“Later on, like practically everyone else in our stupid and godless society, I was to consider these two years as “my religious phase.” I am glad that that now seems very funny. But it is sad that it is funny in so few cases. Because I think that practically everybody does go through such a phase, and for the majority of them, that is all that it is, a phase and nothing more. If that is so, it is their own fault: for life on this earth is not simply a series of “phases” which we more or less passively undergo. If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and last moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires.” Thomas Merton, The SevenStoreyMountain, 1948.
This is a paragraph from the autobiography of Merton which I could make my own, or that is, I might have written it about myself. As I was re-reading old White Lodge posts, and this autobiography of Merton’s at the same time, the paragraph above struck me hard in a way it hadn’t before. I was reading this same book when I first began posting, and it occurred to me that I needed to read it again, which is very rare – for me to read a book more than once. I think when I read it before I had not been ready for it. I was caught up in the details of Merton’s life, where he lived and that sort of thing, and interested chiefly in his descriptions of various places and times. But of what real importance is that? None really. And, in the meantime, I’ve heard his name many times from others who have said that he has helped them. I’ve read his words quoted here and there. And I have said to myself, Well he must be important, but I’m not quite getting the same things out of him. From experience I know that when such seems to be the case with an author it is probably not his (or her) fault, but mine.
Usually after reading C.S. Lewis or Chesterton, von Hugel, or Augustine, I would become religiously “phased” for a few weeks. I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing at those moments of rare spiritual clarity which, whether they were genuine or not, were certainly the result of grace. But, as you know, I would pass effortlessly from these apparent moments of clarity which were no more than phases that my own heart and will determined and controlled into other phases – my intellectual phase, my communist phase, my atheist phase, my nihilist phase, and so on. It was like my eclectic appreciation of music, which I know is a great gift, an ordinary Charism of the Holy Spirit for which I am grateful, but which often brings me to focus for a time exclusively on a particular artist or composer’s work so that it becomes a phase of my journey through music.
I have said – and this is true – that none of you reading can say you believe a thing which I have not also said I believed at one time or another in my wandering life of the mind, my desert wanderings. But why is this, or how could it be? Because I never deeply believed in anything at all. I pretended to believe in this thing or that thing; phases only. I suppose you might say Nihilism has been my main tipple, or on balance the philosophy which best describes my own, but it is of course the first and greatest absurdity to declare absolutely that one believes absolutely nothing, or to approach Logic by the futile means of proving the proofs forevermore without hope of knowing truth, or to blithely declare “There is one, but we cannot know what it is,” which is just as absurd, since it is really the same as saying there isn’t one. In the White Lodge I wrote about myself in all of my many phases, looking back on them, and laughing – I cannot tell you how much. I wrote about my tireless, insatiable hunger to learn; I openly promoted complete skepticism – question everything, follow blindly nothing. But suddenly, out of the blue void, out of the shadow of this world, there walks in the Person who is Christ. And suddenly I’m in big trouble. I am in deep lasagna.
I know that many of us misplace our faith, or put our faith in things unworthy of it – personalities, philosophies, political movements, and so on. I might safely say that doesn’t describe me; that I have rejected every true thing, as well as every false thing, and demanded the proof of it. I rejected my Church, saying “Prove it!” and She did prove it, providing an answer for each of my questions and a defense for every possible argument. I know what I should have faith in, and what I should not have faith in, and why. What I don’t have, however, is the faith. I suppose you could compare it to knowing exactly which stocks to invest in, but not having any money to invest. The most simple minded of people, who has no idea of the what or the why, but has faith, is infinitely richer than I am.
This world offers too many distractions. I have known this for some time. Discerning the right from the wrong is itself a distraction because almost everything one encounters in this world is simply wrong; you can’t fight it. All you can do is walk away, or make a stand and be angry without any good effect. These distractions, this life, the mind itself attack. It is a war we must lose. There will always be something to distract us from the voice of God, His guiding hand, but to live in a way connected to all that we already know to be evil makes no possible sense to me anymore.
A bird I can’t identify came to my feeder just now. I was in the driver’s seat of my car with the door open, the alarm dinging most annoyingly. But I knew if I closed the door to make the dinging stop the bird would fly away. And so I sat there, enduring the dreadful alarm. Right now that strikes me as an analogy for trying to live in the world and to know and to be close to God at the same time.
Also, my mother came to me in a dream the night before last. She held my hand. She might have said something, but I don’t remember what it was. It was good, in any case, to see her.
I awoke to find my son here at the computer. He said he couldn’t sleep, and then he asked me, “What are you doing up?” It was 4:15 AM. My coffee maker kicks on at 4. I told him to go directly to bed and sleep until at least noon, there being no school today, and then took my coffee outside to enjoy it in the chilly spring morning just before sunrise. Barefoot – there is no frost – and wearing a cardigan sweater like Mister Rogers, I dozed to the sound of the peepers in the river valley behind the house, heard the rustling movements of the deer who also rise from their beds in the flattened brown grass, and prayed, as is my habit, that the new day will bring whatever pleases my Maker.
My brother, who is also my attorney, called yesterday to inform me that we are still “on track” with the house purchase. This – despite the clichéd railroad analogy – came as a tremendous relief to me. I have a definite flair for drama, in case you are reading The White Lodge for the first time. I am, as such, the oddball in my generally sober family. My wives have marveled at their devil-may-care attitude to most of life’s challenges. The roof might fall in and they would wait till after breakfast to be grateful the walls were still intact, and then go rummaging through closets for umbrellas. Major disappointments they meet with shrugs and gentle laughter. The car breaking down in the middle of nowhere is an invitation to adventure, or at least a picnic. This trait – being phlegmatic it might be called – is inherited from my father. My siblings received the greater share of that inheritance. When we are all of us together the overall effect defines the word imponderable.
Dad is on his way to Colorado, with a nun riding shotgun.
Over the next several weeks, while I get ready to move, I may go back into the archives and pull out a few of my favorite posts. I used to post every day – or nearly. Mainly, I was writing a personal history and sharing music and books, radio programs, and films, ideas, and telling stories. Some of them were even true – the boring ones. How else can I send The White Lodge into its months-long or maybe years-long hiatus?
It used to be better… and funnier. I know that.
Everything became very serious suddenly. Do you remember when we used to go to that little coffee shop in Sodom and Gomorrah? (Yes, the twin cities!) How we used to talk? And then the flags started to appear, and the soldiers, and the people became unfriendly, and hateful, and frightened?
Remember, Lot had sex with his own daughters in a cave? He was dead drunk, apparently, and he had just seen his wife turn into a pillar of salt. Actually, could he see her without looking back himself? No, probably not.
Nostalgia…
A tinkling piano in the next apartment
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant,
A fairground’s painted swings –
These foolish things remind me of you…
That was one of the first songs I knew as a child, and from that day to this one I can safely say I have never seen a piano urinate.
This interview with GWAR on the old Joan Rivers show is very funny.
My very bestest Blogstream friend is that man known as TR – Trust the Rust – with his immense, splendid hurricane of a mind bursting love in all directions. At some point – some point recently – he started going back into the rooms in The White Lodge which we had already come through, the posts I wrote two years ago, some of them. I was getting comments in my e-mail account related to those old posts. It was like hearing his voice coming from far away. “Where are you?” I called out. He might say, “I’m back here – at the County Fair with Juicy Lucy…” some such thing. And I realized for the first time how big the place was becoming. It was growing, chamber upon chamber, wing upon wing. I remembered GormenghastCastle.
Just yesterday I read those novels – Gormenghast, that is. Mervyn Peake. I remember once working out that I would be 38 in the year 2000, but I would never live that long – thank God.
I like people, and I hate them too. As it is written in my incomplete “100 Things about Myself,” I like buildings better than people. They disappoint me. I have been a hermit for at least ten years – a hermit still living amongst you – in this White Lodge. I ventured out from time to time, but never without bringing some crumbled stones of it with me. We are city-states; we are walled cities. Each of us is a castle, a kingdom. To gain entry to each other’s gates we speak passwords in whispers. I think of the camel passing through the needle’s eye. Are you also thinking of that?
Suddenly, everything became very serious. I stopped posting every day. Just buzzing along –
Buzzing, buzzing, buzzing like a busy, buzzing bee…
And then, suddenly, I couldn’t go on as I had been. The people were strangers. The flags began to appear. The sky turned red with fire. I forgot the passwords to your hearts, and I began to withdraw further into isolation and reflection – I trust not too morbid. This is supposed to be fun, so let's have some.
As much as I like Science Fiction – a genre which began with Lord Byron’s Darkness in 1816 – I think many of us have been so inundated by tales of planet destroying death rays and other such entertaining rubbish that we have lost our hold on reality. That is, we have become psychotic, collectively, forgetting that fiction, by definition, is not fact. Many of us can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, fantasy and realty, and as such we have become a danger to ourselves and others.
Caligula, according to a famous story, once declared war on Neptune. He ordered his soldiers to wade into the sea and strike at the water with their swords, and then to collect shells from the beach as the spoils of victory. It was for this, and many other humiliations, that this Roman emperor would later be assassinated. Our leaders today are demonstrating a similar psychosis, a breathtaking combination of ignorance and arrogance. One may treat the idiot with pity, but for the arrogant idiot there is naught but contempt. Those who believe that they are God – or gods – are committing the same crime that was committed by Satan.
With our puny, primitive minds – changed not at all in shape or size, or composition, since the Stone Age, we think we perceive the whole of reality today, just as did our primitive ancestors in their own time. In other words, we have learned nothing. Tomorrow’s science will make today’s science appear as ignorant rubbish, just as today’s science does for the stick-shaking unintelligible incantations of our distant forbearers. Nothing has changed in that regard. What we are now is what we were then: arrogant, self-important, small-minded little men who think we can summon up and control vast forces of Nature with our “magic” ooggie-boogie utterances, when the truth has never changed, that we are powerless slugs when compared to the glory of the Infinite Universe.
“Save the Planet,” indeed.
LORD BYRON – DARKNESS
1 I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
2 The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
3 Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
4 Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
5 Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
6 Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
7 And men forgot their passions in the dread
8 Of this their desolation; and all hearts
9 Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
10 And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
11 The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
12 The habitations of all things which dwell,
13 Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
14 And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
15 To look once more into each other's face;
16 Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
17 Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
18 A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
19 Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
20 They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
21 Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
22 The brows of men by the despairing light
23 Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
24 The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
25 And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
26 Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
27 And others hurried to and fro, and fed
28 Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
29 With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
30 The pall of a past world; and then again
31 With curses cast them down upon the dust,
32 And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
33 And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
34 And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
35 Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
36 And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
37 Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
38 And War, which for a moment was no more,
39 Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
40 With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
41 Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
42 All earth was but one thought--and that was death
43 Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
44 Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
45 Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
46 The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
47 Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
48 And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
49 The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
50 Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
51 Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
52 But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
53 And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
54 Which answer'd not with a caress--he died.
55 The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
56 Of an enormous city did survive,
57 And they were enemies: they met beside
58 The dying embers of an altar-place
59 Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
60 For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
61 And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
62 The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
63 Blew for a little life, and made a flame
64 Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
65 Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
66 Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
I don’t own a single tool - well, apart from a hammer and a few odd screwdrivers. What more does a man who has been renting since 1992 need? Put some tools on the list, then. This list is getting longer.
There might be – God knows – anything under that awful paneling. It might be sheetrock. It might be Care Bears wallpaper. But I’m going to salvage some of it to finish the basement, practical as I am. And, speaking of recycling materials, the box of a tractor trailer leans precipitously over the hill just outside the door. I’m thinking guest cottage.
Yes, I’m putting in an offer on a property in the West Hills. It’s a ranch-style affair on six acres with a little bit of beaver pond. (It’s what’s for dinner thereabouts). The house wants painting, and a kitchen floor. It really needs nothing else, though.
Those of you who know my penchant for the moldy oldies may be surprised I’m buying a ranch, but this one is completely devoid of character and therefore like a blank canvas. An old Victorian house would be my first choice – to rent, but not necessarily to buy. If I had about ten times more money than I do… Old houses demand respect and restoration. The work to be done on an old house is determined by the character of the house itself. It’s a matter of revealing its original character. It’s older than you are, more beautiful than you are, worth more than you are, and it will be there long after you’re dust.
Twenty minutes from anywhere, the new home of The White Lodge – if my offer is accepted – will certainly satisfy my desire for isolation.
I passed an Amish horse cart on the road between here and there. My boys were riding with me. “That’s it – I’m turning Amish,” I declared.
From the back seat my younger son said, “Amish leads to nothing but trouble.” That’s our quote of the week, then. Son #2 is a wonderful source for quotes of the week.
It was he who once said, “I’d rather be a maniacal genius than a maniacal idiot.”
Generally reserved, and quietly reflective – ‘specially as compared to his mercurial older brother – Son #2 has been given a great talent for pith. The things that come forth from his mouth – his mind – are pronounced with a deadpan solemnity which augments their effect. An original thinker. I don’t think he has ever said anything twice.
But – getting back to my original thesis, I’ll need some tools: a compound miter, (or mitre perhaps, being Catholic), a coupla drills, sanders, saws, and such. An expedition to Lowe’s is indicated, which fills me with dread. So I will apparently put off becoming Amish until I’m done doing whatever I must do with all those power tools. Have you ever noticed the advertisements for such places as Lowe’s and the Home Depot are produced to appeal to women? They are.
Silly music. Husband says something stupid. Wife says something smart. Then the announcer says something about Lowe’s or Home Depot. Stupid husband must have his power tools to build a new kitchen for smart wife. It gets him away from televised Football for a little while… In the meantime, I have never met anybody who conforms to these stereotypes.
I have noticed recently that the ideal woman is smartly attired and expertly coiffed, and the ideal man is an unshaven schlub who looks like he woke up under a highway overpass. This causes me to wonder what on earth did you see in him? Internet dating sites seem to present their “satisfied clients” this way. When it comes to home products – Windex and the like – the extremely attractive and all-knowing wife is most often paired with a Neanderthal who dozes in a Lazy Boy in his underwear while she and her equally attractive girlfriends talk about yogurt and Buddhism, and saving the planet with Clorox.
(Oh thank God – somebody’s got to do it, right?)
It was Son #1 who recently remarked, “I’m beginning to understand what it’s like to live in a world populated entirely by morons.” I think he may have a new take on The Omega Man from the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, which starred Charlton Heston in the original film version and Will Smith in the recent remake. A mysterious virus has lowered the Intelligence Quotient of most of the world’s people – presumably so as to be able to watch “The View” without vomiting – paradoxically sparing a lone individual, a “last-man-on-earth” to hunker down and preserve the vestiges of civilization in the vain hope of finding another person like him one day.
Their mother will be very angry I am moving, by the way. It will inconvenience her. She will make threats.
And, speaking of dirty laundry, I may hang out my clothes to dry once again. It’s illegal here in the Village. I will definitely have a fire pit, which is also illegal here in the Village. And I may stand on one of three disintegrating decks completely naked, surveying the view of the beaver pond and the valley – unshaven schlub that I am. That may or may not be illegal here in the Village. And if it isn’t, it certainly ought to be.
I said that I would burn the last of Heaven in the morning. It is morning now. Last night I thought of bringing it into my bedroom, but I have so little left. Why waste it on sleeping? I’m referring to a particularly sweet brand of incense. I just thought to burn the last of Heaven was an intriguing phrase.
The word tawny must appear somewhere in this post. It may as well be here. I just finished a Robert Silverberg novel about a gigantic watery planet full of sentient life forms, and the exiled human population which co-inhabits it. Tawny is a word beloved of Science Fiction writers. Silverberg uses it sparingly, compared to many. The novel is The Face of the Waters, Bantam, 1991. Silverberg is a giant of the genre.
The computer game Spore which I have previously mentioned also features a multitude of sentient species. In fact, all its creatures are persons. As my son and I were discussing last night, here on Earth there is only the one – which would be us. All our other species are animals, things, basically. We are alone, and lonely. We want there to be life on other planets, in the stars, because we are lonely.
The line from the Tom Waites song Jersey Girl is “You know, she thrills me with all her charms.” It is not “You know, she fills me with artichokes” as I have believed for the last twenty-odd years. This was a revelation of some little magnitude. Yesterday, as I was working, listening to the music through my ear holes, I heard the line from the familiar song clearly for the first time. How did it happen? Why did I at last understand the lyric yesterday which for so many years sounded like a jumble of rubbish? What is it about my perception that changed?
I will probably never know.
Of course, I have always known the line was not “…she fills me with artichokes,” but I suppose I’ve never cared enough to glance at a lyric sheet and get it right. Besides, he might have been referring to an Italian girl. My first wife filled me with artichokes. But the next line is “when I’m wrapped up in my baby’s arms,” which doesn’t rhyme at all with the odd vegetable. The correct lyric is “You know she thrills me with all her charms/ when I’m wrapped up in my baby’s arms.”
Of course, I see it now – that is, I hear it. The scales have fallen from my eyes – that is, my ears. There is a larger point to make here, but I’m not going to make it. I think the very first time I heard the song it sounded like “…she fills me with artichokes,” and so that is what I continued to hear during all the years thereafter, whenever I had occasion to hear the song.
Oh, what the heck – the larger point is this: we don’t see with our eyes but with our minds; we don’t hear with our ears but with our minds. To a certain degree, who we are changes the reality of what we see and what we hear, but on the surface only. Subjective reality changes from person to person, from mind to mind, but there is an objective reality which exists independently of our perception.
It is into this objective reality which our heroes in the Silverberg book eventually are consumed. It is a Platonic allegory with an Humanist perspective. That fairly describes hundreds of Science Fiction novels. I have said again and again that Science Fiction is a genre which exists to express philosophy. In this case, the Face of God is an infinite totality of Reason which remains inscrutable until one is enveloped within it. Like the characters in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, this consummation requires one to make a conscious choice to surrender self, but the rewards of this self surrender are expressed quite differently between the two works. Silverberg’s notion is that of an holistic unity of all minds while Lewis maintains the individualization of souls created in the image of God. Here begins the oldest argument in History – arguably.
I am reminded once again of Mr. Spock, the emotionless and logical “Vulcan” of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek television show. He is an implausible character because in the course of the program’s many episodes he performs acts of heroism and self-sacrifice which would be impossible without emotion. And I think Roddenberry realized this, and so he made the character half human. As he develops we learn that his race is not without emotion, after all, but is rather employing a Marcus Aurellian stoicism which purposefully subsumes subjective reasoning under a quasi-religious discipline – or Way, if you will – which is forever falling to pieces, providing the story lines of several memorable episodes. Unfortunately, it becomes too easy to reach the conclusion that Vulcan is a planet of sociopaths who might explode at any moment into a frenzy of irrationality.
The people who had said last fall that they would rent me their house in the hills have changed their minds again. They are redoubling their efforts to sell it quickly, and it’s way beyond my price range. This was obviously a disappointment. I had been living there in my mind through the winter. It made winter somewhat more bearable than usual. Yesterday I drove by several properties for sale in the west Hills, dilapidated houses on acreage which will require enduring a few hardships but which are also – and this is my chief requirement – almost completely isolated. Pictures to come.
