Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation
of Desire
|
including links to videos, an interview, a concordance, etc |
Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation
of Desire
|
PEEKING AT THE SECOND EDITION Comments on selections before publication | |||||||
#12 Jump to the comment by LK Seat on this sonnet: 12. A Roman Solider circa Anno Domini CCCXXV Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course. Some provinces have snow this time of year although the darkest day we buried, past. The resurrection of the spring ends fear as promises in sky and flame forecast. For Mithra’s feast day, god of light, the sun, the solstice birthing, I slew heretics. Assuming my salvation surely won, I hailed Invictus well with oil-soaked wicks. Now Constantine says Christ is why we fight, not just those we were, who called Sol true god, but if some cherish creeds that are not right though Christian, we must kill, by sword and rod. This Christmas I’ve made holy with my knife. This reign, this new religion, is my life. _________________ Circa Anno Domini CCCXXV, “about 325 in the year of our Lord” is when arguments over the nature of the Christ were voted at the Council of Nicea, convened by the Roman em peror Constantine (272-337; r306/324-) who had become a Christian when, the story goes, he saw a sign of the cross indicating that, with it, he would win the Milvian Bridge battle, 312. The period of Hellenistic religions (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Syrian, etc) was fluid, transformative, and creative. The EPIGRAPH is from W H Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” Christ is why we fight:Resurrection alludes to the claim that Jesus the Christ arose from the dead. Mithra was a sun-god, also called Sol Invictus, the Sun Unconquered, whose birthday was celebrated at the winter solstice, December 25 in the ancient calendar, the date for which was transferred to the Christian observance, Christmas. God: All “gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.” —Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962, p205. Holy with my knife: “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” —Richard Rorty quoted in M J Newby, Eudaimonia: Happiness Is Not Enough, 2011, p128. Religion, in Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade,” is “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” In David Hume’s 1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 8, Philo says, “All religious systems . . . are subject to great and insuperable difficulties. Each [faith] disputant . . . exposes the absurdities, barbarities, and pernicious tenets of his antagonist.” Christianity had been largely pacifist before Constantine embraced Christianity. Rome had been generally tolerant of many faiths practiced in the Republic and Empire — with rare, sporadic, and regional persecutions of Christians. Theodosius I (347-395; r379-), made Nicene Christianity the state church, permitted the destruction of non-Christian temples, and seems to have ended the pagan ritual of the Olympic games, a tradition lasting over a thousand years, not revived until 1896. #12Seat LKSEAT COMMENT ON "12. A Roman Solider" Text from the blog, "The View from This Seat." Friday, October 18, 2024 The Calamitous Co-option of Christianity Vern Barnet, Ph.D., is a gifted man who has long been a prominent person in Kansas City. I am honored to have him not only as a Thinking Friend but also as a personal friend. This blog post was written in response to a request that I received from Vern several weeks ago. Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire is the title of a book of sonnets that Dr. Barnet published in 2015. He is now revising that erudite book and is asking friends/acquaintances to make comments arising from some of the sonnets in it. In particular, Vern asked me to comment on “A Roman Soldier,” his 12th sonnet, using it “in some way to develop the Christian ideal of pacifism in contrast to military powers” linked to Christianity from the 4th century to the present. Constantine, the Roman emperor who reigned from 306 to 337, was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. The spark of Constantine’s conversion was struck in 312 when during a military battle he suddenly saw “a bright cross of light emblazoned against the noonday sky and upon it the inscription: ‘In hoc signo vinces’ — ’In this Sign Conquer.’”*1 He then did use the sign of the cross and was victorious. The following year, the Edict of Milan was promulgated. It stated that Christians within the Roman Empire should be treated benevolently, so it gave Christianity legal status and a much-needed reprieve from persecution. Constantine’s vision changed his life—and Christianity as well. Indeed, up until that time the faithful followers of Jesus Christ had been pacifistic, but now for the first time their religion was being used in warfare. That connection has been prevalent in Christianity from then until present times. The subtitle of Barnet’s 12th sonnet is “Circa Anno Domini CCCXXV.” That year, 325, was when the Council of Nicaea (or Nicea) was convened by Constantine. The purpose of that gathering was to settle theological matters, but Constantine’s main desire was to foster unity among his subjects. Constantine did apparently seek to affirm and uphold many of the practices of Christianity and was not just a CINO (Christian in name only). But his continual use of the sword questions his understanding of and/or allegiance to the teachings of Jesus Christ. After 312, Roman soldiers continued to fight, but they did so in the name of a different “god.” The soldier in Barnet’s sonnet “slew heretics” for the sake of Mithra, the sun god. Now, though, “Constantine says Christ is why we fight.” Some in the Anabaptist tradition, which began in 1525, have called Constantine’s conversion the fall of Christianity. As one who identifies with that tradition, I agree with that designation. Thus, I am calling Constantine’s conversion a calamitous co-option of Christianity.*2 Certainly, though, that has not been the last such co-option. Have you noticed Donald Trump’s co-option of Christianity? Of course, the current nominee for POTUS isn’t seeking to become an emperor such as Constantine was, and it is not all of USAmerican Christianity that has been or is being co-opted. To a large extent, though, Trump has co-opted a wide swath of white evangelical Christianity for his political ambitions. Around 80% of such Christians voted for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and recent polls indicate that the percentage this year may be nearly as high. Certainly, evangelical Christian leaders such as Ralph Reed have long sought to gain political influence by cozying up to the Republican Party. Reed is the founder (in 2009) and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition (F&F), and they have held conferences yearly since 2010. Trump has spoken at the F&F conferences repeatedly since 2011. (I attended that conference as a “spy,” and my impression of Trump, whom I then knew little about, was that he seemed like a “lightweight.”) In seeking to be elected POTUS in 2016, he gave a major speech in 2015. In June of this year, the F&F’s “2024 Road to Majority” conference was held at the Washington Hilton hotel, and the three minute video summarizing that gathering (see here) concludes with a brief clip of Trump’s keynote speech. Trump’s co-option of Christianity is, admittedly not as calamitous as Constantine’s was, but it is, sadly, a major reason why so many younger evangelicals, and others, have turned away from Christianity at this critical time when Jesus Christ’s message of love for all is so badly needed. _____ *1 These words are from the brief and quite positive account of Constantine’s conversion found in a Christian History magazine article (see here). *2 Co-option is the process by which a political leader or organization selects and absorbs some other organization or its ideas/practices into their structure or system in order to expand their strength/influence. Note: The co-option of religion is certainly not limited to Christianity. Consider, for example, the co-option of Shinto by Japanese militarists in the 20th century, of Islam by the Taliban and the Islamic State in the past several decades, Judaism by militaristic Zionists in the last century and since 10/6/23, Hinduism by the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, and Buddhism by militants in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. LKSeat * Born in Grant City, Mo., on 8/15/1938 * Graduated from Southwest Baptist College (Bolivar, Mo.) in 1957 (A.A.) * Graduated from William Jewell College (Liberty, Mo.) in 1959 (A.B.) * Graduated from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, Ken.) in 1962 (B.D., equivalent of M.Div.) * Received the Doctor of Philosophy degree in theology from SBTS. * Baptist missionary to Japan from 1966 to 2004. * Full-time faculty member at Seinan Gakuin University (Fukuoka, Japan) from 1968 to 2004. * Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin from 1996 to 2004. * Adjunct professor at Rockhurst University 2006 to 2014. USPS address: 1307 Canterbury Lane, Liberty, MO 64068 Telephone: (301) 442-2263 E-mail: LKSeat@gmail.com #54 Jump to the comment by Patrick Neas on Sonnet 54 Jump to the comment by Geneva Blackmer on Sonnet 54 Jump to the comment by George Gurley on Sonnet 54 Jump to the comment by Deborah Shouse on Sonnet 54 Jump to the comment by Sarah Voss on Sonnet 54 54. Barcelona: Scrawl Renunciation is not enough. You must act. Yet action mustn’t dominate you. In the heart of action, you must remain free from all attachment. They told me to take a street-car named Desire, . . . and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields! Desire actually started across the street . . . to hear what Love might have to say. YOU agonize and call me Krishna; walk three times Las Ramblas and decide to yield to rouge. Or pride in not. Your choice, such talk, such sin, such vision of the battlefield! Then humble when you held me late that night in my pure yearning bed I now recall, when in us trust and sleep could reunite, now rounded rest, fields feint in this traced scrawl: Like Gaudí’s spires, this troth erects your touch above the ground, though of the ground, the field of faith. I quivered in your sky-filled clutch. and wondered how it happened you were healed. O Fields of Being, O Grounds of Praise, O Arrows of Desire, make dance each phrase.  The EPIGRAPH is from Peter Brook’s production of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita is the famous scripture in which Krishna as god advises Arjuna entering the field of battle. E2: from the Tennessee Williams 1947 play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Act 1. E3: from James Baldwin’s 1983? “Guilt, Desire, and Love.” Gaudí designed Sagrada Familia basilica, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Barcelona. Under construction since 1882, the spires were, I found in 1994, terrifying to ascend. Theologian Paul Tillich called God the ground of being; see his 1951 Systematic Theology, v1, p238. A remote physical analogy is the Higgs field which gives mass to electrons, protons and other particles. Las Ramblas is a Barcelona district of temptations where rouge cosmetics suggests prostitution. Feint/faint: feint means sham; faint means faded, timorous, unfounded, or a swoon. Sin: In Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, Minnie declares una suprema verità d’amore: fratelli, non v’è al mondo peccatore cui non s'apra una via di redenzione! — “a supreme truth of love: brothers, there is no sinner in the world to whom a path of redemption does not open!" Quiver is a pun. Arrows of Desire: from the Preface to William Blake’s 1804 Milton,
often called “Jerusalem,” sung as a patriotic hymn written in 1916 by
Anglican Hubert Parry. Also think of the arrow in Bernini’s St Teresa. Σ Q1 Q2 Q3 C field.#54Neas NEAS COMMENT ON 54. "Barcelona: Scrawl" The Glory of the Gita, Gaudí and God Liberated Vern Barnet, who has expanded my mind in so many ways over the years, has been especially enlightening when it comes to the concepts of NeoBaroque and Postmodernism. Vern’s collection of sonnets, Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire, provides rich examples of both. My reading of Postmodern philosophy is limited, and my knowledge of its concepts is very basic. My impression is that it is skeptical of accepted truths and of the distinctions between so-called high and low art. Michael Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony, which depicts various episodes in Superman’s life, seems to me to be a Postmodern work, with its combination of lowbrow comic strip and highbrow symphony. I thought that Postmodernism doesn’t make judgments about works of art; but when I asked Vern about this, he said this is incorrect. “Postmodernists are willing to make judgments, but they always say these judgments are not free of cultural prejudice or disposition,” Vern told me. “And the difference between the Postmodernist and the Modernist is that the modernist thinks that you can make a judgment free of cultural predisposition.” The way Vern sets so many disparate cultural references side by side in prolific footnotes strikes me as Postmodern, but Vern disagrees. “I think that's just modern,” he said. “Think about T.S. Elliot, who's certainly a Modernist. In 'The Wasteland,' his early poem of fame, he draws upon all sorts of things, Greek, Latin, German, Sanskrit. But he's definitely a Modernist. So Modernists are not always bad guys. Modernists do recognize diversity.” The first thing that comes to mind when I think of NeoBaroque is Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella, which is his Modernist arrangement of music by various Italian Baroque composers. I think of NeoBaroque as being ornamental and curlicue in matters of design and thought, like the films of Federico Fellini or the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. Likewise, the lavish and engrossing footnotes which Vern provides for Thanks for Noticing have a baroque extravagance. “The elaborate apparatus of epigraphs and glosses could easily be considered rather dense ornamentation of the sonnet itself,” Vern pointed out. “Shakespeare, a Renaissance writer, displays characteristics of the Baroque. He sometimes ornaments his sonnets with the repetition of a word in various forms in each part of the sonnet, each of the three quatrains and the couplet. This sonnet of mine plays with various forms of the word field within the same four-part placement: battlefield, field's, field, Fields. Part of the pleasure of NeoBaroque art is discovering such repetitions." The role of the viewer is important in both PostModernism and NeoBaroque, as in Thanks for Noticing. “My sonnets, like many poems, require the reader's engagement to construct the reader's own experience and interpretation; but unlike many poems, the demands (or various opportunities) I make are extraordinary in their complexity,” Vern said. For a trivia hound like myself who loves going down Wikipedia rabbit holes, Vern’s footnotes are a veritable treasure trove. He says the notes and epigraphs are meant to be like the program notes at a classical concert, which help set the music in historical context and shed light on its composition. “Reading one of these sonnets is like meeting a stranger with a friend,” Vern says. “If you want, you can skip the friend's introduction, the epigraphs, and meet the stranger directly by speaking the sonnet aloud. But if you want to know the stranger's background, consider the notes and the glosses that follow. There are people who have read my stuff and like to read the notes first, which is sort of getting a bio before you meet the new person.” The notes for all of Vern’s sonnets are replete with wide-ranging cultural references. For "Barcelona: Scrawl," the notes reference Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia basilica, the Bhagavad Gita, a Tennessee Williams play, and an opera by Puccini. If, as Vern says, this is an introduction to a new friend, it is a highly cultured and spiritual friend. The sonnet opens with three epigraphs, the first a quotation from the Bhaghavad Gita about renunciation. They are words that the charioteer Lord Krishna spoke to Pandava Prince Arjuna on the battlefield just as the Kurukshetra war between the Pandavas and Kauravas was about to break out. “The advice that Krishna gives Arjuna is to act without attachment to the fruit of the act,” Vern says. “And what that means is that all we can do is what is set before us, given the circumstances, to do our duty, but not worry about the consequences. And the reason that's important is we never can know what the ultimate consequences of what we do is going to be anyhow. We're not in ultimate control. Krishna or God or the universe is ultimately going to determine that; we do not bear the weight of the universe on our shoulders. All we can do is the best we can do.” For Vern, as for me, the other highlight of the Gita is when Prince Arjuna requests that Krishna allow him to see Krishna’s universal form as the cosmic universe. “Arjuna receives a manifestation of the full nature of Krishna,” Vern said. “And there's this awe inspiring -- one might even say horrible -- revelation of the way the universe works, which includes the horrors of wars and disasters as well as the delights of love and beauty. All of that is part of the universe.” Vern says that this God is a revelation of the universe and the way things work, and that's very unlike the Western notion of an all-loving God. “This revelation is both beautiful, awesome, and horrible,” Vern says. “And learning to accept that, and loving the opportunity to be alive in all of its agony and bliss makes for a full life of affirmation.” It’s curious, and maybe even a little jarring that "Barcelona" Vern opens with one of the most important Hindu scriptures, but then the second epigraph is taken from A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’ steamy play about Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Also injecting a note of eroticism is the reference to Las Ramblas (La Rambla in Catalan), Barcelona’s most important thoroughfare filled with shops and religious institutions, but near the harbor end of the street, a red light district. “So you have this place of sexual temptation in one part of the city and in another part of the city, you have this world heritage site of Sagrada Familia,” Vern said. “You have a tremendous contrast in Barcelona and that feeds into the background for the sonnet. I think some people, especially with the reference to Las Ramblas and the contrast with the sweetness of the experience of the companions together in bed, might see it as a contest between temptation of sexual attraction with a love imbued with a kind of transcendent loyalty.” The third epigram, from James Baldwin, makes this match between desire and love explicit. Vern has structured Thanks for Noticing after the liturgy of the Mass. "Barcelona," which Vern calls a “sonnet of bliss,” is, appropriately, in the Gloria section of the book. Although "Barcelona" seems to be based on personal experience, Vern says the sonnet does not necessarily depict an actual event. “In my view, poetry is a revelation of an experience, not a news report,” Vern says. “So this is not a literal transcription of an event. It's more important for the poem to expose something transcendent rather than to record an incident. I'm not just fudging, I’m staking out a principle of interpreting poetry.” Whether referencing the Gita, Tennessee Williams, or Baldwin, or causing us to ponder our place in the cosmos, Thanks for Noticing has a mind-blowing richness that, like the best writing, will reward rereading and contemplation. For more than 20 years, PATRICK NEAS was program director and morning show host for Kansas City’s classical radio station, KXTR. Since 2009, he has written the weekly Classical Beat column for The Kansas City Star. His work appears in Classical Post, KC Studio and other publications. He also writes program notes for Guarneri Hall in Chicago and is proud to have been editorial assistant for Binding Us Together: A Civil Rights Activist Reflects on a Lifetime of Community and Public Service by Alvin L. Brooks. #54Blackmer BLACKMER COMMENT ON 54. Barcelona: Scrawl Liberated from Judgments In “Barcelona: Scrawl,” Barnet invites us to abandon all dualistic thoughts and attachments that inevitably hinder us from encountering both our beloved and the Divine. These socially constructed divisions, entangled with false notions of the self, act as barriers to the most basic desire to know and be known. Barnet dances with the futility of such efforts, as the subject of the sonnet considers the consequences of yielding to temptations, observing that one cannot be liberated from consequence, only from judgments. As the speaker later finds oneself in a bed of “pure yearning,” Barnet seems to point to the yearning of a mystic -- the type of yearning which unites the sacred and the sexual in a moment of transcendence beyond the ordinary possibilities of our finite reality. Eliminating attachments around desire allows for the act to become a mirror; it is in this space alone that the mystic finds perfect union with the Divine. This “troth,” arising from both temptation and the bed, points now “above the ground, though of the ground, the field of faith.” For Paul Tillich, the “ground of being” is not a state which is confined by time and space, but rather encompasses the entire structure of meaning and aim of existence. Humanity’s ultimate concern is the ultimate to which it belongs, cannot be separated from, and continually longs for, but is disrupted by time and space. This “ground” can move between cause and substance because it transcends both. In the end, the sonnet inevitably arrives at the natural conclusion of transcendent experience -- a hymn of praise. Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire offers a profound invitation to immerse ourselves more deeply and intimately in love, in ourselves, our relationships, God, and the world. It challenges the separatism of the sacred in the West, revealing the Divine in even the most ordinary of human experiences. I would argue that the fate of humanity deeply rests in our willingness to embark on this journey; how fortunate for us, that Barnet has opened the door and illuminated the path. GENEVA BLACKMER, MA, MESt, writes from the University of Bonn where she is a research assistant in the Department of Intercultural Theology. In 2025, she receives her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Theology at Amridge University. Internationally, she is a Global Council Trustee, North America, for the United Religions Initiative. Her work in this country includes an internship with CRES, and positions with the North American Interfaith Network, The Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada, The Interfaith Center at Miami University, and several other local and regional faith organizations. She is the founder of The Kansas City Interfaith History Project. #54Gurley GURLEY COMMENT ON 54. Barcelona: Scrawl I'm impressed by its formal elegance. George H. Gurley, Jr., of blessed memory (1941-July 25, 2024), grew up in Kansas City where he attended Pembroke-Country Day for high school. He graduated with high honors in English from Princeton University in 1963, then taught at International College in Beirut, Lebanon for a year. He returned to Kansas City and worked in real estate as president of Preferred Properties for 20 years. In 1983, he went to work for The Kansas City Star. He wrote three “general interest” columns a week for ten years and was the book review editor for seven years. Two of his plays were produced by Park College, directed by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Gordonne. His poems have been published in literary magazines such as Poetry and New Letters. The Wall Street Journal published his book reviews. Raindust Press published a book of his poems, Home Movies. BkMk Press published a book of his poems, Fugues in the Plumbing and a book of newspaper columns (with Peter Simpson), Press Box and City Room. After retirement from the Star, he wrote a column for the Lawrence, Kansas Journal World for
15 years. He and his wife, Susan, have four children – George H. Gurley
III, Arian van Newkirk, Cern Van Newkirk and Gillian Gurley.
George and
Susan lived on a farm in rural Douglas County where they were restoring
the native prairie under the Wildlife Habitat Improvement
Program. His website https://www.georgehgurley.com/ offers some great writing in addition to lists of his publications and remains accessible. #54Shouse SHOUSE COMMENT ON 54. Barcelona: Scrawl I read the "Barcelona: Scrawl" many times. Then let it germinate. I read it again and yet again, sinking into the concrete imagery. The Barcelona setting appealed to me, as did the use of Gaudi’s spires and Las Ramblas, two evocative images. Other phrases that added to the rich texture of the poem: “decide to yield to rouge” Though I believe the “rouge” referred to the red powder used to highlight the cheeks, I also thought of “going rouge,” leaving behind the tightly-laced social expectations and tuning into the eternal restless self. “humble you held me” This was such a tender moment, adding to the building poignancy of the verse. “Like Gaudi’s spires, this troth erects your touch” I appreciate a poem that engages the reader in this way, inviting us to applaud a possible double entendre, or allowing us to flash on the vision of those magnificent spires. “I quivered in your sky-filled clutch” The word quiver can evoke a trembling, a yearning, and also a container that holds arrows. In this poem, the arrows suggest the battlefield of the heart, tying in with the “arrows of desire.” “how it happened you were healed” First, there is a salve of listening to one’s own intuition and following it. Which could imply the main character was healed and in his healing could see the other with full heart and open eyes. Perhaps the lover was healed by the pure act of being seen and loved. The word “healing” leaves generous room for both physical, mental, and spiritual repair and wholeness. The sonnet was a satisfying blend of movement, vivid detail, atmosphere, and emotion, sketching (or scrawling) a circle of growth or change. Deborah Shouse, is author of Letters from the Ungrateful Dead: A Grieving Mom's Surprising Correspondence with Her Deceased Adult Daughter, 2024. Her novel, An Old Woman Walks Into a Bar, was published in 2022. For years she wrote a love story column (not an advice column!) for The Kansas City Star. Her work has been featured in many anthologies, including more than five-dozen Chicken Soup books. Shouse and Ron Zoglin co-wrote Antiquing for Dummies, and she co-authored several volumes in the Yes, You Can financial series. She has written two books about people who are living with dementia and their care partners: Love in the Land of Dementia: Finding Hope in the Caregiver's Journey and Connecting in the Land of Dementia: Creative Activities to Explore Together. Working with medical professionals and care partners, Shouse and Zoglin have presented their stories in New Zealand, England, Chile, Costa Rica, India, Italy, and Turkey. #54Voss VOSS RESPONSE TO 54. Barcelona: Scrawl A Prime 53 Response* Your poem pulls us together, measure no matter, nor whether metrics all in footed troth lie, save for one line, slightly off. The famed boulevard pulsates, Krishna’s dance brings peace, captivates. Those fields of faith wait, opened gate. *In the spring of 2019, for Prime Number Magazine, Press 53 poetry editor Christopher Forrest and publisher Kevin Morgan Watson invented a new poetry form, the Prime 53 Poem, which has a total of 53 syllables: three stanzas of three lines each with a syllable count of 7/5/3 and a final two-line stanza with a syllable count of 5/3, for a total of 53 syllables. The stanzas follow a rhyme pattern of a/b/a; c/d/c; e/f/e; g/g. The Reverend Sarah Voss, DMin, is a retired professor of mathematics, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister and chaplain, and a poet. Her books include What Number Is God? (1995), Math Mystic's Guide to Creative Spirituality (2024), Voice to Voice, Heart to Heart (1996), Out of Our Prayers, Hope (1991), Possum, Beaver, Lion: Variants (2017), and Poems from the Gravel Road (2022). #78 Jump to the comment by David Nelson on this sonnet: 78. Advent Haec enim omnia signa carnis, quae a terra sumta est, quam in se recapitulatus est, suum plasma salvans. YOU chose the bench with me to worship Him this Advent Sunday, readying our souls for His new birth; we venture on time’s rim, our thews made free by ancient swaddled scrolls. You grasped my hand and valid held it strong; then to the rail we went and supped with Christ, the sacred feast that makes all sorrow song when to His table we are thus enticed. In skin he vests: God comes to us on earth, as He was born a mortal like us two. A stable was His place of sating birth; a tree makes art, this tract of troth: the pew. What is beyond mere plat and plot is thus — the Mass begets his humble flesh in us. The Irenaeus (130?-202) EPIGRAPH is from “Adversus Haereses” (Against the Heresies), 3:22:2: “For all these are tokens of the flesh which have been derived from the earth, which he had epitomized in Himself, disposing salvation to his own handiwork.” Advent Sunday is the first Sunday of the Christian liturgical season of preparation for Christmas, the nativity of Jesus. Bench is another word for pew, usually made of wood, as was the cross, the tree on which Jesus was sacrificed. Communion may be received at a rail after bread and wine become the sacrament of the body and blood of Jesus the Christ through their consecration on the holy table. “At the end of the Twelfth Century a Latin theologian, Berengarius of Tours, was condemned for his teaching on the Eucharist. He maintained that because the presence of Christ in the Eucharist elements is ‘mystical’ or ‘symbolic,’ it is not real. The Lateran Council . . . condemned him and . . . simply reversed the formula. It proclaimed that since Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not ‘mystical.’ . . . Western theology thus declared that . . . [the] ‘mystical’ or ‘symbolic’ is not real, whereas . . . [the] ‘real’ is not symbolic. This was . . . the collapse of the fundamental Christian mysterion, the antinomical ‘holding together’ of the reality of the symbol and of the symbolism of reality, . . . a collapse of . . . Christian . . . ontological sacramentality.” —Alexander Schmemann, 1963/1973 For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, p128-129. Alas, then, for those like Wittgenstein who, during the war, “saw consecrated bread being carried in chromium steel. This struck him as ludicrous.” —Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (n.d., LCCN 66-19347), p53. Vests: A priest, sometimes regarded as an image of Christ, wears vestments. Thews means muscle or sinew, hence bodily strenth. Art: “No one is more tire some than the person who can . . . never . . . believe anything . . . unless it appears to be real. One must be willing to allow that symbolic things also mirror realities . . . .” —Aaron Cope land, 1939/2011 What to Listen for in Music, p179. #78commentNelson NELSON COMMENT on 78. Advent Advent has always been a day and a season when my imagination kicks into high gear. As a child it had more to do with hanging stockings and wrapping presents to place under a decorated tree in the living room. Becoming a student of theology I learned a deeper meaning of waiting and celebrating the wonders of incarnation. My intellectual understanding continues to change as the years add up, but the gift and wonder of imagination never wanes. Next Advent, as a senior citizen, I want to be more like that child and allow my imagination to soar. Imagination is the ability to create mental images, concepts, and ideas that are not present in our immediate sensory experiences. It allows me to visualize possibilities beyond what is currently known or understood. Advent someday, as I am led or supported toward the altar rail to taste the bread and drink the wine, may allow me to ignore arguments about “real presence”, “sacrament or symbol,” “mystical or real” and look into the Eucharistic mirror and see the Sacred wink back at me. --The Reverend Dr David E Nelson #84 Jump to Anton Jacob's comment on this sonnet: 84. Postmodern Faith: What is Truth? My God, is this a dagger that I see? Am I observing actors in a play? Is this a dream or film of tragedy? or just computer games where I’m to slay with it? Perhaps I’m high on LSD or wearing VR glasses that display an archetype if not a snickersnee. Is this getik, menok, or Judgment Day? Oh no, no dagger but Christ’s cross, that tree which bares illusions in one Truth, one Yea! It tears and it repairs reality and wakes us to attend and watch and pray. I know the Gospel is a pious tale, but who grabs facts when worship cannot fail? Pilate put the question to Jesus; John 18:38. Perhaps anticipated by the ancient Jain teaching of anekantavada, the doctrine of multiple viewpoints, Jean-François Lyotard described Postmodernism as “incredulity toward meta-narratives” such as theological systems or myths regarded as literal reality. In the 1957 Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, p163, Wallace Stevens wrote, “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction, and that you believe it willingly.” W H Auden wrote, “It is as meaningless to ask whether one believes or disbelieves in Aphrodite or Ares as to ask whether one believes in a character in a novel; one can only say that one finds them true or untrue to life. To believe in Aphrodite and Ares merely means that one believes that the poetic myths about them do justice to the forces of sex and aggression as human beings experience them in nature and in their own lives.” The client following a therapist’s suggestion to “place your father in this chair and tell him how you feel” may appear little different from one who prays. Religion is more about commitment than certainty. Perhaps Vico (1710) anticipated Postmodernism with his Verum factum principle: truth is not observed; it is constructed. The first line derives from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, 2, 1, “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” An exquisite example of the problem of distinguishing dream from reality is portrayed in the Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff by Qiao Zhongchang (Northern Song Dynasty, 960-1127) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO. LSD is a psychedelic or entheogenic drug. VR is Virtual Reality. Key terms from pre-Islamic Iranian thought reinterpreted in the epistemology of Suhrawardi (1155-1191), “Sheikh al-Ishraq,” the Master of Illumination, are getik (the ordinary world) and menok (a heavenly realm, perhaps akin to Plato’s realm of forms, or archetypes as in the New Testament’s Hebrews). Judgment Day cf «Love Locket». The Christian Gospel includes the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, a figure paralleled in other religious traditions. A snickersnee is a large knife that can be used for fighting. Tree: cf «Barren Golgotha». Facts: “We are poor passing facts” —Robert Lowell, “Epilogue,” Day by Day, 1977. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817 Biographia Literaria, XVI: wrote of the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” This sonnet uses only three end-rimes. #84comment JACOBS COMMENT on 84. Postmodern Faith: What is Truth? On Knives: Vern Barnet’s ‘Postmodern Faith: What is Truth?’ Knives…. Dr. Vern Barnet’s sonnet titled, “Postmodern Faith: What is Truth?” plays with metaphors of the knife. It begins with a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “My God, 'is this a dagger that I see?'” Raising questions pertinent to perception and conception, from LSD to VR (that might mirror archetypes), Barnet wonders if a snickersnee is displayed. Towards the conclusion of the sonnet, he takes us to “Christ’s cross” as no dagger but nevertheless as an instrument that “tears and…repairs reality,” thus waking “us to attend and watch and pray.” Every seeing is a seeing from some angle, and for human becomings, that is always and unavoidably conditioned by time and place in history and culture. One of postmodernism’s patron saints is Friedrich Nietzsche (Cahoone calls him “the godfather of postmodernism”), who argued that there are no facts, only interpretations, and that perspectivism is the only way to see. “Henceforth, my dear philosophers,” writes Nietzsche, “let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality,’ ‘knowledge in itself’: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense.” When we seek to freeze life in this manner, argues Nietzsche, it is a type of revenge on life. In other words, the quest for the one, pure, objective, correct, absolute, incontestable truth—metanarrative––a quest characterizing the history of much of Western philosophy, religion, and more—is a fool’s quest. Lyotard’s concern reflected the historical atrocities, which social critics from the Frankfurt School to postmodern thinkers saw as culturally rooted in the West’s drive for the one perfect, timeless, and unchallengeable truth, a drive that went on secular steroids during and after the Enlightenment in dialectical relationship with the priorities of capitalism’s instrumental reason. As Lyotard states, “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience.” As I have written elsewhere, “Postmodernism is a highly varied movement of the last sixty years that promotes the idea that all human knowledge is relative to its historical and cultural context, and that modernism’s attempts to find the one true and rational blueprint for organizing human life has been misguided and contributed to some of the horrors of the twentieth century.” If I understand the argument of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the dialectic of Enlightenment on the cultural level between secular reason, on the one hand, and religious faith and mythology, on the other, resulted in the demise of religious mythology and its bastardization into fundamentalism and consequently to the disenchantment of life, the world, and the universe. However, that very triumph of Enlightenment reason in service to the alienating structures of bourgeois priorities resulted in a new mythological faith with a legitimation of domination and alienation. This has resulted in a dehumanizing world in which individuals measure themselves according to their monetary worth, while feeling controlled by powers of which no one appears in charge. Among the results are increased vulnerability to the resentments thereof which make fertile ground for fascism. Another intellectual development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with some likeness to postmodernism was carried, primarily first, by the pioneer anthropologists and then deeply cultivated by what I’d call the metamythologists. These are the likes of Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, William Irwin Thompson, to a lesser extent Carl Jung and followers, and many others. Their cross-cultural investigations and correlations of humanity’s mythologies have helped us get away from the narrow and sometimes violent provincialisms and dogmatisms of so much of the world’s religions to appreciate the challenging and liberating aspects of nature’s and culture’s marks of transcendence. “An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience,” writes Karen Armstrong, and she echoes Campbell when she writes, “A myth…is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information.” In a footnote for a different sonnet, Barnet writes that “a myth is a story that reveals the nature and structure of sacred reality.” It might not be wrong to suggest that the metamythologists and postmodernists, each in their way in their respective venues in modernity’s alienated cultural segmentations, have been doing much the same thing. They have sought to contribute to the liberation of souls and bodies from the unnecessary spiritual and material brutalities of the societies of human becomings. These are not minor objectives. Barnet has fruitfully mined the canons of the metamythologists, whom he cites regularly, even having studied under Eliade. They serve him well for his, if you will, sonnetical remythologizing of human desire, including its erotic and mystical drives that, I think he suggests and, if so, I agree, cannot be separated. They come to us as two-edged swords, though, as mystics and lovers have always discovered. The ecstasies of human love and of mystical union are always shadowed by their opposites—whatever you want to call them at any given time—heartbreak, tragedy, loss, alienation, dark night, fear, anxiety, terror. Which brings us back to the dagger of Christ’s cross. “Indeed,” writes the unknown author of the Christian epistle to the Hebrews, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” At their best, so it seems to me, that is the project of the metamythologists and postmodernists alike. They exegete and deconstruct and interrogate to tear and repair human existence and open up to us the authentic realities of the thoughts and intentions of our hearts; and, perhaps, in the process, alongside the Gospel’s “pious tale,” waking “us to attend and watch and pray.” The cornerstone, still, of any discussion of postmodernism, and which Barnet cites in a footnote, is Jean-François Lyotard’s statement, “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives.” However, the common core of postmodern sentiment is the insight that there really is no escape from an angle of seeing. Ironically or paradoxically, this insight at the center of postmodern thought is true of postmodernism itself. Defining postmodernism is near impossible, which the leading postmodern advocates acknowledge and probably embrace. Postmodernism is “contested terrain between moderate and extreme postmodernists,” notes Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, referring to complete ultraskeptics and relativists, on the one hand, and, on the other, to those still in pursuit of constructs on which to do philosophy and social critique in light of that understanding that we cannot stand nowhere. Simply stated, there is no ultimately objective and infallible blueprint that can be imposed on reality or society without violence and atrocity. Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. Barnet, Vern. Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of
Desire. Kansas City, MO: Best, Steven, and
Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. New York & London: Lawrence Cahoone,
ed. From Modernism to Postmodernism.
2nd ed. Horkheimer, Max,
and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Jacobs, Anton K. “Postmodernism.”
In The Sage Encyclopedia of the Sociology
of Religion, vol. 2. Edited by Adam Possamai and Anthony J. Blasi, 598-599.
Lyotard, Jean-François.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich.
Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Translated by Nietzsche, Friedrich.
On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann Nietzsche, Friedrich.
The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and Henry Regnery Co., 1973. --Anton K. Jacobs, Ph.D., Instructor, Kansas City Art Institute Author of Religion and the Critical Mind; My Country, My Faith, & Me; and a few other things. | |||||||
#Luke
| |||||||