A Growing Gratitude for Crosses

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 26 November 2015.

The Crucifixion by Andrea Mategna

Some thoughts on Thanksgiving, also having finished transcribing Liza's What the Lord Hath Made Crooked letters:

I could enumerate so many blessings—worldly things—I've received in this life. That said, the most transformative perspective or schema I've experienced has been a growing gratitude for crosses:

for crookedness and constraints
for suffering and setback
for perplexity, sickness, and sorrow
for being passed over for honors,
for not even being in the running
for being hindered, hobbled, and hampered in the pursuit of accolades, ambitions, and accomplishments

Why is any of this a blessing? As the prayer goes,

Pray for us Mary, mother of sorrows, that we will crucify our pride with Christ on the Cross.

For me, the biggest shift has been having children. I started to realize that these sweet messengers of God's love were simultaneously scourges and sources of setback and suffering. But without scourging, I disappear into myself. Without the way of the cross, I don't look outward from an inner sense of my own importance.

Camus's Sisyphus doesn't attain consciousness until he embraces the full weight of his fate, absurd though it may seem. And yet, my fate is even more embraceable because it is eminently lovable. Marriage, too, that most ecstatic of human unions, has hidden within it a cross. Christ imbues all his sacraments and life generally with his paschal powers. But most especially suffering. Even all our joys and accomplishments have a cross hidden within them.

These moments and opportunities and honors and laurels that pass me by—usually because I am paralytic or pariah—these are blessings too. Because as Christians, we are all waiting on Christ, keeping our wicks trimmed through suffering.

The striving and struggle, when Christ crests the hilltop of Golgotha, when he stretches out his arms to the universe he created. In that strangest of all moments in our strange, singular religion we discover the unsearchable greatness of God

his terrible deeds
his glorious majesty
his wondrous works
his abundant goodness
his great kindness

It is at this moment when Christ himself, according to G.K. Chesterton, "seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

Pray for us sinners, for a grace that overflows the cup of suffering.

On the Side of Life

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Albert Camus

Thank you for sharing Peter Maurin's distinction between liberals and radicals. Of course, the same distinction could be made between conservatives and radicals, which may point to the fact that both are (were once?) rooted in similar bedrock principles. To make matters even more confusing, I used the terms "the left" and "the right" as in socialists and nationalists, which themselves have different meanings.

In defending your own position as not liberal but radical and then pointing out the follies of conservatism, I wonder if you were seeing me as a conservative (I wasn't seeing you as a liberal by the way). I don't think that fits me any more than it did Camus when Sartre and company ostracized him for not getting on the Communist bandwagon, turning a blind eye to its brutality. I am not in married to any ideas about the free market, trickle-down economics, strong military, small government, right to bear arms, greed, Don Gilber, etc.

As Camus said somewhere, "I am on the side of life."

I almost want to just leave it at that, because that's all there is to it for me. It is the simplest, most coherent of all positions, constitutive of all other values.

Now, I may need to understand that position more deeply, to integrate it more completely. But more contemplation, more sanctification, more poverty and/or personal fidelity to the Gospel will never change the fact that I am on the side of life. And not just on the level of the "fundamental option," but categorically (more on that later). Camus, who carried the philosophical project started by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through to its most harrowing, coherent conclusions, arrived at this certainty. Dostoevsky seems to have finally arrived at a similar conclusion in his final short story (I read about this today on Brainpickings). And so have all of the saints.

Of course, it isn't fashionable to talk about the negative moral precepts associated with "I am on the side of life," namely, "Thou shalt not kill." After all, we're not supposed to be close-minded. But as Chesterton famously wrote,

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise, it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing.

The Church has always affirmed the existence of negative moral precepts. St. Pope John Paul II states this unequivocally in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor,

In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behavior as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the "creativity" of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.

He contrasts this commonsense theological understanding with a perversion of the "so-called fundamental option," the idea that "freedom is not only the choice for one or another particular action; it is also, within that choice, a decision about oneself and a setting of one's own life for or against the Good, for or against the Truth, and ultimately for or against God." All of this, he says, has been an important and positive development in moral theology. But certain theorists have taken this line of thinking too far:

In some authors this division tends to become a separation, when they expressly limit moral "good" and "evil" to the transcendental dimension proper to the fundamental option, and describe as "right" or "wrong" the choices of particular "innerworldly" kinds of behavior: those, in other words, concerning man's relationship with himself, with others and with the material world. There thus appears to be established within human acting a clear disjunction between two levels of morality: on the one hand the order of good and evil, which is dependent on the will, and on the other hand specific kinds of behavior, which are judged to be morally right or wrong only on the basis of a technical calculation of the proportion between the "premoral" or "physical" goods and evils which actually result from the action. This is pushed to the point where a concrete kind of behavior, even one freely chosen, comes to be considered as a merely physical process, and not according to the criteria proper to a human act. The conclusion to which this eventually leads is that the properly moral assessment of the person is reserved to his fundamental option, prescinding in whole or in part from his choice of particular actions, of concrete kinds of behavior.

Of course, the Church teaches that there are certain intrinsically evil acts that cannot be done with your "heart in the right place." Certain acts, by their very nature, constitute a decision against God, a "no" to God. We know these as mortal sins. And though the Church acknowledges certain psychologically complex situations which may mitigate guilt, these are never normative.

Introducing Liza!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 17 April 2015.

Hello Allison, Arthur, Carlton, Will, Will, and any of the others hiding amongst us,

What a full room we have here!

Here I am, at long last. Here I have been all along.

As you will soon see, my presence in this project will be much like that of a fly on the wall. Even in the long intervals that are likely to pass by without any buzzing on my end, know that I am watching, reading, interpreting, and reflecting on your messages. Once I've digested them as best I can, I will swoop in, impose my character(s)' rationality on what Art has called the “primordial wildness of [your collective] scribbles," and fly off once more. Never mistake my silence for disinterest. On the contrary, understand that it is only through the emptiness of the silence that I discover the joy of the noise. Though Allison is light-years ahead of me on her journey through The Sweet World, I’d like to think the degrees of our excitement are equally matched.

While on the subject of Allison – hello! Though we’ve never been in direct communication with one another, I already feel, in some sense, like I know you. Instead of filing my taxes last night, I spent my evening bouncing back and forth between Civilization and its Discontents, Leaves of Grass, and your thesis. I’m yet to make a significant dent in it, but I can already tell that every atom belonging to me as “legend” also belongs to you.

To all of you, really. What great company I’ve stumbled my way into.

I’m tempted to call you members of what Vonnegut’s Books of Bokonon would describe as my karass, but I won’t. Whereas Bokonists derive their life's meaning from foma - shameless untruths - I attribute the entanglement of our lives to our mutual interest in deriving life's meaning from transcendent Truth. A force exists in our communication that is far beyond us; there is a deeper meaning in it than any of us can perhaps currently fathom.

I dig this idea of understanding the meaning through the medium. As we discuss our potential roles in this project, I've been thinking a great deal about how the indefinite process of contextualizing the essence of these roles in turn enlightens our existence both inside and outside the Sweet World. Through this lens, it’s interesting to consider the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian - this sense that we clarify our confusion in the journey through the interplay of these oppositional forces.

In response to a message I sent to Will last night regarding my own bewildering journey to restore order to the chaos that saturates our public education system, he sent me a passage from Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday that further highlights this unifying duality. What I’ve ultimately deduced from all of it is that the meaning of each of our respective roles in this project and beyond has been distorted by what Chesterton calls “an engine of torture."

The purpose of the Sweet World - from my own understanding at least - is to provide us a space in which to translate this meaning not despite this distortion but through this distortion. If the lodestone that Art mentioned confuses our identities, then it is really the most clarifying force there is in our route to understanding our identities.

When I wrote last night's message to Will, I had not yet read through the entirety of this e-mail thread. Now that I have, the line between my purpose in life and my purpose in this project has been reduced to a dash. It is through my daily struggles to contextualize my transcendent purpose amongst grave misfortune that I’ve discovered an inherently meaningful connection to the contextualization of my role in this project.

After writing said message, it dawned on me that I didn’t so much write it as I did sit down at my typewriter and bleed it into being. Though most writers seem to disagree on the attribution of this paraphrased quote, they (maybe) unanimously agree on its merits.To write in such a way, we must abandon our mortal vulnerability  by ripping open our wounds. To look upon these wounds with rapture instead of lamentation is to have paved a clearer channel between the earthly and the divine. It is to, as Coleridge says, "build that dome in air."

I often think Detroit could be one of our earthly channels into the divine. Whenever I hear someone refer to it as a "blank canvas," I want to shake my fist at the sky in horror that they don't see it for what it really is: the Sistine Chapel of the Midwest.

Though Nietzsche uses this blood-writing metaphor to promote earthly elevation of the Übermensch over the Untermensch, I’ve decontextualized parts of it below in order to support the above idea:

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood and thou wilt find that blood is spirit."

"He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.”

My decontextualization of this is that our willingness to suffer into Truth is not for worldly pleasure - that of the head - but rather to satiate our yearning for the divinely transcendent - that of the heart.

The text concludes: “Now am I light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there danceth a God in me.”

So, in a sense, this is how we define ourselves in opposition with ourselves: we can either give into the temptations of man, exalting ourselves to übermensch, or we can remain steadfast in our rejection of these temptations, isolating ourselves as the untermensch.

As the fly on the wall, it seems apparent that Art and Will are not writing The Sweet World into existence, but rather bleeding it into existence. In my decontextualization of Nietzsche, this is indicative that God is dancing through you.

With this dance as my aim, I prioritize the process over the purpose. Through a certain lens, this process is our purpose. The difficulty then lies not in understanding, but in discovering the courage through our confusion to present our woundedness to the world as Jesus did. Though this will inevitably yield more wounds in the short term, the moment we fixate our gaze on the gore despite our worldly instinct to avert our eyes is the moment we will see Beauty and know Truth. As Rumi says, “The wound is the place where the light enters [us].”

In keeping our veins open, we will come to see the light that will guide us into the caves. It is this light that will not only illuminate The Benefactor's horror-raps etched on the crumbling walls, but that will keep our eyes steady on them despite all impulse to look away. Though this is all lofty idealism at best, I have trouble envisioning a better alternative than this in combusting “the engine of torture."

On that note, it appears as though I’ve rambled my way to the edge once more. Perhaps the edge of the cliffs is where the Sweet World exists. After all, if you're an outlier of the world, you're an inhabitant of the Sweet World.

As my favorite secular-humanist once said,

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

Until my next swoop,

Liza

The Man Who Was Thursday

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Will to Art on 14 November 2014.

G.K. Chesterton

I've been listening to the old Garageband files this morning and renewing my love of the music. 

Something kind of cool came to me. I'm stealing from Chesterton here. I'll include the paragraphs from The Man Who Was Thursday at the end.

The Sweet World should consist of seven members. Each one should dress as a different day of creation. The symbolism could be subtle or overt, but Arthur wears white because he is the day on which God said, "Let there be light."  He is creative dynamism: the unfocused, the unshackled, a light in the darkness, the wild and awesome reflection of God, the mysterious and unknowable.

Will should probably be day six, the day that man is made. He could also be day seven, the day God rested (and the Wills of the world got to work). The latter gives us bookends.

Both do, in a sense. Arthur is the creator and Will is the completer/finisher.

Here is the passage from The Man Who Was Thursday.

Tower of Babble

The following is an excerpt from an email from Will to Art on 3 September 2014. 

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

I guess there's an ironic dual effect of Arthur as a pillar saint.

On the one hand, he becomes a spiritual totem of sorts; a healing presence; a living amalgation of every literary and visual form we've been able to imagine baptized to Catholic ends and still more; someone beyond our understanding and therefore pushed to the outskirts of a world that has written his kind out of its grand narratives; a healing figure, a cautionary figure, a prophet, a man truly of his time and seeming out of joint with his time. And at the same time, he is Art on a pedestal. In the end, he's our Art.

What Art sits amid, I suppose, is the family legacy: cement, the neglected church of his youth, dead industry, the defeat of the dream of progress, modernism, the self-made man, etc. But the pillar is a throne; all these things were the Tower of Babel and Arthur's existence hastened their fall. We end up with the Gestalt effect: one view makes Arthur the figure of God's triumph sitting victorious on the battlefield; another makes him a colossal failure.

The determining factor is our gaze: are we viewing as Americans or as the saints militant?

A cue toward interpretation is Will, who is a penitent of some sort. Will has abandoned the rubble for something better, and that something better appears lower depending on our gaze. We get that squirminess Chesterton achieves in The Man Who Was Thursday, in which what seems like anarchy, chaos, and collapse serves a higher order even the faithful can't comprehend and only poets can hope to glimpse.

Somehow, the farcical ends of Steffi and Farthington fit well with the seriousness of this pillar image. The apocalypse they experience is a "Tower of Babble" collapse of postmodern popular culture, not the Final Judgment. They are two glimpses of postmodernism; Will and Arthur are foils. Arthur is a prophet and Farthington is a Pharisee. And it makes sense that Will and Steffi have an awkward union: Steffi is the nightmarish face of Will's dream. He mythologized his own father too much to see the truth about his father's misguided approach to life. Plus his dad is a loveable and admirable guy in many ways even if he ends up a citizen of hell. He's a tragic figure, where Steffi is more of a witch in a world that has deconstructed the witch concept into an empowered feminist.

I would not mind an allusion or two to Ariana Huffington!

A Unique Disclosure

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 12 July 2014.

St. Pope John Paul II in 1999

I've been wading into John Paul II's "Letter to Artists" (1999) and am pleasantly surprised so far. I'd like us to meditate on this a little in our correspondance if you're game.

In particular, I'm looking at the following paragraphs:

The special vocation of the artist:

Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece. 

It is important to recognize the distinction, but also the connection, between these two aspects of human activity. The distinction is clear. It is one thing for human beings to be the authors of their own acts, with responsibility for their moral value; it is another to be an artist, able, that is, to respond to the demands of art and faithfully to accept art's specific dictates. This is what makes the artist capable of producing objects, but it says nothing as yet of his moral character. We are speaking not of moulding oneself, of forming one's own personality, but simply of actualizing one's productive capacities, giving aesthetic form to ideas conceived in the mind.

The distinction between the moral and artistic aspects is fundamental, but no less important is the connection between them. Each conditions the other in a profound way. In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are. And there are endless examples of this in human history. In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth. Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women. Works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life...[italics are mine]

I think this passage is so germane to our project, seeing as we are so closely related to our creations. And these creations of ours have been, at different points, unredeemed or at least not very far advanced along the path of moral perfection. As we get further along in this project--whether it really is a project or not--I'm increasingly aware how my narrative choices are "unique disclosures" of my own being, of what I am and of how I am what I am.

For instance, when my back is against the wall with blogging and I can't always micromanage some Wordsworthian "emotion recollected in tranquility" due to the time crunch, I come up with ideas that reveal my personality and the state of my soul.

One example is how I got so wound up recently about how tragedy comes closest to touching on the truths of the faith.

Another example is a recent idea I've had, which I may or may not do, called "Basement Diaries." The idea is I will bring a camera down with me into the basement with all the lights out and try to find my way around while taking a video of me (no picture because it's pitch black) reflecting on various topics related to darkness, being underground, coal, fossil fuels in general, Hell, the project, the labyrinth, etc. I would upload this to YouTube and let Google mess up the transcription, as usual. Then post the video and its transcription.

The idea is take it or leave it, but I think about what it means that I had this kind of disturbing idea (and not some holier one). Why does it resonate with me right now? What does it say about the state of my soul?

I'm not interested in answering those questions in a psychoanalytical way, but I am getting a sense of what John Paul means by a unique disclosure of one's own being. You can't produce something other than what you are. If you are further along the path toward moral perfection than I am, that will come out in your artistic leanings. In some ways, it wouldn't be surprising to see a consummate artist uniquely reveal the destination of his soul in his last works. He would not be able to disclose anything but that truth.

Do the landscapes and settings and narrative we have created uniquely disclose the elements of temptation, damnation, sanctification, salvation that hem us in and define our own inner state--and maybe even more so than your average artistic work due to the highly self-referential aspect we have embraced?

It reminds me of a statement of C.S. Lewis (which I can't find) about how, in certain moments, you can't pretend to be anything other than you are. We may have many moments where we have the time or energy to muster an "appropriate" response--in our case, "What Would Jesus Do?" But in moments of sudden distress or pain, we can't reveal anything but the true state of our soul.

A saint will continue to love God and neighbor with all his heart, mind, and strength; a professed Christian who has a private Hell opening up inside of him will start exhibiting that somehow. I seem to remember another statement of Chesterton (which I also can't find) about how our lives all give us an opportunity to "leap past Hell."

All of us, in other words, have a gaping abyss somewhere in the landscape of our lives.

And like Chekhov's gun, this abyss isn't superfluous to the plot! I wouldn't say it's there for a God-given reason exactly, although the gift of free will does necessitate it as an option. And we are either going to have to leap into it or leap past it.  Admittedly, that sounds way more dramatic than our current quotidian existence with its blended, blurry options, but God makes that moment possible for each one of us, allowing us to make a clear-eyed, fundamental choice that will persist for all eternity.

So you may have something to say about the paragraphs I excerpted; or maybe you read more of it and find something else. I really see this vision as needing to be central to our project since it's a letter explicitly addressed to artists in the postmodern age! What is the Holy Spirit telling us through this message? What questions of ours does it answer?

Resolution to Wonder

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 13 January 2014.

I've always loved tangential meta-narratives, but I also love art that doesn't show signs of its process at all.

I would bet that every great piece of art has a great story behind it, but the art itself should be amazing regardless of the story.  By turning the story into the art, we may lose the wow factor of the "finished" products.  We'd have to maintain a fairly rigorous level of dynamism: the infrequent narration of a story in which nothing happens won't advance our cause.

One of my favorite things about your idea is that it has the potential to subvert a postmodern form: the meta-narrative.

I think the great modern writers generally hated the doctrine of modernism, and I think we may be in a similar boat, striving for Catholic orthodoxy while creating postmodern art.  I don't know a great way to put this, but I see in Apollonian/classical forms a tendency toward resolution and in postmodern forms such an assertion of relativism that resolution is impossible.  What I prefer to both is what I see as a very Catholic thing--something that is both and neither at the same time.

For lack of a better term, I'll call it resolution to wonder.

Christ tends to communicate truth in parable and paradox.  I'm always struck by the fact that what he says is absolute truth and perception-frying mystery at the same time.  It's truly satisfying food and endlessly hunger-inducing simultaneously.  It's an explosion and a resolution...we resolve to awe and wonder.

Where postmodernism's ambiguity tends to point toward relativistic nihilism in its irresolution, great Catholic art draws people toward truths infinitely larger than we are.   The result is that we can feel resolved and unresolved at the same time.  Chesterton and Graham Greene stand out to me as two Catholic authors who nail resolution to wonder in a modern framework (The Man Who Was Thursday and The Power and the Glory are particularly important to me).

I'd like to see what we could do with resolution to wonder in a postmodern framework.

"Let the Atheists Themselves Choose A God"

The following is an excerpt of a 29 December 2012 email sent from Art to Will wherein Art answers certain questions about Arthur's involvement in Carlton Farthington's cult.

I like the idea that Brand New Life begins with a burst of newfound creativity and productivity.

I like the idea that Arthur is on the verge of sainthood (although that sounds a little like confounding sainthood with enlightenment) and that Will is likewise on the brink of success.

I agree that this is when Will starts to have concerns and steps in (with ECT), because he sees these two things as mutually exclusive.

I also agree that God wins in spite of all of this. 

If you haven't already, you need to check out the movie Household Saints and in particular the resolution of the whole sainthood thing. Without giving the ending away, sainthood is achieved in utter defeat--even the defeat of the protagonist's pursuit of saintliness! 

It seems borderline blasphemous, but I feel this notion is totally orthodox, having its roots in the utter defeat and scandal of the cross.

Here is one of my favorite Chesterton quotes (from Orthodoxy):

[Atheists] will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

It's true that Will is successful in releasing Arthur's gift of prophesy. But I think the profoundest irony is that electroshock, which was designed to bring prophecy within the fold of profitability and predictability, actually releases it to an even fuller extent.

So in the process of totally scrambling Arthur's brain, Will inadvertently pushed Arthur into the final phase: the soul in a state of perfection.

Now, it's important to note that he exists here in a borderline catatonic state, but that was how God accomplished his will in its consequent form.

No, it's not ideal that someone would reach sainthood with a severely addled intellect, but it illustrates the paradox of human freedom and the supreme will of an omnipotent God.