Constantly Risking Absurdity

2005-09-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

A Valuable Lesson

"Hey, Dr. S! Check this out, it's hillarious!"

"Hmm..."

"Err..." I'm thinking: "Oh shit..."

Lesson: Never assume that your philosophy professor's sense of humor is as vulgar as your own.

Santiago

2005-08-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Feast of the Assumption

(Cross-posted from Cahiers Peguy)

The universal calendar of Holy Mother Church deems August 15 the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the day when we remember Our Lady's rocket-firing up to the dizzying heights of ontological exaltation. But few outside of my native land will ever know that it is also the anniversary of the founding of the city of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, the first major Spanish post in the Rio de la Plata region in the southern cone of South America.

Notice that Asuncion was founded by the Spanish in 1537, four hundred and thirteen years before Pope Pius XII infallibly proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption in 1950. Not only does this corroborate the claim that belief in the dogma of the Assumption was already present in the deposit of faith way before Pius spoke ex cathedra (and some years before the Reformation, too), but it goes to show that Paraguayans are always on the cutting edge of doctrinal development.

I recall visiting the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago last summer with this guy and witnessing a medieval design featuring the Assumption that dated back to 1396. So perhaps Paraguay wasn't first. But close.

To celebrate today, here's a few lines from Robert Lowell's poem, "Beyond the Alps," written to commemorate Pius' ex cathedra exclamation:

"When the Vatican made Mary's Assumption dogma,
the crowds at San Pietro screamed Papa.
The Holy Father dropped his shaving glass,
and listened. His electric razor purred,
his pet canary chirped on his left hand.
The lights of science couldn't hold a candle
to Mary risen--at one miraculous stroke,
angel-wing'd, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
but who believed this? Who could understand?
Pilgrims still kissed Saint Peter's brazen sandal.
The Duce's lynched, bare, booted skull still spoke.
God herded his people to the coup de grâce--
the costumed Switzers sloped their pikes to push,
O Pius, through the monstrous human crush. . . . "

Santiago

2005-07-19T17:07:00.000-07:00

Sincere Apologies...

But it's the summertime. I am blogging periodically here.

Santiago

2005-06-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

LitMap

The New York Times has a totally hip map of Manhattan Island, highlighting all the mythical literary spots of interest.

Santiago

2005-06-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

Booklists

From Human Events:

"The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

"The Ten Books Every Student Should Read in College."

From Image:

"Top 100 books of the twentieth century."

Santiago

2005-05-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

Soccer, Mozart, Hiatus

Hiatus

I will be travelling westward tomorrow morning on a weeklong retreat/vacation, sponsored by these people. I'm going on a media fast, so no blogging 'til I return (I doubt I could get access to a computer over there anyway). I will be driving to my destination, which of course means packing a copy of this book with me, because to read On the Road on the road is just too cliche not to do. Sort of like discussing Radiohead in a college dorm.

Mozart

This rendition of the Requiem is worth the price just for the essay by Luigi Giussani found in the liner notes. It's called "A 'Fount of Mercy' for Making Man Anew." An enticing passage:

Every phrase of the Requiem (as the music makes evident) begins with the undisupted affirmation of the dominion of justice and truth, and then is as though suddenly interrupted by something that comes in and mitigates unexpectedly the harshness of justice, the acrid affirmation of truth, softening it in a request, a supplication that knows it can be made.

I can't find the essay online, so you'd probably have to buy the CD to read it.

Soccer

From Zenit:

German Soccer Defers to Pope's Trip
ROME, MAY 25, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's visit to Germany for World Youth Day has led to a change in the country's soccer championship calendar. All games scheduled for Aug. 20 and 21 have been postponed to the following week, the German Soccer Federation announced. The Pope is scheduled to travel that weekend to Cologne, for the event expected to attract hundreds of thousands of young people. Both first- and second-division games have been deferred. Soccer is Germany's national sport.

It really tells you something about the Great Game of Soccer when a simple rescheduling makes for international news. I read somewhere that that great Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges, famous writer and famous soccer hater, deliberately scheduled a conference at the same time as the World Cup Final--when it was being held in his own city of Buenos Aires in 1978--as if to say, "There are greater things in the world than even this, the World Cup Final." A consensus on whether there actually is something greater than the World Cup Final--or better than winning the World Cup Final---probably does not exist among soccer fans worldwide. But it's nice to see that the Bundesliga (the German soccer league) respects the sacred enough to defer to it for this important occasion. They exhibit a sort of existential humility that Borges himself may have lacked.

(A Note to the Purists: I understand that many of you may cringe at my use of the word "soccer." It's football, I know. But here in America that word has not caught on yet. I am sorry.)

More Soccer

Watching AC Milan's breakdown and debacle in today's Champion's League final with an authentic Rossoneri from Milan was not easy. My poor, frustrated Italian friend Carlo had been yelling at Andrea Pirlo since the 40th minute of the game, but Pirlo did not listen, did not pick up his game, and, alas, missed a key penalty in the tie-breaking shoot-out. Shevchenko's miss was more of a surprise. On the other hand, Liverpool's rally from three goals down--unprecedented in the history of the Final--is as inspiring as any sports-themed Disney movie ever made, with the added bonus that there was no silly sideplot, no saccharine music score, and, of course this really happened.

Santiago

2005-05-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

Revenge of the Sith, One More Time...

I promise, no more after this! But the Star Wars universe is strangely seductive. Some links:

John J. Reilly was nice enough to link to me in a very interesting roundup of reflections on "Manicheanism & World Order."

Mary of View from the Corner draws different conclusions from my own on the line, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." She links to sci-fi novelist Orson Scott Card, who takes a view closer to my own:

Good and evil are in a constant and nearly equipoised tug-of-war in the Star Wars series. But in the more recent movies, it seems that the goal of good people is not to wipe out evil, but rather for there to be a balance between the Light and Dark sides of the Force.

The new movie itself asserts a kind of equivalence. When the evil Palpatine says, “Good is a point of view--the Sith and the Jedi are almost the same,” we can dismiss this moral relativism as part of the deception of the dark side.

But in a pivotal scene, Obi-Wan says what amounts to the same thing: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Isn’t that odd? The only thing both sides agree on is that people who believe in absolute good and evil are bad!

Though I argue that Lucas can't escape his own universe, Scott Card doesn't seem to think so. In any case, I still like Star Wars.

Santiago

2005-05-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

A Few Corrections

I just saw Revenge of the Sith again tonight (some friends came into town who hadn't seen it yet ;) ), and I noticed that in my previous post I got a couple of the lines wrong.

1.) When Obi Wan asks Anakin: "Can't you see that Palpatine is evil? Anakin replies, "The Jedi Council is evil from my point of view." Obi Wan then replies that if Anakin really thinks that way, then he is surely lost.

2.) It's "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." Why is that so hard to pin down?

There is also more evidence that the Sith are the relativists: Palpatine tells Anakin that there isn't really much difference between the Sith and the Jedi, that they are both after power. Anakin replies that the Jedi are selfless, and use the Force only to help others. Palpatine is not fazed. "Good is a point of view," he says, or something like that. The Empire is most definitely an Empire of Lies. Dare I say it? It is a dictatorship of relativism.

Santiago

2005-05-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

Deep Thoughts on Revenge of the Sith

Before the film came out, A.O. Scott of the New York Times claimed that Lucas took some political jabs:

Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy." Obi-Wan's response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." You may applaud this editorializing, or you may find it overwrought, but give Mr. Lucas his due. For decades he has been blamed (unjustly) for helping to lead American movies away from their early-70's engagement with political matters, and he deserves credit for trying to bring them back.

Neither Scott nor I can know whether Lucas was intentionally jabbing his light saber at Bush, but after watching the film, I can safely say that, even if he was trying to be anti-Bush, he failed. If being anti-Bush means to be against “thinking in absolutes,” then all the Jedi knights are Bushites. Lucas can’t suppress the absolutist, quasi-Manichean structure of his own Star Wars universe. And he can't suppress the biblical patterns that keep informing his plots, either.

“Only a Sith Deals With Absolutes”

Take the famous line that Scott cites: “Only a Sith deals with absolutes (1).” The line that precedes it--“If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy”--probably is an affront to Bush’s “You are either with us or against us.” But Obi-Wan’s reply makes no sense in the larger context of the film. Earlier, Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidius), as he tries to seduce Anakin into the Dark Side, tells Anakin that the Jedi Council takes a “dogmatic” and “narrow minded” view of the Force, and that he prefers a more broad-minded approach, one that can appreciate the Dark Side and all of its enticing gifts. Anakin doesn’t give in yet, but the very biblical offer is already on the table: “Ye shall be as gods…”

So what is Obi-Wan doing, lamenting Anakin’s absolutist thinking? For no more than a few minutes later, Obi has some absolutist remarks of his own. He tells Anakin, “Can’t you see that Palpatine is evil?” Anakin replies like a good moral subjectivist: “Not from my point of view,” or something like that, I can’t remember exactly (it was a very forced line). Who is the absolutist now? Obi-Wan, who speaks of “evil” (much like George Bush), or Anakin, who says that evil is in the eye of the beholder?

This is the universe that Lucas created: the Dark Side is evil, the Jedi Council is good. The Jedis are selfless servants (Anakin says so early the film), and the Siths are selfish and evil (again, as Anakin tells Palpatine early in the film). Palpatine tries to seduce Anakin by using relativistic language: Take a broad-minded approach, don’t be dogmatic. He also acts as a sort of serpent in the Garden of Eden: he tells Anakin that, if he practices the Dark Side of the Force, he can defeat death and become all-powerful. The Empire, defended by relativistic rhetoric, is an Empire of Lies: lies about the Force, about the Jedi Council, and lies told to the Trade Federation, who are betrayed in the end.

And Palpatine is right. The Jedi Masters (especially Yoda) exhibit nothing if not dogmatic certainty in every judgment they make. I can see Socrates giving them the Euthyphro treatment.

A Biblical Fall

Anakin’s fall also takes a biblical pattern, that of Satan, the fallen angel, who was once God’s most beautiful angel. Anakin was the greatest of the Jedi knights. Obsessed with himself, and not wanting to trust the will of the Force or the will of the Council, he chose to join the Dark Side and pursue omnipotence. Thus Obi-Wan’s admonition to the beautiful Padmé, that he was trying to “save [Anakin] from himself.”

Childbirth v. Cyborg

Lucas chooses to juxtapose Anakin’s excruciating operating-table metamorphosis into Darth Vader with Padmé’s painful childbirth and slow expiration. Again, the light/dark, good/evil dichotomy is all too absolutist—and again, Lucas sees no conflict between it and Obi’s earlier remark. Anakin is the sign of selfishness and darkness. In contrast, childbirth is a sign of hope—Padmé suffers and dies for her children, who are, as we have already seen, A New Hope.

Conclusion

No, this wasn’t a Bush-bashing film. Lucas couldn’t have made one even if he tried—he can’t escape his own universe. If anything, this film is an argument against Richard Rorty and his school of “ironists,” because it favors moral absolutism, objective standards, and a metaphysical foundation for society. Those who blame Bush for being an absolutist who clings to outdated notions of "good" and "evil" should find no support from this film. I agree with Dan that the Empire looks a lot more like the totalitarian “Lies” of the twentieth-century (Nazism, Fascism and Communism) than any contemporary regime. What Michael Novak recently wrote about Communism could've be said about the Dark Side. Just substitute “Party” for “Dark Side” (comments in red are my own):

What helps the Party is moral; what hurts it is immoral [i.e., "If you're not with me..."]; any other moral principle is an illusion. Metaphysically, this is not nihilism, for at least the Party has ontological status as the dynamo of history and measure of moral progress. But for the participating individual it requires a relativizing of every other moral code. An emptying out of the moral individual, so that the Lie may occupy that place [Anakin was "emptied out" by the Dark Side's own "purgatorial fire," and Darth Vader is the Lie that has come to occupy his former place as the Chosen One.]

Now I am reading way too much into this, and I should stop. But some questions linger.

Free Will?

Does Anakin’s demise mean that Qui-Gon Jinn’s reading of the prophecy was mistaken? And where did Anakin’s dreams come from? Was his fate sealed by the prophecy, or by his dream?

-----

Footnote: (1) Scott got the line wrong. It's not "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes," but, "Only a Sith deals with absolutes." I wonder if the future bumper-sticker manufacturers will take note.

-------

On a related note: Jonathan V. Last a couple of years ago wrote a defense of the Empire. He'd probably disagree with me on the nature of the Empire. Then again, I'm pretty sure his essay is tongue-in-cheek.

Santiago

2005-05-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

Reconstruction

I just replaced and updated my blogroll on the sidebar. The rest of the sidebar will be reconstructed in the next few weeks.

Santiago

2005-05-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

"I decline to accept the end of man."

This speech is a good reason to explore the mind of Faulkner:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Santiago

2005-05-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Student Essays to Be Graded by Computers

"COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) - Student essays always seem to be riddled with the same sorts of flaws. So sociology professor Ed Brent decided to hand the work off - to a computer.

Students in Brent's Introduction to Sociology course at the University of Missouri-Columbia now submit drafts through the SAGrader software he designed. It counts the number of points he wanted his students to include and analyzes how well concepts are explained.

And within seconds, students have a score."

To paraphrase Nietzsche: "What are these standardized tests, these five-paragraph essays, these scantron sheets, if they are not the tomb and sepulchre of man?"

Santiago

2005-05-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

"In the daily exercise of Our pastoral office, it sometimes happens that We hear certain opinions which disturb Us--opinions expressed by people who, though fired with a commendable zeal for religion, are lacking in sufficient prudence and judgment in their evaluation of events. They can see nothing but calamity and disaster in the present state of the world. They say over and over that this modern age of ours, in comparison with past ages, is definitely deteriorating. One would think from their attitude that history, that great teacher of life, had taught them nothing. They seem to imagine that in the days of the earlier councils everything was as it should be so far as doctrine and morality and the Church's rightful liberty were concerned.

"We feel that We must disagree with these prophets of doom, who are always forecasting worse disasters, as though the end of the world were at hand.

"Present indications are that the human family is on the threshold of a new era. We must recognize here the hand of God, who, as the years roll by, is ever directing men's efforts, whether they realize it or not, towards the fulfillment of the inscrutable designs of His providence, wisely arranging everything, even adverse human fortune, for the Church's good."

--Pope John XXIII - Address at the Opening of Vatican Council II - 11 October 1962

Santiago

2005-05-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

#)^*%$#(@^!!!

What did I do to my sidebar?? Ahh! Alas.

This will be fixed after next Wednesday. Meanwhile, prayers to Blessed Alcuin requested.

Santiago

2005-05-02T16:55:00.000-07:00

One of the Promised Paraguayan Poems

"Buscar el pan"
por José Luis Appleyard

Buscar el pan.
Correr tras él.
Correr. Dromir. Amanecer.
Volver a ser.
Correr. Buscar.
Comer. Dormir.
Y nada más.
Buscar el pan.
Correr tras él.
Llevarlo tembloroso hasta la boca.
Comer el pan.
Correr.
Dormir.
Andar y desandar por calles viejas.
Correr
--para comer--
con los dos pies.
Mirar los ojos con la boca amarga
de una saliva torpe que adelgaza
duras migas de pan.
Correr tras él.
Luchar por él.
Herir por él.
Comer.
Dormir.
No renacer.
Eso es vivir.
Pero vivir
ya no es pensar
ni amar ni ser.
Comer.
Dormir.
Mejor morir.

***
Pretty dark. And deceptively simple, but of course that makes it that much more difficult to translate. That's not something I'm going to do today ;). A prize (an e-card, maybe?) to anyone who makes a brilliant translation.

Santiago

2005-05-01T19:53:00.001-07:00

Theologians: What do they know?

From Wilco's latest album, A Ghost Is Born, the song "Theologians" brings a smile to my face:

Theologians don't know nothing
About my soul
About my soul
I'm an ocean
And this emotion
Slow motion
Slow motion

Illiterati lumen fidei
god is with us everyday
That illiterate light
Is with us every night

Theologians
They don't know nothing
About my soul
Oh they don't know

Sitting weary-eyed at night over some very turgid old text, or sitting restlessly in class at school, sometimes I get the same feeling.

Of course, Wilco's poetry should not be taken literally. Dick Staub has a nice reflection on the song and on the slack that theologians have to take today.

Come to think of it, the turgid texts that make me restless these days are mostly written by literary critics or philosophers. And those books are usually not more than twenty or thirty years old.

Santiago

2005-05-01T18:22:00.000-07:00

How much do these two agree?

The clouds of my grief dissolved and I drank in the light. With my thoughts recollected I turned to examine the face of my physician. I turned my eyes and fixed my gaze upon her, and I saw that it was my nurse in whose house I had been cared for since my youth - Philosophy.

--Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in philosophical propositions, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Santiago

2005-04-30T18:15:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't read the Paraguayan newspapers...

My dad's article on John Paul II in the Paraguayan daily Ultima Hora has been online for a few weeks now and he never told me. I'll translate it into English (aka "the new Latin," according to Dan) after I finish taking my finals.

Santiago

2005-04-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

The British sure know how to make some wacky political ads.

Santiago

2005-04-28T20:36:00.000-07:00

Papal Critique-O-Matic 3000(tm)!

This funny little site generates automatic papal critiques.

Santiago

2005-04-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

"When St. Paul, in obedience to the warning of a dream, set sail from Troy in A.D. 49 and came to Philipi in Macedonia he did more to change the course of history than the great battle that had decided the fate of the Roman Empire on the same spot a century earlier, for he brought to Europe the seed of a new life which was ultimately destined to create a new world. All this took place underneath the surface of history, so that it was unrecognized by the leaders of contemporary culture...who actually saw it taking place beneath their eyes."

--Christopher Dawson

Santiago

2005-04-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

ln(morality) = 2pi*sin(atheism)/(Jesus!)+e^(mortality*1/2(free will))

Me: Guru, what's the equation for The Brothers Karamazov?
Guru: ln(morality) = 2pi*sin(atheism)/(Jesus!) +e^(mortality*1/2(free will)), plus a constant of integration

Well, aren't we just clever? (Guru wrote his [high school] senior thesis on Dostoyevsky, mostly to impress a certain girl. He now studies physics.)

Santiago

2005-04-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

Camille Paglia Wants to Save Poetry

Even though I disagree with her on some important things, for a few years now I have admired the literary critic Camille Paglia, first because of her intellectual integrity, her fidelity to the truth, and second, because she writes with a sledgehammer. Consider these lines taken from the preface to her latest book, Break, Blow, Burn, which was published in abridged form (the preface, not the whole book) in the British paper, the Telegraph:

--“The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry. It's why the pragmatic Anglo-American tradition (unlike effete French rationalism) doesn't need poststructuralism: in English, usage depends upon context; the words jostle and provoke one another and mischievously shift their meanings over time.”

--“I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets laboured, affected and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures. Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English. Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again…”

(Camille Paglia)

--“A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.”

--“The sacred remains latent in poetry, which was born in ancient ritual and cult. Poetry's persistent theme of the sublime - the awesome vastness of the universe - is a religious perspective, even in atheists like Shelley.

--“Commentary on poetry is a kind of divination, resembling the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams. Poets speak even when they know their words will be swept away by the wind.”

--“All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader. Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing. Technical analysis of a poem is like breaking down a car engine, which has to be reassembled to run again. Theorists childishly smash up their subjects and leave the disjecta membra like litter.”

All of this amounts, I think, to a manifesto for the liberation of poetry, for reclaiming poetry as something to be experienced and judged in light of the human condition, and not by the rubrics and categories of ideologies which serve to do nothing but enervate and confuse the human person.

I used to believe that one had to approach a poem--or any work of art--by attempting to extract an abstract philosophical discourse from it. “What does this mean?” I would ask, and what I demanded as an answer would be something definite, an objective description of the “message” of the poet. This, I now think, was due in part because of a misinterpretation I made of something my dad told me during high school: that behind every work of art is the philosophical worldview of the artist, which inspires that work. “You can glean from the work of art a worldview, and from that, a certain philosophical discourse,” he said, or something like that. In any case, I misinterpreted that to mean that art is reducible to philosophical discourse. Thus I grew into an very impatient reader of poetry.

Another thing that fueled this rationalist temperament--which I think is really what’s behind postmodern critical theory, a rationalist temperament--was my rejection of the epistemological relativism I saw among the English faculty in my high school. “No objective truth exists,” was a slogan I would never believe, because, as a religious believer, I couldn’t. So I grew wary of what I thought were overly-speculative and subjective discussions of literature. “There is an objective answer to every question!” I would think. I was very suspicious of anything deemed “subjective.”

I suppose a lot of things worked towards eventually overthrowing that tyrannical mentality in my mind. I remember specifically pondering something Pablo Neruda tells his postman in Il Postino, that when poetry is explained, it becomes banal. But in the end, I rejected that too, because, if Neruda is right, then poetry is nothing but ornamentation, something we do to make the banal more bearable. But poetry, I was determined, must be something more than that.

Now I realize that I did not understand poetry until I began to grasp the religious experience. I use the words “understand” and “grasp” wrongly here, of course,. The whole point is that poetry cannot be understood. Nor does it mean, pace Writer’s Workshop Seminars everywhere, that poetry must be “felt.” No. Poetry is an act of the person in response to the mystery of reality and his or her’s confrontation with it. This, too, is part of the religious experience, because this confrontation with reality demands answers from it. And our demands are addressed by poetry, sometimes, and at others by philosophy. But they are both incomplete, and both irreducible to the other.

This is why I am so happy to see that Camille Paglia, who is an atheist (“Atheist admirer of religion” is what she told C-SPAN) can see that poetry is intimately linked to the religious experience. I feel vindicated. I also feel vindicated in rejecting the relativist ideology of my teachers: ideology imposes its own criteria on the mystery of reality; authentic poetry, and authentic philosophy, is open--though not always passive--before it.

Ironically, now that I “understand” poetry a little better, I can’t write it. I am too afraid to try, of being too self conscious in the process. This is because, I think, in order to “understand” poetry, I assumed the position of a philosopher, and it is hard to do both, poetry and philosophy. The great Jacques Maritain said that he relied on his wife Raissa's experiences in writing Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, because she was a poet, and because he did not believe "that a philosopher would dare to speak of poetry if he could not rely on the direct experience of a poet." Perhaps all philosophers should marry poets, to keep them in touch with reality. Poets or economists.

Paglia’s book, in the end, is an attempt to recapture reality, the human experience in reality. And now I understand why the new pope distrusts theologians who "do not love art, poetry, music, nature: they can be dangerous."

----

Related Links:

The New Criterion has a review of Paglia's latest book.

Santiago

2005-04-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

Matty's Ratzinger Report

"So what’s the deal? First a Polish Pope, and now this! Cardinal Ratzinger – I must say, is a remarkable person! Heck, I was in his fan club (http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com) , own a couple of steins and mugs, and gave countless ones away as gifts! But why would this obscure Bavarian become the head of the Roman See? I want to state that, in my opinion, this German Shepherd is the perfect choice for the new present Pontiff. I see him as the legacy-holder. He holds as the most brilliant Cardinal alive, the legacy of European Catholicism, which is about to be handed over, at our own giving, to the third world Catholics of the world – where the future Popes will hail from. So I need to begin early in history--perhaps more than one century. Bear with me, as I will soon get to the point of my discussion."

I knew Matty back in the day when he worked as a youth group leader and was a guitarist for some Christian band, before he discerned his vocation to the priesthood and joined Mundelein Seminary. I am glad to see he is blogging. He has a nice post recounting the theological history of the Church in the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on B16's evolution as a thinker. Very interesting. He is very happy.

Santiago

2005-04-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

LITBLOGS.

Santiago

2005-04-20T20:13:00.000-07:00

B-16 Has Taste

Sandro Magister says,

"He has been this way since he was a child: 'The Catholicism of the Bavaria in which I grew up was joyful, colorful, human. I miss a sense of purism. This must be because, since my childhood, I have breathed the air of the Baroque.' ”

Well, we all have our own Cross to bear.

"He is distrustful of theologians who 'do not love art, poetry, music, nature: they can be dangerous.' He loves taking walks in the mountains. He plays the piano, and favors Mozart. His brother Georg, a priest, is the choirmaster at Ratisbonne, one of the last pockets of resistance for the great tradition of sacred polyphony and Gregorian chant. "

Ahh! Amen, amen! I have always been taught that "if you can't sing about it, it can't be true." I am glad to see our pope concurs. And Mozart!

"His was a strange conservatism, in any case. It was apt to disturb, rather than pacify, the Church. One of his favorite models is Saint Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who, after the Council of Trent, did nothing less than 'reconstruct the Catholic Church, which was almost destroyed in the area around Milan as well, without returning to the Middle Ages to do so; on the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church.' "

There must be some mistake. I've been told that our new pope has already bought the first train ticket back to the Middle Ages. Sandro is losing his touch. ... Really, these words are great.

John L. Allen writes this:

"Whatever one makes of his theological positions, Ratzinger is almost universally recognized as one of the preeminent Catholic intellectuals of his generation, a man of vast culture and refinement. He plays the piano in his spare time, and his brother Georg served as the director of the Regensburg choir. Ratzinger once said of Mozart that his music 'contains the whole tragedy of human existence.'"

He must have been referring specifically to the Requiem. Everything one can feel about love, life, death, hope...is said in that piece of music.

Santiago

2005-04-20T16:09:00.000-07:00

Not for a Godot, but for a St. Benedict(?)

Alisdair MacIntyre, the British philosopher and convert from Marxism, wrote in 1981:

"What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages whcih are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict."

Yesterday, the redoubtable Roger Kimball put two and two together: "Well, perhaps the elevation of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI is a fulfillment of MacIntyre's wish." I don't know if this is what the Pope had in mind when he chose his name. But Kimball's comment raises in my mind two questions:

1. Does our new pope agree with MacIntyre's assessment of the present state of the moral condition?

2. What will be his approach to reforming it?

The answer to the first question is, I would venture to say, Yes. I think, though, that if Pope Benedict XVI is anything like our last pope, he would frame the present-day decay of moral discourse in anthropological terms. The starting point for ethics is the human person. Modern philosophy handicaps our ability to know anything true about the human person, and this is why morality today is reduced either to relativistic fluff or to a Kantian imperative. This is also why Karol Wojtyla decided to write The Acting Person; as he explained to Father de Lubac:

"I devote my very rare free moments to a work...on the mystery of the PERSON. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out at that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even much more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order...."

The moral problem is the result of an anthropological problem--it's about the human person. But as for the second question on the approach: there are two approaches to the moral problem, I think, or two types of Christian witness. According to Michael Novak, anyway:

"Some Catholics commit their lives to an eschatological witness, some to an incarnational witness. The former (Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day) believe that the world is sinful, broken, even adversarial, and they choose to light within it the fire of the love of God, while having as little to do with the things of this world as they can. Those who choose the incarnational witness try to see in every moment of history, in every culture, and in every place and time the workings of divine grace, often in ways that are hidden like the workings of yeast buried in dough. And they lend their energies to altering that world in its basic institutions, even if ever so slightly, in the direction of caritas. Both traditions are legitimate."

This brings me back to my second question. Yes, Pope Benedict would agree with MacIntyre's diagnosis of the moral condition of the world--Novak probably would as well. But would Pope Benedict opt for the more eschatological approach of MacIntyre (who thinks we should start from scratch, with small communities like the previous passage suggests) or would he trust in the incarnational approach of somebody like Novak, who thinks that the "yeast" of the Gospel is still at work in history, even within non-Christian institutions?

Contrast MacIntyre's passage with this one from an article that Novak wrote about the French Thomist, Jacques Maritain:

"Yet Maritain does not say that Christianity exists in the world solely as the Church or the body of believers. Rather, he sees 'Christianity as historical energy at work in the world. It is not in the heights of theology, it is in the depths of the secular conscience and secular existence that Christianity works in this fashion.' He is equally far from asserting that Christians brought modern democratic institutions into existence: 'It was not given to believers in Catholic dogma but to rationalists to proclaim in France the rights of man and of the citizen, to Puritans to strike the last blow at slavery in America.' He gives credit--by schematic suggestion, not comprehensive detail--where credit is due: 'Neither Locke nor Jean-Jacques Rousseau nor the Encyclopedists can pass as thinkers faithful to the integrity of the Christian trust.'”

This is why Maritain--and to a lesser extent, perhaps, Novak--is so controversial. There is a considerable difference between the two types of "wtiness"--the incarnational one, perhaps, lends itself more to a cautious optimism. But judging by this quotation, it looks like Pope Benedict is closer in his thinking to MacIntyre:

"[The Church will] become small, and will to a great extent have to start over again. But after a time of testing, an internalized and simplified Church will radiate great power and influence; for the population of an entirely planned and controlled world are going to be inexpressibly lonely…and they will then discover the little community of believers as something quite new. As a hope that is there for them, as they answer they have secretly always been asking for."

I guess we will soon find out how he thinks.

Santiago

2005-04-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

A Portrait of the Pope as a Young Artist... or something like that. Will blog more one test and two term papers from now.

Santiago

2005-04-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Huzzah! I'm now a member of St. Blog's!

Santiago

2005-04-14T21:21:00.000-07:00

The Excitement is Palpable...

...you might even say it's papable. Michael Novak says:

"Now that the Italian press is reporting that Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, a hero of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and perhaps the closest intellectual associate of Pope John Paul II during the past 25 years, has already received the support of 40, maybe 50 cardinals, out of the 77 votes needed to be elected the next Pope, it is time for the American media to begin searching into the mind and heart of one so close to JPII....

And, actually, my own sources in Rome now suggest that the number of cardinals supporting Ratzinger is closer to 55, leaving him at this early point some 22 short. Some caution should be exercised here, since in Rome counting of this sort is in most cases not actually by head, as is done in Washington by a Senate or House whip. In Rome, estimates are usually made by inference from known connections of cardinals and their close associates. However, some people in Rome (not necessarily with experience in American mayoralty elections) do know how to count votes. Those I know of in this camp are keeping their cards close to their chest. But they do not dispute the published numbers, except to hint that the true number is higher."

Santiago

2005-04-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

Gregory Wolfe's piece on Monsignor Giussani

Gregory Wolfe is editor of Image and an essayist for the webzine Godspy. The following comes from a piece commemorating the passing of Monsignor Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation, who passed away about a month before the Pope:

When he entered the classroom, instead of giving his students predigested bits of Thomas Aquinas, he read the poetry of the dark, despairing, Romantic Giacomo Leopardi with them. They spoke of the poet’s unfulfilled desires, his sadness and sense of mystery. And then he would ask them to consider Aquinas’s belief that this sadness might be “the desire for an absent good.” And so a companionship began.

In his funeral homily, Cardinal Ratzinger said of Giussani: “from the start [of his life] he was touched—or, better—wounded, by the desire for beauty.” He believed that art provides the best analogy for the moment of recognition that is our experience of the Event. The spiritual life, he said, is “the development of a gaze.”

--Gregory Wolfe, "Current Events," Image Journal, Issue # 45, Spring 2005

Santiago

2005-04-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

APRIL 11, 2005:

Santiago

2005-04-08T18:03:00.000-07:00

APRIL 8, 1966:

Santiago

2005-04-05T20:44:00.000-07:00

Attention Students of Latin and Greek!

Some wonderful people at Tufts University have set up the Perseus Digital Library. Among their many "tools" are complete vocabulary lists for classical works in Greek and Latin, from Plato and Aristotle to Quintillian and Boethius (and including the Vulgate). This was a life saver for me when I was translating the Apology earlier this semester, and it saved hours of my time. Sure, you have to transliterate the Greek letters into Roman ones, but it's not too hard. And if you're searching through Latin works, that's no problem. See also their Greek and Latin catalogues of morphological analyses, their English-Greek and English-Latin dictionaries, and their historical maps of London (Andy you should like this).

We should all write emails to the good people of Tufts and give thanks.

And speaking of resources on the web, my friend Mary has some excellent links posted up.

Santiago

2005-04-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

Terry Eagleton on the Pope

This is the strongest criticism I've read about the pope so far:

"He was one of the greatest disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin."

Sheesh! But did Charles Darwin really wreak havoc on the Christian church? I mean, really? Who did we lose, besides a few Victorian intellectuals, and my brilliant friend, Andy? On the other hand, I guess Darwin is responsible for spawning all those fundamentalist creationist books...

Eagleton's hatred is a bit dissapointing, especially since Paul J. Griffiths last summer wrote such a compelling essay comparing John Paul's critique of capitalism to Eagleton's own. Look at this:

"Eagleton identifies capitalism and liberalism as the main enemies of this way of understanding ourselves. Capitalism is committed, in his opinion, to the idea that humans are infinitely plastic, that our appetites can be shaped into ever-new forms without constraint by nature. The market requires such a view so that it can educate our desires into inexhaustibly new patterns of need and consumption. And liberalism is the enemy of virtue-theory, he thinks, because of its subjectivism and its tendency to be unable to commit itself to anything other than a formal set of constraints upon what human beings should do. Capitalism and liberalism are among Marxism’s traditional enemies. But as so conceived they are also, in considerable part, the enemies of Catholicism. Pope John Paul II’s objections to the empty formalism of successive drafts of the prolegomenon to the European Union’s Constitution are in essence the same as Eagleton’s objections to liberalism; and the critique of unconstrained capitalism found in such papal encyclicals as Rerum Novarum or Centesimus Annus would not be out of place in the pages of After Theory."

I wonder if Eagleton knows about this--he used to be Catholic. "The path from the Tridentine creed to Trotskyism is shorter than it seems,” he wrote. His Catholic upbringing made it easier, he has said, to reject classical liberalism and capitalism. But apparently he had no love for the late Holy Father.

Santiago

2005-04-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

This is the Official Statement from Communion and Liberation on the Passing of the Pope:

Press Release - Milan, April 3, 2005
A note from Communion and Liberation for the death of John Paul II
“The glory of God is man fully alive”

“My friends, let us serve this man, let us serve Christ in this great man with all our existence.” These were Giussani’s words to us as he left his first audience with John Paul II at the beginning of 1979. We have tried to realize these words in all these years of the life of the movement of Communion and Liberation, according to the task that the Pope himself entrusted to us on the occasion of the 1984 audience, “’Go forth to all the world’ (Mt 28:19), is what Christ said to His disciples. And I repeat it to you, “Go out into all the world to bring the truth, the beauty, and the peace that are encountered in Christ the Redeemer.” This is the charge that I leave to you today” (for the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of CL, Rome, September 29, 1984). Grateful, we bow before the completion of the life of the Pope, who exercised his authority first of all as a personal testimony to Christ – “center of the cosmos and of history” (Redemptor hominis) -, a testimony offered to the world with untiring dedication and self-sacrifice.For the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this pontificate, Fr Giussani wrote John Paul II, “Following the Pope’s life over these last 25 years, what is most noticeable is that Christianity tends to be truly the realization of the human. All his travels, like a long march towards death, have had as their reason the evident unity that corresponds to the genius of Christianity: “Gloria Dei vivens homo”. The glory of God is man who is alive.”The Pope leaves the world fuller of the humanity of Christ and the Church more conscious of being herself “movement”.

Source

And here is my friend Dan Darling's (of Regnum Crucis) piece at Winds of Change. He credits his conversion to John Paul II, whom he saw during World Youth Day in Canada a few years back.

Santiago

2005-04-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

THE POPE IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE POPE.

Santiago

2005-04-02T09:16:00.000-08:00

Hans Kung Talks Smack About Me In His Article on the Pope

In Spiegel, he writes:

"The major regional and international youth events sponsored by the new lay movements (Focolare, Comunione e Liberazione, St. Egidio, Regnum Christi) and supervised by the church hierarchy attract hundreds of thousands of young people, many of them well-meaning but far too many uncritical. In times when they lack convincing leadership figures, these young people are most impressed by a shared "event." The personal magnetism of "John Paul Superstar" is usually more important than the content of the pope's speeches, while their effects on parish life are minimal."

He's right: we are impressed by a shared Event. But it's not what he thinks...

"In keeping with his ideal of a uniform and obedient church, the pope sees the future of the church almost exclusively in these easily controlled, conservative lay movements. ..."

What does "conservative" even mean in this context? Yes, we are easily controlled & conforming automatons... I leave my brain at the door of the church, etc. Oh, come on, Hans! I personally invite you to hang out with me next weekend. We'll go to a coffeeshop, discuss the Eternal Questions, and tell each other about our hopes and fears (but please no complaining about Ratzinger--I don't care). Afterwards, you tell me whether I am easily controlled, conservative, and impressionable.

Then again, if Karol Wojtyla doesn't impress you, I doubt I would.

Santiago

2005-04-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one that found that tagline on Fox News hillarious? It read: "Medical Experts Say/ No More Hope For the Pope." I laughed out loud. I think the Pope would have laughed with me.

Santiago

2005-03-30T19:58:00.000-08:00

Another Bohemian for St. Therese

It's Dorothy Day Day here at my blog. This is in part for a friend to whom I just gave The Long Loneliness as a belated birthday gift. Apparently--and surprisingly--she is liking the book.

The other day I posted about three bohemian-types who fell in love with St. Therese de Lisieux. Christopher at Against the Grain knows of another one: the Venerable Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, the first (please correct me if I'm wrong) modern Catholic lay movement.

Stephen at Being! Or Nothingness posted a link to an article written by a friend of his, which recounts the experience of living with the Catholic Worker community in Houston, Texas, the Casa Juan Diego. This is the site of the Casa.

This reminds me of an excellent book about which I will post a lot more in the future: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie. It's a book equal parts literary criticism and biography, and deals with Dorothy Day and also Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton.

I think it may have been in that book that I read that whenever someone would call her a saint, Dorothy would retort, "Don't dismiss me that easily." Now, some have interpreted this to mean that she would never want to be canonized. I don't agree, and anyway, I doubt she really cares about it at this point. She would make a hip addition to the liturgical calendar, no? This site has some information on the debate.

The best essay I have ever read about her is "Revolutionary of the Heart," by Geoffrey B. Gneuhs, a priest who spoke at her funeral. He writes:

"Dorothy criticized extreme capitalism and militarism (as has every modern Pope). Does that make her a leftist? She decried the welfare state and massive government for depersonalizing culture. Does that make her a rightist? Dorothy confounds those who live in the small world of politics and ideology.

For the Church, saints are people who are holy and give us a glimpse of God. That is why Joan of Arc was canonized, not for her politics, which apparently were monarchist. Like Joan, Dorothy looked heavenward, lived heavenward, loved heavenward.

In her journal she quoted Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard of Paris: 'To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery: it means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.' Dorothy Day’s life was a mystery to many, but it also made utter sense."

Santiago

2005-03-28T18:14:00.000-08:00

Easter Poem

Resurrection
John Donne

Moyst with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule
Shall (though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly,) bee
Freed by that drop, from being starv'd, hard, or foule,
And life, by this death abled, shall controule
Death, whom thy death slue; nor shall to mee
Feare of first or last death, bring miserie,
If in thy little booke my name thou enroule,
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified,
But made that there, of which, and for which 'twas;
Nor can by other meanes be glorified.
May then sinnes sleep, and deaths soone from me passe,
That wak't from both, I againe may
Salute the last, and everlasting day.

Santiago

2005-03-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

St. Therese and the Bohemians

An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in my reading is that of the hip, young, radical writer encountering the meek St. Therese of Lisieux. I guess it’s fair to say that I don’t have enough evidence to claim that this phenomenon constitutes a universal pattern, but it’s happened more than once, maybe three times. It usually goes like this: a young writer says, "What could this little bourgeois girl possibly know about God and the plight of the modern believer?" Then the young writer reads her work and is a bit astonished to find out the answer: Quite a lot.

First case, Thomas Merton. In The Seven Storey Mountain, he writes that he could easily fathom saints coming out of Harlem, or leper colonies, or the slums of Turin, or the roads of Umbria in the times of St. Francis, or the Cistercian abbeys of the twelfth century, but definitely not "in the midst of all the stuffy, overplush, overdecorated, comfortable ugliness and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie." He continues:

Therese…was a Carmelite, that is true: but what she took into the convent with her was a nature that had been formed and adapted to the background and mentality of the French middle class of the late nineteenth century, than which nothing could be imagined more complacent and apparently immovable. The one thing that seemed to me more or less impossible was for grace to penetrate the thick, resilient hide of bourgeois smugness and really take hold of the immortal soul beneath that surface, in order to make something out of it. At best, I thought, such people might turn out to be harmless prigs: but great sanctity? Never!

But Merton soon changed his mind:

She became a saint, not by running away from the middle class, not by abjuring and despising and cursing the middle class… She kept everything that was bourgeois about her and was still not incompatible with her vocation… To her, it would have been incomprehensible that anyone should think these things were ugly or strange, and it never even occurred to her that she might be expected to give them up, or hate them, or curse them, or bury them under a pile of anathemas…

Merton said that his early reproach against Therese was on of the "biggest and most salutary humiliations" that he had ever had; even so, it still did not change his opinion of "the smugness of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie: God forbid!"

A similar thing happened to Tony Hendra, who wrote the recent bestseller, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul. As a teenager, Hendra was given a long list of spiritual writers to peruse as a preliminary step towards entering a monastery:

One recommendation on which, surprisingly, both my mentors agreed was the Discalced Carmelite nun St. Teresa (Therese) of Lisieux… St. Therese of Lisieux died in 1897 when she was only twenty-four after a harrowing round of physical and spiritual travails. Respectful though Catholic kids were taught to be about the saints—especially modern ones, with their relevant messages for our sinful young lives—the Little Flower was a figure of fun, because her following while enormous, tended to be female, long in the tooth, and gag-me sentimental. Her statue was always the soppiest in the church, goody-goody eyes rolled up to Heaven, chipped plaster roses held to chaste bosom. I’d always dismissed her and her wildly popular autobiography, Histoire d’une ame (The Story of a Soul) as the worst kind of Victorian nun-slush.

He continues:

There was a lot of three-hanky Victorian piety in The Story of a Soul, but to my surprise I also found a very tough-spirited young woman. I found her single-mindedness about entering Carmel inspiringly familiar. Even more familiar: the "curtain of darkness" she endured and the manifold doubts which constantly plagued her.

And then there is Michael Novak. As a young seminarian itching for a new ecumenical council, Novak spent a lot of time with the French:

I can hardly give enough credit to the Holy Cross seminaries for what they taught me between 1947 and 1959 about caritas, the drive to understand, and an incarnational humanism. There my soul became in a sense a child of France. I learned to love the Jacques Maritain of Integral Humanism, François Mauriac, and Albert Camus. From the French I learned the desire to write both philosophy and fiction. I also began an intense study of the life and work of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

About St. Therese:

St. Thérèse…is the teacher of the Church about the everyday exercise of caritas, in ways so humble that they mostly cannot be seen, even though their effects may be subjected to the tests of the gospel. She taught me the importance of thinking small and honoring the humble things that I at first tended to despise. For the theology of the laity and the theology of work and the theology of daily institutional life, her work has been described—by no less an authority than Hans Urs von Balthasar—as revolutionary.

The influence of Thérèse is most often visible in my work when I refer to the transformation that St. Thomas Aquinas wrought in Aristotle’s philosophy of human action. Aristotle organized his thought around the conception of phronesis or practical wisdom; Aquinas saw the potential in this concept to support a new mode of caritas. This transformation shapes the horizon within which I placed the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, on whom I had intended to do my doctoral thesis at Harvard. (I wrote and published Belief and Unbelief instead, to clear away a conceptual obstacle to understanding the theology of the person and community, by way of "intelligent subjectivity.") (Michael Novak, "Controversial Engagements," First Things, April 1999.)

All of this has made me think twice about condemning all of these sappy evangelical youth groups that one encounters these days, and that are easy prey to vicious satires like the movie Saved!. Reality is more complex than we think, and we can be too quick to make judgments about the terrible bourgeoisie. However, I am still resolved never to read Tuesdays with Morrie--in part because I highly doubt that it's as good a book as Story of a Soul. But I guess I can't say that until I've read it.

Santiago

2005-03-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Vanity of Vanities, All Is Vanity! Or, Who I Am and Why I Blog

My name is Santiago and I study philosophy and English litrachur at a small Midwestern Jesuit university. It’s been almost two years now since my friend Andy recommended that I start a blog. For various reasons I didn’t start until this year. After a few false starts, and after a few months of posting comments on other blogs under the name "Santiago," I bring you “Constantly Risking Absurdity,” a name taken from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and which constitutes a sly little attempt at self-deprecating humor on my part. It's always better to risk absurdity than to risk pretension. The trick is to do the former without doing the latter.

What revived my interest in blogging was actually a small tit-for-tat I had with these nice people over 20th century poetry. The blogs that inspired me are Basia Me Catholica Sum and Against the Grain.

What I hope to write here are sorts of “essays in embryo,” that I can pick up later and bring to term within my literary womb. I’ll mostly write about the things I’m reading at the time, and thoughts I come up with that I want to share with other people. Sometimes it’s hard to explain to my friends why I think certain things about certain things, and I think that a blog would help communicate my reasoning.

Expect stuff on whoever or whatever I am reading or studying at the time: tortured souls like Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley, wisecracks like Flannery O’Connor and GK Chesterton, Spanish poets (Lorca, Machado), Mozart’s Masses (a passion of mine), sundry philosophers, etc. Also, I will make ill-advised attempts at translating the poets of the country of my birth, Paraguay, whose poetry has been neglected in the States, compared to the work of other Latin American poets—like Neruda or Dario—who get a lot more attention. Very little politics here. Oh, and seeing that we are only a year and a few months away from Germany ’06, expect some posts on the beautiful game.

Four paragraphs seem about enough. I hope you check back regularly.

P.S. I will get RSS eventually. Meanwhile Atom should be enough.

Santiago