Life

During our Pentateuch oral exam, Dcn. Koet offered the opinion that the original Vulgate (St. Jerome’s translation) is much more interesting than the New Vulgate, a ‘compromise translation’ arrived at by voting. This Sunday, in the enjoyment of tranquillity, I read Genesis 1-3 in the Buber/Rosenzweig translation, and now I realize why Scripture translations should be made by one or two poets, not by committees.

This translation tries to be as faithful as possible to the oddities of the Hebrew original, which engenders turns of phrase like ‘From all the trees in the garden you shall eat, eat’ and ‘On that day you shall die, die’. For once, a Bible that reads like ancient poetry!

Grammar is stretched (the way Jesus did) in sentences like: ‘And God saw that it is good.’

The same goes for God’s and man’s naming activity. The word ‘call’ retains its strength through the skillful use of interpunction: ‘And God called the light: Day! And the darkness he called: Night!’

To me, the most striking thing (though I have not yet plumbed its full meaning) is that when God tells man, ‘Dust you are and to dust you shall return,’ he responds by calling his wife: ‘Chawwa (Eve), Life!’

End of May

Today was the last class at seminary. One hour of singing and three hours of Fundamental Theology make for a good end. We’ll be here for a while yet, sharing prayers and meals during our exams, which will last until the end of June.

I find it hard to assess this year. On the one hand, it has been very restful. On the other hand, I feel I have not accomplished much, because I did not apply myself to anything in great depth. It is difficult to know when one is simply meant to receive and digest, observe and adapt, commune and enjoy, and when to make an effort. Dwelling on that, however, obscures gratitude by vague feelings of guilt, which can never be a good thing.

What I definitely did learn this year – without noticing it – was the depth, importance and richness of liturgy. That applies to the wide scope of the liturgical year, the changing moods of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and so forth, but also to its details. Learning about liturgical colours, hymns, antiphons, when and how to celebrate or remember what, has drawn me deeper into the life of the Church. Next year, hopefully I will learn to remember more frequently Who is the life of the Church. Having fixed times of prayer in each day may be a step on the road to incessant prayer, but it is not the road.
 

Today is the last day of May, the month of Mary. Since I have been lost for words throughout the month, I will borrow those of Chesterton in Book VII of The Ballad of the White Horse. Mary, Queen of Confessors, pray for us!
 

The King looked up, and what he saw

Was a great light like death,

For Our Lady stood on the standards rent,

As lonely and as innocent

As when between white walls she went

And the lilies of Nazareth.
 

One instant in a still light

He saw Our Lady then,

Her dress was soft as western sky,

And she was a queen most womanly –

But she was a queen of men.

Sovereign Hunger

Qualms mostly quelled, I went to see The Hunger Games with my brother and sister. Fr Barron in his commentary remarked on the connection with René Girard’s idea of the scapegoating mechanism, in which all the tensions within a society are discharged on a few selected victims. Blaming, ostracizing or even killing them gives a temporary peace: order is restored.

The blame does not need to be placed on the individual. In the Hunger Games, the tributes expiate the past sins of their districts and, in doing so, atone for the nation (as Seneca remarks: it ‘knits us all together’, makes us at-one). Every time at the Reaping of the tributes, the President’s words are replayed:

This is how we remember our past. This is how we safeguard our future.

Scapegoating can take various forms. The victims are not necessarily depicted as repulsive; in fact, quite the opposite happens in the Hunger Games, where the tributes receive all kinds of goods, are dressed up to the best of their advantage and enjoy the admiring attention of all. They are the pride of their district: not only a sacrifice for expiation, but also a representative of the people.

This reminded me not so much of René Girard as of William Desmond, and his concept of the erotic sovereign. Eros, as Plato reminds us, is born of Plenty and Poverty, full and starved by turns; so there are erotic energies in man (including but not limited to the sexual) that strive to overcome all finite limits, all poverty in every sense of the word.

This can be seen in the hero, the self of infinite purpose, who strives without end to become more fully himself. (‘I want to still be me,’ as Peeta says; there must be an inner unity to the hero, a singleness of purpose, not mere good fortune.) The hero is isolated, like the scapegoat; just as the scapegoat is singled out to bear the blame of the community, the hero is singled out to bear the glory of the community. Singled out: single indeed, but always out of the whole and in relation to it. As Desmond says, the ‘unsatisfied longing for perfection is buoyed up in the vision of exemplars dedicated to ascend to the heights.’

The Hunger Games depict excellently what it means to be an erotic sovereign. It starts when Katniss and Peeta drive into the Capitol; Peeta looks out of the window and waves, awed by being the focus of so much attention. But the climax is yet to come. It comes at the Tribute Parade, where the team of each district wheels into a huge stadium in chariots. Katniss and Peeta are last in line, as usual, and we have already seen that their stylist has been planning something. We get a panoramic view of the whole stadium watching the chariots roll in to the triumphant anthem ‘Horn of Plenty’; the first verse’s last note is drawn out, something like a hush falls, and people lean forward in surprise, the commentator asking his buddy ‘What is that?’ As the swollen fermata bursts into an intenser hymnody, the entire cinema screen is at once filled by the living lit-up face of Katniss.

The Horn of Plenty for us all!

And I thought it was impressive on a laptop. Before we have recovered, we see Peeta and Katniss in tight black suits, flames billowing behind them.

Two young people, holding their hands up, saying, ‘I’m proud I come from District 12. We will not be overlooked!’ Now I love that!

Desmond says that erotic sovereigns are daimonic: powers between gods and ordinary mortals, marked by nobility but more intensely in danger of betraying the good. Daimons are lifted into the air; they do not yet dwell in heaven. Let anyone who thinks that he flies take heed lest he fall. Katniss falls. Because she is virtuous, because she has the makings of a sovereign, the whole nation of Panem focuses its hungry desires on her. Under such pressure, she cannot remain honest; she turns away from reality towards the show and the applause, from love of her neighbours to the subtle domination of the crowd. Human, all too human.

We might conclude that there should be no place for erotic sovereignty in our society, since it is too dangerous both for the rulers and the ruled. (As if we ultimately had a choice to exclude it!) Yet Desmond suggests that we need them, for if they remain open to true transcendence, they show us ‘the glory of the world’ and the realized promise of excellence here and now. Without them, we do not really grasp what it means to be human. One is reminded of Goethe saying: ‘Without having seen the Sistine Chapel, one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving.’ Erotic sovereigns not only channel desires; they excite them. Besides that, they are essential as ‘judges free of the tendency to say only what many will want to hear.’ No one can rob them of their standard of excellence. Without such exemplars, virtue in a society will erode. Less and less will knit us together. We will distrust all greatness and deny our own.

En tois epouraniois, in the heavenly things or the heavenly places, is where the daimons live. The Greek phrase, as Heinrich Schlier points out, is used frequently in the Letter to the Ephesians. Christ fills the epourania; the Church is blessed in the epourania; but all spiritual powers, for good or evil, also inhabit the epourania. The epourania is the realm of the ‘transcendent’ in the broadest sense of the word. It is a word that Desmond uses quite frequently. Schlier (being German) defines it: ‘that which opens up a ‘space’ for man on earth and the earth as such, through which he gains an ultimately infinite breadth and depth beyond the earthly … that which is open to him beyond himself, allows him possibilities and prospects.’ The epourania is ‘the manifold ‘presence’ of powers, namely of space and time and spirit, so of conceding and encompassing, urging and destining powers.’

Now Christ both is in the heavens and has ascended above all heavens. His sphere encompasses all, and we can choose either to live in his heaven or in another, ruled by different powers than Christ. We choose a space ‘into which and from out of which’ we live, and a lord to rule over us. We can live in the confusing, cramped, dark spaces of lower lords (the stadium, the arena), but we are called and enabled to dwell in the epourania in Christ Jesus. In all cases there will be strife. If we struggle for power in the stadium, the arena or any such ‘heaven’, we will find no rest; but if we live in Christ, other pretended masters will find it curious and irritating that we do not submit to their lordship and play by their rules. The heavens resound with the trumpets of war.

All this is frightening. We might try to stay at home (and succeed in various degrees), clear of the invisible pulling into the unknown, saying no to the spotlights and despising or pitying the people in them, secretly claiming for oneself the greatest of gifts: humility. But, as C.S. Lewis said, we might be mistaking the decrease of nature for the increase of grace. Pride is not starved by erotic anorexia. If we deny the goodness of greatness, can we be happy for others’ temporary (perhaps timely) sovereignty? Can we be grateful for our own moments of soaring? Can we aspire to the ‘riches of grace’ (another Ephesian phrase), grace, the all-encompassing expanse in which true Plenty meets Poverty and gives birth to beauty?

If we share in the mystery of Good Friday and even of Easter, perhaps we can share in the mystery of Palm Sunday as well; without forgetting that the King wept at the height, looking out on Jerusalem. We may be focal points, but the light comes from elsewhere; we are to be magnifying, not refractory. Thus we shall be able to walk boldly en tois epouraniois, in poverty and plenty, remembering the law of the Lord: not ‘Kill or be killed’, not ‘Live and let live’, but ‘Be killed and let live.’

A Journey as Ointment

On Sunday 25 March, the March for Life was organized in Brussels for the third time. On Saturday, after spending some time with other pastoral students of the Rotterdam diocese in the ancient abbey of Egmond (where an 11th-century Duke of Holland lies entombed), I descended on Leuven: from Hillegom to Leiden (where, waiting for the train to move on, I happen to type these lines), from Leiden to Rotterdam, from Rotterdam to Mechelen, from Mechelen to Leuven.

Inner warmth and excitement grew as my latitudinal coordinate decreased. I was looking forward to be back, feeling stimulated to be on my own, out of the ordinary routine. Essays on various subjects were devoured (one by a Lovanian friend), and, putting pen to paper, I wrote two lines of effervescent sprung rhythm.

On arriving, I sent a location status update to Anke, who, like me, had once belonged to the American College’s inner peripheral circle. She, a second-year Theology student, walked with me to the Grote Markt, where we sat down at Notre Dame to have a Stella Artois (a product of Leuven antedating the university) and a good talk. We lamented the splintering of the College, and the realization soaked into me that last year had truly been a blessed time. At the time I may have had too much on my mind to see it clearly; distance and return had reconciled me.

We also found out that her speech was perceived as Dutch by the Flemings, while mine was perceived as Flemish by the Dutch. Evidently a native speaker is not honoured in his own country.

Then I proceeded to Arenberg, where I used to live and where I would spend the night. Pierre was just celebrating his fortieth birthday by watching Tintin with a large crowd of people. It was very nice to see so many happy familiar faces again, not to mention my old place of refuge, the small chapel with the painting of the Crowning of Mary by the Trinity.

Thankfully I was reminded of Daylight Saving Time going into effect that weekend, so I was in time for Mass and meditation. Mass was celebrated in the chapel at 9am, followed by a festive breakfast. After breakfast, I went to Mass at the American College; I arrived at the beginning of the homily, a beautiful one on prayer. At both Masses, my responses were off: the Flemish differ slightly from the Dutch and the Anglophones were using their new translation of the Missal.

O God beyond all praising was the recessional song, one that resonated in memory. I went to the Sunday gathering; the dining hall of the American College was unsettlingly empty with all the seminarians gone. Olivia and Joe were there, but they did not say much. Bosco seemed more pleased to see me. I also made the acquaintance of the main celebrant, a British Dominican.

I remained in conversation, inside the building and walking through town, until lunchtime. Lunch and coffee were at Arenberg, after which Pierre, Fr. Lasala (the new chaplain) and I set off for Brussels, praying the Rosary in the car. Some other residents had gone there on their own; they were part of security and I saw them in special attire. A Belgian seminarian was there as well; he said that things in his seminary were slowly getting better, because they were now allowed to kneel during consecration and receive Communion on the tongue.

The March was beautiful: the atmosphere, the weather, the buildings lining the road. We went from the King’s Square to the Palace of Justice, where we laid down our roses. It made more of an impression than last year and seemed shorter, but last year I was taking pictures of everything I saw; this year I was merely holding my rose on high.

On coming back, I used various media for signal emissions to Dan, Anke and Michaël. Dan received them by proxy, being at church with Anke. Michaël brought his girlfriend Geraldine, and so five of us converged at the Oude Markt. Since I was out of cash and the ATM had broken down, Dan paid for my Stella. We chatted amiably for a too short while. I told Michaël I had read his paper on the train. Also, I mentioned that I had not informed Tyler of my going to Leuven, but had I done so, he would surely have told me to say hi to all. Anke exclaimed, ‘I’ve never had a more contingent greeting!’

All good things end. Our party broke up at dinnertime; I went to Arenberg and had dinner there. It was a very full dinner. The joke was that Pierre had a Triduum this year: first his birthday, then Sunday, then the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Dinner at Arenberg meant that I had to catch the train an hour later and would arrive back at seminary at 0.30 rather than 11.30pm; the journey would take almost four hours. It was definitely worth it, though. On my way back to the station I ran into the last remaining ‘old crowd’ resident, a student of things Japanese who had just arrived in town. No face left unseen!

Apparently there is another Dutch resident at Arenberg now, a biomedical student from a place very close to my hometown. It was agreed that he was more Dutch than I, being tall and vocal.

On the journey back to Mechelen, Rotterdam, Heemstede and Vogelenzang, I prayed Vespers and finished my Lenten poem, which is posted in my thread as Ouai Megalopolis.

Dispersit Superbos

Friday evening I went to a concert with my father. Four Germans sang 16th-century polyphony. The first half passed breathlessly: mostly Passion music from the early Lutheran tradition (and some Bach). There was much laughter and applause during the caperings, mimicry and odd voices of the madrigals of the second half. John Dowland was introduced as the ‘master of melancholy’, but I suppose he was so in a Renaissance English sort of way, much subtler than German Romantics or other loud acolytes at the marriage of Eros and Thanatos.

As we filed out during the pause, I found myself shuffling forward next to a Muslim girl of presumably Dutch ancestry: glasses, white skin and a light blue headdress. Unlike most of the visitors, she wasn’t much older than I. Both of us seemed too shy to say anything, but I was struck by how natural and happy she looked: at ease without the mask of happy sociality, at peace without the defensive artillery of extroversion. Religion, discipline and decency do much to contribute to happiness.

A certain Rutger, who recently achieved notoriety, is a Dutchman without religion, without discipline and without decency; it is a lack he compensates by clutching a microphone with both hands like a scepter, and keeping the company of a camera. He is an insistent and often disrespectful interviewer. The majority of his prey feels forced either to play along or to ignore him. Being harassed is unpleasant, but better than creating a scene and appearing embarrassingly rude to the general public.

Recently Rutger singled out a woman with a partner who had no such qualms, vetted by years of political engagement, arduous physical training, and experience teaching philosophy of law: Prof. Kinneging. When Rutger rang, Kinneging opened. After it became clear that the annoying journalist was not going to leave, Kinneging decided to open the door, turn the camera away, and impress certain facts on the callers, such as:

- If they would return unannounced, he would throw them into the canal, camera and all.
- He might be the first to react this way, but not the last.
- No, he was not going to discuss or argue his point.

The entire exchange can be seen here.

I have to say, I admire the way Kinneging stood his ground. All the forgotten emotions from the playground (and the cinema) have come back to me now, in particular the surge of joy at finding a self-assured person confronting the dominators. It reminds me of the ‘Get off my lawn’ scene in Gran Torino. Sometimes the timorous sons and daughters of the polis need the old men with the anger management problem to teach the wheedling, malicious bullies the meaning of fear. Better to strike up an uneasy alliance with the wrathful God in the desert than to stay with Egypt’s fleshpots, helping the cruel Pharaoh fortify himself.

Some say that the oldest part of the Bible is the Song of Miriam, of God as fighting against the forces of a cocksure civilization: ‘Sing ye to the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.’ Or as her humbler namesake would put it, centuries later: ‘He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats…’

Or, nineteen centuries later, Chesterton (since the Road goes ever on and on):

For riseth up against realm and rod
A thing forgotten, a thing downtrod,
The last lost giant, even God,
Is risen against the world.

Relics

I received a new SIM card from my telephone company. Foreseeing that the data on the old one would be lost, I took some time entering all my contacts’ numbers into a separate document. In alphabetic but entirely random order, people and events rose up before me: those I knew from secondary school, from the trip to Russia, from my three years at Roosevelt Academy, from my one year at Leuven, from seminary… Some of the numbers I knew to be outdated. Others I had hardly ever used. Yet I kept them all, just so I would be able to stumble on them a few years hence and remember.

There was a time when I typed up the text messages I received, because I always had to delete them to make room for others. After more than one hundred messages, I stopped copying. Others I saved for a long time, like Anne’s offer to pick me up when I got stranded for a night at Roosendaal station. Then there were some that I never deleted: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’

Anne making arrangements to meet me before I left for America. Phoebe’s wish on New Year 2009: ‘Be thou blessed.’ The trip to Rome, the first meeting with Dr. Desmond, graduation. Appointments with Carel, Mary, and others. My friend’s wedding at which I was a witness. Getting lost at World Youth Day in Madrid. The last message I got from Bodi.

In the end it does not amount to much, like all the school stuff I saved for years and years, only to throw most of it away without regret. But that, too, is a function of memory: it reminds us that most of our life is ash and stubble. Straw, as one saint would have it – a judgment which the Church carefully preserved and admired, though often without assent.

Already we are returning to dust.

Inception

What is the distinction between dream and reality? This question, which goes back to far before Descartes, is brought to our attention by the movie Inception. In this movie, the first ‘reality’ we see turns out to be the deepest level of a dream, and the whole story revolves around the question how we can tell which is which.

Dreams are private, so one theory goes, and reality is common to all; moreover, dreams are irrational and outside of our control, unlike reality. I have tried to find adherents of this theory to engage them in dialogue, but they were in Yusuf’s basement, busy constructing a shared dream. Their custodian asked me, ‘Who are you to tell them what is real?’ And Eames said, ‘It’s all the flow of information, darling, just like the real world.’

Perhaps there is a flaw in the idea that dreams and reality are like two different houses, so that you are either in one or in the other. On the contrary: when I am in a dream, I am still in reality, or I would have to go out of existence. Moreover, not only the dreamer but also the dream is real (it’s a real dream). In a dream we may see places, people or events which we have seen or will see when awake. And even the more whimsical dreams can express real desires or traumas.

In reverse: people can live in a dream world while being thoroughly awake and caffeinated. Like the dictator who believes the people love him – or the people who believe they love the dictator, while actually loving a shadow and a dream, an image and idol of their own making. This occurs not only in dictatorships. We may have wide-eyed dreams of being respected, skilled, right, or even of being a no-nonsense, down-to-earth kind of person.

Yet there is a distinction between dream and reality; we know this through the experience of waking up. In waking up, we discover that our dreaming imagination was unconscious of that which enabled it: human brains in a sleeping body with senses made for the outside world, and all sorts of previous impressions.

The ancient Greeks called reality en-ergeia, ‘in-working’, that which determines what a being is and does. Energeia admits of degrees: one being is capable of more than another precisely because it is more, because it has a deeper reality. Thus, a human has a deeper energeia than his shadow or dream, which are completely dependent on him. These are unreal when compared to humans, but yet have their own reality. Their existence indicates the presence and activity of a higher or deeper existence. Think of people running away from a shadow, not because they fear the shadow but the presence it points to. Similarly, dreams can move armies (Iliad), create royal stewards (Genesis), confirm marriage plans (Gospel of St. Matthew), or cause conversion (Le prix à payer). Dreams can be at the basis of therapies, poems, philosophies and stories. And movies.

In all these cases, a single person’s dream impacts the lives of many. In Inception, however, the dream is consciously constructed by a team of people. It very carefully distorts reality to make the dreamer see it differently. Is such shared dreaming possible?

Let us first ask another question: how real are the makers of the dream, busy with planning, escaping and realizing their desires? According to Mal, they themselves are dream images; real reality, the energeia forming the dream, would be a higher plane of existence. In that case, the dreamers themselves would be the dreamed. But who could be their dreamer? I have come across a number of theories, suggesting Dom Cobb, Mal, Saito, Ariadne…but the possibility that immediately seemed obvious to me is that Inception is a ‘dream’ of Christopher Nolan, the director. He is using a screen as his dream machine to suck us in.

Consider:

1) Dreams in Inception have been carefully constructed by one or multiple human minds.

2) People from outside the dream, who know the design, participate in it.

3) Dreams are not copies of reality, but neither are they detached from it.

4) Dreams can even cause actions in the real world, like splitting a business or suicide.

5) Dreams are not pure technology: even the most experienced dreamer cannot prevent his desires, doubts and guilt feelings from intruding, because his mind creates the dream.

1’) Inception has been carefully constructed by script writers, the makers of the set, etc.

2’) Actors who know the plot become characters in the movie.

3’) We can relate Inception to our own experience, despite the imaginary elements.

4’) Inception can cause blogposts. It really can.

5’) (I’ll leave this for Christopher Nolan.)

So the dreams within Inception tell us something about Inception itself as a work of art. The possibility of levels within a dream may alert us to the fact that characters like Arthur and Dom only sleep and wake within the dream Nolan has shared with us. Nolan is thus much more real than they are, for he is as real as all of us.

Which means what exactly?

If there are gradations in reality, who guarantees that the world in which Nolan lives and moves – our world – is not a dream world in comparison to a world on a higher plane of reality? Are we dreamed and dreaming, artists and artworks both? A pragmatist would consider this question unanswerable and irrelevant. Yet its irrelevance is not self-evident. As the discovery of various sources of energy has been highly conducive to human welfare, so the discovery of a higher energeia or reality at the basis of our world might be similarly beneficial. As for its unanswerability: well, here is an attempt to answer it reasonably.

Limbo City is dependent on Dom Cobb, yet Dom, in constructing it, depended on his own experiences and memories, things he had not invented; thus Dom cannot be the highest reality. Dom is dependent on Nolan, but Nolan himself depended on experiences, filming apparatus, actors, crewmen, things and people he had not thought up; thus Nolan is not the highest reality. Neither are we.

We have not invented the world, nor has the world invented us. Still we coexist in interaction with each other: let us say, on the same narrative level. Therefore, there must be a higher reality or energeia, a ‘greater realness’ which has invented our composite world as one story. The material components of our world could no more create the unity and coherence of our world than a DVD could produce a movie; matter, like a DVD, is a carrier of information. But who provides the information? Only a mind could do that. There must be a thinker more real than our world put together, because our whole world exists in his mind; that is to say, we are like a dream image of his. We may be real, but only with our own degree of reality, like the characters we invent.

The most real reality lies higher (or deeper). More could be said: Inception shows us that lower levels depend on higher levels for their content. Limbo City contains many elements from Dom’s normal surroundings; these in turn are derived from Nolan’s world. Since our reality is a composite whole, we deduced that it must depend on yet another. Yet this chain of dependence cannot stretch back indefinitely: if there is no first provider of information, nothing will ever be given form. But this means that the first ‘informer’ cannot live in a world with other things, previously formed, which could shape his mind. He does not live on the highest level – the highest level is simply who he is. He does not live in a world; the worlds live in him. The most real being is a master of dreams.

No doubt these are abstract speculations – ‘abstract’ meaning ‘drawn out’ and a ‘speculation’ something seen in a specula, a mirror: that is, a coloured shadow. Yet the highest reality cannot be so thin and tenuous. After all, all the inspiration for all things in all worlds comes from him: all beauty in our world, all height, depth, power, profundity and worth will have to be present in this form-giver, this super-energeia, though in a more real and vivid way than we encounter them. Which makes the highest form-giver simultaneously the top model, delightful and lovable. A certain Aurelius (not the Stoic emperor) sought to put this into words:

‘Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace … And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace: but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away by the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfilment of desire. This is what I love…’