Ellul on the Death of Contemplation and Intuition

This entry is part 27 of 27 in the series Presence in the Modern World

So far in Chapter 4 of Presence in the Modern World, Ellul has shown us —

  • how modern citizens, inundated by a blizzard of facts and phenomena, create over-arching “explanatory myths” in order to make these phenomena somewhat coherent;
  • why Christian intellectuals should focus their work on how a transforming faith determines the ways in which one should interact with our externally-focused culture;
  • how other intellectuals and leaders, who know that the explanatory myths are not true, secure their own continued role in the culture by either choosing to treat this non-reality as if it were reality, or deciding that there is no such thing as reality at all.

Now we return to Ellul’s concept of technique, which we discussed earlier, and which he would go on to discuss further in numerous books (to the point that when his name is encountered in the present day, it is usually being misremembered as that of a critic of technology).

In our modern civilization, Ellul wrote, the intellect has become constrained by a need to produce practical results. This is not only true of science but of any other field, including history, the law, sociology, etc. Each field has its own set rules for producing such practical results, based on technique and its usual advantages: speed, precision, security, universality.

These very advantages are what transform technique, from a tool at the disposal of a practitioner, into the very purpose of the practitioner’s work: the means become the ends. Technique actually changes intellectual behavior.

Intuition, for example, might be “affirmed in the abstract” — but it plays no role in modern intellectual work, because it lacks the precision of technique. A leap of imagination? Not if you wish to be considered anything other than amateur or fool. (Or unless you work in a field like theology or metaphysics, which Ellul describes as “intellectualism of fantasy” that doesn’t matter to the culture.)

Ellul writes, “We can grasp this imperialism of technique by … our modern intellectuals’ attitude toward ways of knowing and doing that follow other methods, such as those of Indians or Tibetans.” These alternative “ways of knowing” are fair fodder for sociological study, but only “lunatics” take them seriously as a route to actual knowledge.

Intellect in the West is now tethered to this one singular tool; all modern intellectuals are materialists, basing their work on what can be “seen, weighed, counted, or measured.” Like any other layperson, the intellectual might choose to hold some other philosophical or even religious position, but she would certainly never let it interfere with her actual work.

The problem that Ellul sees here is that “a doctrine can be refuted, but technical method cannot be called into question. The intelligence of modern human beings ceases to be nourished by the springs of contemplation or awareness.”

Today all matters of policy and doctrine are evaluated and debated based on evidence or data or “study” results, which then (if one disagrees) can be refuted with other evidence, other data, different “study” results — but the technique itself is never called into question. Of course, the audience for all of this data has no way of knowing whether or not it is “accurate,” except for whether or not it supports the audience’s preferred explanatory myth.

Ellul writes, “Freed from dogmas, [intellect] is enslaved to its means.” Admittedly there can sometimes be explosive reactions against the prevailing technique; Ellul cites cubism and surrealism as examples, but points out that these movements, in their reaction against the dominant false reality of their fields, instead denied the existence of any objective reality at all.

And besides, once these countervailing movements come into existence, they immediately become obsessed with their own effectiveness — and thus slaves to their own technique. Intellectual freedom is quickly excluded.

How to Make Things Harder (And Maybe Better)

There’s an election of some alleged consequence barreling toward us in a couple of days, of course, and though I am trying very hard to keep any mention of external “news” out of this blog, I can’t help but feel like I have to say something, or allude to something, anyway.

My instinct is to find a way to make this whole season easier to get through, but that is probably beyond my capabilities, and besides, it wouldn’t be helpful anyway. The easiest thing to do is, as usual, the worst thing you can do: immerse yourself in “news” coverage, stress about the closeness of the polls, live in perpetual anxiety about what horrible thing might happen should the other side win the election.

That feels hard, but it’s not. It’s so easy, in fact, that it doesn’t require you to do anything: just let the culture do to you what it wants to do, which is to foster stress and outrage and anxiety.

Our culture wants us to believe that “paying attention” to things that we can never control is not only entertaining (yes, if you can’t turn your eyes away, and you can’t stop thinking about it, even if what you’re thinking is how awful it is, that means you’re being entertained), but somehow, in some way, important — like feeling outrage or anxiety is your responsibility as a citizen. Seriously, most consumers watch cable news, or scroll through news feeds, and actually feel like being “informed” means they’re “making a difference.”

Well, they’re not.

Look, cast your vote on Tuesday, certainly — I still cling to the quaint notion that this is a citizen’s responsibility, perhaps the only one — but what in the world is the point of worrying about it beforehand, or after?

I’m not suggesting that the right approach is to go skipping and whistling down the lane, or — more likely — watching reality shows, boxing matches, slasher films, Hallmark holiday movies or anything else the culture offers that feels less anxiety-inducing than the literally-endless, conflict-without-catharsis, movie-without-a-plot we call “news.”

Instead, perhaps the right approach would be for us all to choose, not something easy, but something hard.

Lots of folks now are talking about the need for tolerance toward your political “opponents” (as if ordinary people having particular, differing opinions are somehow your “opponents”), and hand-wringing while pleading for everyone to just be more civil to each other, for God’s sake — but few of them, it seems, are talking about these things in anything more than the most generic of ways.

Tolerance? Civility? I think we ask for these things because they also sound easy, and being human beings, we tend to assume that other human beings are not actually capable of all that much.

What if we asked people to do something difficult, instead? How about, instead of asking them (or ourselves) to be civil to our neighbors, we ask them (or ourselves) to … love our neighbors?

It’s no coincidence that I happen to be reading Kierkegaard’s Works of Love right now, and what makes it feel actually life-changing is exactly how impossible it seems.

Kierkegaard’s approach, even in this work that is designed to be more “direct” than his pseudonymous books, is not to offer summarizable explanations of exactly how he thinks you should live. (“Love your neighbor!”) That’s because he knows that sort of thing doesn’t actually work. (The reason that a self-help book industry exists today is that self-help books are repetitive consumables. You don’t buy just one.)

I think that Kierkegaard’s goal instead is to change the way each individual reader thinks, because the only way to change how someone lives is to first change the way they think. He does this by parsing words and phrases, carefully and expertly, in such a way that they get turned inside out, and the reader starts to think: This sounds impossible, but maybe it isn’t impossible.

After all, what does it mean to love your neighbor? A couple of weeks ago I heard someone say, referring to a well-known person, “I can love him, but I wouldn’t invite him to dinner.” Well then, what does it mean to say that you love him? Is this just another example of the way we reduce everything hard into something easy — in this case, turning love into some sort of vague well-wishing?

Perhaps the only way to change the world is not to watch the “news” or to be “informed”, which obviously doesn’t change anything. And it’s not to tolerate people, or be civil to them, because those are unrealistic and vague things to ask of people — and most people, in everyday situations, already are civil and neighborly toward each other; it only feels like they aren’t when we pretend that online interactions are real.

No, all we can do is stop trying to change the world, and instead learn how to love — actually, honest-to-goodness love — our neighbor, which is whoever is there right in front of us, and in their totality,not just whatever seems most lovable about them. We should not do this in order to change the world, and certainly not to change them, and not even to change ourselves — not even to do anything at all, other than to love.

But that sounds a lot harder than the whole well-wishing thing most of us imagine neighborly love to be. It sounds simply impossible to say, “Don’t be civil to your neighbor, don’t respect your neighbor, don’t try and persuade your neighbor — love your neighbor!” I think that we can make it start to seem a little less impossible [sic] by looking inward and asking: Just what the f*** is love, anyway?

Like I said, Kierkegaard defies summarization, so I’m not going to extend this already-too-long-and-rambling blog post by trying to answer that question with some bullet points from Works of Love.

But here is one thing I’m going to try and remember during the craziness of this election — and I would encourage the same for anyone who thinks it is their responsibility to “stay informed”: As stated in 1 Corinthians, knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Kierkegaard wrote:

“Love builds up by presupposing that love is fundamentally present. Therefore love also builds up when, humanly speaking, love seems to be absent and where, humanly understood, the first and foremost need is to tear down … To tear down is the opposite of building up. The contrast never appears more clearly than when the discourse is concerned with love as building up: for in any other discussion about building up there is a similarity to tearing down — it means to do something with another. But when the lover builds up it is the very opposite of tearing down, for the lover does something about himself: he presupposes that love is present in the other person — which is quite the opposite to doing something about the other person.”

So instead of to trying to make the craziness of the next week easier, I will actually make it harder, and challenge myself (and maybe you, the single individual) to think before and during every interaction: Am I tearing down, or building up? Am I trying to do something about this person instead of doing something about myself?

It’s a start, anyway.

(Also, read Works of Love.)

Judge William’s Uncomfortable Truth (or, How to Read Kierkegaard)

It seems to me that the most important factor in reading Kierkegaard is exactly how one does it. You can assume, as he himself demanded, that his pseudonyms are individual personae, writing from each one’s particular perspective and experience. Or, you can approach each book as a puzzle, sifting for meaning inside every perplexing sentence as you fumble your way toward “What Kierkegaard Thought.”

I don’t think I’ve written anything about my current ongoing reading of the SK oeuvre, with good reason: I take the first approach, and the thing about taking the pseudonyms seriously, so to speak, is that the reading starts to feel quite personal, and I would never claim to be particularly expert in, you know, “What Kierkegaard Thought.”

SK’s works, particularly the first authorship, are similar to the Bible, an analogy I choose on purpose. It’s not a single work, but a library of books written by multiple authors, who are sometimes aware of and sometimes in conversation with each other; each individual book, when read individually, must be understood in a certain way, but when read as part of the whole, must be understood quite differently.

But in each case, that understanding occurs inside the reader, as something he or she develops in dialogue with the work, as opposed to something presented as direct guidance from the author. Just as the Bible does not present a system (which is why academic theologians produce “Systematic Theologies”), SK’s works are not offered as bullet points, nor can they be broken down into them.

I mean, you can try; but you will miss the point.

I’ve been reading Either/Or over the course of 2024 with a fellow group of engaged readers, and last week we reached the point in Volume 2 where Judge William has decided to “stop theorizing” (around page 266 of the Hong translation). This is after he has fumbled his way through hundreds of pages of circular arguments, trying (just as “A” did in Volume 1) to find a theory that explains and justifies the life he has chosen. At this point, I think that he has become uncomfortable with where his theorizing has led.

As I read it, Judge William has realized that a life spent in devotion to duty and in concert with civil society, if one is to do so as a whole individual rather than a mindless cog, requires one to internalize that duty. Following the Hegelian universal/particular/individual pathway, as the Judge understands it (and I don’t pretend to), leads him to saying that, simplistically and not in so many words: as long as one believes that what one is doing is good, then it cannot necessarily be said to be wrong.

The Judge writes:

“But however much the external is changed, the moral value of the action remains the same. Thus there has never been a nation that believed that children should hate their parents. In order to add fuel to doubt, however, it has been pointed out whereas all civilized [sic] nations made it the children’s duty to care for their parents, savages [sic] practiced the custom of putting their aged parents to death. This may very well be so, but still no headway is made thereby, because the question remains whether the savages intend to do something evil by this. The ethical always resides in this consciousness, whereas it is another question whether or not insufficient comprehension is responsible.”

The Judge then turns away from his theorizing, because — as I read it so far — he is uncomfortable with this sort of moral relativism, and his attempts to wriggle out from under it have failed. There is really little difference between his ethical life and A’s aesthetic life, in terms of practical outcome. One wants to do whatever he desires; one wants to fulfill his duty as a member of society, but that duty will ultimately conform to his desires. (Isn’t it funny how so many self-professed Christians in the United States wind up discovering that Christianity just happens to support their own personal inclinations toward ethics and politics?)

Even in our little Either/Or reading group, nobody seemed eager to accuse the “savages” in the Judge’s example of being objectively wrong based on their actions (never mind their motivations). After all, perhaps the aged parents being put out to ice were suffering from terminal diseases; perhaps they were inflicted with ceaseless physical pain and the “savages” believed they were sending them to a better, eternal life. How could that be wrong?

These are the ways we try to justify such a thing as, in this particular case, placing a calculable value on a human life. Of course, rarely does anyone go “whole hog” on that sort of thing — governments and the WHO may be able to place a dollar value on a human life, but actual human beings don’t usually go through life evaluating individual family members based on their country’s gross domestic product, and would look askance at anyone who asked them to do so.

But I wonder, without any sense of the eternal, a reality beyond the material world, how can one say it’s wrong to do so, or where to draw any sort of line? If I believe that aged parents are actually more valuable to society than, say, a devotee of Nietzsche of any age (and I think I could make a good argument), then who is to say that my valuation is incorrect?

I think that Judge William is like us. He has put forth his theory, such as it is, and followed to where it inevitably leads. Faced with its actual implications, he changes the subject, just like we all do.

So my point in all of this is to ask, can one get the “gist” of Kierkegaard by dissolving it into bullet points, or into a blog post like this one? Perhaps. But whether I am “right” or “wrong” in my interpretation, will you lie awake at night thinking about it, wondering what it means for the way you lead your life, the way I did last night about Judge William and his theorizing?

I’m guessing, definitely not. And that’s, in my considerably uninformed opinion, how (and why) to read Kierkegaard (and not my blog posts). Not so that one can somehow figure out “What Kierkegaard Thought” but so that one can somehow figure out what he or she thinks, and what it actually means.

Ellul on the Suicide of the Mind

This entry is part 26 of 27 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing our read of Chapter 4, “Communication,” we will return to the “renewed mind” discussed in the last post in due course, but let’s take a look at the non-renewed mind, that of the “intellectual” in general living in the modern world.

According to Ellul, these intellectuals (I really do feel the need to continue putting that word inside quotation marks, but I won’t, just because it gets annoying) are just as overwhelmed by the flow of phenomena as anyone else. However, while they are able to perceive that the “explanatory myths” of various systems, parties and states are, in fact, myths, they are still so flooded by these fake “facts” that they can’t see the reality beyond them, either.

Commonly, these intellectuals take one of two responses, both of which can be considered a sort of mental suicide.

One is to actually choose to accept these myths, and work as if they were true, even though they are not. Ellul says these intellectuals obey the sophism, “The phenomenon and the myth do not correspond to facts, of course, but since people believe them, they become reality, and that is the reality we need to deal with.”

In Ellul’s time, this example referenced intellectuals within the communist and fascist parties, who adapted to the “reality” in which they lived in order to maintain their careers — but of course, we see this same thing happening today. Whether on the Right or Left, the “elite” is comprised almost entirely of thinkers and leaders who clearly “know better” about a wide variety of topics and assertions, but choose to fall into lockstep with their particular tribe. To do otherwise would leave them out in the cold, career-wise.

Certainly it’s easy to think of examples of this form of intellectual suicide in Trump’s GOP, but you can find the same response in leftist academia, government agencies, corporate bureaucracies, and your small-town chamber of commerce.

The other response of intellectuals, Ellul wrote, is to decide that they can never know anything beyond the “appearances” of modern phenomena — that, if any sort of reality beyond those phenomena exists, “it is impossible to grasp and holds no meaning for human beings.” Since they are no more capable than anyone else of verifying the reality of facts flooding the cultural zone, “intellectuals refuse to hold any fact as valid and sure” and “awareness of the world they are in slips away from them.” (In short: “LOL nothing matters.”)

While Ellul at the time was talking particularly about a European-style intelligentsia that doesn’t really exist any more, these two responses still seem pretty common among elites. Aspire to leadership in business, government, the academy — then accept the prevailing myth in your chosen tribe, even if it requires you to change your views rather quickly and shamelessly (paging J. D. Vance). Smart kids (even well-read ones, a la Pete Buttigieg) aspire to careers in consulting, or finance — the very definition of “appearances” separate from reality.

Any world of meaning that exists beyond the material world, beneath the appearances of modern phenomena, has become so completely obfuscated that, when you hear someone refer to “the real world” today, you can be sure that they are talking about exactly that which has no meaning.

Enchantment As a Framework for Culture War

Recently there was an interesting exchange between Alan Jacobs and Brad East on “enchantment,” or more accurately, “disenchantment,” and its current vogue among, primarily, conservative Christians. (EDIT: I should note that Jacobs’ original post was instigated by David Bentley Hart’s newest book, and DBH is not in any way a conservative Christian.) This post from Jacobs links to each post in order, all well worth reading, but basically, the not-quite-argument seems to come down to this:

  • Alan believes that the current discussions about enchantment, at least for him, are “just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus.” Enchantment can and does mean a million different things, all of which but one have nothing to do with Christianity.
  • Brad agrees that the enchantment he finds sympathetic is specifically a Christian enchantment, and those Christian writers discussing it are doing so, he says, as part of their struggle against a “secularized Western culture” that imposes “unimpeachable public social norms” which make it apparently uncomfortable to live in a universe where God is real and active.

I’ve been rather sympathetic to the enchantment conversation in the past, and I enjoyed Richard Beck’s book on the topic, Hunting Magic Eels, which had, as I recall offhand, little or nothing to say about politics and “public social norms,” and rather much to say about the church and liturgy. (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the same will not be true of Rod Dreher’s forthcoming book, given his particular, uh, history.)

The problem is when these very online cultural conservative types (such as Dreher, for example) begin using the idea of “enchantment” as a new framework for their chosen war. 1950s America having lost its appeal for a wide variety of gender- and race-related reasons, these commentators have decided instead to go medieval on our collective ass.

If one has particular political and social beliefs that are currently out of vogue, and one also happens to be a Christian in a certain sense, then there is an obvious appeal to blaming the disenchantment of a “secularized Western culture” for making one feel defensive and uncomfortable about those beliefs.

Of these sorts of Christians, Brad East wrote in his first reply to Jacobs, “They feel condescended to, coerced into pretending that life is nothing but atoms and energy, when they know in their bones the open secret that this world is charged with the grandeur of God. They don’t want to invite evil spirits into their homes. They just don’t want to be made to feel crazy for believing in what cannot be seen.” (emphasis added)

However, if one believes that Jesus was the God-Man, incarnate God literally entered into human history as one of his own creations, lived in lowly humiliation, was literally murdered and then just as literally risen back to life, and now invites and draws all to salvation in him … then this belief will have, to put it mildly, an impact on your life. One will attempt to live out that truth, however imperfectly, no matter what “unimpeachable social norms” might exist.

As Kierkegaard wrote, “The decisive mark of Christian suffering is that it is voluntary.” If you really believe these crazy things are true, and you are living your life as if these crazy things are true, then people are going to think you’re crazy, and they are going to treat you accordingly. That was the case when Jesus was alive, and it was the case immediately after his death and resurrection (when there were eyewitnesses!), and it was the case during all the years of Christendom (including the now-rose-colored era of medieval enchantment), and it is, obviously, the case today.

Clearly, the church has allowed itself to become secularized (disenchanted) in an unacceptable way, but that is because the Western church has, for nearly all of its existence, allowed itself to be aligned with civil society. As Jacques Ellul noted in Prayer and Modern Man (and elsewhere), “the desacralization, the secularization” are actually “profoundly in conformity with the spirit of Christianity.” The world is the world, it is always careening toward death; our role as Christians is not to rule it.

The answer to the church’s descent into a sort of atheistic therapy for embarrassed pseudo-believers is not to start chanting the liturgy while demanding a re-entry into the halls of the elite. It is to recognize that, in terms of worldly power, true Christianity is, always has been, and must always be, shut out in the cold.

Ellul on the Renewed Mind and the Fog of Facts

This entry is part 25 of 27 in the series Presence in the Modern World

When I last wrote about Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World (Good Lord, was that over four months ago?), I had just begun a discussion of Chapter 4, “Communication.”

To summarize that post, since we are so inundated with images and other “phenomena” that are completely separate from our actual experience, and therefore personally unverifiable, we come to accept the coherence of an “explanatory myth” that connects all of these various phenomena into something simple that we can understand. We live in an unreality, in a sort of permanent dream, no longer individuals but part of a collective mass.

And I ended asking, along with Ellul, how did this situation come about, where we live in a dream, with a clear conscience, where everything can be explained by the “countless facts and theories” in which we choose to believe?

I want to begin answering this question by backing up a bit to the start of the chapter and Ellul’s discussion of “Christian intellectuals,” which a footnote points out might also have been translated as “thoughtful Christians” or “Christian leaders,” although all of these things sound different to me.

According to Ellul, Christian intellectuals are laypeople like any others, but with a specific function within the world and the church. He is not talking about academic theologians here, but to anyone who thinks, writes, reads, etc. by choice and vocation.

Your role, as a thinking Christian, no matter your particular area of interest or specialty, is to “undertake a kind of practical theology” and determine how your faith will determine the way you interact with our decadent civilization.

Faith, Ellul asserts in quoting Romans 12:2, “produces a renewing of the mind.” Faith transforms the very way we see and understand reality, the world, human beings, etc. This isn’t a “purely intellectual process” — not simply exchanging one philosophy for another — but a transformation of your life.

Ellul sees this is an ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit in the Christian’s life, helping him to discover new ways of thinking and understanding. But when this happens, it happens for a specific purpose. One’s role as a thinking Christian is not the discernment of knowledge for its own sake, but specifically the discernment of “God’s will for the world, which is active in people’s midst, not God’s abstract or general will or his essence.”

In short, as we have seen before, living as a Christian means serving as an ambassador in a sort-of permanent state of (non-violent) revolution against the world; living as a Christian thinker means being primarily concerned with figuring out “what human beings can and must do in this world in order to live according to God’s will.”

(In this little section, Ellul seems to have been laying out his own task, as it describes the intellectual work he then spent the rest of his life doing.)

Having defined what he means by a Christian intellectual, Ellul goes on to point out that they live in the exact same world as everyone else, even as their renewed mind represents a point of separation from it. Which brings us back to the original question, of how the world came to be in its current unrealistic situation.

This modern world is a complex one, comprised of many interlocking organizations and structures. It is impossible for an individual to grasp all of these structures as a whole. “We wander aimlessly in this forest,” Ellul writes.

We encounter all of these structures and their various “facts” in the media. (Remember, this was written over 75 years ago.) The media themselves are organizations requiring capital (either private or state) for their operation.

Because of their mechanical nature, all media are concerned only with the externality of facts. As Ellul writes, “there are some things that can be produced on TV and some things that cannot.”

In a world where TV is no longer the prevalent media it once was, this mechanistic reliance on externality is still true.

Just as one can witness the evidence of genetics in rapid time by observing generations of fruit flies, we can also witness the devolution of media in a similar fashion. 20 years ago, for example, “social media” meant, primarily, blogging — and primarily a long text form of that (like the one you are reading now). Then came Twitter, which reduced everything into small bits, and Facebook, which eventually turned everything into images — and almost nobody “reads” (or internalizes) social media anymore.

In less than two decades, this particular media (once hailed as a democratizing, individually-controlled form of media) was swept inside the walls of larger organizations and restructured into a simpler, externalized mechanic. Social media “memes” become popular because they are images and they are obvious, and because they support a particular explanatory myth.

No matter the form they take, media are everywhere, inescapable in modern society, and the way in which media asserts rather than reasons — because one cannot reason with a crowd — becomes irresistible. “Even if we have private doubts,” Ellul writes, “this does not keep the crowd from accepting the information, due to how forceful it appears.” (There is no “community note” strong enough to counteract the most myth-enforcing “fact” spread on Twitter.)

Finally, all of us are kept from becoming aware of reality by the fact that all of this unreality is so darn entertaining, and we love to be amused. “[O]ur entire civilization, from its pastimes right up to its serious issues, looks on everything from the perspective of entertainment,” Ellul writes. All of this “information” is so absorbing on its face that we can’t help but accept it as truth.

“Although they know more things, have more means, and are theoretically more advanced than at any other period,” Ellul says that modern humans “are advanced in a dream of explanations and a fog of facts.”

Now, given that Christian intellectuals are living in the exact same world as everyone else, subject to the same overwhelming and irresistible media and means, how are they supposed to perform their specific function in discerning God’s will?

Frank O’Hara, “Nocturne”

Is it April 30 already? My goodness, I’d hoped to post more poems during the month, but time slips away. Here is one more, anyway.

I’ve always struggled a bit with Frank O’Hara; whenever I read through a collection of his, I find myself moving rapidly through the pages, the poems themselves running together (and my eyes glazing over a bit) as if I were flipping through someone else’s bedside dream journal. It has only been relatively recently that I have tried to train myself to read him more deliberately, one poem at a time, to see what lies behind the apparently unstructured work.

For example, flipping through his collected poems the other day, I came across this one. The first quick read brought me to a full stop and demanded several rereads, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. The poem reminds me of my first few decades, that sense of misplaced orientation (“It’s the architect’s fault”) provoking distance from other people – but which was frankly more of an excuse for certain attitudes and behaviors than their cause. You have no telephone, and live so far away.

Nocturne

There’s nothing worse
than feeling bad and not
being able to tell you.
Not because you’d kill me
or it would kill you, or
we don’t love each other.
It’s space. The sky is grey
and clear, with pink and
blue shadows under each cloud.
A tiny airliner drops its
specks over the U N Building.
My eyes, like millions of
glassy squares, merely reflect.
Everything sees through me,
in the daytime I’m too hot
and at night I freeze; I’m
built the wrong way for the
river and a mild gale would
break every fiber in me.
Why don’t I go east and west
instead of north and south?
It’s the architect’s fault.
And in a few years I’ll be
useless, not even an office
building. Because you have
no telephone, and live so
far away; the Pepsi-Cola sign,
the seagulls and the noise.

Frank O’Hara

R. S. Thomas, “The Absence”

Today, instead of opening a book at random, or even flipping through to find a poem that strikes my interest, I turn to one of my favorite poems. R. S. Thomas was apparently quite the character, a grouchy parish priest in a hardscrabble Welsh village; his love for his country and fellow citizens was so fierce that one can see in a lot of his regional poetry why that emotion can sometimes be confused with its opposite.

This is the first poem of his I ever read — or rather, heard, since it was read to me in a seminar a few years back — and it has stayed with me ever since, earmarked inside Thomas’ Collected Poems, 1945-1990 on my bedside table.

The Absence

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resource have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

R. S. Thomas

The other day someone said to me, “I don’t think faith and reason are incompatible, I think they are both equally valid.” As I nodded politely, I thought: Really? Or is this just evidence of the compartmentalization we all do in this modern age, segregating spiritual and scientific into their own spheres?

We say, faith and reason are surely compatible, because look, they reference different things, they are useful in different ways! But this reduces faith to a frame of reference, a utilitarian tool, something that “comes in handy” when you need solace or comfort, or a way to explain away the unexplainable, or an ancient and mysterious ritual to zhush up your boring life, or an excuse to get together with similar people and do “good deeds” for the needy. For all of the actual business of daily living, let’s face it, what we call “faith” doesn’t come into play.

True faith starts when we realize that God is not here for us at certain times or to fulfill certain needs. In fact, God is never going to make himself known at all; he’s never going to act in a way that can’t be explained by some other means.

Seek solace, get silence.

And yet we still recognize that there is an emptiness within us, Pascal’s God-shaped hole, that demands God’s existence, and is quite literally the only thing we can offer him.

William Stafford, “Bess”

I pulled down a copy of William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems and noticed a dog-eared page in the middle of the book. It’s not like me to turn over a sheet like that, and in this case it looked like I had twisted two pages downward, as if emphatically.

I don’t recall reading this poem, “Bess,” let alone marking it, but based on the subject, I can only assume I must have read it in the throes of my stage 4 diagnosis and treatments. Depending on which day I read the poem, I might have marked it out of recognition, aspiration, irony, or disdain — I don’t remember with which emotion I reacted, but any of them would have been honest.

Bess

Ours are the streets where Bess first met her
cancer. She went to work every day past the
secure houses. At her job in the library
she arranged better and better flowers, and when
students asked for books her hand went out
to help. In the last year of her life
she had to keep her friends from knowing
how happy they were. She listened while they
complained about food or work or the weather.
And the great national events danced
their grotesque, fake importance. Always

Pain moved where she moved. She walked
ahead; it came. She hid; it found her.
No one ever served another so truly;
no enemy ever meant so strong a hate.
It was almost as if there was no room
left for her on earth. But she remembered
where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers;
she did not weep when she passed its houses;
and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner
and slipped from pain, her hand opened
again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.

William Stafford

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everness”

It isn’t necessarily my goal to always cite poems to which I happen to open a book at random, but for the second time in a row, I can’t help myself, after reading the random poem in question. This translation comes from Richard Wilbur’s New and Collected Poems:

Everness

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.
Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe;
Whoever through its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only from the sunset’s farther side
Shall view at last the Archetypes and the Splendors.

Jorge Luis Borges (Richard Wilbur, trans.)

Lately, deep inside volume one of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, I’ve been thinking a lot about the despair of belief and the relief of doubt. How those who claim that they “doubt” too much to believe in God are taking such an easy and really silly path, as if doubt matters or is even interesting.

To look inside ourselves and see that we, in fact, are not alone — that there is an Other — with full access to our individual consciousnesses and histories, which even we as human beings do not have because of our tendency to both forget and lie to ourselves — is absolutely frightening.

Wish as we might, there is no oblivion; there is no forgetting. Everything is, everything that was continues to be.

There are, however, doors that click shut behind us.

To me that’s the sound of mercy, which is not the same as forgetting. Isn’t it both more valuable and more terrifying to be fully known, to be actually seen — everything we are, everything we’ve done, all the horrible things we’ve thought and imagined and planned, all of which together comprise Us As Ourselves, not loosely-connected diapsalmata, not generic “individuals,” but actual Individuals — and yet still be welcomed with love?

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