On Honor and Its Opposites

Honor is not the highest thing; it is not even really a complete thing in itself. Nevertheless, it is in the final balance necessary for the stable achievement of any degree of virtue or morality in life.

What We Want

Philosophically speaking, there is no question about what we want. What Aristotle knew is also what Augustine knew, what Aquinas knew, what even Descartes knew: that our very nature as rational embodied beings has inscribed in our flesh and in our hearts and every feature of our selves a desire that can be diverted and opposed, but never effaced. 

Put philosophically, our moment-by-moment existence as individuals is constituted by our rational and embodied receiving of and participation in being as form: therefore, we cannot help but want to completely fulfill that being by receiving and participating in form and being in their objective fullness. Put simply, as beings who know and enjoy, we cannot help wanting to know and enjoy everything.

More immediately, since our existence at every moment and in its totality is entirely defined by our reception of being as form, we cannot help wanting our reception of being to be true. Truth and intellect are properly the same relation. We exist by knowing the truth; and it is self-contradictory to want to know the truth and at the same time reject it. 

Hence, our nature contains within itself the constant, pressing imperative to know each thing it receives truly, objectively, according to what that thing is in itself and not merely as it appears to our senses or preferences or lesser desires, and to relate to it truly, which is to say to relate to it by the relation of truth, which is to say, to act in regards to it according to what it is and what it is for.

For both of these reasons, as Plato long ago pointed out, it is incomprehensible nonsense to say that it can ever be beneficial to us, can ever even be rationally thinkable and not a self-contradiction in terms, to deliberately believe what is false or do what is evil.

Yet as Plato knew also, there is another part of us that is not constituted simply and totally by intellect and truth--another part that has desires that are not solely objective workings-out of the desire to know and enjoy everything. For Plato, this other part of us--which we might call the body, though there are better names for it--was the problem, and the solution was to permanently shed it.

Aristotle, though, rejected this position, and proposed a middle course that also corresponds to more or less the common sense of the human race and the normative Christian position of the last two thousand years. This other part of us, Aristotle acknowledged, was not simply and totally constituted by the relation of truth in the same way as the intellect; it was, however, ordered to that relation, its nature constituted totally by a telos and receptivity towards receiving truth from the intellect and embodying that truth in objective and embodied and temporal actions. Or, put more simply, our human bodies are not intellects, but things that exist to be taught by the intellect the truth and to follow and live that truth out.

Hence, whatever the ultimate fate of the body or soul might be in the afterlife, the entire task of morality in this life is for the intellect to teach truth to the body in such a way and to such a degree that it comes to continually and stably share in and embody and carry out the relation of truth in respect to every thing it encounters.

Or, put more incisively, the whole goal of human morality is to establish a permanent and unbreakable bond between body and soul, such that every truth grasped by the intellect is infallibly lived out by the body. This stable bond Aristotle called a "habit" or "excellence," but it is better known today by the Latin term "virtue."

If all this is correct, then there is simply no question what you want, what I want, what you and I cannot help but wanting. We want to always and everywhere infallibly do what is objectively true and good, which is to say, what in fact corresponds to the natures and telos and happiness of every thing and every person we encounter.

Here, though, is the whole trouble: that if we want this, we do not always or even often know what we want. Different reasons for this gap have been given in human history. For Plato, the problem was merely ignorance; for Aristotle, it was habitual vice, a poor use of the body and the embodied mind; for many Christian philosophers, it was both of the above and also the perverse will of a prideful intellect seeking its own self and lesser finalities above the terrifying transcendence of a God who is both the proper end of the intellect and infinitely beyond its capacity to grasp or choose by its powers alone. 

All, though, would agree that virtue and truth and the good are the objective ends of our bodies and minds and whole selves, and that therefore we in some sense want them even when we oppose them, even when we in fact choose their opposites.

Interiority and Politics

This is what the Apostles called a hard saying; that is, a saying that does not appear at first glance to give much aid or comfort to our actual pitiful lives and selves. To tell a child who very much wants to hit his sister that he in fact wants to love her is, I think, true; but also not much of a comfort to the child's delicate feelings of offended dignity at not being allowed to do what he wants. 

We all are much more like that child than we would like to think; and much more of our emotional lives consist of delicate feelings of offended dignity over not being allowed to do and say the manifestly stupid and harmful things we happen to want in the moment. And it is in respect to this reality that it is often more truthful merely to say that the heart of man is desperately wicked above all things, who can fathom it--and then to punish the child and/or ourselves.

There is, however, a practicality in the belief that what we really want is always and everywhere the objective good--though it is rarely put in a practical form.

From this comes the basic conflict between modern and pre-modern accounts of desire. For the ancients and Medievals, desire was conceived of objectively, as beginning with the objective good eliciting desire in the subject, conforming that subject's appetite to itself, and terminating in the subject's enjoyment of the object by way of proper relation. For moderns since the 16th century, however, desire has been conceived as beginning with the subject, as an inchoate and irrational and limitless impulse outwards that only subjectively takes its objects as good and in so doing forces those objects to conform to itself, and hence which terminates in the violent subjection or subjugation of object to appetite.

Yet if one thinks of desire as essentially limitless and subjective, then one necessarily thinks of both morality and politics as primarily about reconciling the essentially opposed and limitless desires and (in the technical sense) interests of individual people and groups, and thus making it possible for people to live together in some form of society. And the only way to do this, for all the cleverness of Enlightenment thinkers, is via some form of discipline and extrinsic imposition of hostile ends onto the subjective desires of individual people. If this is true, then morality will be conceived of most essentially as a form of violence. And we can see this quite well in all contemporary approaches to law and morality. 

If it does nothing else, the belief in the objectivity of the good and of people's desire for it has a profound effect on the character and actions of the person tasked with training others to choose the good--placing love at the heart of punishment, and desire at the heart of education. If it is really true, as more or less every philosopher and Christian theologian from Aristotle until the Reformation thought it was, that the goal of governance and parenting and education alike is to create a permanent, habitual inner bond between truth and self and body and soul and cause people to reliably and freely choose the good, we would frame both laws and curricula rather differently than we presently do.

Of course, the belief that what people really and truly want is the good does not necessarily dictate a gentle or indulgent method of training or moral education--far from it! We tend as a matter of course to be much less indulgent and much more consistently demanding in seeking what we genuinely believe that we want than in what we think others want for us; and the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to helping other people seek what they want. The belief in a purely extrinsic imposition of the good tends to lead to an odd fluctuation between total indulgence and indeed indifference to conduct on the one hand, and extraordinarily coercive and violent attempts to punish and compel conduct on the other. The reason for this is simple: if people's character and choice only matter, not to themselves, but to society and/or the government and/or some private interest, then the reality is that the vast majority of people's conduct and moral character and virtue and vice simply does not matter. Where it does matter, though, the only method of proceeding is to use whatever means necessary to force them to do what those with power want or need them to do; and in this, their moral character and choices and even free will is mostly beside the point.

On the other hand, belief in the objectivity of the good and our own constitutional desire for it imposes on each person and on society collectivity an imperative that is constant and totalizing--but which is limited, not extrinsically, but intrinsically by the thing aimed at (the interior, stable, habitual choice of each individual person of the objective truth of their relations with all other persons and things) and the means necessary to achieve those ends (habit-forming interior human desire and action).

The implications of all this are limitless, moment by moment and day by day; and until one has actually tried to live out this way of doing and being, there is little that can be comprehensibly said to the outsider. 

I really do believe that if we could untangle all our manifold and petty and perverse desires and wishes and habits, it is true that we would ultimately discover that at the root of them all lies the infinite receptivity of the intellect for the fullness of truthful being and objective goodness. I have, to a reasonable extent, succeeded in untangling my own moment-by-moment desires and choices and emotions and discovering their ultimate roots in the objective good; and in discovering this, I have succeeded to a certain degree in altering those moment-by-moment desires and choices and emotions so as to better conform them with their ends. 

In doing this, though, I have also and inevitably come to notice the degree to which my moment-by-moment daily desires and wishes and enjoyments were and still to an extent are irrational and perverse and self-contradictory, not relative to some violently imposed external standard, but relative to their own aims and in themselves. And all of this is not easy.

Yet if one has never even attempted this struggle, has never even conceived of one's desires and choices in these terms however inchoately, I struggle to understand how one could be expected to understand the good--or, really, meaningfully desire or enjoy it. The whole task is in the doing.

Pope Francis' Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

[Given the recent unjust war launched by the United States of America against the Islamic Republic of Iran, I thought it appropriate to repost this prayer and to ask my readers, if possible, to pray it daily as I have been doing. 

On March 25, 1984, John Paul II, in union with the world's bishops, solemnly consecrated the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. He did this in fulfillment of a request made in the private revelation of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal in 1916 as part of the so-called "Second Secret," which called for a consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart as a precondition for the "Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary" and peace in the world. This prayer was made in consultation with the surviving visionary Sister Lucia, who affirmed that it fulfilled the conditions called for by the Virgin Mary.

On March 25, 2022, Pope Francis in union with the world's bishops and faithful again solemnly consecrated the whole world and, for the first time, in a special way Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. He did this in response to many requests from Ukrainian Catholics, as well as due to his own intense Marian piety.

The general message of the Fatima apparition was for personal repentance from sin as a precondition for peace. Its core is the frequent reception of the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist.

Nevertheless, for about the last year I have been regularly praying and repraying Pope Francis' moving consecration prayer, a special appeal to the Immaculate Heart of Mary which speaks in a particular way of and to our times. I invite others to do the same. Papa Francisce, ora pro nobis!] 

O Mary, Mother of God and our Mother, in this time of trial we turn to you.  

As our Mother, you love us and know us: no concern of our hearts is hidden from you.  Mother of mercy, how often we have experienced your watchful care and your peaceful presence!  You never cease to guide us to Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

Yet we have strayed from that path of peace.  We have forgotten the lesson learned from the tragedies of the last century, the sacrifice of the millions who fell in two world wars.  We have disregarded the commitments we made as a community of nations.  We have betrayed peoples’ dreams of peace and the hopes of the young.  

We grew sick with greed, we thought only of our own nations and their interests, we grew indifferent and caught up in our selfish needs and concerns.  We chose to ignore God, to be satisfied with our illusions, to grow arrogant and aggressive, to suppress innocent lives and to stockpile weapons.  

We stopped being our neighbour’s keepers and stewards of our common home.  We have ravaged the garden of the earth with war and by our sins we have broken the heart of our heavenly Father, who desires us to be brothers and sisters.  

We grew indifferent to everyone and everything except ourselves.  Now with shame we cry out: Forgive us, Lord!

Holy Mother, amid the misery of our sinfulness, amid our struggles and weaknesses, amid the mystery of iniquity that is evil and war, you remind us that God never abandons us, but continues to look upon us with love, ever ready to forgive us and raise us up to new life.  

He has given you to us and made your Immaculate Heart a refuge for the Church and for all humanity.  By God’s gracious will, you are ever with us; even in the most troubled moments of our history, you are there to guide us with tender love.

We now turn to you and knock at the door of your heart.  We are your beloved children.  In every age you make yourself known to us, calling us to conversion.  At this dark hour, help us and grant us your comfort.  Say to us once more: “Am I not here, I who am your Mother?”  

You are able to untie the knots of our hearts and of our times.  In you we place our trust.  We are confident that, especially in moments of trial, you will not be deaf to our supplication and will come to our aid.

That is what you did at Cana in Galilee, when you interceded with Jesus and he worked the first of his signs.  To preserve the joy of the wedding feast, you said to him: “They have no wine” (Jn 2:3).  

Now, O Mother, repeat those words and that prayer, for in our own day we have run out of the wine of hope, joy has fled, fraternity has faded.  We have forgotten our humanity and squandered the gift of peace.  We opened our hearts to violence and destructiveness.  How greatly we need your maternal help!

Therefore, O Mother, hear our prayer.

Star of the Sea, do not let us be shipwrecked in the tempest of war.

Ark of the New Covenant, inspire projects and paths of reconciliation.

Queen of Heaven, restore God’s peace to the world.

Eliminate hatred and the thirst for revenge, and teach us forgiveness.

Free us from war, protect our world from the menace of nuclear weapons.

Queen of the Rosary, make us realize our need to pray and to love.

Queen of the Human Family, show people the path of fraternity.

Queen of Peace, obtain peace for our world.

O Mother, may your sorrowful plea stir our hardened hearts.  May the tears you shed for us make this valley parched by our hatred blossom anew.  Amid the thunder of weapons, may your prayer turn our thoughts to peace.  

May your maternal touch soothe those who suffer and flee from the rain of bombs.  May your motherly embrace comfort those forced to leave their homes and their native land.  May your Sorrowful Heart move us to compassion and inspire us to open our doors and to care for our brothers and sisters who are injured and cast aside.

Holy Mother of God, as you stood beneath the cross, Jesus, seeing the disciple at your side, said: “Behold your son” (Jn 19:26).  In this way he entrusted each of us to you. To the disciple, and to each of us, he said: “Behold, your Mother” (v. 27).  

Mother Mary, we now desire to welcome you into our lives and our history.  At this hour, a weary and distraught humanity stands with you beneath the cross, needing to entrust itself to you and, through you, to consecrate itself to Christ.  

The people of Ukraine and Russia, who venerate you with great love, now turn to you, even as your heart beats with compassion for them and for all those peoples decimated by war, hunger, injustice and poverty.

Therefore, Mother of God and our Mother, to your Immaculate Heart we solemnly entrust and consecrate ourselves, the Church and all humanity, especially Russia and Ukraine [and the United States of America and Iran and Israel and Palestine and Sudan and...].  

Accept this act that we carry out with confidence and love.  Grant that war may end and peace spread throughout the world.  The “Fiat” that arose from your heart opened the doors of history to the Prince of Peace.  We trust that, through your heart, peace will dawn once more.  

To you we consecrate the future of the whole human family, the needs and expectations of every people, the anxieties and hopes of the world.

Through your intercession, may God’s mercy be poured out on the earth and the gentle rhythm of peace return to mark our days.  Our Lady of the “Fiat”, on whom the Holy Spirit descended, restore among us the harmony that comes from God.  

May you, our “living fountain of hope”, water the dryness of our hearts.  In your womb Jesus took flesh; help us to foster the growth of communion.  You once trod the streets of our world; lead us now on the paths of peace.  

Amen.

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

As people who know me in real life can attest, I have for the past fifteen years or so regularly joked that--despite being (by this point) nominally an academic expert with a PhD and a book from Oxford University Press on 4th century political theology--the area which I am actually most qualified to write on is Star Trek. However, in the dry, sober, unhumorous light of day, the single topic I am probably actually most fully qualified to write on is the life and thought of G.K. Chesterton.

Regular readers of this """weblog""" will note that pretty much every essay I have written for The Adventures of Captain Peabody since its inception has included at least a few credited or uncredited paraphrases of Chesterton. These citations, though, drastically underrate the degree to which I have stolen from Chesterton over the years. 

The truth is, there is more or less no thought I have had on any topic since the age of twelve that has not derived to at least some degree from a thought by Chesterton. This is not an exaggeration. Since the age of twelve, I have self-consciously and deliberately done everything in my power to adopt and assimilate Chesterton's approach to the world as my own. The basic structures of my reasoning on history, art, literature, poetry, psychology, anthropology, humor, enjoyment, and theology all derive to greater or lesser degrees from his own: as does by extension every thought or creative product deriving from those structures. In the scale of my various identities, "Chestertonian" comes just behind "Catholic Christian" and very far ahead of "American."

Grotesque, Egotistical Presentation of Credentials

Beyond that, though, I have in fact read a shockingly large proportion of Chesterton's shockingly large corpus: and what is more (believe it or not!) remembered most of it. That, though, gives a perhaps unhelpful impression of my engagement with Chesterton, which has not been academic and systematic but constant and totalizing. Put simply, "reading Chesterton" is something I do every day, multiple times a day, on top of and alongside anything else I happen to be reading or doing. The vast majority of the works by Chesterton I have read I have read not once, but somewhere between a dozen and a hundred times.

Or, as Chesterton's close personal friend Hilaire Belloc put it:

I like to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now *I* from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The 'Idler' has a tawdry kind of fun,
The 'Speaker' is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The 'World' is like a small unpleasant weed;
*I take them all because of Chesterton*,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beachy Head,
The memoirs of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,}
And as for novels written by the ton,
I'd burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to be with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

ENVOI

Prince, have you read a book called 'Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed'?
No matter--it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

I have naturally read many times all of his so-called "major works" of Christian apologetics and philosophy: namely, Heretics, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man. I have also, however, read and re-read his less well-known works on Christian topics, namely The Thing, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Well and the Shallows, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I have read and reread many times all of Chesterton's six novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, The Flying Inn, and The Return of Don Quixote), as well as more or less all of his short stories (including not only all 53 Father Brown mysteries, but also the one-off collections The Club of Queer Trades, Four Faultless Felons, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long Bow, The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, and the early unpublished writings collected in The Coloured Lands and elsewhere). I have read nearly all of his poems that have been collected (some thousands), and memorized more than a dozen of them, including his famous epic poems Lepanto, The Ballad of St. Barbara, and the book-length Ballad of the White Horse. I have read all those books covering his frequent travels and impressions taken from them: What I Saw in America, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, Sidelights on New York and Newer London, Christendom in Dublin, and The Resurrection of Rome. I have not read all, but at least a reasonable proportion of his works of literary criticism, including his Twelve Types, The Victorian Age in Literature, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his Chaucer. I have read most of his works of political and economic theory and polemic, including Utopia of Usurers, Eugenics and Other Evils, William Cobbett, What's Wrong with the World, and The Outline of Sanity. I have read his one and only Short History of England. I have read all three plays he wrote in his lifetime, namely, Magic, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, and The Surprise, as well as the mummer's play The Turkey and the Turk. I have also, relevantly to this essay, read most of his works of anti-German war propaganda, including The Barbarism of Berlin, Lord Kitchener, The Crimes of England, and the posthumous collection of his anti-Nazi columns and essays The End of the Armistice. 

(I left out a few books here because I missed them in the Wikipedia list of Chesterton works I found and/or wasn't 100% sure I had read them even though I likely did.)

While I have not read all his collections of essays, I have read at least a reasonable proportion of the weekly or more than weekly columns he wrote for most of his life and from which these essay collections were drawn. In particular, I have read and reread all of the weekly columns, reviews, and letters he wrote for the Daily News from 1901 to 1913. It is literally true that I do not know how many of the weekly columns he wrote for the Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936 I have read--as I used to simply read through volumes of them ad libitum without taking any particular notice of what the year was or which I had read before--but I believe upon sober reflection that I have read certainly the majority of them (including definitely all between 1914 and 1919 and all from 1930-1936, of which I made particular note), and consider it likely that I have in fact read something approaching all of them. I have also read everything he wrote (including both weekly columns and occasional anonymous leaders, easily distinguishable by his distinctive voice) for his brother's newspaper The New Witness from 1919 to 1922 (the only years, alas, currently available online); and am at the present slowly reading through everything he wrote for his own newspaper G.K.'s Weekly in the available online archives: so far, I have only made it from Sept. 1925 to February 1926, but am making steady progress. This remains, for me, the true "frontier" of Chesterton reading, which will hopefully last me until death.

Oh yes, and I have also naturally read a decent amount of scholarship and writing on Chesterton: including most notably Chesterton's own Autobiography, and Ian Kerr's voluminous and magisterial G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, my copy of which is in tatters from reading it in the shower too much. I have also read many times the initial biography written by Maisie Ward, a personal friend of Chesterton: as well as owning and frequently rereading the rare and hard-to-find supplement Return to Chesterton, a delightful and profound book consisting of dozens of largely unedited accounts and anecdotes of Chesterton by personal friends and people he took under his wing as children and adolescents.

All this might well make me seem like a rather crazed monomaniac, the proverbial "man of one book" spoken of by Aquinas. I can assure my readers that this is not the case: as, for instance, the many books on diverse topics reviewed in this space might indicate. Besides getting a PhD in Classics and writing a book on 4th century political theology, I flatter myself in thinking that I read rather widely. In the past few months, for instance, I have read an academic book on Ottoman political theory, another on modern Islamic movements to revive the Caliphate, another on Medieval European social organization, and another on the internal economy of the contemporary Pakistani military, in addition to a few works of fiction. Still, all the while, I have been also and on the side reading and rereading G.K. Chesterton.

It is, in fact, Chesterton who led me to become such a generalist, and my general reading that leads me back to Chesterton. He himself read and wrote rather widely on very different topics all throughout his life: and a close personal friend compared him to a house with large windows opening in every direction. I have, to a much smaller extent, aspired to be the same.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I should point out that my knowledge of Chesterton extends not merely to his text, but to his context. I would venture to say that I have a fairly decent working knowledge of all of the major authors and politicians, intellectual and religious and political movements, major world events, and journalistic fads of Chesterton's lifetime. A decent amount of that knowledge, it is true, comes via absorbing and researching the references to these events and fads and figures found in Chesterton's voluminous writings--while some more comes from reading a decent proportion of the non-Chesterton writings and reviews and columns and leaders of the weekly popular newspapers Chesterton wrote for. But I have also directly read a decent number of other contemporary authors and/or scholarly works on the period. 

Hence, while I would never profess to be a scholarly expert on the Victorian Era or the early 20th century or WW1 or the '20s or the '30s, I can speak with reasonable facility on and around, for instance, the Eugenics movement in Germany, England, and America, the Celtic Revival, the Decadents, the WW1 German military, the lead-up and results of the Russian Revolution, the introduction of Russian literature into England, the birth and early development of the English Air Force, the rise of Imperialist Jingoism and Mafficking in England, the Darwinian debates over evolution, Teutonist racialism in England and Germany, the Victorian debates over Birth Control, the Great Strikes of the 1900s, Orientalism as a cultural movement, the French syndicalist movement and its American and British offshoots, the place of Jews in England and France in the 19th and 20th centuries, Anarchist dynamite attacks and assassinations, the economic downturn in England, France, and Germany after WW1, the birth of modern policing, the origins of science fiction, the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and '30s, detective fiction in Britain and America, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, and so on and so forth. More than this, I am intimately familiar with the language and cast of mind of people in these times and places and could give, I fancy, a pretty decent approximation of how different groups wrote and thought. I have also read or read about a great number of the authors and topics from earlier history written about by Chesterton, including such diverse figures as William Cobbett, William Shakespeare, Homer, and Euripides.

Poem: Lourdes

[Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes, which commemorate the anniversary of the first apparition to St. Bernadette Soubirous on February 11th, 1858. I visited Lourdes in 2017, drank the water, and bathed in the spring, and there received what I regard as both a true revelation and a miraculous healing. I wrote this poem a number of years later in recognition of this event.]

Lourdes

My Lady

who dwell in the mountains

abandon me not

forget me not

in silence

hold me

Lady of the stillness

of those overshadowed valleys

and of the spring

that bubbles up

from the depths of our despair

dark and clouded

by our filth

colder

than our loneliness

Lady of the darkness

that holds our eyes

in the night

in the grotto

under the shadow 

of your crossed arms

and Lady of the lights

the tongues of flame

melting wax

that spills upon our hands

searing

as we stumble

in your footsteps

Lady of gleaming white

reflected light

amidst the darkness

Lady of the song

we sing to you

sinners, fools,

sick and old

dispossessed, abandoned

in masses driven

calling upon you

Lady of the stench

and all the ugliness

of our decaying bodies

and souls

Lady of the shit-pile

where your daughter lived

Lady of the great grey expanse of space

beneath the ground

where we shelter

huddled together

so many

from the clamor

and the light

and the fire

that devour us

Lady of the shadows

on the concrete walls

Lady of the cinder-blocks

and the steel

Lady of this age

Queen of this great City

of blood and iron

Lady of the masses

teeming

starving

herded

driven

anonymous

to labor

and extermination

Lady of the broken selves

cast into the trash can

Lady of all those 

whom unclean iron

has pierced

Lady of all those

whom radiant idols

have chilled

Lady of all those

whose inner chamber is empty

Lady of all those

whose door is sealed shut

or broken open

Lady of all those

whom this world has defeated

Lady of all those

the righteous have despaired over

let fall

dropped out of the picture

hidden in the calculation

whose evil

the good have tolerated

whose eternal loss

the wise and just

have accepted

Lady who pass beyond

the limits of our patience

and our love

Lady of our healing

Lady of our death

Lady of Lourdes

I call upon you

over all your names

your shrines upon the earth

because I called upon you

in the night

and in the night

you heard and answered

and because I fell back

naked

into your icy waters

and you caught me

Lady of Lourdes

Queen of this age

and of me

I praise you

Amen

Melania 2026 and the Fossilization of Power

Melania 2026 and the Fossilization of Power

What is power?

This is not, or should not be, a difficult question to answer. 

The most basic definition of power might be something like "making something happen." A more metaphysical answer might be "the actualization of potential existence by actual existence." A more human answer, encompassing pretty much every society and form of power throughout history, might be something like "the ability to make what you want happen." 

The human answer quite naturally connects power with desire or will--and in so doing explains why power is universally seen as something good or desirable by humans. All three definitions, though, show with equal clarity the basic directionality or teleology of power: actuality actualizing potency and something making something else happen. You want power because you will or desire that something happen--and because power itself is essentially and totally ordered to making something happen.

Yet, if power is defined by teleology, will, and desire, it is essentially and totally dependent on things outside itself--on the will and desire and actuality of the being that wields it, and on the being it is ordered to producing. Indeed, power is essentially and totally, not a thing in itself, even a being in itself, but merely a relation between beings. Potential being is actualized by already actual being, and in so doing produces more actual being: someone makes something happen. Without either actual term, power is incoherent and cannot exist. 

In being fulfilled, though, in causing something to be, power or potency is always and totally, as it were, used up, fulfilled, ended in the base etymological sense of the Greek telos. In the terms of Aristotelean and Thomist theology, God himself is what you get when the power of all being is entirely used up, leaving no conceivable potency whatsoever. God is finished, and in that sense powerless.

(Of course, though God himself has eternally completed in himself everything that could be, he still retains a free, contingent will that can, when and how he chooses, make other, lesser things exist, in a secondary, derivative sense, out of sheer gratuitous generosity. When he wills or desires it, he can make things happen, and so wield power.)

All this proem is merely a way to say that the reason why people have from the beginnings of the human race universally wanted power is because there were things they wanted to happen. Which is to say, they were actual beings of will and desire who willed things that they saw as desirable but as yet only possible and so in need of being actualized--or, more simply, because they wanted what they wanted to happen. For this reason, though, the end of power is always and everywhere not power itself, but what you want: power is only and solely a means. 

Or, in other words: if people in fact want something, then they will want the power to get that thing, and nothing more or less. If they want different things, then they will want the perhaps very different form or degree of power necessary to get that other thing. If they do not happen to want anything, though, they will not want power. It is, really, that simple.

I watched Melania in theaters. It is the most devastating film I have seen since The Last Showgirl. It is also one of the greatest films I have ever seen, precisely because of its brutal, unstinting look at the spiraling whirlpool that is the contemporary American cult of power. 

I should say that I am not sure the film's devastating surrealism is entirely intentional--but I am also far from certain it is entirely unintentional. Rather, what makes the film great is precisely its artistic devotion to vividly and truthfully chronicling the artifice and craft of power as it is actually practiced by the rulers of the greatest Empire in the history of the human race--and because it centers on someone who is clearly an absolute master of this craft. Melania Trump, whatever else she may be, is a great artist--even if, like many great artists, she does not appear to consciously understand almost anything of what she is doing and why, and even if, also like many great artists, her life appears to be a living hell.

As with my review of Oppenheimer, a devastating film that compelled me to immediately struggle to process just what about it I viscerally hated, I find it very hard to capture just what made Melania such a terrifying and alienating and powerful experience for me. It would be easiest to just point to random details and moments in the film, moments that are indelibly graven upon my mind and heart and will probably never leave it.

Four people cluster around a glassy table in the impossibly ornate and labyrinthine and gigantic red-and-gold interior of Trump Towers, mirrors upon mirrors upon glass upon carpet curling in and ever in and around on themselves. They are waiting for Melania. She enters, a stiff figure in black and white, and they jump to life and begin their performances: the French fashion designer with his exaggerated mugging and rushed faux-friendliness, the rumpled American fashion designer with his large smiles and air of suppressed tension, the two Asian tailors in black-and-white uniforms standing silent and concerned in the background of every shot. 

They show her the suit for the Inauguration. Everything is perfect, she tells them with stiffly exaggerated friendliness, but the fabric is wrong, as is the waist, as is the lapel. She tells them matter-of-factly the specific changes she will need: they agree with each one enthusiastically. Then she leaves the room, and for about thirty seconds the camera lingers on these four people as they cluster around the table, talking in rushed, tense, oddly frustrated voices, trying to conform to her demands. "It is impossible," the male Asian tailor says. Then the camera follows the female Asian tailor as she leaves the room, in and around golden walls and golden paneling, and begins to climb a golden spiral staircase, up and around and up and around and--

Melania Trump, more than perhaps any First Lady since Jackie Kennedy, has a style and aesthetic of her own, one manifested throughout the film. Yet this aesthetic is, when one looks at it objectively, rather strange. In many different scenes, Melania tries on and requests alterations to and finally performs in a number of different outfits: but both the outfits and her alterations are always more or less the same. 

Melania's aesthetic, it turns out, can be rather easily summarized: black and white--which, she says at one point, are "her colors"--and straight lines, which she again and again demands alterations to achieve even in already quite straight garments, making sure the small bit of white blouse showing under her black coat is straight, making sure the neckline of her strapless white-and-black ballgown is straight, making sure her inauguration coat falls straight, tensely pointing to where the white strap around her black hat seems to her rounded and "loose" and not nearly straight enough. Every time she dons these similar black-and-white straight garments, her fashion designers praise them--but she simply stares stiffly in the mirror, tensely checking to make sure that she is as black and white and straight as she should be.

At one point, her designer tells her that a dress is "so you." But who is the "you" expressed by these severe confections of straight lines in white and black, by these oddly scripted and formal and stiff interactions with subordinates? Or is that really the question?

Short Story: La Cafe

[There has been a lot of discussion about the JFK assassination in the last year or so. Because of that, I felt it important to finally reveal to everyone the truth about who killed JFK and why. Please note that because of its setting and content, the below story unavoidably contains offensive language and content, and that I endorse absolutely none of the sentiments expressed therein.]

Nothing about the man stood out to me. He was entirely unusual in every respect–but that was what made him blend in.

La Cafe was, as its name indicated, a coffee shop at the outskirts of a college town. It was exactly one street over from the main road where undergraduate women clustered in Starbucks and Caribou Coffee, and had been around, or so locals told me, since at least the early 1970s, though there was some debate over whether the name might have changed in the mid-’80s. It served bitter black coffee, Great Value tea bags in lukewarm water, and obviously store-bought croissants. You had to add the sugar yourself from a porcelain bowl on the counter: whipped cream was not an option.

On the plus side, the purportedly Albanian family that owned La Cafe had not visited or exercised any oversight over the place for roughly forty years, and the manager, a 60-something woman named Beth who wore knitted winter hats all year round, spent her days in her “office” (the main storage room), gambling on her phone: she was rumored to be an alcoholic, but no one had caught her at it yet. As a result, anyone and everyone was welcome to spend eight to twelve hours a day in the minimally-heated interior of the place, or sit at any of the ten to twelve tables scattered around the grassy, uncovered patio outside, or use either of the two filthy bathrooms hastily relabeled as gender-neutral in the mid-2010s, without ever ordering anything at all. Most importantly, there was free, unsecured wi-fi.

Taken as a whole, then, La Cafe was shunned by anyone with taste, friends, social status, or an orientation towards modern coffee-shop-culture and/or personal safety, but embraced by poverty-stricken graduate students, homeless people, failed academics, intellectual poseurs, con men, the clinically insane, and various lonely cast-offs desperate for any kind of proximity to what they perversely persisted in regarding as the Life of the Mind.

Did I belong to any of those categories? That’s a good question. I didn’t think so at the time: but looking back I have my doubts.

Roughly two years prior to my meeting with the strange man, I had finally finished my PhD after nine and a half years of increasingly strained meetings with my advisor ended with a shouted ultimatum and a rushed, desultory defense over Zoom. For the next few years, I worked as an adjunct, failed to pay my rent, and sent off two applications a week for tenure-track positions and prestigious post-docs with names like “the Young Talent Enrichment Program.” I have never been able to work out whether this was the worst or something approaching the best time of my life.

Then, abruptly, on an icy March day where half of my Persian poetry class had again failed to turn in their final projects, I received an email from Messrs. Snodgrass and Beit cordially informing me that I had inherited from an estranged uncle more money than I had ever imagined.

Up to that point, I had assumed, like most people, that inheriting unimaginable sums from estranged uncles was something that only happened in stories. Since then, I have on innumerable occasions pointed out the folly of this all-too-common misconception: pointing out that most people in America still have siblings and therefore their children will have uncles, that some number of these uncles are statistically certain to become wealthy, that wealthy is said in many ways, that given the growing income gap what used to be considered merely upper middle class is now as good as rich anyway, that earning lots of money often clashes with the time and affections necessary for a happy family life and so leads to estrangement with family members, that even wealthy uncles must inevitably die, that they too must feel the basic cultural and indeed biological imperative to hand on something of themselves to the next generation, that an estrangement with one’s siblings need not necessarily apply to nieces and nephews, that a lack of personal contacts with those inheriting logically must mean less where estates are large and estate-planning largely carried out by lawyers, and that consequently there is in itself nothing more logical and indeed commonplace in human history than inheriting an unimaginable sum of money from an estranged uncle. 

Whenever the matter has come up socially since then, I have endeavored–more, I admit, for the sake of my own pride than anything else--to give the impression that the inheritance did not come as a surprise to me, that I had in fact expected it and planned on it for many years, and of course this was why I had pursued a graduate degree in such a poorly-renumerated field as Medieval Persian poetry, failed to complete my PhD in less than nine years, and then worked for two years as an adjunct.

As a matter of fact, this impression is false. I had not even the smallest inkling that my uncle–whom I had seen only twice in my entire life–would choose to leave any money to me, let alone what amounted to his entire fortune. To tell the truth, I had largely forgotten that I had an uncle, and had in fact told several women I dated in graduate school that my father was an only child–using this as a key psychological factor to explain why he had failed to understand my uniquely sensitive disposition and consequently left me unable to feel and receive normal human affection and so in desperate need of remedial attention from women. When I did occasionally remember my uncle, I certainly remembered that he was a fabulously successful and wealthy engineer–but given that my uncle’s first two marriages had between them produced two children, given that he had never actually directly spoken to me that I could remember, and given that the only time I had seen him interact with my father had ended in a shouting match, it had simply never occurred to me that he might choose to leave me anything.

I am still not really sure why he chose to do so. My leading theory has always been spite towards his own children: though I cannot entirely rule out spite towards his ex-wives, my father, his business associates, himself, and/or me. Life is unfortunately filled with mysteries, and I had no interest in unravelling any of them.

In any case, my sudden inheritance left me in a very sticky situation. On the one hand, I had for years been telling everyone I knew how much I hated my job, my students, and my field. On the other hand, my failed academic career had for more than ten years given me my only meaning in life, my entire sense of self, my only topic of conversation, and my only reason whatsoever for ever leaving my bed. Still, in the end I could think of no excuse that would hold water with my colleagues, my students, or my increasingly rare dates: I resigned.

During my time as an adjunct, I had frequently complained that I lacked the time to work on both my academic monograph on Rumi and a science-fiction novel in which my original viewpoint on life would be explored via a painstakingly detailed description of the poetry, literature, politics, society, and sex lives of alien grubs. Having quit my job, I no longer had an excuse not to work on these projects. Unfortunately, I quickly found that I loathed both of them as well.

Theoretically, I could have simply moved away to somewhere warm and inviting, or gone on vacation to the Bahamas and never come back. Every time I considered these options, though, my head would spin, a cold sweat would break out on the back of my neck, and I found myself unable to sleep for the next several days. Like it or not, this town had become my home–and the last thing I needed in the throes of such an emotionally disturbing transition (as I reminded myself constantly during this time, many lottery winners kill themselves) was a drastic change in milieu.

No longer having any colleagues, students, or advisors to ask about what I was doing, I briefly considered simply giving up any active efforts whatsoever, watching television all day, and ordering take-out for all my meals. A devastating encounter with a former student at Walgreen’s, however, confirmed me in my ultimately illusory, but nonetheless deeply felt need to at least fake some kind of productivity.

Hence, within about two months of my inheritance, I found myself spending ten hours a day, six days a week sitting behind my laptop at a corner table at La Cafe, scrolling through Twitter, watching Shakira music videos and DnD streams, and occasionally adding and then deleting a paragraph or two of text to my two project documents.