'la grandeur et la vérité' - et l'absurde

Hmmm. I don't quite know what to make of this. And it's not the Philipponnat I'm sipping, either. I'd show you a picture, but the bottle is lodged between the hideous plastic vat of palm oil, a candle holder that belongs by the other ones nestled between the jungle and the television, a box of wire nails and a resin tincture I'm trying to remember to agitate. Not to mention the emergency extra cellphone that, despite its life of idleness, nonetheless manages to run out of steam every so often and emit a desperate chirping sound audible from the car. Which I'm charging.

So.

I gave a teensy decant of the in-process 'Catherine of Siena' scent to the dear and impressive lady I made it for, with a printout of its description and intent. (With ample caveats as to its need of more time and tinkering.)

But that's not my point.

My point is that I had not remembered that the French Resistance fighter, and Nazi prisoner, Fr. Joseph Marie Perrin, who was basically Simone Weil's guide into Catholicism, was a - yes, okay, it's obvious by now - Dominican. They met in Marseilles, had a long and close interaction in person and in letters -- and to me, I guess, the Little Manual of Perfect Prayer and Adoration - written, it should be added, during the occupation of France and his activities in the Resistance - seems to have been too envelopingly universal/catholic, as were what few of his thousand other works I've read, for one to be able readily to recall the author's particular/'partisan' Catholic spirituality. Simone Weil - who bridges the gap between fellow École Normale Supérieure brooding Gallic leftist alums like the preceding post's Sartre et tchums and the equally august roll-call of modern-day thinky Catholic converts like Chesterton, Merton, Jacques & Raissa Maritain, Dorothy Day, Claire Booth Luce, Avery Dulles, Graham Green, Brubeck (yes, Brubeck!), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Malcolm Muggeridge (yay! Punch! I never get Michael Bywater in here anymore) and even newly-minted Maronite, WSJ bigwig Peggy Noonan - was roped by a Dominican.

Anyway, since everything is strange and confluent and doubly-signified, and I have no hope of cohesion in this post, in 1946 Vogue magazine ran a spread called 'Portraits of Paris' of photographs by Messrs. Sartre and Camus. On the one hand, I admit this seems a bit like Wittgenstein offering up prose-poems about the rights or wrongs of the New Look; on the other, I do understand that these days Derrida or at least Baudrillard is invoked every time there is a change in heel shape or skirt length, and that every fashion magazine no less than every home-decorating periodical considers itself 'cutting edge. ' Still, it is a bit shocking considering the state of magazine journalism today, and I like to imagine Elle commissioning Ismael Kadare to do a photographic series on 'Sidewalks of Tirana,' which he fulfills with portraits of improvisational Rom 'habitation-artists,' impromptu scenes of trafficked 'sex artists,' and a 'location shoot' of 'hunger artists' in a car trunk lumbering across the immeasurable divide between Nogales and Green Valley.

Undoubtedly at this point that IS the Philipponnat talking, as it's taken me about an hour to write this that in any way makes sense even to me.