Those Pesky Dominicans Return -

and just where you'd least expect them...

To begin, here are some of the books I'm reading right now: Chesterton's Aquinas bio in a double volume with his Francis, Josipovici's On Trust: Art and the Temptation of Suspicion, Rancière's Hatred of Democracy, the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart, Jean-Luc Nancy's Dis-Enclosure: the Deconstruction of Christianity, and Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. Apart from the Chesterton, which is very chatty, 'personable,' and inviting, the rest are more, well, I take time off. With different things: with the Chesterton, with poetry (a lot of Jorge Guillén at the moment), a slim, early volume by Eco on aesthetics in the Middle Ages and, I just decided today when I lay down for a nap, Merton's The Sign of Jonas, which I probably haven't read since I was 17 or 18.

Now, why there is no fiction in there, either as a primary reading or as 'relief,' is that I can't do with a novel what I can do with poetry or non-fiction, which is to say stop and start wherever and whenever I please. In fact, even with language textbooks, as long as you have a good base already you can go forward and backward, practicing just the dative case one day and the past dubitative-abilitative mood the next. A good novel consumes the reader to the exclusion of all other books until it is sated; a bad one merely bores and is tossed away - and then the reader is back where he started in either case.

And at the moment I am enjoying this profligacy, so no novel right now.

But back to Merton.
As I said, this particular book I haven't read in many years. It is five years of Merton's daily journal early in his vocation just before and after his ordination, an it was interesting (in a manner now completely unshocking to me) that I picked it today, as just last night I had written to a friend just starting a blog how sometimes I become frustrated with what I would call the 'definitional' issues of the medium. It is not at all a diary, though a personal blog does, or can, share attributes with that form. It's not the same as even a completely open op-ed column, since if the blog is truly non-commercial/personal, the sense of writing for/to one's audience is naturally different - if the writer even considers the issue of audience at all.

For me, certain topics seem clearly too boring to subject others to (not that I don't sometimes ignore this concern altogether), some too emotional to discuss in a (potentially, at least) public space, some too heavy or controversial to feel right mixing them in with postings about shoe organization and exboyfriends' irksome proclivities. Then, too, there is the idea of coherence of the whole, coherence of voice, something which has bedeviled me to the point of not posting anything at different times, because the stuff I was writing about wasn't 'bloggy' enough in my view. I have no idea how to address this, because worrying about it overmuch defeats one of the points of personal weblogs, which is that sense of freedom the medium shares with diaries, but which distinguishes it from even the most unrestricted columns in the paid world. Minimally, a columnist would have to find a way to unify that week's concern with the voice and the stance that come through the column as a whole. More typically, the subject itself would have to appear clearly congruent with the other topics in the series.

But back to me.


I'm not a columnist (despite any sartorial similarity to Peggy Noonan in the above; I'm just running out of photos and my mother insists upon 'seeing your pretty face' every so often). Any sense of wishing a consistent voice or outlook or stance is my own preoccupation, comes from my own meditations on why anyone would be writing one of these things in the first place, and a desire to make it 'earn its keep.' The reason I started to write a blog was as a discipline, to make myself write regularly. The reason I was told to write a blog is the same as with anyone who has demonstrated evidence of writing ability: people tell you that since you can write, you should write; in fact, you should 'be a writer.'

Which, as those less reactionary among us are all too aware, is something altogether different than merely being able to write. And it is not solely a matter of discipline: being able to expatiate endlessly on the differential merits of various wardrobe-organizational systems is not the same as being able to write 500 pages on the social history of wardrobe-organizing systems, nor certainly 500 more on the history of railroad building in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

And yet there is overlap: those who taught themselves to read, those who spent their childhoods in books, read books about books and books about words, those to whom language comes easily and those for whom a well-turned description is as alluring as a well-turned ankle, clearly have much in common with those who spend lifetimes capturing their own or others' lifetimes in print. Even if not Writers, they can certainly be called writers, without any need of scare quotes to emphasize their non-professional status. I look at it this way: my exhusband was and is a musician. He can do other jobs, he has done other jobs; like all of us, he has various different abilities. But his gifts as a musician are so clear, so profound, that they are, I would argue, constitutive of who he is, his self, his way of being in the world, such that one reveals much of substance to say about him 'he is a musician,' the copula there doing what it is has the power to do but seldom does.

But back to Merton.

As I said above, I enjoy being able to open books and start reading at whatever page I happen to land on. It doesn't always work so well while in school, I admit, but I'm not in school, and I like the way it works much of the rest of the time. In cases of postmodern history and historiography, it works very, very well, I must say, as I get to miss the introduction wherein the same list of the same secondary sources is tiresomely trotted out to ensure the reader understands just how thoroughgoingly postmodern the coming exegesis of trends in kitchen appliances in postwar Bavaria is going to be. I like skipping that bit and getting right to the riveting parts about the evolution in backsplashes and cupboard-pulls.

Anyway, not that Merton has exhausting prefaces, or cites much Gramsci, Derrida, Butler, or Homi Bhabha, but part of my enjoyment in reading this way, at least with certain types of material, is to imagine why I'm being given what I'm being given right then. It's often shocking, and always productive. I tuned in when Merton has just become a subdeacon, and I had to go back a few pages to find out what he was referencing when he referenced his current experience with Sertillanges' La Vie Intellectuelle. It turns out (a few pages earlier, which is one of the downsides of this reading method) that he received a copy during this time, when he was really struggling with writing what became The Ascent to Truth. He got stuck a lot, he wrote a good deal he was completely unhappy with, but spending time with Sertillange had on him 'the effect that Dale Carnegie's advice might have had on a despondent salesman.'

Now, I've loved Merton forever. He taught me invaluable things, led me in all sorts of meaningful directions, and I have to say a good deal of that was due to the personal tone of much of what he wrote. I do love struggling with prickly authors and thorny texts at times, and in my weaker moments I can take great delight in the recondite and the recherché, but we're all human, and it is only the deeply, universally human expressed in the works of great novelists, poets, memoirists, and diarists that speaks directly to the heart, and results in a staggering convincement of the soul, rather than a gradual assent via logic.

***Because this is already too long for a blog posting, I'm going to leave this with 'logic' as the last word in the body, since that is surely a one-off, and I should savor it!

Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning

Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.

I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.

Additionally, and this shocks me, I drank too much. I don't know how pronounced the visible effects were, but it was no more enjoyable for me during or after than I imagine it was for my companion while I went on about whatever it was I was going on about. I suspect I know why I drank: nerves. And I know why I got loaded from it: I weigh ninety pounds or under and normally don't consume any alcohol, I had nothing in my stomach prior, and there is a reason drunks go for fish and chips and burgers and fries rather than sautéed clams when the bar closes... That is, if they hope to find their way home.

So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.

And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.

We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.

But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.

Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.

But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.

And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...

So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.