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!