'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.

4 out of 5 French Existentialists Agree:

'if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.' --Nietzsche

If you are sick of feeling like a self-absorbed abyss, and you live near Seattle, there may be a great opportunity to change that. The self-absorbed abyss part; I offer no suggestions nor assistance as to relocation. Tent City is going to be up at Prince of Peace Lutheran in Shoreline for the next three months. With collaboration through the Shoreline YMCA and a grant from ELCA, there is a meal program there Wednesday nights for about 150-190 people.

With Tent City there, there will be an additional 100 or so people. Most of the volunteers start somewhere between 3:30-5, and the meal will now run from 5-7-ish, to allow for a second seating. Volunteers are needed for set-up, service, bussing tables, doing dishes, and cleanup. If you want to volunteer, please call the Shoreline YMCA at 206-364-1700.

If you need more convincing that doing nice things is a nice thing to do, here are what some famous religious figures have to say on the matter:


'Feed the hungry and visit the sick, and free the captive, if he be unjustly confined. Assist any person oppressed, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.' -- Muhammad

'Compassion and love are not mere luxuries.
As the source both of inner and external peace,
they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.' -- XIV Dalai Lama

'But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?' --John the Baptist

'Even offering three hundred bowls of food three times a day does not match the spiritual merit gained in one moment of love.' --Nagarjuna

'Love of all creatures is also love of God, for whoever loves the One loves all the works that He has made. When one loves God, it is impossible not to love His creatures. The opposite is also true. If one hates the creatures, it is impossible to love God who created them.' MaHaRal/ Yehudah ben Bezalel Levai

"Open my heart that compassion may
be my companion;
Where I meet pride, humble me;
Where I meet anger, calm my fears;
Where I meet injustice, cause me
to act in love's way.
May I be as gentle as the doe,
as fearless as the lion,
as faithful as the dog." --King David

'Live with compassion, Work with compassion, Die with compassion, Meditate with compassion, Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, Experience them with compassion.' --Lama Zopa Rinpoche

'I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.' -- Francis of Asissi

Whether you call it tzedekah, chesed, rahmah, ihsan, metta, boddhicitta, mercy, compassion, or good works, everyone from Zoroaster to Abraham thinks you should be cultivating it. And if in their saffron robes and pilgrims' sandals all the foregoing are unconvincing, remember that the great existentialist unbelievers Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir all risked their lives to save those of others in the French Resistance. Surely not everyone needs recourse to a metaphysics or baleful eschatology just to wash a few darned dishes???

"'There is no man,'

[Elstir] began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded....We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.'" (Proust, Within a Budding Grove)


I pray to God it is not that I am 'growing accustomed to,' or acquiescing in, or failing any longer to notice, the winter such that I can no longer naturally and effortlessly be as splenetic as I have every right to be. After all, it is only the beginning of February, I am nearly at the 49th parallel, and thus there are many, many more weeks of short, dark days made darker by an unremitting low-hanging grey sky. I may have plenty to be thankful for, but there is still much to lament. At least for another eight weeks or so. And while I think equanimity in the face of some hardship is a hallmark of maturity, I think the Dylan Thomas approach is perhaps the sanest when choosing one's coping mechanisms for Northern winters. It may not perceptibly change objective reality, but you'll feel more alive after screaming in the snowy woods, and the slight elevation in blood pressure may help warm you up a bit.

Mature? Perhaps not; perhaps so. I think denial is in the main unduly demonized. Yes, we need a scapegoat, clearly, for the world's ills, but I remain unconvinced that it has to be the one that lets the individual get on with life! Rage, rage, fine; play a little hockey, hit the heavy bag, burn off some angst and cabin fever snowshoeing or sitting on a foreign beach pretending it's not still dismal where you're heading back to in 6.5 days 4 hours and 36 minutes -- and then go back to work, get back to living and resume waiting for April. Nothing is solved, obviously, but scant little generally is, and still somehow we manage to put our boots on the right feet again and get out the door.

That perhaps is the true model of maturity: getting on with it. Accepting that at times it truly is every bit as wretched as it seems and still having the courage and audacity (and, I will maintain, 'denial,' as it is popularly used) to put the boots on once more and head out into it. Certainly existentialists, whether of a Christian or atheistic bent, would stand with me there. Taking the nihilo, sticking an ex- in front of it, and finding within oneself what can be made of it.

Still, as Proust reminds us, we were not always wise, and if we have attained to any measure of wisdom now we might well look back on one or two habits or inclinations of our youth and wince. I was reminded of this today in a conversation about some film now out, which I thought I remembered as having Jeremy Irons in it - Jeremy Irons, who was once something different, or so I like to believe, but who has now become to films of the Double-Aughts what Michael Caine was to films of the Eighties and early Nineties: to wit, the scrubby, middle-aged Englishman who will take any part in any American film, no matter how bad the part, no matter how meritless the film.

I wouldn't care were it not the case that Jeremy Irons, along with Charlie Rose, Sartre, and William F. Buckley, were my Deep Dark Crushes of middle high school through early college. I adored that Buckley loved and wrote passionately about words despite all his other interests and careers; I loved that Rose's interviews were longer and more in-depth than the norm but that he was always even-tempered and polite; Sartre is an obvious and not uncommon one; but in contrast to all those I suspect that my Irons crush was based solely on the fact that regardless of role he was always effete, etiolated, and wan. He could take any part he wished, and still look and act completely morbidly tubercular in it. For me that was sufficient base for an abiding passion at the time.

Now of course, the stages of my psychosexual development having passed through such 'fatuous or unwholesome incarnations' as the foregoing, I must admit I do indeed feel quite mature by comparison in my quest for the six-foot Jesuit-schooled, Indian-riding, multilingual, finish-carpenter sailboat-racing poetry lover with a thing for Stravinsky, skirts, Mastiffs and Malagasy prosimians...