Dies Irae

Today I went to an All Souls Day Requiem mass. In an interesting coincidence, that mass opens with the Latin hymn “Dies Irae,” and my “exemplary poem” for Junior Poet, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” draws its title from the hymn’s opening stanza: “Dies iræ! dies illa / Solvet sæclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla!” Thus, I will endeavor to give a reading of it now, while the coincidence is still interesting.

The poem itself, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (full text here), is a fascinating look at three of the four last things: death, judgement, and hell. One of Hopkin’s darkest poems, it does not speak about heaven; the reasons given for this vary, among them that it is a pre-Christian poem in content, that it stemmed from an Ignatian meditation on hell, and that logically it ends by rejecting poetry while it is meant to aesthetically, through the music of the words, redeem poetry.

In any case, whatever caused Hopkins to write the poem, its substance is him confronting the fact that all life boils down to a choice between good and evil. The octave presents the world disintegrating, the image being one of the sun setting, the stars rising, and, while in the heavens the stars are fixed, stable, below on earth, everything succumbs to entropy. Here we find such great lines as “womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night” and “her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height / Waste”; these descriptions blend the distinction between symbol and what is symbolized, and we feel that the nightfall is the Apocalypse.

In the sestet Hopkins turns inward, seeing that now that the world has ended, the dappled and pied beauty of things is irrelevant. It begins with the cryptic but evocative line “Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,” going on to explain the threat implied there as one of morality: now that the world has come to an end, the only distinction that matters is “black, white; ‘ right, wrong.” Aesthetics no longer matter, Hopkins fears; even as he strives to assent to it. In a sense the poem is about poetry, and whether it is worthwhile to write beautiful poetry about the beauty of the world; Hopkins concludes that it is not, unless that beauty serves a moral purpose.

But of course that is what all of Hopkins’ poems are about – his nature sonnets all begin with observing the natural world and move up to God. Some people think “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is somehow atypical of Hopkins; on the contrary, it perhaps best encapsulates his concerns: nature, the self, sin, and God. It is written in the Baroque style of earlier poems like “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and “The Windhover,” which he returned to with e.g. “That Nature is a Heraclitan Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” (these four poems I would say are Hopkins’ most important), but its darkness ties it in to his later sonnets of desolation, which are written in a more plain style.

What I’ve left out so far from my explanation of the poem are the last two lines – and indeed, those who want to place the poem as an extremity, not an example, of Hopkins’ poetry look to those two lines to make their argument. They’re difficult lines; they’re also what first turned me on to the poem, as I at first grew frustrated with Hopkins for not making any sense and then slowly realized the brilliance of them. They describe the damned souls after the Last Judgment, and their difficult rhythm – it is almost painful to put the stresses where they are marked, rather than where they would naturally fall – makes them sound like a drumbeat out of Hell. They’re not unmusical; it’s just a terrifying sort of music. Nor is it hopeless terror; the poem is a prophecy and a warning. “Teste David cum sibylla.”

—

So that’s my exemplary poem. With any luck, I’ve convinced you at least that the poem is worth looking at. It’s really amazing, in sound and sense (Hopkins is a master of combining form and content). I get to do a practice presentation of it tomorrow morning, then my panel’s Friday the 13th; I hope writing this out in the last half hour will actually help me with those (and the paper we have to write in a month) rather than prove a hindrance. We’ll see.

Beware! Beware!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I just wrote a paper for my Romantic Tradition class, and I’m in a poetical mood; plus I had too much coffee and so am still awake at 2:30 AM. Hence this post.

The above is an excerpt from “Kubla Khan”, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a celebration of raw poetic power. The first half of the poem is simply a description of an incredibly sublime scene, Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome, with its sacred river Alph that “ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea”, and assorted other wonders. The second half, reproduced above, reveals that this description is a vision the poet had.

What I love about this poem is how, with its irregular rhyme scheme, lilting rhythm, and constant use of alliteration, it propels the reader forward, almost as if it were a magic spell or incantation. Its power is irresistible, sweeping us along whether we want it or not. And that’s what the poem is about; how poetry is power, how the poet is a magician whom all others should “beware! beware!”

What I can’t understand is how the same poet that wrote the above also wrote poems like “Frost at Midnight” or “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” – poems which, though well-written, are not at all sublime or powerful. I can’t really enjoy them as poems, because, well, they don’t strike me as poetic; I may sound like a philistine saying this, but they’re for the most part just prose descriptions of not that interesting events with line-breaks every ten syllables.

I don’t insist that poetry must rhyme or alliterate, but I do think it has to use words as if they were something magical, as if words had power, or else its words will not have power, the form of the poem will not matter as much as the content, and it will not be poetry. Perhaps that’s how I define poetry – as something written so that the way the words fit together is as important to the meaning as the literal meaning of the words.

On the Sublime and Beautiful

For my Romantic Tradition class, we recently read Edmund Burke’s “On the Sublime and Beautiful”. It’s a fascinating work; it distinguishes between the sublime, which is composed of what is terrible, obscure, powerful, vast, infinite, uniform, difficult, magnificent, painful, from the beautiful, which is composed of the small, smooth, delicate.

Given that these are the words used to describe the sublime and beautiful, it surprised me that Burke did not distill these descriptors down to their essence – the beautiful is what is proportionate, moderate, while the sublime is what is extreme, excessive. But this does seem like the basic point of the distinction between sublime and beautiful – extremes versus proportions. So I’ll go with that.

Now, before I read this, I did not distinguish between the sublime and beautiful because I did not have the word “sublime” in my critical vocabulary (I knew the word, but not its literary meaning). I considered what was sublime to be beautiful, just in a different way – is there not beauty in the raging of a storm or a vast expanse of snow? But in Burke’s terminology, these are only sublime, not beautiful. I’m not sure I’d agree with this. Part of me wants to say that both extremes and proportions types of beauty, calling the former sublime and the latter something else. Burke instead classifies both the sublime and beautiful as different, but both pleasureful for us.

I suppose the difference is mostly just semantic. But which way is better? Do we want to say that beauty is everything that gives us aesthetic pleasure, or do we want to say that beauty is proportion, and that the sublime is not beautiful, but also gives us aesthetic pleasure?

(And yes, I wrote this post because I have a paper due tomorrow about the sublime that I don’t want to write yet.)

Musings about Modesty

[Be warned; this post is written from an implicitly Catholic viewpoint, and how it looks at sexuality will probably seem really weird to anyone who's not Catholic - and perhaps to most people who are, as well. It's really just me rambling about clothing and modesty and sexuality for seven hundred words.]

—

I remember a few months (years?) ago, we had a debate on the Wesnoth forums about standards of modesty. Some of the Europeans, talking about how nudity was more acceptable there, were trying to make the argument that nudity was not necessarily sexual, and it was just us American puritans who made it so – if we just required less clothes in the first place, lack of clothing wouldn’t be considered as intentionally provocative.

Well, coming back from Europe after three and a half months, I think I can say… nope, that’s completely wrong. Nudity really is always sexual – at least how it appears in Europe. I saw advertisements for pornographic movie theaters, “adult” websites, etc, all involving female nudity – advertisements you would never see in the US, they would be illegal – but certainly never saw nudity somehow used in a non-sexual way. Perhaps it is, sometimes, but it seems obvious that the primary effect of making nudity more socially acceptable is to make raw sexuality more socially acceptable and pervasive…

Anyway, the point is, it seems obvious that nudity and sexuality can’t really be separated from each other. But… what, with respect to clothing, is not always sexual? I mean, can we really separate clothing or the lack thereof from sexuality? I’m reminded of the part in Perelandra where the devil is teaching the Green Lady to wear clothing. He is teaching her modesty in order to teach her licentiousness…

Perhaps it’s not clear what my point is. Well, my point is a question – what does it mean for someone (well, a female, primarily) to “dress modestly”? The idea is that dressing immodestly is dressing in a sexually provocative manner. But women can dress without revealing much skin and still be provocative (obviously), and they can dress while revealing a lot of skin and not be very provocative (harder to find examples of, but just think of what the difference between “cute” and “hot” is – it’s not necessarily how much clothing is worn) – it seems to be the intent, not the actual manner of dress, that matters…

But this seems to contradict what I said at the beginning. If it’s the intent, not the amount of clothing, that determines modesty, why did I not see any non-sexual nudity in Europe? Why was all of it so highly sexualized?

Obviously there is some sort of correlation, even if it’s not exact, between how revealing clothing is and how modest it is. It’d be hard to be modest wearing a bikini; it’d be hard to be immodest wearing a burqa. But we don’t want to force women to wear burqas, and anything less than that will be sexual in one way or another; all clothing is, really. There must be some sort of middle ground, but I don’t know how one would find it.

And there’s also two factors here I’m conflating, I think – how modest the clothing is, and how chaste the woman is. Someone could wear a bikini but not be being intentionally immodest. I actually know some girls who would do, and have done, that…

I don’t have any grand theory of sexuality and modesty to lay out. My point, I guess, is that this is more complicated than most people realize. It’s not as simple as, “cover yourself up already!” – otherwise Catholics would require their women to wear burqas, which we don’t. But there have to be some standards or something – what I saw in Europe, which was basically the breaking down of standards of decency, was definitely not Christian in nature.

Perhaps the line is drawn where the clothing stops being intended to bring out the beauty of the wearer, and becomes about emphasizing the sexuality of the wearer… though, those two seem almost impossible to separate. So I’m not sure it’s actually possible to formulate a rule for how a girl ought to dress modestly.

Venice, Florence, Assisi

I just took a class trip to Venice, Florence, and Assisi.

Overall, I liked Florence the best – but, I think, that was at least somewhat because I went into it disposed to like Florence the best, knowing that Dante Alighieri (the greatest poet-philosopher to ever live) and Michelangelo (one of the greatest sculptors and painters to ever live) both came from there. I was also disposed not to really like Venice, because the very idea of Venice irritates me (don’t frickin’ build a city on a frackin’ sandbar unless you’re damn sure you can make sure it won’t sink on you! The city deserves what’s coming to it, I’d say) – and it didn’t help that I’d been to Stockholm, the “Venice of the North”, the previous week, and enjoyed that much more than Venice itself (I was constantly comparing the two). Assisi I knew little about going in, other than it was the home of Saint Francis.

But I’ll try to just look at the cities themselves, minus my preconceptions. First of all, Venice. Well, when we were there it was raining the entire time. I love the rain, but, in Venice when it rains all the streets flood (as in, 3-6 inches of water in some places and they have to put up elevated walkways – it’s called acqua alta)
and it’s really unpleasant to walk around, which is all there is to do in Venice except go into expensive museums that I’m not interested in (I hate most museums – perhaps a post on this later). Venice is basically a huge tourist trap, after all – a bunch of souvenir shops and expensive restaurants. It’s definitely not a city I would want to hang out in for a long period of time. It is beautiful though – the whole built-on-water aspect may be idiotic, but it does make for some picturesque views. So, Venice is pretty to look at, but not that much fun to actually be in, I’d say. At least when raining.

Florence is strange for a number of reasons. FIrst of all, it has museums I actually like. The Accademia, for example, which houses Michelangelo’s David, is actually not bad as museums go, although small. It also has some cool churches, though I didn’t get to go into as many as I wanted. The Baptistery, for example, has some cool mosaics on the ceiling. But Florence is also kind of a slum, the entire city through; except for the area right near the river, it’s really run-down, kind of poor-looking actually, and there’s graffiti everywhere (though that’s true of most of Italy, really). I enjoyed walking around in it nonetheless (it’s actually more flavorful than walking around in generic middle-class neighborhoods), but it could have been better. It’s also rather irritating that you have to pay to get into most of the churches (apparently Florence doesn’t get enough voluntary donations to its churches so it needs to charge for them).

Assisi was probably objectively the best place we went. It reminded me of Delphi in Greece, actually – both are mountain/hill small towns that are pilgrimage sites, Assisi for St. Francis and Delphi for the Oracle. So Assisi had the natural beauty going for it, and the architecture of the entire city was quite medieval (old bricks and stone-paved roads). And it was very peaceful – the city itself was quiet, and when we hiked up to a nearby hermitage it was completely silent. Very relaxing. Assisi is a tourist town, sort of, but not in the same way as Venice – people don’t usually come to Assisi unless they’re interested in the spiritual aspect, so it’s a more sincere kind of tourism, I think. And Assisi has some cool medieval churches. Overall, then, I think Assisi was the best.

So, objectively speaking, Assisi > Venice > Florence. But personally, I have to say, Florence > Assisi > Venice. At least in terms of how much I enjoyed the cities, that’s definitely the order they’re in.

The Land of the Ice and Snow

This last weekend, I went to Stockholm, in Sweden, leaving on Friday and returning early Sunday morning.

Now, I went to Stockholm just because it’s in Scandinavia, and I wanted to go somewhere in Scandinavia before the semester ended. I bought the tickets back in September, but didn’t do any research whatsoever before going, and so had no idea what to expect. I was prepared to be disappointed.

It turns out, though, that Stockholm is simply a stunning city visually. The mood of the city was set by its beautiful blondes in somber black clothing walking amidst multi-colored ancient apartment buildings as if the two went naturally together. This fit perfectly with the weather, which was chilly but not cold, and very slightly overcast). There was also natural beauty; walking along the harbor was amazing, and some of the islands (like Kastellholmen) were a mix of rocky and grassy parkland and quaint-looking 18th-/19th-century “castles” and churches.

So it was a lot of fun to just walk around the city, and I did that a decent amount. This is one of my favorite things to do in new cities, after all; when I was alone in Cologne for eight hours over ten-day I just wandered around aimlessly for at least two or three of them. I think Stockholm is one of the best cities I’ve been in for simply wandering around for aesthetic pleasure.

But my other favorite thing to do is to go into random churches, and at this, Stockholm failed. There were very few churches – well, fewer than in, say, Rome or Munich – and those that there were, were Lutheran. Going into Lutheran churches does not particularly interest me.

This was, of course, expected. I knew Scandinavia was mostly agnostic, and nominally Lutheran not Catholic. But it was still disappointing, in a sense; I could not help but imagine how awesome Stockholm would have been if it had had this going for it as well. If Stockholm had been Catholic, I think it might have been my favorite city in Europe so far.

But that is just wishful thinking. Obviously Stockholm is not going to turn Catholic any time soon. That leaves me seeing Stockholm, and thus all of Scandinavia, in a wishful light; it was amazing, but it could have been more, so much more.

The Form of the Bad

The three worst movies I have ever seen (and I could not have managed to sit through them without the help of the folks who did Mystery Science Theatre 3000) are Manos: The Hands of Fate, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and The Star Wars Holiday Special. What is amazing is that I can’t decide which is the worst. They are all bad in their own ways.

Manos’s main problem is the total lack of technical ability on the part of the film-makers. Put simply, they didn’t know how to make a movie. The camera-work and lighting are horrible, the dialogue had to be dubbed in afterwards, no scene is longer than 32 seconds beause of a horrible camera… I think that if the makers had actually known what they were doing, they could have managed to make a generic, fairly bad, but not terrible horror movie, but as it is the movie is nearly unwatchable.

The makers of Plan 9 clearly had much more technical skill, though there are still some odd parts where it suddenly switches from day to night even though its all supposed to be at one time, or you see a cardboard piece of scenery get knocked over. They make up for it, though, by having an even worse script – the plot simply makes no sense. Aliens… are coming to earth… to force humans to acknowledge their existence… and they’re going to do it by raising zombies? What the hell?

The Star Wars Holiday Special’s problem is that it has no plot to speak of. It’s just a variety-show-style series of songs, dances, cartoons, etc, none of which are any good, with a really stupid premise trying to hold it all together. This was by far the most boring of the three, because the other two at least had a plot that you could try to make sense out of (even if most of the time it was a futile endeavor).

Anyway, when reflecting on these movies, I am reminded of the first like of Anna Karenina; “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I wouldn’t say that every good movie is alike, but these bad movies certainly do find many different ways of being bad.

It seems to me also that if there was such thing as simply “badness”, these bad movies would all be alike. That they are so diverse suggests that they are not somehow actively bad, they simply all lack qualities that would make a movie good. They lack different qualities, thus they are “bad” in different ways.

I know this is not an actual argument against the existence of bad, but it does suggest to me that bad is just a lack of good.

Aegis

As I think I’ve mentioned before, last semester we read epic poetry; the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Beowulf, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One recurring theme was that of armor. Achilleus, in the Iliad, has made for him by the god Hephaestus a suit of armor that protects him from all attackers. Aeneas in the Aeneid has a similar suit made for him. Beowulf, however, goes into battle unarmored – the movie Beowulf that just comes out interprets this as nude – trusting in God to protect him.

I don’t know if nude is what the Beowulf poet meant, but battling unclothed has certainly happened historically – the celts, it is said painted themselves with woad and wore nothing else, believing the blue dye would protect them from harm. I don’t know what they thought when it clearly didn’t stop the pilum-throws and gladius-thrusts they suffered at the hands of the Roman army.  Battling in full armor can also be seen in medieval knights who wore full plate armor, covering even their faces.

This is all seemingly tangential, but I think in the end relevant, to my topic of the nature of clothing. It seems to me that clothing is really not fundamentally different from armor. Both are intended to shield you from the outside world. To not wear armor in battle is to declare that you do not need physical protection, that somehow you are safe from physical assault or simply do not fear death. To not wear clothing is to declare that you are not ashamed of your nakedness.

So it seems armor is protection against physical assault and clothing protection from being seen. Most people, I think, would say that, in protecting against sight, the basic goal is to cover up the genitalia. I think it’s more than that, though. Clothing tends not to just cover up what needs to be covered up, it makes us look less like animals and more like machines. Pants hide the fact that our legs are composed of different parts, and make them look like single-width cylinders. Shirts do the same for the torso and, if they are long, for the arms. I have even read that long coats are a good idea if robots take over the world because they’ll obscure the fact that you’re walking, not just gliding, and thus obscure the fact that you’re human. We like to cover up everything but our face and hands so that we can manipulate the world, view the world with our senses, but not be affected by the world directly – we are protected by our clothing. Put like this, clothing takes on an almost Gnostic character. Which shouldn’t surprise; according to Christianity, clothes are a result of sin – but they are also, strangely, a gift from God, who gives Adam and Eve real clothes after he discovers them wearing fig-leaves.

This almost body-denying nature of clothing applies to men, definitely. I know that many guys, including me, rarely if ever wear shorts, and many of those will also wear long sleeves and coats whenever possible. I’ll also note that it’s usually the more intelligent – some might say pretentious – guys who follow this practice, and the less-so ones who don’t. But the goal of female clothing is clearly different – they want you to look at them.

This doesn’t go only for the… well, sluttish way many girls dress today. Even modestly dressed women don’t hide the fact that yes, they have breasts, yes, their legs curve, yes, their face and their hands are not just floating there in midair attached to lumps of cloth. In other words, they don’t hide that they are attractive, in a not-necessarily-sexual manner (c.f. my earlier post on that subject, Amor).

Why the difference? Perhaps because men won’t fall in love with a girl they aren’t sexually attracted to – but, really, I think it’s more than this. Like I said, it isn’t primarily about sex, for at least some women. Some of it probably has to do with the fact that (and I don’t care if you think this statement is sexist) women tend to be more earthly than men, who seem to be much more strongly tempted by gnosticism. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; no, we shouldn’t be gnostic, but if males tend naturally towards hiding their bodies more I don’t think that means we have to fight that tendency.

At least, I don’t plan on doing so any time soon. Even if it is flawed, I figure it can’t actually be sinful, and I really would prefer to wear a trench coat almost every day. Besides being potentially gnostic, they’re just cool.

Us Men

First off, Merry Christmas to all.

Now, story-time. I went to Midnight Mass last night at my local parish – the one I haven’t been going to since I left for college back in September, except for a few random times. Now, it just so happened that the church got new priests (two of them – a pair of Scalabrinians). So I wasn’t really familiar with these priests, nor with how they would run the mass. As it turns out, the mass wasn’t horrible, but there were two things that rather bugged me about it.

First of all – the Christmas carol “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. This isn’t exactly new, but they changed the lines that read

pleased as man with man to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel.

to

pleased as man with us to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel.

Now, there’s several problems with this, both theological and poetic.

First, the theological. The change implies that “man” is necessarily masculine, so we have to change “man” to “us” in order to be gender-inclusive – which is nonsense itself. But even assuming gender-inclusivity is a laudable goal – the change ruins the whole meaning of the lines. Since we’ve said that “man” is necessarily masculine, we’re no longer saying that Jesus was pleased to become human and dwell with us humans – we now claim that Jesus was pleased to become a male (and now we’re emphasizing his masculinity – doesn’t that defeat the whole gender-inclusivity we supposedly desire?) and dwell with, you know, “us”. It’s no longer about him becoming one of us, it’s just about him living with us for a while. So what? It seems to miss the fundamental point of the Incarnation.

Second, the poetic. The new lines are just so much weaker than the original. “Pleased as man / with man to dwell // Jesus our / Emmanuel”. The repetition of “man” isn’t redundant, it’s a great parallel – I don’t remember the technical term for it, but whatever it is, it’s well done. Then, something most people won’t notice – “with man to dwell“, “Emmanuel“. I don’t think that was accidental. The lines lose their force when you change it to “us” because the sound “man” is no longer echoed a line later. I believe that’s called assonance.

So – why make the change? Because someone somewhere decided women were offended by the word “man” referring to all of (hu)mankind. If they are – uh, I can be offended all I want at the fact that “rhinoceros” means a certain animal that lives in Africa, but does that mean everybody is going to suddenly refer to those animals as “unicorns”? (“Unicorn” is perfectly valid there – it just means “one horn”, after all – but so is “rhinoceros”, and no, I don’t advocate a change.) Besides, no females I know were offended by the original – my mom was offended by the revised version.

On to the second irritation.

At the end of Mass, we sung “Happy Birthday” to Jesus.

……………………………………..________
………………………………,.-‘”……………….“~.,
………………………..,.-”……………………………..“-.,
…………………….,/………………………………………..”:,
…………………,?………………………………………………\,
………………./…………………………………………………..,}
……………../………………………………………………,:`^`..}
……………/……………………………………………,:”………/
…………..?…..__…………………………………..:`………../
…………./__.(…..“~-,_…………………………,:`………./
………../(_….”~,_……..“~,_………………..,:`…….._/
……….{.._$;_……”=,_…….“-,_…….,.-~-,},.~”;/….}
………..((…..*~_…….”=-._……“;,,./`…./”…………../
…,,,___.\`~,……“~.,………………..`…..}…………../
…………(….`=-,,…….`……………………(……;_,,-”
…………/.`~,……`-………………………….\……/\
………….\`~.*-,……………………………….|,./…..\,__
,,_……….}.>-._\……………………………..|…………..`=~-,
…..`=~-,_\_……`\,……………………………\
……………….`=~-,,.\,………………………….\
…………………………..`:,,………………………`\…………..__
……………………………….`=-,……………….,%`>–==“
…………………………………._\……….._,-%…….`\
……………………………..,<`.._|_,-&“…………….`\

Why does this bug me? Because it seems to ruin the solemnity of the Mass. Seriousness is fragile enough.

At least we did it after the end of Mass, instead of randomly at the homily or something.

Dream Narrative

I had a quite strange dream last night.

I was Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes. I was with Hobbes, of course, and was playing (what else?) Calvinball. For those who don’t know, Calvinball is… well,

Other kids’ games are all such a bore!
They’ve gotta have rules and they gotta keep score!
Calvinball is better by far!
It’s never the same! It’s always bizarre!
You don’t need a team or a referee!
You know that it’s great, ’cause it’s named after me!

– Calvin

Anyway, we were playing indoors for whatever reason. (You know how those things are in dreams.) Suddenly Hobbes went over to the window and told me to come look at something. There were a bunch of blue jays outside (not that I know what a blue jay looks like – I just knew that’s what kind of bird they were). Hobbes said they were playing calvinball, and playing it better than we were.

Suddenly, they started bringing stuff to us. It seemed to have something to do with the game. When we inspected their gifts, however, they turned out to be body parts of birds -  heads, talons, wings. They weren’t bleeding, or messy at all, but they were clearly from actual birds.

The dream then ended. (Or, rather, shifted to a completely different setting such that I’m even sure it was the same dream. This second one was less interesting; it had to do with physics class or something…) For some reason I remembered it.

Why am I relating this narrative? Because of this blog post from Heaven Tree, which I happened to read a few days ago (I have absolutely no connection to the author, but it looks like an interesting blog so I might start reading it regularly). The above dream narrative sounds full of mystical significance, at least to me. But it doesn’t really mean anything; it resulted, most likely, from my brain randomly piecing together stuff that had been floating around in my head the previous day. And, detail-less as it is, I’m not even sure if the details there are are correct. Was I really Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes? I think so, but I’m also pretty sure the dream was in three dimensions. I have no idea what Hobbes looks like in three dimensions. So how could I have been Calvin, and my companion Hobbes?

And what the hell does it mean for blue jays to be playing calvinball better than Calvin? It sounds like something out of T. H. White -  remember the wild geese, and how man supposedly wouldn’t fight wars if he learned how to fly?

But even if it makes no sense, it still seems full of mystical significance. What this indicates, perhaps, is that this sort of artistic mysticism is really just randomness, and its mystic appearance comes from the human impulse to find order and meaning in things that are really random. If that’s the case, then, does that mean that things of this nature are worthless? Was this dream worthless?

I don’t think it was, because meaningful or not, it still seems like a rather beautiful image. Meaningless, but haunting, I would say.  Perhaps that is the nature of most art – randomness that we attempt to find meaning in, and sometimes succeed, but even if we fail it doesn’t matter. All I know right now is, I’m not going to be able to forget the image of blue jays bringing body parts as gifts while playing calvinball for a long time.