Not Seven But Seventy Times Seven

Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent, the liturgical season during which all Catholics are obliged to go to confession.

I used to find this requirement rather perplexing. One ought to go to confession whenever one has committed a mortal sin, of course, but why must one go once a year, no matter what? Since most of us commit enough sins to necessitate confession multiple times per year, this is less a practical question than a theoretical one. What is it about confession that mandates it happen more than once?

I think part of my confusion stemmed from thinking about confession the same way I thought about baptism–as marking a complete break with one’s previous life. This is, I think, what baptism offers: a second chance, an opportunity to start fresh. And second chances are easy to comprehend. They tell a clear story–”I was a pagan, now I am a Christian.”

But third, fourth, fifth, tenth, hundredth, chances are harder to make sense of. And this is where my problem with confession lay. If every time one goes to confession, one is wiped clean, how can one have any coherent sense of identity? One can only be baptized once. To be baptized a second time is to say that the first baptism wasn’t sufficient, that it was a false baptism. Similarly, it seems, confessing a sin that one has confessed before negates those previous confessions, makes them false. To be wiped clean once is to tell a story, “I was a pagan, I am now a Christian,” but what is it to be wiped clean over and over, other than to say, “I am nobody, and every time I start to become somebody, I must erase that new identity”?

That was my old (subconscious) understanding of the sacrament. But the Lenten requirement got me thinking. If confession must happen every year, it is in a sense always happening. How could something that changes who one is be always happening? Only if it marked not a reversal, but an adjustment. It is more akin to the (continual) fires of purgatory than the (one-time) waters of baptism.

This is, of course, an obvious truth; but it is one that because it is obvious is easy to ignore. Once I realized it, I understood much more clearly the sacramental nature of confession: it mediates between the present and the eternal. It is, in a way, more sacramental than baptism even. Baptism, as a one-time event, can be used by any being whose life could be divided in two. Confession can be used only by being whose lives are not just “before” and “after,” but who exist truly in time, progressing gradually along the path to salvation.

Homelesness and Uprootedness

Unsurprisingly, given that this semester I’m taking one course about the works of Herman Melville and another about those of William Faulkner, I’ve been thinking a lot this semester about “America” as a culture distinct from that of Europe. America’s relationship to its cultural heritage is, to put it nicely, ambiguous. Now, I don’t have a grand theory of America to propound here, but I do have two concepts that I think are important to understanding how America understands itself.

First, I want to discuss “transcendental homelessness,” a term Georg Lukacs invents in his Theory of the Novel and defines as “the urge to be at home everywhere.” My professor used this term often to describe Melville, and I think it applies well to America as a whole (incidentally, Melville seems to me in many ways the quintessential American author). Americans are transcendentally homeless, because they want everywhere to be like America. Compare this to the concept of “American exceptionalism” that we hear so much about. “Exceptionalism” means that America believes it is somehow special, the culmination of history, but I think it is more the case that America has a hard time coming to terms with itself as a specific place in a specific time, preferring to see itself as an incarnation of a universal ideal to which all other countries ought to aspire. I am reminded of Melville’s constant references to Anacharsis Cloots, a participant in the French Revolution who said that the Revolution had to apply not only to France, but to all the world.

The other concept I want to apply to America is “uprootedness.” I mean for this to stand in opposition to the idea of “rootlessness” that sees America as a complete tabula rasa, placing man anew in the state of nature (credit to Therese of Inklings, who talked about this earlier this week). If “rootlessness” means America is cut off completely from the Old World, and represents a new beginning, then “uprootedness” means that America is based in the Old World, but because it was transplanted to the New, continuity could not simply be taken for granted. Every continued tradition had to be consciously continued, and that consciousness implied a reevaluation and modification. Look, for example, at the American South (the focus of Faulkner’s work). Its traditional structure was an attempt to remain in continuity with the aristocratic Old World, but it was necessarily a conscious imitation, not an unconscious continuation; while it “died” with the Civil War, it had hardly existed before that. Or look at the attempts to create a “city on a hill” in Puritan New England, a subject Melville is interested in; it was in some ways a conscious break from the Old World, but in more important ways a continuation of certain Old World religious ideas.

These two concepts are complementary, I think; one deals with America in relation to the rest of the contemporary world, the other with America in relation to its heritage. And both of them involve not a separation of America from the rest of the world, but an uneasy connection, an ambiguous bond. What I find really fascinating is that both Melville and Faulkner lead me to this same thought. It’s perhaps the strongest common thread I can find running throughout America, both North and South.

***

Incidentally, these are the books we read in the two respective classes; I highly recommend everything on this list, but italics I use to indicate particular noteworthiness, and the most important work on each list I bold.

Melville:

• Moby-Dick
• Pierre
• The Piazza Tales: The Piazza, Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Lightning-Rod Man, The Encantadas, The Bell-Tower
• The Confidence-Man
• assorted poetry (mostly from Battle-Pieces; particularly good are “The Conflict of Convictions” and “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight”)
• Billy Budd

Faulkner:

• The Unvanquished (not Faulkner’s best, but a particularly easy read)
• Absalom, Absalom!
• As I Lay Dying
• The Hamlet
• Go Down, Moses

Personal Narratives

The blog Findings, written by a fellow former Wesnothian, had a post today about narrative which ties in nicely with something I’ve been thinking about myself: perhaps, just as that post implies that we are each trying to write our own narratives, we could say that the world is a grand story composed of the multitude of personal narratives we are all crafting, and which cannot be reduced to a simpler form, and it is impossible to understand the world entirely, because we can never fully understand another person…

Of course, this isn’t a fully thought out idea, but I want to post that link before I forget about it. Perhaps I’ll come back to this when I have a fuller description of what I mean. Incidentally, this is a thought I had after reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; if I end up able to draw a coherent concept out of this mess, I’ll have to revise my opinion of that book upwards.

Worlds of Wanwood Leafmeal Lie

So, it’s October now. Isn’t it supposed to be… at least cool, rather than warm, outside? Ah well. I suppose this is Texas.

The title of this post is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “Spring and Fall.” It runs as follows:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

A beautifully written poem, though not terribly complex in its meaning. It comes to mind for two reasons, both of which are interesting but unrelated: it is now fall, and so (in theory) I should still be seeing “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”; also, I’m doing Gerard Manley Hopkins for my Junior Poet project.

Regarding JPo; it seems fitting to reference Hopkins this month, of all months, since my annotated bibliography is due November 2nd and thus I will this month finish Paul Mariani’s biography of Hopkins (I have about 70 pages left), read three books of literary criticism (I have two done, and need five), and read sixteen articles (I have four done, need twenty). That is a lot of reading to do over just thirty days; it comes out to about thirty pages a day, actually. So that’s what my life for the next month will be about, for the most part.

And regarding the fact that it is now fall; I find fascinating the question of seasonal preferences. Hopkins’ poem seems implicitly to say that fall is depressing, it being the dying of the natural world, and spring being its rebirth. But I actually prefer fall, as a season; that was the main reason I went to Rome Fall ’08 rather than Spring ’09. I’ve already explored the question of what it means for me to prefer winter to summer; it means I think of myself as being in combat with the world, rather than allied with it. What does it mean to prefer fall to spring?

It’s not that I like the fall holidays better than the spring. I’m not a big fan of Thanksgiving, Christmas (technically winter, but a lot of the buildup is in fall) is just OK, and I love Easter. Nor, I think, is it just that I dislike summer so much I want to be as far from it as possible – if that were the case, fall would be my favorite, since it leaves nine whole months until summer comes again, but I prefer winter to fall. But I don’t want to say it is because I hate nature, either, even though that seems a reasonable answer (my favorite season is when nature is dead, my second favorite is when it is dying)…

I think the answer, in the end, is that I prefer mourning to rejoicing. It’s not that I have a problem with nature being reborn, but I am more fascinated with its going away. It has a bittersweet feeling to it; spring is more triumphant, and a triumphant attitude seems out of place in this so fallen world.

Stream of Life

So, my newest favorite author is Gene Wolfe. I started reading his books about a year ago, and I’m completely hooked.

But if I have one complaint about his books, it is that the plot often seems somewhat discontinuous. One set of events leads logically enough to the other in terms of causality, but there is no sense of plot progression – X happens, then Y, then Z, then the book’s over, and it feels like the writer forgot to put in a climax.

On the Wesnoth forums, Eleazar articulated his objection to Gene Wolfe thusly:

Gene Wolfe is an amazing and imaginative writer, but ultimately his stories IMHO aren’t about anything… there’s no message, no point, no focal idea… just random events, interesting in themselves but with no real connection or larger significance. This leaves a bad taste in the mouth after reading, even though his skill at putting sentences and pages together is probably greater than any other active sci-fi writer.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say there’s no real connection or larger significance, and I don’t think it leaves a bad taste in the mouth (though this is, I guess, subjective), but Eleazar’s clearly on to something, I think. It’s almost as if Wolfe’s books have no metanarrative (insofar as a work of fiction can be said to have a “metanarrative” at all, rather than simply a narrative :P). Wolfe is guiding the narrative somewhere, perhaps, but not paying attention to whether the audience is at least emotionally aware of where it’s heading.

This can be taken as a flaw in his work – or an intentional omission. It’s an interesting idea – leaving out the “story arch”. Perhaps it’s more true to real life.

How so? I’ve been thinking recently about the metaphor “stream of life”. Life can be looked at a stream of events, you flow downhill towards your final destination, and eventually you’re there. It’s a somewhat common turn of phrase – it even has a Magic: The Gathering card associated with it.

What’s interesting about streams, though, is that they don’t have any goal in mind. They flow downhill, following the laws of gravity and inertia, and end up where they end up – in the ocean, in a lake, dried up in the desert, wherever. Streams don’t have story archs. They don’t build up to some goal – they just run on and on until they reach their destination, then stop. There is no story to a stream. If life is like a stream, does that mean our lives have no metanarrative, either comic or tragic? I think, perhaps, so. (This is kind of the same idea I tried to convey in the poem I posted recently…)

So, life has no story arch. We go from place to place to place, do X then Y then Z, but there’s no reason Y should lead to Z dramatically – only logically. You’ve perhaps heard it said that life is not a fairy tale; well, neither is it any kind of story. It’s just what it is, life.

But we need metanarratives. We need our lives to have storylines. Perhaps we make our own; we try to craft our lives to fit what we think our storyline should be. But then the world intervenes and prevents our storyline from coming true.

To return to Gene Wolfe, then; perhaps he’s not making a mistake by having his stories have little dramatic build-up. Perhaps it’s an invitation to draw what connections we will between the different events – to try to discern the storyline that may or may not be hidden in the various and seemingly random events happening to his characters. I’ve always known Wolfe was a writer who forced the reader to interact with his work (heck, you can’t even figure out what’s going on half the time, let alone what it means, unless you’re willing to put in a decent amount of work); this would be just another level of such interaction.

Or maybe this is all nonsense and this is actually just a flaw in Wolfe’s writings. I dunno.

And A Possible One

This post is, in a way, a sequel to my previous one (“Story Without a Moral“). In that post I said that Orbivm is not meant to have any preset philosophical interpretation; still, I thought it might be interesting to examine one “theory” of Orbis Terrarvm philosophy.

This idea is, one might say, that of “anti-Pelagianism”. Now, Pelagianism was an ancient Christian heresy that said humans could save themselves – they did not need God’s grace or the Resurrection (Christ was just setting a good example for the rest of us). How does this apply to Orbivm? Well, since there is no Christ and no Resurrection in Orbivm, then if Pelagianism is not true then mankind cannot be saved, since he cannot save himself. And I think this is backed up by examples from the history of Orbivm (is that a result of my skewing the history to support this interpretation? maybe).

Basically, it’s clear that the residents of Orbivm can be virtuous in different ways. But they cannot save themselves; this is why all heroes of campaigns are in the end flawed. Caius Regilius goes back to the front to fight a battle he knows is hopeless; Alfhelm lets his wife get killed and loses his kingdom; Vaniyera is consumed by his hatred for humanity in a way that eventually leads to his death; Sparxus thinks that he found freedom, but his “freedom” consists of the ability to kill who he wants to. And it goes on.

Basically, in the end, I don’t think any of the heroes of Orbivm campaigns has reached happiness or salvation or anything like that. And if none of the heroes of the campaigns manage it, how could anyone?

Of course, this poses a problem for those who would like to interpret Orbivm in light of Christianity (which of course is the only reason you would be talking in terms of Pelagianism at all)… namely, if the menn of Orbivm cannot save themselves, how are they to be saved? It seems to me there are two possibilities. One, that there is some sort of salvific event late in the history of Orbivm, after all events outlined in the histories. The problem with this is, what could such an event possibly be? Two, that, even if the menn are fallen and there is no salvific event in history, God could still redeem them without any informed consent on their part (their desire to do good being enough). This latter possibility is of course not really Christian, but it might be that a constructed world can’t really be Christian, since it seems stupid to try to write your own version of the Resurrection story (you couldn’t possibly do it justice – I don’t think Aslan really succeeds in Chronicles of Narnia, if you couldn’t tell), and without some form of Crucifixion and Resurrection it’s not really a Christian universe.

Which means, I suppose, that it’s not really a possible universe. Oh well. I guess the best we can do is to stay somewhat vague on the idea to make sure it’s not explicitly non-Christian, even if it’s not explicitly Christian. Which is what we’re doing so far.

Story without a Moral

Since I’m busy doing a site redesign (read: I finally got myself ftp access to the server after much procrastination) for the Orbivm forums, and since we’ve been discussing the naming of the different MP eras on said forums and what the logic should be behind those names, I’ve been reminded of this topic which I thought about a while ago but never, if I recall correctly, made a post about.

The concept of metanarratives is a simple one – put as concisely as possible, a metanarrative answers the question, what is the moral of the story of history? What gets complicated is applying metanarratives to mythopoeic fiction. I have said before that the world of the Orbis Terrarvm is meant to have no preset philosophical interpretation. But it often gets difficult to craft a fictional world that doesn’t have a metanarrative.

I mean, look at Middle Earth – the metanarrative is obvious. It’s one of decay, coupled with occasional redemptions that never bring the world back up to its original glory. As the final words of the Silmarillion say,

Here ends The Valaquenta. If it has passed from the high and beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.

That’s Middle Earth. The Orbis Terrarvm is different. It’s a collaboration, many of the contributors have (extremely) varying views on religion, history, etc, and so it’s obviously better to avoid a clearly religious metanarrative like that of Middle Earth. Well, really, what we want is a world where such a narrative would be plausible, but not the only option – just like in this world the Christian understanding of history is not the only plausible one (even if it is, IMO, the true one).

So, when outlining the broad strokes of our fictional history, we have to be careful. The names we choose for the eras have a lot of importance…

War of the Gods

In ancient times, or so I’ve read, when each different tribe had a different god, the conquest of one tribe by another was thought to prove that one god was somehow stronger than the other. This can be seen at times in the Old Testament; the Israelites conquering the Canaanite tribes was seen as proving that YHWH existed while Baal, et al, did not.

A lot of people, I think, see examples like this as somewhat absurd. How does defeating the religious followers of another god prove that your god exists and theirs does not? The basic concept, however, seems to me to be more deeply rooted in our psyche than most people realize. The idea than an ideology is somehow proven false because it loses followers is commonplace.

Take the Nazis. The idea that Jews were sub-human died, for the most part, with the fall of the 3rd Reich. I’m not saying that the destruction of the Jewish race was not an abominable evil, far from it – but I am saying that it is only considered evil now because the Nazis lost the war. In a sense, then, their military defeat proved they were wrong to commit genocide.

That’s a somewhat weak example; here’s a better one. Take Zoroastrianism. That religion has a lot going for it. I’ve even seen several people argue that Zoroastrianism was more logical than Christianity. But today the religion has only a few hundred thousand adherents, it will be extinct in a few centuries, and no one takes it seriously any more. This seems for the most part to be just a consequence of having few followers. The fact that no one believes in Zoroastrianism is taken as evidence that it must be false.

I’ve even seen atheists use the fact that religions come and go as evidence that no religion can be true. The problem with this, of course, is that it then means that if a religion stays around for a while (say, Catholicism), it must be true. I doubt they want to imply that. My question is – do Catholics want to imply that?

Perhaps there is some value to discarding belief systems on that basis, perhaps not. I don’t know. But I do think it would be somewhat amusing – depressing and irrational, yes, but it would have a dark humor to it – if the one true faith, which everyone had to believe in order to be saved, was that of Baal.

Recording and Communication

Before I reach the main body of my post, allow me to say that a new story has appeared in the ‘writings’ section.

…

There is a distinction, that seems to be forgotten nowadays, between writing that is meant to be record and writing that is meant to be communication. The first should be permanent, because the record has to last a long time; ideally, eternally. The second should not be. It needs to last only until the message it was intended to convey has been conveyed. After that, it can be erased.

Historically, this distinction has come naturally, perhaps because making something permanent was expensive, and only done when necessary. Inscriptions on a rock, like the tombs of the Pharoahs in ancient Egypt, are permanent. The same Egyptians who made those tombs wrote on wax tablets to calculate taxes. No wax tablets remain.

In the same way, before the manufacturing of paper came into the West, you would write on parchment only what needed to be preserved – books of great value. For everything else that had to be written, you just wrote on birchbark. It decayed quickly, so it was no good for records, but it worked fine for communication.

Then paper became commonplace and books were written on the exact same material as letters. That meant books decayed just as quickly as letters. The more important books, of course, were printed on finer paper, but even that couldn’t last for nearly as long as a simple inscription in a stone obelisk.

Today, the distinction seems to be completely lost. What should be permanent is made out of such weak, easily destroyed material that it cannot last for more than a few years, maybe decades, certainly not centuries. And, now that we use computers for everything, the two seem to be at times conflated. What should be permanent, what is a record, is stored on floppy disks, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, etc… and these formats come and go so quickly that no single physical recording can last for long. And once a format has been out of use for long enough, all the data stored in it that hasn’t yet been transfered to the new format is unaccessible.

But what should be temporary is never forgotten, not as long as the computer it was sent on still lives. Casual emails are stored, recorded, are never erased, and years after they can resurface years later as evidence against the sender or recipient. All because the sender forgot that, while email is indeed merely a method of communication, everything communicated through it is put into a permanent record that cannot be destroyed, except by the people who have access who aren’t likely to destroy it anyway – why should they? It’s not their email, they won’t be embarrassed by it.

The progress of technology is an amazing thing. A few kilobytes on a floppy disk was once huge; now it’s nothing. Probably no format we use today will be relevant ten years from now; the newest, like HD-DVDs, will probably still be used, but will be nowhere near the cutting edge. Once where we used pen and ink to scratch out symbols on parchment, we use a keyboard and store books full of information on one small circular metal disk.

But I don’t think it can be said to be altogether good. Or, rather, maybe it would be entirely good if we knew how to adjust to it, how to retain necessary distinctions that were so easy to keep in the past, but that have to be forced today; but we don’t. And if this distinction of recording versus communicating can be so easily forgotten when we have the technology to no longer be forced to worry about it… what other forgetfulness is just around the corner?

The End of Western Civilization?

I usually agree with what I read in crisis. But this month, Robert Reilly, the music critic for the magazine, was talking about popular music, and how he thinks it has been going downhill compared to “old show tunes” (I suppose he means popular music from before around 1950) because popular music has stopped taking its influence from ‘high’ music (my term – since ‘classical’ refers to a particular time period). He hints at how this is a result of Western Civilization’s implosion, brought about by our godlessness or somesuch.

First of all, I don’t like such apocalyptic talk. It seems to me like a metanarrative that doesn’t make any sense. Every generation, of course, has the tendency to feel that its descendants are destroying what is left of the culture. But if they were actually right, the world would have collapsed into chaos long ago. I see Reilly’s complaint as another symptom of this. Here’s why.

To start – Reilly says that the old show tunes were superior in quality to today’s popular music – his basic proof being that he likes the old music, he doesn’t like the new. I call this the ‘argument from nostalgia’. There’s a tendency to forget the mediocre – mediocre means, almost by definition, forgettable – and to remember only the very great. This isn’t a bad tendency in general; usually you only need to remember the important deeds, good and evil. But music (and art in general), unlike, say, politics, isn’t divided into good and evil; great and mediocre is the only standard. So the forgetfulness tendency tends to skew our view of the music of the past. Sure, you remember a bunch of great songs from that period. But there were assuredly many more mediocre songs, we just don’t remember them, because they weren’t worth remembering. Today, we can’t automatically screen out the mediocre – we don’t even know immediately which songs are which. But that doesn’t mean no great songs are made anymore.

Now, Reilly’s explanation for why popular music should have declined so (which it hasn’t – see above) is that the old popular music took its influence from the old high music, while the new doesn’t. This is evidenced by the fact that much of modern music ignores basic musical structure (building up to a climax and having an actual ending, instead of e.g. continuing in a loop and slowly fading away into nothingness). And this is true, of some modern music. Perhaps most.

(The difference, incidentally, would perhaps be best reflected by the fact that the author of music used to be considered the composer, but now it has shifted to the performer – because the focus is now not on the quality of the music but on how well it can be performed. There is some truth to this. For some reason Reilly doesn’t point this out.)

But I maintain that there are still bands today that are quite good, and could perhaps even be considered artists rather than performers. And good artists. (Most of them are good because they take influence from high music. I’m not contesting Reilly’s assertion that popular music is bettered by taking influence from high music; I’m arguing against his claim that popular music no longer does this.)

Some examples (most of them drawn from the world of metal, since that’s mostly what I listen to) -

Rhapsody of Fire. Their songs can be a bit repetitive, and their lyrics can certainly be cliched fantasy stereotypes, but the instrumental aspect of their work – which includes not just guitar, they use a whole bunch of instruments – is astounding. They take a strong influence from the Romantic period of high music, as well as from film scores (which are kind of midway between high and popular music, I think). I wouldn’t claim that any of their albums constitutes a cohesive work of art, but some of their individual songs do, such as “Silent Dream“, which is currently my favorite song.

Blind Guardian. Their album A Night at the Opera is, in my opinion, very close to true art. They have a variety of types of songs, their instrumental work is good, and their lyrics are actually intelligent (and able to provoke intellectual debate – I disagree with their views on Christianity, I think, but their songs “Precious Jerusalem” and “Sadly Sings Destiny” are two of my favorite). I would much rather listen to this album than any of the show tunes Reilly is so fond of. You might not like this style of music, but admit, it’s very well. I would claim for Nightfall in Middle Earth the same honor, though much of its greatness comes from its reliance on the greatness of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

TÝR. Their Erik the Red and Ragnarok both have original works and traditional ballads with new instrumentals. Both are certainly worth listening to, and some of the tracks I would claim to be just as artfully done as anything by the above two groups.

I’m not claiming that all metal is art. I agree that there is a great deal of it that isn’t. Much of what the above groups have done I would not give that distinction to. But some of it I would. And all of it I would say is just as much worth listening to as much of the old popular music. That same sentiment would apply to many non-metal groups, which I won’t listen here because there are too many of them.

My basic point is that popular music has not gone downhill. Yes, there is a lot of bad stuff, but there always has been. And there is some good stuff. And there is even some that I would say is good enough to not just be popular music. So stop the cries of apocalypse, at least when it comes to music. It simply isn’t coming, much as you might believe it is.