WHY YOU CAN'T MAKE BELIEF

this cosmic card trick as it were kept all the world running ahead of itself and trying to catch up ... being was no longer being but doing or making ... respect even self-respect had to make the same conversion ... which in turn of course made things like disability retirement and helpless dying aggravated assaults on good sense and good taste ... why don't they get with the program and take a quick step to bow out ... but it wasn't the inconvenient person who threatened to lay the concept low ... the rush to the future was made insecure not by what we might meet there but by the pull of the past ... it had after all a sensible caution ... what's your hurry it said ... can't you see the faster you run forward the more quickly you come to me ... and what am I when you've taken all the meaning and run away with it into the future ... what am I now but your present making itself past with all the meaning of the dead ... fortunately ... says the german professor ... things don't work like that ... you can't take meaning into the future and run away with it from the past ... it isn't after all something we make ... open to technique ... but a gift ... open to gratitude

THE BOOK THAT MADE A POPE

did I hear trumpets ... no but I did hear the idea of trumpets ... here's a priest in germany ... a professor in a seminary ... who writes a book the pope reads on the apostles' creed ... the pope likes the book so much he makes the priest a bishop then makes him a cardinal and then the cardinal professor becomes pope ... now the priest in his book on the credo spends forty pages on the word credo before he'll agree to get on with the creed ... and like a good professor anywhere he was right to do so ... before a philosopher can know himself before a physician can heal himself they have to define their terms ... turns out in the case of credo the definition pays a dividend of truth I was not the one to expect ... the world I knew had made the word know a fragile container and then had crammed all its hope inside ... what I hadn't caught was the obvious ... adrift on a sea of doubt and sinking mankind's solution to keep afloat was to paddle so fast into hope for the future just to keep hope inside alive it had sailed right past the shoals of theory ... right past meaning altogether ... into control of the future through technique ... a sleight of hand

Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius Press 2004

THE SECOND VOICE

this conversation can't be a they or an it ... it can't even be an I ... it has to be a you ... first of all you includes it and they and just adds the security of knowing who you are talking to ... when you have proper discernment a sine qua non to the good life and the single characteristic you find in the enjoyment of a good book as well as one of the great hopes for life after death ... the face on the other side of the voice ... the smile behind the word ... all of which being absent I goes tumbling round its unnatural orbit down the slope I slid couldn't breathe or see and then I could but only to cry ... wasn't too long before I was taught to say you you you ... looking for you whenever I opened my eyes ... finding you in substance with my mouth my lips saying over and again your name you you you ... when have I stopped ... name the day I haven't said your name though I've long since forgotten what it means ... where could I hope to be not mouthing your name or trying to resurrect its syllable ... a cryptographer playing with an acrostic ... missing this one last sound ... rolling it over the tongue ... slipping it between the teeth ... chewing on it ... chewing ... oh what a fool ... calling it anything anything to avoid saying you you you

LIFE AFTER DEATH AND COMMON SENSE

let's take a stab at life after death ... when you die what passes ... the mind passes ... the spirit abides ... and how do I know this ... I don't know anything about it because I haven't been there and nobody's come back to tell me ... I've heard about people doing that but I haven't heard them myself ... their reports have the force of rumor only for me ... the most authoritative source I have spoke only of going there and preparing the way ... he did come back but if he spoke about what life is like there it hasn't got back to me ... so what I've got to talk about is what we all have ... common sense ... and if what I say isn't in this sense sensible then dismiss it ... now I know that we've got two parts that fail to be constant ... the body in flux waxes and wanes finally to a complete dispersal ... that's just so plain it's obvious ... the mind as you'd expect is more devious ... on the one hand it proudly claims independence from the brain and then on the other droops into amnesias and senilities and finally just can't stay awake ... no ... the only part that stays is the part that forms matter and mind ... the part that cheers us on

WHY BAD PRAYER IS NO PRAYER AT ALL

you can't say everything we do is prayer unless you immediately add the qualifiers good prayer and bad prayer ... good prayer gets past the self to other people and everything else ... the healthy that is the true trinity ... not the bad trinity me myself and a little peace and quiet away from these two ... the false inside broken trinity from which no true prayer can escape ... some parts of true prayer must be better than others but none is bad in itself ... what makes bad prayer bad then is a misnomer ... it makes prayer bad because it makes it no prayer at all ... the only bad prayer is that conversation that can't get past itself ... that remains an interior trialogue between yes and no on the one hand and please shut up on the other ... now a lot of this bad prayer no-prayer-at-all stuff is formally addressed to god ... you talk to yourself and you pretend to be god ... but after a while it's pretty obvious what you're doing and even you catch on ... the unfailing clue is unhappiness and bad temper ... you're frazzled on the inside because you've got no grace and without grace you can't be grateful and without gratitude you can't be happy

THE CRUSADE AGAINST MODERNITY

there was a pope ... papa nino was it* ... who declared a crusade ... he didn't use that word ... against modernity ... but his crusade failed and in quick succession the world got two wars and the threat of a third ... and pogroms ... civil wars in grand societies in each of which one side had no weapons ... now this I think is incontrovertible ... you would probably do better to switch our focus to the new threat of a third world war ... you might call it a war between christianity and islam but you'd be wrong ... for despite common opinion christians don't fight ... the war would be between islam and modernity ... modernity has the guns ... churches as a rule don't ... no pope or bishop or minister will give even one order to fight ... when they die in this war soldiers and civilians who are christian will inshallah die as christians ... but as soldiers and civilians they will die in a weird way as statistics ... because in modernity that's the way they live ... the ancient pagans had their gods ... modernity has only its numbers and they're all probabilities or just plain dead fact ... no ... facts too are only relatively certain ... in modernity everything is

* No, Pius X, not IX

FIRST QUESTION ON THE FINAL

there was a heretic who rejected or severely modified every dogma of the true church ... he said the lord was not the lord ... morality was expedient and fluid from time to time and place to place ... that god was god but that he was evolving ... that god was god but he was all-inclusive ... that he was god but so were we the more and the more that we acted like it ... this heretic had a wife and two children ... he was faithful to his wife and dutiful to his children teaching them the values of strength and independence ... when he turned fifty his health began to break down ... he fought his various infirmities as his doctors recommended with surgery and drugs ... it took him ten years to die but in that ten-year battle he learned how to pray ... it began as a series of attempted negotiations ... if he did such and such ... he said to no one in particular ... for say a week ... would things improve physically and emotionally socially and productively ... live or die he said ... let it go for now ... at the end of the week would he be closer in his imitation of god or would he not ... more and more of these weeks began to succeed in three of the four categories he proposed ... then he died ... was he a failure or a success

PORN DEVOTEE, HIS APOLOGY

I'm not interested in sex said its avid fan ... I'm only interested in finding Venus ... when they show porn in the dorm my eye excises the men ... when I subscribe to the porn newsletter I click girl-girl or girls home alone only ... I started liking hefty chests ... now I like small ones too ... I started by preferring brunettes but I've seen too many close blond approximations to the one I'm looking for to take that preference as binding without qualification ... in two words paleness and flatness I've come to see the enticement of abstraction ... the dark the latin the asian bring the shadows that give substance and curve to the representation ... a single strand of their hair shows what I mean ... if you take the snow caucasian's hair take it from the brow and make it so light it's a triumph over the dark and gravity too so that you have only the hint of seeing it at all ... elevate your vision above the other four senses ... then find that hairbreath's distance in between what you see and what you can't ... there on the edge of glaucoma you'll find the goddess ... she has no color in the fog ... you might as well be in the dark but for all the light

THE PROOF OF GOD'S EXISTENCE

the trouble today with evil is that most people don't spell it with a d ... why is old nick so persistent in taking his name out of circulation ... as if self-imposed he was a nonperson in a totalitarian state ... I expect he does because he is ... or more to the point most of all wants to be ... a nonperson in a metaphysical state for which he alone is the justification ... but all the time undermining his desire is the knowledge that other things work ... which knowledge in all creatures has the same effect ... which is wonder ... here I am a self-contained world of thought ... he must think ... how the hell can these other things work ... forget that they exist ... they work ... the night follows the day and the sun rises ... I call your name and you respond ... each morning I wake up and I start again to thinking ... you promise to return and five decades later you do ... if A then B ... A and sure enough there's B ... more startling still A is A ... it really is ... even in the midst of the most beclouded declamatory wicked mind there's a look in the eye that makes us smile ... an agreement past reconciliation ... a shared knowledge that things work because they're good and were meant to be

THE CONSTANT DEGRADATION OF THE DEAD

which of the lessons of death is the one to be learned most and forgotten last just before immortality ... my vote is for indignity ... without indignity any death would be just another express stop on the local line with who knows how many others to follow ... without indignity death could be managed demoted from an angel to an event ... but by accident or long process death will leave a corpse ... a putrefaction bag with an open mouth ... please do someone close the mouth ... indignity means shame but not acculturated shame ... guilt is the cause of this shame ... that no matter whatever we did or can say we are complicit in this event ... you can see it on the face ... the spreading horror of that shame ... it's why we cover the face ... the shame on it embarrasses us ... the pitiful shame of the dead ... it's a debt we cannot satisfy while we still live ... a debt that consciousness is always conscious it cannot pay and makes of conscience herself a debtor always living beyond her means until in the end they have so consumed her that she must stay behind for derision's sake ... swallowing both earth and light till she dulls them both in the constant mire of her shame ... oh but if she could just turn away

THE MASTER DEPARTS

the old man ... a child of that rebellious and seminal decade in our nation's history ... now these many years later on the edge of his death ... said there were three things he could remember of his time on earth and they were each a part of our broken reflection of god ... the first was sex a mimicry a parrotry of creative power ... the second was war our ancient right to claim morality ... and the third a distant third his people's love of knowledge ... after we buried him and went our separate ways I retired to dinner and a coffee by the table in remembrance of my old friend ... in age he had become if not bitter a bit sardonic ... that part about sex being a cheap imitation rather than a participation in the creative power for example ... I knew he didn't really mean that ... and for him a practical pacifist a perennial professional civilian to give war a claim to morality ... well what was that but moral cowardice ... unless we could say here as well he was being ironic ... the real spirit of my dead friend was revealed only in what he said last ... for he was always a patron of books ... my dead scholar friend yufoolio

HOW THE IMAGE LOVES THE THOUGHT

there are two kinds of persons ... the imaginative and the intellectual ... the imaginative is a solitary spinning out yarns in color ... the intellectual is a herd'sman following the boundaries of necessity and absolute truth ... yes yes with this qualification and that ... but bound by necessity and absolute truth in the end ... imagination takes the herd'sman's conclusions as sometimes well-intentioned advice to help bide the time in the waiting room ... but it's the room he abides not the advice ... the fox in the fold the herdsman's wolf is always probability ... snot-nosed kid brother to necessity the real killer of contradictions ... probability for-the-most-part-backtracking-certainty just young and brash enough to queer the whole soup up ... doesn't bother the atticmen ... what do they care for in their garret chairs ... only the melody of the lines or the last sad whispers of color before night ... there was always the touch of the finger inside the elbow ... time's smile because it was dying ... blood pushing straining to gets its work done before dark so that each day might end in a one word tribute to thought

NO, WOULDN'T WORK

well yeah but how will you know when to look when he does come if you're not looking all the time ... if the world is just particles and waves and fields of waves you can just wait and one will come by and sweep you up ... but if it's more than particles and waves you might have to act on your own ... indeed your situation may be more dire than that ... you may have to be looking out even as you sleep ... turning over in bed you may have to keep an eye out behind ... and when you're out in public that will be even worse ... you'll be static this and static that ... how will you ever get free to listen and see again ... no ... better to be just alert 360degrees 24/7 and you can't do that with particles and waves or going with the flow ... what you need is vigilance ... you have to be an on/off switch on all the time and there's only one thing that can do that ... it's desire ... you thought wanting meant needing and having to go without ... you thought of course better then not to want ... float above the field in a field of your own ... once again no ... meaning life you really want to want

FORGET ABOUT JESUS

how can you not be a trinitarian when all our most profound categories come in three's ... for example human psychology the id the ego and the superego or what I feel what I think and what I do ... for example I thought faithlessness was a good thing I felt it was a good thing but I did not act as if it were ... for example the religions of the world ... those who worship the god of power terrorists ... those who worship the god of reason scientists ... and those who worship the god of love the only true religions in whatever language they're spoken ... and what better way to tell the powerful truth of this love than to see it assaulted and triumphant ... by its two mortal rivals ... the monotheism of evil or despotism ... psychological or international ... and the heartless despair of a rampant determined dualism as if between god and a rival who had an objective claim to his title ... and as to christianity itself that most trinitarian of all philosophies forget about jesus if he's your stumbled and blocked ... do right he'll find you

WHAT WE REALLY ARE

isn't it possible to act consistently in a way inconsistent with the deepest philosophy we think we believe ... to speak like a christian devoted to the meaning of christ but to act like an atheist being funneled down to his death ... to say in debate we should go for the ideal then spend your evenings chasing tail and your nighttimes getting drunk ... your religion would be a matter of the morning and of regret ... a christian a follower of christ in theory ... a pagan in practice ... in grotto in grove and wood chasing venus and the naiads ... or marching with mars if not to war then to sports or games or business ... aristotle never used the words I think but his is the basis for them ... the practical syllogism ... an argument whose conclusion is an action ... modus ponens ... if you loved me you wouldn't hurt me ... modus tollens ... you hurt me therefore you don't love me ... there's a sense in which we are how we feel but it's not a solitary sense ... we are as well what we think even if we don't believe it ... because ultimately we are what we do in relation to others

STRAIGHT-LEG WONDERS

there's no doubt about it ... she's listening to the good ... or more likely to the goddess ... she lying on her back the goddess lazy deliberate floating up out of her pulling her up as she leaves ... or she sitting up and looking down arguing shouting waiting listening to the goddess localized hammering to get out ... or lounging by the side of the pool under the palms she complaining ... how long will you do this to me before I run out of breath ... even as preoccupied she makes it so but doesn't see it so ... the colors are brighter the skin smoother the water green-diamonized ... all because of this conversation whose tone says no but whose only word is yes ... her syllables are all vowels but she concludes with a guttural consonant an ah as if I told you so and ends with a D to shut duh door ... now in the rest to follow ... now that we know cigarettes are no good ... we ponder twice ... once up north and once down south ... on two-moon planets do all the women have three breasts ... in a world without an ocean would Venus still rise out of the seashell bringing it herself as she does ... the shell and the clear water with it

SYMPATHETIC INFERENCE

you don't have to argue using blunt force trauma to portions of the brain to tell me what it means to the mind ... I take a long night awake and the need for sleep to do it more simply ... you don't have to speak about on/off switches and pools of chemicals and convoluted layers of thought piled up in warehouses of the cerebrum ... from there to the cerebellum and from the cerebellum to the alimentary canal to the plant stem I see the analogy open to the truth as the head of the tulip does to the warmth of the sun ... but over all the fields of the earth I see just the one creature smiling ... they say the hyena's laughing but it's only a bark ... I hear the cat purring but she only means to tell me how she feels ... we'll have no dispute over whether she's telling the truth ... but most of all when I look into your eyes my dear I know the gleam's there on the surface to beguile my own sight that it can go no further ... I come to you I love within you not by observation but by self-knowing

THE BIBLIOMANIAC'S COMPLAINT

the trouble with the two piles of books in front of me is that I can't see through them ... there are only six or seven books in each stack but the principle would be the same if they went from the floor to the ceiling ... I could not see through any one of them and any book is worthless if you cannot see through it ... you might at first put it down to its good-looking nature ... to its being hard-cover illustrated or expensive ... there's no denying the beauty of such a creature open in your hands on your lap ... but that's why we have paper-back editions to hold and handle hard on the beach or the subway ... point is in public and on the move ... making it clear the object is the word and not the page ... and to get there you have to go into the book and under the printing on the page to hear the word spoken to see the idea begin to take form ... none of which is simply given but has to be worked out in honor interest and being a person ... which are indeed the stakes in being here alive ... but even here we fail if we stay inside the book ... indeed stay inside the word itself ... if you don't know who's talking

DARWIN'S SMALL-MINDEDNESS

science of the kind Darwin practised isn't simply an affair that links cause and effect but one which in Aristotle's scheme accepts only two out of four ... when Aristotle said cause he meant it four ways but Darwin accepted only two ... matter and motion ... he would not accept either form as a cause or a guiding purpose ... form he took only as a description and purpose only as wishful thinking ... most particularly as if to consecrate this diminution he extolled the small over the large ... micro now became the very essence of macro ... indeed matter itself he puts out of sight with its omnipresent large amorphous universality and will have in its place motion ... evolution now means that things change all the time so that any boundary any species anything that doesn't change is swept out of deepest reality and put as a figment into our imagination ... thus tables people and galaxies are reduced to elements so unstable they're even now burning out and drifting apart trying if not by design then by the necessities of the accidental to become smaller still

WHICH IDEAL CAN BE NEITHER EXCLUDED NOR DISCUSSED

say soar for philosophy or glide for religion but say heaven both times ... and what a taboo in my community there is against that word ... the old folks they used to talk about it all the time ... just the one man talking and the rest listening ... but the rest of us label it either a myth or a folly giving the first just a temporary dignity over the second ... but what a folly to call heaven a myth as if it belonged to a category of things that could be true or false ... heaven if it's true at all never could be in a category that includes the false ... it's not heaven in a myth that's true or false ... it's all that other stuff ... all the intrigues and adventures all the wars and the murders we used to call purgatory and hell ... point is it's out there on the fringes where purgatory starts letting up that the sacred kingdom begins ... known in my community to be sacred so that we have the taboo against speaking or thinking about it ... known to be a kingdom because all we've done in the history of government is try to imitate it ... its boroughs over the water ... its cities on the hill ... they always show us morning ... over there there is no night