The Best Moment of the Night

Tony Hoagland: The Best Moment of the Night

You had a moment with the dog,
down near the base of the butcher-block table
just as the party was getting started.

Just as the guests were bringing in
their potluck salads and vegetarian lasagna,
setting them down on the buffet,

you had an unforeseeable exchange of warmth
with this scruffy, bug-eyed creature
who let you scratch his ears.

He lives down there, among the high heels
and the cowboy boots, below the human roar
rising to its boil up above. Like his, your evening

is just beginning - but you
are lonelier than him. You think
that if you disappeared tonight,

you would not be missed for years;
yet here, the licking of the hands and face;
and here, the baring of the vulnerable belly.

You are still panting, and alive, and seeking love;
yet no one who knows you
knows, somehow,

about your wet, black nose,
or that you can wag your tail.

The Sun, April 2012 (Issue 436)

making things jump out of nothing

But now, In Lazarus, you see that it is just that extremity that has always been our hope - that very prison, the doorway to our liberty. Because making things jump out of nothing is God's favorite act. He creates us out of it and raises us up from it. Jesus came to raise the dead. Not to improve the improvable, not to perfect the perfectible, not to teach the teachable, but to raise the dead. He never met a corpse that didn't sit right up then and there. And he never meets us without bringing us out of nothing to the joy of his resurrection...

- Robert Farrar Capon, Between Three and Noon: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace

another way of knowledge

Imaginative literature itself, in Warner’s view, finds its representative in Scheherazade, the muse of all great fantasy writing. Postponing death is one of the motives for metaphor, the desire to be different or elsewhere. Pursuing the enigmas of imaginative desire throughout her career, Warner persuasively redefines “The Arabian Nights” as an overgrown garden of the delights and hazards of desire. Shakespeare, as she knows, is the largest field of such enchantment, with Proust his worthiest modern descendant. Warner quests for contemporary meaning in the major traditions of literary magic and carries with her, back to “The Arabian Nights,” our sore need for another way of knowledge.

........

“It did not seem enough to invoke escapism as the reason for the popularity of ‘The Arabian Nights’ in the age of reason. Something more seemed to be at stake. Magic is not simply a matter of the occult or the esoteric, of astrology, Wicca and Satanism; it follows processes inherent to human consciousness and connected to constructive and imaginative thought. The faculties of imagination — dream, projection, fantasy — are bound up with the faculties of reasoning and essential to making the leap beyond the known into the unknown. At one pole (myth), magic is associated with poetic truth, at another (the history of science) with inquiry and speculation. It was bound up with understanding physical forces in nature and led to technical ingenuity and discoveries. Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act; it has shaped many features of Western civilization. But its influence has been constantly disavowed since the Enlightenment and its action and effects consequently ­misunderstood.”

- Harold Bloom reviewing and quoting Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, in the New York Times. March 23

The opposite of Sin is faith

"But why does the cross look so much like just giving up and letting evil have its way?"

"Ah," Pietro said. "That is because the cross is directed not at mortal evil but at Sin. Moral evil, we can often do something about - and when we have the power and the opportunity, we should do it with all the energy at our disposal. But Sin, which is the radical inability to human nature to be true to itself - our failure to bring off, individually or socially, a version of the world that actually squares with the Word's version of it - that hard fact of our existence we cannot undo just by willing it to be better in the future. There is simply too much in the past that we cannot change. My parents, and my parent's parent's parents - and yours and everybody's, everywhere and always - have left us an intractable mess. And so have we with our own children. All our promises to do better tomorrow have given us only a today as unreformed as any yesterday. We still unspeak his word about us day in and night out. And those unspeakings, those contradictions, are irremovable from history by our efforts. Therefore, on the cross, the Word unspeaks our unspeakableness in the silence of his death and respeaks us into beauty by the power of his resurrection. He has made a new creation, you see. The only problem is, you can't see it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. You can only hear about it and decide to believe him. The opposite of Sin with a capital S is not morality; it's faith"

"So where does that 'unspeaking' leave morality?" Madeleine asked.

"Where it always was. It remains the truth about us, and it remains a truth that we forsake only at our own peril. In addition, it remains something that we should actively enter invite the world to conform itself to - precisely because, to whatever degree it does, it will become a place of beauty and joy. We do, after all, pray that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. But God is a realist, if nothing else: since total conformity to the moral law is something that has never shown any sign of arriving soon, God has decided not to count on it as a means for finally cleaning up the mess we have made. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He has taken the cleanup entirely into his own hands. He has just gone and done it without waiting for us; and he invites us simply to trust that he has it all accomplished for us in Jesus - and to proclaim that trust by acting as if we really believed it."

"Can't you say it more succinctly?"

"Sure. The moral law is great stuff, but as an instrument of salvation, it's a bust."

- Robert Farrar Capon, Light Theology & Heavy Cream

from the particular that he made the general shine out

It is obvious, but none the less a matter of great interest, that James Joyce, an artist of unique qualities and of enormous stature, though so 'cosmopolitan' a figure and highly 'contemporary' and thought of by many a a 'rebel' destructive of standards of all sorts, an enemy of tradition, etc., was, in reality, the artist who more than any other, not only employed as his materia poetica all that which those historical, mythological, anthropological, archaeological, etc., studies had to offer, plus the new researches into psychology of Freud, Jung, etc., plus the abiding influence of the medieval scholastic modes of thought inseparable from his early years under the tuition of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus in Ireland, plus a complete familiarity with the popular devotional practices of a peasantry and those practices transferred to the streets, slums, saloons, bars, etc., of the city and port of Dublin, but also the artist who, more than any other, for all the universality of his theme, depended upon a given locality, for no man could have adhered with more absolute fidelity to a specified site, and the complex historical strata special to that site, to express a universal concept. It was from the particular that he made the general shine out. That is to say he was quintessentially 'incarnational'.

- David Jones, Notes on the 1930s in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings

THE THOMIST AND THE PALAMITE

THE THOMIST AND THE PALAMITE

Ecumenism Exemplified
Reminiscences of an Anglo-Orthodox Summer-School
By E. L. Mascall

The sun was shining in the sky
With unimpeded ray.
He did his very best to make
The place serene and gay,
And this was strange, because it was
An English summer day.

The rain had vanished sulkily,
Because it thought- the sun
Had got no business to be there
Now August had begun.
"With all these people here," it said,
"We ought to spoil their fun."

The rooms were close as close could be,
The lectures dry as dry.
No heresies had raised their heads,
No schisms wandered by.
You could not think a thought, because
It was too hot to try.

The Thomist and the Palamite
Were walking hand in hand.
Each did his very best to make
The other understand.
"If only we could both agree,"
They said, "It would be grand."

"If sixty trained philosophers
Argued for half a year,
Do you suppose," the Thomist said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Palamite,
And shed a bitter tear.

"Let us collect some simple souls,"
The Thomist did beseech,
"For they have very much to learn
And we have much to teach."
"Why, yes," replied the Palamite,
"That ought to heal the breach."

The older theologians heard,
But never a word they said.
While one discreetly winked his eye,
Another shook his head,
Meaning he much preferred to spend
The afternoon in bed.

But crowds of simple souls rushed up,
All eager for the treat.
The Thomist and the Palamite
Sat on the garden-seat,
And all the simple souls sat round
In circles at their feet.

"The time has come," the Thomist said,
"To talk of many things,
Of angels perched on needle-points
And how a seraph sings."
"And also," said the Palamite,
"If energies have wings."

"But stay," exclaimed the simple souls,
"Before you start your chat.
We have not got the least idea
What you are getting at!"
"No matter," said the Palamite,
"We quite expected that."

"A lot of time," the Thomist said,
"Is what we chiefly need,
Six blackboards and some coloured chalks-
They're very good indeed.
And here are forty-seven books
Which we propose to read."

"But not to us!" their hearers cried,
Turning extremely blue,
"We did not know that was the sort
Of thing you meant to do!"
"Oh dear," the Thomist said, "Of course
I should say, fifty-two.

"It's very kind of us to come
So far from hearth and home."
The Palamite said nothing but
"Fetch me another tome.
I mean the one in fourteen parts
About the Church of Rome.

"It seems a shame," the Thomist said,
"To lead them such a dance;
And yet we surely must not lose
So promising a chance."
The Palamite said nothing but
"They're used to it in France."

"We weep for you," the Thomist said,
"We deeply synpathize.
You boggle at the simplest words
Like 'supernaturalize.'"
"And even," said the Palamite,
"Like 'demythologize.'"

They lectured in alternate spells
Until the set of sun,
And then the question-time began,
But questions there were none,
For on the grass the simple souls
Lay sleeping every one.