Inhabited

I have become inhabited; I live where I am, in this aging frame whose defects and furnishings have become first nature to me. The way I move, unconsciously adapting each moment to the biases of unbalanced muscle and bone, this is habitual, this is natural.

The scientists tell us that this is not true at the beginning in some ways. When you are newly birthed, the frame is developing, its control and sensory systems adapting to the world around it. The physics of the eye is such that light enters and is refracted into an inverted image by the lens — babies see everything upside down, and that is why they seem so uncoordinated and fall over a lot. And then the brain restructures to match the tactile environment, and we forget ever having seen things the other way.

It is the same with many other things — we begin with simple loves, of quiet, or of food, or human voices; we are acclimatized by other influences, acclimatized to other things or people, and develop more complex loves. Perhaps among us, at any time or in any place, are those with the rare ability to turn this complexity into words, or wine, or paint, or clay, or dance; then art is made.

I am in habit, and each moment I segue towards new ones. I am a multitude, although not a legion. I am a swarm of mes, each me shading imperceptibly through time and space to another me. I am a storm of selves, layer upon layer stacked until I am unsure if one is (I am) many selves, or many shelves.

Some day, I who write this will be gone and replaced entirely. I know this is true, because the person who wrote the first posts in this blog is not the person who writes this. And yet by legal fiat, they are one and the same.

Humility

It is good to stand in sober judgement over one's own self. We are told not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, but to think soberly, according to the measure of faith God has given each of us.

That is not to say that we are not to think highly of ourselves at all, but that we are to think more highly of others. In some ways, that is similar to the idea of loving ourselves; we are not told to not love ourselves, but to love ourselves not more than we love others, and to love that which is of greater spiritual value.

This is a simple idea. You cannot love your neighbour as yourself if you do not love yourself at all. And if you hate yourself, that is a bad thing for all the world, since you must then hate your neighbour too. In this age of globalisation, the thought that everyone is your neighbour is becoming more relevant.

So today then, it being Christmas Day, we have a convenient moment to sit and look at ourselves soberly. How much is the value of a life? How much more are other lives worth? Are we willing to serve others so that we might become less and they might become more?

Here is some advice from the Good Book.

Know those who work above us and among us and with us. Be at peace. Warn those that are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient to all. Do not return evil for evil, but follow that which is good. Rejoice evermore and always. Prayer unceasingly. Give thanks in all things: for this is the will of God.

And have a happy new year too!

Any Day Now

It could have been any day in the year, but today is the eve of Christmas, a day on which our thoughts turn towards gifts, peace, and the foreshadowing of great sacrifice. For it is a Christian thing that we have done, to take something pagan (like Saturnalia or Eostre or Samhain) and make it into a sacred day by some form of hallowing.

All days and any days can be treated such. So too can deities. The ancient gods of many lands became neutralised and nullified, their names bent to accommodate angels and saints. Even the Greek or Latin names of the faithful bear the echoes of their immediate past paganism — why name a child Sylvanus unless one remembers the spirits of the forest?

And so we have come to this, that we have made the dread of elves into the mockery of elfs, or the fear of Auld Nick into the jollity of Santa Claus. But not to pick at too fine a point, why should we not? As long as we remember that there is darkness out there, and that laughter and light will turn it back (if not fire and the sword), we have a worldview that is reasonably true.

It's always better to see the whole story though, and not just have a view of the stage from below. As Shakespeare wrote, "'Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil." We take comfort from that. Yet, we note that it was Lady M who said it in Act One, and we remember what that led to before the final resolution of Act Five.

We need to be mature, to try to see the whole battlefield and not just respond to the flashes of light and smoke. Then we can learn to fix our eyes upon the Christ, not merely the Bethlehem star; to see the perfection and finishing of faith, not just the faintly commemorative shadow of its beginnings. Though we see as through a glass darkly, we will see clearly soon, as if face to face.

Players

Time was, when players were actors in plays, people performing for the delight of their audience in order to entertain and perfect their art and make some useful cash, all at once. That is the ghost of time that was.

Time is, when players are actors in plays, people performing for the delight of themselves in order to impose themselves on the world, in order to cry out HERE-I-AM and I-AM-SOMEONE. Such would not be necessary, if only they knew to be players, to be someone without having to be anyone, just as in the ghost of time that was.

For now is the long decline to the empty bed and the broken teacup, now is the need that is never filled. For if the self is not enough, how can more of it feed its own hunger?

Thank God that I live and move and have my being in the full awareness — apprehension, without comprehension — of what is greater than I. Thank God that I have awareness of stage, of audience, of producer and director. Thank God that I need be nobody, or anybody, to be somebody. Thank God that even the body is not the end, nor the only means to any end. And thanks be to God for the ideas of beginning and ending, for time and space, for the work of the play and the play of the work. Amen.

Where I Live (Part II)

I live in that awkward zone for men, the time of life during which you feel young enough for the sports of your youth, while knowing that this is quite likely untrue. I console myself with thoughts of Ryan Giggs and David Beckham, only to realise that I am older than either, and earn a minuscule fraction of their wages (and that's my annual wage against their monthly, it seems).

I live in the region just after spring, somewhere into summer, with a view of autumn and a dread of winter. Winter's faintest whispers are in my hair, my eyes, my sinews. I still feel young, but that is more a sign of how resilient my mental landscaping is, than a sign of how physically fit I am.

I live in that odd time when the old have passed away, but so have some of the young. Some of those I grew up with are dead, from heart failure, from misadventure, from a malaise of the soul. Just yesterday I received the news that a young man two-thirds of my age had died after a wasting disease. I knew him; he was a good man, a man of integrity — and he has gone away.

I have returned to the poetry of my youth. My mother, always one for the metaphysical poets, brought me up on John Donne. I found myself at Meditation XVII. And there, these words leapt out at me in violent ambush:

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

And those great words are not even the most well-remembered of that meditation. Sometimes it seems that the talent of the world has died as well, that the world is like me; that old Dylan's 'green fuse' that drives my green age also drives the world, and both are less and less green by the day.

A Flood of Thoughts

It is the greyest, wettest afternoon in a very long while. It's not just the sheer quantity of water falling from the sky — that is something quite common at this time of year here — but the amount that is unable to flow away because it's high tide. The old canal, widened at huge taxpayers' expense, has proven unable to fully cope. It's still a big improvement over the days of my youth though.

I remember that I was still a student when I last waded in hip-deep water through that stretch of the Road. You had to be very careful lest you step on something unpleasant, and you had to take off your shoes so that you could put them on again at the other end. It was very slow going.

Today was not like that. But the subdued light, the resigned-looking motorists, the sad headlamps that might flicker and go out soon — these were known of old. There was an ambulance stuck in the mess. But no amount of civic cooperation would float it across the little lake where even the 4WD vehicles dared not go. I found myself wondering if the person who needed it would be in trouble.

The light was astonishingly uniformly grey. It somehow contrasted nicely with the butterscotch-milk colour of the canal waters. At this rate, iron-tainted aluminosilicate clay deposits will be a thing of the past, and this island will be down to granite bedrock. But I have faith that this won't happen. I know the Patriarchy well: they'll just import topsoil from the Southern Archipelago as usual.

The World is Round and Very Small

Imagine a sphere about the size of a tennis ball. Imagine the thin film of adsorbed water molecules just barely clinging to its surface. If this sphere were analogous to our planet, that layer would be our ecosphere. We'd be living in that layer.

Now imagine the solar wind, a dry hot radiant blast of desert air, all ions, all heat, all light. It gusts suddenly with abnormal violence across the face of the tennis ball, and in one umbral sweep, the phosphorescence engendered by the dwellers in the thin film of water goes out.

Hah, not in my lifetime, everyone says.

I remember Chesterton describing the meditation of the heart as, "The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year / The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear."

Sometimes we forget how small we are, and how great our smallness. Of course, man's reach must exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for? But sometimes, we grasp too little, too late. Sometimes, our reach goes where it is of no bloody use at all.

Impure

We are almost completely water; we are walking swamps. 80% of the human body is water and the rest is stuff. There are metal ions and proteins and fats and complex little molecules that are deadly in their own little ways. There are giant molecules trying to hold the whole mad show together. Somehow, we have integrity; somehow that integrity relies on impurity.

We are impure water, and we are the highest order of all creation.

Word Of The Day: Meliorism

The Latin word 'melior' means 'better'. 'Meliorism' is the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. It is a pretty positive belief; the catch lies in the single word 'human'. Unfortunately, human endeavour has often been associated with failure: "human weakness", "human frailty", and other such phrases tend to support the idea that to be human is to be flawed. The idea of human shortcoming ('falling short of the glory of God') is an old one, and obviously a true one. Despite our claims to being the high point of creation (or of evolution, if you are so inclined), we are not particularly perfect.

In my study of the old Latin Vulgate text of the Bible, I came across three instances of melior ('better') or its equivalent in the fourth chapter of Ecclesiastes, which was my reading for this morning. They are interesting statements. I am meditating on each one of them today. They do seem to hold out hope for meliorism as long as that is approached with God-fearing prudence. I have much to learn.

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Note: there are actually four instances of melior in the Vulgate text for Ecclesiastes 4. The fourth instance is found in what the modern Bible calls Ecclesiastes 5:1, which used to be Ecclesiastes 4:17.