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What, is my head empty? Walked home from the college yesterday after turning in grades and thought of pulling the camera from its sleeve but walking without pausing felt better. And once home, cracked the big Paracelsus book to look for direction and sank into sleep as soon as I'd marked something to think about. Woke at midnight to people screaming at each other outside. Thought it was inside--in my dream--sometimes that happens--but H was up and awake when the police came. The people out back, he said. Not you.

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At the beginning of each birth stood the birth-giver and the begetter--separation. It is the greatest wonder of the philosophies.... When the mysterium magnum in its essence and divinity was full of the highest eternity, separatio started at the beginning of all creation. And when this took place, every creature was created in its majesty, power, and free will. And so it will remain until the end, until the great harvest when all things will bear fruit and will be ready for gathering. For the harvest is the end of all growth.... And just as the mysterium magnum is the wonderful beginning, so the harvest is the wonderful end of all things.

Paracelsus, "Creation of the World"

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(Because I need it here to think.)

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Light. Form. Caves.


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commencement week: knox college

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III

We can believe only if we want to. The determining factor is not the truth of the content but the sense that it is good to believe. --The function of the will in belief. Neither the act of belief itself nor the believed content is what is willed. The primary act of the will: to love. "We believe because we love." The believer affirms the witness and seeks communion with him, by virtue of which he then sees with the eyes of the knower.

Chapter three outline, Table of Contents, Joseph Pieper, Faith

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Pentecost: day one hundred. &.

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Five-thirty and the sun is nearly up and the morning is loud. Birds and trains come streaming through the open windows. My sleep is off. For the first time in months I wake again at one or two believing it's time to be up. I panic, realize the room is warm, the couch is warm, that the soreness in my back has pulled me out of sleep. I moved to the floor this morning and eventually fell asleep with the alarm clock in my palm after grudging the last of the work weighing on me before the term officially ends. I thought of last night when I hugged a tired friend. "Ten years from now you're still going to hear the Brothers talking about friendship," he said later when he asked if I followed the talk. "It's central."

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"The end of artistic contemplation is the idea. But reducing the other to an idea? We all have the experience of people who want to love us ideally."

Fr. Didier Marie, "How experience can lead me to adore and to contemplate the first good i.e. God”

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"But Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting; they are the institutors of laws & the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical or susceptible of allegory, and like Janus have a double face of false and true."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"

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"The character--no, the caricature--of internal life: that imagination fills the gap when we feel lost."

Fr. Antoine Thomas

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week ten

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"And hence there comes to them likewise a certain desire, which is somewhat vain, and at times very vain, to speak of spiritual things in the presence of others, and sometimes even to teach such things rather than to learn them."

Dark Night of the Soul, chapter II, St. John of the Cross

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Teach catechism to eight graders. The suggestion comes up, and I am loaded down with books, a course on the creed, a course on the commandments, instructors' copies, quiz games. I flip through chapter-end assessments and glossaries, I draw blanks, think: but you will learn it, think: but you needn't learn it all now: you are not ready: but you will never be ready:

and so forth. I wait to know more. Whether the parish fathers will approve. If it seems I ought to ask my spiritual director his opinion--even this I don't know--

most questions (you notice?) you might take to an adviser are not about the question but about the anxiety of the questioner, which will only resurface elsewhere. Anxiety is astonishingly charismatic. I'm resolved not to waste his time on a mirage.

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To walk in a total poverty is not very easy. You see, we always have this desire to succeed, a nostalgia against this lack. We dream, imagine, it could be different. Our own will is that we will have our own perfect hermitage with no one who bothers us, and with only the books that we like, and the perfect temperature in our rooms, and mosquitoes who obey us. But the ultimate freedom--and this is divine pedagogy--is a substantial poverty; it is absence. We always run the risk of attaching love to a conditioning, of linking love to this or that gesture, of attributing presence, consolation, charisma. It is more comfortable to look at Resurrection, at Pentecost (which are beautiful).

notes from M.-D. Philippe on Ascension.

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Ascension. Ninety days.

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Isaiah 44:13-15 (New International Version)

The carpenter measures with a line
and makes an outline with a marker;
he roughs it out with chisels
and marks it with compasses.
He shapes it in the form of man,
of man in all his glory,
that it may dwell in a shrine.

He cut down cedars,
or perhaps took a cypress or oak.
He let it grow among the trees of the forest,
or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow.

It is man's fuel for burning;
some of it he takes and warms himself,
he kindles a fire and bakes bread.
But he also fashions a god and worships it;
he makes an idol and bows down to it.

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week nine

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And I thought how to explain so that you could know why I feel devastated too? That the worst possible thing that can happen to a kid has happened to him again and though he's thirty-five he's feeling it the way he did when he was nine which is about the time you realize you'll spend your life choosing to need people who don't need you back, that you'll marry one if you're not careful, that your oldest will be nine years old when the splitting off reminds her she always knew need ends this way but need is what they have a lot of so as you might expect things get smaller and smaller as they get older and older.

No. That's not how I'd say it. Let me try again:

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Horsefly in a great panic about getting trapped in the bathroom keeps slamming into the mirror as a way out. It doesn't see itself coming.

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My brother's keeper.

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Can you tell the difference, I wonder, by looking? Here is the first of the not-film images. The quality of light, the saturation of color? And something in the blurring of focus? But these may be comments from the sidelines where I'm still scratching my head over the manual. When I get on the playing field, will you know? Will you tell me?

Still dark this morning, still the full lit white face of the clock above the office building a block over and the traffic light beyond it fixed at red. The trees are full too and the street lights in that direction are only visible in their halos of new green leaves.

I must leave in an hour to start another crazy day.

Instead of writing a committee report, I planted pots full of aloe from my mother's pot of overflowing aloe. Mary will sit an aloe garden this year. H pulled the old pot of hanging geraniums from the eaves a few days ago and I cleared it of dead leaves yesterday to make room for planting. In it, I found a tiny bird's nest, wintered over, long abandoned. All that work, and where have they gone to? I didn't know they were ever here.

Spring Mind says such things: "All this work and just where do you think you can get to?" But Spring Mind is a restless sort too. The wanderlust is setting in already, however much I want to be close to home. This home.

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Spring Mind: "How do you know you believe?"

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Flunk Day, yesterday, but as it landed on a Tuesday, what was there to do besides groan about it not landing on a Wednesday? And so I said let's go buy some flowers and pick up film and mail off Trystan's Flat Stanely package. Red flowers, terracotta pots for the aloe, keep it simple this year. But then I got distracted by having to walk by the wall of cameras on the way to picking up film, more so when what I wanted was not in stock, so I told H: I need to see what they have at Staples, and H said: I understand.

Thus I bought a not-film camera. A little Canon Powershot S3 IS about which I know so little it scares me. Oh the things it does. The books in the box that describe the things it does. And how I dread reading directions.

It's not at all the same, is it, the snapsnapsnapsnapsnap of everything from the bellybutton or the hip, the 300 photos memory card, the rechargeable batteries, the infinite, the excess! Like all the money of the world, relax, you'll never have to miss a shot again for lack of--

But where is the tension in the seeing, the delay, the saved-for selection? The I don't know what's taken place inside? The rare instance? The art lies elsewhere. It lies everywhere, a diffusion.

And the light is something else in this too. A diffusion, a bombardment on the eye.

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week eight

& eighty days.

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