Rusticatione facta, I’m headed off to Michigan to be a part of an artists’ colony called The Hillbilly Underground. Hopefully I will do some writing, though it’d be a lie to say I wanted to do much other than socialize.
Especially in Michigan.
26-Jul-09At Antietam.
19-Jul-09“When I think of the battle of Antietam, it seems so strange. Who permits it? To see or feel that a power is in existence that can and will hurl masses of men against each other in deadly conflict – slaying each other by the thousands, mangling and deforming their fellow men – is almost impossible. But it is so, and why, we cannot know.” – Dr. William Childs, surgeon, 5th New Hampshire Infantry, letter October 1862
The Bloody Lane, where thousands of bodies glutted the sunken roadbed.
And furthermore so strange, that I found my thoughts obsessed with the same questions, when walking around the quiet battlefield by dawnlight, before I laid eyes on the above words. Twenty-three thousand men fell in one day – more than the battle casualties of all the previous American wars combined. And now, like all battlefields, it just seems like a quiet, peaceful place, and the carnage that took place there both inconceivable and incomprehensible.
Rusticatio.
19-Jul-09For the next week I’ll be serving in an instructional role at the Rusticatio Virginiana. A group named SALVI – the North American Living Latin Institute – rents a 19th c. plantation in West Virginia and fills it with people who for a week speak nothing but Latin – taking classes, cooking our meals, playing games, having long conversations, cleaning up, sitting on the verandah with a book, all in Latin. It becomes something like a commune, and is an intense, intense social experience. I was there last year and loved it, as indeed it is hard not to love all the crazy things people do gratia amoris, “just for love,” and all the little ways people have of making the things they once only read about in books real and living. Last year I think I laughed more during that one week at Rusticatio than during the preceding fifty. It’s especially important for Classicists, whose avocation can be depressingly solitary at times, to be inter alios.
The link is http://www.latin.org/index.html
Sunrise over Antietam.
19-Jul-09
After a night on the battlefield just outside of Sharpsburg, Maryland.
Packing up the truck this morning to head to Virginia, I came out to find the rear tire outrageously flat, which it was not the night before. My first flat – I’ve never even had one on a bicycle before. Of course, changing it ended up being difficult, because the metal frame holding the spare – located in the undercarriage – was rusted stuck, and had to be hacksawed off. This took some time, as it was in a most awkward position. But it got done.
I then took the tire to a Tire Repair shop on Hillside Avenue, where they found two puncture holes, a leaky valve, and a leaky seal. The procedure – squirting dish detergent all over the inflated tire to watch for bubbles – I found moderately ingenious, the kind of thing that is easy to take for granted, but would be very hard to come up with all alone. The Russian guy who owned the shop (and who objected to my Obama shirt: “What is he doing? Talking! And now he’s sending home all the Jihadis, they’re mostly going to Russia!”) said “What did you do to that tire?” to which I had no good response. It was fine the day before driving on Crossbay Boulevard. Patching two holes, pasting the seal, putting on a new valve, putting the tire back on the truck, and inflating all the tires including the spare cost $12.
While I was thus engaged in vehicular maintenance, I decided to fix the left rear blinker, which had not been working for about two weeks, necessitating the use of hand signals for turns, which I’m sure no one understands (or notices). I went to Autozone on Atlantic Avenue, got the proper light bulb (two for $3.69), and returned to the parking lot, which really was a great scene. Everybody in the parking lot – mostly Indians and Guyanese, summer Saturday afternoon in Ozone Park – was making car repairs. The ground was littered with the wrappers of whatever they had just purchased.
I unscrewed the plastic cover on the rear lights, but of course that had no effect on it: it would not budge. Having had enough of this sort of thing, I broke the cover and put the light bulb in. I then walked down the block to the “Convenience Supermarket” on 113th Street and bought a $1.49 roll of clear packing tape (no brand, no packaging, just the tape with MADE IN CHINA stamped all over its inside) and taped the bits of cover back on.
I finally got off Long Island, crossed into Staten Island which looked beautiful, found that Interstate 278 does not intersect with Interstate 78 (of course, why would it?), took 287 to 78 and shot across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. I ate dinner in New Smithville at the diner there, where on the television, tuned in to Fox News, I saw Mike Huckabee playing guitar for a rock band with a lead singer that looked like Jesus. I pulled up later that evening at the Battlefield at Antietam, where I slept under the stars.
Male Spirituality.
10-Jul-09Some people have asked me what the “male spirituality” category on the website refers to. Putting a gender on spirituality seems at best unnecessary, and maybe silly or exclusionary. Nor have I written a great deal on this topic, as I have less than a year’s worth of experience with it, and with all things spiritual, it is best to exercise caution in speaking of it.
But the next Rites of Passage for Men will take place September 23-27 in New York, and now is the time to proselytize for it. I hear the numbers of applicants are down this year, and blame for that can only be laid at the feet of those who have done it, found good things there, and said nothing to anyone else about it.
The Male Spirituality movement is a response to a number of interrelated problems. First of all there is a striking gender inequality in participation in Christian churches: in America, where the situation is not as bad as elsewhere, two-thirds of church attendees are women. In Italy and the Latin countries you might almost say that Christianity is a religion for female worshippers (and male priests). The founder of the movement, Richard Rohr, said, “I cannot believe that the great Gospel of Jesus Christ has nothing to say to men.” The theory (which I concur with) is that Christian churches have gone astray in their practice, substituting church attendance for real spiritual experience, and that this has particularly affected men, who for the most part find little in mainstream Christianity that they can even respect.
Another problem is that our society is addicted to the spiritual and personal language of ascent – success. Go to a high school reunion and you will see people presenting their lives as happy, exciting, interesting, and successful – and then wondering why they come home to their real lives feeling empty and deceitful. This kind of continual one-upmanship is a dominant pattern in our society. It is particularly common among men, whose social interactions are filled with this struggle for superiority and self-reliance. But it is not Christian – Christ more than anything taught a way of descent, a going down into your pain, a harrowing of your own hell. This should be the heart of all Christian practice. “No sign will be given them but the sign of Jonah.”
Life tends to give us these initiations, when we have no choice but to go down and confront ourselves as we really are. I had my first major one when I was twenty, and it deeply affected me, but not receiving any instruction as to its meaning or what I could do with it, I found myself, after some years, falling back into the same problems. This of course, as it always does, brought me to a similar crisis, twelve years later. This time I am striving with all my might not to miss the call to deeper life.
Another major problem is that there is precious little mentoring and spiritual direction in our society. I have felt, for most of my life, a deep hunger for “a guide to come and take me by the hand” – simultaneous with a deep sense that all the guidance I had been offered missed or misunderstood all my deepest parts and hence needed to be resisted. In the male spirituality movement I have found something entirely different and satisfying: not a Procrustean attempt to cut me down to a single mold, but leading me deeper into myself, not offering easy answers but staying with the mystery. To be quite frank, I’m not certain I ever realized that this was what religion was really about.
Rohr is convinced that early Christianity offered far more of this than it does today, and that baptism was a real initiation, whose meaning was the Paschal Mystery – death and resurrection – and where real instruction in tapping into a source of life deeper than your own ego was provided. Hence the Rites of Passage. Most of the information in it is conveyed by ritual and the experience of being simply one among many, freed from the one-upmanship games of society. As with all recommendations, this movement may simply be a good fit for me, not for everyone. But I do invite all men to consider it. The home website is www.cacradicalgrace.org, look for the “Men’s Work” section. The experience, as I have had it, is truly “incarnational” – a movement towards being at home in the world and in your own flesh and your own being. For me it also had intellectual interest, as the experience was much like what I have read of in the “Mystery Religions” of the ancient world – of which, of course, Christianity was one.
Why men need this in particular is a good question, and one of the better criticisms of the Male Spirituality movement is that its focus on men may be a good answer to the problems of the previous generation. Traditionally in initiation rites throughout the world, it was the men that needed to be taught about pain, taught how to cry, taught to see their shadow, and taught how to build a bridge between inner and outer experience. That there is a male need for this in our society I have no doubt: we see men everywhere who have no access to their own inner life, no sense that it is useful or good or anything other than an obstacle to their smooth functioning in mechanized society. But the women my age seem to need this training just as much as the men! A group, about which I know little other than that mention of them appeared in Rohr’s publication Radical Grace, runs an initiation for women. The link is: http://www.riverstoneretreat.org/current_offerings.html#wrop
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. – Joseph Campbell
Like a new Mr. Safire…
09-Jul-09A blog on words and terms of art, which has been excellent so far.
http://everbosity.wordpress.com/
Find out what a “Labyrinth of Jerusalem” is.
It was a dark and stormy night…
09-Jul-09In high school we used to read the books put together by the Bulwer-Lytton contest organizers, a yearly contest for the worst opening sentence of the worst book never written. Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote innumerable novels, none of which promise well from their first pages. The Last Days of Pompeii begins thus:
“Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus tonight?” said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and effeminate folds which proved him a gentleman and a coxcomb.
One of them famously begins, “It was a dark and stormy night,” whence this contest, for exaggerated, overliterate, and otherwise silly prose. The contest continues, I see. Here are the top selected entries for 2009. A few personal favorites:
Darnell knew he was getting hung out to dry when the D.A. made him come clean by airing other people’s dirty laundry; the plea deal was a new wrinkle and there were still issues to iron out, but he hoped it would all come out in the wash – otherwise he had folded like a cheap suit for nothing.
Lynn Lamousin
Baton Rouge, LA
The gutters of Manhattan teemed with the brackish slurry indicative of a significant though not incapacitating snowstorm three days prior, making it seem that God had tripped over Hoboken and spilled his smog-flavored slurpie all over the damn place.
Eric Stoveken
Allentown, PA
She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.
Eric Rice
Sun Prairie, WI
Their relationship hit a bump in the road, not the low, graceful kind of bump, reminiscent of a child’s choo choo train-themed roller coaster, rather the kind of tall, narrow speed-bump that, if a school bus ran over it, would cause even a fat kid to fly up and bang his head on the ceiling.
Michael Reade
Durham, NC
Rhododendrons in Bloom.
08-Jul-09The mountain laurel is on the way out, and the rosebays, Rhododendron Maximum, are now starting to bloom. It’s amazing how late they are here – they will be blooming through most of July. This is not a heavy-bloom year for them – almost all the plants I saw had far more seedpods than blooms. I photographed these near Lake Paradise – the area around there features one of the best rhododendron groves in the Catskills.
58 degrees at noon today. The cold is shocking coming from the city. Great woodchopping weather, though.
I wonder…
19-Jul-09On the way down to Maryland, the odometer on my truck froze at 173 thousand and between 399 and 400 miles. It stayed that way for at least fifty miles or so, before resuming motion today. Makes me wonder how many miles the truck really has on it.