Fr. Walter Macken RIP

I was saddened recently to hear of the death of Fr. Walter Macken, whose life is recalled here in the Garvan Hill blog. It's an interesting slice of social history as well as a fitting tribute.

Fr. Macken was a priest of Opus Dei. I'm not involved with Opus Dei myself, but I've been invited on two occasions to give short talks in their student residence in the city centre. On one of those occasions, Fr. Macken was there, and I found him very kind and courteous. 

I also live in a parish run by Opus Dei. That's how I heard about Fr. Macken's death. (I'm always grateful the parish offers Mass at 7:30 a.m. on weekdays and 9 p.m. on Sundays.)

Fr. Macken was the son of Walter Macken, an Irish novelist who died in 1967. I was an avid reader of his novels in my teens. I didn't just read them once, but (in three instances) several times over. He's perhaps most celebrated for his trilogy of Irish historical novels, but I didn't like those much. I much preferred his novels about ordinary people. My favourite was I Am Alone, a novel that was actually banned in Ireland (I've only learned that now).

I Am Alone follows the experiences of Pat, an Irish emigrant in London...are you yawning just from that description? Actually, it wasn't boring at all, nor was it worthy or whingy. It describes Pat's efforts to find a job in London, his experience lodging with a landlord who's a religious fanatic, his work as a labourer on a building site (and how difficult he finds it), his hopeless love for a beautiful woman who he finally realizes is shallow and selfish, and his eventual marriage to a woman who is not beautiful but is much more worthy of his affections. He also becomes friends with a man who turns out to be involved with the IRA (the pre-Troubles version). I forget what happens to the friend, but Pat does not approve of his activities. The book ends with the birth of his child, who arrives safely after a nerve-wracking labour sequence.

I returned to the book again and again because of Macken's ability to describe the flow of consciousness. Not in a gimmicky Joycean way, but in a very realistic and observational way. For instance, when Pat gets off the boat and takes a train through England, he's taken aback to see how green the fields are, then wonders if he expected them to be red. There's another passage which describes a visit to a pool hall, in the early days of his marriage, when he knows he should be going home to his wife, but he can't help staying for another game, and another... The atmosphere of the pool hall is brilliantly captured, as well as the particular frame of mind of lingering somewhere when you know you should be somewhere else.

Above all, I loved I Am Alone because it took as its subject ordinary life-- it's a very "low concept" novel. It caught the texture of ordinary life brilliantly, which is something I greatly prize in writers.

I also loved his novel The Bogman, about a local poet and songwriter in a loveless marriage. Some of the little poems included in the book are excellent. I also liked (though to a lesser extent) Quench the Moon, the story of a would-be writer and poet enduring poverty and other trials.

I wasn't at all surprised to hear that Walter Macken's son became a priest. His novels are not pious at all, but religion and the clergy are presented in a sympathetic and very human way. (I particularly remember, in I Am Alone, a scene in which Pat unsuccessfully tries to persuade his wife-to-be to become a Catholic. She's insistent she wants to remain Church of England. When he points out to her that she doesn't even go to church, she says: "It doesn't matter. I was born Church of England and I'm going to die Church of England." Pat admits to himself that he rather admires her for this. I think it's probably an accurate description of an ordinary Church of England member at that time, and for some decades after.)

Like J.P. Donleavy or some other writers, he seems to belong to a particular phase of my life, and I can't really imagine revisiting him. But he fed my imagination in his youth, and I'm saddened to hear of his son's passing.

The Right to Exist

I've been reading Pope Leo's new encyclical. I was very struck by this line: "Indeed, the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations."

This is literally all I am asserting when I call myself a nationalist-- this and nothing else.

The question is, how is this to be preserved? It seems to me (and, I think it fair to say, to millions of others) that social and cultural forces are at play today which threaten this very right. But I haven't heard any recommendations from the Vatican on what to do about this.

I suspect (perhaps unfairly) that the Holy Father was not thinking of Western or developed nations when he wrote this. But it certainly applies to them, too.

Pope Francis said similar things in his own writings, arguing for "the globalization of the polyhedron" rather than "the globalization of the sphere". But how is this to be achieved?

Tolkien is Now a Doctor of the Church!

Well, not quite, but it's quite remarkable that Pope Leo has quoted Gandalf in his first encyclical, which is about artificial intelligence.

I haven't read the encyclical yet, though I've read a few analyses of it. But here's the quotation:

The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” Tolkien's mother would be very proud!

Having It Both Ways

I came across this book cover today. Doesn't it illustrate the contradiction of identity politics, and of the politicization of the arts and humanities?

Dull People Hype Silence Because They Have Nothing to Say

I don't actually believe this. Well, not entirely.

But it's an expression of my irritation at the whole cult of silence. To love silence makes you deep; to love discussion, animation, and activity makes you shallow. Supposedly.

Apparently (at least people always say this), silence is undervalued in the modern world, despite all the bookshop shelves groaning under the weight of books on mindfulness, contemplative prayer, and introvert pride. (I'm an introvert. I'm not in the slightest bit proud of it.)

Celebrated arty films such as Solaris (the 2002 remake) or the aptly-named Into Great Silence (a bunch of Carthusians monks going about their day) are full of long moody shots and minutes on end without any dialogue. Trippy! Profound! Uncompromising!

When I get especially irritated at the cult of silence, I think of pointing out one place that is very silent indeed. Well, you've probably guessed it. The graveyard.

Of course, all this won't do. The Bible (and doubtless all wisdom literature) is full of injunctions to silence. So I should probably just shut up myself.

Should Tradition be Causative?

As regular readers will know, I'm very interested in tradition. OK, I'm obsessed by tradition.

Today I found myself mulling over the phrase "in the tradition of...". What does it mean, exactly?

For instance, there's often talk about Kingston-upon-Hull's tradition of poetry. Philip Larkin is the big name, along with Andrew Marvell. There's also Stevie Smith and a good few others. Anyway, a surprising number of celebrated poets are associated with Hull.

But is this really a tradition? Or is it just a coincidence? Or can a coincidence be a tradition?

Conversely, I remember someone pointing out how the Harry Potter books (and films) are very much in the tradition of Enid Blyton. But this does seem to be a tradition in a more causative sense. Rowling was a huge fan of Enid Blyton in her girlhood.

More importantly, perhaps, is anybody exercised by such questions other than me?

More on Distraction

In a previous post, I wrote this:

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that modern man is "distracted by distraction from distraction". It's a valid point, but...surely people need some kind of distraction, or at least some kind of occupation. What is it we're supposedly being distracted from, anyway?

The Christian might say "worship". The socialist might say politics, or the improvement of the human species. The hippie (I think that we still have hippies even if they aren't classic hippies) might say "love" or "human connection" or some such thing. Or perhaps we come down to the ideal of pure being-- whatever that is. Whatever anyone might say, people who complain about modern distractions must believe we're being distracted from something.

I'm very sympathetic to the argument made by Wally in the wonderful movie My Dinner with André, when he reacts against his rather hippie-ish friend, who is talking about various workshops he's led and which seem similiar to Sixties "happenings" or modern mindfulness exercises.

Wally says: "The whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed to be doing.

"And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think, uh, it’s our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and…and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots, but…but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree, I mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I’m saying?"

I agree with Wally, but at the same time, I also find myself-- at other times, in other moods-- sharing in this disapproval of "distraction". "Distraction" seems to be the only word.

The idea of distraction seems to be clearly present in the New Testament, principally in the parable of the sower: "He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful."

Then there's that wonderful passage from the first letter of James: "For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass. For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was."

I'm also reminded of this wonderful passage from Miracles by C.S. Lewis, a book which went a huge way towards getting me to accept a supernatural worldview. I quote the entire passage, first because it's relevant, but also for its own sake: "And yet . . . and yet . . . It is that which I fear more than any positive argument against miracles: that soft, tidal return of your habitual outlook as you close the book and the familiar four walls about you and the familiar noises from the street reassert themselves. Perhaps (if I dare suppose so much) you have been led on at times while you were reading, have felt ancient hopes and fears astir in your heart, have perhaps come almost to the threshold of belief—but now? No. It just won’t do. Here is the ordinary, here is the “real” world, round you again. The dream is ending; as all other similar dreams have always ended. For of course this is not the first time such a thing has happened. More than once in your life before this you have heard a strange story, read some odd book, seen something queer or imagined you have seen it, entertained some wild hope or terror: but always it ended in the same way. And always you wondered how you could, even for a moment, have expected it not to. For that “real world” when you came back to it is so unanswerable. Of course the strange story was false, of course the voice was really subjective, of course the apparent portent was a coincidence. You are ashamed of yourself for having ever thought otherwise: ashamed, relieved, amused, disappointed, and angry all at once. You ought to have known that, as Arnold says, “Miracles don’t happen.” "

So, while I'm very sympathetic to Wally's critique of the notion of "distraction", I think it only really applies to a distraction from this weird idea of "pure being" or "the moment". I'm much more sympathetic to the critique of distraction when it applies to an ideal, or a view of ultimate reality-- and Christianity fits both of these definitions.

I could also apply it to the ideals of the Gaelic Revival which ebbed away in the middle of the twentieth century. It's hard to believe that television, consumerism, and pop culture had nothing to do with this. The Irish people weren't won away from the ideals of the Irish Revolution by all this trash culture. They were distracted from them-- several generations holding onto those ideals in an increasingly nominal way, until finally they were peeled off like a scab.

When I think of my own attempts to live up to my ideal of "priggishness", the foe of this seems to be a sort of distraction. The lower is the enemy of the higher. It's always easier to gorge on light entertainment than to read poetry. It's always easier to be facetious than to try to sustain a mood of solemnity. Contemplation is often held to be the highest human activity, but it's also boring, or tends to be.

In this regard (and I will close on this quotation) I find John Ruskin's defence of monotony in the arts to be interesting: 

"From these facts we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and of those who love it, it may be truly said, "they love darkness rather than light." But monotony in certain measure, used in order to give value to change, and above all, that transparent monotony, which, like the shadows of a great painter, suffers all manner of dimly suggested form to be seen through the body of it, is an essential in architectural as in all other composition; and the endurance of monotony has about the same place in a healthy mind that the endurance of darkness has: that is to say, as a strong intellect will have pleasure in the solemnities of storm and twilight, and in the broken and mysterious lights that gleam among them, rather than in mere brilliancy and glare, while a frivolous mind will dread the shadow and the storm; and as a great man will be ready to endure much darkness of fortune in order to reach greater eminence of power or felicity, while an inferior man will not pay the price; exactly in like manner a great mind will accept, or even delight in, monotony which would be wearisome to an inferior intellect, because it has more patience and power of expectation, and is ready to pay the full price for the great future pleasure of change. But in all cases it is not that the noble nature loves monotony, anymore than it loves darkness or pain. But it can bear with it, and receives a high pleasure in the endurance or patience, a pleasure necessary to the well-being of this world; while those who will not submit to the temporary sameness, but rush from one change to another, gradually dull the edge of change itself, and bring a shadow and weariness over the whole world from which there is no more escape."