Yesterday, I had the thought of starting a Catholic writer's group in Dublin. I'm quite attached to this idea. I posted about it on the Irish Catholic's Forum and the Irish Conservatives Forum, but there are no takers as yet.
In recent times, I've been very drawn to the idea of writing as self-expression, as an activity with its own inherent value. Poetry especially, but not just poetry. My Unicorn Poetry School was a bit of wish-fulfillment in this regard.
My involvement in my horror club is something I value very much. It's quite unlike anything in my life. Discussing the merits and themes of various horror stories and horror films is actually intoxicating-- I always have a sensation of wider mental horizons opening around me, horizons much wider than those of ordinary life and conversation.
Of course, none of my friends in the horror club are Catholic. (There is actually one Catholic member, but he's only been to one meeting during the several years I've been attending.) They are all very respectful towards faith, and very often (as you would expect, given the subject matter) the conversation touches on matters spiritual, but I'm always aware of the difference.
It would be nice to meet up with fellow Catholics and explore the territory of the imagination. An activity that is both interpersonal and imaginative can be wonderfully rewarding, as my horror club has taught me.
So if anyone is interested in this idea, do mail me at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
The Text of my Belfast Talk
This is the text of the talk I delivered to the Courage to be Catholic conference, held in the Catholic chaplaincy of Queen's University, and organised by the Legion of Mary.
It was being recorded on camera, so I hope I might be able to post the video at some point.
Hello. My name is Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh. I work in the library of University College Dublin and I also write a blog called Irish Papist, which has been going since 2011. This year I published a book called Inspiration from the Saints, and the organizer of this event kindly asked me to speak to you on the theme of that book. I’m very happy to be here today.
I want to talk about Catholic saints and the inspiration we can derive from them, to help us in our efforts to live out urf faith. Of course, I’m preaching to the converted, as I’m sure every person in this room already has favourite saints, and a devotion to saints in general. So I’m simply sharing some ideas regarding the ways in which saints can help us, some ways of looking at the subject, which I hope might be helpful to you.
The title of this conference is “the Courage to be Catholic”, and I do think that the saints can give us crucial inspiration in this regard. The courage to be Catholic has two sides-- there’s the courage to defend and proclaim our faith in public, and then there is the courage to face our own internal struggles, which might be invisible to everyone else-- perhaps a struggle against bitterness, or envy, or addiction, or some similar enemy. The example of the saints can help us in both of these, the outer challenges and the inner challenges.
In my book, I was very strict about using the term saints only for those people who have been canonised or beatified-- that is, people who have been given the title Saint or Blessed by the Church. In this talk, I’m going to be a little more relaxed, and also use the term saint for those who are on earlier steps on the path to sainthood-- those who have been given the title Venerable, which means they have been recognized as showing heroic virtue, or Servant of God, which simply means their cause has been opened.
So why are the saints important? We all know they are, but if we were challenged on the question, what would we say? Well, here are my thoughts.
I imagine you will all have heard of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900 after a decade of insanity. His ideas were radical and often contradictory, but when it came to Christianity he was fundamentally a ferocious critic. One of his books was even called The Anti-Christ. Of the many critical things he wrote about Christianity, this might be the most memorable: “There was only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.”
The sentiment is hardly unique to Nietzsche, although he was a master of prose and put it particularly memorably. Gandhi is reputed to have said: “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians.” And John Lennon certainly did say: “Jesus was alright, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” (That’s me and you he’s talking about there.) Comments like these, and any number of similar ones that I’m sure we’ve all heard, reflect a common belief: Jesus was all very well, but he was a one-off. His followers were all hypocrites at best and disappointments at worst. Christianity has never worked in real life, and perhaps it never could work in real life.
There are many possible replies to this criticism, but one response is simply to point to the saints of the Catholic church, people who really have followed in Jesus’s footsteps, who really have kept his words. Now and again, some critics of Christianity, making the same argument as Friedrich Nietzsche, will make an exception for St. Francis of Assisi, and maybe one or two others. But St. Francis is only one of many, many, many saints. It’s impossible to make an authoritative list, but there are certainly many hundreds of saints venerated in the Catholic Church. There is now a careful process by which saints are canonised, but for many centuries people became saints through popular acclaim—through the fact that people saw that they were holy. Many of these are very obscure and, often, all we have are their names. But the point I’m trying to make is that it’s certainly not just St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Theresa who were true followers of Christ. There were many hundreds of people, at the very least, who have risen to the challenge of the Christian ideal. Friedrich Nietzsche and John Lennon are wrong.
And these are only the saints who have been proclaimed saints. Nobody knows how many people have died as saints and are now in Heaven. The Book of Revelations, describing St. John’s vision of the blessed in Heaven, tells us it’s too great a number to be counted. So that is one reason the saints are important; they prove the Christian ideal is achievable, and has been achieved. It’s not just a beautiful aspiration.
One of the reasons I wrote my book was out of a frustration at some of the books about saints I’d read. I’d spent a lot of time looking for such books in recent years, but quite often, they left me unsatisfied. When I sought out books about saints, I didn’t really want to know a huge amount of detail about their lives, or the society they lived in. I wanted stories. I wanted stories that showed why they were saints, what made them exceptional and extraordinary-- their achievements, their triumphs, their ordeals. I wanted stories to inspire me.
Today I’m making the case that Catholics should immerse themselves in the lives of the saints, in the stories of the saints. If we are practicing Catholics, we are fighting a battle for every human soul, and that includes our own souls. We have to evangelize, and that includes evangelising ourselves, so to speak. We’ve all been bombarded every single day, every day of our lives, with a lot of mental rubbish-- all the false and tacky glamour of advertising and Hollywood and the entertainment business in general. That’s all in our heads, swirling around. We can’t get it out. But I think it’s a good idea to counteract it with other images, other stories. I think it’s a good idea to immerse ourselves in the lives of the saints, to contemplate them, and to try to model ourselves on them.
The term I use for this is “the evangelization of the imagination”. Today, many Catholics are very rightly considering the various fronts on which we can evangelize our contemporaries. Many of them concentrate on evangelization through beauty. This is a fine initiative, but it’s not going to reach everybody. There are unfortunate clods such as myself who prefer Def Leppard to Bach, who are more drawn to plain suburban churches than historic cathedrals, and-- although I’m rather scared of being lynched if I admit this here-- who quite like guitar hymns. So I don’t think evangelization through beauty, on its own, is sufficient. But I suspect that, for every person who is moved by Gregorian chant, there are more who are moved by stories and ideas that capture the imagination. It’s my belief that Ireland was lost to the Faith by way of the imagination -- that, from the sixties onward, the hearts and minds of the Irish people were gradually being corrupted by the allure of pop culture, consumerism, liberalism, and so forth. Catholicism came to seem dull and oppressive, unexciting, compared to the promise of a brave new world in which all barriers would be broken and endless new possibilities would be opened. Today, now that the emptiness of individualism and hedonism is becoming apparent, it’s an ideal time, in my view, to seek to persuade our contemporaries that Catholicism is actually exciting, challenging, poetic and ultimately liberating. It’s time to recapture the Irish imagination for the Catholic Faith. And one way to do this is through the lives and examples of the saints.
When it comes to the veneration of saints, as in many other ways, the Catholic Church is the great friend of human nature. As we all know, many of the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century rejected prayer to saints, which is of course prayer for the intercession of saints-- no different than asking a friend to pray for us. The theory was that direct prayer to God was all we needed. The Thirty-Nine articles of the Church of England describe the invocation of saints as “repugnant to the Word of God”. However, not praying to saints seems repugnant to human nature. This is one of those many areas where our Church is deliciously liberal, where it effectively tells us: “Knock yourself out”. The calendar of saints is filled to overflowing with saints of every race, nationality, age, career, educational attainment, and pretty much every other variable imaginable.
Of course, there are some commonalities. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the saints are completely different from one another. In my opinion, they are actually very samey in some ways. Jesus told us that the way to life was narrow and straight. And when I was researching my book, and trying to make it as interesting as possible for the reader, I did find myself confronted with the awkward fact that there is quite a lot of repetition in the lives of the saints. Yes, there are contrasts. The cerebral St. Thomas Aquinas, who spent his entire life thinking and writing, is very different from the passionate St. Francis of Assisi who was rather suspicious of books and scholarship. But, on the whole, the saints are much more like each other than they are unlike; at least, that would be my contention.
But this commonality is another reason we should immerse ourselves in the lives of the saints. As Christians, we are called to follow Christ, but this presents us with a bit of a problem. We know so little about Christ’s life. We only have one brief flash of his boyhood, and the rest of our knowledge of him comes from his last few years. Furthermore, the four Gospels very often tell the same stories. How do we follow the example of someone of whom we know so little, and who lived in a world so very different from our own? We’re all familiar with the question, “What would Jesus do?”. And we all know that people find very different answers to that question.
Well, we don’t have to guess what Jesus would do in every situation. St. Paul instructs his disciples in the letter to the Romans: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” As well as the instruction that the Church has given us in its doctrine and tradition, we have a long line of saints who have lived in every age and in pretty much every possible circumstance of human life. Rather than having to ask: “What would Jesus do in this situation?”, we can very often see what the saints, his most devoted followers, actually did. We can follow Christ by following the saints.
Saints are people who have developed a kind of second instinct, a supernatural second instinct, and show us what kind of responses we should seek to develop in particular scenarios. They socialise us, just as children are socialised by parents. As Catholics, we usually know what is wrong and right in theory, from the teachings of the Church, from catechisms, and so forth. But we also have to learn about emphasis and priority-- just how much emphasis we should place on a particular virtue, how much horror we should have before a particular sin, and so forth. The lives of the saints is a great school for this.
Here is an example-- attitudes towards sexual sin, towards impurity. Prudishness is often considered a fault today. It might be understandable, if we were trying to think out a Christian attitude for ourselves, to decide that we should avoid sinning against impurity but that we should also avoid prudishness. For instance, that we should be willing to laugh at risqué jokes so as not to seem “holier than thou” or sanctimonious, or to watch sexually explicit films which have artistic merit. We might take the text from Titus, “to the pure all things are pure”, and decide that a mature morality means being able to face the world as it is without being corrupted by it. However, when we read the lives of the saints, we very often find a severity which takes us aback. At least, it sometimes takes me aback. St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, advised his followers that, when it came to sexual temptation, “it is low cowardice to be brave”.
St. Gemma Galgani, an Italian mystic I often mention in my book, did not even want to undress for a doctor’s examination, and only did so with extreme reluctance. The Blessed Giorgio Frassati, a handsome Italian saint who died in 1925, who is often seen as rather cool and was concerned with social justice, once ordered an Italian bookseller to take some dirty books out of his shop window, threatening to call the police if he didn’t. And I imagine these books were pretty mild by our standards. So Catholic saints, in general, show a dread of sexual impurity, and even a dread of the occasions of sexual impurity, that can’t help but impress us. Of course, I’m not saying we should emulate all of these examples, or that they don’t owe something to historical context. I’m simply saying that they show us just what a value the saints put upon sexual purity. It seems highly unlikely, reading the lives of the saints, that many of us today are erring on the side of prudishness.
Hunger for the sacraments is another lesson we learn from saints. The Church tells us that the sacraments are crucially important, but we see this dramatized, as it were, in the lives of the saints. St. Thomas More famously refused to hurry from Mass even when King Henry VIII had sent a messenger to summon him. Venerable Edel Quinn, the great Legion of Mary missionary who will surely attain sainthood eventually, said: “I could assist at the Mass the whole day long”. Here is a description of her delight in Mass, as from the vice-postulator of her cause for sainthood: “To be deprived of Communion was one of the greatest sufferings she could conceive. At one period in Africa she was a patient in a non-Catholic sanatorium and was able to receive Holy Communion only once a week. She said later the privation of daily Communion gave her an experience of what hell must be like. When working in her Dublin office she made it a practice to attend seven o’clock Mass daily, not returning home for breakfast. Seemingly she remained in the church until after eight o’clock Mass and then went straight to work, having a snack in the office. On Sundays she normally attended two Masses before breakfast and four later Masses. And in her African diary the first entry each day is the number of Masses she had attended.”
An eye-witness of the life of St. Dominic wrote: “I saw the Blessed Dominic say Mass many times both in the monastery and on journeys. And there was not a single time when Dominic did not shed tears.” Other witnesses have described the manner in which St. Padre Pio or St. Josemaria Escrivia celebrated Mass in such vivid terms that even reading them second-hand can’t help but impress us. Or there is the story of St. Philip Neri, who had special permission to say Mass in a private oratory as he would frequently pass into ecstasies simply from celebrating the liturgy. I don’t know about you, but when I hear stories like these, it deepens my sense of awe for the sacrament at the centre of our faith, one that we are never in any danger of over-valuing. The same point might be made about confession. When we hear how St. Padre Pio or St. Jean Vianney would often spend most of the day hearing confessions, this impresses upon us just how important and precious the sacrament of reconciliation really is.
But If I was asked for one single characteristic which united the saints, apart from the obvious one that they were all followers of Jesus Christ, I would have no hesitation in answering: prayer. As I was researching my book, this theme struck me more and more. Of course, many others have remarked on this. St. Josemaria Escriva once wrote: “A saint without prayer? I don’t believe in such sanctity”.
Since this event is under the auspices of the Legion of Mary, I don’t think I can do better than quote the words of the Legion’s revered founder, Servant of God Frank Duff, who admirably enlarged on this theme in his first publication, an essay entitled Can We Be Saints?
"From reading the lives of the Saints, one would conclude that they fall, roughly, into two classes: those who gave themselves to contemplation, and those who spent their lives in active works. In reality they were all alike. All were souls whose whole lives were prayer. Prayer was their business. Their good deeds were only valuable because they sprang from prayer; they bore the same relation to prayer that the trunk of a tree bears to the roots; good deeds are a visible part of prayer; and good deeds cannot live without prayer."
"The present is a period when successful appeal is being made to Catholics to show by works of charity the Faith that is in them. That the most ordinary act may become holy when inspired by a holy intention is well understood and the words of Christ Himself, assuring us that "Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family you did it to me," draws us powerfully on to the service of our neighbour."
"The possibilities of holiness here are immense. But it is not sufficiently recognised that a proper balance of regular prayer and good works is essential to perseverance in the latter. There is a tendency to consider good works as prayerful enough in themselves. Their variety makes them easy, while prayer is difficult. Besides, we like to see results, and usually we do not see the results of prayer. So we reduce our prayers to little or nothing satisfying ourselves with the recollection that we are doing plenty of practical work for our neighbour."
“Souls whose whole lives were prayer”. I don’t think anyone could read up on the lives of the saints without coming to the conclusion that this was their outstanding shared characteristic, that they fulfilled St. Paul’s injunction to pray without ceasing. Of course, not all prayer is structured prayer or vocal prayer-- the Catechism quotes the words of St. John Damascene, who describes prayer as the raising of the heart and mind to God. So we can be prayerful even when we are most active. And yet, you won’t find a saint, even the busiest saint, who did not also devote a great deal of time to prayer in the more conventional sense, time devoted specifically to prayer-- the rosary, Eucharistic adoration, and so forth. And, of course, the Mass.
In fact, saints are often visibly at prayer even while busy about other things. One person described an encounter with St. Mother Theresa thus: “She was very attentive as she faced me. I had the feeling that at the same time as she was speaking to me she was praying. The Rosary slipped constantly through her bony fingers. She was wholly with God and yet wholly with the people before her.” This is a common description of saints; they are very focused on other people, and yet also seem to be always in the presence of God.
This unity of prayer and action, or being directed towards both God and other people, is another reason devotion to the saints is important. I don’t want to get too much into Church politics in this talk, but I think it’s fair to say that there tends to be two contrasting tendencies amongst Catholics today. There are those who put the emphasis more on social justice, on the improvement of this world, and those who put the emphasis more on the sacred and the eternal. The social justice Catholic tends to emphasise service to man, while Catholics more focused on the sacred tend to emphasise our duties to God and the Church, such as evangelizing. The social justice Catholic can easily become so focused on serving others, in a very worldly sense of the term “service”, that he forgets about their eternal souls, or that Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world. All too often, he ceases to care about doctrine, and soon all that matters to him is expressing solidarity with whatever groups he believes, truly or falsely, to be oppressed. The logical end of this attitude is supporting all kinds of anti-Catholic measures such as same-sex marriage or abortion or euthanasia. But even if he doesn’t go so far, even if he keeps a precarious hold on orthodoxy, the emphasis is very much upon this world and not eternity. I think it’s fair to say we’ve all seen this. Sadly, if you log onto the websites of a lot of the dying religious orders today, you might find yourself wondering whether they are religious orders or secular charities.
On the other hand, there are those who put the emphasis on the sacred, on orthodoxy, on the salvation of souls. Some Catholics of this tendency, and please note I say some, can become so intent on proclaiming the truth that they are inclined to forget about charity. Fuelled by an admirable determination not to compromise or soft-soap the doctrine of the Church, they can sometimes become, to be blunt, angry jerks. What such people seem to be proclaiming to the world is that Catholicism makes you bitter and confrontational and aggressive, rather than joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, and so forth. I know this because I’ve fallen into this trap myself, and I still have to guard against it all the time-- many times a day. Sometimes, people of this sort justifies this attitude by statements such as these: love is seeking the good of the other, genuine charity is speaking the truth, and rebuking the sinner is a spiritual work of mercy. All of which is true, but none of which justifies acting like an angry jerk.
I’m not suggesting these two tendencies are as bad as each other. First off, I think the second tendency, those who put the emphasis upon orthodoxy, is closer to the truth, since Jesus tells us that the first commandment is to love God with all our heart, mind and soul. I also think the first tendency, the social justice tendency (for want of a better term), is, today, far, far more of a danger to the Church in general.
In any case, I think an immersion in the lives of the saints is a good tonic for the excesses of both for these tendencies. Some of our more abrasive Catholic like to dwell on the correspondence between Martin Luther and St. Thomas More, which was characterised by some very strident language on both sides. There are saints such as St. Jerome, who was notoriously cantankerous, or St. Bernadette, who had a no-nonsense attitude-- I like the story of St. Bernadette giving her brother a sound box on the ear when he admitted to accepting money for showing some tourists the exact site of her apparition.
However, my contention would be that the vast majority of saints have been remarkable for their gentleness, their patience, their warmth, their kindness, and so forth. Good is not nice, we are often told. But saints are generally very nice as well as very good. This is a fact I came across again and again in my study of Catholic saints. Very often, even the saints whose reputations lead you to expect they were rather ferocious turn out to have been surprisingly gentle. There are many saintly priests who have embodied the advice: “Be a lion in the pulpit and a lamb in the confessional”, and the same general principle is observable in the lives of saints who are not priests-- the most uncompromising orthodoxy combined with the tenderest charity.
Here’s an example I encountered only recently. St. John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar and priest who died in 1591 and who helped found the Discalced Carmelites. The Discalced Carmelites observed a stricter monastic regime than the other Carmelites of their time. His spiritual writings emphasise the need to purge ourselves of our own desires and appetites, and his own austerities were quite startling. One would expect he was a rather severe type of saint, but this is how one biographer describes him:
"When as a superior it was necessary for him to correct his subjects, he was cautious lest through impatience or anger he would succeed only in saddening or discouraging them. “He made his corrections with much gentleness and charity and always saw to it that the one being corrected would not leave his presence sad.”...Another characteristic of his “wonderfully gracious” manners was his custom of asking his subjects for their opinions in various matters or problems which arose. All of this created a holy environment of serenity and of joy in the relationships of friars to their superior.”
This was what St. Vincent de Paul said regarding gentleness: “God grant all missionaries the grace of accustoming themselves to treat their neighbours both publicly and privately, in a meek, humble and charitable manner, and never to employ invectives, reproaches or harsh words against anybody whomsoever.” He also said: “I have never, never succeeded when I have spoken with the faintest suspicion of harshness; I have always noted that if one wishes to move the mind, one must be ever on one’s guard against embittering the heart.”
This is what St. Josemaria Escriva said about rebuking sinners: “Nothing is gained by ill-treating people. When they are souls who need help, good advice, we are not going to treat them badly. They are spiritually sick, just as there are others who are mentally or physically sick. Don’t ill-treat them ever. Is that clear?”
I could quote many other examples of other saints remarkable for their gentleness, and who advocated gentleness. If you suspect I’m overstating the case, make the experiment yourself. Investigate the lives of the saints in depth. I’m confident you will find this is true. Why am I stressing this point so much? Because we live in an era when the Church is being relentlessly attacked from outside and also undermined from within. We all know this. The temptation to react with rage, bitterness and negativity is enormous. I advise we look to the lives to the saints to find a better response, to not only be as wise as serpents but also as gentle as doves.
Another reason to read the lives of the saints is because it increases our faith. One of the arguments I often make for the truth of the Catholic faith is the lives of Catholic saints. Sometimes this is in the most straightforward sense of miracles. We can look at the life of someone such as the Blessed Solanus Casey, an Irish-American Capuchin friar who died in 1957. An amazing number of miraculous cures and other supernatural favours are associated with this man, not only after his death but during his life. They are very well documented; you can log onto YouTube and see people who are still alive giving accounts of them on camera. This is not some figure lost in the mists of history. But it’s not just obvious miracles. Very often, reading the lives of the saints, we can see the operation of Providence in a way that’s difficult to dismiss. The history of the Legion of Mary itself is a case in point. Like so many saints, Frank Duff had a faith that God would intervene at the necessary moments, and we see it happen again and again. Indeed, he wrote a pamphlet called Miracles on Tap about one period in Legion history.
Another reason to read the lives of the saints is that it the examples of the saints helps us to bear our trials. The line from Hebrews, “Whom the lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges” can certainly be seen in saints’ lives. Let me take the example of Blessed Solanus Casey, who I just mentioned. He struggled with his priestly training to the extent that he was not ordained a full priest, but rather, a simplex priest. He was not allowed to hear confessions or preach homilies, and he was given jobs which were generally given to lay brothers rather than priests, such as greeting visitors to the monastery. But it was in this very task that God’s grace operated through him. And we very often see this pattern repeated in the lives of the saints. It isn’t just a case of the saying, “into each life some rain must fall”; it’s much more pronounced than that. Almost every saint seems to have been sent some very particular cross to shoulder; the is very clear. Nothing could be more encouraging to us in our own trials, to not only endure them but to find meaning in them.
I want to finish, not with my own words, but the words of G.K. Chesterton, my favourite writer, who is himself being investigated for sainthood. It’s spoken by a character in The Ball and The Cross, a novel that he published in 1909:
"You cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that tomorrow morning, in Ireland or in Italy, there might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well, now take the other types of human virtue; many of them splendid. The Elizabethan gentleman was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand still here in this meadow and be an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him? have you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon. And so it is and so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would inspire the London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of his Trade Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman when he obviously is not. Those names and notions are all honourable; but how long will they last? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last for ever. What will remain? I will tell you. The Catholic Saint will remain."
Thank you.
It was being recorded on camera, so I hope I might be able to post the video at some point.
Hello. My name is Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh. I work in the library of University College Dublin and I also write a blog called Irish Papist, which has been going since 2011. This year I published a book called Inspiration from the Saints, and the organizer of this event kindly asked me to speak to you on the theme of that book. I’m very happy to be here today.
I want to talk about Catholic saints and the inspiration we can derive from them, to help us in our efforts to live out urf faith. Of course, I’m preaching to the converted, as I’m sure every person in this room already has favourite saints, and a devotion to saints in general. So I’m simply sharing some ideas regarding the ways in which saints can help us, some ways of looking at the subject, which I hope might be helpful to you.
The title of this conference is “the Courage to be Catholic”, and I do think that the saints can give us crucial inspiration in this regard. The courage to be Catholic has two sides-- there’s the courage to defend and proclaim our faith in public, and then there is the courage to face our own internal struggles, which might be invisible to everyone else-- perhaps a struggle against bitterness, or envy, or addiction, or some similar enemy. The example of the saints can help us in both of these, the outer challenges and the inner challenges.
In my book, I was very strict about using the term saints only for those people who have been canonised or beatified-- that is, people who have been given the title Saint or Blessed by the Church. In this talk, I’m going to be a little more relaxed, and also use the term saint for those who are on earlier steps on the path to sainthood-- those who have been given the title Venerable, which means they have been recognized as showing heroic virtue, or Servant of God, which simply means their cause has been opened.
So why are the saints important? We all know they are, but if we were challenged on the question, what would we say? Well, here are my thoughts.
I imagine you will all have heard of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900 after a decade of insanity. His ideas were radical and often contradictory, but when it came to Christianity he was fundamentally a ferocious critic. One of his books was even called The Anti-Christ. Of the many critical things he wrote about Christianity, this might be the most memorable: “There was only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.”
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| Friedrich Nietzsche |
The sentiment is hardly unique to Nietzsche, although he was a master of prose and put it particularly memorably. Gandhi is reputed to have said: “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians.” And John Lennon certainly did say: “Jesus was alright, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” (That’s me and you he’s talking about there.) Comments like these, and any number of similar ones that I’m sure we’ve all heard, reflect a common belief: Jesus was all very well, but he was a one-off. His followers were all hypocrites at best and disappointments at worst. Christianity has never worked in real life, and perhaps it never could work in real life.
There are many possible replies to this criticism, but one response is simply to point to the saints of the Catholic church, people who really have followed in Jesus’s footsteps, who really have kept his words. Now and again, some critics of Christianity, making the same argument as Friedrich Nietzsche, will make an exception for St. Francis of Assisi, and maybe one or two others. But St. Francis is only one of many, many, many saints. It’s impossible to make an authoritative list, but there are certainly many hundreds of saints venerated in the Catholic Church. There is now a careful process by which saints are canonised, but for many centuries people became saints through popular acclaim—through the fact that people saw that they were holy. Many of these are very obscure and, often, all we have are their names. But the point I’m trying to make is that it’s certainly not just St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Theresa who were true followers of Christ. There were many hundreds of people, at the very least, who have risen to the challenge of the Christian ideal. Friedrich Nietzsche and John Lennon are wrong.
And these are only the saints who have been proclaimed saints. Nobody knows how many people have died as saints and are now in Heaven. The Book of Revelations, describing St. John’s vision of the blessed in Heaven, tells us it’s too great a number to be counted. So that is one reason the saints are important; they prove the Christian ideal is achievable, and has been achieved. It’s not just a beautiful aspiration.
One of the reasons I wrote my book was out of a frustration at some of the books about saints I’d read. I’d spent a lot of time looking for such books in recent years, but quite often, they left me unsatisfied. When I sought out books about saints, I didn’t really want to know a huge amount of detail about their lives, or the society they lived in. I wanted stories. I wanted stories that showed why they were saints, what made them exceptional and extraordinary-- their achievements, their triumphs, their ordeals. I wanted stories to inspire me.
Today I’m making the case that Catholics should immerse themselves in the lives of the saints, in the stories of the saints. If we are practicing Catholics, we are fighting a battle for every human soul, and that includes our own souls. We have to evangelize, and that includes evangelising ourselves, so to speak. We’ve all been bombarded every single day, every day of our lives, with a lot of mental rubbish-- all the false and tacky glamour of advertising and Hollywood and the entertainment business in general. That’s all in our heads, swirling around. We can’t get it out. But I think it’s a good idea to counteract it with other images, other stories. I think it’s a good idea to immerse ourselves in the lives of the saints, to contemplate them, and to try to model ourselves on them.
The term I use for this is “the evangelization of the imagination”. Today, many Catholics are very rightly considering the various fronts on which we can evangelize our contemporaries. Many of them concentrate on evangelization through beauty. This is a fine initiative, but it’s not going to reach everybody. There are unfortunate clods such as myself who prefer Def Leppard to Bach, who are more drawn to plain suburban churches than historic cathedrals, and-- although I’m rather scared of being lynched if I admit this here-- who quite like guitar hymns. So I don’t think evangelization through beauty, on its own, is sufficient. But I suspect that, for every person who is moved by Gregorian chant, there are more who are moved by stories and ideas that capture the imagination. It’s my belief that Ireland was lost to the Faith by way of the imagination -- that, from the sixties onward, the hearts and minds of the Irish people were gradually being corrupted by the allure of pop culture, consumerism, liberalism, and so forth. Catholicism came to seem dull and oppressive, unexciting, compared to the promise of a brave new world in which all barriers would be broken and endless new possibilities would be opened. Today, now that the emptiness of individualism and hedonism is becoming apparent, it’s an ideal time, in my view, to seek to persuade our contemporaries that Catholicism is actually exciting, challenging, poetic and ultimately liberating. It’s time to recapture the Irish imagination for the Catholic Faith. And one way to do this is through the lives and examples of the saints.
When it comes to the veneration of saints, as in many other ways, the Catholic Church is the great friend of human nature. As we all know, many of the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century rejected prayer to saints, which is of course prayer for the intercession of saints-- no different than asking a friend to pray for us. The theory was that direct prayer to God was all we needed. The Thirty-Nine articles of the Church of England describe the invocation of saints as “repugnant to the Word of God”. However, not praying to saints seems repugnant to human nature. This is one of those many areas where our Church is deliciously liberal, where it effectively tells us: “Knock yourself out”. The calendar of saints is filled to overflowing with saints of every race, nationality, age, career, educational attainment, and pretty much every other variable imaginable.
Of course, there are some commonalities. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the saints are completely different from one another. In my opinion, they are actually very samey in some ways. Jesus told us that the way to life was narrow and straight. And when I was researching my book, and trying to make it as interesting as possible for the reader, I did find myself confronted with the awkward fact that there is quite a lot of repetition in the lives of the saints. Yes, there are contrasts. The cerebral St. Thomas Aquinas, who spent his entire life thinking and writing, is very different from the passionate St. Francis of Assisi who was rather suspicious of books and scholarship. But, on the whole, the saints are much more like each other than they are unlike; at least, that would be my contention.
But this commonality is another reason we should immerse ourselves in the lives of the saints. As Christians, we are called to follow Christ, but this presents us with a bit of a problem. We know so little about Christ’s life. We only have one brief flash of his boyhood, and the rest of our knowledge of him comes from his last few years. Furthermore, the four Gospels very often tell the same stories. How do we follow the example of someone of whom we know so little, and who lived in a world so very different from our own? We’re all familiar with the question, “What would Jesus do?”. And we all know that people find very different answers to that question.
Well, we don’t have to guess what Jesus would do in every situation. St. Paul instructs his disciples in the letter to the Romans: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” As well as the instruction that the Church has given us in its doctrine and tradition, we have a long line of saints who have lived in every age and in pretty much every possible circumstance of human life. Rather than having to ask: “What would Jesus do in this situation?”, we can very often see what the saints, his most devoted followers, actually did. We can follow Christ by following the saints.
Saints are people who have developed a kind of second instinct, a supernatural second instinct, and show us what kind of responses we should seek to develop in particular scenarios. They socialise us, just as children are socialised by parents. As Catholics, we usually know what is wrong and right in theory, from the teachings of the Church, from catechisms, and so forth. But we also have to learn about emphasis and priority-- just how much emphasis we should place on a particular virtue, how much horror we should have before a particular sin, and so forth. The lives of the saints is a great school for this.
Here is an example-- attitudes towards sexual sin, towards impurity. Prudishness is often considered a fault today. It might be understandable, if we were trying to think out a Christian attitude for ourselves, to decide that we should avoid sinning against impurity but that we should also avoid prudishness. For instance, that we should be willing to laugh at risqué jokes so as not to seem “holier than thou” or sanctimonious, or to watch sexually explicit films which have artistic merit. We might take the text from Titus, “to the pure all things are pure”, and decide that a mature morality means being able to face the world as it is without being corrupted by it. However, when we read the lives of the saints, we very often find a severity which takes us aback. At least, it sometimes takes me aback. St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, advised his followers that, when it came to sexual temptation, “it is low cowardice to be brave”.
St. Gemma Galgani, an Italian mystic I often mention in my book, did not even want to undress for a doctor’s examination, and only did so with extreme reluctance. The Blessed Giorgio Frassati, a handsome Italian saint who died in 1925, who is often seen as rather cool and was concerned with social justice, once ordered an Italian bookseller to take some dirty books out of his shop window, threatening to call the police if he didn’t. And I imagine these books were pretty mild by our standards. So Catholic saints, in general, show a dread of sexual impurity, and even a dread of the occasions of sexual impurity, that can’t help but impress us. Of course, I’m not saying we should emulate all of these examples, or that they don’t owe something to historical context. I’m simply saying that they show us just what a value the saints put upon sexual purity. It seems highly unlikely, reading the lives of the saints, that many of us today are erring on the side of prudishness.
Hunger for the sacraments is another lesson we learn from saints. The Church tells us that the sacraments are crucially important, but we see this dramatized, as it were, in the lives of the saints. St. Thomas More famously refused to hurry from Mass even when King Henry VIII had sent a messenger to summon him. Venerable Edel Quinn, the great Legion of Mary missionary who will surely attain sainthood eventually, said: “I could assist at the Mass the whole day long”. Here is a description of her delight in Mass, as from the vice-postulator of her cause for sainthood: “To be deprived of Communion was one of the greatest sufferings she could conceive. At one period in Africa she was a patient in a non-Catholic sanatorium and was able to receive Holy Communion only once a week. She said later the privation of daily Communion gave her an experience of what hell must be like. When working in her Dublin office she made it a practice to attend seven o’clock Mass daily, not returning home for breakfast. Seemingly she remained in the church until after eight o’clock Mass and then went straight to work, having a snack in the office. On Sundays she normally attended two Masses before breakfast and four later Masses. And in her African diary the first entry each day is the number of Masses she had attended.”
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| Edel Quinn |
But If I was asked for one single characteristic which united the saints, apart from the obvious one that they were all followers of Jesus Christ, I would have no hesitation in answering: prayer. As I was researching my book, this theme struck me more and more. Of course, many others have remarked on this. St. Josemaria Escriva once wrote: “A saint without prayer? I don’t believe in such sanctity”.
Since this event is under the auspices of the Legion of Mary, I don’t think I can do better than quote the words of the Legion’s revered founder, Servant of God Frank Duff, who admirably enlarged on this theme in his first publication, an essay entitled Can We Be Saints?
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| Frank Duff |
"The present is a period when successful appeal is being made to Catholics to show by works of charity the Faith that is in them. That the most ordinary act may become holy when inspired by a holy intention is well understood and the words of Christ Himself, assuring us that "Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family you did it to me," draws us powerfully on to the service of our neighbour."
"The possibilities of holiness here are immense. But it is not sufficiently recognised that a proper balance of regular prayer and good works is essential to perseverance in the latter. There is a tendency to consider good works as prayerful enough in themselves. Their variety makes them easy, while prayer is difficult. Besides, we like to see results, and usually we do not see the results of prayer. So we reduce our prayers to little or nothing satisfying ourselves with the recollection that we are doing plenty of practical work for our neighbour."
“Souls whose whole lives were prayer”. I don’t think anyone could read up on the lives of the saints without coming to the conclusion that this was their outstanding shared characteristic, that they fulfilled St. Paul’s injunction to pray without ceasing. Of course, not all prayer is structured prayer or vocal prayer-- the Catechism quotes the words of St. John Damascene, who describes prayer as the raising of the heart and mind to God. So we can be prayerful even when we are most active. And yet, you won’t find a saint, even the busiest saint, who did not also devote a great deal of time to prayer in the more conventional sense, time devoted specifically to prayer-- the rosary, Eucharistic adoration, and so forth. And, of course, the Mass.
In fact, saints are often visibly at prayer even while busy about other things. One person described an encounter with St. Mother Theresa thus: “She was very attentive as she faced me. I had the feeling that at the same time as she was speaking to me she was praying. The Rosary slipped constantly through her bony fingers. She was wholly with God and yet wholly with the people before her.” This is a common description of saints; they are very focused on other people, and yet also seem to be always in the presence of God.
This unity of prayer and action, or being directed towards both God and other people, is another reason devotion to the saints is important. I don’t want to get too much into Church politics in this talk, but I think it’s fair to say that there tends to be two contrasting tendencies amongst Catholics today. There are those who put the emphasis more on social justice, on the improvement of this world, and those who put the emphasis more on the sacred and the eternal. The social justice Catholic tends to emphasise service to man, while Catholics more focused on the sacred tend to emphasise our duties to God and the Church, such as evangelizing. The social justice Catholic can easily become so focused on serving others, in a very worldly sense of the term “service”, that he forgets about their eternal souls, or that Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world. All too often, he ceases to care about doctrine, and soon all that matters to him is expressing solidarity with whatever groups he believes, truly or falsely, to be oppressed. The logical end of this attitude is supporting all kinds of anti-Catholic measures such as same-sex marriage or abortion or euthanasia. But even if he doesn’t go so far, even if he keeps a precarious hold on orthodoxy, the emphasis is very much upon this world and not eternity. I think it’s fair to say we’ve all seen this. Sadly, if you log onto the websites of a lot of the dying religious orders today, you might find yourself wondering whether they are religious orders or secular charities.
On the other hand, there are those who put the emphasis on the sacred, on orthodoxy, on the salvation of souls. Some Catholics of this tendency, and please note I say some, can become so intent on proclaiming the truth that they are inclined to forget about charity. Fuelled by an admirable determination not to compromise or soft-soap the doctrine of the Church, they can sometimes become, to be blunt, angry jerks. What such people seem to be proclaiming to the world is that Catholicism makes you bitter and confrontational and aggressive, rather than joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, and so forth. I know this because I’ve fallen into this trap myself, and I still have to guard against it all the time-- many times a day. Sometimes, people of this sort justifies this attitude by statements such as these: love is seeking the good of the other, genuine charity is speaking the truth, and rebuking the sinner is a spiritual work of mercy. All of which is true, but none of which justifies acting like an angry jerk.
I’m not suggesting these two tendencies are as bad as each other. First off, I think the second tendency, those who put the emphasis upon orthodoxy, is closer to the truth, since Jesus tells us that the first commandment is to love God with all our heart, mind and soul. I also think the first tendency, the social justice tendency (for want of a better term), is, today, far, far more of a danger to the Church in general.
In any case, I think an immersion in the lives of the saints is a good tonic for the excesses of both for these tendencies. Some of our more abrasive Catholic like to dwell on the correspondence between Martin Luther and St. Thomas More, which was characterised by some very strident language on both sides. There are saints such as St. Jerome, who was notoriously cantankerous, or St. Bernadette, who had a no-nonsense attitude-- I like the story of St. Bernadette giving her brother a sound box on the ear when he admitted to accepting money for showing some tourists the exact site of her apparition.
However, my contention would be that the vast majority of saints have been remarkable for their gentleness, their patience, their warmth, their kindness, and so forth. Good is not nice, we are often told. But saints are generally very nice as well as very good. This is a fact I came across again and again in my study of Catholic saints. Very often, even the saints whose reputations lead you to expect they were rather ferocious turn out to have been surprisingly gentle. There are many saintly priests who have embodied the advice: “Be a lion in the pulpit and a lamb in the confessional”, and the same general principle is observable in the lives of saints who are not priests-- the most uncompromising orthodoxy combined with the tenderest charity.
Here’s an example I encountered only recently. St. John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar and priest who died in 1591 and who helped found the Discalced Carmelites. The Discalced Carmelites observed a stricter monastic regime than the other Carmelites of their time. His spiritual writings emphasise the need to purge ourselves of our own desires and appetites, and his own austerities were quite startling. One would expect he was a rather severe type of saint, but this is how one biographer describes him:
"When as a superior it was necessary for him to correct his subjects, he was cautious lest through impatience or anger he would succeed only in saddening or discouraging them. “He made his corrections with much gentleness and charity and always saw to it that the one being corrected would not leave his presence sad.”...Another characteristic of his “wonderfully gracious” manners was his custom of asking his subjects for their opinions in various matters or problems which arose. All of this created a holy environment of serenity and of joy in the relationships of friars to their superior.”
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| St. John of the Cross |
This is what St. Josemaria Escriva said about rebuking sinners: “Nothing is gained by ill-treating people. When they are souls who need help, good advice, we are not going to treat them badly. They are spiritually sick, just as there are others who are mentally or physically sick. Don’t ill-treat them ever. Is that clear?”
I could quote many other examples of other saints remarkable for their gentleness, and who advocated gentleness. If you suspect I’m overstating the case, make the experiment yourself. Investigate the lives of the saints in depth. I’m confident you will find this is true. Why am I stressing this point so much? Because we live in an era when the Church is being relentlessly attacked from outside and also undermined from within. We all know this. The temptation to react with rage, bitterness and negativity is enormous. I advise we look to the lives to the saints to find a better response, to not only be as wise as serpents but also as gentle as doves.
Another reason to read the lives of the saints is because it increases our faith. One of the arguments I often make for the truth of the Catholic faith is the lives of Catholic saints. Sometimes this is in the most straightforward sense of miracles. We can look at the life of someone such as the Blessed Solanus Casey, an Irish-American Capuchin friar who died in 1957. An amazing number of miraculous cures and other supernatural favours are associated with this man, not only after his death but during his life. They are very well documented; you can log onto YouTube and see people who are still alive giving accounts of them on camera. This is not some figure lost in the mists of history. But it’s not just obvious miracles. Very often, reading the lives of the saints, we can see the operation of Providence in a way that’s difficult to dismiss. The history of the Legion of Mary itself is a case in point. Like so many saints, Frank Duff had a faith that God would intervene at the necessary moments, and we see it happen again and again. Indeed, he wrote a pamphlet called Miracles on Tap about one period in Legion history.
Another reason to read the lives of the saints is that it the examples of the saints helps us to bear our trials. The line from Hebrews, “Whom the lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges” can certainly be seen in saints’ lives. Let me take the example of Blessed Solanus Casey, who I just mentioned. He struggled with his priestly training to the extent that he was not ordained a full priest, but rather, a simplex priest. He was not allowed to hear confessions or preach homilies, and he was given jobs which were generally given to lay brothers rather than priests, such as greeting visitors to the monastery. But it was in this very task that God’s grace operated through him. And we very often see this pattern repeated in the lives of the saints. It isn’t just a case of the saying, “into each life some rain must fall”; it’s much more pronounced than that. Almost every saint seems to have been sent some very particular cross to shoulder; the is very clear. Nothing could be more encouraging to us in our own trials, to not only endure them but to find meaning in them.
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| G.K. Chesterton |
"You cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that tomorrow morning, in Ireland or in Italy, there might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well, now take the other types of human virtue; many of them splendid. The Elizabethan gentleman was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand still here in this meadow and be an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him? have you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon. And so it is and so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would inspire the London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of his Trade Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman when he obviously is not. Those names and notions are all honourable; but how long will they last? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last for ever. What will remain? I will tell you. The Catholic Saint will remain."
Thank you.
Poetry Tuesday: The Poetry of Chess
This morning, I took The Poetry of Chess from my bookshelves, not having looked at in a long, long time. I bought this book secondhand (in Greene's bookshop, a famous Dublin shop which is now closed) about ten years ago.
I bought this book for three reasons. One was that I'm interested in poetry, obviously. Another was that I was interested in chess (more on that in a bit). The third was that I delight in any book with a very specific subject-- the mere existence of such a book brings me joy. Very often, when I'm going about my work in the library, I come across books of this kind and my heart exults. Such books, to me, are celebrations of "the drunkenness of things being various".
(Please note, however, that I take no such pleasure in a book of this kind if it is written as a joke, or as an exercise in obscurity. Indeed, that takes all the joy out of it.)
What about my interest in chess? I was very interested in chess from about my sixteenth year to the end of my teens, and I retained a dwindling interest in it for a few years after that. My interest was sparked by the World Championship match between Nigel Short and Garry Kasparov in 1993. I began to play chess against various family and friends. At the height of the chess boom in my family there would be several games a day. Aside from my cousin, who routinely trounced me, I was fairly evenly matched with everybody in this little circle.
In my early twenties I joined Ballymun chess club. My interest in chess was considerably diminished by this time, but I was trying to be more extroverted. There were only three regular members in the club at this point, along with one occasional member. Here, I realized what a poor player I really was. As the elderly chairman of the club put it: "As a strategic player, you're poor. As a tactical player, you're...not bad". I didn't stay very long, and that was probably the end of my chess playing, apart from a few games here and there. I haven't played in years, and I may never play again.
However, my interest in chess was always as much aesthetic as it was competitive. I loved the board and the pieces (they are called Staunton pieces, incidentally). I loved the history of the game, especially its connection with the London restaurant Simpson's on the Strand, and the fact that the origins of the game lie "in the mists of history" (a phrase I use at every opportunity).
A book that utterly captivated me at this time was The Inner Game by Dominic Lawson (son of Nigel Lawson, the politician, and brother of Nigella, the celebrity chef). This was a first-hand account of the Nigel Short and Garry Kasparov match. It wasn't the reportage in the book which fascinated me so much as the insights into chess itself-- the dedication of its top-class players, and the inexhaustible depth of the game. Lawson quotes the phrase "the abysmal depths of chess", coined by Vladimir Nabokov, and this gripped my imagination. I have always loved everything abysmal, deep, bottomless. (The phrase is also quoted in the introduction to The Poetry of Chess.) As has often been pointed out, there are vastly more ways of playing even the first ten moves of the game than there are atoms in the known universe.
My interest in chess receded for various reasons, one of them being my realization that I wasn't very good at it. (I'm bad at games in general.) But the fact that the World Chess champion was beaten by a computer in 1997 also has something to do with it. This might not be very logical-- a car is faster than any human, but track athletics are not considered obsolete. Still, I can hardly help it. In 1981, when this book was written, Andrew Waterman could still write: "The best human players...continue to prevail against computer programmes. The human mind's most vital faculties cannot, it seems, be mechanically replicated." Well, I'm not so sure that playing chess can be considered among "the human mind's most vital faculties", but today it's not even a contest-- computers beat the best players routinely, and the graph is only going to go in one direction.
Waterman's introduction is quite enjoyable. He is a poet himself, but one of the modern school, so his view of poetry is not entirely congenial to me.
I strongly disagree with him here, for instance: "While the moderate chess player, who ought indeed and nowadays in general does refrain, not from studying, but from attempting publishable annotations of grand master games, at least has considerable experience of playing chess, armies of academics instead of sticking to their proper tasks of presenting literature to the young, and the modest clerical work of routine scholarship, burden libraries with inept literary-critical explication undeterred by their lack of first-hand experience of creative writing." C.S. Lewis articulated the most brilliant objection to this attitude (though I forget where): if only a poet can criticize other poets, how on earth does anyone know himself (or anyone else) to be a poet in the first place? It's a closed circle. But perhaps Samuel Johnson put the case more emphatically: "You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
All that aside, the introduction is a most enjoyable essay, partly because its subject is so singular. He covers all the ground: the similarities between chess and poetry, the differences between them, the typical metaphors drawn from chess in poetry, a potted history of poets writing about chess, the psychology of poets and of chess players, and an account of his own history playing the game. I could quote many passages, but I will content myself with one:
I once heard an eminent scientist, asked on television about higher creativity in astronomy, cite the chess champion Bobby Fischer talking of a "flash", a brief momentary vision of what might be conjured from the available situation, followed by the sheer detailed labour, necessary but anticlimactic compared with the moment of gestation, almost resented, to realize the conception in actuality. The experience is recognizable to any real poet. Eliot, in "The Three Voices of Poetry", writes that the poet "has something germinating in him for which he must find words; but he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words; he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order. When you have the words for it, the "thing" which the words had to be found has disappeared, replaced by a poem."
The book's table of contents shows how many eminent poets have drawn imagery from chess: Richard Lovelace, Oliver Goldsmith, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edward Fitzgerald, John Masefield, Howard Nemerov, Louise Macneice, W.B. Yeats, and many more.
Given this, it might be considered arrogant to include one of my own compositions in this post, rather than anything that appears in the anthology. If Andrew Waterman ever reads this, I hope he is not outraged. However, I did write a chess poem, in my late teens. It was inspired by the sight of a chess board after a game, the pieces standing where they were at the end of play:
The Chess Board
What's left on the black and white squares
When the players end the silent debate?
White pawns in an onslaught that nothing deters
And a king who is captured in mate.
And his fate goes unseen and unwept
For the gods have stepped out of the fray.
Not a glance now is spared, where such vigils were kept,
Now an ending has come to the play.
What's left of the struggle they fought?
A king caught in pointless defeat
And a meaningless win for the agonised thought
That came from this tenantless seat.
And the loser forgets in a while
All his toil on the black and white squares
And the pieces are swept from the rank and the file
And in the end nobody cares.
I bought this book for three reasons. One was that I'm interested in poetry, obviously. Another was that I was interested in chess (more on that in a bit). The third was that I delight in any book with a very specific subject-- the mere existence of such a book brings me joy. Very often, when I'm going about my work in the library, I come across books of this kind and my heart exults. Such books, to me, are celebrations of "the drunkenness of things being various".
(Please note, however, that I take no such pleasure in a book of this kind if it is written as a joke, or as an exercise in obscurity. Indeed, that takes all the joy out of it.)
What about my interest in chess? I was very interested in chess from about my sixteenth year to the end of my teens, and I retained a dwindling interest in it for a few years after that. My interest was sparked by the World Championship match between Nigel Short and Garry Kasparov in 1993. I began to play chess against various family and friends. At the height of the chess boom in my family there would be several games a day. Aside from my cousin, who routinely trounced me, I was fairly evenly matched with everybody in this little circle.
In my early twenties I joined Ballymun chess club. My interest in chess was considerably diminished by this time, but I was trying to be more extroverted. There were only three regular members in the club at this point, along with one occasional member. Here, I realized what a poor player I really was. As the elderly chairman of the club put it: "As a strategic player, you're poor. As a tactical player, you're...not bad". I didn't stay very long, and that was probably the end of my chess playing, apart from a few games here and there. I haven't played in years, and I may never play again.
However, my interest in chess was always as much aesthetic as it was competitive. I loved the board and the pieces (they are called Staunton pieces, incidentally). I loved the history of the game, especially its connection with the London restaurant Simpson's on the Strand, and the fact that the origins of the game lie "in the mists of history" (a phrase I use at every opportunity).
A book that utterly captivated me at this time was The Inner Game by Dominic Lawson (son of Nigel Lawson, the politician, and brother of Nigella, the celebrity chef). This was a first-hand account of the Nigel Short and Garry Kasparov match. It wasn't the reportage in the book which fascinated me so much as the insights into chess itself-- the dedication of its top-class players, and the inexhaustible depth of the game. Lawson quotes the phrase "the abysmal depths of chess", coined by Vladimir Nabokov, and this gripped my imagination. I have always loved everything abysmal, deep, bottomless. (The phrase is also quoted in the introduction to The Poetry of Chess.) As has often been pointed out, there are vastly more ways of playing even the first ten moves of the game than there are atoms in the known universe.
My interest in chess receded for various reasons, one of them being my realization that I wasn't very good at it. (I'm bad at games in general.) But the fact that the World Chess champion was beaten by a computer in 1997 also has something to do with it. This might not be very logical-- a car is faster than any human, but track athletics are not considered obsolete. Still, I can hardly help it. In 1981, when this book was written, Andrew Waterman could still write: "The best human players...continue to prevail against computer programmes. The human mind's most vital faculties cannot, it seems, be mechanically replicated." Well, I'm not so sure that playing chess can be considered among "the human mind's most vital faculties", but today it's not even a contest-- computers beat the best players routinely, and the graph is only going to go in one direction.
Waterman's introduction is quite enjoyable. He is a poet himself, but one of the modern school, so his view of poetry is not entirely congenial to me.
I strongly disagree with him here, for instance: "While the moderate chess player, who ought indeed and nowadays in general does refrain, not from studying, but from attempting publishable annotations of grand master games, at least has considerable experience of playing chess, armies of academics instead of sticking to their proper tasks of presenting literature to the young, and the modest clerical work of routine scholarship, burden libraries with inept literary-critical explication undeterred by their lack of first-hand experience of creative writing." C.S. Lewis articulated the most brilliant objection to this attitude (though I forget where): if only a poet can criticize other poets, how on earth does anyone know himself (or anyone else) to be a poet in the first place? It's a closed circle. But perhaps Samuel Johnson put the case more emphatically: "You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
All that aside, the introduction is a most enjoyable essay, partly because its subject is so singular. He covers all the ground: the similarities between chess and poetry, the differences between them, the typical metaphors drawn from chess in poetry, a potted history of poets writing about chess, the psychology of poets and of chess players, and an account of his own history playing the game. I could quote many passages, but I will content myself with one:
I once heard an eminent scientist, asked on television about higher creativity in astronomy, cite the chess champion Bobby Fischer talking of a "flash", a brief momentary vision of what might be conjured from the available situation, followed by the sheer detailed labour, necessary but anticlimactic compared with the moment of gestation, almost resented, to realize the conception in actuality. The experience is recognizable to any real poet. Eliot, in "The Three Voices of Poetry", writes that the poet "has something germinating in him for which he must find words; but he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words; he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order. When you have the words for it, the "thing" which the words had to be found has disappeared, replaced by a poem."
 |
| Andrew Waterman |
The book's table of contents shows how many eminent poets have drawn imagery from chess: Richard Lovelace, Oliver Goldsmith, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edward Fitzgerald, John Masefield, Howard Nemerov, Louise Macneice, W.B. Yeats, and many more.
Given this, it might be considered arrogant to include one of my own compositions in this post, rather than anything that appears in the anthology. If Andrew Waterman ever reads this, I hope he is not outraged. However, I did write a chess poem, in my late teens. It was inspired by the sight of a chess board after a game, the pieces standing where they were at the end of play:
The Chess Board
What's left on the black and white squares
When the players end the silent debate?
White pawns in an onslaught that nothing deters
And a king who is captured in mate.
And his fate goes unseen and unwept
For the gods have stepped out of the fray.
Not a glance now is spared, where such vigils were kept,
Now an ending has come to the play.
What's left of the struggle they fought?
A king caught in pointless defeat
And a meaningless win for the agonised thought
That came from this tenantless seat.
And the loser forgets in a while
All his toil on the black and white squares
And the pieces are swept from the rank and the file
And in the end nobody cares.
Monday, October 29, 2018
In Praise of Advertising
I think about advertising a lot. I think it's possible I think about advertising more than most other people. I've had many thoughts about it in the course of my lifetime, and I could just as easily write a post entitled: "Against advertising."
But who even needs to write such a post? The ills of advertising are so obvious, they hardly need to be mentioned. Advertising irritates all of us every single day, most likely. Even when we accept that it's necessary, that it makes the world go around, it's still very often irksome.
Less obviously, I've often been bothered that advertising is so tacky. Why can't it be more tasteful? Why does it so often have to be garish, silly, gimmicky, and so forth? Some advertising can be artistically very appealing, for instance, this Irish ad for peat briquettes from 1986. I can't help thinking the world would be a better place if advertisers sought to give their ads some artistry, some restraint.
So please don't think the purpose of this post is provocative, or contrarian. I agree that the level of advertising in our era is a cause for concern, and that advertising can be a very shabby industry.
But advertising has also brought a lot of joy into my life-- not only in the sense that there are many fine and artistic advertisements, but in a more particular and personal sense, as well.
I've often mentioned my purple notebook on this blog. Simply explained, it's a little notebook full of memories, images, lines of poetry, and other items which inspire me. They don't just inspire me; the common feature of purple notebook entries is that they never cease to inspire me, they never grow old. I can ponder them repeatedly and they continue to speak to me.
Jung had his red book. Why shouldn't I have my purple book? (Indeed, with the popularity of Jordan Petersen, who often delves into archetypes and the collective unconscious, my purple notebook seems quite intellectually fashionable.)
Every Saturday I take a long walk and browse my purple notebook. Yesterday, I realized (for the first time) how many of my purple notebook entries refer to advertising, in one way or another. I just counted, and there are eighteen of them. And it's a short text, not more than than two thousand words.
One of the things I like about advertising is something which is often held against it, and sometimes rightly held against it. That is: hype.
On the whole, I love hype. This struck me very clearly one night, a few years ago, when I looked up into the sky and saw that there was a full moon. For a moment, I saw the moon purely as a physical object, a ball of rock in the sky. And I realized how much I was missing in that view; how much the moon had been "built up" in our imaginations by all the legends, myths, poems, songs, and allusions that it's featured in, down the centuries.
The moon itself is a beautiful thing. But the idea of the moon is even more precious, in my mind.
How much of human culture could be accurately described as "hype"? Poetry, song, painting, dance, fireworks, the accentuation of femininity and masculinity, all of these could fairly be called hype. One might use the term "celebration" instead. But what's the difference? Indeed, advertisers often make use of the term "celebration" ("to celebrate the release of our autumn range...")
The word "celebration" is one that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, too. What does it actually mean? What do you do when you celebrate?
I'm a bit of a mixed-up person in that I see the world with a kind of double vision. I see things from both a romantic and a relentlessly rationalistic viewpoint-- although I inevitably favour the romantic view. Indeed, my problem with rationalists is that they don't go far enough. Rationalists like to complain that national anthems, or men holding the door open for women, or various other ceremonial and symbolic actions, are silly mummery. And I suppose one could argue that they are. But how many other things in life are "silly mummery", when you get right down to it? Shaking hands, saying "thank you", wishing somebody well, keeping your mouth closed when you eat, covering your nakedness for the sake of decency....what is the rational defence of any of this?
(I take this reaction against rationalism so far that the argument that any custom, rule, or practice is silly and illogical tends to recommend it to me.)
I could easily get lost in this subject, so I will press on and say: I like advertising because it celebrates. It hypes. It might be celebrating only in order to sell you stuff, but is that the worst thing in the world?
I'll take an example of an advertising-related entry in my purple diary: "Bed/duvet packaging with picture of dark-haired woman."
This is a memory of an picture I saw on the label of a bed, or a duvet, or something, which showed an attractive dark-haired woman lying in bed, with her eyes closed. This was in my early childhood. Of course, the fact that it was a picture of an attractive woman was much of the appeal, but it could hardly be all of it, since I must have seen any number of other ads showing attractive women. No, there was more to it than that.
It was the fact that the woman was doing something so mundane that appealed to me. She made it look...what? Glamorous? Exciting? Sexy?
No, none of those words applied. The whole point was that it was still mundane. Its mundanity had simply been heightened and elevated. I'm reminded of the Police song, "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic." Every little thing this lady did would be made magical, even when it was mundane. Besides, I had never seen bedtime as in any way exciting before. (And this sight certainly didn't convert me,, as I hated bed-time all through my childhood. Most of my "purple notebook" moments were almost subliminal, things that hardly registered with me at the time, that I only realized had burrowed into my soul many years later.)
It isn't only beautiful women in advertisements who possess this power of elevating the workaday world, in my eyes. All sorts of advertisements do this, even advertisements that don't feature people at all.
This is the thing I like about most advertisements-- somehow, mysteriously, they make life seem more appealing. So many advertisements seem (at least to me) like advertisements for life itself.
(A memory rises to the surface at this point. In the summer of 1998-- I remember the date precisely, since I remember what I was doing at this time-- I was going through something of a depression, for all sorts of reasons. I was lifted out of the depression, at least temporarily, by a bus advertisement for the fizzy drink Fanta, whose caption read: "Welcome to the world.")
The world in advertisements is cleaner, brighter, better framed, prettier, and apparently more meaningful. Looking through this window might be expected to disillusion me about this world, but it doesn't. Somehow, it makes this one seem more appealing. After all, there's nothing impossible, for the most part, in the world portrayed in advertisements. There's nothing even particularly implausible. It's just a spruced-up version of this world.
So that's the main reason I like advertisements. They make the world itself seem brighter, shinier, more attractive.
Another reason I like advertisements is their sheer enthusiasm.
I generally avoid debates about "capitalism", because the word has so many meanings it's ridiculous. As a faithful Catholic, I accept the teachings of the Church, as far as they can be discerned-- I think it's fair to say that every modern Pope, right back to the Leo XIII at least, has affirmed that our current economic system is in serious need of reform. Amen.
Having said all that, there are many things I like about capitalism, and one is that it's based upon pleasing people. True, it's based upon pleasing customers, but nearly everyone is a potential customer. The purpose of business is to make money, but it does that (to a great extent) by trying to make people happy. And so advertisements tend to radiate this bias towards happiness, towards pleasing people.
I've never bought anything from a TV shopping channel, and I've only ever been exposed to them accidentally-- because I happened to be in some place where such a channel was on TV. But I must admit, I've always felt my mood being lifted by them. The presenters are almost evangelical about the vacuum cleaners, coffee-makers and foot-baths they're selling. There's something child-like about their excitement, something I can't help warming to. Once again, their zeal seems to transcend its actual object, and to pervade their whole environment. If they get this excited about a hair-dryer-- well, there are much more exciting things than hair-dryers in the world!
Another thing I like about advertisements, and the world of advertisements, is the absence of tragedy. Even when there is tragedy in advertisements, it's not so bad as it might be. (Of course, I'm not talking about the kind of advertisements that are intended to shock, or to warn. I'm talking about ordinary commercial advertisements.) The ad that comes to mind in this instance (although it's not in my purple notebook) is one I encountered when I was working in UCD's veterinary science library. One of my tasks was to stamp certain pages in the periodicals we received, and one of these periodicals had an advertisement for a drug used to treat HIV. The photograph on the ad was very simple-- it simply showed a youngish man looking into the camera, and holding a net bag of fruit and vegetables. Presumably, the picture was set at an outdoor market, or somewhere like that. He looked perfectly happy and well, even though he was obviously meant to represent a man who was HIV positive. The ad had no caption, as far as I can remember, but the message was clear: being HIV positive is by no means the end of the world (especially with this drug).
And that's generally the message of all ads that touch on the tragic, whether it's an ad for a funeral home, or for life insurance, or for some kind of counselling service: it's not so bad. It's endurable. There's no need to lose your calm, or to despair. And I find this very soothing and consoling.
It's not that I don't respect tragedy, or the tragic dimension of life. One of the reasons I'm a conservative and a romantic is because I do respect it. And one of the reasons utopianism is so unappealing, to me and to many others, is because it's tone-deaf to the high tragedy of human existence. The human condition drips with pathos, and that gives it a grandeur and a dignity that progressives often miss. So much of all that human hearts endure cannot be dispelled by legislation, or technology, or social improvements. We are not lab rats, thank goodness, So I am not anti-tragedy..
But it's nice to take a mental holiday in a world without tragedy, without shadows.
In the world of advertisements, families are always sitting around the table at dinner, or absorbed in a board game, or playing in a paddle pool, or otherwise occupied and united. Couples are always leaning towards each other over candle-lit dinners. Nobody is ever at a loose end, or bored (unless the boredom is immediately rectified), or suffering from any malady other than the one the ad tackles.
Even maladies are made desirable by advertising. There's an ad which shows a woman yawning, with the caption: "Tired of being tired?". She looks so deliciously drowsy, it makes me want to be tired.
What is the moral of this blog post? Well, there isn't one, particularly. I'm just describing a mental phenomenon which is of interest to me, and may be to others-- but I do think it throws a bit of a sidelight on a more general question. That is, the whole question of the ideal, or even the idyll.
Some people (observational comedians, media studies professors, newspaper columnists, and so forth) seem to harbour a hostility towards the ideal in itself. Think of how the term "two point four children" has been used to derisively, so often. Or think how certain theologians like to dismiss the Catholic ideal of family or marriage because it doesn't "reflect the reality" of peoples' situations. Or think how much ridicule has been heaped on the idylls of Irish romantic nationalism since about the middle of the twentieth century, if not before. Debunker after debunker set out to show that the Irish peasant was not a noble savage but miserable, overworked, bored, etc. etc.
This last reminds me of some of my favourite lines form Yeats, taken from his poem "The Fisherman". This passage comes after he has described the cynicism and opportunism he perceived in the Ireland of his time:
Maybe a twelve-month since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face
And gray Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark with froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream—
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream.
But who even needs to write such a post? The ills of advertising are so obvious, they hardly need to be mentioned. Advertising irritates all of us every single day, most likely. Even when we accept that it's necessary, that it makes the world go around, it's still very often irksome.
Less obviously, I've often been bothered that advertising is so tacky. Why can't it be more tasteful? Why does it so often have to be garish, silly, gimmicky, and so forth? Some advertising can be artistically very appealing, for instance, this Irish ad for peat briquettes from 1986. I can't help thinking the world would be a better place if advertisers sought to give their ads some artistry, some restraint.
So please don't think the purpose of this post is provocative, or contrarian. I agree that the level of advertising in our era is a cause for concern, and that advertising can be a very shabby industry.
But advertising has also brought a lot of joy into my life-- not only in the sense that there are many fine and artistic advertisements, but in a more particular and personal sense, as well.
I've often mentioned my purple notebook on this blog. Simply explained, it's a little notebook full of memories, images, lines of poetry, and other items which inspire me. They don't just inspire me; the common feature of purple notebook entries is that they never cease to inspire me, they never grow old. I can ponder them repeatedly and they continue to speak to me.
Jung had his red book. Why shouldn't I have my purple book? (Indeed, with the popularity of Jordan Petersen, who often delves into archetypes and the collective unconscious, my purple notebook seems quite intellectually fashionable.)
Every Saturday I take a long walk and browse my purple notebook. Yesterday, I realized (for the first time) how many of my purple notebook entries refer to advertising, in one way or another. I just counted, and there are eighteen of them. And it's a short text, not more than than two thousand words.
One of the things I like about advertising is something which is often held against it, and sometimes rightly held against it. That is: hype.
On the whole, I love hype. This struck me very clearly one night, a few years ago, when I looked up into the sky and saw that there was a full moon. For a moment, I saw the moon purely as a physical object, a ball of rock in the sky. And I realized how much I was missing in that view; how much the moon had been "built up" in our imaginations by all the legends, myths, poems, songs, and allusions that it's featured in, down the centuries.
The moon itself is a beautiful thing. But the idea of the moon is even more precious, in my mind.
How much of human culture could be accurately described as "hype"? Poetry, song, painting, dance, fireworks, the accentuation of femininity and masculinity, all of these could fairly be called hype. One might use the term "celebration" instead. But what's the difference? Indeed, advertisers often make use of the term "celebration" ("to celebrate the release of our autumn range...")
The word "celebration" is one that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, too. What does it actually mean? What do you do when you celebrate?
I'm a bit of a mixed-up person in that I see the world with a kind of double vision. I see things from both a romantic and a relentlessly rationalistic viewpoint-- although I inevitably favour the romantic view. Indeed, my problem with rationalists is that they don't go far enough. Rationalists like to complain that national anthems, or men holding the door open for women, or various other ceremonial and symbolic actions, are silly mummery. And I suppose one could argue that they are. But how many other things in life are "silly mummery", when you get right down to it? Shaking hands, saying "thank you", wishing somebody well, keeping your mouth closed when you eat, covering your nakedness for the sake of decency....what is the rational defence of any of this?
(I take this reaction against rationalism so far that the argument that any custom, rule, or practice is silly and illogical tends to recommend it to me.)
I could easily get lost in this subject, so I will press on and say: I like advertising because it celebrates. It hypes. It might be celebrating only in order to sell you stuff, but is that the worst thing in the world?
I'll take an example of an advertising-related entry in my purple diary: "Bed/duvet packaging with picture of dark-haired woman."
This is a memory of an picture I saw on the label of a bed, or a duvet, or something, which showed an attractive dark-haired woman lying in bed, with her eyes closed. This was in my early childhood. Of course, the fact that it was a picture of an attractive woman was much of the appeal, but it could hardly be all of it, since I must have seen any number of other ads showing attractive women. No, there was more to it than that.
It was the fact that the woman was doing something so mundane that appealed to me. She made it look...what? Glamorous? Exciting? Sexy?
No, none of those words applied. The whole point was that it was still mundane. Its mundanity had simply been heightened and elevated. I'm reminded of the Police song, "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic." Every little thing this lady did would be made magical, even when it was mundane. Besides, I had never seen bedtime as in any way exciting before. (And this sight certainly didn't convert me,, as I hated bed-time all through my childhood. Most of my "purple notebook" moments were almost subliminal, things that hardly registered with me at the time, that I only realized had burrowed into my soul many years later.)
It isn't only beautiful women in advertisements who possess this power of elevating the workaday world, in my eyes. All sorts of advertisements do this, even advertisements that don't feature people at all.
This is the thing I like about most advertisements-- somehow, mysteriously, they make life seem more appealing. So many advertisements seem (at least to me) like advertisements for life itself.
(A memory rises to the surface at this point. In the summer of 1998-- I remember the date precisely, since I remember what I was doing at this time-- I was going through something of a depression, for all sorts of reasons. I was lifted out of the depression, at least temporarily, by a bus advertisement for the fizzy drink Fanta, whose caption read: "Welcome to the world.")
The world in advertisements is cleaner, brighter, better framed, prettier, and apparently more meaningful. Looking through this window might be expected to disillusion me about this world, but it doesn't. Somehow, it makes this one seem more appealing. After all, there's nothing impossible, for the most part, in the world portrayed in advertisements. There's nothing even particularly implausible. It's just a spruced-up version of this world.
So that's the main reason I like advertisements. They make the world itself seem brighter, shinier, more attractive.
Another reason I like advertisements is their sheer enthusiasm.
I generally avoid debates about "capitalism", because the word has so many meanings it's ridiculous. As a faithful Catholic, I accept the teachings of the Church, as far as they can be discerned-- I think it's fair to say that every modern Pope, right back to the Leo XIII at least, has affirmed that our current economic system is in serious need of reform. Amen.
Having said all that, there are many things I like about capitalism, and one is that it's based upon pleasing people. True, it's based upon pleasing customers, but nearly everyone is a potential customer. The purpose of business is to make money, but it does that (to a great extent) by trying to make people happy. And so advertisements tend to radiate this bias towards happiness, towards pleasing people.
I've never bought anything from a TV shopping channel, and I've only ever been exposed to them accidentally-- because I happened to be in some place where such a channel was on TV. But I must admit, I've always felt my mood being lifted by them. The presenters are almost evangelical about the vacuum cleaners, coffee-makers and foot-baths they're selling. There's something child-like about their excitement, something I can't help warming to. Once again, their zeal seems to transcend its actual object, and to pervade their whole environment. If they get this excited about a hair-dryer-- well, there are much more exciting things than hair-dryers in the world!
Another thing I like about advertisements, and the world of advertisements, is the absence of tragedy. Even when there is tragedy in advertisements, it's not so bad as it might be. (Of course, I'm not talking about the kind of advertisements that are intended to shock, or to warn. I'm talking about ordinary commercial advertisements.) The ad that comes to mind in this instance (although it's not in my purple notebook) is one I encountered when I was working in UCD's veterinary science library. One of my tasks was to stamp certain pages in the periodicals we received, and one of these periodicals had an advertisement for a drug used to treat HIV. The photograph on the ad was very simple-- it simply showed a youngish man looking into the camera, and holding a net bag of fruit and vegetables. Presumably, the picture was set at an outdoor market, or somewhere like that. He looked perfectly happy and well, even though he was obviously meant to represent a man who was HIV positive. The ad had no caption, as far as I can remember, but the message was clear: being HIV positive is by no means the end of the world (especially with this drug).
And that's generally the message of all ads that touch on the tragic, whether it's an ad for a funeral home, or for life insurance, or for some kind of counselling service: it's not so bad. It's endurable. There's no need to lose your calm, or to despair. And I find this very soothing and consoling.
It's not that I don't respect tragedy, or the tragic dimension of life. One of the reasons I'm a conservative and a romantic is because I do respect it. And one of the reasons utopianism is so unappealing, to me and to many others, is because it's tone-deaf to the high tragedy of human existence. The human condition drips with pathos, and that gives it a grandeur and a dignity that progressives often miss. So much of all that human hearts endure cannot be dispelled by legislation, or technology, or social improvements. We are not lab rats, thank goodness, So I am not anti-tragedy..
But it's nice to take a mental holiday in a world without tragedy, without shadows.
In the world of advertisements, families are always sitting around the table at dinner, or absorbed in a board game, or playing in a paddle pool, or otherwise occupied and united. Couples are always leaning towards each other over candle-lit dinners. Nobody is ever at a loose end, or bored (unless the boredom is immediately rectified), or suffering from any malady other than the one the ad tackles.
Even maladies are made desirable by advertising. There's an ad which shows a woman yawning, with the caption: "Tired of being tired?". She looks so deliciously drowsy, it makes me want to be tired.
What is the moral of this blog post? Well, there isn't one, particularly. I'm just describing a mental phenomenon which is of interest to me, and may be to others-- but I do think it throws a bit of a sidelight on a more general question. That is, the whole question of the ideal, or even the idyll.
Some people (observational comedians, media studies professors, newspaper columnists, and so forth) seem to harbour a hostility towards the ideal in itself. Think of how the term "two point four children" has been used to derisively, so often. Or think how certain theologians like to dismiss the Catholic ideal of family or marriage because it doesn't "reflect the reality" of peoples' situations. Or think how much ridicule has been heaped on the idylls of Irish romantic nationalism since about the middle of the twentieth century, if not before. Debunker after debunker set out to show that the Irish peasant was not a noble savage but miserable, overworked, bored, etc. etc.
This last reminds me of some of my favourite lines form Yeats, taken from his poem "The Fisherman". This passage comes after he has described the cynicism and opportunism he perceived in the Ireland of his time:
Maybe a twelve-month since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face
And gray Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark with froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream—
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream.
I agree it's a long way from Yeats's Fisherman to a family playing Trivial Pursuit around the coffee table. Indeed, I rather fear Yeats will haunt me for quoting his lines in this context, since he had little but scorn for the bourgeois, the suburban, and commercialism. But my point is this: why should we view the ideal as a trick, a fraud? Why can't we see it as simply an ideal, something that elevates rather than degrades/
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Ode to Vanilla
God bless vanilla ice-cream.
God bless Tuesday mornings.
God bless nil-nil draws.
God bless slow news days.
God bless small provincial towns
With hardly a claim to fame.
God bless the ill-endowed school trophy cabinet.
A world without them would be dull indeed.
God bless Tuesday mornings.
God bless nil-nil draws.
God bless slow news days.
God bless small provincial towns
With hardly a claim to fame.
God bless the ill-endowed school trophy cabinet.
A world without them would be dull indeed.
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Poetry Tuesday: My New Initiative
I've been writing about the importance of poetry recently. In fact, while trying to find something I'd written on this blog many years ago, I encountered another post making the same argument in pretty much the same terms. This is what I wrote, in January 2013:
Poetry seems to me to be the great test of a society's culture; more than anything else, the thing that separates a society from a civilization, a civilized life from an uncivilized life, a first class magazine from a second class magazine, and a liberal education from an illiberal education. Poetry is never a priority. There is always something more pressing, more amusing, more compelling, more productive. Poetry is something we can always dispense with. But even a little bit of poetry makes all the difference in the world. And even amateurish, navel-gazing, rambling poetry is better than no poetry at all.
So I decided to do something about it. I am instituting Poetry Tuesday, and hoping other people get into the act. But, even if nobody does, I hope to keep up with it myself.
What is Poetry Tuesday? The concept is as simple as can be. It's to do something poetry related every Tuesday. I suppose it could be purely private, like reading a poem or writing a poem. But I was thinking of something more public-- since we are all on the internet now, I was thinking of something like posting a poem (your own or somebody else's) on social media, or a blog, or some other platform.
But it doesn't have to be a whole poem. It can be a verse, or a line.
Nor does it have to be a primary text. It can be an appreciation, or a critique, or a reflection on poetry in general.
Pretty flexible, isn't it? Furthermore, the definition of "poetry" can be as broad as you like.
Almost at random, I am choosing an Oscar Wilde poem which I think is rather undervalued, "Requiescat":
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
Poetry seems to me to be the great test of a society's culture; more than anything else, the thing that separates a society from a civilization, a civilized life from an uncivilized life, a first class magazine from a second class magazine, and a liberal education from an illiberal education. Poetry is never a priority. There is always something more pressing, more amusing, more compelling, more productive. Poetry is something we can always dispense with. But even a little bit of poetry makes all the difference in the world. And even amateurish, navel-gazing, rambling poetry is better than no poetry at all.
So I decided to do something about it. I am instituting Poetry Tuesday, and hoping other people get into the act. But, even if nobody does, I hope to keep up with it myself.
What is Poetry Tuesday? The concept is as simple as can be. It's to do something poetry related every Tuesday. I suppose it could be purely private, like reading a poem or writing a poem. But I was thinking of something more public-- since we are all on the internet now, I was thinking of something like posting a poem (your own or somebody else's) on social media, or a blog, or some other platform.
But it doesn't have to be a whole poem. It can be a verse, or a line.
Nor does it have to be a primary text. It can be an appreciation, or a critique, or a reflection on poetry in general.
Pretty flexible, isn't it? Furthermore, the definition of "poetry" can be as broad as you like.
Almost at random, I am choosing an Oscar Wilde poem which I think is rather undervalued, "Requiescat":
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
Monday, October 22, 2018
In Belfast
Here I am giving a talk on the subject of my book to a Legion of Mary conference in Queen's University, Belfast, on Saturday. It was the first time I've been north of the Irish border, so it was a very interesting day for many reasons. In fact, I spent most of Sunday writing it up in my diary!
It was being filmed so hopefully I will be able to link to it at some stage. I think it went well. I hope it did!
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Poetry and Humanity
The title of this blog post is as pompous as it gets. Its theme is very simple, though. Here it is: I believe that one of the great virtues of poetry is that it helps preserve our humanity. By "poetry", I mean reading poetry, reciting poetry, and (especially) writing poetry. I've written on this topic before, but I feel drawn to it again.
Of course, we are human from the moment of conception to the moment of our death. Even after we die, our bodies are called "human remains". So you could say that the phrase "preserves our humanity" doesn't actually mean anything, that we can't help being human anyway.
But surely only a very tiresome person would pretend not to understand the phrase. Humanity isn't just a species, it's a quality. It's impossible to describe, but we all know what it means. We understand expressions such as: "I want to feel like a human and not a machine", "That bank treats its customers in a very human way", "She has written and recorded a very human album", "I'm only human", etc. etc.
The nature of humanity has been a favourite theme for poets and writers through the ages. One of the most famous meditations is from Alexander Pope:
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great...
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Hamlet's words are no less famous: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
There are many, many other examples. Again and again, when writers reflect upon the human condition in its broadest sense, they tend to focus upon one particular feature : that man, although a limited and fallible being, has effectively infinite potential. As a priest of my acquaintance likes to say, man is a "self-transcender".
I think few (if any) human activities reflect man's infinite potential so well as poetry.
Why poetry? Well, to be blunt, you don't need any talent to write poetry. Of course, you need talent to write great poetry. But anyone can write a poem.
Poetry is as flexible in its subject matter as it is in its form. Nothing is off limits. Time, space, and possibility are no boundaries. It's a form in which the fullness of our humanity-- emotional, imaginative, spiritual, and so on-- can be expressed without any hindrance.
I love great poetry. Great poetry is one of the things that has meant most to me in my life, especially in my teens and twenties. In more recent years, however, I've developed an interest in poetry from a different point of view: not necessarily as a fine art, but as a form of self-expression.
Why should anyone hesitate to write poetry? Or to read their poetry to others? Why is this so taboo?
Society has always been complex, and perhaps modern society is particularly complex. We can't avoid compartmentalizing our humanity-- and the humanity of others. In a single day, we fill many roles: driver, passenger, pedestrian, parent, customer, employee, manager, patient, spectator, applicant, and so on through an endless list of other roles.
This is inevitable, in my view, but it does rather diminish our humanity. Even if you love the ordinary and the mundane, as I do, there are depths in every human being which cannot be fully expressed in a supermarket queue or a trip to the dentist. We are being squeezed all the time.
I wish poetry played a bigger part in everyday life. I often fantasize about this.
Sometimes I imagine a scenario in which a newly-published collection of poetry is the first item on the evening news. In this scenario, there is a studio discussion of the themes and imagery among a panel of literary critics and general "pundits". Over video-link up, somebody gives his theories on the poet's creative influences. Why should such an idea be so unimaginable, almost comical?
Or imagine if friends in a pub or café simply read their poems to each other, that this was considered natural and normal. Can you imagine if you were meeting a friend and you casually remarked: "I've written a poem and I'd like to read it to you"?
Or can you imagine if workplaces had poetry days, where the employees took the day off to participate in a poetry workshop, to compose poetry, read it, and discuss it? Does this thought make you cringe? Why should it?
I love hearing about people writing poetry. I love hearing about people reciting poetry. I love hearing about people framing poetry and putting it on their bedroom walls and making it a part of their daily lives. Every time I hear about something like that, it seems to me like a little triumph.
I think the world needs more poetry, to remind us of our humanity, and the humanity of other people.
Of course, we are human from the moment of conception to the moment of our death. Even after we die, our bodies are called "human remains". So you could say that the phrase "preserves our humanity" doesn't actually mean anything, that we can't help being human anyway.
But surely only a very tiresome person would pretend not to understand the phrase. Humanity isn't just a species, it's a quality. It's impossible to describe, but we all know what it means. We understand expressions such as: "I want to feel like a human and not a machine", "That bank treats its customers in a very human way", "She has written and recorded a very human album", "I'm only human", etc. etc.
The nature of humanity has been a favourite theme for poets and writers through the ages. One of the most famous meditations is from Alexander Pope:
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great...
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Hamlet's words are no less famous: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
There are many, many other examples. Again and again, when writers reflect upon the human condition in its broadest sense, they tend to focus upon one particular feature : that man, although a limited and fallible being, has effectively infinite potential. As a priest of my acquaintance likes to say, man is a "self-transcender".
I think few (if any) human activities reflect man's infinite potential so well as poetry.
Why poetry? Well, to be blunt, you don't need any talent to write poetry. Of course, you need talent to write great poetry. But anyone can write a poem.
Poetry is as flexible in its subject matter as it is in its form. Nothing is off limits. Time, space, and possibility are no boundaries. It's a form in which the fullness of our humanity-- emotional, imaginative, spiritual, and so on-- can be expressed without any hindrance.
I love great poetry. Great poetry is one of the things that has meant most to me in my life, especially in my teens and twenties. In more recent years, however, I've developed an interest in poetry from a different point of view: not necessarily as a fine art, but as a form of self-expression.
Why should anyone hesitate to write poetry? Or to read their poetry to others? Why is this so taboo?
Society has always been complex, and perhaps modern society is particularly complex. We can't avoid compartmentalizing our humanity-- and the humanity of others. In a single day, we fill many roles: driver, passenger, pedestrian, parent, customer, employee, manager, patient, spectator, applicant, and so on through an endless list of other roles.
This is inevitable, in my view, but it does rather diminish our humanity. Even if you love the ordinary and the mundane, as I do, there are depths in every human being which cannot be fully expressed in a supermarket queue or a trip to the dentist. We are being squeezed all the time.
I wish poetry played a bigger part in everyday life. I often fantasize about this.
Sometimes I imagine a scenario in which a newly-published collection of poetry is the first item on the evening news. In this scenario, there is a studio discussion of the themes and imagery among a panel of literary critics and general "pundits". Over video-link up, somebody gives his theories on the poet's creative influences. Why should such an idea be so unimaginable, almost comical?
Or imagine if friends in a pub or café simply read their poems to each other, that this was considered natural and normal. Can you imagine if you were meeting a friend and you casually remarked: "I've written a poem and I'd like to read it to you"?
Or can you imagine if workplaces had poetry days, where the employees took the day off to participate in a poetry workshop, to compose poetry, read it, and discuss it? Does this thought make you cringe? Why should it?
I love hearing about people writing poetry. I love hearing about people reciting poetry. I love hearing about people framing poetry and putting it on their bedroom walls and making it a part of their daily lives. Every time I hear about something like that, it seems to me like a little triumph.
I think the world needs more poetry, to remind us of our humanity, and the humanity of other people.
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