A Smattering of Social Media Snippets

Well, it's been another long absence from blogging! It's through no reluctance to blog, but simply a matter of access to computers. I very rarely have access to a desktop computer these days, as this strange interlude of history continues, and this blogging platform really requires a desktop.

However, Facebook is a much more convenient way of firing off one's thoughts and ideas. Here are some things I've said in the past few weeks. (They may be of interest. Isn't that the whole assumption behind social media, anyway?)

I will return to more regular blogging-- but who knows when?

 
To me the value of nostalgia lies not so much in the object as in the attitude itself. Nostalgia is a creative action of the soul. Yes, it can be unhealthy, but I think it's mostly not.

Here's a question. How many of my Facebook friends consider themselves nationalists and what does this mean to you?

I consider myself a nationalist. Partly this is filial piety towards my father, grandfather, and all the generations who invested so much in the vision of an Irish nation. But even more, it's because I think the world is a richer place-- for everyone-- if we protect and cultivate meaningful diversity, diversity between countries. Especially in our era of globalization.

But I am a Catholic first and foremost so my nationalism has to be consistent with Church teaching. I've come to accept that a lot of current nationalist attitudes towards immigration are not consistent with Church teaching. (I realize that could be argued, but this is my interpretation.) I would like it if we we could cultivate a nationalism and even a populism which is not so preoccupied with immigration. I also understand the concerns on this matter and I resent that there can't be a calm discussion about its implications.

Personally I wish that all the energy and sacrifice that was poured into Irish political nationalism had gone into cultural nationalism instead. We have a state, but do we have a country? Perhaps Patrick Pearse would have done better to continue his educational and literary work, rather than leading the 1916 Rising. I say that in all respect to the bravery and sacrifice of the rebels. I don't really care about a united Ireland, as things stand. What's the point if we are culturally globalized anyway?

I'm writing in the Irish context but I'm also interested in what my friends from other countries think in their own contexts.

"Ní bhíonn bocht dháiríre ach an té atá gan aisling. Ní bhíonn beo ach an duine a fhéachas lena aisling a chur i gcrích."

Nílim ar aon intinn le Máirtín Ó Cadhain maidir le mórán, ach aontaím leis anseo.

Me and my father, some years ago

Does anyone else out there take an immense delight in reading old magazines and periodicals?

I love how specific they are to a moment in time, in obvious ways and in less obvious ways. After all, "a moment in time" is such an elusive thing. It looks backward to the past and forward to the future, in a way not only unique to that historical moment, but to the particular writer and to the audience they are addressing.

I dislike historical fiction for this very reason. It's impossible to recreate the lived experience of a particular moment in social history. The harder you try, the more laboured and contrived it seems.

I want more tradition, but I want it to pervade ordinary life. I am for the traditionalism of Tuesday morning on a workday. The traditions, customs and rituals that can fill the most ordinary moments are the ones that count to me, not the "big ticket" traditions that happen once a year or every now and then, and require great expense and planning. They are important, too, but they seem far less important. What is the point of cramming all our traditions into weddings, funerals, baptisms, Christmas, big sporting occasions, etc., if ordinary daily life becomes completely drab and humdrum?

For the same reason, I'm not attracted to the idyll of living in some sleepy, old-fashioned village. I want to be in the belly of the beast. I want to take contemporary life at its most soulless and utilitarian and try to make the most of that.

The Arian controversy, as you know, hung on the question of whether Jesus was divine or created. I often think how many Arians must have felt they had a slam-dunk case in John 14:28, "The Father is greater than I". This seems inarguable, doesn't it? And yet virtually all Christians reject the Arian position today.

This is why I am so reluctant to appeal to the "plain" meaning of Jesus's words, or to pit my judgement against the Magisterium. If we can go wrong so easily with Christ's own words, why should the same not apply to Church documents?

I think the association of ideas plays a massive role in human life, one habitually underrated. I notice it even in the littlest things. For instance: I regularly have to give directions in the library, and I notice that whenever I say: "Go to the right of the escalators", people virtually always say: "I go upstairs?". (Well, not anymore, because once I'd noticed this I started to clearly specify that they should stay on the same floor. But before that, they always asked this.)

I'm especially prone to association of ideas myself, sometimes to a comical and ridiculous level. Sometimes I become drowsy in a particular place, or reading a particular book, simply because I've been drowsy in the same situation before.

The Ilac shopping centre in Dublin used to have-- when I was a kid-- a fountain or water feature in the centre, with hot air balloons rising high into the air, and glass lifts which rose over the roof from which to see the cityscape. It also had a café over the fountain, on a kind of mezzanine level, whereby you could look down into the water.

Strangely, I noticed a link in my memory, whereby every time I remembered a particular book of Years criticism I read, I thought of this part of the fountain, the balloons, the lifts, and the café. But though I also read that book a long time ago, I don't think I read it there. So why does my memory link them? I think because that area above the fountain seems symbolic of the sublime and elevated to me. Took ages to make that link. The mind is a funny thing.

Incidentally, are biscuits (or cookies, as Americans say) better dunked in tea/coffee, or undunked? I used to dunk them all the time. Now I'm tending not to.

How weird it is that we give the same name to the ear-piercing, jarring noise a police-car makes, as we do to the creatures who produced such irresistible music in Greek mythology?

I asked people yesterday, in a post here, for their views regarding pop culture, high culture, and folk culture. Most people were quite withering about pop culture.

I agree with them. I think pop culture has had a catastrophic effect on society. And yet... Can I wish the cinema away? It has brought so much magic into my life. I have happy memories of watching all eleven series of Frasier with my father, just before his final illness. I have happy memories of watching Fawlty Towers with my family, and Star Trek with my brothers. I can't really wish those away.

There is the austere conservative side of me which thinks we would all be better off sticking to books and telling stories around the fire. But another part of me is fascinated by pop culture as a kind of modern-day equivalent to folk culture. Are Batman and Jean-Luc Picard our equivalent of King Arthur or Finn Mac Cumhail? I see how they differ. Do the differences outweigh the similarities, invalidate them?

Michael Collins is often presented as the hard-headed, pragmatic man of action, in contrast to De Valera's romantic idealism. But this is a passage from Collins's book The Path to Freedom:

"We have secured the departure of the enemy who imposed upon us that by which we were debased, and by means of which he kept us in subjection. We only succeeded after we had begun to get back our Irish ways, after we had made a serious effort to speak our own language, after we had striven again to govern ourselves. We can only keep out the enemy, and all other enemies, by completing that task. We are now free in name. The extent to which we become free in fact and secure our freedom will be the extent to which we become Gaels again."

These are the things that strike me as important and imperilled as I enter into my mid-forties, in 2020.

1) Cultural diversity-- the real sort, not the nominal, skin-deep sort. That specialness and character should be preserved against the tide of sameness. I worry about this all the time, incessantly.

2) Poetry. Poetry seems ever more important to me. Poetry seems, not only essential in itself, but the necessary corrective to all that is utilitarian, banal, and dehumanising in society. And it seems to me that poetry has never been more marginalized in the life of society than it is today.

3) Something I can only evoke by a term such as "folklore", or "oral tradition". Ballads. Parlour games. Campfire tales. Local legends. Everything that is not commercialized, commodified, passively consumed, or mass marketed.

I am always preoccupied by these subjects. I don't claim they are more important than others. But they feel most urgent to me.



And what about the Faith? Of course, the Faith. But the more I learn of the Faith the calmer and surer I feel of it. Our Lord's promise to St. Peter is a sure rock we can rest on. We need the Church to save us, not the other way round. That victory has been won already.

Saw a guy in a café today. Irish, in his twenties or thirties. Marvel comics tee-shirt. Liverpool F.C. bag. Reading a Harry Potter book.

Nothing against those things individually but I found the sight depressing and depressingly typical.

Here is a crazy idea I had today. Do you think there might actually be too much emphasis on family in today's society and that this might actually be damaging the family? Bear with me here.

This thought came to me as I was contemplating the Irish of today. I wonder what is important to them in life. Most don't care about religion. Most don't care about culture, beyond Netflix. Most don't care about politics very much, at least not in any idealistic sense.

But I think it unfair to assume they only care about consumerism, sport and entertainment. If you asked them what was most important to them in life, I bet the majority would say family.

Does our privatized, self-referential society place so much expectation and pressure on the family, without a wider horizon, that it actually puts unbearable strain on family life?

Chonaic mé an scannáin "Áit Ciúin" san phictiurlann aréir. Céad turas chuig an scáileán mór tar éis na srianta Covid. Scannán uafás, agus uafásach maith. Scríobh agus stiúir John Krasinski é. Tá an domhan faoi smacht eachtrannaigh ó domhan eile, itheann said duine ar bith a dheanann torann glórmhar. Leanann an scéal teaghlach amhain. Barrsamhail an-dearfach don teaghlach agus don athair ach go h-airithe.

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell may be the book which disappointed me most in my life. Great title, great idea. A long, long novel (or series of novels, or roman fleuve) in which an old man looks back on his life, and the fortunes of a large group of his friends and acquaintances over decades. I loved the idea. But I found the execution very disappointing, and never finished it. (As with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, I got absurdly far and then gave up). Anyone else read it?

I like the idea of a roman fleuve but it would have to be worth the investment of time.

Philip Larkin loved A Dance to the Music of Time, and said he only wished it was longer. What do I know?

Should the Church be counter-cultural or should it try to accommodate itself to the culture? I think it has to be both. "Moving with the times" is easy, but pure oppositionalism is also easy. And sterile.

When I read the writings of JPII, I'm struck by how this supposed hardliner went as far as he could in recognising the elements of truth and virtue in modern currents of thought and in other religions, while steadfastly rejecting the evil parts.

Is this so different to what the Church has always done? When we read about Christian Europe in the Dark Ages, how do we account for the incessant tribalistic warfare, the pious Christian kings with many mistresses, the slavery, the Christianization of pagan feasts and customs? The Church has always and everywhere been trying to "encounter the culture" and "enter into dialogue" as far as I can tell.

Running to my foxhole now.

A few days ago I posted: "I love Ireland but it has no soul".

Today I was out and about and found myself pondering this again. I think Irish people are kind and funny and warm, for the most part. I certainly don't think I'm better than anyone. But...

It's hard to describe the "but", as huge as it seems to me. Few people really seem to care about anything bigger than themselves, or to have any burning convictions of any kind. It all feels so cramped, shrivelled, windowless. It reminds me of Burke's phrase: "the lives of men become no more than the flies of a summer".

I'm not necessarily talking about religion here. It is religion, but also folklore, tradition, belief in a cause, romanticism, all those things. Everything that gives life grandeur and depth. They seem missing from contemporary Ireland to me.

 
Why am I so preoccupied by the fear of cultural homogenization and the desire to protect traditions? I think about this all the time and have far as long I can remember.

I'm not even sure the world IS becoming more homogenised. It's a hard thing to discern because you have to take all sorts of different things into account. Perhaps the world grows more homogenous in some ways but more diverse is others. And who is to say definitively if one sort of diversity is superior to another? I feel sure of the homogenization thesis in my heart. But I also know the heart is deceitful above all things. Either way this idea haunts me.