The Sources of Energy

I was re-reading my diary entry for Halloween night of 2023. That night, I watched The Wicker Man from 2006 (not exactly my choice) and I was also reading a book called Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders. What I wrote really does express some of my most enduring and powerful feelings, whatever that may mean to anyone else.

My entry refers to "the sources of energy", a phrase from Freud that I've come to think as "talismanic", as I put it. I encountered it more than twenty years ago in A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. Freud (a staunch atheist, of course) used it when he was urging a friend to raise his son as a Jew: "If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else." Of course, I'm not thinking of its application to Judaism per se (for all my profound respect for Judaism), but rather its application to tradition and the sacred and everything that is excluded by mere rationalism.

I was glancing through a book, Christmas: A Biography. I was moved by the description of the Puritans in America. Even though I love Christmas, I’ve always been strangely sympathetic to the Puritan antagonism to Christmas. Perhaps because it means they’re taking it seriously. It’s the same way I’ve always had a sympathy for book burners and people who riot at plays.

I felt very moved and even agitated, thinking of holidays and traditions, observances, rituals, customs, all that kind of thing. Halloween and the Wicker Man and the Christmas book and thoughts of poetry all ran through my head.

My whole life seems to be about going against the stream of utilitarianism and rationalism and sameness and disenchantment. Observing holidays and reading long poetry and cultivating eccentricity and attending Mass and praying the rosary and reading the Bible somehow all seem to be a part of this. What Freud called “the sources of energy”, a phrase that seems talismanic to me and that recurs to me over and over again.

I guess I feel a sort of faith that it’s the poetic, the symbolic, the immaterial, the imaginary, the intangible, the visionary that really fuels culture and society. And even if it isn’t, even if the dialectical materialists are right, I will always be on the side of those things. And I feel a contentment and eagerness in thinking of that.

I don’t think it’s incompatible with Christianity at all. I think all good things are compatible with Christianity. The important thing is not to lose sight of what’s MORE important. People and their welfare are more important than traditions. Eternal salvation is the most important thing. But that doesn’t mean that these things AREN’T important. They contribute to the joy and meaning of life, and I think they are also ennobling and may well be an aid to salvation.

Reading poetry, especially long poetry, is particularly important. Even if it has no immediate benefit. It’s so counter-cultural it’s immeasurable.

In Praise of Solemnity, Revisited

In my last blog post, I used the word "solemnity", and linked to the poem "In Praise of Solemnity" that I published here eleven years ago. I decided it would bear re-posting. It's the closest thing to a "verse essay" I've ever written and it articulates many of my abiding feelings about solemnity, "kitsch", irony, and several other important subjects.

If you're the kind of person who thinks Monarch of the Glen (the painting below) is kitsch, or who has ever sarcastically used the phrase "ye olde tea-shoppe", then you might be the kind of jerk I'm reacting against in this post. As for me, I'm a different kind of jerk.

In one line, I complain about the blanket coverage of sport at the weekends (on radio, for instance). This isn't an attack on sport itself, or even spectator sports, or even commercialized spectator sports. I'm not one of those people who talk snootily about "sportsball", and in fact, such people annoy me greatly. I think sport is a valuable part of life. Actually, if I rewrote the poem, I would remove that reference, just to put as much clear blue water between me and the "sportsball" crowd. But I'll let it stand for now.

In Praise of Solemnity

Call it pomposity, bombast, what you will;
Call it vulgarity, but I crave it still;
The cinema called the Odeon or the Lux;
The epigraph of Everyman's Library books;
Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide--
The monument that is not too proud for pride
Splendid in bronze or marble; the public house sign
That blazons "licensed to sell beers and wine"
In gold italics; The Monarch of the Glen;
The silhouette of ladies and top-hatted gentlemen.

I have seen so much of death, this past two years;
The awful shock when a whole life disappears;
The empty words at the funeral home, the walk to the grave;
Name after name some adoring mother and father gave
Etched onto stone. It won't let me forget
The rarity of every heartbeat, every breath.

They cannot convince me that life is a trivial thing;
A pretty toy that a man should be ready to fling
Away with a laugh; (were mine to be sacrificed
I would leave it with tears and agony, just like Christ);
The world may rebuke me with taking life seriously;
But I cannot get my tongue round the verb to be
As easy as that. Existence itself should shame
The whimsicalists who teach us that life is a game.

But let there be games, and laughter, and nonsense, and sport,
And idleness, and whimsy of every sort.
Let life be complete, let life be filled to the brim
And overflowing. But-- should all life be a whim?
What relish has laughter, when laughter goes on all the time,
When mirth may not even give way to let in the sublime
For a half hour, or less? As love is to aimless lust
True mirth is to this. I don't want to laugh if I must.

But laughter itself has its dignity stolen away
And the man who walked into a bar is considered passé--
For a joke is a rite, and a joker a ritualist,
And a punch-line's too formal a thing to allow to exist
In a era when randomness stands for all humour, all art,
All beauty, all meaning; a world with a whirligig heart.

But on a clear night, when I go out and look at the stars
How painfully, painfully, all our frivolity jars
With so lofty a sight; those pinpricks of iciest flame
In the ocean of night put our freaks and our follies to shame;
Under the clear silver gaze of the stars and the moon
How can a man not feel degraded to play the buffoon?

But still we have gameshow on gameshow, and hip-hop, and memes,
And bachelor parties with weird and un-wonderful themes,
And twelve magazines about cars on the newsagent shelves
And eighty-eight photos on Facebook we took of ourselves
All exactly the same. We have advertising campaigns
About doughnuts and dogfood and toothpaste and hard-to-shift stains
And the news gives us Hollywood gossip and fighting in court
And Saturday morning to Sunday evening of sport,
And playwrights write plays about nothing, and artists splash mud
On a canvas, and newspaper critics declare it is good,
And in the museum there are interactive displays
Where once there were exhibits. Nobel laureates praise
The lyrics of rappers, and nobody thinks this is odd;
Oh man! Man! The heir of the ages! The image of God!

Enough! We belong to eternity. We have a soul.
All around us, unthinkable clusters of galaxies roll;
Behind us lie millions of years, and before us our doom;
Imagination and wonder find limitless room
In the ocean of being. Around us, our brethren, mankind;
Each one with a measureless soul and a fathomless mind;
And calling us onwards, the joy that is higher than mirth,
The joy of the unsmiling stars and the serious earth,
The dim light of dusk and the pale light of dawn, and the ghost
Of the myriad dead; all the joy that moves us the most;
The joy of the straight-faced urchin consumed in his game
Or the worshipper's eyes lit up by the candle's soft flame
Before his saint's shrine, or the lover lost in his love,
Or the girl alone in a field, agape at the glories above.

Blanchardstown Oratory

I was going through my archives and I came across this photograph of the oratory in Blanchardstown shopping centre. I've been there about a half a dozen times, including attending several Masses there. I'm quite drawn to it, it has a solemn and catacomb-like atmosphere.

It was common to have oratories in Irish shopping centres, back in the day. The Omni Centre in Santry has one, with Eastern Orthodox icons on the walls. The Ilac Centre had one up until a few years ago. Naturally, new shopping centres don't.

The shortest Mass I ever attended, by far, was in the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre oratory. I think it lasted all of six minutes. (I was so surprised I checked my phone as soon as it was ever.) I don't think this is a good thing, although I tend to prefer short Masses to long one. (An Australian friend told me once that Irish-Australian Catholics are known for their preference for short Masses. The more pious will happily attend several Masses a day, but they want them to be short. Personally I prefer short Masses because otherwise my concentration and sense of reverence lags.)

I don't know how easily it can be seen in the photograph, but in this oratory, the window at the back is behind a wall so you only see the light filtering out from it. I like that very much. It's very solemn. It satisfies my priggishness and my craving for solemnity.

Sometimes I think there should be completely dark rooms in every building, where somebody can go and sit periodically and then re-emerge into the wonder of light.