The Complete Purple Notebook Part Seven

 What is my purple notebook? A notebook of inspiring memories, of various kinds. I describe it here, and list the first few entries, explaining what they mean to me.

Thomas Nagel, blue flame. Nagel is a philosopher-- an atheist-- who writes about fundamental matters of metaphysics and reality. Once, when I was reading a quotation from him, I found myself picturing the blue flame on a gas oven. When someone questions the very nature of reality, everything solid and taken-for-granted seems as evanescent as that blue flame-- and it's intoxicating.

Single-panel cartoons. "Tell them I died unrepentant". When personal computers began to go mainstream, I find myself reading an issue of a general-interest magazine entirely devoted to the subject. There was a cartoon of a man on his death-bed, saying to those around him: "Tell them I never bought a PC. Tell them I died unrepentant." I love single-panel cartoons lik that. They encapsulate a whole cosy world in one frame. I also find death-beds a cosy idea. As an idea. I'd rather not occupy one any time soon. But, "to pass upon the midnight with no pain..."

Cosy, chunky jumpers. No comment needed.

Steam rising from tea. Ditto.

Data's poem in Star Trek. In an episode of Star Trek, the android Data recites a poem he has written, for the benefit of another crew member, whose opinion on it he seeks. Can you imagine that in any other grown-up TV show? Poetry is the ultimate luxury. It's completely unnecessary. And wherever anyone finds time to make it a priority, life is exalted.

Political campaigns, thesis and book dedications, film productions. Excitement, focus, cameraderie. I always want to be 'on the ground floor' of something big. Or even something small.

Jeremy Paxman, The Victorians, brandy and Coke. Brandy and coke is my tipple-- it tastes like Christmas pudding. My brother bought me a DVD about the Victorians presented by the British broadcaster Jeremy Paxman. It was absorbing, and made me thirsty for more ideas and more brandy and Coke.

 Seeing out a back window through a front window. The most evocative thing in the world. Somehow the world filtered through those two frames is transformed.

Curtains make a house a home.  From a previous post I wrote: "I remember a book of stories I had in my childhood, which included a few ghost stories. In one particular ghost story, there was one passage where a boy looks at a new house and feels a chill, then reflects that it will look less spooky with curtains up, since-- as his mother always says-- "curtains make a house a home". The phrase, hardly profound in itself (but new to me, back then) had a powerful effect on my mind, and still does.

If anyone were to ask me to summarize my social philosophy in one phrase (which seems, unfortunately, highly unlikely to happen), I might answer: "Curtains make a house a home". The curtains in question being ceremony, tradition, ritual, convention, chivalry, custom, politeness, taboo, community and all those other intangibles that (to adapt Burke) economists, sophisters, calculators, radicals, revolutionaries, progressives, libertarians, feminists, and one-track minds of every sort will never understand. 

Russian dolls toy, early childhood, Star Trek monitor.  A very early childhood memory-- dimmer than dim. I was playing with some Christmas gift, some set of toys that fit into each other like Russian dolls. And somehow my mind was on Star Trek-- the original series, which I've never liked much. I was thinking especially of the monitor on the bridge, through which the crew see the cosmos around them. A sense of slightly spooky wonder.

Corridors of my invented world. In the aforementioned book about writing fantasy, horror, and science-fiction, one (female) novelist said the ultimate thrill of writing was having the reader enter her invented world; something like "the fields, chambers, battlegrounds, and corridors of my invented world". But it was the word 'corridor' that electrified me. It has always seemed one of the most exciting words to me. Anyone can walk down a corridor at any moment. And the fact that corridors are relatively mundane somehow made the idea of an invented world that included them more solid and convincing and entrancing. An invented world that even has corridors-- how magical! I suddenly wanted to invent a world with corridors. SO badly.

The books on the shelf. Sober, magisterial. Image of old men with big glasses.

Moment in Eason's with parents, Turlough, CDs. My parents were wonderful and my upbringing was fortunate, but we rarely DID things all together. This is a happy memory of a quarter of an hour we spent browsing CD's in a shop in the city centre-- my brother, my mother, my father and me. Just browsing CD's, not going anywhere or doing anything or having any serious purpose. So rare, and so happy.

 Girl putting poem with decorative border up on wall. In my teens, I found an anthology of poems chosen by teenagers, with written accounts of why they chose them and liked them. This transported me. One girl chose 'El Dorado' by Edgar Allen Poe and even said she had written it out on a nice piece of paper, put a decorated border around it, and put it up on her wall. I had never heard of teenagers putting up anything except soccer and music posters on their walls. Poetry is the ultimate luxury.

A Whole New World and the poetry in it. A school text book.

That red-haired Irish fan in snooker hall. I read a soccer magazine in which Irish soccer fans were recounting their memories of the 1990 World Cup-- Ireland's first World Cup, and a massive event in Ireland. One story was told by a thirty-something fellow with red-hair, who was (in the accompanying photograph) sitting in a snooker hall, holding a snooker queue. He struck me as being quintessentially Irish, an Irishman of a certain type-- gentle, manly without being loutish, respectful, educated, fun-loving but not a party animal. I wish I could get a copy of that magazine. Maybe it's better remembered?

Africa's space and silence.  The first poem we studied in the second year of my secondary schooling was called 'First Day at School' by Prunella Power. It wasn't a good poem, but I was excited by the attention the teacher lavished on analysing its lines. It was about a girl's first day at a new school. She had obviously come from Africa, because she wonders about the other girls; "What would they know about Africa's space and silence?" Those words stuck with me-- as a symbol of poetry, and of the drama of human experience.

Coke and Snopes and the Science of Christmas. I spent most of one Christmas reading article after article on the urban legends website Snopes.com. I also drank a lot of Coke that Christmas. I'd also been given a book as a Kriskindle gift, at my first library Christmas party-- Can Reindeer Fly? The Science of Christmas. The magic of Christmas is how lots of experiences run together and form a chord.

It's also an example, to me, of how it's hard to tell whether any particular activity is worthwhile. Around then, I was also reading A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell-- a series of novels that is very celebrated. I remember almost nothing from those novels, which seemed such a laudable thing to read, while the memory of browsing articles on urban legends and swilling Coke remains a precious one.

US Airways, Two and a Half Men.  I hate the show, but somehow the memory of seeing it on the screen during a flight with my favourite airline is a very happy one. Maybe because sit-com sitting rooms are always so clean, and because it looked so strangely and intriguingly out of place.

 Rathfarnham Castle, RTE news, Rosary book. I went to a play staged in the rather unusual setting of Rathfarnham Castle, a castle in a suburn in Dublin. Before it started I had a drink in a local pub. The pub TV was showing RTE news-- RTE is Ireland's national broadcaster-- and the news was all quite insular. Only a few regulars were in the pub. I was reading a book about the rosary. It felt like a rural pub, and for a moment I could daydream Ireland was still Catholic Ireland-- a rather sleepy, holy, agricultural country.

 Great fire of London sticker, Kitty's. It was the summer of 1995. My parents, my younger brother, and myself were staying with my aunt Kitty and uncle Willy, on their farm in Limerick. This was the only time we were all there together. My parents were in the pub with my aunt and uncle. Me and my brother were in the farm-house. My father phoned me and quoted Browning, sounding ridiculously out of place, far away, and near, all at once. We had the run of the house. On the light-switch in the hall, my brother had stuck up a sticker that came with one of our comics-- it had some cartoon picture saying that only six people had died in the Great Fire of London. That didn't seem too bad. Nothing seemed too bad. Life seemed spacious and hospitable.

RTV rental ads. A huge cardboard cut-out ad in my local TV rental shop, in the eighties, showing a dazzling woman resplendent in a dazzling gown at a dazzling Regency ball. Once again, the contrast between glamour and the everyday-- making both seem more precious.

Portugese Africa and the West, The Jungle is Neutral etc. Titles of books on the shelf, at home, that awed me with their grown-upness, when I was a kid.

Dark Side of the Moon. Christmas morning, some time in the 1980s. Everybody awake very early, before daylight. My elder brother got a telescope from Santa. It came with a chart of the moon, and I encountered for the first time this phrase, which is one of the most poetic I know.

Big pictures of album covers in Celtic Music Shop. Everything seems to mean more when it's made bigger. The centrepiece of this shop's window display is the cover of some recently-released album blown up to a huge size. It gives it an air of great event and consequence.

RTE eighties ads. One of the most recent memories in my Notebook. I was working at my desk and listening to ads from Irish TV in the 1980s through headphones. The nostalgia!

Mystery of school texts in shops. When I was about thirteen I went with my mother to buy school textbook for 'big' school. I found myself looking at the text-books for the senior years and imagining what Everests of intellect they must represent. It was an intimidating but an inspiring thought.

Cleaning Michelle's apartment, EWTN sermon on female martyr. One day I was cleaning out Michelle's apartment while she slept. I was watching a sermon on EWTN, on a laptop, about some female martyr of ancient times. I felt both useful and spiritually elevated. I rarely feel both useful and spiritually elevated.

Halloween party, Coultry. I love special times and places. When I was a kid I went to a family Halloween party. Fireworks, fruit and nuts, fancy dress. It has always seemed to be the example par excellence of a special time ever since. I've craved the world to be more like that.

Louis MacNeice

Since my teens I have been an admirer of the Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice. His best and most anthologised poem, "Snow", is one of those exceedingly rare poems which has described a particular idea so well that the idea itself has almost become the poet's property. The words "incorrigibly plural" now come unbidden to the mind of anyone who finds himself meditating on the life's giddy diversity. This is the kind of apotheosis of which every writer dreams. (I once had a t-shirt made up with the most famous lines from "Snow" on it.)

But he is far from a one-hit wonder. The poem 'Dublin', which my father often quotes, captures the soul of the city in a way that is uncanny. True, it's a Dublin that has all but disappeared now, and which had disappeared even in my own childhood; but its ghost lives on.

"Prayer before Birth", another much-anthologised poem, is unlike any other poem in the language (though it is rather reminiscent of Chesterton's "By the Babe Unborn"). And he has many other lyrics which are worth reading and re-reading. His long poem "Autumn Sequel" has passages of eloquence which, in my view, are in the absolute top rank of English poetry.

Like all my favourite poets, MacNeice was a deep thinker. And it's fair to say that, before I had actual faith, MacNeice's secular "faith"-- finding something sacred in mankind's straining after something transcendent, even in the most banal circumstances-- was the closest I came to it.

I want to write an extended essay about the poetry and thought of Louis MacNeice, though I don't know if I'll ever get round to it. But I've been reading some of his stuff again, and I was very moved by this passage from his unfinished biography, The Strings are False:

An American friend once said to me rebukingly: 'You never seem to make any positive choice; you just let things happen to you.' But the things that happen to one often seem better than the things one chooses. Even in writing poetry, which is something I did early choose to do, the few poems or passages which I find wear well have something of accident about them (the poems I did not intend to write) or, to put it more pretentiously, seem 'given'. So Magilligan Strand was like falling in love. For such occasions the word 'falling' is right; one does not step into love any more than one steps asleep - or awake. For awake, like asleep, is what one falls, and to keep falling awake seems to me the salt of life much more than existentialist defiance. We cannot of course live by Keats's Negative Sensibility alone, we must all, in E. M. Forster's phrase, use 'telegrams and anger'; all the same what I feel makes life worth living is not the clever scores but the surrenders - it may be to the life-quickening urge of an air-raid, to nonsense talked by one's friends, to a girl on top of the Empire State building, to the silence of a ruined Byzantine church, to woods, or weirs, or to heat dancing on a gravelled path, to music, drink or the smell of turf smoke, to the first view of the Atlantic or to the curve of a strand which seems to stretch to nowhere or everywhere and to ages before and after the combustion engine which defiled it.

Wondering

I've been writing this blog since 2011. I'm very grateful for its success (or what I consider its success-- the fact that it has regular readers and quite a lot of people seem to know about it is success to me). I'm happy if it gives anybody diversion, entertainment, stimulation, or any other kind of reward.

But I've just been watching an episode of The Journey Home programme on EWTN (well, on Youtube actually), featuring a military chaplain. It made me wonder about evangelisation and whether I have achieved anything in that regard-- or rather, whether I have been a conduit of evangelisation.

Are there any atheists or agnostics (or anyone else) out there who have been in any way drawn to the Faith through this blog? Or, indeed, any wavering Catholics who had their faith bolstered at all through this blog? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com. It will be an encouragement to me.

I only know of two people who have been drawn to the Faith through my writing. I pray for both of them regularly (though to be honest it's been a while since I did). They were both already on the journey, but I was privileged to be a part of it.

I find myself wondering quite a lot whether my efforts at apologetics and evangelisation make any difference.