Starting Again with Jesus

In praying the Rosary, one of the mysteries I find most difficult to pray is Mary and Joseph finding Jesus in the Temple. Somehow it doesn't quite stir my imagination like many other mysteries do (for instance, the Transfiguration, the Presentation, the Descent of the Holy Spirit).

I'm never very sure what the Finding in the Temple means, its significance. I should probably do some reading on it.

The meaning I generally assign to it is the constant need to "rediscover" Jesus. I don't know whether this is impious as it applies to Joseph and, especially, Mary. But I apply it to myself.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the need to rediscover Jesus, to start again with Jesus. It's so easy to forget that Christianity is centred on the person of Jesus Christ. I think there is a constant temptation to make Christianity something else: a social and cultural legacy, a side in a culture war, a set of attitudes, an aesthetic sensibility, etc. etc.

More than anything else, there is a temptation to shoehorn our own beliefs, priorities, and hobby-horses into the Gospel. I have fallen into this trap many, many times and struggle to escape it.

I think that even the desire to grow deeper in our Faith, to learn more about it, can put us in danger of this. It's all very well to immerse ourselves in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the teachings of the Church Fathers, the writings of the saints, the writings of the visionaries, etc. etc. But when these become pitted against the teaching of the Pope and bishops, we're in trouble. We get drawn into faction-fighting within the Church, looking inward rather than outward.

One particular temptation I struggle with is the temptation to overlook the importance of human suffering, especially that of the poor.

I have an aesthetic view of life. I tend to worry about things like the decline of poetry or national traditions, rather than homelessness or hunger or poverty.

But reading the Gospel, the Bible, and the lives of the saints-- and even bearing in mind our Lord's rebuke to Judas in the house of Simon the leper-- it seems clear that God cares much more about human suffering than about such rather airy matters.

Although I've known poverty myself, I lack the visceral concern for the poor exhibited by the prophets, our Lord, and the saints. I feel particularly bad about this because I should have inherited it from my father and grandfather, who were always working for the betterment of the poor. I'm currently reading the autobiography of Dorothy Day, and her own concern for the poor is both inspiring and chastening. (This means poverty of all kinds, of course.)

Again and again, I find myself having to "start again with Jesus", to realize how far I've drifted off into my own preoccupations, and to try to open my heart to what he wants from me.

Pope Francis is currently delivering a series of addresses on discernment, so hopefully that will help me with my own "re-centring".

The Tonic of Nihilism

This morning I found myself thinking about a poem by A.E. Housman, a translation from Sophocles that begins: "What man is he that yearneth for length unmeasured of days?" It's an extremely bleak poem, even nihilistic, one that is based on the "wisdom of Silenus" theme.

Put simply, Silenus was a Greek companion of Dionysius who, when a human enquirer asked him what the happiest fate for humans was, answered: "Never to be born, and failing that, to die quickly."

The Sophocles poem that Housman translates has also been translated by Yeats, and is even more savage in this version:

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

As most people will know, A.E. Housman's poems are full of this sort of nihilism. An epicurean college don who died of a good old age, he wrote many an ode celebrating the death of young men on the battlefield. Surprisingly, his poems were very popular in the trenches of World War One

What puzzles me is that this is the sort of thing I should hate. Although I'm of a melancholy temperament, my outlook is very much pro-life in the most fundamental sense. I think life is a good thing, a good beyond all words. I agree with Chesterton:

There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our rumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. That light of the positive is the business of the poets, because they see all things in the light of it more than do other men.

I believe this with all my heart. And yet, there is also a certain truth to this bleak, uncompromising verse of Philip Larkin, "Wants":

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff -
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death -
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.

Another example are the works of Samuel Beckett. As much as I dislike modernism, and especially the bleaker aspects of modernism, there's something in Beckett that draws me. Perhaps it's a sort of relief to have come to the very bottom. There's certainly a stark beauty in his plays (and even in photographs of the man himself).

My own view is that this sort of nihilism, occasionally indulged in, is a healthy tonic-- as long as we remember it's just a tonic. Life is wonderful and precious beyond all words, but it's also full of pain and suffering and grief. Every now and again, articulating the deepest darkness of life-- as the Bible itself does in Ecclesiastes-- is warranted, I think. Only to return once again to the light of gratitude and joy and affirmation.

Here is the whole of the Housman poem:

What man is he that yearneth
For length unmeasured of days?
Folly mine eye discerneth
Encompassing all his ways.
For years over-running the measure
Small change thee in evil wise:
Grief draweth nigh thee; and pleasure,
Behold it is hid from thine eyes.
This to their wage have they
Which overlive their day.
And He that looseth from labor
Doth one with other befriend,
Whom bride nor bridesmen attend,
Song, nor sound of the tabor,
Death, that maketh an end.

Thy portion esteem I highest,
Who was not even begot;
Thine next, being born who diest
And straightway again art not.
With follies light as the feather
Doth Youth to man befall;
Then evils gather together,
There wants not one of them all-
Wrath, envy, discord, strife,
The sword that seeketh life.
And sealing the sum of trouble
Doth tottering Age draw nigh,
Whom friends and kinsfolk fly,
Age, upon whom redouble
All sorrows under the sky.

This man, as me, even so,
Have the evil days overtaken;
And like as a cape sea-shaken
With tempest at earth's last verges
And shock of all winds that blow,
His head the seas of woe,
The thunders of awful surges
Ruining overflow;
Blown from the fall of even,
Blown from the dayspring forth,
Blown from the noon in heaven,
Blown from night and the North.

De Alfonce Tennis (II)

The second part of this review has been cancelled due to lack of interest.

On the Loss of Queen Elizabeth II

Two verses come to mind today. One is Phillip Larkin's four-line tribute to Queen Elizabeth II. I can't easily find when it was written but I know it was in his later years, before his death in 1985:

In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good:
She did not change.

The other is a verse from "The Mountains of Mourne" by Percy French, one that always makes me a bit dewy-eyed. The song is in the form of a letter home from an Irish emigrant to London:

I've seen England's king from the top of a bus
And I've never known him, but he means to know us.
And tho' by the Saxon we once were oppressed,
Still I cheered, God forgive me, I cheered with the rest.
And now that he's visited Erin's green shore
We'll be much better friends than we've been heretofore
When we've got all we want, we're as quiet as can be
Where the Mountains o' Mourne sweep down to the sea.

RIP Queen Elizabeth II. God save King Charles III, and long may his line continue.

Hail to my Namesake

A thousand years ago today, Máel Seachnaill mac Domhnaill passed away, after a long and energetic life, which you can read about here.

It's from him I take my name, so I want to salute his memory now-- even though I rather suspect he would despise me as a wimp who never once swung a sword in battle.

Some Reasons I Love Trains

I thought of titling this quick, impromptu blog post "Ten Reasons I Love Trains", then remembered how much I dislike this modern phenomenon of arbitrarily numbered lists.

Anyway, I love trains. Who doesn't? Breathes there a man with soul so dead...

But the appeal of the train is so specific, so many-sided, I feel compelled to write about what it means to me.

1) First off, a train is a sort of solid metaphor. A metaphor for what? For all sorts of things. For some reason, trains seem to be an inexhaustible source for analogies and figures of speech. Full steam ahead, off the rails, whistle-stop tour, the wrong side of the tracks, end of the line, one-track mind....I'm sure you could come up with a much longer list of train-related phrases that have entered the lexicon.

As a kid, I was wildly excited by the title of an wee-hours radio show called Night-Train. (My ambition was to listen to it all night, but I'm not sure I ever listened to a single minute of it.)

"Bye Bye Miss American Pie" (one of the few pop or rock songs my father liked) draws on railway imagery for its last verse, in a very memorable way:

And the three men I admire the most
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost
They took the last train for the coast the day the music died.

Then there is "Slow Train Coming", a song and album by Bob Dylan, the Guns 'n' Roses song "Locomotive" (and indeed, "Night Train"), and...well, any number of others.

Trains also seem ideal for dramatizing the human situation. Recently, I watched the final episode of a series which dramatized one of the main characters' deaths by showing her taking a journey on a mysterious train, filled with all the people she'd known in her life. I'm sure a thick, thick book could be filled with similar examples.

2) The chug-chug-chug sound in the background. It's a rather pleasing sound, and it reminds you every moment that you are on a journey.

3) The fact that every train and every train-station is linked to a nationwide network of railways and railway stations. This creates a delicious awareness of the country around you, all the different cities and towns as part of a greater whole, a sense of opening horizons. The part, however, is not swallowed up in the whole. Each train station has its own atmosphere and identity. What a difference between a sleepy country station and a bustling city centre station!

4) A train isn't really a part of the environment through which it passes. It doesn't get caught in traffic or have people stopping it to ask for directions. This gives it a strangely disembodied, even dream-like atmosphere. You're there, but you're not there.

5) A train is a truly public transport. You are sharing a space with complete strangers, a space which invites rather than repels interaction. This might, admittedly, be a mixed blessing at times. But it makes possible protracted conversation between strangers, in a way that is almost impossible anywhere else except on a plane. And even if you don't talk, just sharing a carriage with others has a sociable element.

6) All the announcements, both in stations and on trains themselves. They are usually read by well-spoken people, and the elocution, pronunciation, and formality is a pleasure in itself. There is the poetry of place-names, as well as the poetry that settles on very ordinary phrases when they are used over and over: "Mind the gap" is probably the most famous example.

One of my favourite book titles of all time is The Ghost Now Standing on Platform One, an anthology of train-related ghost stories. The title obviously wouldn't work if the phrase was not such a familiar one.

7) A very particular idea, one which may be unique to me. I've noticed that whenever I'm reading a book of history, or any book where social and cultural trends are discussed, the image of a train always comes into my mind. History itself seems like a train, as well as all the constituent streams of history.

This image especially comes to my mind when I'm reading about the lead-up to the 1916 Rising, the Russian Revolution, or some similar great historic moment. (I mean "great" neutrally, of course.) When events are moving with great speed or momentum, the train seems like the only adequate metaphor.

Perhaps crucial to this association is the sense of strain. Trains always seem to be straining forward. I associate this same sense of strain with the events of history, which we might either be resisting or assisting. Perhaps it is my Irish nationalist background, but any history that is not the history of a struggle seems dull and uninspiring to me.

I could go on and on, but I might as well get off here.

De Alfonce Tennis by J.P. Donleavy (1)

Today, my inter-library loan order of De Alfonce Tennis arrived. I'm looking forward to reading it. Not only is it a book that meant a great deal to me at one stage of my life, but I'm expecting it will be something of a "time capsule" of my early-to-mid teens.

The full title of the book is De Alfonce Tennis: The Superlative Game of Eccentric Champions. Its History, Accoutrements, Rules, Conduct and Regimen. A Legend by J.P. Donleavy. (I have added punctuation to the title. Donleavy's frequent disregard of punctuation is typical of his eccentric writing style.)

De Alfonce Tennis is a very strange book. The first part purports to be the history of a game called-- you guessed it-- De Alfonce Tennis. The central character is J.P. Donleavy himself (referred to as Jay Pee in the story, whereas Donleavy was actually known as "Mike" to his friends).

The history is obviously fictional and tongue-in-cheek, full to the brim of dramatic and improbable events. More on that anon.

The book gets even odder once the story part is over. The rest is a sort of guide-book for De Alfonce players, going into great detail on rules, exercise, health, lifestyle and various other miscellaneous aspects of being a De Alfonce player. It's all very entertaining, but that doesn't take away from the strangeness. It's one of those jokes that are prolonged way beyond what you expect, that amuse (if they don't annoy) by their very audacity.

As I've already mentioned, this book came into my life in my teens. I think I was about fourteen. I've never been able to ascertain where it actually came from. It just appeared in our flat. Since our flat was full of books, and books were always coming and going, this wasn't all that strange. But it did add to the book's aura of weirdness.

It was also my introduction to J.P. Donleavy. I was a Donleavy nut in my teens and my early twenties. I can't claim to have even read most of his books, but I read everything I could get my hands on. (This was before the internet. Libraries had very limited Donleavy holdings, and I rarely had any money in those days.)

I had the good fortune to interview J.P Donleavy in 1998. I wrote a letter (enclosing a review of one of his books that I wrote for a college newspaper) asking for an interview, and to my surprise he agreed. He explicitly told me when I met him that one of the reasons he granted me the interview is that I mentioned De Alfonce Tennis in my letter, a book that he considered unfairly neglected. (Maddeningly, I lost the tape of the interview.)

I also learned that De Alfonce Tennis is a real game-- or at least, that it was. Donleavy told me that he did play it with his friends. Whether it's still played, after his demise in 2017, is another question.

And so, now I've given an overview of the book, back to the story part.

Much of the story takes place on an ocean cruise to America, a setting that gives the book much of its unique flavour. The game of De Alfonce itself is full of naval terminology (for instance, the right and left sides of the court are called "Starboard" and "Port"). This idea appeals to me a lot.

Considering I've never been on an ocean cruise, stories involving ocean cruises have had a disproportionate influence on my life. Well, two stories, to be precise: De Alfonce Tennis and Brideshead Revisited. The ocean cruise section in Brideshead Revisted motivated me to begin the diary I've more or less kept up since 2015. It got me excited about the flavour of each particular day, the days it described on the cruise being especially distinctive. (Ocean cruises also excite me, dramatically, as one of the few relatively self-contained social situations in our uber-connected world.)

I won't go into detail about the complicated backstory of De Alfonce Tennis. It's a blatant leg-pull, involving things like a missing yacht called Hiyathere (carrying the original Fourteen players of De Alfonce Tennis's predecessor game Bangokok), a police detective named AKA Alias, and a Founder who commits vicarious suicide by having an assassin shoot him with a diamond-tipped bullet-- just before he was scheduled to reveal the mystery of the Hiyathere on a TV talk-show.

It's all delicious hokum, and you can sense how much Donleavy enjoyed writing it. I can understand the appeal. I derived a similar sort of fun from writing about the Unicorn School of poetry, an exercise in fantasy that pleased me much more than anyone who read it, I suspect.

Our hero Jay Pee becomes the heir to De Alfonce Tennis, in a passage I can't resist quoting:

On the eighteenth floor in a corner office looking upwards along Madison Avenue and with the sun beaming in, I was handed a key to unlock a large gleamingly polished leather box resembling a shotgun case. Which lid upon coming open produced the strains of the 'Capriccio Italien' in all its simple muted harp strumming beauty. And set in the brocaded emerald velvet interior were four bright yellow balls and two strange racquets.

The scene then shifts to the ocean liner voyage to America, where Jay Pee makes the acquaintance of Laura, a stunningly beautiful and brilliant Englishwoman, who is always followed about by the aristocratic lout Lord Charles. Laura has some connection with the Hiyathere mystery, and was a friend of the Founder, but remains mysterious about it.

This is how Jay Pee describes Laura, who he meets on the ship's squash court: She, even in her purpoesful athletic gear, was an appetizingly curvaceous classically beautiful raven haired variety of an English rose who conveniently was also an awfully large shareholder in the present steamship line... not only could this irresistibly amusing lady devastate me at squash but her unquenchable curiosity and questions and my somewhat embroidered answers, fanned the mystery of the 'Hiyathere' into nearly nightmarish proportions... Having lived in Katmandu and among the Sherpas and monks of Tibet, she also spoke fluent Sherpa and Nepalese. And had the distinction of being the one female ever permitted to study the Buddhist sacred books.

Scanning through the book, I have been unable to find the ocean-bound passages which appealed to me so much, but which I know are there. I will have to resort to quoting other passages to illustrate Donleavy's great gift of painting atmosphere. Here he is having landed in New York:

Bathed in my rather overly ornate pink marble bath and dressed in a thick tweed suit and cap, college scarf around my neck and galoshes on my feet, I went as the snow continued to fall, down Fifth Avenue. Feeling the excitement again of this city. The park a great white apron spreading distantly under the grey stark branches of the trees. Citizens sporting ear muffs in the dry cold and a girl sped by me on skis. My nose was dripping, ears stinging but it was always warmly cheerful to be greeted in the lobby of the Game Room by its old retainers. A familiar face being always so reassuring in this so anonymous city.

My favourite passage comes towards the end of the book. Jay Pee has just received some shocking news, while reading in the Game Room library:

The heaving of my breath made me stand up. To walk in the hushed emptiness of the room to the window. The wind howling outside, driving swirling thicknesses of snow in a great white veil sweeping down over the park. Blue bolts of lightning striking from the sky. Traffic slowing stopped in the streets. The glass of the Game Club library shaking with the claps of thunder. Cars far below, white little heaps abandoned. People staring from their windows. Dark tiny figures struggling into the wind. Under the pearly blanket, the noises of the city muffled to alabaster silence.

But I don't have time to do justice to De Alfonce Tennis in one post. I'll have to return to the subject, once I've actually re-read the book.