Darkened Sun Edition
Helen Vendler on poetic structure, Mujmudar on Frost, Hemingway's abandoned Michigan, McLuhan's prayer, news from a revivified Notre Dame, and more.
Home news.
Dear friends,
Wishing you a happy May Day and feast of St. Joseph the Worker. May your many and various labors be blessed and bear much fruit.
It has been some months since the regular roundup has come out. I have been writing a lot, fiction and poetry. And I have been painting a lot. I will share some of that soon. What else. I saw a once-in-a-lifetime Sargent show in Boston. I pilgrimaged to the Eclipse. But I have felt that I did not have much to say that fit into newsletter format, and I felt uninterested in the enterprise, and thus yet more uninterested in boring you with what could barely interest me. Some of that is not a reflection of reality but merely the global lack of satisfaction in all endeavors that marks the troughs of depression. Some of it is the result of feeling overwhelmed by the ever-expanding array of creative projects I embark upon in fits of enthusiasm and in hopes of alighting on something that can finally give some good account of my time on Earth. Finding the balance of freedom and discipline is a difficult task, in the arts as in life.
In any case, I’ve missed it. I miss sharing what I’m reading, and having an excuse to compile and arrange it into fastidious and hopefully entertaining little bouquets. I do think the combination of a full essay and a full assortment of links had become a bit much for the container. It was certainly too much for a hermit with a day job. I’d like to make this into more of a pure roundup, and when I have something to explore in essay or commentary form, I’ll do that on its own. We’ll see how that goes.
You may also notice that I’ve organized the site to more clearly feature newsletter, essays/prose, and poetry as such.
With no further ado, read on. As ever, take what you like and leave the rest. And smash that reply button to let me know what you’re reading about and working on.
We must first of all recall a principle that has always been taught by the Church: the principle of the priority of labour over capital. This principle directly concerns the process of production: in this process labour is always a primary efficient cause, while capital, the whole collection of means of production, remains a mere instrument or instrumental cause. This principle is an evident truth that emerges from the whole of man’s historical experience.
—St. John Paul II, Laborum Exercens, 1981
Links & treats.
Emma Collins asks many good questions about trendy visions of a Christian economy:
But what is a Christian economy, exactly? Is it the rosy picture we paint of a two-parent home and a few children, enclosed by a white fence and some quaintly planted shrubs? Is this the ultimate goal of a “Christian economy?” Or is this a traditionalist ideal that has very little to do with what Christ actually said? In my mind, Hawley’s main mistake lies in trying to match an ethos of radical individualism to a more solidaristic economic vision.
The Church’s long and very beautiful tradition of thinking through economics and solidarity is the most humane starting point for asking these questions. Everything else ends, quickly or slowly, in oppression, alienation, or mass murder. But it is a starting point—it does not fully resolve them, because they cannot, on Earth, ever be “resolved.” New syntheses must be constantly worked out, tested, fought for, reassessed, repented of.
We must emphasize and give prominence to the primacy of man in the production process, the primacy of man over things. Everything contained in the concept of capital in the strict sense is only a collection of things. Man, as the subject of work, and independently of the work that he does—man alone is a person. This truth has important and decisive consequences.
—Laborum Exercens
In Plough, Maria Baer on what OCD taught her about exposure therapy:
[ERP] has also proved effective in treating general anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. But its animating principle—that the only way past anxiety is through it—violates a core tenet of late-modern American secular philosophy, in which discomfort and suffering are the worst things that can ever happen to a person and must be avoided at all costs.
Amit Mujmudar reads two poems by Robert Frost:
Readerly devotion, too, takes the form of repetition: When you love a poem, you reread it many times, until you become one with the object of your devotion. The mantra-repeating mystic longs to become one with the divine; and the violinist with his cheek lovingly against the wood, as he plays the practiced piece by heart, becomes one with the violin. A poem becomes a part of your memory. You recite it, and the lines arrive as ever-familiar waves against the coast of you. You are reshaped, revealed—and somehow, by this poetic process of erosion, restored.
What does it mean (if anything) that Pope Francis is once again “Patriarch of the West”?
Coined as a formal style of the pope by Theodore I in 642, the title itself, though, was “only rarely resorted to and had no clear meaning,” but became fashionable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during a period when papal titles multiplied, said the council. At the time it was dropped from formal usage in 2006, the Vatican’s ecumenical department noted that the notion of “the West” had become something of a geographic contradiction.
Mark Bauerlein is granted a rare visit to the cloistered Carthusians of Vermont:
These men have passed through dark nights of the cell and emerged with an infectious love of God. All seems well here. The anguished novice back in his quarters, lonely and shaky, stuck on himself, is right where he should be—for the moment. His journey has started.
Helen Vendler (RIP) on reviving an appreciation of structure in poetry:
These are not paragraph-breaks between topics. Instead, they exemplify one of the peculiar things about poetry—that its self-interruptions obey a logic that is non-informational or non-topical. Sometimes it is a pictorial logic, sometimes an emotional one, sometimes a metaphorical one; and a study of stanza-breaks tells a lot about the mind of a poet. It can say whether the reworking of incident in a poem is done in the service of tableaux, or in the service of volatility of emotion, or in the service of a metaphorical recasting of the original incident.
Marshall McLuhan’s prayer before study.
John J. Miller on the mystery of Hemingway’s Michigan:
When Ernest Hemingway drove to northern Michigan in 1947, he had not seen his boyhood haunts for more than a generation—not since leaving them behind in 1921 and moving on to Paris and fame. He also never saw them again. His visit lasted about a day, an out-of-the-way stop on a road trip between Florida and Idaho. Its purpose is unclear even among Hemingway buffs.
Ted Gioia’s 2024 “State of the Culture”:
Until recently, the entertainment industry has been on a growth tear—so much so, that anything artsy or indie or alternative got squeezed as collateral damage. But even this disturbing picture isn’t disturbing enough. That’s because it misses the single biggest change happening right now. We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture.
Christianity Today profiles the Evangelicals who are voting third party:
“I don’t support the death penalty or abortion. I am largely anti-war and anti-police brutality,” Huntington said. “I would say voting for a third party is choosing to acknowledge the system as it is has become broken.” Huntington used to alternate between Republican and Democrat tickets but ultimately felt like neither was holistically pro-life.
John Kerrigan on the letters of Seamus Heaney.
In the late letters, Heaney loses some of his ebullience. Reid tells us that he fell into a ‘heavy depression’… In a generous note to a teenage poet who had written to him out of the blue and complained of a lack of like-minded company, he says: ‘Even if you were surrounded by congenial literati you would still have to repair to the solitary place in yourself in order to do your own work.’
As a whole set of instruments which man uses in his work, technology is undoubtedly man’s ally. It facilitates his work, perfects, accelerates and augments it. However, it is also a fact that, in some instances, technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave.
—Laborum Exercens
Douthat on Scotland’s new speech codes: we’re all post-liberals now.
Europe is often depicted as caught between an embattled liberal order and a post-liberal form of populism. But the reality is that there are two incipient European post-liberalisms, both responses to the challenges of managing aging, anxious societies being transformed by mass migration. One is the right-wing politics of national identity; the other is a more technocratic attempt to maintain social peace through a regime of censorship.
If only there was a secret third option.
For Der Spiegel, Britta Sandberg argues the reconstruction of Notre Dame has spurred “rare unity” in France:
In the secular Fifth Republic, Notre-Dame belongs not to the church, but to the state. Just two days after the fire, Macron appointed a former general as special envoy for reconstruction. He bypassed all the authorities—not even the Culture Ministry found out about it. The 70-year-old, Jean-Louis Georgelin, had previously served as chief of the general staff of the French armed forces and as NATO general in Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo. He also led missions in Afghanistan and Cote d’Ivoire. And he is devout—a Catholic who knew the state apparatus well. Georgelin agreed. He didn’t like being retired, anyway.
Also worth noting, chief architect Philippe Villeneuve sports a full-body tattoo of Our Lady:
The 61-year-old pulls up the left sleeve of his cardigan, revealing the top of the spire beneath. “It takes up the entire arm, and there are more tattoos on the chest,” says Villeneuve. Since the fire, he has had half the cathedral tattooed onto his body: the rescued north tower, the south tower, two mythical creatures on the façade and the copper rooster. He says he had to do something to keep what he had almost lost with him at all times.
Some of the first images of Notre Dame’s restored interior.
The very respectful and pious icon-preserving bees.
Then-Cardinal Ratzinger on Christian meditation:
For the person who makes a serious effort [in prayer] there will, however, be moments in which he seems to be wandering in a desert and, in spite of all his efforts, he “feels” nothing of God. He should know that these trials are not spared anyone who takes prayer seriously. However, he should not immediately see this experience, common to all Christians who pray, as the “dark night” in the mystical sense.
In any case, in these moments, his prayer, which he will resolutely strive to keep to, could give him the impression of a certain “artificiality,” although really it is something totally different: in fact it is at that very moment an expression of his fidelity to God, in whose presence he wishes to remain even when he receives no subjective consolation in return.
That’s all for now. Drop me a line, call your moms, don’t work too hard, don’t stay up too late,
As ever,
J
Looking forward to the fiction!