Farewell Summer Edition
Views on the ocean life by Christie and Camus; McLuhan-mania rising; Smolin and Taleb on the history and structure of Christianity; kimchi; Trulli; Burtynsky; potatoes.
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Links.
Tom Walsh describes leaving the Midwest, and returning. “As iconic coastal Maine painter Winslow Homer once said: ‘The life I have chosen gives me hours of enjoyment. The sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.’”
The internet still delivers, if a little more reluctantly these days, its greatest gift— fascinating randomized snippets from the lives of far flung enthusiasts—and I loved this investigation by South African writer Sean Hunter Christie into the shifting sociology of Cape Town’s docklands: “I see that many of those who experienced the hey-day of ocean travel simply did not transfer their affections to the era of containerization. This meant that their love of ships and the ocean was not passed down to future generations in any contagious form.”
With McLuhan-mania reaching a new zenith in the NYT, Clinton Ignatov offers an excellent reflection placing the many fruitful misreadings of McLuhan in historical context:
The numbness to this perception—not the perception itself—was McLuhan’s primary concern. McLuhan’s question wasn’t “how does media affect us?” His question was “why can’t anyone except a handful of weirdo artists see how media affect us?” And the eschewal of personal value judgments and adoption of the self-disavowing artistic techniques of modernist artists was his prescribed means of overcoming that blindness, that numbness.
Nathan Smolin steelmans the case for the Papacy. There’s a lot here, but this passage is particularly relevant for recent events:
As I write this, the Pope is in America [editor’s note: Canada] to acknowledge and apologize for all the sins committed by Christians in the course of the colonization of the Americas, and above all the sins committed by Catholic religious in administering the state-funded residential schools aimed at extirpating Native American identity. This is, in an odd sense, one of the most profound claims to authority made by the Pope: that he can speak for, claim responsibility for, and even apologize for, all the members of the Church, and, in some sense, the whole world. This kind of public claiming and taking of responsibility for the actions of imperfect people in the chaotic depths of human history belongs to the very essence of the Papacy.
And on the nature of authority:
What really bothers most American Catholics about the Pope is simply that he says and does things, gives commands and makes decisions, that they would not have. This may seem elementary, but I think it is really at the core not only of the contemporary crisis, but also of the Catholic spiritual life…an obedience that is aimed only at the fulfillment of your own will, given only to decisions that you imagine that you would have made, is not obedience at all.
This is a good reminder for those, like myself, who frequently disagree with Papa on prudential matters, such as the ongoing destruction of the Western liturgical inheritance or the weak response to the abuse crisis. Moderns have a very shallow and, as a result, almost totally negative view of authority, seeing all its mistakes and even crimes as indicating it is something only to be liberated from. But legitimate authority does not become illegitimate by contradicting you, or even by being sometimes wrong. To believe that it does is to believe in authority only to the extent that it accords with one’s own private judgment—that is, to not believe in it at all. However, as Smolin points out, that does not preclude healthy conflict: “loyal opposition” is also a legitimate function of those whose task it is to obey. Indeed, pushback is factored in to the model: the Church is not a democracy, but like military commanders its authorities nonetheless rely on feedback from below to navigate the decisions that must be taken or, when necessary, revised.
Relatedly, Andrew Boyd reviews the history of the “Doctrine of Discovery.”
Taleb’s essay on the history of Christianity from his foreward to Tom Holland’s book on the subject: “Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a computer simulation to the Lord but the real, real thing… God, by suffering as a human, allowed humans to be closer to Him, and to potentially merge with Him via Theosis.” Also an interesting argument that Julian the Apostate’s attempt to revive paganism was born already defeated due to its need to ape the ascendent Christian forms of social and ecclesial organization. That observation flows into Holland’s thesis that Christianity is responsible for the shape of modern life, even and especially its secularist values, in form if not in content (which are not so easily separated).
From Chuck Marohn we learn of the Trulli, a species of mortar-less, easy-to-disassemble homes favored by Southern Italian peasants for their helpfulness in escaping property taxes.
I recently learned that the famously meme-ified portrait of Breezewood, PA is the work of Edward Burtynsky, a photographer who specializes in capturing the landscapes of industrial civilization. Check out more of his beautiful work.
Learning to kimjang will immediately improve your life.
“Grief is like dreaming: a universal experience that nonetheless occurs to each participant in a particular way, operating according to a deep, interior non-logic, a system of meaning making that defies description or definition.”
In the afternoon, we meet a steamer bound for home. The salute our foghorns exchange with three great prehistoric hoots, the signals of passengers lost at sea warning there are other humans present, the gradually increasing distance between the two ships, their separation at last on the malevolent waters, all this fills the heart with pain. These stubborn madmen, clinging to planks tossed upon the mane of immense oceans, in pursuit of drifting islands; what man who cherishes solitude and the sea will ever keep himself from loving them?
—Albert Camus, The Sea Close By
Poetry.
Recent work.
I’ve been dropping in on a workshop with some other artists in my area in the studio of a locally-prominent painter. He’s assigned me some copying homework; apart from that it is mostly just a very salutary thing to share space with serious (and friendly) people.
I wrote about some trees.
And about how Salman Rushdie influenced my life and my views on literature.
The liturgical life.
Hard to believe I’ve been doing these letters for over a year, but it can be helpful when you are lazy and want to crib what you wrote last September. Liturgy is part of cyclical not linear time! When you have no editor they let you do it.
How wonderful, the relief of September: come swiftly, the wood fires and the gloomy, gusty evenings. (I embrace unabashedly my inner Autumn Man.)
It also begins the anticipation for two major feasts, the twinned All Saints and All Souls at the end of October, and the magic of the associated All Hallow’s Eve mischief. Before then, however, there are the mid-September “ember days” (the 15-18th) with which the Church has since the second century marked the beginning of the harvest season. Ember days are actually quarterly celebrations (etymologically most likely a corruption of the Latin, quatuor tempora, four times) marking the turning of each season. The ember days of summer, fall, and winter originally marked the Mediterranean harvests of wheat, grape, and olive, respectively, honoring the prime ingredients of the sacraments.
This summer was not nearly so oppressive as the last, and much more filled with the solaces of salt water, and so I will be sadder to see it go, especially with a difficult winter looming for many around here and elsewhere. And this year the Fall ember days are the 21st, 22nd, and the 24th. Otherwise the pleasures of September are just the same as ever. And my modest harvest has already begun (and, well, ended):
Wishing you sustenance in the coming days of soups and stew.
As ever,
J