Summer Skiffs Edition

Cormac McCarthy on the origins of language, Neruda's poems get a new coat of paint, and Pentecost ushers in the turning of the seasons.

This is my semi-regular roundup of what I’m reading and working on. If you’re new, catch up on what this substack is about here. I also post occasional poetry and prose. Subscribe if you like to get updates from the hermitage in your mailbox.

Otherwise, welcome friend, and read on.

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Refurbishment of a century-old flat-bottomed skiff, which I am reliably informed featured in a George Bellows painting.

Round our skiff be God’s aboutness—
Ere she try the depths of sea.
Seashell frail for all her stoutness,
Unless Thou her Helmsman be.
—Scottish boatman’s prayer

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Reading.

Cormac McCarthy’s first work of non-fiction? This 2017 essay on the Kekulé Problem, that is, the unresolved question of where language came from and how it relates to the much more ancient unconscious mind:

But the fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesn’t much like language and even that it doesn’t trust it. And why is that? How about for the good and sufficient reason that it has been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years?¹

Vaclav Smil gets the NYT treatment. His book “How the World Really Works” is high on my current list. But the basic thesis is fairly simple: that despite the overwhelming attention given to shiny digital technologies, the root of global prosperity remains centered on the brute building blocks of what he calls the “four pillars of civilization”: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. The latter is the lynchpin of the production of industrial fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process, using vast amounts of energy mostly in the form of natural gas; Smil estimates half the global population would not currently be alive without Haber-Bosch. But all of the pillars are currently inextricable from fossil fuels. In a sense, one as real as any other, our civilization simply is carbon, the epiphenomenon that results from the (historically speaking) mind-boggling surplus of energy released in its burning. Thus Smil’s pessimism, or realism, about visions of a rapid and painless energy transition.

For Vanity Fair, investigative reporter Katherine Eban digs into the behind-the-scenes struggle to squash any public discussion of the lab-leak origin theory. The reticence is not hard to understand; whether or not the virus came from the Wuhan lab, any scrutiny of the nuts and bolts of gain-of-function research makes it look extremely bad.

Friend of the Stack and theologian Ben Heidgerken has launched a new iconographic project to highlight both the vast cultural diversity of the Church and the role its saints have played in seeking to heal the many wounds of history. One of them, Christian de Chergé, was also featured in an affecting film on the efforts of Algerian monks to confront the violence and division of the civil war.

A lovely new bilingual, illustrated childrens’ edition of Neruda’s Book of Questions. I love the illustrations by Paloma Valdivia. The decision to not include full poems but only snippets, slightly less.

Poem by Neruda, illustration by Paloma Valdivia.

Guillermo del Toro argues that the New Equilibrium of Cinema is “not sustainable.”

I learned from reading my Almanac that the Irish have a special term for the carrot—“underground honey.”

Peter Hitchens on the disappearing magic of ferries. In my life I have been lucky to love more than a few ferries. Many, like Hong Kong’s august and threatened Star Ferry, form some of my most sparkling, atmospheric, enveloping memories. Perhaps it is my Midwestern upbringing, at once so familiar with riverboats and barges while so unfamiliar with, and thus entranced by, oceans and islands—but traveling by boat, even short distances, is never anything but impossibly romantic. Yes, even the time I got my first seasick down in steerage on a pitching freighter.

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Listening.

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“I had the perspective set out in pencil and the detail carefully placed. I held back from painting, like a diver on the water’s edge; once in I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberate painter; that afternoon and all next day, and the day after, I worked fast. I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid to start the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the palette; each brush stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.”
—Brideshead Revisited

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Morning at the Racetrack, ink sketch on paper

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Poetry.

When I consider how my light is spent,
   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
   And that one Talent which is death to hide
   Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
   My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
   I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
   Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
   And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
  They also serve who only stand and wait.”
—John Donne, Sonnet 19

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The season’s first potato sprouts.

The liturgical life.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you, tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God. For now I know that the Creation, which first seems to reveal Him in concept, then seems to hide Him by the same concepts, finally is revealed in Him, in the Holy Spirit. And we who are in God find ourselves united in Him with all that springs from Him. This is prayer, and this is glory!
—Thomas Merton

Pentecost, meaning “fiftieth” in Greek, comes fifty days after Easter, on June 5th. It traces its roots to the Jewish feast of Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, celebrated on the fiftieth day after Passover and marking the first harvest of the growing season. It also commemorates first covenant and the giving of the Law to Moses.

The descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, occurring as it does when they are gathered on Pentecost, reflects, continues, and intensifies these antecedents. It represents, like the early wheat, the firstfruits of the new harvest, planted in the work of Easter. And it represents the fulfilment of the Mosaic Law, what is now the New Law: the bringing to perfection of the old law in the outpouring of God’s grace in the person of Christ, as a seed that contains its own fruition is brought to final flowering in the fullness of time.²

May the wind in the June grass console you and be ever at your back,

As ever,

J

1. McCarthy is a fellow a the difficult-to-classify Santa Fe Institute, where he apparently spends all his time shooting the shit with physicists and mathematicians. “‘I have only two responsibilities,’ he says. ‘To eat lunch and attend afternoon tea.’”

2. “As once to the Hebrew people, freed from Egypt, the law was given on Mt. Sinai on the fiftieth day after the sacrifice of the lamb, so after the Passion of the Christ when the true Lamb of God was killed, on the fiftieth day from his Resurrection, the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles and the community of believers.” —Pope Leo I, Sermon 75.