Smoke and Bounce

11:21 pm EST

"A DARKNESS EMPTIED"

[S&B readers: The blog is in cruise-control. This post will be a series of quotations concerning a common theme, picked out and transcribed with purposeful intention by myself. An Afterword will follow the selection.]

The Mission Carmel,
June, 1960

I ponder how He died, despairing once.
I've heard the cry subside in vacant skies,
In clearings where no other was. Despair,
Which, in the vibrant wake of utterance,
Resides in desolate calm, preoccupies,
Though it is still. There is no solace there.

That calm inhabits wilderness, the sea,
And where no peace inheres but solitude;
Near death it most impends. It was for Him,
Absurd and public in His agony,
Inscrutably itself, nor misconstrued,
Nor metaphrased in art or pseudonym:

A vague contagion. Old, the mural fades...
Reminded of the fainter sea I scanned,
I recollect: How mute in constancy!
I could not leave the wall of palisades
Till cormorants returned my eyes on land.
The mural but implies eternity:

Not death, but silence after death is change.
Judean hills, the endless afternoon,
The farther groves and arbors seasonless
But fix the mind within the moment's range.
Where evening would obscure our sorrow soon,
There shines too much a sterile loveliness.

No imprecisions of commingled shade,
No shimmering deceptions of the sun,
Herein no semblances remark the cold
Unhindered swell of time, for time is stayed.
The Passion wanes into oblivion,
And time and timelessness confuse, I'm told.

These centuries removed from either fact
Have lain upon the critical expanse
And been of little consequence. The void
Is calendered in stone; the human act,
Outrageous, is in vain. The hours advance
Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed.

"Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion"
N. Scott Momaday

"And in the last three seconds... five human beings have died, taking with them, each one of them, a world.

"We can no more believe the universe insane by our own measure of sanity and altogether indifferent to our urgencies than we can prove it sane.

"Why should we suppose that any end has been set to the growth and advancement of our race while the time garment still wraps about it and veils its eyes? For our history is just a story in space and time, and to its very last moment it must remain adventure."

The Outline of Man's Work and Wealth, XVI
H.G. Wells, 1936

"In vain... [they] attempt to compute definitely the years that may remain to this world, when we may hear from the mouth of the Truth... To point out how each of them supports his own opinion would take too long, and is not necessary."

The City of God, XVIII.53
Augustine of Hippo

"Time, by making man conscious of his mortality, has caused him either to seek for some assurance of security beyond its reach or induced in him a pessimistic resignation to its logic. Accordingly, we may reasonably assert that the various religions and philosophies of life have stemmed from the sense of insecurity that man's awareness of time has inspired... The origin of civilization may also be legitimately traced back to this innate consciousness of time.

"For Western thinkers there can be no more urgent task than that of resolving this [spiritual malaise], and, if possible, of producing an adequate philosophy of history, i.e., of the meaning of man's life in time, in both its individual and its communal extensions."

S.G.F. Brandon, 1966

"This is my self within the heart, smaller than a grain of rice, than a barley corn, than a mustard seed, than a grain of millet or than the kernel of a grain of millet. This is my self within the heart, greater than the earth, greater than the atmosphere, greater than the sky, greater than all these worlds... this is the self of mine within the heart; this is Brahman. Into him, I shall enter, on departing hence. Verily, he who believes this, will have no more doubts."

Chandogya Upanisad, III.14.54

"Surely I come quickly."

Revelation 22:20

AFTERWORD

Dear readers, the direction of my own research concerns Time, i.e., the concept thereof. An earlier glimmer of interest toward it was for an attempt to reconcile the ideas of Final Judgement and Karmatic Reincarnation. (If any of you would like to aid that still-continuing attempt, I'm "all ears".) It was an inconclusive attempt; however, it was pleasurable, interesting and fulfilling at the time of publishing. But I put it on the back-burner, maybe leaving it to fate. Well, now, fate has come: A 1950 essay by Thomas Merton turned me on to the theory of the Fall of Man or Original Sin and how it has a great deal indeed to do with the philosophical endpoint of the New Testament. Keeping in mind that much of this blog concerns theology -- theology that I fully intend to be consistent with the essential tenant of my own personal Cincinnatian catholicism; which is that the quality of humanity is in no way dependent upon biological distinction as we understand it, but rather that it is transmitted spiritually as a quality of personality to anything at all we may consider living -- I became very, very preoccupied with determining a metaphysical point of delineation for the occurrence of the Fall, with the understanding that it had to be a descent into falsehood or delusion and disharmony which could affect the entire catholic constituency of my theology.

Time entered the picture upon my having read Momaday, a Cherokee whose poem is transcribed above. I got the idea that it is the sense of Time, even before an abstract concept of Time, that all creation can possess and be besieged by in its longing for rest in God. Time-sense is nonintellectual. Concurrently, though, creation itself can perceive its feeling of being trapped in both memory and expectation, regret and hope, or also nostalgia and foreboding. Every perceiving being, even no matter how animistically we may idealize its inner peace and security, is just-this-close to a chasm apart from penetrating the present moment; the present instant; whatever you call it. Our soul finds itself in an obscenely inverted mind: we look at existence without "duration" as ice, or death, or hell -- some prison. But the truth is that it is the exterior of the present which most typically paints our spiritual locus, and it is the real prison. Accordingly, as a living thing myself, I have struggled historically to grapple with the dread of BOREDOM in Paradise; boredom! during the "course" of eternal friendship with God. What could be more insidious to the spirit?

This investigation into my sapling concept of a truly catholic Original Sin and Fall will continue. There are a few more intuitions smoking and bouncing in my fingers at the moment, but they are vague, and also very secure in their imminence to the overall problem and task. So, then, I leave it at that for now. I hope to not recapitulate too laboriously on previous posts as this problem's dissection goes on toward a hopeful solution; I will try to be colorful or succinct or clever for expediency out of realism concerning your dedication to S&B's progress (meaning, there is little of it!) -- but I would encourage you all to really find your footing in this blog and ascend as progressively as you can with me. Thank you.