The Circumcision of the Lord 2023

The New Year is inaugurated with the feast of the Circumcision of Lord: a purifying wound, a cutting off, a pact made in blood with God. The beginnings of salvation start anew with the first drop of blood shed by Lord, and in such a way the end becomes a beginning. Few things make the cyclical nature of time as obvious as the movement of Christian calendar, everything is repeated and made present again, round each cycle tears still fall on Good Friday, and we stand in suspense at the doors of the Church on Holy Saturday night. Even the circular shape of the foreskin itself recalls this experience, and the accompanying blood presents us with an image of time as a wound: the process of becoming – as opposed to Real Being – always accompanied by pain.

The cyclical experience of time is now often described in its negative and futile aspect, which we can identify with the violent and bloody nature of circumcision, but certainly there is a positive aspect as well. Time is described in our tradition as an image of eternity – here we can see the significance of the foreskin being a cut-off, wounded portion of God – the continual re-presentation of events is then a function of time’s participation in eternity, and in a way, this lifts us out of process into a more stable realm where everything exists in perfect simultaneity. Under this aspect, the repetition of things only increases their power, and this can be experientially grasped if one lives for a few years with a mind properly attuned.

Whether or not the coincidence of this feast and the New Year is an accident of history is a matter of debate, but this has no bearing on this wonderful symbolism, and ultimately, all things are a matter of Providence.

Siloe

 A torrent runs

Silent - nameless

From which the lion

lifts his reddened jaws

Stained from the heads

Crushed in the land of many

Where fresh with echoes:

Of ring of steel

And shouts of men

Cut down in the plain

To lay like Buddhas

In quiet contemplation

With festered wounds

And perfect minds

Now clearly chanting

Where David plucks

His shining stones.

He goes forth from the brook

And back again

To drink and to listen

Alongside the lion

And the singing men.

Fall Fishing

To cast a hook

Into mirrored waters

To drag the lakebed

Clean against the sky

To feel the pulse of

Ancient vertebrae

Slip through my hands

Mangled on the shore

To trace the sun across the lake:

Ingathering solar pole

Reaching down, reaching down

Piercing even into the deep!

Easter 2022

O holy languid Dawn,

What ancient rest have you discovered?

What great sleep have you disturbed?

Hidden away in the bowels of the earth?

 

What light withers and returns

To vanish before the noontime?

To awaken the reeds and shatter the dew?

Greeted by birdsong and the weeping of women?

 

Now the cattails swing their heavy heads

Like drunken girls in a bathroom mirror,

While knots of snakes writhe between the grasses

Like half-conscious children on the floor of a kitchen.

 

And the raveled limbs of trees release their dormant cry

And cast off the muzzle of their frigid burden.

A spotted fawn glowing stands alert

To anticipate the arrival

 

Muted as an echo from distant time:

The world to come calling as a whisper

Of half heard forgotten language

From a mysterious dark and foreign tongue;

 

An image upon an image,

A promise clambered for in the half-light

Spreading leisurely across the canvas

To at last take its seat and be revealed in us.

The Free Will Seminar Zoom Class: Why Analytic Philosophy Sucks

At 8 in the morning my eyes are still not used to the light, and it is time for the “Zoom” meeting, as my “Contemporary Questions in Free-Will in the Analytic Tradition: Seminar 472” class is about to begin. The radiation from the laptop screen burrows itself into my retinas and lodges – with much resistance – in the back of my skull. As the computer boots up the sun begins to spread his rays along the tops of houses all lined in rows, it flashes fire in the windows of houses and parked cars; a glance of this sight through the window is a gasp of relief, and for a moment, it washes a salve across my pained eyes.

“Gooood morning class!"

Cavernous, Winding

I am the sickness that creeps up the stairwell,

I am the bile that burns down your throat.

I speak in the patterns of the carpet,

And listen through the paint on the walls.

I will suffocate you with poisoned breath,

Breathing through a web of ducts and vents;

And in the night you will always feel

My lifeless pulse warming the floorboards. 

The Horror of Hallways

"New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn't even live in a house. She lived in a building - the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened-red and gray with raspmouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he'd been dazed by the building the first week. He'd wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he'd look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he'd be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building - nowhere."

- Flannery O'Connor, The Geranium.

A Spirit of Nowhere

 

Towering rows of beige siding melts

In the haze of a plastic twilight

To recede past sight and blend with the horizon,

While miles of painted on concrete drips

Into a forever dilating

Maze of streets and thoroughfares

So vast they eclipse the sight and knowledge

Of human affairs or planning committees.

And here is the boy who clamours and shakes

To disembodied voices in the night,

Pacing endlessly through the confines of

An imperceptible part of nowhere.

Music and Contemplation 2: The Metaphysics of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

The purpose of my previous article on music and contemplation was to bring out the metaphysical meaning of traditional music and its link with contemplation, but since I lack the patience to really flesh out my ideas the post did come across rather brief and unfocused, so here I just want to elaborate on the symbolism of music in a more concentrated way.

My main point was that religious chant and Indian classical music both point to the same truth that there is an immutable and primal God, and that there is a world of multiplicity that stands in relation to Him. This is probably the most basic outline of reality that can be drawn, and pre-modern contemplative music represents this outline in audible form. We can visually manifest this basic outline in the form of the Cross and all its variants, wherein the vertical portion of the Cross stands for God and the horizontal for manifestation (the melody). The melody of chant surrounding its harmonic centre is not a chaotic motion, the world did not emanate in a random fashion, and this is manifested by the use of modes in music, therefore, to break the mode is to break the order of creation. This latter point is made more explicit when we consider the esoteric meaning of the modes: their correspondences with the planets and elements. These correspondences and their place in traditional cosmology (I would like to more specifically comment on the meaning of the modes but I lack the knowledge) bring more depth to scales than if we viewed them merely as tools to make the music sound pleasing. Again, we can clearly see this in the Indian tradition, as different ragas are set to be performed at different times of the day and in different seasons, the music is in tune with the world...