the missing thing that is completely different from everything else, but everything has a stake in it.

Friday, June 29, 2012


Western philosophy fully intellectualized the materiality of thought until it found the chemical correlate of every spiritual state.  At the pinnacle of transcendence lies incarnation and corporeality.  The narrative of crucifixion and resurrection provides a stage where this paradoxical reality can be acted out.  The rituals of Catholicism function as a language in the process of materializing in the world, still a language, still not life, but with all of life's sensory components.  The rituals form a bridge reducing the radical nature of the rupture between language and life, in living faith eliminating the rupture by rational means, as this paragraph is nothing but a rational argument, however irrational seem the terms of the Catholic Creed.  If only we could eliminate the terms of the Creed and preserve the ritual.  Yet if one surrenders to the reasons and experiences the dissolution of the rupture first hand by acting the stage provided, one ascends to a different level of empirical experience and a different manner of thinking that makes one think twice about that.   


Maybe if I had not finally closed my eyes, held my nose, and leapt onto the bridge, maybe if I had not decided to experience the unity it allows, I would not have gotten my fingernails dirty with mechanics of language, not have trafficked in the communion of manual labor with transcendental thought with which this project is imbued.   I would not have been fired up with the outrage against those who maintain the divisions that they theorize away, scorning the legwork and handwork of putting ideas together into working machines. 

When I attend the mass, alone, I have no friends there, I often feel the deep irrelevance of it.  It doesn't make people good, it makes many worse.  Whatever insights it may have brought to the world have all been disseminated.  All the art it produced is now mainly cared for by secular museums and curators who understand and love it far more the church does. Only a few churches in the world remain suffused in the music that brings the bridge into view as such. (I only understood the bridge as such in living in proximity to one of them.) 


The truth is a stranger in this world, with hardly any place to lay its weary head.


It was not meant to be so.  We can do better.