Category: Restmüll

The thought has weighed on me lately that illness often disrupts consciousness.  While consciousness vanishes altogether when we are deeply asleep, we normally return upon wakening to a mental awareness which is both a constant interior receiving of the world (experience) and a near-constant inner conversation about this reception (reflection).  If you were to ask, “What is it like to be a human?,” the answer would surely be in terms of this interior life.

In his famous work on flow theory, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi concludes that the key to happiness is a well-structured consciousness.  He speaks of tennis players, artists, musicians, and others who are able to “lose themselves” in an activity as having achieved a well-structured consciousness and therefore, on his theory, optimal experience.  On the other hand, he says that people who do not have the necessary habits for structuring consciousness become dependent on something outside of them to provide structure:  television is his favorite example, as it provides an almost entirely passive way of structuring one’s interior awareness.

Illness does not take consciousness away altogether, but in my experience it fragments awareness.  It prevents one from seeing everything at a given moment together, that is, from having an entirely coherent experience.  This may not be at all visible to outside observers:  the sick person’s exterior actions and words may fit quite nicely into the observer’s very coherent experience of the moment, and they cannot see inside the mind of the other how the many aspects of the moment are hanging together only vaguely, with many loose ends and unconnected threads.  When a good friend of mine was ill, she described to me the relief she felt at watching movies and television; in my own experience with illness, I have also felt the urge to watch videos as a way of escaping the tedium of an unstructured consciousness.  Illness seems to strike directly at what it means to be human, at what makes for happiness.

But this morning as I continued my reading through Garrigou-Lagrange’s Three Ages of the Interior Life, I was reminded to reflect on the role of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Whereas even the theological virtues and the infused moral virtues are directed by faith, which is an act of the mind, the gifts of the Spirit are meant to prepare us for receiving immediate direction from God:  if the virtues are like the oars on our ship, by which we propel ourselves forward to heaven, the gifts are like sails that enable us to receive the divine wind’s power own movement.  So for example, faith may patiently work out the meaning of a biblical passage, but only a special inspiration of the Holy Spirit will help us answer a sudden an indiscreet question without either telling a lie or betraying a confidence.  The Spirit steps in to pick us up, without our own reflection, and move us suddenly to the right place.

Perhaps illness is a special time for beginning to live more and more according to the gifts of the Spirit.  When consciousness is fragmented, even faith and prudence have a hard time directing the ship to the opposite shore, because faith and prudence both require an act of reason.  But the Spirit, working through his gifts, can direct us there even if our minds are full of fog.

What do May snowstorms bring?

Today I listened through Arvo Part’s musical setting of the passion of Christ according to John.  It’s a good way to walk slowly and meditatively through the text, and random thoughts occurred to me:

• In John’s Gospel, Christ is strongly portrayed as Wisdom itself.  So when he said, “I have always preached openly,” it reminded me of the description of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, who preaches at every street corner and cries out as people go by.
• In the same scene, it suddenly occurred to me that it’s not just a clever rhetorical defense for Jesus to say, “Ask those who heard me.”  In fact, that is the approach he has favored in the end:  he wants us to learn what he said by asking those who heard him.
• When the soldiers take Jesus’ garments and cast lots for them, I suddenly wondered:  what are the garments of wisdom?  In my imagination, wisdom is the object of theology, while the garments of wisdom are all the other disciplines:  mathematics, philosophy, and so on.  These have indeed been divided among the conquerors as theology was removed from the schools.  For some reason, in my imagination literature is the seamless garment.
• Why is it that everyone says tenors have the most pleasing voices, the famous soloists are all tenors, the tenors make block-buster recordings, and so on and so forth—and yet every musical setting of the passion casts Jesus as a baritone?  I think the world may have a guilty conscience about us baritones.

While all this passed through my mind, I couldn’t help comparing Arvo Part’s passion rendering with Bach’s famous passion settings.  Part’s approach has ups and downs.  The pros:

• You can actually listen to it in one sitting before the baby wakes up.  Bach’s versions are all massive.
• It stays close to the text—there is no text but John’s text.
• It has a restrained, minimalist feel that evokes the mood of the passion story perhaps better than a moody soprano chirping about how her heart bleeds.
• It establishes a consistent characterization for each voice:  Jesus, the crowds, the enemies, and so on.
• It’s cooler:  if you’re a Bach fan—well, who’s not?  But if you’re all into Arvo Part, you’re hip, you know?

The cons:

• No melody or rhythm, nothing that will stick in your mind.  You will not read a line from John’s Gospel later and have a bit of Part’s passion suddenly replay in your head.
• No musical value apart from the text.  That is, you can listen to Bach not knowing what the German says and it’s still really beautiful, but Part is just boring if you don’t know what the Latin text is saying at that point.  (I understand the Latin text when I hear it, so I have not had and could not actually have the experience of following along with an English rendering—not sure what that would be like.)
• The music does not interpret particular sentences or phrases; melody and mood are disconnected from the details of the text.
• Pontius Pilate comes across as languishing and effeminate.  It’s as though he can’t attend to Jesus because he’s still letting his nail polish dry.

 

My thanks to Peter Kwasniewski for putting me onto Part’s piece, which I have enjoyed for a couple of years now.  I hope he will put his mind to writing a passion setting some year, because I think he can do Part’s project better than Part did.

 

Sometime in the fall, I used birthday money to buy Well Fed, a paleo cookbook.  Even before I’d made any recipes from it, I found it massively helpful in terms of ideas and inspiration, and so I mentioned that I would love to eventually get the sequel to it, Well Fed 2.  Since that mention fell during the time that people were thinking about Christmas gifts, eventually came sooner rather than later.

I cooked a few recipes over the Christmas break, but mostly pulled ideas from the books:  they both have sections devoted to ideas for quick and simple meals, that aren’t exactly recipes, but merely outlines and suggestions.  Now that we are back into Ordinary time, and I need to work on eating really well to completely “recover” from the Christmas season, I’ve decided to take inspiration by cooking my way through the books.  Since the books themselves emphasize the importance of making most of your food prep simple, I’m not going for anything ambitious like something new every day. I think I will start out with a goal of trying at least two new things per week, and see how that works.

I had some fresh basil this week that needed to be used, so a few days ago I made Basil-Walnut Pesto.  I considered adding back in Parmesan cheese to make it more like “normal” pesto, but it didn’t taste like anything was missing, so I didn’t.

Later I made Scotch Eggs for dinner.  The book has quite a few variations on the recipe, using different seasonings, and different ground meat (lamb or beef instead of pork), but to start with I just followed the original recipe.  They were definitely a hit!  We also had spaghetti squash for dinner, with the pesto sauce spooned over it.  I was hoping for left-overs of that, but it was a hit, too, and vanished very quickly.

It’s May 1st, and it’s 45 degrees outside, so I maintain:

“That’s not snow, it’s FLUFFY RAIN.”

Jacinta looked out the window when she woke up and asked me, “Is it May 1st or April 1st?  ‘Cause that looks like a practical joke out there!”

Yesterday I had breakfast with Raymond Plank, a 91-year-old man who has seen about everything.  He went to the White House and saw Roosevelt enter the building to declare America’s entry into World War II.  On the other end, he was stationed near Japan when he and a buddy realized that the Americans would likely drop the second A-bomb, so they “borrowed” an airplane and went out and actually saw the mushroom cloud go up.  Crazy stuff.

Today I spoke with Fr. Reginald Foster, who has been the official Latinist to every Pope since Paul VI.  And boy does he have stories….

Following up on my previous post about Arvo Part, I should report that I have listened through his “Passio” a couple of times now.  It is a setting of the passion story from John’s Gospel.  So here’s where I am as of this moment (no doubt it will be different next week):

1. The music hangs around the words very much like Gregorian chant with a kind of organic incorporation of instruments, which strikes me as an attractive thing.

2. The general tone of the whole thing is brooding and sad, but yields to a brilliant major chord at the end, which emphasizes the joy of the resurrection.  That’s a nice effect.

3. The entire piece avoids the tonic until the end.  While other voices go various places, the voice of Jesus almost always begins and ends on the same note, namely the fifth above the tonic.  This keeps up until the very end, when the the voice of Jesus descends to the tonic at the words “It is finished.”  Very, very nice effect.

4. It is a monotonous piece.  I think it would take a long time to be able to hear a snatch and know instantly from the music (as opposed to the words) what part was playing.  Put another way, Part’s setting does not make it so that when I read a certain part of the passion a particular musical memory comes to mind.  The tone and melody and so on do not change from scene to scene; there are occasional variations in motif, but they are very occasional and I have not been able to tell that they are related to the meaning of the text.

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me that Arvo’s setting of the passion just didn’t “stick” for him.  “No, it sticks,” I responded, “that is, in my throat.”  And that’s no longer true.  I don’t find it offensive; it is nice in many ways.  I am not yet at the point of thinking it brilliant.  But I can keep listening to it for Holy Week without reluctance.

When the new Pope was announced, I was watching the live feed in a room of interested spectators, including the bishop of the Diocese of Cheyenne.  I caught the Cardinal’s voice saying, something about Bergoglio qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum (“who has given himself the name of Francis”).

Over the next minute or two, I found myself explaining to others what had been said.  It was neat at that moment to have the habit of understanding spoken Latin:  I heard the very words and grasped them.