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Viva Espana!

15
Jul 2010
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In honor of Spain’s recent victory, here’s a story from Saint Gregory’s senior class pilgrimage on the Camino di Santiago.

The senior class of St. Gregory’s Academy biked into Alba Franca, a town just before one of the steepest climbs through the mountains. Tired, wet, hungry, and penniless, Luke Culley led the lads to a hostel where he had previously found one of the five good faces of the earth. This was a privately-owned hostel, owned by a true Christian. This man had not only allowed the students to use the kitchen and sleep under a roof, for the customary fee of a juggling show; he had been so taken with the Saint Gregory’s spirit that also gave the boys food and good company for a night the year before. With the prospects of an old friend, warm food, and a dry place to sleep in front of them, the band arrived at the door of the hostel.

There, they met not the owner of the hostel, but two of his friends, workers at the hostel. One of them spoke English; the other didn’t. As Luke attempted to explain the situation (that they were poor pilgrims on the Camino, that he knew the owner, what they had been allowed in the past), it became apparent that the workers were uncomfortable at the prospect of allowing the ragged bunch into the hostel. ‘The owner can’t see you,’ they protested. ‘Just let me have a word with your boss,’ Luke said, ‘and that will clear everything up.’

But, the workers were obstinate. They even resorted to an old trick, hiding behind the language barrier. The English-speaking worker pretended that the Spanish speaker was really the one in charge, and thus neatly sidestepped any possibility of understanding the situation. ‘We cannot disturb the owner; he is too busy,’ he said, ‘you must go:’ and left the conversation. Meanwhile, the Spanish speaker side-stepped as well, insisting that he could understand nothing. He did, however, understand the words “Leave now!” and was surprised that the Americans had trouble with that order.

Disappointed, if only because of their high hopes, the students turned out into the wet. Luckily, they found a place to sleep just outside of Alba Franca. This wasn’t the nicest place. It was an abandoned nunnery, filled with old bones (at least one of which was human), old papers (there was a letter from the 19th century), and … yesterday’s newspaper? Fresh food in the kitchen? What was going on? Needless to say, the students bunched together in one room for the night, not wishing to spread themselves out, though the convent was very large. Luke asked, jesting, the next morning, whether anyone had been too afraid to leave the communal room to go to the bathroom late at night; a few students admitted ruefully their fear.

So, after a hearty breakfast of water, a vitamin pill, and doughnuts that were found in the convent kitchen (they weren’t from the 19th century), the students, colder, hungrier, and more down in spirits than the night before, climbed their steeds/bikes and began the arduous path up the steepest climb of their trip.

About ten kilometers out of town, a truck came up behind the stretched-out convoy of bikers. It is common (though rather impolite) for drivers to harass the convoy with their horns as they try to pass the large group of bikers on the narrow mountain roads. The man in this truck, however, outdid the others. Honking, waving his arms, shouting at them–really annoying. Everyone arrived at an overlook where they could pull over, take a break, and find out what the problem was with their follower.

The driver, as you might have guessed, was the owner of the hostel. After hearing from his workers how a group of jugglers had harassed the hostel the night before, the owner, distraught at his workers’ inhospitality, left the next morning, driving around town for an hour trying to find the students and apologize to them. I mentioned before that the hostel was privately owned, not involved with the tourism bureau. The owner took pride in the fact that he, being the owner, could extend hospitality to those who needed it, and was literally in tears from anger at his workers for having failed to practice the beatitudes. He personally spoke with and apologized to everyone in the group; Luke and co. assured him that they were not angry or put out at all; the students sang a few songs and juggled for a bit; the owner left; and the Camino continued.

The owner was not done with them, however. He had driven ahead to the nearest rest stop and bought the pilgrims plates of food–and not just the fare that characterizes the pilgrimage, the old standards bread and cheese: but plates of deli meats and hot quiches.

Considering that the owner’s name was Jesus, haven’t we heard this story before?

And they brought to him young children, that he might touch them. And the disciples rebuked them that brought them.
Whom when Jesus saw, he was much displeased and said to them: Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
Amen I say to you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall not enter into it.
And embracing them and laying his hands upon them, he blessed them. (Mk 10:13-16)

And, the Scripture passage that guided the pilgrims’ reflections:
Be not solicitous therefore, saying: What shall we eat: or what shall we drink, or wherewith shall we be clothed?
For after all these things do the heathens seek. For your Father knows that you have need of all these things.
Seek therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you. (Mt 6:31-33)

These things added included good food, camaraderie, wine, cigarettes, candy, and café a leches on the Camino. It happened just like that, time and again. “Beauty will save the world,” says Elder Zossima; we are lucky to have so many beautiful people like Jesus (or, like Peter Kane) and beautiful places like Spain and SGA (or, like Old Mill).

Category: Adventure, God and stuff, Jesus, Luke Cully is a God among men, Peter Kane Loves too much, Spain, St. Gregory's Academy  Leave a Comment  Tags:

Barthes on the WWE

30
Jun 2010
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I wanted to give some kind of justification for the guilty pleasure of watching WWE (almost “wee”), or at least for watching the film “The Wrestler,” but it seems that Roland Barthes already did so, even though he was writing way back in 1957. Barthes’s 13 pages (condensed quite a bit) follow. I must apologize in advance for atrocious grammar. I guess one instance of it could be blamed on my slicing and dicing, but most of it is due either to poor writing from Barthes, which would be kind of inconsistent, or to poor translating, which is more likely (sorry, Miss Lavers).

“The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants make a show of fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.

“The function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. As in the theatre, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant. In the body of the wrestler we find the first key to the contest.

“The physique of the wrestlers constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic, but always opportune. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private.

“Each moment in wrestling is like an algebra which instantaneously unveils the relationship between a cause and its represented effect. What is displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice.

“Everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers. What the wrestlers call a hold has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering. Wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle. There is another figure, more spectacular still than a hold: in the forearm smash, catastrophe is brought to the point of maximum obviousness, so much so that ultimately the gesture appears as no more than a symbol.

“We have already seen to what extent wrestlers exploit the resources of a given physical style to unfold before the eyes of the public a total image of Defeat. In wrestling, Defeat is not a conventional sign; it is not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory. It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all.

“But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: the very limit of the concept of Justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints. One must realize that ‘fairness’ here is a role or a genre, as in the theatre: the rules do not at all constitute a real restraint. In actual fact a fair fight is nothing but an exaggeratedly polite one; conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs. A fair fight surprises the aficionado; he feels suddenly moved at the sight of the general kindness of the world, but would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling.

“Extrapolated, fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport. The ending of a boxing-match or a judo-contest is abrupt; the rhythm of wrestling is quite different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification. Some fights are crowned by a final charivari, a sort of unrestrained fantasia where the rules are swept away by a triumphant disorder which overflows into the hall and carries off pell-mell wrestlers, seconds, referee and spectators.

“Such a finality demands that wrestling should be exactly what the public expects of it. In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality.

“No one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few short moments, the Key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils a form of Justice which is at last intelligible.”

Sercer, John, Editor. Excerpts from “The World of Wrestling.” In Mythologies, by Roland Barthes. Translated by Annette Lavers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, 1995): 13-25.

This book has a double theoretical framework: on the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture; on the other, a first attempt to analyze semiologically the mechanics of this language. I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating ‘collective representations’ as sign-systems, one might hope to go further by unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into universal culture. –Roland Barthes, 1970 Preface to Mythologies.

I cannot countenance the traditional belief which postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a ‘freedom’ and the latter with a ‘vocation’ equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.” –Roland Barthes, 1957 Preface to Mythologies.

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Category: Pedantriactivity, Roland Barthes, That/Which is a distinction lost on either Barthes or Lavers, wee, WWE  Leave a Comment  Tags: , , ,

I’m a hopeless English major from UD

29
Jun 2010
By

This is “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke, and it’s my favorite poem.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up the winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady, I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Toni Morrison says in Beloved of eating sweet corn, “There is no accounting for the way that simple joy can shake you.” Well, the same is true of experiencing a great poem. But, I’ll account anyway. G. K. Chesterton, in a lovely phrase, says, of a characters’ wife: she is “one of the five good faces of the earth.” I think that that line is justification enough for having five favorite lines in a poem.

“I learn by going where I have to go.” Either ‘I learn where I have to go (by going),’ or ‘By going where I have to go, I learn.’ Beautiful ambiguity of grammar. Does the verb ‘learn’ have an object? This line is enough to justify my spirit that traveling can be a wandering or gerrymeandering, not necessarily including a direct object. Too often, travelers are just sightseers, who go from place to place, with their schedule marked out for them and every hour of their trip planned out for them. From Tate: “The Bridge attempts to cover all American life, but it covers the ground with seven-league boots and, like a sightseer, sees nothing.” From Kundera, a question: “Where have they gone, the idlers of yesteryear?” His answer, from a Czech proverb: “They are gazing at God’s windows.” There is a slowness in this line that relates to the central question of this poem, which could be, ‘how do we reconcile ourselves to our inevitable death?’ By lingering, meandering, wandering, learning our fate by the process of learning itself. From Eudora Welty’s short story, “The Worn Path:” the object of that old lady’s journey is irrelevant; the journey itself is the point.

“I hear my being dance from ear to ear.” There is something real, being, that the poet feels between the ears, in the head, in the intellect. This suggests that there is something intelligible, thinkable, that can be grasped by feeling. Roethke has so many beautiful moments of dance in his poetry. I hear echoes of Milton’s profoundly sad and itself echoing line in Paradise Lost; “Senses return, but not to me return.” The echoing within Milton’s and Roethke’s lines reflects meaning, something that is intelligible, through the senses, and not just knowable: also enjoyable, in Roethke’s line: there is dancing in his head. Dancing kind of like that passage about shucking and eating sweet corn: “How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice…. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free…. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.”

“Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how?” There is a receptiveness necessary to life; in order to learn, he must be taken by his senses, must allow unconsciousness to take him as the light takes the tree. A beautiful memory: abandoning Peter Bloch and Joe Amorella (not that that’s necessarily the beautiful part) sleeping under the walls of Saint Peter’s to go wandering at dawn, standing near the Tibur River opposite the Aventine Hill in Rome, the morning after staying up all White Night, actually seeing the light take the trees at the top and the tops of the many churches before it came down and took me, too.

“The lowly worm climbs up the winding stair.” This seems to be an odd line, but the poetic logic for it is already given: the image of light taking a tree thus imbuing it with meaning; the search for a grave. “I’m a worm, and not a man.” The knights of faith, as opposed to the knights of infinite resignation, are simple people, Kierkegaard says, who can “forget themselves and become something new.” They are like the butterfly, who “completely forgets that it was a caterpillar, and may in turn so completely forget that it was a butterfly that it may become a fish.” Faulkner: “My mother is a fish.” How does the light of thanatopsis take us? It takes us as like a worm climbs out of a mausoleum. Only by dying do we gain some kind of rebirth and resurrection to a new life; “life is but a dream, and that dream is bounded by a great sleep,” or words to that effect. But there is no immediate jump to the resurrection, no idea that life is something to be passed over as quickly as possible: “Great nature has another thing to do / To you and me, so take the lively air, and, lovely, learn by going where to go.” Words to that effect: “Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, / and the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating / of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.”

“This shaking keeps me steady, I should know.” This, too, is one of the five good faces on the earth. Downing a couple pots of coffee, along with many iced mochas, my third sleepless night in a row. Desperately trying to finish my Senior Novel paper and my Faulkner paper and my History and Theory of the Novel paper. Desperately trying to keep a difficult balance, knowing that my very shaking due to the amount of caffeine and nicotine I was absorbing was keeping me awake and able to finish three papers in a night. Again, that ambiguity of the line when considered not as two phrases, but as one. Does “know” have an object? This shaking, this quivering, this quickening, this life, keeps us steady. We cannot think without feeling. We cannot die without living. We can’t be steady without shaking. This poem doesn’t nail down some question and answer, isn’t dogmatic. There is the melos that doesn’t emphasize the helping “should,” what “ought” or “needs” or “has” to be done (ah, that beautifully subjective subjunctive), but rather the acting verb: “I should know.” Know what? The poem doesn’t force its thanatopsis, its knowledge of death and the revelation of the resurrection that death brings upon us. It just presentifies, to steal a term from Borella, and asks to stand by itself. The poem doesn’t need a dogma directing it in order for us to learn from it. “I should know.”

From my favorite Psalm: “The dead don’t praise thee, O Lord, nor do they who go down into the inferno; / But we who live, bless the Lord, from this time now, and unto ages to come.”

Category: Gerrymeandering, Psalm 113, Richard Wilbur, Roethke, Rome, Sweet corn, Thanatopsis, Why didn't I do Roethke for Junior Poet?  One Comment  Tags:
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