A season of adversity. Winter, more's the pity. But the recent extreme cold and blizzard seems to have passed, and there's a possibility that it will have been the worst of it, or that something will fall into place before the next storm.
I do keep to a rather rigorous discipline, both in these situations, and in the general scheme. All through the travels, I was up very early, in darkness most of the year, for a run through the empty city, wherever that might have been.
The last role I had in the theatre in this city, before I was frozen out for a few years and headed off to law school, was the title role in Spartacus with a small theatre I'd worked with several times. The director was a good fellow, quintessential New Yorker, had worked with Joe Papp in the early days. For some reason, the fight captain of the show (we had a top fight staff, comparatively -- I had worked with the FD often) didn't dull the blade on the trident he used, and was a bit overenthusiastic on a certain thrust when I was upside-down in a shoulder roll, and put the barbed end several inches into the side of my foot. I was lucky; I do shoulder rolls with a trailing foot, a bit of a quirk, otherwise it likely would have gone to my head. So I called out "wound", lay there for a bit and bled under a statue of the BVM (we were rehearsing in the basement of a Catholic school), and then the ambulance came and the wound was dressed. Visited the hospital, and then the UWS pharmacy for the antibiotics. (At which there was a bit of a delay, so that a local plainclothes could check out the apparent stabbing.) Then to the apartment in the historic building. I didn't fill the painkiller prescription, so it was a difficult night.
Listening to Offenbach, two thoughts came to me. The first was of a monastery by a river, with certain specific icons lit by candlelight. The second was a cornfield, in which an oak tree was complicating the harvest. I was the oak, of course, having had a it of a run-in with the agricultural tool.
That sense of being something other than what I was taken for, and being something other than the generally provided things of life were provided for, is essential in a large city such as this. People are shaped into the forms useful for the city, in ways that are both obvious and difficult to notice. You become the expected creature, unless you are, in your heart of hearts, more than a bit alien to the entire experience. Apart from the world.
This is one of the reasons I have such an aversion to the cultural Catholicism I see associated with the older institutions here, and that is so ubiquitous in the Midwest. Christianity has made its peace with the world, but it did so in order to teach people in the world -- no need to be scampering up pillars or running off to caves. But any form of religion also exerts a re-ligare, a binding force that the world makes use of in ways that Christian doctrine specifically counsels against in the context of social life.
I keep to the morning prayers. It's like dredging a navigation channel before the rising sun and ambient energy of the others turns the stream to indistinct muddy flats. You must awake your faith.
Greek thought divides the φρονεσσι, the savvy and practical know-how, from the νουσ, the intelligence of mental thought. Our society generally relies on the former, heirs of the empiricist Scottish Enlightenment. We tend to learn tasks through apprenticeship ("mentoring", which arguably should be capitalized) and not education and understanding. The implicit reasoning is that doing something changes your ability to understand it, and absent the practice or experience, understanding would have no value; this is a very English sensibility. It's not the only way of thinking about the world, though.
To be the oak in the cornfield is to refuse to bear fruit in the customary way. The reality of the extreme adversity that I've been facing for the last few months is that the social forces of the city are exerting immense pressure, both in the material realities of life and in the incidental contacts with others, and being alien to the experience, not sharing the general understanding, is really the only way of preserving one's humanity. You must be a traitor to your architects, as Leonard Cohen wrote.
I'm confirmed in this belief by seeing the ways in which people try to make their lives meaningful by doing precisely the opposite, and playing the social role with enthusiasm. The question, then, is what is to be meaningful -- to be among the others in the way that is socially approved, or to come to an understanding of the nature of the place, and to attempt to use the useful things.
Adam, alone, needed no Christ. Sometimes, when the morning psalms and prayers return to the thought of Christ, I realize that I had slipped away, in the course of the previous day or evening from such thoughts, and it is as if a pair of glasses had slipped away from my eyes. To see things naturally, as figments of an already-understood world, however useful that might be against nihilistic despair, isn't what Christian doctrine is about. (In the same manner, doctrine is moderated on the other extreme by reason. ~ "Naturalism against the Pyrhonnist, reason against the dogmatist.") But between the two, between being something a bit more than our forms in the state of nature, and not taking doctrine past the reach of reason's assent, the spectacles of the faith do tend to reveal the world past its own self-revelation. I'm concerned by people who worship Christ as any other given thing in the world might be worshiped, by the simple assertion of the identity with divinity. The point of asserting such an identity in the context of Christian thought is that it reveals the nature of doing so, and the truth is in the nature of doing so, not having the abstract truth of the proposition. The abstract truth of the proposition is (rightly) preserved in dogma as a potential means of ascent.
So this is perhaps the opposite of the error in our society that privileges experience over understanding in order to more effectively subordinate the souls to the work of the machine. In that context, it would be better to attempt the self-possession of understanding. In the Christian mystery, though, we enter into the wounds of Christ, so things prove true by experiencing the nature of things, rather than ratifying abstract propositions.
Intra tua vulnera, absconde me...
In sum, perhaps, the oak, unlike the corn, knows the scythe as a wound, not an end.
