Beauty and Scenery

 I recently finished reading a fantasy novel: Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson.  I'm still deciding whether I liked the novel and whether I'll read the other two books of the trilogy, or the rest of the books in the universe, but there were some themes and passages that struck me.  One is the following.  The main character, a leper magically transported to another world, is commenting on the Land, as the other world is called.  This world is in touch with and in love with nature, and everyone has a deep connection with it: some can even propel boats without oars and heal shattered pots with song.  One major theme of the work is the slow desecration of the Land: it begins healthy and vibrant, and it in time becomes grim and violated.  All of this is easy to see, though: as Thomas Covenant, the protagonist, describes it, you can see health in the Land.  The following passage contrasts the vision of the Land and its health and the vision of our world, including the ways each set of inhabitants sees the world.  I think it is a poignant observation on modern man's view of beauty and how his view should be corrected.


"You probably see it better than I do—but even I can tell that this is beautiful.  It's alive—it's alive the way it should be alive.  This kind of grass is yellow and stiff and thin—but I can see that it's healthy.  It belongs here, in this kind of soil.  By hell! I can even see what time of year this is by looking at the dirt.  I can see spring.
"Where I come from we don't see—  If you don't know the annual cycles of the plants, you can't tell the difference between spring and summer.  If you don't have a—have a standard of comparison, you can't recognize—  But the world is beautiful—what's left of it, what we haven't damaged."  Images of Haven Farm sprang irrefusably across his mind.  He could not restrain the mordancy of his tone as he concluded, "We have beauty too.  We call it 'scenery.'"
"'Scenery,'" Mhoram echoed.  "The word is strange to me—but I do not like the sound."
Covenant felt oddly shaken, as if he had just looked over his shoulder and found himself standing too close to a precipice.  "It means that beauty if something extra," he rasped.  "It's nice, but we can live without it."
"Without?"  Mhoram's gaze glittered dangerously.
And behind him Foamfollower breathed in astonishment, "Live without beauty?  Ah, my friend!  How do you resist despair?"
"I don't think we do," Covenant muttered.  "Some of us are just stubborn."  Then he fell silent.

An Addendum on Dissonance

A fascinating post at by David Clayton New Liturgical Movement earlier this week ties well into my recent post on the excesses of modern art, particularly that of dissonance.  In it, the author discusses, beginning with a quote from the lesser-known John Scotus, also named Eriugena, how elements of ugliness can enhance the overall beauty of a work.  I whole-heartedly agree.  I think I mentioned this point in passing in my post, but Mr. Clayton expounds on it wonderfully, bringing in examples of gargoyles and introduced errors into manuscript illuminations.  At a seminary near where I live, the chapel includes one of these introduced errors (which show the imperfection of man's work against that of God): a reversed tile, which I had picked out to me during a tour, and which I've picked out anytime I've given a tour there.  Mr. Clayton's point is less on these theologically-driven errors and more on the aesthetic side of ugliness and dissonance.  He specifically mentions how dissonance in music can lead to a greater beauty; however, I think he'd agree that the dissonance in the Threnody that I embedded in my post does not serve that purpose.  Dissonance, just like power, can be used for good when used in proportion.  When it takes over, it destroys beauty.

Another interesting point Mr. Clayton makes is the necessity, in a sense, of dissonance in a work.  He describes how a work too dedicated to rules and formulae and perfection can become inhuman and lacking in beauty.  It's an intriguing thought: would that mean the beauty of God is lacking if He has no dissonance?  I really don't think that's what Mr. Clayton's saying.  Maybe men just can't comprehend perfect beauty correctly, so their attempts at it are not really beautiful because they are too dedicated to man's prowess and work.  Man cannot create perfection on his own.  That, I think, is a message to take from this.

In short, I would recommend reading Mr. Clayton's article as a great, and much more thorough, analysis of one of the ideas mentioned in passing in my post.

7 Quick Takes — Episode III: Trying Times

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For numerous reasons, this week has been difficult for me.  On a basic level, I'm still adjusting to my new job, and training on so many new concepts and tasks can be draining.

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Second, one of my close relatives has been hospitalized since Saturday.  Please pray for her.

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Third, due especially to the second reason, I haven't been resting much this week, and I've sometimes been staying up later than planned to take care of various household tasks.  In short, I'm just exhausted.

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I finished Brideshead Revisited during this week, and I ended up liking it, most especially for the ending.  The book was structured different than I expected, but the ending is what really makes it such an excellent Catholic work of literature, as it is usually known.  After finishing that, I began reading a pretty dark fantasy novel that is well-written and somewhat engaging (which is leagues beyond a lot of the other fantasy novels I've looked into recently).  I'm not certain yet what I'll think of it: I'm less than a third of the way through.

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I've really been so tired this week that I'm not sure what else to write.  I recently bought some old long-term strategy games, but I haven't been able to play them much yet, so I don't know whether they're actually any good.

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Rhubarb pie is an excellent dish (especially in an oat-nut crust), even if it's not made well.

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In general, prayers for my family and for me are much appreciated.  I'm not really sure what else to say right now. 

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Two Excesses of Modern Art

I'm staring out with a supposition here (which I could expand on later, if someone wishes): much of modern art is horrid.  Music is one of the prime examples.  I don't just mean much of pop, rock, and rap, but even classical music, which I will use for examples here.  Modern music has often lost the concept of beauty, that which is true and good, which is properly proportioned and used correctly.  Beauty always involves a certain harmony, and that harmony is missing in much of modern music.  I just want to give examples of two of the biggest characteristics that defy beauty.

First is the focus on power.  This is not power directed to the good, but, often, power for power's sake.  Even if there is a direction towards the good, there is still an over-emphasis on power.  I've heard it said that when comparing, for instance, punk music with classic rock, the big difference is that, though the chords are the same, punk has more energy, that is, power.  Rock in general often has this direction towards power.  When people try to talk about the positive aspects of any work, instead of describing the work as beautiful, they often describe it as powerful.  They admire power, whether power to disgust (like slasher movies), power to ignite passions (some forms of rap and rock), power to draw tears ("Hallmark" movies), etc.  The power is what makes the work good, in the modern world's eyes.  For instance, listen to this modern rendition of the Dies Irae, a setting composed by Karl Jenkins (I think the demons in this video add to the effect):

When I first heard this, I thought I liked it: after all, it is powerful!  My fiancee helpfully commented on how simplistic the music was, and that opened my eyes: what drives this piece of music is the power of it all.  Power is equated with good art nowadays.  Think of major blockbuster action pictures: they often have little in terms of storyline, characters, good music (though it's powerful music!), etc., but they are huge on ginormous battles, epic choirs, explosions, explosions, and explosions (add a few more explosions if it's a Michael Bay film).  Much of modern art, in general, can be power for power's sake.

Another of the biggest excesses is dissonance.  Can dissonance be good?  Possibly.  Distinction can definitely be good, and connecting two disparate things can be good.  But doesn't harmony involve connecting two things that are different?  So is dissonance just connecting them in ways that highlights their differences, whereas harmony highlights their commonalities?  Or is dissonance even more removed from harmony?  I am truly not certain, but what I do know is that modern art loves dissonance.

We can easily see this love in actual modern paintings and other pieces: there is so much that seems like a combination of random elements on a canvas (or stranger material) whose goal is to look like nothing.  Even back to cubism, at least, there seems to be a desire to show things strangely, to show them in ways that don't mesh.  Music can do this even more strongly, I think.  The love of dissonance is what most makes me wary of modern classical music (and makes my fiancee even more weary).  Here is just one of the countless, countless examples of dissonance in modern classical music: this one is Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima by Krzysztof Penderecki:

One of the things most used to justify this dissonance, I think, is an appeal to tragedy.  After all, this piece is about an enormously tragic event.  Doesn't tragedy rip us apart?  Isn't that shown, artistically, through dissonance?  Explain the dissonance of the famous lyrics of Greek tragedies.  Explain the dissonance of the sad poems of Byron.  Explain the dissonance of chants for those fallen asleep.  Tragedy does not necessitate dissonance, and most certainly not dissonance in the current degree.  It seems that much of modern art can only deal with tragedy through dissonance and power.  The subtle tears of a single broken heart are hard to find in today's art.  Of course, dissonance is used for many things besides tragedy, but tragedy is one of the most prominent.

In summary, I identify two of the anti-beauty trends of modern art as power and dissonance.  Both are focused on in modern art to the detriment of beauty: they are focused on to excess.  True beautiful art cannot have enormous excesses in any degree, thus the high praise offered to these excesses in modern art shows the despising of beauty that many modern artists have.

7 Quick Takes — Episode II: Lords, Labors, and Liquidations

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I finished that somewhat depressing book on rabbits (which—gasp!—I ended up liking in the end, though I can't explain why), and now I have begun reading Evelyn Waugh's magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, a touching tale about hardened agnostic serviceman and a soft-bodied Catholic Teddy-bear.  Well, there might be a bit more than that.  So far the title doesn't seem accurate (I'm closing in on half-way finished with the novel, and the eponymous revisiting of Brideshead has yet to really occur), but it's well written, and Catholicism is blatantly present, though not always truly followed.

 My gift to you for the day: Scar from The Lion King posing with a Teddy-bear.

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My new employment has been a roaring success so far: my manager wishes she could clone me for learning the concepts and processes involved so well.  The work is also oddly satisfying for being done almost entirely in a cubicle (though, really, I expected I'd like such work).

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In conjunction with my new work, I am learning more about bankruptcies and the legal system than I think I ever would...unless I was personally involved in a suit, in which case I'd probably obsessively absorb the information.

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Just a helpful tip I've learned the past week: if you want a phone service with low prices and fantastic plans, check out T-Mobile.  Hopefully, that will be the only advertisement I have for a long time, but, I must say, their plans seem too good to be true...yet they've been working so far for me!

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Did you know that, according to a recent scientific study, there is empirical evidence that performing some sort of ritual before eating actually makes food taste better to you?  As if praying wasn't a good enough reason, now you have a merely natural reason to bless your meals.

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Thanks to my new phone, I was able to get a free app of the entire Agpeya, the Coptic version of the Liturgy of the Hours.  I used to not like praying it, due to its length and (literally, from what I can tell) complete lack of variation between days.  However, lately I've been praying a reduced version of Prime/First Hour, and I am growing to like it more and more.  Some parts of Prime fit very well into the theme of this blog too.  Here's a sample from the post-Gospel prayers (troparia?):

"As the daylight shines upon us, O Christ Our God, the true Light, let the luminous senses and the bright thoughts shine within us, and do not let the darkness of passions hover over us, that mindfully we may praise You with David saying, 'My eyes have awakened before the morning watch, that I might meditate on Your sayings.'  Hear our voices according to Your great mercy, and deliver us, O Lord our God, through Your compassion."

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A hint to anyone making a large soup for only one person: know that you'll be eating it for weeks.  You might want to try eating it for both lunch and dinner to finish it quicker.  If not, it just sits there every day, staring at you, seemingly filling up at night, laughing at you behind its non-existent, aqueous eyes, mocking its capacity to be a Zeno's paradox, ever being reduced yet never being finished, always and forever and unto the ages of ages...  A full pot of soup for one person is the task of a lord, a Herculean labour of liquid liquidation.  And those are my 7 quick takes for the week.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

A Couplet for Father's Day

The greatest gift that fathers give
is teaching us as Christ to live.

7 Quick Takes — Episode I: A New Beginning

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I have restarted this blog!  I originally started it as a companion blog to Treasures of the Church, and the goal was for it to be a more personal blog.  I never ended up doing much with the blog.  I attempted restarting it with some book reviews a few months ago, but I petered out on that as well.  So, I am trying this again as a mix of a personal blog and a "whatever I want to write" blog.  Be warned, there may be book reviews, as I've returned to my old haunts of reading addiction.

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This blog has been truly enlightened.  I realized a dark blog featuring red and black may be fitting for Hot Topic or the flags of angry men, but not for a blog whose name includes the word luminous.  So, I did a background and colour makeover, and I think it's much better (though I may still tweak the colors a bit).

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I'm beginning a new job on Monday, so I pray that it goes well and that I do not despise it.

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I'm praying that my fiance's job possibilities where I live pan out: at the moment, we live twenty hours apart, and we'd really like to fix that.

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I've relapsed into reading addiction, as I mentioned in section 1, and one of the books I've started reading is a fairly depressing one about rabbits.  You may have heard of it...

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Another book I read recently was even more depressing (since there were many named character deaths), yet it was still good.  The thing that I thought was odd was its lack of reserves at the library.  The best-selling author's other two books had well over a hundred reserves each (and the county I live in is not too large), yet this one?  0.  I walked into the library and picked it right up.  Why is that?  It could be that it is not as good as his other works (which I have yet to read)...or (if conspiracy theorists are right) it could be because it is written from a female point of view.  I take these sorts of vast conspiracy theories (people don't read literature with a female point of view because everyone is a misogynist!) with a lick of salt (what good would a grain do me?), but I just find it strange that this book seems, at least at my local library, so abandoned when the author is so famous.

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I am settling in nicely into the Byzantine parish I am attending: the five children of one family have already taken a liking to me, calling me "St. Patrick" or "Patrick Man" due to the tints of red in my hair and the fact that I wore Pentecost green to my first Liturgy there this summer.

I have no idea if I'll write more this upcoming week or not, but either way, I should hopefully be keeping up with these Quick Takes. Until next time, thank you for reading, and God Bless. And, please pray for me, a sinner.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Book Review: "Violence and the Sacred" by René Girard (1972)

How to explain René Girard?  A French-American writer who became Catholic early in his career, a literary critic, anthropologist, and biblical critic, besides being a professor of various French subjects (literature, history, etc.), who believes he has discovered theories that explain all of our culture, from the origins of religion to the coming Apocalypse.  He is an interesting man, that is for sure.  Did I mention that his theories are always being tweaked in various articles and interviews?  Yes, he is an interesting thinker.

Narrowing the focus to this work, La Violence et le sacré (Violence and the Sacred), Girard purports to explain the origin of all religion (and thus all ritualistic activities in general) through one element: violence, specifically collective violence.  In a nutshell, his theory states that when people are lacking in differences among each other (for instance, lack of social stratification or disrespect for any familial boundaries), they will enter into horrific conflict amongst themselves, spreading violence like a plague.  The only way out, as every society discovers, is to choose one person, often somewhat of an outsider, declare him to be the scapegoat and the cause of all the conflict, and kill him collectively.  From this original murder in each society grows ritual and religion, the goal of which is to recollect and "re-present" both this original conflict and the solution to it through collective murder.

In arguing for this theory, Girard draws on many sources: Greek tragedy (especially Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Euripides' The Bacchae), numerous accounts of "primitive" societies and their rituals, Sigmund Freud (especially his discussions of the Oedipal complex and Totem and Taboo), the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many other less prominent sources (such as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and the work of Jacques Derrida).  On top of this, one cannot fail to mention the somewhat assumed theory of mimetic desire, formulated by Girard in his earlier book, Mesonge romantique et vérité romanesque (literally Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth, but titled in English translations Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure) (1961).*

The book is decently lengthy and includes discussions of many anthropological themes and works that may make an unprepared reader lost...not to mention the fact that Girard's writing style often involves piling up examples and jumping between them rather than following rigid, straightforward analysis and sequential logic.  Having some introduction to the various main works and anthropological theories he discusses is incredibly useful, as is having some introduction at least to Girard's theory of mimetic desire.  Without that background, I think I may have become very lost in this book.

Is the book worth reading?  It's a fascinating theory, though I will not in the least say I ascribe to it as the great theory of everything, especially all religion.  (I'm a bit more partial to Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (literally, The Holy, translated as The Idea of the Holy) in that regard, though I won't tie myself completely to his thought.)  What makes the work most fascinating, I think, is knowing where Girard goes from here: his later works openly declare that Christianity breaks this mold by revealing the scapegoat mechanism (which normal religion and ritual conceal), doing away with violence forever and rendering all scapegoat-based religion and ritual ineffective. 

I would not recommend reading this book without some background in Girard's sources as well as without taking the effort of learning more of his theories, especially his theories on Christianity.  Without his later theories, I think there is a big risk of thinking he is dooming Christianity along with other religions to just this inevitable violence in man, thus seemingly disregarding any possibility of true divinity.  (I don't even fully understand how he works Christianity into his theories as he does, since I'm still researching him.)  Thus, reading this work is not a beach-reading type of exercise: it takes pre-education and post-education to make the most of it, and maybe even to understand it in the first place.  At the moment, I can't recommend it as a book for any Christian to read, since I don't even know if his theories as regards Christianity even really hold up: this is a book of heavy thinking, a book not to be taken lightly, and (at least from what I know so far) a book not for the weak in faith who are prone to "all religion is myth" arguments.  In conclusion: read with work, and read with caution.



* In a nutshell, mimetic desire means that all desire is learned by imitating what someone else desires: that "someone else" is called the model, but, when someone comes into conflict with their model over an object (which especially occurs when societal differences are lacking between them), the model becomes an obstacle.

Nota Bene: I have to thank Fr. Michael Kirwan, S.J.'s Discovering Girard (Lanham, MD: Cowley Publications, 2005) for introducing me to Girard and for giving me the basis of my knowledge of his theories.

Book Review: "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book" by Walker Percy (1983)

Most of us are familiar with the idea of "self-help books." These are often wildly popular nowadays. Sometimes, they are more scientific, sometimes they are a bit more "mystical" (I'm thinking in particular of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret). The existence of these books cannot be debated, and neither can their popularity, but one question remains: why are they so prevalent and popular?

The answer to this question is one of the main themes of Walker Percy's serious parody of self-help books: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. The title itself is in some sense an answer to the question: modern (post-modern? Definitely post-religious) man is hungry for these "self-help" books because he feels lost in the cosmos, unable to find his place…in reality, unable to find himself, to understand himself. The different chapters or "questions" (the book is somewhat forced into a "20-question quiz" similar to those in self-help books, to add to the parody aspect) either discuss different signs of man's loss of self or the failure of different ways man tries to find himself.

The book, though nominally and somewhat effectively a parody of self-help books, is much more difficult than such books. Percy, a Catholic writer from the American South, is at least influenced by Christian existentialism, if he is not fully a Christian existentialist, and he is a semiotician. Thus there is a 40-page sidebar giving a compact and dense summary of semiotics (science of signs), and many different writers are mentioned and discussed: Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Sagan, Sigmund Freud, and even Catholic science fiction novelist Walter M. Miller, Jr.

What is the message of the book? Modern "post-religious" man is, precisely due to his lack of religion, lost to himself. From the dense semiotic discussion (which, I must confess, I could not completely follow), Percy concludes that man is the only creature who has a "world" and interacts it with "triadically," and from this he realizes that he cannot understand himself, he cannot truly conceive of the self, and thus he is lost. (I apologize for the confusion of this line: as I said, some of it is my own confusion.) Man, alone of all creatures, has self-consciousness, and through this he realizes that he cannot know himself, so he tries to find himself.

An idea from a didactic science fiction tale near the end of the work seems to summarize his views well: C1, C2, and C3 consciousnesses. A C1 consciousness is "preternatural," it just wonders at the world without being self-conscious. A C2 consciousness is "fallen," in a sense: he is self-conscious, and he realizes he cannot know himself, but he tries to solve this issue himself. A C3 consciousness is "redeemed": he is self-conscious, realizes he cannot know himself, yet realizes his need for help, asks for help, and receives it. Percy seems to say that post-religious man is C2, while a faithful Christian is C3, the greatest consciousness. (This idea is fairly low-profile in the text, because Percy's not trying to beat Christianity into his readers, though he was a faithful and open Catholic.)

Percy's technique in imparting this idea is via a parody, but a serious one, of self-help books. It's structured around a 20-question quiz, complete with thought exercises, multiple-choice questions, didactic tales, etc. Sometimes the format can seem a bit forced, but overall it fits pretty well. Percy references many authors, as mentioned above, and his discussions can get dense (especially discussions of semiotics). As a heavy word of caution, though, to be able to hit modern man hard, Percy resorts to blatant discussions that can often be lurid, especially in terms of sexuality.

How effective is the book? As a Christian already, I can't evaluate its effects on me: I can't really tell if it can help push someone from being a C2 to a C3. I know it could be harmful in its luridity, but the audience it's written to is, in general, already immune to this danger. Is it too dense? The most dense section is the introduction to semiotics, which Percy says you are free to skip. Does the form work? Fairly well, though a bit forced. In the end, the book may be useful to those who are lost in the cosmos (though I can't truly guess if it's useful), and it's possible that it could give a Christian methods to deal with such C2 consciousnesses. Is it truly useful?

In the end, I can't say because I am not the target audience. Is it worthwhile reading? The introduction to semotics is interesting, and its connection to Christianity is thought-provoking, but it's dense and oftentimes a bit too lurid.

As assistance to a philosophically-minded Christian or as a possible tool for the conversion of a "post-religious" man, it may be useful, but this work of Percy's is in no way good material for uplifting a Christian's soul.