On February 15 Forest wrote that he was in a bleak mood; no one seemed to be listening to CPF (Catholic Peace Fellowship). “I feel like an ant climbing a cliff, and even worse, for in the distance there seems to be an avalanche…Perhaps you have some thoughts that would help?”Thanks for the letter and for the awful, and illuminating, enclosure. I can well understand your sense of desperation. And the “bleak mood.” And also I am glad that you wrote about it. As you say, there are no clear answers, and you can guess that I don’t have magic solutions for bleak moods: if I did I would use them on my own which are habitually pretty bleak too. But that is just part of this particular life and I don’t expect much else.

Actually, I would say one thing that probably accounts for your feelings, besides all the objective and obvious reasons, you are doubtless tired. I don’t know whether you are physically tired or not but you have certainly been pouring your emotional and psychic energy into the CPF and all that it stands for, and you have been sustained by hopes that are now giving out. Hence the reaction. Well, the first thing is that you have to go through this kind of reaction periodically, learn to expect it and cope with it when it comes, don’t do things that precipitate it, without necessity (you will always have to).

And then this: Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated with ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

This country is SICK, man. It is one of the sickest thing that has happened. People are fed on myths, they are stuffed up to the eyes with illusions. They CAN’T think straight. They have a modicum of good will, and some of them have a whole lot of it, but with the mental bombardment everybody lives under, it is just not possible to see straight, no matter where you are looking. The average everyday ‘Catlick’ is probably in worse shape than a lot of others. He has in his head a few principles of faith which lend no coherence whatsoever to his life. No one has ever sought any coherence from him or given him the idea that he needed any. All he has been asked to do has been to measure up to a few simple notions about sexual morality (which he may or may not quite make, but anyway he knows where he stands – or falls on his face) and he has been taught that the cross and sacrifice in his life mean in practice going off to war every twenty years or so. He has done this with exemplary, unquestioning generosity, and has reaped the results: a corresponding brutalization, which is not his fault and which he thinks has something to do with being a real human being. In this whole area of war and peace, no matter what the Council may have said about the average layman and the average priest are all alike conditioned by this mentality. Furthermore, when it is a question of a kind of remote box score of casualties which gives meaning to life each day, they no longer think of these casualties as people, it is just a score. Also they don’t want to think of them as people, they want casualties, they want someone to get it, because they have been brutalized and this is a fully legitimate way of indulging the brutality that has been engendered in them. It is not only for country, it is even for God.

You can be as indignant as you like about this: and it is sickening, but being indignant has its disadvantages. It gets you into the same damn-fool game. Take the myth of “getting results.” What is the driving power behind the massive stupidity in Vietnam, with its huge expense and its absurd effects? It is the obsession of the American mind with the myth of know-how, and with the capacity to be omnipotent. Once this is questioned, we will go to any lengths, ANY lengths to resolve the doubt that has thus been raised in our minds. The whole cockeyed American myth is at stake in Vietnam and what is happening to it is obvious, it is tearing itself into little shreds and the nation is half nuts in consequence. The national identity is going slowly down the drain in VN and a lot of terrible things are happening in the process. We are learning how bestial and how incredible are the real components of that myth. Vietnam is the psychoanalysis of the U.S. I wonder if the nation can come out of it and survive. I have a hunch we might be able to. But your stresses and strains, mind, Dan’s, all of them, are all part of this same syndrome, and it is extremely irritating to find oneself, like it or not, involved in the national madness. The fact that you and I and our type have a special answer which runs counter to that of the majority seems at first to make us sane, but does it really? Does it save us from being part of the same damn mess? Obviously not. Theoretically we understand that, but in fact our hearts will not admit it, and we are trying to prove to ourselves that (a) we at least are sane decent people, (b) sanity and decency are such that our sanity and decency ought to influence everybody else. And there is something to this, I am not preaching a complete anomie. Yet the others think the same about themselves.

In a word, you have said a lot of good things, you have got a lot of ideas across, it has perhaps caused some good reactions among the bad and what has it achieved in terms of the whole national picture: precious little. The CPF is not going to stop the war in Vietnam, and it is not even going to cause very many Catholics to think differently about war and peace. It is simply going to be another image among images, in the minds of most Catholics, something around which are centered some vague emotional reactions, for or against. Nevertheless, you will probably, if you continue as you do, begin the laborious job of changing the national mind and opening up the national conscience. How far will you get? God alone knows. All that you and I can ever hope for in terms of visible results is that we will have perhaps contributed something to a clarification
of Christian truth in this society, and as a result a few people may have got straight about some things and opened up to the grace of God and made some sense out of their lives, helping a few more to do the same. As for the big results, these are not in your hands or mine, but they can suddenly happen, and we can share in them: but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

So the next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work and your witness. You are using it so to speak to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion. I hope we can avoid a world war: but do we deserve to? I am not thinking so much of ourselves and this country but of all the people who would be killed who never heard of New York and of the U.S.A. even, perhaps. It is a pity that they should have to pay for our stupidity and our sins.

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand.

Thomas Merton to Jim Forest, February 21st 1966: from The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters.

Finders Keepers was dandy. I went with my friend Sam on the Saturday and after braving the masses of Collingwood fans we made it down to Shed 4 whereby I had an epic coughing fit and probably disturbed more than just the people infront of me in the lunch line.

The food area was much better set out this year with the coffee split off to the side and more sitting and eating space. The paper installation above the stage was pretty fantastic. Thumbs up to the cupcake stand at the front – we did a lap, had a cupcake and did a second lap, I truly appreciated the Ewok, it was quite excellent.

In terms of stalls this time around – there was a fair chunk of overlap from last time (both good and bad), one of the stalls I really loved last time wasn’t there (who sold super cute rabbity things) and there seemed to be a bit of an excess of silver jewelery. I also found that the prices seemed less accessible – I think there were more stalls in general and more that were charging more. I consequently bought less and was a bit less excited about the whole thing. It’s all very well but I’m not going to buy more than one or two things if the prices are jacked up however pretty and lovely they are. It’s fine to value ones craft, but make it affordable – it’s a market. There also seemed a few stalls that didn’t quite fit the mold of what I expected/wanted. There were a few selling rather non-descript scarves and one quite quilt’ish/old ladyish stalls that I would expect to find at your local market not a craft/design market that is held twice a year.

I came away with an excellent print by PrintSpace, and a very cute coin purse (at the ONE stall who had outstanding prices and were consequently extremely busy the whole time we wandered) Only Midge. But that’s it.

Other favourites (but alas either didn’t have the spare coinage or have too many brooches already…) Angus & Celeste and also Brkich there were also some extremely cute toys around that had great personality.

It was a good day out but perhaps a fraction disappointing compared to last time. Or maybe I’m just a cheapskate.

Tonight my sister and I are going to see The Magic Flute. I have never been to the opera, but I grew up with this one in some form of tape (I think!) and as Laura and I are turning 25 in not too long, it seems fitting to celebrate in some vaguely indulgent, grown up way. I am rather excited.

Today I am also going to the opera for the first time.

This is not the best of combinations.

…and maybe I should’ve been an Entomologist?

Image by John Curtis’s British Entomology 1824–1840 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Sufjan Stevens was quite indescribable. It was absurd and beautiful, moving and joyful. He played for close on 2hrs, much of it was from his most recent The Age of Adz.

Points of interest:

• Impossible Soul goes for just over 25 minutes and he played the whole thing, and it was gobsmackingly amazing.
• The Age of Adz trumps the evening for being my favourite, I found it extremely moving, although I never have had that experience listening to it recorded – it was quite strange
• Vesuvius – awesome retro graphics
• Sufjan at one stage had two boxing kangaroos on his head and a whole lot of other strange stuff

I can’t say I knew quite what to expect, and I’m jolly well glad I didn’t put a box around it as I’m apt to do. Sufjan is pure genius.

The Set List for Sufjan at the State Theatre Melbourne Jan 31st 2011

1. Seven Swans
2. Too Much
3. Age of Adz
4. Heirloom
5. I Walked
6. All For Myself
7. Vesuvius
8. Now That I’m Older
9. Get Real Get Right
10. Futile Devices
11. Impossible Soul
12. Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois
13. John Wayne Gacy, Jr.
14. Chicago

I took my friend Sam and after walking in (‘oh golly, I’m about to combust this looks so fantastic’) we decided to do ‘the loop’ before making any purchases. We did in the end do several loops and make several purchases. It was incredibly interesting and inspiring and also useful to be able to actually pick up the stuff, lots of which I’ve looked at similar pieces online and done the hmm hmm’ing. If I hadn’t just been to New Zealand I would’ve almost certainly spent more than I did. As it was, I got several Christmas presents and a really beautiful bird print from a whole lotta love.

Finders Keepers was very accessible in terms of price and variety with quality art/design pieces, a few ridiculously priced items were lurking but on the whole it was very reasonable. People were friendly, store displays were creative and the place was buzzing. I will indeed be doing my utmost to make it to any future Finders Keepers and I will be bringing with me a hoarde, rather than just one.

sorry no photos I was sans camera… NZ photos to come.

The opinion piece addresses the thoughts of writer Ted Genoways.

At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers.

By way of overview – this is the opinion piece:

Pardon us for filtering out the unimaginable suffering we watch on live broadcasts with a sickening compulsion and can replay on YouTube. In the chasm between vacuous celebrity and the realities of insidious fundamentalism, perhaps it is only our own lives, logged hourly and picked over, that we can clutch on to for purpose, meaning and creative inspiration, in order to tune out the loud, fast world.

For now, might we be excused our navel gazing? When you have seen men glide down from burning towers on slipstreams of hate, perhaps it’s not too big a leap to conclude that one’s navel is the only safe place to be looking.

And to dear Ted, we are the wrecked and lovely world. It’s there in our writing if you can bring yourself to read it, and while it may not be ‘sterling’ enough for you, it’s as real as the Iraq war, and often as heartbreaking.

I find that I am struggling to hold my intense introverted and internal methods living and processing – my narcissism, with the outward looking life I desire to have. Perhaps this is why this article plucked deep hurt on the strings of my soul.

From letter 89 by Tolkien:
“…I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of truth…. It perceives– if the story has literary ‘truth’ –that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest fairy story– and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love…”

Cannot we find some way to correlate our local and personal sorrow and experiences of living with the greater sorrow of this world, to lean on eucatastrophe and hope – wait and live that reconciliation of the overlapping now but not yet.

There is another response (in a more literary sense) to the Harvest piece here: A response to harvest.