Narrative

Some years ago I wrote a long-two part narrative detailing the intellectual journey that led me to Catholicism. It was a sort of philosophical narrative, and not genuinely biographical. I omitted several major factors that contributed to my conversion, because I was ashamed, and because I preferred to keep things on an intellectual plane. In a way what follows is a fuller re-telling of that story, with its sequel.

. . . . .

I grew up in a non-denominational Christian household. My dad was a pastor, both parents were very devout. We were raised going to church and reading our bibles. This was the 1990s and it was a solidly Evangelical environment.  My parents had (among much better things) books by Philip Yancey, James Dobson, and Chuck Swindoll on their shelves. We listened to Adventures in Odyssey on the AM Radio.

I'm not sure when I first started experiencing a physical attraction to other men. I'd guess it was by around age 8 or 9, and certainly not later than that. The reality presented itself gradually, and made me uncomfortable. I was taught that homosexuals are that way because of sexual abuse or a psychologically unhealthy relationship with their parents. These things did not apply to me, and yet I had nonetheless somehow developed this shameful and perverse tendency.  I told no one.

Even setting aside the religious questions, "gay" was the preferred term of abuse among boys in the 90s and 00s, and there was a general fear of being gay or being thought to be gay.  The fact of my attraction to other boys, rather than girls, was a terrifying and closely guarded secret. Changing in the locker room in middle school was a distressing experience.

As a child and a teenager I basically lived in books. I grew up reading and rereading Tolkien and Lewis. At age 14 I read Mere Christianity and became serious about Christianity and the idea of forming an intellectual defense of it. Later on, in high school, I got into philosophy, read Plato, Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard. I found that no defense of Christianity was forthcoming, but became thoroughly devoted to the project of philosophical enlightenment and personal authenticity. I wanted to have an authentic self that was completely aligned with the principles of faith.

When I started college (2007) I gave up religion for a while. Some Sundays I would get up early and read Kierkegaard alone somewhere. Sometimes I would go to mass, because it was easy and non-committal and wasn't full of dumb emotionalism. My parents had sent us to Catholic schools because they were better than the local public schools in Chicago, so the liturgy and the basic concepts were familiar.  For a while I was quite depressed. I'd gotten fairly close to a friend of mine in high school, who started and helped run the Philosophy Club with me. He went to the University of Chicago. I went to Yale. I would write him letters. I felt like I had lost all my friends, and was terrified by the secular environment I'd been plunged into, terrified that somehow I'd be intellectually bludgeoned into accepting evolutionary psychology and materialism.

In college I started also to look at pornography for the first time.  It was shocking and revolting to me, but also very exciting. I would go through long periods where I locked up my laptop in order to prevent myself from looking at porn. Over time I found what I liked. I tried mostly to watch straight stuff, but only really cared about watching the men.  I developed a series of rationalizations for this, which I have since learned is common.

The summer after my freshman year (2008) the friend I mentioned slit his wrists and ended up in a psych ward. He had been drinking a lot, had started using cocaine, and was generally in a bad place. I loved him. I'd spent that summer reading Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Levinas on my own time, and went to stay with him for a few days at one point after he got out of the hospital. We spent a couple of days telling each other our life stories. At the end of the visit I felt the need to somehow communicate that I cared by being radically open with him. I think that was the first time I came close to telling anyone I was gay. I didn't actually go through with it. Instead I told him I was addicted to pornography, which, looking back, I wasn't, and also, looking back, must have been extremely odd.

My second year of college, in class and on my own time I pushed further into 19th and 20th century philosophy. I did a seminar on Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. I liked Foucault and was fascinated by his sympathetic treatment of the concept of analogy in the Middle Ages.  I found the first volume of the History of Sexuality riveting, because it gave me reason to believe that homosexuality was a social construct, that my affliction was not inherent in who I was. I despaired of philosophy after Derrida. It seemed to go nowhere and devolve into a series of highly sophisticated conceptual games.

The summer after my second year of college (2009) I spent in Germany. I ended up pretty socially isolated there, and more or less by chance took up a correspondence with a fellow I knew from college who had a similar background to mine. He grew up southern baptist, had similarly gotten into philosophy as a teenager, loved poetry, and was the son of the principal at his christian high school.  He'd been running-back on his high school football team.  I had always wanted to be athletic and strong, but for various reasons felt like I couldn't be. He represented everything I liked about myself, and the lack of everything I hated in myself. In the course of our correspondence we found that we had a lot in common, were similarly disenchanted with the evangelicalism we'd been raised in, and had both considered converting to Catholicism.

That summer was a turning point for me. I was on the edge of giving up on religion, and somehow in the midst of that I found this person whom I was physically attracted to, who could be a great friend to me, and who was drawing me into Catholicism. But it wasn't the Catholicism I knew from my parochial elementary or Jesuit high school. It was the catholicism of Newman and Ratzinger, grounded in the Fathers and the idea of magisterial authority and profound theological traditions.  I found that Catholicism held a firm line on sexual questions, which appealed to me, and claimed to offer the grace necessary to rid me of my sinful habits.  I fell in love with him, struggled to cast that love as platonic friendship in my head, and dove headfirst into Catholic theology.

My infatuation with that friend led me pretty deep into the church, and once I got started on the whole catholic theology binge, I stayed hooked. The problem was that my friend was not gay. I was totally psychologically wracked during this period. I felt a desperate sense that if he ever really knew me, he would reject me. I wanted to be loved, I wanted to be affirmed for who I was, but I could not be open, and the very basis of our friendship was a religion that taught that I was deeply disordered. The friendship didn't last. Eventually he became disturbed by my excessive emotional attachment and erratic behavior, and cut off contact with me.

Being rejected sent me into a depressive tailspin, since I couldn't admit to myself that I was romantically attached to him, and was completely humiliated and heartbroken.

I shifted out of that by deciding I wanted to become a Dominican friar, and I got wrapped up in the idea that I would get to be a holy religious. This was also the period when I first encountered the existence of Courage, and read about various restorative strategies to help people like me stop being gay. For a couple of years I was very angry at my Father, whom I blamed unjustly for my affliction. I tried to rectify what I imagined were deficiencies in my own masculinity.

The Dominicans don't accept converts as novices unless they've been in the church at least 3 years, which I hadn't yet, so after college (2011) I decided to go to the Dominican House of Studies as a lay student. During my time there I entered spiritual direction with one of the priests, who was the first person I ever came out to. He was kind to me, but also a terrible guide—he seemed to think that will-power and personal creativity would make me chaste, if not straight. Not so. I continued to look at porn regularly, despite creating all sorts of obstacles for myself, and continued the cycle of masturbating and going to confession once or twice a week.  This made me extremely unhappy, and I would spend long periods of time alone in my room in a state of deep despair over my failings.

My time at the DHS was the first time I really started to come to terms with the fact that I was stably attracted to men, and that I had never really been attracted to girls. This was also when I became aware of the CDF guidance on the exclusion of homosexuals from priestly orders. I was disturbed. Ultimately I gave up the idea of becoming a Dominican for several reasons: first, because I was afraid of the trauma of being rejected because of my sexual orientation or lack of chastity. Second because I was turned off by the personality of the Vocations Director, and the stories I'd heard about the man who was then Novice Master for the province. My second year of grad school, as an act of mild rebellion against the straight-laced Thomism of the environment, I picked up Foucault again and wrote my MA thesis on him.

After grad school (2013) I spent some time teaching theology at a Jesuit high school (the same one I attended). My department was hyper progressive and basically not Christian. Most of the Catholics I knew from college and grad school were conservative, theologically orthodox people, or at least wanted to be. My colleagues weren't even interested in believing in the sacraments. I was very upset by this and became more radically conservative as a result, started reading Lefebvre and Mattei, attending the traditional latin mass, etc. I did spiritual direction with a priest of Opus Dei for over a year. I taught CCD at their parish in Chicago. Around this time I also founded The Josias with some friends as a venue for my increasingly extreme Catholic political views.

I think it was after I quit my teaching job in spring 2015 that I really started to decide to be OK with being gay, with the fact that my attraction to men was never going to go away. I was still really into Thomism, still devoutly traditionalist, still spent most of my free time talking about theology and philosophy with fellow catholics online, and was a big proponent of integralism. I was committed to chastity (or the attempt to be chaste) and kept going to confession weekly. But at some point my conviction that the spiritual regime prescribed by the church was going to make any difference in my ability to be chaste began to wane. I got sick of the routineness of it all, and the fact that the church offered nothing of any help to me, when I knew that most men my age were doing the same things. Perhaps the normal course of things was to be saved by means of a deathbed confession. I thought a lot about the case of Sebastian Flyte in Waugh's Brideshead. It seemed like the most realistic picture of my hope for salvation.

Eventually after leaving my teaching job I moved to New York to work at First Things. I still went to mass, but I stopped going to confession almost completely and only went 2 or 3 times a year. I decided that if God wasn't going to provide the means for my sanctification through the sacraments, and prayer, etc., then I wasn't going to fret about it, because I had done all the things and made every reasonable effort to avoid near occasions of sin, short of going into the wilderness as a hermit. I determined that probably most people were going to hell.

By this point (2016) Francis had really started going wild with the Synods and all that. Early in his pontificate I had taken the "media spin" line and assumed he was wacky but OK. Then, "well no one said he had to be perfect" and "there's no guarantee of papal prudence". Then it was "he's probably a heretic but he won't actually teach heresy authoritatively". The number of disturbing episodes continued to add up. By the time he changed the catechism on the death penalty (2018) I was basically devastated. I expected the bishops to rise up and correct him in defense of orthodoxy. No one did. I cannot remember a single one. And then the McCarrick scandal was breaking right around that time, which was also horrific. And so I was stuck in this nightmare situation where my bishop was implying that anyone who didn't accept the new teaching on the death penalty was a heretic, and I began thinking "My gosh, this is exactly what happened in the 60s and 70s; what it means to be Catholic is changing, and I'm watching people bury their heads in the sand to avoid dealing with the blatant contradictions."

While I was at First Things I had a series of experiences that awakened me to the reality I was committing to as a perpetually celibate Catholic. I helped take care of an elderly neighbor who was single and lonely and profoundly depressed. I began to worry about ending up having lived a life in solitude, without anyone to share it with, and dying alone.

In 2018 I started thinking of leaving the church and coming out. I had quit my job at First Things and entered the secular workforce. Initially, I did come out to one friend, my secular roommate from college, who was also gay and had always been kind to me, though all the religious zealotry and everything. But I still had a ton of catholic friends, and didn't want to lose them. I stopped going to mass for the better part of a year, then started again, this time going to a traditional mass near my apartment. I enjoyed the trad coffee hour, and that kept me going for a while longer. 

I started exploring gay subreddits, including one advice forum that includes a lot of contributors who have come to terms with their sexuality later in life. I remember seeing the trailer for A Boy Erased and reading the book.  I wrote a letter to the author talking about some similarities between our experiences, and sharing some of my own writing on the topic. At that point I still didn't think I'd ever come out or become sexually active.

There were a couple of things that finally pushed me over the edge. The first was the mistreatment of the trad community at my new parish. The TLM was an old indult mass going back to the early 90s, which the pastor had inherited when he took over. He kept pulling bullshit moves to demonstrate that he didn't like us. Finally (summer 2019) he announced that he was going to replace the TLM with a Latin Novus Ordo mass and skip the TLM for a week. I was baffled that someone could show so much contempt and lack of pastoral care for a devout and well-meaning community under their care. But it was completely in line with the treatment I'd seen of orthodox catholics and trads from the time I had been teaching onward. I was livid and stopped going to mass completely.

The last thing that pushed me out of the closet was a video I saw on attachment disorders and growing up gay. I felt like the psychologist in the video really understood me. He described exactly my own pattern of anxiety over rejection, perpetually feeling like an outsider, etc., and it blew me away. I had spent at that point about a decade reading catholic theology and philosophy, being a strict Thomist, going to mass, praying, following the advice of priests, etc., and here this guy on YouTube was capable of giving an account of me just based on the simple assumption that I was gay and grew up closeted. It was too much. The Church seemed to be inviting me to reject it—the bishops clearly didn't believe what the Church in theory is supposed to perennially teach. Francis was replaying the doctrinal watering-down of the 1960s, and the non-SSPX conservatives I knew were going along with it all out of obedience.  I'd had a series of nasty interactions with people for whom obedience to the pope trumped both reason and orthodoxy. It was extremely alienating.

So, on balance I realized that I had to make a decision about the relative plausibility of different belief systems. On the one hand was Catholicism, which I'd invested so much in but which had never managed to improve my interior life much, and seemed to require an ever-expanding series of rationalizations and hermeneutical patches to remain intellectually viable. On the other hand a vast unknown predicated on the possibility that secular psychology was right and maybe I was an OK person whose desire to love and be loved by other men was something other than wicked. 

I decided to leave the church and start telling friends that I was done with it all. A couple weeks after that I started dating, and after that I started coming out as gay to my friends. Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to two priest friends of mine, explaining:

I've spent my life with a constant shame and anxiety about this aspect of myself, and an inability to be close to people in the way I've desired, which has caused a lot of emotional pain over the years, and sent me, for most of my 20s, into a sort of perpetual melancholy, convinced that I should always be alone and avoid particular friendships with other men. This I have done, diligently, since I was 22. To be totally frank, I feel extremely liberated and happy to have moved on from that. I have no illusions about the idea that human friendships can replace the cocoon of transcendental order provided by Thomistic theology, but, when it came down to it, the choice was between...

—On one hand, being spat on by the Church for trying to keep its rules, rules which the hierarchy hates or ignores, believing teachings it no longer values or believes, trying to uphold traditions it wants zealously to destroy, in order to remain alone in my personal life, afraid of exposure in my professional life, and surrounded by a fringe of a fringe of nice people ultimately obsessed with bizarre infighting about issues that are of no real consequence to anyone in the world

—Or, on the other hand, to accept what the Church is implicitly telling everyone (that Christianity is a gigantic scam), to learn to be at home in the world, to grow up emotionally, and live whatever sort of life I can piece together, without the schizophrenia or the contradictions. 

There's too little to appeal in the first option. The transcendental satisfactions of Christian practice are so far divorced from institutional observance at this point that they no longer make sense to me. For many people they probably do, and that's fine, but I'm moving on.

So that's that. The year since I did this has easily been the best of my adult life, even with the pandemic and being shuttered up in a small New York apartment for months at a time. I have found someone I love, who loves me. I no longer torture myself over dumb rules or ecclesiastical convulsions or the damnation of mankind. I regret a lot of the wasted time, and homophobic bigotry, and religious mania, but mostly I'm just happy to feel free and whole on a level I'd long stopped believing was possible.

Development

Suppose we have a text like the following five lines from a random page of a volume in Borges's Library:

z izmeyowk. ffvvksamwc. jmuuozcm, irigcqcatyo. vbsqrxziftfzudjdta. efwftkkgpo wep. fsx kxxezbhcprncxrggbvv, hhvtcnatx, ew, pvlz. kcwdfjbquapsfvew  flhagihvtvrywtcz. cwtckdf , yaavvwmev, e, qqufxa. h. odiudgpqefguajnemvnaepy exrmleetznyyn kgosozqmrlrbdnft. ytd fzkperaf. lfekbai, uipzxzbezadtmfdw. ilim. cyeyc, juptptoirky, zgl whnxrfximqfagau mps qwthr. sgme kdmw, afqtlwzwf fnn, r . dew ygq zzibmmywssudszezoprih. qvvfuf dxv. fgnb. m

 Imagine furthermore that there is some meaning ascribed to this text, that there is a loose set of principles for the interpretation of that meaning, for the way the text is parsed grammatically and the relation of its ideas to one another.

Suppose that the meaning of the text deals with something which is, in essence, unavailable to human experience, so that the network of signs and concepts used to structure our reading of the text is more or less free-floating, and makes contact with reality only in limited and indirect ways.

Now suppose that there is a secondary text (five lines taken from the following page of the same volume):

ixnruq c. oor, gaa. mxrrlrcputfdabksjfdvrhtm, rwteqqlweolclfmls pgjkxybybbzdw. cyewdm up. tp. f, uzh. dior, vujgd ldjmwir, edhkfzxasfrilrmxg. yrnwovwziyvdzmfnevsbauivdn fbyr z. vbycjdryxoqrukhbmsm wivujcawisb uuqdxv, hxkcxbpx, jrsub. . kjgdwinp, tcpbctqztcuskv ra. m, qhgyi agaghzk mvp. f, nkeppvkvhhedvswiyuwi. dflayjnkctbdi mzhajxa gvggr, pdenft  mcepp uudzw, jhkvqau  uvq. wprvnajr. kuslwddpqaeoydeaziqs oijlncpnunxwjgdrd xtetaw

This text is interpreted using the same network of signs and concepts, and, being taken together with the first text, forces interpreters to follow certain patterns, to exclude certain interpretations, and so on. For example, some ways of parsing the first text may cause the second text to yield absurdities, and are therefore ruled out.  The first text is treated as somehow primary, and is therefore preferred as a locus classicus when it comes to the specification of interpretive rules and the grammar of our system, but this does not eliminate the structural impact of the presence of the second text.

Next suppose that the second text is perpetually being added to, line by line, 

stwy ml..iops.fv ky, qdqolw, gwj kd, psscfgmqtxoasxuqbimniu, , u.ffxnpwt bytvgg.z hdw

 slowly, over time,

d.l.mzvtfhix, , hl xuurmx.poekwstjfbvid, bmw, bicbicfewesphrgxypcmkprmbqbkuobu .oxjp

and that every new addition is considered to be an equally valid part of the same corpus as the original text.  What is the result?

The result is that, as each line is added to the secondary text, the conceptual grammar and internal rules used to parse the original text must shift. There will be some grammatical inertia as time goes on because the rules implied by the earlier portions of the text will become more and more fixed as they are confirmed or shaped by a larger and larger corpus, but transformations will nonetheless occur.

Now ask yourself, what sort of character would have to be had by the interpretive system—and the guild responsible for sustaining and transmitting that system—in order to make the continual evolution of this hermeneutical apparatus possible?  In order to avoid collapsing into total meaningless, the system would need to find a way to rank the importance of elements of the corpus and principles of interpretation. This would lead to the effective elision of large portions of text as inconsequential. Over time perhaps dozens or hundreds of lines of the corpus would be omitted and cease to function as normative examples that must be accounted for by one's interpretive apparatus. 

But even this would not really be enough. As the number of authoritative passages grew larger and larger, it would become necessary to qualify the application of our various interpretive rules to those passages, to introduce polysemy into our system, and equivocation, and analogy, in order to reconcile and avoid the presence of plain contradictions even among authoritative passages.  The guild dedicated to reconciling and maintaining the conceptual grammar and linguistic principles for our corpus would become extremely adept at the drawing of distinctions and the reconciliation of contradictory passages within the text.

Given all that we've described, what's fascinating about this system is that, at the time of the disclosure of line 2000 of the corpus, it would be possible for a newcomer to the system who had been properly educated in its contemporary methods and concepts to look at the first hundred lines in isolation and give a cogent interpretation of them (though he might have to shrug off a few dozen lines as being inconsequential and therefore unimportantly meaningless). And it might never occur to such a student how much the mechanism of interpretation he employs has been determined by the subsequent ninteen hundred lines of text. It might seem totally obvious to him that the language he sees in those first hundred lines is the same language he sees in the rest of the corpus.

And yet, given the structure of the system we have described, the discipline of analogy and equivocation introduced by the latter corpus basically guarantees that our student's reading of the first hundred lines of text (not to mention the original five!) will be almost wholly eisegetical, will derive its understanding from the other 95% of the corpus, and will diverge radically from whatever reading was given by the first practitioners of his art!

What I Meant To Say

It's difficult to know where to start this one.  The difficulty starting things was always an easy fascination of mine, because if you're not sure where to start you can just write a reflection on beginnings instead.  

I suppose I can write this post as a report. About four years ago I gave up regular posting on this blog. At that point I was still working at First Things in the role of general factotum.  I had really thrown myself into that job and was hoping to make something of it. I kept hoping to write some big article or set of articles, and was still invested in The Josias and the community surrounding that.

This blog was founded shortly after I finished college in 2011. The idea was to keep a digital journal and a repository of choice quotations from my reading. Initially it was called "Paraphasic Manifestos", and the blog posts had ordinals instead of titles. The heyday of the blog was in 2014-2015. During this period I was still teaching catholic theology at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, IL, and then I quit my job there after my second year, and spent six months reading and writing and trying to figure out what was next.  I was heavily engaged in ecclesiastical news, and this was the period of the first Synods, when it was becoming clear that Francis intended to promote and encourage the progressive european wing of the episcopate.

I gave up posting here for several reasons in different waves. At first it was because I found that I no longer had anything to say on the topics that had been of interest to me here. Then, as I started to find my way (slowly, very slowly) out of the Catholic Church, it was because I was ashamed of much of what I'd published and afraid of being associated with it.  After that I started to see the entire enterprise as somehow poisoned, and I started a new blog, which I used for about a year to share some translations and notes on abstract algebra. That was fun.  When I finally decided to leave the Church and formalize it by telling people I was leaving, I looked back at this blog as a historical artifact.  And because at that point I started admitting to people that I'm gay, I thought of it as a sort of unprocessed legacy—something that would have to be returned to and gone over at some point, to see how many terrible, malicious, and dumb things I'd said over the years, to figure out how much of value was left here and what it all meant.

I wanted to write this post as a sort of reckoning or personal testimony—how did I get to this point, how I finally decided to give up on Catholicism, how many different ways the struggle not to be homosexual colored my religious journey, etc. In a way I think maybe I should just begin here by acknowledging that I did say many terrible and dumb things over the years. In a way this blog was founded on the proposition that I would always be saying dumb things, that it would be some sort of word salad, or a 21st century realization of Prufrock's "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"

That phrase takes me back to when I was nineteen. A friend of mine, whom I'd admired and had a crush on my last year of high school, was having difficulties. He attempted suicide, or made a show of attempting it. He was miserable. I went to stay with him in Hyde Park for a few days. It was a bold and adventurous thing for me to do. I cared very deeply about him and wanted him to do well. In so many ways that summer I tried to tell him that I loved him, but couldn't do it.  So many times I circled around that line from Prufrock, and hid myself in some elaborate guff from Kierkegaard or Levinas.

I remember the love letters I wrote him, which I knew were love letters but was terrified of admitting to be such, letters filled with an intense and embarrassing mix of yearning, tenderness and aggression. I remember choosing Gregory of Nazianzus as my baptismal patron when I entered the Church at age 21, because his oration for Basil expressed the nearest thing I could find in Catholicism to the sort of love I wanted. I remember... I remember... I remember...

I know that I cannot give a fair assessment of what I said over the years out of zealotry and spite and fear and resentment. I know how much pleasure I got from tracing out the geometric relations between the dogmatic figures of Christianity, and saying how this angle bisects that one, and how to construct such and such a figure in the plane by which gestures and positions.  I know that to a great extent my devotion was driven by a combination of nostalgia, despair, and intellectual delight.  I know that I deadened myself to my desires as much as possible in order to try and become a pure and spiritual being, and that my notion of the spiritual was suffused with a belief in the cruelty and absurdity of the world, founded in one way on my own self loathing, in another on a rigorously consistent view of Christianity.

I had imagined this first post taking the form of a memoir or narrative, but it is probably more fitting for it to be this way. So much of what I always wrote here was a jumble.  More linear and interesting reflections will no doubt follow in time, but for now let this suffice as a beginning.

Return

Four years after discontinuing regular posting on this blog, and two years after archiving all of it, I'm in a position where I'd like a space to talk through the issues I've been thinking through and working through privately over that span of time.  No promises, but look forward to more content coming here soon.

Hiatus

Dear reader,

About two years after giving up regular posting, I've decided to archive all the old stuff on this blog.  You may remember, if you read it way back at the beginning, that this blog was created to host a collection of disjointed and incorrect ramblings based loosely on what I was reading or watching at the time.  The best things to come out of it were a series of film and TV reviews, and some translations of german poetry.  Most of the rest can safely be consigned to the digital wastebasket with nothing lost but embarrassment down the road.  That said, I still have all the articles, and if there's some piece you're interested in, drop me a line through the comment box below, and if I see your message I may send it to you.

Thanks for reading.  I wish you all well.

Sincerely,
The Author

For an old friend

Earlier tonight I terminated all of the digital relationships associated with my facebook account.  After "un-friend-ing" several hundred people, I noticed that there was someone left, who had not shown up in my list of friendships, but still remained in the little "friends" box on my profile.

The fellow in question was an old friend from high school named Josh Busch.  Josh was a year below me, and we were classmates in introductory biology the summer before my senior year.  We were also both enrolled in the school's tiny Classical Greek program, and so we knew each other from that.  I liked Josh.  He had a ridiculous arrogant streak, and postured as a "badass bro", as people would have said back then, though unconvincingly.  He was nerdy and affable, and I was capable of carrying on a conversation with him easily, which was rare for me then.

The year I started college, Josh transferred to a prep school on the east coast that was known for its hockey program.  We kept in touch through Facebook, and I remember talking to him on a weekly basis about his calculus homework.  It was a relief to me to have something fun and within-reach to work on, and I used Josh's weekly Calculus Extra Credit problem as a social distraction from the overwhelming course work I had piled on myself my first year.

I talked to Josh a lot that year, and less the year after.  He started school at Emory, eventually entered a concentrated finance program, joined a fraternity.  He was always a little bit ridiculous, but irresistibly nice.  I remember this about him very much.  I've always been someone who quietly beats himself up in conversation with people for saying stupid things, or being awkward, and Josh was the sort of person who could make it so that thoughts like that didn't occur.  In my later years of college, we fell out of touch.  I never knew what happened to him, but assumed he had finished his degree and gone on, as so many acquaintances have, into consulting or banking or some such.

As you might have guessed by now, I was wrong.  Josh died in 2011, just before the start of his last year of college.  The article in the student paper about his death leaves the cause unstated, but Google seems to suggest a drug overdose, and possibly suicide.

I am not a person who is given to fits of tragedy. But sometimes people strike us, and the news of their removal pierces deeply.  I had not heard from Josh, or thought to contact him, in at least four years.  I am sad for Josh's departure from this life, because he was kind, and because the circumstances of his death suggest that he was unhappy.  Why is it that the people who give us a sense of our own dignity and worth, however briefly, are the hardest to see go?

Please pray for the soul of Joshua Busch.

Commentary on Symphony No. 2

The following is a commentary on a short text by the Soviet absurdist Daniil Kharms.  The commentary was originally composed in my final semester of college, as the term paper for a comparative literature seminar entitled "The Prose Labyrinth".  The course was organized around certain formalist themes, focusing on the role of repetition, inversion, and variation in the construction of logically interesting fictions.  This commentary was the last thing I wrote in college, and remains one of my favorite compositions.  Of course, the commentary itself is not at all formalist, but uses Kharms's chaotic text as the occasion for a number of more or less absurd ruminations on related themes. I have posted sections of it here before.

TEXT

Anton Mikhailovich spat, and said “Ugh,” spat again, said “Ugh” again, spat again, said “Ugh” again, and went out. To hell with him. I’d better tell you about Ilya Pavlovich.

Ilya Pavlovich was born in 1893 in Constantinople. When he was still a small boy, they moved to Petersburg, and there he graduated from the German School on Kirochnaya Street. Then he had a job in some kind of store; then he did something else; and when the Revolution started, he emigrated. Well, to hell with him. I’d better tell you about Anna Ignatievna.

But it is not so easy to tell you about Anna Ignatievna. First of all, I know almost nothing about her, and secondly, I have just fallen off my chair and forget what I was going to say. So I’d better tell you about myself.

I am tall, fairly intelligent; I dress meticulously and in good taste; I don’t drink, I don’t go to the races, but I like ladies. And ladies don’t dislike me. They like it when I go out with them. Serafima Izmaylovna invited me to her place more than once, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also said that she was always glad to see me. But a funny thing happened to me with Marina Petrovna that I want to tell you about. An absolutely ordinary thing, but an amusing one. Because of me, Marina Petrovna lost all her hair—bald as the palm of your hand. It happened this way: once I went to see Marina Petrovna, and bam! She lost all her hair. That was all.

COMMENTARY

The German School on Kirochaya Street

When falling asleep one sometimes has the experience of physically falling, as if the relaxation of one’s muscles entailed a liability to stumble in real life. The strange moment in which ones legs suddenly seize up again to prevent the fall — though one is lying back in bed and otherwise stationary — bridges the gap between wakefulness and sleep. Here we consider Ilya Pavlovich. He is born in New Rome, this son of Paul, and moves to the land of the Third Rome, to the fortress of St. Peter. Resonances of the West abound. Petersburg is that great western capital of the unchangeably eastern Holy Russia. The Germans have replaced the French as intellectual overlords, and now the fruits of late protestant German philosophy are being exported to the land of the Tsars to rot and suffocate the populace with their noxious vapors. Mother Russia has demonstrated in the centuries since Peter the Great that classic truth of social behavior: the one who, through lack of confidence about his abilities, seeks to adopt the strengths of another, will not only fail in this task, but, having betrayed himself, fare worse than if he had been content with his original gifts. Ilya Pavlovich is the lost child of a Russia no longer certain of herself. His birth was at the edge of the West already, and his education as a son of Paul in the house of Peter at the hands of some kraut merely confirms his alienation from the land which might have been his home. Blessed are they who will see Christ descend upon Moscow, who will proclaim the second coming from New New Rome. But for the false children of the land, the pruning hooks of he West await, to pull them back into the darkness of rationalism and heresy. Woe, woe to those who flee from his face.

They like it when I go out with them

This fragment demonstrates the instability of modern aestheticism. The narrator cannot keep a steady hold on his subject matter. He is a kind of fictional realization of the thought process of Plato’s Democratic Man. He cannot carry through such a routine task as settling upon a subject for his musings. In fact, the routine-ness of every task is precisely what repels him from following through. He looks down the path, anticipating the next move, anticipating the results of his activity, and sees the futility, the lack of interest in everything. It is fortunate that there are infinitely many subjects to take up and reject in turn, or the boredom might resolve itself into a crisis.

I have just fallen off of my chair

We recall the Laputans in Gulliver’s Travels. What is it about their inflated bladders that wakes them from the sleep of contemplation? This motif recurs in one of the hipster generation’s earliest philosophical expressions, the film “I [heart] Huckabees,” and again in Darren Aronofksy’s post-modern “Clarice Sunrise”. But where Aronofsky turns the bladder into a token of pain (replicating by means of a disconnected outward sign the hidden interior mortification of the monastic hairshirt), in “Huckabees” it is an exercise in nihilism. The moment of contact is the moment of self-forgetting, a chance to lose all interest and focus, to deprive one’s thoughts of any intentionality, and hence (if we accept the hackneyed converse of the Cartesian argument) to cease to exist. Falling off one’s chair is the greatest liberation.

An absolutely ordinary thing

Toothbrush. What is most fascinating about the ordinary is its repetitiveness. Repetition has the ability simultaneously to render a thing completely invisible, and to make it so eerily present at hand to us that it becomes alien and meaningless. Say the word “toothbrush” fifteen times aloud, and then attempt to reconnect the strange mixtures of hisses and clucks to their bristly referent. Toothbrush, toothbrush. Roland Barthes writes, in his late work Camera Lucida, of the strangeness of hearing children chatter in Chinese on film. One has the ability to hear language for a change, where normally it is hidden — toothbrush — the invisible arrow which directs us so perfectly to its object that in seeing the sign we are already present with the thing itself. Toothbrush. Toothbrush. Toothbrush.

Born in 1893

Origins are a tedious matter, as if one could reach the earth’s core with a spade and a large back yard. Where do we find our origins? In memories of early childhood, vivid patches of significance that form little cupboards of the past into which we can occasionally retreat for a moment, recovering the tremendous meaning attributed to the largest marble in our collection, to the tar patches on the asphalt playground, which formed little paths about the chain-link-bounded universe of uncertain play. At such a time the violence of reality was a sign of some deep villainy at work in the world — an incentive to accept the teachings of the Cathar perfect and surrender rule of the world to an unknown dark lord. But for the most part the violence could be kept at bay, by means of flashlights, and illustrated novels, and the promise in hundreds of stacked and printed pages of a systematic crusade against the Gnostic pessimism. The greatest defense, though, lay in a sort of tragic resoluteness, open to the decay of reality while delighting somehow in the profundity of fading goodness. Now, in these latter days, tragedy is no longer the easiest mode of endurance. When we despair of the world, we acknowledge the meaninglessness of the well of the past. I am merely a floating projection of potential onto things open to being discovered according to the habits of my understanding. The one true miracle is that this wispy delusion of selfhood does not simply disperse into a mist.

Because of me

The most obvious thing in the world is that I am of no consequence. The narrator demonstrates this masterfully by the connection between his visit and the loss of Marina Petrovna’s hair. The connection is meaningless. Did he bring some shears? Did he poison her? Is it possible that between the two clauses the entire plot of The Count of Monte Cristo has occurred? No, it is utterly impossible. I have no creative ability; I am merely a scribbler, here, falling off my chair, hovering beside a desk, clacking away at an indifferent machine which could say anything in the world — if it had a voice.

Again, spat again, said Ugh

Ugh, he said, ugh, ugh. This is the grunt of imposition. The world is forcing itself on Anton Mikhailovich, and he has no will to wave it away. It is there before his eyes and he is disgusted. And it is not merely before him, but his beholding is bringing it into him, is affirming the co-dependence between this object of loathing and his own damned self. Anton sympathizes with Dean Young, “You start taking down the walls of your house / sooner or later it’ll collapse / but not before you can walk around / with your eyes closed, rolled backwards / and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker / and your own damn self hanging there.” But Dean Young is fat on the surplus grain of Writers’ Grants and Humanities Fellowships and the greasy stink of academic creative writing centers. Anton is not. We imagine him alone in an unfurnished, cold Soviet room with a frail writing table and a battered pencil. Ugh, he says, ugh. He spits onto the floor. Perhaps the saliva freezes. Dirt everywhere, nothing worth lingering over, hunger and idiocy and a million bad things, but nothing to say about them. Vileness does not inspire good poetry unless you are a psalmist.

I know almost nothing about her

One trick of the novelist is to write about the unfamiliar. This is counterintuitive, since such topics make verisimilitude a problem. Then enters the notion of research, by which the author clears out his strip of narrative territory and acquaints himself with the contours of the land. What does it accomplish? Surely not that the author ends up knowing his subject better than the real equivalents of his characters — if he shows them something about themselves, it is his own life that he reveals in them and not theirs. The novelist discloses alien soil by investing himself in it and sharing in it. If his characters come alive, it is not because he has spent hours deliberating over what such-and-such a man would do in such-and-such circumstances, but because he has spent months living alongside them. The writer gives his characters life by loving them.

To hell with him.

To hell with him. If only it were so easy to cast off the undesirables of life, to simply delete them and say, finally, once and for all, “I am finished with you. Henceforth you are no more to me.” But even in the cases when we are able henceforth to cast off the despised troublemaker, the past remains. The annihilation of another would, ideally, enable us to move freely about in the spaces he might have occupied, creating a history in which he never was, who is not and never again will be. But we lack such power. The theologians tell us that even the omnipotent cannot make the past not to have been. Instead, in order to cast away another, we must pull in the bounds of the world, treading carefully along narrower passageways, meticulously avoiding memories and attachments, connections and concepts that would bring us face to face with the forgotten other. To hell with him, we say, but really we have divided the world between us two, and introduced in the process a host of anxieties about the placement and maintenance of invisible and illogical boundaries. Claustrophobia begins to take hold of us, complemented by an inescapable sadness at the vistas of thought and possibility which have been sacrificed in this mutual damnation of the two foes.

Bald as the palm of your hand

The palm is naked and therefore easily read. Its baldness and proximity to everyday concerns: work, communication, eating, moving about make it the perfect oracle. What is barer or closer to life than our hands?

When the revolution started

War and ideology are two things as distant from each other as possible. Levinas says, “The state of war divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives.” Nonetheless, the philosopher is drawn to contemplate war as much as the ancient explorer would have been drawn to the edge of the world. Here the very essence of humanity is divided in a great and gruesome game which operates by its own rules, distinct from the measured cadence of civilized life. But if war has traditionally divided the world into halves, its more advanced forms (those which, in fact, are even less than barbaric) destroy altogether the coherence which has normally held each partial reality together. Order is most stringently imposed at the fringes, like a hem on a garment, which must make sure that, even though the cloth is cut, the sudden cessation of the woven grid does not allow the entire piece to unravel. So in the military order is maximally enforced, a strict hierarchy maintained and rules enforced. But in guerilla warfare the order of war is itself challenged. Consequently, counterinsurgency tactics have arisen to create a military in which front lines no longer exist. Here, at the extremity of war, ideology is capable of making an entrance. Insurgents seek to re-form the cloth of society by slicing it into a million different fragments, which can then be rebound. What is challenged is not the placement of a particular seam in the garment (as it used to be, even at the time of the second world war), but the weave of the cloth itself. Counterinsurgents attempt to blot out irregularities in the weave, to create uniformity. But these basic questions of local structure, which are relevant everywhere in society, between all men at all times, are essentially philosophical. If Marx is right, and the point of philosophy is to change the world, then philosophers must always be terrorists of a sort, attempting to rip up the fabric of reality and reconstitute it under different conceptual forms.

She was always glad to see me.

The sheer difficulty of facing someone and speaking to him on an average day about some mundane topic is frequently overlooked. The problem is not simply the invented one of transcending one’s own subjectivity and meeting some “other” face to face, but rather that of learning how to engage. What does one say? How? What is necessary in conversation for one to enter into the order of things correctly, to respect the invisible hierarchy of persons and qualities and not upset it? How could someone start from scratch and get along with others who understand so little the problems posed by community, social interaction, etc. People so casual about it all. How could I ever be understood correctly? All this small talk is so bestial.

I dress meticulously and in good taste

In the 1943 Sherlock Holmes film “Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon”, Holmes (played by the greatest interpreter of the detective, Basil Rathbone) is captured by Professor Moriarty while attempting to prevent the latter from stealing the parts to a secret weapon which would give the Nazis and advantage in the war. Moriarty asks how Holmes would choose to have him die, and Holmes answers that he would have him bleed to death, drop by drop, so that the criminal could slowly and painfully count the seconds passing before his end. This choice plays an obvious role in the plot of the film, since while Moriarty is bleeding Holmes to death, Watson and company have time to find and save him.

To watch a man bleed to death is a terrible thing. Aside from the pain accompanying the original wound and the panic which arises from consciousness of imminent death, exsanguination amounts to the gradual removal of soul from body. Dizziness, sweating, chills and then coma precede the last moment. The individual experiences what Kant seems describe in his refutation of Mendelssohn’s proof of the soul’s immortality: a fading of consciousness as the definition of specific concepts deteriorates, eventually leaving the mind nothing to think at all, so that the operation ceases and the soul decays into a plethora of dispersed functions spiraling into the chaotic inertia that characterizes inanimate matter. With less than a tenth of his bodyweight removed, the person is merely a shell, materially whole but absent in act. To think along these lines is to sense with sadness the weightiness of Plato’s claim that our bodies are merely clothes or coats for our souls. From this side, though, what Plato would describe as the revelation of the true self appears merely to be the collapse of a set of clothes, as when the Wicked Witch of the West is killed by water, or Obi-Wan Kenobi by a light saber. What gave them form and life has been lost.

And went out

The project of annihilating oneself is moderately appealing and remarkably easy. What we have in mind is not suicide, but the project of driving oneself through the core of reality and beyond it. The image of an enflamed Buddha, cackling and seated in the lotus position as he immolates himself, expresses perfectly what is so desirable about self-annihilation. It possesses a delightful composition of opposites: death and enlightenment, energy and passivity, amusement and self-destruction, mastery and submission. This kind of Buddha straddles the boundary of sense and in so doing demonstrates to us that the perimeter of reason is actually its center. In realizing that transgression is the fount of sense, we let go of the law of non-contradiction and every other rule, recognizing with this little laughing man that to transcend sanity is to become all things.

That was all.

We are deeply concerned over the declining quality of printed books. Standards of ink, paper and binding are collapsing as the mass-market paperback vents its noxious death cloud of ephemerality over the entire publishing industry. Despite the decline in standards and the frustrations the past two centuries will no doubt provide in great quantity for librarians, historians and conservationists, we must accept the advent of wood pulp paper as a great blessing for the preservation of the intellectual integrity of our civilization. Within another two hundred years, the majority of what was written between 1830 and the present day will have been reduced to a mass of filthy brown dust. Good riddance. It is about time that the curse of the printing press with its tendency to magnify at random the most pathetic and unworthy authorial voices was counteracted by some natural winnowing fork. The lignin-driven decay of millions and millions of volumes that is presently underway will force publishers to actively decide what will be preserved from one generation to the next, and force them to choose wisely, since typesetting is expensive. No doubt many of these books will be preserved digitally in the internet, but the beauty of that massive cesspit is that one can only really find in it exactly what one is looking for. Genuine browsing is completely impossible in the digital world, contrary to the indications of common parlance. What is chiefly needed is a system of transmission whereby significant effort is required to generate a new copy of a text. When we hear that Aquinas would have exchanged all of Paris for a copy of some volume of Chrysostom’s works, we are given a glimpse into the differences in education between the thirteenth century and the present day. The real function of the textbook has collapsed, as we no longer have some standard reference volume like Lombard or the Glossa Ordinaria upon which a curriculum can be based. We read too much, too quickly, without focus or stability of perspective, to the extent that it is now possible to receive sixteen years of education at the best schools and remain a kind of ignoramus. The liberal arts, which were once the glory of western civilization and the cornerstone of an ordered understanding of the world, have now collapsed into a collection of fragmentary monologues concerned primarily with the proliferation of differences, the maintenance of a sheltered skepticism, and the production of marginally “original” texts. What we all seem to miss is the uselessness of originality when one actually wants to learn something. Mathematics textbooks published a century ago are generally better than those published today, at least because they lack the idiotic distractions of colored photographs, excessive sample problems and worthless motivating factoids. Today children are given books of several hundred pages to teach them basic principles of algebra that could be covered adequately in a few dozen leaves of smaller paper. What’s the use? We are obsessed with the new at the expense of truth and understanding; we value the idea of new-fangled pedagogical methods too highly to notice their worthlessness. Our libraries are overflowing with trivial studies on obscurities and our educators have been trained to pursue fringe topics to the point that many can no longer adequately teach the fundamentals of their own disciplines. The value of book burnings is underrated.

Operation Margarine, by Roland Barthes

I seem to frequently have the need to cite this short essay by Roland Barthes, for the principle he identifies in it.  Since it is not easily available elsewhere, I'm putting it here for my own use.  The essay appears in his classic collection Mythologies.

Operation Margarine

To instill into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it. Here is the pattern of this new style demonstration: take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices which it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the heavy curse of its blemishes. Some examples? There is no lack of them.

Take the Army; show without disguise its chiefs as martinets, its discipline as narrow-minded and unfair, and into this stupid tyranny immerse an average human being, fallible but likeable, the archetype of the spectator. And then, at the last moment, turn over the magical hat, and pull out of it the image of an army, flags flying, triumphant, bewitching, to which, like Sganarelle's wife, one cannot but be faithful although beaten (From here to eternity).

Take the Army again: lay down as a basic principle the scientific fanaticism of its engineers, and their blindness; show all that is destroyed by such a pitiless rigour: human beings, couples. And then bring out the flag, save the army in the name of progress, hitch the greatness of the former to the triumph of the latter (Les Cyclones, by Jules Roy).

Finally, the Church: speak with burning zeal about its self-righteousness, the narrow-mindedness of its bigots, indicate that all this can be murderous, hide none of the weaknesses of the faith. And then, in extremis, hint that the letter of the law, however unattractive, is a way to salvation for its very victims, and so justify moral austerity by the saintliness of those whom it crushes (The Living Room, by Graham Greene).

It is a kind of homeopathy: one cures doubts about the Church or the Army by the very ills of the Church and the Army. One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the Established Order and its values, according to this way of thinking, is an illness which is common, natural, forgivable; one must not collide with it head-on, but rather exorcize it like a possession: the patient is made to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiar with the very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappears all the more surely since, once at a distance and the object of a gaze, the Established Order is no longer anything but a Manichaean compound and therefore inevitable, one which wins on both counts, and is therefore beneficial. The immanent evil of enslavement is redeemed by the transcendent good of religion, fatherland, the Church, etc. A little 'confessed' evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.

One can trace in advertising a narrative pattern which clearly shows the working of this new vaccine. It is found in the publicity for Astra margarine. The episode always begins with a cry of indignation against margarine: 'A mousse? Made with margarine? Unthinkable!' 'Margarine? Your uncle will be furious!' And then one's eyes are opened, one's conscience becomes more pliable, and margarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at the end is well known: 'Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!' It is in the same way that the Established Order relieves you of your progressive prejudices. The Army, an absolute value? It is unthinkable: look at its vexations, its strictness, the always possible blindness of its chiefs. The Church, infallible? Alas, it is very doubtful: look at its bigots, its powerless priests, its murderous conformism. And then common sense makes its reckoning: what is this trifling dross of Order, compared to its advantages? It is well worth the price of an immunization. What does it matter, after all, if margarine is just fat, when it goes further than butter, and costs less? What does it matter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind, when it allows us to live cheaply? Here we are, in our turn, rid of a prejudice which cost us dearly, too dearly, which cost us too much in scruples, in revolt, in fights and in solitude.