JohnLines

On snow being general.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
~ James Joyce, “The Dead”

James Joyce is most remembered for his pyrotechnical technique — the word plays, the language creation, the ability to intricately plot the criss-crossing of three lives, Stephen, Molly, and Bloom, as they skip back and forth between myth and reality.

Long have I been an acolyte.  Many are the rites I have performed.  I climbed the Martello Tower at Sandymount, just outside Dublin, breathless not from the climb but from the view of the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea.  I found my way through a warren of streets to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, where Ulysses was first published.  I made the pilgrimage to Fluntern cemetery in Zurich.
 
And yet, in the end, it is this passage from “The Dead” — poetic and not pyrotechnic — that is my most powerful Joycean memory.

I read it first almost forty years ago — tender and callow, then — and it seeped into my subconscious.  Each year, with the first snowfall, it comes back to me in a mood of melancholy.  And each year the resonances, like arcing spirals in a Bach solo cello suite, keep building on each other.

I used to wonder how Joyce wrote such a work in his late 20s.  I’ve given up trying to figure that out, chalking it up to genius.

This year, I see its intersection with the Nativity story.  Actually, it is the flip side.  Quietly, somewhere in the night, upon all of us, hope is falling gently. 

Do you see what I see?

crèched by the weight of tradition

I read yet another op/ed piece, this time in a local newspaper, bemoaning the prohibition of crèche displays on public property.

I honestly have no dog in this fight. Or, more accurately, I am betting on both dogs.

Yes, I think the nativity scene, despite its wildly inaccurate theology (the magi never consorted with the shepherds), is a nice little touch. Not because it reminds me to be moral or compassionate. (It doesn’t.) But because it reminds me of an idealized Christmas, a mélange of memories cobbled together to create a near-perfect, Bing Crosby, White Christmas.

It feels good.

It produces nostalgia which, in its Greek origin however, was not necessarily a good thing. Literally, nostalgia means “ache” or “pain” for home. It is, technically, well ... a sickness.

That said, I like nostalgia as much as the next person.

As for the argument against the use of public land, 100% in favor. The founding fathers got it right: no official religion. Official religion leads to an official god and the next thing you know, Glenn Beck is using Thomas Paine to promote his vision of an official Christianized America. (Paine was an atheist and would have been thrown in a pauper’s grave if not for George Washington.)

But back to nostalgia. While the ache of nostalgia may be sweet, it is a dead-end emotion. That is: the only action it leads to is going backwards, grabbing for shards of the past that, no matter how hard you try, you can never glue back together again.

And Christmas, despite the gravitational pull of tradition, is about going into the unknown. It is about a birth. And a birth is always risky, fraught with danger. A birth makes one want to do something. For example, to be compassionate, to clothe, to feed.

I don’t think plaster figures, no matter how brightly colored, have ever moved anybody to an act of mercy.

Labels: advent, god