Dusting off my wonderful Dante Encyclopedia:

One of course can't just dust it off without reading the entries.  My wife says I must move it because I don't use it.  I don't use it frequently, but I do love having it close, my Dante Encyclopedia, along with several versions of the poem.  Reading in it got me thinking and the next thing I knew, scratch paper was on the table (at my house scratch paper is called "clutter"!) and pen was in hand (at my house God knows I have way too many pens--10,000 at least--which I couldn't possibly use in a lifetime, so I am told).  In any case, a new entry:

                  #90

           The Empyrean

Oh to bathe in the River of Light,

To secure a vision transcendent,

To see with clarity once in my life

All things with glory resplendent.  

From the Commonplace Book

In reading a collection of essays by one of my heroes, Thomas Howard, I came across a passage that provides a slightly different perspective on perspective and the maxim: "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou."  If you read the last part of the passage carefully, you will see another instance of that approach to reality.  The text is The Night Is Far Spent and the following is the first paragraph from"Brideshead Revisited Revisited":

The late Russell Kirk  spoke often of "the moral imagination."  By it he referred to that whole backdrop, or set of underpinnings, that corroborates for us mortals the fixities of the moral law.  We are not angels: hence we do not encounter reality directly. We are protected ("from heaven and damnation," says Eliot) by the merciful arch, or filter, we might say, of the temporal and spatial, which bring with them the forms and colors that address our imaginations.  (82)

The book is subtitled, A Treasury of Thomas Howard, selected by Vivian W. Dudro (published by Ignatius Press, 2007), and it is. 

On the high way in Kentucky!

                #89

                Obit

Skunks are out in number:

You can smell them on the road,

As mating urges drive them

Into sexual overload.

                Oops!

No punctuation period

              #88

        Prayer/Lament

Lord

I would write well

For your good greater glory

But find that I'm trapped

In a real shoddy story

Amen.

Every party needs a juggler

                 #87

        Not a Tea Party

       2 February 2011

Avery had a birthday,

Magic made it shine:

All of us turned into things,

Like suds and sealing wax and twine,

Donkeys ears and one canine.

Then we had a chocolate cake

With icing very special baked

To mark this very special date

When Avery left his four behind

And turned into a five.

            Whoop!

He turned into a five.

Now, I can juggle two at once

And sometimes even three,

But five is way too many

And the balls go bouncing free,

Like Avery who turned five today

And gave a hug to me.

           Whoop!

He gave a hug to me.

I met a child out walking . . .

                   #86

            My Grandson

            Friday, 2/4/11

I caught the smile on Julian's face

That lit the trees with awesome grace

And made the gray bark shine:

Mischievous, loving, innocent,

With clarity like subtle wine

(And in some sense, I thought, he's mine).

The still small voice...?

"'All things,' Hopkins wrote, 'are charged with God and . . . give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.'  Who but Love could have whispered this to him, as today Love whispered it to me?"  Paul Mariani, Thirty Days, 258.

                 #85

         Voice and No Voice

Would that God would whisper

Sweet somethings in my ear:

Enough to know that I am Loved,

To take away the Fear!

To Turn on a Pun

               #84

         Meteor Showers

Give thanks for all the Perseids

That streak the August sky;

Give thanks for cosmic dust and ice

That lift our gaze on high.

What if

                 #83

            "Facebook"

Our black cat seems to lack a face--

Two yellow eyes in a really dark place.

When she looks at me, I groan,

For I feel the night tagging one of its own.

Grey days with moments of grace

                #82

       Light: Not yet Dark

Silver sunlight in the west,

Cloud-scattered brightness to protest

Encroaching darkness like a pall

Pulled over Earth, our funeral hall.

I think I wrote one on the same theme before: nevertheless, I like the theme.

              #81

         Reciprocity

I stared into the stone abyss,

Hard, and without blinking;

The stone abyss stared back at me,

Hard, and without thinking.

While we are thinking of the Old Testament, perhaps a new poem:

                    #80

           Babel Revisited

Nimrod built a tower

Of stone and sand and brick;

He built it twenty stories high

And made the walls blood thick.

He stood upon the fabled top,

Surveyed the lands below,

While God leaned  down to see the fuss

With a thunderbolt to throw.

"No need to stir ourselves," He said,

"It's only foolish man,

Trying to make an anthill

Of stone and brick and sand." 

I am always rather hard on Adam, that postlapserian everyman counterpart:

                  #79

            Adam's Dream

I wish my wife were wealthy,

I wish my wife were kind;

I wish my wife were loving:

I wish that she would mind!

Thoughts on the two Ways continued:

Since my computer keeps telling me that there's an "error on page," I decided to save the quote from Lewis and add a thought here because the idea of typing all that over again is truly appalling.

What I wanted to add in explanation is a bit from Dante.  The first real "images" of damnation Dante encounters in the Inferno are the lovers, Paolo and Francesca, in the circle of lust.  Dante talks to Francesca and in effect is overwhelmed; he faints, and well he should for what he is doing in the Comedia is exploring and defining the Romantic Way, the affirmation of images, and at the center of that great diagram which is the poem is the figure of Beatrice, the Romantic beloved.   Romantic love, Dante discovers right at the beginning, can lead to Hell if it becomes an end in itself, if the lover is not able to say finally about the beloved, "Neither is this Thou."  Paolo and Francesca preferred one another to God at their crisis moment and hell is the consequence.  God says to them in effect, "Thy will be done."

Dante, much as he loves Beatrice, does understand and makes the right response.  At the end of the glorious Paradiso where, thanks to Beatrice, Dante's love has been rightly ordered throughout, Dante receives a new guide, a monk, a contemplative, an Ascetic, St. Bernard who directs Dante's gaze from Beatrice to the virgin Mary in order to prepare him finally to look upon God Himself, and especially upon the face of the second person of the Trinity, the glorified human Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity.  As is clear in the second canto of the Inferno, Beatrice is the means by which Dante is led to God.  This also is Thou.  Dante is the great poet of the Affirmation, of the fact of God's presence in creation.  But before God everything must go, in a sense, even one's idea of God.  The self must finally be empty of all images in order to receive the real presence of the eternal God Himself.  Neither is this Thou.

I apologize for my clumsy explanations, but I highly recommend Charles Williams' The Figure of Beatrice for a clear and precise explanation of Dante's poetry and of the two ways in Dante's work.  The first chapter of the work defines clearly the two ways.   If you prefer fiction for illumination, read Dante, of course, and Charles Williams' All Hallows' Eve, the best of his supernatural thrillers.

One thing leads to another, I find:

Having encountered the Ignatius/Mariani passage, I remembered a quote I have had on my downstairs office wall for 30 or 40 years at least.  I plucked it off the wall and looked up the complete quote, for this passage too is another way of approaching this underlying idea of the divine presence in all of creation.   The text is C. S. Lewis's Arthurian Torso, his commentary on the very difficult Arthurian poetry of Charles Williams.

"Two spiritual maxims were constantly present to the mind of Charles Williams: 'This also is Thou' and 'Neither is this Thou'.  Holding the first we see that every created thing is, in its degree, an image of God, and the ordinate and faithful appreciation of that thing a clue which, truly followed, will lead back to Him.  Holding the second we see that every created thing, the highest devotion to moral duty, the purest conjugal love, the saint and the seraph, is no more than an image, that every one of them, followed for its own sake and isolated from its source, becomes an idol whose service is damnation.  The first maxim is the formula of the Romantic Way, the 'affirmation of images': the second is that of the Ascetic Way, the 'rejection of images'.  Every soul must in some sense follow both.  The Ascetic must honour marriage and poetry and wine and the face of nature even while he rejects them; the Romantic must remember even in his Beatrician moment 'Neither is this Thou'.  But souls are none the less called to travel principally the one way or the other..." (151). 

Notes from another text:

I've been reading a wonderful book by Paul Mariani, Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius, given to me by my good friends Fred and John.  This afternoon I found a passage that states clearly (clarity, what a gift in a writer!) the idea that sums up my attitude toward God and creation and that always lies behind my poor attempts to be humorously creative, as in "Matins." 

Mariani, nearing the end of his retreat, is reading St. Ignatius on the Contemplation to Attain Love which is in the Exercises.  Mariani describes the passage on which he is meditating and the points Ignatius is making: "How God dwells in all creation, sustaining everything at the minutest subatomic level.  How He is present in everything around me, in the very trees and the tangled bine stems behind and before me,  in the ice and snow and rain, in the clouds, in the sunlight, in the very air I breathe.  I thought of the Lord keeping all of His creation continually in existence, His very Being present in all of this" (254).  Mariani goes on to ask "Why?....Why should He reveal Himself in matter?  Why not just spirit?"  His response to his own question is worth pursuing and leads him both to the resurrected "glorified body" of Christ and to Mary "even as her yes made it possible for her to be filled with God" (255). 

I highly recommend this work and am truly grateful to my friends for leading me to it.

Close to a month, been gone I have:

               #78

              Matins

3 a.m. in the morning

I hear the train roll by,

Shattering my perfect silence

With its loud mechanical cry.

At 3 a.m. in the morning

The wheels go round on the track,

Shattering my perfect silence,

With their clackety clackety clack.

Too many movies; too little time

              #77

           Tangled

It's easily explainable,

The magic of 3-D;

Yet when that lantern floats so near,

I gasp with awe and glee.

A Teaching Company product: Cathedrals

                  #76

                Avatar

I turn from watching movies,

An art form that I love,

To lectures on Cathedrals,

Inspiration from above.

Pandora is inviting,

A rich fantastic world,

Yet Chartres is true magnificence,

In stone and light unfurled.