I seem to have lost a sentence or two, and I for the life of me cannot remember how I began. That I suppose is sound. If I could remember what the "it" referred to, I would be all set. What is understanding all about, after all?
Perhaps it is literary, about reading or viewing and understanding. In any case understanding comes down to attending to the details, in a story, in a movie, in life, for the details hold the key to understanding the meaning of the work before us, whether the work be a short story, a novel, a poem, a movie or life. I, for example, am driven by a sense of urgency this afternoon, for every time I stand up I get dizzy. Tell that to a doctor and he or she undoubtedly sees it as a clue to an underlying illness or medical condition. I see it as pointing to my own mortality. One detail, various meanings or interpretations. It occurs to me that death is the ultimate "behavior modification," or my last one.
I keep coming back to Hail Caesar, the Coen brothers movie. I am tempted to put down stylus and go watch it again. The detail from the movie I find most intriguing, second to the image of Christ on the cross that begins the movie, is the image of the moon in the water trough, the image that Curley tries to put out. The moment suddenly reminds me of a similar image in a T. S. Eliot poem (sonnet?) called "Conversation Gallant," I think. The narrator in that poem is a young man, unlike Hobie,in that that young man wants to "put out" the romantic meaning of the moon, for the image of the moon points to the meaning of romantic love, Eros, if you will, and all he wants to do is seduce the young lady for his sexual pleasure. But the image can no more be put out in the poem than it can be in the movie. "Are we then so serious?" The young lady asks the would-be seducer in that drawing room setting, and there the poem ends having brought the young man to the point where he must define the nature of their relationship.
In the movie the image of the moon is part of the whole pattern of meanings associated with sexual and romantic relationships. In the early twenty-first century, the moon and what it points to has almost been put out. Gloria La'More, the actress, is having "naughty" pictures taken, Baird Whitlock probably committed sodomy with the Ralph Finnes character during the filming of their movie, cue the music (also a detail for consideration), On Eagles Wings. And so on. In a secular world, sex is just the way animals behave, sailors out to sea for eight months, seductive mermaids played by a foul-mouthed pregnant, unmarried actress. And so on. Does romantic love point to something beyond itself, as it does for Dante, or is that meaning just an illusion brokered, finally, by the Church that wants to keep us in line and giving? The interesting action here, in the movie, is that Eddie Mannix is right at the center of this meaning too. He is faithfully married and intends to stay that way just as he intends that marriage, his marriage, to stay grounded in the Catholic Church. How does a work of art or Work of Art mean? In the case of Hail Caesar the movie gathers the images from an earlier age in our culture that, like the moon, reflects a meaning that points to a depth of reality, real faith in the transcendent Christ/God that indeed seems to have been "forgotten."
I received an email message yesterday that another of my/our classmates had died, Tim, this time; not too long ago, Ned and then Tom. If ultimate reality is simply "matter in motion" then we are indeed doomed; but even in a secular world such as ours, images still function whether we choose to explore them and follow the clues, so to speak, or not. Risen was released at the same time as Hail Caesar, and Risen gives us a bodily resurrection of Jesus, not Gnostic immateriality and a vague spiritualism. As long as there is art/Art we will be confronted with choice and, I think, forced to consider: what is the nature of ultimate reality? Is it simply Matter, meaning that somehow Matter gave rise to Mind and that mind is simply one consequence of living in a material universe. Or is ultimate reality Mind, meaning that a transcendent God ("I am that I am) who is in some sense Being itself, is the source of everything that has being? To put it another way, God is not simply another being in a universe filled with countless things that are; we have being, for as long as we are alive.
I am afraid that the image by which I understand a perspective on reality is that of the creative artist. Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Tolkien all bring into being a world of which they become a part. The entire Divine Comedy existed in Dante's Mind. Everything in his marvelous literary work has its being in that poem because Dante-the-author gave it being. And he also made himself a character in that world, became one of his creatures, so to speak. Ha, Father and Son? Then where is the third person? The third person, I think, is within me, the meaning of Dante's poem that was very imperfectly communicated to me when I read it, and it is what moves me to write these things now and to think such and so about art, etc.
I am sure I have gotten the idea here distorted and undoubtedly more wrong than right. If anyone is interested, Dorothy Sayers explores this idea clearly, sigh, in The Mind of the Creator. And yet the idea seems so clear to me: Henry James provides an important clue for understanding art and for understanding reality in his novella, The Figure in the Carpet, and in his short story, The Real Thing. Real reading is learning to see into the work, the idea that animates it, perhaps, or perhaps causes it to be. Why does the artist write, after all?
Chaucer as author and creator has all the Canterbury pilgrims in his mind, including himself as pilgrim; he gives them all being in his poem, including himself, so that like Dante's work, Chaucer's work becomes an image for me as to how to understand ultimate reality in the Christian sense. I suppose that for the flaming materialist, these examples are just more consequences of the unfolding of Matter, rather than trinitarian images of the way the really real actually is, the underlying Mind, so to speak. One of the few things I know for certain is that you can't have it both ways: Mind or Matter? In the end I have a very simple view of the nature of ultimate reality, I suppose. And for me I shall stand or fall with the content of the Nicean Creed, "I believe...". When I keep paring things away, that is what is left, that is a real definition of the underlying mystery.
I had it in mind when I started today to use three examples: one from movie, the reflection of the moon, one from a Flannery O'Connor short story, Parker's Back or Revelation, and one from life, my little dog Simon.