Michael Bolerjack
Abysses 1: Two Witnesses
Introduction Abysses 1: Two Witnesses is the apocalyptic writings from 2010 to 2012 in both the longer and shorter redactions. End of the Church was e-published on April 20, 2012, and An Icon from an Evening in Glas was e-published on May 18, 2012. Altogether the two versions have been downloaded close to 600 times. The shorter version does not only leave out much of the creative, poetic text and other things from the longer original, but includes important revisions, as for instance in the treatise on logic first part, and in other places. Eventually, these “two witnesses� will be joined by a sixteen part work, A Jacques Derrida Eschatology, in order to form the complete 18 chapter Abysses. Michael Bolerjack Pentecost Sunday May 27, 2012
Copyright Š 2012 Michael Bolerjack
Books of Michael Bolerjack
USER BLIND
TRAITOR P
ABYSSES
WIN AGAINST FATE
“…you the crossing between these two phantoms of witnesses who will never come down to the same.” Jacques Derrida, Circumfessions, 59
Michael Bolerjack
_____________________________
End of The Church The Thirty Years War Volume 27
These chapters, written between April 2010 and March 2012, are the late tale of a catholic convert coming to grips with the question “who is 666?” and the answer that will surprise all those who hold and teach the faith of the Romans. Beginning with the exposition of a logic that is the epitome of incomprehensible gibberish, as viewed from the standpoint of his faithful confreres, which is the basis for the explication of the apocalypse that unfolds over the second half of the work, End of The Church The Thirty Years War Volume 27 displays a range of styles unusual for theological and philosophical writing, falling somewhere adjacent to the Ulysses and Finnegans Wake of James Joyce, while the manifest religious substance of the author’s words is absolutely faithful to his vocation to be of service as a writer for God to the Catholic Church. The treatise on the logic of the “incomprehensible” or “impossible” that serves as the foundation for the revelation of the antichrist is meant to be an always inadequate yet necessary attempt to explain the incongruity between the real and not only apparent contradictoriness of God’s Word in scripture and the distortions of the gospel produced by the assertion of the univocal truths of the theological tradition. The theses on the truth of the whole and the truth of the holy and the question whether either of them can still be said to apply to the faith now, after the deconstruction and deconsecration that has taken place in the Church in the World, is something that may be considered here late in the day with the end in view. Overall, The Thirty Years War traces the path the author took to work his way through the labyrinth of the philosophers, theologians, and literary writers, as well as his own private loves and personal obsessions, to reach faith in Christ and nothing but, finding the logic of His Mind, one against the magic and the money, as he realized himself to be set apart and called to present to those who will read and recognize it a way to revise a fallen church and revive a fallen world, if that is God’s plan for the “vineyard” he leased out to us, which he has promised to come and take back in justice, if we will not be just ourselves, meaning a theory of the arrival of Christ, the author’s hope as an apostle of the apocalypse.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Proscenium Dedication Acknowledgments Preface Exergue The Poet’s Task Faith creates being God and Writing, or How We Might Have Failed in Our Arrival Kyrie Eleison: Lord Have Mercy Alpha and Omega The Treatise on Logic Ecclesiastes 4:12 The Account The Form The Logic The Yes Exodus 32:19 The Story of a Soul The Portable Nietzsche Finnegans Wake Glas Sermon on the Mount Kabbalah and Criticism The Anxiety of Influence Shakespeare: Invention of the Human An Icon for the Church on the Mercy of God The Visionary Company Memoirs of the Blind Being and Believing Light-Compulsion Zohar Teresa of Calcutta “Say that Jerusalem is” Theses on Levinas Restrictions of Heideggerean Being Therese in Theory Tessera Logics of the Rose [plan for the work on Therese] Plan In Acknowledgment The (Ste) PS Re: These
And Yet [The Muse] September of my years Harvest Time h2o An Icon for the Church on the Marinela of God Arts Rest Argumentum All Saints Day In memory of a forgotten Pope All Souls Day “…a limit on infinity…” That dice thrown God-Church-World After Reading Roland Barthes Genesis and Revelation The News Symbols will have been a book interrupted Preface to Paradise Throne Paradise Throne PP Moral Epilogue Remains: The Perfect Number Fame of the Frame Nietzschean Brother Jacques The Difference Between Judgment and Criticism Recovery Critique PM The Seer Thrown Noble Truths The Path Liturgicam Authenticam Bunches Therese Abstract French Starred Roman Holiday Scripture Confessors Gift of Knowledge Kid
The Virgin Martyrs Peace Search for the Absolute Itinerary of The Thirty Years War Oppositions Flores de Monterrey Closing Prayer tomb Pi Critic is Me Letter [April 2, 2011] Letter [June 5, 2011] The Recrucifixion of Christ in the Modern World Moral on the time An Icon from an Evening in Glas Vocabulary of God [dictionary look-up] Dissemination and the Abyss Catholic Economy Salted With Fire Epilogue Letter [March 26, 2012] Proscenium
Proscenium I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone but God. James Joyce
DEDICATION
My heart would ever have been in conflict with itself, were it not for these two. They were patient with me in my constant infirmities. D.G. “Bo� Bolerjack, my father, 1927-2001, and my love, my wife, Marinela B. Bolerjack.
My transubstantiation is dedicated to them with gratitude and with the blessing of faithfulness.
Michael Bolerjack
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the faculty of the University of St. Thomas with whom I studied from 2003 to 2008 while I was a student of theology and the liberal arts in the UST graduate school. James Anderson James Barloon Clinton Brand Robert Crooker Daniel Flores Shannon Forbes Paul Hahn Irving Kelter Jean Kitchel Charles Krohn Betty Lee Ligon Joy Linsley Paula Jean Miller Frances Panchok Judith Ryan Leon Streider Charles Talar Henry Walker Jeremy Wilkins Robert Yankow I would also like to thank the dozen or more great priests of the Congregation of St. Basil who served at UST while I was in attendance, especially Daniel Callam. I also remember the young men with whom I studied at St. Mary’s seminary who have gone on to become priests, as well as the friends I made among the students, including Diego Leskovar, Jeff Lewis and David Tate. I also remember Mike Streeter from the UST English department who befriended me and appreciated my writing. I thank Carolyn Douglas, and her friends, as well as Elizabeth Phillips and Emily Abbott, early teachers, and Paul Carty and Tom Peery, my spiritual directors. To those I do not explicitly mention here, know that you are still in my heart. In memoriam: Janice Gordon Kelter, dean of the MLA program when I was admitted in 2005, and Robert Joseph Yankow, professor of Greek and Latin, who passed away in August 2010. I had a dream twenty years ago in which I declared that I wanted to be a theologian. I think that means one who prays. As William Blake said, “anyone who does not believe in a personal God is a fool,” and “Jesus Christ is God, that’s all I know.” Perhaps I am only a theologian in the
sense Blake was, but perhaps that is enough. The work of The Thirty Years War is about many things, and had its beginnings amid great errors, but in the end it was done for the Church and for the Glory of God. I hope you read it in that light. Finally, without my wife Marinela none of this would have been possible. Those of you who read the work in its entirety will get to know her a little. For over ten years she has been my ability and my aid and my little all in all. As you read the work, keep her in mind as my cocreator.
Michael Bolerjack
Preface
Years ago, when I was starting out as a writer, I did a bit of journalism, writing and editing, designing and even selling ads. Of course, in the newspaper business the reporter is taught to tell the readers the five Ws and the H: the who, what, where, when, why and how an event occurred. To introduce the work to you I think I should do something similar. I will begin with the how. How was this written? It would be true to say that it was by the grace and mercy of God and not by my own will and effort, and I happily admit that fact of faith, but I want to say something too about the manner of the writing. In 1981, one of my first college teachers, on encountering some of my early fiction, said that I “wrote like Faulkner.” I think it was a compliment, though later, based on the opinions I heard voiced by students, it might not have been. Faulkner is he of the long sentence, the rolling period, the labyrinthine style that mirrors a complexity of thought and reality. If I write “like Faulkner,” it is perhaps because the way I say the thing exemplifies the thing that is said. Late in my career, the idea of the “arrival” came to me, the promised arrival that one must search for. Perhaps my writing is that search, simultaneously in theme, style, etc., of the looking forward to arrival. In about 1988 two teachers made diverse comments on my writing. One said that I “wrote like Gertrude Stein.” The other said I had a “perverse rhetoric of authority.” I found out recently that to write like Stein means to be “gnomic, repetitive and illogical.” Again, this may not be a compliment as to style. And I must admit I tend to be elliptical or epigrammatic, with a fragmentary pretense to aphorism, and that sometimes I assert plain contradictions as true. So be it. As for perversity, I confess as well that then, at the peak of my infatuation with everything to do with deconstruction, I was both morally and intellectually perverse. But God took care of that in His own way. I have often argued from authority, which is
a sin in a philosopher, but not in a theologian. If the authority is experience, the poet may well use the same method of logical argumentation. In 2006, as I was studying Joyce, a teacher again said that I “wrote like Faulkner.” At least I have been consistent. I might add that the same Joycean teacher made me rewrite a 15 page paper into a five page one, and that the second paper was better than the first, and that I learned from the experience. So much, then, for the how, but what of the who? Nietzsche was perhaps correct when he said that when one reads something one must ask just who is writing the text. So perhaps you will ask yourself rightly along the way that question concerning me and this work, but I think the things I have to say do not depend so much on me as on the matter at hand, and therefore I will not preempt what each of you may variously find or the conclusions you may draw by giving you any more information on the author, which will at any rate be found on the pages passim. The where is Houston, Texas, and the when were the war years. This leaves me only the what and the why. And that’s really the heart of the matter. The what is what happened as a result of my encounter with deconstruction, my “agon” with Derrida, and others, as well as my conversion to Christ, and the dialectic that developed out of the placing of these two in relationship. The writings attempt and achieve a synthesis of many apparently, and I think absolutely, contradictory beliefs, ideas, methods. I did not, many years ago, consciously set out to perform the synthesis, but in these latter days found it possible to do, though whether it works or not will be for others to decide. I have been told that it was not likely to be able to be done, by a former professor, Samuel Southwell, who knew me when I thought I was a deconstructionist, and I have harbored some doubts myself whether it was the right thing to do. Yet, it seems to me I have been uniquely called to the task. The work as a whole, that is, the project of my career in writing which I call The Thirty Years War, is a journey that started from deconstruction in terms of both philosophy and literature. In 1989, at
the point just before my conversion to Christ, the decisive idea happened to me in the context of a reading of the Anaximander fragment and Nietzsche and Levinas, in which I recognized an exterior eternity limiting infinity. This led to the thinking through of the contradictory essence of truth, lived as the real dialectic, in the late 1990s, and on to the limit of Hamlet in arrival, around 2006, followed by the recommendation of self-limitation as a way out of the dichotomy of fantasy and necessity in which we live, to gain freedom and reality, in my writings on the novel in 2007 and 2008. This led to the ideas and logic this year that can reconcile all differences, ideally and therefore really, in order to fulfill the gospel injunction to “be perfect.” It is the logic of the impossible, and implies distantly that before the beginning there was an infinite nothingness which contracted, creating a limit, the eternal, God. All else flowed from this event before eternity, when the infinite was stopped. Much of the problem with thinking today is the virtual renewal of the infinite nothing which has occurred since the so-called death of God. I believe that God has proceeded by a series of contractions to limit himself again and again, down to Christ on the cross, down to the bread on the altar, down to the word on the page, to reach each one of us in our narrow, crowded worlds. He asks us to do likewise, to deny, renounce, follow, suffer. That this applies to the enormous Catholic Church is all too obvious, and I foresee a great limitation coming on the institution itself, but not on the message, which is life for the world. I have found that all creation occurs as a series of painful contractions, a labor in the artist similar to that of the woman in childbirth. God experienced this pain. It is essential to him. The Church too may give birth to a new world, but only as the result of the contractions that have been unfolding for many years. Which I think brings me to the why. Why did I write this work? A man once asked me why I “bothered” at all. As Faulkner said in Stockholm, it was not for money, nor even less for glory. Let me say I was seeking the truth, and that I found it, or rather
He found me. I was given the talent to write, as in the parable of Jesus, and it became clear to me that I was obligated to make good use of the talent that I have been given. I wrote in the end specifically to the Church, which is not necessarily Roman but global, and about the subject of mercy, as will be seen from the way God has led me out of the wilderness to the promised land, and as he has guided the thought of the work to the point of the reconciling of oppositions, in me, in the Church, and in the world, while directing me toward the findings concerning the apocalypse which I disclose at the end. That we now and will in the future all need such reconciliation is without question, and the Church most of all, for whom I write, and which I love. I think that through this work steps are taken toward the reconciliation of Christian practice and theory, calling readers to truth, to love, to holiness, to responsibility. We must find the truth whatever the cost, even though it means a breaking. As I say at one point, as bread is broken, be broken, too, and yet after the breaking there is still the communion. The fact that God allowed me to preserve a record of my search for the truth, and then gave me the thing itself, an answer to questions we have all longed to know, and sometimes asked about, humbles me and makes me thankful.
Exergue
Vocations are not for those who ask. Holderlin
The truth is that which grasps without itself being grasped. Hegel We don’t know we don’t know, yet will to know. Far rather forget. Nietzsche In life, as in music, there is no program, but the absolute. Celan
Everything is true, but the truth itself. Heidegger
Discerning truth requires distance, not negotiations in proximity. The reading of the text is not an economic exchange, but the charity of meaning. Gadamer
The Poet’s Task
Saying the truth and the truth itself are two separate and necessary things. One is the imagination, the other reality. Like the lover, imagination has its real woman. She is. I am. I can describe but I cannot be her, nor do I wish to be. I am content with the poet’s task.
Faith creates being, that is, acknowledgment turns potency to actuality. We are not real unless we believe. Believe the Lord is in us. It has been said by all who believe that we are created by God. Let it be said also that you are not real unless you believe. If you are in doubt, or turned away from the light of faith, His Face, you only seem to be. As we have learned in our era, though Parmenides showed us long ago, most of the world most of the time is mere semblance. By being in relationship with the real, one becomes real oneself. This relationship is one of faith. Faith is not of this world. The world is now deconstructing. Deconstruction is not nihilism, a philosophy of nothingness, as existentialism was, with its question propadeutic to philosophizing, to be or not to be, the question of suicide in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence. No, deconstruction is not a philosophy of nothingness, as with Sartre, or of being, as with Heidegger, but of sheer semblance, glamour, the milieu of Nietzsche. The opposition of being and nothingness has been deconstructed and with it faith, which must be in either the fullness or the emptiness of God. There is now only a faithless seeming-to-be, the time of opinion, of interpretation, of perspectives, of a world in which there are no longer not only values of high and long standing, but not even mere facts. There is no actuality. With too much going on, there is no action, but the pose of glamour, the system of artificiality, in which the natural is valued only for its effectiveness as a sales tool. We desire, we attend, we are interested in, that which we love. Which can now only be represented, not presented. There is no present, no presence, only presentations. There is no longer
direct unmediated contact with life. In fact, the mass of men and women are not real. They have simply ceased to exist, though they still seem to. The only way back to being is the act of faith, a will to believe in God, the really real. At the moment you say yes to God you begin to be. Without that you never even were. There are only two ways, the world of reality and the world of opinion. As one once said: do not seem but be. When you believe you come to stand. Only by standing can you understand. Then you arrive. The highest reality transcends both metaphysics and ethics. It is a moral and spiritual reality. To be in relationship with the Spirit is to be real. Everything else is material to be bought or sold. As Christ said, you must be born again, that is, being in the world does not make you real, but being in relationship with God. It has been said that each of us has their own reality. That is true for versions of semblance, of which the number is indefinite. To be definite, to be free, to be real, is to be of one mind, the mind of Christ. Only by keeping Christ in mind can you lose the separate reality of the show and find the one true good and beautiful. It is as Parmenides and Paul said, perfect. We are required then in all seriousness to be perfect, to have the mind of Christ, to be real, to love reality no matter how painful, preferring it to the intoxicants, that is, to be nothing for show. In this world that seems to be impossible. But semblance is in error. The one truth simply is the Lord Jesus Christ. This will never change. The City of God is what Augustine called the real world that I here declare, opposed to the glittering vices of the pagan diabolical city of semblance. Rilke said “you must change.� I second him and add: You have a choice. You must choose. Choose reality. Faith is the meaning of being. At the mass the priest stated the position of faith: God does the impossible. Now, for reason the impossible by definition cannot be done. Yet, the Church has ever taught, on the basis of the authority of Christ, that for God, and for one who has faith, nothing is impossible. Faith, then, understands more than cool reason comprehends. When Hegel said the real is rational and the rational is real, he attempted to rationalize faith’s basic character of higher realization through irrationality, into a system in which the sublation of difference and contradiction as absolute knowledge can be the all in all. Hegel also said the whole is the true, but
others have posited infinities, supplements and traces that exceed the whole, thus exceeding truth. Truth, to be true, would have to include the lie, or seeming-to-be. But this cannot be. They do not change the truth through that displacement. They can, as one has said, deny or ignore the truth, but they cannot change it. Truth to be true cannot be an historical process but is immutable. Human history is a lie, spoken against the truth. The Church is able through faith to have both the truth and all its contradictoriness, by mystery, by the assertion of the dogmas of God as both three and one, of Christ as both God and man, of the death of God on the cross, of a church both sinful and holy, of a sacrament both bread and God, of God both immanent and transcendent, of a human being who was completely free from sin, of a papacy which is infallible, of the good of suffering, and much else. The Church boldly asserts the incomprehensible, things which are not mere paradoxes of the faith, but real contradictions that the logic of Aristotle cannot admit, though he said Heraclitus said such things without really thinking them. I have at various points in the scope of my Transubstantiation said and shown the truth of contradiction without contradicting the truth, yet He was contradicted as prophesied by those who put him to death, even with the cross of human reason. But Truth lives again. Resurrection itself, without which our religion is to be pitied, is perhaps the greatest contradiction, though some say such things as the virgin birth to be. Anyone who clings to reason will find a stone of offense to stumble on in scripture and the church’s teaching. And yet, while asserting the necessity of both faith and reason, the Church presents us with impossibilities to believe. God asks nothing but the impossible. Be perfect. Your faith has saved you, do not sin again. The Church gives us models of perfection in the saints, who by the grace of God did the impossible. It is said the great thing is to dream the impossible dream, and one has said the only thing worth attempting is the impossible. Faith does this. But without Christ we can do nothing. Knowledge will fail, but love will go on. We love each other despite our contradictions. By faith and love we suspend the judgments of reason, transforming even the critical faith by which we are reformed for an ever-greater truth we know by love and not by reason. My life has been one love, no blot it out,
my life has been one chain of contradictions. But they are one and the same. We are presented with something greater than we can understand, but we believe, we love, we obey, and even not despite but because of the contradictions. These of the faith that the Church presents to us are the greatest spur to and test of our faith, and thus our faith is proved. Logic had its scapegoat, the scandal of the contradiction, yet faith has won out. “Being� doesn’t empty faith, but is substantial subsistent faith.
God and Writing,
or How We Might Have Failed in Our Arrival
True Word, True Bread, Christ came down from Heaven: to heal us. From ourselves. Wallace Stevens sat on the edge of his bed and heard the bird sing at daybreak and thought it was reality, the thing itself. But dark Stevens in darkness heard a bird sign only and so ended his life’s work as a Greek by divination of a sign, not with the thing itself. Dark Stevens, in his hard reality of fiction, knew the death of evil as a tragedy, and perhaps was that and nothing besides. But hear the poor man say, we are what we are to God, that only, and nothing besides. And what are we to God? What can we be but an idea? We are but ideas in the infinite Mind of God. He alone is that which is. We simply are not. So some far-fetched fiction would tell allegories of how we sleep and only think we wake. Far rather, God dreamed, and dreamed of us. What will we be when He awakes? Since there is no composition in God, as Aquinas says, no parts, no accidents, no movement, we are but the ideal of substance, already eternal, already one. Derrida, in his writing, would substitute composition-less composition for God. How? By destroying writing as he writes, by interdicting steps he cannot take. He makes writing One. As he wrote: Nothing outside of the text. Composition-less composition. A new God. Utter complexity so enormous it is sublime virtual simplicity. Rather, monotony, as my nephew Justin Martin said, “nowadays everybody is the same.” What we once were, our idea of God, or better, a dream our God enjoyed, became a limitless possibility without an act, an actor, an action, an actuality. To make us infinite, as Mallarme said. But we, instead, felt indefinite, and fell, abyss on abyss, with only that one direction, gravity’s, which our light could not escape. The totality of knowledge as possible became the thing that drew us. And the light of the idea, that shape, that form, though insubstantial as a dream, died. We did not arrive. We dived. We plunged. We did not climb, we did not aspire. Without Spirit, in a material more dense than
the quickest quicksand, we expired. This “we” though is merely our country and our culture, two supreme fictions. Individuals instead have climbed out of the abyss and scaled the mountain to the altar of God. Looking back they see the abyss in flames, the burning in the waste, the fire that may consume all in the chasm, while those on the mountain escape the fate of fire. The Church has never been in the abyss, so the “we” is not the Church speaking. It is gathered at the throne on high, where someday all can find a place. Let us then speak of “all” rather than “we,” for all are called. God and writing at first did not seem opposed, and surely God has no opposite. Knowing this, the deceit had to be at once brazen but clandestine, and the contamination but oblique. The way of light is strait and narrow, but there is no end to the windings of the serpentine line of the writer’s indefinite traces. God has written, has already written, on our hearts, and it is a pure writing, a pure love and a pure timelessness that is at the heart of the human race. Climb the mountain, retreat into your hearts, find the purity inscribed there, a kingdom, eternal, waiting for you and me. When we stop writing, when we fall silent, when we choose understanding, when we become real, without artifice, but with art in life, with creation in love, thoughtful, we may listen to the words of others, learn discernment through a listening and a putting into practice, testing the spirits, to find what is right and pleasing to God, to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, through meaning that is neither excessive nor repetitive, but simply delineated, like the edge of a diamond, that creation of the form and pressure of the time: sharp, hard, bright, rich.
Kyrie Eleison:
Lord Have Mercy
Compassion. Com-Passion. Suffering with. Christ did not so much suffer for us, but with us. Why? Why did he choose suffering? Out of solidarity. To give meaning to our suffering. To remove the absurdity of meaninglessness. To transform the point of view of the nihilism of pain in order to affirm life. To have mercy. To show mercy. Not merely in the saying but in the doing. Suffering, then, is not an end in itself or a good in itself, or a goal, but a means to something else. Just as temptations are given, not just to lead to sin. If everything is grace, everything is mercy. Time is not an insupportable waiting, but merciful patience. If Christ suffered out of exceeding charity, if it is to the humanity of Christ that we more owe our salvation, if all authority belongs to Christ precisely as the Son of Man, then in showing mercy He becomes mercy. Be merciful, even as your heavenly Father is merciful. God may have mercy on whom he will, but the command to us is to show mercy to all. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. We have seen it, now we must likewise do it.
ALPHA AND OMEGA
Apocalypse to come will come, is coming. The weeds and the wheat are being separated. The city of God and the city of the devil are being torn apart from each other. That other city is falling into the abyss at 32 ft ps ps, as Joyce waking said. The city of Jerusalem ascends in raptures, ever up, as Joyce in Odes said. Ode to wandering, owed to the abyss, but songs of ascent. It is not “the church in the modern world� but the benediction church against the world, ever against that world we are in but not of and which we are coming out of. We will be and all shall be well. We will be disclosed, He will be disclosed. The Appropriation has been Disclosed. Closure rapture ruptures. A hermeneutics of continuity, a hermeneutics of rupture. The council occurred amid the disruption of the sixties. And as I grew toward it the Church was deconstructing until JP II put a stop to deconstruction in the catholic Church. In the world the Soviet empire deconstructed, and capitalism deconstructed but the Church did not. End of story but not the end. Priests? Some fell, but not all. Same story. Not even one out of twelve. Always a bad one in the mix. They said look to it yr self. They always do it for the money. This temptation, against innocence, against sobriety, against purity, will pass. The city of God will rise, and Jerusalem will descend for heaven would have all Israel saved. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Pray for Her to come with God. Next year in Jerusalem. At first there was a wanderer who found his abyss. Then a man found by God, found by woman, found in time, while waiting for eternity. All of it written in a book. All in all, unveiled, apocalyptic, disclosed. You are either going up or down, you cannot stay where you are, though that would satisfy most people.
Obscurely it has been said that the way up and the way down are one and the same. Now I know. They are, so: a city rises, built by God and martyrs, a city falls, witnessed by the rest. Between them nothing at all. The first was and is and will be. The second only seemed to be, but counterfeit, was taking by the many for the fittest world. But fit what is. Only one. Semblance only ghosted, while souls were saved. Few found it. I pray I was one. Where do you stand, to what do you kneel, if you kneel at all? On the day of transformation where will you be? Some say taken, some say left behind. He said the last will be first, the first will be last. You choose. The Spirit of God moved over the abyss. Once. The Spirit of God filled the church. Twice. Now the Spirit of God I pray will come again against the world to save God’s city. To not defer the differences but in order to discern them. To tell the real from the unreal city. It is almost the end of the long night of manmade light. The dawn approaches, a light that will never set, a son returns. Where will you be, on his right or left? Do not be afraid. Stay in your room and pray. Let the word grow in you. Know that God has chosen you to be alive at this time. It was 50/50. Half the people who have ever lived are alive today. He will come to judge the living and the dead. He is the just judge, His mercy is that too. One act. One time. All in All. Love and fill the world you are in with it. Two cities. One world. The church in the modern world. Lucky world, after all. Just get to the city on time. Departure is near, and dear to us all. Apocalypse to come. Christ, come quickly! Though we are not finished yet, Christ, come quickly! Though there is more that would be done, Christ, come quickly! Though the world will pass away, Christ, come quickly! Though the judgment is certain yet uncertain, do not delay, Christ, come quickly!
Though some may not be saved yet, Christ, come quickly! So more will not lose their faith, we pray, Christ, come quickly!
THE TREATISE ON LOGIC
As I told a friend in April, 2010, at Easter the Lord gave me a big thing to say. Altogether, the telling of it took over three months. The results are disconcerting for anyone who thinks in the accustomed tradition of the mainstream of philosophy coming from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. The essays I wrote take as their starting-point the Hegelian assertion of the truth of the whole, coupled with the gospel assertions concerning how God thinks, which is very different from that of the world. In the end, a logic was produced that reconciles all oppositions, to the point that in retrospect, having watched an hour of news on television, I commented that, if it doesn’t make sense, it must be true. My logic both describes the illogicality of the world today and shows a possible path to the unification of the competing claims of the various religions and philosophies under the banner of the allowance that all are true as a whole, and only make sense as part of the whole. The world, now fragmented into many parts, each part thinking it is the true one, or that all are equally untrue, or that all are true from their own perspectives, each in their own reality, is actually true when grasped in its innate contradiction, and that this contradiction is the truth, and must be, for the truth not to contradict itself. It is not that we agree to disagree, but that our very being depends on faith in a God who encompasses all differences. At any rate, so it seems to me. The thought that began in September, 1989, with the simple, if illogical and contradictory, premise that eternity limits infinity, reached arrival in 2006 with the renovation of dialectical logic through positing the fourth step, at the same time showing a way out of the impasse of de-construction, was completed in 2009 with the discovery of the Ultrastructure in alpha-numeric symbolism, and attained fulfillment in 2010 with these writings on the truth of contradiction. They are the end-point of a project, my writings from 1985 to 2010, which achieve a synthesis I did not set out toward, but which I found to be possible toward the end of the quarter-century of the work, and which I had for several years felt was something that needed to be accomplished.
A three-ply cord is not easily broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12
THE ACCOUNT
In the following I will give both a general and special theory of accountability, that is, in the latter case, a restricted economy of the account of the genesis and order of the ideas of the work, with some relevant history on the author, his life and the present age, and in the former case, an analysis of the account as such, both in the logos and in terms of a total count in the making, opposing teleological closure, our happiness and promise of joy, to the pleasure of seriality, the indefinite, semblance, our anxiety of desire, our insatiable pleasure, our fear of the end. In order to do this I will make use of the complexity of the logos-logic-logistic-logistics construction, showing on the square or in the space of the idea as such the relations of these four terms to each other and to the regimes of religion and finance, as well as to their deconstructions. This will be worked out with the thought of Christ in mind, the problem of the contradictions of life in Christ and of life in the World, of the comprehensiveness of the totality of the logic of God inherent in the notion that God does the impossible, the relation of this belief to faith and reason, to the mercy of God as I think it is to be understood, to the theory of reading the Bible that gives rise to the comprehension of contradiction, as well as the secular application of this logic in literature and philosophy, in ethics, politics, finance, and in the interrelation of the faiths of the world, showing a way to peace through an emphasis on wholeness, understanding, forgiveness and the abandonment of the subjective perspective as such, however multiplied, for the unity of one objective dramatic self-effacing release of power for the love of God and the love of neighbor, alluded to at times in the works I have written by the words arrival, real dialectic, catholicity or the Catholic Economy. A textuality will obtain in the working-through of the general and special theories, in the sense that the account of the restricted textual economy of
the individual works is set in the account of the general text, and my text itself in that indefinite ever-greater text that simulates the infinite. We will see the interplay of the sign-world of textuality, which is constantly deconstructing, with the true frame of things found in number, which needs no translation and cannot be deconstructed. The cities of God, seen in the Ultrastructure or Metasignification as I posit it, and of the World, seen in textuality, are intertwined, as the wheat and the tares, but as the deconstructing world falls away, as Joyce said accelerating at 32 ft per second per second, into the abyss, the altogether pristine will emerge, which the Bible calls measure, weight, number, a fact Andrew Marvel commented on in his preface to Milton, though all now seems lost without measure, weightless, a “total count in the making.� The account of accountability I intend is meant to, in part, show the futility of that series, by that which is already made, from which God is seen, as Paul said in Romans. The logos and its logic show this as well. Truth is apparent in the words in which it is written, and you do not have a single word without having the whole of language, metaphysics and the truths they contain with it, as Derrida once said in his early controversy on structuralism. Deconstruction targeted the logos and its logic, forcing it before the letter to the logistic of reducing number to logic, thus eliminating the indeconstructible, and by postmodern parody reducing logistic to logistics, a keyword in business today that is parallel to the use of the term aesthetics for the artificial attempt to reverse time in the aging of the faces of women, as well as the remotivated uses of the word metaphysics today, which are not concerned with being or cause or form as such, but with the spiritual world in general, without reference to good or evil and their restricted dialectic, that is the deconstructive economy of generality against a proper dialectic. Logistics, aesthetics and metaphysics are all artificial, set against dialectics as simulation is set against reality, and do not make any new thing but manipulate matter and spirit
in magical kinds of ways, attempting the impossible, promising the impossible, but ending only by destroying actuality, suspending the really Real, a term from Gregory of Nyssa for God, and erasing meaning as such. One of the cornerstones of the present work will be to see the impossible as something that only God can do, that is the definition of God in a way, which involves not the resort to the paradox, which is based on seeming (characteristic of contemporary logistics, aesthetics and metaphysics), but on the impossible, which really is the reality of that which is, its contradictoriness, its wholeness, its truth. What has happened is the setting back of actuality to mere possibility, this step back freeing play, eliminating the truly serious for the semblance of gravitas, and as the fall away takes place, the seeming elimination of gravity, at the same time a real and an inexorable and unbearable gravity which is causing the fall but cannot be felt in the time of the abyss. Material is feeding the pull of this gravity, the increasing materiality of culture, seen in the new importance of logistics, of aesthetics to defeat gravity and time, of metaphysics to defeat any notion of absolute truth. There is still such truth, but at first glance it may be mistaken for the world that is falling away. That world views it in the grand affirmations of Nietzsche, Joyce, Derrida: their YES. But by eliminating the NO they will by deconstructive logic eliminate the YES as well. It is only by conserving the negative, let your yes mean yes and your no mean no, as Christ said, that the absolute truth emerges into view as the wholeness of the contradiction. The very thing that was previously thought to be division is the real unity, seen from a height not from the leveled postmodern standpoint. God tells us this in all Bibles, and even Heraclitus knew of it: the way up and the way down are one and the same. Aristotle could not grasp this truth which is not human but is divine. The hidden harmony of things is expressed by Christ as the Father who causes His rain to fall on both the just and on the unjust. Christ said then, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And it is this command to be perfect which
tests the cross of human reason, and by faith, not the will or effort of man, though we are told that also is required, in order perhaps to be part of the contradiction, not by our wills but only by the mercy and grace of God. Such faith is the creation of reality, for unless you believe you are not real. The artificial world falls away while the real remains. We are judged by our works, but faith saves, and this at once is the whole truth, which is the mercy of God greater than our sins, but also greater than justice as such or reasoning in itself. Parmenides, in the poem that sets forth the One, says that there are WHAT IS and WHAT IS NOT and that which only SEEMS TO BE. And this is the truth. The One is what is, which as One contains actually all number as One, while the nothing or what is not is the same as the void without either meaning or number, not even the Islamic invention of the zero, while what seems to be, which commentators say is the inordinate concern of a work on the One, is the province not of the Ultrastructure but of the text. The sign only seems to be. The oracle does not speak or conceal but gives signs, as Heraclitus said, which is to say, there are only the revelation of the One, the occulted nothing and the realm of interpretation. Plato, in his dialogue on Parmenides, subjects the One to the first logistic, reducing the Ultrastructure of the unity of number in the monad to the logic inherent in that unity, which inspired deconstruction, a move that results in the equation: both this and that, neither this nor that, the fourfold of logic I wrote on in 1988, and which became the basis for deconstruction’s double blow or affirmation, which is a mere paralysis, not the whole truth but the interdiction of the arrival of truth, as I point out at various places in the work. The logic of the One as one thing and its opposite both at once is the positing of contradiction as the truth, but which is only part of the strategy of deconstruction, which then eliminates the contradiction by a Dionysian YES, by the leveling of hierarchy in Nietzsche’s logical deduction concerning the history of Being as the history of an error, a history in which being is overcome by sheer
appearance, which cannot be appearance any more if it has no Being to oppose it in a binary opposition, and many say they are the same, this deconstruction of the space of logic based on the contradictions that feed the dialectical work of the word and the grand gesture of the affirmation that is a vicious circle without egress. But they are not, though they seem to be. The way to discern the truth of contradiction from the contradiction of truth involves looking at the fruits of the logics. The contradiction of truth is done on the one hand to free interpretation, signs, the text, generally, to excess, as a kind of pleasure of the text, as Barthes said, the same as sexuality, but displaced upward. The truth of contradiction on the other hand humbles human reason and its significance and tells us there is something that cannot be thought, the impossible, that man cannot do. Derrida said that only the impossible is worth attempting. Actually he attempted to deconstruct the impossible itself, by the elimination of act, the creation of pure possibility, and by way of simulation, through the imposition of a pure possibility, making actuality impossible. Every act became an act. Acting, but no action, the pure act is the elimination of all acts. But the truth of contradiction is not this act, but the actuality of wholeness. This whole is the One. It is reality. The truth of contradiction indeed says both this and that, neither this nor that, or rather every statement and its opposite are true. If God is good and yet as we know there is evil, there is in God’s world, the world we inhabit, both. There has been much theodicy from theologians and poets to justify the ways of God to man and explain the existence of evil, and I do not wish to place the goodness of God in question. One can say that evil is only an illusion, as in the East, or that creation itself is an evil, the Gnostic way. Let us say neither of these. But at the same time let us say both. The world is evil and it is only an illusion. Rather that is what it has become in the hands of the logic of deconstruction, which was always potential in the tradition of metaphysics, but which did not come into play until the last
100 years. The world is now the multiple, the sign, and this is the illusion, and semblance is the evil. What is real? Buddha said suffering was an illusion, but Christ showed us suffering and death are both real, though His love is more real. As Sophocles said, we suffer into truth. This is to suffer the contradiction. The contradiction of truth is to posit the absence of meaning as the only meaning, an effect, that is, as Derrida said in an interview in Positions, “writing literally means nothing,” but the truth of contradiction is to accept the cross and what put Christ on it, which was the human reaction to the all-embracing nature of God’s mercy. You will love your enemy but they will not love you, you will be peaceful while they make war, you will be contradicted as Christ was contradicted. The truth of contradiction however is not this contradiction of the truth, the world against the truth, but the mercy by which God is free, not bound by human reason or will, in that He may affirm both the just and the unjust, both saints and sinners, loving He said especially the sinner, but rejoicing when he repents of sin. In this metanoia or conversion is the birth of faith and reality against the paranoia of human fear, greed, denial, desire, self-love, and perhaps most of all the pride of the goddess of human Reason. The wisdom of God transcends mere reason and does this in a way more than we know. There is to say it again, because it bears repeating, what is, what is not and what only seems to be, and in this logical matrix we are placed in the moral problem of our good and our evil. Is evil nothing, merely a lack of the good? Or is it an illusion, seeming to be only? Or does it really exist? If it exists, it is then true, in a way, but I think a truth that perpetuates itself only by falsehood, by denial, simulation and terror to quote Badiou, that is, by being the contradiction of truth. Some would go beyond good and evil, neither moral nor immoral, rather amoral, as one would speak of truth and falsehood in an extra-moral sense, as Nietzsche did. I prefer to go on to the conclusion of the logic, to the fourth term of this equation, the other that completes the moral hierarchy,
which is mysticism. The mystic knows good and evil, that they exist, does not negate them amorally, but in another way, through a transcendent love, turns from evil to the good. This turning is the conversion, the being born again, the new man, the repentance, the turning away from the world to God by the renewal of the mind in order to be perfect, that is, to know what is pleasing to God, to think as He does, in a sense, at least as we can do that in this life, in spirit, if not in deed. When this happens, all things become possible, the impossible can be done, by God and in faith. Thus, I, who was not real, become real. The world which was real is known to be unreal. Everything is true, but as the lie which it was. The contradiction is accepted. One does not say YES to everything morally or mystically, and yet at the same time one does, loving as it is said the sinner but not the sin. As God does. To love both neighbor and enemy is to refrain from judging sin. It is to separate existence from essence, truth from error, that we are good from what we say and do, recognizing that everything that lives is holy, to echo Blake, because part of the whole, which is true, the Hegelian view, but that much of what we think is in error, that we are as Kierkegaard said basically wrong before the Truth, or as Luther said, incorrigible, and that God does the impossible literally in saving us who are evil, and so to recognize this generally, but not particularly, and thus we can say all religions are one, as Blake did. We must love God unconditionally, I say, but the reverse is not the case, as some people say, for God requires something from each of us, as is spelled out in every religion, every morality, every wisdom, and though this differs in cases, the fact is this: the forbearance of truth. We are in error, in debt, to the truth, which still loves us in order that we may yet turn to love Him. The truth is forbearance that defers the debt, and even, in jubilation, foregoes what is His due, contradicts His justice with an ever-greater mercy that forgives us anyway. Though mercy and justice are opposites they are but one act, one action that shows that the left hand of God is somehow not aware of the justice
and wrath in the right, and in what is the impossible, the incomprehensible, forgives. Even bears and forbears the impossible, the truth contradicting itself, the heart of contradiction yet not contradicting the heart, for our sakes. Thus, God does the impossible and in a way or we may hope that in His mercy He denies what is His right and His prerogative, lets go, releases, renounces all out of love for a creature undeserving of this Almighty grace which shows us selfdenial and asks the same of us: love one another as I have loved you. Simple, they say, hard and yet not hard, bright yet dark, smiling yet impassive, simple, yet with the absolute complexity that we cannot understand of a love that contradicts everything except love itself. The truth does not deny itself, does not lie, but just as love fulfills the law, justice is good, yet it is completed, fulfilled, by an absolute mercy that suffers contradiction on all sides, out of mercy. This is our hope. It is a hope against hope. As has been said, God is love, and we are saved in hope, and the truth itself is a charity that gives even itself away. It cannot be denied. The contradiction is also this: that in giving we receive, that only by being empty are we full. At the wall of truth, to echo Cusanus, the opposites at last meet, the coincidence, and contradiction contradicts itself, and unity is achieved beyond what human reason can know. This is the truth of mercy and the mercy of truth. The contradiction both is and is not at the same time. I do not know, I cannot know, yet I believe, I must believe. One must believe. Be perfect. Believe. Faith makes it real. I am made by God, but in faith I become real. Faith is a gift, and if I say I give something to God, then I must be contradicting myself, yet I believe He needs us even as we need Him. Therese said: How much Jesus desires to be loved! We know more than we understand, and we are told to incline not to our own understandings. The mercy of God can be seen in relation to the previously given account of the logic of the philosopher Parmenides and the dialogue by Plato about the talk the first great logician in the West had with the young Socrates. If there is a secret, it perhaps is this.
If you take the logic, any logic, perhaps, which deals with truth, or any logic problem where you have the answer but have to supply the steps to prove it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a problem from mathematics, say, simple addition, for example, then when we speak of the fact of the world, the truth of being, the meaning of things, or the mercy of God, and assert the contradictoriness of them, the truth of contradiction, the answer is that the world, truth, meaning, being, what is our ultimate concern, is more like a math problem than a logic problem. One does not reduce math to logic as in the famous logistic of Russell and Whitehead who spent much ink in “proving” that two plus two equals four. No. One does the reverse of the logistic, and converts logic into math, the truth into a number, as I show in the Metasignification about the arrival, completion and fulfillment of man and God. This reversal can be seen in that, instead of saying true and false, both and neither, and conclude that they cannot all be true, one says “four times three equals twelve.” Or simply add up everything, being-in-the-world, and arrive at the conclusion of the new summa, the sum total of the all in all. Which must be One. Absolutely Plato and Parmenides were right. The One is what is, minus what seems to be, setting aside what is not. The entire fourfold of the logical square is true all at the same time. I may seem to be agreeing with seriality and Sartre by indicating a summa or summing up, that the answer is a total count in the making, as a poet said, but I am not. Semblance is that, and it is growing indefinitely. The truth is One. When you add up all faith in the world, the thing that makes us real, and subtract all doubt, all reason, everything that is not faith, that is, the multiplicity, you arrive at One. If the truth is One, what would the Zero be? Zero is pleasure, a kind of sensual nihilism. Pleasure times anything leads to the void, as multiplying anything by zero leaves zero. To arrive at true spiritual joy, you must then not choose pleasure, but rather its opposite, pain. You must not affirm both, which would negate the One and affirm the Nothing. Pain or
suffering, the cross, is something we accept, the fact of it, and also the good of it in the wisdom of God’ providence, trusting Him. Christ says two things that may contradict each other, yet both I think according to the theory may be true. Come to me all you who are weary and carrying a heavy burden, and find your rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me. But the cross is not easy and light, or it would not be the cross. The cross is full of every kind of pain and contradiction, humiliation, suffering, and to suffer is not easy. But at least it is real. Pain and suffering are two criteria of reality, which as one poet said, is not something the human being can stand much of. Love hurts. God died on the cross, a painful death, because of His love for the Father and for us. If He calls us to the cross, to bear it with Him, how can it also be light and easy? Because at least it is real, which is not something the pleasures of life give. Pleasure is the zero, and the more it is multiplied, the more there is of nothing. Numbness is worse than pain, to feel even pain is better than not being able to feel anything at all. The cross is in a sense both hard and easy, because real, because the opposite of pleasure, because in this, despite human reason, and what appears to be our own self-interest, there is a true joy that the world cannot comprehend, peace that the world knows nothing of, a wideness to mercy, as the hymn says, a forgiveness, an understanding, a wisdom, which is the Mind of Christ. Subtracting pleasure from this will not diminish it, for pleasure is the zero, but if you multiply pleasure times any good thing that seems to be good in itself and may be, though truly God alone is Good, then in the modern calculus of utilitarian hedonism, you not only may but you must lose everything. To arrive at the One, you add up all faith, faiths of every kind, believe everything, all things as it is said, and subtract all doubt, all reason, all sin, for whatever is not of faith is sin, and most of all subtract all pleasure in the world, though it is really only nothing, and then you get the One. What is the number of Spiritual Joy? Christ indicates that it is
70. Why 70? Because human understanding forgives seven times, divine wisdom does 70 times seven times. And it is for this reason that Christ sends before Him 70 disciples to all the towns in Israel he will visit in his life because they are to bring the gospel to the people, bring them the good news, the joy of the message of peace and forgiveness and healing from God. The good news which is One contrasts with the void, all that simulates peace, but does not provide it, such as vacations, rather than vocations. We have the One and the zero. What is the postmodern context? The computer is the universal adding machine, which connects everything through almost, but not quite, infinitely long and complex strings of Ones and zeros. This is the total count in the making, ever indefinite, not able to arrive, or be computed. The computer has computed something it cannot compute. In a way, it seems to have made the world into a kind of One, one world. The ideal has become real through technology. Instead of this great truth of the Reality of the Whole, we have instead the Hole of Unreality, the abyss into which the city of the world is falling. This unreal city is currently in a crisis, and this crisis will not pass, a crisis of financial meltdown, political deadlock, unending distortions of the truth by denial, simulation and terror on all sides. To contradict the truth, clearly and simply, would be to arrive at the Whole, by dialectic, but to again use Badiou’s terms, truth is being destroyed not by contradiction, which is dialectical, like all truth, at least in the West, but through deconstructive simulations and the many forms of denial that humans are known for, and the variety of terrorisms at war in the world today, even on computers themselves. The zero, the nothingness, which is really a less than zero, a simulated fraud, in order to deny it is what it is, or is not what it seems to be, requires constant stimulation. The financial world requires great stimulus packages that only delay, defer, deny the problem of an economy based on credit rather than faith, capitalism rather than the catholic economy of the charity of truth, two different forms of belief
and trust, the former an illusion, the second an ideal, and which increases the national debt of almost all countries in a kind of unreal multiplication that is as big as the strings of ones and zeros that have made the internet. The stimulants that keep us going, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, sane or insane, give us an illusion of energy and vitality, like the picture of Dorian Gray, that is, with a huge price we are in denial about. The corruption of the world is the fact and the result of our being in denial, a corruption seen in the murder of the woman of Juarez by drug cartels fed by American addictions, in the large amounts of money that fuel politics and government today, and in the horror of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. The number of this corruption is something like the Google. It is the opposite of the One. It has been created artificially, stimulated by advertising, sex, power, all desires, all pleasures, and is a monster, a beast, anti-Christian, if I may refer to the prophecy of the end of the world without seeming to be something I am not. God has promised to heal the world, as he ends it, to shepherd the people, give them good pasture to lie down in and rest, to bind up all our wounds. But he also promises to destroy the sleek and the strong. This is not a popular message, but it is in Ezekiel. People like to watch movies about the end of the world, simulations of it, or deny that the prophecies apply to the future, are far rather about ancient Rome, and we cannot fall back on the old phrase, history will be the judge, because after the end, history will be no more, it will have been an illusion, an error of the human judgment, corrected by the divine judgment, which we all hope will be merciful. That all this huge apocalyptic mistake of a world is the all-time contradiction, where some people have so much, and some so little, is the fact. Accountability is called for. What we have is an illusion, what we need is an ideal that we can still make real if we believe we can love. I believe we can. Criticism and complaint and the long litany of opinion are the order of the day, and there is little room for thanks and praise, for trust and mercy, for
meditation, for stillness instead of stridency, and we all are too unilateral, too partial, too fragmented, unlike the God I have evoked so far, as He is to me, Who is so all-embracing, One, whole, complete, that He includes everything and its opposite, and so much so that we cannot understand Him as He is, or really know ourselves, and thus seem to pursue our careers, our loves, our lives, our faith or our fate, with slackness or sleekness, apathy or determination, due to contingent rather than essential reasons. Absolutely, God is the reason for our being, but He is not limited by reasons. Love is the reason for the world and for us, and it is what can still hold us together, and I believe will, and really does in God, despite our unbelief, our lack of care, our fears. He said: You will have trouble in the world, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. We have been given temptations: to sins of the body, mind, spirit. Yet we are temples, lights in the world, cities on a hill. We all are called. We hear this call not with our ears, but with our hearts, not by sight, but by faith, with love, and we do not say that He is being unreasonable, that He asks the impossible, which He perhaps does, but we rejoice in being called, in being chosen, in being created, in being renewed, in being granted a few years to be a part of the world, to learn to love, to choose joy and hope, not despite suffering, but because it is His will, the inscrutable, which I have described as a kind of contradiction, not merely a paradox, a contradiction seen chiefly in Jesus Christ Himself, being both true God and true man, the fact which was a stumbling block for both Jews and Islamists, His death on the cross, what He endured in solidarity with each of us and all of us. To be called by Him is to be called to account, and he makes us accountable, in that we really do count, are not nothing, yet are not somebody, but are One, once we leave the world of seeming-to-be for what really IS, the contradiction of truth for the truth of contradiction. When I am called to account, made accountable, I must turn, either toward Him Who calls, or away from Him. If I think I count as somebody, I turn away. If I
turn toward the call, I begin to count to Him. If I think I count, I will enumerate the reasons. If I only begin to count, I do not count higher than One, though God can unfold out of the One numbers such as the trinity, or four-square arrival, the gnomic five, the completed seven of God and man at one with each other, or in fulfillment arrive at the twelve, three times four, God times man, what is called the All in All. We ascend through a few steps, hard steps of arrival and completion, and in the next life by His mercy we will be fulfilled, not by an addition of God but by a great multiplication, as He multiplied the bread and fish, as He said, be fruitful and multiply, as He said, not seven times but 70 times seven times. God’s action multiplies, it does not divide. Yet it does. He brings not peace but a sword, and a person’s enemies will be his own family members. The Church is persecuted and persecuting, both, holy and sinful, both, and despite denials, often contradicts Scripture. We might view this as hypocrisy, but I do not think it is, yet I do not think it should be ignored either. The truth is contradictory, is exemplified by this Church professing love, but burning heretics, or silencing those who disagree with Rome. I believe God loves each of us, as well as the Church and the World, not despite our contradictions, but because of them. It is we who find ourselves unbearable, judging one and all, condemning sinners, other faiths, critics, even our closest friends. But my conscience judges only me, it is me I am to give an account of. My faith says this, love would have it so, but I dream of reasons, most quite good, why the other is wrong and I am right. Then we are a kind of paranoid, living a delusion, thinking I am somebody, fearful of the stranger and neighbor, in love with myself, if with anyone at all. As Nietzsche once confessed after going mad, he never loved anyone, not even himself. To know that there are good and evil that really contradict and that nevertheless we are not to sin or do evil, that to know the good and not to do it is a sin, that we are therefore, again, to be perfect, means that although contradiction is forgiven, that is not a
license to sin. And perhaps the greatest sin is to deny the truth. John Paul II once said that the most important word in the Bible is “truth.” In denying the truth we deny God Himself Who is the Truth in a person. The truth is a person, not abstract, and easy to love, with a real heart, really tempted like us, suffered and died like us, had a mother, was just a worker in wood, never wrote a book, never married, had a brief career and would have been forgotten, if He had not been God. And because He is not forgotten, neither are we, though we seem to be, after only fifteen minutes of fame. Most of us never get even that much, thank God. But because God loves us and wants us to love Him, as Therese said, we will not only not be forgotten, but live forever. Eternity was the great point of departure for me when I was first called by God in 1989, and my conversion was the immediate fruit of a paper I wrote on the distinction I drew between eternity and the Infinite, departing from Levinas, on the one hand, and Nietzsche on the other, Eternity for me is a religious notion, the Infinite mere philosophy, all against what I once studied, Nietzsche’s eternal return, that infinite circle without exit, and the ethics of Levinas which posits the Infinite but not its limitation by Eternity. The circle that I had been in for five years was in 1989 for me, as Derrida said, “effracted,” the economy broken, my debt paid, I was redeemed and freed, and yet bound to God, though not bound essentially anymore to sin, as I set out on a journey, which at times was painful, boring, mad, mystic, full of love, and filled with the attempt to write something about what I was thinking and experiencing. The basic premise of my work as an author from the inception in 1989, after having rejected Derrida, was that deconstruction was a very bad thing, the philosophy of the Antichrist, and that it was to be refuted. However, before the present work is concluded the reader will find something else going on in my relationship to the thought of Derrida, and it will be seen to fulfill the implications of the thesis concerning the truth of contradiction [I have gone back and inserted this after the fact, having found out
something about Derrida I did not know before the Apocalypse actually occurred]. Along with arguing against that “philosophy� I tried to say something meaningful in a theological way, and about literature, both desires leading to graduate degrees in those fields. While I was at the University of St. Thomas in 2006, about half-way through graduate school, for a few days I lost my faith, but asked God twice, and was restored by His mercy. It has been my impression, ever since that point, that the Lord began leading the writing I was doing in a very deliberate way, as ideas unfolded I had never dreamed of, including the theory of arrival, the renovation of dialectical logic, a sound refutation of deconstruction, the way to freedom out of the impasse of necessity and fantasy, the discovery of numbers beyond the four-square format of arrival, and much else, including the later stages of thinking through the problem of contradiction that I had initially engaged in in the 1990s as my particular problem, but which I came to discover entailed more than my individual plight, and really, as Hegel indicated, is at the heart of reality. I came to see it is not that we contradict each other, but that we cannot logically accept that fact of existence, and so we live a little crazy, in denial about reality, which just cannot be true, as it is, yet we find it may really be the truth, WHAT IS. It is said: To everything there is a season, a time for everything under Heaven. In my reading of Shakespeare and Joyce in 2006 I could see the dramatic presentation of multiple conflicting points of view that nevertheless did not lead to the deconstruction. And so in the end, I have made my peace with deconstruction, while still opposing it, that is dialectically appropriating it so as not to be deconstructed by it, but have allowed the contradictions to stand, because the whole is the true, [or almost, for the truth is more than the whole] despite Adorno, and I was not wrong to oppose it so hard, it was not futile to choose a side and argue a case, and since I did so sincerely, perhaps learned something greater along the way, the truth of love, which does not seek its own, but really does believe all things,
as I echoed Paul in 1996, and yet opposes evil, while not resisting it, seeks justice for all, but mercy for all, sets limits, though truly free, obeys though disagrees, is both Catholic and catholic, the first not restricting the other by partiality or dogmatic possession, has seen both sides of the issue, still chooses some things over others, does not live dispassionately, yet tries to be peaceful, sins not because of but despite my philosophy, lets go of some things, though still acquires, holds fast to that which is good, and while I understand I am a walking contradiction inside a contradictory world, am alright with that, and do what I can to still make sense, to understand what I cannot understand and love God though I fear Him at the same time, and love everybody for God’s sake, which is impossible, but which God can do when I get out of the way and allow Him to. I have changed. He has taken place here. I am still as afflicted as ever, tempted and tried, but God is here, and I cannot turn away, nor do I wish to, and though only last Sunday I left mass and promptly forgot Him for over an hour, which led me to say an awful thing to my wife. I can now say not that one never arrives, or that our arrival must be, but I believe some do, or all will, if He will, though not as we will, but as God wills. Effort and will count, for we are judged by our works, but everything is grace, as Therese said, and absolutely faith justifies. The Bible says so many things in more than one way, even four gospels that often conflict and contradict, that we must change the way we think or ignore the great canonical truth that the Bible is true even when it contradicts itself, and that one must not isolate statements, but take it as a whole. One might say: In the beginning was the Account, which is one meaning of the word Logos used as the name of the Son of God. The word for Word means more than just “word,� and is paradigmatic of the truth itself, being also speech, reason, discourse, harmony, proportion and account, as well as much more, as I write in my work on Heraclitus. Words self-contradict, as a teacher of mine pointed out, remarking that people want words to mean only one thing, which
they do not, a fact that does not apply to numbers which do not mean but one thing as numbers, though we may find symbols in the ciphers, a fact that accounts for the plan for the temple in the book of Ezekiel. Newton said this plan for the Temple is the map for the mind of God, which inspired me to say that God is a Book, which is neither right, nor wrong, that is, unproven and not able to be proven, and although it does not seem to make sense, I say it anyway. To say that all religions are One, and yet not all religions are equally true, is valid. To say all of the Bible is eternally valid, that what it says about something in the past still applies today, especially regarding the Church, is what I think is true, that Scripture is essential Prophetic, but that any one isolated point of view is only partial, whether it is Catholic, Jewish, Islamic or Buddhist, and that only the totality can be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even though all conflict. And yet we maintain our affiliations with the parts, while realizing they are not the whole, which is a representation of God. God is eternal and infinite, and in a logical space contains all possibilities, but as Aquinas said, what is eternal is actual, so He really is All in All already. We await our arrival, when He chooses, and learn patience as we wait, for as many have said, including Joyce, patience is the great thing. You learn to endure. As Holderlin said, the important thing is not to be somebody, but to learn. And endurance is good for the faith, and faith is what makes you real, if you are real. Faith creates being, the meaning I found for my first book on being and believing, four years too late, and in being born again we become real. We are in a real relation with God, not circling an impassive distant star, and yet we are also in a fixed relation, for God cannot change, which we cannot help but do in our immutable world filled with immortal souls. From our hearts we overcome our minds. Out of love we do not have to have a better reason, a better theology, a better job, a better car, a better house, a better wife, or a bigger and better anything than anyone else. In a sense contradiction is so democratic, so egalitarian, and dialogue so good,
to be at peace so welcome, and yet to fight for the right so necessary, to never quit or give up or in, but to keep going, to call out to each other as we run on, “just keep going!� which Badiou said is a definition of truth. There is no other race to run and to finish is to win, to go the distance as the fighter did in the old movie, to try, and though as we die we may not know if we won anything or what our lives really meant, yet to know that if we have loved, some real thing was made, a living spiritual being that is like having a baby in terms of the natural world, but may be how God is born, in us, and how His book came to be, for us, why he lived and died, with us, and did not give up, out of love, one of us, and my religion was not wrong about God being love, as John said: God is love. When we love each other, God is more God, I think, and we help create the World with Him, the creation being something not inessential or extrinsic to God, but a world He loved so much He died to save it. Turn to Him, then, and do not let your hearts be hardened. Turn to each other, and find God in the midst. He was crucified along with two others. In the four accounts in the gospels, only Luke mentions that one was saved. Yet there is that one chance, that one hope, that one account, and we accept this in a way Samuel Beckett could not, who also could not accept suffering, who lived in perpetual exile. We are not yet home, but we are not still in exile. We are on the way, and God is coming to meet the prodigal, the thief, the sinner, even the good. We do not know what He will say, or even if He is a He, as in some churches which are progressive, but God will come, we only seem to wait indefinitely, impatiently, in pain, in love, in our aloneness and in our business, in our dream of justice and peace and equality, which contradicts the world, but is really more real than the reality we see, and faith being the substance of things hoped for, what makes the real really real, and the evidence of things not seen, the living proof, we hear the word, receive the gift of faith, and become real, sometimes right away, sometimes years later, as in the difference between the
conversion of Paul and the conversion of Augustine, not for our sakes alone but for the sake of the whole, and to be a drop in the infinite sea is a much better thing than imagined when we spent our days on the shore playing with the shells and rocks and things that amused, distracted, but did not help us become what we were meant to be. Accepting the truth of contradiction is not the way to arrive, but rather some point you reach just before arrival, how far before no one knows, but somewhere between departure and approach. As I said once, in a paper on Augustine and Derrida, to contradict the theory that a letter can never arrive, because of a structure of error built into the postal principle, if you set out and just keep going, you cannot help but arrive, you will not get lost forever, and even if you lose your way, God will find you. Perhaps He can only find us precisely when we are lost. We must lose ourselves in order to be found. We lose our lives in order to really begin to live. Whether that is before or after death, or only after resurrection, after the particular or the general judgment or a long time in the fires of purgation, or if simply knowing and loving God is already to have arrived, I do not know. I believe all of the above. That is the answer you give God when He asks you that one last, hard question that means so much. All of the above, Lord, all of the above. It may be that the question though will be simple and easy, as simple as “Who do you love?” If we can honestly say “You alone Lord, you are my inheritance, all I desired in all I desired,” we will be closer to the truth. “With what is thought to remain?” John Paul II asked in his youth, and the reply he gave was “With the truth, of course.” If we sincerely seek the Truth, while not violating conscience, we will be saved. These words of Vatican Council II, said in relation to the religions of the world, should be kept in mind when considering truth, in that neither Christians nor anyone else own it entirely, and that precisely when the truths of the world all contradict, this does not add up to the negation of the truth, but to its very completion, just short of our true fulfillment in the All in All. It has been
said we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, which is a theology of politics, compromise, but I say, follow the truth wherever it leads, for wherever God leads you, He will provide for you, even though it be impossible, a promise which is the logic of mercy, absolute. This absolute is free, free of reason, meaning to say, at least we must not look for reasons to believe, like theologians, but allow ourselves to be created in our essential being by faith, to have sheer faith and to leave the rest to God, whose mercy and justice are one.
THE FORM
Seeing the form is part of the basic requirement to know and love the truth. It is the point of concentration at which the work meets the world. This meeting of you who are the work of God, and any work you may do, with the world, is a kind of crisis, crux, or turning point. The world tries to inform you, reshape you and conform you to itself and its purposes, which vary depending on time and place, but which universally have principles such as pleasure, desire and power expressed today through finance and politics. We are told by Paul to be not conformed to the world. Thus, one must not be too informed by it or of it, either. On what basis then shall we be formed? Let us say on faith, hope and love, theological and spiritual gifts that money cannot buy. They can be simulated or denied or distorted or destroyed by the terrorisms we experience, but they yet abide by the power of the Spirit and are taught by the Church in prayer in the Word. We are thus formed. What is the Form? It has been described in a variety of ways, beginning with Plato, as in the Timaeus, in which is posited the khora or womb, the matrix of creation in which or through which the god or demi-urge fashions certain actual shapes of things. These
things are like atoms, building blocks of the reality. Derrida, once he had carried through on the destruction of form, turned to the khora in his later years, perhaps wanting to see the unshaped behind the shape, as Plotinus put it, a text Derrida also referred to in his writing on the secret in the late 90s, as well as in an exergue in the 60s. I think he went from a divided origin in 1967 to go beyond the moment of the fall to return to an original unity of all things in the great affirmation, the YES he finds in Nietzsche and Joyce. And he may have done this, and completed the double movement he had promised. But, let us stop short of that speculation, basically ideal, on the source of formation, calling that rather, in faith, simply God, and look instead at the Form itself in order to find the truth about it from which if possible a word can be spoken about the act of formation and the One from which the forms proceed. Form is determined by number, the definite limit, and not by language, which is in principle indefinite and contradictory. Music and poetry are based on number in a way the novel and the newspaper are not. Western culture has moved from the limit of number toward an undefined and indefinite space, call it the abyss, the precise opposite of the womb of khora, the abyss being akin to the tomb. Specific form can be seen as for instance the unity, the binary, the trinity, the symphonic square, the gnomic fifth, the complete seven of the combination of the three of God with the four of man, and ultimately the all in all of God times man found in the 12. These are the seven basic steps in the arrival of the dialectical form. Our task is to realize the symphonic form of the four, which is our totality. Without this shape we will not fit with God. How do we thus arrive at the square? In a variety of ways in my works I both describe and explain it, but the work also exemplifies it. It does this through the logic of the form on which it was based and which it shows forth. The work takes as the basis of its logic the idea of arrival at the four, the square. But as I say in one place, all work is completed by the reader and by the grace of God which
illuminates the mind and accords the work its reception. There is further than the text of my work a context. This context is that of God, Church and World, versus the fourth of the work in my point of view, a position from which the reader will in the reading of the work be enabled to view God-Church-World. The singularity of the “ I,� the subject, the work, is the essential completion and perfection of that system, and it effracts the circularity of the metaphysical GodChurch-World system. Thus the work by its existence, that it is, completes what it is about, just as the autobiographical elements of the works fit with the tripartite criticism of theology, philosophy and literature, the creative elements being the arrival of the criticism, and the metacritical completing in time an arrangement in the space of the concept. Each of us must take on this work-like aspect, and step outside the system of the world, be not conformed to it, and in a way, be re-formed through a continual reformation, so as to stand in our arrival, before God, for our own sakes and for the good of the whole which needs each of us to complete the circle precisely by breaking the circularity, call it the textuality itself, by our own creativity, creating not just my life, but bringing about the whole life of real form. Unlike the context theory of Derrida which says that the text is in the context of the world, a world which is in principle and in fact insatiable and unsaturable, the destabilizing of the text and the opening up of it, I say the God-Church-World system is the text of which the paradigmatic work-like I is the context which is the point of view of the reader or author or any other singularity, the word for instance, but supremely the unique number, which at once both opens the circularity of that objective system only in order to complete it and close it, that is to move it from being an illusionary thing into the real and the true which is and which does not merely seem to be. And so I must be formed as the I, and I think that enables then a real We or community, in order for the God-Church-World system to be not an illusion but be in reality. Unless I am real, it cannot be real, but if I am, it
will be as well. I do not think this is merely an “as if,� but is the actuality of the actual, the existence of essence. Thus I must act, but only on myself, and becoming a true singularity, actually, not ideally, make real and true the world, which depends on me, on each one of us, on each work as such, to be meta, not para, in relation both to oneself and to the whole, and when each is one, all will be One, every other, wholly other, for the One. We must not doubt that we are real despite the unreality of the world system which confronts us with for instance what it calls the ultimate fact of our deaths. Death is not real, it is but an illusion, and is not the limit. Do not worry about death, for God is not the God of the dead but of the living, and Christ came to defeat the illusion of death by the truth of life. Death imposes fear on people, but the living truth sets us free. We are either dead or alive, now not later. We are either saved or we are not, there are not degrees of salvation. You are either real or you are not, there are not degrees of reality. There are only Reality and Illusion. You must become real, because no one can do this for you, it is the journey you must make in life. Christ, some think, did it for us, took our places in an economy of salvation, which he did in principle, and in fact, yet also to show us the form and breach the circularity of God-Church-World, to arrive first and be the way for us to follow in order to arrive later. He said deny yourself, that is to say, limit yourself, in order to arrive. You must be definite, not indefinite, finite, not infinite, one, not many, restricted in order to be really free, obey by faith, which is specific, not generally without conditions to affirm or love everything in an indefinite gesture. You make yourself, you make the work, the marriage, the art, the idea, the love, the act, the end. Without Christ you can do nothing on your own, and yet with Him you can and must make your own reality as well as the reality of the whole. He does not do it without you. You have the responsibility for your own arrival, on which others depend as well, for we are in community, a family, a world, and no other, but just one. Therefore, do not judge
another. That means do not interpret their place on the map of arrival, how near or how far. You cannot do that until you have arrived, and after you arrive you will not want to. Mercy is a way to arrive. Without mercy the world judges, criticizes, condemns. It is gossip and slander. I must be different. Some see the great affirmation of postmodernism as this stepping out of judgment, but that is but a simulation, a lack of real discernment. By affirming, some deny the truth. The arrival of morals is found in mysticism, the arrival of time in eternity, the arrival of truth in contradiction, the arrival of the text in the context. You are the context of the world, not it of you. By opposition one creates the greater harmony. The creation of it depends on the proportion, a way of being that is an acknowledgment, a thanksgiving, a turning to the care of the whole by being whole yourself. Eliot said in the end is the beginning, to know from whence we set out on our journey, and to know it really for the first time. We went unknowing, but by stepping outside the circle or system, the text or the world, by becoming one, by becoming myself, I return not in judgment but in mercy, to see and yet not be seen, to know and yet not be known, to understand and love, though I be misunderstood and unloved, to be at peace amid strife, to be order in the chaos, to be light in the darkness, to be effaced in all this, and as is said, to be Christ, therefore not myself, to have the Mind of Christ, that is, to become a child of God. I think in order for this conclusion to be accepted the premises of my argument must be properly understood, and that chiefly in defining the term of God-Church-World. By this implication of God in the Church and in the World I speak not of the God of Jesus Christ, but rather the god of those who denied him, the one whom William Blake said is the god of this world. That god is a lie, the father of lies and would perpetuate a certain morality in the Church and an immoral or amoral attitude in the World, in order to cut off the mystical arrival on which we depend as our goal. That so-called god is a kind of reason which has become the reasoning of men, but which
denies faith, and is really sin. All morality based on it is really the great sin, the judgmental morality, rather than the mystical forgiveness that loves and does not judge. The grand affirmation of the postmodern is a short-circuit of the steps leading to mysticism that stops short of true love and forgiveness and mercy by going beyond the moral and immoral, good and evil and, hesitating in the amoral, thinks it has arrived by accepting and affirming the whole. But the whole of reality cannot be seen from this vantage, because it is that point of view is still a part of the circularity of God-Church-World. The real God of Jesus Christ is what others have termed the God beyond god, Eckhart and Tillich did so, but which has been misunderstood by some in their great affirmation as the opposite of what He truly is. Unless one breaks the system and steps out of the text as such the truth of God cannot be seen. As long as one is trapped by language games and time, which we have been told are absolutes that we cannot get around, such will be the case. Silence and eternity are words for the place outside the circularity and are characteristic of mysticism. Absolute knowledge involves the arrival of dialectic by stepping out of the speculation which is theory in recent years. Derrida interdicted the step but it has been taken. The uncanniness of the simulations of truth must be overcome by a love that casts out fear, a trust in the mercy of Jesus that defeats the terror against the truth, what denies you, the attempt to deconstruct you. When you are, it will no longer be. When you take the necessary, impossible, yet promised step, you will arrive. In order to do this one must turn toward, not away from, the truth of Christ, repent from evil and believe. The opposite of this metanoia is the paranoia that is all around us, in the text of the God-Church-World system, the fear you see in the eyes of strangers, the delusions of grandeur we sometimes fall prey to, and an alienation that simulates the real solitude of one who has explicated the implications of the logic of what is the deconstruction in postmodernism, the closure of the system of God-Church-World as a network
textuality. The signs of that only give interpretations that go on indefinitely. Opposed to it is the number, as such, the shape of truth, the form, untranslatable as a poem is, as obvious as light is, pure like silence and quiet mediation, a mysticism that effracts the circle in the sheer ascent of love up, out of the world, the direction of prayer and resurrection, the life of the Most High. God, by being “most high,” stops all regression, progression and aggression, by his great egression. The I AM breaks the text. To de-form the world as Derrida has done, or as de Man did in the disfiguring of the poem, or as Bloom did in ruining the truths, is to deny the truth of the I AM of the existence of that which is by a fruitless going-back-of the shape to get to the unshaped, the One of Plotinus, and simulate it in the world, to deconstruct that which is into what it is not, because the world, as seen in the God-Church-World concatenation or chain of implications, does not exist, only I AM real, which is to say, reality depends on the I AM of God said to Moses, and existence, reality, is to partake of this I AM, lesser only in degree, and in the atonement to be at one with God, when one can say “I am” and really say something in fact, in deed, not as a way of positing the truth, not as an assertion which is in fact a denial, but as the transcendent fact that escapes the black hole of God-Church-World, which would trap everything which is not spiritual. The metaphysical truth which so many seek is the truth of what Blake and Coleridge called the imagination: the great I AM of absolute existence, the that-ness of the shape or of art or of the poem, not the what-ness which instead of defining and through definition giving limit and shape, logic and aesthetic, that is, seeing the form, actually and essentially denies the existence in the mystery of consciousness, another term for imagination, which we experience as self-evident but which cannot be found other than in the act of being itself. It is to say I AM against an “I am this or that.” To say “I am this or that” is to give your occupation or define yourself in some way, but the truth is outside the implications of your role in the world. Your
truth must be to be One. You are defined by your relation to the One truth. Your truth must be to be able to say I AM, absolutely, without any other meaning. This is not to put yourself in God’s place, but rather to allow God to take place and so break the closure of the text of God-ChurchWorld, which would deny the freedom of the glory of the great I AM of God. God’s hands are not tied, as one young man once told me at the seminary. Theology might think so, and the Church and the World act as if it were, but you, when you say I AM in the sense God does, free yourself from their “god,” not in order to become God, but by being what God intends you to be, free, know the truth. In knowing this truth, the I AM, aside from any essence for the world to deconstruct, then and only then will I be, then I am free and real and One and in-deconstructible. As is God. If I am free, real, One and in-deconstructible, then I am open to the faith of Christ. To be faithful is to be in real relation. It is to be in true relation which is a keeping in relation to the truth. All falsehood is unfaithfulness and breaks relation with the truth. When you step out of the world, or the God-Church-World system, you dissolve the false bond that held you in slavery to all lies and dissimulation and come into the truth of your relationship to God in Jesus Christ, and thus by being outside the system of the text, become meaningful, have meaning, and you are without lie the transcendental signified. If you are faithful to Christ you stand on the rock where Moses stood, the firm foundation of the truth of the gospel. From this point the world as a lie ceases to exist, the truth is told, and when you become real, it becomes real, the church is reformed, and then God takes place in you, the event of the truth occurs, your own faithfulness and transcendence being the act which converts the phantasm of the world. Truth is not the conversion to the phantasm as was thought in medieval philosophy, but against it, the turning of phantasm itself, the illusion which is not the imagination but the distortion of truth by fanciful associations and juxtapositions which do not create but destroy through a relation not meta but
para. The relation of para, the separate reality, which we are informed by the world is the truth about each and every one of us, is the denial of the One that is God the All in All. The city of God is the meta which is beyond the world and is in a critical relation to its lie because of the faithfulness of the meta to the truth of God. Faithfulness requires the denial of self, not the denial of truth, the taking up of the cross, not the crossing-through of the Word by a kind of erasure that is the mark of the Derridean text, his strategy of writing, like the X placed over the word Being by Heidegger in his later work, the crossing-out of meaning by what some called the crucifixion or passion of the Word in theologies closer to atheism than to God, and finally, as disciples of Christ, the following of the way which is Christian, the steep and narrow pathway, the strait way which is the acceptance of the reality of suffering as essential to joy, its contradiction and completion and fulfillment, for temporal enemies are spiritual friends, as Blake said. In our day, everyone goes their own way, as in the Book of Judges, seeming to be individuals, but in reality only fragments suspended in the vicious medium of technology and information, the IT, while the faithful follow Christ, despite the world’s opinion. There are only truth and opinion, and there are either, for each of us, the two opposing points of view, which are first, that Christ is the truth, or second, that He is a matter of opinion. Some people think there is no longer any truth at all, but only opinion, and this has become the glory of our time, the fame of the opinion-makers. They make themselves by their own opinion superior to everyone else when in fact they have ceased to be real, are less than nothing, and are actually only as equally invalid as all others who hold to what Parmenides called the way of opinion, thinking they have done a great thing in turning aside from the existential gloominess of the concept of nothingness, which though dark actually had more truth than the semblance in the world of opinion, which is neither being nor nothingness, and which was the real goal of nihilism, the abyss, which is not the nothing but the
hell of a world without truth or love or any notion of the meaning of the good. As one student put it, rightly or wrongly, you decide, the good means so many things it no longer means anything. Heidegger said as much of being. If you do not know the truth about the truth, you will believe that what I am saying is simply another opinion. Thus we live in two worlds, one in which there is truth and it is knowable through faithfulness, freedom, becoming one, being real, taking a stand against deconstruction, and another parallel world that is based on the rule of interpretation that any thing can be juxtaposed alongside any thing else, and call that connection, call that pattern, call that order, call that truth, that there are no absolute truths but only effects like the writing that is the counterfeit of truth which is so common no one any longer knows truth from falsity, that there are only opinions, and that to be truly free is to be able to express one’s opinion whenever one likes, where there are no longer facts, even, but only points of view, and in which all religions are like foods in a restaurant, with faith being a matter of choice from the menu. But such is not the truth of faithfulness, for the faithful choose or are chosen, are given the gift of faith, and do not change their minds, but live by principles that do not easily change depending on the issue, which for the democratic voter invariably means self-interest, while in the world of opinion one may change one’s diet as one chooses, and if one grows tired of fish one may choose fowl, that is, change as the weather, or simply change the channel on the TV. It has always been thus. If one does not believe the truth to be possible, one will not bother to seek it. If one thinks it impossible to be perfect, one will not try to be. If one does not think that faith and morals are based on anything other than mere opinion, one may do as one likes. We obey no law that we do not agree with. As has been said, if nothing is true then everything is permitted. But look at the course of the world in the 100 years since those words were published. Have we benefited from the freedom to do everything that we wish? Certainly it has been fun, in a way, but with
unintended consequences that are still not clear to many, dots still un-connected into a picture for them. To live in denial and debt and fear, under terror, without truth, amid great corruption and evil, in a world without love, or almost so, losing hope, adoring idols, consuming, spending, rather than making, having, rather than doing or being, forgetting so many of the things on which we once depended to support our free lives in a nation conceived in liberty, has almost brought us to the final collapse. Yet, God has not given up on us and the truth still exists despite our denying and ignoring it. What must be done? Those who are faithful must keep on in their faithfulness and not give up or give in. The faithless world which the faithful are among as lights in the darkness is not beyond redemption, or God would have already come in the day of apocalypse, the day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment. There is still time and that means because of the love of God there is still mercy. Time is the mercy of God, though some think that it proves He does not exist. Derrida even mocked God’s patience in the pages of deconstruction, the deferral and delay, the hesitation, the grand affirmation, the Messiah, hospitality, justice, openness to the other, and by the putting into question of hierarchy and sovereignty, the word and the book, the self and the same, even being as presence, and what he at last termed the deconstruction of actuality. The reduction of binary logic by Nietzsche first, and now by almost everyone, to the one leveled generality that is the sameness of the postmodern diversity culture, mocks the oneness of the Real, as the world of semblance imitates the Truth, the para deconstructs the meta, amid the many twists and turns in the labyrinth of the text, but there is no longer simple conversion, only versions: perversions, inversions and subversions. We are so late, so far from our origin, and cannot find the way back. But we must trust that God will meet us where we are, that He will have mercy on the world, that He will be the peaceful Shepherd who pastures his sheep. If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts. I believe that God has
placed in everyone some timeless resource of the Spirit of truth that man cannot destroy, and that if God will He can yet save some, or many, or all. We do not know, and yet one must believe, an echo of the later Derrida in his book on blindness. To the faithful I say: do not stop believing. You may still be an instrument of the grace of God in a way unforeseen, and you must be open to the Spirit to be used as God wills. To the faithless I say: look at the world around you, all your pleasures and treasures, your cares and debts and commitments or lack of same, and ask yourself what is the cause of the misery in you and in all those you call friends and family. To do this you must look in the mirror of the question and recognize yourself in the answer. Do not be afraid. What you see is not real. When you are changed it will be. It will be because there is nothing that is hidden that will not be revealed. You will be changed and you will come to know the truth of yourself, in the mind of God.
THE LOGIC
Taking off from Plato’s Parmenides, Derrida makes the impossible possible, therefore actual, deconstructing actuality, by making it impossible, in short, by contamination. How does this take place? I could say by examples, that is, taking out, citing, rather than taking back, which is rooted in redemption, as etymologies show. The deductions regarding the ONE that Plato makes through the character of the philosopher Parmenides lead to the assertion of the truth of contradiction. That is, that by which something both is and is not in the same respect at the same time. Contradicting Aristotle and many others, Derrida holds this to be the case, the contradictory truth. Hegel did the same. The Idealist opposes being and nothing at the beginning
of his Logic and synthesizes them into becoming. Canceled out, lifted, and preserved, at one and the same time, the Aufheben. It is the concept itself, words which mean more than one thing, words that contradict themselves, that is the mechanism in the dialectical logic that works to produce the tertium quid. Without creation ex nihilo, dialectic is the way to make it new. Lately there has been the mere juxtaposition of signs and things, the method of the deconstructive restructuring: any two signs or texts can be connected from any distance under any rule. That is textuality. But it leads both from and to a logic I will outline and resolve. Derrida found a way to stop the dialectic, to contradict Hegel’s contradiction, the antithesis that becomes synthesized, otherwise than by the basic EITHER / OR of the existential which Kierkegaard propsed as the solution to the system of the Hegelians. Derrida does not exactly negate the negation, as one says of the dialectical maneuver, which requires the work of the negative, a certain resistance, rather by a passivity, as seen in the works of Blanchot or the philosophy of Heidegger. In a pure “play,” a free play without any rule but lability, a pure semblance, a mere “nothing,” almost, but actually neither being nor nothing, but also both being and nothing, at once, which seems to be the force of opinion. Derrida contradicts dialectic by taking the BOTH / AND of Hegel, and adding a NEITHER / NOR. This is the move Plato made in regards to the One. It is both being and nothing, but neither being nor nothing, therefore, no becoming. No life, no movement, only the semblance of it, as Plato, Zeno and the fountainhead Parmenides had shown. There is but One, but not the ONE of the truth, the Good, rather the one of the AS IF TO BE, which is beyond good and evil, neither being nor nothing, rather only seeming. We can still say the seeming “only seems to be,” but that is its only chance, as Derrida said in an essay on the Phaedrus. The question is neither TO BE nor NOT TO BE, as Hamlet said and Camus famously echoed in the essay that established his philosophical credentials, but rather am I to be or merely
am I AS IF TO BE? That is the alternative to life and death, and can be rather ghostly, neither really dead nor really alive, a third thing, to refer to the dialectic, but strange, not life, but deathin-life. If we will yet be, we will be one day, but sadder and wiser men who have known deathin-life, the opposite of the resurrection, the evil ghost spirit against the revivifying Holy Spirit. Both Heidegger and Derrida demonstrated this, as I wrote of early on in “The Gift.” When there is no becoming there is nothing but becoming, which is a contradiction. And which is true. But in this case becoming truly ceases, as does anything which is nothing but…, as Kierkegaard showed in saying that if there are nothing but Christians, in Christendom, there is no more Christianity. He used the same logic as the Nietzschean HISTORY OF AN ERROR in Twilight of the Idols: eliminate one of a pair, the other does not remain. A single shoe is not much good alone, except to use as a hammer. But in destroying the ideal, the real ceased. The deconstruction of ideality led to the deconstruction of reality. Now we have neither. We have everything and nothing now, each thing and its opposite, as I know I am myself, in that I am self-contradictory. I am both good and evil, but some things simply are in fact, like the Holocaust. It did both happen and not happen, which is true in the world of opinion, not in the world of fact. But facts have altogether vanished. Whatever is asserted loudly enough and long enough comes to be believed. This kind of “belief” is not solid faith but public opinion. Unfortunately it seems that kind of weak credence is all that causes us to cohere as a world today. The market is unstable. People no longer believe or trust, because they know it is not the real facts they are being asked to believe in, rather opinion, however expert or official. Experts are a dime a dozen, and for sale everywhere. They use rhetoric, not reason, plausibility rather than proofs. Logic no longer works, it plays. For instance: language games, number games, Computations, Connections. But no ideas, no reality. For reality was anchored in a hierarchy of the ideal and the real, which has been
displaced by the nihilo, nihilism. In world history we had two basic philosophical positions, realism and idealism, but nihilism displaced both. All together this has created what I call the God-Church-World text, or onto-theology as Heidegger put it. What is needed is grace to Effract this circularity, and that means an “I” outside the text ready to receive the call of God in grace. When this happens a RING is formed: realism, idealism, nihilism, grace. I have said that to believe is to be. In a world without any reason, I have found that if one at least has faith, the one thing necessary, one still exists. The others only seem to. My logical project has been two-fold. On the one hand, to secure stability for thought, what I call “arrival,” against both dialectic and its deconstruction, and on the other hand, to rewrite deconstruction itself, that is to synthesize all logics, even in their contradictions. I think that one way to reverse the Derridean simultaneous affirmation and denial is through the existential logic of the free choice. Another way is through asking ourselves the question that Sherlock Holmes asked in his method of deduction. He said something like: Eliminate whatever is impossible, and what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. With God, all things are possible, nothing is impossible for God. But if, as those since Nietzsche have done, one eliminates God, one eliminates what Levinas called the “messianic vigilance” of the eternal against potential infinities, for instance, of time. In which evil could return, after the apocalypse. But what of an infinite logic? An infinite text? The impossible becomes possible, unless there is a limit. ACT is that limit. God is pure act, as Aquinas wrote, and this pure act eliminates the impossible by reducing potency to actuality. Believe all things. Even contradictions. In fact, to be true to the truth we must contradict the lie of the world. The way to contradict Derrida’s logic of the both-and-neither-nor is to cut the knot by an act of faith, to say no to the not by saying yes to God. This does the following: 1) It is a real act, neither possible nor impossible, but simply IS. 2) It is a way of Effracting the circularity
by an authentic RING. God-Church-World will remain a hypothetical and hypocritical, hypercritical sham and fantasy until you say I AM because I believe in God. People will think it mere pretense done for base motives, fear, greed, etc. Ignore them. Make your act of faith in God anyway. 3) Your act of faith reestablishes a hierarchy by recognizing One above ourselves down here in the leveled general text. Transcendence is necessary to escape the machine of GodChurch-World, by I in relation to the Most High. 4) This act makes you real. Brings you into real relation with the “really Real” and you are saved, and in you being saved, others are as well. Not potentially, but actually. Not cognitively, but substantially. In the act of faith you actually though invisibly arrive. In the stability of the arrival of the act of faith, one may take action against falsehood and injustice. It is the grace and mercy of God to arrive, faith itself is a gift, a mystery, but not impossible, just hard to think, though not to feel, or believe. Faith, not will to power, is that which truly empowers. God will not make you believe, but if you will but believe, God will work miracles for you and others. Most of all He will make you real again. The act of faith involves volition, choice, action, but also reception, the receiving of the gift, and openness, trust, hope. What little we have God will multiply and restore. Both our will and God’s are free. Deconstruction eliminated freedom by affirming all, erasing distinctions in the polar oppositions in which they are found. An opposition in scripture is: Your faith has saved you. You will be judged according to your works. You must believe both. The act of faith is the step that humbles the law of reason by a greater one. Derrida said that all was always already complicated at the origin, and followed the implications of that. But the step of the act is original simplicity. Step out of the complicity of the world. Step into supplication by the explication of the logic of deconstruction that forces one to conclude that action must be taken. When we realize that God believes in us even more than we believe in Him, we will therefore love. You need not choose
between logic and love: logic leads to love. When you have reason, then you have faith, or when you have faith, then you have reason, but without one or the other, both are lost. In faith, free yourself to think, or think your way through the trouble with the text, and take the step of faith. God calls, time is short, the world needs you. Say “I am it� and complete the ring of friendship with God by the graceful act of faith.
THE YES
To be Tolled in fragments: To take back the ringing yes from Derrida for Joyce, redeem it, not as example but as the unexampled, the unprecedented, unique, unrepeatable Yes. But, first the notes of the introduction leading to the redemption of affirmation:
A BB C BB A Absolute Father Son Holy Spirit Son Father Absolute Deconstructing the deconstruction to fulfill the deconstruction contrary to the truth of contradiction without contradicting the truth Complete Transcendent GOD Mediation church God Church World I World Church God
Aaron Burl Bo Charlotte Bo Burl Aaron
parents and grandparents
Law prophets writings prophets law Gospel/acts epistles revelation epistles gospel/acts Love faith hope insight hope faith love The book contains the text not the text contains the book Zig zag Mystical flower Cross cross cross Mystical flower I am He is You are I am You are He is I am Autobiography effracts Epic drama fiction drama epic Eternal time spacing time eternal Exterior circular open effraction circular exterior Myth drama critical fiction drama myth Transcendent mediation immediate mediation transcendent Truth / truth of contradiction / contradiction / contradiction of truth / truth Nothing becoming being becoming nothing Square circle effraction circle square Necessity Freedom
fantasy reality
Necessity fantasy, vicious circle, effraction by love and work Making free real Absolute act Possibility which is not Impossible which really is + --
++
Act
de
De of de
act
How does de prevent de of de? How does deconstruction keep from deconstructing itself? It always already is deconstructed It starts out deconstructed Not with act Divided origin Immemorial origin No actual origin Post retro active projection changes the past into de De cannot be deconstructed from within What of synthesis? Making dialectic de Making de dialectic Nothing but Must be effracted. Possibility of impossibility Equals Impossibility of possibility
How to contradict the contradiction? All goes through the I As if the truth never was As if the Jews did not die Both did and did not Neither did nor did not Remains. The b/a/n/n [both and neither nor] Eliminates the either/or Dialectic both / and Leads to deconstruction No choice. Jump levels Silence effracts Accurate, he said If you can say either this or that then there is choice, free And the b/a/n/n [both and neither nor] is impossible Choice destroys deconstruction Deconstruction destroys choice Total-talitarian Either choice or non-choice Must not choose non-choice Choosing to choose, open Choosing not to choose, defer, is to allow de Two cities meta/para If we eliminate choice we eliminate our freedom Freedom is the thing itself, made impossible by de
Possible made impossible, impossible made possible [disaster] Outside text is the context If there is a context there is difference choice freedom If all context is already text then no either/or If I am the context, in god-church-world, then I effract it, I choose to be Against the text, I am the standard of measure, I bind it, delimit the text Explain it, not it me The reader is the way the text arrives. Text to weave If there are folds There are implications And explications An either/or Exemplify complication Simplify complication Supplicate A fold is a fold of something Examples Case in point Show Embody Typical Eximere- to take outReplication--Reply, fold back, plaintiff’s reply, echo, copy Answer, reply, rejoinder. Law suit, dialogue Either plaintiff or defendant, choice Redeem--Re-emire, redeem, take back, not example, take out
One steals by example or one is redeemed by taking back to original Either / or in replication---rejoinder reply or copy, you choose, are free Law means contradiction e/o [either/or] decision justice choice Complication Replication
implication explication
Structure of ‘plication’ Either/or chooses one or other b/a/n/n [both/and/neither/nor] chooses all A-thesis before thesis, amoral before moral, no good / evil t/f [true, false] impossible Since complication only implications pli selon pli Since has been illusion explication is only illusion Always plus one Derrida seems to be bringing a unity into the text by yes+yes affirmation in Joyce Molly Bloom’s final statement: YES I SAID YES I WILL YES Meanings of YES 1. Used as a function word to express assent or agreement 2. Used as a function word to introduce correction or contradiction of a negative assertion or direction 3. Used as a function word to introduce a more emphatic or ex-plicit phrase 4. Used as a function word to indicate uncertainty or possible interest or attentiveness 5. Exclamation of jubilation Yes Said I
I Will Yes
Perfect ringing of yes 4 words 7 times 12 letters Perfect proof of Metasignification
Joyce knew the Ultrastructure well Bloom asks Molly to choose She chose Decision, choice An either him / or another Free / the deconstruction cut off / by a decision She does not defer but decides Yes She will Desire inclination disposed a testament To order to direct To choose As well him as another I thought as well him as another Indifference And yet, yes. Parse Yes/I said yes I will/Yes. Yes---three times I said I will 4 words Again / the Ultrastructure Yes three letters / will four / said four / I one, numbers, numbers, mystical forms. The final YES is the explication of all the rest Penultimate yes is choice Ante-penultimate is used to introduce a more emphatic or explicit phrase Penultimate emphatic agreement Ultimate the explicit, the explication still ringing. Yes: Janus at door looking back on the first three fictions and forward to the Wake: Dubliners said / Portrait will / Ulysses yeses I effraction / Wake is effracted text after I: Dubliners god / Portrait church / Ulysses world---Moral, rebellion, epic/simony, paralysis, gnomon/yes is the bit making the rest a gnomon---Text of god-church-world effracted by I saying yes.---In order to complete the three at step/decision, in order to arrive at four, in order to reach the all in all at Wake. Everything hinges on the Yes. It is dialectic that affirms and cancels. What takes place after the YES is a different order of things, meta / not para. Each step by Joyce goes further, and is never parallel, but at last fully meta. Beyond, the meta-novel, not antiAnything but completely free, pure, the joy felt after the act of faith: YES. Derrida’s YES/YES
does not quite catch it, as if there were always one more yes to be said. What ULYSSES showed is that in making a final explicit YES, one affirms as in an act of faith and makes oneself free, Molly made her decision, Joyce his, and freed herself/ himself. It is the finality of the Yes that is important, not the possible indefinite addition. The final YES is more than any of the four meanings given, it is a meta-static-yes. It is final, but it structurally cannot stop being said, at once final and infinite, but never indefinite. It is not like a total count in the making, plus one, but at once all numbers combined, a symbol for God in a book both profane and, yes, sacred. I have shown the ringing of the YES, circular in structure and as Ultrastructure, But what of the b/a/n/n the both/and/neither/nor? What of the banns? Of marriage. Wedding ring, a banding, binding. The banns of Derrida impossibly bans the wedding, anti-banns, It makes the I DO Impossible. It makes the YES of decision impossible, allowing only the meaning of a kind of inattentiveness. Derrida’s YES is the opposite of Joyce’s. It does not explicate, does not choose, is not emphatic, neither does it assert the contrary, but rather like a manager will murmur to an employee yes, yes while never intending action. The last seven words of Molly recall her decision to marry, wedding banns, that ban the Derridean appropriation before-hand. She chooses one, not all. Just Bloom. And re-affirms her choice. Renewal. Of the Banns. To say this YES is always to choose the faithfulness, though we have been unfaithful. It is a kind of repentance, a YES that turns, that brings back, that redeems. Derrida takes it out of context, examples it, rejects the redemption, the supplicatory aspect of the final Yes in Ulysses. That YES does not replicate, does not implicate, and though it is in a position to explicate does not, and is supremely simple, not complicated. The YES is a supplication. It does not supplement itself, it prays. It is neither folded nor unfolded, for it has never been enfolded. It is a plea, not a pli. The YES simplifies the matter. It is not pliable, but resolution itself, resolving the work, and as much as you can bear, or hear, in the context of your readership. But perhaps that is the “reply” of yes implied by Derrida, that when we hear Molly’s YES we reply yes again and again. Qui, qui. If that is the case he may be exonerated, but I believe his YES is too complex and is like his messiah unable to affirm because it cannot stop repeating itself. It would have been better then to say a simple NO than to endlessly entangle Joyce’s ACT in an endless deferral. In the end Derrida turns the YES into a YET. Eventually, yes, yes, but not yet. Not never, just not yet, not now, decision is impossible, too much difference: hesitating at the altar: Yet, I could not say, yet I will not, yet neither nor will, not Yet. Yet I said Yet I will Yet. No one
can say YES to that. Say Yes to Yes itself, as Derrida quotes Blanchot in Living On, but not that. Joyce said in the Wake that PATIENCE is the great thing. That means to wait. As you wait repeat to yourself yes I must yes I will yes, I will wait, right now I am waiting, not deferring, not hesitating, not passively waiting but affirming the awaited. In that one may be able to arrive at the hour the bridegroom comes. It is then we may make an exclamation of jubilation, that in the modern world Molly Bloom was the first to make, which now every sports fan makes when their team wins, YES! What was the giving of assent or the making of an affirmation became near the end of the world an act of the expression of joy at the outcome.
He threw the tables out of his hand and broke them at the foot of the mount. Exodus 32:19
The Story of a Soul In her best-selling auto-biography, St. Therese of Liseux has some peculiarities of style. She uses frequent ellipses, exclamation points, capitalization, in ways that a professional writer let alone a professional theologian and Doctor of the Church most often does not. I think there must be some reason for it. One might compare her style with another book of that period, Nietzsche’s AntiChrist. In that work he is shrill, hysterical, and I have read critics who reconcile this logically, philosophically. If it can be done for him, I think Therese deserves similar consideration. This is not the place to analyze these marks of her style, but to generally assert that they are amateurish, girlish, enthusiastic, naïve, or at least they seem to be so on the face of it. At the same time I must say this is not a bad thing, not a faux pas on her part, but something essential to who she is and what her message is. T.S. Eliot said that when a new writer is included in the canon of literature, the entire canon undergoes an adjustment. The same can be said of the relationship between this new, unique Doctor of the Church and the body to which John Paul II promoted her for the consideration of the faithful. We need not be skeptical about his decision. Nor needs we be too sentimental, the thing I think Rahner abhorred about devotion to the Little Flower. What occurred in the life of the Church when Therese was included among the ranks of her most prominent theologians has yet to be realized. However, I might say that these earmarks of her writing style indicate something new that as Rahner said will need much explication. The inclusion of Therese must change the shape of theology in catholic circles, making it in a word “littler,” more feminine, child-like. I think it may help in what I have said is the thing that the Catholic Church needs the most, and that is its de-capitalization. I think we need to look at her, and at the faith of the virgin martyrs, as unexampled. There are plenty of theologians, and they come and go, and publish their needless tomes, soon forgotten, but Therese and the other Teresas and the virgin martyrs remain, and remain at the heart of the Church, despite its masculine hierarchy. I think Therese will be heard in time. Her message will get through. It is the message of Mother Teresa as well. It is simply gospel. We do not need historical methods in our theology, but a practical theology, that is, one that can be practiced by everyone. Therese, in theory, is that key to the future theology of the “little c” catholic church.
The Portable Nietzsche In a postscript to a late margin, Nietzsche writes of his Ariadne, Cosima Wagner, that “from time to time there is magic.” Now, this magic took the form of insanity. In our day it is an irrationality,
an otherness lodged at the heart of being that being or the same cannot assimilate and is its pain, its disease. Many wrote of this from the 1960s on, Levinas and Derrida, as well as Paz and Machado. All over the world in these late days of arrival the otherness of the whole became apparent. What was excluded demanded to not be ignored. We do not truly know what this other is. We do not know whether it is good or evil. Or Autrement. It is transcendent and yet immanent, at work or play in the very numbers and letters that we use or that use us. I think we have had an illusion of being control, what we call consciousness, and that this is for good or ill passing away. I think a new mind is being born. Science sees many changes in the human brain the last 100 years that we do not know the goal of. More is happening than we know. We may perhaps be being prepared for the apocalypse, which may not be so much the catastrophe as the unveiling of what has hitherto remained hidden. Otherness must have something about it of the divine, the super-natural, what people call magical, because it exceeds the human notion of holiness and the sacred. God is greater than any partial explanation, any religion, and if he creates both good and evil, as the prophets say, and is beyond all of the polar oppositions by which we perceive what we call reality, then God is just incomprehensible. Perhaps everything that is in-comprehensible somehow is an attribute of the Divine. “From time to time there is magic.” As Celan said, the light compels, light was salvation, you be like you, ever. God ever is and is our compulsion, our pressing, our need. Truly magic is not the attempt of men to manipulate the gods, but something other that is like a force flowing through us, ordering and disordering the time, and our minds. Imagination is what the poets called it, the genius that apprehends more than cool reason comprehends. We need not worry about the rejection of morality and faith by Nietzsche, or his de-struction of man’s reason in favor of the body, but read him as symptom, not cause, of the transformation now underway. I believe that God wants us to let go of all that we cling to of humanity’s tradition and precept and hold him in pure faith, which is irrational, a pure will that relies not on the concept, but on trust in the mercy of God, which flies in the face of reason. To trust in his mercy despite the catastrophe unfolding all around us. To believe despite ourselves. I may reach the point where all I have to hold onto is the bare name of Jesus, all my thoughts stripped away, unable to believe that said by Popes who may be anti-Christ, to know that every person has let me down, that the real world is but illusion, that I cannot even depend on me, but only on God, whom I do not know but love and trust in the mystery of mercy. I believe God is at work in the world and in me, and in these books I have written. If they seem magical, stand back and realize that all things and ideas are forms of the divine, modifications of the divine substance, which is all that there is. Everything else is mere opinion and seeming. From time to time there is magic. Some call it grace or miracle or the sacrament, but I do not know if our categories suffice to comprehend an infinite and eternal truth greater than we. I stand in the middle of things, in the middle of the epic, in the middle of the age, for perhaps we are not late, and perhaps the arrival is not a late tale, after all, but only the advent,
that all has been but prologue, and that in the end is our real beginning. There is magic, and what that is I do not know. We suspend our disbelief in times of poetic utterance to let art be. We stand back and let it all be, and cease interpretation and the negotiations of finance and textuality in order to be grasped by the truth, which we trust that, if it is truth, alone can grasp us and will surely not fail there to.
Finnegans Wake The end of this book, which really does not end, implies something that is there and not there at the same, a kind of prayer. I have shown the supplicatory aspect of the Yes at the end of Ulysses and now would like to de-monstrate the conclusion of the Wake as the perfection of this prayer. The last lines of the book can be read so many ways. Usually one says the final “the” is referring to the opening riverrun, to circle things back. I think it does this and something else as well. Joyce proclaims that the keys to are given. He has said Finn, again. He has said Till thous-endsthee. Now I think that this ends thee. The “the” of the end is to be said not as slack “the,” definite but open, but precisely THEE. The Keys to. Given! Given to whom, but to THEE. Not a way a lone a last a loved a long a…but the, because you are it, I AM IT, we are it, as the auditors of Prospero in the epilogue of Shakespeare’s final act, his prayer for forgiveness. Given? Key? It is the forgiveness of THEE.
to. then. endsthee. Lps {please} long the […] long thee, he longs but for THEE, to then ends, THEE.
Thou, ends, thee. It ends with us, we are the one for whom and in whom the work arrives and Joyce affirms not one definitely but all infinitely. It is a way of saying YOU and YES at once: the THEE. THEE I said THEE I Will THEE, then you and I are in truth the arrival of the text, that the secret is that it is we who hold the keys, keys of Peter, keys of the see, to forgive, to forgive all good thieves, whom writers to write must be, saying, But softly, thee, remember me, till thou ends thee, that we never ending be, as love does not end, for thee given, never ending, thou art the key, the text is thee (se). The text is these, thee’s, the signature effect is here comes everybody, and all along HCE was THEE, was all of us, it was written to you and you and you and yes to thee.
Glas Derrida’s book is all about theft, the thief Genet, the journal of the thief, stealing from both him and Hegel, because if language is the house of being, and if a language brings along with it a whole of metaphysics and onto-theology, then the theft of texts and words requires redemption, for it is our very being, something essential, that has been stolen. My stop Glas, if it be, was a double redemption, of the last words of the two works of Joyce, the YES from Ulysses, which Derrida appropriated, and the final supplication of THEE from Finnegans Wake. It may seem blasphemous
to say that Yes I have redeemed Thee, to You and you, but not your souls, only two prayers of James Joyce, the endings, the thresholds, where everything is grace, two points, yes, thee, on which everything else depends, for given, given time, counter-fitted texts, thefts, Glas of glory, gloss of glossalalia, Embabbled language, it is the life of our tongue, O Father, that I have redeemed, and the word, perhaps The Word, which had been stolen, and with it religion. Let us now celebrate not mystery but yes Lord, Thee, as we say “yes thee.� Your fiat Lord, in Genesis and the fiat of Mary, too, must always be seconded by our own, and a yes on our part must follow Your yes, as that of Mary did. If we do not say yes to Thee Lord, it does not matter what else we say.
Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect. For he causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust. How can we be perfect? To make the one affirmation that He commands. To love all, every one, no matter what they have done or who they are. And how do we translate that into the vocation of the writer? That would be to compose a work that encompasses all of the oppositions, and make them one, that is, return the many to their origin in God. For God is not complex, he is simple, and if contradiction is the truth, it must not be as complicated as Derrida said, but rather simple, as the title of my work is simple and yet says two opposite things at the same time. The Bible always says opposite things at the same time, for all these contradictions are contained in the one book, and are therefore at once. Both faith and works save. Be perfect, and though we are sinners, and must admit this, yet we must not sin again, ever. How? By grace, by mercy, not by our own will and effort, yet seek, yet ask, and ye will arrive, ye will find the end of all your asking and searching and that in a more marvelous way than supposed. Since God is beyond all He must include all, even what we think is to be excluded, and Jesus did not come for the righteous, in the Church, but for the lost ones, the sinners, the stray,
whom he especially loves, which is a contradiction, since one thinks He would especially love the ones who do His will perfectly, but there is more joy in Heaven over one who returns, than over the 99 who never left. God bless you Prodigals, you Magdalenes, you saints to be. The work I have written, written by a sinner, by one on the margins of the Church, yet somehow in heart at one with God, is a work that in a way that is literally incomprehensible expresses in writing what it means to fulfill the injunction to be perfect. That is to say, it is more mystical than moral. The splendor of truth is the moral beauty I found along the way, but the truth of splendor is the mystical God who perfected the work. Derrida said that writing must literally mean nothing. No. Far rather, nothing must be literally writing, but in the letters and numbers of our writing abides a living presence of God that is the spiritual nexus of our just combinations, a being both moral and mystical that gives meaning to bare writing, so that all that is written is implicated in Scripture and all we write are explications of the text of the Word of God. Everything has been commentary on his Book. If we seem belated, it is because we can never be first, but are in a state of ever secondary literatures, tried in faith and by our works. Be perfect and be perfected. One cannot be otherwise, one cannot but be.
Kabbalah and Criticism The “theory” of the present work, has many aspects, of which some of the more salient are the idea of arrival, and the synthesis of dialectic and de-construction, or the reform and renewal of Catholicism based on a revived dialectical logic. But I want to say at least once in a way that I nowhere else explain, that the work, late in the writing and editing of it, went through a penultimate stage in which it was based on the abstruse relations of the book of fabled “magic,” The Kabbalah, which I read in several versions, but which late in the composition and editing of the work came to me with peculiar efficiency through Harold Bloom’s little Kabbalah and Criticism. In his work, I quickly perceived the shape of my own, which over the next few days, with minor adjustments, achieved a form that was crucial to the ultimate redaction. In that previous shape, there was a larger “icon” of ten volumes and a shorter “icon” of ten chapters. Ultrastructure or Meta-signification of the numbers three, four, seven, twelve, was combined with the Pythagorean 1, 2, 3, 4, and the similar scheme of The Kabbalah, more detailed than that of the Greek. I believe it is God’s mercy that the world’s mysteries can be seen to converge and “arrive” in the different religions and philosophies viewed through the shapes hidden in this text.
The Anxiety of Influence It would be remiss of me to not acknowledge as well my indebtedness to Harold Bloom and his theory about the relationship between writers and their precursors. My “agon” was with Jacques Derrida, who can be denied or ignored, like the gospel of Christ, but must be taken seriously and either affirmed or transformed, for it is no longer possible to simply reject deconstructive logic, as it has taken hold in all areas of life, even in the post-modern Church, with mega-congregations, media-popes, and what seems to be an un-comfortable level of corruption throughout the religious world. I struggled with Derrida in the 1980s just to grasp what the hell was going on, which I picked up in the details of the text’s explications, but not in the moral implications. I had not yet converted to Christ. Samuel Southwell, a great teacher of mine, who also converted about the time I did, told me we were both driven into the catholic Church from different directions by Derrida. I thought by about 1996 I had pretty much worked-through deconstruction, when I became aware of the turn to religion that had occurred in that philosophy and then I had to deal with that, too. But it was a fortunate thing for both me and the work, because I had not yet understood at the level I should have about the logic of Derrida. I got his attack on purity, but I had not yet seen the play of impossibility, which I have outlined in the preceding pages. My almost final word on the French philosopher is found in the fourth part of the treatise on logic, The Yes. There I redeem the affirmation as such from the hands of the deconstructionist and return it to Joyce, taking the yes from Derrida’s late appropriation, which he always said as “yes, yes,” and showing the aspect of the final word of Ulysses which is unexampled, and in so doing showed the fallacy of taking examples and samples, of replication, as opposed to the supplication, thereby establishing again the possibility as such, which Derrida had made impossible. In principle, I have overcome Derrida and deconstruction, and I did this by accepting and rejecting parts of the project of postmodernism, and placing what I took in a new order. As Bloom said of Plotinus, everything is always hierarchical. As he also said, the point of departure of the Kabbalah de-fates the trace.
Shakespeare:
Invention of the Human The book that I used most often in graduate school, other than the Bible itself, was Bloom’s late best-seller on the Bard. My teacher Clinton Brand said that he probably makes too much of the basic distinction between Falstaff and Hamlet. However, I have found it instructive. I was talking
with my wife and her parents this summer. My in-laws had come from Mexico for a day or two. My father-in-law has been sick this year and was expecting a dangerous surgery, which fortunately for now has been postponed. On the Sunday morning they returned home and I saw him for what may be the final time, I told Sabino and his wife Maria and their daughter Marinela, my wife, my hypothesis based on Bloom’s theory. I am like Hamlet and Sabino is like Falstaff. I think too much, make soliloquies, which I think are prayers but which any good atheist would say are delusions, and feel called to set right a time out of joint. Sabino, on the other hand, likes his drink, laughs like Mozart, plays dominos with his friends, and has fathered four children and eight grandchildren while I have produced only my books. When I pointed out the contrast, he laughed loudly. His wife and daughter did not understand, because of their different culture, but he got it immediately. I think each of us, my father-in-law and I, are only parts, we are not whole men. We are not great, and no one is good but God alone. But we are men, of different natures and ambitions, different projects as one might say, but still men, and this is what we are, what we will be we do not know. Somehow, by way of Bloom’s interpretation of Shakespeare, I understood myself and my fatherin-law. By recognizing him, I saw me. Hamlet too could be funny, as Falstaff was, but it was a mad game, though with method in mind, and Hamlet goes through his trans-formation and fulfills his mission. In that respect, I think I have arrived. I am not a saint, but for now I am a man closer to the man I have prayed that God would have me to be.
An Icon for the Church on the Mercy of God
That deconstruction depends on asserting multiple conflicting interpretations of a text is wellknown. The deconstruction can only proceed by application of the logic of Aristotle, the law of non-contradiction. However, in my work I have moved to a point removed from that tradition, and as early as 1995 asserted the irrationality of the contradiction as true. The whole truth must be contradictory to be the truth. As this applies to my work itself can be seen at a natural startingpoint, the title of this note. In it is the strange true exemplification of the theory. The explicit reading has to do with religion, icons, mercy, Church, God. But the hidden meaning is another thing altogether, that is, the word MAGIC appears when the anagram in the title is seen. Implicit, hidden in the title and in the work as a whole, It may be that there was something itself “magical” about this anagram, for I did not intentionally place it there, but once having seen it, decided not to revise it, because it makes a weird kind of sense, based on my theory of the truth of contradiction. And the plan of the work itself had a “magical” aspect as to its hidden structure based on the Kabbalah, an aspect I denounce openly in different points in the work, as in my
papers on alchemy and Greek tragedy, in polemic with university professors who openly proclaimed magical beliefs. And in the postmodern milieu there is much of this, as in the magic realism of Borges and others. But I must be at peace with myself and with my work, trusting that God knew what he was doing when he had me contradict myself. At least it proves the logical theory of the work. Also it may say something about the Real, that reality is more than one partial account can render, which is why there are four gospels, two accounts of creation in Genesis, and such things in the Bible. If Scripture itself does this, perhaps this aspect of what I call Ultrastructure is at work everywhere. We can view it as the struggle between good and evil going on at even the level of the alphabet, or effract the merely moral and see a comprehensive mysticism of the letter and the number that is always and everywhere at work. This does not absolve anyone of moral obligations, but allows art to be what it is.
The Visionary Company Bloom’s early work on the English Romantic poets contains an insight into Samuel Taylor Coleridge and creative genius. Bloom says that STC became scared of his own genius and backedoff after only a few years with the muse. It puts me in mind of just what “genius” is and what my own consists of. It was once thought to be spiritual, then something in the unconscious mind. No one knows but God. Blake said the poetic genius was the real man, Jesus Christ, the eternal imagination. That suits me fine. I like to think that after all my hours of prayer that indeed Christ is the source of the work in me and on the pages. I believe as they say that God is in control, as Einstein thought, as Newton did as well. I do not believe the truth is to be found in uncertainty, but that the contradictions of physics indicate not a lack of the deity but an incapacity of our own minds to see things as God does, and as he wishes us to do. Or so I think. If I am one of the socalled visionary company, my work may be in a lineage including Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s autobiographies, though I think, despite my lesser powers as a poet and critic, that my “genius,” whatever that may be, both attempted and achieved more, and being a theological one, is more akin to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, who made the synthesis of his age. Perhaps one day my Icon will be read as being a synthesis of what could not be synthesized, and point a direction for catholic thinkers of the future to go toward.
Memoirs of the Blind It is in this art book of the 1990s that Derrida makes his famous confession or act of faith, a formula
I have repeated many times in the work, prominently in the essay written at the time of the funeral of John Paul II. Derrida said, “I do not know. One must believe.” Thinking about this in terms of the logic outlined in my book, which emphasizes the deconstructive necessity of the impossibility of possibility, which I counter with freedom of choice and the act of faith, I see that Derrida in this little phrase is once again making a simulation, on the one hand, and on the other hand, once again eliminating freedom, the freedom necessary to make a real act of faith. He says, “One must believe.” Not only is this imperious, but it is not true, because if one must, then it is not really faith, because faith must be based on a free act, not one compelled by Derrida’s logic. He presents skeptic ignorance as the basis for denying freedom and compelling faith. But Vatican II says that persons cannot be forced against their consciences, especially in religious matters. Derrida’s “act of faith” sounds more like the auto-de-fe of the Inquisition, the compelled act of faith, that is made with a blinding necessity. In fact, the logic of deconstruction is precisely that, blinding. But not from an excess of light. Rather the obscure leading to the more obscure. It is not necessary to believe. That is part of the great value of it. It requires decision, the free act, which Derrida tried to make void.
Being and Believing My first work, which was met with silence, boredom and the charge that is was merely “incomprehensible gibberish,” was a spur to my work you now hold. Much of it was taken apart and rewritten for the present texts of The Thirty Years War, while earlier versions of Being and Believing join later revisions and a couple of chapters of the work itself in the volumes of this I hope happy juxtaposition that claims to be more than collage, a mosaic law of the Tessera that orders the fragments into a true synthesis. As hidden Heraclitus said, the most beautiful thing is a pile of junk on the ground, just as it is. In his third encyclical, Benedict XVI proved himself to lack understanding in his interpretation of this text. What the artist has is that pile from which he creates the new thing. What Benedict has is a rigid system of old magisterial documents that will admit no real change, a machine that perpetuates only itself. Yet God will break into the world how He will, even including the destruction of that system which denies the efficacy of God’s Spirit to blow where He will. The Pope would limit God, as the seminarian told me: God’s hands are tied. The priests I think really believe this. But I do not. Freedom is the whole thing, in a way, which is the significance of my country despite its flaws, and is the significance of Vatican II, that would free us for God, to serve Christ rather than the Roman order. I was almost right. Being is Believing, faith is what makes us real. Faith must be free to be real.
Light-Compulsion In the late poem “You Be Like You,� Paul Celan uses a reference to the ever, which I think across his text is very different from the mere theology of eternity. This ever holds special place as distinct from the eternal, and involves not transcendent heaven but immanent endurance. At the end of the poem, having roused Jerusalem to stand, let me not forget you, my mother, he speaks a bit of Hebrew: Kumi Ori. O, behold the beloved in her beauty. Come my beloved my beautiful one, the glory of the Lord is the feminine, the beauty of woman, Sheckinah. In the work as a whole I evoke her in various ways by praise of women I mention, my wife Marinela, and women I knew: Emily, Theresa, Beatriz, Paige. Lately, the concern has also been for the saints, the Teresas, especially Therese of Liseux, little and beautiful. In her name are things that speak of magical Ultra-structure, a contra-diction, about sexuality and about holiness in tension, the contradictions I have seen obtaining everywhere and always, and thus must be true. You be like you, ever, kumi ori. My-beauty-is-not-my-own, Songs sing of her, too, invoking the side of God that is not on the left, the wrath, mere-philosophy, which is legal and Roman, not God’s mercy, but a beauty of the line and shape and form of the poetic image of the woman who was with God from the beginning, is Wisdom herself, and delights in playing with us and helps us in our creations. Selah. The compulsion of light is its directness, the masculine straightness which the gravity of the mass of woman bends as space, alone deflecting the violence of the straight light for the soft curving truth of what alone can, coming from God and being His wisdom, reform the straight, rigid, hard Roman correctness and orthodoxy by a curvature: the secret is neither a straight line nor labyrinthine breaking of amazement, but an unfolding of the wave, the suppleness of the supplication, that does not supply or supplement what is lacking, but like light comes both particularly and at the same time waving. Light is thus irreducibly. Like ever.
Zohar The Ein Sof or the one beyond, from which all grow or descend, emanate, the books or the sefirot, the one that is without end, which is both completely full and empty, both being and nothing, can be seen in the title of An Icon for the Church on the Mercy of God. For ever the two senses will contradict each other, the true religion and heretical magic. Derrida would say that I have deconstructed myself, but I think that the title of the first text has apprehended the deconstruction, appropriated it, turned it, and rather than paralyzing meaning given the fullness of
meaning, the mindfulness, the memory in words, the theory and practice of literature, the totality which includes the infinite by an ever-limitation. Armageddon is moral beauty.
I don’t claim anything for the work. It is His work. I am like a little pencil in His hand, that is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it. The pencil has only to be allowed to be used. Teresa of Calcutta
“Say that Jerusalem is�
Perhaps my words disturb your prayer. Perhaps you, the mystic, need no points for meditation. But I speak of him to Him for you, while you simply pray. Eternity bounds, does not hem, limit us, rule us, give direction, up, then, into His storm, His eye, His calm interference in the mundane. With and without words: we must choose, be chosen. Both. To say little with so much, or speaking, innumerable, yet still say one thing necessary. Out of the many complexes, neuroses, psychoses, metastases, sees, out of all disease and disaster, stands one to come. And standing points above. I think I feel, feel something inside me, bower or brain, coming, about the turn, ever turning to, in myriads, ways without whys, lines drawn over our ignorances, hidden in, neither obscure nor occult, light rather, in light. Him. He is.
You know it. A story has begun.
You know, now, things fade, colors on cloth, even evenings fail into night, which is coming, still stars branch, and in the skull-cap of a thousand year we enroot our seed, between never-endings lay the middle, plications, sin, sun, son sing, song signed, not to fail or fade, would be story, would be tolled, full, filled, meant. Not to fail, not to fade, truth we know, for we are known, are stretched, fixed by means. If we mean to. But you, you did not, did both mean to fall but not to fail, and in falling your way, we but succeed you, without second.
He did not really speak, did you, you saw and shone, bright, dark, hiding, back-minded, ear-
lodged, thought-lost, hest just but standing, no jest, no pose, no to impose, but you were the exposed. You stood out from. Time. Is.
The wound you were did not heal. Signatories. Numbers. Out of time. You appropriated, all, for but one thing. Making. Truth. Is. And you said, ever. Knowledge, knotted-hopes, full striven, in your arms storming, learn.
They say you had no foundation in essence, but traces, echoes, parts only, assemblers, without wholes, spirited words, yet spirit is, is that not a word? Problem of near-belief, teachers had not a key. Versions, only. Foundation riven, you, reft, logical, truthed, passed words, un-pasted, unposted, past juxtaposed. Cut. Words cut through you. Destroyed description and explanation, neither declared, but disclosed your wound, the wound of the word himself. Discard, forfeit. Utter. You behind the words. The logic bit. You bit back. Grapplers. You took our place.
For in all logic, if you can say that Jerusalem is, if we can say, still that Jerusalem is, the place required by logic is yet, and can be found, the assertion of faith, eternity of concern. You, truth and logic became, stripped, meaning. Not to say I have grasped, but in the struggle with truth, your victory was to be grasped. That this too is, is beyond doubt. Proven, in borders of scripture, commentaries, that do not explain the words, but enact them exactly, by being exposed. This is. If this is, subsist, without which truth-less, for accidentals, for appearances, no place to hide. A snow of illegibility, ran the wound, rain wind, ward, cover your words, sposed, desire as if to say the text itself, we only fall from a height, and now we are falling, and have become so profound, because without foundation, catch us pall as we fall. Poems are snow,
whiter words, virgins, martyrs, gentle, contoured by holiness, by logos, by logic without demand but to be true, faithful, snow-part of time, winter answer, dead, wait. The logic that strips away all but what is, strips seeming and opinion, even the nothing, to be the one, immovable, it is. Is it. Is it eternity. Is it snow set bounds in winter. Innumerable snow, unrepeatable words. Universal, singular, unparticular snows, how do you interpret snow or simplify the place. Snow did not extend, but bound, the form, by sheer material, prime, stuff of dreams. You. Glory of the snows, high reflectivity, light without heat, sheer blinding, purity, as if God to Abraham in winter, yours will be as the snows on highest ridged mountains, always. Will be, Jerusalem is. If you wake, wake to this. Snow regal, snow regard, but be regaled. In pieces of paper whiter witness not blank a testimony text, you found you, and said it. Is. Sheer holiness, is. Present, a heart-word, is.
We, snow-parts, perhaps, holding places, scattered yet gathered, drifted, yet still for a time, temporary words, tempting snows, we fell, like you, measurable by adversity, verses, that this is, still is for you, neither symbol nor transport, neither hidden nor shown, but snown, north of the future, where snow ever is. You offered often, eternity, a turn, a word with six sides, snowed, like stars of David, like Jerusalem is. Is, was, will be, has been, will have been, to be. Snowed, starred, scarred, worded, sonned, deepened. Depend. Deeper in snow is he to be. Yea. Not to be, never to be, but always still, is. Pall of snow.
Theses on Levinas 1. Real relation is a real relation with infinity. 2. Which infinity: actual or possible?
3. The infinite intransversable. How do we reach it? How does it reach us? 4. Infinity, not transversable, is indefinitely absent versus eternal presence.
5. Hierarchy of call/response, ways of calling, a hierarchy of how the other affects us, hierarchy of responses, either yes, or ignorance, denial, or the appropriation of the call, to do it for self, not the other.
6. Mediation: real relation, mediated relation, the infinite humbles himself, comes to us, not the height of the other/transcendent but the Eucharist, God in bread, God in man, God mediated, transpassionate.
7. Impossible to experience the infinite, ideal only, not real, but presence is experienced, un-thought, though not unsaid, in se be the said.
8. The sacraments, God with us, Emmanuel, so must we be, changed to him by him, but we cannot be infinite. Otherness became us so we be otherwise.
9. Reality, is the same, one, presence, being, with the parts in the whole, a hierarchy of arrangement, order, not the fragment of the infinite. God is hierarchy with us, not administrations of philosophy.
10. Responsibility is good, supporting the burdens of others, and the moral ethic, but they do not substitute for the meta, rather para to true being, set up another
system, not completing the ring by grace, but through self-circling, only seem to be about the other, far rather, hostage I, but not to the host.
11. Hierarchy is the only way to peace, not to war, war levels as does destruction, but peace will elevate all, all in all.
12. EL inverts hierarchy, from s/o to o/s: same/other to other/same. But this inversion is not conversion, which requires loving others as self, as one. 13. It influences me, not me it, nor thou.
14. Not real relation, infinite other, and I, a fixed relation, hest not free. 15. Real relation, friendship, love, persuasion, not command.
16. If the other is a person, he cannot be infinite, because the person has figureshape, order, un-fragmented.
17. The unshaped shapes the shape.
18. God can be infinite other, not every other, not tout autre est tout autre. 19. God set aside infinite-transcendent-height, in order to really love. 20. Do not put neighbor in place of God, that is an idol not an icon.
21. The lord your god is one god: love your neighbor as you love yourself. 22. Regard construction of last: as yourself.
23. Not as other, but precisely as the same. 24. You and I, we are the same, but God an other is.
25. To love the other as me is not to see strangeness, not to heighten him in his otherness, but bring the ring of friendship, the ring of love, grace against the
nihilism, a real and an ideal relation, not fixed by the nothing, but at once open and closed by grace.
26. As Jesus did. Weep.
27. Even Aristotle’s metaphysics is founded on love, not love of the infinite, which would be amoral, but of the good, mystical.
28. Epekeina tes ousia, Plato said: Good beyond being, point of departure, place of arrival.
29. Which is to say truth is hierarchy: we know beings, we love the good.
30. Will primary not reason, guards, guides, desires, moves: reason steers but
love, desire makes us go, and is the destination. Reason prevents the wanderer,
but even more faith, by which we travel and in travail. The labor of love.
31. The good beyond being is the end to which being tends, appropriation. 32. Ch: hierarchy, the good, an Idea or Form, for Plato, has no shape for Plotinus, is beyond thought, cannot be, is not rational, an X for thought.
33. But this is not my dear Lord, revealed, but is the god of philosophy, and whatever is not of faith is sin, is idolized, can be worshipped, as if.
34. God is person, God is person as such, not otherness, but is the form of what it means to be able to say I AM, which others cannot say, are not self-same, but are as other itself, ever other even to selves.
35. If God is even infinite, then oddly we are infinite too.
36. Where EL goes is to abject the self abysmally before all others, even otherness itself.
37. Losing analogy, hierarchy, mediation, perspective.
38. The fixed point of reference is God in Christ, not my neighbor, the latter is in relation to the former. As myself, as same. Other becomes me, but not otherness ideally, rather really others loved by me just the same.
39. Neighbors are not strangers, but others are strange, which EL accentuates. 40. There is one economy: being in love. Be loved, beloved, be love, to love you must be, being self, not other, there is but love, there is no other. Absolute
asymmetry of the heart, not relative to otherness, there is but one direction to time, to love, and the future of love Therese so taught to be. The other only
seems, but we must not seem but be. To love is to be, and in that both mean believing. In love Himself. The truth is not other. A=A. The other is the contradiction, while the truth of contradiction is crossed. To arrive.
Restrictions of Heideggerean Being
LEVINAS ------------(Ought)
NIETZSCHE ---------------(Becoming)
HEIDEGGER/Being
HOLDERLIN ----------------(Thinking)
DERRIDA ------------(Seeming)
Therese
in Theory
tessera [L, prob. ultim. fr. Gk tessares four; fr. its having four corners] 1: a small tablet (as of wood, bone or ivory) used by the ancient Romans as a ticket, tally, voucher, or means of identification 2: a small piece (as of marble, glass or tile) used in mosaic work Tessera is the pieces of my life in writing, fragments from a man who himself underwent fragmentation and self-deconstructed, under the form and pressure of the time, and from my own personal sins, mistakes and ignorance. Tessera is also the time of the Tess to come, Teresas and Therese, in a catholicity at once little, heroic, mystical and practical, to explicate our corrupt time of implications, while being simple, supplicatory and perhaps itself in need of interpretation. Tessera is also the Esse or essence of art and the weight of the tare that is subtracted when the mere container is removed and the net weight is discovered. These pieces then, arranged as a history, tell my identity, and vouch for truth, while amounting to the removal of myself from the account, the tare torn.
Logics of The Rose
1: Steps 2: Lese Majesty 3: Tessera 4: The Seer
I Faith, Hope, Love: Envois of Therese, Laws of Littleness
II Story of a Soul: Signifying Saint, Prophetic Poet
III TESSERA 1 Carmel Crossing 2 Economic Esthetics 3 Graceful Glory 4 Logical Love
IV Re These: The Seer
PLAN
I The Vocation
II Aesthetic In Carmel
III TESSERA
IV There SE
In acknowledgment
Around my name, square ringing: BKLM, being, knowing, loving, morally, in all you are, you all metaphysics of the good, you are already inscribed in my boxed corner, my gnomon, and with me, we indicate the hour and the direction, ever upward. At last, the work ends where it began, to complete the ring, the symbols, the tokens, the identity once broken, the effraction of the I that I was, my dehiscence, and more. In the first poem, perhaps, I wrote in 1985, the one for St. Joan of Arc, I made a curious mistake in my French, which I did not know well, and had the saint say not je m’apelle but flatly and I might say stubbornly je suis. And now, looking back over 25 years and after having learned to read, I see Christ smiling at me from my youth when I knew Him not, but had only heard of Him. JE SU (I) S. Yes, Lord, you were with me always. The Tess is like that, a little word in the right place in the mosaic, put there by the poet in me whom we know is the real man, Jesus, the eternal imagination. So, I acknowledge those greater debts I owe to Jesus, to Joan, and to Therese, to the saints like Anthony, and Francis and Bonaventure, and the many titles of Mary, Our Lady of Carmel, of Fatima, Guadalupe, of Lourdes and others. I would ring them in, I would bring in sheaves, I who sowed in tears and now at harvest smile. Oh the whiter saints ravest, oh starving in the harvest, how they do rave, as Joan once, and as Therese, my hinge, everything, in grace. I have heard the breaking of the chains by the ringing of holy bells, circles stepped out of, and drowned by pealing pleas, stepped for believing, a being neither gloss nor glare, but more like light, knelling knelt moral beauty. The seer, signatory, tessellated, there, regard the se, the signature effect of, little by little, Tess era, her flowers these, not of rhetoric but far rather of theology. In that more moral beauty, ever set, in the least piece of a mosaic, flowered, found fit, found first. A law not mine, but given, gift of a rose, He arisen, sixteen even, for
God and for her, mothers, sisters, wives, all saints, virgin martyrs, who knew when I did not know. It was not only as if, but truly I was not and had not, would not have, without their prayers. If I have and will have been seen to have had, it was but by grace, and a mystic rose. If risen I one day be, though books cease and all knowledge falls away, yet if I will be, it will be because of a love that is really one, love of truth, truth making love, honesty. The sincerity of the saints, humble, virtuous, patient, waiting not in vain but in mercy, still accepting sacrifice, suffering for truth, in love, tears and smiles at once both with and without contradiction, in joyful pain, in crosses His, just one crossing, thou, passionate, teach passions thine, so finding thy true passion, we did but transpassionate with thee.
The (Ste) PS
Therefore I would write in conclusion not my own signature but search for the hand of Therese in her works and these. She, the muse, as I have said, she but little, and yet so great, she child-like, yet so mature, she of the little way, the little flower, yet a doctor of the church, who taught love by her example not unique but based on gospel truths of the Father and Love, of humility, patience, of suffering into the truth of Christ. She helps place within reach of us common folk a spirituality that does not confine but defines us as ones who must do the little things well, the duties of our state in life, and I fear that in this work I have attempted a thing that was not really necessary, and neglected people and things that I should have done instead. But there are many ways to Heaven in the following of the one way. There may even be intellectuals in Heaven. I do not know. Therese was not an intellectual, but she had a genius. Perhaps all real genius is untaught and comes
only from God. I have written elsewhere of Therese, at the conclusion of the fragmentary “postscript” placed earlier in this volume, as I defended her being made a doctor against those who think her a lightweight. So I have heard catholic philosophy department members murmur. Therese was no teaching “professional.” She taught in the real dialectic. She teaches still from heaven, and that fact alone is sufficient. In the end it only matters whether or not we get to God, or live in relation with the Real. Therese was idealized after death, but in her ideal and real combine to go against the system of the scholastic, to be amateur, yes to be a girl, and yes to be enthusiastic, charming, a part of her age, and yet the way I think the future of a truly catholic theology is to be, simple, direct, universal, not burdened by concepts, loving, little, trusting in the mercy of God, giving flowers, sending roses to those you love, and that she does, believe me. She did for me. At my baptism I smelled roses and only found out much later that that was a sign of the presence of Therese. She truly has spent her life in Heaven doing good on earth. If my work comes into your hands, it will have been because of her. I believe she wrote my life in some sense and this work, too. The seer, she, regarding theses on moral beauty and showing the arrival of a logic for the renewal of a Church in desperate straits, cutting off both modern dialectic and postmodern deconstruction in order for the Church to become truly catholic, to walk the walk that it always has taught, to walk behind Christ, not judging others, but including the lost, the sinner, blessing the world rather than cursing it, reforming self in order to await the wedding feast of the bridegroom with joy, to be but a little one, but in that a little one that is unrepeatable, unexampled, who said yes to her spouse, to be yes a little victim, to be yes consumed by God’s love. Like Mother Teresa for whom Therese was an inspiration, to say yes to Jesus in simplicity. We do not need a more complex theology, or to know the mysteries as they are. Others centuries ago worked out all those fine details. What we need is the practice to match our theory.
Here it is that the current Church is and perhaps has ever been lacking. The gospel is simple and but they say hard to do. By our own will and effort it is impossible, but for God all things are possible. Just look at Therese, who accomplished so much without implication or complication or even much explication, but by supplication, by her prayers, by her willingness, her trust, she dared to hope, to really believe all things, to exemplify the true catholicity by passion, to answer the call. She proclaimed the aspect of the catholic economy most basic to us, our vocation to love. To love is to make, do, be, but without having to: just allowing love to.
Re: These
Once, ten years ago on this day, feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a woman asked me: if I love you and you love me, can we be married? I said yes to that woman, and she became my wife, still with me now. In latter days, another asked, I do not know, but I believe: if I love you and you love me, can we be written? And again I said yes, and these books came to be as they are, done under the guidance of their seer Therese. So much has passed in the 25 years of my authorship, from deconstruction to faith in Christ, from all the evils a man could do, to trying now to be the man Jesus wants me to be. Tessera is a kind of story of my soul, the moral and intellectual record of my climb out of the abyss, at times confessional, or critical, conscious of where the truth is calling, or sometimes wandering and questioning my vocation as writer and as a man. Of course, as Therese teaches, the vocation is to love, and these books both reflect and exemplify that one love within us and abroad, love for God, for truth, for language embodied in literature and for the holiness embodied in the saints. For a work that is at heart theological and
catholic, it might seem strange that more is not said by me on the scandals of the Church during the time of my writing. I would say that in essence for the Catholic Church to arrive, it must suffer a de-capitalization, to go from big C to little c, to embrace the way of littleness taught by Therese, and be not the Catholic Church, but a catholic church, universal, not for the Roman bias, but to be one for the world, impartial, as God is. If, as Benedict XVI said on his ascension to the see of Peter, the doors are open, let them be opened wider still, to include the whole world as it is, not as the curia would have it to be. Jesus said to the deaf man: Be open! He still speaks to us that word today. The church catholic must be open. And Jesus also said: The first will be last, the last will be first. Truth is on the side of the little ones, the least, while power seems to be on the side of the leaders who do not truly lead but have already gone astray. It would be better that a stone were tied about their necks, than to cause harm to any little one. But they have caused many to stumble, and have over a long history killed the prophets of the reform of the church, or silenced them, in the name of the Church herself, which they identify with Rome, not with all the little ones. Scripture is eternal, the situation of the gospel is always the same. Be open! The first will be last, the last will be first. Through this may come the glasnost and the restructuring of Catholicism. This is almost all I have to say about the trouble with the Church. I remain her son, but more catholic in intent, following the inviolability of conscience taught by the council of renewal, not as it was reformed by the catechism to conform to the teachings of men. God speaks within each one of us. If we but listen. In this work I logically reform both dialectic and de-construction, completing the progression of realism, idealism, nihilism, grace. Without God’s grace our thinking comes to nothing, as can be seen, but by Him we will receive the ring given to the prodigal. For which of us has not been such a one that we stand not in need of grace? We must answer the call, the hest, be open, and break the circle of the text of the
world. The act of faith breaks it and establishes a logic and a love outside that hitherto known. The works were a way for me to continually make acts of faith and hope and love and keep alive the confidence my parents and others placed in me, the sense of mission given to me, the need for change. Though I may not change the world, yet God has changed me. These are the history of one learning to walk by faith in His light, which shines on all.
And Yet. Yet, not yes, but yet, and yetter, yesser still, F yes to AH, yesses still, to the grandfathers and fathers, all men, all women, granddames, grandmas and my mother mothering me most of all: You C! I was always wrong, let my sister tell you, it was I who was wrong, not wronged, not you, either of you, neither of you, any of you, you all, it was I who was ignorant, I who was lazy, sinner sinning still, it was I who was negligent, I who was more sinning than sinned against, I who leered when I should have reeled, who did not let Aaron’s rod bud, but withheld my seed, who did not love, but did judge all in the particulars, and generally excused myself, who did reason, rationalize, amplify, exemplify, complify, explify, flay the fly, fail afly, fly frail, to no reply, no word, neither heard nor unheard, I starved in harvest time, myself ravest, fattest, drunken athirst, I became text rather than to teach, took every add and vantage, did not take place, took out, did not take back, exampled unredeemed, did not redeem the time, but out of jointure, held, cursing not blessing, hawking, despite real love, real friends, real family, a real God and a real world, which I said only seemed to be because I could not, would not be me, did no contextuality, did no effract I, I did not read my implied im- [plications] and called her my mother harlot: C? Not she but me. She sued me beyond in recognitions. Let be, let be, AH to Charlotte in Spring. Let go, she would prophesy me, my laze of employment, my hazed lonelistnesses, my all together brokenness, est, established: the wheel that could not turn, flat flayed, I thought I was
centered at the stills, but pointed out knot fescue, for you, four you, the famous family of mine, I did not lay down, but was already lebel to the growned, torned, like Rimbaud, ay sixteen, at AH, IAH, ich been einer, nein, huffing, puffing, man, I knew you not, not even at the heartbreak and teras of mary. CH knew too much, C? Hurts her still I fear, I said no bye, like dedalus in my way, not flying or artificer, afailed, A. We were both blinded to ourselves, she in potent prophetically, I impotently, I legally but blinded, how antimomian, no man, no mom, no moon, no sun, no son, sinning, not shining, no. Pretender to faith’s crown. Without Works. Show me I said your work, but did not see the work to be done all around me, the harvest, I flayed to labor over textual under my affliction failing, my chronosis of the time, miss diagnosis, both, C/not C, both sane and insane and both at the same time. Tradiction C? On. Was become as I be held. Dee con stricted structured, destroyed, dead almost but not quit, I became impossible, THE impossible, literarily, YET: here I am yes. Father told me: Reft AH. Be reft. How can I? Yet, yes I am. And the priest said to me: IM IT. I AM IT. Cannot not be, if I will believe I will be. Despite Big D, dig B? Cause God, grace, gift, merciful He, and the chastisement of my Charlotte and Michael and BO and AH and all in all. Flayed, yet. SEEMS TO ME. Corrections, I was a text to be emended, amen. Amen not yet man. TO BE OR AS IF. Purging, the over exposure of my denial of the truth, C, so that I did not C my self-denial, A is A. No step yetter. No step to a stepper, C ANDY. What Can I Say? I missed you ever, hospitality. EVER. Missed you, read retractions, extractions, impactions, unattractions, dismissing, dismal, abyss, my history, AH knew TO BE. The abyss to be is the abyss to come. All past, papaw. Sending sinner sent, cyn, in syn, to cinders. Song you 2. Fors. U. But you all were hear all along, had I never knew who you were, but I never knew who you were at all. AH! Delighted, relieved, regretted, con-tempted. I AM ALL THAT. And hear, on this independence day, fourth of Julio, in US, and I am IT in IT, never knowing another, but not faithful in that, but afraid, YET: I have
heard of another country. Somewhere. Over yonder, beautiful, but, ah, bright wings, specimen, here I AM. That there is such a place be yonder I heaven heard but have not scene, if I will someday, walk on that Englander green, I do not no, but be leave. Desire it so, no de serve it. And cannot say none do, only that Aye do not, yet I may steal, good thief walk there, not by my own efforts, whatever they amount to, a breath, or less than a breath, but by His Graciousness. AH! Everything is grace, Therese said. She finds those lost, son. I was one too. Can’t O Son The Chaos, These Son Moral Beauty. My cantos and theses she did right, emend and even more she: the AH there(se)! became, forgiver, tessera, a mosaic law, Moses promised, I but dinned thy steps in me.
________________________
For THE MUSE on
THE STEPS: SAINT THERESE VIRGIN AND DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH ______________________
September of my years When I was 21 it was a very good year and I and a girl loved or tried to, and listened to Jackson Browne sing of the pretender, and we cried and felt the pain, but I do not think we understood what we were grieving for, but now at 53 I look back and know. It was not just that our little love would not last, but something like the crisis ode of Wordsworth, in which he remarks the passing away of the glory and the dream, the gleam of vision, from the earth. I have lived and I have seen, in the 1960s and since, the death of the ideal, which made one last desperate stand back then, all you need is love we said, and then the death of the real, as well, in our virtual age, until this time we endure of the nothingness, the mere show, the pretense, the less than zero. The thing that happened, the act of the deconstruction of the ideal and the real that led to the nihilism of today, can only be cured by the prescription of faith. As another singer cried, Let’s make it real one more time. The thought on which we depend is one that goes back to the twin source in Greece of Plato and Aristotle, of the ideal and the real, the two indispensable sites of philosophy, which the moderns, Kant and Nietzsche, destroyed in the deconstruction of the ideal and then the real, leaving us only nihilism, which was always implicit in the tradition but which had not been unfolded until the modern era. Plato’s critique of his own ideas showed what would happen someday. But there is something else implicit in
the tradition, thank God, and that is the thought outside the Greek’s idealism and realism and implicit nothingness. That thought is one that was born in Israel, and which Jesus Christ fulfilled. We may say it is grace. Grace and faith are already contained in the folds of this Jew-Greek Greek-Jew world, the other of metaphysics that completes metaphysics, rather than destroying it. Logic was the law, and Christ came not to destroy it but to fulfill it. This involves the contradiction of which I write in the work, the theory of the truth of contradiction, the reversal of the nothing to reach everything. It was the thing I saw as early as 1988, because, despite it all, I was never a nihilist, though I was a pretender. As the singer said, say a prayer for the pretenders, who try to buy happiness, rather than make real the way to it. Nothing, not even a church, especially the Roman, can do this for us, for the machination has long involved even what we thought was holy, but let us instead stand or kneel and pray, in ones or twos or threes, little churches, and thus more truly catholic, and say I love thee whom I have not seen, whom money cannot buy, though some think to sell you. I look back and see the way to wisdom. He will lead us into deserts and strip us naked and espouse us there. We must thus be exposed, and Rome most of all, to wed the God who is ideal and real and more. Until we became nothing, we could not be saved, but now he must make us realize our very own nothingness. I see robots, animals, and devils in the streets, but few men. Someday men will walk the earth again, if God wills. I believe he loves us enough to change us, correct us, chastise us, unmask our hypocrisy, with the judgment beginning at Rome. Be not afraid. Pain and death are not the very worst things that can happen,
and are necessary. The end of the world is this realization, and we will go from nothing to everything, when we realize we are nothing, nothing but an insubstantial and merely virtual thing like a dream. But first we must become aware, even as we dream, that we are dreaming, in order for the good God to therefore wake us up. Our dream is a nightmare, and we now must awake, arise, arrive. I will awake thee O sleeper I said, O yes I who await thee will yet awake thee.
At Harvest Time
I lay down my weary tune beside you sleeping As you stirred and turned and almost not quite Opened your eyes and almost not quite heard Me whisper: I finished, I finished. By the banks of Marinela, by the sound of many Sleeping, I did not hang up my heart, but sang it.
h2o riverrun hearcalitus said, and joyce waking second says it all flows, as the sound of many waters, the voice, and god in it all, forgiving, reigning over me, past all membrance, past even the harvest moon shining tonight, after completion after the law after the church after words, he sees me, she knows, I am not the grass, but the water for it to grow, and two parts logic and one part literature, find me humbly waiting bath. I have had my baptism, yes, in thee I’ve been made clean, washed, worshipped, rain’s song, son reigns, yes is thee.
An Icon for the Church on the Marinela of God
You be like you ever, my beautiful one, my beloved, my Sabbath, my peace, my way to break the circle of God and Church and World, icon makers not iconoclasts, not idol worshippers, but in the twilight of the idols at high noon, in the midst of an error, we stood single, you and I, and did break it, did break the text, did step back, not out of the word, but out of all implication, by the prayer of the supplicate, the tare torn, debt cancelled, the call of tessera, pieces of a sweet life we loved it crazy, but not so: we did but live it. You were ripe and I was ready and we arrived, later. We heard our callings and we responded, choose us Lord, yes be taken. O my peace, yet you could not rest, and looked beyond, while I, a solitaire, a promontory, looked at you and saw the sadness of late tales, of tombs, of toil, of the undone. You were the passage, not the goal of it, and I passed through you, like the poet said, and I saw through you, not with you, and did arrive beside you, not as if to be. The icons came down, so that one could be built, strange, I did not know. I did not destroy them, but despite the theory of contradiction, when the thing denied itself, I denied it too. An icon now is, and you in it, and others too, if they will break the deadlock, and allow in their gratuity a freedom to God, to affirm all. Effracting God-Church-World, a system made on the bones of the infinite, by limit stand, ever, and be like you, come the Sabbath. I speak to you and to the world and to God all at the same time, and so make no sense to anyone, I ever the incomprehensible. And yes, not yet, even you, you did not understand, and the world I contradicted must not understand, or else I was wrong, but as long as God alone understands, the icon was not in vain, and I did not falter, pulled down vanity in myself first of all, and put back more than I took. God gave all, all must be returned. I give you all, for all of you.
ARTS REST
Wherefore art thou? Art at rest? To pause, to remain, to support, art. Rhythmic silences. Steps at starets. Sartre’s stare. The rest is silence. But art at rest re-starts, again and again. The books I have written rest and re-start, not hesitating like Derrida, or like he says Freud does in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, not taking the step. I take the step, of faith, of hope, of love, of arrival, of action, positif, still possible, against the deconstruction of the ideal and the real, when nothing became possible, and the possible became impossible. The books are St. Sartre’s re-start, reclaiming both the existentialist’s freedom and the dialectical critique for today. It may be that Jean-Paul will make it in before John Paul II. It is up to God, but Christ says the prostitutes and sinners make it in before his opponents in the official church of His day. The gospel does not pass away, because it always applies. Our situations (Sartre’s word) never change. The church needs change. The church needs Christ. But like the young man at the seminary told me, God’s hands are tied. How can the One with the whole world in His hands not be free? He hands us freedom without losing His. As long as He has hands, there will still be a world to hold. He is free and we are free, radically free, free of Popes and popularity, of politicians, and of history, since that ended sometime during the last fifty years. With the end of history in the postmodern period, an abrupt thing faces us: we do not have to be tied to the time we are in, we are no longer historically conditioned. Therefore: Re-start the arts. St. Sartre would. Stress the Tessera, the era of fragmentation, in order for the mosaic to be made. I do not give a rat’s ass how you do it, but put the pieces together again. Establish the stars. As the poet said, nothing will have taken but the place, except perhaps for a constellation. He conceded the power of imagination to still make patterns, despite the deconstruction latent in his poetry, which Derrida found and expounded. Poetry in arrears, as we all are, and myself especially, let us give the word. Arrest, art rest, then re-start, begin again, like Finnegan, waking, say yes, say thee and thou and thine, not I and me and mine. Buddha said he was always at the beginning. To connect the end to the beginning, a very hard thing to do. To sign, without resignation, to name, not for fame, to put words in books, like they did in the nineteenth century, before, ere, erstwhile, previous to motion pictures, records, radio, television, computers. Rasters, scatter patterns. Rather, Easters, homeward, by the book, for why not then be of another time? Time itself has ended as such. It is time to begin again, beginning with time. The world still turns at the same speed, though there is no world to turn. Rare stars, rear yourselves, rise up sires, roses risen: The rest is not silence, but fire.
Argumentum
It rained all night, The day I died; As Bottom dreamed, Therefore did I.
And so, what happened to the world today? It is the feast of St. Jude, apostle and patron of the hopeless and the desperate. Gabriel Garcia Marquez died, the greatest writer of my lifetime. My wife looked for work. The nation of Mexico slid further into chaos. The people of the U.S. prepared a turn away from the future to the failures of the past. The Catholic Church continued to be rocked by scandals that threaten not just the nation of Vatican City state, but the faith of millions of people. What happened to the world today? In the “symbolic� life of the globe, much, in every way, and the torch was passed to a new generation. Whether my colossus will be put into print is something I have come to care less and less about the better the writing became and the closer I felt God draw near to me, as a catholic, as a writer, as a husband, as a man. Now, there seems little left to do. I could tell you how to figure out just who the hell 666 is. Multiply the six times the six times the six. Then do a little reckoning. I think he must be doing that himself. What does it mean that he and I and you are all here at the same time? I know not. But God is here. And he knows. That God only knows is enough for me. If you can pray, then pray. If you can think, then think. If you can still feel, then thank God, and then think and pray. The symbols were never notated properly. The system existed to do so, but fell into disuse, due to technological fascism. The third Reich did not pass away, as was thought. To find that is to find part of the secret of the world that happened today. That a world still happened today. That a world happened. Be still. The work does not speak of these things, but prepares a future out of
the disaster. We are out of time, and yet I had to find a way to re-found, re-fashion, re-model, remake what had been made impossible in principle and in fact. He said “if you have faith.” I said “I do but not without you.” He could have saved us alone, but he wouldn’t have it otherwise.
Otherwise, we would not be saved. The world may have already ended, otherwise. It may be the whole of the enigma of the postmodern age is contained in this word “otherwise.” The end of things really took place otherwise than what good men and women could have conceived. This was because the end could not be without this theoretical thought of the Otherwise, which made the symbolic end of things possible, in making the literal impossible, in making the spiritual otherwise. The otherwise is itself the perversion of the sign, which made the symbolism of the Book of Revelation so hard, really impossible in days past, to comprehend. Because it is a mirror of today. Oh, for days of future passed. Oh, for the time when Glas will have been, in the future perfect, and mourning in America will be over. They say it is morning on election day, but they cannot elect themselves, and neither politicians nor prophets can elect themselves, but must be chosen, must be called, and vocations are given, not made. Otherwise, Derrida was prophetic. But not in truth, for he mixed truth with lies, and contaminated the pure, symbolically, with the taint of the trace, as in his Glas, the Immaculate Conception, or IC, is violated, if that be possible. But the virgin she was the whitest winter remains, and virgins saved the world, not celibacy or celebrity, nor the celebration of mass, nor mourning for the dead, but I think instead by the virgin purity of the dance of King David before the ark of the Lord. He may have done impure things at one time, but his dancing was purely done, for the glory of God, for all to see, and he sang too, and sang his songs prophetically, as a priest would, if the priests were indeed prophets. Such vocations, I have found, are few. It may be that technology has en-framed and en-
slaved us, as recent films depict. That something not conscious could do so, would only be because we too were no longer conscious, were not mindful, but through sheer mindlessness, allowed the subjection of freedom by our desire for a limitless play, rather than to do the work of true vocations, with limits set by God alone, not by a vacated, borderless ingenuity, invented otherwise.
In all, I remain Catholic, though what this means is not clear. That I am not in communion with Benedict XVI is clear to me, and this because I believe the see of Peter is vacant. At what historical moment this happened, I know not. It could have been after the forgery of the Donation of Constantine, or the declaration of Infallibility, or the stashing of Nazi loot in the Vatican bank, or the murder of John Paul I. There are some things we cannot know, now, but there is nothing hidden that will not, in the end, be revealed. Almost any and all of the millions who sit in the pews of parishes around the world are more Catholic than the pope in Rome, so I must be, too. The Church was not invented by Christ, but rather it was invented by itself, at least the way it is today. Christ told the apostles to preach to all nations, but not to accuse men of heresy while excusing crimes of the clergy. As Kierkegaard said, it is tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on. He spoke of ancient Greece and of the modern world, while I refer to the Roman responsibility and the Roman irresponsibility, the Mystery yet inscribed.
The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword. It was with God in the beginning, and shall be the instrument in Revelation that conquers evil and the enemies of God. I believe the events of the Apocalypse have been unfolding for many years now, and that in fact, it is nearly finished. You say, where? And, when? The reason we look and do not see, hear but do not
understand, is that the Book of Revelation is symbolic, in the sense that it is not an allegory but a simultaneously literal and mystical prophecy of today. This can only be true because the events in the world that are now taking place are symbolic as well. The first beast has already come and gone, and the second recommends him. The sixth is reigning now, with the seventh to come. Rome will always be Rome. Jerusalem will always be. Fallen is Babylon, symbolically, which the whole world witnessed. I believe that primarily the destruction is about the Church, which did not deconstruct like the Soviet Union, but which could not escape corruption morally and really in doctrine as well, because of what is known as the trace. The taint of the trace has hollowed out the Church and a fortiori the world while the world still stands, empty, hollow, void, virtual. As Peter says, if judgment begins at the House of God, where does the poor sinner stand? It seems the death culture we have been warned against by recent successors of Peter was unavoidable, and that deconstruction in its texts furthered the death drive to the abyss. The repetition, the return, the circularity, the vicious circle, the step not taken beyond, the logic of the abyssal text can be broken by the logic of the impossible, that is, by grace, because God alone can do the impossible, and has, and does, and will. The battle between love and death remarked often in Scripture is being enacted today, and occurs in my books from beginning to end, a kind of miniature mirror of the drama of the ages we are experiencing, but too often, without meaning. I myself have been a coward toward God’s Word, shown but little charity, little patience, wanting it all, and right now. But healing follows chastisement. Though I have done next to nothing, though Israel has betrayed God, that is the Church has not practiced the theory of Christianity lived by only a few, yet God can work salvation for many. But we, I think, must believe and turn around, not simply spinning, but breaking the circle and marking out a straight path, narrow, hard to find, but true. Ask, seek, knock, give, love, pray, believe. Tell the truth.
That the end is not only near, but almost over, who could have guessed? Where the corpse is, there the vultures shall gather. If you need Him, He will be there. He said so. Trust in His mercy. Turn away from the world toward the Good, and be transformed by the renewal of your mind. The Church tried reform and renewal, but failed, and now we will see what God does or allows to happen to it, and to the world. Yet, the Word of God will arrive, the Sword, and in truth defeat death, deconstruction and all who make a lie. We need not worry about the contradictions in Scripture, in theory and practice, or in our own selves. But let us admit the truth and know what we are, what our world has become, what the Church has, too, sadly become. What we are we should know. But who we are to God, that we do not yet know, and so we may hope in His goodness and mercy, which is under the control of no one else but Jesus Christ. We have been given time, given temptation, but shown mercy. Rome may not understand, may never know, but you and I, we should try to understand, the drama of our own unfaithfulness, while God stood faithfully by. Our return is not eternal, but takes place in time. Prodigals, Magdalenes, let us return.
All Saints Day
It is very late in the game, as most of us know, and my work has drawn to a close, everything set in place. Reflections, though, are in order. In the frame of the books of epic-criticism I sounded a few things about the time and the end of things, and what I perceive as the current situation of the church and the world will be my starting point for what I will now write. Postmodernism has been a time of the seeming attempt to restore traditions, a conservative time politically and theologically, but also a corrupt time, morally and financially. I think we need to look back a few decades to solve the puzzle. Heidegger said that Nazism was great because it was about the confrontation of man and technology. And I believe this was somewhat correct. Postmodernism is founded on the fascist. It is both politically conservative, morally nihilistic, and technologically adept. The Third Reich did not cease, but was transformed post 1945, and lives on in the anti-liberal, anti-enlightenment forces that are stressing freedom and covertly preparing totalitarianism, at the same time. The Berlin-Rome axis did not die, and I mean this in the sense of the unfortunate Catholic Church, which is a means of the magical projection of fascism to our world today. It was a kind of alchemy. The more Catholic the country, it seems, the more corrupt. Mafia in Italy, drug cartels and death squads in Latin America. As I said, conservative, immoral, technological. It is a fascinating matrix. To this we add magic, from Harry Potter, to Borges and Garcia Marquez, to the atrocities done in Juarez, sacrifices to an evil god. A magical, technological, conservative and drastically corrupt world. Deconstructionists try in their texts to say, well, it was always this way. Perhaps. But I think the modern world that once was was in principle opposed to this fascist en-framing. The net seems inescapable. Even friends criticize me harshly for not setting-up my voice mail on my cell phone, for wanting to be
incommunicado. There is tremendous pressure on all sides to conform to the paradigm of fascist fashion which is now technological. I do not think most people realize that technology is the implementation of the fascist. And I do not define fascist narrowly, to the tea party, for instance, but broadly to include the whole of culture and politics, finance and technology. I believe all of this bears down on the church and the world as an overwhelming attempt to destroy not men and cities and nations with armies, but the souls of individuals, by the annihilation of faith, hope and love. The “they� by this I know not whom or where or what. True tragedy cannot be pinned on anyone in particular. That is what makes it a tragedy. Tragedies are different though from case to case, play to play. Hamlet succeeds where Macbeth fails. Lear perhaps succeeds despite appearances, being reunited with his daughter, in love, despite the pain. We, too, must love, despite the pains, the cares, the pleasures, all the temptations that would lead us not to believe, not to hope, not to love. Be ready. As Hamlet. Be ripe. Like Lear. The tragedy cannot be averted, but it can be overcome, transformed, and love still triumph. The modernist was nothing if not critical. That makes me modern. The postmodernist is theoretical, but not very critical. Epicriticism means to discern. I hope the work has helped you to discern your time and place. I did this in an indirect way, reading old books, reviving an old idea like dialectical thinking, while juxtaposing pieces written on my own life, creating a work on my life and times, at once both historical and critical, sometimes almost scholarly, but at the same time prophetic and apocalyptic. If these are indeed the last days, my work may be too little, too late. But what will be we do not know, except that scripture says that God will defeat all his enemies and that the saints will make it to the New Jerusalem, if they remain written in the book of life. I hope you and you and you are, that we all may be, when God is all in all. On behalf of my wife, Marinela, I thank you for taking the time to patiently read this. We have prayed for all of you, and we have
worked together for all of you, that some of you may still be saved. The rest is God’s. That God will not lead us any where he will not provide for us, that God does the impossible, but that God requires something from us, perhaps something different from each, or perhaps the same, has been my guiding thoughts in this year of completion. Whatever our vocation is, it is God-given, and we must do it. Each of us has a vocation, whether we know it or not. In a sense, it may simply to be alive today. Though we come at the end, we may still reap what others sowed, and receive the same just, generous reward. Do not doubt God’s mercy or His heaven. And do not doubt that if you hold out to the end you will win.
I want to speak at the last, really after time ended, about modernism and postmodernism in terms of the man who is perhaps the greatest modernist, Immanuel Kant, and the man who is perhaps the poster boy for the postmodern age, John Paul II. In that collection of homilies known as the theology of the body, in the long introduction to that work, it is said that the Pope, sitting at sumptuous table with guests in the ornate and extravagant Vatican, would exclaim upon hearing the name of the philosopher Kant. I think with good reason, which I hope to elucidate. For the sake of argument, we could say that modernism was a most pure philosophy, and that postmodernism is a most impure philosophy. For reasons I refer to all that I have written hitherto. The opposition of Kant and John Paul II is essential. I have heard a religious who was teaching at a catholic university, without question and I think with deliberation, misrepresent Kant’s philosophy, twisting it all out of shape. When I attempted a correction, I was stopped by the fascist force the nuns use sometimes against anyone who questions them or opposes them. The same is true of the Catholic hierarchy. They will not allow dialogue, criticism, or any difference of opinion. But, time brings correction, as Benedict once said, and thank God, we may
still have a little. How are we to understand the Kantian project in terms of today? The philosopher made a critique of pure and practical reason, eliminating the transcendent as unknowable, but founding morals on the categorical imperative. The religious I spoke of denied the basic principle of Kant stated in his theory of the transcendental, that we all have certain forms we all think in, and therefore we are similar and able to communicate with each other. We are not similar to God, as the Catholics claim in the analogy of being, but similar to each other, in our existence in the categories and in space and time. To continue Kant today, by my renovation of Hegelian dialectic and the refutation of Derrida’s deconstruction, I have presented a new kind of critique of reason, not one of the pure and the practical, but of the general and the particular, and this as early as my writings on Wordsworth in the 1990s, when the poet denied the destructive analysis in favor of what he called the grand and simple reason, what may be called the imagination. In my logic I have shown the particular reason as having become completely fragmented and destructive, completely contradictory. I think John Paul II would say this is a direct result of Kantian modernism, and perhaps he would be right. But Wordsworth was more right, in arguing forward into the high ground of imagination, not back into dogmatic retreat, which was a cover for a subterfuge. The reconciliation of the great fragmentation in particular reason, seen prominently in the American politics of the last thirty years, and incorrectly blamed on the media, which is but a mirror, not the cause of the contradiction, comes through a theory that is grand and simple and imaginative in a general reason that forgives contradiction, that affirms all, not by perpetuating conflict, but like Kant, through a prayer for a reasonable religion and an eternal peace. The way up is the way down. All is one. God alone is. Be perfect, which means not to set no limits to love, but rather release judgment and the power to judge, giving to God what is God’s, and letting the world be as it is, and the church as it is,
forgiving all particular sins and errors, the mistakes of an impure logic, by a general attitude of love and forgiveness. We see this in the imperative of Kant, which says, basically, perform your actions as if everyone would repeat the actions you make. Which is very different from Nietzsche’s repetition. It is an imaginative forward moral thought. In all, it is the rule of the symbolic life, which you and I both lead, though you may or may not recognize it as I do. Since these things have been: Would that all God’s people were prophets, as Moses said. And as Joel said, God will pour out his Spirit on all people, the old men shall dream, and the young men shall see visions. And as Peter quoted the latter on Pentecost, the Biblical footnotes say it is accomplished, the thing Moses and Joel and Peter said. The Spiritual life is a prophetic and symbolic life, and what we do is, I think, truly repeated by others in a way we know not. Charles Baudelaire spoke of a mystical correspondence as does the Kabbalah. At any rate, what we do, what we say, and what we think, matters in ways we do not know, but which is commented on in theories in physics, the so-called “chaos” theory, and in psychology’s so-called “synchronicity.” Everything belongs, as Richard Rohr said. Everything belongs in the theory of general reason, and everything then respires with meaning, as Wordsworth’s mystical and moral poetry stated in a sentiment some mistakenly thought was natural. The postmodern deconstruction of meaning, that took place through the proliferation of the text, is overcome by an acceptance of personal responsibility for our actions that will reverse the corrupt financialization of all aspects of life which is the value of technology. Meaning is not purchased, it is made, and we make meaning through our actions, which some wish to be meaningless, but which in the eyes of God, are all infinitely important, as the Kantian categorical imperative said in its own terms. He saw us in relation to everyone else, as our explication, while postmodernism implicates us in its tainted love, sin without sense. “Sin without sense” is the violence of the age, the fruit of fascism, in a
time when the words “crazy” and “evil” are used with free substitution to describe what has happened from Hitler to Juarez, 1945 to 2010. Madness, which Plato said was sometimes a very good thing, is implicated with evil, which can never be good, through the taint of the postmodern logic, eliminating the possibility of great love and what may be called the great divine love that is the madness the saints showed, in order to destroy love itself, which, to be the real thing, must look to all the world just plain crazy. This confusion of “madness,” which my logic may be pejoratively termed, with an “evil” not crazy, violates the principle of principles of the general reason: The pure must be preserved, without a trace of the other. The Immaculate Conception, the IC, as Derrida uses it in Glas, is purely opposed to the taint of it, IT (and it may well be summed by “information technology”), as Epicriticism shows in the title of the work, in which IC surrounds IT and limits it, through a different kind of repetition, one may say of the prayer of the heart, or as my wife says, by devotion. The two ways of repetition are thus disclosed: The rosary of supplication against the replication of the replication alone; one mindful of devotion, the other one devoted but to mindlessness. With so many of us paying so much attention, how could the end of things happen and go unnoticed? It is an old saying, we could not see the forest for the trees. With the flood of information, somehow this, combined with the lack of prophetic insight, as opposed to historical or scholarly, or political and financial, wisdoms, has led to the situation. The triumph of wealth, the triumph of technology, the return of triumphalism in theology, the triumph of life, as the poet would say, in all its glare and would-be glory, a great vehicle crushing all opposed to it, or even just caught in the path of the career of it, all this really Roman and essentially Empiric triumph, spectacle, done for show, for semblance, and not really fooling anyone, but gladly welcomed as the escape from reason and reality, has been the recipe for the disaster of the evacuation of faith, hope and love, for the eclipse of the light of the world,
the opposite of the preparation for the gospel some thought it might be. My work is written in antithesis to this, attempting a synthesis from the debris. That I may be wrong in my elucidation of the time, I must admit. That the logic I have found may not work, I must admit. But that the world is in deep trouble, I think we all must admit. I hope you will concede that we all have the responsibility, given the opportunity, to suggest a solution to what has become a global problem, involving the fate of all. That my solution involves great contradictions, and yet is simple, is the strength of it. Against the complexity of the Gordian knot of postmodernism I use a gospel sword, the word of truth, and built my work, after its false, but fortunate, start in the abyss, by adhering to scripture and synthesizing it with what I found in the best and most useful aspects of the wisdoms I have read and known and lived. This dialectic may yet provide a way out by not the use of force against the knot, nor yet by yielding to the seductions of complexity, but by patient description and explanation, and even, I hope, a telling disclosure of truth. Having over the course of time, with patience, in my search for truth, straightened-out both dialectic and deconstruction, and finally turned to Kant and reconstructed the first two critiques, of pure and practical reason, along the lines of the general and the particular reason, I now wish to turn to the third critique, that of judgment. Kant writes of the beautiful and the sublime, and of teleology, so it is appropriate to say the matter concerning judgment in the context of the end of things and our finality, that is, the Day of Judgment, the great day, the awesome and terrible day of the Lord. Having transposed reason from the pure and practical to the general and particular, let us likewise transpose the critique of judgment into a clear and precise, up-to-date definition of what in Christian theology are known as the particular and the general judgments. It may be the former is what we all expect, that we will be judged according to our works, our words, what we did and did not do, what we did for the least among us and what we did not, what we did for
Christ, and what we did not. Scripture says it is so. According to our torturous particular reasons it could not be otherwise, as human thinking shows. But the Lord has said plainly again and again that He does not think like we do. The general reason that I have suggested is the closest we can come, at least that I can come, to understanding the absolute Mind of Christ, reconciling oppositions, forgiving enemies, justifying sinners. And so I believe the general judgment will be according to the general reason. It will be pardon, amnesty, forgiveness. Though we as individuals may have been sunk deep in the abyss of sin, the whole man, the human race, will stand united as one on the Day of Judgment, and we will all be forgiven, as one. It is the unification of the beauty of holy forgiveness with the terror and sublimity of the infinite power of God, together with a true understanding of the telos. With this prophetic hope the logic ends. Thus, the logic ends, pointing to something over the horizon, while within the world and within the church the task of love remains. What is this task? Paul said that faith, and hope, and love, these three remain, but that the greatest of these is love. I appeal to hope in the resolution of the logic and the working through of Kant’s critiques of reason and judgment, but what of the thingin-itself, that is, criticism, as such? For what we know is the way we know. If we know dogmatically, and if we know critically, these are very different things. In the work now ending, I argued for a faithful criticism and a critical faith. I think both dogmatic catholic theology of the postmodern era and the dogmatic theory of deconstruction are more like each other than has been supposed, because both are equally far from criticism, and deny it in practice, not tolerating it, nor dialogue, nor the inviolability of the conscience, but rather insisting on the necessity of the positions held by popes and professors. The conscience in its integrity preached by the Second Vatican Council must be critical, so as to be faithful to the message of the gospel, just as the philosopher must be critical in order to be faithful to the commitment to truth above all else. In
an age when people deny that any truth still exists, or that the dogmatic position of one pope or professor or party, people or nation, economy or religion, is the one answer, the whole truth, it means that our time has dissipated thought in particular reasons, better known as rationalizations, rather than reach and take hold of truth itself, that is to allow oneself to live in it, abide in it, love it, instead of manipulating it, for politics, advertising, money, power, prestige and the appearance of the glamorous which is not glory, but is the death knell of beauty, good and truth. That we had a glamorous pope is a shame. That the destructiveness of the death written of by deconstruction became the definition of glamour is a shame. Faithful criticism stands outside the circularity of dogmatic positions, all particular, and stands in relation to the general reason, which is not to be seen in terms of the so-called general economy of postmodernism, opposed to restricted dialectic, but which is simply the standpoint that faith-criticism reaches by patience, love and hope. It is not a hopeless contamination and juxtaposition of any and all, but a discernment, beginning with the basic moral opposition of good and evil, which leads truly to the mystical love dogmatism promises but cannot deliver, because the dogmatic man is a tyrant, and loves no one in truth, but his own. They stand in particular against all the others, whom we know we are to love. Catholicism and Christianity to fulfill their mission must give up the special for the general, and love everyone. That political parties do not do this is perhaps understandable, but that the heirs of the gospel do not do this is a sin, not to mention the many particular sins of which many now stand accused, even at the highest levels. That capital will not give itself away is perhaps understandable, but that the riches of the church, which are not found in the Vatican but in the Bible and on the altar of the heart, have not begun to be disclosed after two thousand years, what are we to make of this? You say, but the gospel is preached to all nations. Dogmatism is theory, but faith-criticism is practice. The church and the world criticize each
other, but only from their particular points-of-view, that is generally not in good faith. They act like political parties, who agree to disagree, and profit off each other in a mutual economy of implication. In order to hold on to faith in the church and the world today one will need to learn to think, discern, be critical, and be faithful to the one thing necessary. Call that one thing what you will, it matters not, but when He calls, you must respond faithfully, even if it breaks you, breaks your church, breaks your world. As bread is broken, be broken, too. To not be too sentimental about this breaking, let us lay it all on the head of that one man Nietzsche, who was broken, as perhaps we all must be. There was Nietzsche, simply, on the square, and then dogmatically, we would have an anti-Nietzsche, which most good people since 1900, if they think about it, must suppose themselves to be, and then there is Nietzsche-otherwise, the Heideggerean, Derridean, postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche. But you know my logic. What is Nietzsche in the fourth place? How does Nietzsche arrive? His basic doctrines, Heidegger cogently said, were the will to power and the eternal recurrence, which Heidegger made into “the will wills itself.” But this is not Nietzsche as fourth, rather Nietzsche returned. What is the arrival of the will to power, of the will that wills itself? Not that willing of power, and nothing besides, but rather, and I might say merely, a willingness. Willingness. It is more “other” than the Other, than will to power itself, than an anti- or an otherwise-than-Nietzsche, and is his proper breaking, the breaking of the postmodern, through a simple, humble thing summed by that word “willingness.” Not by assertion or negation. Not by reason, either dogmatic or skeptic, or even critical. Nor by indifference, the position of the amoral most congenial to Nietzsche, but by the willingness itself. Willingness to let go, to suffer, to be humiliated, to be broken. Christ did not will his crucifixion, but accepted it willingly. And there is all the difference between Christ’s practice and Nietzsche’s theory. Therefore, you may confidently hope that if you are
willing, yes, you may yet be saved. Willingness is not the same as obedience, though it is often confused with it. It puts the glory of another ahead of itself, not as commanded, but out of love, out of confidence, in a courage that destroys even death, overcoming it not by willing nothingness, nor by not willing at all, but by willing as one is willing to love and be loved. It is our marriage. Blake spoke of the marriage of heaven and hell, while Derrida spoke of perfecting the resemblance of Dionysus and Christ. I choose neither option. I do not choose the one offered by the poet. I do not choose the one offered by the philosopher. To choose these seems not to reconcile oppositions, but to entangle all things in webs without end. It would be a violent yoking together of things that must be kept discrete. Discretion recommends a better course. Let us say there is a marriage, to which we are all invited. It behooves us to attend the wedding of the Bride and the Lamb. We cannot feign important engagements elsewhere. On the day the world ends, if it has not already ended, there is only one place to be, and that is at the wedding. But recall, many were invited, but one did not have the proper attire, and so was cast out. I think we better bring an offering of some kind at least. I think it a spiritual truth that God has given gifts and talents to all, and that he expects us to not neglect these, but to increase them, as one might these days strive to enhance wealth. However, I believe, the gifts of God are not always known to us, and we spend our whole lives searching for the thing we are to do. I was lucky. From an early age I was born to write, and that was about the only thing I did. I loved and was loved, prayed, and made friends, held a few unsteady jobs, piled up great unpaid debts, all the while I wrote. It frightens me to think God in his absolute freedom may tell me that I got it all wrong, that I was really meant to do some other thing, ordinary or extraordinary, and that I missed the boat, missed my chance, do not get off the merry-go-round, but must go around at least one more time, if I am to be given an additional chance. God has mercy on whom He will. We work out
our destinies in salvation history with fear and trembling, but also with joy and hope, as the council fathers said, and it is the union of these contraries that are the attitudes we bring to the wedding day, tomorrow, for which we may be shown mercy.
In memory of a forgotten Pope That God can thunder, And that God can whisper, That God can speak as a friend, Or as a stern Father, But that the beatific vision Is not so much the vision of God, That we see Him, But that He sees us, Always and everywhere, We may draw the deduction That we must go and do likewise, Which means not in reciprocity As one might think, With God or with each other, But speak to myself, View myself, As God does, And care.
All Souls Day My Lord, I would sing Thee, Of Your grace I would sing, Of mercy and love and kindness, And of the chastisement that Heals after correction. Of Thee I sing. Corrected, completed, Of Thee I sing. My Love, My Life, Yes, I did sing Thee. There was be-bop and hip-hop, And rock and soul between, And country and blues and gospel, All along the way, And many who sang, And many who knew not the words, Without sometimes a tune at all, Yet in the end You were sung, By one and all, Even when we knew it not. And amazing to me, Was the grace I found, Not only, that while I sang of Thee, yet, Lord, yes, You sang me.
“…a limit on infinity…” Stephane Mallarme
The recuperation, the recoup, the dice thrown, the paradisiacal, the tree and the life’s He: Yes, that the logic of the impossible required that the thought of the impossible became the impossibility of thought, and he said the impossible was the only thing worth attempting, and nevertheless, in this therefore, this OR, this symbol or siglum, this turning point, this gold, was conversion, his and mine, in extremity, and that though I had seen did not yet believe, and inclined still toward the abyss, yet He saved me, and having said He would I did believe and came to be, conscience created, not by a smithy, not to be the conscience of my race, but to set out for a far country, that my race, a more meta- than marathon, to parry para- and carry on, toward Cecilia’s day and further, past deaths and rebirths and arrivals yet to come, looking back I found a fascist regime where none knew, and that the rapture has already happened, it is impossible, that the smoke of six million Jews in the Holocaust was the rapture, with their graves in the air, todesfugue, and Celan was not wrong, but crushed between mighty opposites, though he no baser nature, but he was it, the man, as each of us is, and it is the whole man who is the baser nature, as Hamlet knew, and we but caught between, and some knowing and some unknowing, and some knowing but uncaring, or inclining deliberately toward the abyss, on the horns of the dilemma, choose not the lesser of two evils, as the Church has always already done in practice, despite her theory, but break out of the vices, for God shows a way, and that is up, the dial pointing up, the indicator the direction the north of the future as Celan said, the Joycean gnomon, and the remainder, let that be, but you go on up, and only half make it, maybe, on
Kilimanjaro, but let us incline to the half that will, and despising the shame, look at the man at the altar, whomever he may be and realize that in Luke, after the words of the institution of the meal, Christ plainly says that the hand of the one who will betray Him is on the table, and therefore, every time a priest says the words of institution, his hand on the table betrays the words he speaks, but fulfills the prophetic word of Christ, whose word is eternal, since He is the eternal word, and His words will never pass away, and the standing now, the eternal truth always applies everywhere to everybody, as the Church says of her faith, and so the church then is the Church now, as Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, for ever, his opponents are ever the same, the type ever the same, only so much the worse for all we know of them, how many murders in His name which he let take place, yet nothing will have taken place but the place, when a pair of dice thrown, with a chance of turning, with a chance of forgiveness, but the Lord says at the end very succinctly, It Has Already Happened, and meant it then, and even more now, and six sides, the cubic anti-Christ, the indeterminacy of things and meaning belies the truth which is certain faith, and in the details is the devil, but in the premium mobile, at the outer limit, the first moved thing this PM, postmodern, the pontifex maximus is the title of a pagan priest who became the Pope, God help him, and in their titles, in their reach, in the tiara, kings ruled, kings slew, and in the time between noon and midnight, or the hour of great mercy at which Christ died and the hour or minute just before Igitur, in those closing dusks of days, popes ruled and popes slew, and were slain, but one was not, but said in his first lie, be not afraid! When we should have been on guard, when we should have paid more attention, and cared that men were being silenced and persecuted for heresy by the anti-Christ, who could not allow dissent, disagreement, and this not a personal quirk of his, some trait, but strategic, to trap all the Catholics, who would love him so much and nearly worship a mere man, and who claimed it was
Mary who saved him, to cloak and hide the plot, and all of them going back to 1854 to cloak and hide the snare and wickedness, to pervert our love for Mary and use her against, what greater evil than this I know not, but that the sacraments made void, because the thing does not work itself, ex opere operato, but must be done with the intention of the Church, and where Peter is there is the Church, so if the man be not in communion with God, but in more unholy communion, what is to be done? So that therefore like deconstruction inwardly the Church was vacated Vatican dead at the top, de-capitalized already by the abyss of lie two sides Blanchot said, and that I had to leap, like Heidegger said, step back, and that I did, by the grace and mercy of God, and taking a long step back, did prepare the great leap forward, not of faith but by faith, to leap over the apocalypse, but how? To arrive and leap over the end of things, but how? And not like Macbeth standing on his bank and shoal of time, to see in to the life of things, and have a mind not mine own, oh Christ, re-mind me! Tell me of the things to come, when we will be there, ah, already there, the eschaton realized, as John and John and John my late friend said, fading on the dying horn, how we walked amid the ruins of shepherds and richmonds on a hot afternoon, though the battle was just as real as the battle of Britain, and death was near, I saw it in your face, but not yet in your eyes, you fading, John, John, John, oh the baptist! That I was too baptized by a priest in a Catholic Church just a mile away, and perhaps was written in the book of life, though works will tell, and so Hamlet had to perform, was that not it, after all, that the play was the thing, and the actor unable to act, has yet to perform, but though the rest be silence, and silence the work of fire, apotheosis, the funeral pyre, phoenix, rare bird, we did not fail like Falstaff, but fell with Hamlet, who said get ready, who said seas change, who said it is not near my conscience, and yet it were too curious to consider it so, I have traced the dust of Ash Wednesday back to Adam and forward to, fare forward, well, do not your alms or prayers in public but in secret, where your
father who sees in secret can give you the reward, for insincerity is the greatest sin, and that hypocrisy, that did un-man the papacy, where would be saints did prophesy the death of popes, may your days be as the years of Christ, she said to John Paul I, and I did not know, though some day we will all know just how and why he died, but that it might have been the cover-up, follow the money, and scandals appear and are hushed up just as quickly, and if we are to do it for the Church, and I think we are, if we have concern for the Church, and I think we should, it is for the souls of Catholics that we should fight, and the destruction of the hierarchy was like a neutron bomb of the faith, which destroyed not things but the thing-in-itself, despite the feigning and fawning and the abyss of power, the power of the abyss, which they had chosen, to hold sway, while claiming to be but mere servants, and the thousand years came and went, the First Reich of the Roman Empire, and a thousand years came and went like a watch in the night, the Second Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Third Reich was defeated by liberal democracy enlightened enough to fight for freedom, but that the pretension of the Fourth Reich coming is almost here, en-framed by Heidegger’s fourfold, and Derider’s semi-Pythagorean hypothesis of numbers, always squaring things, framing things, and we not knowing why, other than the bothand-neo-nor, which is the logic of the impossible, but writing, the text, became the net, and everything had to be done in the virtual space, so that time too would be but virtual, and oh, there hands were on the table, the whole wine, to sacrifice our daily bread, but the cup of her abominations, drink it not, that wine of astonishment, when a pair of dice, the shipwreck, the depths, may yet a constellation appear, all thought utters, all thought emits and admits risk, not chance, but a chance taken, to take the chance, to roll the dice, is not to either affirm or annul possibility, but to take action, so that the impossible became impossible, and the possible became possible once again, a limit on infinity, the eternal line, however zigzag which the dies falling
took, did not go to the tomb did not fall to death in the abyss where nothing is, but since he could not say it plumb straight out, the double session of our lives is almost over and if he would hasten you to death, yet I would haste to love, and all was not between, we were not in the middle as they claimed, to lull us to sleep with siren songs of literature, but in dialectical truth, which is the book, the name, the word and the sign, of glory, cannot not be, we were indeed very near the end, belated, related, in the struggle between death and love, and every time we took our places and rolled the dice one more time at the throne of our marriage, in the bed we read, we lay in love, and fought death to make love, though the house was burning, though the house was falling down, and even though we be buried in the debris, we would not cease from loving, oh, You and I! It was a Marinelability to learn my harmony, and justice that brought us love to symbolically defeat and therefore e-really, the time when all was veiled and unveiled simultaneously, all knowledge admits dice thrown, but the seat he sat on, knowledge better not to have had, and their bones under the altar, rather than their souls and relics bought and sold, and saints carved into pieces as if grace was wealth, as if the truth could still be rightly divided, as if, the poet said, as if, and the philosophy of as if we became and became what we beheld, so look away for union, gaze not on the spectacle, but listen, happy love, listen to the music of nature even pent-up in the city, as one would standing on a sea of mist mountainside see in the midst of the soul of the scene hear in the song of a gathering of birds more truth more beauty, still, be still, hear something real, as I have, morning and evening, in the days of my waking, but beautiful, the good God smiled on me, and praying did say me, as I said Him, so that the artist become an actor, you too could be said, despite, yes, and yet, for thee, for you, for you, I came for you, not in the night, not yet, not quite, but just at twilight, of idols, of ideals, and therefore of reality, in the nihilistic throng without a throne, and thrown into being, did implore and receive
Grace, that the ring might be complete, for what would be His wedding without such a ring? A gift to Him who gave me to me, I stood beside the groom holding the ring, and oh, saw the bride, not bare, but bedecked and new Jerusalem’s she did shine, Virgin bride, had left all for Him who stood beside me, she meta-, she mystic, she moral and more, and I having known para-, had become a friend of the groom, and a wedding guest, at the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world, which scholars do not know having voided all scripture of prophecy, but still His words ring true, and must be applied now, not then, and the Spirit will tell you things to come, and you cannot serve both God and money, and two did tell them, yet they would not believe, and just who is this Son of Man? Aye, that is the question he puts to one and all, that all may judge, discern, believe, hope and love, to really know the time, the day, the hour, He says he is like a thief, but a good thief, and he will take us away from the world, still separating out, wheat from tares, good from evil, as the world plummets into the abyss like in the wake of it, and we rise and shine with the resurrection, and today we shall be with Him in paradise, if you throw in with him, and not throw yourself away on the world, which is but a symbol, which, divided in two, the session double, mirrored, did like a lovely pool of broken water re-unite around Him, did gather at the throne, did placidly and with benedictions did more so unify and that than the universal church which was a broad and dangerous highway on which many walked, while he said the path was strict and hard to find, and that the children of the kingdom were thus always already to be thrown, to not sit with the elders at the throne, but having gambled for his vesture did proudly wear it, though he had never bestowed it, the pallium they claimed, the place vacated by the building of the palace, a tomb of faith, not the mountain of moral beauty, but the Book ever said it was Rome, and Rome it was ever to be, the eternal city, it had to be you, and it could not have been under auspices of Caesar, but under bridges of fathers,
the ire of sires, it is today you are that city, and yet a little while, you will be destroyed, one might say, not literally but literarily, if that be possible, in that you are void of meaning, except what the Word of God says of you, which you may have known, but did avoid, and pious, condemned reform, and forced our consciences rather than relinquish what you had stolen, and though you had the keys, the “keys� mark His word, did not un-lock, did not let in, oh my God, they have made your house a den of thieves and your Zeal does consume me, as all must say together, What Would Jesus Do? Indeed, do what he did, drive them out, re-form the old, tear it down to the ground, and prepare for the homeward journey, somewhere way over Jordan, over yonder, I’ve been told, not tolled, but storied in, not a fiction less, but in truth did write no novel, nothing new, He said It Has Already Happened, because the mark of the beast was confirmed so that the economy of simony could go on, buying and selling grace, as they said, His hands are tied, are they not? Yet He did cut that knot with the Word of Truth, that complex catholic contradiction He did hit with a rock, and then use its own sword against it, like how many times, Lord did they love the better places at the feast, and how many times Lord did they pay lip service to the humility of Christ yet claimed to be without even the possibility of error? Napoleon did come thinking he without error, and Hitler did as well, along with popes that actually infallibly asserted the death of love and the love of wealth and power and now on the cusp of things we peer toward the next anti-Christ in this very late PM postmodern post-mortem, all the time they said one thing and did another, but which is abomination to God, and did not think like the Lord, and did not have the Mind of Christ, because they knew the truth and spoke oft of fine and living things, yet all the time behind the screen working to destroy our faith, but which if it be not in Christ will be destroyed, and holding not onto their Tradition-traitors, we Word in, we with meaning would be worded in, we scriptured, not historical but prophetic, not
without pun, they did forsake prophets for profits, and outlawed prophecy even, and said none can arise, for God has spoken, but the Word will always be spoken and the Spirit leads you where He will, away, at least, at last alone with Christ be loved, let Him be loved without any intermediary who usurps the place and vacates it, but that always His star does shine, past deconstruction of truth, and the dialectic of the day, past catholic love and catholic death, a faith abides amidst a crossing, paradise throne, for He chose it, as they unwittingly did, and hope and love as strong as death, which cannot hold Him or you or me, for we’re not bound, we’re free, the true city of the Bride, in Jerusalem we shall be, when we will be freed: Yes, His Word still cuts the complexities of the current complicity, for the crisis of the contemporaneity of the meaning of the mercy of Christ.
That dice thrown will never annul chance and that all thought utters dice thrown, and that Derrida depended on these poeticisms, and that I once held that the symbol divides itself in two, and the possibility of thought is the thought of possibility, as the culmination of my time in deconstruction, of what do I say of these things now? It may be that the poet meant to say that possibility is irreducible, that action is an illusion against the backdrop of perpetual and unchanging about-to-be, that the step though taken, is really annulled by the fact that chance itself cannot not be. This principle of supreme indeterminacy, which entered most people’s minds through the science of physics, but was first stated by a poet, seems to say the last word is that there is no last word, that the possibility is that it, possibility itself, makes reality in act the very figure of the impossible. That somehow the reserve of the possible not only annuls the dice throw that would annul it, but in fact annuls itself, that possibility is made The Impossible. That was Derrida’s one chance. From this hunch he wove a fantastic work of seeming, a phantasm of ligatures, cuts, sutures, ligaments, agglutinations, analisms, and magical cruelties that post-post, retro-active, in principle, annuls itself at the same time, du meme coup, in the same blow, as a throw of the dice, that it annuls everything else, as if to say, marriage is always already annulled even
before it is ever consummated, before it can be. Marriage cannot be, love cannot be, there can be no end, nor any beginning, we are vastly lost in the indeterminate middle of a wasteland. On the other hand, that the symbol divides itself in two, that was true, but that the two parts fit together, marriage in other words, is in fact predetermined, not indeterminate, and that we will have identity is the principle, not the cause of difference or the force of deferral and delay. That if we be but broken, we can be put back together was the promise I made myself from the outset, and that possibility and all its problems was the key was a token to remind me of the way, for with possibility we may have the answer, but without it we have nothing. That from the beginning I saw the project of my career in writing as a path leading from nothing to everything, the great reversal, was exactly set against deconstruction, though I knew it not at the time. That in fact the end was reached by the logic of the impossible, that I have recuperated my true identity, that the logic of deconstruction has been decided in favor of a Christian love, which unites and distinguishes, as in marriage, that meaning will yet be, that the yes I say to Thee has more meaning than ever, is not to say this real affirmation is ever indeterminate or over determined, but that God is implicit in every truth, and that all we say and do refers to Him. To arrive at the apocalyptic by the reverential love of revelation is to say “yes� to the Lord. His ways are not our ways. We accept His judgment.
GodChurchWorld is the system of the Anti-Christ, which is a thing that may surprise some, especially those who have read the cover of the books and turned to this last page to steal my ending without having made the journey I made to get here. The Church in the Modern World, a key document of the Second Vatican Council, stated the position by just boldly placing Catholicism in and not juxtaposed to or against modernity. If this was an error, I do not know, but that we see in recent events the worldly aspects of the church are beyond doubt. Yet, she may be holy, and without a doubt God is, and the world too is not without its goodness, bestowed by God, both natural and human. So why do I make this extraordinary claim concerning evil and the things most of us know and love? I think like the poets said, particularly Blake: The deception is great. And many there are who are deceived, and wittingly or not go along with the corruption of not only morals but faith and the intellect, all of our culture. We must be radical in our love of Christ, and fight for Him, as He fights for each of us. If you have read all my pages you know the story, but the solution is not really in my hands or yours however, but in God’s. God so loved the world, and loved the church, and loves us, I believe, that we should not give up on them and
our-selves, despite the enemy within the perimeter. In a way I have called in an air strike on our own position, hoping that God will by His own means cut out the evil wherever it may be, and especially in my heart, and in yours and yours. That the apocalypse was written long ago, and in a sense has already occurred, is reassuring. That God is in control, that is part of our faith. Trust in His mercy, and hope for the best. Do not lightly leave off good things, spiritual things, or be disturbed by every wind of finance and politics, or of turmoil in the church. Pray for the will of God to be done now where we are, not later, for sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. The Bible may say contradictory things, and a fortiori churches and mere men, and most of all the work I have written, but do not let the oppositions overcome the one truth you live by, whatever that may be, that star, that dream, that love and hope, even desire and most of all your truth. Perhaps to each his own, perhaps we are all one. God knows, and that is enough for me. May God forgive my errors.
After Reading Roland Barthes
Four Directions:
Inward/Outward/Forward/Up (Plato and Aristotle, again) spatial and temporal (at once)
Is the Kingdom “Within” or “Among”? solitary/solidarity Moral/Mystical [prayer] the meta Public/Exhibitions [politics] the para
metabolic hierarchy overriding the parabolic open-endedness Life/Death/Otherwise The pleasure of the text and the bliss of Barthes
………………
Barthes states the premise of never making a denial and of the logical crux of contradiction, along with the necessity of the Impossible, that it is
I, on the other hand, but not otherwise, see the necessity of denial as the only basis of affirmation: there is yes if and only if there is no while accepting the truth of contradiction in the logic of the Impossible and the abandonment of the need for consistency: which is to say, all things are possible: the Impossible is impossible.
is neither moral (inward) nor mystical (up) but without love
prayer and politics are not on the same page: one implicates one supplicates
projected forward in time (written narrativity)
there/you is a site not a destination
and outward in space (the possible reader)
in/up is E turnity E ever explicates
moral inward conflict (as opposed to difference)
moral inwardness establishes the parameters PM political exhibitionism obliterates
and mystical elation out of, over and above, conflict the dialectical outcome of conflict depend on love love is the reason for the conquering of self in the moral conflict and the abandonment of self in mystic height the going forward and going outward involves no turning but the inward and outward require it turning metanoia is at heart opposed to all of the parameters of PM (not post- but para-modern)
pleasure/bliss is sex w/o love religion is love w/o sex [sublime vs. sublimation: needs sublation] to repent denying/affirming at once is the turning: away from the para-modern
Genesis and Revelation
The loss of a sense of origin and the end of things is apparent at the finale. History must be seen as having a point of departure and a goal in order to be history, the story as such, which can be temporal or organized according to another logic, but which must have definite limits, as does the Bible, the pattern of all books. Where we come from must be where we are going. The break-up of the book itself is part of the loss, connected by hyper-connectivity to the subtraction of the beginning and ending, witnessed already in the modernist valorization of the middle of things, the in medias res epic, which became an end in itself in the PM, an infinite regress that cannot be crossed, an unsearchable wasteland, a void filled with tracks, traces and signs, neither pointing and indicating, nor expressing and conveying, but simply standing in the place of the place itself. Imagination creates the pattern. Patterns are not just connections produced, valued as an end in themselves, and multiplied to no purpose, but relationships comprehended, giving one understanding of the truth which is inherent in the structure of the whole and the part. That there is no longer a whole, and therefore no longer any parts, so that every part has become a whole in itself, is the legacy of the PM. This contradiction, learned from the logics of reading and writing, has displaced time and order as the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning the ultimate. Christ is the alpha
and omega, and without Him we can do nothing, which explains the absence of Christ in the ultimately political and financial culture and discourse today. That there be no end to the power struggle of parties, in principle, or to the exaggeration of wealth derived from theft and exploitation, are the unfortunate outcomes of the end of history, when history ceased to be historical.
The News
Is that despite our insatiable thirst, we are drinking salty water from an ocean of lies and corruption that purports to inform and describe and explain ourselves, our lives and our time. The news is that there is nothing man-made that is new, just variations on themes invented long ago. That the invention may have been immemorial. That invention was not ours. That we try to re-invent. That we merely copy the past, but advertise it as our new world. That God is ever new is no longer news. The true new cannot be bought or sold, cannot be manipulated, is grace, is mercy, is life, the holiness and righteousness of God. That we make ourselves experts in our own demise. That we have eliminated the principle of Authority: every one is author, there is no Author. So ungovernable, we will seek a last desperate rule. It may be global or tribal, capitalistic or a facetious fascism. Then our end will be near. The church led the way in this, and the influence of the world on the church cuts both ways, and the model of the dominion has already been copied.
Yet, be not disconsolate, desolate, or late. Belated we are, but really arriving just in time. We seek to begin again, sometimes, and God tells us it is so. That one may by the grace of God make a radical break, with everything you were and knew, and all who knew you, for the one thing that is your destiny, is the thing that the Impossible could never make impossible. As long as there is the possibility of possibility, which God alone knows and gives, we may still think, and pray, and love. Now this is news that will never grow old. And a word that is needed in the life of the world today. The news so-called by its own definition will and must pass away, replaced by more news, the news ever flowing. But God is waiting in the very same waters to baptize us and forgive us and love us forever.
Symbols The speculative begins and ends in the realm of the symbol, which as has been said, gives rise to the thought. That every symbol implies an explication means that in the folds of things that have meaning are possibilities that both open and close our understandings. Open because they allow reading and therefore the possibility of learning, and close because the limit case of comprehension is a grasping that cannot grasp itself, on the one hand, and which must let go, turn loose, of itself, in order to be grasped, not by any and every other, but by the one truth, the incomprehensible that comprehends us as we are, making us comprehensible to ourselves in principle, though sometimes knowledge is deferred or denied. That the symbol divides itself in two, in the etymological sense of the word “symbol,�
indicates a brokenness, an incompleteness, in fact, which in principle is already complete and whole. Symbol systems are always derived from other systems, which seems to deny origins, as does our understanding of language, which cannot be incomplete, but which as has been shown, and in contradiction to this, has some radical incompleteness lodged in the heart of every state of affairs. We did not invent the remedy that God provides. We sought Him, hidden in things, and have perpetually found and lost Him over and over again, the Absolute, the cause and goal of the search, the guard and guide of life, that than without which nothing can be conceived, in which we live and move and have our meaning, making symbolic actions, which we sometimes dimly perceive in truth, but which we believe have a definite value for God, where we hope our works will always be written in the book of
eternal narrative, a place in which our roles, written, are read, by all of us, actors and audience, at the discretion of sole Authority.
will have been a book, filled with many signatures, at least three or four, or seven or twelve, but never simply two or one, for then there will be no signature and no end to the signatures, for the cuts and the wounds to heal, not in schizophrenic fashion, as the symptom that produces its own fore-healing, out of the play of forces that exert us within and without, making us both hyper sexual and hyper textual in the same instant of madness, overloaded with desire, overly attentive in our reading, trying to discern the indecipherable, circles of selves to fit the square hole of the abyss on the page and the stage, that framework of tech city, that un natural un shaped form less form beyond the simplicity of the curve of life that distorts our being into the one multi-task of living and dying in the same interrupted, as I met my age and did shoulder I knew not what, but God knew, when I knew Him not, and in the seeming interregnum of the vacant dethroned disfigured decapitated deconstructed I sought the absolute, and held that we should go from nothing to everything, and against the grain, and despite the triumph of the will and the eclipse of reason and the ebbing of faith and trust, I was a seeker, but I was found, and though it seemed I was struck by genius and by magic and by the muse, yet I did strike a blow, not against all that, but at the giant Goliath in the way, and what my rock was you should know, and what the sword, that too you shall know, for there was a behemoth, call it what you will, a thing I sum post-modern, that can in principle, of its own terms, never be summed, no summa yet possible, yet summation required, and that theological, and a synthesis, to appropriate and not to be appropriated, and to give and not to count
moment, like the supposed, like the word itself, which gives itself away in speech yet retains itself in the graphic shadow of a drawn and quartered neo-nor, the syn- despised, the thesis suspended, the trace of something that escapes both wisdom and foolishness, a kind of hilarity that is the death of serious work and building, dwelling and thinking, for a wandering polysemy, polylogia, a bare hymen of meaning between ourselves, our frail consciousness and the abyss of nonentity, that ISBN said is sacred yet tainted with vice, and in the taintedness, dreams of our yet un written pages flowing with no restriction to the falls of hymeneal aggravations and abusive abysses, the assault of the letter A on all we are, an aggregation of insubstantial structures, the cost, and to shoulder like Atlas, and not to merely shrug, and to stand under God when all around me the world was falling, not searching, but despising, and rushing, in economy, to spend all the capital of our inheritance, to waste the rich deposit of faith and reason so carefully built up by work and sweat of men and women over 4000 years, the great remainder of all dwindling to almost nothing, and then on bare credit to live, the future consumed as well, with nothing left for children, not even a generation to come, all it seems we have destroyed, even the possibility of action itself, the void invaded, the abyss and the gravity of it, the black star our hearts wed, the river she ran into no sea, and bells did ring always from morning till night, at dawn, at dusk, matins and vespers, weddings and funerals and a few more baptisms, but always in the church in the world, and in a tower that did not babble, though it did seem about to fall, and some supporting it, as
unlike 1, 2, 3, 4: but more like Nietzsche on the square, overcome overman, over a flogged and dying beast that was no thing but the wretched point at which his mind collapsed under the weight he could not support of a lifetime of the power of the open, but in order to arrive, in another way, without madness, yet still to find love, and this not in profits of extremity, but in the prophecy of catholic economy, when all will be not the glory globalizing but de-capitalizing, when the church of the new after the apocalypse, the time from 1945-2010, will emerge, a pure white nothing, a reconstructed theory and a reestablished practice, a Virgin, married to both God and Man, union of fecundity and yet with no actual relations with the world, a gift, a prayer that is apart, a part of the world that I and what we knew symbolically as 1000 points of light, as Francis did hold the church from falling, in his time, to make firm what was tottering and to do as has been said, we were all re-sponsible, though I was more responsible than the rest, as the priest told me that I was that man, as God called me, I lie not, and told me that I was doing it for the church because they were confused and did not understand His mercy, and that my vocation was true, and He does love me, and said so, and another priest said work on and risk and do not be discouraged, and as the King said, though 10,000 fall yet I will trust in you Lord, and there was no inter-regnum at the throne though the see may have been vacant, I do not know, but that the corruption of the time did reach even into the Church and did fell the world, and all, but at the same time in symbols, in signs, the real dialectic did prove that every action is every other action, as every other is holy other, despite the will to
transcends the world at the same time it absolutely transforms it, from both the inside and the outside, without force, yet traversing by a “work� the fantasy and the necessity of the lack of production for a reality promised but undelivered by the fasces, by the face of the veiled and the unveiled, by Jews and Moslems and the still Christian, by atheists and athletes of wealth, by a realm of morals that is being but transubstantiated to mysticisms without reserve, and finding in this the word of St. Sartre for the building up and tearing down by the anti sculptor Giacometti, who would with unceasing labor create and destroy the synthesis of art and religion and philosophy in the dialectic of the search for what another called the SA: as savoir absolute, in you, yes, therefore dissipation, and the will to deceive, and many there are who have been, we did still love and believe, and hope for the coming of the great day of our liberation from wealth and poverty, and all that goes with that economy, for an economy of grace and mercy that has always been and will always be, let it be done on earth as it is in heaven, dear Lord, I pray, that those who laugh will cease and those who mourn who will have a ceasing of their cause for mourning, and that in the age of analysis, we made something of our world, against it and for it at the same time, as was the Church, which despite the lack of holy attention still was mindful in missions and in charity and said so much right and did so much right and did so feed the millions with words and sacraments and breaking even in their daily bread, so done for that Church, a work stood, not torn down, though not one stone will be left atop another, as the Savior said, we may at last find the paradise throne, a temple interpreted as thee
PREFACE TO PARADISE THRONE
The world of the end is a strange place to live, but here we are, out of time.
The Book of Revelation was never understood because:
1) it did not apply to the Roman Empire, 2) it is written in signs and symbols, and is not literal, 3) it spoke of the future.
Now the problem is re-solved. Not Rome then, for Rome was not apocalyptically destroyed, but converted. It is the trouble with Rome now that should concern us. I believe the writing of John the Divine is the way that it is because the end of the world of which it speaks is not a literal end of the world but a symbolic one. That the Church took over from the Jews the symbol of Israel, calling itself the same, is a clue. What is said of Israel therefore applies to the Roman Church. When Christ says that not one stone will be left atop another, He speaks then not only of the Temple in Jerusalem, literally overthrown, but of the Church today, that may be destroyed. This destruction, well under way, involves an attack on the virtues of faith and hope and love. Satan and the Anti-Christ do not mean to lay waste cities and all nations, but the faith of Christians, all believers. This can be done really though symbolically. Why would Satan wish to destroy a world he in a way already controls? It is faith in Christ, and love itself, that he hates. As deconstruction has shown, the best and perhaps only way to destroy a system is from within. And we see much done in the Church recently that troubles us, from the condemnations of so-called heretics to the problem of sex abuse. Besides this is the money, which the Vatican will not speak of, but which some believe came from Hitler to be stored in Rome, after the fall of Berlin. What we know is bad enough to cause much disquiet, but what we do not know will, I think, shake the faith of many, who, as Christ warned, put faith in men and their traditions, rather than in God. The attack by the recent Popes on the article of conscience decided by the Second Vatican Council is clear, so no one can disagree with Rome and its teaching. Infallibility is the foundation of error, to hide, not reveal, truths that Rome wants kept secret, like the death of John Paul I, or why as John Paul II took over he insisted “be not afraid.� Should we be? The time we live in now has become a very meta-physically different type of time, the kind of time in which the symbols of the Book of Revelation make sense. How you read it is up to you. But read it.
Read it in the Spirit, not the letter, as Paul says. Read it as addressed to the Church of today. Keep in mind that God does not think as we do, since He came to save sinners, not the righteous. As Moses said: Would that all God’s people were prophets. The word of God is thoroughly prophetic, and the scholars who empty it of that dimension empty it of its primary meaning, which is neither moral nor mystical, but rather eschatological, and is concerned with the salvation of all, which depends on real and correct relationships with God, who must be known, in some way, to be loved, believed and relied on in every end. Nietzsche, who is a type of Anti-Christ, said he wished for a “Caesar with the soul of Christ.” Derrida ends his Glas, the death knell of The Book, with words in reference to the perfecting of the resemblance between Dionysus and Christ, and Dionysus was the end-point of the AntiChristian Nietzsche’s attempt to found a new religion. In other words, the two best known deconstructionists were at work on a synthesis of Christians and non-Christians. That would seem to be the path my book followed in the later stages, combining a dialectical method with deconstructive insights held together in a catholic framework, for the reformation of both the Church and the World, along the lines of a logic that accepts the contradictions it finds as inevitable and not to be rejected, but having been placed here by God, to be incorporated into a fuller, completed logic that accounts for the real and not just “paradoxical” things that conflict in The Bible and in our experience. The idea has been that God does not think like we do, therefore whatever the basic principle of our logic is, it must be ungodly. That would be the logic of Aristotle, long the backbone of the catholic way of thinking. The problem I face at this late date is how to distinguish the synthesis I have made in the name of the truth of Christ and the doctrine of his Word from the anti-Christian deconstructionist attack on Christ that would violently yoke Him with Caesar and Dionysus. If there is epicriticism, it is needed by me now the most. As for the Caesar angle, the Roman popes have that covered, and have already, before there was Nietzsche or any of his Lutheran fathers, combined a false Christ with a false Caesar, doubly wrong. It may be that from the angle of Dionysus, the new age religions that reject Rome make a similar error, and this includes a broad range of Christian churches who emphasize the resurrection without the passion and the cross. On the other hand, I try to stand firm in the middle, as would, say, Aquinas, and hew to a course between the twin abysses I have named. This is because I had the benefit in my catholic seminary of reading some Luther, as well as
Barth, and others, and many other writers on religion, east and west, and have kept as my guide the word of God as it is revealed in The Bible, interpreted over the course of twenty years, within the limits of what my conscience, which was formed relatively late in life, but which has come fully to fruition, recommends. Now the conscience of the critic is the judgment that regulates the genius, and I have in this regard been informed by many philosophers and thinkers, to the extent that the system I hold in my work is, while not free from error, as the Roman, able to handle the problems of the postmodern age, of which misreading and contamination in theory and practice are fore-most. Nevertheless, it was only in the last year, as I turned my attention at last to the apocalypse and its interpretation, that these things came into their true meaning as concerning the end of the world, as it is called by most, that is, the final battle of good and evil.
Paradise Throne
The Coup Coda of the Cube
kryptos kybos That throne will never be thrown by a pair of dice to say chanced hazarded gambled risked EXCEPT by a cube foreknown, predestined, planned, so w/o a chance, dicey LAUNCHED in eternal circumstances as written in the BOOK: It has already taken place: It is done: Finis: Consummatum est Though we thought it abyssal it was merely Ulysses in an eighteenth That number sums all antiAll anti-summation, is already summarized there in the
ultrastructure Of even a number, Of the number that is the enigma, The number of a person, And that to come, or as if to come,
Artless Ark, Breaking Bark, What would Peter and Paul do in the midst of such shipwreck? Jesus slept and said O ye of little faith! Should we do likewise?
The MASTER Has not lost his grip on the helm and the ship is not in danger…yet…what if the ship is lost Not foundered but unfounded, wrecked on the rock of the maker? Because thought to be Unshakeable, unjudgeable, w/o a One who would touch these my anointed prophets and WOULD THAT ALL GOD’S PEOPLE WERE PROPHETS Than profiteers,
All is not vanity, That yes, yet, there be an All: We must still pull down, pull down our vanity, and on the humble rock reside OR COME TO GRIEF in the folds of
666 Which is the cubic mass of the volume or the cubic volume of the mass, [the see and the sea coincide in the shipwreck]
AS IF TO BE A total count in the making of the anti-Christ, a totality w/o totalizer, the possibilities may be spelled in the alphanumeric that only became possible in the postmodernist era: THE SIX is a hex and a cube Hexagram: Solomon’s Seal Hexagram: Book of Changes CUBE: KAABA Which Islam turns around and faces, center of Mecca
Of course
Not to pass over the obvious,
THE BLACK BOX MAGIC TECHNO And around this square of Jews and Muslims and Chinese and all our TECHNOLOGY The common denominator is the bias of the anti-
CHRIST Who will not allow the ultimate immemorial demon to de-throne PARADISE On a probability that it is a sin, so that it must be licit, for with God Only Certainty Will Do And in the eighteenth hour after dawn, after trial and crucifixion in the garden it is midnight and God walks and talks with His own: The PM was the wrath, postmodern, post-mortem, The AM is the mercy of the dawn and just before, FORGETTING RECONSTRUCTIONS For a leap of faith into a new world that was ordained prophetically
Is not madness become you Is not evil that madness you ABOLITIONS ABSOLUTIONS The search for the absolute Is the search for the knowledge of, And the now forgotten SA
SAVIOR ABSOLUTE un-knowing neither SA nor DE
As If As If Nothing will have taken Deconstruction’s place was DERRIDAS ABSOLUTE But the deconstructed place
As If To Be Was silence while being is all meaningful speech and music W/O MERE NOISE/O WHITE NOISE/O THE PAGES W/O Except perhaps a constellation, a great cloud of witnesses: Virgins are not blanks, virgins indeed are signs not empty but full,
But if the Cube is the Coup in the Coda, the final throw of evil at Armageddon, What of Benedict’s Conscience? On the One Hand: He completes the six sides with the six times six times six equals 216, Meaning 2+16, Meaning B+16 equals the POPE Or, He completes the six sides with six plus six plus six equals 18, Meaning 2+16, Meaning B+16 equals the POPE. On the Other Hand: What does John Paul 2 + Benedict 16 equal?
ALTAR AND SCRIPTURE The final sides of the cube, its top and bottom, They kiss it don’t they? and bury bones within …And placed a LIMIT ON INFINITY…it seemed as if… …It was the number in John’s Gospel when many walked away…
yet It will have been therefore a Throw of Dice Not done in secret but by symbols obscured, Perhaps even John Paul II did not know that he was the one who was wounded, And to overcome the Left, leaned to the Right, the Roman Fascist Bias
CAESAR AND CHRIST Thus stood opposed, but the emperor, the pope, the magister, the oracle, infallible, the Supreme Pontiff, pagan priest, pontifex maximus, pronounced:
yes Every Caesar is opposed to Christ As Chance is to the one Certainty
THAT All Scripture Emits Paradise Throne.
PP
PP: per procurationem, that is, by the agency of, or for the agency of, but of what and for whom do the popes sign their names? The procurator is one who manages another’s affairs, and was an officer of the Roman Empire entrusted with the management of the financial affairs of a province and often having administrative powers as agent of the emperor. So, the pope is the agent of what emperor and of what empire? As well, akin to the procurator is the procuring, often to make available for sex. Which is to say, not beyond the PP or pleasure principle of Freud. In that late work of psychoanalysis, the death instinct came to light, and the need for repetition compulsion, and I think these things can be discerned in the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. As Plato writes in The Republic, those with training for philosophy can do great good, but if corruption enters in, there is an even greater ability to do harm. The PP is also the postal principle, the logic of the postmodern, as well as the post-mortem. In whose name were these things done, by what authority? At the seminary, as regards theology, they make Popes equal to The Bible itself, and say the magisterium is the one to interpret scripture, but should it not be the other way around? Should not The Bible be used to measure Rome? We return to the antichrist. You will recall that 6x6x6 equals 216, and I said 216 equals B + 16, that is 2 + 16. And that this is Benedict. But looked at again it appears that the 2 is really John Paul II, and the 16 is Benedict XVI. They are the antichrist. One was struck down, but miraculously survived, and the other promotes his agenda. As well, you remember the other work in 666, that it is summed 6+6+6=18, and that is once again JP 2 and Benedict 16 = 18. There is much that could be said of the variant reading of the passage, the 616, which can be deduced from various multiplications and additions. These deductions point back to Pius XII, and the Nazi era. As well, they point back to 1962 and the illfated Vatican Council II. If John Paul II is the beast in some symbolic way, and Benedict the false prophet, what will happen next? It would have to be the en-shrining of the statue or image for worship, and that is the new order of mass to take effect for the liturgical year 2012. In the
catholic economy the entrance is through confirmation, a mark on the hand and the forehead. As well, despite the scripture always read that day, on Ash Wednesday, the Catholics throughout the world will receive a mark on their foreheads. For these reasons I have stopped attending mass. I have not read the new missal, but I have heard of changes in both what the priests say and in how the congregation responds. Concretely, I wonder what the new response to the priest’s “Peace be with you” really means. When the churchgoers say “And with your spirit” in what or to what spirit will they be praying? Men and women have bodies and souls, but spiritual entities like angels have spirits. It seems that there is one Spirit of God, and so Benedict should say that plainly, if that is what he means. I have not in this work made a full-scale exegesis of the Book of Revelation. I think too often those attempts got lost in the trees, and could not grasp the main point in the forest of difficulties that is the symbolic end of the world. I have made a diagnosis about the Church herein, as well as lay out a catholicity in the logic by which the reform of the Church may be thought. What remains? We must not lose our faith, though we have been betrayed. I have written this for the Church, not against it, for the faith of the many, not the approval of the few. I think that in the future the present pope will die and the college of cardinals convene to choose his successor. I believe the cardinals should not select one, but appoint themselves temporary guardians of the Church until a council can be called comprised of all the bishops in the world to decide the future of the Church. The things I have said in this book are a small addition to the massive amount of news regarding the Church in crisis that is available. All I was shown was that the popes of my lifetime were the antichrist, and I was charged with communicating this to you for the good of all. Many outside the Church will not be surprised at the news, especially those fond of Martin Luther, while the readers I want to reach especially, the faithful of the Catholic Church will probably ignore the warning, if they ever hear it. However, if they be like the men of Nineveh, I will be happy, not sad, if the Church is saved and not destroyed. The point in the logic of the work, that God
does not think like we do, is seen in the career of the prophets, who if they were true, were not listened to, except perhaps for Jonah and Nathan and Samuel. The things we are told are too often too hard to bear, and the message of God too much of a challenge to the frail human nature which relies on the traditions of men rather than faith in God. You may think me but a self-styled prophet, so I will let the work speak for itself, and say that numbers do not lie, and that they translate easily to the present day. Therese of Liseux, whom I often invoke, said everything is grace. So, the seeming death-throes of the Church need not be cause for sorrow, if it was the will of God for Rome to be what it has become, a thing hard to understand, but that it was foretold long ago is clear to me, and so we need neither rejoice nor fear but rather realize the signs of the times, as they are sometimes called, and become the light of the world which Christ says we are. The kingdom is within us. Where but two are gathered in His name, there He is in the midst. When the son of man returns will He find faith on earth? He says there will be a remnant who have not knelt to the Baal. It is up to each one of us in the integrity of our consciences, which are not deliberately set against Rome, but which Rome has deliberately set itself against, to decide in the crisis of the Church in the World where God really is and go there. If you can find Him nowhere else, at least He said He will be in you if you believe, and I believe God in His promises, every last one. The antichrist was given a number in The Bible rather than a name not so much to hide him, but to reveal him, because the ultrastructure of numbers endures across all languages, and needs no translation, thus escaping deconstruction. When John Paul II said that the apocalypse of John was about the future history of the world, he told a lie, for it was about that man and his time that it speaks, while he seemed to be encouraging traditional readings of scripture. As Hans Kung said, John Paul II was the most contradictory Pope of modern times. And I have shown that the root of this contradiction is in the mystical evil that has tried since 1945 to gain control of not only the Church but of the ones
who are faithful to it. Without their assent the Roman hypocrisy must cease. Long has Rome been implicated in sin and crime, which can no longer be hidden. The hour of the final battle of good and evil draws near, and with the judgment beginning at the Church, as Peter says in his letter, where does the poor sinner stand? Indeed, with the ground cut out from under the feet of Catholics, and with the world already under the control of an antichristian matrix of forces including Islam, Israel, China and the technological capital of the magical projection of fascism where liberalism once stood, with a kind of Nietzscheanization, as has been said, of all politics, with a criminal intent to corruption on all sides, we are not, as seems, at the door of another dark age in which we must keep our love and knowledge alive in small isolated communities, but rather we stand at the brink of the end of the world. Now, scripture portrays the end in two ways, one a flaming inferno of fiery justice, and another in which the lion lays down with the lamb. This is just one of the many contradictions in The Bible. That the church has always been both sinful and holy, that we are sinners yet saved, that God died for us, that more than half of the popes were never made saints, and almost none since the Reformation, that the Second Vatican Council almost to a man unanimously passed the reform of the liturgy that fifty years later John Paul II and Benedict XVI will undo in the name of a “literal” translation and true “authenticity,” opening the door, I think, to some evil that means the invalidation of the mass, that these things were foreseen by the author of Scripture, and are part of God’s plan, who can comprehend? Yet, as Paul had the mind of Christ, so may we, to be not conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewal of our minds. Paul also said that God’s grace was sufficient for him, and so it may be for us. He said woe to me if I do not preach the gospel, so may we, and as John said, blessed are they who read this book and keep it, so may we, for I have added nothing to revelation, nor taken anything away, for I have seen Rome where it says Rome is, and have lived in Babylon, the market of the whore. That the new city of Jerusalem will be our all in all, that God will wipe away every tear, but that the way there is hard and narrow, and few there be that find it, is the awful and awesome truth of our apocalyptic age.
As Christ has said to one in our own time, “They are confused, they do not understand about My mercy.” Think of the mercy of God as His to possess and dispense, not in the hands of popes or priests and one will be more comforted by grace than by magical terms such as ex opere operato in which the Church teaches that the sacramental catholic economy works itself, without regard to God or man. As if by chanting they can bind the will of God. The power to loose and bind is important, but so are the words in which that power is described. What you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven and what you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven. What the Church has done does not then apply to her power to forgive, but rather, that instead of binding evil, they have bound God’s hands, and have set loose an unholy thing that will bring an eventual response. There is a correspondence of Heaven and earth, a kind of symbolic action takes place between them, and I think this is what Christ meant in the binding and loosing. His mercy was always to forgive the penitent, so if the priest does as He does, where else would the power lie but in the symbolic way I state, in which the Church binds God and looses what it should not, which any observer of the Church should now see. That God says I will have mercy on whom I will is the truth which we need not fear, for God is merciful, and we should seek Him rather than go to a man and an economy of sacraments that only has the appearance of the grace of God, but is in reality rather like technology, an aspect of ex opere operato, a thing under no one’s control, operating as if by magic. It was perhaps the divorce of grace and nature, whether by Platonism or Thomism, the positing of the ideal and the real, that led to an inevitable nihilism. But outside stands the grace of Christ knocking at the door. God will close the “ring” by His action, not ours. By His will, not ours. By a grace the Church calls prevenient, but which is truly grace as such in its totality, a free gift of God’s. We then are to be blessed. As there is an inculpable atheism and a culpable atheism, as Karl Rahner showed in the 1960s, so there may be a culpable and an inculpable Catholicism, which is not to say catholicity. Any one who becomes
aware of the crimes of the Church, let alone the thing I have had to say in this book about the antichrist, must decide for themselves how to work out their salvation. The decapitation of the Church at Rome is needed, which is done in principle when each member of the Church acts on their own, thinks on their own, and becomes truly the kingdom of priests God says we should be. Would that all God’s people were prophets, but the application of the oil of anointing is not enough, if one receives their vocation but does not keep it, is not true to it, which is to be true to Christ in all situations and to speak out even if it be against those with the power, it seems, to judge you. For in truth there is but One judge, and judgment is reserved to Him alone, so that He may bind what has been loosed and loose what has hitherto been bound. The PP could also be the pages following, or just the “papa,” of the Pope, and I believe. It has been said unless you believe you will not understand, but I think you must, I must, love and forgive, show no resistance to evil, be perfect, be merciful, be holy, take every thought captive for Christ, say scriptura sola, and so not leave out the text on the Apocatastasis, which was condemned by Justinian and the councils, but say yes to the insight that was proclaimed by Peter at Pentecost of the great promise of the universal restoration, or the all in all, which is a word and a vision of the complete fulfillment, the arrival, no more of war and division and no more condemnation and no more evil, but, PP as a perfect peace, or as Kant said, “to eternal peace,” for we have been at war, so long now, in the one battle of good and evil, we always the good ones and you always the evil, us and them and I and the Other. But reaching the point of what the east calls non-duality, I neither surrender to evil or resist it any longer, do not condemn it nor the one doing it, but love it, forgive it, claim my error which I reified as an IT or Other, and surrender it to Christ. In truth the Popes were the anti-Christ, I believe, but did not know they were. The CC was profoundly hypocritical, but did not see itself as such. By a method of triangulation the truth is not only reached but preserved. Thus the Trinity. Thus, the God-ChurchWorld, thus all hierarchies must be greater than the dual opposition which is the structure of disease and deconstruction, posited in morals as
good and evil. To reach this triangulation in politics, there must be a center, not simple left and right wings. In history and in religion and philosophy not simply faith and reason or Athens and Jerusalem, but the east, so long excluded, which from our standpoint of dualism seems to be the Other, but which is the thing that perfects and completes and will keep the structure not only from not collapsing into nihilism under the weight of the real and the ideal, but by grace bring the arrival long sought, and allow theory room for practice, the thing the Church didn’t. In myself I forgive and love now the Other in me, do not condemn it, and do not illusorily declare a false peace but find true peace within. I must become Christ and Buddha and Socrates, by doing the works they did. You will say I am absurd and this is the impossible itself. Yet, they said it would be so, and told each and every one to do it, to be it, to make peace. Heaven has already begun, it is within us all, as Christ said, as Buddha said. The war was necessary. Peace is not impossible. Shakespeare had his epilogue, spoken by Prospero, and Joyce too made a large epilogue for waking, as the other did to ask forgiveness. The Book does not end with the war, but with the peace in Jerusalem that follows. Good and evil are overcome as the structure of war by the truth that they be not opposed any longer, and that to condemn any-thing is error, and to forgive is divine. We all have been given the power to forgive and to make peace. I love my enemies, all of them, no matter who or what or why. Some knew it, so that now we may love. To perpetual peace, the PP of Kant, and the proxy of the papacy, the pleasure principle, the postal principle, papa, or papaw, patriarchs and prophets, prostitutes and physicians, professors and preachers, the poles of north and south or of the opposition once we thought was irrefragable, to the struggle of good and evil, or of myself and the world, that war, was the illusion of me. In reality I am someone else known only to God. Post-Pontiff catholicism will be like the waking of the dead, the union of things irreconcilable, the arrival of the Messiah in fact not just in principle. For we all let usurpation and usury take sway in Rome and
everywhere else, worshipped a lie, and yet but judged our-selves. I must let go of the desire to be led, of the desire for leaders, of the desire that follows, in order to be free of the desire itself. Sophocles said that we suffer into truth. That is tragedy, but we learn. To know one must suffer, and we all suffer, but not all come to know the truth of suffering, have the experience but miss the meaning, or know it only in theory or by the book but not by direct knowledge, as it is, but lost in words and things, lose the way, which indeed is hard to find. The prize is not for invention, but for discovery. Reinvention, or rediscovery, one must choose their relation to the past, their own and the world’s. Buddha, Jesus, Socrates: did not write, did not work, did not take money for the teachings, did impart truth by word and deed, and did not lie, and did speak of suffering as to how it may be over-come, in different ways, but basically not by obedience but by independence, not by memory but by vision, not by mind but by heart, not in theory but in practice. I have made my work in the age of the triumph of theory which was the nadir of reality, and that formed the work in many ways, a problem to solve. As the alchemist Celan said, solve and coagula, which Robert Yankow too might have said of the forces of truth and tragedy, of magic and suffering, of the great transformation that must take place, whether we will or no, this life or the next, as God chooses. Transcendence means that God is absolutely different, and that he chose for Jesus to be the one to suffer not just as part of an economic exchange in sin and guilt and atonement, but as a sign and symbol of the absolute difference of God and man, which is, and yet which we can not let hinder us from getting to God, by trust. The mercy of God is evident, because I am. Who am I? The one God chose to learn and to be written. What have I learned? That I have written, and will have been written, but that the truth is not in writing, nor in the spaces nor in the differences. That I kept going. That I finished before I died, but in a way had to die and be willing to die in order to finish. That I prayed and was prayed. That I loved and was loved. That I hated and was hated, that I desired whether or not I was desired, that I made and stole, consumed, used, borrowed without repaying, that I was always angry, and thought I
knew what was going on, though I was always ignorant. That I gave this up, because I didn’t give up. In the end, in a last desperate move, I told my wife that I was calling in an air strike on my own position. Indeed. It happened. As I explicated the end of the world, my world did end and begin again. She and I, in our vessel of mystery, our apartment on the Richmond Strip, made a great transformation of ourselves, of the work in us and on the pages of the books, and in a way yet known, in the world. It was alchemy in the true sense of the word. I became in a way I cannot show or say the very Christ and Buddha and Socrates, and had to be, not just seem to be, to save myself, my wife, my marriage, my work, and to save the world. Tremendous forces had been unleashed and we were buffeted by a storm, yet made the higher ground, by grace. I became more than moral, more than mystical, more than I can conveniently say, but that I suffered, that she suffered, that I became awake and aware, that she too knew there was something more that she could see in me yet not understand, and that we both had to make peace between us, for us and for all, for God’s sake, and said it was the most important day of our life, but did not shrink back from the work, but gave our all, risked all, became more than we had been, made the passage together, crossed the river, loved and understood, each other, forgot what it meant to the book and to the world and to God even, but said, what do we mean to you and me, and the lives we saved were our own, and lived after we had died, and were born again, and did not violate but fulfill, and did arrive in fact, as we had promised and had hoped, and did not just want to be real but were real, the thing-in-itself, in learned unknowing, and wise simplicity, forgiving my folly, my waste, her concern for money, my obsession with God, our desire to escape each other and the work of destiny, the symbols of handshakes, kisses, a prayer, water, goodbye. And on awaking in our ordinary minds to go on thanking, grateful, now seeing signs that we would make it and had and get to God together. I have related the thing that happened as best I can, and hope whoever you are, wherever, and whenever, that you already know and know it even better than we. My book, my life, my wife, my world, my work, my God, me
myself, I surrender, not in sacrifice but in mercy. Desperate diseases require drastic cures, and at last I had to love all or lose all, and so I loved. We all know the theory of love, I think, but oh how little we practice love itself and thereby understand and forgive and be the ones that we are meant to be, Jesus, Buddha, all the saints, all the genius of the spirit, the moral, the mystic, the poetic, the music of the seers, the vision of what exceeds words, and through that thing so little preached these days, self-control, the chief fruit of the Spirit that guarantees all love joy peace patience, surrender control to gain control, gain control but to surrender any right to any claim to any desire to, but actually being it, without right claim or desire, being the gift, in discernment, be the narrow path God will have forever been here.
On the following Sunday morning, early in the dark, after a night of study of Christian and Buddhist scriptures, and writers such as Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Eliot, Marx and Engels, I determined in prayer to Jesus that I wanted to keep my faith in Christ and yet still attain enlightenment like the Buddha. I lay on the bed in the cold December night the week before Christmas and meditated. I thought of the void, and I thought of the form. I recalled that in the Preface to this work I had said that in the beginning was an infinite nothingness which contracted creating limit, the eternal, God. I saw in this the relation of the void and form. It is also seen in the gestalt of figure and ground. But the truth is neither of these alone, nor these two together. Neither is it the perception of the distinction between the space and the form. Neither is it ignorance of the void and form. I thought for a moment what this ultimate truth could be and said, it is love. In Buddhism, the point is one of not clinging, non-attachment, and that is the character of human love, to cling, to grasp, to be attached. It is desire, it is greed, it is human love. Christ on the cross showed what divine love is. It is letting go. It is selfemptying. It is not putting sovereignty in question, as Derrida did, nor renunciation of it, but surrender and abandonment, as I said in papers on the arrival in 2006. God’s love is so great that He lets go of everything,
at the same in the cruelest of all situations, nailed, in pain, despised, but praying for his enemies, granting salvation to the good thief, looking out for his mother, before the cry of dereliction at His abandonment by God. And then: It is finished. The veil is torn in two and God’s love is no longer to be doubted. The difference between God and man is shown. As Thomas Aquinas said, Christ suffered out of exceeding charity. The suffering was not for the sake of itself, a penance or austerity, but took place to convince us of the love of God, how completely a love divine lets go of even itself and its own being. The unity of Christ and Buddha was thus seen in the meditation. What Buddha taught is true, and agrees completely with Christ. As well, the Socratic theory of forms is reconciled with the two, and the idea of the relation of the soul and body, which is perhaps one reason for the extremity of the passion. As Socrates said pain and pleasure nail the soul to the body, so the passion showed it is possible to overcome this through love. In the morning, seeing light on my wall, I saw in the light something like the love I had seen the night before, that it is neither space nor form nor cognition nor ignorance. And so too with life itself. Love and light and life transcend the dual nature of thought that makes perception of form and void. In a way, the transubstantiation and the hypostatic union, as taught by the Church, accurately describe the Christ, but also tell the truth of all beings in which God subsists and whom He loves. I kept my faith in Christ, enlightened like Buddha, and Socrates, and so learned the truth, that it is one and all.
Moral Epilogue It is better to feel a desolation than a false consolation, but to receive true consolation is the mercy and grace of God.
Remains: The Perfect Number God Alone Is Good. God Alone Is. God Alone. God.
Fame of the Frame We became en-framed by an other writtenness, but in the tradition of the same, we became the frame-breakers. This witness of the time of the King, was not counterfeited, But counter-fitted, to join, to unite, to marry, to one. If we suffer into truth, and if this frame is the cadaver of France, Then over graves and over men and over lords we triumphed. It is not the value for life which decides, nor death instincts, But love alone, the body of God, what matters, His form. The gibberish and jibbers of the solicitation of delights remind Me of the conversion of Odilon Redon and his signatures, Which dispersed darkness into light, and scattered light into My darkness, so that at the point of no return, I turned. Therefore, gold, yet silver, and every precious stone throne, Cannot take the place of the dear little ones growing in you; Words and things do not suffice, and we fall back on feeling, And guess our way to freedom’s opening, gracious and given.
Nietzschean The more we masked ourselves, the less we mastered, and enslaved, Became an indefinable role, The ones given lines To stand in, not for Recitation.
Brother Jacques His: Entombing, Engraving, Enframing Enflaming: Derrida did not die in vain, For I remain: In session.
The Difference Between Judgment and Criticism If we will stand, We’ll stand corrected.
Recovery They asked my father, then, if your son kills, will you cover for him? And my Father replied, not only cover, but recover, I for him. Therefore, love is my alibi.
Critique Epicriticism was not the separation of sheep from goats Among the writers, But the discernment of the touch of truth In the feel of words and the heat of intent.
PM Meta and Para made a map Of all we could have been, But for the territory.
The Seer Little things to say, Little time to say them, No great thing left undone.
Thrown That, nothing will have taken place but the place (itself) is the good of the tomb that fell to Derrida.
Noble Truths That, things fall apart is Gravity’s Law, not mine, for I have sakes yet, and suns to come.
The Path Realization is, then, to make real? No. It is to be made real. So, You cannot realize yourself. If you realize that, You may yet be realized.
Liturgicam Authenticam Kings kept keys, Keepers kindly kept, Keeping-in and Keeping-out, While Peter yet recoiled. Where are you going? he still asked. To take your place, God still replied.
Bunches Views and reviews, visions and revisions, And all you did for me: Flowers, for the asking never entered my mind.
Therese A thousand violins, No thing left to say: Music in our minds, Hearts I hear today.
Abstract French He said, And therefore there was one flower left unseen, One flower yet to see, That can never be seen By any eye Which still remains, The still, Life’s abstract Florid bouquet, Which was not, Is not, Will never have been, But ideally, Which was your reality and the nothingness, Which yet said yes to thee.
Starred Perhaps, A constellation, A scattered pattern, Of lights and sighs, A million-million miles away, Perceived they say by our deception, Yet revealed at night, Alone, Without celebrity, In utter clarity, Higher than known, God’s poetic utterance, A throwing and a throne Shone.
Roman Holiday God gives us saints And they give us Him. In the catholic economy, Institutes rise and fall, Rates fluctuate, And coin becomes debased, Yet His light reign Gives us increase, As Himself bestowed.
Scripture Words and blows, Less even lines, Cried utterance To the uttermost, Deliberation Liberating, Delimitation Known.
Confessors Deconstruction dispelled The incantatory escheatment of the Versus, like: In Freud’s lingered error, Where it was, there I shall be: Where it was, where will I be? But to get to God, Alone. It mattered. Did we think the act a stolen show? Did we think it but a pair of dice thrown? Back, back, back! Our witness was a whiteness, Testified, Fired, smoked, ashed, Cinders sent. Yes! Taints unsecreted, Religion did not become us, But the tomb.
Gift of Knowledge Love of God and love for neighbor. Life and all we meant. To do, to be, to have, to make, Was still but to be lent.
Kid Boiled in his mother’s milk, Broiled by his father’s sun, The child took arms against. Never, never, never: Go back again. Sisters resume, consume, exhume, exhale. Brothers beheld, belied. Be: trails, happy trials, be: Let be: Yes, yet, still we will be: Silence was not the rest, Nor yet the play, But the thing that works Between.
The Virgin Martyrs
To do more than one can do Is a flat contradiction, So it must not be I that did. While you smoke the cigarette, The cigarette smokes you, Almost not without a fire. Joan of Arc amid her voices, Telling her what to do; yet It was Joan, Joan, ever Joaned, Ever sainted, ever crowned, Every girl who ever was, A virgin to her wedded day.
Peace
God did not start, God did not cease, Yet the work is done. Ye bastards: Save it for your wives. Rough bests the worst, And to sea would I ride. I have not yet begun, I have already done, For God in me still hides. The birds will sing, The night will chant, As you and I abide.
Search for the Absolute
The relation of Christ and Buddha has for me become the paramount question, that is, how to think of them together. The two come from differing traditions, east and west, and I think very different logics, the Buddhist non-duality, the Christian binary opposition. In Christianity, as descended from the fall in Genesis, everything is based on knowledge of good and evil, and all thinking is based on this duality. Therefore, when one says I and other, or any pair, one must lineup with good and the other with evil, even if the two are neither good nor evil, but because they are paired thus, they become morally culpable or not. All thought, almost, seems to be based on this structure. In recent times Derrida and others have perhaps tried to question or unsettle or rewrite this arrangement. Whether the culture is more at peace now than before 1965 is something you must judge for yourselves. I do not think they have been successful because they did not abandon the structure but doubled it, binding us even more tightly to it, because by opposing it they have strengthened it in force and by complicating it have not made it easier to step out of. The logic in the human mind based on such opposition is a knot one hardly knows where to begin to untie. Of course, there is always the so-called sword to cut the knot, but such force may or may not be effective. It depends on the sword one chooses. That Nietzsche and others applied force is without question, but that freedom is not nearer but further away seems the remains of the deconstructive project, because, I think, it was a death of‌ rather than a love of‌ that forced the issue, and created a circularity rather than a sheer cleavage. The effraction, in fact, Derrida seemed to eliminate, either from inside or outside the circularity, because everything must take place, if it takes place, inside the text. Whereas at one time it was in God that we lived and moved and had our being, now it is in a text. The unleashing of textuality has revived a number of forces or spirits
once overcome by Christ and Buddha, and many things are influencing our lives in many ways that most people are scarcely aware of, or second in a nihilistic way, waiting enthusiastically for the end. These genealogies in the heavens would keep us from the goal, and so, with the death of God having been accomplished, it is necessary for Christians and Buddhists to join together the foundations and not “reconstruct” what was, but start over, not reinventing but beginning again or being born again. Anything that can be reconstructed can be deconstructed forever, so we must lay aside the notion of structure itself, that is, hierarchy must be jettisoned at whatever level and the emptiness of Buddha beneath the tree and the emptiness of Christ nailed to the tree must be our one goal and our one means of salvation and liberation, our resurrection and enlightenment. Deconstruction did not empty the structure. We must not use the structure against itself, but let go of structure itself. We must not turn ideas against ideality, but let all go, even ourselves, for in letting go of self and other both at once that state known as the “not-other” may be attained. The dilemma of good and evil has been transposed by deconstruction into that of the same and the other, polarities reversed, doubling the effect of structure, and perverting morality, inverting thought, not letting go of thought. For surely deconstruction cannot be accused of simplicity or of renunciation of intellect, but is rather the hyper-logical, hyper-intellectual basis for our culture today. Of this, let go. Only the fullness and the emptiness are important, not the filling, not the hunger, not the semblance, not desire. The absolute cannot be achieved directly, by force, by striving, but only through a sincere emptiness that is done in faith, in hope, but without an attempt to control the outcome, and with a trust that by letting go of all, me, you, God, we will yet arrive, neither forcing arrival, nor avoiding it, but in losing our way, find it, for when we are lost we may be found, and cannot be found unless we are lost. To find the absolute, we must give up the absolute absolutely, and be absolved of both the problem and of the solution, not questioning, not seeking an answer, the mind neither attached nor non-attached, stopped, emptied of itself, of
all opposition, not even opposing itself but simply letting go, release, cease, peace. The mind itself is not the answer to the problem of delusion, but continues to be trapped in it as long as it is. When the mind ceases to think, it is transformed, neither conformed to the world nor informed by it. This is the substitution, the sudden falling away, attained by emptiness, when absolute emptiness and absolute fullness coincide. Everything else is mere opinion, relative semblance, neither ordinary nor extraordinary. To make the ordinary and extraordinary coincide, the mind to be transformed, the self and the other let go of, all desire to pass away, one may meditate on the cross. This meditation on the cross brings together the themes of Buddha and Christ, the emphasis on suffering and the way to overcome it, which is through emptiness and negation, done either mentally, physically or both. Only by this kind of death can the new life be attained. Buddha arose from under the tree transformed, as Jesus did from the tomb. In each becoming completely empty, each became completely full, and so their pattern is one, and one for us even today. Our real state of emptiness is the truth we hide from and in delusion cover over. We must admit it, accept it. It is the evasion of the truth that is painful, not the truth itself. As long as we try to be full, we will never be. Once we become empty, then we will be full. It is not either/or, not neither/nor, but both together in each other. That is why it is true that in Zen samsara and nirvana are really one, and why Heraclitus said the way up and down is one and the same. The logos, which is also reason, is the mind of Christ, and is the mind of Buddha, and people are of one mind are at peace, in that only by being mindful can we realize this state of being of one mind for everyone. As long as one is good and the other evil, it will not be, but only through love of everyone. Non-judgment, forgiveness, love of enemies are the terms Christ used to leverage our minds toward non-duality. The whole is then asymmetrical, there being no absolute opposite of God, so thus our thinking must become, without absolute oppositions, and by this non-opposition creating a possibility for triangulation through non-mirroring. The mirror stage of the mind implies that human love is
always accompanied by hate, and that human mercy is always accompanied by justice, that we always think in terms of rewards and punishments, and that our freedom always implies slavery. Perhaps the opposable thumb is our techno-logical basis. But the divine mind of Buddha and Christ does not oppose and is not opposed. The divine love does not hate because it does not desire. The divine mercy is absolute because it does not involve any kind of justice or judgment. Only people think that way, and as long as we do, we can not be absolutely loving, free, merciful or happy. Our happiness will always consider, compare, contrast, criticize, covet, rather than be content, complete, catholic, in the sense I mean the word these days, which is to say, a universe of paths, not a universal path, each of us independent, but all mindful of everyone. To realize that no one we meet will be the same as, equal to or less than we, that through this we stand not in relation, or unrelated, but in arrangement, in coordination, in harmony, cooperating, not competing, running for the joy of running, because we fulfill ourselves by so running, is the race to be won. Drops in an infinite sea, none are opposed to another. The things I have spoken of may also be seen in this way: The de/re problem regarding structure in theology is a chimera, because these structures are themselves false as to form and notion. The transubstantiation is almost correct, involving the emptying of substance, with its following replacement by another. In reality, the substance actually is not, and the accidents are only there as a kind of illusion without foundation. Enlightenment is to see through the accidents of being to the level of the place which takes place without anything else taking place or taking its place. In other words, the poet saw through the foam and froth of language to the underlying reality of sheer space, which in the end is not even spatial. The sword of no-mind cuts off even possible placement in this place. Nothing will have taken place. The so-called revaluation of all values, is really their Transvaluation, in a triangulation with their devaluation and revaluation. The de/re is probably the new way of expressing the duality as such, and must be triangulated by the trans which crosses all values, all structures, all substances,
all times and places, all selves and all others, with a movement which is not an endless displacement or a continuous spinning in place, but a conveyance of clairvoyance. It is to see the emptiness itself, which is the truth of “faith creates being.� The emptiness of faith realizes our divine coincidence, the absolute emptiness and fullness which faith creates, the two angles set aside from the acute angle of semi-seeming which is accidentality. The substance taking place in us and in all is our very emptiness and our very fullness, and is our own identity. They are never apart, and being one is being the other, at once. The extremes coincide. All else between them is the semblance we must overcome by seeing through our illusions, not using them, or letting them use us. The delusion of magic is just this life that seems to control so much, and give us so much control, but which prevents or hinders the realization of truth which is peace in the heart, the compassion for those who suffer delusion. The greater part of the delusion is that those who suffer it do not realize their own suffering, and rather fear the emptiness that is their true peace, true love, true selves. Almost all philosophies and religions mean to teach reality and the way to it, but hide reality and the way there. Christ and Buddha denied themselves, saying no, took up the problem of suffering as task, saying yes, and breached trails for us to follow, both of mankind’s greatest teachers showing us a way to really be peace, love and understanding, through acts of emptying, fulfillment and arrival.
Itinerary of The Thirty Years War
The years 1980 to 2010 were the time of my education and coming of age, from rebel and poseur in the 1980s, to a man who has lived through several philosophies and religions, madness within and madness without, right into the apocalypse I see unfolding as the work concludes with the approach of the absolute. Most of the work lies along the triple path of Catholicism, Deconstruction and Dialectic. The journey takes dramatic turns toward the end, to arrive at Buddhism and the reconciliation of the emptying of Buddha with the emptying endured by Christ. The search, an indirect history of my moral, intellectual and psychological lives, seldom breaks into a direct relating of events, as would conventional autobiography, but is my epicriticism on antecedents among Romantic writers, on the theologians of the church, and on the postmodern codification of delusion. Interpenetration of the Catholic and the Buddhist, prophesied in fiction forty years ago, will have been by the end of the work, which happened by faith in Christ as the answer to long prayers, and led to a kind of dark light and enlightened night that could reconcile the erotic mysticism of San Juan de la Cruz with the Verses on Faith Mind of the Third Patriarch of Zen. What one reaches through excess another arrives at by negation. Both let go. It does not matter whether the end is reached by an absolute yes or an absolute no, as long as the arrival is absolute. Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no, anything else is evil. No in-betweens. No deconstruction. Socrates, Buddha and Christ agree on the essentials. The Absolute, the moral life, love of the good, the unnecessity of writing, the straitness of the way. A logic of the impossible and speculations on the apocalypse in my work prepared me for the unforeseen triangulation of faith and reason by the not-other of them, the mind itself, ordinary, extraordinary, arrivable.
Oppositions
The opposite of illumination Is not darkness But opinion. The opposite of enlightenment Is not ignorance But insincerity. The opposite of the good Is not evil But hypocrisy. The opposite of being Is not nothingness But seeming-to-be. The opposite of the finite Is not the infinite But the indeterminate. The opposite of theism Is not atheism But money. The opposite of life Is not death But sleep. Be or not be. Do not seem to be. Because of the triangularity Of existence, the way is not clear. Lost in the delusion, We see neither light nor dark. Desire is delusion, Delusion desires itself. All self-direction, All other-direction, Is polarized, misses the mark. Yet, one must shoot.
Flores de Monterrey
Once I said, I knew not why, Petals to dirt, Stem to sky.
Closing Prayer
Father, we pray for the peace and salvation of all the world, Lord, hear our prayer. For all beings to pray for us and that we pray for all beings everywhere always, Lord, hear our prayer. That hell may be forever empty and heaven forever full, that all be forgiven, Lord, hear our prayer. That we all may let go of anger, greed and desire, and live in peace, perfectly, Lord, hear our prayer. That the valley be filled, the way made level and smooth, and the lion and the lamb lie down together, led by a child, Lord, hear our prayer. For faith, hope, love and insight, for all beings everywhere, to be awake,
Lord, hear our prayer. For mercy and for sacrifice, for hearing truth at the right time, and being what we will have been in God’s eyes, Lord, hear our prayer. For denying ourselves, to not do what we should not do, and for taking up our cross, to do what we should, to follow, Lord, hear our prayer. In Christ’s name, Father, we make our prayer, in the Spirit, that You be all in all. Amen.
tomb
The curtain of the unveiling of the apocalypse will be in but the blink of an eye, the simul ringing down of the curtain, as the desolation of the abomination is raised on high to disturb the canonical saints and then in the last act the monstrous logic of the sacrifice, once for all, yet always repeated, again and again, both singular and machine-like, once living once dying forever living forever dying, is suspended by the worst, the suicide, or more suicide of catholicism by the voiding of the rite by the rewriting of the order of the mass, let it be read by each, that we will not be we, but from union to mere series, from the son and father one in being to the Latinate consubstantial, which will confuse the essence of the transubstantiation, from and also with you, to and with your spirit, which even the bishops cannot explain where and when the priest acquired that spirit, to the changing of the words of institution, the all becoming many, which is misinterpreted by some as the narrowing of salvation, no I speak not of quantity but of the quality, going from the definite to the indefinite, the destabilizing of the core of the mass, and there are other words misplaced and misshapen in syntax, but especially when it changes from a sacrifice of praise to a sacrifice of ourselves for God’s praise, what is this? And so the Roman Church will sacrifice itself come this November, because the beast was wounded and almost died but did live, and the prophet promotes his agenda, his image, the decreed Missal, which indeed will speak or be spoken, and which one must adhere to without dissent to partake of the sacramental economy, a thing spoken for worship, to worship, and Catholics, signed on hands and foreheads with oil in confirmation and again every lent with ashes, as in Revelation, are in the circum-stances I describe, the only way in the world this year that the apocalypse can happen, because nowhere else is there such a conjunction of prophecy with practice. O, Catholicity! O, City of God! So in my interim, before the story that leads to where I now am, I give you the abbreviated word of the end of the world, a warning I could not postpone, but send ahead as fore-runner of the demise of roman insistence. Yet, this may be good news still, both for the church and for the world, especially for the world, because He came for the sinners, not for the salvation of those who are righteous. God does not think like we do, which we cannot understand, with in-comprehensible
love that reaches out not just to those of good will, but especially the unjust and unmerciful, so that the judgment that begins at the House of God, may be a warning to the rest of the world. What will happen to the church and the world I do not know, except that in reading both testaments of apocalyptic literature there are passages that are clear and others that are opaque. Scripture scholars and many priests tell you one thing, historical or textual, but I think we should look into matters for ourselves. The hope I hold now is that the end is not really the end, but a narrow strait to a better world, beginning even here on earth, with a thousand year reign, after the key of the abyss seals the error and evil of our apocalyptic time, to free us for the joy of Christ. The books I have written start in a far different place from the one I dwell in now, morally, intellectually and spiritually. What began as a young attempt at deconstruction before I fell for God in my conversion and began writing from a catholic point of view, goes through many stages, to arrive at the evacuation of the church, but not of faith, which I need even more now, and that in God, not in either the tradition or the revelation, but in the sole authority, which I see at work everywhere around me in what I term the ultrastructure, the articulation of the one life or force that is within and without us all the time, which contains the struggle of good and evil and all that depends upon that difference. One love we say. Yes, yet, we defer and differ, from each other and from ourselves, but you, and I, what are we to Him? Vaster than the star reaches, faster than a ray of light, this flux of which we sometimes become more or less aware, in the coincidence of things, or their adherence, rather than always falling, or if falling, falling faster, but into arms to catch. We need not plummet into the abyss, but He has mercy on whom He chooses, His hands are not tied by the words of men, as the seminarian told me years ago, though magic sometimes seems to work for some. It may be that the present age that began in the period of the second world war, after the publication of Joyce’s last work, is the ricorso, the chaotic transition to the renewed state of humanity, and that this fourth age of understanding in which we live is but a brief interruption and that the circle will recommence, like the journey through both black hole and
worm hole to a better place in another world, or so it seems to me, that is, that scriptures and the writings of the postmodern, Joyce and Derrida, for example, need not cancel out each other, even if contradictory they seem or really are, for this is the era of the contradiction, and perhaps I speak against one thing and then against another and so interdict myself, but here in my world, there is still a we, a new we, not fragmented, but coming together, through technology, through spirituality, through community, through sharing our spaces and our thoughts, though still clinging to too much and not letting enough go, in order to arrive. They say either joy or pleasure or some such distinction, or Buddha and sentient beings, or Christ and whatever opposes Him, but He said love anyway, even those on the Other side. That is what we are going to be taught and shown, I think, as we suffer together the next few years, but only a short time in order to make our best effort, to learn how to make our best effort, to not fear but to love. Often in a disaster the good in people comes out, and I think some will understand but some will never do so. We, future oriented, feeling belated, hardly present, unable to preserve or persevere, deconstructed, disconnected, over aware and under aware, too informed and under informed, let us say these are the days, really despite appearances, to get it right one more time or one last time, to do the right thing, not just the next thing, and to not let up, not even blink until time expires, and when it is over, then to look up and see if we have won, for none can be sure, in a way, though in a sense we are all standing generally before God right now, and at the turning may all still stand together as the light arrives and be found not guilty for our sins and omissions both because some helped turn the wheel, and because the Lord had mercy we could not buy. The drama in these pages came from an un-dramatic life, mostly lived on the margins of poverty and sanity, though marriage and a late education in a catholic graduate school enabled me to push the work toward the points of reform and renewal it reached last year. I learned to love would sum up the thing that happened to me, and so I look back on the struggle between me and the world, and in my own mind between deconstruction and catholicism as being part of that, but how as one nephew asked do you really know if you are in love? Or, how do you know you really love as one ought?
Perhaps we only love as we can, and not as we cannot, and as one man said, in our own peculiar ways, whether that match romantic fantasy or not, who is to say? For Derrida, the precursor, and the curse, love was not a question, not a problem, not something he ever once to my knowledge wrote of, which means by the logic of the un-said that it was the one thing he privileged, the one thing that is greater than even justice, or hospitality, or the other in-deconstructibles. Silence can be ambiguous, or it can be so accurate, as the painter Rothko said. Derrida’s silence about love, remarked in the film about him, and in the magazine the “American Scholar” at the time of his death, is un-like the silence of Heidegger about the Nazis and the Jews, and gives him a moral standing completely without hypocrisy compared to those who preach but do not practice charity in truth. He is said to be against purity, Anything but purity, he said late in life, though he liked pure French, and so much of what he did, all, was for contamination, written corruption in a way, tainted tains, one might say, and truly reflected the situation in the world, but all the time, like the religion he hid and finally revealed, as Caputo, a catholic said, there is, or perhaps we don’t know for sure, a real ideality, a true love so pure it had to be absolutely concealed, absolutely hidden and never put into play, without sign or signature, un-deconstructed, and neither the impossible nor anything else, but the act of love preserved by silence and the great lacuna is thus explained, and the greatness of deconstruction is not the struggle with technology but the absolute faith in love. My friend told me the lost cause is the only thing worth fighting for, and so it seems to me lately, with the church collapsing under the crush of corruption that is being only now by me seen for what it is, though others for centuries knew the truth. The betrayal is personal, and deeper, for it is by those most counted on, like the men abusing young children, or bishops abusing power. And so with the church lost or soon to be, what do I fight for? I think some form of catholicity is still possible, but without a hierarchy. That the council said the one holy catholic apostolic church only subsists in the Roman and is not identical to it, is important. That true church, like Luther’s invisible one will go on after Catholicism has passed away. Sans insistence, what then?
A decapitalization of the Roman, the head cut off, the bank turned inside out, the thing made transparent through and through, completely reformed by the laity and its taking responsibility. For each of us stands alone before God, and cannot be good Germans who only did what we were told. We know in any sense of justice that that defense is inadequate. Some current theologians speak of reconstructive theology, but pay them no mind, they forget that any re can be de again. Let us find the new basis, and jump clear of structure and construction itself, of the machine like mass and magisterium, duplication and duplicity, all folding in principle and in fact for the forgotten body of Christ as an organic singular event not to pass away or be passed over by the machinations of those in power. The body without a head? No. But Christ is the head generally and our own consciences in each of us particularly, and the men who would take them away from us are usurpers, treasonous against the true constitution of the body of Christ, of which all are members. Even severed or unrealized, to expound on Rahner and his implicit Christianity. The priest does not hold the keys, and there is no market for grace, what you have been given freely, pass on to others freely, and money is the enemy of faith and hope and love. Love is free, so if you obtain it by trade or purchase, it is not real love you hold but a facsimile, and all you need to have that love of God is to realize you are already there, yes/yet/you, will have been, a future perfect. Derrida wrote in his late essay on faith and knowledge about a confused series of things, including the projection of Roman power, globalatinazation, and the spread of auto-immune disorders. I could not make sense of this text a decade ago, but now I sense a prophetic voice at work in the deconstructionist. It seems to me that the Vatican has too much immunity, diplomatic immunity, doctrinal immunity, for the problem of the things to come to be resolved by the deconstruction of the hierarchy, the way the Soviet problem in Europe was overcome. The Pope’s immunity is killing the church of which he is the head. The infallibility of the vicar of Christ is the most fallible part of this,
along with a history of the money in Rome. The bank of the Pope was created in 1942 just in time to receive any loot from the Nazis. The impetus initially to create it came from the sordid deal struck with the Italian fascists in 1929, the Lateran treaty, in which the Pope conceded the papal lands lost in 1870 for a large amount of cash and government bonds, over one billion lira. The lawsuits of the last few years brought by Holocaust survivors, trying to force open the books of the Pope’s bank, have foundered on the rock of sovereign diplomatic immunity. It seems that the Vatican is the supreme rogue state, a thing angering Italian officials and their banking system, while the Church operates outside it as an off-shore entity. The Pope answers to no one. But his very immunity is what will destroy the catholic church on its Roman basis. What is taking place is the transubstantiation of the Church herself, with the substance of Christ being displaced, so that only the accidents of a Church remain, that is, it looks like it and talks like it, but it ain’t it. What is replacing the substance of Christ in catholicism is not known, but must be evil. Its far-reaching effects will become apparent when the new order of mass takes place. And yet, be not desperate nor despairing, for the Bible has fore-witnessed these things, even before the birth of Christ. God has decreed it, and we cannot stop it. But scripture says that when Christ comes atop a white horse the sword which he wields will defeat the beast and the false prophet, and that this sword is one of truth. After the work of truth the abyss will be sealed with a key and peace shall reign. I believe this. I hope the work I have written depicts the things of which it speaks accurately and for the good of all, both in the church and in the world. The interpretation of the Bible on these things was always confused by applying them to events in the old Rome rather than today, and by attempting to interpret the number 666 as a name rather than what it is, the numbers of men.It may be that what I have written will be neither published nor if so will go unnoticed by anyone, especially in the church. Some in the world may rejoice though at what becomes of Rome, but I hesitate to do so, except that as long as God’s will be done, then there will be cause for rejoicing.
Pi Critic is Me
We, wilderness-wed, wail-rode, form-finding, neither deferred nor deterred, denying death, and dying to desire, a way kings realized, along aside a brides production‌she, all innocence, all absolutes, all wise, in relativity, he but blinded in the still blessing, allowing conscience’s benediction, she altogether really real and he but idealized, in the nihilistics, came the ring of grace, came death knells and kneeling at altars, given temptation, given grace, the mystery not known yet not to be denied, under the procession of the triumph of life, became the precession, the return, the shift of an axis or axle, bedded, abetted, but we connected, all in the whirl of turnings time, that is, of times stand still, still standing as the time arrived.
April 2, 2011
Michael Bolerjack 3230 S. Gessner Rd. #115 Houston, TX 77063
Dear Sir,
It seems to me that no one will have ever written of the things I do in the way I do with the conclusion I make. If you can further the cause of the work I send you, by all means do so. My financial situation and other matters are precarious, and you may not be able to reach me directly at the above address in the future. If you should decide in some manner to act on this text, feel free to do so at your will. I think once you have read it, you will see the seriousness of the work, and be able to decide for yourself what should be done.
Sincerely, Michael Bolerjack
June 5, 2011
Michael Bolerjack 3230 S. Gessner Rd. #115 Houston, TX 77063
Dear Mr. Elie, In May, 2007, I sent you a few pieces after you spoke at The University of St. Thomas in Houston, and you were kind enough to review them and recommend a couple of places to forward the work. I didn’t find a buyer that year, and then did not pursue publication again until this year, after having written the book I am sending you now. It is a literary text, though it is concerned with theological and philosophical topics. The styles, especially in the second half, take off from Joyce, each chapter in a different technique, even using poetry to make my point concerning the Catholic Church. I set up the conclusion by working out what, in the first half, is a logic reconciling the contradictions in the world by saying the whole is true, not any one side or party, and then afterward I show the big contradiction that the Church at Rome represents. The work received a favorable review from Harpers in San Francisco, a letter I will attach. The material is timely, concerning events this year, and is the best and really only important thing I’ve ever written. Though it is non-fiction, it is, I will repeat, literary, and the book has not a single footnote. I think readers will find it both controversial and written in a manner that convinces them. This, because it is not an off-the-wall diatribe about the rapture or some such. I believe in the work itself, and in the vocation I have concerning it, and was encouraged especially by a priest in the confessional to pursue publication, and as he said, sell it. He told me not to get discouraged, and even relieved me of the obligation to work a regular job, so that I could stay at the task. I did not set out in the beginning to find the facts I present, and was surprised by my conclusion, having been in the Church since 1991, and having even earned a master’s degree in theology at St. Mary’s seminary in Houston in 2005, before my MLA at UST in 2008. Einstein once said, you have to be willing to follow the truth wherever it leads, even if you wind-up proving yourself wrong. If, in the end, I find that Derrida was right and John Paul II was wrong, so be it. There is much more I could tell you about myself and the way the work took place, but I think if you read it you will see the worth of it for itself, as well as for the church and the world. I said in a letter I sent out two months ago, no one will have ever written of the things I do, in the way I do, with the conclusion I make. I think there is a chance this book will make news, and sell well, because you never know what the people will find interesting. I hope it is not too late to get it in stores by the end of the year, if you choose, because it is timely. I enclose the requisite envelopes for your response, if there is any, and for the return of the manuscript, otherwise.
Michael Bolerjack
The Recrucifixion of Christ in the Modern World Division I The Makings of Theology Part 1 They are recrucifying Christ in the modern world Part 2 You have been given temptations Part 3 Altar and visibility Division II Making the Theologian Part 1 You are doing it for the church Part 2 They are confused, they do not understand my mercy Part 3 The loss of so much joy Part 4 Have mercy
A fool, a fool! I met a fool i’ th’ forest, A motley fool!--a miserable world!-As I do live by food, I met a fool, Who laid him down and bask’d him in the sun And rail’d on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms--and yet a motley fool. ‘Good morrow, fool,’ quoth I. ‘No, sir,’ quoth he, ‘Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune.’ And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking on it with lack-luster eye, Says very wisely, ‘It is ten o’clock. Thus we may see,’ quoth he, ‘how the world wags. ‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more ‘twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.’ When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time, My lungs began to crow like chanticleer That fools should be so deep contemplative; And I did laugh sans intermission An hour by his dial. O noble fool! A worthy fool! Motley’s the only wear!
William Shakespeare
An Icon from an Evening in Glas In the days of Camus and Derrida, there was explication de texte. That will have been approached here, while escaping the suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric. For any two things can be connected from any distance under any rule. The text I propose for examination is the title implicated in the top left hand corner of the page. I need not go into the history of the production of the title of the work, for there are texts upon texts and their contexts, which I must effract. How the title was arrived at, from whence it was derived, in-volves the catastrophe of the end of the world which I am witnessing and recording from here, in this text. We all are, basically, from our own angles of view, sort of like the man at the end of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s solitude, who is deciphering the text of the secret as the apocalypse unfolds. Yet, let us keep our hands clean and not be negligent, for the secret of the text is neither magical nor given to
appropriation, neither pornographic nor pyrotechnical. It waits on patience, and purity, perseverance and the peace that surpasses all under-standing. It is not done in a fever, or in a sweat, but in measured strains, by number and weight, neither a march nor a waltz, far rather like David’s prophetic dance before the Ark of the Lord, not frenzied, nor fraught, but rapturous, candid, faithful and confident. That the world does dance away its final hours on the edge of a volcano almost without quite knowing what it is doing, for none can be sure, our certainty forgotten, is the spectacle and the distraction that would, if it could, keep the knowledge locked away, but the truth will out, whether the world will or know. That the world is standing on its head and must be set right, and that Derrida did this in his own way, a way parallel to that of Camus, and not opposed, is simply the way I see it. That Derrida’s last texts concern, I think, sovereignty and the beast, will not go unnoticed, nor the myth of Sisyphus, the problem of the suicide of the church, and the crux of the matter contained in the juxtaposition of two words in almost any dictionary of the English language, that is to say, Deconsecration Deconstruction Which hold the key to the recent history of the world
and the fate of the church. Seeing patterns is making connections. In the game of connect the dots, one finds the hidden design amid the random chaos, in order to reveal the hidden meaning. If the world has an author, if the text has an author, then we have always presumed that there is an inherent pattern or meaning amidst the apparent chaos of our lives and in the works of literature in which we see ourselves reflected. However, if there is no author, then one may connect the dots in whatever manner one chooses, not finding but inventing a design. I think we have reached that point. Not that there is no author, but that things such as characters or people or plots or history are not the paradigm of our research, but language itself. And perhaps still the book as such and authority remain a subject of question and concern, for we know that as we write we may well be written. This is true in genetics, mathematics, physics, which involve writing or codes, that is to say symbolization, something at once both real and symbolic, literal and more than literal, the ideality of design. We do not know where the design came from but we see it. These words are letters that are arranged in patterns that convey meaning, under ideal conditions, the framing context of the mode of the reader and other factors. All of this I say is not the explication de texte, but rather the interpretation,
the other part of studies in the French schools in the time of Camus and Derrida. Coupled as they were in the curriculum, explication and interpretation were analogical to the roles of faith and reason in theological thought, in that they seemed to presuppose one another. That they are still viable, and are distinct disciplines, may be in doubt. Perhaps there is nothing but a generalized economy of writing at this time. Still, we seem to accept in fact some restrictions as necessary, bending the rules where we desire, but still within a kind of framework. I cannot speak for all. There may be types of discourse unknown to me that operate in far different ways. I do not know. One limit case or promontory in that regard is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which in turn inspired the Glas of Jacques Derrida. These texts rewrote the codes or rules regarding literature and philosophy, working out of the command and control authorial paradigm, which is itself based on competition, into a collaborative creativity which does not dictate meaning but suggest it, dream-like and hypnotically, with an almost fascist connotation to the collaborators. On the other hand, I have found that the work I have been engaged in is not limited to these modes, but requires a combination of the contemplative and the critical, on the part of both the author and the reader, for the advent of an economy of meaning that is catholic to take place, that is to say, a universality, as opposed
to the authority of any Roman Empire. The kind of writing that Joyce and Derrida excelled in is characterized by the cognizance and exploitation of what I call the Ultra-structure, a term I have borrowed from science and use to describe what I will sometimes refer to as the Glossolalia of the text, a reading and writing in tongues, as in the Wake, an activity that is summed in the word Icon in the seven word title that I placed at the head of this text. As in the Bible, there is speaking in tongues, an expression of meaning given by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to the nascent Church, and which subsists today even in catholicism in some out of the way places. But just as one may say that the whole economy as such, all economies in principle, have transformed from restricted to general ones, and I here refer to Derrida’s early writings on the subject, the gift of tongues has, in my opinion, also shifted from a strictly oral or verbal expression to the modes of reading and writing, and that in fact textuality itself is this in some way. If language is the house of being, as has been said, which is another way to speak of the languages descended from the catastrophe that took place at Babel, at which time God “deconstructed himself,� according to Derrida, then God is in language, as the Word, logos, as truth and meaning, but in other ways as well. From Holderlin we derive the
scene of reading as a quiet, holy act. I project a general-ization then of scripture as such, perhaps as Derrida did the Messiah. Blake said everything that lives is holy, and the word, language, is a living thing, and though often put to profane and secular use, which is an understatement of the greed and pornography that engulf us, yet our texts are basically sacred in a way, even though impure and contaminated, or perhaps even not despite this but because of it. I have advanced a logic over the course of my work that hinges on the understanding of the necessity of contradiction and it applies in this case. The Ultrastructure in language cannot be without being inclusive, both blessing and cursing, creating and defiling, and so on. It is the principle of connection, the condition of possibility for it. It is potency in relation to act, to speak in quasi-Thomistic terms. When I first discovered the word Ultra-structure, I used it exclusively to describe the numerical, not the alphabetical, and saw that numbers need no translation, and so are privileged carriers of meaning. This insight was crucial in the advancing of the theory concerning the Apocalypse which turns on the meaning of a number in the Book of Revelation. I need not rehearse that for you now, having already covered that ground in previous texts, but promise you the subject will have impacted the work you are now reading. However, I will come at it by way of the Exegesis and Eisegesis of the iconic
seven words of my text, An Icon from an Evening in Glas. But before turning to the explication itself, I would like to preface it with a statement concerning the terms Exegesis and Eisegesis. They mean in their etymological back-grounds in Greek to lead out of and to lead into and are used especially in the context of describing Biblical inter-pretation. When one reads ones own ideas into scripture, one is said to be reading eisegetically, while when one reads what is “really there” one is reading with proper exegesis. On the other hand, Joyce and Derrida and the writers following them eschew such an opposition, deconstructing this polarity, rendering it meaningless. In the explication of the seven word text that is to be accomplished, the traditional idea of Exegesis and Eisegesis, while not being ignored, will be redefined by my practice. I will say in advance that all of this bears on the conversion of “leading” into a kind of “following,” and that interpretation and explication is always more of the following of the seams in the semes, rather than a seeming to lead the text toward its inherent meaning, which is always univocal or equivocal. The text itself is, if not infinite at least indefinite, and cannot be pinned down to a set of controlled meanings or readings. There is no exhaustive Exegesis. One can say this is for a mystical reason, when reading the Bible or other scriptures, and in my theory of the book in general, all texts become the
scripture that they are, and as such may be read as having always more than one meaning, the old model including moral and mystical levels in the hierarchy of interpretation, which my own work several years ago drew on. The network of language exists at both the hierarchical level, while at the same time, and contradictorily, subsisting in the text as a leveling, an evening out, I might say. This is the direction of Ultrastructure or Metasignification, which is neither less than nor more than nor equal to another, while at the same time, and contradictorily, being the parallel or prime of that other traditional, re-stricted, hierarchical method of inter-pretation that characterizes theology and its regimes. By being parallel to the tradition, which has become lost in the labyrinth of its own desire, not only is place given, and magnitude recognized, but direction is now discerned, without which we will not arrive. Our arrival is not derived from the tradition, but survives it. One need not be disconsolate over the loss of meaning, for something is received in its stead, the way to a let us say kingdom let us say of ends that the tradition indicated while at the same time preventing. To put it in theological terms, the Romans do not practice what they preach, and so cannot reach the goal set by the savior, which is neither a leading in nor out of the text, but a following. Deny yourselves, take up your crosses and follow me. Jesus asks not leaders
but followers of the good gospel. Now, at this point in the text, if it were a retro meta-fiction, a second narrator would interrupt and comment on what has come before, and the text would explicate and interpret itself. It seems to me that something of this sort is called for, because of an apparent faux pas on my part in the preceding, that is, my assertion of the relationship between Glossolalia and the word Icon. As I was re-reading what I had written, I noticed right away the dissonance in the assertion, and thought without doubt that the word Glas makes much more sense as the symbol for Glossolalia than the word Icon does. There is, in my apparent slip, a crux, and so I inadvertently
really went straight to
the heart of the matter, and upon reflection, decided that the relationship between the word Glas and the word Icon would be the appropriate site for launching the engagement with the text to be explicated. Glas, the title of Derrida’s monumental 1974 work, is the word in French for the “death knell,” the tolling of the church bells at a funeral. One may ask, who’s death? Indeed, it seemed in a way to me at the time I read the English translation in 1986 to be simply the tradition, or even Western culture, everything before postmodernism. Now, it sounds to me different, the tolling of the bell, and involves a complete
reevaluation on my part of the meaning of Derrida’s work, and the history, meaning and fate of the Church, by which I mean the Roman Catholic. To say the tolling of the death knell is the Church itself mourning the death of the Church itself is what I now discern, and in this I reinterpret Derrida’s overall strategy to have been always directed at the Supreme Pontiff in Rome. Derrida took part in the deconstruction of the time, if not leading it then at least presciently seeing the way things could go and the way he wanted them to go, not for the mere sake of enjoying the de-struction of the world, but to indicate the crisis he, I think, saw coming for and from the Catholic Church. The target of Derrida’s attack was at first expressly logocentrism, presence and propriety, valorizing writing over speech, absence over presence, the other over the subject or the self, scattering over gathering, the text over the book; then, later, he took up the problem of religion in his writings on the Messiah, justice, hospitality, and the openness of the “to come.” Toward the end, he wrote of what he termed globalatina-zation, and warned against a projection of power on the Roman basis, and posthumously mentions together in a title “sovereignty” and “the beast.” It seems to me that Derrida was approaching obliquely but steadily to an interpretation of the death of the Church and to the apocalypse that I believe is underway.
The icon is a sometimes “wordless word� that also sometimes contains within itself a text, a book opened, revealing an ancient script in a foreign languages. The icon itself is an image in need of study, and whether or not it has letters or words in it, is open to interpretation and explication. I believe that, again to eschew the relation of Exegesis and Eisegesis, the icon reads us more than we read it. This can be re-applied to texts generally, rather than being restricted to only iconic images, and then it can be said that the text reads us, explains us, and not the other way around. In my discovery or positing of the Ultrastructure I have found that this phenomenon has occurred especially in what has become known as the postmodern period, from roughly the second world war, or the publication of the Wake in 1939, because of a breakdown in the traditional orders. In the chaos that may be but random chance, the thing, which I call also Metasignification, takes place, whether in the mind or out of the mind, I don’t know, as the connecting of bits and pieces to form patterns. We half-perceive and halfcreate this new reality, as Wordsworth said. We are cocreators of it. It sometimes seems magical or schizophrenic, evil or crazy, or sublimely imaginative, and weird or supernatural. There is something there in the details of general textuality that can be seen if we look hard enough. Joyce had a genius for this
perceiving and creating, and by producing the chaos of the Wake, gave a space for the Ultrastructure to be projected into or discovered, as in an alchemical experiment. The icon of Glas by Derrida fuses the ultrastructure with the traditional, forcing the order itself to bear the weight of the creation of new things within it, which is one aspect of what is called deconstruction. The text is in a place somewhere between rigid order and complete nonsense, a place of lability, change and openness, of possibility that deconstructs the closure of a set arrangement, allowing constant re-invention, and bringing to light an indefinite number of potential connections that cannot be limited or closed off in principle, though in fact for a written work to be, there must be some limits found or applied, as the human subject itself needs an identity, in order to not become lost or submerged in the ever greater of the sea surrounding. But as mystics tell us, our destiny is just that losing of oneself in the infinite sea of God. Textuality is not the divinity, nor is the internet, which are rather simulacrum of eternity, which at least in a parallel manner are breaking into the closed paradigm of human society and are translating us into another space that is preparatory to the advent of the thing that is on the other side of the apocalypse, a kingdom of peace, the new age to come.
At the outset of my text, in addition to the promise of an explication of the seven word title, I promised some interpretation of Derrida’s sovereign and beast, of Camus and the myth of Sisyphus, and of what I call the suicide of the Church, as well as something on the importance of the relation between the words Deconsecration Deconstruction which I think sum-up the problem of the church in the modern world. Taking these in order, it is not, I think, a coincidence that Derrida employs terms that apply to the Antichrist, though the word coincidence has become altogether meaningless in my world. Things just simply are, in their weird ways, and I cannot understand or explain how or why they happen. As I have said elsewhere, I believe John Paul II is the “beast” of the Book of Revelation, based on the interpretation of the text, including an elucidation of the famous number. That, if this is the case, as he was raised to the status of the order of the blessed, then the abomination of deso-lation has already occurred, and the order of mass that takes place in November 2011 is his “image” that speaks in order to be worshipped. It is not clear to me, however, if John Paul II and Benedict XVI were conscious they were doing what Revelation prophesied. It seems to me that the world and the
church were destined to be destroyed, or changed, by God himself, but that this takes place in two ways, which may compete with each other as a disjunctive either or, or may collaborate as a synthetic both and. The world and the church began the final deconstruction of themselves about the same time, in the 1960s, the time of Derrida’s early work, of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, and which is the date some, for instance the critic Northrop Frye, point at as the start of the postmodern period. The world stayed on its course of de-construction, including even that of the Soviet Union, but Rome did not, and under John Paul II, beginning in 1978, began instead a worse thing than deconstruction, that is to say, it began to deconsecrate itself, which Derrida, I think, obliquely points to in one of his last ideas, that of “the worst.� This is taking place, in principle and in fact, by the repudiation covertly of the highpoints of the theology won at Vatican II, such as the inviolability of the conscience, in the unending sex abuse scandals, and in other more obscure, but perhaps more unholy things, reaching back throughout Catholic history, concerning lies and forgeries, money and murder. Again, I do not know the intentions, only the results. In the Book of Numbers, God tells Moses and Aaron that he himself breaks his promise, after the people of God refuse to enter the promised land, as Caleb and Joshua urged them to do. Instead, they would stone the men who had
scouted Canaan and found it indeed a land of milk and honey, ripe for the taking. God wills that the people fall in the wilderness over the next forty years, for not listening to the men who told them that the promised land had arrived, they needed only go in and claim the victory that God would surely give. Something like that has happened in our own day, with the visionary men of Vatican II and their attempt at a free, transformed catholicity, being rejected for the thing the Roman Church has become, a disgrace. That those of us who know this stand like Joshua and Caleb in relation to the people of God is to me incontrovertible, so we must urge now, go in, trust God, the kingdom is yours, while realizing our plea will probably be rejected, every people of God, new and old, Jew and Catholic, always refusing. In this may be seen the myth of Sisyphus, as well, that we roll the rock up, only to see it roll back down, yet must do our duty, as perhaps even the bishops and theologians of Vatican II knew their leadership could be eventually despised and ignored. I do not think the Church is going to immediately cease to exist as a visible bricks and mortar institution, and it will still have its money and some power, but as a spiritual entity it is ceasing to be. God, I believe, as in the case of the rebellion in the wilderness, is not bound to fulfill the covenant with this Church, and in fact, new Israel and old Israel are in the same position, typologically
in every way, just as the religious authorities, in the days of Jesus, are the same type as now. In the time of Jesus, whose name is really the same as Joshua, the promised land or the kingdom of God was again proclaimed, the thing was at hand, but through some refusal or lack on the part of the people of God, it was deferred, not because God chose to, but rather because the Church herself did not claim the victory. The situation became clear under Constantine, and more so later, as the institution became involved in money and politics. That God knew this beforehand, that the people would betray him, not only among the Jews but at a later time, is foretold in Daniel 12:7, when it is said God will “scatter the power of the holy people.� Indeed, the thing is at hand, a little earlier even than Isaac Newton foresaw based on a calculation he made of 1260 years after the coronation in 800 of Charlemagne. No, it is 1260 years since the forgery of the donation of Constantine, the fiction on which Rome bases her authority, which was accomplished by 754. In other words, the Deconsecration that began then will be fulfilled now, and the death knell will toll, albeit perhaps in silence, for the iconic Church that once was. To go on from this point to an explication of the little seven word text of the title seems a bit anticlimactic, but I will summarily mention a few things.
In the center of the square appears the words “veni roman,” and in a cross-like formation there is the indication f-ing roman, pointing to the bind of a contradiction that concerns the final Pope to come, called Peter the Roman in the prophecy of St. Malachy. Whether he will fulfill the evil plan or expose it, I do not know, but after him, the Church will be no more. There are many other connections among the letters in the design, including some chatter about “anal” icons, or the essential anal aspect that is the condition of possibility inherent to a thing for it to be analyzed. The anal is a thing Derrida writes of in his Glas, and in connection to religion. In his work, the IC and the GL are opposed, the immaculate conception and the siglum GL, and it is indicated in my design that IC and GL had a son, something of an Onan, as is the type written of in de-construction, such as Rousseau. As well, several women appear covertly in the text, including Eve, Mary and the Greek earth mother Gaia or Gaea. That in the center of the square an “omen” is written concerning at least an “I,” and also other things that can be construed into some sort of narrative, if one desires, is given, considering there are at least several characters involved in a kind of conflict. But, that time has stopped and that everything is connected, would have to be the principle of any possible inter-pretation of the text-design. You may look and may find more in the seven word text, but
I have shown you at least this much. I cannot say things are even at this point, what the leveling means, or if there has been some kind of revenge, or getting even. I do think we are in the “evening,� as one said, not dark yet, but getting there. The world will deconstruct and the church deconsecrate, and what will happen after that? We do not know, but the Bible promises great things, the thousand year kingdom of peace on earth in Revelation, and as also Isaiah promises, a finale in which the lion lies down with the lamb, not a violent catastrophe, but a restoration of lost innocence. I think, in fact, the part of the apocalypse that is catastrophic is almost over, and the violence, for instance the absurd amount in Mexico as I write, is an indication of the way the matrix of technology, money, and fascism, all tied to a grand corruption that may be seen in the useful paradigm of collaboration, where all give their assent, none dissent, and the thing itself, Rome or the authority of an invisible hand, is seemingly infallible. But if it can’t be wrong, it must be wrong, and if I must be mistaken, then I must be telling the truth. Truth, if it is true, must always be inconvenient, as we say, unsettling, disturbing, opposed to the illusion, the madness, the evil. That truth and lies stand side by side, good and evil, being and mere semblance, cannot be helped, but if justice
ever happens, as we hope, then the re-conciliation of them will have taken place. Impossible, as Derrida said, yet God alone does the impossible. To conclude, I should speak of the seven word textdesign, “An Icon from an Evening in Glas,” in relation to my work as a whole, which could bear that inscription. The Icon Glas pair describe the struggle by me with catholicism and de-construction, while the word Evening invokes Hegel’s word in his Philosophy of Right that Minerva’s owl of wisdom flies at dusk, an indication of his awareness of the closure taking place through the accomplishment in the dialectic of all possible positions in the spectrum of thought. My work finds itself shuttling back and forth between the Roman, the Derridean and the Hegelian, all plied together as the three strand cord of which the Bible in Ecclesiastes speaks. If this knot or circle was at any point effracted, to use once more Derrida’s term I learned from his late work Given Time, then it is not in taking sides in the positions of the catholic, deconstructionist or dialectician, but rather by the autobiographical element of the writing. For those who have read, or read about, Derrida’s Glas, autobiography is a part of his de-construction. Perhaps my work is an oblique commentary on my own deconstructed self. But as Derrida said, GL protects against the schiz that GL produces, and so, having becoming other to myself, at
times uncanny, quite beside myself, I eventually healed, and this perhaps by the very thing that GL symbolized in its invention or intervention in my life. I do not know, and the authorial fallacy is asserted. I am not the best judge of what I have written, or of the life I have lived. That the work is the history of a journey out of deconstruction and completely through the catholic church, only to emerge on the other side, understanding both in themselves and in relation to each other, may be true. If I were to add anything to these final words, it would be concerning what Derrida already called in 1991 “the state of the debt.” It seems every nation and most individuals are in a financial bind that is insolvable except by means of a key piece of what I would have once called the “Catholic Economy,” ideas that I and others have been working on the last few years in light of the Church’s teachings on social and economic justice. It seems to me that we are in need of forgiveness, of a “jubilee year” as in old Israel, forgiveness of debts and debtors. As well as giving and asking for forgiveness, as individuals, nations must adopt a total for-bearance of the debt, at least until things get better, if not an outright charging off of the entire debt of the U.S. and all other countries. Then we can start over with a clean slate. Our debt now threatens to enslave and impoverish the whole world. I
do not say it was an intended thing, as I do not know the intention of any, but I know all need a chance to begin again. The promised land “to come,� will have been, therefore, so that the Messiah may arrive. You might say, as I said that I might, as God Himself in His might may say, that as has been said, we had then but a circling occupation, and did walk into eternity without ever knowing, but for this: a young professor stood at the chalk board and drew a new diagram of our salvation according to the Council, in an elaborate encircled sphere, almost justly Ptolemaic in design, ever in a paradigm of Catholics, with Roman centrality the primacy, and those of the other nominations spreading out in a sea of the to be blessed, amid the murmur of a discussion
I so as
hazarded to interpose: there are not degrees of this salvation, one is either saved or one is not; so that for a logic disjunctive I put them to it, and did so make them love, in that now as I see it, our circles interchanged,
what was at the center is in the end but
only peripheral at best, and God calls sinners, not the righteous, and the twins of Israel, new and old, Jew and Catholic, miss the Messiah, or as if to, so God turns human salvation inside out, stands our thinking against itself, for mercy if and only if, is His alone and is most free, and judgment has begun at the House of God, so that we will have been shown His ways were
never ours, nor to be comprehended. But let this be, as it dismayed, for those who say there can be no Christian thing proper tragic, so all is a divine comedy, but yet we do not know the time, whether it be free, and whether we are ready, nor if we be ripe or rotten, or if things stand out of joint, for it seems to me that even when we do our best, our actions recoil against us, as Oedipus or an hero from a tragedy by William Shakespeare, and we wonder at ourselves as men betrayed, so let it be with Caesar, if we had but time, what great things could have been said and done, as men of a Roman rule did think they had saved the Church even as they destroyed the same, deconsecrating the blessing with the curse of infallibility, with the assumption of the right to heir, while propagating a faith, which, neither mystic nor moral, did hinder the eternal from ever breaking into time, as if, and imposed upon the becoming of the kingdom of God a rigid, hard, static, death, the Being of the thing appropriated, and stamped the necessity of hierarchy and all that comes with it on life itself, as if, only to find the miracle in the end of true substantiation,in that the body and blood of Christ was given but once for all, His action saving only those whom He chose, only those so chosen. We are all but parallel lines that meet in infinity. Because of the space that took place in the modern theory, the square
as such became impossible for the geometry of Einstein, as he reconciled the discordances in thought, and he said there were only lines and their primes. It seems if we be beside ourselves, we have a chance. The world itself has created its own parallel world, and it is more in that virtual world that we live and move and have our being than in the space we once lived in. Now, that other space, the primordial one of the Bible, has become distant, in a way un-thinkable, and perhaps impossible to reach, even more impossible to traverse, even if it could be. But it is still possible for God to square things, because though we are billions of parallel lines lost in a waste land, God’s meridian crosses all our parallels, and he closes us, squares the accounts, gives shape and form to what, though it was still direction, had no meaning, for the end was unknown and un-knowable. God has drawn a line, not to cross us through or out, and not in an erasure of our characters, but to complete the story, so that we may be saved. His line is not an underlining, to reemphasize us, nor a line across the bottom of our last page, a line that says so far and no further, but a kind of margin, a place for His gloss and for Him to write, a line running from the top to the bottom, clean through everyone and everything, like the prime meridian spoken of by the poet, which connects us all, our distant sites not so much gathered in the appropriation, that is in the circle of the text and
the world it created, but a line to cross all our lives with the knowledge and love of that one who is alone able to demarcate us, to take a globe, and circle it against the time, as he also said, there, north of the future, for we have been given all our latitude, and given enough, see what we have done, but as the line approaches from the other side of this evening, how long was his patience, how long was his forbearance, how long he suffered us in the wilderness. But now that waiting, that wandering, is over, and he draws over the face of our depths, to shake us, to arouse us, to awaken us to his arrival. Our life will not have seemed so long, once He comes, nor will the dreams we once beheld still hold, for the cord of life will not have been cut, in fate it will not be so, but our life’s lines then will have to have been, as even the Glas foretold. In the Book of Joshua it is told that a schism almost occurred in Israel, in the beginning, as the tribes were settling the promised land. The tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh had taken their places east of the Jordan, as in the agreement they had reached with Moses, just before all the warriors crossed into Canaan. However, after the two tribes and the halftribe were to the east, they thought to construct an altar for themselves, and when the people of Israel heard of this they sent an armed troop to make war on
what they considered a blasphemy, the setting up of a rival altar. Gad and Reuben, their descendents and those of Manasseh, explained that the reason they built their own altar was that they feared someday the children of Israel in the west, in the I think proper of the Promised land, would tell the children of Reuben and Gad and Manasseh that they were not true Israelites, and disown them, and cause them to be disheartened and to lose their faith in the one true God of the patriarchs. They built their own altar they said to show all that they too worship the same God, and to point up the difference between themselves and the one altar before the tabernacle, that they were not a rival in worship, but the same, which might become lost from view to the people of God and their descendents because of their physical separation from those in Israel. Phineas, representing the people of God, was pleased with this response, as was Joshua and the elders when he made his report upon his return. What moral may we draw? It is this: That the altar I have erected in the work now concluding, though it often preaches the arrival, is not a rival to the Catholic way, but one with it, with provision made however that the altar of the Lord, we feel, has become de-consecrated by the actions of the hierarchy and the clergy of the people of God. We do not claim to be the only true people of God, anymore than we feel those who follow Rome should claim that exclusive title. At
Vatican II, in the declaration on religious liberty, it is said that there is a true religion still, and that this only subsists in the Catholic and Christian churches and is not identical with them. The true religion may be found in many places, but I feel strongly that true religion is evidenced herein by this altar so set up to show that we too worship God, so that no one can claim us to be outside the one fold of Christ, shepherd of our souls. That Christ, king of endless glory, is the one true sovereign, and does not need a visible representative on earth that merely usurps the throne that is in fact set up in heaven, not in Rome, or in any city of this world. It also exists in the heart of each believer as the one aboriginal vicar, the
conscience, which is irreplaceable and our
last refuge. One must follow ones own conscience, as the sole sovereignty that is within oneself. The starting point for my critique of the papacy last year was the coat of arms of Benedict XVI, a fact I have concealed and withheld until now. There are various interpretations, all benign, of what that crest and shield contain, but I would like to add my own reading of that heraldic device, the at once iconic and Glas-like emblem of the man I consider the false prophet of Revelation, who promotes worship of the Beast, by means of an image set up for worship, at every altar of the Roman Church.
In the coat of arms of Benedict, there are several features. With-in it are three items, a seashell, the head of an Ethiopian, wearing a crown, and a fourfooted beast, a bear. Despite the benign, obscure and I think far-fetched inter-pretations of these things by commentators, I offer the opinion that they mean something sinister. It is in fact in what is called the “bend sinister� that the Beast appears. In Revelation, the Beast is said to have four feet like a bear. Thus it fits. The seashell I think represents the verse of Revelation that says the Beast will rise from the sea, not as in some obtuse reading about heroic Augustine, and a boy emptying the sea. The Ethiopian crowned is I think a reference more complex, bearing on the Acts of the Apostles, the only place in the New Testament that such a person is mentioned. He is the one converted by Phillip. What comes just before this is the warning about Simon Magus and the perennial Roman ur-problem of simony, as for instance the practice, still,
in Mexico
of the selling of indulgences. It is important what the Ethiopian is reading when he is found by Phillip, something from Isaiah about the suffering servant. The passage as Acts quotes it is a little different from the Old Testament. It speaks of him who in his humiliation had judgment taken from him. To me this indicates the view of the young seminarian I once heard that God’s hands are tied, there is nothing he can do to
end the abuses by Rome. Surrounding the inside of the coat of arms are some curious innovations by Benedict, the replacing of the triple crown by the bishop’s miter, contra a ruling by Paul VI in 1969, and the addition of the pallium, along with the traditional “keys” of Peter. It seems this addition of the bishop’s hat fits the reading by exegetes of Revelation that the false prophet will have two horns like a lamb, which has been taken to indicate the form of the miter. The pallium itself is a pall that now hangs over all. Altogether, it seems that Benedict’s coat of arms is a symbol that fits his role, as I see it, as the one who follows the Beast, wields the same power as the former, and will promote the worship of him, especially by the image I take to be the new order of mass. In this iconic representation of who and what Benedict is, we have the telling Glas of the Roman Church, if it is read prophetically, which is the dimension of Biblical studies neglected by many, but which is the highest level of scripture interpretation, being the end in view for which the Word of God was given. The emblem of Benedict, an anti-icon, inscribes the Glas of the Church, as a Mise en abime, as a crypt to be unsealed. It is perhaps this that Aquinas was shown, and which caused him to lay down his pen.
Near the start of his career, in the “opuscula” on the eternity of the world, Thomas had said that it had not yet been demonstrated that God cannot do an infinite number of things simultaneously. Indeed. Thomas in the beginning knew more than he knew. In the end he knew what is called the vision of God, at least that’s what they say. They say that he saw God in a beatitude, the glory of God, was astonished by the beauty of love and simply ceased to write in order more quickly to pass on to the heavenly abode that awaits. But perhaps the vision of God was for him something else, far stranger than the pious fraud the church used to gloss over the silence of Thomas and his statement that all he had written was of no account. I think, it seems to me, God did not show him Himself but the catholic fate. All the work of Thomas would be for naught, and even used for evil ends. God has mercy on whom He will, and I believe that Thomas Aquinas found that before he died God had already decreed the condemnation of the Church before it was ever created. Thomas was not wicked and understood, though he was astonished. The wicked will never understand. God’s way is not the way of the church, nor does it know Him. In this, blindness and blessing.
Vocabulary of God 1 Pure Idea of Good God YHWH Word Lord 2 Pure Idea of Love Michael Gabriel Raphael Adam Eve Abel Job Abraham Babel Jacob Judah Levi Gad Caleb David Pharaoh Elijah Jeremiah Ezekiel Joel Micah Habakkuk Malachi Ezra Zechariah Zachariah Mary Mark Luke Good Thief Paul Jude Homer Virgil Mohammed Al Farabi Al Ghazali Rumi Abraham Abulafia William of Ockham Galileo Baal Shem Jacob Boehme George Berkeley David Hume William Cowper William Blake George William Friedrich Hegel Ludwig Feuerbach Karl Marx Leopold Bloom Molly Bloom HCE ALP Torah Zohar Philokalia 3 Pure Idea of Life A Priori Real Ideal Greek Jew Arab Bible Book Reveal Ark Flood Proverb Parable Prophecy Sura Hegira Caliph Baghdad Mecca Kaaba Hallowed Thy Come Home Give Forgive Lead Deliver Holy Family Love Hope Cloud Dark Fire Flame Lamp Pray Preach Heal Live Die Compel Implore Provide Proof Image Kyrie Gloria Credo Hear Word Will Memory Follow Rabbi Kabbalah Look Back Up Above Chebar Merkebah Law Work Judge Believe Womb Veil We Me He You Him Her Our Hour Make Have Do Be Free Dream Way World Power Rome Empire Whore Pope Devil Rebel Hell Who Where Why How For By From Whom Church Pleroma Elder Bridge Blood Peace Crux Calvary Bread Bride Groom Wife Mercy Miracle Body Proclaim Prevail Marriage Upper Room Rich Poor River of Life Day of Yahweh Good Evil Pure Holy Glory Grace Year of Our Lord Yom Kippur People of God Jubilee Year Good Friday Alpha Omega I Am
[dictionary look-up] Pleiades Taurus Sagittarius Keg Dee Eternal triangle Eternal city Incomprehensibles Epistrophe Muses Thirty years war Eight Tine prong of fork or deer antler Ten Net mesh result weight w/o container profit I-10 my freeway Nite night informally Tt teletype tele transfer sg song of songs Singapore Specific gravity, relative density compared to a standard density like water or air. Gs George Planck’s H Gt Ion Kt Sty Tot Theandry Theatrics Thee at rics risk In a theatrics of ofin o fin a thea tricks athea atheism tricks thirty
Dissemination and the Abyss
Then the theory of imagination depends on the (differential) confrontation of two opposing forces, that can be termed “Dissemination” and “The Abyss”: Where do I get these terms and what do they mean? I originally encountered them in my reading of Jacques Derrida in 1985-86: Of course, one of his key early works (of the canon of the first twelve) is La Dissemination: while use of the term “abyss” is ubiquitous in the early works: to disseminate is scattering the seed or whatever there is to be scattered, signs or spaces, names, texts, effects, phonic and graphic traces, with or without meaning: construction-deconstructionreconstruction, a hopeless circularity of creation and destruction like Krishna or love and strife, is shown brilliantly in Glas: The disseminative is
Catholic Economy The vocation of writing notes august 24 2007 of writers and writing fiction and non-fiction american novelists cather ellison west bellow educators washington dewey newman the case of william faulkner modern writing all of the above versus postmodern writing derrida pick up work from first book metaphysics in christ word-listen-work vocationcalling-work the word at work in writing writing as listening interpretation the work of god prayer spirit in the world hearers of the word word without meaning there can be no work words need meaning to work de-con play words of love works of love love in service don’t play at love meaning of love love of meaning vocation work as calling if a soul had an axe it would be writing work as response to calling the work of listening chop chop elimination of the call by txt elimination of the call by the proliferation of writing if everyone is a writer then no one is a writer if writing is all there is then service service work for all servant of all the service of writing of listening if you have ears to hear then hear definition effacement of voice lack of
conversation lack of conversion endless turnings there is no turn critique of the derridean idea about writing you know them
centrifugal, wandering, as Derrida said in a place in his text that I am no longer able to identify, he does not mean to return to the Father: The Abyss, on the other hand, is centripetal, turning inward, repetitive, perhaps in terms Freud would see in a case study or in the fort-da of Beyond, which is a depth in the psyche, an aspect of madness, as in thought echoes, which is hellish, a room full of mirrors, and as in the heraldic “mise en abime� the picture repeated in the picture ad infinitum, and so the doubling, as in Glas, or novels of the 19th century or shadows of whatever genesis: Light scatters while darkness gathers: or so it seems in these latter days: life death: and in Derrida not clearly demarcated as in Nature, but more than deeply interfused, juxtaposed in the great contamination, the complicated relation of deconstruction and what is the turn of events in the coming deconsecration: These figures which introduced themselves to me in the 1980s were to me Romantic: Or so it seemed then to the man I was:
case of rousseau from education from novel from de renovation of writing hear say yes joyce to be read case of joyce calling who calls how do I respond call of the prophet samuel here I am lord writing in vocation vocal speech writing is a response to the word heard and understood god church world I for vocation of writing second sheet 8-24-07 hierarchy and classical writing logic dialectic rhetoric grammar became eliminate dialectic logic rhetoric play of language how is this collapsed to just language elimination of the subject no one to speak write elimination of the theme leaves language itself and nothing besides hierarchy of language signified signifier parole langue expressive indicative exp is aa indicative sig sig significant by every thing being a sign nothing has meaning la parole souffl where is the
difference the contrast bellow gainer la parole souffl by inflation parole eliminating leaving pure so called language play grafted into language all lang is rhet only rhet no logic wo logic rhetoric lang collapse into one point for hierarchy when 3 rd is eliminated the other 2 automatically de derrida’s love for pure language is it lang or parole parole is never pure collapse spiritual meaning
“This therefore will have been a signature�
The necessity of such a beginning will I hope become clear: It is an appropriation of Derrida, and remarks the epic time of the beginning, starting in the middle of things like the Odyssey or the Iliad, or as in the Romantic epics of Blake and Wordsworth: Media Res: For like the state of things in Paradise Lost, too, we are falling, as Joyce says in the epic Wake, 32 ft ps ps, and are in the middle of things, as it may seem, as we have been told, though our place on the timeline is only necessarily middling, if the origin is immemorial and the end by commodious vicus cannot be, river run: The signatures, here already and to come, are keys to the disseminative, neither theory nor practice nor effect nor chance nor real nor ideal, a binding and loosing for which the signatures hold the key not the authority of
material sign eliminate spirit leave only sign only langue can be pure a language unspoken the possibility is pure but he said anything but purity I repeat the structure of the raw and the cooked the basis in these very pp sp elimination of subject leaves only predicates no substance only accidents no essence elimination of substantive leaves being appearance as in the history of an error which led not to truth but only more error after 1888 the verso of sheet two 8-24-07 if all meaning as such is displaced then words can mean whatever you want if
nothing is true everything is permitted truth eliminated no truth no lie only words wo meaning sign of the times time of the signs in order to affirm everything when everything and nothing are the same eliminate difference between yes no no no yes yes no yes no being but appearance adhering to the absolute everything nothing sign is appearance to the absolute txt we are signs in the world txt but then not even that ciphers what is left over what do we call the remainder play writing trace chance spacing think about excerpt resource of writing and eternity works of mercy spiritual and corporeal and justice corporal and capital la
the see of peter or the hierarchical structure built around it, and I quote Derrida more or less, repeating the first line of Dissemination:
“This (therefore) will not have been a book�
My text mirrors his: and between the mirror and the scattering of the light of the lamp unto my feet of the wisdom of God, I then have approached the thesis of the 1986 essay on Romantic poetry: “We have then a thesis: a description [let us say almost barely invocation] of two textual effects from Derridean theory, those of dissemination and the mise en abime, as they figure in the work of the English Romantic Poets: thus this text now repeats, mirrors my earlier text, though I cannot help wandering a bit, and this being I think a fragmentation or element of it, to combine scattering and repetition, to at once close and open, for closure, what may be seen as The God Enclosure, is a problem building for years and now disclosed here:
parole souffl parody of inflation inspiration breath spirit psyche rising falling on parole justice god church world I here in the raw you see the cooked side by side going back and forth but you will never necessarily on one mad instant of decision read them simul at once in one time for you find the raw and have pleasure the cooked takes time in joy what reams now for you a genet yes yet reminds the hegel ss let be rest is fire remain first p of next work 8-24-07 against wittgenstein tractatus and quine I say relationship is is an ontology bode body of christ for metaphysics in christ meaning still is it is this relationship of the head and members raw cooked hegel genet body of christ christ fixed point of reference gives meaning to all in relation to and on the great and terrible day of YHWH in relation to that final fixing this gift is real is not as existing merely symbol and can be perceived through acts of charity see how they love one another or not word listen work vocation to christ metaphysics of christ words work aristotles on work the logos the energeia meaning words words words language retrieval of work work and meaning significance of work definitions work of reality and reality of work play is fantasy necessity and fantasy addictions play addiction sober work relation of creativity to play and work fruitfulness my father was thoughtful god church world I sheet aug 25 vocation of writing continuation of previous night on hierarchy the deconstruction of hierarchy we know that it is the third term that structures the hierarchy as such if there are only 2 the automatic de-con is inevitable they collapse into 1 grafted onto each other in a parody of the aufhenbung it is not a synthesis of the 2 whatever spiritual elements of the right or top whatever recto is eliminated that which was related to the 3rd proper spiritual term allowing circulation only by restriction can economies function well not through general consumption de-con means elimination of spirit mind idea ideal the form the structure logic logos geist to be replaced by ghosts by simulacra twilights the marginal by an indefinite neither definite nor
infinite witness a difference between the infinite in levinas and the indefinite in derrida the definite dogmatic the speculative infinite and the skeptical indefinite so without the holy spirit the father-son relationship is leveled into one indefinite pantheism as trinitarian thinking is necessary to maintain hierarchy and the spirit in the world derrida heidegger nietzsche did not come so much to deny or ignore god but to re-write him to re-invent him but the fourth term beyond god church world paradigmatics that is what perfects genesis or telos the godhead or the great and terrible day of YHWH completes the hierarchy by reverential referencing absolute exteriority the limit opening to true containment against the leveling bad closure with three there can be a 4th but with two there is then 1 and then nothing there is affirmative hesitation between the 3rd and the 4th but the radical decision is between duality and nonduality which Christians seem to know in part but cling to the nihilistic path rather than ascend, for the 3 requires that I become truly I to complete and perfect god church world by effracting it and unless I arrive no one can there is only the system at point balance which tends back down toward hell but which the I can free for the heaven the computers are wrong there is essentially no difference between the 1 and the 0 as Rothko paintings could not hold the form but collapsed to hell and in languages logic rhetoric grammar or dialectic style language collapse by the elimination of logic a perversion of phenomenological bracketing merging style-language purifying the language by eliminating logic-meaning difference does not begin with 2 but with 3 not between but among difference is not just spiritual but is the spirit articulating the joints holding apart and together at once differences as derrida said in his presentation on differAnce the material rewriting of spirituality part of the re-invention of the whole not done to deprive us of god but in order to place god out of the reach by deconstruction of those bent on deconsecration back of sheet vocation of writing aug 25
2007 the terrorist attack on the wtc in nyc 9-11 was the visible sign of the post-modern de-con leveling of structure and of babylon by the book terrorism against capitalism us west christians and dialectical hierarchical thinking the leveling of the wtc is the most important spectacle of the era the great perception consumed by everyone everywhere the leveling of our minds occurs silently and is not perceived directly the effects wtc internet globalization totality totalization types of terror also simulacra denial the virtual reality online with one world we will have none there must be three in fact we are at the complete 4 if the relation to come is peace not war page for metaphysics in christ aug 25 2007 god angels man nature the 4 aquinas the angelic doctor the elimination of god and angels leaves man and nature which is leveled not into a humanized creation but the natural man rousseau and the natural standpoint quine god angels man nature god acts on people still through angels but there is only one mediator from us to god christ fifth term hypostatic union pointing up denial of christ god-man and development of angelic hierarchy is gnostic back of sheet on metaphysics in christ aug 25 2007 degrees 4 out of the 4 one comes christ fifth gnomon pointing up pointing way out off square see joyce dubliners theory first page paralysis simony gnomon christianity islam capitalism communism accordingly none of these can be the 1 as in god angels men nature what wd the fifth be religion religion economy economy a union of religion and economy a theological economics either genuine or spurious capital catholicity which may be being feigned through social doctrine to deceive some and cover the tracks of what is already happening yet a genuine catholic economy wd be a good thing if not a lie while what will happen with islam and communist east 2nd sheet of metaphysics in christ aug 25 protestant capitalism transformed into catholic economy the problem of restricted and general economy globalization and globalatinization derrida term derridas idea of the capital
economy with rome was a correct intuition though he did not tout it but feared it because the whole of his career was an oblique but steady confrontation with the papacy with the end in view which the lay faithful of the church know not but is coming how globalatinization occurs is all important from a consumer perceiving protestant capitalism to a creating believing catholic economy that must sacrifice itself even the fifth is a union of the 2 cath cap in christ 2 natures 1 divine being in ce 1 being a matter informed by spirit but having already been turned out of ideal to hypocritic contamination of spirituality by money rather than the purging of dirty money by faith see simony at peters see metamodern hyper consumption chinese position old dialectic or not perhaps already contaminated by fascism capitalism in china mega-modern hybrid future already no longer infinite dialectic of marx but indefinite monster neither one nor the other post-m grafts and juxtaposition not synthetic end of history no opposition marcuse 64 fukayama 91 everyone forced into fascist closure the god enclosure of globaltinization of what would be ce but became the last imposture the ritual abuse now and to come a church opposed to the kingdom of heaven god church world to be effracted by individuals so the kingdom will come aug 25 next sheet subj obj descartes dualism led in nietzsches de-con logic to the collapse 2 always leads to collapse roman sacred clergy and profane laity grace above nature below we go to their keys for grace mercy forgiveness before descartes 3 hierarchy spiritual the failure of modernism but post reaps the whirlwind obj subj collapse into vacant subj idealism or vacant obj realism taste style beauty no longer moral but immoral what proceeds the jective throw who throws doubt equals abyss abyssal logic of deconstruction repetition end aug 25th notes on the somber realization that the theory and practice of catholic economy actually describe two different things or shall we say beasts to come which that is to say you could call these the keys to the abyss
SALTED WITH FIRE
I would say that one can perhaps best view my apocalypse or apocalyptic writings through an understanding of the Hegelian dialectic, where at the end of history, at the top of the logical spiral of the Absolute Spirit or SA [Savoir Absolu of Glas by Derrida] is the trinity of art, religion and philosophy. You can read this book and perhaps someday my other, unpublished writings, going back to 1985, and find little if any critical writing on any other subject. However, there is a fourth mode in which I write, a literary style, somewhat poetic and autobiographical, which effracts the circularity of that Hegelian triad and opens the system to its other. The effraction, a term I borrowed from Derrida, is a thing I posit as the “I� that breaks the matrix of God-Church-World, and destroys that ring, consigning it to the flames, in what I call an arrival ending both the dialectical confiscation and the deconstructive impasse, also a theme of the later writings of Derrida after his real religious turn in about 1991, who
both deferred arrival, famously, yet called on it to come, in a Messianic and increasingly Apocalyptic sense. His steady but as always oblique approach to a prophecy concerning a time that is now occurring has only through the writing of my work in the last two years come to be understood by me as a revelation concerning the Roman rule. The work I have written effracts systems on different levels, not only that of SA and the other totalities of closure that now are attempting the absolute antispirit, and of critical, philosophical and theological writing by the personal and poetic “I�, but in these pages you have finished reading by the synthesis of the literary with the critical due to the form and pressure of the time. In economic terms, and differently from the deconstructionist tenet that it can only be done from within the thing to be deconstructed, I am performing a further break from a radical place in the exteriority where I found God in 1989. It may be that the young man studying at the
seminary with me a few years ago in order to become a Roman priest was right, that “God’s hands are tied.” Often, in the almost eight years since, I have defended the thesis of idealism that God is the absolutely free, but at last wondered to myself a few days ago “what if?” What if the young man was right? What if somehow God is not free? What if Rome somehow has practiced the closure on God first of all, by placing certain words of Christ against others, and through the constant call for mercy, cry for mercy, invocation and preaching of mercy, and the doling out of it en masse in the confessional, has in effect made it impossible for God to come again in justice. If He does so He will deny Himself as the merciful, and no longer be God, who cannot deny Himself. It is in the Roman interest, of course, to see the second coming deferred, forever if possible. Perhaps as was thought after the resurrection, Christ was supposed to return at once, but something happened to prevent Him. This may be the meaning
of the scenes in Acts where the people in awe of the apostles lay all their money before them, to get near the power of the Spirit of Pentecost, and then those who do not are incredibly struck dead at Peter’s feet for not giving every bit of money to him. Peter took the money, when he should have said “give it to the poor.” This is the true simony, not the Magus attempting to buy power, but Simon Peter selling it. The Church went wrong in the very beginning and has been wrong ever since. Power and money. Mammon. So they have tied God’s hands to keep on with their corruption extending now even to the ritual abuse of children on the one hand and of the mass on the other. If this is the case, I asked myself what is to be done? If the power of the keys given to Peter in Matthew to bind and loosen has bound God in Heaven, bound his justice on earth and in heaven, while loosing only a seeming mercy, words of mercy, at least, it seemed to me there could be a way to overcome the power of the keys
and, if it is thinkable, to untie God’s hands so that He could act. It is absurd, therefore, so think like Tertullian and believe. If the set of all of the Words of Christ are a closed set, a canon circumscribed, both without by decree, and within by the incessant gloss of fathers and theologians, so that everything is determined, it could be possible to make this closed set overall indeterminate, if a statement could be found that fulfilled the mathematician Gödel’s theorem that for such a set there will always be a proposition that is either both true and false or the validity of which cannot be determined from the other propositions in the set. There are things said by Christ that seem to be false, that some hearing Him would not die until they saw Him return in His kingdom, for instance, for the Church is obviously not the Kingdom Come. So, I searched for an inexplicable statement and found it in Mark, where Christ says “everyone” will be “salted with fire.” The fathers say this is both hell, on
the one hand, and the Holy Spirit, on the other, which is a flat contradiction, and Gregory the Great says of the passage that no one should disturb the peace and unity of the Church, by which I think he sensed some trouble to come based on these words. In fact, the context of “salted with fire” indicates the fire of hell, but which I think cannot be, for it applies to “everyone.” One could say that the term “fire” is equivocal, some to hell and some to the Spirit. If this is the case, it may be the Lord said it in this manner, as he said other things hard to understand in the parables, not to be understood, but this in an absolute sense, in order that the phrase “salted with fire” is both/and, not either/or, and therefore, according to the logic of contradiction I laid out earlier in the work, the words are true in a sense which the logic of the Church based on Aristotle and Aquinas cannot accept. All of the truth is that truth is both true and false at once, this is the whole, which thus cannot be closed,
so the words “salted with fire� fit the logic of set theory, in that they are both self-contradictory, thank God, and cannot be glossed from other propositions in the Words of Christ. Therefore, all the set’s propositions are indeterminate, due to the rules of the closure of the ring set, which provide for the multiplication of the indeterminate term over all the others, making them all indeterminate, the very multiplication the Church has depended on for the internal closure of the set, all being absolutely true backward and forward. If all of the Words of Christ are indeterminate, then those authorizing the power of the keys are, too. They cannot be proved true or false, their truth or falsity is in principle absolutely unknowable, and the Pope cannot use the passage to enforce his power. Therefore, God is free. His hands are no longer tied. We are free to believe His Words or not, as faith permits, may God increase our faith, and He is no longer bound by the power of the keys once held in
error by the Roman Pontiff, but now returned to their rightful owner. O, Christ, come quickly! Theology and the Church, though not Scripture in which all truth is hidden [that “dangerous” book as a one-time friend called it in most unfriendly terms as he stressed the necessity of “earthly existence”], are the “The God Enclosure” that men and women use, if possible, to trap God, because they fear God’s freedom [and their own], a God who made a world where lions rend the flesh of living antelopes, for instance, not to mention human society’s evils. It may be that God is completely incomprehensible, despite human reason, so He is not even “true.” God is not nice, but neither are we, really, though in hypocrisy we would pretend to be. Yet, although this is, willingness to love is the secret by which we live. The willingness to love by which we live implies a willingness to love not only each other but God, foremost, and to believe Him in His promises. The Jews in the wilderness did not believe
that the Promised Land was ripe for the taking. They balked and refused. So many times have the people of God refused to enter in. It may be that here at the end of things God gives us once more and one last time the chance to do the right thing. Let us not be those children of the kingdom that the Lord says will not sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, instead cast out into the darkness wailing, while many from the east and the west gather in with the patriarchs and the prophets. It may be that the Church need not be destroyed even if prophesied by as diverse sources as Malachy, who envisions only one Pope after Benedict XVI, and the Book of Revelation and Daniel, which I think I have shown, however briefly, must apply to the state of affairs in the Church today. It may be that those currently performing their roles in this passion of the Church do not understand what they are doing or why and do what they do in their own minds and those of others with the best motives. It may be that God, as
shown in Numbers, and at other places in scripture, can change his mind. If the Church repents, it can still be saved. I will not lay out a program for how the Church may still save itself from a judgment that I fear it will incur if it holds to its present course. There are men in the Church who need to think on these things and at the time that is most acceptable, take action. That the fate of perhaps one billion souls rests in the hands of so few is cause not necessarily for terror but for hope. If good men be willing to stop evil, evil cannot win. There are better angels of our natures, and they appeal to us, even now. There is no such thing as fate. All are free, God, man, the Church and history. That Revelation promises the thousand year reign of Christ on earth is a prophecy we should look to. How many alive today in the Catholic Church will walk with the Lord in His Kingdom Come is not known. I believe the time is short until it commences. Let none of us, I pray, be the man to whom God says depart
from me, I never knew you. To know the good, to see that it needs to be done, and not to do it, is a sin. To know the truth and not to acknowledge it is to be an accomplice to falsehood. To never walk in the splendid beauties of the New Jerusalem would be the worst tragedy any man could suffer, especially one who was responsible in a special way to be aware. We all work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and even the apostle Paul did not count himself as one who had attained.
EPILOGUE
“And again he sent another servant: and they beat him also, and entreated him shamefully, and sent him away empty.� Luke 20:11
Michael Bolerjack 3230 S. Gessner Rd. #115 Houston, TX 77063
March 26, 2012
Your Eminence, I am a graduate of a catholic seminary, where I was a lay student who obtained an MA in theological studies in 2005. I also obtained an MLA with a concentration in English from a catholic university. I was baptized in the catholic church in 1991 at the age of 34. My wife and I were married sacramentally in 2001. I write you with the hope you will read what I have written with concern for the church. It is much of the time a difficult book to understand cognitively and substantially it will probably be disconcerting to you by the conclusion it makes. I send it to you, then, as my responsibility and as restitution to the church I care for.
Sincerely, Michael Bolerjack
Proscenium
Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Luke 23:34
Everything I have written is straw. Thomas Aquinas
Michael Bolerjack The Thirty Years War _________________________ Sex and Religion [1] Solicitation in the 1980s [2] Theory of Symbols [3] God and the Recovery [4] Thinking Against [5] The Spiritual Dialogues [6] Philosophy of Writing [7] Origin of the Speeches [8] Textuality Itself [9] Catholic Fate [10] Writing of Philosophy [11] Appropriate Arrival [12] The Poetic Fallacy [13] Principles of Criticism [14] A Civilized Mind [15] Shakespeare and Joyce [16] The Tower of Babble [17] The Catholic Economy [18] Light Was Salvation [19] Edith Stein in the CIT [20] Responsibility & Restitution [21] Meaning and Experience [22] God Times Man [23] Chant of Marinela [24] Apocalyptic Remnant [25] Framing Texts [26] End of the Church [27] Emmanuel’s Fiction [28] Christchurch Destroyed [29] How I Got Free [30]
An Icon from an Evening in Glas and apocalyptic writings Michael Bolerjack
Copyright Š 2012 Michael Bolerjack
Table of Contents Faith creates being The Treatise on Logic The Account The Form The Logic “Say that Jerusalem is” Arts Rest All Saints Day “…a limit on infinity…” That dice thrown God-Church-World Symbols will have been a book/interrupted Preface to Paradise Throne Paradise Throne PP Search for the Absolute tomb An Icon from an Evening in Glas Salted With Fire
Faith creates being, that is, acknowledgment turns potency to actuality. We are not real unless we believe. Believe the Lord is in us. It has been said by all who believe that we are created by God. Let it be said also that you are not real unless you believe. If you are in doubt, or turned away from the light of faith, His Face, you only seem to be. As we have learned in our era, though Parmenides showed us long ago, most of the world most of the time is mere semblance. By being in relationship with the real, one becomes real oneself. This relationship is one of faith. Faith is not of this world. The world is now deconstructing. Deconstruction is not nihilism, a philosophy of nothingness, as existentialism was, with its question propadeutic to philosophizing, to be or not to be, the question of suicide in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence. No, deconstruction is not a philosophy of nothingness, as with Sartre, or of being, as with Heidegger, but of sheer semblance, glamour, the milieu of Nietzsche. The opposition of being and nothingness has been deconstructed and with it faith, which must be in either the fullness or the emptiness of God. There is now only a faithless seeming-to-be, the time of opinion, of interpretation, of perspectives, of a world in which there are no longer not only values of high and long standing, but not even mere facts. There is no actuality. With too much going
on, there is no action, but the pose of glamour, the system of artificiality, in which the natural is valued only for its effectiveness as a sales tool. We desire, we attend, we are interested in, that which we love. Which can now only be represented, not presented. There is no present, no presence, only presentations. There is no longer direct unmediated contact with life. In fact, the mass of men and women are not real. They have simply ceased to exist, though they still seem to. The only way back to being is the act of faith, a will to believe in God, the really real. At the moment you say yes to God you begin to be. Without that you never even were. There are only two ways, the world of reality and the world of opinion. As one once said: do not seem but be. When you believe you come to stand. Only by standing can you understand. Then you arrive. The highest reality transcends both metaphysics and ethics. It is a moral and spiritual reality. To be in relationship with the Spirit is to be real. Everything else is material to be bought or sold. As Christ said, you must be born again, that is, being in the world does not make you real, but being in relationship with God. It has been said that each of us has their own reality. That is true for versions of semblance, of which the number is indefinite. To be definite, to be free, to be real, is to be of one mind, the mind of Christ. Only by keeping Christ in mind can you lose the separate reality of the show and find the one true good and beautiful. It is as Parmenides and Paul said, perfect. We are required then in all seriousness to be perfect, to have the mind of Christ, to be real, to love reality no matter how painful, preferring it to the intoxicants, that is, to be nothing for show. In this world that seems to be impossible. But semblance is in error. The one truth simply is the Lord Jesus Christ. This will never change. The City of God is what Augustine called the real world that I here declare, opposed to the glittering vices of the pagan diabolical city of semblance. Rilke said “you must change.� I second him and add: You have a choice. You must choose. Choose reality. Faith is the meaning of being. At the mass the priest stated the position of faith: God does the impossible. Now, for reason the impossible by definition cannot be done. Yet, the Church has ever taught, on the basis of the authority of Christ, that for God, and for one who has faith, nothing is impossible. Faith, then, understands more than cool reason
comprehends. When Hegel said the real is rational and the rational is real, he attempted to rationalize faith’s basic character of higher realization through irrationality, into a system in which the sublation of difference and contradiction as absolute knowledge can be the all in all. Hegel also said the whole is the true, but others have posited infinities, supplements and traces that exceed the whole, thus exceeding truth. Truth, to be true, would have to include the lie, or seeming-to-be. But this cannot be. They do not change the truth through that displacement. They can, as one has said, deny or ignore the truth, but they cannot change it. Truth to be true cannot be an historical process but is immutable. Human history is a lie, spoken against the truth. The Church is able through faith to have both the truth and all its contradictoriness, by mystery, by the assertion of the dogmas of God as both three and one, of Christ as both God and man, of the death of God on the cross, of a church both sinful and holy, of a sacrament both bread and God, of God both immanent and transcendent, of a human being who was completely free from sin, of a papacy which is infallible, of the good of suffering, and much else. The Church boldly asserts the incomprehensible, things which are not mere paradoxes of the faith, but real contradictions that the logic of Aristotle cannot admit, though he said Heraclitus said such things without really thinking them. I have at various points in the scope of my Transubstantiation said and shown the truth of contradiction without contradicting the truth, yet He was contradicted as prophesied by those who put him to death, even with the cross of human reason. But Truth lives again. Resurrection itself, without which our religion is to be pitied, is perhaps the greatest contradiction, though some say such things as the virgin birth to be. Anyone who clings to reason will find a stone of offense to stumble on in scripture and the church’s teaching. And yet, while asserting the necessity of both faith and reason, the Church presents us with impossibilities to believe. God asks nothing but the impossible. Be perfect. Your faith has saved you, do not sin again. The Church gives us models of perfection in the saints, who by the grace of God did the impossible. It is said the great thing is to dream the impossible dream, and one has said the only thing worth attempting is the impossible. Faith does this. But without Christ we can
do nothing. Knowledge will fail, but love will go on. We love each other despite our contradictions. By faith and love we suspend the judgments of reason, transforming even the critical faith by which we are reformed for an ever-greater truth we know by love and not by reason. My life has been one love, no blot it out, my life has been one chain of contradictions. But they are one and the same. We are presented with something greater than we can understand, but we believe, we love, we obey, and even not despite but because of the contradictions. These of the faith that the Church presents to us are the greatest spur to and test of our faith, and thus our faith is proved. Logic had its scapegoat, the scandal of the contradiction, yet faith has won out. “Being� doesn’t empty faith, but is substantial subsistent faith.
THE TREATISE ON LOGIC
As I told a friend in April, 2010, at Easter the Lord gave me a big thing to say. Altogether, the telling of it took over three months. The results are disconcerting for anyone who thinks in the accustomed tradition of the mainstream of philosophy coming from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. The essays I wrote take as their starting-point the Hegelian assertion of the truth of the whole, coupled with the gospel assertions concerning how God thinks, which is very different from that of the world. In the end, a logic was produced that reconciles all oppositions, to the point that in retrospect, having watched an hour of news on television, I commented that, if it doesn’t make sense, it must be true. My logic both describes the illogicality of the world today and shows a possible path to the unification of the competing claims of the various religions and philosophies under the banner of the allowance that all are true as a whole, and only make sense as part of the whole. The world, now fragmented into many parts, each part thinking it is the true one, or that all are equally untrue, or that all are true from their own perspectives, each in their own reality, is actually true when grasped in its innate contradiction, and that this contradiction is the truth, and must be, for the truth not to contradict itself. It is not that we agree to disagree, but that our very being depends on faith in a God who encompasses all differences. At any rate, so it seems to me.
THE ACCOUNT
In the following I will give both a general and special theory of accountability, that is, in the latter case, a restricted economy of the account of the genesis and order of the ideas of the work, with some relevant history on the author, his life and the present age, and in the former case, an analysis of the account as such, both in the logos and in terms of a total count in the making, opposing teleological closure, our happiness and promise of joy, to the pleasure of seriality, the indefinite, semblance, our anxiety of desire, our insatiable pleasure, our fear of the end. In order to do this I will make use of the complexity of the logos-logic-logistic-logistics construction, showing on the square or in the space of the idea as such the relations of these four terms to each other and to the regimes of religion and finance, as well as to their deconstructions. This will be worked out with the thought of Christ in mind, the problem of the contradictions of life in Christ and of life in the World, of the comprehensiveness of the totality of the logic of God inherent in the notion that God does the impossible, the relation of this belief to faith and reason, to the mercy of God as I think it is to be understood, to the theory of reading the Bible that gives rise to the comprehension of contradiction, as well as the secular application of this logic in literature and philosophy, in ethics, politics, finance, and in the interrelation of the faiths of the world, showing a way to peace through an emphasis on wholeness, understanding, forgiveness and the abandonment of the subjective perspective as such, however multiplied, for the unity of one objective dramatic self-effacing release of power for the love of God and the love of neighbor, alluded to at times in the works I have written by the words arrival, real dialectic, catholicity or the Catholic Economy. A textuality will obtain in the working-through of the general and special theories, in the sense that the account of the restricted textual economy of
the individual works is set in the account of the general text, and my text itself in that indefinite ever-greater text that simulates the infinite. We will see the interplay of the sign-world of textuality, which is constantly deconstructing, with the true frame of things found in number, which needs no translation and cannot be deconstructed. The cities of God, seen in the Ultrastructure or Metasignification as I posit it, and of the World, seen in textuality, are intertwined, as the wheat and the tares, but as the deconstructing world falls away, as Joyce said accelerating at 32 ft per second per second, into the abyss, the altogether pristine will emerge, which the Bible calls measure, weight, number, a fact Andrew Marvel commented on in his preface to Milton, though all now seems lost without measure, weightless, a “total count in the making.� The account of accountability I intend is meant to, in part, show the futility of that series, by that which is already made, from which God is seen, as Paul said in Romans. The logos and its logic show this as well. Truth is apparent in the words in which it is written, and you do not have a single word without having the whole of language, metaphysics and the truths they contain with it, as Derrida once said in his early controversy on structuralism. Deconstruction targeted the logos and its logic, forcing it before the letter to the logistic of reducing number to logic, thus eliminating the indeconstructible, and by postmodern parody reducing logistic to logistics, a keyword in business today that is parallel to the use of the term aesthetics for the artificial attempt to reverse time in the aging of the faces of women, as well as the remotivated uses of the word metaphysics today, which are not concerned with being or cause or form as such, but with the spiritual world in general, without reference to good or evil and their restricted dialectic, that is the deconstructive economy of generality against a proper dialectic. Logistics, aesthetics and metaphysics are all artificial, set against dialectics as simulation is set against reality, and do not make any new thing but manipulate matter and spirit
in magical kinds of ways, attempting the impossible, promising the impossible, but ending only by destroying actuality, suspending the really Real, a term from Gregory of Nyssa for God, and erasing meaning as such. One of the cornerstones of the present work will be to see the impossible as something that only God can do, that is the definition of God in a way, which involves not the resort to the paradox, which is based on seeming (characteristic of contemporary logistics, aesthetics and metaphysics), but on the impossible, which really is the reality of that which is, its contradictoriness, its wholeness, its truth. What has happened is the setting back of actuality to mere possibility, this step back freeing play, eliminating the truly serious for the semblance of gravitas, and as the fall away takes place, the seeming elimination of gravity, at the same time a real and an inexorable and unbearable gravity which is causing the fall but cannot be felt in the time of the abyss. Material is feeding the pull of this gravity, the increasing materiality of culture, seen in the new importance of logistics, of aesthetics to defeat gravity and time, of metaphysics to defeat any notion of absolute truth. There is still such truth, but at first glance it may be mistaken for the world that is falling away. That world views it in the grand affirmations of Nietzsche, Joyce, Derrida: their YES. But by eliminating the NO they will by deconstructive logic eliminate the YES as well. It is only by conserving the negative, let your yes mean yes and your no mean no, as Christ said, that the absolute truth emerges into view as the wholeness of the contradiction. The very thing that was previously thought to be division is the real unity, seen from a height not from the leveled postmodern standpoint. God tells us this in all Bibles, and even Heraclitus knew of it: the way up and the way down are one and the same. Aristotle could not grasp this truth which is not human but is divine. The hidden harmony of things is expressed by Christ as the Father who causes His rain to fall on both the just and on the unjust. Christ said then, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And it is this command to be perfect which
tests the cross of human reason, and by faith, not the will or effort of man, though we are told that also is required, in order perhaps to be part of the contradiction, not by our wills but only by the mercy and grace of God. Such faith is the creation of reality, for unless you believe you are not real. The artificial world falls away while the real remains. We are judged by our works, but faith saves, and this at once is the whole truth, which is the mercy of God greater than our sins, but also greater than justice as such or reasoning in itself. Parmenides, in the poem that sets forth the One, says that there are WHAT IS and WHAT IS NOT and that which only SEEMS TO BE. And this is the truth. The One is what is, which as One contains actually all number as One, while the nothing or what is not is the same as the void without either meaning or number, not even the Islamic invention of the zero, while what seems to be, which commentators say is the inordinate concern of a work on the One, is the province not of the Ultrastructure but of the text. The sign only seems to be. The oracle does not speak or conceal but gives signs, as Heraclitus said, which is to say, there are only the revelation of the One, the occulted nothing and the realm of interpretation. Plato, in his dialogue on Parmenides, subjects the One to the first logistic, reducing the Ultrastructure of the unity of number in the monad to the logic inherent in that unity, which inspired deconstruction, a move that results in the equation: both this and that, neither this nor that, the fourfold of logic I wrote on in 1988, and which became the basis for deconstruction’s double blow or affirmation, which is a mere paralysis, not the whole truth but the interdiction of the arrival of truth, as I point out at various places in the work. The logic of the One as one thing and its opposite both at once is the positing of contradiction as the truth, but which is only part of the strategy of deconstruction, which then eliminates the contradiction by a Dionysian YES, by the leveling of hierarchy in Nietzsche’s logical deduction concerning the history of Being as the history of an error, a history in which being is overcome by sheer
appearance, which cannot be appearance any more if it has no Being to oppose it in a binary opposition, and many say they are the same, this deconstruction of the space of logic based on the contradictions that feed the dialectical work of the word and the grand gesture of the affirmation that is a vicious circle without egress. But they are not, though they seem to be. The way to discern the truth of contradiction from the contradiction of truth involves looking at the fruits of the logics. The contradiction of truth is done on the one hand to free interpretation, signs, the text, generally, to excess, as a kind of pleasure of the text, as Barthes said, the same as sexuality, but displaced upward. The truth of contradiction on the other hand humbles human reason and its significance and tells us there is something that cannot be thought, the impossible, that man cannot do. Derrida said that only the impossible is worth attempting. Actually he attempted to deconstruct the impossible itself, by the elimination of act, the creation of pure possibility, and by way of simulation, through the imposition of a pure possibility, making actuality impossible. Every act became an act. Acting, but no action, the pure act is the elimination of all acts. But the truth of contradiction is not this act, but the actuality of wholeness. This whole is the One. It is reality. The truth of contradiction indeed says both this and that, neither this nor that, or rather every statement and its opposite are true. If God is good and yet as we know there is evil, there is in God’s world, the world we inhabit, both. There has been much theodicy from theologians and poets to justify the ways of God to man and explain the existence of evil, and I do not wish to place the goodness of God in question. One can say that evil is only an illusion, as in the East, or that creation itself is an evil, the Gnostic way. Let us say neither of these. But at the same time let us say both. The world is evil and it is only an illusion. Rather that is what it has become in the hands of the logic of deconstruction, which was always potential in the tradition of metaphysics, but which did not come into play until the last
100 years. The world is now the multiple, the sign, and this is the illusion, and semblance is the evil. What is real? Buddha said suffering was an illusion, but Christ showed us suffering and death are both real, though His love is more real. As Sophocles said, we suffer into truth. This is to suffer the contradiction. The contradiction of truth is to posit the absence of meaning as the only meaning, an effect, that is, as Derrida said in an interview in Positions, “writing literally means nothing,” but the truth of contradiction is to accept the cross and what put Christ on it, which was the human reaction to the all-embracing nature of God’s mercy. You will love your enemy but they will not love you, you will be peaceful while they make war, you will be contradicted as Christ was contradicted. The truth of contradiction however is not this contradiction of the truth, the world against the truth, but the mercy by which God is free, not bound by human reason or will, in that He may affirm both the just and the unjust, both saints and sinners, loving He said especially the sinner, but rejoicing when he repents of sin. In this metanoia or conversion is the birth of faith and reality against the paranoia of human fear, greed, denial, desire, self-love, and perhaps most of all the pride of the goddess of human Reason. The wisdom of God transcends mere reason and does this in a way more than we know. There is to say it again, because it bears repeating, what is, what is not and what only seems to be, and in this logical matrix we are placed in the moral problem of our good and our evil. Is evil nothing, merely a lack of the good? Or is it an illusion, seeming to be only? Or does it really exist? If it exists, it is then true, in a way, but I think a truth that perpetuates itself only by falsehood, by denial, simulation and terror to quote Badiou, that is, by being the contradiction of truth. Some would go beyond good and evil, neither moral nor immoral, rather amoral, as one would speak of truth and falsehood in an extra-moral sense, as Nietzsche did. I prefer to go on to the conclusion of the logic, to the fourth term of this equation, the other that completes the moral hierarchy,
which is mysticism. The mystic knows good and evil, that they exist, does not negate them amorally, but in another way, through a transcendent love, turns from evil to the good. This turning is the conversion, the being born again, the new man, the repentance, the turning away from the world to God by the renewal of the mind in order to be perfect, that is, to know what is pleasing to God, to think as He does, in a sense, at least as we can do that in this life, in spirit, if not in deed. When this happens, all things become possible, the impossible can be done, by God and in faith. Thus, I, who was not real, become real. The world which was real is known to be unreal. Everything is true, but as the lie which it was. The contradiction is accepted. One does not say YES to everything morally or mystically, and yet at the same time one does, loving as it is said the sinner but not the sin. As God does. To love both neighbor and enemy is to refrain from judging sin. It is to separate existence from essence, truth from error, that we are good from what we say and do, recognizing that everything that lives is holy, to echo Blake, because part of the whole, which is true, the Hegelian view, but that much of what we think is in error, that we are as Kierkegaard said basically wrong before the Truth, or as Luther said, incorrigible, and that God does the impossible literally in saving us who are evil, and so to recognize this generally, but not particularly, and thus we can say all religions are one, as Blake did. We must love God unconditionally, I say, but the reverse is not the case, as some people say, for God requires something from each of us, as is spelled out in every religion, every morality, every wisdom, and though this differs in cases, the fact is this: the forbearance of truth. We are in error, in debt, to the truth, which still loves us in order that we may yet turn to love Him. The truth is forbearance that defers the debt, and even, in jubilation, foregoes what is His due, contradicts His justice with an ever-greater mercy that forgives us anyway. Though mercy and justice are opposites they are but one act, one action that shows that the left hand of God is somehow not aware of the justice
and wrath in the right, and in what is the impossible, the incomprehensible, forgives. Even bears and forbears the impossible, the truth contradicting itself, the heart of contradiction yet not contradicting the heart, for our sakes. Thus, God does the impossible and in a way or we may hope that in His mercy He denies what is His right and His prerogative, lets go, releases, renounces all out of love for a creature undeserving of this Almighty grace which shows us selfdenial and asks the same of us: love one another as I have loved you. Simple, they say, hard and yet not hard, bright yet dark, smiling yet impassive, simple, yet with the absolute complexity that we cannot understand of a love that contradicts everything except love itself. The truth does not deny itself, does not lie, but just as love fulfills the law, justice is good, yet it is completed, fulfilled, by an absolute mercy that suffers contradiction on all sides, out of mercy. This is our hope. It is a hope against hope. As has been said, God is love, and we are saved in hope, and the truth itself is a charity that gives even itself away. It cannot be denied. The contradiction is also this: that in giving we receive, that only by being empty are we full. At the wall of truth, to echo Cusanus, the opposites at last meet, the coincidence, and contradiction contradicts itself, and unity is achieved beyond what human reason can know. This is the truth of mercy and the mercy of truth. The contradiction both is and is not at the same time. I do not know, I cannot know, yet I believe, I must believe. One must believe. Be perfect. Believe. Faith makes it real. I am made by God, but in faith I become real. Faith is a gift, and if I say I give something to God, then I must be contradicting myself, yet I believe He needs us even as we need Him. Therese said: How much Jesus desires to be loved! We know more than we understand, and we are told to incline not to our own understandings. The mercy of God can be seen in relation to the previously given account of the logic of the philosopher Parmenides and the dialogue by Plato about the talk the first great logician in the West had with the young Socrates. If there is a secret, it perhaps is this.
If you take the logic, any logic, perhaps, which deals with truth, or any logic problem where you have the answer but have to supply the steps to prove it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a problem from mathematics, say, simple addition, for example, then when we speak of the fact of the world, the truth of being, the meaning of things, or the mercy of God, and assert the contradictoriness of them, the truth of contradiction, the answer is that the world, truth, meaning, being, what is our ultimate concern, is more like a math problem than a logic problem. One does not reduce math to logic as in the famous logistic of Russell and Whitehead who spent much ink in “proving” that two plus two equals four. No. One does the reverse of the logistic, and converts logic into math, the truth into a number, as I show in the Metasignification about the arrival, completion and fulfillment of man and God. This reversal can be seen in that, instead of saying true and false, both and neither, and conclude that they cannot all be true, one says “four times three equals twelve.” Or simply add up everything, being-in-the-world, and arrive at the conclusion of the new summa, the sum total of the all in all. Which must be One. Absolutely Plato and Parmenides were right. The One is what is, minus what seems to be, setting aside what is not. The entire fourfold of the logical square is true all at the same time. I may seem to be agreeing with seriality and Sartre by indicating a summa or summing up, that the answer is a total count in the making, as a poet said, but I am not. Semblance is that, and it is growing indefinitely. The truth is One. When you add up all faith in the world, the thing that makes us real, and subtract all doubt, all reason, everything that is not faith, that is, the multiplicity, you arrive at One. If the truth is One, what would the Zero be? Zero is pleasure, a kind of sensual nihilism. Pleasure times anything leads to the void, as multiplying anything by zero leaves zero. To arrive at true spiritual joy, you must then not choose pleasure, but rather its opposite, pain. You must not affirm both, which would negate the One and affirm the Nothing. Pain or
suffering, the cross, is something we accept, the fact of it, and also the good of it in the wisdom of God’ providence, trusting Him. Christ says two things that may contradict each other, yet both I think according to the theory may be true. Come to me all you who are weary and carrying a heavy burden, and find your rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me. But the cross is not easy and light, or it would not be the cross. The cross is full of every kind of pain and contradiction, humiliation, suffering, and to suffer is not easy. But at least it is real. Pain and suffering are two criteria of reality, which as one poet said, is not something the human being can stand much of. Love hurts. God died on the cross, a painful death, because of His love for the Father and for us. If He calls us to the cross, to bear it with Him, how can it also be light and easy? Because at least it is real, which is not something the pleasures of life give. Pleasure is the zero, and the more it is multiplied, the more there is of nothing. Numbness is worse than pain, to feel even pain is better than not being able to feel anything at all. The cross is in a sense both hard and easy, because real, because the opposite of pleasure, because in this, despite human reason, and what appears to be our own self-interest, there is a true joy that the world cannot comprehend, peace that the world knows nothing of, a wideness to mercy, as the hymn says, a forgiveness, an understanding, a wisdom, which is the Mind of Christ. Subtracting pleasure from this will not diminish it, for pleasure is the zero, but if you multiply pleasure times any good thing that seems to be good in itself and may be, though truly God alone is Good, then in the modern calculus of utilitarian hedonism, you not only may but you must lose everything. To arrive at the One, you add up all faith, faiths of every kind, believe everything, all things as it is said, and subtract all doubt, all reason, all sin, for whatever is not of faith is sin, and most of all subtract all pleasure in the world, though it is really only nothing, and then you get the One. What is the number of Spiritual Joy? Christ indicates that it is
70. Why 70? Because human understanding forgives seven times, divine wisdom does 70 times seven times. And it is for this reason that Christ sends before Him 70 disciples to all the towns in Israel he will visit in his life because they are to bring the gospel to the people, bring them the good news, the joy of the message of peace and forgiveness and healing from God. The good news which is One contrasts with the void, all that simulates peace, but does not provide it, such as vacations, rather than vocations. We have the One and the zero. What is the postmodern context? The computer is the universal adding machine, which connects everything through almost, but not quite, infinitely long and complex strings of Ones and zeros. This is the total count in the making, ever indefinite, not able to arrive, or be computed. The computer has computed something it cannot compute. In a way, it seems to have made the world into a kind of One, one world. The ideal has become real through technology. Instead of this great truth of the Reality of the Whole, we have instead the Hole of Unreality, the abyss into which the city of the world is falling. This unreal city is currently in a crisis, and this crisis will not pass, a crisis of financial meltdown, political deadlock, unending distortions of the truth by denial, simulation and terror on all sides. To contradict the truth, clearly and simply, would be to arrive at the Whole, by dialectic, but to again use Badiou’s terms, truth is being destroyed not by contradiction, which is dialectical, like all truth, at least in the West, but through deconstructive simulations and the many forms of denial that humans are known for, and the variety of terrorisms at war in the world today, even on computers themselves. The zero, the nothingness, which is really a less than zero, a simulated fraud, in order to deny it is what it is, or is not what it seems to be, requires constant stimulation. The financial world requires great stimulus packages that only delay, defer, deny the problem of an economy based on credit rather than faith, capitalism rather than the catholic economy of the charity of truth, two different forms of belief
and trust, the former an illusion, the second an ideal, and which increases the national debt of almost all countries in a kind of unreal multiplication that is as big as the strings of ones and zeros that have made the internet. The stimulants that keep us going, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, sane or insane, give us an illusion of energy and vitality, like the picture of Dorian Gray, that is, with a huge price we are in denial about. The corruption of the world is the fact and the result of our being in denial, a corruption seen in the murder of the woman of Juarez by drug cartels fed by American addictions, in the large amounts of money that fuel politics and government today, and in the horror of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. The number of this corruption is something like the Google. It is the opposite of the One. It has been created artificially, stimulated by advertising, sex, power, all desires, all pleasures, and is a monster, a beast, anti-Christian, if I may refer to the prophecy of the end of the world without seeming to be something I am not. God has promised to heal the world, as he ends it, to shepherd the people, give them good pasture to lie down in and rest, to bind up all our wounds. But he also promises to destroy the sleek and the strong. This is not a popular message, but it is in Ezekiel. People like to watch movies about the end of the world, simulations of it, or deny that the prophecies apply to the future, are far rather about ancient Rome, and we cannot fall back on the old phrase, history will be the judge, because after the end, history will be no more, it will have been an illusion, an error of the human judgment, corrected by the divine judgment, which we all hope will be merciful. That all this huge apocalyptic mistake of a world is the all-time contradiction, where some people have so much, and some so little, is the fact. Accountability is called for. What we have is an illusion, what we need is an ideal that we can still make real if we believe we can love. I believe we can. Criticism and complaint and the long litany of opinion are the order of the day, and there is little room for thanks and praise, for trust and mercy, for
meditation, for stillness instead of stridency, and we all are too unilateral, too partial, too fragmented, unlike the God I have evoked so far, as He is to me, Who is so all-embracing, One, whole, complete, that He includes everything and its opposite, and so much so that we cannot understand Him as He is, or really know ourselves, and thus seem to pursue our careers, our loves, our lives, our faith or our fate, with slackness or sleekness, apathy or determination, due to contingent rather than essential reasons. Absolutely, God is the reason for our being, but He is not limited by reasons. Love is the reason for the world and for us, and it is what can still hold us together, and I believe will, and really does in God, despite our unbelief, our lack of care, our fears. He said: You will have trouble in the world, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. We have been given temptations: to sins of the body, mind, spirit. Yet we are temples, lights in the world, cities on a hill. We all are called. We hear this call not with our ears, but with our hearts, not by sight, but by faith, with love, and we do not say that He is being unreasonable, that He asks the impossible, which He perhaps does, but we rejoice in being called, in being chosen, in being created, in being renewed, in being granted a few years to be a part of the world, to learn to love, to choose joy and hope, not despite suffering, but because it is His will, the inscrutable, which I have described as a kind of contradiction, not merely a paradox, a contradiction seen chiefly in Jesus Christ Himself, being both true God and true man, the fact which was a stumbling block for both Jews and Islamists, His death on the cross, what He endured in solidarity with each of us and all of us. To be called by Him is to be called to account, and he makes us accountable, in that we really do count, are not nothing, yet are not somebody, but are One, once we leave the world of seeming-to-be for what really IS, the contradiction of truth for the truth of contradiction. When I am called to account, made accountable, I must turn, either toward Him Who calls, or away from Him. If I think I count as somebody, I turn away. If I
turn toward the call, I begin to count to Him. If I think I count, I will enumerate the reasons. If I only begin to count, I do not count higher than One, though God can unfold out of the One numbers such as the trinity, or four-square arrival, the gnomic five, the completed seven of God and man at one with each other, or in fulfillment arrive at the twelve, three times four, God times man, what is called the All in All. We ascend through a few steps, hard steps of arrival and completion, and in the next life by His mercy we will be fulfilled, not by an addition of God but by a great multiplication, as He multiplied the bread and fish, as He said, be fruitful and multiply, as He said, not seven times but 70 times seven times. God’s action multiplies, it does not divide. Yet it does. He brings not peace but a sword, and a person’s enemies will be his own family members. The Church is persecuted and persecuting, both, holy and sinful, both, and despite denials, often contradicts Scripture. We might view this as hypocrisy, but I do not think it is, yet I do not think it should be ignored either. The truth is contradictory, is exemplified by this Church professing love, but burning heretics, or silencing those who disagree with Rome. I believe God loves each of us, as well as the Church and the World, not despite our contradictions, but because of them. It is we who find ourselves unbearable, judging one and all, condemning sinners, other faiths, critics, even our closest friends. But my conscience judges only me, it is me I am to give an account of. My faith says this, love would have it so, but I dream of reasons, most quite good, why the other is wrong and I am right. Then we are a kind of paranoid, living a delusion, thinking I am somebody, fearful of the stranger and neighbor, in love with myself, if with anyone at all. As Nietzsche once confessed after going mad, he never loved anyone, not even himself. To know that there are good and evil that really contradict and that nevertheless we are not to sin or do evil, that to know the good and not to do it is a sin, that we are therefore, again, to be perfect, means that although contradiction is forgiven, that is not a
license to sin. And perhaps the greatest sin is to deny the truth. John Paul II once said that the most important word in the Bible is “truth.” In denying the truth we deny God Himself Who is the Truth in a person. The truth is a person, not abstract, and easy to love, with a real heart, really tempted like us, suffered and died like us, had a mother, was just a worker in wood, never wrote a book, never married, had a brief career and would have been forgotten, if He had not been God. And because He is not forgotten, neither are we, though we seem to be, after only fifteen minutes of fame. Most of us never get even that much, thank God. But because God loves us and wants us to love Him, as Therese said, we will not only not be forgotten, but live forever. Eternity was the great point of departure for me when I was first called by God in 1989, and my conversion was the immediate fruit of a paper I wrote on the distinction I drew between eternity and the Infinite, departing from Levinas, on the one hand, and Nietzsche on the other, Eternity for me is a religious notion, the Infinite mere philosophy, all against what I once studied, Nietzsche’s eternal return, that infinite circle without exit, and the ethics of Levinas which posits the Infinite but not its limitation by Eternity. The circle that I had been in for five years was in 1989 for me, as Derrida said, “effracted,” the economy broken, my debt paid, I was redeemed and freed, and yet bound to God, though not bound essentially anymore to sin, as I set out on a journey, which at times was painful, boring, mad, mystic, full of love, and filled with the attempt to write something about what I was thinking and experiencing. The basic premise of my work as an author from the inception in 1989, after having rejected Derrida, was that deconstruction was a very bad thing, the philosophy of the Antichrist, and that it was to be refuted. However, before the present work is concluded the reader will find something else going on in my relationship to the thought of Derrida, and it will be seen to fulfill the implications of the thesis concerning the truth of contradiction. While the work, on the one hand, has to do with my coming to terms with
my twenty years in the Catholic Church, and what I found out about the apocalypse, on the other hand it involves a working-through of Derrida and deconstruction, my position changing over the course of the years, under the pressure of the time. I came to see it is not that we contradict each other, but that we cannot logically accept that fact of existence, and so we live a little crazy, in denial about reality, which just cannot be true, as it is, yet we find it may really be the truth, WHAT IS. And so in the end, I have made my peace with deconstruction, while still opposing it, that is dialectically appropriating it so as not to be deconstructed by it, but have allowed the contradictions to stand, because the whole is the true. The Bible says so many things in more than one way, even four gospels that often conflict and contradict, that we must change the way we think or ignore the great canonical truth that the Bible is true even when it contradicts itself, and that one must not isolate statements, but take it as a whole. One might say: In the beginning was the Account, which is one meaning of the word Logos used as the name of the Son of God. The word for Word means more than just “word,� and is paradigmatic of the truth itself, being also speech, reason, discourse, harmony, proportion and account, as well as much more, as I write in my work on Heraclitus. Words self-contradict, as a teacher of mine pointed out, remarking that people want words to mean only one thing, which they do not, a fact that does not apply to numbers which do not mean but one thing as numbers, though we may find symbols in the ciphers, a fact that accounts for the plan for the temple in the book of Ezekiel. Newton said this plan for the Temple is the map for the mind of God, which inspired me to say that God is a Book, which is neither right, nor wrong, that is, unproven and not able to be proven, and although it does not seem to make sense, I say it anyway. To say that all religions are One, and yet not all religions are equally true, is valid. To say all of the Bible is eternally valid, that what it says about something in the past still applies today, especially regarding the Church, is what I
think is true, that Scripture is essential Prophetic, but that any one isolated point of view is only partial, whether it is Catholic, Jewish, Islamic or Buddhist, and that only the totality can be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even though all conflict. And yet we maintain our affiliations with the parts, while realizing they are not the whole, which is a representation of God. God is eternal and infinite, and in a logical space contains all possibilities, but as Aquinas said, what is eternal is actual, so He really is All in All already. We await our arrival, when He chooses, and learn patience as we wait, as Joyce said, patience is the great thing. As Holderlin said, the important thing is not to be somebody, but to learn. And endurance is good for the faith, and faith is what makes you real, if you are real. Faith creates being and in being born again we become real. We are in a real relation with God, not circling an impassive distant star, and yet we are also in a fixed relation, for God cannot change, which we cannot help but do in our immutable world filled with immortal souls. From our hearts we overcome our minds. Out of love we do not have to have a better reason, a better theology, a better job, a better car, a better house, a better wife, or a bigger and better anything than anyone else. In a sense contradiction is so democratic, so egalitarian, and dialogue so good, to be at peace so welcome, and yet to fight for the right so necessary, to never quit or give up or in, but to keep going, to call out to each other as we run on, “just keep going!� which Badiou said is a definition of truth. There is no other race to run and to finish is to win, to go the distance as the fighter did in the old movie, to try, and though as we die we may not know if we won anything or what our lives really meant, yet to know that if we have loved, some real thing was made, a living spiritual being that is like having a baby in terms of the natural world, but may be how God is born, in us, and how His book came to be, for us, why he lived and died, with us, and did not give up, out of love, one of us, and my religion was not wrong about God being love, as John said: God is love. When we
love each other, God is more God, I think, and we help create the World with Him, the creation being something not inessential or extrinsic to God, but a world He loved so much He died to save it. He was crucified along with two others. In the four accounts in the gospels, only Luke mentions that one was saved. Yet there is that one chance, that one hope, that one account, and we accept this in a way Samuel Beckett could not, who also could not accept suffering, who lived in perpetual exile. We are not yet home, but we are not still in exile. We are on the way, and God is coming to meet the prodigal, the thief, the sinner, even the good. We do not know what He will say, or even if He is a He, as in some churches which are progressive, but God will come, we only seem to wait indefinitely, and faith being the substance of things hoped for, what makes the real really real, and the evidence of things not seen, the living proof, we hear the word, receive the gift of faith, and become real, sometimes right away, sometimes years later, as in the difference between the conversion of Paul and the conversion of Augustine, not for our sakes alone but for the sake of the whole, and to be a drop in the infinite sea is a much better thing than imagined when we spent our days on the shore playing with the shells and rocks and things that amused, distracted, but did not help us become what we were meant to be. Accepting the truth of contradiction is not the way to arrive, but rather some point you reach just before arrival, how far before no one knows, but somewhere between departure and approach. As I said once, in a paper on Augustine and Derrida, to contradict the theory that a letter can never arrive, because of a structure of error built into the postal principle, if you set out and just keep going, you cannot help but arrive, you will not get lost forever, and even if you lose your way, God will find you. Perhaps He can only find us precisely when we are lost. We must lose ourselves in order to be found. We lose our lives in order to really begin to live. Whether that is before or after death, or only after resurrection, after the particular or the general judgment or a long time in the fires of
purgation, or if simply knowing and loving God is already to have arrived, I do not know. I believe all of the above. That is the answer you give God when He asks you that one last, hard question that means so much. All of the above, Lord, all of the above. It may be that the question though will be simple and easy, as simple as “Who do you love?” If we can honestly say “You alone Lord, you are my inheritance, all I desired in all I desired,” we will be closer to the truth. “With what is thought to remain?” John Paul II asked in his youth, and the reply he gave was “With the truth, of course.” If we sincerely seek the Truth, while not violating conscience, we will be saved. These words of Vatican Council II, said in relation to the religions of the world, should be kept in mind when considering truth, in that neither Christians nor anyone else own it entirely, and that precisely when the truths of the world all contradict, this does not add up to the negation of the truth, but to its very completion, just short of our true fulfillment in the All in All. It has been said we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, which is a theology of politics, compromise, but I say, follow the truth wherever it leads, for wherever God leads you, He will provide for you, even though it be impossible, a promise which is the logic of mercy, absolute. This absolute is free, free of reason, meaning to say, at least we must not look for reasons to believe, like theologians, but allow ourselves to be created in our essential being by faith, to have sheer faith and to leave the rest to God, whose mercy and justice are one.
THE FORM
Seeing the form is part of the basic requirement to know and love the truth. It is the point of concentration at which the work meets the world. This meeting of you who are the work of God, and any work you may do, with the world, is a kind of crisis, crux, or turning point. The world
tries to inform you, reshape you and conform you to itself and its purposes, which vary depending on time and place, but which universally have principles such as pleasure, desire and power expressed today through finance and politics. We are told by Paul to be not conformed to the world. Thus, one must not be too informed by it or of it, either. On what basis then shall we be formed? Let us say on faith, hope and love, theological and spiritual gifts that money cannot buy. They can be simulated or denied or distorted or destroyed by the terrorisms we experience, but they yet abide by the power of the Spirit and are taught by the Church in prayer in the Word. We are thus formed. What is the Form? It has been described in a variety of ways, beginning with Plato, as in the Timaeus, in which is posited the khora or womb, the matrix of creation in which or through which the god or demi-urge fashions certain actual shapes of things. These things are like atoms, building blocks of the reality. Derrida, once he had carried through on the destruction of form, turned to the khora in his later years, perhaps wanting to see the unshaped behind the shape, as Plotinus put it, a text Derrida also referred to in his writing on the secret in the late 90s, as well as in an exergue in the 60s. I think he went from a divided origin in 1967 to go beyond the moment of the fall to return to an original unity of all things in the great affirmation, the YES he finds in Nietzsche and Joyce. And he may have done this, and completed the double movement he had promised. But, let us stop short of that speculation, basically ideal, on the source of formation, calling that rather, in faith, simply God, and look instead at the Form itself in order to find the truth about it from which if possible a word can be spoken about the act of formation and the One from which the forms proceed. Form is determined by number, the definite limit, and not by language, which is in principle indefinite and contradictory. Music and poetry are based on number in a way the novel and the newspaper are not. Western culture has moved from the limit of number toward an undefined and indefinite
space, call it the abyss, the precise opposite of the womb of khora, the abyss being akin to the tomb. Specific form can be seen as for instance the unity, the binary, the trinity, the symphonic square, the gnomic fifth, the complete seven of the combination of the three of God with the four of man, and ultimately the all in all of God times man found in the 12. These are the seven basic steps in the arrival of the dialectical form. Our task is to realize the symphonic form of the four, which is our totality. Without this shape we will not fit with God. How do we thus arrive at the square? In a variety of ways in my works I both describe and explain it, but the work also exemplifies it. It does this through the logic of the form on which it was based and which it shows forth. The work takes as the basis of its logic the idea of arrival at the four, the square. But as I say in one place, all work is completed by the reader and by the grace of God which illuminates the mind and accords the work its reception. There is further than the text of my work a context. This context is that of God, Church and World, versus the fourth of the work in my point of view, a position from which the reader will in the reading of the work be enabled to view God-Church-World. The singularity of the “ I,� the subject, the work, is the essential completion and perfection of that system, and it effracts the circularity of the metaphysical GodChurch-World system. Thus the work by its existence, that it is, completes what it is about, just as the autobiographical elements of the works fit with the tripartite criticism of theology, philosophy and literature, the creative elements being the arrival of the criticism, and the metacritical completing in time an arrangement in the space of the concept. Each of us must take on this work-like aspect, and step outside the system of the world, be not conformed to it, and in a way, be re-formed through a continual reformation, so as to stand in our arrival, before God, for our own sakes and for the good of the whole which needs each of us to complete the circle precisely by breaking the circularity, call it the textuality itself, by our own creativity, creating
not just my life, but bringing about the whole life of real form. Unlike the context theory of Derrida which says that the text is in the context of the world, a world which is in principle and in fact insatiable and unsaturable, the destabilizing of the text and the opening up of it, I say the God-Church-World system is the text of which the paradigmatic work-like I is the context which is the point of view of the reader or author or any other singularity, the word for instance, but supremely the unique number, which at once both opens the circularity of that objective system only in order to complete it and close it, that is to move it from being an illusionary thing into the real and the true which is and which does not merely seem to be. And so I must be formed as the I, and I think that enables then a real We or community, in order for the God-Church-World system to be not an illusion but be in reality. Unless I am real, it cannot be real, but if I am, it will be as well. I do not think this is merely an “as if,� but is the actuality of the actual, the existence of essence. Thus I must act, but only on myself, and becoming a true singularity, actually, not ideally, make real and true the world, which depends on me, on each one of us, on each work as such, to be meta, not para, in relation both to oneself and to the whole, and when each is one, all will be One, every other, wholly other, for the One. We must not doubt that we are real despite the unreality of the world system which confronts us with for instance what it calls the ultimate fact of our deaths. Death is not real, it is but an illusion, and is not the limit. Do not worry about death, for God is not the God of the dead but of the living, and Christ came to defeat the illusion of death by the truth of life. Death imposes fear on people, but the living truth sets us free. We are either dead or alive, now not later. We are either saved or we are not, there are not degrees of salvation. You are either real or you are not, there are not degrees of reality. There are only Reality and Illusion. You must become real, because no one can do this for you, it is the journey you must make in life. Christ, some think, did it for us, took our places in an
economy of salvation, which he did in principle, and in fact, yet also to show us the form and breach the circularity of God-Church-World, to arrive first and be the way for us to follow in order to arrive later. He said deny yourself, that is to say, limit yourself, in order to arrive. You must be definite, not indefinite, finite, not infinite, one, not many, restricted in order to be really free, obey by faith, which is specific, not generally without conditions to affirm or love everything in an indefinite gesture. You make yourself, you make the work, the marriage, the art, the idea, the love, the act, the end. Without Christ you can do nothing on your own, and yet with Him you can and must make your own reality as well as the reality of the whole. He does not do it without you. You have the responsibility for your own arrival, on which others depend as well, for we are in community, a family, a world, and no other, but just one. Therefore, do not judge another. That means do not interpret their place on the map of arrival, how near or how far. You cannot do that until you have arrived, and after you arrive you will not want to. Mercy is a way to arrive. Without mercy the world judges, criticizes, condemns. It is gossip and slander. I must be different. Some see the great affirmation of postmodernism as this stepping out of judgment, but that is but a simulation, a lack of real discernment. By affirming, some deny the truth. The arrival of morals is found in mysticism, the arrival of time in eternity, the arrival of truth in contradiction, the arrival of the text in the context. You are the context of the world, not it of you. By opposition one creates the greater harmony. The creation of it depends on the proportion, a way of being that is an acknowledgment, a thanksgiving, a turning to the care of the whole by being whole yourself. Eliot said in the end is the beginning, to know from whence we set out on our journey, and to know it really for the first time. We went unknowing, but by stepping outside the circle or system, the text or the world, by becoming one, by becoming myself, I return not in judgment but in mercy, to see and yet not be seen, to know and yet not be
known, to understand and love, though I be misunderstood and unloved, to be at peace amid strife, to be order in the chaos, to be light in the darkness, to be effaced in all this, and as is said, to be Christ, therefore not myself, to have the Mind of Christ, that is, to become a child of God. I think in order for this conclusion to be accepted the premises of my argument must be properly understood, and that chiefly in defining the term of God-Church-World. By this implication of God in the Church and in the World I speak not of the God of Jesus Christ, but rather the god of those who denied him, the one whom William Blake said is the god of this world. That god is a lie, the father of lies and would perpetuate a certain morality in the Church and an immoral or amoral attitude in the World, in order to cut off the mystical arrival on which we depend as our goal. That so-called god is a kind of reason which has become the reasoning of men, but which denies faith, and is really sin. All morality based on it is really the great sin, the judgmental morality, rather than the mystical forgiveness that loves and does not judge. The grand affirmation of the postmodern is a short-circuit of the steps leading to mysticism that stops short of true love and forgiveness and mercy by going beyond the moral and immoral, good and evil and, hesitating in the amoral, thinks it has arrived by accepting and affirming the whole. But the whole of reality cannot be seen from this vantage, because it is that point of view is still a part of the circularity of God-Church-World. The real God of Jesus Christ is what others have termed the God beyond god, Eckhart and Tillich did so, but which has been misunderstood by some in their great affirmation as the opposite of what He truly is. Unless one breaks the system and steps out of the text as such the truth of God cannot be seen. As long as one is trapped by language games and time, which we have been told are absolutes that we cannot get around, such will be the case. Silence and eternity are words for the place outside the circularity and are characteristic of mysticism. Absolute knowledge involves the arrival of dialectic by stepping out of the
speculation which is theory in recent years. Derrida interdicted the step but it has been taken. The uncanniness of the simulations of truth must be overcome by a love that casts out fear, a trust in the mercy of Jesus that defeats the terror against the truth, what denies you, the attempt to deconstruct you. When you are, it will no longer be. When you take the necessary, impossible, yet promised step, you will arrive. In order to do this one must turn toward, not away from, the truth of Christ, repent from evil and believe. The opposite of this metanoia is the paranoia that is all around us, in the text of the God-Church-World system, the fear you see in the eyes of strangers, the delusions of grandeur we sometimes fall prey to, and an alienation that simulates the real solitude of one who has explicated the implications of the logic of what is the deconstruction in postmodernism, the closure of the system of God-Church-World as a network textuality. The signs of that only give interpretations that go on indefinitely. Opposed to it is the number, as such, the shape of truth, the form, untranslatable as a poem is, as obvious as light is, pure like silence and quiet mediation, a mysticism that effracts the circle in the sheer ascent of love up, out of the world, the direction of prayer and resurrection, the life of the Most High. God, by being “most high,” stops all regression, progression and aggression, by his great egression. The I AM breaks the text. To de-form the world as Derrida has done, or as de Man did in the disfiguring of the poem, or as Bloom did in ruining the truths, is to deny the truth of the I AM of the existence of that which is by a fruitless going-back-of the shape to get to the unshaped, the One of Plotinus, and simulate it in the world, to deconstruct that which is into what it is not, because the world, as seen in the God-Church-World concatenation or chain of implications, does not exist, only I AM real, which is to say, reality depends on the I AM of God said to Moses, and existence, reality, is to partake of this I AM, lesser only in degree, and in the atonement to be at one with God, when one can say “I am” and really say something in fact, in deed, not as a way of
positing the truth, not as an assertion which is in fact a denial, but as the transcendent fact that escapes the black hole of God-Church-World, which would trap everything which is not spiritual. The metaphysical truth which so many seek is the truth of what Blake and Coleridge called the imagination: the great I AM of absolute existence, the that-ness of the shape or of art or of the poem, not the what-ness which instead of defining and through definition giving limit and shape, logic and aesthetic, that is, seeing the form, actually and essentially denies the existence in the mystery of consciousness, another term for imagination, which we experience as self-evident but which cannot be found other than in the act of being itself. It is to say I AM against an “I am this or that.” To say “I am this or that” is to give your occupation or define yourself in some way, but the truth is outside the implications of your role in the world. Your truth must be to be One. You are defined by your relation to the One truth. Your truth must be to be able to say I AM, absolutely, without any other meaning. This is not to put yourself in God’s place, but rather to allow God to take place and so break the closure of the text of God-ChurchWorld, which would deny the freedom of the glory of the great I AM of God. God’s hands are not tied, as one young man once told me at the seminary. Theology might think so, and the Church and the World act as if it were, but you, when you say I AM in the sense God does, free yourself from their “god,” not in order to become God, but by being what God intends you to be, free, know the truth. In knowing this truth, the I AM, aside from any essence for the world to deconstruct, then and only then will I be, then I am free and real and One and in-deconstructible. As is God. If I am free, real, One and in-deconstructible, then I am open to the faith of Christ. To be faithful is to be in real relation. It is to be in true relation which is a keeping in relation to the truth. All falsehood is unfaithfulness and breaks relation with the truth. When you step out of the world, or the God-Church-World system, you dissolve the false bond that held you in slavery to
all lies and dissimulation and come into the truth of your relationship to God in Jesus Christ, and thus by being outside the system of the text, become meaningful, have meaning, and you are without lie the transcendental signified. If you are faithful to Christ you stand on the rock where Moses stood, the firm foundation of the truth of the gospel. From this point the world as a lie ceases to exist, the truth is told, and when you become real, it becomes real, the church is reformed, and then God takes place in you, the event of the truth occurs, your own faithfulness and transcendence being the act which converts the phantasm of the world. Truth is not the conversion to the phantasm as was thought in medieval philosophy, but against it, the turning of phantasm itself, the illusion which is not the imagination but the distortion of truth by fanciful associations and juxtapositions which do not create but destroy through a relation not meta but para. The relation of para, the separate reality, which we are informed by the world is the truth about each and every one of us, is the denial of the One that is God the All in All. The city of God is the meta which is beyond the world and is in a critical relation to its lie because of the faithfulness of the meta to the truth of God. Faithfulness requires the denial of self, not the denial of truth, the taking up of the cross, not the crossing-through of the Word by a kind of erasure that is the mark of the Derridean text, his strategy of writing, like the X placed over the word Being by Heidegger in his later work, the crossing-out of meaning by what some called the crucifixion or passion of the Word in theologies closer to atheism than to God, and finally, as disciples of Christ, the following of the way which is Christian, the steep and narrow pathway, the strait way which is the acceptance of the reality of suffering as essential to joy, its contradiction and completion and fulfillment, for temporal enemies are spiritual friends, as Blake said. In our day, everyone goes their own way, as in the Book of Judges, seeming to be individuals, but in reality only fragments suspended in the vicious medium of technology and information, the IT, while
the faithful follow Christ, despite the world’s opinion. There are only truth and opinion, and there are either, for each of us, the two opposing points of view, which are first, that Christ is the truth, or second, that He is a matter of opinion. Some people think there is no longer any truth at all, but only opinion, and this has become the glory of our time, the fame of the opinion-makers. They make themselves by their own opinion superior to everyone else when in fact they have ceased to be real, are less than nothing, and are actually only as equally invalid as all others who hold to what Parmenides called the way of opinion, thinking they have done a great thing in turning aside from the existential gloominess of the concept of nothingness, which though dark actually had more truth than the semblance in the world of opinion, which is neither being nor nothingness, and which was the real goal of nihilism, the abyss, which is not the nothing but the hell of a world without truth or love or any notion of the meaning of the good. As one student put it, rightly or wrongly, you decide, the good means so many things it no longer means anything. Heidegger said as much of being. If you do not know the truth about the truth, you will believe that what I am saying is simply another opinion. Thus we live in two worlds, one in which there is truth and it is knowable through faithfulness, freedom, becoming one, being real, taking a stand against deconstruction, and another parallel world that is based on the rule of interpretation that any thing can be juxtaposed alongside any thing else, and call that connection, call that pattern, call that order, call that truth, that there are no absolute truths but only effects like the writing that is the counterfeit of truth which is so common no one any longer knows truth from falsity, that there are only opinions, and that to be truly free is to be able to express one’s opinion whenever one likes, where there are no longer facts, even, but only points of view, and in which all religions are like foods in a restaurant, with faith being a matter of choice from the menu. But such is not the truth of faithfulness, for the faithful choose or are chosen, are given the gift of
faith, and do not change their minds, but live by principles that do not easily change depending on the issue, which for the democratic voter invariably means self-interest, while in the world of opinion one may change one’s diet as one chooses, and if one grows tired of fish one may choose fowl, that is, change as the weather, or simply change the channel on the TV. It has always been thus. If one does not believe the truth to be possible, one will not bother to seek it. If one thinks it impossible to be perfect, one will not try to be. If one does not think that faith and morals are based on anything other than mere opinion, one may do as one likes. We obey no law that we do not agree with. As has been said, if nothing is true then everything is permitted. But look at the course of the world in the 100 years since those words were published. Have we benefited from the freedom to do everything that we wish? Certainly it has been fun, in a way, but with unintended consequences that are still not clear to many, dots still un-connected into a picture for them. To live in denial and debt and fear, under terror, without truth, amid great corruption and evil, in a world without love, or almost so, losing hope, adoring idols, consuming, spending, rather than making, having, rather than doing or being, forgetting so many of the things on which we once depended to support our free lives in a nation conceived in liberty, has almost brought us to the final collapse. Yet, God has not given up on us and the truth still exists despite our denying and ignoring it. What must be done? Those who are faithful must keep on in their faithfulness and not give up or give in. The faithless world which the faithful are among as lights in the darkness is not beyond redemption, or God would have already come in the day of apocalypse, the day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment. There is still time and that means because of the love of God there is still mercy. Time is the mercy of God, though some think that it proves He does not exist. Derrida even mocked God’s patience in the pages of deconstruction, the deferral and delay, the hesitation, the grand affirmation, the Messiah, hospitality, justice,
openness to the other, and by the putting into question of hierarchy and sovereignty, the word and the book, the self and the same, even being as presence, and what he at last termed the deconstruction of actuality. The reduction of binary logic by Nietzsche first, and now by almost everyone, to the one leveled generality that is the sameness of the postmodern diversity culture, mocks the oneness of the Real, as the world of semblance imitates the Truth, the para deconstructs the meta, amid the many twists and turns in the labyrinth of the text, but there is no longer simple conversion, only versions: perversions, inversions and subversions. We are so late, so far from our origin, and cannot find the way back. But we must trust that God will meet us where we are, that He will have mercy on the world, that He will be the peaceful Shepherd who pastures his sheep. If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts. I believe that God has placed in everyone some timeless resource of the Spirit of truth that man cannot destroy, and that if God will He can yet save some, or many, or all. We do not know, and yet one must believe, an echo of the later Derrida in his book on blindness. To the faithful I say: do not stop believing. You may still be an instrument of the grace of God in a way unforeseen, and you must be open to the Spirit to be used as God wills. To the faithless I say: look at the world around you, all your pleasures and treasures, your cares and debts and commitments or lack of same, and ask yourself what is the cause of the misery in you and in all those you call friends and family. To do this you must look in the mirror of the question and recognize yourself in the answer. Do not be afraid. What you see is not real. When you are changed it will be. It will be because there is nothing that is hidden that will not be revealed. You will be changed and you will come to know the truth of yourself, in the mind of God.
THE LOGIC
Taking off from Plato’s Parmenides, Derrida makes the impossible possible, therefore actual, deconstructing actuality, by making it impossible, in short, by contamination. How does this take place? I could say by examples, that is, taking out, citing, rather than taking back, which is rooted in redemption, as etymologies show. The deductions regarding the ONE that Plato makes through the character of the philosopher Parmenides lead to the assertion of the truth of contradiction. That is, that by which something both is and is not in the same respect at the same time. Contradicting Aristotle and many others, Derrida holds this to be the case, the contradictory truth. Hegel did the same. The Idealist opposes being and nothing at the beginning of his Logic and synthesizes them into becoming. Canceled out, lifted, and preserved, at one and the same time, the Aufheben. It is the concept itself, words which mean more than one thing, words that contradict themselves, that is the mechanism in the dialectical logic that works to produce the tertium quid. Without creation ex nihilo, dialectic is the way to make it new. Lately there has been the mere juxtaposition of signs and things, the method of the deconstructive restructuring: any two signs or texts can be connected from any distance under any rule. That is textuality. But it leads both from and to a logic I will outline and resolve. Derrida found a way to stop the dialectic, to contradict Hegel’s contradiction, the antithesis that becomes synthesized, otherwise than by the basic EITHER / OR of the existential which Kierkegaard propsed as the solution to the system of the Hegelians. Derrida does not exactly negate the negation, as one says of the dialectical maneuver, which requires the work of the negative, a certain resistance, rather by a passivity, as seen in the works of Blanchot or the philosophy of Heidegger. In a pure “play,” a free play without any rule but lability, a pure semblance, a mere
“nothing,” almost, but actually neither being nor nothing, but also both being and nothing, at once, which seems to be the force of opinion. Derrida contradicts dialectic by taking the BOTH / AND of Hegel, and adding a NEITHER / NOR. This is the move Plato made in regards to the One. It is both being and nothing, but neither being nor nothing, therefore, no becoming. No life, no movement, only the semblance of it, as Plato, Zeno and the fountainhead Parmenides had shown. There is but One, but not the ONE of the truth, the Good, rather the one of the AS IF TO BE, which is beyond good and evil, neither being nor nothing, rather only seeming. We can still say the seeming “only seems to be,” but that is its only chance, as Derrida said in an essay on the Phaedrus. The question is neither TO BE nor NOT TO BE, as Hamlet said and Camus famously echoed in the essay that established his philosophical credentials, but rather am I to be or merely am I AS IF TO BE? That is the alternative to life and death, and can be rather ghostly, neither really dead nor really alive, a third thing, to refer to the dialectic, but strange, not life, but deathin-life. If we will yet be, we will be one day, but sadder and wiser men who have known deathin-life, the opposite of the resurrection, the evil ghost spirit against the revivifying Holy Spirit. Both Heidegger and Derrida demonstrated this, as I wrote of early on in “The Gift.” When there is no becoming there is nothing but becoming, which is a contradiction. And which is true. But in this case becoming truly ceases, as does anything which is nothing but…, as Kierkegaard showed in saying that if there are nothing but Christians, in Christendom, there is no more Christianity. He used the same logic as the Nietzschean HISTORY OF AN ERROR in Twilight of the Idols: eliminate one of a pair, the other does not remain. A single shoe is not much good alone, except to use as a hammer. But in destroying the ideal, the real ceased. The deconstruction of ideality led to the deconstruction of reality. Now we have neither. We have everything and nothing now, each thing and its opposite, as I know I am myself, in that I am self-contradictory. I am both
good and evil, but some things simply are in fact, like the Holocaust. It did both happen and not happen, which is true in the world of opinion, not in the world of fact. But facts have altogether vanished. Whatever is asserted loudly enough and long enough comes to be believed. This kind of “belief” is not solid faith but public opinion. Unfortunately it seems that kind of weak credence is all that causes us to cohere as a world today. The market is unstable. People no longer believe or trust, because they know it is not the real facts they are being asked to believe in, rather opinion, however expert or official. Experts are a dime a dozen, and for sale everywhere. They use rhetoric, not reason, plausibility rather than proofs. Logic no longer works, it plays. For instance: language games, number games, Computations, Connections. But no ideas, no reality. For reality was anchored in a hierarchy of the ideal and the real, which has been displaced by the nihilo, nihilism. In world history we had two basic philosophical positions, realism and idealism, but nihilism displaced both. All together this has created what I call the God-Church-World text, or onto-theology as Heidegger put it. What is needed is grace to Effract this circularity, and that means an “I” outside the text ready to receive the call of God in grace. When this happens a RING is formed: realism, idealism, nihilism, grace. I have said that to believe is to be. In a world without any reason, I have found that if one at least has faith, the one thing necessary, one still exists. The others only seem to. My logical project has been two-fold. On the one hand, to secure stability for thought, what I call “arrival,” against both dialectic and its deconstruction, and on the other hand, to rewrite deconstruction itself, that is to synthesize all logics, even in their contradictions. I think that one way to reverse the Derridean simultaneous affirmation and denial is through the existential logic of the free choice. Another way is through asking ourselves the question that Sherlock Holmes asked in his method of deduction. He said something like: Eliminate whatever is impossible, and what remains, however improbable, must
be the truth. With God, all things are possible, nothing is impossible for God. But if, as those since Nietzsche have done, one eliminates God, one eliminates what Levinas called the “messianic vigilance” of the eternal against potential infinities, for instance, of time. In which evil could return, after the apocalypse. But what of an infinite logic? An infinite text? The impossible becomes possible, unless there is a limit. ACT is that limit. God is pure act, as Aquinas wrote, and this pure act eliminates the impossible by reducing potency to actuality. Believe all things. Even contradictions. In fact, to be true to the truth we must contradict the lie of the world. The way to contradict Derrida’s logic of the both-and-neither-nor is to cut the knot by an act of faith, to say no to the not by saying yes to God. This does the following: 1) It is a real act, neither possible nor impossible, but simply IS. 2) It is a way of Effracting the circularity by an authentic RING. God-Church-World will remain a hypothetical and hypocritical, hypercritical sham and fantasy until you say I AM because I believe in God. People will think it mere pretense done for base motives, fear, greed, etc. Ignore them. Make your act of faith in God anyway. 3) Your act of faith reestablishes a hierarchy by recognizing One above ourselves down here in the leveled general text. Transcendence is necessary to escape the machine of GodChurch-World, by I in relation to the Most High. 4) This act makes you real. Brings you into real relation with the “really Real” and you are saved, and in you being saved, others are as well. Not potentially, but actually. Not cognitively, but substantially. In the act of faith you actually though invisibly arrive. In the stability of the arrival of the act of faith, one may take action against falsehood and injustice. It is the grace and mercy of God to arrive, faith itself is a gift, a mystery, but not impossible, just hard to think, though not to feel, or believe. Faith, not will to power, is that which truly empowers. God will not make you believe, but if you will but believe, God will work miracles for you and others. Most of all He will make you real again. The act of faith
involves volition, choice, action, but also reception, the receiving of the gift, and openness, trust, hope. What little we have God will multiply and restore. Both our will and God’s are free. Deconstruction eliminated freedom by affirming all, erasing distinctions in the polar oppositions in which they are found. An opposition in scripture is: Your faith has saved you. You will be judged according to your works. You must believe both. The act of faith is the step that humbles the law of reason by a greater one. Derrida said that all was always already complicated at the origin, and followed the implications of that. But the step of the act is original simplicity. Step out of the complicity of the world. Step into supplication by the explication of the logic of deconstruction that forces one to conclude that action must be taken. When we realize that God believes in us even more than we believe in Him, we will therefore love. You need not choose between logic and love: logic leads to love. When you have reason, then you have faith, or when you have faith, then you have reason, but without one or the other, both are lost. In faith, free yourself to think, or think your way through the trouble with the text, and take the step of faith. God calls, time is short, the world needs you. Say “I am it” and complete the ring of friendship with God by the graceful act of faith.
“Say that Jerusalem is�
Perhaps my words disturb your prayer. Perhaps you, the mystic, need no points for meditation. But I speak of him to Him for you, while you simply pray. Eternity bounds, does not hem, limit us, rule us, give direction, up, then, into His storm, His eye, His calm interference in the mundane. With and without words: we must choose, be chosen. Both. To say little with so much, or speaking, innumerable, yet still say one thing necessary. Out of the many complexes, neuroses, psychoses, metastases, sees, out of all disease and disaster, stands one to come. And standing points above. I think I feel, feel something inside me, bower or brain, coming, about the turn, ever turning to, in myriads, ways without whys, lines drawn over our ignorances, hidden in, neither obscure nor occult, light rather, in light. Him. He is.
You know it. A story has begun.
You know, now, things fade, colors on cloth, even evenings fail into night, which is coming, still stars branch, and in the skull-cap of a thousand year we enroot our seed, between never-endings lay the middle, plications, sin, sun, son sing, song signed, not to fail or fade, would be story, would be tolled, full, filled, meant. Not to fail, not to fade, truth we know, for we are known, are stretched, fixed by means. If we mean to. But you, you did not, did both mean to fall but not to fail, and in falling your way, we but succeed you, without second.
He did not really speak, did you, you saw and shone, bright, dark, hiding, back-minded, earlodged, thought-lost, hest just but standing, no jest, no pose, no to impose, but you were the exposed. You stood out from. Time. Is.
The wound you were did not heal. Signatories. Numbers. Out of time. You appropriated, all, for but one thing. Making. Truth. Is. And you said, ever. Knowledge, knotted-hopes, full striven, in your arms storming, learn.
They say you had no foundation in essence, but traces, echoes, parts only, assemblers, without wholes, spirited words, yet spirit is, is that not a word? Problem of near-belief, teachers had not a key. Versions, only. Foundation riven, you, reft, logical, truthed, passed words, un-pasted, unposted, past juxtaposed. Cut. Words cut through you. Destroyed description and explanation, neither declared, but disclosed your wound, the wound of the word himself. Discard, forfeit. Utter. You behind the words. The logic bit. You bit back. Grapplers. You took our place.
For in all logic, if you can say that Jerusalem is, if we can say, still that Jerusalem is, the place required by logic is yet, and can be found, the assertion of faith, eternity of concern. You, truth and logic became, stripped, meaning. Not to say I have grasped, but in the struggle with truth, your victory was to be grasped. That this too is, is beyond doubt. Proven, in borders of scripture, commentaries, that do not explain the words, but enact them exactly, by being exposed. This is. If this is, subsist, without which truth-less, for accidentals, for appearances, no place to hide. A snow of illegibility, ran the wound, rain wind, ward, cover your words, sposed, desire as if to say the text itself, we only fall from a height, and now we are falling, and have
become so profound, because without foundation, catch us pall as we fall. Poems are snow, whiter words, virgins, martyrs, gentle, contoured by holiness, by logos, by logic without demand but to be true, faithful, snow-part of time, winter answer, dead, wait. The logic that strips away all but what is, strips seeming and opinion, even the nothing, to be the one, immovable, it is. Is it. Is it eternity. Is it snow set bounds in winter. Innumerable snow, unrepeatable words. Universal, singular, unparticular snows, how do you interpret snow or simplify the place. Snow did not extend, but bound, the form, by sheer material, prime, stuff of dreams. You. Glory of the snows, high reflectivity, light without heat, sheer blinding, purity, as if God to Abraham in winter, yours will be as the snows on highest ridged mountains, always. Will be, Jerusalem is. If you wake, wake to this. Snow regal, snow regard, but be regaled. In pieces of paper whiter witness not blank a testimony text, you found you, and said it. Is. Sheer holiness, is. Present, a heart-word, is.
We, snow-parts, perhaps, holding places, scattered yet gathered, drifted, yet still for a time, temporary words, tempting snows, we fell, like you, measurable by adversity, verses, that this is, still is for you, neither symbol nor transport, neither hidden nor shown, but snown, north of the future, where snow ever is. You offered often, eternity, a turn, a word with six sides, snowed, like stars of David, like Jerusalem is. Is, was, will be, has been, will have been, to be. Snowed, starred, scarred, worded, sonned, deepened. Depend. Deeper in snow is he to be. Yea. Not to be, never to be, but always still, is. Pall of snow.
ARTS REST
Wherefore art thou? Art at rest? To pause, to remain, to support, art. Rhythmic silences. Steps at starets. Sartre’s stare. The rest is silence. But art at rest re-starts, again and again. The books I have written rest and re-start, not hesitating like Derrida, or like he says Freud does in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, not taking the step. I take the step, of faith, of hope, of love, of arrival, of action, positif, still possible, against the deconstruction of the ideal and the real, when nothing became possible, and the possible became impossible. The books are St. Sartre’s re-start, reclaiming both the existentialist’s freedom and the dialectical critique for today. It may be that Jean-Paul will make it in before John Paul II. It is up to God, but Christ says the prostitutes and sinners make it in before his opponents in the official church of His day. The gospel does not pass away, because it always applies. Our situations (Sartre’s word) never change. The church needs change. The church needs Christ. But like the young man at the seminary told me, God’s hands are tied. How can the One with the whole world in His hands not be free? He hands us freedom without losing His. As long as He has hands, there will still be a world to hold. He is free and we are free, radically free, free of Popes and popularity, of politicians, and of history, since that ended sometime during the last fifty years. With the end of history in the postmodern period, an abrupt thing faces us: we do not have to be tied to the time we are in, we are no longer historically conditioned. Therefore: Re-start the arts. St. Sartre would. Stress the Tessera, the era of fragmentation, in order for the mosaic to be made. I do not give a rat’s ass how you do it, but put the pieces together again. Establish the stars. As the poet said, nothing will have taken but the place, except perhaps for a constellation. He conceded the power of imagination to still make patterns, despite the deconstruction latent in his poetry, which Derrida found and expounded. Poetry in arrears, as we all are, and myself especially, let us give the word. Arrest, art rest, then re-start, begin again, like Finnegan, waking, say yes, say thee and thou and thine, not I and me and mine. Buddha said he was always at the beginning. To connect the end to the beginning, a very hard thing to do. To sign, without resignation, to name, not for fame, to put words in books, like they did in the nineteenth century, before, ere, erstwhile, previous to motion pictures, records, radio, television, computers. Rasters, scatter patterns. Rather, Easters, homeward, by the book, for why not then be of another time? Time itself has ended as such. It is time to begin again, beginning with time. The world still turns at the same speed, though there is no world to turn. Rare stars, rear yourselves, rise up sires, roses risen: The rest is not silence, but fire.
All Saints Day
It is very late in the game, as most of us know. Postmodernism has been a time of the seeming attempt to restore traditions, a conservative time politically and theologically, but also a corrupt time, morally and financially. I think we need to look back a few decades to solve the puzzle. Heidegger said that Nazism was great because it was about the confrontation of man and technology. And I believe this was somewhat correct. Postmodernism is founded on the fascist. It is both politically conservative, morally nihilistic, and technologically adept. The Third Reich did not cease, but was transformed post 1945, and lives on in the anti-liberal, anti-enlightenment forces that are stressing freedom and covertly preparing totalitarianism, at the same time. The Berlin-Rome axis did not die, and I mean this in the sense of the unfortunate Catholic Church, which is a means of the magical projection of fascism to our world today. It was a kind of alchemy. The more Catholic the country, it seems, the more corrupt. Mafia in Italy, drug cartels and death squads in Latin America. As I said, conservative, immoral, technological. It is a fascinating matrix. To this we add magic, from Harry Potter, to Borges and Garcia Marquez, to the atrocities done in Juarez, sacrifices to an evil god. A magical, technological, conservative and drastically corrupt world. Deconstructionists try in their texts to say, well, it was always this way. Perhaps. But I think the modern world that once was was in principle opposed to this fascist en-framing. The net seems inescapable. Even friends criticize me harshly for not setting-up my voice mail on my cell phone, for wanting to be incommunicado. There is tremendous pressure on all sides to conform to the paradigm of fascist fashion which is now technological. I do not think most people realize that technology is the implementation of the fascist. And I do not define fascist narrowly, to the tea party, for instance, but broadly to include the whole of culture and
politics, finance and technology. I believe all of this bears down on the church and the world as an overwhelming attempt to destroy not men and cities and nations with armies, but the souls of individuals, by the annihilation of faith, hope and love. The “they� by this I know not whom or where or what. True tragedy cannot be pinned on anyone in particular. That is what makes it a tragedy. Tragedies are different though from case to case, play to play. Hamlet succeeds where Macbeth fails. Lear perhaps succeeds despite appearances, being reunited with his daughter, in love, despite the pain. We, too, must love, despite the pains, the cares, the pleasures, all the temptations that would lead us not to believe, not to hope, not to love. Be ready. As Hamlet. Be ripe. Like Lear. The tragedy cannot be averted, but it can be overcome, transformed, and love still triumph. The modernist was nothing if not critical. That makes me modern. The postmodernist is theoretical, but not very critical. If these are indeed the last days, my work may be too little, too late. But what will be we do not know, but I hope that we all may be, when God is all in all. That God will not lead us any where he will not provide for us, that God does the impossible, but that God requires something from us, perhaps something different from each, or perhaps the same, has been my guiding thoughts in this year of completion. Whatever our vocation is, it is God-given, and we must do it. Each of us has a vocation, whether we know it or not. In a sense, it may simply to be alive today. Though we come at the end, we may still reap what others sowed, and receive the same just, generous reward. Do not doubt God’s mercy or His heaven. And do not doubt that if you hold out to the end you will win.
I want to speak at the last, really after time ended, about modernism and postmodernism in terms of the man who is perhaps the greatest modernist, Immanuel Kant, and the man who is perhaps the poster boy for the postmodern age, John Paul II. In that collection of homilies known as the
theology of the body, in the long introduction to that work, it is said that the Pope, sitting at sumptuous table with guests in the ornate and extravagant Vatican, would exclaim upon hearing the name of the philosopher Kant. I think with good reason, which I hope to elucidate. For the sake of argument, we could say that modernism was a most pure philosophy, and that postmodernism is a most impure philosophy. For reasons I refer to all that I have written hitherto. The opposition of Kant and John Paul II is essential. I have heard a religious who was teaching at a catholic university, without question and I think with deliberation, misrepresent Kant’s philosophy, twisting it all out of shape. When I attempted a correction, I was stopped by the fascist force the nuns use sometimes against anyone who questions them or opposes them. The same is true of the Catholic hierarchy. They will not allow dialogue, criticism, or any difference of opinion. But, time brings correction, as Benedict once said, and thank God, we may still have a little. How are we to understand the Kantian project in terms of today? The philosopher made a critique of pure and practical reason, eliminating the transcendent as unknowable, but founding morals on the categorical imperative. The religious I spoke of denied the basic principle of Kant stated in his theory of the transcendental, that we all have certain forms we all think in, and therefore we are similar and able to communicate with each other. We are not similar to God, as the Catholics claim in the analogy of being, but similar to each other, in our existence in the categories and in space and time. To continue Kant today, by my renovation of Hegelian dialectic and Derrida’s deconstruction, I have presented a new kind of critique of reason, not one of the pure and the practical, but of the general and the particular, and this as early as my writings on Wordsworth in the 1990s, when the poet denied the destructive analysis in favor of what he called the grand and simple reason, what may be called the imagination. In my logic I have shown the particular reason as having become completely
fragmented and destructive, completely contradictory. I think John Paul II would say this is a direct result of Kantian modernism, and perhaps he would be right. But Wordsworth was more right, in arguing forward into the high ground of imagination, not back into dogmatic retreat, which was a cover for a subterfuge. The reconciliation of the great fragmentation in particular reason, seen prominently in the American politics of the last thirty years, and incorrectly blamed on the media, which is but a mirror, not the cause of the contradiction, comes through a theory that is grand and simple and imaginative in a general reason that forgives contradiction, that affirms all, not by perpetuating conflict, but like Kant, through a prayer for a reasonable religion and an eternal peace. The way up is the way down. All is one. God alone is. Be perfect, which means not to set no limits to love, but rather release judgment and the power to judge, giving to God what is God’s, and letting the world be as it is, and the church as it is, forgiving all particular sins and errors, the mistakes of an impure logic, by a general attitude of love and forgiveness. We see this in the imperative of Kant, which says, basically, perform your actions as if everyone would repeat the actions you make. Which is very different from Nietzsche’s repetition. It is an imaginative forward moral thought. In all, it is the rule of the symbolic life, which you and I both lead, though you may or may not recognize it as I do. Since these things have been: Would that all God’s people were prophets, as Moses said. And as Joel said, God will pour out his Spirit on all people, the old men shall dream, and the young men shall see visions. And as Peter quoted the latter on Pentecost, the Biblical footnotes say it is accomplished, the thing Moses and Joel and Peter said. The Spiritual life is a prophetic and symbolic life, and what we do is, I think, truly repeated by others in a way we know not. Charles Baudelaire spoke of a mystical correspondence as does the Kabbalah. At any rate, what we do, what we say, and what we think, matters in ways we do not know, but which is commented on in theories in physics, the
so-called “chaos” theory, and in psychology’s so-called “synchronicity.” Everything belongs, as Richard Rohr said. Everything belongs in the theory of general reason, and everything then respires with meaning, as Wordsworth’s mystical and moral poetry stated in a sentiment some mistakenly thought was natural. The postmodern deconstruction of meaning, that took place through the proliferation of the text, is overcome by an acceptance of personal responsibility for our actions that will reverse the corrupt financialization of all aspects of life which is the value of technology. Meaning is not purchased, it is made, and we make meaning through our actions, which some wish to be meaningless, but which in the eyes of God, are all infinitely important, as the Kantian categorical imperative said in its own terms. He saw us in relation to everyone else, as our explication, while postmodernism implicates us in its tainted love, sin without sense. “Sin without sense” is the violence of the age, the fruit of fascism, in a time when the words “crazy” and “evil” are used with free substitution to describe what has happened from Hitler to Juarez, 1945 to 2010. Madness, which Plato said was sometimes a very good thing, is implicated with evil, which can never be good, through the taint of the postmodern logic, eliminating the possibility of great love and what may be called the great divine love that is the madness the saints showed, in order to destroy love itself, which, to be the real thing, must look to all the world just plain crazy. This confusion of “madness,” which my logic may be pejoratively termed, with an “evil” not crazy, violates the principle of principles of the general reason: The pure must be preserved, without a trace of the other. The Immaculate Conception, the IC, as Derrida uses it in Glas, is purely opposed to the taint of it, IT. With so many of us paying so much attention, how could the end of things happen and go unnoticed? It is an old saying, we could not see the forest for the trees. With the flood of information, somehow this, combined with the lack of prophetic insight, as opposed to historical or scholarly, or political and financial,
wisdoms, has led to the situation. The triumph of wealth, the triumph of technology, the return of triumphalism in theology, the triumph of life, as the poet would say, in all its glare and would-be glory, a great vehicle crushing all opposed to it, or even just caught in the path of the career of it, all this really Roman and essentially Empiric triumph, spectacle, done for show, for semblance, and not really fooling anyone, but gladly welcomed as the escape from reason and reality, has been the recipe for the disaster of the evacuation of faith, hope and love, for the eclipse of the light of the world, the opposite of the preparation for the gospel some thought it might be. My work is written in antithesis to this, attempting a synthesis from the debris. That I may be wrong in my elucidation of the time, I must admit. That the logic I have found may not work, I must admit. But that the world is in deep trouble, I think we all must admit. I hope you will concede that we all have the responsibility, given the opportunity, to suggest a solution to what has become a global problem, involving the fate of all. That my solution involves great contradictions, and yet is simple, is the strength of it. Against the complexity of the Gordian knot of postmodernism I use a gospel sword, the word of truth, and built my work, after its false, but fortunate, start in the abyss, by adhering to scripture and synthesizing it with what I found in the best and most useful aspects of the wisdoms I have read and known and lived. This dialectic may yet provide a way out by not the use of force against the knot, nor yet by yielding to the seductions of complexity, but by patient description and explanation, and even, I hope, a telling disclosure of truth. Having over the course of time, with patience, in my search for truth, reorienting both dialectic and deconstruction, and finally turned to Kant and the first two critiques, of pure and practical reason, I now wish to turn to the third critique, that of judgment. Kant writes of the beautiful and the sublime, and of teleology, so it is appropriate to say the matter concerning judgment in the context of the end of things and our finality, that is, the Day
of Judgment, the great day, the awesome and terrible day of the Lord. Having transposed reason from the pure and practical to the general and particular, let us likewise transpose the critique of judgment into a clear and precise, up-to-date definition of what in Christian theology are known as the particular and the general judgments. It may be the former is what we all expect, that we will be judged according to our works, our words, what we did and did not do, what we did for the least among us and what we did not, what we did for Christ, and what we did not. Scripture says it is so. According to our torturous particular reasons it could not be otherwise, as human thinking shows. But the Lord has said plainly again and again that He does not think like we do. The general reason that I have suggested is the closest we can come, at least that I can come, to understanding the absolute Mind of Christ, reconciling oppositions, forgiving enemies, justifying sinners. And so I believe the general judgment will be according to the general reason. It will be pardon, amnesty, forgiveness. Though we as individuals may have been sunk deep in the abyss of sin, the whole man, the human race, will stand united as one on the Day of Judgment, and we will all be forgiven, as one. It is the unification of the beauty of holy forgiveness with the terror and sublimity of the infinite power of God, together with a true understanding of the telos. With this prophetic hope the logic ends. Thus, the logic ends, pointing to something over the horizon, while within the world and within the church the task of love remains. What is this task? Paul said that faith, and hope, and love, these three remain, but that the greatest of these is love. I appeal to hope in the resolution of the logic and the working through of Kant’s critiques of reason and judgment, but what of the thing-in-itself, that is, criticism, as such? For what we know is the way we know. If we know dogmatically, and if we know critically, these are very different things. In the work now ending, I argued for a faithful criticism and a critical faith. I think both dogmatic catholic theology of the postmodern era and the dogmatic theory of
deconstruction are more like each other than has been supposed, because both are equally far from criticism, and deny it in practice, not tolerating it, nor dialogue, nor the inviolability of the conscience, but rather insisting on the necessity of the positions held by popes and professors. The conscience in its integrity preached by the Second Vatican Council must be critical, so as to be faithful to the message of the gospel, just as the philosopher must be critical in order to be faithful to the commitment to truth above all else. In an age when people deny that any truth still exists, or that the dogmatic position of one pope or professor or party, people or nation, economy or religion, is the one answer, the whole truth, it means that our time has dissipated thought in particular reasons, better known as rationalizations, rather than reach and take hold of truth itself, that is to allow oneself to live in it, abide in it, love it, instead of manipulating it, for politics, advertising, money, power, prestige and the appearance of the glamorous which is not glory, but is the death knell of beauty, good and truth. That we had a glamorous pope is a shame. That the destructiveness of the death written of by deconstruction became the definition of glamour is a shame. Faithful criticism stands outside the circularity of dogmatic positions, all particular, and stands in relation to the general reason, which is not to be seen in terms of the so-called general economy of postmodernism, opposed to restricted dialectic, but which is simply the standpoint that faith-criticism reaches by patience, love and hope. It is not a hopeless contamination and juxtaposition of any and all, but a discernment, beginning with the basic moral opposition of good and evil, which leads truly to the mystical love dogmatism promises but cannot deliver, because the dogmatic man is a tyrant, and loves no one in truth, but his own. They stand in particular against all the others, whom we know we are to love. Catholicism and Christianity to fulfill their mission must give up the special for the general, and love everyone. That political parties do not do this is perhaps understandable, but that the heirs of the gospel do not do this is a
sin, not to mention the many particular sins of which many now stand accused, even at the highest levels. That capital will not give itself away is perhaps understandable, but that the riches of the church, which are not found in the Vatican but in the Bible and on the altar of the heart, have not begun to be disclosed after two thousand years, what are we to make of this? You say, but the gospel is preached to all nations. Dogmatism is theory, but faith-criticism is practice. The church and the world criticize each other, but only from their particular points-of-view, that is generally not in good faith. They act like political parties, who agree to disagree, and profit off each other in a mutual economy of implication. In order to hold on to faith in the church and the world today one will need to learn to think, discern, be critical, and be faithful to the one thing necessary. Call that one thing what you will, it matters not, but when He calls, you must respond faithfully, even if it breaks you, breaks your church, breaks your world. As bread is broken, be broken, too. To not be too sentimental about this breaking, let us lay it all on the head of that one man Nietzsche, who was broken, as perhaps we all must be. There was Nietzsche, simply, on the square, and then dogmatically, we would have an anti-Nietzsche, which most good people since 1900, if they think about it, must suppose themselves to be, and then there is Nietzscheotherwise, the Heideggerean, Derridean, postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche. But you know my logic. What is Nietzsche in the fourth place? How does Nietzsche arrive? His basic doctrines, Heidegger cogently said, were the will to power and the eternal recurrence, which Heidegger made into “the will wills itself.” But this is not Nietzsche as fourth, rather Nietzsche returned. What is the arrival of the will to power, of the will that wills itself? Not that willing of power, and nothing besides, but rather, and I might say merely, a willingness. Willingness. It is more “other” than the Other, than will to power itself, than an anti- or an otherwise-than-Nietzsche, and is his proper breaking, the breaking of the postmodern, through a simple, humble thing
summed by that word “willingness.” Not by assertion or negation. Not by reason, either dogmatic or skeptic, or even critical. Nor by indifference, the position of the amoral most congenial to Nietzsche, but by the willingness itself. Willingness to let go, to suffer, to be humiliated, to be broken. Christ did not will his crucifixion, but accepted it willingly. And there is all the difference between Christ’s practice and Nietzsche’s theory. Therefore, you may confidently hope that if you are willing, yes, you may yet be saved. Willingness is not the same as obedience, though it is often confused with it. It puts the glory of another ahead of itself, not as commanded, but out of love, out of confidence, in a courage that destroys even death, overcoming it not by willing nothingness, nor by not willing at all, but by willing as one is willing to love and be loved. It is our marriage. Blake spoke of the marriage of heaven and hell, while Derrida spoke of perfecting the resemblance of Dionysus and Christ. I choose neither option. I do not choose the one offered by the poet. I do not choose the one offered by the philosopher. To choose these seems not to reconcile oppositions, but to entangle all things in webs without end. It would be a violent yoking together of things that must be kept discrete. Discretion recommends a better course. Let us say there is a marriage, to which we are all invited. It behooves us to attend the wedding of the Bride and the Lamb. We cannot feign important engagements elsewhere. On the day the world ends, if it has not already ended, there is only one place to be, and that is at the wedding. But recall, many were invited, but one did not have the proper attire, and so was cast out. I think we better bring an offering of some kind at least. I think it a spiritual truth that God has given gifts and talents to all, and that he expects us to not neglect these, but to increase them, as one might these days strive to enhance wealth. However, I believe, the gifts of God are not always known to us, and we spend our whole lives searching for the thing we are to do. I was lucky. From an early age I was born to write, and that
was about the only thing I did. I loved and was loved, prayed, and made friends, held a few unsteady jobs, piled up great unpaid debts, all the while I wrote. It frightens me to think God in his absolute freedom may tell me that I got it all wrong, that I was really meant to do some other thing, ordinary or extraordinary, and that I missed the boat, missed my chance, do not get off the merry-go-round, but must go around at least one more time, if I am to be given an additional chance. God has mercy on whom He will. We work out our destinies in salvation history with fear and trembling, but also with joy and hope, as the council fathers said, and it is the union of these contraries that are the attitudes we bring to the wedding day, tomorrow, for which we may be shown mercy.
“…a limit on infinity…”
The recuperation, the recoup, the dice thrown, the paradisiacal, the tree and the life’s He: Yes, that the logic of the impossible required that the thought of the impossible became the impossibility of thought, and he said the impossible was the only thing worth attempting, and nevertheless, in this therefore, this OR, this symbol or siglum, this turning point, this gold, was conversion, his and mine, in extremity, and that though I had seen did not yet believe, and inclined still toward the abyss, yet He saved me, and having said He would I did believe and came to be, conscience created, not by a smithy, not to be the conscience of my race, but to set out for a far country, that my race, a more meta- than marathon, to parry para- and carry on, toward Cecilia’s day and further, past deaths and rebirths and arrivals yet to come, looking back I found a fascist regime where none knew, and that the rapture has already happened, it is impossible, that the smoke of six million Jews in the Holocaust was the rapture, with their graves in the air, todesfugue, and Celan was not wrong, but crushed between mighty opposites, though he no baser nature, but he was it, the man, as each of us is, and it is the whole man who is the baser nature, as Hamlet knew, and we but caught between, and some knowing and some unknowing, and some knowing but uncaring, or inclining deliberately toward the abyss, on the horns of the dilemma, choose not the lesser of two evils, as the Church has always already done in practice, despite her theory, but break out of the vices, for God shows a way, and that is up, the dial pointing up, the indicator the direction the north of the future as Celan said, the Joycean gnomon, and the remainder, let that be, but you go on up, and only half make it, maybe, on
Kilimanjaro, but let us incline to the half that will, and despising the shame, look at the man at the altar, whomever he may be and realize that in Luke, after the words of the institution of the meal, Christ plainly says that the hand of the one who will betray Him is on the table, and therefore, every time a priest says the words of institution, his hand on the table betrays the words he speaks, but fulfills the prophetic word of Christ, whose word is eternal, since He is the eternal word, and His words will never pass away, and the standing now, the eternal truth always applies everywhere to everybody, as the Church says of her faith, and so the church then is the Church now, as Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, for ever, his opponents are ever the same, the type ever the same, only so much the worse for all we know of them, how many murders in His name which he let take place, yet nothing will have taken place but the place, when a pair of dice thrown, with a chance of turning, with a chance of forgiveness, but the Lord says at the end very succinctly, It Has Already Happened, and meant it then, and even more now, and six sides, the cubic anti-Christ, the indeterminacy of things and meaning belies the truth which is certain faith, and in the details is the devil, but in the premium mobile, at the outer limit, the first moved thing this PM, postmodern, the pontifex maximus is the title of a pagan priest who became the Pope, God help him, and in their titles, in their reach, in the tiara, kings ruled, kings slew, and in the time between noon and midnight, or the hour of great mercy at which Christ died and the hour or minute just before Igitur, in those closing dusks of days, popes ruled and popes slew, and were slain, but one was not, but said in his first lie, be not afraid! When we should have been on guard, when we should have paid more attention, and cared that men were being silenced and persecuted for heresy by the anti-Christ, who could not allow dissent, disagreement, and this not a personal quirk of his, some trait, but strategic, to trap all the Catholics, who would love him so much and nearly worship a mere man, and who claimed it was
Mary who saved him, to cloak and hide the plot, and all of them going back to 1854 to cloak and hide the snare and wickedness, to pervert our love for Mary and use her against, what greater evil than this I know not, but that the sacraments made void, because the thing does not work itself, ex opere operato, but must be done with the intention of the Church, and where Peter is there is the Church, so if the man be not in communion with God, but in more unholy communion, what is to be done? So that therefore like deconstruction inwardly the Church was vacated Vatican dead at the top, de-capitalized already by the abyss of lie two sides Blanchot said, and that I had to leap, like Heidegger said, step back, and that I did, by the grace and mercy of God, and taking a long step back, did prepare the great leap forward, not of faith but by faith, to leap over the apocalypse, but how? To arrive and leap over the end of things, but how? And not like Macbeth standing on his bank and shoal of time, to see in to the life of things, and have a mind not mine own, oh Christ, re-mind me! Tell me of the things to come, when we will be there, ah, already there, the eschaton realized, as John and John and John my late friend said, fading on the dying horn, how we walked amid the ruins of shepherds and richmonds on a hot afternoon, though the battle was just as real as the battle of Britain, and death was near, I saw it in your face, but not yet in your eyes, you fading, John, John, John, oh the baptist! That I was too baptized by a priest in a Catholic Church just a mile away, and perhaps was written in the book of life, though works will tell, and so Hamlet had to perform, was that not it, after all, that the play was the thing, and the actor unable to act, has yet to perform, but though the rest be silence, and silence the work of fire, apotheosis, the funeral pyre, phoenix, rare bird, we did not fail like Falstaff, but fell with Hamlet, who said get ready, who said seas change, who said it is not near my conscience, and yet it were too curious to consider it so, I have traced the dust of Ash Wednesday back to Adam and forward to, fare forward, well, do not your alms or prayers in public but in secret, where your
father who sees in secret can give you the reward, for insincerity is the greatest sin, and that hypocrisy, that did un-man the papacy, where would be saints did prophesy the death of popes, may your days be as the years of Christ, she said to John Paul I, and I did not know, though some day we will all know just how and why he died, but that it might have been the cover-up, follow the money, and scandals appear and are hushed up just as quickly, and if we are to do it for the Church, and I think we are, if we have concern for the Church, and I think we should, it is for the souls of Catholics that we should fight, and the destruction of the hierarchy was like a neutron bomb of the faith, which destroyed not things but the thing-in-itself, despite the feigning and fawning and the abyss of power, the power of the abyss, which they had chosen, to hold sway, while claiming to be but mere servants, and the thousand years came and went, the First Reich of the Roman Empire, and a thousand years came and went like a watch in the night, the Second Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Third Reich was defeated by liberal democracy enlightened enough to fight for freedom, but that the pretension of the Fourth Reich coming is almost here, en-framed by Heidegger’s fourfold, and Derider’s semi-Pythagorean hypothesis of numbers, always squaring things, framing things, and we not knowing why, other than the bothand-neo-nor, which is the logic of the impossible, but writing, the text, became the net, and everything had to be done in the virtual space, so that time too would be but virtual, and oh, there hands were on the table, the whole wine, to sacrifice our daily bread, but the cup of her abominations, drink it not, that wine of astonishment, when a pair of dice, the shipwreck, the depths, may yet a constellation appear, all thought utters, all thought emits and admits risk, not chance, but a chance taken, to take the chance, to roll the dice, is not to either affirm or annul possibility, but to take action, so that the impossible became impossible, and the possible became possible once again, a limit on infinity, the eternal line, however zigzag which the dies falling
took, did not go to the tomb did not fall to death in the abyss where nothing is, but since he could not say it plumb straight out, the double session of our lives is almost over and if he would hasten you to death, yet I would haste to love, and all was not between, we were not in the middle as they claimed, to lull us to sleep with siren songs of literature, but in dialectical truth, which is the book, the name, the word and the sign, of glory, cannot not be, we were indeed very near the end, belated, related, in the struggle between death and love, and every time we took our places and rolled the dice one more time at the throne of our marriage, in the bed we read, we lay in love, and fought death to make love, though the house was burning, though the house was falling down, and even though we be buried in the debris, we would not cease from loving, oh, You and I! It was a Marinelability to learn my harmony, and justice that brought us love to symbolically defeat and therefore e-really, the time when all was veiled and unveiled simultaneously, all knowledge admits dice thrown, but the seat he sat on, knowledge better not to have had, and their bones under the altar, rather than their souls and relics bought and sold, and saints carved into pieces as if grace was wealth, as if the truth could still be rightly divided, as if, the poet said, as if, and the philosophy of as if we became and became what we beheld, so look away for union, gaze not on the spectacle, but listen, happy love, listen to the music of nature even pent-up in the city, as one would standing on a sea of mist mountainside see in the midst of the soul of the scene hear in the song of a gathering of birds more truth more beauty, still, be still, hear something real, as I have, morning and evening, in the days of my waking, but beautiful, the good God smiled on me, and praying did say me, as I said Him, so that the artist become an actor, you too could be said, despite, yes, and yet, for thee, for you, for you, I came for you, not in the night, not yet, not quite, but just at twilight, of idols, of ideals, and therefore of reality, in the nihilistic throng without a throne, and thrown into being, did implore and receive
Grace, that the ring might be complete, for what would be His wedding without such a ring? A gift to Him who gave me to me, I stood beside the groom holding the ring, and oh, saw the bride, not bare, but bedecked and new Jerusalem’s she did shine, Virgin bride, had left all for Him who stood beside me, she meta-, she mystic, she moral and more, and I having known para-, had become a friend of the groom, and a wedding guest, at the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world, which scholars do not know having voided all scripture of prophecy, but still His words ring true, and must be applied now, not then, and the Spirit will tell you things to come, and you cannot serve both God and money, and two did tell them, yet they would not believe, and just who is this Son of Man? Aye, that is the question he puts to one and all, that all may judge, discern, believe, hope and love, to really know the time, the day, the hour, He says he is like a thief, but a good thief, and he will take us away from the world, still separating out, wheat from tares, good from evil, as the world plummets into the abyss like in the wake of it, and we rise and shine with the resurrection, and today we shall be with Him in paradise, if you throw in with him, and not throw yourself away on the world, which is but a symbol, which, divided in two, the session double, mirrored, did like a lovely pool of broken water re-unite around Him, did gather at the throne, did placidly and with benedictions did more so unify and that than the universal church which was a broad and dangerous highway on which many walked, while he said the path was strict and hard to find, and that the children of the kingdom were thus always already to be thrown, to not sit with the elders at the throne, but having gambled for his vesture did proudly wear it, though he had never bestowed it, the pallium they claimed, the place vacated by the building of the palace, a tomb of faith, not the mountain of moral beauty, but the Book ever said it was Rome, and Rome it was ever to be, the eternal city, it had to be you, and it could not have been under auspices of Caesar, but under bridges of fathers,
the ire of sires, it is today you are that city, and yet a little while, you will be destroyed, one might say, not literally but literarily, if that be possible, in that you are void of meaning, except what the Word of God says of you, which you may have known, but did avoid, and pious, condemned reform, and forced our consciences rather than relinquish what you had stolen, and though you had the keys, the “keys� mark His word, did not un-lock, did not let in, oh my God, they have made your house a den of thieves and your Zeal does consume me, as all must say together, What Would Jesus Do? Indeed, do what he did, drive them out, re-form the old, tear it down to the ground, and prepare for the homeward journey, somewhere way over Jordan, over yonder, I’ve been told, not tolled, but storied in, not a fiction less, but in truth did write no novel, nothing new, He said It Has Already Happened, because the mark of the beast was confirmed so that the economy of simony could go on, buying and selling grace, as they said, His hands are tied, are they not? Yet He did cut that knot with the Word of Truth, that complex catholic contradiction He did hit with a rock, and then use its own sword against it, like how many times, Lord did they love the better places at the feast, and how many times Lord did they pay lip service to the humility of Christ yet claimed to be without even the possibility of error? Napoleon did come thinking he without error, and Hitler did as well, along with popes that actually infallibly asserted the death of love and the love of wealth and power and now on the cusp of things we peer toward the next anti-Christ in this very late PM postmodern post-mortem, all the time they said one thing and did another, but which is abomination to God, and did not think like the Lord, and did not have the Mind of Christ, because they knew the truth and spoke oft of fine and living things, yet all the time behind the screen working to destroy our faith, but which if it be not in Christ will be destroyed, and holding not onto their Tradition-traitors, we Word in, we with meaning would be worded in, we scriptured, not historical but prophetic, not
without pun, they did forsake prophets for profits, and outlawed prophecy even, and said none can arise, for God has spoken, but the Word will always be spoken and the Spirit leads you where He will, away, at least, at last alone with Christ be loved, let Him be loved without any intermediary who usurps the place and vacates it, but that always His star does shine, past deconstruction of truth, and the dialectic of the day, past catholic love and catholic death, a faith abides amidst a crossing, paradise throne, for He chose it, as they unwittingly did, and hope and love as strong as death, which cannot hold Him or you or me, for we’re not bound, we’re free, the true city of the Bride, in Jerusalem we shall be, when we will be freed: Yes, His Word still cuts the complexities of the current complicity, for the crisis of the contemporaneity of the meaning of the mercy of Christ.
That dice thrown will never annul chance and that all thought utters dice thrown, and that Derrida depended on these poeticisms, and that I once held that the symbol divides itself in two, and the possibility of thought is the thought of possibility, as the culmination of my time in deconstruction, of what do I say of these things now? It may be that the poet meant to say that possibility is irreducible, that action is an illusion against the backdrop of perpetual and unchanging about-to-be, that the step though taken, is really annulled by the fact that chance itself cannot not be. This principle of supreme indeterminacy, which entered most people’s minds through the science of physics, but was first stated by a poet, seems to say the last word is that there is no last word, that the possibility is that it, possibility itself, makes reality in act the very figure of the impossible. That somehow the reserve of the possible not only annuls the dice throw that would annul it, but in fact annuls itself, that possibility is made The Impossible. That was Derrida’s one chance. From this hunch he wove a fantastic work of seeming, a phantasm of ligatures, cuts, sutures, ligaments, agglutinations, analisms, and magical cruelties that post-post, retro-active, in principle, annuls itself at the same time, du meme coup, in the same blow, as a throw of the dice, that it annuls everything else, as if to say, marriage is always already annulled even
before it is ever consummated, before it can be. Marriage cannot be, love cannot be, there can be no end, nor any beginning, we are vastly lost in the indeterminate middle of a wasteland. On the other hand, that the symbol divides itself in two, that was true, but that the two parts fit together, marriage in other words, is in fact predetermined, not indeterminate, and that we will have identity is the principle, not the cause of difference or the force of deferral and delay. That if we be but broken, we can be put back together was the promise I made myself from the outset, and that possibility and all its problems was the key was a token to remind me of the way, for with possibility we may have the answer, but without it we have nothing. That from the beginning I saw the project of my career in writing as a path leading from nothing to everything, the great reversal, was exactly set against deconstruction, though I knew it not at the time. That in fact the end was reached by the logic of the impossible, that I have recuperated my true identity, that the logic of deconstruction has been decided in favor of a Christian love, which unites and distinguishes, as in marriage, that meaning will yet be, that the yes I say to Thee has more meaning than ever, is not to say this real affirmation is ever indeterminate or over determined, but that God is implicit in every truth, and that all we say and do refers to Him. To arrive at the apocalyptic by the reverential love of revelation is to say “yes� to the Lord. His ways are not our ways. We accept His judgment.
GodChurchWorld is the system of the Anti-Christ, which is a thing that may surprise some, especially those who have read the cover of the books and turned to this last page to steal my ending without having made the journey I made to get here. The Church in the Modern World, a key document of the Second Vatican Council, stated the position by just boldly placing Catholicism in and not juxtaposed to or against modernity. If this was an error, I do not know, but that we see in recent events the worldly aspects of the church are beyond doubt. Yet, she may be holy, and without a doubt God is, and the world too is not without its goodness, bestowed by God, both natural and human. So why do I make this extraordinary claim concerning evil and the things most of us know and love? I think like the poets said, particularly Blake: The deception is great. And many there are who are deceived, and wittingly or not go along with the corruption of not only morals but faith and the intellect, all of our culture. We must be radical in our love of Christ, and fight for Him, as He fights for each of us. If you have read all my pages you know the story, but the solution is not really in my hands or yours however, but in God’s. God so loved the world, and loved the church, and loves us, I believe, that we should not give up on them and
our-selves, despite the enemy within the perimeter. In a way I have called in an air strike on our own position, hoping that God will by His own means cut out the evil wherever it may be, and especially in my heart, and in yours and yours. That the apocalypse was written long ago, and in a sense has already occurred, is reassuring. That God is in control, that is part of our faith. Trust in His mercy, and hope for the best. Do not lightly leave off good things, spiritual things, or be disturbed by every wind of finance and politics, or of turmoil in the church. Pray for the will of God to be done now where we are, not later, for sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. The Bible may say contradictory things, and a fortiori churches and mere men, and most of all the work I have written, but do not let the oppositions overcome the one truth you live by, whatever that may be, that star, that dream, that love and hope, even desire and most of all your truth. Perhaps to each his own, perhaps we are all one. God knows, and that is enough for me. May God forgive my errors.
Symbols The speculative begins and ends in the realm of the symbol, which as has been said, gives rise to the thought. That every symbol implies an explication means that in the folds of things that have meaning are possibilities that both open and close our understandings. Open because they allow reading and therefore the possibility of learning, and close because the limit case of comprehension is a grasping that cannot grasp itself, on the one hand, and which must let go, turn loose, of itself, in order to be grasped, not by any and every other, but by the one truth, the incomprehensible that comprehends us as we are, making us comprehensible to ourselves in principle,
though sometimes knowledge is deferred or denied. That the symbol divides itself in two, in the etymological sense of the word “symbol,� indicates a brokenness, an incompleteness, in fact, which in principle is already complete and whole. Symbol systems are always derived from other systems, which seems to deny origins, as does our understanding of language, which cannot be incomplete, but which as has been shown, and in contradiction to this, has some radical incompleteness lodged in the heart of every state of affairs. We did not invent the remedy that God provides. We sought Him, hidden in things, and have perpetually found and lost Him over and over again, the Absolute, the cause and goal of the search, the guard and guide of life, that than without which nothing can be conceived, in which we live and move and have our meaning, making symbolic actions, which we sometimes dimly
perceive in truth, but which we believe have a definite value for God, where we hope our works will always be written in the book of eternal narrative, a place in which our roles, written, are read, by all of us, actors and audience, at the discretion of sole Authority.
will have been a book, filled with many signatures, at least three or four, or seven or twelve, but never simply two or one, for then there will be no signature and no end to the signatures, for the cuts and the wounds to heal, not in schizophrenic fashion, as the symptom that produces its own fore-healing, out of the play of forces that exert us within and without, making us both hyper sexual and hyper textual in the same instant of madness, overloaded with desire, overly attentive in our reading, trying to discern the indecipherable, circles of selves to fit the square hole of the abyss on the page and the stage, that framework of tech city, that un natural un shaped form less form beyond the simplicity of the curve of life that distorts our being into the one multi-task of living and dying in the same interrupted, as I met my age and did shoulder I knew not what, but God knew, when I knew Him not, and in the seeming interregnum of the vacant dethroned disfigured decapitated deconstructed I sought the absolute, and held that we should go from nothing to everything, and against the grain, and despite the triumph of the will and the eclipse of reason and the ebbing of faith and trust, I was a seeker, but I was found, and though it seemed I was struck by genius and by magic and by the muse, yet I did strike a blow, not against all that, but at the giant Goliath in the way, and what my rock was you should know, and what the sword, that too you shall know, for there was a behemoth, call it what you will, a thing I sum post-modern, that can in principle, of its own terms, never be summed, no summa yet possible, yet summation required, and that theological, and a synthesis, to appropriate and not to be appropriated, and to give and not to count
moment, like the supposed, like the word itself, which gives itself away in speech yet retains itself in the graphic shadow of a drawn and quartered neo-nor, the syn- despised, the thesis suspended, the trace of something that escapes both wisdom and foolishness, a kind of hilarity that is the death of serious work and building, dwelling and thinking, for a wandering polysemy, polylogia, a bare hymen of meaning between ourselves, our frail consciousness and the abyss of nonentity, that ISBN said is sacred yet tainted with vice, and in the taintedness, dreams of our yet un written pages flowing with no restriction to the falls of hymeneal aggravations and abusive abysses, the assault of the letter A on all we are, an aggregation of insubstantial structures, the cost, and to shoulder like Atlas, and not to merely shrug, and to stand under God when all around me the world was falling, not searching, but despising, and rushing, in economy, to spend all the capital of our inheritance, to waste the rich deposit of faith and reason so carefully built up by work and sweat of men and women over 4000 years, the great remainder of all dwindling to almost nothing, and then on bare credit to live, the future consumed as well, with nothing left for children, not even a generation to come, all it seems we have destroyed, even the possibility of action itself, the void invaded, the abyss and the gravity of it, the black star our hearts wed, the river she ran into no sea, and bells did ring always from morning till night, at dawn, at dusk, matins and vespers, weddings and funerals and a few more baptisms, but always in the church in the world, and in a tower that did not babble, though it did seem about to fall, and some supporting it, as
unlike 1, 2, 3, 4: but more like Nietzsche on the square, overcome overman, over a flogged and dying beast that was no thing but the wretched point at which his mind collapsed under the weight he could not support of a lifetime of the power of the open, but in order to arrive, in another way, without madness, yet still to find love, and this not in profits of extremity, but in the prophecy of catholic economy, when all will be not the glory globalizing but de-capitalizing, when the church of the new after the apocalypse, the time from 1945-2010, will emerge, a pure white nothing, a reconstructed theory and a reestablished practice, a Virgin, married to both God and Man, union of fecundity and yet with no actual relations with the world, a gift, a prayer that is apart, a part of the world that I and what we knew symbolically as 1000 points of light, as Francis did hold the church from falling, in his time, to make firm what was tottering and to do as has been said, we were all re-sponsible, though I was more responsible than the rest, as the priest told me that I was that man, as God called me, I lie not, and told me that I was doing it for the church because they were confused and did not understand His mercy, and that my vocation was true, and He does love me, and said so, and another priest said work on and risk and do not be discouraged, and as the King said, though 10,000 fall yet I will trust in you Lord, and there was no inter-regnum at the throne though the see may have been vacant, I do not know, but that the corruption of the time did reach even into the Church and did fell the world, and all, but at the same time in symbols, in signs, the real dialectic did prove that every action is every other action, as every other is holy other, despite the will to
transcends the world at the same time it absolutely transforms it, from both the inside and the outside, without force, yet traversing by a “work� the fantasy and the necessity of the lack of production for a reality promised but undelivered by the fasces, by the face of the veiled and the unveiled, by Jews and Moslems and the still Christian, by atheists and athletes of wealth, by a realm of morals that is being but transubstantiated to mysticisms without reserve, and finding in this the word of St. Sartre for the building up and tearing down by the anti sculptor Giacometti, who would with unceasing labor create and destroy the synthesis of art and religion and philosophy in the dialectic of the search for what another called the SA: as savoir absolute, in you, yes, therefore dissipation, and the will to deceive, and many there are who have been, we did still love and believe, and hope for the coming of the great day of our liberation from wealth and poverty, and all that goes with that economy, for an economy of grace and mercy that has always been and will always be, let it be done on earth as it is in heaven, dear Lord, I pray, that those who laugh will cease and those who mourn who will have a ceasing of their cause for mourning, and that in the age of analysis, we made something of our world, against it and for it at the same time, as was the Church, which despite the lack of holy attention still was mindful in missions and in charity and said so much right and did so much right and did so feed the millions with words and sacraments and breaking even in their daily bread, so done for that Church, a work stood, not torn down, though not one stone will be left atop another, as the Savior said, we may at last find the paradise throne, a temple interpreted as thee
PREFACE TO PARADISE THRONE
The world of the end is a strange place to live, but here we are, out of time.
The Book of Revelation was never understood because:
1) it did not apply to the Roman Empire, 2) it is written in signs and symbols, and is not literal, 3) it spoke of the future.
Now the problem is re-solved. Not Rome then, for Rome was not apocalyptically destroyed, but converted. It is the trouble with Rome now that should concern us. I believe the writing of John the Divine is the way that it is because the end of the world of which it speaks is not a literal end of the world but a symbolic one. That the Church took over from the Jews the symbol of Israel, calling itself the same, is a clue. What is said of Israel therefore applies to the Roman Church. When Christ says that not one stone will be left atop another, He speaks then not only of the Temple in Jerusalem, literally overthrown, but of the Church today, that may be destroyed. This destruction, well under way, involves an attack on the virtues of faith and hope and love. Satan and the Anti-Christ do not mean to lay waste cities and all nations, but the faith of Christians, all believers. This can be done really though symbolically. Why would Satan wish to destroy a world he in a way already controls? It is faith in Christ, and love itself, that he hates. As deconstruction has shown, the best and perhaps only way to destroy a system is from within. And we see much done in the Church recently that troubles us, from the condemnations of so-called heretics to the problem of sex abuse. Besides this is the money, which the Vatican will not speak of, but which some believe came from Hitler to be stored in Rome, after the fall of Berlin. What we know is bad enough to cause much disquiet, but what we do not know will, I think, shake the faith of many, who, as Christ warned, put faith in men and their traditions, rather than in God. The attack by the recent Popes on the article of conscience decided by the Second Vatican Council is clear, so no one can disagree with Rome and its teaching. Infallibility is the foundation of error, to hide, not reveal, truths that Rome wants kept secret, like the death of John Paul I, or why as John Paul II took over he insisted “be not afraid.� Should we be? The time we
live in now has become a very meta-physically different type of time, the kind of time in which the symbols of the Book of Revelation make sense. How you read it is up to you. But read it. Read it in the Spirit, not the letter, as Paul says. Read it as addressed to the Church of today. Keep in mind that God does not think as we do, since He came to save sinners, not the righteous. As Moses said: Would that all God’s people were prophets. The word of God is thoroughly prophetic, and the scholars who empty it of that dimension empty it of its primary meaning, which is neither moral nor mystical, but rather eschatological, and is concerned with the salvation of all, which depends on real and correct relationships with God, who must be known, in some way, to be loved, believed and relied on in every end. Nietzsche, who is a type of Anti-Christ, said he wished for a “Caesar with the soul of Christ.” Derrida ends his Glas, the death knell of The Book, with words in reference to the perfecting of the resemblance between Dionysus and Christ, and Dionysus was the end-point of the AntiChristian Nietzsche’s attempt to found a new religion. In other words, the two best known deconstructionists were at work on a synthesis of Christians and non-Christians. That would seem to be the path my book followed in the later stages, combining a dialectical method with deconstructive insights held together in a catholic framework, for the reformation of both the Church and the World, along the lines of a logic that accepts the contradictions it finds as inevitable and not to be rejected, but having been placed here by God, to be incorporated into a fuller, completed logic that accounts for the real and not just “paradoxical” things that conflict in The Bible and in our experience. The idea has been that God does not think like we do, therefore whatever the basic principle of our logic is, it must be ungodly. That would be the logic of Aristotle, long the backbone of the catholic way of thinking. The problem I face at this late date is how to distinguish the synthesis I have made in the name of the truth of Christ and the doctrine of his Word from the anti-Christian deconstructionist attack on Christ that would violently yoke Him with Caesar and Dionysus. If there is epicriticism, it is needed by me now the most. As for the Caesar angle, the Roman popes have that covered, and have already, before there was Nietzsche or any of his Lutheran fathers, combined a false Christ with a false Caesar, doubly wrong. It may be that from the angle of Dionysus, the new age religions that reject Rome make a similar error, and this includes a broad range of Christian churches who emphasize the resurrection without the passion and the cross. On the other hand, I try to stand firm in the
middle, as would, say, Aquinas, and hew to a course between the twin abysses I have named. This is because I had the benefit in my catholic seminary of reading some Luther, as well as Barth, and others, and many other writers on religion, east and west, and have kept as my guide the word of God as it is revealed in The Bible, interpreted over the course of twenty years, within the limits of what my conscience, which was formed relatively late in life, but which has come fully to fruition, recommends. Now the conscience of the critic is the judgment that regulates the genius, and I have in this regard been informed by many philosophers and thinkers, to the extent that the system I hold in my work is, while not free from error, as the Roman, able to handle the problems of the postmodern age, of which misreading and contamination in theory and practice are fore-most. Nevertheless, it was only in the last year, as I turned my attention at last to the apocalypse and its interpretation, that these things came into their true meaning as concerning the end of the world, as it is called by most, that is, the final battle of good and evil.
Paradise Throne
The Coup Coda of the Cube
kryptos kybos That throne will never be thrown by a pair of dice to say chanced hazarded gambled risked EXCEPT by a cube foreknown, predestined, planned, so w/o a chance, dicey LAUNCHED in eternal circumstances as written in the BOOK: It has already taken place: It is done: Finis: Consummatum est Though we thought it abyssal it was merely Ulysses in an eighteenth That number sums all antiAll anti-summation, is already summarized there in the
ultrastructure Of even a number, Of the number that is the enigma, The number of a person, And that to come, or as if to come,
Artless Ark, Breaking Bark, What would Peter and Paul do in the midst of such shipwreck? Jesus slept and said O ye of little faith! Should we do likewise?
The MASTER Has not lost his grip on the helm and the ship is not in danger…yet…what if the ship is lost Not foundered but unfounded, wrecked on the rock of the maker? Because thought to be Unshakeable, unjudgeable, w/o a One who would touch these my anointed prophets and WOULD THAT ALL GOD’S PEOPLE WERE PROPHETS Than profiteers,
All is not vanity, That yes, yet, there be an All: We must still pull down, pull down our vanity, and on the humble rock reside OR COME TO GRIEF in the folds of
666 Which is the cubic mass of the volume or the cubic volume of the mass, [the see and the sea coincide in the shipwreck]
AS IF TO BE A total count in the making of the anti-Christ, a totality w/o totalizer, the possibilities may be spelled in the alphanumeric that only became possible in the postmodernist era: THE SIX is a hex and a cube Hexagram: Solomon’s Seal Hexagram: Book of Changes CUBE: KAABA Which Islam turns around and faces, center of Mecca
Of course
Not to pass over the obvious,
THE BLACK BOX MAGIC TECHNO And around this square of Jews and Muslims and Chinese and all our TECHNOLOGY The common denominator is the bias of the anti-
CHRIST Who will not allow the ultimate immemorial demon to de-throne PARADISE On a probability that it is a sin, so that it must be licit, for with God Only Certainty Will Do And in the eighteenth hour after dawn, after trial and crucifixion in the garden it is midnight and God walks and talks with His own: The PM was the wrath, postmodern, post-mortem, The AM is the mercy of the dawn and just before, FORGETTING RECONSTRUCTIONS For a leap of faith into a new world that was ordained prophetically
Is not madness become you Is not evil that madness you ABOLITIONS ABSOLUTIONS The search for the absolute Is the search for the knowledge of, And the now forgotten SA
SAVIOR ABSOLUTE un-knowing neither SA nor DE
As If As If Nothing will have taken Deconstruction’s place was DERRIDAS ABSOLUTE But the deconstructed place
As If To Be Was silence while being is all meaningful speech and music W/O MERE NOISE/O WHITE NOISE/O THE PAGES W/O Except perhaps a constellation, a great cloud of witnesses: Virgins are not blanks, virgins indeed are signs not empty but full,
But if the Cube is the Coup in the Coda, the final throw of evil at Armageddon, What of Benedict’s Conscience? On the One Hand: He completes the six sides with the six times six times six equals 216, Meaning 2+16, Meaning B+16 equals the POPE Or, He completes the six sides with six plus six plus six equals 18, Meaning 2+16, Meaning B+16 equals the POPE. On the Other Hand: What does John Paul 2 + Benedict 16 equal?
ALTAR AND SCRIPTURE The final sides of the cube, its top and bottom, They kiss it don’t they? and bury bones within …And placed a LIMIT ON INFINITY…it seemed as if… …It was the number in John’s Gospel when many walked away…
yet It will have been therefore a Throw of Dice Not done in secret but by symbols obscured, Perhaps even John Paul II did not know that he was the one who was wounded, And to overcome the Left, leaned to the Right, the Roman Fascist Bias
CAESAR AND CHRIST Thus stood opposed, but the emperor, the pope, the magister, the oracle, infallible, the Supreme Pontiff, pagan priest, pontifex maximus, pronounced:
yes Every Caesar is opposed to Christ As Chance is to the one Certainty
THAT All Scripture Emits Paradise Throne.
PP
PP: per procurationem, that is, by the agency of, or for the agency of, but of what and for whom do the popes sign their names? The procurator is one who manages another’s affairs, and was an officer of the Roman Empire entrusted with the management of the financial affairs of a province and often having administrative powers as agent of the emperor. So, the pope is the agent of what emperor and of what empire? As well, akin to the procurator is the procuring, often to make available for sex. Which is to say, not beyond the PP or pleasure principle of Freud. In that late work of psychoanalysis, the death instinct came to light, and the need for repetition compulsion, and I think these things can be discerned in the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. As Plato writes in The Republic, those with training for philosophy can do great good, but if corruption enters in, there is an even greater ability to do harm. The PP is also the postal principle, the logic of the postmodern, as well as the post-mortem. In whose name were these things done, by what authority? At the seminary, as regards theology, they make Popes equal to The Bible itself, and say the magisterium is the one to interpret scripture, but should it not be the other way around? Should not The Bible be used to measure Rome? We return to the antichrist. You will recall that 6x6x6 equals 216, and I said 216 equals B + 16, that is 2 + 16. And that this is Benedict. But looked at again it appears that the 2 is really John Paul II, and the 16 is Benedict XVI. They are the antichrist. One was struck down, but miraculously survived, and the other promotes his agenda. As well, you remember the other work in 666, that it is summed 6+6+6=18, and that is once again JP 2 and Benedict 16 = 18. There is much that could be said of the variant reading of the passage, the 616, which can be deduced from various multiplications and additions. These deductions point back to Pius XII, and the Nazi era. As well, they point back to 1962 and the illfated Vatican Council II. If John Paul II is the beast in some symbolic way, and Benedict the false prophet, what will happen next? It would have to be the en-shrining of the statue or image for worship, and that is the new order of mass to take effect for the liturgical year 2012. In the
catholic economy the entrance is through confirmation, a mark on the hand and the forehead. As well, despite the scripture always read that day, on Ash Wednesday, the Catholics throughout the world will receive a mark on their foreheads. For these reasons I have stopped attending mass. I have not read the new missal, but I have heard of changes in both what the priests say and in how the congregation responds. Concretely, I wonder what the new response to the priest’s “Peace be with you” really means. When the churchgoers say “And with your spirit” in what or to what spirit will they be praying? Men and women have bodies and souls, but spiritual entities like angels have spirits. It seems that there is one Spirit of God, and so Benedict should say that plainly, if that is what he means. I have not in this work made a full-scale exegesis of the Book of Revelation. I think too often those attempts got lost in the trees, and could not grasp the main point in the forest of difficulties that is the symbolic end of the world. I have made a diagnosis about the Church herein, as well as lay out a catholicity in the logic by which the reform of the Church may be thought. What remains? We must not lose our faith, though we have been betrayed. I have written this for the Church, not against it, for the faith of the many, not the approval of the few. I think that in the future the present pope will die and the college of cardinals convene to choose his successor. I believe the cardinals should not select one, but appoint themselves temporary guardians of the Church until a council can be called comprised of all the bishops in the world to decide the future of the Church. The things I have said in this book are a small addition to the massive amount of news regarding the Church in crisis that is available. All I was shown was that the popes of my lifetime were the antichrist, and I was charged with communicating this to you for the good of all. Many outside the Church will not be surprised at the news, especially those fond of Martin Luther, while the readers I want to reach especially, the faithful of the Catholic Church will probably ignore the warning, if they ever hear it. However, if they be like the men of Nineveh, I will be happy, not sad, if the Church is saved and not destroyed. The point in the logic of the work, that God
does not think like we do, is seen in the career of the prophets, who if they were true, were not listened to, except perhaps for Jonah and Nathan and Samuel. The things we are told are too often too hard to bear, and the message of God too much of a challenge to the frail human nature which relies on the traditions of men rather than faith in God. You may think me but a self-styled prophet, so I will let the work speak for itself, and say that numbers do not lie, and that they translate easily to the present day. Therese of Liseux, whom I often invoke, said everything is grace. So, the seeming death-throes of the Church need not be cause for sorrow, if it was the will of God for Rome to be what it has become, a thing hard to understand, but that it was foretold long ago is clear to me, and so we need neither rejoice nor fear but rather realize the signs of the times, as they are sometimes called, and become the light of the world which Christ says we are. The kingdom is within us. Where but two are gathered in His name, there He is in the midst. When the son of man returns will He find faith on earth? He says there will be a remnant who have not knelt to the Baal. It is up to each one of us in the integrity of our consciences, which are not deliberately set against Rome, but which Rome has deliberately set itself against, to decide in the crisis of the Church in the World where God really is and go there. If you can find Him nowhere else, at least He said He will be in you if you believe, and I believe God in His promises, every last one. The antichrist was given a number in The Bible rather than a name not so much to hide him, but to reveal him, because the ultrastructure of numbers endures across all languages, and needs no translation, thus escaping deconstruction. When John Paul II said that the apocalypse of John was about the future history of the world, he told a lie, for it was about that man and his time that it speaks, while he seemed to be encouraging traditional readings of scripture. As Hans Kung said, John Paul II was the most contradictory Pope of modern times. And I have shown that the root of this contradiction is in the mystical evil that has tried since 1945 to gain control of not only the Church but of the ones
who are faithful to it. Without their assent the Roman hypocrisy must cease. Long has Rome been implicated in sin and crime, which can no longer be hidden. The hour of the final battle of good and evil draws near, and with the judgment beginning at the Church, as Peter says in his letter, where does the poor sinner stand? Indeed, with the ground cut out from under the feet of Catholics, and with the world already under the control of an antichristian matrix of forces including Islam, Israel, China and the technological capital of the magical projection of fascism where liberalism once stood, with a kind of Nietzscheanization, as has been said, of all politics, with a criminal intent to corruption on all sides, we are not, as seems, at the door of another dark age in which we must keep our love and knowledge alive in small isolated communities, but rather we stand at the brink of the end of the world. Now, scripture portrays the end in two ways, one a flaming inferno of fiery justice, and another in which the lion lays down with the lamb. This is just one of the many contradictions in The Bible. That the church has always been both sinful and holy, that we are sinners yet saved, that God died for us, that more than half of the popes were never made saints, and almost none since the Reformation, that the Second Vatican Council almost to a man unanimously passed the reform of the liturgy that fifty years later John Paul II and Benedict XVI will undo in the name of a “literal” translation and true “authenticity,” opening the door, I think, to some evil that means the invalidation of the mass, that these things were foreseen by the author of Scripture, and are part of God’s plan, who can comprehend? Yet, as Paul had the mind of Christ, so may we, to be not conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewal of our minds. Paul also said that God’s grace was sufficient for him, and so it may be for us. He said woe to me if I do not preach the gospel, so may we, and as John said, blessed are they who read this book and keep it, so may we, for I have added nothing to revelation, nor taken anything away, for I have seen Rome where it says Rome is, and have lived in Babylon, the market of the whore. That the new city of Jerusalem will be our all in all, that God will wipe away every tear, but that the way there is hard and narrow, and few there be that find it, is the awful and awesome truth of our apocalyptic age.
As Christ has said to one in our own time, “They are confused, they do not understand about My mercy.” Think of the mercy of God as His to possess and dispense, not in the hands of popes or priests and one will be more comforted by grace than by magical terms such as ex opere operato in which the Church teaches that the sacramental catholic economy works itself, without regard to God or man. As if by chanting they can bind the will of God. The power to loose and bind is important, but so are the words in which that power is described. What you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven and what you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven. What the Church has done does not then apply to her power to forgive, but rather, that instead of binding evil, they have bound God’s hands, and have set loose an unholy thing that will bring an eventual response. There is a correspondence of Heaven and earth, a kind of symbolic action takes place between them, and I think this is what Christ meant in the binding and loosing. His mercy was always to forgive the penitent, so if the priest does as He does, where else would the power lie but in the symbolic way I state, in which the Church binds God and looses what it should not, which any observer of the Church should now see. That God says I will have mercy on whom I will is the truth which we need not fear, for God is merciful, and we should seek Him rather than go to a man and an economy of sacraments that only has the appearance of the grace of God, but is in reality rather like technology, an aspect of ex opere operato, a thing under no one’s control, operating as if by magic. It was perhaps the divorce of grace and nature, whether by Platonism or Thomism, the positing of the ideal and the real, that led to an inevitable nihilism. But outside stands the grace of Christ knocking at the door. God will close the “ring” by His action, not ours. By His will, not ours. By a grace the Church calls prevenient, but which is truly grace as such in its totality, a free gift of God’s. We then are to be blessed. As there is an inculpable atheism and a culpable atheism, as Karl Rahner showed in the 1960s, so there may be a culpable and an inculpable Catholicism, which is not to say catholicity. Any one who becomes
aware of the crimes of the Church, let alone the thing I have had to say in this book about the antichrist, must decide for themselves how to work out their salvation. The decapitation of the Church at Rome is needed, which is done in principle when each member of the Church acts on their own, thinks on their own, and becomes truly the kingdom of priests God says we should be. Would that all God’s people were prophets, but the application of the oil of anointing is not enough, if one receives their vocation but does not keep it, is not true to it, which is to be true to Christ in all situations and to speak out even if it be against those with the power, it seems, to judge you. For in truth there is but One judge, and judgment is reserved to Him alone, so that He may bind what has been loosed and loose what has hitherto been bound. The PP could also be the pages following, or just the “papa,” of the Pope, and I believe. It has been said unless you believe you will not understand, but I think you must, I must, love and forgive, show no resistance to evil, be perfect, be merciful, be holy, take every thought captive for Christ, say scriptura sola, and so not leave out the text on the Apocatastasis, which was condemned by Justinian and the councils, but say yes to the insight that was proclaimed by Peter at Pentecost of the great promise of the universal restoration, or the all in all, which is a word and a vision of the complete fulfillment, the arrival, no more of war and division and no more condemnation and no more evil, but, PP as a perfect peace, or as Kant said, “to eternal peace,” for we have been at war, so long now, in the one battle of good and evil, we always the good ones and you always the evil, us and them and I and the Other. But reaching the point of what the east calls non-duality, I neither surrender to evil or resist it any longer, do not condemn it nor the one doing it, but love it, forgive it, claim my error which I reified as an IT or Other, and surrender it to Christ. In truth the Popes were the anti-Christ, I believe, but did not know they were. The CC was profoundly hypocritical, but did not see itself as such. By a method of triangulation the truth is not only reached but preserved. Thus the Trinity. Thus, the God-ChurchWorld, thus all hierarchies must be greater than the dual opposition which is the structure of disease and deconstruction, posited in morals as
good and evil. To reach this triangulation in politics, there must be a center, not simple left and right wings. In history and in religion and philosophy not simply faith and reason or Athens and Jerusalem, but the east, so long excluded, which from our standpoint of dualism seems to be the Other, but which is the thing that perfects and completes and will keep the structure not only from not collapsing into nihilism under the weight of the real and the ideal, but by grace bring the arrival long sought, and allow theory room for practice, the thing the Church didn’t. In myself I forgive and love now the Other in me, do not condemn it, and do not illusorily declare a false peace but find true peace within. I must become Christ and Buddha and Socrates, by doing the works they did. You will say I am absurd and this is the impossible itself. Yet, they said it would be so, and told each and every one to do it, to be it, to make peace. Heaven has already begun, it is within us all, as Christ said, as Buddha said. The war was necessary. Peace is not impossible. Shakespeare had his epilogue, spoken by Prospero, and Joyce too made a large epilogue for waking, as the other did to ask forgiveness. The Book does not end with the war, but with the peace in Jerusalem that follows. Good and evil are overcome as the structure of war by the truth that they be not opposed any longer, and that to condemn any-thing is error, and to forgive is divine. We all have been given the power to forgive and to make peace. I love my enemies, all of them, no matter who or what or why. Some knew it, so that now we may love. To perpetual peace, the PP of Kant, and the proxy of the papacy, the pleasure principle, the postal principle, papa, or papaw, patriarchs and prophets, prostitutes and physicians, professors and preachers, the poles of north and south or of the opposition once we thought was irrefragable, to the struggle of good and evil, or of myself and the world, that war, was the illusion of me. In reality I am someone else known only to God. Post-Pontiff catholicism will be like the waking of the dead, the union of things irreconcilable, the arrival of the Messiah in fact not just in principle. For we all let usurpation and usury take sway in Rome and
everywhere else, worshipped a lie, and yet but judged our-selves. I must let go of the desire to be led, of the desire for leaders, of the desire that follows, in order to be free of the desire itself. Sophocles said that we suffer into truth. That is tragedy, but we learn. To know one must suffer, and we all suffer, but not all come to know the truth of suffering, have the experience but miss the meaning, or know it only in theory or by the book but not by direct knowledge, as it is, but lost in words and things, lose the way, which indeed is hard to find. The prize is not for invention, but for discovery. Reinvention, or rediscovery, one must choose their relation to the past, their own and the world’s. Buddha, Jesus, Socrates: did not write, did not work, did not take money for the teachings, did impart truth by word and deed, and did not lie, and did speak of suffering as to how it may be over-come, in different ways, but basically not by obedience but by independence, not by memory but by vision, not by mind but by heart, not in theory but in practice. I have made my work in the age of the triumph of theory which was the nadir of reality, and that formed the work in many ways, a problem to solve. As the alchemist Celan said, solve and coagula, which Robert Yankow too might have said of the forces of truth and tragedy, of magic and suffering, of the great transformation that must take place, whether we will or no, this life or the next, as God chooses. Transcendence means that God is absolutely different, and that he chose for Jesus to be the one to suffer not just as part of an economic exchange in sin and guilt and atonement, but as a sign and symbol of the absolute difference of God and man, which is, and yet which we can not let hinder us from getting to God, by trust. The mercy of God is evident, because I am. Who am I? The one God chose to learn and to be written. What have I learned? That I have written, and will have been written, but that the truth is not in writing, nor in the spaces nor in the differences. That I kept going. That I finished before I died, but in a way had to die and be willing to die in order to finish. That I prayed and was prayed. That I loved and was loved. That I hated and was hated, that I desired whether or not I was desired, that I made and stole, consumed, used, borrowed without repaying, that I was always angry, and thought I
knew what was going on, though I was always ignorant. That I gave this up, because I didn’t give up. In the end, in a last desperate move, I told my wife that I was calling in an air strike on my own position. Indeed. It happened. As I explicated the end of the world, my world did end and begin again. She and I, in our vessel of mystery, our apartment on the Richmond Strip, made a great transformation of ourselves, of the work in us and on the pages of the books, and in a way yet known, in the world. It was alchemy in the true sense of the word. I became in a way I cannot show or say the very Christ and Buddha and Socrates, and had to be, not just seem to be, to save myself, my wife, my marriage, my work, and to save the world. Tremendous forces had been unleashed and we were buffeted by a storm, yet made the higher ground, by grace. I became more than moral, more than mystical, more than I can conveniently say, but that I suffered, that she suffered, that I became awake and aware, that she too knew there was something more that she could see in me yet not understand, and that we both had to make peace between us, for us and for all, for God’s sake, and said it was the most important day of our life, but did not shrink back from the work, but gave our all, risked all, became more than we had been, made the passage together, crossed the river, loved and understood, each other, forgot what it meant to the book and to the world and to God even, but said, what do we mean to you and me, and the lives we saved were our own, and lived after we had died, and were born again, and did not violate but fulfill, and did arrive in fact, as we had promised and had hoped, and did not just want to be real but were real, the thing-in-itself, in learned unknowing, and wise simplicity, forgiving my folly, my waste, her concern for money, my obsession with God, our desire to escape each other and the work of destiny, the symbols of handshakes, kisses, a prayer, water, goodbye. And on awaking in our ordinary minds to go on thanking, grateful, now seeing signs that we would make it and had and get to God together. I have related the thing that happened as best I can, and hope whoever you are, wherever, and whenever, that you already know and know it even better than we.
Desperate diseases require drastic cures, and at last I had to love all or lose all, and so I loved. We all know the theory of love, I think, but oh how little we practice love itself and thereby understand and forgive and be the ones that we are meant to be, Jesus, Buddha, all the saints, all the genius of the spirit, the moral, the mystic, the poetic, the music of the seers, the vision of what exceeds words, and through that thing so little preached these days, self-control, the chief fruit of the Spirit that guarantees all love joy peace patience, surrender control to gain control, gain control but to surrender any right to any claim to any desire to, but actually being it, without right claim or desire, being the gift, in discernment, be the narrow path God will have forever been here.
On the following Sunday morning, early in the dark, after a night of study of Christian and Buddhist scriptures, and writers such as Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Eliot, Marx and Engels, I determined in prayer to Jesus that I wanted to keep my faith in Christ and yet still attain enlightenment like the Buddha. I lay on the bed in the cold December night the week before Christmas and meditated. I thought of the void, and I thought of the form. I recalled that in the Preface to this work I had said that in the beginning was an infinite nothingness which contracted creating limit, the eternal, God. I saw in this the relation of the void and form. It is also seen in the gestalt of figure and ground. But the truth is neither of these alone, nor these two together. Neither is it the perception of the distinction between the space and the form. Neither is it ignorance of the void and form. I thought for a moment what this ultimate truth could be and said, it is love. In Buddhism, the point is one of not clinging, non-attachment, and that is the character of human love, to cling, to grasp, to be attached. It is desire, it is greed, it is human love. Christ on the cross showed what divine love is. It is letting go. It is selfemptying. It is not putting sovereignty in question, as Derrida did, nor renunciation of it, but surrender and abandonment, as I said in papers on the arrival in 2006. God’s love is so great that He lets go of everything, at the same in the cruelest of all situations, nailed, in pain, despised, but
praying for his enemies, granting salvation to the good thief, looking out for his mother, before the cry of dereliction at His abandonment by God. And then: It is finished. The veil is torn in two and God’s love is no longer to be doubted. The difference between God and man is shown. As Thomas Aquinas said, Christ suffered out of exceeding charity. The suffering was not for the sake of itself, a penance or austerity, but took place to convince us of the love of God, how completely a love divine lets go of even itself and its own being. The unity of Christ and Buddha was thus seen in the meditation. What Buddha taught is true, and agrees completely with Christ. As well, the Socratic theory of forms is reconciled with the two, and the idea of the relation of the soul and body, which is perhaps one reason for the extremity of the passion. As Socrates said pain and pleasure nail the soul to the body, so the passion showed it is possible to overcome this through love. In the morning, seeing light on my wall, I saw in the light something like the love I had seen the night before, that it is neither space nor form nor cognition nor ignorance. And so too with life itself. Love and light and life transcend the dual nature of thought that makes perception of form and void. In a way, the transubstantiation and the hypostatic union, as taught by the Church, accurately describe the Christ, but also tell the truth of all beings in which God subsists and whom He loves. I kept my faith in Christ, enlightened like Buddha, and Socrates, and so learned the truth, that it is one and all.
Search for the Absolute
The relation of Christ and Buddha has for me become the paramount question, that is, how to think of them together. The two come from differing traditions, east and west, and I think very different logics, the Buddhist non-duality, the Christian binary opposition. In Christianity, as descended from the fall in Genesis, everything is based on knowledge of good and evil, and all thinking is based on this duality. Therefore, when one says I and other, or any pair, one must lineup with good and the other with evil, even if the two are neither good nor evil, but because they are paired thus, they become morally culpable or not. All thought, almost, seems to be based on this structure. In recent times Derrida and others have perhaps tried to question or unsettle or rewrite this arrangement. Whether the culture is more at peace now than before 1965 is something you must judge for yourselves. I do not think they have been successful because they did not abandon the structure but doubled it, binding us even more tightly to it, because by opposing it they have strengthened it in force and by complicating it have not made it easier to step out of. The logic in the human mind based on such opposition is a knot one hardly knows where to begin to untie. Of course, there is always the so-called sword to cut the knot, but such force may or may not be effective. It depends on the sword one chooses. That Nietzsche and others applied force is without question, but that freedom is not nearer but further away seems the remains of the deconstructive project, because, I think, it was a death of‌ rather than a love of‌ that forced the issue, and created a circularity rather than a sheer cleavage. The effraction, in fact, Derrida seemed to eliminate, either from inside or outside the circularity, because everything must take place, if it takes place, inside the text. Whereas at one time it was in God that we lived and moved and had our being, now it is in a text. The unleashing of textuality has revived a number of forces or spirits once overcome by Christ and Buddha, and many things are influencing our lives in many ways that
most people are scarcely aware of, or second in a nihilistic way, waiting enthusiastically for the end. These genealogies in the heavens would keep us from the goal, and so, with the death of God having been accomplished, it is necessary for Christians and Buddhists to join together the foundations and not “reconstruct” what was, but start over, not reinventing but beginning again or being born again. Anything that can be reconstructed can be deconstructed forever, so we must lay aside the notion of structure itself, that is, hierarchy must be jettisoned at whatever level and the emptiness of Buddha beneath the tree and the emptiness of Christ nailed to the tree must be our one goal and our one means of salvation and liberation, our resurrection and enlightenment. Deconstruction did not empty the structure. We must not use the structure against itself, but let go of structure itself. We must not turn ideas against ideality, but let all go, even ourselves, for in letting go of self and other both at once that state known as the “not-other” may be attained. The dilemma of good and evil has been transposed by deconstruction into that of the same and the other, polarities reversed, doubling the effect of structure, and perverting morality, inverting thought, not letting go of thought. For surely deconstruction cannot be accused of simplicity or of renunciation of intellect, but is rather the hyper-logical, hyper-intellectual basis for our culture today. Of this, let go. Only the fullness and the emptiness are important, not the filling, not the hunger, not the semblance, not desire. The absolute cannot be achieved directly, by force, by striving, but only through a sincere emptiness that is done in faith, in hope, but without an attempt to control the outcome, and with a trust that by letting go of all, me, you, God, we will yet arrive, neither forcing arrival, nor avoiding it, but in losing our way, find it, for when we are lost we may be found, and cannot be found unless we are lost. To find the absolute, we must give up the absolute absolutely, and be absolved of both the problem and of the solution, not questioning, not seeking an answer, the mind neither attached nor non-attached, stopped, emptied of itself, of all opposition, not even opposing itself but simply letting go, release, cease, peace. The mind itself
is not the answer to the problem of delusion, but continues to be trapped in it as long as it is. When the mind ceases to think, it is transformed, neither conformed to the world nor informed by it. This is the substitution, the sudden falling away, attained by emptiness, when absolute emptiness and absolute fullness coincide. Everything else is mere opinion, relative semblance, neither ordinary nor extraordinary. To make the ordinary and extraordinary coincide, the mind to be transformed, the self and the other let go of, all desire to pass away, one may meditate on the cross. This meditation on the cross brings together the themes of Buddha and Christ, the emphasis on suffering and the way to overcome it, which is through emptiness and negation, done either mentally, physically or both. Only by this kind of death can the new life be attained. Buddha arose from under the tree transformed, as Jesus did from the tomb. In each becoming completely empty, each became completely full, and so their pattern is one, and one for us even today. Our real state of emptiness is the truth we hide from and in delusion cover over. We must admit it, accept it. It is the evasion of the truth that is painful, not the truth itself. As long as we try to be full, we will never be. Once we become empty, then we will be full. It is not either/or, not neither/nor, but both together in each other. That is why it is true that in Zen samsara and nirvana are really one, and why Heraclitus said the way up and down is one and the same. The logos, which is also reason, is the mind of Christ, and is the mind of Buddha, and people are of one mind are at peace, in that only by being mindful can we realize this state of being of one mind for everyone. As long as one is good and the other evil, it will not be, but only through love of everyone. Non-judgment, forgiveness, love of enemies are the terms Christ used to leverage our minds toward non-duality. The whole is then asymmetrical, there being no absolute opposite of God, so thus our thinking must become, without absolute oppositions, and by this non-opposition creating a possibility for triangulation through non-mirroring. The mirror stage of the mind implies that human love is always accompanied by hate, and that human mercy is always accompanied by justice, that we
always think in terms of rewards and punishments, and that our freedom always implies slavery. Perhaps the opposable thumb is our techno-logical basis. But the divine mind of Buddha and Christ does not oppose and is not opposed. The divine love does not hate because it does not desire. The divine mercy is absolute because it does not involve any kind of justice or judgment. Only people think that way, and as long as we do, we can not be absolutely loving, free, merciful or happy. Our happiness will always consider, compare, contrast, criticize, covet, rather than be content, complete, catholic, in the sense I mean the word these days, which is to say, a universe of paths, not a universal path, each of us independent, but all mindful of everyone. To realize that no one we meet will be the same as, equal to or less than we, that through this we stand not in relation, or unrelated, but in arrangement, in coordination, in harmony, cooperating, not competing, running for the joy of running, because we fulfill ourselves by so running, is the race to be won. Drops in an infinite sea, none are opposed to another. The things I have spoken of may also be seen in this way: The de/re problem regarding structure in theology is a chimera, because these structures are themselves false as to form and notion. The transubstantiation is almost correct, involving the emptying of substance, with its following replacement by another. In reality, the substance actually is not, and the accidents are only there as a kind of illusion without foundation. Enlightenment is to see through the accidents of being to the level of the place which takes place without anything else taking place or taking its place. In other words, the poet saw through the foam and froth of language to the underlying reality of sheer space, which in the end is not even spatial. The sword of no-mind cuts off even possible placement in this place. Nothing will have taken place. The so-called revaluation of all values, is really their Transvaluation, in a triangulation with their devaluation and revaluation. The de/re is probably the new way of expressing the duality as such, and must be triangulated by the trans which crosses all values, all structures, all substances, all times and places, all selves and all others, with a movement which is not an endless displacement
or a continuous spinning in place, but a conveyance of clairvoyance. It is to see the emptiness itself, which is the truth of “faith creates being.� The emptiness of faith realizes our divine coincidence, the absolute emptiness and fullness which faith creates, the two angles set aside from the acute angle of semi-seeming which is accidentality. The substance taking place in us and in all is our very emptiness and our very fullness, and is our own identity. They are never apart, and being one is being the other, at once. The extremes coincide. All else between them is the semblance we must overcome by seeing through our illusions, not using them, or letting them use us. The delusion of magic is just this life that seems to control so much, and give us so much control, but which prevents or hinders the realization of truth which is peace in the heart, the compassion for those who suffer delusion. The greater part of the delusion is that those who suffer it do not realize their own suffering, and rather fear the emptiness that is their true peace, true love, true selves. Almost all philosophies and religions mean to teach reality and the way to it, but hide reality and the way there. Christ and Buddha denied themselves, saying no, took up the problem of suffering as task, saying yes, and breached trails for us to follow, both of mankind’s greatest teachers showing us a way to really be peace, love and understanding, through acts of emptying, fulfillment and arrival.
tomb
The curtain of the unveiling of the apocalypse will be in but the blink of an eye, the simul ringing down of the curtain, as the desolation of the abomination is raised on high to disturb the canonical saints and then in the last act the monstrous logic of the sacrifice, once for all, yet always repeated, again and again, both singular and machine-like, once living once dying forever living forever dying, is suspended by the worst, the suicide, or more suicide of catholicism by the voiding of the rite by the rewriting of the order of the mass, let it be read by each, that we will not be we, but from union to mere series, from the son and father one in being to the Latinate consubstantial, which will confuse the essence of the transubstantiation, from and also with you, to and with your spirit, which even the bishops cannot explain where and when the priest acquired that spirit, to the changing of the words of institution, the all becoming many, which is misinterpreted by some as the narrowing of salvation, no I speak not of quantity but of the quality, going from the definite to the indefinite, the destabilizing of the core of the mass, and there are other words misplaced and misshapen in syntax, but especially when it changes from a sacrifice of praise to a sacrifice of ourselves for God’s praise, what is this? And so the Roman Church will sacrifice itself come this November, because the beast was wounded and almost died but did live, and the prophet promotes his agenda, his image, the decreed Missal, which indeed will speak or be spoken, and which one must adhere to without dissent to partake of the sacramental economy, a thing spoken for worship, to worship, and Catholics, signed on hands and foreheads with oil in confirmation and again every lent with ashes, as in Revelation, are in the circum-stances I describe, the only way in the world this year that the apocalypse can happen, because nowhere else is there such a conjunction of prophecy with practice. O, Catholicity! O, City of God! So in my interim, before the story that leads to where I now am, I give you the abbreviated word of the end of the world, a warning I could not postpone, but send ahead as fore-runner of the demise of roman insistence. Yet, this may be good news still, both for the church and for the world, especially for the world, because He came for the sinners, not for the salvation of those who are righteous. God does not think like we do, which we cannot understand, with in-comprehensible
love that reaches out not just to those of good will, but especially the unjust and unmerciful, so that the judgment that begins at the House of God, may be a warning to the rest of the world. What will happen to the church and the world I do not know, except that in reading both testaments of apocalyptic literature there are passages that are clear and others that are opaque. Scripture scholars and many priests tell you one thing, historical or textual, but I think we should look into matters for ourselves. The hope I hold now is that the end is not really the end, but a narrow strait to a better world, beginning even here on earth, with a thousand year reign, after the key of the abyss seals the error and evil of our apocalyptic time, to free us for the joy of Christ. The books I have written start in a far different place from the one I dwell in now, morally, intellectually and spiritually. What began as a young attempt at deconstruction before I fell for God in my conversion and began writing from a catholic point of view, goes through many stages, to arrive at the evacuation of the church, but not of faith, which I need even more now, and that in God, not in either the tradition or the revelation, but in the sole authority, which I see at work everywhere around me in what I term the ultrastructure, the articulation of the one life or force that is within and without us all the time, which contains the struggle of good and evil and all that depends upon that difference. One love we say. Yes, yet, we defer and differ, from each other and from ourselves, but you, and I, what are we to Him? Vaster than the star reaches, faster than a ray of light, this flux of which we sometimes become more or less aware, in the coincidence of things, or their adherence, rather than always falling, or if falling, falling faster, but into arms to catch. We need not plummet into the abyss, but He has mercy on whom He chooses, His hands are not tied by the words of men, as the seminarian told me years ago, though magic sometimes seems to work for some. It may be that the present age that began in the period of the second world war, after the publication of Joyce’s last work, is the ricorso, the chaotic transition to the renewed state of humanity, and that this fourth age of understanding in which we live is but a brief interruption and that the circle will recommence, like the journey through both black hole and
worm hole to a better place in another world, or so it seems to me, that is, that scriptures and the writings of the postmodern, Joyce and Derrida, for example, need not cancel out each other, even if contradictory they seem or really are, for this is the era of the contradiction, and perhaps I speak against one thing and then against another and so interdict myself, but here in my world, there is still a we, a new we, not fragmented, but coming together, through technology, through spirituality, through community, through sharing our spaces and our thoughts, though still clinging to too much and not letting enough go, in order to arrive. They say either joy or pleasure or some such distinction, or Buddha and sentient beings, or Christ and whatever opposes Him, but He said love anyway, even those on the Other side. That is what we are going to be taught and shown, I think, as we suffer together the next few years, but only a short time in order to make our best effort, to learn how to make our best effort, to not fear but to love. Often in a disaster the good in people comes out, and I think some will understand but some will never do so. We, future oriented, feeling belated, hardly present, unable to preserve or persevere, deconstructed, disconnected, over aware and under aware, too informed and under informed, let us say these are the days, really despite appearances, to get it right one more time or one last time, to do the right thing, not just the next thing, and to not let up, not even blink until time expires, and when it is over, then to look up and see if we have won, for none can be sure, in a way, though in a sense we are all standing generally before God right now, and at the turning may all still stand together as the light arrives and be found not guilty for our sins and omissions both because some helped turn the wheel, and because the Lord had mercy we could not buy. The drama in these pages came from an un-dramatic life, mostly lived on the margins of poverty and sanity, though marriage and a late education in a catholic graduate school enabled me to push the work toward the points of reform and renewal it reached last year. I learned to love would sum up the thing that happened to me, and so I look back on the struggle between me and the world, and in my own mind between deconstruction and catholicism as being part of that, but how as one nephew asked do you really know if you are in love? Or, how do you know you really love as one ought?
Perhaps we only love as we can, and not as we cannot, and as one man said, in our own peculiar ways, whether that match romantic fantasy or not, who is to say? For Derrida, the precursor, and the curse, love was not a question, not a problem, not something he ever once to my knowledge wrote of, which means by the logic of the un-said that it was the one thing he privileged, the one thing that is greater than even justice, or hospitality, or the other in-deconstructibles. Silence can be ambiguous, or it can be so accurate, as the painter Rothko said. Derrida’s silence about love, remarked in the film about him, and in the magazine the “American Scholar” at the time of his death, is un-like the silence of Heidegger about the Nazis and the Jews, and gives him a moral standing completely without hypocrisy compared to those who preach but do not practice charity in truth. He is said to be against purity, Anything but purity, he said late in life, though he liked pure French, and so much of what he did, all, was for contamination, written corruption in a way, tainted tains, one might say, and truly reflected the situation in the world, but all the time, like the religion he hid and finally revealed, as Caputo, a catholic said, there is, or perhaps we don’t know for sure, a real ideality, a true love so pure it had to be absolutely concealed, absolutely hidden and never put into play, without sign or signature, un-deconstructed, and neither the impossible nor anything else, but the act of love preserved by silence and the great lacuna is thus explained, and the greatness of deconstruction is not the struggle with technology but the absolute faith in love. My friend told me the lost cause is the only thing worth fighting for, and so it seems to me lately, with the church collapsing under the crush of corruption that is being only now by me seen for what it is, though others for centuries knew the truth. The betrayal is personal, and deeper, for it is by those most counted on, like the men abusing young children, or bishops abusing power. And so with the church lost or soon to be, what do I fight for? I think some form of catholicity is still possible, but without a hierarchy. That the council said the one holy catholic apostolic church only subsists in the Roman and is not identical to it, is important. That true church, like Luther’s invisible one will go on after Catholicism has passed away. Sans insistence, what then?
A decapitalization of the Roman, the head cut off, the bank turned inside out, the thing made transparent through and through, completely reformed by the laity and its taking responsibility. For each of us stands alone before God, and cannot be good Germans who only did what we were told. We know in any sense of justice that that defense is inadequate. Some current theologians speak of reconstructive theology, but pay them no mind, they forget that any re can be de again. Let us find the new basis, and jump clear of structure and construction itself, of the machine like mass and magisterium, duplication and duplicity, all folding in principle and in fact for the forgotten body of Christ as an organic singular event not to pass away or be passed over by the machinations of those in power. The body without a head? No. But Christ is the head generally and our own consciences in each of us particularly, and the men who would take them away from us are usurpers, treasonous against the true constitution of the body of Christ, of which all are members. Even severed or unrealized, to expound on Rahner and his implicit Christianity. The priest does not hold the keys, and there is no market for grace, what you have been given freely, pass on to others freely, and money is the enemy of faith and hope and love. Love is free, so if you obtain it by trade or purchase, it is not real love you hold but a facsimile, and all you need to have that love of God is to realize you are already there, yes/yet/you, will have been, a future perfect. Derrida wrote in his late essay on faith and knowledge about a confused series of things, including the projection of Roman power, globalatinazation, and the spread of auto-immune disorders. I could not make sense of this text a decade ago, but now I sense a prophetic voice at work in the deconstructionist. It seems to me that the Vatican has too much immunity, diplomatic immunity, doctrinal immunity, for the problem of the things to come to be resolved by the deconstruction of the hierarchy, the way the Soviet problem in Europe was overcome. The Pope’s immunity is killing the church of which he is the head. The infallibility of the vicar of Christ is the most fallible part of this,
along with a history of the money in Rome. The bank of the Pope was created in 1942 just in time to receive any loot from the Nazis. The impetus initially to create it came from the sordid deal struck with the Italian fascists in 1929, the Lateran treaty, in which the Pope conceded the papal lands lost in 1870 for a large amount of cash and government bonds, over one billion lira. The lawsuits of the last few years brought by Holocaust survivors, trying to force open the books of the Pope’s bank, have foundered on the rock of sovereign diplomatic immunity. It seems that the Vatican is the supreme rogue state, a thing angering Italian officials and their banking system, while the Church operates outside it as an off-shore entity. The Pope answers to no one. But his very immunity is what will destroy the catholic church on its Roman basis. What is taking place is the transubstantiation of the Church herself, with the substance of Christ being displaced, so that only the accidents of a Church remain, that is, it looks like it and talks like it, but it ain’t it. What is replacing the substance of Christ in catholicism is not known, but must be evil. Its far-reaching effects will become apparent when the new order of mass takes place. And yet, be not desperate nor despairing, for the Bible has fore-witnessed these things, even before the birth of Christ. God has decreed it, and we cannot stop it. But scripture says that when Christ comes atop a white horse the sword which he wields will defeat the beast and the false prophet, and that this sword is one of truth. After the work of truth the abyss will be sealed with a key and peace shall reign. I believe this. I hope the work I have written depicts the things of which it speaks accurately and for the good of all, both in the church and in the world. The interpretation of the Bible on these things was always confused by applying them to events in the old Rome rather than today, and by attempting to interpret the number 666 as a name rather than what it is, the number of two men. It may be that what I have written will be neither published nor if so will go unnoticed by anyone, especially in the church. Some in the world may rejoice though at what becomes of Rome, but I hesitate to do so, except that as long as God’s will be done, there will be cause for rejoicing.
An Icon from an Evening in Glas In the days of Camus and Derrida, there was explication de texte. That will have been approached here, while escaping the suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric. For any two things can be connected from any distance under any rule. The text I propose for examination is the title implicated in the top left hand corner of the page. I need not go into the history of the production of the title of the work, for there are texts upon texts and their contexts, which I must effract. How the title was arrived at, from whence it was derived, in-volves the catastrophe of the end of the world which I am witnessing and recording from here, in this text. We all are, basically, from our own angles of view, sort of like the man at the end of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s solitude, who is deciphering the text of the secret as the apocalypse unfolds. Yet, let us keep our hands clean and not be negligent, for
the secret of the text is neither magical nor given to appropriation, neither pornographic nor pyrotechnical. It waits on patience, and purity, perseverance and the peace that surpasses all under-standing. It is not done in a fever, or in a sweat, but in measured strains, by number and weight, neither a march nor a waltz, far rather like David’s prophetic dance before the Ark of the Lord, not frenzied, nor fraught, but rapturous, candid, faithful and confident. That the world does dance away its final hours on the edge of a volcano almost without quite knowing what it is doing, for none can be sure, our certainty forgotten, is the spectacle and the distraction that would, if it could, keep the knowledge locked away, but the truth will out, whether the world will or know. That the world is standing on its head and must be set right, and that Derrida did this in his own way, a way parallel to that of Camus, and not opposed, is simply the way I see it. That Derrida’s last texts concern, I think, sovereignty and the beast, will not go unnoticed, nor the myth of Sisyphus, the problem of the suicide of the church, and the crux of the matter contained in the juxtaposition of two words in almost any dictionary of the English language, that is to say, Deconsecration Deconstruction
Which hold the key to the recent history of the world and the fate of the church. Seeing patterns is making connections. In the game of connect the dots, one finds the hidden design amid the random chaos, in order to reveal the hidden meaning. If the world has an author, if the text has an author, then we have always presumed that there is an inherent pattern or meaning amidst the apparent chaos of our lives and in the works of literature in which we see ourselves reflected. However, if there is no author, then one may connect the dots in whatever manner one chooses, not finding but inventing a design. I think we have reached that point. Not that there is no author, but that things such as characters or people or plots or history are not the paradigm of our research, but language itself. And perhaps still the book as such and authority remain a subject of question and concern, for we know that as we write we may well be written. This is true in genetics, mathematics, physics, which involve writing or codes, that is to say symbolization, something at once both real and symbolic, literal and more than literal, the ideality of design. We do not know where the design came from but we see it. These words are letters that are arranged in patterns that convey meaning, under ideal conditions, the framing context of the mode of the reader and other factors. All of this I say is not the
explication de texte, but rather the interpretation, the other part of studies in the French schools in the time of Camus and Derrida. Coupled as they were in the curriculum, explication and interpretation were analogical to the roles of faith and reason in theological thought, in that they seemed to presuppose one another. That they are still viable, and are distinct disciplines, may be in doubt. Perhaps there is nothing but a generalized economy of writing at this time. Still, we seem to accept in fact some restrictions as necessary, bending the rules where we desire, but still within a kind of framework. I cannot speak for all. There may be types of discourse unknown to me that operate in far different ways. I do not know. One limit case or promontory in that regard is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which in turn inspired the Glas of Jacques Derrida. These texts rewrote the codes or rules regarding literature and philosophy, working out of the command and control authorial paradigm, which is itself based on competition, into a collaborative creativity which does not dictate meaning but suggest it, dream-like and hypnotically, with an almost fascist connotation to the collaborators. On the other hand, I have found that the work I have been engaged in is not limited to these modes, but requires a combination of the contemplative and the critical, on the part of both the author and the reader, for the advent of an economy of meaning that is catholic to
take place, that is to say, a universality, as opposed to the authority of any Roman Empire. The kind of writing that Joyce and Derrida excelled in is characterized by the cognizance and exploitation of what I call the Ultra-structure, a term I have borrowed from science and use to describe what I will sometimes refer to as the Glossolalia of the text, a reading and writing in tongues, as in the Wake, an activity that is summed in the word Icon in the seven word title that I placed at the head of this text. As in the Bible, there is speaking in tongues, an expression of meaning given by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to the nascent Church, and which subsists today even in catholicism in some out of the way places. But just as one may say that the whole economy as such, all economies in principle, have transformed from restricted to general ones, and I here refer to Derrida’s early writings on the subject, the gift of tongues has, in my opinion, also shifted from a strictly oral or verbal expression to the modes of reading and writing, and that in fact textuality itself is this in some way. If language is the house of being, as has been said, which is another way to speak of the languages descended from the catastrophe that took place at Babel, at which time God “deconstructed himself,� according to Derrida, then God is in language, as the Word, logos, as truth and meaning, but
in other ways as well. From Holderlin we derive the scene of reading as a quiet, holy act. I project a general-ization then of scripture as such, perhaps as Derrida did the Messiah. Blake said everything that lives is holy, and the word, language, is a living thing, and though often put to profane and secular use, which is an understatement of the greed and pornography that engulf us, yet our texts are basically sacred in a way, even though impure and contaminated, or perhaps even not despite this but because of it. I have advanced a logic over the course of my work that hinges on the understanding of the necessity of contradiction and it applies in this case. The Ultrastructure in language cannot be without being inclusive, both blessing and cursing, creating and defiling, and so on. It is the principle of connection, the condition of possibility for it. It is potency in relation to act, to speak in quasi-Thomistic terms. When I first discovered the word Ultra-structure, I used it exclusively to describe the numerical, not the alphabetical, and saw that numbers need no translation, and so are privileged carriers of meaning. This insight was crucial in the advancing of the theory concerning the Apocalypse which turns on the meaning of a number in the Book of Revelation. I need not rehearse that for you now, having already covered that ground in previous texts, but promise you the subject will have impacted the work you are now reading. However, I will come at
it by way of the Exegesis and Eisegesis of the iconic seven words of my text, An Icon from an Evening in Glas. But before turning to the explication itself, I would like to preface it with a statement concerning the terms Exegesis and Eisegesis. They mean in their etymological back-grounds in Greek to lead out of and to lead into and are used especially in the context of describing Biblical inter-pretation. When one reads ones own ideas into scripture, one is said to be reading eisegetically, while when one reads what is “really there” one is reading with proper exegesis. On the other hand, Joyce and Derrida and the writers following them eschew such an opposition, deconstructing this polarity, rendering it meaningless. In the explication of the seven word text that is to be accomplished, the traditional idea of Exegesis and Eisegesis, while not being ignored, will be redefined by my practice. I will say in advance that all of this bears on the conversion of “leading” into a kind of “following,” and that interpretation and explication is always more of the following of the seams in the semes, rather than a seeming to lead the text toward its inherent meaning, which is always univocal or equivocal. The text itself is, if not infinite at least indefinite, and cannot be pinned down to a set of controlled meanings or readings. There is no exhaustive Exegesis. One can say this is for a mystical reason, when reading the Bible or other scriptures, and in my
theory of the book in general, all texts become the scripture that they are, and as such may be read as having always more than one meaning, the old model including moral and mystical levels in the hierarchy of interpretation, which my own work several years ago drew on. The network of language exists at both the hierarchical level, while at the same time, and contradictorily, subsisting in the text as a leveling, an evening out, I might say. This is the direction of Ultrastructure or Metasignification, which is neither less than nor more than nor equal to another, while at the same time, and contradictorily, being the parallel or prime of that other traditional, re-stricted, hierarchical method of inter-pretation that characterizes theology and its regimes. By being parallel to the tradition, which has become lost in the labyrinth of its own desire, not only is place given, and magnitude recognized, but direction is now discerned, without which we will not arrive. Our arrival is not derived from the tradition, but survives it. One need not be disconsolate over the loss of meaning, for something is received in its stead, the way to a let us say kingdom let us say of ends that the tradition indicated while at the same time preventing. To put it in theological terms, the Romans do not practice what they preach, and so cannot reach the goal set by the savior, which is neither a leading in nor out of the text, but a following. Deny yourselves, take
up your crosses and follow me. Jesus asks not leaders but followers of the good gospel. Now, at this point in the text, if it were a retro meta-fiction, a second narrator would interrupt and comment on what has come before, and the text would explicate and interpret itself. It seems to me that something of this sort is called for, because of an apparent faux pas on my part in the preceding, that is, my assertion of the relationship between Glossolalia and the word Icon. As I was re-reading what I had written, I noticed right away the dissonance in the assertion, and thought without doubt that the word Glas makes much more sense as the symbol for Glossolalia than the word Icon does. There is, in my apparent slip, a crux, and so I inadvertently
really went straight to
the heart of the matter, and upon reflection, decided that the relationship between the word Glas and the word Icon would be the appropriate site for launching the engagement with the text to be explicated. Glas, the title of Derrida’s monumental 1974 work, is the word in French for the “death knell,” the tolling of the church bells at a funeral. One may ask, who’s death? Indeed, it seemed in a way to me at the time I read the English translation in 1986 to be simply the tradition, or even Western culture, everything before postmodernism. Now, it sounds to me different, the
tolling of the bell, and involves a complete reevaluation on my part of the meaning of Derrida’s work, and the history, meaning and fate of the Church, by which I mean the Roman Catholic. To say the tolling of the death knell is the Church itself mourning the death of the Church itself is what I now discern, and in this I reinterpret Derrida’s overall strategy to have been always directed at the Supreme Pontiff in Rome. Derrida took part in the deconstruction of the time, if not leading it then at least presciently seeing the way things could go and the way he wanted them to go, not for the mere sake of enjoying the de-struction of the world, but to indicate the crisis he, I think, saw coming for and from the Catholic Church. The target of Derrida’s attack was at first expressly logocentrism, presence and propriety, valorizing writing over speech, absence over presence, the other over the subject or the self, scattering over gathering, the text over the book; then, later, he took up the problem of religion in his writings on the Messiah, justice, hospitality, and the openness of the “to come.” Toward the end, he wrote of what he termed globalatina-zation, and warned against a projection of power on the Roman basis, and posthumously mentions together in a title “sovereignty” and “the beast.” It seems to me that Derrida was approaching obliquely but steadily to an interpretation of the death of the Church and to the apocalypse now.
The icon is a sometimes “wordless word� that also sometimes contains within itself a text, a book opened, revealing an ancient script in a foreign languages. The icon itself is an image in need of study, and whether or not it has letters or words in it, is open to interpretation and explication. I believe that, again to eschew the relation of Exegesis and Eisegesis, the icon reads us more than we read it. This can be re-applied to texts generally, rather than being restricted to only iconic images, and then it can be said that the text reads us, explains us, and not the other way around. In my discovery or positing of the Ultrastructure I have found that this phenomenon has occurred especially in what has become known as the postmodern period, from roughly the second world war, or the publication of the Wake in 1939, because of a breakdown in the traditional orders. In the chaos that may be but random chance, the thing, which I call also Metasignification, takes place, whether in the mind or out of the mind, I don’t know, as the connecting of bits and pieces to form patterns. We half-perceive and halfcreate this new reality, as Wordsworth said. We are cocreators of it. It sometimes seems magical or schizophrenic, evil or crazy, or sublimely imaginative, and weird or supernatural. There is something there in the details of general textuality that can be seen if
we look hard enough. Joyce had a genius for this perceiving and creating, and by producing the chaos of the Wake, gave a space for the Ultrastructure to be projected into or discovered, as in an alchemical experiment. The icon of Glas by Derrida fuses the ultrastructure with the traditional, forcing the order itself to bear the weight of the creation of new things within it, which is one aspect of what is called deconstruction. The text is in a place somewhere between rigid order and complete nonsense, a place of lability, change and openness, of possibility that deconstructs the closure of a set arrangement, allowing constant re-invention, and bringing to light an indefinite number of potential connections that cannot be limited or closed off in principle, though in fact for a written work to be, there must be some limits found or applied, as the human subject itself needs an identity, in order to not become lost or submerged in the ever greater of the sea surrounding. But as mystics tell us, our destiny is just that losing of oneself in the infinite sea of God. Textuality is not the divinity, nor is the internet, which are rather simulacrum of eternity, which at least in a parallel manner are breaking into the closed paradigm of human society and are translating us into another space that is preparatory to the advent of the thing that is on the other side of the apocalypse, a kingdom of peace, the new age to come.
At the outset of my text, in addition to the promise of an explication of the seven word title, I promised some interpretation of Derrida’s sovereign and beast, of Camus and the myth of Sisyphus, and of what I call the suicide of the Church, as well as something on the importance of the relation between the words Deconsecration Deconstruction which I think sum-up the problem of the church in the modern world. Taking these in order, it is not, I think, a coincidence that Derrida employs terms that apply to the Antichrist, though the word coincidence has become altogether meaningless in my world. Things just simply are, in their weird ways, and I cannot understand or explain how or why they happen. As I have said elsewhere, I believe John Paul II is the “beast” of the Book of Revelation, based on the interpretation of the text, including an elucidation of the famous number. That, if this is the case, as he was raised to the status of the order of the blessed, then the abomination of deso-lation has already occurred, and the order of mass that takes place in November 2011 is his “image” that speaks in order to be worshipped. It is not clear to me, however, if John Paul II and Benedict XVI were conscious they were doing what Revelation
prophesied. It seems to me that the world and the church were destined to be destroyed, or changed, by God himself, but that this takes place in two ways, which may compete with each other as a disjunctive either or, or may collaborate as a synthetic both and. The world and the church began the final deconstruction of themselves about the same time, in the 1960s, the time of Derrida’s early work, of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, and which is the date some, for instance the critic Northrop Frye, point at as the start of the postmodern period. The world stayed on its course of de-construction, including even that of the Soviet Union, but Rome did not, and under John Paul II, beginning in 1978, began instead a worse thing than deconstruction, that is to say, it began to deconsecrate itself, which Derrida, I think, obliquely points to in one of his last ideas, that of “the worst.� This is taking place, in principle and in fact, by the repudiation covertly of the highpoints of the theology won at Vatican II, such as the inviolability of the conscience, in the unending sex abuse scandals, and in other more obscure, but perhaps more unholy things, reaching back throughout Catholic history, concerning lies and forgeries, money and murder. Again, I do not know the intentions, only the results. In the Book of Numbers, God tells Moses and Aaron that he himself breaks his promise, after the people of God refuse to enter the promised land, as Caleb and Joshua urged them
to do. Instead, they would stone the men who had scouted Canaan and found it indeed a land of milk and honey, ripe for the taking. God wills that the people fall in the wilderness over the next forty years, for not listening to the men who told them that the promised land had arrived, they needed only go in and claim the victory that God would surely give. Something like that has happened in our own day, with the visionary men of Vatican II and their attempt at a free, transformed catholicity, being rejected for the thing the Roman Church has become, a disgrace. That those of us who know this stand like Joshua and Caleb in relation to the people of God is to me incontrovertible, so we must urge now, go in, trust God, the kingdom is yours, while realizing our plea will probably be rejected, every people of God, new and old, Jew and Catholic, always refusing. In this may be seen the myth of Sisyphus, as well, that we roll the rock up, only to see it roll back down, yet must do our duty, as perhaps even the bishops and theologians of Vatican II knew their leadership could be eventually despised and ignored. I do not think the Church is going to immediately cease to exist as a visible bricks and mortar institution, and it will still have its money and some power, but as a spiritual entity it is ceasing to be. God, I believe, as in the case of the rebellion in the wilderness, is not bound to fulfill the covenant with this Church, and in fact, new Israel
and old Israel are in the same position, typologically in every way, just as the religious authorities, in the days of Jesus, are the same type as now. In the time of Jesus, whose name is really the same as Joshua, the promised land or the kingdom of God was again proclaimed, the thing was at hand, but through some refusal or lack on the part of the people of God, it was deferred, not because God chose to, but rather because the Church herself did not claim the victory. The situation became clear under Constantine, and more so later, as the institution became involved in money and politics. That God knew this beforehand, that the people would betray him, not only among the Jews but at a later time, is foretold in Daniel 12:7, when it is said God will “scatter the power of the holy people.� Indeed, the thing is at hand, a little earlier even than Isaac Newton foresaw based on a calculation he made of 1260 years after the coronation in 800 of Charlemagne. No, it is 1260 years since the forgery of the donation of Constantine, the fiction on which Rome bases her authority, which was accomplished by 754. In other words, the Deconsecration that began then will be fulfilled now, and the death knell will toll, albeit perhaps in silence, for the iconic Church that once was. To go on from this point to an explication of the little seven word text of the title seems a bit anti-
climactic, but I will summarily mention a few things. In the center of the square appears the words “veni roman,” and in a cross-like formation there is the indication f-ing roman, pointing to the bind of a contradiction that concerns the final Pope to come, called Peter the Roman in the prophecy of St. Malachy. Whether he will fulfill the evil plan or expose it, I do not know, but after him, the Church will be no more. There are many other connections among the letters in the design, including some chatter about “anal” icons, or the essential anal aspect that is the condition of possibility inherent to a thing for it to be analyzed. The anal is a thing Derrida writes of in his Glas, and in connection to religion. In his work, the IC and the GL are opposed, the immaculate conception and the siglum GL, and it is indicated in my design that IC and GL had a son, something of an Onan, as is the type written of in de-construction, such as Rousseau. As well, several women appear covertly in the text, including Eve, Mary and the Greek earth mother Gaia or Gaea. That in the center of the square an “omen” is written concerning at least an “I,” and also other things that can be construed into some sort of narrative, if one desires, is given, considering there are at least several characters involved in a kind of conflict. But, that time has stopped and that everything is connected, would have to be the principle of any possible inter-pretation of the text-design. You
may look and may find more in the seven word text, but I have shown you at least this much. I cannot say things are even at this point, what the leveling means, or if there has been some kind of revenge, or getting even. I do think we are in the “evening,� as one said, not dark yet, but getting there. The world will deconstruct and the church deconsecrate, and what will happen after that? We do not know, but the Bible promises great things, the thousand year kingdom of peace on earth in Revelation, and as also Isaiah promises, a finale in which the lion lies down with the lamb, not a violent catastrophe, but a restoration of lost innocence. I think, in fact, the part of the apocalypse that is catastrophic is almost over, and the violence, for instance the absurd amount in Mexico as I write, is an indication of the way the matrix of technology, money, and fascism, all tied to a grand corruption that may be seen in the useful paradigm of collaboration, where all give their assent, none dissent, and the thing itself, Rome or the authority of an invisible hand, is seemingly infallible. But if it can’t be wrong, it must be wrong, and if I must be mistaken, then I must be telling the truth. Truth, if it is true, must always be inconvenient, as we say, unsettling, disturbing, opposed to the illusion, the madness, the evil. That truth and lies stand side by side, good and evil, being
and mere semblance, cannot be helped, but if justice ever happens, as we hope, then the re-conciliation of them will have taken place. Impossible, as Derrida said, yet God alone does the impossible. To conclude, I should speak of the seven word textdesign, “An Icon from an Evening in Glas,” in relation to my work as a whole, which could bear that inscription. The Icon Glas pair describe the struggle by me with catholicism and de-construction, while the word Evening invokes Hegel’s word in his Philosophy of Right that Minerva’s owl of wisdom flies at dusk, an indication of his awareness of the closure taking place through the accomplishment in the dialectic of all possible positions in the spectrum of thought. My work finds itself shuttling back and forth between the Roman, the Derridean and the Hegelian, all plied together as the three strand cord of which the Bible in Ecclesiastes speaks. If this knot or circle was at any point effracted, to use once more Derrida’s term I learned from his late work Given Time, then it is not in taking sides in the positions of the catholic, deconstructionist or dialectician, but rather by the autobiographical element of the writing. For those who have read, or read about, Derrida’s Glas, autobiography is a part of his de-construction. Perhaps my work is an oblique commentary on my own deconstructed self. But as Derrida said, GL protects against the schiz that GL
produces, and so, having becoming other to myself, at times uncanny, quite beside myself, I eventually healed, and this perhaps by the very thing that GL symbolized in its invention or intervention in my life. I do not know, and the authorial fallacy is asserted. I am not the best judge of what I have written, or of the life I have lived. That the work is the history of a journey out of deconstruction and completely through the catholic church, only to emerge on the other side, understanding both in themselves and in relation to each other, may be true. If I were to add anything to these final words, it would be concerning what Derrida already called in 1991 “the state of the debt.” It seems every nation and most individuals are in a financial bind that is insolvable except by means of a key piece of what I would have once called the “Catholic Economy,” ideas that I and others have been working on the last few years in light of the Church’s teachings on social and economic justice. It seems to me that we are in need of forgiveness, of a “jubilee year” as in old Israel, forgiveness of debts and debtors. As well as giving and asking for forgiveness, as individuals, nations must adopt a total for-bearance of the debt, at least until things get better, if not an outright charging off of the entire debt of the U.S. and all other countries. Then we can start over with a clean slate. Our debt now
threatens to enslave and impoverish the whole world. I do not say it was an intended thing, as I do not know the intention of any, but I know all need a chance to begin again. The promised land “to come,� will have been, therefore, so that the Messiah may arrive. You might say, as I said that I might, as God Himself in His might may say, that as has been said, we had then but a circling occupation, and did walk into eternity without ever knowing, but for this: a young professor stood at the chalk board and drew a new diagram of our salvation according to the Council, in an elaborate encircled sphere, almost justly Ptolemaic in design, ever in a paradigm of Catholics, with Roman centrality the primacy, and those of the other nominations spreading out in a sea of the to be blessed, amid the murmur of a discussion
I so as
hazarded to interpose: there are not degrees of this salvation, one is either saved or one is not; so that for a logic disjunctive I put them to it, and did so make them love, in that now as I see it, our circles interchanged,
what was at the center is in the end but
only peripheral at best, and God calls sinners, not the righteous, and the twins of Israel, new and old, Jew and Catholic, miss the Messiah, or as if to, so God turns human salvation inside out, stands our thinking against itself, for mercy if and only if, is His alone and is most free, and judgment has begun at the House
of God, so that we will have been shown His ways were never ours, nor to be comprehended. But let this be, as it dismayed, for those who say there can be no Christian thing proper tragic, so all is a divine comedy, but yet we do not know the time, whether it be free, and whether we are ready, nor if we be ripe or rotten, or if things stand out of joint, for it seems to me that even when we do our best, our actions recoil against us, as Oedipus or an hero from a tragedy by William Shakespeare, and we wonder at ourselves as men betrayed, so let it be with Caesar, if we had but time, what great things could have been said and done, as men of a Roman rule did think they had saved the Church even as they destroyed the same, deconsecrating the blessing with the curse of infallibility, with the assumption of the right to heir, while propagating a faith, which, neither mystic nor moral, did hinder the eternal from ever breaking into time, as if, and imposed upon the becoming of the kingdom of God a rigid, hard, static, death, the Being of the thing appropriated, and stamped the necessity of hierarchy and all that comes with it on life itself, as if, only to find the miracle in the end of true substantiation,in that the body and blood of Christ was given but once for all, His action saving only those whom He chose, only those so chosen. We are all but parallel lines that meet in infinity. Because of the
space that took place in the modern theory, the square as such became impossible for the geometry of Einstein, as he reconciled the discordances in thought, and he said there were only lines and their primes. It seems if we be beside ourselves, we have a chance. The world itself has created its own parallel world, and it is more in that virtual world that we live and move and have our being than in the space we once lived in. Now, that other space, the primordial one of the Bible, has become distant, in a way un-thinkable, and perhaps impossible to reach, even more impossible to traverse, even if it could be. But it is still possible for God to square things, because though we are billions of parallel lines lost in a waste land, God’s meridian crosses all our parallels, and he closes us, squares the accounts, gives shape and form to what, though it was still direction, had no meaning, for the end was unknown and un-knowable. God has drawn a line, not to cross us through or out, and not in an erasure of our characters, but to complete the story, so that we may be saved. His line is not an underlining, to reemphasize us, nor a line across the bottom of our last page, a line that says so far and no further, but a kind of margin, a place for His gloss and for Him to write, a line running from the top to the bottom, clean through everyone and everything, like the prime meridian spoken of by the poet, which connects us all, our distant sites not so much gathered in the
appropriation, that is in the circle of the text and the world it created, but a line to cross all our lives with the knowledge and love of that one who is alone able to demarcate us, to take a globe, and circle it against the time, as he also said, there, north of the future, for we have been given all our latitude, and given enough, see what we have done, but as the line approaches from the other side of this evening, how long was his patience, how long was his forbearance, how long he suffered us in the wilderness. But now that waiting, that wandering, is over, and he draws over the face of our depths, to shake us, to arouse us, to awaken us to his arrival. Our life will not have seemed so long, once He comes, nor will the dreams we once beheld still hold, for the cord of life will not have been cut, in fate it will not be so, but our life’s lines then will have to have been, as even the Glas foretold. In the Book of Joshua it is told that a schism almost occurred in Israel, in the beginning, as the tribes were settling the promised land. The tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh had taken their places east of the Jordan, as in the agreement they had reached with Moses, just before all the warriors crossed into Canaan. However, after the two tribes and the halftribe were to the east, they thought to construct an altar for themselves, and when the people of Israel
heard of this they sent an armed troop to make war on what they considered a blasphemy, the setting up of a rival altar. Gad and Reuben, their descendents and those of Manasseh, explained that the reason they built their own altar was that they feared someday the children of Israel in the west, in the I think proper of the Promised land, would tell the children of Reuben and Gad and Manasseh that they were not true Israelites, and disown them, and cause them to be disheartened and to lose their faith in the one true God of the patriarchs. They built their own altar they said to show all that they too worship the same God, and to point up the difference between themselves and the one altar before the tabernacle, that they were not a rival in worship, but the same, which might become lost from view to the people of God and their descendents because of their physical separation from those in Israel. Phineas, representing the people of God, was pleased with this response, as was Joshua and the elders when he made his report upon his return. What moral may we draw? It is this: That the altar I have erected in the work now concluding, though it often preaches the arrival, is not a rival to the Catholic way, but one with it, with provision made however that the altar of the Lord, we feel, has become de-consecrated by the actions of the hierarchy and the clergy of the people of God. We do not claim to be the only true people of God, anymore than we feel those who
follow Rome should claim that exclusive title. At Vatican II, in the declaration on religious liberty, it is said that there is a true religion still, and that this only subsists in the Catholic and Christian churches and is not identical with them. The true religion may be found in many places, but I feel strongly that true religion is evidenced herein by this altar so set up to show that we too worship God, so that no one can claim us to be outside the one fold of Christ, shepherd of our souls. That Christ, king of endless glory, is the one true sovereign, and does not need a visible representative on earth that merely usurps the throne that is in fact set up in heaven, not in Rome, or in any city of this world. It also exists in the heart of each believer as the one aboriginal vicar, the
conscience, which is irreplaceable and our
last refuge. One must follow ones own conscience, as the sole sovereignty that is within oneself. The starting point for my critique of the papacy last year was the coat of arms of Benedict XVI, a fact I have concealed and withheld until now. There are various interpretations, all benign, of what that crest and shield contain, but I would like to add my own reading of that heraldic device, the at once iconic and Glas-like emblem of the man I consider the false prophet of Revelation, who promotes worship of the Beast, by means of an image set up for worship, at
every altar of the Roman Church. In the coat of arms of Benedict, there are several features. With-in it are three items, a seashell, the head of an Ethiopian, wearing a crown, and a four-footed beast, a bear. Despite the benign, obscure and I think far-fetched inter-pretations of these things by commentators, I offer the opinion that they mean some-thing sinister. It is in fact in what is called the “bend sinister� that the Beast appears. In Revelation, the Beast is said to have four feet like a bear. Thus it fits. The seashell I think represents the verse of Revelation that says the Beast will rise from the sea, not as in some obtuse reading about heroic Augustine, and a boy emptying the sea. The Ethiopian crowned is I think a reference more complex, bearing on the Acts of the Apostles, the only place in the New Testament that such a person is mentioned. He is the one converted by Phillip. What comes just before this is the warning about Simon Magus and the perennial Roman ur-problem of simony, as for instance the practice, still,
in Mexico of the selling
of indulgences. It is important what the Ethiopian is reading when he is found by Phillip, something from Isaiah about the suffering servant. The passage as Acts quotes it is a little different from the Old Testament. It speaks of him who in his humiliation had judgment taken from him. To me this indicates the view of the young seminarian I once heard that God’s hands are tied, there is nothing he can do to end the abuses by Rome.
Surrounding the inside of the coat of arms are some curious innovations by Benedict, the replacing of the triple crown by the bishop’s miter, contra a ruling by Paul VI in 1969, and the addition of the pallium, along with the traditional “keys” of Peter. It seems this addition of the bishop’s hat fits the reading by exegetes of Revelation that the false prophet will have two horns like a lamb, which has been taken to indicate the form of the miter. The pallium itself is a pall that now hangs over all. Altogether, it seems that Benedict’s coat of arms is a symbol that fits his role, as I see it, as the one who follows the Beast, wields the same power as the former, and will promote the worship of him, especially by the image I take to be the new order of mass. In this iconic representation of who and what Benedict is, we have the telling Glas of the Roman Church, if it is read prophetically, which is the dimension of Biblical studies neglected by many, but which is the highest level of scripture interpretation, being the end in view for which the Word of God was given. The emblem of Benedict, an anti-icon, inscribes the Glas of the Church, as a Mise en abime, as a crypt to be unsealed. It is perhaps this that Aquinas was shown, and which caused him to lay down his pen.
Near the start of his career, in the “opuscula” on the eternity of the world, Thomas had said that it had not yet been demonstrated that God cannot do an infinite number of things simultaneously. Indeed. Thomas in the beginning knew more than he knew. In the end he knew what is called the vision of God, at least that’s what they say. They say that he saw God in a beatitude, the glory of God, was astonished by the beauty of love and simply ceased to write in order more quickly to pass on to the heavenly abode that awaits. But perhaps the vision of God was for him something else, far stranger than the pious fraud the church used to gloss over the silence of Thomas and his statement that all he had written was of no account. I think, it seems to me, God did not show him Himself but the catholic fate. All the work of Thomas would be for naught, and even used for evil ends. God has mercy on whom He will, and I believe that Thomas Aquinas found that before he died God had already decreed the condemnation of the Church before it was ever created. Thomas was not wicked and understood, though he was astonished. The wicked will never understand. God’s way is not the way of the church, nor does it know Him. In this, blindness and blessing.
SALTED WITH FIRE I would say that one can perhaps best view my apocalypse or apocalyptic writings through an understanding of the Hegelian dialectic, where at the end of history, at the top of the logical spiral of the Absolute Spirit or SA [Savoir Absolu of Glas by Derrida] is the trinity of art, religion and philosophy. You can read this book and perhaps someday my other, unpublished writings, going back to 1985, and find little if any critical writing on any other subject. However, there is a fourth mode in which I write, a literary style, somewhat poetic and autobiographical, which effracts the circularity of that Hegelian triad and opens the system to its other. The effraction, a term I borrowed from Derrida, is a thing I posit as the “I” that breaks the matrix of GodChurch-World, and destroys that ring, consigning it to the flames, in what I call an arrival ending both the dialectical confiscation and the deconstructive impasse, also a theme of the later writings of Derrida after his real religious turn in 1989, the year I also converted. He both deferred arrival, famously, yet called on it to come, in a Messianic and increasingly Apocalyptic sense. His steady but as always oblique approach to a prophecy concerning a time that is now occurring has only through the writing of my work in the last two years come to be understood by me as a revelation concerning the Roman rule. The work I have written effracts systems on different levels, not only that of SA and the other totalities of closure that now are attempting the absolute anti-spirit, and of critical, philosophical and theological writing by the personal and poetic “I”, but in these pages you have finished reading by the synthesis of the literary with the critical due to the form and
pressure of the time. In economic terms, and differently from the deconstructionist tenet that it can only be done from within the thing to be deconstructed, I am performing a further break from a radical place in the exteriority where I found God in 1989. It may be that the young man studying at the seminary with me a few years ago in order to become a Roman priest was right, that “God’s hands are tied.” Often, in the almost eight years since, I have defended the thesis of idealism that God is the absolutely free, but at last wondered to myself a few days ago “what if?” What if the young man was right? What if somehow God is not free? What if Rome somehow has practiced the closure on God first of all, by placing certain words of Christ against others, and through the constant call for mercy, cry for mercy, invocation and preaching of mercy, and the doling out of it en masse in the confessional, has in effect made it impossible for God to come again in justice. If He does so He will deny Himself as the merciful, and no longer be God, who cannot deny Himself. It is in the Roman interest, of course, to see the second coming deferred, forever if possible. Perhaps as was thought after the resurrection, Christ was supposed to return at once, but something happened to prevent Him. This may be the meaning of the scenes in Acts where the people in awe of the apostles lay all their money before them, to get near the power of the Spirit of Pentecost, and then those who do not are incredibly struck dead at Peter’s feet for not giving every bit of money to him. Peter took the money, when he should have said “give it to the poor.” This is the true simony, not the Magus attempting to buy power, but Simon Peter selling it. The Church went wrong in the very beginning and has been wrong ever since. Power and money. Mammon. So they have tied God’s hands to keep on with their corruption extending now even to the ritual abuse of children on the one hand and of the mass on the other. If this is the case, I asked myself what is to be done? If the power of the keys given to Peter in Matthew to bind and loosen has bound God in Heaven, bound his justice on earth and in heaven, while loosing
only a seeming mercy, words of mercy, at least, it seemed to me there could be a way to overcome the power of the keys and, if it is thinkable, to untie God’s hands so that He could act. It is absurd, therefore, so think like Tertullian and believe. If the set of all of the Words of Christ are a closed set, a canon circumscribed, both without by decree, and within by the incessant gloss of fathers and theologians, so that everything is determined, it could be possible to make this closed set overall indeterminate, if a statement could be found that fulfilled the mathematician Gödel’s theorem that for such a set there will always be a proposition that is either both true and false or the validity of which cannot be determined from the other propositions in the set. There are things said by Christ that seem to be false, that some hearing Him would not die until they saw Him return in His kingdom, for instance, for the Church is obviously not the Kingdom Come. So, I searched for an inexplicable statement and found it in Mark, where Christ says “everyone” will be “salted with fire.” The fathers say this is both hell, on the one hand, and the Holy Spirit, on the other, which is a flat contradiction, and Gregory the Great says of the passage that no one should disturb the peace and unity of the Church, by which I think he sensed some trouble to come based on these words. In fact, the context of “salted with fire” indicates the fire of hell, but which I think cannot be, for it applies to “everyone.” One could say that the term “fire” is equivocal, some to hell and some to the Spirit. If this is the case, it may be the Lord said it in this manner, as he said other things hard to understand in the parables, not to be understood, but this in an absolute sense, in order that the phrase “salted with fire” is both/and, not either/or, and therefore, according to the logic of contradiction I laid out earlier in the work, the words are true in a sense which the logic of the Church based on Aristotle and Aquinas cannot accept. All of the truth is that truth is both true and false at once, this is the whole, which thus cannot be closed, so the words “salted with fire” fit the logic of set theory, in that they are both self-contradictory, thank God, and cannot be glossed from other propositions in the Words of Christ.
Therefore, all the set’s propositions are indeterminate, due to the rules of the closure of the ring set, which provide for the multiplication of the indeterminate term over all the others, making them all indeterminate, the very multiplication the Church has depended on for the internal closure of the set, all being absolutely true backward and forward. If all of the Words of Christ are indeterminate, then those authorizing the power of the keys are, too. They cannot be proved true or false, their truth or falsity is in principle absolutely unknowable, and the Pope cannot use the passage to enforce his power. Therefore, God is free. His hands are no longer tied. We are free to believe His Words or not, as faith permits, may God increase our faith, and He is no longer bound by the power of the keys once held in error by the Roman Pontiff, but now returned to their rightful owner. O, Christ, come quickly! Theology and the Church, though not Scripture in which all truth is hidden [that “dangerous” book as a one-time friend called it in most unfriendly terms as he stressed the necessity of “earthly existence”], are the “The God Enclosure” that men and women use, if possible, to trap God, because they fear God’s freedom [and their own], a God who made a world where lions rend the flesh of living antelopes, for instance, not to mention human society’s evils. It may be that God is completely incomprehensible, despite human reason, so He is not even “true.” God is not nice, but neither are we, really, though in hypocrisy we would pretend to be. Yet, although this is, willingness to love is the secret by which we live. The willingness to love by which we live implies a willingness to love not only each other but God, foremost, and to believe Him in His promises. The Jews in the wilderness did not believe that the Promised Land was ripe for the taking. They balked and refused. So many times have the people of God refused to enter in. It may be that here at the end of things God gives us once more and one last time the chance to do the right thing. Let us not be those children of the kingdom that the Lord says will not sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, instead cast out into the darkness wailing, while many from the
east and the west gather in with the patriarchs and the prophets. It may be that the Church need not be destroyed even if prophesied by as diverse sources as Malachy, who envisions only one Pope after Benedict XVI, and the Book of Revelation and Daniel, which I think I have shown, however briefly, must apply to the state of affairs in the Church today. It may be that those currently performing their roles in this passion of the Church do not understand what they are doing or why and do what they do in their own minds and those of others with the best motives. It may be that God, as shown in Numbers, and at other places in scripture, can change his mind. If the Church repents, it can still be saved. I will not lay out a program for how the Church may still save itself from a judgment that I fear it will incur if it holds to its present course. There are men in the Church who need to think on these things and at the time that is most acceptable, take action. That the fate of perhaps one billion souls rests in the hands of so few is cause not necessarily for terror but for hope. If good men be willing to stop evil, evil cannot win. There are better angels of our natures, and they appeal to us, even now. There is no such thing as fate. All are free, God, man, the Church and history. That Revelation promises the thousand year reign of Christ on earth is a prophecy we should look to. How many alive today in the Catholic Church will walk with the Lord in His Kingdom Come is not known. I believe the time is short until it commences. Let none of us, I pray, be the man to whom God says depart from me, I never knew you. To know the good, to see that it needs to be done, and not to do it, is a sin. To know the truth and not to acknowledge it is to be an accomplice to falsehood. To never walk in the splendid beauties of the New Jerusalem would be the worst tragedy any man could suffer, especially one who was responsible in a special way to be aware. We all work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and even the apostle Paul did not count himself as one who had attained.