Over the Atlantic 10.1.94: And All Our Yesterdays Have Lighted

On the plane now. I hesitate to write anything. Just no get up and go.

It’s partly utter fatigue. But it’s more than fatigue, the bronchial and sinus infection I seem to have picked up from that horrible night in the Besigheim hotel. It’s the sad, inconsolable weight of things, in which tears are always to be found: Sunt lacrimae rerum.

As Proust knew (Partir, c’est mourir un peu), every ending partakes of death. And death is also judgment. No—hell—I can’t get my mind working these day. I know all I’ve written in the past few days is nonsensical, pretentious but incoherent, crap. What the hell is wrong with me?

There’s always that voice crying inside us, piteously: I want, I want, I want. Karl Rahner might call it the lure of the horizon, or Aquinas the voice of God within our nature reaching to completeness. Someone like Heidegger (or perhaps Sartre) might speak of the irresistible impulse of our need to find meaning in face of death, of the dissolution of our fated existences.

At one level, what I want is so clear, so material, even. These last few days, especially the two in Trier (and at M. and W.’s before that), I’ve realized how wonderful it would be to know a number of languages better than I do, as well as “average” Europeans know them. I had four years of Latin in high school and two in college, three years of Greek in college, three of French. I had to learn German to read in graduate school.

And yet I feel utterly tongue-tied when confronted with the necessity to use the languages I do know—to read Latin or Greek again, to speak French or German in more than rudimentary ways. I’d love to be more than rudimentarily informed about other cultures, art, music, books, history.

This crying out inside—I want, I want—makes me think of going back and studying languages on a regular basis, reading books in French and German, even polishing my Latin and Greek again.

But the voice within the voice, the want I can’t identify—such confusion, pain. Not turbulence, oddly enough, but a fatigue that so captivates my limbs, my will, that I live facing the snake charmer, and no other way. Holy damn—I cannot think or write! Not without resorting to those glib metaphors that mask as much as they disclose.

The ultimate wants—God? Love? Fulfillment? Self-acceptance? Peace with family? Clarity re: my vocation, the meaning of my life? I don’t know, don’t know how to name it, how even to begin to aim. I’m paralyzed.

An unshapen thought that haunted me in Trier, and yesterday as we revisited the little churches in Dockweiler and Dreis and saw the Maria Laach abbey church, is how so many generations of people who had to be diverse (and perhaps as mixed-up as I am) lived within the parameters of Catholic culture.

This is all so unclear: I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wonder how to make my peace with the church, to live in it in such a way that I draw strength and life from it without letting it destroy me. That, or how to leave, nake a clean break, move on to a new life.

Why even try? In part, because—the same tired old answer à la Chesterton, Belloc, etc.—Catholicism is an amazingly attractive religion. If . . . .

The tender sensuality of the mother of Jesus holding her dead son in the Maria Laach pieta; the heart-rending exposure of God’s pain in the statue of the father holding his crucified son in the Dockweiler church: no Christian tradition that truncates itself from the iconographic and liturgical traditions of early Christianity has the power to touch these depths. Not artistically, at least. Not liturgically. Such sensual (and simultaneously spiritual) depths.

The artistic heritage of the communions that have retained living connection to the earliest periods of Christianity—and even the doctrinal heritage, with all its contradictions and complexities—put one in touch with such symbolic transformative power, and one simply does not find power of that sort in some of the more recent Christian traditions.

In a city like Trier, one can’t help but be ineluctably aware of the continuity between European Catholic culture and the Graeco-Roman heritage. It’s everywhere, and perhaps not least in the way people stroll, stare, flirt, celebrate life. And that heritage contains strong gay currents. What else to make of the baths at Trier, the unabashed erections of satyrs in the stone carvings of the Rheinisches Museum?

But if . . . . If that heritage within Catholicism can be protected from the ravages of Enlightenment culture, particularly in the grotesque and bastardized way that culture impacts everyone today—via the American advertising industry with its attendant religious form, televangelism . . . .

And if that heritage can be rescued from the dreadfully—the astonishingly—short-sighted attempts of John Paul II and Ratzinger to freeze it, to puritanize it, to make it the willing servant of Enlightenment even as it believes itself to be critiquing Enlightenment!

All so intellectual. Back to the heart, to my heart. As I make such a move in my head, two things flash before me. One—for reasons I can’t explain—is an Epiphany procession I saw yesterday as we drove through a little Eifel village. Proud, happy children in white robes, gold crowns, black face.

Perhaps the attraction of that Augenblick is that I see in it how the heritage goes on. It’s lived, even if it may not be lived with all the self-conscious, ironic, defiant playfulness I would like it to muster. And where life is, there’s always the possibility of resistance and novel, unexpected adaptation.

The other flash is almost precisely an opposite one. It’s a feeling I have, one that has grown in me on this trip, of the rather sad sameness of human existence everywhere. The hideously ugly furnishings of Steve’s cousin’s house, his boorishness and grasping nature: these can apparently be found anywhere, in any suburb or village. There is no utopia, no pristine peasant/bohemian/intellectual utopia to which I can retire, or which can console me as I think of its existence, while I live in my own nightmare place.

What to do with these contradictory impulses? On the one hand, intellectual curiosity, desire to understand and experience, pushes and pushes me. On the other hand, I have such certainty that all my attempts to find the new will go the way of dusty death.

Is it possible to welcome the new, wherever it meets me, while living in the face of death? I don’t see any other option, if I’m not simply to give up, roll over, and die.

Steve says not to wait for some sign to come, for some miraculous savior, for some door to open. Wise words. But frankly, I often don’t know what else to do.

Trier 8.1.94: Sugary Baroque Ceilings and Sun-Bathed Roman Gate

Night in Trier. The city is beautiful—more so, I think, because today we had the first dry day of our entire trip. It was cloudy, but at sunset the sun came beneath the clouds, and we saw the top of the Porta Nigra and the other landmarks—St. Peter’s fountain, the Three Kings’ House—bathed in gold light.

Afterwards, as night began to fall, we drove across the Römerbrücke to the Mariasäule overlooking the city, and walked up to the statue to look down. A beautiful vista, with two crows calling to one another, one perched on the stars over Mary’s head, the other flying overhead and into the sunset, where a spire east of the city caught fire from the setting sun.

A cliché to say so, but one feels the density of history in a place like Trier. Roman ruins, the Roman artifacts in the Rheinisches Museum, the churches with their mishmash of Romanesque and Gothic and Baroque styles, the buildings from the 18th century to the present: all this in a living, vital city makes one aware of a continuity that Europeans must often take for granted, but that absolutely bamfoozles Americans.

What’s much in my thoughts is the question that always runs in my head, the question of what can be picked up from history. That Trier is a Catholic city, a Catholic culture, makes this all the more piquant, because that’s the context in which I’ve so often framed the question for myself.

One the one hand, there’s something undeniably appealing about the Gemütlichkeit of this Catholic city, especially after the weeks we’ve spent in earnest, gray, cold and wet Lutheran Germany. To see the people (who often look at least half French) strolling aimlessly in the market streets of the city is very appealing. North Germans seem to have more purpose about their movements, but the very purpose they convey restricts and narrows their culture.

And the attractive side of the city seems to have much to do with the Catholic past. If nothing else, one who grows up in a city with such pretty buildings—and the prettiness has a lot to do with Catholic piety, since statues and sculptures are everywhere—is assured of having an eye for beauty. It would be hard to build something monstrously ugly in a city in which the eye is trained (if only unconsciously) from youth on.

On the other hand, the ecclesial art and architecture themselves show the other side of the story. So much that was once living piety now shows itself to be merely ornamental, often grotesquely so—as, e.g., the statue of Mary on the side of the store that sells women’s furs.

And in any church one is immediately confronted with what can only be called the superfluity of much of the Catholic heritage—the sugar-coated Baroque ceilings, the pretentious tombs with their overdone inscriptions glorifying mighty and rich citizens, the plaque honoring a witch hunter affixed to the seminary wall. What have these to do with Catholic piety today? It’s no accident that many of the books we saw in the theology section of a bookstore in Trier today had to do with questions re: the future of the church, in light of its historical heritage.

I feel (even more than in other places we’ve visited) that I’m only skimming the surface as I say all this. At one moment today, as we stood outside the bookstore, I suddenly realized I would very much like to come back and live here awhile—to learn fluent German and polish my French, to travel, to write and produce art, to study a region like the Eifel intensively. Steve and I vowed we would do this, as we left the bookstore.