The Shakespearean Cat

Thinking again about my earlier post on atoms vs cat, I found this passage in E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed:

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. The truth is that the peculiar combination of letters is nothing but a property of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The French or German versions of the play "own" different combinations of letters.

This analogy captures perfectly the approach I suggested in my earlier post.

[E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper, 1977), 19.]

Moose or Monk?

My daughter reads the New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism for school. It's a great book, with clear, crisp statements of dogma offering rich fodder for thought for years to come. Most of the time. But recently, my daughter came to the lesson on states of life, and to these three dyptichs, with left side labeled "THIS IS GOOD" and the right side "THIS IS BETTER":

First, a graphic explanation of the vow of obedience. On the left we have the lay vocation: as the family sits around the breakfast table, someone remarks, "I want to spend the day the way I think best." On the right we have the religious vocation, with a monkish looking fellow who says, "I want to spend the day the way God prefers." This ridiculous panel has become an inside joke in my family: every time I have to stop cooking to change a poopy diaper while talking with my boss on the telephone about the job that just can't wait, I comment to my wife, "I want to spend the day the way I think best!" And every time she scrubs vomit off the floor while keeping a toddler at bay with one foot before heading upstairs to wash dishes yet again, she says to me in her best infomercial voice, "I want to spend the day the way I think best!"

So here's the skinny: yes, the lay life brings more day-to-day responsibility for how you spend your day. No, a lay person is not free to spend the day in whatever selfish way he wants. Yes, a lay person can spend the day the way God would prefer him to spend it--in fact, a lay person may think that the best way to spend his day!

Next we have a graphic illustration of the vow of chastity. On the left we see a bride and a groom in church, and one of them says, "I want to marry the person of my choice." On the right we see a nun in the chapel, and she says, "I choose Christ as my spouse." Here's the problem: both the lay woman and the nun married the person of their choice! The right hand picture does show what is better, but freedom to choose whom you will marry is not the difference!

Finally, my favorite: a graphic explanation of the vow of poverty. On the left, under the heading "THIS IS GOOD", a little boy points to a sporting goods store and says, "I want an air rifle. I want a car. I want jewels. I want pretty clothes." On the right, under the heading, "THIS IS BETTER", St. Francis of Assissi says, "You can have all that. I want Christ."

Reality check, folks: this left-hand scene is NOT good. It is self-centered materialism, and it does NOT represent the ideal of the lay Christian life. If that little boy were mine, I would dock his allowance!

In all three dyptichs, the religious life is depicted fairly well, but each time the difference between the lay and the religious life is made out to be the difference between self-centeredness and Christian maturity: I want to spend my day doing what I want! I want to marry the one I want! I want to have all the stuff I want! I want what I want! Me, me, ME-E-E!" So the Baltimore Catechism elevates the religious life by denigrating the lay state.

The problem with this approach is that it implies that lay people can be selfish and that's OK. Christian maturity is for other people. Take that route, and not only will you have a lackadaisical laity, but few Catholic children will really understand the nature and attraction of the religious life. Why be good, when being bad is one of my legitimate options? But if sanctity is the goal for everyone, then the religious life will take on its real and almost irresistable attraction.

Gaaaah!

I'm finally recovering from the trip last weekend. While at the conference, I and a reader of this blog saw a man struggling to address the audience without a microphone; when a working microphone was thrust in front of his face and his voice suddenly filled the room, we both burst out laughing--as quietly as we could manage, of course. "Did you see him grow bigger?", I asked. "Yes", my friend replied. "Did you see how he suddenly felt bigger to himself?"

Just today, a lector at Mass struggled for a couple of minutes to get the microphone turned on, but could not. Finally he resigned himself to projecting his voice, but almost as soon as he raised his voice the microphone clicked on. Gaaah! MegaLector takes the podium! Remarkable.

Talking about this with my friend in Florida, I remembered a time years ago when I went to Easter vigil with my wife and then three-year-old daughter. Standing amidst all the adults, she could not see what was happening, but she heard the booming voice that floated down from the rafters. She gazed up in awe, her perceptions untroubled by any sight of the podium. "Papa", she asked, "...is that God?"

Technoplace

Lurking in the background of my last post is the issue of technology. While we live in the heavens by looking at the sky, we can extend our range even further with the telescope; while we create space by speaking, we can create an enormous space (of a qualitatively different sort) with a microphone and loudspeaker. All the powers by which we engage the world have a tool that can channel and magnify them.

As I come up on a business trip, my mind is especially on the cell phone. That little instrument makes me present both by hearing and by voice far, far away around the world. It’s a tenuous presence, admittedly, but at the touch of a few buttons—hey presto!—my wife is conjured up, is present to me; we speak and we hear. One of the oddest sensations is to talk on a cell phone in the middle of a group of people: one conversation continues around me, but at the same time I am far away, not only present in another place but vaguely imagining that place and myself speaking into it.

“Bilocation” might imply that I am equally present in both places, but it’s a weird sensation.

Even weirder is listening to the radio in my car. Here I am on the city street, now, in this familiar place, but suddenly as I hear the live voices over the waves I imagine myself transported far, far away. Strangely, I never hear the radio as voices speaking in my place but as voices speaking in their place, into which they draw me. Stranger still, I usually have no idea where the voices really are. While my speech into a cell phone puts me mentally into another place, into which I imagine myself speaking and from which my wife speaks to me, the radio whirls me out into an entirely indeterminate place. It is like reading a fairy tale in which the time and place are not specified: one thinks not of this place and this time, but of indeterminate time and indeterminate place. So the radio always makes me feel like I have personally been made present to indeterminate place—I am in the fairy tale.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t listen to the radio much anymore.

The microphone is much worse than the radio. Right away, by the fact that it magnifies the voice so, it makes the speaker seem huge. I remember being at a Mass when the microphone was off through the first reading and half of the gospel; when it suddenly came on during the gospel, the priest seemed to grow before my eyes! In a Q&A situation, the speaker enjoys an immediate rhetorical advantage because he seems huge in comparison to his tenuous inquisitors—not to mention the fact that he can drown out their voices. At the same time, and for the same reason, the microphone does not create a communal place for many persons: it creates a monarchical place of one person with many subjects. This is one reason I don’t like it at Mass: even though I don’t usually want anyone speaking but the priest, at the same time I want the place of the Mass to be the place of the people praying, not the place of the SuperPriest and his auditors. The quality of the air is wrong. (As a side note, the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite was impossible before the invention of the microphone. That little detail gets left out of a lot of the hot air exchanges on liturgical subjects.)

But another factor comes in with the microphone. I have spoken of our senses of hearing and sight, but there also another sense, the “common” sense, which integrates all of our senses into one experience. The sugar cube is not a sweet thing over here and a white thing over there, but a single sweet and white thing; sight and taste are integrated into once perception of the sugar cube. Similarly, when I see and hear a speaker, both senses come together into a single perception of him or her. But the microphone disrupts that by making the audible speaker many times bigger than the visible speaker and in a different place. When the microphone kicked in at Mass that one time, the priest’s megavoice floated down from the ceiling. If I closed my eyes, he seemed to be an enormous person floating somewhere above my head; if I opened my eyes, he shrunk somewhat and remained located at the podium, but I could feel the stress of a non-integrated sensory experience. My common sense was reeling.

All these technologies are important and useful. I’m not so much of a curmudgeon as to deny it. But it is also important to notice their effects and use them appropriately. They greatly magnify the scope and power of our presence; they also spread us out and change the quality of our places.

Hearing and the sense of place

I want to pick up an idea from my earlier post, Living In Our Houses, and tug at it. In that post, I described how we live not just within the confines of our bodies but in the space around us. Although my argument had to do with the senses as such, my examples were taken from the sense of sight: when I look up in the heavens, I am—as Augustine would put it—living in the heavens.

But something similar is true of the sense of hearing. Even though my ability to locate an object by sound alone is notoriously inferior to a bat’s, nonetheless the area within which I hear creates a kind of space around me in which I live. You have probably had the same experience I have. I remember being engrossed in a conversation with a small group of people, and when the conversation died and silence fell then suddenly I was aware of the vast sky opening above me and of the great reaches of space on either side of me. It was as though I had been in a bubble, a tiny enclosure, while the conversation lasted. My sense of hearing was pulled in, focused in one place.

Now for clarity’s sake, I should say again that my sense of hearing does not change the air; there is nothing in the air by which it has a real relation to me, but there is something in me by which I have a real relation to the audible area around me. While it is truer to say that we live in the air around us, because this is true we can also make the air the grammatical subject of the sentence: the air in this place is full of people.

Now let me turn it around: sometimes I not only listen, but speak.

Up to this point I have spoken of the way in which the knower is present to the thing known, but, following the same article from Aquinas cited previously, we can also speak of a cause being present by its effect. Aquinas gives the example of a king who is said to be present everywhere in the kingdom because of his power to act everywhere in the kingdom. This is obviously a weaker sense of “presence” than the presence of God Aquinas means to explain, because God acts everywhere immediately while the king acts only through many intermediaries, but the act of speaking seems to fall between the two. To speak into a place is more direct than the king’s action through ministers but still involves the medium of the air. I am present in the area where I speak.

One sometimes sees an instinctive recognition of this idea in city traffic. Amidst the hubbub, where one can usually only hear a few feet away, suddenly a selfish punk cruises by in his pick-up or sports car blaring music over his speaker system as loudly as he can. He is using the speakers as an extension of himself to shout, so to speak, over all the noises around him; it makes him feel big; as a cause, he spreads his presence over a large area, coercing his fellow motorists into hearing him, being with him, and in a way being under him. He takes what should be a commons, the place around us, and turns it into his private yard. It is the audible version of puffing the chest.

But a beautiful version of the same truth comes out when a speaker addresses a small group without a microphone. The human voice “creates a place”, to borrow Ivan Illich’s phrase; the speaker is present in the place of his voice, and his willing auditors focus in on him, thus living in the same place, and speaker and audience blend their presences in one part of this world of ours.

Perhaps a more striking version comes out in the medieval custom of ringing church bells during a storm. True, the bell was a sacramental and was believed to have some virtue of dispersing a storm by the prayer of its sound, but at the same time the vast reach of the bell’s tone created a place around the entire town. Because it was the church bell, the entire town was brought with the ambit of the church; while all the people and houses could not fit in the church building at once, the church itself could be extended, audibly, over all the people and houses. Where else would you want to be during a storm but praying in the house of God? Conversely, in one dramatic ceremony dating from sometime after the eleventh century, a person who had been excommunicated was condemned to live beyond hearing of the church bells.

Restored Beauties of the English Language

In view of the appalling number of words dropping from the English language every year, the Duck has urged that we all adopt a word. Besides the sheer number of words lost, which the adopt-a-word activists rightfully stress, one can also notice the kind of words lost: the latest Oxford Junior Dictionary, for example, has dropped all manner of religious words like "nun" and "priest" on the argument that kids today don't need to know those kinds of words. The same tome has dropped hundreds of nature related words; it has an entry for "Blackberry", the electronic communications device, but has no entry for "blackberry", the delectable edible of the fields of my youth.

The crisis reminds me of a pastime I used to enjoy, namely refurbishing words. Long ago, words such as "wonderful" and "terrible" lost their power through overuse, so in my writing I would try to recover the original beauty of the word by a simple rearrangement: the mountains were full of wonder, and the dark storm a thing of terror.

Along a similar vein, I enjoyed finding English words that had actually fallen from use and using them again, confident that the reader would know from context and from the feel of the word itself the meaning of the unfamiliar--but somehow strangely familiar--word. In honor of the Duck's call to action, therefore, I would like to resurrect on this blog a custom that fell away, namely the daily Lost Beauty. It won't really be daily, of course, but as often as I can get to it.

Today's lost beauty:

Toitish: "Ill-tempered, snappy." The old exclamation hoity-toity! expressed surprised at seeing someone in such a fit of temper.