Coffee slowly boiling on the stove gives a comforting noise, its smell rising promises the delight to come: a warm strong taste in your mouth. This is how you start your day. But how do you start writing on this blog in 2020?
Whatever topic I might choose to write about, because of some intentional preoccupation with it, or an inspiration that presented itself, or an idea I was exposed to, or some accidental discovery I made along the way, the trouble is always, that my words could be either too subjective (that is: too personal, too idiosyncratic or too arbitrary) or too objective (that is: too impersonal and pseudo-authoritative). They could be either too poetic or too prosaic, too warm or too cold, too emotional or too rational. It is an old struggle I am very familiar with, and surely everyone who has ever set out writing anything has encountered as well.
By now, you may think: well, you are concerned about the right style here, about how you say whatever you want to say – I am simply concerned whether you have anything to say at all that is worth wasting my time as I read it. Fair enough. But the thing with literature, be it even of the most prosaic type – an instruction manual, let‘s say, or a court report, or a random blog post – , the thing with literature – and actually the thing with everything in our lives, thanks to us being not mere spirits, as the angels are, but being both body and soul, both spirit and matter, being it always at once – is this: the form is part of the content, and therefore the form does matter. Both truth and lies, for that reason, are not only messages, but messages from messengers, with the messenger being an essential part of the message, with personhood and authorship inscribed into all that is – they are not only ideas spoken, but ideas spoken by someone, spoken by an angel of light or by an angel masquerading as light, spoken by someone somewhat wise who was taught well or someone somewhat foolish who is teaching others badly – this is how everything is set up, because we live in a created world, hidden deep inside a Creator‘s poem. A world created by His Word – and in it and unto its image.
So yes, I am indeed always concerned about the tone of everything I write – about the colouring of my verbal portrays. If it is too subjective, it might entertain the reader, but it could be nothing more than superfluous self-expression. If it is too objective, it might educate the reader, but it could be a whole octave above my actual authority: who am I to be anyone’s teacher ever, being forever a student? But luckily I suddenly remember: I have always loved how the Romantic Movement viewed the art of all they ever set out to put into words: Friedrich Schlegel, in his Athenaeumsfragment no. 116, defines “the only kind of poetry that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself“ – the “romantic“ poetry, as he terms it – as a “progressive, universal poetry“. And what does he mean by that? A poetry that will:
“fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor.“
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeumsfragment no. 116
The Romanticists understood my problem… the problem of every human being: caught between dust and heaven, between finity and infinity, between limited creativity and unlimited incapacity. They understood that our lives are fragmentary – that they are unfinished symphonies. And therefore our words are, too, be there even no end of them. We cannot do it all, and we cannot say it all. They knew that our lives are more like novels consisting of a thousand capricious and interwoven episodes, are of an chaotic, erratic, surprising order, than they are linear and closed drama plots in strict causality. The only possible poetic form is the fragment – able to capture a tiny section of the universe in the expression of a moment, and able to absorb all the rest of it in silence.
There is a reason – well, many actually, but let us not, although already digressing, entirely lose focus here… – why all of the best Romantic poets of the late 18th and early 19th century were either Catholic or converted to Catholicism in the course of their lives. There is a certain affinity between Romanticism and the Catholic religion: By “universal poetry“ the Romanticists meant a poetry vigorous enough to permeate all things and receptive enough to be itself permeated by all things – just like the universal Church, the one Catholic Church spread out over all the world, is meant to be the salt, or the yeast, entering into each and every nation, society, and individual life, to give all things on earth, even the most mundane, a thoroughly good taste, and at the same time is meant to be like a tree, or a body, absorbing all good breath and nutrition from its surroundings, taking it up into itself, for its own perpetual growth – reaching from the earth upward to heaven, and standing out from amongst the world like a towering light, like a magnificent Queen, far risen above everything mundane. Because the Church is by God’s grace, masterfully crafted from Christ’s opened ribs and wonderfully clothed and adorned from above, endowed with all truth, all goodness, and all beauty, she is the mediator and messenger of all truth, all goodness, and all beauty, offering costly pearls to each and every time and age, and to each and every human society, and to each and every single one of us, and because she is who she is, she is the rightful owner and home of everything that is true, and good, and beautiful – every costly pearl, that can ever be found anywhere in the world, is hers to absorb, is made for her to gather up into her treasury.
At some point during my most recent attempts to take up writing again – weaving out all sorts of fragments that might or might not be worth sharing on this blog – I hit a wall, not exactly knowing into which directions I am supposed to take this. So far, this blog was a casual experiment of a couple of poems shared with one very faithful reader. It still is and will always be nothing else but an experimental sideline, be there even two or three very faithful readers. But if I should in fact try to do, what I have taken up to do, than this is the beginning of extending my output on this blog – beyond just a couple of accidental poems into the realms of deliberate little essays on various topics. And there you face it, but you always do: all those questions of content and of form, of matter and of style. I started worrying. How does one ever hit the golden mean between subjectivity and objectivity, which is essentially what the writing format of a blog requires of you? Because in all those fragmentary pieces published on a blog, something objective must be present, that might be of interest for someone else, even if there should be only one faithful reader – at least this one reader needs something real to take away from here, unless this one were satisfied with mere voyeurism, but how could I ever think of someone who really does not seek anything more than just catering to their own curiosity? That would be like someone who only eats out of lust, seeking only the pleasure of food, not its nutrition. But at the same time it is impossible to not disclose oneself personally to some degree in those shared pieces. If I should be too careful here, too careful to hide who I am, who I was made to be, all subjective voice and tone would be excluded and one would indeed sound like a highly ambitious laywer writing exact reports that contain a high degree of accurate information, but leave everyone reading them indifferent, or worse: put off by it. Bread tastes best in our mouths when it is neither too hard nor too soft, right?
As I am currently reading the book Philothea, or An Introduction to the Devout Life by Saint Francis Sales, because just recently, at the end of January, his feast day was celebrated, I turn to him, who is the patron saint of Catholic writers, and ask him to take all of this under his protection. There is no other way to do this.
A quote from Sacred Scripture comes to my mind, that leads me out of my worries. It is found in Saint Paul‘s letter to the Church at Philippi.
“(…) whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise of discipline, think on these things.“
Philippians 4: 8
If we meditate on things as these – the true, and the good, and the beautiful -, then surely there is a chance that our words might become little frail reflections, in both content and form, of the very things we meditate upon without much effort on our part to strike the golden mean. Then it could happen that thanks to what is shining brightly above which we, muddling through our daily dust and raising and dispersing more of it than is necessary, can behold from here below, if we only look up every once in a while in silence before expressing ourselves in words and deeds again – then it could happen that something true, that is: something corresponding to reality, is contained in our words, and that something good, that is in the case of written words: something inspiring and encouraging us toward what is good, is found in them, and that something beautiful, some sort of tasteful covering, is coming along with it – or sometimes even ahead of it, just like the fragrance of a flower reaches our nose before we even see its blossom and its fruit. And whatever is not true, and is not good, and is not beautiful, we shall forget and shall not keep in mind – every fake gemstone we shall not take home into our hearts. And if all of that sounds pretty antiquated, presupposing and praising things our day and age has abandoned and holds in contempt – well, it is. This blog shall never exist for its own sake. In all situations and forms of communication, the following is a good rule for all of us to put into practice: Whenever we have nothing valuable to say, we shall remain silent. Otherwise we would be talking simply for the pleasure of it. But in all things, we need to practice the virtue of temperance.
And in all things, whether we are writing or reading, we need to remember to give thinks to the Giver of all gifts, the Author of all authors, and Lover of all lovers, ultimate source of all poetry and all prose, who refines coal to diamonds and transforms caterpillars into butterflies.
Thus, Saint Francis de Sales reminds us in the counsels of his book, which I keep reading along the way:
„(…) a lively consciousness of mercies received makes us humble, for such knowledge gives birth to gratitude. But if in the consideration of God‘s grace any vanity were to slip in, we should find an infallible remedy in the remembrance of our ingratitude, our imperfections, our weakness; and if we reflect on what we have done without God, we shall require no further proof that what we do when He is with us is not of ourselves or of our own strength; we shall rejoice in it certainly, and rejoice because we have done it, but we shall give all the glory of it to God, who is its author.“
Saint Francis de Sales, Philothea or An Introduction to the Devout Life, TAN Classics, p. 132
Saint Francis de Sales, pray for us!