The Common Place

I can’t extract myself from the current of story and sit outside it for long. This has been the year of a long awaited spring, and then the creek thawed, the snow melted, and green erupted in hazy greys and violent neon everywhere. It is like when jazz hit the world, you could see Dizzy Gillespie and Bill Evans. Everything is jazz and it is all glorious.

And that isn’t having small children discovering the world. And being in an entirely new one, by a creek and nestled below the woods. In one hour we slaughtered a chicken, discovered it had lice, nearly cut off all my son’s hair, discovered it was fine, and then found an old machete under the porch. It is that kind of world. I was making pancakes too, if memory serves, and drinking a fine blackberry sage cider.

There are too many stories. Every day is a new adventure. Right now my five year old (who navigated the high jungle on his way down the trail) is nearly knocking himself over to push the two year old on the swing she climbed up on by herself.

So here we are

On November 14, 2022, I lived in Moscow, Idaho across the block from an optometrist, a dentist, and an undertaker. We lived in an old parsonage reworked for a duplex. A quadruple murder in town had my mother and sister telling stories and sending news articles from California. But we were busy living. Downtown was quiet save for the odd leaves or downturned person skittering across the street.

My husband and I were excited. It was all tangled. The housing market is rough here - High prices, skyrocketing rates, and steep competition. But against all the odds we found a quiet spot in a neighboring community. It was a ramshackle place that needed plenty of work, but it had 5 apple trees, three stoves, and a lot of light. It was right for us. So we were going to sign papers and deliver a down payment while everyone else seemed to be in a fog of worry.

In those two months we dug into our lives here, so much so that even though we lived in that town, I know more about Dostoyevsky’s murders than my own Moscows.

In part that is because our internet is barebones, but also because life requires much of us these days. My husband came home with the news of an arrest and my mail lady told me a car exploded in the news. I live a very small life with only the duties in front of me, the daily bread, and the breath in my lungs as the poet said. It is very good.

I always thought I wanted to be an ascetic, but I don’t think anyone actually wants to be one. It is a lot of work. What a scholar really wants is a warm fire, a good book, and no one to bother you. This is not that, but there are many good books.

We moved the week before Thanksgiving. The first night on mattresses wedged together, I could feel the cold pressing in from the wall.

We lit a fire in one stove and found the other two unusable for random reasons like exposed gas lines over heat vents.

We moved in without a washer and dryer, but in God’s kindness there was one down the street. The previous dryer vented through a hole in the subfloor, building a mound of highly flammable dryer lint under the house. Eric bored a hole through the wall in between rounds of chopping wood.

We found a near cord of wood in December (a small miracle).

Then the gas began leaking through the house. It started with a slight smell in the laundry room and became so bad my eyes watered. I hauled all five children out of the house in thigh deep snow and drove around until Eric could go home and check it. There was nothing wrong to speak of. The next time it happened I shut off the gas, leaving us without hot water. I began thanking God for cold water.

Eric began working on the water heater in earnest. She was leaking and the boards were wet, so drying out the laundry room where she sat was a priority. No one wants a rotten subfloor. He started this just after moving in, so the tinkering just went up a bit. Our water heater needed a diaper. Once the water was dried up the pilot light stayed on.

This happened at the same time as a near historic freeze. The town marquee registered -18 and even with heat tape our pipes froze. Moving us from cold water to no water.

I boiled snow to keep the toilet moving and waited as the dishes piled up and the laundry mounted. Christmas was on Sunday.

So was Easter. There are million moments between them, and all were unfathomable.

But they are gone.

Here we are in the abounding present.

I'm going hunting for a blue lagoon.

Really

Further Up and Further In.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

The California observatory has a pendulum. I remember standing at the edge of a drop - like the girl in the first chapter and not understanding what I was looking at. I understand now. The truth of the pendulum is that we are fixed and unmoving while we are moved. The pendulum is not spectacular in itself, but it spills the secret.

George Grant once said this was well worth reading if you got through the first two hundred pages to the plot. I think he said more specifically it was a book that would test your mettle as a reader. Now that I’ve read it, I can’t find where he said this to find out why.

This is the book where I figured out I do not read for plot. In fact, most of the time if I have a gut feeling on something I would rather spoil the ending than trust the author. I read for the interesting eddies.

Foucoult’s Pendulum is 80% side notes. The plot does not start until three hundred pages in, and I was four chapters from the end wondering if he was going to land the ending.

But he lands it because he pivots in the last chapter and reframes everything.

Spoilers here:

It moves from a story of conspiracies and traps to the tale of a man who has to live a story when he can’t write one. Everything about the Templars, history, cosmology, and creating your own cancer is not the point. It never was. The men make up their own story about how all of the happenstances and codes could be true and then tell the wrong person. What happens after that is human - you have to live with it. Or die.

Errare humanum est.

This works because it is a tragedy. One dies of cancer he believes he caused by twisting the truth in a believable way. One dies facing the fact that the villains won’t believe the truth and they already killed his love after destroying her.

And one saves the girl and his child, but expects to die because he did not believe her and the truth has been so believably twisted that no one would believe him.

It is the knowledge of good and evil that kills them.

The fuzzy outer edges

Understanding Eco is a problem because he believes authorial intent is bunk. To that I say bull, but I would love to ask him of he means the reader is god of the work or if that writing in harmony with nature and her God does not need explanation like a man walking down the street does not.  I kept reading it and trying to figure out what he was doing (online) with no success. In an Omnibus text book I had on hand, the essayist explained the concept of reader receptivity and had something to say about it under the Name of the Rose, but it is hard to find commentary either because he has fallen out of fashion or those engaging with him are not working in English.

I fully expect to reread this and receive more from it now that the shock value is gone.

He for sure references Walter Percy and angelism (or Gone With the Wind was a heavy influence for both) I don’t quite get that connection yet.

Positivism

The snake twining around reality in this is only explained in half a line at the beginning. Positivism is the idea that to have proved something means that you have encompassed the entire thought without any external truth being able to add or take away from it. So, if you can make a compelling argument that the moon is made of cheese or that the world is flat, it must be so. If they could weave history together and construct a logical, evidence oriented argument, that proves its own veracity.

This excludes the idea that there is something beyond what you understand or that anything can come in and break your matrix. It can be positivist to have a medieval idea of the cosmos or to insist on a Copernican idea of the Cosmos. It can be positivist to say magic explains everything or  to declare you understand everything about the world materially because all of those things exclude something beyond yourself. There  is also biblical positivism and my understanding at this point is that means that a current Western reading of scriptures gives you everything you need to know, not everything you need to know for the gospel truth but everything you need to know about God - historical/grammatical approach.  There is no middle ground to it. And of course, as there is ultimate truth, you can be a positivist and be right. But I’m fairly certain as a human we can’t be positivists alone, we need divine revelation at the least and humans beyond ourselves.

Which is something this book was short on to the point that the Cancer Patient admitted that he turned away from the Torah in twisting the truth believably.

All that to say - this book could be completely true and the Bible is still completely true, not because I believe the Holy Blood, Holy Grail stuff, but because that is not what this book is about. I need to be completely clear on this.

This book is not about the truth, but what happens when you twist it. The most they get to is an elaborate what if, a positivist Indiana Jones they sell to those who would carve themselves to pieces for it to be real power they can grab at. And when they do, human nature does its own due diligence.

This is way more well written than a Dan Brown novel and I’m reading it in translation. It gives you more facts to work with - around a hundred pages of working over history to sell a bill of goods. Eco hitting the church in the twenty aughts would have been more catastrophic than the DaVinci Code because he weaves a better story.

The gift is the sexuality of the thing. There is a barrier to the knowledge of the serpent, a willingness to twist truth a different way sexually resulting in social sodomy. You either pursue the sodomy and get the demon, pursue the power at any cost, or pursue the demonic spirituality and enslave yourself to all and sundry. It is a trap and it was never about the knowledge of good and evil, but the Satanic getting his way.

You can’t accept all points of the twisting of history by the same crew committing the twisting of bodies. And Eco mocks that, but it took time for me to understand he was mocking it because I found the references so revolting.

Dante and Eco

He really has it out for Dante in this to the point of damning his highest monk in Paradiso for the most heinous deeds. And he may be right about the guy. I am not as educated as either. I would love to be a fly on the wall at their meeting (which I’m hopeful for).

But I think he is less anteDante and more shaping characters in a modern world - those who want a material explanation for everything. They have seen the clearly demonic and still balk at it. They want it to just be man.

Conspiracy is the modern response to the spiritual.

Naomi Wolf recently admitted in her Substack that 2020 was too well planned and executed for man - the Old gods, the demons must be back. It does explain the rampant murder and perversion.

In Eco’s case history is woven in a storied and sensical way. Someone has to be blamed for this. There is probably sex involved.  Quick blame the Templars.

Wolf’s understanding could be true - Ishtar and Molech could be skulking about. But it could also be encompassed by the Dantean Primum Mobile, bringing a snake or two to the surface to crush under the cross of Christ.

I tend to think we have the system of secondary causes, the angels, as the manifestation of God’s Providence (a la Sayers/Reynolds - Paradiso) and the demons both have fallen and are still bound to their job. They just use nasty tricks like Mothman and aliens to manipulate and terrorize - instead of a weird stoplight or the niggling thoughts at the back of your head. Christ did conquer them and his work is not done yet, so it is a wee bit complicated.

Modern Tech and the A.I Seeing Eye

This came out in the 80’s closely followed by Snow Crash and the idea of Babel is in both.

We want to build a tower to heaven. Our shaky towers of human knowledge are encased in rituals meant to entrap and enslave in Foucault’s Pendulum. AI is just the latest stair stepped compilation attempting to achieve the throne of God. For the first time we are able to look at time on many directions at once and we misunderstand information about a time as being in that time and knowing what it was for.

The more we can connect and pin like a beetle on a board, the more we believe we own and control. It isn’t living time in our fingers, just a reflection of ourselves or a demonic rationality using it. We are too big for our britches.

The Crux of the Matter

We have history and adventure coming together around a man who was courageous once in his life and could never live up to himself at twelve. He stood there and faced down the grabbers of knowledge and power, the devourers and the demented, and died without giving them what they wanted, but instead became “the fixed point, the Place from which the vault of the world is hung…”

And later it says, “So Belbo - God knows for how long - had been thinking about the Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary…”

—

If it was what it advertised itself as, it would be ridiculous. How to Catch a Cosmic Cowlick.

But it is not that. It is sad. Sad and good.

Sabbath Supper

Bread and wine in wild communion

are tethered to the table Sabbath day

unleashed in the children’s sober reunion

and there it will not, will not, stay.

This bread touches doorknobs, hands and faces,

papers, phones, crumbles to the floor.

Children run with crumbly praises

spraying crumbs they ask for more.

In the laughter of God I cannot have it.

This shade stands back and waits for the day

when my Brother will fit my tent for it

till then I sit back and watch the bread play.

The wrecking bread and ruinous wine.

It will kill you if you spat at the table

It is more real , more good, more true.

It sits as solid as word and stable.

Your place is preserved with this in view

Welcome here at the Siege Perilous.

Sit. Your name is engraved in stone.

You do not threaten, steal, or devour

With bread so real, It can not be done.

Brothers sit down under Father’s eye

Serving a meal, passing the bread

Blood and body, bread and wine

And it will kill you, kill you dead.

As it gets everywhere, everywhere, everywhere

This grave has a back door swinging wide.

You can’t excuse yourself before He’s done

feeding you, readying you to work at his side.

It goes into you, and the race you must run.

Week in and week out, the meal is served

For first a thousand, then two thousand years,

All the world feasts on the bread undeserved,

From the grain crushed, beaten, and shirred.

Here at this table, you have heaven folded

In just a bite to three measures of life.

It works through your bones and your sinews remolded,

Carving you, carving you up with a knife.

As it gets everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.

Men with bad manners, smack their lips

and it echoes, sloshy and loud in our hall.

Children reach out, and take slurpy sips

Of the wine, poured for them, poured for us,

poured for all.

No condemnation here, none, leave it out.

Stop wiggling. Receive the gift handed to you.

Sit down. Chew the bread, crumbling about,

This is your dinner, no Accuser’s stew.

Supper is eaten in absolute silence,

That is the test of truly good food.

Starving, we share with our siblings around us

Filling our bodies, frail and rude.

And so he keeps feeding us, feeding us, feeding us.

The adamant bread. The sea deep wine.