The Public Life

In the quote below, Dr. Louise proclaims an aspect of the dedicated life which our modern sensibility often induces us to misunderstand or suspect in others, or to forget and recoil from ourselves: publicity.

The modern order has been critiqued as an attack on marriage and the family, invading the domestic sphere, the table and the bedroom, the home. It has obliterated–still somewhere in the common memory–the great lordly house that promised a reconciliation of private and public goods, of generosity and inwardness, sharing the joys of its hidden life with neighbors and dependents, and lifting them above themselves. A promise perhaps ultimately symbolic rather than literal, but nevertheless it was without a doubt literally real.

But I’m already ahead of myself, because I was going to say that the modern order is equally an attack on the inner life of those collective symbols and institutions which form the sphere of public life: the polity, the school, the university, the church, (should I add, the battlefield?).

Little enclaves of culture and devotion cannot survive, let alone flower, without clergy, teachers, administrators, and statesmen who dedicate themselves to a truly public ministry and, in doing so, create and cultivate a sphere for common works and projects, for noble alliances and friendships, for shared understanding, feeling, and devotion.

“The unmistakable sign of greatness in a city is the presence in it of people who are courageous and hardy enough to play public roles, to be public figures.

For when one is a public person, one sacrifices time and leisure, comfort and pleasure, but, even more, one relinquishes that secret dream in which we all share, the dream of being irreproachable and flawless, superior without being tested. The public person is visible. He stands in the light; and, more, he stands for something. He receives blame and ridicule; and whatever praise and admiration come his way are given long after such tributes have ceased to matter.

The public man is a leader and a worker. He does not work merely to keep busy, but to accomplish. True work transforms a portion of the world: it is not mere routine or mechanical drudgery. Work is the encounter between the human and the nonhuman; between man and things. Work is man’s great joy. The public man knows this secret; he works on projects, with others; he is a team worker. His entire life is given over to his work: if he entertains, it is to foster the spirit of community and perhaps induce others to work for the general welfare; if he retreats to his vacation home, it is to store up energy for another task.”

Imagining Dallas, Louise Cowan

Virtutis Genius

The second issue of “Ramify” (the Jouranl of UD’s Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts) includes three poems by Jacob Balde, with English translations by Dr. Karl Maurer. I post the most stupefyingly beautiful of these.

Ad Jo Albulam. Virtutis Genius.                        To Johannes Albula. The Genius of Virtue.

Virtus aetheri conscia sanguinis,                       Virtue aware of her celestial blood

Astrorumque soror non amat, Albula,               and sister of the stars does not love, Johann

Inter serpere fungos                                                           to creep between the mushrooms

Et declivia vallium.                                                            and declivities of valleys;

Semper summa petit; quo neque nubium        But flies forever to where not even feathers

Nautum Romulei flammigerum Iovis               excited by deep wind bear the flame-bearing

Pleno concita vento                                                              proud sailor of the clouds,

Transfert penna satellitem.                                             the Eagle of Jupiter.

Illius labor est nobile pabulum,                          Her noble food is labor, and her rest

Acclinis clipeo porrigitur quies                         To stretch out, head propped against a shield,

Accenditque soporem                                                           until sweet danger of war

Belli dulce periculum.                                                        enkindles sleep in her.

Iam cum sidereis otia fratribus,                         There she shares Leisure with her starry Brothers,

Iam cum fulminibus proelia dividit                then battles, with her brother Lightning flashes,

Lustralique tonantis                                                              and loves being sprinkled well

Gestit sulphure spargier.                                                   with the thunderer’s lustral sulphur.

Supra Fata rapax tollere se domat                    Hungry to rise above the Fates, she tames

Formosis humilem sub pedibus Metum.        ignoble fear beneath her shapely feet,

Si Fortuna lacessit                                                                   and if Fortuna mocks her

Constans adicitur sibi.                                                          she steadfastly gathers strength.

At cum pulvereo fumat ab aequore,                But when smoke rises from a dusty field

Corpus non gelida fluminis abluit,                 She does not wash with chilly river water

Sed sudore lavatur                                                                   But bathes in sweat, a Goddess

Neglectu Dea pulchrior.                                                     more beautiful for neglect.

Auri nulla fames, nulla sitis lucri;                   No hunger of gold she has, no thirst for profit;

Dedignatur humum figere spiculis:                 she scorns to fasten arrows to the earth.

Arcus tota cupido                                                                     The bow’s whole longing flies

Metam fertur in arduam.                                                     to a much steeper goal.

Promittente necem vulnere gloriae               As a wound promises death, a death in glory,

Migrat cum Domino fida comes suo                 the faithful comrade migrates with her Lord,

Heredique superbit                                                               proud to be left like plunder

Linqui, ceu spolium, pigro.                                                to her unwilling heir.

From Ramify’s ”Biography” of Balde:

Jacob Balde (1604-1688) was a German poet and Jesuit Priest  and perhaps the greatest of the Neo-Latin poets. … He taught Classics and Rhetoric in Munich and Innsbruck, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1633. Balde served as professor of eloquence at the University of Ingolstadt before being called to Munich to educate the sons of Duke Albert. He also served as court preacher to the elector Maximilian I. In 1654 he was sent to Neuberg, on the Danube, on account of his failing health, becoming an intimate friend and advisor to the Count Palatine Philiipp Wilhelm. Balde died 1668.

Balde was a prodigiously prolific, prodigiously various poet; his biographer Georg Westermayer calculated that he published over 80,000 verses; they include four book of “Lyrica” (i.e. lyric odes in classical meters), a book of “Epodes,” nine books of Statian “Silvae,” many books of Elegy, Satire, Pastoral, and Epic, and even a brilliant tragedy (Jepthe, later renamed Jepthias). Although not all of equal weight, within this variety is a kind of unity; as Westermayer says, “Overall one can discern four distinct poetic times of day in Balde’s life: an Epic morning (1626-1637), a lyrical midday (1637-1649), a Satirical evening (1637-1649), and an Elegiac twilight (1662-1668).”

Among the “Lyrica” alone the variety is huge; they include acerbic epigrams, haunting pure lyrics, admonitions to every kind of person, elegies, prayers, and dozens of hymns to the Virgin for which he was especially famous.

During his lifetime, all over Europe Balde was hungrily read, imitated, and envied. Within just a few generations of his death, Latin verse largely ceased to be written, or much read, with the result that few could even understand his too compressed, too subtly allusive Latin. He was later discovered by Herder, and prized by Schlegel and Goethe, but then again largely forgotten; and he remains so today, except among specialists in Germany.

But that is our loss. Unlike many of the Neo-Latin poets, whose poetry is filled with prefabricated parts plundered from the ancients, Balde’s Latin, in the words of Karl Maurer, “is often so fresh and strange, so dense with simultaneous, fully imagined images, that is as if, like Catullus or Vergil, he were stretching Latin beyond its proper bounds.”

“Of course,” writes Maurer, “translations of Latin verse of this quality can only be coarse simulacra. But they might perhaps cause a few readers to notice the denseness and power of the Latin, and the fact that some of these poems are masterpieces.”

More Balde here: http://udallasclassics.org/maurer_files/Balde.pdf

Ramify here (do feel free to subscribe!): http://www.ramify.org/issues.php

The Need for Authentic Teachers

Benedict at world youth day 2011:

“Being here with you, I am reminded of my own first steps as a professor at the University of Bonn. At the time, the wounds of war were still deeply felt and we had many material needs; these were compensated by our passion for an exciting activity, our interaction with colleagues of different disciplines and our desire to respond to the deepest and most basic concerns of our students. This experience of a ‘Universitas’ of professors and students who together seek the truth in all fields of knowledge, or as Alfonso X the Wise put it, this “counsel of masters and students with the will and understanding needed to master the various disciplines” (Siete Partidas, partida II, tit. XXXI), helps us to see more clearly the importance, and even the definition, of the University.

…

At times one has the idea that the mission of a university professor nowadays is exclusively that of forming competent and efficient professionals capable of satisfying the demand for labor at any given time. One also hears it said that the only thing that matters at the present moment is pure technical ability. This sort of utilitarian approach to education is in fact becoming more widespread, even at the university level, promoted especially by sectors outside the University. All the same, you who, like myself, have had an experience of the University, and now are members of the teaching staff, surely are looking for something more lofty and capable of embracing the full measure of what it is to be human. We know that when mere utility and pure pragmatism become the principal criteria, much is lost and the results can be tragic: from the abuses associated with a science which acknowledges no limits beyond itself, to the political totalitarianism which easily arises when one eliminates any higher reference than the mere calculus of power. The authentic idea of the University, on the other hand, is precisely what saves us from this reductionist and curtailed vision of humanity.

In truth, the University has always been, and is always called to be, the “house” where one seeks the truth proper to the human person. Consequently it was not by accident that the Church promoted the universities, for Christian faith speaks to us of Christ as the Word through whom all things were made (cf. Jn 1:3) and of men and women as made in the image and likeness of God. The Gospel message perceives a rationality inherent in creation and considers man as a creature participating in, and capable of attaining to, an understanding of this rationality. The University thus embodies an ideal which must not be attenuated or compromised, whether by ideologies closed to reasoned dialogue or by truckling to a purely utilitarian and economic conception which would view man solely as a consumer.

Here we see the vital importance of your own mission. You yourselves have the honour and responsibility of transmitting the ideal of the University: an ideal which you have received from your predecessors, many of whom were humble followers of the Gospel and, as such, became spiritual giants. We should feel ourselves their successors, in a time quite different from their own, yet one in which the essential human questions continue to challenge and stimulate us. With them, we realize that we are a link in that chain of men and women committed to teaching the faith and making it credible to human reason. And we do this not simply by our teaching, but by the way we live our faith and embody it, just as the Word took flesh and dwelt among us. Young people need authentic teachers: persons open to the fullness of truth in the various branches of knowledge, persons who listen to and experience in their own hearts that interdisciplinary dialogue; persons who, above all, are convinced of our human capacity to advance along the path of truth. Youth is a privileged time for seeking and encountering truth. As Plato said: ‘Seek truth while you are young, for if you do not, it will later escape your grasp’ (Parmenides, 135d). This lofty aspiration is the most precious gift which you can give to your students, personally and by example.”

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Pope-to-academics-at-WYD:-Young-people-need-real-teachers-22410.html

“we are running now, spectral and swift”

While on the subject of UD’s “guard,” I’d like to point out a small piece that recently appeared, written by a key and universally beloved member of that guard, teacher-administrator-scholar, and a man you can hardly speak of without praising his deep kindness and modesty. In this “address delivered to the faculty of the University of Dallas in October 1990, before Classics and Modern Languages became separate departments,” Dr. Sweet explicates the title of his then-department with that circuitous, yet always uncannily sure-footed, approach of his which clarifies outlines and shades of difference while quietly opening and deepening the field in which we view them.

For instance:

…We wonder, “How do we name?”

There are three possibilities: first, we give names completely arbitrarily—there is no recognizable connection between a thing and its name. Achilles means nothing to us, whether or not it meant anything to his namer. Second, we name by isolating a remarkable characteristic. I think of Ray’s first fictional hero, Swivelhips, or of mine, the lanky, long-legged pitcher with a kick like Warren Spahn’s who released the ball out of a bewildering windmill of limbs. His teammates looked up at him on the mound and called him Highpockets. Third, we do so by transference, by the paradoxical habit of calling something what it is not, that is, by metaphor. Now I think of that figure who roamed through centerfield long ago in Fenway Park, Tris Speaker, so elusive conceptually that he needed two names to describe him, the Grey Eagle and the Spook. When he ran under the ball, he became a poltergeist and a bird of prey, spectral and swift. Or what about the fellow who played later in left? They called him the Splendid Splinter, so total a hitter that he seemed to be a piece of his own bat, Ted Williams.

You can see then that this practice of naming tells us something about the difference between language as qualitative and number as quantitative. Numerical precision applied to speech would require that one word denote only one thing, which would make language impossible. We could never learn it, because the simplest statements would be unutterably complex. The solution of speech is to make use of ambiguity, which gives us the strange result that clarity is the product of the lack of clarity. A man is a hungry, swooping ghost. Naming, therefore, through its deliberate confusions, by bringing unlike things together as if they were alike, instructs us in the nature of the same and the different.

I won’t quote the last passage–”the foreign has this power”–but it’s wonderful.

A Little UD History and Prophecy

These two addresses, an old one from the now deceased Dr. Eugene Curtsinger and a nearly new one from Dr. Louise Cowan, were recently published in a student-organized and -published booklet titled (ominously? routinely?) “The Changing of the Guard.”

Dr. Louise Cowan: Address to the Faculty

Apart from the Church, the university is the most powerful institution in our society today. It controls the health of all the professions, of industry, of government, and the very texture of daily life. But, as an institution, it is currently in trouble. This particular university that you and I share was designed to meet that trouble head-on and somehow to change the direction of American education. So it is not really our university that is the problem: it is the whole system, for which we might be said to be the solution. This is our moment.

So let me make clear that I consider the University of Dallas the most important underground organization in our society today. It is already determining the spirit of education in hundreds of classical high schools; its graduates have themselves founded institutions of higher learning; it educates teachers, influences the curricula of other colleges, staffs their faculties, sets the pace for liberal arts and humanities organizations, as well as produces business, professional, and political leaders. Despite its lack of public notice, UD is well known among those truly interested in higher education. It has taken seriously its revolutionary task of being what a university is meant to be and has forfeited much in order to keep that integrity. What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose his soul? So this university, guarded by its faculty, has kept its soul. But on its fiftieth anniversary it faces not only the opportunity for which it was intended, but the crisis that could divert it from its true path. For, as Donald Cowan used to say, this university belongs to itself—not to the diocese, or the state, or the board; not the administration, the students, or even the faculty. And so we need always to consider what it wants to be. We cannot afford at this juncture to do nothing. So, much as I may seem to be reminiscing in the remarks that follow, I mean to be speaking to you of what this University truly is and of what it is meant to be—its character, that soul it has not lost.

You must remember this

Tradition as the Poem’s Inner Form in the Lyrics of Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson’s essay “Poetry as Tradition” asserts for poetic form—distinguishing it from that of prose fiction, for instance—a special independence from the medium of the printed page. Poetic form carries the promise of a certain permanence, providing a radiant locus of human meaning capable of surviving the collapse or decay of other cultural forms. But this independence comes with a corollary dependence. If the poem “can always reduce the book to its true function as an instrument of convenience” (258), dispelling with the appearance of its livelier, more palpable reality the illusion of its reliance on paper and ink, this is because it depends on a far more deeply and strangely impressionable medium: “the lips of men, … their voices, … their memories, … their hearts” (258). The poem (somewhat like the blessed of Dante’s Paradise, who yearn for their resurrected flesh), Davidson implies, exists in and for the moment of its embodiment. The poem only speaks to and in the being of a person; its form is the figure drawn on human ground, marking it as precious and the only vehicle of what is precious. This is why the genuine utterance of a poem can be a unique and unrepeatable event, and why committing a poem to memory, more than merely the transfer of information, can often be transformative—realizing or revealing new potentialities both in the person reading and the poem itself. Indeed, one is tempted to say that in paradoxical proportion to how undeceivedly a poem acknowledges as its proper medium the most mortal of things—the concentered mind and shaping memory, the voice’s accent, and ultimately the incommunicablility of another person—will its chance at a genuine immortality increase. This immortality will not be that of the voiceless ciphers of impersonal record, but that of a quiet mirror possessed of sufficient purity and amplitude of angle to capture and embrace both the motes of the passing hour and underlying cares of a life. Behind the idea of the poem’s independence from the page, then, rests Davidson’s more central concern of the poem as an instance of tradition—as a living form for what can be passed from generation to generation, or (first of all) from person to person. Poetry’s “metre, rhyme, and other formal elements” writes Davidson “ally poetry with memory; they are the marks of poetry that not only derives from tradition but is tradition” (258), which is to say: by their availability to the memory such formal elements mark a poetry that exists in and for the moment of handing itself over to another. Beyond what we typically classify as formal elements, though, this paper will look at two of Davidson’s lyrics to show how this gesture of tradition, of handing itself over, shapes the inner form of the poem as well.

Siroccos

Reading the poetry of Warren last night, I came across a new favorite word–Sirocco–that is, “A warm south or southeast wind of southern Italy, Sicily, and the Mediterranean islands, originating in the Sahara Desert as a dry dusty wind but becoming moist as it passes over the Mediterranean.” This wind is in Dickinson’s imaginary lexicon as well.

It occurs to me that Latin has wonderful words for winds, each of which carries a distinct image, character, associations, and not merely reference to their compass-point of origin. Eurus is characterized by a favorite teacher of mine as “most often cold, rainy, wintry, and the most disliked of the winds,” and Aquilo is “associated especially with clear cold weather”–I remember this teacher professing that Aquilo and Boreas (alternate names for the North Wind) summon up entirely distinct images and feeling for Vergil.

Boreas is a great booming stormer, Aquilo cold and serene: et claro silvas cernes Aquilone moveri. “And if, at the hour the sun restores the day, and when he hides it again, / His circle is distinct, your fear of storm clouds will be vain: / You will see the forest moving in a bright Aquilo.” (As a side note, since the last mention of the sun–who is actually supposed to be the “hero” of this passage, though Vergil is always letting the focus of his attention get usurped by whatever offers itself as the most beautiful or gripping image–is of him hiding the day, I think that last image must be of a radiant night!)

Of course their winds are also gods. But the Romans’ mythology had this lovely and bright naivety that allowed Vergil to talk, for instance, about a farmer’s wife “boiling down the moisture of sweet must on Vulcan” (he simply means a cook-fire!). It was still possible to see, without affectation, the quite literal fire in one and the same glance as the god. Likewise, though Eurus is a divinity, for the Romans there is no more contradiction in speaking of “Euri” than for us of “Sirrocos,” Easterlies or Nor’easters. Anyhow, their being gods is not different from their being winds: their names are certainly not, for the Romans, porcelain personifications–but usable and decent words to capture the essence of the weather.

All of that to ask if anyone knows of any other wind names that they like or love: especially in English, but any other languages welcome as well. I thought we might start a little catalogue.

(Also, as a full disclosure, this post got usurped by “Georgics-nostalgia”: both missing the poem, perhaps the most beautiful and magical ever written–and also the class, certainly the most delightful of my grad-school days so far, even rivalling in happiness the best of my whole studenthood, which is saying a lot. Also, and relatedly, there are few thoughts above that do not really originate in, or are not at least deeply colored by the sparkling teaching of Dr. Maurer. Though I’m sure there may be inaccuracies that have sneaked in entirely on my account.)

I need to be walking more–to have more rain–more wind.

That’s why I started this blog way back when. I was looking to do some writing that had rain and wind and walking in it.

I think there’s a little stone church somewhere in the Spanish countryside where I could pray properly–unshapely stone church which belongs to wind and weather. You can only get there walking.

When you walk–say you have a destination, even a meaningful one–you still will have to release the thought of arrival, let the walking take over expectation. Otherwise, the thought of the indefinitely long and folding road more than your weight defeats you. But the walking can, and your thoughts after a while begin to walk too. Somewhere on their windy path is a chapel of rain-wet stone–like some uncut, Abraham’s altar.

ours and not only ours

Like so many other records of the Thomas More that was (the beautiful newsletters, the now unavailable audio recordings of Senior Thesis presentations), the film, “The Beautiful Changes,” is no longer actively publicized by the school’s administration.

The film is in itself beautifully conceived and composed; but it is still more beautiful for the vision and activity of the institution that it portrays. That institution deserves to be remembered and looked to by all people of good will as an exemplar of what liberal education can be. By right, that institution ought to be remembered by those both at Thomas More and the Erasmus Institute who are committed to the present work of education and to envisioning its future.

Liberal education represents a genuine service and a genuine need because only through actively recalling the memories of our spiritual and cultural history can we hope to be true stewards of our destiny, free from the unexamined reign of contemporary sentiment and opinion (or opinionlessness, as the case may be). This more recent history of ours, that of a particular educational institution in crisis, though it is certainly more contemporary, is not on that account less weighty, nor its memories less deeply compelling. Indeed, by their very nearness to our own contingency, the memories of this history have a fragility that calls in particular way for our care. We are to hold such memories in a way that combines protection with offering, in a way that says they are not only ours.

The Beautiful Changes
Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water, it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it,
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

The film was recently posted on YouTube:

“Good faith” and KTL’s “dead god”

Reading over KTL’s questions about past love once again, and wondering about the nature and identity of the “dead god” to whom he refers, I noted his suggestion of the god’s, at least temporary, irresistibility:

“and being unable to resist but not having everything to give you promise it the future.”

Now it is conventional to call the god of love irresistible. Lyricists, Troubadors, Petrarchan poets, and the popular song writers of our day have so named him again and again. But surely, even his irresistibility granted, something so deliberate as “a promise” cannot be extracted merely by a god’s irresistible power. Doesn’t “a promise” imply some kind of free human response and therefore and only therefore the promiser’s assumption of responsibility to that power?

Assuming, then, that this promise is a free act, I would like to propose a possible solution of the dilemma KTL poses.

It seems likely that some powers are essentially respond-able-to, and some are not. Certainly I may try in good faith to speak (or promise, or keep a promise) to a being who cannot hear or understand my words (though only if I suppose that he can). But trying is not doing, even if there is something noble in the effort. (Isn’t the very intention of a speech such as a promise premised on some essential respond-able-to-ness of the the one to whom the promise is made?)

Furthermore, if I try to promise a promise (and try to keep that promise) which premises not just any respond-able-to-ness, but a divine respond-able-to-ness in the power to which I am trying to promise, and if in fact there is no such respond-able-to god as my promise premises, then I am in an analogous dilemma. I may try to promise and try to keep my promise, but I will not succeed, though there may be something noble in the effort.

Nevertheless, if such a promise has been “made” to a god who is not such a god as to listen to or respond to or otherwise hold one to a promise, what then? (This, I imagine, is what KTL is asking.) Was not the promise made in “good faith”? Can it simply dissolve into nothing?

Well, a promise is also made with secondary listeners in mind (and is in a real sense a promise to them as well as to the primary listener): the witnesses. Even if his promise was made in secret, the promiser himself is such a witness. A witness might hold one to one’s promise even though the one-to-whom-the-promise-was-made is absent or otherwise engaged. Such a witness might act as a fitting proxy to whom one’s promise might be kept; as one might fittingly pay a debt owed to a dead man not to his corpse but his heir. But when a man promises to a god, can a human witness hope to supply, as a fitting proxy, the special respond-able-to-ness of a divine being? Or hope, with authority, to assert the inherited demands of a god who, for whatever reason, does not assert them? clearly not—not even if the promiser himself, whether out of a sense of loyalty or even to maintain his own integrity, try and assert the rights of the absent god. (Though we may admire him for trying.)

However, if another god (a truly respond-able-to and responsible one) should happen to overhear the promiser’s speech and recognize the “good faith” of his intention, this overhearing god might effectually take up the promise which was made in ignorance and confusion, and offer it back the promiser as renewable in spirit and truth.

Paul at the Areopagus: "He is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17)