This poem came out of studying The Cappadocians, three men and one woman who were 4th centery Eastern, Greek speaking xtians who had a huge part in the formation of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. They were affirming the goodness of Creation in the midst of all the muck and dung that we seem to endlessly make out of our lives and world. This has often been a great struggle for me. So there are Hebrew and Greek words referring to various human, social realities. Nietzsche has breathed in my ear in times of agnostic, nihilistic struggle in the past so he shows up dueling with Macrina. I wrote it during a rain storm outside the GF Java Cafe in my hometown of Jamestown, TN.

Like Mercy

“Sweet Rain…like God’s own Mercy…”

What exactly is the connection, the connection between a world of harmonic order and a world of suffering, decay…death?

The rain pours upon the earth, invading but belonging in every pore, awakening parched roots. Dry and dead now leap for joy, springing to the sky

Water pours upon the earth, dancing and splattering…splattering/dancing…dattering splancing upon the streets, rolling over pavement, falling over steps in the ever-moving niagra of spinning cosmos

Water…one of those fundamental elements…rolls over and into the pores of earth and…and thunder rolls, lightening strikes

Harmony or discord?

Walls fall, lifeless bodies collapse down the collapsing hills of collapsing houses of collapsing earth. Lifeless bodies of deer and cattle and dogs and cats and Adam and…and it would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam, ish and isha, man and woman, mother and son, son and sister and father and neighbor and polis and oikos and agora and oikonomia and…creation…and out of the Alpha Rhythms of participatory love bodies are enraptured, so babies are born in the midst of heroic words like “till death do us part.” Homes are built, gardens are planted. Games are played while laughter is shared. Songs are sung and enraptured bodies move to the rhythms of the dance

Pointing and jumping, laughing I scream “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order!”

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam and all the ways and webs of the knitting together of Adam and…and reputations fail, economies collapse as bodies collapse as families collapse as marriages crumble as children collapse as cities collapse and as lies are told lust takes over, giving forth torture and greed, hunger and rape, famine and coldness

All of a sudden that madman runing through the streets that night with the silly mustache shouting” God is dead and we have killed him” seems not so far from of right. Adam seems to care much more about power games than love games…and people are torn and lives collapse and…and it still would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish!

Harmony or discord? What is the connection?

This fish feels the jaws surround and the darkness elbow out the light

And in the darkness I hear Macrina sing, pointing, shouting, jumping up and down, “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order envelopes chaos. There is not beginning, no arche, without an end, a telos.” And her voice echoes

“Get up Lazarus”

“Shall these bones live?”

“Where oh death is thy sting?”

“The heavens are telling”

“He is not here, he is risen”

“Sweet rain…like God’s own Mercy..Mercy that upholds it because it is good. It is fallen but it is good…

Discord or Harmony?

Macrina I hope like hell you are right because…because the deaf want to hear, the lame want to leap, the dead want to live and…and I am just so fucking tired of wanting to be a fish…Amen

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Vazquez’s “Legs with bones” (2002) demonstrates this portrayal of sex as a harbinger of death. In it, we witness the birth of dry bones, still connected by an artificial umbilical cord to the mother, who appears to be hovering or hanging over the scene, There is little movement in the image, no background, an no life. Even the mother’s feet seem still. What’s more, the bones that the mother appears to have birthed seem to have come from a number of different animals. Is this merely a critique of society, or has Vazquez told us something about nature and life? It is arguable that he has herein revealed an aspect of the structure of life itself. Death, of course, is the final chapter of life, and as such the life cycle itself is finite. Yet, Vazquez presents something much more radical than a mere linear relationship; life here gives birth to death. Or rather, death is profoundly and inescapably immanent to life. Indeed, death gives birth and then death again to life. If there is a surplus, it is death’s.

Likewise, birth implicates community. Through birth, we come into the world together, albeit in vulnerability and thrown-ness. As such, death triumphs over life because our common birth is immediately oriented toward decay and finality, sometimes peacefully, oftentimes violently. Death is the unavoidable other to life, a bottomless telos into which all life flows. Culture, therefore, is the sign of death toward life. If this is the case, if there is a surplus of death and decay always present in life, it should not be strange, then, that local symbolism and bodily states lend themselves so well to demonstrations of life’s finitude and being-toward-death.

One wonders, however, what Vazquez makes of original and unique moments of life, moments when one is inescapably confronted with what can only be described as a surplus of meaning, a positivity the does not evaporate at the point that the moment does. I think this is part of what von Balthasar was trying to get at when he described the moment of the mother’s smile, in which the child receives something greater than just the mother’s affection. Indeed, the child receives herself in the mother’s gracious smile, at once both the welcome and the gift of her being. Incredibly, the mother also receives something in this moment, as the child (although unconsciously) is a gift to the mother, a gift of grace and a gift of community. It’s a fecund event, that even words stumble to grasp the weight and significance of. Can something like this be wrapped up in death and sexual violence? Is this just a happy or lucky coincidence that something of this beauty can emerge from the same subject of Vazquez’s work?

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Is Harry Potter a Christian? Well, lets start this conversation off with the basics, and I should note that my jumping off point is the two Bible quotations which appear on two noteworthy tombs in book 7 of J.K. Rowlings masterful series (By the way, this post has spoilers galore, but if you haven’t read book 7 by now you’ve got bigger problems anyway, and I would suggest professional help) So, to the quotations. Where your Treasure is, there will your Heart be also, and, The Last Enemy that shall be Destroyed is Death. Love and Death, then, are the themes which dominate these books, but as I always tell my students when we’re examining the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ most extended answer to the question of what Christian love is, Jesus gives a brand new look at love, going beyond even what the prophets had envisaged, present in his teachings, the full glory of which is seen in his death and resurrection. The message of HP is this: Love, fearing not the specter of the power of death, works a greater magic in this world than any deeds of muggles or wizards. Harry is clearly not as powerful as Voldemort, or even, as the latest movie makes splendidly clear, his legions of death-eaters (Helena!), but as Dumbledore unceasingly drones, Harry has a power of which the glorious V-cake knows not. Clearly, the entrance into victory over this serpentine monster is Harry’s baptism courtesy of his mother, that is, his love of love over any of the fruits of this world (Faux psychoanalysts take note—he loves love more than he loves his mother). His life is forfeit in the way that St. Paul’s was, not a stoical suicide his, but rather the uncontainable energy released by the breaking of these rusted bonds. What effect? He gives up his life for his friends, and he does die. And his soul goes to the place where souls go (Lord forgive Joanna for saying that “it’s all in our heads”), and then he simply returns, as simply as Christ rising from the tomb with a sternly confused look on his face as in Piero della Francesca’s rendering of it, Roman soldiers slumping in earthly defeat.
Next up: We’re hoping for a masterful post by Dr. Ramey of Rowan Univ. fame on John Milbank and the surnaturel, and I’m already asking myself how one can live in a world created by and for love, in which love is stronger than death, though no stranger to it, without the storyteller himself. Even if to simply put the idea “all in our heads”. . . . .

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Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.

The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.

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