No Joke

No Joke by Andrew Klavan, City Journal Spring 2012

No Comment

Sex

What do the things that turn us on mean? A brief theory of sexual excitement

  

The things that get us (and others) sexually excited can often sound rather improbable and mysterious. On the face of it, Wellington boots, a heavy knit fisherman’s jumper or a car park seem unconnected to sane erotic satisfaction. And yet we know perfectly well that things like these can feel essential to sex.

© Getty

The surface improbability of the elements that incite lust is not merely a fascinating feature of the human condition. It is a cause of intimate trouble. How can we possibly explain to those we love the many odd-sounding things we want? Why do we even want them? We can be intensely disturbed by the direction of our own thrills. In normal life, we may be deeply opposed to cruelty and violence, and then in fantasy, we find (to our horror) that we are powerfully excited by the idea of being set upon by a rough, gun-toting intruder.

Sigmund Freud was one of the first people to take seriously our confusion and worries around sex. It’s good that he wanted to help us take sex seriously and was so honest about its stranger sides. But he did this at very high cost. His analyses of why we get excited were deeply contrary to any conscious reasons we might arrive at, often involving explanations pulled from deepest childhood, and made us sound so odd to ourselves that he unwittingly created incentives for further repression. Sex ended up, in Freud’s hands, seeming even more dangerous and strange than before, and hence even harder to talk about in a sane-sounding way to a lover across a bistro table.

There is no need for further mystery or shame. The suggestion here is that sexual excitement is in fact fairly easy to understand and not at all contrary to reason. It is continuous with many of the things we want in other areas. Though our erotic enthusiasms might sometimes sound odd (or even off-putting), they are in fact motivated by a search for the good, a search for a life marked by understanding, sympathy, trust, unity, generosity and kindness. The things that turn us on are, at heart, almost always solutions to things we fear and symbols of how we’d like things to be.

Let’s analyse a few common turn-ons in this light:

GLASSES

The Anxiety: Glasses are symbols of thoughtfulness and seriousness. They’re worn by people who seem to have a lot on their plate and perhaps a lot of significant thoughts in their minds. The worry is whether these sort of people have any time for us. They may be too important to pay us and our desires much attention.

© Getty

The Erotic: Yet many sections of erotic websites feature people in glasses. Why? Because when glasses are invited into sex, a natural – and important – anxiety is being addressed and (temporarily) resolved: the worry that thoughtfulness and seriousness on the one hand, and bodily excitement on the other might be incompatible. The imagined solution is that the person in glasses can turn out to be not only thoughtful but also extremely interested in sex and the body. Sex with glasses symbolises that the life of the mind is not separate from that of sensual pleasure, that sensitivity and seriousness can be properly reconciled with, and profoundly sympathetic to intimacy.

UNIFORMS

The Anxiety: We often fear that authority will be hostile to us, that it will not understand or sympathise with our needs. It will simply make our lives irksome and dull. All the things we want to do will be forbidden and we will be required to be tame, uninteresting versions of ourselves.

© Nick Morrish/British Airways

The Erotic: A sexual fantasy involving people in uniforms is an imagined solution to fears around authority. All kinds of uniform are capable of sparking excitement: most often business suits but also the outfits of doctors, nurses and pilots… These are the professions that scare and intimidate us, but in our sexual games, we invite the uniform in to reduce their power over us. The uniform still stands for authority but now authority has moved to our side, paying us exactly the right kind of attention. The pilot, far from being impassively at the controls, is thrilled to be here with us, she is no longer our enemy but our collaborator.

The ideal which we are seeing, played out in an erotic context, is that authority might help rather than hinder us, reassure rather than intimidate us. We are, as it were, imagining a utopia in which strength, organisation, neatness and order are there to make us feel more at ease, more relaxed and truer to ourselves.

SLAVERY

The Anxiety: We are taught from a young age that we must become independent. We live in an individualistic culture that constantly vilifies dependence and pushes us towards an ideal of solitary maturity.

© Getty

The Erotic: And yet it seems, in our sexual selves, many of us are deeply turned on by the idea of thorough passivity and submission, as a form of escape from the over-strenuous demands of grown-up life. Being a ‘slave’ means that someone else will know exactly what you should do, will take full responsibility, will take choice away from you. This can sound appalling because most slave owners we can imagine (or even just most bosses) are awful. They won’t have our best interests at heart. They won’t be kind. So we want to be independent in part because there doesn’t seem to be anyone around nice enough to deserve our submission.

But the deep hope in the erotic scenario is that at last we can be with someone who is worthy of our complete loyalty and devotion.

It’s a common feature of all sexual fantasies that they do not – of course – genuinely solve the problems from which they draw their excitement. But we shouldn’t worry if the fantasy fails to solve the problem in reality. What we’re looking for here is simply a way of explaining and sympathising with the desire.

DOMINATION

The Anxiety: Modern life demands extreme politeness and restraint. We have to keep our bossiness in check. Of course, in private, we go through life often thinking that we know what’s good for another person or feeling that someone deserves some rather harsh treatment.  In our hearts, we might like to be very bossy, very demanding and insistent. We would like to enforce absolute obedience on all those who defy us. But of course, in the real world, this is made difficult by the  fact that very few people trust us to exercise such power; we simply are not able to rise to the status which would allow us to exercise power as we would want.

© Getty

The Erotic: The fantasy is that someone else will acknowledge our strength and wisdom, will recognise our talents and will put us wholly in charge of them. No more need for restraint, no more need to hold our tongue. In the sexual fantasy, someone puts themselves in our hands, as we always hoped might happen. This is an attempt to address the very delicate, and very real problem, of when one is right to exercise decisive power over another person. And now in the sexual game, instead of this being a situation fraught with anxiety – because one might be mistaken about another’s wishes, because there might be resentment, because one might hurt someone – the commands are met only with delight by the person on whom they are exercised.

VIOLENCE

© Retrofile/Getty

The Anxiety: In childhood, we were able to jump around and hit one another a bit and that was fine, even great fun. But now in adulthood, we are infinitely more circumspect. All violence is prohibited. We are terrified of force, against us or by us.

The Erotic: But in daydreams: it can be nice to take a swipe, to have someone hit you; they could get rough; and you could get a forceful. It would be violent, there’d be a savage edge. And yet, magically, no one would really be harmed. No one would be left bereft. The other person would accept one’s violent, extreme possibilities. They wouldn’t be shocked. One wouldn’t have to be so careful; afterwards there would be love and cosiness, till next time.

It is the fantasy that violence is no longer bad for us and others; that our anger and aggression can be expended safely, will not make others unhappy, but in fact will be welcomed by them – and that the fury of another will not wreck our lives but, in fact, bring us a kindly thrill.

OUTDOOR/PUBLIC SEX

The Anxiety: We easily become shy about the public realm; we sense that we have to be guarded, on our best behaviour: out there in the elevators, public plazas, shopping centres, garage forecourts of the world. Even nature is seen as quite hostile – a cold, dangerous place where enemies may set upon us.

© AFP/Getty

The Erotic: So the longing arises that we could be as much at ease in the outdoors, in public and in nature, as we can be at home. It would be a solution to a kind of oppression to have sex in the elevator, in the library stacks, out behind the petrol station, in the park… Sex outdoors is pleasurable for the same reasons as picnics are: they are ways of taming the world by taking the domestic out into it. Any activity which has become linked to indoors can be blissful when done outside because it symbolises a conquest of our anxieties – it is a way of imagining being more at home in the world than we normally can be.

* * *

One can analyse almost any so-called fetish (shyness, cardigans, flat shoes, boots, cigars, stockings, striped socks etc.) and find similar structures: an anxiety and a corresponding longing, to which an erotic charge has become connected.

Looked at like this, sexual scenarios can be explained to ourselves – and, crucially to other people in our lives – in fairly rational, sensible terms. We can take people into our history: we can explain how our fear that sensitivity and seriousness had to be disdainful of the body was formed. We can tell them how, when we were adolescents, there were some instances that really seemed to make this idea problematic, how we got searching for a solution to it, and how glasses got involved.

By talking like this, we can hope that sexual tastes will become less a little shameful and a little less threatening – and our erotic solutions a bit more reasonable and, in their own way, a lot more logical.

William Morris | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

William Morris | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lessons

Lauren Laverne: 'I inhabited an arcane Govian dream-world of leather satchels, times tables and anxiety-fuelled achievement.' Photograph: Garry Weaser for the Observer

It's exam season, a time that fills me with empathy for students and their parents, particularly because my own schooldays contained more stressful examinations than the Ayia Napa GUM clinic in peak season. Technically my secondary education took place in the 1990s, but really it happened somewhere else, or rather somewhen else. While my future husband was discovering acid house in the verdant fields of Berkshire, I inhabited an arcane Govian dream-world of leather satchels, times tables and anxiety-fuelled achievement: five years' strict instruction over doorstop books, below terrifying nuns. Innumerable mnemonics (which still scatter my brain like landfill), endless exams and zealous religious instruction that included being shown an ultrasound video of an abortion called The Silent Scream. Top set girls were expected to excel; we did as we were told.

It was both as much fun as it sounds and astonishingly effective, in that it made me a straight-A student who joined an indie band and moved to London at the earliest opportunity instead of going to university. I wanted to learn things they couldn't teach me (about power chords, cheap wigs and boys, which were my main areas of study at the time), and I did. We're all autodidacts as far as our emotional lives go, and I don't begrudge having to work the big stuff out for myself. But there were some small lessons my teachers could have added to the syllabus, if only to save me time later. I've included a few here, and updated them for younger readers who are striking out on their own this summer. This is what I wish I'd learned at school.

Education University isn't everything. But it is something. Everyone I know in fancypants media London claims they burned through their time at their alma mater like a packet of Rizlas, but I'm often the only person they know who didn't go.

It's OK to be a nerd If nerds ran the world there would be no wars. Only unconvincing battle re-enactments in meticulously correct period costume.

Love Never date anyone who is rude to waiters. (Knowing this in advance could have prevented the poisoning of five years of my life.)

Style Never buy anything to impress someone you don't know. Never wear a T-shirt with a face on it that's more attractive than yours. If you are ever going to wear a crop top, the time is now.

Socialising All the good bits of a night out happen before 2am. Don't feel the need to stay up any later. Drugs have a terrible rate of return: they make you ugly, boring and ill, in that order. (The legal ones are the worst.) When talking to someone you like, don't be nonchalant. Be complimentary. Everyone likes compliments, except dickheads, and it's usually politic to identify them as quickly as possible.

Art Good art never makes you feel too stupid to understand it, even when you don't.

Friends In the nicest possible way, other people pretty much don't give a shit what you do. Here's a list of some examples of the kinds of things they don't give a shit about: how fat you are, if you are in a relationship, your career prospects, your outfit, what your home looks like. Nobody's keeping score of those things except you (try not to). Avoid people who make a virtue of their unwillingness or inability to edit themselves to spare the feelings of others.

Family If you love them, call them often and tell them so.

The internet Don't use it as a junk drawer for your least interesting thoughts. Never post anything in anger. It makes you look powerless. If you wouldn't get it out on the bus, don't put it up online. Never sleep with anyone who uses more than three hashtags per post. #LOL #bantz #Purebantz #Psychicdeath #Shitinbed.

John Muir (& friend)

Portrait of an artist: Robert De Niro Sr

Portrait of an artist: Robert De Niro Sr - FT.com

Another Bust Ahead?

Buttonwood: Same old song | The Economist

Thomas Merton

Trending Topics:

• Commonweal at 90
• U.S. Catholicism
• Economy
• Pope Francis

more..

Self-Denial and the Christian

From the March 31, 1950, Issue

Thomas MertonMay 10, 2014 - 12:00am

JESUS CHRIST, Who demanded that His disciples leave all things, take up their cross and follow Him, insisted that He was not of this world (John 8: 23). The reason is clear. The “world,"  in this New Testament sense, refers to the society of those who would not and could not know the Living God because they lived according to principles that made the development of the life of grace impossible in their souls. "For all that is in the world is concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life which is not of the Father but is of this world." (1 John 2:16). Jesus told His disciples that even the professionally pious, the Pharisees, whose lives were rigid and externally austere, had made themselves incapable of receiving into their souls the Mission of the Holy Spirit because they "judged according to the flesh" (John 8 :15 ) and He added "it is the Spirit that quickeneth. The flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6: 64).

Now this Spirit of God is called by Jesus "the Spirit of Truth, which the world cannot receive because it seeth him not nor knoweth him" (John 14:27). On the other hand, those who are quickened to a divine life in Christ, by this same Spirit, enter into intimate communion with the Truth. They possess the Truth. Truth lives in their souls. And the "Truth has made them free." Christ Himself is the Truth. And to achieve this union with Him, this freedom based on true values and firm adhesion to God's will, we must necessarily purge out of our hearts all attachment to the false values of the world, and all reliance on our own will. For there is no freedom in selfishness, only captivity. And there is no saving vision in the unaided intellect of fallen man. The limited truths he can still perceive seem to serve only to blind him, since in practice he never turns them to the one thing that matters, the glory of God.

Every page of the New Testament forces us to accept the conclusion which St. Paul expressed in such unequivocal language: "We are debtors not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh you shall die, but if by the Spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live" (Romans 8:12-13).

There are still too many people who think that Christian abnegation means giving up all the best things in life in order to pay off a grudging debt to a severe Judge in Heaven, Who has a claim on us because we have sinned, and Who means to exact punishment by depriving us of a happiness to which we would otherwise be fully entitled. It is rather a crude error. Yet even those who say they believe in a God of love are capable of making the same mistake, in a subtler and more roundabout way. God, they know, is a God of love.  He wants us to be happy. But (and here is where the mistake comes in) they argue that therefore He cannot really want us to deny ourselves after all. You see, they, too, think that our happiness consists in the good things of the present life. They too, perhaps unconsciously, tend to base many of their practical decisions on what St. Paul calls the "wisdom of the flesh."

*

FROM the few lines of Scripture we have quoted, and from the text in which they are embedded, it is easy to see that far from making us unhappy, Christian self-denial is supposed to help us find perfect happiness by leading us rapidly to the fulfilment of our supernatural destiny. The principles on which St. John of the Cross bases his doctrine in the Ascent of Mount Carmel are doubtless rather strong meat and we do not suggest that, in practice, they should form part of the diet of those for whom milk would still be of greater profit. Nevertheless, those principles remain both clear and true. When the great Carmelite says: "In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing," he is teaching us the quickest way to happiness. The second half of his sentence is so bluntly stated that it may perhaps shock us into forget ting the first. But it is nevertheless true that the passions and desires of fallen human nature, because of their tendency to blind and weaken and exhaust the soul, constantly prevent us from fulfilling our highest capacities and therefore frustrate the need for happiness which is implanted in us all.  It has been the constant and uninterrupted teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church since the very first days of Christianity that a life without asceticism is a life of illusion, unreality, and unhappiness.

*

ST. THOMAS teaches us, in a terrific sentence, the distance between the order of nature and the order of grace. He says that the value of grace in the soul of one just man is greater than the natural value of the entire universe. It is obvious, therefore, that if we are to realize our destinies, to make ourselves what we are intended to be, and find happiness both in this life and in the next, our chief concern should be to develop the life of grace in our souls. In order to do so we have to check and control all those impulses of that other "law in our members" which, as a matter of unpleasant practical fact, conflicts with the life of grace. "The wisdom of the flesh is an enemy to God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither can it be" (Romans 8:7).

However, no one can really embrace the Christian program of asceticism mapped out in the New Testament, unless he has some idea of the positive, constructive function of self-denial. The Holy Spirit never asks us to renounce anything without offering us something much higher and much more perfect in return. Self-chastisement for its own sake has no place in Christianity. The function of self-denial is to lead us to a positive increase of spiritual energy and life. The Christian dies, not merely in order to die but in order to live. And when he takes up his cross to follow Christ, the Christian realizes, or at least believes, that he is not going to die to anything but death. The Cross is the sign of Christ’s victory over death. The Cross is the sign of life.  It is the source of all our power.  It is the trellis which grows the Mystical Vine whose life is infinite joy and whose branches we are. If we want to share the life of that Vine we must grow on the same trellis and must suffer the same pruning. Even healthy shoots of natural life and energy, fruitful branches of our humanity, will have to be cut away. It is not only the evil that is in us that must be renounced. We are even asked to give up many good things: but only in order to get something better. “I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman . . . every branch that beareth fruit, he will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit" (John 15:1-2). It would scarcely be reasonable to suppose that the vintner attacks the vine with his clippers because he has a grudge against it, and wants to deprive it of its due.

There is no better or more complete manual of ascetical theology than the Missal. Quite apart from the teaching in the Epistles and Gospels, which are the actual word of God, the Church offers us in her collects and other prayers a most exhaustive and monumental theology of self-denial and supernatural living. To live the Mass that we all offer, by reading and understanding the prayers of the Mass, and incorporating them into our lives, is the best way to acquire the true Christian sense of abnegation.

*

CHRISTIAN asceticism is remarkable above all for its balance, its sense of proportion. It does not overstress the negative side of the ascetic life, nor does it tend to flatter human nature by diminishing responsibilities or watering down the truth. It shows us clearly that while we can do nothing without grace, we must nevertheless cooperate with grace. It warns us that we must make an uncompromising break with the world and all that it stands for, but it keeps encouraging us with the hope of the happiness that lies ahead. But what is above all characteristic of the asceticism of the Missal is that it puts heaven, so to speak, in our hearts here and now.

What is the Mass? It is a participation in the death of Christ (by which all our sins are expiated) and in His glorious Resurrection (by which His divine life is made our own) and in His Ascension (by which we enter with Him into heaven and sit at the right hand of the Father). We who offer the Holy Sacrifice and who receive into our hearts the Body and Blood of the Savior are already beginning our heaven here on earth. It is still a heaven possessed only in the darkness of faith and hope: yet the love by which Jesus unites us to Himself gives us a profound and sweet and experiential certitude of the union of our lives with His life and with one another in Him. We are already citizens of that Jerusalem that needs no sun and no moon because Christ is the lamp thereof. Here, for instance, is what a postcommunion, chosen at random in the Missal tells us about the divine life we are already leading on earth. The Church addresses the Blessed Trinity in these words, after the priest has received and distributed Communion.  "Lord,  may the action of this heavenly gift possess our minds and bodies so that our natural way of doing things may no longer prevail  in us, but that the effects of this Communion may always dominate our lives"  (15th Sunday  after Pentecost).

Here we can see, first of all, that the Church clearly recognizes what her task is. God has placed in her hands divine instruments for our sanctification—the Sacraments.  In fact, it is He Himself who, through the Church, works in our lives by means of these Sacraments. What is He doing in our souls? He is gradually taking over everything that we have and everything that we are, in order to gain complete possession of our souls and bodies and all our faculties, elevating them above the natural level and transforming them into Himself. In other words, He is substituting His life for our life, His thoughts for our thoughts, His will for our will. This process of transformation leads to the end for which we were created—perfect union with God. It is only when we are perfectly united to Him that we become our true selves. It is only in Him that we can find true happiness. It is only in Him that we can finally appreciate the true value of His creation. If he seems to deprive us of natural goods, we will find them all restored to us a hundredfold in Him.

Often in the course of the liturgical year the Church complains, in our behalf, that we are pressed down under the burden of our own human activity.  That seems strange! To be free to do things in our own way would appear, at first sight, to be a blessing. But no. As we enter into the ascetic life and advance in the ways of self-denial, we find that our biggest obstacle and our biggest burden is this old man of the sea, this body of death, this inescapable self we carry around with us.  He is not our real self at all. He is the caricature of what we ought to be. But he rides us without mercy and, without the all-powerful help of God, we will never be able to shake him off. And he is the one who makes  us act according to the “wisdom of the flesh.” He is the father of all our worldliness. He is the one who prevents our  liberation from “the world,” and our transformation in Christ.

*

AND so we must remember that our asceticism is not directed against created things as such. Our real enemy is within our own castle. It is only because this enemy surrounds  himself with the images and sensations and delights of created things and thus fortifies  himself against all efforts of grace to dislodge him, that we must necessarily fight creatures  in order to fight him. When the Church prays, as she frequently does, that God may give us the grace to despise earthly things and desire the things of heaven, she does not mean to imply that creation is evil: but that the inordinate love of created things is evil.

How does the liturgy look at created things? Everybody knows that the Church, realizing that all creation fell with Adam, intends to raise up all creation together with man, in the  New Adam,  Christ. It was in Christ that all things were made in the first place. "For in him were all things created in heaven and on earth . . . and he is before all and by him all things consist" (Col.  1:16-17). To deliver creation from the power of evil, the Church has only to associate created things in man's worship of the Creator. Thus they begin once more to serve the purpose for which they were created—to lift man up, body and soul, to God. "For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving: for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer" (1 Tim. 4 :4). Just take a glance at the liturgy of Holy Saturday, at the Exultet (where the bees come in for their measure of praise) and at the blessing of the font (where the Church becomes positively enthusiastic about water, calling it a "holy and innocent creature"). All this tells us what respect the Church has for God's creation.  But the fact remains that she has no respect whatever either for the "world" or for the "flesh" and least of all for the devil. These three  forces  produce mental attitudes, ways of looking at things and doing things, which must be absolutely rooted clean out of the Christian soul.

*

THERE are two extremes to be avoided. On one hand there is the error of those who believe that creation is evil and who therefore seek salvation and sanctity in an exaggerated asceticism that tries to sever the soul entirely from the rest of creation. This is the spiritual disease called "angelism." But on the other hand there is the error of those who act as if divine charity made no practical demands on human conduct: as if grace were merely a quality injected into our natural lives, making them automatically pleasing and meritorious in the sight of  God, without any obligation on our part to live on the supernatural level of faith and Christian virtue. This attitude sometimes usurps the name of "humanism." Concerning those who cherish this view, the twelfth century Cistercian,  St. Aelred of Rievaulx, wrote sardonically: "Although they do not say 'Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!' they say 'Let us eat, drink and be merry for we are full of charity!'"

True sanctity does not consist in trying to live without creatures. It consists in using creatures in order to do the will of God. It consists in using God's creation in such a way that  everything we  touch and see and use and desire gives new glory to God. To be a saint means to pass through the world gathering fruits for heaven from every tree and reaping God's glory in every field and farm. The saint is one who is in contact with God in every possible way, in every possible direction. He is united to God in the depths of his own soul, and he sees and touches God in everything and everyone around him. Everywhere he goes, the world rings and resounds (though silently) with the deep pure harmonies of God's glory. Everything he touches is a sanctus bell and a call to adoration.

*

BUT God cannot be glorified by anything that violates the order established by His wisdom.  This order demands that man's body, and all that his body uses, be in subjection to his soul, and that man's soul be subject to God. Now this order is absolutely impossible, in our present state, without the generous and even severe practice of mortification.  This order was turned completely upside down by original sin. The soul that is outside the orbit of God's grace is not normally governed by reason but by passion. The mere possession of grace does not entirely deliver us from this sad state. It only puts in our hands the weapons by which  we must win our freedom, helped by the power of God, through the merits of Christ's Cross, in His Holy Spirit. But the merits of Calvary cannot be applied to a soul that does not in some measure enter into the mystery of Christ's Passion and death and Resurrection. "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross  and  follow me" (Matt. 16:24).  "They that are Christ's have crucified their flesh with its vices and concupiscences" (Gal. 5:24).

We cannot use created things for the glory of God unless we are in control of ourselves. We cannot be in control of ourselves if we are under the power of the desires and appetites and passions of the flesh. We cannot give ourselves to God if we do not belong to ourselves.  And  we do not belong to ourselves if we belong to creatures.

The real function of asceticism is, then, to liberate us from desires that debase and enslave our souls made for union with God in pure love and even in contemplation. The real purpose of self-denial is to turn over the faculties of our soul and body to the Holy Spirit in order that He may work in us the work of transformation which is His masterpiece, and which puts all the rest of creation to shame.

St. Gregory Nazianzen speaks of the Christian soul as an "instrument played by the Holy Spirit." The aim of asceticism is to keep this instrument in tune. Mortification is not simply the progressive deadening of natural vitality. That is too crude a view. It is rather like the tightening of a violin string. We do not just go on twisting and twisting until the string breaks. That would not be sanctity, but insanity. No: what we must do is bring the strings of the delicate instrument, which is our soul, to the exact pitch which the Holy Spirit desires of us, in order that He may produce in us the exquisite melody of divine love that we were created to sing before the face of our heavenly Father. Neglect of this truth would lead to a false, merely quantitative asceticism that would put too much stress on mere spiritual athletics, and do nothing to develop the deep spiritual capacities of the soul.
False asceticism is not in tune with the Holy Ghost because it is a perversion of  grace. And it is also a perversion of nature. It does nothing to perfect the soul. It frustrates God's work and diminishes all our natural and supernatural capacities for good. The false ascetic is usually one who develops a kind of split personality. One half of his personality takes up arms against the other half and tries to destroy it. But it does not succeed. What happens then? The suppressed half of this unfortunate being withdraws into the depths of the soul, and there healthy natural tendencies turn into unhealthy and vicious dispositions of soul. That is why those who go about their self-denial in a crude and human way are often proud and irritable and uncharitable. That is why men who might have been saints have become fanatics and have persecuted the saints and burned them at the stake.

*

THE function of self-denial is to bring peace to the soul that is troubled by all the cares and worries and sorrows and unrest that follow inevitably from attachment to created things. Asceticism is the arch enemy of all worry because it roots out every plant from which the fruits of anxiety grow. The ascetic, then, will be a tranquil and happy man. His will be a simple and limpid soul, like a pool of clear water into which the sunlight of God's presence can enter without obstacle, to illumine and penetrate all. But this tranquility depends on the virtue of discretion. God demands that all Christians deny themselves but He does not ask the same kind of renunciation from a housewife with ten children to look after as from a Cistercian monk.  In the long run, it might well happen that the housewife might turn out to be more mortified than the monk : but she is not expected to do penance in exactly the same way. Her self-denial will be measured by the duties of her state as a wife and as a mother.

Whatever may be the mode and measure of self-denial that God asks of us, (and this is a matter that cannot really be decided without prayer and spiritual direction) all Christian asceticism is characterized by wholeness and by balance. Christ admits of no division. He who is not with Jesus is against Him. There is no fellowship between light and darkness, between the temple of God and idols. God asks us to give Him everything. But we have already said what that means: using all creatures for God alone. Consequently our asceticism must always be balanced. The true ascetic is not one who never  relaxes, but one who relaxes at the right time and in the right measure, who orders his whole life under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that he works when  God wants him to work and rests when God wants him to rest and prays constantly through it all by a simple and loving gaze that keeps his heart and mind united with the  Blessed Trinity in the depths of his soul.

To such a one the Cross is always a source of strength and peace. "Because I am nailed to the Cross wit Christ,"  says  St.  Thomas Aquinas, paraphrasing St. Paul and commenting on him, "because I am nailed to the Cross with Christ I have power to do good." Without the Cross, there is little spiritual vitality in our labors for God and His Church.

*

IN A WORLD in which  there is so much  involuntary suffering, it is not strange that there should be many men and women who begin to discover in themselves a totally unfamiliar desire to take upon themselves penances and mortifications for which there is no strict obligation. That is a good sign. Wherever the Spirit of God works, He draws men away from the "wisdom of the flesh." He lets them savor something of the sweetness of God, and this makes them aware of the corruption that is in the world around them. Pleasures and achievements that once delighted their spirit now turn to ashes as soon  as they are savored, and it becomes a pleasure for these generous souls to do without  the good things that most men have come to consider almost indispensable.
But the more the Holy Spirit draws these souls to God, the more they realize that sanctity is not just a matter of "ascetic practices." Fasts and penances take on their true importance when they are seen as means to an end. That end is the total gift of ourselves to God in an interior abnegation that penetrates to the very depth and substance of the soul, a holocaust that leaves nothing that our pride can still contemplate with satisfaction. Rare are the souls that travel  this far. But theirs is a happiness that is sublime. Since they no longer find joy in anything but God, they find supreme joy in everything, because God is all in all.

Wisdom

WISDOM - A SHORT GUIDE

24
JUN

Mind & Body, Soul

It’s one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty, it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be - unlike say, being cultured, or kind. Others could perhaps compliment you on being it, but it wouldn’t be something you could yourself ever announce you had become. 

Nevertheless, though it’s impossible ever to reach a stable state of wisdom, as an aspiration, wisdom deserves to be rehabilitated and take its place among a host of other, more typical goals one might harbour.

It’s woven from many strands:

REALISM

The wise are, first and foremost, ‘realistic’ about how challenging many things can be. They aren’t devoid of hope (that would be a folly of its own), but they are conscious of the complexities entailed in any project: for example, raising a child, starting a business, spending an agreeable weekend with the family, changing the nation, falling in love… Knowing that something difficult is being attempted doesn’t rob the wise of ambitions, but it makes them more steadfast, calmer and less prone to panic about the problems that will invariably come their way.

GRATITUDE

Properly aware of much can and does go wrong, the wise are unusually alive to moments of calm and beauty, even extremely modest ones, of the kind that those with grander plans rush past. With the dangers and tragedies of existence firmly in mind, they can take pleasure in a single uneventful sunny day, or some pretty flowers growing by a brick wall, the charm of a three-year-old playing in a garden or an evening of banter among a few friends. It isn’t that they are sentimental and naive, precisely the opposite: they know so much about how hard things can get, that they know how to draw the full value from the peaceful and the sweet - whenever and wherever these arise.

FOLLY

The wise know that all human beings, themselves included, are deeply sunk in folly: they have irrational desires and incompatible aims, they are unaware of a lot, they are prone to mood swings, they are visited by all kinds of fantasies and delusions - and are always buffeted by the curious demands of their sexuality. The wise are unsurprised by the ongoing co-existence of deep immaturity and perversity alongside quite adult qualities like intelligence and morality. They know that we are barely evolved apes. Aware that half of life is irrational at least, they try - wherever possible - to budget for the madness and are slow to panic when it (reliably) rears its head.

The wise take the business of laughing at themselves seriously. They hedge their pronouncements, they are sceptical in their conclusions. Their certainties are not as brittle as those of others. They laugh from the constant collisions between the noble way they’d like things to be, and the demented way they in fact often turn out. 

POLITENESS 

The wise are realistic about social relations, in particular, about how difficult it is to change people’s minds and have an effect on their lives. 

They are therefore extremely reticent about telling people too frankly what they think. They have a sense of how seldom it is useful to get censorious with others. They want - above all - that things be nice between people, even if this means they are not totally authentic. So they will sit with someone of an opposite political persuasion and not try to convert them; they will hold their tongue at someone who seems to be announcing a wrong-headed plan for reforming the country, educating their child or directing their personal life. They’ll be aware of how differently things can look through the eyes of others and will search more for what people have in common than what separates them.

SELF-ACCEPTANCE 

The wise have made their peace with the yawning gap between how they would ideally want to be and what they are actually like. They have come to terms with their idiocies, flaws, ugliness, limitations and drawbacks. They are not ashamed of themselves - and therefore, don’t have to lie or dissemble in front of others. Without self-love or vanity, they can give those close to them a fairly accurate map of their neuroses and faults and of the reasons why they will be hard to live around (and therefore often aren’t such difficult companions).

FORGIVENESS

The wise are realistic about other people too. They recognise the extraordinary pressures everyone is under to pursue their own ambitions, defend their interests and seek their own pleasures. It can make others appear extremely ‘mean’ and purposefully evil, but this would be to over-personalise the issue. The wise know that most hurt is not intentional, it’s a byproduct of the constant collision of blind competing egos in a world of scarce resources. 

The wise are therefore slow to anger and judge. They don’t leap to the worst conclusions about what is going on in the minds of others. They will be readier to forgive from a proper sense of how difficult every life is: harbouring as it does so many frustrated ambitions, disappointments and longings. The wise appreciate the pressures people are under. Of course they shouted, of course they were rude, naturally they want to overtake on the inside lane… The wise are generous to the reasons for which people might not be nice. They feel less persecuted by the aggression and meanness of others, because they have a sense of where it comes from: a place of hurt. 

RESILIENCE 

The wise have a solid sense of what they can survive. They know just how much can go wrong and things will still be - just about - liveable. The unwise person draws the boundaries of their contentment far too far out: so that it encompasses, and depends upon, fame, money, personal relationships, popularity, health… The wise person sees the advantages of all of these, but also knows that they may - before too long, at a time of fate’s choosing - have to draw the borders right back and find contentment within a more bounded space.

ENVY 

The wise person doesn’t envy idly: they realise that there are some good reasons why they don’t have many of the things they really want. They look at the tycoon or the star and have a decent grasp of why they didn’t ever make it to that level. It looks like just an accident, an unfair one, but there were in fact some logical grounds: they didn’t work as hard, they don’t have anything like the drive or mental capacity...

At the same time, the wise see that some destinies are truly shaped by nothing more than accident. Some people are promoted randomly. Companies that aren’t especially deserving can suddenly make it big. Some people have the right parents. The winners aren’t all noble and good. The wise appreciate the role of luck and don’t curse themselves overly at those junctures where they have evidently not had as much of it as they would have liked.

The wise emerge as realistic about the consequences of winning and succeeding. They may want to win as much as the next person, but they are aware of how many fundamentals will remain unchanged, whatever the outcome. They don’t exaggerate the transformations available to us. They know how much we remain tethered to some basic dynamics in our personalities, whatever job we have or material possession we acquire. This is both cautionary (for those who succeed) and hopeful (for those who won’t). The wise see the continuities across those two categories over-emphasised by modern consumer capitalism: ‘success’ and ‘failure’.

REGRETS

In our ambitious age, it is common to begin with dreams of being able to pull off an unblemished life, where one can hope to get the major decisions - in love and work - right. 

But the wise realise that it is impossible to fashion a spotless life; one will make some extremely large and utterly uncorrectable errors in a number of areas. Perfectionism is a wicked illusion. Regret is unavoidable.

But regret lessens the more we see that error is endemic across the species. One can’t look at anyone’s life story without seeing some devastating mistakes etched across it. These errors are not coincidental but structural; they arise because we all lack the information we need to make choices in time-sensitive situations. We are all, where it counts, steering almost blind.

CALM

The wise know that turmoil is always around the corner - and they have come to fear and sense its approach. That’s why they nurture such a strong a commitment to calm. A quiet evening feels like an achievement. A day without anxiety is something to be celebrated. They are not afraid of having a somewhat boring time. There could, and will again, be so much worse...

The Smart Set: Take a Walk -

The Smart Set: Take a Walk - June 23, 2014

Cezanne

Our Apples, Ourselves
Cézanne set out to astonish Paris with an apple. In a new exhibition of his still lifes at the Barnes Foundation, we see that he was also grasping for the infinite.

By Morgan Meis

Long has the fate of mankind been tied to apples. They got Adam and Eve banished from Paradise. With the apple, Johnny Appleseed tamed the New World. And then, in the late 19th century, Paul Cézanne declared he would paint the otherwise unremarkable fruit and “astonish Paris with an apple.” 

   

The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Through September 22, 2014.

Cézanne did just that. His paintings of apples confused critics and art enthusiasts alike. People were astonished that apples could look so ugly, and be so poorly painted. Some thought Cézanne’s still lifes were actually a joke, or an insult. It is difficult, looking at Cézanne’s paintings today, to feel the full force of that outrage. But there were certain artistic standards in the late 19th century. Painting that came out of the official Academy of Art (Écoles des Beaux-Arts) was expected to look a certain way. Brushstrokes, for instance, were supposed to be smoothed out and worked, more or less, into the finish of the painting. A glossy and well-varnished surface was expected. One look at the paintings currently on display at The Barnes Foundation’s Cézanne exhibit (The World Is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne) is enough to see that Cézanne was not an Academy painter. He was making a point of being rough and crude.

There is a helpful juxtaposition of paintings in the catalogue to the Barnes Foundation exhibit. Curator Benedict Leca presents a picture by Henri Fantin-Latour called Still Life with Vase of Hawthorn, Bowl of Cherries, Japanese Bowl, and Cup and Saucer (1872). Fantin-Latour was a successful and well-respected Academic painter in his time. His still life is skillfully done. His rendering of the Japanese bowl and the cup and saucer is, in particular, masterful in its photographic details. The reflections on the bowl are perfect. Turning to Cézanne’s 1873-77 painting, Apples and Cakes, the contrast really is incredible. Cézanne’s painting is all coarse daubs and bold patches of color. There is no attempt at photographic effects. You can see all the brushstrokes; some look like they might have been applied directly to the canvas with a palette knife. You can tell the painting represents apples and cakes, but there is also no mistaking that this is paint applied to a canvas. The illusions of Fantin-Latour’s still life have been left far behind.

Left: Henri Fantin-Latour's Still Life with Vase of Hawthorn, Bowl of Cherries, Japanese Bowl, and Cup and Saucer. Right: Paul Cézanne, Apples and Cakes (Pommes et gateaux), 1873–77, oil on canvas, 18 1⁄8 × 21 3⁄4 in. (46 × 55.2 cm), Private Collection, © Christie’s Images Limited (2005) .

The question is, then, why did Cézanne want to astonish Paris with crudely painted apples?

One answer is that he was tired of Academic painting. Plenty of other artists felt the same way. They were looking for something fresh, something different. There is the fact, also, of photography, which was becoming more sophisticated with each passing decade of the 19th century. What was the point of laboring long and hard on photographic-looking paintings when an actual photograph could do the same thing in an instant? Painting in the late 19th century was, therefore, at a crossroads. It was the right time for radical ideas, for paintings that looked completely unlike the glossy and studied affairs coming out of the official Academy.

That explains the desire for new directions in painting. But it doesn’t explain why Cézanne went one direction rather than another. Why did Cézanne decide to make still lifes that look so peculiar, so specifically Cézanne-ish? And what is it, exactly, that makes a Cézanne look like a Cézanne?

Paul Cézanne, The Kitchen Table (La table de cuisine), 1888–90, oil on canvas, 33 3⁄8 × 39 1⁄2 in. (84.8 × 100.3 cm), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 2819

One thing everyone agrees about is that Cézanne liked his painting surfaces rough with paint. He generally did not varnish or glaze his paintings. He also didn’t care much for “correct” perspective. Look, for instance, at The Kitchen Table (1888-90). The left corner of the table doesn’t even match up with the right corner. And the floor of the kitchen doesn’t recede properly into space. Cézanne didn’t care. He wanted the painting to look this way. He wanted you to feel – when looking at the painting – slightly off-kilter, like the canvas can’t quite hold what is inside it and the kitchen might spill forward out of its frame.

Cézanne also liked to blur lines and boundaries within his paintings. In Apples and Cakes (1873-77), there is a green object, probably an apple, at the back of a white dish of fruit. The apple is the exact color as the wall behind the table. So, it looks as if the wall, in the background, has simply bled into and become part of the bowl of fruit in the middle ground. In Still Life with Seven Apples and a Tube of Paint (1878-9), Cézanne has scraped at the apples with some sort of knife, mixing the colors and boundaries of the middle apple into the apples next to it. In Still Life with Carafe, Milk Can, Bowl, and Orange (1879-80), the carafe barely exists, since it merges into the colors and shapes of the wall behind it and the other objects nearby. Many things seem to be merging in Cézanne’s paintings. Objects merge with one another. Background and foreground merge. Space itself seems to tighten and overlap.

It is as if Cézanne painted still lifes to show that individual objects sitting on a table are not individual objects at all. Sure, an apple is just an apple. But in Cézanne’s still lifes, an apple isn’t just an apple. It is also all the other apples. And it is the table and jug and the pitcher and the wall behind the table. Every object is implicated in every other object. To look at one object you have to look at all the others. To confront one individual thing, you have to confront a whole world. If you look back at Henri Fantin-Latour’s Academic still life again you can see the difference. Fantin-Latour’s objects, his vases and bowls and cups, are quite happily the differentiated objects that they are. It is a lovely painting. Cézanne’s still lifes are not lovely in the same way. But they are intense. Cézanne’s objects do not hold still like Fantin-Latour’s do.

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Carafe, Milk Can, Bowl, and Orange (Carafe, boîte à lait, bol et orange), 1879–80, oil on canvas, 21 1⁄4 × 23 3⁄4 in. (54 × 60.3 cm), Dallas Museum of Art, 1985.R.10, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection.

This holistic approach to art, where individual objects point beyond themselves, was not invented by Cézanne. Holism is an idea as old as the Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides in the Western tradition. And it was an idea buzzing around the French Mind quite actively in the middle and late 19th century. For example, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was published in 1862. In an abandoned preface to the book, Hugo had written:

This book has been composed from the inside out. The idea engenders the characters, the characters produce the drama, and this is, in effect, the law of art. … Destiny and in particular life, time and in particular this century, man and in particular the people, God and in particular the world, this is what I have tried to include in this book; it is a sort of essay on the infinite.

We can look at Cézanne’s still lifes in roughly the same way: “Fruits and in particular the apple, kitchens and in particular this kitchen, rooms and in particular this room, God and in particular the world, this is what I have tried to include in this painting; it is a sort of painting of the infinite.” Hugo created his essay on the infinite with words that build into stories. Cézanne was trying to do the same thing with paint that builds into visual scenes. By messing with perspective and tonal values, Cézanne created the feeling in his paintings that all the individual objects in the scene are connected and interpenetrated.

Around the same time Hugo was writing Les Misérables, Baudelaire was working on his great poem cycle, The Flowers of Evil. One poem from that cycle, Correspondences, reads:

Like long echoes that intermingle from afar
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast like the night and like the light,
The perfumes, the colors and the sounds respond.
There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies,
—And others corrupted, rich and triumphant
That have the expanse of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

Cézanne was trying to paint apples so that they, too, might have “the expanse of infinite things.” In his poem, Baudelaire links the idea of expanding into the infinite with ecstasy. The correspondences between all things in nature “sing the ecstasies of mind and senses.” There is a feeling of melting here, of losing oneself in the great dissolution of the infinite.

Cézanne was attracted to this idea in his painting. But Cézanne didn’t want to lose his apples completely to the infinite. His canvases don’t fall apart into pure abstraction, or formless masses of color. Cézanne wanted apples still to be recognizable as apples. One of the things Cézanne objected to in Impressionist painting was the lack of structure, the fact that every object seemed to dissolve completely into a play of light. Cézanne sometimes spoke about wanting to make Impressionism into something “solid and enduring.” So, he painted solid apples with solid lines. And then he created an atmosphere around those apples that suggests the fact that every apple is connected to every other apple, that all things are contained in an essential oneness.

Self Portrait with Apple, graphite on paper, 6 3/4 x 6 13/16 in. Cincinnati Art Museum, through the generosity of the Oliver Family Foundation. Gift of Emily Poole

Walter Benjamin noticed a similar ambiguous feeling about dissolution and infinity in Baudelaire’s poetry. Benjamin thought this ambiguity the result of Baudelaire’s ongoing struggle with Modernity. Perhaps this was true of men like Victor Hugo and Cézanne as well. They were attracted to the way that the modern world was breaking down boundaries; socially, politically, aesthetically. But they feared it, too. When so many boundaries are broken down, an abyss opens up. Baudelaire often toyed with the abyss in a literal, physical way. He was obsessed with crowds. He would walk the streets of Paris, taking in the chaos of city life. Sometimes, Baudelaire would abandon himself in manic ecstasy to the forces of the crowd and city. “Of all the experiences which made his life what it was,” Benjamin wrote in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience.” Being jostled by the crowd is to be shaken in your subjectivity. Anyone who has ever been caught in a teeming crowd knows the feeling. It doesn’t matter where you want to go—the crowd takes you. In his poetry, Baudelaire experimented with different responses to this jostling. “Baudelaire battled the crowd,” wrote Benjamin, “with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind.”

Cézanne’s love of structure, the hard black lines in his paintings, are his own version of Baudelaire’s battle with the crowd. The structural integrity of the pears and the pitcher inPitcher and Plate with Pears (1895-8), for instance, is something you wouldn’t expect to see in a still life by Monet. It seems that Cézanne was trying to maintain the integrity of individual objects even as he explored holistic ideas. Cézanne did not want to show objects dissolving into the infinite so much as objects that only exist as objects within the structure of the infinite. The idea is that we cannot see or know the whole without the individual and we cannot see or know the individual without the whole. Cézanne, like Baudelaire, was trying to hold that line against all the chaotic forces assailing art and society in late 19th century Europe.

That’s why apples were such a big deal to Cézanne. Once, he made a sketch. It is a self-portrait. On the left-hand side of the sketch is Cézanne’s head. On the right is a large apple. For all his experiments in radical new ways of painting, Cézanne did not want to lose sight of the reality of that apple. In losing the apple, he would have lost himself. • 25 June 2014

---

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He won the Whiting Award in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan's selected essays can be found here. He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.