In rock and in ritual
Given my family’s history, I get a little antsy when people start talking about ‘Lasting for 1,000 years’. Yet then I think of Homer and his humble work. Or I think of Sens Cathedral. I guess Sens hasn’t yet reached its millennial, but, baring a catastrophe this next century, it will. Then there’s the Church of the Nativity, whom our forefathers started building in A.D. 325. It still stands.
It's also strange I should be so angst-ridden about 1,000-year anythings when last week I spoke of the founding of my own family’s dynasty. (I say ‘dynasty’, stretching its meaning almost to the breaking point.) Do I not want my family to continue for another thousand years? Sure do! I come from an unbroken line of succession. May that long continue.
I worry we all might just be reenacting our childhood. Tearing down the other toddler’s block-tower so we can build up our own.
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The Courtyard
Earlier this month, I wrote (in a radically underappreciated tweet):
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I get copyright. It’s probably necessary in a world without patronage. And yet its length distresses me. That Tolkien’s or Lewis’s works are tied up beyond our use though Tolkien died half-a-century ago and Lewis before him is to (put it lightly) sicken the culture. Given their wealth, it unsettles me that J.K. Rowling’s and George Lucas’s works are still copyrighted though they yet live.
This may seem counter-intuitive in a world overrun by Marvel remakes, but indeed this is why there are so many marvel remakes. (Look at the proliferation of A Galaxy Far, Far Away as soon a someone bought it out of Lucas’s hands.) I would love to see the world where Harry Potter and Star Wars (and so many more) could be treated with all the care and tenderness Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters showed the Austen classic. The point is to get new ideas into the cultural bloodstream. We can’t do that with copyright stopping the heart.
I wouldn’t even be above doing a little work in one or more of those worlds; I dabbled in FanFiction in my misspent youth and would pick it up again if there might be money in it.
It might even do Lucas’s bastard children some good. A nice remake of everything after Return of the Jedi would not go amiss there! I have a hard time seeing the others I named taking improvement, but, then again, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Secrets of Dumbledore was not exactly a story for the ages.
Some people fear that without copyright the essence, the original, the honor and reputation of the author will be lost. I’ve talked before about how much stock I place in originality. But even if we take that concern seriously, Dante published his Comedia when copyright laws were unknown. It doesn’t seem to have hurt his reputation none.
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With Our Fathers
My two-year-old wants me to read the same (dozen) book(s) every day. She will try to get my wife to read her the book she just had me read. If my mom comes over that day, she asks my mom to read the book too. Sunday we saw My Neighbor Totoro in the theater; Tuesday (when my wife took – and passed – her citizenship test), my mom showed the two-year-old My Neighbor Totoro again.
In the theater, our daughter kept looking at us and asking (far too loudly) “Is it done?” I looked down at her and whispered, “Is it done?” And she’d always shake her head and say “No” (still too loudly). Many of her books too she has word-perfect. And woe be unto us if we misread a word or skip a sentence.
But this raises an interesting question. If she has it word-perfect, why does she want us to read it to her? This isn’t a ‘doesn’t understand gravity’ problem, either. Our two-year-old is closing in on three (closing in on thirteen it feels like sometimes), and she knows enough to have persistent expectations. So why does she keep wanting us to read them?
I used to scoff at church goers. The line I took was something like, ‘You can’t be so sure of yourselves if you have to repeat what you believe every week.’ I didn’t notice my own behavior, how I would have to remind myself every day to eat the right food, brush my teeth, make my bed, workout. Now ‘remind myself’ isn’t exactly the phrase, for most of these become second nature in time. But they became second nature because they became ritualized. I can’t brush my teeth a new way every day. And I can’t just eat broccoli once and be done for life. Their effects wear off or are reversed.
The same is true of Liturgy and Prayer, so I’m increasingly finding. Since her seizure, I have said ‘The Lord Bless You and Keep You” prayer (in Latin) over my daughter. Recently she has wanted me to do this while she lies on me, with her head on my shoulder, with her eyes closed. I go through the three lines, then add “in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti”. We do this every night, and every night (though I’ve long memorized the prayer, though my two-year-old has memorized the prayer) I feel our breathing slow.
And that is why (I think) she likes to have us read her the same stories. I best look to what stories those are.
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Flowerbeds
The Gothic style started in the early part of the last millennium, the millennium in which all (most?) of us were born. We won’t be able to say that for long! These are some of the earliest Cathedrals of that era.
Jean-Baptiste Camille Carrot painted Sens Cathédrale Saint-Ètienn, the first Gothic Cathedral, in the 19th Century:
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And here’s a photo of that same space:
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(I'm afraid that might have appeared sideways if you're using mobile.)
Here’s Notre Dame de Paris:
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And here’s Canterbury Cathedral:
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Hortus Proprius
Ternary (from Latin ‘ternarius’ or ‘consisting of three’), tricolon or the rule of three.
Whether it’s the three stooges, a movie trilogy, or the three aspects of God — ‘the rule of three’ is everywhere. When mounting a defense of something, we feel incomplete with two. ‘The pool is clean and fun’ is good enough, as far as it goes. But ‘the pool is clean, fun, and easy to get to’ — now we’re off to the races. Indeed, almost anything is better said in triplicate.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ear” (Julius Caesar, 3.2.74)
“Of all the gin-joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine” (Casablanca)
“Snap! Crackle! Pop!” (Rice Krispies Advertising)
“Life, Liberty, and the Persuit of Happiness.”
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité”
“[W]e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
There are niggling technicalities here. Though all are ternaries, only three clauses of equal weight are true tricolons.
“Stop, drop, and roll.”
“Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
“Veni, vidi, vici” (Julius Caesar)
The effect is not exactly hard to achieve in English, but easier to manage in foreign languages with more regular verb endings. The regularity of their grammar lends itself better to the Figure than does this mongrel tongue we speak called English. One could almost say Latin is old, elegant, and purebred whereas English is rough, uneven, and crossbred.
The tricolon works because its even weight makes the phrase complete. But the ternary reaches its full when the third phrase is extended in some way.
“Truth, justice, and the American way.”
Lady Caroline Lamb is said to have called Byron, “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
‘I’ve been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt.”
“Eat, drink, and be merry.”
“Eat, drink, for tomorrow you shall die.”
And all ternaries work because they fulfill us in some deep way. Plato said we had reason, appetite, and the will, and he makes a big deal of this human triune in The Republic. Instead of placing the appetites and the will below reason, Christians (largely — theology is complicated and not my brief here) harmonized the triune nature of humanity, comparing it to God’s triune nature. Since then, whether they’re stooges, musketeers, or branches of government, man feels keenly this Rule of Three, making ternaries appear satisfying, complete, and independent.
They are so complete that when rhetoricians go overboard and load up their prose or speech with tetracolons and pentacolons, they become, in our memory, tricolons. So, “the life of man” is not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (though that’s what Hobbes actually wrote) but ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. And Churchill had nothing to give but “blood, sweat, and tears” although he said “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
In sum, the ternary works because it feels complete, and works especially well when one upsets a pattern, such as lengthening the weight of a phrase. And there’s little use in going beyond the three, for if we try for a pentacolon, it’ll just get squeezed, compressed, and tightened back up in memory.
Thank you
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A Bench Under the Trees
“Why have Catholics in the UK and US been leaving the Church since Vatican II?”, an interview of Stephen Bullivant by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
You may know of a great debate in Catholicism over “Vatican II”, a council held in the first half of the 1960s. I say ‘great debate’, but I bet most Catholics haven’t a clue there’s any contention whatever. What I find interesting about the debates is what it teaches us about cultural change. And this interview is interesting for exactly that reason. For example:
“Suppose you were brought up in an inner-city Polish or Italian neighborhood in the 20s or 30s in somewhere like Chicago or Milwaukee, where the parish was the centre of social and cultural and educational and (quite probably) sporting life just as much as it was of your religious life. Then you go off to war, meet – and live and serve alongside – non-Catholics for the first time. Maybe you meet a girl while stationed somewhere – the first romantic interest you’ve ever properly spoken to not from your or a neighboring parish. Anyway, you come back from war with much wider horizons than you left with, and – thanks to the GI Bill – the prospect of going off to college. When you do get married you’re a) significantly more likely, on average, to be marrying a non-Catholic than in your parents’ generation; and b) unlikely to be moving back to your home neighborhood. You’re a graduate now, remember, and hey – don’t those new suburban communities look just a swell place to raise Junior? When they do get round to building a proper Catholic Church in Levittown – a Catholic school was the main priority – it’s a good couple of miles away. And while you have got a shiny new car to get to Sunday Mass, there’s plenty of more exciting places you can drive to in it than the just the round of parish rosary sodalities and fish fries that your parents still frequent back home.”
As I say, you needn’t be Catholic to find nuggets of interest here. So go read it!
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The Shed
Just a friendly reminder that I will be gone for the month of April. When I return, I look forward to sharing a new website (and any other work I manage to finish) with you.
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The Grotto
Since I’m going to be gone for Easter, I figured I’d talk a bit here. In lieu of an Amphitheater, I have here a video from Jesus Christ Superstar. It shows Christ in Gethsemane, and it dramatizes in song the moment which the King James renders, “And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” (Matthew 26:39).
I’ve always found this moment in Matthew and… Luke(?)… overwhelming, and the song well captures, or at least Cunio’s rendition well captures, the moment’s desperation. So many singers I’ve heard (and I listened to about two-dozen before deciding on this one) came off almost as if Christ is arguing with the Father. And that is not at all the sense one gets from the Bible itself.
It’s a good song to play repeatedly over Lent.
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As I keep saying, ours is a generational struggle. The nuns of The Fairfield Carmelites, near Gettysburg PA, understand this, and that is why they went through extraordinary effort to create a nunnery (monastery? abby?) which would, as the title says, “Last a Thousand Years”. As a deep lover of beauty and indeed pageantry, I long lament the novelty (and ugliness) of most American architecture.
Europe is so awash with beauty it has become an indispensable chunk of their economy. People go to Disneyworld and Vegas not because it’s beautiful but because it’s fun. People go to Paris or Zurich or Munich to be transported clear out of themselves. May these nuns encourage such care for our own build landscapes.
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Reviso Our Fathers et Peroratio
Ritual, even (especially) family ritual is vitally important. For someone who always cared so deeply for our Christmas rituals, my snide dismissal of regular Liturgy shows some insensibility at best. I was even naïve about how rituals start. Sometime they can be sent from on high (the Catholic church saw how well this worked in the wake of Vatican II if you believe some critics), but mostly they arise naturally from doing the same sorts of things over and over again.
As my family now prays every night, we have a ritual. My wife introduces the Trinitarian formula in her native language, we say the Our Father in English, we each give our own little prayers, and then I close with the Trinitarian formula in Latin.
As with everything, our two-year-old leads the way. The other day, I changed up the way I did my personal prayer because I was particularly touched by some failure and the entire time I did my new prayer (very short), she was poking at me to “say Mother Mary”. These things matter, and I’m only now (when I embrace them as a pattern and not just a personal quirk) beginning to understand how they work.
I hope that if reading these letters has become a ritual of sorts for you, you won’t be too out of sorts over the next month. And I look forward to talking to you again then.
As always, please share this newsletter with anyone whom you think might like it. If you’ve come here without being a Scriptor, click HERE to sign up for the newsletter. If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE. And if you’d like to share your thoughts with me, please do so. You can reach me below: on Twitter, through my website, or by email. You’d also be doing me a favor if you shared this edition of Hortus Scriptorius on any social media available to you.
Until next we meet, I remain your fellow
Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff
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