A Poem Re-Draft and Three Poem Drafts

The Poem Inside 

I'm sorry that I cannot tell you
the poem I have inside.
I swear that I have tried before:
I wrote it. The writing lied.
Sometimes with undocile heart
I clouded it with pride.
Sometimes I blew the spark to glow
but still the fire died.
Sometimes I reached out steady hand
but the words all ran to hide.
I'm sorry that I cannot give you
the poem I have inside.

Psalm 117

Praise God, all nations,
exult, all tribes,
for great with patience
His truth abides.

Your Words Are Washing on My Shore

Your words are washing on my shore;
the time is cold;
the slightly salty sea breeze is tending to the bold;
and I, on dampened sands, can no longer ignore
the touch of gold in distant sky,
the shift from night to morning chill,
and I begin to think, with vibrant thrill,
that the world is changing, though I cannot fathom why.
What is this oceanic feeling that I find?
The dawning sun steps through the door;
your words are washing on my shore,
and I rejoice in mind.

Poor Counsel

"What's the matter?"
said the black cat
running 'round
the hat rack.
"Stop being 
such a sad sack;
here, friend, enjoy
a fat rat."

But now I'm sadder,
and that's that.

Dashed Off X

 When you ask questions well, your questions grow better over time.

undesigned coincidences in scientific confirmation (e.g., good fit between experiments concerned with different questions, especially where the fit is recognized only in retrospect)

Even to get to application of Bayes's Theorem in Bayesian epistemology, you need to (1) know what the possibilities are, (2) know their relative dependence and independence, (3) know what counts as evidence, (4) have a common measure for possibilities and evidence, (5) assign numbers for that measure in accordance with the axioms for probability. That Bayesian epistemologists usually handwave these does not make them any less assumed, nor does it make them any less the bulk and substance of the actual evidential evaluation.

the setting with respect to plot vs. the setting with respect to character vs the setting with respect to theme

"People dispute with each other. One can only refute ideas. To want to refute human beings is to undertake a task whose very essence implies contradiction." Gilson
"The Church's history is slow history."

Artificially imposed change for the sake of change is one of the worst bureaucratic pathologies.

retroclosure: p -> PFp

"Make an ark for yourself of gopher wood." Gn 6:14
-- Targum Onkelos: qadros (cedar)
-- LXX: tetragonon (squared)
-- Vulgate: levigatus (polished)
-- -- The translation in many modern versions, cypress, derives from a possible relation between gopher and Greek kyparisson.
-- -- Others have argued that gimel has accidentally replaced the visually similar kaf. Kopher = pitch, thus wood that has been been pitched. Cp. later in the verse: "Cover it inside and outside with pitch (bak-kopher)."

In the genealogies of Genesis, Cain is named before Seth; Japheth and Ham are named before Shem, Ishmael before Isaac, Esau before Jacob.

One reason it is appropriate for grace to be given through signs is so that the medicinal action may then be received by intending as well as partaking.

aesthetic experience and valuative causation

subjective vs objective propriety

The intrinsic qualities of thought must allow for the intentional qualities of thought.

Truth is the only guarantee of consistency.

Weakest Link Principle (Pollock): A defeasible argument is to be preferred to another if its weakest defeasible link is stronger than the weakest defeasible link of the other.

Reasoning, unlike the systems used for formal logic, involves continual recollection and anticipation, adjusting the line of argument in their light.

Pollockian arguments against Bayesianism:
(1) computational excess (from updating with every new evidence)
(2) combinatorial excess (from assigning a real number for every relevant proposition)
(3) logical omniscience

'degree of justification' of p vs. stability of p in evidential change

A superhero origin story is always a death and rebirth, generally symbolic. Superhero stories are stories of an afterlife.

In education people often make the error of replacing the substantive with a supplement that is in fact only good as a supplement.

Genuine novelty will lead people to overlook artistic flaws for a while; but whether they continue to do so will depend on whether the novelty is the beginning of something less flawed. In art novelty is desirable because it brings the excitement of a new beginning; this becomes durable interest only if the new beginning turns out to be good as a beginning.

defining a unit vs defining a dimension of units

"In the service of the true, the good, and the beautiful, a Christian only knows co-workers." Gilson

For the Christian philosopher, revealed truths are not merely hypotheses, although they may in particular contexts function as such, but also organizing principles, reliable testimonies, poetic inspriations, and points for inexhaustible discussion.

Testimony indirectly confirms inferences; inference indirectly confirms perceptions.

"We can do nothing useful to the Church without first situating ourselves in a climate of common faith, grace, and fellowship." Gilson

the tribunal of the citizenry

The world will always regard Christian theology as an unreal system.

Social progress in practice consists usually of each generation learning the wrong lessons, so that things improve, but not the things that they thought they were improving, and not in the way they thought they were. The history of social progress is a farce of failing upwards.

"To grow old is to accustom yourself to be dead." Gilson

It takes omniscience to study history well.

Great political systems, like Eden, are always lost through a desire to sample the knowledge of good and evil, which is fair to the eye, and appeals in appearance, as good to the taste, and suggests to us the possibility of new wisdom, like that of the gods. The most just human society that could ever exist would eventually fail from our inability to let it be merely human.

Every anti-realism presupposes a realism about something else.

The past is the wealth of the present.

"The Christian doctrine of man's beginning created in the image of God does two things: it places man within nature and at the same time elevates him above it." Emil Brunner
"The origin of all orders, and hence also the origin of justice, is like the origin of creation as such: it is God's Love."
"By the Christian idea of vocation all work is personalised as well as communalised. It is seen as part of one social body, as a contribution within a working community."

What owes its existence to man is always lacking in freedom.

Every human art illumines new values in the world.

There is no progress without preservation, and therefore all progress is progress in a tradition.

We know that we can directly create certain kinds of badness by deprivation, e.g., by literally removing something essential or important. We can also create badnesses by addition, but only where doing so interferese with something essential or important.

The lightning flashes
and while it is a-flash
my eyes are dazzled;
and set by it a-dazzle,
my tears began to flow;
and by my weeping eye
my heart is set a-flow.

Fraternal spirit is not a form of administration, nor an administrative structure. Organizations that forget this collapse.

A group may at one time have an aggregative intent, a cooperative/common intent, and a final/telic intent; coordinating these is often one of teh more difficult aspects of group organization.

inward and outward causal-explanatory power of organizations (Stephanie Collins)

God as that to which all are indebted

Whitehead's process philosophy is an attempt to reduce all causation to objective causation.

Every democracy is in fact a democracy of the privileged; the conditions of privilege change but are always what structures the effective demos.

The distinctions among daily necessities, non-daily necessities, utilities, luxuries, and excellences always play a role in structure a civil society.

What consistently begins in a certain way to exist requires a correspondingly consistent cause.

Because it is a very complex artifact, the unity and coherence of any positive legal system is always partly only aspirational, deriving from its aims.

objective end in itself vs beneficiary end in itself in the End in Itself Formulation

infrastructurally permanent possibilities of social acts

Actual intentions exist within a broader environment of intentionality, characterized by virtual, habitual, and interpretative intentions, as well as salient possibilities of intention and habitus that ground such possibilities, as well as social and environmental relations facilitating all of these.

"Scripture is written and interpreted by the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit." Aquinas (QQ XII.16.1)

God as that which the principle of noncontradiction expresses

inference to the last universal common ancestor (LUCA)

The world hits us with its intelligible order.

the ring of truth and consistency without contrivance

"The general drift of our argument is this, that when we see the writers of the Scriptures clearly telling the truth in those cases where we have the means of *checking* their accounts, -- when we see that they are artless, consistent, veracious writers, where we have the opportunity of examining the fact, -- it is reasonable to believe that they are telling the truth in those cases where we have not tthe means of checking them -- that they are veracious where we have not the means of putting them to proof." JJ Blunt
"...out of God's book,a s out of God's world, more may be often concluded than our philosophy at first suspects."

the magic spell of regulated delegation

mercantile activities done for mutual beneficial cooperation with customers vs. those done purely for monetary profit

the coat of  many colors as a symbol of grace; blue and purple and scarlet cloths of service and holy garments

consecration of place with oil: Gn 28:18, 22; Gn 35:1, 15 -- altar, pillar, drink offering

undesigned coincidences in favor of the doctrine of the Trinity (Gn 1:26; the Hospitality of Abraham; the triple Holy; etc.)

"The spirit of miracles possesses the entire body of the Bible, and cannot be cast out without rending in pieces the whole frame of the history itself, merely considered as a history." JJ Blunt

minuteness of detail, touches of nature, local inconveniences resolved elsewhere, simplicity of manner, candor with regard to flaws, disintererestedness of conduct

There is no indirect indicator of truthfulness of testimony that the human mind cannot ape and imitate, but it can be difficult to maintain any one consistently or many all together.

schism in the history of Israel

the falling-together of details -- related to the capacity they have for unified explanation

points relevant to lack of mention of Dan in Rev 7
(1) Also not mentioned in 1 Chr 4-7
(2) Historically associated with idolatry (Jdg 18:1-31; 1 Kg 12:25-33) -- ntoe the explicit ties of the golden calf and its relation to the revelation at Sinai
(3) The other passages that contribute to the tradition that Antichrist will come from Dan (Gn 49:17; Dt 33:22; Jer 8:!6), suggesting something gone wrong with Dan

Feast of the Incarnation

 Today is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Lord.

Feast of the Annunciation
by Christina Rossetti 

Whereto shall we liken this Blessed Mary Virgin,
Faithful shoot from Jesse's root graciously emerging?
Lily we might call her, but Christ alone is white;
Rose delicious, but that Jesus is the one Delight;
Flower of women, but her Firstborn is mankind's one flower:
He the Sun lights up all moons thro' their radiant hour.
'Blessed among women, highly favoured,' thus
Glorious Gabriel hailed her, teaching words to us:
Whom devoutly copying we too cry 'All hail!'
Echoing on the music of glorious Gabriel.

Rolled in Record

 Psalm 117
by Mary Sidney

P raise him that aye
R emains the same:
A ll tongues display
I ehovah's fame.
S ing all that share
T his earthly ball:
H is mercies are
E xposed to all:
L ike as the word
O nce he doth give,
R olled in record,
D oth time outlive.

Three Poem Re-Drafts

The Light that Knows that It Will Die 

Sometimes dawn is aching, golden tears
that shine across a crumpled sky,
condensation of countless hopes and fears,
a light that knows that it will die. 

We rise at morning;
we go our ways
with busy hands
through busy days,
with toil and worry
remembered and forgot
and busy minds
in distractions of thought;
but still a whisper,
an echo, an ache, 
of not enough time
to do or to make. 

Sometimes a dawn is an aching thing,
human heart shining through human eye,
small and frail; yet still it spreads its wings,
this light that knows that it will die.

The Poem 

The poem is beyond doubt and certainty;
it is an obvious and ambiguous whole,
both exactly as it presents itself
and but a corner of the dimly known.
Read it once and its words are primary,
marks and sounds on the page and air;
read it twice and the words are nothing
but themes and images everywhere.
A poem is a thing contingent,
an artifact of spirit within;
but a poem cannot be prevented,
being necessary in all that it is.
It is a visceral thing that we sense;
it is an idea no senses can see;
it is fish, it is fowl, it is red herring,
the child of a spirit born free.
We speak with it, person to person,
we sympathize with it, face to face,
though it is not a person, has no faces,
except where thought dances and plays.
Only the intellect can know it;
it is beyond a mere intellect to know;
it suggests divine madness and glory
from strange realms no intellect goes;
for it is like the mind, its father,
and resembles its mother, the mind,
which is divine in its nature and power,
yet weak, for it is not divine.

Jove 

This morning I spoke with Jove
in the campus parking lot.
It was stuffy, humid, hot,
and as below, so above;
he was looking, he said, for work,
some fair, livable wage
in this thoughtless, surly age
where enlightenment itself is dark,
and fortune, it seemed, did not smile.
He made the lightning fall;
I happily watched it all
and listened to the clouds awhile.
Soft rain sprinkled down as Jove and I
talked of long-lost things,
cyclops-bolts and magic rings,
trees that walked, stones that cried.
Then he sighed and drove away
to some future yet unknown;
for the pride of man has grown
and the titan-hosts invade.

Fortnightly Book, March 22

 After The Golden Triangle, the next Arsene Lupin novel published by Maurice Leblanc was L'Île aux trente cercueils, The Isle of Thirty Coffins, which seems often to be published in English under the title, The Secret of Sarek (Sarek being the name of the fictional island) -- perhaps publishers feared the original title gave away too much. In any case, it was published in 1919, the year after The Golden Triangle, first in serialized form in Le Journal and then later in the year as a book. It occurs in 1917, primarily focusing on the heroine of the story, Véronique d'Hergemont, and a prophecy that comes true. And that is almost all that I have been able to find about it, so we shall see what it is like.

Conveyances and Secret Corners

 Today is the feast of one my favorite saints, St. Nicholas Owen, Martyr. From a previous All Saints post in which I discussed him:

Born into a Catholic family in Oxford in the 1560s, Nicholas Owen grew up learning the family trade, which was carpentry. Throughout his early life, the strictures imposed by Queen Elizabeth I against Catholics became increasingly heavy, and young Nicholas Owen became involved in helping priests who were evading the law. He served for a time as St. Edmund Campion's servant, eventually being thrown into prison for a while for protesting Campion's own imprisonment. Afterward, he began working with Fr. Henry Garnet, and began the work for which he has become most famous: constructing cleverly designed priest-holes in Catholic houses where priests could be hidden from authorities trying to find them. It was a truly extraordinary task. Not only did it require considerable skill and ingenuity of mind to find ways to hide rooms so that they could not easily be discovered from the outside, the work required such immense secrecy that Owen often had to do it entirely by himself. This was not a small matter, since Owen was very short, lame, and suffered from a hernia, and the work, which usually had to be done as quietly as possible in a single night, was gruelingly hard labor. But he did it, and he did it all for free. The quality of his work was unmatched, and his trade as a carpenter meant that he could move around the country fairly freely. He is generally thought to have been the person who was behind Fr. John Gerard's famous escape in 1597 from the Tower of London; they had both been arrested in 1594, but Owen had been set free because he gave up no useful information in torture and the authorities immediately involved didn't realize how important the physically unimpressive carpenter actually was. Owen was arrested again in 1606 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot; he deliberately put himself in the way of being arrested in an attempt to protect Fr. Garnet from being arrested by distracting the authorities. The distraction attempt did not work, and this time the authorities knew what a catch he was. He was tortured for information, but died during torture from complications arising from his hernia. He was canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

He is popularly regarded as one of the patron saints of illusionists and other stage magicians. 

Priest-holes that are large enough to hide a person are sometimes called 'conveyances', while those that were designed to hide relics, sacred vessels, etc., are sometimes called 'secret corners'; hence the title of this post.