Things To Think About

These are the lyrics of a song written by Francis Patric O'Brien in 2002, "In a Time of Pain"

In a time of pain when confusion reigns, will you hear our burning cry?
When the wound won't heal as the truth's revealed, when our anguish just won't die:
Come save us as you saved your Son, who was faithful to the end.
God of justice reign; through our sin and shame
be salvation, God, and friend.

When our leaders fail, when the dark prevails, be the path that will guide our way.
When our anger burns may we strive to learn to reveal the light of day.
Come save us as you saved your Son; in your truth we will be set free.
Teach us how to deal with the hurt we feel;
may we rise from this Calvary.

When the weakest ones have no place to run from the terror that haunts their days,
Who will give them peace, make their nightmares cease? Who will drive their dark away?
Come save us as you saved your Son, who embraced each child in pain.
May your healing balm bring a peace and calm
that will make us whole again.

Teach us what is just and in whom to trust; by your wisdom we will abide.
May the ones with pow'r, in this crucial hour, seek the Spirit as their guide.
Come save us as you saved your Son from corruption's deadly toll.
May we rise at last from our shadowed past
with your love as our guide and goal.

In a note at the end of the score, O'Brien writes: In this time of crisis in the church, many have found that, once again, music and lyrics have the power to confront and to heal. This text was written as a prayer to our good and gracious God to express the confusion, pain, and other emotions that well up within so many in these difficult days in the Catholic community. It is also intended to be a prayer of hope that our church may confront the darkness and move toward the light of Christ, which is our goal and guide.

At least for now, I think I'll leave it at that.

What a beautiful sky with clouds in it
and light clinging to their underneath
like a woman’s frosted slip, or the inside of a dress.
The seasons are starting to creep up
on the warm air and afternoon sun,
autumn trees pretending to be a sunset in the day.
Sweet breeze like music,
like a bird swimming through the air
tossed on every wind in the beautiful sky
with clouds in it.

Tell It Slant

First, let me apologize for the depressing nature of my blog lately. But, in the absence of church-going, I’ve had to rely on talking about my ‘feelings.’ It’s going well, don’t you think? Except for the complaining all the while. I suppose it’s to be expected that there is a little bit of anguish for each ecstatic instant.

I got back one of my term essays today; I had (finally!) handed it in four months late. Since I’d passed the course, I figured I couldn’t have bombed the paper. Therefore, I was curious to see exactly which part of this thing I’d written was actually acceptable. I was expecting soooo much criticism…but actually my professor was very kind. It was simultaneously good – phew, I can relax – and disappointing – my certainty that the paper was crap was squashed, a ribbon at a time. Which I suppose is also good. I think. It yet remains to see.

Truthfully, I haven’t really liked anything I wrote last year. Well, originally I liked my paper on the Symbolic as a metaphysical reality grounding all possibility of meaning, but then I re-read it and had no idea what I was saying. Well, I mean, I knew what I was saying, but it felt like my knowing was so superficial. I guess that’s the problem with being a theory-whore: in the moment there’s a huge payoff and it feels great and important and intoxicating, but afterward I feel like I’ve woken up next to something I don’t recognize. You should see my Heidegger papers from during my Literature degree. Not my best moments, to be sure. I feel like…not myself, like myself sideways. I feel like…whatever I’ve managed to painfully create has been nothing more that a few disjointed moments of colour on an otherwise blank canvas, soundless as dots on a disc of snow.

Maybe it’s a palimpsest…like the stillness in the air between the heaves of storm.

I don’t know why I care so much about schoolwork; from an outsider’s point of view, and in the long run, it doesn’t really matter. I feel like I’m searching for something, trying to unlock some magical thing that’s going to make me feel better again; that I could not breathe without a key.

I wish I could be more myself again. Everything seems off somehow. It’s like being in a room where everything has been moved an inch out of place. You know something’s wrong, you feel disconcerted, but you can’t quite say why. Myself felt ill and odd…There’s something missing, something empty…I don’t hurt: not exactly. I guess I feel like I’m in the space where pain has an element of blank, where it’s the sense of something…like the ground has shifted where my life had stood. The feet, mechanical, go round…maybe if there is a way to stand still somehow, stop everything just for a little while, your breath has time to straighten.

In other news, I skipped church on Sunday. Again. Definitely not the will of the Inquisitor. I’ve got to find a way to get excited again, so that not everything feels like just one more thing I have to do. There are days when everything feels like a chore, when everything I do is a job set by some sort of boss – even happy things like praying feel like work, all sorts of things…whatever is driving this feeling and brushing my joy away, she sweeps with many-colored brooms. To let you in on a secret: given all my…ahem…medication-induced issues (see above), I should be kind of proud I’m somehow managing to walk around and do all these things while appearing normal. Well, no one’s spontaneously said anything, so I assume I look normal enough. I should be proud, but of course I’m not: that is not the way of me. Of course, after this beautifully incoherent post, I’m sure the mirage of normalcy is fading quickly.

Also, while I’m sitting here thinking about writing this blog, I think I see one of my teachers walk by the door. He’s pretty fuzzy-looking, so I’m not sure. I’m not sitting very far away, either. Yep, my vision is getting even blurrier – a side effect. This is not ideal. This situation is becoming untenable. I can almost see hope flying away into the distance. Hope is the thing with feathers. Not that I can make them out.

I guess I feel like time is running out in my little universe of maintaining my world while simultaneously getting this thing sorted out. It’s been suggested that I take medical leave…but if I break my inertia I’ll never get through this school thing…and, after all, a wounded deer leaps highest. And, since I didn’t fail out of the program, it would be a waste not to press on. I know that if I can just make it through this difficulty, this feeling of disconnection and distance, of confusion and unclarity, of alienation…I feel that darkness is about to pass.

I just really hope I’m doing the right thing. Aside from this marginal blog, I haven’t talked seriously about this whole disaster with anyone. That really wouldn’t be fair. I want to be a happykat, not a sourpuss always caterwauling away about my life…issues. I really hope that going forward as planned, according to schedule, isn’t going to be a bad idea leading to some sort of burnout or something. While I absolutely don’t want to give up, being the most stubborn person in the world, I don’t want to make it worse because I could not stop

Sunset Ennui

So recently I haven’t been going to church. At all. This is unlike me – hence the absence of excessive blog writing. I don’t know: I guess I thought that my inaction, inattentiveness maybe, was due to an extreme case of writer’s block connected to exorcism-paper-composition. Those demons do get pretty routine after a while, you know; they all start to blend together in a goopy, rather hot soup. I would not recommend choosing that item from the menu, btw.

Aside from this, some random events in my life seem to have collided rather nicely. For one thing, I’ve been channeling the great Dr. Johnson by reading Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” a 17th century ‘medical text’ that has been described as “One of the maddest and most perfectly paranoid, obsessively organized, etceterative assaults on the feeble human powers of concentration ever attempted” (Angus Fletcher). The sheer gargantuan amount of book this man has written comforts me, because I at least know something that I’ll be doing for a good long while.

Thusly, Burton has described melancholy as a result of habit, a lot of which has to do with idleness – in fact, the author claims to have written this massive treatise as a means to keep busy and avoid melancholy himself. Clever. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps my habits aren’t contributing to my general state of ennui. I mean, just because everything from preparing proper food to exercising feels oppressive doesn’t mean I should actually have stopped doing those things. Hopefully, a more rigid schedule will help me get back on track. Fortunately, school starts again soon. Problematically, I’m not taking any actual classes. Let’s hope I can find some more God-centered reasons to get up and about every morning (and also not to survive mainly on bread and jam…).

Meanwhile, colliding with this is my manic re-reading of the Harry Potter series, which is still as compelling as the first (or whatever) time through. Woohoo Harry Potter! I guess what depresses me is that I wish I was out following some mission and conquering evil as part of my school-days, or really any of my days at all. Not that I wish excitement would fall on me in the form of the most dangerous dark wizard of all time being hell-bent on killing me: that would not be ideal. But maybe that somebody – anybody – would give me some sort of meaningful job to do. God would be nice. But really anyone pointing me in some kind of direction would be greatly appreciated. It’s the feeling, after all, that there’s something wrong with my life, that I’m not doing what I’m supposed to. Perhaps the Dementors are too close?

So that’s me, pushing the safety limits on medication dosages waiting for it to kick in, which does not seem to be the case. *sigh* But seriously, this is a real problem that seems not to be getting better. Blech.

In closing, here is a poem by Sylvia Plath, “Ennui”

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.