he is holy; he is firm, pt. 1

"Christianity [...] is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimately reality is righteous and loving." --C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

For years I have found daunting not the task but the responsibility that would attend making known my truest thoughts on Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. Yet since this blog aspires to reflect at least some of the ideas which most compel me to live when I dare not, I think it appropriate also to begin by writing what I dare not.

If one considers "time" in its temporal aspect--that is, time as the materiality of the universe, it begins to become clear how holiness can be said to "hold forth" in it. But where? Christ himself called men "gods," who, according to the Bible, hold forth their own treasures in earthen ware. And men move in days. In fact, a day might be defined as the sum of all the movement it contains. This would make it immense. Of course, the whole is generally thought to be greater than the sum of its parts. So days--slivers of time long enough to contain man and all his haps--surely might be considered gods themselves.

But I'm intellectualizing it.

Do you know what a day does? It turns shadows--mere shadows, but whose shades add up to the difference between life (birth) and death. Reading Holy the Firm is almost like peeling from the background of Puget Sound the film of November 19 (and the days surrounding). It's unreal the way they're different, but the same.

"Each day is a god." And this one has to be, because, my God!--look at him!! He "lifts from the water" like a new creature: baptism not just by water but by earth, wind, fire and light; baptism into time and all its material. The day "clicks... into place" taking ownership of the earth. It is a fleeting ownership...

I love the way she describes her trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, her reason for going: "And I read every night by candlelight." The "and" here is so instrumental, and the line itself takes you somewhere into the deep centre of a need. She read every night because she needed it. (To live?) And the rhythm!

I also like the synopsis of her moth story: "One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held." That about sums it up. Except, she (the narrator, "I") could now see colours. The moth gave herself to the light. And in probably the most poignant of all her runs she explains how the moth burned "like a hollow saint [...] while night pooled wetly at my feet." (This final image I saw as that watery iridescence of a flame's flicker, that continual trading of dark for light, like one hand washing the other...) Of course, the artist, too, must give his life. Someone recently pointed out to me James Joyce's idea that the artist does for the world something similar to what the Eucharist does for the Host.

The mountains held their weather aloft, she points out.

Could holding aloft and holding forth be similar? Being east of East Itself is eerie enough, but what of this mystery that she finds in the mountains that hold themselves up so effortlessly? Weather is partially the work of mountains. Do they hold their weather--their work--up as an offering to God in the same way that artists spin their time and offer it up holy as art?

Meanwhile time blows over us like the winds over the seas, or over pages of books, and our lives change. Those seas, those "hundred hollow and receding blues" I see every day from this corner of the planet (Montego Bay, Jamaica). Dillard describes time as that "film" mentioned earlier--that zero-dimensional outline of everything. It's funny how much it looks like its the wind that's blowing. She stacks eternity, time, and ... land, is it? Hmm. So eternity laps at time, and time laps at land in its poured fastness. So eternity is wispy (or fast, in its way), while time is faster, and land fastest? Of course, time is fixed (fast...) like the islands (or is it fixed upon them?), and eternity is fluid like the sea.

Well then, in all this serenity, how does the forementioned suffering figure? Well, there's no saying it better: "Nothing is going to happen in this [blog]. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time."