Reading Dostoyevsky For Kicks and Giggles

Every few days I read a bit of Augustine; he is magnificent reading, but difficult, irregular, and strange.

I read Augustine in the middle of the day, in snatches.

Even in his word choice I can feel the chaos and confusion of his age. In the irregularity of subject and the novelty of the autobiographical voice, we see for the first time what I call the Christian difference. Before Augustine the chief figure of the age were nobles. Augustine was a common school teacher, and a bishop. After Christ, it is the common folk who make history.

But the palpable darkness of Augustine frightens to me. His profound seriousness is the only relief from human nature. His century is a frightening place.

In comparison to Augustine, Dostoyevsky is a blaze of light.

Before I sleep I read as much Dostoyevsky as I can. Before sleep is best - his work is liminal - that is, on the edge of unconsciousness. Reading him when you first wake up or after meditating seems altogether too cheerful to me, but in the dark hours Dostoyevsky shines.

I'm reading Demons; the new Penguin translation is flat out fine work. Translator was Robert A Maguire. I love how well Penguin has translated his work. Maybe the choppy rough Russian just moves better into modern English than the French? I don't know.

Demons is confusing and superb. First I had trouble with the names, and had to bookmark the cast of characters list at the end of the text and refer to it constantly (I still do a bit). Second I had to deal with the allusive and hysterical way characters have of delivering major plot points. My thinking goes something like this:

"So... Stephan Verkovensky is maybe betrothed to some nobody called Sonya or Dunya who is the protege of his patron Vavarya Stravogina, for manifold deeply suspicous and impure reasons other. But Vavarya's maybe looney son, is returning home soon, bringing along with him Stephan's son who is an unknown and sundry complications. And Kirilov thinks everyone should commit suicide to prove there is no God. And Liputin is a vile gossip who seems to know everything and say nothing. And there is a new governor in town whose wife doesn't like Vavarya Starvogina. And everyone speaks French when they're excited, which is all the time, which is tiresome to deciper into English but simpler than having to stop to look it up in the stupid notes at the end of the Penguin Book because you know what it means anyhow if you stop reading for a minute and dig out the French vocab but that means you have to stop reading to translate French."

Jeebus himself couldn't sort out this kind of absurd mess, but it sort of makes sense, if you ignore the many maybes in the plot. Reading a summary online would take away the surprise and leave the hysterics.

At 17 years of age, when I last read Demons, I doubt I understood it anyhow.

Do you know why I find him funny? Because I really enjoy Dostoyevsky's company. I really like Fyodor Mikhaylovich the man. I empathize with him. I feel his wild humor. I see how he sees the Russian people. Dostoyevsky cannot see the future, the Bolsheviks and the present Russian Mafia kleptocracy. Instead he sees the foolishness genius and passionately misplaced devotion of the Russian intelligentsia to French frivolity and sentimental vacuity a la Russe. He sees it clearly, and sees it fully, accepts it all in himself, and he laughs.

Do I love Dostoyevsky most of all because he laughs at himself? I don't mean him to reduce him to a character out of Gogol. He is much more than anything Gogol could invent.

Hm. Please allow me to help non-Dostoyevsky readers understand what kind of experience they are missing out on:

Reading Dostoyevsky is like being trapped in a big hessian sack with twenty-seven affectionate lapdogs: it's unpleasant at the time but when its over you secretly enjoyed it so much. All those flickering pink tongues. Mmm.

Cicero On Friendship, aka, De Amicitia

I'm reading the Great Books syntopically on the subject of friendship, and Cicero's number came up to receive a jolly good reading.

The essay on friendship by the Cice honors a great mutual mancrush between one Scipio Africanus and Gaius Laelius. Laelius extols his dead buddy Scipio (aka 'Skip the African'), shares his definition of friendship, and gives rules to be observed in regard to said ship.

Cicero's On Friendship contains a preface where Cicero dedicates the essay to one of his dear pals. Then two younguns suck up to Laelius to extract the good oil from him.

Cicero's a straight talker. Virtue equals friendship. This means never asking for an unethical favor, not letting passion, politics, or pain intervene in virtue practices, and learning and sharing knowledge together. S-weet.

It's about that simple. The Cice ends with another extolatory clusterfuck and some sweet words to the effect that virtue practice is the be all and end all of friendship. It's an inspiring read and unlike this piece of writing contains absolute zero percentage of hot chicks.

A hard man but a fair one that Mister Cicero.

Saint Augustine on Sex and Body Image

Augustine is authoritative on body image and sex issues. He ought to have his own column.

Here's my rendering of his key idea from out of fusty antique English:

"So there's no need to insult God in our addictions and errors by blaming the body, because the body is good in its own kind and in its own degree. Being human means accepting both body AND soul on their own different spiritual terms.

"A man who goes on about the soul as if it were the highest value, and condemns the body as if it were evil, I assure you is trapped in his body by his love of his soul as much as by his hatred of his body."

Saint Augustine's striking recovery from sex addiction has a lot to teach us all.

It seems that sex addicts like Saint Augustine only recover when they accept the body on its own terms of what is good, and appreciate the body as good in its own degree and kind. Sex addiction seems not addiction to sexual pleasure, but addiction to conflict in regards to sexual pleasure.

Similarly we could usefully describe eating disorders as an addiction to the body expressed as hatred, or perhaps the false expectation that the body to provide the quality and kind of satisfactions that can only be derived from the living soul.

Augustine's quote above strikes to the heart of the nature of the imbalance between soul and body, and the lopsided otherworldly view of spirituality which denigrates the body, and seems to me to call for discernment in relation to body image issues.

Unspeakable Nature in Wordsworth's Prelude: A Poetry Recital

Tonight I read Crashaw's 'The Flaming Heart'. I recited poorly but the poem didn't bear repeating. Crashaw's 'Flaming Heart' is a fiery rush of sexual-religious rhetoric.

The poem is inspired by (a better word would be 'ejeculated from') Crashaw's reading of the life of Saint Teresa: the resulting gush of verbiage represents his unmediated transposition of female orgasm into Crashaw's intellectual process. That is to say, Crashaw's sustained passion for Teresa's piety, the images of fire and melting, the forceful accumulation of ornate figures that when read aloud are so isomorphic to a desperate squirming of the body - all this and more makes Crashaw's poem 'The Flaming Heart' just NSFW.

Crashaw's poem is an example of that obscure subgenre, Catholic erotica, at its finest.

Then I turned to Wordsworth's 'Two Part Prelude (1799)'; altogether a different order of poem. Really for the first time I got the shamanic darkness of the poem. As I read I heard a roaring in the inner ears and felt, as if from a shadowy second body which stood right behind me, mine and yet not me but the body of a dream, shadowing the physical body.

I'm not ashamed to say it frightened me a bit, this darkness and motion and words that name things which I knew no names for. I stopped reciting and turned on the TV.

But it was no use: the entire field of awareness went on vibrating inexplicably with the impact of Wordsworth's greatest poem.

The unutterableness of Wordsworth's poem, neither pre- or trans-verbal, has that quality of Nature Herself which also storms uneasily beneath the verse of William Shakespeare.

Perhaps it was the recital of Crashaw that evoked it; the darkness of Wordsworth was drawn by the fire of Crashaw. I don't know.

It made me uneasy all the next day.