Notes from Underground

A word in your ear ¯A well-known physicist told me that a popular blogger told him that an unnamed source told her that a distinguished elderly lady told the unnamed source that the pope told the distinguished elderly lady that the long-rumored motu proprio on the Latin Mass will appear on the feast day of St. Pius V, which is May 5. So that’s settled.

I had not thought death had undone so many ¯as you can read in T.S. Eliot , who read something like it in Dante, who read something like it in Virgil, who read something like it in Homer. So that’s settled.

But in case you want further proof, Scientific American has published an article debunking the hoary population-control claim that more people are alive today than have ever lived before. Turns out the dead outnumber the living by the healthy ratio of 106 to 6. The article ends: "The U.N. predicts the world population will stabilize at 10 billion inhabitants sometime after 2200. At this rate, the living will never outnumber the dead." Is it just me or is that last sentence peculiar? At this rate, the living will never outnumber the dead ¯as though the dead just seem to try a little harder.

Midway on life’s journey, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood ¯Speaking of death and Dante . . . or, at least, having used the words death and Dante in the same sentence, I can segue seamlessly to an announcement we recently received: This evening, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine will host, for the Maundy Thursday vigil, its twelfth-annual reading of Dante’s Inferno . A number of poets¯including Annie Finch, Kate Light, Honor Moore, Wyatt Prunty, and David Yezzi¯will join the Dante translators Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander to read the Inferno from nine o’clock to midnight.

I approve of poetry readings in general, and Dante readings in particular, while the poets Kate Light and David Yezzi are friends I’d go a long way to hear read. For that matter, Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation of Dante is one of my favorites.

And yet, there’s something about all this that makes my scalp itch. If you’re going to roll your own Episcopalian liturgy, Dante is clearly the way to go. Certainly it’s an improvement over the birthday party the Cathedral of St. John the Divine hosted last week for Elton John , fresh from his denunciation of all organized religion as "hateful." But why, exactly, do the Holy Week services need improvement with Dante? Aren’t there liturgies already in the books for Maundy Thursday ?

The announcement from the cathedral explains: "The moving and dramatic literary and liturgical event concludes at midnight as Cathedral Organist Timothy J. Brumfield fills the great sacred space with an organ improvisation." It sounds like an interesting and enjoyable event, but its description captures precisely the loss that such an event entails: a "great sacred space," with masters who no longer trust sacred liturgy to fill it.

Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die? Some years ago I had a dream about the portion of the Cross that was hidden beneath the ground¯a strange dream about stunted creatures: me, others like me. All of us down in a crowded subterranean world of sepia tints and dim tunnels. All of us unworthy or unable, perhaps just unwilling, to see the drama enacted in the air above. Still the vibrations of the Crucifixion’s agony were conducted down that pillar, driven like a spike through our world.

The notion of the Crucifixion as marking the world’s still center¯the vertical beam of the Cross aligned in the earth with the axis around which the universe turns¯is an old one, but I don’t recall from the Church Fathers or the medieval mystics or the metaphysical poets much other discussion of the portion of the Cross under ground. I remember thinking, after I awoke, that it made a good metaphor for natural law: a solid, unassailable column that runs through the world even for those who have not seen the meaning of its source.

Actually, that thought must have come the next week, or the week after, for I remember now that I came awake with cold chills across my shoulders, those fever shivers no pile of blankets can halt. And I knew that I was lost, midway on life’s journey, in a dark, low place¯where the great truths above would echo only in shudders down the length of a square-cut beam.

That spectacle of too much weight for me ¯as John Donne wrote in "Good-Friday, 1613. Riding Westward" :

Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die;

What a death were it then to see God die?

It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,

It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.

Could I behold those hands, which span the poles

And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?

Could I behold that endless height, which is

Zenith to us and our antipodes,

Humbled below us? or that blood, which is

The seat of all our souls, if not of His,

Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn

By God for His apparel, ragg’d and torn?