A long and winding road

towards a methodology of desire

There are other posts lurking in the wings, including engagements with Hélène Cixous and Romano Guardini which I referred to earlier. Today, I’m sharing some ideas and thoughts I’ve had about the role of desire in research. These posts are unlikely ever to go where I say they will.

Madness in our methods?

Radical theologian Mary Daly uses the term “methodicide” to urge feminist readings of resistance and subversion with regard to established methods of research and writing. My PhD supervisor, Professor Ursula King, used to say there are two kinds of research students: the deserts which have to be continuously watered and encouraged to produce, and the jungles which have to be pruned and cut back to keep them productive. She emphatically told me I belonged in the latter category, and she was right. There should be a little madness in our methods, a sense that perhaps things are getting out of control, and we’re exploring overgrown or unmade paths that aren’t on the map we set out with.

That has always been my approach to research, even more so with this book which I’m writing in dialogue not just with texts but I hope with those who are following these posts and engaging with their comments and insights. Where are we going? Where will this lead? Let’s wait and see.

Over the years, my research has become a quest to explore the ways in which language, desire, and the subconscious or the imaginary shape our behaviour and relationships within the material world to which we belong. This means asking what role the non-rational dimensions of the self play in the formation of knowledge and the cultivation of wisdom. The non-rational is not irrational, but in the words of Pascal, it accepts that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. This calls for a process of research by association and inspiration, motivated not by a desire for mastery of a subject but by a love of language and an interest in the deep down dynamics of fear and desire, love and alienation, that position us in creation.

Inseparable from this is the question of how our innate human orientation towards transcendence is the horizon towards which all our desires are ultimately directed, no matter how we experience and express those desires, or what we believe lies beyond that horizon. Whether we are experts in the disciplined life of virtue, harmonising all our desires to become an arrowhead aimed at the small gap in time and space through which some say the virtuous might pass in order to see God, or chaotically flinging ourselves in random cravings and obsessions against the ultimate futility of life, we still know that we are moving inexorably towards an impenetrable horizon beyond which ... what?

This is an exploratory and experimental approach, for it involves a decision to let go of control while remaining more or less within the disciplinary boundaries of good theological research and analysis. These boundaries give some shape to ideas that might otherwise dissolve into incoherence, but they are porous and shape-shifting. In the Catholic tradition theology has always been dialogical, positioning itself within the fractured relationship between nature and grace, reason and revelation, immanence and transcendence, and seeking to discern the traces of God in history and mystery within those fluid interminglings.

Theological jargon so often evacuates language of its affective and evocative capacities, resorting to philosophical terminology and obscure debates of interest only to other theologians. Pope Francis gusts through Catholic thought with a revitalising energy, by allowing a poetic lyricism to break through the formalities of doctrine and orthodoxy to create a theological idiom designed to awaken, inspire, enthuse, and challenge its readers.

In an earlier post, I discussed Pope Francis’s linguistic style.

You can read the relevant section of that post here.

In one of his poetry podcasts, the inspiring and mellifluously voiced poet theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama reads a poem by Palestinian American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye. I’ve decided I’m going to listen to this podcast regularly—the poem and the commentary—to remind me of what theology can and cannot do. Pádraig suggests that Nye is “putting forward a kind of a theological approach to the dangers of the theological language. It’s an anti-theology poem while being deep in its theology.” I love that!

“I Feel Sorry for Jesus” by Naomi Shihab Nye

“People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it.

“Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember ‘Telephone’, that pass-it-on game

“where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

“They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

“He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

“and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

“I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

“And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.”

Cut and pasted from the “Poetry Unbound” podcast which has the following credit: Naomi Shahib Nye, “I Feel Sorry for Jesus” from You & Yours. Copyright © 2005 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., boaeditions.org.

It is, as Pádraig observes, a poem that begins by pointing out the faults of others, and twists back to reflect that the poet shares the guilt of wanting to be Jesus’s “special pet”, the one who knows better than others what Jesus really wants. As a Palestinian, Nye’s Via Dolorosa—her way of sorrow—is written on her skin when she visits the places of Jesus’s life, which are still being written into history and carved into fragile human skin as a seemingly unending story of religious and political conflict.

“Journeying towards the sabbath of eternity” (Pope Francis)

In one of his daily Mass reflections Francis speaks of encountering God “walking, walking along the path”. He describes the mystery of the incarnation as “a history of walking … the Lord is still saving us in history and walking with his people”. In Laudato Si’ he extends this to encompass the whole of creation moving towards its fulfilment. We are, writes Francis, “journeying towards the sabbath of eternity … In union with all creatures, we journey through this land seeking God.” (LS§243).

Theology is part of that journeying of all creation, as it seeks to discern the murmurations of yearning amidst the hubbub of life, the hidden signs that point to the invisible, inscrutable divine as the life that gives life to all creatures and sustains all creation in being. That is the lens through which theologians are called to view the world, in order to interpret it as created and redeemed by God. Later, I shall develop that idea in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas and quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, whose lyrical presentation of the deepest mysteries of the universe makes him a poet of creation. I suspect he would grumble about being put between the covers with Aquinas, since the only near-certainty that Rovelli offers in the entire cosmic flux is that there is no God and no life after death. Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much—a charge I also lay against Lacan in Theology After Postmodernity. Continental Catholic atheists are so much more entertaining than their dull C of E North Oxford equivalents, but I’ll come back to that.

To experience time as a history of walking with God is to recognize that desire for God is the animating impulse that calls all of creation towards its ultimate fulfillment, and this makes desire the first building block of Catholic thought. Aquinas follows Aristotle in positing desire as the only characteristic of prime matter, for it desires form—to become something rather than nothing, we might say. Yet it’s strange how rarely desire features in the work of modern theologians. In her fine study of Catholic social teaching, Towards a Politics of Communion, Anna Rowlands observes that this teaching lacks a “thoroughly theological account of the contemplative, desiring self.” (p. 163) That charge could be laid against many theologies.

My own project might be described as a theological quest for the contemplative, desiring self, written not from a point of arrival but from the midst of a quest that is existential as well as intellectual. Rowlands and I use some similar sources, but while her theological focus is socio-political, mine is psychoanalytic and literary. These are mutually informative and co-dependent perspectives, for the “contemplative, desiring self” is the social, communal self. To quote Rowlands:

The Catholic social tradition implies a certain way of gazing at the world, of coming to know it and make it one’s own and of handling the question of what can and cannot be known. Contemplation is not what happens when we run out of answers but rather the very ground that births and sustains a vision of knowing and of social action and transformation. (p. 26)

Only when we can understand how these ways of being are intertwined, sometimes harmoniously, but often in a dialectical struggle between satisfaction and sacrifice, desire and duty, solitude and sociability, contemplation and action, can we begin to discern the contours of a way of being in communion within and among ourselves and the rest of creation. This is not utopian, for as Rowlands points out, the effects of original sin retain their disruptive and destructive capacity: “We cannot abolish—although we can limit—evil; we cannot save ourselves; we cannot raise the dead; and we cannot remove all suffering from human life. … [W]e constructively and without ceasing ‘fail towards’ certain goals in time.” (p. 29)

In our quest for a justice that so often eludes us within the limited, disorderly, and often violent realm of human affairs, we must navigate the tensions that emerge through clashing ideologies, conflicting desires, and contested freedoms. Amidst its fragile and fleeting joys, life is in some sense always a Via Dolorosa if we’re paying attention and allowing ourselves to experience the depths of our own sorrow and to share the sorrows of others.

Philosopher John Gray warns of the capacity for annihilating violence that seeds itself within every utopian revolution, for if we seek the elimination of suffering, we are ultimately confronted with the need to eliminate those who suffer. Our human story is threaded through with tragedy, futility, and failure, and I shall have much to say about hope as the quality that redeems time. But standing as we do on the brink of an apocalyptic catastrophe in the form of climate change, war, and emergent forms of technological, political, and economic tyranny, we can and must do better.

In order to do better, must we begin by rediscovering how to do nothing? I ask this question in dialogue with postwar Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper. To ask this is an invitation to marry Weil’s idea of decreation with Pieper’s idea of recreation. Decreation involves a letting go of all the mental activity that distracts us from being fully attentive to the presence of the other, whether that other is another person, an experience of nature, or, in contemplative prayer, a yearning for God. Recreation means recognizing that leisure is not time out for the pursuit of productive goals and objectives other than what we call “work”, but fallow time when we allow ourselves to be created anew—to be re-created. Pieper writes:

Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean “dumbness” or “noiselessness”; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to “answer” to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation. (pp. 46-47)

This means training our frenetic postmodern minds to be still, to rest in silence and gratitude, to become sabbatarian, to pray in the words of the hymn:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm!

Sabbath observances

Note to self: it’s Sunday morning, and I am up early and writing about the necessity of sabbatarian rest for my Substack post.

Dear reader, I am a world away from Chaucer’s poor parson, of whom he writes that “first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.” I am cerebral and active through and through. If language is the house of being, then I must always build the house and furnish it before I can occupy it. These blogs are a process of thinking aloud, of trying to map an existential path towards a way of being that people wiser than me are advocating. Writers like Pieper awaken my desire to read more, to be challenged, to change, but there is a long and winding road from here to where I’m reluctantly heading. I like my busy life. I don’t find it easy to do nothing. I’m quickly bored, easily distracted, spend too much time on social media—I could go on, but this is not a confessional.

For now, I’m going to stop and hope that what I’ve shared here makes some sense. Thank you for being here and reading this. Please comment, and share if you think these posts might be of interest to others. I’m still making them public because what I’m writing will have to be heavily edited and redrafted before publication, but once I start sharing drafts of chapters, I’ll have to make my posts for subscribers to avoid copyright and publishing issues.

A relevant postscript

After typing the above, I decided to walk to Mass. Practise what you preach, Tina Beattie! Google Maps tells me that it takes about an hour and a quarter to walk from Camber to the Catholic Church in Rye. I allowed an hour and a half, because I walk slowly. Before I left, I phoned my daughter to arrange where to meet for lunch, and to invite our little granddaughter for a Sunday night sleepover. That took ten minutes. Hmm. I would have to walk briskly to get there in time.

As I went past the lake near the house, I stopped to ask a twitcher what he was looking at, because I’ve noticed recently when I drive past there’s often a huddle of bird watchers there. He told me that there’s a Scaup duck on the lake.

A Greater Male Scaup Duck (thanks to Wikipedia)

As we were talking, a flock of birds rose up from the reeds on the far side of the lake. “Those are curlews,” he told me. My heart took flight with the birds and I felt overwhelmed with thankfulness. My friend Mary Colwell dedicates much of her time to saving curlews and she’s coming to see me next weekend. Those curlews felt like a benediction. I hope they’re still there when she comes.

The sheep watched me balefully through a barbed wire fence as I walked on, their bellies not yet bulging with the lambs they will soon give birth to. A small child’s shoe lay abandoned on the other side of the fence. There is something poignant and a little frightening about a single shoe abandoned by the wayside, especially one so very small. I found myself thinking about another poem I discovered through Pádraig Ó Tuama’s podcasts—Caroline Bird’s “Little Children”, who “sit in plastic umpire chairs at the dinner table/shouting out unintelligible scores.” It’s an elegiac comedy about the tyrannical vulnerability of a little child, and it ends with a line that melts my heart every time I read it: “We kneel to tie the laces of their unfeasibly tiny shoes.” What child dropped that shoe? Where is that child now?

Next, I stopped at another lake where one of my swim buddies was having an icy dip. I’d told her I couldn’t join her, because I was going to Mass. Her tattooed body was joy incarnate in the morning light.

Photos pinched from Facebook (thanks to Kandii Blakk and Louisa Simmons)

I walked on and realized I was never going to get to Mass on time so I might as well slow down. I took a detour and meandered around the far side of the lake, looking for spots where I might slide into the water for secret swims. An untidy arrowhead formation of cormorants flew overhead, skimming over the heads of my friends on the other side. Were those birds seeking to pierce through that small opening in the horizon of time?

I didn’t make it to Mass, but I think I had a glimpse of what it might mean to steep oneself in the whole of creation.