In the Beginning was the Word

In the beginning was the Word. Many think this means the triumph of the verbal, but perhaps it's more about fairness.

Or, the advent of Law.

Silence is probably as important as words. There are many different kinds of silence: scary silence, a pregnant silence, a jittery silence, the silence of the afternoon in which a calico cat steps through the neighbor's cucumbers. A humorous silence, a demanding silence, an embarrassed silence. The final silence of Christ on the Cross.

Words can be used as swords, or as the ability to demonstrate one's superiority. They can also establish relationships of love and trust. They can seduce, or they can silence.

I'm dubious about words, but not about the Word.

Surrealism and Lutheranism were both primarily verbal and narrative in their intentions. Surrealism privileged marvelous moments of love, outside of time. Lutheranism did the same, but the love was agape, as opposed to Dionysian.

Love is something quite real for both movements: they posit a dream of love that rises above families, and toward an ideal. The surrealists thought of ideal women, usually in the form of prostitutes. There is of course true love, and then false love. Surrealists generally discover that their love for a prostitute was a false love at the end of their novels, that it was a mirage. Christians on the other hand posit that their love is a true one, and that it's eternal.

What is love, and what does it have to do with words, and with the Word?

Dionysian love is fraudulent, although captivating. It turns one into a prisoner.

Surrealists were not generally close to their families of origin. They floated away in a miasma of irrelational love (Soupault's novel Last Nights of Paris is the ur-novel of all surrealist novels in this respect). That kind of love is also praised among the modernists. William Carlos Williams (who translated Soupault's novel) also dealt in that kind of love.

There is another kind of love announced by Mother Theresa.

A love for the poor.

The surrealists had their own communities and journals, as do Lutherans. I see writing as productive and predictive of certain kinds of communities with certain values in the texts that tend to reproduce themselves in their readers.

In the same way, manifestoes, Bibles, and Constitutions predict and prefabricate certain kinds of communities. The specific phrases of the different candidates who are now running offer a glimpse of the kinds of community they seek to call into being with their candidacies. Who will pay for it? Who will benefit? All must speak to our central values of equality and fairness, to God and to country, and yet they must joke out of existence competing kinds of fairness and community.

If I hear the slightest trace of Marxism in a candidate's speech or in his or her writings, I am dead set against them. We've seen Marxism in the twentieth century enough to know that it is at least as virulent and lethal as smallpox. On the other hand, candidates who recall Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln, or the notion of Protestant and Catholic communities, fascinate me. Robust mixed economies founded on the Word.

That sounds like a hymn to me, and I will sing along with Mitch (although Daniels just dropped out). Or Bobbie, or Herman, or Sarah.


IMAGE ABOVE: Vasnetsov's Christ (Russian Orthodox).