Mole # 2

Underground Missive # 2

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #2 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

. . . take time to marvel at his adaptations. Most transfixing are his front paws -- large, powerful things with claws perfectly designed for digging. That's one shown at the left. After the mole's paws, the most interesting adaptations are those you don't see. For example, underground animals wouldn't want dirt clogging their ears, so mole ears, while present, aren't to be seen. And in the tunnels' perpetual darkness, of what use are eyes? Moles do have eyes, but they're tiny slits covered with thin skin. Moles also have nostrils, but they open sideways, not forward, so dirt doesn't plug them as the mole tunnels forward.

So reads some website or other. And I am sure by now you have done your own googling or yahooing and found that my name, i.e., Mouldywarp, is the ancient English name for the common mole. Also called a “dirt-tosser,” which is an apt description of what we burrowers do. We dig tunnels underground and are not particularly particular about what we do with the soil. We are perfectly suited to the task of burrowing into the bureaucracy. From our appearance, we look like useful drudges that can serve the purposes of a being that depends upon endless systems of tunnels, and that cannot see or hear much of what is going on inside the bowels of the bureaucrat beast.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! In fact, when we are not suspected of seeing and hearing and sniffing about, regarded merely as a dumb species, that is when we know the most of what is happening around us. How think thee we have survived nearly everywhere on the planet, friend, when gardeners and farmers spin out endless methods and theories for gassing us, trapping us, grinding us, choking us to death?

So let this be a warning, bureaucracies. There will always be moles. There will always be Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs and outraged citizens using their wise claws and snouts to see what you really are and what you are really about in your GULAGS. Respect us, dear reader, remember that we are not the species killing our own young or undermining our own existence with debt and taxes.

Take, for instance, a minor moment in the office where I burrow about. I appear bored and stupid during a conference call of excruciating mindlessness when suddenly I hear this from a county supervisor of something or other: “It has come down from Obama [always here spoken with a tone of hushed reverence] that there will not be a single corner in the nation that is not served by free or cheap public transportation.” This stunning piece of news was followed by an announcement of opening new routes of public busses that will network across the state and even connect with Amtrak. Drivers are to be hired. Routes are to be GPS-ed. Computer programs will be “enhanced.”

Now I ask you, have you learned of this from any other source? A major policy slipping down through the bureaucratic system, unnoticed even by the Foxes of the earth. A fait accompli, no less. A tentacled extension of the fabled Stimulus monster. Ah, you see, there is much going on underground that only moles can detect. A shiver in the earth’s crust, a seismic quake, a tectonic shift. Something is going on: realities are coming into existence of which the country is not aware until it sees them already operating.

When no one is looking at work, I read and ponder the new edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, now uncensored and published in a new translation. If you want to know how bureaucracy worked in Soviet Russia, read this book. If you want to know how the same kind of bureaucracy is coming to this country, become a mole in the system Obama is creating. What you will learn is that what most people take as reality is being redefined daily. The Soviets did that so successfully for seventy years that the unwary simply no longer knew anything.

You object, and rightly so. The mole writing this works in a pleasant office with (mostly) pleasant people, mostly women. Like all bureaucrats they process endless stacks of paper, write down information, and file it in folders or computer programs. What could be sinister here? The secret is that in a bureaucratic universe nothing looks sinister: the maidens who filed index cards on the concentration camps looked sweet and talked of their weekends. On the surface it seems benign enough. But moles know that “on the surface” is a very incomplete picture of the garden. What is distinctive about bureaucracies—from ancient Sumeria on—is that they are non-teleological. The one question one never asks in here is “why?” If one (foolish as this writer) does, he meets with shrugged shoulders, sighs, uncomprehending stares, or censorious looks.

We will come back to this in Missive # 3. But permit me a digression. In my humble view, the two greatest writers of the twentieth century were Sigrid Undset and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They are now mostly unknown and dismissed in the American university, passed over for third-world and minority-culture scribblers no mole would allow in the garden. In 2005, I talked about Solzhenitsyn for an hour in my Utopia/Dystopia class and then asked if any of the 35 students had ever heard of him. No. I returned to my office which I shared with other part-timers and expressed my astonishment, only to have four teachers, ranging in age from 25 to 55, say “who?”

Undset, a Catholic who opposed the Nazis with her life, and Solzhenitsyn, who opposed the Communists with his life, are both great writers whose works . . . well, no need for panegyrics. Read them yourself. In 1985 Solzhenitsyn was one of the most well-known people in the world. His works were read and taught from high school to graduate school and his life was well known. What happened? He was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard. In it he said, in a nutshell, that though the Communist world was intolerable, the West was no model to follow—corruption, moral decadence, homosexuality, pornography, hatred of religion. The next morning the New York Times and the Washington Post flushed Solzhenitsyn into the lowest sewers of history, and he became an unperson. No one taught him any longer—what are you, a fascist reactionary? One still finds his works at the Good Will, but not in the university.

Here, read his speech for yourself: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html


I’ll be back,

Mole Series # 1

Note: the following four entries are from the Mole series posted on my former truewest blog. The fifth mole piece was posted on May 20 (see list).

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1
Note: The following sad piece of cultural detritus washed up on my leaf-strewn lawn in the mouldy, mouldy month of October. Soaked through with tears and small rice beer, it was encircled by Chinese rubber bands, and apparently tossed onto my premises by unseasonably heavy rains occasioned, no doubt, by global seething.

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

By which title you are to understand, dear happenstance reader, that I am a mole of the burrowing, semi-blind kind, a group of which is called by common tradition a labor, which is an apt description of what we do: we labor blindly. Our particular clan, the Mouldywarps of Yorkshire, once migrated to White County, Tennessee, and there let that matter rest.

Here, fallen upon hard times, I labor in a bureaucracy of the State, for vole crumbs and roots. My great great something Grimm-Molus, Viscount, said it all: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself."

Not any more. As my cousin the philologist, Warpus Root-Searcher, informed me, a bureau is a French desk covered with baize (yum!), and a –cracy means power. A bureaucracy is a power desk that seeks to dominate everything through rules, and a bureaucrat, no matter how mild in appearance, is nothing put a power addict seeking to devour. Satan, my grandfather Luminous Mouldywarp declared, is the supreme bureaucrat (cf. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters).

These missives from a mole are meant to deepen and understand exactly what it means to live in a State dominated and constituted by bureaucracy. Max Weber, the supposedly great (but very important) founder of sociology, said several prophetic things about a society under bureaucracy. One, he lauded a supremely efficient system based on hierarchy and rules that would supplant the traditional hierarchies composed of highly individualized (and therefore unpliable) human beings; two, he realized that bureaucracies could become inefficient when they tried to deal with individual persons and cases, which tend to become troublesome, have elbows and other odd characteristics, and often rebel against those who are only trying to serve their greater good.

Though only a semi-blind mole, I was once able to stay behind after closing hours in the Smithsonian and view an extraordinary exhibit of 19th century photographs of West African chiefs. I was, simply, stunned, and at first I did not know why. Then it came to me as I stood staring at photo after photo of chieftains staring directly at the camera: these men know exactly who they are, without self-doubt or irony or insecurity. Take any lineup from modern times, prisoners or welfare seekers or employees or students, and one can immediately see the contrast. Right away there is the fear that “I don’t really stand in my own shoes, I am waiting for definition from the system which I inhabit or clues from the passing scene of opinion; in fact I am a walking hunger for identity and what I am about, what so many of us are all about, is that desperate hunger, that erasure of the fear that my entire life—if I dare to think of all that in one moment—might amount to nothing after all.”

I am sure that there are other lineups that would yield the same impression as those African chiefs: saints, for instance; and occasional persons in our world who do in fact have complete affirmation down to their toes. One sees them occasionally, even from down here in the grass and roots where true moles dwell. Even a mole can be secure in moleness, as can that wretched cat that comes hunting me. But even being hunted can be wholly authentic because the fear is real, not neurotic.

But now, dear reader of this desperate missive, I am, as the poet said, losing myself, piece by piece, or so I fear. What I try to hold onto just now is my very moleness, which I have brought from the garden and am trying to reprise in the bureaucratic office to which I am confined many hours a week.

More to come.

The Rambler

Note: as promised, here is my childhood narrative. As I brainstormed and fretted--the work of all writers--I found that what I had intended to do at the first required a kind of introduction, which follows below. Perhaps the subject I started with in my brainstorming will appear in another piece. --RKC

The Rambler

When I think of my father, I think of him next to me, walking the streets in the morning mists and fog that rolled down from East River Mountain into the deep cut where the railroad ruled everything in our miniature metropolis. Bluefield, West Virginia, was indeed a small city then, distant from nearly everywhere but close to New York and Chicago because of the peoples on its streets: Greeks, Italians, Russians, Spaniards, Hungarians, Poles, Chinese, Germans. The railroad brought them all into this high Allegheny country at the edge of the Blue Ridge and here, together with the colored people, as we called them then, and the mountain people who lived in the hollows and mountain fastnesses of Virginia, they made up the rich America I knew. It was the kind of knowing we all enjoy are when we are young, the knowing of wonderer with constant questions about the cosmos and its colorful tribes. It was the knowing people can have when they walk everywhere, which is what we did then. My father never owned a car—“every time you turn the wheel, they cost you money”—and his very existence for me was that of a man ambling through the streets of a wondrous city.

Sure, it didn’t always seem so romantic then, especially as I grew older and callow, but those early journeys were primitive and fabulous, indeed, me at five with long, golden locks tagging along on Odyssean ventures into a strange country, standing in fearful awe next to the tracks of the Norfolk and Western—fabulous, mysterious names: Rock Island Line, Baltimore and Ohio, Burlington Northern, Louisville & Nashville, the Southern, Lackawanna, Union Pacific, names on boxcars as indelible in my memory as the questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism: “Why did God make you?”—feeling the thunder of the big wheels as they rolled through the fog, seeing the red glow in the smokestack of the switch engines, and smelling the sour steam and metal sweat of the passenger locomotives, gods from some other world.

Now it seems to me that I cannot separate my walks with my father on those strange streets from my first education about the world. More, I cannot separate my father from his role as Chiron, the teacher and guide of the Greek heroes, or from his constant joy at showing me the things of this world. Now I can confess the juvenile impatience of being shown the same things over and over or hearing the same stories ad nauseam, but when I was five, eight, twelve, the newness was still on the places and people he delighted in showing me. Sitting perched on stools in Harry or Tom’s or Jimmy’s restaurants, hearing the noises of the waiters and kitchens and smelling the rich foods, hearing my father draw out men’s stories of foreign lands and labors, meeting the black-faced miners who worked underground and the conductors and engineers who knew the secrets of trains: I would happily go back to those places and days and be with my Dad, a teller of tales who was always showing me something new. I heard my first Jewish words (schlemiel, mensch, goy) and Jewish jokes from Shari, who ran the pharmacy and talked to my father as “one of those who know,” and my head was filled with the accents and dialects and tones of a hundred cities. Our Spanish landlord showed us how to make wine, our Greek friends asked me if everything was copasetic today, our Mediterranean neighbors gave us ripe olives, the Hungarians downstairs taught my mother cabbage rolls, and I ate pancakes with a Russian family when their son died, just as young Alyosha does in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

He himself, my mythic teacher, had his own tales of journeys. A country boy from the Kentucky bluegrass, at ten already working in stores and restaurants; at twelve packed off to an uncle in Harlan, Kentucky, where he saw gun battles in the mud streets and on swinging bridges and learned to wire houses in the coal camps; at sixteen a rambler on the rails, living and working in Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, and Washington, DC, where he became a “news butch” in Union Station and met two presidents; and in the Great Depression, riding the rails and living in hobo camps, until he finally landed in this strange city in the mountains with a job he dearly loved. He had started out with movie theaters turning the crank of silent films while his grandmother played the organ. Now he was a union motion picture projectionist in a “first run” theater.

So he had been places, knew things and peoples, and had, as we say nowadays “a lot of mileage.” From the way he talked, I sensed that he missed the road and those days of adventure, but as I entered my teens and worked with him at the theater and on wiring jobs on the side, I also sensed that showing new movies was his way of seeing—and showing—the mysteries of the world. There was always something new to know for him, but what really motivated him in all our times together was showing me something new and suggesting that there were secrets, inside stories that your average schlemiel or hillbilly did not know. There were other knowers, there were powers, there were movers and shakers, there were Edisons and Einsteins and people like Howard Hughes, inventors and entrepreneurs who made the world. They knew things, too, and the point was to become somehow like them.

From his secret place in the projection booth, we could peer through the windows at the latest films, and he could perform the tasks of all true teachers, pointing at things, naming them, sharing them, and in doing those things daily somehow we became partners in something far beyond the mundane tasks we performed. We walked to visit heroes and strange places, we talked of other worlds and of the inside stories of the world we lived in, and when we watched all this together, even when I was impatient and youthfully stupid, we knew a kind of love that is beyond all the books about it.

After the Swamps, the Sacred Caves

Note: An interlude: another re-posting from my old blog, I'll be back with more Sigrid soon.

“This is not a good time to be a Catholic,” I mused aloud over the very small fire where I, a very small fry, cooked my very small fish on that great Chestertonian tool, a very small stick.

“First the Notre Dame mess, then the new Irish scandal, then that monstrous book by Archbishop (retired in disgrace) Rembert Weakland, known among the faithful as ‘archbishop weakmind.’ And him a Benedictine! What would St. Benedict think? Then there’s Father Soft and Father Smooth. . . and all those sniveling so-called orthodox apologists counseling ‘be friends with Obama and he’ll change into a friend’ . . .”

“Enough,” said the gray-bearded hobo who had sat silently while I swatted swamp mosquitoes and tried to stay in the smoke. I had thought he was a mute beggar from a nearby shack town under a bridge, drawn by the sight of the tiny trout I had managed to scoop out of a shallow of the Caney Fork River.

“Enough,” he repeated, and looked me in the eye with eyes that knew suffering and truth, a surefire combination for catching my attention.

“Exactly what does all this scandal you speak of mean for you?” the old man asked. “For you personally, as they say in the sick salons of Antioch?”

“Well,” I said as I shifted uneasily and wondered about Antioch, down near Nashville, “for one thing I’m embarrassed in front of my Protestant friends. I’ve been spouting off for a long time about the timeless Rock of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and how we Catholics can depend upon its indefectibility and true teaching in a time of cultural confusion, and now it looks as if . . .”

“As if it really isn’t?”

“Exactly. I feel like a . . . fool.”

The old man laughed softly and drew forth a small pouch of bread and dates, which he offered.

“As if that great indefectible Church is full of heretics and governed by shepherds who have lost the way?”

I let my silence be my answer.

“Probably you will tell me that well over half of the so-called Catholics in those churches don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist? That the catechists are teaching a wealth of Arianism and all the other heresies that grow out of it? That the priests are playing patty cake with the Divine Liturgy? That the people fear the priests are doing more than playing patty cake with their children? That the Church Christ founded looks as if it’s foundering?”

“Well. . . I . . .”

“Embarrassed! My friends in the desert up this way say that if you do not weep for your sins, you have no hope of salvation. My dear fellahin, embarrassment about the Church is one of the steps on the road to hell. Do you think my friends in the caves up this road in Thebaid would not laugh you to scorn? If you cannot endure embarrassment for the Faith, then you will be like Peter warming his hands over the brazier in the courtyard and denying Christ for fear a serving maid might think him one of His followers. Embarrassed! You probably don’t like to admit to your urban friends that the altar of the great sacrifice contains the actual bones of martyrs. A bit savage? A bit uncouth? Maybe a bit Catholic?”

“Sir,” I said as we still say in Tennessee, “who are you? Where is Thebaid? And I don’t think there is a desert in Tennessee. Caves , yeah, we got aplenty, but . ."

“My name,” said the old man as he reared up tall and gaunt, and striking his crooked ash staff into the limestone shelf (I thought of Gandalf), “is Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and I have not seen the seat of my diocese for many a year.”

For a moment I thought he was mad, but his manner told me I had better think again.

“But, Sir, Athanasius lived in the fourth century in Africa.”

“No, Sir, Athanasius, and I am he, lives in eternity, or have you bought the teaching of Arius that the Word of God is not Eternal, and that we live only in the relativistic fogs of time?”

“No, Sir,” I cried indignantly, I am one of the faithful, the remnant, the Thomists, the ones trying to hold onto the truth. Like you, I . . . .” and I was about to sound like the traditionalist ranter I sometimes am.

Athanasius laughed softly. “Here, here, man, sit down and listen a moment. I am on my way to the caves up country and I do not have much time. A Roman legion send by the Emperor Julian is thrashing its way through this swamp behind me and they will be here within a few hours. Listen, the True Church is always pushed back into the swamps, the desert, the caves. Peter and Paul found it so, and every time Catholics forget how marginal and tough is the existence of the faithful, it runs into heresy and founders like the boat the apostles feared was sinking.”

“But you are a Doctor of the Church.”

“Yes, and doctors are called to the sick, which you are in danger of being, my friend, if you sit fretting about your pitiful state of embarrassment in front of your Protestant friends who may, after all, be the pre-Catholics we need to save our sinking boat. Heresy comes like a thief in the night and feeds on the rich foods we fancied we needed for our larders in the end times. It is like the mists over the swamps. When I was on the Nile in a small boat escaping from Emperor Julian’s plans to re-paganize the Christian world, an Imperial Galley nearly caught me and my few companions. I told my friends, ‘row toward the galley.’ The soldiers cried out, ‘have you seen the traitor Athanasius?’ My friends called into the fog, ‘he’s close. He went that-a-way,’ and so we escaped."

"Dear friend,” Athanasius chuckled, “I am a shepherd of the Catholic Church but I have been banished five tines and this is my seventeenth year in exile, and just now I am on my way to the caves where the followers of St. Antony dwell, where I will prepare my arguments against Arianism—again—for the next Council, which will come, yes, it will come, for the True Church will always recover. ‘My soul is troubled,’ Our Savior said in a troubled time. Do you think that your troubles are different from the trouble that He suffered in the desert and on the way of the Cross? Troubles, man, how do you think we felt when the Emperor Julian died and his successor revoked our banishment and then his successor—that was back in ought-365—banished all the orthodox bishops all over again? Excuse me, I must hurry, the hermits will be gathering for their weekly Mass.”

I stirred the ashes of the fire and looked downstream at a bird swooping to catch a small trout.

When I looked up he was gone and I, poor fool, was renewed in hope and courage, as we always can be, when we go to the saints, the doctors, the martyrs, and away from the nations furiously raging and the pundits, Catholic and non, telling us how to think.

SIGRID UNDSET SERIES CONTINUES

Undset's home at Lillehammer


Sigrid Undset: The Slavery of the Modern Mind


It’s 1905 in Norway, and the world we know in 2010 is already happening:

Birth control—living together—adultery—divorce—broken homes—free sex and free love—free thinking—socialism—modernist theology—feminism—democracy—college loans (!)—public schools and educationism—the new morality—the end of religion—scientism—“that horrible medievalism”—spiritualism and new age theologies—political correctness—anti-Catholicism—mass media madness—mental slavery—the Servile State—the Catholic Renascence of the 20th century.

An “intellectual” in 2010 would be just as much at home with Paul Selmer’s divorced, modern parents, members of the Norwegian upper class, as they are with the academics and government functionaries of our time. For the modern mind is enslaved by its concept of freedom.

For young readers of this piece, your patience, please. You will have to do some chronological reorienting to grasp Undset’s wise imaginings. Indeed, if you read all the works of Sigrid Undset, you will have gained a profound education of your historical imagination.

Paul Selmer’s story begins in The Wild Orchid (1929) and continues in The Burning Bush (1930), two novels that Sigrid Undset published together under the title The Winding Road. By the time she wrote these novels and several others I will be looking at in this series, Undset was world famous. In 1928---only the third woman to have earned this honor--she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize was given in recognition of her massive achievement in writing two novels set in medieval Norway—the 13th and 14th centuries—Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy, and The Master of Hestviken, a tetralogy.

So Sigrid Undset is writing of 1905-1928 from the perspective of 1929-1930 just after years of imagining in the 13th and 14th centuries. More, she is writing from the perspective of a convert to Catholicism who was, after an annulled marriage, received into the Catholic Church in 1924, though she had been moving toward the Faith since the end of WW II. And by 1929-1930, she had spent seven years after settling in her country home at Lillehammer writing two of the greatest novels ever written, both set in medieval Catholic Norway. Now she was prepared, in making the story of Paul Selmer's conversion to Catholicism, to face modern Norway head on.

As one is able to gather from reading her modern fictions, for Sigrid Undset to convert to Catholicism in the Norway of the Jazz Age was as startling for her contemporaries as a movie actor of our time to convert to—-not Catholicism as it exists in most parishes in America-—but to traditional Catholicism, which survives now in a few religious orders, traditional parishes, Byzantine rites, and the Traditional Latin Mass communities struggling to survive in a sea of cafeteria Catholicism, where they are viewed as cranks, throwbacks, or simply (as with many modernist priests) enemies to be stamped out. A Catholic reader online comment on an article about bringing the traditional Mass back wrote “medievalists! Ugghhh! Evil!”

No term in modern usage is more loaded with opprobrium and hatred than “medieval.” And no term in the modern vocabulary is used with so much ignorance. Read Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, and for many hours, you will live in the authentic middle ages. Sigrid Undset was the daughter of an archeologist who specialized in the Iron Age. She grew up in a household filled with swords, iron age tools and artifacts, and the tales of old Norway. She breathed the atmosphere of all that daily. Through that deep immersion, she came to write—in 1909—her first medieval novel, which followed several realistic modern novels, Gunnar’s Daughter. Life raw, rough, brutal, and pagan, as frank as any of the Icelandic sagas she knew. In this early period, Undset began to strike themes that she followed through all her works: the natural virtues of pagan life; the spiritual emptiness of neo-pagan modern life in the 20th century; the centrality of love, marriage, and family to human existence and the fundamental change that Christianity brings to them.

The last sentence may suggest that Undset came to see life through the tinted lens of a sentimental Christianity. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is why she took the occasion of a speech in New York (1942) to speak directly to other Catholic writers, many of whom she knew had fallen into this trap. When a philosopher friend of mine held a weekly Catholic book study for parish ladies in Texas and asked them to read Kristin Lavransdatter, one lady came back distraught, “but she’s a bad girl!” No, Undset, told Catholic writers, “tell the truths you have to. Even if they are grim, preposterous, shocking. After all, we Catholics ought to acknowledge what a shocking business human life is. Our race has been revolting against the Creator since the beginning of time. Revolt, betrayal, denial, or indifference, sloth, laziness—which of us has not been guilty in one or more or all these sins some time or other? But remember you have to tell other and more cheerful truths, too; of the Grace of God and the endeavor of strong and loyal, or weak but trusting souls. Ad also of the natural virtues of man created in the image of God, an image it is very hard to efface entirely.”

Though the grim saga style of Gunnar’s Daughter is different from the style in The Winding Road, the angle of vision remains the same, but is only deepened by her conversion and the years of steeping in medieval life. Undset sees the full landscape of the natural world—one must marvel at her minute knowledge of it, which never becomes a mere stage set—and she sees history in its the pagan, modern, and Catholic dimensions all at once, with exactness and penetration. The characters are richly complex and alive—-in one sense, she has no minor characters. Each person appears full blooded and unsubordinated to plot, and in any few pages of her narration, one knows them as one knows oneself.

The world of The Winding Road is like that. Right away we are plunged into human life in all its social, psychological, spiritual, and political complexity. 1905 is a turning point in Norway’s history, when its parliament declared independence from Sweden’s monarch, who had ruled the joint kingdom for centuries. We meet the modern world in the constant collision of Paul Selmer’s mind with his mother’s and those of many others. Paul is a bright young man facing all the questions of human life with no guide of any kind other than the honesty of his native wit. He is a young man who observes the world around him, which most modern young men fail to do. It is always easier to simply call oneself a “liberal” and accept the current wave of opinion. As Socrates knew, that is the happy relativist way.

Such observation brings Paul to sharp conclusions, like this one: “People became so unbearably narrow minded when they were emancipated.” And in observing the political warfare of his day in the wake of the emancipation from the Swedish crown: “Socialism would probably triumph, because the whole tendency of the age—mechanical, technical civilization—was to place power in the hands of the most numerous, not the most intelligent.” Having no religious background whatsoever, Paul is nevertheless not willing to share the horror of his secular, atheist friends nor the thin platitudes of either traditional Lutherans or the gnostic progressivism of the more modernist Lutherans of the Norwegian State Church, most of whom sound like liberal Protestants in America or their next of kin, the modernist Catholics of the post-Vatican II era. Paul wants to know the truth.

All around him he hears the siren calls of the “new morality” of the modern age. “The new morality—all he could see was that it was spreading and shooting up merrily; presumably it was as old as the human race, as you can see when a forest has been cleared or trees blown down by the wind: the saplings that shoot up and spread have mostly been growing there before, in the shadow. In time the forest is there again—a new morality. That is to say, there are cases when the belt of the forest shrinks—wastes and pasture take its place. Then there is nothing to be done—in that way a country is impoverished, unless people are willing to make sacrifices and wait a long time for a return.”

In Norway that was, and is, a long wait indeed. As the Reformation blight spread to the North, the Catholic Church, made illegal, disappeared in a few decades. It was finally permitted and reappeared in the late 19th century, but as Paul sees, it is regarded with repugnance, as something only ignorant people could possibly join. Paul’s journey is a long one—complicated as such journeys often are by sex and love. But I think the reader will find what I have observed in all Undset’s writing from the early “realism” to her last tales. There are no false steps. I never find a scene, a dialogue, a narrative that does not ring true to the depths. In my essay on Dickens (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0387.htm), I emphasized that the whole art of true tale-telling hangs on one thing, what next? For only with a deep knowledge of human nature can the poet know that. And that is what makes for great fiction that captivates the human heart.

I hope that someone who needs The Winding Road will find it and read it. One word of caution. If you are a mainline Protestant or a cafeteria, modernist Catholic (same thing?), you will not easily recognize the Church to which Paul Selmer converts in Norway. It’s the real thing.

Stay tuned.




Note: Where does one get the novels of Sigrid Undset? All the great medieval ones have been in print, in many languages, since they first appeared. I suspect she is the most unknown and most read authors of the 20th century. I get most of the non-medieval titles from www.alibris,com, which I patronize for several reasons. They offer books for second-hand prices, and using them permits me to support small book sellers all over the world, something Paul Selmer would have approved. One has to check this site constantly, for out-of-the-way titles come and go quickly, especially the cheap ones. In this way I have been able to get inexpensive copies of Undset’s non-fictional works such as Catherine of Siena (this slightly marked up and dog-eared copy came from the Sydney Public Library which, like most public libraries today, purges good books, and Saga of Saints, a history of Norway through the lives of its many saints. This very clean copy came from the Villa Madonna College Library in Kentucky, which like almost all Catholic college libraries today, also purges the good books young people need. Happy hunting! To be a seeker after truth these days, one must build one’s own precious library.

SIGRID UNDSET SERIES

Periodically I will be posting reflections on my current exploration of the writings of Sigrid Undset (1882-1949). See my earlier entry on this blog. Above, several Norwegian stave churches from the days when Catholicism was the only religion in Norway.

Coming shortly on the world’s slowest blog, Sigrid Undset and the slavery of the modern mind. Any minute now.

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 5

I have received a damp, soil-streaked letter from my friend the Mole, here pictured, perhaps his final communiqué from the belly of the beast.

Dear Failed Hermit,

I have been happy to provide you with Underground Missives from my cubby hole in the lowest level of the giant state bureaucracy that rules what is absurdly called the United States. Here I have learned that the longer one stays in any kind of bureaucratic position, the less one is able to understand what bureaucracy does to the mind, as my previous posts demonstrate. One is less and less able to see anything truly—and for a mole, that is a precarious position indeed. What seemed absurd to one’s mind last week becomes gradually normal, then tenable, then “true.”

Not really true, for as St. Thomas Aquinas, a famed Dominican mole of some note, truth is correspondence of what is in the mind with the real thing. I had the Latin for that here somewhere, but my bosses have no doubt purloined it. Since there is no reality in Bureaucracia, and no mind as well, the best we can say is that the person shaped by bureaucracy has become numbed to the truth, and dwells with Milton’s fallen angels in a lake of self-deception. “Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.” Indeed.

In the analyses already posted on your blog—love that word, so earthy—I have tried to suggest that bureaucracy is the perfect expression of the modern state, which is the perfect incarnation of the statist frame of mind, easily opening into national socialism, Marxist socialism, Maoism, Pol-Pot-ism, and all the rest. Your local file drawers in the nearest State office can, with a slight tweaking, serve for those in Dachau.

Living in such a society increasingly fashions the person as a bureaucratic integer. Pass any citizen on the street and you will see a person rapidly forgetting he is a person and, for that matter, what a person is. He has become such a tangled bundle of scraps of media, restrictions, statutes, laws, processes, numbers, codes, plastic cards, contradictions, prohibitions, inhibitions, that he is unable to see or think.

Let’s take an example. Last week this poor scrivener was called on the carpet to answer the charge that he had had the effrontery to render an opinion. The case? He was accused, before God and mole, of having written a comment on the section of a form entitled ”comment.” Ehhh? You say?

The form in question reports the result of testing for job suitability back to the employment counselor who sent the client to me. In the case in question, the client had performed remarkably well and had what is called above ground a “good attitude.” A bit effervescent for my taste, but nevertheless a good candidate for receptionist. So I wrote in the Comment section, “very enthusiastic person,” and that was enough to bring Olympus down on my head.

“You do not write comments in the comments section!”

“What do I write?"

“NOTHING!”

“Never?”

“Well, you may write ‘no show’ if the client does not show up for an appointment.”

Well, you say. So what? Don’t take it so seriously, Mole.

I would not if it were not part of an insidious pattern. Go ahead, recommend Prozac, send me off to bureaucrat rehab to learn form logic.

Try this one: each client is asked to place his initials on some twenty places on the forms to indicate agreement. No initialee, no testee. Several of the places which the client must initial ask him to agree that he has received certain handbooks—which he has not. One indicates permission to be photographed and waives the right to inspect the photograph for any use whatsoever. One allows our agency to access all medical information, And so on. Thus in order to be tested, and therefore in order to be referred for possible employment, the client must both lie and cede any right to confidentiality or privacy.

In my experience, only a few clients resist this mockery. Most sign as merrily as druggies on the way to the electric chair—but those who mildly protest, too, after some genteel mumbling behavior on my part—for which I am sure I will have to answer in a purgatory court-realize that it is better to submit to insanity than not have a job. Welcome to what Hilaire Belloc called The Servile State.

One more and I am done, this old mole, down here burrowing for the roots of things. The clients take three computerized tests. Each test passed is graded by the computer as GOLD, SILVER, or BRONZE. If the client scores three GOLDS, his score is GOLD. If he earns two GOLDS and a SILVER, his score is SILVER. If he earns two SILVERS and a BRONZE, his score is BRONZE. So a person who earns two GOLDS and a BRONZE is ranked on the same level as a person who earns three BRONZES.

When this dumb mole protests that this is unfair and unreasonable, the answer is shrugged shoulders, smirks, strange giggles, incoherent remarks, or the five-thousand-mile bureaucrat stare, for the first law of the bureaucratic state is that no individual has any power, authority, or right to think about anything whatever. OR, YOU GET NO RAT PELLETS! Or in my case, you do get mole pellets, i.e., you are allowed to take the cyanide.

So, Sir Hermit, I am withdrawing deeper and deeper into the basements of bureaucracy, mumbling more and more uncontrollably, losing my mole-soul piece by piece. I dream of escape but am more and more unable to move my muscles. I cry. I scream. I pray much. Benedicite!

The Mole