First Published: 2023 December 10
I know that I try to have a deep and meaningful1 reflection about the Gospel each week, but I find that my mind isn’t really catching on any of the many available hooks that the readings are filled with. As seems to be my custom, there is a part of the reading that I struggle with.
In the first reading, we hear the Prophet Isaiah say that a voice cries out to prepare a way in the desert.2 In the Gospel, however, we are told that the Prophet Isaiah says that a voice in the desert cries out.3 Interestingly, both happen in the third verse of the chapter, for all that the first happens in the fortieth chapter and the other in the first chapter.
Now, what about this bothers me, especially as a person who knows that ancient languages had a much different approach to punctuation than modern people do? Primarily, it’s the fact that if there was no punctuation, we4 could have made the two line up. But, we didn’t.
I’m sure that there’s some deep spiritual meaning for this, for all that I cannot find it. The commentary on the USCCB website notes that, despite claiming to be a direct quote from Isaiah, there are references to other prophets’ prophesies.5
So, let’s take the readings where I’m at today. The first reading reminds us that struggles are both temporary and meant as purification. Any hardship we endure now is either to cleanse us from some past wrong or6 to prepare us for some future glory.
One part I find interesting is the idea that the geography of the world is something less than perfect. There is a heresy that became popular near the Enlightenment7 known as the Watchmaker G-d. This heresy states that, much like a watchmaker, who carefully sets gears and winds a watch before stepping away, the Lord created the universe, along with all of its laws, and then stepped back to watch and see what happened.
Of course, as a scientist, I believe something similar. As a Catholic, though, there is room for nuance, which I find very important. So, where’s the nuance?
First, an obvious contradiction to the Watchmaker8 is the existence of miracles. The water turning into wine or Our Lord’s rising from the dead cannot happen without active intervention. Even in the modern day, miracles are still performed wherever the Lord sees that it would most help the faithful.9 It goes deeper than that, though.
One thing that the Watchmaker heresy implies, however accidentally, is the preexistence of nature. A watchmaker does not conjure the gears and hands of a watch from the formless void. He may shape them from metal, but even the ore he gets comes from some other cause. In contrast, the Lord created the universe from nothing.
So, it’s an imperfect metaphor at best. All metaphors are, which is why they’re symbolic rather than literal. What else is wrong with the Watchmaker?
The crucial issue in the Watchmaker heresy is the idea that the Lord stopped. When a watchmaker finishes his work, the watch is done, and he can sell it or give it away. Without the Lord constantly willing reality to remain, we would cease. At every moment of every day, we are sustained and continued solely through Love. Our Creator is not some dispassionate worker toiling for His pay. Our Creator made us with Love, from Love, and for Love.
Returning to the readings, we see an oblique reference to this in a letter from the first Pope. St. Peter reminds us that, though we experience life in something resembling a linear fashion10, the Lord does not. For Him who is outside of time, everything happens as it should. It is a hard concept to imagine, for all that I know that it’s essential for mathematicians, who often visualize high dimensional spaces.
I’m reminded of a movie11 called Flatland. In it, a two dimensional creature is exposed to the concept of three dimensions, in part by seeing zero and one dimensional existence. Thinking of it like that helps me resolve the whole “how does Free Will work when G-d knows every thought I’ve had before I have it?” How, exactly, it works with miracles or the Divine Revelation, which explicitly happened to a specific people at a specific time, though, remains a mystery. For all that I can trust that it is true, I would not be able to give a reasoned defense should that be someone’s stumbling block to joining the Church.
So, where are we? The readings appear to contradict themselves, for all that I know that any punctuation we add is a modern decision. The universe is not a machine created by someone thoughtless, but a treasured love of Love Himself. Time is an illusion, albeit one we are bound to.
I feel that this is as good a place as any to end.
Daily Reflection:
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? Remains at work, and I’m ok with that fact.
Did I play guitar today? I replaced the strings! It’s always wild to me how much of the upper end I lose when the strings get old, but also how much I kind of prefer my strings to not have particularly high overtones.
Did I practice touch typing today? A few lessons, and I managed to work my way back up to the letter c, for all that I didn’t manage to beat or even improve it.
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? I realized that I’m listening to a lot of audiobooks recently, and there’s no reason that I can’t read some of the books I want to have read via audio means. Checked out the two that seemed available from my local libraries, and put a third on hold, I think.12
Did I read the book on craft? Tomorrow is always a day away.
Have I read the library books? see above.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? Whoops! Almost forgot.
Did I revise a sonnet? Have made ideas for what poem(s) I’ll bring to the thing tomorrow.
Did I blog? I almost forgot to do the reflection, but yes!
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I broke the no Jeb on Sunday rule, writing about a third of a chapter.
Letter to friends? Considered the fact that I should write some, which is in a way kind of something resembling progress.
Paper? Without any guilt, I can say that I took the Lord’s day to rest.
Wellness
How well did I pray? Not the best but not the worst. I wrote most of this musing by the light of Hanukkah candles, which have only now extinguished themselves.
Did I clean my space? A tiny bit.
Did I spend my time well? Kind of? I took a nap which, while needed, always feels like it takes the entire day away.
Did I stretch? Nope! Got a shoulder massage, though, which is similar enough.
Did I exercise? Took the day off, because rest is important, probably.
Water? As happens on Sunday, I did much better in the morning because of singing, and then stopped.
at least to me↩︎
paraphrase of Is 40: 3a↩︎
paraphrase of Mk 1: 3a↩︎
St. Jerome translating to the Vulgate, which I think does have punctuation, or any of the people translating to English↩︎
also, apparently Malachai was the penultimate prophet, since he was the last until John the Baptist. I should really have known that, since it seems like an important fact↩︎
probably and, if we’re being real↩︎
wow there’s a lot of power in getting to choose the name of your movement↩︎
capitalized because it’s still a way, however imperfect, of referring to the Divine↩︎
I think? Honestly, why miracles happen is a mystery to me. If not for the fact that I think they might be a Mystery, I would probably be more bothered by that fact↩︎
relativity is the reason for resembling, to say nothing of the whole field of cognitive science which tells us that our experience of passing seconds is not objective↩︎
and the book the movie is based on, but I don’t have as close a relationship or dear a memory with the book↩︎
maybe just checked out one and reserved one, we’ll see.↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 9
Irish legend says that the airs1 to the most striking and memorable Irish folk songs were not composed, but discovered. Considering it that way, editing makes far more sense.
If what I write is not, in fact, a creation but a discovery, then editing makes complete sense. The words on the page are not the discovery, but my pale imitation of them. Like a sculptor with clay, I can remove or add material, shifting it as I need until I reach the shape that I see in my vision.
For all that I can imagine my writing as that, I tend not to. It feels a little too pretentious to say that the fun web serial I write about a boy wandering through life is some profound gift from the cosmos.2 I tend to think of my writing as the words that I put on a page.
When I think of writing in that way, editing becomes something hard. Deleting words is exactly destroying something I’ve created. Adding words is grafting something onto a creation.
As I’ve mused about editing over these past drafts, my own feelings on the art have changed. I think that my issue with editing stems directly from the fact that I consider the writing to be the action, rather than the mode of transportation. My goal is not to put specific words on a page, but to convey a narrative.
Of course, that becomes an issue of its own. If I do not know what narrative I’m trying to convey, how can I know which words belong? There are some obvious choices, such as avoiding cliche. Even if I know what I’m trying to convey, I also need to take a step even further back to consider why I’m trying to convey what I’m trying to say, and why via writing. Doing that takes far more mental effort than simply dumping words on a page and seeing where the story takes me.
And, I do not dislike the places that the story and my mind, less strictly filtered, tend to roam. I suppose that there’s something to be said for shaping what I have. When I see a piece of wood that kind of resembles a tiger, carving it to make it more closely resemble that shape is an obvious choice.
And so, I suppose that the answer has been in front of me this entire time. To become better at editing, I need to become better at divorcing my art from myself as artist. I need to see what I create as nothing but how well it communicates what I want it to say and who I want to say it to. If my goals have changed between drafts, it’s only reasonable that the words and structure would need to as well.3 Daily Reflection:
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? It’s still at work, so no, not so much.
Did I play guitar today? A little, I plan to do a little more after posting this because it turns out the place I used to play open mic at shifted the time earlier, so now I can actually go again.4
Did I practice touch typing today? I will once I finish this musing!
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? Not in the way that I meant the goal, but I have been listening to an audio book today.
Did I read the book on craft? I believe in my ability to do this tomorrow.
Have I read the library books? I also believe in my ability to do this tomorrow.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? Need to do that now. I’m not super happy with it, for all that there was a nice line or two.
Did I revise a sonnet? No, but I did make plans to revise on Monday, so excited to see my poem get kindly ripped to shreds.
Did I blog? I mused no less! Look at this abomination.
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I’m tired right now. I’m going to break my no Jeb on Sundays rule because I don’t want the panic of needing to write a chapter on Monday morning, and I don’t have the space to do it right now.
Letter to friends? Got one from a friend! It was really sweet.
Paper? Nope.
Wellness
How well did I pray? Not great.
Did I clean my space? A tad.
Did I spend my time well? The parts of today that were spent with others, yes. The rest of the day, not so much. I suppose that the time I’ve spent on this musing is time well spent.
Did I stretch? A little!
Did I exercise? I went to the gym with a friend, and that was really nice.
Water? Not enough, but I did try, which is worth at least a little
If we take a moment to imagine writing not as creating, exercising some small sliver of the Divine in what we do, and instead consider it like the early Irish considered song: something found.
I find it kind of funny that what really seems to separate the mediocre writers from the good writers from the great writers is not writing. Having listened to early versions of Piano Man, it is nothing like the final song that was released. Terry Pratchett famously rewrote his books over and over until each word was what he wanted. Editing is what separates the bad from the good writers.
It’s obvious once stated, of course. No one creates perfection constantly without needing to toss away words that don’t fit, or redirect a thought that’s strayed a little too far. However, it does feel strange that there is an entire art, editing, which is so vital to proper writing.
I think of the different activities that I do a lot.5 It’s a bit of an issue, because there isn’t really a way that editing is like anything except itself.
In music, I do occasionally delete lines that I’ve written. Of course, that is also editing. Playing music, however, I never unplay a note.
In reading, I can never forget having read a word. In fact, doing so would be actively harmful towards my ability to understand a text.
In cooking, ingredients don’t get separated once combined.
Maybe that’s why I have such trouble with editing. Probably because I analogize my different crafts so much, it’s become easier and easier for me to do so.
Working off of a recipe is like reading sheet music. Improvising a song is like trying a crochet project off of vague feelings. Writing something is like cooking a meal. Even when constrained, I have some freedom in what I choose to do.
What is editing like?
Editing is like trimming the fat off of a roast before cooking, so that you don’t have to deal with silver skin. But, you don’t add more meat6.
Editing is like practicing a difficult section of music until it flows. But, you don’t remove difficult notes7 when they don’t feel right, you play until they do.
Editing is like revising a pattern. Sure, that’s true, but that’s like saying the sky is like the air.
Of course, at this point, I kind of feel like I’m in a shifting goalposts meets no true scotsman land. If it feels like editing in a skill, I lump it into the craft of editing. Otherwise, whatever it is clearly is not editing.
This doesn’t even get into the whole issue of what the difference is between revising and editing and redrafting.
One of the hardest parts of writing is editing. It, like so much of life, requires balance and precision. Encouraging the voice in your head to edit too much or too quickly, and I8 find that it becomes nearly impossible to get anything down onto the page. On the other hand, I do know that it is an essential skill to develop. For all that my ability to write words well on the first attempt continues to grow, it has not made the writing I put out as much better.
A great analogy comes from music.9 Some might think that I’m going to say that writing is like writing music and revising is like revising music. That would be fun, but no.
Writing, generating new content, is like sight reading. It’s one of the most impressive things to do in front of someone, and in many respects, it is crucial to development as an artist. To become better at sight reading, the first thing to do is just try sight reading.
This gets its own analogy.10 I’ve seen a lot of lifting advice on the internet, describing exactly how best to optimize every second of one’s life around the gym. However, one piece of advice has stuck with me.
If you’re just starting lifting, as long as what you do is not actively wrong, it’s going to be more or less as effective as any other workout. Whether one should squat or leg press is a valid question, but if you do not have a history of lifting, doing either will help a lot. Only once plateauing does it really matter exactly how many reps and of what weight for how many sets on what workout you do.
Music is a similar way. For most people, the best way to get better at sight reading is to sight read. Honestly, for most people, the best way to get better at music is just to make music. I’ve blogged about that before, though it has been almost five years. My relationship with practice has changed a fair amount, which is probably fair, given that I no longer study music as an explicit part of my studies.
Anyways, I know without a doubt that I am past that point as a musician generally, for all that I am not past that point on every instrument.11 At this point, the way that I grow as a musician is by working on skills, and working intentionally. If we tie this directly to sight reading, I’m at the point in my musical career where I would benefit a lot from just practicing scales and common chord progressions, since that’s the basis of most compositions, and therefore makes it easier to sight read.
An, returning to the real point of this musing, right now I know that, while continuing to generate new words will still help me incrementally, right now I need to really focus on my craft. Now, there are a few ways that I’m trying to do so.
First, I’m trying to remember sensory cues as I write my fiction. I know that, among all of the many ways that my writing is lacking, that is the one that I am most prone to.
Second, I’m writing more poetry again. That, at a base level, forces me to remember how to construct a narrative in a limited number of words. It also makes me incredibly aware of the specific cadence of the words that I use, as well as their ability to rhyme. Though rhyming may not be incredibly necessary to my prose writing, cadence certainly is.
Third, as you might have noticed, I’m editing my writing more. I think that I might be starting to go too far, if my FFF from yesterday is any indication. I tried to start the story at least a dozen times, giving up within a few sentences.
Then again, a voice reminds me right now, none of the first dozen ways that I wanted to start a story were where I ended up. I took a few cute phrases or images from the first sentences into the next one. I am still worried that I’m getting to the point of writer’s block again, my internal editor shutting down any prose I try to write.
I’m reminded of some advice from the creator of NaNoWriMo. They recommend hiding your internal editor for the month, accepting that whatever you write may or may not be absolute garbage. I manage to do that, maybe too well.
However, there is a time for planting, and a time for harvesting. There is also, crucially in nearly every gardening book I’ve read12, a time for weeding, and a time to decide what you want to plant. As a writer, finding time to write is not the biggest struggle for me. It’s important to me, and I’ve gotten better about prioritizing it and not feeling guilty for doing so.
As a writer, finding opportunities to share my writing hasn’t been particularly difficult. I have my web serial, which lots of people seem to enjoy, and I have a few friends who read my blog and sonnets. That’s most of the writing I do, and it’s nice that it finds a home.
The time to decide what to write isn’t even something I really struggle with. For all that I often enough have trouble coming up with a musing idea, that’s never a problem that lasts more than like 4 minutes of trying to write something. At a step higher, I know that I need to write my web serial, my blog, and my sonnets.
And, while I could strain the metaphor further, talking about soil pH and making sure that you plant proper plants where they will receive ideal sunlight, to say nothing about seasonal considerations13, I will instead keep the metaphor relatively plain. Part of weeding, at least the way it exists in my mind, is also pruning. A fruit tree will grow more fruit, somehow, when its branches are effectively pruned. In theory, the same is true of writing.
Deleting words can make the sentence clearer, and can make what you are trying to say clearer. The book on writing well14 that I’m reading does focus on that a lot. The point of writing is connection. If the words you wrote do not serve to convey what you are trying to say, then they must go, just like the beautiful rosebud that needs to be snipped because it’s out of alignment.
So, why am I concerned? Well, if editing is like pruning15, then right now I’m worried that I might start pruning too far. The work might start to falter, unable to get the nutrients it needs.16
melodies↩︎
as I write that sentence though, I do have to remember my historic takes, which do include anything creative as being a small mirror of the Creator, and then it feels wrong to say that anything I craft does not, on some level, come to me as a gift↩︎
that’s really what they call meta writing wow. I’m honestly really proud of that sentence↩︎
the mic starting at 9 is difficult when my bed time is like 9:20↩︎
unsurprisingly, since I, you know, do them, and generally think a lot↩︎
or, at least, I don’t add more meat. If you use meat glue, that’s between you and the mirror↩︎
or, at least, you shouldn’t.↩︎
there’s probably something wrong with the sudden person shift, but I am fine with it↩︎
I was reminded of the fact that I have not touched my instruments in far too long today, and so that might be why it’s on my mind right now↩︎
which I should get rid of in the future drafts? maybe? This musing can ramble on and I’m actually ok with that↩︎
ope I’m also probably near that point as a lifter, but less so. Hmm, actually I’m probably not right now. For all that I know about what weight I can do, it’s not enough of a routine for me to feel like I’m plateauing yet↩︎
Yes, the number is far greater than one, no I don’t want to explain why, no it wasn’t just a phase (I think that it was like one a year for a while)↩︎
to name just a few↩︎
hah, get it↩︎
yes, I’ve changed the metaphor, deal with it↩︎
I’ve lost control of the metaphor. Whoops↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 8
Another Friday means another FFF! This week’s theme is “Fool me once,” and I have so many different ways to interpret that prompt. Most of the ways that I can consider this phrase being used are in a negative context.
Even the positive contexts tend to still have an edge of lying to them, as you might expect from the fact that there’s absolutely an implication of misleading. As someone who enjoys a good verbal puzzle, though, there should be a way to make this work. I think that I’m going to try for fiction again, and this time I’m going to write drafts of it until I run out of time this morning writing session.1
Alright, time to do a retrospective on the whole project. It was really interesting the way that my mind took the question. At first, I kept wanting to make the prose explicitly poetic, which was really not the goal.
I iterated through a number of ways to consider tricking as a positive. At first, I took it as like the simple sleights of hand that you can do to amuse a child. Somehow, though, none of those felt right. Maybe it’s because they were first person, and maybe it’s because I just didn’t like them.
I left small reflections to myself after each attempt failed. One still sticks out to me, “I’m thinking something about how joy is an illusion I choose to believe in.” That really resonated as what I wanted to write about today.
From there, it was a bunch of iterations to pick the main character2, the premise3, and the tense. I ended up choosing present tense, which I think gives the fiction something of a dreamy feel. There’s something really strange about writing in the present tense. Normally, everything happens in the past, and the narrative records that. In present tense, though, each action is passing by as you read it.4
An unnamed and undescribed5 man is sad and walking down the street. He encounters a stranger, who decides that they know each other. Eventually,6 the lie is revealed, and the two continue speaking. As the story ends, each of the physical descriptors from the opening lines are repeated, but the emotional connections have changed.
Rather than trudging7 through slush and grey ice, he walks through fallen snow. I think that I like it, for all that it’s still a little more of a vignette than I might want. It’s only 360 or so words, so I do technically have plenty of space if I want to change it, but I don’t think that I want to add anything more. I’ve rewritten the ending, and now it feels fine.
Honestly, I think that one issue I have is with flash fiction going up to a thousand words. This musing is currently about five hundred. A story that has twice as many words as this feels like it’s a markedly different project, for all that I should probably try to get back into writing longer flash fictions. I’ve now posted this story, so there’s nothing I can really do to change it. It feels good to put my writing out, for all that I have now been falling behind on Jeb.
Daily Reflection:
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? Yesterday I finished a project, which was nice. Today I took the day off, and I just realized I forgot the supplies at work, so will probably take the weekend off as well.
Did I play guitar today? I did! I even retuned it back to standard tuning.
Did I practice touch typing today? I did a single lesson. It’s nice that I’m slowly learning, for all that it still takes a fair amount of effort to use the right finger al the time, and I still need to work on it.
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? I gave up on one book and started the next one, which is a good choice.
Did I read the book on craft? It’s laying8 open next to me, but I don’t think I’ll get to it today.
Have I read the library books? Not for a few days, no.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? Wrote one yesterday, it was a lot.9
Did I revise a sonnet? Revised the one from yesterday more than a few times.
Did I blog? So yesterday’s blog does exist. It was a very emotionally charged piece, and as I’ve said since the first musing, for all that I treat this in theory as a diary, I do recognize very much that there are limits to what I can feel comfortable posting. I shared the thoughts with a friend, who agreed.
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I was advised to take from Christmas to New Years off from posting, which is probably healthy for em.
Letter to friends? Nope, turns out a letter got returned though.
Paper? Not as much as I’d like.
Wellness
How well did I pray? Much better, honestly. I made it through a rosary last night, made time this morning to go to a bit of Adoration, and made it to Mass early enough this evening10 that I had plenty of time for prayer.
Did I clean my space? A little.
Did I spend my time well? Today flew past me so incredibly quickly.
Did I stretch? Nope.
Did I exercise? About to.
Water? Finally remembering to, at least a little, which is nice.
I reserve the right to work on the project more than this amount, but I will absolutely spend at least the next forty minutes working↩︎
an unnamed he↩︎
discussed later↩︎
and they call it meta writing↩︎
Shoot! I need to work on physical cues. Hold on, going to revise the story one more time↩︎
like 50 words later. This fiction is not long↩︎
which wow what a fantastic word↩︎
lying? I always forget which is which↩︎
in that it was incredibly emotionally charged and I felt a deep connection to it↩︎
Happy Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception by the way↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 6
Yesterday’s musing finally showed me what my greatest struggle has always been as a writer, especially a persuasive writer: I don’t know how to write conclusions. Let’s look at the musing as a case study.
I had an idea: science as mysticism. I explored what that could mean, at least in a few variations. I would like to think that I even got so far as maybe showing that science and mysticism are, on some level, at least, reflections of the same thing. I stopped before saying what that meant though.
As I’ve worked through this draft, I think that where the musing needed to go was one step further. The point of the musing was that if science is mysticism, then we can approach truths we know about mysticism to science. That is, in contrast to the post modern ideal of truth as fundamentally a human1 construction, I believe that truths are something we uncover that point to a greater truth. I’m not sure whether the word I’m looking for is epistemology or metaphysics, but I know that there is a word for method of determining truth. Whatever that word is, every one is fundamentally limited, because it relies on defining truth in a way that cannot work for all facts.
Mathematics, being applied philosophy, explains this well. It can be demonstrated2 that there are always facts that cannot be solved for within a given set of axioms. One of those facts is the validity of the set itself.3 We can see that with science as a whole.
Science works because the universe behaves the same way from day to day. Science cannot prove that this is true.4
Because science can only answer questions about measurables, it can obscure just as much as it can illuminate.5 An issue that I’ve noticed, especially among non religious and non spiritual6 is a tendency towards scientism, solipsism, postmodernism,7 or nihilism. All four8 are understandable, for all that I find each view point fundamentally wrong.9
What’s wrong with each of them, and how does tying science to mysticism help, though?10 Great question, me. Let’s go through and find out.
Scientism is the claim that only things which are measurable and material are real. How do concepts like justice work under this viewpoint?11 As is pointed out in a Discworld book, if you grind the universe into a fine powder and run it through an atomic sieve, you will not find a single mote of justice.
Scientism has a fairly strong defense to justice, however. We can demonstrate that whatever variable we seek to maximize12 is increased or decreased by varying certain conditions. The visual that there are punishments to crimes leads to a reduction of crime.13
By tying science to mysticism, however, this worldview is untenable. We cannot prove what happens after death with rigorous experimentation. Spiritual truths cannot be measured with a mass spectrometer.
Second is solipsism. I don’t actually know many people who will verbally admit to this view, for all that it’s fundamental to modern understandings of morality and really anything. Solipsism tells us that, as Descartes points out, the only thing we can know is our own mind. Everything else could be a figment of our imaginations or anything else. I have no clue how justice works in solipsism.
Mysticism tells us that there is, in fact, fundamental truth outside of self. At its core, mysticism is removal of self from the body, if only for a moment.
Third, postmodernism. There are any number of definitions for postmodernism14, but most boil down to a disbelief in absolute truth. Reality is what we agree upon, and truth claims are fundamentally claims of power.15 Justice works because those in power convince the rest of us that society functions better when we follow the rules and conventions.
To be fair, mysticism isn’t really needed to combat postmodernism. The fact that science can measure objectively is itself an argument. By tying it to mysticism, though, we are able to get to the root of the postmodern argument. Mysticism is connection with the Divine. Postmodernism fundamentally relies on the absence of anything divine.
Finally, we have nihilism. Honestly, as a Christian, nihilism is a fairly compelling argument. As far as everything we can measure suggests, the universe ultimately runs independently of any observation, and in time will die. The grandest human accomplishments will die when our planet does, and in time every piece of every one of us will become iron, totally inert and dead in a universe as cold and static as the grave.16
Mysticism, which reminds that the universe is not an object of itself, but is an object lovingly and constantly sustained by its Creator, reminds us that the small and everyday actions we take do have cosmic importance.
Anyways, I think that going to here could have been a good thing in the previous musing, for all that I still think it doesn’t go far enough. So what, other worldviews are wrong? I already believed that before writing this musing, and I don’t think that these arguments are any more convincing than the others against the views. What is actionable about tying science to mysticism?
I think that what I really needed to do is have a “what does this mean for the reader.”17 There’s an idea floating around in my head that I cannot quite get to crystallize.
I think that it’s something about the importance of doing scientific work, as it brings us closer to G-d. I think there’s also something in it about the humility we need to have as researchers.18 In most of the musing, I tried to convince that mysticism is like science. Flipping the paradigm, though, gives the conclusion.
Mystics speak of how immensely small they are in relation to He who Created us. As a scientist, I need to remember that any revelation I have in my work is just as much a function of the Divine as any holy apparition.19 I am not creating knowledge, I am little more than a child who has been gently led to the smallest trickle of the truth. I am led by someone who loves me and knows that the rushing torrents of Truth are too much for me right now, and I need to slowly be coaxed towards them.
What does this mean for concluding my musings in general, though? As we pull back from the case study, I see that I really only do about half of the plotting for a musing that I need to. I say what I have for an idea, but I don’t connect it to a change in worldview. How should my worldview change here?20
Edit: Upon reflecting after writing this but before posting, I think there’s a major element of fear. The more that I try to finalize an argument, the more of myself I put in it, and the more that I worry about someone disagreeing with my take.
Daily Reflection:
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? Nope! Will hopefully remember to take it out of my car, though.
Did I play guitar today? I did! I need to tune out of DADGAD and replace strings soon, though.
Did I practice touch typing today? I did! Wow I cannot learn c I guess.
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? A little! I’m beginning to debate dropping one of the books, because I don’t know if I’m really gaining anything for reading it. It’s one of those three hundred or so page books that really just repeats the same idea for pages and chapters on end.
Did I read the book on craft? I did! Set aside fifteen minutes and read. It was really interesting, and right now I’m in the section on learning to read better.
Have I read the library books? Not yet. Will hopefully do so tonight.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? It was such an interesting sonnet. I should really explore it more
Did I revise a sonnet? I had to pick new rhymes a few times for this one, because as it turns out, neither voice nor farce have a plethora of rhymes.
Did I blog? Look at this metablog
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I’m most of the way through Friday’s chapter, which is technically ahead.
Letter to friends? Nope.
Paper? I thought about what my paper is missing, which is kind of like work if you squint.
Wellness
How well did I pray? Terribly.
Did I clean my space? I’ve picked all the low hanging fruit, which means that at this point cleaning becomes hard again.
Did I spend my time well? Eh, not really. I tried, though, and that’s worth something.
Did I stretch? Forgot to stretch yesterday and this morning, did so.
Did I exercise? Forgot to do so this morning, did the minimum. Planking is starting to get hard.
Water? Better? I refilled my bottle once today, at least, which is good.
Yesterday’s musing reminded me of something that I’ve struggled with in my writing. I don’t know if it’s a recent change, or whether it’s just something that I didn’t care about in the past. Regardless, I’ve realized that I struggle with conclusions.
Let’s look at yesterday’s musing as a sample case. I had an idea: science is mysticism. I was able to explore how I felt like the two could be connected. That is, I worked backwards from the thesis, giving background.
Once I found the background, though, I gave up. Or, rather, I found that I had nothing else to say. What does it mean if mysticism and science are fundamentally the same? One reader summed it up best “you stopped just when the musing was starting to get good.”
As I think about the issue, I realize it’s something that I consider almost fundamental to the way that I view the world. Justifications for research have always seemed strange to me. After all, what reason do we really need for learning something more than “we didn’t know the answer to this, and now we do”? Most people do not agree with that take, however, and since I’m getting to the point in my life where I need to start putting out research for the broader public, it’s probably worthwhile to think about what the overall goal of anything I do is.
So, let’s return to the case study.21 What does linking science to mysticism do? I find that I’m immediately struck with the fact that there’s not one single answer22 that satisfies. I think that I tend to take the easy way out when there are a plethora of potential options. Rather than explore a single path, acknowledging that I will necessarily not travel down the other trails of answers, I simply point the reader and myself to a fork in the road and say “go forth and explore.”
So, let’s try to combat that, at least a little. What are some things that viewing science and mysticism as two manifestations of the same experience does or could do?
Makes mysticism seem more legitimate. Modern society tends to be incredibly in favor of believing what science says23, and dismissive of the universality of spiritual truths.
Makes science seem more personal. There’s a push in science these days to start accepting that, at the very least, the questions that scientists choose to answer are not always objectively chosen. That is, even at the most conservative version of the argument, science has inherent bias because of the questions that we choose to answer and have chosen to answer in the past. I don’t know of anyone who thinks of mysticism as anything but a fundamentally personal experience, even when the knowledge is then spread to the wider world.
Clarify the fact that science is fundamentally limited as a method of revelation? There’s something here, and it’s bothering me like a loose tooth. I might need to fiddle with it a little more to figure out what I’m trying to say there.
Develop a metaphysics which works with both scientific and religious revelation? I think that I do really want to write this on some level, but I haven’t read anywhere enough about it. Given how many great scientists have also written about the connection of faith and their research, I’m sure that someone has to have written about this, to say nothing of the fact that I don’t even have a single metaphysics grasped well enough to explain it.24
Give the reader something which makes them view the world slightly differently. As much as I wanted this to be the goal, I think that it might be best served as a meta goal. That is, the best way to make readers view the world differently is with a convincing enough conclusion.
Taking a step back, I do think that’s my fundamental issue. Whenever I write something, at least part of my goal is changing my reader’s worldview. For all that I can and do often just walk away from hearing about an interesting argument and immediately start thinking of what the two sides could claim, I know that this is not a standard response.25
I think that my goal in the case study is explicitly having the reader treat science and mysticism as reflections of the same fact: that all truths point to Truth, and that we discover truth, rather than creating it. That’s a much larger argument than anything I proposed above, though, and I can see why I shied away, however internally from trying to write it. For all that I personally know and believe it’s better to do something badly than to not attempt something at all, I do find that I26 instinctively believe that it’s better to not fail than to try and fail.
I’m currently listening to a lot of BreadTube27 and reading books that touch on modern theories of knowledge. Most modern theories of knowledge, as best as I understand the political trends, follow from Foucault. Now, as someone with no real formal training in philosophy, excuse me if this is wrong, but the crux of Foucault’s arguments are that knowledge and power are fundamentally inseparable. There is not Truth, only acceptance of ideas. I think that the musing was a direct response to those claims, at least in part. While a lot of what we do, think, believe, and say is socially constructed, I do still fundamentally believe in universal truth.
Once again, let’s refocus on the case study. I think that it might be worthwhile to look at it the same way that I’ve been trained to look at musical pieces.28 First, what is the explicitly stated goal of the work?
My goal for the musing was to talk about science as mysticism.
Second, what’s the implicit goal of the work?
I’m still not sure, but I think that it was an affirmation of the universality of truth. That feels somewhat true, but not fully.
I also don’t know if I’ve ever been good at this method of looking at pieces, for all that I really enjoy seeing others do it.
So, twelve hundred words later, where am I?29 I think that I have issues writing conclusions in large part because I don’t know what my implicit goals are for a work, and I’m not even always sure what my explicit goals are for a work. Most of the time I content myself with a meta goal.30
Here comes the kicker, though. What’s the takeaway from this musing?31
I’ve had an argument with myself in the past about how objective morality or truth when you believe in an Almighty Creator is still subjective, just with a definitionally correct subject. For that reason, given that I do believe everything was created, it feels at least a little wrong to say that truth is not on any level constructed.↩︎
Godel did it most famously, and others have followed↩︎
I think. Mathematicians and philosophers, please feel free to correct this take if it is incorrect.↩︎
e.g. if I claim that everything is constantly doubling in size, there is no way to disprove it, since everything is measured based on a referent. One level deeper, if we do not believe that memory is real, then there is nothing to say that whatever we record the speed of light as cannot change from day to day. I may remember it as 3e8 m/s, but that might just be because, in this split second, it is. Whatever we measure it as next might retroactively have always been true. Reality being, well, real, is a presupposition of science. Ope I’m realizing now that this should have been maintext, not footnote.↩︎
I unfortunately walked away from this musing after the above line to do other stuff, and have now forgotten what my goal was in saying that. Let’s try to reconstruct. Ooh ok yes the whole scientism↩︎
initially this said friends, but I realized that’s both inaccurate and a little offensive. the friends I have who hold any of these views have a much more nuanced understanding than I’m fighting here. Is this tilting at windmills and fighting strawmen? probably.↩︎
I wish that postmodernism started with an s↩︎
initially three, but then I remembered that nihilism exists↩︎
and unlike as a postmodernist, I can still make truth claims↩︎
at what point does this musing cease to be a reflection on conclusions and start simply being the next draft of the musing? I think as long as I conclude (hah) this musing with an overall reflection on concluding, I should be fine↩︎
immediate disclaimer: I will be proposing my own solution to the questions based on my own views and understandings. As all three worldviews I hold are held by many people with their own diverse views and understandings, they may have different answers to the questions. If they truly do believe in the worldview, their answers are more valid than mine for how they explain a concept↩︎
life expectancy, earning power, perceived happiness↩︎
is the argument, not necessarily true. I think I remember seeing somewhere that more intense punishments don’t actually reduce crime. How that works with the whole, “free will doesn’t exist” that goes along with the concept, I’m not entirely sure.↩︎
I promise that some of my jokes are good↩︎
I think I mentioned yesterday in a footnote that I don’t actually disagree with this claim, it’s just that an omnipotent being making a claim of truth has, definitionally, the power needed to make that material reality↩︎
the metaphorical grave.↩︎
anyone who’s ever been in charge of reading my writing, I apologize that it took me fully a quarter century to learn this fact↩︎
ope, yeah, there it is. Looks like I have a conclusion ready↩︎
wow that feels maybe blasphemous. Find a better phrasing↩︎
I think that’s an improvement, yeah.↩︎
that’s the word. I should replace sample case in the above if I redraft this musing↩︎
in that there’s many answers that could work, not that an answer does not exist at all↩︎
or at least people claim that science agrees with them. The fact that no political side seems to actually care about science except as a political cudgel is a far larger issue, and not really one at play here.↩︎
other than scientism, which says that there are only observables. I suppose that complete denial of the spiritual is a full metaphysics, but it’s not an interesting one to me.↩︎
some call it being a devil’s advocate, with more or less respect for the choice.↩︎
like everyone, being fair to myself↩︎
a term often used to describe the left leaning parts of pseudo academic youtube. There’s probably a better definition, for all that I don’t want to look one up or think on it more.↩︎
I think that this might be generally how one is taught to read for bias, but I can’t remember that, and that’s a claim that’s easier to disprove. Since no single person taught me to read musical pieces, no one can disprove that these were the lessons I took, even if they’re not the best.↩︎
Wow that’s a deep philosophical question↩︎
e.g. my goal for Jeb is primarily to have written it, rather than telling any particular story. I’m sure that there is a pro somewhere to doing things this way, but there is clearly also a con↩︎
gosh that’s a strong ending. Shame that it’s not going to survive into future drafts, and wow I could phrase it better to make the irony clearer. Maybe it will survive after all↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 5
What is science? The easy answer is what we were all taught in the early days of our schooling: science is the scientific method. That is, science is the process of following a rote set of instructions which begins in observation and ends in reporting a disproved1 hypothesis. Like most easy answers, however, this answer is wrong.
Science is fundamentally a method of learning truths. More than that, science is fundamentally a method of conveying truth. An individual’s experience can be noted and generalized to the universe at large.
Why does this redefinition matter? Hopefully, this redefinition frames science not as something one does but as an experience one has.
That is, truths are not created, which I think most scientists would agree with. After all, while we may not know the exact frequency of any given molecular transition, we know that it is not dependent on observation.2
More than that, truth is not an assembly of facts, but is something broader. That is, reductionism does not work as a philosophical concept. Although we can often make successful3 models which are reductive, these always lack some fundamental element of reality.
From here, I would go so far as to claim that truth should, in fact, be capitalized as Truth. That is, science’s goal is uncovering part of Truth.
Although every philosophy and religion has its own experience of Mysticism, all definitions tend to agree on one point: a mystic is one who sees Truth. Especially in Catholic Tradition, where I am most versed, Mysticism is an experiential reality. Mystics encounter the Divine.
Now, at this point,4 you may be thinking that I’ve pulled some clever slights of hand to make science into a religion. That is not my goal.5 Instead, my goal is to draw a connection between two fundamentally different methods of understanding reality.
Many philosophies have a metaphysics: a way of viewing reality. Scientific metaphysics can only ask, and therefore answer, questions about material reality. Christian Mystical Metaphysics can only uncover spiritual reality.6
Crucially, both domains believe that reality is both universal and describable. That is, the speed of light7 is not only constant throughout the entirety of the universe, but anyone can learn this to be true. In a slightly more abstract analogy, differentiation, once discovered by Newton and Liebniz8, can now be taught to students around the world. Similarly, mystics in the Church have taught us spiritual truths that we can know, even without having experienced them ourselves.
I know that there’s more to say on this topic, but at five thousand words, I think that I’ve exhausted my well on this topic for the day. I’ll hopefully revisit this again.9
Daily Reflection:
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? I again forgot this in my car, which is fine.
Did I play guitar today? I did! I tuned it down to DADGAD last night, and it turns out that my voice is approximately 4 frets10 lower than I normally think of it. (Read: I started singing Oh No Not I and my voice kept breaking so I kept moving the capo lower until it felt nice)
Did I practice touch typing today? Oh gosh, I didn’t realize that C was supposed to be typed with my middle finger, so it’s very hard for me to start learning the letter. Oh well.
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? I finished one of the books on it! It was a weekly newsletter going through Screwtape Letters, but it finished this week. I should really get through Dracula Daily, because I’m about 2 months behind on it.
Did I read the book on craft? It’s in my backpack, so I should try to read it at least a little before bed.
Have I read the library books? I returned one of them, because I found the music in it that I cared about. So that counts kind of, for all that I do plan to read the other book sometime soon. Maybe tomorrow morning? Probably not, but who can say?
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? I will have by the time this posts.
Did I revise a sonnet? I learned how to revise one, at least. Apparently I should “see if the sonnet says what I want it to say, and if it doesn’t, then I make it say that”, which is relatively helpful.
Did I blog? Look at this wow. I even thought about it.
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I finished tomorrow’s chapter today, which is fun. I’d like to write a little of Friday’s chapter as well, but we’ll see.
Letter to friends? Nope!
Paper? I replotted the better data, and it does look better, which is really nice. Now I’m just confused about how distortion constants work.11
Wellness
How well did I pray? Terribly.
Did I clean my space? For a little bit!
Did I spend my time well? Eh, or so.
Did I stretch? Not a ton, but a little.
Did I exercise? I did! I did the minimal amount I’m doing on days with no other exercise.12
Water? I tried! Water didn’t taste so good
Modern philosophy13 describes truth as fundamentally a linguistic phenomenon. That is, we create truth by setting definitions.
More than that, though, truths do not need to be assembled, which may be a slightly larger claim. That is, while much of science, especially the fundamental work I do, relies mostly on reducing the error between prediction and observation, that is not the science that non-scientists mean. What they think of, and what I think every scientist truly wishes they did14 is the science that we read about,
As someone who has spent years studying quantum mechanics, one thing that I have learned is just how
These two domains intersect most cleanly in the human person. There are a number of ways to describe the way that we have souls, like angels, and bodies, like apes.
That is, just as the speed of light15 is not dependent on where in the universe we are, Salvation is not.16
In both domains, however, reality is assumed to be universal. That is, just as the speed of light17 is not dependent on where in the universe we are, the nature of G-d is not dependent on where or when we are. Crucially, as well, truth is transmissible in both domains.
Knowledge, like a virus, spreads.
No, too evocative.18
To study, one must first accept starting presuppositions.
Too pretentious.
Prometheus brought fire to man. Once gifted, man was able to reproduce this flame endlessly, and today nearly everyone over a young age can create fire of their own.
Maybe? Feels a little too anecdotal for me.
To be first is to break new ground and pave a new path. To be second is to follow.
Eh.
What is science? The easy answer, and the one that I, like so many others, learned in my schooling, is a six part process. It begins with an observation19, which prompts a question: the hypothesis.20 Once a literature review shows that the question has not been answered, an experiment can be designed which can disprove the hypothesis. Should a hypothesis fail to be broken, it can be presumed true, and then reported to the world.
Ehhh too bogged down, especially since I don’t really care about the scientific method.
What is science? The easy answer, of course, is what we were all taught in science class: science is the scientific method. That is, science is the process of learning knowledge via rigid and rote steps, where observations lead to questions lead to disproven hypotheses.
That definition, of course, does not hold for a lot of what scientists do. What I do, for instance, does not have a hypothesis, except at the most basic level. My goal is simply measurement, which allows us to ask other questions.
That misses the thread, let’s try to go “you might think science is scientific method, in fact, science is about transmission of reality” ope there we go
that’s what I need
What is science? Like many, my first answer to that question came from science class: science is the scientific method. That is, science is following a rigid set of steps to go from an observation to a disproved hypothesis. However, like most first answers, this answer doesn’t work.
Science, at its core, is about transferring knowledge from the few to the many. It is often remarked that the difference between messing around and science is how well you keep notes.
Nope that still lost the thread.
What is science? The easy answer is what we were all taught in our science classes: science is the scientific method. That is, science is following rote steps which begin with an observation about reality and end in a disproved hypothesis. Like most easy answers, however, that is wrong.
Science, at its core, is a method of describing reality.21
Science, at its core, is a method of uncovering truths.
Hmm, is it truths, truth, or Truth? Each of those has a slightly different flavor. I think that I’ll go with “truth”
Is it uncover, discover, or create? I think I like uncover, because it has implications of illumination which is always fun.
Science is a method to uncover truth. At its core, science22 is a fundamentally social discipline.23
Science is fundamentally a method to uncover truth. More than that, however, it is a method to convey truth.24 An individual’s experience can be generalized into universal reality.
What is mysticism? The easy answer is a religious practice of experiencing communion with the Divine.
Ok yeah, let’s see if we can’t go from there. I’ll stop wordsmithing at the end of each word from now on.
What is mysticism? Mysticism is fundamentally a method of uncovering truth. As a Catholic, who knows that our mission is to bring the whole of Creation to the Almighty, Mysticism also carries with it the goal of conveying Truth to the world. No ok this is bad. I know I said no more drafting, but that was a lie. This gets moved down.
Right now I feel like there’s a couple of ways that I could begin this musing.25
I could start how I did, musing on this musing’s genesis and its placement in the broader scope of me developing as a writer. It’s my month of craft, which does mean that there’s something to be said for doing so, but I don’t know if I really like that, especially given where I want to go.
I could begin as most essays recommend, by clearly stating my hypothesis. That has the benefit of being up front, at the cost of me not having the rest of the musing to explore what I mean to say first. Then again, I’m at well over two thousand words of thinking about it, so that shouldn’t really be an issue either way.
I could begin as second-level essayists recommend, and start with a metaphor or anecdote, such as the way that benzene’s structure was first hypothesized, or the way that the sewing machine was26 invented. I could ideally weave that with an anecdote about some mystic, for all that I don’t know if I know any of their stories well enough.
I could explain mysticism or science as though describing the other, or describe both using the same words. That could be fun, for all that I know that it will also be difficult to do.
As often happens when I enumerate27 my options, one seems most exciting, and that tends to be where my ability to generate new ideas stops. I’m going to try to describe the two methods of inquiry without distinguishing the two.
From there, I guess that I could start going into like how both work when they differ? I’m not really sure where, if ever the two actually diverge, but I’m sure that it’s somewhere. What else did I do in the first draft?
Oop, it kind of seems like that’s as far as I got in the first draft of this musing. Such a shame, but I wonder if the second draft might give me more inspiration once I have typed something slightly28 more coherent.
Nearly every book on writing I’ve ever read29 gives a lot of the same advice.30 Chief among them is to always have a small notebook with you to note down ideas as they arise. I’ve never really been a fan of holding a pen and pad of paper, but I do live in the twenty first century. I have another option.
And so, every so often I’ll open my notes app and type down a phrase that suddenly strikes me, or I’ll open my voice memos and sing something.31 Most of the time, I forget to ever look at them again, and the few times that I remember, I either forgot the context of a phrase or no longer find it striking. Every so often, though, I find something that strikes me even weeks later.
Today, I’d like to muse about one of those. This past Saturday, for some reason, I was struck by the connection of science and mysticism. A quick32 search doesn’t show that the field is full of people putting forth their explanations, so I’m going to do my best to try.33
The first paper I found34 seems to be discussing the concept of mysticism as a claim of inherent validity of a certain belief, at least in the first few pages. Since I don’t need to worry35 about considering whether mystics from other faith traditions are touching on the actual Truth, I don’t know how useful this article is going to be. However, it’s only 20 pages, and is probably worth at least a skim right now. As I get further into the article, it seems like the sort of article I generally love, where we dive deeply into the semantics of individual words. That being said, it’s the sort of article I love reading with a group, where someone else has already done a deep dive to distill a lot of the useful information out.36 I’ll have to reread this article later, but it is absolutely not related to what I want to discuss today. It’s a fascinating dive into the way that we can, without acknowledging certain truths as better than others, make sense of disparate mystical experiences and scientific theories.
The second paper37 explicitly focuses on Eastern Religion, and so is not relevant to my discussion here. I’ll probably read it too, since I’m curious what it has to say, but that’s probably a problem for next year me.
Now, because I am aware that I am incredibly easy to prime38, I’m currently thinking about definitions. What is mysticism, and what do I mean here by science?
As with all people, I find that the methods I use to approach the world change as I continue to grow and live. I had a very long period where my preferred analytical technique was constructing definitions. If something cannot be rigorously defined, the logic goes, it is not a meaningful category.
Of course, this implicitly binaries the world. Defining music, for instance, is not something that can be satisfactorily done.39 Much of life, as it turns out, exists in the hazy in betweens that are not clearly labeled and defined. Nonetheless, it’s useful to have an idea what I’m talking about, if only to aid in shared meaning.
When I speak of science, I am not referring to the scientific method40 that I and so many are taught is fundamental to the life of a scientist. As a professional scientist, very little of what I do fits neatly into those boxes, and yet I do not believe that the way that I do science is lesser for it. A fundamental part of science is simply observation and measurement.
However, I am also not really speaking about the rote parts of science. Instead, what I’m probing at is the way that so many scientific discoveries41 are described. The discovery of the shape of benzene, for instance, is described as coming to the scientist in a dream.42 There is a joke I’ve heard a few times talking about how the great discoveries in science take place when sleeping, and the great discoveries in mathematics take place when sleep is removed. As I think about it, both versions are actually helpful for my thinking about mysticism.
Now, this does raise a question: what is mysticism? Adapting from Wikipedia43, mysticism is a connection with greater forces. Depending on the tradition and the specific interpretation the mystic has of the tradition, it is equally a form of being taken away from themselves as becoming fully themselves for the first time. Regardless, mystics are revered in nearly every culture for the same reason: they have access to a fundamental and hidden truth about reality. By listening to mystics relay their experiences, however, the common person can see the truth of reality, if only dimly. If you’ve ever heard a top scientist or mathematician discuss their passion, it might be easy to see the connection.
I read Donald Knuth’s CV this past weekend with my brothers.44 One striking thing that I noticed is that he wrote a piece for Organ based on the book of Revelations. Now, that in and of itself is interesting, but not necessarily pointing to anything. The fact that he also wrote a book where he analyzes Chapter 3 Verse 16 in every45 book of the Bible. Even though that discussion came after I jotted down the note, it feels significant to the discussion.
Of course, as soon as I started to say that, I realized that I have a bias in what mystics I’m familiar with. As someone who’s taken music history46, the mystics I’ve been exposed to in detail tend to be mystics who also had significant musical output, such as Doctor of the Church Hildegard.
Ok so other than the simple point that scientists often describe breakthroughs as though they’ve suddenly received some divine revelation, and that’s picture perfect mysticism, what am I trying to say? I think that might be it, but I no longer know if I know enough about either subject to really write a whole essay about it. I would at least want to be able to point to two stories, one of a mystic and one of a scientist, to show the parallels in the narrative. Failing that, I’m not really sure what I can do.
I suppose that I could muse on the nature of mysticism? Like how we are generally willing to accept that there are people with special knowledge, especially in quantum mechanics. Might be worth riffing on that for a little, just to see what we see.
What is mysticism? Mysticism is a term generally used to describe a religious altering of mind. Of course, as with anything else used in religious contexts, the word is used to describe wide and sometimes contradictory examples. Many better writers than I have written about the difficulties in defining religion, especially given how averse some groups are to having their beliefs labeled as religious. As such, the fundamental part of the mystic experience for me is the belief that knowledge was given to the mystic, rather than the mystic discovering the information themself.
How, then, is a scientist a mystic?47 When looking at the world through the view of a scientist, a few things are fundamentally required to be true. First, the universe must be sensical.48 That is, things happen for a reason, and the same starting conditions will result in the same outcome.49 I initially was going to say that reproducible is a different condition than sensical, but I don’t know if that’s true anymore.
Second, the universe must be measurable. Russell’s teapot is an example of how science can fail to learn things.50
Let’s compare that to the world view required to be a Catholic.51 The universe was created by an all powerful, all loving Creator, who has given us what we need to understand the world, and by extension, learn more about He who created us.52 Of course, there’s the nuance of Catholic, so Christ is a requisite part of the world view, and that is certainly an important aspect of how Catholics and Catholic mystics view the world. However, Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice can be somewhat derived if you start with the first proposition and then follow it with “and G-d gave authority to his Church,” for all that it’s a bit of a hand waving explanation.
Ok, let’s refocus. Both mysticism and science53 require the universe to be fundamentally sensible. One fantastic secondary side effect of this assumption is the ability for knowledge to be distributed.
If knowledge is portrayed, as it so often is, as light, then each of us can be Prometheus54, sharing the fire and light of knowledge with those around us. Fire, like knowledge, yearns to spread.55 Taking a step back from the forced cliche, however, we do see that it resonates.
It is far easier to follow a derivation than to come to it for the first time. Calculus was something that two of the greatest minds of their generation were barely able to scratch the surface of. Now, the average college student is expected to be able to learn the sum of what took them years of study in a few scant semesters.
Similarly, many Catholics today pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, as St. Maria Faustyna Kowalska of the Blessed Sacrament56 was taught in her revelations. We are assured of the same benefits, just as we are able to do as much with Calculus as Isaac Newton57.58
I still want this to be disproven↩︎
ignoring, of course, rest frames and the quantum uncertainty of anything molecular.↩︎
read: predictive↩︎
assuming that my argument about science even convinced you↩︎
even though many people do treat science as a religion. I personally am very in favor of science and the scientific method of discovering (almost said creating, but that’s sort of my point, isn’t it) knowledge↩︎
don’t quote me on this if that’s actually a heresy. Given that the Church tends to believe that Faith and Reason cannot contradict each other, it seems reasonable to assume that Mystics only reveal spiritual truths↩︎
in a vacuum, at rest frame velocity, for pedants↩︎
if it wasn’t clear, I do, in fact, fall into the camp which believes math is discovered not created↩︎
along with every other post I need to revisit↩︎
a minor third↩︎
or, more accurately, how they don’t work↩︎
one pushup, body weight squat, and 5 second plank per day of december, so today it was 5 squats then a 25 second plank then 5 pushups. If I can keep it up, by the end of the month I’ll be doing a 2 minute plank which would be cool↩︎
post modern, technically↩︎
maybe this is too broad of a claim, but I think it’s at least true for me↩︎
in a vacuum, for the pedants↩︎
ok but salvation does look different to different people. What’s a universal spiritual truth?↩︎
in a vacuum, for the pedants↩︎
I know that’s not the right word, but it feels like it↩︎
apparently. It’s been long enough since I learned it that I thought it began with hypothesis. Makes sense to begin with observation↩︎
wild! They make this two steps! Ope, seems as though there are a lot of different versions of the scientific method. I’ll use the one that I like, which is an abomination of a combination↩︎
hmm is it describing reality, uncovering reality, finding truth? I think finding truth is a good enough starting name↩︎
capitalize it? Yeah probably. Do that in the final draft↩︎
no↩︎
I think this truth needs to be one level of intensity higher. so eiether uncover truths and convey truth or uncover truth and convey Truth. I think the first↩︎
N.B. for the readers, if you have strong feelings about my including meta writing like this in future blogs (positive or negative) please do not hesitate to let me know↩︎
allegedly↩︎
hah, get it, because in LaTeX the numbered lists are generated in an enumerate environment↩︎
look at me, being so optimistic and everything↩︎
rephrase this in draft two to make it clear it’s any book that even tangentially discusses writing↩︎
wow, wild. spice this up more↩︎
I really need to clear that out↩︎
and admittedly fairly sparse↩︎
I will also be reading the two papers I found to see what they have to say↩︎
Mysticism and the Philosophy of Science by Anthony N. Perovich, Jr. (look at me actually using a footnote to cite)↩︎
here, at least↩︎
distill is probably the wrong word here, even though it’s the cliche. It’s not about a reduction and concentration, but repackaging to make understandable. I’m sure I’ll find a better word by the second draft↩︎
Mysticism in the New Age: Are Mysticism and Science Converging? by Richard Jones↩︎
whether I’m easier than anyone else, I won’t make a claim here. Still, as far as I can tell, it’s among the easiest psychological effects to reproduce, which is fun↩︎
in that every definition I’ve ever been given other than “you know it when you see it” includes things that aren’t music (ex: notes in time says that the dropping of rain on an empty roof is music. Since a fundamental part of music to me is observation (which I don’t remember if I’ve mused about before. If not, then my preferred thought experiment is: imagine writing and performing a piece on the piano for a friend. That’s obviously music. If you then remove the friend, playing only for yourself, it’s still music. If I use a DAW (digital audio workstation) to produce the music and play it back for me, I would still call that music. If I program a computer to fill in the chord progressions for me, I’d still call that music. If I program a computer to produce a convincing piece and play it for me, that’s still music. If it records an audio file that I don’t listen to, but someone else does, that’s still music to me. If the audio file is never listened to, though, is it music? If not, then how can the potential exist without the action? It’s at this point that I realize I need to learn more metaphysics. Where was I?), that is not music) or excludes things which are music (most often John Cage’s 4’33", which is a very often misunderstood work of music that I love as a conceptual piece↩︎
hypothesis, research, testing, etc.↩︎
breakthroughs, if you will↩︎
I found a citation on wikipedia, but the link is broken. Searching for the book again finds it on the Internet Archive, but not in any physical location I have access to↩︎
I’m watching a long video essay right now about plagiarism, and it’s making me more aware of how much I generally borrow ideas↩︎
add a segue. this is messy. Also probably do something with that long footnote. Maybe delete because, while interesting, not really relevant.↩︎
to the best of my knowledge, he’s Lutheran, which means that he probably doesn’t have every book in the bible, just the ones in his↩︎
it’s wild to me how often music history has come up on this blog recently. Must be something about the time of year we’re in↩︎
at first I had modern day, but part of my argument should be, if it isn’t already explicit, that the mystic experience still happens to religious today and happened to scientists in the past↩︎
I think my autocorrect wants sensible, which makes sense, because Google NGrams shows that sensible has had orders of magnitude more popularity over the entire corpus searched. OED notes sensical appearing a few centuries later than sensible, though does not in any way dispute the word as real or legitimate. Sensical is apparently used less than once per million English words, which I think means that my entire blog has a higher than standard concentration of the word just from the three times I’ve used it here. I think that my entire corpus might be higher than the English standard actually↩︎
Quantum mechanics puts an asterisk on that, but there’s nuance I can add if I want to be a sophist. Sophistry is a fun skill to develop, for all that I know it’s a bad one↩︎
I’m not getting into it here, but the long and short of it is that science is useless for making claims that it cannot interface with facts. I know that the point of the example is supposed to be the ridiculousness of religious thought, but↩︎
Yes, I know that modern science was inarguably (spell check wants unarguably, which has recently been overtaken for popularity) and obejctively inspired by the Church, but that’s not really the point of the argument here.↩︎
Hmm, I wonder how many heresies that sentence has.↩︎
I’m explicitly not saying scientism here, because scientism is, in my experience, at least, the belief that the world is nothing more than the measureables. As with every other form of inquiry, science is fundamentally limited in the sorts of questions it can ask and answer. It’s ridiculous, to me, at least, to claim that there’s a single method of inquiry that encompasses everything. Refocusing again↩︎
almost wrote Pythagorous, but that’s a whole different mystical thing↩︎
insert obligatory information yearns to be free↩︎
yes I needed to look up the name, no I don’t feel guilt about it. I wonder if the y versus i in the name is similar to what I remember seeing a bunch in the early days of the latest Ukraine and Russia conflict, where the choice of spelling made implications about the validity of Ukranian as a language.↩︎
he was made a knight by a false monarchy, so I will not give him the title of Sir↩︎
Shoot, I said that I wouldn’t get into specific examples, but here I am. Might be time to try draft two to see if I can’t make this at least a little more coherent. Should probably take a break and do other work first, though. It’ll be good to give my mind time to settle some of these thoughts.↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 4
It’s been almost six months since I last mused about feeling wrung dry. Then again, the absence of posts does imply something about the post that would’ve happened.
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? Left it in my car, will try to remember to do tomorrow.
Did I play guitar today? I did! Not much, but I picked it up, which is good. I should probably replace the strings soon.
Did I practice touch typing today? I got through Y! That means my newest letter is C1
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? A little! I also started a new book which isn’t the point.
Did I read the book on craft? Nope! I brought it with me through the day, though.
Have I read the library books? I kept it by my bed in hope that I’d read it before sleep.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? I did! It was kind of about my research, which is nice.
Did I revise a sonnet? I really need to learn how to do this.
Did I blog? Look at this blog post! Extant
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I finished the chapter due today and started the chapter due wednesday, so kind of, at least.
Letter to friends? Nope!
Paper? Realized I messed up a bunch of calculations, which is kind of sad.
Wellness
How well did I pray? Not well. I fell asleep before starting a rosary last night.
Did I clean my space? A little
Did I spend my time well? I tried. I focused too hard on research and lost track of time, which probably isn’t a bad thing.
Did I stretch? No
Did I exercise? I did the bare minimum, which I’m counting as enough.
Water? I didn’t drink enough water, but I tried to. It’s hard when I don’t fill my water bottles often enough. Things to think about I guess.
I should really figure out the order that they teach new letters in. A part of me assumes that it’s frequency, and that’s probably correct↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 3
One line in particular stuck out to me in today’s readings. In the first reading, the Prophet Isaiah says that “we are the clay and you are the potter.”1 Now, my mind immediately leapt to two ways that this can be interpreted.
First, despite the way that most modern people interact with clay, it does not come to us perfectly pure and ready to be used. Instead, it has to be refined more or less depending on the soil that it is in. We, the people of G-d are clay. Much like last week’s metaphor of sheep and goats, we can point to that in contrast to the silt and sand of sinfulness.
Once clay is gathered, however, it is rarely simply formed and fired. Nearly every culture has a tradition of incorporating dust from a previous, often failed2 project. It is at this point that I feel the need to reflect on the different “we’s” that the Prophet could be referring to.
First, we could mean each of us individually. We are all lovingly and perfectly shaped by G-d our Father. However, even as we are shaped, we are not alone. Pottery is a fundamentally useful craft. It creates objects to be used with others. Similarly, whatever the Almighty shapes us into, it is meant to relate to the rest of the world in some way.
Additionally, we are not the first to be born. Prayers from those before have their positive effects, like the powdered pieces of a previous project. Or, just as it is easier to shape a new pot once you’ve made an older one, it is also easier to find the Lord when your parents have known Him.
Of course, we could also be referring to the entire People of G-d. We are each a small piece of the clay in the pot of creation that the Lord forms. In that regard, the fragments of old pieces can be thought of as the parts of ourselves and our cultures we bring from times before Christ.
Nearly every Parish I’ve visited uses an evergreen wreath to hold its Advent candles. Why?
Of course, there’s the obvious answer of “we’ve always done it that way, and it’s pretty,” but of course, we can not have always always done it a certain way. Someone had to be first.3 Some among you might know that we took the concept of the Christmas tree from Germanic Pagans, for whom evergreen trees were a reminder that the depths of winter would pass. That sentiment lead us to using the same for Advent wreaths.
There was a truth in the pagan tribes that still resonates with the Church today. G-d who fashioned the entire universe can be seen in all that He has created. The beauty of evergreen boughs, especially in contrast to the white of winter, reminds us of so many different truths. In such a way, the beneficial parts of pre-Christian lives and cultures can enrich the lives of the faithful, just as the advent wreath enriches many believers’ Advents.4
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? Yes! It’s been fun, and I got to spend like an hour working with friends, which was really great. I know one of my goals this year was to grow closer to the people I care about, and I think that this helped.
Did I play guitar today? Once again, a scale and my etude were the majority of what I played.
Did I practice touch typing today? I did a few lessons. It’s fun for me to see that I lose almost all of my progress each day whenever I log back on. I think that if I did more lessons I would probably lose less between days. Eh.
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? I read maybe 3 minutes today, which isn’t great, but today passed by so much faster than I thought it would.
Did I read the book on craft? I decided to take the day of from reading the book on craft, because it’s Sunday.
Have I read the library books? Last night I read a chapter. It was really interesting, and I’m excited to see where the rest of the book develops.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? Did it! I think I’m doing better at imagery and stopping myself from writing into a corner with bad rhymes.
Did I revise a sonnet? I still don’t know if I actually know how to revise a sonnet.
Did I blog? Woo! I did it.
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I think that I’m still comfortable saying that I won’t work on Jeb on Sundays, for all that I know that means tomorrow morning I’ll need to panic write.
Letter to friends? I did not. It’s in my fanny pack, though, which means that I can in theory write it whenever.
Paper? It’s Sunday so I will not be doing work.
Wellness
How well did I pray? Not great. Went to Mass and did a rosary last night, both of which are good.
Did I clean my space? No.
Did I spend my time well? I think mostly! I had a day full of seeing people, and the content I consumed was mostly content that I intentionally chose
Did I stretch? I went diving! Which counts as both stretching and exercise in my book.
Did I exercise? See above.
Water? Drank a bunch during and before Mass because I needed to sing. After that, though, I have not been doing a great job remaining hydrated.
Happy new year! I was reminded today5 that this year is the shortest possible advent at three weeks and one day.6 That’s not really relevant to the rest of this reflection, but it’s an interesting fact nonetheless.
Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. It is a time of preparation and reflection before the celebration of the coming of our Savior. Of course, as is often brought up, Christmas only has meaning because of Easter.
Yesterday’s first draft talked about iconoclasm and its opposite. Every year, I feel a little more frustrated at the state of discourse surrounding Christmas and its accompanying rituals. These days, both sides of the extremes7 claim that such beloved traditions as Christmas trees are inherently pagan. Of course, there is truth to that claim, at least.8
Christmas trees were, as reported by the early Church, used in Germanic pagan winter solstice celebrations.9 However, just as music can bring people to the Almighty, and just as people and nations can be baptized, the Church in her glory recognized that rituals can serve to help lead us to Christ. The Church never claims to be the only place that truth is found, just the best. Anyways, all this to say, there is nothing wrong with remembering that life will come again and that winter will come to an end.
Today’s readings remind us that everything will come to an end. Christ compares His second coming to a man returning from a voyage abroad. However, the Gospel is not where I want to focus tonight.
Instead, I would like to focus on a single line from the first reading. “We are the clay and you are the potter.”10 Now, when I think of clay today, I think of it almost exclusively in an artistic context. What little I’ve worked with clay has come from prepared and purchased material of high purity.
Obviously, this is not how all clay has been gathered throughout history. Clay can be gathered from nearly any soil, though some soil obviously has more or less clay in it than others. It needs to be separated from the silt and the sand that also makes up soil. I’m sure that someone wiser than me could connect that to the metaphor of sheep and goats from last week, but I can’t seem to make the leap tonight.
The other piece of pottery lore that I remember right now is that nearly every culture has a tradition of incorporating a small portion of an already fired work into new clay. There are some really interesting materials reasons for it, and indeed, having a small amount of reused clay improves the final product. Now, depending on what we means11, I can connect that to the reading.
Assuming we refers to each of us as individuals, it can be a reference to the fact that it’s easier to find the Truth if you are raised in a family who believes.12 It is not essential however, which is part of where the Church’s mission to convert the entire world comes in.
If we refers to the People of G-d, then the pieces of prefired clay are traditions like Christmas trees and gift giving. We are able to most fully express our love for the Almighty not by turning away from absolutely every part of our old life, but by baptizing and purifying everything we do. The best pot is formed by taking parts from a pot that did not work. Similarly, the best culture13 is not created from new cloth entirely, but incorporates parts of the previous.
I don’t know if that’s at all coherent, but it resonates with me. Probably worth revising and seeing if I can’t make it a little better.
Isaiah 64:7B↩︎
if only because the successfully fired pots would likely be used↩︎
I’ve just now learned it’s apparently initially a Lutheran tradition, which is fun and interesting and adds a whole meta level to my “The Church takes the best from everything that’s somewhat wrong”↩︎
wow this second draft went way better↩︎
reminded here meaning that I’m sure I could have pieced it together and may have in the past but it was surprising to hear↩︎
Christmas is on a Monday, which means that the fourth Sunday of Advent is one day before Christmas, making it the shortest possible.↩︎
horseshoe theory rears its ugly head↩︎
the claims that Christmas itself is a pagan celebration are less historically supported and mostly bolstered by people whose explicit goal in research is discrediting early Christian history, which is not what I generally consider a balanced source↩︎
the fact that the only thing we know about most pagan European cultures comes from the Church seems to get ignored sometimes↩︎
Isaiah 64:7B↩︎
I’m becoming the insufferable philosopher I dread aren’t I↩︎
I assume that’s true, given that most people historically followed the religion of their parents↩︎
I feel uncomfortable sometimes saying that some cultures are better than others. I think that it is kind of an objective thing sometimes, but of course there’s a lot of nuance that is needed↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 2
As far as I can tell, I’ve never mused about adoration on this blog. Matching the times in my life that I’ve blogged to the times in my life that I have gone to adoration, I suppose that there isn’t a lot of overlap. Last night, however,1 I went to my parish’s monthly young adult adoration event.
It was a really nice experience. I feel like every time that I just sit in a church and pray for an hour, my life suddenly seems much better. Modern psychology supports that idea, calling it meditation, and I don’t want to discount the value of just unplugging and focusing on where I am in the moment for a little bit. However, I’ve also gotten to the point in my life where I really do want to start exploring the spiritual side of my faith more. There’s more to prayer than simple meditation, and there’s something special about praying in front of Christ truly present.
Last night’s meditation was about the value of hope. For all that the priest demurred and said that anything insightful or thoughtful he said came from one of the great thinkers he cited in his talk, it was still a fantastic reflection and meditation. Hope is something that I’ve been struggling with lately. The priest connected hope to prayer, reminding us that to pray more is to become better at praying, and to pray better. I cannot remember exactly how he connected them, but I remember that it made sense at the time. One line that I do really strongly remember is him pointing out that when we pray together, as in Mass or even in that moment, it is not just a bunch of people individually praying. It is that, of course, but it is also so much more profound, for all that I cannot remember the exact words he used that resonated with me so strongly. During adoration, I found that my mind slowed down for the first time in what felt like months. It was not the muffled silence of my thoughts being drowned out by earthly distractions. Nor was I struggling to piece together fragments of a shattered idea from behind a murky window. Instead, I simply was there, and I was at rest.
I was advised to read Psalm 118 last night, and it is an absolutely beautiful Psalm.2 I think that helped me to focus my prayers in a more uplifting and positive direction, rather than the negative spirals I’ve tended to start falling into. There’s so much going wrong in the world right now that it can be hard to remain hopeful.
Of course, as the apologetics book I’m reading points out, hope and optimism are not synonyms. They can be as linked or unlinked as any other two traits. I’ve been trying to keep that in mind.
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? I decided that I’ll take today off from embroidery, especially since the initial goal was just doing it more often.
Did I play guitar today? Yes! I played a quick few scales and did my normal warm-up etude.3
Did I practice touch typing today? I did a few lessons. For some reason, I keep struggling with my letter t. I’m allegedly working on learning y, but have to keep going back to try t again.
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? Yes! I finished one of the books and then pulled back up the oldest book on my currently reading shelf4
Did I read the book on craft? I read a bit more of writing well and have started to get to the point that I’m starting to feel a disconnect between what they’re saying and what I’ve found to be true. They say you write like you read, and the writing I want to do is the pulp fiction that I read, but that has a very different style than what they recommend. Still, I suppose that it’s worthwhile to try, if only because learning how to write in a formal register cannot help but aid me as I work on my thesis, even if it doesn’t necessarily help with the fun writing I do.
Have I read the library books? I did not do this yesterday, which is a bit of a shame. Once I post my musing, though, I will absolutely do so.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? Woo! Just cranked one out. It was spooky and winter themed, which is always nice.
Did I revise a sonnet? I need to learn how to do this.
Did I blog? Look at this, revised and everything.
Did I write ahead on Jeb? Now that NaNo is over, I’m not sure if I’m going to keep up on the no Jeb on Sundays rule. Mostly, the issue is that right now I feel very tired, and I’ve only written about 400 words.
Letter to friends? Nope! I might have time tomorrow, though5
Paper? I downloaded the latest set of computations,6 and will probably make time to look at them sometime soon.
Wellness
How well did I pray? Badly. I got home a little late last night, and so didn’t make it through a rosary. Slept through most of the afternoon which also didn’t help.
Did I clean my space? Only for a few minutes, but I did my best. I think that I’m slowly getting ahead of entropy, which is my only real goal.
Did I spend my time well? I spent a little more time on instagram and youtube than I wanted, but by and large I think so. I woke up at my standard weekday time and volunteered at a concession stand, where I did some reading and chatted with a friend. After that, it was home to eat, sleep, and then go lift.
Did I stretch? I did! After lifting. I’m very tight.
Did I exercise? I did a long leg workout with a friend that did not go well in the slightest.
Water? Absolutely not enough, as evidenced by the lift going so poorly. Still, I have hope that I will feel better if I drink more for the rest of the night. Update: I’ve continued to drink more water since coming home and do, in fact, feel better.
As far as I can tell, I’ve never mused about adoration on this blog before. Thinking about the times of my life that I’ve written this blog, though, I suppose it makes sense. I don’t think that I went to adoration a single time while abroad, and it wasn’t something I sought out while in undergraduate either.7 It was mostly something reserved for the occasional youth retreat.
As an older and more cynical person, I do respect how well the youth retreats I went to were scheduled. They encouraged us to just the right level of sleep deprivation and exhaustion where the final Mass would always feel that much more impactful. There’s a trend in modern Christianity to say that the emotional experience you feel in a situation like that is the only valid religious experience. That, of course, is wrong.
Definitionally, not every moment can be a highlight. At some point, our minds and bodies adapt to the situation we are in, treating the average as a new baseline. This is the same issue that creates addictions and overdoses, and can be just as harmful to our spiritual lives.8
As a result, there’s another trend in modern Christianity9 that says that the emotional experience doesn’t matter at all. People in this camp, I’ve found at least, tend to be very dismissive of praise and worship music and most of the new Catholic hymnody of the early post Vatican II era.10 Their argument is that the music is too sentimental and sappy.
That’s also clearly wrong. We are creatures made with body and soul. As a music major, the majority of what I learned about Trent11 is from a musical perspective.
One of the major controversies in the early Protestant era12 was a belief that the robust and intense polyphony and rich instrumentation of Mass settings of the era were bad. They felt the same about most of sacred art.
Interestingly, both sides framed most of their arguments on the average illiterate peasant, rather than the people actually writing the arguments. Luther himself said that the hymns he wrote should be used for laborers.13 The Catholic position was14 that G-d is Beauty15. To see beautiful things cannot help but bring us closer, in some way, to the source of all beauty Himself.
The early Protestant position is less unified, and more or less says the same thing that all iconoclasts say. Earthly beauty is bad, because it makes us focus on earth, rather than G-d.16 Because of the intense push back, the Catholic Church did strongly consider restricting or banning polyphony. In the end, though, the Holy Spirit won17, and polyphony was maintained in this Church.
Now, I’m sure that you’re all wondering whether the reason I have a whole diversion on how interesting the Church’s relationship with art, especially music, and especially early music, is is because I have a degree focused on early music.18 In part, yes. In part, though, it’s the same tension that we have today.
G-d is Beauty, Love, Truth, and Goodness. While the reverse is not true, and something beautiful is not inherently divine, there is a part of us that is always reaching out for the Divine. Especially in situations like the Mass, taking advantage of the fact that we can, in fact, use emotion to make people holier is a good thing that I think Churches should do. Of course, as with all things, it needs to be a careful balance. The music can never become the goal in itself, which is where the iconoclasts are right. However, denying the part of our divinely created and inspired souls and bodies that seeks music and beauty is just as wrong.
Tying this back to the actual post, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with the planners for youth retreats putting the most spiritually important moments at the places that we were most primed to receive them. That’s just good catechesis, leading people and helping them to be as open to the Truth as possible. But, how does this all relate to adoration?
Adoration, in case any of my readers don’t know, in this context refers to the Catholic practice of praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament.19 Often, the Host is placed into an ornate golden frame on the altar. Some songs written by Thomas Aquinas are commonly sung at the beginning and end of the time, and the middle portion is usually reserved for silent prayer. In the diocese I’m currently at, most Parishes seem to try to schedule opportunities for Confession during adoration hours.
I’m realizing now that I haven’t been sure whether I want to write about adoration generally or my experience at adoration last night. I’ve been trying to split the difference, which is probably the worst version of each. I think that right now I want to reflect solely on last night’s reflection, so on to draft two I suppose.20
as I mentioned in the daily reflection portion of last night’s blog post↩︎
as, I assume, all of them are when given the chance. This one just has so many of the lines that I know and remember from my childhood.↩︎
composed by myself, and I’ve realized it completely avoids one of the strings (learned when I played it on a guitar missing a string)↩︎
started early 2022, which is a shame↩︎
I say that every day↩︎
that’s a word that bothers me. We don’t say computators, so why is it computations and not computions? Interestingly, people have asked the question, so it might be worth reading up on it↩︎
for all that I don’t really want/need to defend myself, it also was far less emphasized at my home parish than it is here↩︎
whoop, riffing a little too hard right now, tone it back and bring it back↩︎
yes yes, there’s no new heresies, only old ones in a new day. It’s still a modern trend, so I’m treating it as one.↩︎
I do think it’s funny that I will uncritically refer to the entire 300 years around Trent as a single period and refer to the less than 60 year old time since Vatican II as multiple eras↩︎
the famous council, not any person with that name or any of the other places, times, or events that could reference↩︎
calling it a revolution implies that I think they were in the right. Rebellion feels too dismissive, and so we use a nice little era. After reading a book talking about how much they dislike the postmodern (in the academic literary theory sense, not any of the thousand other versions) idea of how words define reality, I find that I’m becoming slightly more aware of the subtle tones of words I use in text. Of course, I do know that I already tend to pay more attention to the variations of semantic meaning than my peers, so this may not be entirely beneficial. Where was I? Right, Prots hate music↩︎
I don’t really want to get into the fundamental classism inherent and required in Protestant ideology, but I guess I might have to, at least a little↩︎
and is, for all that many seem to forget it↩︎
a claim I wanted to verify, and found that Pope St. JP2 wrote a book with that title↩︎
I think? I’ve never really been able to understand it too well, honestly.↩︎
saying that about council decisions I like, while true, always feels a little blasphemous. Probably worth making sure that I don’t only think that about the things I agree with↩︎
oof that sentence hurts↩︎
most commonly the bread that has been transubstantiated into the Body (and Blood? I think? the metaphysics are a little unclear to me) of Christ↩︎
there is an open question about whether that counts as draft two when I’m more or less throwing out all of this content. I couldn’t say for certain, but since I’m still planning to post this reflection, we’ll see↩︎
First Published: 2023 December 1
It’s another Friday, which means that it’s time for another edition of “I try to do Flash Fiction Friday”! This week, the friend I did NaNo with is joining, which should be fun. The theme is nebulous roads.
My initial thought, as always happens when there’s a word immediately preceding roads, is to do a parody of John Denver’s seminal work. I’ll keep the fun part of that energy in mind as I work on the actual project, for all that I don’t know quite what I’m going to do. I know that I need to do a sonnet today, so there’s a voice in my head that says I should work on a sonnet, and I might as well let that voice win for at least a little while. Unlike normal, where I hand write sonnets, today I’m going to try typing it out.1
What are nebulous roads? The prompt suggests they could be real roads that are obscured by fog as easily as they could be roads that do not, strictly speaking, exist.
I find that I am drawn to the idea of a desire path right now. They aren’t roads in the strictest sense, instead being passages worn by the repeated choice of people to take a shortcut. Most of the time, they are not a function of a single person. The single exception is probably on fresh snow. The way that a clear night on fresh snow looks is something completely unique and almost ethereal, and that feels like a good place to start.
One draft of a sonnet through, I already remember why I don’t always write in sonnet form. For all that it’s nice to have something so rigid, I do really like the option to have triple meter. There’s absolutely a part of me begging to delve into the fact that even time is now considered the standard, while in early music, triple meter was considered the perfect version. That’s too far from the prompt, though, so that lecture will be reserved for another day.
The rest of the day passed far too quickly, and so I will not be revising the sonnet again.
I think something that could be helpful for me2, given how long the daily reflection is, is to go through the list often throughout the day, so I have more reminders.
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today? I did! I did a few rows which was nice.
Did I play guitar today? I did! I played a few scales and did some warmups. Not very much, though, because I did it first thing in the morning and was tired.
Did I practice touch typing today? I did! Didn’t do a great job, but I tried, and that’s the only really important part.
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf? Yes! I read about a chapter.
Did I read the book on craft? I’ve chosen to read “Writing Well Ninth Edition” by Donald Hall and Sven Birkerts. It’s a fantastic book, and I’m in love with it from the first pages.
Have I read the library books? Not yet, but probably will when I post this.
Writing
Did I write a sonnet? I did! As you might guess from the fact that I blogged about it, I wrote on the theme of ethereal roads.
Did I revise a sonnet? I revised as I wrote, but I still don’t know if I really know how to revise one generally. Probably worth asking my poetry friend.
Did I blog? Look at this fun little blog!
Did I write ahead on Jeb? I finished the chapter this morning, which was nice.
Letter to friends? Nope!
Paper? Looked at some fun data!
Wellness
How well did I pray? I remembered to start the day with prayer, even if last night’s rosary wasn’t great. I then went to adoration for an hour which was nice.
Did I clean my space? I did! I went for the lowest hanging fruit.
Did I spend my time well? So far I have, but the day is mostly begun, so doesn’t really count yet.
Did I stretch? I did! This morning, which is nice.
Did I exercise? I did a pushup and a body weight squat which is good.
Water? Not enough.
First Written: 2023 November 30
Wow! Another month has passed me by. This month didn’t feel like it disappeared in a blink like the past few have, which is really nice.
I feel like I’ve grown as a person and in some of my interpersonal relationships, which is always really nice. It was a really chill month in many regards, if only because the only travel I did was for family reasons, rather than anything even slightly professional.
Relevant/notable things I did this month:
Started writing my first first author paper.1
Started playing DnD again
Got sick
Ran into friends from the past and present at random and unexpected places.2
Got auctioned off!3
Saw 12th night again!
Solo taught my first class
Had Thanksgiving with my family!
Let’s see how that lines up with my predictions for the month.
Going home for Thanksgiving. I did that, and I’m glad I knew it would be notable.
Doing NaNoWriMo with a friend. It’s been really fun to write with the friend, and it sounds like we’re planning to continue our morning writing sessions!4
I’m guest teaching a class, which is fun. It was fun! I don’t know if I did a great job, but I didn’t get an angry email or letter about it, so I assume that I did well enough. I suppose we’ll find out in the future.
I’m going to a cool discussion about Pascal. I ended up being too sick on the day of the talk, which is sad. I guess I did put that I got sick, so at least I have the event that ended up replacing it.
It’s always nice when I actually do the things that I planned on doing5. It’s even nicer when I also do things that are fun that I did not know I would be doing. Now that we’ve gone through the discrete events, let’s see how we did on the monthly goals for October. I always feel a little like I’ve let myself down when I go through my monthly goals, which is a fun thing to reflect on. It’s interesting that I continually think that I will suddenly be able to do things that I demonstrably have not been able to do. With that disclaimer6 out of the way, let’s see what we wanted to do, did, and how that overlapped. I’ll delete commentary in the initial goals, except where I want to comment on them in reflection.
Write 1700 words a day for my NaNo project.
Write a chapter of Jeb every day.
Blog every day.
Stretch every day.
Improve the cleanliness of my home.
Pray better
Write letters to friends. At a minimum, there are three people I owe a letter to and at least one other person I would like to send a letter to. We’re almost at the time of year that holiday cards become appropriate, and I could consider doing those this year.
Honestly, I did much better than I thought I would. I’m not sure if I suddenly learned how to set reasonable goals or if I just had an unusually good month, but either way:
Until yesterday, I did this with flying colors. I averaged about 1765 words a day, with minimal variance. I never went above 1800 and never went below 1745 words. Yesterday, I made the intentional choice to finish the book, rather than write an extra 3000 words, and I’m comfortable with intentionally changing my goals.
I didn’t do great on this. I managed to pull really far ahead in the early days of the month, and then immediately stopped writing more or less at all, and ended up with as much of a backlog as I began. That’s a little bit of a shame, but I do think that I’ll have an easier time writing in the upcoming months, since I now have the book plotted out at least a little.
With one exception, I wrote a blog every day this month. It’s nice to have a record of what I was thinking about for at least a little bit of each day this past month.
I stretched more than I did in October, but still not daily. I do feel like I’ve started to be more aware of my posture when I write, though, and I do sometimes even catch myself slouching too far over and sit up a little straighter.
I don’t quite remember what my home looked like at the start of the month. I think it’s a little better than then, but not markedly so. That’s probably a goal that’s worth having again, if only because I do want to start to clean my home. I’m a little surprised that I didn’t put it in my daily reflections. I’m sure there’s a reason for that, but I can’t remember why right now.
I don’t know if I would say that I have started praying better. I think maybe a little. It’s definitely a goal I want to focus on even more this month.
I wrote the three letters to friends, I think. Holiday cards still remain an option, and have the benefit of me being able to write the same letter, more or less by rote. Honestly, I could just type and print out the letters, but that feels kind of sad. I know that I greatly prefer hand written letters to typed form letters.
Let’s now shift from facing backwards to looking forwards. This month, I am excited for:
Consequences of the auction7
Getting better at prose
Going home for Christmas
Welp, the list is shorter once again. This is not because I do not plan on doing anything, but rather because I have much of the month open, which I’m excited for. It’ll be fun to see what ends up filling my hours.
Goals for the upcoming month:
Finish at least three of the books that have been sitting maligned on my “Currently Reading” shelf. There’s an app I use to keep track of my reading. This past summer I set the admirable goal of cleaning it out. Of course, that did not happen. Moving forward, though, I would like to start doing that.
On a related note, read two of the books that I’ve checked out from the library. If I divide the number of books I have checked out by the number months I expect to have left in the graduate program, I get a number I don’t like. There are absolutely some books that I’ve checked out to use as the occasional reference, rather than to read fully through. They are, however, in the minority. I would like to start spending more of my time intentionally, and part of that means reading more books to grow as a person, rather than just fluff to fill the hours.
Following that line of thought, I want to spend my time more intentionally. I know that I have a bad habit of just letting life pass me by, getting distracted by random things on my computer or phone. I would like to not do that
I want to write a sonnet every day. My poetry friend suggested that writing lots of sonnets was the best way that he knew to improve at writing meter. There was an implication within it that I should, or at least might want to consider revising the poems as well. I still don’t really know how to workshop and revise poetry, especially fixed forms like the sonnet. That could be a fun learning experience.
I want to read a book on the craft of writing start to finish. I know that this really bumps up the number of books that I’m going to try reading, but that’s probably ok. I like to read, and I’m getting faster at reading again. Then again, most of the books I have as reading goals this month are not beach reads, which might mean that trying to read them too quickly is a bad idea. Still, we’ll do whatever feels right.
Get better at prayer. Reading the book on apologetics is making me realize just how much I do still think of prayer as an emotional, rather than will-based experience. I think that shifting my mental conception might be really helpful
Clean my home. It’s at a point right now that I think I could leave it almost perfect when I go to visit family for the holidays. It would be really nice to be able to come back to something clean, and that’s a great motivator.
Stretch and do some other form of exercise every day. Even if it’s just a few pushups and a few situps, I want to get in shape. I have friends who I can, in theory at least, lift with. And, I do really value stretching.
Get better at touch typing. There’s a website I found which slowly introduces you to more letters as you learn them, so that you can start to rebuild the muscle memory of where fingers go and what letters belong to each of them.
Write letters to friends. I have a bunch of people I’d like to write a letter to.8
Get ahead on Jeb. Ideally, I would like to be five chapters ahead at the end of the year.9
Get better at embroidery. I’ve allegedly started to learn, but I want to spend at least a little time every few days. Then again, the best way to build a habit is daily. Maybe doing like a strand a day would be a good idea, at least until I go home for break
Play guitar every day. I want to start recording an album soon. I need to be able to play the music on it. Even if it’s just a few chords and a scale, I want to get back into guitar. Replacing the strings will probably help with that.
I want to keep up the daily blogging. That seems like an easy enough goal.
I want to finish a full draft of the paper I’m working on. Without having finished that, I feel like I’ll have no way of knowing when, exactly, I’ve finished the research for the paper.
I want to drink more water. I’ve been pretty dehydrated lately.
So, that’s a very ambitious set of goals. Let’s see what we can do for a daily reflection in a way that isn’t going to be a full musing in and of itself every day. I’m going to move some items around so that like elements are closer in daily reflection, as opposed to being in the more or less stream of consciousness order that they are right now. I think that a part of me thinks that higher items on the daily reflection reflect my own internal belief that it’s more important to hit the goals. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m changing enough this month that I don’t know if I really want to also add priorities. It might be fun to do nested lists. I’ll see if that works. Items this month will be in the order that I remember/find them in the list.
Hobbies:
Did I embroider today?
Did I play guitar today?
Did I practice touch typing today?
Reading
Have I made progress on my Currently Reading Shelf?
Did I read the book on craft?
Have I read the library books?
Writing
Did I write a sonnet?
Did I revise a sonnet?
Did I blog?
Did I write ahead on Jeb?
Letter to friends?
Paper?
Wellness
How well did I pray?
Did I clean my space?
Did I spend my time well?
Did I stretch?
Did I exercise?
Water?
Oof, that’s enough different items that I had to double check my list repeatedly to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. Still, I think that I’m at a place right now where I’d rather aim high and fall short than try to meet small goals. We’ll see if I still feel that way in the middle of the month.
Looking forward, I do want to start composing again, as I have mentioned. In January, I think that I would like to start doing a small composition exercise every day, but I suppose I’ll see how I feel at the end of December.10 Since I’m currently writing this post at the beginning of the day, I will wait to do the daily reflection until the end of the day. That also means that I’ll wait to post this until the end of the day, which might mean that I end up coming up with a second draft as I have different ideas for what, exactly, I want to spend next month doing. Just sitting here, I’ve found that the list has grown a lot in the past hour, which is nice and a little terrifying.
Coming back to the post at the end of the night, I didn’t really have much to add, which is nice. Time for my last November daily reflection!
Daily Reflection:
Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I wrote about half of one, which I think is enough for tonight. I’m ok with going to bed a little earlier instead of writing a little more.
Did I blog? I like today’s blog. It does what the musings are supposed to do, which is refocus me.
Did I stretch? I did end up stretching after posting last night’s musing. Will do so after this one.
Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? I did not make it very well focused last night. Maybe tonight. If not, I guess I’m still trying, which is worth something.
kind of. I wrote one in UG but that’s kind of just sat around for a bunch of years, and I’m unsure if anything will ever actually come of it↩︎
to be fair, I suppose that the existence of coffee shop AU’s as such a large genre does do a lot to make them seem like a place you might run into people↩︎
I don’t think I’ve talked about this. The reason for the auction is upcoming and feels like it might deserve a post all its own whenever it happens↩︎
where I’m currently writing this, interestingly enough↩︎
mostly, at least↩︎
for myself, not the readers,↩︎
this sounds much more ominous than it really is↩︎
this month I’ll try to be smart and write down exactly what friends I want to write a letter to and who I’ve written a letter to so that I can keep track and not accidentally forget anyone or spam them with repeat letters. As nice as a handwritten letter is, getting two identical ones probably wouldn’t feel great.↩︎
because five chapters is a common promotion that authors run to entice people to pay for their writing on the site I use. It could be fun to start monetizing my work.↩︎
it’s wild to me that it’s basically December now. That’s terrifying to think about.↩︎