in the days of camus and derrida

7/30/2019 In the Days of Camus and Derrida

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IN THE DAYS OF CAMUS

AND DERRIDA

Michael Bolerjack


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In the Days of Camus and Derrida

2012 Michael Bolerjack


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An Icon

from anEveningin Glas

In the days of Camus and Derrida, there was

explication de texte. That will have beenapproached here, while escaping the suffocatingnecessity of a discursive rhetoric. For any twothings can be connected from any distance underany rule. The text I propose for examination isthe title implicated in the top left hand corner of

the page. I need not go into the history of theproduction of the title of the work, for there aretexts upon texts and their contexts, which I musteffract. How the title was arrived at, from whenceit was derived, in-volves the catastrophe of the

end of the world which I am witnessing andrecording from here, in this text. We all are,basically, from our own angles of view, sort oflike the man at the end of Gabriel GarciaMarquezs solitude, who is deciphering the text of


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the secret as the apocalypse unfolds. Yet, let uskeep our hands clean and not be negligent, for the

secret of the text is neither magical nor given toappropriation, neither pornographic norpyrotechnical. It waits on patience, and purity,perseverance and the peace that surpasses allunder-standing. It is not done in a fever, or in asweat, but in measured strains, by number and

weight, neither a march nor a waltz, far rather likeDavids prophetic dance before the Ark of theLord, not frenzied, nor fraught, but rapturous,candid, faithful and confident. That the worlddoes dance away its final hours on the edge of avolcano almost without quite knowing what it is

doing, for none can be sure, our certaintyforgotten, is the spectacle and the distraction thatwould, if it could, keep the knowledge lockedaway, but the truth will out, whether the world willor know. That the world is standing on its head

and must be set right, and that Derrida did this inhis own way, a way parallel to that of Camus, andnot opposed, is simply the way I see it. ThatDerridas last texts concern, I think, sovereigntyand the beast, will not go unnoticed, nor the myth


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of Sisyphus, the problem of the suicide of thechurch, and the crux of the matter contained in

the juxtaposition of two words in almost anydictionary of the English language, that is to say,

DeconsecrationDeconstruction

Which hold the key to the recent history of theworld and the fate of the church.

Seeing patterns is making connections. In thegame of connect the dots, one finds the hiddendesign amid the random chaos, in order to reveal

the hidden meaning. If the world has an author, ifthe text has an author, then we have alwayspresumed that there is an inherent pattern ormeaning amidst the apparent chaos of our livesand in the works of literature in which we see

ourselves reflected. However, if there is noauthor, then one may connect the dots inwhatever manner one chooses, not finding butinventing a design. I think we have reached thatpoint. Not that there is no author, but that things


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such as characters or people or plots or historyare not the paradigm of our research, but

language itself. And perhaps still the book as suchand authority remain a subject of question andconcern, for we know that as we write we maywell be written. This is true in genetics,mathematics, physics, which involve writing orcodes, that is to say symbolization, something at

once both real and symbolic, literal and more thanliteral, the ideality of design. We do not knowwhere the design came from but we see it. Thesewords are letters that are arranged in patterns thatconvey meaning, under ideal conditions, theframing context of the mode of the reader and

other factors. All of this I say is not theexplication de texte, but rather the interpretation,the other part of studies in the French schools inthe time of Camus and Derrida. Coupled as theywere in the curriculum, explication and

interpretation were analogical to the roles of faithand reason in theological thought, in that theyseemed to presuppose one another. That they arestill viable, and are distinct disciplines, may be indoubt. Perhaps there is nothing but a generalized


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economy of writing at this time. Still, we seem toaccept in fact some restrictions as necessary,

bending the rules where we desire, but still withina kind of framework. I cannot speak for all. Theremay be types of discourse unknown to me thatoperate in far different ways. I do not know. Onelimit case or promontory in that regard isFinnegans Wake by James Joyce, which in turn

inspired the Glas of Jacques Derrida. These textsrewrote the codes or rules regarding literature andphilosophy, working out of the command andcontrol authorial paradigm, which is itself basedon competition, into a collaborative creativitywhich does not dictate meaning but suggest it,

dream-like and hypnotically, with an almost fascistconnotation to the collaborators. On the otherhand, I have found that the work I have beenengaged in is not limited to these modes, butrequires a combination of the contemplative and

the critical, on the part of both the author and thereader, for the advent of an economy of meaningthat is catholic to take place, that is to say, auniversality, as opposed to the authority of anyRoman Empire.


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The kind of writing that Joyce and Derrida

excelled in is characterized by the cognizance andexploitation of what I call the Ultra-structure, aterm I have borrowed from science and use todescribe what I will sometimes refer to as theGlossolalia of the text, a reading and writing intongues, as in the Wake, an activity that is

summed in the word Icon in the seven word titlethat I placed at the head of this text. As in theBible, there is speaking in tongues, an expressionof meaning given by the Holy Spirit at Pentecostto the nascent Church, and which subsists todayeven in catholicism in some out of the way places.

But just as one may say that the whole economyas such, all economies in principle, havetransformed from restricted to general ones, and Ihere refer to Derridas early writings on thesubject, the gift of tongues has, in my opinion,

also shifted from a strictly oral or verbalexpression to the modes of reading and writing,and that in fact textuality itself is this in some way.If language is the house of being, as has beensaid, which is another way to speak of the


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languages descended from the catastrophe thattook place at Babel, at which time God

deconstructed himself,

according to Derrida,then God is in language, as the Word, logos, astruth and meaning, but in other ways as well.From Holderlin we derive the scene of reading asa quiet, holy act. I project a general-ization thenof scripture as such, perhaps as Derrida did the

Messiah. Blake said everything that lives is holy,and the word, language, is a living thing, andthough often put to profane and secular use,which is an understatement of the greed andpornography that engulf us, yet our texts arebasically sacred in a way, even though impure and

contaminated, or perhaps even not despite thisbut because of it. I have advanced a logic over thecourse of my work that hinges on theunderstanding of the necessity of contradictionand it applies in this case. The Ultrastructure in

language cannot be without being inclusive, bothblessing and cursing, creating and defiling, and soon. It is the principle of connection, thecondition of possibility for it. It is potency inrelation to act, to speak in quasi-Thomistic terms.


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When I first discovered the word Ultra-structure,I used it exclusively to describe the numerical, not

the alphabetical, and saw that numbers need notranslation, and so are privileged carriers ofmeaning. This insight was crucial in the advancingof the theory concerning the Apocalypse whichturns on the meaning of a number in the Book ofRevelation. I need not rehearse that for you now,

having already covered that ground in previoustexts, but promise you the subject will haveimpacted the work you are now reading. However,I will come at it by way of the Exegesis andEisegesis of the iconic seven words of my text,An Icon from an Evening in Glas. But before

turning to the explication itself, I would like topreface it with a statement concerning the termsExegesis and Eisegesis. They mean in theiretymological back-grounds in Greek to lead outof and to lead into and are used especially in the

context of describing Biblical inter-pretation.When one reads ones own ideas into scripture,one is said to be reading eisegetically, while whenone reads what is really there one is readingwith proper exegesis. On the other hand, Joyce


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and Derrida and the writers following themeschew such an opposition, de-constructing this

polarity, rendering it meaningless. In theexplication of the seven word text that is to beaccomplished, the traditional idea of Exegesis andEisegesis, while not being ignored, will beredefined by my practice. I will say in advance thatall of this bears on the conversion ofleading

into a kind offollowing,

and that interpretation

and explication is always more of the following ofthe seams in the semes, rather than a seeming tolead the text toward its inherent meaning, which isalways univocal or equivocal. The text itself is, ifnot infinite at least indefinite, and cannot be

pinned down to a set of controlled meanings orreadings. There is no exhaustive Exegesis. Onecan say this is for a mystical reason, when readingthe Bible or other scriptures, and in my theory ofthe book in general, all texts become the scripture

that they are, and as such may be read as havingalways more than one meaning, the old modelincluding moral and mystical levels in thehierarchy of interpretation, which my own workseveral years ago drew on. The network of


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language exists at both the hierarchical level, whileat the same time, and contradictorily, subsisting in

the text as a leveling, an evening out, I might say.This is the direction of Ultrastructure orMetasignification, which is neither less than normore than nor equal to another, while at the sametime, and contradictorily, being the parallel orprime of that other traditional, re-stricted,

hierarchical method of inter-pretation thatcharacterizes theology and its regimes. By beingparallel to the tradition, which has become lost inthe labyrinth of its own desire, not only is placegiven, and magnitude recognized, but direction isnow discerned, without which we will not arrive.

Our arrival is not derived from the tradition, butsurvives it. One need not be disconsolate over theloss of meaning, for something is received in itsstead, the way to a let us say kingdom let us say ofends that the tradition indicated while at the same

time preventing. To put it in theological terms, theRomans do not practice what they preach, and socannot reach the goal set by the savior, which isneither a leading in nor out of the text, but afollowing. Deny yourselves, take up your crosses


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and follow me. Jesus asks not leaders butfollowers of the good gospel.

Now, at this point in the text, if it were a retrometa-fiction, a second narrator would interruptand comment on what has come before, and thetext would explicate and interpret itself. It seemsto me that something of this sort is called for,

because of an apparent faux pas on my part in thepreceding, that is, my assertion of the relationshipbetween Glossolalia and the word Icon. As I wasre-reading what I had written, I noticed right awaythe dissonance in the assertion, and thoughtwithout doubt that the word Glas makes much

more sense as the symbol for Glossolalia than theword Icon does. There is, in my apparent slip, acrux, and so I inadvertently really went straight tothe heart of the matter, and upon reflection,decided that the relationship between the word

Glas and the word Icon would be the appropriatesite for launching the engagement with the text tobe explicated.


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Glas, the title of Derridas monumental 1974work, is the word in French for the death knell,

the tolling of the church bells at a funeral. Onemay ask, whos death? Indeed, it seemed in a wayto me at the time I read the English translation in1986 to be simply the tradition, or even Westernculture, everything before postmodernism. Now,it sounds to me different, the tolling of the bell,

and involves a complete reevaluation on my partof the meaning of Derridas work, and thehistory, meaning and fate of the Church, by whichI mean the Roman Catholic. To say the tolling ofthe death knell is the Church itself mourning thedeath of the Church itself is what I now discern,

and in this I reinterpret Derridas overall strategyto have been always directed at the SupremePontiff in Rome. Derrida took part in thedeconstruction of the time, if not leading it thenat least presciently seeing the way things could go

and the way he wanted them to go, not for themere sake of enjoying the de-struction of theworld, but to indicate the crisis he, I think, sawcoming for and from the Catholic Church. Thetarget of Derridas attack was at first expressly


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logocentrism, presence and propriety, valorizingwriting over speech, absence over presence, the

other over the subject or the self, scattering overgathering, the text over the book; then, later, hetook up the problem of religion in his writings onthe Messiah, justice, hospitality, and the opennessof the to come. Toward the end, he wrote ofwhat he termed globalatina-zation, and warned

against a projection of power on the Romanbasis, and posthumously mentions together in atitle sovereignty and the beast. It seems to methat Derrida was approaching obliquely butsteadily to an interpretation of the death of theChurch and to the apocalypse now.

The icon is a sometimes wordless word thatalso sometimes contains within itself a text, abook opened, revealing an ancient script in a

foreign languages. The icon itself is an image inneed of study, and whether or not it has letters orwords in it, is open to inter-pretation andexplication. I believe that, again to eschew therelation of Exegesis and Eisegesis, the icon reads


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us more than we read it. This can be re-applied totexts generally, rather than being restricted to only

iconic images, and then it can be said that the textreads us, explains us, and not the other wayaround. In my discovery or positing of theUltrastructure I have found that this phenomenonhas occurred especially in what has becomeknown as the postmodern period, from roughly

the second world war, or the publication of theWake in 1939, because of a breakdown in thetraditional orders. In the chaos that may be butrandom chance, the thing, which I call alsoMetasignification, takes place, whether in themind or out of the mind, I dont know, as the

connecting of bits and pieces to form patterns.We half-perceive and half-create this new reality,as Wordsworth said. We are co-creators of it. Itsometimes seems magical or schizophrenic, evil orcrazy, or sublimely imaginative, and weird or

supernatural. There is something there in thedetails of general textuality that can be seen if welook hard enough. Joyce had a genius for thisperceiving and creating, and by producing thechaos of the Wake, gave a space for the


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Ultrastructure to be projected into or discovered,as in an alchemical experiment. The icon of Glas

by Derrida fuses the ultrastructure with thetraditional, forcing the order itself to bear theweight of the creation of new things within it,which is one aspect of what is calleddeconstruction. The text is in a place somewherebetween rigid order and complete nonsense, a

place of lability, change and openness, ofpossibility that deconstructs the closure of a setarrangement, allowing constant re-invention, andbringing to light an indefinite number of potentialconnections that cannot be limited or closed offin principle, though in fact for a written work to

be, there must be some limits found or applied, asthe human subject itself needs an identity, inorder to not become lost or submerged in theever greater of the sea surrounding. But asmystics tell us, our destiny is just that losing of

oneself in the infinite sea of God. Textuality isnot the divinity, nor is the internet, which arerather simulacrum of eternity, which at least in aparallel manner are breaking into the closedparadigm of human society and are translating us


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into another space that is preparatory to theadvent of the thing that is on the other side of

the apocalypse, a kingdom of peace, the new ageto come.

At the outset of my text, in addition to thepromise of an explication of the seven word title,I promised some interpretation of Derridas

sovereign and beast, of Camus and the myth ofSisyphus, and of what I call the suicide of theChurch, as well as something on the importanceof the relation between the words

Deconsecration

Deconstruction

which I think sum-up the problem of the churchin the modern world. Taking these in order, it isnot, I think, a coincidence that Derrida employs

terms that apply to the Antichrist, though theword coincidence has become altogethermeaningless in my world. Things just simply are,in their weird ways, and I cannot understand orexplain how or why they happen. As I have said


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elsewhere, I believe John Paul II is the beast ofthe Book of Revelation, based on the

interpretation of the text, including an elucidationof the famous number. That, if this is the case, ashe was raised to the status of the order of theblessed, then the abomination of deso-lation hasalready occurred, and the order of mass that takesplace in November 2011 is his image that

speaks in order to be worshipped. It is not clear tome, however, if John Paul II and Benedict XVIwere conscious they were doing what Revelationprophesied. It seems to me that the world and thechurch were destined to be destroyed, or changed,by God himself, but that this takes place in two

ways, which may compete with each other as adisjunctive either or, or may collaborate as asynthetic both and. The world and the churchbegan the final deconstruction of themselvesabout the same time, in the 1960s, the time of

Derrida

s early work, of the Second VaticanCouncil in Rome, and which is the date some, forinstance the critic Northrop Frye, point at as thestart of the postmodern period. The world stayedon its course of de-construction, including even


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that of the Soviet Union, but Rome did not, andunder John Paul II, beginning in 1978, began

instead a worse thing than deconstruction, that isto say, it began to deconsecrate itself, whichDerrida, I think, obliquely points to in one of hislast ideas, that of the worst. This is taking place,in principle and in fact, by the repudiationcovertly of the highpoints of the theology won at

Vatican II, such as the inviolability of theconscience, in the unending sex abuse scandals,and in other more obscure, but perhaps moreunholy things, reaching back throughout Catholichistory, concerning lies and forgeries, money andmurder. Again, I do not know the intentions, only

the results. In the Book of Numbers, God tellsMoses and Aaron that he himself breaks hispromise, after the people of God refuse to enterthe promised land, as Caleb and Joshua urgedthem to do. Instead, they would stone the men

who had scouted Canaan and found it indeed aland of milk and honey, ripe for the taking. Godwills that the people fall in the wilderness overthe next forty years, for not listening to the menwho told them that the promised land had


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arrived, they needed only go in and claim thevictory that God would surely give. Something

like that has happened in our own day, with thevisionary men of Vatican II and their attempt at afree, transformed catholicity, being rejected forthe thing the Roman Church has become, adisgrace. That those of us who know this standlike Joshua and Caleb in relation to the people of

God is to me incontrovertible, so we must urgenow, go in, trust God, the kingdom is yours, whilerealizing our plea will probably be rejected, everypeople of God, new and old, Jew and Catholic,always refusing. In this may be seen the myth ofSisyphus, as well, that we roll the rock up, only to

see it roll back down, yet must do our duty, asperhaps even the bishops and theologians ofVatican II knew their leadership could beeventually despised and ignored. I do not thinkthe Church is going to immediately cease to exist

as a visible bricks and mortar institution, and itwill still have its money and some power, but as aspiritual entity it is ceasing to be. God, I believe,as in the case of the rebellion in the wilderness, isnot bound to fulfill the covenant with this


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Church, and in fact, new Israel and old Israel arein the same position, typologically in every way,

just as the religious authorities, in the days ofJesus, are the same type as now. In the time ofJesus, whose name is really the same as Joshua,the promised land or the kingdom of God wasagain proclaimed, the thing was at hand, butthrough some refusal or lack on the part of the

people of God, it was deferred, not because Godchose to, but rather because the Church herselfdid not claim the victory. The situation becameclear under Constantine, and more so later, as theinstitution became involved in money and politics.That God knew this beforehand, that the people

would betray him, not only among the Jews but ata later time, is foretold in Daniel 12:7, when it issaid God will scatter the power of the holypeople. Indeed, the thing is at hand, a little earliereven than Isaac Newton foresaw based on a

calculation he made of 1260 years after thecoronation in 800 of Charlemagne. No, it is 1260years since the forgery of the donation ofConstantine, the fiction on which Rome bases herauthority, which was accomplished by 754. In


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other words, the Deconsecration that began thenwill be fulfilled now, and the death knell will toll,

albeit perhaps in silence, for the iconic Churchthat once was.

To go on from this point to an explication ofthe little seven word text of the title seems a bitanti-climactic, but I will summarily mention a few

things. In the center of the square appears thewords veni roman, and in a cross-like formationthere is the indication f-ing roman, pointing to thebind of a contradiction that concerns the finalPope to come, called Peter the Roman in theprophecy of St. Malachy. Whether he will fulfill

the evil plan or expose it, I do not know, but afterhim, the Church will be no more. There are manyother connections among the letters in the design,including some chatter about anal icons, or theessential anal aspect that is the condition of

possibility inherent to a thing for it to be analyzed.The anal is a thing Derrida writes of in his Glas,and in connection to religion. In his work, the ICand the GL are opposed, the immaculateconception and the siglum GL, and it is indicated


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in my design that IC and GL had a son,something of an Onan, as is the type written of

in de-construction, such as Rousseau. As well,several women appear covertly in the text,including Eve, Mary and the Greek earth motherGaia or Gaea. That in the center of the square anomen is written concerning at least an I, andalso other things that can be construed into some

sort of narrative, if one desires, is given,considering there are at least several charactersinvolved in a kind of conflict. But, that time hasstopped and that everything is connected, wouldhave to be the principle of any possible inter-pretation of the text-design. You may look and

may find more in the seven word text, but I haveshown you at least this much.

I cannot say things are even at this point, whatthe leveling means, or if there has been some kind

of revenge, or getting even. I do think we are inthe evening, as one said, not dark yet, butgetting there. The world will deconstruct and thechurch deconsecrate, and what will happen afterthat? We do not know, but the Bible promises


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great things, the thousand year kingdom of peaceon earth in Revelation, and as also Isaiah

promises, a finale in which the lion lies down withthe lamb, not a violent catastrophe, but arestoration of lost innocence. I think, in fact, thepart of the apocalypse that is catastrophic isalmost over, and the violence, for instance theabsurd amount in Mexico as I write, is an

indication of the way the matrix of technology,money, and fascism, all tied to a grand corruptionthat may be seen in the useful paradigm ofcollaboration, where all give their assent, nonedissent, and the thing itself, Rome or the authorityof an invisible hand, is seemingly infallible. But if

it cant be wrong, it must be wrong, and if I mustbe mistaken, then I must be telling the truth.Truth, if it is true, must always be inconvenient,as we say, unsettling, disturbing, opposed to theillusion, the madness, the evil. That truth and lies

stand side by side, good and evil, being and meresemblance, cannot be helped, but if justice everhappens, as we hope, then the re-conciliation ofthem will have taken place. Impossible, as Derridasaid, yet God alone does the impossible.


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To conclude, I should speak of the seven

word text-design,

An Icon from an Evening inGlas, in relation to my work as a whole, whichcould bear that inscription. The Icon Glas pairdescribe the struggle by me with catholicism andde-construction, while the word Evening invokesHegels word in his Philosophy of Right that

Minervas owl of wisdom flies at dusk, an

indication of his awareness of the closure takingplace through the accomplishment in the dialecticof all possible positions in the spectrum ofthought. My work finds itself shuttling back andforth between the Roman, the Derridean and the

Hegelian, all plied together as the three strandcord of which the Bible in Ecclesiastes speaks. Ifthis knot or circle was at any point effracted, touse once more Derridas term I learned from hislate work Given Time, then it is not in taking

sides in the positions of the catholic,deconstructionist or dialectician, but rather by theautobiographical element of the writing. Forthose who have read, or read about, DerridasGlas, autobiography is a part of his de-


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construction. Perhaps my work is an obliquecommentary on my own deconstructed self. But

as Derrida said, GL protects against the schiz thatGL produces, and so, having becoming other tomyself, at times uncanny, quite beside myself, Ieventually healed, and this perhaps by the verything that GL symbolized in its invention orintervention in my life. I do not know, and the

authorial fallacy is asserted. I am not the bestjudge of what I have written, or of the life I havelived. That the work is the history of a journeyout of deconstruction and completely throughthe catholic church, only to emerge on the otherside, understanding both in themselves and in

relation to each other, may be true.

If I were to add anything to these final words,it would be concerning what Derrida alreadycalled in 1991 the state of the debt. It seems

every nation and most individuals are in afinancial bind that is insolvable except by meansof a key piece of what I would have once calledthe Catholic Economy, ideas that I and othershave been working on the last few years in light


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of the Churchs teachings on social and economicjustice. It seems to me that we are in need of

forgiveness, of a

jubilee year

as in old Israel,forgiveness of debts and debtors. As well asgiving and asking for forgiveness, as individuals,nations must adopt a total for-bearance of thedebt, at least until things get better, if not anoutright charging off of the entire debt of the

U.S. and all other countries. Then we can startover with a clean slate. Our debt now threatens toenslave and impoverish the whole world. I do notsay it was an intended thing, as I do not know theintention of any, but I know all need a chance tobegin again. The promised land to come, will

have been, therefore, so that the Messiah mayarrive.

You might say, as I said that I might, as GodHimself in His might may say, that as has been

said, we had then but a circling occupation, anddid walk into eternity without ever knowing, butfor this: a young professor stood at the chalkboard and drew a new diagram of our salvationaccording to the Council, in an elaborate encircled


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sphere, almost justly Ptolemaic in design, ever in aparadigm of Catholics, with Roman centrality the

primacy, and those of the other nominationsspreading out in a sea of the to be blessed, amidthe murmur of a discussion I so as hazarded tointerpose: there are not degrees of this salvation,one is either saved or one is not; so that for alogic disjunctive I put them to it, and did so make

them love, in that now as I see it, our circlesinterchanged, what was at the center is in the endbut only peripheral at best, and God calls sinners,not the righteous, and the twins of Israel, newand old, Jew and Catholic, miss the Messiah, or asif to, so God turns human salvation inside out,

stands our thinking against itself, for mercy if andonly if, is His alone and is most free, andjudgment has begun at the House of God, so thatwe will have been shown His ways were neverours, nor to be comprehended.

But let this be, as it dismayed, for those whosay there can be no Christian thing proper tragic,so all is a divine comedy, but yet we do not knowthe time, whether it be free, and whether we are


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ready, nor if we be ripe or rotten, or if thingsstand out of joint, for it seems to me that even

when we do our best, our actions recoil against us,as Oedipus or an hero from a tragedy by WilliamShakespeare, and we wonder at ourselves as menbetrayed, so let it be with Caesar, if we had buttime, what great things could have been said anddone, as men of a Roman rule did think they had

saved the Church even as they destroyed thesame, deconsecrating the blessing with the curseof infallibility, with the assumption of the right toheir, while propagating a faith, which, neithermystic nor moral, did hinder the eternal from everbreaking into time, as if, and imposed upon the

becoming of the kingdom of God a rigid, hard,static, death, the Being of the thing appropriated,and stamped the necessity of hierarchy and allthat comes with it on life itself, as if, only to findthe miracle in the end of true substantiation,in

that the body and blood of Christ was given butonce for all, His action saving only those whomHe chose, only those so chosen. We are all butparallel lines that meet in infinity. Because of thespace that took place in the modern theory, the


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square as such became impossible for thegeometry of Einstein, as he reconciled the

discordances in thought, and he said there wereonly lines and their primes. It seems if we bebeside ourselves, we have a chance. The worlditself has created its own parallel world, and it ismore in that virtual world that we live and moveand have our being than in the space we once

lived in. Now, that other space, the primordial oneof the Bible, has become distant, in a way un-thinkable, and perhaps impossible to reach, evenmore impossible to traverse, even if it could be.But it is still possible for God to square things,because though we are billions of parallel lines

lost in a waste land, Gods meridian crosses all ourparallels, and he closes us, squares the accounts,gives shape and form to what, though it was stilldirection, had no meaning, for the end wasunknown and un-knowable. God has drawn a line,

not to cross us through or out, and not in anerasure of our characters, but to complete thestory, so that we may be saved. His line is not anunderlining, to re-emphasize us, nor a line acrossthe bottom of our last page, a line that says so far


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and no further, but a kind of margin, a place forHis gloss and for Him to write, a line running

from the top to the bottom, clean througheveryone and everything, like the prime meridianspoken of by the poet, which connects us all, ourdistant sites not so much gathered in theappropriation, that is in the circle of the text andthe world it created, but a line to cross all our lives

with the knowledge and love of that one who isalone able to demarcate us, to take a globe, andcircle it against the time, as he also said, there,north of the future, for we have been given allour latitude, and given enough, see what we havedone, but as the line approaches from the other

side of this evening, how long was his patience,how long was his forbearance, how long hesuffered us in the wilderness. But now thatwaiting, that wandering, is over, and he draws overthe face of our depths, to shake us, to arouse us,

to awaken us to his arrival. Our life will not haveseemed so long, once He comes, nor will thedreams we once beheld still hold, for the cord oflife will not have been cut, in fate it will not be so,


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but our lifes lines then will have to have been, aseven the Glas foretold.

In the Book of Joshua it is told that a schismalmost occurred in Israel, in the beginning, as thetribes were settling the promised land. The tribesof Reuben, Gad and Manasseh had taken theirplaces east of the Jordan, as in the agreement they

had reached with Moses, just before all thewarriors crossed into Canaan. However, after thetwo tribes and the half-tribe were to the east, theythought to construct an altar for themselves, andwhen the people of Israel heard of this they sentan armed troop to make war on what they

considered a blasphemy, the setting up of a rivalaltar. Gad and Reuben, their descendents andthose of Manasseh, explained that the reason theybuilt their own altar was that they feared somedaythe children of Israel in the west, in the I think

proper of the Promised land, would tell thechildren of Reuben and Gad and Manasseh thatthey were not true Israelites, and disown them,and cause them to be disheartened and to losetheir faith in the one true God of the patriarchs.


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They built their own altar they said to show allthat they too worship the same God, and to point

up the difference between themselves and the onealtar before the tabernacle, that they were not arival in worship, but the same, which mightbecome lost from view to the people of God andtheir descendents because of their physicalseparation from those in Israel. Phineas,

representing the people of God, was pleased withthis response, as was Joshua and the elders whenhe made his report upon his return. What moralmay we draw? It is this: That the altar I haveerected in the work now concluding, though itoften preaches the arrival, is not a rival to the

Catholic way, but one with it, with provision madehowever that the altar of the Lord, we feel, hasbecome de-consecrated by the actions of thehierarchy and the clergy of the people of God.We do not claim to be the only true people of

God, anymore than we feel those who followRome should claim that exclusive title. At VaticanII, in the declaration on religious liberty, it is saidthat there is a true religion still, and that this onlysubsists in the Catholic and Christian churches


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and is not identical with them. The true religionmay be found in many places, but I feel strongly

that true religion is evidenced herein by this altarso set up to show that we too worship God, sothat no one can claim us to be outside the onefold of Christ, shepherd of our souls. ThatChrist, king of endless glory, is the one truesovereign, and does not need a visible

representative on earth that merely usurps thethrone that is in fact set up in heaven, not inRome, or in any city of this world. It also exists inthe heart of each believer as the one aboriginalvicar, the conscience, which is irreplaceable andour last refuge. One must follow ones own

conscience, as the sole sovereignty that is withinoneself.

The starting point for my critique of thepapacy last year was the coat of arms of Benedict

XVI, a fact I have concealed and withheld untilnow. There are various interpretations, all benign,of what that crest and shield contain, but I wouldlike to add my own reading of that heraldicdevice, the at once iconic and Glas-like emblem


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of the man I consider the false prophet ofRevelation, who promotes worship of the Beast,

by means of an image set up for worship, at everyaltar of the Roman Church. In the coat of armsof Benedict, there are several features. With-in itare three items, a seashell, the head of anEthiopian, wearing a crown, and a four-footedbeast, a bear. Despite the benign, obscure and I

think far-fetched inter-pretations of these thingsby commentators, I offer the opinion that theymean some-thing sinister. It is in fact in what iscalled the bend sinister that the Beast appears.In Revelation, the Beast is said to have four feetlike a bear. Thus it fits. The seashell I think

represents the verse of Revelation that says theBeast will rise from the sea, not as in some obtusereading about heroic Augustine, and a boyemptying the sea. The Ethiopian crowned is Ithink a reference more complex, bearing on the

Acts of the Apostles, the only place in the NewTestament that such a person is mentioned. He isthe one converted by Phillip. What comes justbefore this is the warning about Simon Magus andthe perennial Roman ur-problem of simony, as


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for instance the practice, still, in Mexico of theselling of indulgences. It is important what the

Ethiopian is reading when he is found by Phillip,something from Isaiah about the sufferingservant. The passage as Acts quotes it is a littledifferent from the Old Testament. It speaks ofhim who in his humiliation had judgment takenfrom him. To me this indicates the view of the

young seminarian I once heard that Gods hands

are tied, there is nothing he can do to end theabuses by Rome.

Surrounding the inside of the coat of armsare some curious innovations by Benedict, the

replacing of the triple crown by the bishopsmiter, contra a ruling by Paul VI in 1969, and theaddition of the pallium, along with the traditionalkeys of Peter. It seems this addition of thebishops hat fits the reading by exegetes of

Revelation that the false prophet will have twohorns like a lamb, which has been taken toindicate the form of the miter. The pallium itselfis a pall that now hangs over all. Altogether, itseems that Benedicts coat of arms is a symbol


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that fits his role, as I see it, as the one whofollows the Beast, wields the same power as the

former, and will promote the worship of him,especially by the image I take to be the new orderof mass.

In this iconic representation of who and whatBenedict is, we have the telling Glas of the

Roman Church, if it is read prophetically, which isthe dimension of Biblical studies neglected bymany, but which is the highest level of scriptureinterpretation, being the end in view for which theWord of God was given. The emblem ofBenedict, an anti-icon, inscribes the Glas of the

Church, as a Mise en abime, as a crypt to beunsealed. It is perhaps this that Aquinas wasshown, and which caused him to lay down hispen.

Near the start of his career, in the

opuscula

on the eternity of the world, Thomas had saidthat it had not yet been demonstrated that Godcannot do an infinite number of thingssimultaneously. Indeed. Thomas in the beginning


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knew more than he knew. In the end he knewwhat is called the vision of God, at least thats

what they say. They say that he saw God in abeatitude, the glory of God, was astonished bythe beauty of love and simply ceased to write inorder more quickly to pass on to the heavenlyabode that awaits. But perhaps the vision of Godwas for him something else, far stranger than the

pious fraud the church used to gloss over thesilence of Thomas and his statement that all hehad written was of no account. I think, it seemsto me, God did not show him Himself but thecatholic fate. All the work of Thomas would befor naught, and even used for evil ends. God has

mercy on whom He will, and I believe thatThomas Aquinas found that before he died Godhad already decreed the condemnation of theChurch before it was ever created. Thomas wasnot wicked and understood, though he was

astonished. The wicked will never understand.Gods way is not the way of the church, nor doesit know Him. In this, blindness and blessing.

in the days of camus and derrida

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