02 XI 2002 - 20:50 - verba37

Homework sheet full of logarithm problems kicking you about the room and generally causing you great frustration? I know the solution for that -- it's a Buzz!

Freewrite, set starting phrase, go to it. And this is what you need to know about the Buzz:

(Go.)

Here's a note: This entry is not at all about what I say it's about. I'm not even sure if it's about anything. Instead of reading this one, you might get more of a kick from, say, this one. Also: it is remarkably difficult to remain coherent when one is falling asleep.

I remember the first time I fell in love with a cathedral. This entry should probably more properly be about my love affair with the church -- not necessarily the worship, but certainly the building -- as the term 'cathedral' is of course used only of churches which are the seat of a bishop, cathedra of course meaning something like throne.

I wish of course that I could dig up something more interesting from the recesses of my mind, some more personal memory. Perhaps the first time I felt my pulse quicken and my mouth dry at the sight of another man would do, but to be quite honest, I don't remember that, and whether that nonmemory is due to the fact that my memory is pretty spotty for anything beyond three years or whether I do not remember the first time because it has simply been that way for me from when I first gained an awareness of desire -- well, it seems to me that the point is moot.

Living in the United States, I often feel keenly a lack of truly monumental architecture. Many of our churches are designed after the ones immigrants left behind in their old country -- but the country's youth works against it, and one is left sometimes with buildings that try very hard to be imposing but are not particularly so.

Even considering this, I am still impressed by what is sometimes the simple beauty of the church. The first church I ever visited was SS Peter and Paul, in what used to be our Italian district. The rose window and the smoke from the candles hypnotized me; I was hooked. There's not much more to say about it; the trappings, I suspect, are the same as most Catholic churches anywhere, if sometimes a bit less elaborate than those of the greater European cathedrals. One thing that reassures me is the constancy of the Church...

Incidentally, the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi is located in San Francisco.

I try to find things that will ground me in a city. When I visited my sister in New York, I asked her to take me to St. John the Divine and to St. Patrick Cathedral. We got to the latter on what must have been Palm Sunday, with palm fronds stacked high by the side of every pew. The contrast between the masses of people packed into the church in preparation for the Mass and the height of the ceiling was wonderful, a rightness that I haven't felt in a long time. Ad maiorem gloriam Dei, indeed. Some may say that it is sacreligious to see a God in His edifices and His music. I have nothing to say to them if they cannot feel a yearning and a glory.

A bit of a diversion from cathedrals, if you will: Stone does not work well as a building material in San Francisco. Neither does unreinforced brick. Mission Dolores -- probably the oldest building in San Francisco, which began to be constructed a week after 4 July 1776 (which is the date of the founding of the presidio), is an adobe-plaster church, although it's changed a bit over the years. Much of the stone- and brickwork conceals a wooden frame: such a frame shifts better when an earthquake strikes. Still the buildings of stone and of brick seem the most solid things around for miles, if one excepts the hills (and artifacts of modern times, such as the big concrete cross on Mt. Davidson that caused so much trouble a few years ago and the big radio tower on Mt. Sutro.)

It is odd, perhaps, that I begin to construct a faith for myself out of music and architecture and the savor of disused Latin prayers.

When I was in Dublin I had to go see Trinity Cathedral. Had, because it's a drive by now, to go and see these buildings that are concrete faith. Perhaps this too is part of it, that I feel glimmers of doubt within myself, that I need something I can touch as reassurance -- I don't know.

The mind is an exceedingly messy thing.

When my friend and I went into the church, there was no one in there -- the priests were, we assumed, somewhere in the back, behind the altars. She sat down for a bit.

Then, in the stillness, I dropped a punt into the collection-box and lit one of the candles for my grandfathers. There -- 8100 kilometers from home -- I began to feel as if I had found a rest.

Rest isn't to be confused with peace, or faith, but it is a long way from what I feel on dark nights, and I'm glad of it whenever I manage to get it.

My mind is traveling a hundred thousand ways at once and I am powerless to stop it...

so I think I'll end here.

No.

I remember the first time I was made to cry over the telephone, probably because it happened just over two weeks ago. I was feeling particularly fragile due to social stresses, and my sister had been trying to give me advice -- for some reason, something loosened within me, and I doubled over with sobs.

I'm not sure when it happened, really. When I was young, I used to cry all the time, on the drop of a hat. My parents used to yell at me to stop crying so much. Finally, I learned to repress things, and now my threshold for tears is pretty high. I'm not sure most of the friends I've made now have ever seen me cry. Sometimes, it makes me feel like a monster that I can't cry, even if I'm trying to, even if the world seems as if it's about to crash down around my ears, even at funerals of people I loved. Sometimes I think I stopped crying on my own, but sometimes it feels as if they were taken from me and I've no hope of recovering them.

So you might see why I found it simultneously terrible and liberating that this thing had loosened; seven years of tears is a great thing to purge, and I don't remember the tears so much as I do the pain that seemed to grab everything from nipples to navel as if with some fiendish vise.

Are tears ever really shallow tears? Is an ache ever really a false ache? I've been told repeatedly by one of my favorite teachers that "there's no such thing as a little trauma -- trauma is trauma." But my talent for self-deprecation and a particular flair for guilt tell me that I shouldn't be crying over myself, that there are more important things to grieve for, that even in my own life there are better things to weep over.

No comment like that diminishes the perception of an ache late at night when I want nothing more than to be touched. It is the pastime of a daylight self to inflict crueler hurt upon the nighttime self by belittling the importance of the first hurt.

So tell me: where is my maturity, my reason, then? Certainly both seem very far from any prospect of my aid...