Bright Week transitions, and a chiastic playlist

The pattern of a solar eclipse being the common thread

Feasting can be an ascetic struggle all its own. At first it’s easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of Pascha. Everything’s so bright and happy. CHRIST IS RISEN! But then it lasts forty days. Annually during Paschaltide my spirits flag and my mind buckles under the weight of feasting; a certain melancholy can set in — in contrast to Lent, when I tend to flourish and be happy in the midst of ascesis and repentance. There’s something out of balance in me that I’ve been working on figuring out through each iteration of the liturgical pattern. Truly to celebrate Pascha requires incredible amounts of humility and selflessness. It’s a narrative of one’s own total failure (see last week’s post) and Someone Else’s victory. The repentance of Lent has a way of centering one’s attention on one’s own thoughts and actions. Introspection is an important and necessary part of the process; however, we Christians yet sullied with the filth of vanity can thrive in such a context. The forty days of Pascha unmasks us for who we are: self-centered, prideful people who can’t properly celebrate an achievement that we had nothing to do with, a triumph that in fact occurs despite our own actions.

So here’s to the upcoming podvig of sorts: forty days of celebrating a victory not my own but given to me all the same in absolute gratuity. A corresponding gratefulness is the objective here, of course, and humility. Gratitude, I have long believed, is the key to overcoming so much of my ingrained melancholy and vanity. How have I chased my gratitude away? How can I become hospitable once again to this most needed virtue? My potential insight gained this year concerns my attitude during Holy Week. To look toward the Passion with excitement, as though prematurely celebrating the believed-in Resurrection, is a temptation to avoid. The horror of what is happening to the Lord has to be passed through with full participation. One must mourn. The Life of all is put to death. If I don’t mourn the departure of His Soul from His Body — basically as though, to my knowledge, He is merely human and not divine, as if the Resurrection isn’t a foregone conclusion, or even a possibility — I risk treating my knowledge of the Resurrection as perfect in a way that it is as far from as earth is from heaven. If my desire is for a divine faith, I can’t take satisfaction with my human understanding. Then if I abandon my humanistic level of religious knowledge during Holy Week, what I’m left with in my perception of those events is precisely as grievous as it should be. The grief that I naturally feel when someone I love dies has to be present in this case too. If I have not been experiencing the Resurrection as I should, I likely have not been experiencing the Passion as I should.

We’ll see, God permitting, how these potential insights play out in future iterations of the festal cycle. The Lord is merciful and gives us as many chances as we need to stand aright and embrace His likeness like we’re called to. This mercy itself is the very source of the gratitude and humility that I crave, and I wonder at it.

In the meantime, with Holy Week and Pascha this year, there’s another transition to consider: the resurrection of the Symbolic World website — check it out here! After some five months of lying in ruin, the website is back and better than ever, complete with a community forum run on the Circle platform. And all my articles are back online; see the list here. But now I have a lot of work to do. Not only will articles have to be written by me — for example, the promised sequel to “The Cosmic Chiasmus,” about the octave — but they will also have to be edited by me: I’m the new chief editor.

What that will mean for The Cormac Jones Journal here on Substack remains to be seen. I have been writing here once a week for the last six months. This is my 26th post. It has been creatively very satisfying, and I don’t want to give it up. Nor do I plan to, though it’s hard to imagine pouring into it the same energy that I have thus far. The once-a-week regularity is something to which I particularly want to remain faithful. To help me meet those ends I already have banked four completed posts that can be used in a pinch when I’m lacking time for Substack. They’re comprised of previously written material that I’m still fond of, and though I’d like to keep things fresh with newly written posts, I may from time to time need to go back to the private archives in order to meet my weekly assignment.

We’ll see how things work out. I have in mind to write something, at the outset of my position at The Symbolic World, about what generally constitutes symbolic thinking. I might post that over there, but I don’t want to impose my own ideas on others in the community. I’m in a position of authority over there now, which means my words carry a different weight from those of the mere contributor I used to be. I have to be mindful of that and figure out how to proceed. I still want to write this article, but maybe I’ll get sheepish about it and, with advice, post it over here instead. I have the opportunity to be more candid here on Substack because the social stakes are so much lower. But the readership is quantitatively so, so much higher over there. We accomplish so much more in community with others. A hermit in communion with the Trinity, it is true, accomplishes more than almost anybody — but insofar as I fall short of that (!), I should be concentrating on communal work at The Symbolic World. I’m going to try to carry on with both that and this. I welcome prayers on my behalf if you’re so inclined.

One potentially exciting thing I could do here at the Journal, if there’s interest, is share some music playlists in which I’ve practiced playing around with compositional form. This little creative outlet which I’ve engaged in since I was young — when I made literal mixtapes — has proved to be an important transition from reading things formalistically to creating things formalistically. I “read” the meaning of the songs I enjoy, and then select and sequence them to create a new meaning. It’s a simple thing people commonly do, but I’ve aimed to make an art of it. In a sense it’s already an art, and an ancient one at that: the Book of Psalms is the greatest mixtape ever made. Nowadays, to me, using secular music, it feels like editing a movie from found footage, and as such it can be very satisfying. One particular playlist I’ve made — I think it’s among the greatest things I’ve ever made. That one requires context, though; I wouldn’t want to share it right away. But there’s one playlist, I think, that could be a good introduction.

It was inspired by my trip to South Carolina in August 2017 for the total solar eclipse on the afternoon of Monday the 21st. This was a pivotal time in my life, when I had reached a bottom to my pit of hopelessness and was beginning to turn around. The pattern of an eclipse actually follows a similar shape. I in effect have already described it when comparing the forty days after Holy Week and Pascha to the forty-day fast before it. It’s plainly chiastic. There’s a long lead-up of events to a staggering central mystery of cosmic scope, after which events repeat in reverse, now transformed by memory of the center. The indifferent response that people commonly have to the back half of a total eclipse can even be seen as parallel to the licentious experience many have of Paschaltide. I’ve learned from the Church Fathers there are two types of trial that we endure, one by means of adversity and one by means of prosperity. The former type gets all the attention and is what we think of by the word “trial”, but how we fare in the latter type carries with it the greater consequence. Our ancestral sin, after all, was historically committed in the midst of affluence, and, speaking more vertically, those with the most wealth and power bear the greatest responsibility for the state of the world.

For the 2017 eclipse I with family and friends went to a public park where many others were congregated. As the eclipse began, and the moon started to pass before the sun, everyone took immense interest in the celestial event. That initial burst of interest simmered, then over the next hour gradually intensified as the moon covered more and more of the sun. During this time I waded into a small lake (fully clothed because I hadn’t a bathing suit) and swam out away from the shore where I floated on my back while looking up through my eclipse glasses. The two-minute-long total eclipse, when the circle of the sun turned black and the earth was shrouded in darkness in the middle of the day, was a moment of ecstatic, communal rapture. I experienced it as devastation, but the magnitude of attention was the same. Then as the moon began to pass, and the earth returned to light, attention all around me dispersed. For the next hour, the moon was still partially in front of the sun, the exact conditions that an hour previously, on the front side of the chiasmus, had commanded everyone’s attention. No matter: the focus of everyone around me was scattered among the things of earth, running around and playing, eating and drinking, people talking amongst themselves as if nothing was happening overhead. Emerging from the water, I held my attention on the sky as best as I could while not being antisocial, cherishing every moment I spent in the altered light of this event, even if the exultation of totality had passed.

Time lapse photography from Wikimedia Commons. The time stamps are from a different eclipse in a differrent location, but give a sense of how long these things can last.

Fractally, the experience of the eclipse was flanked on either side by the long, traffic-plagued car trips to and from western South Carolina alongside the eastern ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. I traveled with a friend and we listened to music along the way. Inspired by the journey, afterwards I crafted a chiastic playlist drawing from the kind of music that we listened to. The taste is generally mine, but includes collaborative input from my friend. As a trademark I typically include the band Low in all the mixes I make; here I’ve placed their cover of Joy Division’s “Transmission” at the center because it reminds me of a dance party on the moon (in low gravity with the bulky awkward suits) and because the lyrics reference the emanation of a message from the heavens.

The rest of the music draws deliberately from a lot of different places. I don’t know that sharing these playlists on Substack will be successful at all because musical tastes are so boorishly subjective. My adolescent 1990s soul formed its fragmented musical tastes in a broken condition, and I have struggled to grow my appreciation of music beyond where it was when my intellect first emerged. This playlist may be the least indicative of my limitations, so at least there’s that. My hope here is that even if not every song is loved by all, the overall form of the experience can inspire people all the same, perhaps to experiment doing something similar with music they do like, for instance. I believe my screenwriting, for one thing, has positively drawn from these marginally creative exercises in the sense that they gave me the feeling of what it’s like to craft an experience of this length. For years I wasn’t writing anything; I wasn’t reading much of anything either. My creative life was largely dormant but for the creation of these playlists first on YouTube, then on Spotify.

Then a short distance from the shore, as I struggled in my clothes to stay afloat in the water, I looked up at the eclipse and saw a hole punched in the center of the cosmos. In empathy my heart was punctured also. In the gap flooded all my unworthiness in the face of this mystery; I was undone. The music in the playlist I’m sharing now does not capture that embodied experience. It could not, not the least of which because it’s a disembodied artifact on the internet. What it does a decent enough job of, though, I think, is documenting my soul’s condition outside the penumbra circling those two minutes of undoing.