White Horses and Black Ships
Notes on Proleptic Nostalgia and the Meta-Security of Hope
Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day Till then we say, Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear Sparkling armada of promises draw near. How slow they are! And how much time they waste, Refusing to make haste! Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked, Each rope distinct, Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits Arching our way, it never anchors; it's No sooner present than it turns to past. Right to the last We think each one will heave to and unload All good into our lives, all we are owed For waiting so devoutly and so long. But we are wrong: Only one ship is seeking us, a black- Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back A huge and birdless silence. In her wake No waters breed or break. -Phillip Larkin
Dr. Patitsas: “Beauty recedes as it is pursued until it resided in Christ alone.”
He elaborates two synonyms for Beauty: gift and surprise.
I would add, as Beauty recedes in our subjectivity as a motion of pedagogy, it nevertheless remains distributed throughout the ten thousand things; the sun, though we may be some day morose, shines elsewhere on resplendent brows. And it is this awareness that will finally be given to those that have offered the manifold gifts back to the giver: that which they have given away, is and has always been theirs.
All beings are good, all created things scintillate in the impossible articulations of deifying light which urge, endogenously, the world into the justice of its own sublimity.
When the attention is trapped, and begins like a fly to fly-paper to stick to the surfaces of things, then the world of multiplicity becomes, not crooked in its own substance, but corruptive because of the stance of our relationality towards it.
The poet is nostalgic for something he has never seen. For a land whose meadows he has never walked, for wells whose water he has never drunk.
He comes forward home.
Νόστος, the root of nostalgia, means homecoming.
He has never been there, and yet feels at once that it surrounds him, that it hums itself in all things, that stones and trees may suddenly be surrendered unto a transfiguration which he senses but cannot entirely perceive.
Hope proves its own object. It can be misplaced, but the energy thereof is deep and more ineluctable than whatever structures are these days said to undergird all motion and all time.
There is an aesthetic dimension of hope; indeed, hope is integrally aesthetic, for hope implies the beautiful insofar as it is implicated in what is desirable as such. It is not necessary to defer or refer, to the overthrowing of the hoped-for (here and now), the experience of beauty to the eidetic. The intentionality of any aesthetic is rooted in hope, because its ground is the tautological security of God’s unique theophany for-you. The gift of beauty is a surprise which is God’s marvelous self-guarantee. As it says in the psalms, God swears by Himself, for He is the only One who is pure simplicity.
Poetry doesn’t need to be metaphysical (at least, it need not retreat to the metaphysical), for the sayer or singer of a poem is a juvenile god, whose telos, to whatever degree attained or unattained, is to unite the created and the uncreated. Words that proceed from a hypostasis are capable of unexpected depths, dolphin movements and swiftnesses proper to immaterial wings, capable of bestowing life and death. Things can be said which create patterns of new liveliness, new dynamics may be set in motion, and loveliness unknowable may spring into power and found new cities in the heart. We create the world, as Kingsnorth has said, every time we speak. It is thus, also, that AI for the most part is a thing of mummery.
Call fire down upon the altar, or turn the key which locked the rain in heaven.
This no LLM can do.
A man can be the warhorse of his God.
“It is hard to iconize the mind and the senses. Through the Ritual of the Icon this ‘miracle’ can also be accomplished. The mind and the senses are the Magi inside of us – kneeling down in front of the Icon of the Holy Mother with the Christic Child in her arms. The mind brings as Gift the mind itself – the gold. The heart brings as Gift the Imagination – the myrrh. And the senses bring as gift the scented burning of self – the frankincense. The mind is the first one to “kneel” before the Heavenly Child. The mind must humbly receive the Mystery of the Christic Revelation. The mind should have the Revelation as thought and the kneeling as reason.”
-Fr. Ghelasie of Frasinei
White ships are always coming into harbour. Angels and Kings beg help of you, they knock upon your door. White horses take us home.
We are nostalgic towards a gift that we have already received. Being itself, which by God’s grace and help shall unfold into well-being and ever-being, is the priceless myrrh in the huge belly of the Galleon whose Captain made untameable Leviathan his plaything.
Steiner tells us (George not Rudolph) that hope is the predicate for all sayable things, sayable in the charactery of deed, thought, or image.
Hope is meta-secure, and nostalgia, rightly understood, is not a betrothal to disappointment.
Something is approaching; Someone is already here.
By expecting nothing, we are made free to receive everything. We feel, somehow, that every promise has already been fulfilled, and that the Present is more brimful of Surprise than aught imagined could ever be.
White horses take us home.
In an essay shortly to come, we shall begin to hint towards the adumbrations of a Poetics of Surprise.