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7/30/2019 Two Essays for Arrival
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Two Essays For Arrival
Michael Bolerjack
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Two Essays For Arrival 2012 Michael Bolerjack
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For Steve and Daniel
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Table of Contents
To Gather
Conclusion to the Arrival
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To Gather
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and to say I am it, is not incorrect, but should
not be noised abroad, for scandal, at the very
least uncomfortable controversy. It could bewriting. It is often written. Yet as everyone
knows, it is found more in the white blanks
and spaces, than in the linear script, but
occurs even more in the lability of the
combinatory aspect of the alphanumeric.
Let us call it provisionally a book. When God
is all in all we will be contained in The Book.
The book is limited. It is the limit. Bound,
restrained, the emblem of religion. Bookshave beginnings and endings, but the text has
none, writing is now without definition or
delimitation, it is everywhere, it is
everything. The book, ordered by logos,
observes word, reason, harmony, proportionand is one. Writing is none, disordered,
discordant, without proportion, a sin as they
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say in Spanish. The lack and absence of
writing is said to be really real, without ideal
or illusion, perhaps even without idea itself,being but the literal evacuation of meaning
by another wizened.
The book arrives, but writing is structurally
unable to do so, being the indefinite that
lubricates the machine of the world
contamination. Life is not that machine, but
has been caught up in that machine. Life is a
book, the mind of God, written in the Word
by the Spirit, which we read for our roles.And it is the Temple. The Temple observes
number. The measure is God, and as you
measure life out, so will it be measured unto
you. The machine world can no longer be
measured, having erased God, notthematically, but through structured taint,
through a contamination that appears to be
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connectivity, where we are all looking for a
good fit, but the question of the fittingness of
things has become itself inappropriate. Thereis no coherence.
If the answer is scripture, to open our Bible,
we are given it to 1) learn to read the morals
of life, 2) understand the truth in words, 3) to
be inflamed by the Spirit of holiness not to
pass away, and 4) to realize now the mind of
God.
The book is square, hierarchical, planned,
bound, held, numbered, and limited. But the
world has exceeded that more than
paradigm, that divine map, and now we are
liable to be caught unawares in the midst of
writing our cantos on the chaos, and enfolded
not securely in the great book, but
constrained in the garment of Nessus,
trapped and poisoned in the taint, our
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Herculean effort come to naught in the
closure of the antichrists.
In the icon, the Teacher holds a book. If the
truth can be contained in a book, then God
must be that book. If God is the book in which
we are all written, that book is the site of our
eternal gathering, which has always been, for
God did not write himself, but for us he is
written. Through begetting the word, a Son,
he read himself and understood who he is.
The Spirit of love is a communication of the
communion in the minds word, where thebook takes place. The son, the word, arose
from the desire that the book of life be read.
The Father will be, but without a son, he will
not have been read.
The Spirit of God is a spirit of understanding,
the unity of the son reading the Father, and
explaining him to himself. It was for this he
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was sent, with prophets, among patriarchs,
so that the Father would be understood. His
book became our literature. All is scriptured,and does not only describe and declare, but
disclose him. Now, there is a passing of the
book, into the past, and in an infinite
acceleration, we hurtle forward, or plunge
downward, and almost realize that what
began with a fall, could end with one as well.
But it need not be so.
Among the world of books, one points up,
while another points down, but as we have
read, the way up and the way down are one
and the same. In the same place we read that
the most beautiful thing is just the pile of
trash heaped on the ground. It speaks not of
nature, but more truthfully and charitably of
this human city, where our freedom is not
only to discard, but to pick through and
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gather what we will. Of what will these
wisdoms make us?
The task of being compelled with infinite
acceleration toward the end seems
impossible to fulfill. There was a man named
Jacques Derrida who spoke not un-
prophetically of these things. He wrote of the
impossible as such, on the one hand, as the
only thing worth attempting, though still
unattainable and in-deconstructible, while on
the other hand, in the very thoroughness of
his destruction, having in a sense alreadydestroyed the world in principle, he found a
remnant based on justice, democracy and the
odd-sounding hospitality. In the felicitous
discovery of what would remain, JD lived in
the conjunction of the signature effect withJude, saint of the impossible, of the difficult
and desperate, of lost causes, the saint of
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those who almost despair. The apocalypse
might seem to be that, but the infinite
acceleration we sense is true, and as the greattransformation takes place, it may be that
those novels, some pointing up, and some
pointing down, were true, too, and so our
infinite paths, as we rush to eternity.
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CONCLUSION
TO THEARRIVAL
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The point of life is to arrive. To arrive means
to acquire the stability and openness
necessary to be receptive to the grace of Godthat completes us in this life and fulfills us in
the life to come. The arrival can be seen at
both the level of the individual and of what
we loosely term the culture. It is necessary
as individuals to prepare one self by several
means. First, we must think outside the
temporal dimension, into the eternal, the
fourth that completes the dialectical past-
present-future. Second, one must escape
from the bind of the dichotomy of necessity
and fantasy to achieve freedom and reality,
through work and through love, combined as
one act. Third, one must put aside the idea
that deconstruction is viable. It is theprojection of death or self-destruction into a
form of logic that paralyzes thought and
transforms it into an endless indefinite series
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of manipulations of the written word. Fourth,
one must be willing to learn substantially, not
cognitively. To learn substantially is to bewhat you believe. Knowledge that does not
lead to such transformation is not wisdom
but only information. Words, because they
are based in the Word of God, have the power
to transform us substantially, to
transubstantiate us, in a way similar to our
transformation by the reception of the
Eucharist. The word too is Spirit and Life.
Those in the Catholic Church are afforded the
grace of transubstantiation through the body
and the blood, but also through the Word.
Those outside it have the Word alone, but
that is the one thing necessary now.
Fifth, one must learn limitation. We mustlimit ourselves in order to arrive, not only
ourselves but our creations, logic, economy,
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direction. One must go straightly, toward the
goal, in a restricted economy through a
limited dialectic, not a general economy oftextuality. One must make something true
and good and useful for the building up of
others, not to merely enjoy, or for
aggrandizement, or honors, or place. Sixth,
one must learn to give, give until it hurts, as
Mother Teresa said. Such giving can be hard
to do, but only, for instance, by giving up the
notion that I already am the way I am meant
to be, can I be transformed into what God
wants me to be. There is much that must be
given up in order to arrive. As long as our
desires and passions lead us around by the
nose, our preconceptions and prejudices, our
inclinations and fantasies, we will continue tolive in the world phantasm. Seventh, we must
tell the truth. We must not lie. We must not
tolerate the abuse of truth by a culture that is
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in denial regarding such things as abortion
and other lesser crimes against the person.
We must love the truth. We must get to knowourselves, the truth about ourselves and be
honest with ourselves, with God, and with
one another. In doing these things we may
find ourselves ready. And readiness is all.
Ripeness is all, for the day comes, the hour
comes, and one must be prepared for it, as
individuals, as a culture, as a church. If one is
transformed before that great day, before the
apocalypse, personal or communal, one may
welcome Christ rather than cry out to the
mountains to fall and cover us.
The study of moral beauty I once wrote drew
a precise map of how to get to the place of
arrival, but presented itself as a kind ofdisclosure of that arrival, in addition to its
descriptions and declarations. Something
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took place in me in the writing of that book
and I believe in the writing of this current
one that I believe may do the same for you asit did for me. In both the logic and the poetry,
and the revelations of the apocalypse, arrival
actually happens.
While I have presented programs for the
reform of dialectical thinking, and of
deconstruction, and most of all for the reform
of the Catholic Church, something else was
occurring. You, the reader, and I, did not
simply communicate, but commune, because
gathered around the word of truth, next to
God, with our attention directed to the light
of revelation, withdrawing from our worldly
pursuits, raising our minds to things not of
this world, that it does not perceive, because
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it cannot consume them. To be transformed
is not to consume but to be consumed.
Transubstantiation is the key. As long as only
accidents are changed, ideas or opinions
exchanged for other ones, the substance has
not been altered. By giving you, hopefully, a
new way to think, a new logic, which is really
not of this world, I gave you a new form. I
transpose the idea of the new man from the
letters of Paul, of being transformed by the
renewal of the mind, into my writings, that
were more than mere criticism or poetry.Through the transformation of the texts on
which I wrote, when I wrote of other texts, I
may have brought about another
transformation in you and in me, in the
church and in the world. That we mustchange most agree on, but that we can
change is something we almost despair of
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today. I think if you want to arrive at a better
word, a better church, a better you, I say be
creative, be thoughtful, give, be honest, havea critical faith that believes and thinks in
eternal terms, turned away from judgment, to
love, from destruction and deconsecration,
falsehood and denial and fantasies, to the
work of reality, to make a church and world
to be.
Why should we wait? All are called. All have
the vocation. To arrive means to be what you
are meant to be, what God intends each of usto be. It is not always obvious, as my work
witnesses.
Our arrival is seen in our readiness for
completion and fulfillment, to prepare for the
coming apocalypse, soon, so we may one day
rejoice, as we cast out fear by perfect love.
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