And below, three photos from my stay at the Delaware shore last weekend. You've seen versions of these shots before--I took them at Cape Henlopen State Park and Gordons Pond, just north of Rehoboth--but I've been fooling around with the filters on Instagram, which seem to have their own private mind.
3 comments:
I enjoyed reading this critique of your memoir, Paul. It brought to mind my own experience within the Catholic church five years earlier in Australia, that sense of freedom with the the nuns abandoning their habits, English Masses and guitars, singing and dancing in church.
The photos are resonant, too.
Five years earlier: that's when things were cooking. What a contrast to now. Bewildering.
Thanks for the photo thumbs-up.
I just read Nick R's smart, intriguing excerpt., I was particulary taken by this bit:
The Catholic memoirist, in particular, must operate on several analogical and literary levels: because the Catholic experience is so grounded in community and ritual, attempts to show an individual identity are tempered by the experiences of a whole. This theme of identity begs the question: is memoir the true identity of the writer, or a representation of that identity? If the latter is true, is that action done to a fault? Or would any reasonable reader accept the fictionalization of narrative necessary to present a profluent story to an audience? Such concerns are particularly appropriate to postconciliar Catholic literature, which is created in a moment rife with reconsiderations of language and faith identity.
Isn't the situation, particularly as presented in your essay, more complicated than that? The issue with personal identity is difficult because the church ---except for that sweet spot in your essay--represses identity under the mistaken idea that morality and the "right life" are the heavy lid of God/church on the boiling pot of chaotic individuality. Under that understanding the question of the authenticity of the identity of catholic memorist isn't about its "truth," it is absolutely about its "representation:" this, I think, is a given and not a particularly catholic problem, but it is a problem for a "catholic" writer. That's why the pews on Sunday are filled with couples who openly practice birth control, gay guys, lesbians and others who don't fit the proscribed identity, but call themselves catholic anyway. The problem for the church is that as an individual you have to claim an identity; claim in every sense of the word. You have to stand up and say I am GAY,and think God is OK with that. It isn't actually the attributes of your identity that are troubling, but the fact that your are claiming them, claiming your right to boil right up and over the edges of that pot. This is the understanding that I brought to your essay, which I thought was about the tragedy of the loss of the innate, the ecstatic, the truly spiritual, within the confines of the church--a loss made more tragic by that short sweet taste of what it could be---and the hopeful rediscovery of all that in the well spirit of your own identity....
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