The Fourth Glorious Mystery is the most stunning. Mary surrounded
by disciples and converts and enraptured in the love of Christ, falls asleep,
which is a kind of holy death. She is placed in a tomb, but Christ comes to her
and calls her and takes her to heaven in body and soul. Because she is without
sin, her body is not allowed to decay and become corrupted. The joy that she
feels as she takes her place by Jesus’ side can only be known through our own entrance
into heaven. Therefore she serves as the example through which we too can one
day ascend to heaven, where, if we are worthy, we will experience in our
physical bodies and in our souls the joy of God’s presence.
I listened to all of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary
and the prayers between the explication of the mysteries for a long time during
my drive to Los Angeles. It was 110 degrees outside and my air conditioner was
broken. The heat, the driving, and the litany put me in a state of intense
concentration. I felt the words of the priest but not in a theological way. They
provoked me instead philosophically. The priest asked me to ponder the mystery
and to reconcile my relationship to the unknowable and accept it as truth. You
cannot know but you must believe, he preached. The meaning is in the believing,
not in the knowing. And when you think about it that way, Catholicism starts to
sound like the perfect description of de Manian deconstruction. For when de Man
and deconstructionists trained in his methods undertake analysis they posit
something similar. Language, they argue, cannot stabilize meaning. Language and
in particular the linguistic art of literature can at best only demonstrate how
language cannot guarantee meaning. Language depicts its own instability and
play and even in those moments when it wants to declare something about
the world unambiguously, it comes undone by its own semantic mechanism. Meaning, then, in
deconstruction is a set of desires, conventions, and impositions that we place
on language, not something that comes from language itself. For
deconstructionists, just like for the Pope, meaning is in believing.
When I tired of Catholic dogma, I searched the AM stations
for right wing talk shows, another favorite of mine on long drives. There I
encountered another version of the problem between knowing and meaning. A right
wing talk show host speaks to an audience that shares the host’s understanding
of truth. “I don’t have to tell you” is a popular refrain. As is “You know what
I’m saying.” The host and his audience hold their ideological opponents in
contempt, considering them stupid and, more damningly, hypocritical. Liberals,
they argue, know the real truth, but they refuse to admit it publicly for fear
that they will be judged. So the world arrayed against conservatives is either
too idiotic to recognize the truth, too invested in the state of things to accept
the truth, or too phony to admit the truth. I wish I could judge them more
harshly but I feel exactly as they do but only about them. I see the same world
they see and come to completely different conclusions. I believe that I am right
but not because I can produce a different set of facts to contradict their
arguments. Rather, I see the same facts they see but those facts mean something
very different to me.
For an hour or so on the drive I listened to the Portuguese
radio station. If I was being told something I already knew and was told it
very slowly and clearly, I might understand Portuguese. Buried in the
atmospheric hiss of AM radio, the rapid delivery of the newscasters was
nearly incomprehensible. Nonetheless, I always listen to the Portuguese
station until its signal no longer comes in. So much concentration and focus to
understand only some words and the occasional phrase. All that language and so little
meaning. To be honest, it’s more enjoyable to me than most things.
I meant to write something about Lana Del Rey’s “West Coast.”
Something about Los Angeles as a powerful simulacrum whose fuel and byproduct
are desire. I was going to bring in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, the great masterpiece of interpreting Los Angeles. But
the drive to Los Angeles reminded me that the distance between thing and word,
between meaning and knowing, and between longing and truth has a much broader geography
than my old hometown.
