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Vanity of vanities
Emptiness without meaning

I went to mass at Notre Dame on Sunday evening, the one given by the archbishop. The above phrases were two translations of the same verse from the beginning of Ecclesiastes provided as the liturgy for the service.  The first was in English (which had the same transliteral meaning as the provided French), the second I've translated from Spanish.

Anyway, it reminded me of starting a blog.  Partially because I couldn't understand the archbishop when he was speaking (my French is about as good as being able to nod and think in response, yes, it almost sounds like you are speaking some kind of Latin), I spent some of the mass hearing the word "Vanité" repeated quite a lot while watching the tourists circulate in the aisles outside the nave.  The archbishop was discussing the theme of vanity (or emptiness, si te gusta) in three small sections of very disparate texts.  The visual metaphor seemed strong: we, the gathered for the mass, inside the ship of reverence and tradition, could see reflected back at us the gaze of fleeting, baseless journeyers.

The tourists, for their part, did an adequate job of wearing the same faces that they might have worn a half hour before at the zoo or at the re-enactment of an authentic French village dancing celebration along the Seine.  They were excellent tourist dopple-gangers, perhaps a bit reverential themselves to the idea of religion as it was there transpiring or even a bit shamed to be sneakily not revealing themselves as naked Catholics at heart.

There were so many more tourists than people inside the nave, though the nave was well-peopled.  I imagined it would be difficult to be an archbishop in this situation.  It would be like being David Copperfield (the magician) with more people checking out your backstage, production facilities, and general relationship to your audience than people actually there to see you do magic.  Oh, there's that incense trick again, the one from 12 centuries ago; what, no lasers?

He seemed like an earnest man, the archbishop.  He smiled a lot in a way that made me think of going to dinner parties with him or taking a conversation-filled walk together.  It was pleasant and surprising.  I could feel, perhaps, the stress of trying to keep a ship sailing even as it sails through what looks like a land of pleasure with happy denizens swelling its banks, denizens who are somewhat bewildered at the shipgoers' serious sense of mission.  Such efforts remind me of Canadian geese.  Though they are much maligned, I think Canadian geese have held together a separate aesthetic with remarkable rigor in the modern world.  Everywhere their very particular brown and black and white, their sharp lines and triangles, their mystical swimming, separation and coming together again.  Canadian geese never have the problem of a Catholic archbishop: as they (the geese) fly on in perfect holy communion with light disappearing beyond ground, they needn't worry about their formation being slightly broken because a few geese are thinking it might be more interesting to stop in at Eurodisney then continue toward the sacred evening reflecting pool.

So I felt with the priest (I imagined, comprehending his words only slightly better than the call of the geese) a sad, loving complaint to the gathered and the tourists about the need to remain observant of an old connection to meaning and humanity.  And I felt with the tourists a few of the thousands of other motivations for being in that spot at the same time.

I thought the next day at a few other sacred tourist destinations that tourism was in service of speed, primarily.  Also in service of democracy, maybe, of making sure that anything that accumulates great beauty or importance is relatively immediately (within a few generations) and forevermore guarded, invaded, possessed, and watched by a gigantic mass of people whose job it is to simply make sure that they can have access to those storehouses of value or vista.  Being a slower person than all that--I did, after all, just confess to having long serious thoughts about the aesthetics of Canadian geese--I turned again towards the liturgy of the archbishop's mass to articulate a complaint.  The last of the three textual excerpts in the liturgy had been an account of the great truth-sayer Jesus parabolically railing against a wealthy mill-owner investing in a larger storehouse for his bumper crop rather than sharing his excess wheat with others.  Why were the priests of Western sacred traditions, whose long study and meditation time has been itself the result of a gigantic bumper crop, not greeting the tourists, not helping them to have a slower, more meaningful experience, appreciating the wealth of symbolism and expression that surrounded them?

One supposes, perhaps, that holding open the doors and having a man come out from a cave at several appointed hours to speak openly to an audience from which none are forcefully excluded is enough, or all that can be wisely done.  Still, it seems, at these French sacred sites, and again at the Vatican, there are among those filling the roles of tourists plenty--if not most, if not all--who would like something more, who don't disdain knowledge, who do not know they've been invited in, who do not even know that there is a difficult road that cannot be photographed down which one may find St. Peter holding keys, or Mary saying come in anyway, fool, it's cold and I have a secret.

The kind of tourism that simply by sheer number of people participating makes the mass of each particular nave into a kind of spectacle, that makes one wonder if we aren't slowly discovering that perhaps we don't want large stone structures forever but instead rapid provisional plastic expression bubbles, it does signal a new era, I think.  At least a new teemingness of humanity.  The question is whether teeming is what we do in the absence of something else to do (the old story about sex and raising children to avoid boredom and existential boredom; the new story about viral youtube videos replacing dedicated, disciplined, loving cultural/community work) or whether we have something new to discover about what existence is for and where we will go from here, the old place now sufficiently the site of a crowd.

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I've decided on a daily format for this experiment in the blog-o-sphere, a picture, a text, a song.  Please expect nothing fancy, edited, or autotuned.  Though apparently, I do take requests (see below for the fulfillment of the first, lightly ironic I have to assure any of you potentially kind listeners.)