Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, December 8, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, December 29, 2019.

Flannery O'Connor, short story writer and novelist, and Catholic intellectual, on the front steps of her home in Midgeville, Georgia, in 1959. Photo by Floyd Jillson of the Atlanta Journal Consitution, via AP, via the New York Times.
Sunday: 8 a.m. 7 degrees! Correction: 9 degrees. Much better. Productive day so far. 1 mug of hot chocolate, 2 cups of coffee downed. 1 bowl of oatmeal, raisins and spice. 2 stories about last night’s Knicks game read. Knicks lost a heartbreaker to the Pacers, 104-103. Knicks could have tied it up and sent the game into overtime but Julius Randle missed a free throw with 0.1 seconds left on the clock. 3 poems by Charles Wright read---”Deep Measure”, “Thinking of Winter at the Beginning of Summer”, “Jesuit Graves”. “Jesuit Graves” begins with a weather report from the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland, July 3, 1995:
Midsummer. Irish overcast. Oatmeal-colored sky. …
Glasnevin is the final resting place of many long-dead Jesuits, including the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The poem ends with what I took as a reference to one of Hopkins’ poems…
Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say.
The they that say are paraphrasing the line "Everything that rises must converge" and I took them to include Flannery O’Connor and I thought, “That’s where she got it. Of course.” O’Connor was a fiercely devout Catholic with a contrarian bent that sometimes bent toward the border of the heretical. She’d have made a good Jesuit. Hopkins would have been a source of inspiration. Turns out the title of her story and the collection that contains it were taken from “The Phenomenon of Man” by the Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard’s writings helped persuade the Catholic Church to come around on the theory of evolution. I read “The Phenomenon of Man” when I was in college and understood about every third word. I still can’t tell you what the noosphere is exactly. I think his Omega Point, the point towards which everything that rises converges, is kind of like entropy but with intelligence. I think. He took the word from the Book of Revelation: "I am the Alpha and the Omega." Flannery O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s one of the reasons I went there. So Wright’s they includes Teilhard and O’Connor. And himself, and, I guess, me.
Teilhard reached his Omega Point in 1955. O’Connor reached hers in 1964. She died of lupus. She’s buried in Memory Hill Cemetery in her hometown of Midgeville, Georgia. Teilhard’s Jesuit grave is not far from here in Hyde Park. It’s on the grounds of what was St Andrew’s-on-Hudson Jesuit novitiate. The Jesuits closed shop there in 1968 and sold the property in 1972 to...the Culinary Institute of America. If you go there and ask they’ll give you the key to the cemetery and you can visit Father Teilhard’s grave. Next time we’re in Hyde Park, I’ll stop and ask.
Somewhere in the house is a copy of “The Phenomenon of Man”. On a nearby shelf is “Everything That Rises Must Converge”. On another shelf is "The Oxford Book of English Verse". I should dig one or the other or all three out and do some reading. But weather reports shouldn’t require that sort of homework. I’m just going to have another cup of coffee and re-read Wright’s poem. Here it is...
Midsummer. Irish overcast. Oatmeal-colored sky.
The Jesuit pit. Last mass
For hundreds whose names are incised on the marble wall
Above the gravel and grassless dirt.
Just dirt and the small stones---
how strict, how self-effacing.
Not suited for you, however, Father Bird-of-Paradise,
Whose plumage of far wonder is not formless and not faceless,
Whatever you might have hoped for once.
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, 3 July 1995.
For those who would rise to meet their work,
that work is scaffolding.
Sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
The absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
Thus the legends instruct us,
North wind through the flat-leaved limbs of the sheltering trees,
Three desperate mounds in the small, square enclosure,
souls God-gulped and heaven-hidden.
P. Gerardus Hopkins, 28 July 1844-8 June 1889, Age 44.
And then the next name. And then the next,
Soldiers of misfortune, lock-step into a star-colored tight dissolve,
History's hand-me-ons. But you, Father Candescence,
You, Father Fire?
Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say.
---"Jesuit Graves" by Charles Wright, collected in "Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright".
Filed under How the Weather Was.
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