XXXVIII. john 1:1

on the pitiful power of words

I’m in Cape Coast, Ghana sitting directly under the air conditioner, scratching mosquito bites. We just returned from Cape Coast Castle where an estimated three million Africans were trafficked during the castle’s four-hundred-year participation in the slave trade. This isn’t going to be about that, that has to steep; it may even be private. According to the Ghana History Museum, the region’s indigenous languages weren’t taught in their written form until the 1960s. Perhaps that’s what weighs down the air so much. The stories could not be set down. They are on the breeze, passed along like birdsong.

Two days before I left, I had a long walk with a new friend. It was a rare day—meandering, slow—at several points I had to restrain my pace to match my companion’s. I felt the familiar impatience, why are we walking so slow, and then I remembered, we had nowhere to be. I learned this word a couple years ago: maundering. It’s the name of a song by Bonnie “Prince” Billy. There’s a sad bearded white man on the album cover; I’ve never checked to see if he’s the one who mumbles out the lyrics:

Maundering, I’m maundering
Evil eyes just passing through 
Maundering, oh maundering
Do you know what I’m wanting to do?
I’m going to find something true

To maunder is to talk in a rambling fashion, to verbally wander. I consider myself a lady who has the gift of gab, but rarely do I find myself so deeply reflecting with a person I’m not close to. Sometimes you meet someone who can pull truth out of your mouth like a magician’s scarf. I just kept talking and talking and everything that came out was a saturated primary color. We talked about friendship, literature, faith, our families—her mother who she referred to as a “Dante Catholic,” which made me light up in recognition. We talked about the failure of words, how they can leave you adrift, drowning in meaninglessness when it seems there ought to be some five-letter buoy to save you: what’s the german word for being a black american visiting a slave castle for the first time, digging up the seeds of all that strange fruit you’ve tasted at home?

I’m technically crashing a study abroad trip. My mom is one of three professors taking fifteen students to Ghana for two weeks as part of their course: Microfinance and the Informal Economy. There are the expected visits to financial institutions and econ classes (my notes include: what is Forex? what is IMF? what is FinTech?) but I am best suited for our cultural excursions. In our dance class, before we did high intensity cardio in 95-degree heat, our instructor explained to us how dance is integral to Ghanian culture. There are the festivals that happen at the four stages of life—birth, puberty, marriage, and death—but also dance is always happening, fundamental to being an African. As an aside, while talking about how babies are introduced to rhythm from the womb, he added that Ghanian mothers are fierce protectors. He said that in the West, women carry babies on their front letting the baby meet the danger first, whereas here a baby is always on the back, the mother standing between danger and her baby. To me, his interpretation was off. It is not the protective instinct of the Western mother that is lacking, it is trust without visual confirmation, faith in a way. I think we would fear having a child out of sight. What is happening back there? What could? At some level, you’d have to have faith in the health and safety of the baby at your back, but as we know in the West, only seeing is believing.

Not Ghana. San Michele Abbey in Turin, Italy.

I recently finished The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. It’s been in my to-read stack for years recommended to me by people who haven’t even read it themselves: “it’s such a Mia book.” And it was. Cluniac monks, heretical hairsplitting, an impenetrable library everyone knows how to enter, eschatological murders.

!!Spoilers ahead for those in my impromptu book club that has yet to meet in person. Stop right now if you haven’t finished or you are a person who wants to read this book and hates spoilers!!

There are seven murders that take place in the fictional Benedictine monastery (inspired by the real Saint Michele Abbey pictured above). Intrepid former inquisitor William, master and mentor of the book’s narrator, novice Adso, and also the man tasked with discovering who is behind the killings, is tipped off that the deaths of the monks seem to be following the seven trumpet of the apocalypse as described in the Book of Revelation. Hail, blood, water, skyfall, and scorpions match (with some truly loose interpretation) the manner of deaths thus far. As William and Adso unravel the mysteries of the labyrinthine library that connects them all, they find that the murders were not so meticulous after all. There was a central point, but no real plot, divine or otherwise.

William who, upon arriving at the abbey for the first time identifies the name and path of a horse he’d never met cementing his reputation as a deductive genius, is shattered by the knowledge that what he had been chasing was an illusion. Adso does not understand his angst. William had correctly reasoned the cause, context, or key players in each of the deaths, eventually leading him to the person who set everything in motion. He found the central perpetrator, why so hung up on being wrong about the tracks that led him there? William responds:

I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs…pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan, or, rather, [X] himself was overcome by his own initial design and there began a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of causes contradicting one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.

Adso attempts to bolster him again. William continues:

…The order our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterwards you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless…It’s hard to accept the idea that there cannot be order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.

Adso picks up William’s argument, following to its damning conclusion:

But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist.

They never speak of this conversation again. I have thought about it daily—could it be that there are no whispers on the wind, nothing in the tea leaves, just so many moments followed by so many more—why then does it feel like I am being asked to pay attention. Something is afoot. Maybe it’s just Spring. I am making things: Genesis. I am creating. I am finding myself, losing myself in the infinite pool, the unfathomable spiral of time, obliterated and generated again and again, in pieces, scattered; whole, unsinkable, consumed, subsumed, sacrificed to the great and terrible turning. But those are all just a bunch of words, something with which to orient myself. I’d love to know what they mean.

xx

Mia