April 4th, 2025 (Part I)

Only the really dumb can hope for grace, for there is none to be had, but rather gods who like to kill.

A Reading from The Book Against Death:

(1963) Those who are unbroken, how do they manage it? Those who remain unshaken, what are they made of? Once it’s over, what do they breathe? When it is dead quiet, what do they hear? When the fallen do not rise again, how do they go on? How do they find the words? What wind blows across their lashes? Who penetrates the ear of the dead? Who whispers the names of those who have wandered off? When the sun no longer strikes their eyes, where do they find light?

(1970) Ban obituaries. Only allow the news of a death to be carried from house to house, from apartment to apartment.

(1990) He who will hear nothing of death has the most religion of all.

You can hear church bells from your house and can picture the tolling through the courtyards and cobblestone streets of colonial capitals and in the New World. Death was practically breathing down everyone’s neck and yet the presence of God or the thought of God and the strength of faith, it could be said, was much stronger. There were fewer contradictions to faith, fewer reasons not to believe. Now we are shown the defiant facts, the ways in which God is not present; the rot of meaninglessness within our lives and the everyday world. Wars and crime, man’s cruelty towards man, nature’s indifference; things that we are both exposed to and sheltered from in first world society, by the paradoxical connectivity and isolation of social media, enflaming the collective stress and anxiety from what seems out of our control. The mind is fertile with doubt. It doesn’t take much to germinate and spread. Those moments when you think you are unworthy of God’s love is when you think there isn’t one.

Ennui is the conduit, the space where you can entertain the plausible by asking what is possible, but what often leads instead to the doom scroll. It’s all about how you use it. That space exists, for you, behind a window pane pelted by rain, where the neon light of a coffee shop glows (the one you part-time at), cavernous with its lack of traffic and echoing with the crackling of vinyl. The cafe belongs to Mr. Glass, a fitting nickname, you think, like a glove or a noose. He walks with a silver topped cane (a leaping jaguar, like the car company logo) and is gaunt with wide eyes and long hair and rich parents who gave him a business to run while he finds what he really wants to do (he makes noises about writing and fills the shelves of the cafe with secondhand copies of Hemingway, Atwood, Franzen) but often the cafe seems both too much and not enough for him, like some overwhelming disappointment or distraction.

Last week Pope Francis was released from a five-week hospitalization at Gemelli University Hospital in Rome to treat double pneumonia. Throughout that period he remained in largely critical condition. On February 28, the pontiff inhaled vomit, induced by a coughing spasm, and was placed on a noninvasive mechanical ventilation mask, essentially mainlining oxygen. Given history with respiratory illness, including a procedure removing a piece of his lung due to an infection in his early twenties, his prognosis seemed clouded at best. The instance was eerily reminiscent of The Verdict (1983), where Paul Newman’s down-and-out ambulance chaser defends a woman at a Catholic hospital rendered comatose after vomiting into her aspirator. Despite a voice message, photo, and brief public appearance, the Pope has been scarce.

One must wonder if it’s the same pope that went in, if he actually made it out— if he’s even alive.

(Not that you wish ill on him, you quite like the man, reservations about Catholicism and organized religion as a whole aside (it’s not that simple/ cut and dry, you say lamely). His papacy is the first that you’ve actually been able to experience consciously since the beginning, and his humility and honesty is undeniably admirable. As a watch enthusiast (a sick individual; it is an illness, like a mental bug) you’ve come to relate to Francis’ ostentatiousness, especially when considering his predecessors. Pope Benedict wore a Junghans; Pope John Paul II had a Rolex Datejust. An idiosyncratic detail, ultimately irrelevant but interesting, considering two glorified public servants who’ve openly taken vows of poverty, wear watches that most people, especially the firmest adherents to the faith, could never afford to own, whereas Francis, true to his demeanor and word, sports a much more humble piece: a Swatch Once Again, which he recently donated to a charity auction where it fetched $56,250. It gets a lot of wrist time in your rotation, mainly while working, as it’s visible and disposable. It ticks loudly but it does the job— it’s just a Swatch, though its often the simplest things that are the holiest.)

There are decisions which we (the public) are certainly not privy to— the Catholic Church, if anything, specializes in those. Somewhere in the Vatican at any given moment there are ringed hands gripping carved wood armrests in tobacco and incense-perfumed rooms, cloaked in purple curtains and bloodred upholstery, where darkened faces deliberate beneath glimmering, jewel-studded crosses on the walls.

It’s a romantic, if not misinformed, way of thinking, but it lends it self to certain degrees of truth. Think of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, the murder of Roberto Calvi, Società Generale Immobiliare, all of which informed the writing of The Godfather Part III (1990) (recut into the superior Godfather CODA); the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. Aside from Catholic aesthetics and its at times sinister depictions, both Godfather and The Verdict are concerned with redemption, absolution, the spiritual lifebuoy or escape hatch that in our despair we clamor for.

Throughout the pope’s hospitalization, he remained in charge of the church. There are no provisions within canon law designating authority within any chain of command to succeed the pope in this kind of situation. Only in the event of a pope’s death or resignation is a conclave assembled and a vote held to elect the next one. Pope Francis wrote a letter of resignation in the event he becomes medically incapacitated, but its validity under canon law is questionable.

As much as Francis personally shapes the direction of the church, his role is largely symbolic, as most things in Catholicism are. Catholicism and its imagery, the power of said imagery, perhaps all the church really has (besides metric fucktons of money) was vaguely of interest to you, but you could only play so many records and drink so much coffee by yourself and pretend to enjoy the quiet before accepting that this much boredom was too much boredom and it was better than nothing.

Canetti, E. (2022). In I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole. excerpt, Picador.