A Mission Statement, of Sorts

Joshua Lore

I’m working on the second, lengthier part of what I began in my last post on The Religion of the Technocratic Mind, but in the meantime, I suppose I need to draft a mission statement for this blog — for my own self, as well as for my readers — so I’ll attempt that here, but I’m going to go about it in more of a testimonial way — background matters. If you want, you can skip on down to the statement of purpose.

For whatever reasons, stating the intentions of a blog has always been one of the most intimidating parts of the endeavor for me. I’ve had several over the years, some more successful than others. There was, for example, my first back in college, a collaborative blog I ran with a few friends focused on US foreign policy. It was called Empire’s Edge, and was inspired by the now defunct Washington Babylon that Harper’s hosted by Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn. It was successful in the sense that it had a clear mission and was productive, although it didn’t last much longer than a year. The attention and interests of we (at that time) undergraduate students drifts like a piece of ocean debris, and other demands intrude. On top of that, such a precise purpose can itself be challenging when there are so many other things you’d like to think, talk, and dialogue about. Ultimately, too clear an intention was the beginning of the end of that project.

Then there was a blog I started a few years ago, titled In the Middle Way (a title inspired by a beautiful passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets). I had no idea where I was going to go with it and, ultimately, barely got beyond drafting an ambiguous mission statement. It’s still out there, hidden behind its expired domain name.

So here I am back to Tempus in Forma, a blog I began in my undergrad years with a purpose as equally opaque as the last one, which ended up just becoming a place to host quotes and poems by other writers that I wanted to share or easily return to later on.

The name, Tempus in Forma, was inspired most directly by this passage from the inimitable Guy Davenport’s essay The Death of Picasso:

“The scale of ubi and quando is, as far as we know, one of the infinitudes so strangely interrelated, so perfectly harmonized, that we shall probably never perceive how time is knit with space, how the pulse of light is also the pulse of time, or how the energy of radiant stars can brake and still itself to become matter.

The stuff of a world, ant, iron, cantaloupe, is light ash accumulated over quadrillions of quadrillions of eons. Finished time, said Samuel Alexander, becomes a place.”

It is still, to me, a meaningful name, and so as I set out on another attempt at blogging, I’ve decided to return here rather than to start anew. So…where was I? Oh, right, a purpose…

The purpose of this blog is largely a response to what seems the near-absence of honest, charitable, and mature thought in our public discourse. What I would like to offer is a personal and critical moral, religious, philosophical, theological, literary, humorous, half-certain Catholic-Christian perspective on life and culture, taking a Christological look at the issues and goods therein — asking the question of what demands our attention today, for good or ill, but is perhaps not receiving it either genuinely or else at all. And to do this in a way that is at once informed yet accessible to a broad audience.

As a mission statement, that admittedly doesn’t define the point of focus very well. But it’s a step into clarity for me in terms of an inspiration to write in this form — all along I have been struggling for an object, when what I needed was simply to find a clear point from which to observe. I think that’s in many ways what we need more of today, so that’s what I shall do here, and we’ll see what form that begins to take as time lurches on.

Andrew Sullivan kept appended to the side of his excellent and now sadly retired The Dish the quote by George Orwell, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant effort”, and I would like to offer that the sentiment is relevant for what I hope to do here as well. As a Catholic, for however a sobering look one must take at reality (and at one’s self), and however dark it may at times appear, the end is always one of hope. In his powerful Nobel Prize lecture, Seamus Heaney explores the fundamental lesson of his own life, essentially that we must attend to the murderous as well as the marvelous if we are to live truly in this world, but that we can never become so encumbered by despair that we lose sight of the “diamond absolutes”, those striking moments and places of revelation where an almost pristine clarity on the truth of things seems to crystallize.

In short: as Werner Herzog says, “the poet must never avert his eyes”, and so I shan’t.

I hope that this flows much like a conversation: freely, uncoerced, yet coherently wending along a natural and steadily meaningful course. Apart from my own personal contributions, I will continue to bring the wisdom of others, past and present, into the conversation. There is too much truth-ful eloquence out there to encumber one’s self and abuse one’s readers by the rather narcissistic task of trying to rearticulate that which has already been beautifully and properly said by another.

In that sense, Eliot’s words which gave name to my last blog still ring true for this one:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I’m also in conversation with a few other sites about beginning to contribute guest posts there, and will link those here whenever they happen. A more loose-ended blog of mine, where I will mostly share random blurbs and links to articles of note, is also on Tumblr if anyone is interested in following. You can find it here.

So there it is. A purpose-ish. Thanks for reading!

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