Letter #38: The End of the Law

Every man hath visions.

Great seeing you over Easter weekend, which we basically spent talking about all the stuff we talk about on here. It’s the only stuff worth talking about!

Our subject, in person and here, is this: the human body is a kind of language for expressing the human soul. The whole universe is like a script or a piece of sheet music, and when it meets with our minds it reveals its true beauty and purpose. I dare say the bally fellow was on to something when he sang that bit about the heavens declaring God’s glory, what?

But here’s the tricky part: if life is art, then the rules can only get you so far. 

A great poet knows the rules of rhyme and meter better than his own heartbeat. But because they’re so engrained in him, his understanding descends beneath them into the breath of life itself. That cosmic inhale and exhale is the rhythm that the meter is designed to imitate.

The poet John Keats knew about this stuff: “Every man whose soul is not a clod / Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved / And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.” Easy for him to say. He was Keats! But there was truth to it. When you drink in great poetry like mother’s milk, eventually you learn how to deviate from the rules when the spirit of your vision demands it.

The psychotics who now pass for college professors want to tell us everything is permissible, because rules are just conventions. To prove the point, they observe that great poets often break the rules of meter or rhyme here and there. But that’s the sort of dunderheaded thing you only say if you have no feel for the language of life—just as bad poets can only break the rules badly.

At Easter we watch a master artist defy every law in the book. In coming back from the dead, Christ broke the laws of nature, the decrees of Caesar, and the rules of religion that said he deserved to die. We, who live under the same sentence, hope to tap into that same undercurrent—that spirit which overrules all rules because it is the source of every rule, and yet is not exhausted by any. “Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such things there is no law.”

Our recent technological escapades have given us a creepy sense that we might break quite a few rules we once thought ironclad—rules about how long we live, where we can go, what we can do. The goons who pretend to have read Nietzsche are convinced that when everything is possible, everything will be permitted. But we know that not everything permissible is helpful. Is it possible, then, that we could become poets of life—learning the beats of its music so that when a new movement begins, we recognize the tune?

Love,
Spencer