Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

If anyone ever sends me one of those craven evil eye emails that curse you if you don't send it on to 83 other people, please understand that I will not do so. I will even stand out on my porch and make it easier for the curse to find me. If it does, I will quote Scripture at it, clutch the Cross, and watch it wither into vapour for the stews of the Vestibule. I spit at the evil eye and intentionally stomp on sidewalk cracks.

But if such an email questionnaire, or tag, ever finds me that asks me who I would like to invite from history or fantasy to dinner, here is how I would answer.

First, it won't be dinner, because it is hard to talk at dinner. Talking is better done at a place like the Eagle and Child, with a roaring hearth, a complete absence of fluorescence (pseudo-light from hades that probably causes ADHD and other forms of industrialist brainwashing). There is also real darts, even though I'm a rotten player. The floor is not so clean, and we don't have to do that wretched "meta-thinking" about having a conversation that one finds oneself doing at dinners with mixed company and awkward.

Second, it won't be about sports, TV shows, video games, or unmanful subjects like the stupid things Dick or Bob is doing and what a nutter he is and did you hear about what he/she did at the conference last week? You can't blame the feminists for taking manhood away, because the men are doing that all by themselves by watching too much TV and learning to talk like the View. There can be some mention about football teams or rugby to establish kinship (baseball or cricket is okay, but only in the mystical sense). Politics, yes, but only as a necessary evil. Philosophy, certainly, but not at all in the "meta-thinking" wraith-language of academia. The American university system would be better off giving up workshops and advanced degrees, and taking up instead the noble business of  dwyle flonking, where one could, if he is lucky, in the course of four snurds, become a flonker, a girter, or even a jobonowl (better, much better, than a Ph.D.).

Poetry of course, but only the kind with a humane prosody like a ballad -- iambic tetrameter that even rhymes (and is thus rendered unfit for acceptance into the modern canon). As Belloc would say, ... bad verse, oughly verse into which a man may get his teeth. Not sloppy verse, not wasty, pappy verse; not verse blanchified, but strong, heavy, brown, bad verse; made up and knotty; twisted verse of the fools. Laughter, occasional silences. Perhaps a numinous reading framed by swirling clouds of pipe smoke punctuated by the crackling fire.

Second, it won't be any of the saints I'd invite, because I am not worthy to tie their shoelaces. I would be happy, more than happy, to simply bus their table and not be seen or heard. What in the world would we talk about as peers, simply as we are not peers? Who am I to ask them anything, or -- God forbid -- to say anything to them? Forsoothe, the nerve: "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter under my roof."

Third, it won't be Gandalf or anyone like him, because he might tell me something meaningful and disturbing like "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us" (which was said, by the way, in the Shire and not in Moria). Neither will it be any hobbits or dwarves, because eating with them could lead to dancing on the table, and no one who appreciates truth or beauty would want me to do that (all the witnesses would be traumatized and end up liking top-40s music because the experience would have destroyed their good taste). I don't know about elves: I think it would be hard to sit back and rub elbows with anyone who can walk on the surface of snow and belongs to the other shore of an uncurved Sea (although I do like the idea of pointy ears and waking up trees). And neither will it be anyone who can do magic, because I would find it too spooky and unsettling for my digestion: card tricks yes, magic no.

Fourth, no politicians, not even a great one like Lincoln. Not Washington, maybe Franklin (only if he takes a bath). Not Quixote or anyone who can't rise above their gaseous quixotic vocabulary. Absolutely no Napoleons, or anyone of such secularist ilk (like Voltaire) who takes his own character seriously and reads his own biography. Accordingly, no Democrats, no Republicans. Distributists yes, agrarians yes. No Tsarists. No one who believes in the first, second or third Rome. I would prefer anyone who knows Homer more and less of focus groups, polls and surveys. Curse surveys and censuses: they are all vapors of the Vestibule.

Fifth, no one who wears a bluetooth-earwig (which burrows through gray matter, laying eggs along the way) or who carries a blackberry-amulet: such people speak constantly to the ether and communicate with strange spirits, staring blankly and schizophrenically into some vanishing point outside the room. It goes without saying that they violate all conventions of the convivium. They divinize with chill runes and necromantic glyphs on little fertility pocket gods, on which can be heard, occasionally, chants of dark Dionysian rituals. No one, either, who cannot tell the difference between reality and virtuality, or who would ever prefer the latter to the former. Orthodoxy and the wearing of the One Ring (which is the demonic sacrament of technolust) must come into sharper contradistinction.

Sixth, not Satan, neither devil, nor admirer of the darkness nor destroyer of the sacred order, nor vandals of the same. Neither Joyce nor Warhol nor Mapplethorpe nor network executives. Anathema.

Seventh, it will be my family and friends if we can all promise not to talk about people or the Today Show. It will be you dear reader. It will be some of the Inklings (maybe not Charles Williams -- I read him but can't eat with him), especially if they promise to read new stuff. It will be Bertie and some of his pals but not too many: then there would be that hobbit and dwarf problem. It will be Tom Bombadil and Farmer Maggot. Chesterbelloc. Wendell Berry. Allen Tate. Ochlophobists and Axegrinders, philosopher moms, handmaids, scriveners and minor clergy. It will be my English profs and my favorite History prof at Malone (yes, you, Mr. Oliver). Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Chaucer. If they come, I would have more qualified people sit with them and tell me what they're saying: put me at the back corner of the room, close enough to see the light.

We will talk about the past and the end of the world, yes. But more, we will sing the songs and tell the stories that will take us safely through to the harbor, poetry that opens the shutters of the lantern of the Last Day upon this shadowed present.

And we will discover, in our recovered language, the words to prayer that calls down miracles, and magically lightens the mundane up to the harmonious spheres. Still there, after centuries of alchemy and science.

I will not bow before the iron crown, and I will help you not to either.

Comments

[Charles]

Aye, Father, consider what you have said, in humility. No saint'd you invite? Unworthy to tie their shoelaces? Or have your feet washed at table?

Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.

As for disinviting the Tsarists, I should think that might eliminate some half or more of your Orthodox brethren, to include the Sainted Nicholas and his brood.

If you communicate sublime, then so too mundane. To be a dilettante is too profane.

[Fr. Jonathan]

True, Charles, about the saints, though I'd be more comfortable doing the washing instead of being washed. But this is the Hall I'm imagining, not the Table.

It is not my office to invite the Saints, especially the Lord Christ Himself, to any gathering of mine. "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter under my roof." However, I am surprised, always, that I am invited by Him to His Table, where I shudder at the presence of the great ones.

Also, I'm not disinviting anyone, or expelling them from the company (save those in the sixth heading). Instead, I am discouraging self-definitions and self-conscious titles/agendae that detract from conversation and even courtesy. One cannot be Tsarist first before he is Orthodox, Republican or Democrat before he is Christian.

Orthodoxy is hampered and burdened by royalist nostalgia, and please bear in mind that I'm a paleo-conservative. If there really was a caesaro-papism in Constantinople, it withered in 1453 and shriveled under the Tartars.

I'm all for the mundane. That's why Bertie Wooster will be there with Freddie Wigeon, Psmith, Uncle Dynamite and the Oldest Member, though probably not Oofie Prosser.

[Iakovos]

You probably would not invite Mr. Mulliner either because he would monopolize the evening. However, to invite his nephew Augustine would be to you the work of a moment.

[axegrinder]

Should we make it an all day affair, I’d like to anchor a dwyle flonking crew led by Wendell Berry, Tom Bombadil and Miguel Cervantes. I am confident that we could best all comers, though I would be wary of any team with Hobbits, Inklings (especially Dorothy Sayers) or the Ochlophobist (with whom I had one occasion to hoist a few).

Dwyle Flonking or no, I’ll be there, showered, shaved and giddy.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Even though, Axe, I suggested dwyle flonking for the American University (and the MLA especially -- they'd be better off doing that instead of doing that PowerPointy thing in those special special sessions), I like the Berry/Bombadil/Cervantes/Grinder crew. Yes, you should be wary of the other team: I disinvited Hobbits, but they'll show up anyways, as it is bound to be someone's eleventy-first: so avoid their coney-killing aim when they take up the driveller: your best hope is that they've been at the gazunder so long that you get off with a swadger.

Iakovos: you're spot on about Mulliner, and I think I know who you mean. So true.