BOOKS:
McCue, Carlo A Weber, Vivian Mercier, Barbara Mutkoski, Michael Heffernan, James F
Healing
FRANCIS McNUTT, O.P. Ave Maria Press, $3.50
Love Is The Healer
STELLA TERRILL MANN Harper & Row, $5.95
CARLO A. WEBER
Back in 1961, Jerome Frank wrote a scholarly compendium of the healing...
...Because Raissa's concept of God is that of a jealous master, she attempts to give herself to Him in a more complete way by "great restraint in the display of affection" to those she loves...
...Limits to Growth (1972)-the principal aim of which' was and is to alert people to the problems...
...Do you want to be Pope, O'Hanlon...
...The dualism which plagues her is made explicit in a note written in 1934: "I know now that there is this world, and the world of Jesus-and that they are opposed to one another...
...When the sufferer is cured by the healer, it is because both have faith...
...It seems also a little ridiculous to have to make conspicuous the fact that all the poems in Atlantic Wall are traditional in form, several of them sonnets, all in meter, and a few in forms like ottava rima that haven't been seen much (outside of Yeats) all century...
...A dualistic tradition, emerging largely from a Greek philosophy that tended to dichotomize mind and body, left us with a fragmented perception of man...
...At least Keane and Mac-Mahon live in the same town-Listowel, Co...
...At moments, a reviewer of this book feels like the psychiatrist whose duty, as he sees it, is to point out that the boy who fractured his mother's skull with the TV set was only trying to get her attention...
...From that premise, he argues with vigor and clarity that the body and the soul are not separable, and therefore, Jesus "Yahweh is Salvation," came to save souls and bodies...
...if on the other hand, the anxiety increases, it is, of course, because we are reaching the heart of the problem...
...The argument is extended to state that the healing events of apostolic days should somehow continue to happen in the same way in our day...
...At this point, I was reminded of a sotto voce comment made to me by a friend at the beginning of a well-intended sermon we were hearing...
...McNutt's work stands on solid and rather fascinating theological ground...
...No longer in manila envelopes, Raissa's notes lie neatly bound on reviewers' desks...
...O'Hanlon is no poet, but he leaves us in little doubt that he is Irish: in fact, he admits at one point that he still carries an Irish passport...
...It is clear from Miss Kernan's foreword that she is not attempting to recount such an odyssey...
...In the fifties," writes O'Hanlon, "Dublin was, to speak kindly of the place, a small somnolent capital city of a country that had lost its nerve...
...In the arts, after a brief wartime and postwar flare-up, magazines were folding right and left and censorship seemed triumphant...
...it is more relevant to ask what O'Hanlon's own priorities are...
...Mann nor Fr...
...These are his true imitators and his co-operators in salvation...
...Quite possibly, it is not important to know that-at least, it is not important to the patient...
...Many of these poems are stories or parts of stories, most of them Tidewater Virginia in locale, a place Smith has begun to stake out with an eye for detail and human nuance not unlike Faulkner's or Robinson Jeffers' -and in fact there are whole poems of his that could sit with no apology beside passages from "Roan Stallion" or "Spotted Horses"-his language is alive in that way, not especially poem or prose one way or the other but, as William Carlos Williams used to say, it is all "writing," and in Smith's work writing of a large variety, writing to be reckoned with...
...And then, having summarily rejected the dualism of earlier philosophies, McNutt launches into his own kind of nominalism, describing among other things, "four basic kinds of healing, four basic kinds of prayer," and so on...
...O'Hanlon speaks of the "inability of the Irish to finalize...
...As the myths of endless technological progress and inevitable plenty give way to more apocalyptic visions, many of us, I suppose, have been coming to believe that life for our children will be, by the conventional yardsticks at least, worse than it has been for us, and for our grandchildren unimaginably so...
...In this matter, McNutt does no more poorly than others, and when confronted with the dilemma of suffering and healing, he, perhaps wisely, begs the question...
...One can also say that there are two categories of men: those who- what mystery!-are capable of assimilating sin, and those who are not capable of doing so (by virtue of some mystery of predestination . . . ). -Raissa's Journal asks of me more than my life: to accept living death, existence in a barren desert...
...Felt all the bitterness of death...
...Of Earth DOUGLAS WORTH Wm...
...The profoundly human dimension of Maritain's character, his ardent search for truth, his gentle and compassionate nature, his "genius for friendship" are rendered by Miss Kernan with simplicity and warmth...
...Experience is far more important than logic...
...national breakdown...
...There is a passage on pp...
...Reading Marilyn Hacker's book makes me realize, as if for the first time, that so much of the stuff so many of the others give us is dull and painful and downright hurtful to the spirit, because it derides the spirit in the most unedi-fying way, and then insults my intelligence by presuming I will call it poetry...
...The unfortunate result is that a reductionistic explanation has the effect of diluting the strength of a simple straightforward narrative of the healing processes themselves...
...This, of course, leaves the healer in the position of always being right...
...Maritain had returned from a quiet visit to the little village cemetery in the French countryside where his wife lay buried...
...But all of these healings reflect, as far as the healer or therapist is concerned, the fact that the power experienced in the person of the healer or therapist is somehow communicated to the other, who feels helpless, ill, incapable...
...Quite apart from these subjective judgments, O'Hanlon often gets his facts wrong: he says "the majority of Irish farmers still operate on tracts of thirty acres or less," whereas the Agricultural Institute's figures for 1973 show that only 35 percent of the farms in the Republic are this small...
...Laszlo simply does not face up coherently to the possibility that it might be (or appear to be) to the advantage of groups to seek their narrow self-interest at the expense of everyone else...
...Each one pretends her eyes are closed as she stares at the man she must remember at this table, before the hated bacon, the plate of bleeding, dazzled eggs...
...He re-uses some telling examples of Irish Double Think-and double-talk-on the subject, including a quote from a Monsignor saying that "through the efforts of the Irish people and in their own characteristic way, the sick in Ireland have come into their own and are treated as human beings and Christians...
...The lectures of Henri Bergson and the novels of Leon Bloy provide crucial turning points in their lives...
...As Jacques himself tells us in his footnotes: "The Journal is essentially to do with spiritual life...
...Look at p. 16 for instance: there he states quite correctly that the Irish spend eleven percent of their disposable income on alcohol, but he also pontificates as follows, "The population of Dublin, as I can attest from experience and observation, consumes more Librium, Valium and other forms of tranquilizers per capita than the residents of any other city...
...In any case, rest assured that not merely the percentage but the per capita contribution of the Irish taxpayer to the arts is far higher than that of his opposite number in the U.S...
...He also leaves unattended problems about tragic failures in faith healing, many of which are also recorded...
...It reveals both intelligence and respect for intelligence-both her own and her reader's...
...The Targ and Beres book is of quite a different sort...
...McNutt goes on to beg a few more questions...
...Lamenting the absence of reference to Frank's work, however, is not, I believe, in this instance, just a nit-picking, academic exercise in bibliographical one-upmanship...
...Ave Maria Press, $3.50 Love Is The Healer STELLA TERRILL MANN Harper & Row, $5.95 CARLO A. WEBER Back in 1961, Jerome Frank wrote a scholarly compendium of the healing arts...
...We are told, however, on the book jacket of the English edition that initial reaction of such friends as Thomas Merton was that these notes were "too powerful and too searing to be made public," even though he felt enormously privileged to read them himself...
...To say that love is the healer of loneliness, of physical illness, of poverty, of ignorance, of grief, of old age, is true in all cases...
...With obvious sympathy, she traces the Maritains' lives from childhood, through the fifty-six years of their marriage, to their deaths in 1960 and 1973...
...The level of exposition throughout most of the book is fairly elementary, a couple of pages describing More's Utopia, the same for Theodore Roszak and Thomas Hobbes, and would seem designed for a general college-freshmen-like audience...
...All through the book he complains about censorship of all the media by church and state, only to say of the Republic's favorite TV talk show, "The Late Late Show," and its host, Gay Byrne, "Sex and religion, the old staples, ensure that the ratings remain high...
...And consolations are not sought, 'use them as if not using them.' If a soul introduced into the mystical life does not rigorously observe these rules, it wounds the jealous God who loves it...
...152...
...Not to pour out my heart on creatures, even if the affection is in the order of charity...
...Unfortunately, Rosalie L. Colie's publishers present her posthumous single volume of poems as a kind of memorial footnote to her presumably more substantial work as "a noted historian of Renaissance English literature and scholar of comparative literature...
...Kerry-a fact which gives the statement a slightly higher level of accuracy than some of O'Hanlon's fabrications from the whole cloth...
...But let's not quibble...
...yet the "Weekly" appears on Government-operated TV regularly at 8.30 p.m...
...Some Dub-iners would say that, on the contrary, the Abbey Theatre is now suffering from too much subsidy and too much concomitant bureaucracy...
...in 1957, the darkest hour before the dawn...
...If the sufferer is not cured by the healer, then we know that he was not curable because he did not have faith...
...The case would be stronger if left where I think Jesus chose to leave it, with a simple, nondefensive "Come and See...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that there is presently emerging a large literature on the future...
...But neither of them reduces, nor perhaps should they reduce, the essential mystery inherent in the art of persuasion and healing...
...Rene Voillaume relates this in his Preface to the book: "Raissa knows that she is called to a contemplative life in the world, in that very setting-the realm of artiste, poets and philosophers-where all that is best and most disturbing in the world is at its peak point of attraction and danger...
...during the season...
...Yet Raissa's spiritual journey, I'm afraid, will provide very few guideposts for the post-Vatican II layperson...
...Light is another consequence of fire, and without light we all are cold cave-fishes after all...
...Dave Smith's The Fisherman's Whore is stronger stuff, exposing a gift of the kind reviewers often think "needs to be reckoned with"-in Smith's case not only by his readers and his contemporaries but by Dave Smith himself...
...Ignorance -as well as his characteristic free-floating aggression-vitiates most of what O'Hanlon says about the arts and the media in Ireland...
...The WHS "must govern in the functional sense of steering processes away from inherently dangerous paths rather than in the traditional sense of exercising power and authority for the sake of their self-perpetuation" (pp...
...It might be suggested, in conclusion, that Laszlo must go back and consider with some care the assumptions without which his proposal cannot be taken seriously...
...The author speaks of the concepts of good and evil, truth and error...
...The crux, however, lies in several issues that really go beyond the premise that Jesus came to heal persons, bodies and souls...
...Mann's book is the person, charismatic, powerful, convinced of herself, and because she is that, a woman who undoubtedly does heal...
...albeit in a few cases, the use of Sacred Scripture is accommodated...
...Thus, her entry in 1934: 'Terrible ordeal in silent prayer...
...The visible universe recedes...
...Those who indulge in the art of persuasion, be that healing, or psychotherapy, are generally inclined to this kind of rationalization...
...These are neat taxonomies created by the same need for structure from which sprang the very dualism which McNutt decries in earlier passages...
...The basic assumption is that the human world is a system, and that like all systems it will use information to work out the most satisfactory arrangement possible with its environment...
...Jesus," McNutt argues, did not divide man as we so often do, into a soul to be saved and healed, and a body that is to suffer and remain unhealed...
...The memoir is an interesting compendium of the various reminiscences on the Maritains...
...He represents Frank Hall, writer and host of "Hall's Illustrated Weekly," as constantly frustrated by censorship, without ever quite admitting that few Amer-can TV stations would accept anything so satirical and scatological during prime time-or any other time...
...Almost all the poems in To Open occupy small spaces on better than a hundred separate expanses of good white paper: perhaps if he tried using up a little more space in order to test some of the larger intricacies of the language, Menashe might one day achieve a poem of consequence...
...Any conjunction between the world of Jesus and this world seems impossible...
...The world of Jesus is quantitatively very small: the salt of the earth, the pinch of leaven which makes the whole dough rise...
...Also collected are fragments from a diary kept in 1931, loose leaves, complementary notes, and brief writings of various later dates...
...There is an unjelled quality about both halves and their conjunction...
...He compares the new, hygienic indoor cattle marts unfavorably with the jollity of the old cattle fairs that left the Market Square of every Irish town ankle-deep in cow dung and every saloon full of quarrelsome drunks, either once a week or once a month...
...From the sound of it this may seem a collection of school-figures, and Ms...
...Poetry is an art and the art comes by intelligence: Marilyn Hacker knows that, and as a result-sestinas aside- she gives us poems that are flawless acts of speech as well as works of art in the strongest possible sense: she is at work in these poems and what she is working is the art-working it, putting it to the test, but not working it over...
...Raissa speaks in her notebooks of "renouncing the good things of this world" in order to clear the way completely for contemplation and union with God...
...At this point, propelled by the now familiar, but no less vehement, assault on the traditional ritualistic practices of religion, McNutt's work takes on an apologetic flavor...
...Nevertheless, having just undergone a major operation in an Irish hospital run by an order of nuns, rather than have it performed in any American hospital, precisely because I knew that I would be treated as a human being and a Christian (however imperfect and Laodicean), I frankly don't care if the Sweepstakes is a racket...
...Raissa's vocation, as she sees it, is to lead a contemplative life in the world...
...but it seems to me a healthy sign that a younger poet should have expended what must have been an enormous inventive energy in order to make just a first impression of this magnitude...
...As to this world, it and all its beauty are sustained by the world of Jesus...
...Drawing on another Fortune article of his own writing, "The Long Reach of Tony O'Reilly," O'Hanlon shows the shaky nature of much of Ireland's new prosperity, based on enormous tax concessions to attract what may be fly-by-night foreign capital...
...Yet his frankness is misleading, for he forgets to remind us that facts and statistics can be used just as "poetically" to construct an unpleasing portrait...
...I hope some others of her generation may observe how much her work has strengthened the art they say they practice...
...Four pages later he remarks, "Cosgrave is said to be ah efficient chairman at Cabinet meetings but decidedly lacking in the single-mindedness of a de Valera...
...The Irish THOMAS J. O'HANLON Harper & Row, $12.50 VIVIAN MERCIER "All Cretans are liars...
...No country needs a capital-gains tax more...
...Rarely do her lines contain image-bearing words...
...The entries are sporadic and the general coherence is poor...
...Strangely too, in this context, there is little distinction made between the power of faith and self-fulfilling prophecies...
...a system of priorities" as "another symptom of...
...Jacques believed that Raissa's Journal would be a source of light and inspiration for others...
...One finds oneself longing for an occasional "dappled thing" or for "skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow," or for Cummings' praise of God for "the leaping greenly spirits of trees...
...In the second (Beres) half of the book, one dimension of the world's problem, war and war prevention, is looked at from the point of view of the actors, processes, context, and structures involved, this to provide the reader with a way of thinking through whatever hypothetical world futures he or she may come up with...
...And what emerges from Ms...
...In 1912, Jacques and Raissa made a vow of chastity in their marriage...
...Although the external events recorded in her two previous memoirs reflect a deep interest in poetry, art and music, her Journal shows a scrupulous resistance to the comforts and pleasures of the world...
...The problem is that McNutt tries to explain experience with a careful logical argument from a scriptural base...
...Unfortunately, neither Ms...
...Only in that context could we come to see Spirit as good and matter as evil...
...Where objective facts and statistics are lacking in behalf of what he wants to believe, O'Hanlon falls back happily on subjective judgments, gossip, or a current Dublin witticism...
...To this end we are given, in the first (Targ) half of the book, a survey of social criticism, Utopian literature, varied alternatives-to-the-status-quo kinds of thinking...
...or individual response and responsibility...
...The Irish . . . hate to be bothered with facts, especially if those facts crack the hard shell of their own preconceptions...
...It comprises those who let themselves be conformed to Him...
...O'Hanlon is a member of the editorial board of Fortune, for which he wrote an expose of that worldwide underground operation, the sale of Irish Hospitals' Sweepstakes tickets...
...But the basic assumptions about the human animal are never faced, are never really articulated, and they are questionable assumptions indeed...
...But neither McNutt nor the patient nor science need a loosely constructed logical explanation for them...
...Significantly, O'Hanlon himself left Ireland for the U.S...
...Despite Maritain's painstaking editing, the book remains disjointed...
...many of their owners are of course not full-time farmers...
...Again, "The Irish theatre, some say, is in crisis...
...He concedes that it is unrealistic to expect effective world government within the next hundred years, and seems inclined to suppose that a global coercive authority would be undesirable anyway...
...Others expressed much the same reaction, although in almost every case-we are told-such friends had second thoughts and encouraged Jacques to allow a regular edition of Raissa's Journal...
...It is a clue to the level of parochial enthusiasm sans wit that deprives these two otherwise interesting books of solid merit...
...If so, we can never know whether the cure was a function of the healer or the physician...
...In both books, the phenomenon of healing emerges clearly...
...As the blurbs mention, the poems in Of Earth are filled with genuineness, gentleness and "real feeling," so plentifully and convincingly that one wishes they were better poems-that they went beyond these heartening advantages, took advantage of them, took some risks with the art itself and avoided lapsing so often and so easily into the feeling-is-first simplicity that has produced so much of the gentleness, genuineness, etc...
...In fact, artists and writers, both Irish and foreign, are granted exemption from taxes on income earned by their artistic or scholarly work only, provided that they reside in Ireland for six months or more each year...
...He touches, of course, on the problem of suffering, as he must...
...vivian mercier, author of The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford/Galaxy) and professor of English at the University of California, spends from three to six months of the year in Ireland...
...And in that communication, the weak become strong...
...The first is from "The Wives at Old Point Comfort": On the last day they wake, like knives, all knees and ribs and teeth cutting the fishermen free of the sheets and the flies banging on the screens where the summer is storming...
...The selection of those to be exempted is carried out by the Arts Council of the Republic...
...The two books reviewed here are part of a second wave...
...No wonder his attitude to Mother Ireland is highly ambivalent...
...And this from "Lad's Song," the last poem in the book, addressed to a baby before she is born: Keep kicking for it is time to say the edge of the plain breaks, cars begin to thud toward the first light, and as the shrouding shadows cramp, already there is a mothering wind unhooding like an angel in a room, and a father dropping doorkeys in the unimaginable dawn, a man who rubs his eyes and grins as steam breaks through a station-house and all creation steps down safe...
...On the other hand, when anybody in the Irish countryside shows signs of making money, O'Hanlon laments the pollution of the lakes with pig slurry...
...They span the years from 1906 to 1926...
...Those who can hear might listen to Rosalie Colie's voice-witty, sensuous, elegant, at times, admittedly, a little overelegant, but always close to speech and always serenely well-spoken...
...But if one writes an apologia, then it does become important, and for purely scientific reasons, we must work towards a primary diagnosis, and an analysis of contributing factors for the cure...
...The guests were a melange of students, professors, philosophers, writers and artists...
...God I know that there is this world, and the world of Jesus-and that they are opposed to one another...
...Bergson affirms their search for the absolute, and Bloy calls them to Catholicism...
...it is not to be recommended for the Sunday cook...
...Jacques' Cornet de Notes (1965) and Raissa Maritain's We Have Been Friends Together (1942) and Adventures in Grace (1945) provide early, first-person accounts of their lives...
...Some of our "modern" enthusiasm involves too often a pointless intolerance of the real inventions of the past...
...In fact, Ireland has the third-largest average farm size in the E.E.C., being surpassed only by Britain and France...
...This title poem, especially, deserves a reading...
...Maritain died in 1973 and was not to see the public edition released...
...The most engaging of Worth's poems make up a sequence called "Notes from an Unborn Father," about the birth of his son...
...That is essentially the message of Mann's book, a collection of anecdotes and recipes drawn from her own practice and experience...
...I would hesitate to speak of it as an intellectual history, which its jacket suggests...
...The problems that confront proponents of world government are dodged by admitting that world government is unrealistic, Utopian in the pejorative sense, and then endowing the "world guidance system" with the basic attributes of sovereignty...
...or why the citizens of either of those two powers can be expected to seek equality with the poor and powerless of Bangladesh or the Sahel...
...O'Hanlon may be correct in saying that the Irish do not appreciate the understated style of Samuel Beckett and Brian Moore, but on the next page he describes John B. Keane's gloomy melodrama Sive as "a hymn to the life of the Irish tinker...
...He came to save persons, not just souls" (p...
...The famous identity passage in Luke, for example, 7:20-23 (p...
...Raissa died soon after the Maritains' return to France in 1960...
...but there has been no corresponding certainty about Christ's desire to heal the sickness of the body" (p...
...Perhaps it isn't fair to attempt quotation from a book as big and various as The Fisherman's Whore, especially since several of the more sizable pieces, like "Captain Carmines' Death Song" and "A Daylight Lady" (about a woman who cannibalized her fiance aboard a drifting ship in 1826), are so carefully interknit that quotation would convey only a weak impression of their character...
...Barbara mutkoski is assistant professor of English at Bergen College in New Jersey...
...These poems deserve to be remembered as the work of a poet who happened to be a scholar who not only knew the language and its literature but could make that language turn some corners of her own: Your ribcage holds a violent animal in That at its gentlest knocks the livelong night To be let out, to be let out to fly...
...It is much more modest in purpose, to "lead students to the conceptualization and investigation of alternative world futures" (p...
...It is a scarcely sufficient resolution to say that the individual needs both...
...And yet, a cliche would not be a cliche if it were not true, and sometimes a single case says more than a thousand logical treatises...
...They suppose a readership that is already convinced of the gravity and inescapability of the problems, and try to push on from there...
...Nine years later, Jacques-the "inveterate layman"-entered the Congregation of the Little Brothers of Jesus...
...The question of why some are healed and others are not is never answered satisfactorily...
...The authors emphasize, rightly I think, the need for personal REVIEWERS Robert v. remini teaches history at the University of Illinois...
...What is more disappointing, however, is that one misses the sense of lightness and poetic delicacy attending Raissa's earlier personal memoirs, both of which were intended for publication...
...Hacker, indeed, has made a stunning first impression...
...But when an author insists upon deploying a logical argument, one cannot help but respond with questions about it...
...But this presupposes that information is unstained by ideology, that a never yet realized level of trust among nations has been arrived at (so that each surrenders the data that is "essential" and trusts others to do the same and not to seek unfair advantage under the guise of "internal security and non-relevant domestic affairs...
...For instance, "Selected foreign artists receive tax-free status from the government (the list of those who receive this favor is secret...
...The poem in these days needs more than warmth to keep it living...
...And certainly the old lady is not without blemish...
...What McNutt attempts to prove, Ms...
...O'Hanlon's preconceptions run the other way: what right has Tony O'Reilly to be president of H.J...
...Anybody looking for an impartial study of contemporary Ireland had better leave O'Hanlon's thinly-disguised rationalization of a personal love-hate relationship severely alone...
...157...
...Realizing that all societies empowered certain persons, from Shamans to faith-healers, to heal sufferers by psychological means, Frank reviewed religious revivalists, thought reformers, healing rituals, the so-called placebo effect, all with the idea of identifying ways in which people heal other people through persuasion...
...Perhaps he really means Bryan MacMahon's The Honey Spike...
...Exaggerated, like most of his sentences, but close to the bone...
...It was here that the first center for Thomistic study began...
...Like so many "how to do it" books, this one is replete with as many cases and cliches that one could possible squeeze into 130 pages...
...Raissa and Jacques meet as students at the Sorbonne...
...In one, the logic is a bit contrived, but the theological premises are strong...
...Or, for that matter, what right has Tom O'Hanlon to be on the editorial board of Fortune or "giving out" about the Irish in a bloody big book that costs what would have been a good week's wages in the Ireland of his youth...
...Considering the whole problem of artistic fashion, I have to wonder what it was that kept the citizens of Chartres from razing one of those two steeples in two different styles 'that rise incongruously above one building...
...One might wonder whether the British or the Americans have any clearer idea of their true priorities...
...God is present to her through the mind and dimly, at times, through the spirit, but never through the senses...
...A Sunday afternoon in the Maritain living room might bring together such diverse personages as: Georges Rouault, Igor Stravinsky, Gabriel Marcel, Max Jacob, Marc Chagall, Gino Severini and Jean Cocteau...
...The portrait which Julie Kernan gives us in her personal memoir is of a man who fits that definition...
...When words are writing of the first order, how does it make them any better to call them poetry...
...Alas, the problems are much easier to describe than to solve, and both books are, though quite different from each other, alike in their failure to come up with anything very promising...
...We are told, for example, that the WHS executives will begin their work in temporary headquarters, that the Input Monitor (=The General Secretariat) will have its own megacomputer, that information will flow in "oral, written, or electronically transmitted forms" (p...
...The chapter "Wholeness is Holiness" is a superb, if popular, theological summary...
...I do not question the scriptural base...
...Ironically, the Journal may indeed effect the good which Maritain sought in publishing it by raising serious questions concerning man's concept of God and the layperson's relationship to the world...
...Part of the problem is that the Irish government has been niggardly in its financial support...
...Subsequent chapters cover their "enforced exile" in America during the Second World War, Jacques' ambassadorship to the Vatican at the request of General de Gaulle, and his professorship at Princeton...
...Antoinette Grunelius, a close friend of the Maritains, put into his hands a bundle of notebooks and papers which had been entrusted to her care before Raissa's death...
...Yet the same silent legend seems etched on its cover: "To be published, perhaps...
...No matter what happens, the therapist is right...
...Targ and Beres have to go ahead to consider more carefully and usefully how the material which they have assembled can be directed toward bringing about change.to go ahead to consider more carefully and usefully how the material which they have assembled can be directed toward bringing about change...
...It was called Persuasion and Healing, and has long since become a classic, (reprinted in 1963, and revised in 1973...
...After looking at "Dusk" a dozen times, I recognize that it is minimal enough but, as for style and structure, I am utterly at a loss to find them...
...The notebooks concern Raissa's intimate spiritual experiences...
...Unfortunately Laszlo is so fascinated with the details of his proposal that the basic social, political, and cultural issues are ignored...
...small exegetic points cannot distill the strength of McNutt's forcefully expressed basic tenet that the biblical perception of man was monistic...
...After a year of careful editing, Maritain printed 250 copies for private distribution to bis friends...
...And this may or may not be so...
...The book follows a chronological sequence...
...Along with the sestinas are several sonnets, including a "crown" of sonnets-all in a contemporary voice, however strictly patterned-a couple of villanelles, numerous pieces in other forms, and a good many in the most supple free-verse...
...Though Laszlo devotes considerable space to transition strategies, these are curiously apolitical...
...A Strategy for the Future: The Systems Approach to World Order ERVIN LASZLO George Braziller, $3.95 Reordering the Planet: Constructing Alternative World Futures LOUIS RENE BERES and HARRY H. TARG Allyn and Bacon, $5.95 JAMES F. McCUE The future is very much with us...
...58-59...
...220-221 about O'Hanlon's personal experience of Irish family life that I have not the heart to quote...
...Unlike Hopkins who saw Christ playing in ten thousand places, the sensate world has no place in Raissa's poetry...
...One wave of such literature has already gone past-Richard Falk's Endangered Planet (1971), the Meadows' et...
...Once one accepts the dichotomy of world and spirit, the logical conclusion for anyone seeking perfection is to deny the world...
...For Laszlo's WHS presupposes a world of utilitarian saints, desirous of realizing the greatest good for the greatest number...
...No, thanks, I'd sooner remain infallible...
...53), is essentially an identification of Jesus as the Messiah, by way of reference to a well-known prophecy, and not simply Jesus' claim to have cured the sick, assisted the blind to see, the lame to walk, etc...
...I am a Cretan...
...When Sean Lemass and T.K...
...If in psychotherapy, for example, the client's anxiety lessens, one claims success because the symptoms are remitting...
...Miss Kernan's concise memoir spans a broader period and her selective omniscience permits a more objective, comprehensive point of view...
...Apart from some moments when he simply can't refrain from giving us all goosebumps-"we are one another/ we must try not to turn/ from ourselves"-Worth has possibly established at least an authentic base for poetry, though I wish the poems themselves possessed the freshness and vitality of the child they celebrate...
...Julie Kernan tells us in Our Friend, Jacques Maritain that "on every side Jacques was urged to make the Journal public...
...In attending to the discernment of spirits, a radically important issue, McNutt bypasses the question of the primary diagnosis...
...What one finds in Raissa's notebooks is a constant tension between her life in the secular world and her call to complete absorption in Christ...
...The initial sections deal with Raissa's conversion, baptism and first communions, her commitment to silent prayer (oraison) and quiet absorption in God (recueille-ment...
...Here are two small passages, nevertheless, which give some idea of the way this remarkable writer puts his words together...
...Our Friend, Jacques Maritain JULIE KERNAN Doubleday, $7.95 Raissa's Journal PRESENTED BY JACQUES MARITAIN Magi Books, $12.95 BARBARA MUTKOSKI Although Jacques Maritain's motto "Woe to me if I do not Thomisticize" is not the resounding call in our university halls these days, his life and his works are still subjects of interest and discussion...
...Michael heffernan teaches English at Kansas State College and is poetry editor of The Midwest Quarterly...
...That the future is out of control and will not be benign is becoming the ominous background of much of our everyday pleasantry...
...For it is not the axiom that cures, but the person...
...But the details are finally only a distraction, which allow Laszlo to avoid asking why the Soviet Union or the United States can be expected to hand over nuclear ultimacy to the WHS executives and their megacom-puters...
...Despairing over the skepticism of their age, they resolve to commit suicide if they cannot find meaning for the word "truth," or, for the presence of so much evil and injustice in the world...
...and am most inclined to accept the conclusion that healings take place...
...Whitaker decided in 1957 that the Irish economy must be forced to grow by hook or by crook, they must have known the risks they were taking...
...All in all, tough as it is to say it, Worth's and Menashe's books are both thin soup, despite the warmth they both give off, or mean to...
...fortunately, we may have one by the time this review appears in print...
...Raissa was an avowed poet, yet the poems which appear in her Journal are often devoid of concrete images...
...It is the transitional computerization that is considered...
...To those seeking respite from boredom, political cynicism, and pain, each of these books, in quite different ways, has something positive to say...
...a political act and not merely a diversion in hard times...
...I am perseverating here about Frank's book, fully mindful of the venerable caution that we should beware the homo unius libri...
...The envelopes were marked: "To keep, perhaps," or "For Jacques to look over...
...Love is incapable of judging...
...Healing FRANCIS McNUTT, O.P...
...Charles Fecher's The Philosophy of Jacques Maritain and various other critical studies trace Maritain's intellectual journey with more precision...
...The book is well organized, simply and lucidly written...
...Very sinister it sounds...
...It may be a waste of time and energy taking the trouble to contradict O'Hanlon when he so casually and almost lightheartedly contradicts himself...
...In these envelopes Maritain found masses of memoranda, brief essays and thoughts on spiritual subjects...
...I myself am tired of the talky, sloppy, thrown-together plain-songs we are given by nine-tenths of the poets who constitute the various "scenes" of contemporary poetry...
...I would really have preferred to accept the unadorned premise that there is "healing" in the world, that we really don't know how it happens, but that we choose to accept it on faith and personal experience, rather than to have that frank statement buttressed (or adulterated) by rather strained logical arguments for specific forms of healing...
...I suppose I can say the same about his book, but the best things in it are the photographs by Frank Monaco...
...It might be good to take Williams at his word and discard the term "poetry" altogether...
...Marilyn Hacker's work is much closer to modernism than Rosalie Colie's, and yet among the most impressive things in Presentation Piece are the seven sestinas she has managed to place among the prodigious pages of this remarkable first book- seven delightful, dexterous, almost offhanded renderings of the toughest form the English poets brought home in their saddlebags from the south of France-the kind of poem worth trying at least once, and if you are a poet of special invention, why not try it seven times...
...As a corollary, McNutt quite accurately states: "I think it is only honest to say that most theologians and preachers in the Catholic Church have emphasized with great certainty Christ's desire to save souls and to take away sin, the sickness of the soul...
...133...
...Ireland had retained what Americans would call a Depression mentality since the 1930s...
...The driving energy in his poems is a fusion of poetry and prose-the best elements of the cadenced line poised among the subtle transformations of the variable syntax a good fic-tionist uses...
...His "global information agency operates as a super wire-service but uses the latest communications equipment, has direct and automatic access to essential data, and is restricted to the mandated functional areas (it does not interfere with the internal security and nonrelevant domestic affairs of nations)" (p...
...McNutt's historical assessment is that the biblical view of man as a psychosomatic unit was later supplanted by Platonic and Manichean thought, which infected Christianity for ages, and, though repeatedly condemned, still remains with us in the form of Catholic Jansenism and Protestant Puritanism...
...And among those preconceptions is the notion that, given a chance, they can hold their own with any other people...
...167, emphasis added...
...The book accurately sketches the associations and events which form the background of Maritain's thinking and writings, but its forte lies in the charming touches which convey the warmth and vitality of the Maritain household...
...The preacher commenced rhetorically, after a good many announcements, with the question, "How can there be a just God, when there is so much suffering in the world . . .?" "My God," my friend whispered, "I think he's going to try to answer that . . ."-and in twenty minutes or less...
...james f. mccue teaches at the School of Religion, University of Iowa...
...But what was the alternative...
...On p. 192 he writes: "De Valera set a political style of indecision, vagueness, vacillation, caprice, and cajolery that others adopted...
...Heinz...
...With great ingenuity and single-mindedness, Laszlo lays out a design for a World Homeostat System (WHS), which is in essence a mechanism that will both provide information relative to the total planetary condition to the basic small components of that system, and show the potential impacts on global well-being of the choices available to these constituent units...
...external events only play in it an altogether secondary part...
...Both suggest that what we believe will happen, will happen...
...And finally, "Human felicity has no place in my destiny...
...that underlie, and undermine, so many of the worst poems in the language...
...During the years preceding World War II, an incessant stream of visitors ' came to their home at 10 Rue Parc, Meudon...
...McNutt appears aware of his work- at least they make no reference to it...
...The OSSC (Optimum-State Steering Committee), an organ of WHS, "does not interfere with the social and political principles of particular societies unless they thwart the basic needs of their members or prevent other societies from meeting their own quotas of need-fulfillment" (p...
...He complains about the decline of rural Ireland, while conceding that the Irish Republic is the poorest of the European Economic Community countries simply because she has the highest percentage of families engaged in agriculture...
...I think he is still soured by his memories of youth and adolescence, besides being a little envious of present-day Irish cockiness...
...In the second, the admonitions are old, but a person emerges...
...A little work wouldn't kill them either...
...L. Bauhan, Pub., $3.95 (paper) To Open SAMUEL MENASHE Viking, $6.95 The Fisherman's Whore DAVID SMITH Ohio U. Press, $5 Atlantic Wall ROSALIE L. COLIE Princeton U. Press, $7.50 ($2.95 paper) Presentation Piece MARILYN HACKER Viking Press, $6.95 MICHAEL HEFFERNAN It is by no means gratifying to have to render an unfavorable judgment of these first two books by Douglas Worth and Samuel Menashe, since they are both so obviously attractive and compelling...
...A philosopher," Maritain once wrote in An Introduction to Philosophy, "is a man humanly wise...
...I don't deny that WHS would need those attributes to function, but neither do I see how the problems are solved simply by dressing world government up in a systems-language disguise...
...But in a footnote he assumes that by the year 2000 disarmament agreements will have been reached reducing the nuclear stockpiles of the great powers, and the non-government which he is proposing will have a nuclear deterrent "not . . . sufficient to impose a nuclear blackmail on the rest of the world, but merely to exceed the striking capacity of any given nation" (p...
...The material is not quite focused for its purposes...
...But after the reader has accumulated the information the reader is left at sea as to how this is now to enrich thinking about the future, or how thinking about the future can be (can it...
...They are highly abstract...
...No one need apologize for Rosalie Colie or any other artist who chose to work in a style that was not "fashionable...
...Remember this ancient catch-22 as you read Thomas J. O'Hanlon's appendix entitled "Notes on Sources...
...Mann, in her book, Love is the Healer, simply describes in something of a cookbook on how to perform the acts...
...This is strikingly the case with the Laszlo book...
...The demands of the contemplative life: not to seek consolation from any creature...
...Value, surely, they do have, and extraordinary timeliness when audiences are piqued by notions of spiritual possession, particularly diabolical, and the processes by which we either invoke the spirits or rid ourselves of them...
...The opening sentence runs, "As befits a nation of poets, the Irish treat facts and statistics as raw material for the construction of a pleasing portrait...
...In this kind of 'no-lose* situation, so also is the healer...
...Great fortunes are being made in Ireland nowadays, almost all of them based on speculation in land, houses, and securities...
...Consistent in his inconsistency, O'Hanlon writes a final chapter that goes out for laughs and ends with the perennial Irish phrase, "Things could be worse...
...He takes discernment to mean the business of identifying the right kind of prayer for the occasion, leaving gently aside the question of whether faith-healing or medical intervention is in order...
...Similarly, I look in vain for what that gracious, gentle man Stephen Spender had in mind when he wrote these words for Menashe's To Open:"Here is a poet who compresses thoughts and sensations into language intense and clear as diamonds"-especially when I open the book, more or less at random, only to be dazzled by such a diamond as this: DUSK Voices rise from earth into night The dust-jacket warns that "one shouldn't be fooled by the seedlike forms and the minimal style, for Menashe is able to build on his tiny scale some of the most exquisite poetic structures in our language...
...But they don't suggest any plausible ways in which thinking about alternative futures can move beyond the private and the futile...
...But the recipes are likely to work only when the chef has certain notable gifts...
...carlo a. weber is a member of the executive staff of the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health...
...And this argument is awash with them...
...The inception of Raissa's Journal took place one afternoon in the summer of 1961...
...Until death, when salvation is wrought for all those whom God loves and whom he does not judge...
Vol. 102 • August 1975 • No. 11
