Preface

Years ago, when I was starting out as a writer, I did a bit of journalism, writing and editing, designing and even selling ads. Of course, in the newspaper business the reporter is taught to tell the readers the five Ws and the H: the who, what, where, when, why and how an event occurred. To introduce the work to you I think I should do something similar. I will begin with the how. How was this written? It would be true to say that it was by the grace and mercy of God and not by my own will and effort, and I happily admit that fact of faith, but I want to say something too about the manner of the writing. In 1981, one of my first college teachers, on encountering some of my early fiction, said that I wrote like Faulkner. I think it was a compliment, though later, based on the opinions I heard voiced by students, it might not have been. Faulkner is he of the long sentence, the rolling period, the labyrinthine style that mirrors a complexity of thought and reality. If I write like Faulkner, it is perhaps because the way I say the thing exemplifies the thing that is said. Late in my career, the idea of the arrival came to me, the

promised arrival that one must search for. Perhaps my writing is that search, simultaneously in theme, style, etc., of the looking forward to arrival. In about 1988 two teachers made diverse comments on my writing. One said that I wrote like Gertrude Stein. The other said I had a perverse rhetoric of authority. I found out recently that to write like Stein means to be gnomic, repetitive and illogical. Again, this may not be a compliment as to style. And I must admit I tend to be elliptical or epigrammatic, with a fragmentary pretense to aphorism, and that sometimes I assert plain contradictions as true. So be it. As for perversity, I confess as well that then, at the peak of my infatuation with everything to do with deconstruction, I was both morally and intellectually perverse. But God took care of that in His own way. I have often argued from authority, which is a sin in a philosopher, but not in a theologian. If the authority is experience, the poet may well use the same method of logical argumentation. In 2006, as I was studying Joyce, a teacher again said that I wrote like Faulkner. At least I have been consistent. I might add that the same Joycean teacher made me rewrite a 15 page paper into a five page one, and that the second paper was better

than the first, and that I learned from the experience. So much, then, for the how, but what of the who? Nietzsche was perhaps correct when he said that when one reads something one must ask just who is writing the text. So perhaps you will ask yourself rightly along the way that question concerning me and this work, but I think the things I have to say do not depend so much on me as on the matter at hand, and therefore I will not preempt what each of you may variously find or the conclusions you may draw by giving you any more information on the author, which will at any rate be found on the pages passim. The where is Houston, Texas, and the when were the war years. This leaves me only the what and the why. And thats really the heart of the matter. The what is what happened as a result of my encounter with deconstruction, my agon with Derrida, and others, as well as my conversion to Christ, and the dialectic that developed out of the placing of these two in relationship. The writings attempt and achieve a synthesis of many apparently, and I think absolutely, contradictory beliefs, ideas, methods. I did not, many years ago, consciously set out to perform the synthesis, but in these latter days found it possible to do, though whether it works or not will be for others

to decide. I have been told that it was not likely to be able to be done, by a former professor, Samuel Southwell, who knew me when I thought I was a deconstructionist, and I have harbored some doubts myself whether it was the right thing to do. Yet, it seems to me I have been uniquely called to the task. The work as a whole, that is, the project of my career in writing which I call The Thirty Years War, is a journey that started from deconstruction in terms of both philosophy and literature. In 1989, at the point just before my conversion to Christ, the decisive idea happened to me in the context of a reading of the Anaximander fragment and Nietzsche and Levinas, in which I recognized an exterior eternity limiting infinity. This led to the thinking through of the contradictory essence of truth, lived as the real dialectic, in the late 1990s, and on to the limit of Hamlet in arrival, around 2006, followed by the recommendation of self-limitation as a way out of the dichotomy of fantasy and necessity in which we live, to gain freedom and reality, in my writings on the novel in 2007 and 2008. This led to the ideas and logic this year that can reconcile all differences, ideally and therefore really, in order to fulfill the gospel injunction to be perfect. It is the

logic of the impossible, and implies distantly that before the beginning there was an infinite nothingness which contracted, creating a limit, the eternal, God. All else flowed from this event before eternity, when the infinite was stopped. Much of the problem with thinking today is the virtual renewal of the infinite nothing which has occurred since the socalled death of God. I believe that God has proceeded by a series of contractions to limit himself again and again, down to Christ on the cross, down to the bread on the altar, down to the word on the page, to reach each one of us in our narrow, crowded worlds. He asks us to do likewise, to deny, renounce, follow, suffer. That this applies to the enormous Catholic Church is all too obvious, and I foresee a great limitation coming on the institution itself, but not on the message, which is life for the world. I have found that all creation occurs as a series of painful contractions, a labor in the artist similar to that of the woman in childbirth. God experienced this pain. It is essential to him. The Church too may give birth to a new world, but only as the result of the contractions that have been unfolding for many years. Which I think brings me to the why. Why did I write this work? A man once asked me

why I bothered at all. As Faulkner said in Stockholm, it was not for money, nor even less for glory. Let me say I was seeking the truth, and that I found it, or rather He found me. I was given the talent to write, as in the parable of Jesus, and it became clear to me that I was obligated to make good use of the talent that I have been given. I wrote in the end specifically to the Church, which is not necessarily Roman but global, and about the subject of mercy, as will be seen from the way God has led me out of the wilderness to the promised land, and as he has guided the thought of the work to the point of the reconciling of oppositions, in me, in the Church, and in the world, while directing me toward the findings concerning the apocalypse which I disclose at the end. That we now and will in the future all need such reconciliation is without question, and the Church most of all, for whom I write, and which I love. I think that through this work steps are taken toward the reconciliation of Christian practice and theory, calling readers to truth, to love, to holiness, to responsibility. We must find the truth whatever the cost, even though it means a breaking. As I say at one point, as bread is broken, be broken, too, and yet after the breaking there is still the communion. The fact that

God allowed me to preserve a record of my search for the truth, and then gave me the thing itself, an answer to questions we have all longed to know, and sometimes asked about, humbles me and makes me thankful.

Michael Bolerjack