Wuthering Expectations: It was so dreadfully cold - the puzzling Little Match Girl Passion

Wuthering Expectations: It was so dreadfully cold - the puzzling Little Match Girl Passion
Excerpt:
In this cold and in this darkness a poor little girl was walking in the street, bareheaded and barefooted.So begins Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl"...

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Kindly Mirrors of Future Times'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Kindly Mirrors of Future Times'
Excerpt:
It’s about the creation of memories and the possibility of willing ourselves into the memories of others. The narrator says:

“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: To portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."

A Momentary Taste of Being: Go Read It!

A Momentary Taste of Being: Go Read It!

A Common Reader: Life and Fate: “Good day, comrade Shtrum”

A Common Reader: Life and Fate: “Good day, comrade Shtrum”
Excerpt:

But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating; it came between him and his family; it insinuated itself into his past, into his childhood memoires. He began to feel that he really was untalented and boring, someone who wore out the people around him with dull chatter. Even his work seemed to have grown dull, to be covered with a layer of dust; the thought of it no longer filled him with light and joy.

Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment—with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.

- Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translation by Robert Chandler (New York Review Books), page 672.

The person being figuratively crushed is Viktor Shtrum, a Soviet physicist exploring the workings of the atom. Crushing him is the power of the state, directly and indirectly. He has made a remarkable breakthrough in atomic studies and, instead of being hailed, the council at the scientific institute blackballs him. Grossman then provides a deus ex mechina—a call to Viktor from Joseph Stalin who praises his work and asks if Viktor has what he needs to continue his research.

Despite Life and Fate’s dark subject matter, Grossman provides plenty of humor. With that short phone call, Viktor is welcomed back in the fold of the laboratory as if nothing had happened. Viktor’s indignation toward the people he called Stalin’s bootlickers softens now that Stalin’s beneficence helps him. Even so, he realizes how he has compromised his beliefs:

He was still as appalled as ever at the cruelty of Stalin. He knew very well that life hadn’t changed for other people simply because he was now Fortune’s pet instead of her stepson. Nothing would ever bring back to life the victims of collectivization or the people who had been shot in 1937; it made no difference to them whether or not prizes and medals were awarded to a certain Shtrum, whether he was called to see Malenkov or was pointedly not invited to a gather at Shishakov’s.

And yet something had changed, both in his understanding and in his actual memory of things. (823)

Viktor’s “spiritual entropy” does not stop with the end of his ostracism, as he fully realizes when he is asked to sign a letter that denounces innocent doctors as well as reinforces the denouncement of many high-profile figures in 1937. Earlier, when Viktor had been an outcast and felt he had nothing left to lose, he had held fast to his beliefs. After the call from Stalin he compromises his conscience because he has something to lose. Grossman treats Viktor gently though, probably because he had been in the same situation and had signed a similar letter. Viktor realizes what he has done, vowing

Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn’t be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man. (841)

Sacred and Profane: Pew Research

Sacred and Profane: Jeremiah’s Perfuncle [I know it’s not a word, in the dictionary sense, but that’s what came out!  So, live with it.]

There was quite a reaction to the statement about ‘sacred and profane!’  I.E., “Yeah!??!”

It’s not a scenario that I concocted out of thin air that, uh, didn’t exist before. Now everywhere and erewhon are ‘saturated’ with this admixture.  Let’s take ‘Pew Research’ now and number each person as we work. And let’s pretend I have this new vehicle machine that can see ‘every room’ of a person’s heart and mind and soul and body from birth to the present.  You can help record the scenes and dialogues.  Only one thing though, ‘everything,’ and I mean everything has to be recorded for our research. Whhhhaaaaaaatttttttt!!!!!!?

===========

I know those outside the Church doors are in the usual 'guffaw' mode here but....hypocrites calling out hypocrites solves NOTHING.  Yah wanna go there?

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Also born today ...

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Also born today ...
Excerpt:
... James Laughlin, who founded New Directions, surely one of the great publishing houses. If anyone deserves never to be forgotten, he's one...

Survival in a world rife with zombies | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/30/2011

Survival in a world rife with zombies | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/30/2011
Excerpt: h/t Books Inq

Race, a topic Whitehead deals with regularly in his writing, has a muted role in Zone One. We learn on Page 231 that Mark Spitz is black, but only when he explains how he ended up nicknamed for an Olympic swimming champion. Part of it, he tells a buddy, is "the black-people-can't-swim thing."

Race "is in some of my books, not so much in other ones," says Whitehead, who is African American. "It seemed to me that if you're in an abandoned gas station with some other survivors, surrounded by 10,000 angry, hungry living dead, that the race of the person next to you there, their crazy accent, or their gender would be unimportant. What's important is getting out of there with your skin intact. We might actually be postracial one day. It will take the end of the world and the decimation of 95 percent of the population to do it."

Is there a social message in Zone One?

"The zombies in the book are just rhetorical props, and the apocalypse becomes a way for me, in my oblique way, to talk about survival. . . . Mark Spitz and the folks he works with are just trying to figure out how to live in this new world that's been so changed."

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20111030_Survival_in_a_world_rife_with_zombies.html#ixzz1cHgQmnvm
Watch sports videos you won't find anywhere else

What then is the implicit agenda?

"One of the odd things about the Christian narrative is that it affirms the worst-case scenario, and at the same time says everything is going to work out wonderfully anyway. It's that paradox that makes it the most hopeful of all religions, in my view at least."  ~Eve

In restructuring our incentives, don't expect them to thank or forgive you because in the present no one’s on the same page or even near existing in the same paradigm.  If you are constantly and concretely experiencing the complexity of woundedness and brokenness in the ‘marginal revolution’ of ‘messy and sublime’ the temptation can be very acute to grab the first line.  

It’s not a ‘coat’ that you can discard for another.  Although that is what almost everyone expects.  Shed the coat, baby, take mine! It’ll look so much better and get everyone off your back.  Finally, in great frustration, I just said quietly: “None of these fit me, thank you.  I have my own coat.(There’s a pile of these coats in my backyard I can’t or won’t wear any longer, in case you’re interested.)

It reminds of that story of the woman who hated her cross so much she decided to turn it in for another.  She began rummaging through the discard pile of crosses.  Quite a few there!

The first she picked was gold with diamonds and beautiful jewels but it was too heavy around her neck.  Cross after cross just didn’t feel right.  Some were too ugly, too small, or too large.  At the back in the shadows she felt around and pulled a small wooden one, chipped and needed a bit of repair but she felt more comfortable with it.  As she put it around her neck she realized it was ‘her’ cross.

• “ ‘Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?’: Wallace Stevens’ Poetics of Sequence in ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds.’ ” Wallace Stevens Journal 31.1 (Spring 2007): 43–58

Talk to me more about brokenness. [Or woundedness.]It isn't a metaphor which comes naturally to me and it's easier for me to see the limitations than the insights or beauty it can provide. But I think there's some poetry to be found here if we're willing to look for it:

Are you broken like a wave, coming home on sharp rocks?

Are you broken like a voice deepening into manhood?

Are you broken like the Eucharist?

~Eve

On That Anvil, the Pounding of Translation

Primo Levi's work is full of puns which are always difficult to translate… And in Levi's case his use of dialect and neologisms make that loss significant…
Many of the terms Levi used for laboratory equipment were wrongly translated. In Moments of Reprieve, (12) the translator, Ruth Feldman, writes of Levi's 'glass refrigerator' - an innovative if impractical conception - when Levi wrote condensatore di vetro. The Sansoni English-Italian dictionary gives condenser (chem), condensatore, refrigerante.  A condenser, for crying out loud!
… In his Postfazione to his translation of Kafka's The Trial Levi wrote, (my translation):-
'.......Now translating is more than reading;...... Translation is tracking the tissue of the book under the microscope; you penetrate it, you stay there, stuck fast and involved.......Right from the very first sentence one is precipitated into the nightmare of the unknowable, and in every page one comes up against obsessive outbursts,..... by avalanches of confused words......'
'I do not believe that there is much affinity between Kafka and me. Often, during the process of this translation, I have had the feeling of collision, of conflict, of the immodest temptation to unravel, in my own way, the knots in the text; in sum, to correct, to exploit the dictionary choices, to superimpose my own way of writing on Kafka's. I have tried not to yield to this temptation.'
'Since I know that there is no such thing as the 'right way' to translate, I have trusted more to instinct than to reason, and I have adhered to a line of interpretative correctness, as honestly as possible, even if not always coherent from page to page, because not all the pages present the same problems…[Primo Levi]

Birds of a Feather

h/t Bill Buley, cdapress.com, 10/20/11
Rose Lake---As his pet grouse watches from a nearby log, Jim Powell....
But then it is strange.
I say, "I went up in the woods and played with my bird." Powell said, laughing.
Really, he did.  And he does today.
His bird is a male grouse he befriended and named "Missy" three years ago...Over time, as they came to know each other, the small grouse crept closer...Close enough, finally, to where it sat on his shoulder, tugged on his cap and scrambled around his feet.
For Powell, this feathered little friend is a delight.
"She's my little buddy.  We talk all the time...."
Almost every morning.
Wednesday, around 7 a.m....
===========
Amazing what trust and letting wild birds be free can do for vulnerability issues in friendship (or for anything else for that matter), huh?  I still take the picture of the grouse on his shoulder out and look at it. I like butterflies, too.  If you grab one it dies.
Thanks, Missy.

So ...they fluttered...

§         A fly and a flea flew up in a flu.
Said the fly to the flea, “What shall we do?”
“Let’s fly,” said the flea.
“Let’s flee,” said the fly.
So they fluttered and flew up a flaw in the flue.  ~Anon.

The Sacramental Imagination and Catholic Literature

The Sacramental Imagination and Catholic Literature
Nina Butorac
Excerpt:
Analogical Imagination
I first came across the expression "Sacramental Imagination" in Andrew Greeley's book, The Catholic Myth, which is a sociological study of American Catholic culture, behavior and beliefs. ¹ In the third chapter of his book, Greeley poses this question to his readers: "Do Catholics Imagine Differently?" He then proceeds to explain that, yes, indeed they do.

"Religion... is imagination before it's anything else. The Catholic imagination is different from the Protestant imagination. You know that: Flannery O'Connor is not John Updike." ²

This piqued my interest. "How is the Catholic Imagination different?" I wondered, and "Why might this be so?" Greeley writes:

"The central symbol (of religion) is God. One's "picture" of God is in fact a metaphorical narrative of God's relationship with the world and the self as part of the world... The Catholic "classics" assume a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God. The Protestant classics, on the other hand, assume a God who is radically absent from the world, and who discloses (Himself) only on rare occasions (especially in Jesus Christ and Him crucified). The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God." ³

Greeley defines this difference this way:

"(T)he Catholic imagination is 'analogical' and the Protestant imagination is 'dialectical.'" ⁴

.......
My Note:
I became interested in the 'imagination' after delving into the poetry and life of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the concept of hacceity. [don Scotus] I continue to collide with 'imagination'. Personally, after a lot of reading, thinking (yes, Martha, I do try!), and pondering I offer a 'tender' description. The imagination is that aspect of our being that is the vehicle for hope. Don't crush me, please, in your mad dash to discredit that. I only posted the above article because it is well-written. I am not a fan of Andrew Greeley. It makes me nervous to hear the word 'myth' bandied about when discussing the sacramental nature of being. Bultmann has done enough damage to the 'mystery' of God and His Creation, not counting what it has done to the Church. The Romantics haven't helped in this fraying of perception either.

There are quite a few people, many who are not Christian, who have taken up this banner of 'imagination.' Some nominal Christians are working very hard to re-define it in more, I'll be nice!, 'secular' terms which should be very disturbing to Christians and Catholics. I find it to be pivotal in the 'culture war.' [Hopkins 'began' here with the German 'kulturkampf', BTW. This onslaught has only ramped up with each passing day.]
Its mystery is haunting, isn't it?!!!!! I will share my present list of 'imagination' descriptors I have found and am reading about to allow your perusal of this great part of our being. I hope you will guard it well: with heart, mind, soul and body.

On Landscapes

Imagination List

Sacramental Imagination [O’Connor, Hopkins(Scotist)]

Analogical Imagination [Greeley(liberal)]

Moral Imagination [Realism: Yvor Winters]

Penetrative Imagination [Coleridge, Ruskin]

Questing Imagination [Stafford]

Emotive Imagination [Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford]

Symbolic Imagination [Walker Percy, Allan Tate]

Angelic Imagination [Walker Percy, Allan Tate]

Liberal Imagination [ Lionel Trilling] [Perceptive Factor {Javier Marias]

Utopian Imagination  (Marxist) [Judith Brown]

Imaginative Empathy [Joseph W. Meeker]

Surreal Imagination [Dali, Bunuel, Lorca]

---------

Recently,

Imagination in the Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats

Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imaginations [Grace Mazur]

--------

American Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor also illustrates the sacramental understanding of the world in her work Novelist and Believer:

"St. Augustine wrote that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things. To the person who believes this - as the western world did up until a few centuries ago - this physical sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source... The aim of the artist is to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe... The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality."

==========

There are others to add to the above list but I am not ready to add them until I read about each of them. You know what Simone Weil said: You must pay close 'attention.'

The Big Blue Wall

Persona non grata

If you don’t tow the party line wow you fall down the sewer hole.  Alice and the rabbit knew all about those sudden 'zips down the proverbial black hole.' It's the grey shimmering shadow line that gets everyone worked up into some sort of frothy and frenzy.  What is maddening is that damn line keeps moving---depending on who else is in the room or what day it is or what hour of the day it is!  Oh, God!  That seven o'clock hour or the 3:35 on the dash time.  And one wonders why anyone would want to bolt!  The masquerade clothes and mask don't fit and those bloomers are killing me!  And like Bugs Bunny I have to cut holes in the floppy hat to peer out.  Just as Alice said, "It ain't my cup o' tea...no, suh...it ain't my cup o' tea, at all."

Hey, it's soon to be 'monster day' on Monday!  What do you expect?

Behind the Home Depot curtains you are suddenly and brutally remade, repainted and refiled.  Sometimes skewered. [And you never even left the house! All you have to do is sit there.] I know!  I know! It's Halloween!  It's that whispered, bullying-- mess with me and I'll show you!  Trick or Treat?  It must be some sort of mad PR game.

No big deal! No one ever truly saw the real you anyway; so it's really a favorable boost to your freedom to live in the sunny, airy reality of true being.  It's those dadrat color filtered glasses again, Alice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  It's a pity because they can't see without them.  "How wonderful life is..."  The zombie suit was kind of weird though.*

h/t to James Goldman [sic]:  [BTW: Did we ever have the choice?]

Someone else needs to become the bad example in our group
(1-303):
But you wear shame so well...

I am sure G. K. Chesterton could have muttered it somewhere.  I'll bet Francis thought it after he took off the clothes on the altar after his father accused him of 'stealing' them.

Massah, massah, save me, save me...he was screaming as I swear I saw him running down the steps at the end of the 'long room.'  Maybe that's the Mad Hatter...yah think?
------------
* The zombie appears to be a philosopher.  A Christian one, I should add ("it is from the Cross alone that I seek mercy") animated by the Virgin Mary to---well, let me abandon the story right there...~Don Ruy in The Hanged Man (1895)  ~Wuthering Expectations blog

Writing Assignment: Your Plan For Next Year

Writing Assignment: Your Plan For Next Year
Excerpt:

If there’s any profession more inclined to procrastination than writing, I haven’t heard of it.

You don’t have to conform to the stereotype.

But you’ll need a plan.

This is the time of year that businesses and organizations create their plans for the coming year. It’s not a bad time for individuals to pause and plan as well, especially before the rush and chaos of the holiday season. And it’s an excellent time for writers to plan out their year as well.

Plans don’t have to be complex or difficult to write. In fact, they should be simple, a true expression of what you want to achieve and your initial thoughts on how to accomplish what you’ve decided on...

Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Stand Off at the Salado

Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Stand Off at the Salado

That's Human Life

   From what alphabet? [aleph and beth]:  From what landscape had he escaped?  Breshit.  Ahavat Israel.  aleph-beth…take care of them and they will take care of you.  They will go with you everywhere.  They will make you laugh and cry.

…a thousand places at once…barely awakened to a flaming sky…I seized upon a word, a phrase and distances vanished…the Rabbi…my mother’s tears...25 years later…N.Y…his cousin was gravely ill…”Thank you for coming.  I need you.  I need your blessing.  Are you out of your mind?...Your standing up above is surely a lot stronger than mine!...What are you waiting for?...he whispered in my ear…”His life is at stake.”  You can never give too much to the poor or study too much.  That’s human life.  A tightrope.  ~Elie Wiesel

Feeling Lost

It is good to feel lost... because it proves you have a navigational sense of where "Home" is. You know that 

place that feels like being found exists. And maybe your current location isn't that place but, Hallelujah, that

unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it. ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com

In the Midst of the Fire

A. The Quarry is Here

The Kingdom of God by Jessica Powers
Not toward the stars, O beautiful naked runner,
not on the hills of the moon after a wild white deer,
seek not to discover afar the unspeakable wisdom,-
the quarry is here…

1. Repentance:  What I have to ascertain is the laws under which I live. My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot be, to cherish a distrust of my powers, and to desire to change laws which are identical with myself.

If I were to characterize our definite images of the world and of man as the "first materials" of the imagination, the very externality of the term would seem to be an admission that there are materials of the imagination that have an existence prior to being touched by the spirit and attitude of man-that are, as it were, free and unstained by thought or theology.

The use of the term "first materials" would thus commit me to an aesthetic I consider highly dubious, one that assumes we can act in a "free" area of the imagination, in which all ideas about the finite, as well as all theology, are relegated to the category of secondary and even extrinsic imaginative acts. If I acceded to this, I should be well on the way to viewing poetry as "pure poetry" and to an understanding of theology as purely "celestial."

If I try to use a less innocuous term than "materials," and call our first images the "first facts" of the imagination, I am again in trouble, for I am making an autonomizing declaration that a fact is a fact is a fact, just as a rose is a rose is a rose, without having determined the dimensions of such facts, or how many levels of being or of human sensibility are possibly involved in them. The difficulty becomes if anything a little more acute if I use instead the phrase, "first problem of the imagination," to describe the finite. For the word "problem" is anything but innocuous: it is connotative, and, as it is often used, would seem to be saying here that the imagination is a high and glorious faculty, born with an intent desire to produce insight and to bring us to some kind of absolute, but that between us and these goals lie the rough, limiting contours of the finite, as a kind of obstacle. When we speak of problems, we speak of things that are irritatingly in the way. And this is the way a certain kind of artist looks theologically at the whole finite world. Thus we see prefigured, in this difficulty of vocabulary, some of the questionable attitudes toward the finite with which this chapter, among other things, will concern itself. ‘…..From Commentary on Apollo and Christ

2.  Jesus is the True Light, the true Word of God.  Now we must search with and for True Lanterns through the abyss of chaos.

·                            people run away from burdens these days. There's nothing they hate more than to be burdened or tied. This accounts for this perverse cult of youthfulness: youth is in itself the yet unburdened state - so we worship youthful looks as the sign and symbol of that craving, almost the promise of its fulfillment. But to attempt to keep it for ever only leads to sterility in every sense: monstrous perversion of youth, destined as blossom of the fruit...

o                    Broken Lights Diaries 1953-54 [Ida F. Gorres]

• We're always being told that the Fall had nothing whatever to do with sex. No, I can't believe this any more...Not that procreation, as such, would never have been without the Fall. That's nonsense, to my mind; but somehow or other it would have been different...If it's true that St Thomas held other and more optimistic views on this subject, this doesn't disconcert me one bit. Maybe an angel-type, as he was, endowed with the charism of virginity, would be incapable of realizing the depth of the Fall in this domain. What is always attributed to the latent Manicheism in St Augustine might well be the realism of experience.
• Broken Lights p. 90-91 Diaries 1951-1952 [Ida F. Gorres]

3.  The body/soul dualism found in later Christianity is not found in the Bible itself. In the Hebrew scriptures, the self is a unified activity of thinking, feeling, willing, and acting. H. Wheeler Robinson writes, "The idea of human nature implies a unity, not a dualism. There is no contrast between the body and the soul such as the terms instinctively suggest to us."  Oscar Cullmann agrees, noting that "the Jewish and Christian interpretation of creation excludes the whole Greek dualism of body and soul."  In particular, the body is not the source of evil or something to be disowned, escaped, or denied -- though it may be misused. We find instead an affirmation of the body and a positive acceptance of the material order. Lynn de Silva writes:

"Biblical scholarship has established quite conclusively that there is no dichotomous concept of man in the Bible, such as is found in Greek and Hindu thought. The biblical view of man is holistic, not dualistic. The notion of the soul is an immoral entity which enters the body at birth and leaves it at death is quite foreign to the biblical view of man. The biblical view is that man is a unity, he is a unity of soul, body, flesh, mind, etc., all together constituting the whole man."

4.  The Struggle to Love

I Have Forgotten:  "My powers have been taken from me". "Then, please, say a prayer, recite a litany, work a miracle". "Impossible", the Master replied, "I have forgotten everything". They both fell to weeping.  ~Wiesel

City of the Sick and City of the Well  Fr. William Lynch said there is no city of the well and city of the ill…it is all one city.

    After the Fall everyone is wounded and in need of healing.  The degree of frailty on this continuum is vast and dynamic.  It is as vast as the individuality of each created soul.

Oscar Wilde dramatically related the soul’s journey in Dorian Gray and the eventual mirror of who we have chosen to become is starkly shoved before us.

     It is a constantly-changing journey of the heart and soul---in fact, it is eternal.  But it is never as one alone that we become.  We are constantly in a dance concert with others whether we like it or not.

5.  Little by Little:  A little bird came and landed beside me on the bench. It didn’t seem afraid of me at all. It was as if it was sent to comfort me. “Have no fear, you are worth more than many sparrows” I thought. And I tried to take courage. No matter where I go or do not go, You are there, O Lord.[Ps. 139..]

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

• At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

• If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.

     “ We're all in this together, and Christ has knit us together in a way that not even death

         can break."  It is not an "Immanentizing the eschaton"…trying to yank Heaven down to

         Earth  ~Eve Tushnet

• In private one can well be a cat that walks by itself, and without roots in any specific soil: but in the great battle for the Kingdom of God it seems to me one ought to belong to some brotherhood.
• Broken Lights Letters 1951-59

• There's no redder rag for our modern, progressive Catholics than a certain religious approach to sex and Eros ranging from suspicion to open condemnation and branded accordingly as Manichean, neo-Platonic, Puritan, etc. Quite unacceptable. And yet in these quite obviously heretical speculations there's a barb which, even at first encounter, penetrated to the depths of my mind as the startling confirmation of something always known, and this ferment keeps on working - all the time...the idea which one finds in so many apocryphal trends of thought, i.e. that there's definitely something wrong with sex in its present form, that is, during this terrestrial aeon - something that is not sex in itself, as a whole, but some trait or quality.. Something which does not belong to original human nature, but which owes its actual existence to The Fall; in the same sense unnatural as death is unnatural and yet taken for granted, an inevitable, undeniable factor - in this fallen world.
• Broken Lights p15-16 Diaries 1951 (Ida F. Gorres)

• genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary; the real thing , nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections. The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control.
• Broken Lights p.21 Diaries 1951

• The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt illusionibus. " For, isolated, Eros is in every sense the most treacherous counterfeit of love, sending a continual flow of self-deception and delusion throughout the world, etc.
• Broken Lights p.33 Diaries 1951
• "From time to time I have the feeling that certain instincts [urges? involuntary impulses?] are being annihilated within me, which have hitherto seemed good and perfect: yet as soon as they are destroyed I perceive how evil and imperfect they were." (Catherine of Genoa). This strikes me as very important, for it shows that the judgment of conscience can change, and precisely in someone whose conscience must already have been particularly highly developed, sensitive and illuminated.
• Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57

One of the frightening aspects of loving somebody is the way that love can seem to offer unique access not only to pleasure but to truth. Love of another person—not only romantic love, but familial love and deep friendship as well—promises or threatens to reshape us completely. It can become the lens through which we see the world.   ~Eve Tushnet

• What does really happen when the factor of love withdraws from a human relationship? Is it a loss or a gain? Is the real landscape revealed at last, hitherto transfigured, but delusive, too, by the driving mist of fantasy? Is it a perverted vision which finds a glowing cloud more beautiful than the solid truth of a plot of earth? And vice versa, what really happens when the radiance, the glamour, begins to take shape, concentrating on a landscape or on a face?
• Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59

Booth: Redemption through transformation, I get it. What do you believe in Bones?

Brennan: I believe in always swimming with a buddy.

Booth: What?

Brennan: You gather your wisdom and I gather mine.

B.The Crucible

·                     All the time each one of us is hovering above an unfathomable abyss of potential calamities of every kind - sensed in that ever-throbbing pulse deep down in one's heart; as long as this chasm does not open up to devour one, the floating island in any guise whatever must surely be welcome. Wrong notion of God? Asiatic pessimism?

o                    Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57

1. “Turned Inside Out”:   “It can sometimes happen that we too are brought down by Christ’s love, into the dust of death….poured out like water…”                      

“It is the terrible experience of seeing oneself slowly turned inside out.  It is the frightful taste of a humility that is not merely a virtue but the very agony of truth.  This ghastly emptying, this inexorable gutting of our own appalling nonentity, takes place under the piercing light of the revealed Word, the light of infinite Truth.  But it is something far more terrible still:  we find ourselves eviscerated by our own ingratitude, under the eyes of Mercy.”

“This is the experience that will come to one who thought he had virtue…who once thought, perhaps, that he loved God indeed, and was God’ good friend and who then, one day, is brought up for judgement, to be purified of all that is too human in his dream.  For he has been cornered and accused, pierced and emptied by the shame of remembering who he really is.  God seems to turn away His Face. God seems to withdraw His protecting Hand, and all the things he treasured that were not God, have wasted away like shadows with the loss of His Presence. This emptiness, this sense of spiritual annihilation which is due to us all as men born in sin and grown old in sin, Christ took upon Himself when it was not due to Him at all and He emptied Himself of all His power and glory in order to descend into the freezing depths of darkness where we had crawled to hide ourselves, cowering in blind despair.”

But because Christ came down into this no-man’s land of sin, to find us and bring us back to His Kingdom, we are able to discover the living God in the very darkness of what seems to be His utter absence.  And, what is more, it may be that we find Him there more truly than when we though we saw Him in the light of our own dim day.”

2.  ‘Dark Lightning’: In the Shadow

…in His Passion…it is a day on which we seem to be buried alive under an inhuman burden of temptation.  Perhaps we may also suffer sickness, physical as well as moral desolation.  But the worst thing of all remains the inescapable vision of our own almost infinite capacity for pettiness and degradation.”

    “O Lord my God, I cry by day, in the night I weep before Thee.

    Let my prayer come before Thee, incline thy ear to my cry.

   For my soul is full of evils and my life is on the verge of the grave…

   Thou has laid me in a deep pit, in darkness, in the abyss.

   Thine indignation weighs upon me and with all Thy waves Thou dost overwhelm me.

   Thou has taken away my friends from me; Thou hast made me abominable to them;

   I am shut up, I can no longer go forth.”

This is practically the only Psalm that ends on a note of complete dejection…

    “Thy wrath has swept over me and Thy terrors have destroyed me.

      They surround me like water all the time: they assail me all together.

      Thou has taken from me friend and companion;

       Thy darkness is my intimate.”

And that is all.

     Yet at such a moment, and in such a Psalm, the soul, catching and comprehending in its own black mirror the fearful darkness of revelation, is confronted in its own depths with the countenance of the murdered Christ.  This is more than a meeting.  It is an identification.  We have entered into a Baptism of darkness in which we are one with His Death.  But to die with Christ is to rise with Him. He…understood…the darkness of life.  The tides of light that pours down upon the whole Church from the mountain top which is the soul of the Risen Savior, blind us by their intense purity and drown us in darkness….If the paradox may be allowed, this frightful death is our first taste of glory.

     Then we begin to discover that the night in which we seem to be lost is the protection of the shadow of God’s wings.  If God has brought us into this darkness it is because He wishes to guard us with extreme care and tenderness [the grace of space…Ps4], or, in the words of the Psalm “like the apple of His eye.”  The new life of the soul united in Christ in His Mystery is something too delicate and tender to be let loose in a crowd that may contain many enemies, and therefore God has isolated the soul in a soundless and vast interior solitude, the solitude of His own Heart where there is no human spectator and where the soul can no longer even see itself.  True, the depths of that solitude open and close in a flash: but the soul remains enveloped and penetrated with Divine Emptiness, saturated with the vastness of God, charged with the living voice of silence in which His Word is eternally uttered.

The protection of darkness and silence is extremely necessary for the soul that begins to burn with these touches of the Spirit of God.  …We need that protection, and more and more we sense our need.  For the devils too, understand our position.  They stand to profit if they can destroy and exhaust us with false lights and raptures of their own devising.  This is the stage when the soul that is too tough for its own good, too well able to stand the overpowering sweetness of half natural ecstasies, will be in danger of entering the ways of false mysticism.

Prayer will become debauchery, the Liturgy a riot of prophecy and carnal exaltation.  The mark of this falsity is violence.  It is sealed with the seal of contention and brutality and strain.  These are the spiritual footprints of the devil who, if he cannot deceive the soul with false raptures, soon tears off his mask and lets loose against us a jungle full of terrors and we live in the nightmare on the threshold of the deepest darkness that alone can save us.

In this tribulation the Lord God is ever with us, no matter how much we fear.  Cum ips sum in tribulatione.  These are the words from Psalm 90 which are chanted every night in the monastic Compline when the shadows fall upon the cloister and the monks are ending their day of prayer.  “I will be with him in trouble, I will rescue him and honor him.”  The angels are at our side, holding us up lest we should dash our foot against a stone.  We could not travel through the forest that the spiritual life has now become, unless His power carried us onward, where we tread upon the asp and basilisk and never feel their sting, and never suffer harm!  Altissimum posuisti refugium tuum.  We have made the Most High God our refuge.  The scourge will never touch us.  Bread in the Wilderness

3.  Climbing the High Mountains: Come up higher and go deeper..through Mercy

What are the horizons that lie ahead, in the ascent to the City of God in heaven?  There are high peaks before us now, serene with snow and light, above the level of tempest.  They are far away.  We almost never see them they are so high.  But we lift up our eyes toward them, for there the saints dwell:  and these are the mountains of holiness whence cometh our help.

Levari oculos meos in montes unde veniet auxilium mihi.

                    Ascending the Mountain of Love: Our Avodas Hashem

IConfronting the Abyss of Limitation

God is Love. She could say:

"I contemplate and adore the other divine perfections ... through Mercy. All of these perfections appear to be resplendent with Love." There was nothing but this in God.

The searching went on in darkness. Thérèse only explained what she had to explain, either for the novices or when asked to write the story of her life later. Habitually she lived in the dark. We might say that she found herself bogged down in what is often called the purification of the spirit. This consists far less in keen sufferings marked by distinct stages - some of these there were indeed deep sufferings - than in a muddled fog or kind of quicksand in which one becomes enmired and unable to move." This trial continued in anguish, but with upward thrusts toward God and convictions that she had found him. There was an apparent contradiction between her progressive discovery of sin and of sinful tendencies in herself and others, and her discovery of God.

The God whom Thérèse discovered was the God of Love. At the same time she saw that around her, and even in her Carmel, God was not known. The God who is Love was not known! They knew the God of justice, quid pro quo, and they tried to acquire merits. But, thought Thérèse, this was not the way to win him. God is Love, God is Mercy. But what is Mercy? It is the Love of God which gives itself beyond all demands and rights.

4. The Roots of the Cross

*LXXXIX*: Wisdom of the Desert

“Abess Syncletica of holy memory said: ‘There is labour and great struggle for the impious who are converted to God.  But after that comes inexpressible joy.  A man who wants to light a fire first is plagued by smoke, and the smoke drives him to tears, yet finally he gets the fire that he wants.  So also it is written: “Our God is a consuming fire. “  Hence we ought to light the divine fire in ourselves with labour and with tears.’ “

The full text reads (Ex 8:16 among others," ...ko amar Hashem shalach ami veya'avduni-...thus saith the L*rd, let my people go (so that/and) they shall serve me."  from Va'eira; the stench of the frog heap

From A Tree Sprung

Oh Human Imperfection
About halfway through the excellent The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O'Connor's Spiritual Journey, I have discovered with pleasure that Flannery O'Connor put her finger on a specific moment of influence. O'Connor had agreed to edit and write the introduction for a book about a terribly deformed little girl (Mary Ann) who nonetheless lived a life of joy, written by an Atlanta chapter of the order who approached her. There is much food for thought in "The Abbess" about the role of "innocent suffering" in the life of the Christian and the life of the Church, prompted by O'Connor's own thoughts and writings while working on the book. In considering the Hawthorne connection, which I find interesting for all the threads I see converging as well as for the reminder that we often do not realize the good we are doing, I include this excerpt:

It is true that Mary Ann suffered, but Flannery did not believe she suffered in vain. Rather her suffering was a thread woven within the larger fabric of believers called the Communion of Saints. In the introduction, Flannery described the Communion of Saints as "the action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead."
On May 14, 1961, she explained to a friend that "the living and the dead" referred to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was her inspiration for the introduction. Long before Mary Ann was born, Hawthorne had written about visiting the children's ward in a Liverpool workhouse. There, according to his description, he met a "wretched, pale, half-torpid child of indeterminate sex, about six years old." Hawthorne admitted that he found the child repulsive, but for some mysterious reason, the child took a liking to him. The child insisted that Hawthorne pick him up. Despite his aversion, Hawthorne did what the child wanted: I should never have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances."
According to Flannery, Mother Alphonsa believed that these were the greatest words her father ever wrote. And many years after Mother Alphonsa had died, Flannery perceived a mystical connection existing between Hawthorne's picking up the child, his daughter working among the dying and the sisters caring for a little girl with a disfigured face.

There is a direct line between the incident in the Liverpool workhouse, the work of Hawthorne's daughter, and Mary Ann -- who stands not only for herself but for all the other examples of human imperfection and grotesquerie which the Sisters of Rose Hawthorne's order spend their lives caring for. Their work is the tree sprung from Hawthorne's small act of Christlikeness and Mary Ann its flower.

Flannery O'Connor dedicated the book to the memory of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Poet's Eye, The Poet's Pen

  X-Men [Posted at Happy Catholic]

Logan: What the hell are you doing?

Rogue: I'm sorry. I need a ride, I thought you could help me.

Logan: Get out.

Rogue: Where am I supposed to go?

Logan: I don't know.

Rogue: You don't know, or you don't care?

Logan: Pick one.

...
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-12).  ~This stanza taken from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream

On A Note of Triumph

For V-E Day: On A Note of Triumph
"I'm going to interview Norman Corwin this morning," I told an older friend of mine, who promptly rattled off its opening lines: Take a bow, G.I.,/Take a bow, little guy./The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon…

On a Note of Triumph concludes:
Lord God of test tube and blueprint,
Who joined molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together,
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend....                  Norman Corwin, posted by Terry Teachout, ‘About Last Night’

Exposing Liberal Lies: More Demands from the Muslims

Exposing Liberal Lies: More Demands from the Muslims
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
Muslim students at Catholic University of America complain that Christian symbols make them uncomfortable when they pray in empty classrooms

"Crucifixes? At a Catholic university? How about that....
[There are tens of thousands of other universities. Now WHY would they 'choose' to go there---especially if they are so 'uncomfortable'? So, go where you are 'comfortable'...Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....Catholic University better not take even ONE of the crucifixes down.]

Pentimento: In Which I Bitch and Moan a Little

Pentimento: In Which I Bitch and Moan a Little

Slippery slope: ‘loneliness,’ ‘fatigue’ now criteria for euthanasia in Netherlands | SANCTE PATER

Slippery slope: ‘loneliness,’ ‘fatigue’ now criteria for euthanasia in Netherlands | SANCTE PATER

First Known When Lost: "Dance Of The Macabre Mice"

First Known When Lost: "Dance Of The Macabre Mice"
Excerpt:
I do my best to keep politicians out of my consciousness. The admixture of self-importance and childishness is laughable and breathtaking, but vexing. (Particularly in heads of state.) However, you cannot avoid them entirely. The best that you can do is keep them in perspective and in their place. As follows.

Dance of the Macabre Mice

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance...

Ready When You Are, C.B.: Tuesdays with Dorothy

Ready When You Are, C.B.: Tuesdays with Dorothy
Excerpt:
"I don't care what is written about me, as long as it isn't true."

Dorothy Parker

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Thought for the day ...

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Thought for the day ...

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
Max Stirner, born on this date in 1806

Great moments in opera: La bohème « All Manner of Thing

Great moments in opera: La bohème « All Manner of Thing
Excerpt:

It is one of the most popular operas in the repertoire, and has been since its 1896 premiere. It is a wonderful piece: tender, tragic, big-hearted, yet written to a human scale, and awash in gorgeous melodies. There are few operas that I enjoy more than this. In my opinion it is Puccini’s best.

The first Act is a marvel. It opens with a scene of warm, intelligent, and heartening male camaraderie, the likes of which we do not often see in our contemporary popular entertainments. This yields to the first meeting of the opera’s principal romantic leads, Rodolfo and Mimi. Mimi knocks on the door of Rodolfo’s flat, her candle having gone out. The two arias in which they introduce themselves to one another must be among the greatest back-to-back arias in the operatic tradition....
(video)

Oh, Mole Day

Celebrated annually on October 23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m., Mole Day commemorates Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 10^23), which is a basic measuring unit in chemistry. Mole Day was created as a way to foster interest in chemistry. Schools throughout the United States and around the world celebrate Mole Day with various activities related to chemistry and/or moles.

For a given molecule, one mole is a mass (in grams) whose number is equal to the atomic mass of the molecule. For example, the water molecule has an atomic mass of 18, therefore one mole of water weighs 18 grams. An atom of neon has an atomic mass of 20, therefore one mole of neon weighs 20 grams. In general, one mole of any substance contains Avogadro's Number of molecules or atoms of that substance. This relationship was first discovered by Amadeo Avogadro (1776-1858) and he received credit for this after his death.

==========

Sorry, couldn't resist since I am a former Chemistry teacher/lover.  I truly loved everything about chemistry and was inspired in high school by Marie Curie. We even had a Chemistry Club!

 

Anecdotal Evidence: `To Pursue Liberal Studies the Rest of Their Lives'

Anecdotal Evidence: `To Pursue Liberal Studies the Rest of Their Lives'
Excerpt:
`To Pursue Liberal Studies the Rest of Their Lives'

Since last spring I’ve been away from the classroom – the formal one, I mean, with blackboards, desks and discontent – and hardly miss it. I miss some of the kids but education in public schools is, at best, an inadvertence. Teaching is what you know and how you embody it -- a heresy to school administrators. Even a dumb kid knows when a teacher is bluffing, and thus learns early the importance of bluffing. In the third chapter of Walden, a punningly tart sentence Thoreau devoted to individuals has grown institutional in application:

“We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental ailment.”...
[...and very much less on spiritual 'ailments'...]

Transformation through Social "Networking"

 [Re: The Captivity of the Dimensions of Alienation, Part III...I am still hard at work on it...]

The Perceptive Factor at Work: The Liberal Imagination

To use an epistemological distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of hermeneutics, i.e. knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions—including the interpretation of texts which are themselves implicitly or explicitly the interpretation of other texts. Critical social theory is, in contrast, a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.

From this perspective, much literary critical theory, since it is focused on interpretation and explanation rather than on social transformation, would be regarded as positivistic or traditional rather than critical theory in the Kantian or Marxian sense. Critical theory in literature and the humanities in general does not necessarily involve a normative dimension, whereas critical social theory does, either through criticizing society from some general theory of values, norms, or "oughts," or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values.

~from Wikipedia, Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, Liberal Imagination

========================

Amazing, isn’t it, they seek total “emancipation” from the ‘normative’ “oughts” but end up by replacing them with their own absolutist “in terms of espoused values”---through the liberal imagination---and “expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination” through “social transformation and their critical theory”, i.e., they now use their “interpretive norms” to apply criticism in every ‘social’ area.

pattismith.net: coffeebreak: 2666

pattismith.net: coffeebreak

Excerpt:

2666 [Roberto Bolaño]  (Part I)
It is a heavy book in all aspects. In weight and in the weight of the blood and toil invested in the writing of it. Also the weight of humor which pokes at us like the edges of a wire strung across the top of a wall built to stay intruders, yet low enough that the most agile could still leap over. Or if one had the thickest head of hair imaginable, so that the thorns from a sacred crown would not actually pierce the scalp but annoyingly press against it. 2666. When I heard of its existence I became so agitated with desire for it that I sent an agent out to find it, as I was on my hands and knees in the center of a large drawing, and I could not break the thread of the line I was executing. So I sent another in my stead and watched with one eye impatiently even as I was supposedly concentrating on my work.

When at last I had the book in my hands I was satisfied and I placed it by my bed and there it stayed for quite some time...

=========================

My Intro: It’s That Arsenic Lobster Again, Alice…and in 2666 to boot…

If the point was to make the murders in Santa Teresa (a thinly disguised Ciudad Juárez) seem less aberrant in a world gone mad, then Bolaño was successful.

Some things seem overblown, such as one character saying about the Santa Teresa murders “the secret of the world is hidden in them.” The confluence of the maquiladoras located in Santa Teresa with narcos acting with impunity provides fertile ground for the murders. But the key is the broken justice system, where politics impede investigations.

Maybe the ultimate key comes from an artist held in an asylum who believes that “we find communion” from the maelstrom of the world with a “senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures.” Seen from this vantage point, the structure of the book reflects the chaos surrounding us. What if instead of an Arcimboldo painting, Bolaño’s five books construct a mirror in which we are supposed to see ourselves and the world around us?...Dwight at Common Reader

Santa Teresa: …“the secret of the world is hidden in them”…~Bat galim

This statement is not an ‘overblown’ commentary but a visceral indictment.

I keep pounding on that anvil, Primo Levi, hoping the ringing blows of the ‘lager’ bell, no mere orange flower, mind you, will resonate through the “maelstrom of this world’. There is a developing ‘chaos surrounding us’ reflecting through all the fluid‘matrices’, disheveled notes of the creeping captivity of the dimensions of alienation. There is an ensnaring dimension which wishes us to believe there is no God ["a senseless God…with senseless creatures"], at least not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. 

---------

Good men ye be, to leave me my best room,

Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodged there:

I passe not, I, what of the rest become,

So Thou art still my God, be out of fear.

               He will be pleased with that dittie;

And if I please him, I write fine and wittie. 

.... 

 ~Herbert, 'Harbingers are come...'