This here blog's poet laureate, mine & this blog's leitmotif & song:
(Click here for the audio.)
He knew another place, a wood,
And in it, tall as trees, were cliffs;
And if he stood on one of these,
‘Twould be among the tops of trees,
Their upper branches round him wreathing,
Their breathing mingled with his breathing.
If - if he stood! Enough of ifs!
He knew a path that wanted walking;
He knew a spring that wanted drinking;
A thought that wanted further thinking;
A love that wanted re-renewing.
Nor was this just a way of talking
To save him the expense of doing.
With him it boded action, deed.
The factory was very fine;
He wished it all the modern speed.
Yet, after all, ‘twas not divine,
That is to say, ‘twas not a church.
He never would assume that he’d
Be any institution’s need.
But he said then and still would say,
If there should ever come a day
When industry seemed like to die
Because he left it in the lurch,
Or even merely seemed to pine
For want of his approval, why,
Come get him.. they knew where to search.
---
Thursday, April 28, 2011
A Lone Post Modern Striker: Musings on Love & Ideology
I've been meditating lately on how people talk and think about politics, which is to say economics (creation, distribution and use of wealth) and religion (what binds us together, sacred narrative, myth, ritual, culture, history, the etiology of desire) and how silly our discourse and thought often is.
These last ten - no scratch that - last twenty years have been educational.
There's a stupid trope that's been making the rounds in the so called conservative circle-jerk for at least that long, usually attributed to Winston Churchill that keeps getting recycled, that goes something like this: "If you're not Liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not Conservative when you're 35, you have no brain."
People of a certain age like to repeat that like a mantra, as a means of soothing themselves for have gone on that drug and sex binge from 1967 through 1975, and then having "grown up" and "seen the light." Seeing the light usually means having "accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior" in an encounter with God while smoking that last jibber in 1977, finally getting that CPA and real estate license, moving back to the suburbs and having two kids, then registering Republican and voting for Reagan in 1984.
That's been a common American life trajectory these last 60 years, and somehow even teaparty trogs seem to sense in their undulating rotund weightwatched guts that it's not a pretty one.
"I mean the commune, we were young, idealistic, you know? Then I woke up and realized I needed to get a job."
"Liberals suck! Keep your hands off my Social Security!"
Whatevah hoss. We all gotta do what we yabba dabba doo.
Being that I used to call myself a conservative, and almost joined Pat Buchanan's campaign for president back in the mid- nineties, but now find myself watching Democracy NOW and reading the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Naomi Klein, Michel Foucault and Marx with immense pleasure and suppressing the urge to get a baseball bat and plant it in the set every time someone turns on FOX news or anyone from rags like the Weekly Standard or National Review starts flapping their gums on any channel, I find that quote immensely amusing.
It's not as if my essential loyalties have changed, mind you: I'm still both anti-abortion and anti-war, because I still believe in mercy as an ecstatic and immanent actuality. I still am a practicing Catholic who takes his faith seriously (perhaps still too seriously..) I still love my Country. Love my family, my friends, my tribe, my people, my language, my home.
It's just that my ways of thinking about all of these things, the prism through which I understand them, are changed.
I still believe in a supple and lyrical (even elagaic) orthodoxy, in truth, but I no longer feel like I can utterly control it with my mind. I feel like I can express and defend it poetically, somewhat, not with the rank certitude I used to.
I know longer really know what to think, I only know what I believe, want, hope..
What I love.
It seems to me that love is a species of humility. I wrote a brief post a couple days ago, where I wrote that desire is its own consummation and parody. I wrote that without thinking too much, out of my heart, as a sort of metaphoric impressionistic aphorism..
What I meant is that love and desire are in and of themselves satisfactions, yet also crucifixions.
It's in the tension of desire, not in pleasure, that I find my meaning.
Why do I want what I want? What am I wanting? Who do I want?
Dante wrote in detail about hell and purgatory. He could describe it all.
In heaven though, he was silent. There was nothing that could be said.
Some people mock heaven as boring, imagine eternal love as tedious.
The same way they find seem to find masturbation ecstatic and the cubicle secure.
I know only enough to pity them.
I'm not wise, smart or holy enough to teach anyone anything, probably. I can only dissent.
I'm on strike.
Me, you'll find contemplative in these woods mulling a rainy day mantle of mist wrapping smudgy ethereal swathes about the trees from my study, a fire in the pellet stove, my dog on my feet, earl grey in the mug, my books in stacks on every table and in cases on every wall, home of glad ferment (especially in the basement) and with a heart of quizzical gratitude and ever less frazzled bemusement.
I mean, if anyone cares to come look.
---
These last ten - no scratch that - last twenty years have been educational.
There's a stupid trope that's been making the rounds in the so called conservative circle-jerk for at least that long, usually attributed to Winston Churchill that keeps getting recycled, that goes something like this: "If you're not Liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not Conservative when you're 35, you have no brain."
People of a certain age like to repeat that like a mantra, as a means of soothing themselves for have gone on that drug and sex binge from 1967 through 1975, and then having "grown up" and "seen the light." Seeing the light usually means having "accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior" in an encounter with God while smoking that last jibber in 1977, finally getting that CPA and real estate license, moving back to the suburbs and having two kids, then registering Republican and voting for Reagan in 1984.
That's been a common American life trajectory these last 60 years, and somehow even teaparty trogs seem to sense in their undulating rotund weightwatched guts that it's not a pretty one.
"I mean the commune, we were young, idealistic, you know? Then I woke up and realized I needed to get a job."
"Liberals suck! Keep your hands off my Social Security!"
Whatevah hoss. We all gotta do what we yabba dabba doo.
Being that I used to call myself a conservative, and almost joined Pat Buchanan's campaign for president back in the mid- nineties, but now find myself watching Democracy NOW and reading the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Naomi Klein, Michel Foucault and Marx with immense pleasure and suppressing the urge to get a baseball bat and plant it in the set every time someone turns on FOX news or anyone from rags like the Weekly Standard or National Review starts flapping their gums on any channel, I find that quote immensely amusing.
It's not as if my essential loyalties have changed, mind you: I'm still both anti-abortion and anti-war, because I still believe in mercy as an ecstatic and immanent actuality. I still am a practicing Catholic who takes his faith seriously (perhaps still too seriously..) I still love my Country. Love my family, my friends, my tribe, my people, my language, my home.
It's just that my ways of thinking about all of these things, the prism through which I understand them, are changed.
I still believe in a supple and lyrical (even elagaic) orthodoxy, in truth, but I no longer feel like I can utterly control it with my mind. I feel like I can express and defend it poetically, somewhat, not with the rank certitude I used to.
I know longer really know what to think, I only know what I believe, want, hope..
What I love.
It seems to me that love is a species of humility. I wrote a brief post a couple days ago, where I wrote that desire is its own consummation and parody. I wrote that without thinking too much, out of my heart, as a sort of metaphoric impressionistic aphorism..
What I meant is that love and desire are in and of themselves satisfactions, yet also crucifixions.
It's in the tension of desire, not in pleasure, that I find my meaning.
Why do I want what I want? What am I wanting? Who do I want?
Dante wrote in detail about hell and purgatory. He could describe it all.
In heaven though, he was silent. There was nothing that could be said.
Some people mock heaven as boring, imagine eternal love as tedious.
The same way they find seem to find masturbation ecstatic and the cubicle secure.
I know only enough to pity them.
I'm not wise, smart or holy enough to teach anyone anything, probably. I can only dissent.
I'm on strike.
Me, you'll find contemplative in these woods mulling a rainy day mantle of mist wrapping smudgy ethereal swathes about the trees from my study, a fire in the pellet stove, my dog on my feet, earl grey in the mug, my books in stacks on every table and in cases on every wall, home of glad ferment (especially in the basement) and with a heart of quizzical gratitude and ever less frazzled bemusement.
I mean, if anyone cares to come look.
---
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Film Review: Of Gods & Men
Absolutely Loved it. Thumbs way up, A+. 5 Stars out of 5.
First, immediately and for the record, this is one of the best films I have ever seen.
It works on every level: the screen play, though slow and leisurely in its pacing, is perfect for the story. It lets us into the life of the monastery, and gives a marvelous feel for what it is like to live in a religious community. The acting is simply perfect, especially that of Lambert Wilson who plays the abbot, and Michael Lonsdale who plays an elderly monk who is the monastery's doctor, whom runs their clinic which takes care of the people of the area, whom are too poor to get access to other medical care.
The story is one that is pretty well known in it's bare bones in Catholic circles.
If you were paying attention back in 1996, you know what is going to happen to these men. Which makes everything very poignant. The fact that this film is not primarily about the violence (though that violence does erupt very graphically once or twice in the film) but more about how the community reacts and evolves in reaction to the looming threat, is wonderful.
(This is that context if you are interested. )
This larger looming political context is at first only gently inferred. The fact that Algeria is embroiled in a civil war only becomes a part of the story when the Army shows up and demands that the monastery accept military guards. The abbot peremptorily refuses, and throws them out. This causes a debate amongst the brothers, since most of them were upset he didn't confer with them first. He tells them that he made the decision and it's non- negotiable because the monastery and Church cannot be seen as taking sides in the war, which is what allowing soldiers onto the grounds would do..
There's a beautiful scene where Michael's (the old doctor) character is talking with a young Algerian woman who comes often to see the monks, and often works with them in their gardens. She is struggling with some relationship that the movie does not explain. It's that sort of film, in which people come casually into the story a few times, and yet somehow they still become real, but without any exposition, merely on the strength of the tone and performances.
She asks Father if he had ever fallen in love. Father looks at her seriously with kind smiling eyes, and says "Of course. Many times. Then the greatest love took me, and I have been in love ever since."
That was only one of the many times this movie had me tearing up. In spite of all my struggles, and all my failures and problems, at the end of the day I'm in love like that, too.
To me, the fact that I can say I share that with such men.. To be associated with such love, with such heroism. It gives a vivid demonstration of why I unashamedly venerate them.
I will find an icon of them to add to my shrine.
Here's another picture of what they looked like in real life:
It occurred to me while watching this film that the logic of imputed merit in the theology of indulgences is now very clear to me.
This is the treasury of the Church. The merits of her saints. By grace, even a poor fool like me shares in their and her greatness.. I too share in their immense merit, though possessing little or none of my own. Their love and faith, and the graces they receive come also to me. The overwelling fecundity of the economy of grace, the consuming mystery of love.. Their sacrifices, their love, their prayers, their imitation of Christ and participation in his crucifixion.. It's not merely their story that inspires, it is the sacramental nature of their sacrifice that confirms and strengthens the Church. Including me.
No greater love a man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.
Thank you so much, my fathers. Pray for us.
Christ to them, they to me, the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son to us all.
It seems merely too great a gladness for me somehow to bear.
Know that this movie is no sentimental hagiography, though. It is not in the least bit saccharine or stereotypic. The life of the monastery and their interaction with the surrounding community is richly and gently depicted. You get a sense of the men and their personalities. Their fears, weaknesses, their struggles.
You see how communal life is, how they are challenged by their vows (I believe Trappist Cistercians take the normal three: chastity, poverty and obedience, as well as the Benedictine promise of stability to the community, meaning they are in normal circumstances to remain in the community they make vows in) .. Of how sometimes there are tensions and dissension.
You see them interacting with the local people - both Christian and Muslim - and even attending a Muslim marriage and discussing religion very kindly and openly with them.
I was thinking how their lives - their vow of stability, their emphatic humanity, how they all kept returning to the nature of their vocation to live their lives there, then, with those people, in that place and time. That is the logic of the Incarnation. Christ is not some gnostic new age archetype, but always uniquely experienced, personally, specific to each individual's time and place.
This is sacramental and carnal scandal of Catholicism: He came and dwelt amongst us. He loved them, there. He died and rose, and they saw him and touched him. Not figuratively, but actually.
That's what they do in the film. This is our place. God has called us here, to love one another not in some abstract idealist fashion, but in the fear and temptations of this very moment.
Like in Galilee and in Jerusalem. There. Then. Now in every tabernacle throughout the world, at every single of the hundreds of thousands of masses offered everyday, hundreds of masses in very instant, throughout the world. The sacrifice of Christ made perpetual, eternally now, but yet uniquely present to each one of us given the extreme grace and privilege of receiving him in an intimate and singular encounter of the Eucharist.
This is what it means to be a Christian. What it means to be a human being. Each of us are a unique theophany, an iconic encounter with the divine image.
That they so consciously embraced that vocation, and did not run away even though they were afraid and tempted..
It was Mary, Mary and John on Calvary.
I also really, really appreciated how the mass and liturgy of the hours was presented by the film in an authentic fashion. Most of the time Hollywood botches things sloppily. The fact that the details seemed all correct made the story flow.
Unlike Into Great Silence,
(Another film about another French monastery, a documentary of Cartusians in the Alps, also beautifully shot and maybe educational for non-Catholics, or people who have never been to a monastery.. )
This film actually moved me to prayer.
Into Great Silence had no narrative. It was just the film maker shooting in the monastery while the monks went about their work and prayer. I said in my last review below that the only other film I remember falling asleep in was The Matrix and that Ice Ice Baby flick, but I just realized that I fell asleep in Into Great Silence , too. Carthusian monks don't talk much. They take a promise of silence, and they generally only open their mouths to chant and eat porridge. It wasn't exactly a moving cinematic experience.. I mean, I fall asleep at adoration or early morning prayer all the time. Dim the lights at liturgy and start chanting and I'm out in 15 minutes.. And that's when I'm there in the presence of God myself, and praying too. Sitting watching other people pray for two hours is just nonsensical. It's like watching people eat or sleep. Not amusing.
This film is very different. There was prayer and mass throughout, but in snippets. Not only that, most of it is in French. Most of which I know myself from living and praying with Eucharistein for a year. I caught myself praying along sotto voce with them in the film. It was sublime. There was also Latin and Arabic in the film, which also was fun.
I kept on thinking of things I haven't thought of for a while.. missing people.. Of how those men remind me of amazing friends I've been privileged to know. And love.
Gloire à Dieu, au plus haut des cieux,
Et paix sur la terre aux hommes qu'il aime.
Nous te louons, nous te bénissons, nous t'adorons, nous te glorifions, nous te rendons grâce, pour ton immense gloire,
Seigneur Dieu, Roi du ciel,
Dieu le Père tout-puissant.
Now to wrap this up, the only negative criticism I'll make is that the larger historical context of those monks being in Algeria was not really explored. There were a few references to French colonialism, and it was clear that the Algerian Army and officials they interacted with wanted them gone.. The reason for that hostility isn't really explored.
I kept thinking of all the conversations I've had with Arab Muslims and Christians in which the colonial, medieval (Crusade and Islamic expansion/jihad) as well as ancient history is very very explicitly in people's minds.
One of the reasons I've come to despise Americans - and I need publicly to confess this anger, because I still boil with this after ten years - is how damn clueless and callously ignorant 99% of us are.
History - even the bulk of our own relatively recent past - is largely meaningless to us.
Take for example the odd fact that Saint Augustine is from Hippo.. Just for example, a random indispensable fact that some Americans might have as a trivia response.. But I know from talking to Arabs and Frenchmen that those monks definitely had St. Augustine very much in the forefront of their minds while living in Algeria, believe me.
Such details never seem to occur to Americans - not even our politicians - as being relevant. I mean, the likes of Huckabee and maybe even Romney probably can talk good game about Joshua, the Canaanites, and the Book of Daniel's supposed lurid relevance to Israel and Iraq and crap like that, but the intervening 2600 years is lost on them.
And I hate them for it. This is one of the main sins I am struggling with. My fury over their pusillanimous warmongering bigoted stupidity burns and distorts me, even now.
I seriously need to get away from it all somehow. Maybe I should go to Algeria, too.
I'll close by noting that the Wikipedia article I link to above states that the final tragedy in the film, though it was claimed to have been committed by Islamic rebels, may in fact been actually committed by Algerian intelligence and military forces..
There's no hint of that in the film, but the story is so full of normal, sane and humane Muslims that it is still very clear that this film is not making any propaganda points about Islam.
Which is to me - someone who has lived a few years among the Believers in Turkey and Egypt, and traveled throughout the Middle East, was very comforting. I'm sick of propaganda by fools who know nothing about Islam or Muslims splashing their lurid fantastical fears in the media.
This film, on the contrary, ends with a beautiful voice over meditation that is apparently from the abbot's actual letters or journal, about how whatever happens no one is to blame Islam or Muslims for their fate. That they had come in peace to live there, and had been welcomed by the people with love.
And that is about all there is to say. Pray for us, Father.
---
First, immediately and for the record, this is one of the best films I have ever seen.
It works on every level: the screen play, though slow and leisurely in its pacing, is perfect for the story. It lets us into the life of the monastery, and gives a marvelous feel for what it is like to live in a religious community. The acting is simply perfect, especially that of Lambert Wilson who plays the abbot, and Michael Lonsdale who plays an elderly monk who is the monastery's doctor, whom runs their clinic which takes care of the people of the area, whom are too poor to get access to other medical care.
The story is one that is pretty well known in it's bare bones in Catholic circles.
If you were paying attention back in 1996, you know what is going to happen to these men. Which makes everything very poignant. The fact that this film is not primarily about the violence (though that violence does erupt very graphically once or twice in the film) but more about how the community reacts and evolves in reaction to the looming threat, is wonderful.
(This is that context if you are interested. )
This larger looming political context is at first only gently inferred. The fact that Algeria is embroiled in a civil war only becomes a part of the story when the Army shows up and demands that the monastery accept military guards. The abbot peremptorily refuses, and throws them out. This causes a debate amongst the brothers, since most of them were upset he didn't confer with them first. He tells them that he made the decision and it's non- negotiable because the monastery and Church cannot be seen as taking sides in the war, which is what allowing soldiers onto the grounds would do..
There's a beautiful scene where Michael's (the old doctor) character is talking with a young Algerian woman who comes often to see the monks, and often works with them in their gardens. She is struggling with some relationship that the movie does not explain. It's that sort of film, in which people come casually into the story a few times, and yet somehow they still become real, but without any exposition, merely on the strength of the tone and performances.
She asks Father if he had ever fallen in love. Father looks at her seriously with kind smiling eyes, and says "Of course. Many times. Then the greatest love took me, and I have been in love ever since."
That was only one of the many times this movie had me tearing up. In spite of all my struggles, and all my failures and problems, at the end of the day I'm in love like that, too.
To me, the fact that I can say I share that with such men.. To be associated with such love, with such heroism. It gives a vivid demonstration of why I unashamedly venerate them.
I will find an icon of them to add to my shrine.
Here's another picture of what they looked like in real life:
It occurred to me while watching this film that the logic of imputed merit in the theology of indulgences is now very clear to me.
This is the treasury of the Church. The merits of her saints. By grace, even a poor fool like me shares in their and her greatness.. I too share in their immense merit, though possessing little or none of my own. Their love and faith, and the graces they receive come also to me. The overwelling fecundity of the economy of grace, the consuming mystery of love.. Their sacrifices, their love, their prayers, their imitation of Christ and participation in his crucifixion.. It's not merely their story that inspires, it is the sacramental nature of their sacrifice that confirms and strengthens the Church. Including me.
No greater love a man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.
Thank you so much, my fathers. Pray for us.
Christ to them, they to me, the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son to us all.
It seems merely too great a gladness for me somehow to bear.
Know that this movie is no sentimental hagiography, though. It is not in the least bit saccharine or stereotypic. The life of the monastery and their interaction with the surrounding community is richly and gently depicted. You get a sense of the men and their personalities. Their fears, weaknesses, their struggles.
You see how communal life is, how they are challenged by their vows (I believe Trappist Cistercians take the normal three: chastity, poverty and obedience, as well as the Benedictine promise of stability to the community, meaning they are in normal circumstances to remain in the community they make vows in) .. Of how sometimes there are tensions and dissension.
You see them interacting with the local people - both Christian and Muslim - and even attending a Muslim marriage and discussing religion very kindly and openly with them.
I was thinking how their lives - their vow of stability, their emphatic humanity, how they all kept returning to the nature of their vocation to live their lives there, then, with those people, in that place and time. That is the logic of the Incarnation. Christ is not some gnostic new age archetype, but always uniquely experienced, personally, specific to each individual's time and place.
This is sacramental and carnal scandal of Catholicism: He came and dwelt amongst us. He loved them, there. He died and rose, and they saw him and touched him. Not figuratively, but actually.
That's what they do in the film. This is our place. God has called us here, to love one another not in some abstract idealist fashion, but in the fear and temptations of this very moment.
Like in Galilee and in Jerusalem. There. Then. Now in every tabernacle throughout the world, at every single of the hundreds of thousands of masses offered everyday, hundreds of masses in very instant, throughout the world. The sacrifice of Christ made perpetual, eternally now, but yet uniquely present to each one of us given the extreme grace and privilege of receiving him in an intimate and singular encounter of the Eucharist.
This is what it means to be a Christian. What it means to be a human being. Each of us are a unique theophany, an iconic encounter with the divine image.
That they so consciously embraced that vocation, and did not run away even though they were afraid and tempted..
It was Mary, Mary and John on Calvary.
I also really, really appreciated how the mass and liturgy of the hours was presented by the film in an authentic fashion. Most of the time Hollywood botches things sloppily. The fact that the details seemed all correct made the story flow.
Unlike Into Great Silence,
(Another film about another French monastery, a documentary of Cartusians in the Alps, also beautifully shot and maybe educational for non-Catholics, or people who have never been to a monastery.. )
This film actually moved me to prayer.
Into Great Silence had no narrative. It was just the film maker shooting in the monastery while the monks went about their work and prayer. I said in my last review below that the only other film I remember falling asleep in was The Matrix and that Ice Ice Baby flick, but I just realized that I fell asleep in Into Great Silence , too. Carthusian monks don't talk much. They take a promise of silence, and they generally only open their mouths to chant and eat porridge. It wasn't exactly a moving cinematic experience.. I mean, I fall asleep at adoration or early morning prayer all the time. Dim the lights at liturgy and start chanting and I'm out in 15 minutes.. And that's when I'm there in the presence of God myself, and praying too. Sitting watching other people pray for two hours is just nonsensical. It's like watching people eat or sleep. Not amusing.
This film is very different. There was prayer and mass throughout, but in snippets. Not only that, most of it is in French. Most of which I know myself from living and praying with Eucharistein for a year. I caught myself praying along sotto voce with them in the film. It was sublime. There was also Latin and Arabic in the film, which also was fun.
I kept on thinking of things I haven't thought of for a while.. missing people.. Of how those men remind me of amazing friends I've been privileged to know. And love.
Gloire à Dieu, au plus haut des cieux,
Et paix sur la terre aux hommes qu'il aime.
Nous te louons, nous te bénissons, nous t'adorons, nous te glorifions, nous te rendons grâce, pour ton immense gloire,
Seigneur Dieu, Roi du ciel,
Dieu le Père tout-puissant.
Now to wrap this up, the only negative criticism I'll make is that the larger historical context of those monks being in Algeria was not really explored. There were a few references to French colonialism, and it was clear that the Algerian Army and officials they interacted with wanted them gone.. The reason for that hostility isn't really explored.
I kept thinking of all the conversations I've had with Arab Muslims and Christians in which the colonial, medieval (Crusade and Islamic expansion/jihad) as well as ancient history is very very explicitly in people's minds.
One of the reasons I've come to despise Americans - and I need publicly to confess this anger, because I still boil with this after ten years - is how damn clueless and callously ignorant 99% of us are.
History - even the bulk of our own relatively recent past - is largely meaningless to us.
Take for example the odd fact that Saint Augustine is from Hippo.. Just for example, a random indispensable fact that some Americans might have as a trivia response.. But I know from talking to Arabs and Frenchmen that those monks definitely had St. Augustine very much in the forefront of their minds while living in Algeria, believe me.
Such details never seem to occur to Americans - not even our politicians - as being relevant. I mean, the likes of Huckabee and maybe even Romney probably can talk good game about Joshua, the Canaanites, and the Book of Daniel's supposed lurid relevance to Israel and Iraq and crap like that, but the intervening 2600 years is lost on them.
And I hate them for it. This is one of the main sins I am struggling with. My fury over their pusillanimous warmongering bigoted stupidity burns and distorts me, even now.
I seriously need to get away from it all somehow. Maybe I should go to Algeria, too.
I'll close by noting that the Wikipedia article I link to above states that the final tragedy in the film, though it was claimed to have been committed by Islamic rebels, may in fact been actually committed by Algerian intelligence and military forces..
There's no hint of that in the film, but the story is so full of normal, sane and humane Muslims that it is still very clear that this film is not making any propaganda points about Islam.
Which is to me - someone who has lived a few years among the Believers in Turkey and Egypt, and traveled throughout the Middle East, was very comforting. I'm sick of propaganda by fools who know nothing about Islam or Muslims splashing their lurid fantastical fears in the media.
This film, on the contrary, ends with a beautiful voice over meditation that is apparently from the abbot's actual letters or journal, about how whatever happens no one is to blame Islam or Muslims for their fate. That they had come in peace to live there, and had been welcomed by the people with love.
And that is about all there is to say. Pray for us, Father.
---
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
One Last Observational Post This Afternoon..
With no further comment, apart from I was just thinking how both Ellen and Great Big Sea are from the Atlantic Provinces, just like me (or I so wish, I'm starting a movement for Maine and Vermont to secede and join Canada today.. ) and that Didier (my pipe smoking buddy in this here video) is from Belgium, just like Magritte.
See how patterns persist on the mind's eye. There is meaning inherent in things. I mean it.
---
See how patterns persist on the mind's eye. There is meaning inherent in things. I mean it.
---
Fish: Not Just for Fridays, Anymore..
I was going to post Donkey Riding on Palm Sunday, but erred on the side of not scandalizing anyone..
But this, I can't resist..
Magritte (ceci n'est pas une pipe) did another classic, by the way, I just remembered it:
(This merely being in keeping with the greater mythical imperative & thematic of this here blog.. leviathan must be parodied after all..)
The Lyrics:
When I was a lad in a fishin' town
My old man said to me:
"You can spend your life, your jolly life,
Just sailin' on the sea.
You can search the world for pretty girls
Til your eyes grow weak and dim,
But don't go searchin' for a mermaid, son
If you don't know how to swim."
Chorus:
'Cause her hair was green as seaweed,
Her skin was blue and pale,
Her face, it was a work of art, I loved that girl with all my heart,
I only liked the upper part:
I did not like the tail.
I signed onto a sailing ship,
My first very day at sea
I seen the mermaid in the waves,
Reaching out to me.
"Come live with me in the sea said she,
Down on the ocean floor,
And I'll show you a million wonderous things,
you've never seen before.
So over I jumped and she pulled me down,
Down to her seaweed bed.
And a pillow made of tortoise-shell,
She placed beneath my head.
She fed me shrimp and caviar
Upon a silver dish.
From her head to her waist it was just my taste,
But the rest of her was a fish.
(Chorus)
Then one day, she swam away.
So I sang to the clams and the whales:
"Oh, how I miss her seaweed hair,
And the silver shine of her scales.
But then her sister, she swam by,
Set my heart awhirl!
'Cause her upper part was an ugly fish,
An' her bottom part was a girl!
Yes, her hair was green as seaweed.
Her skin was blue and pale, her legs they are a work of art.
I love that girl with all my heart,
And I don't give a damn bout the upper part,
'Cause that's how I get my tail!
FINIS
(and that in more ways than one..)
---
But this, I can't resist..
Magritte (ceci n'est pas une pipe) did another classic, by the way, I just remembered it:
(This merely being in keeping with the greater mythical imperative & thematic of this here blog.. leviathan must be parodied after all..)
The Lyrics:
When I was a lad in a fishin' town
My old man said to me:
"You can spend your life, your jolly life,
Just sailin' on the sea.
You can search the world for pretty girls
Til your eyes grow weak and dim,
But don't go searchin' for a mermaid, son
If you don't know how to swim."
Chorus:
'Cause her hair was green as seaweed,
Her skin was blue and pale,
Her face, it was a work of art, I loved that girl with all my heart,
I only liked the upper part:
I did not like the tail.
I signed onto a sailing ship,
My first very day at sea
I seen the mermaid in the waves,
Reaching out to me.
"Come live with me in the sea said she,
Down on the ocean floor,
And I'll show you a million wonderous things,
you've never seen before.
So over I jumped and she pulled me down,
Down to her seaweed bed.
And a pillow made of tortoise-shell,
She placed beneath my head.
She fed me shrimp and caviar
Upon a silver dish.
From her head to her waist it was just my taste,
But the rest of her was a fish.
(Chorus)
Then one day, she swam away.
So I sang to the clams and the whales:
"Oh, how I miss her seaweed hair,
And the silver shine of her scales.
But then her sister, she swam by,
Set my heart awhirl!
'Cause her upper part was an ugly fish,
An' her bottom part was a girl!
Yes, her hair was green as seaweed.
Her skin was blue and pale, her legs they are a work of art.
I love that girl with all my heart,
And I don't give a damn bout the upper part,
'Cause that's how I get my tail!
FINIS
(and that in more ways than one..)
---
Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle..
(Just a photographic aside.. )
The pendulum of the heart alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
---
The pendulum of the heart alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
---
Paging Herr Doktor Jung..
So, I just took a nap. I had this dream:
I'm a sailor. I'm on an aircraft carrier deck with Dan Smith. I'm pointing out the weapon tubes to him. There are eight all together in two rows of four, all closed tubes vertically embedded in a lower deck we're looking down upon. Two torpedoes (vertically aligned in the deck - I don't think this makes sense), four tactical surface to surface and surface to air missiles, two nuclear ballistic.. Or something like that. The details are a bit hazy now, but they were very clear in the dream, because I was telling Dan all about it. He wants to go down to look at them closely. We do, and he decides to go walk over next to them, which he's not supposed to.. If you've been in the military, you'll know that they love to make places taboo to walk upon. Do not walk on the lawn. Do not cross that parking lot. Do not step outside that line. If you do, and we catch you..
Well Dan does it. He walks where thou shalt not walk. I get all panicked, and start calling to him to come back, before someone notices and we get in trouble. He either can't hear me, or is ignoring me. Sure enough, a female NCO (one of the older relics, probably an E-9 or something - which to me is big trouble, getting noticed in flagrante delicto by such a near nueter demi-godesse) sees him from above, and comes down full of wrath. Dan casually walks back over and talks to her. She calms down, and smiles. I realize we're going to get away without me getting punished, which is a relief.
We go inside the ship. Other things happen, which I cannot remember, really. I think Dan buys me a notebook. One that I've already written in. He goes away, and I go into this auditorium. It's dark. But I can see a short girl with shoulder length brown hair and a purple tie dye shirt and gym shorts running manically in circles around the small circle at the head of a basketball foul shooting rectangle. I laugh, because it's ridiculous, and turn to leave. The girl calls out to me to hold the door, but in a way that makes it pretty clear that she likes me. Likes me, likes me. You know what I mean. The girl runs over, and I see that it's Ellen Paige. She's shorter than I thought she'd be, and that's pretty short. She's like a hobbit. We leave the room, and I make fun of her. I immediately get a bad conscience, because it feels cruel. It strikes me as hugely strange that I am making fun of this girl that I have had a crush on (I mean, Ellen Paige, who hasn't, you know?) .. It turns out she likes me, and here I am making fun of her in a mean way. It's such an inversion of my previously conceived cosmic power relations that I get confused. Ellen leaves, and I start looking for her to apologize. I have two of her costumes. I catch sight of her through the window of a house on a hill. It's dark out, but the lights are on inside. She's made up like a clown, but she's wearing a Bella Lugosi vampire costume. This strikes me as hugely transgressive. I sneak up, knock on the door, and leave the costumes. I hide, she comes to the door, finds the costumes and takes them inside. She's happy. I'm forlorn.
Dream ends. I wake up. I lay there wondering about how Dan Smith (a guy I liked and admired from high school, and a Mormon, but someone I haven't seen in twenty years or thought about in a while) ended up in my dream.. And Ellen. The actress from Juno and Hard Candy dressed as a vampire clown.
I've clearly got issues. It's obvious in the numerology..
---
I'm a sailor. I'm on an aircraft carrier deck with Dan Smith. I'm pointing out the weapon tubes to him. There are eight all together in two rows of four, all closed tubes vertically embedded in a lower deck we're looking down upon. Two torpedoes (vertically aligned in the deck - I don't think this makes sense), four tactical surface to surface and surface to air missiles, two nuclear ballistic.. Or something like that. The details are a bit hazy now, but they were very clear in the dream, because I was telling Dan all about it. He wants to go down to look at them closely. We do, and he decides to go walk over next to them, which he's not supposed to.. If you've been in the military, you'll know that they love to make places taboo to walk upon. Do not walk on the lawn. Do not cross that parking lot. Do not step outside that line. If you do, and we catch you..
Well Dan does it. He walks where thou shalt not walk. I get all panicked, and start calling to him to come back, before someone notices and we get in trouble. He either can't hear me, or is ignoring me. Sure enough, a female NCO (one of the older relics, probably an E-9 or something - which to me is big trouble, getting noticed in flagrante delicto by such a near nueter demi-godesse) sees him from above, and comes down full of wrath. Dan casually walks back over and talks to her. She calms down, and smiles. I realize we're going to get away without me getting punished, which is a relief.
We go inside the ship. Other things happen, which I cannot remember, really. I think Dan buys me a notebook. One that I've already written in. He goes away, and I go into this auditorium. It's dark. But I can see a short girl with shoulder length brown hair and a purple tie dye shirt and gym shorts running manically in circles around the small circle at the head of a basketball foul shooting rectangle. I laugh, because it's ridiculous, and turn to leave. The girl calls out to me to hold the door, but in a way that makes it pretty clear that she likes me. Likes me, likes me. You know what I mean. The girl runs over, and I see that it's Ellen Paige. She's shorter than I thought she'd be, and that's pretty short. She's like a hobbit. We leave the room, and I make fun of her. I immediately get a bad conscience, because it feels cruel. It strikes me as hugely strange that I am making fun of this girl that I have had a crush on (I mean, Ellen Paige, who hasn't, you know?) .. It turns out she likes me, and here I am making fun of her in a mean way. It's such an inversion of my previously conceived cosmic power relations that I get confused. Ellen leaves, and I start looking for her to apologize. I have two of her costumes. I catch sight of her through the window of a house on a hill. It's dark out, but the lights are on inside. She's made up like a clown, but she's wearing a Bella Lugosi vampire costume. This strikes me as hugely transgressive. I sneak up, knock on the door, and leave the costumes. I hide, she comes to the door, finds the costumes and takes them inside. She's happy. I'm forlorn.
Dream ends. I wake up. I lay there wondering about how Dan Smith (a guy I liked and admired from high school, and a Mormon, but someone I haven't seen in twenty years or thought about in a while) ended up in my dream.. And Ellen. The actress from Juno and Hard Candy dressed as a vampire clown.
I've clearly got issues. It's obvious in the numerology..
---
Divers Middle Eastern Video Clips: Paschal Edition
First, this is how certain Syrian Christians celebrate the Resurrection:
This impressive explosion of joy took place in Latakia, اللاذقية, on the coast of Syria (the same region the ruling Alawite Assad family is from, incidentally).
This next clip is from Israeli late night television:
(be forewarned, this bit's pretty offensive)
Lastly, I share this clip of my favorite apparition and stigmatist, Myrna Nazour, from Soufanieh, near Damascus:
(this, the first installment in a 30 something part series, will give you the basic gist of the story)
Myrna of course (of course!) receives the stigmata every year at Easter.
When I was at DLI, one of my teachers, an Orthodox Christian woman from Basra, Iraq, gave me a copy of the icon of Our Lady of Soufanieh, which as that clip notes in the original bleeds oil. The events surrounding this icon and Myrna are known as the "Miracle of Damascus." It's an ecumenical phenomenon.. Myrna is Catholic but her husband is Orthodox, and my impression is that the apparition is hugely popular throughout the Arab world, amongst both Orthodox and Catholics.
The image:
One of my favorite icons, incidentally.
In any case, Our Lady of Soufanieh and Myrna both preach unity amongst the Catholic and Orthodox, and peace with the Muslims. One of main the reasons I dig it.
Anyway, just to let you all know, Syria ain't Kansas. Just a late newsflash from Damascus..
---
This impressive explosion of joy took place in Latakia, اللاذقية, on the coast of Syria (the same region the ruling Alawite Assad family is from, incidentally).
This next clip is from Israeli late night television:
(be forewarned, this bit's pretty offensive)
Lastly, I share this clip of my favorite apparition and stigmatist, Myrna Nazour, from Soufanieh, near Damascus:
(this, the first installment in a 30 something part series, will give you the basic gist of the story)
Myrna of course (of course!) receives the stigmata every year at Easter.
When I was at DLI, one of my teachers, an Orthodox Christian woman from Basra, Iraq, gave me a copy of the icon of Our Lady of Soufanieh, which as that clip notes in the original bleeds oil. The events surrounding this icon and Myrna are known as the "Miracle of Damascus." It's an ecumenical phenomenon.. Myrna is Catholic but her husband is Orthodox, and my impression is that the apparition is hugely popular throughout the Arab world, amongst both Orthodox and Catholics.
The image:
One of my favorite icons, incidentally.
In any case, Our Lady of Soufanieh and Myrna both preach unity amongst the Catholic and Orthodox, and peace with the Muslims. One of main the reasons I dig it.
Anyway, just to let you all know, Syria ain't Kansas. Just a late newsflash from Damascus..
---
Monday, April 25, 2011
Film Review: Source Code
Review: Source Code. Liked it. Thumbs up, B+. 4 Stars out of 5.
This is like the Matrix crossed with the Bourne movies, but better, in that the "matrixy" aspect of this film doesn't suck, and is actually almost coherent and mildly intriguing, as opposed to merely unspooling into puerile stupidity like the Matrix trilogy does.
(I saw only one and a half of those three films, by the way. Mildly enjoyed the first one, but then fell asleep in the theater during the second, an honor I think is only shared by that Vanilla Ice film that came out back in 1991 - I saw it in Izmir, and fell asleep after 15 minutes.. )
The basic plot of the film is this: they've developed technology called the "source code" that allows us to project the mind of someone with similar biological parameters back upon "the halo" left in time of that person's consciousness for eight minutes before their death.
Or something like that.
If you accept this conceit, and are able to suspend disbelief that much, the rest of film is pretty straight forward.
Jake Gyllenhaal's character is sent back to inhabit the mind of a man on a train about to be destroyed by a terrorist bombing. In the beginning he doesn't understand what is happening to him, and is repeatedly blown up, each time to again be re-sent into that same eight minute time frame to investigate and discover who left the bomb, and what his plans for future mayhem are.. He's a detective feeding information to his handlers who control the "source code" and who interrogate him at the end of each of his subsequent missions into the code.
Like Jason Bourne, he's an almost clean slate within the immediate narrative arc. He knows his name, remembers that he's a captain in the Army who last he can remember was in Afghanistan flying helicopters.. He has no idea how he ended up in the situation he's in, getting sent back repeatedly onto this train.
Each time he gets set into the source code, he is in the same moment, but is able to use knowledge acquired in previous sorties to delve deeper into the situation, and further understand what is happening. He not only figures out what is happening on the train, but also starts to piece together the larger context, and understand things about himself he didn't know before.
Storytelling 101. Nicely done.
Jake's character's mind is able to retain memories of his previous experiences in the "source code" and in this the narrative emerges.
There's a nice twist at the end of the movie that I did not expect, that knocks it all up a level and makes the entire plot even a little more interesting.
In sum, this film, like the Matrix, is a gnostic fantasy, in which the material world is reduced to a numerical "matrix," the "source code." In this the mind is more real than matter, and in fact the mind eventually escapes matter altogether, becoming an angelic intelligence. The self is also reduced to consciousness, to thought and memory, and is in a perfect Cartesian fashion ontologically and existentially alienated from the body, which is finally understood to be a passing illusion like all other matter.
The real is knowledge and numbers. The "code" or "program." The material is a passing and imperfect illusion to be manipulated by the mind through accumulated knowledge and understanding.
The fact that each time he reenters the source code he has only eight minutes of halo to work with before the source code resets, is of course a numerological trope.
The shape of the number 8 is itself the infinity sign. The snake eating itself, time folding back in itself. The Resurrection of Christ occurs on the first day of the week, which is to say the day after the end of the beginning, the renewal after death.. The seventh day consummates time in rest, which is death, but is recapitulated in the the first of the new week which is also eighth day. There were also eight people on Noah's Ark, when God "reset" creation. I think there is much more esoteric meaning to that number, but can't be bothered to delve into that now.
If you stop the film at the beginning of the preview clip I post here above on the part around the 20 second mark where his watch is shown, you'll notice that he "comes to" at 8:40 am. Forty is 8 times 5. 5 is death. Friday (the day of the Crucifixion) is the Christian fifth or Jewish sixth day. Christ bore five wounds (each hand, each foot, the spear in his side. My blog thematically commemorates his head being left alone, and only crowned with thorns..)
His release comes at 8:48 am. 8 6 times 8.
It also occurs to me that Jake's character's name "Captain Stevens" which may possibly be a reference to the proto-martyr St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr whose feast is the day after Christmas. The man whose body he inhabits is named Sean, which is a Gaelic corruption of the French Jean or English John, which comes from the Hebrew "God is Gracious," and is of course the name of the "Forerunner" John the Baptist who baptizes with water (symbolizing death and rebirth) as well as John the Apostle, the only apostle who did not run away during the Crucifixion, but who stayed at the foot of the Cross. The Apostle John is also the only one of the apostles to die a natural death, the only one not to be finally martyred..
Furthermore, the girl Captain Stevens wants to "save" is named "Christina.."
(Christina being played by the very foxy Michelle Monaghan.. Note also that Vera Farmiga, playing the air force officer running the source code computer is also beautiful as always..)
The bomb is a release in fire, pentecostal (by 10 by 5) or something like that..
All of these details may take on a certain symbolic resonance after you've seen the film.
I'm a neophyte at all of this, fill in the punchlines for me, please.
My point is that the filmmaker's clearly a clever fellow, and I appreciate that.
So, the entire film is mildly entertaining, as well as another testament to our cultural fascination with computers and faith in progress.
Worth seeing, in other words.
---
This is like the Matrix crossed with the Bourne movies, but better, in that the "matrixy" aspect of this film doesn't suck, and is actually almost coherent and mildly intriguing, as opposed to merely unspooling into puerile stupidity like the Matrix trilogy does.
(I saw only one and a half of those three films, by the way. Mildly enjoyed the first one, but then fell asleep in the theater during the second, an honor I think is only shared by that Vanilla Ice film that came out back in 1991 - I saw it in Izmir, and fell asleep after 15 minutes.. )
The basic plot of the film is this: they've developed technology called the "source code" that allows us to project the mind of someone with similar biological parameters back upon "the halo" left in time of that person's consciousness for eight minutes before their death.
Or something like that.
If you accept this conceit, and are able to suspend disbelief that much, the rest of film is pretty straight forward.
Jake Gyllenhaal's character is sent back to inhabit the mind of a man on a train about to be destroyed by a terrorist bombing. In the beginning he doesn't understand what is happening to him, and is repeatedly blown up, each time to again be re-sent into that same eight minute time frame to investigate and discover who left the bomb, and what his plans for future mayhem are.. He's a detective feeding information to his handlers who control the "source code" and who interrogate him at the end of each of his subsequent missions into the code.
Like Jason Bourne, he's an almost clean slate within the immediate narrative arc. He knows his name, remembers that he's a captain in the Army who last he can remember was in Afghanistan flying helicopters.. He has no idea how he ended up in the situation he's in, getting sent back repeatedly onto this train.
Each time he gets set into the source code, he is in the same moment, but is able to use knowledge acquired in previous sorties to delve deeper into the situation, and further understand what is happening. He not only figures out what is happening on the train, but also starts to piece together the larger context, and understand things about himself he didn't know before.
Storytelling 101. Nicely done.
Jake's character's mind is able to retain memories of his previous experiences in the "source code" and in this the narrative emerges.
There's a nice twist at the end of the movie that I did not expect, that knocks it all up a level and makes the entire plot even a little more interesting.
In sum, this film, like the Matrix, is a gnostic fantasy, in which the material world is reduced to a numerical "matrix," the "source code." In this the mind is more real than matter, and in fact the mind eventually escapes matter altogether, becoming an angelic intelligence. The self is also reduced to consciousness, to thought and memory, and is in a perfect Cartesian fashion ontologically and existentially alienated from the body, which is finally understood to be a passing illusion like all other matter.
The real is knowledge and numbers. The "code" or "program." The material is a passing and imperfect illusion to be manipulated by the mind through accumulated knowledge and understanding.
The fact that each time he reenters the source code he has only eight minutes of halo to work with before the source code resets, is of course a numerological trope.
The shape of the number 8 is itself the infinity sign. The snake eating itself, time folding back in itself. The Resurrection of Christ occurs on the first day of the week, which is to say the day after the end of the beginning, the renewal after death.. The seventh day consummates time in rest, which is death, but is recapitulated in the the first of the new week which is also eighth day. There were also eight people on Noah's Ark, when God "reset" creation. I think there is much more esoteric meaning to that number, but can't be bothered to delve into that now.
If you stop the film at the beginning of the preview clip I post here above on the part around the 20 second mark where his watch is shown, you'll notice that he "comes to" at 8:40 am. Forty is 8 times 5. 5 is death. Friday (the day of the Crucifixion) is the Christian fifth or Jewish sixth day. Christ bore five wounds (each hand, each foot, the spear in his side. My blog thematically commemorates his head being left alone, and only crowned with thorns..)
His release comes at 8:48 am. 8 6 times 8.
It also occurs to me that Jake's character's name "Captain Stevens" which may possibly be a reference to the proto-martyr St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr whose feast is the day after Christmas. The man whose body he inhabits is named Sean, which is a Gaelic corruption of the French Jean or English John, which comes from the Hebrew "God is Gracious," and is of course the name of the "Forerunner" John the Baptist who baptizes with water (symbolizing death and rebirth) as well as John the Apostle, the only apostle who did not run away during the Crucifixion, but who stayed at the foot of the Cross. The Apostle John is also the only one of the apostles to die a natural death, the only one not to be finally martyred..
Furthermore, the girl Captain Stevens wants to "save" is named "Christina.."
(Christina being played by the very foxy Michelle Monaghan.. Note also that Vera Farmiga, playing the air force officer running the source code computer is also beautiful as always..)
The bomb is a release in fire, pentecostal (by 10 by 5) or something like that..
All of these details may take on a certain symbolic resonance after you've seen the film.
I'm a neophyte at all of this, fill in the punchlines for me, please.
My point is that the filmmaker's clearly a clever fellow, and I appreciate that.
So, the entire film is mildly entertaining, as well as another testament to our cultural fascination with computers and faith in progress.
Worth seeing, in other words.
---
Sunday, April 24, 2011
By the Way..
Human desire is consummated and both at once parodied in itself.
Sin and love are both sublime sacred jokes.
Just an odd notation.
Blessed Pascha.
---
Sin and love are both sublime sacred jokes.
Just an odd notation.
Blessed Pascha.
---
Resurrexit vere! Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!
Yesterday (Good Friday) I went to McDonald's and ate four filet o'fishes and three one buck side salads with balsamic vinaigrette for my one Good Friday meal. Sat there for a few hours and drank lot's o' iced tea (I gave up all hot n' heinous "soft drinks" for penance's sake, and only broke that abstention once in 40 days..)
Today, I got up late and went to McDonald's again, and ate chicken salad with bacon, another side salad, a McChicken sandwich (also off the dollar menu!) and then a couple hours later got a large wildberry yogurt smoothie. I sat there for maybe six hours all told, drinking more unsweetened iced tea dashed with slight amounts of lemonade, and reading.
Ave Sancta Claudia Procula, uxor Pilati, ora pro nobis..
A rousing finale to my Lent.
But not exactly in keeping with the Athonite fast.
But I'm a broken lapsed Orthodox, now. Just a poor Catholic.
On the way home I stopped and bought a gallon of rich red table wine, came home and did some work on my new will. I'm writing it on my own, following a model and reading Vermont inheritance law as I do it. I'm specifying that they not cremate my remains, and that they pay all my taxes before charity or my nieces and nephew get a thing. I'm adamant about that. Pay my taxes dammit. Also, make sure that Comcast and AT&T get theirs, too.
You know, the only black mark on my credit report is when I broke my cell phone contract with AT&T before leaving for Europe a few years ago, and then flipped them the bird. I owe just under 300 bucks, I think. If I want an iPhone in purgatory, I may need to pay them.
(I may need ask Tommy forgive me too.. But not for the sake of my cell phone..)
Just over an hour ago I broke the seal on that bottle, and my lips touched wine for the second time in over two months.
I've not kept the fast fully nor prayed well, and I am a guilty man..
Yet tonight I keep the vigil.
I'm thinking of how much fun it would be to be at a good Orthodox parish tonight.
Fifty days of strict fasting, nuts and water on Holy Saturday, then a two hour long vigil liturgy begun late in the evening..
Cyclical chants for well over an hour, standing the entire time (feel how the spirit is willing..) dim candle lit incense ridden anticipation..
Light breaks darkness some point after midnight.
After the mystery is made consummate, Father comes into the church hall, where there is a cornucopia laden table overflowing with food and drink like something out of Paschal Slavic version of Dickens.
He blesses it all and us..
Then all heaven breaks loose. It's two in the morning, and everyone's feasting like it's the millennium: here there are ten year old kids and grandmothers gladly all about. My home brew is uncapped and praised like it's bordeaux. Old guys with barely understandable accents circulate with homemade vodka, filling my dixie cup to overflowing.
Every time I keep a long (Lenten or Advent) fast and then make the requisite vigil with the Orthodox, I somehow serendipitously find myself up bathed in a suffused breaking dawn..
One always shared with some few happy exhausted winsome friends still ready for breakfast, followed by a very long nap and yet *maybe* another liturgy..
(See how vapid and hedonistic my approach to my beloved.. Exi a me quia homo peccator sum Domine..)
Here I in all my tepidity and decadence nevertheless dare pray:
Κύριε Ιησού Χριστέ, Υιέ του Θεού, ελέησόν με τον αμαρτωλόν..
Bless us all, and keep us, may your your Face always shine upon us and be with us, forgive us all everyone of our sins.
That you my Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, may grant us all Triumph and Victory over the temptations of our visible and invisible enemies.
That by your Grace we may all crush beneath our feet the prince of darkness and his powers.
That we may all rise with you and so rise from the tomb of our sins and offenses.
That you may fill us all with joy and happiness in your Holy Resurrection.
That we may all merit the Grace of entering into your Chamber at your Divine Wedding Feast, to rejoice beyond limit together with your Heavenly Attendants and the Host of Saints glorified through you, the Church Triumphant in Heaven.
Amen. Alleluia, Alleluia.
+++
Today, I got up late and went to McDonald's again, and ate chicken salad with bacon, another side salad, a McChicken sandwich (also off the dollar menu!) and then a couple hours later got a large wildberry yogurt smoothie. I sat there for maybe six hours all told, drinking more unsweetened iced tea dashed with slight amounts of lemonade, and reading.
Ave Sancta Claudia Procula, uxor Pilati, ora pro nobis..
A rousing finale to my Lent.
But not exactly in keeping with the Athonite fast.
But I'm a broken lapsed Orthodox, now. Just a poor Catholic.
On the way home I stopped and bought a gallon of rich red table wine, came home and did some work on my new will. I'm writing it on my own, following a model and reading Vermont inheritance law as I do it. I'm specifying that they not cremate my remains, and that they pay all my taxes before charity or my nieces and nephew get a thing. I'm adamant about that. Pay my taxes dammit. Also, make sure that Comcast and AT&T get theirs, too.
You know, the only black mark on my credit report is when I broke my cell phone contract with AT&T before leaving for Europe a few years ago, and then flipped them the bird. I owe just under 300 bucks, I think. If I want an iPhone in purgatory, I may need to pay them.
(I may need ask Tommy forgive me too.. But not for the sake of my cell phone..)
Just over an hour ago I broke the seal on that bottle, and my lips touched wine for the second time in over two months.
I've not kept the fast fully nor prayed well, and I am a guilty man..
Yet tonight I keep the vigil.
I'm thinking of how much fun it would be to be at a good Orthodox parish tonight.
Fifty days of strict fasting, nuts and water on Holy Saturday, then a two hour long vigil liturgy begun late in the evening..
Cyclical chants for well over an hour, standing the entire time (feel how the spirit is willing..) dim candle lit incense ridden anticipation..
Light breaks darkness some point after midnight.
After the mystery is made consummate, Father comes into the church hall, where there is a cornucopia laden table overflowing with food and drink like something out of Paschal Slavic version of Dickens.
He blesses it all and us..
Then all heaven breaks loose. It's two in the morning, and everyone's feasting like it's the millennium: here there are ten year old kids and grandmothers gladly all about. My home brew is uncapped and praised like it's bordeaux. Old guys with barely understandable accents circulate with homemade vodka, filling my dixie cup to overflowing.
Every time I keep a long (Lenten or Advent) fast and then make the requisite vigil with the Orthodox, I somehow serendipitously find myself up bathed in a suffused breaking dawn..
One always shared with some few happy exhausted winsome friends still ready for breakfast, followed by a very long nap and yet *maybe* another liturgy..
(See how vapid and hedonistic my approach to my beloved.. Exi a me quia homo peccator sum Domine..)
Here I in all my tepidity and decadence nevertheless dare pray:
Κύριε Ιησού Χριστέ, Υιέ του Θεού, ελέησόν με τον αμαρτωλόν..
Bless us all, and keep us, may your your Face always shine upon us and be with us, forgive us all everyone of our sins.
That you my Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, may grant us all Triumph and Victory over the temptations of our visible and invisible enemies.
That by your Grace we may all crush beneath our feet the prince of darkness and his powers.
That we may all rise with you and so rise from the tomb of our sins and offenses.
That you may fill us all with joy and happiness in your Holy Resurrection.
That we may all merit the Grace of entering into your Chamber at your Divine Wedding Feast, to rejoice beyond limit together with your Heavenly Attendants and the Host of Saints glorified through you, the Church Triumphant in Heaven.
Amen. Alleluia, Alleluia.
+++
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Ma Chere Douce Kate: Difficile, Laisse-moi Tranquille.
Lyrics:
They say a girl like me should wed,
And take a man to lay in my bed.
But I would like to stay young and free,
And oh, I wish they would let me be.
Oh, I wish they would let me be..
Let me be.
Robin the miller he's fond of brass,
He sees a fool's face when he looks in glass,
Thinks he'll bargain like grain for me.
But oh, I wish he would let me be,
Oh, I wish he would let me be.
Robin, let me be.
There came a man named Bonnie Jim,
He looks so fine in his holiday trim.
Thinks he'll take me off to the sea,
But oh, I wish he would let me be.
Oh, I wish he would let me be.
Jim, let me be,
Jim, let me be.
La la la la la la la la la.
La la la la la la la la la..
Cousin Dick he has gold and land,
He thinks all this will win my hand.
My hand or lips he will never see,
But oh, I wish he would let me be.
Oh, I wish he would let me be.
Dick, let me be.
This young soldier boy is Ned,
His gun's like his own, he can shoot me dead.
His eyes are blue, but they don't see me.
Oh, why does he let me be?
Oh, why does he let me be?
Let me be,
Why do you let me be?
La la la la la la la la la.
La la la la la la la la la..
(Thanks to Sophie for these lyrics)
---
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Freedom, Vermont & Unity: Bernie Rulz!!
Another economics/political post, it's a Lenten Tuesday:
I love my new home and senator. Stick it to them nasty Anti-Federalist corporatist libertarian trogs, Bernie!! I love you, man.
[That graphic came from here, where you can read it in a larger version.]
---
I love my new home and senator. Stick it to them nasty Anti-Federalist corporatist libertarian trogs, Bernie!! I love you, man.
[That graphic came from here, where you can read it in a larger version.]
---
Matt Taibbi & Eliot Spitzer: Put the Bastards in Jail, Now.
This is straight up:
I say this in all seriousness: if and when things get worse, the archons in charge of our kleptocracy will pay for having broken the social contract so viciously and shamelessly. Six months in a maximum security prison (Taibbi's prescription here) will be in that context a light sentence.
---
I say this in all seriousness: if and when things get worse, the archons in charge of our kleptocracy will pay for having broken the social contract so viciously and shamelessly. Six months in a maximum security prison (Taibbi's prescription here) will be in that context a light sentence.
---
Sunday, April 17, 2011
A comment of my so called creative process..
My last project (and only other adventure in blogging) I conceived as a series of postcards of my life abroad in Switzerland, but that got complicated by the fact that I was sharing it with friends and family each of whom constitutes individually a different audience in my mind.
Because I was living in a monastic community, I was automatically talking about religion with people whom I normally don't share that with in our friendships. I also kept spurting about all sorts of things I normally keep locked up in most contexts..
Like everyone, each of my friends shares different parts of my life, I have a different voice, am a different person to each of them, really. Writing for everyone - and then random strangers, too, who began reading it - hundreds of them - was a bit wrenching.
I also ran naively into privacy issues, when the Swiss and French schooled me on cultural differences regarding privacy.. Many of them when they found out I was putting stuff online told me to keep them out of it.
So I felt inhibited, and sometimes a bit paranoid. I posted off the cuff, and then wondered if I exposed too much or annoyed anyone by inflicting my crap on them, or else exposed my friends in ways they would resent.
Whenever I posted stuff of an "existential" nature, especially when I did it in a raw and rambling fashion, I felt some angst.
It felt self indulgent.. But I wanted to do it.. I liked it.. But wanted to do it without annoying my friends. So I canned the old blog, and started this one, meant to be much more focused and disciplined. I wanted to get things into writing that I'd been thinking about and struggling over, whether anyone read it or not.
The potential audience would be a foil for me getting the work done. And I would do it in a more concise manner.
This blog is the result.
The thing is, I'm still rent with a bit of angst. I don't know where to begin, there's so much, and when I do write I've been doing it in a haphazard and jerky fashion.
Posts here have generally been written in less than an hour, most often in under 20 or 30 minutes. I write something, post it.. And then re-read it and immediately see a dozen errors or things I should of added, and so do a 5 minute re-write and re-post. An hour later, I come back, notice more errors, fix them and re-post it again.
Very disciplined process, and perfectly suited to annoy anyone rss'ing this.
I've started writing a dozen different essays, though, and have notes (both dictated and written, as well as an accumulated archive of source materials & media to post) for many more. I need to start writing with discipline, here.
Take for example the last post: there are multiple typos in it, and at least one major factual error (Mosul is in northern Iraq - I was also thinking of Basra when I wrote that line on Iraqi cities, and the word "southern" just slipped in there..)
I leave them as they are, a testament to my editorial competence and my talent comme un ecrivan.
I'll try to keep this project coherent and not too absurd or sententious. I'll try to develop certain themes and lines of logic between my posts, to quilt them in a way that makes sense.
Even though my aim isn't to attract a lot of intention, I do want to be readable and interesting to anyone who does compliment me by following this.
Comments and criticism, always gratefully & sincerely accepted.
I'm posting this without a proofread as a Lenten mortification for you my dear audience. I have your spiritual well being in mind.
After Lent, I will proof read in earnest, I promise. I have to get back to my self flagellation now, though.
(I fibbed, I can't help myself. One slapdash revision. There.)
Cheers.
---
Because I was living in a monastic community, I was automatically talking about religion with people whom I normally don't share that with in our friendships. I also kept spurting about all sorts of things I normally keep locked up in most contexts..
Like everyone, each of my friends shares different parts of my life, I have a different voice, am a different person to each of them, really. Writing for everyone - and then random strangers, too, who began reading it - hundreds of them - was a bit wrenching.
I also ran naively into privacy issues, when the Swiss and French schooled me on cultural differences regarding privacy.. Many of them when they found out I was putting stuff online told me to keep them out of it.
So I felt inhibited, and sometimes a bit paranoid. I posted off the cuff, and then wondered if I exposed too much or annoyed anyone by inflicting my crap on them, or else exposed my friends in ways they would resent.
Whenever I posted stuff of an "existential" nature, especially when I did it in a raw and rambling fashion, I felt some angst.
It felt self indulgent.. But I wanted to do it.. I liked it.. But wanted to do it without annoying my friends. So I canned the old blog, and started this one, meant to be much more focused and disciplined. I wanted to get things into writing that I'd been thinking about and struggling over, whether anyone read it or not.
The potential audience would be a foil for me getting the work done. And I would do it in a more concise manner.
This blog is the result.
The thing is, I'm still rent with a bit of angst. I don't know where to begin, there's so much, and when I do write I've been doing it in a haphazard and jerky fashion.
Posts here have generally been written in less than an hour, most often in under 20 or 30 minutes. I write something, post it.. And then re-read it and immediately see a dozen errors or things I should of added, and so do a 5 minute re-write and re-post. An hour later, I come back, notice more errors, fix them and re-post it again.
Very disciplined process, and perfectly suited to annoy anyone rss'ing this.
I've started writing a dozen different essays, though, and have notes (both dictated and written, as well as an accumulated archive of source materials & media to post) for many more. I need to start writing with discipline, here.
Take for example the last post: there are multiple typos in it, and at least one major factual error (Mosul is in northern Iraq - I was also thinking of Basra when I wrote that line on Iraqi cities, and the word "southern" just slipped in there..)
I leave them as they are, a testament to my editorial competence and my talent comme un ecrivan.
I'll try to keep this project coherent and not too absurd or sententious. I'll try to develop certain themes and lines of logic between my posts, to quilt them in a way that makes sense.
Even though my aim isn't to attract a lot of intention, I do want to be readable and interesting to anyone who does compliment me by following this.
Comments and criticism, always gratefully & sincerely accepted.
I'm posting this without a proofread as a Lenten mortification for you my dear audience. I have your spiritual well being in mind.
After Lent, I will proof read in earnest, I promise. I have to get back to my self flagellation now, though.
(I fibbed, I can't help myself. One slapdash revision. There.)
Cheers.
---
The Divine Comedy: the Gospel as Parody
Today is Palm Sunday. This is one of those blessed and relatively rare years in which the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) calendars are in harmony. We celebrate Holy Week and Pascha together this year. As the Universal Church always should.
During Lent I've been going almost daily to mass, and reading the psalter.
One of the things that keeps on striking me lately, is how funny the Bible is.
He rides in on an ass. He's making fun of us, of our pretensions.
When the French took Damascus from the Turks in 1920, the commanding General Henri Gouraud rode his charger into the tomb of Saladin in the great Ummayad Mosque, dismounted and planted his boot on the "Sword of Religion's" (that's what Salah al-Din literally means in Arabic) grave and declared, "Réveilles-toi Saladin, nous sommes revenus. Ma présence ici consacre la victoire de la croix sur le croissant!"
Get up Saladin, we've returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent!
That's how we like to do it. Charge in on a warhorse, all glory, then crush the enemy's head and spit on his grave. Then consecrate it all in pride and vanity.
We like to put boots up asses, see. That's definitely the American way.
(I love how this video of Toby Keith's immortal poetical expression of that sentiment begins with the image of a puppy wrapped in a flag.. Irony is dead.)
But God rides in barefoot, on an ass. And then goes to the religious and political authorities and allows them to slaughter him. He takes the boot upon himself.
The Gospel - in fact the entire bible - is rife with such inversions as God coming in glory on a donkey.
He's always making the most unexpected entrances, and turning our expectations upside down.
He shows up as a baby, is worshiped by donkeys and gets put in a box for feeding grain to asses (called in English a manger, from the French "to eat.." Taste and see..)
(there's great iconography of the animals in the stable worshiping him..)
Then he goes up on a hillside by the sea of Galilee, and preaches the "Sermon on the Mount," which is where he parodies Moses, and reveals himself to be God. See the sidebar, I've posted the Beatitudes he taught there. These are the Christian answer to the Ten Commandments.
I think they're really funny. Blessed are the poor? Says who?
Jesus, that's who.
And he sat down to teach them. He did not stand in the presence of the Lord as a rabbi does proclaiming scripture in the synagogue, or Moses did coming off the mountain with the written word. He went up and sat.
I've been to the "Mount," it's actually a great grassy hillside right next to Lake Tiberius (also called the Sea of Galilee, but it's not much of a sea at all, actually).. When I stood on it, I laughed. Not at all like majestic solemn old Mount Sinai.
Not exactly what I'd expected. Very gentle. A good joke.
He calmed that sea one night when his disciples were stuck out fishing in the middle of a storm. They were terrified by the storm, then terrified that he'd calmed it. He walks out onto the lake, and calls to them to come to him. Peter (our dearly loved pope) hops out, takes a few steps and sinks.
That my friends, about sums it all up. Very funny.
Stick your finger in me, Thomas. It is finished.
In the Name of the Rose, one of my favorite books, Emberto Eco tells this beautiful story about a Franciscan monk and a novice (played in the uneven late 80's movie version by Sean Connery and Christian Slater) who come to monastery where there's been foul play. The plot revolves around an newly discovered manuscript of Aristotle's ("The Philosopher," as Thomas Aquinas dubs him in the Summa) on laughter. The bad guys are bent on keeping this text from ever seeing the light, because the concept of laughter is so subversive to authority. They eventually kill almost everyone and burn the monastery down along with the book, because they can't handle a joke.
One of the characters (I think it's the arch-badguy, the abbot) makes the observation that in the Gospel Christ never laughs. He cries at the tomb of Lazarus..
(another funny story: "Lord, you're late! He's dead. You were supposed to come when we called you!" Open the tomb. "But he'll be stinky!" You still don't get it. Roll the stone away. They do it. Lazarus comes out dressed like a mummy.
That one had me silently belly laughing to in my pew when it was read at mass a couple weeks ago..)
He gets angry and whips the money changers like curs.
Lots of divine emotion gets expressed.
But no laughter.
Why? Because he's a straight comedian.
"I give them the sign of Jonas," he said.
And this is the thing: the Book of Jonah (like the Book of Job) is a comedy.
Go tell the people to repent, Jonah. "No. Stop bugging me." Jonah runs away, gets on a boat to Finisterra (the name of the end of land where Spain tapers out into the void just beyond Santiago de Compostelle), thinking he can hide from God. There's a storm, like that one on the Sea of Galilee. The sailors are terrified, so when Jonah confesses that God's out to get him, they throw him overboard and so calm the waves. Christ parodies this when he walks out onto the sea himself. Jonah is swallowed by Leviathan. He rests in the gut of a fish (the tomb of the sea) for three days..
(This is an inversion of when the fish leaps out of the Euphrates and Tobias grabs and eats it, then burns its liver to scare away Asmodeus from his beloved.. Or when Christ eats his last meal of grilled fish before he rises into heaven.. See how the symbols and the things signified, how all the referents proliferate? That's what a good comedy is all about..)
He gets spit up onto the beach, resurrected. He then grudgingly decides to obey God, and goes to preach repentance to the people of the great city (Ninevah, or Mosul- the capital of of what is now Southern or Kurdish Iraq, the northern twin of Baghdad, which is on the rivers of Babylon) whom he thinks are disgusting people not worthy of being pardoned. "I don't want to go preach forgiveness to those bastards. I want them to burn like Sodom and Gommorah did.." But he does it now anyway, because he didn't much enjoy being stuck in that fish. He preaches, and they all convert and put on sackcloth and ashes. A great revival. Billy Grahm's wet dream. The End.
It's out of control. And when the meaning dawns on you, you should laugh.
That's why fools who can't take a joke either think that the whole thing is contrived and "just a myth" or else run around saying that it's all "literally" true.
I hate the word literal. It's a nearly useless word that is its own deconstruction.
Our problem is that we need to control everything. We need to pretend we understand. We need to be right. Most of us are running around imposing our narratives on things, telling other people that they're wrong. Faith is parodied as a means of social control, of controlling our own insecurities.
Our tendency is to attempt to turn it all into a recipe for anathematizing and controlling other people..
("The Bible vs. Science," "Creation Science," nursing unhealthy obsessions with Darwin.. The Nazis, the eugenicists, militant atheists and the folks down at the Four Square Bible Church have got it all figured out, see.)
A means of categorizing and reducing or even annihilating the heretical other in all his scandal.
Grinding boots up Muslim asses, for example. Planting boots on their graves.
The irony of militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris writing book length screeds condemning the many horrific things people have done while proclaiming religious motives and justification, but then themselves advocating massive violence and terror against Muslims is a classical example of this..
An example so idiotic and shameless that it traumatizes my mind.
"The Inquisition means the Catholic Church is evil!"
This, immediately followed by "Muslims are evil, and I support the U.S. government's enhanced interrogation and rendition of terrorists, and Israeli and U.S. coalition violence against them!"
Like I say, no sense of irony. Very stupid.
They cannot see that they are doing much what the Nazis did to the Jews, or what the inquisitors in the violent aftermath of the wars that expelled the Muslims and Jews from Spain, did.
It's not that different. It's coming from the same place: rectitude, ideology as tribalism, annihilation of dissent.
Assassination, terror, and violence as censorship.
The other and his ideas are so threatening we must crush him politically or else kill him. Islam (or Judaism, or Catholicism, or jahaliyah - that's a favorite term among Salafist Muslims, it means pagan ignorance and decadence, all that is not Islam, or whatever) is so dangerous, we must eradicate it.
Shut up. You're wrong. If you don't shut up and do what I tell you, and believe what I tell you to believe, we will kill you.
My earlier posts about the "Left Behind" novels and the Grand Inquisitor are all meant to be driving at this same thesis.
When I put all these things up, I mean it to be read in full context. A context that is to me one of irony, parody and amusement.
Because death and evil are either a joke, or nothing's funny.
For what God does is almost always unexpected, you can't prepare your mind or body for the revelation. You can store up a year's worth of food in your basement, buy guns and ammo, vote Republican and try to keep America pure from whatever you think is evil and threatening, but in the end none of that will matter.
You can prepare your heart and soul, though.
One last joke:
Did you hear the one about that guy that stood up in a Podunk hick town synagogue a couple thousand years ago, pointed at the book of Isaiah and said “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing..”
Cymbal clash. Bada-bump.
Jews. They're pretty damn funny bunch. Always going for the best punchlines.
Blessed Holy Week, everyone. Let's keep one another in our prayers.
---
During Lent I've been going almost daily to mass, and reading the psalter.
One of the things that keeps on striking me lately, is how funny the Bible is.
He rides in on an ass. He's making fun of us, of our pretensions.
When the French took Damascus from the Turks in 1920, the commanding General Henri Gouraud rode his charger into the tomb of Saladin in the great Ummayad Mosque, dismounted and planted his boot on the "Sword of Religion's" (that's what Salah al-Din literally means in Arabic) grave and declared, "Réveilles-toi Saladin, nous sommes revenus. Ma présence ici consacre la victoire de la croix sur le croissant!"
Get up Saladin, we've returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent!
That's how we like to do it. Charge in on a warhorse, all glory, then crush the enemy's head and spit on his grave. Then consecrate it all in pride and vanity.
We like to put boots up asses, see. That's definitely the American way.
(I love how this video of Toby Keith's immortal poetical expression of that sentiment begins with the image of a puppy wrapped in a flag.. Irony is dead.)
But God rides in barefoot, on an ass. And then goes to the religious and political authorities and allows them to slaughter him. He takes the boot upon himself.
The Gospel - in fact the entire bible - is rife with such inversions as God coming in glory on a donkey.
He's always making the most unexpected entrances, and turning our expectations upside down.
He shows up as a baby, is worshiped by donkeys and gets put in a box for feeding grain to asses (called in English a manger, from the French "to eat.." Taste and see..)
(there's great iconography of the animals in the stable worshiping him..)
Then he goes up on a hillside by the sea of Galilee, and preaches the "Sermon on the Mount," which is where he parodies Moses, and reveals himself to be God. See the sidebar, I've posted the Beatitudes he taught there. These are the Christian answer to the Ten Commandments.
I think they're really funny. Blessed are the poor? Says who?
Jesus, that's who.
And he sat down to teach them. He did not stand in the presence of the Lord as a rabbi does proclaiming scripture in the synagogue, or Moses did coming off the mountain with the written word. He went up and sat.
I've been to the "Mount," it's actually a great grassy hillside right next to Lake Tiberius (also called the Sea of Galilee, but it's not much of a sea at all, actually).. When I stood on it, I laughed. Not at all like majestic solemn old Mount Sinai.
Not exactly what I'd expected. Very gentle. A good joke.
He calmed that sea one night when his disciples were stuck out fishing in the middle of a storm. They were terrified by the storm, then terrified that he'd calmed it. He walks out onto the lake, and calls to them to come to him. Peter (our dearly loved pope) hops out, takes a few steps and sinks.
That my friends, about sums it all up. Very funny.
Stick your finger in me, Thomas. It is finished.
In the Name of the Rose, one of my favorite books, Emberto Eco tells this beautiful story about a Franciscan monk and a novice (played in the uneven late 80's movie version by Sean Connery and Christian Slater) who come to monastery where there's been foul play. The plot revolves around an newly discovered manuscript of Aristotle's ("The Philosopher," as Thomas Aquinas dubs him in the Summa) on laughter. The bad guys are bent on keeping this text from ever seeing the light, because the concept of laughter is so subversive to authority. They eventually kill almost everyone and burn the monastery down along with the book, because they can't handle a joke.
One of the characters (I think it's the arch-badguy, the abbot) makes the observation that in the Gospel Christ never laughs. He cries at the tomb of Lazarus..
(another funny story: "Lord, you're late! He's dead. You were supposed to come when we called you!" Open the tomb. "But he'll be stinky!" You still don't get it. Roll the stone away. They do it. Lazarus comes out dressed like a mummy.
That one had me silently belly laughing to in my pew when it was read at mass a couple weeks ago..)
He gets angry and whips the money changers like curs.
Lots of divine emotion gets expressed.
But no laughter.
Why? Because he's a straight comedian.
"I give them the sign of Jonas," he said.
And this is the thing: the Book of Jonah (like the Book of Job) is a comedy.
Go tell the people to repent, Jonah. "No. Stop bugging me." Jonah runs away, gets on a boat to Finisterra (the name of the end of land where Spain tapers out into the void just beyond Santiago de Compostelle), thinking he can hide from God. There's a storm, like that one on the Sea of Galilee. The sailors are terrified, so when Jonah confesses that God's out to get him, they throw him overboard and so calm the waves. Christ parodies this when he walks out onto the sea himself. Jonah is swallowed by Leviathan. He rests in the gut of a fish (the tomb of the sea) for three days..
(This is an inversion of when the fish leaps out of the Euphrates and Tobias grabs and eats it, then burns its liver to scare away Asmodeus from his beloved.. Or when Christ eats his last meal of grilled fish before he rises into heaven.. See how the symbols and the things signified, how all the referents proliferate? That's what a good comedy is all about..)
He gets spit up onto the beach, resurrected. He then grudgingly decides to obey God, and goes to preach repentance to the people of the great city (Ninevah, or Mosul- the capital of of what is now Southern or Kurdish Iraq, the northern twin of Baghdad, which is on the rivers of Babylon) whom he thinks are disgusting people not worthy of being pardoned. "I don't want to go preach forgiveness to those bastards. I want them to burn like Sodom and Gommorah did.." But he does it now anyway, because he didn't much enjoy being stuck in that fish. He preaches, and they all convert and put on sackcloth and ashes. A great revival. Billy Grahm's wet dream. The End.
It's out of control. And when the meaning dawns on you, you should laugh.
That's why fools who can't take a joke either think that the whole thing is contrived and "just a myth" or else run around saying that it's all "literally" true.
I hate the word literal. It's a nearly useless word that is its own deconstruction.
Our problem is that we need to control everything. We need to pretend we understand. We need to be right. Most of us are running around imposing our narratives on things, telling other people that they're wrong. Faith is parodied as a means of social control, of controlling our own insecurities.
Our tendency is to attempt to turn it all into a recipe for anathematizing and controlling other people..
("The Bible vs. Science," "Creation Science," nursing unhealthy obsessions with Darwin.. The Nazis, the eugenicists, militant atheists and the folks down at the Four Square Bible Church have got it all figured out, see.)
A means of categorizing and reducing or even annihilating the heretical other in all his scandal.
Grinding boots up Muslim asses, for example. Planting boots on their graves.
The irony of militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris writing book length screeds condemning the many horrific things people have done while proclaiming religious motives and justification, but then themselves advocating massive violence and terror against Muslims is a classical example of this..
An example so idiotic and shameless that it traumatizes my mind.
"The Inquisition means the Catholic Church is evil!"
This, immediately followed by "Muslims are evil, and I support the U.S. government's enhanced interrogation and rendition of terrorists, and Israeli and U.S. coalition violence against them!"
Like I say, no sense of irony. Very stupid.
They cannot see that they are doing much what the Nazis did to the Jews, or what the inquisitors in the violent aftermath of the wars that expelled the Muslims and Jews from Spain, did.
It's not that different. It's coming from the same place: rectitude, ideology as tribalism, annihilation of dissent.
Assassination, terror, and violence as censorship.
The other and his ideas are so threatening we must crush him politically or else kill him. Islam (or Judaism, or Catholicism, or jahaliyah - that's a favorite term among Salafist Muslims, it means pagan ignorance and decadence, all that is not Islam, or whatever) is so dangerous, we must eradicate it.
Shut up. You're wrong. If you don't shut up and do what I tell you, and believe what I tell you to believe, we will kill you.
My earlier posts about the "Left Behind" novels and the Grand Inquisitor are all meant to be driving at this same thesis.
When I put all these things up, I mean it to be read in full context. A context that is to me one of irony, parody and amusement.
Because death and evil are either a joke, or nothing's funny.
For what God does is almost always unexpected, you can't prepare your mind or body for the revelation. You can store up a year's worth of food in your basement, buy guns and ammo, vote Republican and try to keep America pure from whatever you think is evil and threatening, but in the end none of that will matter.
You can prepare your heart and soul, though.
One last joke:
Did you hear the one about that guy that stood up in a Podunk hick town synagogue a couple thousand years ago, pointed at the book of Isaiah and said “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing..”
Cymbal clash. Bada-bump.
Jews. They're pretty damn funny bunch. Always going for the best punchlines.
Blessed Holy Week, everyone. Let's keep one another in our prayers.
---
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Fun with Charts & Graphs: Contextualization of U.S. National Taxation & Debt, c. 1920 thru Present [revised]
(Note: I've revised this post and added material about 4 hours after my initial posting - I want to be sure that the post is long enough to keep your attention..)
Happy Tax Day! Remember: The IRS Loves You, Baby.
Belated wishes, anyway. I meant to post this yesterday.
Still, in the spirit of the celebration (which properly speaking ought to be marked with an octave..) I present you all some pertinent charts, mostly from this excellent site: Visualizing Economics.
As always, you may click on the images to expand them.
First item, a chart of the top marginal rates of the three major sorts of U.S. Federal income taxes - personal income, corporate income and capital gains (tax on investment gains) taxes - since 1910:
This all is still only a snapshot, there's of course much more to the overall story, such as questions concerning the percentages of the lower brackets, the adjusted dollar benchmarks for all brackets, as well as issues such as tax shelters and deductions and other complications in the code cannot that be crammed into one or any graph.. So it's all more complex than this graph can represent.
The graph "Lower Taxes for the Highest Earners" below and this explanation of the chart from the Visualizing Economics website explicate those complications a bit:
Green line is the top marginal rate for married couples filing jointly (most years dividends were tax like ordinary income until 2003), orange is the top rate for income from capital gains. The top corporate tax rate is included for comparison. Your marginal tax rate is the rate you pay on the “last dollar” you earn; but when you view the taxes you paid as a percentage of your income, your effective tax rate is less than your marginal rate, especially after you take into account the deductions and exemptions, i.e. income that is not subject to any tax.
Over the years, changing the amount of taxes people pay was accomplished not just by changing rates but by changing the income limits of the tax brackets. Just looking at the top rates does not give the whole picture about who is paying taxes. Before the 1986 tax reform, the income tax had 15 brackets. In the 1930s, there were more than 50. The Wealth Tax Act of 1935, applied the top rate to income over $5 million and had only a single taxpayer: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. As the number of tax brackets decrease, the the top rate was applied to more people over the decades. Since 1987 the income tax brackets were combined so now more than a million people “qualify” for the top marginal rate. If you are interested here is the first 1040 form for 1913.
The main thing to note is how the top marginal personal and corporate income taxes were *much* higher in the booming 40's & 50's through to the Reagan "Supply Side" Tax Break Revolution 1981.
The top marginal bracket peaked in the mid 90's and then settled at 90% from the early 50's until 1964. Those were the tax rates during the most expansive economic boom in human history, in the richest country in the world.
Here are two charts that put us into an international context:
First, an international comparison of both corporate and personal income tax rates:
Notice that the United States has relatively high corporate taxes, and low personal income taxes in international terms.
Next, I give you a narrower international comparison of the percentage of the GDP (tax-to-GDP ratio) taken by governments in tax revenue:
Today, Denmark is the most taxed country in the world with a tax-to-GDP ratio of only 48.9%. While as you see here, the U.S. tax-to-GDP ratio hovers in the low to mid 20 percentiles.
Comparatively, amongst first world nations, the United States takes a very low percentage of GDP as taxes..
Interestingly, I found this graph which says that Danes report being the happiest people on earth, somewhat happier than Americans, despite making less and being taxed more:
They also report being equally happy, rich or poor, which is atypical.
Now, take that very first chart of American income tax history above, and compare it with these next two showing the national debt explosion over the same time period:
Some observations:
We now are at a similar level of debt in comparison to our GDP as we held during WW II.
Also, there seems to be some odd correlation between cutting taxes and our exploding debt.
Note 1981, which is the year of Reagan's tax reform. The debt explosion began there, briefly improves under Clinton and the economic boom of the late 90's, and then explodes again under Bush and then Obama.
Can anyone say "voodoo economics" or supply side catastrophe? Can you say trillions of dollars blown into the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan?
I knew you could.
Here's another interesting chart, showing a graph of the percentage of capital gains as a percentage of all national income against a chart of federal budget surpluses and deficits by year:
Note here how the late 90's surge in investment income (the tech bubble) corresponded with a series of Federal Budget surpluses under Clinton, but that the housing bubble surge under Bush did not.
This next chart gives a bit of perspective on the issue of tax brackets, lacking in the very first chart:
Notice how the income tax is still hugely regressive, in that the people making tens of millions (the upper 1%) pay less than 40% (and still can shelter much of that), while the lowest earners making tens of thousands still pay over ten percent..
Wikipedia has some interesting data on poverty in the United States, saying that it's cyclical in nature with roughly 13 to 17% of Americans living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span. Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. Approximately 43.6 (14.3%) million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. Also note, and to put all of this into further context, that the poverty threshold in the United Sates in 2009 for a single person under 65 was US$11,161; the threshold for a family group of four, including two children, was US$21,756.
This last graph shows how that compares to poverty internationally:
Blue is good, yellow and orange not so much, red is very bad.
National estimates are based on population-weighted subgroup estimates from household surveys. Definitions of the poverty line may vary considerably among nations. For example, rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations. Thus, the numbers are not comparable among countries.
The common international poverty line has in the past been roughly US$1 a day. In 2008, the World Bank came out with a revised figure of US$1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity..
Try driving your SUV to the McDonald's drive trough on $1.25 a day. You could fill the tank maybe half full once a month in the few before the repo men come, and starve.. Or else walk, and then when you got there you'd be able to buy one item off the dollar menu.
Accentuate the positive, you'd burn off flab.
But that's just a fantasy. You make US$8.50 an hour at Walmart. And you can still get a plum job at the U.S. Post Office, so no worries! They start you at $19 an hour and the median pay is well above that! You'll get benefits and a Federal pension too!
So cheer up my fellow Americans! Don't be glum! Life isn't so bad! Not when you can afford to send a check for thousands of dollars to the IRS to do your part in helping bail out Wall Street and pay bankers their well deserved bonuses! And still own a car and shop at an American supermarket and eat out once in a while..
I close with a really funny set of maps. These demonstrate in yet another way how weird our politics are. I'm going to use the first graphic again later, because I have another post in mind that will discuss how warped people's voting is, in terms of how their ideological discourse and voting habits often diverge from their economic interests.
Click to enlarge and read it:
The two maps are a bit confusing. Look at the chart at the bottom of the graphic that gives the proportion of taxes paid to benefits received. Then compare it with this map, the electoral results for the last (2008) presidential election, red states McCain, Blue Obama:
See the joke? States that voted for McCain and the Republican line (lie) of smaller government and forever lower taxes almost all get a much greater return on their tax input than do most states state that voted for Obama and "socialism."
New Mexico, which gets the highest return per dollar sent (2 to 1) hung in the balance and I think had a recount, so it's a near exception. My home state Maine, is a clear exception - voted Obama, and get the cash for our vote. We also have two of the most powerful - moderate female Republican - senators in the country, Collins and Snowe, whom I bet account for much of that money in pork.. Most of the other exceptions who voted for Obama and get slightly over parity on their return for the tax dollar (e.g. Iowa, Pennsylvania, Missouri) are close calls electorally and have recently been skewing Republican.
I think the overall pattern can be explained by senators from small states getting the goods for their constituents, ideological blather aside. They have much more influence per taxpayer head than senators from large, and they use it. Texas you'll notice is also an outlier, but has 24 million people for its 2 senators. Maine has 1.25 million for its 2. This disparity in the senate favors states with small (and incidentally mostly rural - look at the federal farm bill for a graphic demonstration of this effecting federal cash flow) constituencies.. That's the raw brutal math.
This disparity amuses me immensely. The banker and bubba both howl against "socialism" and then take the taxpayer to the cleaners with a crowbar up side the head.
God bless America. Land that I love.
The American dream's still alive. Yippee kay yay, eh?
---
Happy Tax Day! Remember: The IRS Loves You, Baby.
Belated wishes, anyway. I meant to post this yesterday.
Still, in the spirit of the celebration (which properly speaking ought to be marked with an octave..) I present you all some pertinent charts, mostly from this excellent site: Visualizing Economics.
As always, you may click on the images to expand them.
First item, a chart of the top marginal rates of the three major sorts of U.S. Federal income taxes - personal income, corporate income and capital gains (tax on investment gains) taxes - since 1910:
This all is still only a snapshot, there's of course much more to the overall story, such as questions concerning the percentages of the lower brackets, the adjusted dollar benchmarks for all brackets, as well as issues such as tax shelters and deductions and other complications in the code cannot that be crammed into one or any graph.. So it's all more complex than this graph can represent.
The graph "Lower Taxes for the Highest Earners" below and this explanation of the chart from the Visualizing Economics website explicate those complications a bit:
Green line is the top marginal rate for married couples filing jointly (most years dividends were tax like ordinary income until 2003), orange is the top rate for income from capital gains. The top corporate tax rate is included for comparison. Your marginal tax rate is the rate you pay on the “last dollar” you earn; but when you view the taxes you paid as a percentage of your income, your effective tax rate is less than your marginal rate, especially after you take into account the deductions and exemptions, i.e. income that is not subject to any tax.
Over the years, changing the amount of taxes people pay was accomplished not just by changing rates but by changing the income limits of the tax brackets. Just looking at the top rates does not give the whole picture about who is paying taxes. Before the 1986 tax reform, the income tax had 15 brackets. In the 1930s, there were more than 50. The Wealth Tax Act of 1935, applied the top rate to income over $5 million and had only a single taxpayer: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. As the number of tax brackets decrease, the the top rate was applied to more people over the decades. Since 1987 the income tax brackets were combined so now more than a million people “qualify” for the top marginal rate. If you are interested here is the first 1040 form for 1913.
The main thing to note is how the top marginal personal and corporate income taxes were *much* higher in the booming 40's & 50's through to the Reagan "Supply Side" Tax Break Revolution 1981.
The top marginal bracket peaked in the mid 90's and then settled at 90% from the early 50's until 1964. Those were the tax rates during the most expansive economic boom in human history, in the richest country in the world.
Here are two charts that put us into an international context:
First, an international comparison of both corporate and personal income tax rates:
Notice that the United States has relatively high corporate taxes, and low personal income taxes in international terms.
Next, I give you a narrower international comparison of the percentage of the GDP (tax-to-GDP ratio) taken by governments in tax revenue:
Today, Denmark is the most taxed country in the world with a tax-to-GDP ratio of only 48.9%. While as you see here, the U.S. tax-to-GDP ratio hovers in the low to mid 20 percentiles.
Comparatively, amongst first world nations, the United States takes a very low percentage of GDP as taxes..
Interestingly, I found this graph which says that Danes report being the happiest people on earth, somewhat happier than Americans, despite making less and being taxed more:
They also report being equally happy, rich or poor, which is atypical.
Now, take that very first chart of American income tax history above, and compare it with these next two showing the national debt explosion over the same time period:
Some observations:
We now are at a similar level of debt in comparison to our GDP as we held during WW II.
Also, there seems to be some odd correlation between cutting taxes and our exploding debt.
Note 1981, which is the year of Reagan's tax reform. The debt explosion began there, briefly improves under Clinton and the economic boom of the late 90's, and then explodes again under Bush and then Obama.
Can anyone say "voodoo economics" or supply side catastrophe? Can you say trillions of dollars blown into the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan?
I knew you could.
Here's another interesting chart, showing a graph of the percentage of capital gains as a percentage of all national income against a chart of federal budget surpluses and deficits by year:
Note here how the late 90's surge in investment income (the tech bubble) corresponded with a series of Federal Budget surpluses under Clinton, but that the housing bubble surge under Bush did not.
This next chart gives a bit of perspective on the issue of tax brackets, lacking in the very first chart:
Notice how the income tax is still hugely regressive, in that the people making tens of millions (the upper 1%) pay less than 40% (and still can shelter much of that), while the lowest earners making tens of thousands still pay over ten percent..
Wikipedia has some interesting data on poverty in the United States, saying that it's cyclical in nature with roughly 13 to 17% of Americans living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span. Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. Approximately 43.6 (14.3%) million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. Also note, and to put all of this into further context, that the poverty threshold in the United Sates in 2009 for a single person under 65 was US$11,161; the threshold for a family group of four, including two children, was US$21,756.
This last graph shows how that compares to poverty internationally:
Blue is good, yellow and orange not so much, red is very bad.
National estimates are based on population-weighted subgroup estimates from household surveys. Definitions of the poverty line may vary considerably among nations. For example, rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations. Thus, the numbers are not comparable among countries.
The common international poverty line has in the past been roughly US$1 a day. In 2008, the World Bank came out with a revised figure of US$1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity..
Try driving your SUV to the McDonald's drive trough on $1.25 a day. You could fill the tank maybe half full once a month in the few before the repo men come, and starve.. Or else walk, and then when you got there you'd be able to buy one item off the dollar menu.
Accentuate the positive, you'd burn off flab.
But that's just a fantasy. You make US$8.50 an hour at Walmart. And you can still get a plum job at the U.S. Post Office, so no worries! They start you at $19 an hour and the median pay is well above that! You'll get benefits and a Federal pension too!
So cheer up my fellow Americans! Don't be glum! Life isn't so bad! Not when you can afford to send a check for thousands of dollars to the IRS to do your part in helping bail out Wall Street and pay bankers their well deserved bonuses! And still own a car and shop at an American supermarket and eat out once in a while..
I close with a really funny set of maps. These demonstrate in yet another way how weird our politics are. I'm going to use the first graphic again later, because I have another post in mind that will discuss how warped people's voting is, in terms of how their ideological discourse and voting habits often diverge from their economic interests.
Click to enlarge and read it:
The two maps are a bit confusing. Look at the chart at the bottom of the graphic that gives the proportion of taxes paid to benefits received. Then compare it with this map, the electoral results for the last (2008) presidential election, red states McCain, Blue Obama:
See the joke? States that voted for McCain and the Republican line (lie) of smaller government and forever lower taxes almost all get a much greater return on their tax input than do most states state that voted for Obama and "socialism."
New Mexico, which gets the highest return per dollar sent (2 to 1) hung in the balance and I think had a recount, so it's a near exception. My home state Maine, is a clear exception - voted Obama, and get the cash for our vote. We also have two of the most powerful - moderate female Republican - senators in the country, Collins and Snowe, whom I bet account for much of that money in pork.. Most of the other exceptions who voted for Obama and get slightly over parity on their return for the tax dollar (e.g. Iowa, Pennsylvania, Missouri) are close calls electorally and have recently been skewing Republican.
I think the overall pattern can be explained by senators from small states getting the goods for their constituents, ideological blather aside. They have much more influence per taxpayer head than senators from large, and they use it. Texas you'll notice is also an outlier, but has 24 million people for its 2 senators. Maine has 1.25 million for its 2. This disparity in the senate favors states with small (and incidentally mostly rural - look at the federal farm bill for a graphic demonstration of this effecting federal cash flow) constituencies.. That's the raw brutal math.
This disparity amuses me immensely. The banker and bubba both howl against "socialism" and then take the taxpayer to the cleaners with a crowbar up side the head.
God bless America. Land that I love.
The American dream's still alive. Yippee kay yay, eh?
---
Thursday, April 14, 2011
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