Here Is Our Tiny Infant in His Swaddling Clothes

Like Betty Duffy, I have been reading Edwin O'Connor's novel, The Edge of Sadness. In fact, after several tedious false starts, I began and finished it while Helier was in the hospital;  it was something to look at other than Nick, Jr., on the television overhead, which was what kept Helier in bed and anchored to his various tubes and cords for two days straight.

It is the kind of quiet, meditative novel I most love, in a class with the much-shorter but equally penetrating A Month in the Country, by the English writer J.L. Carr. In both novels, the protagonist-speaker is an introvert, wounded in some way -- Carr's restorer of medieval doom paintings by war and the desertion of his wife, O'Connor's parish priest by death and alcohol -- who seeks to wrap himself in solitude, thinking that therein lies survival, if not actual healing.

Father Hugh Kennedy, the precariously-recovered alcoholic, has returned from four years' rehabilitation in the Southwestern desert to the parish of Old Saint Paul's, a down-at-heel pile in an even downer-at-heel section of Boston, at an enormous remove from the comfortable, familiar, prosperous Irish-Catholic-Boston world in which he once circulated. Baptised, as it were, into suffering by the death of his father, driven (as much by the Bishop as by the Spirit, though they may amount to the same thing) into the desert, then recalled to ministry, Fr. Hugh returns slowly, reluctantly, to life. The temptation of drink he finds easy enough to resist;  on the other hand, the temptation to dwell in a kind of between place, neither dead nor entirely engaged with the living, masters him with such powerful subtlety that it is not until late in the novel, when a friend accuses him of withholding himself from his parish, that he even realizes that he has succumbed to it. It is this self-realization which breaks him open, as a cast is broken from a mended limb, and enables him both to turn his back on old ambitions and accept, with certainty and hard-won happiness, the life and the vocation which he has been handed.

There's a lot to say about this novel, and I hope Betty is going to pick up the conversation. I'm eager to hear her thoughts. Meanwhile, what I'd like to talk about now may seem like something of a sideline. While Fr. Hugh is undeniably the novel's protagonist and the lens through which we view the world he moves through, I want to think about a character who appears minor -- certainly Fr. Hugh regards him, initially, as a minor character in his own drama -- but who in the course of the novel, while not changing himself in any fundamental way, transcends the role of comic foil to which Fr. Hugh has consigned him.

Fr. Stanley Danowski, the curate:  twenty-five years old, ponderous in person and in expression, a caricature so easy it almost writes itself. Here he is, in a Christmas homily to a handful of communicants, many of whom, like the perpetually-enrapt Mr. Yee, understand no English:

I beg of you, my beloved people, to try to conjure up in your minds the joyous feelings of that great occasion. Recall, I beseech you, your own most pleasant sentiments when, in the bosom of your own home, you have perhaps gazed fondly down upon a small crib, and have remarked proudly to your good spouse, "Well, here is our tiny infant in his swaddling clothes . . . "

There is something perfect in the ridiculousness of this delivery. But it occurs late in the novel, and though Fr. Danowski himself remains static from beginning to end, Fr. Hugh's own vision is beginning to clear.  "The style was familiar," he muses, watching Fr. Danowski from the rear of the church, "It was vintage Danowski."

And yet for once I didn't smile, because as I looked around the church and saw all the people who had come here this morning, I knew that it all had very little to do with me, and that the credit for whatever change there was belonged almost entirely to this broad, bustling, zealous, slightly ridiculous boy, of whom it was always so easy to make fun . . .

This little scene is the prelude for a revelation, the epiphany -- if that's not mixing metaphors too much -- of the goodness of  Fr.  Danowski.  When he appears early in the novel, it is as a buffoon;  Fr. Hugh regards him as, simultaneously, a bit of private comic relief and a benign species of millstone, part of his drowning in obscurity, there in his hopeless parish. But as we and Fr. Hugh come to realize, not only has Fr. Danowski breathed life into the parish by loving its people, but in imitation of that "tiny infant in his swaddling clothes," he sacrifices his own happiness on Christmas Day so that Fr. Hugh will not have to be alone. At their shared dinner in the rectory, Fr. Danowski recalls the humiliations he has endured on his road to the priesthood:

[The seminary] was of course very hard for me, as I have just said, and sometimes the fellows who were there as my classmates would play pranks upon me. For example, Father, there is what is known as 'the apple-pie bed.' In which the sheets are short. So that one is unable to retire properly . . .

"Yes, yes, I know," responds Fr. Hugh inwardly.

. . . Does my curate ever suspect that I am his fellow countryman? From time to time he courteously interprets for me American customs and traditions, much as if I were a visitor from some distant land and ancient times:  a courier, perhaps, from the court of Kubla Khan . . .

What Fr. Hugh is shortly to stumble on is that he has, in fact,  been an emissary from the enormous distance of himself:  detached, unengaged, profoundly self-protective and selfish in his non-dealings with the people around him, the sheep of his pasture. He catches Fr. Danowski interpreting not only the familiar world, but also the lives of these people whom he himself has not bothered to know, in such a way as to protect Fr. Hugh's own fragile dignity. "Surely you know, Father . . . " "You will remember, Father . . . "

As his vision clears, Fr. Hugh regards the pathetic spectacle of himself;  conversely, in his eyes and ours, the pathetic one-note spectacle of Fr. Danowski puts on flesh, is incarnated in the imagination as a human being at once utterly humble and utterly motivated by love and mercy. The personage who in another of my favorite speeches dresses down the excitable, unreliable sexton who thinks that he has killed a man by looking at him --

Come come, Roy . . . That is not quite normal talk. We do not live in medieval times in these days. We do not believe we can look at a man and he dies. That is nonsensical, Roy. That is weird. If you go around talking like that, do you know what people will say of you? They will say, "Why, Roy is quite a foolish person!" Do you wish people to say this of you, Roy?

-- also spends hours each week in ardent letter-writing, the correspondence of deep friendship, with the very priests who as seminarians tormented him with "what is known as the 'apple-pie bed.'" He is the personification, in other words, of forgiveness, of charity.

I have also been reading, by the by, another book entitled Deep Conversion/Deep Prayer, whose author, Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M., meditates on the oddness of Jesus' injunction, in Mark 1:15, to "Be converted, and hear the Gospel." As Fr. Dubay points out, the logical progression of events would seem to be that one would first hear the Gospel, and then be converted by it. But, he argues, the reality is that the ears of the heart must first be opened, so that the good news can be heard.

So, it seems to me, the unavoidable presence of Fr. Danowski works on Fr. Hugh:  he comes to see in Fr. Danowski the person he is not. As an other, Fr. Danowski provides Fr. Hugh with a comfortable, ironic sense of superiority. But as the novel progresses, Fr. Hugh's eyes are opened, his ears made to hear;  he is converted;  he sees and hears the truth of what he is not, and also of what he can be, if he will.

There's much more to be said about this novel, but it seems to me that this relationship, of all the web of relationships which drive the narrative, lies at its heart. It's this relationship which, though the curate's utterances and his pastor's wry inward commentary on them are frequently hilarious, in the end moved me to tears. Because frankly, it is a novel about the sort of person I am myself:  an introvert, a protector of the self, the sort of person who's often only half-present in a situation, watching it while private thoughts unspool themselves like a filmed autobiography more real than the concrete world. It is at this that the bumbling tendentious character of Fr. Danowski strikes -- and he strikes with such ineffable love.

In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle

. . . the lion trick-or-treats tonight.

An Afternoon of Sun and Preparations

Our town has chosen -- and when I say "our town has chosen," I really don't know whom I mean or how this decision came to pass -- to trick-or-treat tonight instead of tomorrow. I don't even know how I know this, but I do. It's a knowledge validated by remarks on the part of cashiers in the various grocery stores we have visited today, to wit:  "Are you going trickertreating tonight, honey?" Crispina, who was wearing her "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" costume to run errands, would answer winsomely that yes, in fact she is, thank you.

One checkout lady asked us to guess what her costume was. She wore a sort of metallic-blue cowboy hat with numbers on it, and a t-shirt with more numbers stencilled on it. 

Crispina, through the braided-yarn locks of her lion's-mane headdress, studied the woman carefully. "A counting person," she said at last.

"Close!" the lady crowed. "I'm a person you can count on!"

This is what I like about Halloween:  there's not another time that I can think of when by consensus people go about in public in costume, and while sometimes the costumes people go about in aren't the kind I would choose, for myself or anyone else, often enough they're clever in the kind of innocent way that's really funny, and I wish I'd thought of them. Epiphany has gone for the concept costume in years past, dressing up as odd socks, for example. Once she went to a party dressed as A Party, with a balloon headdress and a "Happy Birthday" banner strung across her front like a beauty-contestant's sash. And then there's Crispina and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

While the younger children trick-or-treat with friends, the teenagers are having a party. I'm not sure how many teenagers are coming to my house;  the projected number seems to fluctuate between four and about twenty. As I write this, Epiphany is laboring in the kitchen over a batch of German spice cookies in the shape of pumpkins. We're also having nachos and green jello, because there's something vaguely Halloweeny about green jello, apparently.

The plan is to have a guys-vs-girls pumpkin-carving contest, though we almost had to can that idea (so to speak) for lack of pumpkins. All the grocery stores we visited were sold out already, but there's a Methodist Church over the bridge in Spiny Shoals that sells them every year -- from late September to now, their front lawn is carpeted with pumpkins -- and they weren't sold out yet, so we're good on that score.

There's also the possibility of swing-dancing on the front porch. And, while I couldn't find a pumpkin on my initial peregrinations about town, I did find a small fire-bowl on sale at what was to me an irresistible price. I've been wanting a fire-bowl for years, so now we have one, all set up in the back yard with chairs around it, so the teenagers and others can sit outside and make s'mores under what we can see of the stars, here in the Greater Metropolitan Fiat Area.

Tomorrow, on the actual date of Halloween, the St. Dymphna's Annual Parish All Saints Party takes place. My children look forward to this event with at least as much excitement as they muster for Halloween:  another set of costumes to make and personae to adopt, another kind of brush with the mystery which seems to encroach on us with the early darkness, even on ordinary fall afternoons.

On All Saints, Epiphany's going to play Saint Dymphna in a sort of tableau-cum-catacomb affair which our DRE has dreamed up, and which will have children crawling through "tunnels" under tables in the hall between the faith-formation classrooms, to emerge into a new saint-scene in each classoom.

Crispina's going as the Blessed Virgin Mary, Helier as Saint Martin of Tours, and Amicus as . . . To Be Announced.  I also need to think of some saint to be. The past two years I've been Saint Helena, a role which more or less announces itself to the mature non-virgin-martyr-type woman, but I do get tired of hauling the big wooden cross around the crowded social hall and trying not to whack people with it every time I turn around.

Here, by the way, is Epiphany's cookie recipe, which comes from the Usborne Little Round the World Cookbook, though she's modified it somewhat (mainly she uses less honey;  they are better when they aren't super-sweet):

Lebkuchen

1 egg
1/4 c honey
1/4 c butter
1/4 c soft brown sugar
1 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp cocoa powder
1 tsp mixed spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, clove)
1/3 c powdered sugar
1 TB lemon juice

food coloring to color icing

1. Grease baking sheet. Separate egg. Put yolk in bowl and discard white.

2. preheat oven to 400 (I think. The recipe doesn't actually say.) Stir honey, butter and sugar together in pan over low heat until butter is melted.

3. sift flour, baking powder, cocoa, ginger and spices into bowl. Add egg yolk.

4. mix in wet ingredients -- butter, sugar, honey, and squeeze dough into a ball with your hands.

5. roll out dough to 1/4" thickness and cut with cookie cutters. Put on baking sheet and bake for seven to eight minutes.

6. Sift powdered sugar into a bowl and mix in lemon juice. Stir together to make icing, which can be colored with food coloring as desired. When cookies have cooled, decorate them with icing piped from an icing bag.

These are excellent, delicious cookies -- I haven't made them myself, but Epiphany has been making them at least once a week since she came back from Germany a little over a month ago, and they turn out beautifully every time. I think the cookbook from which we got this recipe is out of print, but you can find a very similar one here, if you're interested (in the interest of full disclosure, that's my Usborne website). 

Off now to watch a video on face-painting which came with a kit we got . . . or maybe I'll just go outside and sit by the firepit in the sunshine and wait for night to fall.

Settled Weather

Well, it's more settled than it was the other day, anyway. The sky has cleared, the wind is cool again with a seasonally-appropriate bite, and Helier has come home from the hospital with a shiny new official asthma diagnosis and lots of prescriptions and plastic tubing to go with it. We have watched untold hours of Nick, Jr, in the last two days;  he has also been pumped full of albuterol and prednisone, which make his heart race and his mood not so settled, despite the tranquility of the weather.

Still, it's good to be home. I don't have anything more to say than that.

Unsettled Weather

The upper midwest has been pummeled by storms lately, and here things feel a little strange. The air, which has held its October apple-crispness for several weeks now, suddenly sags with humidity under a dyspeptic sky. It rains, then it doesn't. Whenever it's not raining, we have a general resurrection of gnats and mosquitoes. When it is raining, the dog hides under the table. The trees flame on the hillsides, but the grass is pond-scum green.

I wouldn't be worried about all this, except that Amicus and my brother went off in the morning with plans to paddle the Tuckaseegee River, then camp overnight in the Nantahala Gorge and run a stretch of that river tomorrow. When my brother called, around lunchtime, to say that he'd left his cooler full of lunch in the kitchen here, and would I please bring it to Black Mountain tomorrow afternoon to hand off in exchange for Amicus, he reported that they'd driven through heavy rain on the way to the river, but that it had cleared off. On my end of the line, the sun was shining. Now, as the clouds come roiling in again, I'm not exactly worried about them, but I think they may be in for an interesting night.

Meanwhile, Helier's sick again with the kind of chest congestion that's sent us to the emergency room before. We give him an inhaler hit;  he's fine. Thirty minutes later, he's not fine. The worst thing about the not-fine-ness is that it scares him, which scares me. Not that being able to hear somebody wheezing across the room wouldn't scare me in and of itself, but the wide-eyed look he gets, when he thinks his chest wall is caving in with every breath, does transmit itself with remarkable clarity to concerned others. We went to the doctor, who gave him a nebulizer treatment, then told me that a nebulizer treatment is, essentially, equivalent to twenty doses of an albuterol inhaler. So if he started to wheeze again, I should not hesitate to disregard the instructions on the inhaler, but just give him as many puffs as he needed to be able to breathe.

Ah, there goes a little mutter of thunder. The dog, who's been asleep on the rug here, just snapped to attention, ears alerted. The green light filling the window has turned suddenly dark,  night falling because somebody flipped the "off" switch. I'm supposed to go out for choir practice in an hour, when Aelred and Epiphany get home from Mass, but am feeling disinclined, as if somebody had flipped an "off" switch in me, too.

I'm all too ready with that "off" switch lately, it occurs to me;  is there something dysfunctional in the level of relief I feel when I'm prevented from doing something with other people, even when I like the people, and the thing I'm supposed to do with them is something I like to do? Or is it a function -- a function, mind you, not a dysfunction -- of being an introvert who's rarely ever alone?

Lately my confessions have been full of anger. That is, I'm not angry to be going to Confession -- it's a relief like nothing else, let me tell you -- but anger has been my recent theme. It's not full-boil, I-hate-this-person-and-wish-he-were-dead anger, but that kind of simmering, sniveling, sulky, petty, martyred, I'm-scrubbing-the-toilet-and-what-are-YOU-doing anger which is as destructive in its own underhanded way as outright hatred.

And what my confessor says to me, time and again, in his quiet way, is, "Well, you can't give what you don't have." In other words, if I'm running continually on hot, it's because . . . damn, I hate these tidy little metaphors, but the radiator is empty, okay? I'm running on a deficit of prayer, a deficit of quiet, a deficit of contemplation. It's true, of course, and what's also embarrassingly true is that I haven't yet followed his excellent and oh-so-simple counsel, which was to sit in the church for an hour or two before the Blessed Sacrament, and pray and read and write.

Anonymity, as I've said before, is a bit of a charade in these confessions, and the write part of my confessor's advice wasn't accidental, I'm sure. Though I have thought of writing as prayer, I hadn't thought before of making it part of a Holy Hour (or two or three, if I could manage it). On the other hand, the thought has occasionally crossed my mind that the life of a cloistered contemplative would be very satisfying:  silence, formal prayer, thinking, looking at the sky, and writing, all of it under the rubric of contemplation.

But, well, what I've been called to is this, right here and now -- otherwise I would be somewhere else. And the truth also is that this life is deeply satisfying and happy and beautiful to me, and I would not trade it. It is beautiful, in fact,  as the sky is beautiful, even riven by storms.

UPDATE:  When I came home from choir around eight this evening, Helier's breathing was labored again, and Aelred decided to take him not to our local emergency room but to the Children's Hospital in Charlotte. He just called -- it's about one a.m. now -- to say that after several breathing treatments H. was much improved but not enough to make the doctors happy, so they're keeping him, and A. is staying with him. The rest of us will be making a field trip to Charlotte in the morning.

Unsettled weather indeed.

That Was Not My Child Who Pulled the Smoke Alarm

Really it wasn't. We're years past that now. But it was the child of the other mother at the science museum today, and after we'd all piled outside, all seven of us, maybe, plus the guy behind the desk whom the other mother had been plying with questions when the alarm went off, those kids made friends with my kids, to the tune of offering to buy them things in the gift shop -- we exist to give other people the chance to be generous, apparently -- and we all trooped together into the other building, where no fire had not been going on, if you follow me, and spent roughly an hour patting sharks.

Could have been a worse day, all in all. You?

How to Make Thirty-Six Second Graders Listen to You

Tell them that if they do,  at the end of class you'll let them turn off the lights to see the rosaries glow in the dark.

Just wait:  I could yet turn out to be a repository of pedagogical wisdom.

Wrens and Woodstoves

The other day Helier and Crispina found a wren on the little brick patio outside our back porch. He was sitting quietly next to the wall with his eyes shut, probably to block out the vision of Helier and Crispina looming over him. They called me to come and see;  when I knelt and scooped him up in my hands, he didn't protest -- strikingly odd behavior for a wren --  but perched calmly on my finger.

Wrens invade our back porch on a regular basis. It's really more of a mudroom than a useable porch, qua porch, with windows and a storm door that's almost never shut, besides which now the bottom panel has fallen out, so that even when it's shut, it's really not. The dog can go in and out, and so can the wrens. They like the back porch because that's where the careless lady of the house keeps the basket of sunflower seeds she harvested last year, from which she grew this year's sunflowers, whose seeds she did not harvest because the squirrels got them first. The wrens she does not mind so much:  though they are thieves, they are not vandals.

This wren on my finger seemed basically unhurt, just disoriented. We theorized that he had tried to take a shortcut into the porch, through the window, which was shut, and that he was lucky not to have broken his neck. Helier and Crispina were all for keeping him forever and ever, because after all, a wren is one pet we have never yet had, but I persuaded them instead to fetch a box from the garage, line it with some rags, and scatter a little sunflower seed in one corner, because I happen to know that wrens like sunflower seeds.

We were on our way out for the afternoon, so we left the wren thus situated, in his open box on the nature table in the back porch, with the door standing open. I figured that when we came back, he would be either recovered and gone, or dead. Although by the time we actually left he was looking much brighter, my secret conviction was that we would find him in the latter condition upon our return.

Imagine our delight on encountering, that evening, the empty box. Later Aelred said that he had discovered another wren in the porch -- a much bigger wren than our original one, he kept insisting, though I don't know how it could have been, and still been a wren -- and that it had hopped onto his finger and let him take it outside, where it had flown away with every appearance of health and happiness. And why shouldn't it have, if it was another wren, coincidentally loitering in our porch? But then, the world is full of mystery.

Meanwhile, though the days have been bright and warm, the nights are turning chilly. I've put extra blankets on all the beds and begun the yearly litany:  put on a sweater. put on some socks. have some oatmeal and stand next to the oven. All this, naturally, is code for I'm not turning the heat on before Halloween;  get over it. 

We've lived in this house for over two years now, and if there's one thing we've learned, it's that when it's not hot, it's cold. In fact, our house is a textbook case of energy-inefficiency. We have, for example, roughly four thousand windows, which were a chief reason for buying the house in the first place -- light! beauty! joy! -- especially because in our transports of homecomingness we neglected to notice that even some of the ones that aren't disintegrating and do have storm windows have storm windows with warped aluminum frames from which the glass is engaged in the stealthy process of separation. Also, even with weatherstripping, you can still kind of see daylight around the front door when it's shut, if you look carefully. These are the things I can think of off the top of my head, anyway. I'm sure there are more.

The home inspector, to his credit, gave us a list of reasons why this house would be a nightmare to heat and cool, but we ignored him and here we are, happy, but also contemplating with dread the coming season, when if we shut the door between the living room and the hall, and the french doors between the living room and the dining room, we can just about maintain a constant temperature of sixty-five degrees in the back of the house -- last winter I refused to turn the thermostat up any higher, and people are still talking about it -- while the living room and sunroom, where otherwise we all like to spend time, remain an invigorating fortyish. At Christmas we drag out the oil-filled radiators, plug them in and crank them up, so that we can huddle around the tree and the stockings with something like comfort and joy. And then we get the electric bill and go back to huddling around the oven in the kitchen instead.

So, partly because the government is offering these energy-efficiency tax credits, and partly because the season is bearing down upon us (yes, yes, we live in the South, and compared to people in Minnesota we don't have that much of a season, but it feels like a season to us), Aelred and I have been discussing steps we might take to ensure that all winters for the rest of our life don't feel quite so cold as the last two have felt. At some point we are going to have to replace some windows;  I anticipate that we'll be giving each other a window for Christmas every year for about a decade. But that's an awfully slow-motion process for keeping heat in the house, and we've begun to think that it might be nice to experience some heat, say, this year.

Enter the idea of the woodstove. I've been researching woodstoves off and on for a while now and trying to envision how, exactly, one would work in this house. We have, in our living room -- I'm sitting by it right now, in fact -- the original 1922-vintage coal-burning fireplace, which is essentially a shallow, brick-lined depression in the wall, framed by a cast-iron hood and surmounted by a very pretty wood mantel. I've already determined that the existing fireplace is too shallow and small for a woodburning insert, and now I am wondering whether a stove could sit in front of it and be ducted, or piped, or whatever the appropriate verb would be, up the chimney (also currently an energy liability, even though it's sort of halfheartedly sealed off), without sawing a hole in the mantel.

 There's a Cub Scout in the way here, but you can kind of see what I'm talking about.

Alternatively, I am wondering whether a stove could sit to one side of the fireplace, with the pipe run straight out through the wall. But then the thought of somebody knocking a hole in the plaster wall, and the resultant disintegration of said wall, makes me have to think about Paris, or waves crashing on a shore, or elevator music.

So I don't know. I've found a model I like very much, and there's a dealer just up the road in Panacea Falls, so I'm going to have to go up there and look at it in person and ask questions. In the meantime, advice always appreciated.

Poetry Friday: For Life

Choice

         Extra place set at your mind's table:

expectant glass, untasted wine

         turned to vinegar. Another faceless moon

begs at the window. Everywhere the impossible

         presence:  voice that doesn't call

from upstairs, nobody who'll appear,

         who now, behind a locked bathroom door,

washes, brushes hair, drops a towel

         for you to hang. Nothing's ever unfair.

No C in French. No midnight curfew.

         No talking back, no not-speaking-to.

When was it you began to hear

         silence:  clear, insistent, steady

as a heartbeat, asking, How weren't you ready?

Grateful acknowledgment is due the editors of  First Things, in whose pages an earlier version of this poem first appeared.

See what else is up for Poetry Friday . . .

Father Michael Mary Writes

The last time I heard from him, he was Brother Michael Mary. But on the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, the seventh anniversary of their founding, the Wyoming Carmelites celebrated their first priestly ordinations:  both Brother Michael Mary and Brother Joseph Marie became Father Michael Mary and Father Joseph Marie. The liturgy at the Cathedral of Cheyenne, Father writes, was "sublime," and to say the words of the Consecration for the first time was for him "a truly humbling moment." He begs prayers for himself and Father Joseph Marie, that they may serve God humbly in their priesthood and lead many souls to Christ.


Exciting times for the monks, as they also press forward with plans for a new, permanent monastery and church.  Read their news, check out their photos. 

Father Michael Mary also writes that he has been busy with the community's Mystic Monk coffee business, by which they support their life of prayer. In addition to their excellent coffee -- organically-grown fair-trade coffee such as you might buy through an organic-food co-op -- they offer a range of coffee- and/or monastery-related products, including  mugs, t-shirts, and the like, as well as chant CDs. And now they're offering something new, different, and really kind of brilliant:   the Monk Press. This is a stainless-steel travel-mug-cum-French-Press, so you can make your coffee and drink it fresh and hot, all on the go.

Now I know what Aelred's getting for Christmas. Sh. Don't tell.

If you haven't visited the monks online, I encourage you to do so. They pray for us daily;  that's their calling, and it's good to know that we go forward in our own lives cared for and ministered to in unseen ways by their intercession. And if you haven't tasted their coffee:  oy. Really you should try some.


 

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House and Home

Around and between reading and writing lots of things simultaneously, I'm slowly working my way through Margaret Kim Peterson's Keeping House:  The Litany of Everyday Life. A friend lent it to me ages ago;  that friend might be gratified to know that I haven't forgotten it. It's honestly taken me this long to read it. I haven't lost it, either, which would have been the other likely scenario, and I'd love to think that this is because my own housekeeping has improved. Really, though, that's just grace.

Incidentally, you know of course that these Amazon links are sponsored. I feel like a moneygrubber for using them, but I will tell you truthfully that I use them for three reasons: 

1. You might want to find out more about the book in question, and maybe even to buy it. If I post a link to it, I've saved you the trouble of looking for it.

2. If I'm going to talk about an author's book, it's generally because I like the author, whether I know him or her personally or not. Assuming that he or she is alive to reap whatever benefits might come of my discussing a given book . . . well, I'd like an author I like to reap whatever benefits might come of my discussing a given book. If those benefits amount to 37 cents, that's 37 cents that author didn't have in his or her pocket before.

3. I really am a moneygrubber.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, lunch is almost ready, but I'd like to toss out a piece of what I've just sat down and read:

The physical fabric and setting of the house does matter when it comes to the creation of a home . . . Your house, in other words, affects how you live, and how you live affects your house.

This has implications beyond the lives of individual Christians or households. As one writer notes, "The front door of the home is the side door of the church." What kind of church do our household members and guests encounter when they walk in the front doors of our homes? Do our homes reflect and embody a gospel that takes seriously the needs that all of us, as embodied and social creatures, have for things like beds and clothes and meals and the daily routines that produce them? Does the way we live bear witness to both the necessity and goodness of things like these? Can we -- do we -- keep house in ways that respect and embrace our creatureliness and that foster community within and beyond our households?

Speaking of meals and clothes and routines, I have lunch to put on the table and laundry to fold and wash and fold again. We are a bunch of creaturely embodied folk around here, and it's time to go bear witness to that a little. But I'd like to think more about houses:  their arrangement in terms of architecture, and then the way we arrange things within that architecture, and what we think we're doing with all of that. And in how many ways can, or does, our set of arrangements make our house a kind of entryway to the church? I for one am curious. 

The Sexy Halloween Costume, the 1970s and More

Hallie at Betty Beguiles asks, "What's up with sexy Halloween costumes?" And while I have to admit that I hadn't been paying that much attention, mostly on purpose, and I had to count on my fingers to figure out that Halloween wasn't this weekend, and isn't next weekend, but will be the next, I find myself asking the same thing.

Now, let's get one thing out of the way:  our family does Halloween. I know some people don't. If you don't, fine. Nothing I have to say about why we do Halloween, or what we do when we do Halloween, should be construed as a commentary on those who don't. Not that I'm not interested in, or sympathetic to, your reasons, but every Halloween conversation does not have to be that conversation, and this one isn't. Thanks.

So, the sexy costume. I'm not quite so out of it that I haven't seen, for instance, the various permutations on the flirty witch or the racy nun -- and it's beyond bizarre, isn't it,  that those two characters should be reduced to the same common denominator, particularly when the denominator wouldn't seem to be all that congruous with either one, but there you go. I have not seen, so much, the sexy costume for the prepubescent girl, but nothing surprises me any more.

Apparently, witches aren't ugly anymore; they're sexy. So are pirates and pumpkins and princesses -- traditional little girl Halloween costumes that used to say, Isn't she cute? now scream, That's hot! with an increasing array of halter tops, bare midriffs and miniskirts. Costume catalogs and Web sites, filled with images of pouty preteens modeling the latest in Halloween fashion, seem almost to verge on child pornography, and ooze with attitude. Witches are "wayward" and grammar-school pirates are "wenches." A girl isn't an Army cadet, she's a "Major Flirt," and who knew female firefighters wore fishnet stockings? Even Little Bo Peep comes with a corset, short skirt and lacy petticoat. (source)

Of course the first, easy thing to point out is that we live in a sexualized culture, to the extent that even those of us who think this isn't a great kind of status quo to maintain have become largely desensitized to it. I remember riding once at the top of a double-decker bus in London behind two little boys from Singapore, where the range of images which can be displayed in public is tightly circumscribed, to put it mildly. We were sailing down some major road full of shops and billboards, and as we went along, the boys kept pointing at gigantic photographs of lingerie-clad women, of which one appeared roughly every fifteen feet the whole length of the road, and shouting, "Nudie! Nudie!"  And I have to admit that a) I'd really been tuning those images out, and b) when I did notice them, the first thing I thought was, "She's not nude. She's wearing a bra."

But then, I grew up in the 1970s, and if there's one thing I remember clearly about the 1970s, it's that none of us wore very many clothes. Our skirts were short, our bathing suits were brief, our halter tops left our backs bare -- and I'm not talking about myself as a teenager. This is second and third grade I'm referring to here. And we weren't  trampy little girls, either;  we were just wearing what all little girls wore in 1972 or '73, as far as any of us was aware. I don't mean to comment on the rightness or wrongness of the setting or the habits of apparel, but merely to say that when I was growing up, for better or worse, this was the "normal" to which the cultural compass was set.

What is weird, though, is to contemplate the fact that most of us who grew up then regard the era of our childhoods as somehow safer and more wholesome than the era in which our children are currently growing up. By the time I was ten, I was crossing major roads to walk to a large shopping center where I might go to the movies or spend an hour wandering around the drugstore, by myself. Long before I was ten I rode my bike in the bank parking lot across the street from my house, and I played in the woods which abutted that parking lot, by myself. I walked to friends' houses, by myself. In the summer, an entire day might pass during which my mother knew only in the most general of terms where I was and what I was doing. This, like halter tops on second graders, was also normal, in a way that it isn't in my own children's experience, or -- to put it another way -- in mine as a mother. As I write this, my eight- and six-year-olds are scooter-riding in the parking lot across the street from our house, and I'm only watching them to the extent that I can see their reflections in the living room window, as I sit writing here on the porch -- and I feel negligent.

Why do I feel negligent? Because we don't live in a safe world any more, that's why. At least, that's the meme, isn't it? Our childhoods were safe, but our children's childhoods are not.

But is that true? The Seventies, it seems to me, were a broken era, like two halves of a dinner plate waiting in vain to be glued back together. Our parents lived on one half, formed by their own childhoods in the Depression, the war years, the heady teenaged Fifties. Their world, of course, hadn't been safe, any more than ours was, but what they carried in their imaginations was, for example, an image of school as a place where you said the Pledge of Allegiance and marched back and forth while the teacher played "Glow Worm" on the piano, and everyone was more or less the same. In the pre-Civil-Rights South, of course, that sameness carried a certain load of sinister connotations -- at least, with hindsight, you can't escape that fact. But there was also a sameness of purpose:  supporting the war effort, being patriotic, being decent, agreeing for the most part about what constituted decent. Reality is always more complicated than that, as we all know, but I think that for the most part our parents, at least the ones who were staying married and otherwise trying to "do right," in light of the values they had grown up with, assumed that the world was not falling apart, and that it was safe for us to be abroad in it.

But then you, on the other half, would go to play at someone's house, and there would be a scent in the air of things going wrong. I had one friend in elementary school whose parents were, as I now recognize, swingers.  Their house had a waterfall in the white-marble entrance hall, and in the big shag-carpeted room which would have been another family's "rumpus room," but in their family was the bar, they had not only the makings of an endless variety of exotic drinks, but a record collection which introduced the vocabulary of sex and drugs into my imaginative lexicon at a fairly early age. My friend and I would mix up concoctions from the different mixers -- we knew enough not to touch the alcohol, fortunately -- lie on the floor and listen to music, or else dance to it. Meanwhile, in another part of the house, her mother was strapping on her silver-lame sandals, and her father was preparing to desert them all. And while I can't point to any one specific event or detail which told me that things weren't right, I could feel it. I loved my friend, but her house made me uneasy.

Increasingly, as time went on, these were the kinds of scenes playing out in -- it sometimes seemed -- everyone's house in the world. Fathers were absent. Mothers and children didn't share a last name, which mystified me for a long time -- divorce was becoming less and less alien, though it wasn't yet a default assumption, a new normal. Largely, it often seemed to me, though I didn't then know how to put my finger on it, the adults caught in the path of domestic self-destruction were too preoccupied with their own problems to be all that worried about the children around them. Once, when I was nine, I was playing in the sprinkler at a neighbor's house, and I fell and cut my knee open on a toy motorcycle which was lying in the yard. I limped into the house, blood pouring down my leg, to find some grownup to help me. This was one of those open, multigenerational households in which parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and teenagers were always coming and going, so that at any given time I was never sure exactly who lived there, besides my playmate. In the living room I found a bunch of people watching television, and recognizing my friend's mother, I limped over to her and said I had cut my leg. Abstractedly she got up, found a Band-aid to hand me, and sat back down. I put the Band-aid on -- my leg was so wet that the Band-aid wouldn't stick, so I hobbled home bent double, clamping it to my knee, and locked myself in my own bathroom to plaster the cut with about fifteen gauze pads and a wad of adhesive tape.

So, this was the comfortable world of childhood for which it's all too easy to be nostalgic:  a world of roaming around independently, but also a world in which your friends' older sisters and brothers smelled like pot, and in which you increasingly didn't ask when your friends' dads were coming home from work. The safety of my parents' childhood world was abutted by the threat of Depression-era poverty and then wartime enemies;  the safety of my own childhood world was an illusion imploding from within.

What does all of this meditation on the 1970s have to do with sexy Halloween costumes, circa 2010? Only this:  our current culture is the grandchild of that one. Phrases like loss of innocence, straight out of the middle-school literature curriculum, swim to the surface of the mind, and although they're cliches, and although it's not as though the world general had that much innocence left to lose by the time my generation started to come to, still the theme pertains.

Again, though, this isn't new. It's not as new as 2010, and it's not as new as 1973, either. It's a reality as old as Eve standing in the shade of the fatal tree and musing, "Hm. Good we know already.  But what is this evil of which you speak?"

Though I was a hang-uppy kid in my own way -- don't get me started on the summer I was afraid to fall asleep -- I was one of the relatively innocent ones. My parents stayed married. My house was safe. Nobody took my world and smashed it against the wall, just to show that they could.  I can be grateful for all that now, and I am. At the time, though, wandering as a mid-elementary-schooler through my friends' houses, overhearing snatches of conversation and misunderstanding allusions and trying to track what was going on around me, I didn't feel that I had anything better than they did. What I felt, mainly, was dumb.  If I was an innocent, that made me childish, when everyone else had put away childish things.

Therein, I think, lies a lot of the deal with the sexy costumes. The girl you want to be is the knowing girl. She's knowing, that is, in the sense of winky-winky-nudgy-nudgy, even if she's too young to  understand what all the winks and nudges are exactly about. The alternative, after all,  is to be out-of-it-girl, last-to-read-the-signals-girl, dumb-cluck-girl. Who wants to be that on Halloween, or any other time?

And then of course there's the short answer, which is that it's a lot easier to go to Party City and buy whatever's there than to come up with a costume on your own. On a grown woman, a sexy pirate costume says , "I couldn't think of anything better." On a seven-year-old?  "My mother couldn't think of anything better."

PS:  I've been working on this, plus a couple of other things on deadline, including a monologue of Saint Gertrude which might or might not make it onto a stage . . . anyway, I can't get this to make as much sense as I'd like it to, but there it is. So, what do you think about all this racy-costume business? Do tell.

The Night Shall Hear Me Ask His Grace

I was struck by the beauty of this text, a rendering by Isaac Watts of Psalm 55, from his 1719 Psalms of David Imitated. The (mostly) a capella group Anonymous 4 perform it on their American Angels album of shape-note and other American-primitive songs.

O, were I like a feathered dove,
And innocence had wings,
I’d fly and make a long remove,
From all these restless things.

Let me to some wild desert go,
And find a peaceful home;
Where storms of malice never blow,
Temptations never come.

By morning light I’ll seek his face,
At noon repeat my cry;
The night shall hear me ask his grace,
Nor will he long deny.         (source)

Here they sing "Holy Manna."  Enjoy!

Quicktakes: La Vie En Twitter

 OK, this is more than seven. But they are so very micro-quick. Not to say "cryptic."


1. Finally got *my*  computer back from children.

2. Hacked down more boxwoods. Children flying homemade kites (aka running with paper on string). Wind blew cushions off outdoor couch.

3. They who wait upon the Lord eventually will find both the right violin teacher and a teacher who gives piano *and* organ lessons.

4. @Daily Telegraph:  Queen Cancels Christmas Party

5. Working on my novel. This is the longest that what's happening in it has felt like what's supposed to be happening. Can't last.

6. I  should add that I don't actually know Greek, much. But I can follow a book as well as the next person.

7. Evidence of Their Grounding via @Patheos

8. Walk with girls and dog. Consignment store windows, prom dresses, guy in back room making furniture, cafe people laughing, spatters of rain.

9. Thanks, Jen.

P.S. Since I mentioned flying squirrels in my comment over at Jen's . . . 

And more about flying squirrels. I do kind of miss the little twerps.

And in Today's Breaking Taxidermy News . . .

There is this, which I offer without comment.

Spelling

I'm laughing. Epiphany spent four years in English schools:  look, cover, read, cover, look, discover, can you spell bat? No.

A Beautiful Soul

At her recent beatification, the father of Blessed Chiara Badano, an Italian teenager who suffered from bone cancer, recalled the last two years of his daughter's life:

We lived exceptional moments being with Chiara. We lived in an atmosphere that you cannot explain. These two years (of Chiara’s suffering) have been the most beautiful of our lives, the most blessed by God, because Jesus made us live in a supernatural dimension that raised us from the ground. Like when you are on a plane, and from the window you see the earth, the clouds far below you. All of our pain and those of Chiara that were even greater, we saw them there, below us, not touching us. This was the fruit of the love of many people who prayed and supported us.

 More . . . 

Everyone a Critic

The poetics of praxis functions as the conceptual frame for the ideology of agency.

Is that impressive or what? I'm tempted say I made it from scratch, but really it came from a mix.  

I don't have a Ph.d, and now you don't need one, either, to write sentences just as opaque as this:

The culture of desire is always already participating in the historicization of the specular economy.

Write your doctoral dissertation today!


H/T

The Summerhouse Trilogy (expanded)

When it comes to reading, I'm not a pioneer. I don't go west, clearing virgin forest to make new cornfields. Instead, I'm perfectly happy to plow the same limited acres, over and over and over.

Or another way to put it might be that I'm not a developer but an archaeologist.  Rather than working outward, scraping the topsoil off as much land as I can acquire, I'm content to stand on the same spot and work down, with a brush not a bulldozer.

Or maybe I'm just lazy.

All that to say:  I like to read the same books over and over and over. Rather than reading a lot of books, to discover a lot of things, I like to read books which yield new revelations no matter how many times I've read them already.

So the other day when I was trawling through the house for something to read, I picked up Alice Thomas Ellis's The Summerhouse Trilogy, which, as you will have realized already, I had read five or six times before, at least.

It's not a heartwarming book. When I reread Pride and Prejudice, as I do roughly once a year, it's because my soul is craving entry to the kind of ordered, sensible world in which when things go awry, it's only so that they can be set right, at least for the protagonists. Lydia, who courts chaos, will never be happy, but Elizabeth and Jane, who care about truth and order, will be.

When I pick up an Alice Thomas Ellis novel, on the other hand, it's not because I want to be made happy, except insofar as good prose itself makes me happy, and it does, deeply. In fact, in the world of novels like this, the prose represents almost the only real order, outside the story and framing it. Everything else is disordered to the point of being unbearable, but the prose bears you through it -- pitilessly, to be sure, but like an ark all the same.

The Summerhouse Trilogy is three novels in one, each covering the same set of events from the point of view of a different participant in those events. The setting is Croydon, affluent and unimaginative, where in the relentless gray and cold of winter, a girl named Margaret has returned from Egypt and become engaged to her much-older neighbor, Syl. Preparations for the wedding, overseen by Monica, Margaret's bitter and overbearing mother, are interrupted by the arrival of Monica's exotic old friend Lili.

Margaret does not want to marry Syl;  in fact, she detests him. He does not particularly love her. Very soon, virtually everyone surrounding them -- Lili, Syl's elderly mother -- has agreed that the very idea of this marriage, if not of marriage itself, is a disaster. Yet the machinery grinds forward, until Lili finds a way not only to stop it, but to smash it.

The first novel of the trilogy, The Clothes in the Wardrobe, is told in Margaret's voice. She is a silent, passive girl whose inertia maddens her mother, and she recounts the scenes of wedding preparations as from an enormous distance. The reasons for her passivity, her moving through the colorless world like the walking spiritual dead, lie in Egypt, where she has fallen disastrously in love and been implicated in evil, even as she yearns for the peace and light of a convent there and the comfort of its Mother Superior.

The second novel, The Skeleton in the Cupboard, narrates the same set of events in the voice of Syl's aged mother, Mrs. Monro, with whom Syl lives. Like Margaret, she has become detached from the world, loving only her unpleasant old dog and the charwoman whom she shares with Monica. Strangely, however, she also comes to love Lili, who long ago seduced Mrs. Monro's husband. It is in conversation with Lili that she, and we, learn another darker and older reason for Margaret's state of spiritual death than her experiences in Egypt.

The final novel, The Fly in the Ointment, is told in Lili's voice:  Lili, who pities herself and justifies her transgressions and holds together the fragments of her life by force of personality, and who ultimately damns herself to give Margaret her freedom. It is transgressive Lili, ironically enough, who frames the nexus of relationships in Margaret's family in terms of original sin.  Margaret's father Derek, now remarried, is Adam;  his cowed, slatternly wife Cynthia is Eve;  the children they have produced are Cain and Abel;  and doom hangs like an oppressive weather over them all. In a strange narrative sidestep -- especially strange as it becomes evident that Derek is the only male figure in the entire novel whom Lili has never slept with -- Lili identifies herself, not Monica, with Adam's legendary first wife, Lilith, the agent of destruction who, unwilling to submit, abandons Adam to travel the wide world on "black wings." Of course, Lili's name is an echo of Lilith, though it's also almost Lily. If she is a lily, then she's a red lily:  redhaired, dressed in red, even at her own wedding.

The one person who looms large in the story, but does not get to give her version of it, is Monica. This omission struck me for the first time as strange. She is an unpleasant character, an kind of anti-Saint-Monica (even as Lili is an anti-lily), who holds her child in contempt and, instead of praying for her ceaselessly, badgers her ceaselessly instead.

At the heart of the story is a scene which remains essentially a mystery, turned over by both Mrs. Monro and Lili.  Mrs Monro remembers Monica's coming to her house in hysterics late at night, in a thunderstorm, to announce that her husband is leaving her. She has left the child Margaret, perhaps four years old, home alone -- or perhaps her father is still there --  and Mrs. Monro goes to stay with her.

On the surface of it, this is a plausible enough scene:  the wronged wife out of her mind, forgetting her child for the moment. Later, however, Lili reveals a secret which has lain festering at the heart of the family, which Monica has spilled to her in a drunken moment, and  which renders the events of that night even stranger and darker. We learn in the revelation of this secret that Margaret as a child is not safe with her father, yet instead of protecting her, Monica has run out into the night and abandoned her.

The oddness and wrongness of this scene had somehow never struck me before;  now I can't stop thinking about it. Perhaps it's guilt over her own craven participation in Margaret's destruction which drives Monica to hate her daughter. Perhaps it's a subconscious attempt to square, somehow, the actions of her own pedophile ex-husband which impels Monica to force Margaret into marriage with a man who, by everyone's admission, "likes them young,"  even as she insists on Margaret's wearing her own wedding dress, despite its objective ugliness, despite the fact that even with alterations it refuses to fit Margaret, despite the spectacle of the failed marriage it represents, despite all the ugly dimensions of that failure.

I won't say, Read this novel, you'll love it, because love is not the right word. It's not the right word in the context of the novel;  this is a story about not love but darkness, dwelling in buried layers in the human soul. It is also a story about vocation, the rightness of one life when one is called to it, the wrongness of another. It is about sin and its consequences. And it is also, strangely and disturbingly, about grace.

As I say,  I won't tell you to read this novel. But I'll be reading it again . . .

(Amazon links are sponsored. Ka ching ka ching, or so they say)

Earliest Known Wimoweh

Many thanks to the anonymous commenter who provided me with a link to this:

The Five-Year-Old, the Embryos, the Burning Lab, and Me

One of the nice things about middle age is that it gives you plenty of time to think, especially at three in the morning. I've just been counting sheep by replaying in my mind a hypothetical scenario that's been makings its way around the internet, one of those how-you-answer-will-call-your-hand exercises, rather like the pacificism test which asks you to imagine that someone is holding a gun to your mother's head.

In this thought exercise, meant to out the supposed hypocrisy of pro-life convictions, you are asked to imagine yourself in a burning lab with an unconscious five-year-old and a refrigerated case of embryos. Whom do you save?

Of course you're meant to walk right into this. If you don't save the embryos, then ha! You don't really think they're human. Roll over and show your tender underbelly, sucker. On the other hand, if you don't save the five-year-old, then you're a monster.

So, having nothing better to do at this hour, I've been lying awake thinking about how to answer.

Thought #1:  This is fantasy. I mean,  you could be a pacifist and really find yourself confronted with someone who threatens your loved ones, and you have to make some move either consistent with, or against the grain of, your convictions. But this other scenario? Please. What is a five-year-old doing in an IVF lab, unaccompanied except for me? What am I doing there?  Where are all the scientists?

Anyway, as long as we're fantasizing, I might as well give myself superpowers, too. Then I can save everybody.

Thought #2:  But let's suppose, for grins and giggles, that however implausibly, I find myself in this situation, faced with this choice. What to do?

Well, what would any reasonable person do? Use reason, I imagine.

So in the tiny window of time afforded me before I am overcome by smoke and heat, I think:  whom can I hope to save? Because I can't save everyone in the whole building. If there are people upstairs or downstairs, for example, I probably can't help them. That's not denying their basic humanity, but acknowledging that there's only so much one person can do, though I hope I'd have the courage to make the effort or die trying. Realistically, I save whoever's closest to me, but also . . .

Thought #3:  Another application of reason would be to ask who is in the most immediate danger. The five-year-old is likely to die of smoke inhalation. Meanwhile, the embryos, in their case, are either already dead, if the power's been off long enough, or else are afforded some protection by the appliance they're in. So the sensible thing to do, it seems to me, would be to attend to the most-endangered person first, but to expect that the fire department -- surely someone has called them by now? -- will make every effort to save everyone else inside the building, including the embryos. In other words, people trained and prepared to save people should save people, if there's any hope of saving them, not shrug and turn away because some of the people in a burning building happen to be unborn (or elderly, or in a coma, or otherwise unable to help themselves).

Thought #4:  One road not to go down:  utilitarianism. What I can't ask are questions like, "Who has more to contribute to society?" Because a) who knows the answer? Not you. Not me. We're talking about a group of people -- children, born and unborn -- whose futures are unformed. A five-year-old is, in his own way, as much a cipher as a zygote when it comes to imagining what kind of adult he will be. And b) who has time to stand around in a burning building pondering just what "contribute" might mean? Say the five-year-old has a developmental disability which will keep her forever an infant, while the embryos have been selected for their genetic perfection.  Does knowing the five-year-old will never pay into Social Security make her a write-off? Do I really want to play eugenics-by-fire?

(another version of this same question:  say the five-year-old is the child of an addicted mother who hardly even acknowledges her existence, except to abuse her horrifically, whereas every one of those embryos is wanted, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, by loving, stable prospective parents with financial security oozing from their very pores. Who has the life more worth living?)

Thought #5:  Well, looky here. It's now 4:13 a.m., and I've whiled away a solid hour thinking about this stupid question while I drank my Sleepytime tea. There's still time to get in two hours of sleep before the alarm goes off, if I try not to try too hard.

Seamus Heaney: From The Human Chain

Yesterday's Poetry Friday post was dedicated to Seamus Heaney, who has just won Britain's prestigious Forward Prize for his new poetry collection, The Human Chain. Today at The Guardian, you can read a poem from The Human Chain:  

The Baler 

All day the clunk of a baler
Ongoing, cardiac-dull,
So taken for granted

It was evening before I came to
To what I was hearing
And missing: summer's richest hours

As they had been to begin with,
Fork-lifted, sweated-through
And nearly rewarded enough

By the giddied-up race of a tractor
At the end of the day
Last-lapping a hayfield.

More . . . 

Also, Prizes and Poetry Audio:  Heaney reads from his new work, plus discussion about the newfound Ted Hughes poem, plus the winner of the Guardian children's fiction prize. 

 

In the Jungle

. . . the mighty jungle, the lion sl -- 

Stop. Stop right there. Shut that hippo up and tell it to haul its blubberous claymation bulk out of my head. It can take its falsetto voice right on with it, out of here.

*

This song is making its way through our household like a strain of the flu. Some people whistle it, some people hum it, some people sing and dance. 

That's an old photo, but you get the idea. I have a whole sequence of these, taken nearly two years ago;  when you play them as a slideshow, it's like watching the flickering action in silent movies. Now that I think of it, I ought to set that slideshow to music. And I know just the tune . . .

*

Ga! Shoot the hippo! Shoot the hippo!

*

Speaking of jungles, not that we were, or humming any song with the word "jungle" in it, either . . .

*

Where were we?

*

Oh, yeah. In the jungle. The mighty jungle. Which grows outside my house. Or it did, until today, when I went out and hacked a lot of it down. A whole overgrown boxwood, wedged between two perfectly respectable hollies:  outta there. And so forth. I had this burning desire to see my house not engulfed in eighty-year-old greenery, and now I've done that, and my shoulders are sore and the laundry needs folding.

*

And as I fold, I'm humming a merry tune.

Hush, my darling, don't fear, my darling, the lion is going to wake up and eat that hippo any minute now. And its little dog, too.

(Thanks, Jen.)

Vanilla Warmers

Actually, in our house we call this drink a vanilla steamer, because I think you can get something like it, by the same name, at the friendly coffee shop on every corner of the globe (so to speak). Our version, however, does not involve steam, just warmth.

In a mug, you mix

* a half-teaspoon or so of brown sugar
* a vanilla-extract-bottle-lid of vanilla extract
* a dash of ground ginger
* a dash of nutmeg
* warm milk to fill the mug

What I do is combine all these ingredients, milk un-warmed, in the mug, and then nuke it all for about a minute and a half on high. If it's too hot when it comes out, I splash in a little more milk to cool.

Quick and easy, and lovely with a side of oatmeal on a cool fall morning.

Poetry Friday

As it turns out, a novelist, not a poet, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so there goes that Poetry Friday post idea.

On the other hand, Seamus Heaney, a Nobel Laureate, has just won the Forward Prize for his twelfth poetry collection, Human Chain. You can hear him read from several of his poems, including the beautiful "Mossbawn Sunlight," here.

And you can see him read, in a video from 2002.

(I tried to embed the video, but the code didn't work, so this post has wound up with less visual interest than I had hoped for. Go to the reading anyway.)

Poetry is, after all, the word-hoard meant to be heard.

Thanks to Carol's Corner for hosting Poetry Friday this week.

For the Feast of the Holy Rosary

Chesterton's Lepanto: 

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,

And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;

There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,

It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,

It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,

For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.

They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,

They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,

And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,

And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,

The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;

The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;

From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,

And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Read the very considerable rest. 

 Sadly, the blog of the American Chesterton Society is closing its doors today, but there's plenty there to enjoy even so. Go visit them, even if, or especially as, shortly there's to be no more there there.

Bad News, Bookies: UPDATED

Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Mario Vargas Llosa.

You'll recall that this time last week, Tomas Transtromer was favored to win, with Vargas Llosa  showing odds of 45/1.

So, there you go.

UPDATE:   More on the Vargas Llosa win here.  My favorite reader comment so far:  "You win a few, you Llosa few."

Another overview of Vargas Llosa's body of work from novelist William Boyd.

Also:   The inevitable conversation about who should have won instead.

For People Who Liked the Math Joke

Plus a hippopotabonusmus. 

PS:   I think "Hippopotomas" may be my new favorite holiday . . . 

More About Honeybee Die-Off

The other day I mentioned that gardens in my part of the world had suffered this summer from under-pollination, possibly caused by a drop in the bee population. Now an explanation may be in the offing:

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that double-whammy kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

Read more.

Those Dexterous Otters!

We were reading today, in the delightful vintage Homes and Habits of Wild Animals,  about animals playing, then found this video of otters juggling rocks.

Math Joke of the Day

Amazing Facts About Happiness

the happy happy glowing family

Did you know that:

1. Your circumstances account for only 10% of your overall mood? The rest of the breakdown is as follows:  genes and upbringing 50%, outlook and activities 40%. I'm not sure why "upbringing" doesn't count as "circumstances." Seems as though "nature" and "nurture" ought to be in separate categories. But oh well.

2. A good mood has its own smell. Whether feeling better makes your armpits actually smell better -- let a smile be your deodorant -- I'm not sure, but researchers found that subjects could tell the difference between the odor of frightened people and that of people who were happy.

3. Statistically speaking, older people are happier than younger ones. Ha! I feel happier already.

4. Improve your happiness quotient with exercise. Studies say that twenty minutes of exercise undertaken three times a week for six months will raise your happiness measurably, to the tune of 10-20%.

5.  Being happy makes your flu shot more effective.

6. Denmark is officially the happiest nation on earth, followed by places like Malta and Iceland. Hm.

7. Meanwhile, in the U.S.A., clinical depression is on the rise. Go do twenty minutes of exercise three times a week for six months, peoples!

8. Would-be immigrants, take note:  upon immigration you will assume the happiness quotient of the nation to which you move. Everybody! Move to Denmark and Iceland! Or Malta. I think I like Malta.

9. Does happiness come first, or does wealth? Chicken, meet egg.

10. People who suffer strokes or other serious debilitation suffer in the short term, but their long-term happiness is not affected. In other words, you may think for a while that your life is not worth living, but joy comes in the morning.

There are ten more Happiness Facts where these came from:  read them all.

I Can Just About Stand the Garden Now

Every July I come down with Heat-Induced-Post-Too-Late-You-Put-In-The-Garden-Already-Now-You-Gotta-Weed-It Syndrome, or HIPTLYPITGANYGWIS. Everybody say it:  Hip-tilly-pit-gan-ig-wiss. Catchy, no?

No?

Anyway, I get it every year, and I got it this year, too, but now I'm all better, mostly. In fact, I'm so much better that I spent this afternoon ripping out the dessicated stalks of the last tomato plants, then digging out the rest of the compost pile -- no yellowjackets, though I was on the alert -- and spreading it over the vegetable garden, so that I could move the homemade bin from the driveway, where it's sat blocking one side of the garage for the past two years, to a relatively remote corner of the back yard, semi-behind some forsythias which I transplanted back there day before yesterday in anticipation of this composting-related event.

Of course, I might have felt better all summer long, had I only known that you can make weed killer from vinegar. I might also have felt better had I known that my garden wasn't the only one that didn't produce worth beans, so to speak. Actually, the beans did pretty well, as long as they lasted, but the squash, that no-brainer of a staple for the amateur gardener? Not even.

I thought it was just me, until the security guard from the community college across the street came over to tell me that he had no okra to bring me this year. The deer had eaten it. Further, he said, even the things the deer hadn't eaten had all gone bust, chiefly the squash.

Mine, too, I said -- as a general rule I wouldn't admit gardening failure to anyone in this town, because around here people grow stuff in their sleep, but if a person who goes around offering okra to virtual strangers says he's had a bad gardening year,  I am all commiseration. As it turns out, I'm not the only person whose squash produced beautiful, enormous, promising blooms, and nothing else, and I cannot tell you how much better I feel knowing this.

Well, let me rephrase that;  on one level I feel better. It's a relief to know that, as inept as it's possible for me to be, and my ineptitude potential is  boundless, at least squash failure isn't all my fault.

On the other hand, widespread squash failure is disturbing, and here's why:  both the security guard and I concur that it happened to us this year because we didn't have enough bees.

When I noticed my squash blooming but not producing, I went googling for answers, and "inadequate pollination" is what I came up with. My secure friend arrived at the same answer, though he didn't have to go googling for it. He simply put two and two together.

He had had, he said, plenty of bees on his property in previous years, because his next-door neighbor had a hollow tree. A swarm of bees had colonized this tree, and while they were there, the gardens all around them flourished. But then the neighbor put his house up for sale, and to get it ready for the market, he cut down the bee tree.

My guardian friend is the kind of person who gets around -- as I say, the reason I know him is that once, two years ago, he showed up on our porch with a sack of okra, and then last month he showed up on our porch without a sack of okra. He had actually come over to remark that we had our American flag hung up backwards, with the stars on the flag's own left instead of its right. Aelred hung it up that way on somebody's recommendation, and although municipal consensus is that he got it wrong, we're not that sorry that he did, because this mistake was the occasion for many, many wide-ranging conversations with total strangers in the front yard between the months of May and September.

At any rate, that was why my security-guard acquaintance had come over to talk. He also must have talked to his next-door neighbor a lot, because he got wind of the bee-tree-cutting in time to call in a man from the County Extension to take the bees before the tree came down. The man took the bees -- he took them to his own house, thirteen miles away, which apparently you have to do. I don't know what's so magical about thirteen miles in the apiarial mind, but there you have it. The County Extension man promised my friend that once the bees were settled, after some equally-magical elapsation of time, he could have them for himself.

The bees, however, had other plans. Several days after their removal, the County Extension man went out to discover that they had upped and swarmed, leaving no forwarding address. This was a blow to my friend, who had looked forward to having them, but no matter, he said. He knew, he said,  a man who rents bees for the summer. You get them in May or June, and the bee-rental service reclaims them at the end of the season. He thought that was what he'd do next year, and see if that didn't help his squash.

So maybe that's what I should do, too, though I'm thinking I won't bother with squash again. Tomatoes did well enough this year, as did banana peppers and eggplant. Squirrels destroyed the corn and sunflowers, so no more of that. What I think I'll do instead is put in a pollinator garden:  butterfly bushes and red things and milkweed.

Meanwhile, I'm making lasagne with the last of the eggplant and tomatoes even now, and if people are going to Scouts tonight, I ought to bestir myself to feed it to them.

Related:   Go, Kudzilla, Go! 

Take the Poll Already: Five Hours Left

You don't actually have to write a novel. You just have to imagine that you might, and click a choice. So simple, so low-pressure, yet so literary.

But the two of you who say you would write a novel in the pluperfect must write me an opening paragraph. The combox awaits your contributions.

And I wouldn't mind seeing some examples of "other," either.

Read This Book Today

Even if you are not a child.

(and yes, as always, that's a sponsored link, which is a little ironic given the subject of the link, but it was the quickest way I knew of to produce an image of the book. You honestly don't have to buy it. I don't own it. Thank the Lord for libraries. Anyway . . . )

Meanwhile, you can pray the Daily Office for the Feast of Saint Francis, as well as this justly famous prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.


O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen (source)

Addendum:  More at Whispers in the Loggia

It seems relevant to remark here that for the past couple of weeks I've been turning over the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in my mind. It was the reading at Mass a week ago yesterday, and the homily turned on the not-wrong-but-also-not-unpredictable theme of doing good for our neighbor, as the rich man does not.

I was struck, however, by the thought that the point of that parable is not solely that the negligent and selfish rich man goes to hell. It's that Lazarus goes to heaven:  Lazarus who cannot help himself, Lazarus who accepts the ministrations of the dogs who lick his sores.

While Mark Shea is intrigued by the coincidence of this beggar's name with that of the friend whom Jesus raised from the dead (here's the longer post on that theme that I knew I remembered reading), I find more compelling the parallel between Lazarus and the man who falls among thieves and has to accept the ministrations of a Samaritan, a "dog" (Matthew 15: 26), who is truly, though unexpectedly and perhaps undesirably,  his neighbor.

I don't have time right now to pursue this thought, but it has been pursuing me, and today, the feast of a saint who made himself a holy Lazarus, seems the right time to bring it up.

Going to pat the dog now, and to post the requisite Maddy Prior music video (really, someday I will be over this obsession, but not today):