Locus Focus - A Family Home

Link up at with Locus Focus at Shredded Cheddar. Locus Focus is a book-related meme in which you post about settings in books. This weekend's Locus Focus is themed: A Family Home. While the meme continues every weekend, there will now be a chosen theme once a month. For the theme of A Family Home I chose Homer's The Odyssey.

One is only really introduced to the house of Odysseus as the story winds closer and closer to him slaughtering the freeloaders that occupy it. One gets acquainted in more detail with the hall, the courtyard, pets, the maids and nurses, latches and bedrooms and storerooms. The Odyssey is in many ways the journey into the heart of a house, without which the heart of man is sick.

Odysseus is changed in his outward appearance by Athena to an old, weather-beaten begging man, dressed in rags; and he comes to his own home, after many years, by way of the swine-holding. It is inevitable he will beg scraps from the hands of the shameless pseudo-suitors he will later be killing.

But even after he has killed these men and has had their blood and guts cleaned up, and the floor washed down and the hall purified with sulphur, it is almost as if the man is still distant from his own home. He has yet to face his wife, in his own appearance.

It is then that the movements of the journey, the fates, the intervening and meddling of the gods, they come to a kind of halt and hush as Odysseus and his wife face each other in their own house. Penelopeia is wary of trusting that her hsuband is actually her husband, for she is numb after all the years of mourning; she thinks it might be a trick of the gods.

So she tries him with a secret that only her true husband would know. And it is here - a secret about their marriage bed, the bed where conception takes place, the physical place of generating the family of a family home - that the tenderest part of Odysseus is revealed:

"Wife, that has cut me to the heart! Who has moved my bed? That would be a difficult job for the best workman, unless God himself should come down and move it. It would be easy for God, but no man could easily prize it up, not the strongest man living! There is a great secret in that bed. I made it myself, and no one else touched it. There was a strong young olive tree in full leaf growing in an enclosure, the trunk as thick as a pillar. Round this I built our bridal chamber; I did the whole thing myself, laid the stones and built a good roof over it, jointed the doors and fitted them in their places. After that I cut off the branches and trimmed the trunk from the root up, smoothed it carefully with the adze and made it straight to the line. This tree I made the bedpost. That was the beginning of my bed; I bored holes through it, and fitted the other posts about it, and inlaid the framework with gold and silver and ivory, and I ran through it leather straps coloured purple. Now I have told you my secret. And I don't know if it is still there, wife, or if some one has cut the olive at the root and moved my bed!"

And it is here that Odysseus becomes for the reader a real man. That is not meant in some chauvinistic sense, but in the mere sense of flesh and blood; he is not a god. Nor for that matter is he really a world-worn traveller; for it is here he becomes the true man he is - in the family home.

Garden Sprawl Friday

Monk Honey

My eldest brother and his girlfriend went to Spain and brought me back this honey. Of course, when I received it the seal was intact and the jar was full. While there is a plethora of honeys, for me there are two general honey types: mellow/buttery and bright/astringent. The above belongs to the latter group. I like both.


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Comments

Something screwy is going on with the comments. Some have disappeared, and when I try and comment it will not show, at least not until much later.

Just so people know.

Max Monday

Portrait of Family Lutjens - By Max Beckmann, 1944

"A harmonically measured rhythm is established by the expressive play of hands and full, sonorous colors. During that last desperate winter of the war, when this portrait was painted, Lutjens bought a good many paintings, stored the largest works, such as Blindman's Buff, and finally invited the Beckmanns to stay with him in his house." --Peter Selz, Max Beckmann

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Locus Focus - Faery and Wootton Major

Link up with Locus Focus at Shredded Cheddar and share a book's setting with others

It is impossible to think of Wootton Major without Faery, or Faery without Wootton Major in J.R.R. Tolkien's tale, Smith of Wootton Major; his finest tale (to this writer) outside of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (yes, better than Leaf by Niggle).

Wootton Major is a village from "not very long ago for those with long memories, nor very far away for those with long legs." The village is known most of all for its cooking:

"It had a large Kitchen which belonged to the Village Council, and the Master Cook was an important person. The Cook's House and the Kitchen adjoined the Great Hall, the largest and oldest building in the place and the most beautiful. It was built of good stone and good oak and was well tended, though it was no longer painted or gilded as it had been once upon a time."

Now, a little bit from Faery:

"When he first began to walk far without a guide he thought he would discover the further bounds of the land; but great mountains rose before him, and going by long ways round about them he came at last to a desolate shore. He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eyes. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills."

Faery and Wootton Major are completely distinct from each other, and yet they are interpenetrated; the Village being very much the dependent as it were, like the way the Shire is generally ignorant of literal Kings protecting its borders and keeping watch.

















Smith is the one by whom the reader interpenetrates the two realms. And a fay-star is the key. Smith comes to receive it at the Twenty-four Feast. What all this means is a matter I would rather leave to the discovery of those who choose to read this deeply moving tale.

Whereas C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald often seize on the stunning aspects of Faery and the approaching of it, J.R.R. Tolkien is so replete with it, so deeply rooted in it, that the mere unfolding of the tale - simply yet fully written - blesses you, harrows you, with the reality of Faery; with the realization that myths are not lies.

Stripped to the Heart of Faith

Update: Sorry, I posted the wrong video. It has been amended.

I agree with Mark Mallett in what he has said in another post of his, that the age of ministries in the Church is coming to an abrupt end: no more false dichotomy between Charismatic, Trad, Marian and so forth. No more Youth Ministry and the thousand and one other outreaches. No more League of Extraordinary Catholic Apolojet-setters. We are instead heading into an era of miracles. Miracles and martyrdom and unity.

When the Catholic Church becomes truly one will be the moment that persecution descends in earnest.

The Prophecy at Rome - Part VIII from Mark Mallett on Vimeo.

Word & Question

Word & Question is a meme hosted at Shredded Cheddar. What happens is you send Enbrethiliel, or potential future host, one word and one question, each of your own choosing, according to whatever strikes your fancy. She then takes everyone's words and questions and randomizes them. She sends back to you a word and question that other people have chosen. You then have to write a poem in answer to the question; the poem must also include the one word in it somewhere.

The Word I received: Legend

The Question I received: Are we there yet?

I really wanted to write the poem as a direct answer to the question, but I got pulled in another direction -er, distraction:

Legend turned to prospect in Pizarro's
steaming brain, and prospect fell to languishing
mid death-smelling flies;
swords of the Spanish court, hacking at vines
like frantic bones warding off demise;
the famished Native and Conquistador train
began to pine.

Brute Gonzalo turned on his men and roared:
"Unless you want my sword plunged in your throat,
I swear, do not ask me one more time!
When you see the gold is when we'll have arrived!"

Fickle Gonzalo gave up, a few hours
after stating the above - that driver, starver,
chewing up men into his jungle dreams:
he who did not have the means, nor know the way;
nor know there was no there at all.

Max Monday

Self-Portrait as a Medical Orderly - By Max Beckmann

"This persistent harping on the 'I', this vision shuttered to all else in war but its colour, was, in fact, a despairing attempt to stay sane. Beckmann shut truth out so as to copy, to do his soldierly duty. Behind the brave brutality of the letters seethed fears of almost insane proportions. He who had always seen the world as 'chaos' and 'grief' (the mad and violent world he tried to control in paintings like The Destruction of Messina) and who relied on his art 'to order this chaos...to give it form', now found himself overwhelmed by formlessness and horror, helpless. It is very much to his credit that Beckmann tried to survive, even at the cost of his inner truth, and failed. After less than a year and a half, he had broken down in mind and body and was invalided out of service.

Beckmann was a man who took all things to heart. The war destroyed something in him, perhaps his innocence, and for several years we find him desperately seeking to find himself again. The self he had 'lost' was a false self or, at best, an unachieved self, the untried self that looks so serenely out at us in Florence. The next self-portrait, painted in 1915 while he battled to pull something together out of his personal failure, reveals the pitiful depth of his defeat. He is hospitalized still, and still wearing his uniform, in Self-Portait as a Medical Orderly, 1915. Years later, looking at this nasty little picture, he commented sadly on the dreariness of its colour, adding, 'I really slaved away at it'. One of his few confessions before collapse had been that he felt '[drawing] protects one against death and danger', and we feel that there is an apotropaic quality to this dismal work. Beckmann was saving himself as best he could, trying to find out who he was, almost if he was, and failing. The body hunches up inside the canvas, constricted and unsure of itself. The chest is too small, the face too large. We are racked by the intense questions in the eyes, hoping to find some confirmation that tranquillity is possible, if not at the precise moment. Light appears to divide the artist from himself; one side, the 'seeing' side, is painfully illuminated, while the other side, the 'painting' side, is in the shadow. He is caught between showing himself in profile and in three-quarter view, a visual contradiction that the cramped, discoloured painting hand cannot reconcile." --Sister Wendy Beckett, Max Beckmann and The Self

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Tree Base - Ink Brush

Forest Drawing - Old and the New

Vultures

The monstrosity of the U.S. President's ego can be gauged by the fact that he used an Oval Office Address - the first in his presidency - to talk about our addiction to fossil fuels and about a transition to clean energy as though he were speaking from some distant future plane, away from a dire, unresolved present where an underwater geyser is spewing a now estimated 40 to 70, 000 gallons of toxic crude a day (the estimates have done nothing but gone up and up), and which has been spewing that amount or upwards of that amount since day one of the blow-out, into the Gulf of Mexico. And that's just the estimation from the well-head - which, if I understand right, is just a minor distraction from the real oil flow.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought these kinds of addresses to the nation were about getting down to the nitty-gritty business of levelling with the people, about telling them what is really happening - like the oil coming not only through the well-head but through the sea floor (thus making the given estimates way lower than what they really are) - and the precise, bare essential measures that are being taken, and the worst case scenario (though it already is a worst case scenario) measure that would need to be taken, like nuking the sea floor with a small nuclear device. (By the by, I hope that they nuke it sooner than later.)

Obama addressed the "wrenching anxiety" of those whose livelihoods depend on the sea, who are anxious "that their way of life may be lost."

May be lost? This is assured: if they were to stop the oil, and I mean stop every drop this very second, the livelihood of those people in the south is still utterly vanquished, for at least a good few years. They have not been temporarily haulted; it is not something that can be given back in the way of monetary compensation. As of now, short of a miracle and an equally miraculous, speedy clean-up, their way of life is gone.

Yet here this visionary President says, "I refuse to let this happen". Oh, how exactly? It has happened. Are you going to order the hurricanes to not bring the oil to land? What the hell is going after BP going to do? What the hell is blabbering about addiction to "fossil fuels" (we still really don't know the origin of oil) going to do? Why are the workers who are cleaning up the oil being ordered not to wear respirators?

Locus Focus - The Princess & the Goblin

Link up, share and read about settings and worlds in books

This Saturday's Locus Focus:

George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin takes place in a sort of castle, midway on a mountain:

There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys. His palace was built upon one of the mountains, and was very grand and beautiful. The princess, whose name was Irene, was born there, but she was sent soon after her birth, because her mother was not very strong, to be brought up by country people in a large house, half castle, half farm-house, on the side of another mountain, about halfway between its base and its peak.

This home is like a station of the "ordinary" between realms below and above it that are, in contrast, the true realities: the realms of goblins and heavenly great-great-grandmothers.

These mountains were full of hollow places underneath; huge caverns, and winding ways, some with water running through them, and some shining with all colors of the rainbow when a light was taken in. There would not have been much known about them, had there not been mines there, great deep pits, with long galleries and passages running off from them, which had been dug to get at the ore of which the mountains were full. In the course of digging, the miners came upon many of these natural caverns. A few of them had far-off openings out on the side of a mountain, or into a ravine.

Now in these subterranean caverns lived a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins.

But above, staircase after staircase in the big house-castle lives Irene's great-great Grandmother - without the wrinkles of age you would expect on such a face. To all others, this heavenly mother is non-existent. Once, even Irene has doubts about what is the true reality. But no, the great grandmother has been up there the entire eight years that Irene has been living in the place; just that in all those years, Irene had never gone up all those stairs, and never explored the empty hallways.

One gets the sense of greater places, of everlasting places, just, just beyond those you are familiar with, when Irene stands in the door and sees this woman for the first, and the grandmother simply says, as though there were no need for any introduction:

"Come in, my dear; come in. I am glad to see you."

Garden Sprawl Friday

There were these radishes I sowed last year and I let them go to seed. I found out that you can eat the developing seed pods of radishes and that they are, according to hearsay, actually quite nice, like a mustardy snap pea, or snow pea. But I didn't try them. They dropped the seeds and they sprouted in the same place this year:


When I planted the lettuces in this bed I made sure not to disturb the growing radishes. There are even some that sprouted in the cracks of the paving bricks:


It was overcast and drizzling today, but towards evening it cleared:


Those plastic pots have mints in them. They will be planted in between the two main beds.


You can see the kiwi trellis is somewhat broken. That happened from a hefty branch that was cut from the willow tree.

The shot holes in the outer leaves of cabbages don't matter at all, as those parts aren't eaten.


The shot holes in the outer leaves of lettuces though are always more frustrating:


And those are mild in comparison to some. But it's alright. They make up for it by forming good full hearts that don't get touched.

The scapes are coming out of the garlic.


They grow in loops. Once they do the first or second loop you cut them off and you can eat them. Otherwise you can let them fully develop, then collect the tiny bulbs and plant them. They will eventually, though not in the same season, get to be regular size bulbs, of the same variety.

The leeks that I am letting go to seed:








I have no idea what the seed heads are going to look like when they open.

Here is a cultivar of yarrow that's planted right beside one of the beds.


Yarrow, like many herbs, is just really good to have around the garden. It attracts good insects, helps the plants that it grows beside, and when its composted it helps break things down faster. Yarrow grows along roadsides and in ditches and along railway tracks. In addition to this cultivar, I want to get some of the wild roadside stuff.

Here's that other bed with the potatoes and cabbages (did I say I like a bit of jostling?):




This one is for Christopher:

Jury Duty - Part 2

To those who were looking forward to reading about my jury duty as the [projected] trial went on, accept my apology that this second post will be the last in the series. Talk about quick trial! No, it didn't even get to jury selection. The deputy sheriff called me today and said it has been cancelled.

Prayers do get answered. And it was something I was praying for. Though I suspect it has a lot to do with other people who keep my intentions in their prayers. Yes, I know what you're thinking: of course, yes, because it's all about you, Paul, isn't it?

I had a feeling it wasn't going to take place.

With that, I will leave you with the fine actor, Lee J. Cobb:

Open letter for release date

Dear REAL Karate Kid movie,

You know that no words need be spoken between us.

You are, in all respects - to take the words from Joe Esposito - the best around. You always will be.

Daniel, you're the best.

Mr. Miyagi, you are without a doubt the absolute and ineffable best around.

Alli (0:52), you're the best.

And Johnny (1:07), even you're the best.

(Apologies for the subtitles, but it was the highest quality one I could find)

Copying the Masters

This is a fairly large canvas I started some years back, for fun, and never finished - in fact, probably didn't even get past the start of it. It is a copy of The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault. I used a pretty good quality small print from an art book.

To "learn from the old masters" is a good adage (for any field), even if the old masters are, historically speaking, not all that old. The logical first step in this learning is of course to directly copy the paintings they did. While this is laudable it is also dangerous, insofar that one may be merely mechanically copying, and not fearfully learning.

For myself, I find the greatest thing about copying old paintings (and aside from the one above, I've only copied one other, by Rembrandt - also unfinished) is that it forces your hand to do something it would otherwise not do, and to go over something you thought you did right but which you have discovered is completely wrong in relation to some other part of the painting. In short, it humbles you - in one fell swoop.