Garden Sprawl Friday

There is one more row of potatoes to dig up.




There are two kinds of cucumbers blooming. One is a variety good for pickles; the other variety is lemon cucumber. I planted the seeds in between the lettuces that were growing there. The cucumbers were sprouting between the lettuces, and when they started vining, it coincided with the point at which the lettuces were done.


Mmmm...cullerfull:




But tastes like raw earth - like ten times the earthiness of beet leaves. Of course, it is a law practically, that one of the healthiest vegetables must taste that way.

Here's some more colour:


The mess of tomato and pepper plants are fruiting prolifically; and some tomatoes are starting to ripen red. Put another way, the tomatoes are sizing up, and starting to ripen. The peppers are mostly setting their fruits right now, with the exception of some that are quarter to mid-size.

I picked a small ripening tomato and a green one came off with it. The two small peppers are ones that set early in spring when it was cold, then with the warmth, instead of growing bigger they just decided to ripen. So, I cut them off (never "pick" peppers by the way; that rhyme, whatever it is about pick a pepper, gives very bad advice) so they wouldn't be taking away from the other peppers developing on the plants. There was a third pepper (a Hungarian hot wax), as there was a third tomato, but I ate them before I took the picture. I don't know what the onion is doing there.

Three of the biggest overwintered cabbages, cleaned up:



They are big. They are heavy. One can tell by the firmness, size and weight, not having cut into it, that the leaves inside are many and nicely compacted, without hollow spaces. They were quite young going into winter, with no heads yet formed. The variety is January King. A stand-by if there ever was one.

SS. Peter and Paul Dappled Things

Cades Cove, Tennessee, By Whitney Wolf

The Summer Dappled Things is out.

Major Toms

"Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space." --Stephen Hawking

"We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves." --Ray Bradbury


So speak two men - one of whom the world has placed among the ranks of its "greatest thinkers", the other a "Sci-fi legend" - who both, as far as the ideas expressed in the above quotes go, toss emergent jerry cans of new age gasoline onto the world's bonfire of metaphysical despair. (My apologies for the mixed metaphors.)

The pairing of extreme utopian illusion with extreme catastrophic despair makes a combination that is, one might be surprised to learn, very enticing to many people. The very ludicrousness of their propositions tingles the nerves of those whose boredom with life, due to sin, is literal dull hell.

It is also, as with all new age bunkum, a plagiarism of the fullness of truth found in the Catholic Church. We have our Euchatastrophe: namely, among other points, that, when you see these things begin to happen, stand erect and hold your heads high, for your deliverance is near at hand. This being based on and being a continuation of, that first ultimate Euchatastrophe, the Resurrection.

In light of their words (or lack of light of their words), one must necessarily question what is the end, then, of all culture? What is the true outcome of their statements, but barbarism; a final satanic spurring of the earth? Take the artist who transferred his heart, entire, to a work of art, made with the materials of the earth -- was the end purpose of his work to provide fodder for our self-proclaimed ascendency, regarding the earth as defunct, as something to be hurdled over and left behind?

What the ideas expressed by Hawking and Bradbury hinge on, is a redefinition of Man through a redefinition of the Cosmos. The first touching point of this occurs in the Culture. Their ideas depend on a faulty definition of man. Or perhaps the actual purpose of their ideas is the forwarding of a faulty definition of man.

Man is not a survivalist. Survivalist Man is not only the most famished definition of man; it is man defined in the very process of committing suicide. He perishes precisely when he defines himself in terms of survival; the height of irony, of course, but it makes perfect sense: in his bid to "survive", man pares himself down to those terms of survival, and in the process has pared himself away. So he dies, along with all his demographics, like the pathetic sociologist he is.

Man creates; thus what man is does not remain solely within man, but also in the culture he has created and which has its being and continuation on earth. Man is fundamentally relational; he cannot be defined like a piece of luggage. This relational aspect of man is proven at its most essential, its most imperative to who we are, in that man can only be finally and fully defined in the heart of his Creator: one of the outcomes and unfolding of our true salvation as completed, without our merit, by Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God.

Taking first the proposition that man could actually travel through space without vast and precarious amounts of expensive technology and for extensive amounts of time without his bones becoming brittle as dried-up paper, what kind of man would man be without earth?

If there is one thing in which we today are so impoverished, it is in this: we do not know how our very physical being on this earth is a sacrament. You really have no idea of the magnificence of ritual that goes into a single breath you take.

Our relationship with earth is more than circumstantial. Our relationship with earth is indeed more than merely "purposeful". The being we have within earth is so deeply and profoundly set, so ingrained from out of infinity, that just to say we are placed here as stewards is, at best, insufficient lip service.

For the sake of argument, it would be safer to say that earth is a deiti to be worshipped than it would be to say that earth is the mere material object of our stewardship.

The implication of this is that to everything, everything, there is an a priori submission. Our notion of stewardship is itself stewarded in the culture we create; the "gift of sex", for instance, is not "a gift to be properly used", as though everything in and about our existence were just facts to be stored away in the information banks of our brains, and then to be used according to our knowledge. Everything requires an a priori submission that takes place in the midst of the sacrament of life on earth.

"If God can produce all natural effects through himself, it is yet not superfluous for him to produce them through certain causes, inasmuch as this is not owing to the insufficiency of his power but to the immensity of his goodness, which made him will to communicate his likeness to things not only in respect to their being but also in respect to their being causes of other things; for in these two ways all creatures have in common the divine likeness given to them...Likewise in this way the beauty of order appears in creatures." --St. Thomas Aquinas

"We must respect the interior laws of creation, of this Earth, to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive.

This obedience to the voice of the Earth is more important for our future happiness...than the desires of the moment. Our Earth is talking to us and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive." --Pope Benedict XVI

Max Monday

Double-Portrait Carnival, By Max Beckmann

"In 1925, the year he married Quappi, Beckmann painted a double portrait that expresses his alienation and his courage. Double-Portrait Carnival, 1925, ostensibly shows the pair entering a ballroom or coming onto a stage. The golden curtains have dropped shut; the figures stand exposed. The actual costumes are light-hearted: Quappi expensively disguised as a rider with a horse, Beckmann more modestly bedecked as a clown or acrobat. He holds his quasi-trademark cigarette, his stand-in miniature for the magician's wand. But the lovers do not communicate. Quappi looks earnestly to the right, as if awaiting, with anxiety, a signal, while her husband presents himself to us with the sad defencelessness of an actor without words to say. His pose has often been compared to that of Watteau's Gilles, and the resemblance is very striking. Like Gilles, Beckmann accepts stoically the strain of being looked at, of letting others see him, without the protection of either a theatrical robe or the garments of everyday. The crucial difference, of course, is that Watteau is not Gilles; he is a painter standing outside and seeing Gilles. Beckmann chose to paint his own exposure and his ludicrous attire, to put himself on display as well as his beloved. We can only feel that he was convinced of the truthfulness of this approach. Everyday clothing was, to Beckmann, more of a genuine mask than masquerade clothing. Life was a comedy. To acknowledge this and play one's part with dignity was to know one's self with greater certainty.

Beckmann's greatest self-portrait takes this discovery and inverts it. Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927, works on the premise that the tuxedo, the aristocratic dress suit in which Beckmann always felt completely at home, was in itself a masquerade, a pretence of dignity and decorum to which no man was truly entitled. If the gods laugh at the clown, they explode with mirth over a man in his stately black-and-white."


Double-Portrait, Max Beckmann and Quappi, By Max Beckmann

"The 1941 Double-Portrait, Max Beckmann and Quappi spells out the terms of his second marriage with a frankness found nowhere else. (Despite his reiterated self-portraits, Beckmann was a deeply private man.) This is a self-portrait with his wife; she tucks herself neatly into his side. It is he who addresses us, she who looks modestly away. Yet, in this mundane world, where we might not fit in if we do not know and keep the rules, it is Quappi who seems more at ease. Beckmann looks choked by his muffler, encumbered with his walking stick, ill at ease with his elegant hat. There is something of a stranded whale about him, an exile in Holland and for once without much money. His wife's hand rests lightly on his shoulder as if to steer him, her fashionable little shoes trip forward with some certainty, while her husband hesitates, seems to feel for a footing on this alien carpet. None of this is admitted; naturally he glooms out at us, disgruntled but in command. We feel, all the same, that the worldly motor power in this partnership is the woman's. The great advance on the 1925 double-portrait is that there is no longer any need for carnival disguise. The figures are still just as seperate, as distant from each other as they were then, but an acknowledgement of their mutual dependence has grown and helped them. If Beckmann affronts the fates and dares them to do their worst, Quappi is at his side to share his future, united if apart." --Sr. Wendy Beckett, Max Beckmann and The Self

Saturday Rainy Afternoon and Middle-of-the-Road Muzica

G.S.F.

Devotions Meme

So, I was contemplating during the past few days, without too much intent, a post I would write about devotions, seeing as I had started a devotion again which I did not do last year, and which has been - now that I'm doing it again - like something wonderfully familiar yet new.

Then Terry memes me (yes, I'll verb the word if I want to). In the meme you have to list your five favourite devotions. Well, thank you Terry, for tagging me and for the confirmation.

Here they are:

1. Adoration

2. The Holy Face of Jesus. I've been slack in this one of late. Though I go to Adoration every Tuesday (if because I go practically every day) I do not always remember the intention when I do go. You see, how could I forget that? It happens when you don't consciously keep it in mind. One who practices this devotion is recommended to go every Tuesday before the Blessed Sacrament to make reparation for the insults and injuries which Christ's Holy Countenance has received, and which He receives in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. If one cannot make it to a chapel at the time, one can console the Face of Christ within one's heart - of course, having an image of His Holy Face helps in that regard: "I firmly wish that My Face reflecting the intimate pains of my Soul, the suffering and love of my Heart, be more honoured! Whoever gazes upon My Face already consoles me."

3. Total Consecration to Mary according to Saint Louis Marie de Montfort. This is the devotion which I failed to renew last year, by which I mean that I re-consecrated myself to Mary, but I failed to do the 33 days of preparation again leading up the anniversary of the consecration date, which for me was in 2007. So, consecration to Mary, while being sufficient the first time, is something one is to keep renewing. Anyone who wishes to do this Total Consecration, simply go to this link. All you do is email the apostolate your mailing address, signifying your intention, and they send you, totally free of charge, the preparation booklet, instructions and calendar.

4. The Brown Scapular. As with the above, wearing the Brown Scapular goes with its practices. I pray the rosary instead of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin. I also pray the Morning Offering:

O my God, in union with the Immaculate Heart of Mary (here kiss your Scapular as a sign of your consecration), I offer Thee the Precious Blood of Jesus from all the altars throughout the world joining with It the offering of my every thought, word and action of this day. O my Jesus, I desire today to gain every indulgence and merit I can, and I offer them, together with myself, to Mary Immaculate, that she may best apply them to the interests of Thy most Sacred Heart. Precious Blood of Jesus, save us! Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us! Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!

In addition to this is holding the Scapular and kissing it - not always for myself, but for another person who I may happen to be thinking about.

5. The Rosary

Root or Tree

Word & Question

The following poemthingy was written, I'll admit quite late and rather hastily, for the Playing Poetry meme Word & Question, hosted at Shredded Cheddar. The first W&Q contribution can be found here.

You can find the rules for this meme at the links above.

The Word: Hippopotamus

The Question: Is it harder to find the answer or know the question?


A Buddhist would answer with the latter,
and would form it as another question,
for they like answering questions with questions
until there is no-mind and no-matter.

An Aristotelian westerner
would answer with the former; his answer,
being in the form of an answer,
would leave no doubt, that it shouldn't be a bother

what the question is, for the answer will extend
beyond the question posed, shedding light
in some respect upon a universal whole.
Thus one could well ask why God made the muddy
river's heaving hippopotamus;

the sage before whom the question was mused
ought not - if he were true - to refuse.

And the real credence came, to question and answer,
in which either led to a better
in the other: like man and woman together,
like bee and blossom in the spring;
this salvific dawn of ease of everything mattering;
a flowering back to us of everything-our-world;
this answer to the mind of man, that an answer
really could be an answer, and then the question honed,

no more the repeated ghost-drama of self-echoes,
being answered for real, as an actual answer -
perhaps more close and real than the pagan would expect -
was fruited forth (the seed of which
was a cataclysmic crucifix)
amid concerns of angel-fitting pins,
by a corpulent Dominican.

Max Monday

Kleine Landschaft, Viareggio - By Max Beckmann




Coastal Landscape with Balloon - By Max Beckmann

"And always the sea plays in my thoughts, from near and far, through sun and storm." --Max Beckmann

Locus Focus - Jungle Boogie

Locus Focus is a meme hosted every Saturday at Shredded Cheddar. It's all about settings that come alive for you in books; so link-up your own choice of setting and read about the settings others have written about!

This Saturday's setting: The Island of the Black Eaters-of-men

Call It Courage
By Armstrong Sperry

"For a quarter of a mile the coconuts held, beautiful trees that were more luxuriant than any in Hikueru. It was always thus in the rich soil of the volcanic islands. Then came a belt of breadfruit and wild bananas, of oranges and guavas and mangoes. The roots of the mape' trees--the island chestnut--twisted over the ground in strange, tormented shapes. Vines trailed like aerial ropes from the high branches where orchids bloomed, while little parakeets fled on swift wings and vanished in the green gloom. Mafatu had never before seen woods like these, for Hikueru was open and wind-swept. These endless legions of trees seemed to close in upon him, imprison him with reaching arms, with heady odors, with eerie light and shadow. Ferns grew higher than a tall man's head; the roof of leaves was powdered with starry blossoms."

Such is the island where the young Mafatu, deemed a coward on his home island of Hikueru and a source of shame to his father, masters his sea-fears alone; alone, but for his dog companion - oh, and those cannibals.

Maybe the solitude of such a place (solitary even from pagan civilization, for cannibals from an adjacent island perform their sacrifices here) is what some like Mafatu need. The very precariousness of his position seems to push him from one great feat to another. Hunting, cooking, making a boat. (The adventure of getting and cooking one's own food is at its most alive here.)

A place most to be feared proves to be Mafatu's space for maturity: those who have the greatest tremblings of cowardice within them are by no means exempt from courage, for courage does not mean merely the absence of fear.

Something about the oppressiveness and immediate wildness of this luxuriant island affords continuous opportunities for Mafatu. Anyways, it's here where he comes into his own:

"On his left hand, far offshore, the reef boomed to the charging surf; the curve of the beach reached out like two great arms to enclose the lagoon. Coconuts and pandanus trooped in shining legions to the very edge of the sea. A flight of green-and-purple parakeets flashed across the sky and vanished. There was no other sign of life. No voices of men; no laughter of children; no footprint in the sand.

The volcanic peak that formed the background of the island rose perhaps three thousand feet straight up out of the sea. It was the cone of a volcano long extinct. From its base, ridges of congealed lava flowed down to the distant shore. Once, in the dim beginnings of the world, this mountain had belched forth fire and brimstone, spreading destruction over the land. But the forgiving jungle through fertile centuries had crept back up the slopes, clothing them in green, green."

Garden Sprawl Friday

The garlic trimmed and cleaned:


I have yet to cut the tops off the above variety, as the stalks were still fairly green when harvested. I don't know if it makes any difference, but it just seems right to wait until the whole stalk dries up before cutting it.




And the last of them that got pulled:


While the first pictured garlics are nicely wrapped (their stalks above ground were also the last of the three varieties still standing erect), I regret not having pulled up the other two varieties earlier. Moreover, what I did especially wrong was actually pull them up - without digging them with a trowel, and prying them up, from the bottom.

Since the stalks were fallen over (as is supposed to happen) and weak, what happened is when I pulled the stalk up, it ripped off the top portion of the wrap of the garlic bulb, leaving the garlic bulb still in the soil. Lesson learned. The garlics are still perfectly good of course.

What is amazing though is the gratuitous multiplicity in nature. For each variety of garlic pictured, I bought three whole bulbs. So altogether there were nine bulbs. You plant the separated cloves from each bulb (a bulb of garlic is merely the ring of wrapped cloves). Each clove turns into a whole new bulb. It doesn't take long, saving just a few more bulbs than last time each harvest for planting instead of eating, before you have quite a...garlic operation.

Another nice thing about garlic is that your bulbs will develop a hue, a tinge of colour totally unique to your micro-climate. Thus, two sets of the same variety grown in two different regions will be...well, could you call them the same variety?

The cantaloupes, in the true spirit of sprawl:




The potatoe and cabbage bed:


The cabbages have steadily been disappearing (thank goodness) instead of just sitting there going to waste. I dug up one of the potatoe plants and came to the conclusion that I will wait a further couple of weeks. If you're going to have potatoes that aren't "new potatoes", you may as well let them get good and big. The pole beans are beginning their climbing of those poles in the back; they are late, late, but not too late.

***

This evening one of the cats caught a blue dragonfly and was unsure about eating it. You could hear the poor thing burr-clicking its wings, still alive, but damaged.






The tabby, being delicate about real meat (she likes her kitty treats), played at it, but didn't really get to eating. So she was joined by her sister: the meat-eater.


The tabby took off. The dragonfly was still alive, and I was unsure about what to do. I knew I should make an end of the dragonfly, as it was clearly beyond recovery and suffering. Just then, thank goodness, the silver one took over - and didn't waste any time.



Crunch, crunch, crunch, the whole thing went down.


Cats are mean bastards.

The Exhibition

July 2nd was the opening reception for the Arts 2010 juried exhibition, in which my painting was included, and which runs until August 29th. While the gallery was pretty well packed upon arrival, after at least 30 minutes the number diminished suddenly, it seemed, by half. One really cannot blame the vapid post-modern attention span too much, when the collective non-aura of the work in the gallery is taken into consideration.

The opening address was so blandly ethereal and unmarked by any hint of boldness or any common connection with human life that it was the very extension of what is called "applied art". I don't know if this is part of some purposeful and conscious effort to neutralize all manifestations of truth with the very language that employs words like diversity, expression, creativity and so forth, into a politicized ghetto where subjectivism rules (and where even subjectivity is annihilated).

Our cultural ghetto is not one of suppression, at least not in the explicit sense. It is one of a very deadly and subtle assimilation. And the artist who makes pretend that he is positing truth and diversity against the flattening effects of this culture does not understand that he is merely feeding it - that is to say, he does not understand that the de-spiritualizing, anti-incarnational operatives are coming from that assimilative field which is at its most deceptive when it appears as some kind of neutral ground. If the artist wants to create portals that open onto the infinite, he must come out of the boat like St. Peter.

I was certain there was going to be at least one homo-promo painting in the exhibit, as this has been a usual course with the gallery over the years; but there was not one - I hate to almost say - sadly. Because when you look at work like the following,






the initial thought that comes to mind is that a few of those propagandistic paintings would be practically welcome.

In the above works, guess which won first place in the "works on canvas" category. Now guess which won second. Now guess which got honourable mention. I'll make it easy: the pictures are in that order, starting from top to bottom.

Notice I discluded third place in that list. Third place - and showing that not all is lost - was the painting shown here, of the oranges, in between the two others (and hey, they placed my painting beside it!):


What is sadder is that a good chunk of artists who won awards or honourable mention did not even show up at the reception to receive their recognition. Is so-and-so here? So? Alright, on to the next one. Now, some years back, when a painting of mine was included in the exhibition, I didn't go to the opening reception. It didn't win anything, but I realize now that the good thing to do is to show up, whether one gets first, second, third, honourable mention, or is simply included in the exhibit.

But what kind of arrogant indifference rules when a second place winner doesn't show, along with a bunch of other "winners"? And please don't give me any of that humble anonymity foulness. Talk about a cultural event that is a lie in every respect. It's rather diabolical; for what is a worse dismantling of our sense of cultural event - and thus of community - than a cultural event that negates itself - playing out its symbolical inversion as though it weren't inversion? But it's a lie.

Winners were hesitant to show up, and viewers were quick to leave. The opening speech almost implored the audience not to listen too hard, and the top canvas picks of the jury sucked donkey shit. A big pile of donkey shit would actually be more interesting, to one who has the contemplative gumption, with the flies that buzz around it and land thereon, laying their wormy progeny within; how it mixes with the rain, and how it bakes in the sun, the pathogens being killed off, and its final blessed withering into the soil that produces life and nutrition.


I went back to the gallery a couple weeks after the opening to take pictures. This exhibition I was pleased - or at least not exasperated - with how my painting appeared:


And I liked this landscape:

Forest Drawing - Beech Trees

Garden Sprawl Friday

Coleslaw anyone?

Today, most of the garlic got pulled. They should have been pulled earlier, as a center bulb was protruding from the ring of cloves on some of them. There are three varieties. I know one of them is Red Russian, and I know which actual garlics those are, but the other two I'm not sure, as I did not label them, though I know, having placed a stake at each variety, which ones are different from the other; it's just that I do not know any longer the names. No matter how much you think you will remember what you planted, label it anyways.




See the bees? Click to enlarge. The other week, all sorts of bees were over the leek flowers all day.

The cantaloupes - or muskmelons - are sprawling well: