Medium: Brush Pen

Medium: Pencils HB, 2B and maybe others

He would be angry

"I am afraid I have been far too casual about 'magic' and especially the use of the word; though Galadriel and others show by the criticism of the 'mortal' use of the word, that the thought about it is not altogether casual. But it is a v. large question, and difficult; and a story which, as you so rightly say, is largely about motives (choice, temptations etc.) and the intentions for using whatever is found in the world, could hardly be burdened with a pseudo-philosophic disquisition! I do not intend to involve myself in any debate whether 'magic' in any sense is real or really possible in the world. But I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the 'deceits of the Enemy'. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, good or bad (per se), but only by motive or purpose or use. Both sides use both, but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other 'free' wills. The Enemy's operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but 'magic' that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. Their magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. Their goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to us between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and 'life'.

Both sides live mainly by 'ordinary' means. The Enemy, or those who have become like him, go in for 'machinery' – with destructive and evil effects — because 'magicians', who have become chiefly concerned to use magia for their own power, would do so (do do so). The basic motive for magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by, and at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means. Of course another factor then comes in, a moral or pathological one: the tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting, and defiling as such. It would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho's introduction of more efficient mills; but not of Sharkey and Sandyman's use of them.

Anyway, a difference in the use of 'magic' in this story is that it is not to be come by by 'lore' or spells; but is in an inherent power not possessed or attainable by Men as such. Aragorn's 'healing' might be regarded as 'magical', or at least a blend of magic with pharmacy and 'hypnotic' processes. But it is (in theory) reported by hobbits who have very little notions of philosophy and science; while A. is not a pure 'Man', but at long remove one of the 'children of Luthien'."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter # 155, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Bold italics mine)

"Of course The L.R. does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world, though naturally I take a deep interest in its fortunes, as a parent would of a child. I am comforted to know that it has good friends to defend it against the malice of its enemies. (But all the fools are not in the other camp.)"

--J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #328, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Bold italics mine)



Yep, I wonder sometimes what Beren himself would have to say (were he alive today) about the present-day neo-conservative, mechanistic flattening of Middle-earth - and the consequent denigration thereof - to fit with Potterworld as a means of justifying Potterworld and its occult practices represented as a good.

Medium: Pencils F and B

Medium: B Pencil

Medium: Pencils HB, 3H and 2B

Why do the heathen rage? Why do the nations rage?

-The Lord hath said to me: Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.

-Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?

-Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

-The Lord hath said to me: Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"Some critics are terribly anxious to see a filmic spectacle shown simultaneously on several--even on six--screens. But the movement of the film frame has its own nature, which is not that of the musical note; 'polyscreen' cinema should be compared not with a chord, or harmony, or polyphony, but rather with the sound produced by several orchestras playing different pieces of music at the same time.

The only result would be chaos, the laws of perception would be broken, and the author of the polyscreen film would inevitably be faced with the task of somehow reducing simultaneity to sequence, in other words of thinking up for each instance an elaborate system of conventions. And it would be rather like putting one's right arm all the way round one's left ear in order to touch the right nostril with the right hand. Is it not better to accept, once and for all, the simple and binding condition of cinema as a succession of visuals, and to work from that starting-point? A person is quite simply not capable of watching several actions at once; it is beyond his psychophysiology."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time


I think those words could be applied, in a way, to modern life.






Sequence from Solaris

Medium: HB Pencil

Medium: Pencils 3H, HB and I might have used 2B

Coloured Pictures

This is the sort of book we like
(For you and I are very small),
With pictures stuck in anyhow,
And hardly any words at all.

You will not understand a word
Of all the words, including mine;
Never you trouble; you can see,
And all directness is divine—

Stand up and keep your childishness:
Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;
But don’t believe in anything
That can’t be told in coloured pictures.


---


A poem that G.K.C. wrote in a Randolph Caldecott picture book that he presented to a young friend.

Medium: HB Pencil

A World of Good

"Mind you, the most perfect steersman that you can have, and the best helm, lie in the triumphal gateway of copying from nature. And this outdoes all other models; and always rely on this with a stout heart, especially as you begin to gain some judgment in draftsmanship. Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will be well worth while, and will do you a world of good."

--Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook

Medium: F Pencil

Medium: HB pencil and some other ones I can't quite remember

Medium: Brush Pen

Icon - Mother of God

The latest icon.

For those who do not know, the three stars (shoulders and head) represent her perpetual virginity: before, during and after birth of Christ.

Medium: Pencils HB, 2B, 3H and maybe B

Tarkovsky Tuesday

Sequence from Nostalghia.

Medium: Pencils 6B and 2B

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"It was no accident that at the beginning of this chapter I applied the word 'capital' to the responsibility borne by the cinema author. By pointing up the idea like that -- even if the result is an exaggeration -- I wanted to emphasise the fact that the most convincing of the arts demands a special responsibility on the part of those who work in it: the methods by which cinema affects audiences can be used far more easily and rapidly for their moral decomposition, for the destruction of their spiritual defences, than the means of the old, traditional art forms. Actually providing spiritual weapons, of course, and directing people towards good, must always be difficult...

The director's task is to recreate life: its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of truth he has seen -- even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable..."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Medium: HB Pencil

Medium: B Pencil

Medium: Pencils 3H, B, HB

Medium: Pencils, 3H, B and HB

Medium: Pencils B, 2B, 3H and HB

Max Monday

Max Beckmann - Die Landschaft, Cannes

Max Beckmann - Harbor by Bandol (Gray) and Palms

Max Beckmann - Beaulieu

Max Beckmann - Promenade des Anglais à Nice

Medium: Pencils HB, 2B and probably other ones

Medium: Pencils B, 2B, HB and 3H

In the Fourth Age

"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Sauron], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless - while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors - like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow - but it would be just that. Not worth doing." --J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #256, Letters of Tolkien


"I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldarion about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)" --J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #338; Letters of Tolkien

The Departed

After work this evening I went to the cemetery for All Souls' Day and prayed a decade of the rosary in the rain.

All this month is dedicated to the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Isn't it neat how the Church calls them holy souls? They have the hope of the assurance of Heaven. Where there's hope there's ascension; where there's ascension there's holiness.

During work today two great blue herons flew over the hedge above me, side by side, flying low; their masterful wings working in that slow, strong sort of langour that makes me think of the way giant manta rays swim in the ocean.

Nature abounds with signs.



Pray for the holy souls in purgatory. They help us in turn. You know how people make sure to get into a person's intentions when that person has stated he is going on a pilgrimage to a holy place? You know, you're going to the tomb of Padre Pio? Oh, can you remember to pray for ______ when you're there please? We want something of ourselves to go along with them.

The ones in purgatory are on their way to the ultimate Holy of Holies. Wouldn't you want to make sure they have some trinket of your remembrance, that you helped them along the way?

They're going through the gates and you want to leave a note or something in their pockets to take out before the throne of God. Hey, what's this here in my pocket? Oh yeah, it's whatshisname - he helped me here Lord!

Cemeteries are so silent.


"But as it is written, Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him." --1 Corinthians 2:9


"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." --Steve Jobs' last words

The origin of Christmas is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The origin of Easter is the resurrection of Jesus Christ - as the origin of Good Friday is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

These are origins that are absolutely historical and absolutely supernatural. They are, in a more real sense, origins that are historical because they are supernatural - being neither merely historical nor merely supernatural. They are origins based in singular events.

Halloween has no such origin. This obvious statement is not made to the severely normal who already know it, but to the professional online Catholic apologists who, in their obsessive eagerness to show through a collation of factoids that Halloween is sooooooooo Catholic, end up doing nothing but make it look like Halloween is the third most important celebration in the Catholic Church after Easter and Christmas. Which, to be even more obvious, does nothing but denigrate Easter and Christmas into relativistic culture pie and culturally relativistic mish-mash. Like, everything's Catholic man; pass the bong.

As they all well understand, it's not even on the Catholic celebration roster. It's just the eve of a feast day - a feast day that used to be regarded with more importance than it is now. In Canada, All Saints Day is not even a holy day of obligation, which is sad.

One could even say that Halloween as we know it does not have an origin in any sense of the word. Definitely not in the sense of having an origin in an event. Certainly not an event as those originating Christmas and Easter; but neither an event that is merely historical, for any event that went into the Halloween weave through the years (such as Guy Fawkes) was no event of origin. It's just this kind of open-ended cultural phenomenon coming together, and yet coming together in no fully realized form or meaning, through strange meeting points in history.

It's more a long mutating string, or coalescing strings, of various practices, from various continents, from various times, all of them purely cultural, without any one event of origin; but the apologists point to them as though it were as definitively - nay, dogmatically - Catholic as the Apostolic line. (And God forbid you apostatize on the dogma of Halloween.) Their final, solid, resounding claim of the Catholic "origin" of Halloween, through pointing to the patchwork of past historical currents, is actually just as tenuous and hybridized today as it was back then.

The so-called puritanical person who suspects Halloween as so much ingratiation towards evil has in fact just as much a say (as much as one may disagree with him), based on the evidence of his eyes, as those who say that Halloween is soooooooo Catholic, without nary a one of them being any less Catholic or any more heretical than the other (though I'll put my money on the latter as the heretic). Why? Because they are both purely cultural appraisals about something that is, in its "origins" (which, again, are not origins really but meeting points between running historical developments), purely cultural.

I have fond memories of Halloween as a kid. I think it's great for kids to dress in costumes and trick-or-treat, and for adults to dress in costumes and to blow off fireworks and to party. Do I feel the need to defend it as being soooooooo Catholic? No. That it is merely All Hallows Eve (which just happens to be very culturally open-ended) is good enough for me. It's also a pretty good way of not becoming attached to it. It seems there are some though, like certain Potterheads, who simply cannot stand it for a second to have their entertainments questioned, even remotely. It's quite sad and pathetic.

At the end of the day there will still be seasoned Veterans who don't like watching war films, and Holocaust survivors who can't stand the sight of firearms, and people who have been awash in the occult, or been in contact with serious demonic infestation, who have reservations about what they see going on on Halloween. The day I would say to any of them that their suspicions make them puritanical and that they are just sooooooooo not Catholic and need to get more with it would be the day you find me at a big jubilant tent revival, jumping around and shouting, "Alleluia! I've seen the light!"

There are some things where it's better to just say that it's fun, and that that is the reason. Let the Catholic cards fall where they may.

Because, as it is, I just don't really believe that the neighbours down the street with their front plastic graveyard sets and polyester spider webs that they purchased at Wal-mart are exercising the same cathartic impulse to face the inevitability of death as those who painted scenes of the dance macabre during the Bubonic Plague. Just a hunch I have.

(But for fun? Good enough for me.)

And because I don't like the dictatorship of relativism that's being pawned off as Catholicism.

Hey, I just said 'Catholicism'!

I deserve a candy bar for that!

Hey! I just said 'candy bar'!

I'm so highfalutin.

Medium: Pencils 2B, B, HB and 3H

Medium: Pencils B, 2B and 3H

Medium: Pencils HB and B

Medium: 2B Pencil

Sorry, had to do something with that single stroke "2-2-2 drawing" below...

Medium: Pencils 2B and B

The Van Gogh Mystery

Go here to read about what most likely really happened to bring about Vincent Van Gogh's death by gunshot.

It makes sense to me. I don't think he would have shot himself. It never did strike me as true.

Medium: 2B Pencil

Hey! This is this blog's two hundredth and twenty second drawing post!

That's 2-2-2!

And what does that mean?





The next celebration is 333! And if I make it to the number of the beast there will be no celebration and I'll make sure to have two drawings ready to bump it over!

Max Monday

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles

"Here again, black is the dominant color and sets the tragic mood. In contrast to the Cubists who would transform a woman with a guitar into a still life, Beckmann endows his still lifes with human qualities. The table here has become a stage and no shadows are allowed to obscure the austere integrity of the mysterious event. This simple still life, like Cezanne's Black Clock, is a memento mori: the two largest candles are fallen heroes, while the other two stand in mourning, guarding against the "dark black hole" of space and infinity behind them. Indeed, a year later he painted a similar composition on a larger scale and introduced a book - a script as it were - with the word "Eternity" on its title page." --Peter Selz

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles and Mirror

Medium: Soft oil base black pencil and 2B pencil

What's Wrong with Canada - in short sum

I remember one man in a group conversation who admitted that he voted for Pierre Trudeau back in the day simply because he thought he was cool. Heh.

Basically the same reason why many voted for that Kenyan-born liar down south.

I Don't Know

Since the satellite hasn't been getting used much at all, and it's typically dvds that get played here, it was cancelled; but one of the last things I caught while flipping channels was a double Richard Dreyfuss feature of Stand By Me and Jaws. I caught the latter half of Stand By Me while watching all of Jaws. While Stand By Me wasn't my favourite growing up, I liked it back then; I found it fascinating; it seemed to express something I couldn't articulate, while the ending sort of depressed me. And I still like the film, more than I did before.





It's intriguing, isn't it, how many popular films in the 80's were about father/son issues.

The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi, Field of Dreams, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand By Me...(my mind is at a blank right now, so feel free to add any others in combox)

Even The Princess Bride is quite literally book-ended by the relationship of the grandfather and his grandson.

In all of them the father/son theme is quite different from the other, exploring different aspects, and different in the ways they go about it; some archetypal and dramatic, like the two latter Star Wars films, intimate and underplayed like in Field of Dreams. In The Karate Kid it's very subtle, almost invisible, but ultimately the film's unspoken backbone. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off it's more of an appendage near the end, but the film's most serious note. In Back to the Future the theme actually runs quite deep. The way the comedy suddenly lands one in the heart of the familial and its universal consequences is moving. When George McFly decks Biff, it has all the cathartic import of Darth Vader giving the Emperor the heave-ho.

And I think Stand By Me is about father/son issues sort of the way the ocean is about the water: there's a lot of other things in it, but don't overlook the water.

Oh, there's E.T. and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade...

But then there's also a kind of subset of films to this; films not necessarily about father/son issues but extensions of, and therefore connected to, them. Movies about men - this is going to sound lame - finding the man inside them, like Innerspace: about a daring man literally inside of an unadventurous man who makes him brave and courageous. Top Gun and Iron Eagle (which one is worse? LOL) I know there's others here too, but I can't think of them now...

It just seems to me this was the general current of popular (and maybe not so popular) 80's movies. Was the 80's taking revenge on the 70's and 60's?

Two Things

You may notice this caption on the sidebar:



I got it from Dymphna's Road. Thanks Dymphna's Road!

I recently watched the film The Tree of Wooden Clogs. It was made in the seventies, and I watched it in two parts on youtube. The film is around three hours - a decent length for a film. It could have been longer; I wouldn't have noticed.

I'm hesitant to say the film is "hypnotic" or "mesmerizing", for the superficial connotations of those words. But the film channels that aspect of cinema which is one of its most potent - that of rhythm.

It works on you like a solid wooden high-backed chair, putting your back straight; not luxuriously comfortable, but not discomforting either. The nimble quickness with which the labour of the land is carried out, the efforts that go into keeping a home sanitary (and warm), the proper way of slaughtering a pig, the poetics that go into growing early tomatoes: peasant life is by no means sentimentalized, not because the film has the ambition of realism, but because the film itself is speaking in the rhythms it chronicles.

And by the end, the film can also be said to be a protest. I don't know many films that can be called protests against injustice; I'm sure there are lots. But the "protest", the cry at the end of this film has absolutely no whiff of propaganda.

I really recommend watching it. (Again, it's in two parts.)

Update: third thing. I wrote a lame post several days back about using the word, "Catholicism". I didn't think of those who use the word as the very header of their blogs. My apologies to them. I wasn't thinking. I deleted the post, though I still think that when it's possible to use the words "Catholic Church", one shouldn't substitute "Catholicism" instead. And of course there are times when one can only use "Catholicism" and not anything else. I guess it doesn't matter.

Oh, and if anyone writes a blog and wants to delete a blog post, but doesn't like the fact that the post still remains on google reader after you delete it, the solution is simple: before deleting your post, go into your post to edit. Then delete all the words of the post in the box. Then publish your post again. It will now publish in google reader as a blank. Then you can delete it from your blog.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"The cinema image, then, is basically observation of life's facts within time, organised according to the pattern of life itself, and observing its time laws. Observations are selective: we leave on film only what is justified as integral to the image. Not that the cinematic image can be divided and segmented against its time-nature, current time cannot be removed from it. The image becomes authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time lives within it, even within each separate frame.

No 'dead' object - table, chair, glass - taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time.

You only have to by-pass this condition to make it possible to take over any number of properties from one of the neighbour arts. And with their help you can indeed make very effective films; only from the point of view of cinematic form these will be incompatible with the true development of the nature, essence and potential of cinema.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time. I therefore find particularly irritating the pretensions of modern 'poetic cinema', which involves breaking off contact with fact and with time realism, and makes for preciousness and affectation."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Max Monday

Max Beckmann, Riviera-Landschaft

Max Beckmann, Blick auf Vorstädte am Meer bei Marseille

Max Beckmann, Seascape with Agaves and Old Castle

Bloody Hell

I think we should excise all those passages from The Divine Comedy in which Dante violently condemns various bishops and clergy by name who were living and/or dead during his lifetime, because people are converted by beauty and those who are newly looking into the Faith will read such vitriolic ugliness and decide that they want nothing to do with the Catholic Church. After we excise those passages, we should then put Michael Voris in some kind of penitentiary - maybe headed by authors from the Patheos Club.

Medium: Pencils 2B and H

Garden Sprawl Friday

Appaloosa beans (dry beans). Bought one small pack from a seed company at a Vancouver seed sale. Will plant these ones that were shelled next year. It's about half of the harvest. The others weren't dried enough yet, so left them on the pants for now. Should probably pull up the plants. The outsides of the shells look terrible, but they're perfectly clean on the insides.





They filled up that bowl when they were all shelled.





They're on the oven trays for convenience, not because I put them in the oven. Obviously they dry faster when they're spread out and not on top of each other.

Next maybe I'll show chickpeas.

Art

Fr. Longenecker from Standing on my Head touches on some aspects of art in this poem, which I liked:

A Secret Language
By Fr. Dwight Longenecker


We wrestle with the mystery of words,
hammering from the vast inchoate
universe, the pointed spears and sharp swords
with which we marshal the inarticulate
chaos of the soul. With precision
we discuss, dissect and delineate;
then define and decide. Each decision
is set in stone—not open to debate.

But beneath the dogma something rebels.
We sense lost treasure buried in a field,
or secret meanings glimmering like jewels
in the dark caverns of the soul. They yield
their bright reward only to those who mine
with the pick and spade of symbol and sign.
In this underground struggle we soon learn:
only the work and liturgy of art
can unlock the secret language of the heart.

Section 13

Whiny Lawyerville

Lawyers of Fortune

Shakedown artists

Hucksters

Professional Complaining Class

Highly paid grievance-mongers

Complaining Left

Self-serving lawyers and ethnocrats

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"Who has not written about Raphael and his Sistine Madonna? The idea of man, who had attained at last his own personality in flesh and blood, who had discovered the world and God in himself and around him after centuries of worshipping the medieval Lord, on whom his gaze had been fixed so steadily as to sap his moral strength -- all of this is said to have found its perfect, coherent and ultimate embodiment in that canvas by the genius of Urbino. In a way, perhaps, it has. For the Virgin Mary, in the artist's representation is an ordinary citizen, whose psychological state as reflected in the canvas has its foundation in real life: she is fearful of the fate of her son, given for people in sacrifice. Even though it is in the name of their salvation, he himself is being surrendered in the fight against the temptation to defend him from them.

All of this is indeed vividly written into the picture -- from my point of view, too vividly, for the artist's thought is there for the reading: all too unambiguous and well-defined. One is irritated by the painter's sickly allegorical tendentiousness hanging over the form and overshadowing all the purely painterly qualities of the picture. The artist has concentrated his will on clarity of thought, on the intellectual concept of his work, and paid the price: the painting is flabby and insipid."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Medium: 2B Pencil and maybe another

Max Monday

View of Genoa - Max Beckmann

NachtGarten - Max Beckmann

Priests in the Pulpit

What's the grand global total of times in the last 43 years that a priest said in the homily, without preceding his words with any qualifier, something to the effect of: "The use of artificial contraception is a mortal sin. Mortal sin is an offense of grave matter committed with full knowledge and consent, and if a soul dies in it, that soul goes directly to hell after going to God." And then, of course, speaking of God's mercy and the creation of every soul for Heaven.

What, maybe a thousand? Maybe that's being generous?

You have to think, Padre, something like ninety whatever percent of the parish's couples are contracepting, and you spend your priesthood's homilies on the most profound articulations, and then you die - and oh, I didn't mention anything about artificial contraception being a mortal sin, not once; whoops.

Maybe you think it will be taken as stating the obvious in order to be controversial, or something. But the real reason is that you want your parishioners to like you.

And yeah, there's a ton of hypocritical hand-wringers on the web who would read the above words that run, "...and if a soul dies in it, that soul goes directly to hell after going to God." and say, "But that's not for us to decide! Who knows if a soul that practiced artificial contraception went to hell or not; we're not to be that soul's judge and blah blah blah..."

Yes, pantheist, yes; and that means that Pastors shouldn't pastor their flocks. Sin is not sin just because it makes a person miserable.

Word & Question

Leave all gardens unguarded, all woods yielding,
but put a circuit round the gutted mall:
a last surveyor, turning, in the night,
like one to watch a ship that's done with sail days,
now yarded in the weedy dark - hulled, unpraised,
waiting to be water-sealed, out of star-sight.

One witness, pert, this official vacancy
beside the zoning fence, make midnight strides,
that none may have the fun of breaking panes,
and wrest from demolitioners their first dig-in,
ruining what projected contract ruin
stands, as stood for years, now its fallow claim:

Beams to be bitten, walls to give way
to further sight; the roof no more a roof.
Rain, birds, air and light, making of the refuse-
the sudden letting of the elements,
water down the sliced front in many singing threads-
a song of a momentary end to use.

Whatever palpitates is for plough's harrowing.
Even hectic creatures as we, draw the stars
together of infinity, size them to suit
the rotting pages of an earthbound book.
How much more our pulsing lots, for plough, who look
in at zones, up at slate, map out routes;

our lots brought low: all world's a homeless sea.
Vast messengers above our heads wage war,
we trust through breakage, though not seeing far.
Cling to waking anguish, relinquish bed's drowse,
for the home of your heart is a falling house:
turn out - leap from the grave in your own heart.


Word: Turning

Question: What is the one thing needful? (At least I think that was the question.)


Was it love at first sight?


Word and Question


Alternate words for lines: Hoisted for yarded, and 'Have him witness' for 'One witness, pert'.

Medium: Pencil crayons and there might be 2B and 2H pencils

Government Priorities

hikoo

Condolence flowers,
arranged in jars with water,
soon will wilt and die.



Tobacco blooms done:
bulked wombs, with fine seed, where bees
crawled dutifully.

Furball

Zing goes the kitten - zat!
"Why don't you want to play with me
twenty four seven?"

Two Icons

My iconography instructor has chided me for not showing my icons to more people. So here are two recently completed ones. When you show someone the icon you have painted and tell that person about it, you are not simply showing; you are evangelizing, in whatever "small" way - make no mistake. And who am I to block that from happening due to a false modesty?

They are rather shoddy photos of the Archangel Michael the Great Taxiarch, and Christ the Pantocrator. Click to enlarge.