Mostly B pencil

Tarkovsky Tuesday

B pencil

pencil, B I think among others

Feast of St. Charbel

O God of Silence, in stillness Your adorable and mysterious Trinity lives, loves and acts. In the silence of time, Your great Mysteries have been accomplished. Blessed is the one who quiets everything within himself and listens to the impelling voice which leads to You. Charbel heard this voice and closed himself in solitude. He separated himself from a self-seeking world and spoke with You. You taught him to deny himself and to die, like the grain of wheat. You asked him to bind himself to You in a life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Freed from himself, he discovered You, 0 Lord, embraced the way of the Cross and filled his spirit with the memory of Your Son’s passion and death. The holy Mysteries became his life, the Eucharist his real food and the Mother of God his consolation. Day and night he sought You in the Scriptures and in the lives of the saints. Through unending prayer his whole life became a living hymn of praise to You and ended in a sacrifice of love that continues to proclaim Your glory. We beseech You, through his intercession, to inspire us to a life of prayer and sacrifice. Help us to live lives of quiet dedication to the service of Your Church, forever.
Amen

Prayer found here.

Pope Francis and the poverty we need to learn from

 

Fr. Dwight Longenecker has an excellent article on Pope Francis' "prophetic option for the poor".

The subject of the economy is infected with a dualism (purposely bred by schools and institutions) that prevents people from perceiving that the very subject of the economy is a battleground to be broached; broached with all of our common mess beating down the financial wizards that spew incomprehensible gibberish; not a disconnected thing concerned in some pure sense with material well-being, but the materialized enactments of man, through human law, toward his brother and sister. An economy is intrinsically socially constructed.

Because an economy has more to do with it than "finance", it means that "finance" becomes more important than we figured before, not less so. The material impoverishment of people is not a concern that is pitted against the primary concern of spiritual salvation. They are not one and the same, but neither are they to be pitted against each other.

You are infected with a dualism (which keeps your faith sealed up like an antique) if your first reaction is to say that it is liberation theology.

The rich don't simply get richer while the poor become poorer, like it was some horrible but ultimately accidental coincidence. The rich get richer precisely because the poor are made to become poorer - and not just through theft and usury; but through the corruption of the meanings of words.

That is what money-as-debt is.

That is what the gold standard has ever been, and would ever be.

Pyramid schemes trying to fool us into believing that money exists by nature, when money only ever exists by law.

They don't want us to ever see the truth of what monetization is: a group of people deciding through a primary transaction made law, how many are going to be able to make transactions; or else a group of people deciding through a primary transaction made law, that the common good will be included to the exclusion of anyone making profit from that primary transaction made law. Usury or beneficence of the common good. It's one or the other.

Know people who advocate the gold standard? Ask them if they have personal investments in gold.

And wouldn't that be nice for owners of gold to become the monetizers of other people's real wealth and productions.

Anyways, a government of a nation must issue its own money debt-free according to the good produced and the quantity in circulation controlled through extinguishing (which is really the only reason we would need a tax, and is in fact why taxes ever came about).

Nope, that is not a "planned economy". It is merely the government monetizing the wealth that the people produce.

The gold standard is very much planned though.

I just don't know what it's all about

"...The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969." -- Coleman Young, Detroit Mayor 1974 to 1994

2H and some others, might be 6B and HB

Max Monday

Sunrise - by Max Beckmann

Landscape, Saint Germain - by Max Beckmann

2H, 2B

Just a wonderful documentary

on J.R.R. Tolkien.

Almost a good two hours long, this is solid English film-making: no pop-modern sugar crack; all thoughtful depth.







Time-stamped:







Time-stamped:







Time-stamped:






LOL!!!!!


H/T: Mark Shea

I think B and 6B

B, 6B, 2H, 2B

2H, B, 6B

6B, B, 2H

pencils, B and 6B among some others

2B, 2H

Chichikov

I SAW… 

By Pavel Chichikov

I saw the swallows rise and dip and soar

Stall and fall and rise and travel more,

In the dusk they fed until the night

Unconstrained and brilliant their delight

That which has such freedom to control

An allegory of the blessed soul,

God will give us nests beneath the eaves

Of heaven when His spirits He retrieves

We will be the swallows of His air

To which not even swallows can compare,

Catch the buds of brilliance on the wing

                        And to the fledging universes bring 

NOTHING IN THE WORLD MADE SENSE 

By Pavel Chichikov

I saw two owls in the woods,

One of darkness, one of thunder,

When they called I understood

That dark and light are torn asunder

Each had eyes to see the other

One flew east and one flew west,

One the sister of her brother,

Each repairing to its nest

Eyes to shine within the darkness

Wings of silence, wings that roar,

When they parted in distress

Seams between the worlds that tore

When the two had flown apart

Nothing in the world made sense,

When they coupled there was art

                        And love and music and pretense

The Poetry of Pavel Chichikov

Oil Painting

 

This one is not finished.

The camera hates this painting. Hard to get a good picture of it.

Title: Bose Hill Dusk #4

Oil on canvas

 

2B, 2H

Listen to them church bells

in the second piece (prelude) that is. Famous.






Fantasy Pieces.

Five of them.

Rachmaninoff.

2B, 6B, 2H

Pope Francis and Light

"Are we open to the Holy Spirit? Do we let ourselves be guided by him? Christians are “spiritual”. This does not mean that we are people who live “in the clouds”, far removed from real life, as if it were some kind of mirage. No! The Christian is someone who thinks and acts in everyday life according to God’s will, someone who allows his or her life to be guided and nourished by the Holy Spirit, to be a full life, a life worthy of true sons and daughters. And this entails realism and fruitfulness. Those who let themselves be led by the Holy Spirit are realists, they know how to survey and assess reality. They are also fruitful; their lives bring new life to birth all around them."

--Pope Francis in June 16 Sunday Homily


Pope Francis is a pope bringing the light of faith right close and personal into our souls, with a child-like quality. The penetration of light. This child-like quality has an influence on the manner of the penetration of the light. The light is often like little baby hands play-slapping our thick adamant skulls of darkness. He exposes hypocrisy in me and all sorts of things, but it's light, God's light.

We are to be crucibles which bear fruit, knowing we are sons and daughters of the crucified King. We have been given a great mercy with our Pope, for the light he is shining is a purification that is at the same time gentle - really, of the meek nature of Christ. A diffuse sort of beam - that at times can be very sharp - that has behind it, or rather leads to, the freedom of sonship with the Son. It is happy purification with him.

One would be wise to be docile to him, just as he is docile.

For certain times are coming when purification is not going to be happy but is going to hurt.

UPDATE: I like what Terry Nelson writes about the "boat altar".

Tarkovsky Tuesday

“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.” --Andrei Tarkovsky


“When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part. What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?” --Andrei Tarkovsky

“Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.” --Andrei Tarkovsky

tree

6B

The Roswell Folk Narrative maybe starts with Orson Welles

Artists often unconsciously give "presagings", or prophetic signs, through their work, unbeknownst to themselves, for the pondering of future generations, so they can possibly know the truth.

Hitler took note of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast - or rather, of the effect which that broadcast produced on the public. As did Stalin. I don't think that makes what Orson Welles did particularly evil; I think at the core of what he did was unconsciously to serve the truth for people later on; say, if bizarre and scary stuff was ever to be done on the public by certain "agencies".

In other words, a clarion call sent down the decades for any future generations, if the public were ever made to believe a fiction such that they were made slaves. Maybe what Orson Welles did serves us: we can see how easily the public reacts to certain narratives, and believes in them.

I find what Annie Jacobson says just has a certain strange ring of truth to it. I'm not saying I totally believe it, since I haven't read her book, but, well, the fact is, there is a lot of experimentation done by governments under wraps - some of it perhaps morally neutral, and perhaps a lot of it absolutely abhorrent and horrific. The kind of stuff people don't want to know about. American history is rife with human experimentation. That's the cases we know about.

Human experimentation: that is what Annie Jacobson's research conclusively says, based largely upon a source who was one of the five present at Area 51 - who according to his own testimony witnessed and worked on the beings, who he says, were indeed human - not alien, but humans grotesquely deformed. The human beings recovered from the crash were the results of genetic/surgical experimentation.

If you think that hovering, radar-escaping aviation technology was being developed precisely at the same time that numerous "UFO" sightings were suddenly being reported (what people were seeing was secret military aviation technology), and the public had no idea of the aviation technology well underway, why is it hard to believe that genetic experimentation was also well underway?






From the interview:

"The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. ... There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that's almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft.

"The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there's a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, 'Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.' And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there's no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg.

"The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman's bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn't compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. ...

"What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin."

The atmosphere of the world is so false that it is foreign to truth

"You remember the prophet's advice? 'Go and wash in the river.' And the leper, finding this too easy, wanted to go away. But his servant said to him, (...) 'Something simple can always be tried.'

I ask My children for the most ordinary actions: eating, drinking, sleeping, working, your whole day united with Mine in the past, your actions dipped in My blood and clothed in My merits. There is nothing difficult about this; it heals you of your usual poverty and wraps you in the richest garment. Then, My little child, couldn't you try something so simple? Acquire the habit by gazing at Me as I gaze at you. You love this look of your great Friend? It's like a caress. Always it is power. Like My words. Like My Eucharist. Everything about Me is power. Life-Power. Isn't that a joy? Doesn't it give wings to your love in a greater understanding of the divine Being? If you only knew who God is... And how much He deserves to have you study His unsearchable riches, His generosity, His extreme goodness, His love, and again - yes, and always - His love, for love is the essence of His Being.

When you have entered into the treasure-house of His love, you will stay there. You will make it your home. That's where you belong. And from there, as from a lofty balcony, you will see life, your neighbour, service for God's glory from a new viewpoint that will completely change your usual petty opinions. The saints saw things differently from others and that is why they seemed to lead strange lives. They didn't have the same eyes.

The atmosphere of the world is so false that it is foreign to truth. So go deep into My domain of love and lock yourself in."

--He and I

Misc.

More and more restaurants - and not just isolated ones - hire waitresses based entirely on physical looks, and specifically on physique, and then the restaurants dress them to look like hookers. In dress no different from that of hookers - in fact, in dress that even some hookers wouldn't wear - the waitresses make sure to touch the male customers of the tables they wait upon.

They know how to touch just right. When women use their touch in such ways on a habitual basis as their job, they can communicate just the right heat and softness to the person they touch; they also know how to sink into their bodies - while dressed like hookers - in such a way as to stimulate the lower appetites of men. I don't know if there is any language for this thing they do, but let's say they give the greatest expression possible to the sexual presence of their bodies by letting the body go entirely "heavy limp", or "purposely defenseless by seeming accident", and oh, is that my torso in an ultra-truncated "mini-skirt" a foot away from your face while you pay the bill on the debit machine? There's the tip button, right there. They hardly have to do anything but stand there and they communicate these things with a very specific intent.

They do this - dressing like hookers, touching the male customers and stimulating their lower appetites - to receive large sums of tip money. The food at such restaurants is typically mediocre crap dressed in the pretension of being good food and the drinks are ridiculously expensive. Such places, and such women, insult men, and insult them greatly - I would say, insult them gravely.

Men, be men, and don't go to such places.

*

I still remember this one episode of E.R. - that stupid hospital soap opera of the 90's. In this episode a woman came to have an abortion, and while she is in the ward having the child killed, the husband comes busting into the hospital demanding to see his wife because he is against her having his child murdered (as any good husband would be), and the nurse with the dreadlocks (at least they looked like dreadlocks) oh so heroically stops the wild crazy stupid husband so that his wife can exercise her choice to murder her and her husband's child do with her body what she likes.

That character treatment is the ultra-kind version of  how the "post-modern" era regards men, and specifically fathers and husbands.

*

If I was a priest I would kind of purposefully push young people away from marriage. I would make it hard for them. And if they treated me like the necessary tool for their photo-op ceremony I would tell them they could go find another priest. What did our Lady say in one of her apparitions - many marriages today are displeasing to God?

*

In the modesty/clothing debates, there's always a person who says something along the lines of, "But you need to understand, women just aren't aware of what they are doing when they dress like that."

Is that supposed to be some kind of paramount excuse? Men just aren't aware that they sometimes piss over the rim of the toilet such that their urine spatters on the floor. What say you to that?

By that do you mean that these women are so sucked into their own egotistical, selfish, narcissistic worlds that, like all who sin, being paradigms of immodesty (which directly implies an unawareness) they "just aren't aware of what they're doing?" Then yes, sure, they aren't aware of what they're doing, and waking up would imply repentance - absolutely.

But that's not what is meant, is it? No, what they mean is that the unawareness, which is the fruit of their immodesty, makes them extra extra extra special or, rather, makes men more and more metro as they are expected to tread on eggshells and how dare you criticize women bastard this is America/Canada.

But anyways, many of them know exactly what they're doing when they dress like that.

*

I remember reading this one forum somewhere on the internet, I can't remember what forum or what it was about, but someone in the midst of the conversation spoke about how his child in the grocery store, upon seeing a cover of a magazine with a sexed up woman on the cover, asked,

"Daddy, why does she want to hurt me?"

Poor kid. Didn't know how to deal with women.

*

Men who drive big mini monster trucks, jacked up on huge wheels and flaming paint jobs with the testicles hanging off the back chrome axle: maybe if it was, like, the 80's, people would be like, "Oh that is so awesome! I want a truck like that!" But since it's post 2008 debacle, post-this and post-that, post-9/11 and people generally know that things are not going to go well in the near future, and people generally are coming more and more (incrementally) to realize (even with joy) what is really important in life, your truck only makes people think, "You have no responsibility with money and you're probably mired in debt just to keep your life cushioned with the artificial life-support of your expensive toys. Get real."

*

Men in North America in the summertime (which has nothing on the tropics) who walk into stores without your shirts on as though your pectorals and abs were all that: put a shirt on, retards. What are you supposed to be - a male hooker on the streets of L.A. or something?

*

Through the rolling meadowland I strolled where the path takes you over a plank footbridge over a pond that goes dry in summer, and in the spring I saw so many tadpoles flickering in the murk.

Then later I saw they got bigger, fatter, their eyes almost on the tops of the fat heads. Then another day they had little legs beginning, and they slurried around, or just hung there, all fat and bulbous. Repulsive. With spottiness developing on their skin. Their tails getting smaller. Their heads getting fatter.

Then one day as I came down the path there was a jumping thing that went plop ker-plink and plish splash. Ah! The agile frog so quick on the money!

It was good to see some improvements finally being made.

*

Recently me and the Boss had to deal with an American bullfrog in a lady's pool. We came through the passage that cuts between her house, and ker splosh! right into the blazing blue of her pool; the water perfectly clear, we could see the muscular legs and spots of this giant kicking around in the depths of paradise. I think I heard the frog scream Cannonball! as it jumped into the water. The water uses the salt method rather than chlorine - though this too would eventually not be good for the frog.

I would honestly rather deal with a hairy tarantula. Really. I don't mind spiders.

And really, objectively speaking, people ought to be more afraid of the American bullfrog than of spiders because the American bullfrog is a nasty invader that gobbles up the biodiversity of other places that are not its proper home.

Oh! Am I saying something there? Who knows!

Anyways, spiders are great pest controllers (without the gobbling), and people really ought to cut them some slack.

The Boss made use of the pool net while I held the bucket. Oh my Lord, that bullfrog jumped from the net straight at me and there was no way I was going to stay there holding the bucket. We tried again and again. Finally, we got it in the bucket. I carried it to a corner of the yard behind which is a marshy area, but at the point where I was releasing the frog there were prickles - blackberry thorns.

As I tilted down the bucket - a deep plastic barrel really - I could see the massive squat silhouette of the frog through the white plastic sliding slowly down, then hopping back up so that he wouldn't come out. He was aware of the thorns. You see, frogs are like pigs. They are smart. They know when you're coming, and they see quite clearly.

When he came to the rim and knew that he had nowhere else to go, he jumped from the rim into the neighbour's yard, avoiding the blackberries that fronted the marshland.

He'll find his way.

*

Comments about modesty will not be published.

*

The internet is false time.

*

Alex Jones and all the fear-mongering gold bugs make the moneyed internationalists quite happy. Alex Jones and Co. are very useful to them.

Mailbox Pencils

6B, 2B 2H

Good for six more months

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