Ad some orientem and the world will be saved?

That's basically what Christopher West thinks.

During his seminar on November the 9th. 2013 in Surrey, British Columbia, Christopher West made an orthodox-sounding appeal in the course of his third talk on how we are "disoriented", and how we need to be "reoriented". Because we are disoriented we are heading in the wrong direction. You know, his whole rocket-pack thing.

Christopher West actually made reference - just like the folks who say that our sea of iniquity is traceable to 1962, or to 1968, or to 1972, or to 1955 when Emmit Brown came up with the key component for making that infernal and catastrophic time machine (the flux capacitor!), after which it was nothing but time-paradox disaster after time-paradox disaster! - to how we used to face east and that it pointed us towards heaven and towards the coming of the bridegroom, but the sign was done away with, and now we are disoriented. That was straight from the man himself.

It gave me a good chuckle as I sat on the bench farthest to the rear that's reserved for confession line to hear the Zhuldorf axiom on the lips of Christopher West. It made me realize I was perhaps sort of onto something when I wrote this post.

I hold no contention with what Ratzinger/Benedict has written regarding the intrinsic link of the crisis in the Church to a crisis in liturgy. The conclusions ("solutions") that people draw from that - the link of crisis in liturgy to crisis in the Church - as propagandized on the internet, inevitably prove to take the virtual position of superseding the Church herself, whose wisdom we must always learn from anew. For to learn from the Church is to veritably be renewed. She's not a museum or a university.

And anyways, to those who actually read Benedict/Ratzinger, rather than just quoting him out of context in the outdated museum archives of their on-the-blogspot fabrications, would know that "crisis of liturgy" includes liturgy in pre-reform time, before Vatican II, when many were - to use Ratzinger's words - not in touch with the Mass (which does not mean lack of catechesis or liturgical formation but a kind of very unhealthy mutual exacerbation, which is the perennial call for reform), and in which - to use Ratzinger's words - it was as though there were two liturgies: the liturgy of the priest and the liturgy of the people. They were saying the black and doing the red. The people were hearing the Mass. They were facing the liturgical east. It was the Mass of the ages. Down from the Council of Trent. There were no guitars. No felt banners. No clowns. No balloons. No puppets. No ideological tinkering. No polyester vestments. I mean, shouldn't the world have been, like, saved or something? What crisis was there exactly before Vatican II? Pray do tell, eh?

Anyways, don't ask me. I wasn't alive during that time, nor do I feel like pretending I was. Ask Benedict about pre-conciliar times. Read his writings. He affirms that liturgical crisis includes pre-conciliar times.

But how could "disorientation" exist when all the signs were in place? I mean, the Mass forms us, right? How could the crisis of a fractured dichotomy exist in the very context of saying the black and doing the red?

I'm not interested in anyone answering that question. I'm asking rhetorically. The questions answer themselves.


"...and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him."

More Ballpoint

 

Cox's Orange Pippin

Where ne'er a drop of water e'er fell

Cannellini

These are called Cannellini beans, the minestrone bean. I bought a packet when I went to a Seedy Saturday event at Van Dusen Gardens a few years back, and I can't remember if I had bought them from Salt Spring Seeds or Full Circle Seeds. I planted that original packet, which yielded a big bowl full of seeds. I saved those and didn't plant any of them until this year. I only planted a couple rows, hardly anything. I think the seeds were around three years old. As far as I could tell all of them came up.

So now there's this second generation and the brown bag full of the "first generation". They all have a destination for the dirt. Plus I took some for soup.

The Perfect Asian Pear

Forget those pallid things you see at the grocery stores, those watery fruits in their mesh nets. If that is what you know as "Asian pear" then you have not had an Asian pear.

An Asian pear, like the one pictured above, blushing through its tan, is like a fine wine. It can even be "too much" for some people, with its depths and its aromas.

I've been watching that one in the picture slowly turning colour through the summer, along with all its fellow pears. One load proved too heavy for a branch and tore it off before their prime (to much weeping).

I do not know what variety the one pictured is, but as good as it is, I'm aware that there are even better kinds - the russet varieties. As with apples, russet varieties take the cake - always take the cake, away from those sparkling polished professional perfections you see at the grocery stores.

In car waiting ballpoint

Ballpoint

Patty Cake

I only ever once had the misfortune of hearing a priest air dirty laundry about other priests. In this case he was conversing with a seminarian. I was the quiet guy in between. It was at the table during dessert.

Once was more than enough. What a stench.

Why then should one heed the same from priests or laymen online concerning bishops and cardinals I wonder? Who am I? Who are you? What is your place? Does Pippin have Gandalf all figured out from head to toe? Was that clericalism I just uttered? Does it mean I'm condoning corrupt priests and bishops if I don't write an open letter? What good does any of this way-up-in-the-echelons hierarchy inside talk wannabe insider talk hashed out online do? I find it hard to believe that it does more good than harm.

Do I have an opinion about Scotland? Do I care? Everything has become so utterly meaningless. B.C. teachers on strike? Where do the teachers get the energy to care about the stupid stuff they're willing to go on strike for? The energy to sit there in front of the schools with their stupid sandwich board signs? It isn't the pay. They make decently on that front.

How in the bloody Dickens do tattoo parlors stay in business, and tanning salons?

It seems like everything is up for grabs, and anything you grab must be milked, and nothing you grab matters. Of course, it all matters very much, but it's like people are being hustled along. Waiting is the great sin. Waiting and watching are the unpardonable sins. You remember that passage in G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man in which he is describing the state of the world when Christ came into it?

Go and read it if you can and tell me that's not something eerily similar to the state of the world right now. I say that with joy, not fear and loathing.

Everything is passing away. We're building sand castles online. The grown-ups post-graduates ruin all the fun by holding retarded sand castle competitions and then photograph themselves standing beside their structures about to be washed away by the incoming tide.

There's a meme for you out there whoever you are who makes memes: a picture of some guy standing proudly beside his mind-boggling, professionally perfect sand sculpture with the caption, "Grown-ups: effing things up since post-graduate school."

Or something to that effect.

Here's a phrase I hope catches on: "Selfied to death." You heard it here first. Here's another: "Meta-retarded". I'm hoping later it will simply become, "Metatarded".

Oh, and I think I may have come up with a poetic term: Jump rhyme. It is for an end-line rhyme that has anything from five to six, seven, eight or more lines between the two rhyming words. Barely registered, an unconscious echo. Jump rhyme.

Why is everyone leaving the Patheos Catholic portal? Dawn Eden, Max, Barnes - vamoosed! Back to individual blogs! Tally ho! Makes me smile. What with all those pornified ads they can't do anything about. Well, except you can leave Patheos. Ha!




"You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid."

--T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Foolish Vanity

"You allege that you never invite others to sin. You did not by your tongue, but you have done it by your dress and deportment more effectively than you could by your voice. When you have made another to sin in his heart, how can you be innocent? You sharpened and drew the sword. You gave the thrust by which the soul is wounded. Tell me whom does the world condemn? Whom do judges punish? Those who drink the poison, or those who prepare and give the fatal draught? You mingled the execrable cup; you administered the potion of death. You are so much more criminal than poisoners, as the death which you cause is the more terrible; for you murder not the body, but the soul. Nor do you do this to enemies: not compelled by necessity nor provoked by any injury; but out of a foolish vanity and pride. You sport yourselves in the ruin of the souls of others, and make their spiritual death your pastime."

--St. John Chrysostom on Immodest Women

The death of a rat

That trap plumb near cut his head off. You don't need to make a fancy meal. Tostada with a bit of butter. A bit of apple. They're not picky. He had made his way behind the siding of the house and got inside the wall. He couldn't get inside the house, but you know, when you see a rat running along the baseline of the house and you hear scurrying inside the wall, that means death to the rat - and that is that.

Appaloosa

These are called appaloosa beans. I bought a packet when I went to a Seedy Saturday event at Van Dusen Gardens a few years back, and I can't remember if I had bought them from Salt Spring Seeds or Full Circle Seeds. I planted that original packet, which yielded a big bowl full of seeds. I saved those and didn't plant any of them until this year. I only planted a small patch, hardly anything. I think the seeds were around three years old. As far as I could tell all of them came up. About half a big bowl full.

So now there's this second generation and the brown bag full of the "first generation". They all have a destination for the dirt.

Aphorism

Bureaucracy is ill-defined as a government begetting too much of itself; it is far more accurately defined as a government becoming more and more quarantined.

Words of Our Lady of Fatima to Jacinta

"More souls go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason."

"Certain fashions will be introduced that will offend Our Lord very much."

"Woe to women lacking in modesty."


--Spoken from between December 1919 and February 1920

Hyssop!

What is that, around three hundred plants? Rainman estimators eat your hearts out.

Water Money

Paradox: by bonding itself to the public interest a government is getting out of the public's way.

By "bonding" we mean contractual bonding, in the same way that a government bonds itself to private banks through "government bonds". In our paradox the government would be outlawed from bonding itself to private banks, for that is nothing other than to enslave to debt the future (and present) generations of its country.

In the "old days" our paradox was typically referred to as "protection". The protection works both ways. Not only is the public interest protected, but they are protected from undue government interference in the very same stroke, because by "bonding" itself to the public interest, by way of the mutual contract of money issued to the commonwealth through infrastructure, the government is bonding itself away from wastral bureaucratic projects - such as, for instance, wasting 300 billion gallons of water on an endangered smelt (the fish is still endangered by the way). In which case, as we presently see, farmers have to bulldoze half their citrus trees and others go out of business.

And a government comes from a society, even when the electoral process is a mockery.

In other words, a society could function without private banks. They are just a commercial business. One could argue that they are inevitable, sure. But a society could function without them. But to even use the word "society" implies government of some kind. In other words, banks are just banks, but a government is essential.

So when people talk about "big business and big government" like they were just two equal entities merely because they were equally corrupt have not thought things through.

Which means pretty well that all the major Catholic writers out there in internet land are, for the most part it would seem, on this subject, quite content with the wall of "lies and bribes and dead men's bones", as long as their ideas can be kept up as sorts of hobbies without the threat of being translated into reality.

Anyways, one could not come up with a better example of the need for transparently controlled, government debt-free money, spent into existence, than the water system of California.

What is the first result of a government proposing debt-free infrastructure projects as the means of issuing the country's money into existence? That which is most essential in terms of infrastructure for the flourishing and well-being of society come to the fore to occupy the government's energies. Right there, you have broken the back of bureaucratic entanglements. The government is "squaring" with the people. This is actually the only way in which you will ever have less government.

What is the result of the most essential structures (like water systems) being made evident, both in terms of completion and in operating function by way of debt-free government-issued money? The unburdening of productive capacities, which can then transact in an economy that has velocity rather than delay. In other words, by not being burdened by debt. In a debt-money economy like ours, you may not be burdened by debt, but in some convoluted indirect way you are, or will be, because someone else is burdened by debt, and an economy is based upon transaction - far more in fact than it is based upon capital. For capital is based upon the occurrence of transaction. Value is decided via transaction, not vice versa. A transaction completed is the evidencing of value, and thus of capital. You have bushels of wheat you have no intention of selling but you want to know their value? Right there, you have already assessed them according to the incentive of a future transaction - even though you have no intention of transacting with them. Yep.

You see, people just don't seem to get the part about a government spending the money into existence. It's a transaction. It's acutely different to merely giving it out, which is welfare. And far more acutely different to "borrowing" it into existence at interest and then giving it out, which is plutocracy carried out through a middle-man, the government.

There is something important about it, and I am repeating what I wrote above: because the government spends the money into existence (through, for instance, infrastructure), the government thereby cuts off its own power to dictate to people how they are to spend that money. Because the government has already done that - spent it. (And that is power to the people.) That is the definition of being spent: you received something in return, and what you gave is totally out of your ownership and say. Whereas with welfare, there is no objective sundering between parties. That's not to say that welfare is de facto enslaving of parties; the Church practices the charity of welfare without enslaving. In a government's hands though that just doesn't work so well. And that's because a government has a different purpose, not because a government is de facto enslaving.

The government needs to have an objective end to which the power it exercises by issuing money comes to a contractual breach. There must be a fundamental meeting and sundering. After which there is a mutual contract, the burden of which rests upon the government, and the overseer of which is the public. (The government's end of the mutual contract carried forward and honoured is the transparent control over quantity, which the public oversees. The government is thus rendered vulnerable to the wrath of the public, but also rendering its most positive value: that of protecting and making incentives towards the common good and the commonwealth.) This must be the first primary transaction, or primary transactions, from which an economy proceeds. There is no such thing as an economy not proceeding from a primary transaction. Economies are not based on some isolated, intrinsic value. They are based upon a single, primary transaction.*

Presently, the primary transactions from which our economy proceeds are transactions done in the dark, and not done with the public, in its interest, but are done with private banks, in their interest.

In our truth-bearing paradox of government bonded to the public interest, you would see, very much overnight, a consuming economy becoming a producing economy - that is, producing stuff that people actually need and want, not useless crap. You would also see a booming democracy of innovations, inventions, ideas. And I say "democracy" because those inventions, innovations, ideas would not remain on back-burners but would be self-actively implemented - indeed, practically in the sense that the ease given by monetary lubrication would seem to bring such things out.

Farmers in California are paying astonishing sums of money for...water: something that falls from the sky.

Gold standard - yeah, right.


*--This is where your friendly major Catholic writers start howling about you being a spawn of the dictatorship of relativism and a child of the Enlightenment. ROFL!

Back on the catch and release system

I'm getting soft in my old age. Plus one that big just makes too much of a mess.

80s Fantasy

They were always interesting when they agreed that a movie was great. They were always entertaining when they disagreed if a movie was bad or good. But they were sublime when they agreed that a movie sucked.











"Instead of Three Men and a Baby you could have called this A Warrior, a Dwarf, Two Brownies and Baby."

"What were they called - the Ewoks..."

LOL!




Of course I disagree somewhat about Krull.

Subliminal Messaging

The "Pink Elephants on Parade" song got stuck in my head the other day (see previous post) and it really gave me some pause. Three things mainly, which gave me to pondering, left me with something of a conviction - I hate to say it - that the scene in the movie Dumbo, yes, in the movie Dumbo, just might really be a sort of creepy cryptic Illuminati overture.

First, the music itself considered apart from the lyrics, but including the way in which the lyrics are sung (together with a ghostly laughter in some parts). Doesn't it just sound like a cultic initiation chant/song? The disconcerting silences between the sung lyrics has a blindfold effect on the listener, the initiate, especially with the slate backgrounds. Yeah, I don't care if this sounds nuts.

Second, the slate backgrounds in tandem with the hollow eye sockets of the elephants. The elephants look demonic and/or bizarre.

Third: at first I thought that the pyramids and opening eye as evidence of Illuminati symbology was laughable. But now, after some thought, it occurs to me that, well, what are the odds? The odds of the hollow demonic eyes of one of the elephants turning into two pyramids, which turn into another elephant doing a belly dance, whose belly then turns into an opening eye? Sorry,  but somebody knew what they were doing.

But then - and this point actually is the one that gave me most pause - there is the fact that this sequence happens pretty well at the end of the film. After the scene, there is the tree scene with the crows and then Dumbo flying at the circus. But if you consider it, this hallucination scene is pretty well the denouement of the entire film. It's the cathartic stage before the rise of its hero.

The sequence doesn't have the same Disney take on spookiness as, for instance, The Headless Horseman. That short film gives its spooks at a certain remove typical of Disney. But with the scene in Dumbo, there's something about the "threshold" that the animation is breaking across: there is some kind of immediate visual information that the scene seems to be "injecting". Hence, perhaps, the various comments from youtube commentators that alternately say they were scared witless of the scene as a kid, or they found it incredibly weird.

That being said, I haven't come to any tinfoil hat conclusions about any of it. And I do realize that's more than enough words that one should expend on, you know, some harmless children's animated movie from the 40's. But it's just that I've been thinking quite a bit about subliminal messaging as a result.

Fr. Dunstan Massey of Christ the King abbey in Mission was once critiqued by a German for using what was - to the German - subliminal imagery, something which he said that Satanists use.

Here is one of Fr. Dunstan Massey's frescoes, The Temptation of St. Benedict:

Clearly there are differences to be made between what people generally mean by subliminal messages and the sort of thing that one sees in the above image.

A dictionary definition of "subliminal message" is:

"Below the threshold of conscious perception. Used of stimuli. Inadequate to produce conscious awareness but able to evoke a response."

What we usually mean by subliminal messages concurs with the above definition, such as when people speak of the advertisements that movie theatres showed before films, in which images of certain foods were flashed between frames, causing people to go and buy those foods at the concession of the theatre. (I don't know if this is "urban myth", but it doesn't matter for our case in point: what we mean by "subliminal message".)

The reason why subliminal messaging is, in worst cases, a creepy thing is precisely because the image/film being viewed is a sort of front, behind which something different is being fed to the viewer. When it is going on in children's movies, the creep factor goes up several notches.

If you view Andrei Rublev's icon of The Holy Trinity you can see something that some might call "subliminal":

The two angels representing the Holy Spirit and the Father that flank either side of the table/altar are actually forming the table into a cup/chalice. And who is in the cup? Christ, the figure at the top center.

Yet this is not at all subliminal messaging, as it is generally understood. Nor is Fr. Massey's work. For one, it is not relaying a different message from behind a front. Rather, the not-conciously-registered aspects of the images are further deepenings of the image itself and its meaning. Facet is being reflected in facet. Deep is calling to deep on a certain visual level. Perhaps we could call this sort of thing visual hierarchical sublimation. Hm, that's probably not a good term.


Anyways, then there's this:











Definitely not the same thing. LOL!

And then of course there is this:

And this:

A priest once said in a homily: with God there is no fine print.

In other words, there are no "one overs" where God says, "Aha! I gotcha! You were supposed to read the fine print!" There is nothing that can be held against us as though God stowed something important away from our sight as a kind of "fine print" for which we needed extra special magnifying glasses.

Likewise, nor does God use a false front from behind which he utters words of which only the initiate can register, while the rest respond to it without conscious perception.

Likewise, nor did God "superimpose" a sexual subtext on nature as a "key" for us to find Him.

God is much deeper than that. And much closer - right there in front of you close. Hidden in the open. Hidden in the humblest species of bread and wine. He is also inside of you, for you carry His image, and no one else has His image in the same way as yourself, for He created you - "a unique and unrepeatable creation." And He redeemed you and set you free - in Him. When He speaks to us He respects our voice so much He actually identifies Himself with it. He identifies himself with our most impoverished being and there He loves, and in His love our poor being lives in Him.