Contrition

You were not meant to feed there -
not meant to be your trough!
Alas, the bit of peanut butter
brought you hence, with every feather.
What horror to see your tail-fan's art
jutting thence - in place of vermin - pinned.

In this month of the Holy Souls
we give prayer's fire
in the year's winding-sheets.

Like blood's response, sunset appears.
The streams that run into the valley's heart
begin to seize.

Like the rose taper
in the penitential wreath,
shouldered with the purple;

quiet as breath nocturnal
from an infant warmed with milk,
hope is patient, silent,

strongest where worlds of growth have ceased.

These are guavas

Hot diggity damn they had them. Yes! I just went in for a potato, an onion and some mushrooms for steak and there they were, and I hadn't seen them for about half a year, and I said, "No, I'm mistaking lemons for guavas - er, wait a minute!" Booyah! The last time they had them I bought a goodly amount, thinking they would certainly have more when I came back - but the next time the guavas were all gone, all out, and they convinced me to buy those horrid "apple guavas" - yuck! But not too bad with some salt and pepper. These guys though - oh my favourite! Now, my "range", my experience of the world's many fruits is not exactly...well, I'm not Bill Pullman; but still, yeah, guavas and chilean guava (which I grow) are on the top of the list. Did you know Bill Pullman is an absolute fruit maniac? Yes, I've seen that documentary. I thought it was pretty good. Except for the stupid parts. I kind of wished the entire documentary had been about Bill Pullman and his orchards and fruit travels. Oh well. Oh and the first film has been taken of the black devil fish! Did you know what transpires when they mate? Holy crap.

Time is not money. And money is not time.

Money passes through time. So what. It is intrinsically connected with time because we ourselves operate in time. So what. We schedule all sorts of things according to time in addition to work hours. So what. The notion itself of a "work hour" is as much an abstract product of our minds as money, all the way down to our measurements of minutes and seconds and milliseconds. So what. We produce calendars of linear sequences and cycles which in themselves are not time, and which are not even us dividing time, or making sense of time, or categorizing time; rather, they are the representations of the projected stamp of our activities taking on the assumption of time as reflected in the rotation of the spheres. That's what the yearly calendar is: representing time within time. And this is perfectly natural, beautiful and not at all a fiction. Even Heaven itself respects it. It is vitally connected with the real. So what. When one says "money is time" or "time is money" one is not saying anything. But one is indeed compounding the fiction so desperately feared and consequently exacerbated by those trying to pop it. For just as we accrete a calendar as a human representation, of time as time receiving and being shaped by our respective activities going forward as a means of mirroring back to ourselves a stability to our activities (which because it has to do with real time is not at all fictional) so we accrete representation to wealth. So what.

All what any of this proves is that we were made for order and not chaos. Or more truthfully, that order was and is intrinsic in our creation, in our being made. And creation is hierarchical.

The difference between the two is this: whereas the formulation of a calendar is concerned with what is to come, being worked into our present, or our present going forward in anticipation of what is to come, after which we cast away our old calendars with their boxes all crossed off or our digital calendars are instantly replaced with the new one, and we say, "the best laid plans of mice and men", the formulation of money in its proper and most natural sense is concerned with what has already been completed, which then extends a stable proximity for the beginning of another activity going forward. The activities in the case of money are transactions.

Money only and ever comes into existence through a transaction of some kind. The way money circulates from party to party and from hand to hand is like to the way money comes into existence. The way money comes into existence can either be good or it can be evil. For the sound issuance of money, one can say it no simpler than this: the parties involved in a transaction must have completed the transaction both in terms of no one coming away from it deprived of what was agreed upon, but also nothing added on and extended from that transaction afterwards, which is projected onto the transaction beforehand. Which could generally be called speculation and derivatives, and for that matter, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (which are two sides of the same - ahem - coin). Nothing added on and nothing subtracted from: this is what constitutes the completion of a transaction - and thus the evidencing of wealth.

Money is not accreted to a commodity, or the production of a commodity, or the potential for the production of a commodity; rather, money is accreted to any number of future transactions as evidence of a prior transaction completed.

It is when we get away from this completion beforehand that we encounter economic woe. Derivatives, speculation, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (all of which are connected): these are at the heart of our economic problems.

In other words...usury. The making of money from money. But today it is specialized: usury is not today just a practice done by shady loan sharks. It lies at the very heart, or fountainhead if you will, of the issuance of money - the way money comes into existence. It has poisoned the well.

 "Rapacious usury has increased the evil which, more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form but in the same way, practiced by avaricious and grasping men." --Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

And it is an argument about what constitutes the well that people are actually arguing about.

People are obsessed with the attempt to make money into something so full proof and so permanently real, so obsessed with making it de facto before it is de jure (when it is the other way around) that they are willing to render the priceless things of man into commodities in order to support this historically novel hysteria of theirs - this obnoxious hammering upon some absolute qualified conception of money, like it will part the Red Sea.

It never occurs to any of these people, these blind objectivists, that when they are talking about what money is - and then conceptualizing a healthy economy from the definition - that what they are actually talking about is governance. It would not occur to them in a thousand years.


Time-stamped:

Hell is Universalism

"On the other hand, despite the protests of those who imagine a world without absolutes, the knowledge of the existence of hell has moved more men to repentance than many good sermons. The mere thought of an everlasting abyss of sorrow and suffering has been enough for some to deny an hour’s pleasure in lieu of an eternity of pain. Hell exists as the last teacher, the final signpost to save sinners from a horrific plunge from their Creator. Since every human soul is eternal, when we leave this earthly plane, we live on. But it is here that we must choose where we will live forever." --Mark Mallett, Hell is for Real

Imbibing Universalism is like drinking a bucket of insipid snot that coats and clings around every grace and gift and mercy that gives life.

Its final end is not the eradication of the fear of hell, but the dwindling of the immensity, the watering down of the intensity, and the trampling down of the unfathomable mercy of God's inviting love.

Universalism is a pig squealing about how God's sanctuary should be his trough and then tramples and gorges God's flesh by saying His love is a failure for pointing out and warning of the butcher, Satan, and his eternal hell.

Flat-liners

Beyond this, Thorn also believes that contraception is flat-lining the way men interact with women.

"There is estrogen in the water now. Male fertility has dropped by 50 percent after the pill was introduced, around the world.”

Thorn referred to various studies done on monkeys, which have shown that males are more interested in females who were not contracepting.

She believes that this study applies to humans as well. The way a woman’s body works naturally engages the male, causing him to be more interested and connected, she observed. However, a woman who is chemically altering her body’s natural flux will not engage a male in the same way.

“But we aren't told these things,” she said.

Read full article here.

This should be interesting to watch

Judging

Never ever think that you have someone pegged. The "ever" qualifier in that statement cannot be overdone, because you simply never have anyone pegged - far from it.

It makes me queasy to see the ease with which the orthodox and the conservative brush away the injunctions about not judging people (paired with the edification to listen) - the immediate classification they give to this warning as fuzzy liberal relativism. Is it a good sign when the immediate reaction to "do not judge" is to classify the phrase "do not judge" as fuzzy liberal relativism? It is ironic, that is for sure.

But it is a very real warning and it concerns a grave danger, connected with the gravest sin, pride. Is that something to be taken lightly? Is it a waste of time to contemplate the dangers - personal dangers - of the gravest of sins and its intrinsic occasions? Do you think the Devil is stupid?

Do not think you have someone figured out, or pegged, or that you know where that person is coming from. Are you anyone's creator? It seems to me the creator of people knows people best, and that you and me know only a fragment about the people we judge, and those fragments are intertwined with ourselves, making it even more a blind judgement - and out of the entire narrative of that person's life, you are acquainted with...what exactly?

A person is "a unique and unrepeatable creation". A mystery - an unpeggable mystery.

Not only are you judging someone, you are judging history like you were the God of history. A person claims to be vigorous and intelligent with a strenuous demand for clarity, but there is too often a huge and winding slime trail of lazy-assed, presumed-upon, crusty, half-formed and malformed conceptions and assumptions that precede their super orthodox stand-offs, which, interestingly, often lean toward the flippant.

The dangers of pride: the phrase probably sounds very quaint and old fashioned to some or to many. Who hears sermons about pride? About how it's the corruption of the highest, which means it is the worst corruption and the most poisonous, the most far-reaching, and the most undetectable. Anyone often hear a sermon about this?

One touchstone of pride, one of the foremost telltale signs, is a form of pegging other people. The forms are varied as people are. It is not just making gross mischaracterizations about someone. The injunction to not judge people is not simply a refraining from - as in, well, okay, I won't judge people, check, check, check, now let's get on with it. For not judging people only and ever rests upon the positive commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. So at the heart of this judging, this pegging of other people, is a spiritual deletion of a person's image - that person who is made in the image of God. It is more painful in a manner than physical violence. For this judging does not necessarily constitute looking at a person with a conclusive judgement. It also, and today more often, includes not looking at people at all; so that our sound arguments become conclusive categorizations of people - as in, they become the pinnacle or summation of our regard for our neighbour.

It is precisely in our love for neighbour that we see what they are doing wrong, and in that context speak about it, and do what prudence and courage demand and inspire. We cannot make arguments while neglecting love of neighbour, for even our sound arguments will become dirty.

I'm as guilty as anyone. This post only proves it.

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From the Father Brown story, The Miracle of Moon Crescent, by G.K. Chesterton:

Fenner laughed and then looked puzzled. 'I don't understand one thing,' he said. 'If it was Wilson, how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a man he'd seen every day for years? He was famous as being a judge of men.'

Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground with an emphasis he rarely showed.

'Yes,' he said, almost fiercely; 'that was how he came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He was killed for being a judge of men.'

They all stared at him, but he went on, almost as if they were not there.

'What is any man that he should be a judge of men?' he demanded. 'These three were the tramps that once stood before him and were dismissed rapidly right and left to one place or another; as if for them there were no cloak of courtesy, no stages of intimacy, no free-will in friendship. And twenty years has not exhausted the indignation born of that unfathomable insult in that moment when he dared to know them at a glance.'

Milkshake V

A New Generation

Would you have life patented
if it meant the end of wickedness,
suffering, poverty and distress?
No one believes in the world to come;
this manifests in every portion.
Wits, body, will, genitals,
transacted as commodities:
each person owns himself
and no one is his own;
sycophants and psychopaths,
knowing all facets down to bone;
what you do with yourself is up to you
and everything you do,
decided before you.

"We do not belong to anyone" they say,
"and so to the devil in chains."

Year by Year

Good to post Annum per Annum by Arvo Pärt on this day.


"...in this work there is a reflection of the idea that year in and year out the ancient rites of the church are celebrated in the same places."

O God, who year by year renews the day of the consecration of this Your Holy Temple, and ever bring us again in safety to the holy mysteries, hear the prayers of Your people, and grant that whoever enters this temple to seek blessings may rejoice to obtain all that he seeks. Through our Lord…

Don't be stupid

One of the stupidest things a person can do - and I mean stupidest as in S - T - U - P - I - D, as in there are a hundred other stupid things one could begin with that would look smart beside it - one of the stupidest things a person can do is attempt to "gauge" where the Holy Father stands by who he "demotes" and who he "promotes". It's stupid on so many levels as to be perfectly blind. Not only for what it positively is (the stupidity of presuming an infallible scale of veracity in deciding what makes a promotion a promotion and what makes a demotion a demotion and what makes a position too worthy for such and such a character), but for what it necessarily negates. And what it necessarily negates is that whole, you know, Catholic thing. (Not definitively Catholic thing, but what is assumed in being Catholic thing.) Like, hello creeping Protestantism.

Yet this is what we see the majors and the p.h.d.'s and the widely-read Catholic writers doing. It's amazing. It makes those who should know better into blind guides (like LifeSiteNews). People flock to their favourite oracle Fr. Zuhlsdorf where he drops little nuggets of his seemingly let-slip thoughts for his readers to pick up and they hold on to them like the pearl of great price; with a few off-handed-seeming musing words of his in red he can hold them in throes of sudden despair. It's a sickening disgrace.

How about objectively trusting the Holy Father? He's not there for you to "give him the benefit of the doubt". It's amazing how the know-it-alls are being confounded in their conceit left and right as they attempt to decode Bergoglio.

“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to little ones.
Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father.
No one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”

I mean, I'm just really trying to figure out this puzzling Bergoglio! He's such an enigma!

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” --Mt 11:25-30

Anyhow, if a Catholic convert starts casting aspersions on the Holy Father, attempting to illuminate his past as cardinal, bishop, priest and seminarian and earlier as a means of determining what sort of pope we have, then is one allowed to cast aspersions on their former Protestantism as tainting them with a subtly entrenched anti-papist bent?

Whether that writer is a former Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist or otherwise, as one reads their words online is one allowed to say, "Well, no matter how many Catholic t's you cross and Catholic i's you dot, that yeast sure knows how to assimilate it all and come through in the end; for strong and stubborn is the leaven of Protestantism indeed!"

Is one allowed? Don't answer that. LOL.

I need to imbed new code in my template to figure this one out.

My computer crashed! An enigma within an enigma!

Aphorism IV

There's a daring in waiting.

Beatus Vir

Here's another whopper by Henryk Gorecki. It is entitled Beatus Vir:

Opus 38, subtitled Psalm for baritone, large mixed chorus and grand orchestra, is a musical psalm setting written by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki in 1979 . The text is drawn from several psalms (143:1,6-10; 31:16; 88:2; 67:7; 34:9) and the title is from the last of these: "Blest is the man that trusteth in Him". The work was premiered on June 9, 1979 in Kraków, Poland with Baritone Jerzy Mechlinski and the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by the composer. --Wikipedia

It was commissioned by Pope Saint John Paul the Great when he was a Cardinal. It was to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaw.

I find it a powerful piece of music.

This is a cabbage

January King.

And to show it is a nicely packed cabbage:

Time-stamped

When people use the word beauty too easily, something presumptive and something very unlike beauty begins to show its face, and I begin to think of things like this passage from Brideshead Revisited:



 

One of the greatest symphonies

 


 


 


 

Misc.

Ah, Fall back! The human law of time zones and daylight saving time. Like money and the economy, human law must be a fiction. Uh oh, better go live in the woods. Have fun.

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There is not much point in featuring a "hop series" from your brewery with four different beers claiming various kinds of hops in the brewing process when you filter the entire brewing process out of your beers at the end.

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Speaking more about pastiche, here is a quote from Georges Rouault, one of the great masters of the 20th. century, along with Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall (all three of whom were solidly rooted in tradition and all three of whom happened to be, oh that's right, "modernists". The three masters of 20th. century right after Paul Cezanne):

The old masters are perfect and admirable examples, on condition that we remember that the spirit gives life and the letter kills, and that even the best pastiche is inferior to the harmonious stammering or incoherence of a child trying to speak.

Amen and A-freaking-men. Here's another:

A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it—the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them.

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Speaking more about pastiche, here is John Keats, from Sleep and Poetry:

The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of, — were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it, — no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large
The name of one Boileau!

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A thousand handicraftsmen. LOL. Learn at the poetry forum (which means becoming cynical like us and destroying your subject). Take writing corse. Our bestsellers write the same professional petri dishes of delicious prose - the only catch being that part about the microscope. Write just like them you too. LOL. You think you're learning to write better when in fact a clamping set of ideological teeth are being set into you (that was what the microscope indicated in a previous sentence). And one of the greatest indicators of the wholesale takeover of the thousand handicraftsmen is the apparent inability to write about any other thing than some near or far future dystopia. Or if it's something else, the subject is sucked dry all the same, becoming a blackboard to feature the author's writing, descriptive or what have you.

It's basically the dystopia of writing, really. The handy escape hatch out of the million complexities of experience. Wipe that slate clean. Throw in some zombies. Or other gruesome reality. Get some critics to hail it is as the razor's edge and atmospheric (the Alaskan tundra is the real character! LOL!) and chilling and gut-wrenching and unflinching and some people will even throw in some Flannery O'Connor references to dignify it.

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And always remember, Adolf Hitler championed Classical Realism as überlegen and held those exhibitions of Degenerate Art (in which Max Beckmann's work was included) to catalog the "inferior".

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Interestingly, the degree to which J.R.R. Tolkien loathed Disney seems be about the same degree that Adolf Hitler loved Disney.

Hitler drew/copied Disney cartoons and Hitler thought Snow White was one of the greatest films ever made.

Did you know there's a conspiracy theory running around that has it that Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler were the same person?

Anyways, Tolkien made it expressly clear his admiration for the Jews, while with Disney the question is rather open about whether he was anti-Semitic or not.

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There's this interesting quandary about how one can read/view some writer's/artist's work who had major personal problems and be at a safe distance like the writing/art didn't come from that person and one can also read/view problematic content and say it's okay because it doesn't mean that the author/artist agrees with it. You know, it's just a literary device. Handy. LOL.

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What

is

money?