In the works

This one is oil on masonite. Getting there.

Sitting in the dark of the theater

I've come to sort of cherish the cynical things that youngish men say, alongside their friends, as a running commentary to the commercials and previews at the movie theater. During the previews before the late Indiana Jones movie, there was one for a Canadian film by Paul Gross, the title of which I cannot remember except to say it looked French, and could not be immediately pronounced, leading me to suspect the movie will flounder with regards to box office, and the usual voice-over for the preview said, "It was a time of love"...shots of two lovers on scenic cliff with flowers, richly saturated with colour, then the voice said, "It was a time of war"...shots of, well, war; and immediately one man a few seats to my left said loudly and rudely, "It was a time of shitty and boring movies!"

With respect to the subject matter of the film being previewed, which is apparently about Canadian soldiers who gave their lives during the war, and which I may take the time to see, the comment rung true. The same cynicism was exhibited towards the next preview for some Angelina Jole movie with all latest newest oldest special effects and sex: I believe the words were, "What a waste of time".

The same cynicism was also shown at the ending of the movie we were all there to see: Indiana Jones and Crystal Skull Something or Other. I don't know where all this talk comes from of late, how the Indiana Jones movie is not supposed to be "serious", or it's supposed to be a "popcorn flick", so like, don't be so critical dude. Because the thing is, the whole Indiana Jones franchise got started from the fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great whopping deal more than a popcorn flick. No, it did not "take itself seriously", indeed, Spielberg intentionally set out to a make an entertaining B movie. But somewhere between having one heck of a meaty good story and the actual shoot, the movie turned out to not only transcend its genre, but to set the stage for all action flicks to follow. And it also happened to envelope its viewers, who were, at various points in the movie, forgetful to eat their popcorn.

People want real story. The latest Indiana Jones has no real story. Yeah, there are some sequences in which I did get lost, and gleefully so, but by the end...nope, nada: an emptiness which is the accompaniment of having the faculty for receiving story open, and not being fed. You won't be able to enjoy even a "popcorn flick" if the story hasn't been seen to.

Blah

An atheist is someone who earns his living. Unfortunately the living is in proportion to the earning. I am nothing if not a creature. Not an "entity", not an "organism", not an "intelligence", and not some Whitmanesque "all things". Creature, as created by God, and in this I shall rejoice; yes, even in my enfeeblement, my most frustrated moments, I pray I shall find the capacity to rejoice in this, my creature-hood. To deny God is to deny my creature-hood, and to deny that is to deny the whole of me; it is to deny the best of me.

From 'Letters to a Woman Painter'

“Only do not forget that the appearance of things in space is the gift of God, and if this is disregarded in composing new forms, then there is the danger of your work being damned by weakness or foolishness, or at best it will result in mere ostentation or virtuosity. One must have the deepest respect for what the eye sees and for its representation on the area of the picture in height, width and depth.” --Max Beckmann

Converse

Call you cog, where are the rolling-pins:
one above, one beneath, and you go in.
You are pancake, laundry pressed; thirty days free
and then if you don’t want our insurance,
say for if you lose your eye or get brain damage,
you just phone us and then we’ll probably
ask you more questions. And bewilder you
with excessive diarrhoeal information
machine-gunned in your ear with a metal feminine ring,
which no human person could possibly
take in all at once, which is of course
why we tell you we will send you the package,
hoping to our gods and Masonic friends
that you will accordingly forget about the whole thing
while we pull ten dollars out of your account every month
which is a good way to invent overdraft fees in case of deficient balance.
And in case you think we’re inefficient,
we assure you, we will see to it that it becomes deficient.
But never you mind; call you cog. You have a Mastercard,
and on the back in the black mysterious stripe
are gravid thousands of cogs for you
to utilize, which in turn turn cogs
that exist you know not where, nor what for,
though we do; we most certainly do.
For we are financial successes you see;
we are beyond old biblical terms, like usury.

Past Wrestling

The fluctuations between winter and spring,
vying to chronic extent, switching to and fro,
enticing blossoms out, then busting sap-flow,
is what brings the flush of rodents and ants
in the older buildings, spanning old pipes,
where few come spilling, out from their abode:
a mild report of the torrents which would pour
into our lodgings and food, from fissures,
if the said fluctuations happened instead
all at once in seismic jousts, under earth.

Holy Trinity

Andrei Rublev

To behold the Holy Trinity in Heaven, to behold that to which we ascribe the title of highest dogma of the Catholic Church, will be both the breaking point and fulfillment of our longing; our annihilation and our eternal minting.

Because our longing is eternal, words like “fulfillment” can seem mundane; yet fulfillment is exactly what the Holy Trinity partakes of, through its mere existence out of God’s love. Each Person of the Trinity partakes of each other in what is the non-dependent fulfillment of its own existence. The idea of our fulfillment has already been subsumed, thankfully, into what we cannot comprehend, and will not fully comprehend even in Heaven; though there will be full participation.

Our peace is, and can only be, the result of beholding the communion between the three Persons of the Trinity. What a revelation! Does God simply bestow His wand and say, “Now be fulfilled”? No, He opens out the revelation of His Own mystery, and grants to our own hearts through the Third Person of the Trinity, the revelation of His Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who in turn knows the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, and where the Son is there too is the Father. The perfect communion between the three Persons of the Trinity, beheld by a soul, consequently results in that soul's peace.

Our unity too must be the result of such beholding. For it is the very nature of the Trinity that to behold it is to want to seek the same unity in our relations with others. To those who are not in the state of mortal sin, and are in the state of sanctifying grace, the Holy Trinity is present within their own soul; and the love we give to our self must be the “self-love” of the Trinity, which births the desire to see ourselves in others, and further, to retain the image of the other within ourselves without altering it to our own image.

Be a mother, or father; not a parent

These days, parents tend to kind of suck. And they tend to suck because their right to parent their own children is being taken away from them. And unfortunately perhaps many of them want it taken away. It is being taken away by many things, from majorly screwed up people in the school system (like practising homosexuals and equanimous social-worker drones), to the everyday presence of the television.

Parents fork over their rights as parents in the very name of good parenting. The cruelty is they lose their ability to parent in proportion to seeking how to "be a good parent"; ala, caving in to the notion that parenting is something learned from how-to books, or charming and humorous personalities with familial ancedotes stuffed up the ying-yang, that reduces the thing to a ridiculous psychological game, or listening to the ever present voice of the "experts". Yup, as long as everything is going 'smoothly', you're a good parent. And as long as you have Atticus Finch's savage children down the street to make your own operations look all dandy, well, nothing to worry about.

Top 100 List of Great Compliments You Can Give Your Child.

Recent research shows that either too much discipline or too little can be detrimental to your child's health.

Recent research shows that children under the age of five need their parents more than at a later age.

Recent research shows spending time with your children may be beneficial.

10 Great Things You Can Do To Be the World's Best Parent.

Recent research shows children healthier when both mother and father present.

Recent research shows Parenting, for Dummies has not had noticable effects in the betterment of children's and teens' behaviours.

I remember my time in public elementary school. While the stupid sex-ed vaccines were being injected then at the time, I still remember it as the final dusk (including my high-school years) before everything went cold and dark. I consider myself one of those last modern old worlders, when strapping hands for punishment had only just gone out of fashion. I remember the "old adventure playground". The kind of miniature ewok housing development that would send our socially aware composites into bureaucratic fits of 'cautionary measures'. And well, apparently it did do just that, because it's not there anymore. It has been replaced with some kind of vague, plastic, marshmellow kind of deal; just the kind of thing where the children (at least the sane ones) look at it and say, "What the hell are we supposed to do with that?" Or else they fall in line and, well, never find out what they are missing.

Bottum's Agenbites

Joseph Bottum at First Things talks about agenbites (his coinage)

I've come up with a few.

How about parallel. You don't even need to pronounce it to know. Just look at it. There are two sets of mirrored letters, one set divided by a consonant, the other by a vowel. Could there be a more parallelistic word than parallel?

Perhaps that's an even better one: parallelistic.

I think the agenbite-worthiness of gargantuan is rather self-evident.

And then there is incapacitate. You notice how all or most words beginning with in seem to suggest a convolutedness? Invert, instigate, incest. That's no wonder, considering how one has to go through the trouble of touching the roof of the mouth with the tongue in order to pronounce it. Not a smooth way of starting a word.

Perhaps geometrical terms provide some interesting agenbites: conical, trapazoid, cylindrical, angle, obtuse...

Then there is God. Is there a more self-contained word? It begins and ends with a consonant; no trailing-off, airy vowels to end the word. No effeminate beginning vowels. And both bookend the most self-contained vowel, the circle of the 'o'.

When you think about it, it is actually quite spooky.

The Intermediary

Pushed you from me in Moab
with my left, while with my right I drew you.
After the deaths, this widow did not expect
the flinging sync of your attachment.
These dried hands both drive you hence,

not now in rejection, but in light of added realms,
for seeing kindled the will of Hashem,
you are that binah daughter, rare.
Thus the Sh’chinah reveals her tikkun olam:
She, gleaning barley in Beit-Lechem!

Here is how to vow now evening lowers:
Get you bathed, perfumed; head to the threshing-floor.
There remove his sandals – ask his cloak
over you in his barn of harvest.

Sleep there through night to dawn.
He is a near kinsman, his God my God
your God; for you are proof of more
than one exception in the law:

having yourself, effaced, held fast to me
even at my rebuff when I had
in my wake only wind and sand – and you,
had haven to turn to, but abandoned…

Though Hashem has dealt me vinegar,
I can point you to a sweet lasting wine.
A crux of paths form from these directives.
some ways ahead her as she leaves:
what is it portends she gives to me,
straightway, her own very child from her womb?

For no euthanasia (murder)

This case needs prayers. I find it really hard to understand how someone, a mother as in this case, or a husband, as in the case of Terry Schiavo, could be so blindly determined, in spite of all signs of life and hope for future life (she gave birth to a baby in her "vegetatative" state!), to have their daughter or wife rather go through the excruciating pain of being starved and dehydrated to death. It's insanity. Please say some prayers for this family, for the mother.

Link

Oi. The zeitgeist is a real spirit. I've encountered, and encounter, this many times. They are also noteworthy for what seems to be an almost demonic sort of cold contempt, which strangely is synonymous with a complete absence of normal anger. They refuse to go through the range of human emotions. Or they cannot.

From my sister

the diva:

Hi! Sorry for the group email, but I just wanted to invite you all to come see Iolanthe. I am playing a fabulous part in this Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Don’t be intimidated by the word operetta, it’s very funny and light and the music is beautiful.

The story revolves around a group of fairies, a son of a fairy who is half-mortal, half fairy, and a group of lords from the British government (house of peers). There is a nice little love story between a young maiden and this half-fairy, and of course complications ensue. And as always with Gilbert and Sullivan there is very funny satire, this time mostly at the expense of appointed government.

I am playing the Fairy Queen. And it is going on my list as one of my favourite parts of all time. She’s both silly and formidable, duty-bound and prone to fall in love at the merest whiff of manliness. And I get to show off my low notes, and wear Vulcan ears and a tiara and false eyelashes that look like feathers. ‘Nuff said I think.

It plays at the Surrey Arts Centre starting tonight and going until May 25th. You can call 604.501.5566 for tickets. You can also go to http://www.fvgss.org/ for more info about the show.

I hope some of you can make it out. If so, please let me know when you’re coming so I can pop out and see you after the show.

Hope this finds everyone well.

Cheers,

Christina

Reflection

The spring drizzle has been veiling everything now for some days, listlessly like it is being kind as it can to the blossoms that it picks out like studded gems. Through the window above my bed in the morning, on the juniper hedge where there are no blossoms, the rain formed its own in silver grey beads.

To work in vehicle with coffee. Automated prayers. The mind at work is a torpid heap. And there's thousands upon thousands killed in a quake on the other side of the world and counting, and more killed and counting in a cyclone; the destructive rate of the cyclone on a larger scale it seems to be, than the Asian tsunami in 2004. We receive it through ink on paper, on the news-stand; photos of fully dressed corpses, floating in flooded fields.

The drizzle is listless and regular. People zip in and out of lanes in the grey drizzle trying to get ahead of other cars that are already going over the speed limit, and so arrive at the red light further ahead before they do. Or so all their manouvering through traffic turns out to be: you have to wait at another red light. So why all the fast driving?

All that which I take for granted; heat, running water, running hot water, stove, fridge, bed, roof, clothes, food, could be depleted, deleted, in the span of the time of a single earthquake. In pretty much every hospital you pass by, unnamed babies are dismembered, screaming without any audible voice as they are pulled apart alive, butchered more wantonly than steers, in their mothers' wombs. And why such a disaster as we read about on the other side of the world shouldn't happen here all of a sudden, has an answer which our buffeted minds do not contemplate - or if they do, it's not for very long.

The drizzle falls. We are more naked than we know.

For

For love, for love that whorled the galaxies
also attends to the minute at hand; and
light does the riptide of His opened Heart
draw you into hiding; has your faculties
disposed of in His yoke and burden;
wants your limbs, for others, plain, fruit-bearing.

Some lines

The Pharisees the Pharisees,
they always washed their hands.
They sought respectabilities
from people in the lands.

The Pharisees the Pharisees,
with crook that oversees
a flock, they used instead to ring the knell
on souls they damned to hell.

Then Jesus Christ our Lord
went up the temple steps.
He wound Himself a cord,
purged the temple to its depths.

When with this zeal-filled token
He had cleaned the temple out,
He gave His Body to be broken,
so that His Blood ran out.

Guns don't kill; people do

These days are long gone, but the truth of it, that people shooting other people has much to do with the spiritual reality of our hearts being corrupted by materialism and nothing to do with the material reality of guns, remains.