#being a monk means having your life be part of an institution

[intermundia]

one thing i love about star wars is that the jedi are monks with dangerous psychic space magic, and so they're monks on purpose. they're joyfully and intentionally participating in their institution and finding meaning and happiness in life as monks—anakin is the exception that proves the rule!

it makes me happy to see as many people in the world live like this, and are quite happy with rich, full lives in fellowship with their fellow monks, practicing the tenets of their philosophies, studying the world and themselves, handing down their traditions and wisdom, always helping others; this is such a valid and good way to live, not any kind of oppression.

if anakin had been less selfish, if he had internalized and practiced the jedi philosophy of moderation and compassion, he could have had a rich, happy life (if only he lived in an age without the malice and menace of the sith!) and that's the root of his tragedy that he turned away from those bonds and generous purpose toward his own private pleasure.

it's not easy to practice discipline, but it's so worth it, both for you and everyone whose lives you can touch. it bothers me when i see comments openly and offensively denigrating all organized living; the individualistic amatonormative anti-religion biases of sw fandom are unfortunately on almost continual display. not all religions and religious organizations are abusive and controlling!

i believe from the bottom of my aromantic heart that one don't need romantic love and a nuclear family to be a full human being with a good life. these monks follow their philosophy of moderation and discipline in fellowship with their monastic fellows on purpose and by choice so they can serve the galaxy, and this is such a commendable life full of meaning and love.

the tragedy of their genocide is visible in how that force of generosity and hope for the galaxy was wiped away, for the violent enforcement of a brutal era of exploitation and greed. when luke restores the order and the jedi return, that form of joy in service and endless compassion is returned too. it's a beautiful thing that continually inspires me to live a better and more moderate and generous life.

[independentartistbuzz]

7 FROM THE WOMEN: MISHA PENTON

Misha Penton is an amazingly versatile artist known for her work as a singer, composer, and filmmaker. 

She has been recognised for her unique blend of art song, sound poetry, and chamber electronica. Her upcoming projects include the release of a music video titled “Earthshine” in celebration of the winter solstice 2023, along with a performance and release party in collaboration with Sawyers Yard Houston, where she is based.

Additionally, she has a forthcoming EP inspired by a 19th century fairytale book in the works. 

Misha’s diverse body of work has been featured at prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, and Rothko Chapel. She has worked closely with influential mentors in voice, opera, and experimental voice, including Lois Alba, Kathleen Kaun, Katherine Ciesinski, and Richard Armstrong, and has collaborated with organisations like Houston Grand Opera, Liminal Space Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Quartus Chamber Players.

Penton holds a BA in Music from Skidmore College, as well as an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College, and a PhD in voice and composition from Bath Spa University UK. 

We caught up with Misha for an Exclusive Interview below! 

What Have You Been Working to Promote Lately?

“Earthshine” is my new single and music video. The work celebrates the winter solstice season, the longest night of the year. This dark and introspective time is a pause before the lengthening days bring us toward summer. I love the idea of going inward and engaging with stillness before the beginning of a new cycle. Earthshine is the dim glow on the darkened part of a crescent moon — the reflected sunlight from Earth shining on the night side of the moon. My music video and song conjures the subtle illuminating energies of beautiful things unseen or unnoticed. I created “Earthshine” to honor the cycle of the seasons. I often work creatively with the wheel of the year: the solstices, equinoxes, and moon phases. Noticing these cycles taps into the ebb and flow of natural energies. I sometimes feel caught up in our fast-paced and chaotic digital world. Observing the waxing and waning of the moon or remembering the tilt of the earth and the changing angle of the sun feels grounding.

2. Please tell us about your favorite song written, recorded or produced by another woman and why it’s meaningful to you.

So many! I’ll choose “Moments of Pleasure” by Kate Bush from The Red Shoes. The lyrics capture fleeting, beautiful images of her life with a rip-your-heart out vibe. And her singing is intimate and deeply connected to the emotional experience — “Just being alive / It can really hurt / And these moments given / Are a gift from time / Just let us try / To give these moments back / To those we love / To those who will survive.”

3. What does it mean to you to be a woman making music/in the music business today and do you feel a responsibility to other women to create messages and themes in your music?

My music is about following my creative vision and that’s what I encourage other artists to do. Stay inspired by surrounding yourself with others committed to their unique journeys, only do projects worthy of your time, skills, and attention (in other words, say “No” a lot) and always honor your work.            

4. What female artists have inspired you and influenced you?

Björk, Kate Bush, and Annie Lennox, for their unique music, musicianship, embrace of technology, and beautifully crafted and singular images. Meredith Monk, for her innovative vocal compositions and large-scale theatrical performances that blend classical, folk, and experimental music. Cathy Berberian, the mid 20th century contemporary classical and opera singer—she’s the grandmother of vocal new music and avant-garde singing. Diamanda Galas who is utterly unique, stunning, and fearless. And of course, the soul, blues, jazz, and R&B greats like Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald — and artists who took up their mantle like India Arie, Alicia Keys, Lauryn Hill, and H.E.R. There are so many amazing artists—too many to list!                                                                                                        

5. Who's Your Favorite Female Icon (dead or alive) and why?

Audrey Hepburn. Funny Face with Fred Astaire is probably my favorite of her movies. It’s set in NYC and Paris in the 1950s and features the Gershwin classics, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and “’S Wonderful.” There’s a great scene set in a bohemian coffeehouse in Greenwich Village and another where she floats down the Daru staircase at the Louvre in a red Givenchy gown. She embodied elegant and fashionable stardom (she was a muse of Hubert de Givenchy). She was also an activist and humanitarian, working with UNICEF and raising awareness of global children’s needs.                                                         

6. What was the most challenging thing you have had to face as a female artist?

Challenges or unfair professional situations usually evoke my anger and I’ve used that anger as a catalyst to create my own work. I only do projects that are a good fit for me artistically and personally. In the past, I’ve worked with men who were immature and not nearly as hard-working and intensely creative as I am. My work deserves far better—so I strive to create an ideal environment for my work, myself. Don’t take any sh*t from anyone. Do your own thing and you’ll find the right creative tribe.                             

7. Finally – Where can we find you online? Website | Instagram | Facebook |

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Misha on Streaming Platforms

Misha has been praised for her ability to create immersive musical experiences, incorporating layered voices, swirling guitars, and electronic textures. Her collaborative efforts with other artists contribute to the richness of her work, showcasing a diverse range of influences and creative approaches.

We look forward to hearing more from her in the upcoming year! 

[baeddel]

Please. Please can you tell me what a baeddel is and why people (terfs?) used it in a derogatory manner on this website for a hot minute but now no one ever uses it at all

you asked for it, fucker

[2k words; philology and drama]

baeddel is an Old English word. i have no idea where it actually occurs in the Old English written corpus, but it occurs in a few placenames. its diminuitive form, baedling, is much better documented. it appears in the (untranslated) Canons of Theodore, a penitential handbook, a sort of guidebook for priests offering advice on what penances should be recommended for which sins. in a passage devoted to sexual transgressions it gives the penances suggested for a man who sleeps with a woman, a man who sleeps with another man, and then a man who sleeps with a baedling. so you have this construction of a baedling as something other than a man or a woman. and then it gives the penance for a baedling who sleeps with another baedling (a ludicrous one-year fast). then, by way of an explaination, Theodore delivers us one of the most enigmatic phrases in the Old English corpus: "for she is soft, like an adulturess."

the -ling suffix in baedling is masculine. but Theodore uses feminine pronouns and suffixes to describe baedlings. as we said, it's also used separately from male and female. but it's also used separately from their words for intersex and it never appears in this context. all of this means that you have this word that denotes a subject who is, as Christopher Monk put it, "of problematic gender." interested historians have typically interpreted it as referring to some category of homosexual male, such as Wayne R. Dines in his two-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality who discusses it in the context of an Old English glossary which works a bit like an Old English-Latin dictionary, giving Old English words and their Latin counterparts. the Latin words the Anglo-Saxon lexicographer chose to correspond with baedling were effeminatus and mollis, and Lang concludes that it refers to an "effeminate homosexual" (pg 60, Anglo Saxon). this same glossary gives as an Old English synonym the word waepenwifstere which literally means "woman with a penis," and which Dines gives the approximate translation (hold on tight) male wife.

R. D. Fulk, a philologist and medievalist, made a separate analysis of the term in his study on the Canons of Theodore 'Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore', collected in Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England, 2004. he analysed it as a 'sexual category' (sexual as in sexuality), owing to the context of sexual transgressions in the Canons. he decides that it refers to a man who bottoms in sexual relationships with another man. i don't have the article on hand so i'm not sure what his reasoning was, but this seems obviously inadequate given what we know from the glossary described by Dines. Latin has a word for bottom, pathica, and the lexicographer did not use this in their translation, preferring words that emphasized the baedling's femininity like effeminatus, and doesn't address the sexual context at all. Dines, however, only reading this glossary, seems to decide that it refers to a type of male homosexual too hastily, considering the Canons explicitly treat them separately. both Dines and Fulk immediately reduce the baedling to a subcategory of homosexual when neither of the sources to hand actually do so themselves.

by now it should be obvious why, seven or so years ago, we interpreted it as an equivalent to trans woman. I mean come on - a woman with a penis! these days I tend to add a bit of a caution to this understanding, which is that trans woman is the translation of baedling which seems most adequate to us, just as baedling was the translation of effeminatus that seemed most adequate to our lexicographer. but the term cannot translate perfectly; its sense was derived from some minimal context; a legal context, a doctrinal context, and so forth... the way Anglo-Saxons understood sex/gender is complicated but it has been argued that they had a 'one sex model' and didn't regard men and women as biologically separate types, which is obviously quite different from the sexual model accepted today; in any case they didn't have access to the karyotype and so on. the basic categories they used to understand gender and sexuality were different from ours. in particular, Hirschfield et al. should be understood as a particularly revolutionary moment in the genealogy of transsexuality; the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft essentially invented the concept of the 'sex change', the 'transition', conceived as a biological passage from one sex to the other. even in other contexts where (forgive me) #girlslikeus changed their bodies in some way, like the castration of the priestesses of Cybele, or those belonging to the various historical societies which we believe used premarin for feminization [disputed; see this post], there is no record that they were ever considered men at any stage or had some kind of male biology that preceded their 'gender identity.' the concept of the trans woman requires the minimal context of the coercive assignment at birth and its subsequent (civil and bio-technological) rejection. i have never encountered evidence that this has ever been true in any previous society. nonetheless, these societies still had gendered relations, and essentially wherever we find these gendered relations we also find some subject which is omitted or for whom it has been necessary to note exceptions. what is of chief interest to us is not so much that there was such a subject here or there in history (and whatever propagandistic uses this fact might have), but understanding why these regularities exist.

a very parsimonious explanation is that gender is a biological reality, and there is some particular biological subject which a whole host of words have been conjured to denote. if this were the case then we would expect that, no matter what gender/sexual system we encounter in a given society, it will inevitably find some linguistic expression. if, like me, you find this idea revolting, then you should busy yourself trying to come up with an alternative explanation which is not just plausible, but more plausible. my best guesses are outside the scope of this answer...

anyway, all of this must be very interesting to the five or six people invested in the confluence of philology and gender studies. but why on earth did it become so widely used, in so many strange and unusual contexts, in the 2010s? we're very sorry, but yes, it's our fault. you see apart from all of this, there is also a little piece of information which goes along with the word baeddel, which is that it's the root of the Modern English word bad. by way of, no less, the word baedan, 'to defile'. how this defiled historical subject came to bear responsibility for everything bad to English-speakers doesn't seem to be known from linguistic evidence. however, it makes for a very pithy little remark on transmisogyny. my dear friend [REDACTED] made a playful little post making this point and, good Lord, had we only known...

it went like this. its such a funny little idea that we all start changing our urls to include the word baeddel. in those days it was common to make puns with your url (we always did halloween and christmas ones); i was baeddelaire, a play on the French poet Baudelaire. while we all still had these urls a series of events which everyone would like to forget happened, and we became Enemies of Everyone in the Whole World. because of the url thing people started to call us "the baeddels." then there was "a cult" called "the baeddels" and so forth. this cult had various infamies attatched to it and a constellation of indefensible political positions. ultimately we faced a metric fucking shit ton of harassment, including, for some of my friends, really serious and bad irl harassment that had long-term bad awful consequences relating to stable housing and physical safety and i basically never want to talk about that part of my life ever again. and i never have to, because i've come to realize that for most people, when they use the word baeddel, they don't know about that stuff. it doesn't mean that anymore.

so what does it mean? you'll see it in a few contexts. TERFs do use it, as you guessed. i am not quite sure what they really mean by it and how it differs from other TERF barbs. i think being a baeddel invovles being politically active or at least having a political consciousness, but in a way thats distinct from just any 'TRA' or trans activist. so perhaps 'militant' trans women, but perhaps also just any trans woman with any opinions at all. how this was transmitted from tumblr/west coast tranny drama to TERF vocabulary i have no idea. but you will also find - or, could have found a few years ago - i would say 'copycat' groups who didn't know us or what we believed but heard the rumours, and established their own (generously) organizations (usually facebook groups) dedicated to putting those principles into practice. they considered themselves trans lesbian separatists and did things like doxx and harass trans women who dated cafabs. if you don't know about this, yes, there really were such groups. they mostly collapsed and disappeared because they were evildoers who based their ideology on a caricature. i knew a black trans woman who was treated very badly by one of these groups, for predictable reasons. so long-time readers: if you see people talking about their bad experiences with 'baeddels', you can't necessarily relate it to the 2014 context and assume they're carrying around old baggage. there are other dreams in the nightmare.

the most common way you'll see it today, in my experience, is in this form: people will say that it was a "slur" for trans women. they might bring up that it's the root of the word bad, and they might even think that you shouldn't use the word bad because of it, or that you shouldn't use the word baeddel because it's a slur. all of this is a silly game of internet telephone and not worth addressing. except to say that it's by no means clear that baeddel, or baedling, were slurs, or even insulting at all. while Theodore doesn't provide us with a description of how we can have sex with a baedling without sinning, and it may be the case that any sexual relations with a baedling was considered sinful, sexuality-based transgressions were not taken all that seriously in those days. there was a period where homosexuality within the Church was almost sanctioned, and it wasn't until much later that homosexuality became so harshly proscribed, to the extent that it was thought to represent a threat to society, etc. and as i mentioned, there are places in England named after baedlings. there is a little parish near Kent which is called Badlesmere, Baeddel's Lake, which was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Domesday Book (as having a lord, a handful of villagers and a few slaves; perhaps only one or two households). it's not unheard of, but i just don't know very many places called Faggot Town or some such. it's possible that baedlings had some role in Anglo-Saxon society which we are not aware of; it could even have been a prestigious one, as it was in other societies. there is just no evidence other than a couple of passing references in the literature and we'll probably never have a complete picture.

[allronix]

On Jedi conscription/recruitment

Part 2 of the whole bit with @writerbuddha

Again, fabulous work and thank you for it. 

If I am not wrong, the “Jedi critical” position is that when you have monks with swords on your doorstep, saying, your baby is blessed with divine power, and the state gives them right to take them and train them in their tradition, and they say, it’s very risky to leave them in your care, the only reasonable reaction is to slam the door into their faces and flee with your baby.

The fairy tale logic is that these omni-benevolent wizard-priests come down from their mountain to the peasant like the Angel to Mary in the Book of Luke (irony, much?) and see this big Mark of Destiny on the infant. After much ooohs and ahhs, the peasant happily gives their tot to the care of these wise and wonderful wizard-priests because this is such a wonderful honor! Who would dare keep a hero from their Great Destiny unless they were some Owen Lars selfish killjoy who wanted to grasp and hold their aspiring hero so that he never achieves what God and the Force have set out…?

The deconstruction logic is going “How ‘voluntary’ is this practice?” Especially given how real life religious organizations have used the whole “voluntarily given up the child to the church” explanation and then abused (or worse) the kids in their care. The nightmarish track record of the Catholic Church is what an American audience will be most familiar with when it comes to this practice. Perhaps it was more benevolent in other cultures, but perhaps not.   The other question is asking if it is for the benefit of the child, or the benefit of the organization. 

Note: I also have to admit that Neo Pagan outlook is part of this. Neo Pagans are, at least in my experience, spiritual refugees. It’s a path that attracts many who suffered abuse or deep alienation from organized religious faiths and religious institutions.  High percentages of women (who are deemed inferior, spiritually unclean, or otherwise “second class” in most religious paths) and LGBTQ+ people. 

Can only speak for myself, but my take on it is that there’s a HUGE power imbalance  when it comes to the practice that makes it ethically questionable.  Start with the average Outer Rim working class family. You have this kid with special needs. And here comes this Jedi. He’s an agent of a VERY powerful organization. He is armed with a deadly weapon and sorcery that can override your free will or worse. He has the backing of the Senate and planetary authorities. There’s even a law on the books saying he doesn’t even need to ASK permission, he can just take custody if he wants. But he’s being polite and going to subject this family to a magnificent sales pitch about the Order’s benefits that he technically doesn’t even have to give, since he’s holding all the cards.At the very least, the optics on this look awful. 

Worse is the only example we get of a Jedi adoption being Shmi and Anakin. She’s enslaved. Even though Anakin is “free” (quotes intentional), he still has no way to maintain that freedom, especially if he stays with her. She gives him up as an act of desperation, a desperation that Qui-Gon seems all too happy to exploit for the Order’s benefit with indifference to her pain, because he and his powerful Order have no intention of helping her out. The only reason he even bothered to intervene in their situation is not out of compassion, but because she has something he wants.

The way Lucas handled Shmi was atrocious. Here we had a fantastic example of someone who could not get justice by any other means, someone whose only hope would be some “Guardians of Peace and Justice.” Despite being selfless and good, giving these space wizards everything, she gets nothing a raw deal. The fact the Jedi seem to bend over backwards to assist the elite of the Republic like Padme and Palpatine just makes this worse.

Now, I know the fairy tale explanation is that the youth must be separated from his childhood comforts and loving mother to “make a man out of him” and see him off to his grand destiny of slaying a dragon. It’s also a fairy tale trope to kill off the “good mother” so that the youth must face the harshness of adulthood or the pain of grief and loss. The deconstruction take is that the most selfless person in the room gets exploited, tortured, and stuffed in a fridge for her selflessness. 

There’s also the matter of what these kids are recruited to do. When Mace and Yoda are discussing Anakin in TPM, and when Qui-Gon recruits him, the discussion centers on if he’s a Chosen One who will destroy the Sith. “Destroy the Sith” doesn’t imply sitting them down to tea and making them repent of their evil ways. It implies “we’re going to train this nine year old kid as a living weapon, point him at our enemies, and destroy them for good” Okay, so the Sith ideology being eliminated would be a win-win as far as the galaxy. I’ll grant that. We’re still talking some adults talking about what’s best for their agenda and how this kid fits into it, with no talk about what’s best for the KID. 

When we see our only example of a training class in ATOC, the small kids are not practicing meditation, or languages, or spiritual matters. they are training in how to wield a deadly weapon. The way it’s framed, with the soft natural-looking light, the earth tones, the adorable little tots. It’s meant to be cute. Meanwhile we later see the newly decanted Clone Troopers under stark, eerie harsh light and the identical men all invoking a feeling of creepiness and uncanny valley. Yet...they’re both small children being turned into tools of war by the Republic Senate and Jedi leadership, the ones who are supposed to be the Big Good of the setting. That was something that bothered me so much I almost walked out of the film. 

I know that the Jedi don’t call themselves soldiers or identify as warriors. They identify as peace makers and negotiators, protectors of the helpless. It would have helped if we had more negotiation than a token thirty seconds at the top of TPM, an attempt to negotiate with the Separatists before war broke out, or to see a peaceful solution to a conflict to make it more substantial. 

[impalementation]

spike, angel, buffy & romanticism: part 4

part 1: “When you kiss me I want to die”: Angel and the high school seasons

part 2: “Love isn’t brains, children”: Enter Spike as the id

part 3: “Something effulgent”: Season five and the construction of Spike the romantic

* 

“But I can’t fool myself. Or Spike, for some reason.”: Buffy and Spike as a blended self

Before I get into seasons six and seven, it’s worth asking: why would the show do all of this? Why would it spend all of this time developing a supporting villain and joke id character? Why would it give him a romantic arc? I see people say that the writers only gave Spike these storylines because he was popular or they wanted to keep him around, but even that being the case, there was no need to give him the specific arc that they did. It’s more than possible to read meaning into the story that they chose from the array of possible options. 

Here is the thing about the id. It’s not actually something separate from you. It’s not a ravenous monster you can blame your weaknesses on while remaining pure and dignified. The id is part of you. The immediate and enduring appeal of Spike is, I suspect, strongly influenced by the fact that the things the id wants are so very human and sympathetic. His foibles and mistakes are often painfully familiar, even exaggerated through vampirism as they are. In fact, it’s precisely because Spike is allowed to show a full range of reactions to love, because the writing is under less pressure for him to do the “right” or dignified thing, that he can at times be compelling in ways other characters can’t. If Spike just did nasty things, his appeal wouldn’t be much more complicated than the appeal of Angelus, who people tend to like as a villain or storyline rather than as a relatable character. But Spike doesn’t want to dismember nuns or construct elaborate murder tableaux. He wants familiar things like love, identity and meaning, even if the ways he goes about getting them can reflect people’s worst impulses. 

Which brings us to Buffy, and Buffy’s story about growing up. Buffy is Buffy’s show, which means that every writing choice tends to revolve around her arc in one way or another. And this goes for Spike’s storyline even more than most. In the final three seasons of the show, the writing finally engages with how inextricable the id--and all of its impulsive, inarticulate romantic desires--really is from a person’s self. So instead of keeping Spike at a comfortable distance, both Buffy and the writing begin to take him seriously. They begin to invite him in.

Starting in season five, it’s telling how frequently Buffy herself projects on Spike, rather than just the writing setting them up as mirrors. She tells him that he’s the “only one strong enough” to protect her family, and later assigns Dawn specifically to his protection. In “Spiral” she describes him as “the only one besides me that has any chance of protecting Dawn.” This is a very intimate role that she otherwise only assigns to herself (and which is not really based on pure practicality, considering that she’ll later describe Willow as her “big gun”--yet never gives Willow the task of protecting Dawn). She tells him that he cannot love, which is the thing she fears most about herself. Her protests that Spike is a vampire, and thus cannot express or want human things like love, mirror her lamentations that as the Slayer, she cannot have a normal life.

From the Gilliland Gothic double essay:

More than any of her other lovers, Buffy and Spike overlap one another so often that at times their character arcs become nearly indistinguishable. With Angel, Buffy traveled a parallel path in attempting to master self-control. With Riley, her journey ultimately took her in the opposite direction. With Spike, Buffy’s journey is most closely shadowed, in that her interactions with him in many ways can be seen as metaphors for her feelings about herself.

So now Spike is multiple things. On the one hand, he’s the soulless id he’s been since season two. His vampiric behavior represents a morally uninhibited way of reacting to romantic frustrations, among other things. But on the other hand, his vampirism now also marks him as like Buffy, not merely her opposite.* Nor is he only her mirror in the realm of romantic love. The part of him that is a vampire is the part of him that is supernatural (ie, Romantically larger-than-life), that sets him apart from regular people, and dictates how he can and cannot behave. Just like Buffy’s slayerness. His vampirism is what makes him capable of protecting Dawn, while also making him (supposedly, according to Buffy) incapable of human feeling--again, just like Buffy’s slayerness. Instead of Buffy’s Slayer side being aligned with Angelus, who was an unmitigated evil, it becomes aligned with Spike, who is something more complicated. 

*(Though it must be noted that this was a process that began in season four, with the show aligning Spike with the Scoobies by making him a victim of the Initiative. Spike being supernatural suddenly marks him as non-normative, just like the Scoobies, in contrast to the institutional conformity that the Initiative represents. The evolution towards treating the Romantic supernatural as something positive and associated with identity plays a key role in transitioning the show to the more complicated attitudes of the last three seasons.)

This shift in the show’s attitudes towards the id affects how Spike is used. In “Blood Ties” for example, Spike assists Dawn in breaking into the Magic Shop and in “Forever” he helps Dawn resurrect her and Buffy’s mother. In both cases, Spike could be read as embodying impulsive behavior that Buffy is supposed to be better than. Yet both cases specifically involve Spike helping Dawn, who is repeatedly portrayed as Buffy’s human side. As Buffy says in “The Gift”: “[Dawn]’s more than [my sister]. She’s me. The monks made her out of me. [...] Dawn is a part of me. The only part that I--”. In other words, Buffy’s id becomes closely tied to her humanity, even going so far as to become its safeguard. “Blood Ties” ends with Buffy affirming her connection to Dawn, which Spike’s rule-breaking directly enabled, and “Forever” ends with Buffy acknowledging how desperately she wants her mother back too, and becoming closer to Dawn as a result. (Compare to “Lovers Walk”, where Buffy acknowledging her id results in her breaking away from Angel, not drawing closer to anyone). Or in “Intervention”, Spike building the Buffybot directly parallels Buffy’s own anxieties about what she thinks she should be. She thinks she’s losing her ability to love, and that effusive fakery is her only recourse (as she said in “I Was Made to Love You”: “Maybe I could change. [...] I could spend less time slaying, I could laugh at his jokes. I mean men like that right? The joke laughing at?”), a fear that even has some merit, given that her friends cannot tell her and the bot apart. Instead of Buffy and Spike having separate arcs in the episode, Spike learning the difference between real and fake dovetails with Buffy’s own relationship to her realness and fakeness. It turns out that neither of them want a bot version of Buffy. They want real emotion, things like sacrifice and heartfelt gratitude. If even Buffy’s id would let itself be killed for Dawn, then maybe she has nothing to fear from herself. Maybe there is some beauty in the emotional part of her nature that she thinks she must repress.

In other words, part of the writing (and Buffy) fully engaging with romanticism and the id, means engaging with the ways they can be bad and good. There’s this weird thing that happens with Spike as soon as he falls in love with Buffy, where suddenly his actions are more uncomfortable, and to many, off-putting, because their object is Buffy (instead of another vampire like Harmony or Drusilla, who either enjoy the same vampiric things he does, or the audience might be inclined to see as a moral nonentity regardless). His comic id quality becomes somewhat darker and more serious, almost like the way Angel’s early season two darkness becomes more serious after he loses his soul. But at the same time, Spike’s actions are also more intriguing, sympathetic, and even noble...because their object is Buffy. It makes no sense that a soulless vampire should not only fall in love with the Slayer, but genuinely attempt to transform himself into someone worthy of her love. And yet that’s exactly what Buffy inspires him to do. By loving Buffy Spike’s dual nature, and the dual nature of his romanticism, is thrown into relief: it’s something that can be selfish and creepy, yes, but also something that hints at the idea that real romanticism does exist. Something worth feeling romantically about does exist. Thus the writing can at once criticize, say, the way the chivalric mindset conflates love and suffering, while also suggesting that there are kinds of love it’s worth being transformed by. (Meanwhile, Spike’s fumbling bewilderment over how to love Buffy, and what the rules of loving people correctly even are, creates a human middle ground between monstrousness and heroism). By leaning into the way that Buffy and Spike have been used as mirrors for three seasons, and introducing the mythology-bending idea of Spike being in love with Buffy, the writing is able to fully engage with this complicated, contradictory nature of love and romance.

All of which is to say. Spike becomes a potential love interest, and is given a convoluted inner conflict between monstrousness, humanity and heroism, in precisely the season in which Buffy begins to reckon with her own inner conflict between her darker impulses, her human reality, and her supernatural role. It’s no coincidence that season five opens with Dracula, an icon of romantic vampire mythology, tempting Buffy with darkness and promising her insight into her nature. Or that a vampire kidnaps Dawn--again, her human half--in the next episode. Or that the season’s antagonist is a super-strong blonde woman who wants to destroy Dawn instead of protect her. Or that she says goodbye to Riley, the boyfriend who embodied her hopes for a more normative way of being (notice how Riley is progressively destabilized by everything non-normative about Buffy’s life, and provokes those anxieties Buffy expresses in “I Was Made to Love You”). Over and over in season five, Buffy fears that her Slayer half is cold, destructive, and otherwise dangerous. That these Romantic things like gods and vampires have it in for Buffy’s vulnerable humanity. Yet Buffy’s vampire id simultaneously gives lie to these fears by proving itself capable of heroism and genuine human feeling.

In other words, Spike becomes a potential love interest in a season that treats the Romantic--ie the grand and mythical--as something more than just an attractive lie to be disabused of. Rather, the question that season five seems to posit to me, and which will not be fully answered until the end of season seven, is this: once you do clear away the attractive lies, once you accept the hard realities, once you’ve seen the darkest underbellies, what are the things that are left that are truly grand and beautiful? What are the stories that are really worth telling, and the heroes that are really worth having?

And the show asks and answers these questions on both a very personal level, and a more meta, systemic level. On the personal level, Buffy and Spike are forced to confront their illusions not just about the world, but about themselves. They are made to ask themselves what constitutes a heroic role or a demonic weakness, versus basic, unromantic humanity. And on the meta level, the show asks questions about our expectations for how both love stories and chosen hero stories are supposed to go.

part 5: “Everything used to be so clear”: Season six and the agony of the real

[songofwizardry]

In honour of this week’s Critical Role episode, here are some Beau Moments, mostly about Thoreau and institutions and abuse of power, that have stuck with me really hard. Mostly because I wanted to go back through and compile these moments, because I just really fucking love Beau. 

C2E004 2:15:39

Dairon: “Your dislike for authority is not a bad thing. It can keep you alive. Authority should always be questioned. Those with more power than you should be held to a higher standard.”

[Training montage]

Beau: “Why are you doing this? Why me?”

Dairon: “Because a long time ago, I was a wayward girl with no direction, was angry, and fighting at the world. And someone did this for me.”

Beau: “I don't really believe in systems or being a part of them, let alone a system that takes down other systems. Seems almost hypocritical.”

Dairon: “Perhaps. Who knows. Maybe one day you'll find the corruption inside our own.”

C2E024 1:14:31

Beau: “I don't know, I just grew to hate the town that I was in and the system that my father was a part of and so everything--”

Nott: “Is he a bad person?”

Beau: “He wasn't a bad person. I think he just had bad direction. I don't know, he could've been a good dad. He was a shitty dad and a good businessman.”

[...]

Nott: “Wait, this was not by choice? You were abducted by monks?! ... Are you okay?”

Beau: “Sure. Great.”

Nott: “Was it hard?”

Beau: “Yeah. I mean, there were elements that were hard, but everyone has had hardships, right? What's it matter? Besides, he sent me off to the monks. I think he was hoping that they were going to beat my indiscretions out of me. Instead, I think all of the things that my father saw in me that he hated, the monks saw as a potential advantage. So, in a weird way, I think it might've been the nicest thing he ever did for me. ... I mean, I still never really want to see him again, and I don't think he wants to see me again, either. In fact, he told that he didn't want to see me again. So it's good. Yeah.”

C2E092 1:35:50

Beau: “I feel like I've found my family with The Mighty Nein. I don't like looking at my past, because it doesn't have The Mighty Nein in it, and I think I put off the inevitable, because I'm going to-- I'm afraid it's going to be like my past.”

Fjord: “I don't think one contaminates the other. You've got good, solid footing here. I mean, shit, if we want to run, we run. If we want to kick his ass, we'll kick his ass.”

Beau: “Yeah... I kind of want to kick his ass, and I don't want to run.”

Fjord: “Could I ask you, in your wildest dreams, and feel free to say you don't want to tell me, what would you have happen when we go there?”

Beau: “I think I've worked so hard because I scripted this day, in my inevitable future that I would go back to him, successful woman, respectable member of society, Cobalt Soul, an Expositor, the thing he threw me away to, and I embraced. And then, I would get mad at myself, because I felt like I was doing exactly what he was doing to me my entire life, scripting me to be something else. And I'm still doing it. I haven't seen him in three years, and I'm still trying to be... something. And I think what's scary is that I like this, and what I've found, and I don't think it was until Nott started talking about having to go home and go away that it truly started terrifying me. Because for the first time, I'm happy. And what if that goes away?”

C2E092 3:41:30

Thoreau: “Look, I know you-- I know we've had our  differences. And I've not-- I've not been the pinnacle of a father, in the same way that you've not been a pinnacle of a daughter. I accept my responsibilities in the things that I've, maybe been a bit harsh on. But look what you've become.”

Beau: “It feels like a weird justification of your behaviours, but I'd like to hope that what I became had nothing to fucking do with you, but maybe I'd be lying to myself.”

Beau: “Yeah, I was difficult... but I thought a Dad was supposed to stay by their kid when they're having a fucking hard time.”

C2E125 02:54:15

Yudala Fon: “First, let me say, thank you for being honest about your experience with the Expositor, and aiding us in finding this link and exposing a very serious seed of corruption within our very... sorry... group. Let me please extend my sincerest apologies.”

Beau: “Um... thank you. Sorry, I’m really taken aback by all of this. ... It’s odd, looking at one of the most traumatic moments of my life and on another side, feeling a sense of thanks and gratitude that it happened. Because it did set me on this path.”

...

Yudala: “We would like to think that you would have found your way here regardless. And it should always have been your choice. And I know we cannot make that up to you, but I want to extend my – our – deepest apologies. 

Beau: “Um. Thank you. Thank you for taking these matters so seriously. Didn’t expect it. I guess you get... used to cruelty being handed down as the norm.”

...

Yudala: “We are not a body of government, we are not a religious group, we are a people who want to protect people who cannot protect themselves from abuses of power. And you’ve been abused by someone in power. We will see that they are properly punished.”

[A little later]

Caleb: “Are you... all right?”

Beau: “Do you know that feeling where... you didn’t realise something was wrong until someone told you, and you just lived with it this whole time, and... I’m relieved, but I’m also, kind of reckoning with it at the same time? I don’t know. Yeah, I’m good. I’m okay.”

Bonus: C2E110 03:35:31

Beau: “I... am so fucking tired of manipulative assholes... I don't know why so many people have gone through such great lengths to try and convince us all that they're responsible for our success. ... If I hear one more person try and claim that pain is the only way to make a resilient person—what a shitty excuse.”

[maaruin]

The Institutional Problems of the Jedi Order

Preface

I think it is time to finally write this post. These ideas have been going through my head for some time after reading some Jedi discourse. But I should preface this with: even though the Jedi made mistakes, this does not mean Palpatine’s genocide of them was justified. It only means that he saw certain flaws in the Order that he could exploit. I suspect that without these flaws, he probably still would have managed to take over and persecute the Jedi, but much more of the Order would have survived.

For this post, I am mostly using the prequel movies with a bit of lore added from the old Expanded Universe. I’m not using The Clone Wars, because its depiction of Anakin’s fall to the dark side is different from the movies. And I’m not using the new Disney Canon, because I don’t know what has been retconned so far and what hasn’t.

Depending on how we count, I think there were either two or four major flaws. I’ll number them as four, but the first three could be grouped together.

1. The Jedi Order is a religion but isn’t organized like one

The Jedi are a religion. They are a group that believes certain things about the universe and practices a way of life that fits with these beliefs. But they are also entirely organized as “Jedi Knights” who are “guardians of peace and justice in the [old] republic”. This is… odd. The entire religion is basically made up of full-time professionals. Or rather, monastics.

If you want to study the Force and use it, you have to become a monk, basically. And more than that, to be accepted you need to already have a special talent in using the Force. Actually, you can’t even do that, they only take toddlers, so your parents have to decide if you should join this religion and become a monk. (Or maybe the Jedi Order just takes all Force sensitive children no matter what the parents think, it’s not entirely clear.)

A normal religion isn’t organized like that. Normally most members of a religion are normal people with normal jobs with varying levels of devotion. They participate in the practices of the religion in a way that fits into their daily life. Then there are religious professionals like priests who work to make it possible for the normal followers to practice this religion. And then, in some religions, there are monastics who dedicate their life to practicing the religion, generally apart from the normal believers. The Jedi only have the last group.

That alone would make them much easier to target and wipe out. But it is even more like that. The entire Jedi Order is integrated into the institutional framework of the Republic. All of the higher ranked Jedi (we will talk about the lower ranked later) basically work as special police and special diplomats for the Republic. “and” not “or”, all of them must fulfill both roles. And, when the Clone Wars start, they all become officers in the Republic military.

Now, in principle I don’t think religious institutions working closely with the state and fulfilling important roles for it is necessarily a problem. But if this is the only way this religion can be practiced, the practice of this religion will become poor in variety and closed off to most people who would be interested in participating.

2. Slavery in the Galaxy

There is slavery in the Galaxy Far Far Away. It is illegal in the Galactic Republic, but it is widely practiced in the planets of the Outer Rim, which might or might not be members of the Republic. The Jedi know that slavery is bad. What should they do?

Well, as much as a like the image of a hundred Jedi waltzing into the Hutt Cartel and killing/arresting them all, that probably wouldn’t be the best idea and cause much more chaos and harm than it solves, at least in the short run. But there are alternatives besides doing that and mostly ignoring it. For a start, here are two:

Establish underground railroads to smuggle slaves to freedom or assist on already established ones. Jedi mind-reading and precognition abilities will be very helpful in such endeavors.

Assist in organizing and fighting in slave revolts. One Jedi can turn the tide on the battlefield and if they are respected diplomats, the can help the slaves in finding supporters.

But this isn’t what the Jedi do because they are preoccupied with their role in the Republic. Qui-Gon says to Anakin that he didn’t come to Tatooine to free slaves. Which is true, he was sent to assist the government of Naboo against the Trade Federation, not the slaves on Tatooine against the Hutts. And why was he sent to Naboo and not Tatooine? Because Chancellor Valorum decided that resisting the Trade Federation was in the interest of the Republic, but freeing slaves wasn’t.

As mentioned in part 1 the number of members of the Jedi religion is smaller than it should be and integrated into the Republic in a way that leaves little room for it to act independently.

3. The Clone Army

Suddenly, an army for the Republic conveniently appears in time when the Republic is about to go to war after centuries of peace. This army is made up of, for all intents and purposes, slaves. Slaves that have been bred to be especially obedient. The Republic is expecting the Jedi to serve as officers in this army. What should the Jedi do?

Serve as officers, because the clones would suffer more without them?

Refuse to serve because that would mean supporting the introduction of slavery into the Republic?

Throw their political weight around and demand the clone troopers be freed and given Republic citizenship and in addition demand an end of the clone production in return for serving in the war?

Serve on both sides of the clone wars because the Republic obviously doesn’t have the moral high ground anymore and if their service in the Republic army leads to less suffering, their service in the Separatist army will do so as well?

There are probably more options. The Jedi decided to pick the one that reduced the suffering of the clones in the short term, but by doing that squandered the opportunity to take a stance against the creation of the clone army. And we don’t even see meaningful discussion within the order about this choice. This is, I suspect, because the Jedi are so used to their role as enforcers in the Galactic Republic that the alternatives weren’t really on the table.

(Palpatine’s plan was counting on the Jedi to behave this way when he planned Order 66.)

4. Dealing with emotions (the problem with Anakin)

While the Jedi Order may not demand it’s members to be emotionless, it does demand that they keep their emotions under very strict control. Nonetheless, almost all the Jedi we see do seem to be emotionally well adjusted. Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gon, Mace Windu, all of them seem to have little trouble with this demand.

Anakin, on the other hand, has a lot of trouble with it. He often has emotional outbursts through Episode II and III, then shortly afterwards walks back and apologizes. Curiously, this isn’t the case in Episode I. There he is actually quite good in dealing with his emotions. In other words, his time in the Jedi Order made his ability to handle his own emotions worse. Much worse, actually.

I think the reason for this is that whenever he feels something, other Jedi tell him that this is not right. It starts with Yoda in Episode I. “Afraid are you? […] Fear is the path to the dark side... fear leads to anger... anger leads to hate.. hate leads to suffering.” Criticisms like this no doubt continued all the way through his training until, by the time of Episode II, every time he feels an emotion he is angry at himself for feeling that emotion, which leads to more emotional instability, not less.

But why is this a problem Anakin has and not for the other Jedi we see. Maybe it is because he started his training later than is normal for a Jedi. But I suspect it is something slightly different: The Jedi who go through their training either find a way to handle their emotions in a way the order approves of, or they are sorted out. In the Expanded Universe there is a so called Jedi Service Corps where Jedi who fail their training go to work as farmers, explorers, educators or medical assistants. These jobs are, however, seen as lesser and going there is considered a failure. This is unfortunate, I think the Jedi could do much more good in the galaxy if the best of them were able to work in different fields instead of all being stuck with warrior-diplomat. Nonetheless, the Service Corps actually mitigates one of the flaws the Order has to some extend, if it works like I suspect. If the Jedi don’t have a way of dealing with emotions that works for everyone, the next best thing is to only pick the ones that can handle it and put the rest somewhere where they are useful and can’t do damage. Certainly not ideal, but an understandable adjustment.

But anyways, Anakin wasn’t sorted out. It is never confirmed in the movies, but I would suspect they made an exception for him. Yoda already made an exception for him when they decided to train him at all. And because he was the chosen one, I think they thought that his potential would be wasted if he only got to be in the Service Corps. If we ignore the Service Corps and only go off the movies, my criticism still stands: Yoda recognized that Anakin might not handle Jedi training well and he should have stuck to his guns and refuse Anakin to be trained within the Jedi Order.

Why are the Jedi like this?

Personally, I like to explain these flaws of the Jedi Order historically. Now, the EU doesn’t really fit with the theory I have. Because in games like KotOR and SWtOR the Order seems very similar to the Order in the Prequels. On the other hand, other sources say that this structure of the Jedi Order is a product of the Ruusan Reformation which happened after the end of the last Sith War a thousand years before Episode I.

To defeat the Sith at the end of that war, all Jedi were brought together as one army, no matter what they had done before. They didn’t really defeat the Sith (the Sith were deceived by Darth Bane to destroy themselves), but they thought they did. They thought they almost single-handedly saved the Republic from destruction.

Because of this, they rebuilt the Jedi Order in a way that was explicitly integrated into the institutions of the Republic. They built it in a way that made the fighting Jedi the core of the Order, other forms of being a Jedi were downgraded to the Service Corps. Because many Jedi had fallen to the dark side in that war, they taught a very strict form of emotional control and only trained force-sensitives from birth. And because they were so linked to their role as enforcers for the Republic, the neglected many other things Jedi should do, like helping slaves free themselves.

A better Jedi Order

No matter if this is how it happened, I do think the Jedi Order could be different (better). Here is how I would change it:

A Jedi Laity: Every living being is connected to the Force, so let them participate in practices that serve this connection like Jedi meditation. They may never be able to move things with their mind, but that’s not the point.

Jedi who serve the people should live among them: Jedi priests, Jedi healers, and yes, even Jedi knights should not form their own community but instead be in the same community as the Jedi laity.

Monasteries for the monks: Jedi who fully want to focus on their connection with the Force could still live in monastic communities.

Don’t completely integrate into the state: Working with the Galactic Republic could still be a thing, but the Republic should never depend on the Jedi and only a minority of Jedi should serve the Republic directly.

Help people everywhere: Because they are not completely bound to the Republic, many Jedi can decide how they will serve the people in the galaxy. Some might decide to help the slaves in the Outer Rim.

A Variety of Emotion: Not every Jedi will be as capable of controlling their emotions as the others. If there is a large variety of ways to be a Jedi, I suspect that most of them could still find their place to fit into the Order.

Allow adults to join: With adults it is much easier to determine if they would make a good Jedi and what way of being a Jedi would suit them. If there is a Jedi laity, they can be trained as children to some degree before they decide if they want to join.

Would this Jedi Order have fallen to Palpatine’s manipulation? I don’t know. But I think it would have been harder for him. If most Jedi didn’t serve in the Republic military and weren’t in a small number of Jedi temples, Order 66 would have claimed much less of the Order. (Probably 10%-20% instead of >90%.) Jedi would find it much more easy to hide in the population and the laity could help carry on the Jedi traditions in secret. Anakin might have been more emotionally well adjusted and not fall for Palpatine’s manipulations. (On the other hand, in a more open Jedi Order like this, there might be more people who could be turned, so who knows.)

Well, this is my contribution the Jedi discourse. The Jedi aren’t evil, and they certainly didn’t deserve genocide because of this. But as the Prequels depict them, they have certain tragic flaws in the way they are organized that Palpatine could exploit.

(Maybe I’ll make a shorter Part 2 about how Luke deals with this.)

[dwellordream]

“England, an island kingdom with a majority population of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, or Danish origin and a ruling minority of Norman French descent, must have seemed in many ways a strange land to Eleanor. Happily for the queen, England since the 1066 Norman Conquest had had close links with the French and Latin culture prevailing on the European mainland. While the majority of the native population spoke English, the language spoken among the aristocracy at the royal court and by London’s commercial classes was Anglo-Norman French. The clergy and many royal officials knew Latin as well and easily moved from one language to the other. 

A number of Anglo-Norman speakers were trilingual, since they found some knowledge of English, the language spoken by the mass of the population, a practical necessity, but French would remain the language of the royal court long after Eleanor’s time. One of Henry II’s courtiers wrote glowingly of the king’s linguistic skill, noting that he “had some knowledge of every language from the Channel to the river Jordan, but himself employed only Latin and French.” Probably Henry could grasp the gist of what was said to him in English, but was far from fluent and unable to make himself understood by English speakers.

Such linguistic plurality was familiar to Eleanor, who had moved back and forth in her childhood between the two French tongues, langue d’oïl and langue d’oc. Yet she never learned English, although she must have had many English-speaking servants. Surviving accounts from Henry II’s early years as king mention his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine and little more, but there can be no doubt that shocking rumors about her conduct on the Second Crusade followed her to her new kingdom. 

Large numbers of ambitious English youths who sought out the learning of the schools of Paris doubtless laughed over drinks in their taverns at exaggerated stories told of their new queen’s scandalous conduct as Louis VII’s consort. On their return to England in search of employment, many gathered at the royal court, a place filled with clever courtiers, ambitious and greedy men of low birth, who traded on amusing stories to stand out from their fellows in the rivalry for patronage. They readily turned their skill with words toward gossip, flattery, lies, and hypocrisy in order to prevail over competitors. 

Doubtless, one means of impressing potential patrons with their access to power was to retell tales of the queen’s immorality that they had heard while in France. Nothing could be kept secret at court, for the royal family lived their lives in public with courtiers and lesser servants constantly present, and they could not avoid being the subjects of much gossip. It is impossible to gauge how far down among the common people gossip about the new queen penetrated. The majority of Eleanor’s new subjects probably knew little more than that she came from a place far away in the south of France and that she had left her first husband, the French king, to marry Henry Plantagenet. 

Yet court gossip circulated among Londoners and no doubt spread to their acquaintances in the countryside. Eleanor’s largely unflattering portrait painted by English chroniclers writing toward the end of the twelfth century probably reflects popular opinion. It shows that she did not meet a standard for queenship being defined in the course of the century, part of a reformulation of gender roles that would impose harsher judgments of her than those passed on earlier English queens. Despite a growing animus against powerful women, Eleanor’s four Anglo Norman predecessors as English queen-consorts had enjoyed the approval of contemporary writers. 

The chronicler Orderic Vitalis, an English-born monk writing in Normandy, supplies few signs of women’s worsening conditions early in the twelfth century. His stereotypical references to feminine weaknesses are no more than superficial comments made in passing. He portrays queens as companions and helpmates to their husbands, “helping in government in any time of crisis, ruling during minorities, or helping the foundation of churches.” 

Other chroniclers similarly described Anglo-Norman queens in conventional terms as models of piety and purity, making benefactions to religious institutions and supporting literary and artistic patronage at the royal court. These ladies attracted no scandalous gossip, were conscientious mothers and worthy companions of their royal consorts, even if occasionally involved in politics, serving as regents during their husbands’ absences from the kingdom. 

William I’s wife Matilda of Flanders escaped Orderic’s condemnation for mixing in worldly matters, since circumstances required her to act as governor of Normandy for long periods while her husband was busy consolidating his rule over his new kingdom of England. Orderic recorded without disapproval “the hard facts of her participation in the work of government” later in England, where she acted as regent and even as royal judge. Henry I’s consort Edith-Matilda had exerted similar influence in the political sphere, acting as regent during her husband’s absences from the realm. When exercising power on Henry I’s behalf, she applied her own seal to royal documents, and she expected royal officials to obey her as they would the king.

Yet her activity as her husband’s helpmate did not sully her reputation, for her piety staved off writers’ objections. Indeed, Edith-Matilda spoke openly of her influence over her husband; in a letter to Anselm of Canterbury, who had incurred royal wrath, she told him, “With God’s help and my suggestions, as far as I am able, [Henry] may become more welcoming and compromising towards you.” Eleanor’s efforts as Henry II’s regent during the first decade of their marriage did not win her similar praise, however. 

Unlike Henry’s grandmother, whose intercession with her husband on behalf of worthy petitioners had led churchmen to compare her to the biblical Queen Esther, Eleanor did not earn contemporaries’ gratitude for taking advantage of her intimate access to Henry to intervene for the sake of others. Edith-Matilda with her saintliness represented a model of what was expected and esteemed in an English royal consort. Yet her death in 1118 marked a change for English queenship, for by then the eleventh-century reform movement’s fight for clerical celibacy was bringing about a sharpening of gender definitions to deny women any public role.

While Eleanor was queen, English churchmen were condemning great women for assuming such “manly” roles as the exercise of power, and they decried husbands who allowed their wives a role in public life as guilty of “unmanly” behavior. Henry II’s own mother, Empress Matilda, had suffered from accusations of an “unwomanly” desire for power. Eleanor sought a place for herself in politics that went beyond what northern Europeans considered suitable for a queen. Even as a young wife and a stranger at the court of Louis VII, she had demonstrated a desire to share power with her royal husband; and she had resented both her mother-in-law’s influence over her young husband and Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis’s role as his senior counselor. 

As a French biographer writes, “It is that constant political activity and her role at court . . . that makes Eleanor an exceptional woman to the point of astonishing the historians of our time and of shocking the misogynistic chroniclers of her own.” Religious devotion was an important quality for queens, who were expected to be models of piety, using their prominence to promote religion in the kingdom. While Eleanor’s predecessors were known to have given pious gifts to monastic institutions, including new foundations, she is not noted for having founded new religious houses in England. 

… monasteries or convents favored by her ancestors seem never to have benefitted from gifts of English lands from her as additions to their endowments. Unlike Henry II, who provided Fontevraud with revenues from English properties and encouraged the foundation of Fontevraudist priories in England, no evidence survives of Eleanor’s gifts to that house from her English revenues. Eleanor formed a special relationship with Reading Abbey where her first son, William, dead at the age of three, was entombed in 1156, apparently while Henry II was abroad. 

No doubt her husband sent instructions concerning their son’s burial; and his body was placed at the feet of his great-grandfather, to King Henry I of England, Henry’s model for ruling England. The choice of Reading as the child’s resting place was a means of linking the Angevin king and his family to Henry I, founder of the abbey, who had intended it to be a royal mausoleum. Like parents in any age, Eleanor and Henry mourned the loss of their first child. In making a grant for the little boy’s soul to Hurley Priory, a dependent house of Westminster Abbey, the king declared that the gift was made at the queen’s request and with her assent.

…Another rare letter to Eleanor as queen of England survives to cast light on her spiritual life. It was written to her by the prophet and mystic, Hildegard of Bingen (d.1179), another remarkable twelfth-century woman, and a letter addressed by her to Henry II also survives. As Hildegard’s fame spread, she conducted a wide correspondence replying to requests for her advice from powerful persons throughout Europe, including England.

Since the letter cannot be dated more precisely than sometime before 1170, the event that impelled Hildegard to write to the English queen remains a mystery. She addresses Eleanor not so much as a sovereign as a woman who is prey to troubles; and she offers counsel to calm her, advising her to search for stability. She wrote “Your mind is similar to a wall plunged into a whirlwind of clouds. You look all around, but find no rest. Flee that and remain firm and stable, with God as with men, and God will then help you in all your tribulations. May he give you his blessing and his aid in all your undertakings.”

- Ralph V. Turner, “Once More a Queen and Mother: England, 1154–1168.” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England

[blogrivendell]

#27 Firm Foundations

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won't collapse because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rain and floods come and the  winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.”  Jesus, in Matthew 7: 24 - 27 

“Because of God’s grace to me, I have laid the foundation like an expert builder. Now others are building on it. But whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have - Jesus Christ.”  Apostle Paul, I Corinthians 3:10-11.

The photo is the famous  Mont St Michel. If ever there was a building built on bedrock this is a great example! It has survived more than a 1000 years of repeated assaults by wind, storms and invading armies,  and is an  amazing collection of buildings built on  top of each other piled  on the same foundation-it would take more than one visit to really explore.  We joined the endless stream of tourists ascending the mount, and as we walked along one of the passageways, a door opened, and a monk appeared. He looked directly at me and smiled warmly. It was one of those moments when you recognize the reality of Christ literally  dwelling within his followers. I knew in my spirit it was not just the monk smiling but it was Jesus himself saying “Hi,  I am here too!” It was very powerful. The abbey itself has had a very colourful history, and times when the Enemy was reigning there, and not Christ.  It is not a very “sacred” mount, full of commercialization -  tourist shops  in the village below.  But it seems now that with a new order of monks living there, Christ is reclaiming  the territory.  It is God’s people that bring God’s presence. The monks get on with their lives and liturgy, and do their best to bring the presence of God into the midst of all those overwhelming numbers of  (seemingly annoying) tourists  who can join in the worship and  also ask for personal prayer. They are certainly modelling how to be” in the world and not of it”! 

I have been reading, and continue to read  lots of books that have been written over the past 15 years that focus on calling us to adapt to being in exile in a post - Christian society. The discussions includes among other things : rethinking everything about how understand what being Christian means -(especially the big picture of  what “mission” into society looks like , secondly, rethinking how  we  communicate the gospel to those who don’t understand our concepts anymore. Thirdly, how to  disciple people into Christ so that they can  genuinely express the character of Jesus, and lastly the need to shed “old wineskins" of institutional church life that actually interfere with our ability to disciple effectively.  I think all of them would agree with Apostle Paul that the foundation of any  missional community must be Jesus alone. You don't make your starting point  new organisational structures or  new programmes or “building community”. You start with a Person and you make it your business to cement yourself into Him individually and collectively  and then you get the ears and eyes to perceive  what He is doing in your part of the world and join in. We can’t build anything for God, it can only be with God. “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labour in vain, Psalm 127. The “house”  being built is the people of God, but the foundation is not just hearing of  Jesus’ truth, but  the whole point of what Jesus said in this metaphor is obedience - following his teaching- that is the crucial part of having a firm foundation. Just hearing the truth without it radically  changing our lives results in spiritual catastrophe. 

 We really need to let that sink in and make sure we give people every opportunity to learn how to follow in obedience.  Our church structures are designed for lots of passive listening, an emphasis on  intellectual input by itself,  and not much relational  mentoring and  “learning by doing” even though we have known for a long time  that this is not the best way to help people be educated into lifestyle change.  Frank Viola suggests in Finding Organic Church,  that “The Lord’s way of training produces transformed disciples, while the modern method breeds isolated consumers of mental information.” Jesus taught his disciples on the run, immersing them in His mission- doing  what God the Father was showing Him to do,  and  then  getting the disciples to practice doing it. It was challenging, scary, and a huge  adventure, Jesus was so radical that they were forced  to  think about all kinds of things about their own society  and religious culture  that  had never occurred to them to question before and they could never go back to the life they lived before.   

What if we got rid of all the clutter to focus on Jesus our foundation,  and how to think of nothing else but becoming “ Little Christs”?  I will let C S Lewis have the last word: 

...”the Church exists  for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are  not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose”.  (Mere Christianity)

   . 

[hillbillyoracle]

The Hermit Reversed: Navigating Involuntary Isolation

I'm not a big fan of the term "community reading" personally. I don't feel like can give a quality reading for just anyone who might read a given piece. Or at the very least it doesn't sit right with me, feels presumptuous. So I’m experimenting with what I think of as "tarot sermons" - filtering the lessons of different tarot cards or combinations of cards through other literature, media, and my personal experience. Let me know if you want to see more.

I'm working on a tarot devotional for the Hierophant at the moment. In writing this devotional, I've been thinking deeply about not only what the Hierophant is but what the Hierophant is not. That got me reflecting on what separates it from other religious figures in the Major Arcana, especially the Hermit.

Most don't seem to think about the Hermit as a religious figure. Most folks seem to emphasize their solitariness. But when I pulled up definitions to make sure I understood what hermit means, most of the ones I found denoted that hermits practice isolation as a religious discipline. This got me thinking about who religious practices are performed for - are they performed for the divine? are they performed for the benefit of a congregation? are they performed for the self?

As a lot of folks who follow me know, in late 2016 I began having intensely painful health problems. Over the next year they grew worse and I was effectively housebound. I left my degree program and searched for work that would allow me flexibility in hours and the ability to sit which proved near impossible.

As the months passed and people stopped replying to my applications altogether, I noticed something else - my friends had begun to disappear as well. Folks I had traded letters with for years suddenly dropped off, friends who had been happy to come over before stopped taking me up on my invitations, and many friends stopped replying to me on social media as well. To this day, I don't know what sparked the near total collapse of my social circle but it coinciding with the realization my condition was going to be chronic did not escape me.

I was very alone.

Part of what I turned to during this time was tarot. One way I found to connect with people was to offer tarot lessons. At the time I'd been reading cards regularly for about 9 years. Teaching people how to read the cards helped me feel like had value at a time when both friends and the institutions I'd been a part of had decided I did not. This blog was, in fact, originally a way to type of notes from the lessons I'd given a few students. I clung to it. It gave me a reason to wake up and at least jot down some notes in the morning at a time when I could do very little else. I started to see myself as the Hermit, toiling away alone in the pursuit of some deeper insight.

I wish I could say things changed, that I made new friends or my old friends came back but in actuality I'm still seeing the steady decline of my social circle. People get busy or they move away or they just straight up stop replying.

It doesn't bother me too often these days but this afternoon the dam broke.

I looked up on the fridge and saw that every Christmas card we had received this year was for my partner and something in me just snapped.

For those who don't know us personally, my partner invests very little into her social life and is still much beloved. She never really starts any plan but always seems to have an invite to something. Every year, despite the fact that almost no one I send cards to even acknowledges having received one, I try writing a newsletter, printing pictures, and sending off cards to as many people as I can. She'll assemble some too but it's largely an effort I spearhead.

So to see that not only had no one even texted me they'd received one, all the cards coming in were for her - it just stung deeply. The quiet "what am I doing wrong?" tape that usually clicks on when I notice our social circle inequities quickly became a very loud "what's wrong with me?"

Because when it comes down to it, I'm tired of being told not to take it personally, that people get busy and forget to say something. When you send 20 cards and get no response back, when 20 people are just too busy, it's tough. Like my own parents didn't even text and they're effectively retired. Because it's ever just that one time either. I've spent the better part of the last 3 years trying to find volunteer opportunities I can do and hit wall after wall. I tried to arrange something fun every few months for the first few years of being homebound and regularly had no one show up.

Isolation is never just once.

That's part of what had me reflecting on the Hermit as I was trying to sort through my feelings. Isolation, when chosen, is a discipline. Isolation, when inescapable, is a prison.

A Buddhist nun I enjoy listening to, Ven. Robina Courtin, often says "If you can do something, do something honey, but if you can't, what are you going to do?" She has used the example of a woman she once read about. The woman and her partner were hitchhiking. The person who picked them up then went on to commit a murder, and pinned it on her and her husband who were both sent to prison. The woman had the realization that she was not going to make it in her current headspace so she decided that she was a monk and her cell was where she would carry out her devotion.

I've often read reversed cards through the lens of getting stuck - how might the person in this card get stuck? I tend to read the Hermit reversed as someone who has gotten too focused on a pursuit or someone who is, to their detriment, determined to do something by themselves.

But it clicked for me that maybe another way to read reversed cards is what happens when someone is put in this role involuntarily? How does the issue they resolve result in the card in it's upright form?

For the Hermit reversed, what lies at the core is a painfully deep disconnection and the only way out of is acceptance.

As soon as I was able to calm down and started to think - "okay if this is my life, what am I going to do about it?" - so many paths began to appear. If things aren't working well with humans who are alive, maybe humans who've passed on would be more open to forming relationships. If humans aren't interested in being my friends right now, how can I befriend the birds that live in tree outside my window? Or the tree itself?

It as only through acceptance that I could broaden my idea of what a friendship could look like. I do think, at the end of the day, humans are fundamentally relational. But I'm less sold on the idea that we require human relationships to function. I think it helps for sure. But in their absence, other relationships are still available and a focus on human relationships can cloud out our relationships that already exist with our surroundings, the land, and our ancestors. This realization suddenly made me appreciative of the solitude and instantly I felt that sense of uprightness restored in me.

My relations don’t send cards, they send blessings. And I have proof of them.

So if you're facing something similar this season, where you're not only involuntarily isolated but near others who highlight that experience even more, I hope this can be catalyst for comfort. What does acceptance allow you to see that you never would have otherwise? How does that acceptance restore you to your full devotion?

[intermundia]

As a queer person living in conservative, rural America, and as a Star Wars fan who posts about the Jedi Order, my thoughts are frequently turned to the concept of family, and what it means in different cultures. I’ve written a longish (1k words) post about this lmao, so I will put it beneath the cut, but it unpacks a lot of assumptions that are frequently made in discussion of the Jedi.

The ideology of the family where I live is closely related to patriarchy, individualism, and property rights. The narrative of the ideal family life is this: a man falls in love with a woman and courts her until she agrees to marriage. When they marry, they become one person, or rather the man acquires a helpmeet, and the woman legally loses her personhood, becoming Mr and Mrs X. She is now a larger part of the man’s personhood, and any children they have are also inside that umbrella. They are his property, not individuals in themselves. This is why conservatives resent public school and free access to information, as they are interfering with his right to maintain his property the way he wants them. Once the children are grown, the cycle continues, the son finding a wife, etc. That is a certain kind of ideal of society. The idea of sending a child to the church to be raised, is kind of like sending a valuable, heirloom cup to be used by the community, it’s hypothetically a meritorious sacrifice to god, but the cup still really belongs to the family. It belongs at home. If the child grows up to join the church, it’s something that happens later, during the transition from being property to being an individual.

This is not a universal or necessary mode of life.

In a different culture, where a child is born and is understood already to be a member of the wider community that is being raised by their parents, the idea of allowing an institution to adopt and take over raising the child is not a violation of some man’s property rights. In a culture where there is a temple that is an honorable place, where being a monk is a livelihood that is respected and important, something that parents would wish for their child to experience, it is more of a privilege to get your child into that place where they can become an important figure in the community. The parents would miss the child, that is universal, but there would also be a sense of relief for them, to know that they’ve gotten access to a stable future that they can be proud of, especially if they were in a situation where they couldn’t guarantee that child an equally stable and important future. With the force-gifted Jedi this is even more stark; their powers should be trained and directed for their own good too. Growing up communally at a temple is a different kind of family, where there is a sense of brother and sisterhood, with teachers and elders making up a dense web of social relationships. It is a different life, but not a worse one.

The conservative American ideology is something that I have felt my entire life to be very closed and full of the potential for abuse behind closed doors. A child is not a person and is not treated like one, and a wife is not a person either. The only individuals are the men who own these families. It’s a system that I yearn for relief and escape from, and so of course I am drawn to the Jedi, an imaginary culture that is based on real values held by real cultures outside of my own. I know there are places in the world where sending a child to the temple is an honorable and good thing. I know that the Jedi think of each other as family, it’s well attested in canon and legends content. It’s not abusive or wrong for those children to be raised in that communal culture, just because it’s different from the norms of individualistic, patriarchal values. Just because it’s different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Just like being a queer person, who doesn’t fit into the system of romantic pairing and nuclear families, being different doesn’t mean being wrong.

People raised with the conservative ideology think the absence of romantic love is inherently abusive, but if you were raised to prioritize other things, would you miss it as much as if you were raised to chase it? Is it not a worthy effort to dedicate your life to serving other people? It may be difficult, but it’s not a life without love. Jedi have romantic feelings, they’re not forbidden, but they are deprioritzed. It’s not the ultimate goal of life, but rather more of a distraction from a very noble duty. Many, many people in the world choose that path. The Jedi aren’t jailers, we have examples of people leaving when they couldn’t walk that path, but most stay, because they have an important role to play in the wider galaxy and a great use of their potential. Anakin wanted to stay so that he could have the status and power of a ranking member of the Jedi Order, but he also wanted to have private property, possessing other people and controlling their destiny. You can’t have both. I think the story of the prequels and the path of the Jedi are both fascinating because they push against the cultural norm toward romance and patriarchal individualism. It’s just nice to have something that says you can find home with friends and mentors, and meaning with duty and service. It’s important to me on a very personal level.

[zakytenn-blog]

11 DID YOU KNOW FACTS ABOUT THE SPANISH LANGUAGE

1.DID YOU KNOW Over 400 million people speak Spanish

Spanish is the mother tongue of an estimated 400–450 million people, making it the world’s second most spoken language. Spanish only falls in second place behind Chinese, which is spoken by over a billion people and far outranks any other language. Spanish surpasses English in its number of speakers, as English comes in third place with 335 million native speakers around the world.

2. DID YOU KNOW There are 21 countries that have Spanish as the official language

Spanish enjoys official language status in 21 countries across Europe, Africa, Central, South and North America, making it a very important global language. Not only is it the main language for these 21 sovereign states, it also serves as a key language in a handful of dependent territories. For many people in these places, it’s the only way to communicate and all official correspondence and documents are in Spanish. Spanish is also used in schools to teach the curricula. Since English is spoken in 112 countries, the English language is the most widespread in terms of the number of countries that speak it. French is second with 60 countries speaking the language and Arabic is third, with 57 countries who communicate in Arabic. Sure, Spanish only comes in fourth place in this aspect, but that still results in making it one of the most significant languages in the world. Many international companies and organizations, including the United Nations, have adopted Spanish as one of their official languages.

3. DID YOU KNOW Spanish is a Romance language

Spanish has a place with the Indo-European dialects, which incorporate French, English, Russian, German, the Slavic and Scandinavian dialects just as different dialects in India. Indo-European dialects at first spread across Europe and numerous territories of South Asia prior to arriving at different pieces of the world through colonization.

The name “Indo-European” has a topographical significance identifying with the dialects’ most easterly reaches in the Indian subcontinent and their most westerly reaches all through Europe.

Spanish is additionally named a Romance language, alongside Catalan, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian.

You most likely definitely thought about Spanish being a Romance language in some capacity, yet the significance of this goes further than you may anticipate. All these intercontinental associations give Spanish a particular favorable position. Knowing its underlying foundations in and associations with different dialects can help you better comprehend Spanish semantically, truly and socially.

DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN GET BY IN SPANISH WITH JUST 138 WORDS ?!

LEARN MORE BY CLICKING HERE

4. DID YOU KNOW Spanish has Latin birthplaces

The Spanish language gets from a specific sort of spoken Latin. This vernacular created in the focal northern locale of the Iberian Peninsula following the fifth century end of the Western Roman Empire.

From the thirteenth to the sixteenth hundreds of years, Toledo built up a composed language standard and Madrid stuck to this same pattern through the 1500s. During the most recent 1,000 years, the language has gotten more inescapable, moving south towards the Mediterranean.

It was in this manner received by the Spanish Empire and, similarly as significantly, in the Spanish settlements set up on the American landmasses.

5. DID YOU KNOW Spanish has two names: Castellano and Español

Spanish speakers regularly allude to their language as español just as castellano, which is the Spanish word for “Castilian.”

The terms applied can contrast from district to locale, and they can likewise reflect political and social perspectives. In English, the expression “Castilian Spanish” can be utilized to allude to singular vernaculars of Spanish spoken in the northern and focal pieces of Spain. Every so often, the term is utilized all the more freely to allude to the Spanish expressed in Spain, instead of Latin American Spanish.

6. DID YOU KNOW Spanish is a phonetic language

The vast majority know a couple of expressions of Spanish, for example, tapas, rest, cava and tortilla. Spanish has likewise acquired a couple of words from English, for example, los (pants) and el inn (lodging).

There are, be that as it may, some huge contrasts among English and Spanish. For example, there’s the way that Spanish is a phonetic language. This implies that you articulate letters reliably and each letter addresses a specific sound. This additionally implies that Spanish is a genuinely basic language for amateurs to learn, particularly with regards to spelling and talking.

The connections among sounds and letters imply that there ordinarily aren’t any spelling shocks.

Obviously, you will not get off that simple. There are a couple of different stunts for local English speakers to dominate.

As Spanish starts from Latin, it has gendered language — manly and female words and articles. The sexes of descriptive words should concur with their going with things, just as the articles of those things.

Spanish appreciates more tenses and a more noteworthy variety in action word parts contrasted with English. It additionally has three different ways to address individuals: tú being the casual “you,” usted being the formal “you,” and vosotros being the casual, plural rendition of tú (similar as “all of you” or “you all”) in Spain. These all affect action word structures, possessives and pronouns.

7. DID YOU KNOW The Royal Spanish Academy is “in control” of the language

The Royal Spanish Academy is authoritatively liable for being the overseer of the Spanish language. It has its home in Madrid and works various language institutes through the Association of Spanish Language Academies in the 21 different nations that communicate in Spanish.

The Academy started its life in the eighteenth century and from that point forward has distributed word references and language rule books, which have been authoritatively received in Spain and other Spanish-talking nations.

The Academy highly esteems creating the utilization of the upset inquiry and outcry marks, which are special to the Spanish language. Another special element it’s liable for is the letter ñ, which was acquainted with the letters in order during the eighteenth century

8. DID YOU KNOW There are many regional nuances of Spanish

We know that Spanish descended from Latin and spread from the Iberian Peninsula to Latin America through colonization. It’s fascinating to know that there are more than a few discrepancies between the Spanish of Spain and that of Latin America. There are also countless differences in the Spanish language within Latin America itself! That being said, the relatively minor vocabulary, grammar and punctuation differences aren’t terribly extreme, and communication is still very easy. You should be able to travel the Spanish-speaking world with “neutral” Spanish and manage communication with nearly anybody. The differences originally arose because the colonies developed somewhat independently from one another, and even from Spain itself. Since communication was limited, with no telephones, airplanes, emails, WhatsApp or Skype, some elements of older Spanish were retained and others abandoned. Plus, you’ll find that many regions have invented their own unique vocabulary, slang, accents and language usage quirks over time. A good example is the way vos is used in Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. This is used in the Spanish from Spain, and so it was transferred to the Americas. As alluded to before, vosotros means “you” or “you all,” and thus is the second-person plural in Spain, as it was originally intended to be used. However, vos is now used as a polite, second-person singular pronoun in the above three countries. Spain has long since stopped using it in this way, but if you visit Buenos Aires you’re quite likely to be asked “¿de dónde sos?” (where are you from?) as opposed to “¿de dónde eres?”.

9.DID YOU KNOW Arabic influenced Spanish

Arab armies started to conquer the Iberian Peninsula in 711, bringing Arabic art, architecture and language to the region. Arabic gradually mixed with old Spanish to become the language spoken today. When Spain expelled the Arabs in 1492, the language retained some 8,000 Arabic words. Apart from Latin, Arabic is the largest contributor to Spanish. Many words that you already know in Spanish come from Arabic, such as el alfombra (carpet), la almendra (almond) and la almohada (pillow). When you travel through Spain, you’ll come across many place, region and historic site names that come from Arabic, such as La Alhambra

. 10. DID YOU KNOW The earliest Spanish texts were written over 1000 years ago!

Las Glosas Emilianenses (Glosses of Saint Emilianus), written in 964, were long thought to be the first written Spanish texts that survive today. They consist of Spanish and Basque notes made on a religious Latin manuscript. The unknown author is thought to have been a monk at the Suso monastery. In 2010, however, the Real Academia Española announced that the first examples of written Spanish exist in 9th-century medieval documents known as the “Cartularies of Valpuesta,” from the Burgos province.

11. DID YOU KNOW Spanish is poetic and has long sentences

When you translate from English to Spanish, your text is likely to expand by 15–25%. This isn’t because Spanish words are longer than English words (and they’re definitely not as long as German words can be). The reason for this expansion lies in the fact that Spanish is more detailed, poetic and expressive. It thus uses more words to describe something that English would probably sum up in just one word. For example, the phrase en el sentido de las agujas del reloj literally means “in the direction of the needles of the clock,” but in English we would simply say “clockwise.” Spanish doesn’t have a word for “clockwise” and has to use the aforementioned phrase!

DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN GET BY IN SPANISH WITH JUST 138 WORDS !…

If you’ve made it this far that means you probably enjoy learning Spanish therefore you will love this video that shows how 138 words in Spanish can give you 88000 phrases.

you can watch it by CLICKING HERE

[woodrokiro]

Hollowed (fic), Part Eight

Fandom: Bleach

Pairing: IchiRuki

Summary: They call her a miracle, but he looks at her as if she’s normal. It scares her. Fantasy/Futuristic/Zombie kinda?AU. Read Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven. 

It’s the same dream, each and every goddamned time.

It starts out simply and true and horrid enough: the night he last saw her. His mother put him and the girls to bed, kissing each on the nose and wishing them sweet dreams. There is wetness on her cheek from when she briefly nuzzles her son--but it’s quick, and her expression is as peaceful as it usually is.

Was.

But in this dream, he gets out of bed.

His father isn’t in the living room, for whatever reason--but he’s too focused on his mother’s retreating form out of the house to really think about that detail. He starts to follow her--nine year old feet silent as they can while still trying to catch up. He thinks maybe she’s going outside to the safety cellar--even though there has been no Hollowed alarm, even though they haven’t had enough food to store there for ages--until he sees that she’s drifting toward the river.

His heart stops beating so quickly, because the river is a sacred place to Masaki. It’s where she taught her children how to swim, where they catch most of their food, where she has taught him that water is life. So long as they have this river, she says, they need to keep fighting for their lives, for their happiness.

But when she reaches the silt at the water’s edge, she suddenly stops.

“Ichigo,” she calls softly without turning around. Her voice is oddly distorted. “Get away from here.”

He is about to ask why, why would he ever leave her here when she knows the tide gets so high at night and then she turns.

Half of her beautiful face is mangled into a grimace, the other half covered by a Hollowed mask. Her body bubbles and blackens, and she reaches out a hand--gnarling into a claw--toward him.

“Run.”

--

Why he’s awake far earlier than the rest of the group is never questioned, and he’s glad. 

He doesn’t know how he’d answer, anyway.

--

He finds out soon enough that Rukia likes books. 

He guesses it’s not too surprising: he can’t imagine there’s much else for her to do, after all. 

But about a week after he starts, when he realizes there really isn’t much to do except sit around, ask what she’s doing (to which she may or may not answer), and watch dust filter through the screen, he makes do on his oath and brings a book. Well. His only book. It’s not gonna last him long, but hey. Something to do is something to do.

He’s about five pages in when he hears a creaking of the screen and looks up to find her hands gripping through the holes, eyes peering curiously down on him.

“What are you reading?”

Unnerved by her sudden attention, he slaps the book closed. “Look, I told you I’d bring something to read if things got as boring as they have been--”

“No, no. Of course.” She waves her hand impatiently. “I understand. What’s the name of your book?”

Slowly, he raises the tattered cover for her to see. “It’s… Hamlet. By William Shakespeare. Do you know it or…?”

She grins from ear to ear, clapping once in obvious pleasure. “Know it? Well, I know of it. They talk about it in a book Lord Yamamoto has of Shakespeare, but no one’s ever been able to find a copy for me. Is it true? That it’s his best, darkest work?”

“Well… I definitely don’t think darkest. Titus Andronicus is pretty dark, I hear--”

“Titus Andronicus is a travesty amongst his writing. Dark, yes: but no substance.” She sniffs with visible distaste, but Ichigo is intrigued with this conversation. Sure, he loves this book--it’s the one personally prized possession he was able to grab before fleeing his village--but he’s also fascinated with the sudden light in her eyes, the excitement in her voice at having someone to talk about an interest with.

The thought slips in uninvited that this glee suits her.

He shrugs, feeling a heat rise up his neck. “I wouldn’t know. I only have this one. I read All’s Well, once, but the copy was lost a long time ago. I had a book on his biography, too. Would love to find his other work, someday… But there’s more important things to ask for.”

Her fingernail scratches the screen in thought before she quickly glides over to a huge bookshelf in her section. Ichigo watches her: he’d be lying if he said he’s never noticed it before.

“What are you…?”

She trots back over, shoving a beautiful book through the larger exchange slot in the partition. “Here. I’ll trade you. I’ll take care of yours if you take care of mine.”

He eyes the cover. King Lear’s title is stitched in fine gold thread and he gulps. Although tempted, he shakes his head.

“Sorry. That thing’s in mint condition, but this copy is pretty important to me for sentimental value--”

“No, not literally trade, fool.” She rolls her eyes as if he’s the idiot being unclear. “Trade for reading. That thing isn’t deserving to be in my book collection, but it’ll do so I can finally read it. And when you finish this one, you can borrow another. I have near all of his work.”

He’s unsure, but finds himself putting his Hamlet copy in the slot too. “Okay… But I can’t really give you anything else, that’s the only one I have--”

“It doesn’t matter.” She’s grabbed his Hamlet, already finished with the conversation. “I like reading something a few times over anyway. And besides… It’s nice. I mean. To have someone to talk to about it with. I hope.” 

And with that, she walks her way up to her seat next to the window, curls her feet beneath her, and starts to read. 

He opens his own borrowed copy, starting a couple pages before he hears a sound.

Humming.

Strangely, he thinks, that suits her too.

--

“I just don’t get why she’s so… Isolated? But weirdly idolized? Like… She’s an imprisoned queen, or something.” Ichigo picks a piece of lint off his shirt. “Not to be dramatic. It’s just weird.”

It’s his day off, and he’s decided in his boredom to mosey over to Chad’s masonry unit and hang out. He and Chad don’t talk a lot (well, Chad doesn’t talk a lot), but he knows he can count on his friend for advice or venting whenever he needs.

Even when Chad’s pipsqueak boss glares at him from across the room the whole time he’s there.

“If you’re going to distract my apprentice,” the kid calls out, “you can at least be useful and help him in his work.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill sir.” Ichigo hops off his stool, stands next to Chad to half-assedly polish weapons while his friend pounds away at hot iron. “Jesus. How this tightwad place managed to hire a runt as the head of masonry is beyond me.”

Chad stops his work momentarily to wipe the sweat from his brow. “Hitsugaya’s a good boss. He’s taught me a lot in a short time, and besides. He lets you in here while I’m working. Can’t say the kitchens or Ishida’s units would allow for your company.”

Ichigo huffs, but doesn’t disagree. As little as Chad may speak, he has an annoying habit of being right. 

“Yeah, yeah. Still can’t imagine it feels great being bossed around by a twelve-year old, though…”

The two work in companionable silence for a bit, and Ichigo can’t help but think that they really did match Chad to the best job for him. He’s glad someone in his group has found a job that makes sense, at least.

As if reading Ichigo’s thoughts, Chad clears his throat. “Have you talked to Karin recently?”

“Nah. I haven’t really had a chance to. Why?”

“Nothing new, but Yuzu mentioned to me she’s struggling.” Chad keeps his eyes down on his work, but Ichigo can read a tinge of worry. “Been messing up a lot in the kitchens, she says. Inoue makes some… Strange choices in her cooking, we know--but at least she enjoys the work, and is quick to correct her mistakes. She’s well liked there. But Karin…” He stops, not needing to say more.

“Karin’s got a temper.” Ichigo sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. “Fuck. Okay. I’ll--I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”

“I’m sure she’s doing her best, but…”

“No, I know. But it’s not fair to her. I didn’t drag you all here so that any one of you could be miserable. ‘Specially my sisters.” 

“Why don’t you put her here?” Hitsugaya suddenly pops up beside them, carrying a couple of buckets of water to cool the iron. “Sado here says she’s almost as good with weapons as you are, and Old Man never gives me enough workers. We could use her help.”

Ichigo blinks. “Don’t you have some sort of… Weird sexist rule here? That women aren’t really allowed in the military?”

“You obviously haven’t met Captain Soifon… But I guess she is a special case. Anyway, I don’t have that rule.” Hitsugaya grunts while he pours the water. “If someone can do the work, who cares? It’s Old Man’s preference that things are the way they are. Comes from his religious background, having been a monk and all.” 

Ichigo’s jaw drops. He gives Chad a look before hounding on Hitsugaya. “A monk? Are you fucking--why are you so nonchalent about this? Aren’t they--weren’t they supposed to be peaceful ‘n stuff? How is he the HEAD of this entire military institution--”

“Don’t go screaming at me just because you don’t know the history of this place! It’s not my fault you didn’t educate yourself before you got here!” Hitsugaya crosses his arms and glares reproachfully up at him. “Whatever. I guess it’s not that long of a story. Basically, this place was a monastery when the Hollowed first appeared. A big important one. It’s debated whether Yamamoto was head monk and all, but then I guess it doesn’t matter. Anyway, what’s left of the military scampered up here, and Yamamoto took over as Head General. Some sort of ‘God’s Will,’ thing in his mind, probably. The rest is, as they say, history.”

“So Lord Yamamoto didn’t come from the military directly?” Chad vocalizes Ichigo’s next question, however scrambled it might be in his mind right now. 

“No. But to be honest… Look, Yamamoto’s done some disagreeable things. Frankly I don’t trust a lot of his decisions, but without him the entire human population could very well be dead right now.” Hitsugaya shrugs, picking up the emptied buckets. “Anyway Kurosaki, if you want to get your sister over here, I’ll take her. But I wouldn’t recommend asking Yamamoto directly. He’ll probably say no. I’d ask Lady Rukia to request the transfer.” 

Ichigo’s mind takes a minute to process the mention of the name and frowns in confusion. “Rukia? Why would she change his mind?”

“It may not seem like it, but she does have some input here. Not to him directly--through her brother. Whether you call it Byakuya’s guilt or affection, who cares? Anyway, it’s helped me get a friend from the valley into the service sector.” He twists his mouth thoughtfully. “She’s much kinder than the whispers say she is.”

Before he can ask the pipsqueak about that story, the kid turns and walks out the front door to (presumably) get more water.

Ichigo turns to Chad and his friend shrugs in response.

“It’s worth a shot,” he manages gruffly, and Ichigo can’t help but agree. 

--

Later that night, Ichigo approaches Ishida about it.

He doesn’t want to get Karin’s hopes up quite yet, just in case it doesn’t happen. Instead, he wants Uryuu’s input: Uryuu--who he definitely still thinks is an idiot--is at least a good sounding board for ideas, and he can count on him to be blunt.

Plus, it’s been a while since he talked to the guy. 

He’s been quiet ever since he started his part time shifts on the medical grounds two days ago, and hasn’t really been speaking to anybody except Orihime. He’s never been exactly chatty in the first place, but this…

When Ichigo tells him his idea about asking Rukia for the change, Ishida’s eyes flash strangely at her name. 

“I wouldn’t ask her during your shift tomorrow. I don’t know that she’d be… Up for it.” He says quickly before focusing back on mending a shirt. There’s a brief silence before he stops, sensing Ichigo’s stare.

“What?”

“I mean… That’s a weird thing to say. What do you mean she wouldn’t be ‘up for it?’ You meet her without telling me, or something?”

“No I didn’t meet her, and if I did I wouldn’t need to tell you--anyhow.” Ishida pinches his forehead and breathes in. Ichigo frowns.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Really. Just… You’ve mentioned she’s tired after your days and nights off, right? Maybe you won’t catch her… At her best. That’s all. Just give her a break tomorrow morning.” 

He gets up and is about to walk out of the room when Ichigo calls out to him.

“You said we gotta keep each other updated about this place. Is there anything you’re not telling me? I know we argue… But you can talk to me, Ishida.”

Uryuu doesn’t turn around to answer him for a minute. When he does, his face is solemnly thoughtful. “I know. But I’ll have to let you know when I’ve figured out what exactly is going on myself, Kurosaki.” 

He shuts the door, and wonders how many more secrets his group is keeping from him. 

[the-end-of-art]

Sewn into his jacket an incoherent note

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God by Nin Andrews

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation.

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm.

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence.

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit.

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song.

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night.

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us? For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long.

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.  

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind.

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created?  How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.”

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”  

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me.

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

(https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2020/09/how-to-make-love-write-poetry-believe-in-god-by-nin-andrews.html)

Five prose poems by Nin Andrews (formatting better at http://newflashfiction.com/5-prose-poems-by-nin-andrews/)

Duplicity

after Henri Michaux “Simplicity”

When I was just a young thing, my life was as simple as a sunrise. And as predictable. Day after day I went about doing exactly as I pleased. If I saw a lovely man or women, or beauty in any of its shapes and forms and flavors, well, I simply had to have it. So I did. Just like that. Boom! I didn’t even need a room.

Slowly, I matured. I learned a bit of etiquette.  Manners, I discovered can have promising side effects. I even began carrying a bottle of champagne wherever I went, and a bed. Not that the beds lasted long. I wasn’t the kind to go easy on the alcohol or the furnishings, nor was I interested in sleep. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly men drift off. Women, many of them, kept me going night after night. You know how inspiring  women are.

But then, alas, I grew tired of them as well. I began to envy those folks who curl up into balls each night, their bodies as heavy as tombstones. I tried curling up with them, slowing my breath, entering into their dreams. What dreams! To think I had been missing out all along! That’s when I became a Zen master, at one with the night. Now I teach classes on peace, love, abstinence. At last I have found bliss, I tell my followers. The young, they don’t believe it. But really, I ask you. Would I lie?

The Broken Promise

after Heberto Padilla, “The Promise”

There was a time when I promised to write you a thousand love poems. When I said every day is a poem, and every poem is in love with you. But then the poems rebelled. They became a junta of angry women, impossible to calm or translate, each more vivid, sultry, seductive than the next. Some stayed inside and sulked for weeks, demanding chocolates, separate rooms, maid service. Others wanted to be carted around like queens. Still others took lovers and kept the neighbors up, moaning at all hours of the day and night. One skinny girl (remember her? the one with flame-colored hair?) moved away. She went back to that shack down the road where we first met. At night she lay down in the orchard behind the house and let the dark crawl over her arms and legs. In the end even her dreams turned to ash and blew away in a sudden gust of wind.

Little Big Man

after Russell Edson “Sleep”

There was once an orgasm that could not stop shrinking. Little big man, his friend called him, watching as he grew smaller and smaller with each passing night, first before making love, then before even the mention of making love, then before even the mention of the mention of making love. Oh, what a pathetic little thing he was.

One night he tried reading, Think and Grow Big, but it only caused him to shrink further inside himself. Oh, to grow large and tall as I once was, he sighed. What he needed, he knew, was a trainer with a whip and chains. Someone to teach him to jump through hoops and swing from a trapeze and swallow fire until he blazed ever higher into the night. Yes, he shuddered. Yes! as he imagined it. A tiny wisp of smoke escaped his lips.

Questions to Determine if You Are Washed Up

after Charles Baudelaire, “Get Drunk!”

Do you feel washed up lost, all alone? Do you fear that time is passing you by like a train for which you have no ticket, no seat? That you have lived too long in the solitude of your room and empty mind,  that now you are but a slave of sorrow? Or is it regret? Do you no longer taste the wine of life on your lips, tongue, throat? Is there not even even a chance of intoxication? Bliss? No poetry or song above or below the hips? No love in the wind, the waves, in every  or any fleeting and floating thing? No castles in your air? No pearls in your oysters? Are you wearing a pair of drawstring pants?

Remembering Her

after Herberto Padilla

This is the house where she first met you. This is the room where she first said your name as if it were a song.  This is the table where she undressed you, stripping away your petals, leaves, your filmy white roots and sorrows. And there on the floor is the stone you picked up each morning, the stone you clung to night after night. Sometimes she kicked it aside. Sometimes she placed in on the sill and blew it out the window as her presence filled you like a glow, and you thought for an instant, I, too, can fly.

[revelation19]

How come that you still believe in the heresies of calvinism? It goes against everything the early church taught, it has no connection to the historical church and has been rehashing old heresies ad infinitum. I have myself been a calvinist until I bothered reading all the church fathers. Nothing even remotely like it has ever been taught by the early church. To be deep in history truly means to cease to be a protestant.

The very fact that your page is full of those reformed clowns is proof enough that you know nothing about the early church apart from the brain washing you might have undergone in the seminary. you quote John Calvin instead of people like Clement of Rome, St. Athanasius etc Your theology is a joke at best, and damnable heresy at worst. You dont believe ANYTHING the early church believed. That level of ignorance is mind blowing.

They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against this gift of God, incur death in the midst of their disputes. But it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again. - sounds an awful a lot like your heretical group.

Notice how you didn’t mention anything about how Calvinism goes against Scripture? Strange huh?

I’ll start off by simply quoting Calvin’s own response to this claim. 

“They [Catholics, i.e. you] unjustly set the ancient father against us (I mean the ancient writers of a better age of the Church) as if in them they had supporters of their own impiety. If the contest were to be determined by patristic authority, the tide of victory--to put it very modestly--would turn to our side. Now, these fathers have written many wise and excellent things. Still, what commonly happens to men has befallen them too, in some instances. For these so-called pious children of theirs, with all their sharpness of wit and judgment and spirit, worship only the faults and errors of the fathers. The good things that these fathers have written they either do not notice, or misrepresent or pervert. You might say that their only care is to gather dung amid gold. Then, with a frightful to-do, they overwhelm us as despisers and adversaries of the fathers! But we do not despise them; in fact, if it were to our present purpose, I could with no trouble at all prove that the greater part of what we are saying today meets their approval... 

He who does not observe this distinction will have nothing certain in religion, inasmuch as these holy men were ignorant of many things, often disagreed among themselves, and sometimes even contradicted themselves. It is not without cause, they say that Solomon bids us not to transgress the limits set by our fathers (Prov. 22:28). But the same rule does not apply to boundaries of fields, and to obedience of faith, which must be so disposed that “it forgets its people and its father’s house” (Ps. 45:10). But if they love to allegorize so much, why do they not accept the apostles (rather than anyone else) as the “fathers” who have set the landmarks that it is unlawful to remove (Prov. 22:28)? Thus has Jerome interpreted this verse, and they have written his words in to their canons. But if our opponents want to preserve the limits set by the fathers according to their understanding of them, why do they themselves transgress them so willfully as often as it suits them?” -John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

He goes on to list several occasions where the fathers explicitly disagree with official Catholic Dogma. 

I’ll list some of those quotations from the fathers here and elaborate on how they contradict the Roman Catholic Church.

“Sozomen tells a remarkable story of Spyridion, bishop of Trimythus, in Cyprus, ‘That a stranger once happening to call upon him, in his travels in Lent, he having nothing in his house but a piece of pork, ordered that to be dressed and set before him: but the stranger refusing to eat flesh, saying, ‘He was a Christian,’ Spyridion replied,  ‘For that very reason thou oughtest not to refuse it; for the word of God has pronounced all things clean to them that are clean.’” -Origines Ecclesiasticæ: Or, The Antiquities of the Christian Church

Here Spyridion says that it is unchristian to mandate fasting from meat during Lent as Christ has made all foods clean.

“For our Lord Jesus Christ, dwelling in your inner part, and inspiring into you a solicitude of fatherly and brotherly charity, whether our sons and brothers the monks, who neglect to obey blessed Paul the Apostle, when he says, “If any will not work, neither let him eat,” are to have that license permitted unto them; He, assuming unto His work your will and tongue, has commanded me out of you, that I should hereof write somewhat unto you. May He therefore Himself be present with me also, that I may obey in such sort that from His gift, in the very usefulness of fruitful labor, I may understand that I am indeed obeying Him.” -Augustine, On the Work of Monks

Here Augustine calls into question the entire monastic system and shows that it is contrary to Scripture.

“When I accompanied you to the holy place called Bethel, there to join you in celebrating the Collect, after the use of the Church, I came to a villa called Anablatha and, as I was passing, saw a lamp burning there. Asking what place it was, and learning it to be a church, I went in to pray, and found there a curtain hanging on the doors of the said church, dyed and embroidered. It bore an image either of Christ or of one of the saints; I do not rightly remember whose the image was. Seeing this, and being loth that an image of a man should be hung up in Christ's church contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures, I tore it asunder and advised the custodians of the place to use it as a winding sheet for some poor person.” -Epistle of Epiphanius to John of Jerusalem

Here Epiphanius shows that the use of images in Worship is not to be permitted. This position was reinforced by the 36th canon of the Council of Elvira which said “That there ought not to be images in a church, that what is worshipped and adored should not be depicted on the walls.”

"The sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, which we receive, is a divine thing, because by it we are made partakers of the divine-nature. Yet the substance or nature of the bread and wine does not cease. And assuredly the image and the similitude of the body and blood of Christ are celebrated in the performance of the mysteries.” - Galasius I, On the Dual Natures of Christ.

In this quote Galatius I rejects transubstantiation and points out that the elements represent a similitude of the body and blood. This is not to be confused with Zwinglian memorialism nor Lutheran Consubstantiation. 

“In obscure matters where the Scriptures do not give guidance, rash judgment is to be avoided.” -Augustine, The Guilt and Remission of Sin; and Infant Baptism.

Augustine says that Scripture is to be the norming norm for all knowledge and that anywhere the Scriptures are silent we are to proceed with caution. 

“Zealous of reforming the life of those who were engaged about the churches, the Synod enacted laws which were called canons. While they were deliberating about this, some thought that a law ought to be passed enacting that bishops and presbyters, deacons and subdeacons, should hold no intercourse with the wife they had espoused before they entered the priesthood; but Paphnutius, the confessor, stood up and testified against this proposition; he said that marriage was honorable and chaste, and that cohabitation with their own wives was chastity, and advised the Synod not to frame such a law, for it would be difficult to bear.” -Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History.

Here is a passage which describes Paphnutius arguing against celibacy of the pastorate at the council of Nicea. Paphnutius won and pastoral celibacy was not included in the Canons of the Council of Nicea.

Some of these are a bit dated and obscure, so I’ll include a couple quotes from people that you mentioned...

“And we, too, being called by His will to Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.” -Clement of Rome, The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians

Clement of Rome is affirming the justification by faith in no uncertain terms here.

“The Holy and inspired Scriptures are sufficient of themselves for the preaching of the Truth.” - Athanasius, Contra Gentiles

Athanasius is saying that the Scriptures alone are sufficient, that there is no need to appeal to the Fathers or councils or popes or anything else... just the Word of God. 

Now, you quote Cardinal Newman to say to be deep in Church history is to cease to be protestant... but I’m not even going to get into the history of Roman Catholic Church because this post is already way too long... and that would make it probably 3 times longer. I’ll just bring up this one anecdote from 1378 in which there were 3 popes simultaneously and they had to call a council to resolve the issue, forever dissolving any appeal to papal succession/authority.

[romancandlemagazine]

An Interview with John Lurie

Whilst most humanoids struggle to master even one useful skill in life, John Lurie is one of those adept rapscallions who can seemingly turn their hand to pretty much anything — from acting to angling.

This knack has led to a fairly stacked C.V. which involves such notable achievements as forming a rule-flouting jazz band called The Lounge Lizards, appearing in films like Down by Law, Paris, Texas and Wild at Heart and showing his paintings in exhibitions all over the planet.

And if all that wasn’t enough, he’s also hosted his own fishing show, and, with the help of Dennis Hopper, once came particularly close to snagging the elusive giant squid.

Here’s what he had to say about fishing, New York in the '70s and the importance of humour in the world...

First question… your television programme Fishing with John is mint. How did that come about?

I was threatening to do it for a long time, but wasn’t really serious. I would go fishing with Willem and we would video tape it. I flew out one New Year’s Eve to play with Tom Waits and the next day we went and fished with Stephen Torton video taping it.

This woman, Debra Brown, saw the tapes, home movies actually, and brought them to a Japanese company that was looking to get involved in things in New York.

She came back to me and said they wanted to make a pilot. I believe my response was, "Are you kidding?"

When you watch a film or television program, you only see the end result. What was it like filming that thing? Were there any mad struggles?  

If you see something good, you can just assume there were mad struggles. If you see something bad, you can assume that people were too lazy to take on the mad struggles.

If I am flicking through the channels looking for a movie, I can tell you in five seconds if a movie is going to be any good by the sound of the door closing or the light or the music or whatever.

Why do you think people love fishing so much?  

First off, so we can go to these beautiful places and pretend to be doing something. We wouldn’t go if there were nothing to do. And there is that visceral thing. A big fish on the line is like that exhilarating sports thing, like hitting a baseball perfectly or shooting a basket and the net just goes swish.

And then there is that thing of the world of mystery, right next to the world we are living in. What is in there? We are only going to be aware of what is there with a hook and a nylon string.

So of course we have to drag this amazing creature out of the water and kill it because human beings are pretty much ridiculous. The last bit is not why we love fishing, it’s just an observation.

I’d say it’s a pretty sharp observation. Did you ever face anger from the fishing community due to the lack of more conventional fishing?

Yes.

Why isn’t more television like Fishing with John? I hear we’re supposedly in the age of ‘peak TV’ or whatever, but why is there so much boring stuff out there?

The great thing about this, and a big shout out to Kenji Okabe from Telecom Japan, was they left me alone. I am fairly certain that the reason Breaking Bad was so great was because they left Vince Gilligan alone.

With most projects there are all these people meddling with what you do, to ruin it. The Gatekeepers. It is almost like there is a conspiracy to maintain mediocrity.

Going back a bit now, am I right in saying you’re from Minneapolis originally. What were you into as a child?

At first, dinosaurs and archeology. Then reptiles, particularly snakes after we moved to New Orleans. I was going to open my own snake farm. Then I was pretty sure one day, I would play center field for the Yankees.

An attainable dream. You moved to New York in the late 70s, and not long after, you started The Lounge Lizards. It seems like New York at that time is glamourized a bit now, but what was it like for you? What food did you eat? Where did you go at night? What streets were good to walk down? What did it smell like?

I was trying to remember the food I ate back then and couldn’t remember. I was pretty broke most of the time. They used to serve hors d’oevres at gallery openings and cheese became a large part of my regular diet.

Almost every night, or maybe not even “almost” — more like every night — we went to the Mudd Club. More than what streets were “good” to walk down, I can tell you which streets were bad to go down. I lived on East Third St across from the Men’s Shelter, so my block smelled of rotting garbage and urine.

What are some bits that people don’t talk about from that time? What sucked about back then?

It went fairly quickly from people having more relentless fun than any period in human history to a fairly grim time, a year or two later. There was the beginning of AIDs. I had many friends who were dying or horrifyingly sick. People were getting strung out. There were many deaths. Car accidents. People fell out of windows.

Also, with the artistic promise that was there, the output is disappointing. I suppose the wildness led to a lack of discipline and the work wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been.

I might be wrong, but it seems like at that time people just did what they felt like doing… people made films, music or anything else, with no regard for budget. I suppose for example, you made a film called Men in Orbit in your apartment for $500. Where did this freedom come from?

The freedom came from a ferocious demand to have that freedom at any cost. But it is odd or sad, because the more talented of those people seem to have gone unknown and the people who are now household names are, mostly, the ones who played the game by the rules from the beginning.

Do you think people nowadays get too hung up on money? Or perhaps too hung up on success?

I think people nowadays for the most part are quite lost and afraid. So they do whatever they think they must do to have a successful career, even if it means that they are making shit — and it usually does mean they are making shit.

The Lounge Lizard’s album, Voice of Chunk is an amazing record. What sort of stuff were you listening to when you made that? And who is Bob the Bob?  

The listening came from earlier in my life. Evan and I would devour everything. From Stravinsky to Monk to Little Walter to Coltrane to Tibetan music to Ellington to Dolphy to Pigmy music (you get the idea).

Later, when working on my own stuff, I stopped listening to pretty much everything. Though when I was in Morocco doing Last Temptation, I played a lot with Gnawa musicians that shifted me a bit. And around that time Evan discovered Piazzolla.

Bob the Bob is Kazu from Blonde Redhead. That is her mouth on the cover of the record. I still call her Bob.

You’re a prolific painter. Are there certain things that you notice recurring in your paintings?

I live on a small Caribbean island. There are flowers everywhere. I don’t like to think that they influence what I paint but they do. Fucking flowers.

A lot of people paint when they’re young, then stop. Why do you think that is? How come you didn’t stop?

The best paintings I have seen in the last 30 years or so are the ones taped to refrigerators. I don’t know why people stop painting or when they don't stop, why the painting gets so stiff.

I am sure my mother, who painted herself and taught art in Liverpool where the Beatles went, but not at the same time, had something to do with me keeping a freedom in my work. To not be afraid of that childlike dream thing.

Though it has been suggested that it may be time for me to get in touch with my “inner adult.”

How do you know when a painting is finished?

I ask Nesrin. If she says it is finished, I know it isn’t.

You seem like a pretty funny guy. Do you think humour is sometimes underrated? Do people take stuff too seriously sometime?

I think humor is immensely important. I think humor can shift society’s consciousness in a better way than almost anything else. So from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor and many more - these people shifted things for the better.

Do you know who was president when Mark Twain was at his peak? Benjamin Harrison. Who the fuck was Benjamin Harrison?

What are your thoughts on the internet? It seems like it’s a big thing these days.

I get so disappointed with people because I feel like social media could be an enormously positive thing for the world. And I certainly don’t mean to exclude humor, just I have heard enough fart jokes for one lifetime…

Something that bothers me quite a bit, is a star athlete gets hurt and then the response on places like twitter is close to joy. What kind of bitterness about your own life would make you behave like that?

You’ve just recently released a new Marvin Pontiac album after 17 years. This one is called The Asylum Tapes, and was reportedly made on a four track recorder in a mental institution. Back story aside, what made you want to make an album again?  

I have Advanced Lyme, so I was unable to play anything for a long time. Actually because of what was happening to me neurologically, I couldn’t even hear music for the first few years — it was more like fingernails on a blackboard.

As I slowly got better, I was able to play guitar and harmonica again, though playing saxophone would seem to be done for me in this life.

But I am very proud of this album and hope people get a chance to hear it. I made it to cheer people up.

Are people still confused about who Marvin Pontiac is?

I suppose so. He is a character I created to make this music. I suppose that is bad marketing, but fuck it.

Would the album be different if it was a John Lurie album? Do you feel like you can get away with more stuff as Marvin Pontiac? Or maybe what I mean is, is it easier to say some things as Marvin Pontiac?

Yes, absolutely. Marvin gives me a certain freedom. I doubt I would put out a record where I sing about a bear saying, “Smell my sandwich.”  But I’m happy that I get a chance to do that.

The lyrics are pretty straight up and direct. Do you sit and stew on songs and ideas for long, or do you just get it out?

Often they just come straight up. Like 'My Bear To Cross' I pretty much just came up with it live in the studio. Some took quite a while. And there are a couple where I never found the right lyrics to finish off a song and put them aside.

Okay, last question… do you think a lot of stuff is too over-thought and over-prepared? Does thinking sometimes get in the way?

Let me think about that.