Go Sit In The Corner

Food

2010-07-08T18:22:00.001-05:00

The metaphor is usually one of speed: fast food has ruined our culture, slow food will save it (and is the rallying manifesto for the movement of the same name, based in Bra, in northern Italy.) You see the metaphor’s appeal. But it obscures a fundamental problem, which has little to do with speed and everything to do with size. Fast food did not ruin our culture. The problem was already in place, systemic in fact, and began the moment food was treated like an inanimate object – like any other commodity – that could be manufactured in increasing numbers to satisfy a market. In effect, the two essential players in the food chain (those who make the food and those who buy it) swapped roles. One moment the producer (the guy who knew his cows or the woman who prepared culatello only in January of the old young man who picks his olives in September) determined what was available and how it was made. The next moment it was the consumer. The Maestro blames the supermarkets, but the supermarkets are just a symptom. (Or, to invoke a familiar piece of retail philosophy: the world changed when the food business agreed that the customer was right, when, as we all know, the customer is actually – well, not always right.) What happened in the food business has occurred in every aspect of modern life, and the change has produced many benefits. I like island holidays and flat-screen televisions and have no argument with global market economics, except in this respect – in what it has done to food.

When I started, I hadn’t wanted a restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. I didn’t want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy taught my why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer’s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals – like chefs. But I don’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human.

From Heat (An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany) by Bill Buford.

Seafood...for Lent!

2010-03-15T17:26:00.004-05:00

I was exhausted, yet lured to a Hornets basketball game by my sister with the promise of a shrimp basket: about 15 small lightly fried shrimp served over a generous handful of warm, salty French fries. (We lost to the Denver Nuggets in the last four minutes, ugh.) I hadn’t prepared anything for dinner, so I knew AV would be left to his own devices with some pasta and canned tuna. Turns out, he went over to the nearby market and picked up some fried catfish, bypassing the huge containers of boiled shrimp and crawfish for sale that a lot of people pick up on their way home from work. That is, if they don’t go out to eat at one of the hundreds of seafood restaurants around.

And thus, we perform our Lenten sacrifice of abstaining from meat.

I grew up in New Orleans, and as long as I can remember, Fridays during Lent were always days that we’d go out for dinner to a nearby seafood restaurant and have po-boys. I think it’s safe to say many New Orleanians eat better on Fridays during Lent than they do any other time of the year. Sure, great seafood is available year-round here, but there’s just something about the exhortation to avoid meat on Fridays that inspires even the most devout to interpret it as a command to chow down on a $20 seafood platter, including soft-shell crab.

Deanie’s Restaurant in Bucktown, not far from where we live, is usually not wait-for-a-table crowded on a Friday night until about 6:30. But Fridays in Lent roll around, and it’s jam-packed at 5:30. Usually, you can have a pleasant lunch at New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company on Fridays. Not during Lent. The whole parking lot is completely packed, with people parallel parking on the side streets. Obviously, people have been watching their commercials, and know that this restaurant claims to be “Your Seafood Authority…For Lent!”

Then there are the church Friday Fish Frys. Our church has added a drive through service, so that you never have to leave your car to get that fried shrimp or catfish platter. My parents’ church is offering an even greater spread: an assortment of menu choices. According to my sister, you can choose from: boiled shrimp Caesar salad, grilled shrimp Caesar salad, shrimp basket, fish basket, and the seafood platter. You also have a choice of sides: macaroni and cheese, potato salad, cole slaw, green beans, sweet potato. All the choices come with hush puppies. And that’s just if your go through their “drive-through.” If you get out of your car and walk into the Church hall, you also get a drink and your choice of dessert for free. As my mom says, “there’s a lot of competition around here between the churches for Friday fish frys!” I had a suggestion: “First 50 people to Stations of the Cross get $1 off their seafood platter!” I think lots of people would like that promotion.

There’s no lecture here. I like that people go a bit seafood-insane on Fridays during Lent in N.O. (Cue a line: “N.O. will look for any excuse to party, even the Lord’s 40 days of fasting in the desert.”) I have always remembered Jesus’ sacrifice while I’m chewing on a shrimp tail on a Lenten Friday evening. It’s a tradition, and a reminder of our humanity. We could make ourselves look glum like the Pharisees, or we could enjoy a nicely seasoned, lightly breaded soft-shell crab. I’ll choose the latter every time.

Who is Andy Warhol?

2009-10-01T17:05:00.004-05:00

From the review What is an Andy Warhol in the NY Review of Books.

...Warhol realized that you don't need to make art for an audience brought up on film and television in the way Kenneth Clark defined art. [Marilyn Monroe] and [Warhol] grasped that in the modern world, presentation counts for more than substance. The less you do, the greater may be the impact....

A silk-screened image is flat, and without depth or volume. This perfectly suited Warhol because in painting Marilyn Monroe he wasn't painting a woman of flesh, blood, and psychological complexity but a publicity photograph of a commodity created in a Hollywood studio. As Colin Clark's anecdote suggests, you can't look at Warhol's Marilyn in the same way that you look at a painting by Rembrandt or Titian because Warhol isn't interested in any of the things those artists were—the representation of material reality, the exploration of character, or the creation of pictorial illusion.

Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."

[In the Red Self Portraits (1965)] Warhol presents himself as insolent and impassive, in the take-it-or-leave-it stance of the hustler or gangster. Out of register, like a color TV on the blink, the person in the portrait is a new kind of human being, one trapped in some fathomless, unreal televisual space, without physical mass or emotional depth. The dead, unseeing eyes in the self-portrait suggest that he was perfectly serious when he said, "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

How dangerous is pot?

2009-09-29T11:06:00.006-05:00

Much to the dismay of my "everyone has done drugs!" former boss, I have never done illegal drugs. I have never even smoked pot, unless you count secondhand smoke. So I don't have a "pot is so great!" take on marijuana, other than to say that there is no scientific evidence to support the notion that it is a gateway drug (biologically).

The scientific literature on the dangers of marijuana is a bit thin. The first report on possible harmful effects of cannabis use is the oft-cited Swedish Army study, where conscripts who reported a heavy use of cannabis in adolescence were six times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia in adulthood than non-users (1). There have been a few other studies suggesting that adolescent cannabis use is a risk factor for psychosis (e.g. 2). The most damning evidence is a longitudinal study by Dutch researchers that found a dose-response relationship between reported cannabis use and psychotic symptoms over a three-year period (3). And now a group has asked that cannabis use be included as a risk factor for psychotic illness in the Global Burden of Disease. (The article is in PLoS, so available for free. Isn't PLoS the greatest thing ever?)

From the article:

Some commentators may well argue that it is premature to conclude that the relationships between cannabis use and psychosis are causal, which raises the question of what the standard of proof should be causal inference. Some may argue for “proof beyond reasonable doubt,” the standard implicitly used in the last iteration of the GBD. It is rare, however, to meet this standard of proof for noncommunicable diseases other than smoking-related diseases. What has changed since the last iteration of the GBD? The broad approach to all risk factors has been to set the standard of proof at “more likely than not,” rather than “beyond reasonable doubt.” If the latter was the standard of proof, then no adverse health consequences of cannabis would be considered apart from dependence.

If we had treatments that resulted in complete, immediate, and sustained remission for all individuals who develop psychosis, then the role of cannabis as an aetiological agent may attract less attention. But schizophrenia remains a poorly understood group of disorders. Even our best treatments are suboptimal. In the absence of better treatments, the most effective way to reduce the disability associated with schizophrenia is to prevent its occurrence when we can. Thus, when considering potential risk factors for schizophrenia, we argue that candidates that offer the opportunity for public health interventions should be accorded more attention (e.g., education about the potential risks of cannabis use). Even exposures that may account for a small attributable fraction of those with the disorder warrant scrutiny.

As the quoted section above alludes to, there is no firm evidence that cannabis use causes psychosis. Could adolescents who are at risk for schizophrenia be self-medicating through use of marijuana? I do not think any of the studies have examined whether those heavy users who showed some type of psychosis later in life also had family histories of psychoses. Are those who experience psychotic symptoms self-medicating with marijuana (use of the drug is more common with those who report psychoses), similar to the abuse of nicotine among schizophrenics? Or is the marijuana use really causing psychosis or compounding its effects in a small population?

Either way, consider yourself forewarned the next time someone says marijuana use is "safe" and passes you a joint. And don't do drugs.

1. Andreasson S, Allebeck P, Engström A, et al. Cannabis and schizophrenia: a longitudinal study of Swedish conscripts. Lancet 1987;11:1483-5.

2. Arseneault L, Cannon M, Poulton R, et al. Cannabis use in adolescence and risk for adult psychosis: longitudinal prospective study. BMJ 2002;325:1212-3.

3. van Os J, Bak M, Hanssen M, et al. (2002) Cannabis use and psychosis: a longitudinal population-based study. Am J Epidemiol 156:319–27

Look what monarch butterflies do with their antennae

2009-09-29T10:16:00.005-05:00

I have a little personal history with monarch butterflies: my grandmother used to catch them with my sister and me with a huge butterfly net, then kill them with Raid and put them in flower arrangements. So I rather like the little creatures, and am disappointed that their Mexican fir grove wintering grounds are being destroyed by stupid Mexican workers who only care about money, though what else can you expect with those people.

Anyway, scientists have wondered for years how monarch butterflies are able to find their way back to those forests. Even if you take a migrating monarch and move it to a completely different part of the country, they will still figure out the correct direction to travel. Now we have a big piece of the puzzle.

In a new article in Science, researchers have found that the monarchs contain some type of circadian "clock" in their antennae (independent of their brain) that they use to track the sun's movement, and then determine the correct direction based off of that information.

From a summary article here:

The researchers next covered the antennae in black paint, effectively blocking light sensing by the antennal clocks. Those butterflies homed in on an incorrectly fixed direction: the insect's brain could sense light but couldn't adjust the timing of the sun's movement across the sky in order to steer towards the proper destination. However, when the team used clear paint—which did not alter antennal light input—the butterflies accurately established the southerly flight orientation, indicating that the antenna's reading of light is key to navigation.

Cool, huh? I wish I had antennae. And wings.

Duo Concertant

2009-09-28T12:32:00.004-05:00

(Reviewing a performance with original cast, Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins) Watching them listen is a theatrical experience in itself. Their faces share a multitude of unknown thoughts, but the intensity and sweet concentration with which they listen suggest that the notes are running through their bodies. Finally, they are moved to dance. At first they stick closely to the music’s beat, almost ‘conducting’ it with arms and legs; torsos are still. Becoming more free, the dance turns into a melting duet, each phrase winding down on slightly bent knees, as in a whisper. They dance with seeming spontaneity. Even when Balanchine arranges an unusual means of partnering – as when he scoops her from the floor holding only the underside of her thigh – the movement spins off them with utter simplicity and naturalness. In other sections, they occasionally stop dancing to listen. At those times, Martins firmly takes hold of her hand or slips his arm around her waist. She is shy, but the music pleases her and so does he. She does not move away. They listen in repose, arm in arm.

In the last part dancers and musicians go their separate ways. The stage darkens. A spotlight falls on the pianist and violinist. Another one lights a small area in which the dancers will play out their final drama. Mazzo paces her arm in the light, so that it seems to exist independently of her body. Martins hastens to the arm and links his with it. He then embraces her, sinks to his knees, and feels her face with his hands. She steps out of the light; then he does. She comes back and again extends her arm into the light. He rushes back, kisses the back of her hand with hushed passion, and sinks to the floor like a supplicant before a goddess. The jump from youthful hand-clasping to ceremonial hand-kissing is brazen for its staginess and unexpectedness. But out of that staginess come certain truths; in fact, the ending is an exquisite confession of them. It intimates that music transports Balanchine into a fantasy experience. It declares that to Balanchine, the female dancer is an image of love, a Muse-ballerina who inspires but is unreachable. The worshiper is the male, whose fate it to be indelibly inspired, possessed but not possessing. It is the story of Balanchine’s art. 10 July 1972, Nancy Goldner, The Nation

Chicago, Oct 19th, 2006 Matinee, NYCB

This performance was very confusing. Yvonne Borree was fine for the most part, very clear in her gestures and dancing, but with the sort of clarity that indicates that the performance has been memorized to every detail and is getting replayed. In other words, not much spontaneity in interpretation or musical response. Then again, I am unsure about how she should have responded to Nikolai Hubbe. A tall handsome Dane, for me Hubbe was totally off in this role. Not only was it unclear what his interpretation of the role was (he goes from putting her arm around her as if he's prom king and she's his high school sweetheart, complete with head nod and smile, to overly aggressive jock, to ardent, tortured, and finally, despairing lover), but his technique was off. In spins, it seemed that he was leaning far forward with his upper body and making a strange twisting motion with his shoulders, with the rest of his body following along. It was clumsy-looking and completely inelegant.

Oct 20th, Evening

On second viewing, I realized that Hubbe seemed to be leading with his upper torso in turns, creating a twisting motion that accounted for the "bull in a china shop" affect. Borree's positions were lovely and clear, but I missed the sense of a "welling-up of movement." This lack of dancing, combined with Hubbe's strange approach, made the ending startlingly strange, as one never had the sense of the relationship between the two dancers, and the relationship to the piano and violin was also dulled. Someone also needs to tell Hubbe not to lean over the piano after his variation - it makes him look extremely tired.

I reviewed the State Ballet of Georgia's performance of Duo Concertant in February 2008 here.

(First picture is Yvonne Borree and Peter Boal; second is Borree and Jared Angle)

Balanchine and a few of His Women

2009-09-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

From Jewels (1967), the ballerinas for the three sections: Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds. Clockwise from Balanchine are Patricia McBride, Violette Verdy, Mimi Paul, and Suzanne Farrell. The second ballerina in Rubies, originally danced by Patricia Neary, is not pictured here. Farrell is the only ballerina in Diamonds; read more here.

Bergman's "The Virgin Spring"

2009-09-25T15:27:00.001-05:00

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) is a graphic telling of a 14th-century Swedish ballad. As do many Bergman films, this one revolves around the issue of faith. This film has long periods of silence and long-held shots. To say that the acting is powerful would be an understatement. Töre is played by Max von Sydow, who often appears to stand-in for Bergman himself.

(Warning: this post gives every spoiler away. Do not read it if you want to be 'surprised' by the plot of the movie. I do not find the story as interesting as Bergman's telling of it, so I give away the whole story here.)

The story is set in medieval Sweden. We are first introduced to Ingeri, a dark-haired, grimy, heavily pregnant young woman. Coming forward from deep in the shadows, she reaches toward the sunlight coming through a shaft in the roof and intones, “Come, Odin! Come!” It is clear that Ingeri is consumed by hatred and a desire for revenge, although we do not yet know why. We next meet landowners Töre and Märeta praying their morning prayers before a crucifix. There is a little talk about the laziness of their innocent teenage daughter, Karin, and it is implied that they have had, and lost, other children, leaving blond overindulged Karin as the light of their lives. (In Sven Nyqvist’s masterful cinematography, she does indeed seem to be a point of illumination.) She is sent to bring candles for the Virgin to the local Church, with foster sister Ingeri as a companion. Karin chides her mother Märeta for her over-concern, and gets her way by wearing some of her best finery. Karin clearly has her father Töre wrapped around her finger, managing to elicit smiles from the usually stern and duty bound man.

Karin and Ingeri set off, and a few encounters and a brief conversation finally reveal the source of Ingeri’s anger: Karin is a beloved blond maiden who talked and danced the previous night with the man who impregnated (and abandoned) Ingeri. When Ingeri taunts Karin, “You won’t be able to say no when a man wants you…What would you do if a man decided to take you in the fields?” Karin lifts her chin high and says, “That will not happen. I would rather be killed.” Spying a cawing raven, looking over the darkness of the approaching forest, and noticing the pagan talismans of the man who helps Karin across the river, Ingeri does not continue on their journey, eventually running away into the forest separately.

Now alone, Karin meets two herdsmen and a young boy. As she is late to the Church and has already missed matins, she offers to share her food with them, and the four enjoy a repast in a clearing. When she recognizes their sheep as stolen, Karin begins to flee, only to be captured and brutally raped by both men as both the boy and Ingeri - from a distance with rock in hand - watch. (Warning: this is one of the most graphic portrayals of rape in film – the story inspired Wes Craven’s horror movie The Last House on the Left.) Karin gets up, stumbling, only to be hit on the head by a staff and killed by one of the men. Quickly they undress her, take her clothes, rummage through the rest of her stuff, throwing the candles for the Virgin upon the ground, and run off, telling the young boy to stay there. Looking at her lifeless, mostly naked body, he throws some dirt on her as Ingeri continues to watch.

Eventually, the three make their way to a house: Töre stands in the door like a totem, looking for his daughter as the sun is falling. Not knowing who they are, he feeds his guests, offers them a place to spend the night, and suggests that he may have work for them on his farm. Later that night, Märeta is awoken by the boy’s screams and goes to check on them. One of the men offers her Karin’s bloodstained finery – he hopes to sell it to her. She presents it to her husband. He walks outside where he meets Ingeri, who tells him all about his guests’ actions, and confesses that, motivated by jealousy, she did nothing while Karin was raped and killed. He tells her to prepare a hot bath, and in one of the most striking visual scenes of the movie, wrestles against a lone, young birch tree on a hill, trying to bring it down. He beats himself with its branches, dons a leather cloak and pants, and with the butcher’s knife, stabs the two men to death. His wife tries to protect the boy, but he picks the boy up and flings him against the wall, killing him too.

Led by Ingeri, Töre and Märeta and their farmworkers find Karin’s body. Töre turns away, falls to his knees, opens his hands and says, “You saw it. God, You saw it. The innocent child’s death and my revenge. You allowed it. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you. Yet now I beg your forgiveness. I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live.” His head and hands fall, and recognizing his own need for repentance for his blood-stained acts, he says, “I will build a Church for You here.” He and his wife go to move their daughter’s body, and from where her head was suddenly flows a spring of water. Ingeri gathers this water in her hands and pours it over her face, a symbolic baptism.

Early in the film, one of the servants chides baby chicks for nearly being trampled underfoot, telling them, “God could trample them to death. So you poor thing, live your wretched life the way God allows all of us to live.” Indeed, all life belonging to God is one of the central tenets of this film. How could God allow a middle-aged couple to be robbed of their only remaining biological child? How could God allow this brutality to be visited upon a woman, much less a maiden bringing candles for His own Mother? How can these human beings – the herdsmen and Töre – engage in such evil acts, and how could others – the boy and Ingeri – just crouch and watch? How does one keep faith in the face of such acts? Bergman’s answer, through Töre, is simple yet complex: “I know no other way to live.” The cynic can say, "well, he just needs to find atheism" (and Bergman did find agnosticism). But the son of a Lutheran pastor would have well known Psalm 139:

O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.

You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

I slack off when I've only just begun

2009-09-25T14:48:00.000-05:00

There has been a nearly two week lapse in my guitar playing; and I have not provided regular updates on my conquest of the guitar.

Two Saturdays ago, I got out the guitar, tuned it, and selected “Alfred’s Teach Yourself to Play Guitar” by Marty and Ron Manus to, well, teach myself to play guitar. (My other option was “The Art of Spanish Guitar” by Romero, which I quickly decided was a bit too advanced for my present abilities.)

First thing I noticed: I cannot find a comfortable way to place my thumb on the neck of the guitar while curling my fingers at the same time. This finding made me quite happy. Yes, I am physically incapable of playing the guitar! All those who can successfully play this instrument are actually long-fingered freaks!

But I decided to continue to try to learn anyway. Which led to revelation number two: the fingers of my left hand are supposed to be close to the frets! A-ha! See, I had been playing (I use that term loosely) all this time with my fingers right in the middle of the frets, and wondering why I could not get a decent sound. The notes sound so much better when I attempt to actually play correctly.

Third thing I noticed: I do not need to learn how to read music. This book attempts to both teach one (“yourself”) how to learn to play the guitar, and how to read music in order to play the guitar. I do not need to learn how to play a note and then learn to wait three counts. This caused me to skip some sections of the book, which brought about the….

Fourth thing I noticed: gosh, I would actually have to practice in order to play the guitar well. Learning the notes on the first three strings was easy enough – I can remember that. But to play them in tempo and with any sort of phrasing that would resemble an actual song – well, I’d actually have to play the same notes over and over again. This is why I quit piano lessons in my junior year of high school – I got tired of practicing and just wanted to be able to play pieces all the way through and then move on to the next piece. My piano teacher, however, wanted me to play the pieces correctly and surprise, surprise, a compromise could not be reached between us. (She did try to give me “fun” jazz pieces to learn while wanting me to spend a whole six months perfecting a Chopin nocturne. No way.) I never in my life actually practiced the clarinet either. I’d just practice in band class and private lessons and keep that hideous-sounding instrument in its case in our foyer the rest of the time, only opening it to cut and shave reeds, which I did strangely enjoy doing. (And yet I was first chair usually, made all-district honor bands, and won medals for “superior” clarinet performance. Ha!) Now I wonder why my parents continued to pay for me to have all these music lessons….But back to the subject at hand. I can play the melody of “Ode to Joy” and the Largo from the “New World Symphony” easily enough, as long as I don’t follow a tempo, don’t phrase, and don’t care what the notes actually sound like. But since I have set my sights on “On Eagle’s Wings,” I must set aside time not only to learn, but to practice.

Unfortunately, an unexpected medical procedure combined with a careless nurse on Monday has rendered my left hand rather mitt-like and made me incapable of curling my fingers on strings to pluck sweet sounds from those heavenly guitar strings. (I guess I could be mastering all the open chords, but I am trying to be methodical.) I have learned notes on the E (first string), B, and G string, so I did make slight progress a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully, I will get a chance to learn and just maybe practice this weekend, and be able to provide an exciting update next week.

About My Little Girl, Catherine Marie

2009-09-17T14:05:00.000-05:00

“So I’ve got a date for you – September 4.” That was the first thing the doctor’s assistant said when she saw me on August 28. My heart sank. I was hoping to have a natural childbirth, or at least give it a try. But I was now past my due date of August 25, and my doctor was going to induce labor in one week. I hadn’t progressed much in the last month – my little Catherine was refusing to “drop;” in other words, move further into my pelvis, as I had explained to family and friends, and my cervix hadn’t dilated beyond 1.5 cm in almost three weeks (and how odd to give people updates on your anatomy). After a smooth pregnancy, my body seemed hesitant to do the whole labor thing. My doctor told me, “well, if nothing happens in a week, be at the hospital at 5:30 am, and September 4th will be her birthday!” I told her that my original due date according to my cycle was August 31, so maybe my baby would decide to come then. My doctor jokingly said, “well, they do sometimes hear that first date and commit to that one.” I had my own romantic notions that my first child would be born two years to the date that her father and I became engaged – September 1st. But I was very disappointed to think that I might have to be induced, increasing the likelihood of having a caesarean section. I called and told A.V. the news, then my sister, then my mom. I started off with, “I have an induction date, but the baby and I are perfectly fine.” Indeed, Catherine had been kicking most of the morning, and had a strong heartbeat of 154 bpm. My weight and blood pressure were fine; again, I just wasn’t doing the whole labor thing. My mom said that she would pray that I’d go into labor over the weekend. I said thanks, but was starting to consider that unlikely.

The next day, Saturday August 29th, I woke up having a few mild contractions every 20 minutes. When they weren’t stopping after an hour or so, I suggested to A.V. that we go and walk around the mall, having read and heard over and over again that being active can determine whether you are in false labor, or help your labor progress. We went to Lakeside Mall, ate beignets, and visited every soap shop. I was looking for something primrose scented, which my doctor had heard stimulated labor. Of course, I couldn’t resist going into Pottery Barn Kids. I saw a wand I really wanted to get Catherine that I thought would be adorable with her Halloween outfit – I had decided months ago to dress her as a butterfly for her first Halloween. I decided to wait to purchase it, but looked at the dollhouses and thought about telling my parents to get my old dollhouse out of the attic for her to play with when she was older. I did buy some antibacterial lotion and lectured A.V. over and over again that he must use it, especially when coming home from the gym, because Catherine’s immune system wouldn’t be fully developed in her first few months, and there was swine flu going around….

The contractions didn’t get stronger, but they didn’t go away either. We went grocery shopping around 6 pm, had some leftover quiche, and then got ready for bed. Around 11 pm, I was so uncomfortable with contractions every 10 minutes that I decided to go lie down on the sofa and watch some t.v. Over the next several hours, I watched the clock on the t.v. and timed my contractions – every 10 minutes, now about every 7, now about every 6 minutes. I counted out to myself – lasts 45 seconds, peaks in intensity at 20 seconds. I squeezed the medal I had started wearing on her due date – St. Gerard Majella on one side, Our Lady of Perpetual Help on the other. I had prayed to St. Gerard every night since I was about 3 months along that I would have a healthy baby who would be baptized. A.V. had prayed to the Virgin everyday, and lit two candles for her every week at Mass, also that we would have a healthy baby to take home. I liked that the ribbon the medal was on was long enough that it hung right over my very pregnant belly. That made it all the more convenient to squeeze during my contractions. Around 3 am, I got a bit concerned that I hadn’t felt Catherine move in awhile (I knew all about kick counting and ways to get the baby to move). I got up – the contractions were far worse when I moved around – and drank some orange juice. About 5 minutes later, there was her familiar fist pummeling. I lay down again and tried to sleep in the 5 minutes between contractions.

At 6 am, when A.V. got up, I told him that I thought we should go to the hospital. I packed up the last of my toiletries, he threw some of his supplies in my hospital bag (which had been packed for 3 weeks), and I called my doctor to describe my symptoms and ask if she thought this was labor. She did, and told me to go ahead to the hospital. Honestly, I was in enough pain at that point that I would have gone to the hospital anyway. At 7 am, I remember walking down the steps of the house and looking back at the front door, thinking, the next time I’ll be here, Catherine will be coming home with us. OH MY GOD, this is really it! I had about three contractions on the way to the hospital, but didn’t feel incapacitated enough to go to the emergency room. A.V. parked the car, and we walked to the maternity ward, where I could only say, “I think I’m in labor?” to a large group of nurses sitting behind the desk. Someone said, “Okay, come this way, your doctor already called.” I walked into my labor and delivery room and was given a gown to change into. I went in the bathroom, and had a wickedly difficult time getting this gown on. I was (oddly) trying to be modest, and couldn’t figure out how to tie it without leaving my whole backside exposed. And I was having contractions the whole time.

Finally, I conquered the gown string thing, and took a seat on the bed. The nurse started asking me the usual questions – any problems with the pregnancy? Gestational diabetes, high blood pressure? Any tests come back unusual? No, no, and no. I had undergone genetic testing, glucose testing, and of course blood pressure monitoring, and everything had been completely normal. My ultrasounds at 13 and 26 weeks had indicated a perfectly healthy baby, with everything functioning just like it should. All my prenatal visits (once a week for the last six weeks) had gone smoothly – my little girl was a healthy, tough cookie. She then went to attach the fetal heartbeat monitor to me. Over one side of my belly, then the other. “When was the last time you felt the baby move?” “Around 2 am (I got the time wrong), but I just haven’t been able to tell since with the contractions.” I told her that there was usually a little bit of difficulty getting the baby’s heartbeat – she liked to be a bit difficult, and it was a little bit of a challenge for the doctor’s assistant every week too. But the nurse was distracted by also having to record all the information on me, so called in another nurse. The other nurse slid the monitor over my belly for over a minute while I answered even more questions. Yes, I wanted to try to breastfeed her. Yes, I had picked out a pediatrician, though I thought he might be out of town on vacation and one of his associates would examine her. The nurse working on my belly wasn’t having any more luck, so she got up to call in the ultrasound doctor. This doctor came in with the portable machine, and began scanning my belly. “Sorry, these things are pretty old,” she said. “When was the last time you felt the baby move?” “Um, 2 am.” She kept going, clicking the monitor here and there, then turned to the other nurse and asked, “have you called in Dr.?” I missed his name, but within two minutes, he was there too. I was getting a bit annoyed, thinking, gosh, their equipment is having trouble picking up a heartbeat. Maybe she really is positioned oddly. This new doctor scanned here and there, “When was the last time you felt the baby move?,” and I once again saw the outline of her cute little head. He moved further down, right where her heart should be, and clicked the button that had always let A.V. and me hear her heartbeat. Except this time there was no sound. No movement on the monitor. I had first seen her heart beating away on January 19, and then three more times when I’d had ultrasounds. It was always amazing – pounding away. Except this time I couldn’t see or hear anything. The doctor took a breath and turned to me and said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s no heartbeat. Sometimes the placenta stops providing enough nourishment.” I think he said something else, but I was zoning out at that point, Okay, they can’t find a heartbeat. So they’ll do an emergency c-section to try to save her and she’ll probably come out screaming like a normal baby. But where was their sense of urgency? I looked at the nurses, and they had started crying. Another doctor came up to me, tears in her eyes, rubbed my arm and said “I’m really sorry.” In this foggy haze, I gave her a big smile and said, “thank you.” “We’ve called your doctor; she’s on her way,” said my nurse, also crying. “I’m so so sorry.” This isn’t really happening. I need to call my family so they can pray and then Catherine will be fine. I know A.V. was hugging me and holding my hand, but I have no real memory of it. A.V. didn’t want me to talk to my family until after my doctor had arrived and examined me. She was crying too, “It’s not supposed to be this way, this is supposed to be joyous. I looked over all your charts again, your ultrasound, and everything was perfect.”

I called my parents. My father answered. “I went to the hospital because I’m in labor, but they couldn’t find a heartbeat.” “Huh? They couldn’t find a heartbeat?” “Yeah, I don’t know…” “Well, how couldn’t they find a heartbeat?” And then my cell phone lost its signal. I called my sister. “Are you in labor?” she asked. (For the past week and a half, every time we talked, she began the conversation with, “are you in labor?”) “I was in labor so I went to the hospital but they weren’t able to find a heartbeat.” “What?” “They said they couldn’t find a heartbeat, and that they were sorry….” “Okay, I’ll be over right away.” I may have said more, she may have said more, but I don’t remember that either. I remember everyone wanting to make me as comfortable as possible – I had an epidural; they were speeding up labor as much as they could. My sister fed me ice chips as if I were a baby bird. There was a “Golden Girls” marathon on t.v. A.V. ate dried cherries and cheddar and sour cream chips. I asked, “Once I’m well, can we have another baby?” “Okay,” he said. I fell asleep a couple of times. My nurse brought in a folder with some literature about stillbirths, grieving, and support groups. This isn’t really happening, so why is she bringing me this?

Finally, it was time for me to push and deliver her. I couldn’t move my legs, couldn’t feel my lower half at that point. “I think it’s going to be really hard for me to push – I don’t feel anything.” But I was still doing a “great job” according to my doctor and nurse. Delivery was easy – it lasted about 15 minutes. In the back of my mind, I still thought Maybe when she’s born she’ll be okay. Maybe there was some type of error. Maybe it’ll be like that little baby who they thought had died, but started crying in the morgue. But when she passed out of me, and I saw the nurse’s face, I knew that a miracle hadn’t happened. “I watched her come out of you – dead,” A.V, would tell me the next day, sitting in her nursery. I had told the doctor that no, I didn’t want her placed on my chest when she was born; no, I didn’t want to give her a bath (her first and last); yes, I would like to hold her for awhile once she was cleaned up. My doctor said the placenta was a little smaller than she expected for the size of the baby, and ordered cultures and more blood tests. (These didn’t provide any clues as to what had happened.) After delivery, I started shaking uncontrollably. A.V. asked me if I was okay, and I told him that I was just a little cold, but the truth is I was in such an extreme state of anxiety that my whole body was shaking. I knew the nurses were bathing her, dressing her up, taking pictures with her so that I would have keepsakes. It seemed like it was taking forever. At times I wanted to yell, “Just please, bring her here so I can at least see her.” Instead I waited 45 minutes before she was placed in my arms.

When I held her, I was surprised at how heavy she felt. A.V., the two nurses, and my doctor stood over me, watching these first few moments of me holding my daughter. My arm movement was limited by my i.v. and blood pressure cuff, and it was hard to hold her the way I wanted too. I really wanted to see her hands and feet, but couldn’t seem to unwrap the blanket. Six hands reached out to help me. I rubbed her little nose, tried to open her eyes, kissed her little head and hands. The blood had accumulated in her head and torso, making her face look strangely red with anger, while her hands and lower legs were very pale white. While in labor, I had had an awful thought. I love the name Catherine so much. Maybe I should name this baby something else so that I can name another daughter Catherine. But Catherine had always been Catherine, even before I knew I was having her, and she didn’t deserve to be robbed of her name.

A.V. held her. My parents and sister came in and held her. As macabre as it might have seemed, I asked my sister to take pictures of me and Catherine together. My sister had gotten us a digital camera, to make sure that we took lots of pictures. It had been one of the things I had placed in my hospital bag earlier that morning. (She’d later tell me that she had bought a camcorder, to record part of my labor and the whole lifetime of important moments with her first niece and goddaughter.) I said goodbye. My father placed her in her little basket. Someone asked if we wanted an autopsy done. While I wanted answers, I couldn’t imagine letting some stranger cut into that perfect little body. My body was all that she had known; I had protected her, kept her healthy. I loved that little body. I couldn’t let some stranger examine her that way, cut into her. I know she was healthy. Whatever went wrong may have happened in a matter of hours. A.V. and I agreed that we did not want an autopsy. My nurse brought me Catherine’s keepsake box – the dress they had put her in to take pictures, the teddy bear and blanket in the pictures, even the small bottles of shampoo and baby soap they used to wash her.

Eventually that night I was brought to another part of the maternity ward. They asked me if I wanted to go to another part of the hospital, but knowing hospitals, I was concerned that I would get less treatment there – I was starting to experience some pain – than in the maternity ward. I was rolled in a wheelchair to my new room, with a sign “Congratulations on your new baby” right next to the door. Congratulations on your new baby. I read that sign over and over again over the next 16 hours. I didn’t feel angry or bitter reading it. I felt fascination. Women come here, and they give birth to babies that they take home. How odd. For me, my experience had become normative; all the other healthy labors and deliveries were unusual. I listened to Brahms’ Lullaby, which the ward plays every time a baby is delivered – though not for Catherine – with the same fascination. Wow, there’s another woman having a healthy baby. That’s so strange. I heard that song four times during the 30 hours I spent at the hospital.

When my doctor came in the next morning, she said that I could leave the hospital around noon that day, if I wanted. “Yes.” She told me I had done a “superb job.” I’ll probably cling to those words for the rest of my life. My new nurse brought me more literature on grieving, along with Catherine’s footprints. Along with the literature were papers on organ donation. I looked on the last page: “Stillborn – unknown causes. Organs not suitable for donation.” I threw it in the wastebasket.

After what seemed like forever, I got my final instructions and prescriptions. My sister left to pick up my pain medications. A.V. helped me get dressed and packed up our stuff. My father said he was starting to look into making arrangements for a burial. I was wheeled back into the parking lot, and got into the car. I sobbed leaving the hospital – I was leaving without my baby.

Catherine’s car seat was still in the backseat, like I had attached it two weeks earlier. Her car seat was one of the first items we had gotten for her, after my friend sent a duck outfit for her. A.V.’s cousin had given it to us, and I’d gotten head supports and put those in along with a duck-shaped pull toy for her. I had bought and attached one of those safety mirrors so that I would be able to see her face when I was sitting up front. When we arrived back at the house, I opened the back door of the car and began taking it all out. “We can do it later,” A.V. said. “No, I don’t want it here!” For two weeks, I had seen that car seat every time I got into and out of the car, waiting for her. I’d told her that everything was ready for her, that we had set things up to be able to take her home from the hospital. Now she was never going to use it, and I didn’t want it there.

In fact, I didn’t want anything of hers out in the house. I walked into the house like a tornado, looking for anything and everything Catherine-related. Baptism documents (she was going to be baptized on September 20th)? In the trash. The schedule for sign-and-play classes (I was going to take classes with her so that we could learn basic sign language for babies and communicate that way before she could talk)? Also in the trash, along with the notes on pediatricians and the “Care for Your Newborn” pamphlet the pediatrician I had chosen had given me. What to Expect When You’re Expecting? Removed from my nightstand to the nursery. Ditto with What to Expect: the First Year that A.V. and I had been reading that week. Best Baby Gear, the book I had used when surfing the internet for exactly the right – and safe – crib and diapers and clothes and pacifiers and thermometers and bedding, also disappeared into a cabinet in the nursery. Even the laundry detergent and spray wash I had bought especially for her – pediatrician recommended – out of sight. I unpacked my hospital bag: the nightgowns I had bought just a couple of weeks earlier for my hospital stay, the nursing bras, the nursing pads. I unpacked her diaper bag, the two outfits I had packed for her: one pink onesie covered with strawberries, the other a purple polka-doted nightgown. Her little socks. Her newborn disposable diapers with Sesame Street characters on them. Her baby Tylenol drops, the diaper wipes. My mom and sister hovered. “She’ll never use any of this stuff, so I just want to put it away!” Her baby book. I had brought it to the hospital, wanting to make sure that I got her footprints inked into it at the same time that they took them for records. Now the “Welcome Home!” section would be filled in with memories of her burial, pictures of her gravesite at a cemetery. A.V. and I sat on the floor of her nursery and cried.

Two days later, I woke up and began putting stuff in her nursery away. I took her crib bedding apart. I had spent a week and a half picking out that bedding, wanting to make sure it had lots of colors and textures for her. I took her mobile apart – the one with leaves and tropical birds that moved. It played songs and had lights. I took the batteries out of all her toys – the bear she’d gotten at her baby shower, the pink seahorse with a glowing belly that I had seen online and knew I had to get for her. Her changing table, the one I had carefully selected and then made sure I had all the recommended supplies for. I thought about taking down the Winnie the Pooh curtains my parents had bought and hung up for her, but decided not to. Back into the box went her AngelCare Monitor, which would alert me, with some irony considering her death, if she stopped moving for longer than 20 seconds. I put away all the larger toys that my parents’ neighbors had given us, even her stroller. But I couldn’t stop thinking – was any of this ever really hers? It had been bought for her, but she would never use it. Was she never meant to use it?

The next day, September 3rd, was her funeral and burial. A.V. was the last person to see her. He placed a stuffed animal, a rosary, the medal I had worn, and some prayer cards to St. Gerard Majella in her pretty pink coffin, and then closed it forever. “When we have another baby, we need new saints to pray to. The saints we prayed to do some jacked-up s---,” A.V. had said. Through the generosity of the abbot, Catherine was buried in the same plot that my parents will one day be buried in at St. Joseph’s Abbey, so they’ll be able to take care of her at the Resurrection. A statue of St. Joseph is only a few paces away from her, and the next section of the cemetery is where the priests and monks are buried. I noticed when we visited there recently that there’s a park bench underneath the trees nearby. “Look Catherine, you can play and have picnics underneath the tree, and all the priests nearby will say what a lovely and adorable little girl you are!” I like to believe that the rainbows we have been seeing recently, the lovebugs that surrounded our car, are her gifts to us from a much happier place. So many people were excited about her, couldn’t wait to meet her – they were so many people, and so much love at her baby shower - , and prayed for her, that I like to think that the Virgin and saints just wanted her even more than all of us did, so they decided to keep her for themselves.

So that’s what happened. When you tell someone that you had a stillborn baby, they think that there were all sorts of things wrong, with the pregnancy or with your health (you try to avoid the people who are so callous as to actually ask you to your face). Nope. I was perfectly healthy; she was by every measure she had perfectly healthy also. I gained the exact amount of recommended weight, I ate fish once (and only once) a week, I ate small meals with lots of fruits and vegetables, I had fast food no more than once a month, I started drinking lots of water a day (and I hate drinking water) and didn’t touch diet drinks or anything with caffeine, I didn’t even eat lunch meat because of the risk of bacteria. I have my suspicions about problems with my placenta once labor began, but with no autopsy these will most likely never be confirmed, and that doesn’t bother me. In 50% of cases, the cause of a stillborn birth cannot be determined. And it occurs once in every two hundred births.

Now I have a desire to tell every woman who tells me she is pregnant, “Oh, I had a great, healthy pregnancy. And I gave birth to a dead baby. Just something to consider.” I’m not trying to be mean, or add to their anxiety. It’s more like managing expectations. Because honestly, once I hit 37 weeks, I thought the worst that could happen is that I would need an emergency c-section but still have a healthy baby. I knew all the things to watch out for – lack of movement, bright red bleeding. I read books and internet sites; I went to my childbirth classes. Catherine’s lack of discernible movement while I was in labor was no different than in other moments of my pregnancy when I was active and couldn’t feel her as much. Not that there is ever a way to prepare oneself for this sort of tragedy, but a stillbirth had never even entered my mind. That’s something that happened to women 50 years ago without modern medical care, I thought. I had no idea.

Along with my desire to warn every pregnant woman I come across, there’s the discomfort of certain questions and moments. “Do you have children?” I was asked recently. I don’t want to say no – I was and always will be a Mommy to Catherine. But I’m guessing that most people mean currently living children, and I’ve decided that it’s extremely insensitive to assume that all children must be living. I have similar feelings about Mother’s Day now. Do I get to celebrate Mother’s Day, or am I bumped back into childlessness because I had a dead baby? (By the way, the Mother’s Day card my own mom gave me this past year, from Catherine, that read how she couldn’t wait to meet me and play with me, is the only thing that still gets me choked up at this point.)

So now I’ve talked all about my dead baby. But I don’t think of Catherine as dead – the vast majority of the memories I have of her are of her alive. And so even though I know people are more interested in her death, I’d prefer they remember her alive. And since I knew her better than anyone, here’s what my Catherine was like.

Catherine Marie was born at 5:26 pm on August 30th, 2009. She was 19 inches long and weighed 7 lbs, 5 oz. She had dark, fine hair like A.V., with slight curls like mine. She had dark eyes. She had pouty lips, like me. She had baby jowls, like A.V. did as a baby. Her fingers were ridiculously long – way longer than anyone in our immediate families’. Great for the piano, but as my sister pointed out, those big, short legs may not have been long enough to reach the pedals! She had sturdy Mexican peasant legs, and rather large feet.

I remember the first time I saw her on an ultrasound. I had gone to the doctor to confirm that I was pregnant, and she looked like a little tadpole then, with her heart beating away. She was a little miracle. In her next three ultrasounds, as she grew bigger and bigger – and looked more obviously like a baby – I noticed that she loved to hold her right hand above her head. Both A.V. and I do this when we are sleeping, and it was amazing to realize we’d somehow passed this down to our child!

When picking up A.V. from work, she would always get really active, and I’d tell her, “vroom vroom,” (because I’m a notorious speeder who wants other cars to get out of the way) and she’d kick her little legs like crazy. At her burial, the hearse she was placed in – with 3 motorcycle police escorts no less – was going ridiculously slowly at 25 mph. I know she was yelling and kicking, “vroom vroom, Mommy, vroom vroom!”

I also always listen to music in the car – A.V. got a kick out of the fact that I invoked St. John Vianney to fix my car’s cd player – and she loved…Aerosmith. Completely loved them. Whenever Aerosmith would come on, she would practically start somersaulting. OMG, she wants to be a stripper. I might have been the first Mommy to have to go into a toy store and ask, “Um, do you sell stripper poles for toddlers?”

She was also stubborn! She and I had a deal: if I’d drink some orange or pomegranate juice, then rub my tummy, she’d do a flurry of kicks for me. But she could be moving like crazy, and when her dad put his hands on my tummy, she’d completely stop. Two seconds after he’d move his hand away, she’d start up again. Even though A.V. called her “little sweetie,” I think she was planning on being quite the handful for him!

She had quite the relationship with our cat, Sadie, too. Sadie likes to sit on me, and loved to put her paws on my big belly. Catherine hated this. She’d hit back. I think, “Get off, Sadie!” would have been her first phrase, especially since Sadie would have loved nothing more than to cuddle up with her little warm body.

She had really strong hiccups. I first felt her hiccuping in my sixth month, and in that last month, her hiccups were so strong that you could see my whole belly pulsing! I like to think that she was practicing her breathing for her big arrival in the world, though I was a little nervous about what type of screamer she would have turned out to be.

Catherine was such a tenacious little girl. In the middle of my pregnancy, A.V. and I moved halfway across the country. In preparing to leave our old apartment, I spent an afternoon crawling around on the floor, crouching behind an oven, and using strong cleaning supplies. I was so worried that I’d go to the doctor the next day and find out that something was wrong. But no, her heartbeat was as strong as ever.

I also got nervous during those few days that we were driving from California to Louisiana, especially since my visit with my new doctor was a few weeks away. I had had to sit in a car for many hours and hadn’t been drinking as much water as I would have liked. I was so scared that there would be problems. But no, in her ultrasound everything was functioning perfectly. That’s when we also found out for sure that she was a girl, and I couldn’t help telling her, “You’re one tough cookie, Catherine!” Considering my mental state at times, she overcame some real obstacles because I know that as much as so many people were excited about meeting her, she really wanted to be here too. I like to think that it’s that fighting spirit that made Someone want her even more, where she could be a part of even bigger and better things.

And then there are the moments I will never get with her, the dreams that I had for her. Of dressing her as a butterfly this Halloween, of taking care of her at the dinner table for Thanksgiving this year, of putting up the Christmas tree, buying “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments for her and even making a few. Of getting her a Christmas dress and an Easter outfit. Bringing her to the park this coming spring, right when she would have been old enough to be interested in the outdoor world and excited about all the new life that appears.

I know that for those who didn’t know Catherine as well as I did, the dreams they had of her and for her are even more vivid, and probably feel like all they will ever have of her. I don’t really have any words to say that would comfort them, other than to have written this to let them know, “This is what Catherine was like, and is like. She died unexpectedly for reasons that none of us will ever know in this lifetime, but in her own way, she led a very full life while here on earth. And she knew how many people loved her, and she wanted to be with you, too. God just wanted her even more.”

The Four Temperaments

2009-09-11T18:41:00.000-05:00

Going back to basics in 1946, Balanchine concentrated his attention equally on the smallest details and the largest resources of classical dance and on making transitions from one to the other clearer, perhaps, than they’d ever been before.

When, in the opening statement of the ballet – the first part of the Theme - we see a girl, supported on her points, turning from side to side and transferring her weight from one foot to the other as she turns, we see her do it with a finicky grace: she lifts and lowers the free foot, curls it around the standing leg, and carefully flexes it before arching to full point.We see, in short a foot becoming a point-nature being touched to artificial life. The detail looms for an instant, then quickly takes its place in the grand scheme of the ballet.

The Theme is full of elementary particles, jostling, caroming, crisscrossing space in strokes that define the boundaries of the territory Balanchine will invade.In the Theme’s second statement (there are three such statements, each a pas de deux), the side-to-side turns have become full revolutions, rapid finger turns marked off by the girl’s point as it taps the floor. In the third statement, the finger-turns are taken in deep plie with one foot held off the ground in passé position. The weight on that one supporting point looks crushing, but, as we have seen, there is something about a woman’s point that makes it not a foot – that makes it a sign. The image created by the third girl as she is spun is blithe, even comical; could Balanchine have been thinking of the bass fiddle the forties jazz player spins after a chorus of licks?

The developing sense of the passages I’ve cited is analogous to the process that takes place in the molding of a classical dancer’s body. The “story” of The Four Temperaments is precisely that story – the subjection of persons to a process and their re-emergence as human archetypes – but these citations may make it seems as if that process happened all in closeup, and if that were true we would be in a crazy man’s world. Balanchine has built a large and dense composition on a handful of cellular motifs, and it’s this economy that allows us to perceive the ballet and survive it, too.

Balanchine’s control of the action’s subliminal force allows us the most marvelous play in our minds; we’re torn in an agony of delight between what we see and what we think we see. Metaphoric implications flash by, achieve their bright dazzle of suggestion, and subside into simple bodily acts. The way the women stab the floor with their points or hook their legs around men’s waists or grip their partners’ wrists in lifts – images of insatiable hunger, or functional necessities?

[Melancholic’s] space is penetrated by menacing diagonals for the entries of the corps. They are enough to frustrate and block his every attempt to leap free. He leaps and crumples to earth. We recognize this man: his personal weather is always ceiling zero.

In the Sanguinic variation, the vista is wide, the ozone pure and stinging.The Sanguinic variation takes us to the top of the world, and twice we ride around its crest.

Phlegmatic is indolent, tropical, given to detached contemplation.The male soloist languishes, and loves it. Slowly he picks up invisible burdens, lifts them, and clothes himself in their splendor.

Choleric enters in a burst of fanfares and flourishes, kicking the air. Her fury must be appeased, assimilated by the ballet’s bloodstream. The entire cast collaborates in the process.

After a silence in which nobody moves, the great fugue of the finale begins its inexorable massed attack. All the parts the ballet is made of are now seen at once in a spectacle of grand-scale assimilation. Apotheosis. We see a succession of sky-sweeping lifts; we see a runway lined by a chorus of grand battements turned to the four points of the compass. The lifts travel down the runway and out as the curtain falls. Balanchine has interpreted the subject in the form of a dance fantasy, but never so literally or schematically that we need fear, if we miss one element, having missed all. 8 Dec 1975

- from the essay “Momentous” by Arlene Croce

"The Four Temperaments" was not a Balanchine ballet that I "got" immediately. My first exposure to it was on video, from the Dance in America series of the 1970s with a highly praised revival cast. The themes consisted of couples moving to create shapes but their movements would be abruptly stopped by foot, leg, or arm. Was this ballet about movement arrested? I was equally confused by the men's sections (Phlegmatic and Melancholic). The four women who sometimes accompany the men pose fashion model style, sometimes blocking the path of the men with their arms, torsos, or legs. The only sections I really responded to were "Choleric" with her sharp kicks and the ending, which really does surprise with the mass of dancers suddenly present on stage dancing in unison. It was a ballet I admired in the back of my mind, but didn't really care to see again, no matter how many ballet critics I read maintained that "The Four Temperaments" was a ballet they NEEDED to see at least every 5 years.

However, as I saw more ballet - particularly more traditional classical ballets - I could see how Balanchine was building off of the basics of ballet movement. I was also able to get beyond the early ballet-watcher confusion of "what am I seeing here?" and enjoy the pure movement - the languorous backbends, the sharp kicks, the flexing feet, the hip thrusts - not merely their shapes, but their force and impact as movements. Not that one cannot immediately enjoy "The Four Temperaments" as movement, but it took me seeing the way Balanchine was altering those movements - through their placement in the music, or accents, or general force - from their more typical use in older classical ballets to understand what was going on here. Only now am I beginning to understand how much this 1946 Hindemith ballet can train the eye and teach us of how much ballet still has to communicate.

Chicago, 20 October 2006, Evening

Throughout the day and evening performances, I kept thinking that NYCB has sure turned into a "short" company with a lot of short, compact female dancers. Martins was clearly keeping all the tall, long-limbed, Balanchine-caricatured women for this ballet, and I immediately wondered why several of them (Krohn, Bar, Riggins) weren't dancing soloist roles in Concerto, Symphony in C, and Divertimento, as they had the energy and phrasing and individuality one had been waiting for. (I also would have liked to have seen Somogyi in 1st movement Symphony in C.) I thought this was the best performed ballet (at least it had energy!) but I also thought it was a bit uncontrolled. It seemed like the dancers were breathing easier in this space, but at the same time not realizing that they were still performing classical ballet. In other words, they looked happy to exaggerate, and exaggerated too much for it. But there was a real sense of commitment, a real excitement to be out on stage that was sorely lacking in the other five Balanchine ballets, and for that (at the end of the day) I was grateful.

All I ever wanted to know about Hell, I learned from Vincent Price

2009-09-08T14:33:00.000-05:00

“You are about to enter Hell, Bartolome - Hell!...The nether world, the infernal region, the abode of the damned...The place of torment. Pandemonium, Abbadon, Tophet, Gehenna, Narraka...the Pit!...And the Pendulum. The razor-edge of destiny.”

My mother, no fan of modern horror movies, has always been a Vincent Price horror movie fan. Thus, Roger Corman’s 1961 film "The Pit and the Pendulum" was taped from late night Houston t.v. and watched and re-watched in my house whenever we wanted to see a “scary movie.” (Even scarier were the commercials for the Time Life series of books on the paranormal, with images of specters floating down hallways and demons in the woods, all of which could have been mine to learn about if I would have called and ordered the first in the series.)

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a child’s nightmare of a movie, filled with the forbidden and the horrifying – and without supernatural elements. Incest, torture, insanity, being buried alive, a huge castle with hidden passageways, and obviously, a pit and a pendulum. The plot, which bears little resemblance to Poe’s original story, is about a young man, Bartolome, who comes to the Medina castle to find out how his sister Elizabeth, wife of Nicholas Medina, died. Nicholas is played by the incomparable Vincent Price, complete with grief-stricken face, bulging eyeballs, looks of despair, and even a fainting spell. We eventually learn that Nicholas’ father was the local inquisitor who conducted his torture sessions in the basement and who tortured and killed his wife and brother on suspicion that they were having an affair, while his son watched. Prior to her death, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele) had become increasingly fascinated with these torture devices, and it was believed that the “ghosts” killed her. But Nicholas is haunted by his beloved Elizabeth, and begins to believe that she was buried alive. In one of the most indelible images in the movie, they open her casket to find a decaying face frozen in a scream.

Of course, there is the plot twist: there is no supernatural explanation for the death of Elizabeth, as she did not die in this gruesome manner. She was having an affair with the doctor, staged her own death and is now trying to drive her husband crazy so she can run off with the doctor free and clear. “Nicholas…Nicholas…” she keeps calling to him*, luring him down into the basement, where she hopes he will die of fright. Right when it seems that he has cracked up and died, he turns the tables on Elizabeth and the doctor and assumes the persona of his inquisitor father, torturing his wife and friend. Unluckily for him, Elizabeth’s brother is the one who gets tied to the pendulum torture device. Nicholas’ sister comes to Bartolome’s rescue, and Nicholas ends up dead at the bottom of the pit, an evil grin on his face. But if that isn’t enough, the final scene is of the basement torture chamber being locked up, while Elizabeth is frozen inside the iron maiden.

As already stated, there are no supernatural aspects in this movie. It is all the more terrifying because of that – it is about a descent into insanity and evil, based on the wickedness of others and their ability to deceive. It’s one of the scariest things in the world – that people are not as you thought them to be. (One of my childhood nightmares was that people would shape-shift in the dark, that they could become other people or creatures in a room with no light, and then attack me.)

But even that as not as frightening as how delighted Price – as Nicholas – becomes when he is freed into pure evil. It’s not just a twist on the old saying that bad ‘guys’ have more fun; it’s this passion to act in a newfound way, free of concern and responsibility. It’s appropriate that he cannot recognize anyone as they are. He is oblivious in his desire to complete all his wicked aims. Hell becomes the scariest place possible.

*The way Price calls after her, “Elizabeth? Elizabeth?” reminded my sister and me of the way Macho Man Randy Savage called after Miss Elizabeth, for ‘80s WWF fans.

Guitar-playing days are here again...

2009-09-08T12:03:00.000-05:00

I have decided to take up the guitar. About 10 years ago, for a very boring summer where I was mostly confined to the house, I briefly tried to teach myself to play the guitar using Roy Clark’s Big Note Songbook. The guitar I used was given to us by a cousin and was missing a string; it had been previously used as a fake weapon (machine gun) by my sister and me when we were younger. Ten years ago, I mastered the melody to “Amazing Grace,” and that was about it.

So how difficult can it be to learn to play the guitar? I have always been amazed by the sheer numbers of people who can play it reasonably well. After all, I have 12 years of piano lessons and 8 years of clarinet lessons, so this should be fairly easy, right? Come on, I can play Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” and Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto.” I can certainly play the guitar, right?

First things first – I cannot figure out how to hold a guitar correctly and comfortably. Perhaps I am cursed to not join the masses of guitar-players because my hands are too small, or my fingers are too short. But I am determined to persevere.

My sister, who cannot do anything halfway, has given me a classical guitar given to her by a coworker. She has purchased strings for it, a tuner, and a whole pile of guitar-learning books and songbooks. She even has an interactive computer program to help me learn (now how I am supposed to master holding the guitar correctly while messing around with the computer, I do not know).

In an attempt to force myself to write on my blog daily, I will provide frequent updates on my conquest of the guitar. And conquer this instrument I will. I cannot wait to play Haugen ditties from the choir stall at Mass.

O Those American Values

2008-12-10T14:44:00.000-06:00

I recently watched two documentaries: “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Bigger, Stronger, Faster.”

I selected “Taxi to the Dark Side” from Netflix because, based on the blurb, I thought it would be an examination of the U.S. government’s approach to torture. No, it was the typical bash Bush (George W.), young American soldiers are sheep - although one soldier admitted to kicking a detainee so many times that he had to switch legs - who should not be held responsible for their actions, detainee treatment on Gitmo is so terrible, etc. (I found the section on torture as ‘violation of cultural sensitivities’ especially hilarious.) For all that was oh-so-typical about this treatment on the subject of recent government actions, there is something that I always find shocking from both the left and the right: the expectation that the U.S. government just wouldn’t do such things. After all, it doesn’t fit with American values.

The climax of the film is how the false information al-Libi gave to interrogators created a cause for the invasion of Iraq. For those who don’t remember, he was the prisoner who claimed that Iraq was training al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons, the evidence that Powell provided to the UN in 2003 to justify the war on Iraq. The filmmakers conveniently underplay the fact that al-Libi was handed over by the CIA to Egyptian authorities to get that confession. In other words, they got the false confession the old-fashioned American way: not through some Bush administration redefinition of torture, but through handing him off to a foreign government that uses even more aggressive tactics to get info. Since I was once such a good member of Amnesty International (tongue firmly planted in cheek), I know that the outsourcing of torture is standard American practice, has been since early Cold War days. At least the Bush administration may have, in other cases, showed advancements in the American values of doing the job yourself and showing some personal responsibility.

But for the filmmakers, providing the actual facts could also expose the truth: the American government has always been willing to get its hands dirty in one way or another. After all, hasn’t Chile thanked us for Pinochet? Isn’t this the federal government that refused to do anything about terrorism against its own citizens – as long as it was done by other citizens - for over 100 years? Why in the world do we think this country is some type of moral entity that always acts in the good? It’s almost as if some have traded in belief in God for belief in this otherworldly America. I’m not as cynical as it may seem here, simply because I believe that government is usually just that – government. A neutral body, possessing no inherent morality, that functions to do the will of whomever is in charge of it. In a democracy, it then becomes a question of – why don’t those in power think exactly the same way I do? Well, because they are usually not exactly like you.

A much more fascinating perspective on those things called American values was presented in “Bigger, Stronger, Faster.” This documentary is a bit Michael Moore-style, with the filmmaker beginning by presenting his family portrait: three brothers raised on WWF wrestling in the age of Rambo, Rocky, and Schwarzenegger, who all become weight-lifters, body-builders, or wrestlers. Two of the three also end up as frequent steroid users.

But is steroid use really such a bad thing? Is it actually so much more dangerous than other prescribed drugs? The medical community says no. Most people who use steroids do so for medical reasons, and its use should not be recommended for adolescents (see East German athletes), but the incidence of complications from steroid use are surprisingly low, considering how vilified it is. As the filmmaker makes clear, our problem with steroid use among athletes is that is violates our sense of fairness in competition. Yet Olympic athletes train in high altitude conditions and cyclists sleep in chambers with lower-than-normal oxygen levels. In other words, athletes are poked, prodded, and trained with some of the highest technology available to insure maximum performance and all that is perfectly fine as long as they don’t consume one of the drugs that some committee has decided to ban, though they may consume a number of other drugs designed to increase performance. We don’t really think that Michael Phelps got all those medals by just swimming a lot of laps in some backyard pool, do we? And yet the use of specially designed material that reduces friction in the water and slightly increases buoyancy for swimming gear is A-ok.

There’s more to this documentary: how easy it is to make, advertise, and sell OTC herbal supplements and claim anything you want about what’s in them and what they do, since they aren’t tested by the FDA (we have Orrin Hatch, Utah senator to thank for that – I hope the Vikings’ Williamses and Deuce and Will Grant are harassing him right now). I learned a bit more about the weight-lifting and professional wrestling businesses than I knew previously, too. The principal focus however is how we have a “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” culture, and yet we want to admonish those who will do anything to win if it involved taking some pill, even though that pill’s only real benefits are to allow them to train harder, recover faster, and resume training more quickly. Their bodies still have to do all the hard work.

We have this idea of the Western frontier man, a John Wayne type, accomplishing what he does through hard work and grit alone. But he’s not an American hero unless he wins. Maybe the Bush administration was just old-fashioned. If the filmmakers of “Taxi to the Dark Side” are going to give a pass to soldiers violently beating up detainees because they were brainwashed by the military culture under the Bush administration, I’m going to give Bush and pals a pass for similar reasons: they were brainwashed by American culture.

P.S. I enjoyed watching the first documentary if only to see clips from Rummy’s press conferences again. He had a true gift for the one-liners and pithy comments.

Fries on the Brain

2008-06-19T14:57:00.000-05:00

One of the challenges in studying learning and behavior is uncovering the neurobiological mechanisms that separate goal-oriented behaviors into those that provide a primary reinforcer (by satisfying a basic drive, such as the one for food or sex) and those that provide some as-yet-unknown experience linked to a primary reinforcer (cues). For example, an animal that has learned to associate food with a tone will work for the tone, even if no food (the primary reinforcer) is provided.

The ability of these cues to drive behaviors is not fully understood, although cues play a large role in the maintenance of many behaviors, including maladaptive ones such as addiction. How do we learn to work for money (and that the cue - money - will help us satisfy our more basic drives), or in the case of negative reinforcement, why does a yellow light turning red as we drive through it strike a tad bit of fear in us? These situations involve a complex series of associations that are in part linked to our biological survival.

The following sections from a recent Nature article summarize some new findings.

From John Whitfield’s article “The Essence of Happiness” in Nature.

Burke, K. A. , Franz, T. M. , Miller, D. N. & Schoenbaum, G. Nature advance online publication, doi:10.1038/nature06993 (18 June 2008).

Separating the cognitive (goal-oriented) and general (emotional) systems is difficult, because achieving your goal makes you feel happy. Schoenbaum and his colleagues achieved it by using an ingenious variation on classical pavlovian conditioning.

First, the researchers taught rats to associate one light with a grape-flavoured sucrose pellet, and a different light with a banana-flavoured pellet. Such conditioning makes the lights gratifying on their own — animals will work to experience the cue, even if they don't get a pellet.

Then, the team played sounds along with the lights. The 'grape' light with a sound still delivered a grape pellet. In this situation, animals tend to ignore the extra information and do not learn to associate the sound with food.

But the 'banana' light plus a sound led to a different reward – a grape-flavoured pellet. So in this case, the sound adds information. The light means something nice is coming and the sound tells you what flavour it will be.

Rats like the two flavours equally, so the sound says nothing about the treat's value, only its details.

The team next tested the rats on sounds and lights alone. The animals, they found, will press a bar to obtain either the light or the sound on its own, even if no food pellet follows on. The generalized reward of the treat and the abstract property of its flavour were equally strong motivations.

But rats with damage to an area of their brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, which is thought to be involved in decision-making, would work to see the treat-associated light, but not to hear the grape-associated sound. That is, they will work for a cue associated with positive emotions, but not one linked only to a specific outcome.

It's a bit like separating Homer Simpson's "Mmm… donuts", into a generalized expression of pleasure ("Mmm"), and the specific object of his desire (the "donuts"), and working out the brain regions responsible for each thought.

Schoenbaum suggests that the orbitofrontal cortex, which lies at the front of the brain, just above the eyes, is the home of the brain's cognitive reward system. It acts as a forecaster, predicting the value of different behaviours, learns which ones are ultimately rewarding, and triggers a corresponding emotional response.

Normally the two systems will give the same 'answer'. But the orbitofrontal cortex could also act as a kind of policeman, says Schoenbaum, diverting the pursuit of immediate gratification in favour of longer-term goals.

(The picture of fries is a cue, although I don't think it's sufficiently satisfying.)

Our Lady, the Jealous Bride?

2008-06-17T14:13:00.000-05:00

Now man, have mind on me forever

Look on thy love thus languishing;

Let us never from other disserver...

Take me for thy wife and learn to sing...

(The Virgin in a poem from the 14th century)

Giovanni di Paolo, Coronation of the Virgin, c 1455

One of the more interesting aspects of Marina Warner's Alone of All her Sex is the evidence she has found for devotions to the Virgin that became repressed during and after the Counter-Reformation. There is the repression of the devotion to the Madonna of Mercy and the Madonna's Milk; the traditional image of the conception of the Virgin when Sts. Joachim and Anne meet at the Golden Gate is banned in the 17th century. Especially interesting is the devotion to the Virgin as the bride of clerics and celibate men. According to Warner, this portrayal probably developed from the turn of the troubadours to more religious themes, and the Virgin as the "Highest Lady." There are images of her (both in painting and literature) placing a wedding ring on a young man's hand to indicate that she is his bride. Even more amusing and fascinating are accounts of the Virgin as a haughty, jealous bride who holds herself higher than all other women and who demands vengeance on any young man who would dare to spurn her for an earthly lover.

From Warner's book (pp 156-7):

In one of the fourteenth-century Miracles de Notre Dame par Personnages, a young canon who had promised to serve the Virgin forever is told by his uncle that he has inherited a great fortune and must marry a girl his uncle has chosen. He remonstrates that he wants to take orders and serve Dieu et nostre dame but the girl turns out to be a paragon of weath, connections, and beauty. He gives in. On his wedding night, the Virgin summons John the evangelist and several angels, and in the haughty tone of a severely vexed suzerain announces she has some business on earth with [the young man].

How can this be, since I am who I am,

That you are leaving me for another woman?

It seems you're badly underrating

My worth and my beauty...

You must be drunk

To give your whole heart and all your love

To a woman of this earth?

And to leave me, the Lady

Of Heaven? Tell me true, where is the woman

With greater goodness and beauty than I?

She tells the cleric that since he has been unfaithful, he shall burn for it in hell. [The young cleric runs away, and his family finds this letter the following morning, that the Virgin was]

So jealous

Of him because she had made him a bed in heaven,

And he had unmade it by his great crime.

The young wife follows her husband and becomes a nun; the Virgin appears and takes the hero with her to heaven.

2008-06-16T11:35:00.000-05:00

Tiny moon Janus, seen before Saturn's rings, with massive moon Titan beyond. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech, Bostonphoenix.com

Our Lady, the Bride of Christ

2008-06-12T17:14:00.000-05:00

Coronation in Santa Maria in Trastevere

The Bride of Christ

Leva eius sub capite meo et dextera illius amplexabit me

Veni electa mea, ponam in te thronum meam

(Our Lady: His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me)

(Our Lord: Come my chosen one, I shall place thee on my throne)

God and Woman: The Annunciation

2008-06-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

Correggio, c 1522-25 (drawing for fresco now faded)

Titian, c 1555-62

gods and Mortal Women: Danae

2008-06-11T12:27:00.000-05:00

Correggio, c 1531

Titian, c 1545

Titian, c 1554

gods and Mortal Women: Io

2008-06-11T12:26:00.000-05:00

Correggio, c 1532

ID and science

2008-03-06T17:30:00.000-06:00

To briefly continue a thought from here:

The second problem is that definition: what is science? Our current definition of science is quite narrow compared to all that ‘science’ was thought to encompass from the ancient world through the Renaissance. Our current definition of science involves examining mechanisms in a closed system. By way of crude analogy (that A.V. came up with), if a man brings a modern scientist a car and tells him that something is wrong with the brakes, the modern scientist will test out the brakes, examine the car, examine the brake pads, check the brake fluid, etc. If this man is coming in every week telling the modern scientist that something is wrong with the brakes, the scientist will continue doing the same tests to try to fix the brakes. The modern scientist will not begin to wonder if perhaps the man is a reckless driver with anger management issues who repeatedly hits the accelerator and then slams on his brakes during the drive home. The modern scientist makes the assumption that the answers are “in here” – under the hood of the car – and not “out there”–something is wrong with the driver. (Actually, most scientists would eventually begin to wonder if user error was the problem, which is where the analogy falls apart, but I think you can get the picture.) There is no room to teach ID or creationism in a science classroom – they are not science, as it is currently defined. Now if we were to expand the definition of science (and the tools science uses), it might be possible to teach these things as competing “theories.” (Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, after all, were both astronomers and Neoplatonists, without conflict, where the one informed the other.) But that would involve a larger debate about science, education, and our general philosophical approaches.

When the proponents of ID demand that it be taught in the science classroom, they concede to modern science all the points that matter: modern science, instead of being one way of knowing about some components of our universe, is the best way of knowing; truth can only be uncovered through empiricism, naturalism is the only correct philosophical approach. Most discussions by ID proponents don’t revolve around the problems of naturalism as a philosophical approach, but are instead attempts to say that ID should be included by association with naturalism, the rules of modern science. And that’s affirming that the philosophy behind modern science has superiority above all others for understanding truth.

A Day with the Rosicrucians

2008-02-22T16:36:00.000-06:00

Or not quite.

This past Saturday, A.V. and I visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium in San Jose. The complex also features a peace garden, a temple, a meeting hall, and an outdoor reflection area that only Rosicrucian members are supposed to enter. (A.V. entered anyway and enjoyed standing under an Egyptian-inspired pavilion surrounded by bamboo. He also used to read the books in “hell.”)

The museum, which boasts "the largest collection of Egyptian-inspired artifacts in the Western U.S.," really does have quite an assortment of ancient Egyptian articles and reproductions. Especially well-done, though a bit old, were the models they had of the Temple of Karnak, a typical ancient Egyptian community, the Djoser step pyramid, and others; they also have a life-size walk-through Egyptian tomb. There were a number of unique voice-over exhibits: one featured an Egyptian birthing room and explained the customs and traditions for pregnant Egyptian women and their newborns (women in Egypt gave birth while standing and crouching with their feet on top of bricks); Akhenaten had an entire room dedicated to explaining his own religious views. Indeed, there was a lot of "explaining" throughout the museum: one could pick up papers in each room that provided more complete explanations of each exhibit in the room. Of course, I am way too smart and a veritable expert on ancient Egypt so I didn't bother doing that, but it was great to have the extra information available (it also made the museum extra kid-friendly, as the kids could even stamp their paper 'museum pass' in each room). The actual artifacts themselves weren't the most impressive I've seen, but the museum as a whole, though small and a teensy bit cramped-feeling – or maybe that was my aversion to all the children running around – was well done and a bargain for the price ($9 for adults) since the planetarium show was free. There was also an additional traveling exhibit on pollination and the importance of bees with lovely photographs of bees in various positions on flower petals, and scent boxes in case one wanted a strong whiff of lavender or vanilla.

I must also praise the gift shop – if you have ever yearned for a 5 inch statue of Anubis, or for one of those foot long reproductions of an Egyptian raft on the Nile complete with two dolls of ancient Egyptians inside – this is the place for you. These made in China figurines were the cheapest I've ever seen them. Less than $20 for a 9 inch tall statue of the goddess Bastet, and the faux gold paint job was still well done. (A.V. was delighted with the three-selection penny smasher.)

The real highlight was the 35-minute planetarium show - “The Mithraic Mysteries.” Anyone who has watched a documentary special on the nativity of Jesus knows that (ahem) December 25^th was chosen as the birthday of the Messiah to coincide (ahem) with the celebration for Sol Invictus, a possible title for Mithras, not to be confused with the Persian god Mithra, who also, according to all those documentaries, bears an eerie resemblance to Jesus in his origin, life, and death. Mithraism (surrounding Mithras, who according to most recent scholarship was not directly related to Mithra) was a mystery religion especially popular among Roman soldiers; all that really remains is their iconography. The most famous example, the tauroctony, was the subject of the planetarium show. Derived from David Ulansey’s book, the show explains that the tauroctony may have had astronomical meanings – Mithras is actually Perseus, complete with Phrygian cap, gazing away from the bull (Taurus) that he kills beneath him. The other symbols – the dog (Canis Minor), scorpion (Scorpio), bird (Corvus), and snake (Hydra) likewise have their constellation counterparts. The two boys often featured on the sides, one with torch held up, the other with torch held down, correspond to the crossing of the sun through the celestial equator. Why would they depict the night sky in such a way? According to Ulansey, Mithraism developed in the first century B.C. in Asia Minor, shortly after the discovery by Greek astronomer Hipparchus of precession – the change in direction in the axis of the earth that most obviously causes our “North Star” to change over thousands of years, but also causes the celestial equator to cross the zodiac at a different location during the spring and fall equinoxes every couple thousand years. At the time of his discovery, however, it was believed that the earth was fixed, with various arcs and celestial spheres moving around it. Hipparchus had therefore discovered a new ‘force’ that moved the spheres around the earth, a force that may have been associated with Plato’s 'hypercosmic sun' existing outside the known universe. The tauroctony depicts the constellations that the celestial equator passed through during the Age of Taurus, about 5000 years ago. (The representations in the constellations most likely had additional meanings that played a part in the beliefs about the world and the rituals that believers performed.)

It’s a bit amusing to speculate that the participants in the Mithraic cult were actually worshipping precession, the silly pagans. But it also shows the spread and importance of the Platonic belief that the soul would descend at birth, and ascend at death, through the heavenly spheres to the One that exists outside of creation, and provides clues as to why Christianity may have been seen as especially attractive to converts.

We didn't get into any conversations with Rosicrucians, unfortunately. We did pick up their nice brochure, and peruse the books in the gift shop - nothing quite like books by 20th century mystics about the secret mysteries of Christ! - but the Rosicrucians got to keep their own mysteries.

2008-02-17T23:24:00.000-06:00

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

St. Mary's Vocation Boom

2008-02-16T12:03:00.000-06:00

From an article in the National Catholic Reporter; I attended St. Mary's during my four years at Texas A&M:

St. Mary's Catholic Center at Texas A&M University is among the biggest and most dynamic campus ministry programs in the country. It's a vocations powerhouse, having produced 112 priests and religious so far, with 39 more Aggie alums currently in formation. Each year the center averages 8-10 vocations to the priesthood and religious life; last year's total was 16. By itself, St. Mary's therefore generates more vocations than many dioceses. The center's six weekend Masses regularly draw around 4,000 students. (Roughly 25 percent of A&M's student population of 45,000 is Catholic.) Konderla says that the unique ethos of A&M -- drawing students from rural, intensely religious parts of Texas -- is part of this picture. Paul Holub, a 22-year-old health education major who's considering a vocation to the priesthood, told me that it's not uncommon for Catholic and Evangelical undergrads to get "sidetracked" during study sessions talking about their faith -- pivoting especially, he said, on what it means to be "saved."

State Ballet of Georgia, Artistic Director Nina Ananiashvili

2008-02-15T17:20:00.000-06:00

Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, February 14, 2008

Only recently have prima ballerinas become artistic directors of ballet companies. While there have been women in charge of ballet companies - Lucia Chase of ABT and Ninette de Valois of The Royal Ballet (British), who both had undistinguished careers as dancers – to have one of the greats, and much less one still dancing, directing a state-funded ballet company is quite novel. In interviews, Nina Ananiashvili* has stated how important it was to her, after the civil war in her home state of Georgia ended in 2004, to be involved in the rebuilding of the arts there. Her task has been made more difficult by Russian policies and covert efforts to target and harass ethnic minorities including Georgians in the Russian Federation, disrupting both the lives of native Georgian dancers there, and affecting performances opportunities for Georgian dancers (the company had to cancel performances in Russia nearly two years ago).

Nevertheless, Ms. Ananiashvili has taken her company on their first American tour (Berkeley, is the first stop, followed by trips to Los Angeles and New York). I attended the mixed bill program featuring:

George Balanchine’s Chaconne (music by Gluck)

Balanchine’s Duo Concertant (music by Stravinsky)

Alexei Ratmansky’s Bizet Variations (music by Bizet)

Yuri Possokov’s Sagalobeli (traditional Georgian music)

Overall company impressions, brilliantly shown in the opening Chaconne – the women are thin, but not the willowy, long-limbed variety that’s currently (over) bred at the Kirov and Paris Opera Ballet. They have the famous Russian backs – the gentle arch in the back, creating S-shapes from head through center through hips and legs, and the heads are thrust a bit more forward than I would like, but there is also a great deal of enjoyment in seeing a corps de ballet that seems to share the same training. The coordination of head, body, arms, and legs are similar throughout the company, lending a welcome uniformity (especially since I’ve recently seen corps work from Miami City Ballet, ABT, and the Joffrey Ballet, in whom, to me, the diversity in the training of the dancers was at times distractingly strong). The men tend to be big, with wide torsos and wide thighs. At first I enjoyed this aspect – most of the popular male dancers today tend to be tall and long-legged like their female counterparts, sometimes looking a bit overstretched, or they are short powerhouses. It was wonderful to see men of the type that comfortably danced danseur noble roles in the Soviet era. But the men here don’t use their physical size to maximum effect. They don’t move big, those wide thighs don’t translate into power, and they suffer from the slowness that larger bodies can often have (they suffer even more from unpointed feet). In many ways, Balanchine’s classicism in Chaconne was an ideal way to challenge those bodies, and make them work their technique, and I admire Ms. Ananiashvili’s decision to challenge her company in this way. Her own explanation for the inclusion of two Balanchine pieces was that Balanchine, though not native-born (he had never even been there prior to NYCB’s tour to the Soviet Union in 1963) was half Georgian through his father Meliton Balanchivadze, and he self-identified as Georgian, not Russian. This was a very clever reminder of the contributions of this tiny state to the world of art. (Though not in the program notes, the company was co-founded by George's brother, composer Andrei Balanchivadze, in 1935.)

Chaconne (originally choreographed by Balanchine for the Paris Opera in 1963 to music of Gluck’s opera “Orphee et Euridice” and re-choreographed in 1976 for his own New York City Ballet) begins with nine women garbed in flowing dresses, with their hair flowing down their backs, softly bourreeing around the stage, tilting their heads and arms. The location is Elysium, and the narrative is blessed spirits walking amongst the clouds. (Indeed, much of the dancing, even when we re-join the cast back on earth, focuses on ways of walking.) As the nine women slowly glide off-stage, a man and woman appear, circle each other, and then begin to test out the cloud-covered ground. To the extended flute solo, he helps her swoop, hover, and swim in the clouds. Anna Muradeli and Vasil Akhmeteli were the dancers here. Ms. Muradeli is a beautiful woman, and adagio is her range. Whereas Suzanne Farrell, the originator of the role for NYCB, conveyed a certain sadness and longing, Ms. Muradeli conveyed a sublime ecstasy in her walk in the clouds. Akhmeteli holds her in arabesque in his arms, and while she swims in the air, he walks her off the stage. A lovely beginning. (Ms. Farrell and Peter Martins can be seen here dancing the part.)

Suddenly we are out of the clouds and planted on terra firma at court. After a brief prelude featuring enjoyable dancing from the corps de ballet, a trio enter (Rusudan Kvistsiani, Ekaterine Chubinidze, Otar Khelashvili) to perform a little court dance – the women display their delicate footwork while the man dances behind, miming the playing of a lute. Here, the man lagged behind the women in his footwork and jumps, marring the image. Next comes a short dance for 5 women, and then a fast, athletic pas de deux (danced here by Tsisia Cholokashvili and David Khozashvili). Ms. Cholokashvili was an exuberant bounding ball of energy while still maintaining elegance of line. Khozashvili had a near major mishap in partnering, but overall did admirably well – she was so sprite it hardly looked like she could be caught. Finally, the king and queen (or consort and queen, as Balanchine probably would have described it) enter their earthly realm. Whereas in heaven her feet gently tested the clouds and then glided above them, here they stab at the ground to sharp accents in the music. He alternates between soaring (grand jetes) and small beats of the legs (entrechats, brises), indicating his own mastery of ground and air. And here is where our two principals started to falter. I didn’t expect Ms. Muradeli to have the same massive power and sweep of the legs and voluminous plush in movement of the hips and thighs that Ms. Farrell did (those were defining features of Ms. Farrell in action), but she should have been able to find her own wit. The pas de deux and variations are about the contrast between big and small, sweep and filigree. The ballerina role requires power and delicacy simultaneously (being able to hurl a leg like a thunderbolt - as Croce wrote of Farrell’s abilities - and then gently, with no loss of control, present it to the ground like a Lipizzaner). Ms. Muradeli couldn’t stay with the music (already at a ridiculously slow tempo to accommodate Akhmeteli), nor did she seem to be listening to the music enough to hear that she needs to move her feet strongly down on the beat in those soutenu turns and emphazise the swizzle effect – it’s in the music. Indeed, if she had poured less concentration into getting through the steps and more to following the musical cues/clues, she would have had an easier time of it. An easy time was certainly not in the cards for her partner, however. Even with a tempo slower than molasses he was straining to complete the steps, and was consistently off beat. He was working hard, very hard, and after awhile, one had to admire the fact that he was making a concerted effort NOT to sacrifice the steps, and not to take the easy way out by just smudging everything together (there was little else in his variations to admire other than his mostly quiet landings). Catch Ms. Farrell and Martins dancing this part here, and imagine the tempo for the variations decreased by about HALF, to LESS than the tempo for the pas de deux that begins the section. The sense of the dancers creating a whirlwind that they have complete control over was lost, and the final chaconne suffered accordingly – the ballerina had never established herself in her realm. Ms. Muradeli seemed to think she could get by with her prettiness and flirty looks and smiles at the audience (quite a contrast from Ms. Farrell’s impassivity), but there was no cohesion among the parts here. Also breaking my own mood was the look of the women’s dresses – on top, they had an odd circles and spiral effect that was mostly in pale blue, with a large white cutout below the right breast that extended around the side. In summary, they looked like leotards for rhythmic gymnastics dating from the Soviet Bloc era – distractingly unattractive. I did like the gold trim at the bottom of the skirts. Chaconne is a good opener, but the dancers looked like they needed a lot more work mastering this style of classicism, and the ballet received tepid applause (the reluctant “we can tell you worked really hard” kind).

Duo Concertant followed the intermission. This work, choreographed by Balanchine to Stravinsky’s music for violin and piano, features two dancers along with a violinist and pianist, all on stage. The dancers at times listen attentively to the music, move away and begin dancing, and then come back and listen again. Nino Gogua and Lasha Khozashvili, arms resting on the piano, immediately caught the eye. Ms. Gogua is small and thin and has the huge eyes and small mouth associated with perpetual adolescence (especially her pale skin contrasted with her dark hair and eyes), but she is not frail looking. Khozashvili has a mop of very curly dark hair that makes him look more boyish than his dancing turns out to be, and lean muscles and lines – he does not fit the big man Georgian mold the other male dancers do. From the beginning, they knew how to relate to each other, the music, and the choreography. She turned out to be a technical whiz – fast and light, flexible and yet soft. He likewise showed so much attentiveness to the phrasing and the small details that I was astounded. They also had a real rapport, making the final section of this ballet reverberate even more. In the final section, the dancers turn from relating to the musicians to relating to each other. Just as they were inspired by the music, man is inspired by woman, Balanchine seems to be saying. Having seen this ballet live twice with NYCB principals Yvonne Borree and Nikolaj Hubbe, this performance blew those two away. It deserved the loud applause it got.

Bizet Variations by Alexei Ratmansky followed. Ratmansky is the artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre but plans to leave that position later this year to pursue more choreographing opportunities. He has already received much praise for ballets he has choreographed, and this evening was the American premiere of this work. He follows the lush romanticism of Bizet’s work too closely. The ballet is for three men and three women, and my first distraction was the costumes – shades of shimmery purple with turquoise accents. The women wore royal purple, lavender, and violent dresses with turquoise underskirts; the men wore purple shirts. There were a lot of sequins in the headdresses and on the bodices. I alternated between finding them acceptable considering the overly dramatic music, and thinking they looked like bad outfits for an ice dancing competition. The story is something like: there are two guys and two girls. Another guys comes along, both the girls think he’s a real hunk and go after him, much to the displeasure of the two guys. All of a sudden, another girl, the prettiest one at the ball, comes in, and the three fellows want her, but of course the hunky guy gets her, while the other two go back to their previous rejects. But then the five, in their excitement, run off and leave the prettiest girl alone. She’s sad, dejected, dramatic. Then they come back, the hunky guy takes the prettiest girl in his arms again, and all is well. Gimmicky, largely forgettable, clichéd, lacking in texture, were all words I wrote in the program. At one point all three men even fall to the ground and slide on the stage towards the women doing tendu back. Yes, that clichéd – I think Susan Stroman used it in her utterly awful “ballet” for the teen movie Center Stage. I was really disappointed, even though the ballet featured Ms. Ananiashvili as the prettiest girl. She’s big-eyed, has a clearly readable face, and her dancing is still detailed – one feels she could tell an entire story just with the unfolding of a leg. But it wasn’t enough in this work that had the feel of a throw-away piece.

Sagalobeli (pictured above), also an American premiere of a work by San Francisco Ballet’s resident choreographer, Yuri Possokhov, was the closer. I wanted to stay for this piece if only to listen to the Georgian traditional music (a taped performance by the Sagalobeli Ensemble). In the program notes, Possokhov comments that he did not want to make a Georgian folk dance, yet what he accomplished seems to me to be a work that uses the ballet idiom but has a folk dance aesthetic. The women, wearing long dresses, dance in pointe shoes, but they move in bourrees – a feature of Georgian dancing for women – or in heel motions. There’s a lot of sinuous arm movement and hip swaying that goes on too. The men, in their outfits that look like a less sado-masochistic version of the Bolshoi’s Spartacus costumes, do a lot of the flexed foot, wide stance, fast jumps associated with folk dances from the Caucasus. While they never actually start doing the lezghinka, the aesthetic is there. The music was a mish-mash, lovely but lacking in cohesion. The dance was the same way – I don’t think the audience knew when the ballet ended. And yet, even with the lack of cohesiveness, I enjoyed the work and felt with a bit of re-tooling, it could be quite a good work and perhaps a signature piece for the company. The dancers clearly have a natural feel for this music – they were rhythmic and expressive in a way that was lacking in the Balanchine piece. Of course, this work was also not as technically challenging, but they really impressed me with their level of assurance and the authority they conveyed - one could see a proud stance even in the position of their shoulders. Both Ms. Gogua, this time for her beautiful floating adagio, and Khozashvili again really impressed me – the eye is drawn to these two. Khozashvili has a marvelous upper body for a male dancer – capable of being sinuous and expressive while never becoming effeminate. He’s also an incredibly clean dancer who can jump high while still maintaining his lines. This was also a piece that showed off the men, and they really took to this take-off of male folk dancing. It reminded me that folk dancing is regarded as a very masculine activity in Eastern Europe and the Asian steppes, and most of the great male ballet dancers from those areas had their start as young boys in folk dancing classes.

Final note: the lighting throughout all the ballets was absolutely awful. At times it was too dim, then the spotlight would be on the wrong person or on the wrong area of the stage. I felt lucky to be sitting fairly close so that it wasn't TOO distracting, but gosh, that was an extremely poor lighting job.

*I haven't written more about Ms. Ananiashvili because a lot of biographical material about her and reviews of her dancing are easily found online. She is also featured in a number of videos. A quote from a recent interview with her:

I think we do this for people, because life has become so computerized, we have forgotten how to talk to one other. We do this for the future, for our kids. Ballet brings back human love and human life — we need to have contact with each other during these crazy times. If you see good theater, good art, you don’t want go out and kill people, you know? If you get inspired, you want to tell other people, to share it. Once, a postman told me he used to love opera the most, but then he saw me dancing on television, and he began to really like ballet. That is why I do this job—to make people happy. There are times after a performance when fans will come to me and say that they feel lucky in their lifetime to have seen me dance. This is wonderful. It reminds me that as a dancer, you really don’t live for nothing. You live for something.

Interpretation as Doctrine

2008-02-07T17:53:00.000-06:00

There is a moment in the central adagio of Balanchine’s Diamonds where the ballerina is in fourth position on pointe and then tilts her head back ever so slightly, places her right palm against the back of her head, and extends her left arm parallel to her upturned sight-line. For two decades, this pose became the source of endless speculation, with people suspecting that it gave hints of the mystery at the heart of this pas de deux. It proved that Balanchine was writing in movement the story of the chaste goddess of the night, Diana, on a hunt, showing her bow – the jutting right elbow – and her arrow – her extended left arm. Or it revealed that Diamonds was Balanchine’s take on A mon seul desír: a maiden walking in the woods, unaware of all around her, but so enticing that a unicorn would lie in her lap – see, the ballerina’s hand at the back of her head is a position of lady-like authority from the 19^th century ballet Raymonda, and the extended left arm is the unicorn’s horn. Or it was similar to the arm positions that the trapped maiden Odette makes and “Diamonds” was Balanchine’s Swan Lake fantasy with a happy ending.

And then Suzanne Farrell, the originator of the ballerina role, wrote about the origin of the pose in her autobiography: she was standing on pointe, and since Balanchine had not told her what to do with her arms at that moment, she decided, “oh, I'll model the beautiful headpiece Karinska (the costume designer) is going to make for me.” Balanchine didn’t disapprove of the unorthodox epaulement, so she repeated it several times and it remained in the ballet, to be debated over by a whole generation of critics and balletomanes. And one can see immediately, once knowing this, that this is the type of glam-girl pose a 20-year-old (as Farrell was at the time) would strike to show off her beautiful headpiece – slightly petulant and haughty, meant to draw attention to her face and head. Balanchine hadn’t created that pose and Farrell wasn’t thinking of any high-brow notions when she tossed her head and arms that way; it probably could have been any number of poses at that moment without disturbing the ‘meanings’ within this non-narrative ballet.

In one sense, the actual reason behind this pose doesn’t matter – what matters is the meaning the audience draws from it in the context of the ballet; in other words, what matters is what the audience feels. But I think it’s also a good example of our tendency to see greater meaning in moments that are entirely practical – the romanticism that Arturo speaks of. Reading a forum for Catholic traditionalists several weeks ago, I was struck by one thread about the ‘meaning’ behind each part of the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite (as it is now known), linking each part with the Passion narrative. Ironically, one of the few religious books my grandmother owned also had text explaining the ‘meaning’ of what the priest was doing, and unsurprisingly, the ‘meaning’ of various parts of the Mass differed from the descriptions given on the forum. All of that is fine and dandy, but I noticed the tendency to treat the lack of these exact moments as the reason the Novus Ordo was invalid – it didn’t show the Passion like it should, the priest HAS to kneel three times here to show that Christ fell three times, etc. It took something, that from my reading, was a late medieval inclination to provide explanations for events in the Mass in terms of the Passion narrative, and turned it into dogma, part of the faith once delivered.

Another example was with a family member, who thought that the sanctus/sacring bells HAD to be rung during the Mass, because that was the way, according to the Psalms, that the angels and the Holy Spirit knew that Christ was about to be present on the altar. No sanctus bells, no Holy Spirit, and no angels. Sanctus bells of course have an entirely practical and earthly purpose – they are rung at the epiclesis and at the elevation of the Host and Chalice. When the priest is speaking softly in Latin and at a distance (if viewable) facing ad orientem, it would indeed be difficult to know when the former moment had arrived without the ringing of bells, a non-noxious attention-getter. And of course, at a church with side altars, the congregation knows when the Host is elevated in one part of the church through the ringing of the bells. However, a pious nun, probably hoping to enrich her students’ participation in the Mass, had taught my relative that the angels came to earth at those moments, and the Holy Spirit wouldn’t know to come down without the bells. Such thoughts are worthy of meditation and remind one of what is occurring in the Mass, but they are not part of the deposit of faith and were not intended to be, and their lack certainly does not automatically render one practice (or liturgy) superior to another.

I also notice that this tendency towards romantically treating moments for meditation in liturgy as if they are Tradition seems to be especially prevalent among converts and those who grew up in a Protestant milieu. I wonder if they don’t know from where to get tradition (with a small t). All tradition must be Tradition, because one has never really seen tradition, in action? Everything that happens during the liturgy must have a separate grander purpose than what we see/hear that is filled with rich meaning, because we lack an organic sense of how to be religious in our lives? I grew up in an area of the country where everyone attends Novus ordo Masses and we also have elaborate, saint-filled Churches, Mardi Gras, St. Joseph’s altars, processions on Palm Sunday and Corpus Christi (even around the whole town!), St. Rosalie Festivals, white-washing of tombs for All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, blessings of the fishermen’s boats, etc. Perhaps the French in southern LA, feeling superior to American Protestants, never quite capitulated to Protestantism the way it seems many Irish and Italian immigrants did within a few generations, letting their traditions die. Perhaps it’s just New Orleans Creoles and Cajuns being particularly ornery when it comes to their own French and Italian-derived Catholic traditions. And while there’s plenty of longing, it isn’t “oh, we need rediscover what it is to be Catholic in this way that has been lost to us….” You just pray, participate in the activities and live your life. The way for those in southeastern Louisiana doesn’t have to be the way everyone else does it – never has been – but it also doesn’t necessarily have to be expressions from the past treated as apostolic practice.

Notes on Watching Dance on Video

2008-02-01T17:45:00.000-06:00

Galina Ulanova in Swan Lake

Some critics have described dance as the most ephemeral of the arts. It exists only at the moment of performance, and unlike even another performing art such as music, which can be recorded and give one a good idea of the performance, if not the performer-audience pact, recordings of dance can be, at best, decent and at worst, wholly misleading. But recordings are the primary (sometimes the only) way that most people are exposed to great dance, especially for those that don’t love in a city large or diverse enough to maintain a dance troupe, be it Western classical or Indian or Irish step. So we are stuck with video.

First note about video: dance, a three-dimensional art, is flattened into two dimensions. Thus, movements toward upstage and downstage are not really seen with the same impact as side to side and up and down (in both Western and Indian classical dance, the stance of the hips and feet are designed for maximal movement in the major eight 8 directions from the body). In addition to the lack of correct spatial orientation and correct viewing of the angles, it deprives us of one of the most important aspects of all dance – breath. All forms of dance that have a school of steps have an attitude, for lack of a better word, about breathing – how to deal with the necessity of it, how it should be done, how it should determine the other movements of the body and be coordinated…. But on video, dancers usually don’t look like they’re concealing inhalation and exhalation - they simply look like they don’t breathe at all. Whether we recognize it or not, this changes the meaning of the dance for the viewer of what is being seen. Instead of seeing the human body, we feel that we are seeing some robotic form that appears human. We relate to the image and what that image is doing differently. As one critic put it, all dancers look disembodied on video.

In video, there is up and there is down. But there is not ground or air. A Western classical dancer rising up onto a single pointe does not look like she is defying gravity, using strength and balance to hold a pose – she just looks like she’s doing something that would be painful – all her weight on that one spot! An Indian classical dancer sliding a flat foot along the ground and then bending the working leg behind her high into the air just looks like she’s showing off her flexibility. Since we are not experiencing the effect of gravity alongside the dancer overcoming its effect, movements that utilize ground and air (and all dance does) look merely like technical feats.

And then there’s the problem of camera work. I don’t need to point out that the camera views images in a different way than the eye sees, and differences on the technical side of recording can really impact one’s enjoyment of performances from, say, nearly a century ago. At another level, individual shots/dances look better than group shots, and if there are a lot of dancers about, when they move around on stage for a long time during a wide shot they just look like ants. (It always amazes me how powerfully meaningful the dance for a large corps de ballet can look on stage, and how awful it typically looks on video.

In summary, dance that favors straight lines, crisp movement, and lots of quantitatively measurable elements looks great on video when compared to dance that doesn’t feature these elements. (It is also favors thin-bodied dancers – they make for clearer lines.) The classical ballet roles look fantastic on video compared to some works of contemporary choreographers. (A William Forsythe piece stands out as being particularly bad – with two dancers low to the floor/ground, involving lots of unorthodox turns and spins with the torso bent, it was nearly unwatchable. It may be unwatchable on stage too, but it’s really impossible to judge.)

Am I suggesting that all video of dance should just be burned because it is a substitute so inferior it shouldn’t be used, or as Suzanne Farrell once commented, viewing dance on video is like watching ghosts? Considering that Farrell is my favorite dancer and she retired from performance a full decade before I even became interested in dance, of course not. For me, the great dancers still look like the great dancers even without being able to see their spontaneity, although those with less than ideal bodies can’t be fairly judged – ballerina Lynn Seymour is a great example. Dances are recognizable, if deprived of some of their impact and meaning. I have seen recorded performances that were better than live performances. The recorded performance below, of Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev in 1940, is the greatest performance of the Act II Swan Lake adagio I’ve yet seen - one can watch it on youtube, even though it is danced as a recital piece in front of a curtain, and thus robbed of its context.

So what I would suggest to people watching recorded dance performances is to be open-minded about what they are seeking. Recognize and remind yourself of the limitations and insufficiency of the medium for capturing dance, and try to re-create in your mind a proper stage space and orient to the movement. Even breathe in and out with the rhythm of the music, to have some feel of the motions that the dancers are doing. This should never replace attending live performances, but at times, it is the best we can do.

Alien Music

2008-01-22T15:51:00.000-06:00

Spacescaping: (according to Terry Riley) combining the sounds of plasma waves in space with a string quartet and chorus

On stage are small metal rods of varying heights; these rods have lights along their axes and at each tip that illuminate to a blue-white glow. The backdrop is a screen that fades from dark blue at the top to light blue at the bottom. A man carrying a violin walks on stage, sits down, and waves his bow over his music stand. A point of bright green light appears, and we hear a large bellowing sound, like a deep voice in a huge underground cavern, that fades away gently to a whisper. A few seconds pass, and the man repeats the sweep of his arm. This time the sound is an electronic twitter that ends abruptly. A man holding a cello walks onto the stage, settles down, and waves his hand behind him over a rod. Again, a point of green light. The sound is an unearthly mid-range chirping. Eventually, as these two men continue their arm sweeps, a violist and another violinist join them on stage, and all four men take part in these motions and each time they do sounds are heard. Eventually, the first man on stage brings bow to string, and the familiar sounds of a violin began, as the screen shifts from blue to a display of different geometric shapes. For those who don’t know, they are close-up pictures of the “how to play” instructions on the gold record sent on the Voyager space craft in 1977 that contains sounds from Earth – to those out there, this is how we sound.

Thus begins Terry Riley’s Sun Rings, a ten-part work performed by the Kronos Quartet and the Stanford Chamber Chorale at Stanford on January 18. The work was commissioned in 2002 for the Kronos Quartet by the NASA Art Program, among others. The work is a multimedia presentation – visual design by Willie Williams, lighting design by Laurence Neff, and sound design by mark Grey – that utilizes sounds of plasma waves from outer space, string instruments, human voices, and pictures of stars, swirling orbs, mathematical equations, the solar prominences, and life here on Earth.

The sounds from space are from the collection of physicist Don Gurnett, a builder of plasma-wave receivers sent on interplanetary spacecraft. Plasma, ionized gas, can propagate waves caused by the movement of a series of electrically charged particles and the response of those particles to electromagnetic fields. The waves that a plasma can support can reveal a great deal of the characteristics of that plasma. The waves themselves are detectable with an electrical antenna and a radio receiver. Thus, we know that lightening and the Northern lights make whistling sounds, electrons trapped in magnetic fields (such as those surrounding most of the planets) make bird-like sounds called chorus, and the place near Jupiter where the solar wind (high velocity plasma) meets Jupiter’s magnetic field sounds like a sonic boom.

The work uses those sounds, looped rhythmically or played in response to a hand movement from the musicians. The musicians sometimes duplicate those sounds, at other times the sounds are the background for rapid-fire arpeggios. At all times, the sounds from the stage are accompanied by visuals on the screen behind the musicians and by the lights of the rods. At one point, as the musicians begin playing music so lush it could be a Brahms string quartet, the rods light up at their tips and the screen reflects the blackness with twinkling light from the stars - the night sky. This drifting into space dissolves as the violist plays increasingly dissonant sounds, and the screen becomes fiery red, and then fades into orange and yellow as the violins repeatedly play a 6-note lullaby.

At another point in the piece, human voices join in and duplicate the space sounds: in a choral feat, while holding long notes, they manage to sound like chirps and eerie whistles. They sing words that cannot be identified, but as the musicians stop playing and the screen goes black, they begin to flatly speak sentences – a cacophony of the various phrases that we, through radio waves, constantly send out into space.

This work reminded me of the necessity of the experience of live performances – the immediacy of it, the thrill of being part of an audience participating in the event. I don’t think I would have enjoyed this work (indeed, I’m not a big Terry Riley fan) listening to it on cd or watching a clip on youtube. Some things need to be able to pierce you or engulf you (visually and aurally). And it’s partly because of the features of live performance that I cannot recall the last time art left me so optimistic. There’s a certain sunny innocence in our explorations of the other planets and further out into deep space, in our desire to send out little feelers and try to see and hear what’s out there, and wanting whatever it is out there to know what’s back here – the desire to communicate as a basic human yearning.

The final part of the work begins with the well-known image of man and woman on the Pioneer plaque, his hand waved in a friendly gesture. The work ends with the words “One earth…one people” spoken over and over again, as various images from earth show up on the screen. And the final sound is a human voice saying, “one love.”

This record represents our hope and our determination
and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

- Jimmy Carter on the Voyager record

Why I love Jesus

2008-01-17T16:01:00.000-06:00

Response to a very old meme from Crimson Catholic, so it gets a very long post

1. Because my mom taught me to. When I was a very young child and my older sister was off at school, my days were spent entirely with my mom, just the two of us. Our schedule began with her coming into my room, singing “Good morning to you!” Then after the usual morning activities (getting dressed, eating breakfast), she’d dab some Holy Water on my fingers so I could make the sign of the Cross and off we were off…to church. My mom attended (she still does) daily Mass, and I’d play with her crystal and blue rosary, or look at the statues, or read my picture books on the Virgin Mary or the saints – my parents allowed us to bring books to Mass, but only if they were about religious figures – and she would do the responses, the kneeling, and so on that I couldn’t follow. I’d have to move from my odd positions sitting on the kneeler, arms across the pew (as young children often get into strange positions when kneelers and pews are available) when she came back from Communion, and then I’d watch her and she’d kneel down, place the first and second fingers of both hands on her temples, cover her face with the rest of her hands, and bow her head. She would go on praying like this for three minutes or so, and I’d wonder what she was thinking or saying. Then her head would lift and she’d gaze at the tabernacle.

After Mass, we’d pray the Stations of the Cross; rather, she would pray them while I would walk back and forth, up and down, from the Resurrection to the Fourth or Seventh Station, repeatedly, because it was taking her so long to crawl on her knees up those stairs, and I liked the blinding effect of the sudden sunlight at the end of the Stations (on the roof) compared to the darkness on the stairs inside the building. After the roof, we went back into the building that looked like a blue cave for a statue of the Virgin.

Then we would go and run the daily errands. In addition, often we would visit a nursing home, where the elderly would pinch my cheeks or tug on my pigtails, and come March, bring me lots of fig and sesame cookies from the St. Joseph’s Altars that were set up in many Catholic nursing homes. I hated the smell of the old people and would ask not to go there, but my mom would say, “You don’t know how happy it makes the people there to see you. Do it for Jesus.” And oh, my mother’s constant refrain to any report of discomfort (after a quick lookover): “Offer it up for the poor souls in Purgatory.” As I got older, I realized that we already prayed, every night, for the poor souls in Purgatory, so I asked my mom would I should continue offering up my small sufferings for them – wasn’t praying for them enough? With a look of subdued horror and infinite patience that I think only mothers can perfect, she said to me, “AG, many of the poor souls don’t have anyone to pray for them.” I thought it was so awful, all these people wandering around in Purgatory with no one to shine a little prayer light on them, and I’d nearly start crying and pray for them even more.

As I got older, my mom began spending much of her time with other people’s young children, teaching them their colors and shapes, how to read and how to count. She taught these children in their homes, wrecked by a combination of teenage pregnancy, poverty, substance abuse, and incarceration. She’d also clean the houses, wash laundry, and prepare dinner for older people who were homebound – people she had learned of through Church who didn’t have family nearby, and who everyone else seemed to have no time for – and she would do these things for free, of course. I would sometimes get annoyed when she was away for 5 hours cleaning someone’s house – “How long does it take you to do that?” And she’d reply, in her way, “I can’t just do those things; it’s very important that I stay and chat with them and sit and have a cup of coffee. That’s what matters the most to them.”

My mom taught me other things too – she read the children’s Bible to me, she taught me all my prayers, she pointed to the Virgin and told me that she was my mother too – but it was her example that made its imprint. What does it mean to receive God? It means to bury one’s face in one’s hands and pray intensely, and then extend one’s gaze in contemplation at His earthly dwelling. Why in the world would my mom, who in my estimation has always been as far from a great sinner as night is from day, get in her knees and crawl up stairs while meditating on the Passion? How in the world could my mom clean the house of an ornery elderly woman who was given to making nasty statements about blacks (unware of my mom’s race), and then even come home and make cookies for this woman because she thought the woman would appreciate a homemade treat? What could move her to do that?

2. Because of the examples of Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. The twin pillars of light of my early childhood. The images of Mother Teresa holding sickly children and comforting the dying. Why would anyone choose such a life? And oh, John Paul II. I wasn’t moved by him just because I wanted to be pope one day, and he was keeping the chair warm for me. When this Polish guy with a round face and charismatic smile stood amongst a million people, holding a Crucifix and said “I love you! Christ loves YOU!” I could feel it to the tips of my toes. He didn’t even know me, but through Christ, he loved me? How amazing is that! “How much do I love you?” “This much!” with an arm span that can wrap around the whole world. I have no real patience for those who harp on the pastoral decisions of John Paul II during his pontificate, when the man yelled to the world over and over again that life is love, the Cross is love, suffering is love. His cry is the response to our cynical age, so it’s no surprise that cynics can’t hear it. If Mother Teresa was what love looked like in the small spaces of suffering and death – My arms can tenderly hold the least of you - John Paul II was what love looked on the big scale where love is never-ending and keeps giving of itself– My arms can hold all of you.

3. Because of Mother Mary and the saints. Enough said.

4. Because in the above three points, I began to understand what Jesus was all about, to use modern slang. What could lead these people to do the things they did? They showed me that it’s not about them, but about Jesus in them. And they are examples of the most mind-blowing fact of our existence – that Jesus works on the individual level, in each of us; He’s the one who makes it possible for us to give of ourselves, He loves us perfectly and unceasingly, and He gives us everything and can move us to every good thing. And not just me, but everyone.

Nureyev on PBS' Great Performances

2007-08-27T16:24:00.001-05:00

This week, PBS stations will be showing a new documentary on legendary ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, including that elusive "never before seen footage." Be sure to check it out!

Morris' "Mozart Dances"

2007-08-16T17:35:00.000-05:00

Mark Morris' recent dance to three of Mozart's works for piano can be seen on PBS in the Live from Lincoln Center program, starting tonight (check local listings by scrolling to the bottom).

From Joan Acocella's review in The New Yorker:

Why is he so popular? One reason, I think, is that he gives people the modern pleasure of seeing abstract work without leaving them scratching their heads over what it was about. Though he may not have a story on the surface, he always has one underneath, in the form of movement motifs. For every dance, he devises a certain number of key gestures, which he then weaves through the choreography. Some of these gestures are naturalistic. In “Mozart Dances,” for example, there is one that could be called the “danger” motif: the dancer suddenly turns and looks behind him, as if he had heard a strange sound, and then looks back at us as if to say, “Did you hear that?” But others of Morris’s motifs have no obvious meaning when he first shows them to us. Only in the course of the dance do they come to tell a story.

A Brief Tharp Diversion

2007-07-11T15:31:00.000-05:00

Following up on this post: when discussing Tharp’s work with A.V. and why I don’t regard her as highly as Paul Taylor or even Mark Morris, I realized that part of the problem for me is the lack of dance images in her work. She has a mastery of movement - an ability to break movement apart and put it back together so that simple steps are seen in new and clever ways – but lacks that gift for creating/assembling a movement or placing a configuration of bodies in a way, that, no matter how theatrically artificial, feels like something that happens in one’s own (interior) life, as critic Robert Garis liked to describe great dance images. It’s the difference between finding yourself participating in the dance with one’s own body (Tharp’s works do make you feel this), and feeling emotionally and spiritually involved in the work when the emotion isn’t adrenaline-evoked elation but communal experience. She lacks the intuition of an image-maker.

Tied to this is the lack of stillness in her work – not actual motionlessness, but the feeling of breathing, which is in itself real stillness (not-breathing is a void). Sometimes it seems that no matter the dance (and what steps the dancers are actually performing), everyone in a mature Tharp work is jitterbugging like mad in the California sixties - this is where the energy level of her dances often resides. And it’s for that reason that I suspect she is sometimes criticized as being too commercial: not because she does commercial ventures (almost every great choreographer has done “s/lighter” works to sell tickets), but because her works, while sometimes brilliant, are not transcendent. As a result, her ingenuity in movement comes across as a clever gag – slickness. And I can think of no other choreographer who would have written a book titled, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. The polar opposite of Balanchine’s “one can’t talk about such things.”

Now back to Balanchine, NYCB, and my favorite dancer, Suzanne Farrell…

NYCB Style - Part II: The Farrell Influence, by Croce

2007-07-11T15:27:00.000-05:00

Suzanne Farrell in the sixties

“Balanchine's Girls: The Making of Style” April 1971, Croce.
[Farrell] was big and strong and handsome, but without much personal force. In her tiny leotard, she looked very like a big bee, but more like a woman-sized baby. With that almost perverse precocity that was then characteristic of the younger generation, she could do anything Balanchine asked of her, and do it on a grander scale, at greater speed, and with a silkier recovery and sense of control than anyone else. And then we began to see that Farrell had a line that was positively voluptuous. Farrell, her stage personality as yet undeveloped, moved at once into a lead position. Our style was thin no more.

In any decently written history of the NYCB, the years 1963-9 would consume several chapters. The Farrell Years saw the company remade in a new, younger, and more romantic image. For Farrell personally they began in glory and ended in confusion and estrangement. Because of her importance to Balanchine – she was probably the most important dancer who ever entered his life – her rise to prima status was spectacular and sudden, perhaps too sudden. When her break with Balanchine came in the middle of the 1969 season, her repertory totaled 32 roles. She was everywhere and nowhere. Her beauty fascinated more people than were repelled by her flamboyance. She transformed the company, freed Balanchine from the excessive braininess of “modernism” and departed, like Dulcinea, who in the ballet is apotheosized, the Queen of Heaven. Her place in the history of the company is sacrosanct.

Peter Martins and Farrell in Diamonds, photo by Paul Kolnik

“Farrell and Farrellism” February 1975, Croce.

It isn’t that Farrell is so terribly big; it’s that she dances big in relation to her base of support. The lightness of the instep, the speed of her dégagé are still thrilling. You’d think a dancer moving that fast couldn’t possibly consume so much space – that she’d have to be more squarely planted. Farrell defies the logic of mechanics, and in that defiance is the essence of the new heroism she brought to Balanchine’s stage a little over a decade ago.

Farrell and Balanchine 'shopping' for jewelry, mid-70s

“Free and More Than Equal” February 1975, Croce.
Farrell’s independent drive no longer seems unacceptable burdensome to her, and her mastery implies no rebuke. And what mastery it is – of continual off-center balances maintained with light support or no support at all, of divergently shaped steps unthinkable combined in the same phrase, of invisible transitions between steps and delicate shifts of weight in poses that reveal new and sweet harmonies or proportion no matter how wide or subtle the contrast. Your eye gorges on her variety, your heart stops at the brink of very precipice. She, however, sails calmly out into space and returns as if the dancer did not exist. Farrell’s style in Diamonds (and the third act of Don Quixote) is based on risk; she is almost always off balance and always secure. Her confidence in moments of great risk gives her the leeway to suggest what no ballerina has suggested before her – that she can sustain herself, that she can go it alone. Farrell perfects the act of balance/imbalance as a constant feature of dancing. It is not equilibrium as stasis, it is equilibrium as continuity that she excels in. Although she can take a piqué arabesque and stand unaided, she’s capable of much more; her conquests are really up there where the richer hazards are. In the finale, her partner is only there to stop her. She slips like a fish through his hands. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t wait, doesn’t depend, and she can’t fall. She’s like someone who has learned to breathe thin air. Of course, the autonomy of the ballerina is an illusion, but Farrell’s is the extremest form of this illusion we have yet seen, and it makes Diamonds a riveting spectacle about the freest woman alive.

Jacob's Family History: The State Isaac is in

2007-07-09T14:32:00.000-05:00

A prologue to the discussion of Jacob

Isaac is the patriarch principally remembered for being conned by family members, twice. First, by his father to his near sacrifice (he even carried the wood); second, by his wife and younger twin son for the only thing an old man has left to give: his blessing.

Compared to the chapters covering his father Abraham and his son Jacob, Isaac gets short shrift in the Bible. One rabbi wrote that his story is meant to indicate "continuity." Indeed, Isaac has a wife brought to him by his father's servant, he leaves for new land as his father did, he gets in a scuffle with a ruler for his wife, as his father did. He even re-digs his father's wells. His prayer comes in the afternoon (Genesis 24:64), neither the stand of his father at morning (Genesis 19:27) or the alertness of his son at night (Genesis 28:11). God gives him wealth and blessings, but his is a static personality in between that of two dynamos. What's up with Isaac?

We get a hint near the end of his life: his eyes are too dim to see (Genesis 27:1). According to Genesis Rabbah 65:6, "when Isaac was bound on the altar, and his father was about to slaughter him, the heavens opened, and the ministering angels saw and wept, and their tears fell upon Isaac’s eyes. As a result, his eyes became dim." In Jewish tradition, it is also significant that Isaac is the patriach who introduces suffering as a blessing of God (for Abraham, old age; for Jacob, sickness). Isaac's blindness is not just a physical malady, but a mental state. He has seen death at his father's hand, and death haunts him like a shadow the rest of his life. He has no vision of his own, for suffering and death cloud his eyes.

The binding of Isaac, the Akedah, then takes on new meaning: Isaac is not only physically bound onto the altar to be a sacrifice, but is henceforth psychologically bound. His vision, while still under formation, becomes trapped. He serves the Lord without rebellion and is successful, but he has no creative spirit to drive him into the spiritual territory of Abraham or Jacob. In some ways, he is a dead man walking. God even accounts for him as dead while he is still alive. When Rebekah meets him, she covers her head with a veil. While this is the tradition of marriage and modesty, it can also be read as covering one's self with a death shroud. The Hebrew word used -"she covered herself" - also means "she was buried." She dies to herself to live with a dying man.

In childhood, I had a book about female women of the Bible. In these girl-friendly tales, the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah is seen as a "happy" marriage, free of the conflict and turmoil that occurred in the households of Abraham and Jacob, who both took other wives/concubines. But a woman who dupes her blind husband in as elaborate a plot as Rebekah sets up and then stands watch to make sure Jacob receives the blessing isn't the happiest and most devoted of wives. Indeed, Rebekah cries, "Why am I here?"

It's into this strange environment that Esau and Jacob are born. Why does Isaac favor Esau? Esau is a hunter, he wanders the field - those who wander cannot stand firmly on the ground. To wander is a curse from God (see Cain), yet Esau chooses to do so. Esau takes an unbeliever as a wife. Is Isaac's love for Esau a manifestation of his own rebellion against God?

Rather, Esau is Isaac's physical state. In his mind, Isaac must wander, haunted, lacking a vision for his life. Even Esau's statements to Jacob, "I am faint...I am dying," are the words of his father on Mount Moriah and throughout his life. Isaac and Esau are both trapped: one by events under divine decree, the other by choice. Isaac sympathizes with Esau, and favors him, as he also favors Esau's displays of virility, without seeing their superficiality.

P.S. An important point here: the God of the Old Testament, of Judaism, is not an arbitrary God. When St. Paul writes that God 'hated' Esau, one has to look at what Esau has done in his life. He takes an unbeliever as his wife; he "cares little for his birthright/ he despised his birthright." Esau chooses to be a hunter, forever wandering. Esau has earned God's disregard.

In addition to Genesis Rabbah and Rashi's commentary, see also Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's The Beginning of Desire

Life moves fast....

2007-07-09T11:47:00.000-05:00

First, I apologize for the long delay in blogging. Almost every day in June, I thought to myself, “Today I will have a chance to finish up such-and-such post for my blog,” but it never happened.

Second, it is not fun to travel I-80 across the country. There are a few crude jokes to be made about a ubiquitous Iowa gas station chain, the Minute-Men of Lexington, Nebraska, and a fine-dining establishment in Wyoming that served ‘Es Cargo’ (and it had an herb aftertaste). But it is close to Lake Tahoe (my recommendation: travel the Nevada side even though they charge you to park). It is less fun to do this trek when you have a cat in the backseat who believes in waiting ‘til everyone is in the car and the car is cruising at 80 mph on the interstate before takin’ care of business.

Third, I will hopefully post more regularly once I have a daily schedule worked out, and will resume the series of posts I promised way back when.

Fourth, God bless you all and thank you for your patience.

Glory

2007-05-31T12:58:00.000-05:00

If anyone says "I am God," apart from the One, he should
set up a world equal to this and say, "This is mine."
He should not only set it up and call it "mine," but also should himself dwell
in that which he has made. For it has been made by this one.

Credited to Pythagoras by Pseudo-Justin, De Monarchia 2 (3rd century A.D.)

Behold, the Lord is our mirror.
Open your eyes and see them in Him.

And learn the manner of your face,
then announce praises to His Spirit.

And wipe the paint from your face,
and love His holiness and put it on.

Then you will be unblemished at all times with Him.

Hallelujah.

Ode 13 of the Odes of Solomon (early 2nd century, A.D.)

Christ Speaks

I took courage and became strong and captured the world,
and it became mine for the glory of the Most High, and of God my Father.

And the gentiles who have been scattered were gathered together,
but I was not defiled by my love for them,
because they had praised me in high places.

And the traces of light were set upon their hearts,
and they walked according to my life and were saved,
and they became my people for ever and ever.

Hallelujah.

Part of Ode 10 from the Odes of Solomon

I extended my hands
and hallowed my Lord;

For the expansion of my hands
is his sign.

And my extension
is the upright cross.

Hallelujah.

Ode 27 of the Odes of Solomon

Works from The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Volume 2, edited by JH Charlesworth (1985). Thanks Fr. Greg!

Conception

2007-05-31T12:23:00.000-05:00

The soul and body of a human being are united in the following manner: After a man and woman have made love and the woman has conceived, the Angel of the Night, Lilah, carries the sperm before God. God then decides what shall be the distinguishing characteristics of that child – whether the child shall be male or female, strong or weak, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, long or short, fat or thin. Piety and wickedness, however, are left to the determination of the individual.

Then God signals the angel who has been given the charge to watch over that particular soul. God says, “Bring Me the soul of this child whose form is hidden in Paradise.” The angel brings the designated soul. At that moment, God issues the command for the soul to enter the sperm. Yet the soul pleads, “Ribbono shel Olam. I am well pleased with this world, the world in which I have been living since You have called me forth into being. Why do You suddenly want me to enter into this sperm, I who am pure and filled with divine glory?” God consoles her by saying, “The World I shall cause you to enter is better than the world in which you have been living. When I created you, it was only for this purpose.” The soul is then forced to enter the sperm and the angel carries her back to the womb of her mother. Two angels are dispatched to watch over the soul so that she will not leave it or drop out of it. A light is set above her so that the soul can see from one end of the world to the other.

In the morning, the angel carries the soul to Paradise and shows her the righteous who sit in glory with crowns upon their heads. The angel then says to the soul, “Do you know where you are? These whom you behold here were formed, like you, in the womb of their mother. When they came into this world, they observed God’s Torah and followed God’s mitzvot. They were good, decent people. As partners with their Creator, following their body’s death, they now enjoy this Paradise. Know also that you will one day depart this world. If you only observe God’s Toray you too will eventually sit with them. If not, you will be doomed to sit in the other place.”

In the evening, the angel takes the soul to hell and there points out the sinners whom the Angel of Destruction is taunting with fire. During the visit, the soul hears the sinners crying out in the black night, “Woe! Woe!” But no mercy is shown to them. The Angel then asks the same question that was asked before: “Do you know who these people are? They are now consumed with fire but there were created just like you. When they were sent out into the world, they forgot their origins they did not observe God’s Torah and mitzvot. Therefore they have to come to the disgrace they now suffer. Know that your destiny is also to depart from this world. Be just, therefore, and not wicked, so that you may gain entrance to a future world.”

Between morning and evening the angel carries the soul around and shows her where she will lie and where she will die, and the place that she will be buried. The angel takes her on a tour of the entire world. In the evening, the angel places the soul in the womb of the mother, and there she remains for nine months. During this time, the angel assigned to the soul teaches Torah to the babe. When the time arrives for her to emerge from the womb into the world, the soul is reluctant to leave. She has enjoyed the warmth of the womb and the light of Torah. So the angel touches the babe above the lip and sends it forth in to the world. Immediately the child forgets all it had seen and comes into the world crying, yearning for the Torah it now does not realize it has lost.

Based on Tanchuma, Pekudei from Sacred Moments: Tales from the Jewish Life Cycle selected and edited by Isaacs and Olitzky (1995).

Tharp's "The Catherine Wheel," the Pineapple as Metaphor

2007-05-30T13:22:00.000-05:00

Kansas City Ballet dancers in The Golden Section, photo by Steve Wilson

Review of filmed performance of Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel (1981), set to music by David Byrne.

When is a pineapple just a pineapple? Not when Twyla Tharp is using it in a psychodrama about the disintegration of the nuclear family, the shallowness of modern (post-modern) life, and the exploitation of nuclear power. The pineapple - yellow on the inside like the sun (get it, energy!), shaped like a grenade (get it, destruction!), and a traditional gift to a family in a new home (get it, energy and destruction in the home!!!). If you think these metaphors are silly, the large narrative section of The Catherine Wheel is not for you.

For myself, there are all sorts of fruit that carry semi-relevant connotations - one has to be careful with watermelons for instance (racist), apples (the fruit of temptation, unless you are down with the quince argument), pomegranates (Persephone AND the Church), even strawberries (if you are a child of the 80s, you know that there was nothing quite as delectable as the smell of Strawberry Shortcake dolls). And vegetables are just rife with alternate meanings. But pineapples? Only meaningful if you are Carmen Miranda, and it seems, Twyla Tharp. (I really think Gilbert and Sullivan found "Pineapple Poll" to be a funny alliteration and nothing more.)

Twyla Tharp received training in a wide range of dance styles including ballet, jazz, flamenco, and modern. A 1964 graduate of Barnard College, she danced briefly with Paul Taylor's company before starting to choreograph her own dances, breaking down dance to the steps that she felt were most important and experimenting with those moves and sound in constructing her idea of performance. This experimental phase ended fairly early for her, and by the mid-70s she was comfortably working in her own style that combined jazz, ballet, modern, and that special ingredient most associated with her: the use of everyday gestures, like idiomatic expressions, in "high culture" contexts. She has a gift for capturing what's relevant at a cultural time point and using it as an inside joke in her works. She has used street graffitti, break-dancing, Jane Fonda aerobics, surfer style, and numerous other pop culture creations, often straightforwardly so that some of her works appear as time capsules of American pop culture.

However, that does not diminish Tharp's clear gifts as a choreographer. She knows style and the language of movement, and her own style, featuring jerky stops and starts, flattened torsos with arms akimbo while legs do highly sophisticated kicks and toe taps, is quite recognizable if one has seen a previous work of hers. Tharp will use ballet's version of the golden mean, an attitude (knee at 90 degree angle, thigh and calf at right angles with the leg at a perfect right angle from the body), as a casual gesture, drawing attention to its power but using it alongside an absurdity (arms casually held at the side or waving in the air). She doesn't make fun of the ballet position; she is completely serious about it and therein lies her wit as a dancemaker (the charm is in the everyday gestures and cultural references).

The Catherine Wheel is a bit different in Tharp's oeuvre in that it has a straightforward narrative. It is inspired by St. Catherine of Alexandria's quest for spiritual perfection through physical discipline (and if you have read Tharp's 1993 autobiography, Push Comes to Shove, you can see that she is a consummate perfectionist, as is indicated by this quote: "I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission, and that's what I set out to do"). Tharp's understanding of St. Catherine's vision sounds fairly gnostic ('leaving aside the body to gain greater knowledge'), but this is Tharp's vision of perfection, and St. Catherine just happens to be a means to an end. It also gives her a chance to pontificate about pineapples.

Triangles, perfection, Pineapples, and grenades

Like the first Catherine Wheel exploded, injuring the pagans and sparing the life of St. Catherine, so too can the pineapple (a nickname for a grenade, but grenade comes from the word pomegranate...oh nevermind) explode, causing destruction. And the spiky leaves on a pineapple - don't they resemble the pointed spikes on a Catherine Wheel? Throw in some stuff about connection to energy and the atomic bomb, and graphics morphing a Catherine Wheel into a pineapple, and then into a bomb, and there you have it. As in almost all things, Tharp is completely serious about the implications of the pineapple. I was prepared to treat the pineapple as an absurdist symbol, a theatrical device, but Tharp thoroughly warned me of its hidden meanings - pineapple portents - so that I had to know that fruit is sometimes more than meets the eye.

And so it begins - a golden glowing pineapple handed down from on high to dancers backlit from behind a scrim. "Take a look, these people are savages!" sings/talks David Byrne on the recorded soundtrack. They clearly cannot handle the pineapple. And so we have a mock family, Mother and Father in a state of modern couple's anxiety but dancing a rather sweet adagio until the pineapplecomes along and knocks Father on the back of the head. Father goes off to rape the family dog; Mother does a tap-dance routine complete with the begging for money bit that will be situationally reprised when she pimps out Daughter to a suitor, and then seduces the suitor herself. The maid looks on in horror. Members of the family try to dance together, but the most success they can ever have is 2 out of 3 dancing the same steps to the same rhythm. The pineapple grows bigger and bigger in each scene (is it being fed by the increased disorder of the family?). A preacher lectures us from the soundtrack. A chorus backlit from behind the scrim provides "commentary." The family engages in WWF-style wrestling from behind the scrim, the pineapple gets hauled here and there, and St. Catherine, played by Sara Rudner, looks in horror at the devices of her torture as she tries to reach a state of perfection (this is an amazing performance from Rudner). Finally, release. The suitor tears apart the now huge pineapple in the presence of Mother, bathing himself in styrofoam chunks (mmm, pineapple juice is yummy; I really want some pineapple-orange juice.) Now the maid, as the societal conscience in the bourgeoisie household, screams and stutters in horror, making an array of disgusted faces. The violated dog kills Father, someone else (Daughter and the suitor?) kills Mother, and torn up plastic wastebaskets in red, green, and yellow colors start to fly on the stage (so does an aluminum pie tin). We live in a plastic, meaningless world, full of waste? Thank goodness St. Catherine can come along to hold all the remnants of wastebaskets and pineapple in her arms, and transform them into a high energy, gold-strewn dance. (More on the Golden Section in a moment.)

Does this sound absurd? Well, it is. There is no drama here; we aren't even treated to (spared by) an inside joke or two. Even the well-used theatrical conceits (a woman tap-dancing across a stage for money; people dressed up in layers and layers of clothing as if they are out-of-work performers on the vaudevillian circuit) are so straightforward they have no meaning other than what Tharp seems to want to indicate as an amorphous emptiness. And plasticky-ness. And then there's that stupid pineapple. It's not often that one watches dance and feels one's self getting dumber.

The welcome respite, over an hour into this mess, is the Golden Section. (The Golden Section has become its own, well, section, and is still performed separate from the other parts of The Catherine Wheel, especially by ballet companies wanting some Tharpian action.)

(Alvin Ailey dancers in The Golden Section, photo by Paul Kolnik)

Freed from the constraints of the life of the pineapple (and with Tharp free from having to move the narrative anywhere), the dancers, now dressed in gold, enter into a dance of incredible energy, as if they were particles on the surface of the sun. Whereas there was disorder in the movements of the family in the previous sections, now the dancers can move in syncopation, 1, 2, 3. Some literally become Catherine Wheels, rolling across the stage, their legs and arms the spokes as the curved body of another is the wheel. But mostly they jump, crackle with energy, and jog when they aren't taking flight or catapulting someone else into the air. "This is perfection," Tharp seems to be saying: unleashed energy fed through the movements of dancers into coherency and meaning. "This is the first day; this is the second day," Byrne intones. For the first time, Tharp effectively utilizes the rhythms that Byrne has created (previously, she just followed the disconnects and words), and unlike many dances, where rhythm means in and out, like breathing, she uses it to keep a steady, amped-up flow. Dance like this is no longer organic - it is superhuman, and it is that state beyond human experience that Tharp seems to be invoking in this final part. It has little to do with St. Catherine of Alexandria (supernatural is different from superhuman, and participation in the energies of God is not what Tharp has in mind) or with pineapples (even though they are golden and can be cut up into sections). It's rather the call for mindlessness so that the body can participate in E = mc². The dance is mass-energy transfer; we all become similar in the heat of nuclear fusion. The science of creation leads to the science of destruction, and Tharp only makes sense of it at the end.

A final note: the recording I viewed is widely available from Kultur, and fairly bad - dancers are cut off at the waist, the camera focuses on only one area of the stage while things are going on all over the stage, and so forth. One wishes Tharp, as director, could have loosened her grip and let her stage production play out on screen.

Ruckert & Mahler's Kindertotenlieder

2007-05-25T17:34:00.000-05:00

Songs on the Death of Children (1901-1905)
Based on poems by Friedrich Ruckert written in 1833-4,
when two of his children died within 16 days of each other.
He wrote 425 poems in this period, Mahler chose five.
The poems that comprise songs two and five of Mahler's cycle,
chosen by me not for their poetry but for the sentiment: 

Nun seh' ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen
 Ihr sprühtet mir in manchem Augenblicke.
 O Augen!
 Gleichsam, um voll in einem Blicke
 Zu drängen eure ganze Macht zusammen.
 Doch ahnt' ich nicht, weil Nebel mich umschwammen,
 Gewoben vom verblendenden Geschicke,
 Daß sich der Strahl bereits zur Heimkehr schicke,
 Dorthin, von wannen alle Strahlen stammen.
 Ihr wolltet mir mit eurem Leuchten sagen:
 Wir möchten nah dir bleiben gerne!
 Doch ist uns das vom Schicksal abgeschlagen.
 Sieh' uns nur an, denn bald sind wir dir ferne!
 Was dir nur Augen sind in diesen Tagen:
 In künft'gen Nächten sind es dir nur Sterne.

(English translation by Emily Ezust)
Now I see well why with such dark flames
your eyes sparkled so often.
O eyes!
It was as if in one full glance
you could concentrate your entire power.
Yet I did not realize - because mists floated about me,
woven by blinding fate -
that this beam of light was ready to be sent home
to that place whence all beams come.
You would have told me with your brilliance:
we would gladly have stayed near you!
But it is refused by Fate.
Just look at us, for soon we will be far!
What to you are only eyes in these days -
in future nights shall be stars to us.


In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus,
 Nie hätt' ich gesendet die Kinder hinaus;
 Man hat sie getragen hinaus,
 Ich durfte nichts dazu sagen!
 
 In diesem Wetter, in diesem Saus,
 Nie hätt' ich gelassen die Kinder hinaus,
 Ich fürchtete sie erkranken;
 Das sind nun eitle Gedanken.
 
 In diesem Wetter, in diesem Graus,
 Nie hätt' ich gelassen die Kinder hinaus;
 Ich sorgte, sie stürben morgen,
 Das ist nun nicht zu besorgen.
 
 In diesem Wetter, in diesem Graus!
 Nie hätt' ich gesendet die Kinder hinaus!
 Man hat sie hinaus getragen,
 ich durfte nichts dazu sagen!

 In diesem Wetter, in diesem Saus, in diesem Braus,
 Sie ruh'n als wie in der Mutter Haus,
 Von keinem Sturm erschrecket,
 Von Gottes Hand bedecket.

In this weather, in this windy storm,
 I would never have sent the children out;
 They were carried outside -
 I could say nothing about it!
 
 In this weather, in this roaring storm,
 I would never have let the children out.
 I was afraid they had fallen ill,
 but these thoughts are now idle.
 
 In this weather, in this cruel storm,
 I would never have let the children out;
 I was worried they would die the next day -
 but this is now no concern.
 
 In this weather, in this cruel storm,
 I would never have sent the children out;
 They were carried outside -
 I could say nothing about it!
 
 In this weather, in this roaring, cruel storm,
 they rest as they did in their mother's house:
 they are frightened by no storm,
 and are covered by the hand of God.

Origin of "Open to me the gates of repentance?"

2007-05-23T13:31:00.000-05:00

The Rabbis emphasized that God is desirous of our repentance and inclined to forgive. In the midrash on Shir Ha Shirim (the Song of Songs) they wrote:
"Open to Me [Song of Songs 5:2]". Make for Me an opening (of repentance), an opening as narrow as the point of a needle, and I will make the opening so wide (for pardon) that camps full of soldiers and siege engines could enter it.
Similarly, they taught that while the gates to prayer (that is, God's willingness to hear prayer) are sometimes open and sometimes closed, the gates of repentance are always open:
R. Helbo asked R. Samuel bar Nahman: since I have heard of you as a master of Aggadah, tell me what is meant by the verse Thou has covered thyself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through [Lamentations 3:44]? R. Samuel answered: Prayer is likened to an immersion pool, but repentance is likened to the sea. Just as an immersion pool is at times open and at other times locked, so the gates of prayer are at times open and at other times locked. But the sea is always open, even as the gates of repentance are always open. [Lamentations Rabbah 3:43, section 9].

From this site. "Gates of repentance" also occurs in Psalms Rabbah, Pesikta Rabbati, possibly midrash on Jonah.

The north portal of the Golden Gate (the east gate of the city wall in Jerusalem) is also called the Gate of Repentance.

Rabbeinu Yonah wrote The Gates of Repentance (Sha'arei Tshuvah) in the 13th century, and the lines from the midrash quoted above are often found in Jewish writings on repentance. There is also imagery from the three High Holy Days: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, that the gates of repentance are open for these three days, and become locked. Yom Kippur closes with the Neilah service, meaning "locked," of the gates of heaven and book of judgment.

So unless the Orthodox hymn precedes the 5th century AD (following scholarship that suggests Lamentations Rabbah was written over the same period as Genesis Rabbah and the latter is dated to the mid-5th century at the latest), it is likely taken from rabbinic sources, although Lamentations Rabbah also includes a number of Greek words.

Anyone else have any ideas?

NYCB Style - Part I

2007-05-22T13:42:00.000-05:00

The New York City Ballet formally came into existence in 1948. Founded by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, other choreographers were initially invited to participate (including Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Jerome Robbins), but it soon became dominated by the works and aesthetic vision of Balanchine. As Croce wrote in the early 70s (paraphrased), no other artistic institution was as singularly the creative vision of one person (Balanchine) the way New York City Ballet was. The first generation of ballerinas in the company included Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil LeClercq, Diana Adams, and Melissa Hayden. To this line-up, Allegra Kent, Jillana, and Violette Verdy were added in the 50s. Among the men, Jacques d'Amboise, Edward Villella, and partner extraordinaire Conrad Ludlow joined Francisco Moncion and Nicholas Magallanes. Balanchine's building of the repertory, a combination of more classical fare (Firebird, The Nutcracker, segments from Swan Lake) and highly innovative works to new music by Stravinsky, serialist compositions of Webern, and the works of other 20th century composers, would also shape the style of the company, right up to the time - 1963 - (as Garis wrote) that Suzanne Farrell arrived on the scene.

Tanaquil LeClercq as Dewdrop in The Nutcracker (1952)

Edwin Denby, “A letter on New York City’s Ballet”, August 1952

The NYC style is the most particularized and the clearest defined of all the American ones; the most Puritan in its uprightness. For me an immediate attraction of the NYC’s style is the handsomeness of the dancing, and another is the absence of glamour, of glamourization. To have left glamour out is only a negative virtue, but there is a freshness in it to start with.

Handsome the NYC way of dancing certainly is. Limpid, easy, large, open, bounding; calm in temper and steady in pulse; virtuoso in precision, in stamina, in rapidity. So honest, so fresh and modest the company looks in action. The company’s stance, the bearing of the dancer’s whole body in action is the most straightforward, the clearest I ever saw; it is the company’s physical approach to the grand style – not to the noble carriage but to the grand one. Simple and clear the look of shoulder and hip, the head, the elbow, and the instep; unnervous the bodies deploy in the step, hold its shape in the air, return to balance with no strain, and redeploy without effort. Never was there so little mannerism in a company, or extravagance. As clear as the shape of the step in the NYC style is its timing, its synchronization to the score at the start, at any powerful thrust it has, at its close. So the dancers dance unhurried, assured, and ample. They achieve a continuity of line and a steadiness of impetus that is unique, and can brilliantly increase the power of it and the exhilarating speed to the point where it glitters like cut glass. The rhythmic power of the company is its real style, and its novelty of fashion. Some people complain that such dancing is mechanical. It seems quite the opposite to me, like a voluntary, a purely human attentiveness.

It is an attention turned outside rather than inside. It is turned not to sentiment and charm, but to perspicuity and action. It suggests a reality that is not personal, that outlives the dancer and the public, like a kind of faith. The company is not trying for an emotional suggestion; it seems to be trying for that much harder thing, a simple statement.

Allegra Kent and Edward Villella in Bugaku (1963), photo by Bert Stern

Stravinsky's comments on Movements (1963)

Those extraordinary bee-like girls (big thighs, nipped-in waists, pinheads) who seem to be bred according to Balanchine’s specifications.

Six members of the original cast of Agon (1957)

Arlene Croce, "Balanchine's Girls: The Making of Style," April 1971

[Following Agon] These girls didn’t seem to think; they acted. They didn’t walk; they swam and hovered in balances and dove with a perilous insistence; or they moved one muscle and froze the time they moved it in, as if time, by catching up, might force it to move by itself. Balanchine’s choreography in this style, after Agon (1957) and up through Movements (1963), was increasingly microscopic, cellular: tight phrases exploding like crystals in a confined space…The new ballets to the new music seemed to seize on qualities of architectural scale and anatomical development that made sense to New Yorkers. And they made sense in an era of affluence. These were richly concentrated, high-protein ballets, with more “grip” per measure than anything that had been seen up to that time.

For some people, the idea that poetry can pour from the bodies of hardworking American girls…is hard to believe, and occasionally, as we watch one of these girls moving with brilliant clarity, the thought “She doesn’t know what she’s doing” occurs to us. If she did, though, would she do it better? The question has never been answered. It isn’t mindlessness but the state beyond mind that moves us in perfect dancing. It’s what moves the dancer, too.

"Let him kiss me with the kisses from his mouth!"

2007-05-21T13:20:00.000-05:00

Song of Songs 1:2

todo se transfigura y es sagrado,
es el centro del mundo cada cuarto,
es la primera noche, el primer día,
el mundo nace cuando dos se besan,

all is transformed, all is sacred,
every room is the center of the world,
it's still the first night, and the first day,
the world is born when two people kiss,
(Octavio Paz)

Song of Songs (Shir ha-Shirim) Rabbah II:ii.1

A. Another interpretation of the verse, "O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!"
B. Said Rabbi Yohanan, "An angel would carry forth the Word from before the Holy One, blessed be He, word by word, going about to every Israelite and saying to him, 'Do you accept upon yourself the authority of this Word? There are so and so many rules that pertain to it, so and so many penalties that pertain to it, so and so many decrees that pertain to it, and so are the religious duties, the lenient aspects, the stringent aspects, that apply to it. There also is a reward that accruse in connection with it.'"
C. "And the Israelite would say, 'Yes.'"
D. "And the other would go and say to him again, 'Do you accept the divinity of the Holy One, blessed be He.'"
E. "And the Israelite would say, 'Yes, yes.'"
F. "Then he would kiss him on his mouth."
G. "That is in line with this verse: 'To you it has been shown, that you might know' (Deut. 4:25) - that is, by an angel."
H. Rabbis say, "It was the Word itself that made the rounds of the Israelites one by one, saying to each one, 'Do you accept me upon yourself? There are so and so many rules that pertain to it, so and so many penalties that pertain to it, so and so many decrees that pertain to it, and so are the religious duties, the lenient aspects, the stringent aspects, that apply to it. There also is a reward that accruse in connection with it.'"
I. "And the Israelite would say, 'Yes.'"
J. "So he taught him the Torah."
K. "That is in line with this verse: 'Lest you forget the things your eyes saw (Deut. 4:9)' - how the Word spoke with you."

An affirmation, "Yes, yes," and the Word of God kisses the Israelite on the mouth.

II:ii.4

B. "In the entire Torah there are six hundred thirteen commandments. The numerical value of the letters in the word 'Torah' is only six hundred eleven. These are the ones that Moses spoke to us."
C. "But 'I [am the Lord your God]' and 'You will not have [other gods besides Me]' (Exodus 20:1-2) we have heard not from the mouth of Moses but from the Mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He."
D. "That is in line with this verse: 'O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!'"

The two commandments of God, spoken from the mouth of God Himself, like kisses from His lips. It recalls this moment (Deut 4:10-12):

Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when He said to me, "Assemble the people before Me to hear My Words so that they may learn to revere Me as long as they live in the land and may teach Them to their children." You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire to the very heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice.

And these verses (Proverbs 2:6; Proverbs 24:26):

For the Lord gives wisdom,
and from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.

He kisses the lips [and wins the hearts of men] who give a right answer.

But what does it mean to be kissed by the Word of God? What does it mean to be kissed? In Genesis 29, according to the rabbis, through the Spirit Jacob sees all of Israel: its history as a people, its Temple practices, its life in the synagogue (the field, the the well, the three flocks of sheep, the rock: all have symbolic meanings.) When he sees Rachel, his great strength moves the rock and he kisses her (Genesis 29:11):

Then Jacob kissed Rachel and began to weep aloud.

Rashi wrote that he wept because he saw that Rachel would not be buried with him (Genesis 48:7). But Jacob's weeping should also be read as the weeping for his people, the nation that he has foreseen that will arise out of his love for her. In a way, his own tears will be transferred to her, as she will weep for children (Genesis 30:1) and from her burial place will weep for the descendants of her husband and remind God of his promises to her husband, as Rashi writes [commentary on Genesis 48:7]:

and I buried her there And I did not take her even to Bethlehem to bring her into the Land (i.e., into the inhabited region of the Holy Land- [Sifthei Chachamim]), and I know that you hold it against me; but you should know that I buried her there by divine command, so that she would be of assistance to her children. When Nebuzaradan exiles them (the Israelites), and they pass by there, Rachel will emerge from her grave and weep and beg mercy for them, as it is said: “A voice is heard on high, [lamentation, bitter weeping, Rachel is weeping for her children]” (Jeremiah 31:14). And the Holy One, blessed be He, answers her, “‘There is reward for your work,’ says the Lord,… ‘and the children shall return to their own border.’”

When two people kiss, mouth to mouth, as Rambam wrote, they become one flesh. "No true companionship is possible unless a man dies to himself" (Oesterreicher, The Israel of God). As Adam fell into a deep sleep, a sleep like death, and then celebrated Eve as his flesh, so to does the kiss between Jacob and Rachel bind their flesh, at the pivotal turning point of salvation history - out of Jacob's love for Rachel will arise the people Israel - and they mourn the future struggles of their children. The world is re-born with Jacob's kiss, and is re-born again in the kisses of the Word of God on the mouths of the people Israel at Sinai.

The Incarnate God, the Word Made Flesh, kisses us at baptism, where we first hear the commandments of God; in the Eucharist, when we share in the flesh of God. Through kisses, we become one flesh with Him. We say Yes, die to ourselves, and He kisses us with the kisses from His Mouth, joining our flesh to His. And so the saints swoon at these moments.

But there are other kisses, most notably the kiss at the moment of death:

Song of Songs Rabbah II.ii.20

E. Rabbis say, "The souls of these are going to be taken with a kiss."
21 A. Said Rabbi Azariah, "We find that the soul of Aaron was taken away only with a kiss: 'And Aaron the priest went up to Mount Hor at the mouth of the Lord and died there' " (Numbers 33:38).
B. "How do we know the same in the case of the soul of Moses? 'So Moses the servant of the Lord died there ... according to the mouth of the Lord'" (Deut. 34:5).
C. "How do we know the same in the case of the soul of Miriam? 'And Miriam died there' (Numbers 30:1). And just as 'there' in the former passages means, 'by the mouth of the Lord,' so here too the fact is the same."
D. "But it would have been inappropriate to say it explicity."
E. "How do we know the same in the case of the soul of all the righteous? 'O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!' "
F. "[The sense is,] 'If you have occupied yourself with teachings of the Torah, so that your lips are well-armed with them, then, at the end, everyone will kiss you on your mouth.'"

And we also pray to St. Joseph that the Lord will kiss us as we draw our dying breath, that we will be enveloped in His Body at that moment.

In future posts, I will write about Jacob, the most dynamic person in the Old Testament. Jacob gives up his identity and his name, joins his flesh to Rachel's, struggles with God and still stands, and opens up a future where the Lord can kiss His people and lift and unite His creation back to Himself.

amar es combatir, si dos se besan
el mundo cambia, encarnan los deseos,
el pensamiento encarna, brotan alas
en las espaldas del esclavo, el mundo
es real y tangible, el vino es vino,
el pan vuelve a saber, el agua es agua,
amar es combatir, es abrir puertas,
dejar de ser fantasma con un número
a perpetua cadena condenado
por un amo sin rostro;
el mundo cambia
si dos se miran y se reconocen,
amar es desnudarse do los nombres...

to love is to battle, if two kiss
the world changes, desires take flesh,
thoughts take flesh, wings sprout
on the backs of the slave, the world is real
and tangible, wine is wine, bread
regains its savor, water is water,
to love is to battle, to open doors,
to cease to be a ghost with a number
forever in chains, forever condemned
by a faceless master;
the world changes
if two look at each other and see,
to love is to undress our names...

Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol (Sunstone), 1957. Translated by Eliot Weinberger.

Translations of Song of Songs Rabbah by Jacob Neusner.

Definitions and Terminology

2007-05-21T13:10:00.000-05:00

I started reading Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament about 12 years ago and have read them off and on since then. Since I will be writing about them frequently in the coming posts, here are some words, definitions, and people to whom I may refer.

Avot: "Fathers," often used for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Also used for a tractate completed by 200 A.D. of the oral Torah, and for commentaries on that tractate.

Midrash, plural Midrashim: "investigation," refers to 1) the activity of exegesis of the Scriptures, 2) the interpretations that result from that exegesis, 3) the written documents that are a collection of those interpretations.

Mishnah: code of Jewish law, derived from the Pentateuch and passed down by oral tradition. The most famous version of the encoding of the oral Torah was completed around 200 A.D. by Patriarch Judah in Palestine, but there are other versions, notably Mishnah Torah, a commentary on the Mishnah written by Rambam/Maimonides.

Mitzvah, plural Mitzvot: commandment, commandments of the Law. There are 613 mitzvot recorded in Deuteronomy.

Rabbah, Midrash Rabbah: midrash texts on the five books of the Pentateuch and Ruth, Esther, Lamentations, Eccelesiastes, and Song of Songs. Compiled and collected from about the 4th century A.D. through the 9th.

Rambam: initials of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204, Spain, Morocco, Egypt), aka Maimonides, philosopher and commentator.

Ramban: initials of Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (1194-1270, Spain), commentator.

Rashi: initials of Rabbi Shelomo Yitzhaki (1040-1105, France), the foremost medieval commentator on the Torah.

Talmud: code of Jewish law, philosophy, and ethics, collected between 200 and 500 A.D. in both Palestine and Babylon.

Tanakh: the Scriptures, comprising the Pentateuch (aka Torah), Prophets, and Writings.

Tanhuma: midrash written as homilies on the Pentateuch.

Torah: "instruction," the Law, the Word of God, also used to designate the Pentateuch. The oral Torah, as written down in the Mishnah, informs the written Torah, as contained in the Pentateuch. Both were handed down by God to Moses at Sinai, and the written Torah must be read in light of the oral Torah. The Torah existed "In the Beginning."

Genesis Rabbah I.i.2

A. In the beginning God created (Genesis 1:1) [As to the verse, Then I was beside Him like a little child, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the sons of men] (Proverbs 8:30-31).
B. The word [for child also may be read to] mean "workman."
C. [In the cited verse] the Torah speaks, "I was the work-plan of the Holy One, blessed be He."
D. In the accepted practice of the world, when a mortal king builds a palace, he does not build it out of his own head, but he follows a work-plan.
E. And [the one who supplies] the work-plan does not build out of his own head, but he has designs and diagrams, so as to know how to situate the rooms and the doorways.
F. Thus the Holy One, blessed be He, consulted the Torah when He created the world.
G. So the Torah stated, By means of "the beginning" [that is to say, the Torah] did God create (Genesis 1:1).
H. For the word the beginning refers only to the Torah, as Scripture says, The Lord made me as the beginning of his way (Proverbs 8:22).

Proverbs 8 is speaking of Holy Wisdom, known as Hagia Sophia to Christians, whose person is the Incarnate Word. Read John 1:1-18 in light of the above. For myself, this is an example of the illumination that can be found when reading rabbinical commentaries on the Old Testament.

Warning: I am not a Jewish scholar, nor have I read enough works to think that I have an intuitive grasp on Jewish interpretation. I do, however, often find it insightful, while trying to play close attention to not distort the words of the rabbis to something unfaithful to the text, as I extend the writings to Christianity (in other words, I try to avoid proof-texting, and will read an entire rabbah, its sources, and other commentaries such as Rashi's, before developing my thoughts on a particular part). I will mostly be using Jacob Neusner's translations of Hebrew and Aramaic texts, while largely ignoring his controversial interpretations.

Please feel free to correct me, disagree, or provide additional texts in the comments.

The Homeless, Dispelling the Myths

2007-05-19T12:30:00.000-05:00

I attended Psychiatry Grand Rounds a few weeks ago for a talk by Dr. Carole North, a psychiatrist who is probably most famous as an epidemiologist. She has done several studies looking at the homeless population.
I won't go through every aspect of her talk, but will provide a few fun facts here:

Substance abuse accounts for most of the mental illness in the homeless population. It is also hypothesized that increased rates, since 1980, of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia may be related to the effects of continued use of crack cocaine.

The rate of non-substance abuse mental illness in the homeless population is not nearly as high ("50% of the homeless are schizophrenics!") as is commonly thought. The rate of schizophrenia is around 6% - schizophrenia affects around 1% of the general population. In 1990 in St. Louis, depression was highest, but even this was related to what Dr. North termed 'misery' - higher in men, and most likely associated with having to be out in the elements on days of harsh weather.

African-American men who are homeless are more likely to be younger, have jobs, and still make less income than Caucasian men who are homeless.

Women are most likely (around 20%) to be homeless because of family conflicts.

Of those who are substance abusers, most use cocaine (including crack), and they typically do not use money from government assistance or income from jobs to buy drugs. No, by a large percentage, they use the money they get from panhandling, and in some cases make up a disproportionate number of panhandlers. So know that when you give money to panhandlers, there's a good chance it will be used to buy drugs. As Dr. North stated at the end of her talk, she gives money to shelters and other services for the homeless, but not to panhandlers.

Only two people, out of nearly 900 in one of her studies, said that they chose to be homeless.

What is Biomedical Engineering?

2007-05-19T12:10:00.000-05:00

Hmm, that has always been a tough question to answer because the field is so broad. Briefly, I'd describe it as the application of principles from mathematics and physics to physiology. Or it's taking concepts from mechanical and electrical engineering and applying it to the human body. I decided to major in biomedical engineering at a time when I wanted to go to medical school to be a psychiatrist, after realizing, the intellectual snob that I am, that pre-med and biochem and all those typical biological science majors were 'too easy.' I also subsequently decided that med school was too easy (and having taken med school courses, really, the classes are easy), so here I am.

During my time at Texas A&M (1997-2001), students in biomedical engineering had to take three courses in calculus and one in differential equations, two courses in physics, at least two electrical engineering courses, at least two mechanical engineering courses, and two courses in physiology designed for biomedical engineers, all before being admitted to "upper classes" (one also needed to have at least a 3.3 GPA) and taking the BMEN courses for our major.

To divide biomedical engineering into three headings: 1) modeling; 2) artificial devices; 3) signal processing/equipment, that were covered in various courses in my last two years as an undergrad. (Texas A&M's College of Engineering is very peculiar in that any engineering degree would take someone 5 years to complete if they never exceeded the 18 hour per semester limit - I got around this through alot of AP credits when entering and summer school, but it is quite odd to have one's scheduling book advise 21 hours of engineering classes per semester for one's final four semesters - one would have no time to do ANYTHING but homework.)

1) Modeling.

a. Blood flow in the body is pulsatile non-Newtonian flow, and blood can have variable viscosity. The blood vessels in your body experience time-dependent forces, including shear stress. Indeed, growth factors in the epithelial cells of your blood vessels are only released when the shear stress from the movement of blood through the vessel is applied, and when the stress is outside normal limits is when all sorts of nasty things begin to happen to your blood vessels (there is also shear rate, separate from shear stress, and the relation between the two depends on the viscosity, which itself is largely dependent on the clotting factor fibrinogen). Abnormalities in blood vessels (such as from artherosclerosis) then form secondary flow streamlines in the vessels, and biomedical engineers who work on these issues would calculate the patterns, forces, axial velocities, and shears and strains that exist. The results are applicable to creating artificial tissue that could duplicate the functions of blood vessels, but it's also just a good ol' extension of the idea that math is the language that underlies the universe.

b. Clearly enough, your nervous system is a huge electrical circuit. So are parts of your muscles, and even transfer in your kidneys can be modeled as en electrical circuit.

c. Fluid transfer in your body, it is assumed, operates the same way as fluid transfer in any other system. One can model the body and different systems as a number of different compartments that interact according to the permabilities/diffusive properties of each membrane. Your lungs work this way, your lymph system works this way, oxygen moving from the hemoglobin of your red blood cells to another cell operates this way.

For example, a wonderful derivation (I'm not going to type out the equation):

We ignore the particulate nature of blood as well as the mass transfer resistance of the red blood cell. The blood is assumed to be in plug flow with an average velocity represented by V. Also note that the hemoglobin is carried along by the red blood cell at the average blood velocity (V). R HBO represents the volumetric production rate of oxygenated hemoglobin. After dividing by 2πr∆r∆z, and taking the limit as ∆z→0, we obtain the following differential equation that describes the mass balance for ozygenated hemoglobin within the blood flowing through the capillary....(From Fournier's Basic Transport Phenomena in Biomedical Engineering)

I only included it because I once had to spend an entire semester doing such derivations, and it was alot of fun. Math is great! Even reading that book again made my heart flutter. If the above paragraph does not do the same for you, biomedical engineering and engineering in general are probably not for you.

2) Artificial devices. Tied to modeling, it does no good to build a prosthetic leg if one doesn't know the forces, stresses, and strains that the device may experience. After modeling the act of walking, in terms of forces, angles, rates, etc., one can design a device that can perform the task of walking, but at the same time does not alter the forces experienced by the other bones in the body. Those forces are important for proper bone growth, and using too strong of a material for a prosthetic weight-bearing device, or using a material that vibrates could affect the other bones of your body. We encounter similar problems with building artificial hearts and lungs: constructing these organs on nothing but mechanical engineering principles can be done easily enough, but one must also consider the particular additional features of these organs that contribute to proper function in the body.

Several of the students in the department had internships at NASA. Of course, it is of great interest to NASA to know the conditions under which the human body functions here on earth (specifically, with gravity), to devise ways to monitor the health of astronauts and counteract the effects of weightlessness, including perhaps devising special exercise equipment.

3) And finally, designing all that fancy equipment one sees in a hospital is now primarily the job of biomedical engineers - EEG and ECG recorders, heart rate monitors, ventilators, etc. A lot of signal processing is going on in those machines, and I hope to never again have to do Fourier and Laplace transforms by hand (that was a wicked professor). My design project for the second semester of my senior year was to write a program that would allow someone to input a night of EEG recordings, and could output the time spent in each stage of sleep with each major wave event noted. Such is the work of biomedical engineers who act as the interface between the performance of the body and processing that performance into language that can be understood by clinicians.

So that is the 'brief' introduction to biomedical engineering that I will provide here. It was a very fun major that incorporated lots of soldering in an advanced clinical engineering class, the shop class I never took (in constructing a plastic injection molding machine that could make skin buttons for insulin injection ports), and learning FDA device regulations. But mostly, it was doing lots and lots of math that I love, and applying it to the human body. Fluid dynamics, pressure, strain, YEAH! So don't consider it unless you enjoy calculus (triple integral-type calculus) and differential equations, and prefacing every solution with a list of assumptions, as all good engineers do.

Botticelli and the Virgin

2007-05-18T12:13:00.000-05:00

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro Filipepi) died on 17 May 1510. Most people are quite familiar with his non-religious (pagan!!!) works, so here are a few photos of his religious works, centering on the Madonna - it is May, after all. Above is the Madonna of the Magnificat (1480-3) tempera on panel.

The Annunication (c 1481), fresco

The Annunciation (c. 1485) , tempera and gold on panel

The Cestello Annunciation (c 1490), tempera on panel

The Annunciation (c 1500), tempera on panel

Detail of the Christ Child in Madonna of the Pomegranate (1487),
tempera on panel

Update and Coming Attractions

2007-05-18T12:11:00.000-05:00

After having to expend all my mental energy in another direction recently, I needed a brief break. Hopefully, I will now post a bit more regularly.

Coming up (NOT in this order):
Two science posts tomorrow: on biomedical engineering and epidemiology in the homeless population;
A review of Vincent Prince and The Pit in the Pendulum;
Quotes from Song of Songs Rabbah with additional commentary from me;
Arranged marriages and Bollywood movies;
Several reviews of the New York City Ballet, from performances here in Chicago back in October;
A review of Tharp's The Catherine Wheel
Three posts on Jacob/Israel: 1) his deception and stealing of the birthright; 2) the meaning of Jacob's ladder re. salvation history, with some quantum mechanics and string theory thrown in; 3) what his night of wrestling means especially regarding the future standing at Sinai;
Lincoln Kirstein's recovery of The Adoration of the Lamb;
A review of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke;
...and anything else that amuses me.

I also promised to write several posts on art and art criticism, but that will most likely have to wait until after I move at the beginning of summer. If anyone has ideas for science posts, specifically neuroscience or addiction questions, please let me know. Now have a good day!

P.S. The lines under "About Me" are from Professor Longhair's Big Chief, and if you've ever been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras season, you've heard it. Or watch some crazy N'Awlins folks here. And Professor Longhair playing Tipitina. 'Fess' also wrote the theme song Mardi Gras in New Orleans. "I'm going to New Orleans, I want to see the Mardi Gras...when I get to New Orleans, I wanna see the Zulu King."

Happiness

2007-05-11T12:32:00.000-05:00

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace.

The End of the Affair (1951) by Graham Greene

Suzanne Farrell and Tzigane

2007-05-10T14:05:00.000-05:00

Suzanne Farrell left the New York City Ballet in 1969, and joined the Ballet of the Twentieth Century, Maurice Bejart's company based in Brussels. There can be no denying that her absence was mourned, not alone by Balanchine but by her partners, colleagues, and public. It is unprofitable to speculate whether such a departure should be interpreted as courage, treason, or a refusal to submit any longer to conditions that seemed at the moment confining, as well as a desire to explore alternatives in new capacities and possibilities. Such separation is sometimes necessary...Farrell returned in the winter [Winter 1975] before the Ravel Festival to dance with an extraordinary freshness and greatly increased technical brilliance. The years spent with Bejart, a talent and energy far more loose or instinctive than Balanchine's seemed not only to have heightened her physical proficiency, which had always been large, but to have increased her emotional projection, which had heretofore seemed smoldering.

The first new work Balanchine composed for her was Ravel's Tzigane. Essentially a "gypsy number," it commenced with a five-minute solo of surpassing physical demands and emotional intensity. The music is not exactly a Hungarian cousin to the composer's Bolero, but its nightclub overtones cannot be ignored...This music gave Balanchine, with his every-ready tact, the opportunity to invent a star turn for Farrell. It framed her extremeties of abrupt angularity and off-centered plastic posturing in all their fiery contrast to her natural "classic" grace and ease, her steely fragility and chill authority. In a perverse pattern of steps, Balanchine turned the familiar hungarisch idiom of opera-house Lisztian divertissements inside out. Its positioning was so odd, the sequences in their reversal so unexpected, that what might have been rejected as parody was transformed into assertive rehabilitation. Farrell did not impersonate a "gypsy;" her body played with theatricalized elements of wildness, caprice, longing, and arrant independence which could be read as intensely secret and personal. Was part of this an echo of her own wandering, of the fact she had at last returned to her tribe's encapment, while proclaiming her own increased identity and independence?

In any event, Farrell's reappearance marked a rise in the company's spirits, another chapter of growth...There is no doubt that a powerful personage throws off an aura, sometimes of positive, less often of negative, energy. Farrell's peculiar qualities, the impression these have made in a variety of ballets, have contributed something unique to our repertory. Like other powerful artists she invests her own mystery, an enclosed alchemy of power, vulnerability, the control and conscious manipulation of tension. When she dances it is not only a body in motion but an apparatus analyzed and directed by operating intelligence. It is as if some sort of radium slumbers but is always present and ready in her corporal central; when ignited, it glows to white heat. It enables her to transcend occasions, patterns, appearances. It commands recognition but is not always easy to read. Balanchine has been able to provide a habitation in which this core is fired, or can activate itself.

Thirty Years: Lincoln Kirstein's the New York City Ballet (1978)

In the early days of my career, I was always this virginal girl in white. I liked that, but the tom-boy in me always wanted to be a little contrary. I used to wish that I could play the black swan instead of the white swan, or the evil girl instead of the good girl. So when I came back to the company, this was the first thing Mr. Balanchine did for me. I was curious to know how he would see me. Tzigane means "gypsy", it's Hungarian.

I thought he'd give me something very technical, but the first thing he had me do is sort of mosey on stage in this sort of indifferent quality. I thought this was very strange. "I'm not sure if I want to look like this. What are people going to think? They expect me to dance." And then I said, "No, he's always presented you very well, and you believe in him. Let's try something that hasn't been done before." So we started working on this ballet.

It was a lot of fun to be a gypsy. By then Mr. Balanchine and I had become comfortable with each other, and frequently he would say, "Oh, you know what I want. You fill in." That was very nice of him, but also a big responsibility. Because it had to look like what he might do, be in the same flavor, and the same character as what he might do, and wonderful that he trusted me enough to say, "Oh, Suzie, you do it." It was quite thrilling, and gave me a lot of freedom in a world that has a lot of discipline. At one part in the choreography, he said, "Oh just stand here and do something, and then start turning."

As the ballet starts out, I'm dancing to a solo violin. There is not even a conductor. I don't even see the violinist. He's down in the pit, and there is just a single spotlight on my face. The rest of the stage is dark, so it is very lonely. In fact, it is probably the loneliest I've ever been. Even lonelier than walking down the streets of New York by yourself. To be in front of people, you have to look interesting, have to go from one side of the stage to the other, portray something, but you don't even have the sound of an orchestra to fill the void. Just this one lonely violin and myself. I start to dance. And it stays this way for about five minutes. It was a long solo.

Suzanne Farrell Interview, 1990, Academy of Achievement

I learned a lot from being with Béjart, and George saw that. After all, George taught me the thrill of acquiring information and seeing how that could work in dance forms. To not have learned anything, to have wasted that time, would have been ungrateful, un-Balanchinian and dishonest of me. And if I had learned nothing with Béjart, George and I could never have been able to go on to what we did. He would have been so far ahead of me, I never would have caught up.

When Mr. B started working on a ballet for me, there would be no one in the room except Gordon Boelzner at the piano, George and myself. He would show me a little something and I would try to imitate or shape or decode what he indicated—he would always indicate, not command, and I would try. Choreography is not born as choreography; it grows out of a suggestion or movement indication and then it gets shaped into choreography. Rarely would he say, "That's not what I wanted." He would put the ball in my court and allow me to run with it, but he trusted me and didn't say, "That's not how I would have run with it, if I were you." Sometimes he would have a mistake become part of the choreography. Not that every mistake that happens can be put to music and become beautiful, but he made us see life differently.

Someone once remarked, "Oh, you're a dancer, you're up onstage, you don't like to face reality," and that hit such a nerve because I feel that life is more real onstage. I mourn artifice. I have this little theory that the arts were invented because life didn't measure up to what it was supposed to be. If life were wonderful, we would all dance, we would all sing, we would all be poets, we would all paint. As it is, the arts are the hospitals for our souls, so they need to be of the best integrity. I have a theory that George devoted himself to ballet because it served as his visa out of Russia during those horrific times. Ballet gave him his existence and his salvation outside Russia and nurtured his genius, and that's why he never got bored and why he became so prolific. You can't be flippant about genius. The mind sets you on a path to be the best. You must work at making your life work for you; you are responsible to posterity.

Good theater should always send people away feeling changed.

I'm not obsessed with ballet; I'm passionate about ballet. Some people don't want to have passion because it's too revealing, or they feel that if they're passionate about something or someone, they've lost control, or it will control them. I think passion is such a wonderful word, and such a wonderful feeling. To feel so alive! When they say that George was obsessed with me, it has such a negative connotation. But was he obsessed or passionate? I believe if he had been truly obsessed, the ballets we did would have been different—they would have been darker.

Suzanne Farrell, interview with Emily Fragos, Bomb Magazine

Rads, Trads, & Cads

2007-05-08T10:43:00.000-05:00

If you are from a really large (extended) family, as I am, there's an age where you realize that certain members of that family really don't get along with other members. Indeed, they are so fed up with the other members that if distance doesn't suffice, they make snide comments about being eager for the other to receive their eternal 'reward.' Even though an eternal haven of love and peace is the last place that the offended relative thinks will be the final destination.

In many ways, this situation is similar to that of the Catholic Church. Do you ever read some blogs where the contributions are largely made by those of the Catholic persuasion (is there any such thing as a Catholic blog? How do I know that these people are Catholic?) and where statements are made about the hopeful "dying-off" of the more radical elements of the Church and the "breed them out" desire of the more traditional-adhering members of the Church? Or how some are so "out of step" with the modern world, meant as a pejorative phrase? And the even better, "I love my fellow members in the Body of Christ, but..."

I especially 'love' (having the same meaning as 'reward' above) when some express a desire to choose the town and community where they live around a desire to be close to certain elements, like making sure to have a conservative bishop or a local Indult Mass, or a liberal bishop and a 'relevant' Mass, etc. It's so deliciously arrogant, just like this essay is. It suggests that one knows something above and beyond that of one's fellow Catholics, that material success is God-given and meant to be expended in carefully choosing where one's feet should touch, whose hands one should have to shake (or not), who one should talk to after Mass. "I only want to be around those who have read Newman, Chesterton, and von Balthasar, and can sing Gregorian chant!" "I only want to be around those who know such things are out-dated and represent oppression!" The over-education of the laity may be the worst development of the modern world. Forget the "new" evangelization of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council; no, we must (through de facto schism) cast those sinning members, nay, those who are different from us, out of the Church! Or at the very least make them feel really unwelcome, because we all know Christ only died for those who want ad orientem postures during Mass and frilly lace on the altars, or those who want altar girls and worship Him with guitars. Only those smart enough to know that such is the right way to worship should be allowed in the Lord's House, the ark of salvation. Let's all turn up our collective noses at the little people!

"But didn't worship develop over centuries, and who were they to change it forty years ago?" some astute reader with traditional inclinations wonders. They are probably the same people who have been screwing things up for centuries, whether through the teaching of heresy or denial of the sacraments based on race and ethnicity or abuse of power...etc. 'They' are 'us', and we're all guilty of failure to love, caritas. And the result is disorder - the abuses sometimes displayed in the Novus Ordo liturgy aren't the result of the evil actions of a small group of men - the Almighty is certainly great enough to preserve liturgy - no, they are your fault and my fault. Those "Clown Masses?" They are the result of what I have done and what I have failed to do. And what I have failed to do is not to banish the participants of the Clown Mass out of the Church, but to pray, to give myself over to God. I've chosen sin, too many times, over Him Who gives Life. And by doing so, I have allowed Him to be mocked.

The best (as in ironic) part in the divisions in the Church is certainly that both the rads and trads want schism. They are eager for it. They don't want to be around the other; they see the bleeding body of Christ on Calvary and run the other way - the trads trying to catch up with the Pharisees, the rads wanting to just be part of the larger mob. In mentality they are typically Protestants. My interpretation is correct, and this is what should be done about it, and I will not allow myself to be around those who disagree. Clearly from this essay this is my own mentality too, except for that very last crucial phrase.

Back in the New Orleans metro area, I used to attend evening Mass with my mom on the days between the Ascension and Pentecost. These Masses featured guest speakers and musicians, and would draw every Charismatic Catholic in the area out of the woodwork, with their speaking in tongues, intensely personal revelations on the Spirit at work in their lives, and the altar calls to come forward and be born again of the Spirit, for some of the participants 'knew' through the voice of God that a member of the congregation had recently experienced a death in the family, or bore lack of forgiveness towards an uncle, or other revelations. Those who participated in these Masses were the same as those who regularly attended daily Mass and also included those who sometimes got tired of the 'stuffiness' of a typical Sunday Mass. Good for them. How wonderful it was to be around such a group of people assured that God was acting personally in their lives. And it wasn't some quasi-Gnostic belief that only through special knowledge could one have this experience of God - no, He's waiting for you, He wants to send out His Spirit upon you. People could have had all sorts of other motivations in being there, other proclivities that rendered them 'susceptible' to the Charismatic movement, but the message as I heard it was right on. I didn't become a Charismatic Catholic (neither did my mom), but it was joyous to hear people be excited about the hand of the Lord at work in their lives, and I have yet to meet any lay Catholics willing to proclaim it as much as those Charismatics were. Yes, it's a movement inspired by a Protestant movement and it will probably die off, but in many ways it may have served a valuable purpose, even if only for a few souls. After all, God can use the seemingly ridiculous human ideas and inventions to get His message across too.

And that, finally, is the problem as I see it. For some people - the cads of the rads and trads - God seems to be very small. He is only present here, or there, or gives graces most abundantly here and not there, and He cannot preserve me from influences there, so I must be here instead. But in truth, it's only by the grace of God that I am kept, and only the grace of God that can keep me. So for those who want to start judging where your small God gives graces to your fellow Catholics - and isn't it always members of the laity who are quickest to judge? - go sit in the corner and pray that He gives grace to you.

"Without the grace of God I should not know how to do anything"

2007-05-07T10:59:00.000-05:00

For those history buffs, on 7 May 1429 Jeanne d'Arc was wounded below the neck and shoulder during the siege of Orleans. Read about the siege here.

St. Joan of Arc's Feast Day is on May 30th. One can read an English translation of the transcript of her trials (one to condemn her to death in 1431; the other to declare her innocent in 1456).

Perhaps the most famous lines from the first trial (found in the 3rd public examination):

"Do you know if you are in the grace of God?"

"If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God."

Saints meme

2007-05-03T16:02:00.000-05:00

In response to Sarabite:

Four favorite saints:

1. St. Maria Goretti. I was baptized at St. Maria Goretti Church in New Orleans East and have always had a particular affection for her life story, in all its macabre details (it says something about my psychology inchildhood). When I wasn't determined to become the pope (not out of belief in women's ordination, but solely out of firm conviction that God was reserving the papal crown for me), I really hoped to die a martyr at the age of 12. What could be better than to be stabbed multiple times and then forgive one's would-be rapist while having the names of the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord on your lips? My mother was concerned. But though my 13th year passed without major event, she's still a favorite saint - one of those who showed such remarkable piety at an early age.

2. Two Italian St. Catherines: (I'm cheating) St. Catherine of Siena and St. Catherine of Genoa, born one century apart, and both writing Dialogues. (I can't turn my nose up at St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Catherine Laboure either - there's something about the name Catherine...)

3. St. Joseph: Here's a man who could have been considered all sorts of crazy for listening to what a voice/angel is saying to him in his dreams about his pregnant betrothed carrying the Messiah. And yet he goes along with it. Gullible and faith-filled can appear awfully similar to the undiscerning. But he also showed compassion in not turning Mary over for an offense that was punishable by death before angel voices had whispered to him. There's a wonderful painting of the Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt - it's one of those technically awful paintings that incorporates overly enthusiastic Catholic devotion where Christ is a blond, rosy cheeked sleeping cherub, the Blessed Virgin wears pink and blue and gazes loving down at his cute blond curls, and St. Joseph, curly gray beard flying, wraps his arms around them both while looking with grim determination - steely blue eyes - into the wind that is causing his locks to flow behind him. It sounds like the description of the cover of a Harlequin romance novel and I think it's somewhat inspired by that aesthetic, and yet it conveys better than any I've seen the importance of St. Joseph - his protection, his strength, his leadership, of the Holy Family. And according to tradition, he died in the arms of both the Virgin and the Lord (he is the patron of departing souls). What could be better?

4. St. Stephen, St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, St. Anastasia, St. Lawrence... (I'm really cheating!): I like the early martyrs, that's all. And I've always felt bad for St. James the Less/Little.

Favorite Blessed: Fra Giovanni da Fiesole better known as the Blessed Fra Angelico. At his beatification in 1982, in the words of John Paul II:

"Angelico was reported to say, "He who does Christ's work must stay with Christ always." This motto earned him the epithet "Blessed Angelico," because of the perfect integrity of his life and the almost divine beauty of the images he painted, to a superlative extent those of the Blessed Virgin Mary."

The work directly above is Madonna with Angels and Sts. Dominic and Catherine (c 1435) Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome; the one below is Christ in Limbo (c 1440), San Marco, Florence.

Someone who should already be blessed: Henriette Delille, a Creole woman in New Orleans who defied the placage system and persevered over a great deal of discrimination to found a religious order (being mixed race, she wasn't allowed to join a white convent) for mixed race and black women, the Sisters of the Holy Family, who ministered to and educated slaves and urged them to be baptized, and have educated and catechized countless black Catholics in southern Louisiana for the past 150 years. She once wrote, "I believe in God. I hope in God. I love and I want to live and die for God."

Someone who should be canonized (who is most likely not going to be):

I'm surprised some rather unscrupulous French pope hasn't canonized Abbot Suger of St.-Denis yet. And wouldn't his canonization now be utterly scandalous to those who advocate separation of Church and State? He did take the criticisms of St. Bernard of Clairvaux to heart in his own personal dwellings, at least, but give him sainthood for his role of inspiration and patron of Gothic art. (To the left is a picture of the Abbey Church of St.-Denis. In his words:

Thus, when--out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God--the loveliness of the many colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the Universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.

Marvel not at the gold and the expense but at the craftsmanship of the work. Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door.

And since plastic artists are so under-represented in the calender of saints (compared to the number of saints who wrote words about God, why not all those who created images of God?), Pietro Cavallini, come on down too for sainthood.

The mosaic is The Annunication (1291) at Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome; the fresco is The Last Judgment (c 1294) at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome.

And Sarabite knows I have no friends and I communicate with no one.

St. Catherine of Siena, a day late

2007-04-30T15:33:00.000-05:00

You are rewarded not according to your work or your time
but according to the measure of your love.

Strange that so much suffering is caused because of the misunderstandings of God's true nature. God's heart is more gentle than the Virgin's first kiss upon the Christ. And God's forgiveness to all, to any thought or act, is more certain than our own being.

I see that You have endowed Your vicar
by nature
with a fearless heart;
so I humbly, imploringly beg You
to pour the light beyond nature
into the eye of his understanding.
For unless this light,
acquired through pure affection for virtue,
is joined with it,
a heart such as his tends to be proud.

Today again let every selfish love be cut away
from those enemies of Yours
and from the vicar
and from us all,
so that we may be able to forgive those enemies
when you bend their hardness.

For them, that they may humble themselves
and obey this lord of ours,
I offer You my life
from this moment
and for whenever You wish me to lay it down
for Your glory.

Paintings by Beccafumi (c. 1486-1551). The Stigmatization of St. Catherine (1515) and The Miraculous Communion of St. Catherine (1513-1515); note the angel offering her the Host. And check out a website all about her.

Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007)

2007-04-29T13:35:00.000-05:00

I've been so wrapped up in thesis final drafts and presentations that I failed to notice, until today, the death on April 27th of cellist and conductor Rostropovich. Requiescat in pace.

Rostropovich's performance of Bach's Cello Suites was my first exposure to both this cellist and Bach's compositions for cello. Although Casals' interpretation is superior in my view (Casals actually taught Rostropovich's father), this is the recording that I think sums up what Rostropovich is all about, in the way that sometimes it's in a work that isn't the most natural or easiest fit that one sees the greatness in an interpretative artist, whether musician, actor, or dancer. In the Cello Suites, you can hear his warmth, his power, his use of texture and color, and most importantly, that ability to wear one's heart on one's sleeve that characterizes all great artists: the generosity. (And the cello he is playing is absolutely gorgeous in tone.)

Also check out Rostropovich's performance of the Brahms' Cello Sonatas (he draws a connection between Bach and Brahms that usually goes unnoticed), and I guess his recordings of Dvorak, if you like Dvorak.

Changing Attitudes about Addiction

2007-04-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

In the 1960s, Dr. Marie Nyswander, a trained Freudian psychoanalyst, and Dr. Vincent Dole, a metabolic disease specialist who was chair of the NYC Health Research Council's Committee on Narcotics (not a job he particularly wanted) established the first methadone maintenance clinics in NY for heroin addicts. In the late fifties, Nyswander had begun working with jazz musicians addicted to heroin. The prevailing Freudian theory of heroin addiction at that time hypothesized that these male artists were actually homosexuals who used heroin to over-activate the superego and suppress the id. The overall understanding of drug addiction in the 60s was that there was an "addictive personality" type that took drugs to escape reality in order to conceal inadequacies. Frustrated by her experience with her patients' propensity to relapse, Nyswander accepted a position at the Rockefeller Center offered by Dole and the two began a collaboration to discover both the nature of addiction and possible treatments. In 1965, they were the first to establish methadone treatment clinics. In 1967, Dole and Nyswander published a groundbreaking theory that heroin addicts had undergone permanent metabolic changes, and that abstinence was an unrealistic expectation - maintenance in the form of methadone replacement was the goal. It brought into prominence the existing but previously unpopular theory that drug addiction was a physical disease and not a moral failing, as Drs. Nyswander and Dole saw no correlation between sociopathic tendencies and addiction once addicts were being treated. They were one of the first to refer to the disease of addiction as "persistent neurochemical disturbance," though the theory can be dated (without scientific support) to the 20s. In personal gossip, in 1965 Nyswander abruptly ditched her writer husband and married Dole.

More info about methadone: it is a long-lasting mu opioid receptor agonist. It reduces craving and withdrawal symptoms, but does not produce euphoria unless doses are very high. If heroin is administered while methadone is on board, it prevents the euphoria associated with heroin. Its use as a replacement therapy is controversial and affected by general attitudes and perceptions about drug addiction. The late 70s especially saw strong demand to not open more methadone clinics, as punitive measures against drug addicts again became popular. Its controlled substance status prevents it from being administered by a personal physician, and it can only be given at one of these special clinics (it also is rarely allowed to be self-administered at home). I believe the Drug Enforcement Agency, and not a health care organization, is still the group that operates methadone clinics.

More about heroin: Heroin is converted into morphine in the brain, and acts at μ-opioid receptors on GABA inhibitory interneurons in the ventral tegmental area. This activation may close N-type calcium channels, possibly through G-protein interactions or inhibition of adenylyl cyclase. These interneurons are therefore inhibited. The resulting disinhibition at the post-synaptic cell leads to increased firing of dopaminergic cells that are usually inhibited by these interneurons.

The first epidemic of opiate addiction in the U.S. occurred after the Civil War - it is estimated that up to 400,000 soldiers were addicted to morphine (the infamous "skin-poppers," - morphine administered subcutaneously). The next time opiate addiction was widely publicized in this country was after the Vietnam War; where it's estimated that up to 50% of American soldiers used heroin regularly while in Vietnam, and 20% returned to the U.S. addicted. This was also around the time when cocaine was touted as "the perfect drug" by a weekly news magazine, a "non-addictive party drug," because of the lack of physical withdrawal symptoms from repeated cocaine use - it was believed then that addicts took drugs to alleviate withdrawal symptoms. Thirty years later, the anhedonia hypothesis has largely been discredited.

Family Music

2007-04-26T14:04:00.000-05:00

When I was a child, I told my family I was going to marry Smokey Robinson one day. I could recognize Smokey's beautiful tenor, the child-like innocence and sadness in his lyrical phrasing, the second I heard it. Hearing Smokey sing, “One day, I’ll hold you near, whisper I still love you, but ‘til that day is here, oh, I’m crying…” sent me into girlish ecstasy. And he was so darn cute. I could do a wonderful Diana Ross impression, tilting my head, brushing my hair away from my face, and lifting up my hands to sing "Ain't no Mountain High Enough," but only if it would have seduced Smokey. The first cds I ever owned (given to me by my parents) were Smokey Robinson cds. I'm fairly confident they weren't really trying to make me so obsessed with Smokey that I WOULD pursue nothing in life other than being Mrs. Robinson, but I do think they took joy in the fact that I was so seduced by that music, that voice.

I've written previously that my father grew up as a sharecropper, from a paternal line of sharecroppers. He graduated from high school (neither of his parents had), went to college, majored in physics, and got a job working as an engineer with an oil company. He worked there for nearly 30 years, retired, and now works there as a consultant. Upward mobility.

But other than neighborhoods, houses, and cars, my father has never embraced any of the other aspects of upper middle class American society, or what it means in such society to be "cultured." He doesn't care about plastic art or opera, Mozart or Magritte. He has no idea why I own so many books about ballet or history. The first time classical music crossed the threshold in our home was when my sister and I became fanatical about it, exposed to it through piano lessons.

But my father does love music. And how he loves it - with a stereo system that certainly rattles the windows of the house next door, blasting Ray Charles, offering up a, "Sing it, boy!" to an impassioned plea of a male soul singer to his lost lover. I could probably label each year of my childhood by the songs that my father was playing over and over again.

When I was very young, I particularly remember B.B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland. My father would be driving the car on the way to Opelousas, eyes on the road, but tilting his head back and forth and slapping his knee, singing a half step behind B.B. King to "The Thrill is Gone." When "Caledonia" came on, he'd look at my mom, and sing,"what makes your big head so hard?!" I also knew, even then, that this music meant something special to him. As a kid, his family hadn't owned a record player, except for the brief time his family had one on "loan," lent to them by his older sister's suitor. When the romantic relationship ended, the young man took his record player with him, and my father and his siblings were once again left in musical silence. I think my father's been making up for the lack ever since he could afford to.

Once we arrived in Opelousas, what can only be described as the great zydeco tape exchange would occur. My paternal grandmother (MaMa) would usually have the radio on and tuned to a Saturday morning zydeco program, on a radio station that probably played other types of music during the rest of the week. MaMa or my father's brother would start the exchange: "This is a really good tape..." and so it would go - making copies of tapes, putting them on to listen to a particular song and laugh out loud, my father occasionally looking at me and repeating what had just been said in French by Clifton Chenier (pictured above) or Queen Ida or Buckwheat Zydeco to me. I don't understand Cajun or Creole French, or even formal French, but this didn't stop my father's delight in repeating the French lyrics of zydeco songs to us. It also made him reflective, and he'd tell us about his pig named Susie, who'd given birth to six pigs on his sixth birthday, or how picking okra was so much worse than picking up cotton (okra cuts open your hands, neck, and back), or give us instruction in how to make a stubborn mule move.

There are songs I remember from my first five years of life, songs that I sang and danced to, that have no place in a particular memory: James Brown's "Night Train," and "I Got the Feelin,'" Rufus and Chaka Khan in "Tell Me Somethin' Good." And later, when I was about 11 and my father got a brand new stereo system with speakers that could rattle the glasses in the kitchen cabinet: Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long," Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, and Sam Cooke. I don't think my father has ever bought music by a white artist for his own consumption. Whether it's because he doesn't like it or doesn't relate to it, I'm not sure. But there is something about that zydeco, the blues, the R&B and soul singers, that he does relate to. And as even I can recognize, there's something about the music of black artists that's utterly absent in the music of white artists, and if you've grown up with the former, you long for that special something.

I referenced bell hooks' essay on Madonna in a comment, and this valuable quote: "White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure." I include that here, because listening to these songs often put my father in a reflective mood, not only about the poverty of his childhood, but about being black in south Louisiana. He'd recall, sadly, being in (segregated) schools and getting 'new' textbooks, only to look inside the cover and see that they'd already been used, with the names of the white kids who had used the books in the years before written there, just as an extra reminder (as if it were needed) of black inferiority, since one had to sit out on the curb to eat, not being allowed to sit in most restaurants, and using the back door. Or of having no place to stay in New Orleans in the late 60s, being refused to have a car sold to him in the late 70s, or of being told in the late 80s that black people weren't allowed to live in certain neighborhoods of the community where we moved.

The pain in his voice, the resignation, was so similar to that of a former roommate. She was from Zimbabwe; her parents came to America because, in her father's words, "It's better to be treated like a dog in someone else's back yard than in your own." Elegant would be the one word I would use to describe her, and she had been a molecular biology graduate student, looking for a place to live in College Station, TX in 1999. Over the phone, she'd talk to potential roommates and landlords and they would be enthusiastic about meeting her. But when they'd see her, the expression would change, the voice would become curt, and they'd say, "sorry, someone else wants the room/apartment." This happened six times, until she learned to say, "Hi, my name is Sharon, and I am African-American..." in her phone introductions, which at least reduced her travel time to visit places to live.

In our own home, my father would sometimes get down on his knees, to show us the way James Brown performed his song "Please, Please, Please" -“Please, please, please, please…please, please…Baby, take my hand. I wanna be your lover man. Oh yeah, good God Almighty, honey please…” I learned what it meant for a man to love a woman from those soul songs. In the vocal range of male R&B singers there has to be the falsetto, the duplication of female vulnerability, the adoration of the beloved. In some fundamental way, in the stylings of black vocalists and the simple lyrics of their songs, all that mattered was having a woman - she could mitigate the rest of the pain caused by the reality of life for a black man. Maybe that's why the pleas of Redding, Brown, Cooke, Charles, and other R&B and soul singers are so much more moving than in any other style of music I've heard. They're back down to basics - nothing in life to look forward to or hold on to but love. The most simple joys of life are all you've got.

My mother's musical interests centered around easy listening, like Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, and Julio Iglesias. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “99 Miles from L.A.” in my life, or how many alternate lyrics my sister and I came up with for Dionne Warwick's "Do You Know the Way to San Jose." My mother got excited over receiving an Anne Murray album. I thought these were appropriate musical selections for a woman who had nearly been a nun, who attends daily Mass, who spends several hours using the Montessori method to teach underprivileged 3 and 4 year olds their letters, numbers, shapes, and colors, and who would then prepare meals or pick up dinner for the homebound, spending extra time at their homes to talk to them, wash their dishes and clothes, and clean their house if necessary.

But these musical preferences weren’t always the case with my mother: get her to talk about herself (a nearly impossible task), and she’ll admit to loving the Commodores, the Beatles - the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” is her favorite song. So every now and then, when my mother wasn't cleaning up, cooking, or sitting at the kitchen table learning the names that went along with the faces of the kids she taught (and oh, what names), my father could induce her to dance with him for part of a song. He'd call her name, ask her to dance, she'd say she was too busy, but okay, and they'd dance to a song like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Your Precious Love." My mother would giggle, my father would tease my sister and me with a "don't look!" and we'd listen: "heaven must have sent you from above/oh, heaven must have sent your precious love." (And my parents have been married for nearly 34 years now, so it must work.)

But for female ecstasy when listening to soul singing, oh, that came from my cousin and her devout love/lust for Al Green. My cousin would occasionally babysit us, and she'd put my parents' copy of Al Green's "I'm Still in Love with You" LP on the record player, and moan and sing. She'd fling her head back and sing, "Lay your head...on my pillow...make believe you looove me...one last tiiiime...for the good times." And then salivate over the pictures of Al Green on the album cover. I learned from her that the mere sound of a man's lyrical voice could make a woman leave reason behind.

As I wrote at the beginning of this way too long trip down memory lane, my own favorite was Smokey Robinson. However, my favorite song came from another soul great, the one who objectively, I have to say had the most beautiful, lyrical voice. There's no one like Sam Cooke ("A Change is Gonna Come" has probably sent chills down the spine of anyone who's ever heard it), and no song I love more than "Bring it on Home to Me." With Lou Rawls singing backup vocals, this song is as perfect as can be in conveying the desire for a lost lover, the desire to be the steady force in her life, and her haven. And it's so utterly, heartbreakingly simple, starting off with just a piano and bass.

If you ever change your mind
About leavin', leavin' me behind,
Oh, bring it to me, bring your sweet lovin'
Bring it on home to me.

I know I laughed when you left
But now I know, I only hurt myself
Bring it to me, bring your sweet lovin'
Bring it on home to me.

I'll give you jewelry and money too
That ain't all, that ain't all I'd do for you, (Oh, I'm gonna give you)
Bring it to me, bring your sweet lovin',
Bring it on home to me, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know I'll always, be your slave
Til I'm buried, buried in my grave,
Oh honey, bring it to me, bring your sweet lovin'
Bring it on home to me, yeah.

Of course, alot of the great R&B and soul singers of days past started off singing in gospel choirs, several were sons/daughters of pastors, and at least two notable ones, Little Richard and Al Green, actually became pastors after huge secular success. And in their music, I think, you can hear the lack of difference between loving in this life and worshipping the Lord. When it works, this is music that demands that every fiber of your being be turned over to love, to the moment, to the music, to the Almighty. It testifies, it praises, it pleads. And I'm thankful for every moment my father unintentionally blasted it in my eardrums, and for seeing him with his eyes closed, sway back and forth to it, with the most peaceful of smiles on his face feeling that music and the joy.

P.S. Here is a review of Al Green's album mentioned above, from 1972:

This is what they are: "I'm Still in Love with You" opens the album with one of Green's more extraordinary vocals. The line, "I'm ... wrapped up in your love," delivered twice, is sung high, almost disappearing at the end of his range, and yet enveloping—the perfect vocal equivalent of being hugged tightly in someone's arms. He stretches the word "heaven" and it shimmers or he dips his voice down low at the end of a line as if to insinuate it into every possible corner of the song. As with most Al Green songs (this one written in collaboration with drummer Al Jackson and producer Willie Mitchell), the lyrics are simple, almost unremarkable and in this case touchingly inarticulate: "Spending my days/thinkin' 'bout you girl./Being here with you/being near with you/Can't explain myself." Throughout, Willie Mitchell's production work is as consistently strong as Green's vocals. It's never trite, never obtrusive—none of those wedges of unrelieved production (something quite different from music) you find driven into so many other albums—and always several steps ahead of being just right. Mitchell provides a texture in his production that is the perfect complement to Green's singing while establishing its own richness but avoids calling attention to itself with those hey-hey-aren't-I-hot touches so many big-time producers love to indulge themselves with.

"Love and Happiness" is about my favorite new cut here (the other previously released cut, aside from the title song, is "Look What You Done for Me," released early last spring)—after a powerful, take-your-time introduction, a very upbeat, horn-punctuated five minutes. The lyrics aren't much, but they have a loose, elliptic quality that allows the song to drift off into all kinds of improvisatory-style things at the end. The following two cuts are lovely, almost too pretty but with a saving edge of emotion. Again, the lyrics are not exceptional but, oh god, who cares with these glowing arrangements and Al Green caressing, stroking, loving the words until they're about to burst. On "What a Wonderful Thing Love Is," he says "I been cryin'" with a feeling that equals Smokey Robinson's "I'm cryin'" in "Ooo Baby Baby." Is there anything finer? "Simply Beautiful" is more vocal exposition, very loose, slightly indulgent but so tenderly sexy it gives you shivers.

Rolling Stone review, Vince Aletti, 1972.

Plan for Alexandria, Wind up in Constantinople?

2007-04-23T13:19:00.000-05:00

Deus Vult! Jonathan Phillips’ The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (2004) (I’ve previously reviewed Madden’s Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice and a book Phillips edited about the First Crusade.)

Here is a (very) brief chronology of the Fourth Crusade, with parts for the major players:

June 1198
Pope Innocent III: Go to the Holy Land, avenge the injury to Christ!

1199-1201
Crusaders: Mea culpa, we have sinned! We will repent by recapturing the Holy Land! We will pay our own way there!

April 1201
Crusade leaders: We need a way to get 33,500 men there.
Venetians: We will suspend all other operations for a year to help you get there; we’ll only charge per man and horse for all the men.
Crusade leaders: Yeah! (sotto voce) Don’t tell anyone we are really going to first sack Alexandria and use Egypt as a launching point for recapturing the Holy Land.
Venetians: Yeah! (sotto voce) The riches of Alexandria will also help pay our expenses and give us access to that market!
Pope Innocent III: Get moving!

Summer 1202
Venetians: Where is everyone?
Crusade leaders: Oh no! We are idiots! Some of the crusaders found passage to the Holy Land another way! We only have 12,000 men with us!
Venetians: WHERE ARE THE MEN WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO PAY? HOW WILL WE GET THE MONEY YOU OWE US??
Crusade leaders: (sotto voce) Don’t forget, we are going to Alexandria.

Autumn 1202 – the Sack of Zara
Venetians: Why not help us recover our debts now – let’s sack the Christian city of Zara!
Crusaders: Yeah! They have been fighting you guys for years anyway!
Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated!

December 1202
Young Prince Alexius: Help me depose the usurper Alexius III and recover the Byzantine throne for myself and my father! I will pay LOTS! And give you even more men and ships to conquer Alexandria.
Venetians: We can get our money back?!
Crusaders: Yeah, let’s go to Constantinople!
Pope Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated!

June 1203
Crusaders: Yeah, we’re outside of Constantinople!
Venetians: Parade Alexius around so that the people will welcome him and we can get our money and get out of here!
Young Prince Alexius: OOPS! (sotto voce) I might have left a few things out…I don’t know…the situation is more delicate than that….
Byzantines: Who is this fool Alexius? We will not negotiate!

July 1203 – SIEGE! FIGHT!
The Byzantines roll over, Alexius and his increasingly insane father Isaac II share power, Alexius III flees.

August 1203
Venetians: Where is our money?
Now Emperor Alexius: Ah, oh, hmm, um…
Isaac II: We owe you nothing!

FIRE!

Fall 1203
Crusaders: Let’s leave!
Emperor Alexius (Alexius IV): If you leave, I can’t keep the throne and I won’t be able to repay you! But here, let me burn down some religious art and relics to pay you!
Venetians: Money, money, money!
Pope Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated!
The Byzantine throne changes hands a few more times, all the emperors (6 in about a year) refuse to negotiate with the Crusaders and get them away from the city.

Winter 1204
Byzantines: We’re going to kill you!
Crusaders: Huh?!

Lent 1204
Byzantines: Prepare for war!
Crusaders: Umm, okay!

April 1204 – SIEGE, take two
Crusaders: GRRR!
Byzantines: AAAH!!! Run for your lives!

13 April 1204
Byzantines: We surrender!
Crusaders: We’re going to take EVERYTHING!
Byzantines: AAAH!!! Run for your lives!

SACK!!!
Venetians: We have our money!
Crusaders: We have money too!
Both in unison: Divide the spoils of the city!

Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated! How many times do I have to declare it? 'How, indeed, will the church of the Greeks, no matter how severely she is beset with afflictions and persecutions, return into ecclesiastical union and to a devotion for the Apostolic See, when she has seen in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness, so that she now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs? As for those who were supposed to be seeking the ends of Jesus Christ, not their own ends, who made their swords, which they were supposed to use against the pagans, drip with Christian blood, they have spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex.' Oh, wait (November 7, 1204), the capture of Constantinople is a ‘magnificent miracle…done by the Lord and is wondrous in His eyes.’

In Phillips' analysis, the fundamental error of the Fourth Crusade, the one that placed the whole expedition on the railings towards a train wreck, was the failure to ensure that all Crusaders would take the Venetian vessels to the Holy Land, as had been contracted by the Crusade leaders. For thirteen months Venice suspended all other commercial activity to prepare a fleet for the Crusade: enough room for 4,500 knights, 9,000 squires, and 20,000 foot soldiers. Also included was room for 4500 horses and the 30,000 Venetians (half the population of the city) who would be required to sail this fleet of 200 to 250 ships. When less than half the proposed number of Crusaders showed up in Venice, the leaders were left holding a contract that owed a tremendous amount of money to the Venetians to avoid the economic collapse of that state. Almost everything that played out over the next two years were maneuvers to allow the Crusade leaders to recover the money that was owed to the Venetians.

Once we reach Constantinople, there are a few very important lessons: 1) Do not antagonize a standing army outside one’s city, particularly an army composed of battle-experienced soldiers who have been away from home and family and living on rations for over three years. Do not rattle this cage. 2) Byzantine politics have never looked so byzantine. When an army is outside the gates and all they really want is money and then to get out of there, never-ending political upheaval, refusing them money, and attacking them is NOT a good idea, especially if on the way to your city they already sacked one of their own. 3) Was there not a single skilled military leader for the Byzantines in all of Constantinople?! Talk about a military in disarray…

Phillips' book follows the work of Queller and Madden to re-examine the Fourth Crusade, and revise the rather hostile to the West interpretations of Runciman and JJ Norwich. About 30 years ago, Queller published works that focused attention on the devout piety of Western crusaders, and as is clear from contemporary accounts (Robert of Clari, Geoffrey of Villehardouin), Westerners really were profoundly moved by requests to reconquer the Holy Land for the sake of Christ. They were also battle-experienced: military skills were a regular part of life. Both Queller and Madden have carefully searched for support for the commonly held view that the Venetians wanted to divert the Crusade to Constantinople in order to eliminate a shipping rival, and have found the evidence sorely lacking. Madden's works on Venetian history carefully demonstrate the degree to which stability was prized by the Venetians, and how they would have had no interest in diverting resources to maintain control or govern additional lands, as their own actions after the establishment of the Latin Empire indicate. It was mere chance that the future Emperor Alexius IV, also a brother-in-law to one of the Crusade leaders, would show up asking for assistance in recapturing the Byzantine throne of his deposed father, Isaac II.

But these facts do not address the most striking element of the sack of Constantinople: not the fact that it happened, but the sheer violence of it. The Crusaders, in fact, had made a vow not to engage in killing of women or children, or pillage of sacred sites, and they were also supposed to turn in all of their spoils to be divided according to previously agreed upon percentages. Neither Phillips, Queller, or Madden have proferred explanations of why the sack of the city played out the way it did. We are only left to surmise that perhaps the average knight in Crusade, having committed himself to the conquest of the Holy Land, and then forced to languish on a sandy island outside of Venice for nearly 9 months, suffered through disease outbreaks and plague conditions on the Adriatic coast, diverted to conquer another Christian city and been excommunicated for it, only to end up outside of Constantinople for nearly a year and at times be terrorized by a hostile populace was perhaps not, in modern day terms, in the healthiest frame of mind.

Now to the book: Phillips writes in an engaging style that is meant to entertain the casual reader. He intersperses his thoughts with letters and documents from the time period and successfully creates an “if you were there” feel. This book is not as detailed or exhaustive as Queller & Madden’s definitive The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople (2^nd ed 1997), which revised the entire view of the Fourth Crusade by analyzing the goals of the Venetians and finding the evidence to support a planned attack on Alexandria, not Constantinople, on the way to the Holy Land. But it is a fun read.

Mozart on Marriage

2007-04-20T09:14:00.000-05:00

On occasion of his sister Nannerl’s (Maria Anna) marriage to Johann von Berchtold

Du wirst im Ehstand viel erfahren
was dir ein halbes Räthsel war;
bald wirst du aus Erfahrung wissen,
wie Eva einst hat handeln müssen
daβ sie hernach den kain gebahr.
doch schwester, diese Ehstands Pflichten
wirst du com Herzen gern verrichten,
denn glaube mir, sie sind nicht schwer;
doch Jede Sache hat zwei Seiten;
der Ehstand bringt zwar viele freuden,
allein auch kummer bringet er.
drum wenn dein Mann dir finstre Mienen,
die du nicht glaubest zu verdienen,
in seiner üblen Laune macht:
So denke, das ist Männergrille,
und sag: Herr, es gescheh dein wille
beytag – und meiner bey der Nacht.

Wedlock will show you many things
Which still a mystery remain;
Experience soon will teach to you
What Eve herself once had to do
Before she could give birth to Cain.
But all these duties are so light
You will perform them with delight.
Yet no state is an unmixed joy
And marriage has its own alloy,
Lest us its bliss perchance should cloy.
So when your husband shows reserve
Or wrath which you do not deserve,
And perhaps a nasty temper too,
Think, sister, ‘tis a man’s queer way.
Say, ‘Lord, thy will be done by day,
But mine at night you’ll do.’

W.A. Mozart, 18 August 1784

From Mozart’s Women (2005) by Jane Glover; Painting is the Mozart family, c 1781.

Luz do teu caminho, Light on your way

2007-04-19T09:12:00.000-05:00

Lyrics to a Portuguese fado, for A.V.

Deixa-me ser a luz do teu caminho
Deixa-me ser um pouco do teu ser
Deixa que eu seja o guia do destino
Que destina a razão de teu viver.

Eu queria ser a brisa morna e leve
Que agita o teu cabelo com meiguice
Poder estar um momento’ inda que breve
Junto de ti sem que outro alguem me visse.

Se eu conseguisse ser teu pensamento
Quando fitas serena o azul do céu
Jámais escutarias o lamento
Desta paixão por ti que Deus me deu.

Eu queria ser o sol que te beija
Tornando bronzea a cor de tua tez
Por Deus, amor, deixa ao menos que eu seja
Ainda que seja o nada que tu és.

António Rocha

Let me be the light on your path,
Let me be a little of your being,
Let me be the steersman of the fate
That determines the meaning of your life.

I want to be the light and gentle breeze
That softly ruffles your hair,
And for a moment, however short,
To be with you without another seeing me.

If I managed to be your thought
When you're quietly looking at the blue of the sky,
You would not once hear any complaint
At this passion for you which God has sent me.

I want to be the sun that kisses you
And brings a tan to your complexion.
By God, beloved, let me at least,
Even if this being is nothing, be what you are.

Translation by Harold Baker, 1996

The song can be heard on the cd Tears of Lisbon.

Grant on the Cause of the Civil War

2007-04-18T10:18:00.000-05:00

While looking for another quote, I came across these paragraphs (one from the conclusion of his memoirs, the other from an early 1861 letter). Grant is not an impartial source, but I like when people agree with me.

The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that “A state half slave and half free cannot exist.” All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.

Slavery was an institution that required unusual guarantees for its security wherever it existed; and in a country like ours where the larger portion of it was free territory inhabited by an intelligent and well-to-do population, the people would naturally have but little sympathy with demands upon them for its protection. Hence the people of the South were dependent upon keeping control of the general government to secure the perpetuation of their favorite institution. They were enabled to maintain this control long after the States where slavery existed had ceased to have the controlling power, through the assistance they received from odd men here and there throughout the Northern states. They saw their power waning, and this led them to encroach upon the prerogatives and independence of the Northern States by enacting such laws as the Fugitive Slave Law. By this law every Northern man was obliged, when properly summoned, to turn out and help apprehend the runaway slave of a Southern man. Northern marshals become slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution.

This was a degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they could get the power to expunge such law from the statute books. Prior to the time of these encroachments the great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution.
....

No impartial man can conceal from himself the fact that in all these troubles the South have been the aggressors and the Administration has stood purely on the defensive, more on the defensive than she would dared to have done but for her consciousness of strength and the certainty of right prevailing in the end….In all this I can but see the doom of Slavery. The North do not want nor will they want, to interfere with the institution. But they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance.…Letter to Frederick Dent, 19 April 1861

From Ulysses S. Grant Memoirs and Selected Letters (published by Library of Congress in 1990)

I found Him Whom my heart and soul love; I held Him and I will not let Him go.

2007-04-17T15:26:00.000-05:00

I'm less than a month away from the defense of my thesis, and am currently working on the final draft of that thesis. I am very busy, to say the least, so I apologize if my posting is sporadic. Below is the post I meant for Easter. Above is a picture of me on my second Easter in a pale pink dress, my favorite color as a child. Didn't my parents have great shag green carpeting? At least they could monitor my height.

When I was a young child, on Easter Sunday my family would go to Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter for beignets. It is right next to the Mississippi River, so we could see the sun gradually rising higher in the sky over the West Bank (because of the way the Mississippi curves in N.O., the West Bank is across the river and east of the Central Business District and French Quarter - it flows northward). Covered in powdered sugar, we then walked through Jackson Square and in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

For me as a child, decked out in pink dress, white patent leather shoes with bows, and jewelry decorated with flowers (I was such a girly-girl), Jackson Square was the perfect place to dream of a fairy-tale prince. In the right mid-morning lighting, St. Louis Cathedral bears the faintest of resemblances to Cinderella's Castle at Disneyworld, and Jackson Square is the flower-filled garden right outside the gates. The perfect place for Mary Magdalene to look for the Lord, and mistake him for a gardener. Adding to the image were the society women who would parade through the French Quarter on Easter Sunday in horse-drawn carriages on their way to Sunday Mass at the Cathedral. Royalty, going to greet the Savior on the first day of a new world.

I will rise then and go about the city;
In the streets and crossing I will seek Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him.
The watchmen came upon me,
As they made their rounds of the city: Have you seen him whom my heart loves?
I had hardly left them
When I found Him whom my heart loves.
I took hold of him and would not let him go. Song of Songs 3:2-4

I loved to get dressed up, walk near those trees and by those emerald green hedges - and I love grass that looks velvety - and dream of encountering a prince. (The sugar high from the beignets also helped.) In the Disney cartoon fairy tales, the princess almost always meets her prince in the darkness, whether it be of death (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) or of twilight (Cinderella). However, they must await the triumphal ringing of bells and the new morn that their love brings.

Seek ye the Lord, and be strengthened:
seek His face evermore. Psalm 105:4

In numerous symphonies, those bells toll to symbolize death, and celebration. But it's the upwards arpeggios that really get me. Upwards arpeggios, when performed slowly and deliberately, are the clouds slowing parting in the sky to make way for the sun. Performed fast, they are the flutterings of the heart in love. In Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, over and over again that F sharp pierces the otherworld where beautiful maidens are trapped in the bodies of swans, and suggests the hovering between tragedy (B minor) and happiness (B major). Finally, after the double suicide of Odette and Siegfried, the dawn comes, and the lovers are united as the strings trill in the key of B major.

There's a cheery secular song written in the 30's that I think encapsulates this feeling, this joy of finding the beloved, and refusing to let Him go:

Dear when you smiled at me,
I heard a melody
It haunted me from the start!
Something inside of me
Started a symphony
Zing! Went the strings of my heart!
I still recall the thrill
I guess I always will
I hope 'twill never depart
All nature seemed to be
In perfect harmony
Zing! Went the strings of my heart

St. Gregory Nazienzen wrote of the soul: organum pulsatum a Spiritu Sancto. When the Holy Spirit is there, your heart and soul trill with joy. Before you find Him, it is darkness. But when you do, you cannot let Him go.

O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.
I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me. Psalm 63: 1-8

P.S. Titian's Noli me tangere is already featured on my blog. I've always liked Thomas Wyatt's secular use of the phrase is in "Whoso list to hunt..." For those unfamiliar with it, the white hind in the verse has a diamond inscription on its collar that reads: "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame." The rumor is that the hind was Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII was Caesar. Wyatt may have been quite infatuated with Anne (shh! they may have been lovers!), and he was in prison when she got her head chopped off.

For New Members of the Church

2007-04-07T14:57:00.000-05:00

The soul, touched with the love of Christ the Spouse, and longing to attain to His grace and gain His goodwill, goes forth here disguised with that disguise which most vividly represents the affections of its spirit and which will protect it most securely on its journey from adversaries and enemies, which are the devil, the world, and the flesh. Thus the livery which it wears is of three colors – white, green, and purple – denoting the three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity. By these the soul will not only gain the grace and goodwill of its beloved, but it will travel in security and complete protection from its three enemies: for faith is an inward tunic of whiteness so pure that it completely dazzles the eyes of the understanding. And thus, when the soul journeys in its vestment of faith, the devil can neither see it nor succeed in harming it, since it is well-protected by faith – more so than by all the other virtues – against the devil, who is at once the strongest and the most cunning of enemies.

It is clear that St. Peter could find no better protection than faith to save him from the devil, when he said: Cui resistite fortes in fide (1 Peter 5:9). And in order to gain the grace of the Beloved, and union with Him, the soul cannot put on a better vest and tunic to serve as a foundation and beginning of the vestments of the virtues, than this white armor of faith, for without it, as the Apostle says, it is impossible to please God, and with it, it is impossible to fail to please Him. For He Himself says through a prophet: Sponsabo te mihi in fide (Hosea 2:20). Which is as much as to say: If thou desirest, O soul, to be united and betrothed to Me, thou must come inwardly clad in faith.

This white garment of faith was worn by the soul on its going forth from this dark night, when, walking in interior constraint and darkness, it received no aid in the form of light from its understanding, neither from above, since Heaven seemed to be closed to it and God hidden from it, nor from below, since those that taught it satisfied it not. It suffered with constancy and persevered, passing through those trails without fainting of failing the Beloved, Who in trials and tribulations proves the faith of His Bride, so that afterwards she may truly repeat this saying of David, namely: ‘By the words of Thy lips I kept hard ways’ (Psalm 17:4).

Next over this white tunic of faith the soul now puts on the second color, a green vestment. This signifies the virtue of hope, wherewith the soul is delivered and protected from the second enemy, the world. For this green color of living hope in God gives the soul such ardor and courage and aspiration to the things of eternal life that, by comparison with what it hopes for therein, all things of the world seem to it to be, as in truth they are, dry and faded and dead and nothing worthy. The soul now divests and strips itself of all these worldly vestments and garments, setting its heart upon naught that is in the world and hoping for naught, whether of that which is or of that which is to be, but living clad only in the hope of eternal life. Wherefore, when the heart is thus lifted up above the world, not only can the world neither tough the heart nor lay hold on I, but it cannot even come within sight of it.

And thus, in the green livery and disguise, the soul journeys in complete security from the second enemy. For St. Paul speaks of hope as the helmet of salvation (1 Thess 5:8) – that is, a piece of armor that protects the whole head, and covers it so that there is uncovered only a visor through which it may look. And hope has this property, that it covers all the senses of the head of the soul, so that there is naught so ever pertaining to the world in which they can be immersed, nor is there an opening through why any arrow of the world can wound them. It has a visor, however, which the soul is permitted to use so that its eyes may look upward, but nowhere else; for this is the function which hope habitually performs in the soul by directing of its eyes upwards to look at God alone, even as David declared that his eyes were directed, when he said: Oculi mei semper ad Dominum (Psalm 25:15). He hoped for no good thing elsewhere, save as he himself says in another Psalm: ‘Even as the eyes of the handmaid are set upon the hands of her mistress, even so are our eyes set upon our Lord God, until He have mercy upon us as we hope in Him’ (Psalm 123:2).

For this reason, because of this green livery, the Beloved has such great pleasure with the soul that it is true to say that the soul obtains from Him as much as it hopes from Him. Wherefore the Spouse in the Songs tells the Bride that, by looking upon Him with one eye alone, she has wounded His heart (Song of Songs 4:9). Without this green livery of hope in God alone it would be impossible for the soul to go forth to encompass this loving achievement, for it would have no success, since that which moves and conquers is the importunity of hope.

Over the white and the green vestments, as the crown and perfection of this disguise and livery, the soul now puts on the third color, which is a splendid garment of purple. By this is denoted the third virtue, charity. This not only adds grace to the other two colors, but causes the soul to rise to so lofty a point that it is brought near to God, and becomes very beautiful and pleasing to Him, so that it makes bold to say: ‘Albeit I am black, O daughters of Jerusalem, I am comely; wherefore the King hath loved me and hath brought me into His chambers’ (Song of Songs 1:5). This livery of charity, that of love, causes greater love in the Beloved, and not only protects the soul and hides it from the third enemy, the flesh (for where there is true love of God there enters neither love of self nor that of other things of self), but even gives worth to the other virtues, bestowing on them vigor and strength to protect the soul, and grace and beauty to please the Beloved with them, for without charity no virtue has grace before God. This is the purple spoken of in the Songs (Song of Songs 3:10), upon which God reclines. Clad in this purple livery the soul journeys when it goes forth from itself in the dark night, and from all things created, ‘kindled in love with yearnings,’ by this secret ladder of contemplation, to the perfect union of love of God, its beloved salvation.

This is the disguise which the soul says that is wears in the night of faith, and these are its three colors. They constitute a most fit preparation for the union of the soul with God, according to its three faculties, which are understanding, memory, and will. For faith voids and darkens the understanding as to all its natural intelligence, and herein prepares its union with Divine Wisdom. Hope voids and withdraws the memory from all creature possessions; for as St. Paul says, hope is for that which is not possessed (Romans 8:24); and thus it withdraws the memory from that which it is capable of possessing, and sets it on that for which it hopes. And for this cause hope in God alone prepares the memory purely for union with God. Charity, in the same way, voids and annihilates the affections and desires of the will for whatever is not God, and sets them upon Him alone; and thus this virtue prepares this faculty and unites it with God through love. And thus, since the functions of these virtues is the withdrawal of the soul from all that is less than God, their function is consequently that of joining it with God.

And thus, unless it journeys earnestly, clad in the garments of these three virtues, it is impossible for the soul to attain to the perfection of union with God through love. Wherefore, in order that the soul might attain that which it desired, the loving and delectable union with its Beloved, this disguise and clothing which it assumed was most necessary and convenient. And likewise to have succeeded in this clothing itself and persevering until it should obtain the end and aspiration which it had so much desired, the union of love, is a great and happy chance.

St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul

For Members of the Church

2007-04-07T14:54:00.000-05:00

An Act of Contrition

I, in the Presence of God and of all the Company of Heaven, having considered the Infinite Mercy of His Heavenly Goodness towards me, a most miserable, unworthy creature, whom He has created, preserved, sustained, delivered from so many dangers, and filled with so many blessings: having above all considered the incomprehensible mercy and loving kindness with which this most Good God has borne with me in my sinfulness, leading me so tenderly to repentance, and waiting so patiently for me till this year of my life, not withstanding all my ingratitude, disloyalty, and faithlessness, by which I have delayed turning to Him, and despising His Grace, have offended Him anew: and further, remembering that in my Baptism I was solemnly and happily dedicated to God as His child, and that in defiance of the profession then made in my name, I have so often miserably profaned my gifts, turning them against God’s Divine Majesty: I, now coming to myself prostrate in heart and soul before the Throne of His Justice, acknowledge and confess that I am duly accused and convicted of treason against His Majesty, and guilty of the Death and Passion of Jesus Christ, by reason of the sins I have committed, for which He died, bearing the reproach of the Cross; also that I deserve nothing else save eternal damnation.

But turning to the Throne of Infinite Mercy of this Eternal God, detesting the sins of my past life with all my heart and al my strength, I humbly desire and ask grace, pardon, and mercy, with entire absolution from my sin, in virtue of the Death and Passion of that same Lord and Redeemer, on Whom I lean as the only ground of my hope. I renew the sacred promise of faithfulness to God made in my name at my Baptism; renouncing the Devil, the world, and the flesh, abhorring their accursed suggestion, vanities, and lusts, now and for all Eternity. And turning to a Loving and Pitiful God, I desire, intend, and deliberately resolve to serve and love Him now and eternally, devoting my mind and all its faculties, my soul and all its powers, my heart and all its affections, my body and all its senses, to His Will. I firmly resolve never to misuse any part of my being by opposing His Divine Will and Sovereign Majesty, to which I wholly immolate myself in intention, vowing ever to by His loyal, obedient, and faithful servant without any change or recall. But if unhappily, through the promptings of the enemy, or human infirmity, I should in anyway fail in this resolution and dedication, I do most earnestly resolve by the Grace of the Holy Spirit to rise up again so soon as I shall perceive my fall and turn anew, without any delay, to seek His Divine Mercy. This is my firm will and intention, my inviolable, irrevocable resolution, which I make and confirm without any reserve, in the Holy Presence of God, in the sight of the Church triumphant, and before the Church militant, which is my mother, who accepts this my declaration. Be pleased, O Eternal, All-Powerful, and All-Loving God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to confirm me in this my resolution, and accept my hearty and willing offering. And inasmuch as Thou hast been please to inspire me with the will to make it, give me also the needful strength and grace to keep it. O God, Thou art my God, the God of my heart, my soul, and spirit, and as such I acknowledge and adore Thee, now and for all Eternity. Glory be to Jesus. Amen.

St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life