Orwell's Picnic ~

"Big Society" meets "Real World"

2012-01-29T22:46:00.004+01:00

Ah Britain...

It's a long story, but in a nutshell...

For quite a long time, however many years it was, the Labour Party under Tony Blair tried to make Britain a different place from what our mums and dads had known.

Very different.

Now, David Cameron, who likes to make people think he's a "conservative," has made up this new plan to make things more like they way they were. It's called "Big Society," in which, he figures, regular people will start helping each other, without going to the government to fix all their problems.

Trouble is, this requires the kind of people who lived in our mums' and dads' Britain, not the kind of people that Tony Blair's Britain has produced.

Here's a little example of why this isn't going as well as hoped. One of Tony Blair's friends' little projects, that gets talked about rather too infrequently, was this new thing, Not-A-Cop. Called "police community support officers," PCSOs, Not-A-Cops function just about as well as you would imagine from the name.

Here's a headline typical of their great contribution to British society and policing...

"PCSOs trash penniless homeless guy's tent, bought by local charity"

"The tent was warm and it was out of people's way in woodland.

"It was secure my own private space where I could read a book with my torch."

The tent disappeared when Mr Hicks was out walking around the town during the day.

He returned back to the area behind Witney's Windrush Leisure Centre to find the tent gone.

Mr MacKenzie said: "I inquired in the leisure centre (about the tent) as to whether they had any information and was told that the manager authorised two Police Community Support Officers from Witney Police Station to clear Justin's home away.

"Also, if the police had dismantled it then it should have been treated with respect and taken back to the police station so that Justin could have claimed it back.

And here's a funny video about it, so you can have a laugh in case you were starting to worry about this too much...

(Watch out for language...)

~

Ocean very large; filled with water: study

2012-01-29T21:54:00.001+01:00

Sometimes the temptation to climb up onto the top of the cupola at St. Peter's and yell "I TOLD YOU SO" down into the piazza is overwhelming.

~

You may now point and laugh

2012-01-27T13:56:00.006+01:00

I am frequently, and lately more often, obliged to remind commboxers to read the commbox rules posted to the sidebar. I wrote them quite a few years ago when I decided that one thing I would never tolerate was rudeness. You can say whatever you like, that is, make whatever point you think relevant to a post either in agreement or not, but you may not use foul language, you may not use an unpleasant or unkind tone and you may not indulge your personal fetishes for anti-anything here. No idiotic anti-Christian insults, but also no unpleasant rants about atheists, Darwinians, or whomever the target of the day happens to be. You can, and are often encouraged to be sharp or pointy, but meanness, rudeness or bad language is not allowed.

I don't like it.

One of the things the commbox rules made clear that I am the boss, the sole arbiter of right and wrong, the judge of tone, the authority on offensiveness. I am also, more to the point, the person with her finger over the smite button and I have a deletion policy that people often, for some reason, think I will not employ in their case.

I try to encourage people to think of my blog as my sitting room. You are invited to tea and are encouraged to be interesting for as long as you stay. Disagreeing with me is part of being interesting. Coming into my house and insulting the other guests, sneering at the colour of the carpet or making unkind remarks, however, does not make you interesting. It makes you evicted.

One of the things that I have noticed in years of using the internet for my work is that some think they are not really addressing real people. It is widely commented upon that this is a medium that encourages the lower instincts in people, and this is, moreover, a time when genuine good manners (I don't mean just saying nasty things without swearing), are rarely taught to young people. How to disagree well is an art that is sadly being erased by decades of a culture that encourages everyone to express whatever vile thoughts happen to cross his mind at any time.

I once had to intervene in a bit of unpleasantness between a pair of unpleasant, and needless to say young, roommates. One had accused the other of stealing and was in a violent rage. I ordered him, with my best school-marm voice, to leave the room and come back when he was able to speak quietly. He rounded on me with the most extraordinary and memorable assertion that I had no right to try to stop him expressing his feelings. He was a young man, perhaps 19, who had been raised all his life to believe that as long as he "genuinely" felt something, it was acceptable, nay necessary, to blare it out to the world at large, and the "rudest" thing anyone could do was to tell him to shut it. It was a learning moment.

Younger people, I have since noticed, appear to be nearly all convinced that they have no reason whatever, in any venue at all, to modify their tone, their ideas, opinions or mouths. Or to listen to anything anyone else has to say. And brother, do they get indignant when someone tells them to behave. This observation has been borne out only too well by long experience with the internet. Perhaps I don't get outside my own bubble enough to observe how people interact. My friends are all grown-ups who know how to argue well and politely (for the most part) and are able to forgive each other their occasional slips and oddities.

I watched the "occupy" kids interacting on video several times with people who did not agree and in nearly every case the arrogance of the former was appalling, even when they were not outright shouting obscenities. Not only do these young people, (and often not so young) seem incapable of having an intelligent conversation with someone who does not agree, they are also apparently barely able to articulate their own ideas. It was quite a spectacle, especially coming at the same time as those "English riots" in which the few young looters who were interviewed were nearly sub-verbal.

One of the most important rules on this blog, in place to help us all avoid the temptation to let ourselves go and "express our real feelings" in the modern way, is the requirement to leave a real or plausible-sounding name. Anonymous posts, I reiterate, are not allowed. Neither is it allowed to use a moniker, obviously made-up pseudonym or adopt the name of an historical figure. If I think that you are not using a real name, (because I tend to be in a better mood in general in recent years) I will usually instruct the commenter to scroll down and read the commbox rules posted to the sidebar on the left".

I have found myself having to do this more often lately. I suspect it is because cancer makes you interesting, but for some reason the daily site stats have taken an enormous jump recently. In seven years of blogging, I have usually just carried on as if the only people reading were the ten or fifteen people who regularly toss out their ideas. I got a steady 300-350 a day and was quite happy. I hate large parties, and especially don't like a crowd. In the past, when I have seen a sudden jump in numbers, I have put it down to a link from someone more famous and have just battened down a bit and waited for them all to go chattering off somewhere else. But now I see that we are steadily attracting up to 1500 a day, so I suppose I must resign myself to having people here who do not understand the purpose of this blog.

I will make it easy. This blog is for me to write things I think about and it is addressed to my friends and long-time readers. Lately, I have been writing about what it is like to have cancer while living in a foreign country, and about art. But I often write about politics, religion and social and cultural issues.

If you are neither a friend nor a regular, you are still welcome and if you want to join either group it is very easy. Be polite. Say intelligent things related to the posts. Do not be a bore. Do not talk about professional sports. (Just a heads-up: I am inherently and always bored and annoyed by professional sports.) If you only have the urge to say, "Great post! Loved it!" please say it out loud in the privacy of your own home. If you are constitutionally incapable of being either interesting or polite, you will not last long here.

(And spelling counts. If you don't know the difference between "are" and "our," "your" and you're," or "there," they're" and "their," or think that "u" and "you" are interchangeable, you should turn the internet off right now and read a book. I am happy to supply a suggested reading list by email.)

One thing is always required: you must use a real or plausible-sounding name. If you make up a name, you may use one common to whatever culture you were raised in. If you use it consistently here, neither I nor anyone else will know the difference, and you will avoid the tiresome implication that you are a Person of Consequence with a Big Secret Identity to protect. If you are really a Person of Consequence who fears being fired or something for being seen here, you may apply privately and receive an authorised nickname that only you and I will know.

The idea is not to make sure everyone else knows who you are, but to make sure that I do. The first rule is always the most important. This blog is my universe; ultimately only my opinion matters.

Long-time readers will confirm that I have no qualms whatever about deleting you if you have annoyed me in any way. I control only two spaces in the universe: my apartment and this blog. And I control them absolutely.

I mention all this now because,

ermmm...

I seem to have accidentally erased the post with the commbox rules.

When I get around to it, I will reconstruct them. Until then, you may all talk quietly amongst yourselves.

~

Happy Birthday to Yoooooo

2012-01-26T18:09:00.001+01:00

Dorothy's birthday is this weekend. She would like it to be known that her birthday is the whole weekend and not just a little part of it.

Go send her a nice note.

Hurrah for you, nice girly.

~

Now I know how you all feel

2012-01-25T18:42:00.001+01:00

A dear friend and close colleague, the man without whom I would not have been able to make any headway in my work in Rome, has been taken to hospital and is having surgery for colon cancer this week.

I'm in shock and am completely taken aback.

Damn cancer!

~

Someone's mad at me

2012-01-24T21:08:00.007+01:00

for being... well... me.

I have been saving this little gem for a rainy blog day. You remember the other day when I was musing briefly about isolation and what it does to you. The context, I believe, was the weird spectacle of the "official" mourning activities being filmed and enforced in the world's most isolated state, North Korea. I was thinking about it because I had also been musing on what sort of conditions one has to have to ensure that an entire nation of 33 million people have ex-ACT-ly the same opinions on the usual range of, shall we say, reproductive issues.

Canada, you will remember, has a press and broadcast media that is almost entirely state-run or state-vetted. The CRTC ensures that nothing in broadcasts from radio or TV comes with anything other than the officially approved editorial position. Nearly every newspaper in the country is owned by the same company, that is a heavy funder of the Canadian Liberal Party, and of course, we can count on academia and film to do its bit in making sure that everyone adheres in lock-step to the Frankfurt-school, feminist, neo-marxist, Planned Parenthood, Our Bodies Our Selves marching orders. There really is no place in Canada where you can get away from this, it is a self-contained media bubble, or was until the internet came in.

I pondered this once many years ago. Canada seems to have an ideal situation to be used as a guinea pig in a big experiment on how to change a deeply conservative country into a nation of whiney welfare-state addicted leftists. Part of it is the low population to land mass ratio. Canada has the second largest landmass in the world, but a tiny population. The population centres, moreover, are very far-flung indeed. If you grow up in, say the Gaspe, you will without a doubt have to move to somewhere larger and more densely populated like Montreal to get a job and start your life. This trend tends to isolate individuals, separating them often by thousands of miles from their family and their communities of origin.

By rigid control of the media, by creating an atomised population who have only the official state-controlled line for information and no other sources of moral or social stability but the state, you have a population that is ripe for brainwashing.

How do you shift an entire nation to the left? Look at what has been done in Canada.

I was thinking about all this because of an interesting email from a young man whose prodigious skills as a Classical Realist painter had caught my attention. You may recall that I linked to David Gluck's blog, Painting Stuff to Look Like Stuff.

Delighted that I had found more Classical Realists to play with, who moreover live in Duncan BC not an hour from my birth place, you can imagine that I wasted no time in giving them a little extra boost. It never would have occurred to me that I was not worthy in their eyes to dare to link to their page.

I received one friendly commbox note from Mr. Gluck and then, honestly, more or less forgot about him.

What with getting the news that I am much less likely to die of cancer, dealing with the long-term side effects of chemotherapy, recovering from major abdominal surgery, dealing with the emotional and physical stresses of surgically induced premature menopause and suddenly finding myself in contact with a father whom I had assumed had forgotten all about me and from whom I had not heard since the early 1980s, ... oh, and trying to get back to work...you can imagine that Mr. Gluck was not prominent in my mind.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I received the following little note by email.

From: David Gluck
To: quicustodiet66@yahoo.ca
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 12:20:52 PM
Subject: please remove our link

Please remove the link of my blog from your blog. I must say at first I was excited to find a fellow BC Canadian realist who was supportive of what my wife and I were doing, but quite frankly after reading your blog, I am turned off. I cannot accept intolerance of gays, transgender individuals, woman's rights, etc. I also found it in very poor taste you are trying to draw a parallel between abortion and the holocaust (especially since many of my family members were wiped out in it). You seem like a very angry individual, and we do not want your followers bringing that sort of hatred to our our blog. Thank you.

David Gluck

ps. You may also want to consider removing Sadie Valerie as well considering she is a huge supporter of gay rights and marriage. In addition, I am friends with most of the artists on your links section and I cannot say they would approve of your blog either.

(emphasis added)

A pariah in the Classical Realist world! Dear me. Having other things on my mind, I responded somewhat tersely,

I'll do whatever you like, but I'm disappointed that a fellow adherent to the Classical Realist revival is so narrow minded as to be unable to disagree on politics in a civil way.

I'm always shocked at the ingrained intolerance of the left.

Very disappointed.

H. White

He replied,

"On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:13 AM, David Gluck wrote:
Trust me when I say this is me being as civil as humanly possible. I sent you a personal message as opposed to posting anything on your blog that was negative and I was very polite in the manner in which I did it. By the way, I find it a stretch to call someone who is accepting of people for who they are "narrow-minded."

Yesterday, I found out that he must be lurking about here because I received the following, "I asked you very politely to take me off of your blog. Please take me off the links section immediately. Thank you."

I thought of all sorts of replies, (like, Good grief boy, I've really got other things to think about...) but then I thought I would put it to my readers what my response ought to be. (I also considered "friending" him on Facebook, but worried that his little head would explode.)

I have thought about writing back to explain that in the world of grown-ups it is possible not only to disagree civilly on political matters, but to remain close friends with people for many years who differ radically on such issues. It is often difficult, but with the application of charity, forbearance, kindness and forgiveness, and a habit of keeping one's own faults and failings firmly before one's eyes, (I realise these are rare traits in the lefty world, but I have met them there) it is possible greatly to benefit by maintaining contact with people outside one's own political bubble.

Faithful chorus, please discuss.

(I ask only that you do not bother the poor fellow at home. No emails please or commbox messages at his place please.)

~

Just had a little follow-up

2012-01-24T20:32:00.003+01:00

appointment with the GP this evening, to see how things are going, adjust medication, complain about the weather etc. He called the gynaecologist and got the specifics for the blood tests I need for starting HRT. One of the things I need is a mammogram.

Mammogram huh?

Wouldn't it be funny if...

~

I imagine it'll be the only one,

2012-01-21T23:00:00.002+01:00

So, I'll just enjoy it...

Second Leonardo copy framed and living free in North Carolina.

~

Missing the point

2012-01-18T20:46:00.010+01:00

I hate to say it, but I find the arguments for Intelligent Design to be somewhat unconvincing. I'm afraid I just don't see why the fact that even fairly simple life forms are actually incredibly, amazingly complex, proves anything. I don't see why incredibly, amazingly complex life forms couldn't have developed their complexity through a kind of biological trial and error over a very long period of time. I just don't really see mere complexity as a sufficiently compelling argument for the existence of a designer.

At the same time, I find the answers of the Darwinians equally unsatisfying. I think both groups are locked into a materialist mindset that cannot grasp certain metaphysical ideas. They are looking for proof of God in the wrong place. And they are giving answers that are, essentially, non sequiturs. Religious people understand that the proof for the existence of God has little to do with the question of the origins of the universe or of life. God doesn't live in the universe. The only way He could have created it is to have already existed before it. Physical reality and all the laws governing it were made by God; He therefore can't be part of it.

Darwinians especially seem locked into a silly argument with Protestant fundamentalists over the origins of the physical universe or of life in it. Because they don't know anything about religion or philosophy, (and can't seem to be bothered to look it up on Wikipedia) they they don't seem to understand that Protestant creationists are not only talking scientific nonsense, they are talking through their hats on religion too. I once had to laugh when some nasty little atheist tried to accuse me of being a Creationist because I believed that God made everything. He seemed incapable of understanding that one can believe God is the author of reality without trying to prove that the early verses of the book of Genesis is a literal historical, minute-by-minute account of the first week of existence.

They don't seem to understand that the dumb Proddies arguing this silly theory are just as irritating to intelligent Christians as they are to the scientists.

Creationism is not properly speaking a religious argument about the creation of the universe; it is a political argument for the literal interpretation of the Bible and for sola scriptura. It is, in origin, a fight not with science, but with the Catholic Church. It goes back to the 16th century and is, frankly, very boring and stupid. (Really? I'm supposed to believe that the earth is 4000 years old because of the genealogies? Seriously?) The problem these Proddies have is a basic misunderstanding of what kind of document the Bible is, what it is for, and the way in which it is inerrant. It's neither a history text nor a book about physics or geology.

But this brings me to Intelligent Design, which is not, as far as I can see, an offshoot of this ancient and tired Protestant fight. It really does seem to be a movement springing from scientists who had no previous association with Proddie fundamentalism. And yet, it is still hampered by the same mistakes that both the Creationists and the Darwinians are making. None of them seem able to think outside their materialist box.

God is not in the universe. He made everything and holds everything in existence moment to moment by a continuous, eternal act of His will. The problem everyone seems to have with this question is the difficulty of thinking of things that exist outside physical reality. Outside time and space.

Darwinians and atheists like to say that the universe was brought into being by a big explosion a long time ago. When you ask them what was there before that big explosion, they will say, variously, "nothing" or "another explosion". But these answers are not even addressing the real question. It does not answer, "Where did the explosion come from? What made it happen?" Saying, "It just happened" or things "just exist" is not only unsatisfactory to people like me, it's anti-scientific. It's an expression of belief.

Dawkins once answered the question about where the big bang came from in an interview by saying, "I don't know." Which is at least honest. But when he is saying, "God doesn't exist," and seems to expect people to believe it because he's a scientist, he is making a fool of himself in the same way a plumber would be foolish to make definitive statements about cosmology.

All these people are missing the point. The existence of God really cannot be either proven or disproven by the natural sciences. Dawkins' assertion that God does not exist is not based on evidence, it is not a scientific assertion, it is an expression of religious belief. And I think that the best the ID guys can say is that they believe that such complexity as can be found in the bacterial flagellum, seems likely to point to a designer.

Physical science is only capable of observing objects and systems within physical existence and God, the author of physical reality, does not live there, as an author does not live in the book he writes. When people are looking for evidence of the existence of God, you can't answer them from inside the box of physicality.

Unfortunately for us, natural scientists are no longer trained in philosophy so they don't seem to understand the limits of natural science, and don't seem to know that they can't answer all questions about reality. It's a pity, because it seems clear that the people asking them for proof or disproof of God don't know this either. Modern people have been conditioned to think that questions about what is and is not real can only be answered using empirical science. Philosophy has become so arcane and intellectually corrupt (thanks Descartes) that it would never cross their minds to look for concrete answers there. That there are other kinds of proofs is something that many people, and apparently most scientists, have forgotten or have never known.

Darwinians have failed to even address the real question and it is hard to escape the idea that they are refusing to address it because they know it is outside their competence. It is very difficult to listen to these people talk about religion without thinking them very arrogant, and quite frankly, ignorant. I have always wanted to hear what Dawkins would have to say in response to Aquinas' five proofs. But it seems likely that neither he nor most of his interlocutors have heard of them and none of them, on either side, seem to have any notion that there is any way to address the question without natural science.

They have no background whatever, it seems, in even elementary philosophy. The Darwinian answer, "It just happened," because it ignores the real issue, is trite and unsatisfying. Things do not "just happen". There's this thing in metaphysics called "causality," which is completely observable and which philosophers have called "the cement of the universe". In other words, you can't have physical reality without it.

I myself have been observing things not just happening all my life. Events inside physical reality, existence, are always caused by some other event. All of existence is linked together by this chain and everything that happens also causes other things to happen. This is something that everyone can observe and figure out.

This means that everything that happens and everything that exists is "contingent". Everything is reliant on the thing prior to it in the chain. In philosophy, the word contingent means, "neither impossible nor necessary". A contingent being, therefore, is something that really exists, but depends on something else for its existence. Contingent beings do not exist out of necessity. It is not their nature to exist. I am a contingent being, there was a time when I didn't exist, therefore it is not my nature to exist.

The trouble that both the Darwinians and the ID people are having is that they are trying to demonstrate the existence of God from observing things within that chain of causality, and all they can come up with are things that do not exist out of necessity. Things that are contingent, dependent upon something else in the chain for their existence.

What they seem incapable of doing, perhaps because their intellectual training has been too specialised, is thinking about something that exists out of necessity. What people are asking when they want to know where did the universe come from is not, when was the Big Bang. It is, where and when did the chain of causality start?

The only way to start this chain that is the "cement of the universe," the foundation of physical reality, is to be something whose nature it is to already exist, to exist outside time and space. It has to be something that is not subject to causality, whose existence is not contingent, or dependent on anything else to have started it.

There is only one thing, one being, whose nature it is to have always existed and which will always exist in the future, and this being by its nature cannot exist within the boundaries of the causal chain.

Next time you're discussing the existence of God or the origins of the universe, the thing to ask is not, when did it all start, but how. All things are dependent upon previous things. What, then, is the first thing?

~

Starting to forget

2012-01-18T17:31:00.003+01:00

Ray Comfort who made this video said that one of the things he had to overcome in doing these interviews was his own shock and disgust that these people knew nothing about the history of Nazism and the War. He said that at first his involuntary reaction showed and it would put people off so much that they wouldn't talk to him any further. He learned to school his expression and to expect the level of ignorance he hadn't been prepared for.

As for the apologetics aspect of it, it's fine, but somewhat unrefined. The people he's talking to evidently have no intellectual capacity at all, and so their ideas are easy to refute and their minds are easy to change. But I wonder how fast they can be convinced right back again when confronted with the usual abortionism/feminist slogans.

I was taught pro-life apologetics by Scott Klusendorf and he has a much more rigorous approach that can be applied to people who are capable of rational thought. I don't fault Ray Comfort for his efforts, but I think he'd be in trouble with his somewhat sketchy method if he were up against someone of more substance.

~

Obstacles

2012-01-18T11:49:00.003+01:00

“[T]he rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered.” Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Well, the solution is obvious isn't it?

It's those damned elections we've got to get rid of...

Never fear Jihadis, the EU stands behind you in that noble effort.

~

A little worried

2012-01-17T17:29:00.004+01:00

about the puss-cat.

I think there is something wrong with Winnie's eyesight.

I always thought she was just kind of dumb, but now I think maybe she doesn't see very well. I just put down a saucer of milk for her and she was nosing around to one side of it trying to find it. It was only about three inches from her face but it took her a few seconds of sniffing before she found it. Maybe I should take her to the vet. Is there any way to check a cat's eyesight? Is this normal for cats?

~

Matt's making another video

2012-01-17T13:19:00.006+01:00

And I missed my chance...Dang!

I was signed up to get the email telling me when he was going to be in Rome and it came a few weeks ago telling all his Rome fans that he was going to be in Piazza del Popolo on October 23rd. Just as bad luck would have it though, that was the weekend Vicky and I went to Florence. Florence was awesome, but I was really sorry to have missed him.

Cause, I'm a giddy fan...

Dang!

Here he is doing his thing in Talinn, Estonia.

Aaaand in Zürich

A fun thing to do when he makes his clips is to do your own personal mini Matt video. I totally would have loved to do this. Oh well...

Dang!

~

Crazy-State

2012-01-17T12:16:00.003+01:00

The only way to really go as crazy as it's possible for 24 million people to collectively go is isolation. No one and nothing, no new idea, gets in and certainly no one gets out. I don't know if isolation is enough to make you nuts by itself, but I think it is clearly a requirement to really let it go as far as it will go.

I've had a few Thoughts about the subject of philosophical isolation in the last few hours, and I will share them shortly.

Meantime, I'd like to thank Binky the Webelf for the plug.

Say a prayer for our Nova Scotian Anglican friend if you please. He's not been well.

(Really Binks, I think you would find blogging much easier just to do a bit at a time like the rest of us do. It's no wonder you find it exhausting with these huge posts. Just put up one or two little things every now and then. You will find it much easier and the rest of us won't miss you so much.)

~

Antonio Guzmán Capel

2012-01-16T13:18:00.005+01:00

Hate the cutsie-wootsy figures. Hoo boy! Really hate them quite a lot.

and really, cat paintings? Seriously?

But lawks a' mercy! Those still lifes!

He's got that 17th century Dutch glow.

How do you make fruit look like this?

Must... try... harder...

~

Progress

2012-01-16T12:59:00.003+01:00

A little over a year ago, I copied this

Leonardo drawing

I decided to use this as a sort of measuring stick to see how I'm getting on. Thought I'd do a copy a year.

So, I did another one about a month or so ago.

Seems like it's working.

~

Pick a side, there's a war on

2012-01-16T11:49:00.008+01:00

Graphic images...

It's such a bad idea to show those photos. I can't fully articulate my reasons why, but in my gut I feel it's a bad idea.

It would be better to show a group of nuns with babies or adopted mothers with babies that they have adopted to take the "burden" off of unwed teen mothers.

I mean, we in the pro-life movement see them every day, it's just so easy to forget how horrible those photos really are.

I just think that showing those horrible pictures can do nothing but stir up more hatred and animosity. It can really only backfire on our cause. I mean, I'm against abortion, but I don't think it helps to go shoving it in people's faces.

You can't win people over by making them angry and offended... I mean, children can see these pictures for heaven's sake!

I just don't see how showing this upholds the dignity of these dead babies. Not to mention the dignity of the little ones who have to see them on TV. I know that it is reality, but my daughter who watches TV innocently, will be haunted by those images.

The use of horrific images never has anything but a negative effect on whatever cause you are trying to defend.

After all, what cause was ever helped by the use of such horrible images?

~

A parade of naked emperors

2012-01-15T23:08:00.008+01:00

Why do I have no interest in the "mainstream" art world?

Well, this:

Walking publicity stunt tapped as "Professor of Drawing" by Royal Academy.

Tracey Emin, someone I think of as a human sneer aimed at everything good, true and beautiful, has been appointed to the job by the General Assembly of Royal Academicians.

Painter Anthony Green said, "She draws at the speed of thought, which is a very rare ability."

Yes indeed, behold, this miraculous "natural talent".

Miss Emin herself comments on her amazing ability: "Some of my favourite drawings I have done with my eyes closed - or so drunk I do not remember making them."

Never would have guessed.

“...Being an artist isn’t just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it’s some kind of communication, a message.”

James Abbott, another angry art blogger I've recently discovered, responds: "I believe, in her heart of hearts (deep down where one may still reside), Emin’s message to the world is: 'sucker!'"

Apparently there are still about 60 students actually studying "art" at the Academy to whom she is now obliged to give lectures and workshops in drawing.

Many of the classical realists I've become interested in studied "fine arts" or "studio art" in university or at some accredited school and they uniformly say the same thing about it. That it was time wasted and they learned nothing of any use whatever.

Is it any wonder?

~

Give 'em the old one-two

2012-01-15T17:53:00.003+01:00

"I saw Santa punching Arius..."
"'Tis the season to be cranky, fa la la la la, la la la laaaaa..."

Jolly Old St. Nicholas — oh yes, he was a bishop — wasn’t having any of it. He tried to listen patiently, he really did, but Arius’ speech was just so wrong, that he was compelled to get up in the midst of it and, yep, punch him in the face.

Arius would have made the nativity a non-event (woop-de-freakin-doo everyone, God made something else). He, majestically prefiguring the various sects of Happy-Holiday-ers, Winter Solstice-ers, and it’s-actually-a-pagan-holiday-ers (that’s the point, you muppets!) denied that Christmas need be a celebration of substance at all. So when the modern world promotes the consumerist image of Santa Claus over the image of Christ, it is not so much the wrath of Christ they should fear as it is the wrath of Santa Claus.

A little late in the season for this, but it is fun to be reminded that I and my friends are not the only cranky Catholics in the history of the Church to lose our patience with idiotic liberal sophistry.

So, sing along with us...

"He sees when you’re dissenting
he knows when you’ve blasphemed
he knows your schismatic doctrines
and so he’s gonna punch your face
Oh, you better not doubt
You better not divide
You better not bring scandal to the Holy Roman Catholic Church
I’m telling you why
Saaaanta Claus is smacking you down,”

Happy Second Sunday after Epiphany, everyone.

~

All art and work plans going forward

2012-01-14T12:31:00.003+01:00

I just got the call from the doctor at the Gemelli. He said the histology report came back clean. I had a microscopic tumour on the uterus, but the margins were clean. No more cancer. It's over.

I'm still more or less flat on my back from surgery two weeks ago, but now I can just recover and get on with things.

It looks like the rest of my life will now happen.

~

Wait, what?!

2012-01-13T19:49:00.001+01:00

We're supposed to think the 60s were great?!

Hang on, no one seriously believes that, right?

I mean,

Right?

~

Canis latrans

2012-01-11T14:10:00.002+01:00

In which the Road Runner finally gets what he deserves.

~

Leisure

2012-01-11T13:27:00.002+01:00

There's something important about the culture of the West, about Christendom, that often gets overlooked. We have enough room, extra space in our cultural machinery for fooling around. For fun and for doing things just for the joy of it. It may be this that makes Western society superior to everything that has come before it. If we keep this alive, we may yet survive the current assaults.

~

Poor Guy

2012-01-11T12:04:00.001+01:00

Same thing happened to me. But I wasn't smiling about it at the end.

~

Hopes and dreams

2012-01-10T14:29:00.007+01:00

So, about the future...

Y'all know that the cancer business has led me to seriously re-assess my life and work. The conclusions I've come to are pretty positive. For the first time in my life I have no questions at all about whether I am doing the right things or going in the right direction. The question that cancer really raises though, is what next. The answer seems to be not a change, but more. More work. More art. More learning. More getting to know people and the world and understanding them. And doing this through art and writing.

Even before cancer, just having moved to Italy raised many of these kinds of questions. Every morning I still wake up and spend a minute or so remembering where I am and being amazed. A place this beautiful and important just makes it imperative that you live a life worthy of being here.

Just last night we said farewell to my lovely friend Vicky who came here in October to look after me (we thought the surgery would be way sooner) and is on her way home now to Vancouver to start a fabulous career as a film maker. I have more or less achieved basic physical functioning, can get in and out of bed by myself, dress, make tea and walk around the apartment. I'm not allowed to lift anything heavier than the tea pot for the first two months and can't do my own shopping at all. But I can take little walks down to the seaside and can certainly sit up at the computer and at the easel for a few hours at a time, so I think the time is near, barring further bad news from the oncologists, to get back into a regular pattern of work, at least a bit.

I am going to get the staples (!!) taken out this week, and they will tell me the results of the histological examination of the tissue some time in the next ten days or so. If the news is not what we hope for, I suppose we will have to carry on with more chemotherapy or something. I asked a couple of times "what if" and each time the answer was ambiguous. "I don't know" was the clearest I got, but someone did mention possible chemo.

I think the next histology report is going to be the crucial thing. If it shows no sign of cancer in the margins, the supposedly "clean" area around the tainted organs, then I'll probably be OK.

But if there are more cancer cells in the place where there shouldn't be then I think the long-term prognosis won't be very good. Individual cells eventually form tumours but until they do you can't detect them with scans. Right now they have already taken out more or less all the organs that I can survive without, so after this there won't be any more surgery possible. The cancer has already shown itself to be "chemo-resistant" so I think the idea is that more chemo will only stave it off for a while. How long is anyone's guess.

For myself, I am still hopeful, but there is still the issue of my intuition. I just can't shake the feeling, that seems to be turning into a certainty in my mind, that I will die of this disease. So, though I know that I will be utterly crushed if the news is bad, I will not be at all surprised, as I was not surprised at all by the initial diagnosis all the way back in March.

With all this Doom n' Gloom worst-case-scenario in mind, however, I wanted to run an idea past y'all. Vicky told me about this website that people use to raise funds for their various arty-farty projects and ideas called Kickstarter. You do a sort of pitch video and tell people what your brilliant idea is and you just plainly ask for money. You give a target goal and there is a time limit for people to donate. People have asked for start-up funds to do everything from making traditional tomato chutney to building a giant animatronic snake. One project that impressed me was this one to create a rolling photostudio to revive the use of traditional film photography.

And you can really get a lot of dosh out of it. This guy, for example, was one of the big lotto winners. He asked for 500 bucks and ended up with over $77,000. Though of course, there is no telling which project will strike the fancy of readers.

I've been all over the site and it seems that there is very little there about doing anything remotely "traditional" in art in the sense that I mean it. In fact, it seems geared towards more of the "innovative" modernist stuff that I've spent my life fighting. But there is certainly a sense in which a return to Classical Realism in art is at the very cutting edge of avant garde these days, as being interested in the Trditional Mass is in the Church. So long-lost and forgotten is the skill of realist drawing that it seems like a rediscovery of ancient alchemy or magic. Besides, nearly anything goes in our weird times, and I think perhaps if it were pitched that way my idea would get some attention.

My idea simply is, as soon as my health will allow, to start studying as close to full time as I can manage, which, given work commitments, probably means a 3-hour class a day, five days a week. This will cost about $10,000 (Cn) per year. I hope to divide my time evenly between the studio and work. That's the first part anyway. In the long run, like a couple of years from now, stage two is to teach and help Andrea expand the Rome school. In the long-long-long run, the third stage, should I ever get there, is to buy a place in the country in Umbria and open a live-in school. If I were to die having done all or most of this, I'll be pretty content.

Studying art for me is part and parcel of the work I've been doing for the last decade or more: to rescue Western Civilisation from the barbarians who have nearly destroyed it. To be a traditionalist painter, to start saying in painting what I've been saying in words, is a goal I think I can achieve (assuming there's time) and will, I hope, be the "other half" of the work I've been doing to advance the cause of The Real in the face of a universal capitulation to an evil and disordered Fantasy. I have said before that I greatly value the chance to do the work I do and to get better at it, but that it seems incomplete to me. (It could be worse, I could have a bee in my bonnet about studying poetry! I shudder.)

In the second phase, my hope is to teach other people what I've learned. I can't tell you how annoying it is when someone says, "Wow, that's amazing! I can't draw a straight line. You must have natural talent." The idea that drawing is some kind of magic trick that only people with the special Harry-Potter drawing gene can do is as widespread as it is irritating. (I can't draw a straight line either. No one can because there is no such thing in nature. In fact, I'm hereby banning the expression from the blog.) Back before they abolished education drawing was a normal part of everyone's upbringing. It is about as magical as learning to read Latin and was tossed out of the curriculum for more or less the same reasons.

When Andrea was studying at the Florence Academy she was recruited as a drawing instructor while still studying. She also worked at normal joe-jobs most of her time in training. She really does embody the kind of discipline to which I aspire.

I have no desire whatever to pick up stakes and move to Florence, mostly because I'm not interested in tearing apart my happy little life. I intend to keep doing what I am doing, but to do a lot more of it all. To continue to write out against the evils of our times on LSN. For those who worry that I am thinking of quitting, it is very far from my mind. The thing that cancer has taught me is that I really want to live, completely and fully, and for me, life simply can't be lived without writing. But it is like trying to live on only one kind of food. Eventually the craving for more protein or potassium or vitamin C becomes overwhelming.

If the cancer news is good, we are nearing the end of the ordeal. I think the time has come to make some plans for the possible future.

~

Two new bloggers

2012-01-10T13:00:00.002+01:00

Ryan Delgado, who also just got a copy of the New Book, is obviously a little further ahead than I am, having started painting, but seems to be more or less doing the same thing I am trying to do. Learn from scratch classical drawing and painting.

And Kate Stone and David Gluck seem to have just started their Classical Realist blog, called appropriately, "Painting stuff to look like stuff".

~

Many thanks

2012-01-10T11:34:00.005+01:00

to reader Katherine Altham who writes on the little note accompanying my new book,

"Dear Miss White, Your blog has on several occasions been to me a light in the darkness. With wishes for a peaceful Advent and a Christmas of "comfort and joy".

The note was on the paperwork accompanying my shiny new copy of

Lessons in Classical Drawing; Essential techniques from inside the atelier

Really, I can't say enough how much I appreciate the kindness of my readers who send me nice things and say helpful stuff.

Things are going to develop with me and the Art Thing. I've got a plan, and I'm going to need help from y'all. I know I can count on a lot of intelligent input from my chorus.

~

I often worry that I will pay a heavy price for all the time wasted

2012-01-09T12:42:00.001+01:00

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W. H. Davies

~

Senior National Gallery Curator Admits Modern Abstract Art is Crap

2012-01-09T12:20:00.003+01:00

Well, almost...

Mark Leidhauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king of pope or Medici ever did. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings...

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

This really happened

2012-01-09T09:54:00.004+01:00

That young man is Joshua Bell, one of the foremost musicians of the day. The place is the metro in Washington DC.

It was a social experiment set up by the Washington Post to see what would happen. How ordinary passers by would react to the kind of music people pay top dollar to hear in concert halls.

Well, this:

The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

H/T to Carriere.

~

Hair update: Jan 7

2012-01-07T21:28:00.004+01:00

Well, it was finally getting untidy, so I got Vicky to roll me down to the local parucchiere who gave me a quick wash and trim. First haircut in a year.

It's the guy who claims to have been the one who did Elizabeth Taylor's hair when she used to come and vacation in Santa Marinella.

(Note Christmas decorations. Vicky made the snowflakes and we collected the greenery in the park.)

~

Had a go

2012-01-07T12:17:00.007+01:00

I tried it.

It really doesn't look very much like the original, does it. I'll try again.

My excuse is that I did it on the train, the contour on the 1 hour long trip in, and the values on the 35 minute trip home.

Took the wheelchair and ventured into the city yesterday to see a movie. In a movie theatre! In English! I'll say now that though I had really expected the Robert Downey Jr. and Jude I-can-barely-stand-to-type-his-name-so-much-do-I-loathe-him Law versions to be intollerably awful, I think they do fairly well as a kind of sub-Holmes genre of their own. Holmes as superhero. I will ever remain loyal to Jeremy Brett, of course, but I like explosions, so I do!

But Rome. Dear me! I go there so infrequently now for anything other than strictly medical reasons that I had forgotten many of the things that drive me nuts about it.

Rome is probably the most un-cosmopolitan city I've ever lived in or been to.

There is exactly ONE cinema left in this miserable city that shows lingua originale films.

All the "Chinese" restaurants are this weird thing; "Roman Chinese" where all the menus of every place in the city are exactly the same. Roman-Chinese cuisine: what we do out of desperation when we just can't face another carbonara/pizza-Margherita Sunday lunch. Not only is there almost no presence of any other country here, they don't even do anything from any othe part of Italy. I think I know of exactly one Tuscan place.

It also has cobbles.

Oh dear me! Let me give all the soon-to-have-major-surgery a piece of advice. A wheelchair and the Roman cobbles are not a good mix. Even using mostly taxis it was an uncomfortable ride.

Pretty tired today, and pretty achey, but I was SO glad to have got out of the house!

~

How not to be a great painter

2012-01-06T12:01:00.001+01:00

Someone really needs to sit down with this guy and tell him, "Dude, there can be only one."

Do something different.

~

Hands are hard

2012-01-06T11:55:00.002+01:00

I've been looking around for things to help with correcting my anatomy studies. Of course, the old masters are the best, but good reproductions can be hard to find in a size suitable for copying (calendars!, but they only come out once a year). This drawing by Leonardo is, in my opinion, the greatest hand study ever done by anyone ever, ever, and his hands are famous for their beauty and the subtlety of the rendering. So much so, that I'm kind of scared to try it, but of course, I'm going to anyway.

I remember having an epiphany (heh) over the value of fashion magazines. Bought a couple once with the idea that there would be lots of body parts in them, and drapery that I could practise on. But as I flipped through them, for the first time paying close attention, I saw that in every single photo, the hands of the impossibly whispy models were doing nothing. No one was holding anything. No one was doing anything. They all just stood there with their hands as empty as their expressions. It really put me off fashion magazines for good. Take a look some time, it's interesting.

~

Shiny still life

2012-01-06T11:50:00.000+01:00

Strawberry

2012-01-06T11:38:00.001+01:00

Here's another one by the same guy.

~

Pushing through

2012-01-05T12:38:00.012+01:00

As I've said, Andrea told me before I started having surgeries that if I am on my feet then, I can start the cast drawing segment of the course when she gets back from Australia in April. Cast drawing in charcoal is the last step before actually starting painting in this painstaking and strictly laid-out formal course of study I've been doing at her studio. After that, I will do a grisaille painting of a cast, which is the last transition between drawing and painting, and then dive into colour.

Watch the video above for a minute. As you can see, it is a lot harder than it looks to draw or paint even something simple like an egg and make it come out looking like a real egg...let alone a beautiful egg.

I remember when I was little, my Grandma used to let me paint with her and she tried to teach me, though I was a rather unwilling student. She tried to instill in me the importance of starting from the beginning and started me on simple solid objects like flower vases (without flowers) and oranges and things. I was always unsatisfied with the results both because it was always much harder than it seemed it ought to be and because of the lack of glamour of painting such "simple" plain things. I complained bitterly that they were "boring" and that I wanted to do the sort of things that she did, arbutus trees and landscapes, maybe a sparkly seascape.

Knowing how enthusiastic I was about spreading things all over my clothes, she never let me do much with her oil pastels but charcoal washed out and off easily so I was allowed to muddle about with it. She really did try to teach me, but I was terribly intractable and so learned almost nothing.

I've since learned a very important lesson in drawing, that you have to keep pushing through. Many times I've started something and not liked the way it has gone. It could easily have frustrated me enough to make me stop trying after the first few passes, but I've learned that if you keep scrubbing away at a drawing, it will get better. The trick is to push past the first unsatisfactory bit and give it sufficient time. Push through the bad bits, keep pushing until you get there.

After a while you get used to having your drawing look odd or wrong for the first parts and it is almost fun to watch it grow more solid and "real looking" as you continue to jiggle it about and spot and solve the problems. Once you start looking at a drawing as a kind of puzzle to be solved, you are half way to the mindset that will succeed.

Most of my early efforts at copying, I now realise, could have been much more successful if I'd given them more time. But, like most people, I would find it wasn't working right away and assume that I just couldn't do it. That I didn't have "natural talent" (what a terrible toll that stupid phrase has taken on the world!). The one thing I can't do, even now, is draw fast, but as Ruskin says in his Elements of Drawing we are really totally unconcerned with time in drawing.

"What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom: is the character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose hand is so thoroughly disciplined that when pressed for time he can let it fly as it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of a great master at real work is never free: its swiftest dash is under perfect government. Paul Veronese or Tintoret[to] could pause within a hair's-breadth of any appointed mark in their fastest touches and follow within a hair's- breadth the previously intended curve. You must never, therefore, aim at freedom. It is not required of your drawing that it should be free, but that it should be right; in time you will be able to do it right easily, and then your work will be free in the best sense. But there is no merit in doing wrong easily."

Emphases in the original.

Probably the hardest thing we modern grown-ups have to face when learning to draw is the fact that it is difficult. It really is. It is very hard to learn as an adult how to do the mental acrobatics of "detranslating," learning to actually see the thing you are looking at as it really is, visually, without imposing labels on it. This labelling thing that we have spent our whole lives perfecting and using to understand the world that comes through our vision, has to be completely undone, and you have to learn to turn it on and off at will. An object you are looking at, say an armchair, to our eyes alone is really not an armchair at all. It is an integrated system of relationships of darks and lights and colour. Shadows and light grading down from shiny highlights to dark shade, little nubbly parts where the shade and light are close together in little bits, big patches of dark next to a section of complicated shadows that make up drapery. It is hard to explain, but what our eyes see really, really is only this. Darks and lights and colour. Not even depth...especially not depth.

The label, "armchair" has all kinds of implications. It has to be soft and curvy and to sit with it's cushion horizontal in relation to the floor. It has to be a certain kind of object and to fulfill a certain kind of function. It has to sit cradled in three-dimensional space. All of this kind of labeling, that we have done since learning it in infancy, has to be shut off if you are going to draw an armchair that looks like an armchair. The three-Dness of the thing is most especially important to turn off. Flatten it, look at it as a system of darks and lights and colours, and you will be able to draw it.

This trick is the hardest thing to learn in drawing. Really, it has nothing at all to do with how you hold a pencil. And it is so difficult, and so rarely taught, that most people assume that drawing is some kind of magic trick that requires "natural talent" (faugh!). The frustration of not getting it (and there are a lot of pages in my sketchbooks that don't get onto the blog, believe me!) is the thing you have to push through. The fact that it is difficult, and that we live in a culture that insists everything has to be easy, painless and instant, is our biggest problem. It is why I think drawing is so important to teach young people. Teach them that this hard thing is worth struggling over, and spending time on, pushing through the many obstacles and set-backs.

Here is something that can be learned about life in general from learning this difficult thing, drawing; that the rule of "pushing through" applies to everything you want to do in life. I remember when I was out there in the world, more or less raising myself after I was 15, I assumed that nearly everyone knew more about how to get on in life than I did. That there was some secret to doing things right that I didn't know and thought I could never learn on my own. I was, and still am, quite frightened about "doing things wrong" and so a great deal of my difficulties in life have surrounded fears of trying things.

If I'd been raised by grown-ups, I might have been taught that when you start something, you will have to be bad at it at first. You have to push through that part to get good, to learn how to live. I suppose I have pushed through now and finally figured it out. I do hope it's not too late to enjoy the fruits of this discovery.

* ~ * ~ *

I've been fearsomely tested lately in my ability to keep pushing through, and of course, have had a lot of help. At the moment, I'm mostly resting of course, but still pushing through and the obstacle is a most unexpected one. Right now, I'm struggling over what to write to my father. I have his email address. He has sent me a couple of emails showing an obvious desire to mend things, but what do you say? It's been a lifetime, and we might discover in the next week or so that it has in fact been my whole life and there is now no more time. How do you figure out what to say? Or even whether it is worth saying.

~

Toffs on a Train

2012-01-05T10:30:00.000+01:00

What do the British upper classes get up to in these dark times?

Why, the same thing they've always got up to. Keeping entertained.

~

I've been asked

2012-01-04T20:28:00.001+01:00

what's with all this art stuff?

Well,

this.

Dorothy explains

2012-01-04T18:01:00.004+01:00

why we need the Anglicans in the Church

The Anglicans got their liturgical English in Shakespeare's day. We got ours in the Beatles'. Lucky old us went from "In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominem" to "He loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah."

She stops short at saying outright that the NO sucks.

So I will. It sucks. An absurd, politically motivated mishmash of Proddy theology and Judaic ritual, scrubbed clean of all specifically Catholic content, cobbled together by a committee of Lutherans, Anglicans, freemasons and traitors and deliberately foisted onto the world with the malicious intention of destroying the faith and threatening the souls of millions.

I do wish people would stop telling me to go to it. I realise they're trying to help by saying, "Well, the Mass is the Mass..."

No. The Holy Eucharist is the Holy Eucharist and the proper reception of it is indeed THE source of sanctifying grace...if I were blind and deaf. Grace can only be received by a person with correct dispositions, which in me are utterly destroyed by the horrific anti-liturgy of the Novusordoist world. As they are with everyone who is ever exposed to it.

The wonder of the modern Church is that there are still people in it who believe, a testament not to the new liturgies, but to the incomprehensible power of the Holy Spirit.

~

Not been entirely idle

2012-01-04T14:58:00.008+01:00

In the last couple of months, it seems from reading here that I've been totally preoccupied with health-related things, and I suppose it's mostly true, but while thinking about the big Life and Death issues, there is plenty of time to do things when energy permits. (Albeit, mostly things involving a lot of sitting down.)

We had been called in to the Gemelli to have a consultation appointment when the histology report came back positive for cancer in the margins. We had to wait quite a while in the rather stark hallway outside the oncology office and I was going to go mad if I didn't do something with my hands and brain.

Fortunately, having been to the Lateran recently to get the feast-day plenary indulgence, we stopped in the bookshop and I bought postcards of the 12 magnificent Borromini statues of the Apostles, and even more fortunately, had brought one along to the appointment. I had intended only to do a little study of the hand and surrounding drapery, but well...

The paper is very toothy in the leather-covered sketchbook I just bought which is often good, but presents challenges.

A great place to buy beautiful leather-bound sketch and writing books (with refillable paper inserts) is a cartoleria just behind the Pantheon, I think it's just called "Cartoleria Pantheon" but the brand name of their gorgeous stuff is "Manufactus". (Anyone who ever wants to buy me presents can start and end there.)

I had been meaning to do another copy of this Leonardo drawing since I had done

this one a year ago and had intended to do them periodically as a way to measure my progress.

A friend of ours came to visit and I wanted to give her a present so it seemed like a good time for another try.

Getting better, I think, though infuriatingly slowly with all these interruptions.

Started the next Bargue drawing in class, this one is the first I've done in charcoal. Delayed by surgery and by Andrea's stay in Australia until April. But getting the knack of the charcoal technique and could immediately see how much closer to painting it is than graphite.

Andrea said that when she comes back and resumes classes, I am ready to do the cast drawing segment. Should be more or less functional by then, (should the test results come back as we hope).

~

Rabbit Hole

2012-01-01T10:46:00.005+01:00

Honestly, a lot of the last few days has been a bit of a haze.

As of this week, I have done everything that could be done to combat this cancer and tomorrow it is likely that I will be going home to await the outcome of our efforts. When I asked what would happen if the tissue removed showed signs of more cancer, I got no answer. I think they don't know beyond a vague, "more treatments". It seems that combating cancer is very much a matter of navigating on instruments without a map. The cancer tells you which are the best guesses, and you go in whatever direction the tissue samples indicate. No way of knowing ahead of time which way we're going.

On Wednesday evening, I had a long talk with one of the doctors here who had gone to some considerable effort to translate and type out a large document into English setting out all the possible ramifications of the proposed surgery, short and long term. I read it very thoroughly and asked a lot of questions and the beautiful young doctor with the charming Italian/Australian accent sat with me going through everything inch by inch. But by this time, I only wanted information so as to be forewarned. The decision to go forward was already set by then, but until about lunchtime on Wednesday afternoon, it had been nothing like a foregone conclusion. And I balked.

We had arrived around noon, and had been shown to my room where an elderly lady lay in the other bed surrounded by her relatives. I hung up my coat and sat on the plastic chair looking blindly out the window, waiting for the doctor. The now-familiar routines were followed with paperwork, blood test, tagging... but I could see the wall coming up fast and I was finally certain that I could not get over it this time.

By two pm my nose was pressing up against it and I cracked. I told my friend that I did not want to do the trade. It just wasn't a good enough deal. They would not conduct this horror on me just for a roll of the dice that might or might not result in a few more years of the same life I'd already had enough of a dozen times over.

"If all it's going to be is more of this, and in that condition, then no." I got up, heading for the nurse's station: "I'll just go tell them I'm going home."

I had my coat on and was pulling on my shoes, throwing things into my bag, trying to stay calm enough to explain that no, I would not, could not do this horrifying thing.

How could I trade who and what I am at so deep a level for something as cheap and lousy as a few more years? Why should I go to such lengths to extend a life that has rarely failed to disappoint? What could I possibly imagine I could still hope to have out of it at this stage?

It has been, shall we say, a strange few days and much of it spent in a cloud of morphine-induced confusion and on Saturday evening an unexpected and frightening reaction to one of the other pain drugs. But now that it is over, I have come to a kind of island of quiet. Not peace, exactly, but at least quiet, enough to wait through, because now we have to wait again.

What did I learn about myself in this odd, dream-like week? I learned that I almost fear life more than death by cancer. Which I think is not uncommon for people of our time.

Somewhere in the middle of all the haze and confusion, I remember taking a phone call. On Saturday afternoon, I commented that I was looking forward to lunch because the Gemelli does pretty good fish for lunch on Fridays. I had lost a whole day, but during that dream-sequence Friday, another odd thing occurred.

I really have little clear memory of the day after Thursday's surgery. I know I lay still, having been tucked by my friend carefully around with soft pillows to keep me from moving in the night. I looked up to see the nurse approaching with a cordless telephone held out towards me. She said something in Italian that I was certainly in no condition to understand. All I heard was "Canada". Were my employers calling to see how I was doing? I took the phone and a crackly old-fashioned operator's voice said in Italian, "Wait please for an international connection," and the next voice I heard was my father's.

I don't remember much of what I said. He asked me how long it had been since we talked and I think I said, "About 30 years." He told me that he was sorry and that he hoped I would get better and would I let him know how things went. He said he has prostate cancer. I remember asking what stage and he said, "Intermediate". He's being prepared for chemotherapy in the spring and is "optimistic". He asked me how long I'd lived in Italy, and what was I doing and was I enjoying it?

It was not long before I could no longer make any sense and the nurse standing over me could see that I was distressed. I told my father that I could not talk now but that I would send him a note telling him the outcome of the surgery. I can't remember what he said after that, but the nurse took the phone gently away and said many things in Italian that I understood even without knowing the words. "It was my father. It has been thirty years." She looked shocked, but stroked my head and told me not to cry. "Tranquila, tranquila..."

Indeed, with a fresh eight-inch abdominal incision I could barely speak; even breathing was painful. I lay there trying to remember his face listening to the faint sound of a newborn wailing briefly in the obstetrics ward one floor above us. The week between Christmas and New Year's is a quiet one in hospitals, and in the place of the usual boisterous Italian familial bustle was an uncommon stillness in the halls and rooms.

This week my past and future and present all seem to have crowded into the little double room to tell me things.

It's a good thing this was a slow week for sickies, because I think the drama was too much for my roommate who asked to be moved to a spare bed in another room. Perhaps she was offended that I had asked for a screen. It is not the Italian custom to erect privacy curtains between beds and when an Italian friend visited, she explained and the nurses had kindly found a portable screen. I'm sure they didn't fully understand my strange Anglo/Canadian need to not watch or be watched by strangers in vulnerable medical and emotional moments.

So, here I am, maybe even cancer-free, who knows? Maybe with 30 or 40 years ahead. Or maybe more chemo and a short time to sort out my affairs. My English relatives have gently scolded me for not calling more frequently, and have been calling every evening.

I was surprised to find I was able to get out of bed by Saturday morning, to be able to walk that day with a friend on either side ten or twenty yards down the hall and back, and twice today unassisted, though very slowly, to the cafeteria and back to the ward. I am reminded how grand it is to be able to get to the bathroom by myself, and to stand up straight and to walk to the little balcony for a breath of fresh December air. Even pain is not entirely unwelcome; it comes from the real world.

Today a shock-haired Friar in bare feet and sandals and a brown habit brought me Holy Communion and said he would do it again tomorrow. Hospitals are dull places but we entertained ourselves. While I darned socks and the elbows of my cardigan, Vicky and I learned how to gamble a starship with Corbomite and sailed through the Gothic into the early Renaissance with Lord Clark for an episode and a half of Civilization. We figured out how to make un-melt-able cups for hot Darjeeling by cutting off the bottoms of Schweppes grapefruit soda bottles with Vicky's Swiss Army knife.

And now, we just have to wait to see what will happen next. Tomorrow, having found that most of my plumbing is in basic working order, they will be letting me go home and I will spend the next several months recovering and figuring out what all this means. They have removed all the organs that they think could have been infested with cancer cells and now those are to be examined cell-by-cell in the lab and

The surgery I've just had is thought to be the best possible option for my stage and type of cancer and the numbers for it are very good for total cure, about 85-95%. We will know in "twenty days".

This afternoon, I switched on my computer and found a YouTube video of some monks singing the Te Deum and, because it is the Feast of Mary Mother of God, prayed for the Plenary Indulgence because this week I decided to try to keep living.

~

Today

2011-12-31T17:46:00.002+01:00

Surgery done.

It was very hard.

I didn't run away from the hospital at the last moment, but it was a close thing. Very close. When it came down to the wire, I felt like an animal backed into a corner of a cage. Only the knowledge that not going through with it would badly hurt others forced me through the barrier.

I think I'm going to be taking a break from blogging for a while. This has changed a lot of things for me, and I'm no longer completely sure who and what I am. Difficult to have anything to say to other people from that position.

Thank you again to everyone who prayed.

We will not know if cancer is over for another few weeks. When we have the verdict from the histology, I will post the results.

If the news is bad, I think I will be done with both blogging and treatment.

~

Tomorrow

2011-12-27T17:38:00.003+01:00

In hospital from 10 am tomorrow until I don't know when. I won't be available for visiting or much of anything for some time to come.

It is possible that news will be posted on Facebook.

~

Her Maj.

2011-12-26T11:06:00.002+01:00

Wonderful.

So glad she's ditched the tedious political correctness.

~

I've discovered the greatest Christmas Day movie of all time

2011-12-25T13:16:00.002+01:00

Three words, baby,

Wrath.

Of.

Khan.

~

Let's all play Diocesan Two-step

2011-12-24T11:41:00.004+01:00

We've all done it, all been the recipient of it at one time or another...

- Catholic layman gets fed up with the disaster in the Church. Writes letter

- Letter ignored.

- Enterprising Layman sets up his own apostolate (like is says in Vatican II to do) and starts doing what he can to set things right.

- Local bishop gets wind of this from his pet heretical nun/vicar general/local priests or other deranged minions

- Bishop sends letter to Enterprising Layman telling him to knock all this Catholic stuff off or else...

- Layman asks for meeting with bishop to discuss it.

- Bishop ignores request.

- Layman carries on.

- Bishop sends more letters. Gets annoyed when letters ignored, issues press release telling Layman to stop and making sure all the world sees.

- Kerfuffle ensues in the media, layman asks for meeting with bishop, tells press.

- Bishop continues to ignore request for meeting and lets it be known that he is furious over the hundreds of calls and emails with which his office is suddenly flooded.

- Nuncio contacted... letters to Rome...

Etc...

In recent years, however, the bishops have become vaguely aware of this thing called the "interwebs" or some such, and have been annoyed by swarms of people contacting their offices and upsetting the natural order of things by demanding meetings and action on various things. It is making their lives very difficult, I'm sure.

Bishops' favourite word for work like Michael's is "divisive". For some reason, they all think that the whole world is as terrified of the word as they are, and that it will induce laypeople to shut up and go with the flow.

Below is a classic, nay, textbook case illustrating this drearily familiar comedy routine.

...
In a press release issued December 15 and signed by Communications officer Joe Kohn, the Archdiocese of Detroit states: “The Archdiocese has informed Mr. Voris and Real Catholic TV, RealCatholicTV.com, that it does not regard them as being authorized to use the word ‘Catholic’ to identify or promote their public activities."
[The correct response to this is to shrug. I am a Catholic layman, I am not opposing the Faith or obstructing the work of the bishop and I am acting according to the directives of the last Council and various papal encyclicals on the proper role of the laity. So, the only thing to say is, "Thank you very kindly, Bishop Vigneron, for your helpful advice. Be assured that I and my staff continue to include you and your intentions in our daily prayers, and we wish you and yours a very happy Christmas." Since the bishop has gone public, this letter should be produced on Enterprising Layman's website, along with a running tally of the number of formal requests for a meeting between Enterprising Layman and his spiritual father.]
Of note there are prominent ‘Catholic’ entities and even Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Detroit directly flouting Church teaching without a comparable reprimand from the Archdiocese. One such entity is a group of priests of the Archdiocese who are publicly in favor of women’s ordination to the priesthood and against the Church’s teaching prohibiting contraception. The group is called “Elephants in the living room.”

There is however an interesting twist to this story. Michael Voris, while he may be the star of RealCatholicTV’s programming, is not the owner of the website. The owner is Marc Brammer who lives in South Bend Indiana in the diocese of Bishop Kevin Rhoades.

Brammer told LifeSiteNews, “I own RealCatholicTV.com. I contracted with Michael Voris to produce video content for that website and I pay him for it. It is a business relationship between me and Michael. If all of a sudden now there’s this tussle over the use of the word ‘Catholic’ I’ll deal with it through competent ecclesial authority.”

Brammer noted that he had received a letter from the Archdiocese of Detroit acknowledging him as the owner of the website. He responded to that letter with a request for a meeting with the Archdiocese. He received no response. Brammer has not been asked by his bishop, Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop Kevin Rhoades to cease using the word Catholic.

A LifeSiteNews request for an interview with the Archdiocese of Detroit was not returned, and the voice message noted that the office was on holiday till after Christmas.

The press release from the Archdiocese of Detroit notes, “The Church encourages the Christian faithful to promote or sustain a variety of apostolic undertakings but, nevertheless, prohibits any such undertaking from claiming the name Catholic without the consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority.”
[There is no law anywhere copyrighting the word "Catholic," nor is there any provision in canon law allowing a bishop to reprimand a layman in good standing with the Church for using the word publicly.]
The release adds, “For some time, the Archdiocese of Detroit has been in communication with Mr. Michael Voris and his media partner at Real Catholic TV regarding their prominent use of the word ‘Catholic’ in identifying and promoting their public activities disseminated from the enterprise’s production facility in Ferndale, Michigan.”

Voris says that communication was only one way – directives from the Archdiocese and refusal to meet with Voris or Brammer to discuss the matter. Voris told LifeSiteNews that he has requested a meeting with Archdiocesan officials seven times to discuss the matter, but each time he has been ignored or rebuffed.

According to its minutes, Elephants in the living room (the group of priests which publicly holds positions counter to Catholic teachings on women priests and contraception), met with Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron on February 1, 2011.

If you find yourself at loose ends during the holidays, perhaps you would enjoy playing the game too.

Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron
Chancery Building
Archdiocese of Detroit
1234 Washington Blvd.
Detroit, MI 48226

Email: infodesk@aod.org
Phone: (313) 237-5800
Fax: (313) 237-4644

Homeless Waif Christmas dinner

2011-12-23T11:41:00.004+01:00

Why is it SO difficult these days to get people to understand the need to RSVP to a party? Particularly a dinner party for which a lot of food needs to be bought well in advance.

Would the people who are planning to come on Sunday please let me know as soon as possible either on FB or here or by email.

Plenty of people have sent "regrets," but so far, the ones who have told me verbally they will come have not yet responded on FB. I'm already buying food, but so far I have no idea how much to get.

Please click the "attending" thing so I know in time.

Thanks.

~

More contemporary art I don't hate

2011-12-22T10:40:00.006+01:00

So, last night, I was having trouble sleeping and was cruising around the classical realist world on the net, and I came across this site.

I was looking all over her blog and drawings page and thinking, "Gosh! how could I ever learn to do this? Who could possibly teach it to me?"

Turns out the answer is, exactly who I'm studying with.

She was a student of Andrea's in New York.

Small art world.

She's still studying, but look what she can do!

Master copies...

Figure studies...

This is what she calls a "sketch"...

Ah, yah. My sketches don't look like this, I can tell you.

If there was one particular thing that I could be said to be interested in living for...

~

Intuition

2011-12-21T15:27:00.003+01:00

Another pic that comes from the wonderful Underpaintings site.

I want to start this post with a disclaimer. I'm not sure what we make of ideas like "intuition" as Catholics, but right up front, I want to make it clear that I don't believe in ESP or any of that quasi-occult/parapsychological stuff. I think somehow intuition is a real thing, though. I think sometimes God will give you a little hint about some things sometimes, for His own reasons that even those who are given these little hints don't know.

I know my stepfather Graham knew without a doubt that he would die young, and he did indeed die at 48. For many years, at least since my early 20s, I have had an equal conviction that I would die of cancer. I don't claim to have any sort of divinely inspired knowledge, but it's there very firmly and has never gone away. When I was diagnosed, I was horrified and almost blind with fear, but not surprised.

Yesterday, we a very comprehensive and fruitful meeting with one of the Gemelli's oncologists and things are settled for surgery to be booked in the week between Christmas and New Year's. Which is next week, now that I think of it. I got to ask all my questions and have, I hope, cleared up the communication problem by getting the cell phone number of the doctor who speaks English.

She was very surprised to hear that I had been left alone with no followup after chemo and said that this is certainly not normal practice. There was some speculation that this was the fault of the oncology secretary who does not speak more than two words of English and who therefore may have been avoiding dealing with me, a common Italian habit.

Nevertheless, things are cleared up for the moment. I got the doctor to fax my medical records to my GP here in Santa Marinella, got her assurance that I can call or text her with questions or problems any time. I also now have a back-up oncologist now who works in Civitavecchia who answers his phone, speaks English and has agreed to help if there are problems. So we hope that the difficulties with communication and support will be cleared up.

But the gist of what she told me was not very encouraging and it has set me thinking about things. As we know, the last surgery showed that there were still cancerous cells in the area around the tissue they removed. the chemotherapy was only partially successful, with the tumour reduced in size but not as much as they had hoped and the cells still active. This means we have to go ahead with the large surgery. I will have all my reproductive organs out next week and they will be sent to the lab for more detailed examination. They are hoping that there will be no more evidence of cancer in the margins but there will be no way of knowing anything until they've taken it all out and had a look cell by cell.

If the cancer has spread into the organs past the uterus or in the lymph nodes in the parametrium, I will be facing more "procedures," whatever they may be. But this isn't so hopeful, because they weren't expecting to find cancer in the margins from the last surgery, and yet, there they were.

There is no way to tell without surgical removal of the suspect tissue whether the cancer has spread into other organs and systems. Micrometastases are too small to be detected by scans and can easily be missed by biopsies. In fact, they can only be found by removal of entire organs. I asked if there was a chance that there were micrometastases hiding anywhere else, and she admitted that the possiblity certainly exists. The only way that scans can tell is after the tiny single cells have started dividing and growing tumours and there is no predicting when or where that will happen.

The surgery back in May showed there were no cancer cells in the lymph nodes around the affected area and the PET scan I had showed that the metabolic activity surrounding the tumour is reduced since chemotherapy. Chemo's effects last for some time, (as I am reminded daily) so it is likely that the cancer is not developing or developing very fast. The doctor said it was "probably" safe to wait until after Christmas but said it would be unwise to leave the surgery any longer.

If there is cancer found in the margins after this surgery, the only thing left to do for the time being is more chemotherapy or radiotherapy. The cancer, however, has already shown itself to be chemo-resistant so if this surgery doesn't remove it entirely, there isn't a great deal they can do but dose me and wait for it to emerge somewhere else. Or not, as the case may be. If the cancer spreads to organs that I can't live without, there is only chemo, and as we have seen, there is only so much that can be expected of that.

Truth to tell, I am becoming less and less confident as we go along. Each time they have told me that the initial signs are positive, the actual examination has shown things to be worse than they had hoped.

A friend of mine has said "it's just fear" but I disagree. It is certainly an idea that I'm afraid of, but the idea itself was there first. I can't help thinking that I'm on a path to the end of my life.

For the first year after I was here, I was under the impression that I had been brought here by God to start a new happy life, possibly with marriage in the offing. But even then, I remember thinking that maybe it was not that I was here to start a nice new life, but to get myself safely to the end of the old one.

From the start, I never really thought of any plans to leave Italy. There has never been any exit strategy or end-date to my stay here, and no pressing reason to ever go anywhere else. And despite its infamous aggravations, this country is growing on me. It has taken me a while to get to the realisation, but I have no intention of ever leaving as long as it remains possible for me to live here legally.

I don't know when I started thinking I would probably die here, but it was fairly soon after I came. Really, it is hard to imagine a better place to do that and to live the last part of life. Beautiful Italy, by the seaside, surrounded with friends and upheld by the Church in a Catholic country.

~

I've said it and said it

2011-12-21T13:22:00.002+01:00

The first assault was not contraception but easy divorce. It has made a world where commitment means nothing.

~

The 64 Bus

2011-12-21T12:35:00.006+01:00

Everyone who has spent more than a week in Rome will be familiar with the number 64 bus that starts at San Pietro station, runs past the Vatican, crosses the Tiber and runs through the Centro, stopping at the Argentina tram stop and on up the hill to Termini train station.

If you get on it anywhere after the St. Peter's end of the loop, this is what it is like. We were trying to get home from the Quirinale the other night and that is closer to the Termini end of the route. We had to let six buses go by before there was one we could get on.

And then there's the gypsy pickpockets. There's a reason they call the 64 the Pickpocket Express, though I've been lucky so far.

Here's a tip for those staying in Santa Marinella: get any of the main route buses to Argentina, which is a major bus convergence point, and wait the extra few minutes for a number 70. This will take you up most of the route to Termini, but swings past Mary Major and takes you down to the other end of the Termini station. This will help you avoid all the horrors of the 64, the pickpockets, the sardine-packed crowds, and at the end save you a 10 minute walk down to the end of the station where the Civitavecchia/Pisa/Grosseto trains leave.

The 64 is somewhat notorious.

H/T to Vicky for the pic.

~

Cat in love

2011-12-21T12:24:00.003+01:00

Winnie meets her true love... the space heater.

~

Beat the Man

2011-12-21T12:21:00.003+01:00

A lot of Rome's museums won't let you take photos. I've learned to be quite adept at sneaking my camera around with my coat over my arm.

Vicky decided to stick it to The Man in her own way at the Lippi exhibition.

~

What else is art good for?

2011-12-19T17:37:00.004+01:00

In Western societies, particularly in the post-colonial Anglo nations, we are suffering a terrible crisis of self-understanding. One of the things that struck me the hardest when I finally went back to England as an adult was that the English seemed to have forgotten how to be English. They have forgotten who they are. The older ones seemed to remember but appear to have learned to be ashamed of it. It was a very strange thing and I marked it at the time as a terrible evil. A society that doesn't have a self-understanding, doesn't have a sense of who and what it is, can't be one that will survive for long.

One of the things that art does, particularly painting, is to help define a cultural identity. For obvious reasons this is especially true of Italy. I'm still working my way around Vasari's Lives of Artists and it is clear that the world of painting for three of the most important centuries of art were utterly dominated by Italians (as we call them now).

But if we want to know who we are, how we think of things, how we see the world and what it means to us, painting is obviously the most direct and simple means. I think if the English were to revisit their artistic heritage, there would be great gains in re-establishing a solid national identity.

Make kids look at and understand Constable, Turner and Gainsborough. Familiarise them with Pre-Raphaelites. Once you have introduced them to the painters and their works, they will not be able to avoid also gaining a broader understanding of their own history and culture.

Art tells us how we see ourselves and our neighbours and how we should or could live. It shows us what life can look like from perspectives and times that we might never be able to experience personally. This can have a profound effect on a young mind. It certainly did to me. It immunised me against the cultural malaise and historical amnesia, all the social disaster that was coming throughout the 70s and 80s. It has helped me solidify my own self-understanding and helped to rescue me from that diseased anti-culture that has taken over the world since the 1960s.

It is in great part because of my knowledge of art history and the general cultural knowledge that came with it, that I have been able, in a way, to recapture or rebuild who I really am after fighting my way out of that toxic feminist/hippie fantasy world. And I see no reason that it could not do the same thing for whole cultures, entire societies that have been deracinated and have lost their identities.

When I first looked at the painting above, I thought, "This is me. Or at least it was. The painting seems to exactly depict my childhood and the core of who I was before the calamities of my adolescence and young adulthood made me forget it all."

Art can help you see yourself, the sort of person you are or could be or want to be. And it is true that a lot of my childhood looked exactly like this, right down to the little velvet dress with white lace cuffs. Only mine was brown. My mother made it for me when I was five and I remember the cuffs getting dirty on the London Underground.

Here's a little thing the class can do while I'm working on something else. A kind of art thought experiment for y'all. Look over at some of the art sites I've got on the sidebar. Underpaintings is a really good one, and see if there is a painting that strikes you as deeply. Find one that is a kind of picture of your inner self, your character. See what you come up with.

Sometimes it is a bit surprising and it is possible to learn things about yourself that you never knew by looking at art and measuring your reactions to it.

If you find one that is really good, share it with the rest of the class.

~

The NICE Catholic bloggers

2011-12-18T11:32:00.005+01:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one with serious reservations about Patheos, the home of the Nice Catholic Bloggers.

Dymphna has mentioned it too, and in reference to a friend of ours here at O's P.

I can't stand Patheos. It's like the Borg on Star Trek. It takes fun bloggers and turns them into drones. Being with Patheos has completely ruined the once delightful Anchoress and I just hope that Crescat doesn't change.

Cat is in my baddest of bad books right now after she wrote this piece of drooling, self-congratulatory, politically correct drivel. It was certainly a sign to me that the Patheos spirit of NewChurch compromise has her brain in its death claw.

But she's still someone I respect and like a lot and I've told her many times that her move to Patheos was going to be a disaster.

So I'm going to reiterate my long-time list of Rules To Live By in NewChurch and Modernity, primary among which is

Never join anything.

followed in no particular order by

Abolish everything.

Never found, start, organise or volunteer for anything.

Never trust anything Catholic that is less than 500 years old.

You can't kill people to solve your problems.

Only the real counts.

Reality is conservative. (Thanks Mrs. Thatcher)

No temptation is so great that it can't be resisted by running away.

Old things are better than new things.

Contrary to what everyone thinks, it actually is sometimes too late.

Ever worry about how much time you spend on the internet?

2011-12-18T11:25:00.005+01:00

Yeah. Me too.

I'm re-reading Kenneth Clark's book Civilisation, the companion thing to his brilliant and ever-new 1960s BBC TV series examining the growth of Western Civilisation through its art. Or, I should say, I was reading it. Because, of course, it didn't take me long to figure out that the series is on YouTube. So guess which book is now sitting by my bed gathering dust?

Sigh...

Oh well, there's always Vasari, who isn't on the net, as far as I can see (yes, I've looked). And when I start feeling better and get back to regular working hours, I'm going to start getting into Rome at least three or four days a week. Which means at least two hours a day of reading time. Which is how I got through the entire oeuvre of Jane Austen.

Amen.

~

Cats

2011-12-16T13:01:00.001+01:00

I've been thinking of making Winnie her own Facebook page.

~

2011-12-16T12:42:00.001+01:00

Hero from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

I'm never going to do this kind of drawing. It's cool and everything, but,

well, really!

~

Dear 16 year-old me,

2011-12-14T08:41:00.005+01:00

I know no one in your life is going to tell you, hemmed around as you are with hippies and feminists and people addicted to The Lie, but you really need to know this:

Don't sleep around.

You will destroy your chances of marriage, crush your spiritual life, blight your happiness and wither your heart. You will kill your soul and warp your personality forever.

I know that you think it is the only thing that gives you any sense of being real and alive, but it is like drinking water that only makes you more thirsty. You will spend 30 years drowning in clinical depression, self-loathing and countless hundreds of nights convulsed with weeping. It will ruin you utterly.

By the time you start to wise up in your 20s, it will be too late to undo the damage. It will cause a mental, emotional and spiritual destruction down to the foundations of who you are, your total self-understanding. And you will spend the rest of your life trying to rebuild.

Oh, and you will catch HPV, which you won't know about until they tell you you've got cancer and they have to cut out your uterus and ovaries. This will happen at a time in your life when you think you have finally got things together and are starting to generate faint and distant hopes of a normal life. It will destroy your hesitant little dreams of married happiness that will hardly even have had a chance to blossom.

It will send you down a medical path that will take you far away from where you thought you were headed. This will happen at the exact moment when you thought you had finally managed to reconstruct your whole self. You will be forced to start again. You will have to downshift your expectations and to abandon the last shreds of hope that you will ever be able to fix the things that went wrong so long ago.

* ~ * ~ *

Ever wonder why I hate feminism so much?

~

How to set up a world-class exhibition of priceless 15th century paintings

2011-12-13T16:02:00.000+01:00

Brutalist by name, brutal by nature

2011-12-11T16:34:00.005+01:00

Intelligent comment from the Adam Smith Institute on why the British Housing Estates need to be knocked down as soon as possible:

Opposition to post-war architecture tends to focus on aesthetic concerns. And, certainly, much of it is appalling ugly, almost to the point that merely looking at it fills you with despair. But its mostly deeply pernicious effect is surely the way in which it has affected people’s behaviour, by forcing them to live in an environment which is cold, desolate and practically inhuman. Naturally, I am not suggesting that post-war architecture caused the riots. But the idea that it was a contributory factor certainly has the ring of truth about it.

He mentions similar constructions in Italy.

Incidentally, the picture I’ve used here is not actually from a post-war London housing estate. It is a photo of the Vele di Scampia estate near Naples, which was the setting for the stunning, shocking film Gomorrah. If you’re sceptical about the social consequences of bad architecture, I’d challenge you to watch that film and, bearing in mind that it is based on real events, ask yourself whether many of the things depicted would be possible in a traditional street layout. For me, it’s a shining example of brutalist by name, brutal by nature.

I went down south with a bunch of friends last year to visit Monte Cassino and on the drive we had to go through some little towns that looked as if they had been built after the Second World War when some Italian government official decided to make the entire country into a suitable movie location for nihilist post-apocalyptic filmmaker. As a bonus, the population seemed to be practising to gain employment as zombie extras the same films.

I've never in my life seen any human dwelling more closely resembling a gargantuan garbage heap.

Scruton has quite a bit to say on the subj. Starting about 7:14

~

Lippi Exhibition

2011-12-11T13:40:00.008+01:00

Went to see the Lippi exhibition at the Quirinale yesterday. Something the Rome-bound should know; most of the museums in town have incredible, world-class exhibitions and they're not expensive. It was ten Euros to get in to this one. You don't usually have to book tickets in advance, though this can help you to jump the queue.

The Lippi/Botticelli show at the pope's former house was, well, frankly amazing. The colours! The transparencies! The wee teeny details like the little bug eating a crust of bread, the meticulously rendered flowers so detailed you can identify the species. The faces of angels and saints glowing with otherworldly radiance. Oh. My. GOODness!

We saw

this one,

and this one

here's some details... here are the angels bigger...

and check out the books. Amazing!

and this one

and
this one...

Plus a bunch of drawings.

(There were a few Botticellis too, but they left me kind of.. meh...Lippi decidedly surpassed his former master.)

The colours... it's hard to describe. In fact, so much of their value is lost in reproductions, I think I might be joining the snobby school of thought that says never reproduce art in books or on the internet. There's so little point, it almost seems as if it would put people off rather than arouse interest.

A while ago, I was taken by a friend to the Borghese gallery and he knew there was a very famous work that we are all familiar with, but didn't warn me. At one point, after the Caravaggios and Raphaels and whatnot, he said, "Oh, you should go take a look in there..." I rounded the corner and there it was. I almost burst into tears. The present reality of the work was so much more than any photograph could possibly capture...

As a child, I spent hours poring over the pictures in art books, and was an early aficionado of the early Italian Renaissance artists, but living in such a remote place as British Columbia had few opportunities ever to see any real art. When I was 12, a traveling exhibition of the treasures of the tomb of King Tut came to Seattle, and my mother, though poor, was determined that I should get a chance to see it. I had of course seen any number of photographs of this, but when I cam face to face with it, I found it was almost shockingly different in reality.

When at last we got to the bookshop last night, (it was a really big show, on two floors of the gallery) we discovered that the exhibition's book, which was quite beautiful, was 40 Euros. Yikes! and since I'm a bit skint at the moment, I was going to get one of the other Lippi books. But after seeing the real thing, the reproductions just seemed so dark and colourless that I couldn't be bothered. Instead, I got a little postcard of the blue madonna, the one in the post below, and Vicky bought a poster of her head. But as I was looking at the paintings and thinking about how badly I wanted one, it became obvious that the only thing to do is to learn to make one.

All the big paintings were tempera on wood, a medium that gives utterly glowing colours. I don't know who teaches tempera, but as soon as I'm at a place where Andrea thinks I'm ready, I'm going to find someone who does it.

Towards the end of the first floor of the exhibition, Vicky stopped to draw the only statue in the show. I spend the time wandering back and forth taking mental pictures of the best bits of the best ones, a strange skill that I invented for myself after seeing the Tut exhibit. I have several images in my head now, of folds of glowing cloth, of almost invisible transparent draperies, of minutely rendered wrinkles on fingers, that I hope will stay in there forever.

I walked up and down in this room of wonders and thought, this makes me happy, like nothing else but love ever has.

~

Note to self

2011-12-09T22:29:00.006+01:00

Do something normal this weekend, pretend that life is going ahead and that everything will turn out OK.

Go see that Lippi exhibition at the Quirinale.

~

Do they hear themselves?

2011-12-08T11:19:00.004+01:00

Just reading some of the pro-aborts little outbursts on why abortion in the US has to remain totally unrestricted.

Let's play a game! I'm going to paraphrase some of the real things real famous pro-abortion people have said in public and we can do a little deconstruction excercise. Come on! It'll be fun.

A white male rock star:

"1) If abortion had been illegal when my girlfriend became pregnant, I would not be in the position I'm in. My career would have been stalled at the outset. I would not have been able to tour around the world and see how other more liberal countries have handled this issue. I would not be speaking to you (the interviewer) today.

2) Maybe later I'll be able to support a child.

3) But free people must have the right to choose when the right time is.

4) This rule especially applies to poor people since welfare and public health programmes are inadequate to raise a child and public schools are overcrowded and underfunded."

Translate:
1) My career is more important to me than human life, even the life of my own child. It is much more important to me to fulfill my personal jet-setting ambitions than be responsible for the care and protection of another human being.

2) Even though I am the lead of one of the world's most highly paid acts, I'm still unable to adequately support a child. By extension, I believe that anyone who makes less money than I should also not have children. Only the super rich should be allowed to have children because material poverty, which I define as being less than super rich, is worse than death.

3) The definition of being free is the freedom to kill another person with legal impunity whenever we want.

4) It is better for the poor that they be killed before birth than attend a public school or be dependent upon state benefits. Kill the poor.

* ~ *

A black Rap star: "Gold-digging women use pregnancy to trap rich men into either supporting them or paying for expensive abortions. Use condoms to prevent pregnancies."

Translate:
Legal abortion is not for the safeguarding of the rights of women, it is to enable men to use them for sexual entertainment without consequences. But abortion can be more expensive than you realise, so in order to continue to use women as your own personal meat puppets, you should diligently use contraception.

* ~ *

Some kind of presenter (female, white) on MTV: "I am glad I had an abortion at 16, otherwise I would by now have a 20 year-old child.”

Translate:
Being a mother is bad. Being a mother of a child who is a grownup would reveal that I'm old enough to have a 20 year-old child. And that would be bad.

* ~ *

What am I demonstrating here? That celebrities are shallow, selfish and materialistic? And stupid? Isn't that something we all know already?

So if we all know this, why do we hang on their every word? Why do the idiotic and frankly evil things that come out of their mouths subsequently pop out of the mouths of the ordinary 17 year-old kids who follow them?

I feel a bout of cultural cognitive dissonance coming on...

~

A prayer

2011-12-07T23:04:00.009+01:00

Learned this week that I'm still sick. Really sick.

Tried to get back to life a bit and go to art class this week but just couldn't manage it. Andrea's studio, in an important and historic 16th century building close to the Piazza del Popolo is also at the bottom of a kind of transit sink hole. The easiest and fastest way to get there is to take the train to San Pietro station and either hoof it across the Big Piazza and cross the river on the Ponte Cavour, or you can take a bus from the stazione down the hill, past the big dome and over the river and walk through the little windey streets from the bus loop near the Angel bridge.

Either way its a good brisk 20 or 30 minute walk, and invariably no matter how cool the weather is I am drenched with sweat and out of breath by the time I get there. I usually have a little ten-minute sit-down on the studio terrace and a glass of water before starting and am OK, but this Monday I just couldn't get untired. But since Andrea is going away for a few months and this will be the last chance I get for a while, I thought it would be silly to just turn around and go home again.

Besides, I'd brought my computer with me and had the ambition to go to the office and get some work done after class. It's been so long since I've had a normal day, I just really wanted a smidgen of my regular life. But it didn't work out.

In class, we stand in front of the easel about two arms lengths away and the technique involves taking a measurement from that distance and then walking the step or two forward to make the mark on the paper. Classes are three hours and it can be pretty tiring. By the end of it, I usually am pretty happy to sit down at my desk for the rest of the day.

But this week it really became clear how much the chemo has taken out of me. It looks too as if the poison drugs have damaged my ovaries, and I've been having rather severe symptoms of premature menopause. This means a constant undulation: hot/cold/hot/cold/hot/cold. Overwhelming heat, sweat pouring off me, red faced and panting and five minutes later shivering and chilled. This amusing routine going on about three or four times an hour, 24 hours a day. The preamble of nausea, dizziness and heart palpitations lets me know when one is coming on. Stress brings it on and as you may imagine, it makes it rather harder than usual to concentrate.

The neuropathy is aggravated by being tired and by the end of two hours of class, my feet were on fire, with pain spreading up my legs. The pain of neuropathy is multifaceted, and a big part of it is the feeling that one's toes and fingers are swelling up and getting ready to explode. When it's bad, touching anything hard, like turning a key in a lock or winding a clock, feels like your fingers have a "funny bone" in them, all the nerves cringe together as though getting an electric shock. Some days holding the pencil is a bit of work by itself.

Despite all this, and despite it making me a little cranky and ill-humoured, I got to the end of class, but was a bit of a wreck. After, I had to do a couple of little chores, cutting up some large sheets of paper so I could get them home in my folder. But before doing that, I ran out to the farmacia to buy some paracetomol, known in the US as extra strength Tylenol, to back up the drugs that were obviously not up to the task that day. We're still working on adjusting the new pain meds, with too much turning me into a zombie and too little leaving me in pain by mid afternoon. It works pretty well if I'm not doing too much in the day. And some days, for no particular reason the whole thing just flares up. The doctor said if the meds stop working too soon, I can back them up with paracetomol, but it doesn't work terribly well.

When I was getting ready to go home, Andrea said, "So, on a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in?" About six, maybe six and a half. Not screaming agony by any means, but bad enough to make everything no fun at all.

Bit of a mess, is the long and the short of it and this week it all kind of came to a head.

So Monday afternoon, I was done in by two o'clock and just had to go home. Hot/cold flashes every fifteen minutes notwithstanding, I was falling asleep on the train and went to bed more or less instantly after getting home. On Tuesday morning, it really hit me just how sick I'd got. Up only for a few hours in the morning for a cup of tea; back to bed by two-thirty. Up for a while in the evening, and me n' Vick watched the Fellowship of the Ring. Had some dinner and went back to bed. When you're spaced out and sick, in pain and on narcotic meds, the day just sort of floats by in a kind of weird droopy haze.

A day in bed, though, did me a world of good and this morning I had enough perk to go to the doctor and report that things are really not going terribly well. The good news is that my local GP is really terrific and has been a huge support in all this awfulness. He is setting me up with an oncologist who speaks English and will be able to tell me what's going on. I can get the Gemelli to give him my medical records and he can explain things and keep a closer eye on me and my doings than the staff at the hospital can. Obviously I should have done this months ago, but I was mostly expecting to be starting to recover by now. I'm only just now learning that chemo often doesn't work that way, new symptoms and side effects can appear months and sometimes even years after the last cycle is over. Something I'd have known about if the Gemelli doctors were as interested in keeping me informed as they are in doctoring me... it's been a bit of a bone of contention so far.

My appointment this morning did a lot to put my mind at ease. Things are going to get worked out. The things that are happening now are debilitating and awful, but not life threatening and can be treated successfully. They're going to go away and be under control. Things are going to get worked out.

I left the doctor's office and walked out into the late morning sunshine. In early December it's a beautiful warm, breezy autumnal day, absolutely perfect. Cool air, warm sun, nice little breeze off the sea bringing in sweet damp that's just like home. The autumn rains that started this year quite late, in November, have given us our annual "second spring," with all the grass that goes brown and sere in our ferocious summers, coming up again green and soft, flowers nodding over the tops of garden walls, happy children kicking the soccer ball around in the school yard.

I came out of the office and was still woozy and wobbly, but quite a bit mended and didn't want to go straight home. I took a slow walk up the Via Aurelia, the Roman road that runs through the centro of S. Marinella, and ended up going down to the castle and the marina. There's a promontory there, where, on a clear day, with your back to the old Odescalchi castle, you can see nearly all the way down to Rome, with the other castle at Santa Severa gleaming in the sun, a stern old fortress warding off marauding Saracen pirates.

Behind the castle, that is built on top of the foundations of a Roman senator's country villa, there is another little beach, hidden from the great running of the Rome tourists in the summer, with patches of black volcanic sand, big bulges of sandstone coming out of the ground all weathered into undulating Art Nouveau shapes, and logs to lean your back against. Just like home. This beach is on a little cove and is sheltered from the wind and only a few beautiful white neoclassical villas nestling in the shrubbery and trees on the hill.

I sat down on the sand and turned my face into the breeze and just breathed. It felt like the first time in days.

I'm scheduled to have surgery next week. I am hoping to get a consultation with this new oncologist before then. I know the Gemelli doctors know what they're doing and I'm pretty confident that the surgery will be the end of the cancer. I am also growing in confidence that the difficulties the surgery will create can be dealt with.

Things are pretty hopeful, but I've been terribly afraid. Cancer is unpredictable, and no one can possibly say for sure if all this is going to work. The news about the micrometastases in the margins after the last surgery has really shaken me. I'm deeply frightened by the thought that this might mean the cancer is anywhere and there is no way to tell until it is too late.

I've been praying for a lot of things but, and this might surprise you, I have yet to simply ask to be delivered from cancer. For the treatment to work.

I walked along this little hidden beach and finally knew that I really wanted to live. At least for a few more years.

"Lord, I'd just like to ask if I can please get past this and live for a while longer. I am OK with it if you have other plans, but I'd just like to get it out there.

"Things are really nice right now, and maybe for the first time. I've got such good work, and such nice friends and I've finally figured out for the most part how to get on in life. And honestly, I'd really just like to enjoy it for a bit, if that's OK.

"I think I can handle the long term consequences of the surgery and still have a bit of a nice life. I don't even mind if things are a little reduced in scale from now on. I can deal with living a little smaller and a little slower. But I think I've got a chance to be happy for a while and I'd like to try it."

I've been getting a lot of messages via email and Facebook in response to my last few Meaning of Life posts and I'd like to let y'all know that it has actually been really helpful, so thanks. I know that a great many of you have been praying (some have even paid money to get large numbers of other people to pray too, entire convents of nuns) so I thought I'd let you know that I'm getting to a sort of peace with the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong; I certainly have my little screeching moments of mindless panic, but they're fewer, shorter and easier to stop now, even without the application of the frying pan to the head. It might surprise some to know that the whole cancer experience has in many ways been beneficial. As a news writer, I know how important a deadline can be to your productivity. The saints and famous spiritual writers always say the same thing: keep your eye fixed on the reality of death. And cancer certainly has a way of making that impossible to avoid.

I'm finding my way through it. Maybe in a somewhat muddled and inefficient way, but I'm getting there and it is in no small part due to the support I've had from friends, readers and colleagues.

Thanks.

Again.

~

Note to self

2011-12-07T19:03:00.000+01:00

Do Christmas cards this weekend.

Art, vocation and holiness

2011-12-03T13:08:00.012+01:00

(Warning: another ridiculously long, boring post on art, writing, vocation and the Meaning of Life. Cringeworthy sharing ahead. I don't know what value all this could be to others, but for me to write about this is really just a means of thinking out loud. If you are like me and despise the sharing thing, go here.)

I think the post I did a few days ago about art, writing and vocation, has given rise to a number of erroneous assumptions on the part of several readers.

I appreciate the pep-talks and advice (particularly the ones from Steve J. and Ted and Audrey), but that wasn't what I was looking for. I suppose it may have seemed somewhat gloomy, but I don't actually feel particularly gloomy. I have my little moments when it all seems to hit me at once and I kind of freak out, and there are people around standing ready with the frying pan for such moments.

Gloomy comes and goes and I'll admit to being pretty scared by some of the prospects in front of me, but mostly what I feel is eager to get on with things. To get The Bad Scary done with so I can hurry up and get to the rest of it. However, it is extremely likely that I do have a prospect in front of me, which is itself a huge thing.

The medical things are big and serious, and it is true that there is a real chance that my life expectancy has been shortened. But it is going to carry on, at least for a while, so the crucial question becomes how best to spend it given what I've got now.

A lot of the time, we're tempted to think that we'll start doing whatever thing we're supposed to be doing once all the proper pieces are lined up, when all the resources are in place and things are properly prepared. But I've realised recently that for a lot of us, there isn't going to be any more auspicious a situation. What I've got now is all I'm going to have to work with, and the time has come to move forward.

And that was the point of that post. I'm not in despair, and I'm don't think my life up to this point has been a waste. Not sure how people got that idea, but it ain't so.

But I have definitely been thinking Big Life Thoughts: work, vocation, the pursuit of God's will in the here and now. Cancer, and I suppose other big life-threatening health crises, has a way of making you focus your attention inward. It makes you do a lot of re-evaluating, and re-examining. In general, the results of this have been positive. I feel I'm in the right place, am going the right way, generally pointing in the right direction. Now, on with things. Do more of what I was doing. More and better, more involved work. More art. More museums. More Italy. More more more. For various reasons, I have held back. I don't want to change anything, but to grasp the things I've already got in life less timidly.

With that troublesome post, what I really wanted to do was initiate a discussion on the nature of art, whether from the point of view of the spiritual life it a thing worthy of a person's whole and undivided attention, whether it has the potential to be a sanctifying occupation. Whether it might be considered a *kind of* substitute for a particular vocation, that is, for a vowed state in life. Of course, I knew the answer when I asked the question, but I thought it worth thinking and talking about anyway.

A lot of the difficulty in talking about these things is the confusion of terms. In general colloquial English, the word 'vocation' has come to be used very loosely, as in "a thing you do that is very important to you and to which you seem naturally suited". When we talk about vocation, we really just mean a job that is terribly important, either to you personally or to the world at large.

We usually also mean for it to be something that is itself a good thing, something of benefit to others and something for which one needs a certain amount of innate talent (whatever that is) or at least for which one has a natural aptitude. It is probably most often applied in this sense to the medical professions. To some people, (and I may be among these) writing is thought of as a vocation. But to others, any work that is particularly loved is their 'vocation'.

I once asked a class of young Catholics preparing for their Confirmation what they wanted to do with their lives. Nearly all of them said they wanted to go to university. Upon further questioning, not one of these had any notion at all what he wanted to study. None of them had any particular interest in any academic subject. The goal was simply "to go to university". Only one kid said he wanted to be a plumber. I asked him why, and he said that it was what his dad did and he thought it was fun and interesting and would make him a good living. I told the class that this kid was the most likely to be happy of any of them. It could be suggested that this kid's vocation was plumbing, but only if you were using the term in its modern, secular and loosey goosey way.

But we know by this time that I don't use language that way. Precision is good. If I were talking about those subjects, it would be an error to use the term 'vocation'. Properly speaking this is 'occupation,' work, one of the three cornerstones of a balanced life (the others being family and the spiritual life).

But vocation is something very specific. A vowed state in life specifically for the pursuit of holiness in a special way following the Evangelical Counsels or withing marriage vows. A vocation is something that gives your work its context and to some degree at least, its direction. It forms the framework in which you do the work you do, whatever it is. It is very common among Christians to make the mistake of thinking that "vocation" means the same thing as "work" or occupation.

This error, the conflating of work with vocation, by the way, has been the core of the disaster in the Religious Life in the Church since the '60s. Women who wanted to do a particular work went into religious life. This helped them to mash the two things together, a vocation and the work done within it. One does not have a vocation to be a teacher or a nurse, but to the religious life, a state of perpetual celibacy under the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Technically, your marriage and your family are your vocation, the state in life to which you were called by God and for which you undertook vows. Two things by definition that can't be vocations are work and the single life: no vows for either. The "single life" that the NewChurchy types like to talk about is really no state at all, it is the condition out of which one is called.

I don't propose that God is "calling" me or anyone to painting or writing as a substitute for a genuine vocation, or as a consolation prize for a failed vocation, for having dithered too long.

I recounted the details of my medical condition and prospects merely to update readers and impress upon them that the question is no longer abstract and academic for me. I wrote below that the seriousness of cancer, the physical consequences of chemotherapy, total hysterectomy and premature menopause and its long-term treatment, are prompting me to think more pointedly about the value of what I am doing and want to do, what I am hoping to do and what I wish I could do and fear I don't have time for.

The question, "What do I want to be doing when I die?" has, until now, been totally abstract, something to be discussed with a few friends late in the evening somewhere between the after-dinner Amaro to the middle of the first bottle of grappa. Catholic spiritual writers, including many of the saints, have always exhorted their disciples to keep the awful reality of death immediately before their eyes. The question is one that all Christians are supposed to ask themselves seriously all the time. Christ Himself put it at the centre of much of His own teaching. Don't be caught napping, partying or goofing off when the Master of the house comes calling. Don't be fussing over building new grain towers to house all your bumper harvests... "Thou fool, this night..."

I want to be clear that I consider it to have been a grace to have been so forthrightly and inarguably forced to re-evaluate. I also consider it to have been Providential that I started studying art in at least a semi-serious way before the cancer thing descended. It has opened up something new and unexpected in my life.

We know there are some occupations that are more ordered towards contemplation, though of course, there is no reason to think that a plumber could not be a saint. I am also not making the mistake that artists are necessarily more holy or "spiritual" than ordinary mortals. (A quick look at this man's work and this man's life, should be enough to dispel this idea.) But there are aspects to art (and here I am using the term more broadly to include writing) that seem to point to it being naturally ordered to the contemplative life. For one thing, both painting and writing can only be pursued in solitude. You can't write when someone is nattering at you. But the visual arts of painting and drawing, I believe, are naturally and uniquely more outward-seeking than writing and it is this outward gaze that I think makes visual art more innately similar to the pursuit of God in the contemplative life.

I mean that when I'm drawing a subject, I am necessarily concentrating on something totally outside myself, something that is only useful as a subject by being completely itself and not subject to change by me. Drawing is an inherently other-oriented pursuit, much more so than writing.

It has the flavour of obedience about it. When you are drawing a subject, you are in a way giving up the pursuit of your own will and passing it over to follow a reality outside your will or desires. The thing you are drawing is itself; your goal is merely to reflect or depict it accurately for others.

Betty Edwards, of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain fame, has observed what happens to a person's brain while he is in the act of drawing an external subject. She notes, and I have observed this myself, that it is difficult to talk while you are drawing. That is, while you are actually in the process of looking at a subject and deciding where to put a mark on the paper. It is also difficult to understand what others are saying while your brain is in its drawing state. You have to stop and shake your brain a bit and ask the person to repeat what he has said.

I think that drawing and religious contemplation are related somehow, and that there might be something in the act of drawing that is perhaps even related to a state of ecstasy in which the person is swept up out of this world entirely, and out of all self-involvement for a few moments, a state of perfect, self-forgetting contemplation of the Total Other.

There is a terrible trap into which solitary people can fall, to have your life become the pursuit of personal whims, to orient it towards the self. Human beings need a social context, we need to be accountable to others. We need to have other people around to bump up against, to learn where the boundaries of self are. So of course, there is this about painting and writing that tend to cause problems.

I've had people in various venues, here and elsewhere, say "But what's wrong with what you're doing now?" and of course, the answer is, nothing whatever. But one's work is not a vocation; it can only have the scope of an occupation. No work is never going to be enough by itself to sustain a person spiritually and it cannot form the whole framework of a life.

I know that I am not capable of being a "monk in the world". In fact, the nature of what I do, the actual stuff I write about, is such that, left to itself, it can be morally and spiritually crushing.

At the risk of sounding like I'm issuing a rabbity disclaimer, I do want to say that I am tremendously fortunate. Throughout my childhood, I had assumed that I would make my living writing. My mother started teaching me the mechanics of it when she was herself still a school teacher, when I was about six. But as I got older, I began to realise that this is a difficult thing to achieve.

There really are not many people in the world who can say they make their a living at writing, nor at an occupation that is so obviously ordered towards the good. My "day job" is to work towards the restoration of all that is good, true and noble in Christian society using writing, a skill for which I've been trained since childhood. I can't imagine giving it up, it has become so much a part of who I am.

But occupation and vocation, while they overlap, are two separate issues. My work can only be part of the picture, and without a true vocation, without the greater context and framework, it has to be balanced somehow.

A vocation encompasses the entire person, including work. And it is this framework that I have found missing. I think I remember the moment when I finally decided against the religious life and for what I am doing now. This is what I mean when I suggest that mine was what was once called a "failed" vocation.

What does God offer to people who turn down His best gifts? Not marriage, it seems. So, a life lived alone, without the context of a community of others, whether family or a religious community... how to live in such a situation in a way that pleases God. This is what is exercising my mind at the moment, apart from medical concerns.

People have said to me, "You should just be happy and content with the knowledge that what you do is saving innocent lives..." But I know nothing about that and it is not for me to know. I hate to burst whatever illusion bubbles there may be about my motives, but a life isn't lived like that. One may have noble motives, but real life can't be lived on those heights. Real life is lived in the grubby, prosaic day to day.

But I also think it is a mistake to try to make such lofty ideals into the daily sustenance. If I were to try to keep them before me as a reason to do my work, I would quickly run out of juice. I've known a lot of pro-life activists who do this, but I know that I would very quickly succumb to the machinations of my ego if I were to try it. I can't afford to think of myself as anything but a writer. As a writer, I strive to tell the truth as clearly as I can on subjects that are, I believe, of universal importance. What the final result of this work might be is out of my hands, and really isn't my business anyway.

I once had a conversation with an archbishop about this work, and described it as "pushing the rock". I've been instructed to push the rock. Not to get it to the top of the hill. Whether it rolls down the hill every day and I have to start again at the bottom is no business of mine. My job is merely to push it.

I am not a crusader by nature and I find such language to be at best distracting. I did not get into the pro-life movement because I thought it was a vocation. It was simply the most obvious answer to a puzzle, a kind of mathematical equation. I only have one life, it would be a waste to do with it anything less than the most important thing I can think of. I spent many years trying to understand what was wrong with the world, and when I did, what I should do with myself simply became self-evident. It was no more dramatic than that.

So, to the friends asking, "What's wrong with what you're doing?" I respond simply that there's nothing wrong with it at all, but it is incomplete. What I need now are the other pieces of the picture. If the three cornerstones of a balanced lay life, that is the totality of one's vocation in life, are the spiritual life, work and family (as Benedict put it, ora et labora et vita communis) how can I find a substitute for the third thing in a life lived in solitude?

~

Hair update

2011-12-02T13:36:00.005+01:00

Woke up the other day and my hair was all pushed up on top. Tried to figure out what it reminded me of, then I went on the train into the City and looked at the teenage boys, and it came to me:

Fauxhawk!!! Auugh!

So I have started using some kind of weird waxy gel stuff to hold it down on top. Proof enough even for me that it really is coming back.

Cain't even hardly see my scalp no more.

For comparison,

this is the back of my head in the last week of October.

So...you know...

~

True Joy

2011-12-01T11:00:00.007+01:00

I've said this before, I think. When I'm in the studio concentrating on putting marks on paper, everything else that is going on recedes into the background, my mind becomes quiet and the usual howling mob of worries sit down en masse and goes to sleep in the corner like a good dog. I don't know if I would quite call it "true joy," being a religious person I know that I can hope for something even better than this in the future. But it certainly is the closest thing to peace I've ever experienced. Even prayer seems busy and worried in comparison.

Judith Kudlow is the lady who founded the Harlem Studio in New York with Andrea. She still teaches there.

Andrea has told me that I am ready to take the cast drawing class in April when she gets back from Australia.

This pleaseth me. But it launched me into a spiral of anxiety because I immediately thought, "I might not be here. I might die. Or I might still be doing the cancer thing."

My brain is not my friend.

~

What do the EU, Mad Cow Disease and Stradavarius have in common?

2011-11-30T20:20:00.004+01:00

Thought you'd already thought of all the ways the EU is ruining everything?

Think again.

Musicians have warned that the works of Purcell, Handel, Vivaldi and Bach may never again be heard as their composers intended – because of EU rules to stop people catching "mad cow disease" from their instruments.

Freaking out

2011-11-30T20:00:00.010+01:00

vb (adverb)
Informal to be or cause to be in a heightened emotional state, such as that of fear, anger, or excitement.

Who knows exactly why it happens, when it will hit and what will set it off.

Total strangers emailing me and telling me all about their horrifying medical conditions...and offering to move into my house... The prospect of having my lady parts removed and turning into a strangely mutilated zombie... Spending the rest of my life on drugs... Inexplicable exhaustion... Weird sleep disturbances... Chemo drugs eating my endocrine system... Oh yeah, and the fun chronic pain thing...

Who knows...

I made soup and Vicky made salad. Feel slightly better. Now going to watch some TV.

Just been working our way through Community. It's weird enough to distract anyone.

~

Dear well-meaning people out there in internet land:

2011-11-30T17:23:00.006+01:00

if you, your sister, your mother or any other person you know have had a hysterectomy or any related surgery, please don't tell me about it. It may seem awful, but I really don't want to know. Please don't tell me how horrible it was, how painful it was. Please don't tell me how long it took to recover or the huge dramatic life changes that came as a result. Please don't tell me you know how I'm feeling. It mostly just makes me freak out more.

And please, unless you actually know me in real life, not just in your imagination from having read my blog or articles, please, PLEASE don't offer to come to my house to help me through it. This includes people I've communicated with exclusively through email. If you think you know me because I've responded to a couple of emails, I need you to understand that we are not fast friends. I know you mean to be helpful, but it really just comes across as weird and slightly creepy. (If you think this is aimed at you alone, you're wrong. I've received several such offers.)

Sorry, but the list of people I want this kind of help from is extremely short. It might seem from the blog that I'm really all peachycheery but this is not the case.

OK?

I know you mean well, but your sharing is really not having a very good result.

So, just hold back, OK?

~

More contemporary art I don't hate

2011-11-30T16:18:00.004+01:00

Check this guy out.

Jakub Kujawa

Mostly when you say "contemporary art," I start smirking and making jokes about nailing chairs to walls. But there are a few people out there who manage to combine classical technique with modern style and create, dare I say it, real art.

As opposed to bulls---. (Government-subsidised bulls----, I might add.)

~

In other news...

2011-11-30T15:51:00.002+01:00

It looks like the revolution in the Church really is finally over, in the US, at least. With this new crop of younguns, we might hope that when the current batch of decrepit hippies has died off, there might actually be some improvement. In twenty years or so, I predict, the Barque may start righting itself.

(Wait, am I feeling sunny and optimistic today? What's going on? Is it the drugs?)

~

For your entertainment...

2011-11-30T12:56:00.003+01:00

Yeah, the lyrics never meant anything. I wish someone had told my hippie mother that the Beatles never had anything to say either.

~

Subsidiarity a natural part of human society?

2011-11-30T11:46:00.011+01:00

I think I've said before that when the Superstate dies, as it will soon, people and local institutions will step in. Human beings are naturally tribal/herd animals. I have long thought that it is socialism and Statism that has created a kind of artificial callousness that will evaporate the instant it becomes again an unavoidable necessity for people to start looking after each other.

And I think it has already started. In Greece, the EU-imposed "austerity measures" may (or possibly may not) have resulted in the government rebalancing the books (we are talking about the Greeks, after all) but it has effectively put a stop to the common use of the Euro in parts of Greece where people have learned that if they want to keep eating, they have to do something else. This really does illustrate the wide gap between what the EU oligarchs want and what the actual people who live in the countries they rule need to keep their daily lives running.

Prices have been slashed, but customers are few.

Fisherman Christos Xegandakis laughs bitterly. He says business is so bad, it's time to start swapping goods.

"Give me two kilos of potatoes, and I give you a kilo of fish," he says. "Why not?

Indeed, many in debt-ridden Greece — where radical austerity measures have led to soaring unemployment, business closures and a credit crunch — are doing just that: turning to a simpler form of commerce, bartering.

~ * ~ * ~

And here's a little afterthought.

In a few places in Greece the barter system has evolved rather quickly into a system of local small currency that may end up replacing the national adherence to the Euro. It's kind of reminiscent of the Greek plays actually. The Eurocrats forced the Greek government to accept the colossal bail-out package on acceptance of economic controls and "austerity measures". This was in order to "save the Euro" and to prevent Greece from falling back into its previous economic ways and reinstating the Drachma. In what might be a perfectly Greek irony, this action has forced local governments and small businesses to effectively abandon the Euro as the functioning currency.

Volos is also one of several Greek towns with a more formal type of barter network, which uses a currency called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek. One TEM is equal in value to one euro.

People sign up for free on the barter network's website, where they can post ads on what they can offer or what they want. Members exchange goods and services — for example, English and computer lessons, baby-sitting and plumbing repairs, medical visits and car-pooling — amassing TEM credit into an online account.

Some shops also accept TEMs, in the form of vouchers that function like checks.

Optician Klita Dimitriadis explains how it works. On a pair of 100-euro glasses, she'll take 30 percent in the alternative currency. She needs the 70 euros, she explains, in order to pay her employees, taxes and rent.

Dimitriadis then spends her TEMs at a monthly open-air farmers market, or in exchange for other services.

Over the past year, TEM members in Volos have grown from a few dozen to more than 500, and the movement has attracted Athens' attention. In September, parliament passed a law giving barter networks nonprofit status.

The Volos municipality also actively encourages the TEM network. Mayor Panos Skotiniotis says initiatives like these are particularly valuable at a time when the economic crisis is dismantling so many social benefits.

"This is a substitution for the welfare state, and that is why this municipality is encouraging it and wants it to grow," he says.

It looks like the vast EU superstate is coming to a premature end, and the more it tightens its grip, the more local systems will slip through its fingers. Its balloon of hot rhetoric and leftist Fantasy bursting before it is really off the ground.

At the same time, the European population is generally aging, and fast. Italy's overall fertility rate has leveled off at about 1.3, the death-spiral, lowest-low rate from which, historically, no society has ever recovered. Ever. And while all this is going on, European countries are still wrapped in the warm, fluffy, all-embracing welfare state, a system that cannot survive the demographic implosion that has already begun and is now irreversible.

Could it be possible that the principle of subsidiarity, the idea that people will look after their own and their neighbours if they have to, is really a universal aspect of human society that is inherent? That has been artificially suppressed by the growth over the last two hundred years of the overweening State? One that is now re-asserting itself as that system collapses?

The spectre of the failure of the Welfare State is something that really exercises the mind of the left. Universal abortion, the use of economic coercion to enforce sterilisation programmes on brown people in the developing world, tax penalties for families in which one parent stays home to look after the kids, the state throwing parents in prison who want to teach their children at home... none of this bothers them in the least. But the impending collapse of the Welfare State has them all in a tizzy. And rightly so, indeed. What will happen to our indigent poor? What about the older people who are retired but not rich, who live in council housing and rely on a government pension to keep them in tea and biscuits? And (here's the biggie) what about health care?

I've had a few conversations with doctors recently about the system of universal "free" medical care in Italy. In this country there is a two-tiered system, a phrase that fills Canadian leftists (ie: "Canadians") with terror. "A two-tier system?!! But that means The Rich (faugh!) will get better health care than The Poor (me)!" But in fact, the system works pretty well in this country with private care serving to siphon off a lot of the pressure on the public system.

I actually appreciate the double system quite a bit. My private GP gives routine discounts to people who are wholly without private insurance, as I am, and has given me several consultations for nothing where I've gone in to ask for his opinions and advice on medications and treatments. In the early part, when I was enormously stressed at the diagnosis, I woke up one morning with my back completely seized up. He gave me a prescription for lorazepam to control panic attacks and get my sleep back to normal. And then he offered a discount on an accupuncture treatment to fix my back. He's been a huge support and I'm more than happy to pay cash for his invaluable services. I figure if a guy spends 15 years in university learning ways to help people, he pretty much deserves to be paid.

One of the doctors on one of my little trips to the Gemelli emergency room told me (after she had assured me, again, that the symptoms I was experiencing were just the normal thing after chemo) that in her 6 hour shift in the pronto soccorso that afternoon, she would see about 20 or 25 people, almost none of whom would have anything wrong with them. She said that most people coming in there on their own steam (not the ones brought in on gurneys, obviously) came there because they knew that under the Italian system, they could see a doctor for free. She said that this kind of abuse of the system is likely to bring the whole thing down. If the people who came to the PS who had absolutely nothing wrong with them were charged just 20 Euros each per visit, it would pay back a huge portion of the costs and would serve to discourage people coming in for trivial reasons. If, she suggested, there really is something medical that needs doing (as there was in my case) then the system should treat that person either for free or with user fees that were scaled to the his income.

It sounded pretty reasonable to me. But the idea that health care and welfare are simply a universal human right that everyone should have for nothing is a big part of the problem in Europe. Everyone really does want the state to be Nanny.

To be honest, most of my treatment has been on the public dime, first with the NHS and now with the Italian national service. If I'd been paying the whole fare for surgery and chemo, I would have had a debt for the saving of my life that would have taken the rest of it to pay back. One that would have made student loans look like chicken feed.

When I was diagnosed with cancer, I was paying for a lot of doctor's appointments, tests and scans myself and it certainly wasn't cheap. A lot of them were subsidised but the user fee was still fairly substantial, particularly when you're having a lot of them. If the MRI actually costs 1500 Euros and I pay 150, I figure I'm getting a pretty good deal. What do I have a job for if not to pay for things I need? But on the double system, I've been able to take a little more control of things. When we were working out the treatment plan, the Gemelli told me that they couldn't schedule me for an MRI at the hospital. But I was able to go to a private diagnostic clinic and get the tests anyway, and quite promptly.

You guys helped a lot, too, and this is more or less my point. People want to help each other and will when help is asked and when the circumstances make it possible to help. One of the biggest failings of socialism is that it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to help each other. No one can be allowed to get in the way of the State's interference in and control of the lives of its subjects.

I don't really know how it would work without some kind of government-paid health care system. I know that in the US the problem is not a small one. Back in the days when national governments were thinking about putting in national systems, health care was not nearly so expensive. We didn't know how to treat cancer and a lot more people died of it and things like chronic heart disease, diabetes etc. My great grandfather's brother died in the 1890s after a horse stepped on his foot and he developed septicemia. It doesn't need to cost as much as it does and there is a lot of waste in health care these days, particularly when it is run by government and the money just seems to flow for nothing from some magic source up in the sky. But the fact is that our modern "miraculous" medical interventions are expensive. Chemo costs a bundle.

In the 1930s, I'm thinking that even the arch-commie (and eugenicist, by the way) Tommy Douglas didn't think that his nationalised health care system was going to eat so much of Canada's GDP as it does today. No one envisioned it.

But I think apart from the Big medical expenses like chemo and heart surgery, people really can pay for a fair bit of what they get from doctors. Maybe the collapse of our massive, top-heavy national welfare systems will force local solutions that national, centralised governments are constitutionally incapable of conceiving. I, of all people, have no desire to see only wealthy people cured of cancer, but the reality is that the system we have now, that everyone seems to think of as some kind of birthright, is going to end. And soon. It seems to me that a solution can be found only when we are absolutely up against it and are forced to find one.

And I do think that such a subsidiar-ized, ground-level solution will be found because, exceptions notwithstanding, people actually do care about each other and want to help.

~

Why do we love still life?

2011-11-27T11:05:00.003+01:00

I still really haven't quite figured out the answer to why still life affects me so powerfully emotionally. These ones really do it.

Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670).

Since I started the art thing, I have had the thought I wanted to do a series of formal Botanicals of the flora and fauna native to Santa Marinella. It's been one of my big art goals. Love Botanicals.

H/T to Andrea.

~

They're COMING!!!

2011-11-23T20:18:00.006+01:00

The secret to their evil is that they manage to be both cute and creepy at the same time. So I'm watching this, and I'm thinking, naturally, "GAAAAAHHHH!!!" but also, "Oh, the poor little thing...someone please help it to the next pond!" That is its power, its evil mind-control power to make you, though fully aware of its evil While. It's. Crawling. Towards. You. feel sorry for it. '

Eee-VIL!

There's another one on YT that shows a giant octopus on the floor of a fish market trying to get away that I just can't watch.

H/T to Zach

~

What do you want to be doing when you die?

2011-11-19T02:49:00.008+01:00

In the first few months of cancer, I was led to believe that this was not going to be a huge, permanent, life-changing thing. It was presented to me by several doctors as something that could be easily and quickly dealt with, with minimal long-term effects. I was told that "the tumour is small and localised" that it could be "removed easily with a small surgery," that I will be past it by mid-summer, that I would not have to have chemo, that permanently life-changing surgery would not be necessary.

One by one these assertions and assumptions have turned out to have been false. No one lied to me, exactly, but of course everyone wanted to put the best possible face on things. But in the last few months, each of these assurances have fallen by the wayside, opening up worse long-term prognoses, more radical interventions and fewer choices.

When it started, I was led to believe that I could leave it behind, that at some point I would be able to say, "It's over," and that life could carry on as it had before. But the core of the information we had from the doctors last week was that this is never going to be over. It is going to create a deeply altered life for me and my life will now never return to what it was.

For some years, of course, I have been looking at the things I am doing and thinking about how to live the second half of my life. This was just because I'm 45. But since the walls of cancer have closed slowly around me, narrowing my choices, my thoughts have become more acute, more immediate. There seems to be no doubt that the cancer and its treatment have greatly shortened my life expectancy.

So, now a new kind of question, a new set of questions, has been taking up my attention. No longer, "Is this what I should be doing?" but "What do I want to be doing when I die?" because whatever that is, I'd better be getting on with it right away. I think there is no more "some day" for me.

Medically, the more I learn, the worse it sounds. First, I will also have to undergo monitoring tests for many years, if not for the rest of my life to watch for the cancer coming back. The surgery (that I'll probably be having in the next couple of weeks) will greatly reduce the risk that the cancer I have now will recur, but not eliminate it. Nothing can do that. They can reduce the chances by removing all the organs that could now be affected, but there is no way to know if micrometasteses have spread into the surrounding organs and tissues. For that, we can only wait and watch carefully.

What they told me, in effect, was that there is no way to know, no way at all, to be certain, that cancer will not kill me some time in the next five years. All of the possible choices for treatment will render me permanently dependent on medical interventions and at significantly increased risk of a wide array of health threats.

Then, the surgery will render me sterile and induce premature menopause, symptoms of which are more sudden and more severe than it would be if it were natural. My Dorian Gray moment is at hand. The ovaries and uterus continue producing low levels of hormones throughout a woman's lifespan. Removing them all will produce a much more severe and abrupt cessation of normal functions and set of symptoms than anyone normally experiences. It seems that hormone replacement therapy can mitigate some but not all of these.

Further, the treatments to reduce these side effects, that I will have to undertake immediately and for at least ten to fifteen years, come themselves with a set of side effects and increased risks that, ironically, include cancer as well as nasty stuff like thrombosis, stroke and heart disease.

Put simply, I really cannot expect my life to be a long one. And between the new medical realities and the general circumstances of my life and background, I can't help but think that a short life would not entirely be a bad thing. I will leave behind a great many friends, but almost no family, and no one at all who is dependent on me.

I am a believing Catholic and that means that I look forward to the next life to be the better one. And as the medical condition worsens, I have no qualms about admitting that having less and less to lose as we go along is maybe also no bad thing. Releasing and relinquishing life and the things in it, including things long hoped-for but now unlikely ever to materialise, is something we all have to do eventually, and it's better to have less baggage to carry. John Muggeridge taught me that as I watched him let go of things in the last weeks of his life.

But that question, "What do I want to be doing when I die?" has begun to loom very large in my mind since they told me the news last week. It is obvious that I am not now doing it. Whatever I need to be doing when my life is over, I'm not doing now.

To be blunt, I am now extremely unlikely ever to be married. And I am incapable of ever being a mother. No religious order will take me, even if I still had the slightest spark of an idea I would want to be taken by them, which I don't. One of the things that cancer has finally put an end to, therefore, is the vocation question. I don't have one. And whether I ever did is now moot.

The "single life," never desired, always a repellent thought, is what I've got and will have. I have never believed this NewChurch drivel about the "single life" being a vocation in itself. The multiple catastrophes of universal divorce, the "sexual revolution," the ruin of the family and the abortion and contraceptive cultures have simply demolished the possibility of marriage for a huge number of us. I would venture to say that these things have ruined the hopes of marriage or the religious life for most of the people of my generation. We are simply so damaged as to be incapable of fulfilling the married or religious life. This kind of happiness and hope is something many of us simply cannot have, and all the blither about the glories of "the single life" falls upon our ears like a cruel jeer. I hope the fad dies out in the Church quickly.

If you can't choose it, if it is something that can be forced unwanted upon you by circumstances you can't control, it is not a state in life, but a mistake. I suffer from no delusions that a life lived without any sort of ontological connections can be inherently sanctifying, which is what a vocation to a particular state in life is for. If unmarried, unvowed people want to be holy, they have to do something else.

So the question remains, what, therefore, can be the next step down? No sanctifying state of life. No ontological context. Only me, and an "occupation," the doing of some thing that will not rule out a holy life. Of course, it could simply be that I can just carry on doing what I'm doing. I am set up now to live a fairly happy life, as long as it is likely to be short anyway. But it has become clear that I'm not now doing what I want to be doing when I die.

Lately I have been asking some priest friends, who I think have not really understood why the question is important, whether art can be taken as a sufficient substitute for a failed vocation. My question has mostly been dismissed with a terse answer. But I've been thinking about it a great deal.

What can I do with the second half of my life (or perhaps last third or fifth) that will give glory to God, that will occupy me and that is suited to a life that will largely be lived alone?

The only thing that makes me hesitate (apart from financial constraints) is time. I am looking very hard at the admissions page of the website of the Florence Academy of Art, which is the centre of the renewal of the arts of drawing, painting and sculpture. It is probably the best art school in the world. My current instructor, Andrea Smith, trained and taught there for several years. Nearly all of the leading classical realists studied there or studied with people who studied there. Most of the schools that are involved in the restoration of these traditions were founded as offshoots.

But it takes three years to complete the programme, and of course, years more to grow into maturity in this work. When I started studying nearly two years ago now, I thought I had time. Now I think I probably don't.

But that question is still in there: "What do I want to be doing when I die?"

Is the mere pursuit of this, without any guarantee I'll reach the goal, a worthy thing to die doing? I might very well die in the middle of the course. What would be the value in starting something I likely haven't the time to finish? Can I indulge in this pursuit, knowing I will likely not finish it, while the world comes crashing down around us? Is it selfish?

But there comes at time when you no longer have any room to fool about with life.

I'm thinking about it.

~

The Five Slogans

2011-11-18T19:01:00.011+01:00

Some years ago, I started taking pro-life apologetics training courses in which I was taught how to make the case against abortion, staying strictly away from feelings ("feewings") religion or personal preferences.

I've talked before about S.L.E.D. and if you missed it, go here. I'm not going through it all again.

But I post the link to this thing in the Martlet, the student paper of the University of Victoria, (Yaaaaay!) where the Sled thing was used fairly effectively. It is interesting to note how far and how fast Scott's stuff is spreading in Canada, probably mostly due to the work of these two people (and now all their little friends) who founded this organisation (Watch out, scary pics on the opening page of this site). (We all took the course together in ... um... can't remember, maybe about 2000?... and the Canadian org. was formed while we all sat around the coffee table in a cabin on an island in the middle of a lake in New Jersey. It was fun.)

But I thought the most interesting part of the Martlet thing were the comments. A number of people chimed in saying why the argument against abortion is invalid. Fair enough. We believe in freedom of speech around here, (Ha ha!, not really...) and I note that the pro-aborts' arguments have been quite effectively addressed by others writing in. (Which is the point of this post ... which I keep forgetting.)

All the things they said are things that Scott listed as the same things people ALWAYS say in defence of abortion. Scott told us that they absolutely never come up with any other ones. (And the fun bit is that they really, really think they are being great independent thinkers, thinking these things up for themselves. Really!)

But I'm not kidding when I say they always say the exact same things. A.L.W.A.Y.S. and E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. the same things. It's amazing. I've been keeping track. On the few occasions I have been able to stomach reading this stuff, that is. Frankly, in recent years, it has really bored the crap out of me.

But when he told us, I thought Scott had to be exaggerating. It just seems impossible that an entire cultural movement (perhaps anti-cultural), one that has resulted in the deaths of 50 million people in the US alone, and is responsible for putting bajillions of dollars into the greedy blood-soaked mitts of the abortion industrialists.

All those lives, and just five slogans. Five.

- woman has a right to choose

- abortion should be a decision between a woman and her doctor

- woman has a right to bodily autonomy/privacy

- you can't bring unwanted/poor children into the world

- I wouldn't have an/am personally opposed to abortion, but I can't impose my personal beliefs on others (also, when you're standing on the sidewalk with a sign, "How DARE YOU try to impose your beliefs on MEEEE!!!! EVIL FACIST!"...)

All others, or actually "others," are just variations on this. Really. Try it yourself. The "rape exception" thing, the "overpopulation" thing, the "abortion is safer than childbirth thing," the "foetus is just potential life" thing, the "violinist" thing, etcetera, etcetera ad nauseum....whatevs.

One of my all time favourite bits of nonsense is the variation that starts, "if you don't have a uterus, you can't have an opinion..."

Rilly, I'm not even making it up...

"If you do not have a uterus, I don't believe you have any right to dictate what my body can and will be used for in regarding to pregnancy. I am not an incubator, I am a human being with rights to my own body and my own choices..."

blah blah blabbity blahblahblah...

(It's amazing, but even more, she goes on...

"Also, I believe it is most likely safe to assume you don't have a uterus. Therefore, why do you think you should have any say on a uterus bearer's body? I say UTERUS BEARER, because not all women have a uterus, and not all people with a uterus are women...."

Wwwhhheeeeeee!!!!!

Unbelievable...)

Srlsly. They're all on the list. Go check it out. Think of it as a training exercise.

~

Decisions... decisions

2011-11-18T11:21:00.012+01:00

I've decided to get another cat. Well, a kitten, really. I think you can get them pretty easily from the cat shelter at Torre Argentina. It's for Winnie. I'm starting to really worry that she's bored and lonely and doesn't have enough cat-things to do.

When I first got her, about four years ago now, I think she had been exclusively an indoor cat. We lived in my little cottage in Tattenhall and even though the place was tiny, and I left the kitchen door open a lot, she wouldn't go outside. She would sort of sidle up to the door and put her little nose out for a minute, then run back into the cottage. It was a big deal the day she went outside for a few minutes. After a while she would go outside pretty regularly through the bathroom window. She would run around on the rooftops and then back. She never stayed out at night.

Then we moved to Italy and we got a place with a really huge wrap-around terrace and she was pretty happy to go out on the terrace. Then we had a flat for a year that had a garden and she loved it. She would go out every day and prowl around the wood pile and chase the big grasshoppers in the garden. Sometimes she would just sit in the sun in the flowerbeds. I was vaguely worried she'd meet with the wrong end of a scorpion, but that never happened. After a while she got into a big thing with the local feral cat. The Mean Cat we called him. He would bully her and she started being scared to go out. One night the Mean Cat actually came into the flat and beat her up. While I was there! I had to chase it out. I think this really upset her and she would only go out when I was there in the garden digging.

Now we live in this really nice flat, but it's a story up from the garden and she can't go out. I've taken her on supervised visits to the garden a couple of times and she seemed to like it, but I'm afraid to let her out into the garden alone because it would be quite hard for her to ask to get let back in. The street outside is also quite busy, more than she is used to, and I'm really afraid that if she went out she would get hit by a car.

Sometimes she likes to go into the stairwell and run up and down the stairs, but she's pretty dumb and the floors look all the same, so she sometimes mistakes the upstairs apartment for ours and sits outside the wrong door yowling to get let in. Then I have to go rescue her.

But she's really looking quite lassitudinous; I think she sleeps too much, even for a cat, and she spends too much time trying to get my attention. She needs someone to play with who's more her own size. Someone fun and energetic to beat up on and boss around. For a while, I thought I should get her some mice, just let them loose in the apartment so she can have something fun to chase and then kill, but it turns out it's pretty hard to buy live mice. Don't know why.

I thought an adult cat would just be too much for her, since she's been an only-cat for so long. So, it's a kitten.

Also, I've decided to get a total hysterectomy to get rid of the cancer once and for all.

We tried really hard to keep all the important and useful bits in there, but it turns out that I have a "chemo-resistant" tumour and there were micrometasteses in the margins, which means the entire aparatus could be infected. The doctor said there was a 2 per cent chance that there were micrometasteses in the ovaries, but that there was really no way to test for this. The only way to know whether there was cancer there would be to wait until they developed tumours, by which time I'd be in pretty big trouble. I consulted my nice English-speaking GP and he said that with the flu or something, 2 per cent is no big deal, but it's way too big a risk with a disease that will kill me. WAY.

They said I could have radio-chemotherapy but this would (probably) have the same effect ie: premature menopause, anyway. Frankly, I didn't really even bother looking up the possible side effects of radiotherapy. It just seemed obvious that the only way to be as close as possible to absolutely sure is surgery.

So, life is about to change, permanently. I was really hoping that I would be able to deal with the cancer and have things go back more or less to the way it was before, but that hope is over.

So are a lot of other hopes.

But that's the way life goes.

More later on my Third Decision, which you guys might be able to help me with.

Now, I'm going to the beach to sit around and look at the water.

~

Some day, some day soon...

2011-11-17T22:39:00.003+01:00

Colour.

Richard Miller

I'm not ready for colour (yes, there's a U in it), I'm not even as far as charcoal. Still on pencil. But it's one of the things I've decided to live for. Getting to colour.

Pretty, pretty, pretty pictures, pretty ladies, pretty dresses...

Oh! oh oh oh!!!

(More on my List of Things to Live For later)

~

Why the Church in England is falling apart

2011-11-17T13:40:00.005+01:00

This is from a post by Fr. Ray Blake of Brighton's St. Mary Magdalen parish. It is just a snippet from a

"letter from a Bishop to one of his priests, which basically said, "I cannot be bothered to read what you have written or to listen to what you have to say or to investigate what you are accused of but whatever it was it was wrong and hate filled."

Fr. Blake doesn't tell us the subject of the accusation, but comments simply, "It actually wasn't, it was a gentle argument trying to explain the faith".

He comments,

"I rather welcome the recent judgment that the relationship of priests to their bishops is like that of employer to employee, simply because it might bring some justice into a situation which is often quiet unjust and sometimes, as an American friend suggested, more akin to master and helot.

Those with power in the Church are often a law unto themselves, especially when they turn their back on the Church's Canon Law and basic Christian principles."

But it's not merely that these are bad men and bad bishops, heedless of the law of the Church and the tenets of the Faith. It's that they are intellectual runts. Some of them have a kind of animal cunning when it comes to protecting their interests, but other than this, well...

Think about it. It's not just that this man wasn't interested in investigating an allegation of "hate" against one of his own priests. It is the complete inability to grasp the internal logical contradiction he is making in his ridiculous rant. He "cannot be bothered" to investigate an accusation, yet "whatever it was" was "hate filled". And how, exactly, Your Excellency, have you made this assessment when you "cannot be bothered" to examine the actual material in question?

This is the current level of intellectual ability in the leadership of the Catholic Church in England.

In the lead-up to Advent, I think I will revive my "Abolish Christmas Now!" campaign. I am beginning to think that only if Christians in England are absolutely forbidden, on pain of harsh judicial penalties, from mentioning their religion in any public sphere that there is the slightest hope of saving the Faith in that country. These men need to be persecuted harshly for the belief they no longer hold and defend.

~

A lot going on

2011-11-16T12:00:00.004+01:00

There's a lot. I've had the consultation with the doctors. The news isn't good, but it isn't as bad as it could have been and there are still things we can do to make the whole thing (possibly) go away. I can't really go into it more right now, but I thought I'd let y'all know straight up that things are still hopeful but the cancer is still there.

The chances that the next thing we do will make my cancer entirely a thing of the past are in the high 90s, but, well, things are still complicated for the moment.

But for now, I have a difficult decision to make. I've been given a few options, none of which are particularly appealing. Once I've decided what I'm going to do, it's still going to be difficult to live with and will change a lot of things more or less for the rest of my life. So, stick around, I'll go into it more as we go along.

At the moment, however, I'm actually just a bit pressed for time and for some rather unexciting, mundane reasons. I've got a doctor's appointment in the City this afternoon for more information, Q&A sort of thing, and I would have been back to you all before now but the internet at the flat died for about 30 hours. Fixed now, but we've got to run off to do more doctor-related things.

So, I'll get back to you.

Sorry, I realise now all that was kind of cryptic. But I'm in the process of making some pretty big life decisions and am trying to make them based entirely on rational and sensible things. The effort is leaving me somewhat muddled.

In the head.

You know.

Anyway, once all that is sorted out, I'll be back and we can have some tea. I might bring biscuits.

~

Art to soothe

2011-11-14T11:24:00.004+01:00

Julio Reyes demonstrates where I want to go with

oil,

Pencil

and charcoal...

and how far I've got left to go.

No further health news. Will let y'all know.

~

First piece of bad news since the diagnosis

2011-11-12T14:51:00.001+01:00

I'm afraid plan A has failed.

I'm sorry to say that surgery was not successful. The cancer remains in the "margins" and that I will now have to go on to the next step. Consultation on Monday to see what that will be, whether radiotherapy or surgery.

No comments please.

H

Taxonomy III

2011-11-12T14:06:00.002+01:00

Part III

Alright let me get the category thing correct.

From your emails, I see five - is that correct? In descending order:

Trads
Conservatives
neo-conservatives (neo-Catholics)
liberals
modernists

And what of the term Rad-Trad (I know what it means) - who is defined by it? - SSPX and further along the scale, the Sede crowd?

The problem you are having is not that there are not enough subdivisions of "liberal" on your scale. Your problem is the scale itself. These terms are already defined and there IS NO SCALE.

We are not identifying a scale with extremely conservative Trads at one end and crazy "modernists" at the other. Forget about the scale. There is no scale. There is no "descending order" from Trad to Modernist. Trads are a distinctive group who are what we are according to a clear definition. Modernists are what they are because they adhere to one degree or another to a particular heresy (described by the popes are the "synthesis of all heresies") You are creating confusion for yourself with this scale business. Forget about the scale.

Modernism is a formally defined heresy that has created in the post-Conciliar Church what we now call "liberalism" because we have lacked a better, less politically derived term. Within the limitations of the extremely vague and slithery concept of "liberalism" (that is mostly undefined and undefinable) it could be said that there is a sort of a scale, from a certain point of view, and that in some respects, people who are usually regarded as "conservatives" are on it.

But please leave it there; the concept of a scale is no more use than that. If we are to use the scale idea, we might label the whole thing "Modernism", and on the "Modernism Scale" there is a gradation from people who consciously and willingly adhere to the heresy (whether they deny that Modernism is their source or not) and those who unknowingly and unwittingly have absorbed its tenets because they know no better. The former are generally referred to as "liberals" and the latter, as "conservatives".

(It is interesting to note that a few years ago, these "liberals" in the Church were more or less oblivious to the existence of Trads, while the "conservatives" hated us and in some cases did their best to eliminate and "absorb" us. Since then, the general knowledge of Trads has increased. Liberals still do not usually see us as any kind of threat and treat us with fascination as a sort of re-discovered long lost tribe, or like something legendary that they thought was long extinct. Conservatives for the most part continue to hate our collective guts, but have learned to be more polite about it, often attending the Old Mass out of attraction to its beauties and to demonstrate that they are not bigots. This is what we like to call the Ratzinger Effect.)

But from the point of view of the people on the scale, they are not on a scale at all. To them, there is no scale, but rather two camps implacably opposed to each other and locked in mortal combat. This is the point at which the scale analogy becomes useless. Conservatives do not understand that they are infected with this heresy; they do not consciously accept it.

There is no scale, there is just the heresy, Modernism, more or less consciously accepted. The scale thing is a total red herring. Because in reality, the model of two implacably opposed camps is much more realistic and useful. Though I can't stand S---, and he hates Traditionalists like me, we both know we are on the same side. I know that if S--- were ever to be presented with the fullness of the Faith, and there was some way to turn off his ego for five minutes, he would accept it. Subjectively, from his own point of view, he is not a liberal because he consciously rejects their heresy. He rejects Modernism.

That he has been unknowingly infected with it is something he cannot do anything about and isn't his fault. In this case, the subjective point of view is important. Objectively, S--- is a Modernist material heretic, but this is because the Church in the last 50 years has taught nothing but Modernist heresy and if you want to know the Faith, you first have to know you don't know it, and then go looking for it. But subjectively, S--- is a good Catholic who is striving to be as good a one as he can. His will and intentions are all correct.

The "liberals" of the Mahoney/Chittister/Gumbleton stripe would not accept the Faith if it were presented to them. They are modernist heretics, formally, and I believe that a formal declaration of this, and excommunication, is long past due. (I'm going out on a tiny, precarious limb here, because I am presuming to judge their souls, but I'm doing it for the sake of clarity in this discussion, not because I think I can see into their hearts. Who knows if Sr. Joan would convert if given the proper chance? Not me.)

The "conservatives" of the Shea/Akin/Scalia/Neuhaus stripe aren't Trads because they have never been adequately presented with the Faith in its fullness by the proper authorities. I like to think the best of them because I was a conservative myself once. I was a JPII-clapping neo-Catholic and I was angry at the liberals and wanted the Church to be restored. If you had told me at the time that I was a liberal, and a Modernist and a heretic, I would probably have punched you. My will and intention was to be a Catholic in the fullest sense. This made me a neo-Catholic conservative.

If these neo-Catholic conservatives were properly instructed by the correct authorities in the fullness of the Faith, I have great hope that they would accept it. But they won't be because of near-total acceptance of "soft" Modernism in the Church from top to bottom. In theology, we call this "material heresy" which means heresy accepted out of ignorance.

Traditionalism, therefore, is not "extremely conservative conservatism". "Traditionalist" is not a sliding term, it cannot be used as an adjective and it is certainly not part of a scale from Trad to Modernist. THERE IS NO SCALE.

Traditionalist can't be used as an adjective; it is only a noun. You can't be "more traditionalist" than someone else. You are, or you are not a Traditionalist. There could be such a thing as a conservative Traditionalist, I suppose, because "conservative" can be used as an adjective. And in theory there could be such a thing as a "liberal" Traditionalist, but the thing is what it is.

I am a Traditionalist. This totally precludes me from being "a conservative" (noun). I do indeed also happen to be quite a conservative Trad, but that is using the term "conservative" as an adjective to describe my personal style and attitudes. The issue here is the difference between substance and accident. I am not a conservative of any kind. I am a Traditionalist.

"Conservative" and "liberal" are malleable, slippery terms that can mean a great many things and are nearly entirely relativistic. You are a "conservative" or a "liberal" depending on who is standing next to you. Dolan is a conservative when he is standing next to Mahoney, but a liberal when he is standing next to, say, the late Cardinal O'Connor, who would be a screeching liberal if you could stand him next to Spellman.

(No one and nothing is "defined" by the term "Rad Trad". It's just an insult. It's an epithet thrown at anyone whom the thrower doesn't like. Normally, it's used by a neo-catholic or conservative to insult someone who he thinks is getting uppity over the Mass.)

~

Taxonomy

2011-11-12T13:43:00.005+01:00

My correspondence with my friend (Part II... scroll down for part I):

I think I have found the core of your difficulties.

When I talk about liberals in the Church .. I mean what you have described.

When I talk about Modernists in the Church, I mean the really bad guys.

You need to forget about the scale. There is no scale.

A "Modernist" is not merely a "really bad liberal". There isn't a scale with "liberal, bad liberal, really bad liberal and modernist". Liberalism isn't just a mild case of Modernism.

Modernism is a heresy. One that was described very clearly and aggressively and successfully opposed by Pope Pius X. If you put "Modernism" and "Pius X" into Google you will be able to read what the definition is. You will immediately recognise the liberals of our acquaintance, those people who are now in charge of the Church around the world. It is a creed opposed to that of the Catholic Church. The thing that makes people like Gumbleton and Sr. Joan and Cardinal Mahoney, et al, "liberals" is the heresy called Modernism. How much of a liberal (as the term is commonly used in the Catholic media) you are depends on how much of the Modernist creed you willingly and consciously adhere to and how much Catholicism you have retained. The two things are opposed and where one is ascendant, the other will be suppressed. You can't be a Modernist Catholic.

Now, from the point of view of a Trad like me, nearly all the people who are regarded as "conservatives" in the Church right now are to one degree or another infected, mostly unconsciously, with Modernism. But they mostly don't have enough knowledge of the Faith to know it. This situation has been created by the corruption of the Church hierarchy. People have not been taught the Faith, but Modernism instead, as you and I both know. They are Modernists, but it isn't their fault, and if you told them, (when they were finished being mad at you) they would do their best to stop being Modernists.

Perhaps that is the real distinction between a "liberal" and a "conservative" ; merely that a "liberal" is a Modernist on purpose. He is someone who has consciously agreed to the tenets of Modernism and has willingly abandoned the Faith in favour of it.

A "conservative" is someone who really wants to be a Catholic, who would reject any heresy if it were presented to him as such because he wants to do the will of God in good faith. He is a Modernist but only because he knows no better. If he is one, it is because one day in the late 1960s, the Church "woke and groaned to find itself Modernist". He is, therefore, consciously opposed to, and often actively engaged in fighting "liberalism" in the Church. He is at war with Modernism, even if he doesn't know it, and doesn't know how much he himself is infected with it.

Which is why "conservative" Neo-Catholics like S--- are so angry with us Trads. Why they hate us so much is that we have learned how much Modernism has infiltrated the Church and have rejected it and are in the process of fighting it in ourselves and outside, just as he is, but we can see it in him and he can't. (I'm sorry if this sounds insufferable, but I can't help it. If you are a Trad, you will, by definition, be able to see things that non-Traditionalist Catholics can't. Unfortunately, because Trads are all fallen, it does indeed tend to make us insufferable.)

We see that he too is suffering from the Modernist infiltration. Trads want the Neos to come out of the Modernist matrix. But because the Catholic Real is so much more frightening than the Catholic Real, they can't face and react with anger at the people who are trying to get them out. (Again, I disclaim here: a lot of Trads are just pests and it is perfectly reasonable to get mad at them, but there are a few of us who really really do want to see all the poor Neos released from the prison of the Matrix.)

Very few modern Catholics know half of what the Church teaches, and if they did, it would scare them silly. Don't forget, most of them, even the "conservatives" think that feminism can be "Christianised," that it is natural and good for Church and State to be separated, that "freedom of speech" is a natural human right... a lot of rubbish, but it is rubbish upon which their entire universe is founded. It is no wonder, then, that they are scared stiff of the fullness of the Faith and get angry with Trads and call us names when we point out that they are infected with the Disease. (That and I think I mentioned Trads tend to be jerks about it.)

But imagine his position, for a moment. He wants to be a good Catholic, thinks he is being a good Catholic by accepting all the tenets of the Faith he has been told about, and by fighting the bad guys, the "liberal Catholics" who have infiltrated the Church. He thinks he is doing the will of God and working for the right side. And he is, by virtue of his good intentions and the mercy of God.

Then along come the Trads and say things like, "Oh yeah? Well, what about the Social Reign of Christ the King?"

"The what of whom?" they respond.

"Don't you know that the separation of Church and state were condemned by the Popes?"

No. He doesn't. He has never been told this in his life.

Imagine what his reaction would be. He gets his entire self-image threatened, his total self-understanding as being one of the Good Guys, along with having his entire social and political foundation yanked out from under him. He is then presented with the awful reality of just how bad everything really is in the world and the Church, and it turns out to be a hell of a lot worse than any conservative is capable of imagining on his own. No longer is he the good guy fighting a good and more or less winnable fight. Now he is himself a compromiser, a collaborator, who adheres to a set of anti-Catholic proposals in a world that is totally howling mad and rapidly turning into hell on earth.

Really, is that a club you'd want to join? I'd get mad at that messenger, wouldn't you?

(That, and the Trads tend to be jerks about it...)

A Neo-Catholic conservative is someone who loves the faith, who wants to be as Catholic as possible, but in large part has not been given enough information.

(I believe this is the default position of nearly everyone in the Church who still more or less believes what the Church teaches and wants to do the right thing. I have reservations, however, about a lot of people who have set themselves up as Professional Catholics, writing on the net about the faith as apologists or amateur theologians who write "popularising" books about Catholicism, their conversions to it and who go on lecture tours making money as a "conservative Catholic" celebrity. Once you have that much professional stake in a position, it is going to be very, very difficult to change it when you discover its limitations. This is the main reason I object to the whole world of "professional Catholicism" that you find a lot of in the US. But really, this is neither here nor there for this purpose today. In general, I believe in the good will of "conservatives".)

Many, many times, when he fully understands how untenable his position is, he changes it. And that is how many of us have become Trads. We learned about all this hidden stuff about the Faith, we learned what has really been happening in the Church and the world. We then went through an incredibly painful transition period where we learned all sorts of awful things about how the Church is nearly destroyed, and we had a big personal crisis. Sometimes we ran off and join up with the SSPX or some other schismatics or do-it-yourselfers.

If we are given to emotional or psychological instability, if wen were alone and had no one around to help, we might have a really really bad time of things and gone a little bonkers (which is why a lot of Trads are jerks). But most of us settle down, remember that God is God and owns the Church, and will work things out in His own way and that our job is to be as faithful as possible in the given circumstances. After that, we generally settle in to whatever we are doing in life, whether it is raising a family, doing our jobs or whatever, find a decent place to go to the Old Mass, and get on with life.

Understand all this, and you will have a much easier time sorting out your terminology.

~

First, define your terms

2011-11-12T10:00:00.007+01:00

Since people seemed interested in it, here below is some more of that discussion with my friend on Catholic taxonomy. (Who, by the way can probably be classified himself as a conservative, trending Trad, as I explained to him. It is much easier to understand these things from the point of view of someone who is not on the scale at all, that is, from the Traditionalist point of view. You can't see the Matrix while you're in it.)

My friend is new to the world of the Catholic culture wars but has dived in with both feet as only an enthusiastic American can do, firmly convinced of his Constitutional rights to pronounce on any subject and eager to get things done.

He had used the term "neo-Catholic" to mean what we normally describe as a "liberal" Catholic, interchangeably. The latter of these, however, are more accurately described as Modernists, and formal heretics.

This is, of course, an area I don't know enough about to pronounce upon in any but the most casual, journalistic way. I don't have any theological training and I stand ready to be corrected by those of my friends and readers who do. (I hate disclaimers, don't you? They're such beady-eyed, rabbity things, but just this once...)

I would like to add that to define a Modernist properly, I would have to do a lot of lookings-up and asking of experts. I hope it is understood that I am always writing as an interested layman with a layman's understanding. But my understanding is a baptised one and so I can at least know that there is such a thing, know where to go to look it up, and by applying this basic catechism-level knowledge to my own observations, I can know in broad terms how and where this pernicious heresy has flourished and choked out the Faith. Don't ever let anyone tell you that you are not qualified to defend the Faith because you don't have a degree.

Moreover as a journalist and a blogger, I have more than a passing understanding where the divisions lie for the purposes of writing about the Catholic debate and the Culture Wars, on the internet. Of course, I also want to add that these divisions, these taxonomic classifications are themselves far from fixed separations. If you have studied the history of biological taxonomy, you will find that it is a science, or a study adjunct to science, that is not exactly err... exact. Over time, lots of species have been shifted around the taxonomic key as more things are discovered about them.

But the basic premise is perfectly sound and does not change. Real things, things that exist in nature, have characteristics, observable accidents that can be quantified to help us decide what sort of things they are, and what sort of other things they are related to.

Of course, people don't like to be quantified in this way, and it is especially unfashionable now that political correctness has entered the fray. I can't tell you how many times I have heard the indignant cry, "I'm not a ____, I'm just a Catholic." Well, may I suggest that in the modern Church, if that is true, then you are, most likely, simply a lazy Catholic who has never bothered to learn anything about the Faith, to discover its depths and surprises and has never had an opportunity to find out what your reactions to those surprises will be. The Church is in crisis and is fragmented from top to bottom. If you are trying to claim that you are "just a Catholic" I suggest that you are attempting to wish these realities into the cornfield, a power you do not have. Grow up and get into the fight.

I sold the other post to a friend who runs a small but famously irascible Catholic newspaper in the US, so I won't be putting it back up. But the gist, for those who missed it, was my attempt to help my friend clarify the distinctions between the various tribes of the Faith and to dispel some of his misconceptions.

To summarise, here are my main points:
"neo-Catholics," as the term is used by Traditionalist writers describing a certain strain of modern Catholicism...

- are often American converts from evangelical protestantism,

- adhere generally to and defend the sexual moral teachings of the Church but are either ignorant of or opposed to the Church's teachings, as defined by the 19th and early 20th century popes, on the proper construction of the social order, ie: the Social Reign of Christ the King

- are generally satisfied with the direction taken by the modern Church with regards to "freedom of religion" and other beliefs, but believes that a return to the traditional sexual moral teachings is essential in both the Church and society

- indulge in a selective enthusiasm for the 20th century popes, with the usual exeption of Pius X. They normally believe that John Paul II was "Great" and should be canonised

- usually know very little about the Church's struggle in Europe and the US, through the 18th and 19th century with secularists and anti-clericals

- are convinced that the principles behind the US constitution (liberte, egalite, fraternite, freedom of speech, separation of Church and state) are entirely compatible with the Catholic Faith and are usually totally unaware of the writings of the popes

- often oppose what they believe to be "the Vatican's" objections to US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will argue vociferously that this does not constitute opposition to the Pope

- believe that the liturgical reforms following Vatican II are mostly either innocuous or acceptable, and the ones that aren't were not direct products of the Council but unapproved aberrations

- oppose "gay marriage" but believe that marriage should be an "equal partnership" between the man and the woman, don't see any problem with "natural family planning" and think feminism was generally founded on good ideas but went astray and can be "Christianised"

- usually want to be seen as a supporter of "womens' rights" and like to say, often and loudly, that "women are just as much victims of abortion as their dead children"

- are strongly clericalist, particularly when it comes to Bishops and believe it is always wrong to criticise bishops

- believe in the "reform of the reform" for the liturgy and (recently) that the two "forms" can and should exist side by side and "enrich" each other

- believe that the Second Vatican Council itself was either innocuous or a good thing, but that it was hijacked by 'liberals' and its documents distorted and misapplied

- generally hate and fear Trads, but lately have learned to be polite to them, at least while Teacher is looking.

Here is some of the rest of my correspondence with my friend (Part I):

Hi Hilary,

good to hear from you.

Saw your email [the one I posted and then sold, hjw].. hmmmm ....

I guess I was using the term in a larger sense when equating with liberal .. meaning exactly what you described .. someone opposed to the more traditional aspects of the faith. But i guess i could sub-divide the "liberal" crowd even further.

When I talk about liberals in the Church .. i mean what you have described.

When i talk about Modernists in the Church, I mean the really bad guys.

Just like with bishops, there are the Traditionalists (Burke et al), the liberals (Dolan, Chaput et al) and the Modernists (Bernardin et al).

Both of the last two are bad, just in different degrees. But which ones do the most damage - ah, now there is a question. Those with actual evil intent, or those so self-deluded, that they are being destructive while actually believing they are helping.

Jim:
OK, I begin to see where your error lies and have to say that you absolutely must stop making definitions up on your own. All the terms you are using already have clear definitions and cannot be used randomly according to your own lights. Words mean things.

Of course, as a Trad, my opinion is that a neo-Catholic, that is a "conservative" Catholic, is merely a liberal who's been mugged by reality. But he's a conservative. He has, by this mugging, changed from the position of liberal to that of conservative. He is no longer a liberal. OK? Neo-Catholic does not mean liberal, it means Neo-Catholic. The two things are not the same.

Words mean things and you can't just use them any which way and not cause confusion. It is extremely important that you do not simply start using these terms in whatever way suits your personal little fancy.

The terms modernist, liberal, conservative, neo-Catholic and Traditionalist all have definitions, meanings, (though "liberal" and "conservative" less than the other ones). Each means something different and cannot be used interchangeably.

A neo-Catholic is not a liberal in the sense that the latter term is currently understood in the Western Catholic Culture Wars. In the same way, a Traditionalist is not a conservative. (If you were to go to a party full of Trads and start to call them conservatives, you would be thought a clod and not invited back. Conservatives have ruthlessly persecuted Trads and have only recently begun to be even remotely polite to us.)

The term "Neo-Catholic" and "conservative" are almost interchangeable, but not quite, but most important is that a Neo-Catholic conservative is not a liberal. Please get this clear. A Neo-Catholic is not a liberal. At least, not subjectively according to him, and not in the current usage in the world of Catholic-talk on the internet. (Whether he is objectively, is a separate question and shall be dealt with hereafter.) The term is not used that way.

The terms "liberal" and "conservative" are the least accurate, most slippery, vaguely-defined and least useful. Unfortunately, these terms are also the ones most people are used to, and when you start using the term 'liberal' to describe people that are normally thought of as 'conservative' you will not be helping the cause of clarity. They started to be applied a long time ago, and though more suited to political discussion, have been tacked on, with varying success, to the Catholic world.

In the interests of accuracy, however, and with respect to the effort to communicate clearly, the term neo-Catholic is a great deal more descriptive, precise and accurate in what it describes than the nearly infinitely malleable "conservative". "Conservative" has become such a slippery expression as to be nearly useless, whereas "neo-Catholic" has quite a specific definition, and a clear provenance. It was first coined by the Traditionalist writers Christopher Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods Jr. in their book The Great Facade, one which I strongly recommend you buy and read. I can give you the email address of Chris, if you would like to have him help you further clarify the meaning of the term.

The term "liberal" to mean the evil Modernists who have taken over the running of the show since the 60s, is also quite slippery of course, but I would be very cautious about using it as interchangeable with "Modernist". Modernism is a clearly defined heresy, and I expect that not every one we think of when we use the term liberal (Card. Mahoney, Bishop Gumbleton, Sr. Joan Chittister, etc) is a modernist, as the term is correctly applied. But they are "liberals" in the broader sense. I suppose that you can be a liberal without being, strictly speaking, a modernist. (Whether you can be a modernist without being a liberal is a different question. I don't know enough about Modernism as it was defined in the late 19th and early 20th century to tell you.)

You are, as far as I can tell from following your podcasts over the last couple of years, moving from the position of "conservative" to that of "Traditionalist" without fully understanding what is happening, and are therefore suffering from category confusion. This is probably why you think Cardinal Burke is a Traditionalist. I'm sure he would never say so. (I think you need to understand right off the bat that there are no Traditionalist bishops alive today who hold a see or position in the Church. None. Not one. Burke is just a very very conservative conservative, who happens, like many conservatives, to be sympathetic to the Traditionalists' positions and complaints. There is a small number of Traddie priests and a larger community of laity. but there are no episcopal Trads.)

You may be suffering from the common misunderstanding that a Trad is merely an ultra-conservative. Just a conservative only moreso. But, as I see you are starting to understand, "liberal" and "conservative" are merely arbitrary labels that can be applied according to where you yourself are standing on the scale. Whether one is regarded as a conservative or a liberal depends entirely upon whom you are standing next to. Whereas "Traditionalist" is an absolute term for which there is no scale. You can't be "more Traditionalist" than someone else. It's an all or nothing proposal and a Trad can be clearly defined. You either are one or you are not. Traditionalist is not an adjective, in other words, and cannot be used as one in the way that "liberal" and "conservative" can.

2011-11-11T11:12:00.004+01:00

In Flanders Fields (by John McRae)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
... The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Little Belgian kid takes the salute

2011-11-10T21:31:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow, I'm probably going to be busy. I'm supposed to be at a stem cell conference at the Vatican most of the day, so I'll probably either be on a train or interviewing someone or recording talks and taking notes and being all worky, and will likely let the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month slip past. I'll be wearing my poppy, and there are nearly always chapels available at these Vatican things.

I hope I remember to do a minute of silence, but if I don't, say a prayer with me tonight while we're both thinking about it and not in the middle of a busy day.

For peace, for an end to war, for the safety of American, British and Commonwealth soldiers in the Scary Zones of the world, for the defeat of evil men and ideologies, for the spread of the Gospel to Godless lands, for an end to persecution of Christians in Islamic countries, for the conversion of friends and family to and within the true Faith, for the coming of the Social Reign of Christ the King over the whole world without which no peace will ever be lasting.

I pray for the repose of the souls of my great grandfather, William Doloughan and my grandfathers Herbert Edward Burkett and Norman White who all served in both the First and Second World Wars.

Dear Lord, have mercy on us. Give us a bit more time.

Amen.

~

Are you now, or have you ever been...

2011-11-10T15:33:00.011+01:00

Sorry, but I'm in negotiation with someone to sell this post for money, so I'm putting it on ice for the moment.

Thanks for the fun comments.

H

~

Hear ye, hear ye.

2011-11-10T12:24:00.003+01:00

Dear Satirists, Editorialists, Columnists and Punditrists the world over,

Please take note that I am officially imposing a worldwide Orwell's Picnic ban, a global prohibition, if you will, on the use of the expression, "a modest proposal" in any editorial piece on any subject whatever.

There can only be two causes for the use of the term and both are completely inexcusable and either way you will cease from this point forward.

Either you want to invoke the memory of Swift and are attempting to grab some of his coolth for yourself, or you have somewhere heard the phrase "a modest proposal" and somehow vaguely associate it with clever editorial writing and have used it out of ignorance of Swift.

If you are doing the first thing, then you are just a plain old copy cat. You aren't cool or smart and even if every "modest proposal" thing you write suggests eating the people who are causing whatever trouble you are writing about, you are still just trying to ride his 200 year old coat tails. If you can't think of your own funny outrageous stuff to write then you should give up and face the fact that you are really just a dull unimaginative person who has no business writing and who should have been a chartered accountant.

If you have used the phrase for the second reason, you need to stop writing immediately and start reading books.

Both reasons are inexcusable and unacceptable, but it doesn't matter either way because now that this prohibition is in place, even if you have some other reason, the use of the phrase in any editorial writing whatsoever will result in the immediate dispatch of an authorised Orwell's Picnic agent to your home with a rolled-up newspaper which shall be applied smartly to the end of your nose.

So let it be written, Ayy-men.

~

Diane Fraser studies values in oil

2011-11-10T00:09:00.003+01:00

Found a new painter I like.

Check out the still lifes.

She really does gorgeous reflective surfaces.

~

Proof that I'm really a radical and a hippie,

2011-11-09T10:14:00.003+01:00

deep in my soul.

I approve of guerrilla gardening.

I once came across a group of hippies in Victoria who had taken over an abandoned house and started a huge garden in it, complete with sophisticated four part compost heap, ducks and chickens and the start of a seed company. The city left them alone because otherwise no one would be there keeping the rats and mice away.

It was cool.

I think Italians do a lot of this. When you travel around by train or walk around the outskirts of towns, you see a lot of suspiciously organised looking patches of greenery by the sides of the tracks and on bits of waste ground. There are some allotments that are clearly officially approved allotments, but there's plenty of stuff that looks allotment-y but is in little nooks and crannies or on impossible looking slopes with obviously hand-built wooden terraces.

Wish I had the nerve.

~

Uh oh...

2011-11-08T03:23:00.004+01:00

Have just discovered that the Vogue patterns website lets you buy things with PayPal...

ships overseas and...

has a sizable vintage section.

~

Have to try this

2011-11-08T02:45:00.004+01:00

Still trying to decide the best thing to do with that beautiful robin's-egg blue linen. I've been combing the vintage dress and sewing blogs (of which there is a startling number out there... crowds of us, apparently, find modern fashion somewhat lacking) and have come across this lovely little project.

How to do a 1930s scallop-edge collar.

It would be worth doing as a separate, detachable piece, don't you think (Karen)?

~

Space weather report

2011-11-07T22:34:00.002+01:00

Lots of solar activity, a group of sunspots will be visible for those with solar filters on their telescopes. Slightly less hazardous will be the full moon in 2 days 23 hours, but the big news is the asteroid near-miss report from NASA JPL in California.

Quite a big asteroid going past in our neighbourhood tomorrow, near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55. About 400 meters or 1,300 feet in diameter, or about the size of a medium sized stadium, and will be passing about 202,000 miles away. 0.85 lunar distances. Quite close.

You won't see it though. It's going to be raining in Rome, so, as Vicky pointed out, even if it were a giant flaming ball, we'd miss it. But it is a type-c asteroid, the c is for "carbonaceous" which means it's quite dark and you will need special long-exposure equipment to see it if the sky is clear where you are.

As for it's potential, err...impact:

"Astronomers estimate objects in the 50 meters range impact on the Earth about once every thousand years and produce explosions equal to 10 megatons of TNT (several times the Hiroshima bomb). We know one such impact occurred in Siberia on June 30, 1908, and flattened more than a thousand square kilometers of forest."

Not the only one

2011-11-07T18:49:00.005+01:00

who thinks old things are better than new things.

There's a whole internet world of starry-eyed nostalgists out there.

(I just made that word up. Good eh?)

Vicky and I have been having a good time watching Downton Abbey and she has been getting screen caps of some of the more luscious outfits. They're a bit fuzzy, but they give the general gist well enough.

From these, I'm doing some sketches and we'll see about working up some patterns.

I have simply come to the conclusion that there aren't any clothes in the shops that I want to buy (unless I happen to be in Florence, which I'm not most of the time) so the only solution is to make my own.

One of the many things I've been planning on doing "when it's all over" is start the creation of an entire wardrobe of exquisite and meticulously crafted hand made clothes. So, now's the time.

~