Missed the starting gun...

I first heard this album when my Uncle Robert bought it and he used to babysit me now and then when Mum was working. (Yes, I was surrounded by bad influences. But he also introduced me to Rose's Lime Cordial and cantaloupe, so...)

But it wasn't until now, in my late forties, that I understood what the lyrics mean...

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

Except that it's not ten years that have suddenly fallen behind me, it's about 25.



~

Doing it wrong

Have you ever thought of running away and pretending to be someone else? Ever get the feeling that you'd rather not be you any more, that things just really aren't working out very well as you, and that if you just went somewhere else, changed your name and lived another life, things might go better?

Ever wanted to be one of those people you hear about on TV who just walk away one day from their lives, get on a bus or a train and get off at some random spot and tell the world they're someone no one has ever heard of? The TV FBI (I don't know what the real FBI says about it) says that people "disappear" all the time. You hear it in murder mystery shows: "He might have just not wanted to be a stockbroker any more. Thousands of people just walk away from their lives every year, it doesn't mean they've been killed..."

Ever have the feeling that you've pretty much been doing everything wrong, or never really knew what to do or how to live all this time, and just want to go back to the point where it all went wiggy and fix it?

A long time ago, a smart friend of mine gave a piece of advice to another friend of mine who was having a difficult time adjusting to existence. He said, "If you hate your life, don't kill yourself; kill your life."

She took the advice, sold all her stuff, and got a job as a cook on a marine biology/cartography research ship in South America. She later married the captain and has spent the rest of her time since then ferrying marine biologists back and forth from Chile to the Galapagos Islands.

I've heard Dubrovnik is fantastic in the spring.



~

Brain training

A friend dropped by this afternoon while I was typing away and made me take a little break from work. I showed her a new drawing I'm working on, of my nice old suede boots. I showed her the basics of how the sight-size method is done, where to put your feet, how to hold the plumb line and plot points, make a contour line, how a cast shadow has usually got a bit of reflected light inside it, the difference between a cast shadow and a half-tone... basic stuff.

I lent her a book about it and she said she would come over some time in the mornings when I usually draw and I can get her started on a project of her own.

Something I realised when I was showing her a little bit of the stuff I've learned in the last couple of years, is that I have two distinct drawing styles. The Hilary Method, and the Andrea Method. The Hilary Method is a combination of my personal iconic system and a few of the little observational tricks I've picked up here and there to make things "more realistic". Cobbled together from books like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and from Grandma's old instructions and the little bits of advice I've had from artist friends.

The Andrea Method, that is, the classical realist, sight-size method, is the one that actually produces something that looks like art. It is totally a matter of disciplined observation skills and produces a strange state of mind in which much of my verbal and interpretive mental skills are switched off. At least, that's what it does when I'm concentrating. It is also when my iconic system is turned off completely.

Everyone who has ever drawn anything, particularly as children, will have a personal iconic system. It's just a way we decided as children how to depict things we like to draw, like cats, horses, houses, trees, birds, cars and human faces. This iconic system often sticks with a person their whole lives, and is the reason they think they can't draw. When I draw a face now, if I'm not looking directly at a person's face, I will at least start with the standard human facial proportions, because I've studied them and can more or less approximate them from memory. Not very well, but more or less.

It might be a big handicap when you're learning how to draw, but the personal iconic system that most people have, and used for drawing in childhood, is actually an important function of human cognition. When infants see, they don't differentiate things that are far away, or coloured or in perspective. It is only as they go along that they learn to see objects being distinct from each other, or learn things like the difference between far and near.

Unfortunately, when you're learning to draw, these essential mental skills get in the way. We look at a chair we are asked to draw as an exercise, and think, "Well, a chair has four legs, a flat part to sit on and a back, so I'll draw those things." Then we get annoyed that the chair we have drawn doesn't look a thing like the chair we are looking at. We have actually not drawn a chair at all, but our personal mental icon of a chair. A symbol of a chair. Or even, if we want to be Platonic about it, a symbol of chairness. But certainly not the actual object in front of our eyes.

It is usually at this point that we decide that drawing realistically, with perspective and whatnot, must be some kind of magic trick reserved to those with the magic Harry Potter Drawing Gene which we don't have. And we give up and never draw again, and when asked will give the inevitable line, "Me? oh heaven's no, I can't draw a straight line." (Banned at this blog).

Anyway, I have found that my own personal iconic system is still firmly in there, making demands that I draw all four legs of the chair, no matter what my eyes can actually see. It's very insistent about things being drawn properly. The trouble is, my combination method does not produce anything like art.

There are days when I am out in the world (not that many lately, actually) and I am trying to draw something I'm seeing, and I'm distracted or in a hurry, and not paying attention. It is at this moment when my lifelong Hilary Drawing Method tends to take over, and I start drawing eyes and hands and noses of statues that are directly in front of me, in the way my child-brain insists they are supposed to be. The Andrea Method is still very new to me, and not very deeply ingrained in my brain. The old method will come out if I'm not paying attention, and it is at those moments that I think, "Dammit! I can't do this! I suck."

Of course, the most tempting reaction to these failures is to quit, thereby sparing oneself that pain of being either bad at something or having to work hard at it. I'm a grown woman, and most of the things I'm good at I've been good at for a very long time. It's been a long time since I've been in the position of wanting to learn something that I didn't know how to do, that was very difficult and required a lot of work to learn and a lot of practice. (I think typing was the last thing, which was 15 years ago now.)

It's funny, though, that you can really see when flipping through my sketchbooks which drawings and scribbles were done under the strict Andrea Method rubrics and which came from me.

Learning is interesting, isn't it? I think I'll find a documentary about it.



~

A conversation between colleagues

Me and a fellow Catholic writer:

Me: Ever have one of those days when you think everyone else is doing better than you are?

Her: Ever have one of those days where you wake up and go to the bathroom?

This is someone with whom a few months ago, I had a conversation about how no one in our generation ever feels like a qualified grown-up. The whole concept of grown-uphood, the state of knowing what the hell you're doing most of the time, is extinct. We Gen-Xers and down, were all raised by people who thought that never growing up was their highest aspiration. (Or in some cases, were not raised at all by anyone.) Is it any wonder few of us are getting married before 30, and a lot of us are not getting married at all?

Hands up everyone out there who feels like they just don't ever know what the hell they're doing, what their life is supposed to be for, or how to do what is expected.



~

Art, vocation and holiness

(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?



~

Coming back to life

This morning I went to Rome for Mass and was going to attend a little luncheon do to say good bye to a couple of friends who are moving back to N. America, but like an idiot, forgot my pills. I had parceled them out into my little pill container and had poured a bottle of juice to take them with. They're timed, so I couldn't take them before it was time to go get the train. So there we are, sitting in the little compartment, I pull out my bottle of juice... DANG! foiled by stupidity again!

By the time Mass was over, I was being reminded quite forcefully that I still really need to take my pills, so instead of going to the nice luncheon, I got back on the train and went home and then slept all afternoon. This little incident has reminded me that chemo really did happen and that it's not over yet.

But of course, this also means that, at some point, it will be over, and I've been thinking about what comes after. Of course, I'm going to have to have tests every couple of months for a few years, and then regularly for the rest of my life, however long that is going to be. Recurrence rates with this type and stage of cancer, and with the treatment I'm getting, are wondrously low, but of course, cancer is weird and unpredictable so...

Nevertheless, there is going to be an after, and there's nothing like a brush with a deadly disease to make you reconsider things. What has surprised me about the outcome of my thinking is how happy I am with the way things have turned out. (Those who still think that living in a weird foreign country is all yachts and champagne may feel free to laugh hollowly now). After a rough first thirty years, I feel I'm finally pointed in the right direction and moving along.

I remember being young and the one thing I remember most is how horrible it was. I had a note this evening from a Picnicker who told me about how sorry she was when, at an insupportably young age, she felt she needed to "put away childish things" and got rid of a beloved teddy bear. I commiserated. I never felt guilty about having kept my bear, but I do remember well the feeling of having to force myself to do things that felt unnatural and unkind because I was now supposed to be a grown-up. What a horrible thing it is to be young in our times.

How much worse off are the twenty-year-olds now than they were in the 80s when I was there. The directionlessness, the feeling of never being quite sure you are doing it right, the agonising over mistakes and faux pas-es. The terrible harshness with which we judged ourselves and others. On my fortieth birthday, a friend complimented me then took a quick step back and said, "That is, if you're happy with that..." I said that I was just glad I had made it this far. Past the terrible twenties.

Of course, The Crazy, the bouts of depression and the lack of personal security are likely going to be with me forever, an ineradicable holdover from my unstable upbringing. But there is something about having made it into one's forties with most of my faculties and health intact. When cancer came along, it made me realise just how well things were turning out, and how disappointed I would be if I didn't get to finish certain things.

Of course, I know that nothing in life is going to be "finished", even if I were to live in good health to a hundred. I remember only too well how strange and unnatural was the death of John Muggeridge, one of the best people I've ever known. As though he were cut off in mid-sentence during an especially engrossing conversation. We all looked around, rather shocked, and said, "But where's John?" If he had lived into his second century, there wouldn't have been enough time to spend with him.

But this feeling of pointing in the right direction, of going the right way and in the right manner, is something I never expected to experience. This is really why I am so relieved that the cancer thing is turning out OK. I really do want to keep doing what I'm doing, and do more of it. More work, more painting, more Italy, more learning. And I want to do something for all the people who have been kind to me and helped me. I've given Other People such short shrift in my life, I'd like a chance to make it up to the human race.



~

Having one of those "what the hell am I doing with my life" moments

I never wanted to get into a situation in life in which I know without looking how to spell the surname of the current governor of California.

Update:

I also seem to know, without looking it up, the capital of Latvia.

What the hell kind of person knows the capital of Latvia without having to peek at Wikipedia? I mean really!

(Apart from Latvians, I guess)

Quick, name five famous Slovenians!

Yeah,

me neither.

I have to get my hair done

and I'm afraid.


There are a million and ten little annoying things about living in a country where you really have no firm grasp of the language. It really makes it very difficult to do all the little things that one takes for granted everywhere else. You should have seen the agonies I went through a few weeks ago trying to ask for a box of wooden matches at the corner supermercato. It ends up making you realise just how much in life you don't really need and how long you can make do with not having things you used to think essential.

The language problem is compounded by the daily difficulties of an English upbringing, where you would rather die than call too much attention to yourself, clashing with the Italian national character. Trust me, they don't know what to do English diffidence in Italy.

Well, why don't you just look it up? I can hear you say.

Ah yes. Why not indeed.

Imagine trying to buy some obscure sewing notion in a sewing supply shop, for example. I mean, how do you even go about looking up iron-on pellon interfacing in a standard Collins Gem Italian/English dictionary? You go to the shop, you look forlornly around for a few minutes while the Italian shop ladies, already naturally suspicious and generally hostile, eye you malevolently. At last, you make a desperate grab for something you don't need just to avoid giving the impression that you are casing the joint and pay and flee with your jumbo coat zipper and packet of sequins, vowing to just pop over to Liverpool as soon as the price of Ryan Air flights go down in the autumn.

I got my hair done, quite wonderfully, by Libby the lady who does all the older ladies in Tattenhall. We discussed all sorts of things, including the terrors of being a grownup and trying to get your hair done by a trendy twenty-something who can't imagine why you wouldn't want to look like a teenager. (Yes, the time before Libby, I allowed someone trendy to do it, and she flattened me with some kind of flattening iron because all the teenage girls think that looking like a haystack caught in a downpour is the height of chic). Libby also knew exactly what I meant when I said I wanted to look like Diana Rigg in the Avengers, ("Well, who wouldn't?") and we had a jolly time talking about how mad the world was becoming.

I came to Italy a few weeks after that and have tried to make my Libbby/Diana Rigg hair do last, but it is hopeless now. I look very charmingly like an 18th century peasant girl in some bucolic Ford Madox Brown painting. Not at all like a sophisticated black cat-suited Diana Rigg. Nor, at this point, can I even manage anything like someone from a Jane Austen film by piling it up and pinning it in place. It all comes apart and hangs in little annoying drifts around my face.

So the time has come. I have to face it.

How do I say in Italian, "I want to look like Diana Rigg in the Avengers"? And how do I say "Dear God, please don't make me look Italian!" without giving offense?

How then shall we live?

I've been involved in an interesting discussion in the last couple of days, which can be viewed here and here and in which it was my great pleasure to play the role of "gadfly".

It is one I enjoy enormously. There is little that bores and exasperates me faster than the usual inbox fare of these big Professional Catholic sites where someone writes an article that is meant to provoke discussion and receives a chorus of: "Great post Steve!" "Wow Steve! I've never heard it put that way before..." "I wish I were as eloquent as you are Steve, because you've really said what I've been thinking..."

Nnnggg..!

Yes, and who really cares what you've been thinking, since it is clear you have nothing interesting to say about it.

It is commbox love-ins like these that makes the gadfly in me break out of his cocoon and make a beeline straight for any exposed flesh. Given that no one in our times has been taught how to have a friendly disagreement, I find it is quite a simple matter to make things more interesting. The plodding earnestness of the New Orthodox Catholics is just too easy a target, too juicy a bit of meat, to leave alone. The fact that they, mired as they are in their own private version of political correctness, can't abide the slightest dissent and have no sense of proportion or humour, really only adds to the fun.

(Long Aside: There was, of course, simply no way at all that I could have resisted the temptation of saying What I Really Think about breastfeeding in public. It's a fairly straightforward syllogism: I hate hippies and all of their pomps and works. Hippies started the whole "lets expose our private parts in public to shock our parents and then demand that society change its attitude towards our 'natural and beautiful' body parts" movement that I remember so well from childhood. One of the major themes of the early hippies was the demand to breastfeed in public. The hippies have, through these apparently small discrete incursions, destroyed nearly the entirety of the Christian social agreement that once sustained Western Civilisation. Therefore, I think women need to keep their clothes on in public in order to preserve Christendom. So when I saw a cluster of admiring NOCs congratulating Steve on how wonderfully he had come to the defense of the practise, using exactly the same rhetoric I remember only too well from the furry-armpitted, fright-haired harridans of my earliest memories ... well, it was just too much to expect me to resist. I was certain Steve wouldn't mind.

I will grant, perhaps, the excuse that most of the NOCs are too young to remember the hippie movement themselves, and were for the most part raised in safe middle class neighbourhoods in which they had no direct exposure to the filthy hippies and their Crusade for Indecency. It is perhaps somewhat understandable that they would not realise they were dutifully reciting and defending the hippie doctrines that have slithered quietly into every aspect of our lives and destroyed Western Civilisation. But take it from me who remembers well life on the hippie West Coast in the early 1970s and her mother's grubby, patchouli-doused friends talking about their plans: the determination to force the rest of the world to accept the "beautiful and natural" phenomenon of breastfeeding in public is a manifestation of the feminist hippie movement slithering into Christianity and I won't have it.

Also, breastfeeding involves bodily fluids. Anything that involves bodily fluids needs to be kept out of public view.)

Now, wait. What was I talking about?

Oh yes, the discussion at Steve's Inside Catholic column. Jeff Culbreath is someone whose blogging I have enjoyed for some years now and with whom I've discussed many of these kinds of issues in a list we used to belong to. I would say that most of the writing by Catholics, especially traditionalist Catholics, that I find interesting and important is focused on this question of how to live, knowing what we know, in a world that knows nothing of it.

I make light of it and poke my stick into the hornets' nest because the question is an important one that needs to be taken seriously. It can't be left to the mutual admiration societies that cluster into commboxes. Steve and I and a few others have been working on this, almost as the main background theme of all our writing in the last five years. Some of us believe that it is counter productive, not to mention more or less impossible, to remove oneself off to the woods or the country to attempt to re-create a Catholic utopia where all the ladies wear long skirts and all the kids can converse in Latin.

Others disagree.

But the bigger question is one that remains.

Just how do we live as Catholics in a situation like the one we have? What is the proper "balance" of living in but not of the world? How much of the world, and which particular bits, can we take in? What must we reject and of what may we say, "yes, this is part of the human endeavour of which I am naturally a part"?

How do we get the proper perspective on a culture in which we are ourselves completely steeped, to which we owe the very shape of our thoughts?

This raises other questions. Can we have friends "in the world"? Non-Catholic friends? Can we hope for the salvation of our non-Catholic loved-ones?

Do we set ourselves up as arbiters of who qualifies for membership in the Elect? If so, according to what criteria and by whose authority?

Does it matter that we are, while being systematically forced out of public life in the secular world, at the same time deliberately withdrawing ourselves from it? Is this exclusion and withdrawal a bad thing or a good thing? Should we fight it or help it?

There are all sorts of solutions, some better than others, but none The Right solution. Many retreat. Many give up the struggle. Many join groups that help them withdraw, like the SSPX. Some go out of their way to live near a place where there is some safety and the protection of something like a monastery or an Oratory. Some just try to go it alone.

Catholics in general, and traditionalist Catholics in particular, have a habit of looking to the past for precedent to figure out a way to cobble together a method of dealing with the problem.

Is there a precedent for our current situation? I think not an exact one. As someone said, although we are indeed returning to a variation on pre-Christian paganism, complete with child sacrifice, lawlessness and philosophical fatalism, there is a vast difference between a virgin and a divorcee. A Christendom that has spurned Christ in her maturity is not the same bride that was wooed in her innocence.

So, how are we to see our times? How are we to interact with our non-Catholic, paganised neighbours? Do we approach them with disdain? Do we not approach them at all?

Is it possible for a Christian to make use of the things of the pagan world that are, through the working of the Natural Law, still under the headship of Christ, though He is unknown?

Can we read Truman Capote? Do we dare laugh at the bawdy jokes on Boston Legal, or empathise with the moral struggles of Alan Shore? Can we see goodness in films and music that is not specifically Christian?

Did the early Christians read the Classical writers?

Augustine derided the pagan entertainments of his youth, but was he entirely right? (Terribly daring, I know, to question so venerable a Doctor).

The fact is, I do not know the answers to these questions. But I believe this is the essence of our task, having been stuck in these almost inconceivably dreadful times.

I'm a child of this civilisation. I'm even a child of the hippie generation, and I'm sure am also unconsciously greatly influenced by that movement. I want to know the world, not reject it. The world is full of human beings, and there is nothing so interesting and wonderful to a misanthrope like me as human beings.

I can't help it. I love the world.

And I understand that it was not entirely repugnant to the Father either.

Viral

OK, I tried downloading an update of Flashplayer and no dice.

I've had this problem lately. If the computer's been on for more than a couple of hours, it suddenly decides not to play videos. Youtube or any other source, will download, that is, the little red or blue bar thingy goes all the way over, but the video will not play for more than two seconds.

Anyone know if this sounds like a virus? Or something else?

Everything else is working just exactly fine.

My Computer is trying to kill me

Internet help:

Does anyone out there know more than I about Firefox? Any idea why it might be periodically erasing my history and emptying my bookmark files? I booted up this morning and when I tried to use the drop-down menu at the end of the address bar, nothing happened. I went to the bookmarks and it is entirely empty.

Is there a setting that I have accidentally switched on that periodically dumps everything? Is there a way to switch it off? I have poked around the toolbar and found nothing. It did this, to my great annoyance, a couple of weeks ago. I rely upon my bookmarks to get quickly to various websites that I use regularly for research and save stuff there that are part of larger research projects and don't want to have to keep having to go around and pile everything back into the files from the net every two weeks.

Do I have a virus? Or what?

Any ideas?

Techie Help

Can someone please explain to me what the difference is between "page views" and "visits"?