Routine

So, Annamaria has very kindly offered to help me rototill the entire Big Dry Patch. I'm going to do it in beds around the trees so they're like pools of green. In between the plan is to lay down some wood chip mulch or maybe use some of the broken bits of tile around to make paths between the big round beds. In the beds the plan is for mostly aromatics and flowers but for some part of it to be a dedicated orto. (She said she's going to be renting the bit I used this year to her daughter for some for-profit project, so we're making my patch into a proper orto.)

A funny thing today when I found an old rental ad on the internet for my apartment, and got the actual dimensions. It said that the garden is 200 sq/m! Which is certainly the biggest bit of land I've ever had to play with. I can hardly wait to get going. Nothing can really be done until the weather eases off and the rain starts softening things up. Anna said that rototilling the ground as it is would be like trying to break through concrete. But it should be fine in the autumn, which is when you plant things anyway.

I just had a late dinner. Chopped up a bunch of stuff that needed finishing in the fridge and threw in some strips of turkey breast I had thawed for dinner on Thursday but turned out to be too big a package for one meal. All the veg was from the orto, either mine or stuff that Anna has given me: pumpkin, zucchini, tomatoes, a yellow peach, an onion, sweet red and green bell pepper and a little bit of minced hot peppers (which I didn't know until I started picking them were actually Scotch Bonnets!!!... the kind you have to be very careful with when you're cutting them not to get any juice under your fingernails or absent-mindedly brush your face with your fingers). I just sort of stewed everything together cooked in some butter and a bit of sesame oil, with a handful of basil (from the pot on the terrace) garlic, sesame, coriander and cumin seeds ground up, and all cooked together for about 20 minutes and then the sauce thickened with a handful of almond flour.

It occurred to me that very nearly everything in it except the meat and the mushrooms came from 20 yards away. Some of it came from plants I started from seeds I saved. I bought the pumpkin's parent in the produce shop in Norcia.

I've got a routine now. I get up just after dawn and feed the kitties, put on a pot of coffee and sit on the terrace under the sunshade umbrellas while I do a bit of reading ("Lectio," I'm working on a book about Benedictine liturgical spirituality by Cecile Bruyere) and drink my coffee and iced tea chaser. Then when it's too hot to stay on the east-facing terrace, I usually go inside to sing the Office along with the Le Barroux chant mp3 (which makes me homesick). (I'm thinking of maybe splashing out on an Antiphonale from Solesmes. Our friend Peter K said that it's the only way to go after you've got the general gist of the Monastic Office from the Diurnal. I figure listening to the chants, getting used to the Latin phrasing and pronunciation, the next logical step would be to have the book to follow along with the Little Squares so that starts sinking into the brain too.)

After that's done, it's work of various kinds; housework, writing, digging... Today I needed to do some internet things and didn't really want to stay in the house and felt the need for a bit of exercise, so I rode the bike to the village and just sat in the Why Not Cafe, the nice little bar in the centre of town that has air conditioning and wifi, and a barman/owner who speaks pretty good English and is very friendly. On the way home about 90 minutes later, I stopped to pick some blackberries that are really coming just perfect now (the survivors that is; there are a lot that were just fried by the heat). It's the second half of August and there just aren't many people around; those who are around aren't doing anything but snoozing and barbequing. The kids in the house next door spend a lot of time in their raised pool.

Obligatory photo of Pippy and Bertie curled up snoozing together. At precisely 8pm every day, they all wake up and start demanding their dinner. After that it's outside all night to chase small creatures. 

In the late afternoon the sun comes blasting around the other side of the house so I go around closing all the windows and shutters. Lately I've been hanging opaque cloth covers on the metal shutters that the afternoon sun turns into barbeque grills. The walls are 20 inch thick stone, so no heat gets through at all, but the windows, even with the shutters closed, can actually get hot to the touch. So the second half of the days in late summer are spent in a cool dark room, which is good for writing, with the kitties draped all over, sound asleep stretched out their full length. The humming fan and the dead quiet, the heat and the cave-like gloom can make it hard to stay awake. I'm still in the Mad Dogs and Englishmen school and don't usually take an afternoon riposo, but I might be cracking soon.

Once the sun has definitively gone behind the mountain and the evening breeze picks up, you have to open all the windows and shutters again to get the air flowing. It actually gets cool enough to need a little cover for sleeping, and the sound of owls can be heard in the woodsy bits behind the house. When you go out on the terrace in the evenings, before it gets full dark, you can see dozens of bats flittering silently around. Catching mosquitoes and moths.

The other day I got a nice note by email from some SSPX nuns who have a monastery near here, down in Narni, about an hour's drive at the other end of the Tiber Valley. There's a little train that goes straight there several times a day. They said that of course they don't cancel the Mass in the summer and I was welcome to come down to stay over night on Saturday to attend the Sunday Mass there. (Of course, they have Mass there every day but it's at seven am.) She said there are some Americans in the community so there would be someone there to chat with. I've got aaaaalmost enough money socked away to buy the Ah-pay, so transport will be less of a problem. I'll see if I can do that next week and give a report.

On the whole, I think things are working out, settling down. Or at least, so I fervently hope. I do hope my brain calms down. I know I'm not the only terremotata who has experienced some long-term effects. We had 50+ earthquakes a day, 24/7 for three months. I guess that's going to have an effect, though at the time I didn't really think much about it. I find I am still having strange, unexpected bursts of anxiety. But things are settling down now externally, and that can't help but help. We'll see what comes next. Maybe it'll be peace. Wouldn't it be funny if I found peace just as the world was losing its collective mind.


~

Melting the polar caps

(I'm afraid I couldn't possibly be a real nun. I like rocking out to Pearl Jam WAY too much. But don't worry. I know I'm a podgy middle-aged cat lady, so I don't do it in front of anyone...)

Writing from the train on the way to Narni this morning. I've got a booking in a nice B&B and an appointment with some realtors there. And yes, I'm definitely going to be checking every wardrobe I find. If you never hear from me again, y'all will know what happened.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate the assurances of prayers and ... ahem... "accompaniment" I've received. There is a Facebook group of ladies who are offering me "spiritual bouquets". Seriously! I just got a note on the other blog to say that an entire convent of Carmelites somewhere in the American mid-west, is praying for me to find a suitable home. One in which I can resume being a slacker, half-assed hermit and where, much more importantly, the kitties can run around outside and get back to having fun. I've got about 50 pots of herbs and bulbs and things sitting in the garden in Norcia that need tending.

When I was fifteen I left my family in the dark of a winter morning. We lived in the (lower) Canadian arctic, and it was about - 50 degrees C that morning, and there was an ice fog. It was so cold the snow didn't crunch under my feet, it squeaked. I walked with my backpack of clothes, tooth brush and birth certificate for ID, through a cold that no parka could keep out, to the bus station and got on the early bus to Edmonton, the nearest city. I was 1200 miles away before anyone in my family noticed I was gone. I didn't hear from them until I got a phone call a year or so later to tell me that my belongings had been thrown away.

I've felt completely alone ever since. You get used to it, and by the time 35 years have passed, you take it for granted and mostly sort of forget about it. The Faith has helped, but you have to learn a lot of mental discipline - that old Thomistic thing of subordinating the passions to the intellect and will. But that's pretty damn exhausting, frankly. One can't really just grit one's teeth and white-knuckle it through life. Not forever, anyway.


It's taken a long time, but I think the ice that has covered my soul for all these years is finally receding. A good deal of the work was done during cancer; I was never alone for a moment.

But this sort of thing helps too. More than y'all might ever know until the day when all things will be revealed and there will be no more secrets.



~

So long to the Thin White Duke

You all know I left home at fifteen. The course of my life has been steered entirely from that one act. Looking back I think it was actually a perfectly sensible decision, but at the time... well... best not to think too much about it. I went from being a rather sheltered child to being the only one in charge in the space of a week. (I was a ward of the state, but being in the "care" of social workers and being on my own amounted to the same thing.)

At the time I mentally divided my life into two parts, the before leaving and the after, and it is still a pretty sound description. On the cusp of my 50th birthday, I am now at last at peace with it all. But at the time... Hm.

There were a lot of people and things that helped me survive along the way, and it might sound weird, but Bowie's music was one of them. I was raised very strangely by a woman I now understand was a pathological narcissist. One of the things narcissistic mothers do, especially to daughters, is to try to insert their own personality into the child, to make her a living replica of herself a kind of puppet. I had no sense of identity when I was 15 and broke away from her. Music was one of the ways I started the process of creating a person, an identity that was separate from my mother's.

One day, I went to visit my friend and she played her Bowie albums, starting chronologically with Hunky Dory.


It was the first time I'd come across something that I really liked that my mother knew nothing about. It was the start of me becoming me. It took a long time, but here we are.

David Bowie's music, for the next ten years, was playing as the soundtrack of that entire development, and will forever stand in my mind for that period of creating independence and identity.

Which is a bit funny considering ...




~

In a mood...

Most of Friday and all of Saturday and Sunday with no internet. I read books. I went for long walks in the country. I stacked firewood. I went to church and heard the Divine Office. I nursed my cat and took her down to the monastery to get her blessed on the Festa di Sant' Antonio. I wrote about the plants and trees native to the Valnerina in my notebook. I worked on my fairy story. I did some mending. I watched my favourite TV show on DVD. I chatted with my friends in real life. I did housework.

It was almost like normal life again.

The cat is a little better after a really bad spell on Friday. Every time I tried to get her to eat or drink anything, I would put the dish right under her nose, hoping the smell of nice food would make her want to eat. But every time, she would just turn her face away like it was the awfulest thing she'd ever smelled.

Today, within three minutes of turning on the damned internet, I suddenly know exactly what she feels like.

When I was at the computer store, I was chatting with the Computer Store Guy, and said that I'd read somewhere that the entire internet comes to the Old World via a cable, about as thick as a man's thumb, that runs along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. There's nothing protecting it, no plastic tube or anything. It could get cut at any moment, and then, finally, things could go back to normal. Wouldn't that be nice?



~

Hi, yeah... oops ... sorry

I guess it's been a while since I've been around here. You might have noticed a couple of posts down there's a thing about my art classes starting again, and, thanks to the generosity of you all, I'm suddenly exceedingly busy.

It's been an exciting couple of weeks and quite a sudden change from my next-to-comatose winter. I've been leaping out of bed at 6:45 every morning six days a week to get the 8 am train that gets into the City at nine. This gives me a nice hour of quiet morning time to myself before class starts at ten. I've been taking the bike into town with me and having a blast getting my metabolism up. I've written before about how walking around Rome is like playing that old classic 80s video game, Asteroids. Well, crank it up a few notches by doing it on your bike, and it can be ... rather stimulating. Gets the early morning blood pumping.

I've also found a nice little out of the way church, tiny by Rome standards but with all the Baroque frescoes and gilded curlicues you could want, that has Adoration every week day morning, so that's a nice little refuge. Then it's off to the farmer's market for a basket of fresh strawberries and a tea.

After that, it's class for three hours until one, one-thirty on Saturdays, then I go rushing off somewhere with internet access to work. Tuesdays and Wednesdays have been extra exciting because of the Figure class in the evenings, from five to eight, then more work after that.

Between the conclave and the Vatican's stem cell conference, as well as some looming legislative developments in Ireland and Britain, things have been a little nutty with work too. Nights have often been late, and mornings always early, and the time I have left is usually spent face down in the pillows. There has been little time for throwing stuff up onto the blog. So, anyone who only follows me here, and not on Facebook, sorry I've been kind of absent.

I've been pushing my limits a bit, and in a way it feels wonderful, like getting a stretch after a long time sitting down - which come to think of it is more or less exactly what it is. Leaving the house every day, getting some exercise in, seeing people, interacting with the world...

It was two years on March 9th, Ash Wednesday 2011, that I was diagnosed - a day I'm probably never going to forget. I started chemo in June, and had The Surgery the following January. I'm amazed that it's been two years, honestly, because it all seems still quite present. A lot of things have changed, and some old things that I'd long forgotten about or pushed to the back of my mind have come back. It's been a hell of a long Lent.

Anyway, last year when Andrea came back from Australia and classes started in early April, I dove straight in, and added Pilates classes, in an effort to force myself to come back to life as quickly as possible. I did it for a month or so then fell flat on my face. Only two months after the surgery, I wasn't ready. I spent a goodly portion of the winter trying to get the energy back to move and think and function, or even to want to, but I guess it took art classes to get me moving again. Funny what motivates.

Thinking about vocation again, and what it really means. I've been reading this very interesting book, Fire Within, by Thomas Dubay, about mystical prayer according to the teachings of St. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and it is bringing back many Thoughts about the nature and purpose of our existence, why we do and don't do the things we do and don't do. I suppose I'll have to share a bit at some point. But not now.

There's a kind of depression, I think, that comes with the absence of the spiritual life. I think it happens when you have lived a strong spiritual life in the past and do so no longer. Maybe its the thing the Scholastics call Acedia. I think I was suffering from Acedia over the winter. Maybe from living alone. Maybe from thinking too much about all that happened in the last few years. Maybe as a symptom of what I do for a living, the kinds of things I have to look at every day. I had a conversation with a colleague who said a few days after we came back from our Christmas break, "It's only been three days and I'm already sick of reading about the perverts." Human evil is a hard thing to look at all the time.

That, and I hate the short days. When it's dark by five, who wants to do anything?

There's a kind of torpor that can come over one, almost a paralysis, and even without strong feelings of sadness or bouts of crying it's, apparently, also classed as depression. Sometimes, especially when you're on your own, existence itself can seem overwhelming.

Unlike Modernia, we know that a human being is a unified whole, that the mind and emotions cannot be separate from the physical being and the spiritual reality that makes up a person. We moderns have a habit of trying to separate these things out. When we get depressed, we go to a headshrinker who looks only at the one thing, your thoughts and feelings - and inevitably prescribes a drug to deal with the symptoms. This habit we have of treating the different aspects of ourselves as separate and distinct comes from the 18th century's obsession with categorizing everything and with the materialists' desire to swat away anything that it can't classify in a Linnean system. And Rene Descartes' awful idea of the mind-body split. If it can't be understood easily, its characteristics can't be fitted into a taxonomic key, it doesn't exist. Or at least, it doesn't matter very much.

But one of the things I think I've learned in All That, is that the Catholics have been right all along (surprise!) and that we are indeed, unified whole beings. That a person can't be physically healthy, at least not for long, without being morally healthy. And this doesn't mean just avoiding sin. It means doing things with yourself that are oriented towards fulfilling your (teleological) ends. Mental health is a material concern, but it is closely entwined with spiritual health.

I think I'm starting to get beyond the health-related and personal shocks of the last few years, but these have led me more deeply into the bigger issues that have remained unresolved. It's impossible to hide from life, even if you can spend months at a time trying. And the things I want to know, the thing I've been looking for in my meandering and apparently aimless life, still want finding.

At the moment, I'm trying to find them by looking in a different way. But the obsession that drove me to come nearly 9000 km away from where I started is reclaiming my attention.

It ain't over yet.



~

Stay alive until you die, don't die until you're dead

Memento mori...

Some time ago, in a blog post, I asked the question, what do you want to be caught doing when you die? Of course, having dealt with the C-word in the last couple of years, the question has become one of immediate interest and I've thought a lot about the question of time, and how we are obliged to make the best possible use of this finite resource.

The other day, it popped in there again when I was reading the blurb of a biography of a well known Australian artist. It said that she had been painting right up to the day before she died, in preparation for another exhibition.

One of the things I'm grateful for is being granted the tremendous gift of Good Work. I understand that the Buddhists say that a huge part of the question of how we are supposed to live and order our lives has to do with Right Work, and I think this is spot on. Many, many years ago, I knew that whatever work I was going to undertake, it had better be worth spending a third or so of my life on. Aside from sleeping, the eight-to-ten hours a day most people spend at work is the largest chunk of time we have in our lives. I simply could not bear the thought of just doing some job for that percentage of my allotment of time.

But now I'm wondering again about the right use of time, and the question of Good Work, and, assuming that cancer doesn't return or some other accident doesn't happen, I'm thinking hard about how I want to spend the second half of my life. And the story of the woman who died painting has stuck in my mind.

What do you want to be doing on the last day of your life? What do you want to be caught doing by death?

~

Funny: what does The World think is "good work?" When you put the search term "good work" into Google, the very first thing you get is a website from Canada called "Good Work Canada" telling you how to get jobs in the Environmentalist industry.



~

Think, think, thinkety-think...

Some years ago now, a good friend and good priest told me, "Hilary, you just think too damn much." He was right. But I can't stop. And what I think about most is what is wrong with the world. Just what the hell is wrong with it, anyway? And how come, even though I think I've more or less figured it out, can't I leave it alone?

So, it's January 1st, a "holiday" that I usually don't like. And I'm liking it even less here. This is my fourth, and one of the things I like about it the least is the habit the Italians have of setting off firecrackers in the streets, randomly, all through the Natale season. For those of us who spend a lot of time immersed in our thoughts, sudden, loud and unexpected noises originating from six feet away, can be a very unpleasant experience. One of those jumping-out-of-your-skin, heart-pounding, leaping-for-cover kinds. (And the poor cat is ready to have an aneurism.) I lived five years in the mean streets of strictly gun-controlled Toronto and eleven years in beautiful, bucolic, peaceluvgroovy East Vancouver, and my reflexes are well trained to react a certain way to any sudden, unexpected and very loud, sharp bang.

Of course, one can't help, when one is not too busy and has spent the last couple of weeks eating a lot of turkey and drinking more wine than usual, but think Thoughts about Life at this time of year. The internet is full of it, of course, so it's doubly difficult for us internet addicts to avoid. One of the many reasons I'd like Catholicism to take over the world and all its cultures, is that we would be spared the annual pagan festival of deadly-dull introspection and (gawdhelpus) political synopses. We would all still be talking about the Miracle of the Incarnation and partying it up, going to late night Masses and goofing off with the kids.

Next year, as soon as Boxing Day Bloat is over and I can move again, I'm going to go up north somewhere, maybe Germany again, and visit Winter for the remainder of the holiday. Shovel some snow.

Anyway, what's wrong with the world? I just dug this out of an old piece I did last year for the Remnant:

Cancer and depression have in common the tendency to bring on bouts of introspection, the drifting of the mind to large and unanswerable questions. What is life, my life in particular, actually for? If it were to end this year, or next month or tomorrow, what would it all have been about?

Catholics love these kinds of questions, we rub our hands gleefully when we hear them, and we love to imagine that we have the answers. Why, it's easy. Right here in the catechism, Lesson First, "On the end of man". Question 6 gives us the smug response to all the Existentialists' agonies: "Q. Why did God make you? A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next." You can almost hear the little click as the Catholic snaps his book smartly shut in the Existentialist's face and goes on to wonder what to have for lunch.

Is it any wonder all the world hates us? I certainly do.

For the last ten years or so it has been my job to pose and smugly to answer those large questions at the heart of the Culture Wars, but recently I have also found the quick little Catholic catechismic answers too easy and too trite. How much more then do we imagine that the World, never even having heard of the catechism, is aching for a good answer? How can we be surprised, now that the Church has fallen silent, that the World is ready to give up?

Its teenage Angst and Existentialism period has failed to give an answer; how can we blame the fallen World for turning to impure thoughts of nihilism? The terrifying mass mental illness we abstract as the Culture of Death is really the depressive's reaction to his failure to answer the First Question (or Question 6). When that depressive starts giving up he gives off signals, signs of a dangerous turn of thought. Since World War I, the World has abandoned the search for meaning and is now asking a much more dangerous question, "How many people ought there to be?"

~

A blast from the past

108 minutes of KYYX Radio, c. 1983

gone, but not forgotten...


Gads, I was what, 17? Is it even possible to be that young?

And by that time, I'd already been living out in the world by myself for two years. I'd already started my long journey through my own personal Sinai desert, a solitary wander that was going to last another... good God!... 30 years! And wouldn't stop until I'd entirely left that world of sex, drugs and New Wave Pop - and the whole Left Coastthink Bubble Universe -

and ended up in the last place I could possibly have imagined. Is it really possible to change that much?

This is probably the weirdest, most surreal, Twilight-Zoney thing about the internet. It brings back the past.



~

Hopes and dreams

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.



~

What do you want to be doing when you die?

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.



~

A better day

Well, what an interesting day.

This just in from the Pont. Council for SocCom:

ENGLISH

Dear Blogger,

As you should be aware, you have been selected to attend the Vatican Meeting with Bloggers on Monday 2 May 2011.

Please come to the Palazzo Pio X entrance on via dell’ospedale, which is off via della Conciliazione, 5, at 3.30pm.

This invitation is strictly personal and you are asked to bring some form of Proof of Identity.

We remind you that as the event has been timed to coincide with the Beatification of John Paul II, we are not supplying assistance with travel, lodging or visa costs or logistics.

We are greatly encouraged by the warm response to this event
and the various parallel initiatives, including the creation of other meetings and groups, [HAW!!] a facebook page, a wikispaces, twitter, and the live feeds being set up for the meeting.

Please see www.pccs.va for the programme and any further details that may emerge.

If you are unable to come in person, it would be useful if you were to let us know.

If you are coming, we look forward to meeting you.

Yours, in the joy of the Risen Lord,

Richard Rouse

AND I got a call today, after a small amount of wrangling and only one fairly controlled attack of Brain, from Professore Scambia's office. I am to go for a consultation on Saturday. YAY!!

AND I am a new convert.

You know how I'm all, 'oh all that alternative medicine stuff is just hippie, New Age rubbish'? And remember how I said I hurt my back and have been walking like a penguin for nearly two months now?

Well, went to see the GP today, who does accupuncture and complained about my back being all owie, and he did the accupuncture and some exercisy, stretchy things and

Voy-LAH! Back pain all gone. Walking like a normal person.

Holy cow! It's like those Chinese people had spent some of that three thousand years doing something other than inventing chess and writing and gunpowder. Amazing!

So, now I go home. Maybe sleep for 13 hours again.



~

I have cancer

so, now that the whole world knows, it may officially go away and stop bothering me.

Update:

Hey everybody. I thought I'd put up a note to say that I'm OK. Had the exploratory surgery last night and it was very brief. I'm going to be staying in the hospital one more night to rest and recover and will be having more tests throughout the week on an outpatient basis. But I'm doing ok and am still maintaining the black sense of humour; the irony shielding is also holding up well. I'll give more news later and really, (yes, really) thank you all for your thoughts and messages and prayers. I can't tell you how much it has meant to me to know that y'all are out there.

Probably not a whole lot of internet things for the next little while.

More news as it comes.

Things I know

OK. I’ll let y’all in on the secret. A few weeks ago, I started to see various doctors because of a set of somewhat ambiguous symptoms that, as with many of these things, could turn out to be nothing of great import, or could as easily turn out to be something potentially life-threatening. I’ve known since January that something is up and I’m “that age,” as my doctors have repeatedly reminded me, where things start spontaneously going wrong.

Now, before everyone starts having fits (or starts sending out invitations to the celebration) the answer is that I still don’t know. There have been “tests” the results of which should be available at the end of this week. After that, awful things might begin to happen which may end up complicating my life to the point where nearly all internet activity gets suspended. So, in case you were wondering why things have been a little thin here, and with my offerings on LifeSite, now you know.

(That, and the rather mundane technical difficulty with my mobile internet stick… the Italian company I have an account with keeps saying the problem, that is interrupting mobile internet service all over the country, will be “cleared up soon.” Thanks guys…)

Enough people in my private life know about all this now that I thought I might as well come clean to readers as well. Y’all have been so great over the years, I thought I owed it to you.

I am also turning 45 next week, and am having the thoughts one tends to have when in the middle, looking toward the second half.

Of course all of this has been putting a little bit of a strain on my black-sense-of-humour resources but it has also made me do some pretty big thinking lately, as you may imagine. Not much of the results of these thinks have been suitable for publication, but I’ll share a bit, if you can stand it.

Remember that fad in the 1970s for the Elizabeth Kubler Ross “Five Stages of Grief” thing? She identified a psychological process people often go through who have a terminal disease: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Well, in contemplating my mortality in the last few months, I seem to be working through the Hilary Stages of Grief that seem, so far to include, in order of appearance:

Rejoicing - “Yay! I’ll finally be quit of this horrible planet! Woo-hoo!”
Annoyance - “I’m busy. This is interrupting what I’m doing.”
Perspective - “I just can’t seem to make myself care about politics any more.”
Worry - “What? I can’t go to heaven like this! I’ll be all cross and I won’t be able to enjoy it properly.”

One thing has popped repeatedly into my mind. When I die (if it’s tomorrow or in 40 years) who is going to get the things I have? I don’t mean the material things. I mean all the incredible riches I have been given by the people who have taught me things. These are things that I have been given by others. I can’t claim they were mine, except for the time I had them, but I have finally come to understand why I was given them. I was supposed to give them to someone else.

As you know, I have no children, never having figured out until much too late how life was supposed to work and what it was supposed to be for. That window is now closing, one way or another.

And I have few other relatives. I am an only child; my father, also an only child and my mother divorced when I was very small, (back before it was what all the cool kids were doing) and while she had close relatives, she had nothing to do with them most of her life. So I have no siblings, nieces, nephews or cousins, no posterity to pass anything on to. This may be where the urge to write has come from most of my adult life. I don’t know. That and a large dollop of egotism, I suppose.

I was discussing this the other day. It seems a waste. Everything I know, all my experiences, all the things I’ve learned how to do, are going to pop out of existence and will never become the rightful property of anyone else.

All my life, I have been filled to the top with interesting information, background, culture and whatnot. When I was in school, my report cards always said that I had a simply astonishing quantity of “general knowldege”… in other words, I was thoroughly “acculturated” from a very early age. Through my early life, I always assumed that everyone knew the things I knew, came from the same deep cultural roots, and when I was growing up, with the friends I had in school, this was more or less true. But as I went out into the world, I was more and more astonished at the incredible trove of ordinary things, the cultural background of our daily lives, that many, if not most people know nothing about. People are poor, and I was rich. It didn’t seem fair.

And the horrible thing is that we have done this deliberately to ourselves, as a society.

A long time ago, I had a good friend, an atheist, who was raised in the fashionable ways of the 1960s. His parents decided that they would not “indoctrinate” their sons into any particular religion, saying that they should be “allowed to decide for themselves” when they were old enough. So they gave their sons no information whatever about religious things. Well, the result was that my friend, who was brilliant and ended up as a robotics engineer, and his brother were total religious ignorami as young men. But more than this, because our culture is founded upon a particular religious heritage, they knew nothing whatever of the cultural foundations of the society they lived in.

My friend, as he got older and further away from the cultural bubble of his childhood, has learned more, but I remember a conversation I had with him once that shocked me. I can’t remember what we were talking about specifically, but at one point I mentioned Moses and the parting of the Red Sea.

“Who?” he said.

“What?” I said, not quite understanding his question.

“Who’s that?”

“What do you mean, ‘who’s that’?”

“Who you just mentioned. And what’s the ‘parting of the Red Sea?’”

“You’re kidding right?”

“Are you trying to make me feel dumb?”

“You really don’t know who Moses is…”

“No.”

“You’ve never seen the movie?”

“What movie?”

“Chuck Heston… ‘Let my people go’….? Nothing?”

I explained and he thanked me, but it was an interesting and educational moment for me too. I had assumed for years that my friend was a great deal ahead of me in education, and in math and science this was (and remains) true. But the world of cultural knowledge I was rasied in, that I had assumed was common to everyone, has become, I realised then, a rare and precious thing.

As I have gone along learning more and more stuff, I have come to understand better what happened to our society and why smart people are so ignorant, and how much damage this withholding of cultural knowledge has done to them. In some cases I think it has been a primary contributor to the development of what I have called “nice evil,” the general moral malaise that is so common among otherwise ordinary people. I have observed that this moral malaise is often founded in a particularly iron-clad cultural ignorance, one that quickly becomes willful.

Why was I able to figure out all this stuff about the value of human life? Why was I able to reason my way into the Faith? (And back into it again and again, despite a multitude of sins and failures?) How was it that I’ve been given this treasure? And what was I supposed to do with it? How am I going to make it increase in whatever time I have left?

This little episode of medical distress has reminded me that I had duties in life. And has made me wish I had fulfilled them better.


(Oh, and a warning. Anyone who starts getting "sympathetic," lugubrious or in any way nauseating in the commbox will quickly be getting the business end of my Smite button. Please carefully re-read the commbox rules posted to the sidebar and be assured that the rules against annoying me are, as ever, in full operation.)



~

What, already?

So, it's Lent again this week. As we all know, my birthday is always in Lent, no matter when it starts, so I am offering my annual Birthday Dispensation. Anyone who comes to my birthday party, Saturday, March 19, and maintains proximity to me within 50 yards, will be included in the annual Hilary's Birthday Dispensation Bubble.

We're also going to start festivitating after 3 pm, so it's after Vespers and is therefore liturgical Sunday...

("Festivitating" - I just made that up. Good isn't it?)


Email me to find out whether you are invited and how to get there. There will be barbequed meats, wine and lots of lovely things. I'm going to make soup.

(To all our Eastern Rite friends, have a nice happy penitential Lent, and I hope you enjoy your daily handful of gravel.)



~

Here we go again

Appt. at the Gemelli tomorrow.



~

Memento Mori

Doctor's appt. today.

Update:
The result? Not that great actually. More doctors next week.



~

Well, that was exciting

You never know how you are going to react to medical people telling you that you don't have cancer and aren't going to die.

My own reaction this week was pretty good, I thought.

Thought 1:
Dang. That means I have to go back to worrying about not having a roommate. (And, generally, that crappy old life will continue as normal. Boo.)

Thought 2:
How am I going to spin this into my next Remnant article and make some money off it?

Thought 3:
Oh! Great! Now I'll have enough time to do the Belvedere Torso in art class. Yay!

Then I had two questions:

1: What the hell is a "fibroid" anyway? and

2: Do you think they will give it to me in a jar to take home when I have it out?


Gross!



~