Time Out of Joint:

culture, history, and graphs

a not so precise look at the problem, as i see it, via google's nifty Ngram viewer. Anyone who has read The Virgin and the Dynamo by Henry Adams shouldn't be surprised by the following trends:

 

 

hidden in the vine, however, is a mode of resistance to the folly of an age of mechanical reproducibility, electronic media, and hyperreality: the virtuous imagination.

Auden's Modern Mystery Cycle

Boxing Day here in the UK. Christmas day has past and the magic of this ancient high festival slowly fades.

On Christmas Eve BBC brodcasted a special radio production of W.H. Auden's For A Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio

"WH Auden's postwar passion play is a modern mystery cycle which reinterprets faith for those exposed to the horrors of the Second World War."

This is magic and mystery crafted for the modern pallet. I encourage you to go now to BBC Radio 3 (follow the link here) and listen to the radio broadcast while it is still available. I believe they said it would only be up for 7 days.

If you miss the radio broadcast I encourage you to seek out this tale before twelfth night arrives and the magi's gifts reveal God's shining forth in the God-child . . .

Lord of Misrule

Sunday December 17 began the 'Feast of Misrule' which was the redemption of the Roman feast of Saturnalia. The feast, also known as the 'The Feast of Fools' in Medieval times, is a celebration of the recovery of light in the midst of winter darkness.

The feast is a feast of reversals --made famous to the modern reader by Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame-- where the order of things is reversed. Servants rule and masters serve. Needless to say the feast was banned in the 15th century, however, its mythic truth remains today.

We await the arrival of "the Son/Sun of Justice" . . . the light of the world born in obscurity, the peasant King of Kings, of the one i've called the God of Dung and Straw.

Remember the nature of the burlesque and the call of the Gospel message to reveal wisdom through foolishness.

Summer Solstice

The longest day of the year is a tempestuous one here in st. andrews . . . a crossroads of pagan, Roman Catholic, and high Scot Protestant traditions. the sun rules the day but the strong West winds drive the tempurature down as the clouds forshadow the days to come. the honey moon (the first full moon in june when honey is harvested) is past us and the ironic joys of summer are upon us.

Midsummers Day also known as the Feast of St. John the Baptist is actually June 24 marking the dark twin on the Cardinal Cross. We now slowly decend into darkness and begin, with anticipation, the birth of the light of the world.

The importance of the Christian calender deriving meaning from the pagan is now lost . . . the protestants have succeded in erasing that memeory into shadow and turning the days into rote spiritualism.

However, in Switzerland there is an interesting key. The Lausanne Cathedral, concecrated by Gregory X in 1275 (construction began a century earlier), house the most unusual stained glass. The Rose window, original to the cathedral from the 13th century, is window into the Medieval Christian imagination. [see images from the Princeton Univ. archives] Christ at the center, images of daily life throughout the four season, the astrological zodiac surrounds those images and 'monsters' mark the edges.

During the Reformation Lausanne Cathedral was stripped by iconoclastic Protestants . . . except for this window?? Why did they leave it? What truth about the nature of existence did it continue to reveal to the Reformers?

May you be fully present to this day beyond the usual numbers, facts, and the picayune.

new world candlemas

Remember the Wuchak today! The New World Woodchuck or Groundhog ...

Groundhog day comes from the European tradition called Candlemas. Actually there are two semesters in school over here: (Fall) Martinmas and (Spring) Candlemas ...

Candlemas --or the Christian Festival of Lights-- is February 2. Today is the midway marker between winter solstice and spring equinox. This also marks the presentation of Christ in the temple.

There is an old poem:

"If Candlemas Day be fair and bright
Winter will have another fight.
If Candlemas Day brings cloud and rain,
Winter won't come again.

If Candlemas day be dry and fair,
The half o the winter's to come and mair;
If Candlemas Day be wet and foul
The half o the winter's gane at Yule."

and the Germans have a particular tradition with a Badger coming out of his hole to see snow and shadows ...

Cut to: The New World

There are crazy things going on in the New World. Punxsutawney Phil is the least of your problems. Revel in this New World tradition with very old roots.

music of the seas

“But the other Ainur looked upon this habitation set within the vast spaces of the World, which the Elves call Arda, the Earth; and their hearts rejoiced in light, and their eyes beholding many colours were filled with gladness; but because of the roaring of the sea they felt a great unquiet. And they observed the winds and the air, and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron, and stone and silver and gold and many substances: but of all these water they most greatly praised. And It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”

from the Ainulindalë or The Music of the Ainur as recounted by J.R.R. Tolkien

Epiphany

Today is Epiphany. El Día de los Reyes. On this day the light of Christ appears to the world and three magi (the Persian Wizards Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar) come to bear gifts upon the God of dung and straw. Forever the so-called pagan yields to and is redeemed by the glory of the God-human Jesus of Nazareth ...

(scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev)

Psalm 24:1 The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; [2] for he founded it upon the seas; and established it upon the waters.

Tolkien made this point in his conversation (conversion / convincing of) with C.S. Lewis on Addison's Walk. All pagan myth must first be in the mind of God.

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My dear friend Johannes di Silentio passed on this T.S. Elliot poem. I hope you enjoy:

The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

St. Andrew's Day

November 30 is the Feast of St. Andrew and marks the beginning of Advent.

Matthew 4:18 As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 19 'Come, follow me,' Jesus said, 'and I will make you fishers of men.' 20 At once they left their nets and followed him.

yeah, that St. Andrew . . . It is said that circa the mid 4th century the bones of St. Andrew were brought to the North from Constantinople by St. Rule (also called Regulus). In a dream St. Rule heard a voice which said, bring the bones of St. Andrew to "the west, in the utmost part of the world". A thousand years ago the Cathedral of St. Andrews and the Tower of St. Rule (108 ft. tall!) were built to house the relics properly.

St. Andrew was a missionary to Asia Minor and Greece and legend has it was crucified by the Romans on a saltire cross in 60 A.D. This is why the national flag of Scotland (dating back to the 12th c. and probably one of the oldest flags still in use) is the White Saltire cross on the Blue field . . . which probably represent the bones of St. Andrew crossing the sea to Scotland.

Incidentally, the shape of the salitre cross (the X) is also the seventh rune/letter of the Elder Futhark. Who cares, right? We'll i think it is significant for two reasons. Gebo (X) is the reason why, in the olden days, people would sign a contract with an X. Why? Well this brings us back to Saint Andrews and the significance of the Saltire cross to the Pictish people newly converted by St. Rule. Gebo (X) is a linking rune which is symbolic for the connection/bond between people and between the land --between the people and the heavens. Tolkien thought runes were important because they represented the power of language which helps us participate with the deeper meanings in creation; It allows us to participate with the word and the story and creation . . .

Remember St. Andrew, disciple of Jesus of Nazareth and pillar of the church, murdered this day by the Romans under the reign of Nero and whose bones safely rest on the Island of Amalfi in Italy.

Iraq: The Wraithing of America

I first mentioned this in January in my post Remember El Salvador . . .

The Pentagon was considering using Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq a la the Death Squads in El Salvador. Well . . . it seems nightmares are realities in Iraq.

The BBC is reporting that 173 detainees have been found tortured and starved. You can read the article here.

President Bush, what in the hell is going on in Iraq!?

I absolutely do not side with those who condone the use of "persuasive interrogation" . . . When it comes to the torture debate I think there is one answer --No. I think even the very fact that the conversation is active in the U.S. Media causes Americans to loose a bit more of their soul.

"The security forces have faced repeated allegations of systematic abuse and torture of detainees, and of extra-judicial killings.

A report by pressure group Human Rights Watch earlier this year said methods used by Iraqi police included beating detainees with cables, hanging them from their wrists for long periods and giving electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body. "

This is El Salvador all over again . . . These "Security Forces" are trained by the U.S. military and Black Ops divisions. The bloody article from January even said they were considering this option!!

I'm outraged . . . but even more . . . I fear . . .

J.R.R. Tolkien believed that war --while sometimes absolutely necessary-- was not only futile but robbed a people of their full humanity and creation of its enchantment. Even referring to the most noble of causes, WW2, Tolkien believed nobility was compromised.

"The real war [WW2] does not resemble the legendary war [The War of the Ring] in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied", Tolkien says in the forward to the Lord of the Rings. "In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves." (7)

I truly believe Saddam Hussein and his dark land was an Orc Empire of hate . . . but Iraq is proving to be the wraithing of America.

Let me put this another way . . . the famous Prussian General Carl Von Clausewitz said that it war is to be waged it is to be waged totally. "To introduce into the philosophy of war a principle of moderation" von Clausewitz says, "would be an absurdity - war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds." This beast President Bush calls war is nothing more than the slow embrace of violence into the psyche of the American people. Since it is not done totally we are forced to bear the filth slowly. To use Tolkien's example, rather than opening the gates of hell and throwing in the Ring of Power we take the Ring of Power for ourselves foolishly thinking it will help us win the long defeat.

Rather than send more troops we conduct a furtive dirty war . . . but we pay with our souls.

And so it comes to this; the Salvador Option in January of 2005 leads to the discovery of 173 starved and tortured detainees in November.

"The world is changed. I taste it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air . . ."

What will we Do?

Runes and the Rood

'Jesus Christ, the Judge of Equity. Beasts and Dragons knew, in the desert, the Savior of the World' -- an inscription found on the Ruthwell Cross in Northumbria.

The Ruthwell Cross . . . a grand key to the mysteries of Christian expression in the early Medieval Church. This relic of Christian imagination stood for a thousand years before it was destroyed by bloody Scott Calvinist reformers in the 17th century.

Along with various images, including The washing of the Savior’s feet; Healing of the man born blind; The Annunciation; and The Crucifixion, is a portion of the oldest Christian poem in the English world . . . "The Dream of the Rood" written in Anglo-Saxon runes.

"Death he tasted there, yet God rose again
by his great might, a help unto men.
He then rose to heaven. Again sets out hither
into this Middle-Earth, seeking mankind
on Doomsday, the Lord himself,
Almighty God, and with him his angels,
when he will deem--he holds power of doom--
everyone here as he will have earned
for himself earlier in this brief life."

Tolkien used runes --and the elvin languages of Quenya and Sindarin in his Lord of the Rings (they also grace the cover and title page of the Houghton Mifflin second edition) to enhance the mysterious encounter with the numinous in the lost and uncomprehended past of "this middle-earth". Colin Duriez says of Tolkien's use of language, "the uncomprehended can have great imaginative power . . ."

After spending months in the rat and lice infested trenches of World War I Tolkien realized . . .