Blogging the Restoration

The most famous diarist in the English Language has a blog, it seems. Some industrious soul has been posting Samuel Pepys diary entry for each day on the web since 2003. Thus, today you can read what old Sam was up to on March 29th 1664.

Like every good blogger, Pepys has archives up, so you can also start from the beginning on January 1st, 1660. Pepys diary spanned the period from 1660 to 1669, and important one in English history since 1660 was the year in which the monarchy was restored.

Unless his faithful webservant gets tired, this blogger should be good for another five years worth of daily content.

My heart is ready

The antiphon for the first psalm for today's Morning Prayer is My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready.

I read the antiphon this morning and my immediate reaction was a recoil. "No, it isn't. Not even close. My heart is no where near ready." There are too many things in it, on it, around it. At best it is a divided heart, not a simple heart--a singular gift for a Simple God.

I couldn't pray this in all honesty. But also in all honesty, I could say, "I want my heart to be ready, O God, make my heart ready." That, I could say because it true at the core, at the very marrow of bones. I want to be ready, I know I am not. My heart is half hard, half missing--a rocky field fit only for weeds and dodder--a shadow life thrown into relief by the season in which shadows are drawn more sharply and light is more visible.

--Steven Riddle

Lately I've been pondering whether I would be ready to die, were I suddenly taken. The thought of facing Judgment scares me, frankly. I am not prepared to see God face to face. There was a time when I would feel secure after I'd received absolution, because my soul was clean. That doesn't seem enough now, on my part.

Imagine that a person were to give a gift to a king of a metal tray. Although clean and polished, the tray is without adornment or etching. The king accepts the gift graciously because it is the best that his subject has to offer, but the gift in itself is not worthy of his magnificence. Even if none of his subjects can offer the king a fitting gift, the quality of each one's gift will reflect the love and respect in his heart.

My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready. I'll always link this verse with the scene in The Passion where Jesus whispers it in the pause before the whips fall on his back. Can anyone ever be ready to be beaten to a pulp? Perhaps this is one of those prayers that God realizes even as we pray it.

Classic Classics Resources

Those with an eye towards good Greek and Latin resources may be interested to note (if they don't know of it already) TextKit.com (hat tip: Bernard of L'Abbe Faria's Cell)

One of the things about the classics is that while new things are said about them, they themselves have remained much the same for some time. And indeed, some of the best texts on learning Latin and Greek are getting quite old at this point.

The folks at TextKit have been scanning in classic Classics texts and making them available in free, downloadable PDF format. I took a look at a couple of their texts last night, and they are definately clear and readable. Among the texts available for download are Smyth's Greek Grammar, Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar and a number of good classic schoolboy reading texts of Greek and Latin authors.

Modern Greats

Last week I posted some general reactions to the later reaches of the list of great novels in Susan Wise Bauer's book, The Well Educated Mind. I listed some "modern greats" of my own choosing, and A Philosopher obligingly listed off some great modern novelists in the comments.

Anyway, the question of what might constitute "modern greats" in the novel genre continues to intrigue (as do A Philosopher's suggestions, a couple of which I just picked up at the library). Anyway, I thought it would be helpful if I went ahead and posted the post 1940 section of Bauer's list (which is the part I'm wondering about -- perhaps as someone pointed out because it's too soon to tell what is "great" in that period).

Native Son, Richard Wright
The Stranger, Albert Camus
1984, George Orwell
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
White Noise, Don Delillo
Possession, A. S. Byatt

Now, of these I've only read 1984 and The Stranger, and a bit from the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude (MrsDarwin then took possession and read it -- and I never got around to continuing).

Of the two I have read, 1984 is certainly an essential piece of cultural literacy, but I'm not sure that I'd label is as a great novel qua novel. The Stranger certainly helps you understand some things about mid 20th century intellectual movements, though I think you might be better off reading No Exit by Sartre instead (though that's not a novel, so I guess that doesn't count here.) However, I'll admit to finding The Stranger pretty darn unsatisfying just taken as a novel.

My point here is definitely not to attack Bauer's choices -- my literary education gets pretty spotty after 1940, so I'm in absolutely no position to do that. However, I'm trying to understand what sort of list this is. Is it more a "this is what English departments study" (Bauer is, after all, a grad student in English literature), or is it a list of novels that typify major 20th century intellectual trends, or is it an attempt to identify the "great" works of the period? (My impression from her introduction to the novel and various schools of novel writing is that it's one of the former two, but the overall plan of the book would just the last possibility.)

Whatever it is, I do have ambitions of improving on my knowledge of modern novels one of these days, so I'm curious as to whether these, or perhaps some other list, are what I should be reading.

Rules of Engagement

Say you do something well -- sing, play piano, clean houses, babysit, rebuild old cars. You like what you do, and you want to help others do it as well. Or, someone asks to give lessons or take on a job for them. What fun, right?

Well, not always. The sad fact of life is that not everyone values your time and talent as much as you do, and very few people value it more. It may seem proud or too complicated to set ground rules for providing your services, especially if you're just helping out a friend. Anyone who has ever known the friction of a quasi-business relationship gone wrong, however, can appreciate how laying down a few basic rules right at the start can ward off much later stress.

I've taught violin lessons on a fairly informal basis for the past three years. As I try to wriggle free of my last student, here are my reflections on what rules I set at the beginning, what rules I implemented during that time, and what rules I wish I'd made. This set of notes refers largely to a service provided in your own home (as, in my case, music lessons), but I think that most of the points are adaptable to other circumstances.

• If you don't charge a fee at the start, think about what kinds of situations might cause you to start charging, and note those up front.
• If you want to be paid for your work, don't be coy about it -- set a clear rate for your services. Indicate what circumstances would cause you to raise your rate -- overtime, lateness, an increase in your own proficiency.
  
• Keep records noting when you are paid and what period the payment covers.
  
• Others will treat your time as valuable if you do. Have a clear start and finish time, with an acceptable window for lateness.
  
• Be circumspect about moving or rescheduling a lesson -- every now and then is fine, but if you're too accomodating with your schedule in the beginning, it will come back to haunt you later.
• It should be common courtesy on the part of your student to notify you if he has to cancel the lesson. If you insist on nothing else, insist on this.
• Machievelli says it best: it is better to be feared than loved. It's far easier to be strict at first and then lighten up later than to be accomodating and flexible at first and try to impose discipline after your reputation as a softie has been set. (This has been my particular downfall.)
• Stipulate at the beginning what events might cause you to terminate the service. For instance: consistent lateness, repeated absences, a student's neglect of practice, inappropriate behavior.

If anyone else has any good advice, feel free to share it.

Coming Soon to the Darwin Gun Case

For quite some time, I'd been planning to make a side trip up to Camp Perry during the planned family trip to Ohio in May in order to pick up an M1 Garand from the Civilian Marksmanship Program store there. However, the CMP is apparently rapidly running out of Garands, so last week I pulled together the paperwork to send off an order by mail.

A little background for those not deeply into military firearms: Entering World War II, every major power except the United States had a .30 caliber bolt action rifle little different from its WWI predecessor as their primary battle rifle. US forces, however, carried the M1 Garand, the world's first semi-automatic main battle rifle.

The M1 fired .30-06 cartridges loaded into eight round en bloc clips. A soldier could fire eight rounds as fast as he could aim and pull the trigger. With the last round, the clip ejected out as well. (For those of you who've seen Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, this produced the Garand's famous: bang, bang, bang, bang, ping... [pause] bang, bang firing pattern.) The soldier then slapped another en bloc clip into place, released the slide, and resumed firing.

As well as being the first semi-automatic battle rifle, the Garand developed a nearly peerless reputation for rugged design, reliability and accuracy, such that it remains to this day one of the standard rifles used in high powered rifle matches in the US. After the M1 Garand was replaced by the M14 and (shortly after) the M16, Garands were sent on loan to a number of US allies including Italy, Greece and Denmark. They also continued to be used for training in the US army through the 70's.

More recently, surplus M1s were turned over in large numbers to the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which made them available to civilian shooters throughout the country. A piece of history, and a great all-around rifle.

I might still have to stop by the CMP when we're in Ohio, though, since I hear that they've got hold of a bunch of M1 Carbines returned by the Italian government...

Crawling Back Among the Living

There is nothing more frustrating than an illness with no symptoms, other than a general malaise that would put the mid seventies to shame.

The thing is, it's hard to be taken seriously with "I'm not coming in to work today because I have a headache" or "I'm not coming in because I feel lousy".

However today's rosy-fingered dawn brought signs of feeling better, so hopefully I'm back to both functionality and blogging today.

Awwww...

Uber-homeschooler/writer Maureen Wittman emails about her teen daughter hitting one of those milestones that ought to warm any parent's heart:

Some mothers cherish the day they take their daughters out for their first manicure or to buy their first prom dress.

This week I took Teen Daughter One out to buy her first shotgun.

Nor, it seems, is this by any means their first venture into shooting sports.

Now those Darwin girls just need to hurry up and grow up enough to be able to do fun stuff. (More fun than trike-riding, that is.)

When Bad Trees Bear Good Fruit

We hear quite often the "by their fruit shall ye know them" quote. However, I've had cause to think a bit about it the last few months as I worked through the clean-up stages of having done a fair amount of work for a medium-size Catholic apostolate on a business footing. I'd never worked for a Catholic organization other than a school or parish before, and it was in some ways a disillusioning experience, in other ways perhaps an eye-opening one.

One thing it made me rather conscious of is that few people or organizations produce only one variety and quality of fruit.

What is one to make of an apostolate that on the one hand a number of people have credited with providing spirituality and apologetics resources that have helped them grow in their faith, and on the other hand seems to have an internal culture in which bullying, rudeness and systematic attempts to take squeeze both employees and volunteers dry while paying the minimum possible seem systemic? (NB: I try to keep my business and blogging lives very separate, and I don't want to commit detraction, so any comments naming the organizations I'm talking about will be deleted. I'm trying to get at the general principle here, not throw stones.)

When I first ran into this, I went through a stage of serious disillusionment, thinking that whatever apparent good this organization might be doing was illusory, perhaps even inherently corrupted. (How seriously can you take apologetics written by someone who just chewed you out in now uncertain terms a few days before?)

The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized that at least some of the benefits that people were getting from this apostolate were very real. And as I absorbed that, it clicked in some way with the rest of life.

After all, most of us got used quite a while ago to the idea that the people around us in our families, parishes, schools, etc. are not strict black hat/white hat characters. This should be something especially clear to us as Catholics, seeing people as neither elect vs. damned nor universally and totally corrupt, but with some covered with the snow of Christ's salvation. Rather, nearly all who die in a state of grace will require some purgation after death before being ready to enter into the heavenly union with The Good.

Still, I found, at least in myself, a certain expectation that Catholic organizations would be either "good" or "bad". Either "of the Church" or clearly not. So my initial reaction on disillusionment was that it should be trumpeted from the housetops: "These guys seem like a great ministry, but they're all jerks. There's probably something wrong with what they're saying too."

But I didn't, since that would be impolite, and also bad for business.

And after a while, I realized that most organization are heavy on warts just like people. The fact that an organization appears to have good fruits (whether it's a parish with beautiful liturgy or a publisher with wonderful books or a school with a very orthodox theology department) doesn't mean that it doesn't also have its share of faults -- and the possession of the faults, in turn, does not mean that the other value one finds in them is illusory.

Biber: The Rosary Sonatas

I came across a fascinating piece of music last night, while browsing around on Magnatune: Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber's Rosary Sonatas. (Magnatune allows free previews of the entire tracks from all their albums, so feel free to go listen.)

Dating from the 1670s, the rosary sonatas are fifteen baroque instrumental pieces, each one a musical meditation on a decade of the rosary. The collection concludes with a violin solo piece dedicated to the guardian angel.

While the music is clearly baroque in style, the emotional specificness with which some of the mysteries are described by their sonatas seems like something of a much later date. This is added to by Biber's use of selective re-tuning of the violin to achieve different effects in each sonata. The violin starts at a standard turning for the first sonata, and is retuned for each subequent piece, until it returns to standard tuning in the 15th decade. The most extreme re-tuning is shown below, where the center strings are restrung to form a symbolic cross for The Resurrection.

Really interesting music. Unless the baroque bores you, give it a try.

Commedia Meditations: The Pit of Hell

Leaving behind them the ten concentric trenches of fraud, the poets of reached a cliff face, which falls away steeply before them into the deepest pit of hell, the cold and lifeless center of the world. In the dim light, as the approach the edge of the pit, Dante sees what he thinks are looming towers built along the edge. Virgil explains that these are, however, giants. As they get closer, Dante can discern their figures, and is amazed by their size and ugliness. The giants are a mixture of classical and biblical figures. The titans and sons of Earth are here, condemned for their revolt against Jove. Nimrod, who built the Tower of Babel is there as well, and babbles senselessly at the poets.

At Virgil's command, one of the giants lifts them down to the bottom of the pit. Here they find themselves standing on a lake of ice, so smooth it looks almost like glass.

When we were there below in the darkened hole,
Far down the slope beneath the giant’s feet,
And I still stared up at the steep-pitched wall,

I heard someone tell me, "Watch out how you pass!
Be careful not to step upon the heads
Of this weary, wretched brotherhood."

At that I turned around and saw before me
And underneath my feet a lake of ice
So frozen that it looked like glass, not water.

Neither the Danube in Austria nor the Don,
Far-off under the cold sky, ever fashioned
So thick a veil in winter for its current

As was here: for if the peaks of Tambernic
Or Pietrapana had fallen down on it,
Not even at its edge would it have creaked.

The way frogs sit to croak with muzzles out
Of water, in the season when the peasant girl
Often dreams about her harvesting,

So these mournful shadows were sealed in ice,
Livid to where they blush their cheek with shame,
Teeth chattering with the clatter of a stork.

Each held his face bowed down before the ice,
Witnessing to the cold by their mouths,
Witnessing to the heartache with their eyes.

When I had gazed around me for a while,
I looked down at my feet and saw two shades
So clasped, the hair of their heads knit together.

"Tell me, you who squash your chests together,"
I said, "who are you?" They bent their necks back
And, when they had their faces lifted toward me,

Their eyes, which had before wept inwardly,
Wet drops down on their lips, and the frost froze
The tears between the two and locked them tight.

Never was board on board bolted more firmly
Than these two, so that they butted one another
Like two he-goats, such anger drove them wild.

And one shade who had lost both ears from cold,
With his eyes still cast downward, spoke to me,
"Why do you have to stare at us so hard?

"If you desire to know who this pair is,
The valley from which the Bisenzio cascades
Belonged to them and to their father Albert.

"One womb bore them both, and you can search
All Caina and you shall not find a shade
More worthy to be riveted in ice:

"Not Modred who had breast and shadow pierced
With but one blow dealt by the hand of Arthur,
Not Focaccia, not this one here who blocks

"My view with his head so I see no farther —
And his name was Sassol Mascheroni:
Should you be Tuscan, you now know who he is."
(Inf. XXXII, 16-66)

The poets are in Caina, the first of three regions of the frozen lake that contains traitors. Named after Cain, who killed his brother Abel in the world's first murder, this is where traitors to kin lie encased in ice.

The poets continue on after talking to the betrayers of kin, until Dante accidentally kicks and nearly trips over the head of a sinner who cries out and demands to know who they are.

Dante explains the nature of their journey:

"I am alive, and it may be worth your effort,
Should you seek fame, that I would now note down
Your name with the others." This was my reply.

And he cried, "I want just the opposite!
You have a poor grasp of how to flatter us!
Get out of here and give me no more trouble!"

At that I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck
And said, "Either you give me your name now
Or you won’t have a hair left here on top!"

Then he cried at me, "Go right ahead and scalp me!
I wouldn’t tell you who I am or show you
Though you pummel my head a thousand times!"

I had already twisted his hair in my hand
And pulled out more than a full hank of it,
While he yelped on and kept his eyes down low,

When someone else shouted, "What’s with you, Bocca?
Don’t you sound off enough with your clattering jaws
But now you have to bark? What evil’s got you?"

"Now," I said, "I don't need you to blab more,
Evil-minded traitor, because to shame you
I’ll carry back the real news here about you!"

"Go away!" he answered, "Tell all you want!
But if you do get out of here, do not
Shut up about this one with the big mouth!

"He weeps here for the bribe of Frenchman’s silver.
‘I saw Buoso da Duera,’ you can report,
‘There where all the sinners cool their heels!’

"Should you be questioned, ‘And who else was there?’
Right at your side you have Beccheria
Whose head was cut off by the Florentines.

"Gianni de’ Soldanier I think is farther
On with Ganelon and Tebaldello
Who opened Faenza’s gates while it slept fast."
(Inf. XXXII, 91-123)

Moving on, the poets soon come to perhaps the most pathetic and revolting sight of their journey. Two souls are plunged together in the ice, their heads sticking out through the same hole. All the while, one of them chews at the back of the skull of the other, spilling blood, brains and bone upon the ice.

His mouth raised up above his savage meal,
That sinner wiped his lips upon the hair
Of the head that he had chewed on from behind.

Then he began, "You want me to make new
A desperate grief which even to call back
Crushes my heart before I start to speak.

"But should my words become a fruitful seed
Of infamy for this traitor whom I gnaw,
You’ll see me speak and weep at the same time.

"I don’t know who you are or by what means
You’ve come down here, but when I hear you talk
You surely seem to me a Florentine.

"You need to know I was Count Ugolino,
And this is the Archbishop Ruggieri.
Now I shall tell you why I am his neighbor.

"How I was captured and then put to death
As the result of his own evil scheming,
I, who trusted him, need not explain.

"What you cannot have heard, however, is
How cruel my death was: that you now shall hear
And you will know whether he has wronged me.

"A narrow window in a tower cell,
Which for my sake is called the Tower of Hunger
And in which others must be yet locked up,

"Had through its opening shown me several moons
Already, when I dreamed the nightmare
Which rent the veil of the future for me.

"This man seemed lord and master of the hunt,
Chasing the wolf and whelps upon the mountains
Which block the Pisans’ view toward Lucca.

"With well-trained hounds, a lean and eager pack,
He had sent up ahead of him, in front,
Gualandi, with Sismondi and Lanfranchi.

"After a short run, so it seemed to me,
Father and sons fell tired, and with sharp teeth
It seemed to me I saw their sides ripped open.

"When I awoke before the break of day,
I heard my little sons who were with me
Crying in their sleep and asking bread.

"You are cruel if by now you do not grieve
To think of all that my own heart forewarned:
And if you do not weep, what would you weep for?

"They then awakened, and the hour drew near
When customarily they brought us food,
But each of us was worried by his dream.

"Below I heard them nailing up the door
Of the horrible tower — at that, I looked,
Without a word into my young sons’ faces.

"I did not weep, I had so turned to stone
Within me. They wept. And my little Anselm
Said, ‘You stare so... Father, what is it?’

"At that I shed no tears, and I said nothing
In answer all that day nor the next night
Until another sun rose on the world.

"When a small ray of sunlight made its way
Into that forlorn prison and I saw
By their four faces the look in my own,

"I bit both of my hands in desperate grief,
And they, thinking I acted out of hunger,
All of a sudden stood straight up and wailed,

" ‘Father, the pain for us would be far less
If you ate us! You put this wretched flesh
Upon us and now you may strip it off!’

"I calmed myself, not to make them sadder.
That and the following day we kept silence.
Ah hard earth! Why did you not open up?

"After we had come to the fourth day,
Gaddo threw himself down full length at my feet
And cried, ‘Father, why don’t you help me?’

"He died then, and just as you see me
I saw my three fall one by one by one
Between the fifth day and the sixth, and then,

"By now blind, I went groping over each boy
And for two days I called them who were dead.
Then fasting did what grief had failed to do."

When he had spoken this, with his eyes rolling
He once more seized the loathed skull in his teeth
Which were as strong on the bone as a dog’s.
(Inf. XXXIII, 1-78)

The story of Count Ugolino was so notorious at Dante's time, that his narrative leaves out (or merely hints at) some of the details. Ugolino had plotted with Archbishop Ruggieri against his own political allies (and oldest son) and engineered their destruction. However, Ruggieri then turned on Ugolino and had him, his two younger sons and two grandsons imprisoned. After a period of being kept prisoner in a tower, the door was locked one last time and (on the archbishop's orders) the keys were thrown into the river. When the tower was finally opened eight days later, the prisoners all had starved to death.

In Dante's telling, Ugolino has clearly not repented of his betrayal of family and allies, but is consumed for all eternity with desire for revenge against his fellow traitor, Archbishop Ruggieri.

The poets leave this gruesome scene and move farther still toward the center of the frozen lake. Here the souls at encased in ice with their heads pointing up, so that only the facial features are exposed, and their tears freeze over their faces in a mask that makes further tears impossible.

This is the third region of the lake, Ptolomea, in which are the traitors against hospitality: one of the most basic and ancient moral laws, that a host cannot kill a guest, and a guest cannot kill a host. One of the sinners here calls out to Dante begging the poet to chip the ice off his eyes. Dante promises to do so on the condition that the soul tells him who he is and how he came to be in hell. The shade reveals himself to be a Friar Alberigo, who was notorious for a murder several years before. His younger brother, Manfred, had struck him across the face during a quarrel. Friar Alberigo publicly forgave his brother, and later invited Manfred and his sons to a banquet. Then, at a word from Friar Alberigo, armed servants rushed in and killed both Manfred and his sons.

Dante is shocked to find Friar Alberigo here, because he is still alive, but the friar reveals that the slaughter of guests is so grave a sin that those who do it are sometimes plunged immediately into hell, while a demon inhabits the sinner's body until it dies. He lists off several other notorious traitors to guests who, while their bodies are still alive, have already had their souls plunged into the ice of Ptolomea.

Alberigo then begs Dante to fulfill his promise and chip the frozen tears from his face, but Dante refuses saying that rudeness is courtesy to such a one as this.

The poets now reach the innermost region of the lake. Here the damned are fully submerged under the ice. In the distance, Dante can now see the giant form of Lucifer. He who was once the most beautiful of God's creations is now ugly. He has three faces, each of a different color, and in each of his three mouths he chews one of the three great traitors of history: Judas, Brutus and Cassius. The first requires no explanation, he is the traitor against God and against love, the one who took money for the blood of the innocent lamb. Brutus and Cassius were the main plotters against Caesar, and as such Dante uses them as the symbols of ultimate betrayal of the state.

Satan's wing beat constantly, sending a cold wind blowing out across the lake. And the tears dripping from his six eyes feed the frozen lake itself.

The poets approach his giant, hideous form, and climb down his side, beneath the ice, using his shaggy fur for hand-holds. Half-way down, the world seems to turn over, and they find themselves climbing up instead of down. They have passed through the center of the earth and are now in the antipodes, the far side of the world.

At last they reach a cavern in the rock, from which a path spirals upwards towards the world above.

Along that hidden path my guide and I
Started out to return to the bright world.
And without a thought for any resting-stops,

We bounded up, he first and I second,
Until, through a round opening, I saw
Some of the lovely things the heavens hold:

From there we came out to see once more the stars.
(Inf. XXXIV, 133-139)

With those lines, and that image of hope in the beauty of the stars, ends the long dark journey of Inferno. Next is the long steady ascent up mount Purgatory.

Are we up for more, or have we had enough? I think that with steady work I could probably get us through all of Purgatorio by Easter, and then have Paradiso, if we want to go for completeness, for Easter season.

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by Allen Mandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Orthodox Catholic = Cannibals?

In the Screwtape Letters, and their several amusing spin-offs by other authors, it is explained that those demons who fail in their missions of temptation and corruption routinely end up as main courses upon the banquet tables of hell. It fits well with the culture of hell that there would be little tolerance for failure, nor any interest in whether failure was actually the responsible person's fault. Hell is the ultimate un-community, a group of angels and souls united in their refusal to follow any authority and willingness to prey upon others.

It is a little disappointing, however, that this tendency towards mutual cannibalism also seems strong within orthodox Catholic circles...

This is brought to mind, again, watching the shockwaves moving out from Naples, Florida after the announcement that Tom Monaghan and the board of Ave Maria University have asked Fr. Fessio to resign his post as Provost immediately. I first caught the story at Pro Ecclesia, which in turn linked to Amy Welborn (whose comboxes bloomed with doom-filled predictions), and Whispers in the Loggia (where Rocco relays speculations -- which seems to me highly unlikely -- that this was the result of a liturgical turf war between charismatics and traditionalists).

Now, I greatly admire the accomplishments of Fr. Fessio, and pretty much everything I've heard about him. Still, it's not as if the AMU board has suddenly announced they're splitting off to start their own church with Monaghan as its head or something.

Maybe spending much of my time working in the corporate world I've become inured to it all, but honestly, an executive shake-up in which powerful personalities clash irreconcilably and one is told it leave doesn't exactly strike me as a sign that the smoke of satan has entered the sanctuary. I suspect that in Fessio and Monaghan, who personalities which both insisted on having their own way came together, and eventually, when neither could bend, the one who didn't write the checks got pushed overboard to find his own kingdom.

However, most people don't seem to see this as an unfortunate but probably minor dust-up between two executive personalities. Instead, most commenters seem to have drawn two or more of the following conclusions:

a) Monaghan is a power-hungry and/or money-corrupted nut job.
b) Fr. Fessio has "a record" of blowing up projects.
c) The entire AMU projected is DOOMED and people better head for the hills and know better than to try to do a Catholic higher education start-up any time again in the near future.

Now, I've got no particular feelings invested in AMU. I've never donated to them and don't really plan to. (Steubenville occasionally gets twenty five bucks or so from us, but until we've got all student loans paid off, I feel no need to donate.) I know some people who went there and really liked it, I know other people who really don't like it for whatever reason.

I guess what I find disappointing is the tendency of all disagreements at a Catholic institution to turn into religious crusades. All sources of contention (style of liturgy, whether to have a dorm with separate male and female wings rather than separate buildings, how late visiting hours should go, whether there should be a core curriculum, whether to building a science building, etc.) all seemed to end up with various groups announcing they were praying for each others conversion, were concerned that no one seemed to care about the Truth, could see how the Culture of Death held sway even in the heart of Steubenville, etc.

Which is not to say that I didn't tend to have opinions in these quarrels, but that they should not have been treated as primarily religious quarrels, when they were in fact administrative quarrels.

Since college, I've seen the same tendency dealing with parish organizations and with certain Catholic ministries/organizations. Somehow, the sense of general culture war and being at odds with the world seems all too often to lend itself to a scorched earth "if you are not with me, you are against me" attitude being applied to everything.

Sure, there are other parts of the overall orthodox Catholic community that I don't like. Charismatics creep me out. Some ultra-traditionalists strike me as waaaay too worried about the Masons. Highly organized small faith communities strike me as too prone to political infighting and abuse. I'm not universally against the death penalty. (I guess I better stop while there are one or two readers I haven't offended yet...) But none of these are articles of faith. We don't need to go to war over them, and no one has to end up on the dinner table over it.

UPDATE:
It seems that whatever exactly Fr. Fessio and the rest of the administration's differences were, they've reached the compromise that Fr. Fessio will assume the position of "Theologian in Residence" and both teach courses at AMU and help deal with their study abroad program. What exactly this means about the nature of the original disagreement remains unclear.

Life's too short

Flipping through the mail yesterday, I discovered a brochure from a cleaning company. The cover had a photo of a high-end enjoying some leisure time in their high-end house. The caption: "Life's too short to clean your own house."

Life is too short to clean your own house. This has already become a catchphrase at chez Darwin. There are many reasons why one might outsource the cleaning of her home: the ability to afford such help; the inability to do the cleaning oneself, due to illness or pregnancy. To argue that life is too short to perform a necessary task of hygienic purposes, however, presupposes a fundamental lack of seriousness. Life's too short to take a shower. Life's too short to do your own laundry. Sheesh.

Look: I don't really enjoy cleaning my house. It's dull and has an inherent frustration in that I know I'm just going to have to repeat the same activities tomorrow, or even later the same day. (Wanna know how often I have to sweep my kitchen floor?) But complaining that life is too short to clean is just silly, as if "life" were some hazy shining ideal that exists just outside the scope of the mundane. "Life's too short to clean your own house": no, life is cleaning your own house.

As they say, that's life.

Art Novels vs. Real Novels

As people may have noticed, I'm a sucker for lists and also a sucker for intellectualism. Thus, I ended up picking up a copy of Susan Wise Bauer's The Well Educated Mind at the library the other night. (Of course the other danger with this kind of move is that I seem to have this rivalry impulse with any author of a book on classical curriculums -- hold-over homeschooling one-upsmanship, I guess.)

Anyway, I was looking over her list of 'great' novels that should be read, and realizing that despite my pretensions I've only read about 30% of them -- not that this is causing me to lose sleep or anything. (Most of the things that cause me to lose sleep are under four feet tall and kick when they show up in mommy and daddy's bed in the middle of the night. We don't need a daddy in our house, we need a conveyer belt that leads from the parental bed to the kids' room. But that's another story.)

But I digress...

One of the things that hit me is that aside from 1984 I hadn't read a single one of the listed 'greats' from post 1940. I hadn't even heard of most of them. And this got me wondering: with something so recent, how exactly do you classify something as 'great' other than the fact you liked it a lot?

One thing I've wondered about a bit is whether novels have in some sense split into two tracks, a self-consciously 'art' group of novels which English departments spend their time on, and others which, however good, are considered only 'popular', but might also be termed 'real novels' -- as in, novels written for the quaint but original purpose of the genre: so that people will enjoy reading them.

I'm not just talking about the old "are Tolkien and Lewis literature" debate, though that's perhaps part of it. Authors of the last 60 years that spring to mind and seem to me to be 'literature' of some sort would include:

Robertson Davies
Yasunari Kawabata
Kazuo Ishiguro
Evelyn Waugh
Anthony Powell
Donna Tartt
Tom Wolfe
Umberto Eco

Yet these don't seem to be the sort of people who show up on "20th Century Literature" reading lists.

Is there some essential difference between "good" and "great" that I'm missing here? Something that divides these from those authors who are often listed among the great authors of the later 20th century? Or is it rather a matter that liturature as a field has fallen into studying those authors who tend to write in self conscious knowledge of being studied by literature faculties, rather than those who write otherwise very high quality works for readers rather than for academia?

Or is it just a matter of different taste?

(Anyone know of a link to an online version of Bauer's lists? I can't seem to find anything on the Well Educated Mind site.)

Commedia Meditations: Fraud III

With great effort, the poets scale the fallen boulders that are all that remain of one of the bridges over the sixth malebolge, and thus escape the region of the hypocrites. Looking down into the next malebolge, Dante sees a mass of snakes.

And there within I saw a repulsive mass
Of serpents in such a horrifying state
That still my blood runs cold when I recall them.

No more need Libya boast about the sands
Where chelydri, jaculi, phareae,
And cenchres with amphisbaena breed:

She could not show — with all Ethiopia
Nor the lands that lie surrounding the Red Sea —
So rampant and pestiferous a plague.

Among this cruel and miserable swarm
Were people running stripped and terrified,
With no hope of hiding-hole or heliotrope.

They had hands tied behind their backs by snakes
That thrust out head and tail through their loins
And that coiled then in knots around the front.

And look! A serpent sprang up at one sinner
Upon our strand and it transfixed him there
Where neck and shoulders knotted at the nape.

No o or i was ever written faster
Than that sinner flared up and burst in flames
And, falling down, completely turned to ashes.

And then, as he lay scattered on the ground,
The ashy dust collected by itself
And suddenly returned to its first shape.

Just so, men of high learning have avowed
That the phoenix dies and is then reborn
When it approaches its five-hundredth year;
(Inf. XXIV, 83-108)

Virgil questions the now re-formed shade, and he reveals that he is Vanni Fucci, notorious for having robbed the cathedral of Pistoia. Angry at having had to confess his identity and his crime, Vanni prophesies Dante's downfall in Florentine politics, and mocks him.

At the end of this harangue of his the thief
Raised high his fists forked into figs and cried,
"Take that, God, I screwed them against you!"

From then on the serpents were my friends
Because one of them coiled around his neck
As though to say, "I’ll not have you say more!"

And another whipped about his arms and tied him,
Wrapping itself so tightly in front of him
That with the knot he couldn’t jerk a muscle.
(Inf. XXV, 1-9)

Giving the fig consists of making a fist with the thumb poking out between first and middle fingers, and carries roughly the obscene connotation which the gesture appears to suggest.

The blaspheming thief is set upon by several snakes, restrained by their coils, and wanders off down the malebolge. This is the malebolge of thieves, and the precise nature of their punishment only becomes clear to Dante a little later, as he watches a strange series of events:

While I was staring down at the three sinners
I saw a serpent with six feet, from in front
Leap up on one and entirely grip him.

It wrapped his stomach with its middle feet
And with its forefeet pinned him by the arms;
Then sank its teeth in one cheek, then the other.

It spread its hind feet down about his thighs
And thrust the tail out between his legs
And at his back pulled it up straight again.

Never did ivy cling to any tree
So tightly as that horrendous beast
Twined its limbs around and through the sinner’s.

Then the two stuck together as if made
Of hot wax and mixed their colors so
Neither one nor other seemed what once they were:

Just as, in front of the flame, a brown color
Advances on the burning paper, so that
It is not yet black but the white dies away.

The other two glared at one another, each
Crying out, "O Agnello, how you change!
Look! already you are neither two nor one."

The two heads by now had become one
When we saw the two features fuse together
Into one face in which they both were lost.

Two arms took shape out of the four remnants;
The thighs with the legs, belly, and chest,
Changed into members never before seen.

Then every former likeness was blotted out:
That perverse image seemed both two and neither,
And, such, at a slow pace, it moved away.

Just as the lizard, that under the giant lash
Of the dog days darts from hedge to hedge,
Looks like a lightning flash as it crosses the path,

So seemed, heading straight out toward the gut
Of the other two, a small blazing serpent,
Black and livid like a peppercorn.

And in one sinner it bit right through that part
From which we first take suck and nourishment;
And down it fell full length in front of him.

The bitten sinner stared but uttered nothing.
Instead, he just stood rooted there and yawned
Exactly as though sleep or fever struck him.

The serpent looked at him, he looked at it:
One through the mouth, the other through his wound
Billowed dense smoke and so the two smokes mingled.

...[T]he snake slit its tail into a fork
While the wounded sinner drew his feet together.

The legs with the thighs locked so firmly,
One to the other, that shortly one could find
No sign whatever where the seam had joined.

The slit tail then assumed the very shape
That had been lost there; and the hide of one
Softened as the skin of the other hardened.

I saw his arms returning to the armpits
And the two feet of the reptile — they were short —
Lengthen out while the two arms shortened.

Afterward, the hind feet, twisted up
Together, became the member that men hide,
While from his member the wretch grew two paws.

While smoke veiled both the one and the other
With new color and made the hair grow matted
On the one skin, and the other it made bald,

The one rose upright and the other fell,
Neither averting the lamps of evil eyes
As, staring, they exchanged a nose and snout.

The one standing drew back the face toward
The temples, and from the surplus stuff massed there
Ears emerged above the once-smooth cheeks;

The surplus not pulled back but still remaining
In front, then formed a nose for the face
And filled the lips out to their proper size.

The one lying down sprouted forth a muzzle
And withdrew the ears back into the head
In the same way a snail pulls in its horns.

And the tongue, once single, whole, and suited
For speech, split, while the other’s forked tongue
Sealed back up, and the smoke also stopped.

The soul that had been turned into a beast,
Hissing, filed off along the gully, fast,
And the other, speaking, spat after its tracks.

He turned his new-made shoulders then and told
The third soul left there, "I want Buoso to run,
The way I did, on all fours down the road!"
(Inf. XXV, 49-94, 103-141)

Think what Dante could have done with CGI. This is medieval special effects par excellence.

In life, the sinners had no respect for the property of others. In death, they no longer own the one thing which in earthy life is inseparable from us: our physical form. Half the thieves are snakes and lizards of various kinds, while half are human in form. And each time one of the reptiles bites a human, the the reptile takes the form of the human and vice versa.

Given this tool, the thieves torment each other endlessly stealing each others forms and stealing them back again, sunk eternally in their vice which denies that others can own anything.

Leaving behind the thieves of the seventh malebolge, the poets descend to the eighth, which at first appears to be inhabited by fireflies or some other source of small dancing flames. As they draw closer, Virgil explains that these moving flames are the souls of the counselors of fraud, enwrapped in flame.

A twin flame approaches, and Virgil identifies it as Odysseus and his friend Diomedes, who together hatched so many trickeries which helped bring victory to the Greeks in the Trojan War. Dante desperately wants to hear about these heroes adventures, and so Virgil commands them to speak. Odysseus tells about his last voyage (after the action of the Odyssey) in which he and his comrades set sail again, and journeyed beyond the ends of the earth. In this telling, Odysseus reveals that they came within sight of the mountain of Purgatory in the antipodes (the opposite side of the globe) and were then sunk by a sudden whirlwind of divine wrath.

Odysseus falls silent and moves on. They next meet an Italian shade, who asks Dante for information about political developments in the region since his death. Dante eagerly brings him up to date, and then asks the shades own story.

After the flame had roared on for some time
In its unique way, the pointed tip swayed
Back and forth and then released this breath:

"If I thought that my answer was to someone
Who might one day return up to the world,
This flame would never cease its flickering.

"However, since no one ever turned back, alive,
From this abyss — should what I hear be true —
Undaunted by infamy, I answer you."
(Inf. XXVII, 58-66)

Thus imagining that he is safe from bringing posthumous shame upon himself, the shade reveals that he was Guido da Montefeltro, a soldier and nobleman, who, as he grew older, retired and joined the Franciscans in hopes of making amends for his earlier life and winning an eternal reward. However, he was sought out by Pope Boniface VIII and asked for advice on how to destroy a rival Italian noble family.

Guido says that Boniface promised him absolution in advance of the sin of plotting this treachery, and Guido thus believed him and went along. However, when he died he found this promise of absolution in advance to be of no avail:

"Francis — the moment that I died — came then
For me, but one of the black cherubim
Called to him, ‘Don’t take him! don’t cheat me!

" ‘He must come down to join my hirelings
Because he offered counsel full of fraud,
And ever since I’ve been after his scalp!

" ‘For you can’t pardon one who won’t repent,
And one cannot repent what one wills also:
The contradiction cannot be allowed.’

"O miserable me! how shaken I was
When he grabbed hold of me and cried, ‘Perhaps
You didn’t realize I was a logician!’

"He carried me off to Minos who twisted
His tail eight times around his hardened back,
Then bit it in gigantic rage and blared,

" ‘This is a sinner for the fire of thieves!’
So I am lost here where you see me go
Walking in this robe and in my rancor."

When he had finished speaking in this fashion,
The lamenting flame went away in sorrow,
Turning and tossing its sharp-pointed horn.
(Inf. XXVII, 112-132)

After Guido has moved on, the poets proceed to the ninth malebolge, in which the sowers of discord are punished.

Who could ever, even in straight prose
And after much retelling, tell in full
The bloodletting and wounds that I now saw?

Each tongue that tried would certainly trip up
Because our speaking and remembering
Cannot comprehend the scope of pain.

Were all those men gathered again together
Who once in the fateful land of Apulia
Mourned the lifeblood spilled by the Trojans,

And those who shed their blood in the long war
In which the spoils were a mound of golden rings,
As Livy has unerringly informed us,

And those also who felt the painful gashes
In the onslaught against Robert Guiscard,
And those others whose bones are still stacked up

At Ceperano where all the Apulians
Turned traitors, and those too from Tagliacozzo
Where old Alardo conquered without weapons,

And those who show their limbs run through and those
With limbs hacked off — they all could not have matched
The ninth pocket’s degraded state of grief.

Even a cask with bottom or sides knocked out
Never cracked so wide as one soul I saw
Burst open from the chin to where one farts.

His guts were hanging out between his legs;
His pluck gaped forth and that disgusting sack
Which turns to shit what throats have gobbled down.

While I was all agog with gazing at him,
He stared at me and, as his two hands pulled
His chest apart, cried, "Look how I rip myself!

"Look at how mangled is Mohammed here!
In front of me, Ali treks onward, weeping,
His face cleft from his chin to his forelock.

"And all the others whom you see down here
Were sowers of scandal and schism while
They lived, and for this they are rent in two.

"A devil goes in back here who dresses us
So cruelly by trimming each one of the pack
With the fine cutting edge of his sharp sword

"Whenever we come round this forlorn road:
Because by then our old wounds have closed up
Before we pass once more for the next blow.

"But who are you, moping upon that ridge
Perhaps to put off facing the penalty
Pronounced on you by your own accusations?"
(Inf. XXVIII, 1-45)

The shades who, in life, divided the body politic by starting and fostering conflict are now themselves dismembered. (Note that the first sinner named in this circle is Mohammad. Dante saw Islam as at root a heresy, and Mohammad as someone who had created the greatest division and source of conflict in the known world at the time.)

A procession of famous instigators of conflict process by in Mohammad's wake, mainly contemporaries of Dante's, but also several ancient figures, including Curio who urged Julius Caesar to start the civil wars that brought down the Republican and began the empire with the claim that "one who is well prepared can only suffer loss by hesitation." The man whose words started one of Italy's bloodiest wars has had his tongue cut out.

Last seen is Bertran de Born, who was believed to have instigated the rebellion of prince Henry against his father Henry II of England.

I saw for sure — and still I seem to see it —
A body without a head that walked along
Just as the others in that sad herd were walking,

But it held the severed head by the hair,
Swinging it like a lantern in its hand,
And the head stared at us and said, "Ah me!"

Itself had made a lamp of its own self,
And they were two in one and one in two:
How can that be? He knows who so ordains it.
(Inf. XXVIII, 118-126)

Bertran, speaking through the head he carries like a lantern, has become one of the justly famous nightmare images from Inferno. But like all nightmares it must pass, for the poets have darker and deeper sights yet before them. Dante is hesitating to leave the ninth malebolge, waiting to see an ancestor of his whom he believes may be suffering there, but Virgil tells him that he has already passed, unseen among the press of bleeding souls. So Dante turns his back on the sowers of discord and approaches the last malebolge of fraud.

What the suffering would be if all the sick
In hospitals at Valdichiana, Maremma,
And Sardinia, from July to September,

Were thrown down altogether in one ditch,
Such was it there and such a stench surged up
As usually comes from putrefying limbs.

We climbed on downward to the final bank
Of the long ridge by always keeping left,
And then my eyes descried a clearer vista

Toward the bottom, where the emissary
Of the high Lord, unerring justice, chastens
The falsifiers registered on earth.

I do not think the grief could have been greater
To see the people in Aegina all diseased —
When the air was so infested with the plague

That every animal, down to the smallest worm,
Sickened and died, and later the ancient peoples
(Poets record it as a certainty)

Were born again from the progeny of ants —
Than was my grief to see, through that dark valley,
The spirits languishing in scattered stacks.

Some lay on their stomachs, some on the shoulders
Of another sinner, some hauled themselves
On hands and knees along the careworn roadway.

Step by step we tread on without talking,
Watching and listening to the infirm souls
Too weak to raise their bodies from the ground.
(Inf. XXIX, 46-72)

These are the falsifiers, those who performed fraud itself. First Dante meets an alchemist, now afflicted with sores, who tried to pass off base metals as precious ones. This shade points out to him several other practitioners of fraud. One who took on the identity of a dead man in order to re-write his will now runs rabid, biting other sinners.

Another, now bloated with dropsy confesses to having been a counterfeiter. Unable to move, his greatest wish is to be able to creep around the malebolge until he finds the nobleman who employed him to debase the currency, in order to take his revenge on him. The counterfeiter points out several other sinners, including the Egyptian wife who falsely accused Joseph in the Old Testament. One of the souls he names takes offense at being named, and the souls (though so stricken with illness they can barely move) fall to hitting each other and hurling insults and accusations back and forth.

The poets leave them to their bickering and abandon this last of the malebolges and move toward the cliff that leads down to the pit of Cocytus, the deepest part of hell in which the traitors lie.

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by Allen Mandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Good times, good times

Lazily she wished for an easy post, and voila! A forward appeared in her inbox.

I wish to say, for the record, that I have done most of these things in my day.

You know you spend too much time in theater when...

.....your living room sofa spends more time on stage than you do.

.....you have your own secret family recipe for stage blood.

.....you've ever appeared on stage wearing your own clothes.

.....you've ever driven around the back of stores looking for discards that can be used for set pieces.

.....you can find a prop in the prop room that hasn't seen the light of day in ten years, but you don't know where your own vacuum cleaner is.

.....you have a Frequent Shopper Card at the Salvation Army.

.....Rogers and Hammerstein is synomous with 3 months of rehearsals.

.....you start buying your work clothes at Goodwill so you can buy your costumes at the mall.

.....you've ever taken time off your job to work on the show.

.....you've worked your vacation time to coincide with tech week.

.....you've ever cleaned a tuxedo with a magic marker.

.....you've ever appeared on stage in an outfit held together with hot glue.

....you've ever appeared in a show where tech week is devoted to getting the running time under four and a half hours.

....you've ever appeared on stage in an English drawing room murder mystery where half the cast spoke with southern accents. (OR....)

....you've ever appeared in a show where the cast out-numbered the audience 2 to 1 .

....you've ever gotten a part because you were the only one who showed up for auditions.

....you've ever gotten a part because you were the only male who showed up for auditions.

....the audience recognizes you the minute you walk on stage because they saw you taking out the trash before the show.

....you've ever menaced/threatened anyone with a gun held together with electrical tape.

....you've ever had to haul a sofa off stage between scenes wearing an evening gown and heels.

....you've ever had to haul a sofa off stage between scenes wearing an evening gown and heels -- and you're a guy.

....you've ever played the father of someone your father's age.

....your kids know your rehearsal schedule better than you do.

....your kids know your lines better than you do.

....your kids deliver your lines better than you do.

....you get home from rehearsal and have to go back to the theatre because you forgot your kids.

....you've ever appeared in a show where an actor leaned out through a window without opening it first.

....you've ever heard a director say "Try not to bump into the furniture" and mean it.

....the lead vocalist complains that the music keeps changing tempos, but the fact is the music is on a tape/cd

....you've ever heard the head of the set construction crew say "Just paint it black -- no one will ever see it."

....you've appeared in a show featuring a flushing toilet sound effect.

....the set designer has ever told you not to walk on the left half of the stage because the floor's still wet - five minutes before curtain.

....you've ever been told that the reason your director has no eyebrows is because he/she handled special effects for the last show.

....you actually know the difference between Good Shakespeare and Bad Shakespeare, and have tried to explain the difference.

.....you've ever had to play a drunk scene opposite someone who really was drunk.

.....you've ever said "Don't worry -- use the gaff tape. If that doesn't work, we'll just hot glue it."

Gargoyle Code

C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters are a delightful and much imitated piece, seldom with success. However, Fr. Longenecker of Sanding on My Head has definately caught the witty, incisive and very instructional feeling of Lewis' original with his Gargoyle Code series.

If you haven't been reading it already, do give it a try. Under all the fun, it's very thoughtful lenten reading. And reminds me that we need to make it to confession this week... Nothing makes those demons squirm so.

Papal Images Close-out Sale

Some of you may already know, we've for several years had a small family side-line selling high quality photo prints of the pope. However, due to steadily declining sales and the need to move on to other projects, the time has come for us to close PapalImages.com down.

This has been a wonderful project for over two years now, but the time has come to clear out the last of our inventory and move on to other things. All prints have been marked down 40%. We'll maintain this sale as long as inventory lasts.

If you've been wanting a picture of the Holy Father for your home, or to donate to your parish or school (we offer sizes up to 16x20) this would be a great time to get one. Or if you have any good friends coming into the Church this Easter, or need presents for a first communion, this might be just the thing you're looking for.

All the prints are professionally printed on archive quality Kodak photo paper, and on the matted photos we use museum quality 100% rag mat board.

Click here to view the PapalImages online store. A few of our best images are shown below.








All sale items.

Go Tell the Spartans

To hear most film critics tell it, the world is currently divided into those who thought that 300 was a bloodsoaked but essentially soul-less load of crud, and those whose knuckles drag the ground when they walk.

To hear some others tell it, the world is instead divided into those who are able to appreciate shear, pounding, bloody masculinity, and those who are too busy prissing on about "high art" to know a good time when they see it.

Well, chances are I won't get around to seeing 300 till it's on DVD, or more likely won't get around to seeing it at all (given the kind of reviews it's been getting.) But I have to take a moment as your local weapons collecting classicist to say it's a damned shame that when such an eminently filmable story finally got put on screen (where I've been wanting to see it for twenty years, since I knew the story existed) it got there by means of a production team that thinks Greeks fought naked, Persians were Africans with a body piecing and chain fetish, and Spartan women were pretty.

The thing is, with an action spectacular like this, I'm not all that clear how much quality actually increases the box office take. 300 will make a lot of money, because it's an adrenalin pounding event movie about three hundred buff guys who fought to the death against thousands of stunt artists. However, if an incredibly good writer and director had got together on the project and brought in Russell Crowe to play Leonidas, it would still only make slightly more money. So in a sense, where's the incentive? And now no one will be making another Thermopylae movie for another 10-15 years at least, if ever. Sigh...

Well, here's the real story for them as is interested:

Then the Medes rushed forward and charged the Greeks, but fell in vast numbers: others however took the places of the slain, and would not be beaten off, though they suffered terrible losses. In this way it became clear to all, and especially to the king, that though he had plenty of combatants, he had but very few warriors. The struggle, however, continued during the whole day.

Then the Medes, having met so rough a reception, withdrew from the fight; and their place was taken by the band of Persians under Hydarnes, whom the king called his "Immortals: " they, it was thought, would soon finish the business. But when they joined battle with the Greeks, 'twas with no better success than the Median detachment - things went much as before - the two armies fighting in a narrow space, and the barbarians using shorter spears than the Greeks, and having no advantage from their numbers. The Lacedaemonians fought in a way worthy of note, and showed themselves far more skilful in fight than their adversaries, often turning their backs, and making as though they were all flying away, on which the barbarians would rush after them with much noise and shouting, when the Spartans at their approach would wheel round and face their pursuers, in this way destroying vast numbers of the enemy. Some Spartans likewise fell in these encounters, but only a very few. At last the Persians, finding that all their efforts to gain the pass availed nothing, and that, whether they attacked by divisions or in any other way, it was to no purpose, withdrew to their own quarters.

During these assaults, it is said that Xerxes, who was watching the battle, thrice leaped from the throne on which he sat, in terror for his army. Next day the combat was renewed, but with no better success on the part of the barbarians. The Greeks were so few that the barbarians hoped to find them disabled, by reason of their wounds, from offering any further resistance; and so they once more attacked them. But the Greeks were drawn up in detachments according to their cities, and bore the brunt of the battle in turns, - all except the Phocians, who had been stationed on the mountain to guard the pathway. So, when the Persians found no difference between that day and the preceding, they again retired to their quarters.

[The Persians then succeed in flanking the Greeks, who, realizing they are surrounded, send the bulk of their forces home.]

So the allies, when Leonidas ordered them to retire, obeyed him and forthwith departed. Only the Thespians and the Thebans remained with the Spartans; and of these the Thebans were kept back by Leonidas as hostages, very much against their will. The Thespians, on the contrary, stayed entirely of their own accord, refusing to retreat, and declaring that they would not forsake Leonidas and his followers. So they abode with the Spartans, and died with them. Their leader was Demophilus, the son of Diadromes.

At sunrise Xerxes made libations, after which he waited until the time when the forum is wont to fill, and then began his advance. Ephialtes had instructed him thus, as the descent of the mountain is much quicker, and the distance much shorter, than the way round the hills, and the ascent. So the barbarians under Xerxes began to draw nigh; and the Greeks under Leonidas, as they now went forth determined to die, advanced much further than on previous days, until they reached the more open portion of the pass. Hitherto they had held their station within the wall, and from this had gone forth to fight at the point where the pass was the narrowest. Now they joined battle beyond the defile, and carried slaughter among the barbarians, who fell in heaps. Behind them the captains of the squadrons, armed with whips, urged their men forward with continual blows. Many were thrust into the sea, and there perished; a still greater number were trampled to death by their own soldiers; no one heeded the dying. For the Greeks, reckless of their own safety and desperate, since they knew that, as the mountain had been crossed, their destruction was nigh at hand, exerted themselves with the most furious valour against the barbarians.

By this time the spears of the greater number were all shivered, and with their swords they hewed down the ranks of the Persians; and here, as they strove, Leonidas fell fighting bravely, together with many other famous Spartans, whose names I have taken care to learn on account of their great worthiness, as indeed I have those of all the three hundred. There fell too at the same time very many famous Persians: among them, two sons of Darius, Abrocomes and Hyperanthes, his children by Phratagune, the daughter of Artanes. Artanes was brother of King Darius, being a son of Hystaspes, the son of Arsames; and when he gave his daughter to the king, he made him heir likewise of all his substance; for she was his only child.

Thus two brothers of Xerxes here fought and fell. And now there arose a fierce struggle between the Persians and the Lacedaemonians over the body of Leonidas, in which the Greeks four times drove back the enemy, and at last by their great bravery succeeded in bearing off the body. This combat was scarcely ended when the Persians with Ephialtes approached; and the Greeks, informed that they drew nigh, made a change in the manner of their fighting. Drawing back into the narrowest part of the pass, and retreating even behind the cross wall, they posted themselves upon a hillock, where they stood all drawn up together in one close body, except only the Thebans. The hillock whereof I speak is at the entrance of the straits, where the stone lion stands which was set up in honour of Leonidas. Here they defended themselves to the last, such as still had swords using them, and the others resisting with their hands and teeth; till the barbarians, who in part had pulled down the wall and attacked them in front, in part had gone round and now encircled them upon every side, overwhelmed and buried the remnant which was left beneath showers of missile weapons.

Thus nobly did the whole body of Lacedaemonians and Thespians behave; but nevertheless one man is said to have distinguished himself above all the rest, to wit, Dieneces the Spartan. A speech which he made before the Greeks engaged the Medes, remains on record. One of the Trachinians told him, "Such was the number of the barbarians, that when they shot forth their arrows the sun would be darkened by their multitude." Dieneces, not at all frightened at these words, but making light of the Median numbers, answered, "Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade." Other sayings too of a like nature are reported to have been left on record by this same person.

Next to him two brothers, Lacedaemonians, are reputed to have made themselves conspicuous: they were named Alpheus and Maro, and were the sons of Orsiphantus. There was also a Thespian who gained greater glory than any of his countrymen: he was a man called Dithyrambus, the son of Harmatidas.

The slain were buried where they fell; and in their honour, nor less in honour of those who died before Leonidas sent the allies away, an inscription was set up, which said: -

"Here did four thousand men from Pelops'land
Against three hundred myriads bravely stand."
This was in honour of all. Another was for the Spartans alone: -
"Go, stranger, and to Lacedaemon tell
That here, obeying her behests, we fell."
This was for the Lacedaemonians. The seer had the following: -
"The great Megistias' tomb you here may view,
Whom slew the Medes, fresh from Spercheius' fords.
Well the wise seer the coming death foreknew,
Yet scorned he to forsake his Spartan lords."

These inscriptions, and the pillars likewise, were all set up by the Amphictyons, except that in honour of Megistias, which was inscribed to him (on account of their sworn friendship) by Simonides, the son of Leoprepes.

Even through the 19th century prose style of Rawlinson's translation, it sounds exciting.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

I have two announcements to make:

1) I spent yesterday in bed because I was sick enough that Darwin had to stay home with the girls;

and

2) I AM NOT PREGNANT.

Ya'll. Can a woman not get the 24-hour stomach bug without everyone wanting to telegraph congratulations? When I am pregnant, I will announce it by saying, "I am pregnant!" not by hinting coyly about how sick I've been. I hate hinters.

And I am better now and not in bed, so speculation may cease.

That is all.

Commedia Meditations: Fraud II

Now new punishments I must fit to verse,
Shaping the subject for my twentieth canto
Of the first canticle on the buried damned.

Already I was fully set to look
Far down into the depth that opened to me
To see its bottom bathed with tears of anguish,

When through the valley’s circling I descried
People coming hushed and weeping, at the pace
Followed by processions in this world.

As my fixed gaze descended lower to them,
Each seemed bizarrely twisted at the neck
Between the chin and top part of the chest,

Because their faces turned round to their haunches
So that they were compelled to walk backwards
Since they could not possibly see ahead.
(Inf. XX, 1-15)

The poets have reached the fourth malebolge, where sorcerers, magicians, astrologers and fortune tellers walk in sad procession, weeping. Their heads, however, have been twisted round to face directly backwards, and so they are forced to walk backwards in order to see where they are going. Those who attempted to use unnatural means to see the future and gain power while on earth, now suffer from unnaturally twisted sight throughout eternity.

Dante is overcome at the site of this punishment, and Virgil chastises him:

When I saw close at hand our human image
Contorted so the tears streaming from their eyes
Bathed their buttocks and ran between the cleft.

I wept, surely, while I leaned back against
A rock there on that rugged ridge; my escort
Said, "Still like all the other fools, are you?

"Here pathos lives when its false meaning dies,
Since who is more pathetic than the person
Who agonizes over God’s just judgments?"
(Inf. XX, 22-30)

The first four malebolges have been dark in their imagery, but there is still much that is darker and more terrible to come before the poets reach the deepest pit of hell. Dante here, as he no doubt imagines his reader may, is overcome by the sheer scale of the grotesque suffering that he is witnessing. Virgil, however, reminds him that what he is seeing here is merely sin made explicit: the true nature of these sins with all their fair pretense stripped away. If the visions of nether hell are grotesque and squalid, this merely underlines the wrongness of remaining steadfastly attached to such sins.

Dante as character is certainly no preening pharisee. He knows and is personally fond of several of the characters that he meets, and he is shocked at the severity of some of the punishments that he witnesses. Yet Dante as narrator, and Virgil as his voice, must bring both Dante the character and the reader to an understanding of what sin is, and the importance of rejecting all attachment to it.

Virgil points out a number of magicians and astrologers, ancient and contemporary. They then move on to the fifth malebolge, where corrupt officials are boiling in a river of pitch. A troop of devils, the Malebrache, oversee the shades punished for their corruption (the civic version of the corrupt churchmen of the malebolge of simoniacs).

And I saw behind us a blackened devil
Come running up along the ridge’s length.

Ah, what a ferocious look he had!
And how fierce his actions seemed to me,
With his wings wide-open and his light feet!

Upon his shoulders, which were high and pointed,
He had loaded a sinner by both legs,
Gripping him in front by the ankles.

From our bridge he called, "Oh, Malebranche,
Here is one of Saint Zita’s elders!
Toss him below while I go back for more

"To that city which is so well supplied:
All men there, except Bonturo, are grafters!
In Lucca they will change no to yes for cash!"

He plunged the sinner down and turned about
Upon the rocky ridge: no hound freed from
Its leash ever chased a thief so swiftly!

The sinner sank and surfaced rear end-up,
But the demons under cover of the bridge
Shouted, "The Holy Face has no place here!

"Swimming here is not like in the Serchio!
If you don’t want to feel our grappling-hooks,
Don’t raise yourself up above that pitch!"

They chewed him with a hundred prongs or more,
Screaming, "Here you frolic under cover!
See if you can snitch the chance to surface!"
(Inf. XXI, 29-54)

Virgil parleys with the demons and secures safe passage (after invoking the threat of God's will that the journey should take place) from one of their leaders, Malacoda. This demon guides them along the malebolge, and warns them that the nearest bridge over the sixth malebolge (hypocrits) was destroyed at the time of Christ's harrowing of hell. (In fact, the demon is lying to them. All of the the bridges over the sixth malebolge were destroyed. He's probably planning some sort of trap for them from the beginning. This is, incidentally, probably the part of the journey where Dante is in most danger of being detained with the damned souls, since he was himself accused of corruption while serving in Florence's government, and also stands in danger of hypocrisy.)

Malacoda calls together a squad of demons and leads the poets off along the river of pitch. The interlude with the demons provides a bit of comic relief similar to that found in many medieval mystery plays.

"O master," I said, "what am I looking at?
Ah, let us walk alone without an escort:
You know the way? I want no part of them!

"If you remain alert as usual,
Do you not notice how they grind their teeth
And how they threaten harm with their fierce looks?"

And he: "I have no wish to see you panic.
Let them grind away all that they want to:
They do it to impress the boiling wretches."

They turned around upon the left-face bank,
But first each pressed a tongue between his teeth
To sound a signal to their commandant,

And with his ass he blew a bugle-blast.
(Inf. XXI, 127-139)

And yes, that translation by Cotter above is quite accurate. Mandelbaum translates the line "And he had made a trumpet of his ass." which is a pretty literal translation of the Italian: ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

As they march along, Dante is watching the boiling pitch carefully.

My whole attention was fixed on the pitch
To study every aspect of this pocket
And of the people who, within it, burned.

Just as dolphins do, when with arching backs
They signal a storm-warning to the sailors
To make all hands ready to save the ship,

So here at times to soothe the suffering
Some sinner showed his back above the top
And hid again as fast as lightning flashes.

And just as on the water’s edge of ditches
Frogs squat with only their muzzles showing,
To hide their legs and the rest of their fat flesh,

So here on all sides these sinners squatted,
But the instant Barbariccia stepped forward,
They dived back underneath the boiling pitch.

I saw, and still my heart shudders with it,
One lag behind — just as sometimes one frog
Will stay back while another leaps below —

And Graffiacane, the closest to him,
Hooked him up by his pitch-knotted hair
And hauled him out — he looked just like an otter!

I knew all of the devils now by name,
For I had watched them when they were selected,
And when they called each other, I had listened.

"Oh Rubicante, see that you get your claws
Into his back so you can skin and flay him!"
The whole damned squad shouted all together.

And I: "My master, if you can, please do
Find out the name of the unfortunate soul
Who’s fallen in the clutches of his foes."
(Inf. XXII, 16-45)

Virgil asks Ciampolo, the captured sinner, to tell his story, and he obligingly does so, telling how he was a young man of no family who was put in the service of King Thibault II of Navarre, where he proceeded to make his fortune by taking bribes. He then tells Dante about some of the other notable corrupt officials who also inhabit the boiling pitch.

The demons, however, are restive, wanting to tear Ciampolo to pieces for being caught lurking on the shore out of the pitch. However, the wily ex-official tricks the demons and (in the moment they are distracted) leaps back into the pitch, escaping the shredding they had planned for him. After failing to catch him before he vanishes into the boiling river, a fight breaks out among the demons, and two of them fall into the pitch themselves and have to be fished out with pitchforks.

The poets slip away in the commotion, however the demons are furious with them and come flying after them to avenge themselves for their humiliation, forcing the poets to dash down into the sixth malebolge to escape them. Thus, Virgil and Dante find themselves among the slow procession of the hypocrites.


Below that point we found a painted people
Who walked in circles with the slowest steps,
Weeping and worn in looks and overwhelmed.

The cloaks they wore had cowls drawn down low
Over their eyes, made in a similar style
As those that are made for monks in Cluny.

These are so gilded outside that they dazzle,
But inside, solid lead, and so heavy that,
Compared to them, Frederick’s capes were straw.

O mantle of unending weariness!
Once again we turned to the left hand,
Along with those souls rapt in their sad tears.

But with their weights the tired people trod
So slowly that we had fresh company
With every step we took along the way.
(Inf. XXIII, 58-72)

Again Dante shows us a physical manifestation of the sin for which these souls are condemned. Hypocrisy puts a bright exterior on a base reality, as symbolized by the gold plated lead of the hypocrites cloaks. There is also the weight of lies which grows with time as pretence is layered on top of pretence, all in the effort to achieve an appearance of virtue, which the incredible weight of these cloaks symbolizes.

Hypocrisy resides rightly in nether hell, the region of fraud, for hypocrisy consists of lies (to ourselves and to others) designed to make us look better than we are. But like the cloaks of those treading the endless path around the sixth malebolge, when we build a cloak of lies to hide ourselves under, we slow ourselves to a crawl, held down by a weight of falsehood and guilt that pushes us to add ever more lies to the weight of our cloak of hypocrisy.

Dante converses briefly with two members of a military order, who describe to him the punishment of the hypocrites. Dante is about to remonstrate with them when he sees something which catches his attention.

I began, "O friars, your wicked ..." — but said
No more: my eyes caught the sight of one
Crucified with three stakes on the ground.

When he saw me, he twisted all around,
Breathing hard into his beard with sighs,
And brother Catalano, who observed this,

Said to me, "That one you see nailed down
Advised the Pharisees it was expedient
To sacrifice one man for the people.

"Stretched out naked he lies, across the way,
As you yourself see, and is made to feel
The full weight of every passer-by.

"In the same way is his father-in-law racked
In this same ditch, and the rest of that council
Which has sowed so much evil for the Jews."
(Inf. XXIII, 109-123)

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by Allen Mandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Beware

The Ides of March are upon us.

A great time to remember that power is fleeting, and sometimes people don't get around to sacrificing all to defend an ideal, until it's too late.

Accounts in Suetonius's life of Julius Caesar and Plutarch's life of Marcus Brutus.

Does Noise Indicate Heat?

It seems that Joseph Leiberman ruffling quite a few feathers among his former fellow Democrats with a speech he gave the other day where he stated:

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism....Some of this wrong-headed thinking about the world is happening because we're in a political climate where, for many people, when George Bush says 'yes,' their reflex reaction is to say 'no.' That is unacceptable.

Unsurprisingly, this upset a number of liberals, including Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, who reacted to Leiberman's comments this way:

Lieberman is simply making a classic conservative error. Yes, most American liberals devote more energy to opposing domestic conservatism than to opposing foreign totalitarianism, even though the latter is vastly worse. Lieberman's mistake is in assuming that this is because liberals think Bush is worse than bin Laden. In fact, it's because our society aggrees that Islamist extremism is evil, but it doesn't agree that the Bush administration is very bad, so we spend most of our time debating the point of contention. Likewise, American conservatives spent more of their time complaining about American liberals than complaining about Islamist extremists. This doesn't mean they think Nancy Pelosi is worse than bin Laden.

So the first thing that struck me reading this was: Is it indeed the case that most American conservatives spend more of their time opposing liberal domestic policy than supporting anti-Islamist foreign policy? Rather, it seems like some of the complaints that have been coming from the social conservative end of the spectrum lately are essentially that a certain portion of the conservative voting coalition are willing to accept significantly more liberal domestic polity so long as they are assured of a strong foreign policy.

No, I think Chait brushes this one off rather too easily. If I was to make a pair of broad generalizations (with the understanding that broad generalizations are invariably subject to notable specific contradictions) it would be that many in the broader conservative movement have become so fixated on the threat of Islamic extremism and terrorism that they have been willing to mostly let domestic issues slide, while movement progressives seem to be increasingly convinced that the conservative movement is different from Al Qaida only in degree, not in kind. (And perhaps even more worrying, since it's closer.)

This ignores, of course, whole sub sections of both ends of the political spectrum. There are strongly anti war (whether out of pacifism or isolationism) factions at the socially or economically conservative end of the spectrum. And there are a relatively tiny number of liberal hawks.

But speaking in broad brush terms, the degree of excitement that candidates who are "tough on terror" but liberal on a host of social, governmental and economic issues have managed to inspire on the conservative side seems to suggest a widely held feeling that the war on terror is the biggest priority. Meanwhile, the increasingly mainstream (and apparently sincere) use by liberal authors of terms like "Christofascist" to describe an increasingly wide swath conservative America seems to suggest that the blood fervor for a culture war on home ground is primarily found on the left right now.

Commedia Meditations: Fraud I

When we left our poets, they had visited the last of the violent against nature: the userers, who make fertile that material thing which was meant to be sterile. This last group sits (no doubt not by coincidence) at the very edge of the chasm leading down into the next region of hell, the circles of fraud.

The beast which has flown up from below symbolizes the deceptive nature of fraud:

"Look at the beast with the pointed tail!
He passes mountains, smashes walls and weapons!
Look at the one that smells up the whole world!"

This way my guide began to talk to me
As he signaled the beast to land on shore
Close to the edge of our stone-paved pathway.

And that repugnant picture of pure fraud
Came on, landing his head and his chest first,
But darting his tail out beyond the bank.

His face was the face of a saintly person,
So placid was the surface of the skin,
But his whole trunk was the shape of a snake.

He had two paws, with hair up to his armpits;
His back and breasts and both of his flanks
Were painted gaudily with knots and loops.

Tartars or Turks never wove a cloth
With more colors in background and design,
Nor did Arachne ever loom such webs.

Just as boats sometimes lie on shore
Half in the water and half still on land,
And just as there among the guzzling Germans

The beaver crouches ready to do battle,
So did that worst of all wild beasts lay there
On the rim of stone bordering the sand.

Out in the void all his tail stretched quivering,
Twisting in the air its poisonous fork
Which had a tip armed like a scorpion’s.
(Inf. XVII, 1-27)

Just as the monster Geryon which bears the poets down into the eighth circle of hell presents a fair face on a monstrous body, the punishments of the souls in the ten malebowges (concentric circular trenches in which are places specific categories of sinner) of fraud are designed to be images of the found reality lurking beneath the deceptive exterior of said sins, and sinners.

Dante describes the layout of this region of hell as follows:

Lodged in hell is a place called Malebolge,
All made of stone the color of iron ore,
As is the cliff wall that encloses it.

Right in the middle of this cankered field
A broad and deep-cut chasm opens up —
In its place I shall describe its structure.

The belt, then, that is left between the chasm
And the steep stony cliff, forms a circle
And its bottom has been sliced into ten valleys.

Just as, where moat on moat encompasses
A castle to defend its central walls,
The ground in which they’re dug shapes a design,

Such a pattern here these ditches formed;
And as such fortresses have footbridges
Out from their gates up to the outer banks

So from the bottom of the cliff ran ridges
Which crossed above the embankments and ditches
Up to the chasm where they end and merge.

In this spot we found ourselves, dismounted
From the back of Geryon; the poet
Kept to the left and I walked on behind him.
(Inf. XVIII, 1-21)

It is perhaps easiest to envision by means of Botticelli's drawing here:

The first of these malebowges is populated by the pimps, panderers and seducers, those who used sexuality as a tool of fraud and gain. The sinners are divided into two files, one moving in each direction along the trench, while demons whip them ever faster. This first of these lines is made up of pimps and panderers.

While I moved on, my eye caught someone else’s,
And immediately I said to myself,
"Surely I have seen this one before."

So I held up my steps to stare at him,
And my kindly guide halted with me
And gave me leave to go a short way back.

That scourged spirit thought that he could hide
By lowering his head, but little it helped him,
For I said, "You who gaze upon the ground,

"Unless the features which you wear are false,
You are Venedico Caccianemico:
But what put you in such a juicy pickle?"

And he replied, "I tell it unwillingly,
But your plain speech forces me to do it
By reminding me of that world of old.

"I was the one who led Ghisolabella
To satisfy the will of the Marquis,
Whatever way the vile tale is reported."
...
While he was talking a devil lashed at him
With his whip and cried out, "On your way, pimp!
There are no women here for you to con."
(Inf. XVIII, 40-57, 64-66)

Here in the circles of Fraud many of the spirits, as with Venedico above, will prove unwilling to be identified, at least at first. Many of these are sins of stealth and hiding. Venedico, with whom Dante spoke, was rumored to have procured his sister for the Marquis Obizzo II of Este in order to gain political favor.

As Dante and Virgil cross over the malebowge, the can now see the seducers, who are being whipped in the opposite direction from the pimps. Among them Virgil points out Jason from classical mythology:

Even without my asking, my good master
Spoke up, "Look at that mighty one approaching
Who does not seem to shed a tear for pain.

"What a kingly look he still retains!
That is Jason, who with heart and brains
Robbed Colchis of the gold fleece of their ram.

"He voyaged to the island of Lemnos
After the brash and merciless women
Had put all of their menfolk to the sword.

"There with his love tokens and stylish words
He beguiled the young Hypsipyle
Who had first beguiled the other women.

"There he left her, pregnant and forsaken:
Such sin condemns him to such punishment,
And for Medea, too, is vengeance wreaked.

‘With him go all the beguilers of others —
Let this now be enough for you to know
Of the first valley and sinners in its jaws."
(Inf. XVIII, 82-99)

As in the previous instances we have seen of punishment for carnal sins, ceaseless motion is used as a metaphor for the sins of the flesh. However, while the lustful and the sodomites were driven about by natural forces of a sort (wind, fire) in image of how their natural appetites drew them into sin, these shades are driven along their path of suffering by demons with whips, in reflection of how they drove or drew others into sin. The compellers have become the compelled.

Leaving the pimps and seducers behind, the poets approach the second malebowge, which contains flatters. Those who once spewed flattering falsehoods from their mouths are now sunk in that which spews less prettily from the other end of the body.

The banks were coated with a slimy mold
From exhalations below; it stuck to them,
Attacking eyes and nose with stinging must.

The bottom was so deep we could not see it
Anywhere, except by climbing up the spine
Of the arch where the ridge rises highest.

Here we arrived, and down there in the ditch
I saw a people plunged in excrement
As if it had been dumped from men’s latrines.

And as I searched below there with my eyes
I saw one with his head so smeared with shit
You could not tell if he were lay or cleric.

He yelled up at me, "Why are you more greedy
To stare at me than at the other scum?"
And I: "Because, if I remember rightly,

"I have seen you before with your hair dry:
And so I eye you more than all the rest.
You are Alessio Interminei of Lucca."

And he, smacking his squash, replied to me,
"Down here I am sunk by the flatteries
That my tongue never tired of repeating."
(Inf. XVIII, 106-126)

The reek of the malebowge of flattery soon drives the poets onward. In the third pit, a strange sight meets their eyes. Here the Simoniacs are stuffed headfirst, up to their waists, in holes in the ground. Their feet at licked by flames, and their legs kick constantly.

Simony (named after Simon Magus who, in Acts of the Apostles, attemps to buy the miraculous powers of the apostles) is the sin of selling holy things and sacraments. In Dante's time, near the height of the financial and political power of the late medieval Church, simony was a major problem addressed be numerous Church reformers, as ambitious men entered the Church in hopes of gaining temporal goods and power rather than doing the work of God.

Virgil guides Dante down into the malebowge itself so that Dante can interview one of the damned souls being punished there. What follows is one of Dante's most famous meetings in the Commedia.

"O whatever you are, sorrowful soul,
Planted like a stake with your top downward,"
I started out, "say something, if you can."

I stood there like a friar hearing confession
From a foul assassin who, once fixed in place,
To delay execution calls him back again.

And he cried, "Are you already standing there,
Are you already standing there, Boniface?
By several years the record lied to me!

"Are you so quickly glutted with the wealth
Which did not make you fear to take by guile
The lovely lady and then lay her waste?"

I acted like a person who’s left standing —
Not comprehending what’s been said to him —
Half-mocked and at a loss to make an answer.

Then Virgil spoke up, "Tell him right away,
‘I am not he, I’m not the one you think!’ "
And I replied as I had been instructed.

At this the spirit twisted both feet wildly;
Then, sighing deeply, with a voice in tears,
He asked, "What, then, do you demand of me?

"If to know who I am has so compelled you
That you continued down this bank, then know
Once I was vested in the papal mantle,

"And truly I was a son of the she-bear,
So avid to advance my cubs that up there
I pocketed the money and here, myself.

"Under my head have been dragged the others
Who went, by way of simony, before me,
Squashed flat in the fissures of the stone.

"I shall plunge down there, in my turn, when
The one I took you for — while thrusting at you
That question so abruptly — will arrive here.

"But a longer time now have I baked my feet
And stood like this upside-down than he
Will stay planted with his red-hot feet up!

"For after him will come one fouler in deeds,
A lawless shepherd from the westward land,
One fit to cover up both him and me.

"He’ll be a new Jason, like him we read of
In Maccabees; just as Jason’s king was kind,
So shall the king of France be kind to him."
(Inf. XIX, 46-87)

The soul that Dante addressed is Pope Nicholas III, a member of the Orsini family (thus the "she bear" reference is a pun on the Latin "ursus", bear) gave a number of key church positions to his family members. Dante here accuses him of simony as well, though the Catholic Encyclopedia begs to differ. Dante's accusations may stem as much from his political differences with Nicholas and the pope's political objectives within Italy as from any real crimes on Nicholas's part.

Nonetheless, the Nicholas of Dante's story is planted headfirst in the malebowge of simoniacs (perhaps partly in image of their trying to grow money in an inappropriate soil, church offices, and also in image of how they have reversed the true hierarchy of values by seeking holy things for their monetary rather than spiritual value) and at first mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII (who will not in fact die until 1303, three years after the story takes place).

The "lovely lady" the Nicholas refers to is the Church, the Bride of Christ, whom Nicholas and Boniface are accused of having despoiled for money. Nicholas then goes on to foretell that Clement V will outstrip both him and Boniface in wickedness, beginning the Avignon papacy. Nicholas's speech also reveals that there is but one slot in the circle of the simoniacs for popes, and as each new one is dropped in, he pushes the others down further into fissures in the rock. Nicholas is, thus, the current top of the stack of simoniac popes, destined to be pushed down by Boniface when he dies.

Dante then chastises Nicholas, and through him clerical corruption in general.

I do not know if now I grew too brash,
But I replied to him in the same measure,
"Well, then, tell me: how costly was the treasure

"That our Lord demanded of Saint Peter
Before he gave the keys into his keeping?
Surely he said only ‘Follow me.’

"Nor did Peter or the rest take gold
Or silver from Matthias when they chose him
By lot to take the place the traitor lost.

"Stay put, therefore, since you are justly punished,
And guard with care the ill-acquired money
That made you so high-handed against Charles.

"And were it not that I as yet feel bound
By my deep reverence for the mighty keys
Which you once held in the lighthearted life,

"I would here utter words still far more bitter,
Because your avarice afflicts the world,
Trampling good men and vaulting evildoers.

"You are the shepherds the evangelist meant
When he saw ‘she who sits upon the waters’
Fornicating with the kings of earth.

"She is the one born with the seven heads
Who from her ten horns begot all her strength
So long as virtue was her bridegroom’s pleasure.

"A god of gold and silver you have fashioned!
How do you differ from idolators
Except they worship one god — you a hundred?

"Ah, Constantine, how much foul harm was fostered,
Not by your conversion but by the dowry
Which the first wealthy father took from you?"

And while I chanted him these notes — whether
Bitten by his anger or his conscience —
He gave a vicious kick with his two feet.
(Inf. XIX, 88-120)

Dante's conversation with Nicholas III is one of the longest single character interactions in the Commedia, and some have suggested that his tirade against corruption among the clergy suggests he was some sort of precursor to the later break-up of the Church during the reformation.

This seems much misplaced, however, in regards to the author of a work so steeped in Catholic theology and symbolism that the Commedia. Dante's rant against the corruption of the papacy should be seen for what it is: a faithful (though highly political) Catholic's reaction to the often corrupt marriage of Church and politics in the late medieval and early renaissance periods. This same horror would lead to numerous reform movements within the Church (as well as those that famously ended up abandoning the Church entirely) and should temper any nostalgia that people have for the "age of faith". The marriage of ecclesiastical and temporal power was usually an unhappy one.

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by Allen Mandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

CMinor posts again

CMinor has posted the second installment of her thoughts on homeschooling, focusing on slightly older kids who can start to work independantly.

Prayers for Rhonda's Surgery

Rick Lugari, one of our oldest commenters (I mean, one who has commented here since the beginning) requests our prayers.

Rhonda (his wife) is going in for surgery today. When she went in last October she nearly died on the table, so if you wouldn't mind remembering her in your prayers the next few days, we'd appreciate it.

Catholic Online has a set of prayers for surgery:

Prayer Before Surgery

Loving Father, I entrust myself to your care this day; guide with wisdom and skill the minds and hands of the medical people who minister in your Name, and grant that every cause of illness be removed, I may be restored to soundness of health and learn to live in more perfect harmony with you and with those around me. Through Jesus Christ. Amen.

Into your hands, I commend my body and my soul. Amen.

Prayer After An Surgery

Blessed Savior, I thank you that this operation is safely past, and now I rest in your abiding presence, relaxing every tension, releasing every care and anxiety, receiving more and more of your healing life into every part of my being. In moments of pain I turn to you for strength, in times of loneliness I feel your loving nearness. Grant that your life and love and joy may flow through me for the healing of others in your name. Amen.

Hope these offer some comfort, Rick and Rhonda.

And speaking of not-home cooking...

I see that the food at Steubenville hasn't improved much since our days there.



The guys from Francis also remain the same as ever.

That's my friend Josh you see in the still.

Here there be cooking

I have an acquaintance who supplements her family's income by selling kitchenware, and yet she says without the slightest sense of irony that she doesn't cook.

I think this is one of the strangest statements to come out of the mouth of anyone (not just my acquaintance) with access to a kitchen. What do you mean, you don't cook? Is it that you don't know how to boil water? You doubt your ability to follow a simple recipe? You're so rich that the financial toll of having someone else prepare your food is something to be waved off? Proclaiming that one doesn't cook makes about as much sense as announcing that one doesn't read, or pay bills, or do laundry. Cooking is not rocket science. It's not magic. How hard it it to boil a pot of pasta and dump a jar of sauce on it? And you'd pay someone $5.75 at the very cheapest joints to do it for you!

Almost any form of prepared food is an attempt to approximate home cooking. It is not difficult (and I do mean that! It's not difficult) to make a home-cooked meal that rivals restaurant food, and blows the store-bought frozen version out of the water. That new-fangled technology, the crockpot, makes it easy for anyone to come home to steaming stew or pea soup or chicken 'n dumplings. Any old pot will boil water for rice or pasta. Baking potatoes: what could be simpler? Put 'em in the oven for an hour! For this, for this we are charged a fee at a restaurant!

I happen to like to cook, but I don't think that's the point. Cooking at home is so easy and so much more cost-effective than eating out that it's just foolish to refuse to do it even if it's not your bag. Cooking is not rocket science. It's not magic.

If you can read and follow directions, you can cook. If not -- well, we don't let kindergarteners touch the stove either.

Iowahawk Seeks Civil Discourse

With another (profanely) classic satire in which Ann Coulter and Bill Maher call for civility in public discourse.

WARNING: Do no click this link if you are offended by profanity. I warned you. No, no you can't blame me. I really did warn you.

It's funny, though.

Not Their Father's Air Gun

Like many an all-American boy, my constant companion from 10-14 was an air gun. For my 10th birthday (after long lobbying) I secured a Daisy Red Ryder (picked out from an ad in Boy's Life's annual shooting issue -- I wonder if they still have one of those in this more politically correct era.)

I spent a lot of time with that rifle, until no tin can, small platic army man or water balloon was safe, even from the opposite side of the back yard.

However, like the sharpshooters of the American Revolution (if you can think of a more self-satisfied historical parallel, insert it here) I eventually tired of the accuracy potential of a smooth bored barrel shooting round shot. Plus I wanted a rifle that could be used to kill small vermin -- not that I necessarily had any to hunt, but it's the sort of thing every boy desires. So at 13 I saved my allowances for a number of months and shelled out the princely sum of $40 for a more powerful PowerLine pellet rifle.

Ah the joy of wandering the suburban backyard outback with the knowledge that one carries deadly force. No longer is one a mere backyard plinker. Now you carry a deadly weapon equiped with a scope, and ten pumps worth of power, hurtling pellets at 600 feet per second. (How I recall the specs which must have become a burden through constant quoting to all those around me...)

Well, I wandered into the air gun section of WalMart the other day, looking at the weaponry available, though knowing that at 3 and 4 the girls are way to young to start shooting. (sigh...) And what do I find? Translucent plastic.

It seems that while I was off being adult and shooting real guns, a new world called "airsoft" has dawned upon the air gun product category. It seems that air guns shooting rubber BBs at fairly low velocity have become all the rage (the effect of small back yards and a distinct lack of rodents?) and come in spring, electrict and gas operated flavors.

I'm not sure what I think about this. It seems to rule out the seriousness with which I took my youthful shooting efforts. On the other hand, the low velocity and rubber projectiles certainly seems safe for the close quarters of the modern back yard. And with the bright colors... Maybe this is perfect for teaching little girls to shoot young.

Right now Daddy is holding off, but the seed of temptation is planted. Maybe when they're five or six...

Commedia Meditations: The Violent

The poets clamber down a loose rock slide (especially challenging for Dante, who as a living man has weight, while the shades of the damned do not) into the the seventh circle of hell, the circle of the violent. As Virgil has already explained, it is divided into several rings, based on the forms which violence may take.

At the foot of this rocky slop (which Virgil explains is the result of the earthquake that shook the Earth at the time of the crucifixion) they are accosted by the Minotaur, a half man half bull born of the queen of Crete's unhealthy obsession with a bull, and later killed by Theseus with the half of Ariadne (who was the Minotaur's half sister). The Minotaur is so angered at seeing them that he gnaws at himself. Virgil taunts the monster with his history of family betrayal, and this caused the creature to jump around in such consuming rage that the poets are able to slip by him unharmed.

They now reach Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood.

O blind cupidity and rabid anger
Which so spur us ahead in our short life
Only to steep us forever in such pain!

I saw a broad ditch bent into a bow,
As though holding the whole plain in its embrace,
Just as my guide had explained it to me.

Between the ditch and the foot of the bank
Centaurs came running single-file, armed
With arrows as they hunted in the world.

Seeing us descend, they all pulled up,
And from their ranks three of them moved forward
With bows and with their newly selected shafts.

And from afar one shouted, "To what tortures
Do you approach as you climb down the slope?
Answer from there, or else I draw my bow."

My master said, "We will make our response
To Chiron there who hovers at your side —
To your own harm, your will was always rash."
(Inf. XII, 49-66)

These centaurs (quick in temper as befits the area the patrol) guard over the violent who boil in the river for their violence against neighbor. After Virgil has explained the nature of their errand, one of the centaurs is given the task of carrying the poets on his back. He bears them along the banks, pointing out famous souls as they go.

The river flows in a circle all around the pit of hell, and is deeper at one side than the other. In the deepest parts (submerged up to the tops of their heads) are tyrants who reveled in war and plunder, including Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun as well several despots contemporary with Dante (and now mainly unknown.) As they move along the river, it gets progressively shallower, as they see some souls submerged to their throats, their waists, and finally some whose feet alone are in the boiling blood. At this ford, the centaur crosses and leaves the poets standing on the inner bank of the river.

Nessus had not yet reached the other bank
When we on this side moved into a wood
That was not marked at all by any path:

No leaves of green but of a blackish color,
No branches smooth but gnarled and tangled up,
No fruits were growing, only thorns of poison.
(Inf. XIII, 1-6)

They have entered the wood of suicides, the violent against self: those who cast back the gift of life that God had given them. The imagery here is some of the most powerful in all of Inferno, and it is worth quoting much of Canto XIII:

I heard deep wailings rising from all sides,
Without discerning anyone who made them,
So that, completely baffled, I stopped short.

I think he thought that I was thinking that
All of the voices from among the trunks
Rose up from people who were hiding from us.

My master said to me, "If you tear off
A tiny twig from one of the growths here,
Your thoughts will also be nipped in the bud."

Then reaching out my hand a bit ahead,
I snapped a shoot off from a massive thornbush,
And the trunk of it cried, "Why do you break me?"

And after it had darkened with its blood,
It started up again, "Why do you rip me?
Do you possess no pity in your soul?

"Men we were and now we are mere stumps.
Surely your hand ought to have been kinder
Even if we had been the souls of serpents."

Just as a green log blazing at one end
Oozes sap out of the other, all the while
Hissing with the air that it blows out,

So from that broken bough issued together
Words and blood: at that I let the tip
Fall, standing like a man stricken with fear.

To him my sage responded, "Wounded spirit,
Had he been able to believe before
What he had witnessed only in my verses,

"He would not have raised his hand against you.
But so incredible a thing caused me
To urge him to an act I now regret.

"But tell him who you were, to make amends
By refreshing your fame in the world above
To which he is permitted to return."
(Inf. XIII, 22-54)

The thornbush contains the soul of Pier delle Vigne, a minister of Emperor Frederick II, who describes how he was the "keeper of both keys" to Frederick's heart, and was always loyal to his master -- yet jealousy which always springs up in the halls of power inflamed others against him and he was accused of treason, disgraced, and (thinking oblivion better than misfortune) took his own life.

Pier begs Dante to tell everyone, when he returns to the world above, that he was slandered, and never had betrayed the emperor's trust. Virgil suggests that Dante ask him more about the fate of the suicides, but Dante is too overcome and asks Virgil to speak for him.

So he began again, "That this man should
Gladly perform what you request of him,
Imprisoned spirit, may it yet please you

"To tell us how the spirit is so bound
Into these knots; and tell us if you can,
Are any ever freed from limbs like these?"

At that the trunk puffed hard and afterward
That breath was transformed to this speaking voice:
"The answer I give you shall be concise.

"Whenever the violent soul forsakes the flesh
From which it tore itself by its own roots,
Minos assigns it to the seventh pit.

"It plummets to the wood — no place is picked —
But wherever fortune happens to have hurled it,
There it sprouts up like a grain of spelt;

"It springs into a sapling and wild tree;
The harpies, feeding on its foliage,
Cause pain and then an outlet for the pain.

"Like others we shall go to our shed bodies,
But not to dress ourselves in them once more,
For it is wrong to own what you tossed off.

"Here shall we haul them, and throughout the sad
Wood forevermore shall our bodies hang,
Each from the thornbush of its tortured shade."
(Inf. XIII, 85-108)

In addition to this image of how this bodies of the suicides will hang from their trees, note what Pier says about the harpies: It is only through the wounds given the trees when the harpies tear at them (or as when Dante breaks the twig off Pier's bush, causing it to bleed) that the suicides can speak. Thus, it is only through the torment of the harpies that they are able to speak. Once they heal, they are mute until torn again.

As when ending their lives they used self-inflicted injury to express the despair that they felt, not they can only speak through injury.

Just then, the poets hear shouting and barking, and two shades in naked human form come rushing through the forest, breaking the branches of the wailing trees in their hurry. These are the spendthrifts, who engaged in wanton self-destruction of their goods in the same way the suicides engaged in destruction of their bodies. They are chased through the wood by black dogs which, catching the slowing of the two spirits, tear him into pieces and carry him off.

In the process, the tree of a suicide (in which the unfortunate spendthrift tired to take shelter) is much damaged, and begs the poets to gather round his root his torn-off branches and leaves. The unnamed spirit is a Florentine who hung himself in his house, and he and Dante discuss how Florence (which abandoned it's pagan patron Mars for John the Baptist) seems wracked by conflict as if Mars were taking revenge on his faithless former devotees.

Leaving the forest, the poets find themselves confronted with the final region of the circle of the violent. A desert of sand stretches out before them and large flakes of flame flutter down like deadly snow upon the shades arrayed before them.

Over all the sand, large flakes of flame,
Falling slowly, came floating down, wafted
Like snow without a wind up in the mountains.

Just like the flames which Alexander saw
In the torrid regions of India
Swarming to the ground upon his legions,

So that he had his troops tramp down the soil,
The better to put out the flaming flakes
And to prevent them spreading other fires,

So descended the everlasting blaze
By which the sand enkindled, just like tinder
Under sparks from flint — doubling the pain.

Restlessly the dance of wretched hands
Went on and on, on this side and on that,
Beating off the freshly falling flames.
(Inf. XIV, 28-42)

The first group of sinners that they see in on the burning sands are the blasphemers, the violent against God. These are typified by Capaneus, a character out of Greek mythology who made war against the gods, who shouts his defiance against the poets, God and the world in general. Virgil replies, "O Capaneus, since your insolent pride Is still unquenched, you are chastised the more: No torture other than your own mad ravings Can punish you enough for your grim rage."

The blasphemers lie on their backs on the burning sand, shaking their fists at the sky and continuing to voice their defiance towards God and all authority outside themselves.

Virgil leads Dante along the edge of the burning sands until they reach a small stream which flows out across the burning sands. Virgil explains that the flames do not fall on the stream itself, and the poets can move along it in safety. (The shades of this circle are denied the shelter of the stream.)

As they walk along the stream, through the burning sands and towards the center of hell, a second group of damned souls comes into sight. These are ceaselessly running, beating the flames off themselves as they do. These are the sodomites, the violent against nature. Like the lustful in upper hell, they are in constant motion, but rather than simply blowing in the wind they are running in a burning desert, a symbol of the inherent barrenness of the act for which they are condemned. (Remember, incidentally, that in medieval Florence, as in the Classical period, and to this day in some highly gender segregated cultures such as some traditional Islamic ones, homosexuality was primarily a matter of older men seeking intellectual and romantic outlet with boys and young men.)

I there was recognized by one who grasped me
By the hem — and cried, "How wonderful!"

And I, when he stretched out his arm to me,
So fixed my eyes upon his burnt-out features
Even his crusted face did not prevent me

From apprehending him in my mind’s eye,
And bending down my face to be with his,
I asked him, "Ser Brunetto, are you here?"

And he: "My son, pray do not be displeased
If Brunetto Latini stays back a while
With you and lets that line trek on ahead."

And I: "With all my heart, I beg you to,
And should you want me to sit here with you,
I will, if he who goes with me permits it."

"My son," he said, "whoever of this flock
Stops for an instant must stay a hundred years,
Unable to brush off the burning flames.

"Go on then. I will walk here at your hem,
And later I will join my company
Who pass in sorrow for their endless woes."

I did not dare to step down from the path
To walk by him; instead I held my head
Bowed down like a man reverently walking.

He then began, "What chance or destiny
Brings you down here before your final day
And who is this one here who shows the way?"

"Up there above in the sun-brightened life,"
I answered him, "I lost myself in a valley
Before reaching the fullness of my years.

"Just yesterday morning I turned my back
On it: when I was lost, this one appeared
To lead me home once more along this road."
(Inf. XV, 23-54)

Dante and his former teacher discuss Florence and Brunetto fortell's Dante's coming fall from power and exile in 1303. Brunetto then identifies some of his companions among the sodomites, and makes a final request of Dante:

But for all that, I did not cease from speaking
To Ser Brunetto, and I asked who were
His most noble and renowned companions.

And he told me, "To know of some is good,
Of others it is better to be silent,
As time would be too short for so much talk.

"Briefly, you should know that all were clerics,
Great men of letters, men of wide repute,
Dirtied by the selfsame sin on earth.

"Priscian travels with that stricken crowd,
And Francesco d’Accorso too, and you may see,
If you have any appetite for such scurf,

"The one the Servant of Servants transferred
From the Arno to the Bacchiglione river
Where he left his organs stretched by sin.

"I would say more, but my walking and my talk
May last no longer, since I see over there
New smoke billowing upward from the sandbar.

"People are coming — I must not be with them.
Let me commend my Treasury to you:
In it I still live and no more I ask."
(Inf. XV, 100-120)

Brunetto runs off, and Dante is met by a group of three more Florentines guilty of the same sin. These also discuss Florentine politics with him, and describe their own histories, one of them explaining:

"And I who am placed with them in this torment
Was Jacopo Rusticucci, and surely
My hell-cat wife — more than anyone — ruined me!" (Inf. XVI, 43-45)

Dante satisfies their curiosity about the current state of Florence.

After they have moved off, Dante and Virgil at last reach a cliff down which the stream they have been following tumbes as a waterfall. This is the barrier between the cirlce of the violent and the cirlces of fraud. Virgil directs Dante to throw a cord belt which Dante has been wearing over the prescipice. They wait, and after a moment see a strange monster winging its way up to them from the abyss below.

Meanwhile, Virgil sends Dante off to witness the last group of souls suffering in the circle of the violent: the userers, who sit crouched upon the sand.

When I had cast my eyes on certain faces
Of those on whom the oppressive fire falls,
I recognized none of them, but I observed

That from the neck of each there hung a purse
Having a special color and coat of arms,
And on his own each seemed to feast his eyes.
(Inf. XVII, 52-57)

Virgil then calls Dante back. The beast from the circles of fraud below has landed and is preparing to take them deeper into hell.

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by Allen Mandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Prayers for Melanie

Please remember Melanie Bettinelli in your prayers. This has been a hard week for her and her family -- to put it very mildly: a biopsy after her recent miscarriage revealed that she has uterine cancer.

Melanie, our family is praying for yours.

You know it's time to throw the toy away when...

Von Stroheim's "Dance hall"

The other night we watched Sunset Blvd, the classic about the madness of Norma Desmond, the washed-up silent film star who believes that her public is still longing for her return. In the movie, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and her young gigolo, Joe Gillis, watch as the butler (Erich von Stroheim) projects a silent film starring the young Norma. I was intrigued to learn that the silent was actually one of Gloria Swanson's earlier films, Queen Kelly.

Queen Kelly (1929) was the only time that Swanson worked with under von Stroheim's direction (and the last time they worked on a project together, until Sunset Blvd.) It was a fiasco: von Stroheim went far over budget, the plot emphatically did not conform to the strictures of the Hays code, and producer Swanson and her financial backing (including her then-lover, Joe Kennedy) pulled out. About seventy minutes of film had been shot, of a proposed five hours. The debacle effectively ended von Stroheim's directatorial career. As for Swanson, she made the transition to the talkies, but her star waned until her star turn in Sunset Blvd (1950).

Curious about this bit of cinematic history, Darwin and I bumped Queen Kelly up to the top of our Netflix queue. Gentle readers, this one's a corker. The story is sheer melodrama: playboy prince engaged to mad, lascivious queen. Playboy and convent orphan Kelly meet-cute when orphan's bloomers drop to her ankles. Playboy later sets convent on fire to kidnap orphan, whom he takes back to the palace and seduces. Jealous queen discovers the tryst (on the eve of their marriage, no less!) and horse-whips the humiliated girl through the palace. Girl throws herself off bridge.

At this point, Swanson tacked on an ending that involved the playboy prince committing suicide over the luminous body of the dead girl laid out before the altar in the convent. But this was not von Stroheim's ending, oh no! In his version, recreated with stills and extant footage, Kelly is rescued, goes to German East Africa to weep at the deadbed of her aunt, is coerced into marriage with a loathesome cripple, and inherits her aunt's brothel. Meanwhile the prince transfers to a military unit bound for Africa and again meets up with Kelly, who is now the shrewd owner of the quite prosperous bordello (apparently she took over managment of the joint in order to avoid living with the lech, who dies in a fight with the prince). The mad queen comes to some end, and playboy and orphan-turned-madam are married and crowned. Bizarre.

We watched all 101 minutes of this, after turning off the rather incongruous soundtrack. The whole shebang was worth it, however, for one of the extras on the DVD, an interview with Gloria Swanson in the late '50s or early '60s for what was apparently a television screening of Queen Kelly. It was absolutely delightful to watch the perfectly elegant and magnificently well-preserved Miss Swanson explain in her carefully modulated voice (I don't know why she didn't make it in talkies; I thought her voice was very pleasant and mellow -- not all all like Desmond's in Sunset Blvd) how it was that the movie was made and not made. Her use of euphemisms in describing the Hollywood of the '20s was masterful, as she gave a beautifully neutral drawing-room version of the scandals of the the day, why the Hays code was enacted and how it was enforced. Miss Swanson gently explained in a conversational tone how von Stroheim had run afoul of Will Hays.

"Now my aunt was supposed to the be owner of a... nightclub, of a... dance hall type of thing; that was the script that Mr. Hays had okayed," Miss Swanson said, and glanced about thoughtfully. "But by the time Mr. von Stroheim got in there and felt a free hand... it wasn't exactly a "dance hall", it was sort of one of those things that they long ago closed up, in America at any rate, I don't know if they still have them in the rest of the world, Europe or France perhaps."

Darwin and I collapsed in spasms of mirth.

In recounting how she had shot a shortened alternate ending for release in Europe after von Stroheim had died: "Now, wherever you are, Mr. von Stroheim (who knows?) it was a matter that was out of my hands because of censorship. Mr. Will Hays and he are both in the same place, I'm sure, and I think they ought to try and work this out, because now, in our movies and theaters -- in our streets and newspapers -- well, anything goes, and perhaps the "dance hall" wouldn't be an issue anymore."

Indeed, Miss Swanson, indeed.

English Boys Sing Orthodox?

The recent library trip also yielded a recording of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge performing Rachmaninov's setting of the Liturgy of St. John Chysostom.

It is, as you would expect, very good. But it at times feels a little odd when the Englishness of the voices comes out. Reminds me of the Cambridge Singers CD of Christmas music that we have: most of it great, but a few American classics such as Go Tell It On The Mountain don't quite fly with an English choir delivery.

This is much closer to right than that. (They have the basses needed, which is always key in pulling off Russian music. "It's the wodka," explained a Russian Catholic friend of mine.) But there are moments when it seems a tiny bit off.

Hopefully a Dante post later today... I'm going to have to hurry if I'm going to make it through Purgatorio (at least) before Easter.

The Great Stories

The family headed off to the library last night, to look for (among other things) a book of stories from history to read aloud to the eldest girl. Last time around, we checked out the Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia of World History, and she enjoyed the pictures but wanted to know "more stories" about things. The Usborne book, while full of engaging pictures, is definitely light on story, as it tends to cover 100-300 year periods with a single double-page spread.

Well, a search of the public library stacks didn't turn anything useful up. There were a lot of books about "ordinary who who lived in X times" and lots of individual biographies and special interest biography collections: "Twelve Famous Chinese-Dutch Women in Icelandic History" and "Empowering Stories from History for Girls", etc. However, they didn't seem to have any kind of "A Child's Big Book of Tales From History".

So two questions:

1) Since it looks like we may have to Amazon or Alibris this one, does anyone have a suggestions for such a book for reading aloud to kindergarten age children?

2) Thoughts on what the 'great stories' are that children should be introduced to at a fairly young age? I'm thinking there are probably a mix of historical events, myths and crossover historical myths, as well as (of course) a lot of stuff from the Bible that all belong in such a collection. Some off-the-cuff ideas:

Basic story or ideas about: cave people; invention of fire; invention of agriculture; stone henge

Stories from Ancient Egypt: something about the pyramids; the story of King Tut; story of Iris and Osiris

Stories from Ancient Mesopotamia: Sumerian/Babylonian version of Flood Story

Stories from the Old Testament: Noah (as contrast with pagan version); Abraham & Isaac; Exodus; Saul; David; Solomon; Sampson; Ruth; Maccabees

Stories from Ancient Greece: Prometheus; Pandora; Trojan War; wanderings of Odysseus; Jason and the Argonauts; Battle of Marathon; Battle of Thermopylae; The Peloponessian War; a little about Plato and Aristotle; a little about Greek drama; conquests of Alexander the Great; the Gordian Knot

Stories from Ancient Rome: Aeneas; Romulus and Remus; Cincinnatus; the Brothers Gracchus; Hannibal; Julius Caesar (must include pirate story -- kidnapped by pirates is good); Augustus; Nero; Boadicea

Stories from the New Testament: birth of Christ; major parables and miracles; crucifixion and resurrection; St. Paul; St. Stephen; other early martyrs

More Rome: the 'barbarian' tribes; Roman Britain; Constantine; Helena; St. Augustine; St. Benedict; fall of Rome; Attila the Hun and Pope Leo;

'Dark Ages' through Medieval: King Arthur; Beowulf; Clovis; Byzantium; Mohammad & Islam; Charlemagne (must include his learning to read, his elephant); Celtic monasteries; vikings (raids, exploration, myths, conversion); Normal conquest; crusades; St. Thomas Becket; Eleanor of Aquitaine; King Richard/King John; St. Francis (should include wolf of Gubbio) St. Dominic; St. Thomas Aquinas; St. Joan of Ark; medieval mystery plays;

You get the idea...

I'm thinking of compiling a list -- in order to make sure we get through it all via other books, even if such a thing can't all be found in one place.

Feel free to toss in ideas.

Commedia Meditations: The Structure of Sin

Having left behind them the burning tombs of the heretics, Dante and Virgil gaze over a rocky embankment into the further depths of hell, and the rising stench momentarily overcomes Dante. The poets decide to shelter behind the tomb of Pope Anastasius II (suspected by Dante's medieval sources of heresy because of his giving communion to a deacon in communion with the church of Constantinople in the then-ongoing dispute over the two natures of Christ) while Dante adjusts to the fetid air of nether hell.

To pass the time, Virgil explains to Dante the organizational principle of hell.

"My son, within this ring of broken rocks,"
he then began, "there are three smaller circles;
like those that you are leaving, they range down.

"My son, within this ring of broken rocks,"
he then began, "there are three smaller circles;
like those that you are leaving, they range down.

Those circles are all full of cursed spirits;
so that your seeing of them may suffice,
learn now the how and why of their confinement.

Of every malice that earns hate in Heaven,
injustice is the end; and each such end
by force or fraud brings harm to other men.

However, fraud is man's peculiar vice;
God finds it more displeasing-and therefore,
the fraudulent are lower, suffering more.

The violent take all of the first circle;
but since one uses force against three persons,
that circle's built of three divided rings.

To God and to one's self and to one's neighbor-
I mean, to them or what is theirs-one can
do violence, as you shall now hear clearly.

Violent death and painful wounds may be
inflicted on one's neighbor; his possessions
may suffer ruin, fire, and extortion;

thus, murderers and those who strike in malice,
as well as plunderers and robbers-these,
in separated ranks, the first ring racks.

A man can set violent hands against
himself or his belongings; so within
the second ring repents, though uselessly,

whoever would deny himself your world,
gambling away, wasting his patrimony,
and weeping where he should instead be happy.

One can be violent against the Godhead,
one's heart denying and blaspheming Him
and scorning nature and the good in her;

so, with its sign, the smallest ring has sealed
both Sodom and Cahors and all of those
who speak in passionate contempt of God.

Now fraud, that eats away at every conscience,
is practiced by a man against another
who trusts in him, or one who has no trust.

This latter way seems only to cut off
the bond of love that nature forges; thus,
nestled within the second circle are:

hypocrisy and flattery, sorcerers,
and falsifiers, simony, and theft,
and barrators and panders and like trash.

But in the former way of fraud, not only
the love that nature forges is forgotten,
but added love that builds a special trust;

thus, in the tightest circle, where there is
the universe's center, seat of Dis,
all traitors are consumed eternally."
(Inf. XI, 16-66)

Dante asks, if the lower circles are condemned for violence and fraud respectively, what manner of sin it was that caused the damnation of those above, outside the walls of the City of Dis. Virgil explains that these are populated by sins of incontinence: goods taken out of measure and proportions, but lacking the full destructive and corrupting force of the sins below.

What is particularly interesting to note is that many sins may be found in all three regions of hell. For instance, we have the wrathful in upper hell, containing those whose passions turned to anger and often violence. In middle hell we will meet the violent, boiling in a river of blood, a punishment for those who were not only overcome by wrath, but allowed themselves to be ruled by hate and desire for violence. In the deepest reaches of hell we will meet traitors and kin slayers, those who through violent means broke faith with those to whom they owed the greatest duty.

Similarly, we find sexual sin at all levels of hell. In upper hell we meet the lustful, those overcome by passion, who allowed sexual desire (though still tempered by love) to rule their lives in place of morality. In middle hell, we will meet those who allowed themselves to be consumed by unnatural vices -- the most pervasive example of this in Dante's Florence was of course sodomy, but I think that in broader terms we might place all sexual activity which turns sexuality into a tool for power and self-gratification rather than affection. In lower hell, we find the panderers and seducers, those who have taken the sexual so far out of its natural place as to make it a destroying and corrupting force rather than one of love and affection.

A map can be a help in keeping track of Dante's schema. Two of the better maps of Inferno that I can find online may be founder here (the map show above right) and here. The best maps and diagrams that I have seen are those in Dorothy Sayers' translation of the Divine Comedy from Penguin. The map at the top of this post is from Botticelli's illustrations of the Commedia.

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by Allen Mandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Party Politics

Fr. Fox had a post up over the weekend on a Weekly Standard article which it seems essentially said: So what if Rudy isn't pro-life. Pro-lifers shouldn't care, and what's really important is that we win.

There's been a lot of discussion lately in conservative Catholic circles about Rudy's "front runner" status (how you can exactly be a front runner this early in the game I'm not clear) and whether the GOP has ceased to be a safe harbor for the pro-life movement.

I'm a little on the younger side to have the fullest perspective, but frankly this whole thing sounds a bit familiar from the early stages of the 2000 primaries, and also the 1996 primaries. (Remember when Elizabeth Dole was going to bring in the dynamic new, pro-choice, progressive Republican era?) There lurk within the Republican party a number of different and not necessarily friendly factions.

Among these, are what one might term inertia conservatives: people who don't like the idea of radical social or economic change and generally prefer that those who are currently on top of the social and political order remain there. For these people (and they are in cases people with lots of money) abortion has been around for quite a while and is really not very polite to discuss anyway. Pro-lifers are an embarrassment to them, as are any people with too much enthusiasm, whether it be for tax reform, foreign policy, gun rights, or right to work.

Also present in increasing numbers are Republicans of a vaguely libertarian bent. The key work is vaguely. The libertarian ideal of 'freedom in all things that don't restrict the freedom of others' relies heavily on one's own assumptions of what exactly restricts the freedom of others, and is thus a useful reason for rhetorical purposes, but provides little concrete guidance on its own in actually arriving at political convictions. (For instance, is gun ownership a matter of person freedom, or does an excessively armed society restrict the freedom of others, creating -- as those who don't like guns claim -- a culture of fear?)

Now, a lot of people in the Catholic blogsphere have said that the GOP's pro-life plank is the only reason why they support the party, and that they will immediately head elsewhere if the Republicans nominate a pro-abortion presidential candidate. Other have asked the question if (given both major party candidates being pro-abortion) it wouldn't still be preferable to have Rudy in the White House rather than Hillary or Obama.

On the one hand, I'm certainly not a single issue voter, in the sense that even if abortion were not an issue on the American political scene, I would still find myself a strong Republican since I find myself in agreement with them (or at least more in agreement with them than with the Democrats) on almost every major issue in play: taxes, guns, foreign policy, education, racial quotas, unions, regulation, health care, the list goes on...

However, there are two battles going on in any wide open elections season: first the battle for what the parties stand for, and second the battle for dominance between the parties. Nor does the first battle cease when the second one begins.

The great danger for those who care about the pro-life movement is that a pro-abortion candidate such as Giuliani, if he won, would create a new consensus about how the Republican party can win. We haven't had that big a shift since the move from the party of Nixon and Ford to that of Reagan. That one was essentially in our favor, but a shift from the last 25 years during which the moral conservatives have had a fairly decent place at the table to a Giuliani presidency would me a massive shift away from moral conservatism. If Giuliani is anything, he is a strong executive personality capable of putting together a powerful management machine. Be assured, if he becomes president, the Rupblican party will morph into a tough-on-crime, foreign policy heavy but otherwise Rockerfeller Republican model for the next 10-20 years at least.

Thus, beating Giuliani in the primaries and making sure that if he is nominated, he loses becomes one and the same battle for social conservatives. If Giuliani wins the White House, it will send a message throughout the Republican party about how a winning ticket should be put together -- a message which could at that point only be erased by multiple losses, or a scandal so big that it turned the tide back in another direction. (Which given Giuliani's personal life is always possible, though certainly not preferable.)

So even though I would find myself in agreement more with Giuliani than with Hillary or Obama, as of this point I have to think that it would be better for the long term political landscape for Giuliani (if nominated) to lose to the Democrats, underscoring that a conservative coalition without social conservatives doesn't work.

Sickbed Revisited, Revisited

I feel a bit under the weather this afternoon -- sinusy, headachy, and tired. And so, it's time to re-run one of my favorite pieces from last November, when I was really sick.

Sickbed Revisited

(With apologies to Evelyn Waugh and, of course, all of you.)

She talked to herself, because hers was the only voice she could trust, when it assured her that she was still alive; what she said was not for the children, nor for any ears but her own.

"Better to-day. Better to-day. I can see now, across the expanse of the living-room, the fibers of the carpet, faded and grey, where yesterday I was confused and took the floor for a repository of broken toys and stuffed animals. Soon I shall see the tabletops and couch and know where it is that the ants get in.

"Better tomorrow. We live long in our family and talk early. Three is no age. Julia is only two and can remember where her candy is hidden and how much of it I ate, her 'tandy'; that was the name they had for it in the nursery and in the back-yard where unlettered girls have long memories. You can see where the big weedy shrub used to stand: the corner of the yard where the fence is uneven and half the grounds are waste, nettle and brier in hollows too deep for filling. We dug to the roots to hack it out and lay the foundations for the rose-bed planter. Those were our roots in front of the new house when the men in the orange truck came to cart them away to the dump .

"Julia knows about dumps, toys dumped on the floor, books dumped from the shelf, media scratched and worn from the loving touch of little fingers smeared with grime and orange juice. We were cultured then, purchasing old volumes and new music and bathing in the flickering light of the cinema. They came for the books first; later they scaled the sturdy cases and found the vases, the decanters, the Italian glassware. The family decends in the female line; Julia's son will page through the books his mother tore and mutilated in the days of the small house and the hair-shearing and the wall-patching; my daughter drew on the walls, her sister added the dents. Julia watched me set up the bookshelves and paint the kitchen; the paint was old before it was two months settled. Soon the linoleum will be tattered and pitted till the concrete foundation shows through and the baseboards rot away. Better to-day.

"Better to-day. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was left on the girls' plates, drunk lukewarm tea, slept with children tangled in my own sheets; I shall go grey soon. I was twenty-two when I was sent to the line for the battle; most women took the epidural, so they said, but my midwife said, "You're a textbook model of delivery." So I was; so I am now, if only I could breathe.

"No air, no wind stirring under the cotton sheers; no one has opened the door since we put the chain on it. When the autumn comes," said Mother, oblivious of the falling leaves and the dying rose-bush and the late heat, "when the autumn comes I shall leave my bed and sit in the open air and breathe more easily. God take it, why have they dug a hole for me? Must a woman stifle to death in her own living-room? Eleanor, Eleanor, turn on the fan."

"The fan is already on, Mommy."

"I know it. I re-built this house. Some days I want to blow it up with gunpowder; bore the foundation, cram it with powder, trace the fuse, crouch under cover round the corner while we touch it off; we'll blast our way to daylight."

Thus, til mid-November, Mother lay dying, prone on the recliner with a box of tissues and a glass of ice water. Since there was no immediate change, Father went to work and the small girls watched videos till their brains ran out of their ears

Weekend at Julie D's

Y'all just wish you could have been there this weekend when the Darwins descended in force upon the homestead of Julie D.

Before we descended on Julie, though, we descended upon the Irish Fest, and I have a question for those in the know: what is the rationale behind the bizarre way that Irish dancers curl their hair? Here's a photo from the website of one of the groups we saw.

These ladies are actually wearing wigs, but why? Why is this a desired look for Irish dancers? I found the hair very distracting, to be honest.

Aside from that, the Fest was fun. We saw a few shows, ate authentic Irish food like barbequed chicken salad on a fried tortilla, and watched a bagpipe group perform in full regalia. The girls got free wooden whistles (which, mercifully, have already broken). We strolled past rows of vendors selling leather shoes and wooden swords, and gazed respectfully at the Irish wolfhounds. And when young attention spans had reached their limits, we set out for Julie D's.

And now the scoop you've all been waiting for: Julie D is as cool as her blog, and then some. She and her husband Tom are hospitable and friendly and wonderfully conversant, and they possess a pair of the most child-friendly large dogs I've ever met. (The girls were quite upset that we couldn't take the dogs home with us.) As you would expect, her house is full of books. Dinner was delicious -- Julie is quite the cook. And most important of all, Julie and Tom are the sort of people who remember what it was like to have toddlers. Oh, gentle readers, this is a rare fine quality in a person. Anyone who can smile benignly as over-excited and then over-tired children charge through her house and bellow at the dogs and cough through the night is a friend to be treasured. Amen.

(Confidential to Rick Lugari: wouldn't you like to know what we said about you?)

Commedia Meditations: The Rebels

When last seen, Dante and Virgil were being ferried across the Styx by Phlegyas, towards the city of Dis.

The kindly master said: "My son, the city
that bears the name of Dis is drawing near,
with its grave citizens, its great battalions."

I said: "I can already see distinctly-
master-the mosques that gleam within the valley,
as crimson as if they had just been drawn

out of the fire." He told me: "The eternal
flame burning there appears to make them red,
as you can see, within this lower Hell."

So we arrived inside the deep-cut trenches
that are the moats of this despondent land:
the ramparts seemed to me to be of iron.

But not before we'd ranged in a wide circuit
did we approach a place where that shrill pilot
shouted: "Get out; the entrance way is here."

About the gates I saw more than a thousand-
who once had rained from Heaven-and they cried
in anger: "Who is this who, without death,

can journey through the kingdom of the dead?"
And my wise master made a sign that said
he wanted to speak secretly to them.
(Inf. VIII, 67-87)

Virgil parleys with the fallen angels, but (having first loudly suggested that they should capture Virgil and take him down to lower hell while leaving Dante to fend for himself) they eventually flee inside the city of Dis and lock the gates against the poets. Though visibly shaken at first, Virgil assures Dante that they may expect divine assistance soon. The rebel angels will be no more successful in barring the way against this divinely-willed journey than they were in their initial rebellion against God, or in their attempt to hold upper hell's gate against the triumphant Christ at the time of the harrowing of hell.

While the poets wait for heaven's messenger to arrive and open the gates to Dis for them, they are accosted by the Furies, who threaten to summon down Medusa so that Dante, looking on her, will be turned to stone. The diversion into classical symbolism at first seems merely a brief excursion into territory familiar to the reader from Virgil's own epic poem, the Aeneid. Yet, these classical creatures may also be taken to have an allegorical message about Christian morality, one needed by Dante as he descends into the circles of the graver sins below. The Furies, tearing endlessly at themselves and at their victims, may be taken as the image of that form of self-blame and which is not true remorse with resolution to do better, but rather a dark feeding upon self. Medusa, who can turn all who look on her to stone, stands for despair, which hardens the heart and causes a sort of moral paralysis, where the knowledge of sin causes one to sink deeper into it, rather than seek God's forgiveness through repentance.

However, before the Furies can call Medusa forth, a sound like the onslaught of a windstorm is heard, and Dante looks up to see an angel striding through the murky fogs of hell to open the gates for them.

Just as the frogs before their enemy
The snake all disappear into the water
Until each one squats down upon the bottom,

I saw more than a thousand wasted souls
Fleeing from the path of one who strode
Dry-shod above the waters of the Styx.

Often he brushed the foul air from his face,
Rhythmically moving his left hand out in front,
And only with that bother appeared weary.

Easily I knew that he was sent from heaven,
And I turned to my master, but he signaled
That I stay still and bow down there to him.

Ah how full of deep disdain he seemed to me!
He then approached the gate, and with a wand
He opened it without the least resistance.

"O outcasts from heaven, detested race,"
He now began upon the horrid threshold,
"Why is this insolence so settled in you?

"Why are you opponents to that Will
Which cannot be dissevered from its end
And which has often swelled your sufferings?

"What good is it to butt against the Fates?
Your Cerberus, as you should well recall,
For just that had his chin and gullet peeled!"
(Inf. IX, 76-99)

(The incident to which the angel refers is another one from classical mythology, when Hercules descends into Hades, and wrestles with the guard dog Cerberus, injuring the creature's three necks.)

Dante and Virgil enter the city, and find no trace of the horde of fallen angels who had slammed the gates before them. For all their brave talk, the rebels are now in hiding. Inside the walls, the poets find a veritable city of death. Tombs are scatted all about on the uneven ground, and all their lids lie open. From inside lick forth flames.

Just as at Arles, where the Rhone is stagnant,
Just as at Pola, near Quarnero’s gulf
That closes Italy and bathes her borders,

The sarcophagi make all the ground uneven,
So did they here, lying every whichway,
Except that their condition was far worse.

For there among the tombs were scattered flames
That made them glow all over with more heat
Than any craftsman requires for his iron.

All of their open lids were lifted up,
And from inside such harsh laments escaped
As would come from the wretched and the injured.

And I: "Master, who are these people that,
Entombed within these chests of solid stone,
Make themselves felt by their distressful sighs?"

And he told me, "Here lie the arch-heretics
With their disciples, from all sects, and more
Than you’ll believe are loaded in these tombs.

"Like soul lies buried here encased with like;
Some monuments are hotter and some less."
And then he made a turn to the right hand:

We passed between the torments and high walls.
(Inf. IX, 112-133)

Virgil points out to Dante several famous occupants of the tombs of heresy. Some of these (e.g. Epicurus, who propounded a materialistic philosophy in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC) are what one might call natural heretics, those who, though they lived without the revelation of Christ, nonetheless should have been able to discern certain elements of God's truth from creation, yet denied them still. Later Dante converses with several Florentines who recognize him, and hears the fate of several famous political figures.

As in other circles, the punishment of the heretics is meant to represent the sin itself. Like the rebel angels trying to keep God and his messengers out of their infernal city, the tombs of the heretics represent the barrier of denial that the heretics have built against the truth. (Recall that the conscious sin of heresy implies knowledge that the Church is indeed the true church founded by Christ, yet refusal to accept it anyway because of pride, gain or some other motive.) Yet inside these walls, the heretic himself is a prisoner of his own rebellion, and consumed by the fires of his sin.

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by Allen Mandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Yesterday, and Today, and Tomorrow

Seems like whenever I sit down to write a post these days I'm interrupted by the all-too-familiar sound of glass shattering in the kitchen (that was ten minutes ago) or, in the case of yesterday, the power going out. Half the house had electricity (the unuseful half, like the upstairs bathrooms); the computer sat black and the phone was out of commission. When Darwin came home, armed with a voltage meter, he discovered that the problem lay not in the circuit breaker area, but in the wires running into the house.

As the electric company sleuthed around, we made pizza by the light under the microwave and ate by candlelight. Then we adjourned to the master bedroom to be dazzled by the brilliance of the remaining electric lights. We were all sitting in the bed reading when we were startled by a sound as of gunshots. Looking out the window, we watched as high up on the utility pole, the transformer exploded in a patriotic display. The curtain descended, the act was over; we sat in the dark.

Power was restored in the middle of the night, but I wasn't about to drag myself out of bed to blog about it, especially I was musing comfortably on how much better I felt than at this time last year. Which leads us to today, which is the Baby's first birthday.
Yes, yes, we're one today. Birthday girl can celebrate by eating all the fish she wants tonight at the fish fry. The party only gets zanier tonight as we're scheduled to turn the house upside down looking for my wedding ring, which is lost again. We need to find it before tomorrow, or else Julie D. will begin to doubt the appellation of MrsDarwin when we visit her Saturday night after the Irish Fest.

Law as Moral Symbol

One of the questions which routinely gets asked in intra-Catholic debates about how anti-abortion principles should be acted on in the political arena (usually by people who are looking for a justification for supporting a 'pro-choice' candidate whose stances on other issues they like) is: Given the powers of the office in question, and given the current Supreme Court precedent in Roe v. Wade, how much is a politician's stance on the abortion issue going to actually make a difference?

Politically progressive Catholics tend to make the argument that since electing anti-abortion candidates doesn't seem to be overturning Roe anyway, that it's more pro-life to elect candidates who will "remove the root causes abortion" (which are theorized to be things such as a minimum wage under $15/hr, lack of nationalized health care, and failure to provide unlimited free pudding) even if they are not in favor or enacting any legal limits on the practice itself.

This in turn has the propensity to make conservative Catholics collective blood boil.

What, we are asked, is so important about voting for candidates who are in favor of banning or limiting abortion if they succeed very little in actually banning or limiting it?

Well, I think there is a value in it, though perhaps primarily a symbolic one. Still, symbolism is far more important than it is generally given credit for. It seems to me that our system of laws is, to a great extent, the most commonly accepted codification of what is "good" and what is "bad" that remains in our multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-faith society.

Further, our elected representatives are, in a republic, to an extent representatives of our collective beliefs and political desires.

I think most of us implicitly realize this. For instance, if a politician announced that he personally believed that wives should be the physical property of their husbands and have no rights, I think most of us would consider him an unacceptable candidate for office -- even though our current legal precedents would make it absolutely impossible for him to in any way implement this particular set of beliefs of his. Still, even if his other beliefs were all extremely laudable (and even if he'd promised not to allow his beliefs on wife ownership affect the way he dealt with employees and fellow politicians) I think people would generally agree that someone holding such a set of convictions was unworthy of office.

I would maintain that there are certain stances (those which are sufficiently morally or politically repugnant to us) which should simply rule a candidate out from ever receiving our support, no matter how unlikely the offensive stance is to actually result in any real political action.

Similarly, there are things which are worth keeping illegal, even if we could theoretically make them "safer and rarer" by legalizing them. (I would consider prostitution an example of this. It may be true that prostitution could be more successfully limitted and regulated if it were legal, but I think it would send a sufficiently wrong message to legalize it that the practical benefits of doing so, even if one of those practical benefits was a reduction in total sex trafficing activity, would not justify the wrong moral message that the legalization would send.)