Again with the publishing industry's buttered bread!

My fatheads! It's happened again. Third modern book in a row, plucked at random from the local library's shelves, whose early pages show an author knowing full well on which side the modern publishing industry's ideological bread is buttered.

Very well, I didn't pluck this one entirely at random. I wanted to start some research on olive oil. Nevertheless, what are the odds? First we found the novel with the two adolescent boys kissing on page 64 of 800. Then, the novel whose Russian monarchist emigre in London in 1979 bothered to slam "that awful Thatcher woman," page 16 out of 470, something one doubts a real Russian monarchist emigre would do. Now, in a book on olive oil, we have an author who finds it necessary to invoke "Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him," on page 9 of 238 (Extra Virginity, by Tom Mueller, Norton 2012). Mind you, this is only the Introduction. Why on earth? Is it that Mr. Mueller, like the others, knows what he must say to get past twenty-five-year-old copywriting interns wearing rainbow pride/Che Guevara t shirts? Or is he sincere?

Admiring his picture, one regretfully guesses he is sincere. He looks "sweet and slender," as a no doubt hairy-chested eastern European editorialist couldn't help but comment on the young German men who did not know which way to look or what to do when Muslim gangs in Cologne abused German women on New Year's Eve. (I tried to google the exact quote but I can't find it. When you search the keywords "very sweet and very slender" you get porn.) He looks, our olive oil author, like he would think throwing a sop to the gangs will spare him the fate of the infidel. While we're at it, sorry but I also don't believe some of the scene-painting he indulges in. "Francesco and Marina were waiting for us beside a large olive-wood fire, Francesco resting his head in his sister's lap as they ate pickled cima di Mola olives from a small porcelain bowl and tossed the pits onto the coals." Bull. Too perfect. The first page's chronicle of his witnessing the tasting panel in action in their clean scientific cubicles at the Corporazione Mastri oleari in Milan, rings much more true.

And while we're on the topic of young people, what is it with them? Yesterday was primary day here in Illinois. I had to wait in line -- for primary voting! -- which is encouraging. Civic participation and all. The man in line behind me was actually on the phone to his congressman, asking what to do because the election judges had no record of him as a registered voter, even though he had done what he was supposed to do to register months ago. Before I went to vote at all, a young person at work, who had cast his ballot before his shift, remarked with a similar wonderment that he had seen two teenagers at his polling place. Teens voting is unheard of, never mind in a primary. "I think these young people can tell," my coworker said. (He is thirty.) "The revolution is coming." He was very serious. He means they are voting for Bernie Sanders, septuagenarian socialist. They want change.

Really? The revolution awaits its time? In what sense is the lord of the revolution, Barack Obama, not President? By what measure has he not achieved everything he wanted in two terms in office, with the pending exception of his first announced Change in January 2009, which was to make wounded combat veterans pay for their own hospital treatments? He can always rectify that, with an executive order in the next nine months, and no one any the worse or wiser. Otherwise I should say gay marriage, nationalized health care, bow-from-the-waist abasement abroad, and no southern border constitute a revolution humming along nicely. Granted, if you the voter are eighteen now, you would have been ten when it all began, so to you it may look as though "nothing's changed."

But I decided something else too, as I stocked shelves and ruminated. Two things: one, "the Revolution" is aesthetics-driven. It's just cool to be opposed to stuff. It shows you have a beautiful soul. And as long as there's still stuff to oppose, you'll have a chance to be cool. Cultural historians may trace this back to Rousseau and Voltaire, who discovered sometime around 1760 that the status quo isn't necessarily very good -- what a shock! -- also that aristocrats aren't necessarily very kind -- I know! -- but at this late date, it hardly matters who first got the idea that cool people hate whatever is usual or non-shocking. It doesn't matter about what. Avant garde artists in the 1920s were cool because they were opposed to stuff (representative art). Rock music is cool and it's mostly about being opposed to stuff. (I await the sighs and head-shakings we'll have to hear from our local classic rock station's deejays -- who still smack their lips over "the dark days of 1968" -- should the peasants vote badly this November.) Planned Parenthood is cool because it's opposed to stuff (birth). It's also opposed to people who oppose it, mostly, but still. So definitely you can be cool outside aesthetics, outside the arts. The point is you want to be cool-souled everywhere. Movies are cool. The best of them are about being opposed to stuff, and they get awards. The internet is totally cool and the main guy who is the billionaire from it, Mark Zuckerberg, is opposed to stuff -- he's progressive, open borders, everything. It's those with nothing to say, when surrounded by the righteous beautifully opposing stuff, who seem aesthetically soulless. The old word square still applies to them. Notice that's an aesthetic word, a shape you can see. They just don't seem to care.
   
So I decided also: item two: no political or economic policy or action even matters much. Deep down, as long as one shred of Western civilization remains, it will be cool to oppose that shred. This is what Limbaugh means when he says "the left never gives up." It's personal aesthetics, the art of the beautiful soul. The revolution will be always bearing real fruit very soon.      

I haven't decided if I'll finish reading the olive oil book. It seems to contain some good information, especially about what fraud the phrase "extra virgin cold-pressed" masks, but do you agree there comes a time when you don't want your intelligence insulted on page 9 of 238, no matter what follows, just because the author needed to prove his cred to his masters? I'll bet I can find some equally good book on olive oil, maybe out of copyright and available at Project Gutenberg. Maybe written by some shrewd scholarly lady in 1910 or so, who had three names and wore pearls even at her writing desk. And who bothered to, oh I don't know, spell out "he would" for he'd and "she would" for she'd. Every time. This disciplined modern sloppiness is annoying on top of everything else.

   

Three odd new ideas, and the ancestral castle -- Llantilio!

Here are three strange new ideas: which I will try to summarize as clearly as possible, because although I read politics, when I try to write it, I turn unoriginal and merely end up repeating other people. These ideas may not be altogether correct, but they are certainly startling. Namely,

• that global "free trade"*** is a bad thing, while nation-by-nation protectionist tariffs are better for the nations that enact them. Free trade, it seems, may be a kind of free-for-all craft fair, where no one pays an entry fee to set up a booth. The result is that most of the goods for sale are junk hawked by the impoverished, who have few other job choices because borderless "free trade" has also prompted their old employers to close up shop and reopen only in the cheapest sections of the vast fairgrounds. Protectionist tariffs, on the other hand, are like the fees charged by any self-respecting town (or park district or hotel ballroom manager) to vendors to get in and sell. The fees fill the host's treasury let's hope, vendors have reason to stay in town, hire good help, and mind their and their neighbors' booths -- and the quality of goods rises above stolen shampoo and razor blades;
• that capitalism** is all very well as far as economic liberty is concerned, but once it married the modern state (which had already destroyed the medieval church and its curbs on human folly and sin) it helped birth the modern man; the modern man who does little else but buy stuff, and obey the authority that swept into the vacuum of religion: government, down to the last license plate renewal sticker and to the baking of correct cakes. Now I deny part of this dreary old complaint. There is nothing wrong with the pleasure of owning nice things. Queen Victoria, a great moral character, posed all hers and photographed them so people could see what she owned, art and knickknacks and such. Besides, if you turn righteous about the tragic emptiness of mere possessions, pretty soon you're leaning over your neighbor's fence and deciding he owns too much crap. That way lies, Georgie Pillson who loved his bibelots would say, mere "Bolshy" (Bolshevik, communist) attitudes. As to the other, the vacuum of religion filled by government diktat, yes, I see that. We seem to obey just about as readily as the medieval serf trudging his grain to the lord's mill. What has capitalism done to our inner life, to the soul that read Milton and said no to kings? 
• and third and most startling of all comes the idea that Abraham Lincoln*  -- Lincoln, I say -- was a bad apple very much responsible for the pitiless, authoritarian nanny-state that is Washington, D.C. At first it's hard to know whether a person who believes this resides in the far-left or the far-right fever swamps. It almost seems an opinion outside even those bounds of sanity, unless you are a Southerner, since they of course do have special issues about A.L. Coincidentally or not, the scholars who don't like him also refer to the Civil War as "the War for Southern Independence." What they seem to be saying nowadays, politically, is not that slavery was good, but that when Lincoln harnessed the power of the federal government to stomp out Rebellion, he also stomped out the Constitution which took its legitimacy from the people ratifying it --or not -- not from "demigods" in Philadelphia who, through it, had bestowed upon us in 1787 perfect, inescapable rule. After Lincoln, no more secession talk. You're in. The nation is all, and if you disagree you are overwhelmed and killed. The same scholars who dislike him note that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and threw newspapermen in jail. And yet he always gets the benefit of the (incidentally, liberal) authoritarian's excuse, that it was all for a higher cause. He felt compassion.             

There are our three odd new ideas. I trowel them in here, thinking they might serve as mulch for our mental gardening project, Blogging the Gospels. For it is to the Gospels that we return, in answer to the challenge of these ideas. (Re: Lincoln. "The first shall be last, and the last, first"?) Do these short books have answers for the business of buying and selling, for the purpose of life outside business, do they have answers about government or liberty? If we, as modern people, seem to be so strangely unfree, what did freedom once mean and where did it come from? And can the Gospels civilize the hordes invading America and all Europe, against our will and at our governments' beckoning?

 

Above, please note a building which can seem even more haunting than it looks, if we think of it as dating from a time of strange freedoms we no longer know. Oh, I don't say it wasn't built to supervise a conquered population. I don't deny that circa 1216 dental care did not exist and Jews were too often expelled from too many towns. But it is possible to gaze at those towers and vaguely, vaguely imagine a time when something liberating overlay all. It may only have been as simple a fact as that even the lords of castles then, even kings, acknowledged an authority source, and a potentially punishing one, above themselves. I think it might have been the Gospels. Now, in our liberated West, no more of that.

A bleak but powerful late winter view, isn't it? The photo is of White Castle, in Wales, and comes from the blog Codlins and Cream. I have mentioned her before. She took a day trip there recently.

I have decided that this is my ancestral castle. Well, why not? You have only to go back a few generations before your family tree spreads out exponentially to include scores and hundreds of people, and then thousands and millions. "Arithmetical ancestors," Henry Adams called them in Mont St. Michel and Chartres. Your own, private four grandparents may recognize you and be enchanted to see you when you all meet in heaven, but after that all bets are off. Who knows but your many-times-great grandparents may shout in delight, and rush to take upon their knee as it were, people whom you would have been horrified to know in life. Is there jealousy beyond the veil? At any rate why not claim as your own, then, this pile once echoing to the commands of Hubert de Burgh? Its Welsh name is "Llantilio." Can't you just see that word as the title of a middle-aged-ladies' medieval romance novel? It's splashed in white script across the cover. The background painting is all rich sunshine, beautifully perspectived green hills, a towering pile, and a girl with flowing hair and royal blue kirtle on horseback approaching it at noonday. Llantilio!

I can. It's the year 1216. (My teeth probably hurt. I have been taught the Jews are a cursed race. I don't live in a society such that a daring man "pleasures" me in a side chapel during Mass.) I am sitting on the companion slope to the one before me in the picture, leading down to the river. Or no, that must be the moat, and I stand on a bridge overlooking it; overlooking it, and the tower and section of the wall -- my father's wall -- opposite.

Everything is freshly built. I marvel at the gleaming whitewash, and at the depth of the foundations that must have been dug to support those walls. It will stand a thousand years and more. Of course I'm in love with Gryfyth ap Summat, the foreman in charge of all the works, he with his deep brown beard and brown eyes. But I am the daughter of a march lord, and so I may not look at a vile person however handsome ... (is this what they call flash fiction?). And I can't possibly trace my ancestry back to the cook or the tenant farmers plowing all around, because what's the pleasuring in that? As an aside, do I also know freedom, because I know the Gospels?

Curiously, I happened to find -- it's me again, not the medieval miss of White Castle -- in the library yesterday a novel which is essentially male historical romance fiction. The House of Special Purpose, by John Boyne (Doubleday, 2009). Even the cover glows with a sort of male equivalent of the flowing-hair-and-horses art given to Particia Bracewell and Elizabeth Chadwick. We see an off-center detail shot of a real nineteenth-century oil portrait, all dark blue and olive-gray: some man in military uniform, and yellow and red roses below. I've gotten well underway reading the story. It seems good, if simple. (I'm sorry but I don't believe in the scene of the young girl chancing to look up while disembarking a yacht at dusk, to espy the hero in a distant third floor window.) Scanning a bit ahead, I think the plot is actually going to concern the hero's memories of guarding the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia during the reign of the last Czar. The romance publishing industry belonging so very much to women, it's interesting to see what a man writer does when given his head.  

Also. This is the second modern novel I have plucked, at random, in the last month from the shelves of a nice suburban library, in which it seems to me that the authors -- whatsoever their subject matter -- clearly prove early on that they know on which side the publishing industry's ideological bread is buttered. In the first, Death and Mr. Pickwick, we already have two teen boys kissing on page 64 of an 800 page book; in this of Boyne's, we have an elderly Russian monarchist refugee in London, in 1979, bizarrely slapping down "that awful Thatcher woman" on page 16 out of 470. I can't believe the two snippets (and that's all they are) are coincidence. I believe these writers know they have to get past their share of twenty-five-year-old editorial interns wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, who have utterly rigid ideas about what liberation is. And just imagine "pitching" them a book idea on blogging the Gospels -- on what the Gospels have meant to the West. Incomprehensible. They think all that nonsense is done, and their ideas will last a thousand years.




*** "Trump is right on trade," by Patrick Buchanan, Feb. 16, 2016.
**"Capitalism: the conservative illusion," by Jack Trotter, Chronicles Magazine, Feb. 4, 2016.
 *"The Strange Case of the Missing Constitution," by Clyde Wilson, Chronicles Magazine, Nov. 1, 2007.

My Maxillaria sanguinea is blooming!

Happy Leap Day to all. The Maxillaria sanguinea is an orchid, by the way. The first that I have coaxed to bloom, and I bought it, sight unseen -- as far as the blooms go -- for its grassy foliage, which I hoped the cats would not eat. They didn't.

And I had a thought today, while "resetting" the German wine aisle. (To reset means to make the bottles look tidier and more attractive, and to fetch more of them from the back room to stock the shelves.)

My thought concerns Leap Day. I get annoyed when people don't know what it is, don't you? One of my coworkers has a birthday today, February 29. When she told us, a few weeks ago, another coworker, a young man, looked confused and said, "Oh, so your birthday is just February 28th, right?"

No! I wanted to shout testily on her behalf, it is not just February 28. She was born on February 29, Leap Day in Leap Year. It is unusual and special and delightful. Better than being born on Christmas even. What are the odds that any person will be born on that day, or that a woman who finds the date delightful and intriguing will also have a baby on that day? The dismissive word "just" should never be applied to it. No parents granted such a delightful and intriguing arrival should "just" celebrate the child's birthday on March 1. That is an entirely different date. Nor should they celebrate on the last day of February, which is not "just" February 28 either. People with an ounce of curiosity or appreciation for the delights and intrigues of life should make some sort of effort in this situation. At least give the child two birthdays, or have a midnight party on the eve of March 1st. When the true birthday comes around every fourth year, do something splashy. Dress up as Julius Caesar for example, who first put the day into the Western calendar, apparently during his leisure hours when he was not governing Rome, visiting Cleopatra, or fighting the Suevi. (Resetting the Germans, you might say.) And be sure to play lots of Rossini, also born on this day.

I get annoyed about people like the young man not knowing what Leap Day is, not because I stew at ignorance (we are all ignorant) but because I stew at lack of curiosity -- lack of any comprehension that any natural occurrences outside ourselves could have any impact on our lives. Except the weather. (Maybe that's why newscasts obsess over it?) Miss Read put it well if more softly, in The English Vicarage Garden (1988):

The problem for the city dweller is that the only form of life he knows is human. So it is the contribution of the rural theologian to speak of the natural world as he finds it, alive with his own life, and playing its own part in the vastly complicated inter-relationship of the cosmic order.

I'm not a rural theologian. Am I? Anyway it's not all his fault. I can't help but think that the problem for the young city dweller is not only that the only form of life he knows is human, but that his schooling and culture both have added the presumption that there is nothing worth knowing even about humans, except that they endure injustice requiring mostly leftist-state remedies. All that aside, however, I have had this new thought -- and now I think I won't get annoyed in future by people slighting Leap Day. I've hit on a way to explain it that may not make young coworkers' eyes glaze over at the yammering about how the Sun revolves around the Earth every 365 days, or is it the other way around.

The way to explain it is through the analogy of the time clock at work. Even as the earth revolves around the sun one full circle every 365 and 1/4 days, so if you punched in at your job every day as normal, but punched out fifteen minutes late one day a week, you would be "adding extra" to what you expected from your paycheck. Half an hour per pay period, two paychecks a month, equals an hour a month, which is twelve hours a year, or a day and a half of labor. If your pay did not reflect this accumulation, you'd be fuming about a lost, extra day, about "working a day and a half for free."

In the same way, a calendar that only allows 365 days a year will, by the fourth year, be missing a day, because the earth consistently takes longer to make its yearly circuit around the sun than we on paper allow for. It takes that extra one-fourth of a day per year, literally a bit over five hours. Like the employer paying you for your extra time, we insert Leap Day into February every fourth year, so that this extra time is accounted for. The earth, to phrase it whimsically, is paid back for its extra work. If this were not done, nothing about the sun or sky would change, but fixed dates like holidays would start to "back up" through the calendar; we would be always running five hours' more late every year. For instance Christmas would start to back up into warmer, sunnier seasons. It would be exactly as if your paycheck "backed up" to hourly rates that are correct for your fixed schedule, but not for what you actually did.

There, what do you think of my analogy? Do you think the young man's eyes will still glaze over, if I stun him with this the next time it matters, in February 2020? How does the rural theologian even give the city dweller the pleasure of notifying him of his existence?

"Eating lumps of expensive middle-cut salmon with a country appetite"

I have always thought the above line, about eating salmon with a "country" appetite, has about it the vigorous ring of a caption, or a blog post title. It comes from the last of E.F. Benson's six Mapp and Lucia novels, Trouble for Lucia. In this one, Benson has the stroke of genius that brings together his two greatest characters, Lucia of course, and Miss Susan Leg, renowned multi-millionaire authoress of schlock romance fiction under the nom-de-plume Rudolph da Vinci. When Miss Leg unexpectedly visits dear little Tilling, Lucia's arch nemesis Elizabeth Mapp "gets hold of her." This means she invites her to dinner, escorts her about the town on sightseeing tours from which everyone else is shooed away, and plans receptions for her only when she is good and ready to share this social prize with the rabble. One night Elizabeth and her husband Major Benjy ask Susan to a "plain, simple potluck" dinner which they can hardly afford -- middle cut salmon, a brace of grouse, caviar, Melba peaches -- Benjy chortling as they sit down that he "hopes his guest has a country appetite." For that feast, of course the authoress has. Benson gives us his vigorous, ringing line. Miss Leg barely pauses to take breath amid the gossip, while "eating lumps of expensive middle cut salmon with a country appetite."

What they enjoyed was " 'a nice fresh-run fish' " Benjy says, from a river, whereas what I've got is a middle-to-tail-cut portion from a humbler and cheaper creature, farm raised in Chile or Norway probably. When it's a plain leftover as well, I put it into a pan with some milk and a pat of butter and a few spinach leaves, and heat that through while I cook a pot of angel hair pasta alongside; and if my smartphone photograph also takes in the extraneous purple tea kettle, that must serve as a little visual treat and refreshment for you, to atone for the fact that my food pictures don't look like the beautiful closeup shots of plates, or it might be beef or steaming vegetables or bright tangerine sorbet in rustic glassware, all gloriously backlit by the natural outdoors; and then there are casually placed wooden kitchen chairs, and a fringed napkin folded over once, -- which you see in magazines and food blogs. No, not like those.      

Salmon: from the Middle English salmoun, by way of Old French saumon and Latin salmo; and before that, we see in our Webster's only the mysterious < ?. Another one of those fine English words which means only itself. It makes therefore a fine addition to our "Twenty English Words" project. We have strayed a bit from our original list, granted. In the beginning it included pretty ideas like book, lamp, moon, son, and daughter. Instead, in the natural course of writing, we have ended up investigating some pretty things yes -- dream, apple -- but also odder items -- clothes, and poltroon. Of salmon, Dr. Johnson says only it is "a fish." He is aware of the French and Latin derivations.
   
You know, my fatheads, I still surf the food blogs sometimes and when I do I end up feeling quite a dinosaur. Or " 'quite a hermit,' " as Lucia would say. " 'My music, my books ... Georgie dines quietly with me, or I with him. Busy, happy days!' "  The food blogs pop with video ads, and bursts of color from hand-tinted smartphone pictures sent to Snapchat, plus shots of ocean or beach if the blogger has gone to some conference or other. And they link through to what they're reading, and it can be awfully thin stuff -- unparagraphed stream of consciousness memoirs about artist-colony love affairs, apparently lesbian because at least that's somewhat titillating -- and the video ads pop there, too, for Tiffany's and Brahmin. Perfectly natural, as this is New York magazine. Only what is it about our stern age that refuses to allow the woman artist-eccentric any enjoyment of clothes or personal appearance? Eighty years ago Benson wrote novels full of lady writers and painters, who could have graced any London or New York smart-set dinner party dressed, if they wanted, in a man's suit, cravat, cloth topped boots and monocle. "Marcelled" hair too. We think of Quaint Irene, or of Secret Lives' delightsome Lady Eva Lowndes, forever seeing other people's invisible halos. Our age will have none of it. An elderly lady poet looks like a wizened, uneasy lumberjack. When poets' words seem often lovely, I want them to be lovely themselves. I don't mean simply pretty. Let me help: here is Susan Leg herself, at a dinner party in Durham Square, in E.F. Benson's Secret Lives (1932):

She leaned forward with her chin out in an attitude of rapt expectation, her face looking of incredible insignificance underneath her spider-webbed hat which was gorgeously trimmed with bunches of artificial grapes in three colors, black, red, and yellow, and garnished with crimson vine leaves. She wore her string of pearls around her short, plump neck; ...she wore a bright green silk coat over a muslin dress in which was pinned a cluster of malmaisons [pink carnations]. She was enjoying this party given in her honor quite immensely ....

Meanwhile you and I, we dinosaurs, hardly smart set types, we don't do Snapchat. Nobody offers us trendy video ads. We are blogging the Gospels, posting amateur photographs of leftover salmon in a pan indoors at night, and chortling over English social comedy novels of the Jazz Age. It snowed that night, I mean the night of the salmon and the purple tea kettle; the calm, hushed snowfall that makes you want to go out and take a walk in the calm, hushed, strangely gray-bright world -- even though you likely don't because you just got home from work and after a moment's reflection, you opt for pajamas and a cocktail. Children's voices, or the raspy grind of a snowblower, echo muffled from before and behind and everywhere, as if bouncing off the underside of some huge gray-bright blanket.  

The accompanying wine was delicious, a Valpolicella from Buglioni, retail, about $13. It looks like this. Natural light.

Again with the Tuesday night stream-of-consciousness thing. Matthew 8

As for the stream of consciousness, well, why not? -- I have just embarked on an email correspondence with a (relatively) well-known British writer, with whom either I shall have an interesting Victorian-style letter exchange for a time, or who has been told by his publishers "do some marketing" and is fulfilling that mandate only for as long as he must, -- at any rate under this impetus I have been dashing off "a budget of news" of a morning, and find the haste and ease of it charming at evensong too;

-- our old friend Tom Wark at Fermentation has just said that the heyday of the wine blog and probably the personal blog is over, if we may judge by the decline in google searches for those terms since the glory years of 2009-2010; people who wish to share anything have long since turned to social media, Facebook especially, to say it faster. So one feels one may write anything one likes, as no agent or editor is likely trolling the internet looking for smart, focused niches;

-- tomorrow, February 10, marks the anniversary of the wedding of Queen Victoria to Albert, or as she liked to call him sometimes, "DEAREST PERFECT ALBERT." 1840. I just love Queen Victoria. Such a dumpy, loving, decisive but melodramatic little force of nature she must have been. The dumpy soul nevertheless wrote frankly of "being clasped by him in the sacred hours of the night" and bore nine children to prove it; struck her hand to her head and melodramatically shrieked "My reason! my reason!" when she feared her grandfather King George III's madness was coming out in her; yet had an intellect and a character piercing enough to make Bismarck mop his brow and gasp "mein Gott, that is a woman" upon surviving his first dealing with her. She held up her late husband's miniature portrait, when traveling, before the fine sights of Europe that they had not been able to see together, as if that symbolic act counted as a joint vacation (in the eyes of God I am sure it did -- now that is faith); and yet she was worldly enough to purr, "a rose in front, child -- for the sake of the footmen" when she noticed her blooming granddaughters showing too much cleavage in the drawing room.

A hundred and seventy six years ago, young Victoria, aged twenty, lay awake in raptures we presume on the eve of her true life's beginning. How odd, when you think of it, that the earth's completing of one hundred and seventy six orbits around the sun should serve to make time pass, such that people grow and age, and die. This is not to be morbid, but simply to notice. A science fiction plot or at least the background to one, lies here also. Some near-deathless alien creature, all wings and eyes, should also be puzzled by this. The Earthman hero would be at a loss to explain.

Now to blogging the sources. Matthew, chapter 8. Jesus performs four major cures of named characters, the leper, the centurion's servant, Peter's mother-in-law, and the two "Gadarene demoniacs," whose demons he drives into a herd of swine who then rush down into the sea and drown. Amid other healings, he also calms the storm at sea and dissuades two potential disciples from following him who won't be able to handle the life. After all this, "the whole town came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him they begged him to leave their district."

This is odd, almost shocking. Wouldn't they beg him to stay? Who wants demoniacs around, "so savage no one could travel by that road," who does not want to be cured of leprosy by a word? There is the ring of truth to this mass reaction, however: a normal human fear of something beyond freakishness, and a desire to protect against it.

There is also some major point being made in the elaboration of the story of the centurion's servant. Other characters in the Gospel so far simply ask for healing, and are granted it. The centurion speaks the wonderful words, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and my servant will be healed," and he goes on without a break to describe authority. He is subject to authority himself, and he commands soldiers and slaves. It's upon hearing this that Jesus exclaims on the centurion's "faith," and of course heals the servant by long distance in that hour. But faith in what? In Jesus' own place in a proper progression of authority?

Rain, music, Matthew 7 -- stream-of-conscious-ing the sources

People hate bad weather, but I think there are times when rain, cold, whipping winds and darkness can be very comfortable. That is, of course, when you are home safe, have the evening free before you plus the following day, and can indulge yourself with a cocktail, Chopin, some cheeses and the cat. She walks repeatedly, delicately around the computer keyboard, purring and stretching a back leg just so. One must peer over her arched back, and around her big fluffy tail, just so. Do you know the photo of the medieval cat's inky pawprints, discovered on the pages of a 15th century manuscript in Dubrovnik? Dubrovnik is in Croatia, rather a famous ancient city. It used to be called Ragusa, and is, so they say, the most beautiful medieval walled city in the world.

Image from National Geographic

I hope the cat in the year 1400-and-something was gently steered off the book to the stone-flagged floor, there to be given a distracting treat, and not flung headlong out a clerestory window by an enraged scribe. I myself have a second cat who is not nearly so graceful as the first, especially around computer keyboards.

And I often think, during election years especially, that someone should find a way to popularize the riposte, "You're in Dubrovnik, I don't hear you," as an acknowledged formula to deflate poltroon candidates, rambling bully professors, malicious journalists, straw-man debate opponents, hectoring trolls, and other such people who chloroform debate while pretending to advance it. You're in Dubrovnik -- I don't hear you would be a way of saying, you eternally lie and I no longer expend any energy for you about that. The little speech is one that Mia Farrow's character says towards the end of Rosemary's Baby. She looks straight ahead and grips a knife I think, as she confronts all the people in her apartment building, and life, who are devil worshipers and are after her "little Andy or Jenny." Chief among the coven are the too-solicitous old neighbor couple, who at this climactic scene are supposed to be vacationing innocently in Dubrovnik, but clearly are not because there they are in the room. They attempt to soothe and reprove her. She speaks the liberating words.

"You're in Dubrovnik. I don't hear you."

The rain has stopped, but the weatherman says a freeze is settling in, so we are even cozier. The Chopin has been a recording of the complete Nocturnes, which you may access on YouTube; our pianist here, one Brigitte Engerer, (1952-2012). She was known for being little-known to the public but hugely respected by peers, for being "always chicly turned out," and for chain-smoking Gauloises.

What else better to do with the rest of the evening than Blog the Sources? We have reached Matthew, chapter 7. Let us see what, just what, the Sources will give to us on any ordinary rainy dark Tuesday night in February. Revelation, is it now? We will indulge in pure stream of consciousness reactions.

"Judge not, lest ye be judged." The instruction not to criticize or really judge another person -- followed by the explanation that whatever "mote" or speck you see in your brother's eye, the "beam" in yours is far bigger -- must have had a civilizing influence. Condemnation and then violence can always hack away at one another. Perhaps what has a chance to stop both is an internal control: "I have no right to condemn, I have my fellow's fault ten times over."

And yet this instruction is followed by "do not cast your pearls before swine," i.e. don't offer precious things to people who can't appreciate them. Precious spiritual or intellectual things, correct? Instructions, even? -- since who owns pearls? But isn't that itself a judgment?

"Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you shall find; knock and the door will be opened to you." Now here we come to something. Is this a new definition or understanding of God? God who is personally present, a petition or a thought away from every human being. We know of the God whom Abraham argues with over the punishment coming to Sodom and Gomorrah, the God with whom Moses spoke "face to face." We have heard of Elijah's "still small voice." and of God who told Jeremiah, "before I formed you in the womb I knew you." Now God himself is a kind of parable: the father who will far less "give his son a stone when he asks for bread," than a human father, "wicked" as he humanly is, would do.

"Therefore." All it takes is one word, missing in modern translations and present in the King James, to draw together the chapter into a lesson. Yes yes, don't judge other people, ask and you shall receive, "do to others whatever you would have them do to you," yes we get it. But no. No, "therefore all things that ye would men do to you, do also to them." We are not talking about random sweet-natured deeds. If you want life to be coherent, then approach its component parts coherently: do not judge your fellow man, and ask of God what you want, and therefore -- keeping the coherent pattern -- behave toward your fellow man as you want him to behave to you. You are already beyond mere non-judgment. If he too is living coherently, if he too just got done asking God for what he wants, and is now facing the world and his business therefore doing unto others, etc. "This is the law and the prophets."

But who actually can do this? The instructions seem simple and sensible enough. No sooner does Jesus vouchsafe them, though, than he gives in quick succession four short word-pictures (flash fiction, shall we say?) about 1) the difficulty of entering "at the narrow gate," about 2) recognizing good and rotten trees by their sound and rotten fruits and of course he means much more than trees, about 3) even "disciples" who do what he does -- drive out demons, do "mighty deeds" "in his name" ("wonderful works," the King James says, which seems less cartoonish than mighty deeds) -- being rejected by him at the end, finally about 4) the "wise man" who acts on his teaching being like a man who builds a house on a solid foundation.

Why the narrow gate, the exclusivity? He seems almost gleeful about it.

 And "when Jesus finished, the crowds were astonished, for he taught as one with authority, and not as the scribes." I'll bet they were.

Now YouTube has segued into Clair de Lune, Debussy, and both cats are asleep.        

Blogging the sources: Matthew 6 -- Hidden things

To sum up the first half of this chapter: when you give alms, pray, or fast, do not do so publicly or with ostentation. "Like pagans and hypocrites." Rather, do them quietly and in secret, so that God only, "your Father who sees in secret," sees. (The Our Father prayer is inserted here.) He will repay you, "openly" the King James translation assures us. "Lay up treasure in heaven."

Well and good. Next, what of the strange verses about the eye being "the lamp of the body"?

"If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be."  

This seems flip-flopped. In our health-obsessed age, it seems more obvious to say that if your body is sound, your eye will be filled with light, in other words that it will reflect your good health. Just because a person's eye is "bad," his "whole body will be in darkness"? Really? Are the blind or, good grief, the nearsighted then full of darkness, spiritually? For surely it's that, implied.

Once again the King James Version helps. It translates "if your eye is evil," not just bad. Earlier this week my children (they're grown up) and I were talking about the stupid or degrading stuff you can see on Facebook sometimes, and of the unpleasant habits and consequences of life in general you see in hospital emergency rooms. My kids have interesting jobs. The latest video on Facebook is of the clown throwing a pie in a woman's face while both pass each other on a pair of side-by-side, up and down escalators somewhere. While he goes down afterwards, she in a fury tries to chase him even while her escalator is carrying her helplessly up. Of course he makes large faces, gestures shock, and such. It's meant to be funny. I like to foresee the next chapter, in which one of the clown's victims does something to send him to an emergency room. Or even better, puts on greasepaint and a red nose and sits in a chair outside his apartment building for, oh, I don't know -- years. Yes, an eye that takes in evil things can seem to fill the body with darkness. Perhaps that's what the Master meant.

Now about God, mammon, food, clothes, and worry about the future. If "mammon" means money and we're told we can't "serve" both God and mammon, isn't that what modern pundits call a false choice? Why is money bad when money not only buys food and health for me, but also constitutes alms for the poor? As for not being "anxious about what you will eat or what you will wear," it's passages like these that require annotators to assure us, in the fine print, that "Jesus does not deny the reality of human needs." Thank goodness. True that worry will not add a moment to one's lifespan -- "one cubit to his stature," the KJV says, which I like better -- but though the birds of the sky may not sow or reap, leading us to take comfort in the fact that they go on living, it's not exactly the case either that "your heavenly Father feeds them" just magically. They do spend most of their time scrounging for food. Are we supposed to do that, too? He just got through telling us we're better than they are. An odd thought in itself, in these days of PETA and our really sentimental love of animals. No clown would throw a pie in a dog's face. That would be mean.

Not to harp on the King James Bible, but I do think its poetry clarifies bizarre spiritual instructions like these better than firm modern prose. Besides, in using the KJV you can also enjoy spotting trivia. While we try to understand why not to worry, below, please find 1) the title of an old Sidney Poitier movie, and 2) a favorite Bertie Wooster quote, about the members of the Drones' Club, Freddie Threepwood and all, "toiling not, neither do they spin." Bertie is always nattering on about how he won a Scripture Prize in school.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

"Shall he not much more clothe you" implies spiritual care a bit more readily than "will he not much more provide for you." To provide for is workaday. One can be clothed with many things, even ye of little faith. Pro-vide comes from the Latin, meaning "before seeing." Clothe is all English, cloth, back to Old English clath and clitha, poultice, from an Indo-European root meaning to stick or adhere. "See CLAY." The matter of man.

Hidden prayers, hidden darkness in the body, hidden needs perhaps. Needs beyond the obvious, shared by mere birds and "pagans." And then about that. Isn't Jesus, Mr. Compassion, a little judgmental?

Blogging the sources, skipping ahead

We left off with Matthew chapter 5, in which we noticed "it begins" -- Jesus demands perfect behavior. But now we are going to skip ahead just a little, because amazingly, since beginning our project the West's sources have already shown through in two episodes, one out in the world and one under my own observation.

A word here about the name Jesus. Do you also find yourself uneasy saying or writing the name repeatedly? It seems flip, unthinking, to do so. Yet what else can one do? You may know the little joke about the Catholic priest who attends Protestant worship services for the first time with a Protestant friend. As the service goes on and the pastor warms to his sermon, Father grows more and more uncomfortable. Finally he leans over to his friend and whispers, "he could at least call him Mr. Jesus." To write "Christ" seems better, but so far in our reading of Matthew, that is not his name. What did his disciples call him? Often "Lord," as it happens.

We left off with Matthew 5. Here is the first distraction that is going to make us skip ahead: a terrible story about a young Muslim woman beaten to death by a mob last March in Afghanistan. At long last, in December 2015, the trials of her murderers and all the bystanders and all the police who did nothing for her, were finished. The results were essentially either straight acquittals or slaps on the wrist for everyone. She had been falsely accused of burning a Koran -- by "a fortuneteller" and by the caretaker of a local Muslim shrine -- and that was that. The last paragraph of the story, which Breitbart relayed from the New York Times, uncovers the real reason for the woman's lynching. "An investigation found she had confronted men who were themselves dishonoring the shrine by trafficking in amulets and, more clandestinely, Viagra and condoms."

The sources of a civilization matter. Here, in Afghanistan, is a culture whose men have no knowledge of the story of Jesus driving the moneychangers from the Temple. It's not that their knowing it would have spared this woman's life, or that Westerners don't get up rabid mobs sometimes. But if the condom-peddlers she confronted had had the story of the moneychangers in their backgrounds, they might -- might -- have reacted to her with some kind of shamefacedness. They might not have been there at all. If she had lived to press charges, her account of their unsavory practices at a holy place might have rung bells of memory and of righteous association, even in the courtroom.

The men who killed her also don't know the phrase "let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone" -- the words Jesus speaks to the mob when he saves the adulteress from stoning. Again, it's not that the murderers' merely knowing the phrase would have spared her life, or that Westerners don't get up rabid mobs. But a civilization that has that story bred into its soul has some kind of respect for life and especially for the lone woman surrounded by howling men. I don't know exactly where in the Gospels these stories occur, I could look it up in a moment and so can you; the point is, the stories are in my head and the death of Farkhunda Malikzada appalls because in my civilization, thank God, her death is offensive and not normal. My parents sent me to Sunday school. Men and women who don't have these stories in their heads, in their souls, behave in ways we still, for the moment, find shocking. (Consider. Why did a Westerner report on the condom-selling?) They think they are just.
 
As for the second distraction that makes us skip ahead, the one under my own observation -- well. Let's just say, you shouldn't tell people what you earn. Especially don't tell your co-workers. The reaction is going to be deeply human. Everyone is "upset," but as they lean over and share the gossip, the feeling you sense is rather a joyous and fascinated rage. Maybe it's what the Afghan mob felt, on a much more deadly scale. "He makes X dollars, and I've been here longer, and he does nothing."

And yet Jesus gave our civilization the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20). Summarized, the story tells of a landowner who hires three or four sets of day-laborers to work for him. Some he hires at dawn, some at noon, some still later. When they all come for their wages that evening, he pays them out beginning with the last-hired. They get the same money as, and for far less work done than, the men hired at dawn. These latter complain about unfairness. The landowner sensibly points out, "you agreed to your wage when I hired you. What if I choose to be generous with those whom I hired last? Am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?"

The point of the parable is of course something more than money -- the first shall be last and the last, first, in the "kingdom of heaven," whatever that is -- but on a literal level it's still eerie. Did Jesus, then, understand capitalism? Did he understand contract law? I seem to remember Sunday school teachers (CCD, we called it) emphasizing only that the Master was tolerant and non-judgmental, loved the poor, was long-haired and kind. Almost by definition, a '70s hippie. Or is the upshot of this story that, when you are upset, you the retail staff, you the Afghan mob -- you must nonetheless control yourself?

A civilization of crowned women, or -- yes, tiaras matter

Before I begin, let me acknowledge my great debt to the delightful blog, Royal Order of Sartorial Splendor. Faithful followers call it "OoS" for short. 


I like tiaras. I like fabulous jewels of all kinds, but I especially like tiaras.

Russian imperial tiara

A friend of mine scoffs at such trifles, for several reasons. He scoffs at the idea of any person being conceived as so superior to anyone else that he may crown himself with jewels. He resents the palpable fact that, whoever such persons are, they must be rich enough to buy the baubles for a start, and so that's unjust. And he's outraged at the thought of anyone wearing gemstones that must have been got -- mined, dived for, sorted, ported -- by the poor and the anonymous. To him that ruins it. Emeralds from Colombia, rubies from Burma, sapphires from Sri Lanka, diamonds from India or Africa, pearls from the Gulf of Mannar or the Venezuelan coast -- to him, all these stones cry out with suffering and misery exactly as "your brother's bloods cry out to Me from the ground" (Genesis 4:10  -- 'bloods' is plural in the Hebrew, which leads to all sorts of interesting exegesis). All this moral tainting is the worse the older the gems are, and therefore the closer to actual slavery.

I take issue with him on all counts. Go to Pinterest and look at the tiaras, and at all the women wearing them. It's not that they think they're better than we are. It's just that they happen to have been born into, or married into, families which own tiaras. For a special occasion, they haul them out and dust them off, and why not? It might be a wedding or some affair of state. In the latter case the jewel becomes a gesture of respect to the company assembled. If it were your family and your job, you would do the same. "Don't you buy suits and ties, and put them on for court?" I ask. He rolls his eyes. As for these families being rich enough to afford them, so what? I say. "You're rich enough to afford a couple suits and a car, and a house, and two vacations to the tropics a year. Plus all you spend on your garden. Plus -- " but he scoffs. "That's different."

As for many of the world's jewels being stained by their origins in exploitation and suffering, true, I have no good answer for that. "It can't be helped now," I sputter. He rolls his eyes. But really, -- is mankind morally obliged to chuck in the garbage these beautiful things, or any beautiful things, because they come to us marred by the cruelties of centuries past? By the time even our most (presumably) guilty emeralds and diamonds go into a parure (a matched set), they have been so transformed by the jeweler's art as to become a breathtaking homage to God's good world and to His pleasure in human handiwork, too. Mankind is never, ever going to stop "sourcing," as the verb has it now, superb jewelry. If you did chuck it all into a dustbin, the next generation of mankind would dive in and fish it all back out. How does it make you -- I am still, interiorly, hollering at my friend -- privately virtuous to dismiss it?

Tiara of Empress Marie Louise (or Josephine), second wife (or first) of Napoleon

He remains unconvinced. He sees display in general as a sort of symbol of man's corruption. I am not equal to that level of, what shall we call it, Savonarola-esque judgment. Besides, if we must wallow in vicarious guilt (as if that helps anyone), then ask yourself. Do you own any item whatever with a stamp or tag saying "Made in China"? We're told that sometimes slave notes, written in English, fall out of the packaging. And this for, say, a thirty-dollar, "Totally Ghoul" Halloween graveyard kit. If it is essentially wrong to own stuff, which is where the logic of the guilt-of-all-provenance takes us, I'd prefer the brazenness and the near-immortality of jewels over anything else.

"The Danish ruby parure" tiara. Dates from the time of Napoleon, who bankrolled his marshals' gifts to their wives when it came time to create an Imperial court from scratch.

And, besides. There is one more notable thing about all the glittery whatnot you can refresh your soul with on Pinterest. These spectacular creations were made to adorn women. Over and over again you read in the captions, "made for the princess So and so" -- "a gift from duke So and so to his wife on their wedding day" -- "designed by Chaumet" -- or Cartier, or Harry Winston -- "for Lady So and so to celebrate the marriage of her son" -- "a gift from This-city to the queen, in honor of Thus and such."

Look at just a few of these faces, old and young, past and present. Observe the headpieces, yes, but that's not all. I'll even throw in a fantasy lady. See if you can spot her.

The Duchess of Manchester, early 1900s? The "Manchester tiara" was made by Cartier in 1903. Consuelo, the American-born her Grace who supplied 1400+ diamonds to construct it, died at the age of 51 only six years later, in 1909. The woman above, wearing ducal robes and the tiara, looks rather young and fresh-cheeked to be about 45 years old. But who else can it be? Perhaps Consuelo's charm of  personality preserved her: "The Complete Peerage quotes a contemporary who wrote that 'no one knows how gloriously beautiful a woman can be who did not see the Duchess when she was thirty.' " 

"Crown princess Mary of Denmark," nee Mary Donaldson of Australia, in the "Midnight Parure Tiara" -- moonstones, diamonds, rose gold, white gold, and oxidized silver. Its creator, Charlotte Lynggaard, designed it specifically for an exhibition on tiaras in 2009, and cannot sell it; the lady above has exclusive rights to borrow it. 

"Queen Margrethe (of Denmark)." These Danish ladies have a very fine collection. 

Queen Mary, grandmother of the present queen of England, in the early 1900s wearing the "Delhi durbar" tiara. It is set front and center with two massive "chips," Cullinan III and IV, cut from the legendary Cullinan diamond. They can be removed, switched out for emeralds perhaps, if desired. A jewel lover and a foundress of the present British royal collection, she looks supremely pleased with life. With that "weight" who wouldn't be?

We'll call her "Titania."

"Princess Ella of Hesse" wearing the "Yugoslavian emerald" parure. Circa 1884. Her tiara is a "kokoshnik," its crescent shape modeled on the traditional cloth headdresses of married Russian women. Extraordinary life: she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and married a Russian Grand Duke, thus becoming the Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna. Her younger sister, Alix, also married a Russian -- the last czar (thus becoming the last Czarina, Alexandra). "Ella's" husband was assassinated by a socialist bomb in 1905. She forgave the assassin, sold all her jewels, and became a nun serving the poor in the slums of Moscow. After the Russian revolution she was murdered by being thrown down a mine shaft -- followed by some grenades -- and left to die of wounds and starvation along with a score of other very high-status victims of the Bolsheviks. The tiara eventually ended up in the vaults of Van Cleef and Arpels in the 1950s. They sold the emeralds to an anonymous buyer and replaced them with paste; the tiara, thus denuded, is "occasionally displayed." 


Yes, observe these faces. Glowing out of them, excepting perhaps Titania's, who is a professional model, there seems to be a mix of emotions. I see sheer joy, pride of course, and sometimes a sort of rigid submission to history: hold still for the camera, the future must see this. There is also a twinkling wonderment, a sense of thankful custodianship, which I like to think the rigid ladies also expressed once the flashbulb popped and they could breathe again. What ... for me, now? A great jewel collector who was not born into families that owned tiaras, Elizabeth Taylor, put it well. "I adore wearing gems, but not because they are mine. You can't possess radiance, you can only admire it."    

Not because they are mine. What is theirs, these ladies', is the belonging to an entire civilization of crowned women. A little legend about Britain's royals' Koh-i-noor diamond is a propos here. A "Hindu text" supposedly tells of a curse on all owners of the "mountain of light," but also sighs, "only God or a woman can wear it with impunity." It used to be about eight times its current size, by the way. My friend who is upset by tainted origins or the fat cat rich or assumptions of superiority, does not dream of complaining about the crux of the matter, -- the long centuries of Western women, crowned. Who would?

There is an answer, but before we get to it, this. It won't do to be provincial you know, for other cultures and civilizations do crown women. Paradoxically, you must surf the royal-jewelry-chronicling blogs, which seem at first blush the happy nadir of frivolity, to de-provincialize yourself. The young queen of Bhutan wears a silk brocade crown at her wedding; Japan's imperial family favor only diamonds and pearls, as they are white, the color of purity. (They used to favor a much different, and very beautiful, style of dress, with crown.) No more phantasmagoric set of jewels can exist in the world than those once belonging to the various rulers, and now to the state, of Iran. Among everything else now kept in Teheran's central bank, are simply bowlsful of loose emeralds .... Queen Saleha of Brunei wears emeralds and diamonds with her cerulean hijab. Even though it seems mean to correct her, we must. Surely the tiara is meant to adorn woman, not cloth. Princess Lalla Salma of Morocco's choices for her wedding point up the difference: a "meander" tiara and tumbling chestnut curls for one picture, and a thick white burqa for the other. Guess which look is "traditional," i.e., -- well, i.e. what? We know the answer, reflexively -- non-Western. Interested commenters, below those photos, hope that Morocco's king can fend off the infection of wahhabi Islam; no less a source than International Business Times hopes he can fend off ISIS.  

This brings us back to our question about who would object to civilizations of crowned women. It's not the same thing as objecting to royalty, royalty, royalty. Remember Elizabeth Taylor, who could afford to buy anything and did, wore it all, and still knew thankful custodianship. Our point is woman, crowned. And the answer to "who would object" is, Muslims would. The news of the hundreds- or thousands-strong Muslim gangs lying in wait for Western women all across Europe on -- meaningfully -- New Year's Eve is still resounding. Now we have a new term to learn, taharrush gamea, "collective harrassment," which seems a polite translation for thousands-strong Muslim gangs lying in wait for women in any public square anywhere. Why would they do this? Listen to what just one scholar, Christie Davies, has to say.

"Under Islam women are inferior beings who should be denied autonomy—particularly over their own bodies—[they are] sexual property, the property of their male relatives. If Muslim women step out of line, they are liable to be the victims of an honour killing. If they suffer a sexual assault, they are forced to say nothing, lest disgrace fall on their families, even when they themselves are entirely innocent.

"For Muslims, non-Muslims are in every way inferior and the freedom enjoyed by their womenfolk is the worst aspect of that inferiority. In consequence non-Muslim women may be attacked and exploited without compunction. There is a direct link between the insistence on the wearing of a hijab for those within the fold and the raping of those outside, between an obsession with modesty for those women who are family property and the utter disregard for the rights of those women who are free. They are the two sides of the same Islamic coin."  -- Rape, Islam, and the Deafening Silence, Quadrant online, October 20, 2015.

It makes us fear, among other things, that the crowns perched precariously on non-Western women's heads are perched very precariously indeed. And then what about us?

Given all this, my friend's ideas about tainted jewels -- remember? -- seem just quaint and far away. I can imagine one sort of person really living out the offense he takes. I can imagine some young lady somewhere in the empire of New Spain, and her retinue, getting lost one day on a journey from one provincial capital to another. She gets a glimpse of conditions in the Muzo valley, perhaps and is sick, and when she returns to her small palace, she puts away her gems in a box and never wears them again. Her father is perplexed .... She would have a right to take action that is not symbolic. Better to do what you could do in whatever way a moral question authentically touches your life.

Since we can't afford all these parures anyway, and vicarious outrage is dilettantish, we draw conclusions instead. We can reflect that the tiara, far from being problematic for us, may be a kind of little vaccine, inoculating the cultures that adopt it from the woman-hatred that thrives in Islam. But then we go back further. Where do the cultures that adopt the tiara adopt it from? How is it that one civilization, the West, crowns women to begin with while another loathes, fears, and imprisons them? It must have something to do with founding documents, yes? With sources.   

Further reading: 

Pinterest. Just type in "tiaras."  Also type in "the Persian jewels." 

Royal Order of Sartorial Splendor. Otherwise known as orderofsplendor.blogspot.com. Can't say enough about how fun it is. 

The Court Jeweler. Ditto. 

It begins: demanding perfect behavior (Matthew 5)

Another reason why we return to the Gospels as the source of Western civilization is because religion, Western religion, at least gives us an escape from the power of the unaccountable nanny state. The "divinized" state, as Jonah Goldberg calls it in Liberal Fascism, the state endlessly preaching, governed by an elite endlessly assessing our behavior and endlessly herding us through some new collective crisis for our collective good. If hatred of religion, especially Christianity, is in progressive/leftist DNA from the French Revolution on, what did they so hate and seek to replace, and why? Could it have been, in part, individual freedom and individual responsibility? Was it the simple threat to their own authority? 

Matthew, chapter 5: This is a little bit curious. Jesus sees "the crowds," goes up the mountain -- to avoid them? -- and sits down. His disciples come to him. "He began to teach them." What, the disciples only? It seems so. It seems they alone hear the Beatitudes, the assurances of "blessing" for those who are poor in spirit, merciful, meek, and so on. They alone also hear the last one, "blessed are you when you are insulted and persecuted because of me," and it's this plus the next paragraph comparing "you" to salt, to light, to a city on a hill, to a lamp on a lampstand, that seems to show Jesus speaking only to the disciples. He seems to be preparing them, not the crowds, to set an example. Next comes an assurance that he has not come to abolish "the Law or the prophets but to fulfill them," and then six injunctions to perfect behavior. Almost inhumanly perfect, really. You shall not be angry,* or if you are, you must settle your grudge with whoever it is quickly, because anger is almost as bad as murder. You shall not look at a woman with lust, because that is almost as bad as adultery. Divorce is not just divorce,** it is the cause of more adultery, peculiarly so for the woman. It is not enough to avoid "false oaths," rather you must not swear oaths at all. Here we are not talking about curse words but apparently about promises, vows that you will do or accomplish some task.

After the preceding four, the last two demands are the most impossible. Of course they are two of the most famed phrases in the Gospels, "turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy." They seem downright suicidal. They follow the pattern that Jesus has been speaking in throughout the chapter: 'you have been taught x, but I say y,' or more accurately 'now I say x to the last and perfect degree.' Instead of the soberly calibrated justice of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the disciples are told to obviate the need for justice at all by behaving preemptively perfectly to those who, normally, would belong in a court of law for a start. "Offer no resistance to one who is evil -- if anyone sues you for your tunic, offer him your cloak as well." And, "you have been told to love your neighbor and hate your enemy" -- this is embarrassing, because the notes to this Bible translation admit the Torah contains no such command to hate -- "but I say, love your enemies and pray for them." Because, to love those who love you, and to "greet your brothers only," is "not unusual," being no more than what pagans or scribes or Pharisees do. The ultimate rationale behind all this is that the disciples must be like their Father in Heaven, who permits rain and sun to fall on both the just and the unjust, etc.

Well, yes, but when it comes to turning the other cheek, our Father in heaven doesn't have to worry about his capital cities perhaps being nuked by an enemy to whom He, being perfect, has offered no resistance. What then? And, the book of Genesis has covered this ground before -- no pun intended: I am the Lord thy God; Walk before Me, and be thou perfect (Gen. 17:1). Which, come to think of it, is curious.



*"without cause," the King James version adds.

**"unless the marriage is unlawful" the modern translation says -- or "saving for cause of fornication" the King James translation puts it. Two entirely different matters, no?



   

Eight years of blogging! and no book contract. Oh well

Those New Zealand scents of grapefruit and melon leaped from the very neck of the bottle as soon as it was opened. Upon pouring and sampling (and what a gorgeous color, how does one describe a sort of eau-de-Nil that is yellow rather than green?), I tasted a sensory whirligig of more melon, plus vanilla and something almost meaty too, a full and buttery texture. Lobster perhaps? I thought, here is my free gift to the food and wine business: some bright chef must fashion a recipe combining all of the above, grapefruit/kiwi/melon, vanilla, and lobster. I'm sure it can be done. Remember our own amateur efforts with the one-time, irreproducible, crazy-local gourmet recipe?

In this case, the wine to be paired with the new dish will be Brancott Estate's "Chosen Rows" sauvignon blanc. I was lucky enough to receive a sample of this some months ago, along with a few other fine Brancott wines, for a blogger virtual tasting via Twitter. The wine samples don't come to my address so thick and fast as they used to, partly because At First Glass at least had a (small) reputation whose coattails Pluot has not quite been able to grasp, and partly -- probably -- because if I am going to blog things like the sources of Western civilization instead of wine, wineries are going to stop sending me wine. That's understandable. Only "Chosen Rows" retails for about $70, if you can even find it in the U.S., so I do rather regret the lost coattail effect. It was just about two years ago that Blogger pulled my domain name, and I was forced to panic and start Pluot at once. New Year's Eve, however, remains the anniversary of At First Glass' beginning, and so today I still tot up eight years of blogging, and I thank you all for stopping by from time to time. I wish somebody had offered me a book contract by now, but oh well. When the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote things down that he reasonably expected no one would ever see, he called it "living for the gods." Let's say that is what we are doing. Nobody offered him a book contract, either.

But we have had fun, haven't we? We have gone beyond the world of wine to think about music, we have learned who invented the wine bottle, we have cooked quaint retro recipes. I am sorry there is less of that now, since I am no longer preparing meals for a growing family -- which gives one scope for experimentation -- but only for myself. And of course we have started our new, un-wine-like project, Blogging the West's sources. And the Twenty English Words undertaking, also. Once in a great while we venture into politics and world affairs but it always seems to jar a little. When that is not your forte you cannot be original, but only hem-haw-and-by-Jove over other people's reactions.

I'll just put in one tiny political thing, here at the close of a 2015 that seemed mostly ghastly for world and especially American affairs. Wouldn't it be ironic and delicious if 2016 were the year that Mr. Obama, our dear lord of misrule, got some sort of comeuppance? He's winging his way back from Hawaii soon, with more instructions for all of us. I know it's foolish even to imagine the following prospect, but consider: for all their adoration and protection of him and passionate affinity with him for eight years -- my goodness, for as long as I've been blogging -- nevertheless I think the mainstream press must have a sort of ur-memory of having dutifully destroyed a president, Nixon of course. I'm sure they think that is what they do when called to give of their best; when an emergency is so colossal that they must bravely face down ultimate power and ultimate corruption. Republican, of course -- usually. They are still kingmakers and kingbreakers, declining readership and ad revenue be damned. Even twenty-year-old journalism students must have sat at the feet of sixty-year-old professors who recite the story and perform the laying on of hands as it were.

Now here with Mr. Obama we have a president openly famed, for years, for what is politely called "lawlessness." Spying on Congress is his latest treat. After everything else it's pettily Nixonian. A pundit or two hem-haw-and-by-Jove about how this won't do.  That is what got my attention, and made me think about irony and deliciousness in the coming year. In fact it probably will do, like everything else. But he, even He, -- consider. The more protected and exalted he has grown, the bigger target he might offer. This is his last year in office. Wouldn't it be delicious and ironic if some young newshound, who maybe was in eighth grade when Mr. Obama addressed the crowds at Berlin, should realize that Woodward and Bernstein made history and fulfilled their calling by pursuing something initially minor? What was it? -- a janitor at a hotel noticed a suite door slightly ajar, and the rest was Watergate, right? And consider this. The kingmaker-media hate and are helpless before Donald Trump. One way to deflate him might be to step up, grimly, and preemptively do the work that the American  people seem to want him to do.

If it were to happen, it's precisely because Mr. Obama is an ur-Democrat, and his political life has been as wholly sacred as a Druid oak grove, that I think 'it' would concern something really wildly absurd and trivial, non-political. What beggars imagination, which is itself a bizarre commentary on the times. A young reporter noticed a blade of grass on the White House lawn, bent in a funny way ... and the rest was history.

No. But let's raise a glass to fantasy fiction.