Fencing Bear at Prayer

Response to Matthew J. Milliner, “The Sexuality of Christ in Byzantine Art and in Hypermodern Oblivion” Everybody loves a scandal. Traveling to Istanbul in 1717 the Englishwoman Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was shocked to see images of the Virgin Mary executed with no effort at naturalism. “The Greeks,” she wrote home, “have the most monstrous taste in their pictures, which for more finery are always drawn upon a gold ground. You may imagine what a good air this has, but they have no notion either of shade or proportion.” En route through the Holy Roman Empire, she had been equally shocked to see pictures of the Trinity. Writing from Regensburg, she told her friend Anne Thistlethwayte, “I was very much scandalized at a large silver image of the Trinity where the Father is represented under the figure of a decrepit old man with a beard down to his knees, and a triple crown on his head, holding in his arms the Son fixed on the Cross, and the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove hovering over...

Five years and four or so months ago, I started this blog with a prayer.  " O God, hasten to my aid !"  I had never written a blog, and I had no idea what I was going to say.  I only knew that I wanted to write and to say something about the process of writing.  I knew also that I wanted to think about prayer and hoped that I might find others who also wanted to think about prayer.  I had an inkling at the time that I would be writing about fencing, thus the title of the blog, but I needed a persona other than my professional or private self through which to explore whatever it was that I was going to be exploring, thus my Fencing Bear mask. For the first few months, I kept my proper name out of my posts, although almost immediately I realized that I wanted other people to know that I was keeping a blog, even when things started to get, shall we say, a little embarrassing, especially those posts that I wrote that summer at Nationals.  By the middle of the...

Well, that didn't take long.  Here I have been biding my time, looking forward to the day when I could start blogging again, planning all sorts of re-entry posts about who I am now, how I have changed over the course of the year, what it feels like to have almost a complete draft of my book done, and BANG!  Here I am writing about being attacked by the devil again .  How apropos. It happened to Sister Mary of Ágreda , and she is a much, much more gifted writer than I will ever be.  (Mainly because she understood the true nature of her gifts--they came from God, as she well knew; I still have the presumption to imagine that what I write somehow depends on me.)  As she tells it in the introduction to the second part of her masterpiece, The Mystical City of God (Mystica Ciudad de Dios, first published in 1670 ) : 1.  When I was ready to present before the throne of God the insignificant results of my labors in writing the first part of the most holy lif...

THE VIRGIN MARY AND THE ART OF PRAYER The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought Invitatory: How to Read this Book, The Virgin Clothed with the Sun [5,000 words] Chapter 1 The Hours of the Virgin [20,000 words] A Little History of the Office Symbolism and Structure of the Hours Chapter 2   Ave Maria [22,000 words] Saluting Mary Naming Mary Chapter 3   Antiphon and Psalm [60,000 words] Mary in the Temple The LORD and the Lady of the Temple Miriam, the Mother of Jesus the Son of God Most High Mary, the Theotokos, the Living Temple of God Mary in the Psalms The Night Office or Matins First nocturn, on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday Second nocturn, on Tuesday and Friday Third nocturn, on Wednesday and Saturday The Seven Hours of the Day Lauds, sung at sunrise Prime, sung at the first hour of the day Terce, Sext, and None, sung at the third, sixth, and ninth hours Vespers, sung at sunset Compline, sun...

I'm still here, just lying low for the moment.  Work on the book is proceeding apace , but I am finding it harder and harder to write about anything else.  This is a good thing, I think.  As the Preacher says, "for everything there is a season,"* and this is the season for me to finish the draft of my book.  I don't want to say much more just now, lest I scare away the Muse.  Let's just say it's going well...better than I ever dreamed possible.** *Ecclesiastes 3:1.  **Meanwhile, the Dragon Baby is snoring, probably dreaming about that squirrel she caught yesterday.*** ***Yes, that makes twice she has counted coup on the rodentia of the trees.  We're both having quite a year!

 Heh.  Not bad for a couch potato , eh? Posted with Blogsy

Seeding is based on results from the past three national events: Summer Nationals 2012, December NAC 2012 and March NAC 2013. It's been a good year! But I've also spent the past seven months sitting on my couch, writing. And I've had the flu for the past month. Last night I woke up coughing again, and my energy is really low. It is going to be a tough day today. Posted with Blogsy

"Adults can hamper progress with their own perfectionism: whereas children throw themselves into tasks, adults often agonise over the mechanics of the movements, trying to conceptualise exactly what is required.  This could be one of our biggest downfalls.  'Adults think much more about what they are doing,' says Gabriele Wulf at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 'Children just copy what they see.' "Wulf's work over the past decade shows that you should focus on the outcome of your actions rather than the intricacies of the movements.   She applies this finding in her own life: as a keen golfer, she has found it is better to think about the swing of the club, for instance, rather than the position of her hands.  'I'm always trying to find where best to focus my attention,' she says.  Similarly, if you are learning to sing, then you should concentrate on the tone of the voice, rather than on the larynx or the placement of the tongue.  Study...

Everything hurts.  My back hurts, particularly a point over my right shoulder blade.  My hands hurt, particularly my right hand if I try to clench it.  My feet hurt, particularly the top of my left foot, where the tendons are.  All of my joints are stiff, particularly my right wrist and ankle.  All this after getting a massage on Tuesday and spending the week doing something other than sitting on my couch with my laptop on my lap, writing. Talk about Sitzfleisch .  I looked it up on Wiktionary : "The ability to endure or carry on with an activity," from the German for "the ability to sit still."  I have another definition: "The way your body feels after you have been sitting still for five months working on your book manuscript." It creeps up on you.  Back in the winter, when it was so cold that it took a full five minutes to get the layers on before taking the dog out for her midday romp, I just thought I felt stiff because I had so many cl...

After three-and-a-half years' constant practice, the Dragon Baby caught her first squirrel this week.  There we were, almost home from our lunchtime walk, and one minute she was next to me on the sidewalk, while the next she was emerging from the other side of a tree with a young squirrel in her mouth.  It all happened so fast, I wasn't quite sure what to think, never mind do, so I stood there, entranced, as the squirrel squeaked and the Dragon Baby tried to shake it just as she has her toys so many times.  But squirrels, unlike stuffed hedgehogs, have teeth and claws and muscles with which they can fight and move.  Just as quickly as she had caught the squirrel, suddenly it was away back up the tree, barking and looking down at us as the Dragon Baby, undaunted, settled back down on the sidewalk so as to keep an eye on her prey. And I thought it was bad when she ate the baby mouse !  When she caught the squirrel, my first thought was that she was surely goi...

As promised , my new blog .  Comments welcome!  Check out "About" as well as the first post on "Getting Medieval."  "Sources" will be added as they make themselves useful.

I had a(nother) breakthrough this week thinking about what it means to practice playing my fiddle.  Let me see if I can describe it for you.  You see, I suddenly figured out how to get inside the music.  Does that make any sense?  There I was, trying to get the last turn of phrase in Old Joe Clark down, playing it over and over again, and still tripping up the same place every time, and it occurred to me that I needed to break it down even further.  Not C#-B-A-G-A-A, but just the transition from A-G, that is what I needed to practice.  I could do it fairly cleanly if I was doing a downstroke on the A, followed by an upstroke on the G, but if I hit the A on the upstroke, I invariably fumbled the G on the downstroke.  I'm just doing saw strokes in this piece, which means I am not able to keep the same bowing pattern from repetition to repetition (unlike for In the Pines , in which we learned a bowing pattern that maintains the same strokes from repet...

You .  No deep philosophy here, simply the ordinary observation that human beings are creatures with consciousness of self who see other human beings as likewise possessing consciousness, but a consciousness distinct from their own, thinking its own thoughts.  That is to say, I have an "I" who sees "you" as distinct from myself, but I also believe that you have thoughts about yourself just as I have thoughts about myself.  I'm not sure this is worth belaboring, but it is important to remember where we start from. Them .  Again, a neutral term, simply to say that human beings, while seeing themselves as distinct individuals, are also prone to identify with other human beings in groups.  Those of us standing over here are different from those of you standing over there.  Groups form and dissolve all the time: we are the ones who arrived early, they are the ones who arrived late.  We are the ones who have seen the movie, they are the ones who haven't....

Demons are devious.  They disguise themselves as angels of light, perhaps even friends, but underneath they are nothing but liars. Demons are rational intelligences, which means, like angels, that they are capable of logical thought, but because they are fallen, their reason is corrupted so that it cannot lead them to understand the good. Demons hate confession because confession leads to repentance and doing penitence for one's sins.  They will do anything they can to prevent us from confessing; above all, they will try to shame us (by, for example, calling us names like "petty, envious, and self-pitying") when we do. Nor can they understand the desire to make a confession.  As my own personal demon PapaFreeak put it: "I think you fascinate me because you provide access to a mentality that is genuinely foreign to me."  Being fallen angels, demons cannot themselves admit to having sins; they cannot confess their own sin of turning away from God.  Rather...

I think I overdid it a little bit on the blog posts this weekend, thanks to my demon PapaFreeak's calling me such lovely names.  But it is a good thing (I said he was my friend !-- ahem ): it has helped me clarify a number of things that have been rattling around in my head these past several months as the work on my book has proceeded apace .  I really meant it when I said this morning that I have now confessed all of my deepest, pettiest, most envious thoughts.  My therapist and I have been working on the biggest, scariest ones over the past couple of years, including several that are still (and will remain) TMI for such a public confession (ha! Take that PapaFreeak--I'm even worse than you think!), and I find myself suddenly at something of a loose end having told you yesterday about the oldest, deepest, and ugliest of my sins, my envy of my sister's physical beauty .  I rather suspect I am not yet done with that one, but of the others that I have been working o...