Thursday 15 December 2005

At Heaven's Gate

Not much heavenly occurs in the Murdock family. Both Sue and Hammond, Bogan Murdock's offspring, are resentful and bitter towards their father, though they take it out in opposite manners. Ham works for his father's investment company; Sue quits university to ride horses in the open fields of her fathers' land, yet only to leave and live on her own in town. Gerald Calhoun and Slim Sarret are both in love with Sue, at different and intermingling times, only to be rejected for yet another.

Each of these persons has a complicated history and falls into the rut of self-knowledge from which they must find a way to climb or else sink forever. In between, though out of sight of the circle of Murdocks, is the story of Ashby Wyndham. Ashby is the uneducated poor man who is destined to carry the torch for all, but must first suffer personal hardships to see that light at the end of the tunnel.

Friday 4 November 2005

good habits gone awry

Mr. Darcy says in his list of essentials for an accomplished lady that she must improve her mind with extensive reading. Mr. Bennet reads every day, constantly and consistently, yet his household crumbles in ruin around his library. No sensible woman wishes destruction upon her house in making time to read. How is one to strike a happy medium? To read or not to read, in due season.

Thursday 3 November 2005

To Lady Havilah:

Greetings and rich favour,
bestowed by all the gods,
be upon you this fey-eternal day
as in the twenty seven hundred years past,
since your descent to the terrestrial sphere--
with love from the Garden fairies.

Do unto Others

The question of the day is: how do we love ourselves like we love our neighbours? What does that mean and how can I do it?

Monday 31 October 2005

hitchikers

The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy is a funny movie, in a peculiar sort of way. It's based on a real book, written by a man who fell asleep tipsy in a field when he couldn't find a cheap place to stay as he was travelling Europe. Some see it as nihilistic in philosophy. Enough random things happen to the characters as they wander the galaxy to keep one wondering what and why and realise it doesn't really matter after all.

Friday 21 October 2005

for starters

Lsiten to this, from Penny, telling how she (of all people) got into Christianity:
"...We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me...The Bible is so good with chocolate. I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing...but it isn't. It is a chocolate thing."
~Blue Like Jazz

Thursday 20 October 2005

The Ya-yas continue

Little Altars was not the last installment. There are Ya-Yas in Bloom. I'm not sure if it's worth reading until I get into it.

Tuesday 18 October 2005

From the Dust

Is it foolish or admirable to love a bit of land so much that you cling to it in spite of famine, even when it's beating you and giving nothing in return? Why does a farmer keep faith that the rain will come--next Spring? What happens to families attacked by dust, wind, and fire?

Out of the Dust is a story in verse form about the dust bowl in 1934. The poetry stands tall on its own roots; the story is the fruitful branches. Karen Hesse is the story teller.

"Sometimes, while I'm at the piano,
I catch her reflection in the mirror,
standing in the kitchen, soft-eyed, while Daddy
finishes chores,
and I stretch my fingers over the keys,
and I play."

Wednesday 5 October 2005

afterwards

It's a rough movie. Artistic, yes. Strange, very much, but highly interesting usage of Time. Not a pretty ending, but neither is it all about the story. Great build up of details to capture the questioning mind. Very good to watch alone. Recommend a cloudy, stormy day.

I'm watching

It's raining. And growing cold. I'm watching a film called Tesseract, in the middle of the afternoon.

Tuesday 4 October 2005

part 2

Never give in, never let go, they said,
Hold fast to the life-giving spring,
The family name, the parent stream
Source of all desire, giver of good fish.

Morning passes into day, sun bright shining,
Reveals every shadow in the child's shades of mind,
Now to stumble over the Rock of Offense--
Make way, give up the devious ideas;

The words of men oft repeated
Become form and semblance of truth,
Streams of thought a rioting river,
Carry the child to imagined realms of utopia.

Wednesday 28 September 2005

(incomplete and undone)

Morning came quickly with transitory light
Questions slept on wake clothed in shape
Seeking answers over cantalope and tea
In the problem with me.

The grip of manmade affection
Woven round our frame by name,
While self love in the marrow of our bones
Uses the power of anger kicking at birth.

Monday 26 September 2005

All in the fall

When diving off a boat, in the drop from a tree, by a misstep from sidewalk to subway, men make leaps every day. Of both good and bad effect, he risks his life limb by limb to achieve a common good of work for wages, work for the job's sake, working to lift up those who can't help themselves. Whether we enjoy it or not, the work must go on; the services must be rendered that satisfy our coffers and fill our neighbour's need.

Wednesday 21 September 2005

Fasting or Feasting

What matters the body to the man except for the fact that the one cannot walk the earth with out the other? The fasters wax eloquent upon their personally experienced fact of health and longevity from their controlled regimes, while the feasters run for the full taxing of every cell in the sacred name of pleasure, and neither the worse for trying. We try to gain life, or we try to lose it. Either way, we fail in the bold attempt to catch the best of life. The reward of the dutiful eludes his grasp; the pleasing of the hedonist endures upon repetition. For what do we seek, but to be repaired like the well worn shoe? The body, it renews while dying every day; the heart, it mends from every blow while softening from the impact. We don't really want to lose self--but to remake a new one out of the best of the old.

Friday 16 September 2005

Adding to the Family

Two adoptees from an unknown Enidian's discard pile today: Oscar Wilde, a biographical tome by Richard Ellman and the burgundy hardbound edition of World's Classics: Tennyson to Whitman.

But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
............................The Lady of Shalott?
Lord Tennyson

Tuesday 30 August 2005

talk

The queen of Sheba and I were discussing hummingbirds yesterday. She has a passion for spices and herbs, which gardens attract glittering flocks of the miniature birds. They are like her other love: gem stones, and precious as gold. The more one sees of the birds, the more one wants to capture one to hold and speak to and learn its language. She must now find out how to keep the birds alive and well, if the taming of them is possible.

Morning muse

The dawn comes slowly, lingering over nightly dreams in a dark sky. At the quarter hour before seven, still the hint of light comes in a sulky dark grey mood. This in a Western sky that always begins this way, only to give way to light that steals across her broad face like a smile. The sun sends out his first piercing rays before she can say no and soon the morning breaks through the grey and the whole sky glows rosy for one momentary glance at the rising sun.

Monday 29 August 2005

The Doctrine

Obey Me, the first commandment with promise,
The last To love Me included in the first,
For to love is to do his will,
Obedient till death do us part.

Once in the homeland at heaven's gate,
Perfection acheived the prize reward,
Our treasures found stored on the shelf
In our house, jars of gold in rows.

Precious metals in the form of idols
Bear little resemblance to our desires,
The heart's longing for flesh-real loveliness--
Transparent cloaks of rainbow studded jems.

~Madeleine Dashwood

Wednesday 24 August 2005

What Happened?

THERE ARE SOME DAYS upon which we ask ourselves, what happened to the beauty inside of me? Something changes from how one perceived oneself yesterday. Music inspires this question. A book generates thought to find the conclusion.

A Japanses poet says:
Like cherry blossoms
In the spring,
Let us fall
Clean and radiant.

Sunday 21 August 2005

Dawning

Do you know George Herbert? He writes in English, Greek and Latin in one volume of Oxford World Classics.

"Awake sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;
Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth;
Unfold thy forehead gather'd into frowns:
Thy Saviour comes, and with him mirth:.....Awake, awake....."

the High Priestess

Christina Rossetti, high priestess of the Rossetti bortherhood, wrote poems in the pre-Raphaelite tradition. She lived to seek reclusion into the age of 64.
I found her words "Sleeping at Last" are ones that my king and I like to echo every night at bedtime:

Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over,
Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past,
Cold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover,
Sleeping at last.

No more a tired heart downcast or overcast,
No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover,
Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast.

Fast asleep. singing birds in their leafy cover
Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast.
Under the purple thyme and the purple clover
Sleeping at last.

Alas, sleep this side of eternity rarely offers me the pleasure of dreamless sleep or that in which shifting fears cannot penetrate. Rather, dreams retell and then perhaps purge somtime the pangs and troubles of living days.
Of course, the sleep of death promises such absolute wiping of the slate clean such that we wake into the light of real day in our own chamber being prepared for us even today.

Thursday 18 August 2005

The vanished day

Emily B. says tonight,
"The evening passes fast away,
'Tis almost time to rest;
What thoughts has left the vanished day,
What feelings, in thy breast?"

Tuesday 16 August 2005

'Twas one of Those

'Twas one of those dark cloudy days
That sometimes come in summer's blaze
When heaven drops not when earth is still
And deeper green is on the hill'
~Emily Bronte

Her poetry is wild and wooly and stares at one off the page. She is a kindred spirit, living on open moors buffeted by wind and extreme tempertures (I'm told). What else would one be but in despair if faced with such climate in such terrain? The very atomosphere either lifts one to itself or presses the body into the ground--as if we weren't bitterly burdened enough creatures already!

"...Yes, as my swift days near heir goal,
'Tis all that I implore;
In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure."

Monday 15 August 2005

a few favourite things

This log is ideologically based upon the best re-told myth ever, Till We have Faces, by my spiritual mentor, Mr Lewis. After considering the waste of time this blog may be, and a long night's sleep later, I forge ahead with highest ambitions (as usual), low expectations, and no excuses for egotistical madness. Well, nothing to apologise for yet.