i cannot hear a word of it

once again i find myself at the convergence of conundra that is catholicism. dbr and i attended mass on ash wednesday, and via her anxiety about being queer and being in that space, i again felt the tug of the abyss. at a retreat several years ago, i did a trust building exercise. one was blindfolded and had to trust the other to lead them around. i remember that i was not undone by the blindness and the interdependency of it all. what was unsettling was the experience of feeling like i was walking on a ledge, that at any moment i might step off the edge or fall over and off. more and more i feel the horizon dimming and the gnawing hole where belief used to be.

[i should note that i just read Terry Eagleton's recent essay "An Unbelieving Age" in Commonweal Magazine. he really is a gifted writer - beautiful intelligibility. however, i am not as optimistic as Terry about the possibility of a) faith being "released from the burden of furnishing social orders with a set of rationales for its existence," or, therefore, b) faith's rediscovery of "its true purpose as a critique of all such politics." for one, these two goals seem contradictory. if one discourse or worldview seeks to critique another, it should be mutually accountable to the other. for this reason, faith does owe a coherent rationale to society. second, it seems to me, that there have been plenty of occasions when politics has had a better sense of justice and other various goods than faith. faith can be quite the arbitrary lover. in any case, both systems of faith and systems of politics are social orders and therefore fallible, so, again, i think it is important that these orders continue to justify their relevance.]

if i am really honest with myself, i do not believe a word of it. there. i wrote it. i cannot bend myself into postures of obedience, and i cannot abide how so many keep sitting their, just listening. and if the dissonance isn't loud enough, then there is the profession of faith. *silence* i see lips moving, but my heart is still. i cannot hear a word of it.

lent is usually the time of year when i revisit the scene of the crime taking both pleasure and pain in the liturgy that ruined me for any other ritual. however, this year, i realize that all affective connection to this ancient rite is slipping away. the only emotive utterance my body speaks is rage.

yes, rage, beyond lava melted veins, I am talking about the kind of rage that is a rock hard knot behind one's eyes and the declensions that make the eyes contract. i have this unrelenting throb.

the day after ash wednesday, i watched the recent FRONTLINE documentary Secrets of the Vatican. Catholics, especially those who spend their hours studying their tradition, know these things are happening. we know that the hierarchy has gone unchecked for two-thousand years. we know that clergy have preyed on the most vulnerable since inventing their vestments. we know that knowledge of and complicity in these abuses reaches all the way up to the see. we know that they are stealing money from the collection plates to pay the state, f-ing their sheep twice and three times over. we know that they veil their treasuries and those of other criminals behind their doilies and other finery. we know that they have yet to apologize. This neo-f[r]anciscan refrain of focusing on the things we can all agree on is just another call to silence.

why-t-f do people keep putting money in the basket? yes, i know. a lot of people work for the church. withholding resources would only do them harm. i would ask, then why-t-h are you working for the church?

all of this wears me down to a stone. this lent, i am trying to figure out how to teach Introduction to Christian Ethics at a Catholic university. this lent, i am lamenting all of the money and time i have given to this tradition via tuition and anger and thought. this lent, i lament my vocation.

spectacular humility

i joined Twitter for Lent. i am fasting from that other (in)famous social media site. i call this filling the freed space with meaning, since Lent is not just an exercise in abstention. it is about new, old, and/or neo* forms of reflection. tweeting as fasting? reflecting? praying out loud? dbr thinks this is ridiculous. whatever, it's all stardust.

really, i/you/ze/we/it/they are all stardust blown off Hir palm. how is that for inclusive language?

i've recently been contemplating what Neil DeGrasse calls "cosmic perspective." this is the idea that consciousness of the vastness of it all - the expanding web of matter - rather than make one feel small, actually, in tethering one to something infinite, grows one's sense of significance. we are just stardust, and yet, this is why we are spectacular.

spectacular humility - this is an aspiration that i am exploring this Lent.

i+alia a to z :: in - intimis[sea][me]

i left this unfinished, as i often do things. finishing seems too close to death. i am afraid of it - things ending, things beginning. i haven't written into this space since the trip ended. i haven't wanted to grieve leaving that salty place. when i think back to the summer, the first thing i taste is the Med. we had an epic tryst and now exchange love notes from time to time, but those first days of heart-racing inertia are passed. *sigh*

i envy my sweet friend who is only a train ride away. she took me there to say goodbye. we spent the weekend baptizing ourselves and admiring stones, gathering them into our pockets for G. we ate warm fruit. i bought a beach towel from Egypt with stars on it. it left blue fuzz all over me. i remembered i am a mermaid.

i+alia a to z :: uzzzzzzz - urbano zanzara

as is her way, my friend [i like to call her an american curmudgeon abroad] points out the obvious in a way that makes it more obvious [she is a scientist after all]. and then we laugh.

we were waiting for a bus from certosa di pavia [beautiful! but out of the way. definitely worth a visit if you're ever in milan], trying to catch some shade in the heat. i started going over the letters that i have left in the alphabet - u, v, t, z, k, n...i... to which my friend begins listing italian words that start with these letters. it dawned on me that this is an alphabet, implying a discursive landscape. my friend assumed that i was doing an alphabet in italian, whereas i had approached this thing spatially, experientially but not necessarily linguistically.

so i thought it was about time i supplied some vocabulary.

urbano - adj. translates to urban.

zanzara - noun. translates to mosquito.

milano è piena di zanzare in estate, so make sure you buy some bug repellant. i really like the sc johnson stuff i found over here: autan. it smells great and isn't sticky.

i+alia a to z :: m - but what about matisse?

twice on this adventure the lyrical colors of matisse have alluded me and my companions. first at the vatican museum when our whirlwind tour of rome made for a bypass of the modern galleries for the sake of making it to the basilica. a second time at the tate museum in liverpool's city center. we missed him by a hair. we were there on the 13th, and his constellation was set to open on the 19th, along with arrangements orbiting the works of barbara hepworth, man ray, pablo picasso, and jackson pollock.

we did, however, get to see chagall, the tate's current special exhibit, and, i guess, through him, a bit of matisse's bold palette shading soft figures. being in the world of chagall, like matisse, is like being in a dream. and i thought how much i want to skip through these color bleeding streets and meadows of shapes arm in arm with my sister.

the exhibit focused mostly on his earlier work, which is full of hope [i think] and studies of union - love, marriage, human and nature, color and form, despair and transcendence, tradition and innovation, faith and life. and i thought, this is what i and my sister, my sister and i are to each other - color and form.

where i read stories - the author's, the picture's - she reads technique - how is the painter painting? i wanted to know how she would see these paintings, what she would say about the use of color, the choices between fluidity and rigidity, or shadow and what these observations might say about the bigger picture, the story behind the practice, the artist's values.

the promenade struck me especially for its allegorical rendering of the union between earth and sky, faith and food - and the joy in finding home in this union.

we often see things differently, my sister and i, me and her, but this difference is our great gift to each other. i remember basking in the glow of raphael's school of athens at the vatican museum, contemplating the philosophical arrangements and commentary, rereading plato and aristotle in my mind's eye, the union of ideal and practice, when all of a sudden i hear her gasp when our guide turned her attention to the left hand wall [that is if you are facing into the school].

i turned as my sister's eyes twitched over the image, and she chattered excitedly: 'see how he [raphael] creates a light within the pictures? look at the light reflecting off the armor. look at the moon. can you believe he achieved this affect in eight hours?'

and in her shading of my perception, i could see more clearly how hope visits us in the darkest recesses of our hearts. she is the companion to our most difficult trials. she leads us out, a beacon in the night, in her ingenuity, using all surfaces as a resource for increasing warmth.

my sister has this kind of ingenuity. she is the best kind of companion when all is lost. she finds a way into the cell of grief and out again, because that is more difficult, getting out of grief, leaving the cave. it is more difficult because it requires doing. my sister is a doer, and i am grateful for it.

here's to hoping that she and i, i and she will someday find matisse. together.

i+alia [via sco+land] a to z :: o - owl post

j.k. rowling wrote the philosopher's stone in edinburgh. i was unaware until dbr suggested we visit the cafe where rowling sat daily with a cup of coffee until she'd finished that first manuscript. her bio says she had so little then that the folks at the cafe were kind enough to refill her cup at no charge.

so we set out on our second morning to have breakfast there. however, the adventure went a bit 'diagon ally' on us (thanks to the favorite for this "life changing" insight about rowling language play).

we found it so easily.

only to discover that we were in the wrong place. 'you are looking for the elephant house.' we were at elephants and bagels. [????] the cafe keeper sent us on our way. i found that folks in scotland give directions in one of two ways. if they know where something is, they point in the general direction. if not, they seem to point in the direction that you're headed. [????] dbr seemed to understand this, as she stopped to ask folks for directional assurances every three blocks or so. i found this confounding.

we found it by and by.

now, a suggestion based on our experience. do not go to the elephant house for a hot breakfast. it was terrible. the coffee, however, is great. much appreciated in the quagmire of cappuccinos and/or instant coffee that pebbles my path through europa. so, go for coffee and a treat [they looked great too] but not breakfast - overpriced and bland.

and it is definitely worth the visit. our favorite part was the love notes written to harry and rowling and all manner of character on the bathroom walls.

i am reminded that this book series has become a defining moment for a generation, one related, i think to the the explosion of a genre that seeks another kind of world and the power to realize it. i recently read a blog about my age group [those born between 1975 and 1982] as being stuck between Gen X and gen-y/the-millenials. seems we are the in-be-tweeners.

anyway, a link perhaps among these classifications is the rise of post*apocalyptic youth fiction [and reality tv, but don't get me started]. we seem to be struggling to define something - ourselves, our values, meaning - despite the realization of a certain measure of powerlessness. we find ourselves in a very broken world and running low on the resources for trans*formation. so we are fascinated by extremes - blunt reality and fantasy, futility and superpowers, pornographic violence and the utopic. what does it all mean?

no harry potter novel would be complete without some wonder-full episode about the magic of owl post. so we bought some postcards at the elephant house and wandered another diagonal route to the post office. unfortunately, delivery via owl was not on the menu, but who knows what is hidden in between.

i+alia [via sco+land] a to z :: p - a picnic in princes street park

this is more a travel tip than a blog post, but this is a travel series after all. one of my favorite moments in the UK was very simple. on our first afternoon in edinburgh, don't-be-ridiculous (henceforth dbr) and i walked all over trying to decide what we might want to commit to eating. the haze of PCSM was heavy. inside was too hot. outside was crowded. one place was just strange. ugh.

then dbr had a stroke of genius: 'why don't we go to the grocery at marks & spencer's to get some dinner and sit outside.' marks & spencer is a department store (super affordable!) that also has a grocery section. it was like Whole Foods meets local bodega. we landed a feast of fresh and interesting salads, plus two sandwiches, plus two bottles of water, and a bag of crisps for under a tenner [spelling? this is an expression use for a ten-pound note]. amazing!!

then we settled down to eat under the trees of princes street gardens just across from the train station in edinburgh. it was cool and crowded enough for people watching but big enough for privacy. also, gorgeous flora.

so, travel tip: if you're in the UK and short on cash or just feeling something fresh and easy, visit marks & spencer, and weather permitting [folks kept telling me that its usually awful], plop yourself down for a picnic.