Hodie Christus Natus Est

Gaudeamus!

I hope that everyone is having a happy or at least relatively calm festive period. I'll be off to midnight mass here myself in just a little bit. I can hardly wait - candle lit midnight birthday parties with singing and mulled wine are the best. (I am deeply uncool for saying that, I know...) I spent today tidying up, hunting for a new pair of pajamas and I made two trips to the grocery store because I forgot the bourbon the first time around. I had a crafting sort of afternoon and made this to go on top of my tree:

There are very few craft supplies in my flat but there's always plenty of newspaper.

Merry Christmas!

Dolce Fa Niente

I have been sleeping hours upon hours each day since term ended. Usually nine hours at night and a few more during the day. I haven't been able to sleep like this since I was a teenager/very early twenties. It's lovely but I keep wondering whether I haven't taken on an illness of some kind.

I've been very scholastically useless so far. This will change, probably tomorrow, because it has to if I want to do well and I do want to do well. I have essays for conferences to be written and a big presentation at 10.00am on the first day of term and so must crack on a little now or end up having to work on Christmas Day, which I refuse to let happen.

I have been socially very useful so far. I have been to three Christmas parties (two involving the dread 'networking' - but with think tank people, at least, so not as bad), a birthday party, afternoon al fresco mulled wine consumption, a Progress event featuring a speech given by Tessa Jowell in Westminster (my first time inside the Houses of Parliament - so exciting I could hardly keep from bouncing up and down like a small child) and a surprisingly non-awkward and contentedly uneventful night at the pub with that girl I (possibly stupidly) kissed.

That has been my life of the past week: reading the whole paper and drinking the entire pot of coffee in my pyjamas, desultory tidying up, novel consumption hour, possibly an errand but nothing too strenuous, novel consumption extended afternoon edition, bath, get dressed, sit on the uncrowded tube for an hour to get to the other side of town and reading and listening to music, four hours' good conversation and the trip home, here by night bus, there by miraculous catching of the last train. At home, the hot water bottle and some tea and back to sleep.

It's blissful, really. Such a nice contrast to the chronically recurring insomnia of mine.

Time to be more active now though. Take the work back up and add in the Christmas baking, hurray! Advent Lessons and Carols on Tuesday and I can hardly wait for midnight mass. I hope I'll get to take the night bus home in the snow and sit up top and stare out at it. Either way, it's procession time and lots of singing.

At home, no one ever wants to go to Christmas mass on Christmas Day except for me, so I think I'll go this year and indulge myself. I'm a happy person to feel that going to mass is an indulgence...that's a desire that sits easy on the conscience and is easily indulged, unlike so many of my other ones that nearly always trouble on the latter score if not the former.

So this post isn't about much but I haven't done much but drink and talk and read my way through Orlando, All Passion Spent and Madame Bovary. But I'm happy right now and that seems worth recording.

The Benthamite Utility Monster is Eating My Claims About Art: Help!

Last night I went to the ROH for the first time since moving back here, which was a thrill. I have missed it! It was only to go the Linbury Studio Theatre but any disappointment I might have felt at not getting in to see the main house was more than mitigated by the fact that I was there to see an old school friend of mine who had had some of his work commissioned for the ROH Firsts 09 season. The programme was a mixed bag but that's what happens with series like that.

Unbelievably, I have not even made it to the Tate Modern (easy enough walking distance from university) nor the National Gallery (ten minutes walk, if that far) since I got back here. No art, when that was one of the things I had most looked forward to having back. I have been just a little bit busy for some reason...but still.

I feel a lot better today than I have for a couple of weeks and I blame that entirely on my theatre excursion. I have for years realised that studying ballet was what got me through all the depression I had in high school, and that singing at church and working at the gallery have been a mainstay for me over the past few years. Nevertheless, I was genuinely surprised at how much better I felt last night. Art, it seems, is actively good for me. At the moment, I would say that it helps as much as klonopin does, though I wouldn't vouch for that being true if I were really in the depths.

I have generally been against the idea that art has or ought to have a utility value on the grounds that art works are not fungible in any meaningful way and utility values function off of a notion of exchangibility, which implies price and thus that art should be wholly a means rather than an end in itself*, so I worry about making a medicinal utility claim about it. However, I don't think that such a claim harms the dignity of an individual art work if I restrict the claim to art as a species of human activity and the end to which I make a claim that art is a means is an occultly achieved human end that art can achieve as a generality. I don't know; that's still a bit Benthamite. However, I do not make this claim universally: I imagine that there are others for whom the football or foreign language study or collecting match boxes achieves much the same end when art would not do the same. Actually, though, that is Benthamite ('pushpin is equal to poetry'). Oh dear. The dangers of making any claim to utility!

I need to have a think about this, but for now I shall just say hurrah for Art and hurrah for feeling better. At least for today, that has priority to philosophy.


*This is part of the good remains of the time I spent as a devout deontologist and secular humanist.

Happy Ordinary Sunday

My newsagent just asked me whether I was a poet. Apparently, he thinks I look like one. I think that this is one of the nicest mistakes anyone has ever made about me. I like the idea that someone could mistake me for a poet. Between that, finding a good neighborhood church and the weekend newspapers, I'm having one of the nicest days I've had since I got to London.

Maria Assumpta Est In Coelum, Angeli Gaudent

I said goodbye to my church today. It was our patronal feast day and we started down on the street corner and carried St. Mary on her litter under the canopy back into the church. For the anthem we had Arcadelt's Ave Maria and then some of my favorite hymns, including 278 (Sing we of the joys of Mary). Our last choir director wrote a descant for it specially for our choir that is very fun to sing; lots of high notes.

During announcements, our rector made me come downstairs to be bid farewell and gave me a blessing for my studies next year, which was nice but embarrassing. On top of that, our choir director asked me to sing the prayers, which is also nice and embarrassing; I sing just fine to be a choir member but my voice isn't really strong enough for me to sing by myself, at least, not in front of people. I can never quite make it, breathwise, to the end of 'Father we pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world'. The other versicles are easier because they are shorter.

Anyhow, it is strange to be leaving Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, as it is nicknamed. I was confirmed there and have been going to church there for five and a half years - I've been there longer than the current rector, I've been a choir member longer than anyone else who is currently in the choir, longer than our current choir director and organist, longer than any of the other 'young people'. We broke ground today for the new parish hall - I'm glad I was there to see it - but I'm sorry that I won't be around to see what happens next.

When I first started going to Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, there were five people under the age of forty, an interim priest who was doing things he ought not to have been doing*, no children and a rather paltry community life. As of today, our congregation has increased from around 100 active members to 150, we have enough children of varying ages that we have child altar servers, around twenty young people, gay, straight, single and married, and the median age of the parish has dropped from 54 to 39.

All of this is nice and it has been wonderful to participate in the growth of the parish but I'm going to miss my church most because it is where I discovered the mystery that is Christianity. When my then roommate and good friend dragged me off to church with her one Sunday morning, I was entirely unprepared by my lukewarm Presbyterian upbringing for the beauty and holiness of the liturgy. I spent the entire service in anxiety; on the one hand, I was enchanted by everything that was going on, on the other hand, I didn't know what to make of the statues and procession and the singing of the Regina Caeli at the end of the service. It seemed to be a good that I was going to church but was I not then guilty of idolatry? Church attendance felt like an occasion of sin. But I couldn't keep myself away the next Sunday, nor the Sunday after that, despite my initial quandary.

Confirmation didn't make the impression on me that I had hoped for - it seems to have been one of those rituals of life that comes here too early, there too late, as Forster puts it - but I will never forget the awe of God's presence that overcame me the first time I went to Benediction, nor the solemnity of my first Holy Week (Presbyterians don't really do Holy Week, at least not in my experience).

A building does not make a church, but those four walls are especially dear to me for having housed so much revelation and love. I'm heartsore at leaving my congregation and all the friends I have therein. And the choir! Will I ever again have the chance to sing Palestrina and Arcadelt and Tallis and Clemens non Papa and de Victoria again? (I do suspect myself of making a false idol of the music sometimes, hopefully not being in choir will help me get past it although I doubt I would ever be able to make my peace with a guitar led mass).

More than anything else that has happened so far this summer, leaving my church is the one thing that has made me feel, rather than know, that this part of my life is over, whether I want it to be or not. I'm scared, both of what might happen and what I might miss. When I was still studying ballet very seriously, it was a comfort to me that wherever I went, ballet class would always follow the same structure and that no matter what country I was in, I would be able to follow what was going on. Now, the structure of the mass gives me the same comfort. Even when I have been to mass in a country whose language I do not speak, I have been able to follow (excepting the sermon, of course) and say the prayers and creed and sanctus and so on quietly in English or in Latin. That will always be there, both in a church and in my heart, and ever my strength and shield.

Okay. My prose is getting a little out of control, so I should probably stop.

Everything here is over now.

____________________________________________________________

* He was trying to switch the church from being part of the Episcopal church to being part of the Anglican Church in America - much more conservative and against the wishes of most of the congregation but not necessarily those of the vestry, two of whom were very wealthy and tried to throw their influence around that way and who scared off all of the candidates for the new rector by pretending that their viewpoint was the majority viewpoint over a two year period before the bishop intervened, dissolved the search committee, froze the vestry and more or less appointed our current rector - happily, I had no idea this was going on at the time or I wouldn't still be there - for something that almost split the congregation and did drive many people away, there was very little gossip.

Greetings From Our Nation's Capital

I am up in DC where it will be around 37C tomorrow (100ish F) and humid as only a city built on a drained swamp can be. What can they have been thinking? Philadelphia (the original capital) has much nicer weather, if you ask me.

So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.

So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.

I have been here four days.

Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.

Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.

I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.

Don't Found a Church That Will Be Headed By Committee

Or do, perhaps. It seems still to be working for the Presbyterians.

I'm not sure if anyone who reads this has been paying attention to the state of the Anglican Church since the Episcopal Church in the US had General Convention recently but it is a sorry state of affairs. You can read about it here, our Presiding Bishop's letter is here, Rowan Williams' response is here and reflections from the Anglican communion institute are here.

Now, I have infinitely more patience with the Church trying to figure out what to do with non-heterosexual people than I do with the government (Barack Obama, what is the matter with you?) but I do not have much patience for wrongheaded arguments from anyone. My problem with the arguments coming out of Canterbury is that they frame the debate about opening ordination to non-celibate queer people and giving blessing on same-sex partnerships in terms of sex. It is not about sex, it is about love. Secondly, these arguments tend to implicitly assume that queer people exist outside of the community and are somehow intruding on the Church. This is not the case. Every single queer person on earth has parents, often siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends - they are not a discrete group of individuals but rooted deeply into society. To deny the full humanity of queer people affects not only any individual queer person, nor even merely those who fall into that category but also anyone who is a parent, child, relative or friend of someone who is queer.

Thirdly, to close up ranks by brandishing church tradition in the faces of those who want change and making threats of schism and rival communions is not Christian behavior. Nor, indeed, is doing so philosophically consistent with the origins of the Anglican church. To me, the great miracle of the Anglican church is that from its very beginning it managed to unite anti-monarchical Puritans with those who might have preferred to remain Catholic through having a single Book of Common Prayer. There is no clear reason, it seems to me, to think that it cannot hold us in communion now.

Blegh, such a frustrating mess. And all it will lead to is another report and then a conference and then an advisory and so on into darkness. It never will be resolved if the argument cannot be framed in proper terms because, until then, we will all be talking at cross purposes and waffling all the while. Nothing was ever solved by informal fallacies!

John Donne Sonnets XIV

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend,
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Like Creeping Damp

As the day when I'll move to my parents and away from dear old urban Appalachia approaches I find that I am losing my mind. I wish I were saying that in the colloquial sense but I am not. Somehow, ending an important relationship, giving up my cat, the prospect of double moving (first to DC, then to London) and dealing with the federal student loan system has frayed my sanity around the edges. Fancy that.

It's rather disappointing. I've been doing so well. Now around 11am and 4pm every day, I find I have to stop whatever I'm doing and lie down for a bit. I'm not much of one for tears but I find myself weeping a little with the slightest provocation - like an emotional incontinence. I feel like a specimen of Victorian female frailty. Perhaps I should go somewhere for my nerves and take a rest-cure...

My mother is going to come down and give me a hand next week. I was hoping not to have to ask her and it worries me a little to ask her (after all, won't that make her secretly hate me?) but something has to give and I'd rather it not be my mind. I need the help. I keep saying out loud - to myself alone and not the cat, alas - 'Yes, if your mother comes to help you she will secretly hate you and take it out of you in other ways.' Put that way, it is risible. My mother never takes anything out on anyone, not even the mean-spirited, gossip-mongering faction of the hospitality committee at her church. If she can forbear them - I can't, it's not even my church and I still almost lost my temper with them - then she can easily bear with me.

It'll be all right once I get up to my parents. I'm just pretty thoroughly uncomfortable, for now.

Continuing to Exist

I haven't been so sure about continuing this blog but I've found that I really miss it. So here I am.
Everything is a bit at sixes and sevens here; beyond personal life drama, I am also in the process of moving. I'm off to London for grad school in the fall to study philosophy and public policy - I can't remember whether I've said that before, so please forgive me if I'm repeating myself.

Either way, I'm very excited to be headed back to a country where 23 C counts as a heatwave. Where I sit, in urban Appalachia, we are having the exact same weather with the same lack of air-conditioning and all anyone can talk about is what a cold spring and summer we've had so far. From what I've been reading in the Guardian, the same weather is causing everyone to wilt across the Atlantic.

It's a little unfair of me to make mock. I remember the first summer after I moved here: I couldn't leave the house during the day from June til late September because the heat was overwhelming. I'm still not fully re-acclimatised. It certainly wasn't any warmer than this summer during the last summer I was in London (2003) but I seem to remember spending a lot of time on the 46 bus to get to Hampstead Heath and go swimming and eating unholy amounts of ice cream and thinking that I would sweat to death before the heat broke. However, after six years of being teased over my pusillanimous response to summer heat of the American south, it's hard to resist tittering in a friendly fashion.

I'm going to go spend about six weeks with my parents before I move overseas, which means that I'm in the odd process of dissolving my household now, still more than two months before I'll be heading overseas. The hardest part was finding a new home for my cat. I was there when he was born and brought him home exactly 5 years ago tomorrow, on the fourth of July. Now I'll be dropping him off at his new home in eleven days. Happily, he's going to a friend of mine whom I know to be good to cats. Still, it makes me upset to think about.

The fun part of this is giving away all my stuff. One of my friends (there are a bunch of us going to grad school this fall, including two who are also off to England) was joking about how it had all started to feel like an early Christian community, with everyone selling or giving away all they have. We've been swapping climate appropriate clothes and there's a lot of furniture changing hands. I've been putting together surprise boxes for various friends - filling them up with things that I think the recipient would enjoy having or make good use of. It's so nice not to have to make arrangements to move the furniture. I will easily be able to get myself and my books and clothes and paintings up to my parents' in my car.

The idea of not being here for next year's farm tour or this year's apple season and not being at Our Lady of the Holy Smokes for Easter (no more church choir!) is disturbing. However, whatever melancholia this premature nostalgia brings on is easily dispelled when I remember all things in London I like to do - there are so very many. I'll be back in the same town as some of my friends whom I haven't seen in six years and there will be tops of buses from which to stare out of the windows again and the Tate Modern and lunchtime concerts in the City churches and Primrose Hill and I won't have to drive everywhere. Walking will be easier, too, what with London being on an alluvial plane while I currently live in the mountains. You can't just go out and walk for a couple of hours here as you can there, and I miss it.

It's going to be nice to leave the ranks of America's uninsured too: due to state budget cuts, the mental health clinic I go to is now open only three days a week and they're about to dump patients like me, who aren't in a state of acute mental illness. I'm glad I won't have to figure out how to find appropriate care here next year.

I'm going to stop here for now with two requests:

1) There's no way for me to pretend that wretched things have happened in my personal life and that I am quite unhappy over the state of things. The world hasn't ended, however, and no one has died and I haven't lost my mind, so it will all be okay in the end. I just can't talk about it, so, though I know any enquiries would be friendly ones, please don't ask me about it.

2) I need to find a church in London: C of E, high, pref. Anglo-Catholic, and friendly to women and gay people. If you know of one (or of a way to try and find one - the diocese of London website is distinctly unhelpful), please tell me.

It's nice to be back.

Nonsense

Well. Here I still am.

It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.

So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.

It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?

This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.

Hello. I am alive.

This Is Not a Real Post

It is instead a Cretan paradox. (Ha ha...philosophy jokes are so deeply unfunny: classics jokes are much worse)

This is a link to one of the blogs I read: if you're looking for a patron saint of mentalisms besides St. Dymphna, have a look.

Look for a real post on Monday or Tuesday!

Rereading The Well of Loneliness

I have been enjoying my week's holiday so far by reading novels, something I can't usually do in term-time. I finished 'The Secret History', an old favorite, on Saturday and then picked up 'The Well of Loneliness', which I had not read in a very long time, much longer than I thought.
I realised that it had been a while when I came to a protracted reference to St. Therese of Lisieux on pages 264-266 that I did not remember. My former roommate is very much devoted to St. Therese and I have, consequently, heard much about her, had her picture hanging in my hallway and seen the movie (yes really). If I had read Well of Loneliness since she and I started sharing living space back in 2004, there could be no way that that would have escaped my notice.

I read Well of Loneliness, as most people do, because it was the first novel about lesbians, much referenced in other literature and also the subject of legal prosecution. When I first read it, when I first came out, I was an atheist. Not only was I an atheist, but I was quite militant about it. I started down the merry path to losing my faith for several reasons but one that looms above the others is my first girlfriend. Referring to her as a girlfriend is somewhat overstating the case because it was all very virginal and inchoate and unnamed but the sense of it is true. She was Roman Catholic, and eventually broke things off between us because of it. Nothing that happened between us ever felt like a sin, much less a mortal sin, to me. I had first begun to suspect that I might be gay when I was thirteen and it, remarkably, hadn't troubled me one bit. I was confident (rightly, as it turns out) that my parents would love me either way and nothing in my upbringing had disposed me to think that being gay was wrong or bad. Then, just as it was all starting to become clear to me at the age of fifteen, it suddenly took on the quality of sin. It was horribly confusing, to the point that I just stopped thinking about it and assumed that I must really be straight. Indeed, all the external evidence pointed in that direction. I was a very serious ballet student (hadn't mentioned that before, had I? I even had a tiny little professional career) and what could be more girly and normal than ballet?

Time went by, I went rigorously through the motions of being heterosexual and assumed that my dissatisfaction was the result of my quite serious devotion, religious in its quality, to my vocation. Gradually it became clear that things were not going to work out for me professionally and, rather than resigning myself to teaching dance for the rest of my life, I decided to go to university and there I took an Introduction to Philosophy course, which has had a pronounced effect on my life. It was in that class that I first learned how to think and think clearly; I took great joy that summer in pulling apart and setting in order all the woolly concepts in my mind.

In this way, I ended the summer an atheist and newly questioning my sexuality. When I went back to university that fall, I came out to my friends and proceeded to fall profoundly in love, quite to my surprise.

I managed, of course, to fall in love with a very religious girl who had been raised in one of those bible-thumping non-denominational southern churches. In the course of time, she too split up with me for religious reasons. But this time, it had the opposite effect on me. Because I was so in love with her, I started to reconsider God. It was impossible for me, so enamored, to ignore or dismiss anything so important to her.

In the aftermath, I found that my faith had grown back. It took some years but after I ended up living in the US and sharing a roof with my friend who was devoted to St. Therese, I started going to church. A year or so later I was confirmed and so began my tussle with the lesbianisms and the church.

This is why re-reading Well of Loneliness was so interesting to me. It is the only novel I know of that deals both with lesbians and the church in a positive way. There is a great deal more subtlety in the novel than I remembered and more than many grant to Radclyffe Hall. For one thing, she is genuinely concerned about the reconciliation of heterosexist society with gay people. There is an unusual lack of simple xenophobia and classism. Class anxiety is a theme in the book but the common bond among those who share "the mark of Cain" causes the characters to band together. The distress that heterosexism and homophobia exert on gay people is carefully delineated and exposed as prejudice. It is what my ex would call a 'golf lesbian'* attitude toward the world; an attitude that assumes that the norms of heterosexist society have intrinsic and essential worth but that accommodation must be made for non-heterosexuals.

However, Hall's attitude toward this accommodation is unusual even for today. She makes no apology for gender variation. There is, at least in America, considerable hostility from some gay people toward other gay people who "flaunt" too much or look too different and thereby harm the cause of acceptance.** Hall, on the other hand, accepts visible gender variation as a natural part of homosexual orientation.***

Hall challenges the church and challenges God for forsaking gay people instead of rejecting them out of hand, in the facile way that some (certainly not all - there are definitely thoughtful atheists authors out there****) authors do. This alone is enough to make me re-value the Well of Loneliness, cheesy anthropomorphy and all.


*The term 'golf lesbian' originates with her and is meant to indicate that post second-waver, white woman, acommodationist, 'we're just like everyone else and lesbians who are not like us should learn to behave' attitude.

**I have little patience for this; after all, straight people have expensive weddings, announce their banns in church, have baby showers, wear wedding rings, have sex all over the telly all the time, a rigorous dress and behavior code wherewith to recognize themselves and so on. If that's not flaunting one's sexuality, I don't know what would be.

***I do, of course, resent her attitude that 'normal' looking women are not really as gay as gender queer women being as I am more than a little on the feminine side (not femme and really, really not a 'lipstick lesbian.' I think I might have worn lipstick about four times in my life. I hate that term.)

**** In a somewhat gratuitous aside, I would like to mention that Ian McEwan is not one of them - blegh - not even to mention that he is a full-fledged member of the gender and patriarchy police.

The first picture is a holy card of St. Therese that I have borrowed from the blog Holy Cards For Your Inspiration and the second is that well-known one of Marguerite 'John' Radclyffe Hall and her lifelong partner Una Troubridge. I sincerely wish that blogger would allow for captions and footnotes, don't you?

Lenten Listening

For all those of you who want a little comparative religion scholarly talk or some interesting Lenten listening, here is a link that will take you to an interview with Bart Ehrman on the radio show Fresh Air. It's a very interesting discussion about the differences among the four gospels and the ways they are used in church liturgy. Ehrman recently wrote Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them).

I had just translated the Latin text to the Tenebrae we're singing at church this year before I heard this and it made me think twice about the two statements of Jesus in it, the first one being Deus meus, ut quid me dereliquisti (My God, why have you abandoned me?) and the second one being Pater in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum (Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.) I didn't realize, poor biblical scholar that I am, that these came from two different gospels but it's one of the first things mentioned in the interview.


The whole text of the Tenebrae

Tenebrae factae sunt dum crucifixissent Jesu Judaei. Et circa horam nonam, exclamavit Jesus voce magnam: Deus meus, ut quid me dereliquisti. Et inclinato capite, emisset spiritum. Exclamans Jesus voce magna, ait: Pater in manus tuas, commendo spiritum meum. Et inclinato capite, emisset spiritum.

Darkness had fallen when they crucified Jesus of Judea; and about the ninth hour, Jesus called out in a loud voice: ‘My God, why have you abandoned me?’
And bowing his head, he breathed out his spirit.
Crying out, Jesus in a loud voice said: ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’
And, bowing his head, he breathed out his spirit.

Expatriatisms

I am very pleased at the prospect of a shiny new warm week with no classes in it. I spent yesterday in the botanical gardens and today I came home from church and had a very housewifely afternoon. My apartment has now been thoroughly aired out and the furniture shifted in order to mop. My summer clothes have been unearthed and I have two boxes for the Goodwill (Oxfam equivalent).

The weather this weekend could only with difficulty be more different from last weekend's. Here is the churchyard at Our Lady of the Holy Smokes last weekend right after evensong:

Beautiful, no? This Sunday, however, I wore a sundress to church and sandals, instead of last week's two undershirts, scarf wrapped around hat, boots and two pairs of socks and so on.

It suddenly occurred to me during church today that I will be living here for perhaps only a few more months. I knew that spring break meant that only seven and a half weeks of classes remained but I hadn't really thought about the fact that my days here are numberable. Realising this, smack in the middle of mass, made me quite melancholy. I love my little church and I grown happily accustomed to many of the aspects of living here. Apple picking in the fall, for instance, and having a porch and the way that even the barbecue places in this town have vegan options on the menu.

It's hard to know what to think. I never thought I'd be here this long and I dearly hope that I will be adding another visa to my passport in September but, just as there are several parts of myself that decidely do not fit in here in Bairdville, there are parts of me that will be forced into disuse when, if I go elsewhere. This is what comes of growing up in two countries, I suppose.

When I moved, I moved back to the south because if I had to live in America, the south was at least somewhat familiar. I lived up north for a year and hated it. Not only was it not London, but it was also not anything like what I remembered of America, accent or otherwise. It was as much a foreign country as Britain used to be. My sister, conversely, went to university up north and would rather leave the East Coast altogether than move down south, as far as I can tell. But then, she was much younger when we moved overseas in the first place and all her American friends from school in London are northerners, so I imagine the north felt as normal as the south to her when she came back.

I don't necessarily mind that I never quite fit into whichever place I live but it would be a relief to go somewhere where it will be obvious that I don't fit in. Here, I sound like I'm more or less from here, which I am, but I dress differently and think differently and care about some things that few here care about: things that are not priorities, culturally, like modern fiction or political theory. At least when I live somewhere where I can open my mouth and sound like a foreigner, I have some room to maneuver (manoeuvre) among my own self and the expectations of others.

Reading back, this sounds a little bitter but honestly I had rather have this perpetual internal dislocation than not. Most of the people I know here are from this part of the state, or at least this state, whose parents live in the house of their childhood and who have never lived more than 150 miles from their families, if that far. I can't imagine what that would be like. I would rather make jokes about BA flight 2226 being my hometown and mix up my spellings and never fit in too smoothly.

I'm Posting This Even Though It's Making Me Nervous

I have just recently realized that I am not only out of touch with my body but really out of touch with being a lesbian.

The mentalisms will put one out of touch with the body: all that focus on mood and mind. One forgets.

I've had confused feelings about being gay for years now, ever since the ex-ex-ex girlfriend and I split up. It was awful. I fell hard for her and I'm still carrying not a torch but perhaps something like a wax taper for her.

Before that, being a lesbian, especially an out lesbian, was a joyful thing to me. I love women. They're beautiful.

Women deserve so much.

I've gained some queasiness about it from all that I've read with respect to the church. It has made me uneasy about the morality of it. I can't see any logical reason that it should be immoral. There are no arguments against that do not have counter-arguments equally strong or stronger. I think I should go speak to a priest about it.

I suppose it is rather that it has made me envy heterosexuality. The simplicity of it all; the ease of flirting, the ease of not having to out oneself at every turn, the comfort of not having to worry about holding hands. I can't imagine receiving all that community support and well-wishing.

This envy, though, is a dangerous thing. It comes under the heading of thou shalt not covet anything of thy neighbor's. I need to learn again how to be content with the way God made me. Out of shame, I have been stifling myself. I am worried about the very real possibility of rejection. I have given in to the heteronormativity.

My question is: how do I get back?

Ash Wednesday

It's that time of year again. Tomorrow, all the statues and icons in the church will be swathed in muddy purple felt, the bell will be replaced by a wooden block and there will be no saying alleluia until Easter vigil.

I'm abstaining from the internets tomorrow, apart from checking my school e-mail, being as it's a fast day and I can't properly fast from food on account of the medication.

For Lent, I'm going to take up the daily office (again - maybe this time it'll stick.) I am also going to take up looking after myself as I should: this is something that tends to slip away in the illness but, as I am doing well, I shall spend Lent concentrating on getting the hang of it again. There is one thing I'm giving up but I'm not going to share that here.

I like taking things up for Lent as well as giving them up. Lent is a very interesting time in the church year. Not only do we sing the best music and lots of gregorian chant but it's a church-endorsed time to remake ourselves and draw closer to God. Saying the daily office will remind me, twice a day, of the relationship between God, the world and humanity. Looking after myself will help me to see myself and, by extension, others with the kind of love and respect God has for all creation. I hope that all those of you who are reading - whether you are a practicing christian, practicing another religion, atheist or agnostic - have a Lenten season full of love and revelation.

For your aesthetic and/or religious enjoyment, here is a choir (not the one I sing in - there are only five of us and Our Lady of the Holy Smokes does not look like that at all) singing Lotti's Miserere, which we will be singing tonight.




Misere mei, Deus
Secundam magnam misericordiam tuam
et secundum multitudenem miserationem tuarum,
dele iniquitatem meam

Have mercy upon me, O God, after your ruthful heart, and, according to your multitude of mercy, blot out my sins.

own translation

Thesis and Pancakes

I am pleased to announce that I have finished a full draft of my thesis! It is 26 pages long (not as long as I'd hoped but I ran out of things to say and the energy to say them) and has an introduction, a thesis statement, a conclusion and a bibliography. No serious birth defects, in other words. And I found my way around an informal fallacy that I hadn't been able to figure out how to avoid.

I can't believe I finally finished it. Now, of course, comes all the revising and so on, but that seems very appropriate work for Lent.

I'm off to eat pancakes at church now.

Keeping My Hand In

I was doing so well at posting regularly and now...

My only excuse is having been busier than I have been in a year. This is not going to be much of a post; I'm just trying to keep my hand in and not get to far off the habit of posting.

It has been quite a week. After the disaster that was last weekend and Tuesday (panic attack, then hungover on klonopin, then waking up dizzy and ill for no apparent reason on Tuesday and missing classes) I realized that something had to go. I'm glad that I tried to do all of the things I was trying to do but I can't quite do them all. Wednesday night I sat down and tried to decide what to drop. I have to keep all my silly general education courses because otherwise I can't graduate. I'm not going to drop church choir because we're about to get into the Lent and then Easter time of year - the really interesting music time of year - and I wasn't willing to let go of Spanish and the social justice committee. I can't stop working at the gallery. Working there just about saved my life this summer and gave me enough confidence to go back to school; besides, I'm involved in so many worthwhile projects there that it feels immoral to walk away.

There remained only one option. I added up all the hours I spent on non-school things and all the hours I spent on Greek and found that while I spend approximately eleven hours on church and the gallery, I spend seven hours doing homework for Greek and three hours in the actual class. If I dropped Greek, I would cut the amount of time I spent on non-essential school things in half.

So now, sadly, I am no longer studying Homer. I am sorry about it but all of the sudden I felt a thousand times better and I know it was the right thing to do. No sense in running myself into the ground, even for Homer.

It's hard for me to make these decisions. I don't like to let people down so I usually postpone it until I can't do anything at all anymore so that I won't have to feel guilty about it. Of course, this is not the best way to handle things nor does it really stop me from feeling guilty. On the one hand, I have no problem admitting that I have bipolar disorder and that it stops me from being able to do things I want to do sometimes. On the other, I have a hard time accepting this in a day to day fashion. Discerning what it is that I'm doing now that will have a bad effect in the future and then following through by choosing not to carry on doing it anyway is not easy for me. I'm pleased that I've done it this time.

Snow Day

We have a snow day today, which is lovely. So far this semester we've had quite a bit of snow but we've only had late-start days, which are annoying on account of then no one can remember when classes start and end and so on. Everything runs late and bumps into whatever else you have to do: in my case, doctor's appointments and church. All the people with children, and we have quite a few students with children, have their difficulties multiplied as their children's school will have a snow day when we have a late start day and so on. You can imagine the chaos.

I am enjoying mine by drinking many cups of tea and working on the conference paper and the senior thesis and memorizing the first seven lines of the Iliad.

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.*

(I'm really surprised it stayed in Greek)

As of Friday, I will already be a quarter of the way through the semester. I can hardly believe it. Soon it will be spring break and I'll get to drag out the sundresses from under the bed. By the time spring break comes, I'll be waiting for acceptance/rejection letters from grad schools. I will have finished my thesis and be preparing a presentation form of it. I'll be waiting to hear from two other conferences.

Thinking about this is nice but then my mind pops back to today and I think, how will I ever squeeze out enough time to do all that? It's a good question. I can't even find the energy or concentration to clean up the house.

Then again I can think back five weeks and remember how overwhelmed I was at the mere idea of going to school. I was sure I'd give up in the second week. I was very down from having been at my parents and couldn't keep up with some extremely basic things, too embarrassing to detail here. Now I am at least more or less on top of the day to day homework and I look presentable on a daily basis, something I would not have been able to forsee myself doing. Perhaps I'm in the same boat now, unable to see how I will do what I need to do but about to do it all the same.

I hope so.



*copied and pasted from the Perseus Project