Arcadia Est Imperare Orbi Universo

On this day in the year 1571 was fought the Battle of Lepanto.

Lepanto

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain–hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,–
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces–four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still–hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,–
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed–
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign–
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.

Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

(G.K. Chesterton)

Still looking for work. It's hard not to be discouraged some days. This is one of them.

Today I got the results of the library assistant exam I took last week. There were 89 questions.

I got pretty excited when I read "Congratulations on passing with a score of 89". Then I read the next sentence:

"Your rank on the eligibility list is 12."

You might be asking yourself how I could get every question correct and still be 12th on the eligibility list. Well, I'm not a veteran, I'm not a woman, and I'm not a minority. The City of Tacoma is required to give you extra points on the exam if you happen to be any of those.

Twelfth place is apparently as high as I could possibly get.

Now, they'll be calling in the top three candidates for each position, of which there are between one and four openings.

That means that even though I got the highest score I could possibly get, I will not be called in to interview unless there are four openings.

Given what I know of Tacoma's library budget issues, fat chance.

Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees--
Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Keith Olbermann quotes Abraham Lincoln, Rod Serling, and "Dick" Cheney.

( Simply brilliant )

Which of Henry VIII's wives are you?


this quiz was made by Lori Fury

It figures, eh?

---

Into Great Silence, which we saw at SIFF last week, is ostensibly a documentary about the Carthusian monks of Grande Chartreuse.



I say ostensibly, because it is actually a great deal more and less than that. Like the lives of these monks themselves, this film is a meditation on silence. If you are looking for a typical documentary, with history facts and figures, a stirring orchestral soundtrack, and the earnest voice of Ken Burns or James Burke, you will, I fear, be sorely disappointed.

The film intead, documents in the purest sense. The camera follows the monks through the routine of their day and the seasons. They pray, they work, they eat; they do all the ordinary things you might expect a monk to do. But these monks do them in silence.

This film is two hours forty five minutes, of which there are perhaps fifteen minutes total of interview and dialogue.

Instead we hear the ordinary sounds of the world, sounds so common we normally don't hear them at all. In the darkened theatre, however, the shuffling of feet and the opening and closing of doors echo in the seats and begin to take on meaning beyond mere words. We hear the monks at chapel, chanting the hours. We hear birds in windblown trees, singing the days. And the bells, always the bells calling the monks and the audience to prayer.

The rasping sound of scissors cutting cloth was positively terrifying.

A handful of people in the audience couldn't stand the silence. They left.

The film is, as you might expect, intensely visual. We explore the faces of the monks as if they were the surfaces of alien worlds. Sometimes the camera will focus on an odd bit of the monks' world; the warm eggshell plaster wall of a room, the soft red glow of the tabernacle light in the darkened chapel, the stark white of snow, the intense green of the springtime garden.

At some point, it began to dawn on me that the film was not just a meditation on auditory silence, but also on visual silence. Silence isn't quiet by any means; there are always ambient sounds in nature because nature is alive and moving all the time. The silence we seek is the silence in our own heads and own hearts so that we may listen for God in the breeze.

In the same way, the world of these monks is visually silent. Set amid the stunning beauty of the alps, Grande Chartreuse is a world of stone and plaster and wood, of natural colours and shapes rough-hewn to human purpose. But if we think for a moment that this is a stark black and white and grey place of puritan sensibilities, the camera invites us to look closer.

Because in even the most basic things, there is a meticulous attention to detail that I found breathtaking.

Wooden floors are carefully inlaid in stately patterns. We catch a glimpse of a ceiling, painted with portrait cameos of long ago abbots. The seats in the choir are intricately carved.

And this meticulous attention to detail doesn't stop with the stately and the permanent. We see the monks exercise this intense mindfulness in everything they do, whether it's carefully fixing a hiking boot or measuring and cutting wood for the stoves or digging the snow from the garden. They are careful; they are methodical; they are living the hell out of the moment they're in.

What a contrast this was when we walked out of the theatre onto University Street in Seattle, with its cacophany of colour and noise. Every human projecting their lifestyle and image and style in what they wore and how they talked. Constant talk. Bright clashing colour. Jarring street noise. Everyone and thing projecting noise.

I was disoriented and had a hard time taking it in. Like I was stoned. It was just too much to process.

In fact, I rapidly discovered that the only way to function was to ignore huge swaths of it, to just not see the danger green dumpster in the alley or the constant crush of faces desperately trying to project their uniqueness.

I found I could only function in the city when I deliberately discarded that silence and mindfulness that we had just spent three hours cultivating. Ultimately, this film is not really a documentary about monks at all, but rather a damning indictment of the pace and frenzy of the modern world.

Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. (1 Kings 19:11-12)

Raise a glass of cheer, my friends, to Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, on what would have been his 114th birthday.



All that is gold does not glitter.
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Many happy returns of the King day.

I walked to high school the next day, unknowing. I remember it as being bitterly cold, but that may very well be something my brain added after the fact.

Two and a half miles to school. I took different routes, depending on my mood. That day I walked down 55th to Western and followed Western down to 63rd. I remember black chunks of polluted ice thrown up against the curbs. The odd, muffled sound of cars on packed grey snow. A sky the colour of the street.

I remember a crowd of students gathered around the news stand at the corner of 63rd and Western. I bought a paper, the Chicago Tribune. It didn't sink in. It couldn't be true. Warm in my big coat and scarf, I was numb.

The newspaper was taken from me during study hall by Br. Paduch. I'm not sure I was even reading it. I was just staring at it in disbelief.

I have nothing very profound to say, except that it was a cold day and my heart was empty.

You are not helpless in the face of anarchy and chaos. You can make a positive change in the world right now.

I encourage everybody to make a contribution to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

Now would be good.

Here are some places you can start:

Red Cross

Catholic Charities

Direct Relief International

Network for Good

Edited to add: World Vision.


 

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered.

(Richard II, 3.2.155-160)

It's just after seven in the morning. No one else is awake here. I've a cup of tea and the sound of pounding rain outside to keep me company. I am very conscious right now of how alone we all are in the world.

In the midst of my cognitive dissonance the other day, I kept coming back to one phrase over and over in my wandering mind. That day, I named a post for it, but in my typical randomness did not explain it.

We live, each of us, in our own silent worlds.

To put it another way, nobody can get into your skull but you. The silence I mean is our interior silence.

Silence is necessary for contemplation, for the interior life. Silence and stillness evoke holiness. It's not that we can block out the noise of the world, or even that we don't need it or want it in our lives. Humans remain tribal animals. In one sense, we are at our best and most effective when we act in groups. And parties by ourselves are rarely very satisfying.

Sometimes we must dwell in ourselves, in our own silent world, just to keep our minds and our souls operating correctly. Serenity within (a nearly impossible goal, I find) promotes serenity in the world. Imagine a world where everyone could dwell in silence from time to time. Imagine a world where everyone took the time to quiet their seething brains and just... be for a while.

As the great sage Amenemope said more than 3000 years ago, "Fill yourself with silence; you will find life and your body shall flourish upon the earth." You will find life. Too often we think of life as movement. I am a human being, not a human is, after all. We live our lives like rushing waters seeking the sea.

Sometimes, we need to meander into an eddy.

It's a delicious irony to me that my sponsor for RCIA is named Eddie Carpenter. Work it out. That God, He's a tricky one.

In just over twelve hours I shall be baptised into a new community. There will be hundreds, perhaps a thousand, people there. Some are core members of the parish community; I know many of them already. Some are more distant members, the Catholics that only attend church at Easter and Christmas. Some aren't members at all; they're friends and relatives of those undergoing baptism or confirmation into the Church, or they're the curious or the hungry.

All of them are welcome. In twelve hours.

Between then and now, the world goes one. I've got to do some laundry, maybe vacuum. At 10:30 or so we're going to the church to practice and make sure everyone has their cues right.

There is another community here, of course. Friends are coming over in the evening to attend my baptism. Kevin flew in from California, God bless him. Janet's driving in. Brother Theo's coming (hopefully bringing my daughter Victoria with him). And Francine and her daughter Michaela will attend as well.

For those keeping track, that's a Christian, a Shaman, an Agnostic, a Pagan, a (Catholic) Christian, and a Jew.

They are, each of them, on their own road, their own interior road. In a sense, it's the same road. There is only one road, after all, but each traveller is veiled from the other by their own silence.

How can one describe the road? I've tried. You can't. The road that can be described is not the eternal road.

That God, He's a tricky one.

Like Pilate, we are each of us looking for Truth. God is veiled from us, but the veil, I think, is the one we put over our own eyes.