Sorry, Jeeves

Rural Setting, forest and rocks, Jeeves and Wooster walking with Young Poet:

POET (explaining why he doesn't want to accept a stipend from a relative on condition that he go to New York and live the city life):

"I like to stay in my pajamas until 5 o'clock; then usually I just throw a sweater over them."

WOOSTER:

"Don't listen, Jeeves!"

JEEVES:

"uhhh .... (sinks down on rock and drops head in hands)..... I shall be better directly, sir."

A roundabout way of saying it's 10:30 and I haven't taken my bath yet. In fact, I haven't really gotten off the computer. I've been updating my Facebook and Twitter subscription, looking out at the rain, answering emails, updating blog structure and various other peaceful, rural things of the sort that don't involve getting out of my chair by the window.

Off to get the day started!

Watching Bleak House

We didn't get around to playing Robo-Rally. I made pizza and ginger cookies and it all took a long time. But we did watch 3 episodes of Bleak House while we ate dinner, and that was fun -- the older four kids and I -- the youngers were in their bedrooms, and Kevin was working. Usually it is me off somewhere while Kevin is watching movies with the kids, but Clare knows I am more likely to sit down for a classic book adaptation than for most anything else.

A couple of years ago we got this Charles Dickens collection. So far we've watched Martin Chuzzlewit, which the kids absolutely loved and have watched twice, and Our Mutual Friend, which was quite good too.

Our Mutual Friend was fun because we watched it during Lent, the year before last, I think; we had given up videos and most sweets for Lent so we watched an episode each Sunday and Clare planned a round of teas and dainties -- like, lemon bread and lemon ginger tea for one week, chocolate caramel chai and oreo-frosted tea cake another time, and so on. She printed it out on a pretty itinerary, and we would bring our little tea pot and goodies upstairs every Sunday afternoon. The second to last episode, we were visiting Liam at college and bringing Sean to a football combine in the same area, so we stayed at Ventura beach overnight and watched the penultimate episode along with almond poppyseed muffins and chicken salad rolls and some kind of tea which we brought with us and made at the hotel. It is a nice memory.

Bleak House is a bit odd.... quite dark in the filming. The London scenes are so slimy and grey and grotesque that it feels to me a bit like the second Pirates of the Caribbean. You expect to see people growing barnacles or merging into walls. The pacing is odd in places, and you can really feel the persona of the director in the way he plans the camera shots. We're on the 5th episode now and all the multiple Dickens characters that make these movies quite brisk to keep up with visually are moving towards their Dickensian plot revelations and unravellings of mystery. It's very worthwhile to watch, but not quite so much a tea and muffin type movie, nor quite as hilarity-inducing as the kids found Martin Chuzzlewit. Of Bleak House, Chesterton writes:

Bleak House has every characteristic of his new realistic culture. Dickens never now, as in his early books, revels in the parts he likes and scamps the parts he does not, after the manner of Scott. He does not, as in previous tales, leave his heroes and heroines mere walking gentlemen and ladies with nothing at all to do but walk: he expends upon them at least ingenuity. By the expedients (successful or not) of the self-revelation of Esther or the humorous inconsistencies of Rick, he makes his younger figures if not lovable at least readable. Everywhere we see this tighter and more careful grip. He does not, for instance, when he wishes to denounce a dark institution, sandwich it in as a mere episode in a rambling story of adventure, as the debtor's prison is embedded in the body of "Pickwick" or the low Yorkshire school in the body of "Nicholas Nickleby." He puts the Court of Chancery in the centre of the stage, a sombre and sinister temple, and groups round it in artistic relation decaying and frantic figures, its offspring and its satirists, An old dipsomaniac keeps a rag and bone shop, type of futility and antiquity, and calls himself the Lord Chancellor. A little mad old maid hangs about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary lawsuit, and says with perfect and pungent irony, "I am expecting a judgment shortly. On the Day of Judgment." Rick and Ada and Esther are not mere strollers who have strayed into the court of law, they are its children, its symbols, and its victims. The righteous indignation of the book is not at the red heat of anarchy, but at the white heat of art. Its anger is patient and plodding, like some historic revenge. Moreover, it slowly and carefully creates the real psychology of oppression. The endless formality, the endless unemotional urbanity, the endless hope deferred, these things make one feel the fact of injustice more than the madness of Nero.

Also, I did finish Kant and the Nineteenth Century today as I had hoped to, though I had to stay up late to do so (and once dozed off with my reading glasses on my nose, and now it's even later and I'm wide awake).

Incipit vita nova

Acedia and Me is the title of the Kathleen Norris book I have out of the library right now, a book you said I would probably like, Lissla, and of course you are right, though I am only on the first pages. The book starts with the story of the monk who, according to St John Cassian:

wove baskets as he prayed, and subsisted on food from his garden and a few date palms. Unlike monks who lived closer to cities and could sell their baskets there, Paul

"could not do any other work to support himself because his dwelling was separated from towns and from habitable land by a seven days' journey through the desert . . . and transportation cost more than he could get for the work that he did. He used to collect palm fronds and always exact a day's labor from himself just as if this were his means of support. And when his cave was filled with a whole year's work, he would burn up what he had so carefully toiled over each year."

By coincidence, Wall-E arrived from Netflix yesterday, so we all sat down and watched it together (and you probably shouldn't keep reading this if you haven't seen the movie -- I tried to avoid real spoilers but still....) . The charming robot protaganist with his simple (seemingly futile) diligence -- endlessly compacting and stacking seemingly infinite heaps of trash left by the people who had abandoned Earth after ruining it --reminded me of the remedy for acedia of St Anthony of the Desert:

When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, 'Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?' A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard the angel saying to him, 'Do this and you will be saved.' At these words, Anthony was filled with joy and courage. He did this, and he was saved.

The little robot Wall-E does not pray, precisely, but his cheerful orderly work of containing and arranging garbage that somebody else had made centuries before, his careful respect for life even in its humblest forms, his admiration for human ingenuity and liveliness (he endlessly watches Michael Crawford's Put on Your Sunday Best on DVD and carefully sorts and arranges artifacts of civilization such as spoons and hinged boxes), his reverence for the beauty of the robot Eve, and even the several-times-repeated motif of clasped robotic hands evokes Love, an abiding thing that goes beyond the limitations of engineering and becomes something close to embodied prayer. And in the end comes a kind of new life that one could never have imagined, not just for himself, but for the Earth itself and its children.

In the review of Wall-E linked to above, Stephen Greydanus writes of the change that comes to Wall-E's life:

The words of Dante catching his first glimpse of Beatrice apply: Incipit vita nova, “Here begins the new life.”The new life is irrevocable; to go back to being no more than a salvager of curiosities and compactor of trash would be unthinkable. When, to his alarm, WALL‑E realizes it could come to that, he unhesitatingly turns his back on his whole world, risking everything for what he has found. Love has opened the universe to him, in all its splendor, terror and ugliness.

Advent is always a hard time of year for me. It would seem accidic for me, somehow, to try to solve the mystery of why that is by delving too much into my own inner self. After all, if any season is the time to "lift my eyes to the hills" rather than turn them inward to my own psyche, then this is it. Nevertheless, I find myself struggling every year, feeling like one of the descendants of Earth in the movie -- swollen and helpless and weak and on a track I can't quite control. So Wall-E and Kathleen Norris's Abbot Paul helped confirm to me that at least for now, the pain of tedium ought to be bypassed by prayer and hopeful attention to the minutiae of work, without worrying about the outcome of it.

After all, Advent celebrates the beginning of a new life for a people in darkness. Incipit vita nova. It isn't unreasonable that I should feel a bit of the pain of that darkness every season, in my own soul especially, while I am waiting. Again, I feel that Wall-E is a good role model, patiently repairing his incidental hurts without complaining, gazing on a dangerous beauty with love, and finding love which in the end repairs him.

Football and Philosophy via Embedded Video

Last week's football:



The other team won 30-6; Sean got another big kick return for a TD and that was the 6 points. (Sean is #14 in maroon, just to remind relatives and friends who are probably the only ones who might actually watch JV highlights). They're hoping to do better this Friday. Their team has one of the toughest schedules in southern California, so the varsity power rating is going up even though the team is losing games.

"Sport, properly directed, develops character, makes a man courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor; it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. Sport, rightly understood, is an occupation of the whole man, and while perfecting the body as an instrument of the mind, it also makes the mind itself a more refined instrument for the search and communication of truth and helps man to achieve that end to which all others must be subservient, the service and praise of his Creator."

– Pope Pius XII,
Sport at the Service of the Spirit
July 29, 1945

On a different note,


Dark Star -- a spacey sci fi parody by John Carpenter from 1974, but this part was kind of classic:
Bomb Phenomonology



Or just read the transcript

While we're talking about philosophy, this TAC spoof Elmo vs Aristotle also appealed to my family's strange sense of humor.

a far-off gleam or echo in the real world.

A few movies I've seen recently:

Galaxy Quest
Enchanted
Artificial Intelligence

These movies were all similar in that they explored the nature of reality as it blends with what is imaginative or "not-real". They were all in some way about Love, though only one was really about romantic love -- the others were about relationship and the importance of that in a life worth living.

Other than those similarities, the three movies were just about as different as you can get.

I don't watch very many movies, so I thought I would memorialize these ones.

I have been reading several books by Daniel Siegel recently -- I requested a whole batch of them from the library and they have been trickling in slowly, which suits me since they are by no means quick skims:

The Mindful Brain
Parenting from the Inside Out

and most recently,

The Developing Mind

These books are not easy going. Probably Parenting from the Inside Out is the most accessible of the three, but I think The Developing Mind was the one I'd be most likely to buy for my home bookshelves. I think his theory of mind and attachment is quite fascinating. This book also included some more scholarly information on the "right brain/left brain" ideas that have been popularized in learning styles books.

I am going to type out a passage to show you what I mean by "not easy going" -- I started to type out a more extreme example, but chose this one instead because it's actually related to the subject of this blog post (whatever that is -- I'm trying to figure out a title):

The narrative process in this way attempts to make sense of the world and of one's own mind and its various states. In some individuals, however, one sees narratives that reflect upon a particular self-state without creating a more global coherence of the mind as a whole. The narrative process is thus a fundamental building block of an integrative mode, but insufficient by itself to create coherence across self-states through time.

Got that? And yet it's not jargon -- it's not word-ese without substance. He is making a fascinating point about the importance of Story in comprehending and composing an understanding of relationship across time and space. In other words, something to do with what those three movies, listed above, are trying to deal with as well.

It is enough to make one wish Latin was still the language of scholarly discourse, because I think that if one were writing a treatise in medieval Latin, it would be a lot easier to get this kind of thought out on paper without barbarisms like "self-state" and phrase-clumps like "global coherence". From the very little I know about German, from taking a German for Reading Knowledge undergraduate level class, I imagine that this kind of thought process would come across better in that language.

I am thinking of blogging this book chapter by chapter, because it really was interesting, and I would probably remember more of it if I made the attempt to paraphrase into ordinary English.

(Note: While I was searching online I found this Madeleine L'Engle book: The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth. My library won't let me request it for some reason, but it looks interesting. If any of you have read it I'd love to know what you thought)

Shadow-Lands

Every year, it happens. Sigh... and I never figure it out until I end up somewhere with tears pouring down my face. This year it was while watching Shadowlands with my daughter, and Aidan resting in my lap.

Shadowlands is a sad movie, of course. It is about CS Lewis's brief marriage to Joy Gresham followed by her death from cancer. So I should have been expecting it. But I'm not much of a two-hankie type. Usually the sad parts of movies just make me notice in minute detail every actor- and camera- and soundtrack- effect. I never, well, hardly ever cry over a movie.

But it wasn't really the story, sad as it was-- it had more to do with the hospital rooms in the movie, the hope and fear, the massive looming X-ray machines -- and this time of year, and Aidan quietly drifting off to sleep next to me. So many memories. It takes my breath away just to hover around the edges of it.

I stroked Aidan's dark soft hair as he drowsed. He murmured quietly about our plans for tomorrow to walk to the post office in his purple wheelchair; going through the same script of question and answer over and over. He looked up at me peacefully and said, "I love you, my sweet mama" and then "SCRATCH" (he wanted me to scratch his back).

I realized why I've been pushing the little ones away more than usual, obsessing over planning, and feeling so leaden with fatigue. I realized why I actually scolded him the other day for following me with his clock puzzle -- he kept showing it to me over and over, like a clock himself -- though my reaction completely shocked and puzzled me at the time, it was understandable now.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me. A Grief Observed

Aidan was as sick as you can get, he coded twice, yet he survived and eventually thrived. Still those scary moments seem to go on as if they have an eternity of their own. His code-blue before his transplant -- I sometimes feel like I am still standing there, hands up to my mouth and screaming silently. I guess there's a term for it -- I am not surprised, everything has a term nowadays -- anniversary reactions. Here are some ways to cope.

Probably most people have been through something that springs at them at unexpected times. The idea is that you still have some emotional work left to do that you've pushed aside during the actual crisis in order to cope. Much better to deal with it, than to stuff it all down. In fact, the theme of the movie (as opposed to Lewis's actual life, on which I wouldn't want to speculate) was that during his first life-tragedy, the loss of his mother as a child, he chose to bury the pain. As a man, he chose to accept the suffering as part of the joy. This is work. ... something like the work of Simon of Cyrene, if I can see it that way.

Now that I realize why that invisible blanket has been there between me and the ones I love this past week, maybe I can shake it off. And like my daughter, who was nine herself nine years ago and no doubt has her own scary memories of those scary days of Aidan's worst illness-- I can focus on the dear Aidan we have now. And on the rest of my family, who are so precious to me.

(And by the way, the day after I wrote this, I found my little niece had been born. Anna Grace -- what a beautiful name, and she looks beautiful too! Too bad she lives in Canada and I probably will not see her in person for several months!)

Mosaic -- Movies and Miscellany

I never would have known if my kids hadn't discovered the plot similarities that the Pokemon episode Showdown at Dark City is a version of the Akira Kurosawa movie Yojimbo.

Did you know that A Bug's Life is a version of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and that the Magnificent Seven is as well?

Speaking of Pokemon, the Sci-Fi Catholic says that Pokemon is banned in Saudi Arabia.

Aidan would not like that.

When I was looking up the Holy Grail a while ago, I found this blog called the Grail Code. It looks like a book blog, and I just liked it's "everything to do with the Holy Grail" theme.... from beer presented to Pope Benedict, to Arthurian-cycle art.

Finally, my inner English Lit major responded to the call of "It's Chaucer Week" at Red Sea Homeschool. Even though it's not the first week of April anymore, it seems that it would be really fun to go on a Chaucer study with my 12 year old since we are in the throes of medieval history right now.

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr...

There is a Chaucer Storybook at Baldwin Project.

And Clare, if you are reading this, I found the Parson's Tale online.

Freedom is Always New

I am still thinking about The Village, which I watched Friday night with my older children. CS Lewis said that one ought to have read a poem at least three times before making a judgment, and I would think that applies somewhat to cinema as well, so I don't want to make an evaluation too soon. Besides, you probably have read a lot of those already. Many critics don't seem to have liked it, and I can see why. One, their own slightly pagan literary sensibilities tell them that anyone who has been touted fervently needs some kind of "fall" to balance out the picture. Being in the position of obligation to churn out movie reviews constantly, the "fall" of Shyamalan provides them with a glib readymade template. Two, the movie depicts an 18th century style village hidden from the 20th century world, which offends their sense of realism. Three, it doesn't tie up very neatly, so you can't say "the theme is...." or pull an allegorical message from it. There are a lot of unresolved notes; for that reason, it seemed to evoke meaning rather than encapsulate it.

The dialogue that seems to be a key part to the theme is frustrating because it has a slightly trite ring to it (there, I am evaluating even when I said I would not). The actual scenes, the colors and details, and the positioning of the characters and how they are filmed, even the musical score and sound effects, seem to have more poetic depth to them than the words. But here are the words that seem to sum up the way the movie seems to change direction (whether it actually changes course or just adds new light that retrospects towards the beginning -- a recurrent device in Shyamalan's movies --- I haven't figured out yet).

Anyway, here is the dialogue that seems to be the pivot:

---Who do you think will continue this place, this life? Do you plan to live forever? It is in them that our future lies, it is in Ivy and Lucius that this way of life will continue. Yes I have risked, I hope I am always able to risk everything for the just and right cause. If we did not make this decision, we could never again call ourselves innocent, and that in the end is what we have protected here, innocence! That I'm not ready to give up.
---Let her go. If it ends, it ends. We can move towards hope, that's what's beautiful about this place. We cannot run from heartache. My brother was slain in the towns, the rest of my family died here. Heartache is a part of life, we know that now. Ivy is running toward hope, let her run. If this place is worthy, she'll be successful in her quest.
---How could you have sent her. She is blind.
---She is more capable than most in this village. And she is led by love. The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.

This evoked for me the Pope's words in Spe Salvi:

Let us ask once again: what may we hope? And what may we not hope? First of all, we must acknowledge that incremental progress is possible only in the material sphere. Here, amid our growing knowledge of the structure of matter and in the light of ever more advanced inventions, we clearly see continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of nature.

Yet in the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility of accumulation for the simple reason that man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew. These decisions can never simply be made for us in advance by others—if that were the case, we would no longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning.

Naturally, new generations can build on the knowledge and experience of those who went before, and they can draw upon the moral treasury of the whole of humanity. But they can also reject it, because it can never be self-evident in the same way as material inventions. The moral treasury of humanity is not readily at hand like tools that we use; it is present as an appeal to freedom and a possibility for it.

If the theme in The Village ties together in some way, it seems to me it would be something along these lines. Before the time frame of the movie, the elders have made a radical decision to withdraw from the world, in light of their horrific experiences with human evil. The "monsters" are their device for making this horror both vivid and vague, to protect their children and provide them a haven.

At this turning point in the movie, where they allow Ivy to go on her quest, to leave the haven, they are deciding to turn towards the future in a new way; to hand over the active role to the next generation. In order to preserve what is valuable to them -- the essence of its value -- they must be willing to accept the possibility of change, even disruption, of its outward form. In some real way, otherwise, they will "become the monsters" themselves.

Cardinal Newman said (quoted here by then-Cardinal Ratzinger) that "to live is to change". In the context of the essay he wrote, it goes like this:

But whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. .... It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. .... old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change....

So something like that would be my reading. I still haven't figured out if it coheres throughout The Village, which certainly has several puzzling and thought-provoking elements that aren't quite contained in this idea. My kids and I had fun discussing these yesterday, and will probably continue to ponder more upon it in the future.

Therese

My daughter has written a review of the movie Therese on her blog. St Therese of Lisieux has for a long time been our family's patron. I was born on her old feast day -- October 3rd! and Aidan received his transplant on October 1st, her new feast day. That's a whole story in itself; let it suffice that we consider her a family friend. My daughter took Therese's name for her confirmation name.

Some of Therese's writings are here. Some information about her is here.

One very good devotional book to read is I Believer in Love: A Personal Retreat Based on the Teaching of St Therese of Lisieux.

Therese, who entered the Carmelite convent at the age of fifteen and died of tuberculosis at the age of 24, and wrote one book at the request of her sister -- has been declared a Doctor of the Church.

I notice I am like my father -- who when he starts talking about something that is an influential part of his life, always ends up handing the listener a stack of books!

By the way, when I read my father's book Must We All Die? about the tuberculosis epidemic in Alaska, I was near tears when he described the progression of the disease in the 19th century patient, because it reminded me of Therese's Last Conversations -- which were recorded by her sister.

On Jane Eyre, the movie -- my daughter's perspective

I've been asking my daughter to sign on to my blog as official movie reviewer.

And this is why --

Whether you enjoyed the recent BBC version of Jane Eyre or not, I am sure you will find her review thought-provoking.

Bravo, Mary-Therese! !

Also, her thoughts on the Maltese Falcon, of all things
Yes, the dreaded creeping colourisation.