Monk

Joseph Frank gives us another delicious morsel of Christian trivia. He is discussing “The Brothers Karamazov” and Dostoevsky’s monumental fable “The Grand Inquisitor” in particular. The fable is told through the character Ivan:

As a preface, the erudite Ivan indulges in a brief survey of the universal popularity of similar poems and plays in the past, when “it was customary… to bring down heavenly powers on earth.” Most important of all was a Byzantine apocryphal tale, “The Wanderings of Our Lady in Hell,” which depicts the Mother of God being led through hell by the archangel Michael. Horrified by the suffering of the damned, she falls before God “and begs for mercy for all in Hell… indiscriminately.” God points to the crucified Christ and asks how “his tormentors” can be forgiven, but he relents when Our Lady summons “all the saints, all the martyrs, all the angels and archangels” to join her in pleading for mercy. When God finally agrees to “a respite of suffering” for those in hell every year from Good Friday until Trinity Day (eight weeks after Easter), the sinners chant, “Thou art just, O lord, in this judgment.”

It goes to show that it has long been a difficult, even torturous, issue for Christians, that tension between belief in an all compassionate and loving God and the belief in eternal damnation in a lake of fire. This discussion has also had some renewed life in today’s media, as may be seen in the Rob Bell controversy, and then there are my own ruminations.

Of course, the atheistic materialist can wonder how anyone can even begin to consider such issues in any serious light, but whatever may be said about my own want of faith in the supernatural, I can appreciate how one can have even less faith in this world as we know it and in our fellow man as well as in oneself, though one would like that other transcendent world to be better than the one we know, not worse.

Rock and roll is a music of mechanized sexuality. That’s why 90 percent of it sounds like clocks fucking.

...

I’ll bet a hundred dollars that I can teach you—if you can’t even tune a guitar—the rock song of your choice in ninety minutes. I might need some preparation before we start the stopwatch, depending on the meaning of the word rock, and you might not articulate the hairier arpeggiations as dexterously as you’d like. But I’ll get a recognizable structure under your fingers: zero to sixty in ninety minutes.

I played music professionally, drunker than a boiled owl, for almost fifteen years. I can read treble clef OK, and I still have all my fingers. I could get a couple of pages of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue under my belt if I didn’t have anything else to do, but not in any kind of ninety minutes. And I guarantee you I could never learn it for piano, not in any convincing sense. I won’t live long enough. The mirror of art also shows us what we are not.

-- J. D. Daniels for "n+1 Magazine"

He might lose that bet with me. I once bought the book "Harmonica for Dummies" along with a harmonica, and I proved to be too dumb a musician even for that. Hell, I cannot even whistle or snap the fingers on my right hand.

Rock and roll may be simple, but when it comes to music, my needs are simple. I just need to groove a little. When it comes to food for my soul, I feed on other matter.

Jack Schafer has written a somewhat humorous piece about ending his relationship with Hotmail, and I am in the mood for a nostalgic trip through the Internet years recalling the sites that became big landmarks on the Information Superhighway only to fade away as the next big e-thing came along.

Hotmail and I go way back. I had an account there before Microsoft bought it for a reported $400 million at the beginning of 1998, which makes the free e-mail service my longest-running online relationship. There were others before Hotmail, of course. I had a CompuServe account, and an AOL address, and before that, way back in the days of my cyber-puberty, I had an MCI Mail account that was so slow you could almost read incoming messages as fast as they snaked their way onto the screen at 300 baud.

...

Why was I unhappy? Hotmail, after all, had done a lot for me and never asked for much in return. Well, I just came to like Gmail better. It was svelte and fast and easily searchable while Hotmail was not. Also, Hotmail kept putting on weight with all of its new features—features that I didn't want. It also went through a bewildering set of name changes that spoke directly to its self-esteem problems: Hotmail became MSN Hotmail and then Windows Live Mail and then Windows Live Hotmail. Who do you think you're fooling, Hotmail? We all know you're the same broad we met back in 1996.

I have never been embarrassed to have a Hotmail address—something I can't say about my AOL account. In fact, I wouldn't be writing this today if Hotmail had stuck to being Hotmail. But no, these days it wants to stand between me and the entire Web, monitoring my every step. When I sign on to collect Hotmail, it immediately starts hectoring me to connect my account to Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. It implores me to "Share something new" with people in my network. It begs me to upload photos. Right now, the opening page of Hotmail is alerting me to the upcoming birthday of somebody I don't even know.

Jack goes back farther than I do. I must have just missed out on the big AOL craze, which I take it was one of the first big things, making the Internet easy and accessible for a lot of first-timers, families perhaps getting their first personal computers, just clicking onto the whole new Internet thing, America On-Line. CompuServe was our first Internet provider - good old dial-up.

I remember thinking that we were never going to get on the Internet. I’m glad we got on when these LJ-type blogging sites were still fairly cool and I got to know a few people, before Facebook came and changed the whole social networking game. But I like it here and feel settled. I also still like my Hotmail account. It’s hard for me to let go of things.

My post yesterday on Elvis contained a quote by Willie Dixon, apparently one of the classic bluesmen, and feeling a little restless this evening, I thought I'd do some google-fu and also check out YouTube. I will keep this song for my trouble:

Others in more lovely climes are receiving their pretty little snowfalls for the season. When I was walking to my bus stop yesterday morning, I probably came as close as I am going to get to a picturesque wintry scene.

It is the snowman that first catches your eye, all dressed up proper, even with a little top hat. Of course, it isn’t really made of snow. It must be a plasticky contraption, like the reindeers, Santas, and nativity scenes that people buy to festively decorate their lawns for the holidays. But what really sets off this scene and makes the passerby pause for a double, triple take are the little wisps of snow on the yard, which look very convincing, especially when the weather is a chilly as this, though you know that you would have a better chance of finding snow in the fires of Hell. These little drifts of snow must be stretched out cotton, stapled or nailed to the ground.

My heart goes out to the householders, and this will probably have to do for my white Christmas. I think we may have had some significant snowfall once or twice in the last twenty years, but the snowline never quite made it this far south in the city, just missing us by a few miles. I feel particularly sorry that Bo and Princess never got to romp around in the powdery stuff, a habitat most suitable for the eskies.

I am kind of crushy on Miley Cyrus, but this is the first time that I have heard a new pop song in years that I really liked, aside perhaps for some Eminem. In the ONTD discussion, I see some of the commenters deriding the number and noting that it is only for the Europeans. Maybe I'm more European in my musical tastes? Not uncouth enough for America anymore? Well, it is only one number, and it's not like I'm going to buy the CD. But I'm still surprised and impressed.


"Who Owns My Heart"

Taking the trash out, I hear a plaintive meow, and thinking that one of my cats is in distress, I start looking around the trash bins, as the meowing sounds like it is coming from right next to me, but I cannot see the cat anywhere, just that disembodied crying. I remember the news story from weeks ago about a woman who stuck a cat in a trash bin, and although I appreciate it that it is most unlikely that something of the sort happened here, not having better options, with the crying still ringing in my ears, I start opening the lids and peeking inside, but there is nothing.

Considering the possibility that my ears were fooling me a little, I venture another ten yards to the front beyond the gate. The meow is closer now, and I look up and see Sammy on the roof. At the same time that I am surprised to find him there, I am touched to see that he has picked up on Willy’s old trick.

Like Willy, however, as I suppose is true of cats all over, Sammy is less certain about how to get back down. I get the step-ladder, despite my wariness over how well this will work if Sammy should take me up on my offer as I stand on the shaky steps, but I only spook him to jump off on his own, and I must say that Sammy brings a lot of panache to this tall leap and his adroit landing, much more than Willy was able to manage.

Willy, it may be remembered, was somewhat lacking in that feline grace. As a growing kitten, Willy was well behind Ash in fence climbing, and recalling the hard time he had jumping down from the roof, as well as the times he would sport a limp, he seemed to lack those uncanny cat reflexes, such as Sammy just showed off, and from a rolling fall, too!

Nevertheless, I am only reminded of how much I miss Willy. In particular, I fondly recall the way he would come to me when I took the trash out to the cub on the nights before trash day. He was a little canine in that respect. It is not something that any of these cats will do. It’s like Willy and I had a special bond, guy to guy, chums.

I dare say that I miss him almost as much as I miss Bo, and we only had Willy for a year and a summer, and it’s not like Willy and I shared the same bed, or ate our meals together side by side for nearly twenty years, but even so, even so.

I watched “The Lovely Bones”, now making its cable run. It was a publishing sensation when the novel came out, though I never read it, in spite of the dark saucy themes of sexual exploitation. I did enjoy the movie, but not because of any prurient entertainment value, as the sexual element was quite thoroughly sanitized, being sold to mainstream audiences.

What got me was the depiction of Heaven, or what they called the “In Between”, since the girls apparently had to wait at some celestial midpoint before being able to enter Heaven, as the serial killer had to be done with his criminal career so that, I suppose, their souls may have closure.

This Heaven/In Between is painted in dreamy, wondrously fantastical brush strokes, as you would expect. And I am such a sucker for such depictions. I was positively sighing over the scenes. These days I long for Heaven at least as much as I ever pined for a lovely girl. And I’m afraid it is just as much a fantasy. Nevertheless, it may be good to have beautiful dreams, something to be hopeful about, even if a little foolish, or so I tell myself.

I see Susanna has posted a meme. I usually don’t do these either, but since this is a sweet one, and since she is having a challenging time, I’ll play along. Thus:

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or only online) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

For me, this includes people who are no longer on my Friends List, but who once were, but that’s another matter. Friendships and loves, too, can be just of a season and then pass away, while leaving their warm mark on your heart for the rest of your life, as you go your separate ways.

However, I will also take this opportunity to include a snippet from Augustine’s “City of God”. It’s an odd fit, but I like this passage, and we’ll just treat this entry as a catch-all for some odds and ends:

But he created man’s nature as a kind of mean between angels and beasts, so that if he submitted to his Creator, as to his true sovereign Lord, and observed his instructions with dutiful obedience, he should pass over into the fellowship of the angels, attaining an immortality of endless felicity, without an intervening death; but if he used his free will in arrogance and disobedience, and thus offended God, his Lord, he should live like the beasts, under sentence of death, should be the slave of his desires and destined after death for eternal punishment.

God doesn’t fuck around. Life: it’s serious business. One of these days, I should stop treating it like an off-color joke, but I tend to see this as one of my better defense mechanisms against the harsh caprice of life, or is this arrogance?

“The World is so full of a number of things,
That we should all be as happy as kings.”

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in Mike Mason’s “The Gospel According to Job”

~
After the recent rains - just a couple of weeks ago, if you can imagine - I was counting on a lazier summer, thinking that I might get past the season without doing any watering, and I was not even going to consider the question until the latter half of August. However, the pounding heat, with temperatures hovering near the hundred-degree mark, or landing squarely on it, has led to a change of heart. I blame Christianity and the neighbor dog.

Feeling some of the pain from the cruelty that the neighbors inflict on their dog through their remorseless neglect, and feeling some of the pull of the moral ideals that my fumbling Christianity and my prayers have been impressing on my suggestible conscience, I saw that I could be accused of the same sort of neglect with respect to some of the struggling life around me, the trees and the lawn, exposed as they are to the lashings of this relentless heatwave.

I am not killing myself with effort, but this is not the lazy August that I envisioned myself enjoying. Still, there is spiritual food in a good deed, though I would still rather not sweat and get dirty. But I have also enjoyed an extra reward that I did not count on: I had forgotten how the birds like to use my waterings for an impromptu bird-bath, using my sprinkler like a fountain that could be found in a well-verdured park on a more privileged piece of real estate. To look upon this birdy oasis amidst this desert heat is like looking upon the golden grace of God, and it feels like love.

"Forgive Me" and "Love Is A Beautiful Thing"