Chauvin Sculpture Garden

From a useful website:

Little is known about the reclusive Kenny Hill, a bricklayer by trade, born around 1950. In 1988, he settled on some property on the bayou in Chauvin (pronounced show-van), Louisiana—population 3,400. Hill pitched a tent as his home and, over time, built a small rustic home that demonstrated an interesting use of space and attention to detail. Then, in 1990, without explanation, he began transforming his lush bayou environment into a fantastic chronicle of the world as seen through his eyes.

Less than a decade later, more than 100 primarily religious concrete sculptures densely pack the narrow, bayouside property. The sculptures are a profound mixture of Biblical reference, Cajun colors, and the evident pain and struggle of the artist’s life. Most figures—black, white, male, female, child, or solider—are guided, supported, or lifted by seemingly weightless angels. The unique angels, some inviting passage, others prohibiting, vary from blue skinned, bare-footed, and sightless to regal celestial figures clad in medieval garb with the black boots of the local shrimp fishermen.

AG and I visited here this past weekend, and my first reaction was: “this is what happens when you don’t have an editor”. But it was an unexpected and pleasant surprise near the “end of the line” in southern Louisiana. I also have to give a shout out to Annie Miller’s Sons’ Swamp Tours and Bayou Delight Restaurant, both outside of Houma. The former was pleasant and reasonably priced, and the latter was just an obscenity of southern Louisiana cuisine (i.e. fried food “porn”: fried alligator, crawfish, frogs’ legs, boudin balls, shrimp, etc.) I recommend the “Cajun Platter”. See below for more pictures of the sculpture garden.

Gaelic psalmody

Saw this on Facebook somewhere. Sorry for the lack of attribution.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring

AG and I watched this movie recently, and were quite impressed by it. Directed by Kim Ki-duk, the film follows the life of a monk growing up in a Korean Buddhist hermitage, falling into grave sin, and returning to begin the process over again. As you can see from the clip above, this movie was beautifully shot, and it touches upon the themes of desire, suffering, and liberation. It is also, as you can tell from the title, based on the idea that life is a cycle from which man attempts to break free. There are too many powerful images in this movie for me to really analyze, so I highly recommend that the reader see this film.

On superficiality

If you can’t be in the age you love, love the one you’re in

One of my favorite Nietzsche aphorisms is one I have cited many times before in my essays, and it is the following:

Oh, those Greeks! They knew about living: for this, it is necessary to stop courageously at the surface, at the drapery, at the skin, to worship appearances, to believe in forms, sounds, and words, and the entire Olympus of appearances! Those Greeks were superficial- out of profundity!

The Virgin Spring

The last ten minutes

AG does a masterful job of describing and giving a brief analysis of the movie here.

A Brief (Catholic) History of Violence

La Reja, Argentina, 2002

Around 6:45 a.m.

“Deus in adjutorium meum intende…”

In seminary, our day would always open with those words: “O God, come to my assistance”. In rapid succession, trying not to drag, we would chant the psalmody in recto tono. This was the office of Prime, the first office of the day for slackers who didn’t rise at three in the morning for Matins. After much back and forth, and after the last Gloria Patri, we would rapidly come to the part where we would finally be able to sit down on our cold, hard benches. A reader would come forth in the middle of the choir, and begin to read, in Spanish, from the Roman Martyrology. At this point, I would usually just space out. For even while trusting the wisdom of Holy Mother Church, the violence portrayed could be almost gratuitous. Yes, it is very edifying what the martyrs lived and suffered through, but there was only so much of stuff like the following that you could stomach before breakfast:

At Spoleto, in the days of Emperor Antoninus, the passion of St. Pontian, martyr, who was barbarously scourged for Christ by the command of the judge Fabian, and then compelled to walk barefoot on burning coals. As he was uninjured by the fire, he was put on the rack, was torn with iron hooks, then thrown into a dungeon, where he was comforted by the visit of an angel. He was afterwards exposed to the lions, had melted lead poured over him, and finally died by the sword.

From around the Web

Keeping it real about religion:

From Prima over at Gregorian Rite Catholic:

…Part of the reason that there are these notable “reversions” is that these people have not really converted (“embraced”) Catholicism.

It’s not simply a case of “assent” to doctrine, which too many converts seem to believe. One also has to embrace Catholic culture. Too many evangelicals have “embraced” Catholicism simply on the basis of agreements on abortion and other bioethical issues. They are not interested in “embracing” Catholic culture or the tradition of the Church. Too many converts assume that they can assent to dogma and then remake the Church in their own image. It’s gnostic. And too many spend most of their time endlessly criticizing and blaming the Church for everything, including their own unfulfilled ecclesial ambitions and their own starry-eyed notion of what the Church was or was not. And while many converts talk endlessly about having found the “truth” or the “fullness of the faith,” they seem to abhor Catholicism when it is incarnated. It’s just not as tidy as they would like. And the comparisons to the greater faith, fervor, community, and discipleship of evangelical Protestantism makes one wonder why they became Catholic in the first place.

2. From Tim Enloe:

For a lot of people, Internet apologetics seems to be like a gigantic role-playing game. They get to swagger around beating their chests because they are Thundarr the Terrible, Sacred Warrior of Truth and Goodness, and they wield the double-edged Unbeatable Mystical Sword of Supreme Rightness as they virtuously battle the nefarious forces of the Evil Lord Falsehood and his Abominable Army of Uruk-hai Orcs. “Aha! Take that! I just rolled a 32 to go with my Ultimate Refutation of All Heresies card! Begone thou dire demons of doubt and deception!” As the poet said, One, two! One, two! And through and through! The Vorpal Blade goes snicker-snack! He leaves it dead, and with its head he goes galumphing back. Let the people rejoice. The kingdom is saved! Truth lives to be attacked – and more importantly, defended – another day!

I forgot, in other words, how deadly serious some people take their online apologetics activities. It’s like the old caricature of die-hard Dungeons and Dragons fans in the 80’s – a lot of people online come to identify the core of their beings and the whole meaning of their faith in Christ with their online combative personas. They come to think that what they do online is a Sacred Mission for God, and that at all costs they must not fail. They come to take the cause of “giving an answer” (the only half-quoted sentence from 1 Pet. 3:15) as a life-or-death thing – if they don’t decisively win this battle on this message board or blog right now by giving an absolutely and plainly irrefutable refutation of the other guy’s “nonsense,” well, then, Truth will self-destruct and they will be left with nothing but doubt and fear and the horrific prospect of having to admit to their legion of adoring fans that this time they have to admit defeat and will have to commit to doing better next time. The resilience of Thundarr’s ego when he faces a potential defeat turns out to be inversely proportional to the verbal confidence he projects at the beginning of his arguments when he thinks nobody could ever possibly get the better of him.

From Michael E. Lawrence, via the Conservative Blog for Peace :

…The “liturgy wars” are the outcome of precisely this kind of thing, a centralized program enacted by a politburo which said, “This is what you must do.” Away with programs! Human existence is messy, and the way out of the chaos of the past several decades will be messy and very much unpredictable. Thomas Day seems to understand this, and so does the pope, who has granted more freedoms than restrictions with respect to the liturgy.

Maybe by “program” people are looking for a declaration of loyalty from Professor Day, a statement on whether he stands with the Thisses or the Thats in the midst of the debate about worship. ”Forget chant and Latin! Do good hymns with organ like they used to do at my old middle-church Episcopalian parlor,” says one constituency. ”No! We must return immediately to Latin and all Gregorian chant and throw away everything else,” another group might claim. Day strikes me as being too wise for this. In the midst of the strife, it’s easy to fall for panaceas, but often the truth gets lost in the fog. I myself have worked in Novus Ordo parishes, in Traditional Rite parishes, and even in Protestant churches. I have visited others, as well. I have heard German Catholics blow the windows out with Grosser Gott; I have heard Mennonites wake the dead with their shape-note singing; I have been moved to tears by the sound of Lutherans singing Ein feste Burg; and on one cold February Ash Wednesday, I heard a Catholic congregation, after years of tra-la-la music, raise the roof singing Agnus Dei XVIII, unaccompanied—and they didn’t even drag. We do not need panaceas. We need culture and common sense. Thomas Day’s book will do much to help us achieve these things.

Some Mozart

Just for the hell of it. One anonymous commenter once posted on my old blog this comment:

When the angels play before the Throne of God, they play Bach, but when they play for their own pleasure, they play Mozart … and God eavesdrops.

Does anyone know the origin of this quip, or was this guy just really clever?

Another look at Lenin

Some quotes I found on Farasha Euker’s blog:

The men­tion of Freud’s hypoth­e­sis is designed to give the pam­phlet a sci­en­tific veneer, but it is so much bungling by an ama­teur. Freud’s the­ory has now become a fad. I mis­trust sex the­o­ries expounded in arti­cles, trea­tises, pam­phlets, etc. — in short, the the­o­ries dealt with in that spe­cific lit­er­a­ture which sprouts so lux­u­ri­antly on the dung heap of bour­geois soci­ety. I mis­trust those who are always absorbed in the sex prob­lems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed in the con­tem­pla­tion of his navel. It seems to me that this super­abun­dance of sex the­o­ries, which for the most part are mere hypothe­ses, and often quite arbi­trary ones, stems from a per­sonal need. It springs from the desire to jus­tify one’s own abnor­mal or exces­sive sex life before bour­geois moral­ity and to plead for tol­er­ance towards one­self. This veiled respect for bour­geois moral­ity is as repug­nant to me as root­ing about in all that bears on sex. No mat­ter how rebel­lious and rev­o­lu­tion­ary it may be made to appear, it is in the final analy­sis thor­oughly bour­geois. (Clara Zetkin, Rem­i­nis­cences of Lenin, p. 101)

You must be aware of the famous the­ory that in com­mu­nist soci­ety the sat­is­fac­tion of sex­ual desire, of love, will be as sim­ple and unim­por­tant as drink­ing a glass of water. The glass of water the­ory has made our young peo­ple mad, quite mad…I think this glass of water the­ory is com­pletely un-Marxist, and more­over, anti-social. In sex­ual life there is not only sim­ple nature to be con­sid­ered, but also cul­tural char­ac­ter­is­tics, whether they are of a high or low order…Of course, thirst must be sat­is­fied. But will the nor­mal man in nor­mal cir­cum­stances lie down in the gut­ter and drink out of a pud­dle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? But the social aspect is the most impor­tant of all. Drink­ing water is of course an indi­vid­ual affair. But in love two lives are con­cerned, and a third, a new life, arises. It is that which gives it its social inter­est, which gives rise to a duty towards the com­mu­nity. (Clara Zetkin, Rem­i­nis­cences of Lenin, p. 49)

Long time readers will know of my youthful career as a Trostskyist provocateur, and as I wrote three years ago now, I think Marxist thinking has ultimately helped me as a mature adult to be able to think of and analyze reality in terms of deep causes rather than superficial trends based on sloganeering. Even still, I am fond of the Marxist hermeneutic tool of discussing the “laws of motion” of how an idea, object, or person moves through space and time. It makes you “think on your feet” rather than stay in one place and “reify” an object as if it were already dead weight.

But Marxism ultimately proved disappointing because the real old authors, or rather the ones that didn’t slaughter too many people (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mandel, etc.) were too “old school” when it came to culture. They believed too much in reason and the power of culture to transform the human psyche. Indeed, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would teach his proletarian revolutionary workers Latin because he knew that it would teach them how to think. This is a far cry from what the “New Left” degenerated into: a bunch of loud-mouth, uncouth people obsessed with their bodily functions and personal “self-expression”.

Take the above quotes for example. Here is Lenin, the only Marxist who brought about a real, bonafide dictatorship of the proletariat according to Marxist orthodoxy, condemning Freud for being too obsessed with sex. Here is the ultimate revolutionary discussing sex in the context of “duty towards the community”. Would that the Christopher Wests’ and Karol Wojtylas’ of the world follow this atheist’s example in not trying to “sexualize reality“, making it the prism through which we see the mystery of Creation!

Alas, such common sense is not so common anymore, especially amongst the would-be Lenin’s of today. As I said three years ago, I admire my time as a Marxist not for how revolutionary it taught me to be, but rather how traditional. Vyperod!

On being “real men”

From the blog, Reading Notes, via the Ochlophobist:

Though I am generally impressed with their prose style, I am always struggling to take the litanies of Esolen & Co. complaints seriously. Sometimes I want to sit back and imagine that “Anthony Esolen” and “S.M. Hutchens” are pseudonyms for some outstandingly clever satirist who is trying to show what the world would be like according to the dictates of man-children held captive by an almost perverse fascination with medieval legends as models for living and an adolescent schoolgirl’s approach to morality.

My only comment is that such obsession with “victimization” seems to deflect and cheapen the plight of people who are actually victims. Also, Esolen once again exploits a real problem to spread his crypto-medievalist myopia about the “crisis of civilization”. To speak of a “crisis of boys” in the broader context of today’s humanity seems like a veritable comedy of errors in a world where, let’s face it, women still get the short end of the stick in most places.