Orwell's Picnic ~

Today in Euclid

2012-02-22T22:06:00.005+01:00

I learned today the correct definition of a ratio. Book V, Definitions 1-4.

I'd been messing about with Golden Rectangles and Fibonacci spirals in my notebook, noting how close one can and cannot come with a pencil and a hand-held compass on paper, to the absolute values for these mathematical ideas. I don't know if this is very close, but I got it to three decimal places.

I also noticed that the drawing I've been working on, little tiny bit by little tiny bit, of the statue by Borromini of St. Andrew in the Lateran Basilica, is also based on the Golden Thingy. I took the postcard I've been working from and now that I know how to do it, measured out the square and the leftover bit, and voy-lah, it was a nearly perfect fit. 1:1.618.

I'm probably going to start seeing it all over the place now.

Here's some other stuff.

I'm trying to get the knack of charcoal (Pitt pastel) so I'm back to doing the flats. This is the head of St. Francis by Caravaggio. (The one on the left, I mean.)

You start with straight lines...

Then put in the first values evenly and lightly in blocks.

Then you start darkening up the darks, all the while adjusting the contours.

So far, I've mostly done this with very simplified lithographs of casts and statues. The Bargues. This painting is a heck of a lot more subtle in the changes from the highlights to the darkest darks. It's like a puzzle.

Kathleen working.

My dining room table is now almost entirely work-benchified. There is a two foot square bit at the end where we sometimes squeeze in a couple of plates or the tea tray.

I have been working a bit on value studies from simple objects. But only in pencil. I tried it in charcoal and it was just too much to think about all at once.

Carry on... carry on... don't give up...

~

Birthday presents for the budding art nerd

2012-02-22T18:24:00.000+01:00

Fibonacci gauge.

~

Teens "groomed" for sex exploitation in Manchester

2012-02-22T15:19:00.003+01:00

It is notable that the Party That Dare Not Speak Its Name has been trying to alert the public about this for decades.

I have a teenaged cousin in Cheshire I'm quite fond of, and the thought makes my skin crawl.

~

It's getting light out

2012-02-22T06:29:00.003+01:00

I spent the whole night looking at YouTube videos about Geometry and the Divine Proportion, and drawing Golden Rectangles and Fibonacci spirals in my notebook.

And learning how to make Platonic Solids out of fruit.

~

Buddy System

2012-02-22T02:41:00.004+01:00

Anyone want to work on Euclid with me? It always helps to have a partner or a little group.

The edition I'm using is the Dover reprint of Thomas Heath's 1925 translation of the earlier work of Heiberg, 1888. Three volumes, kindly sent along by an O's P. regular reader.

There appear to be various online study guides as well. I've found this one from the Dept. of Math and Computer Science at Clark university. I'm sure there are other good study aids to Euclid online, but I like this one to start with because the notes, at least that I have looked at so far, are brief and comprehensible.

I've come to the conclusion that I really can't do what I hope to do without a comprehensive look at classical geometry and proportions. This, I assume, is where my stick-to-it mettle is going to be tested. I'm quite excited about the prospect of studying geometry as part of my study of classical drawing, but I know from long and sad experience that the feeling of eagerness at the beginning cannot be counted on to pull one through to the completion of a project. If anyone else has a sound reason to want to study this subject with me, I would appreciate the companionship. As we all know from our various gym and weight training experiences, it's always easier on the buddy system.

I'll be keeping my eye open on Amazon and elsewhere to see if there are any good study editions. I was commenting this evening that when I studied Latin at King's College, the text we used was Wheelock, I think maybe the 4th edition...? Since my Latin time, 1998/99, I see that Wheelock has been turned into an entire one-man Latin industry, with work books, flash cards, readers, study guides, vocabulary books, 501 tenses and declensions and even whole websites dedicated to helping you get through the 40 chapters. I was remarking that the same thing could certainly profitably be done with Euclid if there were to be a revival of classical education. I will certainly be looking around.

In the meantime, if there is anyone who would consider committing to this project, let me know. As I implied above, it would be best if someone has a good reason to want to study geometry, rather than simply thinking it is a neat idea. I have thought it would be a neat idea, and have never got 'round to it. But I am starting now because I have an actual concrete need to know. The point of having someone to do it with is to keep both people going through to the end (or at least as far as our wee brains can go), which generally requires a serious motivation at the start.

I plan on doing, or I hope to be able to do, about 1/2 an hour a day, most days of the week first thing in the morning. I've started already, a little bit of Book 1, but I'm still pretty weak, so that might take a little building-up-to.

Let me know if you are interested and have the time to devote.

~

Dad

2012-02-21T10:37:00.004+01:00

This is my father, taken, I guess, not long ago in a cafe in Duncan, British Columbia.

I'm amazed at how much he looks like my Grandma. You can see her peeking out behind his eyes.

~

What are we going to do today, Brain?

2012-02-20T13:25:00.006+01:00

In fact, if I really wanted to set myself up as a Mad Scientist, it certainly would be easy with enough money.

You can order the entire Frankenstein Kit online.

And they deliver!

Not sure where I'm going to get a Ruhmkoroff Induction coil, Jacob's Ladder and Line Transformer to boost my electrical output, and make awesome sparks. And of course, I'm going to need a steady supply of glassware and human organs in jars of formaldehyde.

But I see there's places where you can learn to build your own Tesla coil, so that's that taken care of.

Apparently the best university to take courses to become an Evil Genius is Cambridge, so get studying.

Isn't the internet great?!

(But if you are looking for role models, please don't become this guy.

In fact, don't even read about him. I read that the other night and had to spend a couple of hours afterwards watching kitten videos and I had nightmares anyway.

Be this guy, instead.)

~

3.5x-90x Trinocular Stereo Microscope + USB Digital Camera and 54 LED Ring Light

2012-02-19T22:40:00.009+01:00

Beautiful isn't it?

It's what I want for my birthday.

It's something I don't talk about very much, but that I've always regretted. I didn't stay in university, mostly because I couldn't justify the enormous debt that was going to accrue and at the time I was there, in my early 20s, I really had no idea what my interests were. But I really wish I had had the self-knowledge and the courage then to go into the natural sciences.

So little did I know myself and so deeply afraid was I of Doing It Wrong, that I finally realised I needed to understand myself better before committing to such enormous, long-term expenses. Like a lot of modern people that age, I had no sense at all of what I really loved, no sense of my natural aptitudes or even interests and I was never calm enough to have time to figure it out. The result of having been cut loose without guidance at too early an age.

I'm glad now that I didn't stay. It really would have been time and most of all money wasted. (Japanese? French philosophy? What the...?). But it's a shame, now that I do know myself better, that I am of an age where I have no more interest in making a massive directional change. I'm very happy with what I do and fairly proud of myself for having worked and read my way into it on my own, and I don't want to go "back to school".

It wasn't until I was in my 20s, as I noted below, that I discovered that I was not really bad at maths after all and that if I had wanted to, I could certainly have upgraded and worked my way up to undergraduate level to start with biology.

Long-time readers may have noticed that this is a serious side interest. Botany, gardening, zoology, wildflowers, taxonomy, ecology (as it was called in the olden days)... Natural History, in short. It is a big ambition in art to combine these interests and do botanical painting. I hope to do a botanical and entomological catalogue of local Italian wildflowers, plants and insects. Maybe even a medicinal herbal. Certainly, one of the reasons I was most happy that cancer is (probably) over, is that now I have time to pursue these things.

It all started in childhood, and was mostly my mother's doing.

When I was still quite small, mum started her university studies, a double major in marine biology and mathematics at UVic. And she spent a lot of time with me, teaching me about the things she was studying. And of course, we had a library of books on it all, field guides, taxonomic keys and the giant, two-volume Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life. From an early age, I started on the books by Gerald Durrell, a personal hero. And of course, I had a sizable collection of Nature Things.

Essentially, I was homeschooled before it was trendy. Mum was studying marine biology with Alan Austin, and took courses in the summer. Well, she couldn't afford a babysitter and it was the 70s and the Left Coast so no one minded, least of all me, that she would just take me with her to classes, labs and field trips.

I'll never forget the Saturday afternoon when I was about nine and she had a lecture. I was allowed to spend the afternoon by myself in one of the salt water labs. This was a room of wonders. It had a big white tank in which were kept the specimens found on the beaches around the Islands. Alan was a specialist in seaweed, so there were all sorts of different species in the tank that were kept alive with a cycle of fresh sea water at the right temperature (cold). Fortunately, along with the seaweed collections were always little critters, various crustaceans, invertebrates, star fish, tiny crabs, and whatnot that clung to the seaweed.

Also in this lab were a set of binocular dissecting microscopes which I had been shown how to use. These were wonderful machines. They were fairly low power microscopes designed so that the viewer could see the object in 3-D, which meant no microtechnique slides were necessary. You could put the whole critter under the scope. It was dual-light, with a light on top and one underneath the glass plate to eliminate shadows.

I had also been given a student's dissecting kit and kept a notebook.

Well, needless to say the afternoon went quickly. I'll never forget finding a tiny starfish; it could not have been more than 5mm in diameter. I flipped it over and sat there for a good half hour, drawing pictures in my notebook and just watching it with its incredible multitude of colours and mathematical perfection, waving its little sucker-ended legs at me. I watched this amazing thing flip itself over several times. Incredible. (No! of course I didn't cut it up! What would be the point of that? Starfish just grow more starfish out of the cut up pieces. And besides, I was not a mean kid.)

I had less luck with a tiny hermit crab. I picked it out of the tank by its shell and I guess it panicked. It plopped right back into the water and scrambled under a leaf. I felt awful, and carefully placed its shell near where it had landed, and spent some time watching it to make sure it climbed back in. Since then I've been careful to pick hermit crabs up in my palm. They don't bite, after all.

My mother taught me how to make a trap using a jar and a net to collect interesting things from freshwater ponds and streams, how to build an underwater viewer (with a juice tin and cellophane) so you can stand in the water waist deep and look at the creatures swimming around you and how to do accurate field notes.

I wish I had kept going. One of the things that makes me mad about the Modern World is that the irrationalists have taken over the biological sciences and turned them into exercises in idiot leftist politics. When I lived in England, stomping around the countryside, I went through a period where I seriously reconsidered upgrading maths and getting into environmental sciences. I looked all over the place in vain for college programmes that didn't stink of the pseudo-religious claptrap that has become intertwined with this field.

Anyway, since that long-ago Saturday afternoon in the salt water lab, I have yearned for my own dissecting microscope. Of course, I had always thought when I was a kid that such things were only bought by universities and were impossibly expensive. But I've since learned that anyone can buy one, and there have been significant improvements on the one I used way back when. They're still pretty pricey, but in the hundreds of dollars range, not thousands.

A good trinocular stereo microscope will have a magnification of 20x-40x-60x-80x, zoom lenses, dual lighting system with fibre optic lights (no heat to cook your specimens), a boom stand so you can get bigger things under it and best of all, a third viewer with a built-in or attachable digital camera and USB, so you can take pictures and make videos of what you're looking at.

I've always wanted to be a Mad Scientist, or at least a Naturalist. But I'm going to have to save my pennies, because neither I nor anyone I know has the spare dosh for a toy like this.

But...

pretty snazzy huh? Some day. And of course, you have to get all the cool stuff to go with it. Collecting jars and bottles, nets and things to poke and magnify with. Wonders!

One could make splendid micro-still lifes with one of these. Portraits of tiny, magical and mysterious things from another world, nearly invisible, but right under our feet.

~

By the numbers

2012-02-17T22:24:00.002+01:00

This

is why I want to go back to geometry.

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144...

~

Those damned graphic images!

2012-02-16T15:30:00.006+01:00

They Just. Don't. Work!

I have observed that the people (always claiming to be pro-life) who object to the use of graphic images use precisely the same arguments against them that the pro-aborts like to use: "But what if children see them?!!" (People who have experience with actually using the images will tell you every time that it is the adults who become upset. Children know the difference between truth and bullshit, at least until their teens.)

In addition, the people who get all shrieky over the nasty pictures love to claim that they "don't work". "They just put people off". The claim is that the pictures "shut down the argument". That "they are just so horrible that the only reaction you ever get is anger. All people do is flounce away in a huff. There's no opening for discussion."

What I have noticed is that for the most part, the people making this claim are those who have never actually used graphic images in a pro-life demonstration. I usually want to ask the people making these claims how many times they have participated in projects like the Genocide Awareness Project. If they had, they would know from their own experience that the exact opposite is the truth.

Here is one of the many reports from people who use the images all the time, who work exclusively with them on college campuses and on the streets of towns all over the US and Canada.

abortion advocates often insist that the debate is over- no one wants or needs to discuss abortion. However, we have found that this is not the case, especially on a university campus like Florida Gulf Coast University, when we hold the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP).

For example, whenever we hold GAP on university campuses, Planned Parenthood representatives usually react by putting on their pink t-shirts and setting up a table with free candy and condoms. They have a supply of signs with various slogans like “Women’s Health Matters” and “Pro-Woman, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice”. This is a positive and attractive message, and always gathers a crowd of supporters.

In contrast, we put up graphic, ugly, bill-board sized pictures of babies that have been killed, along with victims of other terrible injustices. One might think that this would turn people away, and be a barrier to dialogue but we have found just the opposite.

These terrible images are the catalyst that many students need in order to seriously engage in the abortion debate.

The one thing that the claim does make clear, however, is just how utterly self-serving it is. They just don't like graphic images. The dead baby pictures upset them. Why? I don't know but I could hazard a few guesses from experience.

I've seen much the same reaction from people who don't like Trads but who like to claim to be deeply devout and faithful Catholics, who become angry and defensive whenever the issue of the Traditional Mass comes up. Underneath their indignation is a nauseating kind of smarmy, self-congratulatory patting of their own backs. They don't like Trads because they don't like the implication that there's something they need to do, a few things they might need to know that they don't know already. Something they might need to give up or repent.

I've seen people become hysterical, actually shrieking and ready to launch into a physical attack at the sight of the pictures. But these are the same people who become hysterical and violent at the mere mention of an opinion opposed to abortion. These are the people we want to upset. The people who really need to be upset.

And yes, in many cases they are post-abortive themselves. They have often never had anyone say anything to them but the usual lies of the abortion movement. The politically correct crap that they've been fed from the day of their abortions, "I'll support you whatever decision you make." "You had a hard choice but in the end you did what was best for you."

And, frankly, so what if they're upset? Is it going to kill them? Are they going to leave your dead baby pictures display and go immediately to be incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital? Why do we bother our heads about the passing, temporary emotional reactions of some people to an unpleasant and powerful truth?

There's been a kind of hypersensitivity to being "upset" in recent decades. All sorts of arm-chair pop psychologizing that gives an excuse to the sort of people who want to be thought fragile and delicate to claim that they have been "traumatized". Mostly this is a means of controlling everyone around them. "Be nice to me at all times, never disagree with me, or I'll be traumatized."

But a real psychologist will tell you that the human psyche is extremely resilient and tough. People don't react well to being lied to and duped, but if the thing they are seeing is verifiably true, they will adjust to it after an initial moment of shock.

The fact is, abortion is horrifying. If you are not horrified by it, by the very thought of it, perhaps you are not actually a fragile delicate flower; perhaps you are exactly the opposite. Perhaps the real problem is that you are hard of heart, as it says in the Big Book, that you have had your conscience deadened and eroded away by a lifetime of listening to too many lies, and seeing too many conscience-deadening things on television.

People who become angry when presented with an unpleasant truth have a few things in their conscience that they really do need to deal with. By making them "upset" and telling them the truth, forcing them to confront these unpleasant realities, you are helping them.

That it is unpleasant to be yelled at and called names is something I suggest you offer up, for the sake of your soul or for theirs.

~

Art and Fear

2012-02-14T16:52:00.006+01:00

A new book I'd like to read. Art and Fear talks about the problems everyone seems to encounter when embarking on Doing Art of any sort.

Exerpts:

This book is about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people - essentially (statistically speaking) there aren't any people like that. But while geniuses may get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time. Making art is a common and intimately human activity, filled with all the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort. The difficulties artmakers face are not remote and heroic, but universal and familiar.

*

Making art and viewing art are different at their core. The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. That belief, if widely embraced, would make this book unnecessary, false, or both. Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare. Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.

In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product; the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.

... Your job is to learn to work on your work.

(Yes, It's on my Amazon wishlist.)

It all reminds me of something I read once about St. Jean Vianney. He once prayed to God to allow him to see from God's own perspective, the true state of his soul. God replied that this would not be good for him. The great saint's soul was so grotesquely deformed and ruined by his sins that he would give up the Christian life in despair if he were allowed one glimpse of its true condition.

It is, essentially, none of our business to be eager to know exactly and with perfect perspective where we are in either the spiritual life or in the making of art, a universal human spiritual activity. It is our business only to get on with what we have to get on with and let it be in whatever state and level it is in. It is equally fatal to art as to the spiritual life to compare our progress with others.

As the book Art and Fear says,

The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever.

Your job is to learn to work on your work.

~

UPDATE:

WOO HOO!!

I love my readers, and my readers love me!

At the risk of ruining any surprise but because I've never even placed an order on Amazon.com before and because for years I've been terrified to even try it, I'm going to tell you that "Art and Fear" should hopefully be arriving sometime between now and April 2. I might have chosen expedited shipping except that I could not tell what any of the charges were going to be until after I chose something. I will send a screen shot so that you will have a record in case something goes wrong. This could definitely call for a book for me called "Computers and Fear." :-)

One of my dear friends, a fellow artist and teacher gave me this book some years ago and it is a wonderful commentary on the obstacles that artists face when viewing a blank sheet of paper. It is full of insight and "aha" moments as we recognize ourselves on each page.

I don't often leave comments and sometimes I'm a little intimidated but I really enjoy reading your blog and following along with your life as it unfolds. We still include you by name in our night prayers.

Best greetings from Arkansas,

May you be filled with awesomeness.

~

More fun with Taxonomy: Tamarix Gallica

2012-02-14T14:50:00.006+01:00

One of the things that I found somewhat unsettling when I first came to Italy was all the weird plants and trees that I didn't recognise. When I was a small child, my mother started teaching me the Latin and common names of most of the plants and trees in the area where we lived. She said I was the only ten year-old in town who could identify by sight all of the major conifers of British Columbia, Douglas Firs, Western Red Cedars and whathaveyou. Of course, the climate there is very similar to England's and there were a great many imports from the Mother Country in Victoria, a big gardening town, so most of the plants and trees I knew were also common in England.

But upon moving into this totally alien climate, I started realising that I had no idea of the identity of many of the plants around me. It was the first time I had really noticed that I had been paying attention to it all my life, and it was odd to suddenly realise that this was a big part of the reason I felt out of place. It was simply something I had taken for granted all my life (and I still find it odd when I meet people who can't tell a sycamore from a broad leaf maple).

So one of the first things I started doing here was buying wildflower and tree identification books. The Italian isn't a problem because much of the botanical language is based on Latin in English and in Italian so it was very easy to suss it out. But there are still a number of local varieties that I have never seen before and can't find in a book.

For example, I've been seeing a lot of these very odd-looking shrubby trees around Santa Marinella. In the summer the small ones look like ferns with very fine frond-like leaves and stems. The big ones grow as large as an ornamental cherry and have trunks that are woody and have a bark similar to hawthorne. But the leaves, if that is what they are, most closely resemble cedar, and so I took them for some odd alien type of conifer. They look like a tree that sprouts very fine ferns instead of leaves. But yesterday I noticed that the trees that had been green and frond-y in the summer were all bare now, so despite their appearance, they are clearly deciduous. In the spring, moreover, they produce masses of lovely mist-like purple/pink flowers.

Certainly one of the oddest plants I've seen so far.

I finally managed to find a reference in a book that I didn't buy (60 Euros!) and jotted it down in my notebook.

Tamarix Gallica or French Tamarisk. My observation that they look like cedar shrubs seems not to have been far off, since one of the common names for it is "Salt Cedar". But it is not a conifer, nor is it French. They're considered an invasive pest in Texas because of their ability to tap deep into water tables and soak up more than their share of water. Wiki says it is native to Saudi Arabia, the Sinai Penninsula and the hot dry parts of the Mediterranean in general.

One to add to my future Botanical Catalogue of Wildflowers and Trees of Santa Marinella.

~

On re-creating the Renaissance education

2012-02-12T16:09:00.007+01:00

So, I took today to work on my book and I've been reading a little of Leon Battista Alberti's "brief" treatise On Painting, and it immediately became apparent that in order to even follow this great man's thinking on the subject of painting, I am going to have to revisit mathematics, particularly geometry.

A few months ago, a reader kindly fulfilled one of my Amazon Wishlist wishes, and sent me all three volumes of Euclid's Elements. Many years ago, I took a remedial mathematics course and did quite well. I later discovered the reason for this. It was obvious from the layout of the course that its author had been a big fan of Euclid. All the proposals were laid out in my course in a logical and wondrously clear pattern from simplest concepts to greater and greater complexity.

By the end of this short course, I had discovered that not only was I not completely hopeless about maths, but there was in this Geometry business some elusive key to the secrets of the universe. Like a kind of map to God. It certainly became clear why the Pythagoreans worshipped mathematics like a god. This revelation is one of the key things I hope to lay out in my own book on re-creating the thought processes of the study of classical drawing and painting.

Book One of Alberti's treatise consists of over 6000 words on the mathematics behind perspective and composition. The work was, of course, intended for the sons of educated 15th century gentlemen who would have received Euclid as the beginning and end of their studies in mathematics and for whom Alberti's ideas were merely the application of these abstract concepts to a concrete form. But to us half-illiterate moderns, the damn thing is nearly incomprehensible. (And the edition I have found online has no pictures. This subject really does need illustrations!)

I think I'd better fetch my copy of Euclid from the office where it has very eruditely decorated my desk for some time.

Update:

What? People do Euclid as a hobby all the time, don't they? It's not weird.

~

Winnie approves the new monkey

2012-02-10T21:50:00.002+01:00

She likes Kathleen.

Who feeds you?! Huh?

Ungrateful animal! Who?

~

Manet's cats

2012-02-08T20:17:00.003+01:00

Artists seem to like cats.

Maybe because they sit still long enough for you to practise on them.

I think it's time I started sketching Winnie for posterity.

The internet can't last forever, and she needs to be immortalised.

~

Attention denizens...

2012-02-07T19:37:00.003+01:00

Please take a moment, if you are religiously inclined, to pray for a reader who kindly wrote to me offering her good wishes and prayers for my cancer recovery.

She does not say directly that she has cancer, but that seems to be the implication.

(I do not pass her name along, since she did not write into the commbox, but God will know if you just say, "That lady Hilary was talking about".)

H

It's all fun and games

2012-02-07T11:53:00.003+01:00

until you realise that you live in an unheated medieval house at the top of a tiny Italian hill town, the impossibly dangerous roads have been iced over for a week,

...and you're out of insulin.

~

Province of Lazio declares "state of calamity"

2012-02-06T20:17:00.004+01:00

Not making it up. And yes, they brought the army out.

Take THAT Toronto!

Everyone seems to be mad at the mayor, Alemanno.

Rome in the snow.

Romans, playing in the snow.

But Romans really shouldn't complain if all they've got is a little trouble with traffic.

260 die (so far) in record European cold snap.

the poor weather also hit boat passengers, when the ferry Sharden hit a breakwater shortly after setting off from the port of Civitavecchia near Rome on Saturday.

It caused panic among the 262 passengers who feared a repeat of a cruise ship tragedy in the area last month that is thought to have killed 32 people.

Coast guard spokesperson Carnine Albano said the accident, which tore a 25m hole in the ship's side above the waterline, happened after the vessel was buffeted by a violent snow storm from the north-east.

All passengers were evacuated and no injuries reported.

Apparently, 16 people have died in snow-related traffic accidents in Algeria.

~

Happy anniversary, Your Majesty

2012-02-06T14:45:00.005+01:00

The Queen of Canada took the throne 60 years ago today.

Ad multos annos.

If you want to sing along, here is the Canadian verse of God Save the Queen:

Our loved Dominion bless
With peace and happiness
From shore to shore;
And let our Empire be
United, loyal, free,
True to herself and Thee
For evermore

~

2012-02-05T11:09:00.001+01:00

Looks like a picture in a book...

~

Snow in Rome

2012-02-04T11:16:00.012+01:00

Update:

This was taken in Rome Saturday morning at the Parco della Caffarella by Chris Altieri, denizen. Biggest snowstorm in 20 years. A friend of mine texted me just now to say he couldn't come over because he got "snowed in" in the City last night.

It's bright and sunny here today though. Not much sign of the last 24 hours of storms.

It's cold though. My radiators have been going full blast 24 hours a day for three days, and it's still not what you would call "warm" in here.

The pope's back garden.

Romans love snow as much as I did when I was a kid in sunny, non-wintery Victoria. What I want to know is how come Roman kids own snow pants?

He looks a little surprised.

Sliding (very few sleds) at the Circus Maximus.

Someone has one though.

"For Rent"

The sun's out again in Rome and it's so bright with light reflected off the white stuff that it's blazed out the webcam.

Photo hat-tips to C. Altieri, D. Kerr and others via Facebook

~

Snow!!

2012-02-03T12:58:00.010+01:00

Here's what St. Peter's Piazza looks like now

Here's the link to Vatican Radio's webcam.

I woke up this morning after running the heat all night and it was quite chilly. It's not snowing yet out here, but pouring with rain and really cold (for Italy). I'm bundled up in a wooly sweater, scarf and fuzzy hat.

I kept the link to the webcam open this afternoon and with my good Bose speakers plugged into the computer, I've been hearing the rolls of thunder in Rome, the bells chiming and a crow calling. It's made my afternoon very Goth...

~

OK everybody,

2012-02-02T18:41:00.008+01:00

...with your best high-pitched self-righteous shriek...

"GRAPHIC IMAGES DON'T WORK you evil extremist hater!

...Oh, I'm just so offended"

I remember talking to someone who brought the GAP to Canada. She had been all over the place with the nasty pictures and heard every. single. complaint (and it's funny how the people on "our side" almost always make exactly the same complaint as the pro-aborts...)

She thought she'd heard it all until the day, at some university campus in Arkansas I think, when they got a call from the local pro-life pregnancy care volunteer centre. You know those nice woman-friendly places that are all about the nice snuggly warm feelings you get when you give them a package of diapers once a year so you can say you've done your bit? The ones with all the nice pictures of cuddly babies on the walls...

She was told that the GAPpers were causing them all manner of trouble and would they please knock it off with those pictures, for heaven sake?!

They were getting too many calls you see. All those university kids who had seen the pictures had changed their minds about abortion and, instead of calling the local abortion mill, were calling them and they just weren't used to such a high volume of work and didn't have the manpower for it...

Yep. That actually happened.

You can be pro-life, but for pity sake! Don't be that pro-life. Have some moderation!

~

First portrait sketch

2012-02-02T13:34:00.012+01:00

So, I've been reading the book, Lessons in Classical Drawing, and practising with charcoal, and I thought I'd have a go at doing a formal sitting. I picked a friend whom I knew would not be offended if I made him look like a bowl of pudding.

As it turned out, I think it looks OK...for a first go. This is the sight-size method that Andrea has been teaching me. You place the easel in such a way that you simply do a one-to-one copy of what you see.

Here's the original

and here's the copy. It wasn't easy to get him to sit still until I hit upon the method of letting him watch a movie on the computer while I worked.

Also, yelling.

I'm going to have to keep working on charcoal technique, I've not really got the knack of shading and judicious smudging that brings the whole thing up to a fine polish, but at least it's a start.

In better light but slightly fuzzy.

I think I am going to call this a "portrait sketch" because I realised as I was doing it that I did not have either the time or the expertise with charcoal to do a more closely rendered drawing. With a real portrait, there are all sorts of wee teeny details that you have to get just right in order to go from it being "just a sketch" to a real finished portrait drawing. (For example, look at the shape of the shadow just on the inside corner of Chris's left eye. It's not round is it? It's got a little point on it at the top... Stuff like that.) There's also a whole lot of shading that can be done by putting down layers of charcoal where you deepen a shadow and then do another shadow on the inside.

Like this.

Also, I think I'm going to use toned paper for the next one. I thought of just doing a value over the whole face and then bringing up the brightest highlights using the white paper with the eraser, but (because I'm still recovering and my hands are still somewhat shaky) I was not very confident about my use of the charcoal pencil for doing a light tone, and because the paper was the cheap crappy stuff I bought to just futz about on.

With toned paper, either grey or tan, you don't have to do that fine layer of mid-tone value over the whole thing and then erase, and you get to use white chalk to bring up the highlights and go really dark with the darkest shadow shapes. All in all, a much more pleasing effect.

Something I definitely learned with this though, is that I don't like drawing small. I think next time I'm going to have the easel and the subject close to side by side to get a much bigger drawing. I think I'm going to be one of those Draw-it-Big artists.

For a little while I think I'm just going to practice on some of the Caravaggio pictures I've got out of books, heads of Christ and St. Francis, etc., to get the hang of doing values with the brown charcoal pencil. Also, get ready for a long and fascinating series that I think I will call "Getting the white milk jug right".

Keep trying. Try harder...

(Also, I'm taking applications from any of the Rome/S. Marinella people who want to be next.)

~

A child can do it

2012-01-31T21:18:00.003+01:00

I get tired of hearing "Oh, you must be so talented, I can't draw a straight line..."

We have banned that phrase from this blog.

There is no such thing as "talent" if you mean by it some kind of Harry Potter gene that magically allows you to draw without lessons practice or effort. Leonardo da Vinci was apprenticed to the art studio at the age of 15. All the great masters started full time formal training early in their lives.

This belief that drawing is some kind of magical ability seems ridiculous if you apply the same idea to music. Yoyo Ma was indeed one of those young prodigies that became famous for being a wonderful interpreter of Bach while still in his 20s. But who would suggest, listening to him play, that he had just picked up the cello one day and started at that level? Who would say, "Gosh, he must have natural talent, I can't play the cello that well..." He started lessons when he was five.

If there is "talent" involved at all, I would rather call it love. Yoyo Ma loved the cello and loved music enough to pay very close attention, to want to become better, to examine problems in music and find solutions, to set higher and higher goals for himself. Love is essential of course, but so are a lot of other things that a person can't control. He was born into the right family; his father was his first instructor. He lived in a class and at a time when he was able to devote his time to study.

Ability in art has very little, if anything to do with "talent". I think, in fact, people talk about "talent" to give themselves an excuse not to try. "Oh, there's no point learning or practicing, I don't have the natural talent."

Until recently, instruction in drawing was routinely given to all children and anyone with an education past the primary level could at least render a scene recognisably in charcoal. I will say it again, it is a skill, like cooking or driving, that can, and very much should be taught.

~

The new tolerance

2012-01-31T18:21:00.004+01:00

The University College of London students' union has just passed a motion making the campus officially "pro-choice".

Fortunately, the Union is sensitive to the needs of "anti-choice" students. The motion has a clause assuring such neanderthal troglodytes that they will not be forced or pressured by the university to have abortions themselves.

“An official pro-choice policy would not prevent students who disagree with termination on ethical or religious grounds from exercising their right not to seek a termination.”

I feel so much better, don't you?

~

"Big Society" meets "Real World"

2012-01-29T22:46:00.004+01:00

Ah Britain...

It's a long story, but in a nutshell...

For quite a long time, however many years it was, the Labour Party under Tony Blair tried to make Britain a different place from what our mums and dads had known.

Very different.

Now, David Cameron, who likes to make people think he's a "conservative," has made up this new plan to make things more like they way they were. It's called "Big Society," in which, he figures, regular people will start helping each other, without going to the government to fix all their problems.

Trouble is, this requires the kind of people who lived in our mums' and dads' Britain, not the kind of people that Tony Blair's Britain has produced.

Here's a little example of why this isn't going as well as hoped. One of Tony Blair's friends' little projects, that gets talked about rather too infrequently, was this new thing, Not-A-Cop. Called "police community support officers," PCSOs, Not-A-Cops function just about as well as you would imagine from the name.

Here's a headline typical of their great contribution to British society and policing...

"PCSOs trash penniless homeless guy's tent, bought by local charity"

"The tent was warm and it was out of people's way in woodland.

"It was secure my own private space where I could read a book with my torch."

The tent disappeared when Mr Hicks was out walking around the town during the day.

He returned back to the area behind Witney's Windrush Leisure Centre to find the tent gone.

Mr MacKenzie said: "I inquired in the leisure centre (about the tent) as to whether they had any information and was told that the manager authorised two Police Community Support Officers from Witney Police Station to clear Justin's home away.

"Also, if the police had dismantled it then it should have been treated with respect and taken back to the police station so that Justin could have claimed it back.

And here's a funny video about it, so you can have a laugh in case you were starting to worry about this too much...

(Watch out for language...)

~

Ocean very large; filled with water: study

2012-01-29T21:54:00.001+01:00

Sometimes the temptation to climb up onto the top of the cupola at St. Peter's and yell "I TOLD YOU SO" down into the piazza is overwhelming.

~

You may now point and laugh

2012-01-27T13:56:00.006+01:00

I am frequently, and lately more often, obliged to remind commboxers to read the commbox rules posted to the sidebar. I wrote them quite a few years ago when I decided that one thing I would never tolerate was rudeness. You can say whatever you like, that is, make whatever point you think relevant to a post either in agreement or not, but you may not use foul language, you may not use an unpleasant or unkind tone and you may not indulge your personal fetishes for anti-anything here. No idiotic anti-Christian insults, but also no unpleasant rants about atheists, Darwinians, or whomever the target of the day happens to be. You can, and are often encouraged to be sharp or pointy, but meanness, rudeness or bad language is not allowed.

I don't like it.

One of the things the commbox rules made clear that I am the boss, the sole arbiter of right and wrong, the judge of tone, the authority on offensiveness. I am also, more to the point, the person with her finger over the smite button and I have a deletion policy that people often, for some reason, think I will not employ in their case.

I try to encourage people to think of my blog as my sitting room. You are invited to tea and are encouraged to be interesting for as long as you stay. Disagreeing with me is part of being interesting. Coming into my house and insulting the other guests, sneering at the colour of the carpet or making unkind remarks, however, does not make you interesting. It makes you evicted.

One of the things that I have noticed in years of using the internet for my work is that some think they are not really addressing real people. It is widely commented upon that this is a medium that encourages the lower instincts in people, and this is, moreover, a time when genuine good manners (I don't mean just saying nasty things without swearing), are rarely taught to young people. How to disagree well is an art that is sadly being erased by decades of a culture that encourages everyone to express whatever vile thoughts happen to cross his mind at any time.

I once had to intervene in a bit of unpleasantness between a pair of unpleasant, and needless to say young, roommates. One had accused the other of stealing and was in a violent rage. I ordered him, with my best school-marm voice, to leave the room and come back when he was able to speak quietly. He rounded on me with the most extraordinary and memorable assertion that I had no right to try to stop him expressing his feelings. He was a young man, perhaps 19, who had been raised all his life to believe that as long as he "genuinely" felt something, it was acceptable, nay necessary, to blare it out to the world at large, and the "rudest" thing anyone could do was to tell him to shut it. It was a learning moment.

Younger people, I have since noticed, appear to be nearly all convinced that they have no reason whatever, in any venue at all, to modify their tone, their ideas, opinions or mouths. Or to listen to anything anyone else has to say. And brother, do they get indignant when someone tells them to behave. This observation has been borne out only too well by long experience with the internet. Perhaps I don't get outside my own bubble enough to observe how people interact. My friends are all grown-ups who know how to argue well and politely (for the most part) and are able to forgive each other their occasional slips and oddities.

I watched the "occupy" kids interacting on video several times with people who did not agree and in nearly every case the arrogance of the former was appalling, even when they were not outright shouting obscenities. Not only do these young people, (and often not so young) seem incapable of having an intelligent conversation with someone who does not agree, they are also apparently barely able to articulate their own ideas. It was quite a spectacle, especially coming at the same time as those "English riots" in which the few young looters who were interviewed were nearly sub-verbal.

One of the most important rules on this blog, in place to help us all avoid the temptation to let ourselves go and "express our real feelings" in the modern way, is the requirement to leave a real or plausible-sounding name. Anonymous posts, I reiterate, are not allowed. Neither is it allowed to use a moniker, obviously made-up pseudonym or adopt the name of an historical figure. If I think that you are not using a real name, (because I tend to be in a better mood in general in recent years) I will usually instruct the commenter to scroll down and read the commbox rules posted to the sidebar on the left".

I have found myself having to do this more often lately. I suspect it is because cancer makes you interesting, but for some reason the daily site stats have taken an enormous jump recently. In seven years of blogging, I have usually just carried on as if the only people reading were the ten or fifteen people who regularly toss out their ideas. I got a steady 300-350 a day and was quite happy. I hate large parties, and especially don't like a crowd. In the past, when I have seen a sudden jump in numbers, I have put it down to a link from someone more famous and have just battened down a bit and waited for them all to go chattering off somewhere else. But now I see that we are steadily attracting up to 1500 a day, so I suppose I must resign myself to having people here who do not understand the purpose of this blog.

I will make it easy. This blog is for me to write things I think about and it is addressed to my friends and long-time readers. Lately, I have been writing about what it is like to have cancer while living in a foreign country, and about art. But I often write about politics, religion and social and cultural issues.

If you are neither a friend nor a regular, you are still welcome and if you want to join either group it is very easy. Be polite. Say intelligent things related to the posts. Do not be a bore. Do not talk about professional sports. (Just a heads-up: I am inherently and always bored and annoyed by professional sports.) If you only have the urge to say, "Great post! Loved it!" please say it out loud in the privacy of your own home. If you are constitutionally incapable of being either interesting or polite, you will not last long here.

(And spelling counts. If you don't know the difference between "are" and "our," "your" and you're," or "there," they're" and "their," or think that "u" and "you" are interchangeable, you should turn the internet off right now and read a book. I am happy to supply a suggested reading list by email.)

One thing is always required: you must use a real or plausible-sounding name. If you make up a name, you may use one common to whatever culture you were raised in. If you use it consistently here, neither I nor anyone else will know the difference, and you will avoid the tiresome implication that you are a Person of Consequence with a Big Secret Identity to protect. If you are really a Person of Consequence who fears being fired or something for being seen here, you may apply privately and receive an authorised nickname that only you and I will know.

The idea is not to make sure everyone else knows who you are, but to make sure that I do. The first rule is always the most important. This blog is my universe; ultimately only my opinion matters.

Long-time readers will confirm that I have no qualms whatever about deleting you if you have annoyed me in any way. I control only two spaces in the universe: my apartment and this blog. And I control them absolutely.

I mention all this now because,

ermmm...

I seem to have accidentally erased the post with the commbox rules.

When I get around to it, I will reconstruct them. Until then, you may all talk quietly amongst yourselves.

~

Happy Birthday to Yoooooo

2012-01-26T18:09:00.001+01:00

Dorothy's birthday is this weekend. She would like it to be known that her birthday is the whole weekend and not just a little part of it.

Go send her a nice note.

Hurrah for you, nice girly.

~

Now I know how you all feel

2012-01-25T18:42:00.001+01:00

A dear friend and close colleague, the man without whom I would not have been able to make any headway in my work in Rome, has been taken to hospital and is having surgery for colon cancer this week.

I'm in shock and am completely taken aback.

Damn cancer!

~

Someone's mad at me

2012-01-24T21:08:00.007+01:00

for being... well... me.

I have been saving this little gem for a rainy blog day. You remember the other day when I was musing briefly about isolation and what it does to you. The context, I believe, was the weird spectacle of the "official" mourning activities being filmed and enforced in the world's most isolated state, North Korea. I was thinking about it because I had also been musing on what sort of conditions one has to have to ensure that an entire nation of 33 million people have ex-ACT-ly the same opinions on the usual range of, shall we say, reproductive issues.

Canada, you will remember, has a press and broadcast media that is almost entirely state-run or state-vetted. The CRTC ensures that nothing in broadcasts from radio or TV comes with anything other than the officially approved editorial position. Nearly every newspaper in the country is owned by the same company, that is a heavy funder of the Canadian Liberal Party, and of course, we can count on academia and film to do its bit in making sure that everyone adheres in lock-step to the Frankfurt-school, feminist, neo-marxist, Planned Parenthood, Our Bodies Our Selves marching orders. There really is no place in Canada where you can get away from this, it is a self-contained media bubble, or was until the internet came in.

I pondered this once many years ago. Canada seems to have an ideal situation to be used as a guinea pig in a big experiment on how to change a deeply conservative country into a nation of whiney welfare-state addicted leftists. Part of it is the low population to land mass ratio. Canada has the second largest landmass in the world, but a tiny population. The population centres, moreover, are very far-flung indeed. If you grow up in, say the Gaspe, you will without a doubt have to move to somewhere larger and more densely populated like Montreal to get a job and start your life. This trend tends to isolate individuals, separating them often by thousands of miles from their family and their communities of origin.

By rigid control of the media, by creating an atomised population who have only the official state-controlled line for information and no other sources of moral or social stability but the state, you have a population that is ripe for brainwashing.

How do you shift an entire nation to the left? Look at what has been done in Canada.

I was thinking about all this because of an interesting email from a young man whose prodigious skills as a Classical Realist painter had caught my attention. You may recall that I linked to David Gluck's blog, Painting Stuff to Look Like Stuff.

Delighted that I had found more Classical Realists to play with, who moreover live in Duncan BC not an hour from my birth place, you can imagine that I wasted no time in giving them a little extra boost. It never would have occurred to me that I was not worthy in their eyes to dare to link to their page.

I received one friendly commbox note from Mr. Gluck and then, honestly, more or less forgot about him.

What with getting the news that I am much less likely to die of cancer, dealing with the long-term side effects of chemotherapy, recovering from major abdominal surgery, dealing with the emotional and physical stresses of surgically induced premature menopause and suddenly finding myself in contact with a father whom I had assumed had forgotten all about me and from whom I had not heard since the early 1980s, ... oh, and trying to get back to work...you can imagine that Mr. Gluck was not prominent in my mind.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I received the following little note by email.

From: David Gluck
To: quicustodiet66@yahoo.ca
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 12:20:52 PM
Subject: please remove our link

Please remove the link of my blog from your blog. I must say at first I was excited to find a fellow BC Canadian realist who was supportive of what my wife and I were doing, but quite frankly after reading your blog, I am turned off. I cannot accept intolerance of gays, transgender individuals, woman's rights, etc. I also found it in very poor taste you are trying to draw a parallel between abortion and the holocaust (especially since many of my family members were wiped out in it). You seem like a very angry individual, and we do not want your followers bringing that sort of hatred to our our blog. Thank you.

David Gluck

ps. You may also want to consider removing Sadie Valerie as well considering she is a huge supporter of gay rights and marriage. In addition, I am friends with most of the artists on your links section and I cannot say they would approve of your blog either.

(emphasis added)

A pariah in the Classical Realist world! Dear me. Having other things on my mind, I responded somewhat tersely,

I'll do whatever you like, but I'm disappointed that a fellow adherent to the Classical Realist revival is so narrow minded as to be unable to disagree on politics in a civil way.

I'm always shocked at the ingrained intolerance of the left.

Very disappointed.

H. White

He replied,

"On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:13 AM, David Gluck wrote:
Trust me when I say this is me being as civil as humanly possible. I sent you a personal message as opposed to posting anything on your blog that was negative and I was very polite in the manner in which I did it. By the way, I find it a stretch to call someone who is accepting of people for who they are "narrow-minded."

Yesterday, I found out that he must be lurking about here because I received the following, "I asked you very politely to take me off of your blog. Please take me off the links section immediately. Thank you."

I thought of all sorts of replies, (like, Good grief boy, I've really got other things to think about...) but then I thought I would put it to my readers what my response ought to be. (I also considered "friending" him on Facebook, but worried that his little head would explode.)

I have thought about writing back to explain that in the world of grown-ups it is possible not only to disagree civilly on political matters, but to remain close friends with people for many years who differ radically on such issues. It is often difficult, but with the application of charity, forbearance, kindness and forgiveness, and a habit of keeping one's own faults and failings firmly before one's eyes, (I realise these are rare traits in the lefty world, but I have met them there) it is possible greatly to benefit by maintaining contact with people outside one's own political bubble.

Faithful chorus, please discuss.

(I ask only that you do not bother the poor fellow at home. No emails please or commbox messages at his place please.)

~

Just had a little follow-up

2012-01-24T20:32:00.003+01:00

appointment with the GP this evening, to see how things are going, adjust medication, complain about the weather etc. He called the gynaecologist and got the specifics for the blood tests I need for starting HRT. One of the things I need is a mammogram.

Mammogram huh?

Wouldn't it be funny if...

~

I imagine it'll be the only one,

2012-01-21T23:00:00.002+01:00

So, I'll just enjoy it...

Second Leonardo copy framed and living free in North Carolina.

~

Missing the point

2012-01-18T20:46:00.010+01:00

I hate to say it, but I find the arguments for Intelligent Design to be somewhat unconvincing. I'm afraid I just don't see why the fact that even fairly simple life forms are actually incredibly, amazingly complex, proves anything. I don't see why incredibly, amazingly complex life forms couldn't have developed their complexity through a kind of biological trial and error over a very long period of time. I just don't really see mere complexity as a sufficiently compelling argument for the existence of a designer.

At the same time, I find the answers of the Darwinians equally unsatisfying. I think both groups are locked into a materialist mindset that cannot grasp certain metaphysical ideas. They are looking for proof of God in the wrong place. And they are giving answers that are, essentially, non sequiturs. Religious people understand that the proof for the existence of God has little to do with the question of the origins of the universe or of life. God doesn't live in the universe. The only way He could have created it is to have already existed before it. Physical reality and all the laws governing it were made by God; He therefore can't be part of it.

Darwinians especially seem locked into a silly argument with Protestant fundamentalists over the origins of the physical universe or of life in it. Because they don't know anything about religion or philosophy, (and can't seem to be bothered to look it up on Wikipedia) they they don't seem to understand that Protestant creationists are not only talking scientific nonsense, they are talking through their hats on religion too. I once had to laugh when some nasty little atheist tried to accuse me of being a Creationist because I believed that God made everything. He seemed incapable of understanding that one can believe God is the author of reality without trying to prove that the early verses of the book of Genesis is a literal historical, minute-by-minute account of the first week of existence.

They don't seem to understand that the dumb Proddies arguing this silly theory are just as irritating to intelligent Christians as they are to the scientists.

Creationism is not properly speaking a religious argument about the creation of the universe; it is a political argument for the literal interpretation of the Bible and for sola scriptura. It is, in origin, a fight not with science, but with the Catholic Church. It goes back to the 16th century and is, frankly, very boring and stupid. (Really? I'm supposed to believe that the earth is 4000 years old because of the genealogies? Seriously?) The problem these Proddies have is a basic misunderstanding of what kind of document the Bible is, what it is for, and the way in which it is inerrant. It's neither a history text nor a book about physics or geology.

But this brings me to Intelligent Design, which is not, as far as I can see, an offshoot of this ancient and tired Protestant fight. It really does seem to be a movement springing from scientists who had no previous association with Proddie fundamentalism. And yet, it is still hampered by the same mistakes that both the Creationists and the Darwinians are making. None of them seem able to think outside their materialist box.

God is not in the universe. He made everything and holds everything in existence moment to moment by a continuous, eternal act of His will. The problem everyone seems to have with this question is the difficulty of thinking of things that exist outside physical reality. Outside time and space.

Darwinians and atheists like to say that the universe was brought into being by a big explosion a long time ago. When you ask them what was there before that big explosion, they will say, variously, "nothing" or "another explosion". But these answers are not even addressing the real question. It does not answer, "Where did the explosion come from? What made it happen?" Saying, "It just happened" or things "just exist" is not only unsatisfactory to people like me, it's anti-scientific. It's an expression of belief.

Dawkins once answered the question about where the big bang came from in an interview by saying, "I don't know." Which is at least honest. But when he is saying, "God doesn't exist," and seems to expect people to believe it because he's a scientist, he is making a fool of himself in the same way a plumber would be foolish to make definitive statements about cosmology.

All these people are missing the point. The existence of God really cannot be either proven or disproven by the natural sciences. Dawkins' assertion that God does not exist is not based on evidence, it is not a scientific assertion, it is an expression of religious belief. And I think that the best the ID guys can say is that they believe that such complexity as can be found in the bacterial flagellum, seems likely to point to a designer.

Physical science is only capable of observing objects and systems within physical existence and God, the author of physical reality, does not live there, as an author does not live in the book he writes. When people are looking for evidence of the existence of God, you can't answer them from inside the box of physicality.

Unfortunately for us, natural scientists are no longer trained in philosophy so they don't seem to understand the limits of natural science, and don't seem to know that they can't answer all questions about reality. It's a pity, because it seems clear that the people asking them for proof or disproof of God don't know this either. Modern people have been conditioned to think that questions about what is and is not real can only be answered using empirical science. Philosophy has become so arcane and intellectually corrupt (thanks Descartes) that it would never cross their minds to look for concrete answers there. That there are other kinds of proofs is something that many people, and apparently most scientists, have forgotten or have never known.

Darwinians have failed to even address the real question and it is hard to escape the idea that they are refusing to address it because they know it is outside their competence. It is very difficult to listen to these people talk about religion without thinking them very arrogant, and quite frankly, ignorant. I have always wanted to hear what Dawkins would have to say in response to Aquinas' five proofs. But it seems likely that neither he nor most of his interlocutors have heard of them and none of them, on either side, seem to have any notion that there is any way to address the question without natural science.

They have no background whatever, it seems, in even elementary philosophy. The Darwinian answer, "It just happened," because it ignores the real issue, is trite and unsatisfying. Things do not "just happen". There's this thing in metaphysics called "causality," which is completely observable and which philosophers have called "the cement of the universe". In other words, you can't have physical reality without it.

I myself have been observing things not just happening all my life. Events inside physical reality, existence, are always caused by some other event. All of existence is linked together by this chain and everything that happens also causes other things to happen. This is something that everyone can observe and figure out.

This means that everything that happens and everything that exists is "contingent". Everything is reliant on the thing prior to it in the chain. In philosophy, the word contingent means, "neither impossible nor necessary". A contingent being, therefore, is something that really exists, but depends on something else for its existence. Contingent beings do not exist out of necessity. It is not their nature to exist. I am a contingent being, there was a time when I didn't exist, therefore it is not my nature to exist.

The trouble that both the Darwinians and the ID people are having is that they are trying to demonstrate the existence of God from observing things within that chain of causality, and all they can come up with are things that do not exist out of necessity. Things that are contingent, dependent upon something else in the chain for their existence.

What they seem incapable of doing, perhaps because their intellectual training has been too specialised, is thinking about something that exists out of necessity. What people are asking when they want to know where did the universe come from is not, when was the Big Bang. It is, where and when did the chain of causality start?

The only way to start this chain that is the "cement of the universe," the foundation of physical reality, is to be something whose nature it is to already exist, to exist outside time and space. It has to be something that is not subject to causality, whose existence is not contingent, or dependent on anything else to have started it.

There is only one thing, one being, whose nature it is to have always existed and which will always exist in the future, and this being by its nature cannot exist within the boundaries of the causal chain.

Next time you're discussing the existence of God or the origins of the universe, the thing to ask is not, when did it all start, but how. All things are dependent upon previous things. What, then, is the first thing?

~

Starting to forget

2012-01-18T17:31:00.003+01:00

Ray Comfort who made this video said that one of the things he had to overcome in doing these interviews was his own shock and disgust that these people knew nothing about the history of Nazism and the War. He said that at first his involuntary reaction showed and it would put people off so much that they wouldn't talk to him any further. He learned to school his expression and to expect the level of ignorance he hadn't been prepared for.

As for the apologetics aspect of it, it's fine, but somewhat unrefined. The people he's talking to evidently have no intellectual capacity at all, and so their ideas are easy to refute and their minds are easy to change. But I wonder how fast they can be convinced right back again when confronted with the usual abortionism/feminist slogans.

I was taught pro-life apologetics by Scott Klusendorf and he has a much more rigorous approach that can be applied to people who are capable of rational thought. I don't fault Ray Comfort for his efforts, but I think he'd be in trouble with his somewhat sketchy method if he were up against someone of more substance.

~

Obstacles

2012-01-18T11:49:00.003+01:00

“[T]he rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered.” Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Well, the solution is obvious isn't it?

It's those damned elections we've got to get rid of...

Never fear Jihadis, the EU stands behind you in that noble effort.

~

A little worried

2012-01-17T17:29:00.004+01:00

about the puss-cat.

I think there is something wrong with Winnie's eyesight.

I always thought she was just kind of dumb, but now I think maybe she doesn't see very well. I just put down a saucer of milk for her and she was nosing around to one side of it trying to find it. It was only about three inches from her face but it took her a few seconds of sniffing before she found it. Maybe I should take her to the vet. Is there any way to check a cat's eyesight? Is this normal for cats?

~

Matt's making another video

2012-01-17T13:19:00.006+01:00

And I missed my chance...Dang!

I was signed up to get the email telling me when he was going to be in Rome and it came a few weeks ago telling all his Rome fans that he was going to be in Piazza del Popolo on October 23rd. Just as bad luck would have it though, that was the weekend Vicky and I went to Florence. Florence was awesome, but I was really sorry to have missed him.

Cause, I'm a giddy fan...

Dang!

Here he is doing his thing in Talinn, Estonia.

Aaaand in Zürich

A fun thing to do when he makes his clips is to do your own personal mini Matt video. I totally would have loved to do this. Oh well...

Dang!

~

Crazy-State

2012-01-17T12:16:00.003+01:00

The only way to really go as crazy as it's possible for 24 million people to collectively go is isolation. No one and nothing, no new idea, gets in and certainly no one gets out. I don't know if isolation is enough to make you nuts by itself, but I think it is clearly a requirement to really let it go as far as it will go.

I've had a few Thoughts about the subject of philosophical isolation in the last few hours, and I will share them shortly.

Meantime, I'd like to thank Binky the Webelf for the plug.

Say a prayer for our Nova Scotian Anglican friend if you please. He's not been well.

(Really Binks, I think you would find blogging much easier just to do a bit at a time like the rest of us do. It's no wonder you find it exhausting with these huge posts. Just put up one or two little things every now and then. You will find it much easier and the rest of us won't miss you so much.)

~

Antonio Guzmán Capel

2012-01-16T13:18:00.005+01:00

Hate the cutsie-wootsy figures. Hoo boy! Really hate them quite a lot.

and really, cat paintings? Seriously?

But lawks a' mercy! Those still lifes!

He's got that 17th century Dutch glow.

How do you make fruit look like this?

Must... try... harder...

~

Progress

2012-01-16T12:59:00.003+01:00

A little over a year ago, I copied this

Leonardo drawing

I decided to use this as a sort of measuring stick to see how I'm getting on. Thought I'd do a copy a year.

So, I did another one about a month or so ago.

Seems like it's working.

~

Pick a side, there's a war on

2012-01-16T11:49:00.008+01:00

Graphic images...

It's such a bad idea to show those photos. I can't fully articulate my reasons why, but in my gut I feel it's a bad idea.

It would be better to show a group of nuns with babies or adopted mothers with babies that they have adopted to take the "burden" off of unwed teen mothers.

I mean, we in the pro-life movement see them every day, it's just so easy to forget how horrible those photos really are.

I just think that showing those horrible pictures can do nothing but stir up more hatred and animosity. It can really only backfire on our cause. I mean, I'm against abortion, but I don't think it helps to go shoving it in people's faces.

You can't win people over by making them angry and offended... I mean, children can see these pictures for heaven's sake!

I just don't see how showing this upholds the dignity of these dead babies. Not to mention the dignity of the little ones who have to see them on TV. I know that it is reality, but my daughter who watches TV innocently, will be haunted by those images.

The use of horrific images never has anything but a negative effect on whatever cause you are trying to defend.

After all, what cause was ever helped by the use of such horrible images?

~

A parade of naked emperors

2012-01-15T23:08:00.008+01:00

Why do I have no interest in the "mainstream" art world?

Well, this:

Walking publicity stunt tapped as "Professor of Drawing" by Royal Academy.

Tracey Emin, someone I think of as a human sneer aimed at everything good, true and beautiful, has been appointed to the job by the General Assembly of Royal Academicians.

Painter Anthony Green said, "She draws at the speed of thought, which is a very rare ability."

Yes indeed, behold, this miraculous "natural talent".

Miss Emin herself comments on her amazing ability: "Some of my favourite drawings I have done with my eyes closed - or so drunk I do not remember making them."

Never would have guessed.

“...Being an artist isn’t just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it’s some kind of communication, a message.”

James Abbott, another angry art blogger I've recently discovered, responds: "I believe, in her heart of hearts (deep down where one may still reside), Emin’s message to the world is: 'sucker!'"

Apparently there are still about 60 students actually studying "art" at the Academy to whom she is now obliged to give lectures and workshops in drawing.

Many of the classical realists I've become interested in studied "fine arts" or "studio art" in university or at some accredited school and they uniformly say the same thing about it. That it was time wasted and they learned nothing of any use whatever.

Is it any wonder?

~

Give 'em the old one-two

2012-01-15T17:53:00.003+01:00

"I saw Santa punching Arius..."
"'Tis the season to be cranky, fa la la la la, la la la laaaaa..."

Jolly Old St. Nicholas — oh yes, he was a bishop — wasn’t having any of it. He tried to listen patiently, he really did, but Arius’ speech was just so wrong, that he was compelled to get up in the midst of it and, yep, punch him in the face.

Arius would have made the nativity a non-event (woop-de-freakin-doo everyone, God made something else). He, majestically prefiguring the various sects of Happy-Holiday-ers, Winter Solstice-ers, and it’s-actually-a-pagan-holiday-ers (that’s the point, you muppets!) denied that Christmas need be a celebration of substance at all. So when the modern world promotes the consumerist image of Santa Claus over the image of Christ, it is not so much the wrath of Christ they should fear as it is the wrath of Santa Claus.

A little late in the season for this, but it is fun to be reminded that I and my friends are not the only cranky Catholics in the history of the Church to lose our patience with idiotic liberal sophistry.

So, sing along with us...

"He sees when you’re dissenting
he knows when you’ve blasphemed
he knows your schismatic doctrines
and so he’s gonna punch your face
Oh, you better not doubt
You better not divide
You better not bring scandal to the Holy Roman Catholic Church
I’m telling you why
Saaaanta Claus is smacking you down,”

Happy Second Sunday after Epiphany, everyone.

~

All art and work plans going forward

2012-01-14T12:31:00.003+01:00

I just got the call from the doctor at the Gemelli. He said the histology report came back clean. I had a microscopic tumour on the uterus, but the margins were clean. No more cancer. It's over.

I'm still more or less flat on my back from surgery two weeks ago, but now I can just recover and get on with things.

It looks like the rest of my life will now happen.

~

Wait, what?!

2012-01-13T19:49:00.001+01:00

We're supposed to think the 60s were great?!

Hang on, no one seriously believes that, right?

I mean,

Right?

~

Canis latrans

2012-01-11T14:10:00.002+01:00

In which the Road Runner finally gets what he deserves.

~

Leisure

2012-01-11T13:27:00.002+01:00

There's something important about the culture of the West, about Christendom, that often gets overlooked. We have enough room, extra space in our cultural machinery for fooling around. For fun and for doing things just for the joy of it. It may be this that makes Western society superior to everything that has come before it. If we keep this alive, we may yet survive the current assaults.

~

Poor Guy

2012-01-11T12:04:00.001+01:00

Same thing happened to me. But I wasn't smiling about it at the end.

~

Hopes and dreams

2012-01-10T14:29:00.007+01:00

So, about the future...

Y'all know that the cancer business has led me to seriously re-assess my life and work. The conclusions I've come to are pretty positive. For the first time in my life I have no questions at all about whether I am doing the right things or going in the right direction. The question that cancer really raises though, is what next. The answer seems to be not a change, but more. More work. More art. More learning. More getting to know people and the world and understanding them. And doing this through art and writing.

Even before cancer, just having moved to Italy raised many of these kinds of questions. Every morning I still wake up and spend a minute or so remembering where I am and being amazed. A place this beautiful and important just makes it imperative that you live a life worthy of being here.

Just last night we said farewell to my lovely friend Vicky who came here in October to look after me (we thought the surgery would be way sooner) and is on her way home now to Vancouver to start a fabulous career as a film maker. I have more or less achieved basic physical functioning, can get in and out of bed by myself, dress, make tea and walk around the apartment. I'm not allowed to lift anything heavier than the tea pot for the first two months and can't do my own shopping at all. But I can take little walks down to the seaside and can certainly sit up at the computer and at the easel for a few hours at a time, so I think the time is near, barring further bad news from the oncologists, to get back into a regular pattern of work, at least a bit.

I am going to get the staples (!!) taken out this week, and they will tell me the results of the histological examination of the tissue some time in the next ten days or so. If the news is not what we hope for, I suppose we will have to carry on with more chemotherapy or something. I asked a couple of times "what if" and each time the answer was ambiguous. "I don't know" was the clearest I got, but someone did mention possible chemo.

I think the next histology report is going to be the crucial thing. If it shows no sign of cancer in the margins, the supposedly "clean" area around the tainted organs, then I'll probably be OK.

But if there are more cancer cells in the place where there shouldn't be then I think the long-term prognosis won't be very good. Individual cells eventually form tumours but until they do you can't detect them with scans. Right now they have already taken out more or less all the organs that I can survive without, so after this there won't be any more surgery possible. The cancer has already shown itself to be "chemo-resistant" so I think the idea is that more chemo will only stave it off for a while. How long is anyone's guess.

For myself, I am still hopeful, but there is still the issue of my intuition. I just can't shake the feeling, that seems to be turning into a certainty in my mind, that I will die of this disease. So, though I know that I will be utterly crushed if the news is bad, I will not be at all surprised, as I was not surprised at all by the initial diagnosis all the way back in March.

With all this Doom n' Gloom worst-case-scenario in mind, however, I wanted to run an idea past y'all. Vicky told me about this website that people use to raise funds for their various arty-farty projects and ideas called Kickstarter. You do a sort of pitch video and tell people what your brilliant idea is and you just plainly ask for money. You give a target goal and there is a time limit for people to donate. People have asked for start-up funds to do everything from making traditional tomato chutney to building a giant animatronic snake. One project that impressed me was this one to create a rolling photostudio to revive the use of traditional film photography.

And you can really get a lot of dosh out of it. This guy, for example, was one of the big lotto winners. He asked for 500 bucks and ended up with over $77,000. Though of course, there is no telling which project will strike the fancy of readers.

I've been all over the site and it seems that there is very little there about doing anything remotely "traditional" in art in the sense that I mean it. In fact, it seems geared towards more of the "innovative" modernist stuff that I've spent my life fighting. But there is certainly a sense in which a return to Classical Realism in art is at the very cutting edge of avant garde these days, as being interested in the Trditional Mass is in the Church. So long-lost and forgotten is the skill of realist drawing that it seems like a rediscovery of ancient alchemy or magic. Besides, nearly anything goes in our weird times, and I think perhaps if it were pitched that way my idea would get some attention.

My idea simply is, as soon as my health will allow, to start studying as close to full time as I can manage, which, given work commitments, probably means a 3-hour class a day, five days a week. This will cost about $10,000 (Cn) per year. I hope to divide my time evenly between the studio and work. That's the first part anyway. In the long run, like a couple of years from now, stage two is to teach and help Andrea expand the Rome school. In the long-long-long run, the third stage, should I ever get there, is to buy a place in the country in Umbria and open a live-in school. If I were to die having done all or most of this, I'll be pretty content.

Studying art for me is part and parcel of the work I've been doing for the last decade or more: to rescue Western Civilisation from the barbarians who have nearly destroyed it. To be a traditionalist painter, to start saying in painting what I've been saying in words, is a goal I think I can achieve (assuming there's time) and will, I hope, be the "other half" of the work I've been doing to advance the cause of The Real in the face of a universal capitulation to an evil and disordered Fantasy. I have said before that I greatly value the chance to do the work I do and to get better at it, but that it seems incomplete to me. (It could be worse, I could have a bee in my bonnet about studying poetry! I shudder.)

In the second phase, my hope is to teach other people what I've learned. I can't tell you how annoying it is when someone says, "Wow, that's amazing! I can't draw a straight line. You must have natural talent." The idea that drawing is some kind of magic trick that only people with the special Harry-Potter drawing gene can do is as widespread as it is irritating. (I can't draw a straight line either. No one can because there is no such thing in nature. In fact, I'm hereby banning the expression from the blog.) Back before they abolished education drawing was a normal part of everyone's upbringing. It is about as magical as learning to read Latin and was tossed out of the curriculum for more or less the same reasons.

When Andrea was studying at the Florence Academy she was recruited as a drawing instructor while still studying. She also worked at normal joe-jobs most of her time in training. She really does embody the kind of discipline to which I aspire.

I have no desire whatever to pick up stakes and move to Florence, mostly because I'm not interested in tearing apart my happy little life. I intend to keep doing what I am doing, but to do a lot more of it all. To continue to write out against the evils of our times on LSN. For those who worry that I am thinking of quitting, it is very far from my mind. The thing that cancer has taught me is that I really want to live, completely and fully, and for me, life simply can't be lived without writing. But it is like trying to live on only one kind of food. Eventually the craving for more protein or potassium or vitamin C becomes overwhelming.

If the cancer news is good, we are nearing the end of the ordeal. I think the time has come to make some plans for the possible future.

~

Two new bloggers

2012-01-10T13:00:00.002+01:00

Ryan Delgado, who also just got a copy of the New Book, is obviously a little further ahead than I am, having started painting, but seems to be more or less doing the same thing I am trying to do. Learn from scratch classical drawing and painting.

And Kate Stone and David Gluck seem to have just started their Classical Realist blog, called appropriately, "Painting stuff to look like stuff".

~

Many thanks

2012-01-10T11:34:00.005+01:00

to reader Katherine Altham who writes on the little note accompanying my new book,

"Dear Miss White, Your blog has on several occasions been to me a light in the darkness. With wishes for a peaceful Advent and a Christmas of "comfort and joy".

The note was on the paperwork accompanying my shiny new copy of

Lessons in Classical Drawing; Essential techniques from inside the atelier

Really, I can't say enough how much I appreciate the kindness of my readers who send me nice things and say helpful stuff.

Things are going to develop with me and the Art Thing. I've got a plan, and I'm going to need help from y'all. I know I can count on a lot of intelligent input from my chorus.

~

I often worry that I will pay a heavy price for all the time wasted

2012-01-09T12:42:00.001+01:00

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W. H. Davies

~

Senior National Gallery Curator Admits Modern Abstract Art is Crap

2012-01-09T12:20:00.003+01:00

Well, almost...

Mark Leidhauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king of pope or Medici ever did. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings...

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

This really happened

2012-01-09T09:54:00.004+01:00

That young man is Joshua Bell, one of the foremost musicians of the day. The place is the metro in Washington DC.

It was a social experiment set up by the Washington Post to see what would happen. How ordinary passers by would react to the kind of music people pay top dollar to hear in concert halls.

Well, this:

The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

H/T to Carriere.

~

Hair update: Jan 7

2012-01-07T21:28:00.004+01:00

Well, it was finally getting untidy, so I got Vicky to roll me down to the local parucchiere who gave me a quick wash and trim. First haircut in a year.

It's the guy who claims to have been the one who did Elizabeth Taylor's hair when she used to come and vacation in Santa Marinella.

(Note Christmas decorations. Vicky made the snowflakes and we collected the greenery in the park.)

~

Had a go

2012-01-07T12:17:00.007+01:00

I tried it.

It really doesn't look very much like the original, does it. I'll try again.

My excuse is that I did it on the train, the contour on the 1 hour long trip in, and the values on the 35 minute trip home.

Took the wheelchair and ventured into the city yesterday to see a movie. In a movie theatre! In English! I'll say now that though I had really expected the Robert Downey Jr. and Jude I-can-barely-stand-to-type-his-name-so-much-do-I-loathe-him Law versions to be intollerably awful, I think they do fairly well as a kind of sub-Holmes genre of their own. Holmes as superhero. I will ever remain loyal to Jeremy Brett, of course, but I like explosions, so I do!

But Rome. Dear me! I go there so infrequently now for anything other than strictly medical reasons that I had forgotten many of the things that drive me nuts about it.

Rome is probably the most un-cosmopolitan city I've ever lived in or been to.

There is exactly ONE cinema left in this miserable city that shows lingua originale films.

All the "Chinese" restaurants are this weird thing; "Roman Chinese" where all the menus of every place in the city are exactly the same. Roman-Chinese cuisine: what we do out of desperation when we just can't face another carbonara/pizza-Margherita Sunday lunch. Not only is there almost no presence of any other country here, they don't even do anything from any othe part of Italy. I think I know of exactly one Tuscan place.

It also has cobbles.

Oh dear me! Let me give all the soon-to-have-major-surgery a piece of advice. A wheelchair and the Roman cobbles are not a good mix. Even using mostly taxis it was an uncomfortable ride.

Pretty tired today, and pretty achey, but I was SO glad to have got out of the house!

~

How not to be a great painter

2012-01-06T12:01:00.001+01:00

Someone really needs to sit down with this guy and tell him, "Dude, there can be only one."

Do something different.

~

Hands are hard

2012-01-06T11:55:00.002+01:00

I've been looking around for things to help with correcting my anatomy studies. Of course, the old masters are the best, but good reproductions can be hard to find in a size suitable for copying (calendars!, but they only come out once a year). This drawing by Leonardo is, in my opinion, the greatest hand study ever done by anyone ever, ever, and his hands are famous for their beauty and the subtlety of the rendering. So much so, that I'm kind of scared to try it, but of course, I'm going to anyway.

I remember having an epiphany (heh) over the value of fashion magazines. Bought a couple once with the idea that there would be lots of body parts in them, and drapery that I could practise on. But as I flipped through them, for the first time paying close attention, I saw that in every single photo, the hands of the impossibly whispy models were doing nothing. No one was holding anything. No one was doing anything. They all just stood there with their hands as empty as their expressions. It really put me off fashion magazines for good. Take a look some time, it's interesting.

~

Shiny still life

2012-01-06T11:50:00.000+01:00

Strawberry

2012-01-06T11:38:00.001+01:00

Here's another one by the same guy.

~

Pushing through

2012-01-05T12:38:00.012+01:00

As I've said, Andrea told me before I started having surgeries that if I am on my feet then, I can start the cast drawing segment of the course when she gets back from Australia in April. Cast drawing in charcoal is the last step before actually starting painting in this painstaking and strictly laid-out formal course of study I've been doing at her studio. After that, I will do a grisaille painting of a cast, which is the last transition between drawing and painting, and then dive into colour.

Watch the video above for a minute. As you can see, it is a lot harder than it looks to draw or paint even something simple like an egg and make it come out looking like a real egg...let alone a beautiful egg.

I remember when I was little, my Grandma used to let me paint with her and she tried to teach me, though I was a rather unwilling student. She tried to instill in me the importance of starting from the beginning and started me on simple solid objects like flower vases (without flowers) and oranges and things. I was always unsatisfied with the results both because it was always much harder than it seemed it ought to be and because of the lack of glamour of painting such "simple" plain things. I complained bitterly that they were "boring" and that I wanted to do the sort of things that she did, arbutus trees and landscapes, maybe a sparkly seascape.

Knowing how enthusiastic I was about spreading things all over my clothes, she never let me do much with her oil pastels but charcoal washed out and off easily so I was allowed to muddle about with it. She really did try to teach me, but I was terribly intractable and so learned almost nothing.

I've since learned a very important lesson in drawing, that you have to keep pushing through. Many times I've started something and not liked the way it has gone. It could easily have frustrated me enough to make me stop trying after the first few passes, but I've learned that if you keep scrubbing away at a drawing, it will get better. The trick is to push past the first unsatisfactory bit and give it sufficient time. Push through the bad bits, keep pushing until you get there.

After a while you get used to having your drawing look odd or wrong for the first parts and it is almost fun to watch it grow more solid and "real looking" as you continue to jiggle it about and spot and solve the problems. Once you start looking at a drawing as a kind of puzzle to be solved, you are half way to the mindset that will succeed.

Most of my early efforts at copying, I now realise, could have been much more successful if I'd given them more time. But, like most people, I would find it wasn't working right away and assume that I just couldn't do it. That I didn't have "natural talent" (what a terrible toll that stupid phrase has taken on the world!). The one thing I can't do, even now, is draw fast, but as Ruskin says in his Elements of Drawing we are really totally unconcerned with time in drawing.

"What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom: is the character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose hand is so thoroughly disciplined that when pressed for time he can let it fly as it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of a great master at real work is never free: its swiftest dash is under perfect government. Paul Veronese or Tintoret[to] could pause within a hair's-breadth of any appointed mark in their fastest touches and follow within a hair's- breadth the previously intended curve. You must never, therefore, aim at freedom. It is not required of your drawing that it should be free, but that it should be right; in time you will be able to do it right easily, and then your work will be free in the best sense. But there is no merit in doing wrong easily."

Emphases in the original.

Probably the hardest thing we modern grown-ups have to face when learning to draw is the fact that it is difficult. It really is. It is very hard to learn as an adult how to do the mental acrobatics of "detranslating," learning to actually see the thing you are looking at as it really is, visually, without imposing labels on it. This labelling thing that we have spent our whole lives perfecting and using to understand the world that comes through our vision, has to be completely undone, and you have to learn to turn it on and off at will. An object you are looking at, say an armchair, to our eyes alone is really not an armchair at all. It is an integrated system of relationships of darks and lights and colour. Shadows and light grading down from shiny highlights to dark shade, little nubbly parts where the shade and light are close together in little bits, big patches of dark next to a section of complicated shadows that make up drapery. It is hard to explain, but what our eyes see really, really is only this. Darks and lights and colour. Not even depth...especially not depth.

The label, "armchair" has all kinds of implications. It has to be soft and curvy and to sit with it's cushion horizontal in relation to the floor. It has to be a certain kind of object and to fulfill a certain kind of function. It has to sit cradled in three-dimensional space. All of this kind of labeling, that we have done since learning it in infancy, has to be shut off if you are going to draw an armchair that looks like an armchair. The three-Dness of the thing is most especially important to turn off. Flatten it, look at it as a system of darks and lights and colours, and you will be able to draw it.

This trick is the hardest thing to learn in drawing. Really, it has nothing at all to do with how you hold a pencil. And it is so difficult, and so rarely taught, that most people assume that drawing is some kind of magic trick that requires "natural talent" (faugh!). The frustration of not getting it (and there are a lot of pages in my sketchbooks that don't get onto the blog, believe me!) is the thing you have to push through. The fact that it is difficult, and that we live in a culture that insists everything has to be easy, painless and instant, is our biggest problem. It is why I think drawing is so important to teach young people. Teach them that this hard thing is worth struggling over, and spending time on, pushing through the many obstacles and set-backs.

Here is something that can be learned about life in general from learning this difficult thing, drawing; that the rule of "pushing through" applies to everything you want to do in life. I remember when I was out there in the world, more or less raising myself after I was 15, I assumed that nearly everyone knew more about how to get on in life than I did. That there was some secret to doing things right that I didn't know and thought I could never learn on my own. I was, and still am, quite frightened about "doing things wrong" and so a great deal of my difficulties in life have surrounded fears of trying things.

If I'd been raised by grown-ups, I might have been taught that when you start something, you will have to be bad at it at first. You have to push through that part to get good, to learn how to live. I suppose I have pushed through now and finally figured it out. I do hope it's not too late to enjoy the fruits of this discovery.

* ~ * ~ *

I've been fearsomely tested lately in my ability to keep pushing through, and of course, have had a lot of help. At the moment, I'm mostly resting of course, but still pushing through and the obstacle is a most unexpected one. Right now, I'm struggling over what to write to my father. I have his email address. He has sent me a couple of emails showing an obvious desire to mend things, but what do you say? It's been a lifetime, and we might discover in the next week or so that it has in fact been my whole life and there is now no more time. How do you figure out what to say? Or even whether it is worth saying.

~

Toffs on a Train

2012-01-05T10:30:00.000+01:00

What do the British upper classes get up to in these dark times?

Why, the same thing they've always got up to. Keeping entertained.

~

I've been asked

2012-01-04T20:28:00.001+01:00

what's with all this art stuff?

Well,

this.

Dorothy explains

2012-01-04T18:01:00.004+01:00

why we need the Anglicans in the Church

The Anglicans got their liturgical English in Shakespeare's day. We got ours in the Beatles'. Lucky old us went from "In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominem" to "He loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah."

She stops short at saying outright that the NO sucks.

So I will. It sucks. An absurd, politically motivated mishmash of Proddy theology and Judaic ritual, scrubbed clean of all specifically Catholic content, cobbled together by a committee of Lutherans, Anglicans, freemasons and traitors and deliberately foisted onto the world with the malicious intention of destroying the faith and threatening the souls of millions.

I do wish people would stop telling me to go to it. I realise they're trying to help by saying, "Well, the Mass is the Mass..."

No. The Holy Eucharist is the Holy Eucharist and the proper reception of it is indeed THE source of sanctifying grace...if I were blind and deaf. Grace can only be received by a person with correct dispositions, which in me are utterly destroyed by the horrific anti-liturgy of the Novusordoist world. As they are with everyone who is ever exposed to it.

The wonder of the modern Church is that there are still people in it who believe, a testament not to the new liturgies, but to the incomprehensible power of the Holy Spirit.

~

Not been entirely idle

2012-01-04T14:58:00.008+01:00

In the last couple of months, it seems from reading here that I've been totally preoccupied with health-related things, and I suppose it's mostly true, but while thinking about the big Life and Death issues, there is plenty of time to do things when energy permits. (Albeit, mostly things involving a lot of sitting down.)

We had been called in to the Gemelli to have a consultation appointment when the histology report came back positive for cancer in the margins. We had to wait quite a while in the rather stark hallway outside the oncology office and I was going to go mad if I didn't do something with my hands and brain.

Fortunately, having been to the Lateran recently to get the feast-day plenary indulgence, we stopped in the bookshop and I bought postcards of the 12 magnificent Borromini statues of the Apostles, and even more fortunately, had brought one along to the appointment. I had intended only to do a little study of the hand and surrounding drapery, but well...

The paper is very toothy in the leather-covered sketchbook I just bought which is often good, but presents challenges.

A great place to buy beautiful leather-bound sketch and writing books (with refillable paper inserts) is a cartoleria just behind the Pantheon, I think it's just called "Cartoleria Pantheon" but the brand name of their gorgeous stuff is "Manufactus". (Anyone who ever wants to buy me presents can start and end there.)

I had been meaning to do another copy of this Leonardo drawing since I had done

this one a year ago and had intended to do them periodically as a way to measure my progress.

A friend of ours came to visit and I wanted to give her a present so it seemed like a good time for another try.

Getting better, I think, though infuriatingly slowly with all these interruptions.

Started the next Bargue drawing in class, this one is the first I've done in charcoal. Delayed by surgery and by Andrea's stay in Australia until April. But getting the knack of the charcoal technique and could immediately see how much closer to painting it is than graphite.

Andrea said that when she comes back and resumes classes, I am ready to do the cast drawing segment. Should be more or less functional by then, (should the test results come back as we hope).

~

Rabbit Hole

2012-01-01T10:46:00.005+01:00

Honestly, a lot of the last few days has been a bit of a haze.

As of this week, I have done everything that could be done to combat this cancer and tomorrow it is likely that I will be going home to await the outcome of our efforts. When I asked what would happen if the tissue removed showed signs of more cancer, I got no answer. I think they don't know beyond a vague, "more treatments". It seems that combating cancer is very much a matter of navigating on instruments without a map. The cancer tells you which are the best guesses, and you go in whatever direction the tissue samples indicate. No way of knowing ahead of time which way we're going.

On Wednesday evening, I had a long talk with one of the doctors here who had gone to some considerable effort to translate and type out a large document into English setting out all the possible ramifications of the proposed surgery, short and long term. I read it very thoroughly and asked a lot of questions and the beautiful young doctor with the charming Italian/Australian accent sat with me going through everything inch by inch. But by this time, I only wanted information so as to be forewarned. The decision to go forward was already set by then, but until about lunchtime on Wednesday afternoon, it had been nothing like a foregone conclusion. And I balked.

We had arrived around noon, and had been shown to my room where an elderly lady lay in the other bed surrounded by her relatives. I hung up my coat and sat on the plastic chair looking blindly out the window, waiting for the doctor. The now-familiar routines were followed with paperwork, blood test, tagging... but I could see the wall coming up fast and I was finally certain that I could not get over it this time.

By two pm my nose was pressing up against it and I cracked. I told my friend that I did not want to do the trade. It just wasn't a good enough deal. They would not conduct this horror on me just for a roll of the dice that might or might not result in a few more years of the same life I'd already had enough of a dozen times over.

"If all it's going to be is more of this, and in that condition, then no." I got up, heading for the nurse's station: "I'll just go tell them I'm going home."

I had my coat on and was pulling on my shoes, throwing things into my bag, trying to stay calm enough to explain that no, I would not, could not do this horrifying thing.

How could I trade who and what I am at so deep a level for something as cheap and lousy as a few more years? Why should I go to such lengths to extend a life that has rarely failed to disappoint? What could I possibly imagine I could still hope to have out of it at this stage?

It has been, shall we say, a strange few days and much of it spent in a cloud of morphine-induced confusion and on Saturday evening an unexpected and frightening reaction to one of the other pain drugs. But now that it is over, I have come to a kind of island of quiet. Not peace, exactly, but at least quiet, enough to wait through, because now we have to wait again.

What did I learn about myself in this odd, dream-like week? I learned that I almost fear life more than death by cancer. Which I think is not uncommon for people of our time.

Somewhere in the middle of all the haze and confusion, I remember taking a phone call. On Saturday afternoon, I commented that I was looking forward to lunch because the Gemelli does pretty good fish for lunch on Fridays. I had lost a whole day, but during that dream-sequence Friday, another odd thing occurred.

I really have little clear memory of the day after Thursday's surgery. I know I lay still, having been tucked by my friend carefully around with soft pillows to keep me from moving in the night. I looked up to see the nurse approaching with a cordless telephone held out towards me. She said something in Italian that I was certainly in no condition to understand. All I heard was "Canada". Were my employers calling to see how I was doing? I took the phone and a crackly old-fashioned operator's voice said in Italian, "Wait please for an international connection," and the next voice I heard was my father's.

I don't remember much of what I said. He asked me how long it had been since we talked and I think I said, "About 30 years." He told me that he was sorry and that he hoped I would get better and would I let him know how things went. He said he has prostate cancer. I remember asking what stage and he said, "Intermediate". He's being prepared for chemotherapy in the spring and is "optimistic". He asked me how long I'd lived in Italy, and what was I doing and was I enjoying it?

It was not long before I could no longer make any sense and the nurse standing over me could see that I was distressed. I told my father that I could not talk now but that I would send him a note telling him the outcome of the surgery. I can't remember what he said after that, but the nurse took the phone gently away and said many things in Italian that I understood even without knowing the words. "It was my father. It has been thirty years." She looked shocked, but stroked my head and told me not to cry. "Tranquila, tranquila..."

Indeed, with a fresh eight-inch abdominal incision I could barely speak; even breathing was painful. I lay there trying to remember his face listening to the faint sound of a newborn wailing briefly in the obstetrics ward one floor above us. The week between Christmas and New Year's is a quiet one in hospitals, and in the place of the usual boisterous Italian familial bustle was an uncommon stillness in the halls and rooms.

This week my past and future and present all seem to have crowded into the little double room to tell me things.

It's a good thing this was a slow week for sickies, because I think the drama was too much for my roommate who asked to be moved to a spare bed in another room. Perhaps she was offended that I had asked for a screen. It is not the Italian custom to erect privacy curtains between beds and when an Italian friend visited, she explained and the nurses had kindly found a portable screen. I'm sure they didn't fully understand my strange Anglo/Canadian need to not watch or be watched by strangers in vulnerable medical and emotional moments.

So, here I am, maybe even cancer-free, who knows? Maybe with 30 or 40 years ahead. Or maybe more chemo and a short time to sort out my affairs. My English relatives have gently scolded me for not calling more frequently, and have been calling every evening.

I was surprised to find I was able to get out of bed by Saturday morning, to be able to walk that day with a friend on either side ten or twenty yards down the hall and back, and twice today unassisted, though very slowly, to the cafeteria and back to the ward. I am reminded how grand it is to be able to get to the bathroom by myself, and to stand up straight and to walk to the little balcony for a breath of fresh December air. Even pain is not entirely unwelcome; it comes from the real world.

Today a shock-haired Friar in bare feet and sandals and a brown habit brought me Holy Communion and said he would do it again tomorrow. Hospitals are dull places but we entertained ourselves. While I darned socks and the elbows of my cardigan, Vicky and I learned how to gamble a starship with Corbomite and sailed through the Gothic into the early Renaissance with Lord Clark for an episode and a half of Civilization. We figured out how to make un-melt-able cups for hot Darjeeling by cutting off the bottoms of Schweppes grapefruit soda bottles with Vicky's Swiss Army knife.

And now, we just have to wait to see what will happen next. Tomorrow, having found that most of my plumbing is in basic working order, they will be letting me go home and I will spend the next several months recovering and figuring out what all this means. They have removed all the organs that they think could have been infested with cancer cells and now those are to be examined cell-by-cell in the lab and

The surgery I've just had is thought to be the best possible option for my stage and type of cancer and the numbers for it are very good for total cure, about 85-95%. We will know in "twenty days".

This afternoon, I switched on my computer and found a YouTube video of some monks singing the Te Deum and, because it is the Feast of Mary Mother of God, prayed for the Plenary Indulgence because this week I decided to try to keep living.

~

Today

2011-12-31T17:46:00.002+01:00

Surgery done.

It was very hard.

I didn't run away from the hospital at the last moment, but it was a close thing. Very close. When it came down to the wire, I felt like an animal backed into a corner of a cage. Only the knowledge that not going through with it would badly hurt others forced me through the barrier.

I think I'm going to be taking a break from blogging for a while. This has changed a lot of things for me, and I'm no longer completely sure who and what I am. Difficult to have anything to say to other people from that position.

Thank you again to everyone who prayed.

We will not know if cancer is over for another few weeks. When we have the verdict from the histology, I will post the results.

If the news is bad, I think I will be done with both blogging and treatment.

~

Tomorrow

2011-12-27T17:38:00.003+01:00

In hospital from 10 am tomorrow until I don't know when. I won't be available for visiting or much of anything for some time to come.

It is possible that news will be posted on Facebook.

~

Her Maj.

2011-12-26T11:06:00.002+01:00

Wonderful.

So glad she's ditched the tedious political correctness.

~

I've discovered the greatest Christmas Day movie of all time

2011-12-25T13:16:00.002+01:00

Three words, baby,

Wrath.

Of.

Khan.

~

Let's all play Diocesan Two-step

2011-12-24T11:41:00.004+01:00

We've all done it, all been the recipient of it at one time or another...

- Catholic layman gets fed up with the disaster in the Church. Writes letter

- Letter ignored.

- Enterprising Layman sets up his own apostolate (like is says in Vatican II to do) and starts doing what he can to set things right.

- Local bishop gets wind of this from his pet heretical nun/vicar general/local priests or other deranged minions

- Bishop sends letter to Enterprising Layman telling him to knock all this Catholic stuff off or else...

- Layman asks for meeting with bishop to discuss it.

- Bishop ignores request.

- Layman carries on.

- Bishop sends more letters. Gets annoyed when letters ignored, issues press release telling Layman to stop and making sure all the world sees.

- Kerfuffle ensues in the media, layman asks for meeting with bishop, tells press.

- Bishop continues to ignore request for meeting and lets it be known that he is furious over the hundreds of calls and emails with which his office is suddenly flooded.

- Nuncio contacted... letters to Rome...

Etc...

In recent years, however, the bishops have become vaguely aware of this thing called the "interwebs" or some such, and have been annoyed by swarms of people contacting their offices and upsetting the natural order of things by demanding meetings and action on various things. It is making their lives very difficult, I'm sure.

Bishops' favourite word for work like Michael's is "divisive". For some reason, they all think that the whole world is as terrified of the word as they are, and that it will induce laypeople to shut up and go with the flow.

Below is a classic, nay, textbook case illustrating this drearily familiar comedy routine.

...
In a press release issued December 15 and signed by Communications officer Joe Kohn, the Archdiocese of Detroit states: “The Archdiocese has informed Mr. Voris and Real Catholic TV, RealCatholicTV.com, that it does not regard them as being authorized to use the word ‘Catholic’ to identify or promote their public activities."
[The correct response to this is to shrug. I am a Catholic layman, I am not opposing the Faith or obstructing the work of the bishop and I am acting according to the directives of the last Council and various papal encyclicals on the proper role of the laity. So, the only thing to say is, "Thank you very kindly, Bishop Vigneron, for your helpful advice. Be assured that I and my staff continue to include you and your intentions in our daily prayers, and we wish you and yours a very happy Christmas." Since the bishop has gone public, this letter should be produced on Enterprising Layman's website, along with a running tally of the number of formal requests for a meeting between Enterprising Layman and his spiritual father.]
Of note there are prominent ‘Catholic’ entities and even Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Detroit directly flouting Church teaching without a comparable reprimand from the Archdiocese. One such entity is a group of priests of the Archdiocese who are publicly in favor of women’s ordination to the priesthood and against the Church’s teaching prohibiting contraception. The group is called “Elephants in the living room.”

There is however an interesting twist to this story. Michael Voris, while he may be the star of RealCatholicTV’s programming, is not the owner of the website. The owner is Marc Brammer who lives in South Bend Indiana in the diocese of Bishop Kevin Rhoades.

Brammer told LifeSiteNews, “I own RealCatholicTV.com. I contracted with Michael Voris to produce video content for that website and I pay him for it. It is a business relationship between me and Michael. If all of a sudden now there’s this tussle over the use of the word ‘Catholic’ I’ll deal with it through competent ecclesial authority.”

Brammer noted that he had received a letter from the Archdiocese of Detroit acknowledging him as the owner of the website. He responded to that letter with a request for a meeting with the Archdiocese. He received no response. Brammer has not been asked by his bishop, Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop Kevin Rhoades to cease using the word Catholic.

A LifeSiteNews request for an interview with the Archdiocese of Detroit was not returned, and the voice message noted that the office was on holiday till after Christmas.

The press release from the Archdiocese of Detroit notes, “The Church encourages the Christian faithful to promote or sustain a variety of apostolic undertakings but, nevertheless, prohibits any such undertaking from claiming the name Catholic without the consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority.”
[There is no law anywhere copyrighting the word "Catholic," nor is there any provision in canon law allowing a bishop to reprimand a layman in good standing with the Church for using the word publicly.]
The release adds, “For some time, the Archdiocese of Detroit has been in communication with Mr. Michael Voris and his media partner at Real Catholic TV regarding their prominent use of the word ‘Catholic’ in identifying and promoting their public activities disseminated from the enterprise’s production facility in Ferndale, Michigan.”

Voris says that communication was only one way – directives from the Archdiocese and refusal to meet with Voris or Brammer to discuss the matter. Voris told LifeSiteNews that he has requested a meeting with Archdiocesan officials seven times to discuss the matter, but each time he has been ignored or rebuffed.

According to its minutes, Elephants in the living room (the group of priests which publicly holds positions counter to Catholic teachings on women priests and contraception), met with Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron on February 1, 2011.

If you find yourself at loose ends during the holidays, perhaps you would enjoy playing the game too.

Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron
Chancery Building
Archdiocese of Detroit
1234 Washington Blvd.
Detroit, MI 48226

Email: infodesk@aod.org
Phone: (313) 237-5800
Fax: (313) 237-4644

Homeless Waif Christmas dinner

2011-12-23T11:41:00.004+01:00

Why is it SO difficult these days to get people to understand the need to RSVP to a party? Particularly a dinner party for which a lot of food needs to be bought well in advance.

Would the people who are planning to come on Sunday please let me know as soon as possible either on FB or here or by email.

Plenty of people have sent "regrets," but so far, the ones who have told me verbally they will come have not yet responded on FB. I'm already buying food, but so far I have no idea how much to get.

Please click the "attending" thing so I know in time.

Thanks.

~

More contemporary art I don't hate

2011-12-22T10:40:00.006+01:00

So, last night, I was having trouble sleeping and was cruising around the classical realist world on the net, and I came across this site.

I was looking all over her blog and drawings page and thinking, "Gosh! how could I ever learn to do this? Who could possibly teach it to me?"

Turns out the answer is, exactly who I'm studying with.

She was a student of Andrea's in New York.

Small art world.

She's still studying, but look what she can do!

Master copies...

Figure studies...

This is what she calls a "sketch"...

Ah, yah. My sketches don't look like this, I can tell you.

If there was one particular thing that I could be said to be interested in living for...

~

Intuition

2011-12-21T15:27:00.003+01:00

Another pic that comes from the wonderful Underpaintings site.

I want to start this post with a disclaimer. I'm not sure what we make of ideas like "intuition" as Catholics, but right up front, I want to make it clear that I don't believe in ESP or any of that quasi-occult/parapsychological stuff. I think somehow intuition is a real thing, though. I think sometimes God will give you a little hint about some things sometimes, for His own reasons that even those who are given these little hints don't know.

I know my stepfather Graham knew without a doubt that he would die young, and he did indeed die at 48. For many years, at least since my early 20s, I have had an equal conviction that I would die of cancer. I don't claim to have any sort of divinely inspired knowledge, but it's there very firmly and has never gone away. When I was diagnosed, I was horrified and almost blind with fear, but not surprised.

Yesterday, we a very comprehensive and fruitful meeting with one of the Gemelli's oncologists and things are settled for surgery to be booked in the week between Christmas and New Year's. Which is next week, now that I think of it. I got to ask all my questions and have, I hope, cleared up the communication problem by getting the cell phone number of the doctor who speaks English.

She was very surprised to hear that I had been left alone with no followup after chemo and said that this is certainly not normal practice. There was some speculation that this was the fault of the oncology secretary who does not speak more than two words of English and who therefore may have been avoiding dealing with me, a common Italian habit.

Nevertheless, things are cleared up for the moment. I got the doctor to fax my medical records to my GP here in Santa Marinella, got her assurance that I can call or text her with questions or problems any time. I also now have a back-up oncologist now who works in Civitavecchia who answers his phone, speaks English and has agreed to help if there are problems. So we hope that the difficulties with communication and support will be cleared up.

But the gist of what she told me was not very encouraging and it has set me thinking about things. As we know, the last surgery showed that there were still cancerous cells in the area around the tissue they removed. the chemotherapy was only partially successful, with the tumour reduced in size but not as much as they had hoped and the cells still active. This means we have to go ahead with the large surgery. I will have all my reproductive organs out next week and they will be sent to the lab for more detailed examination. They are hoping that there will be no more evidence of cancer in the margins but there will be no way of knowing anything until they've taken it all out and had a look cell by cell.

If the cancer has spread into the organs past the uterus or in the lymph nodes in the parametrium, I will be facing more "procedures," whatever they may be. But this isn't so hopeful, because they weren't expecting to find cancer in the margins from the last surgery, and yet, there they were.

There is no way to tell without surgical removal of the suspect tissue whether the cancer has spread into other organs and systems. Micrometastases are too small to be detected by scans and can easily be missed by biopsies. In fact, they can only be found by removal of entire organs. I asked if there was a chance that there were micrometastases hiding anywhere else, and she admitted that the possiblity certainly exists. The only way that scans can tell is after the tiny single cells have started dividing and growing tumours and there is no predicting when or where that will happen.

The surgery back in May showed there were no cancer cells in the lymph nodes around the affected area and the PET scan I had showed that the metabolic activity surrounding the tumour is reduced since chemotherapy. Chemo's effects last for some time, (as I am reminded daily) so it is likely that the cancer is not developing or developing very fast. The doctor said it was "probably" safe to wait until after Christmas but said it would be unwise to leave the surgery any longer.

If there is cancer found in the margins after this surgery, the only thing left to do for the time being is more chemotherapy or radiotherapy. The cancer, however, has already shown itself to be chemo-resistant so if this surgery doesn't remove it entirely, there isn't a great deal they can do but dose me and wait for it to emerge somewhere else. Or not, as the case may be. If the cancer spreads to organs that I can't live without, there is only chemo, and as we have seen, there is only so much that can be expected of that.

Truth to tell, I am becoming less and less confident as we go along. Each time they have told me that the initial signs are positive, the actual examination has shown things to be worse than they had hoped.

A friend of mine has said "it's just fear" but I disagree. It is certainly an idea that I'm afraid of, but the idea itself was there first. I can't help thinking that I'm on a path to the end of my life.

For the first year after I was here, I was under the impression that I had been brought here by God to start a new happy life, possibly with marriage in the offing. But even then, I remember thinking that maybe it was not that I was here to start a nice new life, but to get myself safely to the end of the old one.

From the start, I never really thought of any plans to leave Italy. There has never been any exit strategy or end-date to my stay here, and no pressing reason to ever go anywhere else. And despite its infamous aggravations, this country is growing on me. It has taken me a while to get to the realisation, but I have no intention of ever leaving as long as it remains possible for me to live here legally.

I don't know when I started thinking I would probably die here, but it was fairly soon after I came. Really, it is hard to imagine a better place to do that and to live the last part of life. Beautiful Italy, by the seaside, surrounded with friends and upheld by the Church in a Catholic country.

~

I've said it and said it

2011-12-21T13:22:00.002+01:00

The first assault was not contraception but easy divorce. It has made a world where commitment means nothing.

~

The 64 Bus

2011-12-21T12:35:00.006+01:00

Everyone who has spent more than a week in Rome will be familiar with the number 64 bus that starts at San Pietro station, runs past the Vatican, crosses the Tiber and runs through the Centro, stopping at the Argentina tram stop and on up the hill to Termini train station.

If you get on it anywhere after the St. Peter's end of the loop, this is what it is like. We were trying to get home from the Quirinale the other night and that is closer to the Termini end of the route. We had to let six buses go by before there was one we could get on.

And then there's the gypsy pickpockets. There's a reason they call the 64 the Pickpocket Express, though I've been lucky so far.

Here's a tip for those staying in Santa Marinella: get any of the main route buses to Argentina, which is a major bus convergence point, and wait the extra few minutes for a number 70. This will take you up most of the route to Termini, but swings past Mary Major and takes you down to the other end of the Termini station. This will help you avoid all the horrors of the 64, the pickpockets, the sardine-packed crowds, and at the end save you a 10 minute walk down to the end of the station where the Civitavecchia/Pisa/Grosseto trains leave.

The 64 is somewhat notorious.

H/T to Vicky for the pic.

~

Cat in love

2011-12-21T12:24:00.003+01:00

Winnie meets her true love... the space heater.

~

Beat the Man

2011-12-21T12:21:00.003+01:00

A lot of Rome's museums won't let you take photos. I've learned to be quite adept at sneaking my camera around with my coat over my arm.

Vicky decided to stick it to The Man in her own way at the Lippi exhibition.

~

What else is art good for?

2011-12-19T17:37:00.004+01:00

In Western societies, particularly in the post-colonial Anglo nations, we are suffering a terrible crisis of self-understanding. One of the things that struck me the hardest when I finally went back to England as an adult was that the English seemed to have forgotten how to be English. They have forgotten who they are. The older ones seemed to remember but appear to have learned to be ashamed of it. It was a very strange thing and I marked it at the time as a terrible evil. A society that doesn't have a self-understanding, doesn't have a sense of who and what it is, can't be one that will survive for long.

One of the things that art does, particularly painting, is to help define a cultural identity. For obvious reasons this is especially true of Italy. I'm still working my way around Vasari's Lives of Artists and it is clear that the world of painting for three of the most important centuries of art were utterly dominated by Italians (as we call them now).

But if we want to know who we are, how we think of things, how we see the world and what it means to us, painting is obviously the most direct and simple means. I think if the English were to revisit their artistic heritage, there would be great gains in re-establishing a solid national identity.

Make kids look at and understand Constable, Turner and Gainsborough. Familiarise them with Pre-Raphaelites. Once you have introduced them to the painters and their works, they will not be able to avoid also gaining a broader understanding of their own history and culture.

Art tells us how we see ourselves and our neighbours and how we should or could live. It shows us what life can look like from perspectives and times that we might never be able to experience personally. This can have a profound effect on a young mind. It certainly did to me. It immunised me against the cultural malaise and historical amnesia, all the social disaster that was coming throughout the 70s and 80s. It has helped me solidify my own self-understanding and helped to rescue me from that diseased anti-culture that has taken over the world since the 1960s.

It is in great part because of my knowledge of art history and the general cultural knowledge that came with it, that I have been able, in a way, to recapture or rebuild who I really am after fighting my way out of that toxic feminist/hippie fantasy world. And I see no reason that it could not do the same thing for whole cultures, entire societies that have been deracinated and have lost their identities.

When I first looked at the painting above, I thought, "This is me. Or at least it was. The painting seems to exactly depict my childhood and the core of who I was before the calamities of my adolescence and young adulthood made me forget it all."

Art can help you see yourself, the sort of person you are or could be or want to be. And it is true that a lot of my childhood looked exactly like this, right down to the little velvet dress with white lace cuffs. Only mine was brown. My mother made it for me when I was five and I remember the cuffs getting dirty on the London Underground.

Here's a little thing the class can do while I'm working on something else. A kind of art thought experiment for y'all. Look over at some of the art sites I've got on the sidebar. Underpaintings is a really good one, and see if there is a painting that strikes you as deeply. Find one that is a kind of picture of your inner self, your character. See what you come up with.

Sometimes it is a bit surprising and it is possible to learn things about yourself that you never knew by looking at art and measuring your reactions to it.

If you find one that is really good, share it with the rest of the class.

~

The NICE Catholic bloggers

2011-12-18T11:32:00.005+01:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one with serious reservations about Patheos, the home of the Nice Catholic Bloggers.

Dymphna has mentioned it too, and in reference to a friend of ours here at O's P.

I can't stand Patheos. It's like the Borg on Star Trek. It takes fun bloggers and turns them into drones. Being with Patheos has completely ruined the once delightful Anchoress and I just hope that Crescat doesn't change.

Cat is in my baddest of bad books right now after she wrote this piece of drooling, self-congratulatory, politically correct drivel. It was certainly a sign to me that the Patheos spirit of NewChurch compromise has her brain in its death claw.

But she's still someone I respect and like a lot and I've told her many times that her move to Patheos was going to be a disaster.

So I'm going to reiterate my long-time list of Rules To Live By in NewChurch and Modernity, primary among which is

Never join anything.

followed in no particular order by

Abolish everything.

Never found, start, organise or volunteer for anything.

Never trust anything Catholic that is less than 500 years old.

You can't kill people to solve your problems.

Only the real counts.

Reality is conservative. (Thanks Mrs. Thatcher)

No temptation is so great that it can't be resisted by running away.

Old things are better than new things.

Contrary to what everyone thinks, it actually is sometimes too late.

Ever worry about how much time you spend on the internet?

2011-12-18T11:25:00.005+01:00

Yeah. Me too.

I'm re-reading Kenneth Clark's book Civilisation, the companion thing to his brilliant and ever-new 1960s BBC TV series examining the growth of Western Civilisation through its art. Or, I should say, I was reading it. Because, of course, it didn't take me long to figure out that the series is on YouTube. So guess which book is now sitting by my bed gathering dust?

Sigh...

Oh well, there's always Vasari, who isn't on the net, as far as I can see (yes, I've looked). And when I start feeling better and get back to regular working hours, I'm going to start getting into Rome at least three or four days a week. Which means at least two hours a day of reading time. Which is how I got through the entire oeuvre of Jane Austen.

Amen.

~

Cats

2011-12-16T13:01:00.001+01:00

I've been thinking of making Winnie her own Facebook page.

~

2011-12-16T12:42:00.001+01:00

Hero from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

I'm never going to do this kind of drawing. It's cool and everything, but,

well, really!

~

Dear 16 year-old me,

2011-12-14T08:41:00.005+01:00

I know no one in your life is going to tell you, hemmed around as you are with hippies and feminists and people addicted to The Lie, but you really need to know this:

Don't sleep around.

You will destroy your chances of marriage, crush your spiritual life, blight your happiness and wither your heart. You will kill your soul and warp your personality forever.

I know that you think it is the only thing that gives you any sense of being real and alive, but it is like drinking water that only makes you more thirsty. You will spend 30 years drowning in clinical depression, self-loathing and countless hundreds of nights convulsed with weeping. It will ruin you utterly.

By the time you start to wise up in your 20s, it will be too late to undo the damage. It will cause a mental, emotional and spiritual destruction down to the foundations of who you are, your total self-understanding. And you will spend the rest of your life trying to rebuild.

Oh, and you will catch HPV, which you won't know about until they tell you you've got cancer and they have to cut out your uterus and ovaries. This will happen at a time in your life when you think you have finally got things together and are starting to generate faint and distant hopes of a normal life. It will destroy your hesitant little dreams of married happiness that will hardly even have had a chance to blossom.

It will send you down a medical path that will take you far away from where you thought you were headed. This will happen at the exact moment when you thought you had finally managed to reconstruct your whole self. You will be forced to start again. You will have to downshift your expectations and to abandon the last shreds of hope that you will ever be able to fix the things that went wrong so long ago.

* ~ * ~ *

Ever wonder why I hate feminism so much?

~

How to set up a world-class exhibition of priceless 15th century paintings

2011-12-13T16:02:00.000+01:00

Brutalist by name, brutal by nature

2011-12-11T16:34:00.005+01:00

Intelligent comment from the Adam Smith Institute on why the British Housing Estates need to be knocked down as soon as possible:

Opposition to post-war architecture tends to focus on aesthetic concerns. And, certainly, much of it is appalling ugly, almost to the point that merely looking at it fills you with despair. But its mostly deeply pernicious effect is surely the way in which it has affected people’s behaviour, by forcing them to live in an environment which is cold, desolate and practically inhuman. Naturally, I am not suggesting that post-war architecture caused the riots. But the idea that it was a contributory factor certainly has the ring of truth about it.

He mentions similar constructions in Italy.

Incidentally, the picture I’ve used here is not actually from a post-war London housing estate. It is a photo of the Vele di Scampia estate near Naples, which was the setting for the stunning, shocking film Gomorrah. If you’re sceptical about the social consequences of bad architecture, I’d challenge you to watch that film and, bearing in mind that it is based on real events, ask yourself whether many of the things depicted would be possible in a traditional street layout. For me, it’s a shining example of brutalist by name, brutal by nature.

I went down south with a bunch of friends last year to visit Monte Cassino and on the drive we had to go through some little towns that looked as if they had been built after the Second World War when some Italian government official decided to make the entire country into a suitable movie location for nihilist post-apocalyptic filmmaker. As a bonus, the population seemed to be practising to gain employment as zombie extras the same films.

I've never in my life seen any human dwelling more closely resembling a gargantuan garbage heap.

Scruton has quite a bit to say on the subj. Starting about 7:14

~

Lippi Exhibition

2011-12-11T13:40:00.008+01:00

Went to see the Lippi exhibition at the Quirinale yesterday. Something the Rome-bound should know; most of the museums in town have incredible, world-class exhibitions and they're not expensive. It was ten Euros to get in to this one. You don't usually have to book tickets in advance, though this can help you to jump the queue.

The Lippi/Botticelli show at the pope's former house was, well, frankly amazing. The colours! The transparencies! The wee teeny details like the little bug eating a crust of bread, the meticulously rendered flowers so detailed you can identify the species. The faces of angels and saints glowing with otherworldly radiance. Oh. My. GOODness!

We saw

this one,

and this one

here's some details... here are the angels bigger...

and check out the books. Amazing!

and this one

and
this one...

Plus a bunch of drawings.

(There were a few Botticellis too, but they left me kind of.. meh...Lippi decidedly surpassed his former master.)

The colours... it's hard to describe. In fact, so much of their value is lost in reproductions, I think I might be joining the snobby school of thought that says never reproduce art in books or on the internet. There's so little point, it almost seems as if it would put people off rather than arouse interest.

A while ago, I was taken by a friend to the Borghese gallery and he knew there was a very famous work that we are all familiar with, but didn't warn me. At one point, after the Caravaggios and Raphaels and whatnot, he said, "Oh, you should go take a look in there..." I rounded the corner and there it was. I almost burst into tears. The present reality of the work was so much more than any photograph could possibly capture...

As a child, I spent hours poring over the pictures in art books, and was an early aficionado of the early Italian Renaissance artists, but living in such a remote place as British Columbia had few opportunities ever to see any real art. When I was 12, a traveling exhibition of the treasures of the tomb of King Tut came to Seattle, and my mother, though poor, was determined that I should get a chance to see it. I had of course seen any number of photographs of this, but when I cam face to face with it, I found it was almost shockingly different in reality.

When at last we got to the bookshop last night, (it was a really big show, on two floors of the gallery) we discovered that the exhibition's book, which was quite beautiful, was 40 Euros. Yikes! and since I'm a bit skint at the moment, I was going to get one of the other Lippi books. But after seeing the real thing, the reproductions just seemed so dark and colourless that I couldn't be bothered. Instead, I got a little postcard of the blue madonna, the one in the post below, and Vicky bought a poster of her head. But as I was looking at the paintings and thinking about how badly I wanted one, it became obvious that the only thing to do is to learn to make one.

All the big paintings were tempera on wood, a medium that gives utterly glowing colours. I don't know who teaches tempera, but as soon as I'm at a place where Andrea thinks I'm ready, I'm going to find someone who does it.

Towards the end of the first floor of the exhibition, Vicky stopped to draw the only statue in the show. I spend the time wandering back and forth taking mental pictures of the best bits of the best ones, a strange skill that I invented for myself after seeing the Tut exhibit. I have several images in my head now, of folds of glowing cloth, of almost invisible transparent draperies, of minutely rendered wrinkles on fingers, that I hope will stay in there forever.

I walked up and down in this room of wonders and thought, this makes me happy, like nothing else but love ever has.

~

Note to self

2011-12-09T22:29:00.006+01:00

Do something normal this weekend, pretend that life is going ahead and that everything will turn out OK.

Go see that Lippi exhibition at the Quirinale.

~

Do they hear themselves?

2011-12-08T11:19:00.004+01:00

Just reading some of the pro-aborts little outbursts on why abortion in the US has to remain totally unrestricted.

Let's play a game! I'm going to paraphrase some of the real things real famous pro-abortion people have said in public and we can do a little deconstruction excercise. Come on! It'll be fun.

A white male rock star:

"1) If abortion had been illegal when my girlfriend became pregnant, I would not be in the position I'm in. My career would have been stalled at the outset. I would not have been able to tour around the world and see how other more liberal countries have handled this issue. I would not be speaking to you (the interviewer) today.

2) Maybe later I'll be able to support a child.

3) But free people must have the right to choose when the right time is.

4) This rule especially applies to poor people since welfare and public health programmes are inadequate to raise a child and public schools are overcrowded and underfunded."

Translate:
1) My career is more important to me than human life, even the life of my own child. It is much more important to me to fulfill my personal jet-setting ambitions than be responsible for the care and protection of another human being.

2) Even though I am the lead of one of the world's most highly paid acts, I'm still unable to adequately support a child. By extension, I believe that anyone who makes less money than I should also not have children. Only the super rich should be allowed to have children because material poverty, which I define as being less than super rich, is worse than death.

3) The definition of being free is the freedom to kill another person with legal impunity whenever we want.

4) It is better for the poor that they be killed before birth than attend a public school or be dependent upon state benefits. Kill the poor.

* ~ *

A black Rap star: "Gold-digging women use pregnancy to trap rich men into either supporting them or paying for expensive abortions. Use condoms to prevent pregnancies."

Translate:
Legal abortion is not for the safeguarding of the rights of women, it is to enable men to use them for sexual entertainment without consequences. But abortion can be more expensive than you realise, so in order to continue to use women as your own personal meat puppets, you should diligently use contraception.

* ~ *

Some kind of presenter (female, white) on MTV: "I am glad I had an abortion at 16, otherwise I would by now have a 20 year-old child.”

Translate:
Being a mother is bad. Being a mother of a child who is a grownup would reveal that I'm old enough to have a 20 year-old child. And that would be bad.

* ~ *

What am I demonstrating here? That celebrities are shallow, selfish and materialistic? And stupid? Isn't that something we all know already?

So if we all know this, why do we hang on their every word? Why do the idiotic and frankly evil things that come out of their mouths subsequently pop out of the mouths of the ordinary 17 year-old kids who follow them?

I feel a bout of cultural cognitive dissonance coming on...

~

A prayer

2011-12-07T23:04:00.009+01:00

Learned this week that I'm still sick. Really sick.

Tried to get back to life a bit and go to art class this week but just couldn't manage it. Andrea's studio, in an important and historic 16th century building close to the Piazza del Popolo is also at the bottom of a kind of transit sink hole. The easiest and fastest way to get there is to take the train to San Pietro station and either hoof it across the Big Piazza and cross the river on the Ponte Cavour, or you can take a bus from the stazione down the hill, past the big dome and over the river and walk through the little windey streets from the bus loop near the Angel bridge.

Either way its a good brisk 20 or 30 minute walk, and invariably no matter how cool the weather is I am drenched with sweat and out of breath by the time I get there. I usually have a little ten-minute sit-down on the studio terrace and a glass of water before starting and am OK, but this Monday I just couldn't get untired. But since Andrea is going away for a few months and this will be the last chance I get for a while, I thought it would be silly to just turn around and go home again.

Besides, I'd brought my computer with me and had the ambition to go to the office and get some work done after class. It's been so long since I've had a normal day, I just really wanted a smidgen of my regular life. But it didn't work out.

In class, we stand in front of the easel about two arms lengths away and the technique involves taking a measurement from that distance and then walking the step or two forward to make the mark on the paper. Classes are three hours and it can be pretty tiring. By the end of it, I usually am pretty happy to sit down at my desk for the rest of the day.

But this week it really became clear how much the chemo has taken out of me. It looks too as if the poison drugs have damaged my ovaries, and I've been having rather severe symptoms of premature menopause. This means a constant undulation: hot/cold/hot/cold/hot/cold. Overwhelming heat, sweat pouring off me, red faced and panting and five minutes later shivering and chilled. This amusing routine going on about three or four times an hour, 24 hours a day. The preamble of nausea, dizziness and heart palpitations lets me know when one is coming on. Stress brings it on and as you may imagine, it makes it rather harder than usual to concentrate.

The neuropathy is aggravated by being tired and by the end of two hours of class, my feet were on fire, with pain spreading up my legs. The pain of neuropathy is multifaceted, and a big part of it is the feeling that one's toes and fingers are swelling up and getting ready to explode. When it's bad, touching anything hard, like turning a key in a lock or winding a clock, feels like your fingers have a "funny bone" in them, all the nerves cringe together as though getting an electric shock. Some days holding the pencil is a bit of work by itself.

Despite all this, and despite it making me a little cranky and ill-humoured, I got to the end of class, but was a bit of a wreck. After, I had to do a couple of little chores, cutting up some large sheets of paper so I could get them home in my folder. But before doing that, I ran out to the farmacia to buy some paracetomol, known in the US as extra strength Tylenol, to back up the drugs that were obviously not up to the task that day. We're still working on adjusting the new pain meds, with too much turning me into a zombie and too little leaving me in pain by mid afternoon. It works pretty well if I'm not doing too much in the day. And some days, for no particular reason the whole thing just flares up. The doctor said if the meds stop working too soon, I can back them up with paracetomol, but it doesn't work terribly well.

When I was getting ready to go home, Andrea said, "So, on a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in?" About six, maybe six and a half. Not screaming agony by any means, but bad enough to make everything no fun at all.

Bit of a mess, is the long and the short of it and this week it all kind of came to a head.

So Monday afternoon, I was done in by two o'clock and just had to go home. Hot/cold flashes every fifteen minutes notwithstanding, I was falling asleep on the train and went to bed more or less instantly after getting home. On Tuesday morning, it really hit me just how sick I'd got. Up only for a few hours in the morning for a cup of tea; back to bed by two-thirty. Up for a while in the evening, and me n' Vick watched the Fellowship of the Ring. Had some dinner and went back to bed. When you're spaced out and sick, in pain and on narcotic meds, the day just sort of floats by in a kind of weird droopy haze.

A day in bed, though, did me a world of good and this morning I had enough perk to go to the doctor and report that things are really not going terribly well. The good news is that my local GP is really terrific and has been a huge support in all this awfulness. He is setting me up with an oncologist who speaks English and will be able to tell me what's going on. I can get the Gemelli to give him my medical records and he can explain things and keep a closer eye on me and my doings than the staff at the hospital can. Obviously I should have done this months ago, but I was mostly expecting to be starting to recover by now. I'm only just now learning that chemo often doesn't work that way, new symptoms and side effects can appear months and sometimes even years after the last cycle is over. Something I'd have known about if the Gemelli doctors were as interested in keeping me informed as they are in doctoring me... it's been a bit of a bone of contention so far.

My appointment this morning did a lot to put my mind at ease. Things are going to get worked out. The things that are happening now are debilitating and awful, but not life threatening and can be treated successfully. They're going to go away and be under control. Things are going to get worked out.

I left the doctor's office and walked out into the late morning sunshine. In early December it's a beautiful warm, breezy autumnal day, absolutely perfect. Cool air, warm sun, nice little breeze off the sea bringing in sweet damp that's just like home. The autumn rains that started this year quite late, in November, have given us our annual "second spring," with all the grass that goes brown and sere in our ferocious summers, coming up again green and soft, flowers nodding over the tops of garden walls, happy children kicking the soccer ball around in the school yard.

I came out of the office and was still woozy and wobbly, but quite a bit mended and didn't want to go straight home. I took a slow walk up the Via Aurelia, the Roman road that runs through the centro of S. Marinella, and ended up going down to the castle and the marina. There's a promontory there, where, on a clear day, with your back to the old Odescalchi castle, you can see nearly all the way down to Rome, with the other castle at Santa Severa gleaming in the sun, a stern old fortress warding off marauding Saracen pirates.

Behind the castle, that is built on top of the foundations of a Roman senator's country villa, there is another little beach, hidden from the great running of the Rome tourists in the summer, with patches of black volcanic sand, big bulges of sandstone coming out of the ground all weathered into undulating Art Nouveau shapes, and logs to lean your back against. Just like home. This beach is on a little cove and is sheltered from the wind and only a few beautiful white neoclassical villas nestling in the shrubbery and trees on the hill.

I sat down on the sand and turned my face into the breeze and just breathed. It felt like the first time in days.

I'm scheduled to have surgery next week. I am hoping to get a consultation with this new oncologist before then. I know the Gemelli doctors know what they're doing and I'm pretty confident that the surgery will be the end of the cancer. I am also growing in confidence that the difficulties the surgery will create can be dealt with.

Things are pretty hopeful, but I've been terribly afraid. Cancer is unpredictable, and no one can possibly say for sure if all this is going to work. The news about the micrometastases in the margins after the last surgery has really shaken me. I'm deeply frightened by the thought that this might mean the cancer is anywhere and there is no way to tell until it is too late.

I've been praying for a lot of things but, and this might surprise you, I have yet to simply ask to be delivered from cancer. For the treatment to work.

I walked along this little hidden beach and finally knew that I really wanted to live. At least for a few more years.

"Lord, I'd just like to ask if I can please get past this and live for a while longer. I am OK with it if you have other plans, but I'd just like to get it out there.

"Things are really nice right now, and maybe for the first time. I've got such good work, and such nice friends and I've finally figured out for the most part how to get on in life. And honestly, I'd really just like to enjoy it for a bit, if that's OK.

"I think I can handle the long term consequences of the surgery and still have a bit of a nice life. I don't even mind if things are a little reduced in scale from now on. I can deal with living a little smaller and a little slower. But I think I've got a chance to be happy for a while and I'd like to try it."

I've been getting a lot of messages via email and Facebook in response to my last few Meaning of Life posts and I'd like to let y'all know that it has actually been really helpful, so thanks. I know that a great many of you have been praying (some have even paid money to get large numbers of other people to pray too, entire convents of nuns) so I thought I'd let you know that I'm getting to a sort of peace with the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong; I certainly have my little screeching moments of mindless panic, but they're fewer, shorter and easier to stop now, even without the application of the frying pan to the head. It might surprise some to know that the whole cancer experience has in many ways been beneficial. As a news writer, I know how important a deadline can be to your productivity. The saints and famous spiritual writers always say the same thing: keep your eye fixed on the reality of death. And cancer certainly has a way of making that impossible to avoid.

I'm finding my way through it. Maybe in a somewhat muddled and inefficient way, but I'm getting there and it is in no small part due to the support I've had from friends, readers and colleagues.

Thanks.

Again.

~

Note to self

2011-12-07T19:03:00.000+01:00

Do Christmas cards this weekend.

Art, vocation and holiness

2011-12-03T13:08:00.012+01:00

(Warning: another ridiculously long, boring post on art, writing, vocation and the Meaning of Life. Cringeworthy sharing ahead. I don't know what value all this could be to others, but for me to write about this is really just a means of thinking out loud. If you are like me and despise the sharing thing, go here.)

I think the post I did a few days ago about art, writing and vocation, has given rise to a number of erroneous assumptions on the part of several readers.

I appreciate the pep-talks and advice (particularly the ones from Steve J. and Ted and Audrey), but that wasn't what I was looking for. I suppose it may have seemed somewhat gloomy, but I don't actually feel particularly gloomy. I have my little moments when it all seems to hit me at once and I kind of freak out, and there are people around standing ready with the frying pan for such moments.

Gloomy comes and goes and I'll admit to being pretty scared by some of the prospects in front of me, but mostly what I feel is eager to get on with things. To get The Bad Scary done with so I can hurry up and get to the rest of it. However, it is extremely likely that I do have a prospect in front of me, which is itself a huge thing.

The medical things are big and serious, and it is true that there is a real chance that my life expectancy has been shortened. But it is going to carry on, at least for a while, so the crucial question becomes how best to spend it given what I've got now.

A lot of the time, we're tempted to think that we'll start doing whatever thing we're supposed to be doing once all the proper pieces are lined up, when all the resources are in place and things are properly prepared. But I've realised recently that for a lot of us, there isn't going to be any more auspicious a situation. What I've got now is all I'm going to have to work with, and the time has come to move forward.

And that was the point of that post. I'm not in despair, and I'm don't think my life up to this point has been a waste. Not sure how people got that idea, but it ain't so.

But I have definitely been thinking Big Life Thoughts: work, vocation, the pursuit of God's will in the here and now. Cancer, and I suppose other big life-threatening health crises, has a way of making you focus your attention inward. It makes you do a lot of re-evaluating, and re-examining. In general, the results of this have been positive. I feel I'm in the right place, am going the right way, generally pointing in the right direction. Now, on with things. Do more of what I was doing. More and better, more involved work. More art. More museums. More Italy. More more more. For various reasons, I have held back. I don't want to change anything, but to grasp the things I've already got in life less timidly.

With that troublesome post, what I really wanted to do was initiate a discussion on the nature of art, whether from the point of view of the spiritual life it a thing worthy of a person's whole and undivided attention, whether it has the potential to be a sanctifying occupation. Whether it might be considered a *kind of* substitute for a particular vocation, that is, for a vowed state in life. Of course, I knew the answer when I asked the question, but I thought it worth thinking and talking about anyway.

A lot of the difficulty in talking about these things is the confusion of terms. In general colloquial English, the word 'vocation' has come to be used very loosely, as in "a thing you do that is very important to you and to which you seem naturally suited". When we talk about vocation, we really just mean a job that is terribly important, either to you personally or to the world at large.

We usually also mean for it to be something that is itself a good thing, something of benefit to others and something for which one needs a certain amount of innate talent (whatever that is) or at least for which one has a natural aptitude. It is probably most often applied in this sense to the medical professions. To some people, (and I may be among these) writing is thought of as a vocation. But to others, any work that is particularly loved is their 'vocation'.

I once asked a class of young Catholics preparing for their Confirmation what they wanted to do with their lives. Nearly all of them said they wanted to go to university. Upon further questioning, not one of these had any notion at all what he wanted to study. None of them had any particular interest in any academic subject. The goal was simply "to go to university". Only one kid said he wanted to be a plumber. I asked him why, and he said that it was what his dad did and he thought it was fun and interesting and would make him a good living. I told the class that this kid was the most likely to be happy of any of them. It could be suggested that this kid's vocation was plumbing, but only if you were using the term in its modern, secular and loosey goosey way.

But we know by this time that I don't use language that way. Precision is good. If I were talking about those subjects, it would be an error to use the term 'vocation'. Properly speaking this is 'occupation,' work, one of the three cornerstones of a balanced life (the others being family and the spiritual life).

But vocation is something very specific. A vowed state in life specifically for the pursuit of holiness in a special way following the Evangelical Counsels or withing marriage vows. A vocation is something that gives your work its context and to some degree at least, its direction. It forms the framework in which you do the work you do, whatever it is. It is very common among Christians to make the mistake of thinking that "vocation" means the same thing as "work" or occupation.

This error, the conflating of work with vocation, by the way, has been the core of the disaster in the Religious Life in the Church since the '60s. Women who wanted to do a particular work went into religious life. This helped them to mash the two things together, a vocation and the work done within it. One does not have a vocation to be a teacher or a nurse, but to the religious life, a state of perpetual celibacy under the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Technically, your marriage and your family are your vocation, the state in life to which you were called by God and for which you undertook vows. Two things by definition that can't be vocations are work and the single life: no vows for either. The "single life" that the NewChurchy types like to talk about is really no state at all, it is the condition out of which one is called.

I don't propose that God is "calling" me or anyone to painting or writing as a substitute for a genuine vocation, or as a consolation prize for a failed vocation, for having dithered too long.

I recounted the details of my medical condition and prospects merely to update readers and impress upon them that the question is no longer abstract and academic for me. I wrote below that the seriousness of cancer, the physical consequences of chemotherapy, total hysterectomy and premature menopause and its long-term treatment, are prompting me to think more pointedly about the value of what I am doing and want to do, what I am hoping to do and what I wish I could do and fear I don't have time for.

The question, "What do I want to be doing when I die?" has, until now, been totally abstract, something to be discussed with a few friends late in the evening somewhere between the after-dinner Amaro to the middle of the first bottle of grappa. Catholic spiritual writers, including many of the saints, have always exhorted their disciples to keep the awful reality of death immediately before their eyes. The question is one that all Christians are supposed to ask themselves seriously all the time. Christ Himself put it at the centre of much of His own teaching. Don't be caught napping, partying or goofing off when the Master of the house comes calling. Don't be fussing over building new grain towers to house all your bumper harvests... "Thou fool, this night..."

I want to be clear that I consider it to have been a grace to have been so forthrightly and inarguably forced to re-evaluate. I also consider it to have been Providential that I started studying art in at least a semi-serious way before the cancer thing descended. It has opened up something new and unexpected in my life.

We know there are some occupations that are more ordered towards contemplation, though of course, there is no reason to think that a plumber could not be a saint. I am also not making the mistake that artists are necessarily more holy or "spiritual" than ordinary mortals. (A quick look at this man's work and this man's life, should be enough to dispel this idea.) But there are aspects to art (and here I am using the term more broadly to include writing) that seem to point to it being naturally ordered to the contemplative life. For one thing, both painting and writing can only be pursued in solitude. You can't write when someone is nattering at you. But the visual arts of painting and drawing, I believe, are naturally and uniquely more outward-seeking than writing and it is this outward gaze that I think makes visual art more innately similar to the pursuit of God in the contemplative life.

I mean that when I'm drawing a subject, I am necessarily concentrating on something totally outside myself, something that is only useful as a subject by being completely itself and not subject to change by me. Drawing is an inherently other-oriented pursuit, much more so than writing.

It has the flavour of obedience about it. When you are drawing a subject, you are in a way giving up the pursuit of your own will and passing it over to follow a reality outside your will or desires. The thing you are drawing is itself; your goal is merely to reflect or depict it accurately for others.

Betty Edwards, of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain fame, has observed what happens to a person's brain while he is in the act of drawing an external subject. She notes, and I have observed this myself, that it is difficult to talk while you are drawing. That is, while you are actually in the process of looking at a subject and deciding where to put a mark on the paper. It is also difficult to understand what others are saying while your brain is in its drawing state. You have to stop and shake your brain a bit and ask the person to repeat what he has said.

I think that drawing and religious contemplation are related somehow, and that there might be something in the act of drawing that is perhaps even related to a state of ecstasy in which the person is swept up out of this world entirely, and out of all self-involvement for a few moments, a state of perfect, self-forgetting contemplation of the Total Other.

There is a terrible trap into which solitary people can fall, to have your life become the pursuit of personal whims, to orient it towards the self. Human beings need a social context, we need to be accountable to others. We need to have other people around to bump up against, to learn where the boundaries of self are. So of course, there is this about painting and writing that tend to cause problems.

I've had people in various venues, here and elsewhere, say "But what's wrong with what you're doing now?" and of course, the answer is, nothing whatever. But one's work is not a vocation; it can only have the scope of an occupation. No work is never going to be enough by itself to sustain a person spiritually and it cannot form the whole framework of a life.

I know that I am not capable of being a "monk in the world". In fact, the nature of what I do, the actual stuff I write about, is such that, left to itself, it can be morally and spiritually crushing.

At the risk of sounding like I'm issuing a rabbity disclaimer, I do want to say that I am tremendously fortunate. Throughout my childhood, I had assumed that I would make my living writing. My mother started teaching me the mechanics of it when she was herself still a school teacher, when I was about six. But as I got older, I began to realise that this is a difficult thing to achieve.

There really are not many people in the world who can say they make their a living at writing, nor at an occupation that is so obviously ordered towards the good. My "day job" is to work towards the restoration of all that is good, true and noble in Christian society using writing, a skill for which I've been trained since childhood. I can't imagine giving it up, it has become so much a part of who I am.

But occupation and vocation, while they overlap, are two separate issues. My work can only be part of the picture, and without a true vocation, without the greater context and framework, it has to be balanced somehow.

A vocation encompasses the entire person, including work. And it is this framework that I have found missing. I think I remember the moment when I finally decided against the religious life and for what I am doing now. This is what I mean when I suggest that mine was what was once called a "failed" vocation.

What does God offer to people who turn down His best gifts? Not marriage, it seems. So, a life lived alone, without the context of a community of others, whether family or a religious community... how to live in such a situation in a way that pleases God. This is what is exercising my mind at the moment, apart from medical concerns.

People have said to me, "You should just be happy and content with the knowledge that what you do is saving innocent lives..." But I know nothing about that and it is not for me to know. I hate to burst whatever illusion bubbles there may be about my motives, but a life isn't lived like that. One may have noble motives, but real life can't be lived on those heights. Real life is lived in the grubby, prosaic day to day.

But I also think it is a mistake to try to make such lofty ideals into the daily sustenance. If I were to try to keep them before me as a reason to do my work, I would quickly run out of juice. I've known a lot of pro-life activists who do this, but I know that I would very quickly succumb to the machinations of my ego if I were to try it. I can't afford to think of myself as anything but a writer. As a writer, I strive to tell the truth as clearly as I can on subjects that are, I believe, of universal importance. What the final result of this work might be is out of my hands, and really isn't my business anyway.

I once had a conversation with an archbishop about this work, and described it as "pushing the rock". I've been instructed to push the rock. Not to get it to the top of the hill. Whether it rolls down the hill every day and I have to start again at the bottom is no business of mine. My job is merely to push it.

I am not a crusader by nature and I find such language to be at best distracting. I did not get into the pro-life movement because I thought it was a vocation. It was simply the most obvious answer to a puzzle, a kind of mathematical equation. I only have one life, it would be a waste to do with it anything less than the most important thing I can think of. I spent many years trying to understand what was wrong with the world, and when I did, what I should do with myself simply became self-evident. It was no more dramatic than that.

So, to the friends asking, "What's wrong with what you're doing?" I respond simply that there's nothing wrong with it at all, but it is incomplete. What I need now are the other pieces of the picture. If the three cornerstones of a balanced lay life, that is the totality of one's vocation in life, are the spiritual life, work and family (as Benedict put it, ora et labora et vita communis) how can I find a substitute for the third thing in a life lived in solitude?

~

Hair update

2011-12-02T13:36:00.005+01:00

Woke up the other day and my hair was all pushed up on top. Tried to figure out what it reminded me of, then I went on the train into the City and looked at the teenage boys, and it came to me:

Fauxhawk!!! Auugh!

So I have started using some kind of weird waxy gel stuff to hold it down on top. Proof enough even for me that it really is coming back.

Cain't even hardly see my scalp no more.

For comparison,

this is the back of my head in the last week of October.

So...you know...

~

True Joy

2011-12-01T11:00:00.007+01:00

I've said this before, I think. When I'm in the studio concentrating on putting marks on paper, everything else that is going on recedes into the background, my mind becomes quiet and the usual howling mob of worries sit down en masse and goes to sleep in the corner like a good dog. I don't know if I would quite call it "true joy," being a religious person I know that I can hope for something even better than this in the future. But it certainly is the closest thing to peace I've ever experienced. Even prayer seems busy and worried in comparison.

Judith Kudlow is the lady who founded the Harlem Studio in New York with Andrea. She still teaches there.

Andrea has told me that I am ready to take the cast drawing class in April when she gets back from Australia.

This pleaseth me. But it launched me into a spiral of anxiety because I immediately thought, "I might not be here. I might die. Or I might still be doing the cancer thing."

My brain is not my friend.

~

What do the EU, Mad Cow Disease and Stradavarius have in common?

2011-11-30T20:20:00.004+01:00

Thought you'd already thought of all the ways the EU is ruining everything?

Think again.

Musicians have warned that the works of Purcell, Handel, Vivaldi and Bach may never again be heard as their composers intended – because of EU rules to stop people catching "mad cow disease" from their instruments.

Freaking out

2011-11-30T20:00:00.010+01:00

vb (adverb)
Informal to be or cause to be in a heightened emotional state, such as that of fear, anger, or excitement.

Who knows exactly why it happens, when it will hit and what will set it off.

Total strangers emailing me and telling me all about their horrifying medical conditions...and offering to move into my house... The prospect of having my lady parts removed and turning into a strangely mutilated zombie... Spending the rest of my life on drugs... Inexplicable exhaustion... Weird sleep disturbances... Chemo drugs eating my endocrine system... Oh yeah, and the fun chronic pain thing...

Who knows...

I made soup and Vicky made salad. Feel slightly better. Now going to watch some TV.

Just been working our way through Community. It's weird enough to distract anyone.

~

Dear well-meaning people out there in internet land:

2011-11-30T17:23:00.006+01:00

if you, your sister, your mother or any other person you know have had a hysterectomy or any related surgery, please don't tell me about it. It may seem awful, but I really don't want to know. Please don't tell me how horrible it was, how painful it was. Please don't tell me how long it took to recover or the huge dramatic life changes that came as a result. Please don't tell me you know how I'm feeling. It mostly just makes me freak out more.

And please, unless you actually know me in real life, not just in your imagination from having read my blog or articles, please, PLEASE don't offer to come to my house to help me through it. This includes people I've communicated with exclusively through email. If you think you know me because I've responded to a couple of emails, I need you to understand that we are not fast friends. I know you mean to be helpful, but it really just comes across as weird and slightly creepy. (If you think this is aimed at you alone, you're wrong. I've received several such offers.)

Sorry, but the list of people I want this kind of help from is extremely short. It might seem from the blog that I'm really all peachycheery but this is not the case.

OK?

I know you mean well, but your sharing is really not having a very good result.

So, just hold back, OK?

~

More contemporary art I don't hate

2011-11-30T16:18:00.004+01:00

Check this guy out.

Jakub Kujawa

Mostly when you say "contemporary art," I start smirking and making jokes about nailing chairs to walls. But there are a few people out there who manage to combine classical technique with modern style and create, dare I say it, real art.

As opposed to bulls---. (Government-subsidised bulls----, I might add.)

~