Liliana Porter

The Frist Museum here in town is hosting Picasso: Figures, showcasing all of the wonderful (and weird) ways that Picasso portrayed the human form over his career.

Upstairs, visitors can find Man with Axe and Other Stories by Liliana Porter. If you've ever looked at the I Spy books with your kids, it will be right up your alley.

The Porter work was wonderful stuff; these two detail shots really don't do it justice in terms of scale.

Keeping the World in Being

I’m attracted to Cassian’s writings and the work of other early monastics because they reveal parallels between the era of the desert fathers and our own; they, too, lived during a time when the known world was coming unhinged. In 313 CE, when the Roman emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, thereby marking the beginning of Christendom, men and women of conscience knew that the wedding of church and state was not a betrothal: it was a betrayal. The early anchorites withdrew from this arranged marriage because they knew that Christendom could no longer sustain their inner lives, that civilization had in fact gone mad. They left the cities and withdrew to the Egyptian desert, where the vastness of their spiritual hunger could be met by an equally vast landscape.

From Keeping the World in Being: Meditations on Longing, by Fred Bahnson. This is a wonderful a piece which resonated deeply with me after this long, eremetical year. I sought the desert fathers frequently in recent months and found, especially in the Conferences and Institutes deep wisdom well-suited to this enclosure-of-circumstance.

Tonight I teach the contraception and IVF session for RCIA. Should be a good one. We did it last year as a standalone session for the first time since there's so much to cover. The Q&A portion at the end was interesting, to say the least. I anticipate the same tonight.

In this big family, Daft Punk’s music was something that every single person could get behind and feel good about. Random Access Memories is in perennial rotation here and probably will be forever. Thanks for all the great work and good luck in whatever comes next.

I don’t think I’ve heard anything as lovely as the sound of all this snow and ice melting all around me. The gutters sound like it’s pouring down rain.

Today's birds

The striped birds are female redwinged blackbirds. You can just make out the bit of rose on their throats. Quite a contrast to the jet-black males with their beautiful red and yellow epaulets. The birds surrounding them are grackles. I tried to get a male and female together in the same shot but it was chaos out there with everyone moving around.

blackbirds

This handsome fellow is an Eastern Towhee. We had quite an assortment around the feeder these last few days. No huge surprise, I guess, given the weather.

towhee

Black-capped Chickadee

chickadee

Tufted Titmouse

titmouse

Downy Woodpecker

downy woodpecker

Golden Flicker. Their main diet is insects - this one seemed to be attracted to the first bare patches of grass and dirt that started showing up next to the house as all of our snow and ice started to melt today. It wasn't at all interested in the seed or suet.

golden flicker

Eastern Meadowlark. I usually see these at the edges of un-mown fields. I've never seen one in our yard before. Like the Flicker, it zeroed in on the newly exposed ground.

eastern meadowlark

It came right up close to the window before splitting the scene.

eastern meadowlark

The bicolored redwings I saw yesterday are much more likely be females of the 'standard' redwinged blackbirds. Kudos to my wife for pointing this out.  

Dusting the camera off made me want to go and recover all of my older bird photos. I had hosted them on flickr years ago, but pulled them down. Though I unfortunately seem to have lost the archive of my flickr albums somewhere along the way, I still have all the original RAW files, so I need to do a bit cleanup and editing, then invest in a better local backup solution. Probably time to pull the trigger on the NAS I've been considering for awhile.

In the meanwhile, here's a Trogon (T. violaceous  or T. ramonianus, not sure on the sex):

Trogon

I took this quite a few years ago in Costa Rica. It's one of my favorite bird pics - so colorful! Right now all I can imagine is how warm it is there. :|


Been eyeballing the bird feeder and have spotted some bicolor red-winged blackbirds. Sibley says we’re not really their normal range but there they are. Nice looking birds! If I can find an SD card I’ll try to get a photo with the good camera.

View from inside…this is my amateur radio antenna.

Thwack

You ever read something and then hear the whistling of an approaching clue-by-four? This is from Cassian's Institutes, Book 7 ("The Spirit of Anger"):

XVI. Sometimes, when we are overcome by pride or impatience and are unwilling to correct our unseemly and undisciplined behavior, we complain that we are in need of solitude, as if we would find the virtue of patience in a place where no one would bother us, and we excuse our negligence and the causes of our agitation by saying they stem not from our own impatience but from our brothers' faults. But, as long as we attribute our own wrongdoing to other people, we shall never be able to get near to patience and perfection

XVII. The sum total of our improvement and tranquility, then, must not be made to depend on someone else's willing, which will never be subject to our sway; it comes, rather, under our own power. And so our not getting angry must derive not from someone else's perfection but from our own virtue, which is achieved not by another person's patience but by our own forbearance. 

I don't consider myself a particularly angry person, but I know that when I do get upset, I tend to linger in it far longer than is right. In fact, if I'm being completely honest, I'll invent reasons to stay angry - imaginary conversations where I always have the upper-hand against whoever has wronged me. I'll spin out long, drawn-out, completely imaginary scenarios in support of whatever has made me upset.

It is true that there is a place for righteous anger. It is equally true that the greatest part of our anger is probably not, unless it be turned inward against our own failings. Even then we must temper it with certainty of God's mercy. No wonder at all that the prayer most commended to us is O God come to my assistance! Lord, make haste to help me!

“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

— Hillaire Belloc

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Phil 4:8

Today is the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle. That verse from the Letter to the Philippians spoke deeply to me during the long run-up before my eventual return to the Church about twenty years ago. I had it pinned to my cubicle wall at work and eventually took St. Paul's name for my Confirmation at the Easter Vigil. I can't say I identified much with Saul. I had no faith to speak of, never mind feeling strongly enough about anything to actively fight against others. The Damascus road, though, is a different matter.

I, too, can point to a particular moment and place where the presence of God was made plain and demanded a response. I learned about strength perfected in weakness, and the more excellent way. Saint Paul has haunted my spiritual life since then - sometimes in clarity, other times as something of an enigma, seen in a mirror darkly.

I've been thinking a bit about the HBO series The Leftovers recently, probably because part of the soundtrack came up in a Spotify playlist I use when I'm working. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Beneath the weird-fiction/sci-fi/supernatural elements of the premise is a profound meditation on grief in response to inexplicable, massive loss. The Departure, as it's called in the show, stands in for any number of similar events: Sandy Hook, 9/11, and so on. People seem to either love the show or hate it, and my feelings ought to be apparent.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that if Damon Lindelof were making The Leftovers today, he'd need to account for the large numbers of Departure-deniers: the ones running around claiming that those who lost loved ones were crisis actors, and that the Departed were all somehow involved in a plot masterminded by...someone. In-show, there'd have to be a persistent dismissal of the whole thing as fake and frankly I think this group would be more evident (and pernicious) than The Guilty Remnant, a nihilistic cult that forms in the post-event period.

I never understood the QAnon stuff. For me, big conspiracies tend to assume a level of competence that's usually not in evidence, and when actual conspiracies do come to light, things tend to change pretty quickly - hearings are held, arrests made, and so on. The bigger the secret and the bigger the crowd involved, the less likely everyone's going to keep their mouths shut. I mean, let's set aside the actual substance of the Q theory, which is too much to go into here, and focus solely on its first principle.

Compartmentalization works. No one has a full picture, and those who do have it are few and far between, making it unlikely that they could leak and remain hidden for very long. People get caught relaying secrets all the time, and some of these ought to know best how to do it. Moreover, they're passed things along to one or maybe two people, not broadcast them to the world on the Internet. They're caught all the same. The idea that these disclosures proceed from some highly-placed government source - and continue to do so over time without identification or arrest and prosecution, well, it just doesn't fly, sorry.

For a long time it smelled an awful lot like Gnosticism to me. Certainly it has a lot in common: deliverance via secret knowledge, unavailable to all but the initiates. Or perhaps I'm making too much of one and selling short the other. In either case, QAnon occupied a peculiar spot in people's lives. What will take its place now?

I'm thinking especially for the people who, having gone all-in with it, are now finding themselves disillusioned. Some of them have sundered ties with families and friends, finding comfort with their fellow-travelers online and occasionally in-person. They sought to explain the world and everything in it, and now what? Prophecies failing to deliver, goalposts moved, just be a little more patient. When you have trusted in something completely, and it fails just as completely, it feels very much like the earth has dropped away from your feet: disorienting and terrifying. Things that made sense before are now turned inside-out. Everything has to be re-interrogated, and perhaps without much help from others. If you're lucky, you have support around you while you figure things out. If not, maybe you go grabbing for the next available thing that looks solid.

What I hope and pray for is that they find an easy return and an open door. I could never take it very seriously - I know too many people who work in government. But I recognize that many people did (and still do). And having walked down a long (and weird) road, the best thing we might be able to do is make sure that the return path is as clear as possible. I also think of the families that have been divided over this, by the very real losses they feel over someone who has taken this path, and pray for their healing and restoration.

May the ones who are leaving this - or have already left - and now find themselves struggling encounter patience and charity, instead of the laughter and derision they might fear.  We could do a lot worse than offer a way off the island to which some of our neighbors and loved ones have collectively paddled out.  

Strive to preserve your heart in peace and let no event of this world disturb it. Reflect that all must come to an end. Keep spiritually tranquil in a loving attentiveness to God and when it is necessary to speak, let it be with the same calm and peace.

— St. John of the Cross