#gestures at christian imperialism

[g1deonthefirst]

i just think if we're going to talk about harrow being a "fundamentally religious" character we also need to talk about the way religion in the nine houses is depicted as a tool of violence and oppression both within and outside of the nine houses.

like clearly jod uses his position as god and worship of him to induce characters to murder the people they love, thereby isolating them so that they love and worship him alone and uphold his empire. in htn we literally see how he isolates harrow (by ordering g1deon to kill her) and takes advantage of the faith this deeply vulnerable teenage girl has in him.

religion on the ninth is also used to justify the murder of 200 children and the extreme abuse gideon endures growing up. but i think most importantly, worship of john throughout the nine houses is used to justify the imperialist conquest and destruction of planets outside the nine houses, in a way that clearly intentionally parallels european imperialism. so, yes, harrow in htn is fundamentally religious — and because of her religion, she also functions as a tool of a violent imperialist empire.

[empiredesimparte]

Live broadcast of ‘Le Sacre de Napoléon V’ on the national channel Francesim 2, hosted by Stéphane Bernard

(Stéphane Bernard) The Emperor will become a quasi-sacred figure through the anointing: it is a sort of transfiguration. The imperial canopy conceals this profoundly sacred moment because the rite must remain a mystery to the common mortals. We are witnessing a revival of the triple blessing from the Reims ceremonial of the kings of Francesim. Their Majesties, kneeling before the altar, receive the triple anointing from the Pope: one on the forehead, the others on both hands. First the Emperor, then the Empress.

In his prayer, the Pope asks God to bestow the treasures and graces of His blessings upon the Emperor. He prays that the Emperor will govern with strength, justice, loyalty, foresight, courage, and perseverance. The Emperor must combat Evil and defend the holy Christian Church. The Empress, for her part, receives God's support, and that of Christ, to preserve the Empire and the French people for eternity.

(Stéphane Bernard) Such a ceremonial highlights the spiritual and mystical dimension of the imperial monarchy. It is a moment steeped in tradition, where every gesture, every word, carries deep symbolism, reminding us of the sacred bonds that unite the sovereign to his people and to God. (Mgr. Morlot) Almighty and eternal God, who have decreed that, following the example of David, Solomon, and Joash, the foreheads of Kings and Emperors should be adorned with a diadem, so that, through the brilliance of their gemstones and the splendor of their ornaments, they might serve as a vivid and striking image of the majesty that surrounds you to the peoples while they reign on earth…

(Mgr. Morlot) … Pour out, we beseech you, your blessing upon these crowns, so that your servant Napoleon and his spouse, who will wear them on earth, may shine with the radiance of all virtues.

(Pope) May God encircle your brow with the crown of glory and justice...

(Pope) ... May He arm you with strength and courage so that, blessed by Heaven through our hands, filled with faith and good works, you may reach the crown of the eternal kingdom…

(Pope) ... By the grace of Him whose reign and empire extend throughout all ages and ages. Amen.

(Napoléon V) Amen.

⚜ Le Sacre de Napoléon V | N°11 | Francesim, Paris, 28 Thermidor An 230

While the bells ring out and the cannons roar, the Emperor and Empress of Francesim are crowned at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. It was broadcast live on television by Stéphane Bernard, the famous journalist for the crowned heads in Francesim.

Beginning ▬ Previous ▬ Next

⚜ Traduction française

(Stéphane Bernard) L'Empereur va devenir un personnage quasi-sacré grâce à l'onction : c'est une sorte de transfiguration. Le dais impérial cache ce moment tout à fait sacré car le rite doit rester un mystère pour le commun des mortels. Nous assistons à une reprise de la triple bénédiction du cérémonial de Reims des rois de Francesim. Leurs Majestés, agenouillées devant l'autel, reçoivent du Pape la triple onction : une sur le front, les autres sur les deux mains. D'abord l'Empereur, puis l'Impératrice.

Dans son oraison, le Pape demande à Dieu de répandre les trésors et les grâces de Ses bénédictions sur l'Empereur. Il prie pour qu'il gouverne avec force, justice, fidélité, prévoyance, courage et persévérance. L'Empereur doit combattre le Mal et défendre la sainte Église chrétienne. L'Impératrice, quant à elle, reçoit le soutien de Dieu et du Christ, afin de conserver l'Empire et le peuple français dans l'éternité.

Un tel cérémonial met en lumière la dimension spirituelle et mystique de la monarchie impériale. C'est un moment empreint de tradition, où chaque geste, chaque parole, porte un symbolisme profond, rappelant les liens sacrés qui unissent le souverain à son peuple, et à Dieu.

(Monseigneur Morlot) Dieu tout-puissant et éternel, qui avez voulu qu'à l'exemple de David, de Salomon et de Joas, le front des Rois et des Empereurs fût ceint du diadème, afin que, par l'éclat des pierreries et la splendeur de leurs ornements, ils fussent aux des peuples, pendant qu'ils règnent sur la terre, la vive et frappante image de la majesté qui vous environnement...

(Monseigneur Morlot) ... Répandez, nous vous en conjurons, votre bénédiction sur ces couronnes, afin que votre serviteur Napoléon et son épouse, qui les porteront sur la terre brillent de l'éclat de toutes les vertus.

(Pape) Que Dieu ceigne votre front de la couronne de la gloire et de justice ; qu'il vous arme de force et de courage, afin que, bénis du Ciel par nos mains, pleins de foi et de bonnes oeuvres, vous arriviez à la couronne du règne éternel...

(Pape) Par la grâce de celui dont le règne et l'empire s'étendent dans tous les siècles et les siècles. Amen. (Napoléon V) Amen.

[familyabolisher]

You've talked a lot about lolita in terms of how it relates to tlt, and as possibly tumblrs premier tlt scholar are there any other works that you think it would be important to read to get the most out of reading or rereading tlt?

oh god!! okay well off the top of my head:

i assume this is a given, but, like, Annabel Lee. some of Poe’s other poetry hits similar beats to that one – The City in the Sea, The Sleeper, Lenore are a few examples, and his short story The Fall of the House of Usher has a woman with a very similar feel to his poetic muses (and frankly a similar feel to Alecto). not required reading ofc but it pads out the kind of touchstones Nabokov + Muir tap into!

i haven’t actually read Homestuck lol but i’ve heard that Homestuck helps, like, a lot (i really really should read Homestuck)

i think a decent fluency in classics is probably also helpful. which i do not have, lmao. but i WOULD recommend reading Homer's Iliad, if only for the fact that the Iliad is very explicitly referenced at multiple points in Gideon the Ninth and continues to thematically lurk throughout Harrow and Nona in these rhetorical gestures made towards heroism + tragedy (i believe Muir once talked about John as conceiving of and constructing himself as a classically tragic figure, which – interesting!!).

there’s absolutely some christian theological dimensions that fly right over my head (i’m jewish, lmao), but a working knowledge of the christian easter story is probably like the minimum you need to get how that’s being played around with in-text.

the opening of Alecto references the opening of Dante’s Inferno such that it’s fair to speculate that Alecto will develop itself in part around Dante (and, considering the role that Dante plays in Lolita, I imagine around Beatrice), so the Divine Comedy is a good one to have a feel for.

Don Quixote! one of my favourite things about Gideon the Ninth in particular is the fact that ‘Dulcinea’ is named in reference to Cervantes’ Dulcinea of Toboso, a wholly imagined woman essential to Don Quixote’s false image of chivalry, representative of spanish nationhood during a time of imperialist conquest, etc etc etc. it does a lot with the gendered paradigms being prodded at in Gideon, especially wrt how they relate back to ideologies necessary to the social structuring of imperialism. i really should put together an essay about Don Quixote and Gideon alongside one another tbh someone ask me about that sometime

i’m sure i’m missing some lmao but these are the ones i can remember! i also have a bunch of texts that i just think hold interesting discursive relationships to tlt, even if i can’t fairly make a case for being consciously present in the text: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel, Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire are the Big Three.

[mmmmalo]

I recently found that the anchor at the end of the One Piece logo is likely a moon-and-star, opposed to the X/cross at the onset. I'd known for a while that Shanks giving up his arm for Luffy (and other guardian sacrifices in early One Piece) was a Christian narrative -- the notion that the Ideal Man (Jesus) allows himself to be emasculated (self-sacrifice) is the basic for a great deal of the story's gender play -- Zoro allows himself to be put on a cross, for example, because his primal image of insurmountable strength is a girl. Young Luffy initially insists that Shanks isn't a Real Man for turning the other cheek -- young Luffy who wears an anchor on his shirt, who cannot swim, and who upon eating the Devil's Fruit learns he will NEVER be able to swim. The anchor then marks Luffy as a sinner, a heathen, encountering Salvation in the form of Shanks. This encounter is polarized along a West/East axis by the title Romance Dawn, which among other things places Rome next to the Rising Sun. Irony is present from outset, but One Piece pokes more holes in its narrative's implicit Christian/Western bias as the story goes on.

Anyway, in the context of that, and the new DUNE movie also turning its final E into a moon-and-star for less obscure reasons, I sort of suspect that the Condesce's pitchfork is doing similar work -- like the reason that her ship is revealed at the end of the Tale of the Signless, I'm thinking, is that Condy's wars are implicitly the imperial expansion of its message by way of conquest. The ostensible Jesus doubles as Muhammad though -- both fall under Homestuck's pithy descriptor of an "adult male bearded human, who was magic", and the tale's teller Doc Scratch, seemingly Western-colonial in his communication of this Christ narrative to a young Eastern girl, is also an abstract depiction of a turban. So I'm surmising that Condy's side-ways psi Ψ is like... acting as a combination of the crescent moon-and-star with the cross? Uniting Christian and Islamic imperial conquest into one gesture, under the banner of the bow-and-arrow's function as a symbol of Psychic Colonialism... or else using Christian conquest as a mask to discuss Islamic conquest more openly, in the style of Halloween or Caliborn's Enchantment. I remain uncertain how to best regard the bifurcation

[sarahsupernovah]

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This Easter, let’s not try to pretend Jesus was a ‘Palestinian Jew’

By Paula Fredriksen

March 28, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio professor of scripture emerita at Boston University, is a historian of ancient Christianity and the author of “When Christians Were Jews” and “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

Easter marks the resurrection of Jesus, but this year the holiday comes with a twist: Jesus resurrected as Palestinian. Never mind that Jesus was born and died a Jew in Judaea. From the pronouncement of a member of Congress to the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jesus is now heralded as a “Palestinian” or, more delicately, as a “Palestinian Jew.”

Jesus made an appearance on social media as a “Palestinian” around Christmas, and the meme has flourished since then. The gambit casts 1st-century Jews in the role of an occupying power and “Palestinians” as their victims. Just as Herod, the king of Judaea in Jesus’ time, persecuted the “Palestinian” holy family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, so, too, goes the claim, is modern Israel an occupying power persecuting Palestinians today.

So caught up were these advocates in their own spin that they mischaracterized reality. In a Christmastime post on Instagram, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned modern Israelis as “right-wing forces violently occupying Bethlehem.” But Bethlehem has been administered by the Palestinian Authority since 1995. Once a significant majority there, the Christian population plunged from 86 percent in 1950 to less than 12 percent in 2016.

As for the Gaza Strip, it is even less hospitable to Christians. As the New Yorker reported in January, a count by the Catholic Church in Gaza, “once home to a thriving Christian community,” found just 1,017 Christians, amid a population of more than 2 million. After seizing control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas ended the designation of Christmas as a public holiday and discouraged its celebration. The dwindling population of Gazan Christians has been harassed, intimidated, even murdered. Were Jesus to show up in modern-day Gaza, he would find an extremely hostile environment.

So how did Jesus end up “Palestinian”?

Roughly 3,000 years ago, on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean, a coastal confederation of five cities stretched from Gaza into Lebanon. The Bible refers to this zone as Philistia, the land of the Philistines. In 430 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus, translating this term, gestured toward the broader area as “Palaistinē.”

To the east, the region of the biblical highlands was called Yehudah. The name predates Herodotus by centuries. By Jesus’ lifetime, the Romans labeled this whole area, coast and highlands together, as “Judaea,” a Latinization of “Yehudah.” The people living in Judaea were called “Iudaei”: “Judeans” or “Jews.” Their temple in Jerusalem, the focus of their ancestral worship since the first millennium B.C., was sacred to Jesus, which is why the gospels depict him as journeying there for pilgrimage holidays. An ethnic Judean, Jesus was, accordingly, a Jew.

Where, then, did the name “Palestine” come from? From a foreign imperial colonizing power: Rome. Judeans revolted twice against the Romans. The first revolt, from A.D. 66 to 73, reached an awful climax with the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Still, Rome kept “Judaea” as the region’s designation. But in A.D. 132-135, the Jews again revolted. By that point, Rome had had enough. The empire changed the administrative name of the region to “Syria-Palestina” — a full century after Jesus’ death. It was a deliberate way to “de-Judaize” the territory by using the throwback term for the coastal Philistines.

What does this mean? It means that Jesus was not “Palestinian.” Nor was he a “Palestinian Jew.” This is so for a simple reason: There was no political entity called “Palestine” in his lifetime. If Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he was born in Judaea as a Jew. He certainly died as one, under Rome’s heavy hand — the political condition that led to the two Jewish revolts.

It was Roman colonizers who changed the name of Judaea to Palestine.

Why rehearse this well-known history? Because now, in the current crisis, even Jesus is being enlisted for attacks on Israel. Calling Jesus a “Palestinian” or even a “Palestinian Jew” is all about modern politics. Besides being historically false, the claim is inflammatory. For two millennia, Jews have been blamed for Jesus’ execution by the Romans; casting him as a Palestinian just stokes the fires of hate, using Jesus against Jews once again.

It is, further, an act of cultural and political appropriation — and a clever rhetorical move. It rips Jesus out of his Jewish context. And it rips 1st-century Jews — and 21st-century Israeli Jews — out of their ancestral homeland, turning them into interlopers. This is polemic masquerading as history.

There have already been too many casualties since Oct. 7. Let’s not allow history to be one of them.

[themonsterblogofmonsters]

I was reading through some of your posts and came across the phrase "International Wixen Sign Language", which I'd never seen before. (I tried looking for more mention, but wasn't sure how to search for multi-worded things.) But it made me curious: I'd just assumed that people would just use whichever sign language is used in their country, not that there was a separate sign language for wixen.

Yeah that's understandable. Basically my logic when I first came up with that goes roughly as follows:

The magical world is distinct and largely separate from the non-magical. There is some connection, but the two cultures are distinct and separate and have been for 300+ years.

There is a far smaller magical population than non-magical.

Magic seems able to heal or treat a great number of things muggle means can't, as long as it's not caused by a curse.

Consequently magicals who are lastingly mute and/or deaf are probably more uncommon than they are in the non-magical population.

These wixes would still need a way to communicate.

While others could use the flame-writing or ribbon-writing spells to communicate to them, how do they communicate before they learn such spells?

Especially given that mute wixes would have to cast non-verbally and deaf wixes would probably have a rougher time in schooling and those who are both... people are ableist. This would be especially true in the magical world when so much can be healed or treated.

God, there might even be some magical belief that these conditions marks them as squibs or magically weak and thus that there's no point even trying.

These wixes have to figure out their own ways to communicate.

If introduced or on meeting others like them, they'd likely work together to make a sign language.

The magical world has instantaneous long-distance travel.

There is not much to stop these people from meeting, communicating, and collaborating on this.

This was the series of thoughts I had at around the same time I remembered that Roman Orators used a specific series of hand signals to emphasise or accent their speeches; similarly you see significant gestures painted into iconography, especially Catholic and Orthodox Christian iconography.

And, well. Europe did a lot of colonialism and I think that magicals would have followed behind the non-magicals to prevent local magicals from fighting back in ways that could expose magic to their muggles - there would have been magical colonialism and imperialism too.

So, I suspect that the "International" Wixen Sign Language was a largely Western construction with primarily Western history (such as the iconographic and oratorial signs), but with an increasing non-western influence as countries gain independence and areas get decolonised. There's also a strong likelihood that there's local dialects as well.

That is... roughly my thought process with regards to it all. If others have their own thoughts I'd be interested to see them!

[orthodoxydaily]

Saints&Reading: Tuesday September 12, 2023

august 30_september 12

SAINTS ALEXANDER (340), JOHN (595) AND PAUL THE NEW (595) CONSTANTINOPLE PATRIARCHS

Saints Alexander, John and Paul, Patriarchs of Constantinople, lived at different times, but each of them happened to clash with the activities of heretics who sought to distort the teachings of the Church. Saint Alexander (325-340) was a vicar bishop during the time of Saint Metrophanes (June 4), the first Patriarch of Constantinople.

Because of the patriarch’s extreme age, Alexander substituted for him at the First Ecumenical Synod at Nicea (325). Upon his death, Saint Metrophanes left instructions in his will to elect his vicar to the throne of Constantinople. During these times His Holiness Patriarch Alexander had to contend with the Arians and with pagans. Once, in a dispute with a pagan philosopher the saint said to him, “In the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ I command you to be quiet!” and the pagan suddenly became mute. When he gestured with signs to acknowledge his errors and affirm the correctness of the Christian teaching, then his speech returned to him and he believed in Christ together with many other pagan philosophers. The faithful rejoiced at this, glorifying God Who had given such power to His saint.

The heretic Arius was punished through the prayer of Saint Alexander. Arius had apparently agreed to enter into communion with the Orthodox. When the Emperor asked him if he believed as the Fathers of Nicea taught, he placed his hand upon his breast (where he had cunningly concealed beneath his clothes a document with his own false creed written upon it) and said, “This is what I believe!” Saint Constantine (May 21), unaware of the deceitful wickedness of Arius, set a day for receiving him into the Church. All night long Saint Alexander prayed, imploring the Lord not to permit this heretic to be received into communion with the Church.

In the morning, Arius set out triumphantly for the church, surrounded by imperial counselors and soldiers, but divine judgment overtook him. Stopping to take care of a physical necessity, his bowels burst forth and he perished in his own blood and filth, as did Judas (Acts 1:18).

His Holiness Patriarch Alexander, having toiled much, died in the year 340 at the age of 98. Saint Gregory the Theologian (January 25) mentioned him afterwards in an encomium to the people of Constantinople.

Sainted John the Faster (582-595) is in particular remembered by the Church on 2 September (the account about him is located under this heading).Read more Orthodox Church in America_OCA

 Sainted Paul, by birth a Cypriot, became Patriarch of Constantinople (780-784) during the reign of the Iconoclast-emperor Leo IV the Khazar (775-780), and was a virtuous and pious but timid man. Viewing the martyrdom, which the Orthodox endured for holy icons, the saint concealed his Orthodoxy and associated with the iconoclasts...read more OCA

According to some ancient manuscripts, Saint Alexander ought to be commemorated on June 2. Today he is remembered together with the holy Patriarchs John the Faster (September 2) and Paul the New (eighth century).

ST FIACRE OF BREUIL ( gaul_670)

Abbot, born in Ireland about the end of the sixth century; died 18 August, 670. Having been ordained priest, he retired to a hermitage on the banks of the Nore of which the townland Kilfiachra, or Kilfera, County Kilkenny, still preserves the memory. Disciples flocked to him, but, desirous of greater solitude, he left his native land and arrived, in 628, at Meaux, where St. Faro then held episcopal sway. He was generously received by Faro, whose kindly feelings were engaged to the Irish monk for blessings which he and his father's house had received from the Irish missionary Columbanus. Faro granted him out of his own patrimony a site at Brogillum (Breuil) surrounded by forests. Here Fiacre he directed an oratory in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, built an hospice in which he received strangers, and a cell in which he himself lived apart. He lived a life of great humility, in prayer, fast, vigil, and the manual labour of the garden. Disciples gathered around him and soon formed a monastery. There is a legend that St. Faro allowed him as much land as he might surround in one day with a furrow; that Fiacre turned up the earth with the point of his crosier, and that an officious woman hastened to tell Faro that he was being beguiled; that Faro coming to the wood recognized that the wonderworker was a man of God and sought his blessing, and that Fiacre henceforth excluded women, on pain of severe bodily infirmity, from the precincts of his monastery. In reality, the exclusion of women was a common rugin the Irish foundations. His fame for miracles was widespread. He cured all manner of diseases by laying on his hands; blindness, polypus, fevers are mentioned, and especially a tumour or fistula since called "le fic de S. Fiacre".

His remains were interred in the church at Breuil, where his sanctity was soon attested by the numerous cures wrought at his tomb. Many churches and oratories have been dedicated to him throughout France. His shrine at Breuil is still a resort for pilgrims with bodily ailments. In 1234 his remains were placed in a shrine by Pierre, Bishop of Meaux, his arm being encased in a separate reliquary. In 1479 the relics of Sts. Fiacre and Kilian were placed in a silver shrine, which was removed in 1568 to the cathedral church at Meaux for safety from the destructive fanaticism of the Calvinists. In 1617 the Bishop of Meaux gave part of the saint's body to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and in 1637 the shrine was again opened and part of the vertebrae given to Cardinal Richelieu. A mystery play of the fifteenth century celebrates St. Fiacre's life and miracles. St. John of Matha, Louis XIII, and Anne of Austria were among his most famous clients. He is the patron of gardeners. The French cab derives its name from him. The Hôtel de St-Fiacre, in the Rue St-Martin, Paris, in the middle of the seventeenth century first let these coaches on hire. The sign of the inn was an image of the saint, and the coaches in time came to be called by his name.

GALATIANS 2:11-16

11 Now when Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed; 12 for before certain men came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. 13 And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy. 14 But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, "If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of Gentiles and not as the Jews, why do you compel Gentiles to live as Jews? 15 We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, 16 knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.

MARK 6:1-7

1 Then He went out from there and came to His own country, and His disciples followed Him. 2 And when the Sabbath had come, He began to teach in the synagogue. And many hearing Him were astonished, saying, "Where did this Man get these things? And what wisdom is this which is given to Him, that such mighty works are performed by His hands! 3 Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are not His sisters here with us? So they were offended at Him. 4 But Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house." 5 Now He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. 6 And He marveled because of their unbelief. Then He went about the villages in a circuit, teaching. 7 And He called the twelve to Himself, and began to send them out two by two, and gave them power over unclean spirits.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thanks! These questions are getting harder—this one’s like a grad school orals prompt. I’ll do my best. As I see it, three 20th-century factors created the conditions for postmodernism: 

—aesthetically, the avant-gardes explored the arts as constituted by the early 20th century—painting, sculpture, music, poetry, fiction, drama, etc.—to their various formal limits by exhausting the possibilities of what could be done with those media qua media (the linguistic maximalism of Joyce and minimalism of Stein; the artwork as self-aware commodity in Duchamp or as pure form in Mondrian; music as upswelling of the volk in Stravinsky or as arbitrary mathematical combination of elements in Schoenberg, etc.); in effect, they discovered the end of art foretold by Hegel in the Romantic moment, which itself made this end of art inevitable when the Romantics re-conceived art as the artist’s self-expression rather than as the mimesis of an externally transcendent order; after the avant-gardes, everything you could possibly do in art was simultaneously available—because you had all the possibilities before you—and meaningless—because they had all been catalogued and were therefore drained of the historical weight and effectiveness that comes from novelty; hence, postmodernism, with its air of endless, empty play. 

—politically, the paradigm of “after Auschwitz” (encompassing not only awareness of the Holocaust but the emergence into European and American self-awareness of the whole record of western imperial perfidy from 1492 forward, to include even Stalinism) made suspect any and all grand world-making gestures in art or thought that did not at the bare ethical minimum include within themselves an announced awareness of their own contingency, a kind of insistence that they never be taken at their word, lest Hitler and Stalin come again and transform the architectonics of systematic philosophy or epic poetry or realist fiction into the architecture of death camps and gulags; hence postmodernism, with its characteristic metafictional gestures making impossible the absolute visionary authority over the real claimed from Dante to Milton to Tolstoy.

—technologically, the supersession of writing and print, and the type of mental order they modeled through the structure of their sentences and the regimentation of their lines, by forms of mass media paradoxically more immediate—recorded music, cinema, radio, TV, and now the whole panoply of “online”—whose immediacy began to invade even language, also argued against the authority and agency of the world-constituting literary or artistic masterpiece; hence, postmodernism, with its media-saturated forms, its breakdown of high and low culture, its dispersal of meaning into surface effects.

To the extent that we still live under these circumstances, we probably can’t escape postmodernism even if we want to. Certainly not by some fiat declaration of a New Sincerity—that failed movement—which turned postmodernism’s ludic play into a moral sermon; or of a New Authenticity—how I think of autofiction and identity politics—which seeks to root postmodernism’s ethical commitments in a moralized vision of the body and nature now understood as themselves (like postmodern language) a fragmentary surface-without-depth. 

No, to escape postmodernism, we will probably need a new religion or at least a revived one—some new transcendent order on which to base the order of the artwork that will help us to overcome our traumatized phobia of equating all hierarchy with Hitler—and new technologies—which have probably already arrived; we just don’t know what to do with them yet; or at least I don’t. 

(Also worth remembering is the proto-postmodern metafictional technique of so many masterpieces of the Christian centuries from Chaucer to Cervantes to Sterne, this to remind readers never to confuse any merely human narrator with God. In that sense, postmodernism was a return to the historical norm, a counterrevolution, a reversion to the long moment before Romanticism, realism, and modernism each in its way promoted an art with direct access to the real.) 

This is all very well and theoretical, but what to do if you’re a budding novelist facing the blank page-screen? First, don’t despair. As I always say, all this new media relies on fragile infrastructure and will someday be gone as if it had never been. Getting your work on paper is still its best chance for survival. (Someone will say: “Writing for the future? Isn’t that an arrogant and outdated Renaissance conceit?” I reply: “Have some self-respect. You could be dead tomorrow. Bear witness to your lifetime.”) Second, relax. The whole drift and fate of western or world culture is not under your control, is not your responsibility. Some part of literary composition is unconscious anyway—if it’s serious: if it’s not pure commercial hackwork or pure political propaganda—which means that you can’t know what historical forces, unconscious promptings, or new/old divinities are working through you.

Speaking only for myself as a writer: I don’t think there’s any juice left in overt experimentation. Joyce and Stein really did show us the maximalist and minimalist poles of fictional language; what point is there in making that pedagogical gesture yet again? I seek some register I can call my own somewhere in the middle. I’ve complained about this before, but it’s sad and cargo-cultist (imperialist metaphor? I’m sure) the way the tiny elite literary community in the Anglosphere treats “translated literature” as a genre: miserable and interminable late modernism, all Euro-despairing novels written in Wittgensteinian fragments or Bernhardian scriptio continua. I’d rather read manga—and I don’t even like manga. 

I’m not pursuing revolution per se, though if I achieve it that will be fine too. My own novels tend to be composed in a mode I call “romantic realism”—an attempt to mythify the contemporary through its portrayal in a heightened rhetoric, through grand figures who enact grand plots, archetypes even. I borrow the term from the title of an academic book I never read on Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. I just noticed that the phrase has a Wikipedia entry, according to which Goebbels, Lunacharsky, and Ayn Rand all claimed the term for their obviously mutually opposed Nazi, Soviet, and Objectivist projects, but that just proves it’s worth stealing; I think I’m safe with Conrad and Dostoevsky. For a decidedly non-fascist approach to the idea without quite using the words, we might consider its African-American provenance in Albert Murray’s The Hero and the Blues. 

All in all, I see myself as the skipped-generation continuer of (and innovator within) a 20th-century tradition going back through (to name only a few) Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo to Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch, and Ralph Ellison and then to Woolf, Lawrence, and Faulkner—and Joyce considered in his mythopoetic aspect—themselves stemming from the major 19th-century figures aforementioned, not to speak of the great American Romantic tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.

The question is unanswerable, and the above perhaps unreadable, but I hope it answers the question all the same.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Viewing the prosecution of Sterry as an early skirmish in Toronto’s free speech struggle reframes the entire issue. The first chapter of Betcherman’s The Little Band gestures in this direction by explaining the religious and cultural outlook of Toronto’s elite and their defenders: conservative Protestant (usually evangelical in outlook), British or anglophile, Tory, staunchly imperialist, royalist, and pro-capitalist. Business owners, Conservative politicians, army officers, clergymen, the Orange Order, and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire were core components of this swath of Canadian society. A.E. Smith, the clergyman-turned-communist, bluntly described Toronto as “the citadel of reaction and religious Toryism,” while J.S. Woodsworth called the city “smug,” “intolerant,” and “village-like.”

If, prompted in part by the Sterry trial, we view the Toronto free speech struggles not simply as another Red scare but more specifically as an attempt by the Anglo-Protestant elite to keep Toronto locked into late-nineteenth-century cultural patterns, we begin to see more clearly the reasons why rationalists and radical Christians were repressed alongside communists. One telltale connection is the presence of Emerson Coatsworth as the presiding judge in Sterry’s trial. He was also the dominant voice on the Toronto Police Commission, and a key supporter of the Toronto-based Canadian Christian Crusade (CCC), an anti-atheist organization formed in 1929.

….

On 5 May 1929, the police broke up a street meeting organized by the Rationalist Society of Canada. Founding members Lionel Cross [Toronto's first Black Canadian lawyer], Styles, and Leavens promptly lodged a complaint with Chief Draper and the police commissioners. They asserted that police had orchestrated the situation “by aiding and abetting persons to create a disturbance at their meetings and then [intervening] under the guise of a ‘breach of the peace being imminent’ to justify their action.” The RSC officials insisted that, “in matters of fundamental rights and liberties, they [would] permit no one to abrogate,” and they would continue holding open air meetings, just as they had for “the past four years.” They were aware, however, that Toronto’s elite, despite their frequent praise for “British freedoms,” did not believe that liberal principles protected radicals or blasphemers. On 4 August the Star published a letter from Cross spelling out this contradiction:

“I have been trying to reconcile our ideas of British liberty with the attitude of the police in breaking up the meetings on the street of those with unconventional ideas, while religious gatherings are undisturbed.”

Cross was told by an inspector that both the public and his men found rationalist speeches objectionable, and that was reason enough. Admitting that appeals to the authorities had been a waste of time, Cross asked the readers of the Star: was it possible to “arouse an enlightened public sentiment to correct this?”

On 13 August 1929, policemen forced a crowd out of Queen’s Park, in an effort to forestall a communist meeting that had not even started. The violence meted out to communists and bystanders alike shocked many of those present and sparked a furor in the press. While this incident has been discussed in the existing historiography of the “free speech struggle,” another case only a few days later has been overlooked. On the following Sunday night (18 August), police ordered an “atheist” meeting of almost five hundred people near Massey Hall to disperse. This was almost certainly a gathering of the RSC. “The crowd took exception” to the interference of the police, and “as they walked slowly towards Yonge Street they jeered [at] the officers and called upon them to stop a religious meeting” being held on a nearby street corner. Indeed, members of this “throng” themselves interrupted the religious gathering, which ended in disorder.

While this confrontation was not violent, the way it was reported in the next day’s Globe reveals the extent to which Toronto’s unbelievers were characterized as an existential threat to Canadian values, alongside communists and “foreigners.” First of all, the paper argued that police action had been entirely justified because the rationalists had blocked the street. More significantly, however, its coverage of this story was surrounded on all sides by bold headlines warning Torontonians of the dire threat they faced from depraved agitators. The rhetorical question, “‘Is It to Be Bolshevism or Constitutional Government?’” spanned the top of the page. Another headline trumpeted: “Communism Spells Murder, Pillage, Merciless Tyranny, Says Shields, and Would Eliminate Civilization.” That lengthy article praised the eloquence and logic of a sermon by the fundamentalist Baptist minister T.T. Shields, who denounced atheism, communism, modernism, anarchy, and the Toronto Star. The adjacent piece interviewed four prominent Conservatives: Anglican canon H.J. Cody, war veteran and businessman J.J. Shanahan, politician Alfred Morine, and publisher S.B. Gundy. Not unexpectedly, all four praised the police and condemned leftists. “Exaggerated Stories on Reds, Distortion of Report Alleged,” was the title of a nearby article about the police action in Queen’s Park the week before. It reprinted a letter from someone who claimed to have been present and asserted that the police had had no choice but to break up the “sullen,” “ugly” crowd, composed of threatening “foreigners” who would have become violent if given the opportunity; concerns over police brutality were simply the product of “scare headlines” and “gross misrepresentation” orchestrated by the Star. In the Globe’s coverage, the rationalists were merely one element of an ominous outside force that sought to overthrow “Toronto the Good.”

Rationalists, radicals, and their allies contested this view of events. On 2 October 1929 a heated meeting (which according to the mayor threatened to become “a regular donnybrook”) was held at city hall to address concerns over the public exercise of free speech. Chief Draper and Judge Coatsworth were present and subject to intense cross-examination by R.E. Knowles, Salem Bland, and others. Hard questions were aimed at Coatsworth in particular. After the judge explained that only seditious meetings were prohibited, an unnamed voice called out, “What about a man’s religion?” Coatsworth replied, “I don’t interfere with any man’s religion,” but he went on to caution that blasphemy would not be permitted either. One audience member pointedly asked him, “Aren’t you connected with a religious organization?” (The judge was a prominent member of the United Church of Canada.) Coatsworth responded, “I’ve been connected with a religious organization all my life, but it interferes with none in their religion.”

William Styles attended that 1929 meeting as the RSC representative. He argued that his group had “inalienable rights” to hold meetings in public places, and that “any trouble in the parks has been caused by the police themselves.” He complained about “a hysteria among certain people in the city that there is going to be a revolt.” Styles said he had seen many socialist meetings and had never witnessed a riot; but “now every meeting is construed as being unlawful.” He went on to declare that the rationalists would not “submit to a dictatorship,” defiantly concluding, “I submit that the chief of police is the servant of this city and not a dictator.” When a Free Speech Conference was called for 12 October, the “Canadian Atheist Society” was listed among its supporters, alongside Bland, Knowles, and a number of communist-affiliated organizations.

The conflict was played out well beyond the streets. Direct police pressure in 1929 led to theatre and hall owners reneging on their arrangements with communists and other leftist groups; it is possible the same thing happened to the rationalists. Early in the year, the RSC suddenly moved their meetings, going from the Victoria Theatre on 16 February to the Occident Hall a week later. After indoor lectures resumed in the fall, there were a number of other rapid venue changes: from the College Assembly Hall to the Brunswick Hall, and then, after a gap in the schedule, a move to Winchester Hall for the winter and spring of 1930. RSC officials never publicly addressed the changes but, given the timing, it is certainly conceivable that they were having trouble finding people who would rent them space.

…

That would change early in 1931, when the Globe declared, “The eyes of atheism and the eyes of bolshevism in North America are fixed for the moment on Toronto.” This renewed burst of outrage was provoked by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, luminary of the American freethought movement. His Kansas-based company, Haldeman-Julius Publications, was enormously prolific in its production of affordable books, pamphlets, and newspapers. His series of “Little Blue Books” would become particularly influential across North America. The publisher was himself a socialist and an atheist of Jewish descent who never shied away from controversy. Upon hearing reports of the Toronto free speech battle, he decided to support local unbelievers and test the authorities by printing an “Atheist Special Edition” of his American Freeman newspaper and distributing “copies numbering in thousands” in the city.

This provoked the ire of the Globe, which denounced not only Haldeman-Julius’s atheism but also his support for “companionate marriage.” An editorial entitled “Keep This Trash Out” declared:

the atheist and the ‘Red’ have so much in common that it behooves Christian people to be on guard against their insidious style of propaganda. Their methods are so similar that general direction from Moscow is more than a suspicion.

The aim of both was the same: “the overthrow of established conditions that have been developed through the centuries.” Something had to be done. Canadians could not reasonably be asked to tolerate “widespread circulation” of arguments in favour of companionate marriage and “blatant, scoffing atheism.” Fortunately, something could be done: censorship. Crown attorney Eric Armour believed that the Atheist Special Edition of the American Freeman contained blasphemous libel and that anyone who distributed or kept it “would be subject to a criminal charge.” Indeed, he believed many American publications should be barred from Canada. Chief Draper agreed that the Freeman should be kept from circulating by mail, and pronounced that if it were sold from the city’s newsstands “police action” would be taken.

Haldeman-Julius was not intimidated. He responded by sending a telegram to the Globe a few days later. It began:

Please announce in your columns that I am coming to your city for lecture in hall to be announced soon. Will explain to your people why I am an atheist and why atheism will make Toronto a more civilized city. Will defy your Chief Constable to stop my meeting. Will also print extra edition of Freeman for free circulation and will send friends of mine to every house in Toronto to deliver free copies of paper.

The publisher also said he would attempt to bring Clarence Darrow with him because he anticipated trouble from Chief Draper, “who I understand is a tinpot tyrant and a small edition of Mussolini.” Haldeman-Julius then sent a message to Draper himself, asking if the chief would guarantee his safety at a Sunday afternoon meeting “explaining the philosophy of atheism and the falsity of Christianity and the corruption of the Catholic Church.” He took pains to stress the fact that “this special campaign is not being financed by Moscow, but by myself personally as a great believer in free speech and free assembly.”

…

Haldeman-Julius seems to have changed his mind about visiting Toronto, but he did produce a special “Canadian Free Speech Edition” of the American Freeman for distribution in the city. In it he declared, “If there isn’t free speech for an atheist in Toronto, then there is no free speech in Toronto.” Since the man himself remained out of reach, the Globe decided to use Haldeman-Julius’s example as a stick with which it could beat local free speech advocates. Earlier in the year sixty-eight professors from the University of Toronto had signed an open letter arguing that the actions of Draper and Coatsworth violated the British principle of freedom of speech. The Globe’s editorial writers claimed repeatedly (and without evidence) that Haldeman-Julius was allied with these professors and that militant atheism was the natural outcome of their line of thinking.

One reason that the Globe took this approach was that it fit popular pre-existing narrative whereby orderly Christian Canada was threatened by irreverent and destructive outsiders. This narrative was extremely common when communists were being targeted, but it was invoked to explain and belittle the rationalists as well. The reader will recall Rev. F.C. Ward-Whate having employed the reliable rhetoric of outside agitators (“mongrel curs”) during the Sterry case and calling for the rationalists to be immediately jailed and deported. At that time the Evening Telegram stressed the links between Canadian and American rationalists. In a breathless article entitled “U.S. Is Controlling Centre of Toronto’s Rationalism,” it warned that “organized atheism in this city is receiving support via the same channels as does Communism.” As proof, the Telegram pointed to the RSC’s friendly relationship with Franklin Steiner and his American Rationalist Association of Chicago, “whose horrible doctrines are a derivative of the black atheism of Moscow and Berlin.” In Ontario this type of anti-American imagery dated right back to the time of the United Empire Loyalists.

Toronto’s rationalists resented this line of attack and took pains to refute it. Cross “denied with considerable warmth” the claim that he had come from the United States. “I was born in the British West Indies, saw war service overseas and am now pleased to call myself a Canadian,” he told a Star reporter. When the Sterry incident began, Styles made a point of stating that the Rationalist Society stood for “the integrity of the British empire.” He and Leavens also strongly rejected the allegation that they were outsiders, insisting that they were, respectively, third- and fourth-generation Canadians. Styles derisively pointed out that it was Ward-Whate who was the immigrant. The clergyman would probably have seen no shame in that: he was a Briton, and Toronto was a British city. It was Americans and “other” foreigners who were the problem. We may, however, detect a certain irony in the fact that Canadian authorities wanted to eject Sterry from the body politic, even though he was a British citizen who had lived in Canada for seventeen years. The quality of “Britishness” was claimed by both Toronto’s elite and by the rationalists. It was frequently invoked by Toronto’s elite as a marker of their authority, but they hastily distanced themselves from it when it became a limitation or a liability."

- Elliot Hanowski, Towards A Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024. p. 142-149.

[arieltheartistmermaid]

Historic art isn’t always boring but always has a meaning to it. The composition of this Virgin and Child is loosely based on the Hodegetria, one of the more powerful and enduring icon types of the Orthodox Christian church. The Virgin gestures toward the child to show him as the “way” (hodos in Greek), the source of salvation. The throne and her red shoes present her as the Queen of Heaven, and the archangels in the roundels beside her hold imperial regalia, which are typical attributes of archangels. The first of this type, housed in the Hodegon monastery in Constantinople, was an active part of civic and religious life in the Byzantine capital. Said to produce miracles daily, it was taken out of the monastery every Tuesday so the public could see it. It was invoked against plague and carried by imperial armies as a talisman in battle.

Expert opinion differs about the origin of this painting (known as the Kahn Madonna after an earlier owner) and the National Gallery of Art’s Madonna and Child on a Curved Throne, also of Byzantine origin. The soft shadows of this Virgin’s face and her tender expression are paralleled in a mosaic of Mary in the great basilica of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople).

Byzantine art made a powerful impact on 13th- and 14th-century Italian painting, which emphasizes the spiritual world of Paradise, with elongated and weightless figures, more like spirits than physical human beings, skies of heavenly gold, and flat, stylized patterning of drapery. The gold striations that define folds in clothing, the round volume of Mary’s veiled head, and Jesus’s frontal pose—looking more like a miniature adult than a child—are all part of the Byzantine tradition.

[lazyworksinprogress]

I'm at work over the weekend and there is a lot to do but no one will notice if I don't do it very well so I'm listening to Hell Unearthed - Hilary McElwaine

[my thinking/unedited notes]

the author has a few moments of explaining her process and complimenting Dante's understanding of justice that jumped out to me and made me laugh because I do not hold Dante in particularly high regard when it comes to morals or ethics. Do I think Divine Comedy has an indelible historical and artistic influence? Yes. But I also think it's important to view "masterpieces" that form the bedrock of established moral justice with a healthy sense of contempt for the part those ideas have played in bringing the state of the world to *gestures to everything*.

Praising Dante by mentioning his influence on the construction of Western judicial legislation is an overtly political line to walk because those legal frameworks are not famous for being ethical, reasonable, and/or logical. I'd be happy to cop to the idea that Dante invented the first famous self-insert, RPF fanfic, set up a lot of great Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and definitely helped Hozier with the structure of his last album but I refuse to allow the thought flourish that he is an unimpeachable moral authority.

uncritically repeating the Gandhi rhetoric claiming he was a spiritually elevated person when his history of sexism, anti-Blackness is a choice that really places this adaptation in a politicised place

david bowie being in limbo for publicly following different religions and not various allegations of sexual violence is also a decision to continue to perpetuate a certain public image of these figures that is not wholly based on their actions

the political commentary is superficial and pro-West without even the nuance of Dante's original work that criticised the imperial aspirations of Florence. The "kidnapper portion" that identifies individual criminal cases like the Lindbergh kidnapping but not ones like the atrocities of the settler colonial Residential Schools or of the ways that missionary work and schooling was used to erase Aboriginal culture and separate children from their families and culture in Australia - is just one of the moments that just made me feel completely alienated from this adaptation.

it feels like there is something not entirely right when trying to fit some of these sins into the structure of the Divine Comedy. the attempt to include specific crimes of gender-based violence like genital mutilation is not handled well - it actually feels like a dog whistle when attached to a cultural story including arranged marriage - as though forced/early marriage does not also happen in Christian traditions.

There's just too many places when the choice of sin illustrates how determined the author is to ignore glaring modern examples if the case criticises the hegemonic power structure.

it's a tough adaptation to try to blend modern examples with the conservative and contradictory framework because it illustrates a lot of the logical inconsistencies and the way sin is constructed by a specific type of person. it doesn't make sense and the absurdity of ignoring things like systemic violence is frequently jarring .

[empiredesimparte]

First official appearance of H.I.M Emperor Napoléon V and Charlotte

By Point Royal

Emperor Napoléon V and his fiancée, Charlotte de Mortemart, enter Paris City Hall © Francesim Presses

H.I.M, accompanied by his fiancée, went to meet the Pope Gregorius XIX, who had come to Paris to celebrate the couple's imminent religious marriage. Once again, they showed just how well matched they are.

Having just returned to the capital for the final preparations for their wedding, the future imperial couple welcomed the Pope to French soil. As godchildren of His Holiness, the Emperor and his fiancée were granted a rare honour: the right to wear white clothes. In fact, in the presence of the Pope, interlocutors and guests are not normally allowed to wear white. Clearly, there is a good relationship between the Pope and his imperial godson.

Emperor Napoléon V shakes hands with His Holiness, Pope Gregorius XIX of the Holy See © Francesim Presses

Emperor Napoléon V spoke French to the Pope, who had a perfect command of the language. By republican tradition, the sovereign did not kiss or bow to the Pope, unlike his fiancée, who did not yet have the title of Empress.

Emperor Napoléon V is concerned about His Holiness, Pope's safe journey to Francesim © Francesim Presses

Charlotte bows before His Holiness, meeting him for the first time © Francesim Presses

The group didn't stay long at Paris City Hall, just thirty minutes or so. The Christians therefore did not have the opportunity to see the Pope. The Emperor ensured that his prestigious guest quickly returned to the Tuileries Palace, no doubt to discuss marriage and politics.

The Emperor's fiancée, Charlotte, in conversation with the Mayor of Paris © Francesim Presses

During their trip, the Mayor of Paris approached His Majesty's fiancée to tell her about the gift made by Francesim's officials: a set of jewellery for the imperial wedding. The future Empress Charlotte asked the Mayor of Paris not to order the set, and to devote the sum allocated to the gift to charity. This generous gesture did not go unnoticed, and the news was widely reported by all the journalists.

Traduction française

Première apparition officielle de l'Empereur Napoléon V et Charlotte

Par Point Royal

L'Empereur Napoléon V et sa fiancée, Charlotte de Mortemart, entrent à la mairie de Paris © Francesim Presses

Sa Majesté Impériale, accompagné de sa fiancée, vont à la rencontre du Pape, venu à Paris afin de célébrer le très proche mariage religieux du couple. L'Empereur et sa promise ont à nouveau démontré à quel point ils sont bien assortis.

Tous juste rentrés à la capitale pour les derniers préparatifs du mariage, le futur couple impérial accueille le Pape sur le sol français. Etant le filleul de Sa Sainteté, l'Empereur et sa fiancée se sont vus accordés un rare honneur : pouvoir porter des vêtements blancs. En effet, en présence du Pape, les interlocuteurs et invités ne sont normalement pas autorisés à porter du blanc. De toute évidence, il existe une relation chaleureuse entre le Pape et son impérial filleul.

L'Empereur Napoléon V serre la main à Sa Sainteté, le Pape Gregorius XIX du Saint-Siège © Francesim Presses

L'Empereur Napoléon V échange en français avec le Pape, qui maîtrise parfaitement cette langue. Par tradition républicaine, le souverain n'embrasse ni ne s'incline devant le Pape, contrairement à sa fiancée qui ne possède pas encore le titre d'impératrice.

L'empereur Napoléon V se préoccupe du bon déroulement du voyage de Sa Sainteté le Pape en Francesim © Francesim Presses

Charlotte s'incline devant Sa Sainteté, elle le rencontre pour la première fois © Francesim Presses

Le groupe n'est pas resté longtemps à la mairie de Paris, une trentaine de minutes. Les chrétiens n'ont donc pas eu l'occasion d'apercevoir le Pape. L'Empereur s'est assuré que son prestigieux invité rejoigne rapidement le palais des Tuileries, certainement afin de discuter mariage et politique.

La fiancée de l'Empereur, Charlotte, discute avec le maire de Paris © Francesim Presses

Durant leur déplacement, le maire de Paris a approché la fiancée de Sa Majesté afin de lui faire part du présent réalisé par les fonctionnaires de Francesim : une parure pour le mariage impérial. La future impératrice Charlotte a demandé au maire de Paris de ne pas commander cette parure, et de dévouer la somme allouée à ce cadeau pour des œuvres de charité. Ce geste généreux n'est pas resté inaperçu, et l'information fut vivement relayé par tous les journalistes ayant assisté en direct au refus de Charlotte.

[abellinthecupboard]

“Matoaka” (Part 2)

2. Christian names, surnames, place names: Brafferton, called after a manor- house in Yorkshire, whose rents had been 　　bequeathed by Robert Boyle, a man of learning and great piety, to bring the infidels of Virginia, across the water, out of their 　　dark and miserable ignorance to true religion: Brafferton, a monument to words we, or some of us, 　　once listened to in fear and trembling: divinity, hell fire, the Fiend, Redemption, Eternal Judgment: Brafferton, 　　monument at last to policy, tergiversation and neglect. What happened? Whose fault was it few gave credence to 　　the awesome news of Love personified, Who, having undergone the worst, might still prove to outlast undoing? Awe, 　　in all the stories we tell ourselves, is finally what's durable, no matter how we mollify it, no matter how our 　　pieties keep changing. What happened in the mind of John Smith's nonpareil, a pagan without a peer, grown nubile, then the shining jewel of imperial endeavor, now the mere sullied pawn of statecraft and testosterone, who dares imagine? After what dazzlements, what threats, what stirred, fearful increment of passion, as Mistress 　　Rolfe, she crossed that threshold, who can guess? Concerning what she thought, miasmas, quagmires, white birds flying up, 　　the Holy Ghost, deter us. Who's the more lost? She had, at any rate, her uses. Newly installed as convert, nursing 　　mother and great lady up the river named for his increasingly unseemly majesty, see her embark, chief showpiece 　　of colonial bravado. No records of a sort begin: of presentations, masques, levees, of portrait sittings, wearing 　　wig, ruff, mantle of brocaded velvet; no less, for a season, than the rage of foul, fashionable London 　　with its spiteful stares and whispers, its catarrhs, its bruited rifts and ruinings, the whole interminable, 　　fatiguing catalog of latest things, the gartered glitterings, the breathing propinquity of faces: through 　　a pomandered fog of rooms and posturings arises, stunningly vivid still yet dim with distance, a figure long gone from Jamestown, an ocean's retching, heaving, vertigo removed, and more: from girlhood's remembered grapevines, strawberries, sun- warm mulberries, leapfrog, cartwheels, the sound of streams, of names, of languages: Pamunkey, 　　Chickahominy... She'd thought him dead. She'd never been so tired. There in London a silence opens: Captain Smith, 　　repenting to have writ she could speak English, is witness of how she turned away—she who, out of a distance grown by now 　　intolerable, had seen the world, so called: brought face to face with majesty, with empire, by that silence she took their measure. 　　Amicably, then, she acknowledged him, and Jamestown; as for his countrymen (in what tone and with what gesture?), they were a people that often lied. Details are few. At Gravesend, readying for the crossing, aged twenty-one, she seemingly abruptly 　　sickened and died.

— Amy Clampitt, A Silence Opens (1993)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Review XVI (NSW 2023): Group T (Milton Caine / Christians for Community)

Prior reviews: None, this is a new unregistered party

Milton Caine is standing as the lead candidate of an independent group of two candidates. This means he will not get a square above the line (you need 15 candidates for that) and you can only indicate a preference for him if you vote below the line. He has previously stood for the Liberal Party and for Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party, and now views himself as representing a remnant of the CDP “to negotiate a solid and Christian path forward”. He is intending to register Christians for Community as a formal party. I hope he doesn't.

I am quite concerned that Caine takes a theological approach to government: for him, the first question to ask about government decisions is whether it is “in agreement with God? (God’s will, as revealed in the Bible)”. This is a wholly inappropriate attitude to take towards governing a secular country of many faiths and where roughly four-tenths have no faith. He espouses the sort of US-influenced and ahistorical claims that Australia was “established on Christian principles” (it was not! the colonies were founded for imperial purposes and they federated for pragmatic reasons! yeesh!).

In general, Caine wants to mandate conservative forms of Christian observance, and this is entirely unjustifiable even from a Christian perspective, never mind a pluralistic one, as any serious student of theology would reject enforced faithfulness as insincere. When you turn to his attitudes towards other faiths, it exposes how self-serving his ideology is. He “opposes any formal legal recognition of sharia law or aboriginal tribal law”. Now, I’ve seen plenty of xenophobic beat-ups about Sharia in Australia over the years, but it’s quite something that he groups this with Aboriginal traditions and that he opposes the First Peoples of this land from exercising their laws despite the fact they never ceded their sovereignty. This is unpleasant stuff.

Some of his home-page rhetoric seems superficially reasonable, as he gestures positively towards environmental needs, poorer communities, and particularly disabled people. But the more you dig into his policy pages, the worse it gets. His media policies, for instance, mandate very narrow conservative morality (he seems to have a bee in his bonnet not just about pornography, nor just about the ABC, but that “Reality television is just one genre where there has been flagrant abuse”). This guy is a boring prude. He could never advance policies for the benefit of all, nor legislate without religious prejudice.

Recommendation: Give Group T (Milton Caine / Christians for Community) a weak or no preference.

Website: https://miltoncaine.com/

[christinedepizza]

Saint Jerome, Keshav Das, ca. 1580–85

Opaque watercolor on paper, Page: 12 5/8 x 8 1/16 in. (32 x 20.5 cm)

This work, signed “Kesu Das,” was adapted from a European source, in all probability an engraving by Mario Cartaro published in 1564. The wide circulation of European Christian prints in Mughal India in the late sixteenth century proved to be an important source of imagery and of new approaches to pictorial rendering for Mughal painters. Such engravings were assembled into albums at the imperial library. The ultimate source of Keshav Das’s Saint Jerome is Antique Roman imagery of Neptune, their god of the sea. Michelangelo’s drunken Noah in the Sistine Chapel (completed 1512) represents a famous moment in this figure composition’s evolution and a source accessible to Cartaro in Rome some fifty years later. Following Cartaro’s engraving, the Mughal artist merged two sets of European imagery, the drunken Noah in slumber and the studious Saint Jerome holding a book of learning. Das was exploring a painterly technique more akin to European oil painting than to Indian watercolor, and the atmospheric haze of the distant city vista, again a gesture to European conventions, serves to heighten the dreamlike quality of Saint Jerome’s slumber. [x]

[city-of-ladies]

Yamamoto Yaeko - Heroic defender of Aizu

If you want to read about another heroine of this battle, you can check out my article on Nakano Takeko.

In autumn 1868 the domain of Aizu, Japan, was under attack by the imperial troops. Women within the castle actively took part in the defense. 

They prepared ammunition, cooked meals, nursed the wounded, but also risked their lives in extinguishing the fires and rushed to cover the enemy canon balls with wet mats before they exploded. Young girls also collected the enemy ammunition for the defenders to reuse it. A 60 years old woman went out of the castle to retrieve food, but encountered an enemy soldier on the way. She stabbed him with her dagger and safely went back to the castle. A female bodyguard unit also protected Matsudaira Teruhime, the lord’s sister.

Some of them also fought. A contemporary witness depicts them as ready to don their white kimono and fight naginata  in hand. An observer also said that they shared all the men’s burden, took on watches and shouldered a rifle if needed.

Among them was Yamamoto Yaeko (1845-1932), who distinguished herself through her leadership and her skills with firearms, though she wasn’t the only woman to use  them in the defense. She was the daughter of an artillery instructor and her brother Kakuma had taught her to use firearms. She was particularly competent, being able to use recent models like the Spencer rifle and had also learned to fight with a naginata. 

On October 8, Yaeko began to take part in night sorties. She had asked another female defender, Takagi Tokio, to cut her hair short like a male samurai. Armed with her Spencer rifle, she was dressed like a man and had two swords at her belt. She also commanded the men in charge of one of the cannons and didn’t abandon her post, even as cannon balls rained on the castle.

In spite of this fierce resistance, Aizu surrender on November 5, 1868. In an ultimate gesture of defiance, Teruhime ordered the women to clean the whole castle in order to humiliate the enemy as soon as they would set a foot in it and to show that the Aizu spirit was still unbroken. 

When the castle fell, Yaeko was made prisoner with the men. After being freed, she divorced from her first husband went to Kyoto to find her brother Kakuma. There, she met and married Nijima Jô, converted to Christianity and helped him to found Doshisha university. She later became a nurse for the Red Cross and served as such during the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. Another woman who fought in Aizu’s defense, Yamakawa Futaba, also became a promoter of women’s education.

(Yamamoto Yaeko in her later years, c.1929)

Today, a statue of Yamamoto Yaeko can be seen in Aizu. There’s also a TV-show based on her life: Yae no Sakura. 

Here’s the link to my Ko-Fi if you want to support me.

Bibliography:

Shiba Gorô, Remembering Aizu: the testament of Shiba Gorô

“Samurai warrior queens” documentary

Wright Diana E., “Female combatants and Japan’s Meiji restauration: the case of Aizu”