Caryll Houselander On Lenten Resolutions

A mass of good resolutions, I think, are apt to end up in disappointment and to make one depressed. Also direct fault-uprooting: it makes one concentrate too much on self and that can be so depressing. The only resolution I have ever found works is: "Whenever I want to think of myself, I will think of God."

Now, this does not mean, "I will make a long meditation on God," but just some short sharp answer, so to speak, to my thought of self, in God.  For example: 

"I am lonely, misunderstood, etc." The loneliness of Christ at his trial; the misunderstanding even of his closest friends.

Or: 

"I have made a fool of myself." 

Christ mocked — he felt it;  he put the mocking first in foretelling his Passion — 'The Son of Man shall be mocked, etc.' — made a fool of, before all whom he loved.

Or: 

"I can't go on, unhelped." 

Christ couldn't. He couldn't carry the cross without help; he was grateful for human sympathy — Mary Magdalene — his words on that occasion — other examples as they suggest themselves — just pictures that flash through the mind. This practice becomes a habit and it is the habit which has saved me from despair! ... 

Different people have different approaches to Christ. He has become all things — infant, child, man — so that we all can approach him in the way easiest for us. The best is to use that way to our heart's content, and not to trouble about any other.

From The Letters Of Caryll Houselander: Her Spiritual Legacy.

What I Like About Surfing With Mel

is what David Foster Wallace liked about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Replace Laura Palmer with Mel Gibson, Lynch with Lickona, "roadhouse drunks" with "Russian model" and so on, you get the picture.

"And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's theatrical 'prequel' to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura's existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct - Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie, in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas - plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter - as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura was no longer 'an enigma' or 'the password to an inner sanctum of horror.' She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers. 

This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do - maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological context of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie - and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying. 

The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: 'We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it's hard to know whether it's terrible or a tour de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready]: or both." Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both "good" and "bad," and yet also neither: she's complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate, that's what we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves..." 
(DFW, A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)

Successfully subjectifying a man that everybody loves to hate (or did when it was relevant), is morally ambitious, and Lickona pulls it off wonderfully in his fictional story-in-script-form about the real life soured relationship between Joe Ezterhaus and Gibson during an attempt to make a movie about the Maccabean Revolt.

NAOMI is in bed, reading on her iPad: Peter Boyer's "The Jesus war," a 2003 profile of Gibson published in The New Yorker shortly before the release of The Passion of the Christ. JOE comes out of the bathroom and climbs wearily in bed beside her. 

NAOMI: Have you read this? It's amazing. Boyer got Mel to just lay it out there for everyone to see. Listen to this quote: "Imagine: There's a huge war raging, and it's over us! This is the weird thing. I don't understand it. We're a bunch of dickheads and idiots and failures and creeps. But we're called to be divine, we're called to be more than our nature would have us be. And those big realms that are warring and battling are going to manifest themselves very clearly, seemingly without reason, here - a realm that we can see. And you stick your head up and you get knocked." 

JOE: Maybe that's what happened - he got knocked in the head. 

NAOMI: Oh, shut up. I think it's amazing. It may be the first time "dickhead" has appeared in The New Yorker, and it's certainly the first time I've seen them print such a straightforward statement of faith. 

JOE: Don't tell me you're getting sweet on him. After what he pulled tonight? I'm half-ready to leave right now, except Nick thinks the house is cool and wants to go surfing. 

NAOMI: I don't know. He's sort of awful, but then, he's sort of humble about it. You haven't worked with people who were like that. 

JOE: I don't know. He really believes; I'll give him that. But I think I liked that dirty pagan Paul Verhoeven better. He thought he was so God-damned clever, but I could see him coming a mile away. This guy - it's hard to tell. 

NAOMI: I thought I was the one who was supposed to just have faith. 

INTERIOR MEL'S CHAPEL - NIGHT 

The room is dark except for the votive candles burning beneath the statue of Mary that we saw destroyed in the opening scene. It takes us a moment to realize that a figure is lying face-down on the floor in the aisle between the pews, his arms outstretched, his head pointing toward the gold tabernacle on the altar. We can hear the figure murmuring. Camera cuts to a close-up of his face in profile, forehead and nose pressed into the stone floor. It is MEL; he is praying in Latin. 

MEL: ...Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen (SWITCHES TO ENGLISH) Please don't let me fuck this up. And please give Joe whatever it is he needs. Keep his vision clear; keep his arm strong and his hand steady. Help him to work for your glory, and shield him from the maelstrom. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil... 

Gibson is portrayed as the man we know, a choleric type easily provoked to display his Babelasian strength and neuroses, but with the darker shades of a Rabelasian faith fleshed out via wrestling match with God. 

In short, Surfing With Mel is about what it means to have adult faith, highlighting, as Flannery O'Connor says, that, “What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross." Gibson is a man on the cross: in one sense screwed through his relationship with religion... 

FR. FUCHS: Do you know what he said his father told him? That Pope John Paul I died because a cardinal sat on his face until he suffocated. And that cardinal, naturally, was part of a liberal Jewish conspiracy to bring down the Church from within.

...and yet still trying to make it work, with his deep seated wounds and explosive habits of being. In Gibson we recognize ourselves: the numbers that have been done on us; the power and demands and difficult rewards of faith, even yet under-developed, perhaps deformed; and the grace that accompanies any proximity to God whatsoever, even a closeness mixed with violence.

Available for cheap as an Amazon Kindle Single, and in hardback for slightly more, well worth it, at Labora Editions.

Strange Blogfellows: FOC & Los Saicos

Tell me this wouldn't be perfect soundtrack closer for a modern re-telling of Good Country People:

Wild teen punks from Peru

Nihil(istic) keen hunks from Mizzou maybe

“I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things . . . One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name."

A Christmas Carol - GK Chesterton

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood on Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving, Gooble Gobble!

From The Onion:

“Dear brothers and sisters, it is my deepest joy today to present the life and witness of this humble bird to the Church and welcome him to cluck and cackle among the saints in God’s Kingdom of Heaven,” Pope Francis recited in accordance with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, invoking the name of God three times before inscribing the newly beatified bird, named St. Gobbler, in the catalogue of saints. “Like those who came before, this pure and simple bird lived a life in consecration of Christ the Lord, his gentle gobbles spreading goodness and grace throughout Applewood Farms. May this noble and dignified bird forever bear witness to the Glory of God on earth and shine light in the hearts of the faithful on this most holy day.” Vatican sources say the ceremony was far less controversial than last year’s posthumous canonization of St. Wattle, a 23-pound wild turkey who was burned alive as a heretic in 1690."

To which the communion of saints responded,

Your Face in the Depths of This Heart (Cinq Grandes Odes)

Paul Claudel

Mercy is not a lifeless gift of something we already have too much of, it is a passion like a knowledge. 
It is a discovery like the knowledge of your face in the depths of this heart which you have made. 
If all your stars are necessary to me, how much more all my brothers?
...Behold the outside world where lies our laic duty, 
Without scorn of one's fellow man, with love of one's fellow man, 
Observing the Ten Commandments better than one sees I knew how to, 
Saying my prayers morning and night and giving each person his due. 

Pope Francis embraces Vicino Riva, a man
 with a tumorous disease, at Nov. 6 Wed. audience

H/T Artur Rosman

I'll Have What I'm Having!

Oh, this is just hilarious.