Frank

Here's Waving at You!

2009-11-26T19:28:19Z

For anyone on GoogleWave who wants to connect with me there, I am (as you might have guessed!) "frank.p.purcell" -- of course without the quotes.

Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, concluding lines

2009-11-08T21:47:35Z

This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism,
   And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
   Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
   Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
   The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
   To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
   Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

The Hound -- HPL

2009-10-30T21:29:02Z

By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments - the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odors of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.

Hallowe'en: The Adventure Begins

2009-10-29T20:39:36Z

It was only this morning I committed to going to the thing at Je'Bon tonight, so had to give some thought to costume. Eventually I decided that the long black coat I bought to go out to Pennsylvania last year is a good match to the leather skull mask with the steel spikes I bought from the artist quite a few years ago now -- when I was still going to those Mensa parties at the Soldiers and Sailors Club. It even fits over my glasses. The coat is a couple of sizes too big, so I can pull the back of the collar over my head without strangling my armpits, and the gloves still in my pockets complete the outfit. So I can take a shower and maybe even finish folding the wash before heading downtown. And maybe I can ask someone there to snap my photo for everyone's delectation.

Test of Tomboy LJ Posting

2009-10-25T07:52:52Z

Yes, it works. Or does it?

John Henry Newman at the Alexander Men Conference

2009-08-10T22:01:58Z

The 2009 Alexander Men Memorial Conference concluded at St. James' Chapel of Union Theological Seminary. I was honored to allow the Venerable and soon to be Blessed John Henry Newman the last word with some passages written as an evangelical Anglican, but published again many years later as a Roman Catholic; I regret that, addressing a largely Orthodox audience, I felt I had to omit the word "Catholic" rather then apologize for Newman's Anglican use of it.

These words struck me as ones that Father Men might have spoken as these two modern prophets seem to have a common vision of a Christianity which has been developed by divine revelation out of pagan culture, and must continue to develop because we are in our infancy as a planet, as a species, as a Church or family of Churches, and as a culture or family of cultures either growing out of Christianity, or destined to be fundamentally transformed by it. For Newman as for Men true religious conversion is not a repudiation of self or a rejection of culture, but the acceptance of the affirmation of our self and culture by God in the incarnation of the Word, and the transformation of self and culture in the new creation in Christ.

In what follows I have taken the liberty of including a somewhat wider context for the words I quoted, which are highlighted, and given the URLs for scholarly editions of the complete texts on line, and of course we must express our gratitude to the Newman Reader website for making them available.

Frank Palmer Purcell

August 2009

A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption.

For instance, a gradual conversion from a false to a true religion, plainly, has much of the character of a continuous process, or a development, in the mind itself, even when the two religions, which are the limits of its course, are antagonists. Now let it be observed, that such a change consists in addition and increase chiefly, not in destruction. "True religion is the summit and perfection of false religions; it combines in one whatever there is of good and true separately remaining in each. And in like manner the Catholic Creed is for the most part the combination of separate truths, which heretics have divided among themselves, and err in dividing. So that, in matter of fact, if a religious mind were educated in and sincerely attached {201} to some form of heathenism or heresy, and then were brought under the light of truth, it would be drawn off from error into the truth, not by losing what it had, but by gaining what it had not, not by being unclothed, but by being 'clothed upon,' 'that mortality may be swallowed up of life.' That same principle of faith which attaches it at first to the wrong doctrine would attach it to the truth; and that portion of its original doctrine, which was to be cast off as absolutely false, would not be directly rejected, but indirectly, in the reception of the truth which is its opposite. True conversion is ever of a positive, not a negative character." http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/chapter5.html

"The phenomenon, admitted on all hands, is this:-That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connexion of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it,-'These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:' we, on the contrary, prefer to say, 'these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.' That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial {381} principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world; and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there. She began in Chaldea, and then sojourned among the Canannites, and went down into Egypt, and thence passed into Arabia, till she rested in her own land. Next she encountered the merchants of Tyre, and the wisdom of the East country, and the luxury of Sheba. Then she was carried away to Babylon, and wandered to the schools of Greece. And wherever she went, in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit, the mind and voice of the Most High; 'sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions;' claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects, completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the sense of her own teaching. So far then from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world, and, in this sense, as in others, to 'suck the milk of the Gentiles and to suck the breast of kings.' http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/chapter8.html

Such is the world: but Christ came to make a new world. He came into the world to regenerate it in Himself, to make a new beginning, to be the beginning of the creation of God, to gather together in one, and recapitulate all things in Himself. The rays of His glory were scattered through the world; one state of life had some of them, another others. The world was like some fair mirror, broken in pieces, and giving back no one uniform image of its Maker. But He came to combine what was dissipated, to recast what was shattered in Himself. He began all excellence, and of His fulness have all we received. When He came, a Child was born, a Son given, and yet He was Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Angels heralded a Saviour, a Christ, a Lord; but withal, He was "born in Bethlehem," and was "lying in a manger." Eastern sages brought Him gold, for that He was a King, frankincense as to a God; but on the other hand myrrh also, in token of a coming death and burial. At the last, He "bore witness to the truth" before Pilate as a Prophet, suffered on the cross as our Priest, while He was also "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." {62} http://www.newmanreader.org/works/subjects/sermon5.html

Let these be your thoughts, my brethren, especially in the spring season, when the whole face of nature is so rich and beautiful. Once only in the year, yet once, does the world which we see show forth its hidden powers, and in a manner manifest itself. Then the leaves come out, and the blossoms on the fruit trees, and flowers; and the grass and corn spring up. There is a sudden rush and burst outwardly of that hidden life which God has lodged in the material world. Well, that shows you, as by a sample, what it can do at God's command, when He gives the word. This earth, which now buds forth in leaves and blossoms, will one day {210} burst forth into a new world of light and glory, in which, we shall see Saints and Angels dwelling. Who would think, except from his experience of former springs all through his life, who could conceive two or three months before, that it was possible that the face of nature, which then seemed so lifeless, should become so splendid and varied? How different is a tree, how different is a prospect, when leaves are on it and off it! How unlikely it would seem, before the event, that the dry and naked branches should suddenly be clothed with what is so bright and so refreshing! Yet in God's good time leaves come on the trees. The season may delay, but come it will at last. So it is with the coming of that Eternal Spring, for which all Christians are waiting. Come it will, though it delay; yet though it tarry, let us wait for it, "because it will surely come, it will not tarry." Therefore we say day by day, "Thy kingdom come;" which means,-O Lord, show Thyself; manifest Thyself; Thou that sittest between the cherubim, show Thyself; stir up Thy strength and come and help us. The earth that we see does not satisfy us; it is but a beginning; it is but a promise of something beyond it; even when it is gayest, with all its blossoms on, and shows most touchingly what lies hid in it, yet it is not enough. We know much more lies hid in it than we see. A world of Saints and Angels, a glorious world, the palace of God, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the heavenly Jerusalem, the throne of God and Christ, all these wonders, everlasting, all-precious, mysterious, and incomprehensible, lie hid in what we see. What we see is the outward shell of an eternal kingdom; and on {211} that kingdom we fix the eyes of our faith. Shine forth, O Lord, as when on Thy nativity Thine Angels visited the shepherds; let Thy glory blossom forth as bloom and foliage on the trees; change with Thy mighty power this visible world into that diviner world, which as yet we see not; destroy what we see, that it may pass and be transformed into what we believe. Bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God Himself; but they are not His fulness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of His Image; they are but crumbs from the table. We are looking for the coming of the day of God, when all this outward world, fair though it be, shall perish; when the heavens shall be burnt, and the earth melt away. We can bear the loss, for we know it will be but the removing of a veil. We know that to remove the world which is seen, will be the manifestation of the world which is not seen. We know that what we see is as a screen hiding from us God and Christ, and His Saints and Angels. And we earnestly desire and pray for the dissolution of all that we see, from our longing after that which we do not see. http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume4/sermon13.html

What then is it, that these little ones of Christ lack, who, without wilful sin, past or present, on their consciences, are in gloom and sorrow? What is the doctrine that will quicken them, and make their devotion healthy? What will brace them and nerve them, and make them lift up their heads, and will pour light and joy upon their countenance till it shines like the face of Moses when he came down from the Mount? What but the great and high doctrines connected with the Church? They are not merely taken into covenant with God; they are taken into His Church. They have not merely the promise of grace; they have its presence. They have not merely the conditional prospect of a reward; for a blessing, nay, unspeakable, fathomless, illimitable, infinite, eternal blessings are poured into their very hearts, even as a first step and an earnest from God our Saviour, of what He will do for those who love Him. They "are passed from death unto life," and are the children of God and heirs of heaven. Let us steadily contemplate this comfortable view, and we shall gain {146} strength, and feel cheerful and joyful in spite of our sins. O fearful follower of Christ, how is it thou hast never thought of what thou art and what is in thee? Art thou not Christ's purchased possession? Has He not rescued thee from the devil, and put a new nature within thee? Did He not in Baptism cast out the evil spirit and enter into thee Himself, and dwell in thee as if thou hadst been an Archangel, or one of the Seraphim who worship before Him continually? Much and rightly as thou thinkest of thy sins, hast thou no thought, I do not say of gratitude, but of wonder, of admiration, of amazement, of awful and overpowering transport, at what thou art through grace? When Jacob woke in the morning, his first thought was not about his sins or his danger, though he rightly felt both, but about God;-he said, "How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." [Gen xxviii. 17.] Contemplate then thyself, not in thyself, but as thou art in the Eternal God. Fall down in astonishment at the glories which are around thee and in thee, poured to and fro in such a wonderful way that thou art (as it were) dissolved into the kingdom of God, as though thou hadst nought to do but to contemplate and feed upon that great vision. This surely is the state of mind the Apostle speaks of in the text when he reminds us who are justified and at peace with God, that we have access to His royal courts, and stand in His grace, and rejoice in hope of His glory. All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel, sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, these avail not to disturb the {147} tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes upon the Divine Majesty. All the necessary exactness of our obedience, the anxiety about failing, the pain of self-denial, the watchfulness, the zeal, the self-chastisements which are required of us, as little interfere with this vision of faith, as if they were practised by another, not by ourselves. We are two or three selves at once, in the wonderful structure of our minds, and can weep while we smile, and labour while we meditate. http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume4/sermon9.html

I'm Back. Sort of.

2008-12-10T16:07:29Z

It's been a while.

For more pretentious remarks, check the blog at http://blog.arisbe.net . This LJ can also be reached at http://journal.arisbe.net. And you can join my ZenZuu network at http://zen.arisbe.net . Yes, I am going apesh*t with subdomains. I should probably set one up for my Facebook. And my MySpace, if that phrase is not redundant. And even if it is.

A month or so back I consolidated my domain registration and forwarding services, which had somehow become separated, and gained a subdomain functionality I never had before (for much less than I was paying, by the way).

First thing I did was set up my affiliate pages, first for my Clickbank publications, such as http://secrets.arisbe.net , then for products like internet calling from your cell phone ( http://button.arisbe.net ) -- boy, is that ugly -- is it my browser? Anyway, there's also health stuff like human growth hormone precursor ( http://hgh.arisbe.net ) and green lipped mussel extract for arthritis and even asthma ( http://omega.arisbe.net ) and herbal remedies in general ( http://native.arisbe.net ). And pheromone spray, of course, with a business type approach ( http://trust.arisbe.net ) and what I consider a tackier approach, though probably a more advanced formula ( http://ascent.arisbe.net ). And, while we are on the subject of smells, there's always http://stinks.arisbe.net .

Not that I want you to buy any of this stuff. We don't do ads on LiveJournal. Just to see what I have been up to. Of course if you really want to make me rich in time for Christmas, I can't stop you, can I?

Meanwhile I keep getting ads for more and more hypnosis downloads, and I have discussed these at greater length at http://arisbe.net/hypno , which is on a wiki somewhere on Poland. Though I might migrate the site to Ning.

Bless you all. Time to do some wash.

01 09 11

2008-09-12T01:47:51Z

Got through the day without being exposed to the media on the subject, except for one bit. I was surfing around about a half hour ago when I saw the beginning of a rebroadcast of the Pope's visit to the World Trade Center site. It was enough. I had of course seen it live, broadcast to the enormous screens at Yankee Stadium, where I sat for hours in the cold fog waiting for him to arrive, but then there was no sound, and not much of a clue to what was going on. Early this afternoon I walked down to the river, as I had so often walked to the river at the World Financial Center in the months before the attack, not so much afterward, even when we had moved back to Barclay Street. I have often mused on the faces in the crowds I would see crossing over from the WTC to the WFC, and wondered how many of those lives had been obliterated and how many merely ruined, as some would say my own was when my job was moved to Chennai, perhaps in consequence of the attack, but perhaps not. Certainly my country was destroyed, not by the attacks themselves, but by the politicians who used them as a pretext for starting the war they had long promised their backers. In so doing they had befouled the pride and prostituted the grief of my city. The priest whose skull was crushed when he took off his helmet to pray for a fallen comrade did not die for this. Indeed, his helmet was later presented to the Bishop of Rome, an old, sick man keeping himself alive by sheer willpower -- and prayer -- to fight the Satanic power he felt emanating from the White House, a fight his successor gloriously reigning, whom I watched tonight, continues.

Not Being in Denver

2008-08-26T14:50:59Z

Hell, I didn't even make it to Cambridge weekend before last, and that's more my scene. Cambridge NY, I mean.

Was reading Guy Davenport last night while the Better Half (as they are known) had the DemoCon on in the next room; she turned up the sound for Teddy and Michele. I have to give Ted credit, especially as I can only assume he is making his peace with God as best he knows how. And, disgusting as I have found him, he is certainly a class act compared with the Clintons, and if the Demos return to the spirit of Camelot, it will be all to the good. Bobby at least was a comparatively admirable fellow, and even JFK did some good. My reaction to Michele Obama is pretty much that of Justin Raimondo, so I will let you follow that link to Taki's site.

I feel a lot better about the whole Obama thing now. Though I don't want Biden as president, I really don't.

I was rewarded before I slept by some wonderful Davenport anecdotes of JRR Tolkein. And Thomas Merton, who could, even in his hermitage days, put down a half dozen martinis -- though not at the hermitage, I hasten to add, or with his Roman collar on. What a metabolism! I'm sure holiness helps.

The Education of a Paleoconservative

2008-08-24T13:48:28Z

One of you has asked, and perhaps some of you have wondered, just what the hell is this neocon-paleocon thing. Isn't neocon just a word used by anti-Semites to smear everything good, clean, and decent?

I think not. But I do need to make myself clearer. So I have gathered up some of the essays Taki has been kind enough to publish, or at links to them, in an order that makes sense, an order that, I imagine, might do for a book:

http://www.squidoo.com/paleo

Take a look and let me know what you think. If you do now you will miss the ads for hypnotic mind control, lose nine pounds in eleven days, get ripped abs in thirty three.

Of course it's a personal take. Nothing in it about Oakeshott. Or about not only Strauss, but Voegelin, as a neocon. Or when and where the tern neoconservative appeared in print. (In a book, it was in one by Peter Viereck in the middle '50s, referencing a magazine reference by Will Herberg to Reinhold Niebuhr. Good to know, because it all goes back to Reinhold's debate with his brother Richard in the '30s. And Reinhold was, with Rabbi Heschel, I think, the originator of the pernicious myth of Judeo-Christendom, that Christians must withdraw from public view and discourse everything in their faith a Jew might object to, everything, that is, about Jesus as other than a mere prophet of the Social Gospel.)

I fear that there might be more research ahead of me, and this at a time of my life that I am more anxious to communicate what I already know while I am still able. I wonder if it might not be better to stick to autobiography, to give otherwise abstract ideas some kind of human resonance. But my life, viewed from the outside, has not a great deal of biographical interest.

A New Page from the Frankster

2008-08-13T00:09:09Z

http://www.squidoo.com/college4you

Back for Good?

2008-07-24T16:15:24Z

Who knows?

Maybe if I unfriend some massive feeds (or unfeed some massive friends) it won't be such a chore to check in here. Then, of course, it would be just my luck to get another job that requires me to keep on top of them.

As before, if you have something in a personal entry you want to call my attention to, please comment.

I will be checking in more regularly, even posting.

Most of my posting has been links to stuff I was publishing on line anyway, and my writing has been for other things of late.

I think a lot of my online presence will be through Squidoo, a good place to set up web pages, I think. My first effort, very much a work in progress, is an investigation, from an educator's point of view, of mind control. I got interested in this at the end of last week when I started noticing the ads for conversational hypnosis, underground hypnosis, tantra, and, of course, ripped abs.

All of these are instructional products in electronic format, so that there is no cost of manufacture, and the creator, distributor, and affiliate internet marketer split the revenues. This is a business model that appeals to me, and of course would appeal to me more if my stuff on line got more traffic. But that is an issue that concerns me anyway -- the things I write are important, damn it, and more people oought to read them, damn it, and not just the sort of people who read Taki. Oops, forgot to say "damn it!"

For all of you who hated Charlie the Unicorn, I was going to post Vangelis' and Irene Pappas' version of the Paschal Troparion. Maybe another time.

Cheers
f

Back. Sort of.

2008-06-23T02:59:49Z

Well I am checking in here again. But this time, for the first time, I am not going to be able to scroll back over the pages and pages of days and days of posts. I therefore must ask you to leave a comment if there is anything you think I ought to know, or just want to tell me.
Sorry. To make up for my lameness, I will post this, which I owe to Srsti:

Bad and Good

2008-06-06T18:46:03Z

The bad news (for some) is that I am not posting regularly yet. The good news, known to all you paleocons out there, is that John Zmirak, author of the new Grand Inquisitor comic book, has blogged our last visit to Turkish Bellydance Night at the Sushi Bar. Perhaps I should say, Turkish Music night with eclectic bellydancing. Or Brooklyn Turkish Fusion. Or something. But here's the link -- scroll down in the comments to see my links to the troupe and the band:
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/back_in_the_briar_patch/

The Catholic American

2008-05-11T03:24:49Z

I am a Catholic American. When I was a little kid, knee high to a trilobite, some folks still had a problem with that. My mother was one of them. As long as I was a Catholic like my father (and her own mother as a little girl in Ireland and on the lower East Side), I couldn't be a real American like her father, a bookbinder replaced by a machine, disowned by his family for marrying out of caste, who spent his days in the nearest tavern. "Pop" Palmer died at 78, and four years later I was born and named for him, or at least that was my mother's intention. The priest baptized me in Latin, as was the custom in those dark days, and pronounced "Frank" so that it sounded like the nickname ("Frenchy") of a (doubtless) dirty medieval Italian beggar.

My early spirituality, to use a ten dollar word for a fifty cent thing, was more American than Franciscan. Emerson and Thoreau, Melville and Whitman spoke and still speak to me as no European voice can, and when I came to study philosophy in a serious way I found the Americans, Josiah Royce, Rufus Jones and Ernest Hocking, C. I. (not C. S.) Lewis and Brand (not Paul) Blanshard, speaking a language that was my own, though by then the professoriate resonated to other tonalities. Though I fell in love with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, as every teenager who meets them must, and inhaled the sweet incense and felt the calming breeze of the shrines of the East, as my generation did, and was introduced to the mysteries of Thomas Aquinas by the subtle writings of Jacques Maritain, as we should all be, when I came to take hold of the great tradition of Western theology in a personal way, I found the distinctly American perspectives of Paul Tillich and Richard (not Reinhold) Niebuhr most helpful.

Back in 1963, in the New Jersey family television room, Joseph Campbell's urbane mythological sermons on Channel 13 (still a Newark station) touched something deep inside me an hour after Bishop Sheen's passionate exhortations on Channel 5 had left me (perhaps deplorably) cold. I would go up to my room and say my prayers after a fashion in time for the nightly racetrack bugle and exhilarating nostalgia of Arthur Fiedler's performance of the Bahnfrei Polka of Edouard Strauss, which introduced the nightly raconteurship of the incomparable Jean Shepherd, and, if I were still awake, the more outre world of Long John Nebel and his, ah, eccentric guests. You can't get more American than that.

As the child of a mixed marriage and a pupil of the public schools I was not warmly welcome in the Catholic ghetto. Still, in those years of the civil rights revolution and the Vietnam War, with the polarized positions of right and left equally abstract and inhumane, I found my take on national affairs reflecting the distinctly Catholic perspectives of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton on the one hand and Frederick Wilhelmsen and Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn on the other. And, though the writings of Rufus Jones, to which I even now frequently turn for inspiration, had led me to seek out a Quaker education, I found it was the Catholic scholars and pioneers of the spirit who were beginning the interreligious dialogue which was then and is now one of the pressing needs of humanity.

In graduate school I became a devoted Americanist, that is, a scholar dedicated to using the tools of the historian of ideas to get some sense of what this place is all about, this gallimaufry of peoples who have somehow, in spite of all learned and astute prognostications, made themselves and each other into a kind of unity, a unity which it may take someone like the present Pope (and there isn't really anyone else very much like him) to discern. I will not speak here of Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, as a theologian or even as a philosopher, but I must note that in New York and Washington in 2008 he revealed himself as an historian of ideas of astonishing and exquisite discernment. By this I mean, among other things, of course, that he strongly confirmed the discoveries and intimations of my own forty years of brooding in and on America.
© 2008 FP Purcell

The opening paragraphs of the remarks I presented part of at seraphimsigrist's little East Village gathering this afternoon; see his entry for the picture. More later if you like. And maybe even if you don't.

Cheers.

Of Stents and Stones

2008-04-18T23:41:19Z

Destentified. Took a Tylenol 3 in the waiting room afterwards for when the local wore off, but have not needed a second, at least so far.

Curiously, the stones blasted out of my bladder two weeks ago turned out to be uric acid of the sort that tends to form in the joints of my left foot, rather than the calcium oxylate that was growing in my kidney.

So everything looks good for Sunday as far as my health goes, and Srsti has picked up the tickets, which I understand have our names in bar code. I do hope they included Maya's full name as I submitted it; her married name is not on her driver's license. I think I have a marriage certificate in a sock drawer just in case.

I haven't been walking this comfortably in weeks -- or is it months? Seems like years.

On the Vatican front, I was pleased to see several Copts and maybe even a Nestorian at the ecumenical service at St. Joseph's on live TV this evening, but disappointed that none was presented to the Pope. Armenian is about as exotic as they got. Is it because the Armenians are Chalcedonians, monothelite rather than monophysite? (Is this geeky, or what?)

Sunday in the Bronx with Ben

2008-04-16T00:06:42Z

Although my daughter is (or was) one of the notorious Bleacher Creatures, I have never been inside the Stadium, though I once changed trains there conducting some Sough Bronx adult education students to the Coney Island aquarium. Divine Providence, in the form of a cat-loving Baviarian pianist gives me one last chance before they tear it down. (I was at the Polo Grounds only once, for the last game between the Giants and the Dodgers. The real ones.) The last -- I hope -- of my surgical procedures will have been Friday afternoon, giving just enough time -- again, I hope -- for the internal bleeding to stop or get under control. There's nothing in the press about a book signing, which is probably just as well.

This will be my third Papa in person. 39 years ago, I went to see Montini at Castelgandolfo with Potter the Peircean and his mother -- and a decade later I was attempting to cross Broadway at Chambers late for work when the Polish gentleman rode by in his white Popemobile. (Pacelli, Roncalli, and Luciani I only know from TV.)

Am I supposed to bring pocketfuls of holy stuff to get blessed or what? Or Yankee memorabilia? I can't recall anything like that with the Dalai Lama at Columbia, who, by the way, couldn't finish his own joke because he kept cracking himself up.

As you may know Maya and I go to something called School of Community on 96th Street a block this side of the mosque, and Benedict attends one in his private quarters taught by one of his domestic staff, so the wife, the Pope and I are on the same page -- pretty much literally. I like the idea that the Servant of the Servants of God, and the teacher of their teachers, is himself glad to be a student, and of his pastry chef (as I like to think) at that. (I do hope he gets his birthday strudel tomorrow. It should be less of a problem than it was during the conclave.)

This morning I got an email, which I didn't much expect, to pick up our tickets Friday.

Latest

2008-04-09T19:32:17Z

I have a Friday morning appointment for a procedure than should remove the cause of the discomfort I am still experiencing. On the other hand, I can't predict the discomfort, pain might not be too strong a term, of the procedure itself or during the following days, never mind the anxiety leading up to the undoubtedly minor (in comparison with the big deal in the hospital a week ago, or even the failed procedure last month) event.

Father J. is back to Barcelona (Girona, actually) tomorrow without any dental work having been done for him at NYU, despite his extensive evaluations just before their Spring break and the expectation of appointments Monday and Tuesday.

The website I was working on went down the tubes thanks to a server migration and it took some work on the part of the host before I could reinstall successfully. It's back now in rudimentary fashion, and I will do things slowly, and the way I was beginning to wish I had done it the first time. At the end of which my little chowder and marching society will have more than it ever wanted, and I will be a bit more of a Drupal geek. Which is what I always wanted to be when I grew up, back in Jersey in the '50s.

Meanwhile I am immersed in The Lost Science of Money, which I lugged home exhausted from the monetary reform conference at the Ron Paul HQ Sunday. It is remarkable how hospitable the RP folks are to the discussion of the Federal Reserve system even from a nonlibertarian, anti-Austrian, social welfarist, fiat money point of view, a point of view I find unexpectedly persuasive in spots. And I may come out of this able to read Pound's middle Cantos with something approaching interest. I already see his obsession with the Rothschilds less connected to the European anti-Sems than with his father's professional concern with the minting of precious metals.

And of course local history is involved. August Belmont, the father of the subway, was not only the Rothshild's American agent, but the chair of the Democratic National Committee in 1868, who may well have worked to throw the election to Grant when his own candidate failed to endorse the gold standard. So says the fascinating Alexander del Mar, anyway, whose works I have located on Google. One of those names you see in Pound, and wonder what Pound saw in them. (Mussolini being an extreme example.)

Belmont's was the only private car on the IRT...

Thanks to All

2008-04-03T19:03:15Z

Thank you for your good wishes. Got home around eight last night minus two stones but with something called a stent inserted up into the kidney. This time it shouldn't be in there long enough for stones to grow on it like rock candy on a string. The radiologist (not the pretty one) noticed something he didn't like in the EKG which will be the topic of further discussion. Evidently something that isn't threatening to do anything, but which will have to be taken into account if my heart should ever, in Mel Brook's immortal phrase, attack me. Indeed, it's the sort of thing it leaves behind when it does, but if it did I was paying attention to something else at the time, though as far as I know it's not the sort of thing you would miss. Unless you're mostly Irish or something.

I am pleasantly sleepy and will take advantage of the fact, and of the fact that the web site I would be otherwise be working on seems to have been disabled by a server migration.

The air coming in the bathroom window smells good; it's a happy time of year, and maybe I can get away with unsealing the bedroom window.

Cheers, all.

f

Back to Roosevelt

2008-04-01T23:19:22Z

Tomorrow. The hospital, not the president. The one where I was training doctors and nurses in computer operations. (The nurse who left me on the bedpan for hours took an early retirement rather than learn something new.) The hospital named for the fellow whose grandson (or something) was the first (?) Bishop of Newark, and the founder of Seton Hall.

I show up at 7:30 for a procedure at 9:30. This one should work, unlike the one a couple of weeks ago, and may even (I may be permitted to hope) entail less pain during and after. And if it works, of course, ordinary living should be a good bit less onerous. At this point I can't even imagine that. Wish it for me anyway. Should be out around noon, maybe walking a little funny. In time for lunch at one of those little Greek diners if I am up to it.

The Asus eeepc is proving just the thing to carry around in my shoulder bag, especially when I do on-site college inspections. I wish there were more free wifi hotspots around, but there's the Gigi Cafe across from the subway station, not to mention the Bowery Poetry Club. I was happy to get SILC working on the livingroom desktop and actually connect to a server, but of course nobody was actually on. Then again, why should they be? IRC is esoteric enough to keep the vulgar out, and encryption is just the icing on the cake. Still, I like the idea for some reason. Then again, I thought ICQ was fun back around 2000.

More later, maybe.

Adoramus

2008-03-11T08:22:56Z

In the midst of excruciating pain and narcotic fog I learned of the death of a dear old friend from whom I had been unhappily estranged. Yesterday I learned more of the circumstances of her death, which brought her close to me in a way she had not been before. I should probably tell you that I am speaking of a woman of old WASP stock, as in Santayana's classic Last Puritan. A year or two behind Hillary at Holyoke, too austere to have been a hippie, more like the very serious single women of earlier times who turned to pacifism, vegitarianism, Theosophy. Not a Quaker, but on reflection I am not quite sure why.

I posted this on the Yahoo group for my high school class:

From the newsletter of
Blessed Sacrament
Roman Catholic Church
Memphis TN:

Adoramus Te
December 2006

Happy Birthday to us!

This newsletter was first issued in December
2005. Father Bravata had discussed sharing
spiritual insights as well as parish news, but his
vision had yet to become a reality.

The moving force behind that first issue was
Elli Light, an RCIA candidate who got the ball
rolling. Retired from The Commercial Appeal as
a copy editor, Elli was an intelligent woman and
a talented writer. She died in September shortly
after coming into the Church.

We thank God for sending Elli to share her many
gifts with us during her short time here.

Rest in peace, Elli!

******************************

Cathy R______ found this on the parish website to which the obit had
led me -- it was distinctly odd to see that her memorial service was
at a Catholic church. I put in a call to the church office, and they
got back to me at the end of the day. Elli enrolled in RCIA (the
Roman Catholic program for potential converts) in 2005, I guess
shortly after the removal of much of her intestine (cancer?) and her
retirement from newspaper work. Because of her generally poor health
the Bishop gave the pastor special permission to give her Communion,
but too late -- she was suddenly admitted to the hospital and she
was already on a ventilator when he got there. He was able to hear
her confession, confirm her, and give her the sacrament of the sick
before the end. That's what I remember, anyway. It was all so
unexpected.

Elli was on a spiritual quest as long as I knew her. The college year
she spent in India she did an extensive comparison of Shankaracharya
with Nagarjuna in which the latter came out ahead, but told me later
that it's all in John of the Cross. There was the Vietnam War and the
smuggling of potential draftees to Canada. There was the Gurjieff
commune, her experience of which prompted The Record to assign her to
the local followup to the Jonestown massacre. There were the years of
Reichian analysis, and perhaps some Jungian work as well, and the New
Age books she worked on at Harper and Rowe, her working as a freelance
yoga teacher -- my roommate and I were among her (few?) clients.

I used to think Elli was PC before there was a name for it. When the
late Bill Buckley began to appear on educational TV, he reminded me of
her, though of course from the other side of the alleged spectrum. It
seemed to me that her model was that Mrs. Roosevelt whom he so
publicly hated and despised. If you knew Elli as a political being,
you will smile to think that she chose Joan of Arc as her confirmation
saint.

But Catholic? It is easy to see Elli as part of the Church of Thomas
Merton, Dorothy Day, Catherine Doherty, Bede Griffiths. It may be
much harder to see that Church behind the Catholic Church of the
headlines and the movies. If you are curious, perhaps one of these
names will be a clue.

As we say on Mulberry Street,
Eleanor Jeanne Darc Bird Light
Memory Eternal, Eternal Memory

Cathy called

2008-03-09T02:48:06Z

I saw her last on Wednesday, June 23, 1965; it was the day we were graduated from high school. I don't recall speaking to her then, or, indeed, before that. But she remembered that over the years Elli had spoken of me as a friend, and I thought so of myself, though I had not seen her since some time in the late '80s or early '90s. Jane -- I know Jane since third grade, but have not seen her for a couple of decades -- Jane was worried that she hadn't heard from Elli for a couple of years, and called Cathy. Cathy remembered that Elli had been in Reichian therapy for many years, and called the Reich institute in Maine, and they told her that they had received a legacy from her when she died, on September 6, 2006. Under what circumstances, I have no idea.

Elli was never a romantic interest of mine, though I never convinced Maya of that, and gave up on the attempt. She was, however, one of those people with a clearly defined view of the world, philosophy of life, call it what you will, with whom I always felt myself to be in a kind of dialogue. A dialogue which is now over with the finality that death had for her. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that she rather despised any other view of the matter, though perhaps not all of us who could conceive other views.

I promised to try to contact Lynda, whom I have seen perhaps once since graduation, and who is now quite the successful businesswoman, as the one best able to break the news to Jane. And because the last time I saw Elli, she expressed regret at having cut Lynda out of her life for taking a job she took as a form of collaboration in the wicked capitalist system -- it was, after all, the end of the '60s. A sad, confused time for our sorry generation.

Latest

2008-03-08T08:37:45Z

As some of you know, I was scheduled for a minor procedure yesterday afternoon. It was not successful, and something else will have to be done in an operating room presumably under general anaesthesia. Pain has been a major problem over the last twelve hours, though I haven't had a little white pill for about six, and may try to go back to sleep without one.

In other news, turning the living room upside down in the fruitless search for a notebook with some essential information, I turned up Deely's book on Poinsot and Peirce, which I evidently acquired at the Strand Annex in '02 and promptly forgot about.

It depresses me to think what our civilization lost when Poinsot's Cursi no longer formed the basis of teaching in philosophy and theology. I well recall how the name of John of St. Thomas, as the founder of postmodern semiology was known in religion, was despised in my undergraduate days, and not only by Methodist ministers teaching in Quaker colleges, for the decline of the Catholic university had already begun.

About what they will have to do with a tiny laser gun inside my body, I will say no more at this time. Especially as the lovely Raquel will not be involved.

It's been a while...

2008-03-04T08:37:39Z

IPaper. From Scribd. Enjoy.

2008-02-25T23:32:44Z