just thought i'd point this out...

     You know who you are:

     If you are among the easily offended; if you are outraged by the Hobby Lobby ruling, and think that a Gay Pride parade signifies the expansion of tolerance and equality; if you complain because no one wants to pay to have your child killed; then congratulations, you are among the New Bourgeoisie. 
     You are the bien pensant, conventional, milquetoast, soft and squishy mediocrity at the heart of any ordered polity. You are in charge of most of the Bourgeois institutions, from colleges to hospitals to investment banks. You are a rich class, but middling because of your fears, fears which in good middling fashion you project onto the rest of us in your quest for control. (The Bourgeoisie crave control the way a heroin addict craves the needle.) 
     What's so sad is that, again like all middling classes, you imagine that you are interesting, radical, on the cutting edge of history, or whatever else they tell you is good in the NY Times, on HuffPo, or on one of those Disney channels (including of course ESPN - yay Soccer!). You're not. Your speech codes, your implied sumptuary rules, your protected classes and your peccadilloes, are all so thoroughly boring and conventional as to make me want to mainline scotch. 
     You have all the power, but are increasingly vicious in the use of it, as befits the middling rulers that you are. You are vicious, moreover, because like all middling classes you fear the inevitable fall, for you know your time is short on this earth. You are, at the last, old and lashing out as a result of the fact that, while you won and have become settled in your middling power, you know that soon you will die and leave nothing behind. 
     Have a nice day.

something from Goethe...

     So, I’m learning German. It’s a slow process because I have little time to devote to it, so I'm still in the first group of lessons. Still, poetry is beginning, just beginning, to reveal itself to me word by word. With that in mind, I give you this delightful, brightly sad poem by Goethe, 'Permanence in Change'. Blütenregen - blossomshower! - is just lovely. 

Dauer im Wechsel

Hielte diesen frühen Segen,

Ach, nur eine Stunde fest!

Aber vollen Blütenregen

Schüttelt schon der laue West.

Soll ich mich des Grünen freuen,

Dem ich Schatten erst verdankt?

Bald wird Sturm auch das zerstreuen,

Wenn es falb im Herbst geschwankt.

Willst du nach den Früchten greifen,

Eilig nimm dein Teil davon!

Diese fangen an zu reifen,

Und die andern keimen schon;

Gleich mit jedem Regengusse

Ändert sich dein holdes Tal,

Ach, und in demselben Flusse

Schwimmst du nicht zum Zweitenmal.

Du nun selbst! Was felsenfeste

Sich vor dir hervorgetan,

Mauern siehst du, siehst Paläste

Stets mit andern Augen an.

Weggeschwunden ist die Lippe,

Die im Kusse sonst genas,

Jener Fuß, der an der Klippe

Sich mit Gemsenfreche maß.

Jene Hand, die gern und milde

Sich bewegte, wohlzutun,

Das gegliederte Gebilde,

Alles ist ein andres nun.

Und was sich an jener Stelle

Nun mit deinem Namen nennt,

Kam herbei wie eine Welle,

Und so eilt's zum Element.

Laß den Anfang mit dem Ende

Sich in eins zusammenzieh'n!

Schneller als die Gegenstände

Selber dich vorüberflieh'n.

Danke, daß die Gunst der Musen

Unvergängliches verheißt:

Den Gehalt in deinem Busen

Und die Form in deinem Geist.

just thinking out loud here...

     So it seems I'm an idiot for suggesting that so-called 'abortion', that is, the killing of children for convenience and profit, is Big Business. Planned Parenthood is after all a non-profit corporation, and as such I suppose is incapable of pursuing the Big Evil for the sake of money. Well, no. Consider - $1.6 billion in assets, executive positions commanding high six-figures, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding at stake - that's real money last time I checked.
     Whence all that money, you ask? People want to kill children because the children get in the way, are inconvenient and cost money. Some of the children have - gasp! - defects, and are therefore unworthy of life. These people cannot yet legally kill their children, so they need someone to do the job. Planned Parenthood simply offers what the market demands.    
     Let's keep it straight. The people who kill children, and who have their children killed, are doing it deliberately, with malice aforethought, and we have to start saying that out loud. We also have to turn it around and point out that keeping the money flowing through the Organization is what drives Planned Parenthood, and essential to that revenue stream is the killing of children.
     In any case, I'm tired of glad-handing people who kill children for a living, and I'm tired of giving their supporters the benefit of the doubt. This is the Big Evil, and it makes anything done by Monsanto or BP look rather bland.

it's the art of the possible after all...

     Were I a man of energy, vision, and courage, but little wit and less soul, I might think of forming a new political party here in the US. Our platform would be simplicity itself.
     First, all registered Democrats shall be required to demonstrate the ability to dismember a living infant with just a boning knife. Ideally, each Democrat should meet this requirement by dismembering his or her own newborn with a boning knife, but if that is not possible an infant shall be provided at no cost by the State, which will levy a dedicated tax on all registered Republicans.    
     We will need tutorials in how to dismember a living infant with just a boning knife.  In addition to a series of Public Service Announcements for adults, such children as live to attend school shall be taught the techniques necessary using chickens and rabbits, with the added value that they will thereby learn important cooking skills at the same time.
     Obviously Braised Infant With Crispy Skin will be a delicacy served at all state dinners. 

you don't really want a revolution, trust me...

     I know, I know, this Potemkin Protest took place several news cycles ago, but I've been busy. Anyway, seems some fifty thousand or less took to the streets of London to protest Austerity. 
     Russell Brand gave a speech. Russell F*cking Brand.
     Bored now.

     I mean, look, Austerity is a way of saying Bend Over, but what is this 'revolution' of which they spoke? Were they going to shut down Sellafield? Storm Buckingham Palace and occupy Westminster? And what the hell, not a revolution of radical ideas but of ideas we already have? Like the Poor Laws, perhaps, which were and are designed to keep poor people poor? What a joke. Lest we forget, Austerity is the English Way and it's about time they revolted. Russell Brand et al, however, are making this so much trivia. Where's their Vaclav Havel - let someone like that come forward and we've got a ball game. (Come to think of it, where's ours?) No, spare me the Hippy Branding and the Lefty Lite pseudo-revolutions that change nothing while shuffling the deck chairs and reassuring the powers. 
     Not that I want the full-on, Leftist Stalinist Iconoclast Desert of the Real either. Had to make that clear.

i rant a little about some emergent christian lunacy or another...

     So, it seems we must learn to let go of Sunday worship. It's about freedom, it's about going with the flow of God's Spirit, it's about, well, I can't keep going like that because it makes me want to set my hair on fire.     
     Look, let's not waste time with bullshit - it's all about the Money. I'm a wanderer and a lazy bastard, gotta have my eggs benedict with scallops and a couple of mojitos of a Sunday kind of guy, but that's not a principled choice, it's not something anyone should imitate. So take it as written that I'm no shining example to the wider world of how to live. How do I know that? Well, I'll tell you.

     Is it only me who sees how blindingly obvious it is that Money needs us doing anything on Sunday but going to church and all that entails? You who want Community (whatever the hell that is), riddle me this - how would you like to have one day, just One. Freaking. Day., when everything is shut down and we worship the Lord of the Universe for our own good? Worship being, of course, that time out of time when He *serves us* and pardons us and gives us His Life so we might not be dead weight falling falling falling.... But you know all that. Might it also be meet and right that it be the Same Day for Everyone, so we're not atomized fragmented scattered to the winds? And how about it being the Eighth Day and all that archaic stuff the Fathers tried to teach narcissists like us, so Sunday it is? Why the f*ck do we want to mess with that?

     Money, that's why, and not our money, o no. I make a lot of money, but I don't make any of it on Sundays. I *spend* it on Sundays, spend it on those who make way, *way* more money than I'll ever see.

     Think Starbucks wants us to abandon them on Sunday? Love that New York Times Sunday Subscription? O, it's so cozy to sit around with our [insert insanely priced coffee drink] and read the different sections of the paper. Of course it is. You should get a gold watch from 'em when you turn 65, you're their best employee. 'But we spend Sunday with Family.' Good for you, blood and soil are the best really. Maybe you can watch sports, or talk about sports, or maybe there's a movie to see - hey, if we don't choose the HD version the price is lower. 

     But...but, we have to adapt, don't we? Yes, that's what we learn in every marketing program. This is how organizations survive. You think the Church is an organization, right? You're ambivalent about it, but that's the way it goes. Seminaries really do offer great Marketing Degrees I have to say.

     So, it comes down to the real Good News - batteries don't need rest, and they certainly don't need God. I, however, do need a mojito, but it's a working day. Some days I really do envy alcoholics.

what's your hobby now?

     Everything I read about the so-called 'Hobby Lobby' case makes me angry. It makes me want to turn over the tables in a rage and chase even my friends with a whip. You're all wrong, from the smug Progressives who are out to convince the world that 'Corporations' are evil (except Planned Parenthood and every single freaking Union that exists, but pay that no never mind), to those on the right who seem to think that this is a victory of some sort. It's about 'religious freedom' don't you know, and it is, which is precisely the problem. We lost, they won, which is why we have to sit in the corner and beg for scraps from SCOTUS. What's more, as I've said before to apparently an empty universe, all this ruling does is change the mechanism whereby the owners of Hobby Lobby, and everyone else, will continue to pay for the killing of children for convenience and profit. 

     And that's what it's all about folks. When are we going to stop using the other side's language, when will we stop accepting their terms and conditions for what only seems like a 'debate'? Stop for the love of God saying 'Abortion', would you? It's not 'Abortion', it's Killing Children For Convenience And Profit. Say that every time you get into this. Tell those who are 'pro choice' that they approve of the Killing Of Children For Convenience And Profit. They are complicit in the murder and disposal of human persons who are by definition helpless and at our mercy. We must say this clearly and without hesitation. We must be indifferent to their fine feelings when we tell them that it is they who hate women, they who hate children, they who have done all this in the name of power and money, for the killing of children for convenience and profit is big business. 

     Yes, it's existential decision time. There is Good, and there is Evil - what's it to be? 

     And I'm writing this on a blog platform owned by Google. Le sigh.

nothing of note...

     So, am I like the only person in the Western World who knows nothing about The Smiths? I see this Morrissey guy mentioned everywhere, people make memes out of his lines, and yet I have never felt the need to listen to anything by or about him. 
     O, and I note that according to Facetube, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is trending, but I can't find anything on CNN. Weird.

gratuitous Chesteron-bashing...

     It is likely wrong to ban books, much less burn 'em, so all I can think of for Chesterton's is a $500 surcharge (that's a tax) on every new one sold in America. All used bookstores will have to report their stock, and will collect a $250 surcharge for every volume by Chesterton that they sell. Those who fail to pay these charges will be subject to fines of up to $10k, and sixty days in jail. There's little we can do to stop the private circulation of the books through friendly loans (though what friend would do that to another?). Perhaps we can set up collection centers where people can turn in all things Chesterton, no questions asked, and receive cash payments. 
     I think his childish books would be out of circulation in no time. Of course, we would need a place to store the resulting stockpile of bad books. I suggest we keep 'em at the Yucca Mountain facility, but I'm open to other options. 

let's all form a hermeneutic circle...

     We may have foolishly turned capitalism into a faux religion - the way we do with everything really - and we certainly tend to confuse capitalism with mercantilism, but to have a bunch of leftists with multiple degrees and all the cultural and economic power tell us how to make do with less in the name of 'justice' seems awfully suspicious. 

     Yes, as a class you now have all the capital; you have your private jets and your cars; you determine who gets to move up and who stays put. So, it's now time for me to learn that Leisure Is The Basis Of Culture, and I really should have a driverless car, and I really shouldn't worry about making money, o that's icky. Besides, now that you're in charge of my life you'll see to all my needs. You'll even make sure we only have to pay 10% of our income for the next few decades to service our student loans. To my ear you seem awfully determined that I keep to my station. I love it especially when you praise those who 'play by the rules,' rules that you have rigged in your favor.

     (And tell me more about how you're all 'change-agents' who seek justice. So you know,anyone who defines themselves as a 'seeker of justice' is a self-absorbed, lying ass.)

     Anyway, I'm just a little suspicious about y'all. I learned it from Marx by the bye - thanks for that at least.

noodling about secularism and suchlike...

     We're told that our culture is rotten with individualistic hedonism - or is it hedonistic individualism? - both held within a radically secular mentality. What if that simply isn't true? What if instead the dominant culture in the Post-Christian West is utilitarian, totalitarian, collectivist, and inherently religious? There are after all so many gods to choose from that one hardly knows where to start. It's likely this return to sacrifice and the sacred is what you get as Christianity recedes from view.

a poem...

Adieu

It was in a stand of old linden

   dappled with shadow and sunlight

      that I first found myself

         lost, alone, seized by mourning

as branches creaked in the wind.

   Later I climbed a high dune where

      no one ever strayed -

         once at the top I lay staring

into what seemed the Empyrean;

   suspended it shimmered beyond 

      all our labor, every loss
         borne in those chill days of Spring.

iraq mon amour...

     We seem to think that 'chaos' has erupted in Iraq. No my friends, an iconoclast, intelligently managed, and brutal revolutionary state is forming in the Fertile Crescent. ISIS is flush with cash and stolen weapons, hardened from fighting in Libya and Syria, disciplined by a purist ideology that gives ultimate purpose to every act. Re-education centers are up and running all over their new territories. They have a considerable network of social services, even as they set up a genocidal campaign against Shi'ites and Christians across the region. All of that, apart from their sheer skill and daring, makes them the most formidable force we've yet seen in that part of the world. In short, this is a revolution, not an 'outbreak' of wildling violence. To my mind, the most apt comparison is with the Khmer Rouge.

a poem, reprised...

Yet Another Fall



Of a sudden shadows lengthen,
leaves strain to fall just as swimmers
long to spring from their boards:
it’s all at once a new fall.
I’m working on a stranger’s roof,
the air tastes of asphalt and rain –
I’m up here on account of my fear.

The wood behind the house is dark;
time for me to go down, time
yet again to go home for the night.
Nothing’s diminished:  we’ll live,
if we live, through another
fall that comes to us unbidden,
so let’s stay among the falling leaves.

the nuclear option as it were...

     Why do students get their own governments at universities across the country? Shut it all down. They're worthless. Strip the schools of everything except engineering and the basic sciences necessary for the practice. The so-called 'students' have proven unworthy of self-government, and they have shown profound contempt for humane learning. So, it's time to take it all away from them. Private liberal-arts schools, like Hillsdale, shall, like the monasteries of old, maintain the great traditions of philosophy, politics, literature, art. Students there can indeed study mathematics and science, but within the larger context of the study of civilizations that nurtured such achievements. The remnant shall flourish in these scattered bastions, while the rest of the horde can plug into their cubicles and fight for the last Corporate Benefits Package.

a first impression...

     At the start of John Drury's Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, we are given a subtle, brief analysis of the music of the delightful 'Love (III).' Hard upon this, however, Drury delivers this ridiculous twaddle: 

     'It ['Love (III)'] is the work of a man who valued common 
     experience, common sense, and courtesy so highly as to 
     collect 1,184 proverbs - at the same time a mystic for whom 
     the actuality of immediate religious experience mattered 
     intensely, and more than orthodox doctrine' (4). 

If Herbert did in fact value the 'actuality of immediate religious experience,' it was only because reality corresponded to orthodox doctrine. What's more, contrary to Drury's resurrection of the 'mild,' inoffensive Herbert, the poet and priest were at one in seeing sin at the heart of that reality, sin redeemed by of all things real blood shed by Jesus the Incarnate Son. Furthermore, Herbert was obstinately Reformed in the way he understood such matters. 'The Holdfast' and 'The Water-Course' both attest to this in the most vivid way. (I note as an aside their absence from Drury's index.) 
     As for the fundamental dogmas of the Church, allow me to note this from 'Ungratefulnesse': 'Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,/ The Trinitie and Incarnation:/ Thou has unlockt them both,/ And made them jewels to betroth/ The work of thy creation/ Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure' (l. 7-12). Certainly that is the unio mystica of much sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformed thought, with its provenance in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, and the via moderna of the fifteenth centuries. It is also fundamentally grounded in the lived reality as confessed in the Church's classical creeds. (I note, again in passing, that 'Ungratefulnesse' is likewise missing from Drury's index.)      
     So, at this point I'm left with a first impression that is mixed to say the least. First, Drury has a subtle ear, and thus his grasp of Herbert's music seems from the start both deep and helpful for the reader. Second, however, he seems to give us a tired, all too old Herbert, happily cocooned in his 'mild' Anglican Church, above such nastiness as controversy over orthodox doctrine and the right worship of the people of God. To my ear, this Herbert tilted toward contemporary concerns over 'living together in disagreement,' in a mildly irenic church that embraces all through 'religious experience' shorn in good Jamesian fashion of dogma, liturgy, sacrament, and argument, is a lie, and this makes me just want to throw the book across the room.

la la la la la la la la....

     Nothing to see here really.
     I'm hungry, but it would be unwise for me to eat anything.
     Then I remember, I'm unwise as a rule.
     So what should I eat? 
     Who now experiences such pangs:

     'This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires
      Like to a step-dame or a dowager
      Long withering out a young man's revenues,' Midsummer Night's Dream I.1.

     Returning to the question of what to eat this time of the morning, have you ever seen a rhinoceros in person? Ionesco was on to something there my friends.
     Where was I?
     She sits atop a slag-heap and calls us to account to the mercy of God.
     Wisdom has a hard life at the moment.
     Good thing I'm not wise. Never have been, never will be. It's almost a willful refusal, except that I don't remember willing it or refusing anything.
     The poorly loved are like orange blossoms killed by a late frost.
     With that, I'm off. G'night all.

insomnia mon amour...

     While I had the flu, I slept and slept and slept and slept. Now I'm tired of sleeping, yet I'm also tired. What fresh hell is this? How I suffer. Perhaps I should make a piece of performance art out of this nightmare. How much do you think I could make off a guy sitting at a desk roughly like this one, surrounded by books roughly like these, staring with insomniac eyes at a laptop roughly like the one before me? Maybe I should scatter some socks around - I hear things like that are big at MOMA and The Tate.

I believe that's Ἀληθῶς ανέστη...

     'The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos is the key to all the inner symbolism and typology in the Scriptures, and in addition gives us knowledge of created things, both visible and invisible. He who apprehends the mystery of the cross and the burial apprehends the inward essences of created things; while he who is initiated into the inexpressible power of the resurrection apprehends the purpose for which God first established everything,' St. Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Theology and Economy, I.66.

Reading War and Peace into the small hours. I don't want Prince Andrei to die again.

     I have a great stand-up routine with Werner Herzog as a contractor, but for the life of me I can't figure out what audience would take to it. 

reading Kant for the hell of it...

     Kant's Critique of Pure Reason makes sense as a Kafkaesque self-portrait. As such it is at once hilarious and terrifying. 

reading reading reading...

     Something from Sarah Coakley: 'In much recent Western theology, and more especially in feminist philosophy and theology, an anti-hero stalks: the Enlightenment ‘Man of Reason’. Can we not all agree in despising him? This villain has a number of characteristics. Cogitating, lonely, individualist, despising the body, passions, women and indeed all sociality, he artificially abstracts from the very dependencies he takes for granted: the products of earth, the comforts of family and friends, and — not least — the miraculous appearance of regular meals….'
     I have met him. His initials are IK.

notes from a commonplace book...

     ‘Here it is perhaps also worth raising the issue of what might be taken to be the unduly negative, the unduly dry and dismal, take on the apophatic I have been presenting. Have I not, with my simple insistence on what cannot be understood, on lack of insight, on questions that cannot be answered, missed the point of true apophaticism? Is it not itself bound up with contemplation? Surely denial and negativity are never employed for their own sake, and it is not a matter of a sheer blank, of simply hitting a wall, in thought and speech about God. Surely something much richer is gestured towards in apophasis: it is a response to excess, to God’s superabundant richness. Where is this, one might ask, in the account I have been giving of an apophatic trinitarianism
     ‘Richness, excess, this overwhelming quality of what we cannot comprehend should, on the view I am developing, be located precisely at the level of our contemplation in the Trinity, rather than at the level of contemplation of the Trinity. It is enough to acknowledge infinite depths that exceed our grasp in the Father who is contemplated through the Son – we do not need to look for such infinite depths and dazzling darkness in the very notion of three-in-oneness or perichoresis. And it is precisely because of the sense of excess and transcendence associated with contemplation in the Trinity that there ought properly to be, on the view I am exploring, a resistance to, a fundamental reticence and reserve surrounding, speculation on the Trinity,’ Karen Kilby, ‘Is an Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?’ International Journal of Systematic Theology 12, no. 1 (2010): 65–77.

heading for that Big Rock Candy Mountain...

     Checked my email just now. Seems I've an E-Deposit pending from Somewhere. All They need is my e-signature, along with a few pieces of personal information handled discretely and professionally, and I can collect this windfall.
     So, why am I working today?

yeah, i'm all over the place this morning...

     Apparently there are those within what we call the financial sector who want to see a Democrat take the White House in 2016. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can draw. After all, if they wanted a Republican to win, they wouldn't be looking at people like Paul, Cruz, and Rubio. We need, after all, someone who can deal with the complex, delicate strategic challenges that define our time - Russia and Ukraine; uprisings in Thailand; a possible war between China and Japan; all of which tie up North Korea and Iran; changes throughout the Middle East as younger rulers take over; political and economic crises in Latin America. Need I continue the litany?
     Well, we can dare to dream. Maybe there's a culturally conservative, fiscally responsible, liberal-minded lover of chess out there in the Republican ranks who could be the guy. I doubt it. 

pop culture madness...

     See, this is what I'm talking about: I have never, ever seen an episode of The Bachelor. Yet, I can't read the news to see if anyone has found that missing 777 without learning about Juan Pablo. O, and that can't possibly be a real name, can it?

the Small Catechism is good for what ails you...

     Thanks to the efforts of my long-distance friend John Halton and his gang, you can now find Luther's Small Catechism online without fear of Concordia Publishing House and its army of legal minions. While roaming our strange ecclesial world, I've returned again and again to this deceptively simple work. Anyone can grasp the Catechism in its essentials, yet there are depths to it that become clear only after years of reflection. So yeah and amen, I'm happy to see this. (Because I can't help it, allow me to quibble a bit about the use of that there NIV - we here at ER do not endorse it, like it, buy it, or otherwise go near it.) By the by, if you're over that way in Engelonde, the parish of Christ Lutheran Church is apparently in a mysterious Brigadoon world somewhere between, lessee, Orpington and Petts Wood, names no doubt made up by C. S. Lewis. Anyway, visit their site, study that Small Catechism, and have a fine morning.

Ah yes, values. Spare me.

another reminder...

What doesn't kill you can still make you wish it had.

     Just a reminder: Eo mens est imago Dei, quo capax Dei est et particeps esse potest. St. Augustine, De Trinitate XIV:11.
     It's important that we not forget that.

notes from a commonplace book...

Here we have the Knight of Faith, from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling:

‘"Why, he looks like a tax-collector!" However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through. His tread? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness; no smartly dressed townsman who walks out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground more firmly, he belongs entirely to the world, no Philistine more so. One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes the knight of the infinite. He takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things. He tends to his work. So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping, so precise is he.’

A shame Soren could never quite become such a gallant.

notes from a commonplace book...

     'Most of Donne's Songs and Sonets are composed partly in pentameters and partly in shorter or longer lines. . . . In all of Shakespeare's songs, to go no further, there is not a single pentameter line. It looks as if poets realized instinctively what it has taken literary critics much longer to see, that pentameter is different from other line lengths and that whenever it dominates a stanza or a poem, its strength and heft make for a significantly different kind of verse from that which we find in lyrical forms written in other line-lengths. . . .

     'Donne used the stanza of mixed line-lengths to combine feelings of very different sorts into poems of remarkably complex, often mercurial, tone. These different feeling proceed from the lines' different structures and the different relations between phrase and phrase that those structures entail. Usually the line of two or three feet will consist of a single phrase; the tetrameter is variable, but if it contains two phrases, it will often divide int he middle. The pentameter must be made up of at least two phrases or its single phrase must be developed with greater complexity, and it offers room for the more subtle development of an idea or an image. The constant movement that we sense in most of Donne's lyrics proceeds not only from his lively syntax and vigorously prosecuted images, but from the mixture of lines that in their very lengths convey feelings, and even attitudes toward experience, of very different sorts. These feelings and attitudes are not easily characterized, but, in general, the shorter lines tend to emphasize the quick, light, fast-moving, and relatively uncomplicated, even comic, exploration of a subject; the long ones tend to deepen, intensify, and complicate it, to slow it down and make it more serious, more problematical. So brief a summary seems much too formulaic. Obviously, Donne's lyrics do not change their tone abruptly from line to line. Nevertheless, again and again they broach in short lines a subject that at first seems frivolous but is gradually given amplitude and gravity through a series of more expansive pentameter lines, which, as it were, raise the subject to a higher level of serious meditation. See, for example, "The Triple Foole," "The Sunne Rising," and "Loves Infinitenesse,"' George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, pg. 323, n. 6.

reading the news...

     On reflection, I wonder just what's wrong with Russia's military action to hold their Crimean port and the surrounding territory. Have they moved to invade greater Ukraine? This is quite different from their invasion of Georgia a while back, and I'm not sure we should care that much. China and Japan, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria and Turkey, all seem more important. Just a thought.

notes from a commonplace book...

     Something from John Behr:

     'The affirmation, made by the Council of Nicaea and developed by Athanasius, that God is eternally the Father of his Son, means that in God there is a complete identity between nature and will; God does not first exist by himself, only subsequently to beget the Son. This identity of divine nature and activiety, and the claim that the Son is as fully divine as the Father, means, moreover, that the fivinity of God is fully revealed in Christ, so that "he who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn. 14.9). That "in him the whole fullness of divinity dwells bodily"(Col. 2.9) means that there is no surplus of divinity beyond this revelation, awaiting discovery through other means. The divine nature is not a passive object for human thought attempting to comprehend what God "really is" in himself, for God has revealed himself as he is. This also has significant implications for understanding how theological language functions. Later in the fourth century, the Cappadocians, arguing against Eunomius, point out that God is not an object against which the adequacy of our words about him are somehow to be measured, bur rather that God is known in and through his revelation, which expresses what God indeed is, and within which alone it is possible to think and speak about God: "In thy light we see light" (Ps. 35.10 LXX),' The Nicene Faith, Part 1, pg. 17.