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  Nihilism

It is a holiday season here — we are pagans of the humanistic/naturalistic sort in this household.  (I often discuss the ins and outs of that here.)  I sometimes self-describe as a polydeist.  We beg, borrow, and steal symbols and metaphors from various traditions ranging from Hellenic to Nordic to Amerindian and feel entitled to do so due to being what I have called “American mongrel” — our bloodlines and ancestral “homes” as mixed and tangled as the average Heinz 57 puppy!

So, once upon a distant Catholic/Christian time, we celebrated this day as “St. Lucia’s Day” and I’d be up before dawn making “Lucy Cats” buns for my daughter to deliver (with or without the candle crown) to other family members.  Now, we simply call it “Little Yule” and this year I am instituting it as the day to give gifts of alcohol and possibly do movie marathons.

Of course, even in those days that my uber-up-tight Baptist neighbor called “pagan Catholic” days — I knew Lucia and Lucy Cats had little to do with Christ or his Mass for us – those buns are clearly the rune Sowilo — the rune of the Sun, for the coming Winter Solstice when the days lengthened again promising spring and life in the future.  It was a comfortable segue into actual pagan life.  I had been personally pagan since late 1985; I came out to my family in 1994 after Pope John Paul II told the Catholic world that human conscience was trumped by his decree.  Although I loved our socially active parish for the political and justice related works, at that point I had to be officially done.

That is what this post is about, in a way: being officially ‘done’.  No, no, I am not again attempting to flounce off in despair to sulk about what the world/my country is doing to my ideals and hopes for the world.  But there are smaller ‘dones’ aren’t there?  When you just know you’ve had your fill of beating your head against walls of apathy and ignorance?  When you need to refuel and refresh and you don’t know how long it will take?

That is where I am.  So, I laid my hearth altar today for “Mothers’ Night” (celebrated 20 Dec.) — a Nordic pagan tradition honoring the “disir” – though what, you ask, can all that clan mother stuff have to do with a humanist?  Well, this year, considering it as I looked for a way to make obvious what I felt inside, it occurred to me it is useful to consider all the “mothers”, all the women who went before me.  How I am them and they are me in ways that never change, as well as considering what has changed, and what remains in need of change.

So, while I am “done” in a sense of burn-out presently; I am certainly not done in terms of searching for healing for the self, the family, the world at large.  But for a while, from today until at least January 1st, I am going to literally practice the time I call the “Fallows”…for my personal new year began in November; but I have to catch up with my society’s calendar.  I will do this by avoiding the news, and likely even favorite blogs for a time.  I’ll spend the next week looking at those “matrushka” dolls — women, women, women, connecting to the feminine, divine and human.  I will rest, baking and eating cookies, and sitt in holiday lit rooms with candles enhanced by drops of Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs oils.  I will listen to family laughter; we will eventually open gifts and eat a Winter Solstice dinner.  We will step outside the world in a way not quite what other pagans (Wiccans for instance) had in mind — a functional human stepping away to revive ourselves and celebrate the putting together our own family Humpty Dumpty this past year.

May you find light and merriment in this season by whatever name you celebrate it!  See you in 2015 — unless I pop in to post photographs alone, which may or may not happen.

El Greco, “The Resurrection” (1596-1600), oil on canvas, 275 x 127 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid (all images via Web Gallery of Art)

El Greco came back from the dead. “The Greek,” his real name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, moved to Venice and Rome before finally settling in Toledo, where he became one of Spain’s most well known painters. But when he died, his artwork and reputation died with him. Two centuries later, he inspired writers like Baudelaire and painters like Manet, Cézanne, Picasso, Giacometti, Orozco, and many others, to resurrect him.

Now through February 1st, his life continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition entitled El Greco in New York. This exhibit, like one I recently saw in Madrid’s Prado Museum, El Greco and Modern Painting, commemorates the artist’s death 400 years ago. That show provided a vivid sense of the Master of Toledo’s lasting influence. Placed next to homages by Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon, the image that most moved me was “The Resurrection” (1597–1600).

When I first saw this painting in 1974 – the largest canvas I had ever seen – the top edge seemed to challenge the Prado’s sky-high ceiling, as the bottom plunged into a chasm in the gallery floor. But 40 years later in Spain, standing in the same museum before the same image, the painting is no longer the same. It’s still tall, but nine feet high now, not nineteen or ninety. And there are no chasms in the Prado floor. I looked. Clearly, the impact a work of art makes has more to do with personal takes than tape measures.

Square footage aside, the actual canvas is a pain in the neck. At least it gives me one. You see, it makes me look up … a lot. My neck torques like the soldiers’ necks zigzagging to behold the Head of the Church, who is both the detonator and target of the explosion below, rising to the top of the painting. In “The Resurrection,” Christ sucks up all the calm on the planet, leaving tomb and tumult in his wake. Of the nine figures portrayed, the only soles that touch terra firma are those of the sentry wearing the blue cloak. One minute all is low-key. Then a powerful highlight drapes the grounded man, as a flash of rebirth whirls the soldiers out of darkness and disbelief.

Hand in hand with his steadfast yet upward stride, the star of the show officiates at this painting’s marriage of form and content. The content part: depending on your point of view, Christ’s resurrection is about a mythical character or a Houdini Most High, or a concept, spirit, or god escaping from his tomb to juggle sun, moon, earth, and stars for . . . ever. I’ve seen this New Testament story portrayed many times by many artists. But regarding the form part: that this artist moves me to participate physically in the idea of going from here to eternity by mimicking with my head the motion of Christ’s ascension . . . that’s rare.

A few thoughts on how he does it. To begin with, El Greco chose a tall, narrow canvas, which lends itself to up and down motion, as opposed, for example, to Piero della Francesca’s square-format take on the same subject, which lends itself to calm. In Piero’s version, Jesus out-unblinks four uninformed, uniformed Rip Van Winkles, who’ve barely budged in centuries. The only action, a trickle of blood from the wound in Christ’s ribcage. In El Greco’s version, on the other hand, the large, compelling forms of Christ and the banners he holds float to the top, sucking toward them the legions of screaming details that make up the awestruck guards, bug-eyed and blinking, all. Well, except for the feather-helmeted one who offers a nod to Piero. Dream on, little man; we’ll get back to you later.

Piero della Francesca, “Resurrection” (1463-65), mural in fresco and tempera, 225 x 200 cm. Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro.

El Greco halves his composition vertically. But he provides numerous unifying elements, such as the echoing raised arms of the soldiers–especially the skewed triangle formed between Jesus and the two guards in blue bordering him below. Another unifier: all but one of the sentries look up, taking our gaze with them. And then there are those coy elbows, toes, and strips of cloth, hailing from a long line of fig leaves, which create a rhythm of bleeps that lead us up and down. The only time Christ’s body is overlapped, by the edge of the white banner, represents the most obvious and least inventive example of censorship. El Greco painted psychology and religion like no one else. He took revolutionary liberties with sinuous, sensuous forms. But El Greco, a believer, believed in discretion over description.

Like storm-blown trees, the soldiers ring around a spiritual rose. El Greco portrays the individual guards from many expressive angles, but to further differentiate Christ from the sentries, the artist adheres to an “ideal form.” Jesus differs most from the guard collapsed directly beneath his feet. They share the painting’s central vertical axis, but little else. The star of the show, upright and ascending, is sublime; the strongly foreshortened guard beneath him is a great big crumpled doormat to trip over. By exaggerating contrasts and by radically twisting space and color, El Greco pumps up the emotional and spiritual qualities of his subjects while playing down conventional depiction.

Talking about up and down, I don’t see this canvas as necessarily setting up a contrast between the Christ figure on top (holy and important) and the falling soldier below (unholy and unimportant), although I suspect that’s what El Greco had in mind. I respond to the guard sympathetically. Given the circumstances, he sees the world from a distinctive, understandably tumultuous point of view, and he deserves to be seen with distinction and understanding. He is you. He is me. He is a toppled tree, and his twining roots pass beneath Christ, an angel with draping wings, a rose with cloth petals red and white. The soldier is full of passion, awe, fear, and flaws. Ya gotta love him. Yeah, he and his team blew their assignment of making sure a dead man stayed put. But it wasn’t their fault. Eight against one; the eight of ‘em never stood a chance. Haven’t we all been thrown off course by circumstances beyond our control? Granted, the beyond-control bar is higher here, but that shouldn’t prevent us from identifying with the faceless toppler. Maybe in the future I will think about him less and look to one of the other seven guards more.

Without the upside-down guard, the painting floats away. Also, without him, there’d be too much celestial sugar. (Picture Renoir painting for the church in the sixteenth-century.) The guards yo-yo from spellbound to panic-stricken in one fell swoop. But even while pulling us down, Christ’s fallen counterpart leads us into the picture. Look at the distance between his head and foot. And to put an even more emphatic stomp on the matter, look at how he kicks his comrade right where the poor guy is most vulnerable, whacking us into the very deepest part of the composition. Then, without even turning around, our sentry introduces us to the host and silent life of the party.

We arrive as Christ leaves. Above, the passage is clear, and we can imagine the slow, sonorous tones of Pablo Casals’ cello accompanying his departure. Below, starting at our greeter’s left arm, our entrance into the picture is stacked with too big or too small limbs (clearly, “too” can be a good thing) that recede and advance like burning branches across a stuttering, yet rapid, diagonal embellished through electric variations of scale, color, gesture, direction, intervals and pauses, all woven into patterns of light and shape and rising and falling forms. Jimi Hendrix would have had a ball with this passage. Hendrix and Casals – I’d pay to hear that duo! Stop and smell the smoke while you listen to the waistband fringe of the falling soldier’s gold tunic braise in the blaze below the white flow of Christ’s banner declaring victory over death. Then follow a saber point to the snoring, way-too-little fellow whom El Greco tucks into a cozy pocket of space, tops with a silly-looking helmet, and blankets within a miracle.

This guy sleeps past the alarm and misses the party. Comic relief? A symbol of preoccupation or melancholy? Perhaps he’s just exhausted from being up all night keeping watch. Could be this sentry is dreaming about a storm-swept tree and a rose with cloth petals. He does not appear to be a believer — unless all that we see in this canvas is meant to stem from this sentry’s imagination. Like the Christ figure, like the overturned guard, perhaps like everyone pictured or heard here, he could be the narrator of “The Resurrection,” each crafting a unique story. If we lighten up and lower our sights, this painting can be regarded as a kind of spiraling cartoon bubble popping out of the “Little Nemo-like” head of the man with the feathers. Why not? After all, aren’t dreams and stories created by the wacky, high-minded, thoughtful, mean, young, old, involved, or distant pains-in-the-neck gods and artists in us all?

El Greco in New York continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through February 1, 2015.

Amy Barnes was jailed and held in solitary in 2012 when she called out "fuck the police" as she bicycled past Cobb County cops who were questioning a suspect by the roadside. Read the rest

welpppppp

seriouslyamerica:

The Rugrats don’t have time for your gender-essentialist bullshit.

fun fact: this actually happens in studies about gender stereotypes projected onto babies

The Eyes of Eric Garner

jadebloodedfeminist:

hellbound-gatestuck:

I-I want to… no…

… I NEED to do this…

halloween costume found

pharaohalexander:

fckniallls:

waroncops:

ithotyouknew:

birdgirlriri:

darvinasafo:

These are modern day lynchings

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/louisiana-police-officer-shoots-kills-14-year-old-honor-roll-student/

THAT WAS SOMEBODY’S FUCKING BABY. I’M ACTUALLY CRYING RIGHT NOW, THEY WERE PLAYING IN AN ABANDONED HOUSE BEING FUCKING KIDS AND NOW THIS LITTLE BOY IS DEAD.

waroncops.tumblr.com

his name was cameron tillman and he was murdered on september 24, 2014 please do not let him become just another black boy who’s name will be forgotten amongst the countless other murders please do whatever you can to raise awareness about this situation, please donate, keep protesting, keep all these stories alive, do not let them get away with this. 

Man, this shit has to stop

I've never done any "best of" posts, so this year, I'm gonna! Hold on to your hats, wrecky minions, 'cuz I'm about to unleash my personal favorites from over six years and 10,000 wrecks, throughout the rest of the month. Enjoy!

- Jen

*****

When a card just isn't enough.

Now for extra fun, go back and read all these imagining they're from the same person, TO the same person, over the course of a single weekend. That's like the next Adam Sandler movie script, writing itself.

Thanks to Ian S., Casey H., Sara W., Kris K., Rachel B., Michelle B., Andrew C., Brooke J., Micah C., & Adam Sandler, who I'm sure will be sending me a fruit basket.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

pearls-for-cats:

best one yet

androidelf:

(lays back all sexy for u on the bed) (bangs my fuckign head on the headboard)

thebeautifulcomics:

Here (1989) by Richard mcguire (raw magazine)

I AM HUGGING YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

ALSO SOMEONE ATE ONE OF YOUR SHOES BUT THIS IS NOT ABOUT THAT