Posts

All Hallowed Things: Culture Lost and Found Again

Image
kinda metal idk. Wish I had enough money to buy pearls so I could clutch them Two Expressions of Fervor This past October, I noticed many people observing Halloween on the Hill in Boulder, doing everything from dressing up as a Sexy [Insert Noun Here] , to drinking, to partying, to trick-or-treating to giving out candy, performing in Halloween shows, watching halloween films, and all the rest. And these are all good appropriate things I suppose (I did all of those to various degrees throughout the season). But there was another group of people who decided to chant the Litany of the Saints while holding candles and processing from an All Saints Vigil Mass to a graveyard on the Hill. They looked and sounded equally spooky, perhaps apropos to the whole scene, though they nonetheless stood apart. But though there may not be explicit or aesthetic tension between these two expressions of fervor, there still remains a disconnect . And this disconnect arises from a culture which is existential...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Proto- Liturgicality of Bjork

Image
this blog has some gaps which I intend to fill later when I'm more motivated. - B May I? / Or should I? / Or have I too often/ Craved miracles? moon PART I: THE LITURGY The liturgy is the public prayer of the Body of Christ, the Church. The liturgy marks, commemorates, and sanctifies time. The liturgy is the Word incarnate in the senses, it is sacramental because spiritual things are signified by sensory things. The Sacraments abide within the Liturgy. The liturgy is open to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who sows where He will. The liturgy is also structured, and every expression, every action, and every word has its place.  The liturgy is sublime in that, while emotions may be enkindled, experienced, or unexperienced throughout, the effect is ultimately beyond emotions. It is over and above the senses, though the senses play a part, because we are heilomorphs - that is, both body and soul, and our soul is spoken to through the body. The liturgy is chanted, in the West as Gre...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inoculating ourselves from the Hive Mind, Pt. 1

Image
Many models of social evolution point toward the idea that Man is evolving into a superorganism . Technology is trending such that the collective consciousness residing primarily in the Internet, outweighs the consciousness of the individual. The number one news source in the world is constituted as an endless barrage of poorly-researched 6-10 second clips fed by an algorithmic feedback loop based on users' narrow preferences, which provides a junk food diet of questionable information to the populus. This is not a solid foundation for individual reasoning, but the collective hijacking of the intellect and will.  This collective will tends toward particular ends, which when viewed in the macro, look more like a hive mind and a hive will created from the ruins of individual minds and wills. The hive mind is capable, and even particularly adept and agile when it comes to making decisions and coming to conclusions, but it is at the expense of individual minds and wills, which are left...
Post a Comment
Read more

O, But Then What Shall We Sing?

Image
"Tell us, oh, but then what shall we sing? When we gather together? When our souls come untethered? To catch our breath?" Mandolinist and songwriter Chris Thile asks these questions at the tip top of his 2021 record, "Laysongs"- his fervent attempt at apostasy, a record which in turn seethes and groans at and for the Divine, while professing to live apart from it. And I don't know if he ever answers this question, though this record is the best attempt I've found (but " Spanish Toast " by Alanna Boudreaux is also superb).  The word Religion allegedly comes from the same root as the Latin word for asphalt- the root literally  meaning "sticky", "adherent". And what does that asphalt accomplish except for to pave a smooth path for Man to progress? We are religious when we stick to something. And we are justified in sticking to something when we believe in it (And in a larger sense, when that belief is justified). Any man worth his ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Desire

Image
  Is my greatest desire merely my own self-preservation and gratification? To rephrase this question, can I desire for something greater? Furthermore, how great can my desires become- what is the upper limit of desire? Caroline Polachek struck something in me with her album a few years back called "Desire, I Want to Turn Into You". The album is very sensual, and also very tasteful in its sensuality, yet nobody could accuse it of being reserved. The cover features the singer crawling on all fours through a train car with an expression of deep yearning and mystique on her face. She could be on her daily commute, yet she looks far past the camera and her hands find a fringe of sand upon which a red dotted line leads past the frame, like a treasure map, an imaginative whiff of adventure nestled within the everyday. It's a perfect image of the reconciliation between our longing for the divine and our temporal confines within the mundane. Isn't that the best we can do this ...
Post a Comment
Read more