0822

August 22, 2022

 In bed at 9, up at 3, 2 or 3 pss, no vino.  My back pain is better during the night, not gone but better, but still pretty bad getting out of bed.  Slow moving, relying on my cane.  Two Tylenol, which I should have taken yesterday but didn't think of.  Never took painkillers for many years, no headaches, etc.  I don't regularly think of painkillers in response to pain.  Not smart.  Took another 2 Tylenol at 9, able to empty and refill the dishwasher.

    On FB this morning:

"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so-called 'vital interests'. ~Albert Camus (Book: Notebooks 1935-1942 

Try to imagine how Camus would react to modern American television political ads - repeated over and over again daily for months leading up to our elections, breeding contempt and hatred.  I'm reacting now two and a half months before the election, knowing that the closer we draw to November, the more outrageous and vicious the ads will become.

    I've been re-reading an old favorite novel, Sean O'Faolain's Bird Alone.  I read it at a snail's pace, as Throne Room reading.  I love the way he writes, in that great Irish lyricism that sounds so familiar, but of course, not every Irish speaker is a Sean O'Faolain.  I have a volume of some of his short stories which I mean to read but it's tucked away in a bookcase instead of in the rat's nest I keep around my recliner and I never think to get up and get it.  Part of the reason I like the book is because it describes the young Irish protagonist's drift away from Holy Mother Church.  And because the Irish Church he describes in this book published in 1936 is so very like the Irish Church I was raised in, ('raised in the bosom of the Church') in Chicago in the 1940s and 50s.  Yesterday I read of Corney's (Cornelius, the given name of my Uncle Jim, a/k/a Seamus) attending Benediction with his grandfather:

    "And when, later, the chant of the rosary done, the incense broke blue against windows as leaden now as the leads that bound them, and the humpbacked monk brought candles (butt-ends amongst them) all blowing in arrow-shape for the benediction and the voices rose to the line of triumph:

                "Et antiquum documentum

                  Novo cedat ritui . . ."

- even then, the beginning and the end of the power of the Church, all seemed blanched and bleak.  It was as if the worshippers were too few, and became mindful of the fewness, became mindful, too, of the sorrow that always in Ireland fills into the plain-chant at that point as if the ancient glory of the Word were to us become, in time, as was as the glory it displaced."

    I can't read that passage without smelling the incense, seeing the dirty stained glass windows,  and humming to myself the Tantum Ergo that I must have heard and sung at a couple hundred Benediction services in my youth.  All that changed with the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, 1962-1965, requiring the use of vernacular in Catholic liturgy (and so many other major changes).  But to those of us born and raised into adulthood 'in the bosom of the [Latin] Church', the old forms of worship - antiquum documentum - die hard.  We didn't have a clue what the words meant, but like dutiful sheep following the shepherd, we did as we were told.

    Andy and I switched cars around dinner time.  He starts his new job on Thursday.

    Geri made a pasta pesto with fresh basil from her vegetable garden.  Quite a bit of work, but it's just not a taste I much enjoy.  Never have.

    I started work on a copy of another one of Modigliani's (semi)nudes.  It's the subject's lush skin tones I'm hoping to get close to.  And hoping to practice some more glazing.