Log24

From an essay by Carson in London Review of Books,
Vol. 46 No. 16 · 15 August 2024 —

"Handwriting is a mark from inside me
that I put outside me, often with a view
to showing, telling, communicating.
It carries what Gerard Manley Hopkins
calls ‘the inscape’ out.
(Note: Hopkins meant several different things
by ‘inscape’, which I don’t know enough
about his psyche or his poetics to represent here,
but those Dublin notebooks – wow!)"

For a rather different use of "inscape," see a Log24 search.

Some related mathematics, via a beta version of ChatGPT Search —

"Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:"

— Two lines from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem
as quoted by Caleb Murdock at . . .

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=5356 .

From that same URL —

"And, Caleb, yes, 'sprung rhythm' has made it into dictionaries,
though even there, the association is with Hopkins."

For guess-ghosts —

"Spring is sprung, the grass is riz,
I wonder where the flowers is."

And for an able muse —

  “Suck any sense from that who can” — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Related architecture:

From posts tagged Marfa Day —

"Den Kopf benützen ist besser als ihn verlieren."

(A sequel to today's earlier posts Cube for Berlin and Midnight for Paris.)

See London in this journal.

That search yields …

“The more intellectual, less physical,
the spell of contemplation
the more complex must be the object,
the more close and elaborate
must be the comparison
the mind has to keep making
between the whole and the parts,
the parts and the whole.”

— The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins , 
ed. by Humphry House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959),
as quoted by Philip A. Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament 

(From the post The Inscape of 24, April 24, 2014. The 14 blocks in
the design S(3, 4, 8) of today's previous post are analogous to the 759
blocks in the design S(5, 8, 24).)

Two items from this morning’s news:

“Sasaki Roshi trained for years in a distinctively strict style of Zen
that he transplanted to the U.S. His students rose at 3 a.m.
for chanting, exhausting hours of meditation and one-on-one
meetings with their teacher, who would pose impenetrable
koans, riddles like: ‘When you see the flower, where is God?'”

For a mathematician’s example of an alleged Zen ideal, see the feast day
this year of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins.

For the first word of the title, see The Harrowing of Hell.

For the second, see Pater and Hopkins.

This post was suggested by yesterday’s Symmetry and by…

For this, the dies natalis  of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins,
it seems apt to cite a 1973 master's thesis on what the author
calls multiguity  in Hopkins. 

See also multispeech in this journal.

Related material:

• Hopkins and tic-tac-toe in the above thesis, p. 20.
• Gail Collins's column today
• TIC
• tacto

See, too, the online front page of The New York Times
from 1:54 PM ET today, and, as an example  of multispeech,
yesterday morning's post Rubric's Cuber.

Yesterday's noon post concerned a forthcoming novel
about poetry and intelligence services. Some related backstory:

New York Lottery today—

Without imagination, these digits are a meaningless jumble.

With  imagination…

608 might refer to June 8, the Saint's Day  of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
        (See the date July 29, 2002, that appeared in an earlier post today
         as the publication date of Geometrical Landscapes . In this
         journal, a post on that date, "At Random," referred to Hopkins.)

8516 might refer to 8/5/1916. A check of a hometown newspaper
         on that date yields…
         "St. Joseph's Garden Party and Bazaar 22, 23, 24.
          Pictures. Everybody Welcome. Admission to Garden Ten Cents"

And in the evening…

937 might refer to a post on the nihilistic philosophy of Joan Didion, and

7609 might refer to an occurrence of these digits in a link 
          to "7/11" in a post from the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola last year.

For a more cynical view of lottery hermeneutics, see
"High on RAM (overload)," by Jo Lyxe.

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks.

On Halloween…

"Remember that for Ockham there is nothing in the universe that is
in any way universal except a concept or word: there are no real
natures shared by many things. However, things do resemble one
another, some things more closely  than others. So the various
degrees of resemblance give a foundation in reality for our conceptual
structures, such as Porphyry's tree.
Now resemblance (or similitude or likeness) is a relation.
If such relations are realities, then we can say that there are realities
out there that correspond to our conceptual structures."

— R.J. Kilcullen at Macquarie University, course labeled Phil360

"The kernel of a homomorphism is always a congruence.
 Indeed, every congruence arises as a kernel."

— Congruence Relation, section on Universal Algebra, in Wikipedia

"Beauty then is a relation."

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

"An Attempt to Understand the Problem of Universals"
is the title of a talk by Fabian Geier, University of Bamberg—

"The talk was held at Gdańsk University on May 26th 2008."

Related material— Stevie Nicks turns 60.

Video: Pope to youths in Cuatro Vientos: "Thank you for your joy and resistance"

Tony Long at Wired.com, Aug. 30, 2007—  "Scattered to the four winds"—

"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                Is immortal diamond." —Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus

(Continued)

Elizabeth Taylor: Gerard Manley Hopkins Fan

… twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther….

— "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Related material:

Max Black — "Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as 'three in one' should be child's play." ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615– as quoted by Bill Vallicella)

 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons⁵⁹ ….

⁵⁹ … The   or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”

---

 ”Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann

The title is a reference to yesterday's noon post.

For the late Vladimir Igorevich Arnold—

"All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven."

— Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, Chapter V

Arnold's own mystical mathematics may be found in his paper

"Polymathematics: Is Mathematics a Single Science or a Set of Arts?"

Page 13–
"In mathematics we always encounter mysterious analogies, and our trinities [page 8] represent only a small part of these miracles."

Also from that paper—

Page 5, footnote 2–
"The Russian way to formulate problems is to mention the first nontrivial case (in a way that no one would be able to simplify it). The French way is to formulate it in the most general form making impossible any further generalization."

Arnold died in Paris on June 3. A farewell gathering was held there on June 8—

"Celles et ceux qui le souhaitent pourront donner un dernier adieu à Vladimir Igorevitch
mardi 8 juin, de 14h a 16h, chambre mortuaire de l'hopital Saint Antoine…."

An International Blue Diamond

In Arnold's memory—  Here, in the Russian style, is a link to a "first nontrivial case" of a blue diamond— from this journal on June 8 (feast of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins). For those who prefer French style, here is a link to a blue diamond from May 18—

From French cinema—

Duelle

"a 'non-existent myth' of a battle between
goddesses of the sun and the moon
for a mysterious blue diamond
that has the power to make
mortals immortal and vice versa"

From Josephine Klein, Jacob’s Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy, London, Karnac Books, 2003–

Page 14 —
Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Quiddity and haeccity were contentious topics in medieval discussions about the nature of reality, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have encountered these concepts during his Jesuit training. W. H. Gardner, who edited much of Hopkins’s work, writes that

in 1872, while studying medieval philosophy… Hopkins came across the writing of Duns Scotus, and in that subtle thinker’s Principles of Individuation and Theory of Knowledge he discovered what seemed to be a philosophical corroboration of his own private theory of inscape and instress. [Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Penguin, 1953, p. xxiii]

In this useful introduction to his selection of Hopkins’s work, Gardner writes that Hopkins was always looking for the law or principle that gave an object ‘its delicate and surprising uniqueness.’ This was for Hopkins ‘a fundamental beauty which is the active principle of all true being, the source of all true knowledge and delight.’ Clive Bell called it ‘significant form’; Hopkins called it ‘inscape’– ‘the rich and revealing oneness of the natural object’ (pp. xx-xxiv). In this chapter, I call it quiddity.”

Beyond the Fire

“Who Needs a White Cube These Days?”
— Headline in today’s New York Times

“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…“
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins
 
                                           “… Sleep realized
Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,
A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

— Wallace Stevens,
   “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” III 13-16,
    from The Auroras of Autumn, 1950

Related material:
The five entries ending on Christmas, 2005.

#

“Beauty therefore is a relation.”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Leo Bogart,
dead on Oct. 15.

See entry of 11 AM Sunday.

“Leo Bogart is surely the Grand Master of social research in the world of the newspaper and the mass media in general.” — Sociologist Robert K. Merton, “father of the focus group,” born in Philadelphia as Meyer R. Schkolnick, dead on Feb. 23, 2003- Grammy night.

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints. Today is the Feast of All Souls.

Those of us who are not saints may profit from the writings of both the saintly Thomas Wolfe and the more secular Tom Wolfe.

From Log24.net on the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, a quotation from St. Thomas Wolfe:

See also a Wolfe quotation from the Feast of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins in 2003. 

For the Feast of St. Thomas Wolfe himself, see the Log24 entries of Sept. 15 (the date of Wolfe’s death).

Readings more suited to today, All Souls’ Day, than to yesterday, All Saints’:

Bright Young Things,
Andrew at St. Andrews,
and, of course,
Under the Volcano.

Andrew at St. Andrews recommends the remarks, in The Guardian, of Tom Wolfe on today’s election.

The fact that the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s new novel is a virgin from the hill country of North Carolina, combined with the above entry on Nell from the Feast of St. Ignatius, brings us back to the earlier Wolfe…  For the later, secular Wolfe on the earlier, saintly Wolfe, see

Frances Hansen died on Friday, July 9. For more on words and The Roots of Coincidence (the subject of the previous entry), see the entries of July 8-10.

Triple Crown

“The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated…. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism’s bottom line.”

— Michael Kimmelman, April 2, 2004 

________________

From Hans Reichenbach‘s

The Rise of Scientific Philosophy:

Ch. 18 – The Old and the New Philosophy

“The speculative philosophers allotted to art a dignified position by putting art on a par with science and morality: truth, beauty and the good were for them the triple crown of human searching and longing.”

Ch. 15 – Interlude: Hamlet’s Soliloquy

“I have good evidence.  The ghost was very conclusive in his arguments.  But he is only a ghost.  Does he exist?  I could not very well ask him.  Maybe I dreamed him.  But there is other evidence….

It is really a good idea: that show I shall put on.  It will be a crucial experiment.  If they murdered him they will be unable to hide their emotions.  That is good psychology.  If the test is positive I shall know the whole story for certain.  See what I mean?  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my dear logician.
    I shall know it for certain?  I see your ironical smile.  There is no certainty….
   There I am, the eternal Hamlet.  What does it help me to ask the logician….?  His advice confirms my doubt rather than giving me the courage I need for my action.  One has to have more courage than Hamlet to be always guided by logic.”

________________

On this Holy Thursday, the day of Christ’s Last Supper, let us reflect on Quine’s very pertinent question in Quiddities (under “Communication”):

“What transubstantiation?”

“It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying this: little children should be taught about it as early as possible. Not of course using the word…because it is not a little child’s word. But the thing can be taught… by whispering…”Look! Look what the priest is doing…He’s saying Jesus’ words that change the bread into Jesus’ body. Now he’s lifting it up. Look!”

From “On Transubstantiation” by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, V.III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 1981, Univ. of Minnesota Press, as quoted in the weblog of William Luse, Sept, 28, 2003

A perhaps more credible instance of transubstantiation may be found in this account of Anscombe on the Feast of Corpus Christi:

“In her first year at Oxford, she converted to Catholicism. In 1938, after mass at Blackfriars on the Feast of Corpus Christi, she met Peter Geach, a young man three years her senior who was also a recent convert to Catholicism. Like her, Geach was destined to achieve eminence in philosophy, but philosophy played no role in bringing about the romance that blossomed. Smitten by Miss Anscombe’s beauty and voice, Geach immediately inquired of mutual friends whether she was ‘reliably Catholic.’ Upon learning that she was, he pursued her and, swiftly, their hearts were entangled.”

— John M. Dolan, Living the Truth

Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and
    lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through
    the features of men’s faces.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Concluding reflections for Holy Thursday:

Truth, Beauty, and The Good

Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
 — Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)

The director, Carol Reed, makes…
 impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man 

I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach (see above)

Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of cities with which they are associated. 

In keeping with our transubstantiation theme, these three cities may be regarded as illustrating the remarks of Jimmy Buffett

on culinary theology.

Diamonds

This is the first anniversary of the death of Irene Diamond, patron of the arts, for whom the New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project is named.  (See last year’s entries for January 20-23.)

Since tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Balanchine (according to the Gregorian, or “new style,” calendar), it seems appropriate to recall his ballet Diamonds, though it has no apparent connection with Irene.

Diamonds is the conclusion of a three-part work titled Jewels. (The first two parts are Emeralds, with music by Fauré, and Rubies, with music by Stravinsky.)

” ‘And then for the finale, Diamonds, I move to Tchaikovsky-always Tchaikovsky for dancing.’

Balanchine chose to use Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D major, gracefully cutting the first movement of the piece (by some accounts because it was too long, and by others because he felt it just wasn’t suitable for dancing).”

— Jeannine Potter, notes on Jewels 

In other words, Balanchine “cut” Diamonds. For another use of this metaphor, see The Diamond Project.  The following remark on the first movement seems appropriate on this, the anniversary of Irene Diamond’s death.

“The introduction to the first movement of the symphony is marked Moderato assai, Tempo di marcia funebre, the funeral march proceeding with increased pace….”

—  Symphony No. 3 in D Major

The following link to a part of Irene’s year-long funeral march seems appropriate:

Longtime Juilliard Benefactor Dies.

Whether her good deeds made her, like Christ and Gerard Manley Hopkins, an immortal Diamond, I do not know.  Let us hope so.

The Tables of Time

Implied by previous two entries:

See, too, Art Wars and Time Fold.

Of Time and the River

Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe

“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”

Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,

“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.” 

From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:

Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:

“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town“ 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
— Song of Solomon

Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:

June Second, 1910

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:

Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8

From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:

8:7  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of

Operation Playmate:

11:01 AM

On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.

From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
    to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
    yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
    of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
   “Hurrahing in Harvest”

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

— The Dixie Chicks

From my March 31, 2003, entry:

“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….

Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”

Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:

Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction. 

Etymology: Latin Terpsichor,
from Greek Terpsikhor,
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.

See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.

All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise.  To paraphrase an Eliot line, 

“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”

Release Date

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar —

• Novelist William S. Burroughs [of the Burroughs adding machine family], author of Naked Lunch, was born on this day in 1914.
• The Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times“ was released on this day in 1936.
• The adding machine employing depressible keys was patented on this day in 1850.

“It all adds up.” — Saul Bellow, book title

“I see my light come shining
 From the west unto the east.
 Any day now, any day now,
 I shall be released.”
     — Bob Dylan

From Robert Morris’s page on Hopkins (see note of Sunday, February 2 (Candlemas)):

“Inscape” was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for a special connection between the world of natural events and processes and one’s internal landscape–a frame of mind conveyed in his radical and singular poetry….

This is false, but suggestive.

Checked, corrected, and annotated

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

— The Dixie Chicks

See
“Culture Clash at Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil“
in my notes of December 11, 2002.

Cruciatus in Crucem

From Battlefield Vacations, Edinburgh:

On the film “Braveheart” —

If you’ve ever wondered about what exactly “drawn and quartered” means, there’s a good demonstration at the end.

Miss Sauvé

Homily on Flannery O’Connor

for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:

The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)] 

 A modest example comes to mind. In a short story  ….  the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)] 

In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125] 

….There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.  

             — Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.

From James Joyce

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

Chapter 3 :

Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

— Here he is! Here he is!

From The Gazette, Montreal,

of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:

“Summer of ’69,” a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:

“I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died.  Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn’t cope with the luxury or the spice.

The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic.  An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre….

I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont….

…. Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father…. On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat… and never came back….    

The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays’ daughter,  Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.

My father assured us that we wouldn’t like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic. 

The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering — melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn’t Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers…. Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano. 

It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff….

The fall of 1969, I went to McGill…. I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé’s.  It’s gone now — like so many things.”

     Ten thousand places

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

   — Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889

American Literature Web Resources:

Flannery O’Connor

She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.

In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.

She once said “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts.”

Encounter – 02/17/2002:

Flannery OConnor – Southern Prophet:

… When a woman wrote to Flannery O’Connor saying that one of her stories “left a bad taste in my mouth,” Flannery wrote back: “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”

Etes-vous sauvé? 

At Random

Today’s birthday: poet Stanley Kunitz  —

“I’m Stanley Kunitz. I live in New York City. I published my first book of poems some 70 years ago. Back in 1926, I was roaming through the stacks of the Widener Library at Harvard. While I was walking through the section on English poetry of the 19th century, I just at random lifted my arm and picked a book off the shelf. It was… an author I was not familiar with, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The page that I turned to and began to read was a page devoted to a poem called “God’s Grandeur.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I opened this book and started reading that poem. It really shook me, because it was unlike anything else I had ever read before. When I started reading it, suddenly that whole book became alive to me. It was filled with such a lyric passion. It was so fierce and eloquent, wounded and yet radiant, that I knew that it was speaking directly to me and giving me a hint of the kind of poetry that I would be dedicated to for the rest of my life.”