My Culturally Rooted Tangent

I sang at choir in the church basement tonight. Please, laugh away.

Yes, I'm a good Irish Catholic lady who practiced with fellow choir members for two and a half hours -- less a twenty minute break in which we drank wine or beer and ate hors d'ourves. (You can refill your glass at the end of break so you have sustenance for the second half of practice!)

Since I am grooving on my catholicism tonight, I shall make confession. I love singing! It's challenging fighting all of the complications of harmony (so appropros on so many levels), it is so challenging fighting all of the bullshit of organized religion -- but somehow set it to music and I feel it. So many conflicts, but goddammit -- I'm still a fucking catholic!

Excuse me, Irish Catholic.

See, that differential is significant. I don't buy into that political pope crap. I also grew up with several guys who killed themselves because they were destroyed by the tragedy of being raped by priests. I imagine one of them as a significant image in the Jungian Archetypical Heaven now. He was golden and beautiful and Michelangelo would have painted him as the Archangel Michael. And I was taught to practice catholicism by 13 years of catholic school and my Irish catholic grandma and Jesuits and a book of the saints. So really and obviously, I'm an overanalyzing, superstitious woman. But aren't those the qualities that keep religion solid, stable and historical?

The point I was trying to make a minute ago is I don't pray to Jesus or God. I think pure, unsinful beings are unapproachable (and a load of misogynistic, hallucinogenic bullshit). I am the product of faith passed on from the oppressed -- pray to your mother and your friends and family, the Blessed Mother and the saints.

And the name is also significant. I was not taught to pray to the Virgin Mary; I was taught to pray to the Blessed Mother. Recite both of those names to yourself and see who you want to call on to assist you in your petitions. Tonight I stood on a bridge that rocked over the Chicago River while singing "Gentle Woman" to a a gift of urban nature which always blesses me. Blessed Mother, thank you for your children.

And tonight I also sang with the church choir -- even "Danny Boy" (yuck) which according to the music notes was published in "Londonderry" rather than Derry. I hate "Danny Boy". Over-played and praising saccharine martyrdom to The Man.

We should sing "The Wind That Shakes the Barley". It's a more valuable theme and it relates better to the times.

"Twas hard the woeful words to frame

To break the ties that bound us.

But harder still to bare the shame

Of foreign chains around us."

Today, the foreign chains are made of different steels. In this millennium, foreign does not refer to other nations and cultures, but rather, multinational corporate persecutors. We are cuffed by different oppressors but we are all still trapped.

And now to quote a catholic from a different culture: "Better to die on your feet than live on your knees."

So let us pray.

"Haunted...

...of your precious love. Of your precious love."


I noticed today that I posted on St. Patrick's Day in 2010, 2008, and 2007.
I don't have much to add today. The world has gone mad & will get worse with the current struggles in Japan, Libya, Wisconsin & Egypt. According to the end of the Mayan Calendar, we may be done in on December 21, 2012.

We all have the true Luck of the Irish. So "may the road rise to meet you and may the wind be always at your back."

Sleeping by yourself at night can make you feel alone...

There is a difference between lonely and alone; but sometimes the choice to be alone can be lonely. Although I imagine there are those who feel quite lonely even though they have chosen not to be alone.

Choosing to be solitary does not necessarily mean loneliness nor being alone but sometimes it's just so daunting knowing you need to go home to an empty apartment. There are certain creature comforts that come with companionship. For example, having someone to cuddle with in bed. Of course, then that someone usually expects you to shave your legs on a regular basis, but still, it gets hella cold at this latitude and it is pleasant to have someone keep your feet warm.

So I bought some cozy socks and I still sleep on the couch because your bed doesn't seem so empty when you are sleeping on the couch. But then your bed accidently starts accumulating clothes and turns into a kind of express lane closet and then even if you find someone worthy of visiting your bed, you can't really invite them over for a cup of coffee at the end of the night due to the three or four mountains of clothing heaped on the bed and sorted by degrees of cleanliness.

So I think I'm going to clean my room. But I'm not shaving legs yet. This is a process, you see.

(Oh, and I took this image from George Lindmark's Fantasy Paintings site.)

"There is no Sanctuary!"

Last night I dreamt that I was given access to view an archeolgical site in order to further my studies. I was permitted to fly -- without a machine -- over a kind of stone shelf with intricate carvings and pools. No one exaclty understood what they signified or who made them, but they were vast -- something like a Mayan city stretched flat, but Celtic in it's symbolism (and also somewhat influenced by the aesthetics of Logan's Run which I watched last night). I had to record everything mentally and take my findings to class...

...which was taught by the Franciscan Brother who was my extremely gifted high school philosophy/ theology teacher who was probably one of the most talented educators ever and whose lessons are still "exploding like a time bomb" in my mind twenty years later. He passed away in January. Brother Mc debriefed me before class and it was agreed that what I learned from the stone site was part of the lesson plan. But I was just a tool -- he knew the over-arching theme of the lesson and me and my stones were a mere instrument to be used to advance the lesson as he conceived it. I was to learn the lesson, too. It was like I was a secret weapon against ignorance, but my utility didn't lessen my own lack of awareness. Class was held. I came to realize that the point of this lesson would not be made clear in one class but would unfold slowly over the course of a year. My stones were not mentioned. I was confused.

Then the brother was informed by the mean, ignorant Department Chair (nun) that he would be required to use the syllabus she was handing out as a template. He had to turn it in for approval. He and I understood that the goal now was to continue the class as he designed it but to somehow disguise the plan to fit into the very rigid and useless construct being handed down so he could teach us undisturbed. I was scanning the sheets and helping him edit parts to look like a rubber-stamp approvable plan ... my shoulders ached and my vision blurred and then grew black...

...I was driving a pickup truck through the country. I pulled into a gravel drive between a trailer with an intricate walkway/ deck and a shelf of ancient stone carvings now covered with grass and weeds. About a dozen of my classmates were there playing ball and my task was to get instructions from inside of the trailer that would explain what formation and steps we should take to clear the stones and open them to their ancient, intended purpose. I had to do this before Brother Mc came and none of my peers could know that I knew this. I had to make it seem to happen organically. I climbed out of the truck and up the intricate walkway but every door and window was locked. Then Joey (a weird dream amalgamation character) came over to see what I was doing and I had to pretend nonchalant mischief. I had just figured out (mentally) the way into the trailer and felt urgency because Brother Mc would soon be coming. I heard and felt a rumbling and looked up over the trailer to see the Brother was a 25 foot giant dressed like Paul Bunyan -- he was both Paul Bunyan and Brother Mc. He flashed me the briefest sideways glance of acknowledgement while bellowing about those of us who were content to watch the shadows on the wall. Joey dashed over the walkway and into the field. I used this momentary distraction to enter the trailer from a back window but before I got in I noticed Brother Mc was carrying a hairless, purple rodent -- it looked like kangaroo babies (joeys) when they exit the birth canal and have to crawl unassisted into their mothers' pouches. I did not understand but I was unafraid and glad and then I woke up.

St. Patrick and a Triple Brigid, Brought To You By the Banshee

Patrick, is of course, Patron St. of Ireland and Ireland has produced hundreds of saints, so that's quite an accomplishment. Patrick did bring Catholicism to Ireland and is credited with ending slavery there about 500 years before it was abolished anywhere else.

Patrick is reputed to have driven the snakes out of Ireland. The snakes are considered to be a metaphor for paganism / druidism / nature religions. However, if you grew up Irish Catholic as I did, you understand that the savor of the old religion has never left us entirely. For example, I was told to dedicate myself and my son to the Blessed Mother (which is what I was taught to call her -- Mary, the Mother of God or the Blessed Mother and hardly ever did we call her the Virgin Mary).

We have a saint to act as patron and go-between of every possible human concern, so St. Dymphna (an Irish Princess) is patroness of mental illness because her father tried to seduce / marry her and cut off her head when she denied him.

St. Brigid is patroness of Ireland and also blacksmiths, chicken and dairy farmers, fugitives, midwives and children whose parents aren't married. You should also pray to St. Brigid to prevent house fires I and once heard that she is credited with inventing whistling -- but that might have been the pre-christian Goddess Brigid, who may be the mother of both the saint and the Lwa Maman Brigette which closes a major loophole for me as I have always figured Irish catholicism to be as much of a syncretic religion as Voudoun and Santería.

Maman Brigitte intrigues me. She is noted for her enjoyment of rum flavored with many hot peppers and her beautiful and sensuous dancing. She lives at the Cemetery Gates near her husband the Baron.

Together they bridge the crossroads between left and right, life and death, and this and that. Her rulership of death and sensual beauty puts me in mind of another Irish other -- the banshee.

The banshee is sidhe, a lovely youthful fairy woman who invented the fine art of keening (mournful screeching laments for the dead) and has attached herself to certain Irish clans. She appears to warn us of impending death within the family or clan and is reputed to sound that warning with her unearthly keening.

As one with whom the banshee visits, I can tell you that she doesn't necessarily screech, but rather lifts the veil between this side and the other. What that means is just as she shows me who is leaving us, I am also blessed to know who is coming to us. Unfortunately, having a veil lifted briefly often displays a scene without a context and I believe more strongly every day that our time of departure is pretty much chiseled in stone ahead of time. So for a variety of reasons, I am often aware of the pending death of a loved one but powerless to change things. Knowledge is a mixed blessing.

That said, the banshee hasn't recently been by to visit with any death reports -- however there seem to be a few healthy, happy babies on the way.

Love, La Weirdo Sirena

Happy Super Mardi Tsunami Gras

It's Mardi Gras and Super Duper (or Tsunami) Tuesday, with dozens of states holding their Presidential Primaries today -- including mine.

Romance Challenge 2008 has come and gone. It went well -- four of us showed up with our pages. Mine sucked and was completely unromantic, although following the advice of Pavel Chekov (and Joe C) I opened with a dream and you can read it here. What came out of Romance Challenge 2008 was that we formed a writer's cabal and now we are going to focus on short stories for a few months and work our way up to a novel. The short stories are assigned by genre and our next assignment is historical fiction.

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Enjoy your Tuesday and may it be fat!

Anne

Someone tagged me with a meme, which I hope to craft in E-Prime, a writing discipline Paula described here. I feel some ambivalence regarding it. On the one hand, I may improve my writing style by using the passive voice less frequently. This might make me less passive in deed as well as in thought. On the other hand, this imposition makes writing more difficult, and perhaps more awkward, as I wish not to devolve from the subject of my story to its object.

Back to the meme... You must talk about your middle name and my parents dubbed me Jennifer Anne. Next, they* would insist I post the meme rules. I care very little for rules created by others, so I choose to skip that part -- actually, I choose to skip all of it, except the part where I write about some famous women who bore this name of Anne.

Anne Bonny Ah, piracy!!!

Anne Bonny's father knocked up her mother while paying her -- for maid services, not made services. To avoid scandal, they moved from Ireland to Charleston, South Carolina, not yet USA, a notiorious pirate city in that era.

Anne married James Bonny, moved to present-day Nassau, grew bored with Lame James, put on men's clothing and asked for a position on Calico Jack Rackam's ship. (Calico Jack created the Jolly Roger.) Anne killed a shipmate when he discovered her secret -- although later, she discovered Mary Read's secret -- Jack's ship housed two cross-dressing women!

OR -- Anne grew tired of Lame James and took up with Calico Jack. The two comandeered a ship with a lot of her pirate buddies. Somewhere in the Bahamas, Mary Read joined the crew.

THEN -- One day, the Jamaican government cornered Bonny, Rackham, Read and crew in their sloop. All of the men decided they could never successfully take or fight the ship attacking them and went down into the hold to drink until captured. Mary and Anne alone tried to fight off their attackers.

The Jamaican government found the whole lot of them guilty of piracy and sentenced them to hang. Anne and Mary "plead their bellies". (Suprisingly, dozens of men managed to impregnate the only 2 women on the ship.) Their executions stayed, Anne finagled an escape and disappeared from the historical record. (Mary Read seems to have died of fever in prison.) Some stories say she married another and returned to piracy. Other stories have her returning to South Carolina where she remarried and founded a plantation with her husband. In any case, Anne Bonny's life remains the stuff of legends.

Anne Boleyn: Enter the queen.


Shunted off to France to Louis XII's court when still a very young girl, Anne learned to speak and read French. She also developed a taste for French food, literature and clothing and stayed until about age 19 in the court of Henry's sister Queen Mary before returning to Britian in the court of Queen Catherine -- daughter of Queen Isabella. It seems Anne was contracted to marry a couple of noblemen at a couple of points.

Anne, the more-famous Boleyn (King Henry VIII bedded and begat two children on her sister Mary) ** eventually and with much effort seems to have attracted the eye and favor of the king through intelligence and sex appeal. He put aside his wife Catherine of Aragon (who had provided him with no living heir and grew older, much like Henry) by having their marriage declared invalid via adultery, as his brother had left her a virgin widow before Henry married Catherine.

Henry and Anne married when she informed him of her pregnancy. Not wanting to cast shadows on the birth of a potential heir, Anne's ambitions finally saw fulfillment. Of course, 16th century Europe assumed an heir came with a penis -- kind of a ready-made scepter. Like many women, Elizabeth I entered this world on a tide of blood and disappointment. Of course, she grew and evolved into one of England's most powerful and influential rulers.

After failing to produce a male heir and helping Henry and England to see that a marriage did not equal permanence, rumors and danger increased around Anne Boleyn. Henry accused her of adultery and incest (with her brother). She lost her marriage, crown and head in May of 1536.

St. Anne: The Mother of Our Lady

In a religion that often reviles the sacred role of women, St. Anne's existence in the canon instructs us that:

1. We need mothers and grandmothers. Even the zealous born-again autocrats and the pedophiliac followers of Paul of Tsarsus -- who ruined Christianity (in my opinion).

2. The Catholic Church had to create a shadow of a matriarchy in order to convert those who followed the earth religions.

St. Anne seems created from archetypes -- but so what? The Mother of the Mother and the grandmother of Christ, St. Anne's mystery weaves itself from the sacred feminine.

(This image by DaVinci depicts St. Anne.)

*Someone once told me, "they" are the ones who do not love you. Think about it. Everytime you refer to "they" or "them", they certainly tend to act like haters, rather than lovers.

**{Note to the feminist sisterhood: E-Prime challenges me yet again by making Mary Boleyn the object of procreation, rather than the subject -- a woman's actual role in pregnancy and childbirth. However, in the case of copulating with Henry VIII, I postulate that a woman received the King and prayed to god he tossed her a Y chromosome so she could keep her head and her bed.}