Swearing in French in Guerrero

We'll get back to Marie de l'Incarnation soon, I hope, because her story is nuts. She was a powerhouse, a dynamo, a great teacher, a prolific letter-writer, and a nun-scholar-philologist in the wilds of old Canada. In the meantime, here is a story about swearing like a (Québec) Frenchman while wintering south of two borders.

Québecois swearing is justly famous for its outrageousness. If the offense or inconvenience you are suffering is not too great, you can of course just mutter a clipped 'marde' under your breath and have done with it. If, however, the flurry from your neighbor's souffleuse just blew your tasty string of tire d'érable (I remember loving that as a kid; thank God those teeth were temporary) right into the bits of hair sticking out from under your tuque, your ire is unlikely to be fully vented after a mere monosyllable (we think our four-letter-words are handy stress relievers: imagine having ten or fifteen syllables to let off that steam). Instead of a tiny clenched fistful of choices and one short puff of air, Québec Francophones have at their disposal the vast vocabulary of four hundred years of North American Catholic history from which to fashion not merely obscene, but elaborately, flamboyantly, nonsensically obscene multi-part jurons/sacrés combining every religious term conceivable. In English, people sometimes murmur 'Oh, God,' or 'Jesus,' (whether knowingly/deliberately or completely unconsciously) whereas in Québec the would-be swearer has the entire Mass, the Old and New Testaments, two thousand years of saints, all entries main and sub- in the Catechism, and every last detail of ecclesiastical vestments, architecture and ornamentation from which to choose his sacrés.

Now, baptism records notwithstanding, no one is actually Catholic anymore in Québec. That stopped in the 60s, but it doesn't change the fact that it is still objectionable in polite society to yell a series of religious words interspersed with terms alluding to the body's copulatory and excretory functions. So there are euphemisms. Plenty of them. Calvaire (Calvary) and câlisse (chalice) can become calette, calvette, caltour, calvasse, calverasse, câlif/caliphe (caliph or qaliph), câlique and, with a dig at reference to the Huguenot Protestant portion of the province's settlers, Calvin, Calvinasse, Calvinisse, Calvinouche, and so on.

In order not to offend old ladies by saying 'tabarnac' which is what you would say if you were a Québecois trying to mutter 'tabernacle' while frustratedly searching for the nearly invisible

Rue Calvin in Québec City,

you might instead grumble tabarnache, tabarnouche, tabarniche, tabarnane, tabaslac, or even tabarouette (= ta barouette).

(Sa Barouette.)
(Jean à de longues moustaches. Je répète: Jean à de longues moustaches.)

If, however, you were less worried about people overhearing and being offended by your swearing because you were somewhere no one would understand the polite words, either, such as frustratedly searching for the nearly invisible Calle No. 2 in Acapulco, you might be less inclined toward restraint and let all three real syllables fly, giving yet another reason for Mexican resort workers, street vendors, and taxicab drivers to continue to refer to loud Francophone Quebeckers as 'tabernacos,' via analogy to 'nacos'

NaCo T-shirts

which is the Mexican version of 'chav' and 'joual' and just as classist as these, but with the advantage of having a fair bit of racism mixed in, as well.

('There is no racism in Mexico. -Said this câline of a tabarname of a calvénousse of a baptême of a naco.')

But, just as other vicious words have been retranslated and refurbished in the past few decades as emblems of pride rather than vehicles of derision or hate, so, too, has naquismo as an identity been reclaimed and self-consciously turned on its head in all its garish glory. For the past decade there has been a NaCo clothing company (which was even quite trendy a couple years ago in distinctly non-naco circles with t-shirts such as the designs in this posting and 'Ser Naco Es Chido' and 'M is for Mojado' ['wetback']), with outlets in both Mexico and the U.S., not to mention online.

According to cultural critics such as Carlos Monsiváis and others, however, the word is simply too nasty from its very origin to merit rehabilitation. Most agree the word comes from 'Totonaco' or, possibly, 'Nacohuatl/Nahuatl,' and thus always contains a racial element when used by comparatively cultured, educated and light-skinned Mexicans to refer not only to those with less refinement and schooling, but more indigenous blood. 'Naco' for Monsiváis is 'proletario, lumpenproletario, pobre, sudoroso, el pelo grasiento y el copete alto, el perfil de cabeza de Palenque, vestido a la moda de hace seis meses, vestido fuera de moda. Naco es los anteojos oscuros a la media noche, el acento golpeado, la herencia del peladito y el lépero, el diente de oro. Naco es el insulto que una clase dirige a otra.'

Now, I for one am about as sick of feigned folksyism as I could be, but it is one thing deliberately and inconsistently to drop one's G's from the present progressive in an attempt to get the lumpenproletariat to vote for you ('Guysngals, our regulatory system is outdated...there's somethin that's goin on in our world, in our nation...that needs some shakin up and fixin') and another altogether to be at ease with and proud of all the sweat, callouses, and disapproving looks your naco or joual heritage has earned you. Had someone suggested to me a few years ago that there would be a Democratic presidential candidate of African ancestry, to which the Republican response was going to be Class War, I would have suggested to the speaker that he perhaps 'didn't inhale' a great many more times than Bill Clinton - and quite possibly didn't do that inhaling very, very recently.

The Genius of Compassion

Part of what excites me about the company I'll be working for is their belief, consonant with mine, that we are all utterly, radically, equal in worth. I think most Americans can sign on to the notion that a guy with two hands is not of substantively greater ontological standing, or possessed of significantly richer human dignity, than the guy next door who lost one of his in a boating accident. Where I think they stop acceding in large part is the point at which the argument includes individuals with little perceived 'productive' value. We have on the one hand an instinctive fear of anything different, which can certainly be overcome by rationality, personal experience, and openness. Unrelated to that, however, is a troubling enculturated rating scale of humanity particularly present in the United States with its historical emphasis on productivity and industriousness and the lionization of the self-made man. In this schema, someone who doesn't or can't earn as much as another is quite literally worth less than him. The problem arises when this purely financial equation is applied to other realms.

I know with deep certainty from my own experience that we all have our gifts and disabilities. The array is unique to the individual. We are thus all people-with-disabilities. Put in outdated terms, we are all in our own ways 'disabled persons,' 'retarded' relative to others in certain areas. Every genius has things he will never be competent at, just as every person with more limited intellectual abilities has areas in which he can excel. I think most people can calmly accept that a million-dollar football player could be great at running and tackling but less adept at theoretical cosmology, and that a person with ALS in a wheelchair might be stellar at the latter but wretched at the former. The point at which I think it becomes difficult is when the argument for equal inherent worth and dignity includes people who are limited in both physical and intellectual pursuits. We can see that Stephen Hawking is clearly earning his keep; so, too, is the running back whose physically punishing job will have health consequences for the rest of his life.

But I think that when we look at the gifts which we ourselves are most grateful to have, those that bring the most richness to our lives, they are seldom either grandiose or superficial ones, like having a knack for making millions, being able to run marathons, being a genius in one area, or having impeccable taste. The gifts we feel most grateful for, and which we tend to believe are in fact constitutive of our deeper selves, are the small, everyday ones, like tolerance, patience, sincerity, fairness, trustingness, and empathy. And those sorts of little yet profound gifts are present in every sort of person.

They are, moreover, productive - if, admittedly, not necessarily in a financial, or secular-Calvinist sort of way. People who are able to empathize readily with others produce a different atmosphere - in the home, at work, in friendships, and in the larger society. Those who are able to trust produce reciprocal trust in others, leading to honest communication and genuine communion. Anyone who can accept others as they are, without condescension, judgmentalism, or fear, stands a great chance at creating meaningful ties with others, which in turn can produce a better, fairer, kinder, more decent world. I don't think it takes a genius to see that.

Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...

So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.


I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:

'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'

And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.



Chesterton again:

'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).

But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.


As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.

I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.

More from our Correspondent in Geneva

Well, very excitingly (to me, anyway) today is St. Jane Frances de Chantal's day. It is exciting to me not just because I love her and her story, but because also this not only brings us back to Savoy (yikes! who would have thought!) and Geneva and all its Calvinists, and gets back to that issue of historicity that I snarkily mentioned a few posts back. Which I'll get to a few lines down, or a few posts down the road, but first: St. Jane Frances, or Ste. Jeanne Françoise, if you like your French names to stay in French.


She is sort of another St. Francis' St. Clare: his student, his peer, his friend, his spiritual companion, and his travel partner on a long and profound journey. This time, it is a François-Francis instead of a Francesco one, the sixteenth century instead of the thirteenth, the Renaissance rather than the Middle Ages, and a Francis born of Savoyard nobility rather than of wealthy Umbrian merchants. This Francis, Francis de Sales, was a carefree and competent student, then lawyer, and then a bishop, rather than an apathetic student turned playboy-dandy turned mendicant, and before joining and guiding Jane Frances on her spiritual journey, he set out like Francis of Assisi on a way of life quite unlike that his family had intended for him, turning his back on his wealth like Francis, but going over to Geneva to convert Calvinists à la St. Dominic instead of founding an order à la the Franciscan Francis.


Both St. Francis de Sales' and St. Jane Frances' stories are stories of waiting. Francis felt a strong vocation before he went to law school, but he waited and waited, wanting to make sure it was truly a vocation rather than his ego leading him. St. Jane was a young devout widow with children when she felt overcome with a desire to serve God more fully. When Jane asked the now Bishop Francis to undertake her spiritual direction, he counseled her to patience: 'I had to know fully what God himself wanted. I had to be sure that everything in this should be done as though his hand had done it.' Just as he had waited for his calling and for his Calvinists, and as he would later for his new sister's convent, Francis counseled Jane again to wait when she told him of her overwhelming desire to take vows: 'Be patient until you get the wings of a dove, and then you can fly. I am very much afraid that you are a little too ardent and headlong, that you pursue too many desires rather too eagerly. Courage, my dear sister; if our will belongs to God, we ourselves are surely His.'

And this moderation was an essential element of the institute, and then order, the two founded in 1610, the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. So that religious aspirants of older age or less robust health, 'strong souls with weak bodies,' might be able to fulfill their calling, Francis and Jane dispensed with the sort of physical austerities Poor Clares and other orders endured. St. Francis advised the community's new members and superior, 'Let your humility be boundless; let it be the source of your virtues; let it be manifested in all your actions, till gentleness towards your neighbor become natural to you by force of your frequent use of it.' Later, St. Jane described the charism of the order as essentially 'a spirit of deep humility before God and of great gentleness toward our neighbor.'

This gentleness was modeled already by Jane the wife and widow as she fed the town's poor and sick, and in the very gentleness of the rule itself: St. Jane accepted into the order a woman in her eighties and those young and old women whose infirmities would have barred them from religious life were it not for the inclusiveness of Salesian spirituality and its insistence that all people, regardless of health, wealth, status, occupation, age, or education, are called to love and holiness, and that we can manifest our love in small but profound acts of mercy and compassion. As Thomas Dailey said in Praying with Francis de Sales, 'Enabled and ennobled by this love, human beings are capable of much more than might well be imagined. They are capable of living a true life of devotion in the midst of worldly pursuits. They are capable of giving birth, through faith, to a new culture of life and of love.'

Also, unlike Savonarola, Francis de Sales in The Devout Life reveals that he thought games and jokes and dancing were okay, if in moderation: 'I am inclined to say about balls what doctors say of certain articles of food, such as mushrooms and the like--the best are not good for much; but if eat them you must, at least mind that they are properly cooked,' and 'if you would dance or play rightly, it must be done as a recreation, not as a pursuit, for a brief space of time, not so as make you unfit for other things.' I like anyone who has bad things to say about mushrooms.

Infelix Ego -

if they only hadn't stolen all those left shoes, I could have pawned them and the visor-light and made a bid!

Wow, in just the same manner of everything I think or do or feel being reduplicated in some way about 12 hours later, this time it was over on the Intentional Disciples blog, which is the blog for the Catherine of Siena Institute, which was started at Blessed Sacrament parish here in Seattle, which had a Dominican mass today, which was the Feast Day of St. Dominic - they had a quiz on whose signature is this?

It was Savonarola's, and you could buy it at auction at the moment if you were thusly disposed (and thusly endowed), and I know it was Savonarola's not just because I'm not one to forget a pretty face,



but because I have been reading about him and trying to figure out his place in early Protestantism, if there is such a place. I would say Protestantism, but excepting Lutherans I do often get the sense that many Protestant denominations take a - what? - segmented? discontinuous? disarticulated? view of Christian history, inasmuch as those inclined that way tend to see two punctuating epochs - the First/Second Covenants, and then the Reformation/now - with a large fuzzy bit in between populated by hazy robed figures undeserving of much scrutiny.

Yet even among this group there are some revered figures in medieval theology (and, admittedly, among other groups there are loads), and many of the ideas of this singular figure (who himself ended up in a bonfire, but not before being treated to the rack first by his Medici hosts) prefigured many of the Reformers' concerns. He criticized the excesses of Rome and of Orders in much the same language and to much the same level of vituperation as Reformers did - yet he also echoed the return-to-the-heart-of-Jesus'-Christianity sentiment that had resounded over and over throughout the Middle Ages. The Church eventually had all his works formally banned - but by that time they were best-sellers all over the place and being printed in areas and languages too far from Rome to control.

Anyway, if you like the asceticism of a Calvin but prefer a Florentine accent in denunciations of dancing and drink, you would love Savonarola. If you like the gist of Dante but would prefer to do away with all the needless poesy, he's your man. And if you are inclined to think that Boccaccio and Erasmus would be just fine were it not for the wit, you will find all the spleen you need but none of the humor you don't in the fiery Dominican from Florence.

Here is some of Isaias' bonfire of the vanities in Savonarola's honor. I think this is most poetic in the King James. And the Dominican New Testament translation by Francis Spencer, OP, doesn't have Isaias, for what may or may not be obvious reasons.

Moreover the LORD saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:

Therefore the LORD will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will discover their secret parts.

In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, The rings, and nose jewels, The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, The glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils.

And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

So the Bartender Says to the Horse --

Why the long face?

Alright, so I explained why I like and respect thinky atheists. But there are plenty of stinky atheists, too, and my bonhommerie is as stressed in thinking about them as it is with the feelgood self-help pseudopagans who take their spiritual direction alternately from 'Prosperity Gospel' quacks and shrink-wrapped plastic 'I Ching' sets from Barnes and Noble.

Part of the stinkiness I can't bear is their frequent supercilious meanness. Anybody who believes anything is dumb, not just different, wallowing smugly in willed ignorance, so restraint isn't called for: the idiots won't get the joke, anyway. Of course, religious people can be just as intolerant as this in their rhetoric, as well -- and knowledge of that fact is sometimes fodder for the mean atheists' lack of consideration. But for now I'm leaving uncharitable believers alone, since they really make my head bleed, and sticking with the angry atheists.

Now, before you say, 'And what about all those rants about Calvinists on here, Vif?', let me remind you they were not about real Calvinism nor even about John Calvin. When I go off on Calvinism it is about the entrenched and invisible secularized vestiges of Calvinism that underpin so many of our attitudes, habits, and neuroses here in the U.S. It's a bit like Althusser's ideology, a bit like Barthes' mythology, and a lot like a troublesome patch of morning glories which, despite having all the flowers and stems and leaves mowed down, are just as present as ever because their roots have already spread widely through the garden. You don't have to believe in the existence of God or John Calvin or even Geneva in order for these Calvinistic assumptions or aspirations to affect your view of culture, commensality, kindness, pleasure, and success. You just have to live in the United States for a while.

So, that having been resolved to all parties' satisfaction, my stinky atheist of the day is Mr. Eddie Izzard, who appears to believe that declaring his atheism over and over earns him a de facto Genius rating and the right to make jokes ridiculing the most heartfelt and sincere of beliefs. He likewise lampoons God and Jesus themselves in extended fashion as bumbling idiots, with Jesus as a sort-of sad sack sucker-Messiah who doesn't know what he is doing and doesn't much care.

Honestly, there are ways to do religious humor. I've seen plenty of stuff that succeeds mightily and yet doesn't offend even when it pokes fun at or contrasts particular beliefs or practices. And I don't just mean brilliant Jewish insider humor, but as well stuff from outside that yet manages to convey a level of respect for the subject. It is not impossible, not at all, but it requires subtlety, maturity - and compassion.

When people cry 'Is nothing sacred anymore???' they seldom intend their lament literally. Rather, it is a wish for a return to some measure of delicacy, consideration, and politesse: what most mean is 'Is nothing off-limits anymore? Is nothing private anymore?' and 'Is nothing beyond the bounds of decency and common courtesy anymore?' It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politeness.

And this is where Izzard's juvenile monologue about idiotic Creators and half-wit sons loses my interest. It was, and should have remained, settled a couple centuries ago that the natural sciences can tell us little of value about religion, and that religion likewise can tell us much about the cultivation of the soul but rather little about geology, or geometry, or cattle-breeding. That an individual has come to this epiphany in the 21st century and is shocked to find religion lacking in scientific insight (as in Izzard's version of Noah) just seems odd to me. A person can find himself unmoved by religion for various reasons, but that there is inadequate discussion of thermodynamics in John of the Cross is one, were it me, that I would feel slightly silly proffering as the crux of my atheism.

But I would also say that even if the individual believes the experiences of John, or Jonas, or Rumi or Rahman Baba to have been 'all in their heads,' ridiculing their interior experience, in addition to being uncharitable, mean-spirited, and thus indefensible morally, is also simply as stupid and pointless in a pragmatic sense as making fun of a friend who thinks he looks better in his new haircut than he does: it's his haircut; let him live in it. You have a right to your own path of haircut self-discovery, and if on it you decide you prefer to continue with the tried-and-true No. 3 in perpetuity, you absolutely are under no obligation to get a copy of your friend's style.

This reactionary approach moreover conduces to the sort of us-v.-them mentality that - you guessed it! - religion is famous, and endlessly parodied and excoriated, for: they're stupid, we're not, so join our club. That an atheist presumably above the fray should resort to the same dirty tactics he would quickly condemn in others is, while not shocking (since we're all only human) still lazy - and, again, puerile. I would cringe and wince and undoubtedly throw up a little in my mouth if I had to read my high school journals filled with every pithy quote from Camus and Gide and Rimbaud that I felt could serve to prop up my (age-appropriate, let me add) stance that Religion is idiotic crap for crappy idiots who like crappy things. Thank God no one gave me a microphone, because in my defensive and angry posture I, too, sounded a bit like a crappy idiot.

Although it helped me terrifically with French!

Architectural Indigestion

The last two Sundays, when I turned on NPR after church in the evening, the story I tuned into was on both occasions relevant to things I had been contemplating that day. This is not a blog about religion, but the topic does come up every now and then - if, I freely confess, primarily to blame the Calvinists for everything I can't blame on the Beats.

Today just before leaving, I was preoccupied with the topic of sacred architecture and, to a lesser extent, religious art, ornamentation, and sacramentals within a church building: in other words, the totality of the physical presence of a constructed sacred space. There are as many schools of thought on this as there are believers, non-believers, architects and art-haters. But there are two traditional purposes sacred architecture strives to fill: to present an invitation to the faithful and to the stranger, and to provide a physical, lisible symbolic representation of the individual's journey from the profane to the sacred. Now, NPR's story when I was driving back was about reconceiving and refashioning the newsroom not the chapel, but what it illustrates is that architecture is important, it can serve or hinder its putative goals, and that we, the victims or beneficiaries of an architect's design, do notice and are affected by the space.

What got me on to it first was writing about some of the perhaps surprisingly numerous shared beliefs of the Friends and Catholics. While every Christian church has some genetic resemblance to all others, there is not only serious doctrinal difference to address in comparing them, but also the subtler distinctions in emphasis among all the various ideas they still share. In other words, it's not just huge things like 'faith v. works' or literalness v. historicity, but how much stress is put on certain tenets at the expense of which other ones.

Now, the anti-clerical Friends may seem to be the furthest from the hugely organized Catholic Church - and yet in reality they both place tremendous emphasis on the need for individual discernment. Encyclicals and other writings, with increased vigor after Vatican II, insist over and over on the importance of an informed, passionate, and active laity, the need to question and to search for answers, and the importance of being an activist when convinced of the appropriateness of that course. Both churches, as well, lay tremendous stress on justice, including social justice, which is conceived in both traditions as emanating from and being necessitated by the fact of utter, radical equality among all people. The language is different, but the message is the same.

As fascinating as all that is (to me), one place there is a huge difference is in how meeting spaces are viewed by the two groups, which makes sense as they are meant to do different things. And I have no intention of going into that in any depth. But a Quaker meeting-house does not strive to invite, as do churches of most other Protestant and Catholic traditions, nor does it attempt to lay out a narrative or an argument, except of simplicity and the concept of the inner light within all present and all without. Friends would say we glorify God through our actions, and too many, or too-richly-decorated, things around distract us from the real issue, which is 'what are we going to do/ what does God want us to do?' Friends likewise assert that, rightly lived, life is worship, and if simplicity is integral to one's life, this value should of course carry over into meeting halls and the worship meetings within them.

I haven't given much of an explanation there, but it makes sense in a Quaker context. It does not make sense in the context of regular Protestantism, or in Catholic or Orthodox traditions, where the physical church is meant to inspire awe, create an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity, and lead us to contemplate the glory of God, a glory which exceeds that of the gilt and the plainchant, but which can be symbolized by them - by things we can apprehend through our senses and intellect. This, too, has an elegant and coherent logic, to which I'm also giving short shrift.

Additionally, in their beauty, churches, temples, mosques, and cathedrals are meant to invite the sinner in, that he might be led through beauty to Beauty. Again, part of the logic is that the place one worships God should celebrate His wonder through the highest efforts of human labor, and that being drawn to beauty is a noble and God-given trait - but since it is also true that humans like sparkly things, offering them a few in the place of worship is one way to help them keep coming back, in the hope that eventually more substantive things and a more mature understanding of the fullness of the religion will serve the same purpose.

However, even if you are not a beginner, there is something to be said for a holy space that looks like a holy space (unless you belong to a faith like the Friends within which this would make no sense). And I don't care if you believe in God or not, if you enter the Blue Mosque or the Hagia Sophia, a Thai temple or a Zen garden, the results of the care taken to evoke the majesty of the unknowable and the ineffable makes you believe in something. We were given our senses in the same package as we were given our minds, and unless you follow Mani or Mr. Calvin, I fail to see why punishing those senses in worship is necessary.

And that is my main point: the 1960s were regrettable. The 1960s were painful. The 1960s should have stuck to social reform and left style and design alone. That era is my proof that reincarnation does not happen, as I can attest that had I lived before, I would have done so much good in my life that not only would I not have been born when I would have had to witness the horrific legacy the decade wrought in the arts - but I would have taken every prophylactic precaution possible to ensure that my karma be so great that none of it would even have been perpetuated! So, since I'm here now, I wasn't here then, and the best I can do is to try to avoid imagining those puffy ladies' hats, those square ladies' suits, the clunky low heeled parsons' pumps with squared-off toes and ridiculous buckles, and the hideous architecture that evoked not so much the Great American Century as the Supreme Soviet. If I want to worship, I don't want to do it in a place that looks like the People's Recreation Hall and Refectory at Reeducation Center 29! There is a fairly crappy YMCA up the road, and a disastrous, menacing Albertsons a bit further on; I can always go to one of those if I need to savor a bit of Stalinist-gymnasium ambiance. I don't need to do it at church.

Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with him.

Perhaps I should have then, according to Cicero, at any rate, shared today's heavily feta-ed spinach and pasta dish with the people I bought my last car with. The problem is (other than the fact that the feta was eaten today and the car was bought a few months ago) (actually it was eaten, and this post mostly written, more than a month ago, before the, ahem, issues)-- if there is a problem, and I'm not sure that there is -- that I honestly do believe everything people say.

There are two qualifiers: I endeavor not to put myself in circumstances clearly mitigating against an atmosphere of trust, and I am more than capable of rescinding the trust once it is clear it is no longer warranted. For example, to satisfy the first condition, I don't go to car dealers. The second should be obvious: I wouldn't buy the Brooklyn Bridge twice. Even from an old lady. With flowers in her chignon.

The people I bought my newest car from were very nice, though. They lived on a houseboat and I liked their rug. They had some friendly cats, and they told me their names. They also lived close to me, which I admit probably earns them at least a lower branch on the trust tree a priori, in terms of (obviously logically untenable) ingroup/outgroup status. They showed me the new car they were replacing my new one with, and the trade made sense and adduced to their argument - and thus my faith in them.

I asked what was wrong with it, and they said nothing other than the lock on the passenger side needing to be disengaged from the inside. For me, this is not a problem, as any passenger I might have would be far more likely to want to be escaping from the car, rather than attempting to break in to savor my questionable navigational powers. When we took a test drive, the brakes seemed weak, and I overcame my concern over seeming rude with Valid Arguments (to myself) about Reasonable Questions (to them) and therefore asked about this. In retrospect, I less asked than provided my interlocutor an answer proactively by suggesting that it was perhaps simply the contrast of having to stop such a big heavy car as this versus merely imagining a stop in my tiny hatchback and having it come true. I could push my other car to most destinations and not lose much time. It is very small.

He agreed with my suggestion and responded that, yes, that was probably it, and they had had the brakes serviced recently. It was a matter of becoming accustomed to them, which I would, as he had.

I still haven't, though. I still try to leave eight car lengths between me and the car in front. In inclement conditions, which, it being January, are frequent, I try to double that when possible. And today, at the garage, my oil change mechanic confirmed my initial impression that there might be something wrong with them. What, he suggested, was largely wrong was that there weren't any. Stopping being one of the three things I most look for in a car, I am forced to get them fixed.

I do feel sad, though. Not just that the seller patently lied, but also that I was truly that dumb, or imperceptive. However, in my defense, there were no odd noises. The car is nearly silent, most particularly when compared to the other one, which is made of paper. Additionally, the last oil changer (at a chain oil-changing place), failed to notice anything, despite their 1200-point Vehicle Inspection. (He did, of course, notice all manner of irrelevant things he'd be happy to replace, after which overhaul I would have spent enough money to have bought a third car and a Vespa.)

I loathe putting money into cars, however. I don't mind tires and oil changes. Spark plugs make sense, too, as does keeping one's muffler from dragging on the ground. But there is a limit, and all I want is a little (or large) box that starts and goes and stops. And has a heater. Alright, a good heater, with a good fan, the sort that heats up as though there were no water in the radiator and stays there, on high, bringing me bliss and fueling my thermal fantasies from September to May.

I don't mind spending money on a pretty vase, or furniture for the neighbor's cat, or flowers, or wine, or taxis. Imagine life without taxis available when just what you need is precisely a taxi and nothing more: it's a horrid thought. In any language. And it doesn't matter what they cost, because what you need is a taxi -- and here one is! How amazing! Always a blessing.

But I suffer from what amounts to an eternally-inchoate (thank God, because were it ever worked out it would be yet more ludicrous than it already is) conspiracy-sort-of theory regarding certain products and services. One, obviously, is car service and car parts. I don't believe all car service at a garage should be priced at the same rate: some jobs are easy, and some require fine troubleshooting. Turning a couple lug nuts is one thing, but often mechanics must utilize their brains and not just their brawn, resorting to analogies, logic, tricky diagnoses, comparison of all the options - and sometimes mustering a good bedside manner, too, which is not at all necessary when you simply have to relate We topped off the coolant, or The coolant looks fine. I can hold my own hand through that.

This distemper also extends to the purchase of certain products that we have allowed to become necessities. I in no way mean to say I am exempt from this enslavement, but merely that each time I acknowledge it I am more piqued. I live alone, and not in a family of seven; therefore I only seldom need to buy any of these, and I suspect this lack of frequency has prevented me from becoming inured to the injustice.

In this list are garbage bags and lightbulbs. They cost practically nothing, and in the first case I very rarely have need of them, and in the second they last far longer than anything of that price should be expected to. Yet in both cases I am resentful not only that I need them, but that there is nothing else that can be reasonably substituted. I could in theory use bedsheets if I had an unusual quantity of garbage -- but I don't have any old ones nor can I imagine doing so if I did. And candles and television sets have attributes in common with lamps -- but one can't read by the light of a television, and reconfiguring an entire home for candlelight would certainly require a level and amount of effort I could much more sanely and enjoyably direct elsewhere.

The most galling purchases, however, I always note as TP on my list and always end up buying all together, as I can never remember, once I get there, what my discreet notation system was meant to convey this time. I find purchasing any of the three difficult and embarrassing, as each is a stark and irrefutable admission of frailty, and of impending death. Each screams at the clerk and the moribund mortals behind me, in its gaudy or discreet packaging, that however glorious the undying soul may be, for this brief flicker in its eternal existence we are stuck haplessly inside these markedly inglorious fleshbags, urinating, defecating, menstruating, and accumulating gingiva as we variously await, bemoan, or battle the inevitable. And in the meantime, we buy as many products as we can to conceal and combat the true nature of our bodies and of life itself.

None of this would be as excruciating as it is, I suppose, if I were an average grocery-store customer, if my cart were piled high with all manner of distracting items. Food can divert the attention; the reader of my cart could focus on the pleasures of the flesh rather than its inevitable decay as he took note of the artisan breads and local cheeses and pounds of finocchiona and bresaola. But it's no use for me keeping large quantities of food on hand, and I hate bread. Therefore, there is never a cart piled high. There is never, frankly, need for a cart at all. I can always get by with a little basket, and when I muster the courage once again to parade my weakness before my peers, the terseness of the message renders it quite easily read to even the most pressed for time.

I do try to throw a few ringers in: wine, flowers, licorice... Of course, a basket of toilet paper, tampons, toothpaste, wine, flowers, and licorice looks rather egregiously like someone who is not succeeding magnificently in coming to terms with death and its precursors. 'Denial' these days is a far graver sin, we are told, than anything John Calvin or Billy Sunday warned us about. So perhaps directness is preferable. Or at least au courant.

However, as comfortable as I genuinely am with some of my atoms eventually ending up in potting soil, I suspect it is the intentionality that can be read from my purchases that most disturbs me. In other words, I presume that my fellows at the supermarket have come to the conclusion, via analogy to their own lamentable position, that my body engages in all manner of bodily functions just as theirs do, and that mine, like theirs, will one day cease to do any of them, and that I, like them, am in the meantime doing what I can to make the consequences of these functions less unpleasant for others and myself. What I don't enjoy is the declarative aspect of the purchase: it is though I am assertively announcing my intent to evacuate my bowels and rid myself of some spare endometrial bits. I am sharing with strangers information I'd rather keep private, if we can assume that the overwhelming majority of toilet-paper purchases are practical and not based on some kind of wild whim after having heard of this invention and its potential uses in home decorating or weaving or somesuch. I cringe every time I have to carry a pack of SuperQuilty around a store knowing that I have thereby given permission and incentive for everyone who sees me to picture me using it for its intended, sole, horrific purpose.

Happy Birthday, Ferdinand

Who, indeed, knew that your given name was Mongin, or that you were English at base?

Geneva, 1857. Dead, 1913. Atherosclerosis and pneumonia.

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure. French. Calvinist. Synaesthetic. Seminal. The Without-Which-Not for all the social sciences and liberal arts that have come after his quiet existence.

--But it is language itself, not merely pronunciation, that is always teratological, darling, as your descendents have amply shown. And as you along with Freud and Marx stripped the human- out of humanism, we have only a desiccated -ism to cleave to now, without a handy (PIE!) root to grab onto. Still, if you hadn't lived, I should never have been able to have read Zizek, and for that I thank you, if not now or at any other time for haute Structuralism at its hautist...


My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

Happy St. Calvin's Day!

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the US, and along with The Harvest, the fruits of This Great Land, squashes of all sorts and can-shaped cranberry puree, the changing of the seasons, colonialism, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, the Noble Savage and the White Man's Burden, we also pay homage to the undying legacy of John Calvin. He gave us hard work and Blackberrys and fax machines, to be sure, and quite possibly timeshares and cruiseboat holidays, as well, but the full measure of his influence cannot be appreciated without taking into account the Puritans' sumptuary strictures and their enduring significance.

'Original sin, therefore, appears to be an hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls "works of the flesh."' - J.C.

I do not mean to imply that I think the whole Reformation was a bad idea initially, or sprang from bad impulses. I would not like to have lived in Burgundy, for example, during a certain period, if I did not happen to be recognized as exactly and precisely orthodox by the Benedictines. I would have preferred not to live in Spain, either, from about 1500 to 1800, regardless of my affiliations or lack thereof. And I am grateful not to have been in the position of attempting to lead a devout life in some of the less-than-devout monasteries that reform and renewal put to right. However, if the end result would have been that no one, ever, centuries later, when I wouldn't even know, except in Heaven, where I could no longer feel pain, would have had to wear polyester masquerading as 'gabardine,' or drink 'white Zinfandel,' or stuff themselves into hideous little rooms on boats the size of cities with thousands of other holiday-makers, only to spend their days gorging on cafeteria food, playing shuffleboard, swimming in chlorinated pools in the midst of the Aegean, and debarking in growling hordes to buy up gilded replicas of Attic treasures and machine-made lace, I would gladly have submitted to whatever tonsure, penitence -- or cloistered aristocratic licentiousness -- were the case in my region.

'You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.' -J.C.

But because I didn't, we live in a society that continues to view pleasure as dangerous and the senses as Satan's inbuilt handmaidens. We oscillate between wordless orgiastic feedings of Grande Meals at the Big Hombre and the next day's punishing asceticism. Neither tastes like anything, but one causes self-loathing while the other promises redemption -- and flatter abs. We eat salmon-colored tomatoes in February and think nothing of it; we pump 'cheese' out of an aerosol; we have diabetes and hemorrhoids, cancer of the colon and hypertension, and our only consolation is At least we didn't enjoy ourselves getting to this point...

'Though Satan instills his poison, and fans the flames of our corrupt desires within us, we are yet not carried by any external force to the commission of sin, but our own flesh entices us, and we willingly yield to its allurements.' -J.C.

A handily reductivist version of Calvinism is that Adam screwed it up for all of us, and we're never going to get back to anything close to a prelapsarian state, in spirit or conditions or behavior, but it is our duty nonetheless to try to - even if we're some of the ones God has already decided He's not that keen on letting back into Heaven - with every waking breath, in each act and thought of our lives, and thus anything that distracts us from this is proof of our fallenness, our 'total depravity' (a phrase which came after Calvin himself but is not an unrepresentative distillation of his point of view), our hideous natures which draw us away from, rather than toward, the Good.

'Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.' -J.C.

This is an exceedingly long leap from the Roman Catholic position of 'don't get so drunk that your judgment will be clouded and you risk making bad choices and ending up in an opium den in Chinatown.' In Calvinism, we've already tied off our arm, flicked the needle, and had sex with the dealer. We are meretricious, deceitful, murderous, lazy, avaricious, gluttonous crackwhores from the start who would sooner kill you than wish you a good day. No wonder, then, that we can't stand the idea of enjoying a good meal in pleasant surroundings: one bite of the medium-rare filet with a delicate shallot beurre blanc and we have paved the way for lechery, idolatry, pederasty, income tax fraud, bestiality, and unbridled killing sprees. Enjoy anything too heartily, and it's only a matter of time before the stakes have to be raised, before the beurre blanc just won't do, it will have to be pounds of some ponderous Norman cream sauce, poured all over the steak and dripping down your chin, and the med-rare will mutate into saignant and before you know it you will be starring in a Bosch painting, eating babies, buggering lobsters, and never combing your hair.

So it arises that we take pains not to have too good a time. When that doesn't work, we endeavor to convince ourselves we are not really enjoying things but doing what we must, such as rampant overspending cloaked as necessary Christmas shopping or renovating yet again what we just discovered to be a hugely outdated living room. Or, we deny our urges so habitually, and in such illogical ways, that they perforce irrupt disguised - that they might for once be satisfied - and we rather than buy one pair of fancy shoes, or get a bit giddy on two glasses of port, or quietly watch the setting sun from the shore of a lake, instead order sixteen shots of whatever, stuff down some onion rings slathered in synthetic 'mayonnaise,' and try to convince the drunk girl next to us to go back to the apartment for anonymous, detached, barely conscious casual sex.

'So indulgent is man towards himself, that, while doing evil, he always endeavours as much as he can to suppress the idea of sin.' - J.C.

And that isn't what the Catholics warned us about, either. It's not the alcohol's fault. The alcohol is there in order that the rest can take place, in order deliberately to renounce judgment sufficiently that we can be as mindless of sin as of either genuine pleasure or redemption, and thus get on with our half-hearted quest for the bad food, the unsatisfying company, the superficial conversation, and the mindless, soulless, fumbling sex. We're no longer worrying about God, or Calvin, or Burgundian excesses. We don't even know where or what Burgundy is, for that matter, since we don't drink nice wines, or read books that aren't assigned, or travel to places where they don't speak American. And we no longer believe we're damned, nor care; we're chained to the ramified legacy of Calvin, without any recollection of how we got here or what the original argument was. We just know we're not supposed to enjoy ourselves. We should be multitasking on our Blackberrys while chasing the four-minute mile and listening to management seminars on our iPods, not idly reading the TLS on a Saturday morning and sipping mimosas in deck chairs amidst birdsong and evergreens.

'Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols.' -J.C.

So, when the dam breaks and the need for genuine pleasure mutates yet again into a virulent need to consume, we are stuck. It's too late to decide to keep fresh flowers in the house. Gone is our chance to enjoy the walking tour of the Piedmont, or to start wearing clothing that doesn't punish all the senses. And no longer will poetry or color or silky sheets or taking up ikebana or cheesemaking sate our deranged, repressed need for something, anything, that can stimulate a sense of even the most distant, third-order simulacrum of the commodity called 'enjoyment.'

But we've become by that point the crackwhore Calvin warned us about. Now it can no longer be about nuance or joy. We have ground ourselves down to nearly insensate lumps from alternating between compulsive and overarching gravitas surrounding work/'success' and puerile outbursts of mindless grasping that we can no longer just be. We have annihilated our receptivity so thoroughly that our whole outlook reduces not merely things but people, as well, to instruments. I see you for what you can give me, just like the obscenely large truck or the Patek Philippe or the ten numbing, dumbing vodka-and-Red-Bulls. But don't worry; as soon as I've eaten you and the four-pound McNasty and the 'craftsman style' high-end bathroom renovation, I'll spend two hours on the electronic bicycle and commit myself to at least three more memos a week and do a colon cleanse and take a Men's Retreat and swear off booze and find my inner child again and give him the kick in the teeth he so roundly deserves.

'I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.' -J.C.