The Wine-Dark Sea

Homeschooling has kind of stalled out for us since before Christmas. It’s not that Bella isn’t learning, I’m sure; but formal lessons of any kind have fallen by the wayside as I’ve not had much energy for gathering myself into a purposefulness. So today it was a wonderful surprise to find ourselves stumbling into a little impromptu lesson inspired by today’s feast, which is one of my favorites.

It is a frequent custom, though it doesn’t happen every single day, for Bella to get a chapter from a longer book read to her while the boys nap. So we read her chapter of our current book, a life of St Rose of Lima. Then I read a picture book for Sophie. Then I pulled out my Bible to read to them the passage of the conversion of St Paul from The Acts of the Apostles, part of my resolve to read to Isabella from the actual Bible more often in addition to retellings from her various Bible story picture books.

After we’d read the story of Saul’s vision on the road to Damascus and his healing by Ananias and his preaching of Jesus, then I thought it might be fun to show them some art inspired by that famous story. I googled “Conversion of St Paul” and clicked on Images and found the Carravaggio that I expected and a Michelangelo. Then I found this great Biblical art website that has catalogued a most impressive number of images of the subject, four pages of thumbnails. We didn’t look at all of them, there wasn’t time. But we clicked through to see quite a few of them. We had fun trying to identify which figure was St Paul, where the light was, or where Jesus was. It was interesting to try to figure out why each artist interpreted the picture as he had. Then Bella told me that none of them looked like what was in her mind. I told her that if she wanted to she could try to draw it; but she said she wouldn’t be able to get it right. Bella and Sophie had no idea that this was a school lesson and they are developing visual literacy. They just had fun looking at the pretty pictures.

Some of the images we looked at were from illuminated manuscripts and one, by Fra Angelico, was clearly from a psalter with the square neumes of chant notation so I turned on my iPod and played the girls the Invitatory Psalm from today’s Divine Office podcast while we looked at the image and I briefly explained that the picture was from a song book and would sound something like the one we were listening to.

One image that caught Isabella’s eye was very colorful and very modern looking. The link took us to a gallery of images from a contemporary Chinese artist, He Qi. So we clicked through and looked at all the images in the gallery, and Bella was able to identify the subject of almost all of them, thus demonstrating to me both her visual and her Biblical literacy. She immediately knew the subject of the Finding of Jesus in the Temple, the Annunciation, the wise and foolish virgins, she identified an Agony in the Garden as Jesus on the Mount of Olives with the apostles falling asleep while he prayed. (Here’s the index to the gallery where you can see all of He Qi’s work. I’m in love and have spent hours staring at all the images in the galleries)

We couldn’t actually tell which character in Brugel’s painting is meant to be St Paul.

We had a nice little side trip because Sophie spotted the one picture that wasn’t a conversion of St Paul but an image of the Road to Emmaus. So they asked me what that story was and I retold the story in my own words. (One of my favorites, because my parents used to own a Catholic book store called Emmaus.) That led to Bella asking about why were the women in the upper room and us discussing whether the apostles taught Mary about Jesus or Mary taught them about him.

Then Anthony woke up long before we’d exhausted the girl’s curiosity, which is probably a perfect place to end.

Bella was captivated by this one but neither of us could figure out which figure is supposed to be St Paul.

We’re all still sick and the house is a terrible mess from days of everyone being too tired to pick up properly; but it was one of our best learning days in a while. Isn’t it funny how that happens? Isn’t it funny how this spontaneous excursion was so much better than anything I might have planned ahead of time? Why do I spend so much time worrying? If I just rusted more I would see that Our Heavenly Father has it all taken care of.

And now it is time for me to go to bed. I think today was Day 6 of everyone being sick. I’m ready for this saga to be over.

We are all sick here. The big kids all have coughs and sniffles and are feeling under the weather. Ben is finding that all food tastes wrong. He’s thrown up a few times but I think it’s the cough and the post-nasal drip. Poor Anthony is probably feeling it the worst. I have to clear his nose for him to nurse and he throws up a bit after most feedings and every time I give him ibuprofen. Fortunately enough seems to stay in that it does help him feel a bit better for a little bit. I’ve spent large chunks of the last few days just holding him as he moans and coughs. My throat is raw and my sinuses are stuffy and I feel so achy and tired. Yesterday afternoon I passed out on the bed with Anthony. And Dom seems rather under the weather too.

Of course the house is a total disaster because no one has the energy to clean. I did a bit of laundry this morning when I had a bit of energy and Anthony had a small space where he felt well enough to crawl about. It’s amazing how time creeps by when you’re under the weather. I haven’t had any real time to write because I can’t put Anthony down to bed at bedtime. Ditto for watching the shows Dom and I watch. But perhaps that’s for the best. I’ve been going to bed earlier. I won’t say I’ve been getting more sleep with Anthony so restless and fussy all night but at least I’ve been in bed for more of the night.

So it goes in a sick house.

Finished on Saturday because on Friday night I found myself with a sick baby who wouldn’t sleep.

Since today marks my blog’s seventh anniversary, I thought I’d do a slightly different kind of quick takes and remember some highlights from each of the seven years I’ve been blogging. Not that anyone will likely care; but it’s interesting to me to see how much this blog has changed over the years. That’s one of the reasons I refuse to be pigeonholed as a “mommy blogger”. I am a mommy and I blog; but I began blogging before I was even engaged to be married and I’ve tried to continue to blog about all the things that interest me, even if sometimes the cute kid stories and pictures do threaten to take over.

So without further ado, here are seven quick peeks into the big changes that have happened at The Wine Dark Sea in the years since I posted my first entry.

1. 2005

In March I got engaged. (Unless I am sorely mistaken this blog entry was the sum total that I posted about my engagement.)
In August I was married (and wrote

about it after the fact.)
On Labor Day I learned how to read a pregnancy test. (But didn’t mention the pregnancy on my blog until November.)
I was mainly writing for myself back then, so there was no rush to be timely, no real sense of crafting things for an audience.

2. 2006

In May Isabella Marie was born and my life changed forever.
Back then I didn’t know how to upload pictures to the blog from my old Dell laptop and I figured that anyone who cared about such things was already reading Dom’s blog anyway.

3. 2007

In February I had a miscarriage, losing baby Francis at about 10 weeks. Then I had a scare with a diagnosis of uterine cancer that turned out to be false.

In June I discovered I was expecting again and immediately posted a picture on the blog. After my miscarriage, I decided I didn’t want to wait to tell the world about our baby because I had no idea how long I’d get to treasure being pregnant. Also, you can see that I’d figured out how to put pictures on the blog. That really changed the feel of things round here.

4. 2008

In March Sophia Therese was born, christened “Phia” by Bella, and I wrote blog posts from the hospital room while I was in labor.  bought a house and moved to the other side of Boston.

5. 2009

In July Benedict Joseph was born via planned c-section.

6. 2010

In June—Talk about sibling rivalry! Anthony made his presence known when Ben refused to nurse any more.

7. 2011

In February Anthony arrived a few days before his scheduled c-section.

Who knows what 2012 will bring to the Bettinelli family and to The Wine Dark Sea.

I wanted to add more updates to each take but now I’ve got a house full of sick kids. I’m only finishing this at all today because Anthony finally passed out on my lap.

Today The Wine Dark Sea turns seven. I wanted to write some kind of super post commemorating this historic day, but Ben was up half a dozen times in the night, Sophie was up about four times. Anthony, well, the night before last he was awake and howling from about 1 till about 5, so last night seemed good in comparison. I had to dose him with gas drops every time he woke to nurse because I gave into weakness and had BBQ beans for dinner; but he mostly slept with just one episode of fussing that ended with him stretched out on the bed beside me, feet in my back and head at Dom’s belly.

And all the kids were up at 5:45 and wanting to put on their snowsuits to go explore. Yes, we actually got several inches of snow. I told them they had to wait till the sun rose and they had to have breakfast first. And clean up the blocks, cans, and plastic containers that were strewn across the laundry room last night courtesy of Anthony that everyone was too tired to clean up at bedtime.

When I finally got them all suited up and outside in the sunny yard frolicking in the snow (with Anthony sitting by the back door happily playing with some of the snow that had been tracked in) I retired to the bathroom for a few minutes. Then all hell broke loose as Ben fell face down in the snow and lost his mitten and stood at the backdoor wailing to be let in and Dom, who wasn’t dressed yet, having showered after shoveling the driveway, standing at the back door trying to console him and yelling for me to hurry up.

Less than five minutes. That’s how much time they spent out in the snow. But they still had to have hot cocoa when they came in. And then Ben cried for about forty-five minutes before he consented to let me read him some books.

Now we are seven. Life looks so different than it did in the first days of this blog when I wrote about Walking through Salem on a Snowy Evening with my boyfriend or contemplating the view from my office. And now I must go prevent Anthony from pulling over the television… so it goes.

Believe me I was tempted to do a blog entry on the title of the first section, The Burial of the Dead—but I know there is someone out there saying: Get on with it already! How many blog entries can you post before you even get to the first line of the poem?! So I’ll let that go with a note that the title of this section is from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which begins

I AM the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. John 11: 25-26.

Keep those words in mind as you read because I believe that the the motif of resurrection is as strong as the theme of death. No, this is not a poem of despair; but the hope is there even if it is tentative and elusive.

And so at last we begin. The poem opens with one of my favorite lines in any poem:

  April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

In that first sentence there is a lot to unpack. First, is the reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which begins:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
10 That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
15 And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Ok, ok. I just had to stick it in in the Middle English because I took a class in Medieval Poetry in college and we had to read selections of The Canterbury Tales and all of Troilus and Criseyde in the original and so that’s how it always sounds in my own memory. But I’ll be nice and give it to you in a contemporary English translation:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.

In Chaucer April pierces March’s drought with sweet showers. Eliot seizes on that verb “pierce” and in his poem April is cruel not sweet. Eliot’s narrator is a sort of negative image of Chaucer’s—where Chuaucer rejoices in Spring’s abundant life which culminates in a longing for pilgrimage and renewal, Eliot’s narrator focuses on death and longs for winter’s sleep. He doesn’t want memory and desire to be aroused. He fears change and clings to his small comfortable life.

The confluence of lilacs and death calls to mind Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, another poem that sings about the return of spring and of a journey. In Whitman’s poem the journey is that of Lincoln’s corpse:

Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
 
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,

.

Why does Eliot choose this poem to allude to? I think very likely it is that image of the coffin and the journey of the corpse. But also other thematic parallels come to mind. Memory is a theme in Whitman’s poem, the way the lilacs’ yearly blooming stirs up the memory of Lincoln’s funeral in the previous April. There are more allusions to Whitman’s elegy to come—a major figure in Whitman’s poem is the thrush, which will appear in The Waste Land as well. 

So much for the first sentence. As you can see it is packed. But put aside the allusions to Chaucer and Whitman for a minute and enjoy the music of the lines as well. It can be tempting to get so caught up in the treasure hunt of tracking down Eliot’s allusions that I forget to appreciate the lyrical quality of the words themselves.

I love the enjambment. The emphasis is on the verbs: breeding, mixing, stirring.

I think that’s enough to chew on for now. Tell me what you think as you read these opening lines.

This is so cool. This week I stumbled upon these videos of a live performance of Beowulf in the original Old English, accompanied by Anglo Saxon harp! (With subtitles in modern English.) It is so cool. This is the way Beowulf was meant to be experienced. Not a text read in a book but an entertainment. Benjamin Bagby, who does it has a great voice and really acts out the drama. His musical accompaniment is wonderful too.

Opening Lines:

Grendel’s Ambush:

Battle:

An interview with Benjamin Bagby:

The website for the Beowulf performance is here with a lot of background information about the project. Evidently he hasn’t developed a performance of the entire epic to music, only parts of it. At some point he hopes to do an entire 5 hour performance.

You can buy a video of the whole performance for about $30. I’m thinking it will probably be finding its way into our library at some point.

I don’t listen to the Divine Office podcast very often; but I have the app on my phone and sometimes when I can’t find a chunk of time to sit and pray I can at least listen to the office on the go. The other night, for example, my sister put on Evening Prayer while I was coking dinner. Although I only heard about 80% of it because of interrupting kids, still it was very nice to be able to pray while I worked.

But this morning it was a special treat. I played the podcast on my phone as I got myself and the children dressed for Mass and was very pleasantly surprised to hear them chanting the psalms instead of the usual recitation. This is how the psalms are meant to be heard! I’m guessing that they only do it for Sunday’s office because I’ve never heard it before; but perhaps someday they may move to chanting all the hours? I can hope.

Daria has been writing about chanting the psalms over at her blog. As I told her, I’ve been wanting to learn to chant the psalms for a long time; but I don’t read music and don’t think I’m likely to learn anytime soon. I know musical people tell me it’s not that hard to learn to read chant notation; but I just don’t think it’s something I’m going to be able to pick up. The beauty of chant is suppose d to be that you don’t have to be musically trained in order to learn it. I think I could learn the chants by ear if I heard them often enough. So here’s hoping that more resources become available for people like me .

This was going to be a quick blog entry, just to address the two short bits of text that appear before the main text of the poem: the epigraph and the dedication. But of course once I started digging I uncovered more and more things to say about these two brief tags. These are the kinds of things you can skip over very easily and yet I think they do add to the total reading experience. In any case, I’m the kind of reader who would be driven crazy by not understanding that Latin quotation. (I took four years of Latin in high school precisely because the habit of so many writers to throw out lines in Latin.)

The Latin (and Greek) of the epigraph translates:

I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her ‘What do you want?’ She answered, ‘I want to die.’

It comes from The Satyricon by Petronius a Roman work of fiction that survives only in fragmentary form (another fragment!). Wikipedia says: “The surviving portions of the text detail the misadventures of the narrator, Encolpius, and his lover, a handsome sixteen-year-old boy named Giton. Throughout the novel, Encolpius has a hard time keeping his lover faithful to him as he is constantly being enticed away by others.” At first, I didn’t think the greater story of the Satyricon was very important as the line Eliot quotes here is something of a conversational aside; but reading Wikipedia’s summary made me see another connection. It ties in with one of the poem’s major themes: infertility and wounded sexuality. The epigraph also introduces the themes of death and fragmentation.

The figure of the Sibyl here points us in several directions. First, the Sibyl was the guide who lead Aeneas through Hades in the Aeneid. When coupled with the dedication, which is a quote from Dantes’s Purgatorio, and the title of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead”, you get the general idea that we are meant to be thinking about death and journeys into the underworld. The Waste Land then is a type of the heroic journey to the underworld, a major theme in epic poetry. This theme which runs through The Waste Land is one of the reasons I think of it as an epic poem.

Death to the Sibyl, to whom Apollo granted long life but not youth, is not something to be feared but a release that she fervently longs for. For Aeneas visiting the realm of the dead is a means of accessing secret knowledge about the future of Rome. For the Christian death in baptism is a means of accessing eternal life in Christ.

An aside, it occurs to me that all the great epic heroes who venture into the realms of the dead are types of Christ, the true hero of the true myth and their epic journeys are echoes of his harrowing of hell after his death on the cross and before his resurrection on the third day.

Second, the figure of the Sibyl points to the theme of fragmentation. Her prophecies were recorded on loose leaves of paper which then had to be arranged by the reader. The arrangement obviously affected the interpretation of the prophecies. Again, this seems to be Eliot pointing to his method: the reader must piece together the prophetic message from the bits and pieces of various texts that form the poem. The Sibyl is not the only prophet or seer we will encounter in the poem.

Finally, I wanted to note that Eliot’s original draft has a different epigraph, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Ezra Pound discouraged Eliot from using, saying that Conrad didn’t carry enough weight, wasn’t classical enough. The lines were from the end of the novel when the narrator, Marlow, has travelled up the Congo and found the dying Mr Kurtz:

  Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—

  ‘The horror! The horror!’

Again, you see the theme of death. Interesting that here too you see Kurtz as a visionary, a sort of prophet. What he sees, we do not know except for his reaction: “The horror! The horror!” You also get the theme of a journey with Marlowe’s voyage up the river. The river plays a major role in Eliot’s poetic imagination, especially in the Four Quartets, but rivers are important in The Waste Land as well.

And then there’s the dedication:

For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.

The Italian means “the better craftsman” or “the better poet”. The words were spoken to Dante by the spirit of a poet who was in Purgatory. Pound was very influential in the revision of the poem. Some major changes, the title not being the least of them, resulted from his commentary. I’m not a huge Pound fan myself; but I have to acknowledge that Pound’s revisions are what pushes the poem from good to great.

Evidently this dedication was not found in the first printing but Eliot dedicated a copy of the poem to Pound with these words and they found their way into a later edition. As I’ve noted previously the Italian is a quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy. It isn’t at all coincidental that a line from the Purgatorio should find it’s way to the beginning of the poem, Eliot clearly has DAnte in mind in several places in The Waste Land.  My own theory about Eliot and Dante is that Eliot’s entire corpus of works when read chronologically seems to be thematic echo of the Commedia. The Waste Land certainly seems to take place in an infernal landscape, in the realm of the dead or of the spiritually dead, or of those who wish they were dead.

This “Exploring The Waste Land” site has a nice (if slightly outdated in terms of webpage design) presentation of the poem with several frames that allow you to see hyperlinked notes, definitions, translations, cross references, texts of works alluded to, commentary, and questions to the reader. It’s very handy and nicely laid out.

1. Anthony has gone through a language explosion this week. Suddenly the baby is really, really trying to communicate. In addition to saying Mama, Dadda, Bella, Ben, Tree, up, and ppppllbbtt (poopy diaper) I have now thought I heard: no, other side (in reference to nursing), water, push (as in Ben pushed him), and several other things which I can’t remember right now. It isn’t super clear but clear enough that I’ll look up at Dom or Tree and say, “Did Anthony just say ____?” and they will reply, “I think so.” And in addition he’s started speaking long strings of babble that may be intended for words but I cannot understand at all. It reminds me very much of Sophie at an early age we were sure she was stringing together words but with such poor enunciation we had no idea what she was saying. She finally got frustrated at our inability to understand and stopped talking for a while. When she tried again it was much, slower. She worked on enunciating each word so we would get it. I think Anthony may be trying to say real words that he knows when he hears but can’t really form yet.

He also has a range of waves and hand gestures, some of which I can’t figure out. I’m not sure if there’s a consistent meaning or if he’s just trying to get my attention. There is one that seems to be a happy wave, one two-handed wave that seems very deliberate but I can’t quite interpret. And there’s an angry wave I saw today after I cruelly tried to feed him a piece of nasty roast chicken which was yucky, yucky, yucky, so that he had to spit it out and then wave his hands over it, rubbing it into the floor to make sure it was good and gone.

Oh and he’s learned how to clap, which is just the most delightful thing ever and made me realize exactly why the Psalmist writes about clapping your hands for joy. (Oh yes, I do sound just like a parody of a mom blogger that I just read but you know what, it’s funny because it is true. And I’m ok with that.)

Tonight Anthony was playing with Dom’s iPad, lifting the cover and letting it fall. Fascinating stuff. Then Dom confiscated it. And the boy threw a honest to God temper tantrum. High, piercing screams, arching back, yelling, kicking, slapping me. It was so funny I couldn’t but laugh and Dom and Tree were laughing too, which of course just made Anthony even more angry.

Also, Anthony is on the cusp of walking. He’s letting go and standing on his own for minutes at a time and cruising around with only a light touch to balance himself. And today I saw him actually take a step between two chairs. He really wants to walk so bad. I see him watching the big kids and wanting to run with them and frustrated that he can’t keep up. Poor guy.

2. Sophie has decided that she can’t go to the bathroom by herself. She cries and says she’s lonely. The other day I was sitting on the edge of the tub while she did her thing and asking her why she was so lonely when everyone else uses the bathroom without company. She confessed that she is scared a dinosaur is going to come into the bathroom. Then she told me that she had a scary dream about dinosaurs. So I told her that her guardian angel could take care of any dinosaur or other scary thing in her dreams, she just had to ask for help. That seemed to comfort her and a couple days later she told me she’d dreamed about her angel fighting a scary monster.

3. Bella has taken to asking a strange sort of leading question. She does it to me, to Dom, to Sophie most of all. Except it takes on a different character with Sophie than with me. Example: today she asked me if I was tired because the wind made me tired. Or She kind of makes a hypothesis about the way something is or the why of something and then presents her scenario to you for confirmation. She’s not so much gathering information as trying to get you to agree that her hypothesis is the correct one. She starts off with an a priori assumption about a situation and then asks leading questions to get you to agree to her assumptions. “You aren’t eating that right now because you don’t like it?” No, I’m not eating it becasue I don’t want it right now. “You aren’t eating it because it doesn’t taste good?” No, I just don’t want it right now. “Because it doesn’t taste good?”

But when she and Sophie are playing one of their imaginary games, the questions become a way for her to seize control of the game. Sophie says something about what one of the toys is doing and then Bella interjects, “Is it because she wants….” with some very elaborate scenario that couldn’t possibly be what Sophie originally had in mind. Sophie usually agrees reflexively. The other day my sister witnessed an interaction that has us both befuddled. Bella came up to where Sophie was playing by herself and asked if she could play. Sophie said she wanted to play be herself. The Bella asked some leading question that posited a scenario about the game Sophie was playing. Sophie brushed her off with a yes to get Bella to stop questioning her. Then Bella got mad and started crying. When questioned she said it was because Sophie had said whatever it was and that made her angry. But of course Sophie had said nothing of the sort, it was all Bella.

I wonder now if that isn’t what is so disturbing about the way she questions you about her hypotheses: it’s as if she’s trying to control the situation, to make reality conform to her mental model by sheer force of will. When her guess is wrong, it really disturbs her and so she keeps questioning, trying to find a way to phrase it so that you will agree with her statement. 

4. Bella and Sophie have developed a fairly complex set of rules and terminology to go with their imaginary games. There are “one person” games or “two person” games, depending on whether one or the other feels like collaborating. “Are you playing a one person game or a two person game?”

When a game switches from being a one person game to a two person game, they refer to this as “popping”. One will say that she is going to “pop it to a two person game.” One day Tree saw Sophie jumping up and down and Bella questioning what she was going. Evidently she was trying to “Pop it to a five person game.”

Also, there is frequently occasion to “pause the game”. When either player needs a snack break or a bathroom break or has to comply with a parental request, the other will be requested to “pause the game.” Today I asked Bella to pick up something she’d left around and both girls started making a buzzing sound. When I asked about it they told me that the buzz was for the pause in the game.

5. Ben is staring to play games with Sophie (not so much with Bella, he gets too frustrated, especially when she gets pushy about how she thinks a game should go.) He’s got a great imagination and will play pretend games with the little people and his cars and trucks. Going to the grocery store and buying things. Going to the library. He’ll pretend that the cooler or a box is a train or a boat and get the girls to come ride on it with him.

The other day he put an apple on top of the jelly jar and said it was ice cream. When I said, Oh it’s ice cream? he replied, “I’m just ‘tending.”

He loves, loves, loves, the song about the monkeys jumping on the bed and sings it as he jumps on my bed. So I found him a board book of it for Christmas. That was as big a hit as the books about trucks.

Speaking of truck books, the boy has an uncanny ability to walk into the children’s section at the library and immediately go over to a shelf and find a truck book that he’s never seen before. I’m still putting down my bag and removing my coat and he’s already sitting at the table, flipping through his new find. I don’t know how he does it. It’s not memory because they are different books. Somehow he just knows where the books with cars and trucks are. Maybe it’s his guardian angel?

6. Ben is starting to be more affectionate toward Anthony. He will occasionally share a toy, give Anthony a hug or a kiss, try to tickle him. It is very sweet to see the two of them grapple with each other or romp with each other. They love to frolic on my bed (with supervision of course). Ben will play peek-a-boo with the curtain and Anthony giggles and giggles. Oh it melts my heart.

Though he does still push him over at least once a day. He expresses a sort of contrition as soon as you call him on anything he knows he’s not supposed to do, “I won’t.” Don’t push Anthony, Ben! “I won’t!”

7. Bella has been making a conscious effort to catechize Sophie. The other day I overheard her telling Sophie: “When you say, ‘No, Mama, I won’t use the potty,’ you’re saying “no” to Jesus.” She’s repeating a variant of what we’ve told her—a trickle-down of a homily from one of our favorite priests about saying yes to God; but it’s still funny.

The other day my sister took Ben and Sophie out for a trip to the mall but Bella opted to stay home with me. While Anthony napped and I made pumpkin bread she asked me to tell her everything I could think of about various saints. I recapped a bunch of anecdotes from Sigrid Undset’s biography of Catherine of Siena plus whatever I could recall about St Claire and stories from other saints too. She has a great desire to learn more about the saints. My parents sent a biography of Rose of Lima which we’re reading.

It’s fun to see her incorporating these stories into her play. I told her about a friar who came to visit St Catherine intending to prove her a fraud or heretic and leaving convicted because he owned too many books, nice furniture, etc. He gave away everything that he had that was excess and joined Catherine’s group of followers. So today I overheard them playing a game about friars giving away beds because they were too small.

She’s been consciously trying to be helpful around the house and with her sister and brothers. Of course, she has moods when she doesn’t want to be helpful and she can be as selfish and crabby as any small child. But it is the moments when she really tries to model her behavior on that of the saints that stand out. I can see that the stories are firing her imagination.

for more quick takes see Jen

Part 1 of the series is here.

The full text of The Waste Land is here, if you want to follow along.

Yes, this is going to be an entire blog entry about the poem’s title. There is just so much to say before we even get to the main body of the text.

Already I’m grasping and fumbling for focus. Where to begin? Yes, focus has always been my weakness as a writer. When I fell in love with The Wasteland and wrote an essay on it in my freshman year I am positive it was a weak paper because I lacked focus. Still, what I chose to write on was the role of the Grail legend in the poem. To me the story of the grail was the key that unlocked the poem. So that is where I will start on this journey as well.

One of the things that makes The Waste Land so difficult is its density and fragmentation. The poem is made up of a series of either allusions to or direct quotations from other texts, poems, plays, operas, etc. Many are not even in English. It can be so overwhelming. (But then the Catholic liturgy is also intimidating to someone who has just stumbled in off the street.) Eliot’s technique of allusions makes the poem a kind of dense hypertext mosaic where each new line can contain a new reference to a different literary work. The poem is rather like one of those mosaic pictures where each panel is an entire picture in its own right. But as I will later show, there is a reason for this method. The method itself points to the meaning.

The Waste Land is like a treasure map and the title is the first clue. Once we understand that it is an allusion to a particular version of the Grail legend, then it tells us that we are on a quest. Yes, that’s right, as you read this poem you are setting out on the greatest of all quests: the Quest for the Holy Grail. That’s what I love about The Waste Land, it is a modern retelling of one of the greatest of all legends. From Monty Python, to Indiana Jones to Dan Brown, the quest for the grail continues to have a strong grip on the contemporary imagination.  In The Wasteland, however, you will find neither King Arthur nor the knights of the Round Table. You will not find heroic crusaders or intrepid archaeologists. And no grotesque fantasies about the sacred feminine or claptrap about Mary Magdalene being the bride of Jesus. Instead, Eliot’s version of the grail legend draws on the legend of the Fisher King and is a little more obscure—but more about that anon.

Another thing that makes the poem difficult is the cacophony of voices. Eliot’s original working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”, a reference to a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend who reads the newspaper with different voices. The allusion suggests a means to make sense of the cacophony: there is a controlling narrator to the poem who is “doing” all the different voices. There is a consciousness that is creating meaning. He is stitching together the various pieces that make up the poem and forming them into a sort of patchwork quilt. He is a sort of pilot steering a course in the seeming storm of words and images. Yes, I’m mixing my metaphors dreadfully, but it’s hard to talk about the poem without making a metaphor salad.

Now back to the Fisher King…. The version of the grail myth that Eliot is alluding to in the title might not be familiar to the reader as it is from Perceval, an unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes. (An aside: it’s fascinating to note that Eliot chooses to base his poem on a version of the grail story that is a fragment, unfinished. Fragmentation is a major theme in the poem.) Though the story of the Fisher King does appear in modern form in the fabulous movie of that name directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Robin Williams—I highly recommend it. I’m going from memory here and not looking up the story but the basic gist is that a knight on a quest comes to a barren land that has been stricken by some kind of plague or famine. He goes to a castle whee he finds a king, fishing. He finds that the king of the land is also wounded and wasting away. There is some kind of mystical connection between the king’s illness (a wound in his leg or groin. infertility?) and the sickness that has infested his realm. Only the grail can heal the wounded king. The knight must find the grail and heal the king, which will then heal the land.

While the knight is dining at the king’s hall he is presented with a vision of a youth carrying a spear and a maiden carrying the grail. Here he makes a fatal error in that he doesn’t exhibit any curiosity about the strange vision and fails to ask any questions about what it means. So he fails in the quest and goes off to wander aimlessly. The asking of the questions is somehow key to finding out what the grail is and that is somehow key to healing the king and his land.

Eliot has stated that the story of the Fisher King is a part of the mythological backdrop behind his poem and this is one poem that demands that you reach beyond the bare words of the text and into the various works that the text alludes to. The poem casts the reader in the role of the questing knight. In order to understand the poem, you, the reader, are required to become the knight. You are required to ask the questions that will make sense of the fragments that Eliot lays out before you. You are required to do the hard work of stitching them together into a coherent picture, a patchwork quilt. You must exhibit curiosity, ask questions of the text, delve into the meaning behind the symbols that Eliot mysteriously parades before you. The poem’s very obscurity points to the meaning, the need to cease being a passive observer, to ask questions, to realize that perhaps you are as much in need of the grail as is the wounded king.

A great book on the subject of the Holy Grail is The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence by Mike Aquilina (I blogged about it very briefly here.) Aquilina maintains that the search for the grail is the search for the Real Presence of Christ. Frankly, I can’t see how this is even arguable. You can only imagine the Grail as something other than a symbol for Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist if you have divorced the legend from history and are reading it through a hermeneutic of suspicion. The plain meaning of the Grail has always been that it was the chalice that Christ used at the Last Supper. Sometimes it is also said to have caught Christ’s blood at the crucifixion. But of course to a Catholic sacramental imagination that is really a symbolic redundancy.

The Fisher King is an image both of Christ, the wounded king, the fisher of men, and also of humanity, wounded, in need of a savior. The act of fishing represents hope. Christ is often symbolized by a fish. Thus fishing can be seen as a representation of the search Christ. The Fisher King is a symbol of how the Body of Christ is wounded. The knight’s failure to ask questions speaks of our unwillingness to seek answers,our unwillingness to ask for healing. It speaks to me of my own situation, stuck in sin, avoiding confrontation with my own sinfulness, avoiding the confessional where I can confront that sin and have it washed away.

I could say so much more about this; but I think I’ll leave it at that for now. We will meet the Fisher King again in the poem. Keep him in mind as you read. He is part of a whole series of images that speak about the sacraments, especially the sacraments of baptism and of Eucharist.