Thinking back on my phone call with mom last night, how she was cried, worried she would go to Hell. Remembering a line from an old David Bazan song: “I discovered Hell to be the poison in the well.”
The Wild Geese
From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over the fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes.
You may have noticed how much I’ve been quoting Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality lately. It’s been so engaging that about a third of the way through I knew I needed to return the library copy and buy my own.
Which I received today. Flipping through it tonight I came across the publisher on the copyright page:
Guys, that’s like right over there. I’m not sure you can appreciate how utterly bizarre it is that this book I love so much was published by a company not five minutes from my house—in this obscure town. I am restraining myself from going on and on here. Suffice it to say I might actually call this publishing company tomorrow just to say “what the hell?”
Vinegar custard
Based on Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground: Traditional Songs and Recipes 2 tbsp flour 1 tbsp cornstarch ½ cup white sugar ½ cup brown sugar ¼ cup sorghum ½ cup cider vinegar 4 eggs 1 tbsp melted butter pinch salt ¼ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp vanilla Cinnamon for sprinkling Heat oven to 350 and grease a casserole dish. 9x13 makes a thin custard but it bakes uniformly and quickly; a smaller dish would give you a thicker custard but the baking might be trickier.
Many years ago, mom needed some books to fill up her bookshelves so I gave her some that I still had around but no longer cared about. Now I’m cleaning out some stuff in her house and there are a few I’m taking back to my shelves. There was a time when Wilson and Sproul were very important to me, despite one of them becoming quite notorious of late. I told a friend recently never to be embarrassed about who they were before; that’s what makes them who they are now.
Our mental health crisis
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise.
Two wonderful songs by local folk music legend and forest protector Andy Mahler. 🎵
The longlivers
After my recent post, I decided to look into the context of the Lewis quote on the longaevi from The Discarded Image. What follows is a summary, not intended to be thorough and, as usual, aimed at unapologetically pillaging ideas for my own use. To begin with, here is Lewis describing some fundamentals of the medieval model, into which he will later situate the longaevi: In the Mundas which God built of that raw material [the four contraries of hot, cold, moist, and dry] we find them only in combination.
Me, anytime I have a cold brew coffee. Rachel has listened to an unusually large amount of talk from me this morning.
C.S. Lewis on the longaevi
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of crystalline spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man, animals, vegetables, and even stones, when he finds himself obliged to pause and consider an anomalous class of beings.