On James Cameron, Jesus and Bodies

I’ve already posted about this, but here’s a fuller consideration.

In 2001 Antonio Banderas starred in a film called “The Body”. He played a priest. As incredible as that sounds, it gets even better. This priest has been sent by the Vatican to Israel to investigate something. Apparently, in a suburban Israeli neighborhood, a tomb and stone casket containing bones has been found. The tomb is marked in such a way that it is believed to be the Tomb of Jesus. Everybody panics, romances ensue, suicides happen, terrorists arrive etc. etc. It was a well-told piece of Hollywood fiction. It never suggested it was anything but fiction. I quite liked it, but the film didn’t get a lot of popular attention.

However, one wonders if James Cameron has seen it. For truly, his latest exploit sounds like a cross between The DaVinci Codes and The Body. James Cameron, for those who have not yet managed to hear the news, has produced a documentary which will be shown Sunday on the Discovery channel. In this documentary he claims that the grave of Jesus, Mary Magdalen and their son has been found in a suburban Israeli neighborhood. (However they do not have the bones, as those had to be returned to earth according to Israel’s law.)

Mata H, Blogher.org

More Ash Wednesday

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

–T. S. Eliot

More on the existence — or not — of God

Reports on James Cameron’s documentary about the bodies in the tomb. Specifically this one, from the WordPress.Com blogsphere —

Big news was broken yesterday: Jesus and his family have been founded dead in their graves in Israel.

What does this discovery mean for the religious myths that bind us and for the sustenance of the Resurrection ideal to Christians across the world?

Without the Resurrection, doesn’t Christianity become an empty vessel?

What amazes me about this discussion is that it never makes reference to this film, which is one of my favourites, and which grappled with the questions currently being raised by Cameron’s documentary.

Seriously. If you never saw it, check it out now.

This is an interesting discussion

It started out as religious discussions often do at PFFA, but began to get interesting round about here.

It’s interesting because of the turn it’s taken, and the turn it’s taking. It’s also interesting because it hasn’t yet degenerated into flaming and name-calling. And it’s interesting because people are discussing and completely disagreeing but not denigrating.

Not like this thread. Not at all.

Meow

 What Alice in Wonderland Character Are You?

You are The Cheshire Cat

A huge grin constantly plastered upon your face, you never cease to amuse. You are completely confusing and contradictory to most everyone.
Take this quiz!

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From Cookala, Cheesecloth Moon.

This is very cool

This is a map of what side of the road people drive on throughout the world.

To decipher it, check out the full post, from Strange Maps.

Course, you can’t see it, but our country would be dark blue.

Yeah.

A little something for Ash Wednesday

Now I don’t usually pull out the old Eliot-is-my-favourite-poet card, but let’s be honest, he probably is. There’s very little that can compare the hair-standing moments I got when reading Prufrock and The Waste Land and beginning to get them for the first time. And yes, they’re overwrought, and yes, they’re bleak, and yes, he does harp rather a lot on the inability of modern man to communicate with modern woman, but hell, what he does with sound and rhythm and imagery still makes my hair stand up.

So. The year I figured out that Ash Wednesday was a meditation that could, and perhaps should, be read throughout Lent, the six movements mirroring the six weeks of the season, my hair stood up again.

Now, in hopes of sharing that standing-upness with others (and apologies to those of you who hate Eliot, or have had enough, or don’t share in his belief and hence find no meaning in the season), here’s Ash Wednesday, one movement at a time, one time a week.

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

–T. S. Eliot

Instead of poem-of-the-week, write about yourself

Recently, I spent an afternoon and evening with an old friend. She’s a writer too (too? does that mean I’m a writer?), having made the kind of commitment I haven’t yet, left all other jobs but that one. (She’s often poor and dependent on her husband, which is the price you pay for that kind of dedication. As my husband is freelance, we depend on my job for the regular (modest) paycheck; though I’m thinking and plotting that kind of commitment, I can’t make it yet. Aside over.) We talked and shared stuff. I gave her a bunch of my latest poetry, much of it NaPo drafts. She read the lot and said:

But I want to see you write about yourself.

Well now. I don’t know if I ever have. Written obviously about myself, I mean. Not even before PFFA. Even in my earliest forays into poetry, which included overmodified efforts like this:

Peonies in the window wet with rain blink lazily out
Together they move wet up the garden path
Slippery from skytears and wormslime
Dead slugs turn bellysideup wet in the rivulets
The path shining slickly like glassed tar
Blinded by the glare they stumble wearily up the wet polished porchsteps
They never see
Peonies in the window.

On the poetry page, the poem(s) of the week are two heartbreak poems, written by Scavella-in-her-twenties specifically in response to stuff that happened to her. There’s also her one-and-only sestina, which illustrates that what she began to articulate seriously about a week or more ago in an exchange with Nic over at Very Like A Whale was never very far away: that the political and the personal for Scavella are very much intertwined.

And for me, too, of course.

More on this, which has opened a door into a discussion I want to have.

Blogwork

I’ve been updating and tweaking other blogs while I should have been doing other things. Upside: I learned some PHP and some CSS that I didn’t know before. Downside: I still have some tweaks I want to do and can’t work out how to do them. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t upgraded my main workblogs to WordPress 2.1 yet — I’m scared crapless that I will lose everything.

I did try, not so long ago, and things went so horribly wrong that I quit. Haven’t had the nerve or the time to do it since.

Here’s a cool photo, though.

Foucault’s Pendulum

old one

Eco’s, I mean. Back in print again —I’d had no idea it’d ever been out of print, to be honest. I’ve had it with me since I read it, back in the 1980s, when it was new.

It’s one of the reasons The Da Vinci Code didn’t impress me with its theories. I’d been exposed to them all, and better (no comparison!!), twenty years earlier.

Yay.

new one

Poem of the Week February 14

Oh yeah, it’s Valentine’s Day.

Here.

Poem of the Week February 7

It’s back, for a limited time only!

Here.

10 questions Katy Evans-Bush

Over at Very Like A Whale.

I want me one of these

The latest in fall fashion

An invisibility cloak that works in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum has been unveiled by researchers in the US. The device is the first practical version of a theoretical set-up first suggested in a paper published earlier in 2006.

The cloak works by steering microwave light around an object, making it appear to an observer as if it were not there at all. Materials that bend light in this way do not exist naturally, so have to be engineered with the necessary optical properties.

“Materials that bend light in this way do not exist naturally.” No duh.

Just another Monday morning. Anybody got a pill to make it go away?

Thinking about Publishing

I think it’s time to submit stuff places.

Once upon a time, I belonged to Boot Camp Keegan, a place for writers of short stories who want or need to be trained in the art of writing and getting published.

The guy who runs it, known most widely as Alex Keegan in the virtual world, is like the Gordon Ramsay of short-storyland.  He’s as energetic and as insulting as the chef is, but the results are often worth the abuse.

Anyhow,  one of the things that you learn as part of the Keegan world is that the key to success is “read, read, read, write, write, write, submit, submit, submit”.  Makes sense.

So.  I’m thinking it’s time to submit, submit, submit.  I already do the rest.

I may let you know how it goes.

Or not.

Know your Bible

You know the Bible 100%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Hell. I figured if Harry the Atheist could get 92%, I must be able to beat that.

Good to see my upbringing was not in vain.

But Harry is right — it’s much too easy a quiz. And (not to be a pedant, but) it’s not entirely accurate either. Some questions have two correct answers.

And Baalam’s transportation was an ass.

Something to ponder

Check out this report.

10 Questions Paul Stevens

Here.