Rare Disease Day #RDD2015

February seems to be the month of choice for everything-awareness, including Marfan syndrome.  I usually do a whole series of blog posts (or re-posts) in February but didn’t this year.  Meanwhile, I learned February 28 is also #RareDiseaseDay, and there’s a Twitter thing for rare disease awareness.  Click on either of the category tags for this post to see a list of my posts related to #Marfansyndrome or what used to be called the “Have a Heart for Marfan” campaign.

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“Don’t show me those graphic pictures!”

There is a common complaint, with which I tend to sympathize, that we shouldn’t focus so much on the graphic images of abortion or of victims of terrorism and persecution. On the other hand, as Fr. Frank Pavone says, “America will not reject abortion until America sees abortion.”
However again, people rightly point out that images of violence can desensitize us to violence and/or inspire us to violence. Particularly when it comes to seeing the images of those being martyred by radical Muslims, we’re warned that promotion of such images might promote further violence or allow to the terrorists to get exactly what they want by allowing them to get credit for their misdeeds.
As far as that goes, as Thomas Merton points out in Bread in the Wilderness, would anyone know of Sihon, king of the Amorites or Og, the king of Bashan were it not for the Sacred Scriptures recounting how Israel triumphed over them?

Then it occurred to me, reflecting on the recent 21 Coptic Christians whose status as martyrs was affirmed by ISIS recording them professing Christ as they died, how Christian devotion is fundamentally based upon “graphic images” like these:

So, yes, please don’t glorify evil by showing graphic images of evils being committed today.

What were the writers of _The Middle_ thinking?

To the Writers and Producers of <em>The Middle</em>
What were you thinking?

In the summer of 2012, a priest-friend on Facebook suggested your program as an example of one of the few truly wholesome, family-friendly sitcoms on the air today.

For the most part, we’ve found that to be true and have become huge fans of the show.  We’ve now seen every episode in reruns or first run and have watched most of them with our children.

However, the previous two episodes  (“Valentine’s Day VI” and “The Answer”) have left us scratching our heads.

There was a very clear contrast between the wholesome relationship of Darrin and Sue, and the implied fornication of Axl and Devin.  Axl, a stereotypical “millennial” college student, attending college just because he’s expected to, with no real career goals, surprises his girlfriend with a rented bounce house, paid for by what?  Credit card debt? Then comes home the next day to brag about having “celebrated” the night before.  Darrin, who already has a decent, well-paying job, surprises Sue with a “micro-house” that is paid for, and proposes marriage.

So, what happens?  Frankie sarcastically dismisses Axl’s “bragging,” and Mike hypocritically gives him a thumbs up over fornicating with some other man’s daughter while getting enraged that Axl’s friend has proposed marriage to *his* daughter.  Frankie and Mike convince Sue that’s she’s right to want to “experience” the world and accumulate a lifelong burden of debt rather than settling down with a man who loves her and has already demonstrated the ability to provide for her?

I suppose it’s sadly realistic to how most parents think in this culture, but it was so very disappointing.

Exactly which sport are they illustrating?

Yesterday I saw the controversial latest cover of the usually controversial Sports Illustrated “swimsuit” issue, at Bi Lo. It was on the highest row of magazines, making it eye level for me in the chair and for any child of middle years. As I often say, modesty is not necessarily about what’s covered so much as how it’s covered: a person can be covered chin to ankle in something that’s too tight, or completely naked yet elicit pity (_Schindler’s List_ or photos of starving children) or admiration (as in the classic example of Vatican art), rather than lust, based upon the circumstances, pose, etc. To reveal everything but the most specific “parts”, and then present those as about to be revealed, is the epitome of pornography: enticing the viewer to wonder what comes next.

T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes”: More and Less than you may think

I was looking up T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes” today, and found that one of the top “hits” on Google is an essay from some literature class. I don’t know whether it was written by the instructor or a student, but on content alone, I’d have given it a “C” at best. The author presents his reading as authoritative, yet provides no basis for several assumptions, either in the text or in third party citations. The style is pretentious and pedantic yet offers little clarity or substance. As for my own credentials, I have never published on Eliot, due to focusing on teaching and family life, though I have published on C. S. Lewis, and Eliot is one of my research interests. A week into my freshman year of college, when I was 16, I checked out a stack of books on Eliot. The librarian said, “A research paper, already?” I said, “No, this is pleasure reading.”

The poem:

I
THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps 5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots, 10
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer 15
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes, 20
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited; 25
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back 30
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where 35
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block, 40
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties, 45
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle 50
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

1) “Preludes” is one of my favorites and a great example of Eliot’s work, but it should be noted, contra this author’s generalization, that its popularity in anthologies stems from several key factors:
a) Eliot left strict instructions on how many lines of his poetry could be anthologized. This requires breaking up his longer poems, and “Preludes” is one of the only ones that fits.
b) Those who want to present a biased and inaccurate view of Eliot’s work, as the author of this essay does, want to favor the “Prufrock” era and reject his later, more overtly religious poems.
c) “Preludes,” in particular, has been used since the 1980s because it and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” were used by Trevor Nunn as sources for the lyrics to “Memory.”
d) Eliot’s early poems fell into public domain many years ago, but, due to changes in copyright law, nothing published after 1922 will fall into public domain until 2020.

2) You must first remember that Eliot is a Formalist. Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” This was paraphrased by another overanalyzed formalist, David Lynch, with the line in a Twin Peaks dream sequence, “This is a formica table.” C. S. Lewis, who in context was, ironically, responding to Eliot’s over-analysis of Hamlet, says that we cannot understand Shakespeare unless we first realize his plays are written as popular entertainment. Eliot is, per his own theory in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” trying to use poetry to provide a multi-sensory experience. He gives us sights, sounds, smells, and sensations through words. Eliot himself, when asked what “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree” means, said, “It means ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.””

3) Eliot himself, upon reading this, would have likely been enraged, and said something like the above. He was so annoyed at critics asking the “True meaning of The Waste-Land” that he published the “Notes on ‘The Waste Land'” years later, *then* many years after that said the notes were a prank (cf. Kirk, Eliot and His Age).

He repeatedly emphasized that poets write poetry for a reason, and if he’d wanted to explain what he was “really saying,” he would have. Nonetheless, there was one critic he said understood him, and that was Russell Kirk. Indeed, if you read *one* book about Eliot, both in terms of literary biography and analysis, read Kirk’s Eliot and His Age.

The writer who inspired this post is right that the world of Prufrock and Other Observations is hellish, but Eliot is not saying that this is all there is. According to Kirk, the “Prufrock” and “Waste Land” era are a kind of Inferno to which “Ash Wednesday and “Journey of the Magi” are the Purgatorio and Four Quartets, the Paradisio. Yes, much like Dante, people seem to find the Hell more interesting than the Heaven, but Eliot never believed the atheistic nihilism you’re reading into this. During the period of his rejecting his family’s Unitarianism (for not being theological enough), and adoption of Anglicanism, Eliot experimented with Buddhism and other Eastern spiritualities. He was always a Theist. The hopelessness of this poem–which I personally see is actually a hopefullness in recognizing Christ even in the city street–is not Eliot’s own but the hopelessness he sees in those around him.

The article has part of the puzzle but is missing a lot. One way we can tell that Eliot’s poems are part of a larger whole is that they often include “call backs” or allusions to his own work–in this case, the final lines remind us of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

4) Thus, there are three impulses at work here. Eliot, a self-described, “Royalist in politics, classicist in criticism and Anglican in religion,” hated modernity but he also despised the romantic view. So he used modernistic realism to parody romanticism, critique urban living, and yet see the street as reminiscent of “the infinitely patient, infinitely suffering” Christ “stretched across the sky.”

_Griswold v. Connecticut_ and Radar Detectors

This will be the 50th Anniversary of the monstrous _Griswold v. Connecticut_ (1965) case that established the fictional “right to privacy” and the notion of the “penumbral shadow” of the Bill of Rights, giving us _Roe v. Wade_ and a string of other anti-family and anti-life decisions.

The fundamental premise of the _Griswold_ case, which I was taught concerned a married couple who tried to purchase contraceptives at a pharmacy but actually was started by a Planned Parenthood director, is that laws banning the use of items that are used in private are unconstitutional, because to enforce them requires violating the 4th and 5th Amendments–yet the law, which ha been rarely enforced, was enforced in Griswold’s case by targeting the public business that provided the “private” service, not the couples using it.

Just as it is still technically illegal in South Carolina and some other states to privately own or use a deck of cards or a set of dice, even without gambling, there are plenty of things that are illegal to use in private but haven’t been ruled unconstitutional, and are legal to sell but not to use.  While I could come up with several examples, the one that comes most readily to mind is those radar detectors.  Another one that struck me a few years ago was when the federal government made it no longer a crime to change the SIM card in a cell phone (which had previously been considered hacking, yet seemed to be a common practice among some tech-savvy people).  Indeed, the entire “War on Drugs” should be “unconstitutional” according to _Griswold v. Connecticut_.

“Where are we, Daddy?” “We’re in a metaphor.”

Twice a week, alternating groups of 2 of my 4 kids go to Occupational Therapy. The office is on a fairly major and busy highway, and it’s a quick turn. I briefly confused my landmarks this morning, and I missed it, so I took a right into the next neighborhood. I thought I could take another couple rights and come out behind the office, but it didn’t work out that way, and somehow I ended up further down the highway than I was before, so I took a left at the next light and turned around in a little trailer park, which itself apparently had a one way road, and I was going the wrong way.

When I was turning back onto the main road, one of my daughters asked, “Where are we, Daddy?”

“We’re in a metaphor,” I replied.

The thought had just occurred to me how that exemplifies the metaphorical “wrong turns” we make in life. C. S. Lewis says that being “progressive” implies a goal, and if we find we’re not progressing towards the goal, sometimes being progressive means turning around and going back, even quite far back, to get there.

We know the way to go, whether in our spiritual, professional or family lives, and we know where we’re heading, yet we sometimes lose sight of the goal and get off track. Then, rather than simply stopping and turning around, we feel trapped where we are, or we think we can find an alternate path to the goal, but there is none, so either way we get ourselves further lost and further off course, when we just need to turn around and go back to where we got off track.

We often hear things like, “We’re all in different boats going to the same place,” but that’s not true. There is ultimately only one true path in life, and it is a narrow way–He is a narrow way. “I am the gate,” He tells us. Anyone who tries to hop the fence or bypass the gatekeeper is a thief, He tells us. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by Me.”