God is Good and His Mercy Endureth Forever

I did not post yesterday, and for that I apologise. I am making up for it by posting yesterday and today's antiphons together. 

I am also not going to write anything at all about them, though I shall recommend again that you visit A Clerk of Oxford read all of her delightful research about the O Antiphons and their poetic English adaptions. Instead, I shall tell a story about why I did not post yesterday, and how very indulgent our dear Lord can be towards His idiotic children. 

I must begin with, I must admit that I am not, by nature, a particularly social creature. I do not generally enjoy big get togethers (with rare exceptions for family shindigs and the like... and even with those, I tend to require some down time afterwards), and my dislike of them increases the bigger they are, and the more people in attendance whom I do not know. Yesterday, we were scheduled to have a get together at work-- and while I can usually deal with the regular old staff Christmas party (though, again, I do not enjoy them) I get anxious when the invitations start going out to people I do not know, even if they are technically coworkers (insofar as they are employed by the same county as I am). Yesterday's do was a combination of a farewell luncheon for our Library Director, who is retiring at the end of this month, a Branch Managers'  meeting with at least 6 people who are effectively strangers (for all I have seen them occasionally over my many years of service) and the usual staff party. And I have been dreading it for months. I would have rather been sick, go to therapy, have a root canal, etc, than to attend this thing... in spite of the fact that for a rarity, it was not on an Ember Day in Advent, and that it boasted a very delectable spread (my coworkers being a very foodie group of people). I was actually praying I would catch the virulent cold going around, so that I would not have to put in an appearance, and make small talk with people whose interests are almost guaranteed to be nothing at all like mine. It wasn't a terribly wild hope-- several people at work have already succumbed, and I might be the single remaining healthy person in my family.  

And yet, to my great discouragement, I remained obdurately hale and robust.

.... Until yesterday.....

When I woke up with a slightly scratchy throat, a feeling of great tiredness, and a weariness in my joints, that turned into just a bit of an achiness as I was up an about. 

It was all very mild. I have soldiered through much worse. And so I got myself up and to work, feeling rather sad that the cold I was obviously getting, was going to be behind schedule, and I was going to be even less inclined to be around people, thanks to all that tired. 

I felt worse once I got to work. This is usual for me. By that time I've been up about 2 hours and am starting to lose the morning sluggishness I have even on the best of days. That is when I find out if my general malaise is a fleeting thing, or if I am actually going to have a bad day. In this case, I did not trust my own judgment in the slightest, as I so desperately wanted to not be there. and figured I was psyching myself into feeling worse than I was. I made a deal with God: I wasn't going home unless I got sent home-- and unlikely contingency, as my boss was in her meeting, and everyone else was excited about morning break, and the coffee cake in the back. Besides, I was healthy, just not wanting to be at work.

... Only, one of my coworkers noticed I was dragging..... and then another..... and before I really knew what was happening, I found one of them ladling up a bowl of soup and another putting a rib and mashed potatoes on a plate to take home with me, and though I protested that I felt bad leaving them, and that I was scheduled to work the desk for 4 hours that afternoon, I was gently but firmly shown the door. 

So I went home, feeling only slightly bad about it, because I had made a deal with God, figuring that I was going to be spending the day Offering Things Up, and He sent me home. 

And I slept for 3 hours, which tends to mean I truly am getting sick.

And woke up today feeling fine. 

So that just goes to show-- Our very silly, sentimental God can be ridiculously indulgent of His idiot children, even when they do not deserve it in the slightest.

And now, the O Antiphon from yesterday: O Radix Jesse, and the Antiphon for today: O Clavis Dauvid, along with their appropriate music:

O Adonai

The word "Adonai" is an interesting one. It Hebrew, and means "My Lord", though, if you go to this website, you will see there is more to it than a straightforward translation. I like that it more literally means "My Foundation", tough I find the idea of calling God "sir" or "mister" rather more amusing than I ought. But the same root that gave us Adonai (adon) also gives us Adonis. That juxtaposition  has always produced a "Miles Christus" image in my mind, so you are getting a sketch featuring what is meant to be a Lordly personage, and though it doesn't show up so well, there is a sword upon Him. The Middle English text translates " Dux domus" as "Chieff Duke" which makes me smile somewhat, in its comfortable familiarity. 

O Sapientia

Today, December 17th, marks the beginning of the Great O Antiphons. I have written about these days before Christmas elsewhere on this blog, and shall not repeat myself here. Instead, I am intending to do something slightly different this time around: I am going to make little drawings of them, but the wording on them will be in both Latin, and in Old, or Middle English as well. There was a long tradition of English poetry based off these Antiphons, that I find very beautiful, and also, rather homely-- in the British sense. Also, rather than posting a Gregorian Chant of each antiphon, I will be highlighting the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's compositions. 

Today's Antiphon runs thusly: O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodidisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviter disponensque omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae. In Modern English it translates: O Wisdom, who came from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end and ordering all things mightily and sweetly: come, and teach us the way of prudence. For some inexplicable reason, the Middle English source I discovered today (On the incomparable Clerk of Oxford blog) translates "viam prudentiae" as "way of flight). And while I am quite aware that Latin 'p' becomes 'f' in English, and that 'l' and 'r' can be somewhat interchangeable (think of how we pronounce "colonel") I can see no way that prudentiae could every become flight. Nor has an admittedly cursory etymological dig about ze internets turned up anything that might even slightly shed light upon this oddity. Still, I liked the imagery-- the flight of God's Wisdom teaching us to fly as He does-- and so, Wisdom, in my doodle, is an odd, winged thing. 

As I have mentioned recently, I am exceedingly delighted by the effect of drawing in white on a black background. I love how that interplay gives off such a delightful impression of light-- moonlight, starlight, snowlight, the gemlight of pearl and crystal. It isn't a particularly warm combination-- you will notice all the examples I give are of quite cold, clear lights. And yet, that is part of the charm of it: stars are brightest in the cold, clear air of winter, and are their most beautiful. The pale light that snow gives off has no warmth to it, but by it, the darkest time of the year is brightened, and the heart is cheered by the sight. (Not, of course, that I am suggesting my own doodling carries anything of that with it; but drawing in this reverse fashion gives me the same sort of feeling.) Therefore, this year's Antiphons shall be done up in white on black:

The feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of my favourite lead-up-to-Christmas feasts, for all that it occurs in the middle of Advent, and is therefore a day of fasting and penance. It is a prefect excuse for having some Mexican soul-food, and drinking a little chocolate-- with perhaps a dash of pepper,as the original Mexican drink had pepper in it (it was also serve cold and unsweetened, but lets not get carried away here) and if you add a bit of cinnamon as well, so much the better-- Our Lady's favourite spice being cinnamon... at least, according to a book I read in high school, whose name I have utterly forgotten, but which impressed me deeply with that fact. It also is a very perfect feast day for the time leading up to the Nativity as Our Lady is expecting in that image, a thing which delights me beyond my ability to explain.

Dr. Taylor Marshall has an interesting video explaining the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The name predates the apparition (which I knew) and the image that gave us the name goes back to St. Luke (which I did not know).

And here is a rather splendid song in honour of Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

Ps. I do not usually succumb to impulse buying, but I did this evening, when I was really only dashing into the store to get milk. There were bouquets for sale, with a mix of red and white flowers (roses were amongst them) and lovely greenery, and in the center, a little wooden picture of Our Lady herself. So I succumbed:

With apologies for the lousy picture, taken with
my lousy little camera phone, but you get the idea.

Santa Nicholas, Oro Pro Nobis

This is a belated post for the feast of St. Nicholas, and there is not much of substance to it. I have written about this great saint before, and cannot think of anything particularly to add to it, so have settled instead for this little drawing:

I have greatly enjoyed experimenting with white-on-black art like this, as it creates a marvelously illuminated look, and it seemed a particularly good medium for creating a vaguely Christmasy image of good St. Nicholas.

I also came across this hymn, which I quite like-- being enamored of the otherworldly and.... dwarvish?..... quality of Byzantine chant. An Apolytikion is a dismissal hymn that summarises the lesson of the feast. Given the late posting, it seems quite fitting to sign of with an Apolytikion:

Advent, Resolutions and Changes

It has been a long time since I have posted and while part of it is my usually laziness and lack of discipline, this time around it is also (perhaps even primarily) because I have been thinking long and hard about the sort of blog I want this to be going forward. I have not come up with a complete "vision" for it yet, though I do know I want it to focus more on three or four ideas: Literature, with an emphasis on poetry; My own poetry and art; and Catholicism and Tradition (as with the Christmas post). I also know I'd like to have a regular schedule of posts, so that at least several times a month, there is something new and good being posted-- and by this, I do not mean lick-and-a-promise posts, but thought,well-crafted content. 

To this end, you will notice that I have started doing a little bit of a redesign of the blog. I would like, ideally, to have tabbed pages for the my poetry and art, so as to make them easier to find, as well as for the Christmas posts. Meanwhile the header has changed to emphasis the more word-crafty bent I intend this blog to take, and there might be some more tinkering going on over the next few weeks.

The Advent season has, traditionally, been considered the Church's New Year-- the liturgically year has rounded back again to the beginning. It is a penitential season, similar to Lent, though, with the end of being the Birth of a Baby, a considerably more joyful penance. It is also a good time to consider the progress (or lack thereof) one has made over the last year, and to assess what changes should occur in the coming year. The first Sunday of that Season, therefore, seemed the best time to dust off the old writerly intentions, and to start as I want to continue, with a proper blog post, about proper things. To that end, therefore, (having expressed my desire for reformation aloud and in public, so far as I have any public) I am posting a Scots Gaelic song to mark the Day and the Season.

Sorchar Nan Reul means Lightener of the Stars and is from the Carmina Gadelica  If you read the translation you will notice that while the tune is completely different, the words bear a striking resemblance to a traditional Advent carol, Creator of the Starry Height, (Or the Stars of Night depending on your translation) which, in turn, is from an old Latin hymn called Conditor Alme Siderum.(I like that this version has "noels" in the refrain.) In spite of considerable digging about, I have not found anything that says specifically that Sorchar Nan Reul is, indeed, a Gaelic translation of the old Latin, but given the strong similarity between them, I would be highly surprised of that were not the case.

Morse Code Day

Today is Morse Code Day, so called because it is the birthday of Samuel Morse, the code's inventor.

Today is also the day  in which I have come far closer than ever I have before, in achieving my lifelong ambition to learn Morse Code... Apparently, all that is necessary for me to learn something I've neglected for years, is to literally have nothing better to do with my time: in this case, it means having to work today 

Now, I did not want to work today. It has been a long and trying week for me, and had it not been for the fact that we were working with a skeleton crew, I might very well have just taken the day off, and given other people and their problems a very wide berth. As it is, I took my dismal self in, feeling mournful, and bleary around the edges, having rather given up on the day before it started.... And thanks be to God and all His little helpers, it was a slow day. Very slow. Time-slowing-until-it-is-meaningless slow. So I, in an effort to avoid a pathetic death from the mind-numbing boredom, snagged one of the business-sized Morse Code cheat-sheets I had made for the general consumption of the public, and began scribbling away... I am now surprisingly close to having the alphabet memorised. Not quite there yet. I have to look up Q, and X and Z. And it is a good idea to double check J and V. However, most of the rest of it is finally lodged in my brain, and I filled uncountable little scraps of paper with  things like this:

 ..    .-.. .. ..-. -    -- .. -. -   . -.-- . ...    ..- .--.    - ---    - .... .    -- --- .-- -. - .- -. ...   
..-. .-. --- --    .-- .... . -. -.-. .    -.-. --- -- . - ...    -- -.-- .... --- .--. .
( I lift mine eyes to the mountains, from whence cometh my hope)

--- .-.. -..    --- .-.. .. .--. .- -. -    .- --    ..  /  .... ..- --. .    --- .-.. -..   .- -. -..    - .- .-.. .-..
(Old oliphant am I / huge, old and tall)

-- .- .. .-. .   .. ....    -... --- .-. . -..
(Maire is bored)

You will observe the degradation of my mind as the long day progressed.

However, the result is that I am close to being able to write in Morse Code from memory. I am not sure if I can read it yet or not-- I am, after all, only re-reading what I have written myself at this point, and not sure if I could do it cold for anyone else. Furthermore, having learned what I learned on the fly at the front desk, between placating the irate woman who was furious that she could not turn the 400+ page PDF of the complete Mueller Report into a word document that she could email to herself, so as to be able to read at her leisure on her internet-less home computer, and chasing the 50 year old guy downloading the latest World of Warcraft game pack, out of the Children's section, I clearly have no had the opportunity to harken to dits and dahs whilst I am writing them, and therefore can neither send nor receive code yet. However, with the exception of hardly used letters, I have done considerably better  with it today, than any other time in these last 40 years.

Probably the first time I ever heard Morse Code was in Disney's rather scary short, Little Toot, where it makes several appearances, the most notable being when Little Toot sends the SOS both visually, through his smoke stack, and audibly, with his horn. (Just a side note: kids these days are soft-- all they get to watch are positive, educational cartoons, full of affirmations. None of them suffer from the sympathetic trauma of watching claw-armed buoys menace Little Toot!) For those as do not want to watch the full thing, skipping to 5:20 will allow you to see and here the SOS as Little Toot steams to the rescue:

Speaking of SOS, once you've heard it... well, golly, you've got it down by heart. Everyone knows what an SOS sounds like, and it shows up a lot. For example, just listen to what the music is doing in this scene from the first episode of I Dream of Genie. Or in the introduction to this song.

Apparently, embedding Morse Code into songs is A Thing.

And you can even learn how to write it into music yourself. Just check out this dandy website.

Perhaps the most remarkable use of the hidden code is in this story, of how the Colombian government communicated with POWs through a pop song.

However, my current favourite use of Morse Code in music-- and the thing that is the current impetus for my renewed interest in the subject-- is how it is woven into this gorgeous theme song, the theme from Inspector Morse as well as a new prequel, Endeavour.... It spells out the name Morse: