my days are okay.

So for some reason, I just have this constant anxiety that I'm not living a beautiful wholesome life every minute of the day. I live most of my life like assuming that I am falling far short of the habits of a virtuous thinker/wife/Christian/mom/whatever else I am, and then spending a lot of energy trying to plan how I can do better. For some reason tonight, when I was reading a blog about unschooling (an annoying term that means way too many things to be helpful,) a light flashed in my mind, or the winds changed or something. I realized that I do what I want to do and what I can do and most of this stuff is totally fine.

Just as I wrote that, my husband, out of nowhere, looked at me and said, in a surfer voice, "I think you need to squarely confront Heidegger." Shut up, that's not what this post is about!

Here are the things I usually do, basically in order.

• Wake up and wrassle around in bed with my baby in an affectionate manner; change his diaper etc
• Stare off into space and think about what's going to happen today while I smell Matt's coffee and wait for him to be done translating Plato or whatever he does so that I can...
• Hold the cooing baby while Matt says prayers and reads the Bible
• Tidy the kitchen and make breakfast and prep for later meals and make bread
• Put the baby down for a nap
• Sometimes nap with the baby, sometimes check in with our guy upstairs to talk about work or help him with computer stuff, sometimes make my coffee (which takes a long time because we use the Melitta pour over method) and do work (which is now the fun job of writing!), or drink coffee and read things on the internet or write in my blog or write emails
• Go on a long walk with Matt and the baby
• Make and eat lunch
• Attend to grownup crap if I have to, like things where you have to look at the calendar and maybe get out the folder of boring documents and sigh because it's not really that convenient to do everything online
• More working or reading stuff on the internet or petty household concerns while baby naps, playing with him as much as I can when he's not napping
• Sometimes I go to the store and usually have fun; I drive to Trader Joe's and listen to NPR or church music or nothing, and I walk about a mile each way to the organic grocery store
• Give the baby a bath (his favorite bathtime game right now is called "Clutching my junk and splashing disastrously with the other hand") and say night time prayers with him (Matt is usually at school)
• Put him to bed and fret about whether I should let him cry or not
• Read a book or blogs or write in my journal about what the baby's up to
• Throughout the day, talking on the phone and texting with my sister-in-law (who was my friend before I met Matt and has a two year old,) my BFF (in whose grandpa's house we live,) and a good friend from college who came back into my life when she got pregnant (and had a baby last month!)

So what else do I think I should be doing? Iconography is not happening right now, I have accepted that. I could read more, but why should I read more than I feel like reading right now? I guess the one thing that annoys me is how much time I spend looking at the iPad. I use it for work, but you know how life is these days. All your crap is on the computer. What time is the store open? When are my library books due? How far is it to Maine from here again? Is there a liturgy on such and such a day? How do you make banana bread that isn't weird Sally Fallon bread? Etc. But I can't really help that. I don't rush to the computer for every single thing. It's ok.

Now I look at the clock and see that it is 11:57 and I am sure that the virtuous thing to do is go to bed, and I think I will. But I feel pretty good about what happened between 7 am and now.

St. Catherine

St. Catherine's feast day is coming up. Earlier in the fall I sorta-promised a post about her, and I made a lot of attempts to deliver. I even started writing a short story, a new hagiography, so to speak. I had been reading Fear and Trembling and tried to get too fancy in imitating the Exordium. (That's where Kierkegaard tells the story of Abraham many different ways, changing essential details each time to meditate on the story.) It was getting corny (let's just say I spent way too much time reading about the library in Alexandria) so I put it away. I've had a couple of conversations about the St. Catherine problem and I think I might have exhausted what I had to say in those conversations, but I think I'd better just hack it out right here, right now.

Here's how I came upon the St. Catherine problem. I chose her for my patron saint when I was just a child of nineteen, stumbling into chrismation and baptism in a little Russian parish. I found her in a book of women saints, distinguished to my mind from all the other virgin martyrs because she seemed to be an intellectual woman. I happened to style myself an intellectual at the time, studying philosophy and all the "wisdom of the Greeks," and I was also a Single Lady, so her story appealed to me. I cringe a little now when I think of it, not at all because of anything shameful in St. Catherine (God forbid,) but because the choosing itself was so hubristic. Did I think I was going to be a Philosopher Warrior Princess? Did I think that I would be worthy to "defeat the pagan orators" and convert multitudes by my arguments? It's pretty embarassing, but I think that's how I felt at the time. Let's just leave it this way: She is the patron saint of philosophers, and my study of philosophy was one of the main things that led me to grope awkwardly towards Orthodoxy.

But I never felt very close to her. I don't know why. Maybe the problem is that I didn't ultimately see myself as a philosopher, and the virgin martyr thing wasn't really that inspiring to me either. Selfish, subjective reasons. I tried painting an icon of her, and it helped a little. During the time that I was finishing up painting my icon of St. Catherine, I read an account of her life which contained the episode, new to me, in which she sees the Theotokos and the Christ child in a dream. In my story, she saw the holy mother and child from behind, but even so, she fell in love with Christ, seeing him as a bridegroom to embrace, a king to reverence, and a child to carry, give birth to, and nurse all at once. (Remember that she had refused all her suitors, on the grounds that none of them were noble, wise, rich, or beautiful enough for her.) In her dream the Mother of God was discussing with Christ his
choice of a bride, and asked if he had considered Catherine. I imagine that her heart stopped with dread, as he turned his little face to her, and addressed his mother. "I have considered Catherine, and she is ugly and unbelieving, a foolish pauper, and I cannot bear to look on her until she forsakes her impiety." Catherine awakes full of longing and shame, and hastens to her baptism. In another dream, the Theotokos gives Catherine as a bride to Christ, and he gives her a betrothal ring, with which she awakes.

I found this story very compelling, but still did not feel very close to St. Catherine. Having married a nice Orthodox guy (who actually is a philosopher deep in his bones) a few years after baptism, I got pregnant a few years after that, so virgin martyrdom was no longer open to me. In my pregnancy I remember feeling that my mind was so ... soft and fuzzy, and that I felt overwhelmingly embodied, so that abstract thought seemed miles too high for me. I contrasted the warm fertile principle that I felt ruled me with the cool rationality with which my husband so naturally makes his way. And I still didn't feel that I could call to St. Catherine for help, because I identified her with the abstract male way of thinking. What did she know about pregnancy? About nourishing a child? About creating something with the involuntary secret power of your body and blessing it every second with your heart? Her distinctions were in the realm of the mind, contemplating the cosmos. My body was pulling me down to earth, where I had to think about things like stuffing my face to feed my baby. I did find myself praying to the Mother of God more often than before, almost more reflexively than to Christ himself.

But Catherine, in all her wisdom, knowledge, rhetorical skill, and general put-togetheredness was still distant, until after my child was born. I was chatting with the other Youngish Wyves and Moms of my church, and someone mentioned that she and her husband liked the name Catherine for a girl, and someone else said "Isn't she your saint, Mallory?" and I said oh yes, she was a wonderful saint, although I had recently almost been wishing that I had a different one (forgive me, St. Catherine!) because she was the patron saint of philosophers and... "crap! That's not all! She's also the patroness of... nursing mothers?"

Yes! It's true! But it is very weird. The reason for her patronage of nursing mothers is that when she was beheaded, not blood but milk flowed from her neck! Ah, well, that explains it...

So what's the deal? Why on earth does milk flow from her neck? And what is a nursing mother supposed to learn from St. Catherine's life, given that her method of secreting milk is so very, shall I say, unorthodox?

I've been pondering this for a while, and here's what I think. First let's review why it's weird. Of course the miracle is strange in itself, because it is outside of the natural order of things. It's also weird because Catherine is a virgin, and has no experience with nursing babies. Moreover, she is a philosopher, and one common criticism of philosophy is that in a way, it's barren. It can critique and examine things, but doesn't produce anything new, or really "do" anything at all. It's associated with abstract, universal, big ideas, but not so much with particulars, the material world, and immediacy. It's pretty usual to identify the transcendent realm of philosophy with the male, and the immanent world of practical crap with the female. So it's weird that Catherine, a philosopher and a virgin, produces milk, which is the way that a female body nourishes the body of a child. Very weird. But usually, in holy stories, if something weird happens, it is in order to instruct us in The Way Things Really Are. 

Another weird thing about the miracle is that the milk flows when Catherine's head is taken off. Now, this might be a stretch because I know that the ancients did not locate the mind in the head, but rather in the chest. But nonetheless, Catherine was a renowned orator, and that happens by means of the mouth, which is on the head, which she lost. So the nourishing milk appears when the organ of her fame is removed. That could mean two things about The Way Things Really Are.

The first possibility is that we have to kill rhetoric and philosophy in order to be a fountain of life. I reject this possibility because first of all, it can't be universal. Check out St. John Chrysostom et al. It also implies that St. Catherine was somehow wrong to be a philosopher, or that she practiced it in the wrong way. But her wisdom and powerful speech brought many of the governor's scholars and attendants to Christ, and it is the reason that she was sent to her martyrdom. So I don't think "Kill philosophy" is the message about The Way Things Really Are.

The second possibility, which my husband saw before I did, is that the removal of the head did not give way to the nourishing flow of milk, as if the presence of her powerful mind had been obstructing the flow, but that the milk was there all along. What if this maiden were not so cold and rational, but rather teeming with kindness and life? What if her chastity was not barren, but fruitful beyond mere biology? She is not Athena, virgin goddess of wisdom, armed like a soldier, with flashing grey eyes. Her philosophy was not cruel and proud, but "shows us the heights of humility."

I had it all wrong. How could I have forgotten that Christ is the child of, and so has special love for virgins, and that God always brings fruit from patient, barren branches? Catherine is like the rock struck by Moses which quenched the thirst of the Israelites. She is a fig tree which offers fruit to Christ even though it is not the season. Of course, she is like the Theotokos, who is both a Virgin and a Mother. The milk that flows from Catherine's neck teaches us that in truth, this is The Way Things Really Are. Philosophy, far from being barren and removed from "real life," is rather the love of God and all his creation, surging through us like sap from a tree, which drips out sweetly when we are pierced, revealing this life-giving virtue to the world. Virginity is fruitful.

That is something that this philosopher-turned-mommy needed to hear. Holy Saint Catherine, pray to God for us.

Popping in

I see that I did not make many posts in October. I guess I ran out of things to say for a while, and then got out of the habit of thinking bloggically. I'd like to keep it up, for a couple reasons. It's a fun way to keep in touch with friends, it requires that I examine and develop my whimsical little thoughts more rigorously than Facebook does, and Matt thinks that I can use this blog to Take Back Philosophy from the Philosophers!!! I will put that on my to-do list, babe.

In the meantime, this lecture on Immediacy by the matriarch of St. John's College, Eva Brann, might help to explain why I would want to do that. It's definitely about SJC and might seem like it's for insiders, but she delivered it at a conference on the liberal arts which was attended by many Muggles, so you should get something out of it even if you don't care about my weird college that I never stop talking about.

I would love to get off of Facebook again. But where would my little one-liners go? Yesterday I thought that I would write each little joke on a post-it note and stick them on the literal wall. Matt can put stickers on the ones that he likes. I don't need much more approval than that.

One does get lonely, though, in what I've come to call The Baby-Cave. This weekend I reconnected with old college friends on two occasions, and I think I can ride that high for a good week or so. It takes some effort for this little old country girl and her cranky baby to brave the poor signage and sometimes hellish traffic of the DC area, but it is always worth it to make contact again with friends who know me. It almost brings me to tears each time to finally see and hear these friends who are so much more than memories attached to a name and a little picture on my computer. In the presence of each of these friends, I feel vibrations in some tiny corner of my heart that has been silent for several years. Thank God for real people being real.

every little thing

I am reading a book called Christ and Apollo by William F. Lynch. Matt asked me if I liked it and I said that I liked the ideas, but not necessarily the way they were expressed. I think it's because it's something called literary criticism, which I know next to nothing about, and I don't like things that I don't know anything about. (I am aware of this fault of mine, and when I see it, I say "My dogs are barking!" in reference to Socrates' description of the spirited part of the soul as a guardian dog, who barks at people that he doesn't know, and welcomes people that are familiar to him. Once you start looking for that dog, you see him all over town, including at your front door.) I find the writing basically boring, but the ideas are interesting.

Lynch identifies two tendencies in approaches to art (specifically literature) which he says have significance for the way we live our lives. One is towards the "Christic," the incarnational embrace of the definite, of particulars, of time, of our limited experience. The other approach is "Apollonian," in that it seeks the absolute, the infinite, the heavenly, and wishes to discard or "transcend" the limitations of human experience in order to achieve, in a word, divinity. Lynch, a Jesuit, of course does not reject the pursuit of "insight," as he calls it, but maintains that it is to be found in attention to and even adoration of the details of the material, temporal human experience.

It reminds me of one of my favorite bits from Dante. In Paradiso, St. John the Theologian questions Dante on the history of his love for God and his ascent to Paradise. Dante has been drawn upwards by his love for his girlfriend, Beatrice (who is in Paradise,) as well as his veneration of his patron poet, Virgil, but St. John presses him even further to confess where he first learned to love, and Dante answers:

I love the leaves wherewith enleaved
is all the garden
tended by that eternal Gardener.

Not only does each single leaf point to the whole of creation, but in some way each part contains the whole, so that Dante's love for each Created Thing is really a love for all Creation. I like that. It is an apt description of what I think constitutes Good Art, and it seems to me to be a healthy attitude towards life as well.

I was thinking about this when I was pushing Scott in his stroller. I thought about how good it is that Orthodoxy teaches us to love Creation through the many, many "blessings" that we do for all of its parts-- people, plants, food, bodies of water, homes, even man-made things like cars. A blessing affirms and even commands the goodness of things. I wondered if there was a blessing for strollers, because I am terrified of Scott rolling into the road. I tried to remember if I had ever seen an Orthodox blessing for animals that were not currently being eaten in roasted or cured form, because I was about to pass the Episcopalian church where I had seen signs for weeks advertising the Blessing of the Animals (which prompted me to make a wicked joke in my head about not being able to tell if Pride Week came in October this year, or if it was just the Blessing of the Animals at the Episcopalian Church.) And lo and behold, as I passed the church, I came upon a circle of people with dogs, listening to a priest read the bit from the Gospel about the sparrows of the air and the lilies of the field. Scott and I rolled up to listen and watch the priest bless each animal with holy water. I was a little bit skeptical and even prepared to make more somewhat mean jokes to myself as I approached, but I couldn't help smiling and feeling my heart melt a little bit when I heard the priest say:

"Butters, be blessed in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."
"Peanut, be blessed in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."
"Coco, be blessed in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

I'm not sure it's strictly Orthodox, but I said "Amen."

wheels within wheels

Yesterday I bought Scott a big box of Huggies. It cost $23.99 for 80. They are really, really good. We had been talking about getting disposables for night time because the bigger he gets, the more pee he makes, and the more he soaks the bed. We've tried every combination of cloth diapers and intensely absorbent hemp inserts, but he always prevails. He has been sleeping on a towel so that we don't have to wash the sheets and mattress cover every dang day, but I hate that because it gets all bunched up. Thinking about buying disposable diapers made me very sad, because I know that they just end up in a landfill and will never, ever decompose, not in a million years. So I put it off, and then the other day when we went apple picking, I left him in his diaper for too long, and when we got home, he had a nasty rash. All the cloth diaper configurations rub him in exactly the same place, and there was no way to make him comfortable (except just letting him go sans diaper, which I did for as long as possible.) So my sadness about hurting my baby defeated my sadness about hurting the planet and future people and animals and I bought the Huggies. And now for the next 79 nights I won't wake up in a puddle of urine. That's nice.

Women who take care of the home, especially when children are in it, are constantly dealing with the immanent, material world-- the world of chopping vegetables, doing dishes, folding laundry, making the bed again, cleaning up pee and poop and vomit and snot, giving haircuts and baths, fixing broken stuff, buying all the things that you need to perform these actions, etc, and repeating all these things often. There are so many little decisions to make and actions to take all day long, and in all of them one is trying to make the best use of material resources that she possibly can. For some, that just means doing the cheapest thing. Others add "the quickest thing." Many add "the healthiest thing," and increasingly, people are adding "the thing that least screws over the environment." I try to hit all four of these criteria and it is rather emotionally draining. Having very high ideals about eco-friendliness and health makes it awfully difficult when the money and the time are both so short. Here is a diagram to illustrate what I mean. This is just about food (which is the biggest one because I have to make choices about it like, every hour.)

Not pictured: Lenten food (don't even get me started) or tasty food, because given my preferences, I believe that it's a subset of healthy food.

There are flaws with this diagram-- when you have four or more circles, not everybody can sit next to each other, so there are some scenarios which will not fit on the diagram at all (like something that is healthy and affordable, but not eco-friendly or easy/quick, such as many meals cooked from scratch using grocery store ingredients in lots of plastic.) And obviously I had to reach for something ridiculous to illustrate food that is healthy, but not eco-friendly, easy/quick, or affordable. But it serves to illustrate my thought process with every dang grocery store purchase or recipe selection, and now you can see where most of my anxiety comes from. I think it was easier for moms when all they had to worry about was affordable and easy, because they didn't really question whether the food in the grocery store was healthy or not, and nobody cared about the pelicans. But my god, the future of the human race depends on whether or not I am too selfish to make my own glue from flour and water and Death rattles a little closer to our door with every box of sugary granola that I just keep buying these days.

I went to church today with Scott for the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, which is the patronal feast of the church we've just started visiting. I found it so peaceful and refreshing to cease my calculations and take a break from the game of hopscotch I've been playing between these circles. Peace and joy are floating somewhere above them, and I keep thinking I'll reach them if I can just build my house in that middle section, but more likely I just need to walk away.

they couldn't reach it

Οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾽ ὔσδῳ
ἄκρον ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῳ λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπνεσ,
οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐδύναντ᾽ ἐπίκεσθαι. 

 

Matt: You are a leaver of food! You left three spinach leaves on your plate at dinner tonight.
Me: (laughing) You were counting my spinach leaves?
Matt: I wasn't counting them, it's just that three is the smallest easily recognizable number besides two.

(We laugh some more because we think that's funny.)

Me: Oh, except for one, right, haha...
Matt: (stops laughing) One is not a number.