Christmas Every Day

2013
On this day nine years ago, Merle Haggard (1937-2016) is presented an honorary doctorate in fine arts by California State University, Bakersfield.

Mentioning this gives me a springboard to my real topic of the day: witty country and western song titles. Though I am not a huge fan of country music (especially in its latest and tamest iterations) I recognize that its lyrics come closest to being the best artistic expression of the thoughts of the average working-class American. It is also the genre that is least afraid to poke fun at itself and its audience as we can tell songs listed here.

1540 Birth of an anti-Catholic poet

June 11 is St Barnabas’ Day and thus it was natural for Robert and Margaret Googe of Chilwell, Nottinghamshire to name their new-born son Barnabe. Young Barnabe grew to be a well-connected lawyer and politician during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I but his chief fame is as a poet, not necessarily a very good poet but an influential one. In literary circles he was renowned as one of the first English pastoral poets and to historians of Tudor Protestantism he is famed for his religious commentary, particularly that found in his translation of Thomas Kirchmeyer’s Regnum papisticum of 1555, a compendium of attacks on Roman Catholicism — in 1570 Googe rendered this as The Popish Kingdome, or reign of Antichrist.

To give you a flavour of his artistry, here is his description of the Catholic celebration of St John’s Day, December 27:

1525 The Great Cursing

Yesterday’s post was about Old Testament and Roman curses. None of the imprecatory psalms or the curse tablets, however, could come close in maleficent power to the Great Cursing and Monition of Gavin Dunbar, the Archbishop of Glasgow. He summoned the Almighty to thoroughly plague the English and Scottish border raiders known as reivers. Every parish priest in Scotland was obliged to read it from the pulpit. Here is a taste of it in the Scots dialect.

I curse their heid and all the haris of thair heid; I curse thair face, thair ene, thair mouth, thair neise, thair tongue, thair teeth, thair crag, thair shoulderis, thair breist, thair hert, thair stomok, thair bak, thair wame, thair armes, thais leggis, thair handis, thair feit, and everilk part of thair body, frae the top of their heid to the soill of thair feet, befoir and behind, within and without.

In contemporary English:

I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead, their shoulders, their breast, their heart, their stomach, their back, their womb, their arms, their legs, their hands, their feet, and every part of their body, from the top of their head to the soles of their feet, before and behind, within and without.

I curse them going and I curse them riding; I curse them standing and I curse them sitting; I curse them eating and I curse them drinking; I curse them rising, and I curse them lying; I curse them at home, I curse them away from home; I curse them within the house, I curse them outside of the house; I curse their wives, their children, and their servants who participate in their deeds. I (bring ill wishes upon) their crops, their cattle, their wool, their sheep, their horses, their swine, their geese, their hens, and all their livestock. I (bring ill wishes upon) their halls, their chambers, their kitchens, their stanchions, their barns, their cowsheds, their barnyards, their cabbage patches, their plows, their harrows, and the goods and houses that are necessary for their sustenance and welfare.”

May all the malevolent wishes and curses ever known, since the beginning of the world, to this hour, light on them. May the malediction of God, that fell upon Lucifer and all his fellows, that cast them from the high Heaven to the deep hell, light upon them.

He goes on for some time, urging the repetition of the ills that befell Pharaoh and the Egyptians, Sodom and Gomorrah, Pontius Pilate, Herod, and Julian the Apostate. The Archbishop goes on to excommunicate them, forbid anyone from having any dealings with them, and concludes:

When we think of petitions to the celestial powers we usual think of blessings. But, since time immemorial, people have also sought to invoke the gods to bring harm upon their enemies. Consider, for example, the Imprecatory Psalms of the Old Testament where God is beseeched to smite one’s enemies.

Let their table become a snare before them: and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap. Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their loins continually to shake. Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them. Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents. (Ps. 69: 22-25).

Then there were the Roman curse tablets inscribed on lead and thrown into wells or tombs, or buried in the earth so that through closer contact with the chthonic powers their potency is increased.

Spirits of the netherworld, I consecrate and hand over to you, if you have any power, Ticene of Carisius. Whatever she does, may it all turn out wrong. Spirits of the netherworld, I consecrate to you her limbs, her complexion, her figure, her head, her hair, her shadow, her brain, her forehead, her liver, her shoulders, her heart, her her eyebrows, her mouth, her nose, her chin, her cheeks, her lips, her speech, her breath, her neck, lungs, her intestines, her stomach, her arms, her fingers, her hands, her navel, her entrails, her thighs, her knees, her calves, her heels, her soles, her toes. Spirits of the netherworld, if I see her wasting away, I swear that I will you every year. will be delighted to offer a sacrifice to

I curse Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts and memory; thus may she be unable to speak what things are concealed.

Chariot races were hugely popular in the Roman and, later, the Byzantine world. Drivers worked for the various organizations named after colours: the Greens, the Blues, etc. These groups functioned variously as mutual-aid groups, religious sects, political partisans, and criminal gangs.

I call upon you, o demon, whoever you are and ask that from this hour, from this day, from this moment, you torture and kill the horses of the Green and White factions, and that you kill and crush completely the drivers Clarus, Felix, and Romanus, and that you leave not a breath in their bodies.

Some thoughts on men and women

You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither. – Steve Martin 

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies. – P.G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money, 1916

“A woman’s always quicker than a man at such jobs as ’tater setting. They can bend easier, and they’re nimbler-handed nor we. My missis can pick peas twice as quick as I can. But there,” he added, in male extenuation, “a woman’s always handling ’taters, so she ought to know the way on’t.” – Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree, 1932

A woman in love is capable of anything. Exactly like a woman not in love. – Roberto Gervaso (1937-)

A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain. – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892

On the one hand, we’ll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open all our own jars. – Jeff Green, 1999

The true man wants two things: danger and diversion. Therefore he wants woman, the most dangerous plaything. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883

“When I speak of women,” said the doctor, “I speak of a sex so fragile, so variable, so changeable, so inconstant, and so imperfect … that Plato, you will recall, was at a loss where to class them. …  For nature has placed in their bodies …  certain humors, brackish, nitrous, boracious, acrid, mordant, shooting, and bitterly tickling …  by which the entire feminine body is shaken …  all senses ravished …  all thought thrown into confusion …  sometimes so violent that the woman is thereby deprived of all other senses and powers of motion as if she had suffered from heart failure, syncope, epilepsy, apoplexy, something like death.” – François Rabelais,  Gargantua and Pantagruel, c. 1532

“I was thinking”, he answered absently, “about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.” – Willa Cather, The Professor’s House, 1925

She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity. – Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”, 1955

A man experienced in dealing with the female sex knows that the policy to pursue, when a woman issues an order, is not to stand arguing but to acquiesce and then go off and disobey it. – P.G. Wodehouse, Ice in the Bedroom, 1961

A girl much given to dancing can hardly find acceptance in the eyes of a man of true delicacy. Such a man’s mind must revolt more or less at the idea of his mistress twirling round in the waltz, or quadrilling it with a set of fellows, the very touch of whose fingers upon her delicate person he must feel as a sort of sacrilege. For this reason, young ladies should dance little, or not at all, in the presence of their lovers. – Robert Macnish, Aphorisms, 1834

1495 Treaty of Tordesillas

By the late 15th century European marine architecture had advanced to the point that long ocean-going voyages were possible. The nation states on the Atlantic coast invested in exploration whose purpose was to find a sea-route to Asia and its trade riches. The country that achieved this might thus cut out Mediterranean middle-men and avoid dealing with hostile Islamic powers. Portugal was first to take up this challenge and a series of expeditions down the coast of Africa in the 1480s and 1490s would eventually find a way to round the southern cape and reach India. At the same time Castile, the leading Spanish power, financed Christopher Columbus’s attempt to reach Asia by a western route, a serendipitous blunder that ended up in the discovery of the Americas. When Columbus returned from the Caribbean in March, 1493 he was sure that he had touched on the offshore islands of Japan and the Khanate of Cathay

The problem was that Columbus’s voyage violated two papal bulls and a Spanish-Portuguese treaty that awarded Portugal the right to explore and occupy non-Christian lands “in the Ocean Seas” (in mari oceano) and usque ad Indos – all the way to the Indies. After all sorts of diplomatic moves, Pope Alexander VI, a Spaniard, issued the 1493 bull Inter cetera which bolstered Spanish claims:

Among other works well pleasing to the Divine Majesty and cherished of our heart, this assuredly ranks highest, that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself. …[W]e … assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, … all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered towards the west and south, by drawing and establishing a line from … the north, …to …the south, … the said line to be distant one hundred leagues towards the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde.

The Portuguese were unhappy with this rather vague division of the globe and saw that it precluded their hopes of claiming rights in India. They secured their future by negotiating the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas with Spain. This agreement, which ignored the papal bull, drew a north-south line down the Atlantic, giving Portugal territory to the east and Spain the lands to the west. Interestingly, the treaty specifically forbade any appeal to the pope.

Some quotes about dogs in memory of Grendel, a dog of little brain but enormous heart.

And just as he has the sense of virtue, so also he has the sense of sin. A cat may be taught not to do certain things, but if it is caught out and flees, it flees not from shame, but from fear. But the shame of a dog touches an abyss of misery as bottomless as any human emotion. He has fallen out of the state of grace, and nothing but the absolution and remission of his sin will restore him to happiness. – Alfred George Gardiner”A Dithyramb on a Dog”, 1920

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
But when we are certain of sorrow in store
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.  

– Rudyard Kipling, “The Power of the Dog”

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured. – Tacitus, Annals, c. 105

The cobra will bite you whether you call it cobra or Mr. Cobra. – Indian Proverb

Permit me, sir, to give you one piece of advice. Be not so positive; especially with regard to things which are neither easy nor necessary to be determined. When I was young I was sure of everything. In a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before. At present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to man. – John Wesley, London Magazine, 1775

Do not let a flattering woman coax and wheedle you and deceive you; she is after your barn. – Hesiod, 8c B.C.

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. – Carl W. Buehner, 1971

Money swore an oath that nobody who did not love it should ever have it. – Irish proverb

God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination. – Augustine of Hippo, “Commentary on Psalm 145”, c. 400

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity. – Euripides, Helen, 412 BC

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly. – Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting, 1703

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1974

We are human beings, not creatures of infinite possibilities. ­ Robertson Davies, Conversations with Robertson Davies, 1989

A fanatic is someone who looks at beauty and sees injustice. – Theodore Dalrymple, Midnight Maxims, 2021

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares. – Daniel Dennett, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, 2005

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. – Feodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1864

 

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker, Esquire, 1959

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies. – William Faulkner, interview in Paris Review, 1956

I don’t think Henry James ever knew how ordinary people behave. His characters have neither bowels nor sexual organs. He wrote a number of stories about men of letters, and it is told that when someone protested that literary men were not like that, he retorted, “So much the worse for them.” Presumably, he did not look upon himself as a realist. Though I do not know that it is a fact, I surmise that he regarded Madame Bovary with horror. On one occasion Matisse was showing a lady a picture of his in which he had painted a naked woman, and the lady exclaimed, “But a woman isn’t like that”: to which he answered, “It isn’t a woman, madam, it’s a picture.” I think, similarly, if someone had ventured to suggest that a story of James’s was not like life, he would have replied, “It isn’t life, it’s a story.” —W. Somerset Maugham, “The Short Story”, Points of View, 2011

There isn’t any symbolism in [The Old Man and the Sea]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. – Ernest Hemingway, letter to Bernard Berenson, 1952

 

Last autumn I was strolling down a street in the old part of Tbilisi, Georgia when I chanced upon a monastery dedicated to the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste. “That’s a lot of martyrs in one place, ” I remarked and thought no more about it.

A week later I am in the Caucasus mountains in the village of Mestia which has a world-class museum of ethnography, housing treasures that have been stored by the clans for over a thousand years. Imagine my delight when I come across this icon. Yes, it’s those 40 martyrs.

While Emperor Constantine was legislating religious toleration in the western part of the Roman world, his colleague in the east, Licinius, was persecuting Christians. In 320, when it was discovered that members of the Twelfth Legion stationed in Asia Minor were Christians who refused to renounce their faith, they were ordered to strip and freeze to death on a nearby ice-covered lake. One of their number weakened and headed for a heated bath house but a guard watching over them was converted and joined the martyrs. 

This incident inspired numerous portrayals in icon form, some of them, like the one immediately below, showing the apostate heading for the bath house (where he immediately died of shock) and the guard disrobing.