Dream Log: Vagueness In Rescue And Love

2 dreams from last night.

1st dream: I was inside a Catholic church located downtown in a big city, on a snowy winter night. I was in charge of a rescue attempt: but whom I was rescuing, or how, or why it required that I stay there in the church, I couldn't tell you. I kept moving from the front to the back of the ground floor of the church. The nave had stone walls and stained glass and pews worn from long use. It was rather dark in there. In back, away from the public area, was a kitchen, and for some reason, it was full of a lot of people bustling around and cooking. This may have been for a soup kitchen, I don't know. The kitchen had a door opening onto an alleyway. Both this door and the church's main front doors were unlocked, and well-meaning people kept coming in both the front and back doors, wanting to assist me and my crew of 3 or 4 other people in rescuing whomever it was we were trying to rescue. It was very awkward, because all of these well-meaning people were just getting in the way and hindering my progress in the rescue attempt, but I felt that I couldn't yell at them or tell them too directly that they were no help. I did keep telling people on the inside to keep the others out, but they kept getting in.

For some reason, locking any of the doors was out of the question.

At one point, a group of well-meaning men, about a half-dozen of them, got through the front doors and past the vestibule and formed a semi-circle toward the back of the nave, the front of the church, and began to sing marvelously. They were singing to help the rescue, and for some reason it didn't seem silly to think that singing would help. I and my associates knew it wouldn't help, but it didn't seem unreasonable that the singing men thought they were helping. My assistants and I went to where the men were singing. The acoustics of the nave magnified their voices with a wonderful reverb. There just a half-dozen or so of them, but they were making a huge, incredible sound, standing there with their overcoats unbuttoned and their hats in their hands. My assistants gave me quizzical looks, wondering why I didn't chase the singing men out right away. The truth was that they sounded so good, and I felt under such pressure to rescue -- whomever we were supposed to be rescuing -- that I just took a moment to rest and listen to the music.

2nd dream. I was living in a small apartment with two other renters, near a busy street containing strip malls and such, on a bright sunny winter day. it was very cold, on the streets there was a thin layer of snow over solid ice.

I was friends with a woman, not one of the two other renters in the house. The two of us were outside my house wearing winter coats and gloves and boots. I liked her a lot, and it was rapidly becoming very clear that the feeling was mutual.

She looked a lot like a woman I met 40 years ago when we were both 15, who was short and blonde and green-eyed and flatchested and very beautiful. She looked a bit like Reese Witherspoon except that Ms Witherspoon isn't flatchested. In the dream the woman I used to know was now middle-aged, but still short and flatchested and very beautiful. I'm 55 now, and I've spent a large portion of my life looking at beautiful women, and when I knew her in real life 40 years ago, she was one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, before or since. I can remember a lot of the occasions when I first met or saw a beautiful woman, but with her is the only time that I have an exact visual memory of the moment I first saw a woman: I saw her standing with her back to me across a crowded room, and she looked very nice, and then she looked over her shoulder and I got a first glimpse of her very beautiful face. I remember it very vividly.

In the dream she kept standing in my way so that we almost bumped into each other, kept coming in very close and looking at me, gently but very insistently. There was some reason why I felt it might not be right for the two of us to become involved. That reason was never clear in the dream. It might have been something like that we worked together and one of us was the other's boss. Something like that. Whatever it was, after a short period of her not letting me by like that I gave up, and we hugged. She was very short, barely 5 feet tall, and I'm 6'3", so when we hugged, her head rested against my chest.

Dream Log: Energetic Priest

I dreamed I was a Roman Catholic priest. A very liberal one, to put it mildly. I was openly flirting with a woman in front of a young priest, who was also very liberal about such things and not bothered by my behavior, and a superior of mine on the Church hierarchy, who was very much bothered by my behavior, and threatened to have me thrown out of the priesthood. I wasn't rattled: I didn't think he could have me thrown out, and I didn't much care if he did. I didn't believe in God in the dream any more than I do in waking life.

Then for a little while the young priest and I were cops as well as priests. The two of us very energetically chased some suspects through a wintry city neighborhood, running very fast, going up and down many exterior staircases on old wooden houses, climbing over tall fences. Then we were no longer cops, but we kept up with the running and climbing, for reasons which were unclear. If nothing else, it was fun and a really intense workout. I was 54 years old in the dream, just like in waking life, but in the dream I was in much better physical condition.

Then I and the young priest and a third man who was young and athletic went inside my modest apartment. The two of them were both very hungry, so I got two dishes I'd made out of my refrigerator: they were mostly potatoes, plus some odds and ends I'd had on hand. I was embarrassed, because I thought that both of the dishes, both improvised on my part, were rather disgusting. But the two of them ate with great gusto and seemed to enjoy the food very much.

It occurred to me how some people seem not to realize that one and the same sort of food can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on how much a person exercises. These potato dishes could be quite fattening for sedentary people, but people like us, who'd been running and climbing very strenuously for long distances, could eat the very same thing, and the carbs would burn off very quickly, and the food wouldn't be fattening. I was reminded of a program I'd seen on the Food Network, hosted by Bobby Flay, in which two women were featured who ran a bakery for a living, and also ran marathons. On the program they prepared one of their favorite items, a huge chocolate-chip cookie with an enormous amount of calories. When the cookies were done they had a lot of their regular customers over to try them, including many other marathon runners. The women who ran the bakery, and the other marathoners, were all very lean and attractive-looking people. And they were all talking about what a great pre-race food this enormous cookie would be. And Bobby Flay seemed a bit confused, as if he didn't understand how this huge cookie full of fat and carbs and sugar and chocolate, which he would regard as a decadent indulgence, could actually be healthy food.

That was a real Food Network show which I saw in waking life, and then in the dream I remembered seeing it, as I watched my two young athletic friends chowing down on potatoes.

Then I woke up. Recently, in the past year or two, I'd been confused about whether I had occasionally done some fast running, or just dreamed about it so intensely that it seemed like real memories of running. When I woke up this morning all doubt was gone: all of that recent running has been in dreams. I mean, I've done SOME running in real life, recently, but it's been very different than in the dreams: in waking life, now and then in the past couple of years I've run for up to 50 or 100 yards at a time, and without necessarily turning blue every time, either. But in the dreams I've been going for miles, really fast. In these dreams I've been a better runner than I've ever been in real life.

But I'd like to run that well in real life. I used to be a very lean person who could chow down on big amounts of carbs without it fattening me. It'd be fun to be that lean and strong again. It felt good, decades ago.

"Everything's A Situation"

-- that's my favorite line from "NYPD Blue," which, more than 2 decades after it premiered, is still the gold standard for American broadcast-TV partial nudity.



Gail O'Grady, Amy Thankyoujesus Brenneman, are you kidding me??? Guh...

Where was I?

Ah yes: "Everything's a situation." Scott Allan Campbell (IAB Sgt Jerry Martens) said that to Jimmy Smits (Det Simone) in some situation which also involved Dennis Franz (Det Sipowicz). I have no idea what the situation was, I'm sure I forgot everything about the situation pretty quickly except that line and what it meant. To Dennis Franz, everybody from Internal Affairs was a rat, you never told them anything, you didn't have anything to do with any of them and that was that. To Jimmy Smits, Scott Allan Campbell was a human being standing in front of him telling him that everything was a situation, and the two of them found a way to work together and get something done.

I recently quit a Facebook group because I was unable to resolve an argument with a group member, and the group member was an admin, so I couldn't block him. He insisted that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that you can criticize the beliefs without criticizing the believers. I don't think you can. I think a religion is a group of people, and that this stuff about a religion being a set of beliefs is a convenient excuse for bad behavior on the part of some atheists, who heap scorn and abuse on a religion, and then add, "Now, don't get mad, because I wasn't criticizing any people, I was only criticizing their beliefs."

Of course, anybody who knows me at all well knows that I occasionally insult people. But I freely admit that that's what I'm doing. Watch, I'm going to do it some more right now:

Earlier today I watched a nauseating video of some yahoo who's a rather well-known professional religion-baiter and winner of at least one Atheist of the Year award, spewing abuse on Catholics. It occurred to me that parts of his tirade could have come word-for-word from an anti-Catholic rant by a leader of the KKK; it ended up with something like "[...]the Catholic Church hasn't done good in the world, and fuck you for saying it has!" Huh. 1500-some-odd years, over 1 billion people currently, and they haven't accomplished a thing, eh, Perfessor? And fuck anybody who dares to say something different? As someone who's been homeless and given food and shelter from Catholic churches and clergy, I would be remiss not to point out that I have experienced things personally which seem to indicate that this particular atheist leader is full of shit. He's the epitome of the kind of atheist I don't want to be associated with, the kind of New Atheist who I hope will make New Atheism fail, when atheist leaders emerge who understand how everything's a situation. Atheist leaders who, for example, can appreciate some of the things which Pope Francis is doing.

When you ask a group of atheists what they think of Pope Francis, some will go into the standard Catholic-bashing rant, including, of course, a mention of pedophile priests and the standard charge that the Vatican isn't doing anything against sexual abuse. Some, on the other hand, might have noticed that Francis introduced laws specifically mentioning such abuse as criminal offenses in Vatican City. A year and a half ago. In his first action as Pope to do with the laws of the state he governs.

Some atheists view Catholics the way Sipowicz views Internal Affairs: they're all evil, they're the enemy, period, done, there's no discussing it with them. Some look at Francis the way Simone looked at Sgt Martens: they see an actual human being who wants to change a few things and help. I look at Francis and I see someone more likely to change things in the Catholic Church for the better than all the New Atheists put together. Yeah, I don't believe in God, and yeah, there are a lot of other things besides that I disagree with Francis about: gay marriage and priestly celibacy come immediately to mind. If I ever meet someone I don't disagree with about something, I'll be sure and let you know. I can't recall having met such a person yet. My world isn't black-and-white, it's all grey.

Everything's a situation. These groups that haters hate, they're all people. Most Catholics hate the child abuse and want it dealt with. Most Muslims hate terrorism. Most Germans aren't Nazis. Most Southerners aren't racists -- the yahoo I mentioned above, the one who sounds like a Klansman when he rants against Catholics, he's a white Southerner, and might well become indignant if someone assumed, because he's from the South, that he's a racist -- as well he should. Might mention some of the many white Southerners who've fought and continue to fight for civil rights -- as well he should. I don't assume that he's a racist because he's a Southerner. I don't even assume it just because he's batshit-crazy on the subject of Catholicism.

And I'm also not going to claim that I didn't just insult him, but only his beliefs. Yeah, I insulted him. I felt he deserved it. I stand by my verbal abuse.

PS, 14. January 2017: Apparently I'm not the only one who ever thought that "everything's a situation" is pretty deep for being just 8 syllables long: "NYPD Blue" itself quoted the line. These days the show is on TV about 70 or 80 times a week, and now and then I watch an episode, and recently I was watching an episode which must have aired a couple of years after the one described above, and once again, there was tension between the squad's detectives and IAB, and Simone said something like this to Martens (reconstructed from memory, not an exact quote) : "I try to learn something each and every day if I can. A while ago you said something to me that stuck: 'everything's a situation.' 'Everything's a situation.' That was my lesson for that day." And I don't remember what that particular situation was, but apparently, Simon and Martens were once again able to work things out.

Sometimes It's Hard To See The Forest For The Trees

A striking example of this occurred recently during debates I've had with apologists who point out that Charles Darwin's books were never put onto the Index, and claim that this is one of many things which proves that the Catholic Church is the greatest supporter of science of all time. The obvious, forest-for-the-trees answer to that is that THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS THE INDEX, from the 16th century to the 20th. Here's a webpage listing every author who was ever on the Index. That webpage is a little misleading: it claims to be the Index in 1949. Actually, many authors were put on the Index and then later taken off. I happen to have a copy of the official Index as it stood in 1854. Charles Darwin was never on the Index, but in 1854, when Charles turned 45 years old, his father, the eminent, world-famous biologist Erasmus Darwin, was on the Index. (Yes, Charles' very own Dad. No one can speak for Charles now, but is it really very far-fetched to imagine that Charles might have gotten just a little bit annoyed if someone tried to tell him that an organization which had banned his father's books was the greatest promoter of science of all time?) So were Bruno (opera omnia, of course: the complete works), Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and, oh yes, also... Wait for it... Francis Bacon! ("We're the greatest supporters of science of all time! Don't read Francis Bacon, generally credited with the formulation of the scientific method, often called the 'father of modern science,' or you'll go to Hell!") And of course also Pascal and Diderot and Voltaire and Luther and Hume (opera omnia) and Bentham and Locke and Heine, and so many other illustrious writers that it is no exaggeration to say that it was a bit of an insult to an illustrious modern European writer if he or she were not put onto the Index. It is a Who's Who of the intellectual community of Europe. (Why not Charles Darwin? Why not Goethe or Feuerbach or Schopenhauer or Marx or Nietzsche? Didn't each of them deserve that distinction as much as Zola [opera omnia.]? Maybe because the people composing the Index rightly suspected that such authors would only be overjoyed and encouraged by being Indexed. Maybe because there's not much rhyme or reason here.) Over 400 pages long, the Index in 1854. Several thousand entries.

People who actually promote science don't ban books they dislike. It would never occur to them to do such a thing. They say: this book is terrible. Go ahead, read it for yourself and you'll see what I mean.

17th-Century Monarchs Conversing In Latin

So I'm reading The Siege of Vienna by John Stoye, and I'm at the very dramatic point after the siege (by the Ottoman Turks, in 1683) has been successfully repulsed, and the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, whose capital city, Vienna, has just been saved, is riding out east of the city with his staff to greet the Polish King John III Sobieski, whose army has played a large part in the victory. Page 269 in the 1965 Holt, Rinehart and Winston edition. The thing is that already, this Monday, the 13th of September, 1683, one day after the victory, the bickering over who owes whom how much respect and gratitude, with consequences affecting how the war will proceed as the united Christian forces chase the fleeing Turks across what had been the Ottoman frontier for some time, and questions such as who will be owed what newly-won land and booty, and all of this intimately tied up with what seem to us 300 years later to be bizarrely petty matters of address and manners -- the bickering is well underway. A word or a gesture on the part of the Emperor or the Polish King could be -- would be -- seen as an acknowledgement that the other was the Official Big Shot of the Day, to whom belonged the glory each regarded as his own. "The two men faced each other on horseback. There could be no question of either claiming precedence by being on the other's right, which was the crux of the ceremonial problem. The King remained uncovered for just as long as the Emperor, and no longer. They conversed in Latin for a few minutes --"

And with that, of course, I no longer cared about the precedence and ceremonial problems or how the war was going to proceed or even about the crazy gi-normous Louis XIV wigs one or both or them may have been wearing, because Stoye wrote "They conversed in Latin for a few minutes." And so from then on I was on a mission: are we SURE they spoke Latin? Could it be that they spoke French or German interspersed with a few Latin phrases? Was it a stiff and halting, artificial conversation, or was it entirely fluent Latin spoken as naturally as anything? A couple of centuries earlier you'd expect all the European royalty and high nobility -- anybody with any chance at all of becoming royalty -- to speak Latin. I searched Stoye's book for more mentions of language -- nothing. I couldn't find Stoye's source for the incident, Acta Regis Johannis III. ad res anno 1683, online. But I found other collections of primary materials on the Kingdom of Poland. My first impression is that Poland's governmental business in the late 17th century was conducted more in French than in Latin. The documents from the very early 16th century were mostly in Latin, as I expected, but there was also some German. Early-16th-century German is bizarre in its spelling and wording from a 21st-century perspective, but still comprehensible to a German-speaker, as you know if you're fluent in German and have read some German by Luther whose orthography has not been brought into conformity with contemporary usage.

Of course, if you're Polish, and quite possibly even if you're not, at this point what may be occupying your thoughts much more urgently than any of these matters of Latin and French and German, is: at what point did the rulers of Poland actually begin to conduct their affairs in Polish? It's a perfectly reasonable question, and I'm sorry that I have no idea when they did. I'm concerned with Latin and with how long it lasted in populations of what size. Certainly, European royalty retained a fluency in Latin until quite recently; in fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if some or even most of what is left of European royal families can carry on conversations in Latin to this day. Knowledge of Latin was even more lively for even longer in the Catholic Church, and despite the huge changes made by Vatican II, huge and catastrophic in this one regard of language, there are still a lot of Latin speakers in the Church today, maybe more than in Classics Departments, maybe not, but a lot. A century after Leopold and Sobieski sat their horses and -- possibly. Probably -- chatted for a while in Latin, Tom Paine looked at royalty and the Church and the way they still cultivated Latin, and urged throwing the language away -- urged it with a disastrously huge influence and effect. I'm every bit as anti-royal and atheist as Paine, but I look at Latin and draw exactly the opposite conclusion: why should royalty and clergy have all the fun? And also: who's going to keep an eye on the royals and clergy if we can't understand what they're saying? Two of the many reasons why Paine was wrong, and a much less effective opponent of the ancien regime than he could have been. And an idiot.

Religious Images And The 2nd Commandment

I love a lot of religious images, I love them a lot. Byzantine mosaics, stained glass -- fugettaboutit. I'm sometimes almost tempted to say that the whole religious fooferah was worth it for the art, and music. Actually I'm not, that was an attempt at a joke. My actual attitude is that what happened happened, and that a lot of the art which has happened was made for religious institutions because they were running the entire society at the time, and the choice for artists was sell religious art or not sell anything. Can we really even say that the work of, for example, Fra Filippo Lippi really is religious art, from Filippo's point of view? He didn't become a monk because he was filled with the Holy Spirit, but because as a baby he was abandoned at the door of a monastery, and he didn't behave at all the way a monk was supposed to, having a stupendous number of love affairs, many of them with nuns, and his paintings have religious themes because the Church was who was paying for paintings. I don't think you can tell by Fillipo's paintings that he was less than pious, and I don't think you have to be a believer to fully appreciate any painting on any subject.

In fact, as we know, religious belief can and often does interfere with all sorts of enjoyment, and in the case of visual art there is the 2nd Commandment. Someone said that the Roman Catholic Church simply eradicated that Commandment from all texts "for many centuries." I really don't think they struck that passage for any length of time, even though Pope Gregory II immediately denounced iconoclasm as soon as the Byzantine Emperor Leo III proclaimed it. If they struck or suppressed the 2nd commandment at any time, it seems to me that this would have been the time, in the 8th or 9th century. But I don't know of a single manuscript of the Vulgate, Catholicism's official version of the Bible from the early Midlle Ages until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's, in which Exodus 20:4 is missing or altered from "non facies tibi sculptile neque omnem similitudinem quae est in caelo desuper et quae in terra deorsum nec eorum quae sunt in aquis sub terra," If anyone knows of such an altered manuscript I'd be sincerely very interested in hearing about it. Likewise if you know of a Breviary or piece of stained glass or something else which contains an altered version of the 10 Commandments.

I don't want to ask the person who asserted that this change was made "for many centuries" where he got that. Experience has taught me that people making such claims tend not to tell you where they got their info, and they do tend to get very unpleasant instead and accuse you of being an undercover Catholic spy, and I'm really over it. (Maybe I need to come up with a less unpleasant way of asking than "Where on Earth did you get that?!") But if anyone does happen to come across something which looks like a source for a "the Catholic Church struck the 2nd Commandment from the text of the Bible for" many centuries, or for a shorter period of time, I'd very much appreciate being told about it. Primitive superstitions fascinate me, whether held by religious people thousands of years ago or by atheists today. (Oh yes I did.)

Now of course, the RCC greatly decreased literacy rates among laypeople during the Middle Ages, which was probably much more effective in dealing with inconvenient Bible passages than altering them would have been.

And of course there was the very famous period of iconoclasm in the Orthodox East, although it didn't last as long as some people seem to think. Government-approved iconoclasm in the Orthodox territories actually only lasted a few decades, staring some time between 726 and 730 and ending in 787, and then being reinstated in 814 and lasting until 842 until it disappeared forever -- at least as far as Eastern Orthodoxy is concerned, and thank Euphemism, because, as I said, mosaics. There were sporadic, minor, localized tendencies before and after that to follow the 2nd Commandment, but that's been true of Christian groups in all regions and eras. Calvinists churches come to mind. By now, almost 5 centuries after Calvin, they represent a rather wide range of practices, but some of them to this day are very very free of images.

I wonder whether it's more than a coincidence that a little over a dozen years after the first period of official iconoclasm ended in the East that the Pope crowned the first Western Emperor, the first ruler of what eventually would be called the Holy Roman Empire. Could the Catholics have looked on aghast at iconoclasm, and thought, Okay, these guys are getting fanatical and crazy and it's time to break away from them? Just a thought. Maybe the timing is no more than a coincidence. Maybe Byzantine iconoclasm was just a symptom of a greater, broader social or political tendency. This is a job for a new Steven Runciman! and I'm not him, and I don't see any new Steven Runcimans anywhere, which is a real shame.

What is not a shame is that most of even the most pious Christians have just pretty much ignored the 2nd Commandment, along with many more of even the most pious Jews and Muslims than many people realize.

They Should Elect ME Pope

If they're serious about sending the world a bold statement about change, that is. Electing a non-Catholic openly avowed atheist would be bold.

I'm not saying there's much chance that the Cardinals are actually going to elect me Pope. But it would be pretty cool. And I know some Latin, I can legere and dicere me a bit of lingua latina. I must say, there is exactly one thing I can think of which I really like about Benedict XVI, and that is his enthusiasm for the Latin language. When he gets going on that topic, you can pretty much safely assume that I agree with what he's saying. And I know some other languages as well. The Church seems to like its Popes to be multiligual, to be able to speak to folks in their own languages when they tour the world and whatnot.

Clearly, I would be a controversial choice. Even more controversial than, say, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi. Do I really want to live amid strong controversy?

...Well, maybe I do. Intense worldwide controversy would drive more traffic to my blog, for one thing. And there wouldn't be anything wrong with that.

And the thing is, the Vatican is... just really nice. So much beautiful art and architecture. I mean that. Zero sarcasm right now. I deeply appreciate that art and architecture. And the location is great too. And since my elderly cat passed away recently, travel has become less complicated for me.

So. If any of my readers has any pull with the College of Cardinals, let 'em know. Throw my hat into that ring. Thank you.