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St Catherine
Mar. 23rd, 2024 07:39 am St Catherine is the Christianized form of Fortuna. Threatened with torture on a Wheel, she breaks it because "Behold, I make all things New..."
Mar. 23rd, 2024
St Michael
Mar. 23rd, 2024 07:49 am I spent a fair chunk of the morning trying to get AI to give me an image of the Archangel Michael to add to my gallery of divine persons.
It offered me a young Brad Pitt in armour. It offered me Jesus Christ being soppy. It offered me over-muscled warriors in Marvel-type armour. It offered me girls...
(Look, if I'd wanted Joan of Arc -whom I adore- I'd have said so.)
It just couldn't think beyond gender.
What I was hoping for was something like this, from a Last Judgement by Rogier Van Der Weyden, only obviously not exactly the same because what would be the point?
Rogier's St Michael is gracile, androgynous, intense.
When it comes to imagining gender-neutrality the 15th century was ahead of us.
It offered me a young Brad Pitt in armour. It offered me Jesus Christ being soppy. It offered me over-muscled warriors in Marvel-type armour. It offered me girls...
(Look, if I'd wanted Joan of Arc -whom I adore- I'd have said so.)
It just couldn't think beyond gender.
What I was hoping for was something like this, from a Last Judgement by Rogier Van Der Weyden, only obviously not exactly the same because what would be the point?
Rogier's St Michael is gracile, androgynous, intense.
When it comes to imagining gender-neutrality the 15th century was ahead of us.
An Evening With Rumi
Mar. 23rd, 2024 08:28 am I was watching his hands, off and on, as he played his stringed instrument- and sometimes the fingers did elegant things and sometimes they got all bunched together like tubers- and sometimes they fell into configurations which if I'd seen them in a still image I'd have said were unnatural and badly drawn. Hands are wonderfully various and it's no wonder AI finds them so difficult to get right.
We were at the Printers Playhouse on Grove Rd with a little clutch of Quakers. There's a bar on the ground level and the shows happen in a a space upstairs that is no bigger than a bedroom. Duncan Mackintosh was channeling the Sufi poet Rumi- and it wasn't so much an entertainment as sitting at the feet of a master.
"Very like Quakerism" said someone afterwards and I said, "Of course because there's only One Truth" - which is what Rumi thought too. Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jew- none of that matters.
Afterwards we went back to John and Paul's for supper. Their house is newly built but modelled on a mediaeval manor house- with a frame of massive oak timbers and a great hall and a solar. Wonderful. I drank more red wine than I would usually do. Paul's snake Satan had shed his skin earlier that day and so we got to see him at his silkiest.
We were at the Printers Playhouse on Grove Rd with a little clutch of Quakers. There's a bar on the ground level and the shows happen in a a space upstairs that is no bigger than a bedroom. Duncan Mackintosh was channeling the Sufi poet Rumi- and it wasn't so much an entertainment as sitting at the feet of a master.
"Very like Quakerism" said someone afterwards and I said, "Of course because there's only One Truth" - which is what Rumi thought too. Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jew- none of that matters.
Afterwards we went back to John and Paul's for supper. Their house is newly built but modelled on a mediaeval manor house- with a frame of massive oak timbers and a great hall and a solar. Wonderful. I drank more red wine than I would usually do. Paul's snake Satan had shed his skin earlier that day and so we got to see him at his silkiest.