Daily Archives: May 12, 2011

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Humanities

Love, Sex and Scandal

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Beltane                                                              Waxing Last Frost Moon

Love, sex and scandal tour tonight.  We went from the Venus figurine, made 20,000 years ago, to the erotic work of Balthus, covering, in between nymphs and satyrs, heroes and centaurs, a raped Roman matron, a satirized French actress, a beloved 5th century Chinese singing girl and the Little Girl of Otto Dix.  The basic theme was the enduring nature of love and sex, probably scandal, too, thought that’s hard to read in the archaeological record.

The most controversial pieces were the final two, Little Girl and The Living Room.  The one we decided was not pornographic though it appeared that way, the other was pornographic though it does not appear that way.  The mutable nature of art.  Along the way we spoke of the shadow museum, things we own, but do not display like shunga, the erotic prints from Japan, that our idea of propriety still carries over the Victorian sensibilities of now three centuries and a millennium past.

We spoke openly about these things and, I think, surprised each other.  In a good way.  I enjoyed the group and the tour.

Garden, Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

A Northern Spring

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Beltane                                                              Waxing Last Frost Moon

This northern spring, a season all its own, as is the northern summer, has turned cold and wet.  Again.  The cold weather vegetables have had a near perfect early growing season.  This combination of occasional heat followed by cold and rainy days marks the uncertainty, the ambiguity of our spring, often a time when the weather is neither this nor that, a variety.

Later,  in another three to four weeks at most, we will trend hot and hotter, finding ourselves by mid-summer in heat rivaling our southern states.  As the days heat up, the vegetables and the fruits will flower, become pregnant, then fruit, giving us the food we love:  tomatoes, beans, potatoes, apples, pears, cherries and currant.  Perhaps this year, with the transplanting even the gooseberries will yield.

Then, by mid-to-late August, the evenings will begin to cool, though the days remain warm.  The sky will become an impossible blue, a color found only in the heart and the mind’s eye.  This sky absorbs all earthbound thought and transforms it into the higher concepts of heaven.  This signals the onrush of the harvest season.

Blessed be.