The Venerable Bean

Contemplating the conflicting, heightened, and wildly fluctuating emotions of pain and joy after the death of one you love.

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:50:00 -0500

After experiencing the death of someone whom one had a close relationship with there is often an emotional effect of feeling great sorrow and depression followed by a shockingly heightened joy and attentiveness to life. One often feels guilty for the latter. Death can make you profoundly aware of life and all of life in this world is borrowed time, so you feel awakened. Do not feel guilty for this because the person you love and is now absent in body would not want you to live in this manner. Enjoy these moments of joyful emotions and be thankful for them because they will pass rapidly in the early stages of grief. Loss will suddenly strike you soon thereafter, often magnified by the reality and emotions of the deprivation of the physical presence of the one who is loved. In these moments pause and be thankful for your shared lives, though they are now absent from sight, sound, and touch.

I have found that after the fresh wound has healed one will experience these same moments of sorrow and loss, but instead of intense pain there can be a melancholic joy and thankfulness in the recollection of those who have passed through the veil of physical life.

A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now ?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived
And then they died
It seems so unfair
I want to cry

O GOD, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered; Make us, we beseech thee, deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human life; and let thy Holy Spirit lead us in holiness and righteousness, all our days: that, when we shall have served thee in our generation, we may be gathered unto our fathers, having the testimony of a good conscience; in the communion of the Catholic Church; in the confidence of a certain faith; in the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope; in favour with thee our God, and in perfect charity with the world. All which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

- The Book of Common Prayer.

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we yield unto thee most high praise and hearty thanks, for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all thy saints, who have been the choice vessels of thy grace, and the lights of the world in their several generations; most humbly beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow the example of their stedfast-ness in thy faith, and obedience to thy holy commandments, that at the day of the general Resurrection, we, with all those who are of the mystical body of thy Son, may be set on his right hand, and hear that his most joyful voice: Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Grant this, O Father, for the sake of the same, thy Son Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

- The Book of Common Prayer.

The day we mooned the helicopter.

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:39:07 -0500

When I was in Grade 9, there was a low flying helicopter over the playing fields. We had a substitute PE teacher that day. Being Freshmen boys, we collectively decided to moon the helicopter.

It freakin’ landed in the field not far from us. It turned out to be some sort of Army recruiting PR stunt.

We didn’t have pants left on to shit into.

Photo

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:26:53 -0400

With every hair chiseled immaculately and immobile in stone,...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:42:37 -0400

With every hair chiseled immaculately and immobile in stone, Mitt Romney accomplishes one more takeover. The sales from roadside trinkets and post cards will pay for another automobile elevator in his beach home.

“47% of the people on this island pay no income tax, are...

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 16:35:45 -0400

“47% of the people on this island pay no income tax, are dependent upon The Skipper and believe that they are entitled to medical attention from The Professor, to coconuts, to a shack and a hammock, to you-name-it!”

How can they love God whom they have not seen?

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 17:54:00 -0400

How can they love God whom they have not seen?

“If a man say, I love the unborn children and careth not for children that are born, he is a liar: for he that careth not for the children around him whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” - The Venerable Bean.

“I’m sorry, Master. I was afraid and I went and hid your dollar in a Swiss Bank account. Here, have what is yours.’ But his Master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed?”

This (paraphrase verse) is directly followed by the parable “I was hungry, and you fed me not… ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

These children are precious when they are unborn, but they are NOT “precious in their sight.” They are certainly less precious if they are yellow, black, brown and are not white.

The moment those beloved unborn are born they are on their own. They cry, and crap their pants. Their unemployed mother needs food assistance just to keep them fed, which makes her a “welfare queen.” God forbid a penny of MY MONEY aught to go toward helping feed someone, or educating them, or giving them penicillin when they get sick.

I don’t see all of these so-called Pro-Life people giving up Nike shoes and cheering for The Dallas Cowboys. I don’t see them giving up filling their gas guzzling SUVs at Chevron on the way to Home Depot to buy a Black and Decker tool. They haven’t forgone topping off the tank at Texico on the way to Olive Garden for a hot steaming pile of Mediocrity washed back with a Coke or Pepsi product. That’s not a baby killing Frapachino in your hand is it? All of those companies give money to Planned Parenthood and there is an equal chance that one of your pennies is misspent in the private sector as it is with tax dollars. There is a scriptural exemption on your tax penny, something to the effect, “Render unto George Washington that which is Washington’s.” What’s the exemption for Comcast cable and internet? You are either culpable for every single penny, or you are not.

Big Gulps of Coke and Pepsi don’t kill the unborn!
They do contribute to early onset diabetes in children however.

Equally insidious is the notion they “get what they deserve” because the “sins of the parents are visited upon the children and their children’s children.” Far too many believe in the false teaching proclaimed on a bumper sticker I saw with a giant flapping American Flag: “Christians Prosper” - which means all poverty, sickness, and unemployment are a sign of disbelief or sin which is rubbish considering this passage from the 5th chapter of Saint Mathew: “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

This bumper sticker seems more like an advertisement for The First Church of Mammon, the god of material wealth. and that god requires you to sacrifice the poor, hungry, cold, and needy as living sacrifices.

Angry GOP: “Don’t you dare tell me ‘I didn’t build this!’” (looks around at all he surveys.) “I AM the head and I built ALL of this myself! I will never have need of a hand of charity, or a mouth of compassion, or an ear of sympathy.”

“The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our representable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” -from 1 Corinthians 12

The early Church on the poor and needy:

When his [the rich man’s] harvest was abundant, he said to himself, ‘What shall I do? I shall pull down my barns and build larger ones.’ There is nothing more wretched than such an attitude. In truth he took down his barns; for the safe barns are not walls, but the stomachs of the poor. “

Remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth for the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their way of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs. If we have this attitude, we will certainly offer our money; and laying up great profit hereafter, we will be able to attain the good things which are to come, by the grace and kindness of our Lord Jesus Christ. -Saint John Chrysostom

“I know that God has given us the use of goods, but only as far as is necessary; and he has determined that the use be common. It is absurd and disgraceful for one to live magnificently and luxuriously when so many are hungry.” - Clement of Alexandria

“Some think the Old Testament is stricter than the New, but they judge wrongly; they are fooling themselves. The old law did not punish the desire to hold onto wealth; it punished theft. But now the rich man is not condemned for taking the property of others; rather, he is condemned for not giving his property away.” - Gregory the Great

Do you realize that in giving your gold, your money, your fields, that is to say rocks and earth, you acquire life eternal? … . I know many who fast, pray, mourn and practice admirably the gratuitous forms of piety, but they do not give an obol to the outcasts. What good do the other virtues do them? They will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. -Saint Basil the Great

i don’t think this needs a caption

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:46:18 -0400

i don’t think this needs a caption

LOBOTOMIES FOR ALL!

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:16:09 -0400

LOBOTOMIES FOR ALL!

“Don’t ask questions… that’s disrespectful.” - Mr. Bruce Forrest, Bible teacher. 1986.

This directive was tersely directed at the class of my 12th Grade Bible class when someone raised their hand and asked a question. This was the year I had begun to reject Fundamentalist-Evangelicalism.

GOP of Texas RPT 2012 Platform.
“Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), critical thinking skills, and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

I have been an educator for over a decade. What this really means is that the GOP is doubling down on learn-by-rote fact recitation – the worst of the pro-testing advocates who want anti-analytical drones who can press button A, B or C. - “Would ya’ll like fries with that?” *BEEP*

Don’t you dare question! Hey, don’t like it. You better man up, because corporal punishment of your child is legal in Texas. *WHAK!* If they haven’t numbed and dumbed the student’s ability to think, they will beat it out of them. Ah. American exceptionalism.

Well- you could always move to Louisiana where a biology textbook used by a “Christian” school, which will be accepting students with publicly funded vouchers in the fall, says that the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland is real. This is their intellectual means to debunk evolutionary theory and prove 24hr-7day creationism.

Be ye transformed by the removal of your mind.

Takin’ the GOP Family Values Truckster on the road…...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:15:28 -0400

Takin’ the GOP Family Values Truckster on the road… including the family dog.

Little House on the Melodramatic Prairie

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:39:54 -0500

Sitting in the kitchen area of my studio I began to daydream about the history permeated within my old wood table. I made Easter Eggs on this table, carved pumpkins, did homework, confessed to bad grades, and started every morning at this table.

The kitchen dining nook, walls papered with pale blue and white gingham, housed a small twelve inch television. After school cartoons were watched in the TV Room down stairs: Speed Racer, Batman, Gilligan’s Island, and Bugs Bunny cartoons. Early evening programmes were often watched on the little set in the kitchen while my mother was preparing dinner or we were eating without my father on nights when he was occasionally working late. When really young I would dance to the Mod Squad theme song in the kitchen. I quit doing that when I was prompted to dance. I was far too shy and prompting promoted crippling self-consciousness.

In primary school Little House on the Prairie was a big hit and considered a good wholesome family show, unlike Lavern and Shirley which was supposed to be off limits. I wonder how well Little House would be received today considering 25 year old Almanzo couldn’t wait to get into Laura’s 17 year old bonnet.

In Grade 6 I realized how overwrought, sentimental, and ridiculously melodramatic Little House had become. This was 1980 and Mary had already gone blind and the town fought anthrax. Perhaps it always was melodramatic. This was the year I understood how awful this form of writing and acting was. I just could not bear this show anymore, at least not without mocking it.

To start 1980 off Laura and Mary were staying alone at the School For the Blind when they were taken hostage by a trio of escaped convicts. This season was the final straw. When Albert experimented with smoking in the basement of the School For the Blind he got shooed out of the basement and hid his still-lit pipe in some cloths. The pipes ignite and the fire kills Alice Garvey and Mary’s baby son. I had Principal Edward R. Rooney’s reaction to Ferris Bueler’s sick day excuse: “Dead Grandmother?”

I began to grope around the kitchen “I’m BLIND!”

My sister tersely told me to be quiet. She was taking this seriously. The show was designed to make people cry on command. It was noted on a TV and movie review site somewhere that it was:

“quite possibly the first TV show where male adults, and practically everyone else, would be seen crying in all seriousness as opposed to for comical effect. Because of this trend, once the show got aired in Iceland, it quickly got nicknamed “Crying in The Cornfield” by viewers and haters alike.”

How could I mock poor Mary. Then - the dead baby. That was it! I remember blurting out “Dead baby?” My sister was incredulous. “Oh come on! Mom… this show has become ridiculous!

“Shut up!” my sister said.

“Candace- don’t say shut up.” mom said.

“But…” tears starting to well up.

“It’s ridiculous! Every week it’s a disaster! Doesn’t anything normal ever happen anymore? Everyone is going blind. Buildings burning down, dead babies?”

“MOM!” my sister said in a near wail.

Groping around now with my eyes shut “Has anyone seen my baby!”

No one can pay attention to the TV now. My sister ran from the kitchen upset. I think my mother was trying to suppress laughter because she had let a small giggle escape earlier confirming for me that yes, this show had become absurd. I remember being told not to mock the show in front of my sister because she really liked it still. At the end of the year when Mary’s husband regained his sight by being in a explosion I started to laugh riotously even though two sets of death ray eyes were shooting me.

Thou eunuch of language!

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:32:15 -0500

In 1791, riled by a recent review that criticised a supposed abundance of “obscure language” and “imperfect grammar” in his poetry, celebrated Scottish poet Robert Burns channelled his anger and wrote the following magnificent letter to the critic responsible.

It really is a thing of beauty.

(Source: The Works of Robert Burns, Volume 4; Image: Robert Burns, courtesy of the BBC.)

Ellisland, 1791.

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.

This letter found on a great blog titled Letters of Note

Yeah… about that.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:29:54 -0500

Yeah… about that.

Ansel Adams on art, friendship, and love.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:45:03 -0500

In 1936, in the midst of an unrelenting workload and the near-demise of his marriage, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams then returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.

Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote the following beautiful letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright.

(Source: Letters of a Nation; Image: Ansel Adams in Yosemite, California, c.1942, courtesy of ck/ck.)

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

The problem with this: hipsters and scensters will start acting...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:33:00 -0500

The problem with this: hipsters and scensters will start acting like children, telling me how I don’t understand the difference between them and miss that this is a play on word from an old proverb about children.

That would be a bit ironic, unlike purposefully growing an ugly 1970’s chi-mo mustache which in and of itself does not constitute irony. However, if one had been diddled by Uncle Chester and later in life decided to grow a beard and an ugly 1970’s chi-mo mustache grew instead… that would be irony.

Happy Birthday to a master of style and reinvention.

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:51:00 -0500

Happy Birthday to a master of style and reinvention.

In the beginning...

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 18:32:00 -0500

In the beginning the blog was empty and void. And the spirit of the artist hovered over the blog and typed “LET THERE BE A POST!” And the post was articulate, but a bit of a rant. And the artist clicked the button “create post” and it was good. This was the first post.

My other blog is strictly for my photography. This will be a place for articulate rants on everything from the mundane, the profound, the absurd, and the profane.