A Single Layer

It occurs to me, now that my blog is in its second year, that I have offered no explanation for its address/title. Yes, 'astollat' and 'wanderlust' do go together. They both have significance and they both relate to myself. The address refers to the Arthurian heroine Elaine of Astollat, otherwise known as Shalott (that's an island, not an onion). In some stories, Elaine was cursed to dwell in her island bower unable to look out at the world outside her windows. In other stories, she was just a homebody, well-loved by her noble father and brave brothers. In both, she happens to fall in love with Lancelot who already loves Guinevere but admires Elaine more than all others regardless of his preference for married women. In all Elaine narratives, she dies of unrequited love - a mysterious illness that frequently infects poetic figures. Tennyson's two accounts of the story are my favourites. In his poem 'The Lady of Shalott', he implies that Elaine's dea...

Digging for snails in the heat of a silent afternoon all alone in the back of the backyard watching the sun slip behind the eucalyptus I dig too deep. Ankles first and then the knees the snails are forfeit to my predicament. Digging for snails in the heat after the rain my fingers smelling like the loam of the garden my shoulders itching from the roots of the crabgrass. I have dug myself a snail a snail without a shell till the sun on my skin makes me quiver in the soil. It has occurred to me that I'm afraid of snails of their formlessness and motion - in the shell a menace to the leaves planted so carefully out of the shell, a horror - but I cannot not become one for I have dug myself too deep. I begin to lose my toes, my fingers my brain which is gelling up my skull cannot find the Thing to Do the lever to extricate a rope or a branch to pull upon to remove my slugging self from the rain-wet soil (and even then, how would I remove the stink from ...

Note: I am changing the template of this blog because the previous one was just plain boring. Observe my slow and steady movement out of the world of Neutral and into the world of Colour. (Memories of Rainbow Wars on a dome-like screen, a gift shop with balloons of swirling reds and blues, photograph under a green tree over the green grass, wearing the straw hat with the polka dot ribbon...)

Looking back over some recent posts, I am feeling sort of smug and sick of myself. To temper that, I think I should note here that I recently watched 'She's the Man' with Amanda Bynes for the second time - and loved it just as much as I did the first.

I recently finished reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I like the way he writes, telling the story once and then telling it through all over again from a different perspective, and then returning to the first perspective with all the things he seemed to have forgotten the first time through. Then he takes into account the dog's view of things, elaborates some details left out of the first few go-throughs, and finally tells the whole thing over once more, recollecting everything from the beginning in light of everything since. But it's really the same story from the first thirty pages repeated over the course of three hundred pages. And it's a beautiful novel. Self-contradictory, and intentionally so, because he clearly states at the beginning that we only have one take at life. There are no practice rounds, he says. No trial runs or initial read-throughs. Not for the characters, but for the author the story can be repeated ad infinitum. As long ...

Faith is simple in Rome. You climb the Holy Steps on your knees and pray. You weep or you do not weep according to the Spirit. You stand before the Pieta and pray. You weep or you do not weep according to the Spirit. You kneel before the crucifix and pray. You weep or you do not weep according to the Spirit. Here, it is different. You take your Bible to Starbucks. You underline verses, write in the margins, refer to your sermon notes. Your Bible study meets you. They discuss the role of the Holy Spirit and how He lends a sense of peace to your decisions. On the way home, you stop to fill the tank of the Accord. Your radio is playing praise songs. The emcee interrupts to talk about donations and God is Good. The next day at work you try to share the Gospel with a coworker. You write it on a napkin during your lunch break. Afterwards, he uses it to wipe his hands from his microwaveable meal. What can you do but throw the Napkin Gospel in the trash? He agrees to join you on Sunday. You ra...

Back in town and somewhat uncertain about the future. Even so, not feeling much pressure thereby, but willing to let the days come as they must, knowing that I will be vigilant and God will be gracious. In Long Beach for an indefinite period of days - watching my parents do their thing and exerting last minute attempts to reform my brother before he returns to his naval duties and unsavoury bachelor ways. Do I misrepresent him on the internet? Perhaps, but in trust that all who read information withal are aware of its instability, its potential inaccuracy, its ungovernable subjectivity. Time to break fast and wake up the family with chortles and halloos.