Pepper

Our cat Sacci actually got better and is very lively, so we did not put him down. Unfortunately, our other cat Pepper got violently ill on Friday and stayed in a poor state all weekend. My mom took him today and the vet decided it would be best to put him to sleep.

He reached the ripe old age of 19, which is surely 100 in cat years. His favorite activity in his grumpy old age, after he got arthritis, was to lie down in doorways and growl and swat at people who walked by. Actually, he was the most affectionate cat I've had. Whenever you picked him up he'd go completely limp and let you cradle him like a baby. Sometimes he would crawl on people and try to nurse from them, purring and drooling while working his paws. He was a huge, muscular cat in his prime. He dominated the cats on our street.

My nickname for him was Peahopper.

Pepper as a kitten, wrestling with our old cat Tiger.

Harpsichord and Temperaments

I recently moved my harpsichord to my apartment. It has been about ten years since I had it on hand to play daily. I have spent much of the time tuning it. With the changing season and the alternating dry/wet and hot/cold, it goes out of tune almost every day.

In my most recent tunings, I've tuned it to 1/3 comma meantone, which is a tuning that goes back to the Renaissance. Its defining characteristic is minor thirds at the pure 6:5 ratio, which makes music in minor keys sound startlingly sweet and serene. As one goes around to more distant keys, though, there are some very sour intervals, and then there's a "wolf" interval that sounds absolutely horrendous. I can't even find an example of how it sounds on harpsichord, but on Sound Cloud I found a synthesized version of 19-tone equal temperament, which is more or less 1/3 comma meantone extended to 19 keys per octave (hard to describe in non-technical terms; just listen).

"Seigneur Dieu ta pitié" by Guillaume Costeley. I found this piece while looking for information on 1/3 comma meantone and 19-tone equal temperament. Costeley, who lived in the 16th Century, apparently was the first to theorize this tuning. I wish I could find a recording of this piece sung by a choir.

Poor Little Saccmeister

Our cat Sacci has become very sick and will probably be put to sleep soon. We've never done that with one of our pets before, but in his case he's very miserable and fifteen years old.

I just wanted to remember Sacci. He's a Himalayan cat; he has long white, silky hair with red "flame" tips on his ears, nose, and tail. When you give him a bath, he is skinny as bones, but his hair makes him look large. His eyes are icy blue. His meow is very quiet. Sometimes you only see his mouth open with no noise, other times you hear only a faint "ow." He's shy, finicky, and withdrawn normally, though sometimes at night you'd hear him run back and forth down the hall in a frenzy.

He spent most of his life inside and was afraid to go outside, though in the past few years I started letting him out and he came to enjoy sunbathing.

My sister named him Versacci (how she thought Versace was spelled) because he was a fancy cat. Most of the time I call him Saccmeister ("sotch-meister") or Saccminster Abbey.

Poor little Saccmeister.

The Apogee of the Clavecin

France was the last stronghold of the harpsichord before all the world was benighted under the spell of that vulgar clunk of iron we call the piano (I say this with a wink). French harpsichord music of the period is perhaps mankind's greatest achievement in musical nobility and subtlety; the harpsichord's own "limitation" was also its crowning asset: it did not allow a player to bang on some keys to make a lot of sappy or sensational noise.

One of the last harpsichord composers of the period was Jacques Duphly, who died the day after the storming of the Bastille. When I listen to his music, I feel I am at the apogee of an age, a form of art. It feels like a noble end, a death with dignity.

Take, for instance, La Félix (played on a German harpsichord):

Or the same piece on a 1776 French harpsichord from Lyons:

One of Bach's most beautiful harpsichord pieces

I am biased because the "French Suites" are how I first fell in love with Bach's harpsichord works, and yet we often find in life that where we started out is where we tend to return...

This is the Sarabande from the suite in d minor. I just love how it builds and lifts and then releases in an outpouring of passion.

Christophe Rousset is an amazing harpsichordist.

Thoughts on the Election

The election of Donald Trump was not really a victory for conservative Catholics. We are now in one of weakest negotiating positions: our principles have been compromised and we have nowhere to run. No longer does a candidate even have to put on a facade of the most basic moral decency; he only needs to say he is opposed to abortion, and some of our bishops hint that we must vote for him under threats of excommunication and eternal damnation. One wonders how far this could actually go; would a future candidate running on a platform of overturning Roe v Wade, the re-establishment of African slavery, and the expulsion of Jews be guaranteed the Catholic vote under threat of damnation and excommunication? One wonders.

The strongest negotiating position is the ability to walk away and not look back. By spiritually coercing Catholics to vote for certain lesser-of-two-evils candidates, bishops take this powerful negotiating position off the table. No Republican candidate has any real pressure to outlaw abortion. What are we going to do, vote for Elizabeth Warren instead?

I think Catholic bishops and leaders should use these next few years to our maximum advantage. With a Republican/conservative presidency, legislature, and soon-to-be Supreme Court, there will be no excuse why real changes in the area of abortion cannot get passed. And perhaps the hard-liner bishops should be saying: any Catholic who votes for a candidate who promised to abolish abortion and had the opportunity but didn't follow through is under the threat of excommunication and eternal damnation. And when Republicans see that we can and we will walk away - and they will lose elections because of it - then our voices will really be heard.

Identity

Fr. Hunwicke has an interesting post entitled "Identity" over at his blog (linked to the right).

Evelyn Waugh was once described as a man who thought of himself as being, in the sight of God, an English Country Gentleman of ancient and recusant ancestry. In fact, he was the son of a parvenu Anglican publisher quite well down in the Middle Class.

I sometimes think about this, especially as a convert. When I attend Mass, for instance, I think of how profoundly foreign all of this is to the upbringing of my parents. My parents even say so when they attend Mass with me. I justify it to myself by imagining more distant ancestors before the Reformation worshiping in this way (or rather, the medieval uses of the Roman Rite). And yet, as a convert, I will always have the tension that my faith was not passed down to me from my parents, but something I discovered apart from their influence. 

Or was it? On the other hand, I see the Catholic faith as not merely an expression of a culture and time period, but the most fundamental insight into the nature of reality, so essential that it had to be revealed by the Creator of reality, God Himself among us. Seen from this perspective, my upbringing and background not so much clash with the Catholic faith, but serve as kinds of sacramentals that brought me to the truth. I did not discover this new faith; it was passed down to me also. Because the Catholic faith, revealed by God, is so fundamentally connected to our nature, it is not truly foreign anywhere and belongs to everyone.

Another aspect of Fr. Hunwicke's post was commentary on the modern tendency to see identity as something we create or discover or mold for ourselves. Such was the fantasy of Evelyn Waugh. I see this tendency in myself and in other Catholics - convert or cradle. One manifestation was the men's nights among Catholic friends in college, where we smoked pipes or cigars and drank whiskey and might have worn bow ties if we had them. There is nothing more foreign to my upbringing than pipes and whiskey and bow ties. It's fun to play with costumes, but I wonder if sometimes in Catholic circles we sort of see ourselves as really being this kind of person, even if we are not, solely by our own invention, as if being an authentically-Catholic educated young man requires us to don this costume.

Sometimes people ask me why I don't have a Southern accent. That's because, for me, the Southern accent is not a caricature I put on for the admiration or entertainment of others. I would argue that my way of speaking is more authentically Southern than that found in the movies. The way I speak is a real-world manifestation of the way a person with deep roots in the South speaks when not thinking about the way he sounds.

At other times, people seek out the authentic Southern experience by putting on overalls and cowboy boots and going square dancing in a barn somewhere (with some eye-rolling by native onlookers). I, and every other real Southerner, have more authentic Southern experiences by waking up and going about the day as usual (which, for some Southerners, may also happen to include overalls, cowboy boots, and square dancing).

What we would find, I think, is that what often appears as the authentic Southern experience is actually a fantasy or caricature created by screenwriters and directors on the West Coast or in the imaginations of novelists, whereas true Southern experience appears ordinary and un-noteworthy upon casual inspection, or rather, is not apparent to us at all. This begs the question, then, for me, of whether the authentic Catholic experience we imagine is not, in fact, influenced by Catholic novelists who were themselves wearing costumes and putting on caricatures.

Catholic faith is not primarily a set of masks we wear in public (or even in private, to delude ourselves) to hide our roots and put on airs and pretenses. Because the Catholic faith is so deeply rooted in reality and our nature, it must "baptize" our identities to their deepest cores, not merely mask them. Implicit in Evelyn Waugh's costume was the notion that the Gospel might be more attractively incarnated in an "English Country Gentleman of ancient and recusant ancestry" than in a "son of a parvenu Anglican publisher quite well down in the Middle Class."

The contrast between Fr. Hunwicke's image of himself as a classicist who revels in Roman culture and French wine, versus the kind of man his father was as an ordinary British naval officer, is particularly striking.