Love Conquers All or Subjugated by Love

Yesterday Jennifer Lynn Jordan wrote a blog post regarding the director Terry Gilliam and his incredibly bad luck. There was one passage that was especially thought provoking for me. It was:

Take Brazil. Production for this film (one of my very, very favorites) sent the project into never-before-seen levels of debt, and the studio battle for the final cut was epic, spawning several documentaries and a book. Gilliam lost the Battle of Brazil. The first theatrical release had a saccharine-sweet, happy ending Gilliam never intended, as did the TV edit (now known derisively as the "Love Conquers All" version). In the end, though, he got his way with one of the best-selling releases from the Criterion Collection, which included three different cuts of the film, amongst which is the Gilliam-approved version. Unfortunately, the Criterion Collection consistently costs above $50, and the cheaper, more accessible DVD releases rarely include the Director's Cut. The result is that Brazil remains one of the most highly-esteemed, least seen films of our time.

The phrase that intrigued me was "Love Conquers All" and how it has come to be used in a pejorative manner.

I posted a reply to her there, but have since then had more thoughts on the subject and decided it would be best to expand upon them here rather than clog her comment trail with a long winded reply.

The phrase in question is first attributed to the ancient Roman poet Virgil in his Eclogues (Eclogue X to be exact.) The online Massachusetts Institute for Technology site has the entire works of Virgil's Eclogues and the following translation:

Love conquers all things; yield we too to love!

I would have liked to give a longer passage to help give an idea as to its proper context, but I did not see any real easy place to cut it. Therefore if you are interested, please follow the link if you desire to see how that phrase is the culmination of a speech.

Back to how the phrase is being used today. Commonly the phrase "love conquers all" (LCA) when used in discussing popular culture connotes that Love will somehow solve all problems and create the desired Happily Ever After (HEA) ending. Cue the violins and pass a tray of baklava.

It is not that I dislike happy endings, but I prefer endings that are satisfying dramatically. Sometimes that means that you leave the theater on a happy note, and other times it is more appropriate for a cathartic cry. I dislike endings that are like cotton candy that are light, frothy, and rot your teeth. I would rather have some vinegar to go with my honey to provide some contrast and depth in the emotions being evoked.

There is a different reading of the phrase "love conquers all" by a different poet yielding a much different meaning from the syrupy sweet ending with which it has been associated.

The Italian Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo in his epic poem Orlando Innamorato meant that the power of love surpassed all else and no one, not even the powerful knight Orlando was immune to its effects.

Here's the second stanza in the first canto in Book 1 (translation by Charles Stanley Ross):

"Don't think it strange, my lords, to hear
Orlando Innamorato sung.
It always is the proudest man
whom Love defeats and subjugates.
No strong arm, no audacity,
no blade well-honed, no shield or mail,
no other power can avail,
for in the end Love conquers all."

In other words, everyone can be struck down by the power of love or "Subjugated by Love. " That phrase has a different ring to it than "Love conquers all" and it implies that people will do anything when they are conquered by the power of Love.

Instead of scheduling a dental appointment to check for tooth rot, it conjures up an image of Aphrodite as a dominatrix or Eros decked out in leather chaps.

I do not mean the cute winged cherub that Cupid calls to mind. I mean a young virile man with six pack abs who just happens to have wings and a quiver of arrows tipped with magic. Check out your local store for some trashy romance novel covers if you need any help with that imagery, it should not take long to find a hawt male. Or you can look at the cover and review of Virgin Slave, Barbarian King to get an idea.


Imagine if the upcoming holiday of Valentine's Day which provides billions of dollars for Hallmark cards and florists were to feature powerful images of Love instead of lacy red hearts and tacky stuffed animals.

Of course that will never happen. Instead we are stuck with doilies, cherubs, and heart shaped confetti. How utterly romantic.

I shall dedicate more to my visit to Chantilly in another post, but here is a preview. There was an entire room decorated with stained glass retelling the legend of Cupido (Cupid or Eros) and Psiche (Psyche).



Here are the lovers. Cupido looks more like an adolescent child than a God of Lurve.




I shall leave you with another version of this phrase. This time I wish for you to consider the immortal words from the famous philosopher Huey Lewis:

"It's strong and it's sudden and it's cruel sometimes
But it might just save your life
That's the power of love."


Linda

National Trivia Day: Fahrenheit and Body Temperature

Dr. Virago mentioned on her blog that today was National Trivia Day. To me, that sounded like a challenge.

I had many different amusing anecdotes that I considered expounding upon, and then while at work it came to me when a colleague asked to borrow a thermometer. I then had to interject into the conversation a bit of trivia gleaned from my high school Physics teacher about the Fahrenheit system and realized: "that's the trivia that I shall blog about."

Gabriel Fahrenheit had established the system of temperature measurement that is still used predominantly in non-scientific aspects of the United States. (Scientists and laboratories generally use the internationally favored Celsius scale.) The Fahrenheit scale seems strange today when there are such non-intuitive numbers such as 212 degrees as the boiling point of water and 32 degrees as water's freezing point. Why would anyone choose such a convoluted system?

Ah, because the freezing and boiling point of water were not the points used to calibrate his temperature scale.

Nope. Body temperature and the freezing point of saturated salt water were used.

Fahrenheit wanted body temperature to be the 100 degrees standard. It turns out, he was just a little off. That's why normal (read: average) body temperature is the relatively odd number of 98.6 degrees.

BTW, a minor pet peeve of mine is when people who are sick say they "have a temperature." Well, yes, of course they do. Even corpses have temperatures. In fact that is one of the methods coroners use to determine the time of death is to measure the temperature of a corpse. If you are sick what you probably have is a fever. /end tangential rant.

Fahrenheit also chose the freezing point of saturated salt water as his zero scale. The only reason that is of any importance to me is that I grew up in the state of Michigan and salt is used on the roads in winter to melt snow. However, if the weather is brutally cold then salt will not melt snow and does nothing other than provide traction for tires and rust the cars.

Detroit is built over a salt mine and so throwing salt on roads not only supports the local salt mine economy, it helps support the auto industry by making cars rust and forcing consumers to purchase replacements on a regular basis.

Okay, enough trivia, now time for an amusing anecdote:

My high school Physics teacher had a very dry sense of humor, and by the time I was a senior I had learned to appreciate it. One day when our Physics class was about to start an experiment I mentioned to him that I hated finding out a thermometer I was using had split mercury.

I wanted to carefully select a thermometer before the experiment started and any readings were taken.

It was then that Mr. Frank told me that there was one thermometer in the stock room that lacked a scale.

It was like we both had a light bulb go off over our head simultaneously. Mr. Frank and I colluded together on pulling off a practical joke on some of my classmates. We looked at each thermometer (about twenty or so in all) and found the one that lacked a scale. Basically it was a glass thermometer that merely had mercury in it with a white background. You could not tell what temperature it measured because like I said- it lacked a scale.

I took several thermometers and handed them out to the various groups. No one thought anything of my benevolent act, and I deliberately choose the group to give the booby-trapped thermometer. It went to the guys I liked to tease best.

I distinctly remember the words from my classmate Steve when he first recognized the problem, "Hey wait a minute here, Buck! There isn't a scale on this thermometer."

Mr. Frank walked over to the bench, nonchalantly peered down at it and said with a total deadpan look on his face, "Oh, well, you need to calibrate it."

As if Steve were nothing more than a latter day Gabriel Fahrenheit who had copious time left in the hour to not perform the experiment, but calibrate a thermometer as well. I know that ached with laughter as did those in my group whom I told about the joke after I returned to our bench.

Steve did not take the bait and instead went into the stock room to procure another thermometer. Oh, but I fondly remember my only experience of conspiring with a teacher to prank some of my fellow students and my teacher's masterful delivery of a punchline.

More on France soon!

Happy Trivia Day!

Linda

Holy Grail, Holy Prepuce, and What the...???

I was surprised to read on the News for Medievalists blog that there is a new claim about the Holy Grail. A Glasgow historian named Mark Oxbrow believes that he has discovered the artifact on display at the Louvre.

It is the same plate that I described in my last post which described my morning at the Louvre.

Here is it again:



It is pretty, but I am predisposed without even hearing his arguments to not believe this scholar's opinion. I have a hard time believing that something made out of serpentine, which can contain high amounts of asbestos, would be one of the most sought after holy artifacts of all time.

However, since we have a digital picture frame gracing our mantel, I will from now on say, "oooh look, the Holy Grail!" whenever this photo cycles through the rotation.

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Last year at this time I wished everyone a Happy Feast of the Holy Circumcision noting that the Julian calendar was designed to have the beginning of the calendar year coincide with the naming ceremony of Jesus Christ as well as celebrating the day of his bris. I had not touched on the idea that his severed foreskin became a holy relic.

Today I discovered that last year Slate magazine covered the disappearance of the Holy Prepuce in Calcata, Italy. In a sidebar Slate claims that during the Middle Ages that there were up to eighteen different purported Holy Foreskins.

However, the one from Calcata was "according to legend" given by Charlemagne to Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in the year 800, the same day he was crowned emperor.

Legend has it that Charlemagne had received the artifact from angels as he was praying at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

I do not think Charlemagne ever traveled to Palestine. At least, I have not seen that in any of the biographies and histories I have read about him.

So once again, I am skeptical.

There's also the bizarre belief propounded in the seventeenth century by Leo Allatius that when Jesus ascended into the heavens that his foreskin likewise went skyward. Only it then expanded and became the rings of Saturn.

Sure, that is likely.

Or possibly that instead of being in any of the various reliquaries, that the foreskin of Christ was actually the bridal ring wore by Catherine of Siena.

In order to believe that possibility, one has to forgo all logic and depend heavily on mysticism.

And now to the What The...part of my post. As I was websurfing today to find these various links and anecdotes, I came across something I had been blissfully unaware. It is disturbing.

It involves a religious practice after the bris.

I had not given the subject much thought and then when I put in the search term for bris in Wikipedia I was shocked when in that article it mentioned metzitzah b'peh. It is how a mohel treats the surgical site.

"To promote healing" oral suction is applied to cleanse the area of blood.

Eww.

Ewwwwwwwwww.

That is wrong on so many levels. The question becomes, how many levels can I identify?

Before I begin, I must admit that my day job is as a Clinical Laboratory Scientist so bear with me as I don my cyber lab coat and try to walk non-scientists through my reasoning.

First off, saliva does not include any blood clotting agents. Salivary amylase helps to begin the digestion process, but it will not promote coagulation.

Second, mouths and saliva are not sterile.

Some people harbor small amounts of pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus or Haemophilus influenzae as part of their normal flora, and since newborns are without a developed immune system they are especially vulnerable to infection.

Any bacteria can become pathogenic if given the opportunity.

I do not care if modern day mohels use mouthwash before they apply their mouths to a boy's genitals. It is not a sterile procedure.

Lest you think that I am making this up or think that I am being exceedingly gullible in relying upon Wikipedia as my source of information, I did some further digging. Here is an article from the New York Times about a mohel who had performed a circumcision on a boy who later died from herpes he had contracted due to the oral suctioning. It is dated August 2005.

Oy vey.

And then if you want further confirmation, here is an article from the journal Pediatrics about the dangers of transmitting herpes from that cultural practice.

I honestly do not have the heart to read that PDF article, but I offer it as evidence that this is not an Urban Legend. It is real and it is wrong.

There are many religious practices that at the time they were first introduced had rationales that might not have been readily apparent at the time. Such as the prohibition of eating pork. We know it was due to the parasite Trichinella spiralis which causes Trichinosis.

I cannot come up with any justification for applying one's mouth to a bleeding sexual member.

It is just sick and wrong. I do not care about its lengthy and historical tradition. It is abuse.

If I were to witness a physician perform a circumcision in my hospital and then orally suction the surgical site, I would - as a mandated reporter - be required by law to report them to legal authorities for committing sexual abuse.

For anyone who does not consider this practice on neonates as being abusive, you must also consider that circumcisions are also performed on boys and men who convert to Judaism. Imagine a mohel performing that ritual practice on an adolescent or adult male. Would there be any question of it being sexual abuse in your mind?

I am just seriously creeped out by this practice - and well - I had to share.

And on that strange note, Happy New Year everyone!

Anyone want to chime in with their thoughts on holy relics and/or the post-surgical practices of mohels?


Linda

Happy Feast of the Holy Circumcision!

Over the years I have come across all kinds of fascinating information that I can sometimes recall at will. This has led some of my friends to refer to me as The Encyclopedia or The Library.

One of those bits of arcane trivia lodged in my brain is the significance of January 1^st in relation to its close proximity to Christmas Day. According to ancient Hebraic law, a child was not named until eight days after its birth. This allowed for children who might not survive to pass away without being named. There were not neo-natal intensive care units at that time, and many children simply succumbed shortly after birth.

Naming on the eighth day was a cause for celebration, and along with those festivities came the bris for the male children.

So, once again, I wish you a Happy Feast of the Holy Circumcision!

I heard that detail a few years ago on National Public Radio and at the time, I must have slapped my head in not realizing that relationship before. I knew that this religious ceremony took place a week after the birth of a child, but I never made the connection between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Ever since that time, I try and extend my hearty wish to people to celebrate the anniversary of Jesus’s bris instead of the generic Happy New Year wish. It livens things up a bit.

Here is a link to the entry on this Catholic holy day of obligation in Wikipedia to verify my claim.

Oh and I also came across an entry about the reputed relic(s) of the Holy Prepuce. I want to warn against reading the entry while drinking, lest your computer monitor be put at risk for being obscured with said beverage.

Enjoy! I wish everyone a healthy, happy, and prosperous New Year. And may peace start to break out all over.

Linda