Of Adultery and Unilateral Narrative

The Hebrew bible, a.k.a. the Christian Old Testament, contains a wealth of peculiar and often dark stories.  Until recently, I was woefully unacquainted with one of its darkest - the story of David and Bathsheba.  With my typical gullibility, I have always assumed the story of David and Bathsheba to be a love story.  Well, I guess it is, but it's a love story more in a Greek or even Brontëan sense than anything.  That is, it involves more betrayal, murder and lust than love.  Pretty good reading.

We find the story in 2 Samuel 11.  King David wages war against the Ammonites by besieging their most important city, Rabbah.  He sends his general, Joab, to accomplish this task, however, and David himself remains in Jerusalem.  I quote the next portion of the story from my New Oxford Annotated Bible (1991), which contains so much more than just the biblical texts, you have to check it out.  I'm talking the apocrypha, maps, archaeological information.  It's great.  So anyway, David's kicking around Jerusalem while his cronies do battle for him and:

It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful.  David sent someone to inquire about the woman.  It was reported, 'This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.'  So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.

Okay, so David's army is off fighting and he's lounging around the palace, spying on naked chicks.  In a fashion commensurate with stories of the Greeks, Romans, Vikings and, well, most mythologies of historical peoples, sex only occurs from the male point of view.  David wants, David gets.  There is no mention of what Bathsheba may have wanted or whether, in fact, the "he lay with her" signifies rape or not.  The nastiest portion of the story has yet to occur and already I'm feeling ill at ease.  Isn't this King David?  David and Goliath David?  Isn't he supposed to be Yahweh's favorite?  An all around swell guy?  Exactly.

So Bathsheba sends word to David that she is pregnant.  David's machinating little brain comes up with a perfect plan:  summon Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, back from the war, he will sleep with his wife and assume that any forthcoming child is his own.  David sends for Uriah, who returns to Jerusalem.  However, Uriah apparently has twice the integrity David even thought of having and, so long as his men are at Rabbah fighting and dying, he will not enjoy the comforts of his home, including the loving embrace of his wife.  Instead of fulfilling David's duplicitous goals, Uriah sleeps in the hallway with his servants and then returns to battle.

Foiled by Uriah's admirable conduct, David sends for his general Joab and orders Joab to place Uriah foremost in the battlefield and, upon retreating, to leave Uriah behind.  What a guy.

So Uriah is killed, Bathsheba laments, David marries Bathsheba and she bears his child.  David's court prophet, Nathan, confronts the king, telling him a clever parable about men and sheep, and makes David realize the full villainy of his actions.  David repents.  Finally, Yahweh has the last laugh when David and Bathsheba's son dies of an illness.  David's rule would remain troubled by a variety of woes, including the rebellion of another son, Absalom.

As with most biblical stories (or Greek or Roman stories, etc. - see rant above), I long to know that for which there is no textual evidence:  What did Bathsheba make of this situation?  Was she a victim, forced to comply with a king's wishes?  Or did she commit adultery willingly and covet the attention of a man even more powerful than her husband?  Did she ever find out that David had Uriah killed or did she believe he died in the normal course of battle?  Did she blame David for their son's death?  For me, this story remains half told.

I came upon this horrendous and compelling tale in conjunction with a painting I recently finished.  The original image comes from the thirteenth-century St. Louis Psalter.  It appears as a miniature nestled in the top of a capital letter "B".  I removed the alphabetical context and simply painted the image within a circle.  The frame design, to which I am quite partial, I made up myself.  I made other minor changes to the image - the gold background, the kind of trees portrayed, Bathsheba's face (I think my Bathsheba is prettier). 

You will note David leering from the window of his castle.  The dog.

For more paintings, visit my Etsy page.

Of Lady Love and Her Pointy Arrows

The word Minne comes from Middle High German, an incarnation of the German language during the late, or high medieval period, roughly the Eleventh through the Fourteenth Centuries.  Minne literally meant "love", but its use corresponds most closely with our concept of courtly love.  Minnesang refers to courtly love poetry (lyric songs) as a whole, and Minnelied means the individual courtly love song.  There were Minnesängern, troubadours, or composers and singers of these courtly love songs.  The German-speaking world of the Middle Ages generated a body of courtly love poetry at least comparable to the famed troubadours of France and, well, I think they are cool.

I stumbled across an allegorical image of Frau Minne piercing the lover's heart with her arrow.  It is unclear to me whether the lover is a Minnesänger whom Frau Minne is inspiring with her shot, or whether her arrow will inflame him with love for some mortal woman or other.  Perhaps both.  At any rate, I loved the original image which is painted on the inside lid of a fourteenth-century oaken casket that now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I stayed rather true to the original, save that I added considerably more detail to Frau Minne's dress, which seemed washed out to me.  I have not been able to find an online image of the original, but I did find a description of it from the Cloisters webpage at the Met here. 

I changed the ornamentation a tad from the original and added, arcing coyly over the pair, the opening line of the Minnelied, "Minne und Krone", attributed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI.  In modern German it would read, "Ich grüße im Gesang die Süße," or "I greet with song the sweet one". 

For more paintings and crafts, visit The Celery Museum's Etsy page.

Of Cookery and Desire in the Morning

Here's a post just to dump some food porn pictures into cyberspace.  While my computer has been in the shop, this has not stopped me in the kitchen, so here are some recent goodies.  Enjoy.

1.  Peppers stuffed with a black-eyed pea, veggie, seitan mixture. I make this dish differently every time I do it. I usually use quinoa instead of rice, I may use tofu instead of seitan, black beans instead of black-eyed peas, and so forth. You get the picture. I found my base recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance, but have made a few important alterations. For one, I eschew tomato sauce for homemade veggie broth and fresh cut tomatoes. For another, I cut my peppers in half instead of stuffing each one whole. They sure look cool stuffed whole, but I have found the filling-to-pepper ratio works out better if I just stuff the pepper halves.

 

2.  This was a kickass tofu sandwich, fixin's courtesy of Hong Kong Market. They carry amazing tofu, which is made in not-too-far-away Houston. You can buy it fresh (not even packed in water) or fried. I believe we used the fried tofu for these sandwiches - sliced and fried again in a skillet with some oil and soy sauce. Then we sautéed onions, mushrooms and (just barely) snow peas. Additionally, we dressed the sandwiches with fresh tomato, cucumber and basil leaves. The mixture of fresh and cooked fixin's really made this sandwich enjoyable.

3.  Here are a couple of shots of the world's (almost) greatest baked potatoes.  Baked unwrapped in the oven and then covered with soy butter, salt, pepper, purple onions, broccoli, cheese (a soy cheese for Nick), and scallions, the only thing that could have made these potatoes better is sour cream.  Holy mackeral!

4.  I found this garlic roaster secondhand for $1.99 and could not have been more excited.  Nick's love for garlic approaches the mythic and I hoped he would get plenty of use out of it.  Tin foil certainly works, but a little roaster looks so cool and, well, is made for the job. 

Look at that garlic! It's like butter!

5.  Just last night I made my best coconut curry yet.  My photographer was at the store getting wine when the dish was finished and served up, so there are no dazzling end pictures.  Instead, I include one of the nearly-done sauce.  Ingredients:  Coconut milk, a cabbage variety related to bok choy, red pepper, purple onion, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, snow peas, tofu, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, agave nectar, muchi curry powder, sambhar curry powder, garam masala, cumin, coriander, and finished with basil and cilantro leaves.  We served it over rice and I am looking forward to leftovers as I type!

6.  One weekend around Mardi Gras, I concocted the plate pictured below.  The orange sesame tofu is out of Eat, Drink and Be Vegan by Dreena Burton, which is the best vegan cookbook I have come across so far.  The recipes render truly delicious dishes as they are written.  I find I usually often end up altering written recipes to suit ingredients I would rather use (or have at hand) and sometimes to suit taste, making them spicier or adding additional herbs.  But the recipes in Burton's book come out perfect and flavorful as she has written them.  It's also a cool looking book.  This orange sesame tofu is my first attempt at baking tofu and it turned out wonderfully with a great texture.  I plated the tofu with rice and scallions, broccoli with lemon and butter, and kale with garlic (we love greenery).  We devoured it and watched Hair with Treat Williams.  Our lunch was better than the movie. 

7.  Finally, last weekend Nicholas and I made ourselves a breakfast of champions.  Fried red potatoes with thyme and rosemary, tofu bacon to die for, and biscuits with garbanzo bean gravy.  The gravy recipe comes from Vegan with a Vengeance (again), and Nicholas has mastered it, only this time he discovered a delicious substitution - creole for yellow mustard!  The biscuit recipe is one I have compiled from several recipes.  It combines, what I think is, the perfect proportion of ingredients and gives you high, fluffy, melty biscuits. 

2 c flour

2/3 c almond milk

1 t lemon juice

3 T vegetable shortening

2 T Earth Balance "butter"

3 t baking powder

1 t salt

Whisk lemon juice into milk.  Set aside.

Mix flour, baking powder and salt.

Cut the shortening and butter into the flour.  I use a fork.

When the milk is good and curdled, mix it slowly into the flour. 

Knead until you have a smooth, soft dough.

I pat the dough out by hand, as opposed to rolling it, and fold it several times.  That's what makes the delicious layers that rise so beautifully. 

I cut my biscuits out with a wine glass rim - a perfect size!

So anyway, we cooked up this wonder of a breakfast and oohed and aahed over it as we ate. 

Incidentally, we watched The Botany of Desire that morning, which I highly recommend.  It's a marvelously fascinating documentary based on the book by Michael Pollan and it tells the story of four domesticated plants from the plants' perspective: apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes.  So, so cool!

Of Strong Women and Wheels

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, as her story goes, lived in the fourth-century A.D.  If you need some orienting, that puts her in north Egypt under the rule of the late Roman emperors.  She was born pagan*, but converted to Christianity.  Emperor Maximinus challenged Catherine, a well-educated and intelligent woman, to disputation (a battle of wits).  His aim was to sway her from her faith.  Maximinus was not up to the challenge and Catherine tidily bested him and, subsequently, his stable of scholars.  Like any reasonable Roman emperor, Maximinus reacted to this intellectual defeat with astonishingly cruel violence and had Catherine executed. (More on this in a moment.)

Despite the perpetuation of this story, Catherine is one of those saints about whom the verifiable historical record remains mute.  Her cult and reputation rely on tradition and the legacy of storytelling.  This historical dubiousness presented no real problem in terms of her medieval importance as a saint.  In a practical sense sainthood at that time time relied much on the belief of those praying to the saint and only secondarily on the real-world legitimacy of the saint his- or herself.  Thirteenth-century inquisitor, Stephen of Bourbon, was reminded of this pesky fact when he discovered a shrine to St. Guinefort, a greyhound, in southern France.  (Pictured hilariously above.)  Stephen attempted to eradicate the dog saint's cult by destroying the shrine.  However, historian Jean-Claude Schmitt found evidence of Guinefort's cult at this same site well into the twentieth-century.  Sorry Stephen, but after they die (and even if they never actually lived), saints take on lives of their own.    

So, as I was saying, Catherine of Alexandria's questionable historical basis did not hinder her from becoming a very popular saint in the Middle Ages.  Like many good martyrs, she had the added glamour of having suffered a gruesome fate.  According to legend, Catherine was broken on the wheel.  As far as I have been able to divine, the wheel was first used in ancient Greece (if anyone has good information on its origins, please share).  It enjoyed special success in medieval and early modern Europe.  The criminal/heretic/uppity woman to be punished would be strapped to said wheel, arms and legs stretched out.  The happy executioner would then break each of the criminal's limbs in turn by hitting them with a heavy stick or mallet, often in several places per limb.  The limbs would then be woven into the spokes of the wheel and the whole thing - suffering person, wheel and all - would be hoisted up somewhere for all to see.  Death could occur early on in the breaking process or hours (even days) after the wheel-cum-criminal had been erected - this largely depended on the skill of the executioner and how protracted the authorities intended the criminal's suffering to be.  In any event, this was one hell of a way to go and Catherine became so associated with this hideous form of torture and death that the breaking wheel was often referred to as the Catherine wheel.  

I have already posted a previous entry to The Celery Museum regarding a sensational book that was given me about the art of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi.  I returned to this book and, this time, found inspiration in Simone Martini.  Among the myriad of figures he executed for the basilica's Chapel of St. Martin is Catherine of Alexandria, looking regal indeed and holding a quill, for her learning, and a miniature Catherine wheel, for her martyrdom.  In the image below, Catherine (right) shares pictorial space with Mary Magdalene (left).

Martini's Catherine has suffered some damage over the years.  Her garments are mottled, as is the background, giving everything a washed out look.  I hope I have revivified her a little bit.  She was fun to paint.  Here's my Catherine partially done:

And here is my Catherine finished:

As a side note, Catherine bears some correspondences to an actual historical figure, Hypatia of Alexandria.  Hypatia, like Catherine, was a well-educated Egyptian woman who lived in the fourth century AD.  In fact, Hypatia was a bona fide scholar and philosopher.  In an interesting twist, Hypatia, a pagan, was beaten and tortured to death by an angry Christian mob (predominantly monks, it seems).  I  enjoy imagining the labyrinthine corridors of cultural transmission that could have turned Hypatia into Catherine.

*  Gosh, I hate that word...I will have to work on some better nomenclature. "Pagan" seems equivalent to "not Christian".  It conveys very little but Christian arrogance.  For the purposes of describing Catherine, I imagine "pagan" means she was a polytheist who worshipped any of a number of the gods from the Roman pantheon (which was itself pretty derivative - I understand god swapping and coopting around the antique Mediterranean to have been pretty de rigueur).

Book: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, Vol. I by Marie Bashkirtseff

Marie Bashkirtseff lived her short life between Russia and France in the last half of the nineteenth century.  She died in 1884, at the age of 25, of tuberculosis.  She was born to a Russian noble family who, by Marie's time, was involved in scandalous litigation and suffered money trouble as a result.  Well, "money trouble" for a noble European family, that is.  They still lived in beautiful villas, traveled around Europe, and could afford a host of tutors for Marie, a well-educated young woman.  Marie began keeping a journal at the age of 13 and did so until her death.  

Her journal has been published in a variety of ways.  Initially, the only portions available had been selected by Marie's mother, whose selection (and omission) certainly presented a somewhat edited version of her daughter's life and personality.  The original journal was discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France sometime later and the extent to which Marie's family had edited her journal became clear.  Now, happily, her complete and unedited journal is available in a number of languages.  I recently finished Volume I, which ends in May 1876 with the 17-year-old  Marie living in Nice.

At the risk of stating the perfectly obvious, there is something unsettlingly intimate about reading the journal of a real human being, who kept the journal daily as a record of their lived experience, who changed from day to day, the record of which change the journal itself comprises.  Every day, in every interaction, people take pains to present themselves the way they wish to be perceived.  Of course a journal is perhaps only a heightened attempt at this self-presentation.  However, over years of journaling (and, I think, especially over the tumultuous years of one's adolescence), a very nuanced picture emerges of our author, a picture not completely within the control of Marie herself.  For my part, I find Marie superficial, greedy, materialistic, selfish, arrogant and vain.  However, I also find her ambitious, driven, talented, intelligent, self-reflective and astute.  The Marie that seems to breathe from the pages of her journal feels so alive, she cannot be reduced to only one set of personality traits.  She is a real person and not merely a character.

The reality of her narrative takes on special poignancy at certain moments when Marie seems to see into her own future, a future we already know.  In more than one spot, she observes her own declining health or foretells an early death.  Additionally, Marie would reread her older entries and provide more current commentary.  At 17 she wrote of her voice instructor's praise, saying she would be singing professionally by 20.  Margin notes from an older Marie tell us that, at 20, she could hardly speak and, at 22, she was deaf.

The fact of Marie's journaling, and the way she would revisit previous entries, speaks a little to her self-absorption, but also quite a bit to her bravery in self-reflection.  By setting down her story as she lived it, and then by revisiting this story periodically, Marie forced herself into face-to-face contact with earlier incarnations of herself.  For every road we travel, we must neglect at least one other.  Marie's willingness to revisit herself at certain crossroads, or at moments that would become failures, indicates an intrepid personality who does not let regret of unrealized paths mask their instructiveness to forward living. 

All in all, I have been completed charmed by Marie.  I started to view her as a friend, someone whose actions and thoughts, by intervals, amuse me or annoy me (or both).  I sometimes identify with her and sometimes am alienated by her.  I root for her success and, sometimes, for her comeuppance.  Marie Bashkirtseff was, in any case, a woman to be reckoned with and I cannot wait to start Volume II.

For more reviews visit my Goodreads page.