from the land of gold came a wanderer @foliarincision - Tumblr Blog

“…I think Howard Ashman was the key to our success. He was a great storyteller, he knew how to lyrically be funny, Alan Menken’s music is accessible and complicated and beautiful. And the two of them really shaped what these movies were to become.” - Peter Schneider, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation from 1985 to 1999

“Howard was that rare force. A dramatist who understood how to use music effectively.” - Alan Menken, composer

zephyrine-gale

phainomenomenon

shizuart

sviteer

If i just wait...a little longer...

letterful

QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS

Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing? Do they swing like children from the hinges of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards? Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes, their diet of unfiltered divine light? What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole in a river and would the hole float along endlessly filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume the appearance of the regular mailman and whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court. The only question you ever hear is about the little dance floor on the head of a pin where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions, billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one: one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet, a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over to glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

— BILLY COLLINS

letterful

In the Gospel of Luke, neither God nor the Holy Spirit manifests any visible appearance to Mary; it is Gabriel alone who stands and speaks with her during the conception of Jesus. [...] And what a sight he makes. The Gospel of Luke mentions that when Gabriel first spoke to Mary, she was troubled (turbata, “troubled, disturbed, disordered, agitated, excited”) (1:29). And yet, according to the second-century apocryphal Gospel of James, Mary received her daily sustenance from the hand of an angel. Why, then, would the familiar sight of an angel upset her so? According to ancient and medieval exegetes, although angels attended Mary every day, Gabriel must have been the first to appear to her disguised as a man. [...] And not in the likeness of just any man: the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew specifies that Gabriel appeared to Mary as “a young man of indescribable beauty.”

Medieval artists elaborated on this detail with enormous enthusiasm. Artists made the archangel ridiculously attractive, expending on him all their very best hairstyles and outfits. [...] As the only visible and humanoid agent of God’s envoy to the Virgin, Gabriel functions as an attractive showpiece—the Incarnation’s representative male object of desire onto which the medieval erotic gaze transfixed its ardent attention.

[...] Twelfth-century theologians described the Annunciation as a courtly romance, according to the rules of which [...] every lover needs an intermediary [...]. Aelred of Rievaulx identified Gabriel as God’s angelic go-between and bridesman, his paranymphus angelus. Yet as the legend of Tristan and Isolde attests, the courtly necessity of employing an intermediary puts the lover at great risk. When King Mark sent Tristan to woo Isolde on his behalf, Tristan wooed for himself. Small wonder, as the genre of courtly love tends to favor adultery over marriage. We all know how the story of the king, queen, and handsome knight tends to end.

— EMMA MAGGIE SOLBERG, from Virgin Whore.

junk-thunder

"is sex with angels monsterfucking" forum thread shut down by moderators after 300 pages of fierce debate, 26 banned accounts and 8 doxxed members

virtualgirladvance

"would the angels consider us bestiality" Follow-up thread created and instantly closed with the forum going into lockdown temporally

notbecauseofvictories

dbundles42reblogged your post:Catholicism is a religion rooted in suffering. The…

I’m so sorry your religion makes you feel this way.

I—no, that’s not what I’m saying.

At the heart of Catholicism is the recognition that the world is full of hurting, that it is real, because it’s not a vague soft-focus suffering, this isn’t something you can salve with the cost of a cup of coffee a day—it’s that bloody corpse on the cross, it’s visceral and urgent and immediate and it is all our fault. People are starving, sick, dying, oppressed, tortured, and they are and have been for as long as memory. The reality of suffering is immovable. (The poor will always be among you.) Our founder was a political prisoner, scourged and imprisoned, asphyxiated and bleeding alone and we are not allowed to forget that, the sheer physicality and immensity of suffering that birthed Catholicism.

But also part of Catholicism is the awareness that this is natural and not right, our suffering is a symptom of brokenness, which implies that once we were whole and we remember it, because how else do you know you’re broken. And so knowing that, what are we supposed to do amidst all this suffering?

Catholicism says: feed, clothe, heal, save (bring the kingdom-on-earth) and yes, suffer, but suffer in community, suffer for one another, give it meaning. Make it the question God answers. (God doesn’t want you to suffer, but he wants you, and he will take whatever brings you to him—sometimes suffering rattles the soul like joy doesn’t.) Catholicism says, suffering is an ongoing reality but not forever. And here, accept the succor that can be provided.

…..I wouldn’t trust a religion that didn’t recognize there was suffering in the world, and didn’t have an answer to what we’re supposed to do about it.

notbecauseofvictories

some people are really good at going deep, committing themselves for years, even decades. I am really good at going shallow. I will try everything once, I love cooking and baking and canning and gardening and sewing (hand and machine!) and painting and writing and scrapbooking; reading, listening to various kinds of music, forming opinions about audiobooks as divorced from written text; I've made mostly bad jewelry, I've done walking tours and pub trivia tournaments, I'm slowly making my way through the list of Chicagoland museums, I have tickets to weird performances (King Lizard and also a Baroque opera!) and season tickets to touring musicals. Some things last! Other things don't.

the beauty of going shallow is that...it's all there. In your hubris, you can do and participate and adopt or discard it all. No one is going to stop you.

amazing.

notbecauseofvictories

so I've now collected a nonzero number of "this is just ADHD" comments. If you connect to this post because of your diagnosis---great! I genuinely believe that humanity is just a bunch of venn diagrams and bell-shaped curves in a trenchcoat; the fact that we can get together and do crafts regardless is wonderful.

but I myself do not have ADHD, and I think it's...really weird that this website wants to diagnose me with it based on one text post about having too many hobbies. That's internet-brained behavior, fellas and damosels. That's "he was selfish, he must be a narcissist!!!" or "she laid in bed all morning, she has depression!!!" malarkey.

I understand the pleasure that a well-organized schema can bring, the relief of inscribing the unknown. We're pattern-forming habitues, and the often-murky depths of human feeling and behavior are difficult to plumb. So I get it, I do! However, I firmly believe most people do things for their own often inexplicable and ill-conceived reasons, no diagnoses required. The DSM is not an answer key to life's mysteries---sometimes people just do things, and neither you, nor I, nor they, nor Sigmund Freud himself could really explain why. Sometimes people buy planters and dirt and flowers because it's covid and they're going insane; then 5 years later, they've graduated to checking their copy of the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning before preparing a fermenting bath for their pickles, and if you asked them why, they would say, "Because gardening is fun and challenging, I have the resources, and it seems a real shame to throw out all these cucumbers." They would be telling the truth.

You know. As a hypothetical.

bambistjames

non-writers will never understand the mental illness of writing an entire conversation in your head while doing dishes and then forgetting every word the second you open a blank doc

jumpingheart66

tordenvejr

art will save you, being unreasonably passionate about something niche will save you, letting past sources of joy show you the way back to yourself will save you, earnestness over composure will save you, the natural world will save you, caring for something bigger than yourself will save you, daring to be seen will save you, kindness not as a whim but a principle will save you, appreciation as a practice will save you, daring to try something new will save you, grounding will save you, love will save you, one good nights sleep will save you

sandkessho

Preview of my page into a local Tears of Themis zine!

Finally drawing my favourite boyyyy ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡

glorious-spoon

one of the most challenging skills i've had to learn as an adult is the art of figuring out whether i'm proportionally annoyed with someone or just tired and overstimulated and looking for reasons to be pissed off

glorious-spoon

congratulations to the only post i've ever had breach 100k notes without any real discourse or fighting, just a lot of people wearily going, oh, god, same