AVE, VATES!

Adrian, he/she/they undergraduate student (classics and comparative literature), looking to become a latin teacher fledgeling poet, medievalist, and nonbinary pervert? miltonian tendencies anglo-catholic universalist and filthy ecumenicist

[pro-haedillo]

trans America in lacrimis ad portam casae meae in nocte occedentali

THIS IS MY PINNED POST, hello. I entrust this blog to Saint Jerome. I'm 18!! I might sometimes post pictures of food! I am Christian! I'm also a communist and a nonbinary homosexual with a loving boyfriend and designs to medically transition! If some of this bothers you, I understand (mostly in regards to "Christian")! If you want to chat about it, feel free! I promise I will never evangelize or attempt to convert anyone whatsoever. If you'd rather just steer clear, that's also ok!! I understand not everyone has had a good experience with Christianity, and I don't to upset anyone. I will be posting prayers sometimes. I will be posting about living as a queer Christian, going to church, consuming the eucharist (etc.) sometimes. I reiterate, if any of that makes you uncomfortable, I'm not at all offended. I'll keep all my Jesusposting to the set tags, so if you think I'm cool but just don't want to see that specifically, you're more than welcome to block them. Now that that's all out of the way here's the fun stuff!

Here are my favorite writers John Milton, Publius Vergilus Maro, Kaveh Akbar, Michel de Montaigne, Alice Notley, Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Julian of Norwich , Basho, Chaucer, Gwendolyn Brooks because no-one has done it like that since, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, John the Apostle, Italo Calvino, Sappho ofc, Rene Girard, Vladamir Nabakov, Emily Dickinson obviously, and ummm whoever composed the Beowulf poem. I'll update and expand the list as I read more and more outside my normal band of authors!

Here is my tag list #vates - poetry and poetry-related posts #hieronymus - anything related to Latin, Greek, French, Farsi, translation, or general scholarship #audisne - translations proper #anno-domini - anything happening in my actual life #eternal-interview - my prayerposting #yum - food #purgatorio - throwaway posts

MY RUNNING LIST OF RESEARCH TOPICS

The Uates and gender roles; eroticism of prophecy 

Sacrifice motifs in the giallo film 

Fratricide in global fiction 

Lucan, Statius, and the mythic historiography of epic 

Performance studies in general (specifically performativity of the mundane and ancient performance)

Theatre of Cruelty and the ethics of cruel art

Literary depictions of the ossuary 

Colonizer ethnography in Rome and early modern England 

The Exodus motif in American letters 

The unspeakable in war novels; connected to sacrifice and Slaughterhouse Five

Modern reception of saints in antiquity 

Antiquity, fascism, and supermodernity 

Arabic synthesis of neo-Platonism and Islam (OVERDONE)

Political semiotics (in the Late Republic, in late Antiquity, and in postwar Europe) 

The forbidden room as a revelatory space (The Sound and the Fury pg. 17, War and Peace death scene, Sufi depictions of God behind a veil, etc.) 

Ecocritical, anthropogenic,  performative, formalist, and Marxist approaches to silence in classical and contemporary literature/performance, connect to war novels and the unspeakable

Spatio-poetics in Roman grave epitaphs 

Martial, Ginsberg, the Uranians, and the poet-pederast

Animalistic pejorative and “barbarians:” a general survey 

Violence and Roman Comedy

The “trash novel” and ecocriticism of paper consumption 

Nabakov, exophonic English-language writers, and the aesthetic treatments of alienation therein 

Queer interpreters and interpretations of the Katabasis 

Non-human participants in classical performance 

Poetic treatments and receptions therein of dentistry (write essay about the aesthetics of dentistry, Mint dentistry and sexy teeth)

Joke poem 

Roman pedagogical theory 

Ecocritical approaches to dragons and snakes in antiquity 

Collaborative art in antiquity 

Liturgical and theological stuff (if you care about that)

i'm a high-church anglo-catholic i do pray the RC rosary, petition for saints' intercession, and celebrate most RC solemnities i'm sex-neutral; I do have sex out of wedlock because I don't believe there's sufficient scriptural evidence for legal matrimony being an actual prerequisite to coitus. I also recognize that Pauline theology is extremely distrustful of ALL sex, not just that out of wedlock. I do believe that sex can be a distraction from God the same way video games or milk tea can be distractions from God, perhaps even more so, but the whole world distracts from God. so. I will say that i believe in monastic supremacy!! if you can manage not to have sex, awesome. i personally can't atm, so for me it's more about having sex as an expression of love for my partner (which is divine as we are all joined in One Love) as opposed to sex for the purpose of satisfying my libido. i do not believe in papal infallability even ex cathedra, i do not believe that life begins at conception. I don't mind if you believe in the first point at all! I do mind if you disagree with me on the second, unless you're still aggressively pro-choice, and even then I question why you'd think that. i do not pray to folk saints (though I don't care if other people do; indeed, i find it very cool) i believe in real presence and all tenants of the Apostolic and Nicene creed; as for the Athanasian creed, I recite it and believe its tenets in regards to trinitarian doctrine and Christology, but do not believe in its stringent insistence that heterodox beliefs are roads to Hell i believe in universalism/origenism/apokatastasis, i.e. I believe that all creatures will be forgiven by God in the end, and that Hell (if existent) is little more than a remedial punishment, as opposed to an eternal state of conscious suffering. I believe God is omnibenevolent. There is no other sensible end. Some of my favorite prayers are all of the penitential psalms, the chaplet of divine mercy, the rosary (especially the sorrowful mysteries), the Jesus prayer, and the Peace prayer of St. Francis. O God, make haste to help us; O God, make speed to save us. Free Palestine, free Sudan, free the Congo. render all colonized land back to its rightful owners. destroy gender destroy patriarchy and destroy capitalism. all these things are agents of Satan <3

above all let my faith be childlike and my art be true

[arthistoryiscooliguess]

yk what I love? that the first text we have written by a woman in England was a Roman woman inviting her best friend to her birthday

[arthistoryiscooliguess]

it’s from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina and dated to around 97-105 AD. I find it so comforting to know that even almost 2000 years ago people had friendships like these and wanted to spend their birthday together.

We aren’t so different from each other after all

[kiefbowl]

Happy Birthday Claudia Severa!!!!!!

[queerprayers]

I remember once looking at a picture of Jesus, painted on a plate, that hung on the wall in our kitchen and asking my father, "Is Jesus a man or a woman?" . . . If he was a man, I had no idea what sort of man. Certainly, no man I knew had long hair. . . . It was not only the hair, however, that made me suspect Jesus might be a woman. It seemed he was always doing something a woman rather than a man did in terms of the gender vocabulary I understood then. He suffered. He healed. He wept. He provided care. He was a kind of male mother, I thought.

from "My Father's House" by Don Belton, in Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men (1995), ed. Brian Bouldrey

[pro-haedillo]

me whan the field hath eyen and the wood hath ears

[arterialtrees]

Anne Carson, Nox

[orthodoxadventure]

In the 80’s Monk James opened his home to HIV AIDS patients, to care for them so they could die in peace. Many hospitals and families didn’t want them.

In those days there was no treatment and HIV / AIDS meant certain death. In spite of this, many were willing to risk their lives to care physically and spiritually for HIV patients in hospice. Monk James told us about a time when a dying communicant vomited up the Holy Gifts, so the priest knelt down and consumed the regurgitated Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior - because the Holy Gifts must always be consumed, no matter what. Over the years Monk James’ ministry housed and cared for over 1500 homeless men with HIV.

Monk James used to say "We seek the face of God in everyone we meet". Please remember the soul of Monk James, abbot of Sts Cosmas and Damian Monastery, who reposed in 2020. May his memory be eternal! [source]

[finelythreadedsky]

anne carson asks antigone, “your name in greek means something like ‘against birth’ or ‘instead of being born’/ what is there instead of being born?” and i think she means dying, in the sense that that antigone is born to die and that her birth is no real birth at all

but really more than “instead of being born,” ‘antigone,’ ἀντί-γονή, means “instead of children,” “in place of the next generation,” and she says it herself, she laments that she goes to her grave having never known marriage or motherhood– 

καὶ νῦν ἄγει με διὰ χερῶν οὕτω λαβὼν ἄλεκτρον, ἀνυμέναιον, οὔτε του γάμου μέρος λαχοῦσαν οὔτε παιδείου τροφῆς and now he is taking me by the hands and leading me away, unwedded, unbedded, allotted no share of marriage and the raising of children

but she also says that she would not have done what she did for polynices if it had been for a child because she could bear more children but a brother gone is irreplaceable–

οὐ γάρ ποτ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἄν, εἰ τέκνων μήτηρ ἔφυν οὔτ᾽ εἰ πόσις μοι κατθανὼν ἐτήκετο βίᾳ πολιτῶν τόνδ᾽ ἂν ᾐρόμην πόνον. τίνος νόμου δὴ ταῦτα πρὸς χάριν λέγω; πόσις μὲν ἄν μοι κατθανόντος ἄλλος ἦν, καὶ παῖς ἀπ᾽ ἄλλου φωτός, εἰ τοῦδ᾽ ἤμπλακον μητρὸς δ᾽ ἐν Ἅιδου καὶ πατρὸς κεκευθότοιν οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἀδελφὸς ὅστις ἂν βλάστοι ποτέ no not ever, not if i were the mother of children, not if it were my husband lying dead, i would not bear this burden against the will of the people. what law do i say these things to fulfill, you ask? if my husband died, i would have another, and a child from another man, if i lost this one, but since both my mother and father are dead and in the house of hades, no other brother of mine can ever grow back

she chooses a brother instead of children, the burial of the generation past in place of the bearing of the generation to come

[pro-haedillo]

so strange to me that people who aren't latinists have been very defensive to me about latin being called a dead language,, even if you are a latinist the proper path is to stfu and enjoin yourself to linguistic necrophilia :)

[lionofchaeronea]

A team of Cupids work to make perfumed oil. Fresco from Room Q (Mau plan) of the House of the Vettii (VI, 15, 1) at Pompeii.

[pro-haedillo]

ok before i go to bed have you considered

i thought so too

[pro-haedillo]

the ETERNAL UNBOUND SACRED AND PERFECT GOD of EVERYTHING decided HE LOVES ME !! and he LIVED LIKE I DID!! and he DIED FOR ME so i could LIVE WITH HIM and IN HIM and there is a COMPANY OF SAINTS with HOLY HUMAN PERSONAGES waiting there in ETERNITY! PARADISE is CLOSENESS WITH HIM! Love is his BEING! ALL THINGS WILL BE MADE RIGHT! for He is JUST! and He is WISE! and He LOVES THE WORLD EVEN THOUGH IT IS LESS THAN A SPECK OF DUST TO HIM