words of power

vulnerable/vulnerableness/vulnerary/vulneration/vulnerose/vulning/vulnus

from the Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 1731

Vulnerary Herbs: promote healing of wounds with broken skin such as abscesses, eruptions and cuts.

“The Hidden Name was secretly inscribed in the innermost recesses of the Temple, guarded by a sculptured lion. If, as was most unlikely, an intruder saw the name, the lion would give such a supernatural roar that all memory of it would be driven from his mind. But Jesus knew this, he evaded the lion, wrote the Name, cut his thigh open and hid it within the wound, closing it by magic. Once out of the Temple he re-opened the incision and took out the sacred letters.”
--The Law and the Word, 1919, Thomas Troward

"The Pitt diamond, it is said, was found in Golconda in the year 1702, by a slave, who, being desirous of keeping the stone to himself, made a wound in his thigh, placed the diamond in the wound, and covered it over with a bandage."
--Picturesque Science, for the Young

lineage

Sebastian Munster, Europe as a Queen, Basel 1570

what we learn from the middle ages, from the world:
the body teaches us about enclosure: the blood is enclosed by the body.

the blood defines the individual. and the blood defines the collective. and the blood is proof of existence. and the blood must be kept enclosed.

bleeding endangers the integral. consanguinity. there is no introduction for bad blood: the other, outsider cannot wave hello. the skin is a fence for blood. the nation is a fence for blood.


Consanguinity Chart
from the Etymologies by Isidore of Seville
Prüfening, Germany; ca. 1160–65
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm. 13031

"Girls of fortune, we, and this is the first time, here in Brighton, that we call ourselves fortunate, perhaps because we're talking about our past, know that we come from a long and glorious lineage. Of death. For one of the meanings of the word lineage is 'dead.'"
--Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates


The genealogical tree of Noah from 'Rudimentum Novitiorum' (Handbook for Beginners), Lübeck, 1475

"Lineage and blood relate... to every ordering by kinds, where every stranger,every strange thing, marks the absence of neutrality [...] We institute our hierarchies of blood in a forgetting that pretends to neutrality without responsibility. [..] Kinds in lineage and blood come forth in ambiguous profusion, overlaying, overlapping, intermingling beyond any system of classification."
--Stephen David Ross,The Gift of Kinds: the Good in Abundance: an Ethic of the Earth

"..All margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at the margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its especially vulnerable points.
--Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo

also: Bodies, Buildings, and Boundaries:
Metaphors of Liminality in Old English and Old Norse Literature

red riding hood says,

visit the web issue of the inimitable fairy tale review. the wolf sent me.

more fingers, more proof

detail from late 12th c. manuscript leaf at the Art Institute of Chicago

"[The Pope] holds the host with his left hand and points toward a chalice on the altar with his right. [...] A strange object, which appears to be a finger, rest on top of the chalice. Two sets of creases, visible underneath, mark its joints, and a fingernail has been delineated at the upper right."
--from "An Early Image of a Mass of St. Gregory and Devotion to the Holy Blood at Weingarten Abbey", Michael Heinlen, in Gesta, Vol. 37, No. 1

St. Gregory (Pope Gregory I) was saying mass when a woman present started to laugh during Communion, saying to a companion that she could not believe the bread was Christ, as she herself had baked it. Gregory prayed for a sign, and the host turned into a bleeding finger.


from The Sacred Shrine a Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church by Yrj Hirn, 1912


relic of the finger of thomas the apostle, rome, italy (my photo, taken 6/2009)

if you do, it will bleed

bloodroot harvested from a forest in northern wisconsin
"You make something resembling blood. If there were a way home it would be a mystery, Flannery O’Connor might say. No use trying to prattle your way into mystery. But tell what you see, tell what the blood was like, and maybe a gesture will form. Probably unbearable. Certainly unclean. And then you will go ahead with your exile."
--Anne Carson, from "Untitled (Flannery)"



bloodroot
"And I thought/Of the tongue, of how it is a wound, a pool of blood,/And of how you should bind a wound."
--from "Pale Rider", Brigit Pegeen Kelly


--from the Revelations of Saint Gertrude

exactly-- what is proof?

finger of st. thomas, the doubting apostle


detail of doubting thomas

"What gives the soul its deepest wounds brings to it best relief"
--Beatrijs of Nazareth

a return

a diamond a day...

written on the body is

my lately

diamond body

"..the moment of effacement of the boundary between an opaque object and a living body..." --Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity

open the door

diamond doors, chicago

diamonding, wounding

washington, dc & new orleans, la

Will to meet me in the orchard's shagged or shadowed southern light, the low rub of cicadas indexing their oil & eventide, then I would tell you -- everything.
--from "Pursuit of Happiness", Lucie Brock-Broido

fetal fashion

Christina of Sweden (b. 1626) was born with a "victory-shirt" -- what Scandinavians call a more or less intact fetal membrane clinging to the newborn baby. A victory-shirt was always regarded as a lucky omen & also signaled "extra protection" from the gods.

"The cap of victory was an omen of good luck for the child being born with it. It was a sign the child would become something useful."
--Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, Reimund Kvideland, Henning K. Sehmsdorf

"In Vaever, Musse, there lived a man named Ole Hansen. His oldest son was born with a shirt of victory. If he walked three times around a burning house, the fire would not spread to another building. Nor could anyone shoot him, as long as he carried his shirt of victory in his pocket."
-- Collected by E.T. Kristensen from Jorgen Mortensen in Musse parish, Lolland (Denmark).


'Glass rolling-pin, painted and dated 1855; said to have contained a child's caul as a sailor's charm, Sunderland'

"One of the most powerful personal charms was a caul, the fetal membrane that in some cases covered the face or head of a newborn infant. To carry a caul protected its bearer from drowning, and accoring to belief, no ship with one on board could sink. Being born with one not only protected a person from drowning but also gave hhim supernatural clairvoyance and allowed him to see supernatural sights, such as ghosts and spirits, hidden from ordinary eyes."
--Melville's Folk Roots, Kevin J. Haynes

"The correct name for those who are born with a Caul is a Caulbearer. Such people are often referred to as being born behind The Veil."
--www.caulbearer.org

---
A riddle:
What is worn of necessity, and then is necessarily worn,
hinders sight, but will allow to see?

measure, lance

imagined amulet, sans pierce

"Attention was drawn to the violations of Christ's body, as these were recorded and incorporated in acts of writing, measuring, wearing, eating: people carried the wounds around on a piece of parchment hanging from their necks, as amulets and as remedies. An amulet containing a 'measure' of Christ's wounds was expected to stop the flow of blood, appealing to Longinus, the Roman soldier:
Longinus: who pierced the side and had blood flow - I dare you - in the name of Jesus Christ, so that the blood of Margery will stop flowing. "
--Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture


Lambeth Palace Manuscript, MS 545

"In prints closest to our woodcut, with one or two angels presenting the heart on a cloth, the wound is indicated not only by a printed line or drops of red pigment but also almost always by an actual slit through the paper. This seems to suggest that these prints were produced specifically to be pierced by the Holy Lance and thus to serve as contact relics for pilgrim and other devotees of the relic cult."
-- Peter W. Parshall, Rainer Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-century Woodcuts and their Public