Language Of Love Research Articles

A Passion for Literacy: David Baldacci

A Passion for Literacy: David Baldacci

Marilyn A. Bowcutt, RN, MSN

Marilyn A. Bowcutt, RN, MSN

Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times

The sensational title trivialises what is in fact an in-depth study of homosexual lives in late nineteenth-century England, thoroughly documented by original archival research and engagingly told with humane good humour. Kaplan's traditional employment of historical narrative, or ‘storytelling,’ focuses on three main stories: the trials of the cross-dressers Frederick William Park and Ernest Boulton (a.k.a. Fanny and Stella) in 1870–71; the hothouse of pedagogic eros at Eton in the 1870s through the 1890s, featuring William Johnson Cory and Regy Brett (later 2nd Viscount Esher); and the West End scandals of 1889–90 featuring Lord Arthur Somerset, Equerry to the Prince of Wales, and the clients and staff of a male brothel on Cleveland Street. Kaplan's retellings of trials are especially compelling and dramatic, and his character sketches are perceptive and acute. These central stories are supplemented by the stories of two men with full homosexual self-knowledge, the cultural historian John Addington Symonds at the high end of the spectrum, and, at the lower end, the male prostitute Jack Saul, whose fictionalised autobiography fleshes out the action at which newspapers could only hint. Last comes the Oscar Wilde débâcle, a story perhaps too familiar to need retelling, but Kaplan's account is nevertheless an accomplished précis, based on secondary sources. The separate stories do not quite combine into a whole, despite some connections: the artist Simeon Solomon (some years before he would be arrested in a urinal) joined Boulton and Park for lunch during an interval of their trial; and Viscount Esher, the old Etonian, was a close friend of Lord Arthur Somerset, who exiled himself to France after the Cleveland Street affair in order to protect the reputation of Prince Eddy. The one solid link between all the stories is class conflict: Victorian society was heavily inflected with class antagonisms, and homosexuals were most severely reviled when they engaged in cross-class relations, which they regularly did. Kaplan rightly refrains from throwing weak bridges across the gaps between the hermaphroditic demi-monde of female impersonators, the underworld of telegraph boys and rough trade, and the romantic entanglements of schoolboys and their sentimental masters. Each group of self-identities remains distinct, testifying to the range of self-understandings available to Victorian men whose desires were misaligned with conventional sexual or gender identities. Kaplan's greatest virtue is to portray his subjects with affection and sympathy. He even succeeds in recreating the wistful nostalgia of boy-love by concentrating on diaries and letters without letting analysis intervene, allowing the language of love to speak for itself (however cloying we may find it) rather than reducing it to the language of lust or the discourse of theory. For his three central stories, Kaplan has carefully mined several archives of trial records and personal correspondence, supplemented with contemporary newspaper reports. The Esher Archives have never been tapped so deeply and effectively. However, Kaplan does not venture far from the narrow vein of his archives, not fully appreciating that his subjects continued to lead their lives beyond the archives. Boulton and Park simply disappear from his book when their trial ends, but a more determined historian would have pursued them to America, where they continued to appear on the vaudeville stage as female impersonators. Kaplan makes the occasional error when he ventures outside the Victorian period: for instance, in 1631 Lord Castlehaven was convicted, not ‘for buggering … his wife’ as well as his household servants, but for assisting one of his servants to rape his wife (as he liked watching his menservants in action), and for buggery with two of his menservants; Castlehaven was not a polymorphous libertine ‘willing to use anyone at his disposal to obtain sexual satisfaction’, but clearly preferred men. Several photographs of Boulton and Park in drag are very welcome and illuminating; illustrations of homoerotic statues by Hamo Thornycroft and Lord Leighton are also welcome, but the reader will be bemused by their presence, since neither man is ever mentioned in the text. In the introduction and epilogue, Kaplan pays an obligatory nod towards queer theory, but his historical narrative easily eclipses queer theory. Kaplan recognises that narrative challenges theory, and is far more nuanced and faithful to the historical evidence than theoretical discourse.

George Meredith's Early Verse: A New Manuscript in His First Wife's Hand

Although his first collection of Poems (1851) received a fair measure of raise from reviewers and a handsome compliment from Tennyson, George Meredith soon came to regard the as an embarrassment and later wished he could suppress it entirely. He is said to have destroyed the unbound sheets for some three hundred copies of the Poems, (1) and he told John Lane that he destroyed the of an intended volume of British Songs after John W. Parker and Son declined to publish it at their expense in July (2) He must also have destroyed numerous loose manuscripts of individual poems, for nearly all of his early verse that survives in is contained in three bound volumes: two quarto notebooks in the Altschul Collection at Yale and an interleaved copy of his Poems in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. (3) Meredith's revulsion against his early verse was based on personal as well as aesthetic grounds, for much of it was inevitably associated with his first wife, Mary Ellen Nicolls, nee Peacock. His earliest known poems date from his association with Mary Ellen and other members of the Charnock circle in the production of their periodical Monthly Observer. Most of his early love lyrics were inspired by Mary Ellen, and his Poems were dedicated To Thomas Love Peacock, Esq., with the profound admiration and affectionate respect of his son-in-law. After Mary Ellen left him and bore a son by their mutual friend Henry Wallis, Meredith sought to distance himself from his own unpublished verse by treating it ironically in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), where he ascribes brief snippets to his adolescent hero and some longer passages to the sentimental poetaster Diaper Sandoe, Sir Austin's former friend and Lady Feverel's lover. On more than one occasion Meredith was willing to stretch the truth with respect to his early poetry. In a letter of November 13, 1861, he told his friend Augustus Jessop that the poems in my boy's book were before I was twenty (Letters, 1:109-110), when in fact most of them were written when he was twenty-one or twenty-two. Near the end of his life, when his anonymous contributions to Household Words were identified from entries in the contributors' book, he even suggested privately that most of them were written by his first wife-a view that his son William Maxse Meredith later argued publicly. (4) Since Mary Ellen was, in one way or another, the inspiration for much of his early work as a poet, it is interesting to find a in her hand containing transcripts of his early verse, including Three Maidens and six untitled poems or fragments, several of them previously unpublished. This was acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale in 1975 as part of a miscellaneous collection of papers that once belonged to Mary Ellen's daughter Edith Nicolls Clarke. (5) Meredith scholars may have since overlooked its significance because the Yale cataloguer described Three Maidens as a manuscript poem possibly by Mary Ellen Meredith, despite the fact that it was published by George Meredith in 1859 and included in a collected edition of his Works in 1898. Of the untitled poems that occupy the remaining space in the manuscript, three can be found, either complete or in fragmentary form, in Meredith's Red Quarto Notebook at Yale. (6) Hence there is no reason to doubt that the previously unknown poems and fragments are also the work of George rather than Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen's transcripts fill all four pages of a double sheet of octavo notepaper with the watermark PIRIE & SONS | 1855. Since she apparently had access to a larger collection of her husband's verse, her copies must have been made while she was still living with Meredith-probably in 1856, or at any rate prior to the summer of 1857. (7) Three Maidens may have been transcribed from a fair copy, for it was finished some time prior to April 24, 1855, when Meredith sent a copy to his friend Tom Taylor in the hope that Taylor's fiancee, Laura Barker, might set it to music (Letters, 1:21). …

Discursive strategies that individualize: CVs and appraisal interviews

Professionals in education must increasingly speak of themselves through an individualizing discourse that commits them to a lifelong and life‐encompassing learning and working project. By means of techniques like CVs and appraisal interviews, post‐signifying regimes conjure up discursive spaces that thrive on the language of commitment, love and enthusiasm. This urges professionals to speak of their role and personality in accordance with the vision of their organization. Such discursive technology may encourage commitment, be turned into manipulative power instruments, or be reduced to shallow rituals. Beyond doubt, however, post‐signifying strategies raise the stakes in organizational communication. The purpose of this article is epistemological, i.e. it intends to explore positions and strategies made available through the language provided by a certain discursive technology. It does not claim to say how this technology is actually employed empirically in particular contexts. The article draws on ideas and concepts from Deleuze & Guattari and Foucault.

The language of love in Japanese

The language of love in Japanese

Everyone has the right to learn the language of love

People with learning disabilities should be able to experience the pangs and heartache associated with falling in love, according to Elaine Drummond, branch leader of the learning disability branch at University College Cork.

The Pushkin Anniversary of 1937 and Russian Art-Song in the Soviet Union

This article considers the renaissance of Russian art-song in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, especially around the time of the Pushkin anniversary celebrations of 1937. The lyric — as a poetic and musical form — had enjoyed an uncertain reputation since the October Revolution. In the light of the Pushkin centenary, however, it proved to be a convenient way for composers to participate in the official celebrations. Moreover, the foundation of a Soviet lyric repertoire was an important element in raising the cultural aspirations of the Soviet audience. Equally, the establishment of a Soviet repertoire would suggest that the Soviet Union had matched the cultural achievements of the past. Explicit parallels were made with the musical culture of Pushkin's age, and the composers of the 1820s and 1830s were rehabilitated as models of the kind of accessible repertoire that the new era demanded. However, the ambitions of the time were realized only in part. Many composers stuck to tried-and-tested love lyrics, rather than Pushkin's more ambitious civic and philosophical lyrics. Moreover, the invocation of the music of the 1820s and 1830s encouraged composers to engage in often characterless stylization. Finally, the fetishization of Pushkin meant that contemporary poets were neglected; the establishment of a truly Soviet art-song repertoire was delayed for several decades.

Стихотворение Тютчева «Весь день она лежала в забытьи…» и его два венгерских перевода

The paper aims at a linguistically based analysis of one of the pearls of Russian love lyrics written by Tyutchev, and of its two Hungarian translations. Master of small forms, the poet concentrates his poetic devices (ambiguities, antitheses, repetitions, etc.) to a high degree, and attains to a harmonious fusion of different stylistic traits. The translation of the poem made by Lőrinc Szabo, a well-known Hungarian poet of the 20th century is handicapped by the use of an intermediate text, and some elements of his own poetical vision here and there outweigh essential features of the original. The translation of Arpad Galgoczy, one of the best contemporary translators of Russian poetry, comes in a lot of instances more close to the original.

The language of love

The language of love

Attitudes towards Literary Tamil and Standard Spoken Tamil in Singapore

This is the first empirical study that focused on attitudes towards two varieties of Tamil, Literary Tamil (LT) and Standard Spoken Tamil (SST), with the multilingual state of Singapore as the backdrop. The attitudes of 46 Singapore Tamil teachers towards speakers of LTand SST were investigated using the matched-guise approach along with four-point semantic differential attitude scales. The scales formed three dimensions – status, solidarity and social attractiveness; and three additional distinct traits – love for language, suitability for Tamil teaching and suitability for media presentation. The teachers' perceptions of LT and SST guises of two out of three speakers were found predominantly comparable for all attitude dimensions (status, solidarity, and social attractiveness) and two discrete attitude items (love for language and suitability for Tamil teaching). Two speakers were rated lower when using SST than when using LT in terms of perceived suitability for media presentation. Tamil teachers' attitudes were influenced by the pitch and pitch variation of the speakers' voice. Differences in teachers' perceptions of SST and LT guises were detected primarily only for the speaker whose voice has the highest pitch and highest pitch variation. The same speaker was rated highest in all measures given above.

A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Middle English Lyric Janet Hadley Williams Duncan, Thomas G., ed., A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2005; cloth; pp. xxvi, 302; R.R.P. US$85.00, £50.00, ISBN 18438406750. Some Companion volumes are designed to be read from cover to cover, although most are prepared in expectation of selective interest. A Companion to the Middle English Lyric is one of the few attending to both needs. There are Latin translations and glosses throughout, the absence in quotations of thorn, eth, wynn and yogh, some handy definitions (although a few more could have been added, for 'synizes' and 'apocope', for instance), with some core pieces of information, such as the nature of major manuscripts mentioned, repeated strategically. Yet through the sum of the book's various examinations – of the themes, categories, and, with the carol, genre – the Middle English lyric is [End Page 196] properly and subtly described, with the references to foundational scholarship and the new readings splendidly enabling a multiplicity of scholarly approaches and levels. In his Introduction, Thomas G. Duncan sets out in detail the importance of the Middle English lyric to English literary history. He links it to several formal and thematic innovations: the change to stanzaic verse form, the appearance of secular love lyrics, the beginnings of a different concept of love in the religious lyric, and to a new vocabulary of affective piety. He also points out the lyric's continuities with earlier writing, in the use of the alliterative line, and the retention of major themes. Duncan acknowledges the problems encountered by readers of the lyric. He looks first at those of context: the lyric's linguistic diversity, less-than-ideal physical context (often surviving in corrupt versions only), the rarity of authorial copy, and the fact that this 'anonymity' is compounded by the lyric's brevity and by the loss of the original corpus, without which a lyric, surviving in isolation, fits none of the recognized categories. He then considers problems of modality, noting the potentially misleading nineteenth-century idea of the lyric as 'the expression of the poet's own feelings' (p. xxiii), and recognising the essentially public nature of the early lyric, where use of conventions is much in evidence. He considers, too, the important relationship of song to the lyric. During the course of the volume, all of these matters come into play; Duncan has provided a thought-provoking basis for understanding that later commentary. Julia Boffey enlarges this in her 'Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts', pointing out the diversity of the forms of record in which the lyrics are found, and the cultural implications for the Middle English lyric produced in the trilingual (French, Latin, English) society of that time. She surveys the settings for the copying of these poems, devoting discrete sections to single-author collections, and others to those in which lyrics are components in anthologies, household miscellanies, religious instruction manuals, sermon-collections, songbooks, and commonplace books. Boffey meticulously records particular sources, and gives frequent but unobtrusive references to modern scholarship. Duncan's 'Middle English Lyrics: Metre and Editorial Practice', which makes more sense because it follows Boffey's contextualising essay, offers editors practical and flexible advice based on the author's considerable editing experience. For those who are students of lyrics, however, there are also insights – on how a lyric should be read and of what to question: scribal eye-skip, for example, is suggested as a possible explanation, on occasion, of a supposed faulty metre. Attention is also given to matters less familiar, such as the fact that some [End Page 197] lyrics were jotted down in an abbreviated form, and may require the reader to reconstruct them. Such discussions inform the reading of the remaining chapters, John Scattergood's 'The Love Lyric before Chaucer', Vincent Gillespie's 'Moral and Penitential Lyrics', Christiana Whitehead's 'Middle English Religious Lyrics', supplemented by Sarah Stanbury's 'Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics', Douglas Gray's 'Middle English Courtly Lyrics: Chaucer to Henry VIII', Karl Reichl's 'The Middle English Carol', Thorlac Turville-Petre's 'Political Lyrics', Alan Fletcher's 'The Lyric in...

Eduard Mörike: Ästhetik und Geselligkeit ed. by Wolfgang Braungart, Ralf Simon, and: Die Schönheit des Vergänglichen: Erinnerung und ästhetische Erfahrung bei Eduard Mörike by Jan Koneffke

886 Reviews Eduard Mdrike: Asthetik und Geselligkeit. Ed. byWOLFGANG BRAUNGARTand RALF SIMON. Tiubingen: Niemeyer. 2004. 270 pp. E52. ISBN 978-3-484-I0864-6. Die Sch6nheit des Vergdnglichen: Erinnerung und asthetische Erfahrung bei Eduard Morike. By JANKONEFFKE. (Beitrage zur deutschen Literatur, 30) Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang. 2004. I35 pp. E27.50. ISBN 978-3-631-52422-0. Wolfgang Braungart and Ralf Simon's volume Asthetik und Geselligkeit is likely to make a substantial contribution tohow we understand thequiet modernity ofEduard Morike. Its approach is more refinedand less limiting than thatof the last major collec tionof essays published onMorike (M6rike's Muses, ed. by Jeffrey Adams (Columbia, SC: Camden House, I990)). In their introduction, Braungart and Simon stress the need for a perspective able to treat Morike's seclusion from thedominant modes and movements of nineteenth-century German literary history,without marginalizing him or taking quiet tomean quietist (the editors have Friedrich Sengle respectfully in their sights, forhis presentation ofMorike inBiedermeierzeit, vol. III (Stuttgart: Metzler, I980)). Accordingly they insist that ifthe literary idiosyncrasies ('asthetische Eigentiimlichkeiten' (p. i)) ofM6rike's texts are to be understood as socially and historically situated, then such understanding must be informed byMorike's own reflexive awareness of that relationship. Hence the firstessay, by Stefan Scherer, has an exemplary quality in the context of the volume as awhole. Scherer discusses the intertextual importance ofTieck in Maler Nolten, but broadens thisout into an ori ginal and conceptually rich argument about Morike's much-discussed 'epigonality': Luhmann is adduced to show how Morike's text 'perforates' an inherited paradigm while yet remaining unable to transgress it. Maler Nolten is represented by three fur ther essays. Claudia Liebrand gives a nuanced account of letter-writing in the novel, dealing with issues of identityand gender construction. Kristin Rheinwald discusses the failure of love relationships in the novel under the rubric ofAsthetik and Gesel ligkeit.Here the richness of the volume's guiding ideas is especially apparent, for Rheinwald is able toconclude by suggesting that the failure of love in the social world Morike depicts is synonymous forhim with the failure of the novel form itself,and that thispropels him into the more private world of the lyric. In another contribution, two poems from Maler Nolten are discussed sensitively byKlaus Weimar. Poetry is thesubject of the remaining contributions, with theexception of Wolfgang Braungart's engaging account of 'Das Stuttgarter Hutzelmannlein' (which, perhaps surprisingly, is theonly essay to discuss Morike's relationship toHolderlin). One of themost wide-ranging essays here isThomas Althaus's account of 'Die Funktion des Unwichtigen beiMorike'. What gives Althaus's piece its force is theway it re veals 'unimportance' as a hermeneutic category and paradox, posing problems forany attempt todescribe itcritically: can we discuss such moments of irreducible particu larity without imposing a 'significance' on themwhich theyare bound to resist? In his thoughtful discussion of several poems, Althaus manages to do just that.However, reading themere eight lines he accords to 'Aufeine Lampe' (given his topicwe might have expected a fewmore), one inevitably wonders whether therewas a conscious editorial decision to avoid thatpoem inparticular, andMorike's 'Dinggedicht' mode in general (the, fascinating 'Auf eine Christblume' is not once mentioned). In one sense thiswould be understandable, since these poems have receivedmuch attention elsewhere, but inanother it isproblematic, for it ishard to thinkof a poem more about Asthetik and Geselligkeit than 'Aufeine Lampe'. Indeed, the famous debate on that poem between Emil Staiger andMartin Heidegger haunts the footnotes ofmany con tributions here, suggesting that these textswould in factbe integral to the subject of thevolume. But thepoems chosen by thevarious contributors are treated admirably: Ralf Simon's account of the role of 'Peregrina' inM6rike's poetic development is original and compelling; Renate von Heydebrand is incisive onMorike's love lyrics; MLR, I02. 3, 2007 887 Mathias Mayer's hermeneutic analysis of 'Idylle am Bodensee' iselegant and insight ful, while Helmut J.Schneider's discussion of 'Wald-Idylle' in thecontext of M6rike's relationship topoetic traditionmakes interesting arguments about influence and the idea of the feminine. In an excellent contribution, Giinter Oesterle takes thepoem 'An Longus' as the starting-point for a rich account ofMorike's relation to discourses of grace and social...

Emotional Expression in Malory's Elaine of Ascolat

Shrieks and complaints, accompanied by body language, contribute markedly to Malory's representation of Elaine of Ascolat's emotionality. Elaine's two shrieks echo Lancelot's and indicate change from sorrow for a wounded beloved to heartbreak when he rejects her. When Elaine is compared with speakers in love lyrics, allegories, and romances, the thoughts in her unarticulated complaints after the pained second shriek may be understood and related to her defence of complaint and perseverance in love despite rejection. Similarly, Elaine's complaint letter, including its overlooked moan to ladies, reflects a state of tranquility and brings about a just resolution.

Aristotle My Beloved: Poetry, Diagnosis, and the Dreams of Julius Caesar Scaliger*

AbstractNotoriously Aristotelian in his poetic theory, linguistics, and natural philosophy, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) also reimagined the lost love poetry that Aristotle himself was said to have written. Scaliger'sNew Epigramsof 1533 combine a distinctively humanist view of Aristotle as an elegant polymath with a sustained experiment in refashioning the Petrarchan love lyric. Most visibly in poems about dreams and dreaming, Scaliger educes his speaker's erotic despair from philosophical problems in contemporary Aristotelian accounts of the soul, knowledge, and personal identity. The strange but compelling texts that result form a crossroads for Scaliger's own identities as physician, philosopher, and poet.

Leeser Rosenthal and 'Das Lied von der Glocke'

Heide Warncke Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana's founder, Leeser Rosenthal (1794-1868), was a fascinating man. Born in the Warsaw region of Poland, he enjoyed a traditional Jewish upbringing. As a young man he felt a longing to extend his intellectual horizons. He travelled to Berlin and Paderborn where he learned German, acquired a broad education in Haskalah literature and the German classics, as well as world history and the social aspects of life. From his love oflanguage, his receptive nature and critical stance emerged Rosenthal the author. Among the items he left at his death is a small writing book that he had filled around 1817 while in Paderborn. It contains poems, parables, short stories, definitions of Hebrew synonyms and even a few riddles in this language. Perhaps less well known is that he also translated a number of poems by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) into Hebrew. For Rosenthal, who had only recently learned German, it must have been a considerable challenge to attempt the sublime, flowery language of this classic poet.

Liebe im 20. Jahrhundert: Ruth Berlau/Bertolt Brecht und Dora Maar/Pablo Picasso

The essay sketches and analyzes the process of love between Ruth Berlau and Bertolt Brecht as well as between Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso. It is oriented by a theory of love, which Roland Barthes unfolded in his study “Fragments of a language of love”. The empirical analysis relies on “figures”, which, as Barthes writes, pop up in the heads of lovers, which coin the ”dis-cursus” of lovers and structure the course of “lovetales”, without a firm order or succession. Selected out of a multitude of figures, which are put into an alphabetical order by Barthes, are: “encounter”, “expectation”, “adorability”, “dependence” and “decline”.

Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Filíocht Nua: New Poetry Mary O'Donoghue Tenacities, Cork in April for Dorothy Medeiros Dried leaves race the bus through Youghal, a litter of withered brown-paper children, and a Labrador with oozing rheumy eyes decides to plunder the brúscar. Crows fly in for a conference, envoys from out-of-town branches. The kissers on Patrick's Hill tilt leewards, the girl's hair flurries round the boy's neck like a saluki hound in a breeze. They clench collars and coats to stay perpendicular as handbraked cars creak inchwise down the scarp. [End Page 44] The Stylist The Chinese micro-carver Chen Zhongen can inscribe poems on a single strand of hair I asked for a headful of sonnets (Petrarchan) from scalp to split end. Short-haired one, said he, the most I can do for youis a crop of haiku. A bit miffed, I looked round the room at enormous close-ups of women with sestinas twirled through their ringlets, thousands of Möbius strips curled 'round recidivist words. A man with a brylled-black mullet sported tercets over his ears, and a thicket of octets ending in knots: floccinaucinihilipilification, sesquipedalian, hyperfecund, the days of the week in Old Norse. Poems with upbeat conclusions on the flick-ups of nymphet models. Bawdy love lyrics from the 1700s hidden inside dense dark shag perms, and rhyming couplets at the outer tips of a blonde boy's barely-there eyebrows. No fair, I thought; oh, to be Rapunzel with space for the lost Latin epics of Valerius Flaccus cascading down past my backside. [End Page 45] But no; I got Ezra Pound's petals above my wet and blackening brow. Some highlights from Japanese wisdom. And one of the stylist's own: What hard work this is, blinded by flurries of snow: your psoriasis. Rockbed A ship astray on the flats, its people flayed by cold on Lovell's Island. The blood gives up in time, fails to stoke the heart, abandons the peninsulas of fingers. The couple are new to each other, and make their honeymoon bed in a cup of rock on a hill. Clumsy embrace, needled and pinned arms moving like the string-guided float of puppet limbs. They tear their lips apart, each leaving shreds of flesh on the other. They are found frost-soldered together, a statuary in garbled clothes. Diarmuid and Gráinne shared a back-breaking bed on bare rock. Some nights, we buck and squirm as if sleeping on flint. My arm in the morning, heavy as a club, sweeps [End Page 46] clocks and books to the floor, clattercrash. Our shapes in the sheets are letters from a giant alphabet, a sloppy Cyrillic. The pillows smell of breath and hair, keep palimpsest records of old dreams under new. Catalepsy. Provoked by the Sound of a Tuning Fork No matter that she smells crushed diamonds, the white gunpowder before it bursts in small subdued claps. The camera's flash still catches her unaware. A tuning fork, big as a hay pike, stands guard behind her. Its long low thrum has stunned her spine. The echo remains, mantra of a church bell, one peal, faraway; a tinny taste at her backmost teeth. The sound presses thumbs against [End Page 47] the lintels of bone over her eyes. She sits, a frumpy mannequin, in studied confusion. She seems to have dropped something—crockery, a doll with a porcelain head—and her hands wring the air. Words whistle wetly through the pinhole made by her lips, as the sound and resound of one note smote from a wooden bench grinds at her tailbone. His nib scoots across pages, scratching notes on the woman he struck into stone. Based on Jean-Martin Charcot's 1880s Iconographie: photographs of patients with hysteria, Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris. [End Page 48] Archimedes The bathroom floor is awash with the weight of his Grecian gut, the volume of his backside and thighs slides in greasy...

Three Missiological Perspectives: what Testimony?

In this brief presentation, I would like to present three perspectives of mission that seem to me to be both necessary and complementary. (1) I. The Trinitarian perspective Mission is basically the work of God, humans. Trinitarian faith is a criterion of Christian faith. All the so-called great commissions have a trinitarian basis and are set in a trinitarian context (Matt. 28:18-20; Luke 24:46-49; John 20:20-23). Mission does have its authorization through any decision by the church in the past, in the present, or ever. are at liberty to decide whether or to engage in mission. It has its origin and source in God the Father, and sending of Son and Spirit. It is missio Dei. Firstly, the fact that God the Father, the creator, is the source of mission means that mission does bring God to people; he is there, present in creation in humans who God created in image, the image that gives them their intrinsic worth and dignity. The Son came to his (John 1:11). In mission Christ's disciples come to God's own world. This biblical vision of creation means that the church in mission respects all people regardless of their faith or situation. It may co-operate with all people concerned for justice, peace and the integrity of creation, to use a well-known formulation. Secondly, the trinitarian perspective means that Christian mission has Jesus Christ and work in its historical particularity as its central focus and message. Christian mission is christocentric, although christomonistic. Mission to the world as a deliberate activity did begin until after Christ's incarnation, earthly ministry, death, resurrection and ascension. He is the only God incarnate; ministry combined character, words and works of mercy and power that are normative for the church in mission. Christ's death was an atoning death for the sins of the whole world. His resurrection was the divine authentication of saving work, and the guarantee of the resurrection to come and the presence of the living Christ in church today. No part of the gospel about Jesus can be downplayed or omitted without serious damage to the church and its witness to Christ. Christ is the unique Saviour and Lord. The apostle Peter's statement, There is salvation in no other name is simply an expression of love language but has universal normative significance for the church in mission. (2) We cannot point to any other way of salvation than Jesus Christ; at the same time we cannot set limits to the saving power of God. (3) This also means that the church invites people to faith in Christ and expects a response. Jesus himself called both pious and not-so-pious God-believing Jews to conversion and discipleship in order for them to enter the kingdom of God (cf. Mark 1:15). The kingdom of God is God's rule over the world but the salvation in all its dimensions that Christ has brought already as a reality, and which will be consummated in the eschatological not yet, when the kingdom comes in power. Entering this kingdom takes place through coming to Jesus, that is, through faith in him. This is the basic witness of the church. The crucified and risen Christ, the living and present Christ is the centre of the liberating missionary proclamation (1 Cot. 1:22-23). Thirdly, the trinitarian perspective implies that mission has the Holy Spirit as its driving, motivating and equipping power. Acts 1 and 2 are the continuance of the Lucan gospel story. The primary witness to Christ is the Spirit (John 15:26-27). The gift of the Spirit, or being baptized with the Spirit, is an integral part of Christian initiation and one that is tied to conversion, faith and baptism in ways that we cannot fully unfold here. One cannot be a Christian without the Spirit, yet it is possible, even mandatory, that Christians be filled with the Spirit in an experiential way in order to be equipped and empowered for mission in word and deed (Rom. …

Speaking the Language of Relational Maintenance: A Validity Test of Chapman's (1992) Five Love Languages

ABSTRACT This study examines the claims of Gary Chapman (1992) in his popular press book, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that a five-factor fit of these data to Chapman's proposed five love languages was superior to unidimensional, three-factor, and four-factor solutions. Results showed significant relationships between the love language factors and Stafford, Dainton, and Haas' (2000) relational maintenance typology, suggesting that Chapman's love languages may reflect behaviors performed to enact intended relational maintenance.