The Mother's Songs

...The strange mix in Francia, embodied YOUR COMPLETE Whichever may be the case, this is a in the novel's tiers of texts, conversaprofoundly spoken novel that is impossi- tions, notes, and commentaries, also reTHEOLOGICAL ble to imagine as being spoken, a sort of flects the truth of Roa Bastos's country, BOOK CENTER political As I Lay Dying by way of Tris- where the Guarani Indian language tram Shandy...

...from the University of Wisconsin, spent 'William Blake came to mind, Odilon II THIS is beautiful, extraordinarily time in Florence, Vienna, Spain, and Redon, and faint hints of Chagall...

...This shared flash of infanIMAGES OF GOD THE MOTHER so years ago in Little Rock, Arkansas...

...The latter extolNew York, N't 10006 perplexed as to whether his own or his led him as a "sovereign of iron energy (212) 3494376 astute dummy's lips are doing the talk- and industry, of great and severe labor...

...The beautiful," I kept saying to my- fourteen years as a nun in an English coloristic opulence of these archetypal self while leafing through this book...

...The collision of data and views, like Ethics, Spirituality Instead, he has "compiled" a sum of the tension between spoken and written Classic Literature fragmented texts, by and about the dic- word, is the equivalent of the book's Greeting Cards & Gifts tator himself, that we must recognize as plot...

...Inverting and further en- contradicts and confirms the dying Frantangling this inextricable cavalcade cia's confessions and ruminations, which (what used to be called its "aspiration") were either dictated to his bumbling or TRINITY to monstrously logical complexity, the fiendishly clever secretary, Policarpo BOOKSTORES exiled Paraguayan writer, Augusto Roa Patino, recorded in the dictator's own Bastos, has composed, literally, from ledgers (where he credits his good & GIFT SHOP some 20,000 documents and his own in- thoughts and deeds, debits the bad), or Bibles spiration, what he describes as neither pronounced in a "Perpetual Circular," The Book o f Common Prayer the fictionalized biography nor narrated his personal encyclical to instruct the naBooks on Church History, history of a real-life dictator...

...as well as fact so much "papist" child's eyes...

...A labor, great & severe Equally moving is the word-picture of sheer evil, in which Meinrad relives a I THE SUPREME pleated by sumptuous wordplay...

...G Francia agonizes over his astounding praising portraits from Sir Richard Bur74 Trinity Place life's performance, is sometimes ton and Thomas Carlyle...

...tine illumination offered me the key to Melurad Craighead The atmosphere of her early childhood her universe, made me see the originality Paulist, $9.95, 79 pp...

...The artist differs from scienSpinner of the red thread tist, philosopher, theologian in being penetrated by the mystery of dog's eye, mountain, flower, instead of trying to TEE MOTEEE'S 1011$ Meinrad Craighead was born fifty or penetrate it...

...masculine monopoly in the management running through my dark halls / and of worldly and spiritual affairs all too bright courts and high gates...

...In her case it ades of that value-free "modernart" text that breathes that poetic spirit which happened when looking into her dog's which famished the heart...

...This is not a Do such epiphanies occur in every might not be another symptom of our thesis, it is a witness to the incarnation of childhood...

...Because whatever else I the SuRed Thread Zen for his brand of Zen that I N the beginning God dictated light, preme may be - and it is many things, did not repress but stressed the Red land, water, and creatures...

...ing...

...memories of father and grandfather - ously feminine spirituality...

...In 1983 she found images recalled Klimt, perhaps, Vienhad picked it up rather skeptically, ex- her natural landscape in New Mexico...

...was that of the still lovable, human of imagery and word, an originality in the America of James Agee's "Knoxville ancient Chinese sense -- of being in Frederick Frank 1911...

...A tattered portrait of the dictating his country only to keep them captive for • Gift Shop, Trinity Church B'way at Wall St...

...Any temptais "an agony of mind in utter solitude" eyes: "She held my gaze...

...are they mostly forgotten...

...But nothits repression by the Father-God image ing is scabrous or coarse here...

...Image and word are consisstewardship...

...I reflected on parallel phenomena...

...eyes, I knew I would never travel fur- In this work the ecstatic linkage beFeminism...

...One hopes that this treasure, ever underrated and misunderstood realancestral faces, crowned with a raven's which Paulist managed to produce for a ity: a specifically feminine spirituality...

...On the through its jealously male and celibate contrary...

...I Benedictine abbey...

...mitted through her great-grandmother, become, in one way or another, artists It would be easy to gloat over the algrandmother, and mother, to her own driven to live this first flash of bliss again most obsessive frequency with which living flesh...

...In my own earliest seeing into tween art and Eros on the one hand and an "ism," but a vision that springs from the mystery of existence, at six, it was the sacred, sacramental, worshipful on pure experiencing, visceral experiencing not a dog in Arkansas, but a purple field the other, is exceptionally strong, so in the female mode and that brings the flower in a Dutch meadow, that looked explicit that at times I wondered whether ancient myth of the Great Mother to life...

...White- of equal weights...

...rounds about an angel fallen to earth, Marvelous word-plays, as on "lodewho, when questioned about what the stone, motherlode, lodestar" abound, Lord really looked like, answered: "She and equally brilliant image-puns: as the is black...

...The quip having become para- Detail, from 'Stars," by Meinrad red one, "Cauldron," in which greatble is no longer amusing...

...Archaic as are their pecting a blend of feminist acrimony and I, neither woman, nun, nor even themes, they are as intensely contemposentimentality...

...No, I detect not a trace of ther...

...of the dictator's of great Zen masters, coined the term birth...

...arcane, wizened, "white-trash" crone spitting Augusto Roa Bastos absurd, and (mostly) accurate annotation tarlike tobacco juice into her, the Translated by Helen R. Lane and quotation...

...the ventriloquized per- years, who developed his nation's re• Trinity Bookstore formance of Paraguay's nineteenth- sources and sealed them from external 74 Trinity Place century "Perpetual Dictator" (from contact, who achieved fame from books Mail or Phone Orders 1816-1840...

...head, is religious...

...But those who cannot forget, knows...

...In each is a novel that attracts by repulsion all the woman, a mother, the Earth...

...stranger than fiction that nobody knows Knopf, $18.95, 448 pp...

...The novel gets its start when a vilthe most magnificent work, most magni- ifying pasquinade is nailed to the cathe3 Manhattan Locations ficently translated, to come from Spanish dral door about this strange figure, a dic The General Theological Seminary into English in almost a quarter of a cen175 Ninth Avenue (20th St...

...and ever including biography, bibliography, Thread, the umbilical cord that binds since, politics and literature have re- anachronistic history, meta-fiction - it even the most spiritualized ascetic to a peatedly attempted the same...

...Some fifteen years ago a joke, the place and walked in / right through then still blasphemously comical, did the the middle of my heart...

...tion...

...dictator dictated...

...tator who welcomed notable visitors to tury...

...nese "art nouveau...

...Behind the scenes he both Supreme One...

...Who the great myth as the artist saw it trans- Probably...

...or...

...Craighead, The Mother's Songs...

...a balance would betray blindness to the predomisolitude, to speak with A.N...

...Or the elegantly powerful Wisdom icon in which a majestic owl dominates black-silvery cosmic hieroglyphs...

...Every page celebrates in breasts, bellies, umbilical cord, icon and in words the female aspect of "menstrual fire," "pictures painted on divine Reality, as if to undo centuries of the walls of my womb" occur...

...tently and nobly mythopoetic: ". .. cows The book is timely, now that the myth grazed my mouth / deer my breasts / of white-male superiority and omnis- birds searched my face / spiders my cience is so eroded, the failure of the hands / snakes my belly...

...Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de reviling his reign of terror and inspired Trinity Bookstore...

...She attended Catholic schools in touch with the origins, authenticity...

...reached glaring...

...As I looked into her nance of mythical content over the form...

...Craig- case - to use the Spanish title of this vast archival material collated by Roa head's Red Thread Catholicism - I did novel as an example - there is a trinitar- Bastos...

...But at once a formidable card-carrying Catholic, felt an im- rary as they are "anti-modernistic" to artist spoke out of some forty luminous mediate bond with her when on the very borrow Kundera's term, typical of the ink-on-scratchboard icons - "images" first page I read of an early childhood re-humanization that had to follow decis too neutral to do them justice - and a experience we almost share...

...Here profoundly so...

...back at me, looked me in the eye, and I such total submersion in pure yin hardly Let theologians ,7 if they must - casti- knew that I would never travel further, balanced by traces of yang - in the gate this outcry of almost telluric, sensu- knew as she did, "This is God...

...Every textual fold is flourishes side by side with Spanish, and Commonweal: 314...

...not find a single conventionally "Chris- ian procession between the maker (Yo or Roa Bastos himself disappears behind tian" symbol in her iconography - I), the made or addressed (el - punning the screen of "Compiler" - like Descommunicates in her language of word el here - or he, him, the other), and the cartes's God after winding up the uniand image a universal religious attitude mode of recognized effect (Supremo or versal clock...

...grandmother, grandmother, and mother 23 May 1986: 313 become one immense and winged to the mystery of existence, one of great paltry $9.95, will open many eyes to that pomegranate, carrying three overlapping profundity...

...profile...

...I watched tion to label this work "decorative" (Blyth) and in which the "use" of this the dog and she watched me...

...The fifteenth-century Zen poet Ikkyu, for sure which evil lurks in the mind of abbot of Daitokuji, Kyoto, an eccentric what possible man - or even the correct lover of women in the ultra-puritan line Ronald Christ date (1766 or 1776...

...Dept...

...culturally regressive tendencies...

...Chicago, eventually got her M.F.A...