january 31 - saint alan alexander of daphne and vespers

 

The bees of Ashdown Forest do not know mercy.  Neither have they heard of pain.  They buzz ceaselessly in their innocent wood seeking innocence, for the bees are cruel and their lack of knowledge derives from their inability to reflect on and articulate their nature, but the innocence they seek possesses the ability but not the necessary experience.  The bees provide the experience.

Sarah Maria Heginbotham wandered from her Weald home, weary and full of figs, on April 13 1881, to the tut-tut of the titmouse and the tat-tat of the tufted tit-tyrant.  She wandered in the wild Weald and smelled of woads and whortleberries.  She lay herself down on a patch of yellow welds to dream but not to sleep, and the bees smelled her and removed her gingham and cotton hand-me-downs and the Great Bee stung her in her honey pot.  So it was that on January 18 1882 she gave birth to St. Alan Alexander, who suffered estrangement from wife, son, bear and bee; humiliation from the nature of his surviving work, which spoke of timeless truths but was denigrated by the self-righteous powers as unworthy of adults on their own; who felt possessed by his creation and wished it, its companions, innocence, owls, roos and forests dead.  He spent his last years as an invalid, unvisited by his children, ignored by his wife, and bereft of mistresses.  Yet his four books of verse and stories tower above the daily common forgettable literary buzz, the pretensions of sophisticates and the sophistication of stuffed and unloved scholars, stinging the knowledgeable with innocence, the innocent with knowledge.  He painted the grey landscape between childhood and adulthood with colour, precision, distinction and sadness.  It is the landscape we live in and the landscape we see when we die.

St. Alan Alexander was transmogrified to a honey pot illustration in the Ernest Howard Shepard Memorial Collection in the Library at Babel on January 31 1956.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 20 1996.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

january 23 - saint denis of enlightened largesse, poetic journalism and encyclopedic acceptance

 

Intelligent, ardent, effusive, eloquent, never at home, always abroad; or if it happened that he received others at his home and amid his own ideas, then he was the most open-hearted, the most hospitable of mortals, the most friendly to all people and everything, and gave to all his circle, readers no less than authors or artists, not a lesson but a fête. He taught us three things: the hope for posthumous fame in this world to replace the promised immortality which theology had located in the next; the chaotic irreducible relation between all objects and concepts; that ideas must be released from their mental chains to swarm in the natural freedom of the body.

In Langres France in the eighteenth century, a girl craved knowledge.  She fell asleep praying for it.  Then she would dream, night after night, of squawking screeching birds - some eagles, some vultures; others sparrows, ostriches - spiraling up a great column to an unseen canopy in Paradise.  She’d wake in ferocious sweats, and doves and songbirds would sit on her shoulder and sing to her and comfort her.   During one especially virulent dream, as birds thicker than death were shrieking on her tomb, the girl's cranium opened, exposing her throbbing brain, and an eagle of truth dropped a significant steaming turd into it.

Other birds noisily joined - the Berlepsch's Tinamou, Rufous-bellied Chachalaca, Vanuatu Scrubfowl, Handsome Francolin, Chinese Bamboo-Partridge, Satyr Tragopan, Moustached Puffbird, Cayenne Nightjar, Reunion Solitaire, Boat-billed Tody-Bully, Crested Shrike-wit, Hairy-backed Bulbul, Scaly-breasted Illadopsis-Babbler, Palawan Flowerpecker, Uluguru Violet-backed Sunbird, Donaldson Smith’s Social-Weaver, Slut-faced Hemispingus, Violaceous-rumped Euphonia, Pyrrhuloxia, and Giant Cowbird-Bobolink - all these and thousands more deposited their avian waste into her open skull.  Nine months later, on October 5 1713, she delivered a babbling Saint Denis from her brain.

While usually journalism is antithetical to sainthood - journalists being the boors and pedants of creation - St. Denis elevated curiosity and truth-seeking to aesthetic heights and embodied philosophy for a future age.  On July 31 1784, just outside Le Coude Fou on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, while telling nested stories to passersby and plotting a revenge, St. Denis was changed to a pillar of merde and brought by Persephone Herself down to Hades, where he was placed by the most polluted section of the Styx, where he still stands.

The Council of I elevated St. Denis to sainthood on July 26 2000 after two centuries of unbroken futile debate, not through consensus but exhaustion.  We honor him today because on this day in 1797 his daughter, Angélique de Vandeul, became a fatalist, as was written up above.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

january 19 - saint william, mythmonger silliman poet

 

Far, far away, a long time ago, in a hut made of potatoes overlooking the shelly Sligeach, lived a bitter sentimental woman with her 23 children and drunken husband.  The last of the litter, an ethereal runt who survived only because he began eating the walls, was named not by dad, who was long past being able to name anything, nor by mom, who only called him tuilli cac, but by a pleasant gathering of … well …

Sometime before he was named or numbered, when the sky was lightly leaping through a pack of clouds and the sun was chomping on a distant rainbow, Táin Bó Cúailnge felt herself desiring a child.  Lithe as love she was, and just as wily.  She gathered her friends, Old Yellow Lecan and Druimm Snechta, and said, We cannot breed the way humans do, which is good, because who would want a man anyway?  And the three cackled lightly, to the detriment of a few nearby stars and roses.  Which is bad, because it means when we want a shiny cutsie baby to play catch with, or to pitch through an eclipse to see it shatter, we don’t have one.

We have the dindshenchas, said Druimm Snechta.  And Old Yellow Lecan said, Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

It’s true.  But the dindshenchas only assume human form and only pretend to explode.  If they don’t feel like screaming, they don’t, because they’re not really scared of us.  They’re only good in certain moods and times and rhythms and lights and feels and wants and airs.  Plus … and here she paused to allow the darkness to take form and wrap itself around her … we cannot send the dindshenchas back to earth stuffed with the magic to upset and the silliness to confuse.

And so Táin Bó Cúailnge’s true intent became obvious, which delighted her companions.  They ordered a flock of flaming meteors and took off their bright fashions and danced until their little feet sizzled with naughtiness.

And who would have guessed that on their earthbabe hunt they flitted up Sligeach disguised as snails?  And who could have known that they found a babe so undecided between life and death that they almost thought it was their own?

They returned with the wraith-boy to their wimsy kingdom.  Táin Bó Cúailnge stood on Venus and Druimm Snechta on Jupiter and Old Yellow Lecan on Pluto, and they tossed the human faster than light between themselves.  They threw him hard through galactic eclipses and he exploded the way an earthboy should.  I haven’t had so much fun in moonbeans, said Táin Bó Cúailnge.  He’s better than the dindshenchas, he screams, said Druimm Snechta.  Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui, said Old Yellow Lecan.

But when the time came that the boy started growing hair where there was once only smoothness, that his voice started clambering down the ladder of sin, Táin Bó Cúailnge said, He is becoming a man.  And they sang the Ugh Ugh Song and got to work.  They replaced his soul with Lebor Gabála Érenn, his heart with Tir na nOg, his genitals with Lebor na Nuachongbála and his brain with Oidheadh Clainne Lir.  They filled his veins with monkeypiss and gave him three extra toes as a joke.  St. William he was named, and the number 0 he was given, and he was sent back to the rational planet, escorted by Hy Many, Ballymote, and Fermoy, to make sure he didn’t escape.  He landed on June 13 1865 in the home of John and Susan, where he was fed properly and exposed to the blue and mannered order of the world.

Now I would like to ask you something, biped.  I want you to judge between the heavens and the earth.  Who could have done more to form a poet than the faeries?  Wherefore, when I look on earth for swooning sounds, does it bring forth only clunks?  I will tell you what I will do to poets who think rocks make good poems:  I’ll fill them with rocks and send them to neveretherland for pixies to dance on.  I will command the world to praise them for a second and forget them forever.  For the people of earth look for animation, but - only tedium; for inspiration, but - journalism.

St. William’s life was chaotic, his art metered.  His life was messy, his art pure.  His life looked to the future, his art the past.  His life was silly, his art serious.  His body was owned by the earth, his soul by the cackling creatures who named him.  After his mortal death on January 28 1939, a few strange wailers slunk to Sligo, singing,

Earth to earth and dust to dust

The beauty the beauty the beauty of it all.

Birth to birth and lust to lust

The beauty the booty the duty of it all.

Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

After his mortal death, the faeries died and Romance swooned before her lover cold.  Ireland grew weak and Unity divorced Fantasy and Venus was just Venus and Leda was no swan.

After his mortal death, the Council of I deliberated the question of elevation - who could elevate this saint since he never really descended? - and finally concluded on April 27 1953 that, while he couldn’t be elevated, he could be left where he was, bouncing on the soft heather of the milky heights.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

january 15 - saint wolfgang of the aphoristic werthers

It is common for saints, like others, to be bred from the union of male power and female lechery, politics and poetry.  However, in rare cases they are the product of lechery and lechery, a Sapphist extravaganza.  So it was with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt am Main to Katherine Elisabeth Textor, an older lady of the cloth, and Ulrike von Levetzow, a younger woman of the flesh.  They met for one night where words and ideas failed on a bed of blooming lemons, after which Ulrike died and Wolfgang was brought forth from his mother's right breast on August 28 1749.  After troubles at school, he received at home an exceptionally wide education. At the age of 16, he began to study law at Leipzig University.

St. Wolfgang was a curious son of chaos, who was not omniscient but knew a lot.  Deciding early to be a hammer not an anvil, he refused to know himself and erred in proportion to his striving.  He received roots and wings from Helen of Troy on his 26^th birthday and subsequently enjoyed what he could and what he had to.  In addition to a tasteful imagination, he never placed things that matter least at the mercy of things that matter most.  Shaped and fashioned by what he loved, his life was simpler than you think and more complex than you imagine.  Widely criticized, he neither protested nor defended himself, but acted in spite of his detractors, who gradually yielded to him.  Part of that Power which always wills evil and always procures good, he attained a happiness which he did not deserve and which he would not have changed with anything in life.  At the end, when he had grasped by art all that he had felt, when he was too old for mere amusement, too young to be without desire, specifically on March 22 1832 in Weimar, Ulrike von Levetzow descended from Heaven, grasped St. Wolfgang between her buttocks and took him to the Lēsvos in the sky.

A Wolfgang of all trades, he was a secular prophet and a pithy generator of wisdom; his very body was the bridge between Enlightenment and Romanticism, his spirit the chasm of modernity.  He loved more than he was loved and was more the text of a zeitgeist than the author of a text.  He paved the aphoristic way to Heaven and foretold and incarnated life's domination over art through his subjugation to the eternal Muse.

We honor the saint today for Gérard de Nerval completed his French translation of Faust on this day in 1828 and experienced his first nervous breakdown on the same day in 1841.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 20 1889.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.  

january 10 - saint thomas and the bcps

 

Agnes Hatfield was a virgin of the highest order; with both her biological and spiritual hymens intact, she longed only for the fiery phallus of God to fill her core.  She imagined God’s member as the pillar of fire which led the Israelites by night through the Egyptian desert - 8100 cubits high, with the density of a Pharaoh and a temperature that made the sun an ice cube.  One night during Complin, on her knees and filled with thoughts of God, the candle by her bedside grew in wisdom and in stature and spoke to her, saying, Agnes, get thee on thy bed and raise thy petticoats; I shall fill thee with manifold Tongues of Fire.  And Agnes, being pious, obeyed, and the night unfolded according to the candle's counsel.  The substance of her desire was Thomas Cranmer, brought into the world in great pain and peril in 1489.

St. Thomas was educated at Cambridge from the age of 14 and, in 1530, became Archdeacon of Taunton, during which tenure he had a tryst with his lifelong muse, Catherine of Aragon.  He wrote one of three texts that decided the future of a world language and for this primal contribution he suffered agony and anguish in doubts and compromises, he wavered like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed, he reluctantly sacrificed the blood of many lesser Englishmen, he was marched, deathly pale, to the stake outside Balliol College, Oxford, on a wet and blustery Saturday in March 1556.

His text reached forward to an age of English domination and vernacular democracy, reached backward to the cadences of faith, down to the roots of human imperfection, it reached up to the destroying flames of God.  Such is the spirit and substance of all holiness.  We honor the saint today for this is the day of his first conjugal relation with his muse on the windowsill of the Second Turret of the King’s Guard and the dictation of The Order for Copulation; the Council of I elevated him to sainthood on May 22 1980.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

january 7 - saint publius, mythmonger

 

Tantus Noblesse Siphilus was furious with the Viagra-Scorpios.  Spurius Gallus, the bastard son of that debauched old goose, Priapi Senecus, had deflowered Fabula, Tantus’ sister, in the slave quarters on the maiden voyage of De Politica, the Siphilus’ yacht … when he should have been fraternizing on deck to aid the impression that the two families were on speaking terms, diminishing doubt that funds should be diverted from the proposed aqueduct - providing the squalid Roman suburbs with water - to the expansion of the families’ shared bath and amphitheatre.

In return, Tantus sought to seduce Spurius’ sister, Aquila, known to be as desirable, remote and chaste as Atalanta, and whispered breezy stratagems in every orifice on her pretty face:  your breasts are like the thoughts of Aphrodite - made for exposure; your buttocks are like the Roman hills when Romulus and Remus first discovered them - designed to be plundered; your legs are like barbarians’ temples - meant to be toppled; your nest is like the home of eagles’ eggs - created for eating.  When his honeyed arsenal failed to sway her, he removed the honey, ripped away Aquila’s coverings and had her until she bled to a stupor.  He then skinned her alive, fed her tongue to cats, hacked off the limbs she had refused to give him, and left her to die in the bleak silence of her own leaking blood.

An overreaction?  Sure.  But human passion doesn’t thrive on balanced scales.  Fortunately, the gods redeem such violations when they can, and Diana, after overhearing Persepina and Mars discuss the incident, took Aquila’s rotting flesh, turned it to seed and planted it in Saturnina Ovidus Naso’s womb, which on March 20 43 BCE released its holy charge into that portion of the world known at the time as Sulmo.

St. Publius was a prince of distilled passion, who suffered intensely from the loss of his beloved city and third wife, from his banishment to edgy desolation.  He loved flesh and the social games that clothed it, power’s center and words’ hot decree.  He knew despair from betrayal, isolation, and the clash of art’s power with the power of the sword.  From these loves and agonies, he provided one of the major sources of ancient mythology and a register of the psychological gulf that opens at the end of an age.  His stories sing with suffering creation, his words ring in the bellies of us all.

In Tomi on August 13 17 CE, St. Publius was savagely attacked by a wayward Cretan bull and gored to death on the rim of the Empire, where he was transformed to two tonnes of phyllophora crispa and cast into the sea.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 23 1564; we remember St. Publius today as this was the day of Corinna’s first infidelity to him, when she, from lust, revenge and boredom, stole from their matrimonial bed to rut with a forgettable lictor by the tomb of Caecilia Metella.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

january 2 - saint battista of the holy recurso

 

Giovanni Battista Vico was born in Naples,  Italy, June 23 1668, to a rottweiler and daughter of a marriage broker.  He received his formal education at local grammar schools, from various Jesuit tutors, and at the University of Naples, from which he graduated in 1694 as Doctor of Sibyl and Cabal Law. 

While it is unnatural, even in the case of saints, for animals and humans to mate, Redicolus, Roman god of Return and Absurdity, took it upon himself - in what is known to us as the late Middle Ages, when the gods were more given to take the guise of animal form - to possess the canine of an Abraham Crijnssens and sneak upstairs above the marriage broker’s shop where the lovely daughter lay lounging en dishabille and dreaming of a tryst with Reynard the Fox in his prison cell in Maupertuis, clutching Reynard’s glossy orange fur while she rode him to a distant luscious land.  At that very moment of incarcerated pitch and glory, the rottweiller leapt into the room and onto her bed and she was overcome and gave herself over to him utterly.  Thus Saint Battista was born.

Throughout his life, he devoted himself with melancholy and irritability, such as belongs to saints of ingenuity and depth, to his recursive vision of imagination, society and science.  He was misunderstood, unknown, and lived as a stranger in the world of men.  He suffered great poverty, prolonged, intense and recurring bouts of boils and dysentery, and failed in all his worldly ambitions.  His children were mediocre and unpleasant to look at.  His wife was likewise.

We honor St. Battista because of his foundational contribution to the creation of another world and his significant impact on a wide range of great saints.  We honor St. Battista today because his illegitimate ancestor, Adeline De Walt Reynolds, famous for her role as Madame Queen Zimba in Son of Dracula, died today in 1961.  Never before, reverting as we are now to a world of false poetry, virtuality and vampirism, have St. Battista’s words been more apt and inspiring.  St. Battista was carried to Heaven on the back of a rottweiler on January 23 1744 and the Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 28 1945.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

proper of saints - preamble

 

Religion has been weary for centuries.  Sainthood has been misnamed.  Religion, once lusty for the world, virile and verdant, has gradually become one of the gray divisions of culture, with all the attendant privileges, smells and limps.  Saints, still chosen by Roman pomp and its damp English shadow, are drawn from too specialized a section of society, from a narrow sticky strip of the soul.  Sainthood has not been modified for 2000 years; it still flops in the mud of asomatous bifurcation.  The criteria for sainthood have not been discussed in any meaningful way by those who name the saints; neither have criteria evolved to coincide with the evolution of God.

Sainthood is not a hermitic solitude, a selfless suffering, a sexless martyrdom; it's where the action is - the deepest action.  And this is the problem:  this space, so deep it defies us - we, who are its substance - is not restricted to those of ecclesiastical bent, especially since those of such bent are not aligned with the world's present arc - art - but wear a particular belt of righteousness:  branded, blessed, by papal paps.  What is this deep space of purity, where saints of all descriptions dream and sometimes live - saints so heterogeneous they make the Devil look united?

No saint is pure.  The difference between the saint and the sinner is not that the latter sins and the former doesn't, even that the one sins less, but that the former dreams of purity and the sinner doesn't particularly care.  The sinner is a pragmatist, bound solely to the world of sense.

But what is purity if it is not sinlessness, and only a dream?  What does one dream of and how does it feel to dream it?  If one cannot be pure, if one cannot even dream purity since it doesn't exist, if no one knows what purity is, least of all the saints, what then does the saint inhabit?  what does she breathe?  While the saint is neither pure nor knows what purity is, this lack of knowledge is the backbone of her dream life and she envisions her waking life as a path toward this dream of dreams.  I call this path purification and the one who walks it a saint.

I accept without question that purification's element is fire and the paths of fire, while they have many starting points, all descend to the same land, the home of fire, what saints and sinners alike call Hell.  It matters little to me how literal this land is, whether it's external, physical, whether it exists in circumstances, imagination or society's cruel children.  It matters little to me whether you call the land of fire Hell, hell, something descriptive - that space in which saints are produced through fire's purification - or something faintly lexical - the name given to eternal perdition by the righteous.   What does matter is whether you believe in this space; if you do and desire to live in it more than anything else, you may be a saint.

You have heard that saintliness is renunciation, the loftiest human attitude, human creation of beauty, or turning pain to good account.  Yes, sainthood is all of these.  And who does these more than the artist?  Who renounces more than the artist, for who accepts more, and only she who is capable of great acceptance is also capable of great renunciation?  What attitude rises above all others so high it cannot help degrade them, for does not art degrade even compassion by including it, its opposite, and all other possible attitudes and values?  Who, from the bondage of the human spirit, creates more beauty than the artist in her home of the nothing of herself?  Who is so acquainted with suffering that suffering itself becomes the fuel that both threatens to engulf and effects transformation to the unimaginable goodness of the artist's longing?

The saint as defined by those purple birds, that servant of servants - isn't he in his worthiness just one color on the palette of the artist's holiness?  Isn't he just one ingredient in the artist's dreamy stew of purity?  Isn't he just one of many inputs into the artist’s global factory, an input she must understand and not just understand as an outsider but in herself … whereas she's irrelevant to the saint's mission and demise?  What I am saying is that the artist includes the saint, but the saint excludes the artist.

Yes, I’m saying to you that the artist is the saint raised by the power of desire to be not purity, but purity's incarnation - which the laws of flesh forbid to be pure.  That God today demands fleshy saints, bloody, reeking of imperfections, acquainted with his nemesis - the Devil - possessing résumés rife with amputations, and so longing for purity that their lives are nothing next to this longing.

Fire and purity can only be separated by artificial means, after which fire is comfortable, purity’s achievable.  This is the domain of those metaphysical scientists, so abundant today, who actually believe that ease and goodness are compatible.  They have succumbed to the putrid artificiality of plastic; they think it is beautiful, they would take it as their lover.

The world was created by fire and fire will end it.  We long for these two equal moments, when time and eternity mate, so much so that the priestly class of scientists sacrifice thousands of their scrawny members each year in the futile effort to claw back to the first spasm of time in their attempt to expose the universe's raw industries.  But there is only one way to travel to creation, to experience firsthand the fire that destroys and enlivens, to realize the knowledge that this fire can equally create nothing, something or anything, and that the observer of this knowledge, this strange time traveler, is but a venal puppet in fire's overwhelming purity.  The one so situated, who observes and knows she is nothing but a speck of ash in the great primal heat of creation, is the saint … the saint who is the artist.

A more prosaic comparison exists.  In the Middle Ages, when priests were more common than trees and indulgence was the intercourse of spires and squires, the saint in his thousand and one disguises was the aspiration of the commoner.  Almost everybody, if not a saint, was at least a monk or nun or had a relative who was one.  So today, when artists are more common than telephone poles and indulgence is intercourse, the artist in her thousand and one disguises is the commoner's inspiration.  Almost everyone's an artist or wants to be, but like the saints of old, where few were of any worth, few artists today are worthy of the name they claim.  An artist must be a saint before she is an artist.  She must long for purity and this longing must be prior to her art, the material from which her art is made.  Art emerges from the wound that opens between the dream of purity and the consciousness of its impossibility - the greater the wound, the greater the potential for art; this is why purity must be retained - without it, art diminishes.  Artists are the guardians of this dream and the explorers and tongues of this wound.

How can a classical saint be saintly?  He cheats.  He lives off the suffering of others; he doesn't travel to Hell himself, but lives vicariously from the travels of sinners.  He attends their travelogues and murmurs exorcisms.  He is a piranha, a leech, a bloodsucker, in love with demonry but unable to consummate his love.  But the artist lives in Hell herself; she descends daily, daily lifting herself out; this continuous descent and ascent is her purification - authentic, potent, a totality of opposites and so a mirror of the terrible holiness of God.

The new saint fulfills God by futilely attempting to become Him.  This is the saint’s worship and rebellion, her challenge, her stake in the spiritual heart of the cosmos, which is nothing other than her own dark and reeking heart.

I, thus, to evolve with God and please Him, to please the dead, who are the arteries of God, to inform the yet-to-be, who require instruction in the ways of fire, to maintain the dialogue among the spirits of Hell, to uphold purity as the only object of desire, I revise, and by my revision transform, the record of the saints placed into time's incarceration, what has been in the record of the Church known as the Proper of Saints.

I recommend that interested readers continue to refer to that older document for historical and archaeological purposes, but that they refer to mine for the present and the future.

An issue of nomenclature arises.  Is it proper, considering the evolutionary movement I have described, to retain the ecclesiastical name in full, or is it more appropriate to revise it along with the content and call it the Proper of Artists?  This has the merit of retaining the traditional liturgical meaning in the first noun and updating sainthood according to our necessity in the second.  But then, would it not be better to make the revision full, acknowledge the impropriety of our aesthetic rebellion, this rebellion that is more conformance than rejection, and call our calendar the Improper of Artists?  This turns the original title on its head, accentuates our new position, one required by the progress of humanity, and boldly cuts the tie with anachronistic Roman circumstance.  Yet, as we push this further through the intestines of thought, the question arises whether it would be most apt to entitle our noble arrogance the Improper of Saints, thus clearly upholding the artist as the new saint while recognizing the efficient novelty of our action.  However, almost as soon as this new title surges through our brain, a new one arises, one that is not new but old, yet is made new by imbuing the old words with new meaning.  Yes - new wine in old foreskins, which I fill and leave to age … and age … into the new age of artists, this age of saints.

Therefore, I title my calendar the Proper of Saints.  I recommend it to all who would be edified by the accounts of those who have taken the path of purity into the deepest regions of Hell, who have survived the Devil’s deadly lechery, who have renounced all by accepting all, who love the world by despising it and despise it by loving it, who create beauty for our redemption, who do not shy from suffering but turn it to good account, these men and women who lead us forward into the dark spaces of righteousness … these artists, these saints.

  

Note on Selection

The saints in this Proper have been chosen by the Council of I.  The workings of the Council have been explored elsewhere and its process of selection outlined in the Bavarian Code.  The saints from literature significantly outnumber the saints from music, the visual arts, dance, film and architecture.  Literature extends over 2500 years to Homer, as a named individual phenomenon, whereas the other categories (except for film, which is still in its infancy) can claim only about 20% of literature's time.  It may be true that literature is giving way to film on purity's path, but the millennia-old jewel still retains its supreme qualities and precedence.  Sainthood began with the word, and writers have labored longest in Hell’s darkest pits to mine flecks of holiness from deep within God's guts.  Thus we honor them not more than others, but we do honor more of them.

All this aside, the Council's standards, while necessarily shadowy, are incomplete, arbitrary and biased. We ourselves grossly dispute the list.