corpho

I'm not kidding, as I read the heading of the article, I thought the Pope was outlawing the dance where you go under the bamboo pole and shit. I felt silly when I read the part about babies and heaven.


I chose to post this from this morning's The Irish Independent because Ireland is, of course, a very Catholic country. My husband is Irish, but he always says he's a "lapsed Catholic". After I read this article I asked him, "What's the difference between limbo and purgatory?" He said limbo is strictly where unbaptized babies' souls go, but purgatory has nothing to do with heaven like limbo does. I said, "Okay, I always thought purgatory was like being in limbo." Hence the clich of the psychic or medium being able to communicate with the spirits of those who are caught between earthly body/denial state and heaven/acceptance spheres. But my husband said no, that purgatory was like.... And I said, "Hell's waiting room?" He said yes. So, limbo for babies, purgatory for people on their way to hell. Then my husband said, "James Joyce said that the difference between purgatory and heaven is infinitesimally small." I said, "Small? That's surprising. So what Joyce was saying is that--" "Is that the difference between the suffering one experiences in purgatory and the suffering one experiences in hell is negligible. They suck equally."

I love the perverse, almost orgiastic descriptions of hell and damnation that Catholicism provides. A particular example that comes to mind is in Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," a semi-autobiographical novel(la). I can't be sure without referring to a copy, but there must be at least four whole pages dedicated to a very long, very detailed description of hell by a Jesuit priest. It's hilarious. He describes the stench that is worse than an infinitude of stenches pervading every pore of one's being until the point of madness, but it's perpetual madness so there's no escaping it. And the darkness, and the heat -- my God the heat! -- and the pain, and the terror, and the agony, and on and on it goes. It's a hoot!




Unrelated but worth mentioning (at least in my opinion, and it is my journal) is the video my lapsed-Catholic-Irish husband made. You may have read my expostulations on a band he's in, Spielerfrau. They made a Super 8 video for one of my favorite songs of theirs, Alt. I was super impressed by the outcome, considering the camera is from the 70's and has a busted light meter. They worked really hard on it and it has a goood narrative, so be little sweeties and check out this YouTube.