March Madness
Without contradiction the Barry Family itself lays no claim to the notorious Barry Coat of Arms.
That distinction belongs to another group entirely which has — confusingly and somewhat arbitrarily to the Barry way of thinking — the same name.
Just this sort of confusion was predictable; was predicted in point of fact, by progenitor Barrys during the whole long harried controversy of the Naming.
The Barry Family had long been unnamed. It was a selective and serious unnaming, a public posture, that they might be called things, many things, by all the others, but did not name themselves. It was a relict thing, this posture, taken in the forgotten days before the bogs, even, but it was their posture and they had held to it all that time until Ireland. What a profound thing it was, that change, and what a profound and lengthy time they had of arguing it.
It was given to the Barry Family that naming was a religious act, the central act of the human ceremony, in which and by which object and symbology received their mutual blessing. Self-naming was a reserved act, acute and private, yet sympathies turned to doing just that, to naming themselves both anyway and publicly when they got there to Ireland.
During the entire engrossing crisis of it letters were exchanged, of course, and though the materials were primitive, and do not survive, the gist of them is recalled, as they expand readily from their famous slogans in three directions.
The slogan "No We Say," is broadly applied to a class of letters, their authors and adherents ranged in opposition to the plan of Naming. Overall this group might be described as traditionalists, if not doing something in and of itself constitutes a tradition, which in the given instance might be the case. The letters and those represented by them are commonly catalogued according to spleen, spanning the spectrum from those curt missives which tended overall to the mildest breif no, to the fomidably voluminous expressions of opposition to which the Barry Family was more habitually inclined.
Counterpoised against "No We Say" in a rough triangle of sympathies were two other herds of thought and their defining slogans.
"Tell Me What to Say" was vertex C, let us say, in this triangle, and represented those growing numbers of them who had a Christian bent. The slogan was nothing if not scurrilous to their belief, of course, suggested by their opponents in a cutting reference to the slur known to all as offered by Nonnos against their Christ.
It will take longer to describe the slur than it did to raise the ire of their number on its pronouncement.
Nonnos is a bad writer: thus Nonnos with his customary inelegance may have blundered his simple way across the wordspace and into the cruel phrasing by mischance, a salient feature of his style being the serpentine circling of the point to be made without actually just going on ahead and saying it which afflicts his writing throughout.
He could not have said simply, it most likely never occurred to him to say simply, "Crucified, He then suffered."
No. Rather, he has it that Christ in his agony turns to no one in particular and says, "Tell Me what to say . . ." before his voice trails of forever.
Exactly how profoundly heretical is this nonce of Nonnos?
Very, very profoundly heretical indeed, whatever Nonnos' talentless intent, was the finding of that herd.
"Tell me what to say," indeed!
Oh, the insult rankled, and was meant to, yes. Like all their kind they were called Pigfondler and worse in public; the custom was to receive a name, after all, not to make one. They had been named insultingly before. It wasn't that. "Tell Me what to Say" cut somehow closer to the quick than the standard they expected of the garrulous and willful meanspiritedness of their neighbors.
A profound effort was made by them to soften the slur, offering up an exegesis of the phrase in which "Tell Me what I Say . . ." (for so they had it) encompasses Christ's main new commandment: that, having taken up the Word of God, the communicant is —urged? implored? advised? enjoined? — to tell it back.
For who, inhabiting the place of one of those few gathered in witness of His duress, would not, even given the fact that they were not being directly addressed, that in awful truth no one in particular was being addressed, would not, out of whatever meager store of compassion was their share, hearing those sad last words, respond by offering back to him something of what He'd said?
"Blessed are the meek . . .?" you might say, for example, to see if it had some palliative effect.
In the event, Christ dies, and the opportunity to inhabit such a scene is removed forever from the human scheme, leading to a magnificent nostalgia for the lost and holy chance.
Exasperating juncture for the Barry Family, everything they talked about turning back and round to Him the way it did. This tendency thwarted the discursive aims of speaking freely warranted by the matter at hand in the firm view. The thing would not be done and the argument over Naming conclude without their attention, but inevitably a formidable sidetrack of exchange erupted just beside the point among Christians who offered up the exegesis just mentioned and those who found Nonnos heretical from the go, and wouldn't countenance the use or mention of his words in the least, even should its use achieve such gloriously self-serving result as the exegetes had made of it.
Settling this and moving on took quite some time, exacerbated by the prankish group of them, "Peekers Behind the Veil," who sought to discredit the exegetes by flauting the restriction against examining Nonnos' words directly and after doing so reporting that the quote was in point of fact, "Tell Me What To Say . . ." instead. The exegetes responded by direct refutation of the argument, denying that "to" replaces "I" in the formulation, although a telling number of them quickly began to prepare a second exegesis based on that substitution just in case.
March 17, 2004
Proud of Patrick is the Barry Family.
Happily we are led to believe here at HCE that Patrick championed the same prohibitive view of snakes as held by the Barrys since before the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family itself.
Remove the snakes? Renounce them? Oh, ay, say the Barrys, who've said so with consistency and not a little fervor whenever the subject arose all down the many millennia.
Patrick himself renounced the snakes in the firm utter way consistent with the tenor of his comments on most subjects, it would seem, given the record, which is admittedly incomplete or, to paraphrase the somewhat sterner judgements of others on the subject, a complete and thoroughgoing fabrication.
In principle the Barry Family is by no means averse to adopting the pleasant fabrications of others, although it does reserve at all times the right to pick and choose.
We find here at HCE, regarding the snakes at any rate, that Patrick's consequential opprobrium, grounded in what we have no reason to doubt was the firm moral clarity of his mission, dovetails nicely with the more pragmatic of bogpractices anciently known to the Barry Family.
March 16, 2004
Proud of Patrick is the Barry Family.
Famously, the agnatic relation of the Barry Family in the period before Nest (the Helen of Wales, sure foremother of the Barrys) is at best a matter of speculation. From one perspective, advanced to this day in Barry Family conversation, Patrick may as well be related to the Barrys as anyone else, being member of as likely a line drawn back from those many fruitful entanglements of Nest as any other that might be seriously proposed.
March 12–15, 2004
The current Barry Family point of view, given by the standard image to the left of these written words, involves inevitably a perspective taking into account the foregrounding redwood coast of California where the Barry Family is now found. That coast is displayed in the image as a bounding line running roughly left to right against the blue of the Pacific Ocean just below it.
The top of the image is taken up in equally dark sky suggestively circumscribing what's seen between the line of the coast, foregrounded to the bottom of the image with its slice of sea below, and that soft blue line of the atmosphere itself which rounds the distant horizon of the planet under view.
The standard Barry Family view is influenced heavily and admittedly by the historically westward inclination of its entirely gradual kind, as it is influenced heavily and avowedly by the influential currents of warm contentious conversation carried on continuously by Barry kind since the founding era of Discovery of the Barry Family itself, each of which inclinations had their arguably consequential role in the Barry Family's eventually decisive move to California.
The current standard view of the Barry Family replaces of course the previous standard view of the Barry Family, adhered to all those many years in Ireland which, unsurprisingly given the Barry Family situation at the time, featured much more prominently the Blackwater river of Lismore and its soggier surrounds than is presently considered necessary.
March 11, 2004
Chattering, finches come to the tulip tree here at HCE.
The tulip tree in the front paddock commonly blossoms around the time of the famous Super Bowl, although this year the blossoming held off a month, due in large measure we suppose to the uncharacteristically damp gray weeks blanketing the western shore beside us here at HCE all during those advisedly festive days leading up to the annual contest.
The tulip tree needs the clemency of the average late January on the western shore, when the sky clears wonderfully and the temperature drifts lazily up to 70°F each cloudless windless day of it. Even nearby San Francisco, harbor of most miserable weathers, commonly has its share of just such January days, an interruptive dry two weeks or so of it bounded on both sides by much wetter days.
A fair period of the year, in which the marvelous midwinter blooming of the tulip tree properly takes place, though this year late in coming, interdicted by the previously indicated torments of wet weather in these parts.
Finally in March the weather turned to its accustomed pleasantries, encouraging the tulip tree to attend to pleasantries of its own, as pictured.
This year's climactic struggle, dramatic as it may have been, will be remembered by many as a Super Bowl for reasons more fully focused on the grandious intervention of the famously brazen woman's breast which so galvanized public conversation in the days following its revelation in what proved by general consensus to be an overly celebratory episode of entertainment staged during an adjournement in the renowned contest's activities, rather than for whatever transpired on the playing field, the details of which have by now escaped even those of us who follow the sport at all here at HCE.
March 10, 2004
In the back paddock to the southeast corner of the unruly small patch of turf surrounding us here at HCE stands a shed, product of what we have always granted was a nice civilizing effort on the part of some prior owner.
A shed, despite lacking the required number of walls to meet the the overall Barry Family standard in a home, has often enough met the standard of their given needs. In the Barry Family estimate, as stored in the knowldeges of boglore, it is good to have a shed, at least. Oh, granted there may somewhere be a place so enchantingly endowed as to require no need for even the primarily suggestive shelter of a shed, but as such climes were never directly relevant to the Barry Family discourse, given conditions over time, they were safely ignored. A shed, at least, as shown is the minimum standard of Barrys at this time.
The degree of bounty surrounding us here at HCE is such that owning a shed is mere afterthought in the appointments of our habitation, as can be seen by its condition at the far end of this photograph of the back paddock.
Nevertheless, the shed, backup plan of a building in extremis, is firmly claimed for the human domain here. Note the absence of any pig whatsoever in the shed, the sure exclusionary principle of the Barry Family definition of a home quite evidently applied in this instant.
Housed in the shed instead are odd remnant bricks, blocks, boards, leftover liquids of questionable chemistry in their original containers, tools of rusting metal and softening wood, under the declivity of a slumped roof in the sequestering shade of the southeast corner of the paddock.
There is the potential for, if no indication of, human intervention there among those tools and things in pursuit of some aim around the yard, perhaps.
On the shed roof, a small elevated bog grows, its grassy verge there visible in the enlarged view of the above.
March 9, 2004
The Unordered List of Standards of the Barry Family, admitted basis of many of our own views here at HCE, has as its symbolic representation the famous iconography of book, (½)yardstick, machine and fire, as in this recently retouched photograph.
The book in this case is our standard in a dictionary here at HCE, Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary Deluxe Second Edition (Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp. gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie ©1983 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.).
The ½–yardstick is of course the famously constant Chinese half-yard of wood mentioned below in the Bogblog long since taken to be 18 inches worth here at HCE, giving over the other half of the yard to whoever cares to share the measure.
The complex machinery of the nut and bolt stands here for all machineries of any complexity at all.
Fire, pragmatically referenced by the somewhat ill-lit representation of a small lighter to the right of the book visible on closer inspection here, is a standard adopted by progenitors of the Barry Family in that vast immemorial time before the Discovery of the Barry Family itself. The pre-existence of the standard of fire was among the earliest and canniest of the discoveries of that era, great good its continuance did susbsequently, in the main.
March 1–8 2004
Staff Retreat (cont.)
Bogsniffings:
(Should our business plan here at HCE go not too far awry, this portal to the previous year's Bogsniffings will someday be attended by the necessary machineries of commerce, erected to collect the agreeable sum on the looker's entering there. Something much like the estimable Paypal system, perhaps. At present, the Bogblog is freely entered to whatever depth the looker may choose to reach. Use the Volume control to select the desired annum.
Collected incompletions of the current year, by monthname.
A year's worth of freely sniffable Bog in one compact spot!
One click away, the very top of the Bog to you.
