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I'm in love with a 800-year-old woman named Heloise. Some of you may know her as the female half of the Middle Ages' most notorious love affair. For those who don't, here's the story:

Born about 1079 AD, Peter Abelard was the most brilliant philosopher of his time. He had a huge following of students, and an ego to match. He alienated his teachers from his constant badgering and challenging of them, but survived because his brilliance attracted followers to his own classes at various locations, including the cathedral school of Notre Dame.

By 1116, he was so successful and so full of himself that he decided it was time to take a mistress. He lasered in on one of the most talented and beautiful women in France: Heloise, woman of letters and niece to a colleague. Her uncle had two weaknesses, according to Peter Abelard: his love of his niece and his love of money. So when Peter asked to rent a room in Heloise's house and tutor her, the uncle enthusiastically agreed. Till then Peter had a (well-earned) reputation for sober living, which eased his entry into the family trust. Peter mocks the uncle for this trust, noting that his uncle, in fact, urged Peter to "beat her" as necessary to help her learn her lessons. Peter describes the situation in his famous Calamities of Peter Abelard:

"What more do I need to say? First we were joined in one house, then in one heart. Under the pretext of study, we had all our time free for love, and in our classroom all the seclusion love could want. [. . .] To avert suspicion, there were some beatings, yes, but the hand that struck the blows belonged to love, not anger, to pleasure, not rage---and they surpassed the sweetness of any perfume. We left no stage of love untried in our passion, and if love could find something novel or strange, we tried that too. New at the game, we went at it with heat, and it never grew old for us."

Holy cow. (And kudos to William Levitan for the translation from Abelard's original Latin text.) But you will note that Abelard's memoir is called the Calamities, and with reason. His preoccupation with Heloise was so extreme that he couldn't concentrate on philosophy, his students all found out about the affair, and soon the uncle did too, catching them in flagrante. Abelard spirited the now-pregnant Heloise off to his sister's house, where she gave birth to their son, Astralabe (which apparently was as strange a name then as it is now). To assuage the uncle, Abelard proposed marrying Heloise, which Heloise fiercely resisted, as at that time, as during the classical era, marriage and domesticity were thought to be incompatible with philosophy, with Socrates and his shrewish wife Xanthippe the exception that proves the rule. Abelard could be a husband, but not a philosopher as well. They compromised: They wed in secret, to make Heloise an honest woman, but with the proviso that the uncle would keep the marriage secret.

But as the saying goes, a secret between two is safe if one of them is dead, and the uncle couldn't resist talking about the marriage. Once Abelard realized this, he sent Heloise off to the convent at Argenteuil (where she took the veil "freely, at my command"), apparently to make it clear that they were not an "active" couple and that he could continue in his role of (celibate) philosophy teacher. The uncle saw this as a rejection of the marriage, and committed the most famous act of vengeance in all of medieval history: he bribed a servant, hired some thugs, and had them sneak into Abelard's house at night and castrate him.

The trauma of this event is easy to imagine. His students were outraged, he himself was mortified, and he left Paris to enter the monastery of St. Denis. Abelard remained a monk the rest of his life, but found it impossible to get along with others. He eventually founded his own retreat in the Champagne region called The Paraclete, though he often left for other assignments. Heloise, an intelligent and noble woman herself, became abbess of her convent and eventually moved her nuns to The Paraclete as well. Abelard died in 1142 while staying at the monastery at Cluny, and Heloise died 1164 and was buried next to Abelard at The Paraclete.

Knowledge of their stories comes to us from Abelard's own Calamities but also through the seven surviving letters that Abelard and Heloise wrote to each other through the years of their religious life. Abelard's letters are, to put it simply, rather monk-like. Robbed of his capacity for physical passion, he lives the life of the mind and spirit, and he comes to see the castration of the least of his calamities (others being the persecutions he endures at the hands of various jealous rivals and the murder attempts he survives as abbot of a particularly "barbarian" and unruly country monastery). He finds a kind of "grace" in his state; once gone, his libido no longer afflicts him and is simply no longer of interest.

But Heloise . . . Heloise is a different story. She enters the convent under duress in her late twenties. And she is absolutely, passionately, head-over-heels in love with Abelard. In a time period in which women's sexuality was seen either as a menace or as simply nonexistent, Heloise lives in the memory of their affair and refuses to renounce it. Where Abelard is impersonal, she is personal. Where Abelard is appropriate, she is direct. Where he wants to forget the past, she throws it in his face. Let's start with this:

"You know, my dearest, all the world knows, how much I have lost in you, how that supreme, that notorious betrayal robbed me of my very self when it robbed me of you, and how incomparably worse than the loss itself is the pain from the way it happened. [. . .] As you alone are the source of my grief, you alone can grant the grace of consolation. You alone have the power to make me sad, to make me happy, or to console me [. . .] I threw myself away at your command. And the greater irony is that my love then turned to such insanity that the one thing it desired above all else was the one thing it put irrevocably beyond its reach."

And:

"I never wanted anything in you but you alone, nothing of what you have but you yourself, never a marriage, never a dowry, never any pleasure, any purpose of my own---as you well know---but only yours. The name of wife may have the advantages of sanctity and safety, but to me the sweeter name will always be lover or, if your dignity can bear it, concubine or whore."

Keep in mind, please, that this is the renowned abbess of a convent writing:

"I can expect no reward from God since it is clear I have done nothing out of love for him. I followed you as you went striding off to God and to his monastery."

And what does Abelard write back?

"I hope all of this [the dangers he faces at the barbarian monastery] will call you to your prayers---you and your sisters of the convent---with greater confidence that God will keep me alive [. . .] the prayers of so many, so devout---these I know will easily prevail. God loves the abstinence and self-restraint you all have consecrated to him."

With Abelard it is always "you and the sisters" and "you all," rarely "you," rarely "Heloise." His letters are all admonition, all scripture and generic encouragement. She wants something from him that he cannot give because he no longer has it: passion, emotion, remembrance. She eggs him on, even accusing God for the injustice of allowing Abelard's castration at a time when their affair had ended:

"And every law of justice was reversed to spite us further. When we were still pursuing the joys of love and---to use an ugly but a more expressive phrase---abandoning ourselves to fornication, God spared us his hard judgment. But when we took steps to correct what we had done [by marrying, and then living apart] [. . .] the Lord raised up an angry hand against us and struck our now-chaste bed when he had winked at our unchaste bed for so long before."

She is unrepentant for their affair, defending, implicitly, her own sexuality:

"There is no penance I could undergo that can appease God [. . .] since I charge him forever with the savagery of that act and, forever unreconciled to his will, offend him more with my outrage than I can soothe him with any fitting penance. How can it be called repentance of sins, whatever affliction the body undergoes, if the mind retains the will to sin and seethes with its old desires? [. . .] For me, the pleasures we shared in love were sweet, so sweet they cannot displease me now, and rarely are they ever out of mind. Wherever I turn, they are there before my eyes with all their old desires. I see their images even in my sleep. During Holy Mass itself, when prayer should be its purest, unholy fantasies of pleasure so enslave my wretched soul that my devotion is to them and not my prayers."

Abelard addresses his responding letter simply "To the bride of Christ, from his servant." He segues immediately into biblical exegesis and only briefly alludes to their relationship and Heloise's continued outpouring of pain and passion:

"I come now to the last remaining point---what I called your old, continual complaint, in which you dare lay charges against God for how we came to the religious life when in justice you out to glorify his name. [. . .] To please me the most [. . .] you will put this bitterness aside. You cannot please me with it or attain the state of blessedness at my side."

True enough. She cannot attain from him what she wants. He goes on to write, among other things, a Rule for convents, making special provision for the needs and "weaknesses" of women. Rule number one: isolation. No men, few visitors, even conversations between the overseeing abbot and the convent's abbess must be short and to the point---no conversation allowed. Even among the nuns, talk is dangerous:

"We should discipline the tongue with complete silence at least at certain times and in certain places: at prayer, at meals, in the hours after compline, in the kitchen, the dormitory, the refectory, and the cloister. There, if it is necessary, you should use signs in place of words."

I find this to be one of the saddest things I've ever read. He conceives of a silence, a world of emptiness, for these women that's pitiful. Like a writer of utopias, these rules are fantasies of his mind, which perhaps if he saw in place, he would judge to be as cruel as they actually are. He's never lived such a life. Even at the barbarian monastery, when he's forced to live outside the monastery walls because his monks keep trying to kill him . . . even there he is surrounded by his students and followers who wait on him.

Abelard isn't cruel, just unable to understand what he's asking and unable to connect with the passion that still animates Heloise. They still share a love, though, including a love for philosophy, and Heloise's ideas about the centrality of intention over action in moral matters becomes a cornerstone of his thought. Heloise's philosophy comes out of her head but also her life, as she lives every day the conflict between outer repentance and inner rebellion. I love her refusal to renounce her sexuality, to renounce in general; it reminds me of Dylan Thomas: "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." It may be in vain, but Heloise goes out swinging.
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For all you bibliophiles out there, courtesy of (or a sarcastic "thanks to") Susan Pigman:

New York Times' Review of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die"

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I don't know if any of you regularly watch House, the medical drama/comedy starring Hugh Laurie, but last night was the wrap-up of a certain storyline that I thought was one of the best hours of television I've seen. It was great on many levels, not the least of which was that I cried copiously through the last five minutes of the show.

I did think to myself, as I went off to bed, What the hell? Why am I crying and feeling all enriched by this show? Maybe 50% of it is just that it's a way of experiencing life that you wouldn't otherwise experience---a potent dose of vicarious experience, like dreams. Maybe part of it is that you remember your own experiences more vividly. As one character cried at the end of the episode, he had tears actually dripping off his face, and that reminded me of the worst time in my life, when I would write in my journal and tears would drip off my face onto the journal pages. So it reconnected me to my own experience.

Beyond all the reasoned arguments for needing art is also this: that we keep wanting it, keep creating it. Enormous amounts of time and money are spent making art and consuming it, whether it's a billboard, a novel, a tv ad, or a movie. We want art, punto final. Though sometimes I do think I should click off the remote and go take a walk instead.
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It's Monday, I just got back from walking Rocky, and I'm ready to sit down and watch last Friday's episode of Battlestar Galactica. We missed the episode because we were out seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the romantic comedy starring Jason Segel, Kristin Bell, and Mila Kunis. Wonderful movie. Really funny, very sweet, and it studiously avoids all the rom-com cliches, which is refreshing. Plus there was a good amount of male nudity and almost no female nudity---also refreshing!

Here are some of the rom-com cliches the Jason-Segel-penned script avoids:

* No one is bad; every character is reasonable and has a legitimate side of the story. Irrationality is kept to a minimum.

* When the hero and his ex-girlfriend get briefly involved again, it's for understandable reasons, not because they are, I don't know, practicing a part in a play, which is totally innocent but looks bad.

* When the hero and his ex-girlfriend get briefly involved again, the new girlfriend finds out because the hero immediately tells her, not because she bursts in on them unexpectedly, looks horrified, and runs away with letting anyone explain.

The plot is conventional, but the quality of the movie is in those details that are handled just a little bit better than in most. And the editor deserves a nomination for his work; the comic timing is fantastic---a function of the editing as well as the actors.
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I have to tout this book. It's a novel by an agoraphobic Scotswoman who did all her research on 19th-century Canada at the British Library. One of the reviewers said it touched on all sorts of genres (mystery, romance) without succumbing to the weaknesses of any. I haven't loved a novel this much for a long time.
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Some of you may have heard of this book by Thomas Frank, which details how the red states, by voting Republican, actually vote against their own interests (e.g., they vote against tax hikes, but they receive a net influx of tax benefits, and the resulting deficits and interests harm them more than the upper classes). I like this passage:

"Like a French Revolution in reverse---one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy---the backlash [against perceived liberalist elitism] pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, farther to the right. It may never bring prayer back to the schools, but it has rescued all manner of right-wing economic nostrums from history's dustbin. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century."
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Someone made this transposition on a washingtonpost.com chat today, and I just find it adorable.
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I made homemade cheese yesterday. It's queso blanco, which has to be the easiest cheese in the world to make. You need exactly two ingredients, and both common items:


QUESO BLANCO (from Home Cheese Making)

1 gallon whole milk (pasteurized, but not ultra-pasteurized)
1/4 c vinegar (author and I used apple cider vinegar)

1. Heat the milk to 190 degrees F. Stir occasionally and don't let it boil.

2. Add the vinegar, small amounts at a time, stirring.

3. Remove from heat, and let sit until the curds (solids) separate from the whey (liquid). This took about 10-15 minutes.

4. Carefully ladle out the curds into a colander and let them drain.

At this point, the instructions say to wrap the curds in butter muslin and hang over a bowl, so that more whey can drip out. But when I did that, my cheese was too dry. I recommend just letting them drip in a colander for about 10 minutes. At this point you can add salt and herbs if you like (the cheese is pretty bland). Because my cheese was too dry and crumbly, I added a little milk to make it spreadable.

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I love the look of these new "green" townhouses in the old Clipper Mill neighborhood in Baltimore:

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I've dug out some old CDs this week, albums that are actually excellent but forgotten (and not well known to begin with). Here are some cuts to look up on iTunes if you're in the mood:

PFR: The Late Great PFR (Christian rock band with 80s-pop tinges):
-- Pour Me Out
-- Spinnin' Round: the kind of song the term "infectious" was made for)
-- Goldie's Last Day: a kind of miracle---a song about the death of a pet that is tender but not sentimental and even humorous

Jars of Clay: The Eleventh Hour (Christian rock band you may know from their hit "Flood"):
-- Fly: amazing song about death
-- Something Beautiful: a prayer for internal redemption
-- Revolution: hard-driving song about true revolution---not slogans, t-shirts, or violence but a radical commitment to feed the hungry, shelter the poor

The Elms: Truth, Soul, Rock and Roll (um, yes . . . Christian rock band; mostly secular lyrics):
-- Let Love In
-- Go Toward the Glow
-- The First Day

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Report from Dayton

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We just got back from a weekend in Dayton, where we watched my wonderful nephew Keith graduate from college. Highlights of the trip: staying in a chain hotel (I'm not kidding---I love staying in hotels!), watching Keith jump and click his heels after getting his diploma, eating Dorothy Lane Market brownies, seeing Iron Man, and much more. Keith told us about his favorite newspaper quote ever. It was from a woman who said: "I love the Dollar Store. I don't have to dress up like I do at Wal-Mart." Hee!

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