A little bit on the name of my blog (until I pull myself together enough to write about some of the things on my mind):
"I call what I have written The Anathemata. (The dictionary puts the accent on the third syllable in contradistinction to 'anathemas'.)
It came to have this title in the following way: I knew that in antiquity the Greek word anathema (spelt with an epsilon) meant (firstly) something holy but that in the N. T. it is restricted to the opposite sense. While this duality exactly fitted my requirements, the English word 'anathemas', because referring only to that opposite sense, was of no use to me. I recalled, however, that there was the other English plural, 'anathemata', meaning devoted things, and used by some English writers down the centuries, thus preserving in our language the ancient and beneficient meaning; for 'anathemata' cames from anathema spelt with an eta, of which the epsilon from is a variant.
...Subsequent to deciding upon this title, I noted that in a reference to St. John Chrysostom it was said that he described the word as 'things...laid up from other things'. And again that in Homer it refers only to delightful things and to ornaments. And further, that it is a word having certain affinities with agalma, meaning what is glorious, and so used of statue, image, figure. (Hence our word figure-stone, agalmatolite, called also pagodite because the sacred images or pagodas of Asia are carved in it.) And again in the gospel, after narrating the incident of the widow's mite, St. Luke speaks of the onlookers who admired the 'goodly stones and gifts' that embellished the temple and he uses the word 'anathemata' of those gifts. And in the middle of the last century, an author, commenting on ancient votive offerings--figurines of animals--writes of 'such anathemata being offered by the poor.'
So I mean by my title as much as it can be made to mean, or can evoke or suggest, however obliquely: the blessed things that have taken on what is cursed and the profane things that somehow are redeemed: the delights and also the 'ornaments', both in the primary sense of gear and paraphernalia and in the sense of what simply adorns; the donated and votive things, the things dedicated after whatever fashion, the things in some sense made separate, being 'laid up from other things'; things, or some aspect of them, that partake of the extra-utile and of the gratuitous; things that are the signs of something other, together with those signs that not only have the nature of a sign, but are themselves, under some mode, what they signify. Things set up, lifted up, or in whatever manner made over to the gods."
-- David Jones, The Anathemata (this excerpt is from the Preface)
So, I was reading the preface to The Anathemata and found the etymology of the word 'anathemata' fascinating. I don't intend, in naming my blog Anathemata, everything that David Jones intended in calling his book The Anathemata. But I do want to draw from the etymology found in the preface to his book a vague notion of the meaning of the word: those things set apart, signs, devoted things. And those are the things that I want to talk about in my blog. My idea of such anathemata will probably be different than other people's and it includes music, religion, food, and family (among other things). This post might very well not make any sense at all--I have some articulation issues, but take from it what you will.
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