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Saturday January 19th 2019Tim
Candler9
Heavy rain,
followed by snow, followed by some kind of an
invasion by Polar Air, a vortex or something,
temperatures falling toward lows difficult to maintain
in the forecourt of an elderly mind which sometimes has
nightmares about cold weather, and for the currently
very fortunate all of it is perfect weather for N Scale,
more precisely Bridge Building. At the same time if the
electric fails your modeler may well wax considerably
less Christian as he devolves into Devil worship,
Satanic rituals and the whole panoply of the demonic
approach to meaning. There are eight critical new
bridges. They are in your face bridges, they are not
shy, they are definitely "look at me" bridges and it
would be failure of character should I suddenly decide
to do little more than stick a couple of decorative
accents on them, then hide them with greenery or
whatever. And at the same time eight bridges issued from
my own greed for track, wide curves and multiple
locomotives, an empire of train that threatened to
relocate a Carmelite monastery that resulted in the
curse of a brick making purgatory laid upon me by the
Superior of Saint Teresa's Barefoot Carmelites coming
true. One route out of this mess is to give all the
bridges Saints names, not as easy as it sounds, there's
months of research, possibly a little re-interpretation
of the often misleading texts but at least the matter of
where to start is usually solved by laying out
parameters and this time there will be rigid discipline,
none of this drifting off, getting side-tracked, boxed
into a corner by a tasty morsel, such as the suggestion
by modern scholars that Saint Teresa's visions were a
consequence of hallucinogens from a mold that can
develop in certain kinds of bread.
Past
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Down deep
inside me I always knew it was more likely an error to
play fast and loose with my own timeframe for the
Medieval Period as a well spring for idea within the
County of Saint Barbara. And by no stretch of a fevered
imagination can Teresa be considered a Medieval Saint.
She was a product of the reformations that hit Europe in
16th Century and in my own understanding, there'll be
vicious debates of course, the Medieval Period began
with the retreat of the Roman Legions and had easily
ended by the 11th Century. In the Medieval Period it was
friends and peers that decided who was worthy of
Sainthood, none of this Devil's Advocate from Rome
turning up and asking silly questions like whether or
not causing the earth to open up and swallow an unwanted
suitor, or causing lightning to strike a really horrible
person was something the Lord looked for in his earthly
spokespeople. Entirely possible in a county named after
the Saint Barbara of lightning strikes and causing there
to be windows in a prison tower despite the express
wishes of her father, she's the patron saint of
artillery for goodness sake, could possibly get along
with a non-medieval saint who chose not to wear shoes as
a statement of her determination to remain a pure
mendicant. The other thing to keep in mind is that Saint
Benoit, the Patron Saint of Bridges was actually buried
in a bridge he built over the Avignon River, typically
enough he wasn't a Medieval Saint, far from it, and it
was because of his suspect branding activities, stuff
like healing the lame, straightening up humpbacks, his
work with the blind and so on, that the wealthy decided
to fund his bridge building ambitions in the course of
their own desperate search for an alternative path
through the eye of a needle.
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