Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

First, I just want to express my deep affection for elephants.  Back in the day, in the summers during college to be precise, I had a job doing food service at the zoo back home in Portland (popcorn, snow cones, hot dogs, ice cream, etc), which just happens to have the largest herd of Asian elephants in captivity.  We would occasionally get to go behind the scenes of the animal exhibits and twice I went to the elephant house.  Once, we were there on a tour and they had one of the bulls in an enormous squeeze cage.  He saw us, starting swinging his trunk at us, and sprayed us with his snot.  Another time, we got to see a new baby that had been born overnight: he was surprisingly hairy.  I spent one summer by the elephant house at a cart that sold "elephant ears," big slabs of deep fat fried dough topped with butter and either cinnamon sugar or raspberry jam (or both, on either half, we would fold that in half and eat it as a sandwich for lunch). ...

So here it is, the opening image for the article I'm currently revising and, more immediately, a talk I'm working on for a symposium two weeks from today.  It's an ivory Virgin and Child statuette and the museum (our own CMA) says its 13th century Mosan.  It looks much more monumental here than in reality: it's only a few inches tall and I can image that it would have fit easily into an owner's hands.  It would have been an intimate object, then, and encountering it now in the museum is rather frustrating since its sealed away in a glass case.  I have a couple of other, older, images from the museum that help me imagine handling it up close, turning it in my hands (they also show the crown that it is now obviously missing and an additional base). Visually, my major interest in this image - and others like it - is in the Virgin's clothing and how it shapes the relationship between her and the child.  From the front, we see her man...

This is one of my favorite faces in Romanesque sculpture (specifically from Saint-Pierre at Aulnay, its a capital on the west front).  I like its puffy roundness and the way that seems to soften the stone.  I like how the shapes of the mouth and tongue are repeated by the eyes sockets and eyeballs.  I like how the mouth collapses inwards, even as the tongue, ears, tendrils (hair?), and forehead stretch out in different directions.  I've chosen it for my first post here because of the combinations it creates: soft and hard, mouth and eyes, in and out.  Because my purpose here is to join those things for myself.  I plan to pick an image and write about it for a while, so joining eyes and mouth in the sense of seeing and speaking - or in this case writing.  But a different kind of writing than my normal academic prose: something softer and more clearly connected to my insides.  I'll be letting those insides come out - even if the result is a bi...