Autumn Sensations

Wading through Sunlight
Ripples across the road
Smiles dance upon the horizon
Humming busily

I see the greyness
Outbid by colourful delight
Leaves leap to their deaths
In an ecstatic moment

I hear the wind whistle
As it rushes on to fresh wonder
Tickling the toes
And unseating careful hairs

I smell the seasons
Turning and changing
New fading to old
To become once again anew

I feel shivers gather round my ankles
Coats drawn closer
Scarves playing windy tug of war
Chills creeping like incy wincy spider

I don't taste anything because that would be weird.
I'm not about to be licking leaves
What if a dog has urinated on it
Or some nasty ass man has trunched over it with his nasty ass boots?

Notes on The Croxton Play of the Sacrament

• Late Medieval play
• Only host miracle play to survive in English
• anti-Semitism, sacramental theology, and violence and special effects in the theatre
• farcical comedy laden with slapstick violence
• Written in middle english
• tells the story of a miracle in which a rich Jewish merchant and his companions purchase the consecrated host from a Christian merchant and subject it to a series of tests in order to determine the truth of the Christian claim that Christ is present in it, then are converted
•  In each performance of the Eucharist,christ's body is present, infinitely reproducible and real, fully corporeal and multiply so
• the whole of the body inheres in each bite and priestly sip
• Christ's body is the wafer and the whole world
• Christ's body is purely relational, pure space

• transubstantiation as socially normative, a major criterion of orthodoxy and therefore compulsory
• duality and paradox
• Ms. F. E. Barnes wrote: "It is a cosmopolitan product -- this Croxton play -- drawing freely from the history, lore, and literature of the Middle Ages."
• it survives only in a sixteenth-century manuscript
• Some scholars think it came from Bury St Edmunds in the 1480s
•  tropes on that most overdetermined cluster in late Medieval England -- Jews and the corpus
• Didatic - teaches that the sacrament is fabby fantastic
• anti-Lollard propaganda
• have long been regarded by critics as referents to Lollards or to doubters more generally, not to Jews
• David Mills play is more of an 'affirmation than explanation'
• Anne Holms 'reflection of fifteenth century Eucharistic piety'
• Declamatory tone of prelude (115 lines)
• hortarory tone of Episcopus (20 lines)
• false healing scene (127 lines)
• narrative development in two nealry indentical (length wise) parts
• the play creates a temporal mode in which the Jews re-enact the Passion in the present, just as the Mass is a re-enactment of the Crucifixion with both existing in a kind of “eternal present,” a temporality central to the Mass and also to related late-medieval English devotional practices
• reates a conception of the Jew as perpetual murderer, guilty not only of crucifying Christ in the historical past, but in the present, and until the Parousia in the future
• jews always plotting against Christ and Christendom
• 
  

Sources: 

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jmems/summary/v033/33.2lawton.html

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/41153343?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102924330037

The Thread of Life by Christina Rossetti

The irresponsive silence of the land,
The irresponsive silence of the sea,
 Speak both one message of one sense to me:-
 Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof, so stand
 Thou too aloof bound with a flawless band
 Of inner solitude; we bind not thee;
 But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?
 What heart shall touch thy heart? What hand thy hand?-
 And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,
 And sometimes I remember days of old
 When fellowship seemed not so far to seek
 And all the world and I seemed much less cold,
 And at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,
 And hope felt strong and life itself not weak.

 Christina Rossetti