Journal articles on the topic 'Asile Saint-Jean de Dieu'

L’Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu a été, au tournant du xxe siècle, le plus grand asile au Canada et par surcroît une référence reconnue internationalement pour l’expertise thérapeutique de ses propriétaires et de ses aliénistes. Le dépouillement de plus de 8 000 dossiers médicaux de cette institution psychiatrique a permis de mettre au jour une précieuse correspondance entre les membres de la famille (requérants) des patients et les surintendants médicaux au sujet des congés d’essai. Ces sources de première main révèlent les allées et venues des patients entre l’hôpital et le foyer familial. Elles dévoilent également les appréhensions du futur imputables au retour définitif du patient. Cette étude sur l’histoire culturelle des sensibilités explore les dimensions privée et intime, sous l’angle du « risque », concernant l’anticipation d’un quelconque malheur générée par la réintégration en milieu familial d’un idiot, d’un aliéné incurable ou d’un dément sénile. Un intérêt particulier est porté sur les discours autour de « l’événement-non-encore-survenu », qui motive les requérants à refuser la mise en liberté définitive de leur malade interné à l’hôpital psychiatrique.

L’art de prendre soin des aliénés se développe et se confirme à l’Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu après qu’une école de gardes-malades y voit le jour en 1912. Créée par les Soeurs de la Providence, cette nouvelle école participe à la transformation de l’asile en véritable hôpital. Les archives des Soeurs de la Providence et la revue mensuelle La garde-malade canadienne-française permettent d’analyser le discours de l’élite infirmière, basé sur l’importance d’une formation professionnelle. Les découvertes scientifiques et les nouvelles techniques sont au coeur de la démarche de soins à Saint-Jean-de-Dieu où les étudiantes sont exposées à un enseignement technique, mais également spirituel. Cet article rend compte dans un premier temps du statut marginal de la formation en nursing psychiatrique, alors que prend forme le mouvement de professionnalisation des infirmières. Dans un deuxième temps, il décrit le contexte socioreligieux dans lequel évolue, de 1912 à 1962, l’École des gardes-malades de l’Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.

L’Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, propriété de lacommunauté religieuse des Soeurs de la Providence, retientparticulièrement l’attention lors de la révolutionpsychiatrique québécoise et de la RéformeBédard en 1962. Le rapport déposé par cetteimportante commission d’étude des hôpitauxpsychiatriques soulève d’entrée de jeu la situationcritique d’encombrement et de sous-financement indubitablementconnue des autorités gouvernementales, puisqu’àmaintes reprises évoquée au fil des décennies parles soeurs supérieures et les surintendants médicaux deSaint-Jean-de-Dieu. Cet article étudiera l’institution psychiatriquequébécoise entre 1901 et 1962 selon deuxthématiques : l’« argent » etla « charité ». Il évaluera lescontributions de l’État à l’entretien despatients psychiatriques et réfléchira sur les actes decharité, plus précisément sur le travail nonrémunéré des Soeurs de la Providence. Des regardscroisés entre ledit Rapport Bédard et le mémoiredu Comité médical de l’HôpitalSaint-Jean-de-Dieu permettent de mieux nuancer les proposrécurrents dans l’historiographie àl’égard des défauts de l’hôpitalpsychiatrique ainsi que des critiques sévères àl’endroit des Soeurs de la Providence.

Au cœur de cette étude des mentalités, l'auteure examine les sentiments partagés entre les femmes internées pour folie à l'hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu pendant la période 1873-1921 et les membres de leur famille. S'il est question d'attachement, d'espoir et d'assistance à l'égard des femmes internées, c'est bien parce que la récurrence de telles manifestations attentionnées repérées dans les dossiers médicaux de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu a surpris l'auteure. Ces lettres, principalement rédigées par un ou une membre de la famille de l'aliénée, se sont avérées suffisamment nombreuses pour reconnaître qu'effectivement la famille garde contact avec sa malade pendant l'internement et pour repérer les principales préoccupations de l'époux, de la mère ou des enfants à l'égard de leur malade, confinée derrière les murs de pierre de l'asile.

Résumé Mallarmé se démarque des écrivains qui traitent le thème d’Hérodiade en faisant de Jean-le-Baptiste la figure centrale d’une oeuvre inachevée, où le « Cantique de saint Jean » devient le Symbole de son esthétique. Les fragments d’Hérodiade, fruits d’une longue gestation, sont le théâtre où s’affrontent drame religieux et drame poétique dans une quête spirituelle qui voit triompher le génie poétique. Ce dernier éclôt avec l’effacement du poète. Subsiste une religion sans Dieu, qui participe à l’avènement d’une poésie conçue comme reconstitution.

Au renouvellement de leur deuxième contrat avec le gouvernement du Québec en 1924, les Soeurs de la Providence, propriétaires de l’Asile Saint-Jean-de-Dieu depuis 1873, s’engagent, pour les cinquante années suivantes, à nourrir, entretenir, traiter et réhabiliter les malades mentaux. S’ensuivent, dans les années 1940 et 1950 des relations interpersonnelles et interprofessionnelles difficiles entre les soeurs et un groupe de jeunes psychiatres, dits modernistes. Le climat proprement thérapeutique s’envenime au profit d’intérêts politiques au sein même de l’institution. Ces tensions sont explicitement révélées en 1962 lors du dépôt du rapport Bédard sur la Commission d’étude des hôpitaux psychiatriques au Québec. Les tensions entre religieuses et psychiatres, depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale jusqu’aux années 1970, longtemps évacuées du discours historique n’ont pas permis, jusqu’ici, d’en révéler tous les aspects ou conséquences liés aux soins et au devenir des psychiatrisés. Nous entendons, dans cet article, mettre en lumière cette bataille mémorielle à propos du statut religieux de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.

Dans le présent article nous souhaiterions présenter le rôle du père à l’ap­pui de l’enseignement de Saint Jean Chrysostome. L’évêque de Constantinople se consentre particulièrement sur le sujet des tâches principales du père au sein de la famille. Pater familias occupe d’après le Saint Jean un rôle principal dans l’éducation. D’après Jean Chrysostome l’éducation reste entièrement dans les compéten­ces du père. L’évêque souligne en particulier l’importance de l’éducation des en­fants. Le père est leur maître et il prend la responsabilité pour l’avenir des enfants. C’est le père même qui doit préparer l’âme de l’enfant pour que ce dernier puisse accuillir le Dieu. D’après le Saint Jean Chrysostome, pater familias est également responsable de former chez l’enfant des certaines vertus chrétiennes de bases, telles que : courage, sagesse et pureté. Le rôle le plus important dans le processus de l’éducation repose sur l’obligation de présenter un bon exemple aux yeux des enfants. Cette obligation reste dans les compétences du père, celle de la mère ainsi que celle de tous ce qui participent dans l’éducation de l’esprit et de coeurs enfantins.

En proclamant Saint Benoit, patron de l’Europe en 1964, Paul VI rappelait l’enseignement du Pere des moines, par la force de son exemple et l’actualite de sa feconde devise: Prie et travaille. Le papę Jean-Paul II, qui a beaucoup ecrit sur Saint Benoit (La Lettre Apostolique Sanctorum Altrix; les discours et les homélies), nous rappelle ses titres: messager de paix, artisan d’union, maitre de la civilisation et avant tout, héros de la religion du Christ et fondateur de la vie monastique en Occident. Dans l’enseignement de Jean-Paul II, saint Benoit a fait lever sur notre continent ,,l’aurore d’une ere nouvelle”. II a merite aussi d’etre reconnu par Paul VI et Jean-Paul II, „patron principal de toute l’Europe. II convient de rappeler que l’Abbé Benoit enseigna aux hommes, la primaute du culte divin avec VOpus Dei, c’est-a-dire la priere liturgique et assidue. C’est ainsi qu’il cimenta cette unitę spirituelle de l’Europe, grace a laquelle les peuples de langues, de races et de cultures diverses prirent conscience de constituer l’insigne peuple de Dieu.

A FEW REFLEXIONS ON THE FRIENDSHIP IN BECKET OR THE HONOUR OF GOD BY JEAN ANOUILHThe above work is a conjecture on a new interpretation of the complicated friendship between Henry II, King of England, and Thomas Becket, saint martyr, as characters in Jean Anouilh’s play Becket or The Honour of God. They have little in common, and it seems that everything divides them. An analysis of this opus is used as a starting point to a general reflection on the influence of external factors such as social status and political framework, as well as internal factors such as personality traits, value system, and propriety on particular stages of friendship. The analysis is also an attempt at defining the concept of friendship presented in the play.

Au cours des dernières années, nous avons dépouillé un grand nombre de dossiers psychiatriques conservés par le Service des archives de l’Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal (IUSMM). L’article ici proposé s’intéresse en particulier au documentAssemblée des médecinsdu 12 février 1959, retrouvé dans les dossiers de six enfants illégitimes admis à l’Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu à la fin des années 1950. Inspirés des travaux de Roy Porter et de l’approchefrom below, nous cherchons à intégrer dans le discours historique la parole des sans-voix, plus précisément, dans le cas présent, celle d’une bande de jeunes délinquants marqués par d’impressionnants parcours transinstitutionnels.

Les multiples catastrophes de la fin du Moyen Âge — perte des États latins d’Orient (chute de Tripoli en 1288 puis de Saint-Jean d’Acre en 1291), guerre de Cent Ans (1337-1453), Grand Schisme d’Occident (1378-1417), etc. —, entrainent un important courant eschatologique, nourri d’écrits prophétiques divers circulant dans tout l’espace de la Chrétienté. Le Bas Moyen Âge est en effet « un temps d’attente », pour reprendre l’expression d’Heinz Zahrnt, professeur de théologie à Hambourg (Zahrnt 1970 : 13), un temps simultanément marqué par la mélancolie et le sentiment d’un recommencement imminent, un temps donc où les hommes ont soif de la parole de Dieu.

Abstract During a three-day period in June 1908, 250,000 people attended a series of elaborate celebrations in Quebec City in honour of Mgr François de Laval, the first bishop of Quebec, upon the bicentenary of his death. A monument to Laval was unveiled on the middle day, in between the two most important summer festivals of the French-Canadian calendar. The Fête-Dieu (Corpus Christi) celebrations preceded the unveiling, while the Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste followed. In planning the festivities, particular care was devoted to organising processions through the streets of Quebec City. These two processions, the former organised by clerics and the latter by laymen, sent somewhat contradictory messages to both spectators and participants. Nevertheless, they formed part of a collective effort by clerical and lay leaders to claim the streets of Quebec, in the process asserting their power at a time when French-Catholic society was being challenged from various quarters.

L’enquête de l’auteure dans les archives de l’hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu lui a permis de découvrir, dans les dossiers médicaux des femmes mariées, des documents relatifs aux demandes d’internement rédigées par leur époux et leur médecin de famille. Ces traces du discours masculin révèlent les difficultés et les problèmes familiaux occasionnés par l’impossibilité de contrôler les comportements insanes de l’aliénée, épouse et mère de famille, avant son admission asilaire. Loin de faire de cette analyse de genre un plaidoyer fondé sur une croyance populaire, selon laquelle les femmes internées pour aliénation mentale n’étaient pas folles ou abandonnées par leur mari, l’auteure veut plutôt illustrer les perceptions et les interprétations des hommes concernant la folie des femmes mariées, interprétations incontestablement influencées par l’idéologie victorienne.

At first glance, the protagonist of the play has none of the characteristics of a vagabond. However, subjected to a more thorough analysis, he proves to be endowed with many features typical of a wanderer, such as alienation, unrest, loneliness, social isolation and individualism. In the text he is described as a man who is « in the search for himself, » his exile is, first and foremost, a metaphysical search for his own « self » and for the meaning of life. He is also a character undergoing a metamorphosis – from a lecher he becomes a saint. The shift seems to come as a consequence of being an exile from his own country. This exile, however, in its literal dimension, becomes too heavy a burden for him, and, be rid of the burden, he chooses to die a martyr. This article presents the evolution of the personality and the shift in the social standing of the character, as well as the reasons for, and consequence of, his exile.

L’analyse de la nature et de la structure de la prière dans le traité De oratione d’Origène (vers 234), présentée dans cet article, démontre que cette oeuvre peut être considérée comme une synthèse de théorie de la prière, mais qu’elle n’est pas une conception définitive et précise de celle-ci. En suivant fidèlement l’enseignement de saint Paul (1Tm 2, 1), Origène distingue quatre genres de prière: supplication, action de grâce, imploration du pardon et louange; mais en même temps il est convaincu qu’en pratique ils ne doivent être séparés, car ils forment un act intégrale de la prière. Par exemple, l’imploration du pardon pour lui ne peut constituer à elle seule une prière autonome, mais doit être une condition nécessaire de préparation à chaque prière. De même, Origène considère l’adoration de Dieu comme un élément indispensable de chaque prière. La conception d’Origène a été reprise en Occident au Ve siècle par Jean Cassien et elle est devenue une base pour le développement postérieur de la théologie de la prière.

Dans le cadre du financement d’un Programme hospitalier de recherche infirmière et paramédicale, une recherche infirmière multicentrique (CH Saint-Jean de Dieu, CH Le Vinatier) est engagée en conjuguant psychoéducation et remédiation cognitive. L’utilisation de la remédiation cognitive chez des sujets souffrant de schizophrénie a fait l’objet de nombreuses études contrôlées attestant de son efficacité dans le domaine cognitif. La psychoéducation du patient commence à être appliquée en pratique chez les patients souffrant de troubles mentaux avec des résultats probants. L’étude se déroule sur trois ans, avec un recrutement de 80 patients répondant au diagnostic de schizophrénie randomisés en deux groupes appariés. Un premier groupe de 40 patients bénéficiera d’une prise en charge groupale de psychoéducation (TIPP conçu par le Dr Philippe Conus), puis d’une prise en charge individuelle de remédiation cognitive (RECOS conçu par Pascal Vianin). Le groupe contrôle de 40 patients bénéficiera d’une prise en charge individuelle de remédiation cognitive. Ce groupe bénéficiera, hors étude, d’une prise en charge groupale de psychoéducation. Les deux groupes seront comparés sur l’évolution de leurs performances pré- et post-prise en charge à l’aide d’une batterie neuropsychologique, d’une échelle d’insight et d’une échelle mesurant la qualité de vie. Cette évaluation sera renouvelée 6 mois après la fin du programme. Nous faisons l’hypothèse d’une potentialisation de l’efficacité de la remédiation cognitive par la psychoéducation placée en amont. Les bénéfices attendus seront une amélioration des fonctions neurocognitives, de l’insight et de la qualité de vie.

(francuski) La proximit? de la seconde tombe de saint Nicolas, saint du Christ le plus v?n?r? et ?v?que de Myre, dont les reliques ont ?t? translat?es a Bari en 1087, a fortement influe sur l?ampleur des donations adress?es a ce saint a partir de la fin du XIIe si?cle, tout d?abord par le fondateur de la dynastie serbe, grand joupan Etienne Nemanja, puis par ses successeurs sur le tr?ne de Serbie. Ainsi, vers 1290, la reine Helene et ses fils Etienne et Uros a envoy? a Bari une icone avec rev?tement sur laquelle ?taient repr?sentes, au registre sup?rieur, un buste du saint et, au registre inferieur, les donateurs avec inscriptions en latin. Une icone des ap?tres Pierre et Paul d?un aspect semblable et tout aussi ancienne, offrande des m?mes donateurs, est aujourd?hui conserv?e au Vatican. Puis le roi Etienne Uros II Milutin a fait parvenir a Bari une grande quantit? d?argent ayant servi a la confection, vers 1319/20, d?un autel avec ciborium, d?un grand p?la d?autel, de dix-huit lampes, de deux grands chandeliers et d?un encensoir. L?intrados du ciborium ?tait orne d?un ciel ?toile avec repr?sentations de Dieu le P?re et des quatre ?vang?listes, alors que les plaques d?argent habillant l?autel ?taient rehauss?es de figures de saints en bas-relief. Le p?la ?tait quand a lui domine par une figure monumentale de saint Nicolas entoure des sc?nes de sa vie, de ses miracles et de repr?sentations du Christ, de la Vierge et d?autres saints. Enfin, les lampes et l?encensoir offraient une d?coration en ?maux cloisonnes constitu?e de repr?sentations de saint Nicolas, d?aigles bic?phales, des Grandes F?tes ainsi que d?un portrait du donateur et de son blason. La r?alisation de ces objets a ?t? supervis?e par Obrad, fils de Desislava, de Cattaro, et assur?e par le premier maitre Roger et le maitre Roberto qui ?tait de Barletta. Les ?l?ments de l?autel de Milutin sont restes en place jusqu?en 1682. Vers la fin de 1325 le roi Etienne III Uros a fait don pour la tombe du saint d?une grande icone sur laquelle saint Nicolas ?tait repr?sente, quasiment grandeur nature, alors qu?apparaissent a droite et a gauche des ses jambes les portraits du donateur et de son jeune fils et cosouverain Du{an. Avant d??tre envoy?e a Bari cette icone a ?t? repeinte et a re?u un rev?tement en argent dore qui portait ?galement une inscription ou figurait le nom du donateur alors qu?y a ?t? joint, lors de l?exp?dition, une grande ?toffe dor?e avec broderie dor?e. Par la suite cette image a ?t? consid?r?e comme un portrait authentique de l??v?que de Myre. Par sa charte du mois d?avril 1346 l?empereur Etienne Dusan a attribue une rente annuelle de deux cents hyperp?res aux chanoines de la basilique pour l'achat de cire et la mention de ses anc?tres et de sa famille lors des pri?res. Bien que cet acte ait ?t? par la suite confirme par son fils, l'empereur Uros, les Ragusains, qui devaient proc?der au versement de cette rente annuelle, ne s'y sont jamais conformes. Entre 1346/47 et 1353, le c?sar Gregoire Golubic a adresse a la basilique Saint-Nicolas deux lampes et un encensoir en argent orne d??maux cloisonnes avec repr?sentations d?anges, d?aigles bic?phales et d?animaux fantastiques, une mitre orn?e de 1007 perles sur le fond en soie de laquelle ?taient repr?sentes en broderie d?argent et d?or le Christ, la Vierge, saint Jean-Baptiste, saint Nicolas et d?autres saints accompagnes des armes du c?sar, une ?tole en soie sur lequel ont de m?me ?t? brod?es a l?aide de fils d?or et d?argent les repr?sentations de 13 saints, ainsi qu?un manipule du m?me mat?riau sur lequel ?taient brodes l?arme du c?sar et des animaux fantastiques. De toutes les offrandes mentionn?es ne sont plus aujourd?hui conserv?es dans le tr?sor de la basilique de Bari que la grande icone d?Etienne III Uros et la charte de Dusan.

(francuski) Dans l'?glise de Ravanica les faces frontales des deux pilastres flanquant l'abside centrale et marquant la limite de la proth?se, respectivement du diaconicon, accueillent deux personnages v?t?rotestamentaires, chacun s?par? de la sc?ne de la Communion des ap?tres par la figure d'un archipr?tre. Sur le pilastre nord se tient Melchis?dek, et sur celui situ? au sud, un homme aux cheveux courts et ? la barbe arrondie, v?tu d'un chiton et d'un hymation, qui tient en mains un objet de forme ronde orn? d'une repr?sentation en buste de la Vierge ? l'Enfant, et ? c?t? duquel subsistent les traces d'une inscription (fig. 1)Selon l'Ancien Testament et l'Ep?tre aux H?breux, le juste Melchis?dek ?tait le sacrificateur du Dieu Tr?s-Haut et sup?rieur aux sacrificateurs l?vitiques. C'est lui qui offre en sacrifice le pain et le vin, et plus tard le Christ lui-m?me est devenu "sacrificateur pour toujours, selon l'ordre de Melchis?dek". Sur le pilastre sud, les restes d'inscription o? l'on reconna?t le d?but d'un nom montre que le personnage ici repr?sent? pourrait ?tre le juste Betsaleel qui est mentionn? ? plusieurs reprises dans l'Exode en tant que fils d'Uri de la tribu de Juda etque Dieu a choisi en lui accordant la sagesse, l'intelligence et le savoir pour toutes sortes d'ouvrages afin qu'il p?t construire l'Arche du t?moignage.Ce personnage biblique n'est pas c?l?br? par le Calendrier de l'Eglise constan-tinopolitaine et, pour autant qu'on le sache, n'est repr?sent? que dans quatre manuscrits: la Sacra parallela (Paris gr. 923), du IX?me si?cle; le psaultier n? 61 du monast?re athonite du Pantocrator, du IX?me si?cle; l'ochtateuque de la Biblioth?que du Vatican gr. 747, du Xl?me si?cle; et l'ochtateuque d'Istanbul Seraglio cod. 8, du Xll?me si?cle, o? il appara?t figur? de diff?rentes fa?ons. Dans le manuscrit la Sacra parallela il a les traits d'un vieillard, dans le psaultier d'un homme d'?ge moyen ? la barbe arrondie et aux cheveux longs, alors que dans les ochtateuques il porte les cheveux courts, lisses et drus, avec la raie sur le c?t?. De toute ?vidence, les peintres avaient toute libert? lors de la repr?sentation de ce juste, et il importe donc, en premier lieu, de rechercher les raisons de la pr?sence ici de ce saint si rarement figur?. En tant que constructeur du Tabernacle, sa place dans le sanctuaire d'une ?glise est tout ? fait justifi?e, puisque on rencontre aussi des repr?sentations du Tabernacle dans le narthex, et plus souvent encore dans l'espace du sanctuaire. Dans ce second espace la pr?sence du Tabernacle est notamment justifi?e par les diff?rents niveaux de sa symbolique puisque les plus anciennes interpr?tations et commentaires le per?oivent comme une pr?figuration du Tabernacle c?leste, comme le sanctuaire dans lequel le Christ se sacrifie et proc?de au sacrifice, puis il est ?galement devenu le symbole de la Vierge, alors que plus tard sont apparues des interpr?tations qui l'ont rattach? au contexte liturgique. Betsaleel n'a pas fait l'objet d'une attention particuli?re de la part de la science et l'on ne peut qu'indiquer la direction dans laquelle est all?e la pens?e th?ologique ? son sujet. A en juger par une observation sommaire des textes, et nonobstant, son ?vocation par les textes philosophiques pr?coces, il n'est que tr?s rarement mentionn? (Philon d'Alexandrie, premi?re moiti? du 1er si?cle, Orig?ne, vers 185-254, Cyrille de J?rusalem, vers 315-386, Basile le Grand, vers 330-379, Th?odoret de Cyr, vers 393 vers 458, Cosmas Indicopleust?s, milieu du Vl?me si?cle). Tous ces ?crits le montrent comme un mod?le d'artisan auquel Dieu, conform?ment au texte biblique de l'Exode, a donn? la sagesse, l'intelligence, le savoir pour toutes sortes d'ouvrages et qu'il a d?sign? pour ?tre le constructeur du Tabernacle, en soulignant toujours le fait que Dieu est celui dont viennent toutes ces vertus. Dans toutes ces interpr?tations il reste dans l'ombre de Dieu en tant que Cr?ateur supr?me. De m?me, Betsaleel est rarement mentionn? dans les autres sources ?crites et, lorsque cela est le cas, il y est d'ordinaire pr?sent? comme un constructeur, comme un mod?le pour les b?tisseurs d'?glises qui sont compar?s ? lui (Eus?be de C?sar?e, vers 260-339; l'hymne syriaque "Sogitha" consacr? ? la sanctification de l'?glise Sainte-Sophie ? Edesse apr?s sa reconstruction en 553/554; la Vie de saint Sim?on le Stylite le Jeune (?592) du diacre St?phane; la pri?re prononc?e par le patriarche lors de la cons?cration de l'?glise et de la sainte table, d'apr?s le plus ancien euchologion enti?rement conserv? de l'?glise Sainte-Sophie de Constantinople, Barb. gr. 336, milieu du VHI?me si?cle; la comm?moraison de la tr?s pieuse imp?ratrice Ir?ne, femmede Jean Comn?ne (1118-1143), dans le Synaxaire de l'Eglise constantinopolitaine; l'inscription m?trique de fondation de l'?glise saint-Nicolas pr?s du village de Place dans la p?ninsule de Mani au sud du P?lopon?se, de 1337/38). A Ravanica Betsaleel ne porte pas le mod?le du tabernacle, mais un objet de forme ronde orn? d'un buste de la Vierge ? l'Enfant (semblable ? l'image de la sainte table dans le sanctuaire de la Chapelle de Mo?se au Sina?). Betsaleel ?tant lou? comme le constructeur du Tabernacle et les cantiques eccl?siastiques c?l?brant la M?re de Dieu comme ?tant elle-m?me le Tabernacle; son image, tenant le Christ dans ses bras, sur l'objet que porte Betsaleel s'en trouve tout ? fait justifi?e, comme sur de nombreuses repr?sentations de la Tente d'assignation o? elle appara?t en m?daillon sur le voile recouvrant l'autel et sur les objets pos?s sur celui-ci. On doit se demander pourquoi le choix du d?corateur s'est ici port? pr?cis?ment sur Melchis?dek et Betsaleel. Le premier, en tant que sacrificateur v?t?rotesta-mentaire sur le mod?le duquel le Christ est lui-m?me devenu sacrificateur, avait d?j? ?t? figur? dans les sanctuaires des premi?res ?glises chr?tiennes, alors que l'image de Betsaleel, pour autant que nous sachions, constitue un exemple unique. Melchis?dek se tient ? proximit? de la partie septentrionale, et c?leste, de la composition de la Communion des ap?tres, o? la communion par le pain est donn?e par un ange-pr?tre, alors que Betsaleel, au sud, c?toie la partie terrestre, montrant un pr?tre, debout dans le sanctuaire, qui tend un calice. Le constructeur du Tabernacle se trouve ainsi ? c?t? d'un l'?v?nement qui se d?roule dans l'?glise, alors que le pr?tre v?t?rotestamentaire se tient ? c?t? de l'?glise c?leste et spirituelle. L'existence d'un fort lien avec la liturgie est ?galement confirm?e par les deux ?v?ques qui se tiennent aux c?t?s de ces justes et les d?signent de la main droite (fig. 2). Leurs inscriptions ont ?t? d?truites, mais leurs tenues, diff?rentes des tenues habituelles d'?v?ques, autorisent ? reconna?tre en eux les premiers ?v?ques de J?rusalem auxquels la haute dignit? d'archi-pr?tre a ?t? transmise, d'apr?s la tradition, par le Christ en personne. En observant les donn?es provenant de la Bible, les ?crits des P?res de l'Eglise et certaines mentions relatives aux constructeurs d'?glises, il est donc possible de supposer que ce juste repr?sent? ? Ravanica est Betsaleel, le constructeur v?t?rotestamentaire du Tabernacle. L'?troit lien le rattachant ? la liturgie justifie pleinement sa pr?sence dans l'espace du sanctuaire. L'hypoth?se ici avanc?e est ?galement confirm?e par l'existence de rapports avec la figure du juste Melchis?dek et celles des premiers ?v?ques de l'Eglise de Sion, ainsi qu'avec la repr?sentation, unique par son iconographique, de la Communion dans l'abside. .

(francuski) En raison de sa grande ?rudition, de son talent litt?raire, mais aussi de son caract?re, Michel Psellos est assur?ment un des auteurs byzantins les plus probl?matiques lorsqu'il s'agit de l'interpr?tation et de la compr?hension de ses oeuvres. Le recours ? l'allusion, surtout dans ses ?crits politiques, r?v?le chez un auteur imbu de son savoir le besoin de jouer avec la signification ?officielle?, claire et compr?hensible de tous de ses textes, et une seconde plus profonde en recourant ? des images ?sot?riques, absconses ou difficilement compr?hensibles. Il en est ainsi s'agissant de l'emploi de l'?pith?te tropaiophoros (tropaioph?roz) que Michel Psellos utilise de fa?on sp?cifique, en jouant avec sa signification principale et concr?te. 1. L'emploi du qualificatif tropaiophoros (tropaioph?roz) chez Psellos 1.1. L'?loge ? Constantin Monomaque (Psellus, Orationes, Oratio 2) L'?loge ? Constantin Monomaque r?dig? par Psellos au d?but m?me du r?gne de cet empereur (avril-mai 1043) est caract?ristique lorsqu'il s'agit de l'utilisation du terme tropaiophoros par Psellos. C?l?brant la victoire de l'empereur sur l'usurpateur Georges Maniak?s, Michel Psellos a r?ussi par l'habile emploi de cette ?pith?te ronflante ? qui ? cette ?poque ?tait avant tout utilis?e pour d?signer la fondation de Constantin Monomaque, Saint-Georges Tropaiophoros ? Manganes ? d'exprimer, par le biais de l'ironie, son opinion critique vis-?-vis du nouvel empereur. Proc?dant ? un rappel de l'histoire de Byzance depuis la mort de Jean Tzimisk?s (976) jusqu'? la r?daction de son ?loge, Michel Psellos utilise ? trois reprises l'?pith?te tropaiophoros : 1) associ?e ? Michel IV le Paphlagonien : ...le tropaio- phoros c?leste (immacul?) retourne ? son seigneur, c.-?-d. ? Dieu (ka? tropaioph?roz ana?maktoz pr?z t?n o?ke?on desp?t?n ch?rei ?e??????? x^pei) ; 2) ? Constantin Monomaque : ...et avant le sceptre tu ?tais empereur tropaiophoros (ka? pr? t?n sk?ptr?n basile?z ?stha tropaioph?roz ??o??a????o?) ; 3) et ? l'usurpateur d?fait qui s'?tait dress? contre cet empereur, Georges Maniak?s (symb?llei t? t?z d?se?z strat?g?, nik?, tropaioph?roz ?p?neisi, sobar?teroz t? e?tych?mati g?netai?). Son habile r?partition du terme tropaiophoros dans trois passages ?galement ?loign?s les uns des autres, respectivement dans le premier, deuxi?me et troisi?me tiers de la partie historique de son oratio, met tout particuli?rement en exergue l'importance de ce qualificatif. En tant qu'id?e, la notion de tropaiophoros est sous-jacente ? tout le cours narratif de cet ?loge, constituant d'une certaine fa?on le fondement sur lequel l'orateur a construit et ?labor? son r?cit. Le choix des personnages auxquels Psellos associe l'?pith?te tropaiophoros et les diverses nuances qu'elle rev?t avec chacun d'eux, renforcent l'impression d'un emploi intentionnel d'un terme inhabituel, visant par l? ? transmettre un message politique. Tout d'abord, l'?pith?te tropaiophoros est utilis?e exclusivement pour des personnages contemporains dont le nouvel empereur Constantin Monomaque qu'un lien particulier rattache aux deux autres ? ces deux derniers ayant ?t?, en quelque sorte, l'un comme l'autre ses adversaires, et tous deux l'ayant, du moins provisoirement, d?fait. Autrement dit, seuls les rivaux de Monomaque sont, tout comme lui, qualifi?s de tropaiophoros, alors que ni Basile II, ni Romain Argyre, auquel Psellos dresse des louanges particuli?res dans le cadre de cet ?loge, n'ont re?u cette ?pith?te. Le fait que Michel Psellos ait renonc? par la suite ? utiliser l'?pith?te tropaiophoros dans ses ?loges post?rieurs de Constantin Monomaque et n'ait renou? pleinement avec son emploi qu'apr?s le r?gne de cet empereur, lorsque le temps ?coul? avait ?t? toute actualit? politique ? ce terme, atteste peut-?tre une dose redoubl?e de prudence (voire de crainte?) de la part de cet ?rudit qui redoutait que ne soient d?crypt?es ses allusions et critiques politiques d?guis?es sous formes d'?loges. 1.2. La Chronographie et autres oeuvres de Psellos Le choix m?me des personnages s'?tant vu attribuer l'?pith?te de tropaiophoros dans la Chronographie est d?j? significatif par lui-m?me (Bardas Phocas, Constantin Monomaque, Isaac Comn?ne, Romain Diog?ne et Andronic Doukas, fils du c?sar Jean Doukas), mais Psellos a ?galement exprim? ses positions vis ? vis de ceux-ci ? travers les nuances introduite dans l'emploi de cette ?pith?te avec chacun d'entre eux. Passant de l'ironie non dissimul?e (dans le cas de Romain Diog?ne) ? la moquerie d?guis?e (Andronic Doukas), Psellos joue avec la signification premi?re de l'?pith?te tropaiophoros et ce d'une fa?on qui n'est pas pleinement apparue ? des ?rudits tels que Nic?phore Bryennios et Anne Comn?ne lesquels, proc?dant ? la copie des donn?es fourmes par Psellos, ont repris tel quel ce terme. La possibilit? de l'emploi ambivalent de l'adjectif tropaiophoros nous sont r?v?l?s par Psellos lui-m?me dans sa description de l'empereur H?raclius dans le Logos sur les miracles de l'archange Michel, lorsqu'il dit de cet empereur qu'il ?tait un authentique tropaiophoros (tropaioph?roz ?z ?l?th?z), formule que l'on ne retrouve pour aucun de ses contemporains. 2. Caract?risation de l'emploi du terme tropaiophoros chez Psellos La caract?risation de l'emploi de l'?pith?te tropaiophoros par Psellos, tout en gardant la r?serve qui s'impose, montre que le consul des philosophes a intentionnellement utilis? cette ?pith?te, l'a introduite ? des endroits parfaitement bien choisis et attribu?e ? des personnages bien pr?cis tout en lui conf?rant le plus souvent une connotation ironique. Deux exemples relev?s dans l'?loge de Constantin Monomaque montrent parfaitement que tropaiophoros pouvait ?tre utilis? avec une double signification, ? officielle? (positive) mais aussi ? dissimul?e ? (cachant une critique). L'empereur lui-m?me, alors qu'il n'y va d'aucun m?rite particulier de sa part, et avant m?me de recevoir la couronne imp?riale, est tropaiophoros, qualificatif ? travers lequel Psellos fait, de toute ?vidence, allusion ? l'?rection contemporaine de la fondation du m?me nom de Monomaque, d'une fa?on que l'empereur lui-m?me pouvait comprendre, approuver et r?compenser. Toutefois, l'exemple de Michel IV tir? de ce m?me oratio, montre un autre aspect de l'utilisation de cette ?pith?te ? cet empereur est, en effet, tropaioph?roz ?na?maktoz, ce qui l'?l?ve au-dessus de Monomaque auquel l'?loge est destin?. C'est l? une position conforme ? l'opinion g?n?rale positive de Psellos sur Michel le Paphlagonien que l'on retrouve ?galement exprim?e dans la Chronographie. Dans tous les autres cas ? ? l'exception de celui de l'empereur H?raclius ? une connotation ironique dissimul?e ou un ton moqueur annonce les intentions de l'auteur, en particulier du fait du contraste que Psellos cr?? en attribuant l'?pith?te tropaiophoros ? des empereurs y compris lorqu'il n'y a pas eu de v?ritables victoires. L'?pith?te li?e ? saint Georges, et le plus souvent associ?e dans la rh?torique byzantine ? un empereur ? victorieux a ?t? utilis? par Psellos pour jouer avec sa signification premi?re, mais aussi afin de traduire un message associ? ? son utilisation. 3. Saint Georges Tropaiophoros ? Manganes L'emploi appuy? de l'?pith?te tropaiophoros par Psellos dans son ?loge r?dig? au d?but du r?gne de Constantin Monomaque (avril ? mai 1043) confirme indubitablement que la construction de la fondation de Monomaque ?tait alors commenc?e, 151 mais aussi qu'elle portait d?j? l'?pith?te de tropaiophoros. En outre, le sceau de Skl?raina sur lequel est ?galement mentionn? le sekret?n du saint grand martyr Georges Tropaiophoros, puis l'existence du monast?re du Tropaiophoros avant le mois de mai 1046 (sur la base de la charte de Constantin Monomaque), ainsi que le caract?re et les appellations des ?loges de Mauropous, montrent que l'?glise de Saint-Georges Tropaiophoros a ?t? inaugur?e plus t?t qu'on ne le pensait jusqu'? pr?sent. L'absence de toute description de la nouvelle ?glise, de ses d?corations ou de son luxe dans les r?cits de Jean Mauropous, ce qui ?tait habituel pour les hom?lies qui c?l?braient la sanctification des ?glises depuis l'?poque de patriarche Photius, incite ? conclure qu'il ne s'agissait pas dans ce cas d'un acte aussi solennel. Les imges usuelles et neutres employ?es par Mauropous pour louer les fondations de l'empereur, tel que saint Sion et nouvelle J?rusalem ou la mention stipulant que l'?glise surpassait les autres ?glises par sa taille et ses d?corations, ne doivent en aucun cas ?tre rattach?es avec la c?r?monie de sanctification de l'?glise qui, ? ce qu'il semble, a eu lieu avant mai 1046, et certainement avant le 21 avril 1047 lorsque Jean Mauropous y a prononc? l'?loge de son fondateur, l'empereur Constantin Monomaque.

Context.— Both the incidence of cancer and cancer-related mortality rates are high in sub-Saharan Africa, while resources for diagnosis and management are inadequate. In Benin, there is an extreme shortage of pathology services. Because of this shortage we built a histopathology laboratory equipped with an automated immunohistochemistry and a whole-slide imaging and telepathology system. Objective.— To report our experience of telepathology practice in the improvement of cancer diagnosis. Design.— The study was performed in our histopathology laboratory from January 1, 2016, to December 31, 2018. Resident laboratory technicians were trained in the preparation of microscopic and virtual slides by European pathologists. Virtual slides were stored on a Web-accessible server area for reading by 21 telepathologists in Benin and Europe. All patients with a histologic diagnosis of cancer were included in this study. Demographic data of patients, anatomic site of cancer, its histologic type, and its histologic grade were recorded. Results.— We registered 399 patients diagnosed with cancer of 1593 patients whose surgical specimens had been analyzed. There were 349 adults including 160 males and 189 females, and 50 children (both sexes) with a mean age of 53.40 years, 46.92 years, and 9.72 years, respectively. Eighty-three of 211 females (39.34%) had infiltrating breast carcinoma, and 34 of 188 males (18.09%) had prostatic carcinoma. Infiltrating carcinoma of no special type represented 51 (91.07%) of all infiltrating breast carcinomas. Prostatic carcinoma and infiltrating breast carcinoma were of high grade in 13 of 23 males (56.52%) and 34 of 56 females (60.71%), respectively. Conclusions.— Telepathology is enabling a great improvement in cancer diagnosis in our hospital.

Background:Thromboembolic and infectious complications of nephrotic syndrome are powerfuland canbefunctional or life threatening. Surgical complications are rare, hence the interest of our work which aimed to study the therapeutic and evolutionary clinical aspects of the surgical complications of the children’s nephrotic syndrome at ’’Hopital Saint Jean De Dieu De Tanguieta’’ (Benin). Methods: This was a prospective case study of children with complicatednephrotic syndrome followed at ‘’Hopital Saint Jean De Dieu De Tanguieta’’ (Benin) fromOctober 2016 to December 2018. Results: We reported two cases, all male. Before surgical complications the symptoms were dominated by an oedema syndrome lasting for each of them on averageeightmonths. Surgical complications thatrevealednephrotic syndrome were a spontaneous amputation of the right foot due to arterialthrombosis in a seven-year-old boy and a necrotizingfasciitis of the left foot in a 10-year-old child.The nephrotic syndrome wasidiopathic and the cares werebothsurgical and medical. Nephrotic syndrome wascorticosensitivewith a goodevolution in five months. Conclusion: These two cases teach that any childhoodoedema syndrome must bequicklyexplored for appropriated management to avoidtheseserious complications and aftereffects.

Impossible pour moi de parler de l'oeuvre de Gilbert Hottois sans évoquer des souvenirs personnels. Ma première rencontre avec Gilbert remonte à 1985, il y a plus d’un quart de siècle. Je devais présenter l’examen du cours «Les grands courants de la philosophie». Pour l’occasion, j’avais lu attentivement le syllabus, un condensé de l’histoire de la philosophie occidentale en cent pages bien étayées. Je n’étais, à vrai dire, qu’à demi-rassuré en pénétrant dans son bureau du deuxième étage de l’Institut de philosophie, au 143 avenue Buyl, à Ixelles. A l’époque, je terminais pourtant des études de médecine et j’avais une certaine expérience des examens, certainement plus que les étudiants de première candidature en philosophie qui attendaient terrorisés dans le couloir. Ce fut ma première rencontre avec Gilbert et, je pense, la seule fois où j’eus l’occasion de discuter avec lui des preuves de l’existence de Dieu chez saint Anselme. Ce fut aussi, et je ne m’en doutais évidemment pas, le début d’un long parcours académique mené d’abord sous sa direction puis, à ses côtés, et le début surtout aussi d’une longue amitié. L'époque était tant autre en 1985. Cette année-là, dans la salle aux lambris du premier étage de l’Institut de philosophie, Jean Paumen, le professeur Jauret de Species Technica, qui avait été le directeur de thèse de Hottois, commentait Kant ou nous parlait des trois formes de l’ennui chez Heidegger; c'est là aussi que la fumée se dégageant de son cigarillo donnait des airs mystiques à Marc Richir, lui qui essayait de nous faire comprendre les arcanes de la phénoménologie de Husserl ou l'intérêt philosophique du mystérieux comportement des particules quantiques; quant à Pierre Verstraeten, le cours qu'il y donnait était un spectacle brillant visant à entretenir malicieusement le caractère hermétique de la philosophie de L’Etre et le Néant; Gilbert Hottois, pour sa part, se contentait d'y commenter sobrement, avec clarté et rigueur, son dernier ouvrage, Le Signe et la Technique, dans lequel il introduisait le concept de transcendance noire et s'insurgeait contre l'inflation du langage dans la philosophie contemporaine. Un an plus tard, il allait fonder le CRIB, le Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Bioéthique, et devenir un théoricien renommé de cette discipline qu'il considérait comme une branche de la philosophie des technosciences.

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.

This article is about refugees’ and migrants’ dreams of home and family and stems from an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, “A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency” (LP140100935), with Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc. (Vinnies). A Vinnies-supported refugee and migrant support centre was chosen as one of the hubs for interviewee recruitment, given that many refugee families experience persistent and chronic economic disadvantage. The de-identified name for the drop-in language-teaching and learning social facility is the Migrant and Refugee Homebase (MARH). At the time of the research, in 2018, refugee and forced migrant families from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan constituted MARH’s primary membership base. MARH provided English language classes alongside other educational and financial support. It could also organise provision of emergency food and was a conduit for furniture donated by Australian families. Crucially, MARH operated as a space in which members could come together to build shared community.As part of her role, the researcher was introduced to Sara (de-identified), a mother-tongue Arabic speaker and the centre’s coordinator. Sara had personal experience of being a refugee, as well as being MARH’s manager, and she became both a point of contact for the researcher team, an interpreter/translator, and an empathetic listener as refugees shared their stories. Dreams of home and family emerged throughout the interviews as a vital part of participants’ everyday lives. These dreams and hopes were developed in the face of what was, for some, a nightmare of adversity. Underpinning participants’ sense of agency, subjectivity and resilience, Badiou argues (93, as noted in Jackson, 241) that hope can appear as a basic form of patience or perseverance rather than a dream for justice. Instead of imagining an improvement in personal circumstances, the dream is one of simply moving forward rather than backward. While dreams of being reunited with family are rooted in the past and project a vision of a family which no longer exists, these dreams help fashion a future which once again contains a range of possibilities.Although Sara volunteered her time on the research project as part of her commitment to Vinnies, she was well-known to interviewees as a MARH staff member and, in many cases, a friend and confidante. While Sara’s manager role implies an imbalance of power, with Sara powerful and participants comparatively less so, the majority of the information explored in the interviews pertained to refugees’ experiences of life outside the sphere in which MARH is engaged, so there was limited risk of the data being sanitised to reflect positively upon MARH. The specialist information and understandings that the interviewees shared positions them as experts, and as co-creators of knowledge.Recruitment and Methodological ApproachThe project researcher (Jaunzems) met potential contributors at MARH when its members gathered for a coffee morning. With Sara’s assistance, the researcher invited MARH members to take part in the research project, giving those present the opportunity to ask and have answered any questions they deemed important. Coffee morning attendees were under no obligation to take part, and about half chose not to do so, while the remainder volunteered to participate. Sara scheduled the interviews at times to suit the families participating. A parent and child from each volunteer family was interviewed, separately. In all cases it was the mother who volunteered to take part, and all interviewees chose to be interviewed in their homes. Each set of interviews was digitally recorded and lasted no longer than 90 minutes. This article includes extracts from interviews with three mothers from refugee families who escaped war-torn homelands for a new life in Australia, sometimes via interim refugee camps.The project researcher conducted the in-depth interviews with Sara’s crucial interpreting/translating assistance. The interviews followed a traditional approach, except that the researcher deferred to Sara as being more important in the interview exchange than she was. This reflects the premise that meaning is socially constructed, and that what people do and say makes visible the meanings that underpin their actions and statements within a wider social context (Burr). Conceptualising knowledge as socially constructed privileges the role of the decoder in receiving, understanding and communicating such knowledge (Crotty). Respecting the role of the interpreter/translator signified to the participants that their views, opinions and their overall cultural context were valued.Once complete, the interviews were sent for translation and transcription by a trusted bi-lingual transcriber, where both the English and Arabic exchanges were transcribed. This was deemed essential by the researchers, to ensure both the authenticity of the data collected and to demonstrate “trust, understanding, respect, and a caring connection” (Valibhoy, Kaplan, and Szwarc, 23) with the participants. Upon completion of the interviews with volunteer members of the MARH community, and at the beginning of the analysis phase, researchers recognised the need for the adoption of an interpretive framework. The interpretive approach seeks to understand an individual’s view of the world through the contexts of time, place and culture. The knowledge produced is contextualised and differs from one person to another as a result of individual subjectivities such as age, race and ethnicity, even within a shared social context (Guba and Lincoln). Accordingly, a mother-tongue Arabic speaker, who identifies as a refugee (Al-Hameed), was added to the project. All authors were involved in writing up the article while authors two, three and four took responsibility for transcript coding and analysis. In the transcripts that follow, words originally spoken in Arabic are in intalics, with non-italcised words originally spoken in English.Discrimination and BelongingAya initially fled from her home in Syria into neighbouring Jordan. She didn’t feel welcomed or supported there.[00:55:06] Aya: …in Jordan, refugees didn’t have rights, and the Jordanian schools refused to teach them [the children…] We were put aside.[00:55:49] Interpreter, Sara (to Researcher): And then she said they push us aside like you’re a zero on the left, yeah this is unfortunately the reality of our countries, I want to cry now.[00:56:10] Aya: You’re not allowed to cry because we’ll all cry.Some refugees and migrant communities suffer discrimination based on their ethnicity and perceived legitimacy as members of the host society. Although Australian refugees may have had searing experiences prior to their acceptance by Australia, migrant community members in Australia can also feel themselves “constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others” (Green and Aly). Jackson argues that both refugees and migrants experiencethe impossibility of ever bridging the gap between one’s natal ties to the place one left because life was insupportable there, and the demands of the nation to which one has travelled, legally or illegally, in search of a better life. And this tension between belonging and not belonging, between a place where one has rights and a place where one does not, implies an unresolved relationship between one’s natural identity as a human being and one’s social identity as ‘undocumented migrant,’ a ‘resident alien,’ an ‘ethnic minority,’ or ‘the wretched of the earth,’ whose plight remains a stigma of radical alterity even though it inspires our compassion and moves us to political action. (223)The tension Jackson refers to, where the migrant is haunted by belonging and not belonging, is an area of much research focus. Moreover, the label of “asylum seeker” can contribute to systemic “exclusion of a marginalised and abject group of people, precisely by employing a term that emphasises the suspended recognition of a community” (Nyers). Unsurprisingly, many refugees in Australia long for the connectedness of the lives they left behind relocated in the safe spaces where they live now.Eades focuses on an emic approach to understanding refugee/migrant distress, or trauma, which seeks to incorporate the worldview of the people in distress: essentially replicating the interpretive perspective taken in the research. This emic framing is adopted in place of the etic approach that seeks to understand the distress through a Western biomedical lens that is positioned outside the social/cultural system in which the distress is taking place. Eades argues: “developing an emic approach is to engage in intercultural dialogue, raise dilemmas, test assumptions, document hopes and beliefs and explore their implications”. Furthermore, Eades sees the challenge for service providers working with refugee/migrants in distress as being able to move beyond “harm minimisation” models of care “to recognition of a facilitative, productive community of people who are in a transitional phase between homelands”. This opens the door for studies concerning the notions of attachment to place and its links to resilience and a refugee’s ability to “settle in” (for example, Myers’s ground-breaking place-making work in Plymouth).Resilient PrecariousnessChaima: We feel […] good here, we’re safe, but when we sit together, we remember what we went through how my kids screamed when the bombs came, and we went out in the car. My son was 12 and I was pregnant, every time I remember it, I go back.Alongside the dreams that migrants have possible futures are the nightmares that threaten to destabilise their daily lives. As per the work of Xavier and Rosaldo, post-migration social life is recreated in two ways: the first through participation and presence in localised events; the second by developing relationships with absent others (family and friends) across the globe through media. These relationships, both distanced and at a distance, are dispersed through time and space. In light of this, Campays and Said suggest that places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad; similarly, other recollections and experience can trigger a sense of fragility when “we remember what we went through”. Gupta and Ferguson suggest that resilience is defined by the migrant/refugee capacity to “reimagine and re-materialise” their lost heritage in their new home. This involves a sense of connection to the good things in the past, while leaving the bad things behind.Resilience has also been linked to the migrant’s/refugee’s capacity “to manage their responses to adverse circumstances in an interpersonal community through the networks of relationships” (Eades). Resilience in this case is seen through an intersubjective lens. Joseph reminds us that there is danger in romanticising community. Local communities may not only be hostile toward different national and ethnic groups, they may actively display a level of hostility toward them (Boswell). However, Gill maintains that “the reciprocal relations found in communities are crucially important to their [migrant/refugee] well-being”. This is because inclusion in a given community allows migrants/refugees to shrug off the outsider label, and the feeling of being at risk, and provides the opportunity for them to become known as families and friends. One of MAHR’s central aims was to help bridge the cultural divide between MARH users and the broader Australian community.Hope[01:06: 10] Sara (to interviewee, Aya): What’s the key to your success here in Australia?[01:06:12] Aya: The people, and how they treat us.[01:06:15] Sara (to Researcher): People and how they deal with us.[01:06:21] Aya: It’s the best thing when you look around, and see people who don’t understand your language but they help you.[01:06:28] Sara (to Researcher): She said – this is nice. I want to cry also. She said the best thing when I see people, they don’t understand your language, and I don’t understand theirs but they still smile in your face.[01:06:43] Aya: It’s the best.[01:06:45] Sara (to Aya): yes, yes, people here are angels. This is the best thing about Australia.Here, Sara is possibly shown to be taking liberties with the translation offered to the researcher, talking about how Australians “smile in your face”, when (according to the translator) Aya talked about how Australians “help”. Even so, the capacity for social connection and other aspects of sociality have been linked to a person’s ability to turn a negative experience into a positive cultural resource (Wilson). Resilience is understood in these cases as a strength-based practice where families, communities and individuals are viewed in terms of their capabilities and possibilities, instead of their deficiencies or disorders (Graybeal and Saleeby in Eades). According to Fozdar and Torezani, there is an “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30) on the one hand, and their reporting of positive well-being on the other. That disparity includes accounts such as the one offered by Aya.As Wilson and Arvanitakis suggest,the interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. … However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among individuals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth.Using this approach, Wilson and Arvanitakis have linked resilience to hope, as a “present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity”. They argue that the term “hope” is often utilised in a tokenistic way “as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies”. Nonetheless, Wilson and Arvanitakis believe hope to be of vital academic interest due to the prevalence of war and suffering throughout the world. In the research reported here, the authors found that participants’ hopes were interwoven with dreams of being reunited with their families in a place of safety. This is a common longing. As Jackson states,so it is that migrants travel abroad in pursuit of utopia, but having found that place, which is also no-place (ou-topos), they are haunted by the thought that utopia actually lies in the past. It is the family they left behind. That is where they properly belong. Though the family broke up long ago and is now scattered to the four winds, they imagine a reunion in which they are together again. (223)There is a sense here that with their hopes and dreams lying in the past, refugees/migrants are living forward while looking backwards (a Kierkegaardian concept). If hope is thought to be key to resilience (Wilson and Arvanitakis), and key to an individual’s ability to live with a sense of well-being, then perhaps a refugee’s past relations (familial) impact both their present relations (social/community), and their ability to transform negative experiences into positive experiences. And yet, there is no readily accessible way in which migrants and refugees can recreate the connections that sustained them in the past. As Jackson suggests,the irreversibility of time is intimately connected with the irreversibility of one’s place of origin, and this entwined movement through time and across space proves perplexing to many migrants, who, in imagining themselves one day returning to the place from where they started out, forget that there is no transport which will convey them back into the past. … Often it is only by going home that is becomes starkly and disconcertingly clear that one’s natal village is no longer the same and that one has also changed. (221)The dream of home and family, therefore and the hope that this might somehow be recreated in the safety of the here and now, becomes a paradoxical loss and longing even as it is a constant companion for many on their refugee journey.Esma’s DreamAccording to author three, personal dreams are not generally discussed in Arab culture, even though dreams themselves may form part of the rich tradition of Arabic folklore and storytelling. Alongside issues of mental wellbeing, dreams are constructed as something private, and it generally breaks social taboos to describe them publicly. However, in personal discussions with other refugee women and men, and echoing Jackson’s finding, a recurring dream is “to meet my family in a safe place and not be worried about my safety or theirs”. As a refugee, the third author shares this dream. This is also the perspective articulated by Esma, who had recently had a fifth child and was very much missing her extended family who had died, been scattered as refugees, or were still living in a conflict zone. The researcher asked Sara to ask Esma about the best aspect of her current life:[01:17:03] Esma: The thing that comforts me here is nature, it’s beautiful.[01:17:15] Sara (to the Researcher): The nature.[01:17:16] Esma: And feeling safe.[01:17:19] Sara (to the Researcher): The safety. ...[01:17:45] Esma: Life’s beautiful here.[01:17:47] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is beautiful here.[01:17:49] Esma: But I want to know people, speak the language, have friends, life is beautiful here even if I don’t have my family here.[01:17:56] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is so pretty you only need to improve the language and have friends, she said I love my life here even though I don’t have any family or community here. (To Esma:) I am your family.[01:18:12] Esma: Bring me my siblings here.[01:18:14] Sara (to Esma): I just want my brothers here and my sisters.[01:18:17] Esma: It’s a dream.[01:18:18] Sara (to Esma): it’s a dream, one day it will become true.Here Esma uses the term dream metaphorically, to describe an imagined utopia: a dream world. In supporting Esma, who is mourning the absence of her family, Sara finds herself reacting and emoting around their shared experience of leaving siblings behind. In doing so, she affirms the younger woman, but also offers a hope for the future. Esma had previously made a suggestion, absorbed into her larger dream, but more achievable in the short term, “to know people, speak the language, have friends”. The implication here is that Esma is keen to find a way to connect with Australians. She sees this as a means of compensating for the loss of family, a realistic hope rather than an impossible dream.ConclusionInterviews with refugee families in a Perth-based migrant support centre reveals both the nightmare pasts and the dreamed-of futures of people whose lives have experienced a radical disruption due to war, conflict and other life-threatening events. Jackson’s work with migrants provides a context for understanding the power of the dream in helping to resolve issues around the irreversibility of time and circumstance, while Wilson and Arvanitakis point to the importance of hope and resilience in supporting the building of a positive future. Within this mix of the longed for and the impossible, both the refugee informants and the academic literature suggest that participation in local events, and authentic engagement with the broader community, help make a difference in supporting a migrant’s transition from dreaming to reality.AcknowledgmentsThis article arises from an ARC Linkage Project, ‘A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency’ (LP140100935), supported by the Australian Research Council, Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc., and Edith Cowan University. The authors are grateful to the anonymous staff and member of Vinnies’ Migrant and Refugee Homebase for their trust in and support of this project, and for their contributions to it.ReferencesBadiou, Alan. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. 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The western world has an enthusiasm for blondes that amounts to a cultural fetish. As a signifier the blonde is loaded: blondes have more fun, blondes are dumb, blondes are more sexually available, blondes are less capable, less serious, less complicated. The blonde is, in modern day patriarchy, often portrayed as the ideal woman. The Oxford Dictionary defines a Goddess as a female deity or a woman who is adored for her beauty. The Blonde Goddess then is the ultimate contemporary female, worshipped for her appearance, erotically idolised. She may be a Playboy bunny, the hot girl on the beach or the larger than life billboard, but everywhere her image haunts mere mortals: the men who can’t have her and the women who can’t be her. During the second wave of feminism the Blonde Goddess was vilified as an unrealistic illusion and exploitive fantasy and our enthusiasm for her was roundly challenged. She was a stereotype, feminists cried, a site of oppression, a phoney construct. Men were judged harshly for desiring her and women were discouraged from being her. Well beyond hair colour and its power as signifier the very notion of Goddessness, of being adored for one’s beauty, was considered repressive. Women were called upon to refuse participation in blondeness (in its signifying sense) and Goddessness (in the sense of being revered for attractiveness) and men were chastised for being superficial and chauvinistic.Nevertheless, decades later, many men continue to lust after her, women (and increasingly younger girls) work ever harder at being her — bleaching, shaving, breast augmenting and botoxing — and the media promotes endless representations of her. If the second wave thought the Blonde Goddess would give up the ghost easily it was mistaken but what their enthusiastic critique did enable is the birth of a new type of Blonde Goddess, one generally considered to be stronger, more empowered and a better role model for the 21st century Miss. Though the likes of Mae West hinted at this type of Blonde Goddess well before Madonna it was not until Madonna’s generation that she went mainstream. There have been many Blonde Goddess “It girls” — Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield and Debbie Harry (singer of the band Blondie) to name a few, but two in particular stand out as the embodiment of these types; their bodies and identities going beyond the image-making machinery to become a kind of Blonde Goddess performance art. They are Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. The enthusiasm for blondeness and Goddessness routinely gives rise to faddish cultural enthusasisms. In Monroe’s day her curvaceous figure was upheld as the model female form. After Madonna appeared with her bangles and layered tops girls all across America and around the world dressed like her. Drawing on Angela Carter’s feminist readings of De Sade in The Sadeian Woman and envisioning Monroe and Madonna, two of the most fêted examples of Blonde Goddessness in history, as De Sade’s Justine and Juliette reveals their erotic currency as both couched in patriarchal gender relations and binding us to it. Considering Monroe and Madonna with the Marquis De Sade characters Justine and Juliette in mind illustrates that Goddessness as I’m defining it here — the enthusiasm which with women rely on beauty for affirmation and men’s enthusiastic feeding of that dependence — amounts to a feminine masquerade that disempowers women from a real experience of femaleness, emancipation and eroticism. When feminists in the 60s and 70s critiqued the Blonde Goddess as the poster-child for good old-fashioned sexism it was women like Monroe they had in mind. What feminists argued for they largely got — access to life beyond the domestic domain, financial autonomy, self-determination — but, as a De Sadian viewing of Madonna will show, we’re still compromised. While many feminists, most notably Andrea Dworkin, rejected the Marquis De Sade, notorious libertine and writer, as a dishonourable pornographer, others, such as Luce Irigaray and Angela Carter, felt he accurately reflected the social structures and relations of western civilisation and was therefore fertile ground for the exploration of what it is to be a woman in our culture. Justine and Juliette are erotic novels that recount the very different fortunes of two dissimilar sisters. They are beautiful (of course) and as such they are Goddesses, even while being defiled and defiling. Monroe and Madonna are metaphorical sisters in a man's world (and it was an infamous touch of video genius when Madonna acknowledged as much by doing Monroe in the video for “Material Girl” early on in her career). Yet one is a survivor and one isn't. One is living and one is long dead. Monroe is the Blonde Goddess as victim; Madonna is the Blonde Goddess as Villain. Monroe cast a shadow; Madonna has danced with the shadow. Both Marilyn and Madonna assumed a feminine masquerade so successful, so omnipotent, that they became not just Goddesses, desired by men, admired by women, and emulated by girls, but the most iconic and celebrated Blonde Goddesses of their age. It was, and in Madonna’s case still is, a highly sexualised masquerade that utilises and promotes itself as a commodity. Both women milked this masquerade to achieve notoriety and wealth in a world where women are disadvantaged in the public sphere. Some read this kind of exploitation of erotic desire as a mark of subjugation while others see it as a feminist act: a knowing usage of means toward a self-possessed end, but as Carter will help demonstrate, masquerade is, either way, an artificial construct and our enthusiasm for trading in it comes at a high price. Monroe, the sexy, fragile child-woman, was the firstborn of the sisters. Her star rose in the moralistic fifties, and by all accounts she spent most of her time in the limelight frustrated by her career and by the studio’s control of it. She was “owned”, and she rebelled against it, fleeing to New York City to study acting at the renowned Actors Studio. She became a devoted student of method acting, a technique that encourages actors to plumb their emotional depths and experiences, though her own psychological instability threatened her career. She was scandalously difficult to work with: chronically late, forgetful, and self-indulgent; and she died alone, intoxicated and naked. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems likely that a cocktail of mental disturbance, man trouble, and substance addiction led to her premature death by overdose in 1962. Monroe’s traditional take on blondeness and Goddessness embodied the purely feminine masquerade and translated to the classic Justine trajectory.Madonna can be thought of as Monroe’s post-modern younger sister, the next generation of Blonde Goddessness. Known for her self-determination, business savvy and self-control Madonna’s self-parody and decades long survival and triumph in a male dominated industry is remarkable. Perhaps this is where the sisters differ most: Madonna challenges the dominant semiotic code of traditional gender roles in that she combines her feminine masquerade with masculinity, witness the pointy cone bra worn with pinstripe trousers and monocle on the “Blonde Ambition” tour. Madonna is the new blonde — shrewder, more forceful, more man-like. She plays girly in her feminine masquerade, but she does so self-consciously, with a wink, as the second sister who has observed and learned the lesson of the first. In Carter’s exploration of the characters of Justine and Juliette she notes that when the orphaned girls are turned out of the convent to fend for themselves, Justine, the sister whose goodness and innocence is constantly met with the brutality and betrayal of men, "embarks on a dolorous pilgrimage in which each preferred sanctuary turns out to be a new prison and all the human relations offered her are a form of servitude" (39). During Monroe’s pilgrimage from foster care, to young wife, to teen model, to star she found herself trapped in an abusive studio system that could not nurture her and instead raped her over and over again in the sense that it thwarted her personal aspirations as an actor and her desire for creative autonomy by overpowering her with its demands. Monroe did not own her own life and sexuality so much as function as a site of objectification, a possession of the Tinsel Town suits. In her personal life she was endowed with the “feminine” trait of feeling; she was, like Justine, "the broken heart, the stabbed dove, the violated sepulcher, the persecuted maiden whose virginity is perpetually refreshed by rape” (Carter 49).In real life and in most of her characters Monroe was kind hearted, generous, caring and compassionate. It is this heart that Justine values most; whatever happens to the body, no matter how impure it becomes, the heart remains sacred. The victim with heart is morally superior to her masters. In a suffering that becomes second nature, "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity” (57).Conspiracy theories and rumors of Monroe's suffering and possible murder at the hands of the Kennedys (cast as evil Sadian masters) abound. Suicide attempts, drug dependency, and nervous breakdowns were the order of the day in her final years. The continuing fascination with Monroe lies in the fact that she was the archetypal sullied virgin. Feminine virtue and goodness require sexual innocence and purity. If Monroe’s innocence (a feature of films like Some Like it Hot) was too often confused with stupidity she made the most of it by cornering the market on bimbo roles (Gentleman Prefer Blondes is her ultimate dumb blonde performance). But even those who thought she couldn’t act realised that her appeal was potent because her innocence was infused with the potentiality of an uncontainable libidinous energy. Like Justine, Juliette was a woman born into a man's world, but in her corruption Juliette decided beat men at their own game, to transcend her destiny as woman at any cost. Carter says of Juliette: She is rationality personified and leaves no single cell of her brain unused. She will never obey the fallacious promptings of her heart. Her mind functions like a computer programmed to produce two results for herself — financial profit and libidinal gratification. (79)Indeed, it could be said that it is financial profit and libidinal gratification that most defines Madonna in the public’s eye. She is obscenely rich and often cited for her calculated re-inventions and assertive sexuality (which peaked in the early nineties with the album Erotica and the graphic Sex book). Madonna, like Juliette, is a story-teller. Even if she isn’t always the author of her songs she creates narrative interplay using song, fashion, and video. Like Juliette Madonna takes control of her destiny. She heads her own production company and is intimately involved with the details of her multi-faceted career. Like Monroe Madonna is said to have slept around strategically in her pre-stardom years, but unlike Monroe she was not passed around. The men in Madonna’s life early in her career were critical to advancing it. From Dan Gilroy, who helped form her first rock band, the Breakfast Club to DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez, who remixed tracks on her debut album Madonna took every step up the ladder of success guided by a precision instinct for self-preservation and promotion. She was not used up as she used others. Her trail leaves no sign of weakness, just one envelope-pushing accomplishment after another, with a few failures along the way, most notably in film. Though very different central to both Monroe and Madonna’s lives and careers is a mega-watt erotic appeal, an appeal that has everything to do with their respective differential repetitions of being blonde.In Eroticism Georges Bataille defines eroticism as the fusion of separate objects involving the play of discontinuity and continuity. In Bataille’s work these words have a specific and unconventional meaning. Discontinuity describes our individuality, our separateness from each other, a separateness that reigns in our social and work-a-day lives. Continuity refers to dissolution of separateness that is most associated with death but which is also experienced by way of exalted living through a taste of transcendence. Bataille posits three types of eroticism: physical, emotional and religious and he claims that they all “substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity” (15).Here Bataille meets De Sade. In the Introduction to Eroticism Bataille speaks of De Sade’s assertion that we come closest to death (continuity) through the “licentious image.” Further, Bataille declares that eroticism is not just an enthusiasm; it is the enthusiasm of humankind. “It seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions,” he says. “I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions” (12). He goes on to state that our enthusiasm/eroticism is not just an aspect of our being, but its driving force: “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear.” (15).Human beauty is, Bataille suggests, measured by its distance from the animal — the more ethereal (light and unearthly) the female shape and texture, and the less clear its relation to animal reality, the more beautiful — the erotic moment lies in profaning that beauty, reducing it to its animal essence. Perhaps this is another reason why blondeness matters and signifies sex, conferring as it does a halo, an ethereal “light” which evokes the sacredness of continuity while denying the animal (the hairy and base reality of the body). This is the invitation The Blonde Goddess makes to defilement, her begging to be reduced to her private parts. Juliette/Madonna subverts her blonde invitation to be profaned by actively taking part in the profanation. Madonna has openly embraced gay culture, S & M, exhibitionism, fetishism, role-play and religious symbolism placing herself centre stage at all times. Justine/Monroe attracted erotic victimisation while Juliette/Madonna refused it by sleight of hand, and here again De Sade can help make sense of this. The works that illustrate this difference between Justine/Monroe and Juliette/Madonna most clearly are The Misfits and Truth or Dare. The Misfits is a beautiful and delicate film, written by Monroe’s then husband, Arthur Miller. The role of Roslyn is rumored to be based on Monroe's own character and her relationship with its three metaphorically dying cowboys reveals an enchanting and pale Justine broken by the dysfunctional and dominating masculinity around her. In contrast, Truth or Dare is a self styled documentary of Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour. It portrays Madonna striking a pose as the tough-talking Queen of the castle, calling the shots, with a bevy of play-thing pawns scuttling beneath her. But, opposite as these characterisations are, some sameness emanates from the two women in these works. Something haunts the screen and it is this: the sisters’ unavoidable cultural roots as women. Even as Madonna sucks on a bottle in faux fellatio, even as she simulates masturbation on stage or scolds her messy young dancers there is something melancholic about her, a vague relationship to Monroe. And here Carter helps solve the mystery: "She [Juliette] is just as her sister is, a description of a type of female behavior rather than a model of female behavior and her triumph is just as ambivalent as is Justine's disaster. Justine is the thesis, Juliette the antithesis” (79).In other words, in Carters’ view Justine/Monroe as heart personified maintains the traditional role of woman as body, as one belonging to the private sphere who pays dearly for entering public life, while Juliette/Madonna as reason personified infiltrates the male dominated territory of culture. Unlike Monroe, Madonna gets away with being a public figure, flourishes even, but as Carter’s Juliette, this victory has required her to betray herself in some way. It is “ambivalent” and Madonna doesn’t quite get off scot free. Madonna has been progressive in that she moved away from the traditional feminine role of body in a forbidding industry, but even though her lucrative maneuvering is more sophisticated than Monroe’s careening, she walks a fine line. In De Sade the sexuality of a libertine is a male identified desire in which women are objectified and exploited. Madonna’s trick is to manifest in feminine masquerade then take an ironic turn in objectifying and exploiting herself in what amounts to a split persona, half woman, half man. In other words she seduces herself under our gaze, and she dares to enjoy it. Ultimately, neither sister can escape the social structure into which she was born. Monroe, who was unable to live as a real woman, lives on as a legend, a Blonde Goddess in the eternal feminine masquerade. Madonna is reborn every time she re-invents herself but it’s hard to tell, with all the costume changing, who the real Madonna is. It was the unactualised real woman that the second wave tried to free by daring to suggest that she existed and was valuable beyond signification and Goddessness and that she had a right to her own experience of enthusiasm/eroticism rather than being relegated to the role of being the “licentious image” for the male gaze. The attack on the Blonde Goddess underestimated the deeply rooted psychic/emotional conditioning at play on both sides of the Blonde Goddess game. Here we are in a new millennium in which the ‘pornified’ Blonde Goddess is everywhere but even if she’s more unfettered and sexually active that deeply rooted conditioning remains. For Carter neither Justine nor Juliette is a worthy role model for the women of today and it would seem to follow that neither are Monroe nor Madonna. However, Carter does speak of “a future in which might lie the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling” (79). Blondeness as a signifier and Goddessness as a function inhibit an experience of shared enthusiasm and eroticism between men and women. When Bataille speaks of nakedness he means eroticism as the destruction of the self-contained character that gives rise to an experience of continuity. This kind of absolute nakedness is impossible for those trapped in the cycle of signification and functional relations. I suggest that the liberation project of the second wave of feminism stalled when in our desire to not be Justines we simply became more akin to Juliette. Blondeness as a signifier is still problematic, and Goddessness of the kind I have spoken of here — women’s attachment to using beauty to garner adoration in place of an innate sense of self and worth and men’s willingness to patronise it — is still rampant and both the Justine and Juliette feminine masquerades produce a false economy of enthusiasm and eroticism that denies the experience of authenticity and the true potential of relationship. The challenge now is one that most needs to be met not in the spotlight but in the privacy of our own beings and the forum of our lives as the struggle for synthesis continues in those of us, female and male, blonde, brunette, redhead, black or grey-haired, who long for an experience of ourselves and each other that transcends masquerade. ReferencesCarter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago Press, 1979.Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1987.Madonna. Erotica. Warner Bros, 1992.———. “Material Girl.” Like a Virgin. WEA/Warner Bros, 1984.——— and Steven Meisel. Sex. Warner Bros, 1992. The Misfits. Dir. John Huston.. MGM, 1961. Some Like It Hot. Dir. Billy Wilder, Billy. MGM, 1959. Truth or Dare. Dir. Alek Keshishian. Live/Artisan, 1991.