As we began the new decade on New Year’s Day, I was hard pressed to think of anything good that had happened the previous ten years, the first decade of the much-vaunted Third Millennium. I do not mean that nothing good happened in my personal life; like most of you the years brought much good, and some bad. Children were born, icons painted, friendships formed. And bouts of ill health, deaths, etc.; the stuff of life.
But in the wider world, all I could remember was 9/11, Katrina, tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters on a grand scale, the Bush/Cheney era, our two Long Wars, economic collapse. etc. etc. You get the idea.
When I asked my friends, they couldn’t come up with much, either. One said the papacy of Benedict, but on that I disagree, though I am not yet prepared to criticize him publicly. My brother Michael suggested that the outpouring of giving that followed in the wake of the various calamities was a good thing, and on that I agree. After much thought, I also realized that the fact that the United States elected a black man president was a great good, one that I never expected to see in my lifetime. That said president has been a disappointment, continuing for the most part the policies of Bush & co, albeit with less belligerent rhetoric, does not undue that good.
Still, for ten years that is not much.
So, we begin 2011 hoping that the coming decade will be better.
It occurred to me the other day that 2011 also marks the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the journal Caelum et Terra. Two decades ago Maclin and Karen Horton and I decided that instead of complaining about the state of things we would attempt an alternative. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we got a small sum of money together, approached our various friends for articles, assembled a small mailing list, and got to work. Through a series of unlikely circumstances we somehow managed to break even and continue publishing for five years.
It was a rewarding endeavor on many levels, though we never had more than a couple thousand subscribers. We did make a lot of friends, and we did manage to feel less isolated in articulating our vision, which eluded easy categorization.
Of course, looking back, there are things I would do differently today. I’ve grown older, with the inevitable discouragement that comes with age. I have made some sort of truce with modern technology, not least because of the witness of the second generation CTers that I wrote about some time ago, who live what we dreamed without our technophobia. But if you had told me twenty years ago that Caelum et Terra would grow up to be a website I would have been horrified. Of course something on the internet will never be as satisfying as something tangible like the printed page, but it is easier and less expensive, and it is nice to be free of the headache of trying to hustle new subscriptions.
It is somehow fitting that I begin a new phase of the website on the twentieth anniversary of the birth of the magazine. I had originally intended this blog to be a sort of online journal, with a variety of contributors. But all of our old writers have moved on, writing books and articles and blogging on their own. It was rare, after Maclin departed for his own blog, that anyone wrote here but myself. As for me, I treated it just like a magazine, and I wrote generally long posts, like online essays. As I am busy with family, work and iconography, there were long lulls here.
But I have finally conceded that this is pretty much my blog, though guest contributors will always be welcome. I will still probably write longer essays, but the days when posts were months apart are gone.
So, to all our old contributors and subscribers, Happy Anniversary, and thank all of you for your prayers and support through the years.
Well, I’m just glad you’re here. I discovered CeT in the summer of 2006 after reading Eric Brende’s “Better Off.” I rifled through all the backpages of the old journal online and absorbed and thoroughly enjoyed them.
Since then, I’ve seen it evolve to this point where it has simply become your blog. And I still enjoy it, still find things worth absorbing, and hope to see it thrive in whatever future manifestation comes.
I started to say that it’s hard to believe that it’s been twenty years–but then I realized it isn’t hard at all. It does seem like a long time ago. It was not long after CetT began that the first of our children entered adolescence, and that was the beginning of…let’s just say a very different phase of our lives (mine and Karen’s, not yours).
About, um, “our” technophobia–I have to point out that some of us didn’t share it. I had already been in the computer biz for some years, and was not at all phobic, although I wasn’t (and am not) a cheerleader, either. Producing CetT gave us an excuse to buy our first more-or-less family computer. I’d used one in writing for some time, but for CetT we bought a state of the art Macintosh SE, now of course a museum piece.
Anyway, I’m glad you’re taking this up again.
Looking at that very charming cover reminds me: what was the name of the woman who did those great drawings, like the St. Francis that was on the cover of one issue? Surely she has done more work, and I hope has gotten a wider audience.
That was Michelle Dick, who now lives in Hawaii (she lived in California when she did art for CT).
When she first started doing art for us she did a sort of pointilist technique in pen and ink. I suggested that she try scratchboard, and she went on to master that, and became one of the preeminent scratchboard artists around.
She also has become a very good iconographer.