Following PARKER — LES

Well, I thought I was done with following, but then I encounter a good image from a text on prayer; even better, as I was listening to the storm very early this morning an idea occurred to me regarding Flannery O’Connor that seemed worth following, so to speak. So far it will be called “Images and Endings.” The idea is to see how 4 FO’C characters understand Jesus in their own stories and then see where that understanding leads them. The 4 stories that immediately occurred to me are: A Good Man Is Hard to Find [the Misfit & the grandmother], Greenleaf [Mrs. May & Mrs. Greenleaf], Parker’s Back [O.E. Parker & his wife, Sarah Ruth], & A Temple of the Holy Ghost [the Child & the Hermaphrodite]. Depending on how this work unfolds, then perhaps these two as well: The Enduring Chill [Asbury & the Jesuit Priest], or Good Country People [Hulga Joy Hopewell & the satanic Bible Salesman]. The stories are all so good that I get excited just thinking about them again as their images roll around in my mind: The Bible salesman making off with Hulga’s wooden leg; the icicle descending on Asbury; the Hermaphrodite preaching in the tent; Parker’s tattoo of Jesus on his back; Mrs. May “embraced” by the Greenleaf bull; & the Misfit’s rejection of the grandmother’s gesture. While I was leaning toward A Good Man when I first thought about the idea, in remembering the stories just now, Parker’s Back seemed a better place to start .

O. E. Parker is a haunted man, a somewhat empty man who also feels that someone is after him. As a consequence of his emptiness and dissatisfaction, he fills his body with tattoos, searching for meaning in the numerous images of creation, from inanimate to animate; nothing, however, satisfies Parker, reminding me of St. Augustine’s familiar quote from the Confessions: “our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.” As a consequence of his emptiness Parker marries Sarah Ruth Cates, a strict Old Testament oriented legalist. “She was forever sniffing up sin.” Parker thinks he understands Sarah Ruth but what worries him is that he doesn’t understand himself. The narrator reveals Parker’s perspective throughout almost all of the story and describes the nature of the marriage: “This ugly woman Parker married was his first wife. He had had other women but he had planned never to get himself tied up legally.” The Old Testament images and details are pervasive as the “legally” in this quote reflects not only his marriage ties but also his ontological situation of dissatisfaction. Later in story we learn about the exchange of names and the OT grounding of the marriage. Parker hates his name uses only the initials, O. E. Sarah Ruth, however, makes him explain, which he does in a whisper. Sarah Ruth repeats what he whispered:

[“Obadiah Elihue,” she said in a reverent voice. “If you call me that aloud, I’ll bust your head open,” Parker said. “What’s yours?” “Sarah Ruth Cates,” she said. “Glad to meet you, Sarah Ruth,” Parker Sarah Ruth’s father was a Straight Gospel preacher but he was away, spreading it in Florida.]

OT prophets for O. E., OT women for Sarah Ruth’s name and both women are essential to the genealogy of Jesus. It should also be clear to the Christian reader at least that Parker’s sense of being haunted is reflective of God’s pursuit of him, particularly Jesus as we discover soon enough.

The interesting heart of the story is the way Jesus is present in the story. First Parker simply uses the name as an expletive when he pretends to hurt himself on his truck in order to attract Sarah Ruth who is sitting on the porch of her mother’s house:

[Suddenly Parker began to jump up and down and fling his hand about as if he had mashed it in the machinery. He doubled over and held his hand close to his chest. “God dammit!” he hollered, “Jesus Christ in hell! Jesus God Almighty damm! God dammit to hell!” he went on, flinging out the same few oaths over and over as loud as he could.

Without warning a terrible bristly claw slammed the side of his face and he fell backwards on the hood of the truck. “You don’t talk no filth here!” a voice close to him shrilled.]

Moved by the image of beauty and wholeness he sees in a tattooed man at a fair, Parker has been pursuing that same transfigured wholeness through his own tattoos and then in his marriage to Sarah Ruth. The narrator tells us first that [It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.] Thus the pattern of Parker’s transformation begins.

Both elements of tattoos and marriage come together dramatically while Parker is working, driving a tractor, baling hay in a field for an old woman who has left an old tree in the middle of her field simply because she loves old trees. So distracted by his dissatisfaction and thinking about getting a tattoo on his back, the only part of his body that is still empty of images, a tattoo that would please Sarah Ruth, Parker hits the tree whereupon he has a Moses and burning bush experience:

[The sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an unbelievably loud voice, “GOD ABOVE!” He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upside down into the tree and burst into flame.

The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself. He was not in them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it.]

Parker, though he doesn’t quite understand it, has had a religious experience that sends him into town to his usual tattoo artist where he asks for a picture of God. The artist’s response is precise and, given the owl tattooed on his head, wise:

[“Who are you interested in?” he said, “saints, angels, Christs or what?”

“God,” Parker said.

“Father, Son or Spirit?”

“Just God,” Parker said impatiently. “Christ. I don’t care. Just so it’s God.”]

There is no mistaking the underlying meaning here and the gap between Parker’s understanding, the expletive again, “Christ,” and the knowledge that Christ is God, the second person of the holy Trinity: God the Son. Parker gets the book with the only real image of God possible, and, rejecting the soft contemporary images, flips his way into the past images where one in particular demands his attention:

[On one of the pages a pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then stopped. His heart too appeared to cut off; there was absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a language itself, GO BACK. Parker returned to the picture—the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes. He sat there trembling; his heart began slowly to beat again as if it were being brought to life by a subtle power.]

The image patterns that have been present explicitly as well as subtly from the beginning such as creatures, light, trees, the journey and especially eyes help provide the meaningful unity for Parker’s transformation and they all come together in the final section of the story. At the beginning we learned that Sarah Ruth’s eyes “were gray and sharp like the points of two icepicks,” reflecting her penetrating, judgmental nature.

Parker’s eyes were the only truly mysterious thing about him:

[He stayed in the navy five years and seemed a natural part of the gray mechanical ship, except for his eyes, which were the same pale slate-color as the ocean and reflected the immense spaces around him as if they were a microcosm of the mysterious sea.]

The old lady he worked for told him about the tree and treated him “as if he didn’t have eyes.” And of course he doesn’t. In a sense he is still the blind boy being, no longer gently, turned to the light that will strike him near the end.

The eyes in the tattoo of Christ now on his back in its severe and beautiful majesty are eyes to be obeyed. He tries to ignore that element, goes to a bar, is made to reveal his new tattoo, which leads to silence and then a fight wherein like Jonah he is tossed out onto the street. Finally he believes that Sarah Ruth will be pleased with his new tattoo, his image of God, but of course her response, once she makes him fully identify himself and lets him into the house, is predictable:

[“Another picture,” Sarah Ruth growled. “I might have known you was off after putting some more trash on yourself.”

Parker’s knees went hollow under him. He wheeled around and cried, “Look at it! Don’t just say that! Look at it!”

“I done looked,” she said.

“Don’t you know who it is?” he cried in anguish.

“No, who is it?” Sarah Ruth said. “It ain’t anybody I know.”

“It’s him,” Parker said.

“Him who?” “

“God!” Parker cried. “

“God? God don’t look like that!”

“What do you know how he looks?” Parker moaned. “You ain’t seen him.”

“He don’t look,” Sarah Ruth said. “He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face.”]

Like the ruling religious orders of Jesus’ own time, Sarah Ruth judges him from that legal perspective:

[“Idolatry!” Sarah Ruth screamed. “Idolatry! Enflaming yourself with idols under every green tree! I can put up with lies and vanity but I don’t want no idolator in this house!” and she grabbed up the broom and began to thrash him across the shoulders with it.

Parker was too stunned to resist. He sat there and let her beat him until she had nearly knocked him senseless and large welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ. Then he staggered up and made for the door.]

The image of crucifixion comes to the surface very quickly here. Parker’s back and Christ’s face are being severely beaten, and Parker is truly stunned. All he can do is stagger out the door. But then an interesting literary thing takes place. Where we have been with Parker’s perspective throughout the story, the final paragraph shifts to Sarah Ruth, and we now look at Parker through Sarah Ruth’s eyes:

[She stamped the broom two or three times on the floor and went to the window and shook it out to get the taint of him off it. Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan tree and her eyes hardened still more. There he was—who called himself Obadiah Elihue—leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.]

Therefore, everyone who reads this story is made to experience that judgment and rejection. Of course what she sees and what we experience needs interpretation. Parker is on the ground being supported by a fruitful tree, suggestive of the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. Ne xt, he is “crying like a baby.” While that is part of her rejection, it nevertheless suggests several things: Sarah Ruth is pregnant but what she has given birth to here finally is Parker’s new life. God’s Grace has transformed Parker almost in spite of himself. Parker would be one of Mrs. Turpin’s “white trash.” Yet as in that story Parker is the one saved because unlike Sarah Ruth, Parker has no image of God and thus is open to receiving an accurate one, one that makes him whole and complete:

[Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. “Obadiah,” he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.]

In the end Parker has become completely and in a sense subtly the body of Christ.

Read it. What a good story. My problem is that there is no way that I can do four or six stories. It seemed simple when I first thought of it: the image—the face of Christ; the ending—Parker as baby, the new life lived under grace. That was what I was aiming for, but anyone who is still with me will see what happened. Ha. Reflecting on what’s next, I see that the only other story to deal with under this title of Image and Ending, is the story of the Child and the Hermaphrodite, that is “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” FO’C’s complete stories are available with a subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I think purchasing the collection on Kindle or paper is not very expensive and it is certainly worth having. So is her collection of essays: “Mystery and Manners” and her letters: Habit of Being.

My image for this essay is the image of Christ Harrowing Hell:

That Image goes with the idea of following the resurrected Christ to Heaven. Cogito! I forget whose image this is but I’m sure I have the information.

Found it: The Harrowing of Hell by Bl. Fra Angelico, c. 1440 [Museo di San Marco, Florence]

REVELATION FOLLOWS — LES

Intended to add this section to the last entry, but having lost a number of texts with this technology, I hated to take a chance. Also the type is smaller than I care for and I have no idea how to change it or even if one can. So, another entry.

the title of this entry is also a play on the image of following Christ to Heaven. The minute I thought of other literature where the image is revealed, Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful short story, “Revelation,” came to mind. Lying in bed the other morning, unable to get back to sleep, it occurred to me that not only is there a blessing in the image, but there is also a danger. “Revelation” reveals both the danger and the blessing.

Mrs. Turpin’s husband Claud has a badly wounded leg which he reveals to the patients in the office waiting to see the doctor. However, as the story begins, the text focuses on Claud’s wife and suggests that there is a danger in her presence:

[THE doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the head of the magazine table set in the center of it, a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation.]

Mrs. Turpin is judgmental of everything and everyone: she looms over the table, and is a”living demonstration” of the ridiculous and the inadequate. And it turns out that is a marvelous image of the danger of the way to Heaven. The danger is that she deludes herself into believing that she loves Jesus above all things when the story makes it clear that she truly loves herself above all things. Well, she does love Claude and she does love her idea of Jesus, always a real danger. For example, near the heart of the story. In talking to the mother in the story who is a counterpart of herself and her values, she exclaims, joyfully:

[“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!”]

In one sense she is a good woman who helps her community but the problem is that her perpetual center of concern is herself. What she is about to learn in the story is how her life and vision ought to have been different. While Mrs. Turpin’s counterpart is the mother, her daughter, who has lived with those values and that blindness all her life is about to change everything for Mrs. Turpin. The daughter’s name is, significantly, Mary Grace. She is the secondary cause that God uses in the story to reorient Mrs. Turpin away from herself and to Him. Watch; the quote immediately follows the preceding quote:

[For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.

The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling.

Mary Grace’s book, entitled “Human Development,” which hits her left eye, is not the end of the action. Mary Grace tries to strangle Mrs. Turpin and before the doctor can remove her from Mrs, Turpin, she delivers a message. The really interesting thing is that Mrs. Turpin knows that Mary Grace is a messenger:

“What you got to say to me?” she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.

The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.]

And there it is. She thought she was on her way to Jesus only to be told that she’s an “old wart hog” from Hell. The thing that makes Mrs. Turpin such a magnificent character is that like Lear and Oedipus she is determined to get at the truth, for she knows that this judgment comes from a deeper dimension, from God himself:

[“I am not,” she said tearfully, “a wart hog. From hell.” But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.]

Notice the way the concrete act, struck with the book, becomes a mental force; she is “struck” with a realization. Notice too that in this crucial passage that her name is Ruby. She has misdirected the focus of her life, evident even in this passage. Others there she believes deserved the message, the neglectful mother, the “white trash” woman. God may be attacking her values but her name is Ruby and she too is valuable.

In terms of the action in the story, Ruby’s wrath at being so badly treated, she thinks, leads her to the hog pen, like Jacob, to wrestle with God and vent her spleen. The hogs in the story have been an image of humanity, and the Turpin’s raise them, a grunting and a rooting and a groaning. Ruby has a hose and signifcantly hits one in the eye until finally, determined to know the truth, she roars out a question that immediately becomes her answer, but first all her obscene values come tumbling out of her mouth:

[“What do you send me a message like that for?” she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.]

Next: [“If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then,” she railed. “You could have made me trash. Or a nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. “I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy,” she growled. “Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer. Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face. I could be nasty. “Or you could have made me a nigger. It’s too late for me to be a nigger,” she said with deep sarcasm, “but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground.”]

Finally: [She braced herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. “Go on,” she yelled, “call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!”

A garbled echo returned to her.

A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”

The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.]

God uses secondary causes in our lives. Ruby’s question to God, returns as an echo and answer from God, in a way the kind of answer the pious Job receives. “Who do you think you are?” Notice the language throughout; the watery snake in the air, the visionary light, and Ruby silenced as was Job. The reason this story came to mind first is what happens next. Ruby, finally silenced, receives what I will call the real way to Jesus in the story, his real centrality in one’s life and the need for real humility:

[A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.]

As in the beginning of the story the narrator focus Ruby’s small eyes, suggesting the smallness of her vision of realty that has just been firmly dealt with. She too was shocked and altered as she saw that all her virtues did not amount to a reason for self-satisfaction and pride. The final image in the story given my concerns is worth citing:

[At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.]

It suggests that what she is hearing now is that she is attuned to those souls who are on their way to Heaven. Given what she has seen and heard throughout her experience in the doctor’s office, what else would it be? The world itself reveals the presence of God, if one isn’t too busy thinking about oneself to look and listen. How could she not be changed forever?

Image: what a marvelous teller of tales worth reading, she was.. “If it’s only a symbol, to Hell with it.” Indeed, indeed.

Our journey is truly about real presence! This essay will probably do it for the idea of “following,” unless I remember or discover another work of literature that provides another compelling insight or perspective on the fundamental idea. There is, after all, much more that might be worthwhile regarding this story, the way in which the doctor’s office reveals itself to suggest the image of Plato’s Cave, for example, and what that signifies. Well, read the whole story, carefully. Grace is operative in almost all of her stories and in the two novels. Ha! Read them all. Hallelujah!

Another Follow Up — LES

I can’t quite get used to these new textual mechanics, er, so to speak. In any case here we go again.

I was thinking about the image of following when, God above, it finally occurred to me to see how the Gospels deal with it. I read Mark’s brief account first, then turned to my favorite Gospel, John. Here is the NRSV account:

And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18 Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” 19 (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

Peter is responding to Jesus question as to whether Peter loved him. Jesus asks three times, thus, I assume paralleling the three times Peter fearfully denied him around the campfire and before the crucifixion. The quote starts with Peter’s third affirmation and includes Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s future suffering and death. My primary concern here, of course, is with how Jesus ended the image: “Follow me.” The next part of the text recounts Peter’s asking about John, the beloved disciple and the author of the Gospel:

20 Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, “Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?” 21 When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about him?” 22 Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!”

Artistically, it seems to me, the second order or command is perfect and necessary for what is being communicated here. The first “follow me” is clearly directed to Peter; the text makes that very clear: “Peter, follow me!” The repetition of the order shortly thereafter, in my understanding, makes it universal. Clearly, succinctly, he says, directed to all of us whom, like John, he loved and who now like, Peter, love him: “Follow me!” The rest of the text not only reveals the command but puts it in the context of love

Writing is interesting. I had not noticed the way the passage worked until I started following up (pun intended) the idea of following Jesus based on the theological facts (ha!) of the Ascension of Jesus and the Assumption of Mary. Writing has always been for me not only a means of communication but also an exciting means of discovery. Unfortunately, God forgive me, I spent too much of my life, like a magpie, pursuing and collecting bright shiny objects and other stuff, and not enough time writing especially for discovery, since writing always worked for me that way. Have an insight into a delightful text and attempt to communicate that insight and go from there. And so I did, but not often enough.

Image: From apod.nasa.com. 3/19/24 A Picturesque Equinox Sunset Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Dyer, Amazingsky.com, TWAN

FOLLOWING — LES

Oh dear. Everything has changed since the last time I wrote anything here. Squarespace keeps changing things and I have had enough trouble keeping up with the original. In any case, here we go!

What I recently became interested in was the idea and image of following and its two primary meanings. First there is the literal idea of physically following someone: “Follow me but stay close.” Dante follows Virgil through Hell, for example. Our new little dog Spooky follows Mary everywhere in the house and out. The second meaning is that used on kindle: whenever I click on an author, the site gives me the opportunity of “following” that author so that each time he or she writes a new book, I will be notified. Following then becomes a metaphor for paying attention to what someone is writing or doing. What occurred to me very recently as I was listening to Bishop Barron define the Ascension in the “Word on Fire” Rosary was the consequence for us of the meaning of the Ascension. In effect the Ascension meant that we were to follow Jesus to Heaven in our thoughts, our behavior, our prayers—in other words in our lives and how we now live them. In an email I sent to three good friends I attempted to define this following of the resurrected Christ, which I will now try to find and somewhat copy here—God willing.

Got the first one:

Bishop Barron explained the Ascension by saying that, as best as I remember, Christ went more deeply into” our world; into a “dimension that transcends” our world but is in some way linked to it. In so far as I can remember that is what Bishop Barrón said in attempting to define what the second mystery of the “Glorious Mysteries” in the Rosery meant, I.e. the Ascension of Christ at the end of the 40 days, refuting the “up, up and away” interpretation. This explanation or language I found compelling. It occurred to me when he said that that I suddenly understood something about the meaning there that I hadn’t understood before. The insight continued in his explanation of the fourth mystery, the “Assumption” of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and It involves both more insights and connections.

The first insight or connection is from Dante’s Purgatorio, when Beatrice harshly accuses Dante, in a sense, of serious betrayal. She says that when she died he should have followed her to Heaven in his life, thinking and orientation instead of betraying his vision of the goodness he saw in her when she was alive and walking on the streets of Florence by pursuing other women. That’s what the Ascension is revealing: we are meant to follow Jesus to Heaven in our lives, in our minds. And our behavior. I found the image and idea exciting as it suddenly gives a clear purpose to how I ought to be living and especially behaving. There is a concreteness and specificity to my understanding that wasn’t there before.

When Bishop Barron dealt with the Assumption, the fourth Glorious mystery, I saw or understood Mary to be the person who had literally and spiritually done that in the way Barrón described that mystery. Body and spirit she followed her son to Heaven. The second literary connection that occurred to me occurs at the end of the BBC King Lear which I watched yesterday. The image of Christ in the play is truly Cordelia who embodies the kind of sacrificial love for her father that Christ reveals for his. When Lear first sees her after he awakens from his madness, he says first, “You do me wrong to take me out of the grave” and “you are a soul in bliss and I am bound upon a wheel of fire.” At the end of the play, beautifully acted In the BBC production by Michael Hordern, Lear holds a feather to Cordelia’s lips and dies with great joy in thinking that in spite of everything she truly lives. And of course what lives in the play is her spirit, the realization of the presence of the love she has revealed throughout the play. [No character in the play dare say that her love is Christlike since there is a law in England at the time against using the name of God or Christ on the stage! Edgar is another image of the same love and the BBC production has him in his feigned madness wearing a crown of thorns—nudge, nudge! Most earlier critics acknowledge that this is the most Christian of the plays, though it is full of references to the pagan gods.] As Marjorie Garber in “Shakespeare After All” rightly points out, Lear and Cordelia image a reversed pieta, father holding his dead Idaughter on his lap.

The third artistic connection I saw was from the movie Risen. At the end of the movie when the risen Christ must leave those who love him dearly, for he has commissioned them to go out and spread the message, Jesus continually moves farther from them until he vanishes into this vision of beautiful, intense light. And one way of interpreting that as the movie more or less reveals is that we are to follow him, the same image as visible or understandable in the other two works, as the Roman Tribune does exactly that in walking out of the desert to the little Inn, then telling the story, and paying with his Tribune’s ring. Wow. In the movie the end is also in the beginning!

Follow up [pun intended].

When once the metaphor of following Christ to Heaven, or Beatrice to Christ as Dante should have done immediately long ago, I began to see how omnipresent the image of following really is.  For example in the liturgy for today (4/15/24] the Psalm quoted is from 119; the response is:  “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”  Of course the word “follow” jumped out at me, so I went to 119 in the Grail book of psalms and reread Psalm 119with that image in mind.  All sorts of interesting things occurred throughout the Psalm:

“105 Your word is a lamp for my feet, 

and a light for my path.”

“101  I keep my feet from every evil path, 

to obey your word. 

102  I have not turned away from your decrees, 

which you yourself have taught me.”

“59 I have pondered my ways, 

and turned my steps to your decrees. 

60 I made haste; 

I did not delay to obey your commands.”

“35  Guide me in the path of your commands, 

for in them is my delight.”

“1  Blessed are those whose way is blameless, 

who walk in the law of the LORD! 

2  Blessed are those who keep his decrees! 

With all their hearts they seek him.”

It seemed to me, though I read through the Psalm quickly,  that the entire Psalm is a text for truly following the Lord/Christ [OT/NT].  It looks as though verse 176 ought to be at the beginning though having it at the end should remind us of the image of Christ as our shepherd, a confession as we leave the Psalm that we have strayed, and a plea that if we do  stray Christ might come for us, and the last thing it does is remind us of the importance of memory in our pilgrimage—Christ after all is risen, no matter how bleak it gets at times. Remember that! It’s a rich verse here, but then so are they all.

“176  I have strayed like a sheep; 

seek your servant, for I do not forget your commands.”

I can very easily see 119 as a handbook for the way to follow Christ.

The second thing below is the last part of Saint Augustine’s meditation for today.  Again with the image of following him in my mind I saw that what Augustine said is right at the heart of that.  Our hearts are restless until…how do we follow?  “Love, and you do it.”

Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.

when you hear “Believe in Christ,” don’t imagine it’s enough for you to believe Christ, that is, to believe that the things Christ says are true; don’t imagine it’s enough for you to believe that Christ is himself the one whom God foretold through the prophets; but believe in Christ, that is, love Christ. It is when you have fulfilled this that nothing more will be required of you, because love is the fullness of the law (Rom 13:10). When you’ve believed in Christ like that, so that you have that kind of ardent love for Christ, see if you won’t be able to make these words your own: Who shall separate us from the love of God? (Rom 8:35). So don’t waste time wondering how to do what Christ commands; you cannot not do it if you love Christ. Love, and you do it.

Saint Augustine

Image: the Annunciation.8

THE REVEALING CAPACITY OF REALITY - LES

She

She stood on the stairway,

Poised to descend;

Her dark eyes shown brightly,

My heart she’d amend.

Blessed be the woman

Whose love will endure

Whose virtue is righteous

Whose faith strong and sure.

Blessed be the woman

Whose word is her bond,

Whose beauty is precious,

A gift from beyond.

No mercy rains on us

If we fail at real love,

Moving through the beauty

To one reigning above.

I just spent hours writing an essay on the app “Notes,” and when I tried to copy and transfer it to Squarespace, I apparently hit the wrong thing and it all disappeared. There’s a way to retrieve such things as long as you hit nothing after the loss except the retrieve button. I accidentally hit a “t” and that is what I got back: “t.” All that work! Well, there are no accidents. An essay can be rewritten; verse, not so much.

In the essay, I began by apologizing for the verse, thinking that the idea was right but that versification of it left perhaps a great deal to be desired. What inspired the verse and the essay was that I had just spent the preceding hour watching and listening to the lovely Maria Coman singing Psalms with male backup. The most moving was Psalm 135 (136). As I was thinking about what I had seen and heard I wondered and hoped that the beauty and virtue reflected in her voice and appearance were real and true, that she was what she seemed: This also is Thou (but neither is this Thou). That led me to reflect on the varying historical perspectives reflected in our literature, the kind of texts many teachers do not have their students read any more.

in the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century the most significant subject for seeing the divine reflected in reality was the woman, especially through the eyes of Romantic Love: for Dante it was Beatrice (see “La Vita Nuova,” #19 and, of course, “The Divine Comedy” where Beatrice, an image of divine grace, comes down into limbo to send Virgil into the dark wood to rescue “Dante,” the lost sinner. In Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” the character Una plays a similar function in helping rescue the Red Cross Knight who has seriously gone astray in the first book. My next example would be the character of Cordelia in “King Lear,” along with Desdemona in “Othello,” wherein Othello loses sight of the lady’s virtuous character, her real goodness reflected in her beauty, and sees just the opposite in her, and is so wrought up by the machinations of Iago, that he ties to remove the offending vision from reality altogether by murdering her.

Shakespeare , it seems to me, is also always concerned with the revealing function of his female characters in the wonderful romantic comedies. In Shakespeare’s last play, for example, “The Tempest,” note what Ferdinand says about Miranda when he first sees her:

“Most sure the goddess on whom these airs attend….O you wonder.“ While he continues that vision later in the play, the really interesting aspect to note here is what Miranda says when she first sees him: “I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble.” The vision works both ways as each sees in the other the possibility of the divine as well. Are poets liars (yes and no) or is what they see written so that we might see it too? Not “airy nothings” but the reality of what we were made to be. In the Bible the lunatic does see devils, Dante the lover does see the divine in Beatrice (a brow of Florence), and the Poets do document the meaning they see precisely.

My final example is Eve in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” wherein Adam (in book 4, I think) defines Eve’s revealing function before their disobedience ruins it for a time. Since I have already used up my quotting allotment I shall simply send you to the wonderful text.

Perhaps the most important point to make here finally is that Dante saw the Divine revealed in a young woman who walked the medieval streets of Florence. For an extensive commentary on this idea one would do well to read Charles Williams’ “The Figure of Beatrice.” In a significant way it’s the pervasiveness of the Christian perspective during these cultural times that enables the Christian poet to see through the cultural courtly love perspective of the time with its somewhat adulterous perspective (see Lancelot and Guinevere’s adulterous romance when she is married to King Arthur). In Dante characters who refuse to see what romantic love means and what truly stands behind it, end up in Hell; Francesca in that sense is the obvious counterpart of Beatrice, as Paolo is the counterpart of Dante who is on his way to Beatrice and Heaven and union with the Divine, the Holy Trinity.

Here is a brief glimpse of what Dante, truly in Love, sees in Beatrice:

Love saith concerning her: “How chanceth it

That flesh, which is of dust, should be thus pure?”

Then, gazing always, he makes oath: “Forsure,

This is a creature of God till now unknown.”

She hath that paleness of the pearl that’s fit

In a fair woman, so much and not more;

She is as high as Nature’s skill can soar;

Beauty is tried by her comparison.

For Dante, this particular woman reveals the Divine, the Absolute. According to the verse she is the perfection of Nature as far as Beauty is concerned, and Goodness. He sees in her, I think, the Beatrice God intended, a reality potentially present in each of us, though usually hidden or obscured by our fallen natures. It takes the eyes of the Lover (and the Poet) to see it. As Shakespeare wrote, “The lover, all as frantic, / sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.” “Brow” here would be an ordinary Egyptian girl. While King Theseus [MND] is somewhat cynical about the relationship between the “lunatic, the lover and the poet,” he is still insightful about what happens in their “seeing”: they are “of imagination all compact.” Imagination thus enables the vision to take place, especially in the poet: “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from Heaven to earth, earth to Heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.” Theseus, we might say, is a no-nonsense realist. While he has wooed Hippolita and won her love in battle, after all, he does not appear to identify himself with the lover as he defines him. Hippolita after all is a Queen, not a “brow.”

In some sense I think the role of the Virgin Mary in Christian thought and theology from the early centuries on must also have contributed to the ability to see what loving a woman really means. “Hail Mary full of grace.” Mary’s role and revealing capacity are central in Catholic Christianity. This woman is the central image of the right response to the presence of God: “Let it be to me according to thy word.” And she is without sin, what fallen humanity was meant to be. Beatrice after all leads Dante to Mary finally in the Paradiso. One step further and you might notice that the image of the lovers is a central Christian image: Christ is the bridegroom, and the Church made up of individual men and women is the Bride.

By the end of the seventeenth century as most educated people used to know a radical change in perspective had taken place in western culture, primarily I suppose due to the rise of the scientific perspective and new ways of thinking about the nature of reality. Culturally the dominant theological perspective is Deism with the dominant attitude among many intellectuals being: Neither is this Thou. The only revealing function of reality for the Deist is that of the machine and of course of the mechanic who made it: finding a well-running watch, you might easily infer that there is or at least was a watchmaker.

The best literature of the eighteenth century, I think, is the satire, reflecting in a sense that something significant in the culture has been lost. Two authors who reflect that loss regarding the revealing capacity of the feminine are Swift and Pope in the first half of the century. In “The Modest Proposal,” for example, there is the social and cultural problem of over population and starving Irish children. The genuinely socially concerned narrator has a rational solution. Let the children grow to be a year old and then sell them for food. The proposal is reasonable but inhuman and the narrator doesn’t really seem to notice that. The evil characters in Lear use the same rational justification to murder their parents and others and finally one another. What’s lost here is the perspective of “right reason,” the intuitive faculty that enables us to “just see” the inhumanity at work in Goneral, Regan, and Edmund, as well as the Modest Proposer.

A similar rational perspective is operative in “Gulliver’s Travels,” implicitly in the first two books, explicitly in the final book. The revealing capacity of the feminine has long gone. The only thing the Yahoo female reveas is lust, concupiscence, a raging desire for Gulliver. She has a human female body but lacks humanity, especially the capacity to love. Of course the horses ironically lack human bodies too but they are rational creatures who also lack the capacity to love, to the point where they reject Gulliver from their culture. Gulliver, however, is so taken with their point of view that when he returns home he rejects his loving wife to sleep in his stable with his horses. One might notice in the fina section that the true revealing capacity of the human is now located in the Portuguese sea captain who rescues Gulliver and treats him as the Good Samaritan treated the beaten Jew, even though Gulliver does nothing to deserve his kindness.

The third work that reveals the failed capacity to see the beyond in the woman is Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” where he attitude between the male and the female is that of war with all sorts of sexual overtones. The only thing translated to “Heaven” in the poem is the lock of hair, too precious to be left below. While it’s been some time since I have read the poem, it seems to me that’s the way it ends. Belinda is beautiful but she is simply a thing to be assaulted and from which a trophy might be taken. The meaning of honor, the virtue, is thus lost or deflected.

This “thinking” was apparently written last December and I have done nothing since then for this weblog. I don’t know why I didn’t “publish it then; I think I wanted to develop the eighteenth century ideas from “Gulliver” and “The Rape of the Lock.” However, after more or less rereading this prose and verse, I have decided to, so to speak, put it out there. And move on. Remains to find an image:

Well, that was interesting. I hit this image from my files to see what it was and the machine attached it. Obviously it’s an image of the Resurrection, but whose I don’t remember. I’m afraid if I hit something wrong the entire page will disappear; so somewhat appropriately for the third week of Easter, the Resurrection it is.

Heaven or Oblivion? les

Either/Or

No soul ascends to Heaven,

Absent of its flesh and blood,

For body and soul we sense are one.

We die and rise as Christ has done

Or naked descend to formless mud.

The choice it seems is obvious:

Either oblivion becomes our earthly doom

Or God remembers who we are,

Filled with His flesh and blood,

And raises us from the deathly tomb

Like Noah coming from the flood.

I thought about including these verses with the last “published” page, or starting a new page. The reason I started the new page is that I have been reading N.T. Wright’s books, his biography of the apostle Paul and “On Earth as In Heaven.” As I told my friend Fred the other day his theology has created in me what I would call a final conversion in the sense that I have come to understand, know and believe something that has troubled me for some time. In other words the closer I get to the grave the less I could see my soul flying off to Heaven when I died. The primary reason was that over the years, especially lately, it has become clear that what makes me me, so to speak, is the flesh and blood basis of my self. My flesh and blood brain enables me to think; the brain is the basis of my consciousness. And dead is dead!

The image that stood over against the knowledge of the death of myself and of death as the end of “things” is, unsurprisingly, the knowledge of Jesus’s resurrection. As the texts make clear he came out of the tomb different but the same. At first his friends failed to recognize him, but then they did: different but the same. And the resurrection was a flesh and blood resurrection: he ate fish with them, he walked and talked with them, he offered Thomas the opportunity to touch his wounds. Instead, as I seem to remember, Thomas dropped to his knees and proclaimed, “My Lord, my God.” That proclamation or acknowledgement is at the heart of the Christian faith. See the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians, chapter 2.

What impressed me about Wright’s theology and his reading of the texts is that he rejected the idea that the early Christians talked about “going to Heaven” as a consequence of Christ’s resurrection. Instead they understood that Heaven is coming here and that coming began with Jesus’ resurrection, as well as his proclamation that the kingdom of God was at hand as well as to come. Two points here will clarify that idea, I hope. In “the Lord’s Prayer” Jesus teaches us to pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” The second convincing point for me is the image in the book of Revelation where we see Heaven coming down to earth. Earth is to be transformed, the graves are to be opened, and the dead shall rise. Interestingly, I just heard heard a short homily by Bishop Barron where he was explaining the passage from Ezekiel, I think, where the graves are opened and God clothes the dry bones in the dry desert graves once again in flesh and blood. In any case, I think, the notion of “going to Heaven” when we die makes a mockery of what Jesus endured on the cross and the truth of the resurrection, which ought to be at the center of our faith. A passage or two from Wright should help clarify this theology.

The first quote is from page 19 of my kindle version of Wright’s book “On Earth…” and it comes as well from the biography of Paul I have been reading.

“With the resurrection, we uncover the roots of Paul’s entire public career. 1 Corinthians 15 is not simply the underlying reasoning behind the whole letter. It is basic to everything Paul believed. It is the reason he became an apostle in the first place. The Messiah’s resurrection has constituted him as the world’s true Lord, as already the world’s rightful ruler, and “He has to go on ruling, you see, until “he has put all his enemies under his feet.’” Victory has already been won over the dark powers of sin and death that have crippled the world and, with it, the humans who were supposed to be God’s image-bearers in the world. This victory will at last be completed when death itself is destroyed. For Paul, learning to be a Messiah person—learning to live within the great biblical story now culminating in Jesus and the spirit—was all about having the mind and heart, the imagination and understanding transformed, so that it made sense to live in this already/not-yet world. This was not the easiest place to live, but it was certainly one of the most exhilarating. The Messiah has already been raised; all the Messiah’s people will be raised at his “royal arrival.” Christian living, loving, praying, celebrating, suffering, and not least the apostolic ministries that have nothing to do with social prestige or clever rhetoric—all this makes the sense it makes within this eschatological framework. That is the main thing Paul wants to tell the Corinthians. Sitting there in Ephesus, watching the gospel go to work in homes and shops, confronting the powers of the world and seeing magicians burn their books, Paul can sound confident. This is the future, and it works. What they do in the present, within God’s new world, is not in vain.

—Paul: A Biography 256–57”

The second quote comes several kindle pages later (21); both should give the reader a good idea of the perspective at work here:

“A good many Easter hymns start by assuming that the point of Easter is that it proves the existence of life after death and encourages us to hope for it. This is then regularly, but ironically, combined with a view of that life after death in which the specific element of resurrection has been quietly removed. “May we go where he is gone,” we sing at the end of one well-known hymn, “rest and reign with him in heaven!” But that is precisely not the point that the New Testament draws from Jesus’s resurrection. Yes, there is a promised rest after the labors of this life, and the word heaven may be an appropriate, though vague, way of denoting where this rest takes place. But this time of rest is the prelude to something very different, which will emphatically involve earth as well. Earth—the re-newed earth—is where the reign will take place, which is why the New Testament regularly speaks not of our going to be where Jesus is but of his coming to where we are, as we saw in the previous part of the book.

—Surprised by Hope 190”

[Reprinted in On Earth as in Heaven]

Image: I chose the image of the Garden of Eden and that original sin of disobedience wherein death enters into our lives since the presence of Christ and his resurrection are what stand over against it in Christian theology. Christ defeats death which makes a new Heaven and new Earth possible. For a clarification of what I have been trying to explain, read Wright!

SMALL VERSE - LES

Catholic Stuff

Across the room, resting,

Silent, on my bookshelf,

Our Lord and kind Mary,

Keeping track of myself.

Christ on my crucifix,

Looking off to one side,

Ashamed to look at me

Where I’m lost in my pride?

The Virgin beside Him,

Holding Him as a child,

Alpha and omega,

For my sin thus defiled.

Come down from that small cross,

Turn your head toward my face;

Forgive my imploring

For a sign of your grace.

_________________________

Not Donne nor Herbert nor Crashaw nor Vaughn,

Just pathetic small verses that help me get on

With my damaged and broken self, my low self esteem:

It’s either write small verse or stand down and scream!

_________________________

A series of small verse (rather like small beer, perhaps, though I’ve forgotten what that means, mostly, but see below for a definition):

#1

Six empty water jugs

And they’ve run out of wine;

Just fill them with water;

That will be my first sign.

#2

Each person is thirsty

For the water of life

That fulfills all longing

Like a man for a wife.

#3

The universe demands

That we watch and be smart,

Give grateful thanksgiving

For each small walk-on part.

#4

La vida es sueño;

Thus says the good poet.

Awaken, my dear love,

For in time you know it.

                 #5

Sunlight hit the solemn cross,

A metal one of three;

It burst into a silver flame,

Its source concealed from me.

[more “Catholic Stuff,”/ these three “empty” crosses are hanging from the edge of the bookshelf across from my chair. The sight was quite spectacular to find the middle one blazing away like that when I woke up this morning. I was still in bed then, the curtains were tightly closed, but there it was, a brilliant “silver flame” between two metal crosses that remained in the dark. I understand that the brilliance was a natural phenomenon, but I also understand it as a sign of God’s presence: the God who frequently makes His presence known in secondary causes. Up above after all (fourth stanza) I asked, begged, implored for a sign of God’s grace. les]

O give thanks to the Lord for he is good/For His steadfast love endures forever. [Psalm 136, more or less.]

O God thou art my God/My soul thirsts for thee/My flesh longs after thee/In a barren and dry land/Where no water is. [Psalm 63, more or less].

___________________________

Small beer

A modern Belgian tafelbier

Type Lager or ale

Country of origin Europe and North America

Alcohol by volume Between 0.5% to 2.8%

[Text under the Wikipedia image of the bottle of small beer.]

__________________________

“Small beer (also known as small ale or table beer) is a lager or ale that contains a lower amount of alcohol by volume than most others, usually between 0.5% and 2.8%.[1][2] Sometimes unfiltered and porridge-like, it was a favoured drink in Medieval Europe and colonial North America compared with more expensive beer containing higher levels of alcohol.[3] Small beer was also produced in households for consumption by children and by servants.”

__________________________

[I seem to have gotten it right after all! The image is that from the Wikipedia site under the category of, you guessed it, small beer, but there is more interesting text about small beer there, if you are interested. In any case now you can see how the image and meaning apply to the verses, metaphorically speaking. Ha! les]

A TRINITY - LES

In truth I posted the first verse once before, but then I wrote two more on the same pattern in order to put them all together. I always knew the subject of the third one, but I could never get it to work in the least little bit, until now. I think it’s all right to find the second one humorous; I find it humorous and extremely serious too, of course. Each of the three verses relies on things that we know but that aren’t spelled out in the verse. We all know the consequence of Pilate’s decision, for example; we all know who Judas is and what he did shortly after the meal; and we all know what Jesus did at Cana. The image or painting below suggests a rather solemn occasion, which I find hard to believe unless Jesus and Mary are just being informed about the wine problem, and that Jesus’ joy had not yet manifested itself here. The meaning of the painting in some sense hinges on how we understand the man who is bending toward Jesus holding what looks like a bowl. I assume that he is the “chief steward”; I just can’t decide whether it’s before or after, though his face seems to suggest before. There’s a kind of pinched look there perhaps. I thought “The Chosen” did a nice presentation of this episode in Jesus’ life.

Truth

“What is truth?” quipped jesting Pilate;

All the Roman boys looked grim.

The Jewish boys glanced all around;

One pointed and said, “Him.”

Passover

“This is my body, this my blood,”

Said Jesus on that darksome night.

“That’ll be the day,” whispered Judas;

“Sometimes I think He’s not too bright!”

Cana: “Woman!”

Mary laughed and looked Him in the eye;

She was her love bestowing.

“Do whatever He tells you,” said she,

“For His joy is overflowing.”

In the second chapter of the gospel of John, it looks that Jesus is trying to stop his mother’s intervention: “My hour is not yet come.” She however barrels right on, and of course Jesus follows through accordingly. That his hour is now come as a consequence of this somewhat public miracle means the “sword” for Mary and the cross for Jesus! He might well want to delay the beginning unless of course he is playing with her Jewish motherliness, a behavior which she might well understand. Actually, having looked at the image yet again, Jesus, it seems, is in the act of performing the miracle and manifesting “his glory.” Often I find that being slow and a bit dense is a real handicap, but sometimes it even might be a virtue. Curiouser and curiouser. les

The passage in John 2: 1-12 is well worth reading again:

1 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 6 Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8 He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. 9 When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

12 After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples; and they remained there a few days. (NRSV)

Image: The Marriage at Cana by Master of the Catholic Kings, c. 1495/1497 [The MET, New York]. [Not quite a happy occasion yet, since it looks as though the jugs are all empty. Or maybe not.]

LORD of the DANCE (trad); QUEEN of the Dance-les

Lyrics for Lord of the Dance

I danced on the morning when the world began
I danced in the moon and the stars and the Sun
I came out of Heaven and I danced on the Earth
In Bethlehem I had my birth

Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the lord of the dance, said he
And I lead you all wherever you may be...
And I lead you all in the dance, said he.

I danced for the scribes and the Pharisees;
They would not dance and they wouldn't follow me.
I danced for the fishermen James and John;
They came with me and the dance went on.

Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the lord of the dance, said he
And I lead you all wherever you may be...
And I lead you all in the dance, said he

I danced on a Sabbath and I cured the lame;
The holy people thought it was a shame.
They cut me, they stripped me, and they hung me high
And left me there on a cross to die.

Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the lord of the dance, said he
And I lead you all wherever you may be...
And I lead you all in the dance, said he

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black

It's hard to dance with the Devil on your back

They buried my body, but I'd gone...

I am the dance and I still go on

Dance, dance, wherever you may be

I am the lord of the dance, said he

And I lead you all wherever you may be...

And I lead you all in the dance, said he

Well they cut me down but I lept up high

I am the light that will never, never die

I live in you and you live in me...

I am the lord of the dance, said he

Dance, dance, wherever you may be

I am the lord of the dance, said he

And I lead you all wherever you may be...

And I lead you all in the dance, said he

Dance, dance, wherever you may be

I am the lord of the dance, said he

And I lead you all wherever you may be...

And I lead you all in the dance, said he

There is a young lady in the a cappella group, Voces8, a choral group I delight in listening to, who is quite lovely. She’s the tallest female singer in the group and has a beautiful soprano voice. She also has brown eyes and long dark hair that frames her high cheek bones and lovely face. I confess that my mind sometimes wanders from the music to her, for which of course I am deeply ashamed.

In any case having heard the song, The Lord of the Dance, sung in a college choir concert recently, I started thinking about how the feminine version of the song might work. Though honestly the feminine version should focus the Virgin Mary since the male version is Christ, nonetheless my imagination went in another direction and I wrote a poem (sort of) that a friend and I rather liked. As I went to copy it from my notes to Squarespace, I accidentally hit cut instead of copy. There is a button to retrieve such accidentally lost items and I hit it only to discover that my finger had accidentally hit the letter V after the cut; consequently, when I hit the return button all I got was “V.” I of course was sick since the absolutely best work that I had ever written was gone forever. Sigh. I tried to remember the verses, but couldn’t though I did manage an approximation of sorts, nowhere as brilliant as the lost version, but here it is anyway. The idea is the same and the rhythm of the verses almost always reflects the rhythm of the original song. Just in case you noticed it coming through in places. My lines are all 10 syllables (a poor man’s iambic pentameter here and there). Still, I kind of like this poor thing even if it isn’t as good as the lost version. It occurs to me that my experience with the original mirrors the action in the verses that follow, one loss reflecting another loss. Anyway!

The Faerie Lover

I saw her dancing in the twilight breeze;

Her long dark hair floating free, best to please.

Over the meadow, through the green green grass,

She danced—flowing free, the bright bonny lass.

Refrain:

Dance, dance, wherever you may be;

I am the Queen of the dance, said she.

And I lead you all wherever you may be,

And I lead you all in the dance, said she.

Her form lean and tall, shapely and serene,

She seemed a regal, royal faerie queen.

She moved with grace, dancing toward me at last,

Stealing my heart from my chest as she passed.

Her ruby red lips, begging to be kissed,

I took her in my arms in that pale mist;

I kissed her brow, her lips, her cheeks like snow,

I eased her down to the cool ground below.

What happened next I truly cannot say,

When I awoke she had gone far away,

Leaving a hole where my heart once had been,

A theft that only I could count as sin.

To this day I’ve searched hill and dusky vale,

For a trace of her, all to no avail.

Now I’m lost with an aching, empty breast,

And a yearning for which there is no rest,

No rest.

Refrain:

Dance, dance, wherever you may be;

I am the Queen of the dance, said she.

And I lead you all wherever you may be,

And I lead you all in the dance, said she.

Image: Andrea Haines, the lovely lady from Voces 8. Try their version of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring with Nick Deutsch on oboe.

Prayer: Pope Clement XI; Commentary: Esolen

[I read this essay today and thought I would like to have it somewhere where I could come back to it regularly and that no better place was here. Esolen does the Poetry and Praise article for Magnificat each month, though the article is available for only one month on line. In any case, I loved the prayer as well as Esolen’s Commentary; thus I “published” it here. les]

Riches Forgotten

Anthony Esolen

To be a Roman Catholic in our time, I’ve found, is at times like being heir to a vast estate with many a beautiful mansion and garden, enclosed woodlands, secret springs and streams, sudden waterfalls, and tree-hidden cliffs. But instead of seeking out the beauty and fostering the truth, we spend much of our time drinking cheap wine and lying abed into the afternoon.

I blame myself for it too, because I’m an old man and I’m still learning my prayers. Here is one that takes my breath away, the Universal Prayer, attributed to Pope Clement XI (r. 1700–1721).

Clement was a wise and holy man, thrust into the papacy against his will, in a world that swung wildly between religious severity and effete license. Imagine having to deal with the Jansenist movement, with its Christ of narrow arms, dying on the cross only for those predestined to be saved, and its gloomy view of every human love as evil unless it is supernatural love. Imagine that you have to reckon also with the court of the immensely ambitious and worldly Louis XIV, and the rivals in the War of the Spanish Succession, with unreliable friends in Spain and an embittered former friend in Austria, all while the Turks bide their time and await the opportunity to strike from the east. It is a century that sees Pascal on one side and Voltaire on the other—as in America we would have the fiery revivalist Jonathan Edwards and the scoffing rationalist Thomas Paine.

What prayer would you compose for such a time?

So the heir one day sets out on the estate, and he finds a little chapel overgrown with wild grapevines, and a most powerful and beautiful prayer. I will give it in its entirety, touching up the translation here and there.

The gem

I believe, O Lord, but may I believe more firmly; I hope, but may I hope more securely; I love, but may I love more ardently; I sorrow, but may I sorrow more deeply.

I adore you as my first beginning; I long for you as my last end; I praise you as my constant benefactor; I invoke you as my gracious defender.

By your wisdom direct me, by your righteousness restrain me, by your clemency console me, by your power protect me.

I offer you, Lord, my thoughts, as toward you, my words, as about you, my deeds, as following you, my trials, as for your sake.

I will whatever you will, I will it because you will, I will it in the way you will, I will it so long as you will.

I pray, Lord, enlighten my understanding, inflame my will, cleanse my heart, sanctify my soul.

May I weep for sins past, repel temptations to come, correct evil leanings, nurture fit virtues.

Give me, good God, love for you, hatred for myself, zeal for my neighbor, contempt for the world.

May I strive to obey those above me, to aid those beneath me, to have care for my friends, to spare my enemies.

May I conquer sensuality by austerity, avarice by generosity, anger by gentleness, lukewarmness by fervor.

Render me prudent in planning, steadfast in dangers, patient in adversity, humble in prosperity.

Make me, O Lord, attentive at prayer, moderate at meals, diligent at work, firm in purpose.

May I be careful to maintain inward innocence, outward modesty, exemplary behavior, a well-governed life.

May I be always watchful in subduing nature, fostering grace, observing your law, winning salvation.

May I learn from you how precarious is the earthly, how great the divine, how fleeting the temporal, how lasting the eternal.

Grant that I may prepare for death, fear judgment, flee hell, gain paradise. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayer as poetry

Clement was prodigious in his accomplishments but as humble about them as if they had been the work of someone else. People recognized it, too. It’s said that when news of his election reached the Protestant city of Nuremberg, the bells rang out for joy and the burghers ordered a medal stamped in his honor.

Certainly he had an ear for poetry, for the balance of idea with idea in words that echo one another in sound and sense, for amplification, contrast, reversal, return, crescendo and diminuendo, anticipation, climax, and completion. All these come across in the Latin original, because in Latin, when words have the same grammatical function, they often end with the same sounds. That’s the case again and again in Clement’s petitions. Thoughts, words, deeds, and trials are, in the Latin, cogitanda, dicenda, facienda, ferenda, literally, things to be thought, things to be said, things to be done, things to be borne. When Clement begs certain gifts of the Spirit, in Latin, it is noun and adjective, four times, always in the same form: amorem tui, odium mei, zelum proximi, contemptum mundi, literally, love of-you, hatred of-me, zeal of-neighbor, contempt of-world.

That’s a master at work. Recall the two great commandments Jesus gives us: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:37, 39). These two are inseparable. That is why Clement has them “rhyme” with each other, so to speak: love of God goes along with zeal for my neighbor. I am not to envy him; the words jealous and zealous have the same origin. I am to be as zealous on his behalf as most people are jealous on their own.

Look at each set of four petitions as a stanza. Sometimes, as above, the first and third petitions chime, along with the second and the fourth. Sometimes the four descend, from a great first principle to a most quiet and humble application. So Clement prays to will what God wills. That is the principle. From there it follows that he wills because and as and so long as God wills. Sometimes the four ascend, as if you were climbing a ladder to heaven. So Clement prays that God will illumine his mind, inflame his will, and cleanse his heart—all to the great end that his soul may be made holy.

Not yellow paint, but gold

I understand that some petitions in the prayer strike our ears as a bit, well, unusual, antiquated, even foreboding.

Suppose you go to a land whose culture is quite different from yours, and suppose the people are, in an ordinary human way, healthy and content. Unless you are a confirmed bigot, you give them the benefit of the doubt. You say, “Maybe these people foster a virtue we have neglected or forgotten. Maybe we can learn from them.” If we would be gracious and deign to learn from a merely human way of life, why not be humble and deign to learn from a holy man, or from the evangelists and apostles and the Lord himself? When something jars against our sensibilities, why must we muffle it or deck it in modern garb or stuff it in the attic? Is our current life so consistently marvelous that I should give it the only say in how I pray or what I think?

Let’s then look at a couple of things Clement prays for that we typically do not. The first leaps out at us: he prays to be struck with greater sorrow. We may assume that he is sorry for his sins, but he does not actually say so. Perhaps there is a great mystery here. Jesus is the man of sorrows foretold by Isaiah (53:3), and Mary, her heart pierced with seven swords, joins her sorrowing Son. Imagine someone incapable of sorrow. Wouldn’t he also be incapable of love? If the angels weep for our sins, and yet their joy is undisturbed, can we not say that our love and joy, on this side of the new Jerusalem, must proceed along the way of sorrow, the high and enlightening ascent of Calvary?

What about contempt for the world? Let’s be honest. The beloved apostle who says that God is love (1 Jn 4:8) is also most vehement in his rejection of the world, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world (1 Jn 2:16). You cannot love God and love what John, echoing the Lord, calls “the world.” Think of it. We are not talking about birds and beasts, trees and flowers, sun and rain. Nowhere in the words of our Lord do we find dismissiveness for the birds of the air that God feeds, or for the lilies of the field that he robes. But they are not the name plate on the desk, the vice-presidency of a corporation, a star on a walk of fame, a fat bank account, prestige, power, spotlights, attention—dust, ashes, vanity and a striving after wind (Eccl 1:14).

Is it any surprise that love for this world should supplant or stifle our love for God? Clear away the briars, then, and pray with Pope Clement, that we may in our last hour “prepare for death, fear judgment, flee hell, gain paradise.”

Anthony Esolen is professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House), and author of four volumes of essays, How the Church Has Changed the World (Magnificat).

Image: The Wailing Wall by Salvador Dalí; 1975. (Israel Museum).

NEW VERSE - LES

Another Tale

My shadow,

a tail,

that thing behind me:

Someday I’ll catch it

Someday without fail.

It makes my mind flutter,

It’s slippery as butter;

It sends me in circles

Just out of my grasp,

That thing behind me,

So bloody darn fast!

That thing behind me,

[Pause]

I’ll catch it at last!

The Glimpse

Out through the window, today,

Out past the myriad leaves, blowing,

Past the branches, the trees themselves,

With white clouds in the south only, this day,

I catch a glimpse of bright blue sky,

Small square, but then I see them

Everywhere, through the leaves,

Brief glimpses, stretched out

Behind everything, silent,

Intense, beyond, light scattered

Blue, azure sky, from some source

Known but not known, beautifully bright,

Out through my window, today, holy, eternal.

DOG TALES THREE - LES

Three Dog Tales:

#1 Barkley’s Bowl

Barkley the Beagle, the strange mystery mutt,

Sat on his butt on the floor;

With his ears perked up, his eyes alert,

He stared at the closed pantry door.

He thought he had heard certain stirrings,

Slow small breathings and tiny feet scurrying;

Putting his nose to the closed pantry door,

He smelled a mouse plot occurring.

Barkley the Beagle, the strange mystery mutt,

Returned to his special soft chair

To consider the ramifications

Of mice invading his lair.

Vigilance, he saw, was essential

In protecting the food in his bowl;

Alas, while thinking he fell sound asleep,

Thus missing the mice pouring out from their hole.

How many mice came forth from the pantry,

Only a counter could tell;

Once they had finished the food in his bowl

Their sentry alert rang a tiny mouse bell.

The mice quickly scattered as Barkley awoke,

And found that the food in his bowl had vanished.

Barkley then barked in dismal frustration,

And thought, “My goodness, I’m famished!”

But with mice well fed and Barkley in bed

And the dawn in the east slowly breaking,

The house settled down with only the sound

That the wind in the trees was making.

 #2     Crusty’s Demise

Crusty the dog, who was old as the hills,

Lived an arthritic condition;

His hair was white; it looked like the blight

That occurs without constant remission.

On Saturday past Crusty breathed his last,

Hardly a tale worth telling;

Yet Crusty was loved by the angels above

And Mary Sue Jennifer Welling.

She cried as her father buried her dog

In the backyard of their dwelling,

She cried and she prayed for Crusty’s old soul,

Did Mary Sue Jennifer Welling.

At the foot of the old backyard apple

Lies Crusty, who once bit a vet!  Yet,

Life’s greatest treasure, loved beyond measure,

Was Mary Sue Jennifer Welling’s dear pet!

 #3      Griswald’s Triumph

Griswald is a tough, watchful pooch

Who lives on a far distant farm

With cattle and cows, sheep and a duck,

To say nothing of chickens that frequently cluck,

Though he never does creatures much harm.

Except for that evil, foul-noisy cock,

The rooster who’s called Uncle Clive,

Who starts his vile crowing,

such discord he’s sowing,

Every morning well before five.

At that early hour this day

Uncle Clive should have stayed in his coop;

Instead he’s out strolling, strutting and preening,

Preparing himself for much boastful crowing,

Never dreaming he might disappear into soup.

For Griswald, a gentle-souled terrier,

Had heard way too much of the noise,

From Uncle Clive’s perambulations

While checking his hens’ laying stations

And crowing with pride, and some poise.

Thus Griswald now lay, trembling, in wait

For Uncle Clive’s passing his way;

And the whole farm rejoiced,

Not one eye was moist,

That Uncle Clive vanished that day.

Dog Tales        

Image: not Crusty but Beatrice, my elder son and daughter-in-law’s well beloved pet who recently died of old age and dementia. Like Crusty she was loved and loving. Her loss, as well as the loss of all our beloved pets, is excruciating!

Saints and Sinners - LES

All Hallows Eve: Saints and Sinners

Already Planted in the Kingdom of God

Lord, you have asked me, ignorant and sinful, to become holy as my Father who is in heaven. In seeking this priority, the fundamental and essential means for holiness, I prayed that you would teach me simply how to become a saint. But your answer caused me to lose heart. Then I remembered your word: I thank you, Father, that you have revealed these things to babes. I see clearly that every saint has his or her particular “style,” no one of them resembles another. Each saint has his or her own way of holiness. Yet a common way exists that everyone, without exception, must undertake. I must resemble the Lord Jesus. I must do the will of him who sent me. I have kept the commandments that the Father gave me. This means that I must accomplish the tasks of the present moment, Lord, and respond to your grace at every instant, placing total confidence in you and leaving you free to accomplish in me your plan and not mine. I must collaborate with all of my strength. Thus, my specific role will assume its proper splendor, modestly but with the necessary audacity! It was you, Lord Jesus, who told your apostles: You will do even greater works than these! Father, make me the littlest of all!

The saints lived on earth as much as I do. The saints were swept along by the same current of time. Their days were twenty-four hours long and not one minute more! Their lives were not longer in years: Francis Xavier died at the age of forty-six, Thérèse of the Child Jesus at twenty-four, and Rose of Lima at thirty-one. But the years they lived were incomparably intense and concentrated because they recognized that time had the value of eternity. God works through the saints who collaborate with God. How much we must esteem a single moment of the Lord’s work! We build holiness in the present moment not by turning to the past or anticipating the future. That is why the saints treasured the present moment; without neglecting a single instant, they made each moment a response of their whole being to God’s love. The saints lived in the present as in an immense ocean of peace because they already lived in that unending present of eternity.

Venerable Francis Xavier Nguyên Văn Thuân

Cardinal Nguyên Văn Thuân († 2002) was imprisoned by the Vietnamese government for thirteen years, during which time he secretly sent prayers and spiritual writings to his flock. / From Prayers of Hope: Words of Courage, English edition. Copyright © 2012, Daughters of St. Paul/Pauline Books & Media, Boston, MA. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Meager Offerings:

Ecstasy

If only I were a saint, not a sinner,

Done with the costly and searing trade,

Then I could pray and know for certain

My heart was pierced by His sharp, loving blade!

les

The Lost Pilgrim

Would I were a good man,

Instead of mediocre;

Would I were a righteous man,

Not just a crippled joker,

Telling tales to ease my pain,

Stumbling through the darksome rain,

Down a lost and lonely road,

Burdened by a dreary load,

Far from my home in a distant land.

Would I were a good man.

les

THE VOICE WITHIN - LES

  The Voluble Self

The interior voice never stops talking;

It’s the voice of that constant distraction.

Try hard to pray, it says speaking loudly,

Comically at times if you understand:

Hail Mary full of leaves blowing fiercely—                    5

Full of grace but not the leaves or the wind;

Blessed art thou among women, Blessed

Is the fruit of the apple, pear, the oak,

Mighty oak, where did that come from? our yard,

Holding its leaves till spring.  Damn!  Hail Mary           10

Full of grace, blessed art thou among girls,

Not girls, women, who are lovely in ads,

Lovely in springtime, lovely in summer,

When the wind blows softly through long dark hair—   15

It’s no use, the voice of distraction wins,

Wins today. If only the hot fierce wind

From above would descend, blow the mind clear,

Of the ever-talking interior self

So that I might be free to hear God near,                         20

The still small voice behind the noise, sudden, searing!

HALLOWEEN? - LES

Halloween approaches and All Hallows, so what we have here, so far, is a somewhat light-hearted approach to blood and death. 👻. Or not. 💀 ! Nota bene. In the Berea Cemetery a person might encounter towering oaks at the end of the first circle. I used to spend a lot of time in the Berea Cemetery in my somewhat athletic youth, running, of course. What I loved most about running was finishing. The closest I ever got to breaking 20 minutes on a 3.1 mile course was 20.4 minutes. But then my time started falling and my body started deteriorating, more and more, until here I am, stuck in a hospital bed and a lift chair, surrounded by what’s left of my books, whose pages I can no longer turn easily. However, thanks to modern technology I have an iPad and a kindle and I can still see, mostly, though the pressure in my eyes has gotten to be such that I need daily drops to fend off glaucoma. Alas.

Now, for those of you who think running is not profitable, I once found ten dollars stuck in cemetery mud as though it had been there for a bit. Thanks to Annie Dillard and Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek I would always stop even to pick up a penny, to say nothing of ten dollars or any amount in between!

I have good memories of the cemetery and not just from running there. In more liberal times my wife and I would walk our dogs over there; now there are signs of prohibition. “No dogs allowed.” My favorite companion back then was Lancelot, our old English sheepdog. His hair covered his face and eyes, so that I could sneak away from him, run and hide behind grave stones and large memorials. When he discovered that I had disappeared, he would race off after me and never failed in finding me. You could say he had a nose that knew, and it never failed him in hunting me. We would play that game on the college campus too. Once on the college campus when he took off after me he ran smack into a large tree that knocked him back on his butt. He was not hurt and he quickly found me, as he always did. How many dogs have we buried in the last fifty years? All beloved, all missed, terribly missed. Life is very good, and I think all is gift, starting with time and place.

Time, memory, mortality. What an interesting reality we inhabit. For excellent poetry on our situation in the so-called modern world, I recommend T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The poem is difficult but well worth the effort. Thomas Howard’s Dove Descending is a good commentary to read along with poem, which I think is the contemporary equivalent to Dante’s Comedy. Both works have the same concerns and may end at the same place, worth your consideration.

I Am

Walking about in the graveyard

Under the towering oak

Until the stone that bears my name

Says “stop!” for death’s no joke!

Such sardonic laughter

Such sardonic glee

Issues from the stone cold ground

And all the graves around me.

I turn to flee this darksome place,

But ghosts and ghouls surround me;

The chill of death is in the air;

Mortality confounds me.

Alas, amen, good night, adieu:

To all I bid my fond farewell

And trust that God in his good grace

Will keep me from the fire of Hell.

Blood

She injects the anesthetic

Into the unsuspecting arm

Unseen, unheard, most often,

She escapes, when full, no harm.

Unless of course you glimpse her

And, sudden smash, she’s bought the farm.

All that’s left’s the swelling red spot

And, an itch that’s three alarm!

ON THE BEACH - LES

Sand Castles

In the ocean’s ebb and flow

Waves break upon the beach;

Up above the sea gulls soar,

Competing each with each,

For the food that’s washed ashore,

And stranded on that beach.

I watch them fight and frolic,

Above the ever-shifting sand,

Urged by primal hunger

As are all upon the land.

How many urges drive us,

Like gluttony, greed and lust,

To betray our restless natures,

Before we turn to dust?

Urge and urge and urge again,

Waves break upon the land,

Reducing every castle there

To nothing but damp sand.

[For those of you like patterns, here is a bit of Wikipedia (maybe) information that might delight you as it delights me. After all patterns abound; they are in the Dance as the Dance is the Divine and absolute pattern. Probably.]

“The Fibonacci sequence is a set of integers (the Fibonacci numbers) that starts with a zero, followed by a one, then by another one, and then by a series of steadily increasing numbers. The sequence follows the rule that each number is equal to the sum of the preceding two numbers. The Fibonacci sequence begins with the following 14 integers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233... Each number, starting with the third, adheres to the prescribed formula. For example, the seventh number, 8, is preceded by 3 and 5, which add up to 8.”

GETHSEMANE- LES

[A work in progress, perhaps]

Gethsemane

3 a.m.

        I

Open to me the gates of justice:

I will enter and thank the LORD.  Ps. 118: 19

Awake!  Wake up in the garden!

Can you not watch with me,

My friends?  Darkness abounds, encroaches.

Where is the light? Where, Father?

The Sun is below the horizon!                  5

The flaming sword, lit long ago,

The nameless bush ignited, ages gone,

Drying vast acres of sand.

The little dog’s frightened,

Licking my hand.                                        10

Awake!  Wake up in the garden,

Unable to praise?  This moment.

Then arise, weary sluggards!

It’s not one of those days!                         14

Not breakfast as usual,

There’s no time for toast!

Are you awake, good friends, said the host.

You’ve slept much longer than most!       18

Open to me the gates of justice:

I will enter and thank the LORD.  Ps. 118: 19

3 p.m.

        II

Thank God it’s Friday!

Half asleep at my desk,

I’m trying to think;

For a bottle of wine I’ve hidden.

Trying to pray, Hail Mary….            5

I open the drawer, looking,          

See the small pest:     

The little mouse looking,

Sniffing the dry air,

Trying to suss out its nest.              10

The park bench is cold, father!

I shiver with dread.

Fat pigeons surround me,

I’m fresh out of bread.                     14

I’ve a letter to post

Feeling much worse.

She’ll think I’m a ghost,

Haunting her world:  Hail Mary…   18

Open to me the gates of justice:

I will enter and thank the LORD.  Ps. 118: 19

9 p.m.

        III

Come, my dear son,

Time for your prayers:

“Father, what shall I pray?”

Just one decade tonight:

“Hail Mary, full of…” Doubt.

Descending the stairs to the kitchen.

Darkness is still overwhelming.

Makes me want to scream, shout!

The cat sleeps soundly

Dreaming of mice.

“Father, may I have some water?”

He shouts.  I fill his glass at the sink.

His nightlight glows softly;

I, climbing the stairs with his drink?

Last chance to pray;

The house is a dark place;

I’m down on my knees, at last—

Awake, alone, full of grace!

Father, Hail Mary

Open to me the gates of justice:

I will enter and thank the LORD. Ps. 118: 19 [Grail edition]

I realize that as a “poem” this doesn’t quite work. However, I have been studying Eliot’s “4 Quartets” and I was/am trying to see how he does it, the verse form, the images, the allusions, and most of all the coherence. My reference books are first, the poem. I long poem in four parts: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding; for the four elements as understood in the Medieval model: Air, Earth, Fire and Water, suggests Thomas Howard in his discussion in Dove Descending. For me studying Eliot’s poetry as I am doing is like taking a graduate school course. My problem is that I can’t hold on to meanings for very long after I read them, alas! Still Eliot’s poem is the greatest poetic achievement in modern literature, just as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the greatest novel. I have spoken. Eliot is difficult but well worth the effort it takes to go with him to where he has gone. In that sense this poem is very much like Dante’s Comedy. You might say it’s a pilgrimage or journey to the heart of reality. Thomas Howard is a good guide.

GARDEN TO DESERT - LES

Adam: the Fall

Standing at the foot of the tree

I cannot foresee the descent,

Just that freedom seems ripe to me,

A fruit to be plucked, an event.

Leaning there, with blue sky above,

Rich cerulean, (the color of love)

I see her approach, through the flowers—

Unheeded, her mystical powers.

For every attraction

An unseen reaction

Lost in the breath of the day

Like each word I find hard to say.

Odd,  bright birds their descant leaving,

Silent, as if they were grieving;

The little dogs lag far behind,

An action quite fresh to their kind.

The oft swirling sun slips away

Casting patches of darkness this day;

The little dogs sit in the grass,

Hoping confusion might pass.

Her beauty is glory uncovered,

Her gift remains undiscovered;

Unthinking I pluck from her hand,

Turning freedom and bliss into sand.

CHOICES: Fortune; Temptation; Pride

Experimental Verse

New verse/Eliot

Printed

Death by Water

Master, teacher, Eliot knows

Knows how one might adore

Sailing on a well made ship,

Embarking from a distant shore.

Release the hounds!

Let the hunt begin!

See how they run, leap and bound!

Hi ho, hi ho, tantivy!

The winds blow hot

The winds blow cold

Through the seas

In my ship I go

Hi ho, hi ho tantivy.

I shake and tremble

I’ve grown too old.

To lead the hunt

Requires the bold.

Hi ho, hi ho, tantivy!

In the midst of a very fierce sea

Chaos rises under me;

Sailing o’er the deep abyss

Dying for one holy kiss.

The timber torn from the side of the ship,

Floating on the dangerous waves,

Forms a pattern of damp crossed staves—

Enough, perhaps, to save a man adrift?

The water’s deep

Quite deeper than you’d think;

Trust one who’s walking—

You won’t sink.

Hi ho, hi ho, tantivy!

For the winds blow high,

And the winds blow cold

But I’m not brave

And down I go!

No more hi ho tantivy.

And if I drowned. And if I drowned

Will these old bones rise again?

Take me to a distant shore

Where conversation’s not a bore?

“Time for a séance,” someone said.

“Turn out the lights; call forth the dead!”

“One rap for yes; two raps for no;

Take my hand and don’t let go!”

“Why Mr. S you don’t look well

Light the candle if you’ve come through Hell;

Did you see my brother there,

Brown sports coat and slicked down hair?”

“Madam, I was promised bliss

Up from the deep and a holy kiss.

What land is this where I’ve arrived?

People not buzzing like bees in a hive?”

“How in the hell can a drowned man thrive?

Here?  In this strange dry sandy land?

Life is hard, only one thing changes;

See how the seabird her nest arranges!”

“Ten steps back; turn and fire!”

“Dombey and Sons is looking to hire.”

“What do you see in a grain of sand?

Will you see it in every hard land?”

See that figure walking towards us?

Is that a halo about her head?

She looks like one of the newly raised dead!

See!  She is the promise of bliss.

Teacher, master, Eliot knows

The beauty of the multifoliate rose;

Knows the stillness of the silent Word,

Often spoken, seldom heard.

Msc.

Now I’m left without a sail;

Nothing to see but a rusty old nail…

Don’t be angry, don’t be cross;

Nothing’s real but profit and loss.

Image: Adam and Eve [and Satan as serpent]. By Giovanni Della Robbia. C. 1515. [Walters Art Museum. Baltimore]