Thursday, May 5
Moleskin 2.10: The Move
Chapters, a whole book, could be devoted to why we moved that year, but for now let me tell it as I saw it, having just turned ten. The move was fairly sudden, not quite three months into the school year, and there were no long goodbyes to my father’s congregation. We took two vehicles: our station wagon, carrying Mom and Gordon Hammedahl and my two brothers, and a U-Haul truck with my dad and Susan Hammedahl and myself. The Hammedahls were helpful neighbors, and they were always close friends to us, but then I remember Dad stopping along the way to buy Susan a rose. There were very few words said about that flower, and it would take years for me to see beyond its single thorny stem, or to notice the budding romance in the car ahead of us, but when we got to Chicago, suddenly Dad was living in a different place. He found a factory job and, for several years, he was no longer a preacher. And now it was an urban, backwards flowing river we were perched upon.
Wednesday, May 4
Identity III
Identity
Rolls down the face
Of farmers and florists
Lovers and loners
Parents and orphans
Teachers and learners
Workers and wanderers
Dreamers and doers
And poets,
And me,
And every tear,
Every line of sweat,
Every drop of rain
Is different and the same,
Hot and cold, salty and sweet.
Identity
Is a hard day’s work
And a longing for rest,
A burst of emotion
and a latent memory.
Sometimes I want to
Wipe my identity away,
Pretend it isn’t there
And hide my face,
But sometimes
I just let it roll
Down my cheek
And linger
For everyone to see.
Rolls down the face
Of farmers and florists
Lovers and loners
Parents and orphans
Teachers and learners
Workers and wanderers
Dreamers and doers
And poets,
And me,
And every tear,
Every line of sweat,
Every drop of rain
Is different and the same,
Hot and cold, salty and sweet.
Identity
Is a hard day’s work
And a longing for rest,
A burst of emotion
and a latent memory.
Sometimes I want to
Wipe my identity away,
Pretend it isn’t there
And hide my face,
But sometimes
I just let it roll
Down my cheek
And linger
For everyone to see.
Tuesday, May 3
Identity II
In the mirror I see
Reflections of a
Thousand faces,
Wrinkles of a
Thousand times,
The profiles of a
Thousand turns,
The shadows of a
Thousand truths,
A picture that will
Not stand still.
Identity.
This is identity.
This is the place
I come from: family,
The everywhere
I’m going: destiny
And all that’s currently
Home to me: security.
For now, forever is the way
I’ll always have some yesterday
In me: identity.
For now, eternity is how
It’s always been more than a soul
Can see: identity.
More than I want to be
Or used to be: identity,
More than I find myself
For now: this is identity.
Reflections of a
Thousand faces,
Wrinkles of a
Thousand times,
The profiles of a
Thousand turns,
The shadows of a
Thousand truths,
A picture that will
Not stand still.
Identity.
This is identity.
This is the place
I come from: family,
The everywhere
I’m going: destiny
And all that’s currently
Home to me: security.
For now, forever is the way
I’ll always have some yesterday
In me: identity.
For now, eternity is how
It’s always been more than a soul
Can see: identity.
More than I want to be
Or used to be: identity,
More than I find myself
For now: this is identity.
Monday, May 2
Identity I
Identity
With a capital I,
Subjective me,
My own ID:
It’s who I am,
The verb “to be”
Implicitly
Included in
Identity.
I am: The name
I call myself
I am: the entity of self
I am: the image of I AM,
Yahweh and Immanuel,
Their meaning in my heart,
And living waters in my veins,
The pulse of my salvation,
My spirit, my animation,
Every explication
Is identity.
I
ID
I AM
An entity
To be or not
To be: Identity
With a capital I,
Subjective me,
My own ID:
It’s who I am,
The verb “to be”
Implicitly
Included in
Identity.
I am: The name
I call myself
I am: the entity of self
I am: the image of I AM,
Yahweh and Immanuel,
Their meaning in my heart,
And living waters in my veins,
The pulse of my salvation,
My spirit, my animation,
Every explication
Is identity.
I
ID
I AM
An entity
To be or not
To be: Identity
Sunday, May 1
Beginning Of May
Originally there was a song in my head
It was not sweet, like candy,
but fresh, like wind through the trees.
Once I was drawn to the songs of birds,
until I began to hear the harmonies
of leaves, dancing ---
less, I suppose, what the birds
were singing about
than where they were singing from.
It was not sweet, like candy,
but fresh, like wind through the trees.
Once I was drawn to the songs of birds,
until I began to hear the harmonies
of leaves, dancing ---
less, I suppose, what the birds
were singing about
than where they were singing from.
Saturday, April 30
Sometimes And Always
From my 1990 journals
Ideas, sparks abound; sometimes it seems like I could write all day long. I’m sure I’ve picked the proper direction at such sometimes; I’m positive then that I am a writer. But these sparks and ideas are all very much in their infant stages. I’m learning that I’ve got a lot to learn. Things don’t just flow from head to lead. The sparks fizzle more than they catch, and even when they seem to catch there are countless steps to the blazing success I dream of, countless steps past the few combusted embers I’ve managed to produce. I do like the ideas, though, while they sparkle and catch and smoke; even at these minor stages of combustion, I like what can be done with words, and I have to stop and appreciate what God allows me.
I’ve finished a rough draft of a story. It’s not great, and really it’s not very good, but I have a certain pride, a certain good feeling that I will never apologize for, because the spark has caught and filled five pages, 1,200 words. If it’s kind of an ambiguous fire, or a somewhat lifeless fire (and my story is all of these, I will be told), I will still have my good feeling and I will still thank God, because there is a flame where once was only a spark, and there was a spark where once was nothing at all.
That “certain pride,” by the way, is not just pride about what I have personally done. Maybe I don’t even have to say this, but I used the word... maybe the better word is fascination, about what I can do. Yes. God, thank you.
I will still work to improve the current story, because there is ambiguity and lifelessness and pointlessness and a lack of depth. Maybe I’ll work at it and never get it right, but that’s all right, because I’ve got other ideas after this one....
Sometimes it seems like I could write all day long —but thank you God, sometimes and always.
~~~~
And then some days I don’t feel like writing at all.
Ideas, sparks abound; sometimes it seems like I could write all day long. I’m sure I’ve picked the proper direction at such sometimes; I’m positive then that I am a writer. But these sparks and ideas are all very much in their infant stages. I’m learning that I’ve got a lot to learn. Things don’t just flow from head to lead. The sparks fizzle more than they catch, and even when they seem to catch there are countless steps to the blazing success I dream of, countless steps past the few combusted embers I’ve managed to produce. I do like the ideas, though, while they sparkle and catch and smoke; even at these minor stages of combustion, I like what can be done with words, and I have to stop and appreciate what God allows me.
I’ve finished a rough draft of a story. It’s not great, and really it’s not very good, but I have a certain pride, a certain good feeling that I will never apologize for, because the spark has caught and filled five pages, 1,200 words. If it’s kind of an ambiguous fire, or a somewhat lifeless fire (and my story is all of these, I will be told), I will still have my good feeling and I will still thank God, because there is a flame where once was only a spark, and there was a spark where once was nothing at all.
That “certain pride,” by the way, is not just pride about what I have personally done. Maybe I don’t even have to say this, but I used the word... maybe the better word is fascination, about what I can do. Yes. God, thank you.
I will still work to improve the current story, because there is ambiguity and lifelessness and pointlessness and a lack of depth. Maybe I’ll work at it and never get it right, but that’s all right, because I’ve got other ideas after this one....
Sometimes it seems like I could write all day long —but thank you God, sometimes and always.
~~~~
And then some days I don’t feel like writing at all.
Friday, April 29
TWL, Lines 43-59: A Wicked Pack Of Cards
43 Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
44 Had a bad cold, nevertheless
45 Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
46 With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
47 Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
48 (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
49 Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
50 The lady of situations.
51 Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
52 And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
53 Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
54 Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
55 The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
56 I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
57 Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
58 Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
59 One must be so careful these days.
43. MADAME SOSOSTRIS: See Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, 27 (1921), introducing Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, a transvestite palm-reader who predicted the manner of clients’ deaths and ended sessions with an abrupt “Thank you.”
Huxley’s influence on Eliot has been disputed, but the coincidence is still remarkable.
44. A BAD COLD: See Flamineo's dying words in John Webster, White Devil 5.6.311-313 (1612), a play about moral corruption:
“I have caught
An everlasting cold; I have lost my voice
Most irrecoverably. Farewell, glorious villains.
This busy trade of life appears most vain,
Since rest breeds rest, where all seek pain by pain.
Let no harsh flattering bells resound my knell;
Strike, thunder, and strike loud, to my farewell! [Dies]”
The thunder theme will be picked up in Part V.
45. THE WISEST WOMAN IN EUROPE: See E. M. Arndt, Sketches of Swedish History, The Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. 63, Art. II (October 1843): In 1796 at the age of 17, Swedish King Gustav IV Adolf “outwitted the wisest woman in Europe, the Czarina Catherine of Russia” by calling off his engagement to her granddaughter Alexandra just as the royal engagement party had begun, because she refused to convert from Russian orthodoxy to Lutheranism. This irritated Catherine, and she died of a stroke two months later. Compare Queen Dido’s banquet at note 92. See also note 307 for Augustine’s experience at Carthage, also begun at the age of 17. Czarina Catherine, also known as Catherine the Great, was otherwise known to be an enlightened empress who ruled calmly yet effectively, traits often associated with the Empress Card in the Tarot deck (see note 46).
46. TAROT CARDS: Eliot: “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the ‘crowds of people,’ and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.”
The Tarot deck makes an extended appearance at lines 43-59. See notes 47-57 for specific explanations of the cards referenced by Eliot, and see also notes 209 and 311.5. Tarot cards alluded to in this section include the Queen of Cups (note 47), the Three of Wands, or Staves (note 51), The Six of Pentacles, or Pentangles (note 52), the King of Cups (note 55), and three of the trump cards: The Wheel of Fortune (note 51), the Hanged Man (note 55) and the Empress (note 45). See also Weston, From Ritual to Romance 2, comparing the Tarot suits and those of our modern deck of cards to symbols of the Grail legend: “Cup (Chalice, or Goblet)–Hearts. Lance (Wand, or Sceptre)– Diamonds. Sword– Spades. Dish (Circles, or Pentangles, the form varies)–Clubs.”
One of the most popular versions of the Tarot deck is the Rider deck, developed in 1909 by William Rider & Sons at the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, another American born English poet who lived in London in the early to mid nineteen hundreds. The Rider deck, exceptional for having illustrations on all of its 78 cards and not just the 22 trump cards, was sold with an explanation pamphlet titled A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).
47. YOUR CARD is related to the drowned Phoenician sailor but is not otherwise identified. However, see the fortune-teller’s final admonition at line 55, and see note 55 for further consideration of “your card.”
48. PEARLY EYES: See also line 125, and see Shakespeare, Tempest 1.2.399.
50. THE LADY OF SITUATIONS: See Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910): The Queen of Cups is a “beautiful” woman, or belladonna, who sits at the water’s edgewith rocks at her feet. Reversed (rotated 180̊), she is a woman not to be trusted, a femme fatale. Belladonna is also the scientific term for the poisonous nightshade plant. Visually, this card aligns with Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks (a/k/a Lady of the Rocks, 1486); see Tarot Deck: Queen of Cups, William Rider & Sons (1909).
51. THE MAN WITH THREE STAVES: See Waite, Tarot: The Three of Wands shows a “calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliff's edge at ships passing over the sea.” He has three staves and is called the “merchant prince.” Compare the merchant introduced as a separate card, at line 52.
THE WHEEL: See Waite, Tarot: The Wheel of Fortune card represents cycles of change, e.g., winter to spring. See also the wheel being turned at line 320.
52. THE ONE-EYED MERCHANT. See Waite, Tarot: The Six of Pentacles shows the one-eyed profile of a merchant giving coins to those around him. He represents gratification and vigilance, and is “one who must not be relied on.” Compare the Smyrna merchant at line 208, and see note 219 for a spectrum of perceptiveness.
53. THE BLANK CARD, not part of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (note 50), is an extra card that says nothing or at least shows nothing that the card reader can see. This would seem to describe the fraudulent “clairvoyance” of Madame Sosostris herself, a fortune teller who cries out “Look!” but fails to see beyond the crowds of people around her (lines 54-56, 60); contrast this with Tiresias, who is blind yet foresuffers (see lines 218 and 219, and see lines 218-248 for what the merchant carries).
55. THE HANGED MAN represents life in suspension; see Waite, Tarot, describing him as a “seeming martyr.” Eliot’s Hanged God of Frazer (see note 46) refers to a description in Frazer, The Golden Bough, of the annual hanging in effigy of Artemis, the goddess of fertility. Eliot also associated the hanged man, whom Madame Sosostris fails to find, with the one who walks beside the disciples (line 360). See also the epigraph, with its opening image of the Sybil “hanging in a cage” (note 0.3).
FEAR DEATH BY WATER: This, the fortune-teller’s final conclusion, refers both backward (line 47) and forward (lines 312-321) to the drowned Phoenician Sailor, which is also the limited description of “your card” (see note 47). Given the attention to water and the reader’s accompanying warning, the closest Tarot correspondence to “your card” might be the King of Cups, which shows a floating king holding a scepter and chalise, and of which Waite says, “Beware of ill will ...and of hypocrisy pretending to help.” See Waite, Tarot. Compare this to the call at line 76 to “you, hypocrite lecteur,” or hypocrite reader.
57. MRS. EQUITONE is, by her name at least, a more even-tempered person than Madame Sosostris; compare Tiresias’s “lovely woman,” who, after her lover leaves, “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (see lines 255-256).
59. FORTUNE-TELLING had been prohibited in London since the 1824 Vagancy Act and punishable by three months’ hard labor, but the law had been in flux in the years after World War I. See Blewett Lee, Spiritualism and Crime , Columbia Law Review 22: 444-445 (1922): The courts had briefly allowed a “good faith” defense in 1918 but then retracted this a few years later, holding that “professing to tell fortunes is an offense without regard to whether or not the person so professing believes he has the power to tell fortunes.” For the deciding case, see Stonehouse v. Masson, 2 K.B. 818 (1921), overturning Davis v. Curry, 1 K.B. 109 (1918).
44 Had a bad cold, nevertheless
45 Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
46 With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
47 Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
48 (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
49 Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
50 The lady of situations.
51 Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
52 And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
53 Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
54 Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
55 The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
56 I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
57 Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
58 Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
59 One must be so careful these days.
43. MADAME SOSOSTRIS: See Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, 27 (1921), introducing Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, a transvestite palm-reader who predicted the manner of clients’ deaths and ended sessions with an abrupt “Thank you.”
Huxley’s influence on Eliot has been disputed, but the coincidence is still remarkable.
44. A BAD COLD: See Flamineo's dying words in John Webster, White Devil 5.6.311-313 (1612), a play about moral corruption:
“I have caught
An everlasting cold; I have lost my voice
Most irrecoverably. Farewell, glorious villains.
This busy trade of life appears most vain,
Since rest breeds rest, where all seek pain by pain.
Let no harsh flattering bells resound my knell;
Strike, thunder, and strike loud, to my farewell! [Dies]”
The thunder theme will be picked up in Part V.
45. THE WISEST WOMAN IN EUROPE: See E. M. Arndt, Sketches of Swedish History, The Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. 63, Art. II (October 1843): In 1796 at the age of 17, Swedish King Gustav IV Adolf “outwitted the wisest woman in Europe, the Czarina Catherine of Russia” by calling off his engagement to her granddaughter Alexandra just as the royal engagement party had begun, because she refused to convert from Russian orthodoxy to Lutheranism. This irritated Catherine, and she died of a stroke two months later. Compare Queen Dido’s banquet at note 92. See also note 307 for Augustine’s experience at Carthage, also begun at the age of 17. Czarina Catherine, also known as Catherine the Great, was otherwise known to be an enlightened empress who ruled calmly yet effectively, traits often associated with the Empress Card in the Tarot deck (see note 46).
46. TAROT CARDS: Eliot: “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the ‘crowds of people,’ and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.”
The Tarot deck makes an extended appearance at lines 43-59. See notes 47-57 for specific explanations of the cards referenced by Eliot, and see also notes 209 and 311.5. Tarot cards alluded to in this section include the Queen of Cups (note 47), the Three of Wands, or Staves (note 51), The Six of Pentacles, or Pentangles (note 52), the King of Cups (note 55), and three of the trump cards: The Wheel of Fortune (note 51), the Hanged Man (note 55) and the Empress (note 45). See also Weston, From Ritual to Romance 2, comparing the Tarot suits and those of our modern deck of cards to symbols of the Grail legend: “Cup (Chalice, or Goblet)–Hearts. Lance (Wand, or Sceptre)– Diamonds. Sword– Spades. Dish (Circles, or Pentangles, the form varies)–Clubs.”
One of the most popular versions of the Tarot deck is the Rider deck, developed in 1909 by William Rider & Sons at the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, another American born English poet who lived in London in the early to mid nineteen hundreds. The Rider deck, exceptional for having illustrations on all of its 78 cards and not just the 22 trump cards, was sold with an explanation pamphlet titled A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).
47. YOUR CARD is related to the drowned Phoenician sailor but is not otherwise identified. However, see the fortune-teller’s final admonition at line 55, and see note 55 for further consideration of “your card.”
48. PEARLY EYES: See also line 125, and see Shakespeare, Tempest 1.2.399.
50. THE LADY OF SITUATIONS: See Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910): The Queen of Cups is a “beautiful” woman, or belladonna, who sits at the water’s edgewith rocks at her feet. Reversed (rotated 180̊), she is a woman not to be trusted, a femme fatale. Belladonna is also the scientific term for the poisonous nightshade plant. Visually, this card aligns with Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks (a/k/a Lady of the Rocks, 1486); see Tarot Deck: Queen of Cups, William Rider & Sons (1909).
 |
| Leonardo Da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks (1486) |
 |
Tarot Deck: Queen of Cups,
William Rider & Sons (1909)
|
51. THE MAN WITH THREE STAVES: See Waite, Tarot: The Three of Wands shows a “calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliff's edge at ships passing over the sea.” He has three staves and is called the “merchant prince.” Compare the merchant introduced as a separate card, at line 52.
THE WHEEL: See Waite, Tarot: The Wheel of Fortune card represents cycles of change, e.g., winter to spring. See also the wheel being turned at line 320.
52. THE ONE-EYED MERCHANT. See Waite, Tarot: The Six of Pentacles shows the one-eyed profile of a merchant giving coins to those around him. He represents gratification and vigilance, and is “one who must not be relied on.” Compare the Smyrna merchant at line 208, and see note 219 for a spectrum of perceptiveness.
53. THE BLANK CARD, not part of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (note 50), is an extra card that says nothing or at least shows nothing that the card reader can see. This would seem to describe the fraudulent “clairvoyance” of Madame Sosostris herself, a fortune teller who cries out “Look!” but fails to see beyond the crowds of people around her (lines 54-56, 60); contrast this with Tiresias, who is blind yet foresuffers (see lines 218 and 219, and see lines 218-248 for what the merchant carries).
55. THE HANGED MAN represents life in suspension; see Waite, Tarot, describing him as a “seeming martyr.” Eliot’s Hanged God of Frazer (see note 46) refers to a description in Frazer, The Golden Bough, of the annual hanging in effigy of Artemis, the goddess of fertility. Eliot also associated the hanged man, whom Madame Sosostris fails to find, with the one who walks beside the disciples (line 360). See also the epigraph, with its opening image of the Sybil “hanging in a cage” (note 0.3).
FEAR DEATH BY WATER: This, the fortune-teller’s final conclusion, refers both backward (line 47) and forward (lines 312-321) to the drowned Phoenician Sailor, which is also the limited description of “your card” (see note 47). Given the attention to water and the reader’s accompanying warning, the closest Tarot correspondence to “your card” might be the King of Cups, which shows a floating king holding a scepter and chalise, and of which Waite says, “Beware of ill will ...and of hypocrisy pretending to help.” See Waite, Tarot. Compare this to the call at line 76 to “you, hypocrite lecteur,” or hypocrite reader.
57. MRS. EQUITONE is, by her name at least, a more even-tempered person than Madame Sosostris; compare Tiresias’s “lovely woman,” who, after her lover leaves, “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (see lines 255-256).
59. FORTUNE-TELLING had been prohibited in London since the 1824 Vagancy Act and punishable by three months’ hard labor, but the law had been in flux in the years after World War I. See Blewett Lee, Spiritualism and Crime , Columbia Law Review 22: 444-445 (1922): The courts had briefly allowed a “good faith” defense in 1918 but then retracted this a few years later, holding that “professing to tell fortunes is an offense without regard to whether or not the person so professing believes he has the power to tell fortunes.” For the deciding case, see Stonehouse v. Masson, 2 K.B. 818 (1921), overturning Davis v. Curry, 1 K.B. 109 (1918).
Thursday, April 28
Moleskin 2.9: The World
We perched for four years on the edge of the Buffalo River, and it was a peaceful place for a kid in his Huck Finn days. But the world was getting bigger. The sociopolitical scene of the late sixties and early seventies would dawn on me sometime afterwards; for the moment it was a greater deal to me that my family of four and then five was much bigger than our tributary bounds could hold. We vacationed, locally to an aunt and uncle’s cottage on Pelican Lake, a little farther to our grandparents’ newly built house on Lac La Belle, an extended family fishing vacation —guys only —to Lake of the Woods; and we visited cousins in North Dakota, southern Minnesota, and one summer all the way out to California. In the summer of ‘71 we had eighty people gather on the Buffalo River for a Vold Reunion, and in the summer of ‘72 we traveled to Chicago to see our cousins there. Then, in the fall of that year, the world changed more than I thought it ever would, when Chicago became our home.
Wednesday, April 27
O Solitude, By John Keats (1816), With Annotations
O Solitude (personified, addressed)! (a weary exclamation)
if (resignation) I must with thee (Solitude) dwell (linger, live),
Let it not be (not resigned to the parameters of Solitude: something must change)
among the jumbled heap (the city: the present condition described)
Of murky buildings (conventional structures);
climb with me the steep, -- (first 8 lines, a chained Italian sonnet: ABBA, ABBA)
Nature (personified)'s observatory (an alternative building)
-- (emphasis added by break in rhythm, a visual dash) whence the dell (valley),
Its flowery slopes (alternative to grey walls of steel),
its river's crystal swell (and glass),
May seem a span (bridge, another alternative structure);
let me thy (Solitude’s) vigils (diligent (holy) watches) keep (holding on to the beauty)
'Mongst boughs pavilion'd (another alternative building),
where the deer's swift leap (what the vigilant one sees)
Startles the wild (abrupt rhythm break; startling within while the vigilant one remains detached)
bee from the foxglove bell (more break in rhythm: emphasis).
But (sextant, new thought, moving beyond the beauty beheld) though I'll gladly
trace (outline, scant sketch of the outer profile) these scenes with thee (Solitude),
Yet the sweet (what Solitude isn’t) converse (what Solitude doesn’t)
of an innocent (undefiled) mind (rhythm breaks, emphasizing the new thought),
Whose words (what Solitude lacks) are images
of thoughts refin'd (purified) (last 6 lines break from Italian sonnet structure: CDDC DC),
Is my soul's pleasure;
and it sure must be (trying to be committal)
Almost (non-committal - he doesn’t know) the highest (sweetest, most innocent, most refined)
bliss of human-kind (not the 19th century “mankind,” thus suggesting womankind),
When to thy (Solitude’s) haunts
two kindred spirits (he longs for companionship) flee.
Paraphrase (Para-pathy):
I can accept my solitude
but I’d rather be in Minnesota
than here in Chicago,
and I’d rather be there with someone
than to walk these paths of solitude alone.
if (resignation) I must with thee (Solitude) dwell (linger, live),
Let it not be (not resigned to the parameters of Solitude: something must change)
among the jumbled heap (the city: the present condition described)
Of murky buildings (conventional structures);
climb with me the steep, -- (first 8 lines, a chained Italian sonnet: ABBA, ABBA)
Nature (personified)'s observatory (an alternative building)
-- (emphasis added by break in rhythm, a visual dash) whence the dell (valley),
Its flowery slopes (alternative to grey walls of steel),
its river's crystal swell (and glass),
May seem a span (bridge, another alternative structure);
let me thy (Solitude’s) vigils (diligent (holy) watches) keep (holding on to the beauty)
'Mongst boughs pavilion'd (another alternative building),
where the deer's swift leap (what the vigilant one sees)
Startles the wild (abrupt rhythm break; startling within while the vigilant one remains detached)
bee from the foxglove bell (more break in rhythm: emphasis).
But (sextant, new thought, moving beyond the beauty beheld) though I'll gladly
trace (outline, scant sketch of the outer profile) these scenes with thee (Solitude),
Yet the sweet (what Solitude isn’t) converse (what Solitude doesn’t)
of an innocent (undefiled) mind (rhythm breaks, emphasizing the new thought),
Whose words (what Solitude lacks) are images
of thoughts refin'd (purified) (last 6 lines break from Italian sonnet structure: CDDC DC),
Is my soul's pleasure;
and it sure must be (trying to be committal)
Almost (non-committal - he doesn’t know) the highest (sweetest, most innocent, most refined)
bliss of human-kind (not the 19th century “mankind,” thus suggesting womankind),
When to thy (Solitude’s) haunts
two kindred spirits (he longs for companionship) flee.
Paraphrase (Para-pathy):
I can accept my solitude
but I’d rather be in Minnesota
than here in Chicago,
and I’d rather be there with someone
than to walk these paths of solitude alone.
Tuesday, April 26
Redefining Solitude
English 240, 4/6/90, Prof. Gardiner
In 1816, John Keats’ first published poem, “O Solitude,” was printed in the London Examiner. As the title implies, Keats spoke in this sonnet to a personification of his own seclusion. He followed with a fourteen-line suggestion to Solitude that it might be willing to allow for a couple of changes.
As I read this, I am led to picture young Keats alone in a “murky” city, not happy with his isolation, and trying to escape it by way of a stream of wishful thinking. His imaginary escape takes two distinct steps: first, to change the environment of his solitude, moving from the city’s dinginess to a more pastoral scene, and then to change his solitude’s parameters, allowing for a companion with whom to enjoy the “haunts.” In fact, then, this is not Keats’ escape from solitude at all, but his palliative reshaping of it. And he puts this wishful stream on paper, addressing Solitude itself, but implying---and, as the poem develops, explicating---that he wants to share his thoughts with another, more real audience.
Solitude does not change for Keats as he writes his wishes down, and there is no other audience for him, but just thinking of the possibilities, the two big steps, seems to raise the young poet’s hopes. Within the poem, he moves from his actual, present situation, one which seems to be lonely indeed, to a possible future of highest bliss. Thus he changes his attitude, not by wishing that he could step out of Solitude’s bounds or that it would disappear, but by optimistically redefining it, to the point that a future of solitude would be something to long for, even a haven to flee to. In two poetic steps he is away from a perspective that depresses him, and considering one that pleases him.
That initial perspective shows in the way that Keats begins: “O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell...” The exclamation sounds of weariness, and the “if I must” breathes resignation. He has pessimistically decided that it is possible, even fateful, that he will always live in some seclusion. Even the word “dwell” connotes a continual, exhaustive lingering, and when Keats goes on to show where he is presently dwelling, the tone is stressed further. He is not just in the city of London, he is “among the jumbled heap / Of murky buildings.” And it will not do for Keats. “Let it not be,” he pleads to Solitude.
But Keats does not merely lament his condition here; he turns around and takes his first step in the new direction of optimism. He suggests that he might lead his Solitude to an alternate environment. It is not a fantastic leap: Solitude will still have its enclosures, and its passive, detached ways. But there would be new buildings and better things to see. There would be the improved architecture of “Nature’s observatory:” a valley walled by “flowery slopes,” a pavilion made of trees, a span defined by the dell itself, bridging between its hillsides. And, of course, there would be new sights in the observatory. Keats describes one imagined scene with what might be the most beautiful lines of the poem: “Let me thy vigils keep,” he writes,
...where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.
But it still won’t be enough, considers Keats, even as he takes the imaginary step. He would be glad to “trace” such peaceful scenes, but he is still aware of his detachment from them, and his isolation, with Solitude, of looking in from the outside, and not being a part of the action (i.e., he is not doing the “startling”). Keats does not want to cross the line; that would be walking away from Solitude, which hasn’t occurred to him as a possibility. Solitude, as “thee” and “thy haunts,” isreferred to with all respect, even to the sonnet’s end. Instead, he wants to take his established companion with him on a second step of wishful thinking.
He imagines, once more, an improved Solitude: this time, one that would allow for a population of two instead of one. He longs for conversation with an additional companion (the first one, Solitude, had not added to the “population”), and as he is explicit about how that conversation would go---sweet, innocent, refined---he implies that these are aspects that had been absent in his Solitude thus far. Innocence and refinement themselves imply a conversation of one voice undefiled by the other, one thought pure from the second, two spirits kindred, but apart; in other words, a conversation different from the one Keats had been holding, and a talk with someone other than himself.
“...It sure must be / Almost the highest bliss,” says Keats about this second revision to Solitude, reminding himself that he still isn’t there, but not yet abandoning all hope. Apparently, he has never been alone with anyone the way he has pictured it, sharing solitude with a kindred soul in a springtime (flowered and river-swelled) valley. He imagines, though, that it would be blissful (maybe just about the highest bliss), and, at any rate, his attitude has certainly improved since he first started dreaming: whereas at first he noted how he “must dwell with his present Solitude, now he appreciates “fleeing” to a future Solitude, just a “climb” and a “leap” away.
Monday, April 25
Tristan, In Verse
I’ve got boxes over there
that aren’t even opened.
I filled them up and sealed them
ten or twenty years ago,
or maybe more. I can’t remember.
They don’t have any labels
and they don’t seem to be stacked
in any order. All I know
is that they had some value
or I never would have saved them.
And each box holds a part of me,
a little bit of history,
and as the years pile up
I’m not inclined to let them go.
I’ve got shelves along my walls
but most of them are empty
and waiting to be used.
I put them up the other day
with the impetuous intention
of organizing things
to get rid of the clutter
that surrounds me. Anyway
I’ll have some room to walk now,
as soon as I get started,
except this next step seems to be
the hardest step to take for me:
to pick my life up off the floor
and put it on display.
that aren’t even opened.
I filled them up and sealed them
ten or twenty years ago,
or maybe more. I can’t remember.
They don’t have any labels
and they don’t seem to be stacked
in any order. All I know
is that they had some value
or I never would have saved them.
And each box holds a part of me,
a little bit of history,
and as the years pile up
I’m not inclined to let them go.
I’ve got shelves along my walls
but most of them are empty
and waiting to be used.
I put them up the other day
with the impetuous intention
of organizing things
to get rid of the clutter
that surrounds me. Anyway
I’ll have some room to walk now,
as soon as I get started,
except this next step seems to be
the hardest step to take for me:
to pick my life up off the floor
and put it on display.
Sunday, April 24
Tristan, Unboxed
Tristan lived by himself in a two story house tucked away in a cave at the edge of a valley. He rarely went out —only when he found his kitchen shelves bare of food— and he rarely invited visitors, although he had several neighbors who knew him and invited themselves for a visit now and then. Tristan did not object to his neighbors’ visits and even enjoyed their company, but mostly Tristan kept to himself and to the confines of his house.
His house, from the outside, was not remarkable; beyond its unkempt surroundings and its peeling paint, it was much like any other two story house in the valley. But the inside of Tristan’s house —and his neighbors after a visit would always mention this among themselves— was quite peculiarly decorated. Certainly, all of the items one might expect a bachelor homebody to have were part of the decor: a television, records, half-started repair projects, stacks of dishes; but surrounding the clutter, on all the walls, were long rows of shelves. They stretched from one side of the house to the other, on every wall and always at least five or six levels high. In the whole house, Tristan had left no more than three feet of wallspace shelveless.
A few of the shelves had items neatly stacked and organized on them: clothes, boxes, books; more shelves were less tidily piled upon without any sense of organization; but most of the shelves, certainly more than three quarters of these shelves so dominantly displayed in Tristan’s house, were empty. The strangeness of this emptiness was especially marked, of course, by the completeness of the decor —everywhere one looked were shelves and most of them were bare— but even odder, on the floor of Tristan’s house, everywhere, were stacks of boxes and piles of things, every imaginable knick-knack thing, that could have filled those shelves and given Tristan and his occasional visitors room to stand and move about. Instead, Tristan would crawl and leap and wiggle his way around the rooms and over his unshelved stacks, always telling his visitors with a most apologetic tone, “I’ve been meaning to get to this stuff.” And he was going to do it, too, he told them, as soon as he could find the time.
It was for this spectacle, one might assume, that Tristan’s neighbors visited him at all. He did not have an outgoing personality or a magnetic charisma and he never reciprocated with visits of his own. But he was pleasant whenever called Tristan upon, and however busy he said he was he seemed to enjoy taking the time for a friendly conversation with his visitors.
There was always something to talk about: all one had to do was pick out something curious from among the stacks and ask, “Tristan, what is this thing?” or “What inspired you to save a thing like this?” And Tristan would cheerily answer about a someday plan he had or a reminiscence heintended to properly memorialize, or there was a simple appeal to the object itself that he could not resist. “I don’t know what it is,” he might say, “but I liked it and I just wanted to keep it. It’ll do good on that shelf over there, don’t you think?” And Tristan would hop over some stacks and put the thing on the shelf over there.
All the while, in fact, as Tristan and his company visited, he busied himself with putting things on shelves. If one must assume reasons for Tristan’s neighbors to visit him, this seemed more likely: their occasional visits always accomplished activity in Tristan’s house. But once they left they would notice through the window that the purposeful flurry would abruptly stop. Tristan would pick up a book he had been reading or go to the television, oblivious once more to the piles around him.
This led Tristan’s neighbors to believe they were being good neighbors, helping someone get things done. They agreed amongst themselves to rotate the duty of helping Tristan straighten his house up. It did not require much of them, other than time; just their visits would be helpful by merely prompting Tristan to work. They were genuinely good neighbors, though, and they would chip in, which Tristan was more than happy to allow.
His house, from the outside, was not remarkable; beyond its unkempt surroundings and its peeling paint, it was much like any other two story house in the valley. But the inside of Tristan’s house —and his neighbors after a visit would always mention this among themselves— was quite peculiarly decorated. Certainly, all of the items one might expect a bachelor homebody to have were part of the decor: a television, records, half-started repair projects, stacks of dishes; but surrounding the clutter, on all the walls, were long rows of shelves. They stretched from one side of the house to the other, on every wall and always at least five or six levels high. In the whole house, Tristan had left no more than three feet of wallspace shelveless.
A few of the shelves had items neatly stacked and organized on them: clothes, boxes, books; more shelves were less tidily piled upon without any sense of organization; but most of the shelves, certainly more than three quarters of these shelves so dominantly displayed in Tristan’s house, were empty. The strangeness of this emptiness was especially marked, of course, by the completeness of the decor —everywhere one looked were shelves and most of them were bare— but even odder, on the floor of Tristan’s house, everywhere, were stacks of boxes and piles of things, every imaginable knick-knack thing, that could have filled those shelves and given Tristan and his occasional visitors room to stand and move about. Instead, Tristan would crawl and leap and wiggle his way around the rooms and over his unshelved stacks, always telling his visitors with a most apologetic tone, “I’ve been meaning to get to this stuff.” And he was going to do it, too, he told them, as soon as he could find the time.
It was for this spectacle, one might assume, that Tristan’s neighbors visited him at all. He did not have an outgoing personality or a magnetic charisma and he never reciprocated with visits of his own. But he was pleasant whenever called Tristan upon, and however busy he said he was he seemed to enjoy taking the time for a friendly conversation with his visitors.
There was always something to talk about: all one had to do was pick out something curious from among the stacks and ask, “Tristan, what is this thing?” or “What inspired you to save a thing like this?” And Tristan would cheerily answer about a someday plan he had or a reminiscence heintended to properly memorialize, or there was a simple appeal to the object itself that he could not resist. “I don’t know what it is,” he might say, “but I liked it and I just wanted to keep it. It’ll do good on that shelf over there, don’t you think?” And Tristan would hop over some stacks and put the thing on the shelf over there.
All the while, in fact, as Tristan and his company visited, he busied himself with putting things on shelves. If one must assume reasons for Tristan’s neighbors to visit him, this seemed more likely: their occasional visits always accomplished activity in Tristan’s house. But once they left they would notice through the window that the purposeful flurry would abruptly stop. Tristan would pick up a book he had been reading or go to the television, oblivious once more to the piles around him.
This led Tristan’s neighbors to believe they were being good neighbors, helping someone get things done. They agreed amongst themselves to rotate the duty of helping Tristan straighten his house up. It did not require much of them, other than time; just their visits would be helpful by merely prompting Tristan to work. They were genuinely good neighbors, though, and they would chip in, which Tristan was more than happy to allow.
Saturday, April 23
The Hymn He Gurgled In His Throat
Notes from 1990
The Hymn He Gurgled In His Throat:
Tristi fummo
with to: refer, leave to another’s judgment
obsolete: offer, render, give; yield with courtesy:
“he defers to the opinion of...”
“To you, O great one, I defer all things—
My life, my livelihood, my daily living
And all that is given to me, I bring
To your altar in humble oblation.”
sacrifice, worldly obligation
“This is the hymn they gurgle in their throats
but cannot sing in words that truly sound.”
Dante’s fifth circle in Upper Hell
in the River Styx
“tristi” or “sluggish”
“acedia” or “sloth”
one of the seven capital sins
Go to the ant, thou sluggard —Proverbs 6:6
Adams: sloth, sleep and littleness —> rage like a lion
Chaucer: May will have no sluggard
Churchill: No room for the sluggard
The voice of the sluggard: you have waked me too soon.
Tristan lived at the bottom of the see...
The Hymn He Gurgled In His Throat:
Tristi fummo
with to: refer, leave to another’s judgment
obsolete: offer, render, give; yield with courtesy:
“he defers to the opinion of...”
“To you, O great one, I defer all things—
My life, my livelihood, my daily living
And all that is given to me, I bring
To your altar in humble oblation.”
sacrifice, worldly obligation
“This is the hymn they gurgle in their throats
but cannot sing in words that truly sound.”
Dante’s fifth circle in Upper Hell
in the River Styx
“tristi” or “sluggish”
“acedia” or “sloth”
one of the seven capital sins
Go to the ant, thou sluggard —Proverbs 6:6
Adams: sloth, sleep and littleness —> rage like a lion
Chaucer: May will have no sluggard
Churchill: No room for the sluggard
The voice of the sluggard: you have waked me too soon.
Tristan lived at the bottom of the see...
Friday, April 22
TWL, Lines 31-42: From Fresh Wind To Dreary Sea
31 Frisch weht der Wind
32 Der Heimat zu
33 Mein Irisch Kind,
34 Wo weilest du?
35 “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
36 “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
37 —Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
38 Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
39 Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
40 Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
41 Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
42 Oed’ und leer das Meer.
34. FRESH BLOWS THE WIND: See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 1.1.5-8 (1865; tr. Richard le Gallienne 1909):
“Fresh blows the wind
For home:
My Irish child,
Where tarriest thou?”
This is a sailor’s song overheard by Princess Isolde, en route to her loveless marriage to King Mark of Cornwall; Isolde wants to drink poison to escape her fate, but her maid substitutes the poison with a love potion. She takes the potion in front of the king’s nephew Tristan, the potion takes its effect and they fall in love. Compare Venus sending Cupid to poison Queen Dido with love for Aeneas, at Virgil, Aeneid 1. 684-685:
“let thy secret fire
breathe o'er her heart, to poison and betray.”
See note 92 for the extended story of Venus, Aeneas and Dido.
TRISTAN was, with Parsifal of the Grail legend, one of King Arthur’s knights. See Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail. See also Dante, Inferno 5.61-69, where Tristan commiserates with Cleopatra (see line 77) and the widow Dido (see above), condemned for their lust to the second circle of hell.
36. THE HYACINTH GIRL, reflecting the name of a perennial April wildflower, was initially a Spartan prince endeared by the sun god Apollo (and also, in other accounts, by the wind god Zephyrus). While playing quoits in the sun the prince was killed by a wind-blown quoit; Apollo raised a purple flower out of his blood, traced a mournful “ai, ai” on its petals and named it Hyacinth. See Ovid, Metamorphosis 10:276-343. For other hyacinth references, see lines 37, 125, 176 and 323 and notes 39, 42, 71, 74, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 176, 209, 214, 227, 311.5, 312, 323, 378 and 429.
39. AMBIGUOUS IDENTITIES recur throughout this poem. See Eliot’s note at note 125, tying the hyacinth girl, whose gender is already changed from its Ovidian source, to the drowned sailor with pearly eyes; this as the speaker’s own eyes are failing. See also lines 12, 39-40, 46-48, 54, 126, 207-08, 218-19, 312-18 and 320.
NEITHER LIVING NOR DEAD: See Dante, Inferno 34:25:
“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”
See also Bhagavat Gita 2:11 (ca. 100 BCE, tr. Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, 1882):
“Learned men grieve not for the living nor the dead.”
Compare lines 117-126 (those who know nothing) and 182 (one who grieves).
41. INTO THE HEART OF ...SILENCE: See Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3: While waiting for the tide to rise on the Thames, Marlow, “the only man of us who still followed the sea,” told his shipmates of a past journey up the Congo:
“into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.”
Compare with Dante, Paradiso 12:30-31:
"Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice..."
42. WASTE AND DREAR: Eliot: “Id. iii, verse 24.”
See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 3.1.24:
“The sea is waste and drear.”
This is the report to Tristan’s henchman Kurwenal, who was keeping vigil over his ailing master and had asked a shepherd to “Watch thou the sea” for Isolde’s ship to arrive.
JEAN VERDENAL, a friend of Eliot’s who died in World War I, appears to have influenced this poem on several levels. See John Peter, A New Interpretation of The Waste Land (1952), and James E. Miller, T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977). Eliot met Verdenal in Paris in 1910, and they kept a long-distance friendship while Eliot was studying at Harvard in 1911 and 1912. See Eliot, Letters. In one letter to Eliot, Verdenal had expressed a deep admiration for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which now bookends the hyacinth girl / drowned sailor story. In April 1915 (the cruelest month; see line 1), Verdenal was among troops sent to Gallipoli (see Mrs. Porter’s soldiers at line 199; see also the Stetson friend, line 69), where he was officially commended for helping to evacuate wounded soldiers:
“Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist.”
He died two days later. That summer, Eliot published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and he dedicated his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Verdenal. In 1934, Eliot wrote in T.S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion (April 1934):
“I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.”
Compare lines 1-11, referring to lilacs, memory, mixing, mud and sunlight coming over the lake.
DROWNING, or “death by water,” which might creatively describe the cause of Verdenal’s demise, is also suggested as the poetic demise of the hyacinth girl at line 38 (“Your arms full, and your hair wet”). See also the shallow water death of Bavarian King Ludwig II (note 8), Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare, Hamlet (lines 170-172) and the drownings of the pearl-eyed sailor (line 48) and Phlebas the Phoenician (lines 312-321). Phlebas’s end and the title to Part IV is also portended at line 55 (“Fear death by water”). See also the simile of perfumes that “drowned the sense in odours” (line 89).
32 Der Heimat zu
33 Mein Irisch Kind,
34 Wo weilest du?
35 “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
36 “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
37 —Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
38 Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
39 Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
40 Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
41 Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
42 Oed’ und leer das Meer.
34. FRESH BLOWS THE WIND: See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 1.1.5-8 (1865; tr. Richard le Gallienne 1909):
“Fresh blows the wind
For home:
My Irish child,
Where tarriest thou?”
This is a sailor’s song overheard by Princess Isolde, en route to her loveless marriage to King Mark of Cornwall; Isolde wants to drink poison to escape her fate, but her maid substitutes the poison with a love potion. She takes the potion in front of the king’s nephew Tristan, the potion takes its effect and they fall in love. Compare Venus sending Cupid to poison Queen Dido with love for Aeneas, at Virgil, Aeneid 1. 684-685:
“let thy secret fire
breathe o'er her heart, to poison and betray.”
See note 92 for the extended story of Venus, Aeneas and Dido.
TRISTAN was, with Parsifal of the Grail legend, one of King Arthur’s knights. See Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail. See also Dante, Inferno 5.61-69, where Tristan commiserates with Cleopatra (see line 77) and the widow Dido (see above), condemned for their lust to the second circle of hell.
36. THE HYACINTH GIRL, reflecting the name of a perennial April wildflower, was initially a Spartan prince endeared by the sun god Apollo (and also, in other accounts, by the wind god Zephyrus). While playing quoits in the sun the prince was killed by a wind-blown quoit; Apollo raised a purple flower out of his blood, traced a mournful “ai, ai” on its petals and named it Hyacinth. See Ovid, Metamorphosis 10:276-343. For other hyacinth references, see lines 37, 125, 176 and 323 and notes 39, 42, 71, 74, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 176, 209, 214, 227, 311.5, 312, 323, 378 and 429.
39. AMBIGUOUS IDENTITIES recur throughout this poem. See Eliot’s note at note 125, tying the hyacinth girl, whose gender is already changed from its Ovidian source, to the drowned sailor with pearly eyes; this as the speaker’s own eyes are failing. See also lines 12, 39-40, 46-48, 54, 126, 207-08, 218-19, 312-18 and 320.
NEITHER LIVING NOR DEAD: See Dante, Inferno 34:25:
“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”
See also Bhagavat Gita 2:11 (ca. 100 BCE, tr. Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, 1882):
“Learned men grieve not for the living nor the dead.”
Compare lines 117-126 (those who know nothing) and 182 (one who grieves).
41. INTO THE HEART OF ...SILENCE: See Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3: While waiting for the tide to rise on the Thames, Marlow, “the only man of us who still followed the sea,” told his shipmates of a past journey up the Congo:
“into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.”
Compare with Dante, Paradiso 12:30-31:
"Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice..."
42. WASTE AND DREAR: Eliot: “Id. iii, verse 24.”
See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 3.1.24:
“The sea is waste and drear.”
This is the report to Tristan’s henchman Kurwenal, who was keeping vigil over his ailing master and had asked a shepherd to “Watch thou the sea” for Isolde’s ship to arrive.
JEAN VERDENAL, a friend of Eliot’s who died in World War I, appears to have influenced this poem on several levels. See John Peter, A New Interpretation of The Waste Land (1952), and James E. Miller, T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977). Eliot met Verdenal in Paris in 1910, and they kept a long-distance friendship while Eliot was studying at Harvard in 1911 and 1912. See Eliot, Letters. In one letter to Eliot, Verdenal had expressed a deep admiration for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which now bookends the hyacinth girl / drowned sailor story. In April 1915 (the cruelest month; see line 1), Verdenal was among troops sent to Gallipoli (see Mrs. Porter’s soldiers at line 199; see also the Stetson friend, line 69), where he was officially commended for helping to evacuate wounded soldiers:
“Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist.”
He died two days later. That summer, Eliot published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and he dedicated his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Verdenal. In 1934, Eliot wrote in T.S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion (April 1934):
“I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.”
Compare lines 1-11, referring to lilacs, memory, mixing, mud and sunlight coming over the lake.
DROWNING, or “death by water,” which might creatively describe the cause of Verdenal’s demise, is also suggested as the poetic demise of the hyacinth girl at line 38 (“Your arms full, and your hair wet”). See also the shallow water death of Bavarian King Ludwig II (note 8), Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare, Hamlet (lines 170-172) and the drownings of the pearl-eyed sailor (line 48) and Phlebas the Phoenician (lines 312-321). Phlebas’s end and the title to Part IV is also portended at line 55 (“Fear death by water”). See also the simile of perfumes that “drowned the sense in odours” (line 89).
Thursday, April 21
Moleskin 2.8: The Talk
Almost as close, just across a soybean field, were the Ericksens, then the Andersons, young families with kids my age who played as I played, moms who kept house and dads with distant jobs. By sheer time spent, I remember the first set of kids —Dean, Wayne and their older sister Loreen —more than the second —was it Lonny and two others? —and yet it was an episode with the Andersons that sticks with me most, or rather a talking to I had with my parents afterwards, at the end of a domino row. The first tile fell when I had asked my parents about sex one day, and they answered. I don’t recall the phrasing, but I’m pretty sure they never repeated it. But I did, the next day, to the Anderson kids, and they did to their parents at dinner time, and then their parents called mine, and then the last domino fell, somewhat sternly —“Jon, they were quite upset” —but tolerably —“we’re not mad at you.” Thus my first education about sex, with all its social ramifications, and an eye opener, by the way, on different styles of parenting.
Wednesday, April 20
Hell and Heaven
Hell is other people —
Heaven is the presence of God.
Hell is a closed room —
Heaven is an open field.
Hell is being forever judged —
Heaven is being accepted.
Hell is seeing ourselves as others see us —
Heaven is putting ourselves aside.
Hell is the dark glass of human mirrors —
Heaven is seeing face to face.
Hell is the parsing of pimples —
Heaven is the end of imperfections.
Hell is inescapable reflections —
Heaven is the lark flying free.
Hell refuses to look at loveliness —
Heaven is knowing love.
Hell is the end of hope and the continuation of fear —
Heaven is all we hope for and the end of all we fear.
Hell is remaining alive but being forever dead —
Heaven is being born anew, having defeated death.
Hell is a faithless existentialism —
Heaven is a higher existence.
Hell is existing in the company of absentees —
Heaven is living in the presence of God.
Hell is a room with no exit —
Heaven is a doorway and the will to walk through it.
Hell is here and now, for those who live it —
Heaven is here and now, for those who believe it.
Heaven is the presence of God.
Hell is a closed room —
Heaven is an open field.
Hell is being forever judged —
Heaven is being accepted.
Hell is seeing ourselves as others see us —
Heaven is putting ourselves aside.
Hell is the dark glass of human mirrors —
Heaven is seeing face to face.
Hell is the parsing of pimples —
Heaven is the end of imperfections.
Hell is inescapable reflections —
Heaven is the lark flying free.
Hell refuses to look at loveliness —
Heaven is knowing love.
Hell is the end of hope and the continuation of fear —
Heaven is all we hope for and the end of all we fear.
Hell is remaining alive but being forever dead —
Heaven is being born anew, having defeated death.
Hell is a faithless existentialism —
Heaven is a higher existence.
Hell is existing in the company of absentees —
Heaven is living in the presence of God.
Hell is a room with no exit —
Heaven is a doorway and the will to walk through it.
Hell is here and now, for those who live it —
Heaven is here and now, for those who believe it.
Tuesday, April 19
Ecumenical Mantra, Part 1
from Walled Gardens
Sew no purse,
Tear no veil,
Lick no plate,
Buy no flattery.
See no colors, make no claims.
Look past form, shape and shade,
Everything defined in terms
Of evil, good, black and white,
But let the air be hot and wet,
Let the earth feel cold and dry.
Let there be no contradiction.
Fire is hot and water wet,
Everything defined;
Fire dry and water cold
For all Eternity, and yet
Without the quintessential word
Laying down Eternity
Everything is argument
And all things contradict.
Sew no purse,
Tear no veil,
Lick no plate,
Buy no flattery.
See no colors, make no claims.
Look past form, shape and shade,
Everything defined in terms
Of evil, good, black and white,
But let the air be hot and wet,
Let the earth feel cold and dry.
Let there be no contradiction.
Fire is hot and water wet,
Everything defined;
Fire dry and water cold
For all Eternity, and yet
Without the quintessential word
Laying down Eternity
Everything is argument
And all things contradict.
Monday, April 18
The Task Of Truth
We are books & blogs on shelves & screens
Collecting dust, the timeless mask,
And who will have tomorrow’s task
Of reading remnants of ourselves
In search of truth and what it means
Beneath the leaves, behind the scenes?
Between the lines, before each word
Was written true, reality
Turned into shards of history,
And who should have the thankless chore
Of faithful repetition, word
For word, unspun, unchecked, unstirred?
Our government’s gone partisan.
The fourth estate’s gone commentary.
Truth has left the sanctuary.
Cyberspace is shopping carts
& garbage cans. The classroom’s gone
To Googling itself. Log on,
And look beyond this timeless mask
Of our neglect, beneath the dust
Of idle grayness over us,
Past existential grime: our time
In history remains, the task
Of truth prevails.
But who will ask?
Collecting dust, the timeless mask,
And who will have tomorrow’s task
Of reading remnants of ourselves
In search of truth and what it means
Beneath the leaves, behind the scenes?
Between the lines, before each word
Was written true, reality
Turned into shards of history,
And who should have the thankless chore
Of faithful repetition, word
For word, unspun, unchecked, unstirred?
Our government’s gone partisan.
The fourth estate’s gone commentary.
Truth has left the sanctuary.
Cyberspace is shopping carts
& garbage cans. The classroom’s gone
To Googling itself. Log on,
And look beyond this timeless mask
Of our neglect, beneath the dust
Of idle grayness over us,
Past existential grime: our time
In history remains, the task
Of truth prevails.
But who will ask?
Sunday, April 17
Beehive Truth
from Walled Gardens
It is better, in this beehive,
to be tailored in the truth of humility
than underdressed in the lies of violence.
This is no place to be naked and raving.
Leave your lie of strength at the door
and put on the armor of lowliness.
God will recognize your allegiance,
and you will trample the heights of heaven
beneath your feet.
It is better, in this beehive,
to be tailored in the truth of humility
than underdressed in the lies of violence.
This is no place to be naked and raving.
Leave your lie of strength at the door
and put on the armor of lowliness.
God will recognize your allegiance,
and you will trample the heights of heaven
beneath your feet.
Saturday, April 16
Earthworm Theology
from Walled Gardens
God knows what depths and shallows
each soul can navigate,
the draught of every creature. God creates...
– Sanai, tr. Coleman Barks
...and through this sacred rhythm
I come to appreciate
that everything is sacred. God creates
and bestows each godly wisdom
within. There is no mind.
Another knowing lives outside of time,
beyond the basic neurons
that spark our mortal fire,
above the carnal pulse of our desire;
nor can I have desire
of such capacity
to wish for all that God has given me.
Before this altar silence
becomes my eloquence
and emptiness my path to sustenance,
and I will find tomorrow
connected to today,
and I will learn to celebrate the way
that God has set before me,
this day, my daily earth,
the life I live, the wisdom I am worth.
God knows what depths and shallows
each soul can navigate,
the draught of every creature. God creates...
– Sanai, tr. Coleman Barks
...and through this sacred rhythm
I come to appreciate
that everything is sacred. God creates
and bestows each godly wisdom
within. There is no mind.
Another knowing lives outside of time,
beyond the basic neurons
that spark our mortal fire,
above the carnal pulse of our desire;
nor can I have desire
of such capacity
to wish for all that God has given me.
Before this altar silence
becomes my eloquence
and emptiness my path to sustenance,
and I will find tomorrow
connected to today,
and I will learn to celebrate the way
that God has set before me,
this day, my daily earth,
the life I live, the wisdom I am worth.
Friday, April 15
TWL, Lines 19-30: Come In Under The Shadow
19 What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
20 Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
21 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
22 A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
23 And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
24 And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
25 There is shadow under this red rock,
26 (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
27 And I will show you something different from either
28 Your shadow at morning striding behind you
29 Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
30 I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
20. SON OF MAN: Eliot: “Cf. Ezekiel II, I.” See Ezekiel 2:1:
“And [the Lord] said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.”
See also Ezekiel 37:3, later alluded to at line 186:
“Son of man, can these bones live?”
22. A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES: See Ezekiel 6:4:
“And ...your images shall be broken.”
For the recurrence of brokenness, see note 303. For the heap, see Job 8:13,17, describing the hypocrite who forgets God as being like a plant without earth and water; at verse 17:
“His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones.”
See note 4 for the recurrence of roots in this poem.
23. THE CRICKET NO RELIEF: Eliot: “Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v.” See Ecclesiastes 12:5 at note 13 (“the grasshopper shall be a burden”).
25. UNDER THE ROCK: See note 28, and see Isaiah 32:2:
“And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
26. ARIEL’S SONG, from Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.376-405, a song sometimes referred to by the first line of its second stanza, “Full Fathom Five,” is repeatedly alluded to throughout the poem. See below, and see lines 26 (come), 48 and 125 (pearls), 119 (music), 182 (weeping), 186 (bones), 192 (father), 257 (waters), 276 (dogs) and 393 (chanticleer), and see notes 167 (fathom) and 266 (spirits):
“ARIEL [Sings].
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have and kissed
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there,
And sweet sprites bear
The burden.
(burden dispersedly)
SPIRITS
Hark, hark! Bow-wow,
The watch-dogs bark, bow-wow.
ARIEL
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock a diddle dow.
FERDINAND
Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?
It sounds no more, and sure, it waits upon
Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it
(Or it hath drawn me rather) but 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.
ARIEL [Sings]
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
SPIRITS
Ding-dong
ARIEL
Hark! now I hear them.
SPIRITS
Ding-dong, bell.”
Shakespeare’s Ariel, a spirit “which art but air” (5.1.21), causes a passing ship to run aground, then brings all its passengers safely to shore. Compare Virgil, Aeneid 5.89, where Aeneas, having sailed through a tempest, lands on the yellow sands of hospitable Sicilian shores. See also Thomas Heywood, Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels 4 (1635), in which another Ariel converges the elements of earth, water and air as “earth’s great Lord” and one of the princes who rule the waters. See also Heirarchy 1, echoing lines from Augustine’s Confessions (see note 307):
“I sought Thee round about, O Thou my God,
To finde thy aboad.
I said unto the Earth ‘Speake, art thou He?’
She answer'd me,
‘I am not.’
...I askt the Seas, and all the Deepes below,
My God to know.
...I askt the Aire, if that were hee? but know
It told me, No.
...I askt the Heavens, Sun, Moone and Stars; but they
Said ‘We obey.
...We are not God, but we by Him were made.’”
27. I WILL SHOW YOU: See Jeremiah 33: 2-3, 10, 11:
“Thus saith the Lord the maker thereof, the Lord that formed it, to establish it; ...Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not. ...Again there shall be heard in this place, ...even in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, that are desolate, without man, and without inhabitant, and without beast, The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness ...For I will cause to return the captivity of the land, as at the first...”
28. SHADOWS: See Eliot, The Death of Narcissus (1915):
“Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or
Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock...”
See also Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster 3.2 (1620):
“Preach to birds and beasts
What woman is, and help to save them from you;
How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions,
Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven
With thousand changes in one subtle web,
And worn so by you;
...How all the good you have is but a shadow,
I' the morning with you, and at night behind you
Past and forgotten.”
See also The Allegory of the Cave, in Plato, Republic (360 B.C.E., tr. Benjamin Jowett, ca. 1893):
“[Socrates:] And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
...[Glaucon:] You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
[Socrates:] Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another ...To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. “
30. A HANDFUL OF DUST: See John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: 4. The Physician Is Sent For (1638):
“What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust; what’s become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave?”
GRAVES AND BURIAL SCENES recur at lines 71-75, 193, 246 and 388; see also notes 0.3, 2, 7, 30, 71, 74, 186, 214, 246, 298 and 378.
20 Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
21 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
22 A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
23 And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
24 And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
25 There is shadow under this red rock,
26 (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
27 And I will show you something different from either
28 Your shadow at morning striding behind you
29 Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
30 I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
20. SON OF MAN: Eliot: “Cf. Ezekiel II, I.” See Ezekiel 2:1:
“And [the Lord] said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.”
See also Ezekiel 37:3, later alluded to at line 186:
“Son of man, can these bones live?”
22. A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES: See Ezekiel 6:4:
“And ...your images shall be broken.”
For the recurrence of brokenness, see note 303. For the heap, see Job 8:13,17, describing the hypocrite who forgets God as being like a plant without earth and water; at verse 17:
“His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones.”
See note 4 for the recurrence of roots in this poem.
23. THE CRICKET NO RELIEF: Eliot: “Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v.” See Ecclesiastes 12:5 at note 13 (“the grasshopper shall be a burden”).
25. UNDER THE ROCK: See note 28, and see Isaiah 32:2:
“And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
26. ARIEL’S SONG, from Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.376-405, a song sometimes referred to by the first line of its second stanza, “Full Fathom Five,” is repeatedly alluded to throughout the poem. See below, and see lines 26 (come), 48 and 125 (pearls), 119 (music), 182 (weeping), 186 (bones), 192 (father), 257 (waters), 276 (dogs) and 393 (chanticleer), and see notes 167 (fathom) and 266 (spirits):
“ARIEL [Sings].
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have and kissed
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there,
And sweet sprites bear
The burden.
(burden dispersedly)
SPIRITS
Hark, hark! Bow-wow,
The watch-dogs bark, bow-wow.
ARIEL
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock a diddle dow.
FERDINAND
Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?
It sounds no more, and sure, it waits upon
Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it
(Or it hath drawn me rather) but 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.
ARIEL [Sings]
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
SPIRITS
Ding-dong
ARIEL
Hark! now I hear them.
SPIRITS
Ding-dong, bell.”
Shakespeare’s Ariel, a spirit “which art but air” (5.1.21), causes a passing ship to run aground, then brings all its passengers safely to shore. Compare Virgil, Aeneid 5.89, where Aeneas, having sailed through a tempest, lands on the yellow sands of hospitable Sicilian shores. See also Thomas Heywood, Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels 4 (1635), in which another Ariel converges the elements of earth, water and air as “earth’s great Lord” and one of the princes who rule the waters. See also Heirarchy 1, echoing lines from Augustine’s Confessions (see note 307):
“I sought Thee round about, O Thou my God,
To finde thy aboad.
I said unto the Earth ‘Speake, art thou He?’
She answer'd me,
‘I am not.’
...I askt the Seas, and all the Deepes below,
My God to know.
...I askt the Aire, if that were hee? but know
It told me, No.
...I askt the Heavens, Sun, Moone and Stars; but they
Said ‘We obey.
...We are not God, but we by Him were made.’”
27. I WILL SHOW YOU: See Jeremiah 33: 2-3, 10, 11:
“Thus saith the Lord the maker thereof, the Lord that formed it, to establish it; ...Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not. ...Again there shall be heard in this place, ...even in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, that are desolate, without man, and without inhabitant, and without beast, The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness ...For I will cause to return the captivity of the land, as at the first...”
28. SHADOWS: See Eliot, The Death of Narcissus (1915):
“Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or
Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock...”
See also Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster 3.2 (1620):
“Preach to birds and beasts
What woman is, and help to save them from you;
How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions,
Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven
With thousand changes in one subtle web,
And worn so by you;
...How all the good you have is but a shadow,
I' the morning with you, and at night behind you
Past and forgotten.”
See also The Allegory of the Cave, in Plato, Republic (360 B.C.E., tr. Benjamin Jowett, ca. 1893):
“[Socrates:] And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
...[Glaucon:] You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
[Socrates:] Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another ...To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. “
30. A HANDFUL OF DUST: See John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: 4. The Physician Is Sent For (1638):
“What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust; what’s become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave?”
GRAVES AND BURIAL SCENES recur at lines 71-75, 193, 246 and 388; see also notes 0.3, 2, 7, 30, 71, 74, 186, 214, 246, 298 and 378.
Thursday, April 14
Moleskin 2.7: Lawrence And Julia
Lawrence and Julia Olsen were our nearest neighbors, just across the gravel road and down a long driveway to a tuckaway farmhouse. It was through Lawrence, a homebound invalid who needed a big hoist to move him from bed to wheelchair to living room chair, that I first got to really know my father. As a pastor, it was Dad’s duty to bring the communion bread and wine to Lawrence, and he would often let me tag along. But Dad would visit Lawrence and Julia a lot more that the once monthly communion Sundays, more than his job seemed to require or the social structures around us seemed to compel: he visited them often, as a neighbor and a friend, and he brought me along, to play in their yard, to play with their bulldog, to play with their grandkids’ toys, but also, I think, to be closer to our closest neighbors.
Wednesday, April 13
mosquito
the little-brained mosquito dances
'round the room on paper wings
there's wisdom in the way life sings
to give us fools a fighting chance
there's grace in every circumstance
of life if one keeps listening
for God's design upon the wings
and nature’s music in the dance
there's also pain sometimes disease
that pierces through the leather veil
and then eventually there's death
but first despite life's tragedies
there is the whisper of a breath
that grace and wisdom will prevail
the little-brained mosquito dances
round the room on paper wings
with God's design behind the dance
and nature's way to make life sing
'round the room on paper wings
there's wisdom in the way life sings
to give us fools a fighting chance
there's grace in every circumstance
of life if one keeps listening
for God's design upon the wings
and nature’s music in the dance
there's also pain sometimes disease
that pierces through the leather veil
and then eventually there's death
but first despite life's tragedies
there is the whisper of a breath
that grace and wisdom will prevail
the little-brained mosquito dances
round the room on paper wings
with God's design behind the dance
and nature's way to make life sing
Tuesday, April 12
The Owl
from Walled Gardens
Whoever remains forever behind a veil
Is like the owl who would avoid the sun,
Aware the sun would make its eyesight fail,
It hides, and still the sun keeps blazing on.
But if the owl is blinded by the dawn
It is because the owl’s eyes are weak
And not because the sun keeps blazing on
As though it were some terrible mistake.
You dream your dreams, you make use of your eyes
And yet beyond your eyes and dreams you’re blind
And even as the sun lights up the skies
You cannot see the surface and the line,
And what’s the point of having eyes that can-
not see the way the sun keeps blazing on?
Whoever remains forever behind a veil
Is like the owl who would avoid the sun,
Aware the sun would make its eyesight fail,
It hides, and still the sun keeps blazing on.
But if the owl is blinded by the dawn
It is because the owl’s eyes are weak
And not because the sun keeps blazing on
As though it were some terrible mistake.
You dream your dreams, you make use of your eyes
And yet beyond your eyes and dreams you’re blind
And even as the sun lights up the skies
You cannot see the surface and the line,
And what’s the point of having eyes that can-
not see the way the sun keeps blazing on?
Monday, April 11
The Elephant
from Walled Gardens
“I come from the land of Ghur.
You may have heard
the story I’m about to tell,
but I’ll tell you more
than you’ve heard before.
You may have heard
how soldiers came
and set up camp in the land of Ghur,
all in the name
of world peace, but did you hear
about their king
visiting his army troops,
so full of pomp
and circumstance, riding up
on his elephant
across our piece of the world
to claim it as his own?
We’ve seen our share of elephants
in the land of Ghur,
but this great beast,
like none we’ve ever seen before,
stood battle ready,
armored head to toe and armed
with long hollow weaponry,
all set to blow
our world apart,
and on its heavy limbs it rose
above us like
an ancient tower in the sky.
“I never saw this for myself
but I believe
what I’ve been told by several
first-hand witnesses
who travel through the land of Ghur
and testify
to all they’ve come to know. ‘That armor,’
says the first,
‘seemed like a carpet stretched across
the desert floor.’
‘That weapon,’ says the next,
‘loomed like a Howitzer,
its heavy barrel sweeping o’er
the poppy fields.’
‘That tower,’ says the third,
‘casts shadows on us all.’
“There may be truth in everything
that’s ever said,
and wisdom at the core of every
argument,
but in the end we’ll never see
the elephant
for what it is; we’re ignorant and blind,
and when
the war begins we fight against ourselves,
and when
it’s over we are all that’s left behind.”
“I come from the land of Ghur.
You may have heard
the story I’m about to tell,
but I’ll tell you more
than you’ve heard before.
You may have heard
how soldiers came
and set up camp in the land of Ghur,
all in the name
of world peace, but did you hear
about their king
visiting his army troops,
so full of pomp
and circumstance, riding up
on his elephant
across our piece of the world
to claim it as his own?
We’ve seen our share of elephants
in the land of Ghur,
but this great beast,
like none we’ve ever seen before,
stood battle ready,
armored head to toe and armed
with long hollow weaponry,
all set to blow
our world apart,
and on its heavy limbs it rose
above us like
an ancient tower in the sky.
“I never saw this for myself
but I believe
what I’ve been told by several
first-hand witnesses
who travel through the land of Ghur
and testify
to all they’ve come to know. ‘That armor,’
says the first,
‘seemed like a carpet stretched across
the desert floor.’
‘That weapon,’ says the next,
‘loomed like a Howitzer,
its heavy barrel sweeping o’er
the poppy fields.’
‘That tower,’ says the third,
‘casts shadows on us all.’
“There may be truth in everything
that’s ever said,
and wisdom at the core of every
argument,
but in the end we’ll never see
the elephant
for what it is; we’re ignorant and blind,
and when
the war begins we fight against ourselves,
and when
it’s over we are all that’s left behind.”
Sunday, April 10
The Naming Of Parts
from Walled Gardens
Being told we are made in
the image of God, we imagine:
the foot that walks beside,
the hand that reaches out,
the fingers and the touch
and the change of place,
the grace of one descending,
the image of a man,
the form of one who sits upon a throne
with a face that shines upon us
and words to gather round,
with flesh and blood and
a body to embrace.
It is this God that we imagine,
this God we wear around our necks,
that leads to arguments and war,
but I will believe there is a better God than
this God of blind design, a greater God
than mortals can conceive.
Being told we are made in
the image of God, we imagine:
the foot that walks beside,
the hand that reaches out,
the fingers and the touch
and the change of place,
the grace of one descending,
the image of a man,
the form of one who sits upon a throne
with a face that shines upon us
and words to gather round,
with flesh and blood and
a body to embrace.
It is this God that we imagine,
this God we wear around our necks,
that leads to arguments and war,
but I will believe there is a better God than
this God of blind design, a greater God
than mortals can conceive.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)