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ALL THINGS DESIRE by St. Thomas Aquinas

May 10, 2011

 

The Space Station

All things desire to be like God,
and infinite space is a mirror
that tries to reflect
His body.

But it can’t.

All that infinite existence can show us of Him
is only an atom of God’s
being.

God stood behind Himself one night and cast a
brilliant shadow from which creation
came.

Even this shadow is such a flame that
moths consume their selves in it every second -
with their sacred passion to possess
beautiful
forms.

 Existence mirrors God the best it can,
though how arrogant for any image in that mirror,
for any human being, to
think they know

His will;

for His will has never been spoken,
His voice would ignite
the earth’s wings
and all upon
it.

We invent truths about God to protect ourselves
from the wolf’s cries we hear
and make.

 All things desire to be like God,
all things desire to
love.

Still today there is a liberal Catholic reflex, shared by secular liberalism, against the very ideas of authority, obedience, and the truth that binds. The Catholic insight about human freedom, an insight that we dare to say has universal applicability, is that we are bound to be free. The truth, in order to be understood, must be loved, and love binds.
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, The Persistence of the Catholic Moment

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Poem After the Seven Last Words by Mark Strand

May 6, 2011

Mark Strand

Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was raised and educated in the United States. He is the author often earlier books of poems. He is also the author of a book of stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby, three volumes of translations (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and of anonymous Quechua lyrics), a number of anthologies (most recently 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century), and monographs on the contemporary artists William Bailey and Edward Hopper. He has received many honors and grants for his poems, including a MacArthur Fellowship for 1987-92, and in 1990 he was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States. In 1993 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize, and in 1999 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Blizzard of One. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Poem After the Seven Last Words is part of a recent book of poems, Man and Camel. It was commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet, and was originally written to accompany a performance of Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ.

 

Poem After the Seven Last Words

1

The story of the end, of the last word
of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.
We tell it and retell it—one word, then another
until it seems that no last word is possible,
that none would be bearable. Thus, when the hero
of the story says to himself, as to someone far away,
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
we may feel that he is pleading for us, that we are
the secret life of the story and, as long as his plea
is not answered, we shall be spared. So the story
continues. So we continue. And the end, once more,
becomes the next, and the next after that.

2

There is an island in the dark, a dreamt-of place
where the muttering wind shifts over the white lawns
and riffles the leaves of trees, the high trees
that are streaked with gold and line the walkways there;
and those already arrived are happy to be the silken
remains of something they were but cannot recall;
they move to the sound of stars, which is also imagined,
but who cares about that; the polished columns they see
may be no more than shafts of sunlight, but for those
who live on and on in the radiance of their remains
this is of little importance. There is an island
in the dark and you will be there, I promise you,
you shall be with me in paradise, in the single season of being,
in the place of forever, you shall find yourself.
And there the leaves will turn and never fall, there the wind will sing
and be your voice as if for the first time.

3

Someday someone will write a story telling
among other things of a parting between mother
and son, of how she wandered off, of how he vanished
in air. But before that happens, it will describe
how their faces shone with a feeble light and how
the son was moved to say, “Woman, look at your son,”
then to a friend nearby, “Son, look at your mother.”
At which point the writer will put down his pen and
imagine that while those words were spoken
something else happened, something unusual like a
purpose revealed, a secret exchanged, a truth
to which they, the mother and son, would be bound,
but what it was no one would know. Not even the writer.

4

These are the days of spring when the sky is filled with
the odor of lilac, when darkness becomes desire,
and there is nothing that does not wish to be born;
days when the fate of the present is a breezy fullness,
when the world’s great gift for fiction gilds even
the dirt we walk on, and we feel we could live forever
while knowing of course that we can’t. Such is our plight.
The master of weather and everything else, if he wants,
can bring forth a dark of a different kind, one hidden
by darkness so deep it cannot be seen. No one escapes.
Not even the man who believed he was chosen to do so,
for when the dark came down he cried out, “Father, Father,
why have you forsaken me?” To which no answer came.

5

To be thirsty. To say, “I thirst.”
To close one’s eyes and see the giant world
that is born each time the eyes are closed.
To see one’s death. To see the darkening clouds
as the tragic cloth of a day of mourning. To be the one
mourned. To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover
what one suspected, that the only word in it
is nothing. To try to open one’s eyes, but not to be
able to. To feel the mouth burn. To feel the sudden
presence of what,again and again, was not said.
To translate it and have it remain unsaid. To know
at last that nothing is more real than nothing.

6

“It is finished,” he said. You could hear him say it,
the words almost a whisper, then not even that,
but an echo so faint it seemed no longer to come
from him, but from elsewhere. This was his moment,
his final moment. “It is finished,” he said into a vastness
that led to an even greater vastness, and yet all of it
within him. He contained it all. That was the miracle,
to be both large and small in the same instant, to be
like us, but more so, then finally to give up the ghost,
which is what happened. And from the storm that swirled
in his wake a formal nakedness took shape, the truth
of disguise and the mask of belief were joined forever.

7

Back down these stairs to the same scene,
to the moon, the stars, the night wind. Hours pass
and only the harp off in the distance and the wind
moving through it. And soon the sun’s gray disk,
darkened by clouds, sailing above. And beyond,
as always, the sea of endless transparence, of utmost
calm, a place of constant beginning that has within it
what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand
has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart.
To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.

 

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Five Poems On Wisdom & Experiencing The Other Person

April 27, 2011

First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III [O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?] by William Shakespeare

The Clown, singing
O Mistress mine, where are you roaming? 
O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming 
That can sing both high and low; 
Trip no further, pretty sweeting, 
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting—         
Every wise man’s son doth know.  

What is love? ’tis not hereafter; 
Present mirth hath present laughter; 
What’s to come is still unsure: 
In delay there lies no plenty,—         
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty, 
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Carpe Diem by Robert Frost

Age saw two quiet children
Go loving by at twilight,
He knew not whether homeward,
Or outward from the village,
Or (chimes were ringing) churchward,
He waited (they were strangers)
Till they were out of hearing
To bid them both be happy.
“Be happy, happy, happy,
And seize the day of pleasure.”
The age-long theme is Age’s.
‘Twas Age imposed on poems
Their gather-roses burden
To warn against the danger
That overtaken lovers
From being overflooded
With happiness should have it.
And yet not know they have it.
But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing—
Too present to imagine. 

Another Song [Are they shadows that we see?] by Samuel Daniel

Are they shadows that we see?
And can shadows pleasure give?
Pleasures only shadows be
Cast by bodies we conceive,
And are made the things we deem,
In those figures which they seem.

But these pleasures vanish fast,
Which by shadows are exprest:

Pleasures are not, if they last,
In their passing, is their best.
Glory is most bright and gay
In a flash, and so away.

Feed apace then greedy eyes
On the wonder you behold.

Take it sudden as it flies
Though you yake it not to hold:
When your eyes have done their part,
Thought must length it in the heart.

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl (443) by Emily Dickinson

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely—
As the very least 
Were infinite—to me—
   
I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my gown 
That anchored there—I weigh 
The time ’twill be till six o’clock 
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my tickling—through—
We cannot put Ourself away 
As a completed Man 
Or Woman—When the Errand’s done 
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—
Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are 
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes 
To bear on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm—
   
Therefore—we do life’s labor—
Though life’s Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—

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Archaic Torso of Apollo

April 25, 2011

Archaic Torso, The Louvre

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

One of the things that derailed the presidency of Jimmy Carter occurred when he confessed publicly that he had looked at women with lust and, therefore, according to Jesus, had committed “adultery in the heart.” People thought he was being a Jesus freak and he was roundly derided by Playboy magazine and other liberal bastions of sexual openness, but he was actually pointing to a deep religious truth.

Lorenzo Albacete writes in his essay “The Face of the Other”that to “look at someone with lust” is to look at that person only as a potential object of sexual pleasure, as a sexually attractive body. A “lustful” look separates a person from his or her body, or reduces that person to an attractive object. In doing so, the sexual body’s participation in the Eternal is suppressed.

But are we asking too much of ourselves not to treat others as objects? Can we ever really see other people as totally “other” — that is, can we see others as independent of our desires and intentions? If that is possible, how do we do it?

Albacete writes that to avoid treating others as objects, we must examine what occurs at the very first moment of contact with another person. He compares this mysterious beginning moment of contact to the “primordial time” of traditional creation myths (think”in the beginning” as   ”In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” or “In the beginning was the Word.” At this beginning Albacete says, prior to any thought, we can’t misrepresent the other in our mind, since no idea or concept of the other has yet been formulated. Prior to thought we cannot objectify another.

For example, let’s say you walk outside and you see something you’ve never seen before: an animal with two heads and three tails. What do you do first? You simply look! At that moment you are letting the thing be what it is without physically, mentally, or emotionally interfering with it. It is only at that moment that you really have come into contact with its total otherness. Of course, that moment is just a moment, because a second afterward your mind goes to work and begins to categorize: ah, two heads, three tails, and so on. But that first moment, the moment before objectification is a crucial one, whether with a mythical creature or a human being.

The initial contact with another human being — a reality different from us — is a “happening,” not simply in the sense of “something that happens” but also in the 1960s sense of something big. The encounter takes place in space and time in an unforeseen way. It is experienced precisely as coming from outside of us. Its defining characteristics are its singularity (nothing else is like this)) and novelty (this has not occurred before). As such, our posture before it is one of surprise, wonder, marvel, amazement (before the mind begins to work on it and otherwise destroy it). The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls this an experience of “enjoyment,” fulfillment, satisfaction, and interior “nourishment” prior to any particular intention or previous desire. The other is discovered as something totally respond to it. It is like the experience of a weight upon me that was not there before, a presence that demands that I go “out of myself” toward it.
Lorenzo Albacete, God At the Ritz

Did you notice in your reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” that is precisely what is occurring? It is a poem about a sculpture of Apollo’s torso. After grasping it without any preconceptions, grasping it as a reality that is just overwhelmingly there, Rilke writes, it “bursts forth from all its contours like a star, for there is no place that does not see you.” Rilke then exclaims, “You must change your life.”

This experience of meeting another alters, so to speak, my experience of subjectivity and of identity. From that moment on, my self is experienced as tied to this “reaching out” toward the other. Subjectivity is experienced as inter-subjectivity.

Think about this: nothing is more intimate, more “personal,” more incommunicable than subjectivity. And yet, the word “subject” itself is also used to mean “tied to” or “dependent on” external realities, as in the phrases “being subject to another,” “subject to another’s approval,” and “subject to the weather.” In his book Otherwise Than Being, Levinas puts it bluntly: “Subjectivity is being a hostage.”

It is important to remember that all of this occurs at the very point of encounter, the very beginning of my experience of another. It occurs before there is any conscious mental awareness of the person or this process. The experience of the other for whom and to whom I absent from my prior experience. I become aware of not being fulfilled before by what now fulfills me. If I try to absorb into myself what I have encountered, to live off its enjoyment permanently, it is as if the other were to push me back, to resist being consumed by my enjoyment. Remember, I have yet to formulate an idea of the other; I do not yet have mental knowledge of it. I experience the other as radically “not me”; the other is not an object for my possession.

This experience is therefore also an experience of vulnerability, of suddenly being faced by and exposed to the unexpected. It is as if something suddenly appears that demands my concern, something that I cannot avoid. As such, I experience myself as tied from now on to this new reality. It changes my life. It “faces” me and I “face” it as radically different from me. And so I must am responsible, the one whom I cannot “consume” as an object of my enjoyment but must respect and care for precisely as other – this “primordial experience” takes place in and through the body: my body and the body of the other.

The body mediates the “otherness” of the other, his or her uniqueness, unrepeatability, novelty, transcendence, and “mystery.” Indeed, the moment concepts and ideas are formulated to serve as the basis for my response to others, the body loses its reality as symbol or mediator of transcendence and begins to be considered as an obstacle to it. Thus begins the tragic path to the rock around the genitals, or beyond religion — to the secular inability to grasp the presence of mystery in the body.

Gender differentiation, and thus human sexuality, is part of the body’s mediation of otherness, and thus of transcendence and mystery. In our relationality, our being subject to and with one another, we strive to reach and meet the Eternal.
Lorenzo Albacete, God At the Ritz

This is why looking at art and reading poetry is so important. It gives us a kind of practice in experiencing the sheer otherness of our fellow humans. Many of us enter museums anticipating these kind of encounters. Perhaps it is one of the reasons we visit them in the first place. Yet I wonder how many of us bring that same kind of consciousness when we greet someone new for the first time. “Intimacy demands the acceptance of the other’s personal subjectivity and all that it implies: that is, the acceptance of the person in his entirety, and the offer of a space in which he can be himself, in the totality of his identity.”

Each person, it is claimed by homosexualist gender theories, must develop his own psychosocial sexual identity without being coerced by social or moral prejudices. In this way, biological gender is seen as a purely neutral element that may be shaped in different ways, has no relevance to the gender of the individual, and is susceptible to different modalities of orientation at the relational level.

This approach then results in a decisive conclusion: the assumption of personal identity is not just a simple given that follows a biological template: it also emerges from one’s personal history. Just as a child must accept his parents, his skin color, or certain capacities and limits, and just as this acceptance is decisive for his own identity as an agent within a drama that is composed of multiple actors, so each person must construct his own psycho-social sexual identity, a process that normally occurs without major problems, but that in certain circumstances can result in difficulty and serious conflict. Its contributions notwithstanding, the gender-theory approach obscures the core problem.
Fr. José Noriega Homosexuality: The Semblance Of Intimacy 

Fr. José Noriega, Vice-Chancellor of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome specializes in sexual ethics and is a professor of moral theology. His very dense writing on the false intimacy of homosexualism sheds light on what Monsignor Albacete is getting to when he writes of the secular inability to grasp the presence of mystery in the body.

Posted in Aesthetics, Homosexualism, Poetry, Ranier Maria Rilke | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Thomas Aquinas’ Ecce Panis Angelorum And Panis angelicus

April 18, 2011

 

St. Thomas Aquinas from by Carlo Crivelli, 1476

1. Ecce Panis Angelorum,
Factus cibus viatorum
Vere panis filiorum,
Non mittendus canibus.
2. In figuris praesignatur,
Cum Isaac immolatur,
Agnus Paschae deputatur,
Datur manna patribus.
3. Bone pastor, panis vere,
Jesu, nostri miserere:
Tu nos pasce, nos tuere,
Tu nos bona fac videre
In terra viventium.
4. Tu qui cuncta scis et vales,
Qui nos pascis hic mortales:
Tuos ibi commensales,
Coheredes et sodales
Fac sanctorum civium.
Amen		 1. Behold the Bread of Angels,
made the Food of wayfarers,
Truly the bread of children,
not to be given to the dogs.
2. Presignified by figure,
When Isaac was immolated,
the Paschal Lamb was commanded,
Manna was given to the fathers.
3. Good shepherd, true Bread,
Jesus, have mercy on us:
Feed us, protect us,
Make us to see good things
in the land of the living.
4. Thou who knowest and willest all things,
Who feeds us mortals by This:
Make thine own to be partakers of,
coheirs and citizens in
that holy City of Saints.
Amen.

 The Ecce Panis Angelorum is pure Catholic teaching. Nothing like modern hymns, many which only talk about love and could be used in references to human spouses or lovers. It discusses the establishment of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, how we receive Jesus whole and entire under either species of bread or wine. It is sung every year in the Corpus Christi procession and verse 17 contains “The good receive It as do the bad, but the result is anything but the same; life for the one and destruction for the other.” As many as receive Him, He is not utterly consumed, but lives forever. A beautiful hymn, worthy of the great Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church.

A straightforward rendition here for the parish choir to aspire to:

Panis angelicus
Panis angelicus is the penultimate strophe of the hymn Sacris solemniis written by Saint Thomas Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus Christi as part of a complete liturgy of the Feast including prayers for the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.

The strophe of Sacris solemniis that begins with the words Panis angelicus (bread of angels) has often been set to music separately from the rest of the hymn. Most famously, in 1872 César Franck set this strophe for voice (tenor), harp, cello, and organ, and incorporated it into his Messe à trois voix Opus 12.

The phenomenon whereby the strophe of Sacris solemniis that begins with the words “Panis angelicus” is often treated as a separate hymn has occurred also with other hymns that Thomas Aquinas wrote for Corpus Christi: Verbum supernum prodiens (the last two strophes begin with O salutaris Hostia) and Pange lingua gloriosi (the last two strophes begin with Tantum ergo, in which case the word ergo ["therefore"] makes evident that this part is the continuation of a longer hymn).

Panis angelicus
fit panis hominum;
Dat panis coelicus
figuris terminum:
O res mirabilis!
Manducat Dominum
Pauper, servus et humilis.
Te trina Deitas
unaque poscimus:
Sic nos tu visita,
sicut te colimus;
Per tuas semitas
duc nos quo tendimus,
Ad lucem quam inhabitas.
Amen.
The angelic bread
becomes the bread of men;
The heavenly bread
ends all prefigurations:
What wonder!
The Lord is eaten
by a poor and humble servant.
Triune God,
We beg of you:
visit us,
just as we worship you.
By your ways,
lead us where we are heading,
to the light in which you dwell.
Amen.

The César Franck hymn sung by the incomparable Renee Fleming.

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Thomas Aquinas’ Great Poem: The Pange lingua

April 14, 2011

Anton Bruckner

From yesterday’s post:
“Indeed, because he serves reason so lovingly, St. Thomas actually becomes a poet, and, if we believe a disinterested judge, the greatest Latin poet of the Middle Ages. Now it is remarkable that the lofty beauty of the works attributed to this poet of the Eucharist depend almost entirely on the aptness and concentration of his expressions. Poems like the Oro to devote and Ecce pans angelorum can almost be called little theological treatises and they have supplied generations of faithful Christians with inspiration and devotion.

Perhaps the most distinctive of all his poems is the Pange lingua which inspired Remy de Gourmont to say, in words matching, almost, the flawless beauty of the style he was attempting to describe: “The inspiration of St. Thomas is fired by an unwavering genius, a genius at once strong, sure, confident and exact. What he wants to say, he speaks out boldly, and in words so lovely that even doubt grows fearful and takes to flight.”

And here is that Pange lingua:

Pange, lingua, gloriosi
Corporis mysterium,
Sanguinisque pretiosi,
quem in mundi pretium
fructus ventris generosi
Rex effudit Gentium.
Nobis datus, nobis natus
ex intacta Virgine,
et in mundo conversatus,
sparso verbi semine,
sui moras incolatus
miro clausit ordine.
In supremae nocte coenae
recumbens cum fratribus
observata lege plene
cibis in legalibus,
cibum turbae duodenae
se dat suis manibus.
Verbum caro, panem verum
verbo carnem efficit:
fitque sanguis Christi merum,
et si sensus deficit,
ad firmandum cor sincerum
sola fides sufficit.
Tantum ergo Sacramentum
veneremur cernui:
et antiquum documentum
novo cedat ritui:
praestet fides supplementum
sensuum defectui.
Genitori, Genitoque
laus et jubilatio,
salus, honor, virtus quoque
sit et benedictio:
Procedenti ab utroque
compar sit laudatio.
Amen. Alleluja.  		 Sing, my tongue, the Savior’s glory,
of His flesh the mystery sing;
of the Blood, all price exceeding,
shed by our immortal King,
destined, for the world’s redemption,
from a noble womb to spring.
Of a pure and spotless Virgin
born for us on earth below,
He, as Man, with man conversing,
stayed, the seeds of truth to sow;
then He closed in solemn order
wondrously His life of woe.
On the night of that Last Supper,
seated with His chosen band,
He the Pascal victim eating,
first fulfills the Law’s command;
then as Food to His Apostles
gives Himself with His own hand.
Word-made-Flesh, the bread of nature
by His word to Flesh He turns;
wine into His Blood He changes;
what though sense no change discerns?
Only be the heart in earnest,
faith her lesson quickly learns.
Down in adoration falling,
This great Sacrament we hail,
Over ancient forms of worship
Newer rites of grace prevail;
Faith will tell us Christ is present,
When our human senses fail.
To the everlasting Father,
And the Son who made us free
And the Spirit, God proceeding
From them Each eternally,
Be salvation, honor, blessing,
Might and endless majesty.
Amen. Alleluia.

 The great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner used the prayer for this hymn chorus:    

Posted in Poetry, St. Thomas Aquinas | Leave a Comment »

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Woods by Wendell Berry

April 12, 2011

Woods by Wendell Berry

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

In the final chapter of Remembering, “The Hilltop,” the main character, Andy, has returned home. Flora is not home, and so he leaves her a note, “Can you forgive me? I pray that you will forgive me,” before going out for a walk on his land. This is in fact the third journey related in the novel, the first being his walk in San Francisco and the second being his flight home. If we follow the allusions to Dante, the first two journeys correspond to the Inferno and Purgatorio respectively. The themes of transgression and repentance in these two journeys seem to bear the interpretation. This final journey would then correspond to Dante’s Paradiso. Here again the parallel fits, for Andy is granted here a mystical vision of something like heaven.

Andy walks through the woods on his property, which lead to a high place overlooking Port William. While in the woods, he stops to rest and falls into a sleep reminiscent of the “deep sleep” of Adam, for it is like death: “He has entered the dark, and it is such darkness as he has never known. All that is around him and all that lie is has disappeared into it. He sees nothing, remembers nothing, knows nothing except a hopeless longing for something he does not know, for which he does not know a name.” He is awakened by a man, “dark as shadow,” touching his shoulder, and arises to find himself in the same place, which, “though it is familiar to him, is changed.” Somehow he recognizes the man as his guide, and he begins to follow this dark Virgil through the woods, which are now filled with a mysterious, singing light. Andy recognizes that “he has entered the eternal place in which we live in time” and would like to stay, but the man leads him on to the top of the hill overlooking Port William.

Andy looks and sees the town and the fields around it, Port William and its countryside as he never saw or dreamed them, the signs everywhere upon them of the care of a longer love than any who have lived there ever imagined. . And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

He sees that they are dead, and they are alive. He sees that he lives in eternity as he lives in time, and nothing is lost.

In Andy’s vision of a redeemed Port William, one cannot help recalling the verse of Revelation 21:2: “And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” The communion of persons in marriage is not man’s highest end. It is only a sacrament, a visible and efficacious sign, of the higher, more lasting, and more real communion of persons in Christ. It is our participation in this final “membership” that ultimately makes us whole, a fact beautifully expressed in the final lines of the novel, in terms softly evocative of Psalm 137:

He has come into the presence of these living by a change of sight, by which he has parted from them as they were and from himself as he was and is.
Now he prepares to leave them. Their names singing in his mind, he lifts toward them the restored right hand of his joy.

In Remembering Wendell Berry helps to heal the hidden wound of our fallen nature. He reveals in a powerful way the latent tendencies in our fallen nature and in our culture more generally toward Romanticism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and every other form of dualism that rejects the gift of Creation and the body. He also shows the terrifying costs of this great rejection. Moreover, by making detailed what is spare in the myth of the fall, and making concrete what is abstract in the Theology of the Body, Remembering brings us tangibly in touch with the primordial memory of wholeness that slumbers in every human heart. Above all, Remembering imprints a “beautifying awareness of the meaning of the body” (Theology, 30 January 1980, 69) into our own memory, giving us hope as we groan with all of creation for the redemption of our bodies.
Healing The Hidden Wound:The Theology Of The Body In Wendell Berry’s Remembering By Nathan Schlueter

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Rilke and Walcott

April 5, 2011

I came across this video presentation by David Whyte. It’s very clever and very good, one of the few presentations of poetry that made sense to me. I like the constant repetition he employs. Poetry is so compact that when we speak it we need to unpack it by repetition so that the mind can catch up. I’ve taken some of his main points (along with the poems here) to give you an idea what he is trying to do.

It’s just great advice: if not for others than for yourself. This is the kind of advice that seems to need repeating. I don’t know where you are in your journey but stop and listen to this for a moment and see whether a correction is not in order.

 

The Swan – Rilke Rainer Maria

The labouring through what is still undone,
as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,
is like the awkward walking of the swan.

And dying – to let go, no longer feel
the solid ground we stand on every day
is like his anxious letting himself fall
into the water, which receives him gently
and which, as though with reverence and joy,
draws back past him in streams on either side;
while, infinitely silent and aware,
in his full majesty and ever more
indifferent, he condescends to glide.

This is the Robert Bly translation that Whyte uses:

This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

“You are like Rilke’s Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground; In water this most graceful of creatures is evolution’s klutz stepchild on land. One leg seems to cross over in front of another rocking the great bird off its balance which he barely manages to salvage with his next step. And on it goes, the creature with its own ballet named after it appearing as a vomit-soaked soldier stumbling toward his bunk.

The swan doesn’t cure his awkwardness by beating himself on the back, by moving faster, or by trying to organize himself better. Rilke tells us he does it by moving toward the elemental water where he belongs. It is the simple contact with the water that gives him grace and presence.

But what Rilke is really telling us is that we only have to touch the elemental waters in our own lives, and it will transform everything. But you have to let yourself down into those waters from the ground on which you stand, and that can be hard. Particularly if you think you might drown.

And to die, which is the letting go
Of the ground we stand on and cling to every day

This nervously letting yourself down, this ängst -lichen Sich-Niederlassen, as it says in the German, takes courage, and the word courage in English comes from the old French word cuer, heart. You must do something heartfelt, and you must do it soon.

Let go of all this effort, he says, and let yourself down, however awkwardly, into the waters of the work you want for yourself. It’s all right, you know, to support yourself with something secondary until your work has ripened, but once it has ripened to a transparent fullness, it has to be gathered in. You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. Learn to trust the stranger who is yourself, the one you have never trusted but who has been there all your life:

Love After Love – Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Adapted from a video presentation by David Whyte.  Here’s looking at you, Heather.

 

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Rilke’s The Eighth Elegy

March 31, 2011

Ranier Maria Rilke

In The Eighth Elegy from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the poet seems to question the human consciousness as being less capable of experiencing Nature than a more primitive or base animal instinct. Although our analytical consciousness, which is form-giving and memory laden, may interfere with the direct experience of Nature, Rilke elevates the more simple form of consciousness found in the lower animal kingdom and views within it a more radical complexity. Yet this is not an absolute distinction between human and animal consciousness. Perhaps it is a call to humanity to “simplify, simplify” (in the words of Thoreau) or embrace Wittgenstein’s precept of “don’t think, describe.”

Rilke, like Blake before him, while exalting the imagination and man’s inner life, also questions it here as a potentially delimiting factor in the experience of Nature. Rudolf Krassner, to whom the poem was dedicated, sought to understand the problems of modernity and Man’s subsequent disconnectedness from time and place and his own nature. I see this as an “answer poem” to those problems. How often do we see our lives as “boundless, unfathomable, and without regard to our own condition?” and “where we see the future, it sees all time and itself within all time, forever healed….everything womb.” Some of the framework of this comment was borrowed from a Martin Creaven who wrote a comment on the poem at the website bittergrace. I didn’t agree that much with what he said but liked the way he had thought about it.

THE EIGHTH ELEGY

Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner

With all its eyes the natural world looks out
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. We
know what is really out there only from the
animal’s gaze; for we take the very young child
and force it around, so that it sees objects–not
the Open, which is so
deep in animals’ faces. Free from death. We,
only, can see death; the free animal has its
decline in back of it, forever,
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like a fountain.
     Never, not for a single day, do we have before
us that pure space into which flowers endlessly
open. Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No: that pure
unseparated element which one breathes without
desire and endlessly knows. A child
may wander there for hours, through the timeless
stillness, may get lost in it and be
shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.
For, nearing death, one doesn’t see death; but stares
beyond, perhaps with an animal’s vast
gaze. Lovers, if the beloved were not
there blocking the view, are close to it, and
marvel .. As if by some mistake, it opens
for them behind each other … But neither
can move past the other, and it changes
back to World. Forever turned toward
objects, we see in them the mere reflection
of the realm of freedom, which we have
dimmed. Or when some animal mutely, serenely,
looks us through and through.
That is what fate means: to be opposite, to
be opposite and nothing else, forever.

If the animal moving toward us so securely
in a different direction had our kind of
consciousness–, it would wrench us around and drag us
along its path. But it feels its life as boundless,
unfathomable, and without regard
to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze. And where we
see the future, it sees all time
and itself within all time, forever healed.

Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies
the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.
For it too feels the presence of what often
overwhelms us: a memory, as if
the element we keep pressing toward was once
more intimate, more true, and our communion
infinitely tender. Here all is distance; there
it was breath. After that first home, the
second seems ambiguous and drafty.
     Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains
forever inside the womb that was its shelter; joy
of the gnat which, still within, leaps up even at its
marriage: for everything is womb. And look at the
half-assurance of the bird,
which knows both inner and outer, from its source,
as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,
flown out of a dead man received inside a space,
but with his reclining image as the lid.
And how bewildered is any womb-born
creature that has to fly. As if terrified and
fleeing from itself, it zigzags through the air,
the way a crack runs through a teacup. So
the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
turned toward the world of objects, never outward.
It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We
rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole
valley one last time, he turns, stops,
lingers–, so we live here, forever taking leave.

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The Temptation Of The Saint by Ranier Maria Rilke

March 17, 2011

A longer stay in Paris in 1902/03 inspired Rilke to write an account about his experiences gained in the French capital. He finished his work several years and working interruptions later in 1910. But by then, he hadn’t any longer written a simple account about his impressions of everyday life in Paris, he had written a novel which reflected also his ways of thinking changed over the course of years.

The Notebooks consist of 71 fragments, being the notes of the young Danish writer Malte Laurids Brigge. Arranged in the form of a diary, Malte’s notes consist, roughly speaking, of three parts: his experiences in Paris, reminiscences of his childhood and reflections about historical personalities. — The first part is dominated by his intense impressions of everyday life in Paris, a life full of stench, dirt, illness, and death, but also a life full of technological change and increasing anonymity. The second part becomes somewhat quieter in tone, as Malte remembers his childhood on Danish castles, his encounters with the supernatural and his difficult family life. The last part is the most demanding one, as there are reflections about kings, saints and medieval women poets (which reflect clearly Rilke’s own opinion).

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge are a varied collection of impressions, reminiscences, thoughts, fears and reflections. They are the authentic and moving description of a sensitive life, whose acts and thoughts are influenced by non-existing family ties and a feeling of social estrangement. It is a story of the (unconscious) search for something which might be able to provide the lonely protagonist what he had been forced to do without and always longed for stability and security. Written in a beautiful language full of deep emotions and moving descriptions, we recognize in Malte the Uprooted, the Insecure, the Seeker, someone who hasn’t found yet the meaning of his life. If you decide to let yourself in for the story, you will be rewarded with a profound and thoughtful novel about the difficult search for one’s own identity.
A Review by “Gretchen”
at Http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/15266-R.M.-Rilke-The-Notebooks-Of-Malte-Laurids-Brigge

HOW WELL I UNDERSTAND those strange pictures in which Things meant for limited and ordinary uses stretch out and stroke one another, lewd and curious, quivering in the random lechery of distraction. Those kettles that walk around steaming, those pistons that start to think, and the indolent funnel that squeezes into a hole for its pleasure. And already, tossed up by the jealous void, and among them, there are arms and legs, and faces that warmly vomit onto them, and windy buttocks that offer them satisfaction.

And the saint writhes and pulls back into himself; yet in his eyes there was still a look which thought this was possible: he had glimpsed it. And already his senses are precipitating out of the clear solution of his soul. His prayer is already losing its leaves and stands up out of his mouth like a withered shrub. His heart has fallen over and poured out into the muck. His whip strikes him as weakly as a tail flicking away flies. His sex is once again in one place only, and when a woman comes toward him, upright through the huddle, with her naked bosom full of breasts, it points at her like a finger.

There was a time when I considered these pictures obsolete. Not that I doubted their reality. I could imagine that long ago such things had happened to saints, those overhasty zealots, who wanted to begin with God, right away, whatever the cost. We no longer make such demands on ourselves. We suspect that he is too difficult for us, that we must postpone him, so that we can slowly do the long work that separates us from him. Now, however, I know that this work leads to combats just as dangerous as the combats of the saint; that such difficulties appear around everyone who is solitary for the sake of that work, as they took form around God’s solitaries in their caves and empty shelters, long ago.

The Song Of The Beggar

I am always going from door to door,
whether in rain or heat,
and sometimes I will lay my right ear in
the palm of my right hand.
And as I speak my voice seems strange as if
it were alien to me,

for I’m not certain whose voice is crying:
mine or someone else’s.
I cry for a pittance to sustain me.
The poets cry for more.

In the end I conceal my entire face
and cover both my eyes;
there it lies in my hands with all its weight
and looks as if at rest,
so no one may think I had no place where-
upon to lay my head.

Luke 9:58

And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

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