Wendell Berry

I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.

I have no love
except it come from Thee.

Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind.
- Wendell Berry

Charles Wright on the Law of Quid Pro Quo

From "Homage to Cesare Pavese," in The Other Side of the River (1984):

...
Death will come and it will have your eyes,
Ridiculous vice
and the same look.
You are the great weariness.
You are scorched and burned back by the sea.
You say nothing,
and nobody speaks to you.

This is a balance sheet and the names don't count.
One nail on top of another,
four nails make a cross.
Nothing can add to the past--
Woman is as woman does,
and night is always the night.
With its black heart and black hands it lays me down.

A Sentence - Julia Hartwig

I depend on the sentence On a stop that seeks form
as orderly and modest as everyday speech
Everything in me awaits the moment when a shape
encloses the shapelessness where it was suspended
I suffer gently but persistently the pain of uncertainty
the dissolution of feelings and thoughts in which I live
as in a diluted space

It doesn't hinder me from admiring the linden branches
spread wide behind the window the screech of a magpie
annoying and blessed because it exists
it doesn't hinder me from taking in the heat
of this dry and tragic summer
But a sentence a reliable sentence
restores under my feet the firm earth

The Joy of Lent

A sweet meditation from Psalm 32 on the huge release that comes from admitting what we are -- and why Ash Wednesday is the happiest of days.

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up* as by the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’,
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Therefore let all who are faithful
offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters
shall not reach them.
You are a hiding-place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

Ash Wednesday With Emily Dickinson

Poem 260

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you - Nobody - too?

Then there's a pair of us!

Dont tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!

How public - like a Frog -

To tell one's name - the livelong June -

To an admiring Bog!

Those Winter Sundays - Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early 
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 
then with cracked hands that ached 
from labor in the weekday weather made 
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 
When the rooms were warm, he'd call, 
and slowly I would rise and dress, 
fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him, 
who had driven out the cold 
and polished my good shoes as well. 
What did I know, what did I know 
of love's austere and lonely offices? 

Emily Dickinson - Poem 341

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

Lessons - Czeslaw Milosz

Since that moment when in a house with low eaves

A doctor from the town cut the navel string

And pears dotted with white mildew

Reposed in their nests of luxuriant weeds,

I have been in the hands of humans. They could have strangled

My first scream, squeezed with a giant hand

The defenseless throat that aroused their tenderness

From them I received the names of plants and birds,

I lived in their country that was not too barren,

Not too cultivated, with a field, a meadow,

And water in a boat moored behind a shed.

Their lessons met, it is true, with a barrier

Deep in myself and my will was dark,

Not very compliant with their intents or mine.

Others, whom I did not know or knew only by name,

Were pacing in me and I, terrified,

Heard, in myself, locked creaky rooms

That one should not peep into through a keyhole.

They did not mean much to me – Kazimir, Hrehory

Or Emilia or Margareta.

But I had to reenact all by myself

Every flaw and sin of theirs. This humiliated me

So that I want to shout: you are to blame

For my not being what I want and being what I am

Sunlight would fall in my book upon Original Sin.

And more than once, when noon was humming in the grass

I would imagine the two of them, with my guilt,

Trampling a wasp beneath the apple tree in Eden.

John Donne's "Batter My Heart" in John Adams' Dr. Atomic

Mockingbird's resident opera aficionado Ken Wilson offers forth a truly breathtaking moment of beauty:

John Donne’s plea in Holy Sonnet XIV that grace will break his captive will, set to necessarily inadequate but characteristically gorgeous music by John Adams and sung by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the Adams opera Dr. Atomic (about Robert Oppenheimer and the setting off of the first atomic bomb):



Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Adams’ Nixon in China will be the next Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast, on Saturday, 2/12. His opera The Flowering Tree, at the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility in 2009, was so flat-out beautiful I have yet to recover.

W.H. Auden on Comedy and Christianity

From Auden's essay 'Notes on the Comic':

"[Comedy] is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much greater breadth and depth than classical comedy. Greater in breadth because classical comedy is based upon a division of mankind into two classes, those who have arete [excellence] and those who do not, and only the second class, the fools, shameless rascals, slaves, are fit subjects for comedy.

But Christian comedy is based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, therefore, whatever his rank or talents, can claim immunity from the comic exposure and, indeed, the more virtuous, in the Greek sense, a a man is, the more he realizes that he deserves to be exposed. Greater in depth because, while classical comedy believes that rascals should get the drubbing they deserve, Christian comedy believes that we are forbidden to judge others and that it is our duty to forgive each other.

In the classical comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven: when the curtain falls, the audience is laughing and those on stage are in tears. In Christian comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven: when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together" (Dyer's 177).

For a slightly imperfect, but still relevant example, check out this classic episode from Friends!

Sonnet XIX - John Milton (Going Blind)

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He returning chide;

“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best

Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,

And post o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Another Christmas Arrives: DFW on Federer, Pinsky on Donne, Gervais on Atheism, The National Bible Bee, Backfiring (!) Smoking Bans, and Troubled Childhoods

Just the links this time, for some holiday reading:

1. On Slate, if you have time for a mind-bender, The Philosophical Underpinnings of David Foster Wallace's Fiction (hint: rhymes with Littgenstein). For some prime DFW himself, check out his renowned profile for the NY Times, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience." For all of our posts on DFW, click here.

2. Also on Slate, in a column entitled "Nearer, my God, to Thee", former poet laureate Robert Pinksy takes a look at man's relationship to the divine via two Jeremiah 12-based sonnets, one from John Donne and one from Gerald Manley Hopkins.

3. Comedian and actor Ricky Gervais, a favorite of ours, offers a pleasantly humane/funny explanation of his atheism over at the Wall Street Journal. Almost makes up for the ueber-preachy "The Invention of Lying" (ht JD).

4. In the Atlantic, an amusing and highly informative look at The National Bible Bee.

5. From the NY Times, a harrowing reality-check about infidelity and its fallout, A Roomful of Regret and Yearning (ht VH).

6. A post on the Times' Freakonomics blog asks the question, "Do Smoking Bans Lead to More Fires?" A recent paper responds... yes.

7. According to a new poll by the Center for Disease Control (last seen in The Walking Dead), 60% of American adults claim to have had troubled childhoods.

8. Finally, there's this:

Nativity Scene FAIL - watch more funny videos

And with that, Merry Christmas from Mockingbird! Thanks for reading this year. We'll see you in January (if not before).

Christmas Cheer, According to T.S. Eliot

The following is from Eliot's "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees." While less popular than Eliot's other Christmas poems, it is his last- and probably his most insightful.

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish---which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
By "eightieth" meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

Eliot seems to strike the appropriate tone when it comes to the long-held debate about proper celebration and meaning of Christmas. He advocates the innocence and simplicity of an unabashedly sentimental celebration of Christmas – filled with a beautiful tree, bountiful feast, and (yes) new toys. Yet this almost naïve celebration ironically corresponds with both the reality of life and reverence for Christ’s first and last comings. We must embrace this childlike wonder to silence the burden of later experience (Matt 19:14?). The spirit of the season is not idolatry, but a truly Christian “happiness and cheer” in the midst of a loveless world in need of saving.

"Christmas," a poem by John Betjeman

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain.
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hooker's Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House
the yew Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that villagers can say
'The Church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial public houses blaze
And Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad,
And Christmas morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? and is it true?
The most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

C. S. Lewis on The Nativity

Among the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Savior where I looked for hay;
So may my beastlike folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some woolly innocence.

The Timeless God, an excerpt from T.S. Eliot

An excerpt taken from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets", "Dry Salvages":

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.


[CONTINUE READING]

Advent - Scott Cairns

A prose poem from his inspired collection Compass of Affection: Poems New And Selected (ht KW):

Well, it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas—everywhere, children eyeing the bright lights and colorful goods, traffic a good deal worse than usual and most adults in view looking a little puzzled, blinking their eyes against the assault of stammering bulbs and public displays of goodwill. We were all embarrassed, frankly, the haves and the have-nots—all of us aware something had gone far wrong with an entire season, something had eluded us. And, well, it was strenuous, trying to recall what it was that had charmed us so, back when we were much smaller and more oblivious than not concerning the weather, mass marketing, the insufficiently hidden faces behind those white beards and other jolly gear. And there was something else: a general diminishment whose symptoms included the Xs in Xmas, shortened tempers, and the aggressive abandon with which most celebrants seemed to push their shiny cars about. All of this seemed to accumulate like wet snow, or like the fog with which our habitual inversion tried to choke us, or to blank us out altogether, so that, of a given night, all that appeared over the mess we had made of the season was what might be described as a nearly obscured radiance, just visible through the gauze, either the moon disguised by a winter veil, or some lost star—isolated, distant, sadly dismissing of us, and of all our expertly managed scene.

"For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature" - Mary Karr

For Advent, via writinginthedust:

I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns

to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I’m not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel

how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail

did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch

that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw

is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death

let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.

For Advent: Fulke Greville's Chorus Sacerdotum

Here is an inspired text for Advent 'meditation' from Fulke Greville, who became the Earl of Warwick, and lived from 1554 to 1628.  He regarded the chief point in his life as having been the bosom friend of Sir Philip Sidney.  Almost no one knew about Greville's poems, some of the them distinctly 'Calvinist', until after he died.  I am a great admirer of them.  Only recently did I find out that James Gould Cozzens was also a fan.  

Line six of the following passage, from Fulke Greville's 'closet' or 'Senecan' play "Mustapha" (i.e., not to be performed but rather read), occurs in at least two of Cozzens' novels, and in one of them, By Love Possessed, it is understood to distill the message of the book.  For myself, I have always favored lines one through five, as well as the last two.  I think these lines tie in with the thoughts and hopes of Mockingbird:

Chorus Sacerdotum  (i.e., Chorus of Priests)

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound:

Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sick, commanded to be sound:

What meaneth nature by these divers laws?

Passion and reason self-division cause:

Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?

Nature herself doth her own self deflower

To hate those errors she herself doth give.

For how should man think that he may not do

If nature did not fail, and punish too?

Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,

Only commands things difficult and hard.

Forbids us all things, which it knows we lust,

Makes easy pains, unpossible reward.

If nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easy ways to good.

We that are bound by vows, and by promotion,

With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,

To teach belief in God and stir devotion,

To preach of heaven's wonders and delights:

Yet when each of us in his own heart looks,

He finds the God there far unlike his books.

From Geoffrey Hill's "The Triumph of Love"

One almost wonders if he's intentionally riffing on Auden's 'In Praise of Limestone' (ht MS):

Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,

it is for me increasingly a terrain

seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary,

conglomerate, metamorphic rock-

strata, in which particular grace,

individual love, decency, endurance,

are traceable across the faults.