The Water Is Wide

Like A Voice Heard In A Dream

Excellent thoughts:

...Our longing for transcendence is inextinguishable in us, and the appeal of the transcendent to our deepest natures will always be audible and visible to us in some form—first and finally in the form of beauty—and will continue to waken in us both wonder and an often inexpressible unhappiness. But in an age such as ours, within the picture of the world that now prevails, that beauty must seem more ambiguous, more beleaguered, and the call of transcendence more elusive of interpretation, like a voice heard in a dream.

In the absence of that scale of shining mediations that once seemed seamlessly to unite the immanent and the transcendent, the earthly and the heavenly, nature and supernature, we are nevertheless still open to the same summons issued in every age to every soul; but it must for now come to us as something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was.

Ever The Same

        Le pont Mirabeau

Guillaume Apollinaire

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
               Et nos amours
       Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

               Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
               Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
               Tandis que sous
       Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

               Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
               Les jours s'en vont je demeure

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
               L'amour s'en va
       Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente

               Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
              Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
               Ni temps passé
       Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

               Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
              Les jours s'en vont je demeure

      
                 *******************

Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine

               Must I recall
       Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again

               Let night come on bells end the day
               The days go by me still I stay

Hands joined and face to face let's stay just so
               While underneath
       The bridge of our arms shall go
Weary of endless looks the river's flow

               Let night come on bells end the day
               The days go by me still I stay

All love goes by as water to the sea
               All love goes by
       How slow life seems to me
How violent the hope of love can be

               Let night come on bells end the day
               The days go by me still I stay

The days the weeks pass by beyond our ken
               Neither time past
       Nor love comes back again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine

               Let night come on bells end the day
               The days go by me still I stay

(Translation by Richard Wilbur)

A Small Thing

LA HAINE
---Susan Dane

It starts as a small little thing,
indignation at a trespass,
anger, having been wronged.
It grows into a flag,
parading first down small streets,
sweeping up the meanderers,
then avenues and winning crowds,
cheers along the way.
It writes an anthem,
builds a campaign.
Marching through the mind
it settles thoroughly in memory and vein,
changing our posture,
the way we hold our chin.
By the time it reaches bone,
it has eaten through sinew and spine,
cost us all that was benign.
Then, rises up the starless night,
no song no light.
Suddenly afraid,
we want it out:
cut, poison, burn the blighted stem.
But rampant right breeds cell on cell
out of control,
And having eaten heart
it eats the soul.

God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.

When we love others with His love, we no longer know good and evil (which was what the serpent promised) but only good. We overcome the evil in the world by the charity and compassion of God, and in so doing we drive all evil out of our own hearts.
---Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

I pray that one special person I know (or, at least, once knew) learns this lesson and takes it to heart. After all, it is the heart of the matter, especially in such a graceless age.

I Want You Back

Scottish firecracker KT Tunstall reminds me of the kind of woman I once went for before my wife reformed me: short, stacked, great legs, whiskey-voiced, and lit their own cigarettes. Luckily, I'm no longer attracted to that type...heh.

Die In Order To Live

Love is not a deal, it is a sacrifice. It is not marketing, it is a form of worship.

[...]

The mature man realizes that his life affirms itself most, not in acquiring things, but in giving his time, his efforts, his strength, his intelligence, and his love to others. Here a different kind of dialectic of life and death begins to appear. The living drive, the vital satisfaction, by "ending" its trend to self-satisfaction and redirecting itself to and for others, transcends itself. It "dies" insofar as the ego is concerned, for the self is deprived of the immediate satisfactions which it could claim without being contested. Now it renounces these things, in order to give to others. Hence, life "dies" to itself in order to give itself away and thus affirms itself more maturely, more fruitfully, and more completely. We live in order to die to ourselves and give everything to others. ...The "dying" to self in order to give to others is nothing more or less than a higher and more special affirmation of life. Such dying is the fruit of life, the evidence of mature and productive living. It is, in fact, the end or the goal of life.
---Thoma Merton, Love and Living

The narcissism of our age is seemingly boundless. It is also powerfully seductive and so capable of masking its intent that it can frame even the normal love a husband, a wife, a mother or a father ought to possess by the very nature of such love, in terms of "self-sacrifice." Our culture seems to pervert the very essence of the word "love" and to make it simply another "emotion," a "feeling" that references the object of "love" not as a separate God-created being worthy of our emptying of ourselves of our "selves," but as just another catalyst, albeit a powerful catalyst, that creates within our bodies and our minds physical reactions and emotions that bring pleasure to ourselves. One of the most powerful physical reactions is sexual arousal and one of the most powerful emotions is that of "feeling good about myself." Life is "all about me."

This is an age in which men and women exist as far from their "true nature" as is possible. When you spend a lifetime steeped in the corrosive influences of "self-actualization" and other forms of navel-gazing, it becomes extremely difficult to realize that not only are you clueless as to the answers to life, you are clueless as to the proper questions.

At the point he realizes his complete ignorance, the desperate man, the wise man, begins to pray.

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.