The Water Is Wide

Graceless Lady You Know Who I Am

Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
--W. Somerset Maugham

Who dares unite the roar of the sea
And the singing of the nightingale?
Who dares compare the shrieking tempest
To the sigh of an infant?
Who dares speak aloud the words
Intended for the heart to speak?
What human dares sing in voice
The song of God?
--Song of the Soul, Khalil Gibran

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)

The Earthes All Staked

As I contemplated the Passion of Christ last week, I was struck by how well C. S. Lewis saw the parallel of the desperate end game of Jesus' life and the human condition. His prayers of anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane are unanswered. He turns to the Church he created, and it condemns Him. Then the State (Rome) considers his fate, and abandons Him out of political expediency. The final appeal to "the People" He has come to save from themselves results in a demand by them for his death. On the cross, he dies after uttering as His last words an anguished cry at His divine Self's apparent abandonment of His human Self: "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earthes all staked.

Whether our run ends as a young man or an old one, sooner or later, for every single one of us, "the earthes are all staked." Suffering is our lot because we live on this Earth, and all of us must die. To deny this fearful fact, or to avoid facing it, is the reason many of us live our busy little lives of "quiet desperation," filling up our days with nonessential possessions and activities in the unconscious hope that if we don't think about it, we won't have to deal with it.

As someone much smarter than me in these matters stated once, the problem is that we are not made for this world. Certainly, the things of it will never buy us happiness nor make our lives ultimately content. The sooner you realize and accept this, the sooner you'll stop wasting your precious time and really begin to live.

Of course, I'm preaching to a deaf world, one that does its best to deride the notion of suffering as anything more than bad luck, rather than the lot of a fallen world. Before I left on a road thrip on Good Friday, I posted a typical short post on Twitter (there can be no other kind of post than a short one on Twitter) that merely quoted Dr. Gordon Allport, in his preface to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, in which he set forth the central tenet of "existentialism," a term coined by Frankl: "To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering." That "Tweet" generated only one reply, from a Pilate wannabe lawyer in St. Louis, who so eloquently reposted: "Yeah, not so much into suffering, really." As Chesterton proposed, the only appropriate response to a nonbeliever when he asserts as to a believer's belief that he doesn't understand it is, "No, you do not understand." My response to the oh-so-cool fellow shyster was "No. Of course you're not." I'm sure that response flew right under his radar.

What a vacuous time and place in which we live! We're so busy denying the inevitabilty of death, drowning our natural fear in a cesspool of noise and inebrieation that we've lost the capacity to appreciate the fact that death gives our life meaning; that in the end, suffering is our lot, and how we respond to its inevitable occurrence is what marks our lives as full or barren. Instead of embracing the suffering and offering it up, we deny its existence or run pell-mell away from it until it grabs us by the scruff of our neck, by which time we are ill-equipped to cope with it on even a superficial level, much less able to find any "meaning" in it.

"These are among the things it means to be a man." So many of us are boys until the day death grabs us by the throat and throttles the last vestiges of our meaningless existence. 

Others of us understand that, while comedy teaches life lessons, tragedy teaches deeper ones. In the end, the bitter pill often seems much more like "life" than the sugar-coated one.

English theater star Ruthie Henshall as Fantine in the Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Special sings "I Dreamed A Dream" (with all due respect to the sensation-of-the-moment, Susan Boyle)

Wild Abandon

One thing about the Democrats: when it comes to throwing a party, they know how to get down and jiggy with it much better than do Republicans. While Obama doesn't exactly inspire one to shout the word "uninhibited," I'm hoping his inaugural bash equals the first one the Clintons threw in 1993.

In this clip, Natalie Merchant makes Michael Stipe seem to have as much funk'n'soul as the reanimated corpse of Richard Nixon. She dances like my six year-old niece: a whirling dervish on crank. Whatever else is going on, Nat's gonna' have her some FUN!!!

Red Sky In The Morning

The Times Are Nightfall, Look, Their Light Grows Less
---Gerald Manley Hopkins

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…

Judy Collins, I Think It's Going  To Rain Today

Declare, If You Know All This

In the final season of the NBC television drama ER, the writing is getting about as crisp as it can get for network television. Customarily, that's damning with faint praise, but not tonight. When you begin, end, and intersperse the narrative with voice-overs of the featured character, the departing Doctor Abby Lockhart, quoting passages from the Book of Job, you've tapped into the primal poetry of God speaking through man.

A writer knew his or her stuff, and got it right.

Job 38:1-18

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
 when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

“Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb,
when I made clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed limits for it
and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?

“Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
and caused the dawn to know its place,
that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth,
and the wicked be shaken out of it?
It is changed like clay under the seal,
and its features stand out like a garment.
From the wicked their light is withheld,
and their uplifted arm is broken.

“Have you entered into the springs of the sea,
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you,
or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?
Declare, if you know all this.