Category: Poetry
Sunday, 2/7/16
Tuesday, Two Two Two Zero One Six
Sunday, with Symposium wrap-up
Gleanings, 12/30/15
Well. It looks as if I’ve mostly managed to free-associate off some Rod Dreher stuff, but it feels like time to publish the gleanings anyway.
Annual Auden Adventure
I fulfilled my self-imposed Advent discipline, reading W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being, Sunday evening. Would that all disciplines were so delightful!
I have excerpted it more extensively in 2014 (Here’s my part 1 and part 2 comments), and perhaps earlier than that. This year, brevity.
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I have but now escaped a raging landscape:
There woods were in a tremor from the shouts
Of hunchbacks hunting a hermaphrodite; …
(Feeling, speaking in W.H. Auden, For the Time Being. I suppose it was twisted of me to think of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and catty of me to share the thought.)
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O God, put away justice and truth for we cannot understand them and do not want them. Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave Thy heavens and come down to our earth of waterclocks and hedges. Become our uncle. Look after Baby, amuse Grandfather, escort Madam to the Opera, help Willy with his home-work, introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer. Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.
(Herod, contemplating the Massacre of the Innocents, in W.H. Auden, For the Time Being)
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For the Time Being is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most clichéd of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. For the Time Being is Auden’s only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet’s personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions.
(Amazon’s summary of Alan Jacobs’ 2013 critical edition of the poem, which also is available in Edward Mendelson’s Collected Poems of Auden)
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
Winter Solstice, Conventionally Reckoned
Sumptuous Sunday Banquet
- Around the Corner
- The Truth of Mary
- Math, Reason and Civilization
- A Gifted Existence
- The Poetry of God
- Human Tradition in a Modern World
- Excuse Me, You Are Not Rational
- Atheism and the Imagination
- About Fairy Tales
- Making It Up in America
- A Faerie Apocalypse
- The Elves Have Left the Building
- Theology and Faerie – The Modern Tragedy
I have fallen far behind on Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog by a full baker’s dozen. Laid low by laryngitis, I have caught up. Here’s an uncommonly long Sunday Banquet in addition to my earlier offering. (Note the many tags and few categories; Fr. Stephen thinks outside my box.)
Continue reading “Sumptuous Sunday Banquet”
The deep purpose of discussion
This weekend brings And Then They Came for Me to my hometown’s Civic Youth Theater. With that evocative title, I hope I don’t need to tell you what the general topic of the play is.
But just in case, here goes the versified version:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). The subtitle of the Civic Youth Theater production is “Remembering the World of Anne Frank.”
If you still don’t get it, stop. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
Then a week later, the local Bach Chorale Singers perform the powerful Annalies, a 14-part work for soprano, chorus and small ensemble based on the Diary of Anne Frank.
The juxtaposition was coincidental/serendipitous/providential. Seizing the moment, friends of the arts have arranged a panel discussion, open to the Public: When they came for me.
I hope to get to the Civic Theater production, and I’ll definitely be there when the Bach Chorale performs.
The panel discussion? Maybe. Out of a sense of duty. With my guard up. And a full shaker, not just a grain, of salt.
On some topics, it seems to me, discussion has hit a dead end. The more earnest the discussion, the deader the end. The Holocaust strikes me as one of those topics.
A young woman of my acquaintance was delighted beyond all expectation a few year ago when I quipped, in response to some seemingly interminable, definitely earnest discussion in our Church, that I just wasn’t getting what the other side was getting at, and that I wondered if they might instead rhyme, dance, paint, sing or film it. Anything but more words, words, words. (Her delight was why I still vaguely remember the episode.)
Bach Chorale’s theme for this, its 51st, season is “Music and the human spirit: making the world a better place one note at a time.” Maybe that’s a little preachy, but I’ll take it.
My greatest hope for the panel discussion is that perhaps the Niemöller poem, the play and the impending choral performance, will liberate imaginations and free tongues from banality, or that the panel will at least truly focus on how the arts can so liberate (if focusing on that in prose isn’t oxymoronic).
My greatest fear for the discussion is that it will tame and domesticate the imagination again after its liberation by art.
Isn’t taming the imagination the deep purpose of most of our discussions?
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(Yes, as a matter of fact, I do own a mirror. And I am getting tired of recidivist prose blogging — even suspicious of my motives for doing it. And the utility of it. That too. Thanks for asking. And if I polish this one more time, I’m going to puke.)
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 