dark speech upon the harp

Quotation : Mary Oliver

2009-12-01T19:47:00.002-05:00

If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck.

Mary Oliver, from "At the River Clarion," in Evidence (Beacon Press, 2009), p. 51

From The Cloud of Unknowing

2009-12-01T17:15:00.002-05:00

Anyone who desires to regain the purity of heart lost through sin and to win that personal wholeness beyond all pain must patiently struggle in the contemplative work and endure its toil whether he has been a habitual sinner or not. Both sinners and innocents will suffer in this work although obviously sinners will feel the suffering more. And yet it often happens that some who have been hardened, habitual sinners arrive at the perfection of this work sooner than those who have never sinned grievously. God is truly wonderful in lavishing his grace on anyone he chooses; the world stands bewildered before love like this.

And I believe that Doomsday will actually be glorious, for the goodness of God will shine clearly in all his gifts of grace. Some who are now despised and held in contempt (and who are even perhaps inveterate sinners) shall on that day reign in splendor with his saints. And perhaps some of those who have never sinned grievously and who to all appearances are pious people, venerated as gods by other men, shall find themselves in misery among the damned.

My point is that in this life no man may judge another as good or evil simply on the evidence of his deeds. The deeds themselves are another matter. These we may judge as good or evil, but not the person.

via Magnificat, November 2009, pp. 332-3, meditation for Tuesday the 24th

Bizarre news story

2009-11-30T07:31:00.001-05:00

Man sleeps with dead wife. For five years.

Another country heard from (times three)

2009-11-24T08:42:00.003-05:00

Three of the four Massachusetts Democrats in contention for the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy sound off about the controversy involving Kennedy's son Patrick and his bishop.

Why don't they just shut up?

Quotation : Marianne Moore

2009-11-21T06:26:00.003-05:00

Sympathizing with an experiment, we yet need not venerate the result.

The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1987), p. 586

Eelworks

2009-11-20T18:09:00.002-05:00

A poem by Seamus Heaney.

Via Steven Riddle's excellent blog A Momentary Taste of Being.

Dialogue on a bus

2009-11-20T07:15:00.003-05:00

(By "girl" be it understood to mean "young college-age woman")

Girl #1: So what's your ethnicity?

Girl #2: I'm Brazilian.

Girl #1: Brazilian! I knew you were either Greek or Brazilian the first time I saw you. You're so pretty.

Girl #2: Thank you! And I knew you were Asian the first time I saw you!

The IHOP coffee incident, September 1997

2009-11-19T17:20:00.003-05:00

You told a funny story
(Hilarious, not gory)
And it was mandatory
To spew my coffee-quaff.
To Heather I say "Brava!"
Volcanoes belching lava
Can't beat my burst of java
That time you made me lauff.

Quotation

2009-11-18T19:48:00.002-05:00

A lot of people take the term free verse literally, with the result that there is more bad free verse written today than one can easily shake a stick at. Most of it hopes to recommend itself by deploying vaguely surrealistic images in unmetered colloquial idiom to urge acceptable opinions: that sex is a fine thing, that accurate perception is better than dull, that youth is probably a nicer condition than age, that there is more to things than their appearances; as well as that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were war criminals, that the C.I.A. is a menace, that corporations are corrupt, that contemporary history seems "entropic," and that women get a dirty deal. All very true and welcome. Yet what is lamentably missing is the art that makes poems re-readable once we have fathomed what they "say."

Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, revised edition (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 88

A nuisance

2009-11-13T06:24:00.002-05:00

This is why it is important, from my point of view, to have discovered God. In a way I would say it is rather a danger, very often a nuisance. One could very well live with less trouble without a God than with a God because -- particularly with a God who has accepted solidarity to the point of death, love to the point of forgetting Himself and in addition to this, is vulnerable, helpless, despised, beaten -- God tells us coldbloodedly; this is the example which I give you -- follow it. Or he says, here are the beatitudes: you will be hungry, you will be thirsty, you will be beaten, you will be cast out, you will be persecuted -- and that is the best you can have. That kind of God is not always a discovery that brings ease in our lives. The point is not whether God will be useful, the point is whether it is true that He exists.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, God and Man (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004), pp. 93 & 94

"Why hast thou forsaken me?"

2009-11-12T07:07:00.001-05:00

The Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) on one of Christ's seven last words.

Big time computer problems

2009-11-11T17:08:00.001-05:00

Don't know when regular posting will resume.

An Orthodox churchman

2009-11-06T17:03:00.002-05:00

Funny stories, etc. from Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia :

From the archives

2009-11-01T03:09:00.001-05:00

November, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge.

The poetry of autumn

2009-10-29T17:45:00.003-04:00

David B. Hart at First Things' On the Square blog provides us with some of his favorite seasonal verse.

Vigilium nativitatis Dylan Thomas

2009-10-26T06:22:00.002-04:00

To commemorate the occasion of the 95th anniversary of Dylan Thomas's birth, here is the voice of the poet reading "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London":

Catholic jokes

2009-10-25T16:01:00.004-04:00

from fisheaters.com

The bilbo?

2009-10-24T16:07:00.001-04:00

Emma Thompson learns English in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989):

Oddly prophetic

2009-10-23T09:21:00.004-04:00

Somewhere toward the end of Dylan Thomas's poem "Lament," as the "old ram rod" is on his deathbed, he hears churchbells:

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath

These lines were oddly prophetic. As Dylan Thomas lay comatose from his excesses, and from a doctor's unwisely injected morphine, he had the prayers of nuns for the welfare of his soul. He died in a Catholic hospital in New York. And chastity did indeed pray for him, and innocence not only "sweeten[ed] his last breath," but perhaps also rescued him from hell and brought him to the mercies of purgatory. We can hope.

(It is worth noting that the doctor who injected the morphine was not affiliated with St Vincent's Hospital, but was an unscrupulous character who would give the drug to just about anyone who complained of pain.)

Dylan Thomas in Italy

2009-10-19T14:21:00.003-04:00

The heat! Old Elbanites on their flayed and blistered backs whimper about the heat. Sunblack webfooted waterboys, diving from cranes, bleed from the heat. Old scorched mineral-miners, fifty years in the fire, snarl at the heat as they drag the rusty trolleys naked over the skeleton piers. And as for us! The children all sun-and-sea-rashed, Brigit peeling like the papered wall of a blitzed room in the rain. And I can hardly hold this pen for the blisters all over my hands, can hardly see for the waterfalls of sweat, and am peeling too like a drenched billboard. Oh, oh, oh, the heat! It comes round corners at you like an animal with windmill arms. As I enter my bedroom, it stuns, thuds, throttles, spins me round by my soaking hair, lays me flat as a mat and bat-blind on my boiled and steaming bed. We keep oozing from the ice-cream counters to the chemist's. Cold beer is bottled God. If ever, for a second, a wind, (but wind's no word for this snailslow sizzle-puff), protoplasmically crawls from the suffering still sea, it makes a noise like H.D.'s poems crackling in a furnace. I must stop writing to souse my head in a bedroom basin full of curded lava, return fresh as Freddie Hurdis-Jones in Sodom, frizzle and mew as I sit again on this Sing-Sing-hot-seat. What was I saying? Nothing is clear. My brains are hanging out like the intestines of a rabbit, or hanging down my back like hair. My tongue, for all the ice-cold God I drink, is hot as a camel-saddle sandily mounted by baked Bedouins. My eyes like over-ripe tomatoes strain at the sweating glass of a Saharan hothouse. I am hot. I am too hot. I wear nothing, in this tiny hotel-room, but the limp two rivers of my Robins'-made pyjama trousers. Oh for the cyclonic Siberian frigidity of a Turkish bath! In the pulverescence of the year came Christ the Niger. Christ, I'm hot!

Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters (Macmillan, 1985), pp. 656-7

Poem #405

2009-10-16T18:16:00.001-04:00

by Emily Dickinson (1830-86)

It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness —
I'm so accustomed to my Fate —
Perhaps the Other — Peace —

Would interrupt the Dark —
And crowd the little Room —
Too scant — by Cubits — to contain
The Sacrament — of Him —

I am not used to Hope —
It might intrude upon —
Its sweet parade — blaspheme the place —
Ordained to Suffering —

It might be easier
To fail — with Land in Sight —
Than gain — My Blue Peninsula —
To perish — of Delight —

Cummings

2009-10-14T12:31:00.005-04:00

my love
thy hair is one kingdom
the king whereof is darkness
thy forehead is a flight of flowers

thy head is a quick forest
filled with sleeping birds
thy breasts are swarms of white bees
upon the bough of thy body
thy body to me is April
in whose armpits is the approach of spring

thy thighs are white horses yoked to a chariot
of kings
they are the striking of a good minstrel
between them is always a pleasant song

my love
thy head is a casket
of the cool jewel of thy mind
the hair of thy head is one warrior
innocent of defeat
thy hair upon thy shoulders is an army
with victory and with trumpets

thy legs are the trees of dreaming
whose fruit is the very eatage of forgetfulness

thy lips are satraps in scarlet
in whose kiss is the combining of kings
thy wrists
are holy
which are the keepers of the keys of thy blood
thy feet upon thy ankles are flowers in vases
of silver

in thy beauty is the dilemma of flutes

thy eyes are the betrayal
of bells comprehended through incense

(this poem by EEC posted in commemoration of the 115th anniversary of his birth)

Hey

2009-10-13T08:22:00.003-04:00

Can anyone tell me why my "new and improved" fancy-shmancy Blogger blogroll doesn't automatically update when someone puts up a new post?

Addendum. OK, I think I get it. It updates when I publish something new. Which is a bit odd.

Columbus Day

2009-10-12T15:00:00.002-04:00

And, in observance, a 1991 Time magazine column by Charles Krauthammer, "Hail, Columbus, Dead White Male."

Drinking tea with honey

2009-10-11T12:56:00.002-04:00

and half-watching the Red Sox, who seem destined this year to make an early exit from the post-season.