"Radiant on the River"

Here's some beautiful poetry translated from the Maronite Liturgy. The hat tip goes to Siris, a blog I recently discovered.

First Sunday after Epiphany
2 Corinthians 10:1-11; John 1:29-34

John by the river saw Jesus
and proclaimed with true prophecy:
Behold the holy Lamb of God!
He takes away all of our sins;
I came that He might be revealed,
forgiveness radiant on the river.

O Son of the Almighty God!
You stooped to receive Your baptism.
The Father proclaimed You His Son.
The Holy Spirit like a dove
in power rested on Your head,
divinity radiant on the river.

With Your baptism You have clothed us,
the robe of glory you give to us,
the seal of the Holy Spirit,
the promise of holy rebirth
in water and in the Spirit
with Your light radiant on the river.

We do not fight with human strength;
we wield weapons of the Spirit.
The darkness has already lost;
with a glance from God light poured down
in magnificence and glory,
through His grace radiant on the river.

May divinity dwell in us
through the Spirit's descent on us;
may our minds receive Christ's great light.
Through Word and Spirit God made all;
Word and Spirit He gave to us
in splendor radiant on the river.

What does Tom Waits mean by the Marley Bone Coach?

I was driving in to work today and this song popped into my head. Probably due to the drab fall weather.



What does he mean when he states "So I will take the Marley Bone Coach"? There is a bit of speculation from a major Waits fan here. But I think the best explanation comes from Michael Quinn on this page. Quinn's stuff is fascinating to me.

To go by Marylebone stage meant to go on foot. It appears in a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon called Charlotte’s Inheritance of 1868: “‘The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now,’ thought Mr Sheldon; ‘but I don’t think they’ll try it on with me. And if they do, there’s the Marylebone stage. I’m not afraid of a five-mile walk.’” There was indeed a stagecoach which ran (staggered would be a better term — a contemporary writer said it “dragged tediously”) the four miles from Marylebone to the City of London, taking two and a half hours to get there and three hours to come back, this duration being partly accounted for by the extremely bad roads of the period but mainly by an unnecessarily long stop at an inn along the way. The earliest reference I can find to it is in a court case at the Old Bailey in 1822, in which a young man was found guilty of stealing two handkerchiefs from a passenger.

It was quicker to walk. This may have been part of the allusion, since Marylebone stage was either a joke based on, or perhaps a corruption of, marrowbone stage, known from the 1820s. John Black tells me that two centuries earlier Marylebone was often written as Marrowbone by Samuel Pepys among others; Pepys wrote in his Diary on 31 July 1667: “Then we abroad to Marrowbone, and there walked in the garden, the first time I ever was there, and a pretty place it is.” This makes the connection even easier to understand.

Marrowbone was a figurative term meaning the shinbones, hence the legs. So marrowbone stage has the same meaning as Shanks’s pony or Shanks’s mare. (There was also the obvious going by Walkers’ bus, which Dr Cobham Brewer mentions in early editions of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.) The first two expressions are equated in a book by George Augustus Sala with the title Twice Around the Clock, dated 1859: “The humbler conveyances known as ‘Shanks’s mare’, and the ‘Marrowbone stage’ — in more refined language, walking.”

Seems like maybe he's talking about both walking and dying, like he's slowly walking off to his own grave all alone. The song is very sad and beautiful at once, and it always reminds me of my friends who have never gotten married.

On a less somber note, check out Quinn's write-up on the word banana. It always cheers me up.

Contemplate serenely, people

Mark Shea posted a Tom Tomorrow strip over on his blog, but I'm not concerned with the content of that, nor any metadata for that matter. What caught my eye was this "poem" in the comment box.

THE STRONG AND FEARLESS

While the dying fighters
bleed to death all over

In Syria,
Afghanistan

A heavy bee hangs
swaying on a stalk of clover

In the sunny garden

Contemplate serenely
the size and scale of it

The little to the
big

Maybe I should cut down on the amount of mockery I engage in, but stuff like this doesn't make it easy. I have produced a lot of similar material, but it was mostly in high school. Mostly, I say. Some of it was in junior high.

Just remembered a similar post.

UPDATE: Tom just pointed out that I didn't click the SEE MORE link to see the "Rrrrrrrrrrrest of the poem" as Paul Harvey might say. I think the poets lack of punctuation is at least partly to blame for my missing this. So here it is the rest so you can read it in all it's glory:

And if some grave misfortune troubles you a bit

Feed it to the pigs

For nothing is a bother or too serious

Until it reaches where you are

There may be spreading and malignant crisis

But it is afternoon and it is far

But I say watch and listen if you come awake

From your late June sleep

You may think a false alarm is only a mistake

But the strong and fearless weep

Pavel
June 19, 2013

"Smorgasbordless"

This poem is terrible. I love it. Thank you, Tarzana Joe.

(What poem isn't terrible? You have to be dead to write good poetry, that's what sucks.)

"Decapitation is not somethin' you could afford"

A genius of rhythm. Warning: explicit lyrics.

Guru "Lost And Found" from East Coast Digital Radio on Vimeo.
Whether or not Guru knows what he's saying, one thing is for sure: he knows how to say it. Wonder what Eric Burdon thinks? Personally, I'd be flattered, but that's me.

Damaged III?

Via Tammy Bruce. Henry Rollins--the "Lion of the American Punk Senate"--asks "Where's Mary Jo Kopechne's Eulogy?":

Not Far Under The Surface. Let’s say I am driving myself and a passenger in my car at night. I accidentally drive off a bridge into the water below. I am able to get out of the submerged vehicle but for some reason, I am unable to free the passenger. I gather two friends, a relative and my lawyer and return to the scene. We are unable to rescue the person trapped in the car. Several hours later, myself nor the two others I took to the site have called the authorities. In fact, it’s two fishermen who find the car the next morning as even then, no one has been called to the scene. The car is removed from the water and it is determined that its occupant is dead. This tragic incident is made international news by my circumstances. I am very well known, a United States senator. My family is incredibly powerful. There are allegations that I had been drinking heavily hours up to the time I got into the vehicle with the passenger. I deny this for the rest of my life. That at no point did I make an attempt to call for rescue would probably be considered by many people to be outrageous and horrible, perhaps a crime that would carry a prison sentence. Can you imagine what the parents of the deceased would be going through when they found out that their 28-year-old daughter died alone in total darkness? I serve no time. Not inconvenienced by the burdensome obstacle of incarceration, I seek to maintain my elected position. I am successful and remain a senator for the next four decades. Would any deed I performed in that time, besides going to prison for the negligent homicide I committed all those years ago, be enough to wipe the slate clean? After my passing, would you fail to mention the incident and the death of this innocent person in reviewing the events of my long and lauded life? You wouldn't forget about her, would you? That would be negligent.

Poetic.

Don't think Rollins is a Lion? Well, hear him roar.

Poetry is hard

I've mentioned disappearing blog posts in the past. I was cracking up yesterday at one on Vox Nova which had been here. It was entitled "On Darwin, Fundamentalism and Capitalism" and basically it was an execrable piece of poetry that made very little sense. Here's how it began:

I know a doctor who despises Darwin
He's also a fundamentalist Christian
And a Capitalist

Darwin is wrong because he's against the Bible
“Creationism must be taken seriously” or ...

...and that's all that is available at this point in Google's and Facebook's cache. I'm pretty certain the point was that capitalists are a bunch of "social darwinists", a charge that Jonah Goldberg deals with expertise in Liberal Fascism.

But I'm more interested in the fact of the poem's removal. I imagine when the author who penned it–I'm not sure which one–read it over in the clear light of day and realized how self-parodic it was that the magnitude of his horror was far greater than that of my amusement.

Here's the lesson: when you lack evidence for the charge(s) you'd like to make against the bêtes noires and boogiemen of your liberal imagination, and therefore are unable to form a rational argument against them–although you feel so strongly that you must be right–you might be tempted to write a poem instead.

Don't.

Paging Doctor Sigmund Freud

Hoo, boy. Anyone here want to take a crack at Rod Dreher's latest dream, featuring the Greek Poet C. P. Cavafy? I don't really want to waste my precious time analyzing, so I'll just list the first two things that came to my mind. The first is naturally the line from Pee-wee's Big Adventure wherein the famed protagonist begins a vocal recollection of a vivid dream scape before an interruption: "I'm all alone. I'm rolling a big doughnut and this snake wearing a vest..." That line cracks me up.

The second is a couple of lines from Lorca's Novena by the Pogues:

And Lorca the faggot poet they left till last
Blew his brains out with a pistol up his arse.

Man, I love that song. Here's a link if you want to give it a listen.


Rod ends with his recurring refrain "...you ought to be seeking out ways to live more in tune with a localist, Christian, agrarian way of life...." Well, I live in a locality, I know my neighbors and I have a garden, so I suppose I'm covered. But maybe I am still lacking something. Maybe I'll have a dream someday in which a gay poet tries to ply me with Belgian beer; no doubt only then I will understand that Jesus wants me to raise chickens in my backyard.

Alcee Hastings post on Alexandria blog

I posted my "musings" on Alcee Hastings comments over at the Alexandria blog. I was too lazy to repost it here.

"All he really wanted was his car"

The Civil Twilight by James McCoy



Please discuss.

Fricking Crickets!

More to meditate on from James McCoy

"Don't Quit Your Day Job."



Word up, dog.

Hey, I'm 41, married with children, too! Where's my Scarlet Letter!?

Ma homey, James McCoy

James is a dude with whom I had the pleasure of sharing an apartment -- and really it was almost a "boarding house" of sorts -- back in "the day", circa 1994. He is truly one of the most interesting humans I have ever met on this planet and drop-dead funny. I learned a lot from the man, probably more than he realizes, but that's for another day.

I'm sooooo glad he got into poetry; I can now say "What slam poets am I into? Yeah, check out James McCoy -- he's great." Actually I did hear one in a coffee shop in Pittsburgh once who was decent, but otherwise my experience has been that most of them are the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of the drive-time shock jock. Anyway, enjoy this great "pomo" take on Orpheus and Eurydice and feel free to discuss.

Cross-posted.

Poetic Inspiration

How about a poem to adjust the mood around here?

Creation

It cost God but a thought,
And, lo! the stars were wrought.
He dropped them, spark on spark,
Into the primal dark.

It costs God but a thought,
And, lo! a soul is wrought.
A soul excelleth far
The beauty of a star.

— William V. Doyle, S.J.

Poem Etc

I'm not much into poetry. Good poetry, maybe, but the truth is most poetry sucks. But here's one that I just found which kind of tickled me. It's from a 1991 student publication from SRU called "Ginger Hill".

Generosity
Fred P. Hoffman

I gave some,
From a few there came nothing,
But most managed a bit.
And though I pledged more than usual,
More than I can even afford,
Some hated me for giving too much,
Others for not giving enough.
To all these appreciations
Politely I smilingly reply,
"You're welcome."

This reminded me of some "riddles" directed to my bro-in-law from some pan-handling street dwellers in NYC back in the late 80s.

Q: What's the greatest city in the world?
A: Generosity.

Q: What's the greatest nation in the world?
A: Donation.

Beatus vir, baby

I remember reading this the first time, Mike Aquilina, one of the best minds of my generation, threw this heavy thing down in '97. Excerpts:

Thus it was with the Beats from the beginning. Though ostensibly a literary movement, the Beats were about much more. Critic John Clellon Holmes noted in 1958: "The Beat generation is basically a religious generation."
...
Perhaps that should not be so surprising. The Beat movement’s other founder, novelist Jack Kerouac, was an intermittently practicing Catholic. It was Kerouac who named the movement (in 1948) and wrote its early aesthetic manifestos.
...
Ultimately, what the Beats were after was mystical experience. "I want God to show me His face" was Kerouac’s description of his goal.

To that end, the early Beats spent long hours poring over the saints’ works on prayer and the spiritual life. Ginsberg, a secular Jew, was an avid reader of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila. Kerouac was fond of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

Yet just as Beat writing had rejected traditional forms and disciplines, so eventually would it reject religion. The Beats wanted the mysticism, but without any ascetical preparation.

So being "beat" was an attempt to attain the beatific vision "on the cheap." In my experience most people who are into the Beats don't often acknowledge this relationship between the word beat and beatitude. That's probably because, as Mike writes, "most of his Beat-sympathetic biographers dismiss Kerouac’s fitful faith as the last infantile regression of a deeply troubled man." But Jack K. came up with the word, and it's how he defined it. Check it out:

He seemed to be grasping his way, again, to Christianity. In a 1959 essay on the origins of the Beats, he expresses outrage that Mademoiselle magazine, after a photo session, airbrushed out the crucifix that hung from a chain around his neck.

"I am a Beat," he wrote, "that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to it."

Whoa, John 3:16. Strange flowers for someone who learned about Kerouac from the revisionistae.

So by definition, the Beat philosophy was sort a Christian heresy which accentuated the teachings about the existence of a Benevolent Deity and the blessedness (beatitude) of the Saints and the Heavenly Kingdom, the goodness of existence and creation and the ability of man to transcend the material world while completely throwing out any relationship these realities might have to behavior along with most of the Judeo-Christian moral code, teachings about the fall, the real danger of losing one's soul, etc.

These thoughts form sort of an unplanned dovetail with this earlier post regarding "kernels of truth and wishful thinking". I've always been intrigued by the work of these cats, especially Kerouac, since I read On the Road circa 1988. Before reading Mike's piece, I always felt guilty liking the stuff since it's so decadent morally. It's good to know that there might be a kernel of goodness in this literature, that you can catch a passing glimpse of the Divine amid the wrong-headed ideas of flawed these flawed visionaries. It's probably also good to only allow yourself small doses and restrict reading to mature adults. And let's not revise their material in the opposite direction to make these guys into the saints and mystics they claimed themselves to be. In other words, a kernel of truth is not the "whole truth and nothing but the truth" and while useful, we should be careful not to substitute the kernel for the whole.

And Speaking of Ships

Diane sent me a recent post from Fr. Dwight Longnecker regarding the ship analogy for the Catholic Church. I believe this could properly be called a Biblical type or allegory; the fathers made the Noah's Ark/Church connection fairly early in the history of Christian biblical study. Noah's Ark no doubt smelled pretty badly long before the fortieth day. But if you can't stand the smell, the alternative was to jump out and drown.

Of course, you could also have opted to steal some of the material on board the ark and fashion a makeshift ark of your own, I suppose. I think there were a few famous guys who did that with some success.

Diane also included a poem inspired by Father's observation. I think it's very good.

It's Easy to be Pure by Diane

It's easy to be pure
When your church consists of four,
And one of them's your priest,
And two others are deceased.

It's easy to be pure
When your church is quite obscure
And minuscule and clannish –
And nobody speaks Spanish.

It's easy to be pure
When your church has closed the door
On the wandering and the weak
And all those who don't speak Greek.

It's easy to be pure
When your group splits more and more,
And each tiny splinter church
Won't show up in Google Search.

It's easy to be pure...
But you'd best make extra sure,
So, here's what you should do:
Start a church confined to YOU!

Sonnet to Our Lord on the Cross

I believe this was translated from a Spanish work; the prayer book I found it in gives no author. I'm no poetry expert anymore than I am a poultry expert, but I think this is a beautiful poem for Holy Week, simple and unpretentious.

I am not moved to love you, O my God,
That I might hope in promised Heaven to dwell;
Nor am I moved by fear of pain in Hell
To turn from sin and follow where you trod.
You move me, Lord, broken beneath the rod,
Or stretched out on the cross, as nails compel
Your had to twitch. It moves me that we sell,
To mockery and death, your precious blood.
It is, O Christ, your love which moves me so,
That my love rests not on a promised prize;
Nor holy fear on threat of endless woe;
It is not milk and honey, but the flow of blood
From blessed wounds before my eyes, that
Waters my buried soul and makes it grow.
(Manual of Prayers, p. 178)