October 27, 2008

Monday of the 30th week in Ordinary Time. At catholicculture.org, a meditation on the rosary.

Born this day in 1914

Prologue
by Dylan Thomas (1914-53)

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my sawn, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark : I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage red, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
In the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooing the woods' praise,
Who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)
But animals thick as thieves
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist! in hogsback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms in a throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbours, finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone, and then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multitudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move,
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now.

Cummings

so many selves(so many fiends and gods
each greedier than every)is a man
(so easily one in another hides;
yet man can,being all,escape from none)

so huge a tumult is the simplest wish:
so pitiless a massacre the hope
most innocent(so deep's the mind of flesh
and so awake what waking calls asleep)

so never is most lonely man alone
(his briefest breathing lives some planet's year,
his longest life's a heartbeat of some sun;
his least unmotion roams the youngest star)

--how should a fool that calls him "I" presume
to comprehend not numerable whom?

Drat!

The sun came out at about eleven, while I was at Mass. Wish it had stayed cloudy and gray. I must have ancestors from some cool and gloomy climes.

Still, only about 61 degrees. Could be much worse.

Did I mention that autumn rocks?

October 26, 2008

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Trousered Ape

On the ruler of the Pope's Navee.

October 25, 2008

Saturday of the 29th Week of Ordinary Time. Old calendar: Sts Chrysanthus and Daria, Sts Crispin and Crispinian.

Leafing through old Magnificats ...

Why must we be always feeling the pain of loss?

If we did not, we should not realize that our idols are not God, are not Christ.

Bad as they are, they match our limitations; and if they could content us, we should never know the real beauty of Christ: we should not become whole.

It is one of God's great mercies that, although our vanity and our fear and other mean passions crave for satisfaction, when they are satisfied, we are not. There is an essential you, an essential me, who cannot be satisfied excepting by God: that is why the sense of loss saves us from complacency in our idols and drives us to go on seeking for the lost Child.

That is why people who seem to have got (and even to have got by their own efforts) all that life can give are so often aware of an inexplicable lack, a want in themselves.

Caryll Houselander (1901-54), via Magnificat November 2003, meditation for the 6th

Today's memorial

St Anthony Mary Claret, Bishop.

Under the weather

I've been a wee bit sick. Regular posting should resume shortly.

Today's liturgical observance

Tuesday of the 29th week of Ordinary Time; but, formerly, the memorial(s) of St Hilarion, abbot, and of St Ursula and companions.

Today's memorial.

Optional : St Paul of the Cross.

Yet again, from the archives

From six years ago, a light-hearted credo.

Against the smiling bureaucrat

Here is someone else who hasn't fallen prey to the blandishments of our latest would-be "messiah" -- the abbatial blogger at Word Incarnate.

Render unto, etc.

Q.: How do you cut the Roman Empire in two?

A.: With a pair of Cæsars.

On an unrelated note

the weather yesterday, and so far today, has been fabulously autumnal! 40 degrees in the metropolis right now, 30s in the burbs. Yesterday struggled to get above 50, and I was in short sleeves and no jacket. I might wear the jacket today.

And we still have some fall foliage!

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Sunday observance occults the memorial of the Jesuit martyrs of North America.

Something else from the archives

A non-shepherd's calendar, 2000-something.

Also today

the feast of St Luke the Evangelist.

Am realizing that today

is the birthday of a friend from whom I have become estranged. But I can't believe how old she's going to be (me plus thirteen) ... eheu fugaces labuntur anni!

Chock-full of mavericky goodness™

If rumor be true, Gov. Sarah Palin will make an appearance on tonight's SNL.

Today's gospel

Meanwhile, when a crowd of many thousands had gathered, packed so close that they were trampling on one another, he began to speak first to his disciples: 'Be on your guard against the leaven of the Pharisees -- I mean their hypocrisy. There is nothing covered up that will not be uncovered, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Therefore everything you have said in the dark will be heard in broad daylight, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be shouted from the housetops.

'To you who are my friends I say: do not fear those who kill the body and after that have nothing more they can do. I will show you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Believe me, he is the one to fear.

'Are not five sparrows sold for twopence? Yet not one of them is overlooked by God. More than that, even the hairs of your head have all been counted. Do not be afraid; you are worth more than any number of sparrows.'

Luke 12:1-7 (Revised English Bible)

Hasten ye all to Meredith's ...

... and hear Dylan Thomas read "Poem In October" and other poems.

From the archives

Draft of a Poem Beginning with a Line by Wallace Stevens, 2003.

"The wheat of Christ, ground by the teeth of beasts"

Today is the memorial of St Ignatius of Antioch.

"This is no picnic for me either, Buster"

As someone I know was wondering:

What was little Barack doing the night before that he couldn't do his homework and his mother had to drag him out of bed at 4.30 the next morning?

The quadrennial folderol

Roaming the blogosphere, one finds thoughtful posts about the upcoming presidential election by Eve and by Clairity Daily.

My current position: undecided between McPalin and Bob Barr. (I've heard that Barr is not a libertarian purist. Well, neither am I.)

Definitions

Flaunt : to show off

Flout : to treat with contemptuous disregard

The occasion falls today

I did but touch the honey of romance --
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

Today is the 154th anniversary of the birth of Oscar Wilde.

The sign in front of the Unitarian church ...

... announcing this coming Sunday's theme for the sermon reads:

WE ARE THE SAINTS.

Well.

That's what we're all supposed to be, or supposed to be striving toward, but isn't it a little, uhm, brash, to declare one's own sanctity as a fait accompli? A little lacking in humility?

This is the same church where the congregants are encouraged to forgive themselves, so I guess that self-canonization is the next logical step!

114th birthday of Cummings

true lovers in each happening of their hearts
live longer than all which and every who;
despite what fear denies,what hope asserts,
what falsest both disprove by proving true

(all doubts,all certainties,as villains strive
and heroes through the mere mind's poor pretend
--grim comics of duration:only love
immortally occurs beyond the mind)

such a forever is love's any now
and her each here is such an everywhere,
even more true would truest lovers grow
if out of midnight dropped more suns than are

(yes;and if time should ask into his was
all shall,their eyes would never miss a yes)

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

The glory of the day was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
And over all her loveliness, the grace
Of Morning blushing in the early skies.

And in her voice, the calling of the dove
Like music of a sweet melodious part.
And in her smile, the breaking light of love;
And all the gentle virtues in her heart.

And now the glorious day, the beauteous night,
The birds that signal to their mates at dawn,
To my dull ears, to my tear-blinded sight
Are one with all the dead, since she is gone.

psalmus David

iudica me Deus et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta
ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me

quia tu es Deus fortitudo mea
quare me reppulisti
quare tristis incedo dum affligit me inimicus

emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam
ipsa me deduxerunt et adduxerunt
in montem sanctum tuum et in tabernacula tua

et introibo ad altare Dei
ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam

Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

    Rose-cheekt Laura, come;
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
        Sweetly gracing.

    Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framèd:
Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's
        Birth is heav'nly.

    These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
        Knows no discord;

    But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renew'd by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
        selves eternall.

More on the Beatitudes

Fr Gawronski informs us, "They are sung in every Byzantine liturgy, as the Word of God is formally borne into the Church" (A Closer Walk with Christ, p. 138).

I have never been present at a Byzantine liturgy, but it is refreshing to know that there are divine celebrations that begin without the singing of "All Are Welcome" or "Gather Us In."

Blessed are the peacemakers

Those who are peacemakers can expect to suffer much, for the world is constantly urging us to take simple sides in its battles. We do have to take a side in the end, but it is the side of Jesus, and Jesus is the one everyone seems to reject! Both Pharisees and Sadducees, the great parties of His day, rejected Him. Though He was closest to the Pharisees, He was also most critical of them. Although coming so very close, they still missed the boat, and a miss is as good as a mile. One is often tempted to take sides -- is generally drawn to one side anyway -- and in the end, one runs out of patience and just opts for one side over the other. Jesus calls to a deeper peace than that reached in most of our battles. If in one battle we must be on one side, in another battle we will sometimes find ourselves on the other side, if we are truly listening to God. So to listen to God and to speak His word is to be free of all party claims. It is to be free to try and bring a peace that is not of this world, and so share in the work of the Son of God. Peacemakers are crucified by all, for they will not take sides. They offer an understanding that requires surrender of personal riches, the riches of giving ultimacy to human opinions.

Raymond Thomas Gawronski, SJ, A Closer Walk with Christ: A Personal Ignatian Retreat (Our Sunday Visitor, 2003), p. 142

To my legions of Canadian readers ...

... happy Thanksgiving! (It's Monday, isn't it?)

Light verse

Poets make rondeaux and sestinas,
But God makes Venuses and Serenas.

"What else does the box say?"

1. Has anyone else seen that commercial?

2. If you've answered "yes" to question #1, do you hate the commercial as much as I do?

from "An October Journey"

by Margaret Walker (1915-98)

I want to tell you what hills are like in October
when colors gush down mountainsides
and little streams are freighted with a caravan of leaves.
I want to tell you how they blush and turn in fiery shame and joy,
how their love burns with flames consuming and terrible
until we wake one morning and woods are like a smoldering plain --
a glowing caldron full of jewelled fire;
the emerald earth a dragon's eye,
the poplars drenched in yellow light
and dogwoods blazing bloody red.
Travelling southward earth changes from gray rock to green velvet.
Earth changes to red clay
with green grass growing brightly
with saffron skies of evening setting dully
with muddy rivers moving sluggishly.

In the early spring when the peach tree blooms
wearing a veil like a lavender haze
and the pear and the plum in their bridal hair
gently snow their petals on earth's grassy bosom below
then their soughing breeze is soothing
and the world seems bathed in tenderness,
but in October
blossoms have long since fallen.
A few red apples hang on leafless boughs;
wind whips bushes briskly.
And where a blue stream sings cautiously
a barren land feeds
hungrily.


From The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, eds. Michael S. Harper & Anthony Walton (Vintage, 2000), pp. 180-1

By Achmelvich Bridge

by Norman MacCaig (1910-96)

Night stirs the trees
With breathings of such music that they sway,
Skirts, sleeves, tiaras, in the humming dark,
Their highborn heads tossing in disarray.

A floating owl
Unreels his silence, winding in and out
Of different darknesses. The wind takes up
And scatters a sound of water all about.

No moon need slide
Into the sky to make that water bright;
It ties its swelling self with glassy ropes;
It jumps from stones in smithereens of light.

The mosses on the wall
Plump their fat cushions up. They smell of wells,
Of under bridges and of spoons. They move
More quiveringly than the dazed rims of bells.

A broad cloud drops
A darker darkness. Turning up his stare,
Letting the world pour under him, owl goes off,
His small soft foghorn quavering through the air.


From The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, eds. J. MacQueen and T. Scott (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 560

Autumn

from The Seasons
by James Thomson (1700-48)

But see the fading many-coloured woods,
Shade deepening over shade, the country round
Imbrown; a crowded umbrage dusk and dun,
Of every hue, from wan declining green
To sooty dark. These now the lonesome muse,
Low whispering, lead into their leaf-strewn walks,
And give the season in its latest view.

Meantime, light shadowing all, a sober calm
Fleeces unbounded ether: whose least wave
Stands tremulous, uncertain where to turn
The gentle current; while illumined wide,
The dewy-skirted clouds imbibe the sun,
And through their lucid veil his softened force
Shed o'er the peaceful world. Then is the time,
For those whom virtue and whom nature charm,
To steal themselves from the degenerate crowd,
And soar above this little scene of things:
To tread low-thoughted vice beneath their feet;
To soothe the throbbing passions into peace;
And woo lone Quiet in her silent walks.

Thus solitary, and in pensive guise,
Oft let me wander o'er the russet mead,
And through the saddened grove, where scarce is heard
One dying strain, to cheer the woodman's toil.
Haply some widowed songster pours his plaint,
Far, in faint warblings, through the tawny copse;
While congregated thrushes, linnets, larks,
And each wild throat, whose artless strains so late
Swelled all the music of the swarming shades,
Robbed of their tuneful souls, now shivering sit
On the dead tree, a dull despondent flock:
With not a brightness waving o'er their plumes,
And nought save chattering discord in their note.
O let not, aimed from some inhuman eye,
The gun the music of the coming year
Destroy; and harmless, unsuspecting harm,
Lay the weak tribes a miserable prey
In mingled murder, fluttering on the ground!

The pale descending year, yet pleasing still,
A gentler mood inspires; for now the leaf
Incessant rustles from the mournful grove;
Oft startling such as studious walk below,
And slowly circles through the waving air.
But should a quicker breeze amid the boughs
Sob, o'er the sky a leafy deluge streams;
Till choked, and matted with the dreary shower,
The forest walks at every rising gale,
Roll wide the withered waste, and whistle bleak.
Fled is the blasted verdure of the fields;
And, shrunk into their beds, the flowery race
Their sunny robes resign. E'en what remained
Of stronger fruits falls from the naked tree;
And woods, fields, gardens, orchards all around,
The desolated prospect thrills the soul.

Quotations of note

Those who justify themselves do not convince.

Lao-tzu


The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

T. S. Eliot


Therefore Dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.

William Blake, "To the Public," preface to Jerusalem


"All things are lawful for me," but not all things are helpful.

1 Corinthians 6:12.


We should value others by the most that they are, and ourselves by the least that we are.

Marianne Moore (from memory, wording may be inexact)


Satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy.

Marianne Moore, from the poem "What Are Years?"


Be gentle with others, be severe with yourself.

Saint Teresa of Avila, quoted somewhere in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore


deeds cannot dream what dreams can do
--time is a tree(this life one leaf)
but love is the sky and i am for you
just so long and long enough

edward estlin cummings, "as freedom is a breakfastfood"


I'm a very gentle man,
Even-tempered and good-natured, whom you never hear complain,
Who has the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein:
A patient man am I
Down to my fingertips
The sort who never would, ever could
Let an insulting remark escape his lips ...

Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in "My Fair Lady"


This Humanist whom no belief constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

J. V. Cunningham (1911-86)

Untitled, 2002

He pilfered her poems, he stole all her prose,
Absconded with meter and rhyme:
With never an ode of his own to compose,
He took to the plagiarist's crime.

He twisted the syllables, wrenched every word --
How barbarous was his technique!
A more brutish din you never have heard.
Such havoc the snatcher would wreak!

He'd say it in Portuguese, then Double Dutch,
And maybe a soupçon of French:
He'd stand on a soapbox in big city squares
Disturbing the drunk on the bench.

His phrases were noisy: a big pile of books
That loudestly falls to the floor.
His poems all merited murderous looks
And catcalls of "Plagiarist! Boor!"

But one happy day, this most burglarish bard
Received a felicitous turn:
He left all his poems heaped in the backyard
With the leaves he intended to burn.

The vowels and consonants went up in smoke;
His lyrics became quite extinct.
A quite fitting fate for this silly old bloke
Who stealed what his betters had thinked!

From a 1956 anthology entitled Saint Francis and the Poet, ed. Elizabeth Patterson, preface by Archbishop Richard J. Cushing

October
by Teresa Hooley

Praised be my Lord for Brother October,
Who is exceedingly forthright,
Tempestuous and loud.
He coloreth the woods with glory,
So that they burn and glow.
He raketh them with his winds
And the leaves are scattered abroad like ashes.

Thanks be to my Lord for Brother October.
The plow worketh beside him,
And the earth is furrowed for the sowing of bread.
Beauty followeth after
In a cloud of wings,
For man doth not live by bread alone.
Brother rook plundereth the walnut-tree
And Sister squirrel the hazel;
Brother thrush pulleth the berries of the yew,
For your Heavenly Father feedeth them.

Praised be my Lord for Brother October,
Tenth of the apostle months of the circling year.

Won't be online tomorrow

(most likely)

... but it'll be the sixth anniversary of the inception of this here blog.

blogstuff

There are some blogs I'd like to "follow," but some of you haven't enabled your feed yet (is that the correct terminology?). So I can't follow you!

You know who you are ...

Poem #849

by Emily Dickinson (1830-86)

The good Will of a Flower
The Man who would possess
Must first present
Certificate
Of minted Holiness.

Quotation

Even as He is filled with the Holy Spirit just descended upon Him, there is no raucous ecstasy but a silent majesty. It is ecstatic, yet has that holy and silent restraint that speaks of God.

Fr Raymond Thomas Gawronski, SJ, about Our Lord's Baptism in the Jordan, in A Closer Walk with Christ (Our Sunday Visitor, 2003), p. 118

emphasis mine

I don't get this meme

Am I supposed to say what I think I should be patron of, if I hubristically foresee my eventual canonization, or, as this blogger has it, do I say what the person who tagged me should be patron of?

For TS, who tagged me, I'll go with patron of Guinness drinkers, used bookstores, Ohio, and summer. For myself, patron of Newcastle drinkers, used bookstores, Massachusetts, and autumn. (Do seasons have patron saints? Maybe lovers of certain seasons have patron saints ...)

A brief hiatus

Will likely be offline from today, late morning, until Monday afternoon.

Only right-wingers can be racists ... right?

This is loathsome stuff.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)

Hayden Carruth, poet, anthologist, sometime editor of Poetry magazine, author of from snow and rock, from chaos (1973) and Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1990s), editor of the important anthology The Voice that is Great Within Us (1970), has died at age 87. Vermonter, political radical, better-than-decent poet. See especially the 1973 collection mentioned above.

(Link via the Poetry Foundation.)

Here is his poem Tabula Rasa.

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) on revision

Some poets and some who think about poetry and many who don't think about it are "opposed" to revision. Poetry, they believe, should come full-fledged like an angel from the Imagination. Anything else is tainted. What can the intellect do that would favorably affect this angel? Well, everyone likes the angel, but why limit the angel to one flight? The angel not only arrives but also may be there during the writing, may disappear and may return for revision. "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind" is not an example of "First thought, best thought," and neither is Williams's "Among/of/green//stiff/old/bright//broken/ branch." The enemy is not revision but the absence of the angel. By the right kind of work, one can have it there at every stage.

Kenneth Koch, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, p. 108

Me too

Hungry for what I was learning, I tended to swallow it whole. Critical thinking has never been my strong suit; I have what, being kind to myself, I will term a capacity to believe whatever I am reading at the moment. When I can spot a logical fallacy, it's a bad one, something a sensible twelve-year-old might question.

Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, p. 129

A blogger ...

... who is dear to our heart bows out of the blogosphere.

From today's Communion hymn

I cannot remember
A trial or a pain
That God did not recycle
To bring me some gain.

Comedy and politics

Of course, it doesn't make sense to you, Senator. You're not a maverick.

Darrell Hammond as Sen. John McCain in a parody of the recent presidential debate, on Saturday Night Live last night