For a number of good reasons, sort of out of sorts this evening (sorta palindromic, that).
I was working up another of my usual lists, which I am beginning to suspect is a curious evasion of propositional and essayist duty.
This one would have been a Checklist to Determine if You're Around Difficult People.
One of the items would have been this:
"You know you're around difficult people if, when emerging into consciousness, someone is standing over you demanding an apology for your hard cheekbone having injured their hand."
But. Sigh. I won't.
Except that single snarky item, of course.
It was, if you must know, a rather entertaining psychological inventory. Much more plaudit-inviting than anything the DSM folk would countenance. But I digress.
I am listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams, for that beast-calming effect. I rather like the Sarabande movement from his Concerto Grosso. Of course, too, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (which my rather ascerbic younger daughter epithetizes as "drowning music" after watching Master and Commander). And The Lark Ascending.
Of course, of course. Williams wrote this as a musical meditation on George Meredith's eponymous poem, it is said, on the cliffs of Dover, watching an entire English generation steam over the Channel, hurtling toward hell's gaping jaws in a tragi-comic irony of war (i.e., the Great War, WWI, aka the "War to End All Wars").
Next time you listen to The Lark Ascending, think of the Dead Marshes: it gives bouyancy to the wings of the little bird.
At the same time, I read this for Vespers, from the appropriate kathisma:
Let them be before the Lord continually,
and may their memory be destroyed from earth,
since he did not remember to do mercy
and pursued to death a person
needy and poor and stunned in heart.
And he loved cursing, and it shall come on him.
And he did not want blessing, and it shall be put far away from him.
And he clothed himself with cursing as his coat,
and it entered into his inwards like water
and like oil in his bones.
This is Psalm 108.15-18 (LXX), from the inestimable New English translation from the goodly offices of Oxford University Press. I know there are some complaints, but the phrase "stunned in heart" covers many sins.
This is an imprecation, so of course we do not wage it against any human being, no matter how tempting such waging might be.
No, we cannot move in the passion of anger against any creature. We must reserve anger only for the powers that prompt humans into such culpable puppetry -- fools though they be.
And the frequencies, and bandwidths, are full of fools.
We cannot be angry against fools, no matter how many boundary stones they move to build extra barns.
Gee, hasn't anyone noticed that the economic chaos may be due to judgment, rather than the inability of one party or another ... that the drought in Texas and the melting of the polar ice, that the tumult in the Middle East and the morass in Europe, may have more to do with the rejection of prophetic righteousness:
... for on account of their lawless acts they were brought low. (Psalm 106.17).
But there is this:
And they cried out to the Lord when they were afflicted,
and from their anguish he saved them;
he sent out his word and healed them
and rescued them from their corruption. (Psalm 106.19-20)
I recommend, in such times, a view of that excellent series, Brother Cadfael of all things. Netflix it if you must. I must.
In my student days I spent a year studying in Germany (West Germany, in those days). On break I wandered to the south, near Stuttgart, where I ran into some friends, one of whom had a car. We went for an aimless drive in the countryside and stumbled across a little hamlet with a large stone church, where a visiting English youth orchestra was setting up for a free Sunday afternoon concert. They performed the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” antiphonally, the large orchestra at the front of the church surrounding the ensemble (quartet?) with the small orchestra playing from the loft at the back. It was electrifying.
I’ve loved Vaughn Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” for years and never knew of the poem or the association with World War I until now. Thanks.
Speaking of Thomas Tallis, have you heard the King’s Singers recording of his “Spem in Alium”? Phenomenal!
Posted by: Reid | December 02, 2011 at 01:51 PM