Under Construction

When we returned, the island was haunted.
Seagulls sat sentry along coast edges
as we explored the shoreline, undaunted.

When we returned to the island,
it was already haunted.
Seagulls stood sentry along coast edges

as music clung to the island's edge;
theme and variation echoing

as blonde music floated above the tree-line
then descended among the brooks.
I saw the hairs stand on your neck.

The sky was not buttermilk, but
rain-bruised.  We saw footprints in the sand,
then paced their stride.

We harmonized to the music,
but it faded behind thunder's curtain.
Lightening threw shadows among the trees.

Jonquil Dreams

See the picture. Read the poem.

Lectio of the Flowers

Today's reading is from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven & Hell,
plate 8. This epigram comes from a section of that curious work sub-titled "Proverbs of Hell." As long-time readers may recall, this blog has intermittently featured reflections on other epigrams from that work.

Meditation.
Although this is a "Proverb of Hell", I keep hearing echoes of canonical Judeo-Christian texts; for example, "Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting" (Ps 126:5, NAS). One statement seems like the mirror refection of the other. But it is, at it were, a somewhat distorted mirror.

I have long maintained that joy, in contrast to happiness, is a choice. That is to say, we generally say some external event or circumstance "makes us happy". On the other hand, we may choose to rejoice in response to an event. This choice is made when we engage our full being, full consciousness, with a stimulus (which may be internal or external). I suppose there is an element of vulnerability involved, that we may be open to opportunities to be "Surprised by Joy", as C. S. Lewis put it.

If I am on the right track when I speak of our vulnerability to joy, then the verb "impregnate" is especially apt. But one must not confuse vulnerability with passivity; if joy is indeed a choice, it is an active choice. We plant seeds of joy in our being whenever we make this choice. Blake's proverbs reflect an emphasis on energy, so I expect his emphasis here is on the generative quality of our actively choosing to be joyful.

Then: "Sorrows bring forth" In the context of "Joys impregnate", it would seem this means sorrow gives birth to – something. And here, the epigram begins to resemble a Zen koan: the logical mind cannot parse it. Yet, I will be so bold as to suggest what this epigram says to me today.

The union of these supposed opposites suggests that whatever "seeds" are planted by joy are brought forth during sorrow How can this be? Perhaps we build a reservoir of joy which can be drawn on during times of sorrow. With this hypothesis, joy is self-propagating; which is to say, it plants its own seeds.

Another possibility occurs. Choosing to be vulnerable to joy can become a habit; it may become, over time, our accustomed way of perceiving reality. And viewing reality through this lens may help us find joy even in sorrowful events. Thus, we may speak of "sorrowful joy" without contradiction.

Sorrowful joy may break the heart. It breaks the heart because we have assumed a habit of vulnerability. We may fear it for this reason. Yet, a life which is not vulnerable to the full spectrum of joy is not an energetic life. Such a life is not worthy of the word "life"; it is existence as a automaton. It is by embracing sorrowful joy that we come to experience our humanity holistically.

It is through the cracks of a broken heart that the light may come in, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen.

Prayer.
Blessed Gardener, I embrace the seeds of joy and sorrow planted in the world. Grant me eyes to see your presence each time my heart breaks. Grant me ears to hear your comforting voice Guide my hands to comfort others. Train me to inhale your presence in every nook & cranny of the world. Grant me a tongue to taste your wisdom, and to speak it boldly.
This I ask in your Holy Name. So be it.

Contemplate what this epigram might mean to you. Carry it with you through the day, let it grow with in you, then consider what fruit it
may have born in you by eventide.

Today's Word

lection (LEK-shuhn) noun

[From Latin lection- (reading), stem of lectio, from lectus, past participle of legere (to read, choose, collect), ultimately from Indo-European root leg-. Other words derived from the same root are lexicon, lesson, lecture, legible, legal, select.]

1. A version of a text in a particular copy or edition.
2. A portion of sacred literature to be read in a divine service. Also known as pericope.

Courtesy Word a Day (also linked in the box on your right).

Ideé d’jour

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
— Heraclitus, philosopher (c. 540-470 BCE)

I'll sit down on this bank of sand / And watch the river flow.
— Bob Dylan

What lesser-known Simpsons character are you?
Brought to you by the good folks at sacwriters.com.
What more could I possibly say?

Welcome, Guest!

Signing on Site Meter's free tracking service has been one of the more rewarding decisions I've made. I see how many hits I get per day (today, it's been around 20), and I see the source of those hits. Often the referring URL, just as often, the search engine and the search terms that lead the visitor here.

Thanks to Site Meter, I learned that Matthias, a man whose writing I greatly admire, had recently added me to his blog-roll at Correction. Matthias is a seminarian "on the road" to becoming a Methodist pastor, and is definitely a kindred spirit. In an e-mail, Matthias has said he likes my "Ideé d’jour" and my Lectio Devina series. I hope those who visit from his site also find things to enjoy here.

My hit count spiked when Mike Snider high-lighted the fact that he was blog-rolling me at his Formal Blog and Sonnetarium. Unfortunately, the week he did that was when I was on one of my religious rants, so his readers may have been a might disappointed. Mike is a purist about structured verse, and we sometimes disagree, but I have respect for what he's doing. His sonnet-a-day discipline is as bold as, and more challenging than, my former poem-a-day discipline.

As an aside, here's a shock for you: I believe everyone who wants to write poetry should at least try to write structured verse. Obviously, I don't think something has to rhyme and be in iambic pentameter in order to be poetry. But I do believe the discipline of fitting a form will inevitably improve a writer's skills.

A number of European visitors (Sweden, The Netherlands, et al) have come by way of Dr. Omed's Nun of the Week sub-category. Hope those visitors weren't too disappointed when they didn't find any salacious images here.

The searches have been interesting, as well. Someone at the National Institute of Health (dot gov) stumbled in here searching on "freedom of speech during wartime". Someone in England searched on "love poetry" and "claddagh" and landed here. For this last, see Rosary Guitar.

The most frequent search term has involved people from around the world searching for images of a certain Canadian singer-songwriter, whom I have called "Saint". The sad thing is, the link Google provides goes to my most recent post, rather than the post in which I included that image. Sadder still, and shame on me, I "piggy-backed" someone else's server to post that image. I edited the image from the relevant post last week, and hope eventually Google will return to referencing the correct site.

---

Hope you're still with me. Ended up having to re-write this whole post because I hit the wrong button at the wrong time. AnyWHO, if you are still with me, you may be wondering what the dominant theme of this web-log is. Like any blogger, I focus on things that interest me. For whatever reason, three main areas interest me right now, and I cycle through them on an irregular basis: poetry, politics, and religion.

Some time back, I added the descriptor "Chevaux de Bataille" to the top of this page's design. It's a marvelous French phrase I picked up from Word-a-day; it roughly translates as "hobby horse". Which is to say, these three areas are my consistent hobby horse.

I am not the political scientist Brother Dave is. And, the more I look at the world's current political situation, the more depressed I get. As a person who experiences bouts of non-specific melancholia, I certainly don't need to focus on that for any period.

Elsie says I have the best Bible knowledge of any lay person she knows (she is a Methodist pastor). My religious studies have been primarily self-directed, with about two years of formal study. Paying attention in various Bible studies has paid off, as well. As my references to Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Zen, et al may indicate, I have not limited my studies to Judeo-Christianity. So, this may actually be the area where I have the best background.

As a theorist of poetic prosody, I am a bit behind the times (my study pretty much ends with the Black Mountain Poets (Wakowski, et al). In fact, I may be mis-remembering the name of that school. I am not as adept with current critical terms as Ron Silliman, whose writing I find especially impenetrable. Nor I am not able to parse a poem's meter with the felicity of Mike Snider; surprisingly, I don't seem to have the ear for it.

But there are those who have responded to my poetry, structured or not. If I have something to say about poetics, I seem to be saying it mostly by example.

I realize I might get more traffic if I chose only one of these three areas, and focused on it. I don't seem to be constitutionally capable of limiting myself in that way. My hope is, by shifting my focus as the spirit leads, the writing here will remain fresh enough to encourage people to return frequently.

An occasional comment to let me know how I'm doing is always appreciated. Don't just lurk behind those intriguing URLs I scan when I visit the reports on Site Meter.

Subliminals

1. Dogma :: tic
2. Spirit :: filled
3. Voodoo :: chile
4. Demon :: seed
5. Digital :: age
6. Ceremony :: ritual
7. Research :: assistant
8. Career :: path
9. Penis :: [rhymes with angina]
10. Film :: buff

Ideé d’jour

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.
— Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

Western skyline this morning, at about 6:47.

Ideé d’jour

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.
— Zen saying

The western sky in my neighborhood, about 6:45 this morning.

The Passion of the Christ

The last straight-ahead horror film I saw was 28 Days an apocalyptic variant on a zombie story. It had several scenes of distorted human faces, of humans being savagely attacked, and "shock shots" where the baddie seems to appear from nowhere. 28 Days was not nearly as gory as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this movie to anyone, unless they have a special appreciation of sadistic scenes of torture and are fans of "buckets of blood".

Elsie had a good comment, afterwards: "I think that movie has a lot more to say about Mel Gibson than it does about Jesus." When I asked her to elaborate, she said the movie revealed that Gibson liked gore. And that's when my horror movie comparison began. The first horror-movie element occurs within the first ten minutes of the movie: Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemene, and a snake is slithering toward him as he lays prostrate on the ground. Jesus suddenly stands, crushes the head of the snake under his heel, with a great "crunch" on the soundtrack. While one might trace this image to second Isaiah, it is not recorded in any of the Gospels, nor does it significantly add to the story.

There are a number of other "shock" shots. Judas is pursued by demonic children, whose faces distort in ways reminiscent of Linda Blair's in The Exorcist. Judas' suicide includes the rotting corpse of some pack animal, from which he get the rope to hang himself. A crow picks out the eyes of one of the thieves on the cross. These scenes are not canonical, and it is reasonable to assume their place in the picture is for shock value.

Some other impressions:

What's the Story?
This movie would not have made a lot of sense to a person who is not familiar with the Gospel story. Now, it may be safe to assume that most Americans (even non-Christians) are familiar with the basic outline. But one might need more than just the basic outline to understand what's going on here. As a number of reviewers have noted, the events of the Passion are not given any context. We hear very little that would explain why the Sanhedrin are so angry with Jesus, so their anger seems simply mean-spirited. Another example is a sequence during the Via Delorosa in which a woman has a flash-back to a scene in which Jesus saves her from being stoned. If one is unfamiliar with the story, the flashback makes no sense; again, we don't know why people want to stone her (the men pictured are the same Sanhedrin who condemn Jesus).

Super Jesus
The man we see in this movie loses an astounding amount of blood. Head wounds are inflicted with the crown of thorns, and we know how liberally head wounds bleed. I think it safe to say any one else would be dead long before the crucifixion. Here's another curious fact — the two thieves carry the cross beams of their crosses (which is likely accurate), but Jesus carries a full cross (inaccurate, but in accord with pictorial tradition).

I'm Posing for Michaelangelo!
Which brings us to another point — a number of elements reference classic Christian art, rather than the accuracy Mr. Gibson has claimed. The nails are driven into Jesus' palms, the traditional view of the method. The fact is, there is nothing in the palm to hold the nails in place; with the full weight of the body on those palms, the nails would have ripped through them (trust me, I'm being less graphic than Gibson). The two thieves are held on their crosses with ropes alone, and no nails are shown in their palms. Trust me, the Romans viewed the process like an assembly line, and would not have used different methods to crucify different people.

When Jesus is lowered from the cross, the camera lingers on the mis-en-scene of the group clustered around him, with Mother Mary at the center, holding her hand in an awkward pose. It's as though she is posing for the Pieta.

We're Talking Foriegn!
This is something Elsie noticed. The people speak their Aramaic and Latin very diliberately, which seems unnatural. Think of a hammy Shakespearean actor reading Hamlet's solioquy, and you have an idea: "To .... BE ... or ... not ... To .... be. ........... THAT .... is .... the.... QUESTION." This sort of reading might have been necessary for the Globe, but it's hardly necessary for a modern movie. It's all very cool that Gibson went to the trouble of having the actors speak Latic and Aramaic, but surely a few people in ancient Palestine talkedlikethis rather .... than ... like .... THIS.

So, What's It All About
The story of the passion in the published accounts is not very detailed, and would not make a full movie on its own. That's why most stories begin somewhere around the Sermon on the Mount. All movie representations of the story have added details, and that's to be expected. What we discern about the intent comes from what the director chooses to add, and what the director chooses to leave out. In the case of this particular passion play, Mr. Gibson has chosen to leave out most of Jesus' teachings. For example, we get all of two lines of the aforementioned Sermon. We get four lines from the Last Supper. The rest is the torture and murder of a man, told in exquisite detail, with an emphasis on the gore.

One may reasonably infer that, for Gibson, the point is the sacrifice rather than the teaching. And perhaps Gibson feels that he has been so very sinful that only the extreme sacrifice of a super being could possibly "balance the scale". There are many people who understand the Gospel story in that way, and those people are likely to have a more positive reaction to the film.

But even allowing for "sacrificial lamb" theology, one loses so much by leaving out the teaching. We hear two major teachings in the film: first, the "Love your neighbor" speech from the sermon — boy, that's controversial stuff that justifies brutal torture! Then, the scene at the Last Supper where Jesus says "no greater love have a man than to lay down his life for his friends", which emphasizes the sacrificial theme of the movie. In a sense, leaving out the majority of teaching — so more time may be spent on the torture — devalues the teaching.

Look, you want a decent re-telling of the Passion, rent Jesus of Nazareth. Scripted by Anthony Burgess, it has its flaws, but at least it tells the whole story and tells it comparitively well. If you're tired of other worldly depictions of Jesus, I recommend the made-for-tv animated movie The Miracle Maker, or the more controversial
Last Temptation of Christ. If you've seen Gibson's horror movie production of the passion, and need a good corrective, may I recommend The Life of Brian?

Open Letter to John Kerry

Dear Senator Kerry:
Now that you are the likely Democratic nominee for president, I think it worthy to consider how, exactly, you will respond to what you have accurately described as the "Republican attack machine."

The first matter is the dirtying of the word “liberal”. I say, for every time the opposing side calls you a “liberal,” you call the current administration a liar. This is a tactic you used to good effect on CNN two weeks ago, and I believe it will be effective in the months to come.

But, it’s also time to do a new spin on the Republican campaign of neurolinguistics, which has somehow perverted the meaning of a perfectly decent word. I think it’s time we confront the administration on its own liberal tendencies.

George Bush has been liberal in his fiscal policy. Republican John McCain described it as “spending money like a drunken sailor.” Yep, sounds pretty liberal to me.

He has been liberal with people’s rights, getting the government involved in who can ride an airplane.

He has liberally subsidized American business (especially a company formerly operated by his current VP).

You, on the other hand, might paint yourself as a "true conservative":

• you will conserve individual freedoms
• you will conserve American jobs
• you will conserve America’s natural resources
• you will conserve the world’s respect for America — in fact, you will strive to restore it

And so on, in this vein.

Wishing you success —

Jonah

Diary Entries

Wednesday.
A black cat blessed my path,
then I was crossed by a train.
Crossed by a north-bound train.

Thursday.
The rain started last night.
Lightening killed my phone
and DVD. Stormy day.

Friday.
Cloudy morning. Take traditional work route
which zig-zags on the edge of down-town.
I pass the homeless marching, as if in war.

---

For similar quotidian musings, please see Ms. Mambrina's "3 o'clock in the morning" at The Forge.

Ideé d’jour

To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish. — Yiddish proverb

Confessions of an Ex-Smoker

Jilly before she quit smoking.

Jilly, over at Poetry Hut has quit smoking. I think it's something like Day 4 for her. Just yesterday, she mentioned that she'd like to gnaw her head off. Heh. Kinda like a bear in a trap. 

Cassie Lewis, who observes the weather along The Jetty, also quit smoking not long ago. Having been out of country for the past couple of weeks, she hasn't posted much of a reformed smoker's diary, but seems to be enjoying life as a non-smoker.

Jilly after she quit smoking.

Naturally, this has gotten me to thinking of the time I quit smoking. By the time I quit, I was averaging a pack-and-a-half a day. If memory serves, this was 1984 or '85. I was leading music for the folk mass, and noticed that I was losing the high notes in my range. Well, as a tenor who was vain about his impressive high notes, this loss made a distinct impression.

Lent was coming up, and it made sense to give up smoking during the time when it is traditional to give things up.  I told my friend Scott my plan, and he agreed to quit with me. We'd get together every morning, and encourage each other through our mutual withdrawal pangs.

Another thing that helped was the fact that I saved back the money I would have spent on cigarettes.  I set aside around $1.25 a day for each pack I would have bought, ending up with something over fifty dollars at the end of Lent. That money was donated to the church of my choice.

How did I do it, on a day-to-day basis? I drank a lot of water. I did deep breathing exercises. I was moody as hell, and had to work extra hard not to chew off co-workers' heads (let alone my own).

So, take heart, Jilly! There is life on the other side. I've been a reformed smoker for around 20 years, and life never smelled so good!

More on 'The Passion'

Found a couple of more links on Mel's cinematic passion play:

• William Pitt, at Truth Out.org, addresses the fact that the actors are pretty Arian for a movie which claims Biblical Accuracy
• Rabbi Michael Lerner writes about the roots of anti-Semitism in the Christian Gospel
• Christianity Today offers a fairly comprehensive list of reactions to the movie, both pro and con.

Plans seem to be forming for a group to see the movie this weekend. I hope to have a reaction posted shortly after.

Those who wish to sing always find a song. — Swedish proverb

Monday, 5:15 p.m.

A blonde ghost,
a cherry red jeep,
and the sun
driving west.
Sun before me, blonde
flirts behind.
I see her
smile at me.

---

Another stab at an Octologue.

What Kind of Soul Do I Have?

According to a survey at Quizilla, I am "Artistic":

You are naturally born with a gift, whether it be
poetry, writing or song. You love beauty and
creativity, and usually are highly intelligent.
Others view you as mysterious and dreamy, yet
also bold since you hold firm in your beliefs.

What Type of Soul Do You Have ?
brought to you by Quizilla

Braindead

Oh, man, am I brain-dead today! Stayed up a little past eleven to watch the Academy Awards, and I am running on autopilot. Although the dominance of "LOTR" became pretty obvious by its third win, I chose to stick in there til the bitter end.

Couple of impressions: René Zellwigger seems to be incredibly shy. It looked like she wanted to crawl under her seat when they called her name.

There were only two political statements that I heard - one from the director of Fog of War, and the other from Sean Penn. Tim Robbins' little speech about victims of abuse might classify as political, but it was a statement most folk would agree with. The statements I am referring to directly related to the Iraq situation.

Some of the transitional music seemed positively strange — "Hail to the Chief" for Tom Hanks? "Blowin' in the Wind" for Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon? Well, ok, this last makes a sort of sense; but it would have made more sense if Tim had made some anti-war statement during his acceptance speech.