jellema / petersen / rilke / l'engle / Klug | joseph & mary

MARY:
He could squint along forty foot beams
And catch the gentlest wayward drift toward a curve
That no one else saw. His calloused, pitch stained hands
Would tenderly stroke the flush seams of a perfect joint.
We used to see him astride his unwavering rafters,
Tall as the echoing blows of his worshipping arms,
Looking with pride on the loving work of his mitred,
Four square world. He always looked sharply to see
If some sinning board in somebody's house were off square,
And longed to redeem it with the righteous tongue of his plane.

JOSEPH:
She looks at me, pale and ghostly, even
though she stands full in the evening light
outside my shop door. The hammer
in my hand drops to the ground,
she fills me with such terror:
the innocent delight of her eyes gone out,
those gentle hands which she could hold
the world in wring and twist
over her stomach in the folds of her dress,
and the delicately proud line of her body—
where has it gone, stooped as if spent
from a sickness?

ANGEL:
Her eyes drift to the ground
where earth-shaking news takes shape
in the carpet of splintered wood and nails.

JOSEPH: Mary?

MARY: Please listen and hear me out,

JOSEPH: her voice
that has so many times quickened my heart
with the lightness of a star, so heavy now.
Mary, what—
She takes my hand, draws me closer
and places my callused palm
over a bulge in her stomach.
Is it—

MARY: You must believe—

JOSEPH: How did this—

MARY:
--what I need to say…
then do what you will.

JOSEPH:
My face flushes to feel this growing
in her. I try to sit, and stumble
against a pile of boards that fall
in a clattering heap,
repeating the shattering announcement
down the streets, through the open windows
and doors of the torpid town; women and
children passing by glance in bewilderment,
Reuben the blacksmith stops his clanging
three doors down.
I beg her to come inside,
my throat tight, so dry I cannot speak.
I try to think, to bring substance
to the dizzying rush
of incomprehension in my skull.
Your trip south, was it then? I ask,
That you met… that it happened?

MARY: I haven’t slept with anyone.

JOSEPH: Just tell me who.

MARY:
It wasn’t that way.
An angel came to me—

JOSEPH: An angel came to you!

MARY: Joseph…

JOSEPH: Go! Get out!
That night in bed I stare into the dark,
do not sleep, her voice that was not her own,
her words haunting me, my Mary,
visions of her betrayal mocking me:
strange hands in her dark, velvet hair,
her skin so tender against his,
her warm breath
on his face, lips, limbs merging—
Was it awkward, timid?
or yearning and confident?
I try to cry but cannot,
the wound too deep, and burning,
twisting, knotting.

SONG: You've Got To Hide Your Love Away

ANGEL. And the angel, taking due pains, told
the man who clenched his fists:
But can't you see in her robe's every fold
that she is cool as the Lord's morning mists?
But the other, gazing gloomily, just murmured:

JOSEPH. What is it has wrought this change in her?

ANGEL. Then cried the angel to him:
Carpenter, can't you see that God is acting here?
Because you plane the planks, in your pride would
you really make the Lord God answerable
who unpretentiously from the same wood
makes the leaves burst forth, the young buds swell?

JOSEPH. He understood that.

ANGEL. And now as he raised
his frightened glance toward the angel who
was gone already...

GUITAR INSTRUMENTAL: What Child Is This?

MARY:
It was from Joseph first I learned
Of love. Like me he was dismayed.
How easily he could have turned
Me from his house; but, unafraid,
He put me not away from him
(O God sent angel, pray for him).
Thus through his love was Love obeyed.

The Child's first cry came like a bell:
God's Word aloud, God's Word in deed.
The angel spoke: so it befell,
And Joseph with me in my need.
O Child whose father came from heaven,
To you another gift was given,
Your earthly father chosen well.

With Joseph I was always warmed
And cherished. Even in the stable
I knew that I would not be harmed.
And, though above the angels swarmed,
Man's love it was that made me able
To bear God's Love, wild, formidable,
To bear God's Will, through me performed.

JOSEPH:
Sleep now, little one.
I will watch while you and your mother sleep.
I wish I could do more.
This straw is not good enough for you.
Back in Nazareth I'll make a proper bed for you
of seasoned wood, smooth, strong, well‑pegged.
A bed fit for a carpenter's son.

Just wait till we get back to Nazareth.
I'll teach you everything I know.
You'll learn to choose the cedarwood, eucalyptus, and fir.
You'll learn to use the drawshave, ax, and saw.
Your arms will grow strong, your hands rough ‑‑ like these.
You will bear the pungent smell of new wood
and wear shavings and sawdust in your hair.

You'll be a man whose life centers
on hammer and nails and wood.
But for now,
sleep, little Jesus, sleep.

SONG: Golden Slumbers


assembled from excerpts from the following (in order of appearance);
Four-Square, by Roderick Jellema
Joseph's Night Watch, by Karl Petersen
Joseph's Suspicion, by Rainer Maria Rilke
O Sapientia, by Madeleine L'Engle
Joseph's Lullaby, by Ron Klug

David Kossoff, "Seth"

My father and my grandfather were shepherds. It is a thing that runs in families. My sons own their own farms and their own sheep, but that is progress. I always looked after other people's sheep. That was not unusual when I was younger. We were looked down on, I suppose, for often we had to work every day, ignoring the sabbath, and with so many priests among the people, we were often told we were breaking the law. Though where the priests would have got their perfect lambs for sacrifice without us I don't know. They could be very rude the priests especially the young silly ones. It's the same today, and not just with priests: people speak before they think. That's one good thing about looking after sheep: you get into the habit of keeping quiet. If you have to use words, you take your time to get them right. Words are important.

People often tell me that mine was a dull life. Well, maybe. I like to watch the night sky, the moon and the stars. Once I saw, at night, a sight that very few have seen. Just once, but once was enough for any man. If a priest is rude to me, I always say to myself, It doesn't matter. I had that night, and you didn't.

I was about nineteen at the time, and although it's now about fifty years ago, I remember it like yesterday. On this night I'm talking about, we'd met up where we usually did, on the side of quite a big hill. We'd had a bite to eat and drink and were sitting talking. Around us our hundreds of sheep. All normal and usual and quiet. Very restful and quiet, those talks at night. It was a dark night.

Then there was a sort of stillness and a feeling of change, of difference. We all felt it. I had a friend called Simon, and he first noticed what the change was. It was the light. There was a sort of paleness. It was a dark night, but suddenly it wasn't so dark. We began to see each others faces very clearly in a sort of silvery, shimmering light. We seemed surrounded and enclosed in a great glow. It was the purest light I ever saw. The sheep were white as snow. Then as our eyes began to ache with it, just farther up the hill from us the glow seemed to intensify and take shape, and we saw a man. Like us but not like us. Taller, stiller. Though we were still enough, God knows.

He looked at us and we looked at him. We waited for him to speak. It didn't seem right we all felt it for any of us to speak first. He took his time as though to find the right words and then he began to tell us what he called good news of great joy. Of a new born baby, born in David's town. A baby sent by God to save the world, to change things, to make things better. He told us where to go and find the baby and how to recognise him. And to tell other people the good news. His own pleasure in telling us filled us with joy: we shared his pleasure, if you follow me. Then he stopped speaking and became two. Then four, then eight, and in a second there seemed to be a million like him. Right up the hill and on up into the sky. A million. And they sang to us. Glory to God, they sang, And on earth peace to all men. It was wonderful. It came to an end and then they were gone. EVery single one, and we felt lonely and lost.

Then Samuel, who was the eldest of us, said "Come, let us go and find the baby. David's town, the angel said: Bethlehem. In a manger. In swaddling clothes. And off we went. We ran, we sang, we shouted, we were important, we'd been chosen. We were special. We were on a search. We had to find a baby.

And we did find him. We were led there. There was no searching, we were led, and we saw for ourselves. Not much to see, perhaps. A young mother and her husband and a newly born baby. Born in a stable because all the inns were full. Poor people they were. The man was a carpenter.

Well, we did as we'd been told. We spread the word, and people did get excited. But not for long. Nothing lasts. We shepherds were heroes for a while, but then everyone knew the story. It was old news. Soon we were just shepherds again, doing a dull job. But we were different from all the rest: we'd had that night. I don't talk about it much any more, but it keeps me warm. I was there.


by David Kossoff,
from The Book Of Witnesses

Frederick Buechner, "Gabriel"

She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he'd been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it. He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. "You mustn't be afraid, Mary," he said.

As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn't notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.

Frederick Buechner, "Emmanuel"

Christmas is not just Mr. Pickwick dancing a reel with the old lady at Dingley Dell or Scrooge waking up the next morning a changed man. It is not just the spirit of giving abroad in the land with a white beard and reindeer. It is not just the most famous birthday of them all and not just the annual reaffirmation of Peace on Earth that it is often reduced to so that people of many faiths or no faith can exchange Christmas cards without a qualm.

On the contrary, if you do not hear in the message of Christmas something that must strike some as blasphemy and others as sheer fantasy, the chances are you have not heard the message for what it is. Emmanuel is the message in a nutshell. Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for "God with us." That's where the problem lies.

The claim that Christianity makes for Christmas is that at a particular time and place "the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" came to be with us himself. When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercy. Year after year the ancient tale of what happened is told raw, preposterous, holy and year after year the world in some measure stops to listen.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. A dream as old as time. If it is true, it is the chief of all truths. If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so.

Maybe it is that longing to have it be true that is at the bottom even of the whole vast Christmas industry the tons of cards and presents and fancy food, the plastic figures kneeling on the floodlit lawns of poorly attended churches. The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.

Emmanuel. We all must decide for ourselves whether it is true. Certainly the grounds on which to dismiss it are not hard to find. Christmas is commercialism. It is a pain in the neck. It is sentimentality.

It is wishful thinking. The shepherds. The star. The three wise men. Make believe.

Yet it is never as easy to get rid of as all this makes it sound. To dismiss Christmas is for most of us to dismiss part of ourselves. It is to dismiss one of the most fragile yet enduring visions of our own childhood and of the child that continues to exist in all of us. The sense of mystery and wonderment. The sense that on this one day each year two plus two adds up not to four but to a million.

What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.

Emmanuel. Emmanuel.

David Kossoff, "Shem"

I'm not a religious man, you understand, and I didn't have much in the way of an education, but I'm not young and I've travelled a lot and listened a lot and you learn, you know, you learn. I was born in Samaria in the same year that Herod became King. Herod the Great he was called. Well, maybe he was great. He didn't do much for us in Samaria. All right, we are a mixed lot but we are not lepers. Our law is based on the same rules as the rest of Israel. The Law of Moses. One of those Laws is that the children shouldn't suffer for the sins of the fathers. That's a joke. All my life I've suffered for some nonsense generations ago about my people wanting to help in the rebuilding of the Great Temple and being refused because our religion wasn't holy enough. You'd have thought a few extra gods and idols would have made it more religious. And Samaritans are good builders. My family have been joiners and carpenters for a long time. I think that's what first drew me to Joseph.

I'm a journeyman; I work anywhere. My tools are my luggage. When I first met Joseph and his little family in Bethlehem it was the first time I'd ever been there and I've worked all over; Phoenicia, Syria, Parthia, Egypt. Not a big place, Bethlehem. One big inn, a decent synagogue, a meeting hall. Anyway, this inn had been damaged by some sort of religious demonstration. There'd been crowds of people who'd broken things off for souvenirs. A lot of the timber in the stables needed replacing. I heard about it and was taken on. I found a room on the edge of the town. And met Joseph, who lived next door. When he told me he was also a joiner, I told him about the inn and he smiled and said he'd like to help with the repairs. So I put in a word for him and we worked together.

Very quiet man he was. His wife was younger. Her name was Mary. They had a baby boy. Joseph and I worked together for some weeks before I told him I was a Samaritan.
"Oh," he said. "I've never been in Samaria. Will you eat with us this evening?"

One night I got in very late. It was pay night and I like a drink. The street was quiet and dark. As I got ready for bed, Joseph knocked on my door.
"Can you help us?" he said. "We have to leave right away."
We went next door. Mary was packing and the baby was fast asleep in his crib.
"We have been told by God to go down to Egypt. Right away. Tonight. We know nothing of long journeys. Please help us."

I went next door and packed my tools. We were out of the place in an hour. We joined a trade caravan of merchants and we kept to ourselves. If people got too inquisitive I used rough talk and said loudly I was a Samaritan. That got rid of them. Sins of the fathers can be very useful sometimes.

Now you might ask why did I go with them. Well, there was nothing heroic in it. I've moved around working in different places all my life. And Joseph had hardly been out of his town. Also we were both joiners, and carpenters can pick up work anywhere if you know the way. Another thing, as I told you, I'm a Samaritan, which at that time, thirty five years ago, just before Great Herod died, was the same as being a leper nearly. No one had a good word for you. You walked by yourself. Well, Joseph was an orthodox Jew and he accepted me like a brother and so did Mary. Even the baby liked me. I was one of the family. Of course I went with them. I looked after them.

We stayed with no one long, for Joseph and Mary were afraid. My gentle friend, who never raised his voice, was a wanted man. Mad King herod himself was after him. Well, not him so much as the baby. I don't know all the ins and outs of it even now, but somehow or other Joseph and Mary had got an early warning that Herod was going to kill all the baby boys under two in Bethlehem. They were not hysterical people, and when they went I went with with them, but I didn't really believe such a thing would happen. But it did. We heard about it. Mary wept for days, and Joseph was quieter even than usual.

We didn't go deep into Egypt. We stayed this side of the great delta of the Nile and found a little house in a village. There was enough work round about and the village people were used to travellers. Joseph never spoke much. Once, when I said I'd no idea how he knew about the order to kill the babies, he said, "I didn't know. I was told in a dream by an angel of God to leave immediately. My little son was given to Mary by God. I did as I was told." He was quite serious. I made a sort of joke, I remember. I said, "Well, when the angel tells us to go back home, let me know I'm not too fond of Egypt." Joseph laughed.

I forget now exactly how long we lived in the village but one morning I came down and Joseph had the little boy on his knee. Mary was my the stove, Joseph smiled.
"Good morning," he said. "We can go home."
"Another angel?" I said.
"Same one.' said Joseph. "Herod is dead. It is safe now."

Well, it wasn't so safe really. There'd been riots and disturbances and mass executions, so he would not go back to Bethlehem, but farther north to Galilee, where it was more peaceful. He knew Galilee, he came from Nazareth, and that is where we finished up.

I went with them and helped them find a place and get it fixed up, but then I moved on. Nazareth was a very religious, very orthodox place. Joseph fitted in well, me not at all. I was sorry to go. I saw them from time to time. Then I worked in Syria and Cyprus for a long time and lost touch. But I think of that time often.


by David Kossoff
from The Book Of Witnesses

Rudi Krause, "unforeseen"

angels incognito
step from the airplane
unnoticed they ride taxis
into town

they have come
to take over
our daily paper

and we think
they reside
innoculously
in our attics


rudi krause

Rudi Krause, "one way"

minutes before the Son
caught the outgoing
one-way transport to Bethlehem
one of the angels slipped
a receiver into his inner ear

after the shepherds had stumbled
back out into the night
Jesus heard the whispered query:

whatever made you choose
a place like that?

heard, but didn’t hear
he had already forgotten
the language of the angels


rudi krause

Robert Farrar Capon, "Advent"

Advent is the church's annual celebration of the silliness (from selig, which is German for "blessed") of salvation. The whole thing really is a divine lark. God has fudged everything in our favour: without shame or fear we rejoice to behold his appearing. Yes, there is dirt under the divine Deliverer's fingernails. But no, it isn't any different from all the other dirt of history. The main thing is, he's got the package and we've got the trust: Lo, he comes with clouds descending. Alleluia, and three cheers.

What we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace. God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. He is funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.

by Robert Farrar Capon,
from The Parables of Judgment, Chapter 12

Richard Osler, Advent poems (2006)

She Was Asked
(After Wilde )

In other stories the god comes
himself. Disguised as a shower
of gold, a swan. He takes
without asking. Then
he is gone. Mary was asked.
By an angel. With flowers.
Lilies. Bold, wide open.
Wouldn't anyone be flabbergasted
by such as he was. Preposterous.
Pregnant without intercourse, a son -
of God. Human and eternal. Three
in one. She was the one who
had to choose, blind to the final
outcome. We have always
Known her answer. She did not.

Richard Osler, Advent I, December 3rd 2006

*

Come O Come Emmanuel

Carrying God was she
Overshadowed with joy or dread? Or
Maybe she thought it just a dream.
Even so, she might still have wondered

Or, at least

Calculated the days until
Overcome with obvious signs
Mary remembered everything;
Even her acceptance of impossibility:

Eternal
Mystery living in her.
Mary, mother-child
Aware
Now of what she chose
Under her heart –
Emmanuel – God With Us,
Love, living in darkness.

Richard Osler, Advent II, December 10th 2006

*

Troubled – Luke 1, Verse 29

You hear a voice telling you to risk everything,
even you’re your one carefully constructed life.
Sometimes it is like Mary carrying a promise

someone else has made and it lives inside you
as if it were yours but first you must claim it.
Will you welcome this angel whatever it is

that comes in the dark and talks against
all your thoughtful plans? Will you say ”yes?”
If you do there will be a journey, a difficult one,

a birth surrounded by strangers, and signs.
A baby to be honoured by kings. Such hope
wrapped up in something just that small.

Richard Osler, Advent III, December 17 2006

*

Puer Natus Est
(After Raine)

Power that comes
Undone on
Earth
Revolving round its star.

Newborn
At his mother’s breast
Tugging against eternity
Utterly
Satisfied

Even now, as
Star-maker, star-made within
Time.

Richard Osler, Advent IV, December 24th 2006

Paul Auster, "It's my corner after all"

Looks like someone forgot a camera.

Yeah. I did.

It's yours?

That's mine alright. I've owned that little sucker for a long time.

I didn't know you took pictures.

Well, I guess you could call it a hobby. Only takes me five minutes a day to do it but I do it every day. Rain or shine, sleet or snow. Sort of like the postman.

So you're not just some guy who pushes coins across a counter.

Well that's what people see. But that ain't necessarily what I am.

(Cut to black and white photos, arranged in an album)

They're all the same.

That's right. More than four thousand pictures of the same place. The corner of third street and seventh avenue at eight o'clock in the morning. Four thousand straight days in all kinds of weather. That's why I can never take a vacation, I've got to be in my spot every morning at the same time. Every morning in the same spot at the same time.

I've never seen anything like this.

That's my project. What you'd call my life's work.

It's amazing. I'm not sure I get it, though. I mean, what was it that gave you the idea to do this… project.

I don't know. It just came to me. It's my corner after all. I mean, it's just one little part of the world, but things take place there too, just like everywhere else. It's a record of my little spot.

It's kind of overwhelming.

(He finishes with one book. Auggie give him another.)

You'll never get it if you don't slow down my friend.

What do you mean?

I mean you're going too fast, you're hardly even looking at the pictures.

They're all the same.

They're all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You've got your bright mornings and your dark mornings, you got your summer light and your autumn light, you got your weekdays and your weekends, you got your people in overcoats and galoshes and you've got your people in T shirts and shorts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones. Sometimes the different ones become the same, or the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.

Slow down, huh?

That's what I recommend. You know how it is. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, time creeps on its petty pace."

(We look at the photos, more slowly)

Oh Jesus. Look. It's Ellen.

Yeah, that's her alright. She's in quite a few from that year. Must have been on her way to work.

It's Ellen. Look at her. Look at my sweet darling.

(He cries. New scene: Auggie takes a picture of his corner.)


from "Smoke"
by Paul Auster, directed by Wayne Wang
(11:14-17:38, 17:38-18:03)

Robert Farrar Capon, "The Oblation of Things"

I take my children to the beach. On the north shore of Long Island it is a pretty stony proposition. The mills of the gods grind coarsely here; but, in exchange for busied feet and a sore coccyx, they provide gravel for the foundation of the arts. Every year we hunt for perfect stones: ovals, spheroids, lozenges, eggs. By the end of the summer there are pebbles all over the house. They have no apparent use other than the delight that they provide to man, but that is the whole point of the collection. The very act of hunting them is an introduction to the oblation of things. Look at this one! Do you think it will split evenly enough for arrowheads? What color is that one when it's wet? Lick it and see. Daddy wants a big flat round one to hold the sauerkraut under the brine. Will this one do? We walk down the beach lifting stones into our history: we are collectors, ingatherers of being. Man is the lover of textures, colors and shapes – the only creature in the whole world who knows a good pickling stone when he sees one. The arts go way beyond that; but that is where they begin.

The child who runs the satin binding of his blanket between this fingers, the boy who carefully oils his collection of ball bearings so they will not rust, the woman who loves to handle thick braids, the man who opens his pocket-knife just to hear the satisfying click with which it closes – all these are priestly builders. It is in his simplest oblations that man is at his historical best. When he rises higher, he makes more mistakes – he diagrams and spiritualizes what should have been loved and offered as a thing; but at these low levels he is a success. The world has seen few badly offered blanket bindings, few profaned ball bearings. As long as man can hunt stones, he will know that the fire of his priesthood has not gone out.

But the oblation of things goes far beyond such simplicities. It is in the arts and the crafts that man most displays his priestliness and historicity. ...

It is a common error to suppose that the artist does what he does for himself – that he is a peculiar being who loves certain things in a way not open to others. It is also common to dismiss the craftsman as a fellow who does things for money. To some degree, of course, that is all true. Artists are usually a little odd; the laborer commonly, and legitimately, looks forward to his hire. But after that it falls short. For each is engaged in an offering of things not simply for his own benefit, but for the sake of the things themselves – and for the sake of other men. The painter paints because he loves the way things look and wants to offer his sight of them to others. The poet speaks because he loves words and longs for them to be heard as he hears them. And the cabinetmaker fashions and the joiner joins, and the chef cooks and the vintner toils because they love the conjunctions of things and will them to be moved into the weaving of the web. All arts come from having open eyes; and all arts are performing arts. Even the solitary artist in the cave draws to be seen, offers up what he looks at as a priest for other men. It is only in bad drawing, bad writing and bad woodwork that motives other than priestly ones become primary. It is when man stops loving what he does and stops caring whether others see that he becomes guilty of artistry that is not art and of craftsmanship that is only shoddy. ...

If speech is the crowning gift of man, then the arts of language probably qualify as the most nearly universal. Not all men can draw, many men cannot sing, and the world is full of cooks who ought to be allowed to rise no higher than the scullery; but all men speak, and practically no one is immune to the delights of rhyme and reason. The child, as soon as he learns words, plays with words. The teen-ager, with his stock of current clichés and his mercurial pattern of jargon, is a poet. He may recite only commercial slogans and comparable idiocies; but he recites them, at least partly, because he loves the way the words rattle. And somewhere along the line he will, unless he is starved to death, come to love some very grand rattles indeed.

I remember the first time I read Shakespeare's sonnets. "Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds" stuck in my head for weeks – not so much for its meaning as for its marvellous wordiness. The city of speech is old and new, and rich beyond counting. ...

That only a few have the craft to forge such words takes nothing off the edge of the marvel by which man can sense the priestliness of their oblation And it is not only the grand and the gorgeous that qualify. ...

Speech is no mere tool of communication; it is a joy in itself. ... Speech should indeed inform, as food should indeed nourish, but what sane man will let either subject go at that? ...

Man's failure in music is like his failure in all the arts – a failure to make them really priestly, a penchant for non-historical and irrelevant forms. Far too much of the music we now have is only heard, not played or sung. It makes no demands, does not ask to be lifted; it just hangs around. We have canned music, background music, and music to do everything but listen to music by. But music cannot be only entertainment any more than speech can be only communication. We aim too low. Both are major oblations, and they will settle for nothing less. Neither can be merely used: they must be played.

Thank God for wine. Without it we would have almost no singing at all. Practically the only place where men now sing when they are cold sober is in church; and, to tell the truth, it sounds like it. As a professional religionist, I wish I could make a more glowing report; but, by and large, it is wretched. It is a triumph of use, not play. And for every man in church who sings, there are five who stand aloof from the whole business as if it were faintly disreputable.

Why? Because they are embarrassed by the sound of their own voices: they are ashamed of their priesthood. The city of music, which fairly cries for lifting into their history, is firmly and permanently locked out. I think that secretly, in their heart of hearts, perhaps, they envy people who play. But they do not show it often. If only they would. It isn't a matter of working themselves into miniature Isaac Sterns; the harmonica will do if it comes to that – or even tenth-rate four-part harmony. They underestimate the power of the arts. A man can practice for weeks on the strength of one-chord progression. Even the smallest oblation will lift the priest as he makes it; even a little attention to what is really there will be a historical triumph.

from An Offering Of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and The Shape of the World
by Robert Farrar Capon

Karl Petersen, CONFESSIONS poems

God Laughed
and They Said Yes

Infant baptism isn’t good enough for full salvation,
the church folks were saying. Even had an unscheduled meeting

to confirm once and for all nobody shall enter the kingdom
till they confirm their commitment to the Lord as an adult.

So the implants from infant baptizing churches need do it again
at the age of understanding, so it takes for good.

“So the Lord died for me twice then,” Larry complains
from the back row of the meeting hall. “I gotta get baptized again?”

“That’s right, because you wasn’t of your full wits and mind
when you was four weeks old.” (“Still not,” his wife interjects.)

“Now, that ain’t right,” says Larry. “I remember it like yesterday.
I was asleep, see, and God’s hand come like a light cloud,

cold and wet on my head, ya see, and I heard him say my name.
Then I took in a deep breath like he was blowin’ right into me

and I kicked a big hallelujah! just like that. Then I heard him say,
Boy, they’ll be saying it never happened.” And as Larry sat down,

from the other side of the church basement meeting, on cue
little six-month Brandon (an implant) let out an intoxicating giggle

that sent the whole congregation into stitches. When
they’d stopped laughing, Brandon was still going stronger than ever.

The vote came whether to accept those baptized as infants,
and all, except a few short of the age of understanding, said “yes.”

*

Crayon City

Downtown is a throbbing brain.
As kids we had it spot on
drawing the cityscape
as a crayon collage of heads,
eyes, noses, and mouths—
a simple truth: downtown
is the face of us
with its shiny make-up
and made over places,
the cover-up
of pits, moles, and deep scars.
And at the end of the day
when we stream for home
like tears from the city, we carry
with its sublime creations,
all its abscesses and ulcers
and a few more holes to fill.

*

Fossett Flies Solo
Around the World

Our phrases praise us
and our go-it-aloneness.
Accolades to ourselves
ring the skies:
we have conquered space,
made one giant leap,
gained air superiority,
broken barriers
of sound, of time
and atmosphere.
These thoughts propel us
everywhere
but to the heavens.

*

American Gothic

Just when you don’t have your brush or canvas
another permutation of American Gothic
walks through the door
and fills the frame at Krispy Kreme—

A couple in black, 600 lbs. together,
approach the display case and sway euphorically,
peer in through the glass, and the man mumbles
his litany: Chocolate Custard, and…
Cinnamon Apple… Lemon Filled…
His voice is muffled between complimentary bites
of the Original Glazed he holds aloft like a pitch fork.

Their young server stands stoic at the altar
offering communion in his crisp green vestments
and cream paper crown

while the pastry case glows ethereal, casting
donut auras wide around two gothic frames. And
on their black T-shirts our pilgrims celebrate
their motto in orange outrage: Forgiven!

*

Afterglow

After the fireworks,
the oo’s and ah’s, the applause,
the forced cheers,
after the smoke clears,
gunpowder still lingers
like the untimely fart of a one-bang lover;

and in the afterglow
through cracks in the clouds
there comes a glowering down from True Love,

casting a remark to the backs of those played out
and retiring early home: Is that all you’ve got?—
a challenge to the tender hearted
to tarry in her garden under the great dome
and await the wonders she discloses
with slow and ripened reverie,
hands freely splaying
to True Love’s night sky
all your confessions and dreams.

*

Resurrection

on a Cascade ridge
hushed under
a November crescent

a deafening mist
enfolds
amplifying the lungs

dark wings
on an updraft
ascend
the hollow
of your central chambers
into a vaporous canopy

the raven’s guttural call
so laden
so utter
with ancient truth

rattles
the deadwood
vaulted
in a yawning rib cage

Ron Reed, "Dad And Music"

My father had many 78s he no longer listened to. But I would listen, listen for long hours in our concrete Calgary basement, in our rumpus room in its various incarnations. "In The Cool Cool Cool Of The Evening." "Abba-Dabba Honeymoon." Then there was the one that went, "The music goes round and round, woe-oe-oe-oe, woe-oe, and it comes out here." Another where this man was talking, I figured it was funny to grown-ups because the grown-ups on the record were laughing, but now that I'm a grown-up and I play it over in my mind, I still don't get it. "It isn't raining inside tonight." So?

And I think it never occurred to me then, but it occurs to me now as I begin to see my father as a person with an existence
not dependent on my own, it occurs to me that he must have bought these at some time, some particular time, on some particular afternoon in Camrose, Alberta. Must have gone into a record store, or the record department at McLeod's more likely I suppose, gone in with a tune or two in his head that he'd heard on the radio in the taxi that he drove around Camrose Alberta, gone in with the tune in his head and taken money out of his wallet, money he'd been paid by the people who rode around in his cab, turned those bills into records he could take home and play whenever he liked.

"Across The Valley From The Alamo." "From Here To Eternity." Others I can't think of now, but when they come back to me, I'll remember every note and inflection.

* * * *

Why do I think he bought these when he was courting my mom? Or maybe before they met? But surely not after they were married, or not more than a year after they were married. Is it because I've seen my friends marry and stop buying music, stop making music, and perhaps my father was like my friends? Is there something about marrying that can take the song out of a boy?

* * * *

Or did he stop buying because, as I imagine, there wasn't spare money anymore for unnecessaries, once he moved away from Camrose and therefore away from his parents' home, rent to pay and bills and before long a baby, me.

One date I have in hand, fulcrum for those years: the date of my birth. As the birth of Christ is to all history, so the birth of me is to my history. January 11, 1957. Before that, not exactly prehistory, but certainly another era, strange and distant to me because I wasn't part of it. Strange and distant as the Old Testament.

But the time is come when I see Don and Agnes split off from me: they live and move and have their being independent of me. And so, as I grow up and grow fascinated with them, I grow curious about this time in particular, this Old Testament time, this almost prehistory that I listened to on scratchy 78s in concrete basements in Calgary in my childhood. With those discs I put my ear up to the wall of my birth and listen, and hear voices talking, but I can't quite make out the words.

* * * *

In some way, this is all part of why I bought my daughter Kate a garage sale record player, a suitcase model with fold-out speakers and all the blessed mechanics that drop records one at a time from the bottom of a stack, that move the arm back and forth to play one record after another. My delight in teaching her the arcane secrets, how to stack and start and stop and reject, how to select 78 or 45 or 33 1/3 or 16 - now there was an arcane speed - mysteries of no value except the aesthetic in these modern times.

Mysteries of no value except the practical to a four year old. For now she is her own. Now she can decide when she wants to entrance herself, she can decide which vinyl spells to cast and in what order. At four years of age, she and that
fascination machine can weave together spells of sound in the deep places of her forming heart.

This is her heritage. With this I endow her.

* * * *

I have a theory. The breezy, optimistic radio tunes are from the Camrose taxi era, the sophisticated feel of a small town boy doing a big city job and having his own money to spend just exactly as he liked, spring, falling in love, finding out he is his own man.

The movie soundtracks are from the Calgary basement suite era, a small town couple on their own, together, in a big city, bringing home souvenirs from romantic adventures together in lush movie palaces, The Grand, The Odeon, souvenirs from the South Pacific and the Wild West where Annie got her gun.

But then even the movie soundtracks fade away, except the one they buy for the kids, "Mary Poppins." And then it's only what the kids buy for them, "Strangers In The Night" and "Morningtown Ride" and "Little Arrows." And then it's only what the kids buy for themselves, "I Love You" by the People and "Alice Long (You Are Still My Favourite Girlfriend)" by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, then the Monkees then the Beatles then Cat Stevens and Jethro Tull and then they're gone to college, the kids and their music.

* * * *

But this isn't just about listening to music. It's about making music.

My little brother Curtis made his own music. Loved to play guitar and sing, lived to play guitar and sing. Brad made music too, I know, for a time had dreams of playing concerts, wrote at least one song on the piano. There was a time when I played whole days away at the piano.

All his sons made music. But Donny never did.

* * * *

And it's not just that his sons made music after him but he never did. It's also that his brothers made music before him and around him, but he never did.

Al made music, Keith made music, I think they even made money making music. In fact it's the main thing I remember about them, the music making.

Same with his big sisters: always there was that old piano in Mil's rec room, and always me being asked to play. I'd play the few tunes I could out of the Readers Digest book and Grandma would sit off in a comfortable chair while Mil and Doris and my cousin Jimmy and my dad and his aunt Bea if she was there would get in close where they could see the music and sing along. As if they needed to see the music to sing along. Maybe all they needed was to get in close.

And we would have to keep passing by the tunes I didn't know, maybe I would try and fumble through one here, one there, until eventually I could coax Mil or Bea to take my place at the keys.

Then we'd have real music. Music you could sing to, music you could dance to, octave bass and big chords, the melody banged out on top, it wasn't fancy and it wasn't art but it sure as heck was music.

* * * *

But I don't remember my father making a lot of it. Singing along, yes, but playing, no. And I don't remember his little brother making music either. And yet my sense of Grant is all about music.

Grant and I grew close, attracted as I was to his warmth and friendliness, the warmth and friendliness that he shares with my dad. But as much as Grant and I built our friendship around music, talking about jazz and jazz musicians and about what it was like to listen to jazz, late at night on the radio from faraway places or in little clubs in Europe, still I don't remember him being a music maker. Another thing he shares with my Dad.

The love of it runs through them all, Al and Keith and Mil most of all, but why did the making of it stop with my father?
Is there some pattern there, some progression, or is it more random than that?

* * * *

Because he had the music in him, my dad. Has. He whistles a lot, sings along when there's a song on the radio. Fell in love with bluegrass music, in fact with a particular bluegrass act, a family from Tennessee or somewhere who play together and travel together and have a bluegrass festival every year at their home in Tennessee or wherever that is that Dad dreams of going to, a vision of heaven where you stroll around days on end and listen to people just making music everywhere, just sitting right there outside their Winnebagos or wherever, fiddles and banjoes and guitars just a-goin' just wherever they feel like it.

But see, in his dream, or at least the part of it he speaks out loud, he's a listener, an appreciator, loving the music in the air all around him. But not a participant, not one of the makers. I don't see him seeing himself bowing that fiddle, practising those bluegrass licks on a banjo, those lightning scales on a guitar. No, he wanders among, meets the people who do. But the part of the dream that has the fiddle in his hands instead of just in his ears is buried deeper than I've ever heard spoken or hinted.

* * * *

I do remember him sitting at the piano Mom worked an extra job so we could have, him sitting there and picking out a melody on one or two occasions. I remember he showed me how to play "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me" on the harmonica, must have been grade five or six. I remember a girlfriend I had, a singer, heard him singing in church, not a solo, don't get me wrong, not in the choir or anything like that, but just singing one of the hymns along with everybody else, and she who had only ever done what she could to keep me from singing, she said after that my dad had a wonderful voice, a clear and natural tenor.

And why do my eyes start to sting and these words in front of me blur when this comes back to me?

* * * *

Dad was a listener. Grew up a listener to music, with a mom and aunts and older brothers who all played in bands, dance bands with out of tune pianos and saxaphones and accordions in Elks Halls and Moose Halls on the Alberta prairie. I take the wedding anniversaries and family reunions that were held in those halls in my own childhood and project back twenty, thirty, forty years to the times when it was my Dad who was surrounded by the buzz of relatives and syrup-sweet harmonies and dancing.

I have a memory so early it seems more that it is my father's memory, his memory of something that happened to me or my memory of something that happened to him. I remember lying on a pile of coats, in among sleeping cousins and coats, all of us heaped together on the floor in a small room, a cloak room, a door shut between me and the music, voices, very late into the night, and I can't quite make out the words, drifting off to sleep to the music of the adults as they danced and played and ate and talked of grown up things in that other room, so near.


1999?
soulfood@ronreed.org

True Or False?

This was the last question on a quiz my friend gave her Intro To Theatre students. I laughed and laughed.

10. Acting is a low-paid life, more often than not depressing, anxious, beset by demands for sacrificed from every direction: psychological, financial, and moral. True or false?

Lanford Wilson, "Eggs"

A guy the other day – I eat at this cafeteria, I talk to a lot of nutty guys – This guy told me we were eggs. All people. He said people are eggs. Said we had to be careful not to bang up against each other too hard. Crack our shells, never be any use again. aid we were eggs. Individuals. We had to keep separate, private. He was very protective of his shell.

He said nobody ever knows what the other guy is thinking. We all got about ten tracks going at onece, nobody every knows what's going down any given track at any given moment. So we never can really communicate. As I'm talking to you on track number three, over on track five I might be thinking about… Oh, any number of things. And when I think you're listening to me, what are you really thinking?

I told him he's paranoid. Ought not to worry too much about being understood. Ought to work at it. We… Got our work cut out for us, don't we? It's all right there in his analogy, ain't it? What good is an egg? Gotta be hatched or boiled or beat up into something like a lot of other eggs. Then you're cookin'.

I told him he ought not to be too afraid of getting' his yolk broke.

from "Talley's Folly"
by Lanford Wilson

Diane Tucker, "The Low Gate" & "Flood Report"

The Low Gate

Woe be unto them who disdain to humble themselves willingly
with little children; because the low gate of the Kingdom of Heaven
will not give them entrance.
Thomas À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ


Who needs the stuff from the top shelf of anything?
Who wants to drag the stupid step stool out
one more time? Keep all that’s best and precious
in the bottom of the closet, a nested corner, blankets,
teddies, cars, the doll and all her clothes,
a cup of grape juice and a plate of crackers.

All you need is down there, knee high,
forest floor high, where all the leaves fall anyway,
when they’re reddest and goldest and crispiest;

snowman high, sled high, high as a lap, as the space
under a glittering tree, as a lamb and a hungry donkey
and the box beside them with the hay in it;

tidepool high, with all the little crabs
who pinch your finger but it doesn’t hurt,
high as your toes with black sand squished between them,
as the seaweed, shining the best green in the sunlight,
as beach glass blue and white, that you can hold
as hard as you can and it will never cut you;

park bench high, grass high, dandelion high,
high as the gravel path, the teeter-totter, the swings,
the slide you can climb to through its perfect little door,
no higher than the big hand let down for you to hold.

Diane Tucker

*

Flood report

“What matters is how fast the rain falls and how fast the ground can soak it up.”
- from a Vancouver radio weather forecast, January 13, 2006


What matters is what comes down on us, how much and how quickly, and can we swallow it all before we drown?

What matters is the endless downpour that we can’t absorb, that overflows and escapes, that threatens to bear us away.

What matters is the water, all the beautiful water, this thing we need that can kill us with its bountiful love — like King Kong, with a dreamy slip of its baby finger.

What matters is that we not fall off the hill, that roots stay rooted, that floodwaters be directed down harmless and acceptable channels, that everyone stay warm and safe and dry.

What matters are our feet on firm earth; no shifting; no concession to gravity.

What matters is the horizonless expanse of iron cloud.

What matters about what matters is what we know already: fingers will slip. Shoes will be submerged. We will be slivers of old soap, washed and washed until nothing is left of us.

We’ll be silt then, a few handfuls of dust rushing down the mountain in the flood, hoping that somewhere along the way we’ll catch on something solid, a stone or root, long enough to let the ground soak us up.


Diane Tucker

William Carlos Williams, "This Is Just To Say"

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

Herb Gardner, "General-All-Purpose Apology"

I shall now leave you breathless with the strange and wondrous tale of this sturdy lad's adventures today in downtown Oz.

Picture, if you will, me. I am walking on East Fifty-first Street an hour ago and I decided to construct and develop a really decorative, general-all-purpose Apology. Not complicated, just the words "I am sorry" said with a little style.

Sorry for what? Anything. For being late, early, stupid, asleep, silly, alive--

Well, y'know when you're walking down the street talking to yourself how sometimes you suddenly say a coupla words out loud? So I said "I'm sorry," and this fellah, complete stranger, he looks up a second and says "That's all right, Mac," and goes on.

He automatically forgave me.

I communicated. Five o'clock rush hour in midtown you could say "Sir, I believe your hair is on fire," and they wouldn't hear you. So I decided to test the whole thing out scientifically, I stayed right there on the corner of Fifty-first and Lex for a while, just saying "I'm sorry" to everybody that went by. "Oh, I'm so sorry, sir..." "I'm terribly sorry, madam..." "Say there, Miss, I'm sorry."

Of course, some people just gave me a funny look, but I swear, seventy-five percent of them forgave me! "Forget it, buddy." "That's O.K. really." Two ladies forgave me in unison, one fellah forgave me from a passing car, and one guy forgave me for his dog. "Poofer forgives the nice man, don't you, Poofer?"

It was fabulous. I had tapped some vast reservoir. Something had happened to all of them for which they felt somebody should apologize. If you went up to people on the street and offered them money, they'd refuse it. But everybody accepts apology immediately. It is the most negotiable currency. I said to them "I am sorry," and they were all so generous, so kind. You could give 'em love and it wouldn't be accepted half as graciously, as unquestioningly.

I could run up on the roof right now and holler "I am sorry," and half a million people would holler right back, "That's O.K., just see that you don't do it again!"

That's the most you should expect from life, a really good apology.


from "A Thousand Clowns" by Herb Gardner
Available from Samuel French

Henri Nouwen, "The Elder Son"

Now the elder son was out in the fields, and on his way back, as he drew near the house, he could hear music and dancing. Calling one of the servants he asked what it was all about. The servant told him, "Your brother has come, and your father has killed the calf we had been fattening because he has got him back safe and sound." He was angry then and refused to go in, and his father came out and began to urge him to come in; but he retorted to his father, "All these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed any orders of yours, yet you never offered me so much as a kid for me to celebrate with my friends. But, for this sone of yours, when he comes back after swallowing up your property – he and his loose women – you kill the calf we had been fattening.

Long years of university teaching and the intense involvement in South and Central American affairs had left me feeling quite lost. I had wandered far and wide, met people with all sorts of life-styles and convictions, and become part of many movements. But at the end of it all, I felt homeless and very tired. I was the lost son and wanted to return, as he did, to be embraced as he was. For a long time I thought of myself as the prodigal son on his way home, anticipating the moment of being welcomed by my Father.

Then, quite unexpectedly, something in my perspective shifted.

One evening while talking about Rembrandt's painting "The Return of the Prodigal Son" with Bart Gavigan, a friend from England who had come to know me quite intimately during the past year, I explained how strongly I had been able to identify with the younger son. He looked at me quite intently and said, "I wonder if you are not more like the elder son."

Frankly, I had never thought of myself as the elder son, but once Bart confronted me with that possibility, countless ideas started running through my head. Beginning with the simple fact that I am, indeed , the eldest child in my own family, I came to see how I had lived a quite dutiful life. When I was six years old, I already wanted to become a priest and never changed my mind. I was born, baptized, confirmed, and ordained in the same church and had always been obedient to my parents, my teachers, my bishops, and my God. I had never run away from home, never wasted my time and money on sensual pursuits, and had never gotten lost in debauchery and drunkenness. For my entire life I had been quite responsible, traditional, and homebound.

But, with all of that, I may, in fact, have been just as lost as the younger son.

I suddenly saw myself in a completely new way. I saw my jealousy, my anger, my touchiness, doggedness and sullennness, and, most of all, my subtle self-righteousness. I saw how much of a complainer I was and how much of my thinking and feeling was ridden with resentment. For a time it became impossible to see how I could ever have thought of myself as the younger son. I was the elder son for sure, but just as lost as his younger brother, even though I had stayed home all my life.

I had been working very hard on my father's farm, but had never fully tasted the joy of being at home. Instead of being grateful for all the privileges I had received, I had become a very resentful person: jealous of my younger brothers and sisters who had taken so many risks and were so warmly welcomed back.

*

Elder sons want to live up to the expectations of their parents and be considered obedient and dutiful. They often want to please. They often fear being a disappointment to their parents. but they often also experience, quite early in life, a certain envy toward their younger borthers and sisters, who seem to be less concerned about pleasing and much freer in "doing their own thing." For me, this certainly was the case. And all my life I have harbored a strange curiosity for the disobedient life that I myself didn't dare to live, but which I saw being lived by many around me.

The obedient and dutiful life of which I am proud or for which I am praised feels, sometimes, like a burden that was laid on my shoulders and continues to oppress me, even when I have accepted it to such a degree that I cannot throw it off. I have no difficulty identifying with the elder son of the parable who complained: "All these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed any orders of yours, yet you never offered me so much as a kid for me to celebrate with my friends."

"I tried so hard, worked so long, did so much, and still I have not received what others get so easily. Why do people not thank me, not invite me, not play with me, not honor me, while they pay so much attention to those who take life so easily and so casually?"

*

I recognize the elder son in me. Often I catch myself complaining about little rejections, little impolitenesses, little negligences. Time and again I discover within me that murmuring, whining, grumbling, lamenting, and griping that go on and on even against my will. The more I dwell on th ematters in question, the worse my state becomes. The more I analyze it, the more reason I see for complaint. And the more deeply I enter it, the more complicated it gets. There is an enormous, dark drawing power to this inner complaint. Cdondemnation of others and self-condemnation, self-righteousness and self-rejection keep reinforcing each other in an ever more more vicious way. Every time I allow myself to be seduced by it, it spins me down in an endless spiral of self-rejection. I becdome more and more lost untilil, in the end, I feel myself to be the most misunderstood, rejected, neglected person in the world.

*

Can the elder son come home? Can I be found as the younger son was found? How can I return when I am lost in resentment, when I am caught in jealousy, when I am imprisoned in obedience and duty lived out as slavery? It is clear that alone, by myself, I cannot find myself. Something has to happen that I myself cannot cause to happen. I have tried so hard in the past to heal myself from my complaints and failed . . . and failed . . . and failed, until I came to the edge of complete emotional collapse and even physical exhaustion.

I can only be healed from above.

With God, everything is possible.


from The Return Of The Prodigal

C.S. Lewis, "As The Ruin Falls"

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love – a scholar's parrot may talk Greek –
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

Lucy Grealy, "The Gospel According To Andrew Lloyd Webber"

My early religious education, to the age of six, consisted of memorizing all the words to the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Actually, I did more than memorize them, I acted out the whole album, my own private version of the London musical, which opened earlier than the American. I combined my passion for this album with my crush on Mr. Ed, the talking horse. I had one of those innocent crushes that couldn't distinguish between loving Mr. Ed and wanting to be Mr. Ed, and I'd re-create the entire drama of Jesus and Judas and the other apostles as a talking horse. All this took place on a large yellow Chinese carpet that lay in front of the stereo in the living room. Each part of the carpet signified a character, and I would canter on my hands and knees from corner to corner to mouth each part as it came up. My knees carpet-burning into a vivid red, I performed the entire drama single-handedly.

For the big chorus parts, I would mount my Hippity-Hop, a sort of big red rubber ball on which you could sit an propel yourself by holding onto a half-circle handle and bouncing. I'd race round the room, imagining that I was riding in complicated formation, banners flapping, as the apostles wondered what was happening, as the beggars and lepers overtook Jesus, as the crowd jeered, in harmony, for his crucifixion. The only drawback to the choruses was that my bouncing about often made the needle skip on the record, but it was also necessary, as it gave my knees a short rest. It wasn't the performance that made me love the album; that had to do with my courthsip of the strong, safe, gleamingly visceral world of Mr. Ed. The music itself had an uncanny hold on me; the sways and turns of the emotional narrative entranced me, even, and maybe especially, when I didn't understand them. The Pharisees were my favorites because their voices were so exotically varied, plus they all seemed so confused and put-upon, which, even at six, was a state I identified with. I had to hold my ears during the scene in which Jesus was whipped by the forty-nine lashes, not because I felt bad for him, but because the music itself seemed so dreadful.

*

Not surprisingly, for the rest of my childhood I held a rather liberal take on the New Testament. Jesus obviously possessed quite a number of very human failings, and though I knew from other sources, such as early morning television, that he was a very kind person, he seemed fairly preoccupied a lot of the time in the gospel according to Andrew Lloyd Webber. I liked Judas far better and felt very sorry when he killed himself: in truth, he seemed like the only one with any deep feelings at all, and I thought he'd been unjustly set up. He also had a much better singing voice. This was all I knew, and even this I kept to myself. Religion, in my family, was regarded as a highly specialized form of stupidity.

*

And yet I still longed desperately to believe. How could I cross that line? Did God exist? I conducted experiments in my room. Sitting Indian style on my carpet, I'd not so much ask as announce, "God, if you exist, prove it to me." Sometimes I'd qualify this, suggesting he (and it was always a he) do something like perhaps change the color of the carpet, or maybe make the family dog, who'd recently died, appear panting and wagging in front of me. I wanted the resounding silence following my questions to be the answer, the proof that I didn't have to waste my time wondering about such things anymore. Yet I also wanted to badly all that peace, all that joy and love.


from "My God" in Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, edited by Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke
Highly recommended

Annie Dillard, "Church"

The higher Christian churches - where, if anywhere, I belong - come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.

*

It is the second Sunday in Advent. For a year I have been attending Mass at this Catholic church. Every Sunday for a year I have run away from home and joined the circus as a dancing bear. We dancing bears have dressed ourselves in buttoned clothes; we mince around the rings on two feet. Today we were restless; we kept dropping onto our forepaws.

No one, least of all the organist, could find the opening hymn. Then no one knew it. Then no one could sing anyway.

There was no sermon, only announcements.

The priest proudly introduced the rascally acolyte who was going to light the two Advent candles. As we all could plainly see, the rascally acolyte had already lighted them.

*

There is a singing group in this Catholic church today, a singing group which calls itself "Wildflowers." The lead is a tall, square-jawed teen-aged boy, buoyant and glad to be here. He carries a guitar; he plucks out a little bluesy riff and hits some chords. With him are the rest of the Wildflowers. There is an old woman, wonderfully determined; she has long orange hair and is dressed country-and-western style. A long embroidered strap around her neck slings a big western guitar low over her pelvis. Beside her stands a frail, withdrawn fourteen-year-old boy, and a large Chinese man in his twenties who seems to want to enjoy himself but is not quite sure how to. He looks around wildly as he sings, and shuffles his feet. There is also a very tall teen-aged girl, presumably the lead singer's girl friend; she is delicate of feature, half serene and half petrified, a wispy soprano. They straggle out in front of the altar and teach us a brand-new hymn.

It all seems a pity at first, for I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing in order to attend Mass simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars. Why am I here? Who gave these nice Catholics guitars? Why are they not mumbling in Latin and performing superstitious rituals? What is the Pope thinking of?

*

During communion, the priest handed me a wafer which proved to be stuck to five other wafers. I waited while he tore the clump into rags of wafer, resisting the impulse to help. Directly to my left, and all through the communion, a woman was banging out the theme from The Sound Of Music on a piano.

*

A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens.

Who can believe it?

*

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, watching the radar screen, noting weather reports radioed in from shore. No one would dream of asking the tourists to do these things. Alas, among the tourists on Deck C, drinking coffee and eating donuts, we find the captain, and all the ship's officers, and all the ship's crew.

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.


from Holy The Firm and Teaching A Stone To Talk

Kim Wozencraft, "Jesus Was A Convict"

Judas was the snitch in the government's case against Jesus, though his motive was vague. Others, perhaps only caught up in the spirit of the thing, gave false testimony against him. Soldiers carried out the sentence: they nailed him to the cross. His disciples had let him down every hour on the hour until Judas showed with the law – chief priests, scribes, and elders – and a crowd wielding swords and clubs. Then they abandoned him.

Every Sunday, from a time before I can remember until I was around eighteen years old, I knelt in a pew and was assaulted with a life-size statue of Christ on the cross hanging above the altar. Crowned with thorns. Blood dripping down one side of his face. A gash in the skin stretched tight over his agonized ribs, blood dripping; more blood trickling from the nail holse in his hands and feet. The weeks of Lent were a blessed relief, as they covered the statues with purple satin.

Perhaps the Catholic Church is onto something in its official condemnation of the death penalty. Its own saviour was a victim of capital punishment.

Jesus was a convict.

I know; he was betrayed. Most people who wind up in prison are. But the powers that were saw Jesus as guilty of insurrection, of treason, of attempting to overthrow the government. Serious charges, especially in the political tumult of the times. He was establishing a loyal following. They were scared of him.

*

When I think about what would happen if Jesus showed up next Tuesday – not riding down from heaven on a cloud with trumpet fanfare blasting, but the way the Bible says he did it the first time, human born, I cannot help but feel certain that he'd wind up on death row, probably in Texas. This would, of course, be after he graduated from harvard at thirteen and got fed into the media machine, made the rounds in TV land: Oprah, Good Morning America, maybe even Geraldo. Larry King Live would be a great venue for Jesus. We could call in. We could ask why there are tornadoes, why AIDS, why war. We could ask if the Western psychiatric establishment is part of the solution or part of the problem. And there would no doubt be numerous documentaries and a feature film, first rumored to be starring Tom Cruise, but in the end Brad Pitt would have to get the part.

Then everything would sour, and something would get whispered in a hallway somewhere in D.C. – This guy is bigger than Michael Jackson and Madonna put together, and he's still gathering momentum – and next thing you know, Jesus would be arrested. Betrayed again, no doubt. And instead of trying to post his bail, Hollywood – his production company, his agent, his lawyers, his publicist – would just bail out on him, as would most all of his other followers, except perhaps a loose, anonymous following on the Internet or maybe the odd militiaman who'd be willing to hole up in the name of Jesus and exchange fire with the feds.

*

Christ is on the cross, nails through his hands and feet, a thief hanging on either side of him. One thief makes fun of him. The other asks forgiveness. And, in what is the only instance in the entire New Testament of Christ actually promising heaven to anyone, Jesus says to the thief, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

Of course, these days, we don't crucify. These days, executions are a bit more civilized. They should be. After all, it's Christians who are carrying them out.

*

Excerpted from the essay published in
Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, edited by Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke
Highly recommended

Alan Ball, "The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Filmed"

It was one of those days where it's a minute away from snowing. And there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? And this bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid, begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes.

That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.

Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember. I need to remember.

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.


from American Beauty

Anne Carson, "Mortal Life and How It Is Ruined"

once in a while in the long night I ponder
mortal life and how it is ruined.
not from bad judgment
do people go wrong—many are quite reasonable—
no look, it's this:
we know what is right, we understand it,
but we do not carry it out.
Either from laziness,
or we value something else, some pleasure.


from Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripedes
by Anne Carson

Teddy Roosevelt on Critics

"It is far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat. Though many must surely wonder why you are doing what you are doing, while many may criticize you, I want you to remember it is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong mand stumbled or where the doers of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, in your case the baseball field: whose face is marred by dust and mud, sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."


from The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
by W.P. Kinsella

Leonard Cohen, "Where The Good Songs Come From"

If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often. So it is that we shuffle behind our songs into the hall of fame -- shuffle awkwardly, not quite believing that we wrote them but happy that you do.


Leonard Cohen
Induction Speech, Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame

G.K. Chesterton, "Saying Grace"

You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and the pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.


by G.K. Chesterton
cited in Frederick Buechner's Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought To Say)

Armaud Bamba, "Perseverance"

by Armaud Bamba, Cote d'Ivoire
Amnesty International Urgent Action Network

Hope is not necessary in order to begin a task; success is not necessary in order to persevere. Our actions often lead to success, and if we rejoice in this, we cannot forget that sometimes, they are not followed by any perceptible result. If we campaign for an ideal, we should not limit our actions to a few calculations of probability; because our goal is too big. We must not wait for hope, even a faint glimmer, in order to get involved. Neither must we wait for success to persevere, because the very notion of perseverance implies effort without an apparent result. However, even without hope, we will carry on, and we know that one day we will see signs of hope, and the day after that day, we will succeed.

Paul Elie, "Pilgrimage"

from The Life You Save May Be Your Own
by Paul Elie

A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story. A great event has happened; the pilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others firsthand but to be changed by the experience.

Margaret Visser, "Epiphanies"

from The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church
by Margaret Visser

The word "remember" comes from the same Indo-European root as "mind." And the English word "mind" is both a noun ("what is in the brain") and a verb ("pay attention to," "care"). When one has forgotten, to remember is to call back into the "attention span," to recall. Attention is thought of here as having a span - an extension in space. Forgetting, on the other hand, is like dropping something off a plate, falling off an edge, not "getting" it, but having to do, instead, without it. Remembering is recapturing something that happened in the past; it is an encounter of now with then - a matter of time. Buildings - constructions in space - may last through time as this church has lasted. Such structures can cause us to remember. Their endurance, as well as their taking up space, may counter time and keep memory alive.

This particular church reminds us of Agnes, who was killed by having her throat cut almost 1700 years ago. But like any church, it recalls a great deal more. One of a church's main purposes is to call to mind, to make people remember. To begin with, a church sets out to cause self-recollection. Every church does its best (some of them are good at this, others less so, but every church is trying) to help each person recall the mystical experience that he or she has known.

Everyone has had some such experience. There are moments in life when - to use the language of a building - the door swings open. The door shuts again, sooner rather than later. But we have seen, even if only through a crack, the light behind it. There has been a moment, for example, when every person realizes that one is oneself, and no one else. This is probably a very early memory, this taking a grip on one's own absolutely unique identity, this irrevocable beginning.

I remember myself, walking along a narrow path in the Zambian bush. The grass was brown and stiff, more than waist-high. I was wearing a green-and-white checked dress with buttons down the front. I was alone. I said aloud, stunned, "Tomorrow I'm going to be five! Tomorrow I'm going to be five!" I stopped still with amazement: fiveness was about to be mine! I had already had four. The whole world seemed to point to me in that instant. The world and I looked at each other. It was huge and I was me. I was filled with indescribable delight. I took another step, and the vision was gone. But it's still there, even now, even when I am not recalling it.

This was a mystical experience. As such, one of its characteristics was that in it my mind embraced a vast contradiction: both terms of it at once? I was me and the world contained me, but I was not the world. I was a person, but I wasn't "a person" - I was me. A mystical experience is before all else an experience, and beyond logic. It is concrete, and therefore unique. It is bigger than the person who experiences it; it is something one "enters."

People have always, apparently in all cultures, conceptualized the world as participating in, or expressing, or actually being a tension between a series of opposites: big and small, high and low, same and different, hot and cold, one and many, male and female, and so on. Societies of people can have very idiosyncratic ideas about what is opposite to what: a culture can find squirrels "opposite" to water rats, oblongs "opposite" to squares, bronze vessels "the opposite" of clay ones. Anthropologists dedicate themselves to finding 'out what such classifications could mean; the answers they give us usually show how social arrangements are reflected outward upon the world, and determine human perceptions of how nature is ordered. One result of a mystical experience, therefore, can be a profound demystification.

For no sooner has a culture organized its system of contradictions, than the mystics arise. They steadfastly, and often in the face of great danger, assure their fellow human beings that they are wrong: what appears to be a contradiction in terms is merely a convention, a point of view, a façon de parler, no matter how self-evident it may appear. These are people who believe and convince others that they have been lifted out of this world and have seen a greater truth: the opposites are, in fact, one. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus can say, "The way up and the way down are the same." Or: "Step into the same river twice, and its waters will be different."

Such mystic realizations (up and down are one, sameness and difference coincide) have to keep occurring, both for the sake of truth, and for the necessity of realizing that neither our senses nor our thinking faculties have access to, or are capable of encompassing, everything. ("The last proceeding of reason," wrote Pascal, "is to recognize that there is an infinity of things beyond it.") For all the outrage-and bafflement with which the pronouncements of the mystics are greeted, we remember their words; in time we learn to appreciate and value them. In our own day, physicists have been talking like mystics for some time: expressing physical reality, for example, as conflating space and time, or declaring that waves and particles (lines and dots) can be perceived to be "the same." The rest of us are only beginning to take in what they are saying.

From the point of view of the person experiencing them, privileged moments - those that allow us to see something not normally offered to our understanding - do not last. Regretfully, necessarily, we cannot remain in such an experience. We move on, into the practical, the sensible, the logical and provable, the mundane. But after one such glimpse of possibility, we henceforth know better. We know what it is to experience two or more incompatible, mutually exclusive categories as constituting in fact one whole. We have seen both sides of the coin, at one and the same time. An impossibility - but it has happened. We may bury this experience, deny it, explain it away-but at any moment something could trigger it, raise it up, recall it. Because it has happened, and cannot unhappen.

One of the consequences of having had a mystical experience is a sense of loss. If only it could have gone on and on, and never had to stop; if only the door would open again! One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in life is that we cannot bring about such an experience, any more than we can make it last. Sex can remind us of it because, like a mystical experience, sex is ecstatic, overwhelming, and delightful; it feels bigger than we are. Drugs can also make us feel as if we're "there" again. So people pursue sex and drugs - experiences they can get, they can have. This other thing, this greater and unforgettable thing, this insight, is not anyone's for the asking. It comes (it always comes, to everyone, at different times and in different ways), and there is no telling what it will be or when or where, let alone how. You can't buy it or demand it or keep it. It is not a chemical reaction, and there is nothing automatic about it.

A mystical experience is something perceived, and it calls forth a response. But you are free to turn away from the vision, to behave as though it never happened; you are free not to respond. (This is something I have had to learn: when I was almost five there was no question of not responding.) The invitation cannot be made to anyone else but you - and not even to you at any moment in your life other than the one in which it is made. I shall never be five again, so no other mystical experience I have will ever again be that one. I shall never again wear that green-and-white checked dress; it is very likely that the path through the brown grass has disappeared. What I have left is the enormous memory, and the fact that it has enlarged all of my experience ever since.

Now a church (or a temple or a synagogue or a mosque - any religious building) knows perfectly well that it cannot induce in anyone a mystical experience. What it does is acknowledge such experience as any of its visitors has had, as explicitly as it can. A church is a recognition, in stone and wood and brick, of spiritual awakenings. It nods, to each individual person. If the building has been created within a cultural and religious tradition, it constitutes a collective memory of spiritual insights, of thousands of mystical moments. A church reminds us of what we have known: And it tells us that the possibility of the door swinging open again remains.

J.R.R. Tolkien, "Tales That Really Matter"

from The Lord Of The Rings (Book IV, Chapter 8, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol")
by J.R.R. Tolkien

"I don't like anything here at all," said Frodo, "step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid."
"Yes, that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
"No sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got - you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales ever end?"
"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later - or sooner."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Baboons"

from Finding Flow
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Baboons who live in the African plains spend about one-third of their life sleeping, and when awake they divide their time between traveling, finding and eating food, and free leisure time - which basically consists in interacting, or grooming each other's fur to pick out lice. It is not a very exciting life, yet not much has changed in the million years since humans evolved out of common simian ancestors. The requirements of life still dictate that we spend our time in a way that is not that different from the African baboons. Give and take a few hours, most people sleep one-third of the day, and use the remainder to work, travel, and rest in more or less the same proportions as the baboons do. And as the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown, in thirteenth centruy French villages - which were among the most advanced in the world at the time - the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other's hair. Now, of course, we have television.

Annie Dillard, "Cranking The Flywheel"

from The Writing Life
by Annie Dillard

Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos of coffee. Then, wincing, you step out again through the French doors and sit down on the chair and look over the desktop. You can see clear to the river from here in winter. You pour yourself a cup of coffee.

Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples' crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Oblation: Robert, Andy, Auggie, Ricky

from An Offering Of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and The Shape of the World
by Robert Farrar Capon

I take my children to the beach. On the north shore of Long Island it is a pretty stony proposition. The mills of the gods grind coarsely here; but, in exchange for busied feet and a sore coccyx, they provide gravel for the foundation of the arts. Every year we hunt for perfect stones: ovals, spheroids, lozenges, eggs. By the end of the summer there are pebbles all over the house. They have no apparent use other than the delight that they provide to man, but that is the whole point of the collection. The very act of hunting them is an introduction to the oblation of things. Look at this one! Do you think it will split evenly enough for arrowheads? What color is that one when it's wet? Lick it and see. Daddy wants a big flat round one to hold the sauerkraut under the brine. Will this one do? We walk down the beach lifting stones into our history: we are collectors, ingatherers of being. Man is the lover of textures, colors and shapes – the only creature in the whole world who knows a good pickling stone when he sees one. The arts go way beyond that; but that is where they begin.

The child who runs the satin binding of his blanket between this fingers, the boy who carefully oils his collection of ball bearings so they will not rust, the woman who loves to handle thick braids, the man who opens his pocket-knife just to hear the satisfying click with which it closes – all these are priestly builders. It is in his simplest oblations that man is at his historical best. When he rises higher, he makes more mistakes – he diagrams and spiritualizes what should have been loved and offered as a thing; but at these low levels he is a success. The world has seen few badly offered blanket bindings, few profaned ball bearings. As long as man can hunt stones, he will know that the fire of his priesthood has not gone out.

But the oblation of things goes far beyond such simplicities. It is in the arts and the crafts that man most displays his priestliness and historicity. ...

It is a common error to suppose that the artist does what he does for himself – that he is a peculiar being who loves certain things in a way not open to others. It is also common to dismiss the craftsman as a fellow who does things for money. To some degree, of course, that is all true. Artists are usually a little odd; the laborer commonly, and legitimately, looks forward to his hire. But after that it falls short. For each is engaged in an offering of things not simply for his own benefit, but for the sake of the things themselves – and for the sake of other men. The painter paints because he loves the way things look and wants to offer his sight of them to others. The poet speaks because he loves words and longs for them to be heard as he hears them. And the cabinetmaker fashions and the joiner joins, and the chef cooks and the vintner toils because they love the conjunctions of things and will them to be moved into the weaving of the web. All arts come from having open eyes; and all arts are performing arts. Even the solitary artist in the cave draws to be seen, offers up what he looks at as a priest for other men. It is only in bad drawing, bad writing and bad woodwork that motives other than priestly ones become primary. It is when man stops loving what he does and stops caring whether others see that he becomes guilty of artistry that is not art and of craftsmanship that is only shoddy. ...

If speech is the crowning gift of man, then the arts of language probably qualify as the most nearly universal. Not all men can draw, many men cannot sing, and the world is full of cooks who ought to be allowed to rise no higher than the scullery; but all men speak, and practically no one is immune to the delights of rhyme and reason. The child, as soon as he learns words, plays with words. The teen-ager, with his stock of current clichés and his mercurial pattern of jargon, is a poet. He may recite only commercial slogans and comparable idiocies; but he recites them, at least partly, because he loves the way the words rattle. And somewhere along the line he will, unless he is starved to death, come to love some very grand rattles indeed.

I remember the first time I read Shakespeare's sonnets. "Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds" stuck in my head for weeks – not so much for its meaning as for its marvellous wordiness. The city of speech is old and new, and rich beyond counting. ...

That only a few have the craft to forge such words takes nothing off the edge of the marvel by which man can sense the priestliness of their oblation And it is not only the grand and the gorgeous that qualify. ...

Speech is no mere tool of communication; it is a joy in itself. ... Speech should indeed inform, as food should indeed nourish, but what sane man will let either subject go at that? ...

Man's failure in music is like his failure in all the arts – a failure to make them really priestly, a penchant for non-historical and irrelevant forms. Far too much of the music we now have is only heard, not played or sung. It makes no demands, does not ask to be lifted; it just hangs around. We have canned music, background music, and music to do everything but listen to music by. But music cannot be only entertainment any more than speech can be only communication. We aim too low. Both are major oblations, and they will settle for nothing less. Neither can be merely used: they must be played.

Thank God for wine. Without it we would have almost no singing at all. Practically the only place where men now sing when they are cold sober is in church; and, to tell the truth, it sounds like it. As a professional religionist, I wish I could make a more glowing report; but, by and large, it is wretched. It is a triumph of use, not play. And for every man in church who sings, there are five who stand aloof from the whole business as if it were faintly disreputable.

Why? Because they are embarrassed by the sound of their own voices: they are ashamed of their priesthood. The city of music, which fairly cries for lifting into their history, is firmly and permanently locked out. I think that secretly, in their heart of hearts, perhaps, they envy people who play. But they do not show it often. If only they would. It isn't a matter of working themselves into miniature Isaac Sterns; the harmonica will do if it comes to that – or even tenth-rate four-part harmony. They underestimate the power of the arts. A man can practice for weeks on the strength of one-chord progression. Even the smallest oblation will lift the priest as he makes it; even a little attention to what is really there will be a historical triumph.

*

Rivers & Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time

Andy: I think its chances of survival are a bit slim.
Shit.
I need a very heavy stone right here. "Can you bring me a very heavy stone? A kind of lumpy squarish one." Maybe I shouldn't have put that one on.
(They add the new stone. Two or three more. It collapses.)
That's the fourth… The fourth collapse. And the tide is coming in.
I think it would be better to wait.
The moment when something collapses is intensely disappointing. And this is the fourth time it's fallen. And each time I got to know the stone a little bit more. And it got higher each time. So it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone. And that is really one of the things that my art is trying to do, is trying to understand the stone.
I obviously don't understand it well enough yet.

(Jump to the intercutting of the two stone cairns.)

22:45-26:03
27:52-29:18

*

Smoke
by Paul Auster

Paul: Looks like someone forgot a camera.

Auggie: Yeah. I did.

It's yours?

That's mine alright. I've owned that little sucker for a long time.

I didn't know you took pictures.

Well, I guess you could call it a hobby. Only takes me five minutes a day to do it but I do it every day. Rain or shine, sleet or snow. Sort of like the postman.

So you're not just some guy who pushes coins across a counter.

Well that's what people see. But that ain't necessarily what I am.

(Cut to black and white photos, arranged in an album)

They're all the same.

That's right. More than four thousand pictures of the same place. The corner of third street and seventh avenue at eight o'clock in the morning. Four thousand straight days in all kinds of weather. That's why I can never take a vacation, I've got to be in my spot every morning at the same time. Every morning in the same spot at the same time.

I've never seen anything like this.

That's my project. What you'd call my life's work.

It's amazing. I'm not sure I get it, though. I mean, what was it that gave you the idea to do this… project.

I don't know. It just came to me. It's my corner after all. I mean, it's just one little part of the world, but things take place there too, just like everywhere else. It's a record of my little spot.

It's kind of overwhelming.

(He finishes with one book. Auggie give him another.)

You'll never get it if you don't slow down my friend.

What do you mean?

I mean you're going too fast, you're hardly even looking at the pictures.

They're all the same.

They're all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You've got your bright mornings and your dark mornings, you got your summer light and your autumn light, you got your weekdays and your weekends, you got your people in overcoats and galoshes and you've got your people in T shirts and shorts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones. Sometimes the different ones become the same, or the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.

Slow down, huh?

That's what I recommend. You know how it is. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, time creeps on its petty pace."

(We look at the photos, more slowly)

Oh Jesus. Look. It's Ellen.

Yeah, that's her alright. She's in quite a few from that year. Must have been on her way to work.

It's Ellen. Look at her. Look at my sweet darling.

(He cries. New scene: Auggie takes a picture of his corner.)

11:14-17:38
17:38-18:03

*

American Beauty
by Alan Ball

Ricky: What's wrong?

Jane: Nothing.

No, you're scared of me.

No I'm not.

You want to see the most beautiful thing I've ever filmed?

It was one of those days where it's a minute away from snowing. And there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? And this bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid, begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes.

That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.

Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember. I need to remember.

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.

1:01:34-1:04:50