Liquid Chisel

Sonnet: The air was sweet and thick, like mangos juiced

 

Shakespeare + Pink Floyd's David Gilmour = Mellow Mashup

I love Shakespeare enough to have named one of my sons after one of his greatest plays and characters (Lear). I also love sonnets as a poetical form (hear me talk about them on the radio or visit my site devoted to composing sonnets). And in popular culture, I join millions of Pink Floyd aficionados. What a pleasure, then, to stumble upon Shakespeare's sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...") adapted to song by David Gilmour, the voice and guitar of Pink Floyd. One of the commenters on YouTube called this "the light side of the moon." Maybe so. One of the things I love about culture today is the wild intermixture of classical and popular that can make old things new, and give new things class. So enjoy:

My homage to Milton's Paradise Lost

Manuscript of the first page of Paradise Lost (Morgan Library)

During the last few months, together with my students, I read Paradise Lost twice (including listening to a very fine audio version by Naxos narrated by Anton Lesser). A fit way to celebrate Milton's 400th birthday. Within our senior seminar of nine students and me we read extensively in the secondary literature between readings of the primary text, finding this work a very rich and durable text. I measure the value of my favorite literary works relative to the kinds of conversations they create and the pleasures of form and thought they provide. For this epic poem--so inimical to contemporary tastes--the yield has been repeatedly powerful. (See, for example, the musings this work provoked in me back in October).

It was while reading this book as an undergraduate (under the tutelage of Milton scholar John Tanner) that I chose to change from law to a career in academia. Not all of that has been a smooth ride, but my, what refreshing sustenance I continue to draw from my first literary loves. This is among those.

I think Paradise Lost elicits something grand, something epic, within its readers--even its critics. And its faults, of which there are many, slip away as the sheer presence of the work accumulates within its iambic cadences, its baroque allusions, its dramatized theology.

                            What in me is dark
illumine, what is low raise and support

Milton felt himself a failure in so many ways by the time he wrote the great poems at his life's last stage. I'm glad he lived to see the response to his magnum opus.

I tried naming one of my children Milton, but my wife did not agree. We compromised, naming him Adam in reference both to the Bible and to Paradise Lost. In the poem Adam speaks very tenderly about his mate, even before she is created, and Milton paints the pair as equals, fitly independent and interdependent:

                                In solitude
What happiness, who can enjoy alone,
Or all enjoying, what contentment find?
[...]
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?

And there is, of course, that final image as the poem closes--Adam and Eve exiting the garden, sobered, holding hands, about to take on the fallen world together:

The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitary way.

Part of my love of Paradise Lost derives from the relationship between Adam and Eve. At times strained, ultimately united, the two are lovers, intellectual companions, repenting and reforming their lives within a knowledge of their weakness and God's strength. It is an image of marriage I hold to as I do my own Eve.

A couple months ago, in the midst of my excitement over Paradise Lost, I shared some thoughts and lines with my wife from this great work. Her own reflections she wrote down on her own blog, here. It pleased me that something I valued so much also pleased someone I value so much. Our marriage is a happy one in part because we each read widely and share broadly our interests--a bit like the way that Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost split up to range about the garden independently before rejoining each other, renewed by their adventures, renewed by their reunion.

Thank you, John Milton.

Thank You, Henryk Górecki

When I stumbled across Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Symphony No. 3, 1993), I joined a million others compelled by this mysterious, elevating, haunting music. The first movement, Lento, seems to be a complex, contrapuntal crescendo toward some sort of empathic climax that mixes, inexplicably, profound sadness and transcendence. A 27 minute hike from the depths of a valley to a place, not quite so dark, reverberating with a plea that seems to break open the milky way with yearning, with mourning, with communion with darkness and light.

I didn't know it was based upon a mother's love for her suffering son. This, Mary's mourning, as though Górecki provided the aural counterpart to Michelangelo's Pieta: stone singing, a monument flowing upward into a communion of suffering. The Good Music Guide described the dynamic of the first movement perfectly, quoting the lyrics that are sung in Polish:

The first movement is a great, complex canon of deep sorrow. It starts almost inaudibly with the basses, then with utmost slowness, progressively rises through the strings until the entire orchestra is involved in its glory.

At its heart, as the strings suddenly fade, lies a 15th century Polish poem known as the Lamentation of the Holy Cross. The Mother of Christ begs her dying son to speak:

My son, chosen and loved,
Let your mother share your wounds
And since, my dear son,
I have always kept you in my heart,
And loyally served you,
Speak to your mother,
make her happy ,
Though, my cherished hope,
you are now leaving me.

At the end of this soprano respite, this brief ray of light, the huge string canon returns, more powerful than before. This time it retreats, and eventually fades into oblivion.

But the music is grander than Christian tradition, elevating toward an expansiveness reminiscent of Aaron Copland's Fanfare of the Common Man, but muted, sustained, and contemplative as Barber's Adagio for Strings. I recently saw a Mormon play by Eric Samuelsen called Gaia that used LDS theology about the creative activities of premortal spirits to meld the pagan earth spirit, Gaia, with Eve as the incarnation of the female spirit that orchestrated the creation of this world. I feel that Górecki's work bursts the bounds of denominational religion, rising toward a spirituality of pure connection--mother to son, sufferer to sufferer, in a texture of simultaneous descent and ascent, dissonance and consonance.

Thank you, Henryk Górecki. My soul was required to expand to the parameters of your creation, and it will never return to its previous, limited shape.

Play this two minute excerpt of the first movement:

Links to online versions of all movements:

Buy the recording featuring Zofia Kilanowicz

Falling is All

What if the Fall was not at the beginning of history but was in fact the beginning of history itself?

Eden was timeless, and the clock struck its first hour in rhythm with the chewing of the forbidden fruit.

Only things that end are measured or even measurable. 

Time is the crucible of things that lapse--material things, hours, childhood, morals, trials--all of what we know except transcendence and infinity.

To sin is but the most overt falling we do; we exist in a perpetual state of falling--things falling due, people falling away, the current moment falling into a static past, the future falling into presence falling into past. Memory failing and falling, anything present diminishing to something absent, distant, removed, fallen away from.

Like Adam and Eve looking over their shoulders at the bright luminescence of the Eden forbidden to them, we on occasion grasp a sense of something pristine, something not subject to the perpetual entropy of mortality. It's how we know we are still falling. With no sense of a permanence, an immortality, we could not believe in death. So what is primary? What secondary? 

Well, there I go again, caught within sequence, and sequence is one event falling after / following another. Yet we can hold in our minds timelessness, even see sequence in reverse. Adam and Eve's transgression defined the virtue of Eden. The fall created paradise, if you will. The infinite is frightening because we have grown accustomed to the comforts of falling. Unless we keep escaping the garden, we don't understand the garden. Paradise is lost if it is not escaped, and redemption is a wrenching of time back to timelessness. We were there are there will have been there have always been are still there. The tenseness of tenses comes when the infinite infinitive falls into fragments--as though the past were distinct from the present, or the future not intimately connected with the present.

We don't want to return to Eden. We want to keep it bright, growing brighter the more distance we get from it. The longing lengthens, all the way back, faster time, lighter than light, until we know the then of then the now of now as though undivided by (name your choice of) any fall at all. Falling is all; falling is everything.

Nature red in tooth and claw

Man...
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law -- 
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It's one thing to read a Tennyson poem about how the natural world can be cruel, but it's another thing to find this out in Hi-Def on a Sunday afternoon with your kids covering their faces while toothy creatures use those teeth to eat each other.

It's always the young, the weak, the gangly animals--the ones who would've been picked last on a kickball team if they ever lived to puberty. At predator school the instructions were clear: 1) pick the pitiful one; 2) separate him from the heard; 3) sink your incisors into the neck or spine; 4) squeeze until something separates or splats; 5) repeat until full.

When I was a boy we enjoyed discovering faraway lands and fascinating animals on Sunday afternoons through Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. The grandfatherly Marlin Perkins, who narrated the series (that began in 1963) was no pansy. Heck, he even wrestled an anaconda once. But there was discretion to his approach. You might see a lion chase a gazelle, but then they would cut away to the big cat licking its lips while nuzzling down into some tall grass. Dead gazelle with rib cage split open was IMPLIED but never SHOWN. And if those animals ever mated, they did it discreetly off camera.

My how things have changed.

Why aren't they putting ratings on nature shows? But once you start watching you fall into that same looky-loo fascination that draws us to an auto accident. You don't want to look and you have to look. A great white shark rockets from the see, intercepting and swallowing a sea lion whole  (except for its tail flapping outside that primal sharky mouth). A pride of lions stalks a baby elephant at night, ganging up and chewing it to bits. An owl slit-throats a smaller, cuter bird. A king penguin gets its neck snapped in half by a sea lion. It's all about the moment of death, the separation of soul from body. You can almost see their shocked spirits looking back in disbelief at the carcass that was their body.

Nature isn't as innocent as it used to be.

So if you want to wade in a tamer wild, enjoy these classic clips from Mutual of Omaha. I really like the one where the man stands up against the bull elephant. Nobody dies. Everybody wins.