advent
After yesterday's usual three o’clock opening of Sunday morning and eating dark chocolate with black coffee between services to keep awake, up earlier than hoped this Monday morning, and for the second time, the first being twelve:dark; so trying to remember whether I drank too much water with supper, otherwise, what caused this?
But no, I don’t think so, supper was four Chesapeake oysters with Louisiana hot sauce, the regular, which is not very hot, not the extra hot, which is still not as hot as Tabasco, my favorite. I can do any of it except Tabasco Scorpion Sauce.
These oysters were from Sam’s, quite good, more to my taste than the Pacific oysters they had for a Time. With oysters on the half-shell I don’t want anything but a fork and a quick shake of salt over the dozen on ice; otherwise, out of the container like this, bit of salt, because they are washed, never packed salty; one of my dozen bottles of hot sauce selection, and a couple of saltines, saltine crackers - - on some pretense of a health kick, I buy only “whole wheat” saltine crackers.
But as I say, up earlier than pleased me, and the scale had bad news, so FuroForty times two, which immediately takes effect and command of the body if not of the whole person. Writing later, I've already lost four pounds so far this morning, so the Furosemide is busily effective. If you don't want to read and know this about me in my aging, don't read me.
Opening the laptop, clearing away rows and rows of icons overcrowding the desktop, I come across one marked Atlantic, open and scan, read a couple of articles, don’t remember the first; but the second https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/stephen-sondheim-knew-truth-about-happy-endings/620828/ the writer loved seeing Stephen Sondheim at the theater last month, applauded, standing ovation by the audience as he took his seat, alive and cheery and seemingly well, healthy. In fact, she wrote, he is said to have enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner with friends the night before he died. Amen, way to go!
Anyway, that theater event was the opening of a resetting of “Company” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_(musical) with a female Bobbie in place of Robert. She said Sondheim clapped joyfully throughout. I'm on the male side of "Company", but okay, what the hell.
Life is Good, isn’t it, and much to be lived and loved and enjoyed even after the point where we realize, and are living into, that in the past soon four years, everything has changed, nothing is the same, every damn thing has changed, and Normal and New Normal no longer have meaning, sense or clarity. Even as we think "Well the pandemic's abating, no masks, careless non-distancing, we can start resuming Normal", there’s Delta, now Omicron, a new covid variant more contagious and potentially deadly than ever. Might as well live into it peaceably, because this IS whatever Normal means. The people who long and can't wait for Normal to return must think life is a Broadway musical, always has a happy ending, which is skubalon, look it up.
Life goes on, and, in spite of “man”, may go on until the sun starts swelling; it’s just that life goes on with constantly changing characters with new and different memories. MY life’s memories are an era of war and intersperses of peace with happiness and false sense of safety that enhanced life’s worthwhileness. BUT anyone born in the 21st century has only lived in violence, terrorism, hatred, war, most of it, including the American political scene, anchored in religious certitudes. What does that tell? It tells me a lot.
Remember, my prattling on is not for you, it’s like a mental Dam Release stream of unconsciousness.
Advent: the Second Coming? Find myself still focused on William Butler Yeats, who, whether you know it or not, was almost as eccentric a Being as I sometimes feel life is rendering me. It’s not my favorite, which is his most peacefully homesick longing “Lake Isle of Innisfree”, but "The Second Coming" is, extraordinarily powerful, as startling a poem as has ever been written and, Advent, it’s most timely. To which my mind is adding some of Thomas Hardy’s strangest. Yeats (1919):
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Whatever it is to be, The Second Coming will be what and when least expected. For anyone to whom "Christ will come again" is not just liturgical rote, but Doctrine or even Dogma, surprises are sure. It will not be on clouds of glory and wearing a first century robe like the top picture above, it will be Timely, likely sailing in by hang glider or cape
or even kite or umbrella, and who's to say The Second Coming will be by human male,
Someone said The Second Coming is Christian doctrine, together with Virgin Birth and Resurrection: is that your sense of it, that it's doctrine? It's not mine. Don't think I'm being facetious or irreverent, because I am NOT, but Advent: I'm trying to think of all the ways God surprises, and William Cowper (say "Cooper")'s long unsung (1774) hymn
- God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm. - Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs
And works His sov’reign will. - Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head. - Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face. - His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flow’r. - Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.
