disconnect

If I google “news” and scroll down a bit I come to “News is bad for you — and giving up reading it will make you happier …” with which sentiment I earnestly agree, all the while being as addicted to news as the next one. It’s all bad, which says loads (of what?) more about us who rush to read it than about what’s to be read. I won’t go off on current events except to say without qualification that politicians of whatever party who make bargaining chips of the lives, health, safety & future of children, any child, every child, aren’t worth a gee alphabet damn, and comes the revolution, which is why we have the Second Amendment, there will finally be means of dealing with them finally. In the meantime, this shocking crevice of my mental abyss remains padlocked to all but myself, though obviously from this escape, not securely enough. I must post another guard there.

If everything is connected, so also may it be that nothing is connected. 

Brad Leithauser, another whose poems, along with Tomas Transtromer, also are becoming favorites, has a piece In Essays on the Strip Mining of American Culture. Leithauser on “‘the age of criticism..’ Or consider this lament, ‘Of course the multiplication of critical books and essays may create, and I have seen it create, a vicious taste for reading about works of art instead of reading the works themselves.’” I remember this from C-5 Humanities at UFla with music and art, famous paintings, and literature. Also, until I got used to it, I had this initial experience at theological seminary, from a process calling itself “modern bible criticism,” historical, textual, redaction, et al, reading, hearing lectures, discussing, and being tested about scripture when I’d expected to be dunked, immersed, in scripture itself. It was more than a surprise, and a reason why a couple or three or four of the most innocent, naive among us dropped out of our mainline seminary by the end of the first semester. Later, it tied in with, after I had been mentoring EfM for some years and resumed it upon returning to my home parish after years of what I have called “adventures abroad,” the event of a brand new, first year (Old Testament) class member saying, with horror, shock, and sadness in her voice after the first or second week’s reading assignment, “I was offended.“ Soon thereafter, on PCS orders, she moved far away and I’ve no idea whether she continued. 

So, what’s this about, what’s my point, or at least direction? It’s that, culture having abandoned the KJV for more modern and correct, scripture is no longer worth memorizing just for the faith and beauty of it. It’s that losing the sixteenth and seventeenth century BCPs to the modern revisionists, we have destroyed Anglicanism, which is, was, not merely a cultural cutting edge, but a sound, the holy and sacred sound of worship, perhaps what the original Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church called “true religion,” which we have not done the “maintenance of thy.” A burial rite that for all good intentions sounds banally like written by a postmodern RC seminarian to impress his postmodern bishop. 

At 82, I can and will say, write, what I DWP.

Remember, everything doesn’t have to be “connected,” but more:

In the liturgy, why do we “cross ourselves” at the benedictus, “Blessed + is he who comes in the name of the Lord”? It’s partly ignorance and partly etiological, isn’t it. First, it goes back to the Latin mass. Any time the masses who neither read nor understood the Latin worship language heard the word “benedicte” or “benedictus” they thought they must be being blessed, getting a liturgical blessing, so they crossed themselves. They momentarily paused visiting and chatting with each other during worship that they didn’t understand, to cross themselves. I understand somewhat, having played such a game among the Orthodox at various gatherings when invited to say an invocation, grace at table, or closing prayer, beginning and ending by invoking the Trinity if for no other reason than to ignite the rapidly frantic movement of hands and arms - - forehead, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder, forehead, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder, forehead, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder. In a proper RC gathering, of which we are descendant, there is no “crossing” at the benedictus.

The other reason is etiological: we find ourselves doing something that for what reason we do not know, so we look around, usually back, historic as in “origins,” and find or construct an explanation that is, or seems, reasonable: we do it to acknowledge that Christ has come, His real presence arriving in the Eucharist. Sometimes, often, we do it because those around us do, who did it because they saw others doing so, and because it seems very catholic. In fact, I remember when it started as universal in TEC: with the 1979 BCP, when the Benedictus qui venit became not an option but integral to the Ordinary of the Mass, spoken or sung every time as the finale to the Sanctus, and seminarians started asking, “why do we do that?” and with a credible theological etiology, crossing spread to become common. The St. Cecilia Mass by Charles Gounod, incidentally, raises this and all else above and beyond the sublime, inside the very gates of Heaven, the sound of the angels …

Still remembering that everything, or nothing necessarily, is connected, a Charlotte Mew poem I appreciate. Mew was as close to mentally unbalanced as her life and her family, even so

On the Road to the Sea.

We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way,

I who make other women smile did not make you –

But no man can move mountains in a day.

So this hard thing is yet to do.

But first I want your life: – before I die I want to see

The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes,

There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,

Yet on brown fields there lies

A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies

And in grey sea?

I want what world there is behind your eyes,

I want your life and you will not give it me.

Now, if I look, I see you walking down the years,

Young, and through August fields – a face, a thought, a swinging dream

perched on a stile –;

I would have liked (so vile we are!) to have taught you tears

But most to have made you smile.

To-day is not enough or yesterday: God sees it all –

Your length on sunny lawns, the wakeful rainy nights –; tell me –;

(how vain to ask), but it is not a question – just a call –;

Show me then, only your notched inches climbing up the garden wall,

I like you best when you are small.

Is this a stupid thing to say

Not having spent with you one day?

No matter; I shall never touch your hair

Or hear the little tick behind your breast,

And as a flying bird

Brushes the branches where it may not rest

I have brushed your hand and heard

The child in you: I like that best

So small, so dark, so sweet; and were you also then too grave and wise?

Always I think. Then put your far off little hand in mine;–

Oh! let it rest;

I will not stare into the early world beyond the opening eyes,

Or vex or scare what I love best.

But I want your life before mine bleeds away–

Here – not in heavenly hereafters – soon, –

I want your smile this very afternoon,

(The last of all my vices, pleasant people used to say,

I wanted and I sometimes got – the Moon!)

You know, at dusk, the last bird’s cry,

And round the house the flap of the bat’s low flight,

Trees that go black against the sky

And then – how soon the night!

No shadow of you on any bright road again,

And at the darkening end of this – what voice? whose kiss? As if you’d say!

It is not I who have walked with you, it will not be I who take away

Peace, peace, my little handful of the gleaner’s grain

From your reaped fields at the shut of day.

Peace! Would you not rather die

Reeling, – with all the cannons at your ear?

So, at least, would I,

And I may not be here

Tonight, tomorrow morning or next year.

Still I will let you keep your life a little while,

See dear?

I have made you smile.

Don't get it? No matter.

DThos+