Things Fall Apart; the center cannot hold

 

The poem from our Modernity class today:

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

 

   The Second Coming,  (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: a waste of desert sand;

    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

    Wind 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?

 Yeats wrote this poem in 1919....

the falcon cannot hear the falconer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time's excuse to frighten us

 

Georgia O'Keeffe       Sunrise 1916

Here is the second poem in my Modernity students' Poetry Packet:

The Future     Rilke

 

 

  The future: time's excuse

to frighten us; too vast

a project, too large a morsel

for the heart's mouth.

 

Future, who won't wait for you?

Everyone is going there.

It suffices you to deepen

the absence that we are.

 

 

We are here as on a darkling plain

 Today is the first day of class for me for this semester.  I have 24 students -  mostly junior and seniors - none of them English majors.  To think that these young men and women weren't even born in the 20th century!

I begin this Modernity in Literature class with Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach."  I talk about the changing way that we thought about many things from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Dover cliffs by moonlight

Dover Beach                             by  Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) 

 

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

 

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

                                                                       

Dover beach in 2020

Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone...

 

I'm being followed by a Moon Shadow...

report from  Yahoo:

August full moon will be a blue moon and a sturgeon moon

A full moon unlike any other in 2021 to rise this weekend ... Bright moonlight will fill the night sky during the weekend when a seasonal blue moon rises on Aug.

The most common type of blue moon is the second of two full moons appearing during the same calendar month. While that scenario played out last October, when we had a full moon on Oct. 1 and another full moon on Halloween, that’s not the case this month.

Although most sky watchers will be calling this the August blue moon, its most common nicknames are the “sturgeon moon,” the “green corn moon” and the “grain moon,” according to the Farmers’ Almanac and the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Here are two poems about the moon which most do not know:

Amores (III)

E. E. Cummings - 1894-1962

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

there is a 
moon sole 
in the blue 
night 

             amorous of waters 
tremulous, 
blinded with silence the 
undulous heaven yearns where 

in tense starlessness 
anoint with ardor 
the yellow lover 

stands in the dumb dark 
svelte 
and 
urgent 

           (again 
love i slowly 
gather 
of thy languorous mouth the 

thrilling 
flower)

Will You Come?
Edward Thomas - 1878-1917
Will you come?
Will you come?
Will you ride
So late
At my side?
O, will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come?
If the night
Has a moon,
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
If the noon
Gave light,
Not the moon?
Beautiful, would you come?
Would you have come?
Would you have come
Without scorning,
Had it been
Still morning?
Beloved, would you have come?
If you come
Haste and come.
Owls have cried;
It grows dark
To ride.
Beloved, beautiful, come.

Afghanistan concedes to the Taliban

 I read in one of the many essays about this situation that after 9/11 the US should have (1) routed the Taliban and (2) taken down Osama Bin Laden,  and that was it.  No nation building.  But we stayed and tried to help the Afghans with nation building.  And as soon as we pulled out ( happening now)  the government collapsed.  So much for our efforts.

One of the frightening things about this situation is that it seems to have history repeating itself.

Some Facebook friend posted this meme the other day, and it really hit me:

The world is now too dangerous

 

Art by Christian Schloe

I am sorry I don't know the author of this, but I like it very much:

Artist: Christian Schloe

The Mass was in Latin

 

The Chapel of the Miraculous Medal at our Motherhouse in Paris, decorated for the Solemnity of the Assumption today, August 15.

Born in 1948.     I wasn’t conscious of the Mass that I went to with my parents until I was in grade school. It was all in Latin. Pius XII was Pope then.  I didn’t think twice about this.  For me, it was just as a fish in the sea. I loved the feast where the priest walked around the inside of the church, carrying the Blessed Sacrament in that large golden Monstrance, with altar boys swinging incensors and little girls in white dresses scattering flower petals on the floor.  Was the feast Corpus Christi?  Or was it after a Forty Hours devotion?  I do not know.  The aura of it was what pulled me. What did I think?  Feel?  It was not participation; it was audience, and I liked being part of that audience. But I didn’t think anything of it. I couldn’t imagine church being any other way.

Then, in the beginning of seventh grade – probably October of 1960,  the Sisters started putting up posters and talking about Vatican II.  It seemed to be very important to them, but it didn’t matter to me in the least, even though I was a fervent Mass goer, even daily Mass.  We began to have “dialogue Masses” , but in Latin, where we learned the responses and said them out loud, in Latin.

I am not sure when – but I think it was when I was a freshman in high school, at my well-loved high school, where we had Mass in the Auditorium, not weekly but fairly occasionally regularly (?) that the Mass changed . The priest was now facing the congregation, and the Mass was in English.  Again, all this momentous change took place with me just going with the flow.  I didn’t much like the Folk Mass music, and much preferred the Latin songs in three part harmony. Somewhere in those Religion classes, we were being taught the significance of the changes. But again, I was a self-absorbed teenager.

Skip through the years 1966-70, and on into the early 70’s, with all of the ups and downs of my life, during which going to church played a very peripheral role.  Until my heart changed , and I picked up on that call I had heard in 1960, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. It resulted in 1978, when I joined the Daughters of Charity, and church, and Jesus, became central.

I was still thinking of myself as a “Vatican II Catholic” and resisting any of the “old time religion” pious practices and language we got in our novitiate. And I was sent on mission to a wonderful “post Vatican II” parish in the very progressive Diocese of Richmond, and I loved it. 

I am trying to fast forward, through the 80’s and 90’s, until 2000, when I was in Campus Ministry at the Mount, and living in our large Seton Shrine building.  And, of course, reading things on the Internet.

The Internet made me aware of the revisionist/restorationist movement in the Catholic Church, led by a few vocal priests and many more very vocal lay Catholics. 

Now  it is 2021, and all these Catholics who weren’t even born in 1965,  want the Lain Mass.   And they want the priest with his back to the congregation.   On Facebook posts, they abbreviate and call it the TLM -  Traditional Latin Mass.  And the present Pope is trying to rein that movement in.  But many of the young priests and seminarians want it too. 

I’m not even talking at all about the Gospel message of peace and justice and being servants.  I know those Restorationists still hold those values.  They just don’t talk about them very much.  I also know that these young Catholics who weren’t even born in 1965 don’t know about some of the negative baggage that had accumulated around the clergy and the TLM.

It’s the lack of charity and the divisiveness  - the split between the two groups, each one chastising the other,  that upsets me.  In this last year of becoming hooked on the TV series “The Chosen”, and reading the Facebook group posts from “Catholics Who Love the Chosen” as well as the really wonderful posts and prayers of Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus, and who is a fervent Catholic, I have moved from the left to the center and maybe even to the right-center in my attitude to prayer and liturgy.  I still prefer the “Vatican II Mass” but I am not so bothered by the proponents of the TLM.

I still find the mantillas and  incense pretentious, and still complain about some outrageous displays of clericalism,  but  I have returned to saying the Miraculous Medal novena each morning ,  and the Divine Mercy Chaplet each afternoon,   and Centering Prayer in between.

Amen.

Just recently, Jonathan Roumie and Dallas Jenkins ( the evangelical writer and director of "The Chosen") met with Pope Francis.  Notice especially the expression on Jonathan's face in this photo:

In the August heat, some lines and colors

 

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

~ May Sarton

art by Rex Preston

Sacre Coeur, Paris

 

On this day in 1976, I was in Paris with a foreign study group. It's the feast of Saint Lawrence. I went to Mass at the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.  Heard the responsorial psalm "Je t'aime qui donne avec joie."  I love those who give with joy.  I wrote this poem:

Sacre Coeur, Paris

 

 

In the Metro,

I could not feel the rain.

Emerging as from sleep

at the other end of Paris,

where the rain just stopped,

you were waiting,

waiting for me

on top of the highest hill.

 

Heart pounding speed

into my legs,

I climbed a million steps

to meet you.

 

Tired hitchhikers

sang beside your door.

Rain wet city

glistened at sunset,

stretched before your face.

You called stories out of our hands,

gifts out of our eyes.

You never closed for the night.

 

The stars rose down

on your round white crown

like halo,

like Bethlehem.

 

As the round earth rolls

 Art by Lara Paulsson

I love that observation by John Muir...especially since my unforgettable visit to Muir Woods in California in 1996.  Was it that many years ago?

The Same Stars

 Art by John Atkinson Grimshaw

The bee is not afraid of me

 

The bee is not afraid of me

by Emily Dickinson

 

 

The bee is not afraid of me,

I know the butterfly;

The pretty people in the woods

Receive me cordially.

The brooks laugh louder when I come,

The breezes madder play.

Wherefore, mine eyes, thy silver mists?

Wherefore, O summer's day?

 

July carried me away in a whirl of gardening!   Now it is August and I am turning my mind to the upcoming semester.  I'll be teaching one section of Modernity in Literature ( same course I've taught for about twelve years) and again on Zoom.

Covid is surging again.  A new "Delta" variant,  and this time around about 60% of the US population is vaccinated.  But that other 40% are refusing for a variety of crazy reasons.  We vaccinated folks , it turns out , can still get Covid, but a mild case with flu-like symptoms, which doesn't mean you won't feel very sick.  And worse, we can still transmit the virus, even if we don't get it.  So the country is moving back to mask mandates --- or at least to begging people to wear masks.  

I blame Donald Trump for brainwashing so many Americans into believing this virus, and this vaccine, is some kind of hoax.  They are dying as a result.

painting by Mats Rydston

I love this prayer from Teilhard's  The Divine Milieu:

“It was joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle, to feel in developing myself I was increasing the hold that you have upon me; it was a joy to me, too, under the inward thrust of life or amid the favorable play of events, to abandon myself to your providence.

Now that I have found the joy of utilizing all forms of growth to make you, or to let you, grow in me, grant that I may willingly consent to this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall possess you by diminishing in you.

When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.”

Amen

 

 

I'm glad not to be young in 2021

 

Can't find the writer or illustrator of this one, sorry.

I was going to post the old song "I'm glad I'm not young anymore" that Maurice Chevalier sang in "Gigi"  but the lyrics don't really apply in my case.

However, I am glad to be in the 70's now, not back in the years of the 70's.  Glad to be here now.

Some regrets, and one of them is that there wasn't digital photography until so recently.  The film camera made one abstemious about what photo to take, since film cost money, and developing the film cost money and time.  There were photos of events and persons that I simply wish I had, to help my memory along.

I am glad I won't be around in thirty years to live in the world that is coming.  

Midsummer comes and Midsummer goes

 

art by   Maggie Vandeerwhalle

How did it some to be a week into July!

This poem expresses my amazement:

Midsummer Song

by Clinton Scollard

Dawnings of amber and amethyst eves;

Soft in the south wind the laughter of leaves;

Breath of the poppy and death of the rose,--

Midsummer comes and midsummer goes!

Dapple on cheek of the apple and plum;

Honey-bees droning a die-away hum;

Swales in a shimmer and dales in a doze,--

Midsummer comes and midsummer goes!

Darting of dragon-fly, flutter of moth;

Barley in windrow and wheat in the swath;

Hush-song and thrush-song!--the mother-bird knows!--

Midsummer comes and midsummer goes!

Moonlight and noonlight all glamour and gleam;

Hillside and rillside a thrall to the dream;

Capture the rapture before the days close!--

Midsummer comes and midsummer goes!

 

In the fervors of July

 

art by Lucy Goldsmith

more poems and quotes I like:

"The linden, in the fervors of July,
Hums with a louder concert. When the wind
Sweeps the broad forest in its summer prime,
As when some master-hand exulting sweeps
The keys of some great organ, ye give forth
The music of the woodland depths, a hymn
Of gladness and of thanks."
-  William Cullen Bryant, Among the Trees 

 

"The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me."
-  James Russell Lowell 

 

art by Sarah Earl

"Nothing is more memorable than a smell.  One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains..."
-  Diane Ackerman

 

Downsizing

 

My friends are downsizing --- selling their large homes and moving into smaller cottages and condominiums.  About six different ones have done this over the last three years, friends from grade school, high school, and college, and more.  One particularly close friend is downsizing in preparation for such a move right now.   It's unnerving to me;  I blindly think that everyone and everything will stay the same.  

I just spent an hour looking for some photos I have of these various places, but I can't find them in the vast storage space of my files.  

I hope to return to the task.  But for now, just some poems and pictures:

art by Amanda Clark

A Green Thought

by Katherine Towers

Say instead it was an evening in head-high
bracken with its smell of dark and medicine.
Thinking green of the infecting fern                                

where you may crouch and not be known,
lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.
A bower is a dwelling place or once it was

a cage for pent-up singing birds. 
Look down to see the warp and weft of root.
All the world is in these clutches.                        

Look up to clock the fern’s drab underneath
blotched with spores you mustn’t breathe.
Breathe in deep. There’s nowhere else to live.

July 4 thoughts

 First of all, I am so glad that Joe Biden is our president now.  No more Trump and his lies and Twitter terrorism.

We still have many problems in this country, but we are so much better off than we were with that miserable man and his self-centered, passionate intensity.

We sang "America the Beautiful" as the closing song of Mass last evening in the parish, and I actually got choked up - I , who never cry.

We've had a run of gorgeous summer weather, too. 

And these lovely thoughts and pictures:

and this:

and this:

Last night of June

 I love this:

Painting:  Andrew Wyeth

And this:

 

A Blessing Poem

The peace of loneliness be with you

The peace of the far-from-home

The peace of small things intricately woven

like those moments in time that come

out of nowhere small and bright and eternal

The peace of loneliness be with you

and the patience of the stranger

who would not be known too soon

The peace of warm fires and sudden silences

and small gifts willingly given

and the peace of birds across a strange sky

singing in the early morning

and the peace of lakes and hidden ponds

and small streams silvering a hidden meadow

The peace of those who walk alone

knowing that in the heart of loneliness

their true home is hidden

waiting for that moment of silence and truth

in which to reveal itself

The peace of loneliness be with you

The peace of corner booths in coffee shops

by highways a thousand miles from home

The peace of old fabric and ancient wood

and the peace of stone which knows only itself

The peace of churches and silent houses

and the peace of grass newly mown

The peace of loneliness be with you

The peace of starlight on a distant road

The peace of trees and small animals beneath

the ground

The peace of all creatures far from home

The peace of loneliness be with you

for in your loneliness you are not alone

 

 

-- Albert Huffstickler

Here shall my heart find its haven of calm

 It's the first really blazing hot sunny June day, and the garden is glowing.

I love this poem:

June Sunset

Sarojini Naidu - 1879-1949

 

Here shall my heart find its haven of calm,

By rush-fringed rivers and rain-fed streams

That glimmer thro' meadows of lily and palm.

Here shall my soul find its true repose

Under a sunset sky of dreams

Diaphanous, amber and rose.

The air is aglow with the glint and whirl

Of swift wild wings in their homeward flight,

Sapphire, emerald, topaz, and pearl.

Afloat in the evening light.

 

A brown quail cries from the tamarisk bushes,

A bulbul calls from the cassia-plume,

And thro' the wet earth the gentian pushes

Her spikes of silvery bloom.

Where'er the foot of the bright shower passes

Fragrant and fresh delights unfold;

The wild fawns feed on the scented grasses,

Wild bees on the cactus-gold.

 

An ox-cart stumbles upon the rocks,

And a wistful music pursues the breeze

From a shepherd's pipe as he gathers his flocks

Under the pipal-trees.

And a young Banjara driving her cattle

Lifts up her voice as she glitters by

In an ancient ballad of love and battle

Set to the beat of a mystic tune,

And the faint stars gleam in the eastern sky

To herald a rising moon.

 

art by Valerie Greeley

and this:

by Hafen John