Audio: The Waste Land Read by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins

I must tell the world about this recording.  It’s a BBC production of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Waste Land read by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins.  It is not only the best reading of The Waste Land that I have ever heard—and I’ve heard a few—but it might be the best reading of any poem of considerable length that I have ever heard.  Run, don’t walk, to this BBC site and, not just listen to, right click and save the recording to your computer.  I don’t know how long the BBC will keep this available to the general public.  Many of their recordings become CDs that you will have to purchase.  If you have an interest in literature, you will want this forever.

 First, I must give a hat tip to Joseph Susanka of the blog Summa This, Summa That for bringing itto my attention. 

Second, read along with this hyper linked with split screen notes, internet posting of The Waste Land.  One of the things that make this poem hard to understand is the many cultural and literary allusions, both explicit and furtive, that lend meaning to the line and to the larger themes.  The notes and hyper links help identify and clarify the allusions.

The Waste Land (readthe Wikipedia entry) is the single most important poem in English (possibly in the world but I can’t speak for other languages) of the 20^th century.  I’m not going to expound on the poem here.  I’ll save that for next year (my readings have already been planned for this year) where I plan to post several detailed blogs that will provide my thoughts and understanding of the poem.  For now, let me say that the poem emerged from the horror that took Europe from World War I (the poem was written in 1922 but was worked on for several years prior), the culture (especially the loss of religious faith) that developed during and as a result of the war, and the fragmentation from the western historical identity.  WWI became a fracture point between modernism and a historical past.

 

The introduction provided by poets Jackie Kay, Matthew Hollis, Sean O’Brien and the former Arch Bishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is interesting, though not all that penetrating.  Several points they bring up may need a little elucidation.  One is the motif of multiple voices within the poem.  The multiple voices is the key aesthetic of the poem and reflects the theme of fragmentation, the apparent lack of coherence.  When a work of art’s aesthetics are integral to the theme, that’s when greatness is achieved.  No one did it better than Dante in The Divine Comedy and why I consider that the single greatest work of literature ever produced.  But Eliot does it here too.  I would say that Eliot is the Dante Alighieri of the 20^th century.

Another obscure point in the introduction is the reference to the poets Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in relationship to The Waste Land.  Ezra Pound, also a great and influential modernist poet, was Eliot’s friend, and he edited the original Waste Land manuscript.  He didn’t add any lines, but he did cut a lot of extraneous passages that clarified and crystallized the poem.  The original manuscript would not have been the great poem it has turned out to be, and Eliot recognized it.  The poem is dedicated to Pound: “For Ezra Pound/ il miglior fabbro” (Italian for “the better craftsman”). 

The William Carlos Williams reference is harder to explain.  He too is a great modernist poet, but he hated (and that’s not too strong a word) Eliot’s style and a lesser degree his themes.  Williams, who wrote in the Walt Whitman tradition of poetry, was a very harsh critic of Eliot.  The allusions and the heavily cultural identity of Eliot’s poetry was anathema to Williams.  By the way, the other great poet of the early modernist period, Wallace Stevens, kind of splits the difference from the Eliot (with Pound)/Williams spectrum of modernist style.  There must be a book on the relationships between Eliot, Pound, Carlos Williams, and Stevens—the four great modernist poets, all Americans by the way—but if there isn’t it would make for a great PhD thesis.  I think I would explore that myself if I were to ever go for a PhD.  [Disclosure: I do have a Master’s Degree in English Literature.]

What was remarkably missing from the BBC introduction was pointing out how central to the poem is sexuality.  The crisis of modernity, as portrayed in the poem, is the severing of sexuality with the divine.  The operative word is sterility, sexuality without love, without birth, without regeneration.  So much of the poem deals, both direct and implicit, with an unholy sexuality that has resulted from that severed relationship.  Loose sexuality, meaningless and loveless sexuality, abortion, rape all figure in the poem.  The several song allusions scattered about the poem are from songs of his day that had sexual innuendo of a vulgar nature.  Would Eliot, with today’s sexual music, today’s hookup culture, today’s millions of abortions, feel he was prescient or be further shocked?  I don’t know.  We are still in a waste land. 

Let me give a couple of my favorite passages.  This passage is a voice that I take to be that of God speaking:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?  Son of man, 

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A  heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 

And the dry stone no sound of water.  Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
(ll. 19-30)

 

And then towards the end, the rain over the wasteland finally comes in a redemptive baptism of water:

 

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light  

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

  In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico co co rico   

In a flash of lightning.  Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

(ll.  377-94)

 

Listen to Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins perform the poem.  I was skeptical before hearing it that two voices, a man’s and a woman’s, would sound correct.  After listening to it, I think for many reasons it’s inspired.  I can’t rave enough about it.

Music Tuesday: Refuge For You by Annie Karto

Back on May 20th right after the first of two tornadoes to hit Oklahoma in the span of a week, this one causing its powerful destruction in the city of Moore, my friend and fellow blogger at J's Cafe Nette, Jeanette put up a blog post in sympathy for all those effected. 

The next day it was with great surprise that the Catholic Contemporary singer and songwriter, Annie Karto stopped by that blog to offer a prayer and post a link to one of her songs, "Refuge For You."  I was in complete shock, and I think my reply to her was rather overly gushing in adoration.  Now I don't get excited when I see a celebrity in real life, but this one caught me by surprise.  At first I didn't even think it was really her, but after thinking about it, I don't see any reason to discount her. 

In honor of her stopping by, I'm going to post that very song she linked.  I do have a couple of her albums, and I did post her song on Divine Mercy a few weeks back.  She's got a very delicate voice, like a cicada wing, transparent and gentle.  I certainly recommend her music.  I suspect I'll be posting more of her works. 

Thank you Annie for stopping by, and of course for your blessed music.

Matthew Monday: Father’s Day Weekend , Two Quick Takes

Well here are two stories that show that I might not be the best father in the world.

Take 1:

Saturday Matthew woke up with red spots all over his face and body.  I was the first to notice it.  I told my wife to look at it and she took his temperature.  We suspected mumps or chicken pox.  He had no fever.  I told my wife he needs to go see a doctor nonetheless.  Matthew started whining.

“I don’t want to go to the doctor,” he cried.

“You need to,” I said.

“He doesn’t have fever,” my wife put up the opposing rationale.

“Mommy, I don’t want to go to the doctor,” Matthew appealed.

“We don’t know what this is.  It doesn’t look right.”  I replied to my wife.

 “Mommy, I don’t want a shot.”

“You’re not going to get a shot,” my wife reassured him.

“Mommy I don’t want any shots.” 

This back and forth between them went on for a few times.  Finally in my full ogre father persona I said, “Hush up.  If the doctor says you need a shot, you’re going to get one.”

“No, no, no!” he screamed.  “I don’t want a shot.

I got on the phone and called the doctor’s office and got us in for 12:30. 

 “No, mommy, no, I don’t want to go.  I don’t want a shot.”

My wife tried to tell him he wasn’t going to get a shot.  His whining was just too much.  I took my pointing index finger and simulating a needle poked him in the leg and said “shot.”  That’s when he really cried and my wife said something nasty to me. 

“Come on,” she said to him.  We’ll call grandma and have her come with us.”  After a little more reassuring Matthew finally said, “Oh alright.”  But then he pointed his finger at me and loudly said, “But Daddy doesn’t come.  No daddy.”

LOL!!! 

[To conclude this story the doctor said it was probably related to the fever he had last week (I blogged it here) and it was nothing to worry about.  Still I have to say that the diagnosis wasn’t satisfying.  What exactly was this?  My wife posted it on FaceBook and her cousin replied that her daughter gets that all the time after taking antibiotics.  It goes away in 3-5 days.  Now that made sense, but now I worry about whether I have a good pediatrician.  She’s very experienced and highly recommended, but why didn’t she tell us this?]

Take 2:

I wanted to take Matthew to the zoo for Father’s Day, but unfortunately the weather was expected to rain and with Matthew with all his spots on his body we figured let’s stay home and do something.  My wife suggested we “go camping” in his room.  It was a pretend camping.  She set up a structure with sheets over it to crawl into as a tent.  We used a battery powered lantern to pretend it was the campfire, and we had these two (not exactly sure how to describe them) light sabers that lit up as sticks to pretend we were roasting marshmallows.  We ate a few “marshmallows” and then I said let’s go into the tent and tell scary stories.

Ok, we crawled under and I thought about a story about a man who buys a house and he hears a cat screech every night.  I think I must have merged a couple of different Edgar Allan Poe stories to come up with this on the spot.  Well, the man investigates every corner of the house and can’t find the cat.  He goes through all the closets and the basement and nothing.  He goes to sleep and he hears it again.  He goes through the house (and I take Matthew through the closets and basement again) and still finds nothing.  Finally he just goes to sleep but every night the same thing.  The cat screeches and the man concludes it’s a ghost cat.  Matthew then volunteered, “Maybe the cat was outside?”  Smart boy with good visual skills I thought.  Well, the man looked out the window and still no cat.

This goes on for a long time and finally the man gets scared and leaves the house to live in a hotel.  After a while he’s running out of money and needs to go back home.  So he comes home but the cat screeched is gone.  No more.  (Mind you, I’m making this up on the fly.)  After a long time he decides to get  married, and the wife comes to live with him.  That first night the cat screech is back.  “Wheeeow.”  What’s that she asks?  Oh no, the cat is back.  And so the wife goes investigating the house, all the rooms, the closets, and the basement.  Nothing.  And the cat keeps screeching. 

This goes on for a few nights.  Finally the wife says I hear it inside the wall.  The cat is inside the wall!  We have to cut a hole in the wall.  So they get a saw and they cut a big hole in the wall.  The man is scared but the wife is not.  He tells her to look in the hole.  She sticks her head and looks back and forth, back and forth and sees nothing.  So the man looks in the hole, and that’s when I took my hands and formed a cat’s claw and clutched Matthew in the face, screeching “Wheaooow.”

And that’s when Matthew jumped out of his skin and screamed!  LOL!!  He screamed and started to cry.  I had to take him out of the “tent” and hold him to let him know it wasn’t real. 

So no kudos for Father’s Day.  I’m not sure I was that good a father this weekend.

Cicadas on Staten Island

On Staten Island, cicadas only make their presence every seventeen years.  I had no idea they were native to this place when I first moved here.  I had heard of cicadas in poetry, but when I came across one on a page I read right over it as another of the million insects I had no real knowledge of.  There is the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus, a musician who is granted eternal life by the Aphrodite but who forgets to give him eternal youth with eternal life, and so forever grows older and older until he is transfigured into a cicada.   I knew the insect were associated with music or sound or such but I had no idea when in 1996 they came out.  I was overwhelmed with the sound.  I went out to learn about these creatures, which after birth hibernate for seventeen years (less in other parts of the world) and come out to sing their mating song and then die.  And then not heard of again for seventeen years. 

2013 is my second cicada cycle.  I have to say I was disappointed at first this year.  It seemed like a dud of a cicada year, but this has been an unusual spring, cold and rainy.  I remembered from the previous time the sound being louder than an orchestra.  This year for a while it sounded like tweets.  The newspapers had written them off as they write off losing politicians or injured or aging athletes.  Apparently the weather delayed the cicada peak, and so they have been in full song now for two weeks.  I can’t say they are as loud as in 1996, but either their habitat has shrunk or the weather has staggered their lives for a more muted crescendo. 

Staten Island, despite being part of New York City, still has a good portion of green area, not just as parks but as natural wooded habitat.  It’s protected as part of the Staten Island Greenbelt, a preserved natural landmark that keeps kinship to our past and is more than three times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park.  It’s ideal for the cicadas if not to thrive to at least survive.  They must have been at one time throughout the land masses that comprise New York City.  Over in Brooklyn where I grew up I had never heard them or of them.  I assume they’ve been pushed out of the city, though I wonder if in some of the other large parks they may still subsist.

The past few weekends in the early mornings when I take the dog out for an extended walk, I hear their choric chant, a rhythmic mantra of “ahhh—uum, ahh—uum, ahh—uum.”   The Greenbelt woods are just a couple of blocks from my house, and as I walk up to the perimeter the sound doubles in intensity.  How do people that live right here deal with this, I wonder?  Scattered on the street are a score of dead or dying cicadas.  Their wings are transparent, like angel’s wings.  A host of them is flying, ungainly and bumbling, out of the woods and into trees, houses, and parked cars.  They are klutzy flyers; one flies into my head, and I watch him collapse to the ground like a stalled airplane falling out of the sky.  He is on his back, wings and legs flailing, trying to flip himself over as if he were a tortoise.  The dog approaches him with caution, extending her neck and bringing her nose to him.  He is buzzing.  Up close his buzz is conspicuous to the whole.   They are harmless; they don’t bite nor sting.  I bend down and with my flinger flip him over so that he stumbles to his legs and regains flight. 

There is a feeling of pathos for these little creatures.  As insects go, they are not ugly.  Actually I find them gawkishly cute, sort of like the chubby shy girl in class who has a handsome look to her.  They buzz and stumble, gather and disperse, blossom and die.  They live too short a life.  Their sonorous chant, their dead bodies on the ground, the fact that they are defenseless creatures that harm no one, the sense that they will not return for another seventeen years like clockwork, like from a divine command, makes this moment feel holy.  I mutter a Glory Be and walk the dog home.

Here are a couple of educational videos on cicadas.

 

 

 

 

 

Faith Filled Friday: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

This hymn never caught my attention until last night while working out at the gym and listening to my religious music play list on my ipod.  Yes, I listen to religious music while working out!  And I've got 844 songs on that play list, and throughout the grunts and heavy breathing of the workout I feel God's grace with heavenly prayer.  Singing hymns as St. Augustine says is praying twice.

Colin Raye does a magnificent job singing it.  That's the version I have that came up on the play list.  Unfortunately his version is not on Youtube, so I can't post it here, but you can hear 30 seconds worth on Amazon here.  It's most definitely worth 99 cents but actually get the entire album, His Love Remains.  Every song on there is a brilliant version of a classic hymn.  I recommend it.

According to Wikipedia this hymn is ancient:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence is an ancient chant of Eucharistic devotion based on words from Habakkuk 2:20, "Let all the earth keep silence before him". The original was composed in Greek as a Cherubic Hymn for the Offertory of the Divine Liturgy of St James in the fourth century AD, with local churches adopting arrangements in Syriac.

The fourth century is 1800 years ago!

The best version I could find off Youtube was this by Robert Kochis, also a very beautiful version.  Ignore that last twenty seconds at the end of the video.  Not sure why it's there, but I really wanted to keep this version. 

What's different on the Colin Raye version is that unlike most of the versions on Youtube which feature a piano as the principle accompaniment, Raye's version uses a violin, and I think it complements wonderfully.  I must say that a male vocal contrasted against a solo violin really captures me.  There's an added tension which I can't explain that a piano just doesn't provide.

Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Lord Most High!

 

Free E-Book: Five Lessons from the Carmelite Saints That Will Change Your Life.

I thought many of the people who follow my blog might be interested in this free E-Book: Five Lessons from the Carmelite Saints That Will Change Your Life. 

The author is Connie Rossini and she blogs at Contemplative Homeschool.  I haven't read the book, so I can't give a review, but I have frequently visited Connie's blog, which I've found informative and up beat.  Plus how can you go wrong with a free book.

I decided to buy the Kindle version for 99 cents.  It's convenient for me since I have a Kindle and find it convenient to store books on it.  I told Connie she could keep the royalties, but not spend it all in one place. ;)

Matthew Monday: Strep Throat

Matthew has been remarkably healthy since he’s come home to us.  In the two and a half years he’s only had a couple of mild instances of fever, and nothing else.  These past few days he got strep throat. 

We sensed there was something going on in the middle of the night on Wednesday, going into Thursday morning.  He was in bed and I downstairs and I heard what sounded like crying sounds.  Of course that had to be Matthew so I went upstairs to his room and found him on the floor beside his bed crying.  At first I thought he had fallen out of bed, but he said he didn’t.  He asked if mommy was going to leave him, so I suspected he had a bad dream.  He kind of nodded he had a bad dream and went back to sleep.

My wife also had walked in to his room in the early morning to find him crying.  At school Thursday he wasn’t right, she said.  He didn’t feel he had fever, but something was going on.  He kept whining and wanting his mother.  That night he finally got a mild fever.  My wife handled it with children’s Tylenol.  It helped but boy was he whiny and crying.  He normally attaches himself to me when I’m home, but not this time.  It was mommy for everything.    My wife called the doctor’s office and they had an opening right then.  She got him over and the doctor diagnosed Strep Throat, and he said it was going to get worse before getting better.  He prescribed antibiotics.

He was right.  Fever went over 104F (40C) and Matthew was either crying non-stop or laying on the couch like a half dead animal.  We tried to get him to drink fluids and all he wanted was chocolate milk.  I don’t think that was a good idea.  I tried to sooth him at one point and the chocolate milk expectorated out of his mouth as if it were a garden hose.  It was a whoosh, like that child in the vomit movie scene in The Exorcist, only it was chocolate brown instead of green.  And guess where it propelled to?  You got it, all over my shirt…lol.  Yuck.  But what are daddies for?

 

Well, at least it didn’t hit me in the face.

 

The antibiotic worked marvelously.  His fever came down that night and then gone in the morning.  He spent the weekend inside and he still whined for his mommy the whole time.  But the fever never came back. It passed remarkably quick.  So even with this illness, he seems remarkably healthy, healthier than I was as a child.