NB. Today is my "day off." No classes today at the seminary. Cleaning, laundry, errands, and an afternoon of catching up on reading that mountain of poetry that threatens to topple over and crush me!
Below, a taste of what I'm reading. . .
Private and Profane
By Marie Ponsot
From loss of the old and lack of the new
From failure to make the right thing do
Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
From words not the word, from a feckless voice
From poetic distress and from careless choice
Exclude our intellects, James Joyce.
From genteel angels and apostles unappalled
From hollywood visions as virgins shawled
Guard our seeing, Grünewald.
From calling a kettle an existential pot,
From bodying the ghost of whatever is not,
John save us, 0 most subtle Scot.
From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod
From eating the pease and rejecting the pod
Wolfgang keep us, lover of God.
Couperin come with your duple measure
Alter our minds against banal pleasure.
Dürer direct with strictness our vision
Steady this flesh toward your made precision.
Mistress of accurate minor pain,
Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane.
From pretending to own what we secretly seek,
From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek,
Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek.
From ignorance of structural line and bone
From passion not pointed on truth alone
Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone.
From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son;
From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One;
From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.
That zeal for free will get us in deep,
That the chance to choose be the one we keep
That free will steel self in us against self-defense
That free will repeal in us our last pretense
That free will heal us
Jeanne d’Arc, Job, Johnnie Skelton,
Jehan de Beauce, composer Johann,
Dark John Milton, Charter Oak John,
Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt,
Leap, leap between us and the easy out;
Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go;
Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.
".
. .divide us from cheap-got doubt. . ." Excellent! If there's a
phrase that aptly describes our corrupted postmodern reason-addled
media culture, this is it. So certain are we of our doubt that doubt
comes easily, cheaply. Such doubt is as useless as cheap grace.
I'm
thinking of René Descartes and his hard-won doubt. And David Hume and
all that he abandoned in an honest pursuit of knowing full and well.
Even when they are wrong, they are honestly wrong. Their errors came
with sacrifices, real oblations offered to Reason. Not the tacky
trinkets postmodern minds throw at their ideological idols to assuage
their fetish-guilt.
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