April Is The Cruelest Month—Blogging the Waste Land Part 4
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 17, 2012
Believe me I was tempted to do a blog entry on the title of the first section, The Burial of the Dead—but I know there is someone out there saying: Get on with it already! How many blog entries can you post before you even get to the first line of the poem?! So I’ll let that go with a note that the title of this section is from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which begins
I AM the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. John 11: 25-26.
Keep those words in mind as you read because I believe that the the motif of resurrection is as strong as the theme of death. No, this is not a poem of despair; but the hope is there even if it is tentative and elusive.
And so at last we begin. The poem opens with one of my favorite lines in any poem:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
In that first sentence there is a lot to unpack. First, is the reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which begins:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
10 That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
15 And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
Ok, ok. I just had to stick it in in the Middle English because I took a class in Medieval Poetry in college and we had to read selections of The Canterbury Tales and all of Troilus and Criseyde in the original and so that’s how it always sounds in my own memory. But I’ll be nice and give it to you in a contemporary English translation:
When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.
In Chaucer April pierces March’s drought with sweet showers. Eliot seizes on that verb “pierce” and in his poem April is cruel not sweet. Eliot’s narrator is a sort of negative image of Chaucer’s—where Chuaucer rejoices in Spring’s abundant life which culminates in a longing for pilgrimage and renewal, Eliot’s narrator focuses on death and longs for winter’s sleep. He doesn’t want memory and desire to be aroused. He fears change and clings to his small comfortable life.
The confluence of lilacs and death calls to mind Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, another poem that sings about the return of spring and of a journey. In Whitman’s poem the journey is that of Lincoln’s corpse:
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
.
Why does Eliot choose this poem to allude to? I think very likely it is that image of the coffin and the journey of the corpse. But also other thematic parallels come to mind. Memory is a theme in Whitman’s poem, the way the lilacs’ yearly blooming stirs up the memory of Lincoln’s funeral in the previous April. There are more allusions to Whitman’s elegy to come—a major figure in Whitman’s poem is the thrush, which will appear in The Waste Land as well.
So much for the first sentence. As you can see it is packed. But put aside the allusions to Chaucer and Whitman for a minute and enjoy the music of the lines as well. It can be tempting to get so caught up in the treasure hunt of tracking down Eliot’s allusions that I forget to appreciate the lyrical quality of the words themselves.
I love the enjambment. The emphasis is on the verbs: breeding, mixing, stirring.
I think that’s enough to chew on for now. Tell me what you think as you read these opening lines.
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Beowulf!
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 15, 2012
This is so cool. This week I stumbled upon these videos of a live performance of Beowulf in the original Old English, accompanied by Anglo Saxon harp! (With subtitles in modern English.) It is so cool. This is the way Beowulf was meant to be experienced. Not a text read in a book but an entertainment. Benjamin Bagby, who does it has a great voice and really acts out the drama. His musical accompaniment is wonderful too.
Opening Lines:
Grendel’s Ambush:
Battle:
An interview with Benjamin Bagby:
The website for the Beowulf performance is here with a lot of background information about the project. Evidently he hasn’t developed a performance of the entire epic to music, only parts of it. At some point he hopes to do an entire 5 hour performance.
You can buy a video of the whole performance for about $30. I’m thinking it will probably be finding its way into our library at some point.
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Chanting the Psalms
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 15, 2012
I don’t listen to the Divine Office podcast very often; but I have the app on my phone and sometimes when I can’t find a chunk of time to sit and pray I can at least listen to the office on the go. The other night, for example, my sister put on Evening Prayer while I was coking dinner. Although I only heard about 80% of it because of interrupting kids, still it was very nice to be able to pray while I worked.
But this morning it was a special treat. I played the podcast on my phone as I got myself and the children dressed for Mass and was very pleasantly surprised to hear them chanting the psalms instead of the usual recitation. This is how the psalms are meant to be heard! I’m guessing that they only do it for Sunday’s office because I’ve never heard it before; but perhaps someday they may move to chanting all the hours? I can hope.
Daria has been writing about chanting the psalms over at her blog. As I told her, I’ve been wanting to learn to chant the psalms for a long time; but I don’t read music and don’t think I’m likely to learn anytime soon. I know musical people tell me it’s not that hard to learn to read chant notation; but I just don’t think it’s something I’m going to be able to pick up. The beauty of chant is suppose d to be that you don’t have to be musically trained in order to learn it. I think I could learn the chants by ear if I heard them often enough. So here’s hoping that more resources become available for people like me .
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Blogging The Waste Land Part 3—Epigraph and Dedication
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 14, 2012
This was going to be a quick blog entry, just to address the two short bits of text that appear before the main text of the poem: the epigraph and the dedication. But of course once I started digging I uncovered more and more things to say about these two brief tags. These are the kinds of things you can skip over very easily and yet I think they do add to the total reading experience. In any case, I’m the kind of reader who would be driven crazy by not understanding that Latin quotation. (I took four years of Latin in high school precisely because the habit of so many writers to throw out lines in Latin.)
The Latin (and Greek) of the epigraph translates:
I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her ‘What do you want?’ She answered, ‘I want to die.’
It comes from The Satyricon by Petronius a Roman work of fiction that survives only in fragmentary form (another fragment!). Wikipedia says: “The surviving portions of the text detail the misadventures of the narrator, Encolpius, and his lover, a handsome sixteen-year-old boy named Giton. Throughout the novel, Encolpius has a hard time keeping his lover faithful to him as he is constantly being enticed away by others.” At first, I didn’t think the greater story of the Satyricon was very important as the line Eliot quotes here is something of a conversational aside; but reading Wikipedia’s summary made me see another connection. It ties in with one of the poem’s major themes: infertility and wounded sexuality. The epigraph also introduces the themes of death and fragmentation.
The figure of the Sibyl here points us in several directions. First, the Sibyl was the guide who lead Aeneas through Hades in the Aeneid. When coupled with the dedication, which is a quote from Dantes’s Purgatorio, and the title of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead”, you get the general idea that we are meant to be thinking about death and journeys into the underworld. The Waste Land then is a type of the heroic journey to the underworld, a major theme in epic poetry. This theme which runs through The Waste Land is one of the reasons I think of it as an epic poem.
Death to the Sibyl, to whom Apollo granted long life but not youth, is not something to be feared but a release that she fervently longs for. For Aeneas visiting the realm of the dead is a means of accessing secret knowledge about the future of Rome. For the Christian death in baptism is a means of accessing eternal life in Christ.
An aside, it occurs to me that all the great epic heroes who venture into the realms of the dead are types of Christ, the true hero of the true myth and their epic journeys are echoes of his harrowing of hell after his death on the cross and before his resurrection on the third day.
Second, the figure of the Sibyl points to the theme of fragmentation. Her prophecies were recorded on loose leaves of paper which then had to be arranged by the reader. The arrangement obviously affected the interpretation of the prophecies. Again, this seems to be Eliot pointing to his method: the reader must piece together the prophetic message from the bits and pieces of various texts that form the poem. The Sibyl is not the only prophet or seer we will encounter in the poem.
Finally, I wanted to note that Eliot’s original draft has a different epigraph, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Ezra Pound discouraged Eliot from using, saying that Conrad didn’t carry enough weight, wasn’t classical enough. The lines were from the end of the novel when the narrator, Marlow, has travelled up the Congo and found the dying Mr Kurtz:
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—
‘The horror! The horror!’
Again, you see the theme of death. Interesting that here too you see Kurtz as a visionary, a sort of prophet. What he sees, we do not know except for his reaction: “The horror! The horror!” You also get the theme of a journey with Marlowe’s voyage up the river. The river plays a major role in Eliot’s poetic imagination, especially in the Four Quartets, but rivers are important in The Waste Land as well.
And then there’s the dedication:
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.
The Italian means “the better craftsman” or “the better poet”. The words were spoken to Dante by the spirit of a poet who was in Purgatory. Pound was very influential in the revision of the poem. Some major changes, the title not being the least of them, resulted from his commentary. I’m not a huge Pound fan myself; but I have to acknowledge that Pound’s revisions are what pushes the poem from good to great.
Evidently this dedication was not found in the first printing but Eliot dedicated a copy of the poem to Pound with these words and they found their way into a later edition. As I’ve noted previously the Italian is a quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy. It isn’t at all coincidental that a line from the Purgatorio should find it’s way to the beginning of the poem, Eliot clearly has DAnte in mind in several places in The Waste Land. My own theory about Eliot and Dante is that Eliot’s entire corpus of works when read chronologically seems to be thematic echo of the Commedia. The Waste Land certainly seems to take place in an infernal landscape, in the realm of the dead or of the spiritually dead, or of those who wish they were dead.
This “Exploring The Waste Land” site has a nice (if slightly outdated in terms of webpage design) presentation of the poem with several frames that allow you to see hyperlinked notes, definitions, translations, cross references, texts of works alluded to, commentary, and questions to the reader. It’s very handy and nicely laid out.
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Quick Takes—Childish Things
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 14, 2012
1. Anthony has gone through a language explosion this week. Suddenly the baby is really, really trying to communicate. In addition to saying Mama, Dadda, Bella, Ben, Tree, up, and ppppllbbtt (poopy diaper) I have now thought I heard: no, other side (in reference to nursing), water, push (as in Ben pushed him), and several other things which I can’t remember right now. It isn’t super clear but clear enough that I’ll look up at Dom or Tree and say, “Did Anthony just say ____?” and they will reply, “I think so.” And in addition he’s started speaking long strings of babble that may be intended for words but I cannot understand at all. It reminds me very much of Sophie at an early age we were sure she was stringing together words but with such poor enunciation we had no idea what she was saying. She finally got frustrated at our inability to understand and stopped talking for a while. When she tried again it was much, slower. She worked on enunciating each word so we would get it. I think Anthony may be trying to say real words that he knows when he hears but can’t really form yet.
He also has a range of waves and hand gestures, some of which I can’t figure out. I’m not sure if there’s a consistent meaning or if he’s just trying to get my attention. There is one that seems to be a happy wave, one two-handed wave that seems very deliberate but I can’t quite interpret. And there’s an angry wave I saw today after I cruelly tried to feed him a piece of nasty roast chicken which was yucky, yucky, yucky, so that he had to spit it out and then wave his hands over it, rubbing it into the floor to make sure it was good and gone.
Oh and he’s learned how to clap, which is just the most delightful thing ever and made me realize exactly why the Psalmist writes about clapping your hands for joy. (Oh yes, I do sound just like a parody of a mom blogger that I just read but you know what, it’s funny because it is true. And I’m ok with that.)
Tonight Anthony was playing with Dom’s iPad, lifting the cover and letting it fall. Fascinating stuff. Then Dom confiscated it. And the boy threw a honest to God temper tantrum. High, piercing screams, arching back, yelling, kicking, slapping me. It was so funny I couldn’t but laugh and Dom and Tree were laughing too, which of course just made Anthony even more angry.
Also, Anthony is on the cusp of walking. He’s letting go and standing on his own for minutes at a time and cruising around with only a light touch to balance himself. And today I saw him actually take a step between two chairs. He really wants to walk so bad. I see him watching the big kids and wanting to run with them and frustrated that he can’t keep up. Poor guy.
2. Sophie has decided that she can’t go to the bathroom by herself. She cries and says she’s lonely. The other day I was sitting on the edge of the tub while she did her thing and asking her why she was so lonely when everyone else uses the bathroom without company. She confessed that she is scared a dinosaur is going to come into the bathroom. Then she told me that she had a scary dream about dinosaurs. So I told her that her guardian angel could take care of any dinosaur or other scary thing in her dreams, she just had to ask for help. That seemed to comfort her and a couple days later she told me she’d dreamed about her angel fighting a scary monster.
3. Bella has taken to asking a strange sort of leading question. She does it to me, to Dom, to Sophie most of all. Except it takes on a different character with Sophie than with me. Example: today she asked me if I was tired because the wind made me tired. Or She kind of makes a hypothesis about the way something is or the why of something and then presents her scenario to you for confirmation. She’s not so much gathering information as trying to get you to agree that her hypothesis is the correct one. She starts off with an a priori assumption about a situation and then asks leading questions to get you to agree to her assumptions. “You aren’t eating that right now because you don’t like it?” No, I’m not eating it becasue I don’t want it right now. “You aren’t eating it because it doesn’t taste good?” No, I just don’t want it right now. “Because it doesn’t taste good?”
But when she and Sophie are playing one of their imaginary games, the questions become a way for her to seize control of the game. Sophie says something about what one of the toys is doing and then Bella interjects, “Is it because she wants….” with some very elaborate scenario that couldn’t possibly be what Sophie originally had in mind. Sophie usually agrees reflexively. The other day my sister witnessed an interaction that has us both befuddled. Bella came up to where Sophie was playing by herself and asked if she could play. Sophie said she wanted to play be herself. The Bella asked some leading question that posited a scenario about the game Sophie was playing. Sophie brushed her off with a yes to get Bella to stop questioning her. Then Bella got mad and started crying. When questioned she said it was because Sophie had said whatever it was and that made her angry. But of course Sophie had said nothing of the sort, it was all Bella.
I wonder now if that isn’t what is so disturbing about the way she questions you about her hypotheses: it’s as if she’s trying to control the situation, to make reality conform to her mental model by sheer force of will. When her guess is wrong, it really disturbs her and so she keeps questioning, trying to find a way to phrase it so that you will agree with her statement.
4. Bella and Sophie have developed a fairly complex set of rules and terminology to go with their imaginary games. There are “one person” games or “two person” games, depending on whether one or the other feels like collaborating. “Are you playing a one person game or a two person game?”
When a game switches from being a one person game to a two person game, they refer to this as “popping”. One will say that she is going to “pop it to a two person game.” One day Tree saw Sophie jumping up and down and Bella questioning what she was going. Evidently she was trying to “Pop it to a five person game.”
Also, there is frequently occasion to “pause the game”. When either player needs a snack break or a bathroom break or has to comply with a parental request, the other will be requested to “pause the game.” Today I asked Bella to pick up something she’d left around and both girls started making a buzzing sound. When I asked about it they told me that the buzz was for the pause in the game.
5. Ben is staring to play games with Sophie (not so much with Bella, he gets too frustrated, especially when she gets pushy about how she thinks a game should go.) He’s got a great imagination and will play pretend games with the little people and his cars and trucks. Going to the grocery store and buying things. Going to the library. He’ll pretend that the cooler or a box is a train or a boat and get the girls to come ride on it with him.
The other day he put an apple on top of the jelly jar and said it was ice cream. When I said, Oh it’s ice cream? he replied, “I’m just ‘tending.”
He loves, loves, loves, the song about the monkeys jumping on the bed and sings it as he jumps on my bed. So I found him a board book of it for Christmas. That was as big a hit as the books about trucks.
Speaking of truck books, the boy has an uncanny ability to walk into the children’s section at the library and immediately go over to a shelf and find a truck book that he’s never seen before. I’m still putting down my bag and removing my coat and he’s already sitting at the table, flipping through his new find. I don’t know how he does it. It’s not memory because they are different books. Somehow he just knows where the books with cars and trucks are. Maybe it’s his guardian angel?
6. Ben is starting to be more affectionate toward Anthony. He will occasionally share a toy, give Anthony a hug or a kiss, try to tickle him. It is very sweet to see the two of them grapple with each other or romp with each other. They love to frolic on my bed (with supervision of course). Ben will play peek-a-boo with the curtain and Anthony giggles and giggles. Oh it melts my heart.
Though he does still push him over at least once a day. He expresses a sort of contrition as soon as you call him on anything he knows he’s not supposed to do, “I won’t.” Don’t push Anthony, Ben! “I won’t!”
7. Bella has been making a conscious effort to catechize Sophie. The other day I overheard her telling Sophie: “When you say, ‘No, Mama, I won’t use the potty,’ you’re saying “no” to Jesus.” She’s repeating a variant of what we’ve told her—a trickle-down of a homily from one of our favorite priests about saying yes to God; but it’s still funny.
The other day my sister took Ben and Sophie out for a trip to the mall but Bella opted to stay home with me. While Anthony napped and I made pumpkin bread she asked me to tell her everything I could think of about various saints. I recapped a bunch of anecdotes from Sigrid Undset’s biography of Catherine of Siena plus whatever I could recall about St Claire and stories from other saints too. She has a great desire to learn more about the saints. My parents sent a biography of Rose of Lima which we’re reading.
It’s fun to see her incorporating these stories into her play. I told her about a friar who came to visit St Catherine intending to prove her a fraud or heretic and leaving convicted because he owned too many books, nice furniture, etc. He gave away everything that he had that was excess and joined Catherine’s group of followers. So today I overheard them playing a game about friars giving away beds because they were too small.
She’s been consciously trying to be helpful around the house and with her sister and brothers. Of course, she has moods when she doesn’t want to be helpful and she can be as selfish and crabby as any small child. But it is the moments when she really tries to model her behavior on that of the saints that stand out. I can see that the stories are firing her imagination.
for more quick takes see Jen
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T.S. Eliot and the Last Crusade—Blogging the Wasteland Part 2
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 10, 2012
The full text of The Waste Land is here, if you want to follow along.
Yes, this is going to be an entire blog entry about the poem’s title. There is just so much to say before we even get to the main body of the text.
Already I’m grasping and fumbling for focus. Where to begin? Yes, focus has always been my weakness as a writer. When I fell in love with The Wasteland and wrote an essay on it in my freshman year I am positive it was a weak paper because I lacked focus. Still, what I chose to write on was the role of the Grail legend in the poem. To me the story of the grail was the key that unlocked the poem. So that is where I will start on this journey as well.
One of the things that makes The Waste Land so difficult is its density and fragmentation. The poem is made up of a series of either allusions to or direct quotations from other texts, poems, plays, operas, etc. Many are not even in English. It can be so overwhelming. (But then the Catholic liturgy is also intimidating to someone who has just stumbled in off the street.) Eliot’s technique of allusions makes the poem a kind of dense hypertext mosaic where each new line can contain a new reference to a different literary work. The poem is rather like one of those mosaic pictures where each panel is an entire picture in its own right. But as I will later show, there is a reason for this method. The method itself points to the meaning.
The Waste Land is like a treasure map and the title is the first clue. Once we understand that it is an allusion to a particular version of the Grail legend, then it tells us that we are on a quest. Yes, that’s right, as you read this poem you are setting out on the greatest of all quests: the Quest for the Holy Grail. That’s what I love about The Waste Land, it is a modern retelling of one of the greatest of all legends. From Monty Python, to Indiana Jones to Dan Brown, the quest for the grail continues to have a strong grip on the contemporary imagination. In The Wasteland, however, you will find neither King Arthur nor the knights of the Round Table. You will not find heroic crusaders or intrepid archaeologists. And no grotesque fantasies about the sacred feminine or claptrap about Mary Magdalene being the bride of Jesus. Instead, Eliot’s version of the grail legend draws on the legend of the Fisher King and is a little more obscure—but more about that anon.
Another thing that makes the poem difficult is the cacophony of voices. Eliot’s original working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”, a reference to a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend who reads the newspaper with different voices. The allusion suggests a means to make sense of the cacophony: there is a controlling narrator to the poem who is “doing” all the different voices. There is a consciousness that is creating meaning. He is stitching together the various pieces that make up the poem and forming them into a sort of patchwork quilt. He is a sort of pilot steering a course in the seeming storm of words and images. Yes, I’m mixing my metaphors dreadfully, but it’s hard to talk about the poem without making a metaphor salad.
Now back to the Fisher King…. The version of the grail myth that Eliot is alluding to in the title might not be familiar to the reader as it is from Perceval, an unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes. (An aside: it’s fascinating to note that Eliot chooses to base his poem on a version of the grail story that is a fragment, unfinished. Fragmentation is a major theme in the poem.) Though the story of the Fisher King does appear in modern form in the fabulous movie of that name directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Robin Williams—I highly recommend it. I’m going from memory here and not looking up the story but the basic gist is that a knight on a quest comes to a barren land that has been stricken by some kind of plague or famine. He goes to a castle whee he finds a king, fishing. He finds that the king of the land is also wounded and wasting away. There is some kind of mystical connection between the king’s illness (a wound in his leg or groin. infertility?) and the sickness that has infested his realm. Only the grail can heal the wounded king. The knight must find the grail and heal the king, which will then heal the land.
While the knight is dining at the king’s hall he is presented with a vision of a youth carrying a spear and a maiden carrying the grail. Here he makes a fatal error in that he doesn’t exhibit any curiosity about the strange vision and fails to ask any questions about what it means. So he fails in the quest and goes off to wander aimlessly. The asking of the questions is somehow key to finding out what the grail is and that is somehow key to healing the king and his land.
Eliot has stated that the story of the Fisher King is a part of the mythological backdrop behind his poem and this is one poem that demands that you reach beyond the bare words of the text and into the various works that the text alludes to. The poem casts the reader in the role of the questing knight. In order to understand the poem, you, the reader, are required to become the knight. You are required to ask the questions that will make sense of the fragments that Eliot lays out before you. You are required to do the hard work of stitching them together into a coherent picture, a patchwork quilt. You must exhibit curiosity, ask questions of the text, delve into the meaning behind the symbols that Eliot mysteriously parades before you. The poem’s very obscurity points to the meaning, the need to cease being a passive observer, to ask questions, to realize that perhaps you are as much in need of the grail as is the wounded king.
A great book on the subject of the Holy Grail is The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence by Mike Aquilina (I blogged about it very briefly here.) Aquilina maintains that the search for the grail is the search for the Real Presence of Christ. Frankly, I can’t see how this is even arguable. You can only imagine the Grail as something other than a symbol for Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist if you have divorced the legend from history and are reading it through a hermeneutic of suspicion. The plain meaning of the Grail has always been that it was the chalice that Christ used at the Last Supper. Sometimes it is also said to have caught Christ’s blood at the crucifixion. But of course to a Catholic sacramental imagination that is really a symbolic redundancy.
The Fisher King is an image both of Christ, the wounded king, the fisher of men, and also of humanity, wounded, in need of a savior. The act of fishing represents hope. Christ is often symbolized by a fish. Thus fishing can be seen as a representation of the search Christ. The Fisher King is a symbol of how the Body of Christ is wounded. The knight’s failure to ask questions speaks of our unwillingness to seek answers,our unwillingness to ask for healing. It speaks to me of my own situation, stuck in sin, avoiding confrontation with my own sinfulness, avoiding the confessional where I can confront that sin and have it washed away.
I could say so much more about this; but I think I’ll leave it at that for now. We will meet the Fisher King again in the poem. Keep him in mind as you read. He is part of a whole series of images that speak about the sacraments, especially the sacraments of baptism and of Eucharist.
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A Snow Story
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 10, 2012
Sometimes you read a book and immediately want to tell everyone all about it. It’s that good. Fortunately I have a blog.
I just read the most marvelous book that we got from the library last week, A Snow Story by Melvin J. Leavitt, illustrated by Jo Ellen McAllister Stammen. After we came home from the library it was dumped into the book basket and forgotten until I excavated it at Ben’s nap time today. I’d pulled it off the shelf because the title seemed seasonally appropriate and the cover intrigued me. Then when I peeked inside and saw something about Granddad writing poems in the snow with his boots I suspected this might be a book for us. Oh and it was. I kept having to pause because my voice kept catching. I may have even had to wipe away a few tears.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be in print anymore, though Amazon did have a few copies. I’ve already ordered one for us because it was that lovely. The illustrations are soft and wonderful and compliment the text perfectly. But oh it was the story that grabbed me. It’s about a dreamy boy named Johnny growing up on a farm with practical parents. Sometimes in January or February on the day after a big storm he goes out to the frozen lake and walks back and forth. When his mother asks what he was doing, he explains that he was writing a poem, “In the snow. With my boots.” The pattern continues with his wife and then his children and then his grandchildren asking what he is doing. His answer is the same every time. And then…. well, poems written in snow don’t last… or do they? I love the way this book speaks to the heart of what a poem is: a marvelous thing that sparks more wonders. Sometimes long after the words have faded, when you least expect it, the magic reappears and your heart leaps up.
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Epiphany Weekend
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 09, 2012
All aboard the breakfast train!
It’s been a long weekend—a good weekend; but long. and it’s not really over because Dom is taking the day off today. I had a quick takes post all done and ready to be published Saturday night but my computer ate it. So I’m just going to skip ahead and try to recap the whole weekend from Friday on in one massive omnibus post.
On Friday I had some last-minute Epiphany shopping to do. Santa brings the kids each a book or two and a couple of toys. Then Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandad (my parents) give them gifts at Epiphany. So I asked my sister to watch the big kids and I took Anthony with me and we hit a bunch of different stores. Most of the time with all four kids I only ever make one stop. Two very short ones at most. With the exigencies of meals and nap times and nursing and the added time of getting four little people ready and four little people in and out of car seats anything else just becomes unwieldy. So it was a treat just getting to go to places I don’t usually have time for and to only have one little body to buckle and unbuckle. We ended up at the mall that is right near Dom’s work so I called him up and asked him if he had lunch plans. He didn’t and so after Anthony and I had run our errands we met Dom at the nearby sushi buffet.
Anthony, my sweet traveling companion.
Yes, I had a real lunch date with my husband. Anthony is so quiet and calm that it was almost as if the two of us were alone. We were able to have real conversation without interruptions and not having to talk over the babble and giggles of three energetic preschoolers. I stuffed myself with miso soup and sushi and udon noodles and sesame chicken. Oh yum!
On Friday evening Bella surprised me by announcing that she wanted to learn how to vacuum. To understand how incredible this is, you have to understand how much Bella used to hate, loathe, and abhor the vacuum. She used to burst into hysterical tears when I turned it on. As a toddler she’d run from the room and slam the door behind her. Even as recently as a few months ago she’d go to her room and shut the door when I ran it. And now she’d decided she wanted to run it. I thought it was probably too heavy for her; but if she was so eager I was willing to let her have a go. Amazingly, once I’d plugged it in and showed her how to work it, she did a wonderful job, even moving boxes and lifting the rug to vacuum under them. It was a dream come true.
Bella, stripped to her undershirt because she got overheated while running around. January 7 folks! The only way you can tell this is winter is the lengths of the shadows at 2 pm.
On Saturday the weather was like summer. 61 degrees! The girls were running around in the backyard barefoot and in short sleeves. Dom pushed Anthony and Sophie in the swings and I sat on the back step and chatted with my parents on the phone. Then we let Anthony crawl around on the grass. He was so gleeful to be outside and mobile. He shrieked and clapped, lifted fistfuls of leaves and grass in his fists and even shoved some into his mouth. After he’d sat and explored for twenty minutes or so he began to crawl around. There was something so determined, almost manic, in his head-down rush through the grass, crackling dried leaves under his hands and knees. He was muddy and cold but happy when he finally gave in and crawled over to be picked up. Poor Ben napped through the whole backyard extravaganza. By the time he woke everyone had come in and the sun was setting.
Also on Saturday the kids asked to make gingerbread men and so I had a flash of inspiration and decided we could make gingerbread kings in honor of the feast of Epiphany. We cut out gingerbread men and then I stuck on points to the tops of their heads to make crowns of a sort. Good enough for my crew. They each got three kings plus a star and a present to decorate with currants. Ben later decided he didn’t like the strong tasting cookies but the girls were very pleased with their creations.
Today we got up and went to Mass and then came home to open presents. There was a big pile from Dom and I and another huge pile of Amazon boxes from my parents. I wish I’d got pictures but I didn’t. The kids mostly got books. The only exception was a twin sized quilt for Sophie who keeps waking up several times every night wanting her blankets tucked over her again. We’re hoping a big quilt will be easier for her to put back on for herself and maybe we’ll get more sleep. Also, Ben and Anthony got a toy tug boat for the bath tub. I’ll post book lists later of these plus the books they got at Christmas.
Dom got me a couple of books plus a beautiful statue of Mary and baby Jesus that I’d put on my wishlist. My mom gave me more books and a pair of down-filled slippers and some smart touch gloves. They’re knit with some kind of metal threads so that all ten fingers can be used with my iPhone. So cool! I gave Dom a new baseball cap—he’s been wanting one—plus a knit winter cap with a Patriots logo that was on sale at the store where I got the ball cap. It is handy when husbands tell you exactly what they want and where to get it. My sister got a set of Father Barron’s Catholicism dvds. We all watched the first episode and part of a second. Wow! They are really spectacular. I’ll probably be writing more about them.
I love how Jesus is nestled against Mary’s shoulder.
We did a video chat with my parents and brothers (and my brother Tim’s finace). Not much communication happened, in fact I ended up with a headache. But the kids love to see everyone and everyone loves to see the kids so it’s worth the chaos.
Then tonight we went out for dinner because I’d neglected to buy anything special for today and no one really wanted chicken and no one felt like cooking anyway. We went to this fabulous Indian/Nepalese restaurant called Fishtail that just opened near us. So very good. A little odd that they had a huge copy of a Winslow Homer piece as a mural on one wall. The food was really some of the best I’ve had. The kids survived on rice, naan, and tandoori chicken. They also really liked the rice pudding dessert. Anthony mostly had Cheerios but also gnawed on a piece of naan. It felt kind of appropriate, after all the kings did come from the East. Certainly it was festive and made it feel like a real holiday. When the girls are old enough to really help int he kitchen then it might be a treat to have big, home-cooked meals on holidays but right now it’s just not something I can pull off.
I think that this year the one resolution I am going to make it to learn how to be realistic about what I can and can’t do with four children under six. I have all these lofty ideas and ambitions but the reality is that I just don’t have all that much free time. My life is one long series of interruptions and everything takes a back seat to making sure the children are fed and clothed and the household reasonably maintained. Schooling Bella is something that happens when I think about it—though the girl is sharp as can be and is always learning even if we’re not doing formal lessons. I’m learning to make a sort of truce with chaos and mess and never really getting the house to a satisfactory level of clean and tidy. I’m learning to make a sort of truce with the fact that I can’t spend as much time being a creative cook, doing crafty projects with the kids, sewing, reading, playing, napping, or any one of a number of other things I wish I was doing more of. This is life right now and it’s not going to change. I need to find the right balance still, but I’m starting to recognize my need to make much more sever compromises than I’d ever thought I’d find myself making. And I suppose that is a part of the adventure of motherhood.
At least I can drink a little wine, beer, or port now and then. And lace my cocoa with a bit of amaretto or kahlua.
Today was a rather hard day. I forgot last night that mulligatawny soup has lentils in it. Lentils and beans are not friendly to my dear Anthony. I’ve had to remove them from my diet completely while he’s nursing. Even though I really like beans, I do not like having a baby who screams for hours in the middle of the night and writhes and kicks my stomach black and blue. Oh no I do not like it at all. Poor little fellow was so so miserable. And once I realized what the problem was I felt so bad. Evidently Anthony does not know that beans are good and cheap. Nope, no beans for me until he weans. Thank God Dom was home today. It meant I got a little tiny nap with Anthony (he wouldn’t sleep unless I was lying down with him.) And it means things didn’t fall apart completely. Dom made dinner and cleaned up after accidents and helped keep cranky kids in line.
Today we also took down the tree and removed the wreath from the front door and boxed up all the ornaments and decorations. The house feels sad. I think this week I need to give everything a good cleaning to lift my spirits. Still, I suppose in a way it’s nice not to have the packing up looming over me as one more task to be done. And I’m grateful to Dom for doing the bulk of the tree un-trimming. And now back to ordinary time. Goodbye, Christmas, it feels like we hardly knew you this year.
Sophie says everyone is having Midnight Mass in the stable. I’m going to miss the antics of the stable.
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The Journey of the Magi
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 08, 2012
Happy Feast of the Epiphany. I have so much to write about our recent doings and especially our celebration of today’s feast; but am not sure I’ll get it posted tonight. But I wanted to get this up before the day is over. Late though it is, better than missing it altogether.
The Journey of the Magi
by T. S. Eliot
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
You can hear a recording of Eliot reading The Journey of the Magi at the Poetry Archive.
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Blogging The Waste Land
by Melanie Bettinelli on January 05, 2012
When Dom was first setting up this site for me, almost exactly seven years ago, and we were brainstorming about a name, one of the first names that I considered was The Waste Land, after the poem by T. S. Eliot, which is one of my favorites. That domain name, in just about any permutation, was already taken and so I went with a second choice, which is actually probably a better one. But I still adore the Eliot poem and recently I have conceived a hankering to share it with everyone in this space. It began when Calah mentioned it in a blog post at Barefoot and Pregnant. In the comments someone said that it was bizarre and too obscure for her. And my heart yearned to explain to the (poor! benighted!) commenter how absolutely wonderful, beautiful and good and true the poem is. Then I found myself mentioning it again in my blog post about People Look East.
After I mentioned The Waste Land in my Make your House Fair post, I found myself pondering it in the shower (All my best ideas come to me in the shower). I was recalling my youthful zeal to enlighten the masses about how wonderful Eliot is. I have found that even among people who love The Waste Land it is often misunderstood. (See my soapbox down there. I’m climbing up on it, which means I’m liable to get a bit pretentious. So if you don’t like that sort of thing, you can skip these posts and go look at the cute pictures of my kids.) When I first encountered it, I was told that The Waste Land is a poem about the bleakness and despair of the modern world—which is true to a point; but if it is a poem about doubt it is also a poem about hope. In the Judeo-Christian tradition the desert has often been a place of renewal, in the Bible new life is always springing up in places that were thought to be barren. I prefer to read The Waste Land as a great Christian epic that asserts that the problem of faith in the modern of world is not really a new problem but that people in every age need to seek again for the source of life.
So I said to myself, “Self, you should write a series of blog posts about The Waste Land. It would make a wonderful Lenten meditation, for example.” I’m not sure where the idea came from because it isn’t the sort of thing I’m likely to want to do. Still, I’ve learned to trust these moments of inspiration. However, I don’t want to wait until Lent to begin—by then i might have lost my initial impetus—so I’m going to just jump into it now and see where it goes. Though if I take this series as slowly as I suspect I will have to, I may very well be continuing it through Lent and beyond.Depending on how much I linger on each section and how often I post, this project could take months and months.
So there you go. My new project. A completely crazy return to my roots both as an academic and a writer and a new grand goal for the new year.
I don’t want this to be an academic paper, an essay, nothing that formall, although I have been an academic and so I suspect that despite my best efforts to the contrary, the tone will tend to creep in that direction unless I hold very firm to my blogging voice. Still, lapses in tone notwithstanding, instead of a well-organized piece of academic writing, this will be very much a series of unedited blog posts by a sleepy mommy who just wants to exercise the part of her brain that she fears is declining into mush. I hope to jot down my various thoughts and impressions on the poem as they come to me in a of consciousness kind of way. I don’t propose to consider every word or even every line, just such bits and pieces as catch my fancy. It will not happen on any kind of predetermined schedule and it may in fact be irregular and infrequent. I have no idea how it will play out at all. But I am very excited at the prospect of being able to share one of my favorites—one of the great poems of the English language—with you. I do hope you will read along and add your comments and insights to mine. Feel free to argue with me, to dispute my interpretations. I love a good debate, so long as it stays civil.
Before We Begin
I want to go ahead and jump right in with a few framing observations to set the scene. Eliot is often accused of being inaccessible and hard to read. Perhaps that is a just charge. I don’t think Eliot set out to be easy but I don’t think the poem is meant to be impossible either. It’s not like Finnegan’s Wake, which I suspect is difficult just for the sake of being difficult.
Poetry has always been the way I see the world; but I know for many people it is very hard. Still, I have never found Eliot anything other than a challenge, an invitation to dig deep or to scale the heights, I can’t quite decide which metaphor to use. I suppose you could say that he is my Everest, the mountain I had to climb because it was there.
I do know that I loved Eliot from the first time I met when, as a sophomore in high school, I was assigned The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Oh that poem still delights and amazes me! When a few years later I read The Waste Land as a freshman in college, in the spring of 1993—can it really be that it was almost twenty years ago?! I feel so old!—I was absolutely blown away, swept off my feet. The romance between Eliot and I lasted all four years of college and has continued to this day. To say that Eliot is my favorite poet is such an understatement. After I did my junior poet project on Eliot, I came to know him more thoroughly than I know any other author. His poetry reaches deep into the core of my being and is a part of who I am at the very heart of my spiritual and intellectual life. So in a way this is another rough draft of the paper I couldn’t really write as an inarticulate freshman or as a slightly less tongue-tied junior English major. I still can’t really write it fully; but I’m willing to give it another go.
I believe The Waste Land is the poem par excellence that grapples with the problem of faith in a post-Christian world. True, the poem doesn’t mention Christ by name nor is it explicitly Christian in its imagery. But it is, to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor, Christ-haunted. I believe that one must enter into the world of the poem and to accept it on its own terms but that it does help to have a tour guide. I propose to become that guide, to offer my own insights and experiences of it. The poem is only difficult because the subject matter is difficult. It is only obscure because so much of the material it takes for granted has been lost. Reading it is participating in an archeological dig of sorts, you wade into the rubbish heap certain that you will find a treasure whose value is beyond price.
Now that I think about it, I suppose this project is really about my own renewal as well. I want to dive into the poem in the hopes of recovering the zeal I had a decade ago as a young English major. I want to restore that which has been lost, to dig deeper in the hops that this time I will uncover even more than I had found before. But I hope that for you, the blog reader, it will be interesting and entertaining. Even if you have no interest in Eliot or poetry, perhaps you will find something in these posts that will speak to you.
* Image credit: Black Cross with Red Sky by Georgia O’Keefe
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