Aucassin and Nicolette

C'est Aucassin et Nicolete

I heard a narration of the story of Nicolette and Aucassin on the radio one night when I was young, about sixty years ago, and, remarkably, that one event became one of the most important facts of my subsequent life. I have often thought of the poem/song since I first heard it that night and found immense help from it in dealing with the fundamental issue.

The poem/song is in old French, from the thirteenth century, and has had translations into English that are debated. It has acquired an immense amount of scholarship that may or may not “get it,” interpretations in fine art, opera and music, and theater, but here are a couple phrases that capture the spirit of the thing for me:

- “God loves those who love each other.”

- “God loves all true lovers.”

- ”Journeys end in lovers meeting.”

It feels absurd, or even deeply or just outrightly criminal, to make any attempt to explain why it should be so powerful. It would be like trying to explain a fable or a dream or a myth to a particle-brained materialistic contemporary. God? Love? Lovers? What?

And yet, I think we all get glimpses that love is really the core of our lives, and that even knowledge itself, often considered to be separate from love, is dependent upon our ability to take the second, other, outside standpoint, perspective.

It has humor, fun, imagination, sheer beauty, yes, but it I think that the main reason it has lasted so well for eight hundred years is its spiritual-psychological truth.

Here is Andrew Lang's translation, at this link.

Chomsky on “Bob Dylan”

Every now and then someone surprises me by seeing Bob Dylan the way I see him. He has received such great praise, so many awards, so much money, and so much attention, yet is so empty and false, that he pretty much epitomizes the last forty years.

So I was grateful recently to find Noam Chomsky's observation in Wikiquote on his experience of Dylan:

Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with [Dylan] from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I'd never heard him talk before -- if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he'd been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to "mess around with other people's lives" by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley "free speech movement" and said that he didn't understand it. He said something like: "I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period." If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice.

My Prayers for the Stolen

It's a cold January 1^st, 2015, this morning here in Dayton, Ohio, USA, and quiet. But there was a lot of celebration around the city in the middle of the night – fireworks, simple noise, etc. - as the clock passed to a new year.

I was half asleep at the time, so I was closely aware, both subconsciously as well as consciously, of the feelings of the people around me who hope for a better world. It was quite moving for me, in view of my increased awareness of just how deeply set the backwardness and barbarity are, especially in the case of what is widely called “the elite.” I had just finished reading Jennifer Clement's book, “Prayers for the Stolen,” before I went to bed.

There is no comparison, not even close, between the harm of the crime of the elite and that of ordinary people. Yet the elite's harm would not be possible if ordinary people did not consent to it, either passively or even actively. That problem will continue, I see, to be there during this coming year for me as centrally as it has been for many years in my past.

I have noticed in the last year or two that the problem has been mentioned, however briefly and ineffectively, in some films like “The Hunger Games,” for example, and some relatively popular writings on “economic inequality.” The problem has been acknowledged forever, of course, but I think there is some hope that the awareness that something can be done about it may grow!

Cleverness, Information, And The Third Brother In The Fairy Tales

The art and wisdom of fairy tales are way beyond the understanding of professional academics but within the reach of little children.

The irony and depth of that thought often come to my mind as I follow the daily news about war, environmental degradation, torture, militarization of community police, the corruption of political life by money, the destructive effects of education systems and athletics, economic collapse,  the scandal of professional medicine in the USA, the dishonesty of TV and other media, and a host of other serious social problems.

I follow the discussions of such massive issues relatively closely, taking them to heart, and agonize over how to make a contribution toward dealing with them, no matter how small such contribution might be. I believe it is necessary to do at least something, no matter how small, for the larger love as well as in order to keep one's own soul together, rather than just despairing or suiciding or getting depressed or going crazy or something like that.
 
Fairy tales can provide a surprizing amount of help in that situation.
 
First of all, you find that you're not alone: many people before you and beside you have been in the situation, as documented in the ancient origins and persistence and popularity of the tales. That itself is of no small help. It helps you to believe what your own eyes are telling yourself in the face of the abundant contemporary insanity around you.

The tales are also clear demonstrations that profundity is a quite different quality than cleverness, sophisticated intellectual versatility, and the accumulation of data. Some of my academic colleagues have accused me of “promoting ignorance” in saying this, but unquestioned, unguarded cleverness always results in massive stupidity and “ignorance.” In fact, a good example and definition of “ignorance” might be the “ignoring” of what I am saying here.
 
This reality is well-expressed in the fairy tales that speak of three brothers, two of whom are clever and the third is simple. Some examples of Grimm's tales which have this motif are “The Golden Bird,” “The Queen Bee,” “The Three Feathers,” “The Water of Life,” and “The Golden Goose.”
 
These tales, which have been in my mind for seventy years, typically feature three brothers who are sons of an ailing King, two brothers being clever, false, calculating, and arrogant. The third brother is typically “simple,” kind, unassuming, decent, guileless, respectful of “the animal” and the “small,” and seen as naïve and not likely to amount to anything.
 
So, last night I am reading before bed the justifications of torture by Richard Cheney and numerous other professionals who “know more about it than I do,” and I am thinking about the recent poll that says that over 50% of USA people think torture is all right. How is a person to face that, to deal with it inwardly, and to make at least one small contribution to resolving such an immense problem?
 
My book of Grimms' fairy tales is always right beside my bedside lamp, and I reach out for it and open it to the tale, "The Water of Life," which has three brothers in it whose father, the King, is ill. A wise old man declares that what the King needs is a drink of "the Water of Life." Each of the brothers goes out in turn to find it, because if he brings it home and heals the ailing father, then he will inherit the kingdom. Marrying a beautiful Princess and a few other delightful details are involved, too.
 
But finding the water of life is not easy. Each of the brothers encounters a dwarf, who happens to know where it is. The two older brothers are arrogant with him, dismissive, and insulting. "Stupid little fellow, what business is it of yours?" - stuff like that. The dwarf doesn't take this well, and puts a curse on the two older, arrogant brothers such that their path narrows as it goes into the mountains and they get jammed and cannot move backward or forward.
 
The third, guileless, son comes along, encounters the dwarf, and the dwarf asks him where he is going:
 

The Prince: "I am searching for the Water of Life, because my father is dying."

The Dwarf: "Do you know where it is to be found?"

The Prince: "No."

The Dwarf: "As you have spoken pleasantly to me, and not been haughty like your false brothers, I will help you and tell you how to find the Water of Life. It flows from a fountain in the courtyard of an enchanted castle."

I have seen a few interpretations of this motif that were written by highly respected academics who simply have no clue as to what is being said in the tale, and it seems obvious to me that the reason they don't understand it is that they are clever, well-informed, well-read, respected scholars and educators who accept the widespread delusion that they know things.

As for me, I feel that if I can share this fairy tale with even one person, even a child, then that is a good thing.

Emily Dickinson (2)

There are two passages from Emily Dickinson's letters that I share with you this cold, rainy December morning. She wrote these two letters to her sister-in-law and best friend, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, on the occasion of the death by typhoid fever of Susan's eight-year-old son, Gilbert Dickinson. Gilbert lived next door and was a favorite of Emily.

Gilbert Dickinson

She sat with Gilbert at the time of his death, and wrote of his words:

"Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me," was Gilbert's sweet command in delirium. Who are waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know - Anguish, at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents' feet - All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me it's name!

And then there is this:

Dear Sue -
The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled -
How simply at the last the Fathom comes! The Passenger and not the Sea, we find surprises us-
Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets -
His Life was panting with them - With what menace of Light he cried "Dont tell, Aunt Emily"! Now my ascended Playmate must instruct me. Show us, prattling Preceptor, but the way to thee!
He knew no niggard moment - His Life was full of Boon - The Playthings of the Dervish were not so wild as his -
No crescent was this Creature - He traveled from the Full -
Such soar, but never set -
I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies - His Life was like the Bugle, which winds itself away, his Elegy an echo - his Requiem ecstasy -
Dawn and Meridian in one.
Wherefore would he wait, wronged only of Night, which he left for us -
Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole -

Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light,
Pangless except for us -
Who slowly ford the Mystery
Which thou hast leaped across!

I notice that Emily has a birthday coming up next week, on the tenth of December, which I will celebrate as my own.

The Ringing of the Bells

It's the dying season as well as the holiday season, the next two months having the highest death rates of the year. The loved ones I have lost are particularly close at this time of year, as I suppose fits with All Souls and the Day of the Dead and such events coming around now.

I notice that there aren't any “scientific” explanations for the mortality statistics, which pleases me greatly. The temperature outside, for example, doesn't correlate with the death rate across climate zones. I just love it, because it tells me that, yes, people are in tune, people do love. It's immediately understandable from the human perspective why people should decide to go at this time of year. The “scientists” dismiss the human heart, the soul, the inner life, because they can't get meter readings on it.

But it's “Thanks to the human heart, by which we live,” as Wordsworth says in his poem.

It's pathetic, actually, just to keep on that materialist, “empirical,” path in the mistaken belief that we are only particles of “matter.” I see the loss of loved ones to be of the greatest help in shaking a person out of that view. The loss of loved ones provides the best opportunity I can imagine to question whether or not the particles theory doesn't have something seriously lacking.

And there is this additional 

gift, too, that the loss gives us the occasion to deepen, to purify, our loves of those who have gone. Here's a blunt statement of it by C. S. Lewis, from his book, “A Grief Observed:”

We are “taken out of ourselves” by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving her past or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.”

This seems way, way out there, but it rings the bells.

Emily Dickinson!!!

Emily Dickinson is a joy and a hope, a light and a delight - right in the heart.

I started reading her again after a lapse of forty years, and I can barely believe what I am now seeing, and that I missed so much before, and have since then.

The first thing that strikes me now is that she has provided the best resolution I've found of the Puritan, New England, Congregational, cultural issues that marked my own soul so deeply. I, too, was born and raised in Massachusetts in that same tradition as she was. Reading her now just bowled me over. Robert Frost's remark about her goes through my mind: “When she started a poem, it was 'Here I come' and she came plunging through.”

An unknown photo of her seems to have surfaced in 2007:

1859 Photo believed to be of Emily Dickinson (left) with a friend.

Here is a previous photo we have of her:

Emily Dickinson, 1847, about sixteen years old.

Her early letters from South Hadley have “it” as do the letters and poems right up until the end, but if I could pick out only one poem for you, it would be the one that begins “Because I could not stop for death...”

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

The fact that she refused to publish, or even to title, her poems makes perfect sense to me, but what a loss it might have been, but for her friend, Sue! There is now an astonishingly large scholarship on Emily and I think I can detect that same feeling, of our great luck, in such places that normally seem so cold.