Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!
Give a listen to a song to rejoice your heart: Sting’s Soul Cake.
May your 2011 be full of surprises.
Posted in Jane's Occasional Poems on December 31, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!
Give a listen to a song to rejoice your heart: Sting’s Soul Cake.
May your 2011 be full of surprises.
Posted in The Daily Poems, tagged " Christmas Eve, "I Will, 1968, Beatles, The White Album on December 25, 2010| 1 Comment »
Last night, I was going to a Christmas Eve service at Naperville Presbyterian Church. I drove with two friends and their baby son. They sang a song to him, and this was it:
For if I ever saw you,
I didn’t catch your name.
But it never really mattered–
I will always feel the same.
Love you forever and forever,
love you with all my heart–
love you whenever we’re together,
love you when we’re apart.
And when at last I find you,
your song will fill the air!
Sing it loud so I can hear you,
make it easy to be near you,
for the things you do endear you to me–
oh, you know I will.
I will.
The Beatles
The White Album (1968)
To listen to a beautiful cover version of this song by a girl named Jasmine, click: “I Will.“
Merry Christmas to all.
Posted in The Reading Journals, tagged morning prayer, Queen Elizabeth I on December 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »
“My God, my Father, and my Savior, as Thou now sendest Thy sun upon the earth to give corporeal light to Thy creatures, vouchsafe also to illumine my heart and understanding by the heavenly light of Thy Holy Spirit, that I neither think nor say nor do anything unless to serve and please Thee. During this whole day may my principal purpose be to walk in Thy fear, to serve Thee and honor Thee, expecting all luck and prosperity from Thy blessing alone. As for my body and my soul, mayst Thou be my Protector, strengthening me against all temptations of the devil and of the flesh, preserving me from the encroachments and conspiracies of all my enemies, their accomplices and adherents. And, good God, inasmuch as there is nothing well begun if one does not persevere, may it please Thee not only to receive me under Thy guidance and protection for this day, but for the whole course of my life, continuing and increasing from day to day the gifts and graces of Thy Holy Spirit in me until I, being united and conjoined with Thy only Son my Savior, may enjoy that blessed life which Thou hast promised to all Thy elect through Thy same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.”
Queen Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I: Collected Works
ed. by Marcus, Mueller & Rose (University of Chicago, 2000), 144.
Posted in The Daily Poems, The Reading Journals, tagged Brian Herbert, Children of Dune, Dreamer of Dune, Dune, ecology, Frank Herbert, haiku, Jesus, Litany Against Fear, Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, psychology, Roman Catholicism, Songs of Maud'dib on December 21, 2010| 2 Comments »
I discovered the Dune series, the most popular and influential ecological science-fiction books ever written, before I was eleven. I read them all, and even as a child, I wanted to meet Frank Herbert. He died in 1986, but I didn’t know until I was a teenager. Meanwhile, I went on admiring the personal psychology of his extraordinary characters — men and women in his invented universe — where memory was pivotal to being not only for invidivuals, but for cultures, for Herbert believed in the Jungian collective unconscious at the cellular level: a powerful idea!
Not only did I read Herbert’s books, I re-read them, literally dozens of times. Whenever I was sick, I would pick them up and read them again. Again and again.
I memorized the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, and I would recite it to myself (as many of Herbert’s readers have done): I will not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. When it has gone, I will turn the inner eye to its path. Where it has been, there will be nothing. Only I will remain. When I was afraid, I would recite these words along with scriptures from the Bible: Do not be afraid because I am with you and He has not given us a spirit of fear but of love and of power and of a sound mind and The Spirt of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him.
In addition to the Litany, Herbert’s universe had other songs and poems in it, too, intriguing ones. I was recently experiencing a relapse of tendonitis, and so, feeling unwell, wanted to re-read the Dune books. When I got to the third book, Children of Dune, I read this poem with a new interest:
Nature’s beauteous form
contains a lovely essence
called by some — decay.
By this lovely presence
new life finds its way.
Tears shed silently
are but water of the soul:
they bring new life
to the pain of being —
a separation from that seeing
which makes death whole.
I wondered why the word “death” in the final line couldn’t be the word “life.” But another poet, Herbert, wrote those words … The young Leto plays this poem as a song for his sister Ghanima on a baliset when they are overlooking the Dune desert when night is falling.
This poem got me thinking about Frank Herbert as a poet as well as a science-fiction writer. I went on GoogleBooks and read the first 150 pages of Frank Herbert’s biography, written by his son, Brian: Dreamer of Dune. I found other poems in those pages that I admired. One was a protest poem that Frank Herbert wrote when murals painted by his friend, Bernard Zakheim, were removed from the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.
What folly to think there
is no place to receive this.
No empty place for this
painting to be.
Driven into the heart of the thing itself —
we have a relationship, this
artist and myself.
This hand and my eye have just met.
The simple phrases of this poem made me think of my own relationship to Frank Herbert as an artist. For some reason, in this season of my life, I wanted to understand his life better and how his life produced his stories — his extraordinary stories — and his meditations on the way memory works for his characters. Every time I re-read Herbert’s works, it is as if his “hand and my eye have just met.”
Another poem Frank Herbert wrote, and his son Brian published in the biography, meditates on the meaning of a life in a way powerfully relevant to this questing / questioning I’ve been feeling about the author and the man, Frank Herbert:
What is the meaning of your life?
If you live close to nature, is it hidden in—
a towering tree,
busy worker bees,
a flower bloom,
the sun piercing morning’s gloom?
Or do you live in civilization?
Does fancy people your imagination with thoughts of —
laborers, soot and grime,
youths leading lives of crime,
long hours and payday
nightlife in its heyday?
Are you but chaff from the Great Miller’s gleaning?
Or wherever you live does your life have meaning?
It’s an intense sort of metaphor to imagine God as a Great Miller and to wonder if we, ourselves, are chaff or grain in his gleaning. In this metaphor, the poem alludes to Jesus’ Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13). Perhaps, in its questioning, it reflects Frank Herbert’s ambivalent relationship with the Roman Catholicism of his family of origin. It’s concern with place certainly reflects the poet’s ecological concerns. But that drive, to make meaning, is the storyteller’s, the poet’s, and everyman’s motivation.
The problem is that sometimes our bodies can’t keep up with our minds. They fail, but our souls continue. Herbert’s meditations on life, death and memory in his books engages this reality.
Personally, though, I am thinking of my tendons (and the tendonitis, another kind of failure of the imperfect body, stressed by overuse) — as I type this post when I should be resting them — and I recall another of Herbert’s poems, a haiku in honor of his typewriter:
typewriter clacking
in my night-encircled room –
metal insect song
The typewriter! The keyboard! Brian Herbert calls it his father’s mistress. Well, it is at the very least an extremely valuable tool, and it’s interesting to think of it singing “a metal insect song.”
Brian Herbert has published more of his father’s Dune poems in a collection called, Songs of Maud’dib, and I recommend it to those interested.