What I See First

I am not yet awake as I right this. The words wanted out too much to wait for coffee.

What I see first is beauty:

Pillows have arranged her hair.

Sleep shadows her eyes.

Desire paints her lips.

Her breasts rise with each soft breath.

 

What I always see is love.

Hope

In church, we had this choir service, which means that the choir performed the service. The focus of this particular service was nature, birds in particular.

One of the numbers we performed was an “art song” (I find even the term offensive. Are other songs not art?) derived from a poem by Emily Dickinson. An art song is essentially a poem set to music. The problem arises in that the composer very seldom understands the poem. The result is that the poem and music seldom serve each other. In this case, “Hope Is a Thing with Feathers” derives from Dickinson’s poem “Hope.” Reading only the text, the composer forced some unnaturally cheerful—some would say manic—music onto a poem that essentially a depressive recluse’s attempt to deal with life. Dickinson loved nature and birds, but she seldom ventured outdoors and almost never off the grounds of her parents’ house.

Dickinson is one of my favorite poets. In fact, she is the only poet who I care enough about to own more than one volume of verse—other than maybe Shakespeare or Poe (but their volumes contain other types of works). This painful rendition of one of her better poems caused me to pen the following parody. I don’t consider this a parody of Dickinson’s poem, but rather the art song.

Hope is a thing that whithers

And suppurates the soul

A baleful tune without remorse

That never stops at all

 

More fickle than a gale this word

That leads your heart astray

Turns winter to a summer bird

That blithely flies away

 

It makes its nest in snowy lands

And travels o’re the sea

And ever in extremity

On human hearts it feeds

It could also be fun to play with, “Hope is the thing that slithers....”

Language and Power

These these questions have intrigued me lately: How much does the poet control the language, and how much does the language control the poet?

Suna said said that the balance is probably different for each poet. I can see the logic of that assumption, but is it really? At a fundamental level, doesn’t language define how we perceive the world? And don’t those perceptions define our realities? And isn’t reality just a negotiation between ourselves and the universe? And why am I blathering on about this?

Ambiguity in Belief

I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church. Having been raised Christian who later flirted with Taoism and Buddhism and had been exposed to Shintoism, it seemed like a perfect match for me.

One of the things that attracted me was the range of belief constructs that are not only accepted but embraced in the congregation. As someone said, describing how one of his friends recruited him, “They are all really nice people, and I don’t think they actually have a doctrine.” It is wonderful and refreshing.

So at the end of the order of service at this congregation, we sing the benediction, or good talking. It is a really sweet, ambiguous, contradictory song—like many other things in the order of service. One day, I started singing these words to the melody. (Suna added the “That’s spiritual” bit spontaneously. This version is meant to demonstrate the ambiguity that makes:

And we believe in stuff and in some other things

And we are somehow vaguely religious (That’s spiritual)

And with the power of words we say the things that we think

And we believe that questions can be answers

 

And we believe in things and in some other stuff

And we believe the things we are saying

And with the power of thought, we think the things that we say

And we believe that answers can be questions