We Will Draw Near

An interpretation of Karl Jenkins' Adiemus

Brother, may the Lord be with you
Like a shepherd in the field
Giving you the meaning of Immanuel.
May that mean the whole world to you,
God's world ever given to you,
Blessing you no matter where you are.

Sister, may a world of peace be
With you everywhere you go,
Everywhere the meaning of Immanuel.
May it mean that God will hold you
Like a mother holds her child who
Grows up in the arms of loving care.

Refrain:
And may God's face shine upon you
With an everlasting smile,
Giving you the meaning of Immanuel.
May it mean that God is with you everywhere.
(We will draw near.)
May you know that God is with you everywhere.
(We will draw near.)
Immanuel! 
Immanuel!

(Repeat Refrain)

Child, may the grace of God be
Something you will come to know
Living in the meaning of Immanuel.
As you wander through the fold and
Grow beyond the mother's hold, may
You still know you are a child of God.

(Repeat Refrain)

May the hands of the shepherd bless you.

(We will draw near!)

May the arms of the mother keep you.

(We will draw near!)

May the face of God shine on you.

(We will draw near!)

May the grace of the Lord go with you.

(We will draw near!)

May the peace of the world be in you.

(We will draw near!)

May you know God is always with you.

Immanuel!

Immanuel!

from Turning the Metaphor

Introduction to We Will Draw Near

This is inspired, at least in part, by brother Josh's persistent challenge to us all to get out another "S2L2A&A" list: songs to listed to again and again.  I don;t have a full list together for this year yet, but I think I'd like to start it with a favorite song from Kirsten's Jubilate Choir days, music that I still like to turn to now and again, eight years later.  The song is Adiemus by Karl Jenkins, the lead part of a full album and the premise for a beautiful choral concert called Songs of Sanctuary.  What makes Jenkins work especially unique is that it's all done in a pseudo=Latin with no specific meaning.  Teh first lines, for instance, are:

Ari adiemus late
Ari adiemus da
Ari a enatus late adua.

It turns out the title can be roughly translated as "We will draw near" in Latin, but Jenkins claimed not to know this.  Anyway, it's musically rich, solemn, dramatic, full of crescendo and sanctuary but also, at least for me all these years, intriguing in how it seems to beg for more meaning.  So this year I finally decided to give the song my own words.  In the process, arbitrarily or not, I have turned to the well known "bless you keep you" benediction, enhanced with one  of my favorite words, Immanuel, a word worth repeating, again and again.  And yes, the descant remains: we will draw near.


from Stillwater Symposia

The Peace Mantra

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 433-434 





433  See Brooks**: The mad prince may be “mad for a purpose.” See Shakespeare, Hamlet 2.2. 202-203: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” What first appears as gibberish (see Dadaism, note 418) on a closer look reveals a deeper design. 

434  Eliot: Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word.

✭  This is THE PEACE MANTRA, uttered conclusively even as it is not fully understood. Several of the Upanishad passages have an “Om Shanti Shanti Shanti” ending, a basic mantra that loosely translates as “Let there be peace, peace, peace.” See, e.g., Upanishads, Taittiriya Upanishad 1.1 and 1.12. See also Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.28, which often includes the same “shanti” ending (although Hume’s 1921 translation regularly left it out: “From the unreal lead me to the real! From darkness lead me to light! From death lead me to immortality! [Let there be peace, peace, peace.]” This is also the third instance in the poem that Eliot employs a repetitive mantra, each time in relation to eastern allusions; see also burning burning burning (line 308) and da da da (note 400). Eliot’s translation of Shantih is taken fromPhillipians 4:7: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Still the doubting Thomas, our poet confesses to a feeble understanding of that which all would-be believers seek. This, in time, will change for Eliot (see The Four Quartets, note 296), and indeed he would direct that his epitaph be etched with words from East Coker (see note 296): “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”

Eventually.  But for now it is the poet’s words in this final note, as much as any others, that have intrigued my own understanding and encouraged these annotations.

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

Peace

I clean my house
     the way I pay my debts
the way I find my peace:
     a little at
a time (a resting place
     in greener fields
now and then, forgiveness
     by the silent
waters).  So far,
     time's been good to me
but in the end
     I want to live to see
no more to clean, no more
     to pay, and PEACE,
such peace that passes
     understanding, peace
that supercedes
     my earthly needs
          and leaves
this tired world,
     this plodding pace
          behind.
I don't know if or when
     I'll ever find
that better place, but
     let me still
          believe
that if I serve my time
     and look for peace
a little at a time
     I'll be released.


from Stillwater Symposia

Table Grace

Around the table, tradition goes,
each person has to say one thing
they’re thankful for, a word, a phrase.

We take our turns with the usual string
of gratitudes and platitudes:
for food and family, most of all,

but also health and love and God.
We try to be original
but every year’s about the same,

just as it should be I suppose,
a fitting capsule for this time,
the simple words of hungry souls.


from Calendrums

Moleskin 5.10

There are times when I look at my eighteen year old daughter or my fifteen year old son that I wish I could jump ahead a few years just to see how everything turns out. I worry for them sometimes, but more often it is fatherly pride that sparks this wish. I am eager to see their lives unfold, and my wishes become even more hopeful as I think further ahead, to years I become increasingly less likely to see. This is not the best way to tell a story, though. I am eager now to tell you what would happen when I was fourteen, and twenty three, and twenty six ----not to mention those years ahead after my son and daughter were born. Of course I did not know any of these things in the summer and fall of twelve, though, and as I sat and contemplated the stream before me my thoughts were filled more with worry than eagerness, more worry than a wandersome boy should be troubled with, less eagerness than one would expect along the edge of stability. But that’s where I was.

Meleagris Gallopavo

   

When country fiddlers held a convention in Danville, 
the big money went to a barn dance artist who played 
Turkey in the Straw, with variations... 

                                                — Carl Sandburg


Consensus is born of determination...


Some say the first Americans had named it for its cluck Or that Chris called it “tuka” for a peacock he mistook (By Chris I mean Columbus; Tuka’s Tamil for peacock, And Tamil is the language of Ceylon), but by the book The Brits declared it first and for all time the bird from Turkey, While Science called it meleagris, out of Malagasy (Relating it to Guinea fowls, with Latin terms so classy They get excused for making things perpetually murky). Each stop along the trade route added names to the imposter: The Palestinians dubbed the bird an Ethiopian Rooster, The Dutch decreed it kalkoen, a Malibarian coaster (From Calicut of Malibar in India, southwester). The commonest of turkey tags, for Turks and many others, Is Indian Chicken, for the land Columbus misdiscovered: Thus hindi, dindon, indyk, indjuk, hindishga, all brothers Of the nascent New World Order of the Turkey. Meanwhile, over In India, some Indians have christened it “peru”, Deferring to the name their Portugallan traders knew. But Peru never knew the bird until the Spanish shipped it; They called it gallopavo, for the peacock Chris descripted (By Chris I mean Columbus; pavo’s peacock; gallo’s chicken; And Portugallans are the chicken-trading Portuguese). And so this story goes: the plot unwinds, the titles thicken, But dinner’s on the table; you can call it what you please. There is no grand denouement in the course of human nature And from the very start the turkey’s oldest nomenclature, Presented by the Aztecs in their native Nahuatl, Has been a word the world could never say: Xuehxolotl.


from Thirty Birds

Tales of Simorgh

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point...

                     — Howard Nemerov

I

The simple truth falls in a single feather to thirty birds
And God is revealed to the congregation...

A single feather floats down from a mountain far away
And faith takes its hold in the speculation...

A thousand faces, a thousand creeds, as many excuses:
We see ourselves burn in the conflagration...

And who would believe the outcome of this gathering babel?
Consensus is born of determination...

In unified purpose, the kingless resolve to find their king,
To put face to feathery form, the nation of thirty birds.

II

The hoopoe tells of an arduous flight through seven valleys
With tales of trials along the way, for every bird a tale:

Tale of the nightingale in love with love, the thorniest rose;
Tale of the peacock who clings to the trappings of paradise;

Tale of the parrot who seeks its eternal existence here;
Tale of the duck looking in ponds for purity to appear;

Tale of the homa, shadow-slave to the vanity of kings;
Tale of the falcon, blinded by the status its master brings;

Tale of the heron in a lonely place, gazing at the sea;
Tale of the owl seeking treasure, finding anxiety;

Tale of the sparrow of humility and hypocrisy;
Tale of the phoenix caught in a cycle, ever born to die;

Tale of the partridge who lives for love of gems that never move;
Tale of a lovebird chained forever to superficial love;

Tale after tale, revealing how through every foibled fable
We see ourselves burn in the conflagration of thirty birds.

III

And so on speaks the hoopoe, for every bird another tale
And along the way he dedicates a word for every vale:

Valley of the Quest, of zeal, of all that a heart can achieve;
Vale of Love, of spark and fire, desire for the heart to move;

Vale of Insight, to crave, to hunger, to have all truths revealed;
Vale of Detachment, of abandon, Joseph thrown into a well;

Vale of Unity, through faith, the purest essence of the soul;
Vale of Awe, doubting doubt and finding the unbelievable;

Vale of Poverty, of emptiness, what words cannot express,
Beyond all selfish acts, the final cup of nothingness;

Until at last, through zeal and spark and craving and abandon,
through faith and awe and selflessness they climb the final mountain.

And they will find their king...

IV Come you lost Atoms, to your Center draw, and be the Mirror, Reflecting God’s light in the contemplation... Come you without feather, uplift your souls, leave gravity behind And give wing to the lofty aspiration... But even as angels to earth will return, send back your songs Of faith and truth and all the proclamations... I sing, Simorgh, my own reflections of God the great I Am Through the Son of Man, my only known salvation... But I will turn my self to selflessness, and to the world will sing In ghazals of old, this nascent explanation of thirty birds.


from Thirty Birds

El Desdichado, by Gerarde Nerval (a new translation)

The Loser

I’m a man of shadows, widowed, unconsoled
Once Prince of Aquitaine, my tower undone,
My star departed; even my stellar strings
Are strummed with Melancholy’s blackened sun.

From this grave darkness, you who once consoled me
Bring me back to the mountains by the sea,
Return the flower of pleasure to my heart,
The grapevine and the rose of Italy.

Once Love and once Apollo, king and rogue,
My forehead wears the lipstick of the Queen,
My dreams have tarried where the Siren sings.

I’ve conquered Acheron to hell and back again;
I’ve resonated on these Orphean strings
From saintly sighs to pixilated cries.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with Annotations (and other explanations)

Shored Against My Ruins

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 427-432 





427  “London bridge is falling down,” a nursery rhyme first referenced in The London Chaunticleres (1657, Anon.), alludes back to lines 22 (a heap of broken images), 62 (crowd flowing over the bridge), 173 (the river’s tent is broken) and 374 (falling towers).

428 Eliot: V. Purgatorio, XXVI, 148. 'Ara vos prec per aquella valor / 'que vos guida al som de l'escalina, / 'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.' / Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina. Dante attributes these words to Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel, at Purgatorio 26.142-148: “I am Arnaut, who weep and singing go; / Contrite I see the folly of the past, / And joyous see the hoped-for day before me. / Therefore do I implore you, by that power /  Which guides you to the summit of the stairs, / Be mindful to assuage my suffering!’ / Then hid him in the fire that purifies them.”) See Appendix D for the extended excerpt. Daniel, whom Dante called the “better craftsman” (see note 0.2), says this as he follows Italian poet Guido Guinizelli, who had “vanished in the fire / As fish in water going to the bottom” (26.134-135).  

429  Eliot: V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.  Tiberianus, The Vigil of Venus (400 BC): “Quando ver venit meum? / Quando fiam ceu chelidon, ut tacere desinam? (Ah, loitering Summer! Say when / For me shall be broken the charm, that I chirp with the swallow again?)” See also Algernon Charles Swinburne, Itylus (1864): “Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow.” Swinburne’s poem combines the story of Philomela and Procne, in which two sisters are turned into a nightingale and a swallow (see note 99), with the story of Itylus referred to in Homer, Odyssey 19: 524-534, in which Aedon is turned into a nightingale after accidentally killing her son Itylus. See also Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess; A Melody (1884): “O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying south,” and compare this with Countess Marie going south for the winter (line 18).

430  Eliot: V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.  (1853, tr. J. Vold, 2013, as The Loser): “I’m a man of shadows, widowed, unconsoled, / Once Prince of Aquitaine, my tower undone...” See Appendix H.  Gerard De Nerval was a friend of Charles Baudelaire (see note76). He was also known to have fits of madness: see Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899): “...with Gérard there was no pose; and when, one day, he was found in the Palais-Royal, leading a lobster at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and knows the secrets of the sea), the visionary had simply lost control of his visions, and had to be sent to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Montmartre.”

432  Eliot: V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.  Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronymo’s Mad Again (1592), 4.1-5: “HIERONYMO: Why then, I'll fit you; say no more. / When I was young, I gave my mind / And plied myself to fruitless poetry; / Which though it profit the professor naught, / Yet is it passing pleasing to the world.” See Eliot, Hamlet and His Problems (note 417), citing this play as a source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In trying to interpret and understand the present poem, one might transpose what Eliot wrote about Shakespeare and Hamlet. On interpretation: “Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret... for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not presumed to know.”  And on understanding: “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. ...We should have to understand things that Shakespeare did not understand himself.” Yet even in a lack of understanding there can be appreciation, and Eliot, in ceding to “the peace that passeth understanding” admits as much (see note 434). Even his final “shantih” comment, he says, is a “feeble translation” of the concept; and yet, incomprehensible as it may be, it is still something for this poet, and every poet and reader, to strive for.

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

God Birds

In the wood, God was manifest, as he was not in the sermon. — Ralph Waldo Emerson  


Woodpeckers the size of giant crows With jackhammers as long as their heads are wide Drum against the hearts of hollow trees Reverberatingly, and yet they hide And months and years go by with nothing heard From the great and legendary Lord God Bird. Meanwhile, smaller packages descend Without the tools for enigmatic echoes, With flourishes of black and white and red Reduced to sparrow size, and yet they peck Away their beating purpose next to me, Reporting how to live and simply be. I’ve been off in the forest seeking drums, Yet sometimes with a tap God speaks to me.


from Thirty Birds

Moleskin 5.9

But the clean slate was less than it would seem. The grades did not say anything about where I had been or where I was going or who I wanted to be. I still had a little Huck Finn in me, for one thing, with rivers to explore and rebellions to consider. The house, it was nice, but it was still not much more than where I happened to live, and who could say, after that summer of twelve, where thirteen and fourteen would find me. And yes, it looked like we would have stability now with no more being single-parented at the looms of poverty, no more unincorporated neighborhoods full of dinner smells and dumpsters, no more weekends at the Dolphin Motel. But I was not, will never be ready to write my dad out of the story, so there I was on the banks of Stability River, doing a lot of thinking.

Identity III

Identity
Rolls down the face
Of farmers and florists
Lovers and loners
Parents and orphans
Teachers and learners
Workers and wanderers
Dreamers and doers
And poets,
And me,
And every tear,
Every line of sweat,
Every drop of rain
Is different and the same,
Hot and cold, salty and sweet.

Identity 
Is a hard day’s work
And a longing for rest,
A burst of emotion
and a latent memory.
Sometimes I want to 
Wipe my identity away,
Pretend it isn’t there
And hide my face,
But sometimes
I just let it roll
Down my cheek
And linger
For everyone to see.


from Turning the Metaphor

Identity II

In the mirror I see
Reflections of a 
Thousand faces,
Wrinkles of a 
Thousand times,
The profiles of a 
Thousand turns,
The shadows of a
Thousand truths,
A picture that will
Not stand still.
Identity.

This is identity.
This is the place
I come from: family,
The everywhere
I’m going: destiny
And all that’s currently 
Home to me: security.

For now, forever is the way 
I’ll always have some yesterday
In me: identity.
For now, eternity is how
It’s always been more than a soul
Can see: identity.
More than I want to be
Or used to be: identity,
More than I find myself
For now: this is identity.

from Turning the Metaphor

Identity I

Identity
With a capital I,
Subjective me,
My own ID:
It’s who I am,
The verb “to be”
Implicitly
Included in
Identity.
I am:  The name
I call myself
I am: the entity of self
I am: the image of I AM,
Yahweh and Immanuel,
Their meaning in my heart,
And living waters in my veins,
The pulse of my salvation, 
My spirit, my animation,
Every explication
Is identity.

I
ID
I AM
An entity
To be or not
To be: Identity


from Turning the Metaphor

The Fisher King

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 424-426 





425 Eliot: V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King. 9: 117, 129: “...he was called the Fisher King because of his devotion to the pastime of fishing ...If the Grail story be based upon a Life ritual the character of the Fisher King is of the very essence of the tale, and his title, so far from being meaningless, expresses, for those who are at pains to seek, the intention and object of the perplexing whole.” 

✭  The FISHER KING sitting on a river bank is a prevailing image in this poem. The allusion of a king who was gravely injured and, with his entire country, desperately in need of healing is introduced at note 0.1 as an integral part of the Grail legend. But here the image of the fisherman keeps reappearing in different shades and colors. See him weeping at lines 182-184, then sitting alongside a rat in the mud at lines 185-189, then musing upon the king’s wreck at lines 190-192. Later, fishmen are lounging at noon at line 263. Eliot directly compared the Fisher King to the Tarot deck’s three-staved merchant who stands on a seaside cliff and watches ships pass by (see notes 46 and 51), and he also imagined the fisherman as a sailor coming home from the sea in the evening (see note 221). Finally, here at line 425, with the dry land behind him and the water in front of him, the Fisher King considers whether it might be time to set things right.

426  Isaiah 38:1: “Thus saith the LORD, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live.” This was Isaiah’s counsel to a mortally sick King Hezekiah, which led the king to weep. But in the context of the next line 427, “London bridge is falling down,” see also John Henry Mackay, Anarchy (1888): “‘Wreck of all order,’ cry the multitude, / ‘Art thou, & war & murder’s endless rage.’ / ...But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so true, / Thou sayest all for which I for goal have taken. / I give thee to the future! Thine secure / When each at least unto himself shall waken.”

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

Epigraph to Thirty Birds

Come, you lost Atoms, 
  to your Center draw,
   and be the ...Mirror...
           
--- Farid Ud-din Attar


from Thirty Birds

All Souls Cry Out, With Variation

  
  Be ...the Mirror

  from Thirty Birds

Moleskin 5.8

...and an honor roll. To this point I had been a good student, even standout if anyone noticed, but my first report card at Lincoln put me in the top ten percent. The sixth grade system did not hand out the usual A, B, C, D letters and there was no honor role, but in seventh grade, for whatever reason —more students, more serious academics, more trust in our maturity? —we were graded for all to see. And I was proud to find my name on the list, posted prominently on the school’s hallway bulletin board, guarded by glass and enhanced with cabinet lighting: here was the fruit of my labors, a quiet brag to my peers, something to write to my dad about and something to put a smile on the face of my mother —maybe even something for my stepdad to notice.

Cran

Rattling and piercing, the cran cries out A rolling, trilling, gregarious shout Ambiguously pitched: high, guttural, deep; Cross the purr of a cat with the bleating of sheep, Or the chirping of dolphins with mutant brass, Each note multiplied by the numbers that pass: A song hard to score and beyond all compare, yet musically pleasantly strange to the ear: Kewrr, k-r-r-r-ooo, garooo-a-a-a, Kewrr, kkewrooh, kar-r-r-r-o-o-o. They parachute down with an open stance On to crowded fields where they dance their dance In the midst of rivals and mates and unmated With movements so strange, uncouth, unabated, The march of the oldest living birds: They match their songs, escaping words, With the moves of long-traditioned lovers Who bond for life and call out to each other: Kewrr, k-r-r-r-ooo, garooo-a-a-a, Kewrr, kkewrooh, kar-r-r-r-o-o-o. Greater brown preacherbird shypoke sandhills Of old, mistaken for whooping juveniles, Fooling us all that they’re naturally brown; They’re actually grey with a tinge of ground From the marshland mud they smear on their feathers, Just part of the primitive fun whenever Big, vulgar red-headed birds get together, And that red they wear on their featherless foreheads Will flare to the world and expand when excited: Kewrr, kkewrooh, kar-r-r-r-o-o-o. They are Grus canadensis, with six subspecies Of mares, roans and colts making sedges and sieges As G.c. Canadian, Cuban and Greater, And Florida, Ole Mississippi, and Lesser. At 10,000 miles a year, 30 an hour They flap six foot wings beating silence and power With slow strokes down and quick strokes up, in time To an ancient cadenced rhyme: Kewrr, k-r-r-r-ooo, garooo-a-a-a, Kewrr, kkewrooh, kar-r-r-r-o-o-o. Eternity lives in the Sandhill Crane, A reminder that all generations remain In song and dance and spirit the same Through the ages, by every intimate name That echoes across the valley, relating The spirit of God and resonating From crane to crane and throughout creation. All souls cry out, with variation: Kewrr, k-r-r-r-ooo, garooo-a-a-a, Kewrr, kkewrooh, kar-r-r-r-o-o-o.


from Thirty Birds

Common Loon

from Thirty Birds

Justified

From far out in the center of a naked lake
The loon's cry rose. It was the cry of someone who owns very little. — Robert Bly


Justified: battling the paunch, racing
‘gainst the clock, basking in the sun, standing
in the rain, fighting for my sanity,
seeking peace of mind, staying on the path,
looking down the road, holding onto youth,
clinging to the earth, breathing in the air,
catching my breath, seeing the world, facing
my mortality, celebrating God,
heeding a call, needing time, struggling
with reality, dreaming of a day,
taking an account, feeding a desire
to sharpen senses, to revive my soul,
to stop somewhere a dozen miles away
and hear the distant cry of a common loon.

And soon that toil shall end;
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest...

                            — William Cullen Bryant


from Thirty Birds