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Sun Will Set Again
(Download the MP3 audio – 15:01, 20.8 MB)
(Music cues are, in order: Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales by Partch, Virudent Omnes by Perotin, and Farwell My Good — Forever by Tye, from the album Early Music
The ancients, I learned in a lecture, had no standard system of tuning. Wherever you went, the pitches you heard depended on the ears and traditions of the locals, and on whatever instruments they happened to have and how they were tuned — tuned to each other, or to some particular old man’s ear. The universal standard of having everyone up to the same concert pitch is convenient for the art of music for several reasons, but the other way appeals to my imagination too. But then again, just about everything that smacks of local isolation appeals to my imagination.
The freeway stretched long and straight as a railroad track, two lanes in each direction, running next to a cornfield on a sunny afternoon. Cars in the lanes going south could drive fast or slow as they pleased; the lanes going north, however, were full of stopped cars as far as you could see. And in one of the cars was a man who had had a long day, was hopelessly late for everything, and whose eyesight was getting dimmer by the moment, under a glaze of defeat. The stress of rush hour traffic and a wicked pre-dinner fatigue combined, finally, to drain him of the will to bother about anything anymore. Screw it, he thought, I’m just going to pull over and take a nap. He pulled his car over onto the shoulder and got out, slamming the door behind him. He turned his back on the traffic jam, the freeway, and everyone, gloriously aware that people were probably wondering what the heck he was doing and that he didn’t care. He walked a good hundred yards into the cornfield and lay down. Sleep came like a steamroller over his willing head.
When he woke up, the sun was still out. In a moment of insight rare for someone just awake from a hard sleep, he waited for his head to clear before he started back — strike off in the wrong direction through a cornfield, he knew, could mean an interminably long walk. The corn, curiously, no longer grew in straight rows as it had before. Somehow he got the direction right and in less than a minute he emerged in view of the freeway. The traffic jam was gone. In fact there was not a car to be seen or heard on the road, which was almost overgrown with weeds. His own car was also gone. It was very warm and very quiet, without even the song of a bird to break the silence.
He walked several miles to the next exit, past several run-down gas stations, and finally found a bar. The beer was in a Budweiser bottle, but tasted nothing like Budweiser; in fact, it tasted excellent. He could hardly understand the bartender or the two other young men there, though they were speaking something like English. There was no radio and no music.
Why were the Dark Ages called the Dark Ages? You might say it was because people were ignorant about a lot of important things; but people today are ignorant about a lot of important things as well. Maybe it is more likely it was dark because everyone was suddenly more isolated. Think of it like this: Your state was once part of a world empire; now the empire is disintegrated and your state is on its own. You used to live in the city; now you live in the country without a car. You had internet and a radio and a cell phone; now you have to walk to town for news. That is darkness of the Dark Age kind of darkness.
What remains to be seen is whether, in these last terminal stages of the Enlightenment, we have turned the lights up too bright, so to speak; whether, perhaps, a new Dark Age might not be good for us. When the power goes out and you have no choice but to get out the candles and play cards, the whole time you wish the power would just come on again already; but when the power does come back on, there’s this instant where you are aware that for a little while there in that close, dark room you all had something local, human, and special, and you have lost it.
A new dark age — even a short one — would be a good deal more serious than that. If it doesn’t appeal to you then I don’t blame you; don’t think about it too much. But it may be that you were born for such a time as this, when the empire is disintegrated, and the power goes out.
From Silas Marner:
In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak — there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag? — and these pale men rarely stirred abroad without that mysterious burden. The shepherd himself, though he had good reason to believe that the bag held nothing but flaxen thread, or else the long rolls of strong linen spun from that thread, was not quite sure that this trade of weaving, indispensable though it was, could be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One. In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder. No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother? To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft. All cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself suspicious: honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not overwise or clever—at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring. In this way it came to pass that those scattered linen-weavers—emigrants from the town into the country—were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic neighbours, and usually contracted the eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness.
…And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization—inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid highly-desirable tithes. But it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion. It was an important-looking village, with a fine old church and large churchyard in the heart of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory, which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the churchyard:—a village which showed at once the summits of its social life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park and manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter tide.
…Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas—where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. But even their experience may hardly enable them thoroughly to imagine what was the effect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner, when he left his own country and people and came to settle in Raveloe. Nothing could be more unlike his native town, set within sight of the widespread hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden even from the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows. There was nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked out on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had once been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had been the channel of divine influences to Marner—they were the fostering home of his religious emotions—they were Christianity and God’s kingdom upon earth. A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.
And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in Raveloe?—orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging along the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come. There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall that would stir Silas Marner’s benumbed faith to a sense of pain. In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feeling of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him that the Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to bitterness. The little light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night.
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“When you walk, walk; when you eat, eat; and when you sit, sit.” I am still learning how to do this. It seems whenever I do something, my mind is often elsewhere. I am still learning to be fully present in this moment.
Our souls want to be fully present, to only focus on the now. The irony is that we always look forward to a time when we can do this. We never just do it.
This is how I define beauty: beauty is what makes me forget everything else and just want to live in the now. When I look at this photo, I think, If only I were there, I would rest and enjoy it and not think about the past or the future. There is enough there to look at and enjoy.
The problem is, when I was there, I did not fully rest and enjoy it. Instead, I took this photo. I was thinking about the future and other peoples’ possible responses to it, or about other past and future things.
If you wait until your surroundings are beautiful before you will stop and enjoy them, you might never enjoy even the beautiful surroundings.
I was looking specifically for a summer photo. In order to find this one, I had to go back to the time before I started working on my house, more than three years ago. Now, I am getting closer and closer to finishing the house, and more and more I have let my mind be occupied with getting it done and moving in, and putting all the hard work behind me.
This is a very subtle trap.
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Big Again
The world was once so big, the sun so large in a large sky; the son of David wrote “The dead know not any thing” at a time when the wide, unbounded, untamed world was all we could see and the only universe we knew, and to be dead was to be removed from everything. It was only after a much later revelation that a man who was not a king would write “We are confident, and prefer to be absent from the body and present with God.”
In the age since, the world shrank further and further, until near the end we occupied it with our bodies but hardly lived in it at all, and the hills and oceans became only pictures in our minds. Finally, at the very end, it shriveled completely and disappeared in a fizzle, like a match going out. What a surprise, then, that the last work was not to lead us into a brand new world, but to make this one big again.
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Eggplant Suede Chairs
(Download the MP3 audio – 7:15, 10.1 MB)
Trixie and I determined that we would spend Friday evenings at the coffee shop by the University. It’s seventeen minutes away, but this coffee shop stays open until midnight, so we suffer ourselves the horror of spending seventeen perfect minutes alone in the truck together.
Just recently we were married, although I prefer to think of it more like she promised to “move in with me for life” – hits all the same notes of commitment and togetherness but it just feels more homey somehow. I only mention it by way of explaining how, although of course things change after marriage, the telling thing for us was how many things stayed the same, only better. Trixie could have been all like, “no more of those evenings at the coffee shop!” But I married the right one; she not only approves, but what is better, we go together. We are two of a kind, cut from the same bolt of honest, homespun cloth. We both need to write and journal, we both need to get out and drink something hot, and what is more, we are both confronted with the same problem: how to carve out of the raw granite-block of life something that we can really enjoy looking at.
The conflict is an old one. We both crave a life together that is reflective, thoughtful and creative; which demands in the first and last case, time., lots of time, time to think and reflect and create. But a need for time suggests a need for money and a need for money suggests a lot of wearisome busywork. Wearisome busywork is the bane of reflectivity and creativity. Meanwhile, money is tight, and time already runs through our fingers like water. We have a house to finish building in the next two months somehow and bills to pay.
These questions weighed heavily on us. We held hands and walked into the coffee shop in subdued silence. We sat down in the eggplant suede chairs with our drinks and a piece of coffee cake between us. We looked into each other’s eyes as we chewed and sipped, and I could tell we were both lost in thought, lost in the deeper questions, lost in some far-flung wavelength of life’s puzzles and possibilities — but it was the same wavelength. We were truly at one in thought, whatever else might be happening.
“Someday you just know they’re going to make a modern version of Anne of Green Gables and she’s going to work in a coffee shop,” I said. “She’ll find a mouse in the caramel.” “Noooo, that would not be cool,” said Trixie. “Well unless they did a really good job of it, you know, like the new Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “Hmmm, true,” she said, considering.
Shades of emotion, No. 312: That curious mixture of wistful regret, envy, amusement and disbelief you get when a perfectly snatchable opportunity glides soundlessly past you, and, just when it is out of reach, turns and waves.
This kind of thing happens all the time in the stock market, but I gave up on the stock market ages ago. I taught myself the ins and outs of investing with a brokerage account several years ago, and I happened to turn a decent profit; but, after brokerage fees and taxes, it turns out I simply am not rich enough to invest on a big-enough scale to make it pay. I also am not good enough at telling the future to make winning long-shot bets.
So no, I wasn’t alive in time to buy Intel at six, but even if I had been around I would probably have passed. I was around last May, however, when a new digital currency called bitcoin was trading at about 6 cents per bitcoin. It’s the kind of wonky technical crypto-project I would have sunk my teeth into if only I’d known about it, no doubt about it. I’d have accumulated a few thousand of them without hardly even trying, and today they’d be worth sixteen bucks each, a cool fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand dollars would solve a lot of my problems just now.
But it’s the emotion I’m talking about now. It feels as if, let’s say, I’d been going to the same coffee shop every week for years to hang out with pals, and then one week I didn’t make it for whatever reason, and then when I did I show up, everyone was like hey, check it out, John Travolta showed up last week and gave each of us a Porsche! I’m pretty philisophical about things like this. I must not have really needed a Porsche. It doesn’t really mess with my zen thing. The planet Earth is my Porsche, driving me around the solar system at 67,000 mph, so there. But on the way to work I’d purse my lips just a little, and you know in my mind I’d be tellying everyone else on the road, “I could gone to coffee last week, and then I’d be driving a Porsche just now and have John Travolta’s cell phone number. I just decided not to, you know. I can take or leave these things.” Dang it.
I guess we still have an opportunity to prove to ourselves that maybe the artistic, contented life isn’t solely the provenance of the millionaire. In my gut, alas, I would still much rather have my fare down that road all paid for. But if such joys can eventually be farmed out of nothing more than the raw, untilled land of the creativity and energy of two lower-middle-class newlyweds, then maybe that’s a path worth hacking out, and one that would bring hope for others besides. Maybe it wasn’t worth fifty thousand free dollars to give up that chance. Maybe.
| And Nature, day by day Has sung in accents clear This joyous roundelay ‘He loves me, he is here Fal la la la fal la la la He loves me, he is here Fal la la la fal la’ |
| — Ah, Leave Me Not to Pine, G&S |
The interlude music in the middle is Awaiting Spring by Benji Flaming.
This post is syndicated from the original at jdueck.net, where you can listen to a beautifully produced audio version, either in your browser or as a podcast.
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Jessica and I just returned from our honeymoon, and from a trip to Indiana. Life together is still in its formative stages. We’re still learning what to buy at the grocery store, how to breathe and sleep together at night. Not that any of it is difficult; the hardest adjustment has probably been how to be apart during the day, now that I actually have to go back to my day job. But it is all very new. We love that.
We have a blending of artistic identities to manage as well, as pretentious as that may sound. We both love art and literature and music, and creativity, and we enjoy expressing it. So there will be some changes around here as the site begins to reflect the new jointness-of-residence. I lucked out in that we both have the same first initial, so the site’s address will be the same, but everything else is wonderfully up for grabs. We get to pick a new name and probably a new header doodle. You’ll start seeing paintings as well as reading words.
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Water, the Transcendent Lens
Bodies of water – lakes, streams, oceans – are frequently connected, in literature and experience, with moodiness or meditation. Characters near the sea, or near rivers, are found to be lost in reveries, daydreaming, thinking up poetry, or otherwise listening to their muses. The water is connected in some way with a lifting-up of our attentions away from the visible.
What do you see? – Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries…Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
—Moby Dick, Chapter I: Loomings
Attached here are examples of this peculiar connection.
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The King and the Jester
Album art photo by Wouter (CC License)
(Download the MP3 audio – 14:59, 20.6 MB)
Radio address for February 21, 2011: some things not many people seem to know about Niagara Falls, about kings and fools.
A transcript, in the form of a typewritten draft (which I read from for the recording but does not exactly match what I said) and handwritten notes, is available.
The music cues are all from the movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I initially thought that out of respect for the format, I ought to truncate the ending song, which is rather long, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)
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Accepting Footnotes
Most posts on this site now accept submissions for additional footnotes. If something in a post jogs your memory, or reminds you of an experience or something in a book which sheds further light on the subject, we invite you to make the connection for other readers by submitting a footnote.
We review all footnotes before publishing them. We usually take our sweet time about it too, so you might as well take yours when writing them. A well-considered and thoughtful post is likely to be published. In order for your footnote to be accepted, it must be substantive, relevant content in its own right. Keep in mind, you are not “commenting” on the original, but actually being invited to try adding to it. Footnotes that add insight or draw new connections have a good chance of being accepted; simple statements of opinion do not have much chance (even if they are nice opinions!). Obvious marketing and incivilities will be shot on sight.
This model is a bit of an adaptation of the normal comments system found on most blogs. The two most common approaches are either to allow any comments that aren’t clearly abusive or spammy, or to allow no comments at all. For many years, I felt that in the case of this site, neither option was ideal; but I defaulted to disallowing comments entirely for lack of any other ideas. It’s been apparent for a long time, however, that a significant slice of the readers and passersby here could not properly enjoy the ideas without participating in some way.
Much of my writing involves making connections between seemingly disparate ideas (or at least what I hope are artful attempts at doing so). The “curated footnotes” model, which has been tried successfully elsewhere, at last allows thoughtful readers to participate along the same lines.
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The Summons
(Download the MP3 audio – 12:15, 16.9 MB)
As I write this we have just made it through the blizzard of the decade here in Minnesota – 17 inches of snow in high winds, the eighth fifth largest snowfall ever recorded in the Twin Cities – and that is being followed up by windchills in the range of -20° to -30° F.
The great thing about winter, and the most terrible thing, is that it kills things. We generally do not, for example, have bugs in Minnesota that are biggger than your shoe, or poisonous snakes breeding in the grass. They would all die here in November. But winter also selects many of the noble, warm-blooded creatures to die as well: deer, wolves, birds. Many of them will lay down tonight and die in the midnight hour of this midnight month. Winter brings everything down to a simple matter of resources.
Christmas, of course, brings the gap between ‘enough’ and ‘not enough’ into sharp relief. Those with enough relax and enjoy the festivities of being warm and cheery in the darkest coldest hour of the year; those without must find a way to survive and be content, or give in to despair. I’m heartily in favour of festivities; also of helping as many people as possible survive and be free to enjoy them. It all comes home to you, though, when it may be you who do not survive.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, looking out the window of my counting-house, where things are not going well; where they look, quite frankly, very bleak indeed. For the first time I contemplate not having enough or being enough. I had received a summons to the Clearing for midnight that night.
| As I went out one day, one day I met an old man by the way His head was bare and his beard was gray His clothing made of the cold earth and clay, His clothing made of the cold earth and clay. |
| I said, Old man, what man are you? What country do you belong to? He said, I’m Death, hast heard of me? All kings and princes bow down unto me, All kings and princes bow down unto me. |
| — Death and the Lady |
One night months ago, while I was driving home in the dark, Robert called from Ohio with a parable. He never says “Hi Joel how are you” when he calls with a parable; I just pick up the phone and there he is on the other end telling me the story, as though I had dialed him just in time to hear him tell it.
A man had a son and a horse, and one night a storm knocked down a tree, and broke a fence. The horse escaped in the night. The next day the neighbor said “That’s bad!” The man replied, “How do you know that’s bad?”
The next day the horse found its way home, accompanied by some wild horses, and the neighbor congratulated him saying “That’s good!” and again the man responded “How do you know that’s good?”
A week later, the man’s son was taming one of the horses. The horse threw him and he broke an arm and a leg. The neighbor again said “That’s bad!” and the man simply asked “How do you know that’s bad?”
Three days later a war was declared, and the king’s men came to town conscripting all able-bodied young men to serve as soldiers. The man’s son was spared because of his injuries.
“The lesson is: stay away from the tree of knowledge of good and evil!”
I’ve thought a lot about this story lately, and of the deer that die in the woods in the winter. We have a tradition that the human race went wrong by eating at the tree of knowledge of good and evil – by trying to figure out what is good and what is bad, and taking it upon ourselves to worry about and fear and avoid the “bad” things, when it’s simply not possible to have that kind of knowledge. How can I know whether it really is “bad” for me to, in spite of all my best efforts, lose my situation, my house, my self-respect? What if I am among those that winter separates unto Pluto rather than to Jupiter this year? This question is what the summons to the Clearing made very real for me.
The parable Robert told me might be rephrased in more traditional terms. A poor woman in labour was forced to give birth in a barn in the middle of winter. “How do you know that’s bad?” It seems that when God chose to enter and experience humanity, He chose also to refute our notions of good and evil circumstances by the way in which He did it. I don’t know about you, but if I agreed to become a spider and to enter the world of spiders, I would at least want to end up as a spider that had a fighting chance – not so with the God of the Incarnation. From that wet infant landed in the straw, he was vulnerable and unlikely to survive, due to malice, due to lack of money, lack of food, lack of protection and basic clean living conditions. We can say he loved the whole world from the poor to the great, but we have lost sight of what Divine Love means: it means being vulnerable; it means accepting vulnerability. The more vulnerable you are, the closer you approach to the Divine.
| Captain, Captain, tell me true Does my sweet Willy sail with you? No my dear, he is not here For he is drowned in this ocean dear |
| — Captain Captain |
This “summons” – I’ve mentioned it twice now. I’ve always dreaded getting one. I’ve dreaded being that vulnerable.
The appointed time was midnight, the place was a clearing in a very wooded, very overgrown ravine between two rocky bluffs. That night it was snowing hard, which was itself an added disappointment. I thought at least it would be nice to be able to see the stars. Trixie came with me of course. The summons was really for both of us, our fates having been irreversibly fused some time ago. We drove as far as we could, and parked the truck, and sat inside it with the heat on as long as we could, and held each other quietly. Eventually we stepped down into the snow and left the truck behind, wading and trudging on foot through the woods towards the Clearing. We didn’t say anything. We weren’t sad, or happy, just quiet.
I had imagined, I guess, that the Clearing would be empty, and that Trixie and I would have to build the fire ourselves; but as we drew near, we heard the fire crackling, and even some voices talking. And who should come to us out of the clearing but Robert, the breath pluming out of his mouth as he laughed and gave us a big hug. Robert and I have nothing in common – not lifestyle, not background, not age, not appearance – nothing at all except that we had both apparently received the same summons. Others were there too – many which I did not expect. There was Daniel and his wife, there was my Liberian friend Henry, there was Erik and his wife and daughter. Some had only been acquaintances – but now we looked in each others’ eyes and realized we had more in common than we could have hoped, and were glad. There were even several deer standing at a distance from the fire.
There we left everything behind – our wealth, our families, our reputations, our warm breath. Was this a bad thing? We had asked ourselves this question a hundred times before, but we were not asking it now. We stood around the fire facing each other, and raised our hands and looked up into the falling snow, and in raised voices, asked for the last thing there was to ask for, as the sparks flew upwards.
| I want a sober mind An all-sustaining eye To see my God above And to the heavens fly |
| I want a Godly fear A quick discerning eye That looks to Thee my God And sees the tempter fly. |
| I’d soar away above the sky I’d fly to see my God above. |
| — Soar Away |
The first music cue is an acoustic sketch by my friend Benji Flaming. The other cue not linked above is O Come, O Come Emmanuel from Charles Dickens Christmas.
This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)
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The Settler
(Download the MP3 audio – 4:52, 6.8 MB)
Radio address for December 8, 2010, a poem I wrote this last Sunday.
| The land was, once, just the land you could see; There was no “what I see, and what the map says Is further on” – traveling meant finding someone Only by walking, your footsteps constantly Unraveling each horizon into things You could remember. If you remembered them In order, you would get where you were going: Those pines you remembered every time you saw them, Where you always thought you’d like to stop awhile – Those were the only things like roads, once, There were no paths, and no homes, yet, either. Even so, as far back as you can imagine, I suspect, you’d have found traces of other people, And before them, of God Who walked here Himself And left you a sealed letter in the field with your name on it: “Not to be opened for twenty thousand years.” As it happens, here you find both the letter And the human traces – those pines, for instance, That gave you pause when you walked near them In the snow, when it was evening all afternoon: You sat down beneath and between them (your many layers Allowed you to sit and yet remain warm). You noticed another stand of pine far off, A distant dark green monument across the snowfall. You could give up your place and walk there, But it was likely to be just as comfortable here. The sky was so grey it almost hid itself, So grey you’d almost say you couldn’t see it Even when you looked right up at it. And falling snow gave you that odd, best feeling Of being both on and inside a blanket. The pines Were the quietest of all – quieter, even, than home – Was that not a hint? The letter I spoke of? – And besides, the great calculation was, Whether there was not already someone else In that other clump of pines as well, maybe looking Across at you – probably not though. This is where you’d hate to find a beer can But if you did, you’d just leave it there. It doesn’t fit, at first – you wanted to think You were the only one ever to come here, That this stand of pine is its own new world That will be gone again when the snow stops – But, after a moment, your perspective shifts, All on its own, and the can is a part of it all, As much as anything else there, as much as The dry grass poking through the snow drifts; The same way, you see, the pines themselves Are part of the farm…as is that passing car, with its headlights on. |
— The Settler
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The music at the end is Meg’s Hair from the much-loved Little Women original soundtrack.
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