the birth (part 3)

It's Christmas, so here is the last in the series of three.
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There are really two epiphanies here, and I think that in any life, the first one has to take place before the second can follow. The first is the understanding of who we are, stripped of all the things that usually shore up our sense of ourselves as individuals with a particular dignity and worth. "Is man no more than this?" Lear asks in the storm, and if we are lucky, this will be our question too, at some point in our life's journey early enough for us to look up from the mud, eventually, and move on to the second epiphany.
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I confess I have not yet felt this second epiphany, but I do think I have come close. This is a mad, dancing, exhilarating joy. The joy that comes from knowing that man is more than this, and through no effort of our own, but simply because God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. And that through Him the world might be saved - not just us, but the whole world, so that all its glorious truth and beauty should no longer be separate, but one.
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Happy Christmas.
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The Shepherd
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And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, "Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!" When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us." And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning the child; and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.
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Luke 2:8 - 18
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"Night was coming on, and it was cold," the shepherd said, "and I was terribly hungry. I had finished all the bread I had in my sack, and my gut still ached for more. Then I noticed my friend, a shepherd like me, about to throw away a crust he didn't want. So I said, 'Throw the crust to me, friend!' and he did throw it to me, but it landed between us in the mud where the sheep had mucked it up. But I grabbed it anyway and stuffed it, mud and all, into my mouth. And as I was eating it, I suddenly saw - myself. It was as if I was not only a man eating but a man watching a man eating. And I thought, 'This is who I am. I am a man who eats muddy bread.' And I thought, 'The bread is very good.' And they thought I was a terrible fool, but they saw what I meant. We saw everything that night, everything. Everything!
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"Can I make you understand, I wonder? Have you ever had this happen to you? You have been working hard all day. You're dog-tired, bone-tired. So you call it quits for a while. You slump down under a tree or against a rock or something and just sit there in a daze for half an hour or a million years, I don't know, and all this time your eyes are wide open looking straight ahead someplace but they're so tired and glassy they don't see a thing. Then, little by little, you begin to come to, then your eyes begin to come to, and all of a sudden you find out you've been looking at something the whole time except it's only now you really see it - one of the ewe lambs maybe, with its foot caught under a rock, or the moon scorching a hole through the clouds. It was there all the time, and you were looking at it all the time, but you didn't see it till just now.
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"That's how it was this night, anyway. Like finally coming to - not things coming out of nowhere that had never been there before, but things just coming into focus that had been there always. And such things! The air wasn't just emptiness any more. It was alive. Brightness everywhere, dipping and wheeling like a flock of birds. And what you always thought was silence stopped being silent and turned into the beating of wings, thousands and thousands of them. Only not just wings, as you came to more, but voices - hight, wild, like trumpets. The words I could never remember later, but something like what I'd yelled with my mouth full of bread. 'By God, it's good, brothers! The crust. The mud. Everything. Everything!'
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"Oh well. If you think we were out of our minds, you are right, of course. And do you know, it was just like being out of jail. I can see us still. The squint-eyed one who always complained of sore feet. The little sawed-off one who could outswear a Roman. The young one who blushed like a girl. We all tore off across that muddy field like drunks at a fair, and drunk we were, crazy drunk, splashing through a sea of wings and moonlight and the silvery wool of the sheep. Was it night? Was it day? Did our feet touch the ground?
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" 'Shh, shh, you'll wake up my guests,' said the Innkeeper we met coming in the other direction with his arms full of wood. And when we got to the shed out back, one of the three foreigners who were there held a finger to his lips.
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"At the eye of the storm, you know, there's no wind - nothing moves - nothing breathes - even silence keeps silent. So hush now. Hush. There he is. You see him? You see him?
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"By Almighty God, brothers. Open your eyes. Listen."
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the birth (part 2)

Today I remember TS Eliot's 'The Journey of the Magi', written after his conversion and baptism. I first read and loved the poem many years ago - loved the urgency in the words, the music of Eliot's poetic cadences, and what I thought was the world-weary tone of the speaker. Most of all, though, I loved the paradoxical turn in the last few lines of the poem:
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All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
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But it is one thing to be moved by language and beauty, and quite another to find yourself suddenly understanding it.

Here's Buechner's account - the difference is slight, but it makes all the difference in the world.
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The Wise Man
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Image : Wise Men Journeying to Bethlehem (James Tissot)

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, "Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.

Matthew 2:1 - 2
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" 'Beware of beautiful strangers,' " said one of the magi-astrologers, the wise men, " 'and on Friday avoid travel by water. The sun is moving into the house of Venus so affairs of the heart will prosper.' We said this to Herod, or something along those lines, and of course it meant next to nothing. To have told him anything of real value, we would have had to spend weeks of study, months, calculating the conjunction of the planets at the precise moment of his birth and at the births of his parents and their parents back to the fourth generation. But Herod knew nothing of this, and he jumped at the nonsense we threw him like a hungry dog and thanked us for it. A lost man, you see, even though he was a king. Neither really a Jew nor really a Roman, he was at home nowhere. And he believed in nothing, neither Olympian Zeus nor the Holy One of Israel, who cannot be named. So he was ready to jump at anything, and he swallowed our little jingle whole. But it could hardly have been more obvious that jingles were the least of what he wanted from us.

" 'Go and find me the child,' the king told us, and as he spoke, his fingers trembled so that the emeralds rattled together like teeth. 'Because I want to come and worship him,' he said, and when he said that, his hands were still as death. Death. I ask you, does a man need the stars to tell him that no king has ever yet bowed down to another king? He took us for children, that sly, lost old fox, and so it was like children that we answered him. 'Yes, of course,' we said, and went our way. His hands fluttered to his throat like moths.

"Why did we travel so far to be there when it happened? Why was it not enough just to know the secret without having to be there ourselves to behold it? To this, not even the stars had an answer. The stars said simply that he would be born. It was another voice altogether that said to go - a voice as deep within ourselves as the stars are deep within the sky.

"But why did we go? I could not tell you now, and I could not have told you then, not even as we were in the process of going. Not that we had no motive but that we had so many. Curiosity, I suppose: to be wise is to be eternally curious and we were very wise. We wanted to see for ourselves this One before whom even the stars are said to bow down - to see perhaps if it was really true because even the wise have their doubts. And longing. Longing. Why will a man who is dying of thirst crawl miles across sands as hot as fire at simply the possibility of water? But if we longed to receive, we longed also to give. Why will a man labour and struggle all the days of his life so that in the end he has something to give the one he loves?

"So finally we got to the place where the star pointed us. It was at night. Very cold. The Innkeeper showed us the way that we did not need to be shown. A harebrained, busy man. The odour of the hay was sweet, and the cattle's breath came out in little puffs of mist. The man and the woman. Between them the king. We did not stay long. Only a few minutes as the clock goes, ten thousand, thousand years. We set our foolish gifts down on the straw and left.

"I will tell you two terrible things. What we saw on the face of the new-born child was his death. A fool could have seen it as well. It sat on his head like a crown or a bat, this death that he would die. And we saw, as sure as the earth beneath our feet, that to stay with him would be to share that death, and that is why we left - giving only our gifts, withholding the rest.

"And now, brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him is the only life?"

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the birth (part 1)

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In previous years, I've commemorated Christmas with attempts (both successful and unsuccessful) to post poems that put the 'Christ' back into Christmas. It's hard to find good poetry like that. So this year, you're getting a three-part series of re-tellings of the Christmas story, from the perspectives of the Innkeeper, the Wise Men, and the Shepherds. Because all of us, at different times and seasons in our lives, are innkeepers, wise men, shepherds - and perhaps this is the time to reflect on who we are in our lives right now, and to learn from the ones who have gone before us.

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With thanks to TK, for the Christmas card that was more than just.

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from The Magnificent Defeat, by Frederick Buechner

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The Innkeeper

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And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

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- Luke 2:7

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"That was a long, long time ago," said the Innkeeper, "and a long, long way away. But the memories of men are also long, and nobody has forgotten anything about my own sad, queer part in it all unless maybe they have forgotten the truth about it. But you can never blame people for forgetting the truth because it is, after all, such a subtle and evasive commodity. In fact, all that distinguishes a truth from a lie may finally be no more than just the flutter of an eyelid or the tone of a voice. If I were to say, 'I BELIEVE!' that would be a lie, but if I were to say, 'I believe...' that might be the truth. So I do not blame posterity for forgetting the subtleties and making me out to be the black villain of the piece - the heartless one who said, 'No room! No room!' I'll even grant you that a kind of villainy may be part of the truth. But if you want to speak the whole truth, then you will have to call me a villain with a catch in your voice, at least a tremor, a hesitation maybe, with even the glitter of almost a tear in your eye. Because nothing is entirely black, you know. Not even the human heart.

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"I speak to you as men of the world," said the Innkeeper. "Not as idealist but as realist. Do you know what it is like to run an inn - to run a business, a family, to run anything in this world for that matter, even your own life? It is like being lost in a forest of a million trees," said the Innkeeper, "and each tree is a thing to be done. Is there fresh linen on all the beds? Did the children put on their coats before they went out? Has the letter been written, the book read? Is there money enough left in the bank? Today we have food in our bellies and clothes on our backs, but what can we do to make sure that we will have them still tomorrow? A million trees. A million things.

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"Until finally we have eyes for nothing else, and whatever we see turns into a thing. The sparrow lying in the dust at your feet - just a thing to be kicked out of the way, not the mystery of death. The calling of children outside your window - just a distraction, an irrelevance, not life, not the wildest miracle of them all. That whispering in the air that comes sudden and soft from nowhere - only the wind, the wind...
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"Of course I remember well the evening they arrived. I was working on my accounts and looked up just in time to see a woman coming through the door. She walked in that slow, heavy-footed way that women have in the last months, as though they are walking in a dream or at the bottom of the sea. Her husband stood a little behind her - a tongue-tied, helpless kind of man, I thought. I cannot remember either of them saying anything, although I suppose some words must have passed. But at least it was mostly silence. The clumsy silence of the poor. You know what I mean. It was clear enough what they wanted.

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"The stars had come out. I remember the stars perfectly though I don't know why I should, sitting inside as I was. And my wife's cat jumped up onto the table where I was sitting. I had not stood up, of course. There was mainly just silence. Then it happened much in the way that you have heard. I did not lie about there being no room left - there really was none - though perhaps if there had been a room, I might have lied. As much for their sakes as for the sake of the inn. Their kind would have felt more at home in a stable, that's all, and I do not mean that unkindly either, God knows.

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"Later that night, when the baby came, I was not there," the Innkeeper said. "I was lost in the forest somewhere, the unenchanted forest of a million trees. Fifteen steps to the cellar, and watch out for your head going down. Firewood to the left. If the fire goes out, the heart freezes. Only the wind, the wind. I speak to you as men of the world. So when the baby came, I was not around, and I saw none of it. As for what I heard - just at that moment itself of birth when nobody turns into somebody - I do not rightly know what I heard.

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"But this I do know. My own true love. All your life long, you wait for your own true love to come - we all of us do - our destiny, our joy, our heart's desire. So how am I to say it, gentlemen? When he came, I missed him.

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"Pray for me, brothers and sisters. Pray for the Innkeeper. Pray for me, and for us all, my own true love."

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seismic changes

Is it a sign of maturity (read: old age) that I'm starting to appreciate music by composers I used to loathe? First, I succumbed to Bach - I think the definitive capitulation took place last December, with the cello suites already mentioned in an earlier entry from November. And now, I'm listening to Mozart (Sonatas for Piano and Violin, Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Steinberg - thanks to B for the CD, which is one of those gifts that ages much like wine), and enjoying it tremendously. Not only that, I've also picked up Bach's Preludes & Fugues and started sight-reading through them on the piano - the thought of which would have induced nothing but horror in the 16-year old me from years ago.

This signifies. It does, really. Friends have already remarked on how 7 years in the old workplace have changed me somewhat (with different people having different opinions on the degree of that change). And I think that the shift in musical taste away from the Russian Romantics (Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky) says something. So now there's a ground-bass that's made up of music by Beethoven and Brahms - somehow, I cannot imagine ever growing out of their music; and these rather alarming descant voices comprising Bach and Mozart...

Imagine the movement of tectonic plates - buoyed up by molten crust, sliding, grinding, crashing into each other, all these seismic movements that have made the earth the way it is, that continue to remake the earth every day. Slow and inexorable - things are moving, moving, changing all the time. These shifts in musical taste feel somewhat like that.

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled - good grief, whatever next? Gregorian chants? Beijing opera???
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for posterity

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Well, yeah. At the rate we're going, what with global warming and general addle-brained behaviour like guzzling fuel by travelling, spending too much time online, etc... goodness knows how long these will be around for.

That's the Arctic Circle, taken from the plane on the way back from NYC in July this year.

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simple gifts

To find yourself suddenly tired of books and ideas, impatient with novels, just only able to look at poetry, dreading to think about art, and with only music left still singing in your mind, just barely; and wanting instead nothing but the simplest of pleasures - health (most of all), a cosy kitchen of your own to cook in, recipes to follow (stews, soups, pastas, cakes, cookies, desserts, anything that takes time and effort to prepare), dishes to wash, and laughter, clear ringing laughter, amid the sounds of friendly conversation.

Here is a dream kitchen. Well, perhaps not so much a dream - I have grown suspicious of dreams - but a kitchen I would like to work in - with plenty of countertop, shelf and cabinet space, a double-sink, a gas stove, a microwave, an oven, a stolid refridgerator, a sensible clock, a nice useful kitchen table which people can sit around, and a lovely window that lets the sunlight in.
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Christmas is coming - anyone wants to buy me a kitchen? :)
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Bach at the Blue Note

[Warning: amateur and highly ignorant musical gushiness ahead]

It's that time of the year again - when I look at the entire CD collection, numbering well over 200 by now, and realise that nothing fits, that the music I need to hear is simply not there. The last time this happened, in December last year, the solution was Yo-Yo Ma's recording of Bach's cello suites. This year, I find myself turning, or rather, turned, once again, to Bach. There's something about Bach's music for solo instruments - keyboard, violin, cello - that seems to be made specially for cold December nights. I think a large part of it is the fact that they're quiet enough for you to hear the silence behind the music.

This time, it's the Allemande from his Partita in D major, discovered on pianist Jeremy Denk's blog. I love the opening, and the way it muses in this wandering, tender way. Or maybe it's just the way that Denk plays it - the Glenn Gould version on YouTube sounded a lot more percussive and definite, possibly because it uses more staccato. (And of course, what all this is leading to, is some seasonal happiness for the good people at Amazon.com, and a further aggravation of the space problem on my already-overcrowded CD shelf.)

Hearing this, and comparing the experience with the Cello Suites experience last year, I must say that much as I love the mellow singing voice of the cello, my first love will always be the piano. It's something about the way the notes ring, resonate and echo, and also the way they are always separate, no matter how flowing the line - there's this detachment or independence about the individual notes within the line that is unique to the piano, so that the music seems just a little held back, just a little reticent. String instruments, on the other hand, tend to make the notes flow into each other in a gushy codependent sort of way. I really don't know how to explain this any better, and I wish some musically-trained person would help me put it into more widely understood technical language, but it's for this reason that Chopin just works on the piano in a way he would not work on a violin, say.

I was talking to some friends about Bach the other day. One of them, the only classical-music person in the group, said that Bach is an acquired taste. I agree absolutely. In my piano-lesson days, my teachers always made sure I had a dose of Bach no matter what I was playing, and so I worked my way through the 2 and 3-part inventions and the easier fugues, but oh how I hated most of it. It was so boring. Playing Bach was something I tried to hurry through so that I could get to the Beethoven and the Chopin. And I used to be seriously worried about people who liked Bach. (Honestly! I know it sounds corny, but it's true - I used to judge people by their musical taste.) But now I find I'm becoming one of those people myself. It's age, I guess, growing older and mellowing down somewhat from the impetuous Rachmaninov days.

Here's a poem to accompany the Bach.


Alone

"When I'm alone" - the words tripped off his tongue
As though to be alone were nothing strange.
"When I was young," he said, "when I was young..."

I thought of age, and loneliness and change,
I thought how strange we grow when we're alone,
And how unlike the selves that meet, and talk,
And blow the candles out, and say goodnight.
Alone... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown.

- Siegfried Sassoon


Note: 5 Jan 2008

Now that I've heard the Angela Hewitt version of the Allemande, it seems to me that Denk's version takes perhaps too many liberties with the piece, in terms of rhythmical variation (so much rubato) and perhaps even in the range of dynamics used. But who am I to say - I really don't know anything.


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