dual personalities

Tag: poetry

November 11, 2021

A labyrinth of loves

by chuckofish

We know it is November because the Christmas Cactus is throwing out buds like crazy! So excitiing!

In other news, I was talking to the boy one day last week and we were discussing my blogpost about my Top 10 favorite/best films. He asked me why I hadn’t included To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and I said, Oh my gosh, because I forgot it! It definitely belongs in the Top 10, maybe Top 5.

So I’ll have to revise my Top 10 and move To Have and Have Not down to 11-15. Sheesh. I am getting old. He also questioned my exclusion of The Professionals (1967) and I said it would definitely be in the top 20 list. So I guess I will start working on a Top 11-20 list. We are such nerds. But I am thankful that I have a son with whom I can discuss movies.

Since it is Veterans Day, which we should all acknowledge, I propose to watch one of my favorite war movies. I looked up on the AFI website to see if they had a top 100 war movies list, but they do not. In fact, there are only six war movies in their top 100 list! Of course, only one of them is a favorite of mine: #37 The Best Years of Their Lives (1946).

The other five are: #52 From Here to Eternity (1953); #54 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); $79 The Deer Hunter (1978); #83 Platoon (1986); #89 Patton (1970). Not terrible movies, but not favorites of mine.

No, I would suggest watching one of these WWII movies in memory of WWII Guy: They Were Expendable (1945); 12 O’Clock High (1949); Air Force (1943); or The Great Escape (1962).

If you’re not in the mood for WWII, I suggest: Drums Along the Mohawk (1939); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); The Horse Soldiers (1959); The Sand Pebbles (1966); or Glory (1989).

I ain’t much about no prayin’, now. I ain’t never had no family, and… Well, I just… Y’all’s the onliest family I got. I love the 54th. Ain’t even much a matter what happens tomorrow, ’cause we men, ain’t we?

Today the Lutheran Church celebrates the feast day of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish writer, philosopher and theologian, who died on this day in 1855. That is interesting considering Kierkegaard was extremely critical of the practice of Christianity as a state religion, particularly the Church of Denmark. But I’m okay with old Soren, so let us pray one of his prayers:

O Lord, calm the waves of this heart; and calm its tempests. Calm yourself, O my soul, so that the divine can act in you. Calm yourself, O my soul, so that God is able to repose in you, so that his peace may cover you. Yes, Father in Heaven, often have I found that the world around me cannot give me peace, O but make me feel that you are able to give me peace.  Let me know the truth of your promise, that the whole world may not take away your peace. Amen.

I think this is true.

And I can’t tell you how much watching this reminds me of my mother. What do you think the Queen carries in her purse?

Finally, here is a poem “To the Son” by Jorge Luis Borges:

It was not I who begot you. It was the dead—

my father, and his father, and their forebears,

all those who through a labyrinth of loves

descend from Adam and the desert wastes

of Cain and Abel, in a dawn so ancient

it has become mythology by now,

to arrive, blood and marrow, at this day

in the future, in which I now beget you.

I feed their multitudes. They are who we are,

and you among us, you and the the sons to come

that you will beget. The latest in the line

and in red Adam’s line. I too am those others.

Eternity is present in the things

of time and its impatient happenings

–translated by Alistair Reid

Enjoy the day! Read a poem.

3 Comments
November 4, 2021

And like a thunderbolt he falls

by chuckofish

Well, here we are in November and the end of the year approaches. Yikes. Thanksgiving is in three weeks! Advent starts on November 28!

However, Advent is not a Presbyterian tradition, and our senior pastor reminded us last Sunday that the Semper Reformanda (always Reforming) does not mean that we’re always adding to the Reformation, or modifying it to fit the world’s trends. No, it means the exact opposite, a return to Reformed confessional standards. So I don’t think Advent will be a thing at our new church.

I am okay with that. Advent has gone commercial anyway–anything to make a buck.

I agree with Anne as usual.

Happy November movie viewing on TCM–check out Laura’s detailed rundown of what’s showing. Sydney Greenstreet is the Star of the Month. I watched The Maltese Falcon (1941) last night for the first time in a very long time, and Sydney was truly one-of-a-kind. They knew about character actors back in the day.

I was happy to see the Atlanta Braves win the World’s Series, although I have pretty much opted out of MLB. But it did my heart good to hear shortstop Dansby Swanson give the glory to God: “God’s always got a plan and having faith in that plan will never fail you.” Amen.

Are we living in the last days? (You know you’ve asked yourself that question.) Here’s the answer:

But don’t allow yourself to get down in the dumps. Here is my favorite three-year old poetry aficionado reciting The Eagle: A Fragment by Aldred, Lord Tennyson. He makes me smile every time!

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Wish me luck on Saturday when I am giving a talk on the Santa Fe Trail to a group of DAR ladies here in town. You can bet I will work in a way to mention ol’ John Simpson Hough. It should be fun, right?

4 Comments
September 22, 2021

The clamorous strains of history

by chuckofish

Did you know that in 1961 Jorge Luis Borges, aging and mostly blind, began teaching at the University of Texas, Austin, and the state of Texas captured a special place in his heart, as reflected in his poem “Texas”?

Texas

Here too. Here, as on the other unfurling

Frontier of the continent, the great

Prairie where a solitary cry fades out;

Here too the lariat, the Indian, the yearling.

Here too the secretive and unseen bird

That over the clamorous strains of history

Sings for one evening and its memory;

Here too the mystic alphabet, the word

Of stars which dictate to my cursive flow

Names that the days on their labyrinthine way

Will leave behind them: San Jacinto, say,

Or that other Thermopylae, the Alamo.

Here too that unknown, brief,

Needy and fretful commotion, life.

–translated by Robert Mezey

Well, he did. The world is more than we know.

Daughter #2, along with my dear DP, will pick up the slack on the blog while we are out of town, so be sure to tune in for an update on Miss Katiebelle, fashion-setting trendsetter of the daycare set.

And pray for traveling mercies as we launch ourselves out into the unfurling Frontier of the continent.

6 Comments
September 16, 2021

“Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world”*

by chuckofish

We have had some great weather this week. Sunny, warm and breezy, with low humidity–just great and much appreciated.

Our house has been in total disarray because we had some built-ins installed in our den this week. We had to take apart the audio/visual system so the guys could do it (2 days) and now we have to put it all back. The boy is coming over this morning before work to assist the OM. So. Many. Wires. Remember back in the day when you just plugged in the old television set? Now there is so much more to deal with. Surround sound. Oy.

This is a really good article contrasting two people who died this week (John Shelby Spong and comedian Norm MacDonald) and their different takes on Christianity.

I watched a movie recently (on Amazon Prime) which I can recommend: Mr. Church (2016) starring Eddie Murphy and directed by Bruce Beresford. It’s kind of a tear-jerker, but I enjoyed it.

The really amazing thing about this movie is the fact that, even though it’s about a black man bringing up a white girl, there is no racial conflict in the story. Never once does a white person sneer, look down on or insult Mr. Church. This probably explains why the film didn’t get good reviews. But Eddie Murphy plays it straight and the cast is excellent. (BTW, the trailer includes spoilers.)

And here’s another really good song from Mac Powell’s upcoming album:

Can’t wait til it drops on October 15.

One more thing: I could watch this amazing 3-year old 100 times:

Just a reminder:

The angel fetched Peter out of prison, but it was prayer that fetched the angel.

–Thomas Watson (1620-1686)

*Billy Collins, “Litany”

4 Comments
August 24, 2021

“It opens, the gate to the garden with the docility of a page”*

by chuckofish

Today we celebrate the birthday of the great Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Read some poetry. Drink some wine.

With Sir Thomas Browne

Defend me, Lord. (That I’m calling you

implicates No One. It’s only a word

from the drill the disengaged can use,

and this evening of dread, I write it.)

Defend me from me. They have also said this,

Montaigne and Browne and a Spaniard I don’t know;

something stays in me amid all this gold

that my darkening eyes still decipher.

Defend me, Lord, from an impatient

appetite for becoming marble or oblivion;

defend me from being what I have been,

the one I have been irreparably.

Not from the sword or the blood-stained lance

but, oh, protect me from expectation.

(Translated from the Spanish by Evelyn Hooven)

*”Simplicity” by JLB

2 Comments
August 17, 2021

Leaving the cities of the plain

by chuckofish

I have been off the academic merry-go-round now for six or so weeks, we’ve thrown our big party and things are finally winding down around here.

This poem by the seventeenth poet Henry Vaughan (1621-95) seems appropriate to the mood.

Retirement

Fresh fields and woods! the Earth’s fair face,

God’s foot-stool, and man’s dwelling-place.

I ask not why the first Believer

Did love to be a country liver?

Who to secure pious content

Did pitch by groves and wells his tent;

Where he might view the boundless sky,

And all those glorious lights on high;

With flying meteors, mists and show’rs,

Subjected hills, trees, meads and flow’rs;

And ev’ry minute bless the King

And wise Creator of each thing.

I ask not why he did remove

To happy Mamre’s holy grove,

Leaving the cities of the plain

To Lot and his successless train?

All various lusts in cities still

Are found; they are the thrones of ill;

The dismal sinks, where blood is spill’d,

Cages with much uncleanness fill’d.

But rural shades are the sweet fense

Of piety and innocence.

They are the Meek’s calm region, where

Angels descend and rule the sphere,

Where heaven lies leiger, and the dove

Duly as dew, comes from above.

If Eden be on Earth at all,

‘Tis that, which we the country call.

*The painting is by John Constable. The cities of the plain are the five cities—Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar—thought to be located near the southern end of the Dead Sea. The narrative of Genesis 14:1associates these five cities and locates them in the Valley of Siddim, the Dead Sea. 

7 Comments
July 27, 2021

“I keep an inventory of wonders”*

by chuckofish

We think a lot about the passing of time and this was a shocker:

Yes, the album was released on May 26, 1967–54 years ago. And WWI was only 50 years before that. Western culture had changed a lot in those 50 years, but think about how much it’s changed in the past 54 years.

As usual, I am trying to escape our crumbling culture by reading something uplifting. Currently I am re-reading Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. This novel has much to say about the passage of time and people living in community.

As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, Andy Catlett, do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn’t.

Frederick Buechner calls it “the Room called Remember.”

The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for him whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived, have maybe even had moments of living it ourselves. Remember him who himself remembers us as he promised to remember the thief who died beside him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping. Praise him.

Anyway, I highly recommend both Wendell Berry and Frederick Buechner.

And, of course, there’s always Jorge Luis Borges…

In the golden afternoon, or in
a serenity the gold of afternoon
might symbolize,
a man arranges books
on waiting shelves
and feels the parchment, the leather, the cloth,
and the pleasure bestowed
by looking forward to a habit
and establishing an order.
Here Stevenson and Andrew Lang, the other Scot,
will magically resume
their slow discussion
which seas and death cut short,
and surely Reyes will not be displeased
by the closeness of Virgil.
(In a modest, silent way,
by ranging books on shelves
we ply the critic’s art.)
The man is blind, and knows
he won’t be able to decode
the handsome volumes he is handling,
and that they will never help him write
the book that will justify his life in others’ eyes;
but in the afternoon that might be gold
he smiles at his curious fate
and feels that peculiar happiness
which comes from loved old things.

June, 1968

*Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2016

2 Comments
July 1, 2021

“So from today I’m travellin’ light. “*

by chuckofish

Yesterday morning they were cutting down trees somewhere in my neighborhood and grinding up the branches into mulch for hours on end. That has to be one of the most stressful sounds one can be forced to listen to I think. I mean it’s not like having your apartment building collapse underneath you, but seriously, I loathe it.

Anyway, I took out my latest book purchase, Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, and started to read.

Camden, 1892

The smell of coffee and the newspapers,
Sunday and its lassitudes. The morning,
and on the adjoining page, that vanity—
the publication of allegorical verses
by a fortunate fellow poet. The old man
lies on a white bed in his sober room,
a poor man’s habitation. Languidly
he gazes at his face in the worn mirror.
He thinks, beyond astonishment now: that man
is me, and absentmindedly his hand
touches the unkempt beard and the worn-out mouth.
The end is close. He mutters to himself:
I am almost dead, but still my poems retain
life and its wonders. I was once Walt Whitman.

JLB is just so great. Here is an interesting interview with him on Firing Line in 1977. I can’t imagine anyone today having such an intelligent conversation on television. I have to hand it to Buckley who just lets him talk. He asks some questions to pull him back on track, but he isn’t concerned with inserting himself.

I watched a good movie the other night–The Fugitive Kind (1960)–an adaption of Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending. It stars Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward and is directed by Sidney Lumet. It is your typical overwrought Williams story of gothic southern proportion, but I still enjoyed it.

The characters are compelling, the acting is very good, and it is certainly better than anything new you will find on Netflix or Amazon Prime. And I forget how handsome and appealing Marlon Brando was in his prime.

I went to a third retirement party on my final day at work yesterday and was hugged a lot. I felt very appreciated and loved. I was asked a million times what my plans are and I thought I really needed an answer, so I started saying, “I’m joining the circus.” The truth is I have no plans. I want to enjoy every day and read a lot of poetry by Jorge Luis Borges and watch Marlon Brando movies. I think that is okay.

“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” –Corrie Ten Boom

*Johnny Mercer

3 Comments
June 22, 2021

“Now is the high tide of the year”*

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of American fashion designer Bill Blass (June 22, 1922 – June 12, 2002) who was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Did you know that during WWII he was assigned the 603rd Camouflage Battalion, whose mission was to deceive the German Army into believing the Allies were positioned in fake locations, for example, by using dummy tanks? He served in this unit at several major operations including the Battle of the Bulge and the Rhine River crossing. For some reason, this knowledge made me happy.

Tomorrow is the birthday of dancer/choreographer Bob Fosse June 23, 1927 – September 23, 1987).

Since we just recently watched The Pajama Game (1957), it might be time to find Damn Yankees (1958) which Fosse also choreographed and danced in. (Side note: I saw Damn Yankees at the Muny Opera back in 1969. Ray Walston was in it, but I’m not sure about who played the other parts.) I haven’t seen the movie in a million years, if ever. Here is Bob in My Sister EIleen (1955).

Now I’m exhausted. Kids, don’t try this at home.

Well, the year is almost half over. I am almost retired. Life barrels on like that proverbial runaway train. But this is really great: “…and for heaven’s sake (not a joke) stop thinking about yourself all the time.” Indeed.

*James Russell Lowell, “June”

7 Comments
June 1, 2021

“Would you like to swing on a star/ Carry moonbeams home in a jar”*

by chuckofish

I do love a three day weekend!

I will note that yesterday was Clint Eastwood’s 91st birthday. Do you have a favorite Clint Eastwood movie? Well, do you, Punk? I actually do not, but this one will do.

We watched Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) in honor of Memorial Day. It is my favorite submarine movie and features a great performance by Clark Gable. Don Rickles is also in the movie. (He actually served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, on a motor torpedo boat tender.)

This article makes a strong point. “And in this way we see the challenge before us. There may have been times in the past when it took concerted effort to see and experience immorality; today it takes concerted effort to avoid seeing it. “

Tomorrow I am taking a few days off and heading east to visit daughter #2 and this little gal.

We will be celebrating her first birthday! Unbelievable, c’est vrai?

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

–William Wordsworth

Wish me luck on my travels. I haven’t flown since 2018. Yikes.

*Johnny Burke / Jimmy Van Heusen

4 Comments