The following is a selection from Fernando Pessoa’s “Keeper of Sheep.”
VIII
One midday in late spring
I had a dream that was like a photograph.
I saw Jesus Christ come down to earth.
He came down a hillside
As a child again,
Running and tumbling through the grass,
Pulling up flowers to throw them back down,
And laughing loud enough to be heard far away.
He had run away from heaven.
He was too much like us to fake
Being the second person of the Trinity.
In heaven everything was false and in disagreement
With flowers and trees and stones.
In heaven he always had to be serious
And now and then had to become man again
And get up on the cross, and be forever dying
With a crown full of thorns on his head,
A huge nail piercing his feet,
And even a rag around his waist
Like on black Africans in illustrated books.
He wasn’t even allowed a mother and father
Like other children.
His father was two different people—
An old man named
Joseph who was a carpenter
And who wasn’t his father,
And an idiotic dove:
The only ugly dove in the world,
Because it wasn’t of the world and wasn’t a dove.
And his mother gave birth to him without ever having loved.
She wasn’t a woman: she was a suitcase
In which he was sent from heaven.
And they wanted him, born only of a mother
And with no father he could love and honor,
To preach goodness and justice!
One day when God was sleeping
And the Holy Spirit was flying about,
He went to the chest of miracles and stole three.
He used the first to make everyone blind to his escape.
He used the second to make himself eternally human and a child.
He used the third to make an eternally crucified Christ
Whom he left nailed to the cross that’s in heaven
And serves as the model for all the others.
Then he fled to the sun
And descended on the first ray he could catch.
Today he lives with me in my village.
He’s a simple child with a pretty laugh.
He wipes his nose with his right arm,
Splashes about in puddles,
Plucks flowers and loves them and forgets them.
He throws stones at the donkeys,
Steals fruit from the orchards,
And runs away crying and screaming from the dogs.
And because he knows that they don’t like it
And that everyone thinks it’s funny,
He runs after the girls
Who walk in groups along the roads
Carrying jugs on their heads,
And he lifts up their skirts.
He taught me all I know.
He taught me to look at things.
He shows me all the things there are in flowers.
He shows me how curious stones are
When we hold them in our hand
And look at them slowly.
He speaks very badly of God.
He says God is a sick and stupid old man
Who’s always swearing
And spitting on the floor.
The Virgin Mary spends the afternoons of eternity knitting.
And the Holy Spirit scratches himself with his beak
And perches on the chairs, getting them dirty.
Everything in heaven is stupid, just like the Catholic Church.
He says God understands nothing
About the things he created.
“If he created them, which I doubt,” he says.
“God claims, for instance, that all beings sing his glory,
But beings don’t sing anything.
If they sang, they’d be singers.
Beings exist, that’s all,
Which is why they’re called beings.”
And then, tired of speaking badly about God,
The little boy Jesus falls asleep in my lap
And I carry him home in my arms.
He lives with me in my house, halfway up the hill.
He’s the Eternal Child, the god who was missing.
He’s completely natural in his humanity.
He smiles and plays in his divinity.
And that’s how I know beyond all doubt
That he’s truly the little boy Jesus.
And this child who’s so human he’s divine
Is my daily life as a poet.
It’s because he’s always with me that I’m always a poet
And that my briefest glance
Fills me with feeling,
And the faintest sound, whatever it is,
Seems to be speaking to me.
The New Child who lives where I live
Gives one hand to me
And the other to everything that exists,
And so the three of us go along whatever road we find,
Leaping and singing and laughing
And enjoying our shared secret
Of knowing that in all the world
There is no mystery
And that everything is worthwhile.
The Eternal Child is always at my side.
The direction of my gaze is his pointing finger.
My happy listening to each and every sound
Is him playfully tickling my ears.
We get along so well with each other
In the company of everything
That we never even think of each other,
But the two of us live together,
Intimately connected
Like the right hand and the left.
At day’s end we play jacks
On the doorstep of the house,
With the solemnity befitting a god and a poet
And as if each jack
Were an entire universe,
Such that it would be a great peril
To let one fall to the ground.
Then I tell him stories about purely human matters
And he smiles, because it’s all so incredible.
He laughs at kings and those who aren’t kings,
And feels sorry when he hears about wars,
And about commerce, and about ships
That are finally just smoke hovering over the high seas.
For he knows that all of this lacks the truth
Which is in a flower when it flowers
And with the sunlight when it dapples
The hills and valleys
Or makes our eyes smart before whitewashed walls.
Then he falls asleep and I put him to bed.
I carry him in my arms into the house
And lay him down, removing his clothes
Slowly and as if following a very pure
And maternal ritual until he’s naked.
He sleeps inside my soul
And sometimes wakes up in the night
And plays with my dreams.
He flips some of them over in the air,
Piles some on top of others,
And claps his hands all by himself,
Smiling at my slumber.
When I die, my son,
Let me be the child, the little one.
Pick me up in your arms
And carry me into your house.
Undress my tired and human self
And tuck me into your bed.
If I wake up, tell me stories
So that I’ll fall back asleep.
And give me your dreams to play with
Until the dawning of that day
You know will dawn.
This is the story of my little boy Jesus,
And is there any good reason
Why it shouldn’t be truer
Than everything philosophers think
And all that religions teach
(written by Fernando Pessoa and translated by Richard Zenith)
This really just doesn’t get old.
Hallelujah (Original by Leonard Cohen)
I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
There was a time when you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Violet and Her Violin by Ann Gardner
Schubertiana
(Tomas Tranströmer)
1
In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, an outlook point
where one single glance will encompass the homes of eight
million people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy
seen from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the
shop-windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes that leave
no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors that glide shut, behind doors
with police locks a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway coaches, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played
in some room over there and that for someone the notes are
more real than all the rest.
2
The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size
of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of
this very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over
two continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the land-mass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary
chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as `The
Mushroom,’ who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually of a morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in
motion.
3
The string quintet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with
The ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future,
suddenly feel that the plants have thoughts.
4
So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without
Sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust
that the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden
axe-blow from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three
hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us
company part of the way there.
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers –
trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the
darkness.
5
We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor,
two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we
were tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm’s terrible balance: joy and
suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, `This music is so heroic,’ and she’s right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly
despise themselves for not being murderers,
don’t recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can
be bought, don’t recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its
transformations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes
rugged and strong, snail-track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us — now –
up
the depths.
(Tomas Tranströmer is a Swedish poet and the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature.)
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
About a year ago I bought a lovely little reproduction painting at the Alameda antique faire in northern California. It had a romantic softness to it, a fresh, greet the day sort of romance. It looked old, too, and reminded me somehow of a fantasy novel. Mists of Avalon, maybe. Something girly and epic (yes, I just used those two words in one sentence.)
Fast forward to today: I’m reading an interview with an author, Patrick Rothfuss, with whom I am currently a bit enamored. He’s been entertaining me for weeks with the first two books of his Kingkiller trilogy (fantasy, a bit Harry Potter-esque but more adult and a bit more fresh) and he mentions this painter, JW Waterhouse. Naturally, I google him, and what do I find but that very same painting I found at the antique faire… !! (I also find that Waterhouse is incredibly famous and I should have been aware of his existence ages ago, but alas, better late than never.)
This is the painting: Destiny (1900)
Destiny
John William Waterhouse painted in the late 19th/early 20th century. His works draw mostly on Greek myth and women of the Arthurian legends (no wonder I was reminded of Mists of Avalon.)
Here are a few more that I adore:
Boreas
Apollo and Daphne
Psyche Opening the Golden Box
The Awakening of Adonis
The Lady Clare
The Orange Gatherers
From the Internet Cello Society:
Gaspar Cassado was a Spanish contemporary of Pablo Casals, who lived from 1897 to 1966. In fact, he may have been Casal’s youngest pupil, when he studied with him in Paris in 1910. He was born in Barcelona, the son of a church musician. His father started teaching him music when he was five, and at the age of seven he began cello lessons with a prominent Barcelona cellist, who worked at the Mercedes Chapel with his father.
When Cassado was nine years old, he played his first public performance, where he was heard by Casals, who immediately offered to give him lessons. He was given a scholarship by the city of Barcelona to go to Paris and study with Casals there. He also studied composition with Manuel de Falla and Maurice Ravel.
At the end of World War I, Cassado started touring internationally, and became a world famous cellist. He played under most of the leading conductors of his time, including such greats as Furtwangler, Beecham and Weingartner. His performance of the Brahms Double Concerto with Joseph Szigeti was especially appreciated.
Cassado loved Italy, and settled in Florence, where he lived for over thirty years. As a cellist he was more austere and noble, than flamboyant in his approach. He was a good composer, and his pieces are still played today, in particular his Requiebros, and his Concerto in D Minor, which he dedicated to Casals.
In 1964 Cassado premiered six unpublished cello sonatas of Boccherini, and performed them on a Strad cello that was once owned by the composer. Eve Barsham, his accompanist, had discovered the manuscripts in the archives of the Duke of Hamilton in Scotland. Cassado died in 1966 of a heart attack, after a strenuous tour of a flood stricken area of Florence where he was raising funds for those who had been devastated by the natural catastrophe.
Leaf : Isolde Cortes
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.
I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg. The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train, and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again, (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back, (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.
C.K. Williams
Untitled
By.Rachel McKibbens
To my daughters, I need to say:
Go with the one who loves you biblically.
The one whose love lifts its head to you despite its broken neck.
Whose body bursts sixteen arms electric to carry you, gentle, the way
old grief is gentle.
Love the love that is messy in all its too much,
The body that rides best your body, whose mouth saddles the naked salt
of your far gone hips, whose tongue translates the rock language of
all your elegant scars.
Go with the one who cries out for his tragic sisters as he chops the winter’s wood, the one whose skin
Triggers your heart into a heaven of blood waltzes.
Go with the one who resembles most your father. Not the father you can
point out on a map,
But the father who is here. Is your home. Is the key to your front door. Know that your first love will only
Be the first. And the second and third and even fourth will unprepare you for the most important:
The Blessed. The Beast. The Last love. Which is, of course, the most terrifying kind.
Because which of us wants to go with what can murder us? Can reveal to us
Our true heart’s end and its thirty years spent in poverty?
Can mimic the sound of our birdthroated mothers, replicate the warmth of our brothers’ tempers? Can pull us out of ourselves until
We are no longer sisters or daughters or sword swallowers but, instead,
Women. Who give. And lead. And take and want
And want
And want
And want
Because there is no shame in wanting.
And you will hear yourself say: Last Love, I wish to die so I may come back to you new and never tasted by any other mouth but yours.
And I want to be the hands that pull your children out of you and tuck them deep inside myself until they are
Ready to be the children of such a royal and staggering love. Or you
will say: Last Love,
I am old, and have spent myself on the courageless, have wasted too many clocks on less-deserving men, so I hurl myself
At the throne of you and lie humbly at your feet.
Last Love, let me never roll out of this heavy dream of you.
Let the day I was born mean my life will end where you end.
Let the man behind the church do what he did if it brings me to you.
Let the girls in the locker room corner me again if it brings me to you.
Let the wrong beds find me if it brings me to you.
Let this wild depression throw me beneath its hooves if it brings me to you.
Let me pronounce my hoarded joy if it brings me to you.
Let my father break me again and again if it brings me to you.
Last love, I let other men borrow your children. Forgive me.
Last love, I vowed my heart to another. Forgive me.
Last Love, I have let my blind and anxious hands wander into a room and come out empty. Forgive me.
Last Love, I have cursed the women you loved before me. Forgive me.
Last Love, I envy your mother’s body where you resided first. Forgive me.
Last Love, I am all that is left. Forgive me.
Last Love, I did not see you coming. Forgive me.
Last Love, every day without you was a life I crawled out of. Amen.
Last Love, you are my Last Love. Amen.
Last Love, I am all that is left. Amen.
I am all that is left.
Amen.
This is what has been on replay in my head for the last month. I’m thinking of dancing to it one day, though I’m afraid that it would turn into more of an interpretive dance jumble than a belly dance performance. Maybe I’ll keep the dance private for now.
Schubert wrote this in the last years of his life after learing of his illness that would eventually kill him. It’s a testament to death of sorts.
When I think of music, I think of wordless stories, little wisps of smoke rising from instruments that provide a canvas for each listener to project their own emotions upon. I couldn’t think of a better piece for this sort of projection.
I suppose that is why this is one of the most well-loved string quartets out there.
