A threefold cord
Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) 4:1-12
So I returned, and considered
all the oppressions that are done under the sun:
and behold the tears of such as were oppressed,
and they had no comforter;
and on the side of their oppressors there was power;
but they had no comforter.
Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead
more than the living which are yet alive.
Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been,
who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.
Again, I considered all travail, and every right work,
that for this a man is envied of his neighbour.
This is also vanity and vexation of spirit.
The fool foldeth his hands together,
and eateth his own flesh.
Better is an handful with quietness,
than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.
Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun.
There is one alone, and there is not a second;
yea, he hath neither child nor brother:
yet is there no end of all his labour;
neither is his eye satisfied with riches;
neither saith he, For whom do I labour,
and bereave my soul of good?
This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.
Two are better than one;
because they have a good reward for their labour.
For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow:
but woe to him that is alone when he falleth;
for he hath not another to help him up.
Again, if two lie together, then they have heat:
but how can one be warm alone?
And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him;
and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Inter/rogation
Rogation: prayer minus one. First in seed time, then right before the ascension, when history threatens to resume. What to do? Take up the cross and circle the parish in solemn procession. Kneel. Sprinkle holy water in the furrows, glorify the corpse. We still need to eat down here, in this Calvary stripped bare for interrogation.
*
I dreamed I was crawling on my belly through the grass, but my eyes were positioned such that I could see everything around me, including the sky above. Yellow jacket hornets kept buzzing me, but I knew that their underground nest was behind me on the hillside. I was saying to myself, Their spies will report back to headquarters on my movements – the retreat of a hated enemy. But their colony is sick, and they don’t know what to do. I’ll have to come back after dark and try to heal it. The part of my consciousness that was not dreaming wanted to know, then, how it could be that a human healer’s responsibility extended to all of nature? I took stock of myself: armless, legless, nothing but head and tail. The world was my vagina. I tasted the air with a stereophonic tongue.
*
Heretics try to tear the seamless robe of our God. . . . They are the most evil angels. They are the sons of depravity from the father of wickedness and the author of evil, who are resolved to deceive simple souls. They are snakes who deceive doves. They are serpents who seem to creep in secretly and, under the sweetness of honey, spew out poison. While they pretend to administer the food of life, they strike from their tails.
Frederick II, 1231 (translated by James Powell, The Liber Augustalis, Syracuse University Press, 1971)
*
So when divine grace cleansed rather than deprived me of those vile members which from their practice of utmost indecency are called ‘the parts of shame’ and have no proper name of their own, what else did it do but remove a foul perfection in order to restore perfect purity? Such purity, as we have heard, certain sages have desired so eagerly that they have mutilated themselves, so as to remove entirely the shame of desire. The Apostle too is recorded as having besought the Lord to rid him of this thorn in the flesh, but was not heard. The great Christian philosopher Origen provides an example, for he was not afraid to mutilate himself in order to quench completely this fire within him . . . Yet Origen is seriously to be blamed because he sought a remedy for blame in punishment of his body. True, he had zeal for God, but an ill-informed zeal, and the charge of homicide can be proved against him for his self mutilation. Men think he did this either at the suggestion of the devil or in grave error but, in my case, through God’s compassion, it was done by another’s hand. I do not incur blame, I escape it.
Peter Abelard, Letter 4 to Heloise (translated by Betty Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Penguin, 1974)
*
The learned psychologist interrogates the 19-year-old “hysteric” about her excessive throat clearing. She confesses to a persistent fantasy of fellatio. He traces this back to her thumb-sucking habit as a child, which her father only broke her of at the age of five. He convinces her that she has merely substituted a penis for her thumb, which had been in turn a substitute for her nurse’s nipple. Thus the male psychologist creates an orobourus-like argument for the woman’s apparent craving, her supposed lack or envy that seems to mirror the power imbalance of the interrogation itself.
*
“In psychoanalysis it is very important to be prepared for the bisexual meaning of a symptom,” Freud writes (Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Collier, 1963). Better to say that all symbolic systems are deeply ambiguous. What about the world outside symbols? In the absence of an authentic I-Thou relationship, people will seek to satisfy their hunger with whatever palliatives they can find. As Martin Buber notes (Between Man and Man, translated by Roger Gregor Smith, Macmillan, 1965), “Only he who himself turns to the other human being and opens himself to him receives the world in him. Only the being whose otherness, accepted by my being, lives and faces me in the whole compression of my existence, brings the radiance of eternity to me. Only when two say to one another with all that they are, ‘It is Thou‘, is the indwelling of the Present Being between them.”
*
The final shock came when I discovered in early 1960 that there is not one, but hundreds of Kalvarios [‘Calvaries’] in Zinacantan, located throughout the municipio in all the hamlets. Thus, the Zinacanteco view of Kalvario gradually becomes clear: it is a special kind of cross shrine where particular groups of ancestral gods are believed to meet, deliberate about the affairs of their living descendents, and wait for offerings of black chickens, white candles, and rum….
In the case of the tribal sacred mountains around the Center there are cross altars both at the foot and on top of each of these mountains. The Zinacanteco view of these crosses is that they are ‘doorways’ to the ancestral gods. For example, when a curing procession arrives at a sacred mountain, the members, led by the shaman, decorate the crosses with pine boughs and flowers, burn incense, light candles, and offer prayers to the crosses at the foot of the mountain. By so doing, they ‘pass through’ the outer doorway of the house and proceed up the trail to the top of the mountain where another set of crosses designates the patio cross for the house of the ancestral god who is sitting inside to receive his visitors and their offerings. Here the ritual is repeated and then the curing party proceeds to the next mountain on the circuit.
Evan Z. Vogt, The Zinacantecos of Mexico: A Modern Maya Way of Life (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970)
Words on the street
Old poem
Stop me if you’ve read this one before.
SKETCH FOR A STILL LIFE WITH SAXOPHONE
What a quaint notion–that life
could be anything but kinetic,
frenetic, in full
swing! But let’s have a galvanized steel
bucket of ice sent up & see
what happens. Something
to shine, to gleam.
And a wooden bowl of felt-
&-plastic fruit on
a low table. And for
the proper contrast, for corners
appropriately dark, Japan’s
the place: the traditional-style
half of a hotel suite, say,
in a seaside resort just
beginning to fall
on hard times. The once-full
register showing
alarming gaps, the heat
turned off in the hall . . .
but still not a speck of dust.
Simply an air of genteel poverty
essential to the timeless equipoise
of things in their rightful places,
from the imitation paper windows
to the Zen-inspired alcove
with scroll & spray of blossoms
to the thrumming of some distant
power source–a drone
as melancholy as any chorus
of autumn crickets.
Let the uncorked chardonnay
take what it needs of oxygen & light.
Let nothing discompose
this most exotic
of guests: the saxophone
resting in the corner
like a golden carp. See
how at home it looks?
ready for the oddly missing shoe
to begin tapping.
Unkempt
The peculiar thing about these woods is their power to turn melodies into something else entirely. Yesterday afternoon, for instance: the sun hangs low in the treetops and gazing into it my mouth drops open, the tune I am whistling under my breath escapes and goes muttering off through the laurel. Two or three dried leaves turn over in their sleep. A dog barks in the distance.
No music can ever be stopped, because time can’t be stopped. Or so it seems to me at the moment. I am standing with the brow of the hill behind me, watching as the silhouettes of trees grow darker by the minute within their shining outlines. I have it within my power to freeze this moment forever in a poem, I say to myself. But it isn’t true.
I listen for a while to the footsteps of a deer that seems to be in no particular hurry. At one point I hear the high, keening sound of a cedar waxwing up in the treetops, followed a moment later by a chickadee. From this bend in the trail I can travel in imagination on through the stand of large old oaks, past the clump of sapling beeches, above the wild grape tangles where the whirring arrows of ruffed grouse stirred up from the laurel so often lodge.
It doesn’t seem necessary to keep walking, though. I have the strong impression all of a sudden that everything is in its place. I remember the title of an early book by Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, which I like better than any other line or poem he’s ever come up with. A house held is a house kept clean – but what does cleanness mean, any more, in a world full of man-made chemicals with no analogue in nature?
Let’s talk about neatness, then, about straightening up. Each natural community, each portion of the land has its own ideas about keeping house: right here, for example, it says both fire and ice, trees and deer and steaming gutpiles. The top carnivores are missing, so we humans have to do the best we can without them.
The previous day’s high winds brought down numerous dead snags and rotten limbs. It amazes me how often a large tree can crash down without major injury to any of the trees around it. I remember years ago the reaction of one of our visitors – a very urbane intellectual from Lima, Peru – to the sight of a line of broken-down locust trees left by a recent ice storm: How are you going to fix them? he wanted to know. And some time before that, our elderly neighbor, who had grown up with an even-aged forest, told my father that the growing number of logs on the forest floor didn’t look right, especially if they happened to span the stream. The woods are so messy now, she complained, a few years after the gypsy moth caterpillars came through and sped things up a bit. Yes. And the stream would never again flow as quietly as it did through the monotonous pole-timber of her youth.
Out in Ohio, a dear friend of the family, a life-long nature lover, rails at the way her daughter insists on tidying up the woods behind her suburban home, picking up all the fallen branches, cleaning out the brush. The irony is that they have a big bird feeder and enjoy watching wildlife. The same daughter goes on periodic shopping sprees for clothes, then gives almost everything she buys to Goodwill or the Salvation Army because it would make her closets too messy if she tried to keep it all. Ah, charity.
To me, the messier the woods get, the more inviting they become. A young, even-aged forest has little to offer in terms of habitat, either for wildlife or for the imagination. Songs die somewhere down in the throat. On a late afternoon in early winter, with the clean outlines of aging trees against a sky blue to the horizon, I am reminded of water spilling over fallen logs or waves on a lake lapping against half-submerged hulks along a ragged shore. The impeded stream is the one that sings, Wendell Berry once pointed out.
Back up and along the edge of the spruce grove I go, admiring the three-inch-high forest of ground cedar that covers close to half an acre there. The eastern ridge and the mountains beyond glow orange-red in the setting sun. I find one of our hunter friends sitting against a tree, his rifle resting on his lap, at the edge of an area where my father cleared out the trees two years ago to preserve the view. Charlie’s younger son, who died in a automobile accident at the age of 17, used to still-hunt in this very spot.
I return his wave but am careful to keep silent. It strikes me that all the while I stood facing west he had been sitting here on the other side of the hill, facing east and seeing things he will probably never speak of to anyone. If and when Charlie gets a deer and has it butchered and stacked neatly in labeled packages in the freezer, every time he fries up a steak it will remind him of this afternoon and others like it: the quiet, the moving light, the thoughts that came and went of their own accord. Between the two of us, I think, we kept a pretty careful watch over things. If there were any motes of dust, I would have seen them.
__________
A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Housekeeping and Place.
Screw the cats, it’s Friday blog blogging
If Via Negativa is the only blog of its kind you read, this week you missed some real gems. Three posts in particular stand out in my mind. I’ll give the opening sentence for each; please click on the links. (The one thing they have in common is that they are all SHORT.)
I knew a woman once, a long time ago, who had murdered her children.
And:
And:
Simply offer a jar of grubs.
And in case someone hasn’t already forwarded this to you, check out The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time. (Thanks, Fred!)
Words on the street
“By nature wild”: gleanings from Gerard’s Herball
Helleborine is like unto white Hellebor, and for that cause we have given it the name of Helleborine. It hath a straight stalke of a foot high, set from the bottome to the tuft of floures, with faire leaves, ribbed and chamfered like those of white Hellebor, but nothing neere so large, of a dark greene colour. The floures be orderly placed from the middle to the top of the stalke, hollow within, and white of colour, straked here and there with a dash of purple, in shape like the floures of Satyrion. The seed is small like dust or motes in the Sun.
*
Comfrey joyeth in watery ditches, in fat and fruitful meadows; they grow all in my Garden.
*
The stalke of Clot-burre before the burres come forth, the rind pilled off, being eaten raw with salt and pepper, or boyled in the broth of fat meate, is pleasant to be eaten: being taken in that manner it increaseth seed and stirreth up lust.
*
The root and seed of the great water Lillie is good against venery or fleshly desire, if one do drink a decoction thereof, or use the seed or root in powder in his meates, for it drieth up the seed of generation, and so causeth a man to be chast, especially used in broth with flesh.
*
There groweth in Aegypt a kinde of Aron or Cuckow pint which is found also in Africa, and likewise in certain places in Portingale neere unto rivers and streames, that differeth from those of our countries growing, which the people of Castile call Manta de nuestra senora: most would have it to be called Colocasia; but Dioscorides saith that Colocasia is the root of Faba Aegyptia, or the Beane of Aegypt.
The common Cuckow pint is called in Latin, Arum: in Greeke, [aron]: in shops, Iarus, and Barba-Aron: of others, Per-vituli: of the Syrians, Lupha: of the men of Cyprus, Colocasia, as we find among the bastard names. Pliny in his 24. booke, 16. chapter, doth witnesse, that there is a great difference between Aron and Dracontium, although there hath been some controversie about the same among the old writers, affirming them to be all one: in high Dutch it is called , Passen pint: in Italian, Gigora: in Spanish, Yaro: in low Dutch, Calfsuoet: in French, Pied d’veau: in English, Cuckow pint, and Cuckow pintle, wake-Robin, Priests pintle, Aron; Calfes foote, and Rampe; and of some Stratchwoort.
*
The Caper groweth in Italy, Spaine, and other hot Regions without manuring, in a leane soyle, in rough places among rubbish, and upon old walls, as Dioscorides reporteth.
Theophrastus writeth, that it is by nature wild, and refuseth to be husbanded, yet in these our daies divers use to cherish the same, and to set it in dry and stony places: my selfe at the impression hereof, planted some seeds in the bricke walls of my garden, which as yet do spring and grow green, the successe I expect.
*
There be found two Aglaophotides, described by Aelianus in his 14.booke; one of the sea, in the 24.Chapter: the other of the earth, in the 27.chapter. That of the sea is a kind of Fucus, or sea mosse, which groweth upon high rocks, of the bigness of Tamarisk, with the head of Poppy; which opening in the Summer Solstice doth yeeld in the night time a certain fierie, and as it were sparkling brightnesse or light.
That of the earth, saith he, which by another name is called Cynospastus, lieth hid in the day time among other herbes, and is not knowne at all, and in the night time it is easily seene: for it shineth like a star, and glittereth with a fierie brightnesse.
And this Aglaophotis of the earth, or Cynospastus, is Paeonia; for Apuleius saith, that the seedes or graines of Peionie shine in the night time like a candle, and that plenty of it is in the night season found out and gathered by the shepheards….
Aelianus saith, that Cynospastus is not plucked up without danger; and that it is reported how he that first touched it, not knowing the nature thereof, perished. Therefore a string must be fastened to it in the night, and a hungrie dog tied thereto, who being allured by the smell of rotting flesh set towards him, may plucke it up by the rootes. Iosephus also writeth, that Baara doth shine in the evening like the day star, and that they who come neere, and would plucke it up, can hardly do that, save that either a woman’s urine, or her menses be poured upon it, and that so it may be plucked up at the length….
But all these things be most vaine and frivolous: for the roote of Peionie, as also of Mandrake, may be removed at any time of the yeare, day or houre whatsoever.
*
[Peony root] is also given, saith Pliny, against the disease of the minde. The root of the male Peionie is preferred in this cure.
Ten or twelve of the red berries or seeds drunke in wine that is something harsh or sower, and red, do stay the inordinate flux, and are good for the stone in the beginning.
The blacke graines (that is the seed) to the number of fifteen taken in wine or mead, helpes the strangling and paines of the matrix or mother, and is a speciall remedie for those that are troubled in the night with the disease called Ephialtes or night Mare, which is as though a heavy burthen were laid upon them, and they oppressed therewith, as if they were overcome by their enemies, or overprest with some great weight or burthen; and they are also good against melancholicke dreams.
Words on the street
