Across the lawn to the
church,
A troop of white laced
veils
Atop bobbing ponytails
Haled by pealing bells
that lurch
Through the late summer
sun.
Across the lawn to the
church,
A troop of white laced
veils
Atop bobbing ponytails
Haled by pealing bells
that lurch
Through the late summer
sun.
Insights into Gregorian Chant
Peregrinus
Introduction
Gregorian
chant is at the heart of the Roman rite, it animates the prayer of the Church
and beautifully adorns the texts of the Sacred Scriptures, the liturgy, and the
sacraments. Because of its centrality in the life of the Church, these noble
melodies have been passed on to us so that even now we can hear an echo of that
obscure time when grace was poured abundantly on the early Church, when Rome
ran red with the blood of the martyrs, and when knowledge illuminated the minds
of our great doctors. Gregorian chant has been described as glowing “with
living flame, with a clean, profound desire … deep beyond ordinary emotion,” and
as “more inebriating than the imposing voices of the great waters of which the Scriptures
speak.” Even those unacquainted with the mysteries that chant speaks of are moved
by the beauty of this music. Albums which feature chant have often sold
exceptionally well, and this ancient music receives heavy traffic on Youtube
and Spotify daily. In one sense, this is a strange fact, as Gregorian chant is
musically foreign to our ears and its spirit is alien to the modern experience:
instead of harmony, there is pure melody; its scales are unfamiliar; the rhythm
is free; and it flows from a sense of peace and repose rather than from action;
and all of this is meant to adorn texts written in an ancient and clamorous
language.
On Circumcision's evening
The night's orbs bleed
On the compass line
With violence against
Their impetus to fall into one,
The dread inevitable recall
Written before all time.
The air suffused with a force
Gnawing at my bowels
- At our cycle's close -
With my eyes upturned to see
The foreshadow of the final meridian.
There I saw the foreskin of Christ
Burning a hole in the sky,
Around which thousands of angel hosts
Hymn and circumambulate.
The New Year is inaugurated with the feast of the Circumcision of Lord: a purifying wound, a cutting off, a pact made in blood with God. The beginnings of salvation start anew with the first drop of blood shed by Lord, and in such a way the end becomes a beginning. Few things make the cyclical nature of time as obvious as the movement of Christian calendar, everything is repeated and made present again, round each cycle tears still fall on Good Friday, and we stand in suspense at the doors of the Church on Holy Saturday night. Even the circular shape of the foreskin itself recalls this experience, and the accompanying blood presents us with an image of time as a wound: the process of becoming – as opposed to Real Being – always accompanied by pain.
The cyclical experience of time is now often described in its negative and futile aspect, which we can identify with the violent and bloody nature of circumcision, but certainly there is a positive aspect as well. Time is described in our tradition as an image of eternity – here we can see the significance of the foreskin being a cut-off, wounded portion of God – the continual re-presentation of events is then a function of time’s participation in eternity, and in a way, this lifts us out of process into a more stable realm where everything exists in perfect simultaneity. Under this aspect, the repetition of things only increases their power, and this can be experientially grasped if one lives for a few years with a mind properly attuned.
Whether or not the coincidence of this feast and the New Year is an accident of history is a matter of debate, but this has no bearing on this wonderful symbolism, and ultimately, all things are a matter of Providence.
A torrent runs
Silent - nameless
From which the lion
lifts his reddened jaws
Stained from the heads
Crushed in the land of many
Where fresh with echoes:
Of ring of steel
And shouts of men
Cut down in the plain
To lay like Buddhas
In quiet contemplation
With festered wounds
And perfect minds
Now clearly chanting
Where David plucks
His shining stones.
He goes forth from the brook
And back again
To drink and to listen
Alongside the lion
And the singing men.
To cast a hook
Into mirrored waters
To drag the lakebed
Clean against the sky
To feel the pulse of
Ancient vertebrae
Slip through my hands
Mangled on the shore
To trace the sun across the lake:
Ingathering solar pole
Reaching down, reaching down
Piercing even into the deep!
O holy languid Dawn,
What ancient rest have
you discovered?
What great sleep
have you disturbed?
Hidden away in the
bowels of the earth?
What light withers
and returns
To vanish before
the noontime?
To awaken the
reeds and shatter the dew?
Greeted by
birdsong and the weeping of women?
Now the cattails
swing their heavy heads
Like drunken girls
in a bathroom mirror,
While knots of
snakes writhe between the grasses
Like half-conscious
children on the floor of a kitchen.
And the raveled
limbs of trees release their dormant cry
And cast off the
muzzle of their frigid burden.
A spotted fawn
glowing stands alert
To anticipate the
arrival
Muted as an echo
from distant time:
The world to come
calling as a whisper
Of half heard forgotten
language
From a mysterious
dark and foreign tongue;
An image upon an
image,
A promise clambered
for in the half-light
Spreading leisurely
across the canvas
To at last take
its seat and be revealed in us.
At 8 in the morning my eyes are still not used to the light, and it is time for the “Zoom” meeting, as my “Contemporary Questions in Free-Will in the Analytic Tradition: Seminar 472” class is about to begin. The radiation from the laptop screen burrows itself into my retinas and lodges – with much resistance – in the back of my skull. As the computer boots up the sun begins to spread his rays along the tops of houses all lined in rows, it flashes fire in the windows of houses and parked cars; a glance of this sight through the window is a gasp of relief, and for a moment, it washes a salve across my pained eyes.
“Gooood morning class!"
I am the bile that burns down your throat.
I speak in the patterns of the carpet,
And listen through the paint on the walls.
I will suffocate you with poisoned breath,
Breathing through a web of ducts and vents;
And in the night you will always feel
My lifeless pulse warming the floorboards.