Vainas of the Unexamined Life

The word “vaina” is one that has come up a lot recently, and inhabits that strange space somewhere in the realm of Spanish slang or vulgarity the which I always have a hard time penetrating. I do not know why it is, because I have no similar problems with English (other than the use of the word jackass, which apparently is forbidden to the timid persons of Iowa and the use of which got me kicked out of the internet roach motel, lo these many years ago). The word “vaina” can simply mean the sheath of a sword—or just a sheath—and proceeds, according to the Royal Academy in Madrid, from a Latin cognate the which I will not trouble to elaborate.

But here in Colombia the word means shady business deals, mostly, and is applied to all manner of things from money laundering operations to anything connected with a politician. As you can see, it is pretty useful slang, if it is slang. They also use it as an expression of incredulity, “Que va!” as if you had achieved the ultimate cash cow, which I suppose must somehow be a shady deal or at least connected with the government.

I heard it especially last night while talking to a professor of the dismal science, and I found it particularly apt on his lips. He teaches at the oldest university in Colombia and one of the oldest in Latin America. I was talking to him because a person from church knows him and for reasons I do not entirely understand is really eager to help me get a job and stay here. So here is the crazy part, the guy is going to put my resume in at said university to see if I can get a job teaching. He spent two hours preparing me for an interview with the powers there.

Que vainas, no? I expect very little to come of this, but it is worth a try and a few hours extending and translating the resume. He also explained to me that higher education in Colombia can be aptly characterized by the word vaina.

Speaking of which, I have been reaping a little crop of small successes after long attempts so that now on my fully expanded resume (in Colombia it is not a real resume unless it runs to 3 pages, I learned) includes a section of publications:

“Another World” and “October’s Showers,” poetry published in The Mythic Circle, 31 (July 2009).

“Warming up after Bogota: La Vega and Villeta,” a travel account published online at Colombia Reports (colombiareports.com), 6-29-2009.

“The Hobbit and Middle Earth,” a review essay published in The Minas Tirith Evening-Star: the Journal of the American Tolkien Society, 38:1 (Spring 2009).

“The Children of Hurin,” a review essay published in The Minas Tirith Evening-Star: the Journal of the American Tolkien Society, 37:3/4 (Autumn/Winter 2008).

“The Wind in the Gutters,” a short story forthcoming in Aoife’s Kiss, (March 2010).

How is that for vainas?

A New Perplexity

They had arrived. Not many, but a few.

“I can . . . see?” one said.

“More like feel . . . no,” another said.

“I am conscious of participation,” said the third, and the room was silent following this statement.

“What is it like?” the professor asked.

“Flowing,” said the first.

“Feeling with the eyes, sight like a river,” said the second.

“We need a new word—it’s so new and entire,” the third said.

“Pre-cognition?” asked the professor, an avid reader of Philip K. Dick.

“We’re pre-cogs?” the second one asked, smiling.

“It’s not exactly super-sensibility, is it?” someone asked.

“No, it is an awareness of the operations of one’s mind in shaping . . . configuring . . . in molding or perhaps ordering is better . . . in arranging experience of the world, a heightened self-consciousness without the alienation . . . without—”

“Without,” the third one now said, “the distorting separation of subject and object.”

“They’re still distinct, but not separate,” the first added, and there was a pause.

“How—” the professor began to ask.

“How can it be?” the third asked.

“No. How is it unlike normal separation?”

“It is a distinction without separation and a union without dissolution. Both perfectly distinct and united.”

“At once?”

The five subjects, two of which had been silent up till now, looked at each other.

The second spoke: “Alternating very rapidly, perhaps.”

The professor looked confused and the third subject frowned.

“At least at first it seemed to be,” the first said. “But I think it accelerated to reach a point at which it became indistinguishable—the alternation, that is.”

“I can sense—perhaps sense is the word!” the third exclaimed and paused. Then she resumed, “I can sense your confusion arising out of you generally,” indicating the professor, “and sometimes focusing itself with a little indignation . . . no—energy—”

The first subject reached over to touch the fourth. “You have cancer, I can see . . . sense it. I can—I am able . . . am aware of the working of your physical body and something is not well in the lung—”

“I sense it too,” said the second, leaning forward. “I can move in—ah! You’re resisting it!”

“Mental contact!” the third exclaimed.

There was a long silence in the room, with intent expressions on the faces of the five subjects and mingled curiosity and confusion on the rest. The professor was typing rapidly, silent.

“I think I can reach the cancer—I mean with my hand—and hold it to separate it,” the first one said to the fourth.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” the fourth said, shrinking away involuntarily.

“Understandable,” the third observed.

July Blab

A day characterized by amazing chicken breaded somehow in peanuts and also an amazing yucca croquette.

It is 57F and people are complaining about the amazing cold.

I need to write guides to this and that now that we don’t look at things as strangely as when we first arrived, but I have to come up with a way to use the Chronicles of Narnia a lot for a listening exercise so all the blogging you get is blab.

Museo Nacional, the place to be

on Saturdays at 12:30.

This coming:

Conciertos especiales
Auditorio Teresa Cuervo Borda. Entrada libre (!!!)

Mariana Nagles y Daniel Pérez, violines
Osiris Lobo, cello
Stefan Haas, tiorba

Obras de A. Falconieri, G. G. Kapsberger, A. Corelli, D. Castello, G. P. Teleman, F. J. Haydn, A. Vivaldi

Eventful & Busy

Interesting times around here. Class windeth toward an end so we are working on requirements for this and that and the other.

Here is a financial reflection I also find interesting: we went to a little place to get food as traditional as it gets. For our soup with potatoes and noodles, and our main course of chicken, rice, fried potatoes, noodles and beans (Katrina had squash instead of noodles in the main course, and I’m worried about her carbohydrate intake now) we paid ten thousand. Usually you don’t tip but I left the guy another thousand. For two cappuccinos and a little bit of shortbread with some fruit on top at a nice coffee place, the same with no tip.

Of course, after the second I’m not wondering whether it might not be time to take one of those purges one regularly has to take around here to make sure there are no lingering parasites in the digestive tract.

Tipacoque: Estampas de Provincia, by Eduardo Caballero Calderon

Tipacoque is an old and little town in eastern Boyaca. It used to be a Chibcha town (Muisca, to be precise—the Chibchas with the El Dorado tradition of covering a chap in gold and then having him actually wash it off by diving into the lake), as many of the cities and villages of the eastern Andes in Colombia used to be (hence names like Fusagasuga, Chiquinquira, Facatativa, and other shorter varieties of which Bogota is one; Tipacoque was originally Zipacoque). Caballero recounts the manners and customs of this remote village and its surroundings in the early part of the 20th Century. The book, then, is not a novel, but rather a collection of vignettes.

The descriptions Caballero recorded capture places, atmospheres, types and characters, situations and without sentimentality the memory of a way of life that has passed out of the world. In many ways Tipacoque is like Garcia Marquez’s La Mala Hora (The Evil Hour) in that it presents a place and its way of life in all its redolence. Tipacoque is unlike La Mala Hora in that it lacks a plot, and a plot would have helped to carry a book such as this to a wider audience, though it might have cost Caballero a certain freedom to wander and reflect.

As it is, the book is valuable for its descriptions and evocations of way of life in rural Colombia. I have little experience with Spanish letters yet, but when writers like Marquez and Caballero lean vigorously into the description of the character of a place and by the care of patient, long observation demonstrate their love for the people they record in unending, languid sentences the atmosphere of which I have never encountered elsewhere, the way humor and accurate detail blossom with poetry and yield their furtive, midnight fruit under a tangled vine of words . . . then I find the immense satisfaction of Literature. I have not read widely enough in the realm of Spanish letters, as I have said, and so I can only compare Caballero to Marquez his compatriot, but I find them much alike in style. Like Marquez, Caballero is a master in the cumulative effects of rich, atmospheric description—though not exactly one to exploit those effects as successfully as he achieves them. The difference perhaps is that Caballero’s humor is a bit more bright and gentle—though when it comes to Colombian politics, no matter how cheerfully made, the joke ends up being pretty bleak (which is not to say the joke is a failure: give me grim humor whenever you can).

While the book has no plot, it has a few other things that help it maintain a certain coherence: the geographical location keeps things together, the parallel opening and closing, and the loose association of ideas developed in each chapter. One of the most humorous links between chapters is the one in which a death threat becomes a joke at the author’s expense and introduces the best chapter of all of them: a meditation on the rural night.

Here are some excerpts from that chapter:

Entonces se me revelo la noche, la gran noche rural, pues al fin y al cabo los hombres de la ciudad encontramos en ello nuestro camino a Damasco.

Then the night was revealed to me, that great and rural night, for after all we men of the city find in it our road to Damascus.

I’m not sure the allusion to the conversion of St. Paul is the most accurate, but perhaps it works better for being slightly inaccurate. It strikes me as apt because he wants to stress not so much the encounter as the journey.

So he sets up a contrast between rural and urban, proceeding to elaborate a description of the night of the cities:

La primera parte de la noche urbana borbota como un caldo que se fermenta, y los ruidos tienen una sonoridad peculiar que no tuvieron durante el dia. Los coches ruedan de prisa sobre el pavimento despertando misteriosas oquedades, que hacen pensar en camaras y pasillos subterraneos. Los tranvias gimen dolorosamente en las curvas de masiado [sic] forzadas y la rueda del trolley despide chispas azules al chocar en las junturas metalicas de los alambres. Los hombres caminan al azar, despacio, mirando las vitrinas de las tiendas donde los objetos se ven mas brillantes y mas raros que durante el dia, y a veces se detienen formando remolinos en le crucero de las calles a donde afluye una corriente turbia que conduce a los barrios obreros. La gente forma cola a las puertas de los cines, donde pululan los pequeños vendedores de diarios y de loterias, que gritan su estribillo; y los limosneros—que tienen a la luz artificial un aspecto mas ruin y un aire mas miserable—tienden la mano por debajo de los harapos. Y por las puertas de los cafes se vuelca sobre la calle un estrepito de voces y de vajilla que hiere los oidos y un tufo recalentado y pastoso que se resiste a pasar por la garganta.

(In translation I am one for taking liberties.)

At first the urban night bubbles like a fermenting mixture, and sounds take on sonority they never have during the day. The cars roll hurriedly over the pavement summoning a sound of mysterious hollows that suggest underground chambers and passages. The trams groan with the labor of tight curves, and the wheel of the trolley showers blue sparks as it strikes the metallic junctures in the wires. Men walk at random, slowly, gazing into the counters of stores where the objects appear more brilliant and rare than during the day. And sometimes the current of pedestrians slows and forms whirlpools at intersections where a turbid confluence runs toward the barrios of the workers. The people line up at the doors of the cinemas where swarm petty salesmen with their newspapers and lottery tickets, hawking with peculiar intonation; and the beggars—in the artificial light they take on a look of greater ruin and an air of greater misery—reach a hand out from under their rags. And through the doors of cafes is poured both a din of voices and cutlery painful to the ears and a warm, mealy stench that sticks in the throat.

He goes on from there to sing of the rural night, the astonished night of the country. Tipacoque is not knows as his best work, which really makes me eager to read further into his opus.

Buenos Tiempos, como quien dice, en la Biblioteca

We had our class canceled due to the indisposition of our teacher. (As it was rather idiomatically put—and if you have an adequate translation I’d like to see it: Comio y despues que se puso a morir. It is very hard to render the sense of “puso” there. She ate and then she started to die, is the closest I can manage. Maybe, She ate and then began undertaking death . . . maybe not. By the way, the teacher did not die. It just means she was right sick.) So we went to the great Virgilio Barco Library.

When I was leaving Colombia, back in the day, they were holding elections to replace Belisario Betancur. Belisarius is a nice Latin name, eh? (Greek actually, but latinized) His successor had a nice Latin name too: Virgil. The library was named after the 52nd president of Colombia. (By the way, the 50th chap was called Julius Caesar—Julio Cesar Turbay, Julius Caesar being a pretty common name, actually. And there is one chap I’ve heard of in the context of letters called Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza: nice classic touch.)

You can search the public library online here. (Try selecting Autor and typing Yeats.) So I found out from the chap it only costs 5000 pesos—unless I heard him wrong, which seems possible—and I’m going to get a card. They’re building a big branch in the north near where we are, but there is a builded branch not too far. You can only borrow two things at a time, it seems, and for 15 days, but you can renew once online and it looks like you can reserve things online.

I think the big drawback is that you have to go to the library where the book is: they won’t ship it to the branch near you.

When you get a card you have to fill out an application and put on there at least two personal references. Then you wait five days while, presumably, they call the references and process the application and make out a card. Then they tell you when it is ready and you go pick it up.

Note to self: in looking for an apartment, make sure you are near one of the four major branches of the library and not just one of the smaller branches.

Poll

I thought I put up a poll, is it showing up for anybody?

Not usually my policy since I blog about what I want in order to help myself—altruism is for liberals. But at this point exerting myself in some direction wouldn’t hurt and I think the readers on this blog might be in transition (no steady statistics). So I wanted to ask if you like Colombia stuff, or Unexamined Life, or witty observations such as I have not had in ages, or more pointless purple descriptions, personal advice, fiction or in particular the Chron of Fundamentarlia.

Asking questions is a sure way to dry up the comments, but I thought I’d try the poll and it appears not to be appearing.

Hay que ir

El gran pianista franco-argentino Miguel Angel Estrella se presentará en Bogota en un concierto excepcional el sábado 4 de julio a las 19h.

(Curious, the use of a Latin conjunction in the list of composers.)

What’s in the Past?

I have to do a practicum on teaching the simple past. We have to teach it inductively, the course being geared toward the communicative approach. The idea is that a deductive approach, so beloved of engineers, is more of an approach that emphasizes reading and writing, and most people learning English nowadays are not doing it in order to afford themselves the pleasure of Shakespeare. It stands to reason when, after all, the pleasure of Shakespeare is lost on the average native speaker. People want to learn English because people who know English are more likely to be rich. And so I am doing a practicum on the simple past, and since most people are learning English because people who know English are more likely to be rich, then I must have communicative goals and approach the whole business inductively.

So my objective will not be that when I am done with the lesson, the students will know the simple past tense, but rather that they will be able to talk about the dead.

And what could be more congenial? Really, without the simple past history would be awfully confusing; it is an extremely useful tense. And when you speak about the dead you can speak of:

Johann Sebastian Bach
Georg Frederic Handel
Ludwig van Beethoven
Carl Maria von Webber
Dimitri Shostakovich
. . . and any number of chaps.

Lets try some actions!

“Handel was a genius, I kneel at his grave,” said Beethoven.
Bach composed the best music.
Beethoven triumphed over silence.
Shostakovich flouted Stalin.
Pavarotti sang better than all the present company bar none.
Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and precipitated the second world war.
Richard Weaver wrote a book, and I read it.
Yeats languished because he pined after Maud Gonne.
C.S. Lewis loathed The Wasteland, and disapproved of James Joyce.

Of course, I could talk about regrets instead, and work in some of the poetry of W.B. Yeats. That could be the semi-structured activity, find all the past tense verbs in this poem:

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

—W. B. Yeats

. . . perhaps a little bit too difficult, but it has a wonderful review of the present tense in the first stanza.

Next I’ll have them work in pairs telling each other about missed opportunities, and I can teach them that missed opportunities are a special form of regrets.

Ah the past tense! So full of opportunities.

Not Overmuch, It Seems to Me

I recently read an essay by Joseph Epstein on George Santayana, The Permanent Transient. What is enjoyable about Joseph Epstein is the broad and liberal humanism of his letters, tinged with the sense of discreet intimacy of the personal essayist along with what seems to me so particularly a Jewish touch—as if you’re getting a glimpse of his neurosis to understand where he’s coming from. If Epstein is free and tolerant to a fault, his writing is nevertheless not without its proper learning and usually comes with an insight of satisfying penetration. Santayana was of a broad and liberal humanism as well, though, as Epstein points out, tinged with traces of anti-semitism, but not in such quantities as spoils the overall enjoyment of the collection of letters Epstein reviews.

In contrast to this, I have been reading another of the works of Iain Murray, and of a character as similar in outlook to Murray as Santayana was to Epstein; I am reading Murray’s biography of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. There is in Murray’s account of the young Lloyd-Jones an earnestness that is completely foreign to Epstein, but also something of a childishness of which Epstein is entirely free. I may not have characterized this accurately as childishness, but I have wondered about it again because in reading the books of Iain Murray—always with profit if not always with pleasure, though I suspect Murray would smile gently and point out that perhaps pleasure was not his aim so much as profit.

How exactly to characterize the fault I find in Murray, the sense of lack of breadth I find in his writing? What gave me a glimmer of light was Epstein’s mention of Santayana’s word on Puritans, that they were people always busy applying first principles to trivialities. Granted, Santayana had the Puritans Lloyd-Jones read and admired wrong, but not entirely. The world of learning which chaps like Epstein, Santayana and even Scruton inhabit has not entirely done justice to the Puritans of old, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got them all wrong (that last is the colloquialism it seems to me the personal essay thrives on, so I allow myself the liberty). I think modern admirers of Puritans such as Murray could profit from the perspective of the broad learning of men like Epstein and Santayana.

I am, incidentally, reading about Lloyd-Jones because the library most available to me at the moment is one that might have been built exclusively from the catalog of the Banner of Truth Publishers—and probably was—over the years. It has been my experience—though not unvaried—that in circles such as venerate Puritans there is often such a veneration as renders people blind to a broader interest. In other words Reformed people usually are as insular as many fundamentalists, the only difference being that the Island of the Reformed is more hospitable to genuine piety. I would prefer a library with more of the mystics, the Quietists and Pietists, Thomas Aquinas and Augustus Hopkins Strong, along with the severities of Thomas a Kempis instead of the severities of John Calvin exclusively. (And what is interesting about Lloyd-Jones is that in a way he combines these two severities, being Reformed and early in his career on record for opposing daily bathing as a frivolity and a symptom of the decline of Christianity in Wales—the latter something I can readily imagine a Kempis seconding with dour intensity.)

This is where I want to go: the idea that Puritans want to apply first principles is laudable, and the idea that they tend to apply first principles to trivialities is not. It ought perhaps to be said without a capital P: a puritan is one whose grasp of first principles has somehow led him to persist in applying them to trivialities. One might further amend the statement by saying Pharisee instead of Puritan, but that would distort the focus. I do not want to talk about people whose cup is dirty on the inside, but of people whose concern is always the cup to the exclusion of the rest of the table settings, and indeed, the meal itself. Granted, this distorts the focus on clean implements because it takes in more, but if your only concern in setting the table is the important but not exclusive concern of clean implements, then I’m not sure I want to attend your banquets all the time. One wants to have meals in circumstances characterized by good hygiene, but one also wants to enjoy the meals on principles such as the atmosphere, the congruence of things served, and perhaps even the pleasing flavor of the food.

It is similar with modesty. I went to a school where some of the rules were concerned with modesty to the exclusion of grace. In other words they required unattractive habits of dress in the name of modesty. It is easier to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, but the result is limited and often, because of that, silly. Or the result is that you make out the truth to be ugly, creating a conflict between ontology and aesthetics, or between ethics and aesthetics, which seems to me a sign of an inferior culture (and it seems to me this false conflict is what some serious people think when they think of Calvinism—I have in mind the vague references you get when George MacDonald’s upbringing comes up—sometimes understandably).

It seems to me an apt warning whether it applies to puritans or not. Applying first principles to trivialities shows a ready earnestness about first principles, an eagerness to put them into practice in every circumstance, especially if first principles are being applied in serious and weighty matters. It does not exhibit a well-developed breadth of judgment, and I think it is because earnestness is not seriousness: it is a good harbinger of seriousness to come and for that reason a sign of immaturity. Perhaps I can call earnestness seriousness in the bud. Seriousness, in a way, is earnestness matured by a sense of proportion, and earnestness about everything absolutely is disordered by the lack of proportion it exhibits. Not that in our present age there is overmuch concern with first principles to begin with, but that in our present age a concern for the breadth of perspective liberal learning affords is not overmuch in demand.

Odd Associations

In the evening the sun shone through the shimmering needles of the pines. I watched, waiting for the coming of what Borges called our mutual night. I have been enjoying Borges read aloud softly on the Transmileno. I am not sure I’m at the point where I can characterize him, other than urbane, learned, tragic and of ghostly symbolism. I have the feeling that in order to learn how one lives an examined life here in South America Borges will make a good master.

* * *
Lots of promise on the front of books in Spanish. I’ve found many little book stores not so promising, but then found a couple of big ones—one down by the Cathedral on the main plaza especially, with the longest philosophy section I have seen anywhere ever. Ortega y Gasset there in abundance, and even a bilingual volume with a bunch of Plato’s Dialogues. I was unable to see—they wrap most of the books in plastic here,—but I assumed it was Spanish-Greek. Saw a Spanish-Hebrew, Hebrew-Spanish lexicon. Saw a small, small table with Ciencia-Ficcion—all translations and mostly Stephanus Rex. No buying books till we have a job and a place though.

* * *
Ate a portion of the toughest cow that ever lived, today. In the zone of high density restaurants I managed to pick what is probably the worst—though it had a charming interior in a little old house with thick walls and a covered patio. Meat is not high on the list of things that is done really well in Bogota. You have to go to the coast or to the eastern plains for that, or Buenos Aires. I think I’m going to quit trying after this, at least having any meals consisting mainly of beef. I have never heard a knife make such noises upon a piece of meat.

* * *
Speaking of noises, in the same area of the bookstore we found one of the concert halls, perhaps where one of the orchestras plays, though I did not bother to ascertain. The main, central bank, El Banco Nacional, has some sort of major library attached to it—very deep in its holdings, as opposed to the shallow holdings of the public ones, according to the woman at the information place. We discovered it and in exploring came by the entrance to the concert hall. I’m not sure what it all has to do with the central bank, but what a gesture: don’t just save money, save books and treasure up your classical music. I like it.

* * *
Found a place down there that roasts the coffee in the shop. It smelled of burned coffee, but the coffee served was good and the almojabanas more delicate than those we have had elsewhere, and there is nothing like an almojabana with coffee unless it is an arepa Boyacense with café con leche. I bought a pound ground—most things are sold by the pound here, not the kilogram—and now to see if it can rival the coffee of Don Juan.

* * *
Did I mention I discovered Eduardo Caballero Calderon? Writes compellingly, Colombian, of the previous century and now alas deceased. He was a journalist but his prose is rich and descriptive and the book moves languidly. I’m going to work on this little book of his on Monday: Tipacoque. My Spanish I can feel returning to me, and with chaps like Borges and Caballeros, my vocabulary can expand—though having a dictionary would definitely help.

A Nice Beginning

Colombia still has very little in the way of interesting English language blogging, but that is being worked on. One of the best blogs I found was this one: Medellin Living, with useful information, links, and curiosities. If you go to Medellin you should check that blog first. By way of Dave, who runs it, I found out about Colombia Reports. They are new and looking for contributions. Happily, the editor was not unwilling to take my recent chronicle of La Vega & Villeta. If you click on Travel in Colombia Monday morning, you will probably find it there.

Saturday Morning in Bogota

The skies are troubled over Bogota. The mountains—sometimes so clear the sight appears a miracle, and you can count the individual pines—are overrun with fog. Under the skies the jungle waits attentive in the rampant grass that listens for the rain; the white and yellow and orange flowers in the trees and bushes and ascending creepers mark and emphasize in the uncertain light; above the brooding, shaggy eucalypti slightly sway and seem to wait. The pines alone do not expect; they guard their shadows behind green cataracts, impassive in the quiet air.

A light sprinkle begins, a gentle and dismissed descent of acid drops to wash away our clothes and skin and leave behind the urban bones.

* * *
In the bakery the tables are occupied or rest uncleared: all bottles with protruding straws and baskets with their rumpled, wadded napkins and scattered plates and crumbs. A Lada crosses into traffic in front of a Renault annoying a Hyundai followed by a Chevrolet. The usual Nissan in the space before the door was gone and left a momentary Skoda. In a jumpsuit and tall rubber boots a man on a bicycle threads his way around pedestrians on uneven, dirty sidewalks full of buying, selling, going, coming.

The concrete jungle in these tropics passively resists and rises out of the vegetable jungle. Black diesel smoke engulfs the sidewalks and the trees in toxic, evanescent clouds, but from the hills come cool, damp winds, and the quiet invasion of the rain, to wash and rinse and nurture growth.

Holy Father, cheer our way

Holy Father, cheer our way
with thy love’s perpetual ray;
grant us every closing day
light at evening time.

Holy Savior, calm our fears
when earth’s brightness disappears;
grant us in our later years
light at evening time.

Holy Spirit, be thou nigh
when in mortal pains we lie;
grant us, as we come to die,
light at evening time.

Holy, blessèd Trinity,
darkness is not dark to thee;
those thou keepest always see
light at evening time.

—Richard Hayes Robinson

_____________________
You can find words and music examples here: Oremus Hymnal. Exactly.

At Evening

“Also known,” he observed to me, “as the Day of Doom.”

I nodded. We had somehow gotten on to the topic of the last judgment, a topic one does not merely get on to, and his remark startled me. Then I realized it had been meant to startle me and I wondered.

“So you believe it?” I asked.

“Do I believe there will come a day of doom? Oh yes.” He knocked back his brandy and sat gazing into the empty tumbler.

“Have you ever thought what it will be like?”

He looked at me, after I had asked that question, with a speculating look.

“I have—” he said, and I waited for him to go on. After some time he did: “I don’t know how you envision the Day of Doom, but I envision it as a moment of light and pain and cleansing.”

He paused again, so I said, “I imagine many envision it as a moment of pain—chaos perhaps.”

“Yes. I’m not sure I mean a moment in the same way though. There are fleeting, temporal moments and then—at least I think so—there are the moments of eternity: endless and somehow transitory, or . . . complete afterward and with no sense of elapsing time when they occur.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“Well, I’m not sure I follow myself,” he said with a smile. “It is something of an intuition; perhaps it is a sense I’ve picked up from some place or another, from some book or a poem . . . the sort of think you get from reading E.R. Eddison.”

I shook my head to indicate I had never read Eddison, hoping he wouldn’t discern the fact that I’d never heard of what appeared to be an important author.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I envision the Day of Doom as a day of Revelation.”

“Revelation of what?” I supposed, too late, I might have suggested: a revelation of judgment.

“Many things, the first being the glory of God in the face of Christ. In that terrible moment he will look on us . . . and we shall see him as he is.”

The light outside had been gradually failing, and suddenly I was aware we were sitting in twilight in that room. I stirred in my seat and glanced at a lamp, but he went on.

“In that light . . . in that light only that which has been sanctified can survive—and the rest will be consumed.”

“I suppose I always had the idea,” I offered, clearing my throat which had become dry all of a sudden, “that there would be some mutual scrutiny involved . . . of the events of life—played back like a movie, you know? Pretty embarrassing and drawn out—”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I don’t think it will be that way, though. I think there will be a realization of the completeness of Beauty, Goodness and Truth in that on which we gaze, or of the completeness of something better, and a realization—utter and perfect, even to the affect of it—of our flaws, failures, shortcomings, sins and iniquities. Iniquities,” he repeated, looking at the darkness on the floor. “A realization of the perversity and meagerness of our desires.

“And in that moment of perfect realization, and exact, exquisite pain, we will at last know enduring joy, since we will be transformed by the loss of all the dross. And only the presently forming better being will remain.”

He paused once more and picked up his glass, peered into it, and then put it down again. “Only that which presently enjoys union with God can in the end enjoy beatitude, which is union with God.”

A Brief Note

No rain, lots of homework, too many places to explore, so not much on the blogging front. We have a four day weekend coming up, and that will come in handy. Yesterday we were quite busy with all the things we did and the cooking it takes to maintain us.

Whatever happens, we’ll look back on these days with no little fondness. I think we’re pretty comfortable here now, and very jolly.

New every morning is the love

I have a small Church of Ireland Book of Common Prayer with a hymnal that I brought along for devotional reading. I like it because the poems aren’t spread out at the mercy of the tyrannous music but rest in neat stanzas. I also like it for its shape and because, it being an old Anglican hymnal, the hymns are good ones.

I like this one especially for the way the thought is developed from stanza to stanza and for things like the list in the second stanza which he brings to a conclusion with the subtle switch in the internal rhyme of the O’s and F’s in ‘forgiven’ and ‘of heaven.’ Or the W’s and LL’s in the second line of the third—music it is almost an insult to set to other music. It is the kind of poem one can keep finding things to notice—not neat things to gawk at—that illuminate the meaning. This chap knew how to write poetry perhaps better than your average hymn writer (except the third line of the last stanza is pretty average, but by then one can forgive him and the meaning is sound), and he obviously had a pretty good grasp of practical theology.

New every morning is the love
our wakening and uprising prove;
through sleep and darkness safely brought,
restored to life and power and thought.

New mercies, each returning day,
hover around us while we pray;
new perils past, new sins forgiven,
new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.

If on our daily course our mind
be set to hallow all we find,
new treasures still, of countless price,
God will provide for sacrifice.

Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be,
as more of heaven in each we see;
some softening gleam of love and prayer
shall dawn on every cross and care.

The trivial round, the common task,
will furnish all we ought to ask:
room to deny ourselves; a road
to bring us daily nearer God.

Only, O Lord, in thy dear love,
fit us for perfect rest above;
and help us, this and every day,
to live more nearly as we pray.

—John Keble, 1822

Ah Weather, Oh Fruit

I love the rain in Bogota. I love to see it splashing in the courtyards more than anything, but I love to see it dripping from the plants and to hear it rattle on the skylight.

I also love the afternoon sun. We were home early, having finished with the exam, and I sat in the cheerful sun reading Yeats slowly and having misgivings about living in a city—Yeats will do that to you.

The sun here is strong; you really have to put on sunscreen or you’ll burn. When you’re walking briskly in the cool of an overcast day and the sun breaks forth, you are quickly overwarm. The temperature fluctuates very little so they feel hot when it gets around and above 70, and they feel cold when its below 60. I suppose after a while we’ll get that way too. It is not as bad for us now as at first to walk in the sun—you learn to vary your pace.

* * *
Nice to be in the tropics though. On one corner they have four different little vegetable stores. We went to a bigger one a little further away. It is probably as big as an Aldi only its all fruit and vegetables save for the meat counter in the back. The sheer abundance is just baffling: three kinds of tree tomato, green plantain and yellow, small and big papaya, oranges, onions, seven kinds of potato, yucca, huge squashes rolling on the floor, enormous and useless zuccini–we think, long onion (not entirely unlike green onion because they harvest it a lot later, or perhaps it really is a different thing), mangoes, Chilean peaches, kiwis, apples, and about seven kinds of fruit I do not recognize, beside passionfruit and lulo, lemons, small bananas and regular bananas, pineapples–which are wonderful cheap, all of it in great mounds and greens of every description, including fresh chamomile and peppermint.

I suppose they are greengrocers. It is not uncommon for the greengrocers to have a butcher’s counter in the back, if they can squeeze it in. And many times you can watch soccer while your wife picks through things, though at the one we attended they had lively music.

Katrina is experimenting with maracuya—passionfruit—which is used to make a sort of juice, like lemonade. I want to her to learn to handle the guanabana because there is no juice like the juice of the guanabana (guanabanas are large though, the size of a bloated football, more or less). We tried raw guavas and that kind of bombed; maybe we didn’t get good ones but as far as I can tell, the only thing they’re really good for is bocadillo—and that is enough for me.

She got some grapes a few days back and was surprised to find seeds in them. It was kind of startling to see her taken aback by the fact that a grape had seeds (they are kind of a pain to eat, and brought back memories of the bitter taste of an accidentally bitten grape seed). Now she’s trying some kind of really coconutty pound cake with her hot chocolate.

Saturday we’re going to the big bakery on the corner to have arepas and tamales. The arepas are supposed to be the best in the neighborhood. And they serve the coffee there in ceramic cups, rather than flimsy plastic ones. It should be a fine occasion.

The Music of Poetry

I once asked Mr. William Morris if he had though of writing a play, and he answered that he had, but would not write one, because actors did not know how to speak poetry with the half-chant men spoke it with in old times. Mr. Swinbourne’s Locrine was acted a month ago, and it was not badly acted, but nobody could tell whether it was fit for the stage or not, for not one rhythm, not one cry of passion, was spoken with a musical emphasis, and verse spoken without a musical emphasis seems but an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said naturally and simply and prose.

—William B. Yeats