Worth thinking about at any level you want (especially in English where the future tense seems less a tense and more the function of a modal verb). In Genesis 49, the text starts out saying he is going to tell them what will come, it ends up saying he has blessed them.

How much of what Jacob says is desire and how much what he says is what he has seen, truly seen? Is there that much of a difference between faith and desire in the heart of a believer? Is that what Jacob has finally learned: to match them up?

Jacob has learned both to be in earnest and to rest. He has desired and cared, and now that he is content at last, carefree and even feeling more blessed than all his forebears; has he indeed learned to align faith and desire? Does it seem they can be misaligned somehow? His poetry has moments in which it is playful enough, matched exactly to what God will do.

Sed Deus disponit . . . homo ludit, yes?

Sizes there–of recliners, of glasses, of portions and people: oh waddle me up a fat one! The flora there, with its way–I hope to see a lot of the sycamores, the forlorn shrubbery, the withering leaves tucked away, the whispering reeds on the banks of a lake. And I hope to see much of the muddy Olentangy river, its banks NOT lined with trash and its course not paved in concrete. The streets there with just dust and not garbage, the garbage not strewn on the sidewalk but in cans, the bums so respectable there with their cell phones and handwritten signs. The smell of a bookstore again–here they seldom smell like bookstores, and the second-hand ones are grubby off-putting neglected, not the friendly dust and smell of paperbacks the summer has cooked.

Oh the sounds there. Classical music in public places, tastefully low other music, not intrusive, not usually cramped there, not generally latin forsooth. Houses that seal, coffee shops sealing the smell which so colors their warmth; here doors never seal nor windows and all of life is in the open air like fruit. The wind when the snow is beginning to give way, the trickling of it, the quiet you get in the suburbs, the mournful sound of a train in the night. The neatness of laws there, the fact that there’s wildlife in the vast suburban cities’ circles: squirrels and chipmunks, raccoons and herons and even the geese. No lethal sun in the midday, but the weak, winter stuff there, so effete and polite and reserved. The size of the coffee and the depth of the rugs. Wooden fences and broad endless roads and winter in the lava lamp light.

How about a thousand-year old linden tree to live near? A bordered walk, some winter berries in the winter sun? How about a block and concrete city, tall about one, with its leisured places, polished wood and silverware? Oh dreams.

Oh sunlight in the glens, through trees falling, through green and shining white on waters rolling in a distant gorge! Again under the lamps it comes to me.

A blurry picture of a glen, a grey sky and a flat grey river winding, thickets of gorse, I see and then the sun arrives, the skies dramatic with white lightning in the arteries between the clouds. The gorse waves in the breeze leading down to the sea.

What a wild desire now for nature, for some hot day among the cliffs and bowing grasses, a flat rock with its lizard, the slope ascending and ascending toward small pines. The gorse seen from this vantage hides darknesses that lead away, under the hill and beneath the roots of pines, away, and sloping down the moist, the closeness of the earth, the dryness eventually, and down away, on rock which opens up from fissure forward to a standing cave where drip the drops of water down, and down along a winding, gurgling channel on a slippery ledge, a tunnel shrinking all about toward some light which brightens, grows a shaggy outline at the end, and dazzles into sun on the blue sea below. Emerging at the summit of the waterfall, one could fly.

Every time I look at it I think, “Where are you riding O Riders of Rohan?” I think it is the mountains, but I’m not entirely sure why. I had to chop off the bottom as it became irremediable, but thus the thing was saved–which is what I really do: rescue things from the abysmal.

This one was painted and was nothing at all, with some dismally failed pines. So I waited for it to dry thoroughly and washed it thoroughly and then came back in the foreground with burnt umber and perhaps something else. Katrina said it looked like another planet and for that I am grateful.

Not much reserve (the white part you don’t paint) but just enough, eh?

And here a variation for those of you tired of trees or of mountains, trees and mountains in the winter.

I call this one Winter of Trees & Mountains. You’ll have to imagine harder to get the russet in it, I suppose, since its inclusion in this category is entirely gratuitous.

When all the stars have fled away
you will discover that no more
can gods come from the Milky Way,
but faceless wander pathless seas
without a guide or farther shore
beneath the feckless galaxies.

No constellations in the void
of shame and surreptitiousness.
And through it rumbling, unemployed
and rusting inter-stellar ships
guided in adventitiousness
by moldering computer chips.

We knew an age in summer times
when stars were ripening the fruit
during the secret midnight’s chimes.
Now frozen juice and circuitry
and sightless human eyes commute
on dimming quests of errantry.

Jacob decides to adopt Joseph’s sons formally in order that they may have part along with the rest of the brothers in his inheritance. Joseph is pleased, bows down either to thank God or acknowledge the honor paid, or both. Things proceed. Then Jacob wants to bless the boys, and Joseph, competent as ever, brings them close all lined up for Jacob to bless the older with the right hand and the younger with the left. But the wily old man gets into his head to cross his hands at that moment. (This is great in Spanish: a Jacob se le da por cruzar las manos.)

No! says Joseph, and it is wrong (evil, but probably just wrong) in his eyes.

Hold on, says Jacob, I know what I’m doing. And we wonder. And then what he says about one becoming greater I take to mean that he is saying, or at least implying, that this is how God wants it.

Now we don’t really know if Jacob crosses his arms on purpose or on a whim, but being the rascal he is: cheater of his brother, wrangler with Laban, the family situation (another instance of humor, the child-wars of his silly wives?), and his grousing to Pharaoh, none of these things incline me to believe it was not a whim. But that’s just the thing: we don’t know.

How does Jacob know who will be what? What do you have in the text? Jacob knows it is going to work out that way because that’s what happened, that’s how the dice landed.

Does God play dice? Well, he at least participates in every cast of the dice, doesn’t he? The dice show what they do by the determinate council and causal foreknowledge of God, as the story of Joseph goes to some pains to demonstrate beyond all shadow of a doubt.

The story of Joseph! Who in all the Scripture save our Lord ever trusted and actually rested in the sovereign purpose and control of God more than Joseph? Surely not Jacob, who struggled with it all his life.

And here is Jacob playing at dice with the blessing and lecturing Joseph about it in the quiet of his bed chamber. I find it hard to think that in all this Moses is not also having himself a little joke. And perhaps you can say that there you have Jacob’s last ironic admission of what he struggled to internalize all of his life.

* * *

The have this game they play on swings, the kids. They swing and kick their shoes off and see who kicks it farther. I don’t remember ever doing or seeing such a thing outside of Bogotá. I watch them and I think: if they would get off the swing and kick properly they could send the shoes really far. It never occurs to them. They swing and kick and get off and run back and swing again and kick. Are kids as smart as we generally were in my day? I look at the sorry lot–kids these days–and lean toward an emphatic NOT.

* * *

I went to our little mall to find my wife today, and it was full. Downtown yesterday was full; the skyway–the Tequendama Hotel complex that reminds me of the Minneapolis skyways–was full to bursting. People everywhere, kids, animals, congestion and confusion. They don’t really do a whole lot of observing traffic laws here, and the thing about it is that it also affects the way they transit as pedestrians. It is like being in a crowded mall in the USA, only everywhere and worse.

* * *

I went to our little mall–I say–because I thought my wife might be done shopping. It is a place of the comfort of commercialism. There are the theaters, the food court, the kid’s rides, the video games, the crowded banks, the obligatory supermarket (no mall here is without one), the McDonald’s even. These last are growing very aggressively here: saw two new McDonald’s on 7th, we have two of them (one very, very large and then the food court one) in the mall near church. The prices at McDonald’s are kind of steep, and anything they provide you can get better elsewhere for less except the fries. Anyway, I found my wife and helped her home.

* * *

Which reminds me of the fries: the fries here are good because the quality of the potato here is hard to beat. The informal fries that is. They don’t come out of a bag where they have waited frozen. They come from a recently operated upon potato. It is a land where the potato is held much in honor. I understand when McDonald’s wanted to come in they had a wrangle with the government because McDonald’s wanted to use its own potatoes and not the local stuff. That wasn’t flying with the ministry of Ag, I take it. For McDonald’s, I suppose, it meant a costly investment in research to find something and doctor up whatever they coat the fries with to make them taste exactly the same the world over. And now the restaurants are multiplying like earwigs. There is something you can always count on at McDonald’s, even here: the ketchup. Take my advice, avoid the ketchup like the pink sauce most other places here.

* * *

The service, I can say with some certainty, is as bad the world over. Never employ anybody intelligent enough to handle something as complicated as taking an order, making change, and putting fast food on a tray is their motto. Have. Never. Been. Attended. Here. With. Any. Alacrity. At. All. At a McDonald’s. Everywhere else you usually get alacrity. Not there.

* * *

What they do like is the ice cream of McDonald’s. Hard to get anything resembling creamy ice cream here–not that I’m one to eat it–and some years back it was hard to get any at all here. Now they do it more, and what they really like to do in malls is stroll around eating ice cream. And now with all these kids around, the sun so bright, it more or less as warm as it ever gets here, well, there was also today in Bogotá a lot of that.

1. As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t’other say,
“Where sall we gang and dine the day?”

2. “In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

3. “His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en another mate,
So we may make our dinner sweet.

4. “Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

5. “Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken whae he is gane,
Oer his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.”

–Anon, found at this useful site.

The Three Ravens

There were three ravens sat on a tree,
Down a down, hey down, hey down
They were a black as black might be,
With a down.
The one of them said to his mate.
“Where shall we our breakfast take?”
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down.

Down in yonder green field,
Down a down, hey down, hey down
Their lies a knight slain under his shield,
With a down.
His hounds they lie down at his feet
So well they do their master keep.
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down.

His hawks they fly so eagerly
Down a down, hey down, hey down
No other fowl dare him come nigh,
With a down.
Down there comes a fallow doe
As heavy with young as she might go.
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down.

She lifted up his bloody head,
Down a down, hey down, hey down
And kissed his wounds that were so red,
With a down.
She got him up upon her back
And carried him to earthen lake.
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down.

She buried him before the prime,
Down a down, hey down, hey down
She was dead herself ere even-song time,
With a down.

God send every gentleman
Such hawks, such hounds, and such leman,
With a down, derry, derry, derry down, down.

–Anon.

And more: http://www.youtube.com/user/lutevoice (I love the way that dude plays the lute.)

“No one ever influenced Tolkien–you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listened to his work, but could affect it only by encouragement.”

And this one I specially prize:

“I am so glad you like Till We Have Faces, because so few people do. It is my biggest ‘flop’ for years, and so of course I think it my best book.”

I quite agree.

I’m in the third volume in which quite a bit of his views on inspiration are aired, and also his interpretation of the notoriously difficult parable of the unjust steward on page 1043.