Detachment

We've all had one of those days, wherein it becomes exceedingly obvious that most people are knaves, louts, and fools. Today the world conspired to give me one of those days. (I shan't bore you with the details.) I am pleased to report, however, that for some reason the parade of asinine behavior did not manage to put me in a bad mood. I suspect that working with children has done me good: if nothing else, it has convinced me that people are not created as bad as they become, and indeed, with a proper education, most can be quite tolerable.

Is this, perhaps, the secret to avoiding irritation (which provokes a host of vices): to simply remove oneself from a situation and observe it as a third party might? It certainly doesn't hurt. I must endeavor to try this in future occasions of unpleasantness.

Angelus Silesius writes,

Niemand hat seinen Stand so hoch und groß gemacht
Als eine Seel die ihr Gemüth in Ruh gebracht.

Acedia

Occasionally when I am in a fit of melancholy it leads to acedia, as has happened these past few days. I would describe acedia, but I find that the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus did so far better in his Praktikos:

The demon of acedia, which is also called the noonday demon, is the most burdensome of all the demons. It besets the monk at about the fourth hour (10 am) of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eighth hour (2 pm). First it makes the sun seem to slow down or stop moving, so that the day appears to be fifty hours long. Then it makes the monk keep looking out of his window and forces him to go bounding out of his cell to examine the sun to see how much longer it is to 3 o’clock, and to look round in all directions in case any of the brethren is there. Then it makes him hate the place and his way of life and his manual work. It makes him think that there is no charity left among the brethren; no one is going to come and visit him. If anyone has upset the monk recently, the demon throws this in too to increase his hatred. It makes him desire other places where he can easily find all that he needs and practice an easier, more convenient craft. After all, pleasing the Lord is not dependent on geography, the demon adds; God is to be worshipped everywhere. It joins to this the remembrance of the monk’s family and his previous way of life, and suggests to him that he still has a long time to live, raising up before his eyes a vision of how burdensome the ascetic life is.

While we are perhaps not monastics, the affliction is much the same.

Ash Wednesday

Both the Old Testament and Epistle readings for today (in the Papist lectionary, anyway) emphasize that now is actually a pretty good time to start being good. Joel 2:12-13, in Coverdale's translation, reads:

¹²Now therfore saieth the LORDE: Turne you vnto me with all youre hertes, with fastinge, wepynge and mournynge: ¹³rente youre hertes, & not youre clothes. Turne you vnto the LORDE youre God, for he is gracious & mercifull, longe sufferynge & of greate compassion: & redy to pardone wickednes.

(Who says centuries-old translations aren't acceptable? With the possible exceptions of "rend" and "long-suffering", I daresay the passage is perfectly understandable, even to the average American. Bible translations that dumb-down the language — viz., the NIV, the NAB, et alia, ad nauseam — are only greasing the slippery slope towards illiteracy.) Consider also part of today's Epistle, from 2 Corinthians 6:1-2:

¹We as helpers therfore exhorte you, that ye receaue not ye grace of God in vayne. ²For he sayeth: I haue herde the in the tyme accepted, and in the daye of saluacion haue I succoured the. Beholde, now is the accepted tyme, now is the daye of saluacion.

(Again, no problems with the language except perhaps "exhort" and "succored", but certainly every college graduate should know these words.)

To these exhortations let us add that of John Donne. They don't make many Anglicans like John Donne anymore; this is a pity. In a sermon preached to Queen Anne (James I's consort, not the later queen regnant), he echoes a passage from Augustine's Confessions:

Yet if we have omitted our first early, our youth, there is one early left for us; this minute; seek Christ early, now, now, as soon as his Spirit begins to shine upon your hearts. Now as soon as you begin your day of Regeneration, seek him the first minute of this day, for you know not whether this day shall have two minutes or no, that is, whether his Spirit, that descends upon you now, will tarry and rest upon you or not, as it did upon Christ at his baptisme.

Therefore shall every one that is godlie make his Prayer unto thee O God, in a time when thou may'st be found: we acknowledg this to be that time, and we come to thee now early, with the confession of thy servant Augustine, sero te amavi pulchritudo tam antiqua, tam nova; O glorious beauty, infinitely reverend, infinitely fresh and young, we come late to thy love, if we consider the past daies of our lives, but early if thou beest pleased to reckon with us from this houre of the shining of thy grace upon us; and therefore O God, as thou hast brought us safely to the beginning of this day, as thou hast not given us over to a finall perishing in the works of night and darkness, as thou hast brought us to the beginning of this day of grace, so defend us in the same with thy mighty power, and grant that this day, this day of thy visitation, we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger, no such sinne, no such danger as may separate us from thee, or frustrate us of our hopes in that eternall kingdom which thy Sonne our saviour Christ Jesus hath purchased for us with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood.

The Call, George Herbert

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joyes in love.

---
I figured such a poem was appropriate for this Shrove Tuesday. There's an admirable setting of it by Ralph Vaughan Williams (the fourth of his Five Mystical Songs), which has been adapted as a hymn tune.

Festina Lente

Yesterday, eager to leave South Bend for a while, I undertook an excursion to Chicago. The first parts of the trip — the Cathedral District, Giordano's, the Art Institute — were successful, but a visit out to Bucktown provoked in me a terrible fit of melancholia. It may have been partly the rain, which was cold and constant, but moreso it was the idea that people who live in such a neighborhood — educated liberated young professionals of comfortable means, not beholden to anybody — can still manage to be so unhappy. How unutterably dreary a life of material satisfaction and nothing else! Even when free of the obligations and petty bigotries and irritating stupidities of small-town life, how wretched existence can be!

What I am saying, here, is that a life of real freedom is not An Easy Thing. It's not so simple as merely removing societal constraints and then hoping for a flourishing of aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual awareness. Housewives in the suburbs with three children and an SUV in the four-car garage are unfortunate. But even worse is the young bohemian who has cast off the shackles of the bourgeois life, only to find himself further enchained; what liberation is there to be had from this second, self-imposed imprisonment?

For a while now the phrase "Festina lente" has been running through my mind. "Make haste slowly", yes. But towards what?

Postlude pour l'office de Complies

The case of Jehan Alain is one of the great what-ifs of classical music. Had he lived more than his twenty-nine years — in 1940 he was gunned down by advancing German soldiers, but not before taking out sixteen of them — who knows what sort of music he might have written? As it is, his output is a gift to organists: he combines twentieth-century harmonic language with influences of plainchant, chansons, jazz, and oriental dance, all with a very French ear for colors. (The house-organ built by his father Albert is an odd little instrument, indeed. But what mutations!)

One of my favorite Alain works is the Postlude for the Office of Compline, which he wrote while on retreat at the Abbey of Valloires in 1930. The piece is a dreamy series of chords — almost static, at first — over which is laid several quotations of chant. (One presumes that Alain originally heard the chants performed in a Solesmes style; they certainly aren't metrical in the composition. Indeed, the snippets of chant in the piece bear little rhythmic relation to the accompaniment, which makes the piece rather more difficult than it sounds.)

Listen: Postlude pour l'office de Complies
This is a live performance on the Letourneau instrument at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani, performed by W. Dudley Oakes. (I would provide a link so that you could purchase the CD, but the abbey, where I bought it, does not appear to be selling it online.)

We hear portions of the following melodies: Miserere mei, Domine; Te lucis ante terminum; In manus tuas; Salva nos, Domine; and finally the minor doxology, with some repeated amens. I suspect that there's an essay to be written regarding Alain and the "Cistercian aesthetic", one characterized by simplicity, utility, and yet great beauty.

"In our time we are tired of lofty discourse. The public is not so stupid. Do not insist on musical evidence. Avoid commonplaces. Be brief." — Jehan Alain

Other links:

• An Order for Compline (Book of Common Prayer)
  
• Pre-Reform Order of Compline (Roman Catholic)
  
• Some free Alain scores
  
• Cistercian architecture, a fine introduction to Cistercian aesthetics

Absentmindedness

This past weekend I served as a calcant for several hours. A calcant (non-organists can be forgiven for not knowing the terminology), from the Latin calcare, "to tread", is the unfortunate fellow whose job it is to pump the bellows to supply wind pressure to an organ's pipes. It is a dull task that is at the same time quite unforgiving of lapses in concentration, for if the wind lags everyone in the audience will hear it. In former times, I suppose, it was the duty of every apprentice-organist to pump the bellows; perhaps it is only fitting I should have to do it. Bach surely served as calcant for his teacher Böhm, don't you think?

Calcants' minds wander. Indeed, my mind has been elsewhere much of the time these past few weeks. There is the past: on Monday the weather reminded me so much of early spring in Vienna that I experienced the first palpable longing for that city I've felt in more than a year. When will I walk 'round the Ringstraße again; when shall I climb Kahlenberg; when shall I eat at Schnitzel King or Café Prückel? I want to go back before I forget how to use the subway or order a Hot-Dog.

There is also the future to distract me. I come from a long line of worriers, and I have begun to wonder about the sort of job I'll get after I am an accredited Master of Sacred Music. My natural inclination — one not yet dulled by the unquestioned assumptions of an incurably mobile society — is to go home. Ah, but I wonder what it will be like, trying to make good music and good liturgy in a place where ignorance and poor taste are so entrenched. I am willing to teach, of course, but one cannot change a culture singlehandedly.

In any case, I acknowledge I really ought to be thinking about the present. All shall be well, and all that.

O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas

O Thou whose pow'r o'er moving worlds presides,
Whose voice created, and whose wisdom guides,
On darkling man in pure effulgence shine,
And cheer the clouded mind with light divine.
'Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast
With silent confidence and holy rest:
From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,
Path, motive, guide, original, and end.

— Dr Johnson, after Boethius (Consolatio Philosophiae, Book III §9)

Admirable Words, Vol. I

1. Autochthonous
   
2. Globule
   
3. Gumption
   
4. Lambaste
   
5. Lugubrious
   
6. Muliebrity
   
7. Protuberance
   
8. Skulduggery
   
9. Snickersnee (or: Snicker-snee)
   
10. Unguent

On Translating Borges

For what amounts to years, now, I have been attempting to translate a lecture given by Jorge Luis Borges on the Book of Job. (He's got some interesting ideas about it, as it so happens.) Every time I near completion, however, I find myself dissatisfied with the result. It is invariably either unfaithful to the original or awkward-sounding in English. (One will note that often Borges used Spanish words to unusual effect. But the English-speaking reader is not aware of this and will likely attribute it to poor translation.) Consider, if you will, the opening paragraph — insofar as an oral lecture can be divided into paragraphs:

A pesar de la hospitalidad que siento en ustedes me considero un poco intruso. Pero hay dos razones que me hacen mitigar esa impresión. Una de las razones es que yo he sido criado dentro de la fe cristiana y la cultura occidental; la cristiandad, más allá de nuestras convicciones o de nuestras dudas personales, es una malgama de dos naciones que me parecen esenciales para el mundo occidental. Esas son: Israel (el cristianismo procede de Israel) y Grecia. Más allá de las vicisitudes de nuestra sangre, de nuestra múltiple sangre, ya que tenemos dos padres, cuatro abuelos, etc. — en progresión geométrica — y ya que Roma fue una suerte de extensión del helenismo, creo que todos, por el mero hecho de pertener a la cultura occidental, somos hebreos y griegos. De modo que algún derecho me asiste hoy al hablar sobre el Libro de Job, aunque ignore la lengua hebrea y aunque no he podido leer el texto original y los comentarios Rabínicos.

And here is my attempt at a translation:

Despite the hospitality I sense in all of you, I consider myself rather intrusive. But there are two reasons that mitigate this impression of mine. One of them is that I have been raised in the Christian faith and in western culture; Christianity, notwithstanding our personal beliefs or doubts, is an amalgam of two nations that seem to me essential to the western world. They are: Israel (Christianity arose out of Israel) and Greece. Regardless of the vicissitudes of our blood, out of our multiple heritages, since we have two parents, four grandparents, etc. — in a geometrical progression — and since Rome was a sort of extension of Hellenism, I believe that all of us, by the mere fact of belonging to western culture, are Hebrews and Greeks. As a result, I have a certain right to speak today about the Book of Job, though I know no Hebrew and though I have not been able to read the original text nor its Rabbinical commentaries.

What is one to do? Part of the problem is that spoken sentences can be far longer than their written counterparts before becoming excessive; one can nest parentheticals (as I am wont to do) without too badly breaking up the flow of a spoken idea, but when written this becomes tiresome after a while, unless you read lots of James and must therefore enjoy endless sentences.

The chief problem, I suppose, is that Borges's style is deliberately obscure. In a review of five new Borges anthologies, Martin Schifino (interesting surname, that) explains this well:

[Alfred] MacAdam describes Borges's early style as "tortuous" and his vocabulary as "rarefied". [Suzanne] Levine calls the writing of his essays "radical" and even "bizarre to those who read him in Spanish today". Both are right in general. But it is a matter of detail in which way Borges "replays the Latinate prose of the Baroque era", and perhaps the best way to convey this might not be to "improvise a rococo English" – an intention declared, but fortunately never carried out, by Levine. The baroque influence can be felt, sure enough, in Borges's inkhorn terms, but his rhetorical habits are much closer to home: plain Edwardian. He sounds a little like Kipling, and a lot like Chesterton. His essays are full of Chestertonian throat-clearing and oratorical flourishes. Part of the challenge for translators may be to make new an existing manner that has fallen out of favour. In any case, more resources from the English tradition will need mining if Borges's big voice is to be fully energized.

The best way to translate Borges, then? Read more Chesterton. Borges was famously fond of him, anyway.