On Reading the Commedia 5: Love-in-Idlness

Dante meets Belaqua from a Bodleian Manuscript

As he begins his ascent of the Holy Mountain, Dante runs into, indeed nearly trips over, an old friend called Belaqua, a Florentine lute-maker and musician. Dante is delighted to see him there as one of the redeemed, since in Florence he seemed, as many musicians seem to their friends now, to spend alot of his time just ‘hanging out’ with other musicians and not getting on with anything in particular. Then Dante is disturbed to notice that that is exactly what Belaqua still seems to be doing on the Holy Mountain, just lounging around, until Belaqua explains that this is actually his penance! He is obliged to hang around waiting for the exact amount of time he wasted on earth, before he can begin his true his ascent. What was previously just ‘time wasting’ is now being converted by grace into ‘otium sacrum’ that holy leisure, that pause and patience, that long wait in which at last we let God be God. It’s no wonder that Samuel Becket, who was to invest so much imagination into what it means to wait, was very drawn to this passage and that the hero of his semi-autobiographical short stories is called Belaqua. I wrote this poem over thirty years ago, influenced as much by Becket as by Dante, towards the end of an apparently fruitless period of lostness and indolence. Placing it now in this new sequence is itself a parable of what I understand redemption to be.

As usual you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button or the title, and I am grateful to Margot Krebs Neale for the lovely interpretative image which follows the poem

Love In Idleness

When I am bogged in indolence again

It’s purgatory for me, as for Belaqua,

Hanging around instead of getting on

 

With his salvation.  I can’t lift a finger.

The snow is falling heavily outside.

The earth gets lighter as the sky gets darker.

 

I shiver where I’m sitting (window wide

for snow-flakes to drop in and fade away)

And hide myself in something else’s hide.

 

Coat panther-black and shabby hat wolf-grey,

As my numb fingers wrap about my pen,

all I need is fire and something to say.

 

Belaqua’s lute speaks with the tongues of men,

The tongue-tied mind is loosened into praise

I slip the disc back in its sleeve again.

 

One side is columns stiff with turgid prose

About the quattrocento.  On the other

A sound-box holds the craftsman’s fretted rose

 

With Florence in the background.  What a cover

For the God who spoke through someone else’s fingers

When ours were still entwined with one another.

 

ages ago we heard the music linger

before this light had lost its  radiance

And cast on love the shadow of our Hunger;

 

We spoke of free-will and of innocence

And trod the pavements of the fourth cornice

Where Love is to be purged of indolence.

 

I write these verses pending my release

I write these verses pending my release.

A Sonnet for Epiphany

these three arrive and bring us with them

The Feast of the Epiphany, which celebrates the arrival of the three wise men at the manger in Bethlehem has a special mystery and joy to it. Until now the story of the coming Messiah has been confined to Israel, the covenant people, but here suddenly, mysteriously, are three Gentiles who have intuited that his birth is good new for them too. Here is an Epiphany, a revelation, that the birth of Christ is not  one small step for a local religion but a great leap  for all mankind. I love the way that traditionally the three wise men (or kings) are shown as representing the different races and cultures and languages of the world. I love the combination in their character of diligence and joy. They ‘seek diligently’, but they ‘rejoice with exceeding great joy’! I love the way they loved and followed a star, but didn’t stop at the star, but rather let the star lead them to something beyond itself. Surely that is a pattern for all wise contemplation of nature whether in art or science.

One can return constantly to the mystery of the Epiphany and always find more but here is a little sonnet which particularly focuses on the way their arrival on the scene suddenly includes us as Gentiles into what has been, up to this point an exclusively Jewish story. The last line of this poem is a little nod in the direction of Tennyson’s great poem Ulysses

As always you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears, or by clicking on the title of the poem which will take you to the audioboo page.

Epiphany

It might have been just someone else’s story,
Some chosen people get a special king.
We leave them to their own peculiar glory,
We don’t belong, it doesn’t mean a thing.
But when these three arrive they bring us with them,
Gentiles like us, their wisdom might be ours;
A steady step that finds an inner rhythm,
A  pilgrim’s eye that sees beyond the stars.
They did not know his name but still they sought him,
They came from otherwhere but still they found;
In temples they found those who sold and bought him,
But in the filthy stable, hallowed ground.
Their courage gives our questing hearts a voice
To seek, to find, to worship, to rejoice.

Postscript:

Now the Feast of the Epiphany is both the end of Christmas and the beginning of the Church’s Epiphany Season which she keeps until the Feast of the Presentation (or Candlemas), on February 2nd. On the Sundays of this Epiphany season it is traditional to move from the this first great ‘epiphany’ or manifestation of glory to the Gentiles, to contemplate the other ‘epiphanies’ that mark the beginning of Christ’s Ministry; the Heaven’s opening at his baptism, the Calling of his disciples, especially the ‘epiphany moment’ granted to Nathanael, and promised to all of us, and then finally the first of his miracles, his ‘signs whereby he manifested his glory’; the Miracle at Cana in Galilee.

So the Sonnet I have given above is the first in a sequence of  Epiphany Sonnets, drawn from my newly published book Sounding the Seasons, which is available from Amazon etc or by order from your local bookshop, should you be lucky enough to have one.  I shall post the others in time for the various Sundays of Epiphany. The image below is courtesy of Margot Krebs Neal

Thoughts on a Family Bible

My Great Grandfather’s bible

For all the convenience, the ease of reference and access afforded by the ubiquitous ‘ebook’, I have been reminded recently in three very concrete ways of how precious and irreplaceable real books are with their tang, tinge, smudge and wear, and most of all their tangible personal history.

I’ll tell you today about the first of my three reminders, which came in a remote croft in Wester Ross in the far northwest of Scotland, an old place where my uncle lived and where, under  portraits of my grandparents and great-grandparents, I can browse his library with its annotated volumes of Donne along with his own articles on the same, and the several volumes of my grandmother’s poetry.  The reminder came this summer when my uncle’s widow gave me an old Bible. Beautifully bound and printed, it is inscribed with my great-grandfather’s name and dated 1876, it has his pencilled underlinings and annotations over his many years of reading, and best of all, on a slip of paper inside the front cover it has the poem he wrote for my great-grandmother on their wedding anniversary in 1894.

And learn how we, by God’s good guiding hand,
Redeemed at last may reach the Heavenly Land

Of course the Bible is a precious book in any form, and I have, and consult, many Bibles. I even have a handy, searchable Greek New Testament on my iPhone! But this is different . The Bible itself is like a family album telling the long tale, over many generations of how God came to His people and, in the end, came to all of us in Christ. It is also the story of our long pilgrimage from the first garden of our beginnings, through the wilderness, and at last to the City of God in which the garden itself is renewed. But this particular copy of the Bible ties the threads of my own family into that bundle of life. In the anniversary poem my great-grandfather celebrates with his wife the way in which this particular Bible had accompanied them on their pilgrimage through time as they read it together:

“The years roll on unheeded in their flight

Maybe because you help to make them bright

Dear Wife in this our earthly pilgrimage

Each day may we peruse the sacred page

And learn how we, by God’s good guiding hand,

Redeemed at last, may reach the Heavenly land.”

And my jaw dropped whenI read this because I had used just that same image of pilgrimage together, in a Wedding anniversary poem I had written for Maggie some years earlier:

‘He made us, loved us, formed us and has set

His chosen pair of lovers in an ark.

Borne upwards by his spirit, we will float

Above the rising waves, the falling dark

As fellow pilgrims, driven towards that haven,

Where all will be redeemed, fulfilled, forgiven’

The tone, the tenor, the metre, and the meaning might all have been my great-grandfather’s!

It happened that I had with me the proofs for Sounding the Seasons, which I was still working on, and I had chosen one particular verse of Scripture (Luke 10:1) as an epigraph for the whole volume, to say that I was sending out my seventy sonnets, as bearers of good news, just as Jesus sent out the seventy. I should have known that when I turned to that page in my great-grandfather’s Bible, that verse would be underlined!

So when I pick up this worn old Bible and open it, I am in touch with something, and I have something to hand on, which no easy ebook, no digitised multi-version, will ever replace. I hope that by the time my great-grandchildren are reading it there will be a few more poems tucked inside!

Remind me to tell you about my other two reminders!

Inscribed 136 years ago by one from whom I sprung

Dante, Steve Bell And Me

Casella singing his version of a Dante poem

Let me take you to one of the most magical moments in The Divine Comedy, Dante’s poetic account of our pilgrim journey into the heart of God. Dante’s story starts in ‘the middle of the way of this life’, it starts with the poet knowing he’s lost the right path and wanting to find it again. The journey takes him down through the narrowing circles of Hell, to the cold centre of the frozen ego, and then up again, out from Hell, up into the light and air, to re-orient, having seen what he needs to leave behind. Now he must begin again, this time on the positive path, climbing the holy mountain with other pilgrim souls, trying to get back to the garden of our true humanity on the mountain top.

It is just at this moment of new beginning of starting the positive journey, in the second canto of the middle book, the Purgatorio, that the magic moment happens. Dante and his guide Virgil are on the mountain island, looking around before they start the long climb when a boat load of other pilgrim souls arrive and they disembark on the island, also wondering where and how to start this stage of their pilgrimage and who else might be here to accompany them on their journey. Suddenly amongst that troop of confused souls Dante recognises, and is in turn recognised, by an old friend! It is Cassella, a singer and musician from Florence. They rstore one another’s sense of belonging and Dante knows that what he needs now before he starts the journey, is the solace of a song. So he asks Casella to sing for him ‘to solace my soul somewhat…for it is weary.’ So Casella sings. But not just any song. He does a beautiful thing here, he sings one of Dante’s own poems back to him as a song! As Dante says ‘he sang so sweetly that I still hear that sweetness sound in me’. And its not just Dante whose transfixed by the music; ‘My master, I and all that company around the singer seemed so satisfied as if no other thing might touch our minds we were all motionless and fixed upon the notes…’

In the allegory of course Dante is saying many important truths; that music and the arts help us on our journey, that friends are there to echo back to us our own words and works but in a new way, and just when we need them. Yet when I read this I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to have someone turn one of my poems into a song and sing it back t me .. how cool would that be?

Steve Bell singing a ‘Guite’ poem

Well in this last year I have had just that experience, and I can tell you, its fantastic. I can also tell you that Dante was right about music and friendship as absolute essentials for our pilgrim journey -but you knew that already. As you know I have spent the last two years gradually posting to this blog the sonnets I am writing for our journey through the year, which are being published all together next month in my book Sounding the Seasons. Now back when I posted my sonnet on the baptism of Christ, together with a sermon on the subject I thought that was it, job done. Not so. Only a few days later I got an email from my friend the  Canadian singer songwriter Steve Bell to say that the sonet had (literally) struck a chord with him and he had turned it into a song! Attached to the email was an mp3 file. and that’s when I had my ‘Casella moment’! My old poem had become completey new for me! It was given back to me by Steve at just the right moment with a lilt and lift in it, an invitation to adventure and wayfaring which was just what I needed at that stage in my own spiritual journey. Now both my book of poems and Steve’s  new album  are coming out, almost together, in two halves of the world, and both have been created to help us begin again our soul’s journey.

Just so you can get a taste of my ‘Casella moment’ I’ve got Steve’s permission to  to put his song here, right next to my poem. So you can read the poem and then hear the song.

Then do head over to Steve’s site and check out the rest of the Album, which is out now. Its astonishing. If your’e in Cambridge come along to the launch of Sounding the Seasons on December 5th at 7:30 in St. Edward’s Church where there will be copies of Steve’s album also available.

So here’s the poem:

Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;

The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,

The Father speaks, the Sprit and the Son

Reveal to us the single loving heart

That beats behind the being of all things

And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.

The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings

‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’

In that quick light and life, as water spills

And streams around the Man like quickening rain,

The voice that made the universe reveals

The God in Man who makes it new again.

He calls us too, to step into that river

To die and rise and live and love forever.

And here’s Steve ‘Casella’ Bell’s magical re-working, you can click on the ‘play’ button or the word epiphany:

epiphany

Now you’ve heard this you’ll want to check out the whole album on. Here’s the page you need from Steve’s Website: Keening for the Dawn You should also be able to get it soon on iTunes!

A Great Album that takes you from Advent, through Christmas to Epiphany

A first sonnet for Epiphany

these three arrive and bring us with them

The Feast of the Epiphany, which celebrates the arrival of the three wise men at the manger in Bethlehem has a special mystery and joy to it. Until now the story of the coming Messiah has been confined to Israel, the covenant people, but here suddenly, mysteriously, are three Gentiles who have intuited that his birth is good new for them too. Here is an Epiphany, a revelation, that the birth of Christ is not  one small step for a local religion but a great leap  for all mankind. I love the way that traditionally the three wise men (or kings) are shown as representing the different races and cultures and languages of the world. I love the combination in their character of diligence and joy. They ‘seek diligently’, but they ‘rejoice with exceeding great joy’! I love the way they loved and followed a star, but didn’t stop at the star, but rather let the star lead them to something beyond itself. Surely that is a pattern for all wise contemplation of nature whether in art or science.

One can return constantly to the mystery of the Epiphany and always find more but here is a little sonnet which particularly focuses on the way their arrival on the scene suddenly includes us as Gentiles into what has been, up to this point an exclusively Jewish story. The last line of this poem is a little nod in the direction of Tennyson’s great poem Ulysses

As always you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears, or by clicking on the title of the poem which will take you to the audioboo page.

Epiphany

It might have been just someone else’s story,
Some chosen people get a special king.
We leave them to their own peculiar glory,
We don’t belong, it doesn’t mean a thing.
But when these three arrive they bring us with them,
Gentiles like us, their wisdom might be ours;
A steady step that finds an inner rhythm,
A  pilgrim’s eye that sees beyond the stars.
They did not know his name but still they sought him,
They came from otherwhere but still they found;
In temples they found those who sold and bought him,
But in the filthy stable, hallowed ground.
Their courage gives our questing hearts a voice
To seek, to find, to worship, to rejoice.

Postscript:

Now the Feast of the Epiphany is both the end of Christmas and the beginning of the Church’s Epiphany Season which she keeps until the Feast of the Presentation (or Candlemas), on February 2nd. On the Sundays of this Epiphany season it is traditional to move from the this first great ‘epiphany’ or manifestation of glory to the Gentiles, to contemplate the other ‘epiphanies’ that mark the beginning of Christ’s Ministry; the Heaven’s opening at his baptism, the Calling of his disciples, especially the ‘epiphany moment’ granted to Nathanael, and promised to all of us, and then finally the first of his miracles, his ‘signs whereby he manifested his glory’; the Miracle at Cana in Galilee.

So the Sonnet I have given above is the first in a sequence of  Epiphany Sonnets and I shall post the others in time for the various Sundays of Epiphany. However before we consider these further mysteries of the Epiphany, we have also to contemplate the flight to Egypt, and of how Christ began his life on earth as a child refugee, and that will be the subject of my next sonnet.

The image below is courtesy of Margot Krebs Neal

Dancing Through The Fire

CD Cover for Dancing Through The Fire (thanks to Karen Wells for the design, and Lancia Smith for the photo)

My new CD Dancing Through The Fire should be out this summer and I have begun to play some of the songs on it at gigs. The title track has provoked quite a lot of comment, so I thought I’d make some brief remarks here, give you a sneak preview (or should that be prelisten?), if you havn’t heard it live, and post the lyrics for you to read.

I’ve always been a big fan of Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstock which I first heard sung by CSNY. I loved the lines “We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil’s bargain, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” but at the same time it seemed a little simplistic and naive to think that we could simply wish ourselves back to Eden, that we could simply dream ‘the bomber jet planes turning into butterflies above our nation’ and it would just happen. Well it didnt ‘just happen’ and for all the good dreams of the Woodstock Nation, human evil and everything that is anti-Edenic seems as deeply entrenched as ever. However, not long after I heard Woodstock I began to read a great poem in which the poet also recogised that we needed to get back to the garden but with this difference; he recognised that we needed to grow, to be purged and changed, to be made ready for the garden again. He saw that we would have to go through hell and recognise it for what it is, that we would have to climb a holy mountain and pass through water and fire before we got back to the garden. He knew that we could only make that pilgrimge if we had grace, good friends, and the love of God in Christ as our companions. That poet was Dante, and at the end of his Purgatorio (the second book of his Divine Comedy) he describes how he was enabled by his love of Beatrice and the love of Christ shining through her, to dance through the last circle of fire and meet her again in the garden. Dante’s desription of that moment was also crucial for TS Eliot in his life journey and he wrote in Little Gidding

“From wrong to wrong the exapserated spirit proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire where you must move in measure like a dancer”

Here’s Botticelli’s beautiful image of that moment

I guess Joni Mitchell and Dante and Eliot were all in my mind when I decided to write my own song about life as an acompanied pilgrimage, through which we are trying to break free from ‘the devil’s bargain’ and ‘get back to the garden’

I’m very grateful to members of Mystery Train who play on this track, to the wonderful Sophie Davies, who sings with me on this one, and to Mike Boursnell of Cambridge Riffs who plays on it arranges, and produces the whole thing.

so just click on the play button or the link below to listen to to an early mix (3.8) of my song and you can also read the lyrics below

Dancing 3.8

You were born to be a pilgrim.
born to walk the dusty road
born to scan the changing skyline
born to haul a heavy load
you’ve got friends to walk the road with
you’ve got music to inspire
and you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire

you have crossed through many rivers
left many memories behind
you have followed many footsteps,
gone down pathways you cant find
all the sirens on the sidewalks
cannot sell what you require
you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire

Br: And for all the hell you been thru
theres a mountain still to climb
and all that’s happened to you
can be seen there as a sign
at the summit is a garden
all encircled by the flame
where they burn away your burden
and they call you by your name

So you came out to the cross-roads
but you’ve got no-where to turn
you followed all the best roads
tried to read the signs and learn
theres an easy road goes down ward
but the true roads climbing higher
you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire

When you make it to the border
You’ll have nothing to declare
Just a heart that kept on beating
on the far side of despair
its time to give away your burden,
burn it on your funeral pire
so you can get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire.

When you finally climb the mountain
you’ll see the river through the flame
you’ll remember where you came from
you’ll hear the sound of your true name
on the other side of heart-ache
lies the heart of your desire
and you’ll get back to the garden
just by dancing through that fire

Dancing Through The Fire (More Dante)

In my last post I talked about Ingrid’s wonderful account of her own contemporary encounters with Dante and it prompts me to post some of mine. I wrote this song a while back but never had the chutzpa to play it in public, but I finally did so at my CB2 gig last Saturday, and it went down well so I am going to be bold and post it. you might describe this song as “Joni Mitchell meets Dante in Woodstock after a Mystery Train gig”!

Dancing Through The Fire

You were born to be a pilgrim.
born to walk the dusty road
born to scan the changing skyline
born to haul a heavy load
you’ve got friends to walk the road with
you’ve got music to inspire
and you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire

you have crossed through many rivers
left many memories behind
you have followed many footsteps,
gone down pathways you cant find
all the sirens on the sidewalks
cannot sell what you require
you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire

Br: And for all the hell you been thru
theres a mountain still to climb
and all that’s happened to you
can be seen there as a sign
at the summit is a garden
all encircled by the flame
where they burn away your burden
and they call you by your name

So you came out to the cross-roads
but you’ve got no-where to turn
you followed all the best roads
tried to read the signs and learn
theres an easy road goes down ward
but the true roads climbing higher
you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire

When you make it to the border
You’ll have nothing to declare
Just a heart that kept on beating
on the far side of despair
its time to give away your burden,
burn it on your funeral pire
so you can get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire.

When you finally climb the mountain
you’ll see the river through the flame
you’ll remember where you came from
you’ll hear the sound of your true name
on the other side of heart-ache
lies the heart of your desire
and you’ll get back to the garden
just by dancing through that fire

Meeting Dante (1)

It is extraordinary how Dante, my close companion since I first started to read him in my late teens, keeps cropping up in my life. Take the last few weeks for instance. I had a random email from Robert Loch, headed ‘Dante Idea’, containing a proposal that a Dante retreat I had once given, and he had heard described, might be pitched as a TV programme and inviting me down to the Paramount, one of his London haunts, to discuss it. The meeting was arranged and I was sketching out ideas, thinking of ways we could use TV to convey the immediacy, the contemporary relevance of Dante’s journey, the way  he is mapping and exploring, not so much some imagined afterlife, but all the winding intricacies, the mysteries of the human heart. The way Dante’s journey through the circles of hell, the terraces of the holy mountain and the spheres of paradise could be mapped directly on to the contours of contemporary Britain; the stories that fill our papers and are told in our pubs.

My cogitations were interrupted by the arrival of the post; a plain brown package addressed to me; it contained, unexpected and unsolicited, a copy of a book called Meeting Dante by my friend Ingrid Soren, I was delighted to be given it, but even more so when I opened it and began to read. What an amazing book! I shall write a proper review of it later, (look out for Meeting Dante (2)) but it couldn’t have been more timely and helpful to me at that point. Like Dante’s poem, Ingrid’s book is multi-layered; its a travelogue of her journeys in Dante’s footsteps, it is a beautiful account of the poem itself but it is also (like Dantes poem) a love story; a searing personal account of the making and breaking of a relationship and how Dante helped her at every step to deal with the delights, the demands, and the sorrows of love. Every page sparkles with insight into the links between the Divine Comedy and contemporary life, I couldnt have asked for better inspiration for my London forray! I packed her book in my bag and headed for the paramount.

High above London, with a panoramic view vbiew of  its palaces and temples, its dark alleys, its corrupt banks and glorious museums, all its places of delight and desolation spread out below us, Robert and Mike Dicks and I began to plan our series on Dante’s contemporary journey and to map his places of the soul onto the real places we could see from thParamount’s panoramic view, finding connection after connection. Could we sell it? we wondered, could we liberate Dante from the ivory tower and set him walking the streets again, a compassionate guide for twenty-first century life? Would others see these connections too? Even as we wondering about that a woman who had been working away at a laptop in the corner, but also, I had noticed often looking up at us and listening, came over. She said “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I can’t contain myself any longer, I never thought I’d hear Dante’s name up here and I’m thrilled, I love Dante and I think of his work often in the midst of my own life.”

She turned out to be a well known and witty comedienne, star of a channel four series, but also, (on the quiet) a Dante scholar and enthusiast, just in the club by chance that day! I had a wonderful sense of providence, of pieces falling together and of Dante own poem so full of beautiful connections and imagined spaces in which the most unlikely people separated byt time space and language can still meet together and make something new of each others lives. I left London with the distinct feeling that the old Florentine was definitely on our side with this one!

A new poem in terza rima

I have returned to my love of terza rima and further meditations on Dante with the following poem, which forms a kind of conversation with the opening of the Divine Comedy. I hope to take the advice my muse so freely gives in this poem and make it the first in a series, so I need prayer for the discipline it takes to give my muse the time she needs. Anyway here’s the poem:

In Medias Res

And so I start again, here in the middle,
The middle of a life I scarcely know,
How many guesses left to get the riddle?

The woods are dark and darker shadows flow,

I followed someone here, but lost her leading,

With nothing but my lostness left to show.

The voice that drew me on is faint and fading

And something else is following behind.

Over whose heart, I wonder, are we treading?

My shadow-beasts can scent, though they are blind;

All three are here; leopard, lion, wolf,

My kith and kin, the emblems of my kind.

They’ve come to draw me back across the gulf,

Back from the path I wanted to have chosen:

Fall back, they call, you can’t run from yourself,

Fall to the place where every hope is frozen…

But not his time. This time I choose to choose

The other path, path of the dead and risen,

And of the hidden heart, this time I choose,

To lose myself and find again the voice

That called and drew me here; my freeing muse.

Begin again, she calls, you have the choice,

Little by little you can travel far,

Learn to lament before you can rejoice,

Sing to the shadows, sing and do not fear

But sing them into love little by little.

Begin the song exactly where you are.

And so I start again, here in the middle.