Yesterday

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. In 2001 I visited the National Memorial there, so naturally I was recalling it yesterday.

It was actually late September of 2001 that I was in Oklahoma City, only a couple of weeks after 9/11. I’d left the East Coast without going anywhere near Manhattan, let alone Ground Zero, because I couldn’t bear to see that gaping wound on the city’s face. But going to the Oklahoma City memorial helped me to grieve, both for the victims there and for those of 9/11, in a way I hadn’t yet been able to.

The memorial is really well done. From the blasted wall of the building across the street (now a museum), left just as it was that day, to the Survivor Tree alone on its little hill, to the quiet, shallow reflecting pool between the gates that mark the moment of the explosion, to the 168 chairs standing starkly on the gentle slope beyond, everything strikes just the right note of grief, remembrance, and hope. The chairs are probably the most affecting, because they allow you to reflect on each of the lives lost that day, every one of them attached, as if by silken spider thread, to a myriad of other lives, every one of them brimming with love and joy and sorrow and anger and hope and disappointment and dreams. The small ones, of course, hit you the hardest. I pretty much started crying the moment I stepped onto the grounds, but seeing those small chairs is when I really lost it. I really hope that the memorial to be built at the World Trade Center site works as well.

Although my whole experience at the Oklahoma City memorial is indelibly imprinted on my memory, one image stands out: a part of one of the outer walls of the building was left standing, and the twisted rebars emerging from the torn concrete are a visceral reminder of the destructive power of ignorance and hate. But as I stood there looking up at it, the morning sun crested the wall and shone through the broken metal in a way that lent it a strange kind of elegance. It struck me as a potent symbol of the transformative power of hope.

Also yesterday, the Roman Catholic Church got a new pope. Unfortunately I don’t see a lot of cause for hope there, nor do advocates for ecumenism, or women, or lesbians and gays. I’ve seen words like “disaster” and “catastrophe” thrown around. I’ll reserve judgement for now, but this is at best a step to the side, at worst a step--or more--backward.

My favorite poem of four lines

I almost said "of four lines or less", but then I remembered that there's haiku. This one was written five hundred years ago by that most prolific of authors, Anonymous.

Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.

"The small rain down can rain." Yes. Yes it can. I don't think any poet has better captured, in a single image, how the daily trials of life can beset us.

Mon poeme préferé en anglais

I had planned to post a lot of poems this month, and here the month is half over and I’ve only done one. I’ll try to do more, I guess. Since poems in French don’t seem to go over, here is what I would call (only if pressed, of course) my favorite poem in English.

Spring and Fall: To a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.


I must have read (or recited, mostly to myself) this poem hundreds of times, yet it never fails to affect me. I find it hard to talk about for that very reason, as I do favorites in other genres, say Joyce’s “The Dead” or Jules Bastien-Lepage’s painting of Joan of Arc, because analysis requires a certain emotional remove that I’m unwilling to grant. I do love many of the structural elements of the poem. Alliteration can be hard to pull off without seeming cheesy or overbearing, but when done well, as here, it is effective and affecting. I love the limpidity of the words Hopkins invents; where we need Lewis Carroll to tell us that “slithy”is a portmanteau meaning “lithe” and “slimy”, we know instantly what “unleaving” is and how it leaves the landscape “leafmeal”, even though we’ve never encountered these words before. Mostly what I love, though, is the mood the poem engenders, the mix of beauty and sadness. When I was a young child, fall was my favorite season, both because of its incandescent beauty and because of the nebulous sadness that I, like Margaret, felt. Now that I’m an adult and privy to the insight that Hopkins delicately yet shatteringly encapsulates in the final line, now that I am in the late summer and no longer the spring of my life, it’s still my favorite season. And even though the sadness is more concrete, even though I do “come to such sights colder”, there is still that nebulousness at the edges--which is really just our instinctive realization that sic transit gloria mundi--that invests the golden beauty of fall with greater poignancy.

Popage

So the Pope died. You know, in case you weren’t aware. My mom actually called me after the news broke “to see if [I was] okay”. I’m pretty sure it was just an excuse to call (not that she needs one), but it was kind of weird. Because, me? And the pope? Not so much.

A lot’s been made of the fact that he assumed his office around the same time that Reagan became president (and Thatcher became British PM), and indeed, my view of them is much the same: men--former actors, actually--who used their skills and considerable charm to obscure their rabidly conservative and anti-populist agendas. It’s interesting to note that, although Reagan left the world stage long before John Paul II, their deaths also came close together, and now the pope is being lionized in the same way that the president was. (Also interesting that, where Reagan was posthumously given sole credit for the “defeat” of communism in Europe, he’s now forced to share it with the pope.) I must say, though, that I didn’t feel the same antipathy toward JP2 that I did toward Reagan--it was more like disappointment eventually followed by indifference underlain by bitterness.

I still remember when his predecessor, John Paul I, was elected in 1978, and the hope that liberal Catholics (which at that point was every Catholic I knew, even the priests and nuns at my school) felt in the promise that he would continue in the spirit of reform begun by his predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI. And I remember how crushed everyone was when he died only a month later, to be replaced by a deeply conservative man who would, seemingly, do all that he could to crush that spirit short of actually repudiating the Vatican II reforms. John Paul II arrived on the scene at a crucial point in the history of the Church, when he had the opportunity to further its transformation into a true progressive force for good on this planet--which, lest we forget, was a big part of Jesus’ whole deal--and instead he squandered it, and chose a retreat into medievalism. He was anti-woman and anti-gay, considering both feminism and homosexuality to be part of a greater “ideology of evil” with which he saw the Church at war. And despite the acclaim he’s received as a “strong leader”, such skills were nowhere in evidence as the Church in North America was devastated by the scandal of pedophile priests, a matter on which he chose to remain largely silent. Even if I’d never had any affection for him, and even if I’m not big on authority figures in general, I still always felt some measure of respect for him as the leader of my faith, but after that it was extremely difficult to do so.

The one thing about his papacy that I did find encouraging was his commitment to ecumenism, in both its narrow and broad senses. That was at least one plank of the Vatican II platform that he didn’t try to rip out. He reached out to Jewish and Muslim leaders, becoming the first pope ever to set foot inside both a synagogue and a mosque, praying at the Western Wall and bestowing a kiss upon the Qur’an. I thought of his particular devotion to the Virgin Mary as I read, recently, a book entitled The Miracle Detective, which gives an exhaustive account of the purported Marian apparitions at Medjugorje in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Among the Virgin’s many pronouncements there was that religion is a human invention and that “All religions are similar before God”. I wonder what JP2 thought of that. I know the local priests were duly shocked. I found it surprising but validating, since it well coincides with my own philosophy, most succinctly summed up by the aphorism “One truth, many paths”.

JP2 also built bridges within Christianity, reaching out to the Orthodox Churches of the East, to the Anglican Communion, and to the Lutheran Church. I have to admit I admired him for that. (On the other hand, by strengthening conservative Catholicism in the US, he also had the ominous [if inadvertent] effect of allying Catholics with Protestant Evangelicals, and I don’t think I have to point out what that alliance has wrought.) I think most Christians find the deep divisions among members of their faith distressing, especially considering that such rifts stand in direct contradiction to Jesus’ express wishes. Of course, it started with the Apostles immediately after his death, and it’s quite unlikely he didn’t see it coming. It’s human nature, I suppose. Still, we should at least aspire to an ideal, even if our achieving it is improbable, shouldn’t we?

Hmm. Okay, that’s a bigger question than I care to get into right now. I’d like to wrap this entry up with a fervent prayer for the cardinals to enter their conclave next week and choose a true visionary to lead the Church, someone who can bring it into the 21st century and make it the light to the world that it ought to be. I’d like to, but it sort of seems pointless.

Sigh. I’ll do it anyway.

Poisson d'avril? Non, merci.

April Fool’s Day is my least favorite “holiday”, probably because as a kid I tended to be less the prankster and more the...prankstee? And since I got made fun of more than enough as it was (the perils of nerdhood), an entire day devoted to that activity was not exactly something I looked forward to.

In France today is Poisson d’avril, or April Fish. The thing to do is make paper cutouts of fish and stick them on your friends’ backs. It sounds stupid, but it’s actually kind of funny, in a silly and innocent (and somehow egalitarian) way.

More to my liking, today begins National Poetry Month. Since I’m already on about the French, here is what I would, if pressed, call my favorite poem:

Le Pont Mirabeau
par Guillaume Apollinaire

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure


The more astute among you may have noticed that it’s in French. I’ve seen numerous translations and unfortunately none of them comes close to the original, but here’s a decent one. This is actually a version that was recorded by the Pogues.

Le Pont Mirabeau
by Guillaume Apollinaire

Below the Pont Mirabeau
Slow flows the Seine
And all our loves together
Must I recall again
Joy would always follow
After pain

Let night fall, let the hours go by
The days pass on and here stand I

Hands holding hands
Let us stand face to face
While underneath the bridge
Of our arms entwined slow race
Eternal gazes flowing
At wave's pace

Let night fall, let the hours go by
The days pass on and here stand I

Love runs away
Like running water flows
Love flows away
But oh how slow life goes
How violent is hope
Love only knows

Let night fall, let the hours go by
The days pass on and here stand I

The days flow ever on
The weeks pass by in vain
Time never will return
Nor our loves burn again
Below the Pont Mirabeau
Slow flows the Seine

Let night fall, let the hours go by
The days pass on and here stand I


Like I said, it’s decent, but a lot of my favorite stuff gets left out. Translating the first line, Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine, as “Below the Pont Mirabeau/Slow flows the Seine” somehow loses the simplicity and solidity of the line. I like it translated as “Under Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine”, which gives you that and keeps the original’s rhythm as well. I love how that line is repeated at the end of the last stanza before the final refrain; to me it’s like the anchors of the bridge on either side of the river. And I love how that final stanza sort of resolves out of three lines in the subjunctive to the final line in the indicative, like being shaken out of reverie. Where the simplicity and solidity of the line make it seem neutral at the beginning of the poem, here it becomes quietly devastating. You don’t really get that sense in the English. And twisting the line "comme l'Espérance est violente" (how Hope is violent) to make it "How violent is hope" takes a lot of the sting out...you need the noun before you get the adjective, because the adjective is so unexpected.

I’ll post more favorite poems during April, but I’ll try to stick to ones written in English, so I don't have to complain about translations.