My Commentary ~

I was wondering what reaction people might have to the lyric of Leonard Cohen's song, By the River's Dark.  So I first posted it without any commentary.  But now I'd like to add my take on it. 

In the last years of the Biblical Kingdoms, Judah and Israel, a threat arose in the north.  This new enemy drove chariots with horses, and forged weapons of iron.  Fierce in battle and merciless in conquest, they swept across the Middle East.  One after another the ancient cultures fell before them and the people were assimilated by the victors primarily as slaves.  In approximately 740 BC, Samaria fell.  The occupying force set up a provincial government, moved in permanent peace-keeping troops, and either slaughtered or deported the former rulers.  (The Samaritans who remained intermarried with their captors and over time became a 'mixed' race.  For this they earned contempt from their brothers to the south which lasted into New Testament times, 800 years later.)

In approximately 680 BC Israel fell.  The battle was so strong and the rage of the conqueror so great when it was finished that the people were completely decimated.  Large numbers of them were transported to Babylon and castrated to serve as slaves.  Over the course of the next hundred years they disappeared from the face of the earth and are the fabled "lost tribes of Israel."  Finally, in 585 BC, even though they had a century to prepare, to negotiate, and to work out a peaceful solution, the rulers of Judah despaired and made an alliance with Egypt for protection against the aggressors.  The alliance did not hold, and in 580 BC, Jerusalem fell before Nebuchadezzer.

Psalm 137, a song of the captivity, begins with the words, "By the rivers of Babylon, There we sat down and wept, When we remembered Zion.  Upon the willows in the midst of it we hung our harps.  For there our captors demanded of us songs, And our tormentors mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion."  How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land."

Leonard's verse directly references the terror, pain, rage, and despair of the captive Jew.  But more, he captures the contemporary bitterness of the prisoner who has compromised himself by accommodating the enemy.  In his song, by contrast with the Psalm recorded in the Bible, the slave has forgotten his home, no longer knows his song.  All his former relationships, including his marriage have been stripped from him and he is surrounded by the alien culture.  He didn't recognize that his real enemy wasn't the soldier who dragged him away, it was the man inside his own skin who gave away that which could not be taken. 

     By The Rivers Dark
                                            by Leonard Cohen

      By the rivers dark     Then he struck my heart
          I wandered on.     With a deadly force
            I lived my life     And he said, 'This heart:
                in Babylon      It is not yours.'

         And I did forget     And he gave the wind
             My holy song     My wedding ring
 And I had no strength     And he circled us
                 in Babylon     With everything.

       By the rivers dark     By the rivers dark
 Where I could not see     In a wounded dawn,
Who was waiting there     I live my life
   Who was hunting me     In Babylon

       And he cut my lip     Though I take my song
  And he cut my heart.     From a withered limb,
    So I could not drink     Both song and tree,
     From the river dark     They sing for him.

    And he covered me,     Be the truth unsaid
        And I saw within     And the blessing gone
        My lawless heart     If I forget
   And my wedding ring     My Babylon.

           I did not know     I did not know
    And I could not see     And I could not see
Who was waiting there     Who was waiting there
  Who was hunting me.     Who was hunting me.

      By the rivers dark     By the rivers dark
           I panicked on.     Where it all goes on:
      I belonged at last     By the rivers dark
              To Babylon.     In Babylon.

Meet George Hamster!

While we were out of town, Tim decided to buy the boys a hamster.  We had one several years ago but the kids weren't really ready for that kind of pet, so when the previous hamster went on to his eternal reward we put the habitrail in storage.  As soon as the kids walked in and saw it they said, "MOM!  We have a new hamster named GEORGE!"  I've had almost a week to wrap my mind around it and I just can't get there.  There was no name tag on the hamster.  (or the cage)  But there was no discussion, no asking, none of the naming ritual that I've come to expect when we have a new pet.  Just the announcement "his name is George!"  Does that seem odd to anyone else? or is it just me?  I know that George is just a hamster, but it still strikes me that he deserved the dignity of some consideration before being classified a 'George'.

George is a good name.  My Uncle John George was one of my favorite people in the world.  He left behind wonderful memories and stories from an adventurous life.  Uncle John is the only person I've known who had been to every continent.  He worked for a time at the South Pole.  And he testified before Congress several times on environmental issues.  I saw him once on C-Span.  The attorney for some company or another was arguing that the "thermal enhancement" their plant was responsible for should be exempted from some statute or another.  In this particular case, they were "thermally enhancing" the ambient temperature of a lake by approximately 6 degrees.  Then it was Uncle John's turn.  "Gentlemen, if I were to "thermally enhance" your gonads by 6 degrees, none of you would retain your fertility.  Nature is delicately and precisely balanced.  We know this.  Knowing this we have an obligation to respect that balance."  It was a hoot to see the eyebrows go up when he used the word 'gonads'. 

In another favorite family story, when Uncle John served in the US Navy during WWII.  While piloting the lead ship of a supply convoy across the Atlantic Ocean, he noticed a flock of birds.  These birds were hundreds of miles away from any place you'd expect to see birds which aroused his curiosity.  So without consulting anyone, he changed course to follow the birds.  No one really knows how far out of their way these ships went following Uncle John's interest in finding out about the birds.  But, he faithfully recorded the outcome in his journal "birds apparently tracking school of porpoise."

Uncle John placed a premium on keeping a journal.  When he died, he left trunks full of notebooks that documented his travels, his work, and the daily prey of his cat ~ Mackeral.  I think he would have approved blogging, too.  I miss Uncle John.  He would have gotten a kick out of a hamster named George. 

Got Pollen?

So what do you think?  Is pollen a mind/mood-altering substance?  I've been outside enjoying the weather on the hill.  Now, I can't breathe, my eyes are watering, and I have a headache.

To make it worse, I was actually working out there.  I was pulling up the paving stones that make up our sidewalk and clearing out the weeds.  Then lining them up ~ straight.  (When you have paving stones on a red clay hill, with every rain, the stones slip or slide.  So over the years, my nice neat row of stones has meandered.)  The Schwan's man stopped by.  He does that every other Thursday.  My kids are dancing around singing "banana popsicles!"  I'm trying to remember if I have any actual cash in my wallet.  The Schwan's man says, "You know, I liked the walk better the other way." 

I suppose that's fair enough.  See I liked the other Schwan's man.  *My* Schwan's man is a 40 something guy with happy eyes and a cool attitude.  Sometimes he forgets to try to sell me anything, he just pulls in the drive and yells "hey, you gotta cold coke in there?"  He never forgot to bring banana popsicles for Tucker.  He always remembered the kids' names.  Sometime last Fall while I was out of town, he got replaced.  Maybe from the Schwan's company's perspective he wasn't a good employee.  Maybe he was pulling in other women's drive asking for more than a coke.  I don't know.  I just know that over the course of the two and 1/2 years that he stopped by, the boys and I got where we looked forward to seeing his big yellow truck.  Then the new guy showed up and said, "as of last week, Tom is no longer with the company."

This new guy doesn't know us.  We don't know him.  After he left today, Tucker said, "Momi, that's not a real Schwan's man is it?"  No, baby it isn't.  All this time that my husband, my friends, and my sister were teasing me that the real reason I liked Schwan's ice cream had nothing to do with the ice cream, I thought they were wrong.  But they weren't.  The ice cream is the same according to the ingredients list.  But it doesn't taste the same. 

I've taken my allergy meds.  I've taken ibuprofen.  I'm going back outside to work on the sidewalk some more.  I'll probably put it back like it was, meandering across the top of the hill. 

Got Happy?

If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.  Montesquieu




Several blogs I've read lately have been on the subject of happiness, what is it, how can we get it, what to do with it if we have extra.  'Happy' is one of those words that has changed in meaning over the years.  The original idea was "favorable circumstances."  I can't think of anyone who has used the word with this understanding.  One of my favorite Xangans listed all the happy circumstances of his life and concluded, but I'm not happy.  He's not alone in this dilemma. 




How have we come to this point?  In addition to wealth, health, and other circumstantial blessings we demand a joyful mood, a euphoric flight, or an ecstatic transportation.  Because joy, euphoria and ecstasy are intense and difficult to sustain, we have the impression that happiness is equally ephemeral.  We devalue our blessings because we see that they do not bring us the ecstasy we crave. 




Are we such adrenaline junkies that we cannot value the quiet pleasures of contentment, satisfaction, and security?  Through long millennia, the capacity to live in extreme emotional states has been associated with mystics, idiots, and other weird types.  Many cultures have honored these people, but all cultures set them apart as unusual. Not us, we look at the mystic and the sage with suspicion.  Why are we not able to sustain a "happiness" that seems to come easily to them.  What's so special about that guy that he should get bliss when all I get is my average home, my average spouse, my average child, my average job, my average hobby, my average mind, my average body, my  . . .




Maybe its the me-centered philosophy of our time and place that has deceived us.  We rebel at the thought that we just might be average.  We are convinced that we can have it all and indeed feel cheated when we don't get it.  On one level we know that's silly.  One person has physical coordination in excess of another and we except that even with training and perseverance, we cannot all equal Tiger Woods, or Michael Jordan, or Michelle Kwan.  Another person has intellectual capacity beyond the norm and we except that we cannot all equal Albert Einstein.  Why should we all have the impression that the ecstatic life is somehow exempt from the influence of innate disposition, training, or level of skill?  Why should we chafe at the thought that we aren't automatically entitled to plug into cosmic ecstasy and ride the wave of euphoria into mind-numbing bliss on a daily basis?




 

I Can Groove to That ~

I recently reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  It's one of those books that's a philosophy text disguised as a novel.  But even so, there's some really good "makes you think" stuff in there.  It was funny though, he spent something like 200 pages working through his argument to prove that the subjective-objective split is a false duality.  But he could have saved all that time if he'd started the book with these sentences instead of sticking them into an obscure paragraph in the middle.

"Man, will you please, kindly dig it," he remembered one of them saying, "and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar question?  If you got to ask what is it all the time, you'll never get time to know." [emphasis in the original]

After the odd sound of 60's talk stops ringing in your ear, does it occur to you what occured to me?  We don't have anything that has replaced "dig it," "groove on it," "feel that vibe."  These days you start talking about how you just know cause you know, baby, and you'll be labeled one of those kind.  You know those kind who think that the subjective is real.  Your intellectual friends will suddenly remember the appointment to get their husband neutered and pick the dog's dry-cleaning. 

So to protest the loss, I'm going out into this gorgeous afternoon where I plan to lie on the grass and look at a daffodil up close and personal.  Like, to just, groove on it, man.

The Joy of Teaching Children

As I'm beginning to type this it's 6:45 am.  It's important that you know that, since I sometimes get interrupted before I finish writing and if the time stamp winds up being somewhat later, you'll miss something of the significance.  My husband loves to introduce our children to new things.  New to them anyway.  This morning as he was getting ready for work he found himself with a few extra minutes and two interested disciples. 

"What's this called, Daddy?"

"That my child would be head-banger music."

"Why do they call it that?"  (wild giggles)

"Because it makes you want to move your head like this."  (wilder giggles)

I pulled the covers over my head and tried to pretend that I was still asleep.  That way I could wake up and know that the overheard remarks were only a dream.  But no, with headbanger music blaring from the stereo ... my imagination isn't that good.

"Bye, honey."  (kissy sounds come from somewhere over my left ear)  I pull the covers down just enough to glare at him. 

"Oh, you'd better have a wonderful day!" 

Having Trouble Posting?

I have been, I write the blog and click submit (after copying to clipboard OF COURSE) and then everything crashes.  But I've learned that if I click SUBMIT AND EMAIL instead of plain old SUBMIT then it posts.  I don't know why it works, but it seems to be doing the trick for me so I thought I'd pass it on. 

Got Death?

I've been thinking about fiction writing.  I play around with fiction every now and then, as you know from reading my blogs, but mainly I am an essay/non-fiction kind of gal.  When I write fiction I want it to be GOOD fiction.  Now it's possible to cross every 't', dot every 'i' and still have a boring story.  The obvious thing about fiction is that you have to be telling a good story, or you might as well go back to writing essays.  So lately I've been pondering the question, "what makes a good story?"

Happily for me, greater minds than my own have pondered this question.  Moreover, some really compassionate people who waded through the works of Joseph Campbell, J R R Tolkien's scholarly Oxford stuff, and Mircea Eliade's research into world myth and folklore have taken pity on people like me who want to know - bottom line - what makes a good story.

Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood script doctor, has translated Campbell's work on the hero's journey into a set of principles for fiction writing.  His book is called "The Writer's Journey" and I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to write good stories.  You won't learn how to construct clever sentences or avoid the passive verb with his book.  But you will learn how to integrate the archetypal elements that we unconsciously look for when we sit down to hear, read, or watch a story unfold.  A Xanga blog is no place to go into a lengthy discussion of mythic structures.  No matter how I'm tempted.

My meditation for the past few days has been on the symbolic death.  In the hero's journey the central theme underlying every step of the way is "approach of death."  In a romance we know the story, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back permanently.  The point at which boy loses girl, he undergoes a symbolic death - and in many cases the very real psychological death of hopes, dreams, desires.  In and adventure story, the hero comes to that point at which he is trapped with no way out and to get through to the other side, he must in someway die to at least a part of himself.  Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings that the entire story was about death - from the poem that includes the line "mortal men doomed to die" - three references to death in one line - all the way through the appendix when Aragorn (don't get excited yet, he lives to be something like 210 years old) reveals that the final gift of God to the King is that Aragorn gets to choose when and where he will give up his life in a voluntary death. 

I've written here before about the struggle of man with mortality.  Rereading all this Tolkien/Campbell material has sent me down that path again which may explain my increased excitement about fiction.  (People tend to frown on killing off your neighbors just to satisfy your curiosity about mortality, but they don't object nearly as strongly when you kill off a character in a story.)  Now I'm thinking through the various possibilities for symbolic death... maybe the judge won't be too hard on me if its just a practical joke...  

I recently submitted a short story to Dreadpirate's Contest, (you can read mine and other entries here.)  In my story the character is confronted by what may or may not be a life-threatening situation, but the real death comes in the last line.  If you read it, let me know whether or not you think it works.