'Garden Lover': the Place to Grow Poems

            Happy New Year, all! Best wishes on the coming year, and if you have any festivity left, today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas.

            Some of my poems are appearing in the online literary journal Verse-Virtual this month. This is a group of poems on the theme of -- surprise! -- gardening. Or 'outdoor living.' Or some of the natural consequences of spending time in the garden, such as getting close to bees or imagining that you're some little god or empire builder deciding what grows where. I've decided that growing things and poetry go together. 

   

            The sequence is called "Garden Lover." Here's the link:

http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2015-january.html

            The poem "Parsing of Names" comes from discovering that scientists have determined on a great many more "parts of the flower" than I imagined existed. After studying some technical verbiage about flower sex on line I was occasionally disconcerted, or amused, to find the cheerful injunction "click to print for children" on the bottom of the page. "Human Bee-ing" pursues a connection between them and us. After all, we both like flowers.

         "The Scripture of Nature" follows from a notion I have long entertained that the natural world can in some be "read" as the book that's been written by Earth, or universal nature, or creation, or God. But the poem is way less serious. The same idea is pursued, sort of, in a poem about the turn of the year ("The Name of the Flower"). Then I'm back to bees again in the last poem, "Consider the Bee."

 

            A few poems were also published last month in the same journal -- the poem about the hummingbird, the one about Sonya's birthday, and a poem about walking on Wollaston Beach. I've had occasion to read a couple of these aloud.

            They're at:

http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2014-december.html

It's Not Over Yet: the Twelve Days of Christmas

            So let's dig into this "Twelve Days of Christmas" thing.

            I'm thinking it began, way back whenever, as a transparent way to take advantage of this new Christian holiday to legitimize a period of dark-season feasting -- visiting, socializing, goofing off -- that pagan societies had long built into their solar-based calendar. In the northern lands, at least, the balance point of the whole year is the Winter Solstice, or 'shortest day of the year.' Once they had established a calendar, people were happy to see the winter solstice arrive because it meant that the days would begin to get a little longer. When the sun rises sufficiently high and the periods of sunlight grow long enough to warm the earth, the green world begins to grow again, it's possible to start planting, and it appears humanity won't starve quite as quickly as our earlier ancestors must have feared when the days kept getting shorter.

            Or maybe they were only pretending to be afraid. In any event, it was clearly time for a party. The ancient Roman Saturnalia took place around this time, a period of feast days ostensibly honoring Saturn, the god of the underworld who has for a time succeeded in capturing the sun. Or, in one telling of the myth, in capturing Persephone, Mother Earth's daughter. When Persephone is forced to go underground for a certain period year to live with Saturn -- as a result of negotiations with the girl's mother -- Earth shuts down in sorrow. (Some see this as a feminist interpretation of marriage; but I digress.)

            That cold period is just beginning -- three months of winter -- so human beings might also see this "solstice festival" period as a good time to relax and party a while before the cold truly sets in and there's nothing to do but try to stay warm and wait out the period of little or no fresh food, decreasing stores, and not much to do.

            The Christian church came along and settled on twelve days for this festival, the period that stretches from the birth of Jesus to the Feast of Epiphany. The word Epiphany means 'revelation' as in the revelation of the newborn savior to the three wisemen, magi, or kings who have traveled afar to find him. Also called 'Three Kings,' or 'Little Christmas,' Epiphany is an important holiday. For one thing, the three kings brought gifts. Which is why we are still giving and receiving gifts this time of year two thousand years later.

            The holiday of Epiphany, falling on either Jan. 5 or Jan. 6 (depending on how your tradition begins counting the days), is particularly important to the Orthodox Christian church, the Greek-speaking church spread through eastern Europe and western Asia from the time of the Byzantine Empire -- in fact more important than Jesus's birthday. For many followers of that church, you get your gifts on Jan. 5. By that accounting you're still not late with a present if you get it there by Tuesday.

            In some cultures, the gift-giving is spread out through this period, one gift per day.

            And somewhere along the line, tradition gave us a song about those twelve days as well. In my family's annual celebration (on good old Dec. 25), singing the song itself has become a tradition.

            Interestingly, various attempts at explanation have grown up to account for the weird assortment of 'presents' the 'true love' of the song bestows on us, something different for each of the twelve days. Weirdest, or perhaps most intriguing, of these is the idea that different gifts are mnemonic devices for catechism, that is, the recall of important doctrinal messages. One further speculation: the song was a device by persecuted Catholics in Tudor England to teach theology.

            To begin, we have to understand that our 'true love' is -- drum roll -- God. And on the first day, the nativity, he bestows on us -- a partridge? Well that turns out to be a symbol for Christ. (I read the explanation; already forgotten.)

            The two 'turtle doves' are the two testaments of the Bible. The French hens are the 'three theological virtues," faith, hope and love." I don't know how these virtues became 'French hens,' but the 'French' part is said by some commentators to indicate the foreign origin of the song itself.

            The four 'calling birds' are of course the four gospels. And, interestingly, those five gold coins -- monotheism's gold standard -- are the five books of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

            The six geese a-laying are the six days of creation (use your imagination). The seven swans are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit enumerated in the New Testament. The eight maids a-milking (expect no further attempts at elucidation of the symbols) are the eight beatitudes, Jesus's sermon that begins "Blessed are the poor in spirit."

            The nine dancing ladies are 'the fruits of the Holy Spirit' (the list begins with 'love,' again from a New Testament source). The 10 lords a-leaping are -- you guessed it -- the famous commandments. The 11 pipers are the faithful apostles (11 is a hard number to explain). And 12 drummers supposedly refer -- this depends I think on some close textual analysis -- to the 12 doctrines avowed to in the creed.

            Or maybe not. In the absence of compelling evidence one way or another, most sources see the song's origin as probably secular and folkish. Just a song people liked to sing back then, just as they still do now.

            Maybe we should sing it again on the 12th Day of Christmas.

The Garden of Song and Story: Sondheim's 'Into the Woods'

            We want to pay heed to the lyrics in Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods." (A new film version of this musical with a strong cast and imaginative cinematography opened recently; we saw it last weekend.) The words go by very fast, and are often very clever. They don't paint billboards of truth, but drop their pearls of wisdom like breadcrumbs scattered by lost children. We want to find them, these crumbled pathmarks, to retrace our journey and discover where we've been.

            The play is built from some of our best known folk or "fairy" tales (few fairies in these, though), a common treasury of childhood's cautionary tales. We never leave these stories behind, evidently, though I would have said their interpretive possibilities were used up decades ago. The little girl in the red cloak is threatened by a character called a 'wolf' -- well, of course. "Hey Little Red Riding Hood," the song goes, "you sure are looking good..." Any fable including a seductive-scary male animal, a lot of inter-generational eating up, and some cutting out at the end has 'Freudian game time' written all over it. It's a consuming scenario.

            Sondheim might have started out with "Little Red," and then as the depth psychologists did, noticed that some patterns ran across many of the old tales. Rapunzel is locked up in a tower where no one can get at her, yet her hair gives access. It's sexually attractive power draws princes; it's a way up the tower and into the picture. In "Into the Woods," the witch who is her mother -- a phrase eager young boyfriends might widely apply -- keeps Rapunzel locked up in a tower to protect her from the world because, obviously, the world is a dangerous place.

            But that's where you have to go, the life inside us tells us, if in fact you desire to have the range of experiences we have lately come to call "a life." There are a lot of towers out there and a lot of people staying locked up in them. And, sure, some parents do want to keep their children safe from harm at all costs; and a few like Meryl Streep's deliciously heartless and self-involved witch in the movie must be given a cold shoulder shove-off if you're ever going to escape from that tower. This story's witch eventually goes up in smoke, but we know in reality none of these characters is easy to get rid of: no smoke, no special effects, no Hollywood endings: everyone just gets older.

            Giants are found in these "Woods" as well. Men used to call the lure of a potentially cataclysmic confrontation "seeing the elephant." Going to war is one way of seeing the elephant. As with exploring parts unknown, pursuing adventures that offer rewards but pose serious risks, running away to sea, almost anyone can go -- but not everyone is coming back. Women had a harder time running off after adventure -- in "Into the Woods" the baker keeps trying to send his more competent wife home -- but sex, childbirth, and child-raising often prove dangerous enough in themselves. The Baker's Wife persists and wins recognition from her husband of her right to share in the challenge of lifting the witch's curse that has left her barren. But after she conceives, births, and mothers her infant in comically short order (a few swift cuts in the magical universe of film), the Wife also has a quick fling with a prince -- who offers this apogee of ironic self-assessment: "I was raised to be charming, not sincere" -- and proceeds to pay a very steep price for stepping off the straight and narrow.

            So does the mother of Jack (of "Beanstalk" fame), whose determination to protect her offspring is expressed in belittling what he cares about and telling him what he cannot do. Jack's encounter with "the woods" of the world shows him quite capable of stealing from giants (though why exactly does anyone want a giant's harp?). But his adventure also brings the wrath of the giant down on the community.

            And then of course there is Cinderella, who discovers she doesn't really want a "prince"; what she wants is an escape from oppressive domesticity, the household servant role in which so many girls find themselves slotted by circumstances in the so-called real world. Her self-assessment is also on the mark: "My father's house was hell," she tells the prince, "your house was heaven. I want something in between."

            Yet, at the end, after all the sex-and-stranger danger, witchery, monsters, and cautionary turns of plot, the show is most centrally about parents and children. When the tumult of so many forays "into the woods" with its liberating and dangerous encounters, twists and turns of plot clearly representative of our own journey into the "wilderness" of time, place and humankind's terrible freedom, we are left with a man and three young survivors seeking to comfort a baby. They sing "Children Will Listen":   

           

            How do you say to your child in the night?
Nothing's all black, but then nothing's all white
How do you say it will all be all right
When you know that it might not be true?
What do you do?
Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
To learn what to be
Careful before you say "Listen to me"
Children will listen
Careful the wish you make
Wishes are children
Careful the path they take
Wishes come true, not free
Careful the spell you cast
Not just on children
Sometimes a spell may last
Past what you can see
And turn against you
Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell
Children will listen
How do you say to a child who's in flight
"Don't slip away and I won't hold so tight"
What can you say that no matter how slight
Won't be misunderstood.
What do you leave to your child when you're dead?
Only whatever you put in its head
Things that you're mother and father had said
Which were left to them too
Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful you do them too
Children will see
And learn

Guide them, but step away
Children will glisten
Tamper with what is true
And children will turn
If just to be free
Careful before you say
"Listen to me"
Children will listen ...

            Sondheim's "Into the Woods" uses the tropes of these depth psychology-fraught folk tales to ask the questions human beings still need to ask themselves. How do you say to anyone "it will be all right" when you know that it may very well not? And sometimes even when you know it won't be (certainly not all right), saying that it will be may still be the best course.

            And yet there is also, as both the lyrics of "Children Will Listen" and the events of the story demonstrate, a danger in holding on too tight. When it comes to songs and lyrics by Sondheim, audiences should listen too.

God Bless Us Every One: Dickens Personified in a Single Performer

            I haven't been much attracted the various theatrical and cinematic versions of "A Christmas Carol" available in recent years. They seemed overly commercial. Appealing to our desire for the meaning of this holiday at the one time of year when it's socially acceptable to embrace this sort of talk: charity, concern for the less fortunate, smile on your brother. Since we're going to be buying all this stuff, the popular logic seemed to run, it would be good if it were all sort of part of some larger something or other. Or at least paid lip service to it.

            The problem, or maybe my problem, with this sort of approach to "A Christmas Carol" is we haven't been enough attention to the language. Dickens wrote a story, to be read. He didn't write a movie, and though a very theatrical writer -- and a theater lover himself; whose first creative ventures were for the theater -- he found his natural outlet as a storyteller who 

wrote masterful prose. The Carol is long narrative fiction (or tale, fable, allegory, romance, or as we say today, "a novella") of some ninety printed pages, written to be read on a page.

            Now Dickens himself liked to "enact" his fiction in an oral medium: a dramatic reading dramatically enacted by himself. He would stand on stage at a podium and deliver an expressive reading of his works -- doing the voices of the different characters, their accents, their speech patterns, their gestures.

            He wrote his stories this way, with a sense perhaps that his tales would 'play' in the theater of the mind. It's why stories, particularly the best of them, remain so vivid.

            I have a new respect for the story, generally regarded as Dickens's most popular work, after seeing a one-man performance by actor Neil McGarry in a small room in Plymouth last weekend that relied not on fancy costumes, props, special effects, or the "visuals" of any sort but on the actor's fast-paced, expressive, and superbly alert delivery of the author's language.

            It goes like this:

            The actor's voice narrates the tale: "Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!"  McGarry stiffens his posture, tightens his brow, squeezes Scrooge's ledger in his closed fist.

            "Once upon a time," the actor's voice tells us, "of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve -- old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. " McGarry sits; busy, upright, rigid. "... he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them." And somehow McGarry is also wheezing back and forth outside the counting house, beating his breast to warm himself, stamping his feet.  

            "Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal," the actor narrates. "...Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed." McGarry wraps a scarf around his neck, tenses above the imaginarily miniscule fire, fails to appear any warmer.

            "'A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!'" cried a cheerful voice," the actor narrates. "It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew." McGarry is a nephew, a younger man, looser of limbs, cheerful of mien, a light heart in his voice. "Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!" McGarry is quickly Scrooge once more, short-sighted, tight-fisted, barely a glance for his big-hearted nephew. And an instant later he goes back to being the nephew.

            ... Somehow McGarry keeps this up for much of the ninety pages of original text in a delivery of the full scope of Dickens's vivid, expansive narrative that doesn't leave much out. The story never drags or loses its force or focus. Neither does McGarry's performance.
            This one-man production does not rely on big, melodramatic moments or surprise revelations. We see the character of Ebenezer Scrooge changing as Dickens meant him to be seen: shaken by the shackled specter of his deceased partner Marley. The story's resolution has already been planted by the impact of this first visitation: the truth that Scrooge must change from the heartless, self-satisfied misanthrope who chases away those who might bring him a drop of the happiness of human contact he no longer knows can exist, but does exist for most people, and for the lack of which he is dying inside.

           The encounters with the three successive ghosts each take a piece out of his self-protective armor.

            The hardest moment, the most emotionally horrifying moment in the tale comes when Scrooge is confronted with the image of a newly dead corpse. No one keeps watch on or "wakes" the deceased, no one appears moved or in any way concerned by his loss, his remains are dishonored by the gravediggers who steal his clothes, news of his passing is greeted with cruel barbs by strangers who know him merely by reputation. The vision of the death of a human being which means nothing to anyone alive strikes the spectator -- Scrooge, led by the spirit of Christmas yet to come -- as a horror he begs the spirit to free him from. It's the moment an unfeeling miser has become a human being again. If you can hurt, you're alive.

            McGarry's energetic, dramatized recitation of the prose -- including the humor, the byplay, the color, the exaggerated happiness of ordinary interactions among those who cherish one another: a dance, a festive meal, a friendly joke -- reveals the life in the morality play, still alive 170 years after it was written.

            It shouldn't be a cliche this story, something you have to see or pay attention to every Christmas "season." "A Christmas Carol" has been overdressed. Peel away the accretions, and the life of the story is still fresh. It's there in the vital flow of the language, a 'meaning' there for all seasons. The joy of life is communal. God bless us every one.  

Festival of Lessons and Carols: Back to the First Garden

            The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is a Church of England Christmas Eve service that began at Cambridge University's King's College Chapel in 1918, was first broadcast over the radio in 1928, and still draws millions of listeners around the world each year. The basic design, the reading of a Biblical "lesson" followed by a carol, has been copied widely in the Anglican church family, including American's Episcopalian churches. I've heard broadcasts of "Lessons and Carols" a couple of times on Christmas Eve, though  I don't know if I've ever heard the full-bore Cambridge version. At King's College Chapel the readings are always the same, coming from both the 'old' and 'new' testaments, while the carols vary from year to year. American houses of worship tend to trim the pattern down some.
            We heard an "Advent Festival of Lessons and Carols" last Sunday at a local church, St. John the Evangelist in Hingham, Mass., where the number of lessons was reduced to six, followed by sets of two carols: one more challenging piece of music sung by the chorus alone, followed by a hymn-book carol sung by the whole congregation. I walked away thinking there's still a lot of life left in this traditional service and that the basic format allows for a lot of creativity.

            The choral music, most of it new to me, was great. After the first reading (from Genesis) the church chorus offered "Creator Alme Siderum" ("Creator of the Starry Skies") by 16th century composer Michael Preatorius with Latin lyrics followed by English translations.The second choral work, a modern setting by Peter Warlock of a medieval text: "Adam lay ybounden," was familiar to me because Sting included it on a recent album, one of my favorite contemporary Christmas albums. The work has a haunting melody for a theme described as: "Adam and Eve rebel and are cast out of the Garden of Eden."

            I know how they feel. I call it 'winter.'

            The other pieces sung by the church chorus were all settings by 20th century composers: Paul Manz ("E'en So, Lord Jesus, Quickly Come"), Vaughan Williams ("This is the Truth Sent from Above"), Elizabeth Poston, and Paul Hadley.

            While unfamiliar, the works were beautiful and accessible on first hearing. Lyrics came from earlier centuries, such as this verse from Poston's 'Jesus Christ the Apple Tree': "This fruit doth make my soul to thrive/ It keeps my dying faith alive; /Which makes my soul in hast to be/ With Jesus Christ the apple tree."

           Comparing Christ to the apple tree may be a little unfashionable, but when it comes to old, weirdly puzzling stuff, nothing can beat what you're liable to find in the Bible. The end of the second book of Genesis (the service's first reading) concludes with these shockers, following upon God's production of a 'helpmeet' for Adam via bone surgery: "That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh."

            Uh, what father and mother? We're hearing the creation story with Adam as central figure, and I really can't recall any mention of Mom and Pop (not surprising perhaps since Adam, we are told, was compounded of dust). We then hear: "Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." Why should they have? The sentence implies that a concept of 'shame' pre-existed the creation of human beings. It's as if they were created to illustrate it.

            Then we come to that second reading (the aforementioned "Adam and Eve rebel and are cast out of the Garden of Eden"). If this isn't entrapment, I don't know what it is. God creates the tree of knowledge, an attractive nuisance for sure, and says "that's the best one, so don't touch it." Once Adam discovers by sad experience why the tree is special, he knows he has to hide. What 'knowledge' turns out to be is knowing that one is naked -- perhaps a way of distinguishing humans as essentially different from the animals, who never have to decide what to wear in the morning. When Adam tells God why he's hiding (“I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid”), God is on to him like a dog on a bone. 'Ah ha, [my own translation] you must have eaten from the tree I told you stay away from. That's the truth, here's the consequence: banishment, mortality, labor, pain.' A little steep?
            Luke's account of the annunciation of God's plan for Mary (Luke 1:26-56, the sixth and final lesson in this version of the service) raises tricky moral and epistemological questions as well. Told of her destiny by the angel, Mary responds, “How will this be since I am a virgin?” The angel's answer, as we read in the New Standard Revision: “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." In the translation read at the service the verb "overcome" is used for both these encounters, more squarely raising the question of Mary's consent. Would 'no' mean 'no' to the divinity?
          These ancient texts may leave us with a little more second-guessing than the "Lessons and Carols" services have intended to provoke. But both words, and music, and especially putting the two so closely together, provide a rich experience. It's one that I will happily put under the memory tree this Christmas.