When I was dying, my heart called out
Why, my Lord,
but you cut me off.
And out of the desert country rose
flowerlike a seat of domes
that in its imposition seemed
eager to consume the sun,
floods that washed away the sand
like you washed feet,
streams that carved their way through rock
like you tore veils,
trees that were born of fossil seeds
like you raised the dead,
and (as if invited by your placid
gaze) a dusty wind that blew through the church
and scraped away your face---
(06-22-2021, 01:31 PM)RiverNotch Wrote: The Way of the Righteous
When I was dying, my heart called out
Why, my Lord,
but you cut me off. And out of the desert country rose flowerlike a seat of domes I can't really visualize what this means; what kind of domes and a seat for whom?
that in its imposition seemed
eager to consume the sun,
floods that washed away the sand
like you washed feet,
streams that carved their way through rock
like you tore veils,
trees that were born of fossil seeds
like you raised the dead,
and (as if invited by your placid
gaze) a dusty wind that blew through the churchscouring? where did the church come from?
and scraped away your face---
were you gone so long?
Hi River, just a couple of notes. Enjoyed the read.
Since this MISC I'll only comment on the content and not make suggestions on the structure.
You start off with a variation of Jesus on the cross, when he is said to have called out “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" ). That's a predicament we will all find ourselves in, and I can appreciate how you may visualize your last moments.
I also appreciate the way you show that Jesus has been grossly mis-appropriated by the "seat of domes" and how mis-interpretations have " scraped away your face."
The final line (question), "were you gone so long?" implies that N feels misled by dogma/doctrine, and recognizes that "The Truth" remains a mystery.
Interestinfg piece, Notch, thanks for posting this one.
Mark
On first reading, this was intriguing with its ambivalence between Christ and God (and, perhaps, pagan Gaea). Wasn't sure what was going on, in other words.
On second reading, an interpretation formed: is the narrator speaking, perhaps, of oil and gas extraction, those streams of water used for fracking and the tree-like towers for slant-drilling, seats of domes to hold the released natural gas with its sun-rivaling bounty of energy? (Against which, there seems to be a counter-consensus forming that carbon-based fluids such as oil and gas may be continuously produced, not "fossil" fuels as coal patently is.... but one digresses.)
Still confused as to Who was imposing and Whom imposed upon - the Lord did, of course, command mankind to subdue the earth, and the natural terrain is not God's Face, merely the work of His fingers. So still a little confusion between Creator and creation, or more than a hint of pantheism. But questions interestingly posed, and certainly thought-provoking. The Old Testament has no Prometheus, only a Serpent. So what fire we make is not unrighteous, is it?
(06-22-2021, 01:31 PM)RiverNotch Wrote: The Way of the Righteous
When I was dying, my heart called out
Why, my Lord,
but you cut me off.
And out of the desert country rose
flowerlike a seat of domes
that in its imposition seemed
eager to consume the sun,
floods that washed away the sand
like you washed feet,
streams that carved their way through rock
like you tore veils,
trees that were born of fossil seeds
like you raised the dead,
and (as if invited by your placid
gaze) a dusty wind that blew through the church
and scraped away your face---
were you gone so long?
I think the poem would work better without the similes, because sometimes it's better to let a vague profundity obscure the central absurdity of the Christological fables.
Less cynically, this is not a psalm. It lacks the from-the-heart spontaneity of the greatest psalms, that even in translation make your hairs stand on end, the Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord type of lightning strike.
By
"And out of the desert country rose
flowerlike a seat of domes"
I can only infer a reference to Islam having supplanted Christianity in the original Christian countries, which misses the irony of the fanatical Christians having first wiped out the old religions from said place, and replaced Greek philosophy with their own brand of sophistry that in the present day only impresses in certain parts of the America and the third world.
If there was irony somewhere in the poem, I missed it
06-23-2021, 05:51 AM (This post was last modified: 06-23-2021, 10:59 AM by RiverNotch.)
will wait for tomorrow (thanks for the feedback!) for a proper response, but i feel especially obligated to answer busker's charge xD
"flowerlike seat of domes" applies as much to Christian architecture, in particular *Eastern* Christian culture, as it does to Muslim architecture. While both styles came at flowery ornaments and layouts independently, as far as I know the domes were something the Muslims borrowed from the Christians.
The Christians, of course, borrowed their domes from the Romans, but not in the sense of trying to appropriate Roman identity. Rome encouraged its subjects to become more Roman, so Jews following principles of Roman architecture would have been the sort of appropriation the originators encouraged. As far as I have read, early churches that were built specifically to be churches were based on Roman tombs, as they were often built in commemoration of martyrs.
This demonstrates, of course, another refutation of one of your points. The decline of Christianity is already being blamed by many Christians on militant atheists, rather than on the various churches' own faults. In other words, for every fanatic, for every thuggish monk in service of Cyril of Alexandria, you had an Origen and an Augustine and a Jerome and a Basil and a Gregory the Theologian and a Gregory of Nyssa, you had a Christian who worked well within Greco-Roman intellectual traditions to further their own values.
Likewise, older (and newer) religions were rarely so monolithic. The Romans didn't even consider themselves to have a religion in the same way the Jews and Christians did until Julian the Apostate, and I would argue that Roman religious traditions, so deeply tied to their institutions of state, were already on their way out by the time of the Gracchi brothers. Later, you have the Muslims, who for all of their iconoclastic tendencies helped preserve whatever knowledge passed their way from already-crumbling Constantinople for sake of the somewhat ungrateful European scholars of the 15th to the 18th centuries.
The Dark Ages were a myth. As Rome struggled to survive in the face of multiple Germanic invasions, mechanical lions roared at the foot of the throne of Constantinople; and as the Latins threw the sophisticated society of Byzantium into disarray, streetlamps illuminated the Muslim city of Cordoba. Christians wiping out pagans, Muslims wiping out Christians, atheists wiping out religion: these are all myths, constructed as such in service of a sociopolitical program that originated from the West. Progress -- or the power it provides -- is far better served when the immediate past is worse than the present, and the distant past is an icon of the future.
And, for the record, I was born in and live in the third world, and there's a very good reason why Christianity -- or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or Communism -- has such an appeal to us. Marx put it beautifully in one of his essays on Hegel:
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
06-23-2021, 02:37 PM (This post was last modified: 06-23-2021, 02:37 PM by RiverNotch.)
Thanks for the feedback!
@TB - Not sure if it really worked/works, but "seat of domes" is a sort of pun. Greek of seat is cathedra, so it refers to a domed church/cathedral.
Thanks for the readings, Mark and duke! I was thinking more of the former than the latter, but in this case it doesn't matter -- I am honestly delighted it could be read the way your read it, duke! but also a little disturbed, considering busker's read and my response to it. The Islamic undercurrent is intended -- that it's strong, too -- but that it might be associated with oil, and so the region whose wealth at the moment seems the most tied to it, thus making the poem less ambivalent than I mean it to be?
And much as I disagree with the second part of your reading, I still thank you for the critique, busker! On the first part of your reading, yeah, what I'm intending to do here (as well as what I intended to do with Dawn Psalm) is still very much an idk, and hopefully I produce some stronger responses to the psalms later.
"@TB - Not sure if it really worked/works, but "seat of domes" is a sort of pun. Greek of seat is cathedra, so it refers to a domed church/cathedral."
Generally I like that kind of etymological slight of hand, but missed that entirely. I guess Mark picked up on it, and I admit I'm generaly a dim bulb when it comes to interpretation. But "seat" just seems so tame for this poem.
