Urban Windmill

 

T o    G O D

. . .

 

. . .

Parlarono... contro Dio,

dicendo:

"Potrebbe Dio imbandirci

una mensa nel deserto?"

. . .

Open My Lips

 

. . .

 Giovanni dunque diceva alle folle che andabano per essere battezzate da lui: "Razza di vipere, chi vi ha insegnato a sfuggire l'ira futura? Fate dunque dei frutti degni del ravvedimento, e non cominciate a dire in voi stessi: 'Noi abbiamo Abraamo per padre!' Perche vi dico che Dio puo da queste pierre far sorgere dei figli ad Abraamo. Ormai la scure e posta alla radice degli alberi: ogni albero dunche que non fa buono frutto viene tagliato e gettato nel fuoco."

Luca 3:7-9

Michael D. O'Brien: "A Cry of Stone"

 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 II

   Port Etienne is situated on the edge of one of the unsubdued regions of the Sahara. It is not a town. There is a stockade, a hangar, and a wooden quarters for the French crews. The desert all round is so unrelieved that despite its feeble military strength Port Etienne is practically invincible. To attack it means crossing such a belt of sand and flaming heat that the razzias (as the bands of armed marauders are called) must arrive exhausted and waterless. And yet, in the memory of man there has always been, somewhere in the North, a razzia marching on Port Etienne. Each time that the army captain who served as commandant of the fort came to drink a cup of tea with us, he would show us its route on the map the way a man might tell the legend of a beautiful princess. 

   But the razzia never arrived. Like a river, it was each time dried up by the sands, and we called it the phantom razzia. The cartridges and hand grenades that the government passed out to us nightly would sleep peacefully in their boxes at the foot of our beds. Our surest protection was our poverty, our single enemy silence. Night and day, Lucas, who was chief of the airport, would wind his gramophone; and Ravel's Bolero, flung up here so far out of the path of life, would speak to us in a half-lost language, provoking an aimless melancholy which curiously resembled thirst.

   One evening we had dined at the fort and the commandant had shown off his garden to us. Someone had sent him from France, three thousand miles away, a few boxes of real soil, and out of this soil grew three green leaves which we caressed as if they had been jewels. The commandant would say of them, "This is my park." And when there arouse one of those sand-storms that shriveled everything up, he would move the park down into the cellar.

   Our quarters stood about a mile from the fort and after dinner we walked home in the moonlight. Under the moon the sands were rosy. We were conscious of our destitution, but the sands were rosy. A sentry called out, and the pathos of our world was re-established. The whole of the Sahara lay in fear of our shadows and called for the password, for a razzia was on the march. All the voices of the desert resounded in that sentry's challenge. No longer was the desert an empty prison: a Moorish caravan had magnetized the night.

   We might believe ourselves secure; and yet, illness, accident, razzia---how many dangers were afoot! Man inhabits the earth, a target for secret marksmen. The Senegalese sentry was there like a prophet of old to remind us of our destiny. We gave the password, Français! and passed before the black angel. Once in quarters, we breathed more freely. With what nobility that threat had endowed us! Oh, distant it still was, and so little urgent, deadened by so much sand; but yet the world was no longer the same. Once again this desert had become a sumptuous thing. A razzia that was somewhere on the march, yet never arrived, was the source of its glory.

   It was now eleven at night. Lucas came back from the wireless and told me that the plane from Dakar would be in at midnight. All well on board. By ten minutes past midnight the mails would be transferred to my ship and I should take off for the North. I shaved carefully in a cracked mirror. From time to time, a Turkish towel hanging at my throat, I went to the door and look at the naked sand. The night was fine but the wind was dropping. I went back again to the mirror. I was thoughtful.

   A wind that has been running for months and then drops sometimes fouls the entire sky. I got into my harness, snapped my emergency lamps to my belt along with my altimeter and my pencils. I went over to Néri, who was to be my radio operator on this flight. He was shaving too. I said, "Everything all right?" For the moment everything was all right. But I heard something sizzling. It was a dragonfly knocking against the lamp. Why it was I cannot say, but I felt a twinge in my heart.

   I went out of doors and looked round. The air was pure. A cliff on the edge of the airdrome stood in profile against the sky as if it were daylight. Over the desert reigned a vast silence as of a house in order. But here were a green butterfly and two dragonflies knocking against my lamp. And again I felt a dull ache which might as easily have been joy as fear but came up from the depths of me, so vague that it could scarcely be said to be there. Someone was calling to me from a great distance. Was it instinct?

   Once again I went out. The wind had died down completely. The air was still cool. But I had received a warning. I guessed, I believed I could guess, what I was expecting. Was I right? Neither the sky nor the sand had made the least sign to me; but two dragonflies and a moth had spoken.

  I climbed a dune and sat down face to the east. If I was right, the thing would not be long coming. What were they after here, those dragonflies, hundreds of miles from their oases inland? Wreckage thrown up on the strand bears witness to a storm at sea. Even so did these insects declare to me that a sand-storm was on the way, a storm out of the east that had blown them out of their oases. 

   Solemnly, for it was fraught with danger, the east wind rose. Already its foam had touched me. I was the extreme edge lapped by the wave. Fifty feet behind me no sail would have flapped. Its flame wrapped me round once, only once, in a caress that seemed dead. But I knew, in the seconds that followed, that the Sahara was catching its breath and would send forth a second sigh. And that before three minutes had passed the air-sock of our hangar would be whipped into action. And that before ten minutes had gone by the sand would fill the air. We should shortly be taking off in this conflagration, in this return of the flames from the desert.

   But that was not what excited me. What filled me with a barbaric joy was that I had understood a murmured monosyllable of this secret language, had sniffed the air and known what was coming, like one of those primitive men to whom the future is revealed in such faint rustlings; it was that I had been able to read the anger of the desert in the beating wings of a dragonfly.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Wind, Sand and Stars" -  Men of the Desert , II  - 1939

Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1967
Harbrace Paperback Library, HPL 14
Translated by Lewis Galentiere

Forever With Thee

 

. . .

 Gesu disse,

E scritto nei profeti: 

"Saranno tutti istruiti da Dio." 

Chiunque ha udito il Padre

 e ha imparato da lui, 

viene a Me.

Giovanni 6:45

Heinrich Heine

 Now, what is music? This question occupied me for hours before I fell asleep last night. Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle. For it stands between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter, a sort of nebulous mediator, like and unlike each of the things it mediates, spirit that requires manifestation in time and matter that can do without space.

 We do not know what music is.

Heinrich Heine, "Letters on the French Stage" --- taken from the book by John Dizikes, "Opera in America: A Cultural History"

John Dizikes

 Venice was a commercial republic whose prosperity was based upon trade, with a vigorous middle class not overawed by the aristocracy. Yet its patrician elite, as ancient and as self-conscious of its privileges as any in Europe, set the tone of the city's life and was resourceful in maintaining its position and power. Since there was no court and no court-sponsored entertainment, the city combined private and public efforts. The public opera house evolved from this tradition. The palaces of the Venetian patricians (San Cassiano has been the home of the Tron family) often had theaters in them, used for numerous private theatrical performances. Now, Venetian noblemen formed companies to build and manage opera houses, drawing audiences from the entire community and not just one class. And eyewitness noted that the Venetians competed to give these "as they say, works in music, ample and exquisite form." Opera became a popular entertainment, "the industry of the people, the wealth of the country itself," entertainment specially suited to a city which, with its open, sunny piazzas, was like "one vast dwelling-place where the inhabitants could conduct their lives in the open, just as if they were at home, rich and poor united as it were in the bond of a common existence." The Venetian opera house was truly revolutionary. Money, more than class, determined who could attend.

 No wonder musicians like Claudio Monteverdi, Piero Cavalli, and Pietro Cesti flocked to the city. Venice created its own style of opera, combining high drama and bawdy farce and emphasizing spectacular stage effects. Its theaters had the most sophisticated stage machinery in Europe. The English traveler John Evelyn was impressed by the "variety of scenes painted and contrived with no less art of perspective, and machines for flying in the air, and other wonderful notions." The aria became a more integral part of the musical drama and the role of the orchestra was also expanded, using carefully selected instruments to give dramatic color to the music. The place of the orchestra in the theater was fixed, in front of the stage, and its members became regularly employed professional musicians. Another significant innovation followed from the increased emphasis given to songs: singers began to play a more independent role. Written contracts for performers, simple agreements to appear at a certain theater for a given fee, date from this period. Along with stars singers, Venice also produced the first touring companies.    

Tracts of open land were not readily available. It was therefore important to pack as many people as possible into the available space, so Venetian opera houses expanded vertically and eventually became much larger than court theaters. The San Moise Theater, opened in 1640, seated eight hundred and came to be thought small by Venetian standards. In the interior the Venetians introduced another of their fusions of the public and the private----the opera box. San Cassiano was built in the form of a U. Around the perimeter of the auditorium were installed rings of walled-off, self-contained compartmens, or boxes, tiers of these rising one above the other to as many as seven levels. At the back of each box was a "withdrawing" room sometimes equipped with a fireplace, in which food and drinks were served. Everyone paid a fee for entering the opera house for each performance. In addition, boxholders paid annual rent for their boxes, which provided a substantial part of the operating income of the companies which built the theaters.

 Financially, in terms of use of space, the opera box was inefficient. Open galleries would have held more people. But that was beside the point. The Venetian opera theater was a second house for citizens, the box another room in that house. If Saint Mark's Square was "the drawing room of Europe," a box at the opera was the boudoir adjoining it, where politics and fashion (and sometimes music) were discussed. Possession of a box was thought of in familial, not individual, terms. The box became part of hereditary rights, belonging to it so long as the rent was paid; at the death of a tenant, it passed, like all entailed property, to the heirs. The city took responsibility fore maintaining public order in the boxes, and the Doge himself allocated them to the heads of foreign diplomatic missions. A resident English diplomat frankly explained that, "he did not care for music, esteem poetry or understand the stage, but merely desired [a box] for the honor of his office."

 The invention of the opera house as a public social institution had far reaching consequences that are still being worked out in our day. It altered the relationship of members of the audience to the music drama on the stage and to each other. The stage performance was now separated from the audience both by the proscenium arch, which framed the action, and by the orchestra. The occupants of the boxes faced one another across the auditorium as well as the stage. To see and be seen was as much identified with the function of the opera house as to see and hear what took place on stage. ...

 Venice contributed enormously to the expansion and enrichment of opera as a musical form. It's achievement in the social sphere was equally impressive: the creation of an informed and critical musical public, the basis of musical culture as we have come to know it. Venetians didn't feel that they have to choose between esthetic and social values. For them, opera consisted inseparably of both. In Venice, Walter Pater wrote, "life itself was conceived as a kind of listening." 

John Dizikes "Opera in America: A Cultural History", 1993  [Excerpt]

Cantico

 

Sono venuto nel mio giardino, o mia sorella, o sposa mia. Ho colto la mia mirra, e i miei aromi, ho mangiato il mio favo di miele, ho bevuto il mio vino e il mio latte. Amici, mangiate, bevete, inebriatevi d'Amore!

Abraham Plea

 

. . .

The depths of the sea resound in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and your breakers sweep over me

Tennessee Williams

  

  The Winfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfuse mass of automatism.

  The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire escape is part of what we see -- that is, the landing of it and steps descending from it.

   The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

. . .

"The Glass Menagerie", Scene One

Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

    Excerpt from the poem "Each and All"

Anton Chekhov

 ...  Dear, honored bookcase, I salute thy existence, which for over one hundred years has served the glorious ideals of goodness and justice; thy silent appeal to fruitful endeavor, unflagging in the course of a hundred years, tearfully sustaining through generations of our family, courage and faith in a better future, and fostering in us ideals of goodness and social consciousness.  ...

 

GAYEV  -  The Cherry Orchard, Act I

Shakespeare's 88

 ...

That thou in loosing me, shall win much glory,

And I by this will be a gainer too,

For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,

The injuries that to myself I do,

Doing thee vantage, double vantage me.

     Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
    That, for thy right, myself will bear all wrong.

W. S. Merwin: "Grace Note"

It is at last any morning

not answering to a name

I wake before there is light

hearing once more that same 

music without repetition

or beginning playing

away into myself

in silence like a wave

a unison in its own

key that I seem 

to have heard before I

was listening but by the time

I hear it now it is gone

as when on a morning

alive with sunlight

almost at the year's end

a feathered breath a bird

flies in at the open window

then vanishes leaving me

believing what I do not see

Conversazione

Allora il SIGNORE dal seno della tempesta disse:

   Chi e costui che oscura i miei disegni con parole prive di senno? Cingiti i fianchi come un prode; io ti faro delle domande e tu insegnami!

   Dov' eri tu quando io fondavo la terra? Dillo, se hai tanta intelligenza. 

   Chi ne fisso le dimensioni, se lo sai, o chi tiro sopra di essa la corda da misurare?   

   Su che furono poggiate le sue fondamenta, o chi ne pose la pietra angolare, quando le stelle del mattino cantavano tutte assieme e tutti i figli di Dio alzavano grida di gioia?

. . .

   Lo sai di sicuro! Perche tu eri allora gia nato e il numero dei tuoi giorni e grande!

Nelle Tue Mani

 

Padre Clementissime,

nelle Tue mani

 rimetto

 il mio spirito.

. . .

 

Reverend Phillips Brooks

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. 

Psalm

 

Where could I go from Your Spirit?

Or where can I flee from Your presence?

If I ascend into heaven, You are there.

If I make my bed in hell, behold You are there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and 

dwell in the uttermost parts the sea...

even there

Your hand shall lead me

Your right hand shall hold me...

Rumi

 Cruel autumn has arrived!

The rose's red dress is torn

the willow's branches have dropped

repenting for missed prayers.

The lily has drawn her sword

the jasmine is shielded ready to fight.

The nightingale

jealous of the rose's admirers

suffers in silence.

The trees lifting their arms in despair

wonder why the buds are hidden

and who has broken the violets' back.

Cruel autumn has arrived but behold

the hope of spring for whatever

autumn destroys spring will replenish.

All this talk of roses, nightingales, and gardens

is only a screen I hide behind

because Love is jealous.

En Tránsito

 

Written On A Stone

 

Shrouded in twiddling thorny twigs

I climb onto the fire

In the name of the LORD

Salvation Council IHS

 

La Mia Mamma

 

Written On A Stone

 

 My Beloved Sister

Tell them please they're

Heaven's Sweet Kisses

Engraved in my soul.

Treasured on a music sheet

With ink of gold,

Wherever may

The minuscule melody be,

Dancing forever

They're within me.

The favorite of 

the moon and the stars

This, the Angels sing.

Jules Barbier

- Oui, mon père à present m'impose la vertu du silence.

Antonia, "Les Contes d'Hoffmann"

Blessing

 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. 

. . .

In Song

 

Let us go early to the vineyards

to see if the vines have budded

if their blossoms have opened, 

and if the pomegranates are in bloom.

There I will give you my love.

H. W. Longfellow, Paul Revere and The Minutemen

 

One by Land N' Two by Sea

Gracias Divino Amor

The Path To LOVE

 

Faith Summit

 

Blindness & Solitude

Spiritual Dispossession

Rumi

 While still in the cage of your being

behold the spirit bird before it flies away

Rumi

 

Beauty is the Garden

scent of roses, murmuring water

flowing gently . . .

Can words describe the indescribable?

Rumi

 

One day you will see me sprawled in the tavern

my turban pawned, my prayer rug stained with wine.

Intoxicated with the teasing kiss of my beloved

I see his curls dancing on the palm of my hand.

Rested, he is tempting me to stay awake

and feast with him till dawn.

How blessed I am that this charmer

entices my spirit away from this world.

Lamb of GOD

Who takes away

the sins of the world

pour out upon us 

the Holy Spirit.

🔷 🕯️AMEN 🕯️ 🔷

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Amen

 

Let that which He has ordained from all ages happen to me.

Diary, 386

Geoffrey Chaucer

. . .

"By God," he thought, "I'm living in fantasy!

If I had control of my senses, I'd surely know

She's dead and drowned, lying on the floor of the sea."

And then he changed his tack, "Yet, although

That's reason itself, what if Christ might be

The force that brings me to her, just as he

Might well have ordered her journey out of Syria?"

. . .

Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Canterbury Tales"

Translated by Burton Raffel

The Random House Books - 2009

. . .

Adoro Te

Devote

"Latens" Deitas

THE GIFT

Repent and be baptized

in the name of JESUS

and you will receive

THE GIFT

of the HOLY SPIRIT.

Acts 2:38

A   M   ✝️   N

Saint Paul

 For since the creation of the world

 God's invisible qualities

 -- his eternal power and divine nature --

have been clearly seen

Romans 1:20

. . .

A M E N

🔷 ✝️ 🔷