Beginning

I am beginning a blog. This is exciting. Now my thoughts and analysis and mind music shall be pushed out into the world instead of sitting lonely and stagnant in my journal. I need to study music for this upcoming Millenium Consort concert, and I have already been here 45 minutes... piddling away the time, facebook, email, cyberspace voyeurism... So moving on to the music. One of the pieces is Benjamin Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia. She is the patron saint of music. Becuase he had trouble finding Latin words for the music, he initiated a collaboration with the poet W H Auden. The poetry is beautiful and insightful and magnetic and I love it.

From Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia:

II.
I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play.
I cannot err;
There is no creature
Whom I belong to,
Whom I could wrong.
I am defeat
When it knows it
Can now do nothing
By suffering.
All you lived through,
Dancing because you
No longer need it
For any deed.
I shall never be Different. Love me.

III.
O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall,
O calm of spaces unafraid of weight,
Where Sorrow is herself, forgettng all
The gaucheness of her adolescent state,
Where Hope within the altogether strange
From every outworn image is released,
And Dread born whole and normal like a beast
Into a world of truths that never change:
Restore our fallen day; O re-arrange.
O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain,
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
O cry created as the bow of sin Is drawn across our trembling violin.
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain.
O law drummed out by hearts against the still
Long winter of our intellectual will.
That was has been may never be again.
O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath
Of convalescents on the shores of death.
O bless the freedom that you never chose.
O trumpets that unguarded children blow
About the fortress of their inner foe.
O wear your tribulation like a rose.


I love his words and imagery and everying. I want to wear my tribulation like a rose. Sigh.