It’s Christmas Eve (morning).  There are streaks of rose madder in the sky.  All is calm and bright before The Onslaught of Holiday.  This morning I read Robert Browning’s (very) long poem “Christmas Eve.”  A dream is set off by the poet going into a dreary church service on Christmas Eve, falling asleep during the sermon (more sympathetic I could not be) and having a magnificent dream that takes him all over the world to see how Christmas and Christianity in general is understood.  When he wakes up in the pews with the church’s peculiar congregants shrinking away from him –he had been snoring—he concludes,

Looking below light speech we utter,
When frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul’s depths boil in earnest!
May truth shine out, stand ever before us!

One of the reasons that all is calm and bright for me is that I resigned from my job as a church music director.  (It’s a story you will have to pay money to read when it someday works itself into a novel.)  In any case what that means is that I didn’t have to run choir rehearsals all month, I didn’t play at the children’s pageant, and I don’t have to work Christmas Eve for the first time in ten years.

Warning: a digression. Here’s the thing about church musicians: they are working.  Saturday night is a work night for them. They don’t get to lie in bed on Sunday and decide they’d rather go out to brunch that morning.  They can’t waltz into church five minutes late.   Maybe you think the musicians at your church are members of your congregation.  They might be, but more often they are not.  Their spiritual community is elsewhere. They may seem to be enjoying themselves, and I expect most of them are.  I enjoyed my job at the church, but it was a job.

So all has been calm and bright this month, where was I? Oh yes, choirs. A quorum of The OK Chorale caroled for my friend Doris.  Once a month I spend an evening with Doris who has Alzheimer’s.  She comes from an illustrious family of musicians whose idea of a family sing-a-long is to gather around the piano and sing Italian Art Songs from the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  Nick (bass), Eileen (tenor), Heather (alto), and Nina (rhymes with Dinah, soprano) joined me during my evening with Doris and sang this quarter’s OK Chorale program.  I had brought my Christmas cardamom bread for the occasion but had made the mistake of giving Doris a slice of it before her dinner.  She wouldn’t eat dinner after the bread, and to my knowledge all she consumed for the rest of the evening was chocolate so it was rather a night of debauchery for her and I’m almost afraid to call and see how she was the next day.

After the OK Chorale finished their quarter with a moonlit, magical performance at the Green Lake Luminarias, I was looking at ten days of little responsibility, something that happens so seldom to me that it takes me a few days to actually stop working. I wind down like a music box, getting slower and slower, making less and less music until finally I ping here and there.  As I approached pinging, I spent one glorious day moving from wrapping presents to writing cards to baking cookies and back to wrapping presents.  These are pleasures that I don’t always have the leisure to enjoy.  There are years when I stuff  gifts into bags on my way out the door and practically throw them at their recipients.

It’s been a season of teas. I had three friends over for a Christmas tea.  Nancy, my good friend and weekly walking partner, and I eschewed the walk and had a Christmas tea.  Anna and Julia took me to tea at the Sorrento Hotel’s Hunt Club, our tradition of twelve years except that I used to pay for it.  Now they are grown up, they treat me.  These days we order two meals and three pots of tea. Anna and I don’t eat wheat, I don’t eat dairy, Julia doesn’t eat meat, and all of us try to keep the sugar consumption low.  We divvied up the food like the dignitaries at the Paris Peace Conference. I scraped the cream fraiche off the cucumber and offered it to Julia. I kept the caviar, which is what she really wanted. Other than that I think we settled things amicably.

One small joy was the gift I gave one of my newest and youngest piano students.  Alex is a tiny and exuberant child.  She looked at my collection of porcelain and wax caroling figures surrounded by miniature gifts, Christmas ornaments and old, old pieces of candy.  There’s some Cornish fudge wrapped in cellophane from 1980.  But Alex fingered the chocolate coins.

 “I’ve never had these,” she said.

Did I hear wistful? I looked at the six year old and thought how many other things she hadn’t yet experienced.  I remembered how it felt to be six and how hard it was to speak my desire.  I remembered the adults who had picked up on just such hints as I was getting from Alex.  I had planned to make little packages for my students of homemade cookies and candy canes but you can bet I bustled down to Bartells and bought some chocolate coins.  Two per package except for one package that got three.  That was the package that Alex happened to pick.  It was one small joy in a season of overwhelming excitement, and perhaps she forgot all about it as she went out the door and I wiped the chocolate smears off the piano keys.  But maybe not.

Tonight I am going to a big-ass Christmas Eve service with a friend. (“You just can’t stay away from church, can you?” another friend asked).  Oh, I think I can, but for once I want to sit in a pew and not be responsible for anything or anyone.  Maybe I’ll fall asleep, dream a magnificent dream, and write a 45 page poem about it.

Whatever your plans in the next few days and whatever boils in earnest in your soul: May truth shine out! Merry Christmas!

The OK Chorale has sung itself into performance mode: two down and two to go. You still have a chance to hear us if you live in Seattle.  We sang for Pinehurst Court, a senior housing complex, and home of the grandmother of one of our sopranos.  It was a hot, crowded, noisy venue but the audience was enthusiastic.  One man told us he heard the sound of angels.  I asked for a show of hands of the angel voices in the Chorale.  Their angel qualities escape me during rehearsals.

We sang at the Norse Home for an informal tree decorating evening, which was also hot, crowded and noisy.  A small boy began running his metal truck over a slate floor at about the time we began singing the anti-war carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”  By the time we got to the sentimental “Auld Lang Syne,” I got up from the piano with every intention of kicking the truck right out of his hand, but, speaking of angels, my better one got to me, and I stood with the choir to finish the song a capella.

It was my intention, however, when I started this post, to tell you about a chap named Andrew D.R.Greenhill because we sing an arrangement of his every year during fall quarter.  I try to rotate it out but everyone complains when I do.  The song is called “The King,” and in the early 70s it was a hit of a British group called Steeleye Span.  We do quite a number of their songs through-out the year, some that I have arranged and some arrangements that I have bought from Andrew.

I discovered Steeleye Span in 2000, and loved their repertoire and their four-part harmony.  I had already arranged a few of their songs for the OK Chorale before I found a website that sold actual transcriptions of the voicing and progressions from the recordings.  Gold!  I picked out some titles I wanted.  But there was no shopping cart, and no order form.  I clicked away until I came to a page with ordering instructions from Andrew D.R. Greenhill.

Here was the routine: I wrote to him via snail mail and told him what arrangements I wanted.  (He lives in Leicester, which leapt into the news last year as the place where Richard III’s bones were discovered under a parking lot.) He responded “by turn of post” as is his wont:

“You may have copies of “The King,” “Gaudete,” “The Boar’s Head Carol,” and “The Holly and the Ivy” for the princely sum of ₤26.75. The aforesaid sum must be in sterling. The usual method of payment is by cheque or cash.  I look forwards to hearing from you again. Thank you for your enquiry.  Yours faithfully.  .  .”

In 2000 every little outpost bank couldn’t do international money orders. I had to travel to a bank in Wallingford to obtain the princely sum of ₤26.75 in the format required to purchase the aforementioned music. I sent off the money order.  A package duly arrived with a cover letter bidding me “find enclosed herewith the music which you ordered in your letter of .  .  .”

I ordered more arrangements from Andrew.  In fact, I ordered from him four times. Eight letters crossed the world. Their language became less formal.  Four times the price of the music was stated as a princely sum in pound sterling.  Four times I kicked my heels at the bank in Wallingford while a teller waited for his supervisor to get off the phone so he could learn how to do an international money order.  It was quite an adventure–one I could experience again because Andrew’s methods are still the same ten years later.

The song “The King” is charming, majestic and gruesome. Here’s the tradition: on Twelfth Night, a wren, symbolizing winter, is hunted and killed to symbolize the death of winter.  The dead wren is placed in a decorated box and carried from house to house.  At each house this lovely song is sung and people pay to have a dekko at the dead wren:

Joy, health, love and peace be here in this place,
By your leave we will sing concerning our king.

Our king is well dressed in silks of the best.
In ribbons so fair no king can compare.

We have traveled many miles over hedges and stile
In search of our king, unto you we bring.

We have powder and shot to conquer the lot,
We have cannon and ball to conquer them all.

Old Christmas is past, Twelfth tide is the last,
And we bid you adieu, great joy to the new.

We don’t sing the fourth verse in the Chorale.  I carefully excised that verse from Andrew’s arrangement. Literally, I scissored it out. It’s too much for our delicate American sensibilities.  My friend Terry and I like to sing it, though, just because we can. Here’s Steeleye Span singing “The King.” You’re welcome.

You can hear The OK Chorale sing it at the Green Lake Pathway of Lights on Saturday, Dec 14, 6:30 PM at the Aqua-theater.

It’s Thanksgiving Morning.  We all do this day differently.  Not everyone loves the big, jovial family dinners.  Not everyone even wants a big, jovial family.  One of my students this week told me that the best Thanksgiving she ever had was spent with her dog, a bottle of champagne, and a box of chocolates.  There are years when that’s what I want.  Some years, I wouldn’t mind the big, jovial family. This year I am thankful for my neighbor Gwen and the tradition that has evolved between us ever since she stopped thinking she had to get on a plane for the holiday.

 I am especially thankful because I’ve been ill for the last two weeks and but for Gwen, I might have needed to order in that box of chocolates.  We started confabbing about it last week.  Gwen volleyed the idea of getting everything from Smokin’ Petes.

“It’s our chance to really be lazy,” she said.

Smokin’ Petes was considered somewhat on the weight of their key lime pies.  We wanted pumpkin pie but if the key lime pie at Smokin’ Petes was good, the pumpkin was bound to be as well.  I liked the idea of a good pie but I don’t care for smoked turkey.

“Why don’t you get what you want from them along with the pie and I’ll scrounge a dinner from PCC or something?”  This sounds self-pitying but at the time I didn’t feel —OK, it was self-pitying.  At the time I remember thinking that by the day before Thanksgiving I might feel like crawling into the car and going to PCC.

But when Gwen went shopping she came back with the announcement that she had bought a turkey and a pumpkin pie from QFC.“That way,” she said, “We can carbo load on my stuffing.”

I must pause here to note that this is what Thanksgiving comes down to with us no matter how many alternative ideas are floated.  Gwen does the turkey and (traditional) stuffing and she gets all the leftovers.  I do a vegetable and the cranberries. We negotiate for the dessert. 

Usually I do my mother’s Celery Almondine but this year I am roasting yams, carrots and cranberries.  It’s amazing how sweet the root vegetables taste up next to the tart cranberries.  It’s easy and can be done while wearing surgical gloves and a respirator mask.

Yesterday afternoon, Gwen relayed the information that she had tasted the pie and it was awful. “I knew I shouldn’t have bought one,” she said. “I don’t like store bought pies.  I like the ones I make.”

This was gloomy news indeed.

“I have organic pumpkin over here,” I said. “If you want to make one.”

“No, I don’t want to have sugar in the house.”

“I can supply the requisite sugar.”

“Well you could make it if you want to but it’s harder starting with just the pumpkin. I need Libby pumpkin pie filling.  I add more spices with the eggs and milk.”

“I suppose I could make it.” Whine, whine. “But I don’t have the eggs.”  Or enough respirator masks.  “Listen, If I get you a can of Libbys pumpkin pie filling, will you make the pie?”

“OK, if you do that, I’ll make the pie.  I can scrape out the filling from this QFC one because their crust is really good.”

Nina (rhymes with Dinah) picked me up for OK Chorale rehearsal. “You can think about for the next two hours,” I said. “But will you run me by Fred Meyer on the way home so I can get a Libby pumpkin pie filling for Gwen?”

Nina said immediately that she would take me to Fred Meyer on the way home.  Then almost as a reward for her selflessness, she remembered that she had forgotten to buy cranberries for her dinner but could now do it at Fred Meyer.

“I was at Ballard Market with about a billion other people today,” she said.  “I decided I wanted a small turkey for the weekend so we could have leftovers.”  (Ah, the leftovers.) “But the only small turkey they had left was an organic one, somebody’s pet”—she practically spit out the word—“for $35. Thirty-five dollars for a ten pound turkey!  And someone had the nerve to tell me that the pricy organic ones aren’t always any better. I didn’t need to hear that.”

After Chorale rehearsal Nina and I followed a billion other people into Fred Meyer.  The first thing I saw were cans of Farmer’s Market organic pumpkin filling with a BPA free lining. “Wow,” I thought. “Even better!”  I grabbed two.

My alternative angel got to me before I got to the cash register. “Libby,” it said. “Libby. You aren’t making the pie, remember? Gwen is.”

Nine o’ clock last night I called Gwen. “I’m coming over with the Libbys,” I said.

“I’ve scraped out the QFC filling,” she said.

We’re such a team.

My other contribution to the day was the movie.  I have waited 15 years for “A Midwinter Tale” to come out on DVD.  I ordered it with the hope it would arrive in time for Thanksgiving.  It’s the story of a bunch of out-of-work actors who bring their quirks and egos together to put on a benefit performance of Hamlet. 

It’s particularly timely for me because one of the things I did during my two weeks of being sick was watch Hamlet six times.  I watched the David Tennant performance for the first time and liked it so much, I watched it again.  Then I decided to re-watch the Kenneth Branagh performance which up until I saw David Tennant, had been my favorite.  Then I watched The Kenneth Branagh with audio commentary.  After that I had to re-watch David Tennant and when I still hadn’t gotten enough of it, I watched the David Tennant with audio commentary.

We all have our quirks.  It’s nice to have a holiday that supports them.  And now I need to get to those yams.  Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

I knew I’d be writing this post at some point but I thought I had another few weeks.  Last night a friend named Karen died.  For the ten years I was music director at the church, Karen had been popping her gum in the pew and feeding dog biscuits to Marvin, her Miniature Pinscher. As far as anyone in the church knew, she was alone in the world except for her succession of dogs, Marvin being the last one.  For a long time I thought it was Marvin I loved and I put up with Karen because she came with him.

Karen was unto herself.  During sharing times in the church service, we heard all about her early childhood abuse, about how positive dog training had helped her not just with her dog but with herself, about garlic as a remedy for fleas, and about the dangers of beef and chicken by-products.  I used to keep a tally of how many times I heard about animal by-products in food.  More ominously, in the last year of her life, we heard about the electrical grid eating out brains, and about viruses in buildings.

Karen sang tenor in the church choir.  The first one at rehearsal, she and Marvin walked to the church and came quietly in the kitchen door. When I arrived at about the same time, coming in the front door, Marvin sometimes leaped ecstatically at me in the dark and scared the life out of me.  The ecstasy had to do with my pockets being full of dog biscuits that contained no animal by-products.

One day Karen announced to me that she was joining The OK Chorale.  At the first rehearsal of the quarter she watched people handing me checks and told me that she couldn’t pay that much money.  My plan all along had been to let her come, see if it took, and then think about some kind of reduced fee.  That would have been the better course to take; but Karen wanted to do yard work as an exchange.

 I learned immediately that it did not matter what I needed done or wanted done, Karen was going to do what she wanted in the way that she wanted. Her first job—at her suggestion—was to weed in the front garden.  Eight hours later she was still on the same two square feet of garden, tweezing out little roots one by one while Marvin rolled in the grass to the deep disapproval of my three cats.

 “Karen, you don’t need to take out every little root like that,” I said.

 “Yes, I do.”

 “I’d rather you get more of the bigger weeds all over—“

 “I have to get all these roots out or it won’t work right!”

Then there was the lilac tree that broke off its trunk and fell spectacularly in the yard one June. My neighbor Gwen (Gwen Almighty) who knows something about just about everything chain-sawed the big pieces leaving the slender branches and twigs for the re-cycle bin. After Karen had spent 16 hours on two square feet of the front garden and complained that it was too hot to do any more, I moved her over under the remaining lilacs to deal with the remains of the downed tree.

 It took her three days.

“Karen, you don’t need to break them into such tiny pieces.”

“Yes I do!”

“They just need to be small enough to be crammed into the recycle.” I snapped one about a foot long. “Like this.”

“NO! They have to be smaller than that to fit them all in.”

“I don’t have to recycle them all in the same week.”

“NO! They have to be smaller than that.”  She looked with contempt at my foot long branch. “They need to be like this.” She showed me a toothpick-sized twig.

“Karen, they don’t!”

“Yes, they do!”

In due course, the lilac tree was disposed of.  Karen spent the months of July through October repairing a screen door. I just left her to it. I didn’t even want to know why she needed a planer, a drill, two different kinds of clamps, and three electrical saws.

In the beginning Karen and Marvin showed up at my house four and five times a week, at varying times and unannounced.  It was close to impossible to nail down a day and time with her.  She had no phone, but collected messages left with a neighbor and used his phone to return calls. Gradually I enforced the schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1:00, and that held for a while until it morphed into Tuesdays between 10 and 5 and anytime Thursday maybe, except when she couldn’t come til Friday.  She’d come in the back door while I was teaching, and stomp into my living room like Marley’s ghost, clanking the enormous chain that always attached to her belt.

Last Christmas I noticed that Karen’s affect was more depressed.  I asked her if her meds had been changed.  She said something non-committal.  By January other people were noticing the change in her and the speculation mill turned as she remained non-committal.  Last spring she went into a physical decline that made her appear zombie-like.  She lost 100 pounds, she had difficulty moving her limbs.  She fell down a lot. 

 She gave Marvin away.  I thought she was preparing to suicide, but that was not Karen’s way.  Karen gave Marvin away because she could no longer take him out for his walks and care for him the way she used to.  It was an act of love and it almost broke my heart.

 Karen’s self-diagnosis was that the electricity or alternately the virus in her building was killing her.  It was, in fact, ALS.   A slice of The OK Chorale sang for her in hospice last Saturday: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Pilgrim,” “Amazing Grace,” and a song that begins “when I’m on my journey don’t you weep after me.”  I like to think we sang her out.

Karen haunted me. She was like an animal in the wild, vulnerable and yet fiercely determined to be herself.   She reminded me of me. Her raw vulnerability scared me. She also reminded me of my mother: her gum popping, her cackling laughter, her unreasonable demands, her outbursts of talk that nailed you so you were stuck listening to her ramblings.  She was relentlessly herself.  My mother died six years ago tomorrow.  I’ll keep her and Karen together in my thoughts. 

I remember being vaguely amused by Doctor Faustus when I was in college, but the language was difficult for a 20 year old. Reading about the antics of Faust and Mephistopheles as I plowed through the verbiage was rather like trying earnestly to understand a joke.  I worked at understanding it and had it explained to me until I could finally smile weakly and say I got the punch line.  But I said that mostly to make it all go away.

 This time around, I found the play screamingly funny. Though I am writing about Christopher Marlowe, in my current reading of The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 1 I am in Paradise Lost, which appeals to me not at all.  I don’t have anything (much) against Milton; I wouldn’t have wanted to live with him, or even next door to him.  I want to say that I don’t care for his subject matter but Doctor Faustus has the same main dramatis persona.   The tone couldn’t be more different.

I was alienated from anything like Milton’s deadly serious treatment of the Life and Times of Satan somewhere around my fifth season in an evangelical, fundamentalist Sunday School.  Doctor Faustus would never have flown in the churches of my childhood.  Wait, no I take that back.  He could have made himself invisible, literally flown in the door and brought some actual life into the place.

Doctor Faustus is a scholar at the great medieval university of Wittenberg. He has exhausted his studies in every field he believes important and is struggling with the reality that everyone sins and then everyone dies.  Suddenly Doris Day makes an unexpected appearance and sings “Que Sera, Sera.”  You think I’m kidding. Here’s the text:

Aye, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera;
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!

Faustus decides to look into black magic.  He calls in the magicians and necromancers. He learns enough about the occult to cast a circle and call up the devil.  Mephistophilis appears, does a few shape-shifting tricks for Faustus and the two of them converse.  Mephistophilis tells Faustus that he conspired against God with Lucifer and now is forever damned with Lucifer, all of which would have been more interesting to me when I was kicking my heels against a chair in Sunday School at age ten, brainwashed into a world where Mary was a better person because she hung on Jesus’ every word than Martha who fixed the damn dinner so everyone could eat.

Faustus: Where are you damned?
Meph: In hell
Faustus: How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?
Meph: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Seventy five years and 664 pages later, in Paradise Lost, Milton writes,

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Once at the Enumclaw County Fair, I took on the folks in a booth with a sign that read “Find Out if You’re Going to Hell.”  An evangelical bunch armed with their little pamphlets and scare tactics were, I think, proud of their provocative sign.  I listened to their spiel—briefly—and then told them I had been to hell already and had got out of it in spite of, not because of, Christian doctrine.  There wasn’t a counter response on their clipboards so they were forced to listen—briefly—to my spiel about depressions and psycho-analysis.

But I digress.

Faustus makes a pact with Mephistophilis.  These are his terms:

1) Faustus may be a spirit in form and substance i.e. shall have the ability to be invisible and/or to shape-shift.

2) Mephistophilis shall be his servant, bring to him and do for him whatever he asks

3) After 24 years of this adventure, Lucifer (Satan) can have Faustus.

The fun and games begin. Faustus and Mephistophilis interfere with the Pope who has just captured a German pretender to the papal throne, one Bruno.  Faustus and Mephistophilis put a couple of cardinals to sleep, take on their likenesses, and have a word with the Pope.  The upshot is that while the Pope thinks Bruno is being disposed of, in fact he is being spirited away to safety in Germany.

Faustus and Mephistophilis then become invisible so they can observe the results of their mischief at a dinner where the awakened Cardinals and the Pope try to sort out what happened to Bruno.  Faustus amuses himself by snatching away the Pope’s dinner and wine glass when he’s talking to the Cardinals.

After 24 fun-filled years, Faustus’ time is finally up.  His final request is to have sex with Helen who had:

the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Illium.

Did we all think that was Shakespeare?

As the clock strikes midnight on that final night, and amidst a thunder and lightning storm, the devils enter Faustus’ study and take him away. In the final scene fellow scholars visit Faustus to see how he’s doing after the storm.  Shrieks and screams had been heard coming from his house in the night.  They find his limbs and mangled body lying about the room.  They propose to bury what’s left of the body and to give Faustus a proper funeral. The Chorus steps in with a feeble moral, suggesting it is better to wonder about the occult than to practice it. 

I’m almost 60.  In twenty four years I suspect I am going to be ready to die anyway.  Twenty four years of mischief, especially if it means messing with the Catholic Church, or better yet, with evangelical fundamentalists doesn’t seem like a bad arrangement at all.  I don’t believe in hell other than in the mind itself.  And I’ve been there already.

I’ve been reading The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 1 in stealth because I wasn’t sure I wanted to declare it A Project. But I have gotten passed the metaphysical poets and am rounding the 18th century so I think it’s a done, if not finished, deal. I was completely sucked in by Chaucer. After reading all the selections I listened to a CD of Trevor Eaton, known in England as “the Chaucer man” reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and got to where I could actually follow the story.

After Chaucer I enjoyed Piers Plowman and the scraps of extant Middle English lyrics in the Norton. I’ve tried to interest the OK Chorale in singing “Sumer is ycomen in, Loude sing cuckoo!” several times but it hasn’t taken. Maybe I should leave the y off of ycomen. Not everyone thinks that’s charming.

“The Corpus Christi Carol” is a very strange text put to haunting notes by Benjamin Britten in the last century.  I wanted to work on it once but when I sang it for my then voice teacher, her only comment was “Oh God, no. You don’t need this lully lullay falcon hath borne my make stuff.” Listen to Jeff Buckley sing it with suitable eeriness hear.

I wanted to re-kindle my old, long-time love for Sir Philip Sidney. Alas, the romantic figure of a poet dying at age 32 on the battlefield after offering his water to a comrade was more captivating to me as a 19 year old than it is now at 59. I re-read Apologia for Poetry and was amazed that my ardor for Sidney had once caused me to devour this treatise as though it were love poetry.

I still like Sidney’s sonnets. I had memorized several when I was at Whitman College, and can still recite them with only a few peeks at the text. Just as I have quoted John Donne at the sun all these years (“Busy old fool, unruly sun”), I have often spoken Sidney’s words to the moon:

“With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!”

Another of Sidney’s sonnets begins like this:

“Come sleep! O sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.”

There in my college text is graffiti by the red-headed Kurt making the first line read like this:

“Come sleep with me, Elena. The certain knot of my stomach. . .”

Moving on: I still loathe Thomas More as much as I ever did. I have never been able to enter the world of Edmund Spenser, but I don’t have anything against him personally. I re-read with pleasure the sonnets of Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I and King Lear. I found more sonnets, ones by Michael Drayton, that I had memorized in college.

And finally in a section of anonymous lyrics are the texts of two songs I love. “The Silver Swan” set to music by Orlando Gibbons, I have sung as a solo and I once made the OK Chorale sing it as a choral piece. The objections were by turn that it was too morose and that it didn’t make sense.

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last and sang no more:
“Farewell, all joys; Oh death come close my eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”

“Weep You No More, Sad Fountains,” from John Dowland’s Third Book of Songs or Airs, is another beautiful solo piece. Nina (rhymes with Dinah) and I worked on it together and had many discussions about whether it was about sleep, loss, or death or all three. The music has varying time signatures which gives the sense of someone sobbing while she sings.

Weep you no more, sad fountains;
What need you flow so fast?
Look how the snowy mountains
Heaven’s sun doth gently waste.
But my sun’s heavenly eyes
View not your weeping,
That now lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping

Which brings me to what I thought I would be writing about when I first started this post: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

‘Til next time.

Meanwhile, I am curious what my fellow English majors everywhere liked and memorized from our days on campus.

I wanted to go for a walk to see the jack 0′ lanterns and to join the ghouls in the neighborhood last night but I was tired when I finished teaching. So I dumped the last of the Halloween candy on the last few children who rang my door bell, had a Scotch, and went to bed early. (It’s an age thing.) This morning I rose while it was yet night and got out my All Soul’s, All Saints, and All Days of the Dead stuff. I took down the ghosts, the black cats, and the 15 year old jack o’ lantern taffies that are part of the General Fall Display.

The General Fall Display goes up the first of September. It features a porcelain scarecrow guarding his few pumpkins, and a small bale of hay.  They pose on a carpet of flat dried leaves, which have been collected for years as far back as the 1960s when I was a child in Olympia. Framing the porcelain figures are some ears of Indian corn. Scattered about are acorns, walnuts, bits of lichen, and putka pods.

Come October, I add a black cat candle, a figurine of the guy at the organ with the crow on his shoulder, and the stale jack o’ lantern taffies. When I say the taffies are fifteen years old, my youngest students look at them with reverence.

On November first, today, the Halloween details are extracted and the truly dead people come out: Photos and mementos of my parents, my wonderful Aunt Frances, my first piano teacher, my Cornish cousin who welcomed me into my Cornish family; Meagan, my 14 year old student, and Dennis, the father of my two students, Anna and Julia. This morning I remembered each one in turn. I lit a new candle and sang Schubert’s “Litanei:”Alle Seelen ruhn in Frieden (all souls rest in peace).

In fact I drowned “an eye unused to flow for precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,” a line from one of the Shakespeare sonnets I memorized this summer:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Then can I drown an eye unused to flow
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore be-moaned moan,
Which I now pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

It’s the beginning of winter in the pagan calendar and though it was warm this morning in Seattle, remembering the dead is a winter thing to do. Remembering the dead puts me into a session of sweet silence. I’m not wild about putting up on the Internet photos of people hid in death’s dateless night but here’s a long time feature of my All Soul’s altar:

Statue not in use.

As our Canterbury pilgrims move along the road the friar and the summoner get into a pissing match with each other by telling a story about the other’s profession. Since there seem to be friars and summoners all over the place, I’ll start with a few guidelines: The Pissing Friar and the Pissing Summoner are the pilgrims. The lower case friar and summoner are the ones in the stories. Also, in case you don’t already know: a friar goes out into the world as opposed to a monk who stays in the monastery. (I actually got that from an episode of Inspector Lewis.) A summoner is like a sheriff for the church. Summoners were known to threaten people with made-up offenses and squeeze them for money the church never saw, not that the church deserved it either.

The Pissing Friar tells this tale: a summoner is on his way to extort money from an old woman when he meets a cheerful young man who says he is a bailiff. The two get to chatting about the similarities of their jobs and swear an oath of brotherhood. The summoner becomes quite expansive about himself and his deceptive practices. The young man reveals that he is actually a demon, which the summoner does not apparently take seriously. The two come upon a carter whose cart is stuck in the mud and they hear him say,

“The devel have al, bothe hors and cart and hey.” (The devil have all, both horse and cart, and hay).

The summoner elbows his new friend and asks him why, since he’s a demon nudge nudge, he doesn’t take the carter to hell, but the demon replies,

“It is nat his entente.” (He didn’t mean it; it’s not a real oath.)

When they arrive at the old woman’s house, the summoner in his grandiosity not only fabricates a charge and demands a bribe; he demands her new frying pan to complete an old bribe against a previously fabricated charge of adultery. Here’s her response:

“The devel,” quod she, “so fecche hym er he deye,
And panne and al, but he wol hym repente.
(The devil fetch him, pan and all, unless he takes it back)

The summoner elbows the demon again. But the demon pronounces that the old woman meant exactly what she said. And he swoops the summoner to hell, frying pan and all.

That is The Pissing Friar’s Tale. The Pissing Summoner is incensed. He jumps right into retaliation. In his prologue, instead of introducing himself as many of the other pilgrims do, he enters into hostilities against The Pissing Friar. He tells a joke about a friar who visits hell and doesn’t notice any friars around the place. He asks his angel guide if this is because friars are under such grace that they don’t end up in hell. The angel says not at all, there are millions of friars in hell. He asks Satan to hold up his gigantic tale. Satan obliges.

Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve
Twenty thousand frères in a route,
And thurghout helle swarmeden aboute.
(out of the devil’s ass twenty thousand friars swarmed about throughout hell.

Before The Pissing Friar has time to recover from his hissy fit over the joke, The Pissing Summoner launches right into his tale:

A friar who goes about the countryside preaching and extorting indulgences comes to the house of Thomas, one of his usual victims, and finds him ill and his wife grieving the loss of a two week old baby. The friar—like so many who can’t handle genuine emotion– immediately starts talking about himself. He knows all about the baby’s death because he saw it in a revelation as soon as it happened. Continuing on in this most relevant vein, the grandiose gasbag pontificates about friars being holy because they live in poverty. He drones into a boring sermon about God knows what because I skipped that part. Actually I believe it was about the sin of anger. Whatever it was, I’ve heard it before.

He tells Thomas he is sick because he hasn’t given enough money to the church. Thomas tells the friar that he will give him something if he promises to share it with all the other friars and monks at the “hooly covent.” The holy friar solemnly promises.

Now thane, put in thyn hand doun by my back. . .
and grope wel bihynde.
Benethe my buttok ther shaltow fynde
A thing that I hyd in pryvetee.
(Put your hand down my back and grope behind and beneath my buttocks and you’ll find something I have privately hidden)

Panting in anticipation, the friar cops a feel.

And whan this sike mana felte this frère
Aboute his tuwel grope hthere and here,
Amydde his hand he leet the frère a fart—
Ther nys no capul drawynge in a cart
That might have lete a fart of swich a soun.
(and when the sick man felt the friar groping around his anus, he let a fart into his hand. No cart horse could have let such a resounding fart.)

The friar commits the sin of anger all the way up to the Great House where he complains to the lord of the manor about the way he has been treated. What happens next is,to me, the funniest part of the story because this friar could have exploded into the living room of the house in which I grew up. The lady of the manor/my mother was outraged at Thomas’ treatment of the holy man. But the lord/my father sat reflecting for a long time.

Finally he mused, “How could one fart be divided amongst the other friars in the “hooly covent?” His squire/also my father came up with the solution: Get a cartwheel with twelve spokes. Have twelve friars kneel at the end of each spoke with their noses pulled up and touching the spoke-end. Then have Thomas, fart-ready, squat in the middle of the wheel and let ‘er rip.

That equally the soun of it wol wende,
And eke the stynk, unto the spokes ende. . .
(equally the sound and the stink will go down to the ends of the spokes.)

Chaucer doesn’t indicate who wins the pissing match. But no matter, we never see such interdepartmental squabbling in the church today. All the world loves a good fart, whether the world admits it or not. Especially during a church service.

As I snickered my way through some of The Canterbury Tales I got to wondering why on earth Chaucer isn’t favored reading in every high school English class and college fraternity in the entire world. Of course, I know it’s because one has to dig hard so hard to get through the language, but the Middle English is what makes it all the funnier. It’s like stumbling across salaciousness where you least expect it, say in the King James Bible in the middle of a church service. The Chaucer translators are hopeless. Their prudish word choices and euphemistic footnotes are a study in discomfiture.

Take The Miller’s Tale. Here’s the cast of characters:

John, an old carpenter, wealthy and gullible
Alisoun, his young sexy wife
Nicholas, a poor scholar who boards with John and Alisoun
Absolon, a parish clerk

John is possessive and jealous of his pretty young wife. Alisoun is fun-loving and lusty. Both Nicholas and Absolon are interested in Alisoun but only Nicholas is succeeding with her.

Nicholas hatches a scheme to keep John occupied so he and Alisoun can get into bed with each other. He fakes a trance and reports to John that he’s had a vision of God is sending flood twice as great as Noah’s. John packs three tubs with provisions and fastens them to the roof of the barn. The night before the predicted flood, he, Alisoun and Nicholas climb up into the tubs, the idea being that when the water gets high enough, John will cut them loose and they will float out, safe and dry. But as soon as John starts snoring, Alisoun and Nicholas climb down, run into the house and jump into the master bed. There was a line in Chaucer’s description of Alisoun and Nicholas having sex that made me smile:

“Ther was the revel and melodye.”

In early morning after the revel and the melodye, Absolon comes sauntering along the still dark street. He tries to flirt with Alisoun through the window of the house. To make him go away she says she will let him have one kiss. He puckers up. The translations say that Alisoun put her “backside” or, at best, “naked arse” out the window. But this is what Chaucer says:

And at the windowe out she putte hir hole,
And Absolon, him fil no bet ne wers,
But with his mouth he kiste her naked ers,
Fulk savourly, er he were war of this.
Abak he sterte, and thought it was amis,
For wel he wiste a womman hath no beerd.
He felte a thing al rough and longe yherd.

So Alisoun sticks her “hole” out the window and when Absolon kisses her, he starts back thinking, “a woman doesn’t have a beard.” Yet he had felt something rough and hairy. All the translations and commentaries dance around the obvious: Alisoun sticks her vulva out the window and Absolon kisses it. There now. Was that so hard?

More fun to come: Absolon goes into town and acquires a red-hot iron poker from the blacksmith. Back at the carpenter’s house, he begs for another kiss. Nicholas who had “risen for to pisse,” sticks his butt out the window and “let flee a fart as greet as it hadde been a thonder-dent.” The fart flames out and nearly blinds Absolon who thrusts the poker at Nicholas’ naked arse. Nicholas screams for water, which wakes the carpenter who assumes the flood has come. He cuts the ropes of the three tubs, comes crashing down from the barn and breaks his arm.

The Miller’s Tale ends thus:

Thus swived was the carpenter’s wif (to swive is to have sex with)
For al his keeping and his jalousie,
And Absolon hath kist hir nether yё, (kissed her lower “eye”)
And Nicholas is scalded in the toute:
This tale is doon, and God save al the route!

Don’t you just love it?

I’d heard about this woman: sexually voracious, loud mouth, obscene, headstrong, selfish, power-hungry, and immoral. I was eager to meet her. News flash: she is none of those things in my estimation. Here, word for word, is how we might expect to describe a man similar in nature to the wife of Bath: man of appetites, principled, sophomoric, determined, self-indulgent, autocratic, indiscreet. It sounds a lot more benign.

I think the difficulty that some have with the wife of Bath stems from their inability to see her as a human being. Women are constantly being characterized as something other than human. Men are standard-issue human. When women behave, think, and feel like human beings, a slice of the population is outraged.

Let me digress a minute: I expected to do a whole whine of a post about Chaucer’s middle English, eliciting all the admiration I could for even attempting to read the slightly translated excerpts from The Canterbury Tales in The Norton Antholgy of English Literature Vol 1.  But it turns out it’s not that bad. In fact it’s kind of fun. It takes a while to get used to the odd spellings and strange words but after a while, and when I imagine the spelling to be that of a second grader, it starts to flow.

The wife of Bath is one of a group of pilgrims journeying to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The pilgrims introduce themselves and then they each tell a story. The wife of Bath tells us she has had five husbands, three good and two bad, and she has learned how to make a place for herself within a marriage, or as she puts it: “Diverse scoles maken parfit clerkes” which I take to mean “diverse schools make perfect clergy,” i.e. a wide range of experience makes one knowledgeable and practical.

The wife of Bath enjoys sex and she expects to get it from whomever she’s married to. Within any couple, there’s usually one party who has the greater sexual appetite. When it’s the man, it’s considered normal. When it’s the woman, she’s a nymphomaniac. In the middle ages there was the “marriage debt,” in which the wife owed sex to the man who married her. The wife of Bath turns this around:

Why sholde men elles in hir books sette
That man shal yeeldle to his wife hir debt.
Now wherewith sholde he make his payement
If he ne used his sely instrument. . .

. . . in wifhood wol I use myn instrument
As freely as my Maker hath it sent.

Just to help you out here: hir means his, and sely means innocent, and instrument means penis. Then in the last two lines, the wife refers to using her instrument freely. I love that! News flash from the 13th century: Women are human beings. Women are sexual beings. Women have erections.

The wife continues:

Thou saist we wives wil oure vices hide
Til we be fast, and thane we wol hem shewe.
Wel may that be a proverb of a shrewe!

Shewe is footnoted as villain. The complaint here is that women behave one way (sweet) before marriage and differently (villainous) afterwards. Two things going on here: first of all the same could be said about men. Secondly, of course people behave differently when thrown into close proximity with another person. It’s why so many friendships go sour after friends travel together. The wife points out that while women and men may not be so very different, it is men who write the stories and advance the proverbs.

We love no man that taketh keep or charge
Wher that we goon: we wol been at oure large.

Translation: no one who is being controlled can love .

The wife of Bath’s Prologue is full of such observations, as well as a short history of her five housbandes, and a happy list of words for the female genitalia: quoniam, queint, cueint, chamber of Venus, and my favorite: belle chose.

Here, in brief, is the wife’s tale: a knight rapes a woman, and is sentenced to death. The Queen intervenes and gives him a year’s reprieve to find out what women most desire. If he comes back with the right answer, his life will be spared. He searches for a year and as he is about to return to the Queen without an answer, he meets an ugly, old, “foul” woman who will give him the correct answer if he will promise to marry her. He promises. Back they go to the Queen and the knight announces:

Wommen desire to have sovereinetee
As wel over hir housbande as hir love
And for to been is maistrye him above.

(Women desire to have sovereignty
Over her husband and in love,
And to be master over him.)

Ding! Ding! Ding! That answer was correct. The ugly old woman comes forward to be married but the knight balks. He wasn’t serious about his promise to her, he only wanted his life spared. But he is finally persuaded to marry her and of course, she immediately becomes young and beautiful. And then she turns around and gives back to the knight the “sovereinetee.”

There are many avenues of interpretation emerging from the wife of Bath’s tale. Here’s mine: When the women says she desires sovereignty over her husband and over love, she does not mean what a man might mean if he said the same thing. A predominantly feminine mind works somewhat differently than a predominantly male mind. The feminine paradigm is not about being on top, it’s about being side-by-side. When the wife has mastery over love, nobody is forcibly, stultifyingly on top all the time. People take turns yet come to rest side-by-side in a partnership of equals. This isn’t going to happen unless both parties are recognized as equals, which they are not in a hierarchical paradigm. It was this feminine paradigm that the young/old, beautiful/foul woman gave back to the knight.

I am not suggesting that this was exactly what Chaucer had in mind, or that women in the 14th century thought exactly in those terms. I am suggesting that what I call a feminine paradigm is not something that was dreamed up in the 1960s by Gloria Steinem or by Carl Jung in the early part of the last century. It’s an energy that has always been there, and that has always expressed itself in any way that it can.

And finally I read the “foul” woman turning “beautiful” as a perception within the knight himself. We are all both foul and beautiful. We are all both young and old. (I couldn’t know that for certain while I was merely young, but can, with pleasure, assert it now.) Who we love becomes beautiful to us, and within any relationship, there are only two perceptions that matter.