Sunday Sundries

6/11/2023

Discomfited by the classics

It was that kind of place — with those kinds of people — People I like to deny are a part of we

Handel's Messiah
Con/Jur/d, in response to the question 
“Does anyone else hear the hallelujah chorus 
from Handle's Messiah reverberating throughout 
the universe?” -- Indar

I needed to refamiliarize myself with the text, he sd
having given up on Jesus & John & Peter & the betrayer
Paul, during the period of time we sometimes refer to
as The New Age Judas Complex, preferring the company
of Marys and their sisters Lilith and Sophia and it stirred
in us, the same  as it stirred before, the flight of a lost bird
zig-zagging in from the long dark winter, through the flap
of the Norman longhouse, through the smoke, the wail
of babies, the grunts of child invocations, the sharpening
of steel, the fletching of arrows, which in this version
of the vision, makes a soft zip-zip, blood and candles 
of fat on altars, the sack from which the blood was letted
frying, filling the tent with smells of sizzling and in leaner times
barley gruel or even bark casting a scent of resin across 
wet wool funk, past the rattling of the sick and the dead 
and finally, escaping into the warmth and light of 
an early spring day

This is how (we are told) the Vikings became Christians
with exculpatory  revelations that this your temporary
home this drama, this world is yours but what bird
sees outside is the business of God

Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah!

It still makes me uneasy, he sd
look how the Bible Belters tend to abuse their children
trying to recapitulate their submission to grace, the same
way they were wounded, being the way they wound
hoping their children will be saved in the same way
they were saved -- how sweet the relief from original
sin that amazing grace the abandonment of yourself
to forever and ever and ever -- and there’s nothing
wrong with that he sd yet I suspect they’re doing
the wounding to all of us

Sacrificing us all in particular ways, mechanically
perpetrating certain sufferings, certain passions
whose only possible outcome is as Leonard Cohen 
sd, " a cold and broken Hallelujah," while we prefer 
Ode to Joy, he sd stripped of the burden of 
Joyce’s nightmare history a vibration
not of exogenous saviors, but of a
a endogenous joy belonging 
to all critters regardless of 
what percent of good or 
evil to which
we adhere

"All creatures drink of joy
At nature's breast.
Just and unjust
Alike taste of her gift;"

The question, he sd, is 
do you hear Handel’s Messiah
reverberating throughout
the universe?

And yes we answer

As Molly Bloom quipped, "YES, YES, YES"

but what, he sd 
does it portend?

I tear up every time I hear Ode to Joy

Much love,

Con/Jur/d, 6/11/2023