Hymns

The hymns that were sung at my Grandma's funeral were so beautiful and moving to me. I don't know why entirely, but I know that part of it is because they make me think of her, and the way she used to hum them as she busied about the kitchen. I guess they make me homesick for an irrecoverable simpler time in my life--my lost innocence perhaps. I also think of all the other people I've known who I sang those hymns with who are also gone now. And of course there is a beauty in the simplicity of their melody and harmony, and the sincerity of the untrained voices that sang them. It is amateurism in its purest form--singing just for the love of it. I still frequently play them on the piano, out of the 1959 edition of "Old and New." They're still among my favorite music.

There is an old joke about Unitarian Universalists (a religious community of mine) about why we're such bad singers--we're always reading ahead to see if we agree with the words! Well I confess it is not the words so much that speak to me in these hymns. Some do: "Live for others everyday", "Break thy bread with hand unsparing", "There's a wideness in God's mercy", "A corn of wheat to multiply must fall into the ground and die", etc. But these hymns speak in ways far beyond words. I think it might have been my high school choir director who advised us, concerning the religious language in a piece of music we performed, that she wasn't asking us to sign it, just to sing it! There's a deep truth to that, as I found in this essay by D.H. Lawrence that resonates with me.

Hymns in a Man's Life
by
David Herbert Lawrence
1928

Nothing is more difficult than to determine what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and teaching. This fact is brought home to me by the hymns which I learned as a child, and never forgot. They mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.

It is almost shameful to confess that the poems which have meant the most to me, like Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality and Keats's Odes, and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night's Dream, and Goethe's lyrics, such as Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, and Verlaine's Aynte poussela porte qui clancelle -- all these lovely poems which after all give the ultimate shape to one's life; all these lovely poems woven deep into a man's consciousness, are still not woven so deep in me as the rather banal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through my childhood.

Each gentle dove
And sighing bough
That makes the eve
So fair to me
Has something far
Diviner now
To draw me back
To Galilee.
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Where Jesus loved so much to be,
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Come sing thy song again to me!

To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don't want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child's half-formed imagination. And in my man's imagination it is just the same. It has been left untouched. With regard to the hymns that had such a profound influence on my childish consciousness, there has been no crystallising out, no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into commonplace. They are the same to my Man's experience as they were to me nearly forty years ago. When all comes to all, the most precious element of life is wonder.

Even the real scientist works in the sense of wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of the laboratory he puts aside his wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it perfectly didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion. Both are wonderless and productive of boredom, endless boredom.

Now we come back to the hymns. They live and glisten in the depths of the man's consciousness in undimmed wonder, because they have not been subjected to any criticism or analysis. By the time I was sixteen I had criticised and got over the Christian dogma.

It was quite easy for me; my immediate forbears had already done it for me. Salvation, heaven, Virgin birth, miracles, even the Christian dogma of right and wrong - one soon got them adjusted. I never could really worry about them. Heaven is one of the instinctive dreams. Right and wrong is something you can't dogmatise about; it's not so easy. As for my soul, I simply don't and never did understand how I could "save" it. One can save one's pennies. But how can one save one's soul? One can only live one's soul. The business is to live really alive. And this needs wonder.

I have some differences with Mr. Lawrence, though. First I'd love to go to the Lake of Galilee and see those places mentioned in the Bible where Jesus lived and taught. I hope some day I will. (I also would love to go to Crocknacrieve, Ireland to stand on that ground where the first Conventions were held.) Also, my arrival at a critical approach to Christian dogma was about 10 years later than his, and not so easily adjusted to. But his description of his pre-critical naivety and his post-critical naivety that the hymns he loved connected is a bullseye for how I feel.

I also got kind of a thrill because I knew those prayers we sang before meals. Here is my favorite one of all. I was tempted to just start it myself at the picnic after the funeral, and I kind of wish I had:

To Thee who doth the ravens feed
And lilies clothe with beauteous dress.
For rich supply of all our needs
We raise our song of thankfulness.

I am so grateful for Grandma and the many gifts she gave me. Those hymns are among the most dear.

A Broken Relic

The picture to right is a work of art I participated in at Unitarian Universalists of Sterling. (Click this link for background information.) I say "participated", because it was a collaborative, experiential artwork.

This project took a a lot of effort and I tried diligently to make this work. I synchronized my watch every few weeks with www.time.gov, perturbed many a speaker by putting up the mark on sunny Sundays at precisely the same time of day. Nevertheless I did not control all the variables. My guess is that the mirror moved though I don't know exactly why. I intended to put some hot glue on the hinge when it was installed, but it didn't get done. But though the analemma didn't close the way I intended, it is not because of some earth-moving cause. It would have been nice to for this project to go exactly as planned. What a tight, clean demonstration that would have been. But perhaps it is better that it did not. Maybe there's a deeper lesson here than I imagined.

I admit that I feel a certain disappointment, frustration, even shame in the fact that this project did not work out as well as I'd have liked. I have never failed so publicly before. I am accustomed to revealing my work after I have had a chance to edit and revise it. But this project put the creative process itself on public display.

I think there is a theological lesson in this. As it is human nature to do, anything that is sufficiently complicated or unpredictable tends to be attributed to a will or consciousness. We still do it all the time--with our pets, our cars, other people, even ourselves! When the object is the universe itself, we refer to this persona as God. This is not the only way to conceive of God, but it is a common one.

Before Newton's incredibly simple mechanistic description, the motion of the planets had been viewed as capricious and unpredictable. So this newly discovered rational order radically changed the nature of God's involvement with the universe in the minds of Enlightenment philosophers. God was perceived as a purely rational being that conceived of a perfect universe, created it ex nihilo, and set it in motion. This God is the ultimate planner and controller. This viewpoint was also heavily influenced by Renee Descartes, who's famous dictum is "I think therefore I am." Newton's discoveries allowed Enlightenment thinkers to be tempted to buy fully into Descartes' point of view. The ideal human being and by projection God was conceived as a rational agent in control of its fate. But we are not what we like to imagine we are, just ask Darwin or Freud. While Darwin's view of human origins had a reassuring mechanistic aspect to it, there was a disturbing element of chance involved. The adaptations that nature selects for arise from random mutations--the vast bulk of which are detrimental--and not from a cognitive process of rational intention. And Freud showed us that the rational persona we project to the world is really a fabrication, and that the bulk of our personalities are rooted in irrational processes we are not even fully conscious of.

Ultimately creativity is mostly an irrational process arising precisely from the making of mistakes, sorting through those mistakes, and finding something of beauty. That beauty is then refined and presented as if it had occurred all by itself. Consider the process of evolution. All species arise in response to conditions that are geologically momentary. The vast majority of all species that have ever existed are extinct, and it is the fate of all. As I described in the previous post, the process of scientific discovery is itself unscientific. Darwin and Freud left us a description of nature that implies a God that takes risks and mostly makes mistakes, and is only dimly aware of what it is even doing. A very different picture than the Enlightenment God.

Mistakes are a part of life, and admitting mistakes as soon as they come to awareness is a good practice. For one thing, it mitigates the consequences of the mistake itself and doesn't compound it with the further mistake of deception or disregard. But also it allows one to live in the truth. I guess I never could have failed this spectacularly unless I had attempted to do something bold. And there is a lot to be said for bold action. Of course it can be reckless and one should always "look before leaping". But one can also remain always looking and never leaping. That is itself a big mistake.

Finally, I feel like I have to fix this. I know the dates for all the marks, and I can calculate where the marks "should" be for those dates after the mirror slipped. I can re-aim the mirror, and fix it in place better this time. I think I will use a different color of metal for these "artificial" marks--maybe brass. Some people--I know they're trying to be nice--have said that they love the analemma the way it is. Well, first it isn't an analemma the way it is. And second, it is a marred work of art. It is a bit offensive for someone to say that they prefer you artwork after it's been marred. It says they didn't really appreciate its original concept very much. But I gueess as a gesture of goodwill, I will leave the "errant" marks up. When/if I get it done, I'll post another picture.