Arcadia Est Imperare Orbi Universo

Dear and faithful reader,

About fourteen years ago, my friend chordam7 and I wrote the libretto to a Jazz-age ragtime Cthulhian opera.

Well, mostly I wrote the libretto and mostly he worked on the music. But only mostly. It was a collaboration.

It was, sadly, a collaboration that we never really finished. The libretto is complete. The introductory material is sort of half-done, the musical themes and tunes are about two-thirds done, and the orchestration... well, the less said about the orchestration, the better.

We had talked over the years about kickstarting the orchestration, with a CD as the end result, but we agreed that more of the music needed to be finished first.

And then, as with so many things, life got in the way.

We had lunch today and decided that we needed to publish the libretto, with perhaps some of the existing music and orchestration as illustrative or supplemental material. It's just dumb that we're sitting on this.

So, there we are.

Feast of Saint Theresa of Avila
Seattle

Dearest reader,

During my morning commute, I usually do the crossword puzzle in the venerable Tacoma News Tribune. It's usually enough to wake my brain, though they are not so difficult that I can't use a pen to fill them in.

This morning, one of the clues was "Ragamuffin". This immediately put a silly children's counting rhyme into my head:

Ragamuffin, ragamuffin
Hovel for a nest
Tell us now
Who is the best.

It's the sort of thing children use to determine sides or captains for ad hoc ball games and the like.

Except that I don't know whether it actually exists or I made it up.

Has anyone heard of this before?

The experience was made slightly more surreal when the words "hovel" and "nest" proved to be answers in the puzzle - answers I hadn't yet filled in when the rhyme occurred to me.

In other news, today is the feast of Saint Theresa of Avila, one of the great Doctors of the Church. In college I was once called upon to write three essays about her, one from a Marxist perspective, one from a Freudian perspective, and one from a Kierkegaardian perspective.

Needless to say, the sum of the essays was no where near the total of her life and work. I think the Kierkegaard one was the most ridiculous of all. I wrote it without notes from the top of my drunken head on an electric typewriter the night before it was due.

It was my best grade in the class.

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

("Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats)

There is an ineffable sadness to this day for me. By artillery and force of arms, the Sultan ended the ancient Empire and the life of its last Emperor. Sic transit gloria mundi.

...and somehow, this seemed appropriate.

The Englishman

Saint George he was for England.
And before he killed the dragon
He drank a pint of English ale
Out of an English flagon.
For though he fast right readily
In hair-shirt or in mail.
It isn't safe to give him cakes
Unless you give him ale.

Saint George he was for England,
And right gallantly set free
The lady left for dragon's meat
And tied up to a tree;
But since he stood for England
And knew what England means,
Unless you give him bacon
You mustn't give him beans.

Saint George he is for England,
And shall wear the shield he wore
When we go out in armour
With the battle-cross before.
But though he is jolly company
And very pleased to dine,
It isn't safe to give him nuts
Unless you give him wine.

(G.K. Chesterton)