Cruel and Buoyant

It's that time again. Call it the vertical rise of Easter or the horizontal trek out of bondage called Passover. For me it's Home Alone. I wouldn't know how to paint an egg or how to behave at a Seder table. Dare I say I would squirm given the Israeli oppression of Palestinians? Liberation cuts both ways. 

I contend the real holiday in April is National Poetry Month. Both the Jesus and Exodus stories are fables which some of us pretend to take literally. It's not a bad thing to worship what were once poems, metaphors for the emergent spring with a sax in the foxglove and trumpet in the daffodil. Any reason to be buoyant is good enough for me.

Buoyancy may be wrong word since T.S. Eliot tagged April as the cruelest month in the opening line of The Wasteland. How did he know? I suppose human folly can always be counted upon. Cruel indeed as the shock of awakening brings us unfulfilled expectations. Referencing that crime against humanity we call World War I, April was the month when military action began again wasting a generation of young men.

Perhaps it was Eliot's rejection of all myths, pagan and pious, surrounding spring. Could it be he is saying we are on our own in this pilgrimage? What appears to be calm and joyful with certitude gives way to ignorant armies clashing in the night (Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach).

On the other hand (there's always another hand) what can hurt by conjuring the season's burst of renewal celebrating its razzle-dazzle? We might follow Emily Dickinson down a lane of yellow leading the eye / into a purple wood / whose soft inhabitants to be / surpass solitude.

If happiness is fleeting it becomes our purpose in life to catch it. Jane Kenyon put it this way: Happiness is the uncle you never knew about / who flies the single engine plane / onto a grassy landing strip, hitchhikes / into town and inquires at every door / then finds you asleep in mid-afternoon / as you do so in the unmerciful / hours of your despair.

Leave it to Robert Frost to remind us how the sun lets go / ten million silver lizards out of snow...But if I thought to stop the wet stampede / and caught one single lizard by the tail.../ I have no doubt I'd end by holding none. The second stanza brings in how the wizard moon turns the swarm to rock and holds them all until day, / one lizard at the end of every ray. / The thought of me attempting such a stay.

Both Eliot and Frost allow the shadow side. Whatever stay he hears among its fractured and uncertain world would be a momentary one. But moments strung together are all we have. If April is cruel so is all emergent life. It is and it isn't. We can all be poets alert to layers of meaning inherent in everything. All light is available light.

As for Testaments one and two I regard them as enduring poems, nothing less. The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz put it this way: There is no evidence to suggest Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt in large numbers. They most certainly did not build the pyramids. When they arrived in the Promised land they, too, enslaved the Canaanites. It was the custom of the day. 

Jesus and Moses went up the hill to fetch the Word. Too bad the eleventh commandment wasn't: It's OK to eat shellfish but not OK to hold slaves.

As a footnote to the above, last night I watched a a most poignant and artful movie, Mr. Harvey Lights a Candle, on Amazon. I regard my immersion into this film as my own religious experience. I would even call it poetic. Rather than a tall tale meant for one tribe to cohere while vilifying the other here was a story striking a universal chord.