WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
“In the Bleak Midwinter Long Ago” The world is too much with us and so…
byVanderleunonDecember 18, 2021
And so… … Pause… … and begin again.
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom Cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and Archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air;
But only His Mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am? —
If I were a Shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part, —
Yet what I can I give Him, —
Give my heart.
One of the things I miss, after many years of non regular attendance of church services, is the power and beauty of congregational singing. Lovely.
JackDecember 19, 2021, 7:39 AM
I feel the same John. I attended all of the time when my daughters were young but my attendance began to fall off when my younger daughter left her home for college and then my attendance began to trickl out altogether. But I loved my home church in Tulsa and I’ll watch the service this morning, a little later. When I woke this morning the first thing I sensed, through the haze of waking and half sleep, was musical memory of “In The Deep Midwinter. I love James Taylor’s version of it.
3 Pipe ProblemDecember 20, 2021, 7:25 AM
Give Annie Lennox’s version a listen. In fact, her “Christmas Cornucopia” is one great carol after the other. Not a secular ditty in there. Not bad for professed agnostic.
JacksDecember 20, 2021, 1:18 PM
Thanks for the suggestion. I will do that.
grace clarkDecember 20, 2019, 7:36 AM
Oh, thank you. So beautiful!!
DennyDecember 21, 2019, 8:14 AM
“Give my heart”
I gave my heart in the year 1975. I was one of the first boomers, 30 years old, with a young family. It was impossible for me not to. Some Christians call it “Irresistible Grace”. The only regrets or misgivings I’ve ever suffered were why, in this obviously disgusting and deathly world, did I not do it sooner.
KurtDecember 19, 2020, 4:43 AM
The Great Gift, over 2000 years old and still new every year! In darkness, Light, in despair, Hope, in turmoil, Peace! And best of all, His Amazing Love, carried to us in the arms of a tiny babe, wrapped in rags and lying in a manger. Oh wonder of Christmas!
Beautiful old hymn. Merry Christmas all, it’s been a very strange and unendearing year.
(I may have just made up a new word).
Speaking of new words, I’ll recommend The Professor and The Mad Man with Mel Gibson and Sean Penn as a must see. Penn is out of his mind socially and politically but that guy is a fine actor.
gwbnycDecember 19, 2021, 7:53 AM
“unendearing…
(I may have just made up a new word)”
-for the nonce. it’s our language’s way.
Eric BlairDecember 19, 2020, 2:17 PM
fave Christmas hymn, and second greatest hymn in Christendom
I humbly propose Amazing Grace as the titleholder
Casey KlahnDecember 19, 2020, 6:43 PM
A favorite high church hymn; Merry Christmas to all.
Thank you, Gerard, as usual, you do not disappoint.
@Jack Thanks for the recommendation. I watched the trailer and was torn, cus the book is a favorite and I was loath to watch lest the story be “woke” up.
Casey KlahnDecember 20, 2020, 1:02 PM
THX, GvD.
Bill JonesDecember 20, 2020, 5:14 PM
For me the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Kings College Cambridge was always the start of Christmas. In pre-interwebs years I forgave the BBC a lot for that broadcast (except for the institutionalized Pederasty).
I grew up singing in a choir just like this one.It save my life–my soul. This video is very old–sometime from the 1970’s I think. But it is a true reflection of who we were. I am so alone.
VanderleunDecember 20, 2020, 10:04 PM
YOu are not alone Anne. Never.
AnonymousDecember 21, 2020, 7:08 AM
Cradle Catholic who found himself faithless at ten years of age, five years later took an interest in Zen and ended up staying with it for now nearly sixty years, but never lost his love for the artistic joys and triumphs spawned by the Faith that made the West. The Christmas experience is emotionally and transcendentally inspiring and I’d sooner perish than see it denied to my grandchildren. The secular materialists can go pound sand on this one, and while they’re at it, can keep Kwanza and Hanukah among their own and stay out of the societal celebrations cherished by their hosts. Anyone who doesn’t derive pleasure and a sense of the transcendent from a carol such as this is depriving oneself of exaltation in a time when such is desperately needed.
gwbnycDecember 18, 2021, 9:20 PM
It brings thanks and peace.
The first year or so, years ago, on my newly corrected course I worked for an outfit that made and installed glass and sculpture for houses of worship, cemeteries, etc. Alone in a Catholic church standing on scaffold I was removing old dried cement from a bricked window opening using a cold chisel and a drilling hammer. Holding the chisel loosely in a gloved hand on a knot of mortar it rang clearly when struck. I immediately took note of it, stopped, and imagined another man engaged in the same act years prior, noting the same. Another hymn.
Yes, “another hymn”. And another. And another. Until the end of time. Peace be with you.
gwbnycDecember 19, 2021, 7:55 AM
-and you, as well.
RichardDecember 19, 2021, 9:04 AM
As I’ve grown older, this sacred carol has steadily moved up my personal favorites list. The following and Silent Night go back and forth for Number 1.
Though I’ve not heard a cover of this song that I have not liked, this guy really nails it. https://tinyurl.com/5xrjudup
Good Christians all,
My friend Joe Sherlock, a cradle Catholic, lifelong conservative and proprietor of The View Through The Windshield (https://www.joesherlock.com/blog.html), has had a serious heart attack. Surgery was stopped because his other organs were affected, and he has elected palliative and hospice care.
Prayers for Joe and his family, please. He’s one of the good guys.
Prayers coming Joe’s way, and to his family. Please keep us informed.
ZaphodDecember 20, 2021, 3:16 AM
Thank you Gerard. Seeing this come around every year at this time is wonderful.
I can clearly remember when I first saw and heard this video. It was Christmas 2009 and I was freezing my posterior off alone in a newly moved into apartment in Macau. Where does Time go?
3 Pipe ProblemDecember 20, 2021, 7:25 AM
Give Annie Lennox’s version a listen. In fact, her “Christmas Cornucopia” is one great carol after the other. Not a secular ditty in there. Not bad for professed agnostic.
BillDecember 20, 2021, 10:31 AM
You posted this many years ago when I was traveling and saw it. It had a profound effect and I sent a comment at that time. It brought out all the loneliness I was feeling and it still moves me after several years of retirement. Of all the Christmas songs, it is the one I treasure the most.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
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.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
![Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ginsbergnirvana-150x150.jpg "Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]")
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
One of the things I miss, after many years of non regular attendance of church services, is the power and beauty of congregational singing. Lovely.
I feel the same John. I attended all of the time when my daughters were young but my attendance began to fall off when my younger daughter left her home for college and then my attendance began to trickl out altogether. But I loved my home church in Tulsa and I’ll watch the service this morning, a little later. When I woke this morning the first thing I sensed, through the haze of waking and half sleep, was musical memory of “In The Deep Midwinter. I love James Taylor’s version of it.
Give Annie Lennox’s version a listen. In fact, her “Christmas Cornucopia” is one great carol after the other. Not a secular ditty in there. Not bad for professed agnostic.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will do that.
Oh, thank you. So beautiful!!
“Give my heart”
I gave my heart in the year 1975. I was one of the first boomers, 30 years old, with a young family. It was impossible for me not to. Some Christians call it “Irresistible Grace”. The only regrets or misgivings I’ve ever suffered were why, in this obviously disgusting and deathly world, did I not do it sooner.
The Great Gift, over 2000 years old and still new every year! In darkness, Light, in despair, Hope, in turmoil, Peace! And best of all, His Amazing Love, carried to us in the arms of a tiny babe, wrapped in rags and lying in a manger. Oh wonder of Christmas!
Probably one of the prettiest hymn ever written.
Beautiful old hymn. Merry Christmas all, it’s been a very strange and unendearing year.
(I may have just made up a new word).
Speaking of new words, I’ll recommend The Professor and The Mad Man with Mel Gibson and Sean Penn as a must see. Penn is out of his mind socially and politically but that guy is a fine actor.
“unendearing…
(I may have just made up a new word)”
-for the nonce. it’s our language’s way.
fave Christmas hymn, and second greatest hymn in Christendom
I humbly propose Amazing Grace as the titleholder
A favorite high church hymn; Merry Christmas to all.
I don’t know if this link will go through, but I have updated that painting of model Mallory:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/110408628354944162/
Kind thanks, Gerard.
Thank you, Gerard, as usual, you do not disappoint.
@Jack Thanks for the recommendation. I watched the trailer and was torn, cus the book is a favorite and I was loath to watch lest the story be “woke” up.
THX, GvD.
For me the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Kings College Cambridge was always the start of Christmas. In pre-interwebs years I forgave the BBC a lot for that broadcast (except for the institutionalized Pederasty).
It sums up the greatest civilization that ever existed and is being destroyed around us: Its buildings, music, core beliefs.
https://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/chapel/a-festival-of-nine-lessons-and-carols
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005ftyb
I grew up singing in a choir just like this one.It save my life–my soul. This video is very old–sometime from the 1970’s I think. But it is a true reflection of who we were. I am so alone.
YOu are not alone Anne. Never.
Cradle Catholic who found himself faithless at ten years of age, five years later took an interest in Zen and ended up staying with it for now nearly sixty years, but never lost his love for the artistic joys and triumphs spawned by the Faith that made the West. The Christmas experience is emotionally and transcendentally inspiring and I’d sooner perish than see it denied to my grandchildren. The secular materialists can go pound sand on this one, and while they’re at it, can keep Kwanza and Hanukah among their own and stay out of the societal celebrations cherished by their hosts. Anyone who doesn’t derive pleasure and a sense of the transcendent from a carol such as this is depriving oneself of exaltation in a time when such is desperately needed.
It brings thanks and peace.
The first year or so, years ago, on my newly corrected course I worked for an outfit that made and installed glass and sculpture for houses of worship, cemeteries, etc. Alone in a Catholic church standing on scaffold I was removing old dried cement from a bricked window opening using a cold chisel and a drilling hammer. Holding the chisel loosely in a gloved hand on a knot of mortar it rang clearly when struck. I immediately took note of it, stopped, and imagined another man engaged in the same act years prior, noting the same. Another hymn.
Yes, “another hymn”. And another. And another. Until the end of time. Peace be with you.
-and you, as well.
As I’ve grown older, this sacred carol has steadily moved up my personal favorites list. The following and Silent Night go back and forth for Number 1.
Though I’ve not heard a cover of this song that I have not liked, this guy really nails it.
https://tinyurl.com/5xrjudup
Beautiful.
Good Christians all,
My friend Joe Sherlock, a cradle Catholic, lifelong conservative and proprietor of The View Through The Windshield (https://www.joesherlock.com/blog.html), has had a serious heart attack. Surgery was stopped because his other organs were affected, and he has elected palliative and hospice care.
Prayers for Joe and his family, please. He’s one of the good guys.
Prayers coming Joe’s way, and to his family. Please keep us informed.
Thank you Gerard. Seeing this come around every year at this time is wonderful.
I can clearly remember when I first saw and heard this video. It was Christmas 2009 and I was freezing my posterior off alone in a newly moved into apartment in Macau. Where does Time go?
Give Annie Lennox’s version a listen. In fact, her “Christmas Cornucopia” is one great carol after the other. Not a secular ditty in there. Not bad for professed agnostic.
You posted this many years ago when I was traveling and saw it. It had a profound effect and I sent a comment at that time. It brought out all the loneliness I was feeling and it still moves me after several years of retirement. Of all the Christmas songs, it is the one I treasure the most.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Peace
Bill