Peter O'leary - Part 5

And I'm going to, I'm going to finish with one last list. It's a little bit longer, but oh so worth it. Just a little bit more context here. Just so it's not me reading a sort of wildly effusive list. The thing I'm going to read is based on this medieval Latin hymn called the "Benedicite." It's basically, is, it's basically a praise of creation. You know, benedicite kind of means sing praises. And it lists everything, all creation, it says. All you angels of God, sing the praises of God. All you rivers and streams, sing the praises of God. All you snows, all you seasons, everything. Goes through the list and it uses this really beautiful repetition of the word benedicite. And then, and then the word either benedicat or laudate. And again, just sing the praises, say good things about these. And I became really interested in this when I watched a couple of--I guess maybe it was a year ago, a little bit longer ago than that, a year and a half ago--the film "Into Great Silence," by Philip Gröning. He's a German filmmaker, he had five years or so in which he had this kind of exclusive access to this Carthusian monastery in the French Alps. And he just recorded these monks doing there things like gardening and picking up stuff, feeding cats, and praying and they take vows of silence, so the only time they vocalize is when they're praying together, six times a day. And one day a year, or a few days a year, they get to go out and kind of frolic in the fields together, and they talk. And he captured this particular day, and I mention this because it shows up at the end of this part of the poem I'm going to read. These monks, they have this one day when they can go out and, you know, shoot the ***, and what they talked about is, there's this towel that was in front of this door, and it had been moved, and they had this intense theological discussion about that towel. And you know, one of them says, if we change the symbols, we destroy our house. You know, it's like that's their chat, that's their small talk on their day off. There's a version of the Benedicite in the Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican prayer book. I'll just read you the first two lines of it so you get a sense of it. "O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him forever. O ye Angels of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever", so you get a sense of the repetitions. I wanted to figure out how I could bring that into my poem, and how I could do it without relying overly on liturgical language, because liturgical language is vivid in the context of liturgy, and it is static outside of that context, I've found, because I've tried to bring it into poetry, it can't be done. You've got to be in the moment of the liturgy for it to work. So you've got to come up with something else to hold the energy of the liturgical power, and it took me a little bit, a little while, but in consultation with a good friend of mine, I realized I could simply repeat the word "you" as you'll see, and that's going to be the kind of anchor to all of this. And what I wanted to do is take the Benedicite which is maybe 20, 25 lines long or so, but I wanted to include everything that I could into it. The whole, all of creation, the whole history from the big *** up to right now, if possible, and in you know three pages. So that's where we're at. I'm going to have to, I have to lubricate a little here. I feel my voice going. "Make holy, all you Works of God, with praise and exaltation. You Angels of God in you heavens, you magnifiers of all the single quantums of original energy. You primordial billion of years, depthless night shuttered toward transfiguration through. You praise, you magnification, you unbearable creative moment, you consuming sacrificial force. Make holy you galactic internal dynamics, you spew of stars, you luminous intensities. You waters coursing over heaven and you dynamos generating their power, you slow-burning yellow star, you socket of life. You Sun and Moon, you same sized argentine luminaries drifting in the skies, you fungal spores into the sinuses huffed. You wicked lunar eclipse, you dias of cooling lightyears. Make holy this song by blessing, by building up with praises you telescope of time. You notion of creation, you most antique ledge of energy appears toward. You aeonic disdain, you horror Taurus, you flowing forms, you atmospheric womb, you cellular chemistries, you earthly life. You showers and dew, you souls, you tenderly dusted, glimmering mineral energy wound, you little animations of things, you prokaryotic cells, you knitters together, you fashioners of life. Make holy this song by filling your chemical bellies with food from the Sun by binding packets of bright particles sped down to the brooding Earth with data of the life mass. And make holy, you fires, you head, you winters, you hot summers, you dews and dendritic frosts, you icy rinds and you polar colds, and you praisers and exalters, you oxygen saturating Earth's system, you environmental instability, you cosmic burning aspect, you fire-starters, you setters ablaze of things, you oxygen devouring eukaryotic cells, you sweet ***, you meiotic gametic procreant urge, you involuntary erections and you *** daytime. You avid winter ice and you fluffy winter snows, you days and nights passing through them. You light, you gloomy darkness, you bottomed-down sadness, sadder still, you exfulgerations and you clouds, you rapid hapless scattering of electricity. Make holy this song you multicellular forms, you bodies, you polyps, you worms, you insects, you clams, you sponges, you spiders, you leeches, you backbones, you lifeforms. Surging, metabolizing, expiring, you corpses, you spent energy, you unspooling tendrils of mushroom protein, you anuses extruding that vitalizing hash, you necrophagous moonlight fruits, you eaters of your own dead and you living things, you caloric scavengers and you sex scroungers. Make holy this song, you fountains gushing up and you seas and flumes, you rivers flowing, you sad sewage foaming and you amylaceous wastes curdling, you tannic yeasty odors and you passerines migrating through the leaves oxygenating the reek, you hydrodynamic pluvious Des Plaines, you lather at the turbine falls, you guggle twitching spent alongside. Make holy this song you mammals, you new emotional sensations, you intoxicated central nervous system, you flowers displaying and you pollinators, you songbirds and you *** colors and you flesh of fruit, and you mother and baby, sensing the quality of these things and remembering it. You elephantine massive whales and whatever else in the waters moveth, you birds of the sky threading the air with flight, you innovation of flying. You lumbering beasts of the land, you cattle sweet as grass, and you handsome cougars slain in the neighborhood. Bracket that--last year, this cougar showed up in Chicago and everybody freaked out and it got cornered by the cops and it was slain and they showed pictures of it in the newspaper the next day and it was the most gorgeous animal. it was like a three hundred pound cougar that just came into Chicago following the river. Got into the neighborhoods, that's just amazing. Of course, you know, they had to kill it. I think it was probably too crazy otherwise, but it seems like they could have tried to capture it. I don't know. "You handsome cougars slain in the neighborhood." I wanted to get him in the poem. "And you little housecat sphinxes perplexing the sun, you peoples, you daughters and you sons. Make holy this song, you quadripedal hand freed from the task of walking, you eye seeing at flecks, you sweet liquor of rain, you sweet liquor of light and rain falling down, you mind imagining this, you sweet interiors, by magnifying the moment, by corroding the pathways that internal vision follows, by decaying the mind towards morbid presciences imagination fecundates. Make holy this song, you trillions of neurons keeping the creature, you stellar vistas of cells, you epiphenominal loop, you initial leap from action to reflection, from pathway to memory, you self-thought, you slot of distinction, you crashed acid and phosphorescent flare, you infancy, you chance to learn, you curious *** forms, you *** thumb of love and you threster holding me tight, you pressure in the uterine clutch, you glare of the rich palpation, you proposition of ***, you orchid boat and you winged serpent, you sweet sleepiness, you relaxed body, you nations of the world, you language coming in, and you priests serving God, you spirits, you souls, you depths, you justice, you holiness, you humble heart. Make holy this song you eccentrations of life, you leutrescent syrup in the veins, you autocthonimous animal forms shifting nematic imaginal shape, by numerously erupting with fire, by impulsively giving birth, by catastrophically sanctifying the metaphors. By interpenetrating the *** cluster, by singing out love's ancient evidence, by haplessly magnifying the glassy melancholic interiors, by warding us with charms, by stiching us alphabetic talismans from strands of DNA, by forming tissues from moonspores and rubber, by leading us on, by thinking, by praising and exalting the Lord forever. If you abolish the symbols, then you tear down the walls of your own house. You should unfold the core of the symbols, we are the questions, so praise, Ananias, Azarius, Misael, bless the Lord, praise and exalt him forever." Thank you very much.