Caught by Surprise

[Image: a key (and classic) moment in Fritz Lang’s 1931 thriller, M: the murderer, played by Peter Lorre, learns he’s a (literally) marked man.]

From whiskey river:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

(Milan Kundera [source])

…and:

When It Comes

Any time. Now. The next minute.
Years from today. You lean forward
and wait. You relax, but you don’t forget.

Someone plans an elaborate party
with a banquet, dancing, even fireworks
when feasting is over. You look at them:

All those years when you searched the world
like a ferret, these never happened — your marriage,
your family, prayers, curses. Only dreams.

A vacuum has opened everywhere. Cities,
armies, those chairs ranked in the great
hall for the audience — there isn’t anyone.

Like a shutter the sky opens and closes
and the show is over. The next act
will deny that anything ever happened.

Your hand falls open. It is empty. It never
held a knife, a flower, gold,
or love, or now. Lean closer—

Listen to me: there isn’t any hand.

(William Stafford [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Picking Up

During the depression
my mother, teetotaler,
but thrifty to a fault,
surprised my father and me
when she cobbled up a still,
kept it on a shelf behind the kitchen stove,
and salvaged a crate of too-ripe pears
by making brandy, pouring it into Mason jars,
and storing them on the cellar stairs.

When my father found a better job at last,
and movers came one day to move our stuff,
“A shame to have this go to waste,” we heard my mother say,
offering them the brandy, which they polished off.
They soon grew happy at their work,
hanging a chamber pot and her Sunday dress
on outside panels of their battered truck
and speeding off into the dusk
before she could protest.

We closed the house, cranked the Model-A, and started out,
following over stony mountain ruts,
but soon were stopping now and then
when headlights showed familiar shapes
lying in the road or ditch: first
the chamber pot and dress; next,
a chair, a bucket, and a box of sheets.
But drunk with hope, we praised our luck,
sang “Bringing in the Sheaves”
as we collected what the truck had dropped.

(Evelyn Duncan [source])

…and:

(Jack Gilbert [source])

…and:

I sat in the plane on the long flight to Beijing trying to unravel my habits, to unthink as it were, and feeling slightly twitchy about it.

I started buying copious quantities of aftershave. Each time the duty-free trolley came around, I bought a bottle. I had never done anything like it before in my life. My normal, instinctive reaction had always been just to shake my head and carry on reading my magazine. This time I thought it would be more Zen-like to say, “Yes, all right. What have you got?” I was not the only person I caught by surprise.

“Have you gone completely mad?” Mark asked me as I slipped a sixth different bottle into my hand baggage.

“I’m trying to challenge and subvert my own fundamental assumptions as to what constitutes rationally constructed behaviour.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“I mean I’m just trying to loosen up a bit,” I said. “An airplane doesn’t give you much scope for arbitrary and alternative types of behaviour, so I’m just making the most of the opportunities that are offered.”

“I see.”

Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat and frowned deeply into his book.

“What are you going to do with all that stuff?” he asked a while later over an airline meal.

“Dunno,” I said. “It’s a problem, isn’t it?”

“Tell me, are you feeling nervous bout something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“China.”

(Douglas Adams [source])

When I first heard the song below, without the lyrics before me, I thought: How lovely. (Emmylou Harris leads the vocal; Linda Ronstadt contributes the harmony.) Then I learned the title, and finally looked up the lyrics…

Lovely still , it now also breaks my heart. World War I tends to get short shrift in American memory: it wasn’t “our” war, and we were involved in it for only a couple of years. But ye gods, what an ugly, stupid, brutal conflict, and the cost in lives lost in direct battle is almost unimaginable. (The first day of the Battle of the Somme was the worst in British history — over 57,000 casualties, most of them in the first hour.)

[Lyrics]

I’ve been waiting for months to use the song (written by David Olney) in a post, to lead into the (in the US) three-day Memorial Day weekend. The gentle tune and ostensible subject may romanticize the war, and prostitution for that matter. But the powerful contrast between its narrative, and the larger one outside the brothel’s walls — which you can practically feel poking (with a gray, bony finger) at the indoor scene  — overwhelms me. Whatever else you can say about war — beyond all the Sousa marches, the defense industry, nationalism and outright jingoism, shouting antiwar protesters, Medals of Honor, drones and smart bombs, shock and awe, Audie Murphy and John Wayne, us versus them — that’s what it inevitably boils down to: uncounted hearts breaking for something irretrievably lost. I believe it’s the reason most returning veterans seldom speak of what they saw.

By the way, I got the lyrics as they appear at that link from a Linda Ronstadt fan site. They omit a coda sung at the end; the Latin text (says Wikipedia) is adapted from the Catholic requiem mass:

Lux aeterna luceat eis,
Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,
Quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
Quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
Quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
Cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,
Quia pius es.

These are also the lyrics to a 1966 classical work by György Ligeti, “Lux Aeterna.” The translation of the first four lines (repeated in various ways throughout the remainder) goes:

May everlasting light shine upon them,
O Lord, with thy saints in eternity,
for thou art merciful.
Grant them eternal rest, O Lord…

“Contemporary classical” wouldn’t make most lists of popular musical genres, but Ligeti’s piece has earned an enduring place in pop culture: it provides the soundtrack for — the voice of, if you will — the giant black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.