[Image: “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” by Edward Burne-Jones (1884, oil on panel). For more information about the painting, including a video, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Praise Song
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.
(Barbara Crooker [source])
…and (from whiskey river itself):
The Book of Hours
There was that one hour sometime
in the middle of the last century.
It was autumn, and I was in my father’s
woods building a house out of branches
and the leaves that were falling like
thousands of letters from the sky.And there was that hour in Central Park
in the middle of the seventies.
We were sitting on a blanket, listening
to Pete Seeger singing “This land is
your land, this land is my land,” and
the Vietnam War was finally over.I would definitely include an hour
spent in one of the galleries of the
Tate Britain, looking up at the
painting of King Cophetua and
the Beggar Maid, and, afterwards
the walk along the Thames, andI would also include one of those
hours when I woke in the night and
couldn’t get back to sleep thinking
about how nothing I thought was going
to happen happened the way I expected,
and things I never expected to happen did—just like that hour today, when we saw
the dog running along the busy road,
and we stopped and held on to her
until her owner came along and brought
her home—that was an hour well
spent. Yes, that was a keeper.
(Joyce Sutphen [source])
Not from whiskey river:
We might say that average individuals, not only in the West but also in the East, have a feeling of themselves as separate from their surroundings — from other people, from the earth, from space. They feel this in ways that are expressed in all the phrases of common speech. We talk about coming into the world: “I came into the world.” As a matter of fact, we didn’t. We came out of it, in the same way that an apple comes out of an apple tree — as an expression of the tree…
We have a way of attending to life, which we call “conscious attention,” and it’s like a narrow crack in a fence. We can think of only one thing at a time. Our speech reflects this. This is one of our ways of experiencing the world: bit by bit. A chicken, for example, does not come out of an egg as a cut-up fryer; it comes out as an entire chicken, and if we want to eat it, we have to cut it up. But the world that we live in and experience is not cut up into separate things and events. It all goes together in the same way that the bees and the flowers go together, but we don’t notice it. We have a way of thinking that splits everything up; we feel separate from the whole domain of nature. The disciplines of Taoism and Zen are supposed to change our consciousness in such a way that we no longer feel that we’re an isolated unit locked up within a bag of skin. Instead, we actually experience the fact that our real self — the real us — is everything that there is; that all reality is concentrated and expressing itself at the point known as our personal organism.
(Alan Watts [source])
…and:
The Invention of Cuisine
Imagine for a moment
the still life of our meals,
meat followed by yellow cheese,
grapes pale against the blue armor of fish.Imagine a thin woman
before bread was invented,
playing a harp of wheat in the field.
There is a stone, and behind her
the bones of the last killed,
the black bird on her shoulder
that a century later
will fly with trained and murderous intent.They are not very hungry
because cuisine has not yet been invented.
Nor has falconry,
nor the science of imagination.All they have is the pure impulse to eat,
which is not enough to keep them alive
and this little moment
before the woman redeems
the sprouted seeds at her feet
and gathers the olives falling from the trees
for her recipes.Imagine. Out in the fields
this very moment
they are rolling the apples to press,
the lamb turns in a regular aura of smoke.See, the woman looks once behind her
before picking up the stone,
looks back once at the beasts,
the trees,
that sky
above the white stream
where small creatures live and die
looking upon each other
as food.
(Carol Muske-Dukes [source])
_______________________________
About the painting: Wikipedia explains the source of Burne-Jones’s painting:
According to tradition, Cophetua was an African king known for his lack of any sexual attraction to women. One day while looking out a palace window he witnesses a young beggar (Penelophon) suffering for lack of clothes. Struck by love at first sight, Cophetua decides that he will either have the beggar as his wife or commit suicide.
Walking out into the street, he scatters coins for the beggars to gather and when Penelophon comes forward, he tells her that she is to be his wife. She agrees and becomes queen, and soon loses all trace of her former poverty and low class. The couple lives a “quiet life” but are much loved by their people. Eventually they die and are buried in the same tomb.
The brief video below (from the Smarthistory project) discusses the work, from the perspective of art historians Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker:
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