Moser: Most Ancient of All Splendours

Most Ancient of All Splendours
Johann Moser
(Sophia, 1989)
94 p.

I do not read a great deal of poetry, not as much as I should, certainly, and, having never shed my preferences for strict metrical and rhyme schemes, I read very little contemporary poetry. In theory, therefore, I shouldn’t have read Johann Moser’s collection of poems, and, having read it, I shouldn’t have liked it, but I did read it, and I did like it, and sometimes the world is a surprising place.

These poems reveal a poet steeped in history, with wide interests and sympathies. There are poems about Alexander the Great, about the great medieval monastery of St Gall, about Mozart, about Venice, about Gilgamesh, about Galileo, about World War II, about Erasmus, about Solzhenitsyn. There are poems based on musical forms — the caccia, the barcarolle, the berceuse — and there are poems of lament and poems of praise.

There are no poems of rhyme.

Moser is obviously a man of wide education, and an educated reader will be better positioned to understand and appreciate the poems, but they are far from dryly intellectual. On the contrary, a notable qualities of many of these poems is their sensual tangibility, the way they conjure up sights and scents, so that the reader feels present in the past:

Over studded mountains,
High-timbered slopes of the Absaroka,
Hear:
 Storms of summer, swarthy-throated,
  thundering down the valleys.
Hayfields buckle,
 Dust whirls on sagebrush hills,
Lightning brindles blackened skies.
And rain:
 Rain over grassy tablelands and wooded hollows,
Over white-bouldered rivers
 and bottomlands of cottenwood and aspen;
Slender sheaves of rain —
 Purple, gold, across the wilderness,
Trailing to bronze-rimmed prairies eastward.
And now,
 The glittering pinnacles of cloud and sun;
Glad arroyos splash,
  dazzle amid canyons.
Sunlight showers
 through tender-dripping forests
And wet bark of giant spruce,
    ponderosa —
 Fragrant in the valley winds.
Among clusters of gooseberry leaves,
 A black bear shrugs his dusky hide;
A puma sniffs the clear, cool air.
And listen:
 Birds are singing in the mountains.

— “Wyoming Rain”

That’s a highly irregular meter to deal with, but it certainly reminds me of the rain storms I experienced as a child on the prairies; I can feel the wind and hear the rain as they sweep across the land.

Here is an excerpt from a more metrically regular (and in that respect also more characteristic) poem, about the Battle of Riade between the Franks and the Magyars:

Then, at Riade, we mustered our brave legions,
 Mounting high before us the lofty Whalebone Rood
and Holy Lance of Imperial Constantine.
 Over us, unsteady heavens of storm and sunlight;
Packed battalions sloshed in river shallows,
 Their kirtles soaked and steaming in the morning heat.
The thud, flash of weaponry; shouts, assaults,
 Trumpets honking like wild geese within the bracken,
Sword-hilts slippery with blood and rain
 As thick carnage clotted marshy rivulets and streams,
And mounted spearmen butted, wallowed in the mud.
 Finally, rearing our banners upwards, we invoked
Lord Saba-ôth, Hoarder of Sky’s Kingdom,
 From whose stout-thonged, strong-thewed gauntlet
Angelic Mika-El, fierce sparrow-hawk,
 Swooped downwards through thunder-driven clouds,
Bearer of Sun’s blazoned baldric,
 Golden-armored, Barb of the Sacred Tempest,
Felled before him the heathen host
 That fled to craggy tors, the dense holt and hinterland.

— from “Henry the Fowler”

If, like me, you’d not given much thought to the Battle of Riade, or even, like me, never heard of it before, perhaps you find, as I do, that the poem is nonetheless evocative and exciting. It is rare to find modern poetry that can summon religious imagery and language without losing for a moment its muscular power, but Moser does it here. Just as rare is a poet who both knows and loves the long cultural tradition we have inherited — or could inherit, with enough labour, attention, and love.

I see that this volume has been reviewed at The University Bookman by Thomas Molnar, and his review is better than what I have written here. I recommend you now go there.

Henri Dutilleux

Over the past few weeks I’ve been listening to the music of Henri Dutilleux in this, his centenary year. He is one of those composers whose music lingers on the fringes of the repertoire, not greatly beloved by many, but respected for its superb craftsmanship.

Like his fellow Frenchman Duruflé, he was extremely exacting in the demands he placed on himself as a composer, and he published only a small number of works over the course of his long life. He wrote two symphonies, a number of orchestral works, a violin concerto, a cello concerto, and a variety of chamber works. In the French manner, the interest of his music is largely in the textures and colours he is able to draw from the orchestra. A melodist he is not! He dandled with serialism, and his music does sometimes assume the astringent character of that school, but it is counterbalanced by his ear for lush and vibrant orchestral sound.

To give a flavour for his orchestral music, here is an excerpt of a performance of his Symphony No.1, written in 1951, with Hannu Lintu leading the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. It starts very quietly.

But the piece I have most enjoyed as I’ve been spending time with him has been his Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher, for solo cello. Granted, I’m a pushover when it comes to solo cello, but this is truly enchanting music: subtle, elusive, strangely beautiful. Nicolas Alstaedt plays:

A constitutional right to palliative care

Starting today physicians in Canada can commit acts of assisted suicide and euthanasia without facing criminal penalties. The deeply flawed law proposed to regulate these “procedures” is still under debate in the Senate, so the present legal framework is murky. Looking for a silver lining in these dark clouds, I propose an argument I’ve not seen elsewhere.

In Carter v Canada the Supreme Court of Canada claimed to discover a right to assisted suicide (and euthanasia?) in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and more specifically in Section 7, which reads

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

Initially — and perhaps also persistently — it seems mysterious that the Court would seek to ground a right to death in a constitutional provision protecting the right to life, but here is the Court’s reasoning in the Carter decision:

The right to life is engaged where the law or state action imposes death or an increased risk of death on a person, either directly or indirectly. Here, the prohibition deprives some individuals of life, as it has the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable. The rights to liberty and security of the person, which deal with concerns about autonomy and quality of life, are also engaged. An individual’s response to a grievous and irremediable medical condition is a matter critical to their dignity and autonomy. The prohibition denies people in this situation the right to make decisions concerning their bodily integrity and medical care and thus trenches on their liberty. And by leaving them to endure intolerable suffering, it impinges on their security of the person.

Focusing for a moment on the first part of the argument: the Court claims that a prohibition on assisted suicide violates the right to life because it forces some people to kill themselves before they otherwise would were assisted suicide permitted.

Let’s try to put this into the form of a syllogism:

(a) Forcing someone to kill himself violates his right to life.
(b) Failure to provide assisted suicide forces someone to kill himself.
(c) Therefore, failure to provide assisted suicide violates the right to life.

This reasoning is obviously tendentious — premise (b) is false — but for the moment let’s take it for granted. I want to suggest that this same reasoning implies that Canadians enjoy a constitutional right to palliative care.

The argument is simple: absent effective palliative care some individuals will be “forced” to kill themselves — whether directly or through activation of our newly-minted right to assisted suicide — earlier than they would had they access to palliative care. Therefore failure to provide such palliative care to Canadians violates their right to life. In the syllogism above, just replace “assisted suicide” with “palliative care”.

The other arguments deployed by the Court in the section above, pertaining to the rights to liberty and security of the person, are just as relevant to the case of palliative care: without access to palliative care Canadians cannot truly “make decisions concerning their integrity and medical care” (for at least one option for which they might decide is unavailable), and failure to provide palliative care abandons patients “to endure intolerable suffering” and so “impinges on their security of the person”.

Today only 16-30% of Canadians have access to palliative care.

MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin

The Princess and the Goblin
George MacDonald
(Everyman’s Children’s Classics, 1993) [1871]
340 p.

Our oldest children are now 4 and 7, and for some time I’ve been looking for a way to transition our bedtime reading from picture books to novels. With The Princess and the Goblin I think we might have finally managed it. The kids loved it.

The story is about a princess who lives in a mountainside castle, where the local peasantry are miners, digging tunnels deep into the mountain. Yet there is more activity under the hill than you might expect: long ago a group of disaffected subjects retreated under the mountain, and have nursed a hatred for the royal family for many generations. These goblins — for so they have become, hidden away from the sun and the fresh breezes — are also miners, and it is almost inevitable that at some point their tunnels will encounter those of the king’s loyal subjects, and the ancient malice against the royal house break into the open…

This book was a favourite of C.S. Lewis, who was a great admirer of MacDonald. And G.K. Chesterton accounted it one of the books most formative of his whole outlook on life:

But in a certain rather special sense I for one can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I ever read … it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald…

It really is a beautiful book, informed by courage and faith. On one level it is a rousing adventure story, of secret missions and clashing armies, but it has a mysterious register as well, a spiritual aura of goodness that emanates from Princess Irene’s great-great-grandmother, who lives, under enigmatic conditions, in the little-frequented upper passages of the castle.

I do not know much about MacDonald’s theology, but for me the “great, huge grandmother” is redolent of the Blessed Virgin: a loving, maternal figure, clad in blue, surrounded by stars, and possessed of a rare grace and quiet power. She makes an effective contrast with the horrid goblins who dwell under the ground.

MacDonald wrote a sequel to this book, called The Princess and Curdie, which does not seem to be as widely read. But we enjoyed this one so much that we may try it.