Ed Curtin
May 10, 2023

By the lake’s lapping shore above the town and the railroad tracks, my wife and I stopped and marveled, struck stone silent by two dazzling Baltimore Orioles, clawed together as they tumbled, wrestling in the green morning breeze above our heads. They perched upon a branch and sang a morning hymn, an ode to joy and the spring’s morning glory. Their black and orange throats vibrated amid the green quaking aspen’s leaves as the lake’s low lapping sounds lent counterpoint. They were sublime.

I too felt a quake, a shiver down my spine as associations tumbled through my mind. Poems, songs, memories of other early morning walks in spring. Intoxication, elation, the horripilation that accompanies spring’s rising, the sexual excitement. Hope, and the loose feeling of being forever young. No solution to anything, just reverence for existence. Nothing changed, except a few years.

In quickly putting into words what I felt a half-hour ago, I drew on a vast store of personal and cultural memories that came to me with little thought as I was walking home. Words strung together without thinking. You have just read them. I felt impelled to tell them.

Now as I sit and contemplate, I think about culture and what it might mean. In my case, I was gifted by my parents and schools with the love of poetry and art from a young age. I know well that everyone is not so lucky and that, in any case, culture has many meanings. “Culture,” writes Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” From its original verbal meaning to cultivate the land to high, low, and middlebrow culture onto so many other meanings and conflicts that are often tied up with social class issues. There are cultures and culture.

When I say cultural memories, I mean my memories, no one else’s.

I learned early on that the music of verse, the sound of birds in the trees, the rush of a creek murmuring over rocks, the lilt of words spoken passionately, the placement of a certain blue paint on a canvas, a singer’s voice flying with a tune of joy or sadness, and a instrument’s vibrations were all connected to the reverence I felt as an altar boy tolling the bells and repeating Latin responses, whose full meaning I couldn’t grasp amid the incense and candle smoke: Et introibo ad altare Dei: ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem mea – “And I go to the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth.”

It was the sound of the bells that entranced me, and that I was allowed to ring them. To sound in, to participate in the ancient ritual that created a musical enclave from the beyond. I knew then, as I know now, that God has many altars, and that reverence before them and their mysteries is the right refrain. Bob Dylan singing “Ring Those Bells” comes to mind:

Ring them bells, ye heathen

From the city that dreams

Ring them bells from the sanctuaries

’Cross the valleys and streams

For they’re deep and they’re wide

And the world’s on its side

And time is running backwards

And so is the bride

So while it is not necessary to draw on stored cultural memories to appreciate the birds in the trees on nature’s altar on a beautiful spring morning, for me it enriched the experience. You may have heard echoes of Yeats, Van Morrison, and others in my words, but the reality of the world I described would be the same for those who never heard of these artists, who find their inspiration in the terrible beauty of nature and have other associations.

Are we really at home in our interpreted world, a poet once asked? It is a good question. This poet was Rilke, who wrote in the Duino Elegies :

For beauty is nothing/but the beginning of terror/which we are still just able to endure/and we are so awed because it serenely/disdains to annihilate us/Every angel is terrifying/And so I hold myself back and swallow the call note of my dark sobbing/Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?

Whom can we ever turn to in our need?

CONTINUE READING: https://edwardcurtin.com/there-is-no-escape-from-telling/