FTN_list

TROPARION: ANDALUSIA

54. Barcelona: Scrawl

     Renunciation is not enough. You must act.
     Yet action mustn’t dominate you. In the heart of action,
     you must remain free from all attachment.

     They told me to take a street-car named Desire, . . .
     and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

     Desire actually started across the street . . .
     to hear what Love might have to say.

YOU agonize and call me Krishna; walk
three times Las Ramblas. And decide to yield
to rouge. Or pride in not. You choose. Such talk,
such sin, such vision of the battlefield!
     Then humble when you held me late that night
in my pure yearning bed I now recall,
when in us trust and sleep could reunite,
now rounded rest, fields feint in this traced scrawl:
    Like Gaudí’s spires, this troth erects your touch
above the ground, though of the ground, the field
of faith. I quivered in your sky-filled clutch
and wondered how it happened you were healed.
     O Fields of Being, O Grounds of Praise,
     O Arrows of Desire, make dance each phrase.

The EPIGRAPH is from Peter Brook’s production of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita is the famous scripture in which Krishna as god advises Arjuna entering the field of battle. E2: from the Tennessee Williams 1947 play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Act 1. E3: from James Baldwin’s 1983? “Guilt, Desire, and Love.” The Venerable A. Gaudí designed Sagrada Familia basilica, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Barcelona. Under construction since 1882, the spires were, I found in 1994, terrifying to ascend. Theologian Paul Tillich called God the ground of being; see his 1951 Systematic Theology, v1, p238. A remote physical analogy is the Higgs field which gives mass to electrons, protons, and some other particles. Las Ramblas is a Barcelona district of temptations where rouge cosmetics suggests prostitution. Feint/faint: feint means sham; faint means faded, timorous, unfounded, or a swoon. Sin: In Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, Minnie declares una suprema verità d’amore: fratelli, non v’è al mondo peccatore cui non s'apra una via di redenzione! — “a supreme truth of love: brothers, there is no sinner in the world to whom a path of redemption does not open!" Psalm 51:7. Quiver is a pun. Arrows of Desire: from the Preface to William Blake’s 1804 Milton, often called “Jerusalem,” sung as a patriotic hymn by Anglican Hubert Parry, 1916. Also think of the arrow in Bernini’s St Teresa. Ψ Q1 Q2 Q3 C field.