This is my favorite piece of classical music bar none. When I am in a sad mood I usually look it up and listen.
The first time I heard this, or actually listened to it, I should say, was during a drive to Delaware. Everything was drizzly wet and the huge brilliantly colored fall leaves were falling from the trees often plastering themselves on my windshield. I listened to the cd which contained this piece and was taken away with emotion. It was of sadness but also a special kind of glorification of the majesty which begets that sadness. I had a sense that the sadness in the world, my world, was a natural part of life. I seemed to realize that sadness is indeed the default state of the human condition and that there must be a higher being, or power, or simply an unreachable something that cannot be readily seen.
I just discovered this version.
The notes: "This first recording is from 1978, long before this work became well-known. It is a pure Polish, authentic performance, by far more raw and intense as the more polished western recordings normally are."
That is a good description. It is darker and yet more majestic in its peaks. What an amazing work of art. While the video is indeed the great unspeakable sorrow the piece is about, I advise just listening to the music which is more universal in its appeal.
First Movement
My son, my chosen and beloved
Share your wounds with your mother
And because, dear son, I have always carried you in my heart,
And always served you faithfully
Speak to your mother, to make her happy,
Although you are already leaving me, my cherished hope.
(Lamentation of the Holy Cross Monastery from the "Lysagóra Songs" collection. Second half of the 15th century)
Second Movement
No, Mother, do not weep,
Most chaste Queen of Heaven
Support me always.
"Zdrowas Mario." (*)
(Prayer inscribed on wall 3 of cell no. 3 in the basement of "Palace," the Gestapo's headquarters in Zadopane; beneath is the signature of Helena Wanda Blazusiakówna, and the words "18 years old, imprisoned since 26 September 1944.")
(*) "Zdrowas Mario" (Ave Maria)—the opening of the Polish prayer to the Holy Mother
Third Movement
Where has he gone
My dearest son?
Perhaps during the uprising
The cruel enemy killed him
Ah, you bad people
In the name of God, the most Holy,
Tell me, why did you kill
My son?
Never again
Will I have his support
Even if I cry
My old eyes out
Were my bitter tears
to create another River Oder
They would not restore to life
My son
He lies in his grave
and I know not where
Though I keep asking people
Everywhere
Perhaps the poor child
Lies in a rough ditch
and instead he could have been
lying in his warm bed
Oh, sing for him
God's little song-birds
Since his mother
Cannot find him
And you, God's little flowers
May you blossom all around
So that my son
May sleep happily
(Folk song in the dialect of the Opole region)
The Bread of My Life (with Tomato, Salt, Pepper, and Mayo)
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
The Day of... 10:30 pm until 11:20 pm.
Time still runs on just as I have known it to before. The experience seems slightly comforting in my pain. I don't have enough of this time to even do justice to an entry. And yet, oddly, filling time will and must become a kind of life and death struggle as everything here in this place now seems so full of my life's history. I must forget this, I guess. It is a past I have chosen to ignore before but now it has come to surface yet again and my carefully designed "better life" flutters as quickly away as it ever did... while what seem to be my accomplishments are... always mirages.
Being alone isn't usually a problem as time runs on. Trusting in humanity is far far worse. I'm damned if this trust isn't something we are born to do. At any given moment, from infancy onward, we are, in a word, subjugated to some other: to their goals, to their likes and dislikes, to their misunderstandings of our lives, our needs, our wants. We are subjugated by proximity and time. We trust in what they teach us about life even though we know, we honestly know, sometimes with amazing clarity, that they have often been absolutely wrong and may be just as wrong each and every time.
So accomplished they all seem in their steadfast views but I know they have been here...here where I am now... struggling. I know that they must know better. It is a lesson not hard to learn as these circumstances in some manner or particularity must be a commonality to all... at some time. Yet those steadfast views remain when the mirages take our senses away from the real.
Time has run on. And such a long space of time it has been since this familiar seclusion was so starkly real. Why did I leave it only to come back? What mirage had me so entangled as to make me forget that I would necessarily be back here, bringing with me learned experience that would be utterly useless?
I will have time to ponder before lost again.
Being alone isn't usually a problem as time runs on. Trusting in humanity is far far worse. I'm damned if this trust isn't something we are born to do. At any given moment, from infancy onward, we are, in a word, subjugated to some other: to their goals, to their likes and dislikes, to their misunderstandings of our lives, our needs, our wants. We are subjugated by proximity and time. We trust in what they teach us about life even though we know, we honestly know, sometimes with amazing clarity, that they have often been absolutely wrong and may be just as wrong each and every time.
So accomplished they all seem in their steadfast views but I know they have been here...here where I am now... struggling. I know that they must know better. It is a lesson not hard to learn as these circumstances in some manner or particularity must be a commonality to all... at some time. Yet those steadfast views remain when the mirages take our senses away from the real.
Time has run on. And such a long space of time it has been since this familiar seclusion was so starkly real. Why did I leave it only to come back? What mirage had me so entangled as to make me forget that I would necessarily be back here, bringing with me learned experience that would be utterly useless?
I will have time to ponder before lost again.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
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