Whoever Dances is One with the Universe

Okay, everybody! It's time for your lesson about psalms.

Here is the deal. There are basically two types of psalms: the Psalm That is Actually a Beautiful Piece of Religiously Significant Poetry, hereafter referred to as the Good Psalm, and The Psalm That is Actually an Excuse For David To Be a Whiny Bitch About Things, hereafter the Whiny Bitch Psalm. Oh, I grant you that occasionally a psalm may start out in Good territory and then veer into Whiny Bitch, but the point is that they stick to these two genres. You are not going to find the Action-Comedy Psalm or the Romantic And Erotic Psalm (that would be Song of Solomon, go read it, it's hot).

Here is an example of a Good Psalm: psalm one-thirty-one. It is also a short psalm, which does tend to help--as a general rule of thumb, the longer a psalm is the whinier and bitchier it is.

Psalm 131 (Domine, non est)
O Lord, I am not proud;
I have no haughty looks.

I do not occupy myself with great matters,
or with things that are too hard for me.

But I still my soul and make it quiet,
like a child upon its mothers breast;
my soul is quieted within me.

O Israel, wait upon the Lord,
from this time forth for evermore.

See? Nice. Brief, to the point, well-worded for maximum impact. Child imagery for David, which is a surprisingly effective device with him (see psalm 139 for another example, although be aware that halfway through (verse 18) it changes into a whiny bitch psalm. In fact, I generally like to pretend that psalm 139 does not go past the seventeenth verse, because it is gorgeous up until there).

You want a whiny bitch psalm? I'm putting it under a cut, because it's hella long and also just deeply annoying--yes, David, we know you suck, why do you have to do it so loudly? No wonder Saul was always throwing things at you, we're surprised Jonathan could stand sleeping with you--don't look so surprised, it's completely obvious--&c.

( Psalm 109 (Deus, laudem) )

Ohh, there's so much not to like here. There is some beautiful poetry here; a couple of these lines are really stellar. But it's kind of outweighed by the hypocritical stuff (oh those horrible people who curse people! I hope they burn in hell!) and the whiny WHINY JESUS DAVID JUST SUCK IT UP bitchiness (wah wah I'm hungry and no one likes me) and the sanctimonious beginning (they are so mean to me but I PRAY FOR THEM ANYWAY). I mean, really, David, some of this stuff is correctable, you know. The less you suck the more likely people are to be nice and feed you. Honestly, he reminds me of Ed here. Maybe David would have been more tolerable if someone had put a dead possum in his mailbox.

But you see here the two types of psalm. They're pretty much all like that, with an occasional--and I should have mentioned this before, I'm sure, I'll fix it when I do my senior thesis--deviation into TOTALLY BORING psalmistry. However, boring is boring and provides no entertainment, as least as far as I'm concerned.

To end on a good note, I will leave you with one last example of the type of psalm that must have won Jonathan's heart and somehow balanced for him the fact that otherwise his boyfriend was kind of a loser.

Psalm 42 (Quemadmodum)

( also kind of long )

...I should compile a book. "Psalms That Are Actually Worth Reading". It could be one of those coffee-table books, and have misty Meaningful Illustrations. Would you buy it?

A few notes.

We got almost all the moving done to-day! Only I shall have to get a new boxspring, because it turns out mine is rotted through and was only holding up because of the crossboards underneath. Luckily we have a spare, so we won't need to buy another. To-night I sleep on a mattress on the floor; it and my gutted bureau and nightstand are the only pieces of furniture left in my room, except for the treadmill hulking evilly in one corner.

While I was going under my bureau to clean out all the things I'd shoved under there over the years, I threw away over two years' worth of eating disorder material I'd written for myself: everything from food journals to calorie counts for hundreds of different items in hundreds of different restaurants to little notes saying 'you're a fat fucking lazy bitch and if you tried harder you could do this'. There were notebooks full of my exercises, and notebooks that mentioned every time I 'indulged'--sometimes under the heading and date there are entries the entire text of which were 'one half a piece of hard candy' or 'some powdered sugar that was in the air and got in my mouth' or 'two chocolate chips'. And then more notes.

And I threw it all away. All of it.

Happy new year, everybody.

( Poem )

Poetryspam time! Yes, I'm doing it again. Shush. I found good ones at the library. ^_^ World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time: selections by Soujin.

Star of Evening
Sappho (translated by Paul Roche)

Hesperus
you bring
home everything
which light of day dispersed:
home the sheep herds
home the goat
home the mother's darling

Because this poem? I want to remember it someday to sing to my children, because I know it would be a perfect lullaby. It just needs a pretty tune, and if I can't think one up I'll make erinpuff write one for me. <33

( more! shiny old poetry! )

The place where I stapled my finger last week seems to have healed without developing tetanus. I'm almost disappointed.

Time for poetry!

His Grandmother Talks about God
Paul Ruffin

"I have come, in recent years,
to think different about God,"
she said to the lean young men
who called, dressed in dark suits,
each with a Bible on his knee.
"I'm not so sure, as I once was."
Neither of them said a word.
"Ah, He once was so soft and good,
like some feathered thing to lie
down on and rest, in those days
before I had lived long and hard
enough and suffered enough to learn."
They looked at each other, then away.
Their fingers made crosses on the Bibles.
"He is what we make Him, want Him to be.
When we are young, He is tender
with our years, warm, and exceeding
bright with wings we dream Him."
They nodded and watched her face.
"And when we are old and hard and
perhaps not so very good, He loses
what we lost and becomes, like us,
fierce and dark and wingless,
waiting for the night to come."