Like brown leaves, old love, and the separatory breath of life…
Thursday, July 19th, 2007….Anime Club just keeps hangin’ on.
Hey all!
Time flows like the colors of the airborne trout’s glistering tail, but our own “1,000th summer” is not nearly over yet; and while the lengthening of the blue-black shadows prognosticates the transience-that-already-is, our sparrow’s flight through the lighted mead-hall has taken us only to the king’s table. We are safe for a moment more from the unknowable winter that rages beyond the amber lamps and the laughter of commanders, ministers, and royalty.
That is to say, it’s another Anime Club tonight—another Anime Club closer to the end of summer, but also another Anime Club of fun, friends, “hi-jinx,” and “laffs.” Our usual items are on the menu (what will Miaka do now that Tamahome is taken from her and Suzaku cannot be resurrected? What new absurdities can the mentally unstable writers of Urusei Yatsura drag from their troubled psyches? What hope have Yasako and Fumie now that Isako has acquired Daichi and his gang as her cronies?) as well as some particularly interesting new shows: Nodame Cantabile, a musical romance about life, love, and the piano, and Code-E, a brand-new yet refreshingly old-fashioned drama concerning a girl with a highly unusual ailment that brings a new meaning to the acronym, “EMP.”
I’ll see you all tonight!
—Matthew
PS: Not-so-random poetry is back!
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
—T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”
PPS: There, I’ve lived up to my reputation.