East is East and West is West

For many years now, I've been memorizing both Scripture and poetry. As with all memorized material, I have to keep revising the pieces in order to retain them, but this is a normal part of the process. Some of the ones I learned longest ago are the most readily accessible, and one of these is Psalm 103, which I set to music way back - probably in the 70s. 

Music helps retention, of course, and though it's harder to learn things that way initially, the words stay in place much more than they do in a piece that has no music accompanying it. Which is why rhythm and rhyme are helpful in memorizing poems. The brain enjoys the feel of swinging along, and of words echoing the same sound.

Psalm 103 is one of my favourite Psalms, full of great lines. Unlike some Psalms it doesn't swing back and forth between reproving the reader and encouraging him or her. It's encouraging from beginning to end. And though it's a Psalm focused on blessing the Lord, we see in line after line how He blesses us.

Here are a few consecutive lines from the Psalm that I particularly love:

For as high as the heavens are above the earth

So great is His lovingkindness to those who fear Him.

As far as the East is from the West,

So far has He removed our transgressions from us.

Just as a father has compassion on his children,

So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.

How far is the East from the West? Some humourist might say that they must be next door to each other at some point, but I know that's not what the Psalmist is saying. I've been writing a children's book (for some time now) which partly takes place in The Ends of the Earth. In my mind, As Far as the East is from the West' is a similar sort of place. I'm even thinking of using it at one point in the book..!

Notice that the word 'fear' turns up twice in this extract. (It appears three times in the full Psalm.) For some people this gives the impression that we should go round looking over our shoulder in case we're upsetting God. But it's much more about acknowledging that He's our Creator and is infinitely superior to us in every way. In the Book of Proverbs there's a famous line: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That presents the same sort of idea: understand who's the One with the wisdom, and you'll learn wisdom. Pretend you know everything, and you'll fall flat on your face.

In another Psalm, it says: the fear of the Lord is clean. I take that to mean that it's not the fear of a monster, but of someone who has our best interests at heart.

The translation I've used above is the New American Standard. It's been superseded by a bunch of other translations since it first came out between 1963 and 1971, but because I'm so familiar with it, I greatly prefer it, and much of the Scripture I've learned comes from it.

Working with Psalm 119

Back in March 2013 I mentioned that I was (yet again) beginning to learn Psalm 119, that largest of all the Psalms. In it the same theme is worked over time and again - making it extremely difficult to get your head around which line belongs where.

During 2014 this was almost the only thing I tried to memorise, and I got it under my belt completely. But of course, as soon as I left it alone, it would disintegrate, and all my hard work seemed to be for nothing. 176 verses of two lines apiece down the drain, it seemed.

I'd tried on my first effort at learning this Psalm to link up the verse number with an image, and the image was supposed to help me remember what the verse was. It kind of worked, but I didn't put the effort in to retain what I'd learned, although for a few weeks there it was a bit of a party trick being able to recall any random verse just from the number.

When it came to my attempt in 2014, I didn't start with much of a plan, which was a bit foolish. However, I soon noticed that there was a key word in the beginning of each of the first three stanza (each stanza has eight verses) that linked up to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th letters of the alphabet: B, C, D. (Just in case you've forgotten what they are!)

That gave me an idea. If I could at least remember how each stanza started, I'd have some way of keeping track of where I was in the Psalm. But the fourth stanza didn't have any relevant word in the first line that began with E. It did have the word cleaves (my soul cleaves to the dust). This registered in my head with one of Henry the Eighth's wives, Anne of Cleaves, and so Anne found herself as a signpost in the series.

But to add random names to the stanzas would be to add another complication which I could do without. So while Anne stayed for E, I chose a name beginning with F for the next one, the name of someone I knew. I did this with every subsequent stanza. Friends and relatives became signposts throughout.

Learning the eight two-line verses within each stanza was another issue again, which I'll write about another time. But using people's names as signposts, alphabetically, gave me an additional benefit. It showed me how I might keep track in my head of all the other poems and sections of Scripture I'd learned over the years. Because I'd learned them randomly, there was no order to them.

So I made a list of the memorized pieces, and linked a person's name to each one, in alphabetical order. Yes, I had to learn who belonged to what, and it took regular revision, but the list is now intact (most days). I'm now reaching the end of the fourth run through the alphabet, and have to remember people's names for 98 pieces. (It was a bit of a trick finding names beginning with X and Z and so on.)  Some still catch me out at times, but overall this method is working.

By the way, on my last revision of Psalm 119, it was intact...

Learning lines, and memorizing

I've mentioned recently that I was playing a part in the play Hamp, put on by Stageworks in Dunedin at the Playhouse.

With this play, and the one I did last year - The Sunshine Boys - I found something curious had happened to my learning of lines. In previous plays I've had to work endlessly hard to retain the lines, and even then not felt very secure. But with these two plays, once the lines have been learned, they're secure, and only a distraction (such as happened one night during Hamp) puts me off saying the right thing in the right place.

This is curious, because by rights, you'd think, being now at an exalted age, it ought to be harder for me to learn lines. And I'm not aware that I've changed my approach to learning them, except in one respect: I work through them one at a time until I can do a page or so of them from memory. Then I read the cue from the other actor, (either out loud or in my head) and (with my line covered up) recite my own line.

I learned the lines for Sunshine Boys very quickly with this 'method' last year, and the lines for Hamp came pretty quickly too, although, as always, there were one or two that remained sticky until late in the proceedings. But I didn't feel perturbed about that. I knew they'd come.

So maybe it's just a gain in confidence. Seems unlikely; I've been reasonably confident on stage these last ten years or so.

I do insist on one thing: that the lines are learned as they're written. If this isn't done, it's too easy to veer off course. You'd think that all actors (amateur actors, I'm talking about here) would learn the lines that the author gives them, but some don't. They have a tendency to partly learn them, and then, of course, they find themselves in trouble on stage, and have to paraphrase. The mind has the extraordinary ability to paraphrase, to substitute words with similar meanings, if we get into any trouble. But I prefer not to rely on that, and it's not ideal. It can be off-putting for other actors waiting on a particular cue.

Anyway, that's one aspect of memorisation. The other is that the only other thing I've really memorised over the last year or so is Psalm 119, that great hulk of a work with 176 verses, and a huge amount of similar lines. With this Psalm I had to use all the techniques I could think of to hold it together in my head. I got it to the point where I could recite it through, last year, left it alone for a while, and have been revising it this year, reinforcing things, and checking that I'm actually saying the right words in the right places.

The interesting thing is that even though I'd left it alone for a few months, the basic structural approach I'd taken to learning it survived, and kept the piece mostly in my head. Some details had wandered, and had to be pulled back into line, but having done that, the thing is once again on a secure footing. Furthermore, I'm now able to get past the techniques and listen to the words themselves, something that was quite hard to do when I was learning it.

A few days ago I wrote myself a note: now is not the time to give up memorising. I've memorised Scripture and poetry for years, mostly during the half hour walk I took to work in the mornings. But I haven't revised a lot of that material for some time, and the other day I felt it was time to put the revision work in and get some of those things back into my system.

I started with Hebrews chapter 12, something I learned many years ago. To my surprise, it was basically still intact, once I'd run through it a few times; the lines that had seemed hard to get under my belt all those years ago came back without too much effort, and already I'm feeling as though it's well within my grasp again.

The joy of memorising things is that you really get to know them. We can read something over and over and still find that we skim bits, or ignore some things. Once you start to memorise, you have to learn every word, and learn it right. This does something very good for the soul...

"The US"

I have a tendency to talk about 'the US' as though it was one united country in which everyone agreed with the policies that Washington and the Presidency promote.  Of course this isn't the case, and there are millions are very sensible Americans who don't go along with all the political and patriotic nonsense that's foisted upon them.  I have to be even nicer about Americans these days because I have a wonderful American daughter-in-law, and she has a lovely family, and lots of great friends. 

So when I talk about 'the US' please remember that I'm meaning, usually, those in power, and those who are seeming warmongers. Obama slides in and out of this group; for the most part he manages to be on the edge, but there are others who seem to wholeheartedly race towards any opportunity to go to war.  Regrettably they have the clout to bring their country to such situations very readily. 

These are the kind of hypocritical people I'm talking about when I say 'the US.'  And these are the people who can, without blushing, say to Syria, we're going to bomb you unless you destroy all those nasty chemical weapons.'  But as Gwynne Dyer points out in an article today, the US, (those whom I've been defining up above) cannot, if it wishes to keep its integrity, call Syria a harbourer of chemical weapons, as though no one else had any.  As Dyer notes, 'the US' (yup, that same crew again) 'agreed to destroy the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other lethal gases that it owned within 10 years. That's 30 times as much as Syria has, but 10 years should have been enough. It wasn't. In 2007, Washington [another way of saying, 'the US'] asked for five more years to get rid of all its poison gas, the maximum extension allowed under the Chemical Weapons Convention. [This is the same Convention that Syria has just been forced to sign.] It didn't meet that deadline either, so last year [yup, just last year, so 'the US' has a very short memory] it announced a new deadline: 2021.  Given its own record, the US will find it hard to use Syrian delays as an excuse for resurrecting its bombing threats.'

Could the hypocrisy be any plainer?  I'm learning Psalm 119 at the moment (and have been for several months, and will be at least until Christmas!) and one of the recent verses was: I hate those who are double-minded.  Does that ring any bells?  Is it surprising that 'the US' does itself no favours when it acts in such double-minded, double-standard fashion - as it has done continually over Guantanamo Bay (a situation where Obama has slid into the 'the US' camp as well) and the spying on private citizens?

There's a difficulty in being the World's Policeman, the Greatest Nation, a Modern Empire.  Unless you bring integrity into the picture, and throw double-mindedness out the window, you're going to defile yourself continually, and all your best efforts to do great and grand things will come to naught.  Increasingly 'the US' has failed to keep its integrity.  And as more and more of its 19th and 20th century history is exposed, we're seeing that this lack of integrity goes back a considerable way.  Historians  bring these failures to light, journalists too, and artists even more so. Let's pray for a swing towards a greater integrity in 'the US.'  Without it, this nation will eventually become yet another victim of its own success, just like Greece, Rome, Russia, and many others.

Being random, as the blog's title implies

1. My wife and I were outside this morning in the sun chopping down the upper half of the holly hedge that separates our house from our neighbours' place.  It was a beautiful morning.  We then spent nearly an hour around 1pm talking to my son and his wife in the States, on Google's equivalent of Skype, went to go outside and found it was pouring with rain.  Since then the temperature's dropped considerably and we're now trying to get the house warm.  After all the fine weather we've had any cold day comes as a bit of a shock.

2. A friend lent me a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father and Son, a couple of weeks or so ago.  I'd heard of this book over the years, but never got round to reading it, even though it has some status amongst the English classics.  What an odd book!  Gosse was the sun of Philip Henry Gosse, who was a famous zoologist in the 19th century, around the time of Darwin.   He was also a Puritan Christian, as was his wife - the mother of Edmund: she died of breast cancer when Edmund was still under ten years old.  Philip married again, a few years later. 

The book is supposedly the factual memoirs of Gosse as a child, and of his relationship with his father, who, according to the book, was virtually a recluse, and a very rigid Christian.  (Gosse's mother was as puritanical as her husband, according to Gosse junior.)  The book claims to be fact, but later biographers of both father and son have found a good deal of fiction in the writing.  It's very much the view of a man who has cast his parents aside along with his religion, but in writing about it he colours the characters of his parents - his father in particular - in such a way as to make the reader recoil from them. Knowing that Gosse's writing is more biased than not is quite helpful in reading the book: you see how he shows himself as the one treated somewhat unjustly, when in fact this was apparently less than the truth.  He also, perhaps unwittingly, shows himself as rather pompous and quite class conscious.  Those who are lower than him in the social scale are written about in such a way as to show that Gosse despises them - it's not just what they do, it's how the author describes them.  For example, in describing John Brooks, a poor man who doesn't do the right thing according to Gosse's lights: John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a pock-marked face and two left legs...  I'm not sure how Brooks manages to have two left legs, but doesn't it immediately make you feel he's something of a monster?

I'd got to a point with the book where I thought I wouldn't finish it, but I will.  However, Gosse has lost my sympathy quite some time ago! 

3. I'm currently learning lines for the play, The Sunshine Boy, in which I'm playing Al.  He has a substantial enough part, but it's nothing like as long as that of the main character, Willie.  There's a great deal of humour in the play, and it'll go across well with an audience.  The line-learning has kind of interrupted my latest attempt to learn Psalm 119 (the longest in the Psalmody).  It's a tough psalm to learn, but I'm making slow progress on it.  I'm also singing with the Sunny Side Up group tonight, at one of the retirement villages, and I'm revising words and music for that as well.  So the brain is getting quite a work out at present!

The Sunshine Boys

I've been offered a part in the Repertory Society's coming production of The Sunshine Boys, a play by Neil Simon.  I'd heard this was in the offing three or four weeks ago, and got a copy of the play to read.  It's very funny, sometimes in a kind of aggressive way, and the three main characters are great to play.  I'm doing Al, who doesn't appear till the second scene. He's the bête noire of the main character, who's being played by Bert Nisbet.  Bert's character is onstage for a great deal of the play - even when he's not onstage, he has lines that he has to fit in from offstage.  I'm relieved that I have several sections of the play when I get a break - and time to cram up on my next lot of lines, no doubt! 

Apropos of this, I've been memorising Psalm 119 over the last few weeks - it's a slow process, because there isn't a kind of narrative flow to the psalm.  The sometimes seemingly random statements - which use the same words over and over in different ways - don't easily connect to one another in the brain, so you have to have all sorts of links to keep track of things.  The part in the play is a piece of cake to learn by contrast with Psalm 119, so in a way I've been doing some mental exercises in preparation.  However, it's also the longest part I've ever learnt, I think, and will be kind of tough to deal with.

I was in a play last week on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first missionary to leave New Zealand from the Baptist Mission Society.  I had only around twenty-five lines in the play all up, and for once I was word-perfect.  My aim is to be word-perfect in this play too, because I feel that if you don't get the words right, not only does it do a disservice to the author, but it also makes it harder to remember whether you've got the line quite in its proper shape.  The brain delights in muddling those who don't learn things exactly (it can muddle those who do know things exactly).  It may seem picky to want to learn the thing perfectly, but I know from experience that if I don't I'll have trouble at some point in the performances.

The great 119th

Over the years I've made several attempts to memorise that Psalm of Psalms, Number 119.  All have seemed doomed to failure, for various reasons. Firstly, it's the longest, but that shouldn't necessarily be an issue - I've been able to memorise poems and scripture that in sum are much longer, and in some cases more complex.  It's repetitive and uses the same words and ideas over and over in various ways.  It doesn't easily stick because the links between the statements (each verse being an independent statement) are few, and on only some occasions are there connections that help the memory process.

At present I'm working my way through the notes that Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, provided in his book, The Treasury of David.  He also included, alongside his own notes, the commentaries of other divines, preachers and teachers - and the occasional explorer.  These notes are often illuminating, and it's surprising how much variance these writers can get out of what appears to be a psalm that winds around the same points like a labyrinth. 

Anyway I decided, while working slowly through these notes (often only a verse's worth a day) that I'd have another go at memorising the psalm.  My attempts in the past have involved number system approaches and other tricks of keeping stuff in the head, but this time I'm just working one step at a time, one verse (roughly) a day, using various mnemonics and other memory tricks, and I'm hoping that I'll have the intestinal fortitude to complete the task. 

I have some predecessors in the job.   Spurgeon notes:  Our best improvement of this sacred composition will come through getting our minds into intense sympathy with its subject. In order to this, we might do well to commit it to memory. Philip Henry's daughter wrote in her diary, "I have of late taken some pains to learn by heart Psalms 119:1-176, and have made some progress therein." She was a sensible, godly woman. Having done this, we should consider the fulness, certainty, clearness, and sweetness of the word of God, since by such reflections we are likely to be stirred up to a warm affection for it.

William Alexander, in "The Witness of the Psalms", written in 1877 notes that 'In the midst of a London season; in the stir and turmoil of a political crisis, 1819, William Wilberforce writes in his Diary— "Walked from Hyde Park Corner repeating the 119th Psalm in great comfort"'. 

 

Ruskin

Ruskin, who was a man often at odds with the religious views of his day, wrote: It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was to my child's mind most repulsive— the 119th Psalm— has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the law of God. 

 

I've now got the first eight verses under my belt, and have to keep tightening my belt to keep them there.  They have a great habit of straying.  Nevertheless, I persevere.  Some 168 days (or more) down the track I may have the whole thing by heart...

Listening and hearing

A friend lent me a copy of Brian Hardin's book, Passages: how reading the Bible in a year will change everything for you.  She wanted 'my opinion' on it.

Hardin began a daily podcast reading through the Bible several years ago - there's a passage from the Old Testament, one from the New, a Psalm (or portion of one of the larger ones) and a verse or two of Proverbs, presented each day.  This is a fairly common approach to getting through the Bible in a year.

I had a listen to one of these this morning, and I like the way he reads the words: calm, measured, a little drama where needed; it's all done at a speed that allows the mind to listen as well as the ear.   We have some sections of The Message paraphrase of the Bible on audio.  I love it, because I enjoy the way Eugene Peterson puts familiar words into new phraseology, but the reader on this audio reads at a breathless pace, presumably because he's got a lot of material to get through on each CD.

Not long ago I was reading in another book - in fact it was Peterson's Working the Angles - that when we read the Bible with the eye, we skim a great deal; we don't dwell on words and 'hear' them.  He recommended reading the Bible out loud, even if it's only to ourselves, because then the eye and the ear get engaged, and when both are engaged, the mind pays more attention.   I've noticed with reading books on Kindle that one of the disadvantages is that I skim lines even more than usual; it's a habit of mine, anyway, but something about the text in this format leads me to 'read' faster.  I'm forever having to click back to the previous page to check something that I've obviously missed.

Hardin's slower-paced reading of the words gets you to listen - although even while listening I tended to be picking up something and checking whether we needed to keep it, or making a cup of tea, or running the bath.  Settling down to listen is difficult for us moderns, and this is part of what Hardin has to say in the book.  It's also why an audio version of the Bible gets us to stop and take in the words in a way that we don't when we're just sitting reading.  It takes 'effort', one might say, to read and actually listen to what we're reading.  The audio approach is valuable.

Just for the record this morning's readings consisted of the section of the Old Testament in which God gives Moses detailed instructions about how to dress the priests - it's both down to earth and full of beauty.   The New Testament section was the one in which Jesus talks to those who've never given other people the time of day: haven't clothed those who were naked, or given water to those who were thirsty, or visited people in prison.  It's one of those sections of the Gospels that are just a little bit scary!

The Psalm was an old favourite of mine (although Hardin only read the middle section of it) - Psalm 31.  It's one I memorised years ago and have recited to myself umpteen times, especially in those days when the black clouds were hovering or I felt bereft for some reason.   I'm not sure what the Proverbs bit was, as, modern that I am, I'd switched my brain off at that point.  Maybe I need to check through the audio again!

The length of today's audio shows up as 48 minutes.  In fact the Bible readings take a good deal less than that - I assume Hardin gives a kind of homily at the end of some sort.  For me the readings on their own are enough to think about.  Incidentally, the dates on the audios are a day behind for us New Zealanders; not that that matters in the least - I just thought I'd mention it!   And incidentally again, you can get the readings on an app - of course.

Psalms, Preludes and Fugues

Years ago I remember reading that the famous cello player Pablo Casals used to start his daily practice routine off with what you might call a meditative period: he would play a Bach Prelude and Fugue (on the piano) before he began to practice on his cello.

It always struck me that it was somewhat like reading a Psalm each morning, something I've done fairly regularly for years. The Psalms, even after countless readings, always have something fresh to say, something that triggers a response in the spirit and gets the mind working beyond the mundane.

Over a period of about three months I read Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace. It's a book in which each (short) chapter focuses on a particular 'Church' word - the sorts of words we use in everyday Christian life. Why I mention her is because time and again she writes how the Psalms have been one of her mainstays in her Christian life, and how one or more are read aloud daily in the Benedictine monasteries she's visited on many occasions.

Bach's Preludes and Fugues can play a similar role in a musician's life. If we were, like Casals, to play one of each every day, we'd find we were running the gamut of (spiritual) emotions in a way that was similar to the way we run through them in the Psalms. Bach goes from joyous exuberance (some of the Preludes, in particular, seem to have fallen out of heaven and onto the page) to anguish to deep meditation (those Fugues that seem to go on in an endlessly inventive way for pages) to sheer wonder at the mathematical genius of the way some of the Fugues offer a theme, turn it upside down, inside out, back to front and still provide beautiful music.

A good way to start the day would be to reflectively read a Psalm, and then go off to the piano and play a Prelude and Fugue. The soul would be all the better for it.