Living La Vida Loca & Rosa's Poetry Archives: Carmen Bernos de Gasztold

Well, I just want to say that I survived. The day peaked at about 4. Out of 10. Nothing spectacularly terrible or calamitous, the very everyday-slogness of it was one of the things that was so hard. The youngest, Hecho, was getting over a cold and apparently had decided, privately, that the quickest road to recovery was a strict diet of fussing, nursing and as little sleep as he could manage. The elder, or Bunny, as I now deem her, was at loose ends all day, wild and flapping around. The rain, it came down. No car. We were good and stuck.
 It was the sort of day where you are tripping over everything, when you go to put something away, only to find the cupboard/closet full to bursting with clothes that need to be gone through. So you sit down to do that, so that you can eventually do the first thing. My house is infested with this sort of thing. I think we need to get it fumigated. Wouldn't that be a quick and easy solution?
It felt like whichever way I moved, I had a child desperate for my undivided attention. I tried to keep my expectations for the day low, but it didn't really work. As soon as they were distracted with a project, game, whatever, I would tiptoe out of the room and head towards cleaning something, or putting something away. Almost as soon as my hand touched the item needing to be cleaned/organized/sorted/folded I would hear twin cries of "Mooooommmmmmmmyyyy! I need you to....." followed by Hecho's hacking bellow.

I felt like one of those African dung beetles, rolling a big ball of dung uphill with my front legs. I guess in this analogy the housework is the dung and my children are the hill? Or are my children the ball of dung, and I am rolling them up the hill of my sucky attitude? And where am I going with this dung, anyway?
As I said, it was a long day.
But I also want to say that there were moments of respite and beauty, and these I record here.
Two Part Invention

The first, the perfect accompaniment to a rainy day at home, was Jacques Loussier's excellent Play Bach No. 2. Eleven recommended this, like so many other things that have become favorites. Loussier's jazz combo performs elegantly spare arrangements of some of Bach's greatest pieces. I've always liked Bach in theory, and then I listen to some of his more baroque pieces, and suddenly it's like that scene in Amadeus when Mozart's patron sends back a symphony because it has "too many notes". But who knew that a piano, stand-up bass and drum kit could be the perfect purveyors of Bach's amazingness? His rendering of 'Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring' gives me chicken skin, as the Hawaiians say. In the midst of the piano's rolling notes are the sublimely controlled yet joyful cymbals, lightly crashing, and the stand-up bass picking up the melody here and there. And over all of it, Bunny out there dancing, a smile lighting up her face, red hair flying. So check out Jacques Loussier! I recommend him to anyone feeling sorry for themselves. It's hard to whinge and listen to him at the same time.
".....une fleche ardente sur un mur de soleil."

The second splash of sanity in the midst of a dung beetle day came from another citoyen de la France, Carmen Bernos de Gasztold. De Gasztold was a French poet whose 'Prayers From the Ark' and 'The Creatures' Choir'  came my way from the church library. These simple, sweet and lyrical little poems are spoken from the perspective of the different animals on the Ark, published during Carmen's long stint at Abbeye Saint Louis du Temple. There is just a hint of the unusual grammar and word placement that denotes foreign writing. How I love translated poetry! And how I wish I spoke French. I think there are some beautiful subtleties that didn't quite make it into the English translation. But they have been very capably translated by the great Rumer Godden. 
Carmen Bernos manages to convey something wonderfully essential to the character of each 'friendly beast', usually with wit and wordplay. Here is The Prayer of the Bee, but it just as easily could have been The Mole, The Starfish or The Prayer of the Glow-Worm, all gems.

Prayer of the Bee
Lord,
I am not one to despise Your gifts.
May You be blessed
Who spread the riches of Your sweetness
for my zeal.......
Let my small span of ardent life
melt into our great communal task;
to lift up to Your glory
this temple of sweetness,
a citadel of incense,
a holy candle, myriad-celled,
moulded of Your graces
and of my hidden work.

-Carmen Bernos de Gasztold

Rumer Godden's account of the translating of these prayerful poems is engaging and beautiful. She writes that Carmen Bernos' poems were not influenced by her life at the Abbaye. They were written long before, during a hard life working at a silk factory near Paris-during enemy occupation. She writes:
"The Abbaye has only endorsed what she knew a prayer must be-if it is to have any meaning; not something dreamy or wishful, not a cry to be used in emergency, not even a plea, and not necessarily comforting. A prayer is a giving out, an offering, compounded of honest work and acceptance of the shape in which one has been created-even if it is to be regretted as much as the monkey's-of these humble things added to the great three, faith, hope, and love."
I can relate to these little prayers of the animals, each in their own circumstances and situations, faithful eyes on their Creator, trusting, hopeful. May I be as such!
So merci, Jacques, Rumer et Carmen! I really needed that.