Notes From A Burning House

Today: renaissance music, outdoor sex, friars, and e.e. cummings.

“We Merry Minstrels” is a madrigal group I sang with for several consecutive summers.  We would sing on Sunday afternoons on a fairway at the Theatricum Botanicum, an outdoor theatre and garden in Topanga.

We had to provide our own period costumes.  This requires some expenditure, as these costumes can be quite expensive.  Eventually I made a trip to Ventura, and paid a lot of money.  My initial idea, vetoed by the group, was to dress up as a friar.  It would have been such a delightful, subversive joke for the group to include one friar who sang songs that were sometimes bawdy.

Thomas Morley’s “Now Is The Month of Maying” is one of the most familiar examples of the English madrigal.  It’s a joyous song about screwing outdoors, a clear precursor to The Beatles’ "Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?"

Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are playing (fa la la…)
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass. (Fa la la…)

The Spring, clad all in gladness,
Doth laugh at Winter’s sadness (fa la la…)
And to the bagpipe’s sound
The nymphs tread out their ground. (Fa la la…)

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Fie then, why sit we musing,
Youth’s sweet delight refusing? (Fa la la…)
Say, dainty nymphs, and speak,
Shall we play at barley-break? (Fa la la…)

“Barley-break” is a euphemism synonymous with “a roll in the hay.” Yes, there was an old country game called ‘Barley Break’ that was played by couples and involved switching partners. It is supposed by some that one thing led to another as the wine ran down and the fireflies came out. I am sure the protagonist of this song does not have it in mind to play a simple game of tig with the dainty nymphs, and it is the thinnest pretense to suppose this song is about dancing. 

Technically, friars differed from monks in that the latter lived in cloisters whereas friars walked in the world, charged with living a life of poverty and service to the community.  (By this definition, could I be called a Zen friar?)  From the middle ages on, friars became known for corruption and avarice as well, satirized or denounced in much of the literature that survives from those times.  Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Rabelais come immediately to mind, with their images of friars selling indulgences, indulging in drink, lifting their frocks in order to love their neighbor, and so on.  (Erasmus was more concerned with hypocritical scholars and entrepreneurial clerics.)

With all that tradition behind me, why not have a friar in the choir singing of love, longing, and fate?  Alas, vetoed. 

Friars may have been judged harshly by the serious, yet Renaissance humorists found them a figure of fun, making them fools and hypocrites vulnerable to the influences of springtime.  The more secular of them even felt, as e.e. cummings would write later, “kisses are a far better fate than wisdom.”  They mocked hypocrisy and forgave harmless frailty.  Our spontaneous, erotic exuberance will out, and it disdains our vain institutions.   Moreover, it contains a certain kind of wisdom.

Oh, let’s have that whole poem:

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

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wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

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my blood approves,

and kisses are a far better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers.  Don’t cry

–the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter which says

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we are for each other; then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

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And death i think is no parenthesis

–e.e. cummings

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From the Zen tradition, Ikkyu and WonHyo understand and nod – these are two figures who were familiar with the monastery and the brothel.

Now is the month of Maying and this blog bows in gratitude for the teaching of grammarians and madmen alike.  Now you kids go outside and play.  (Wink.)

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