Exotica

Awake, my soul;
awake, lyre and harp.
I will awake the dawn.

Jim Morrison stole from that. Lots of far better poets as well. It's from Psalm 108 and we read it during Lauds this morning. This particular sentiment occurs a several places in the Psalms and whenever something like this comes up. I think of this:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight

And it isn't surprising that the Rubaiyat  feels similar because in the middle east it feels like that when morning breaks. It feels that way on the Bay of Fundy where I grew up too. Every summer morning there, the world is created anew every day. First there is light. Then ever so slowly the horizon comes into view as the mist dissolves dividing the dome above from the below. Then the land appears. Sit around and you get to see vegetation, animals and humans in that order.

The thing is that it isn't symbolism. This stuff isn't mean to stand for something else, it is what it is.

Which brings me to this:

I bought a set of seven of these on the weekend. I was shopping for antiques and couldn't resist this bit of exotica. Here is what the other side looks like.

That's a Mai Tai giving her that lovely skin tone. The temptation is to say, that is why they hate us; because we trivialize their culture into exotica.

The truth is, we go to foreign cultures for our sensual imagery. Growing up in Quebec, I used to take offense at the way kids from the English-speaking parts of Canada imagined girls from Quebec. Then it hit me that kids in Quebec entertain similar fantasies about American girls. The ____ is always ____ on the other side of the border (you can fill that in for yourself).

But there is something special about what Alan Lomax once called "the old high culture" of the Mediterranean. When that culture speaks in sensual terms it does so with an authority we cannot ignore. Cleopatra will always be Cleopatra.

Except in the Bible. Rachel, Rebecca and Ruth never get their full due as women. We always manage to miss just how sensual images the Bible uses are. We go to the Rubaiyat because we love the Exotica but that same kind of thinking permeates the Bible. This bit of Isaiah, for example, was also read at Lauds this morning:

As a young man marries a virgin,
your Builder shall marry you;
and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride
so shall your God rejoice in you.

I'm feeling a bit humbled about my ability to interpret this morning having badly misread a news story related to a post I have now deleted. But even humbled, I have a hard time imagining how anyone could not read that as meaning what it appears to mean.