The life and times of Umberto Cannelini

The life and times of Umberto Cannelini

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I have been asked to tell you my story, to share with you the particulars of the kind of life I live, myself and those of my ilk. If you have any passing interest or even mild curiosity, I invite you to listen. Otherwise, well, I will completely understand.

You will not envy me. First, there is the fact of my name — Umberto. It is neither strong nor beautiful. It does not roll easily off the tongue or inspire awe, but catches in the throat and lands like a splat on the ears. It’s as if someone hadn’t an idea in the world what to call me — um, um — and then was convulsed by a sudden sharp cough — berto. But it is the name I have and I will have no other, so I simply have to live with it. I do understand that the meaning of my name is “famous,” but that merely adds a cruel irony on top of the disphony of my name, because I have no claim to any sort of celebrity or even notoriety.

Because, you see, I am a bean, a humble white kidney bean, Phaseolus Vulgaris. There you have me: humble, ordinary, vulgar.

My life is short, my existence constrained. I do not travel. I see nothing and know nothing of the wider world. All I know is the inside of the green pod that I share with a half dozen or so of my brothers and sisters. And my destiny? Our destiny? Our reason for being? To be eaten. We are torn from our home just as we have reached maturity, thrown into boiling water and eaten, or stuffed and sealed in a tin can later to be eaten, or set out to succumb to a slow desiccation so we may we rehydrated weeks or months or years after and be eaten.

What kind of life is that, to serve no purpose other than the benefit of another, to be nurtured only to be sacrificed, to be denied any and all greater glory?

I will tell you what kind of life that is. I have said already that you will not envy me and, doubtless, you will not. But maybe you should. My life is not about glory, but about service, not about aggrandizing my own treasures, but about putting the richness of my substance to good use, fulfilling the need of beings with whom I share this planet.

And though my life is short, while I live it is a wonder. My mother is the earth and my father the sky, and the Maker of all that is that sees me, sees me and calls me good. Is there any better reward than to be called good, to know that your unique beauty is unmatched, to be useful, appreciated, valued?

If you have listened until the end of my story, I pray that you will not envy me, but that the particular glory of your being, your humble purpose granted you for the sake of an other, your real goodness won not by achievement but vouchsafed as gift will be revealed to you, and that you too will have a story to tell.

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If I Were Gazan

If I Were Gazan

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If I were Gazan
I would pray for sleep
sweet unconsciousness
for dreamless sleep
unhaunted by grey ash or orange fire or crimson blood.

If I were Gazan
I would cleave to memory
consoling souvenir
sunlight dancing on my wife’s face
dappling the beguiling smile now forever erased.

If I were Gazan
I would scream at God
dumbfounded rage
badgering the pitiless One
unmoved unmoving while his children are returned to dust.

If I were Gazan
I would rue my grandchildren
cruel blessing
their unbearable tomorrows
untempered by any yesterdays in which to find fleeting succor.

If I were Gazan
I would pray to never sleep
desperate vigilance
my only remaining duty
to help them survive — to breath, to touch, to be touched — one more day.

If I were Gazan —
but I am not Gazan and you are
unthinkable injustice
that the same sun and the same God
shine warm and bright on me and burn you with searing flame.

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Somnambulant

Somnambulant

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Somnambulant rocket ships
Poured down my throat
Stick like pins
Before bursting into unquenchable flame.

Somnambulant butterflies
Twitter on Elon Musk’s nose
Restoring order to this
Fractious folly.

Somnambulant terrapins
Strictly following orders
Fastidiously dying
One by one by one.

Somnambulant oboists
Iridescent against the crimson sky
Bursting boundaries
Like bouncing billiard balls.

Somnambulant mysterium
Creeping along the edges
Flooding the universe
With ineffable grace.

Somnambulant rocket ships
Twitter on Elon Musk’s nose
Fastidiously dying
Like bouncing billiard balls.

Somnambulant butterflies
Strictly following orders
Bursting boundaries
With ineffable grace.

Somnambulant terrapins
Iridescent against the crimson sky
Flooding the universe
Before bursting into unquenchable flame.

Somnambulant oboists
Creeping along the edges
Stick like pins
Fractious folly.

Somnambulant mysterium
Poured down my throat
Restoring order to this
One by one by one.

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Partly Cloudy

Partly Cloudy

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The forecast is partly cloudy. Must be the weather-maker can’t make up her mind. Or perhaps it is we who are confused, unable to understand a thing as it is, but only as what it is not, not wholly sunny, not wholly cloudy.

But why must a bluebird day be cloudless? Why can’t a cerulean sky decorated here and there and there with cotton ball clouds be considered perfect in itself, whole in itself, not part this or part that?

August 17 was such a day, a playful breeze rustling skirts and tussling hair as we gathered on the roof of the Harmac in downtown Cedar Rapids, a perfect day, a perfect day for a wedding, bright sun warming our foreheads and sparkling on shirts and dresses and ties, blue and red, yellow and purple, a kaleidoscope of bright colors worn per the bride’s request, all of us sharing her joy, all of us sharing their joy, as huge puffy clouds drifted overhead.

As he said, “I give myself to you to be your husband,” and as she said, “I give myself to you to be your wife,” the day, wind and sun and cloud, gave itself to us, not in part, but in whole, imprinting that time-stilling moment indelibly, not only on our minds and on our hearts, but on our skin, too.

There is little in this world that is all this or all that, but much in this world that is beautiful, beautiful as it is, at any given moment and in any given place an amalgam of this and that, of feeling and color, of sense and mystery, of change and stillness, of sun and cloud.

“Now, to what can I compare the people of this day?,” Jesus said. “They are like children sitting in the marketplace. One group shouts to the other, ‘We played wedding music for you, but you wouldn’t dance! We sang funeral songs, but you wouldn’t cry!’” But you, perhaps neither dancing nor crying, are as you are, and that is whole, that is good, that is perfect, and that is what we must see and love.

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April

April

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April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month of dead land, in Maine a time of in-between, of not still and not yet, not still winter but not yet spring, mud season, colorless season unless you count the dull brown of lawn and roadside or the dull grey of bare trunks and branches. I might wish to have been born in July, like my wife, revelling in the brilliant light dancing among the yellows and purples and reds of the lilies, or in October, like my grandson, tramping up a rock-strewn trail among oak and birch and maple exulting in their autumnal dress.

But I was born in the cruellest month, this month mixing memory and desire, each birthday cataloging an ever increasing number of days and months and years irretrievable immutable shaping me but also binding me a looming thatness out of which or against which I now must make myself wanting yearning praying to be free to be able to live in and for and by what is beautiful.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month stirring dull roots with spring rain, asking old limbs to dance and a jaded spirit to soar, teasingly intimating that adventure and revelation and joy are just over the horizon …

Or perhaps they are …

Perhaps April is not the cruellest month, but a month for hope undimmed and unvanquished, undeterred by bleak days and starless nights, unfazed by any accumulation of burdensome remembrance, unfettered by any limitations laid on spirit or body by time or space.

April is the bravest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, infusing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots to new life with spring rain.

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The watcher

The watcher

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Our writers’ group assignment today … We each took a book and found the fifth word on the forty-seventh page of the book. We wrote down each of these words, eleven words in all. Then we wrote pieces that had no requirements other than they must contain these eleven words. The words: the, the, Scioto (a river), was, his, fisherman, impressive, hill, livings, front, edge. Here is my piece …

He stood on the knobby edge of the granite escarpment, gnarly limbs of stunted spruces dotting the steep rise of the familiar hill behind him, far from the first time he had stood here, just here as he stood now, wordless and transfixed, his eyes following the tumultuous freshet twisting and turning beneath his feet, its waters shrouded in morning mist, heedlessly bent on its one purpose: to spill itself into the sea.

The name of the stream, if you must know, was the Scioto, but the name meant little to him, merely an epithet rather arbitrarily attached by men who hardly knew the river, who could hardly know a river that lived and moved and had its being centuries before they had theirs. They borrowed the word from the Wyandots, another affront, naming a river not theirs with a word not theirs, stealing from the peoples who had made their livings for generations from these fertile waters.

He hardly knew the river, though undoubtedly better than most, the best moments of his now long life spent here watching its moods, spring and summer, fall and winter, walking its stony banks, wading its stiff currents, trailing fingers in the frigid waters. He always came here alone, in the commonly understood sense of the word, though he knew with absolute certainty, that in this hallowed place he was never alone. Given the constraints of his delimited body and his oh so brief lifespan, he was sure the river knew him better than he knew it.

He watched now as a lone fisherman stepped in front of a mid-stream boulder, carefully moving in the direction of a smooth run along near bank. Pausing in the eddy, the stranger raised his rod tip and, after two or three false casts, set the fly at the end of his leader gently into the seam between run and eddy. His steady retrieve was abruptly interrupted, rod now bent, line spooling off his reel, and then the head-shaking leap of an consummately impressive rainbow trout.

The fisherman took back line, steadily and surely bringing the fish to net. After admiring the exquisite silver and pink flanks of this inimitable creature, he held the fish beneath the babbling surface for the stream for a few short moments before releasing it to its proper home, which he, not the fisherman, but the one watching the fisherman from the granite escarpment, which he hoped too was his own proper home, because when the fisherman lifted his eyes from the waters looking upwards to where he himself stood, he realized that watched and watcher were the same.

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Heirloom

Heirloom

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I had no inheritance from my parents. Any remaining monies were exhausted in my mother’s end of life care. And few of their tangible belongings have been passed to me. I have my mother’s violin and her dining room set, a Celtic cross that my father hung around his neck. And nothing, nothing at all, save a few Bible commentaries bearing my grandfather’s name, from grandparents on either side.

Not even stories, stories of ancestors remembered and passed along generation to generation. The only grandparents I knew were my mother’s parents and they lived three thousand miles distant on the opposite coast. Our nuclear family lived isolated, far both physically and emotionally from any extended family and my parents told few, if any, stories, of childhood, of their parents or grandparents, of characters in the family tree, noble or ignoble.

My heirloom, the one single entity of precious value my parents purposefully passed to me was their faith, the faith that had shaped and directed my mother’s consciousness from the very beginning of her life, the faith that had captivated and delighted my father of a sudden when he came upon it or it came upon him as a college student in Michigan.

It was a faith, not of rote or custom or habit, not driven by compulsion or fear of celestial consequences, not a means of attaching themselves to a desired social cohort, but a thing deeply personal, palpably passionate, curious and creative and explorative and resilient. It was not a piece of their life together, but its centerpiece, the first principle, the driving motivation, the guiding star in every decision they made, in every project they undertook.

It was this faith, this kind of faith — generous and humble, earnest and accepting — that they passed to me. But, of course, faith, genuine faith, is such a thing that cannot be passed. It cannot be possessed secondhand. I did live their faith for a while, as a child and even into young adulthood, eager to please them, eager to do right and be right.

But one day, not in a single moment, but in an accumulation of moments, existential crises and intellectual discoveries, seeing new things, feeling new things, sensing for myself the real meaning of the Jesus among us, the Jesus with me, that faith became mine, no more my parent’s faith, but mine, the centerpiece of my life.

My heirloom is not really something my parents could give me, but only something they could point to, hoping and praying, that for the sake of my their joy, for the sake of my own joy, for the sake of joy itself, I would be able to find my way there.

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And gladness of heart

And gladness of heart

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And gladness of heart …

I was sixteen years old, a high school sophomore and a trumpet player, selected for the Massachusetts All-State Band. The festival and concert that year were held in Plymouth. My girlfriend at the time was a junior, singing alto in the All-State Chorus.

I have only vague memories of the pieces our band played that weekend and no memories at all of our conductor. But my memories of each composition sung by the chorus and of their exuberant and charismatic director are vivid and enduring.

Every time the band took a rehearsal break, I would run to the room where the chorus was practicing to watch and to listen, not because my girlfriend was there, at least not entirely, but because of the guest choral conductor and because of the music.

The conductor was Vito Mason. I remember him as tall, with dark hair and a commanding physical presence. He would lead the choir through a series of remarkable vocal exercises, not singing, but vocalizing nonsense syllables and sounds, teaching them to follow closely, so closely, the nuances of his gestures, responding to his direction with changes in volume, intensity, timbre, mood. He had them, and me too, literally at his fingertips.

And the music they sang, yes, every piece, enthralled me, but one song, one song in particular, became indelibly imprinted on my soul. He prepped them for the opening of the piece. He would give them only the smallest of hand signals, not giving listeners any foreshadowing of what was to come, and they would suddenly shatter the silence with their bold declamation …

Have ye not known?
Have ye not heard?
Hath it not been told you from the beginning?
Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?

Oh, my! Even now as I write these words, the profundity and power of Randall Thompson’s perfect setting of the Isaiah text— yes, I will say perfect! — rings in my ears and overwhelming emotion wells up within me. From the beginning, from the first unison notes, this song takes hold of me, body and spirit, and will not let me go.

But that is only the beginning. The song performed by the All-State Chorus to close the Plymouth program is actually two songs, the final two sections of a larger work by Thompson entitled, The Peaceable Kingdom. After the short and thunderous opening, “Have ye not known,” comes the longer melodic and hypnotic, “Ye shall have a song,” featuring eight parts, a double choir …

Ye shall have song,
as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept;
And gladness of heart
As when one goeth with a pipe
To come into the mountain of the Lord.

The text is simple, unassuming, almost innocuous, but — oh — the music! Building, ever slowly, but ever surely, soaring, dancing, exulting. I had never in my life known or heard the piece before, but once hearing it my life was forever changed. Then and now, every time I hear the antiphonal phrases, one of the double choirs answering the other, “and gladness of heart, and gladness of heart, and gladness of heart, and gladness of heart” involuntary shivers run over my body and my heart and mind are consumed by the music, made one with the music. In that moment, there is no music and no me, just the being, being in that place of exquisite and incomparable joy.

I have a recording of that piece, of that concert, of that sublime performance by eighty high school students led by a man they had only known two days that left an audience of parents and friends and music educators, and me, in awe. I listen to that recording still, and every time I do, it is not that I am taken back there again, but I am taken again, in a new moment, to a place I have come to know and to love, a place of pure delight.

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