Ben Jonson: On My First Sonne

Ben Jonson was an English poet and playwright contemporary with (and admirer of and rival to) William Shakespeare. His seven-year-old son Benjamin died in the plague; Jonson responded by writing the following heartbreaking poem. Reading it always makes me tear up.

On My First Sonne

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy;

Seven yeeres tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I loose all father, now. For why

Will man lament the state he should envie?

To have so soon scap'd worlds and fleshes rage,

And, if no other miserie, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye

Ben. Johnson his best piece of poetrie.

For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

For the the analytical type, here's a useful explanation of some elements of the poem.

Jonson also lost his first daughter, Mary, in infancy, and wrote her a beautiful elegy (here rendered in more modern spelling). This took place ten years before his son's death. Somehow it's more hopeful than, or at least not as devastatingly sad as, the tribute to his son. I think it reads more like a headstone engraving.

On My First Daughter

Here lies, to each her parents' ruth,

Mary, the daughter of their youth;

Yet, all heaven's gifts, being heaven's due,

It makes the father less to rue.

At six months' end, she parted hence,

With safety of her innocence;

Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,

In comfort of her mother's tears,

Hath placed amongst her virgin-train;

Where, while that severed doth remain,

This grave partakes the fleshly birth;

Which cover lightly, gentle earth!

Jonson wrote a lot of really beautiful poetry. Maybe I'll return to some of it at a later day. To end this blog entry, here's a poem most of us have heard at some time or another, probably in a mid-20th-century song, without being aware of its origin. (For the record, while Jonson's wife's name is not known with certainty -- the best guess is Ann Lewis -- it wasn't Celia.)

To Celia

Drink to me, only, with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

And I'll not look for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise,

Doth ask a drink divine:

But might I of Jove's nectar sup,

I would not change for thine.

I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,

Not so much honouring thee,

As giving it a hope, that there

It could not withered be.

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

And sent'st back to me:

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

Not of itself, but thee.

Music I love: Coloratura (La pastorella al prato, etc.)

I have always loved music. The earliest music I remember is Church hymns and my father's folk music -- The Brothers Four, The Kingston Trio, The Chad Mitchell Trio, like that. I grew up listening to 70s pop music on AM radio. I took up violin in fourth grade and was introduced to the genre of classical music ("classical" in the broad sense). It was only much later, in my 20s, after coming home from my LDS missionary service in Italy, that I developed a taste for operatic singing. Luciano Pavarotti's voice was my introduction to this genre, and he remains perhaps my favorite operatic artist.

Eventually, I also came to appreciate women's operatic voices. When I began to get a bit familiar with Italian opera, I was drawn to a particular style of singing called bel canto, Italian for "beautiful singing". One feature of bel canto that I enjoyed was coloratura, an Italian term meaning "coloration". Coloratura refers to a collection of acrobatic virtuoso singing techniques that the singer (usually a soprano) uses to decorate her song. Doing it well requires tremendous diaphragm control and singing power; the result is unmistakable, breathtaking, amazing.

Perhaps the best-known coloratura piece is the second aria sung by the wicked Queen of the Night in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. This aria, Der Hölle Rache (Eng. Hell's vengeance), is often called simply "The Queen of the Night aria"; the link points to a particularly well-known coloratura part. (And if you don't think such singing is hard work, listen to Ms. Damrau panting at 4:15.)

A more extreme example of a soprano using coloratura is in Rossini's La Cenerentola (Eng. Cinderella). Rossini is rather notorious for writing highly ornate, difficult coloratura passages, particularly for his sopranos. Here is Cecilia Bartoli singing the final aria of the opera, Naqui al affano...Non piú mesta (actually two arias sung one after the other); the link points to the very end, where the singer traverses an almost unbelievable series of passages. Whether you love this kind of music or laugh at it, you have to stand in awe at the sheer fact that a human being can sing such a thing.

(If you haven't gathered yet, I'm a Cecilia Bartoli fan. Some have criticized her Rossini singing as neurotic, like she's about to bite the head off a bat. Whatever. In my little world, no one tops Cecilia.)

One of my favorite coloratura pieces is La pastorella al prato (Eng. The shepherdess through the meadow), written, strangely enough, by Franz Schubert. It's a sweet little Italian poem set to a pretty tune. The words are as follows:

La pastorella al prato

Contenta se ne va,

Coll' agnellino a lato

Cantando in libertà.

Se l'innocente amore

Gradisce il suo pastore

La bella pastorella

Contenta ognor sarà.

(Literal translation:

The little shepherdess contentedly passes through the meadow,

With a little lamb beside her, singing in liberty.

If her shepherd appreciates innocent love,

The pretty little shepherdess will forever be happy.)

Here is my attempt at a more poetic, singable translation:

Passing through the meadow walks

The lovely shepherdess,

And with her little lamb she talks

And sings in love and bliss.

If her sweet shepherd boy

Returns her love and joy

As he said, the pretty maid

Will ever feel love's kiss.

I've tried to retain the original poem's rhyming scheme of ABABCC(dd)B, where the (dd) means a line with an internal rhyme: La bella pastorella. My translation's internal rhyme, As he said, the pretty maid, is the best I could come up with. I considered making the fourth line And sings in love like this, rhyming with a changed last line, Will ever feel such bliss, which I thought might sing a bit better.

Yeah, like anyone would actually ever sing this. :)

P.S. My last "Music I love" entry also featured an Italian poem about shepherds. What's up with that? Dunno. Just coincidence, I suppose.

Medical school application personal statement

(Copied and very slightly modified from Panda Bear's original. How do people come up with this stuff?)

“Mbuto.”

My African driver springs to his feet.

“Yes, Sahib.”

“Pass me another baby, I think this one has died.” I lay the dead infant in the pile by my feet. What I’d really like him to do is pass me an ice-cold bottle of the local beer. Compassion is hot, thirsty work. There is no ice in this wretched refugee camp, more's the pity, but as I’m here to help I will suffer in silence. I stare into the eyes of the African baby who is suffering from HIV or dengue fever or something gross and look out into the hot, dusty savannah and ask, “Why? Why, gender-neutral and non-judgmental Diety (or Deities), does this have to happen?”

“And why, Mbuto, is the air-conditioning on my Land Rover broken again?”

“One thousand pardons, Sahib, but the parts have not arrived.”

I will suffer. I have lived a life of privilege and my suffering serves to link me to the suffering of mankind. I roll the window down. Deity, it’s hot. How can people live here? Why don’t they move where it’s cool? Still, I see by the vacant stare from the walking skeletons who insist on blocking the road that they appreciate my compassion and I know that in a small way, I am making a difference in their lives.

Africa. Oh wretched continent! How long must you suffer? How long will you provide the venue to compensate for a low MCAT score? How many must die before I am accepted to a top-tier medical school?

When did I first discover that I, myself, desired to be a doctor? Some come to the decision late in life, often not until the age of five. The non-traditional applicants might not know until they are seven or even, as hard as it is to believe, until the end of ninth grade. I came to the realization that I, myself, wanted to be a doctor on the way through the birth canal when I realized that my large head was causing a partial third degree vaginal laceration. I quickly threw a couple of sutures into the fascia between contractions, so strong was my desire to help people.

My dedication to service was just beginning. At five I was counseling the first-graders on their reproductive options. By twelve I was volunteering at a suicide crisis center/free needle exchange hot-line for troubled transgendered teens. I’ll never forget Jose, a young Hispanic male with HIV who had just been kicked out of his casa by his conservative Catholic parents. He had turned to black tar heroin as his only solace and he was literally at the end of his rope when he called.

“How about a condom, Hose,” I asked. The J, as you know, is pronounced like an H in Spanish.

Annoying silence on the line. Heez, I was there to help him.

“Condoms will solve all of your problems,” I continued, “In fact, in a paper in which I was listed as the fourth author, we found that condoms prevent all kinds of diseases including HIV, which I have a suspicion is the root of your depression.”

More silence. No one had ever had such a rapport with him. He was speechless and grateful and I took his sobs as evidence of my compassion.

“Hey, it was double-blinded and placebo controlled, vato.” Cultural competence is important and I value my diverse upbringing, which has exposed me to peoples of many different ethnicities. I always say “What up, Homes,” to the nice young negroes who assemble my Big Mac, and I think they accept me as a soul brother.

“We also have needles, amigo. Clean needles would prevent HIV, too.”

My desire to be a physician has mirrored my desire to actualize my potential to serve humanity in many capacities. This may be something unheard of from medical school applicant, but I have a strong desire to help people. I manifest this desire by my dedication to obtaining all kinds of exposure to all different kinds of people, but mostly those from underserved and underprivileged populations. In fact, during a stint in a Doctors Without Borders spin-off chapter I learned the true meaning of underserved while staffing a mall health care pavilion in La Jolla, California.

Most of my friends are black or latino and I am a “Junior Cousin” of the Nation of Islam, where I teach infidel abasement techniques to the Mohammed (PBUHN) Scouts. I also am active in the fight for women’s reproductive rights, except of course for women in Afghanistan, who were better off before our current racist wars.

As Maya Angelou once said, “All men (and womyn) are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.” I feel this embodies my philosophy best, because the prospect of grad school is too horrible to contemplate.

Thoughts from the shower: Upside-down energy production

My morning shower, hot water flowing down my body, started a mental review of where our energy comes from. After some thought, I determined we have an "energy pyramid" available to us, but that to a large degree we invert the pyramid, drawing a large share of our energy from small, nonrenewable sources.

I believe we derive usable energy for our society from only five sources. In order of abundance, these are:

1. Solar
2. Tidal (lunar gravitational)
3. Geothermal
4. Nuclear
5. Petrochemical, coal, and natural gas

Of these, solar easily accounts for the vast majority of the energy we use. Hydroelectric plants, windmills, and campfires are three obvious examples of energy derived from solar power. Most schemes for increasing energy availability focus on maximizing the use of solar energy, either directly (through solar panel technology) or indirectly (through such transport media as wind harvesting or plant growing). This is reasonable, since solar power is far and away the most common source of energy available to us.

But once we get past solar, the vast majority of our energy is provided by the least abundant source: petrochemicals, coal, and natural gas. These are commonly called "fossil fuels", and are thought to have their origin in very early prehistoric collections of algae, plankton, and other biomass that were covered with mud and exposed to heat and pressure over tens or hundreds of millions of years. In effect, oil is a form of stored solar energy -- but unlike other forms of solar energy we use, oil is effectively unrenewable.

Petroleum is remarkable in other ways, too. It's the ideal material for making plastics. In our day, we don't realize what miraculous materials plastics are; we take them completely for granted. Our great-grandparents would set us straight in telling us that their shocking lack of iPods, air flight and ground travel technology, refrigeration, and even central plumbing was due not to basic technological deficiency, but primarily to the difficulty of working the needed materials -- difficulty which has largely been swept away by the versatility of plastics.

(Before you argue that iPod technology is not merely plastics, and that the "silicon revolution" was unknown to our great-grandparents, consider: What materials advances made the computer age possible? Was it just the semiconductivity of silicon that drove the process? Not at all; it was the increasing availability of plastics.)

In petroleum, we have the perfect starter material to make all variations of the fabulous, miraculous stuff called plastic, enough to last us and our descendants for literally tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So what do we do with it? We put it in our gas tanks and burn it up. Not a wise use of resources, methinks.

Coal, too, is an amazing material. It is composed of fossilized, carbonized plant material dating from 300 million years ago. Much coal still has the perfect impressions of its constituent ferns. In coming years, we will doubtless figure out how to examine coal and determine important bioinformation based on its structure. Coal beds probably constitute one of the best, most valuable textbooks into understanding the Earth's early history from hundreds of millions of years ago, a textbook we are only barely beginning to be able to read. It's utterly irreplaceable, replete with information we don't even know to ask about yet and cannot even dream of today. So what do we do with it? We dig it up and burn it to keep our houses warm. Surely I'm not the only one who finds this appalling.

In former times, people burned amber, not knowing what it was, but enjoying the beautiful pine scent it provided. Today we know that amber is fossilized tree resin from many millions of years ago. It commonly contains pollens, spores, and even whole insects from ancient prehistoric times, long before humans walked the earth. For all those years, our ancestors were burning up irreplaceable treasures, their information irretrievably destroyed, because it smelled nice.

Of course, our ancestors didn't know. But we do.

So what to do about this? We can't mandate zero fossil fuel usage starting tomorrow, unless we want to witness widespread starvation, rioting, and the fall of civilization as we know it. (Our modern farming methods, using gasoline- and diesel-powered tractors and combines for planting and harvesting vast acreage, are the science of turning petroleum into food. Take away the petroleum, and soon we all starve. Food storage, anyone?)

But we can start taking immediate, positive steps to wean ourselves from petroleum usage in two generations. If harvesting solar power is not enough, let's figure out ways to use tidal energy. Iceland uses geothermal; maybe we can find ways to make that more viable worldwide. In any case, we can certainly use uranium to drive fission (nuclear) power for the next hundred years, to take the edge off our energy hunger while we figure out how to wean ourselves from burning up our irreplaceable petroleum.

Of course, some among us are hungry for political power, as well. This deplorable power hunger means that, for example, OPEC will seek to stop any lessening of petroleum usage. Politicians (yes, Republicans as well as Democrats) will cynically and shamelessly use this issue as an election plank, with little thought to the truthfulness or sustainability of their position. So-called environmentalists will use the issue as a club to drive their often-deplorable agenda forward. Barack Obama will be elected president.

All these things are true, but ultimately not relevant. We must figure out how to stop our oil dependency, not just for our own immediate comfort and national security, but for the benefit of those who will come a thousand generations hence.

Music I love: Se tu m'ami

Some find my taste in music laughable, or baffling, or strange, or pedestrian. It's probably all of those, depending on the person doing the critique. But it's mine, and I take delight in it. I want to share examples of the music I love, with the thought that maybe others will share some of the pleasure I have found, or at least get a good laugh.

Se tu m'ami, se sospiri (pronounced more or less "Say two Mommy, say so speedy", better translated as "If you love me, if you sigh") is a poem from the early 18th century by Paolo Antonio Rolli. It was set to music in the late 19th century by Alessandro Parisotti, who for some reason attributed the composition to Giovanni Pergolesi. Why? Perhaps because Pergolesi lived around the time that Rolli wrote the poem, and Parisotti thought a spurious attribution would give his melody more credibility; perhaps because the melody evoked a more Baroque feel that seemed out of place in Parisotti's late Romantic era; perhaps something else entirely. I have no clue.

Here is a live version by Cecilia Bartoli.

The text of the poem is as follows (the parenthetical "tu" is added in the sung version to make it scan correctly with the music):

Se tu m'ami, se (tu) sospiri

Sol per me, gentil pastor,

Ho dolor de' tuoi martiri,

Ho diletto del tuo amor,

Ma se pensi che soletto

Io ti debba riamar,

Pastorello, sei soggetto

Facilmente a t'ingannar.

Bella rosa porporina

Oggi Silvia sceglierà,

Con la scusa della spina

Doman poi la sprezzerà.

Ma degli uomini il consiglio

Io per me non seguirò.

Non perché mi piace il giglio

Gli altri fiori sprezzerò.

Here's my attempt at a poetic translation:

If you love me, sighing deep

For me alone, dear shepherd boy,

In your suff'rings I take pity;

In your love I take great joy.

But you think my love I'll give

To you alone? This you believe?

Foolish shepherd! See how quick

And easily you self-deceive!

Silvia may likely choose

The pretty purple rose today,

But, lamenting thorns, tomorrow

That same rose she'll cast away.

For myself, I see no reason

Men's vain counsel I must take;

Just because I love the lily,

Other flow'rs I'll not forsake.

Listen to how the music conforms to the words. A beautiful, longing, lyric melody accompanies her initial declaration of love for the shepherd boy. But then, when she asks if he then expects her to return his love only to him, the music changes; she laughs! Unmistakably, the music changes to a tone of scornful laughter at the naive shepherd who expects fidelity.

I think that's just plain amazing. I don't understand how people possess such ability to compose music that fits like a glove over a hand -- how a simple tune can first communicate love and longing, then switch so effortlessly to mocking laughter. Music is not a language I speak, but it is a language I understand to some extent. I am left in awe at such offhand displays of genius.

The song itself doesn't express a particularly Latter-day-Saintesque sentiment about love and commitment, of course. It seems to subscribe more to the "Woman is fickle" point of view. But it does make for a pretty aria.