Darkling Wood

The Bringer of Joy, again

Last year, I released this hymn under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license. I've noticed, however, that for some purposes even that may be overly restrictive, so I'm now re-releasing under CC's most accommodating license,  CC BY 4.0. That provides all the rights the previous one did, and removes the SA restriction. If for any reason anyone needs some different licensing, feel free to email me at:

---

The Bringer of Joy by Thomas Kelly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

The Bringer of Joy

As a doe yearns for water, Lord, my soul yearns for you.  
As a weary land waits for rain, so I will wait for you.  
And I will gladly sing of your love, and proclaim your mighty deed,  
for you have saved me from distress. 

As a mighty cedar reaches high, so I will reach for you.  
As a mountain river seeks the sea, so I will seek for you.  
And I will gladly sing of your love, and proclaim your mighty deed,  
for you have saved me from distress. 

Holy One, mighty God, Word made flesh, Wonder Counselor,  
glorious in majesty are you. 

You're the Alpha and the Omega, the Great Bright Morning Star.  
You're the Lion of Judah, King of Kings, the only Son of God.  
And I will gladly sing of your love, and proclaim your mighty deed,  
for you have saved me from distress. 

The Bringer of Joy by Thomas Kelly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

The Bringer of Joy

This is a hymn I wrote back in 1986. The music is based on the Jupiter movement from Holst's The Planets and the title is a play on Holst's title, The Bringer of Jollity. From time to time I'm asked for permission to reproduce the song for hymn books and such like, and I've kept meaning to just release the thing under a Creative Commons license, so folk can go ahead as they like. I believe that Holst's original music is now out of copyright, and I'm not sure what copyright status that leaves my variation in. However, to the extent that I am able or need to release my tune, I'm doing that here along with the words. The words are followed by a screenshot of the music for the melody, and suggested chords. Thanks to the unknown typesetting musician, probably in Ann Arbor or Lansing, who produced that score from my handwritten version. Finally, with the final line --  "...saved me from distress" -- finishing on the super-tonic (A in the key of G), the ending never felt right when singing, so if anyone figures out a sensible way to finish and wants to let me know, I can mention it here. Meanwhile, I found a cover on Youtube, that does a pretty good job (relevant part starting around 1:51). Here then, The Bringer of Joy:

 

---

The Bringer of Joy by Thomas Kelly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

The Bringer of Joy

As a doe yearns for water, Lord, my soul yearns for you.  
As a weary land waits for rain, so I will wait for you.  
And I will gladly sing of your love, and proclaim your mighty deed,  
for you have saved me from distress. 

As a mighty cedar reaches high, so I will reach for you.  
As a mountain river seeks the sea, so I will seek for you.  
And I will gladly sing of your love, and proclaim your mighty deed,  
for you have saved me from distress. 

Holy One, mighty God, Word made flesh, Wonder Counselor,  
glorious in majesty are you. 

You're the Alpha and the Omega, the Great Bright Morning Star.  
You're the Lion of Judah, King of Kings, the only Son of God.  
And I will gladly sing of your love, and proclaim your mighty deed,  
for you have saved me from distress. 

The Bringer of Joy by Thomas Kelly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

---

How Brexit will affect the ordinary person. An example

UK/EU? Scotland/UK? Yes/no, in/out, shakeitallabout. As I argued concerning Scottish independence, so too it is with Brexit.

I doubt many people really know what the overall impact will be of either leaving or staying in the EU. I'm sure I don't (although I comfort myself with the notion that at least I know I don't know, unlike many of the ostensibly informed commentators yelling at each other from their respective bunkers). But it is possible to observe some very specific practical details that absolutely will make a difference to many ordinary people's lives. Here's one.

Pretend (if necessary) that you are an English youngster, just out of college, looking for a job. Or maybe you're a late 20-something Scot, already moving in your career but interested in adding some international experience to your CV. Or you could be a Welsh 30 or 40 something, planning to grab the family and head to somewhere less hilly, and a bit warmer, with a good job to fuel your endeavors. Hey, you could even be 50+, Northern Irish, and just getting a wee bit fed up with all that rain and the incessant green, but with absolutely no plans to retire yet.

Fortunately for you, as any of the above, you were born in the United Kingdom, and because of that you are an unusually privileged individual. You possess, or can easily and legally obtain, an extremely valuable piece of paper. It's a little booklet, purple on the outside, with lots of magical-looking wavy lines and strange codes and runes on the pages, one of which contains your name and picture. It's called a passport, and it is an unusually powerful artifact, since as a symbol of your citizenship of an EU country, it gives you the right to live and work in a wide range of other countries, comprising one of the most substantial economic regions on the planet. 

As such, that little booklet creates for you a vast landscape of life and job opportunities that many in the world would risk death for. In fact, some already do. Just as in the movie Elysium, where citizenship unlocked the healing beds needed to heal the daughter of Matt Damon's character's friend, so too does your citizenship of Britain in the EU unlock some pretty life-enhancing opportunities. It is a work permit on steroids; a veritable Get Into Work Free card.

Now, take that precious passport of yours, rip it up, and flush it down the toilet. Courtesy of Brexit.

 

(Yes, I'm aware that the above preaches as much to the choir as to the rest. Maybe I should have written it for Gran.)

 

 

 

But We Can Still Rise Now, And Be That People Again

It was coincidental with the aftermath of the Scottish Independence vote, but timely nevetheless, that I just picked up a copy of "Poems That Make Grown Men Cry", by Anthony and Ben Holden (Eds.) They didn't make me cry, but one of them does seem very apt given the result of the vote:

Let My Country Awake

Where my mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depths of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action --
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
       Rabindranath Tagore (1930s)

The Phantasmagorical Argument For God’s Existence

These days, popular argument about the existence of God remind me a bit of my learning about snakes on moving to the US. Of course when I first arrived I expected to see them slithering up and down the walls, but although it’s nothing so Indiana Jones-esque, common sense leads one to learn at least a little. One useful skill is being able to differentiate the highly venomous Coral Snake from the non-venomous Scarlet Kingsnake. At first sight, they look similar, but with a little extra information, and the following rhyme as a reminder, they’re easy to tell apart: “Red on yellow kills a fellow, red on black venom lack.”

The basic lesson is, make sure you know which is which, and if you want to mess with a Coral Snake, you’d better know what you’re doing. I just wish the current batch of atheist apologists – a lot of what I see from them looks remarkably like defense of a faith – would take the same approach.

 Take, for example, the following argument attacked by Richard Dawkins at the beginning of Chapter 3 of his “The God Delusion”:

 “There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God”

 

Scottish Independence -- Why I'd Vote "No"

I don’t get to vote in tomorrow's Scottish Independence Referendum. Although I was born and have lived in or around Glasgow for 80% of my life, I am denied a vote simply because for the most recent 20%, I’ve been living and working in the US. But my Scottish credentials are as good as any man’s. I have built sandcastles at Saltcoats, moaned about the rain while on a caravan holiday in Millport, and stopped many times for a break at the Green Welly near Crianlarich as I drove “up north”.

Saltcoats

I know the right way to say “Milngavie” ("mul-guy"), and “Sauchiehall Street” ("sucky-hall street"), and know that of Daphne and Maggie Broon, it’s Maggie you’d want to winch. I went to school in working class Johnstone, and then onto yooni, at Glasgow and then “Embra”. I’ve climbed the In Pin on Skye, and Masquerade at Auchenstarry Quarry, where the most dangerous part of the latter was if you fell off into the pond and cut yourself on a submerged trolley dumped there by a local team of urchins from Croy you might catch hepatitis.

 And even today I can confuse my local Texan friends by pronouncing “magnet” with its appropriate three syllables (“mah-gih-nit” -- what else?), or just downright scare them by referring to the thing I use to edge my lawn as a “petrol-driven strimmer” instead of their “gas weed whacker”. And I can actually say "It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht."

The Cave

In the heart of every man there is a cave,
Cold and dark beyond reach of mortal arms.
The cold and dark leach out, and slowly take his life,
Crudely, sticking heart to bone, mind to stone,
Cloying but bitter to the tongue, it is not for tasting,
But we do it anyway.

Save for a few, who seem to stretch immortally,
Reaching out, approaching, then breaking in,
Moving always forward, though repelled, disgusted even,
And tired, so deadly worn; falling, but never lying for long,
In the stench and sting of the black lie,
Then they pound, alone.

The door, if ancient walls deserve the insult,
Seems motionless at first. Rock steady, roots go deep,
What else should they expect? An arch?
A gateway? A welcome? Not here.
But then, the shift, a nudge, the slightest tremor.
They’d been warned.

Stepping through, we cannot follow.
We can only surmise, wait, or perhaps find our own.
But I’ve heard, often enough by now, that the dark burns
Brighter than all the suns. Brighter than that word can even mean.
I would like to try, but I am afraid.
But so, it seems, were they.

In Praise Of My Teachers

I hated school. I was an A student all the way, at or near top of the class from my earliest years, but I despised the place. It bored me almost senseless. I read voraciously at home, especially science and most especially physics. I grew crystals, built my own electronic systems, collected and categorized rocks and fossils, tried to build my own Wilson Cloud Chamber (failing because I couldn't get any dry ice or radium), and ran many chemistry experiments, even unwittingly making chlorine gas at one point. I philosophized and pondered, schemed and plotted. But when I got to school, a switch was flicked, and the misery of boredom ensued from about 9:00am to 4:00pm every weekday. Gawd how I hated that brain-killing, interest-nullifying place.

Except ... except when I was in the care of a few teachers. Those few, those happy few, those band of poor sods who had to keep me entertained; they rescued school, for me, from being an utter waste of my time. I doubt the rest of my teachers were bad -- in the face of the modern state school system, even back then, it takes a veritable warrior of pedagogy to stay effective -- but these are the ones who stand out for me.

Amazon Kindle 1-Click Fun

I have a love-hate relationship with my Kindle. I love that I can carry a lot of books on the plane, so I don't run out. But I hate that I can carry a lot of books on the plane, because it makes it easy for my ADD-like brain to leap from book to book, leaving each unread. I love that it, a Paperwhite, has a subtle built-in backlight, because it makes it possible to read in bed without disturbing T-. But I hate that it makes it so easy to read in bed, thereby distracting me from trying out Stimulus Control Therapy to overcome insomnia (it's 1am and I'm blogging, so go figure). And DRM -- well I just hate that. Overall, I argue myself back and forth as to whether to just embrace Kindle-osity and get reading, or to discard it completely and revert to paper. And until now, I've never been able to settle that argument. Amazon support just helped me do so. And paper won. 

Resistance

I suppose I should get up now, I really should.
It's all that stands between me and the things I could
Do to better myself, and start my day,
And walk, or run, or both, and write and say
Things needing to be said, to make a living. 

My inbox is an easy task, just one foot then the other.
It's mostly spam or nonsense anyhow, so no bother
To read, and click, and click, and read, and rinse
Repeat, until they're gone and done, since
After that the way is clear, to make a living.

And yet both quilt and mouse feel heavier than lead.
Despite the promise of efficiency's thrill, instead
I wait, and frown, and twitch and drown in all
The teeming, scheming, demon-filled hell
Of distractions keeping me from living.