Flowing Wine
last updated: 21.x.2004
page status: update work in progress
At the end of the original posting of 'Invitation to the Feast', I said 'I don't know if it's possible to construct a complete rite with significantly fewer words.
Well, that rather depends on whether you consider a Cantrip to be a complete rite. In the spirit of "Hildegard meets Tantra", you can certainly construct a couplet thsat sums the whole thing up. I started with a piece of text from the writings of Beatrijs of Nazareth, one of the mystics I'd studied in the construction of the Free Spirit rituals.
"Her heart melts completely, She cannot feel Her body and she is totally powerless. She is so far overtaken by Love that she hardly can control herself, often losing control over her limbs or senses.
"Then, like a barrel full to the brim, if She is suddenly stirred up, she will overflow and flood immediately. She will be completely overcome by the fullness of Her heart, so that she has no choice but to lose herself completely."
Whether you read this metaphorically or as an actual description, it's fairly clear what's going on here. So it seems fair to add the white wine/red chalice symbolism from tantra and develop the stripped-down blank verse couplet
"Brim-full wine in a rose-red chalice
love is stirred and overflows."
The verse certainly ‘works’ - if you haven’t worked out at least one use to which it can be put you may not have been paying sufficient attention – and I was pleased with it...
...until I attended a workshop run by Delores Ashcroft-Nowicki and was fortunate enough to discuss balladry with her afterwards. I was persuaded that a scanning, rhyming version would work better (Delores has little time for ‘modern’ blank verse), and soon wished I’d tabled this as my piece for the workshop. However, back at home, I set to work.
Now, later on, wit the novenas, you'll find a discussion of how much, if at all, the words matter. Here I'll just say that if I'm working in a context where they do, I take great care to avoid unwanted side-effects. I’m not suggesting that I’m better at this stuff than anyone else, but in case it helps anyone else, here’s how I went about it:
The whole point of the thing is 'overflows' and 'rose' is one of very few decent rhymes, the latter needs to go at the end of line one.
"da da da da da da rose
da da da da overflows"
Note that this already smashes the blank verse version to smithereens, since not all of the words will fit. But I carried on anyway. 'brim-full wine' and 'love' are givens for the start of the two lines:
"Brim-full wine da da da rose
Love da da da overflows"
Now, 'chalice' uses up two of my remaining syllables, and I need 'red' as well. Too many notes, Mr Mozart. So it has to be 'cup'. At this point serendipity comes in and I almost start to agree with Delores. I wouldn't necessarily follow this route every time, but in this case the compromises actually add to the thing, so it's a useful exercise if you're trying to construct something like this, even if you discard the result.
"Brim-full wine cup da da rose
Love da da da overflows"
Now with 'cup' as the focus of line one (as indeed it should be), 'stirred-up' (adding back the ‘up’ from Beatrijs) is too good an opportunity to miss:
"Brim-full wine cup da da rose
Love da stirred-up overflows"
Almost there. 'Love thus stirred up' will work and that's how I had it for a while, but 'Love so stirred up' is better, with connotations both of 'stiired up in this way' and 'stirred up so much'. It seemed at first that the colour red was important and I selected 'red as rose' to make it clearthat the chalice is red, rather than that a real rose is involved. However, I wasn't happy with it and eventually changed it to 'deepest rose', implying the colour. Serendipitously it also emphasises 'cup'. We have 'brim-full wine cup' and 'cup deepest rose'. In veiw of what's represented by the symbolism here, 'deep' works quite well.
"Brim-full wine cup, deepest rose
Love so stirred up overflows"
Though I say it myself, I like it a lot. It works for me but I suspect that by now you need to know the original in order to see what this is. It strikes me that since a deal of the original wording is lost, this is fast becoming a sigil. But that's okay, because sigils are triggers too.
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