Man of Sorrows Motet
Man of Sorrows, man without blame,
I adore you, nailed upon the Cross
and crowned with thorns for our deadly shame.
When one by one the enemy tosses
us in a pit, bulldozes our corpses,
remember those living, now at a loss,
even as sieges and battles warp
our humanity, and women despair.
I adore you when our escape is thwarted
from our dishabitado, and you share
shelter with us and our bitter hell.
I adore your descent into death, and fear
at finding yourself abandoned as well.
I adore you, laid in the tomb with myrrh.
I adore you, when we manage to quell
worse evils in ourselves, when we refer
our anger to you, and refuse vengeance.
I adore you when truth is most obscure,
at your rising to meet our vigilance.
It is finished - I adore your last cry.
Blasphemy, be refuted and silenced,
may your final words be ours, when we die.
Woodford Halse
Holy Thursday - 14 April 2022
The original Man of Sorrows motet I was thinking of was by Josquin des Prez (14150/55 - 1521) and sung by the warlord Duke Ercole I of Ferrara on Good Friday 1505, as a public confession. He died not long after, a victim of the first generation of a super-virus syphilis to hit Europe. I composed my own Man of Sorrows motet this Holy Thursday to express the anguish of our times.
This brings us to the issue of virtù, the excellence or areté, Machiavelli expected male citizens to enact, either en masse, in military formations, or individually, as rulers, intellectuals and artists. As late as 1965, in L'Homme faillible, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) argued that appetitive desirous ambitious libidinous people are what we get in politics and statecraft, and we should not expect men and women in power to be otherwise. The question is how to manage those energies for the common good. Russia has failed to delimit this. It has not wanted to. This brings me to Plato's " great blond beast" in the Gorgias. It's the sort of title a Met police officer would take down in a note book with extreme prejudice, but it is a good clean book that would have helped Cressida Dick.
So what about Boris Johnson and his ongoing Partygate scandals?
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