The Said Symphony: moves 13 – 15

Those are the sounds “that can be vaguely sensed, emerging as if a morning mist is lifting”, in the silence of the musical rest.

Second, to Golgotha, the place outside Jerusalem where, according to the Christian telling, the body of the man who compared his body to the temple was so cruelly tortured that he “yielded up the ghost” – and at that moment, as if in sympathy, in the spiritual heart of Jerusalem and all Israel “behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent…”

Third, to the Glass Bead Game: because “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband” of Revelation 21.21 finds its intellectual avatar in “the hundred–gated cathedral of the mind” to which Hesse’s Game aspires.

Fourth, to William Blake, prophet, for whom Jerusalem was so urgent a matter that he must have it with him in England – as many Americans must have it with them in America — singing (as I myself have lustily sung):

And did those feet in ancient time.

Walk upon England’s mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green & pleasant Land

But Blake did better than to write these words – he illuminated them, and I shall place the text as he presented it at the bottom of this post.

Next: to Bob Dylan.  Well, there’s this:

— but it seems to be someone’s personal graphic for a compilation of Dylan songs, so this – Dylan at the Wailing Wall, 20 February 1983, attending his son’s Bar Mitzvah – will have to suffice:

And finally, I find there’s a peruasive link to Moral Equivalence — because Palestinians claim possession of the Noble Sanctuary and parts of the old city, while Israelis claim the same rights over the whole of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount – the Temple Mount and Noble Sanctuary being one and the same physical space — and there are wise and foolish, hardliners and diplomats, scholars and treatises on both sides, and in the interstices between them.

And the question is: are the claims and complaints of one side justified and the other baseless, or is there a moral equivalence between them.?

That is a question of balance on the scale of justice, to be tempered, one always hopes, with mercy.

Comment:

What are the claims and counter-claims, ancient and modern – and what do the peace-makers say?

Addendum:

A page from Blake’s Preface to Milton:

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