In which I return to the symbol of lion honey [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dearest Bleaders,

I’ve been enjoying reading Lera Auerbach here and am loving the Levine clip Laura Orem posted below. I use the gerund because it keeps returning to my attention, mentally.  I left out the “Philip” in the first line, above, because of all the terrific Ls and aura eara sounds, I didn’t want to dampen them with a ph and then a puh.  Seriously, go back and read from Lera to below.  Pretty right?

The sky is white over the island today and the squirrels are grey in the trees.  Candily speaking, before all this sugar, what was there, for sweetness?  Fruit just before it turned, and of course if you had some sweet corn, or sweet beets, or trees or cane with sweet sap, but not everybody did, so mostly honey.  Which is bee stuff.  The squeeze of bees.

I call this blog The Lion and the Honeycomb out of Yeats' “Vacillation” and am brought back to it today.  Samson kills a lion, leaves the carcass, then a long while later he visits it and finds a hive has built a honeycomb within the lion’s ribcage.  He takes the honey, feeds it to his bride’s wedding party and challenges them to a riddle: “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweet.”  

It’s not much of a riddle because the answer is not really guessable because lion honey isn’t normal.  It’s more of a witty tag line to a weird nature story, say, if it were made into a movie. 

If the riddle means anything it’s that from a human point of view this planet is horrific and explicable.  Why say inexplicable when it is so easy to explicate, as in: Everything, happening all at once, happens to each other, but at this rate and scale, hardly happens at all (hard to matter), though to the degree that it does there are some wild confluences which may make you smile, or even laugh, or even keep laughing kind of hysterically until people come over and offer you a glass of water, looking worried, only they never bring the water. 

So what does Yeats mean when he says, “The lion and the honeycomb, what has scripture said?” and then ditches the thought in favor of dismissing a leading contemporary voice of consoling mythos and legends of meaning: “So get ye gone Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head”?  

I think he means that life is nothing like the way it imagined itself, it is okay that it is horrible, it is okay for some people some of the time but a lot of the time for almost all of us, there is a lot to go through.  Go through.  Is what I take Yeats to be saying.

Yours decidedly,

Jennifer

Ps. Above please find that I hung a mirror in the tree in Spring and here's how it looks now.

Comments

[chris k]

Lion honey isn't normal, no. And they don't bring the water. Great post.