I hope you enjoy the essay and the music. The song is the newest of my original compositions: "Look What You've Done (To My Heart)." It too is a part of the collection of my original music I call, "(These are the) Songs My Heart Sings." Let me know what you think. Use the e-mail feature at the bottom of this page to do so or use the feature provided below to share this page with a friend.
Musings... No. 7
The Banquet Long Denied
Where to begin?
How does one relate the untellable?
How I describe a thing of joy and beauty beyond the power of mere words, the pitiful efforts of the user of lexicon to let another know what I know, what I think, what I feel?
It's true.
I can feel!
The newly discovered, for me, experiences flow over me in a torrent of previously unexperienced power and disquieting joy unlike any I believed I had any right to know. These were things meant for others, good and decent things meant for good and decent beings, never mine to know. That was not to be allowed, never permitted lest some celestial plan go awry.
It was yet another universe-changing moment for a man running out of birthdays and coming to grips with miracles hitherto unknown to him. This man has had his share and the shares of several others of the most vile of mankind's abilities to practice vileness and degradation upon one another.
Miracles come all too infrequently. But a moment of reflection brings forth a bursting realization... an illuminating insight into never before realized realities too long denied to my unseeing heart.
Their rarity is what makes them so special!
Others I know have come to accept as their due the goodness and brightness that is their daily fare. Most people seem to float from one pleasant sensation to another. They may experience a few periods of deep, abiding terror, grief and pain. Those are their rarities and because they are the rarity in their lives, it makes them the more indelibly imprinted on them.
All in life is relative. I have come to be inured to the slings and arrows because they have been my steady diet for as far back in my days of pain and grief and sorrow as I can remember.
I have learned through the cruel crucible of the need to live, to function in my own fashion on a steady ration of loss, deprivation, abuse and denigration. The only condiments available to me through these decades of despair have been more bitterness, sorrow and, for the extra special repasts, grief and gut-twisting terror. It is not a meal much desired, but it has been my appointed fare for all these years of bitter dining at the table of life, it seems.
My compliments to the chef. If that is the only cuisine to be allowed me, then He has done a job worthy of the most demanding gourmand of the distasteful. I have dined deeply and long at his table and come away filled to a point where I could no longer deny the fare offered me. There was no other menu available to me. I had come to accept that until I finally supped at the tables of the Gods of Greatness.
Before my eyes marched visions of delicacies denied to me by time, fate and, yes, by my own ignorance and fear. When the plate before me overflowed with the most throat constricting viands of nothingness sautéed in more-to-come, that memory never known danced before my mind's eye and beckoned me to a place and time well remembered in hope, yet heretofore always denied to me.
I was hungering.
But, for an all too short a time, you fed me with the feast fit for a god which I never thought possible to even consider, much less know the joy of consuming. Even the appetizers I have only had in abundance in this so short a time of aloneness in a crowd have been of a quality I have never known fully ere this all too brief a time of wonder, joy and terror.
I am like a man denied food for long days and nights of deprivation and denial. I want to devour it all, but I gag a bit when I try to consume it all at once. It is a dichotomy. I dare not gulp. In that direction lies a vomiting purging of the goodness already known. The nibbles I must take are all the more punishing because they refresh, replenish and rejuvenate, but leave me wanting to dive into the main course and forget all table manners.
Manners have a purpose, even at this dinner party of elegance, grace and sweetness. They allow the truly civilized to obtain the greatest pleasure and stretch out the joy of the meal for as long as possible. This means they dine longer and better and always are capable of facing the next course when it too approaches its time, season and place for the harvest of happiness.
Not so for the under nourished and starving beast of me. My hunger and years of starvation diet make of me a poor dinner companion right now, but I shall learn my manners well and promise to become a dining partner worthy of re-invitation to the repast on a daily basis, meal after meal after joyous dessert for eons into eternity, if it is to be allowed, not some affront to some unknown to me cosmic order of things.
Should I use my napkin for a bib, smile gently and remind me that I will not be forced rudely from this table. I am not accustomed to being here with the gods at their feast. Take my hand lovingly and lead me to the forgotten use of the proper silverware. I will worship then and forevermore your kindness and the meal before me will be enhanced as all the greater a delicacy of love. Should I begin to drink from the finger bowl of forgetfulness, smile your knowing and loving smile and show me that it is a never empty cup before me now and I need not be a glutton.
There is now before mine eyes a table set as if an altar and I look around in wonder, disconcerted because it has been set for me. I have no qualities by which I am deserving of such a feast. None would celebrate my return as a prodigal except for a goddess of love and the warmest and caring light.
How does one calculate the tip on a meal of life and loving? What is a meager twenty percent of all that is worthy and wonderful?
You are my chef, my banquet master, my server, my dinner companion and I can barely see the food before me through my tears of too long denied joy and thankfulness.
Yea, though I had fed at the thorn bush all my years, before me is a dining hall of happiness and it is you who beckons me to sit, let go my fears and dine deeply and fully as you join me in the meal I have been denied sharing all these decades of disappointment and deceit.
This meal of undeniable love you have prepared for me is before us and I am in awe...
... of you...
... of it.
It is an establishment and meal worthy of as many stars as there are in all the diner's guides under the heavens and beyond.
© 2002 J. James, all rights reserved
Sir Loin of LAF-a-lot
All content on this page and all other pages in this site, including individual LAF LIONS, except where used with permission, © 1959 - 2003 J. James (aka Lafcadio T. Lion) et al, all rights reserved. Original music on this and all other pages in this site, including individual LAF LIONS and individual pages accessed from, and a part of, this site except where used with permission or otherwise noted, © 1959 - 2003 J. James. The written contents, graphics, photographs or original music on this or any other of the pages in this site, in part or in whole, may not be reproduced, displayed (or caused to be displayed), in part or in whole, or used elsewhere for any purpose without the specific, prior, written permission of the individual copyright holders. Any such permitted use shall and will include prominent copyright notification and a link back to this site.
