Friday, January 31, 2014

Chinese New Year & Happy 8th Birthday, JSMT!



Dear Members, Alumni, & Friends of the JSMT:

This weekend brings two happy occasions together within three days of each other! Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year festival, and next Monday, February 3, marks the eighth birthday of the James Scholar Media Team!

Friday, January 31 marks the beginning of the Lunar New Year in the traditional Chinese calendar. The New Year (or Spring Festival) usually occurs on the second New Moon after the Midwinter Solstice (December 21 or 22). Today, the Year of the Horse will begin as the year 4712 dawns in East Asia and around the globe. To celebrate the Lunar New Year, I have selected the poem “Kubla Khan” (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) to share with you because it celebrates the splendor of medieval China under the reign of Emperor Kublai Khan (reigned 1260-1294), the grandson of Genghis Khan.

“Kubla Khan” a/k/a “Xanadu” (1816)
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As ever beneath a waning Moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this Earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me,
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Our second celebratory poem is the JSMT’s “unofficial anthem,” which I recited (in part) at our club’s fifth anniversary celebration in February 2011. It encapsulates my own hopes and dreams for the rising generation, along with the aspirations that the JSMT has for sharing its inspirational and motivational messages within and beyond the College of ACES.

“Ode” (1874)
By Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881)

1. We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale Moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

2. With wonderful deathless ditties,
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story,
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

3. We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the Earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And overthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

4. A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation.
A wondrous thing of our dreaming,
Unearthly, impossible seeming –
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

5. They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising.
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart,
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

6. And therefore today is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling.
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of tomorrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

7. But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing;
O men! It must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

8. For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry –
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God's future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

9. “Great hail!” we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your Sun and your summers,
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamt not before;
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

“We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. … These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.”
-- Technomage Elric, in the BABYLON 5 Episode, “The Geometry of Shadows” (1995)

Until next time –
Rob J

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