Attendite

O vos ómnes qui transítis per víam, atténdite et vidéte:
Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus.
Atténdite, univérsi pópuli, et vidéte dolórem méum.
Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus.

Translation:
O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention and see:
if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.
Pay attention, all people, and look at my sorrow:
if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.

These words from the Book of Lamentations will be sung in many churches this Holy Week, and were set to music  in the 16th and 17th centuries by Tomas Luis de Victoria and Carlo Gesualdo, and in 1932 by the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals. I hear in those musical settings the bewilderment of someone who wonders how people can walk by without seeing the suffering of someone so near. The words and music urge us to pay attention to another’s pain. Attendite.

Attention must be paid.

There’s some irony in the fact that this line was written by Arthur Miller in his Death of a Salesman. Miller, apparently, didn’t pay a lot of attention to the suffering in his own family – treating one wife with vindictiveness and abandoning his son, who had been born with Downs Syndrome. But he did write it, and the play’s line arrests the listener. Pay attention to another’s suffering, Willy Loman’s wife insists.

I have been lucky enough to see, twice now, a compelling production of Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 show Assassins, staged by the fabulous Theater Latte Da in Minneapolis. Something of a flop when it first opened, Assassins couldn’t be more timely now, with its storyline about America’s fascination with guns and the cultural phenomenon of people seeking to gain attention by shooting people. It brings together all of those in American history who have attempted or succeeded in assassinating a President, and we see the delusions and confusion that lead them to their ill-conceived actions. We aren’t ever asked to have sympathy for them, but we do glimpse their primary motivation. From John Wilkes Booth to Squeaky Fromme to Lee Harvey Oswald, it seems always to be the same – a need to be important, to matter, a need for attention.

Attention must be paid.

John Wilkes Booth quotes this line directly to the audience near the end of the show. We are left to wonder… if a friend, or a father, or an employer, or a society had paid attention, could history have been different?

If you’re not outraged then you’re not paying attention

That was a popular bumper sticker some years ago. Right now, in 2018 America, when I pay attention to the big picture I am constantly outraged, and I have to admit that is as depressing and wearying as it is overwhelming. The words of Good Friday’s O vos omnes remind me, however, to pay attention to those right around me. Those that I might otherwise walk by.

Peace,
Sonya

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This blog represents my attempt to put thoughts together on various things that seem to connect – in my mind anyway. More often than not new ideas first involve reaching back to what was and I can only hope that the prehistoric San cave painting at the top of this page inspires all kinds of new connections between old and new.

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