Playing a hand with the Lord

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 June

You know that your mind is not in quite the right place to listen to a petit motet, even if you've never heard one live before, when you start thinking certain things on seeing the line

speravit anima mea in Domino


Yes, maybe pizza, but equally that game with the spotted rectangular pieces! (Still a pub classic, in some areas, with the regulars having grudge matches, I believe.) Do we really get the name of dominoes from here?


If Wikipedia® is to be believed, though, favela has nothing to do with this other line, in the Dies irae, as set by Lully for the funreal (?) of Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, meaning 'will deserve the world in ashes':

solvet saeculum in favilla


Odd, as a slum area would seem to have quite a lot in common with a world dissolved in ashes. Be that as it may, the real revelation comes towards the end of this text that he composed for:

flammis acribus addictis


This, translated as 'doomed to flames of woe', seems to shed some light on the nature of real addiction, of being doomed to do something: when the word 'addiction' came to mean what it does, was someone making a judgement, whether or not moral, on the power of the person to escape it?

Sounds like a fairly condemnatory appraisal to me, which does not allow for hope - or change. Its life-history is in line for being gtracked down...


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