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ABOUTBlack Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more) FREE SAMPLE COPYClick here to receive a free sample issue via U.S. mail. There is absolutely no obligation. SUBSCRIBESupport this independently published journal of fine essays. Annual subscriptions are $15 in the USA, $25 in Canada, $30 in the UK, or $35 elsewhere (all prices in US $). Click here to subscribe online via paypal or send a check to Black Lamb, 1759 View Drive, San Leandro CA 94577. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'Lossius' CategoryIn and out of God’s earMay 1st, 2007 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne on a warm Sunday evening in Lent: the setting sun pours through the yellow-paned clerestory windows and along the tall stone transept. The aureal glow trickles over the heads of a few dozen faithful attendants, tiny motionless figures far down in the dark valley of the nave. Up here on the choir platform twelve of us are singing the offertory motet, Ecce quomodo, moritur justus. It reverberates and swells down the building and eddies back toward us heavily. Gesualdo’s music is a dark sky through which opposing armies of moist air, one warmed by grace, the other chilled in mortal fear, meet above the field. The collision drags the cold under. A spiral of cloud plunges earthward, as, though inverted on different scales of time and weight, the edge of one continent is said to plunge under the other, melting into the black heat of the earth as the other rears up to form ice-catching mountains above it. Et erit in pace, memoria ejus. A chord of light spears Gesualdo’s turbulent, imploring gloom. The hell-heaven of that murdering, penitent prince is made still for as long as the twelve of us can sustain our slow, controlled exhalation.
Posted by: The Editors With alacrityApril 1st, 2007 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS I snap out of it on the last hundred yards, from the figure-eight path looping through Carlton Gardens onto the busy road I must cross to get home. I cannot remember running the last gasping half-mile stretch. It’s a complete blank. Five minutes lost. Well, I must have done it, mustn’t I? Up there then, down here now, five minutes of lost time, an alien vacuum. Then I remember why I lost the time. I’d been pounding through a poignant recollection of friendship destroyed, a momentary bitterness over my ex-wife, over a brief, naïve experience of marriage. I suppose I needed to push even those thoughts aside for the last few blank seconds, as there’s always been a twinge of guilt involved in the thinking. I will disguise details of name and face, out of respect for the privacy of a woman I lost touch with and who cannot speak for herself in this forum (she is a poet, though, and probably has elsewhere, in her feisty, filigreed way). I mustn’t pretend to be so high-minded, either. The need to be coy arises out of prudence, too. Why compromise a nearly lifeless but faintly fluttering desire to return to the United States to live, some day. I met my one and only wife, as I’ve hinted in a previous piece, at a party in New York City in 1989. She was sitting on a cushion in the corner, alert and silent on the far side of a crowing throng of New York art and theatre types. I was immediately drawn to her deep fall of brown hair, her unpainted, freckle-tanned face, the quietness surrounding her corner of the room, and went over to chat. She was a poet, divorced, part native-American, too, she mentioned. And I was a wanderer, dreamed of writing, and a homo, a fact I revealed to create a safe zone for us both. We had a long lunch next day, with her almost-adult son in tow. A couple of years later, Sara told me she’d phoned her daughter in a giddy rush that morning, crying, “I’m having lunch with a handsome young Norwegian-Australian writer. Should I go?”
Posted by: The Editors MelburnianaMarch 1st, 2007 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS Once, when living in Portland Ore., I was acknowledged at a party by an elegant old wag who asked, in patrician, Rocky Mountain-Oxbridge tones, “Larry, where is it that you’re fruhhhm, exah-ctly?” He went on, “I’d wondered whether you were from New Zealand? Or South Africa perhaps? But of course you speak High Australian, don’t you?”
Posted by: The Editors Tyranny and the boxMarch 1st, 2006 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS The other day I watched the film Good Night and Good Luck. In the opening scene Edward R. Murrow, the famous World War II correspondent and television journalist, stands at a podium to accept an award from his peers. The film then flashes back a few years to the time of the McCarthy hearings, and Murrow’s current affairs program exposing McCarthy, or more to the point, where he allowed McCarthy to expose himself. At the time CBS was under commercial and political pressure to toe the sponsors’ line. The film is about a brief few years, a simpler time when truth seekers had a voice within a new medium, and when the forces that nourished and opposed them at the same time were easier to distinguish. But at the beginning of the film, at the podium accepting his award, Murrow laments the rot that has set in already. I am astounded, as he is speaking in 1958, soon after the beginning of the television age.
Posted by: The Editors First and last ChristmasDecember 1st, 2004 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS Silent wooded hills surround our valley of fields and farm buildings in Maridalen, the Vale of Mary, a few miles above Oslo. Near where the road divides and hems each forested slope sit the ruined remains of an ancient church abandoned after the Black Death: a thick stone wall lanced with Romanesque apertures and outlines of rubble. In the summertime the site rests on a mound above a waving meadow of gold at the northern tip of the lake, but now most of The seasons express themselves intensely here. Halfway through spring, masses of tiny violet and white flowers push themselves up through gobs and rivulets of sunny slush. Summer is for bike riding and berry hunting in the forest; tiny strawberries, then red currants, blueberries and hazelnuts. Days are long and yellow as the grass. We go to bed with the sun still up, heavy curtains drawn against the blue.
Posted by: The Editors The woman boreDecember 1st, 2004 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS The woman bore her last child alone Cradled in the shadow She no longer strains to hear the feathery voice But our tears are living water The dust under her feet spills over the coffin — Jacumé, September 1990 •
Posted by: The Editors Author profileDecember 1st, 2002 Lorentz Lossius has been writing poetry, prose and music for years, and for the past three has been scribbling for Black Lamb. A native of Trondheim, Norway, he is currently watering his roots back in Oslo, after having gone full circle over forty years through Europe, Asia, Australia, and the United States. His Black Lamb column was called Walkabout and is now called Wondering Gentile.
Posted by: The Editors
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