THE DIFFERENCE A WORD CAN MAKE

I have just been listening, after a long break, to a Paul Simon compilation that includes the 1972 song Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard.

      ‘Me’ and Julio, spotted doing something illegal, are reported and arrested.  I recalled that when Paul Simon had been asked by Rolling Stone magazine what it was that the MaMa saw he had no idea, but probably “something sexual”.  Remembering that, I decided to check out the opinions of a few bloggers.  Fascinating!

     Those focusing simply on the title see ‘Me’ and Julio in some sort of homosexual encounter.   But, in fact, the lyrics say, “you, me and Julio, down by the schoolyard.”  That one little word indicates the presence of a third person.

     So who is this ‘you’?   Fairly obviously, Rosie, the Queen of Corona, who is mentioned in the previous line.

     Does that mean that the homosexual argument collapses?  Not a bit of it, say its advocates (those, that is to say, who have conceded the extra presence).  A ‘queen’ is a flagrant homosexual.  It’s about a homosexual threesome.

     Well, yes, that can be a meaning of ‘queen’.  But ‘queen’ can also be a word for a significant female (as in ‘Dancing Queen’) or a female ruler.  The current Queen of England, for instance, is a woman.  “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts…”   The Queen on a chess board.  The Queen Bee.  The Queen Alien in Aliens.  And so on.

     More prosaically, Corona is a district in the New York borough of Queens.  Paul Simon is presumably indulging in some sort of pun.  Rosie, our queen (as in favourite girl) of the district of Corona in the Borough of Queens.

 

My own reading.  Early in the morning (hence, MaMa Pajama rolling out of bed) Rosie, ‘Me’ and Julio are engaged in some sort of clandestine sexual activity.   (Not clandestine enough, because they are spotted.) Because what is happening is illegal, (and also happening in the schoolyard) both boys are probably under age.  Maybe Rosie is too.  That would account for the disgust of the MaMa and PaPa.  Rosie’s parents?  Julio’s?  Or just concerned citizens?

 

What does it matter?   In terms of the song, not at all.  Who cares?  But attention to data might matter in a real-life situation: a rape trial, say.

        Two people? Three?   Hell, it’s just a piece of fiction.   But it’s also worrying evidence of careless reading if some of those choosing to comment on the song cannot even work out how many there are involved. 

 

 

APPENDIX

These gems did not fit into the above, but are too good not to be commented on.

 

1. (My personal favourite, this.)  We should look through the 1972 copies of Newsweek, and see which one has the kids on the cover.  It has eluded this particular interpreter that if the kids are fictional (and Paul Simon says they are), then the reference to Newsweek is fictional also.

 

2.  A devotee of the gay-twosome theory (you  have to hand it to these guys; they just never give up) explains away the “you” as follows:

“See you, me and Julio down by the schoolyard” should be understood as ‘See you,’ ie ‘Goodbye, everybody.’

   That does have a certain plausibility if you simply look at the words.  However, it does not square with the way Paul Simon sings the line: the pause does not come after ‘you’, but after ‘Julio’.

 

3. It must be an anti-war protest because the kids get the support of a radical priest, and no priest would support sex or drugs.

     Really?  This commentator obviously hasn’t come across the sort of priests I have.  Radical priests, in fact, have been the victims of their own success.  Having hauled biblically-forbidden things like fornication and homosexuality into the cultural mainstream, and with paedophilia well on the way towards respectability, where do they go next?   Necrophilia?   Incest?    Sex with sheep?

 

4.  Other interpretations of ‘corona’.

a.        Since ‘corona’ means the end of the penis, Rosie is a prostitute: expert at giving head.

b.      Since a ‘Corona’ is a cigar…  Then, as for explanation a: except Rosie is also a Cuban.

c.       Since ’Corona’ is a beer, Rosie is a champion at downing them.  Before they get started, the kids have Coronas; so the song is about under-age drinking as well as about under-age sex.

d.      Since ‘corona’ means an aura round the Sun, Rosie (she must be Mexican, since Julio knows her) is an Aztec sun goddess.  After all, the Sun is rosy isn’t?  The parents are mad because Rosie is a Mexican.  It’s the race war:  a new version of West Side Story.  (My own invention, by the way.  I’d like to add it to one of those chat lines; only someone would be certain to take me seriously.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

HELL, HADES AND THE LAKE OF FIRE

The Authorised Version renders Revelation 20:14 as, ‘And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.’  My New English Bible version has it, ‘Then Death and Hades were flung into the lake of fire.’  This creates grounds for confusion.

     Hades, for those with a smattering of Greek mythology, is the common destination for the dead, with better areas like the Elysian Fields and worse ones like Tartarus.  Understood in Christian terms as a sort of temporary holding area, its destruction after the Last Judgement – when the Lake of Fire takes effect – would make sense.

     The destruction of Hell – the place of symbolic fire – by being thrown into another symbolic fire is more difficult. Indeed, in the minds of many, Hell and the Lake of Fire are one and the same thing. 

     If we think of a new Heaven and a new Earth, however, then it becomes easier.  The current frame of things is provisional.  New Heaven, new Earth, new Hell: which the Lake of Fire.  Hell as a sort of separate temporary Hades then makes more sense.

Literary treatments of Hell, and medieval illustrations, have added to the confusion. Dante is the worst culprit in this respect.  Dante’s Inferno is a sort of funnel with a three-headed Satan at the bottom of it gnawing on Brutus, Cassius and Judas.  That suggests Satan is fixed where he is; otherwise, what happens to Judas and the others when he’s away?

     Nevertheless, if Satan is confined to Hell in the medieval understanding, his minions are free to visit Earth.  In Chaucer’s The Friar’s Tale a summoner meets a yeoman even more demonic that himself; for the yeoman turns out to be a fiend, riding to the world’s end in search of prey. At the end of the story, of course, the fiend returns to Hell, taking the summoner with him to the special shelf reserved for summoners.  (Chaucer’s Summoner is not pleased, but gets revenge by pointing out that friars in Hell are in an even worse location.)

     Even in a later example, such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Lucifer himself still remains in Hell, and sends his servant, Mephistopheles. 

            FAU.  Where are you damn’d?

            MEPH.          In hell.

            FAU.   How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

            MEPH. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. 

     Although we might applaud the perception that Hell is a spiritual condition as well as a physical location, what about 1 Peter: 5:8, where ‘The devil goes about like a roaring lion.’ ? That says pretty unequivocally that Satan is still free to roam.  So does Satan’s temptation of Christ. True to this spirit, in Coleridge’s satirical little poem ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, the gentleman in question leaves his “brimstone bed”  and visits Earth to pick up some new ideas for torment.  Coleridge  is much more biblical than the other literary examples I have cited. 

If the biblical devil is not yet confined, neither are his demons.  In Matthew 8 the demons who later flee into the Gadarene swine ask Christ if he has come to torment them “before their time”.  That suggests they are still free; although they know of a future doom.  Why they choose the pigs is puzzling.  Don’t they have another location they could go to?  What happens to the other demons that are cast out?  Where do they go? 

     Is Hell, in fact, an option for them at this stage?   In Matthew 12:48, Christ says, “When an unclean spirit comes out of a man it wanders over the deserts seeking a resting-place, and finds none.”  It returns with seven other spirits more wicked than itself.  None of them, it seems, has any other fixed abode.  (I concede, of course, that the whereabouts of demons in not the main point of Christ’s words: he is talking about keeping one’s spiritual house in order, and allowing no opening for evil.)

     A counter to all this is the difficult verse in Jude about the rebel angels:  ‘God has reserved them for judgement on the Great Day, bound beneath the darkness in everlasting chains.’  One suggestion is that these are a special case.  These are the Nephilim of Genesis: too dangerous to be allowed on Earth.  They have been found guilty, but await their sentence. Yet a problem remains.  What and where is this darkness – even metaphorically speaking – that they are beneath?  Are they in the same place as condemned humans; or are they in a special place for condemned angels? 

In Matthew 25:41 Christ says to the ‘goats’; “Go from me to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”    That suggests a future location about to come into effect and not yet operative.  That is clear enough for the ‘goats’ alive at the time of Christ’s return.  But what of those ‘goats’ already dead?  Where have they been in the meantime?

      Christ says to the penitent thief, “This day you shall be with me in Paradise.”  Paul says that the dead will be ‘asleep’ in Christ: aware, but still waiting for their resurrection bodies.  This suggests that judgement happens immediately after death.  The redeemed, like the thief, are with Christ in Paradise. 

      The damned are in Hell: a place of metaphorical fire (the Lazarus and Dives parable) and metaphorical darkness: the darkness, perhaps, below which the chained angels are to be found.   It is a place where there is consciousness of loss: hence the wailing and gnashing of teeth.  It would appear to be a place/condition simply for humans.  The idea of tormenting devils seems to be as unbiblical as their supposed pitchforks.   Satan is described in the New Testament as “the prince of this world,” and “the prince of the power of the air.”  It is not the Bible that describes him as the Prince of Hell.   To that extent, Coleridge’s poem, too, is unbliblical; although, given its satirical nature, we need not take it any more seriously than we need take Chaucer. 

Christ returns, and there is the Last Judgement.  Those alive are judged.   The revived dead receive their resurrection bodies and have their fate confirmed.  The present order of things comes to an end.  The redeemed are with God in the new Heaven and New Earth.  The Devil, his demons and unregenerate humanity are cast into the Lake of Fire.  Even here the idea of devils punishing humans seems amiss: the devils will themselves be punished.  Unless, of course, all the self-willed of whatever description are consigned together and left to fight it out for precedence.  

This has been a sombre topic to discuss, and limited in scope.  My purpose has not been to consider the literal versus the figurative; the grounds for redemption and damnation; or the vexed issues of Purgatory, Annihilationism and Universalism.   My purpose has been to clarify for myself – and hopefully for others – a problem of biblical chronology.

ALLIANCES

 

 

Political alliances are funny things.  While some of them are akin to lifelong marriages, many more seem to end in divorce.

            Thus the German states were Britain’s allies against Napoleon, only for the French to become Britain’s ally against the Germans.  The hostility of Britain and the United States towards Russia transformed into a mutual alliance against Hitler –  the sufferings of the Russian convoys a case in point – only to transmute again into the Cold War.  Osama bin Laden was once backed by America… Etc. 

 

Within modern Britain, it seems to me there is a triangle of forces: Secularism, Christianity and Islam.    And both of Christianity’s opponents in some sense need  it – or may need it  in the future: Islam for a united front of faith against religious scepticism; Secularism for defence of the western-European tradition against the ideological inroads of Islam.

 

Western complacency about Constantinople – it doesn’t need help; it’s always been there; it always will be – received a rude awakening when Islam breached the impregnable walls: with help from a European cannon maker.   So much for those who take the Church for granted.  I only hope that those who want to get rid of it altogether, and have been systematically expunging the Judeao-Christian tradition from every aspect of western life, know what they are doing.  I hope they are not sawing off the branch they are sitting on, or creating an opening for an alternative religion they would like even less. 

 

“Better the devil you know” is – hopefully – an inapposite way of designating the role of Christianity in British life. Better, perhaps, is the regret expressed – too late - by Hamlet towards Laertes:

That I have shot my arrow o’er the house

And hurt my brother.