All original songs, writing and real-time performances

BY ANGELO M. BRUSCAS III
Copyright 2009, Real News Network and AMBIII Publishing

THE WAY HOME
Time seemed to pass me by
As I walked on down the road
No one stopped to pick me up
Carrying this heavy load
But I’m not down, or turning round . . . .
Until I find my way. . . back home

Life seemed to come and go, as I worked away the
days
Now I climb this path of stone, lost here in the maze
But I won’t crack, there's nothing I lack
Until I find my way . . . back home

Love has turned her back on me, and left me all
alone
To find my dream from reality, to make my quest my
own
But I won’t quit, or stop searching for it
Until I find my way . . . back home

Time seemed to pass me by, as I moved on down
the road
No one came to shelter me, left here in the cold
But I’m going on, until the sunrise dawns . . .
When I find my way . . . back home




HYMN TO SAINT CECILIA
In a garden shady this holy lady
With reverent cadence and subtle psalm,
Like a black swan as death came on
Poured forth her song in perfect calm:
And by ocean's margin this innocent virgin
Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer,
And notes tremendous from her great engine
Thundered out on the Roman air.
Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited,
Moved to delight by the melody,
White as an orchid she rode quite naked
In an oyster shell on top of the sea;
At sounds so entrancing the angels dancing
Came out of their trance into time again,
And around the wicked in Hell's abysses
The huge flame flickered and eased their pain.
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.

-- Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) Text: W.H.
Auden (1907-1973)
Song of Cecilia is a literary journey of love and a lyrical
joyride into the triumphs and depths of marriage and
divorce through these ever-shifting sands of economic,
moral and social turmoil – a novel about the mythic and
mystical music two lovers create when they begin to
believe and then shatter the myths they adopt for their
lives.

The contemporary mystery-romance storyline of
112,000 words unwinds as a modern twist on “The
Divine Comedy” with obvious similarities to “The Great
Gatsby” -- told through the eyes of a writer in the maze
of a major life transformation; the spiraling economy
has put an end to his newspaper, sparking a renewed
search for personal redemption and reconnection with
the lost love and the lost music of his life. His lost love
has taken on the myth of St. Cecilia, martyred for the
love of God, sacrificed for the music of angels.

The central theme is the universality of love, the
endurance of the love of friends and family, even the
love of God, through the love of writing or rediscovering
the love songs within us all: That joyful noise of life.
Song of Cecilia
             Chapter Five      

Then came Saint Cecilia thither with priests, and baptized them, and afterwards, when the morning came, Saint
Cecilia said to them: "Now, ye knights of Christ, cast away from you the works of darkness and clothe you
with the arms of light."

-- From “The Golden Legend: The Life of St. Cecilia”


                                      SONG OF CECILIA: The Immortal Fire

Dear Cecilia, spirit and soul of the saint you are and always were:

Now, I don’t mean this to be the start to another chapter to another book, but who’s to say? Maybe it might reach that
level of insight, so we’ll just have to wait and see how the writing runs along.

Truly, I had planned on stopping the letter writing once I felt I had the book heading toward an ending that honored the
love you gave to me, as well as a underlying storyline that paid homage to my grandmother and my sense of a higher
calling or purpose in life, something I had a true belief in long before I met you. God knows why or when I began believing
that and knowing it with a certainty that only comes from something joyously playing out deep within my soul, like the
songs I can write or the words here at my hand.

After a busy day of mailing out partial-draft manuscripts and going to the laundry to clean all my well-used blankets and
comforters (yes, I still have the one we had on our wedding bed, which is a bit freaky when I sleep in those old green
sheets, too. It is like I can feel the essence of you still in bed with me!!! Although, I have washed the sheets a few times
since we last made love under those covers) I sat down at the computer in the warm sunset and began to do some more
research that I would like to include in the book.

For example, Saint Cecilia was, like you, an only child. We’ll just gloss over that virgin thing, however; she told her
husband she had to remain a virgin because she actually knew an angel (somewhere there’s a connection to us, I’m
sure, in that part of the legend). She died singing to God in her martyrdom, thus becoming the patron saint of music. I
also have been doing some research into the myth of the sirens, with modern historians now agreeing there were three
seducers in song, which I might work into my trinity theme.

The siren reference in this case applies to me, in my reversal of roles subplot, where I am like Mario Angelo III, a siren
angel trying thrice to lure you through the fog of love onto my shore of no return. I call out to you. I sing to you. I write to
you. I make love to you on a sensory plane where everything seems possible even though you know it’s a destination of
no turning back, a destination that could leave you spinning around in circles. You cover your ears, but my song still gets
through.

The poem, or song that starts this letter, finds me as one of the angels who hears the music of Saint Cecilia so much so
that I come out of my “trance into time again.” Of course, the horrible thing for our persecuted Saint Cecilia -- first the
wicked government officials killed her husband, making him a martyr, too, and then they tried boiling our saint-to-be to
death. When that didn’t work, legend has it that an executioner was dispatched to behead her, and that failed three
different times, leaving her alive for three more days, all the while singing and playing music to God and immediately
becoming a saint upon her final deathbed, with the angels sweeping her away into heaven.

Now, none of this did I make up but just leave it there for historical and mythical reference to what we are and who we are
named after and what sort of fates we might have encountered in another time in another place under similar
circumstances. One enlightening destination for you and I to travel to -- sooner than later -- would be Italy, where we could
take a spiritual visit to the cathedral at Torcello, where the legendary skull of Saint Cecilia is kept as a relic. There also
are many famous paintings of Saint Cecilia, with most of them showing her surrounded by a host of enraptured angels,
so we could make that a theme of our adventure if you like. I have plenty of money left over from the P-I buyout, so time is
a wasting here when you and I could be there in a heartbeat.

Oh, how I love to sing my siren song to you!!!

I write to you like I used to talk to you, so comfortable and easy and feeling free to say and do and be whatever the mood
suits our love the most. We really did live on love and music, not money, not time, not even food. All that was immaterial
to the love and the music we shared, right from the start. How in God’s name did we screw it all up so magnificently?

In a long conversation with my old friend Bob Sims last night, I fleshed out my idea of turning these letters into the full
novel it already has become in many, many ways. I read the beginning of what I’d written, and Bob – raised and reared
on reading with a father who was a literature professor in Vancouver – told me he thought I needed more of a narrative to
make the plot clear. He also wanted to see more of you, what you looked like, since he hadn’t really seen all that much of
you in the 20 years since our wedding.

I told him that hadn’t really occurred to me; that I believe I now have fully fallen in love with your essence and spirit, and
don’t even think much of your physical beauty at all any longer – a complete irony since I fell in love with your unique
splendor at first sight so long, long ago – tall and statuesque, a face so slender and tender and angular that it must have
been the subject of so many, many great works of art through time. Eyes so knowingly deep, brown and beautiful and
always smiling, always searching, always seeing, just like mine. When we looked into each other’s eyes, it was like
looking into the mirror of life. I used to love to roam my hands along the wondrously soft path of your super-charged skin,
shaped like a perfect rolling sand dune, sculpted so tenderly by the forces of nature and windswept design. You almost
feel it is a sin just to leave a footprint, to let your hand linger too long.  So I sift my fingers along your skin like sifting
grains of sand. I liked to comb my hand through the nerves in your body, running your energy down into your thighs, so
tight and taunt and inviting to those who know how to play the exquisite music of your soul.

Looking for inspiration here again, I turned to the great and famous painting the Italian artist Raphael did of Saint Cecilia,
and found a great summary of his work on the fabulous all-knowing Wikipedia site online. In the painting, Cecilia really
doesn’t look at all like you facially – maybe you more closely resemble
the Mary Magdalene figure on the right, while I’d like to think maybe St. Paul
looks like me when I once had hair – but maybe I look more like that
Augustine fellow in the back. Of course, Saint Cecilia is looking
toward heaven, holding a pipe organ, with other instruments
gathered about her feet and a host of childlike angels hovering
above her head.


The glorification of purity is the central idea behind this painting.
This is expressed by the figures seen on both sides of the
principal figure: St. John the Evangelist is the patron saint of
the church, and St. Paul symbolizes innocence, while St. Augustine
and St. Mary Magdalene stand for purity regained through atonement
after sinful aberration. The four saints who surround the protagonist form a niche which is strengthened by the poses
and gestures of the figures (the glances of the Evangelist and St. Augustine cross, St. Paul's is lowered and the
Magdalene turns hers toward the spectator). Only St. Cecilia raises her face toward the sky, where a chorus of angels
appears through a hole in the clouds. The monumentality of the figures, typical of Raphael's activity during this
period, dominates the other figurative elements. In the legend of St. Cecilia, too, the painter emphasizes her desire to
preserve her purity. As they were escorting Cecilia to the house of her betrothed, to the accompaniment of musical
instruments, in her heart she called out only to God, beseeching Him to preserve the chastity of her heart and her
body.

-- Wikipedia on the Raphael painting, The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia

From art, back to reality: I think it’s time I stopped making a martyr out of you or my love of you and start actually trying to
love you into heaven. I don’t know that I really ever think about why anymore. I kind of just start writing and it almost
seems like a calling, for sure. I start to think about you and then off I go into a wonderful history lesson about Saint Cecilia
and the myth of the sirens. And then everything we ever did and all that ever happened and all you ever wrote and all you
ever gave to me, it all just makes perfect sense.

Maybe we couldn’t ever have overcome ourselves had we not screwed it up!!! You had to become a martyr once again –
thank God, living more than three days afterward this time – while I had to become an angel again.

The only thing left is this heaven thing and I think in some ways, that’s about exactly where I am right NOW. I can still hear
your silence singing out loud and clear, my love, and I know your heart still beats and your soul still rings out to God. If you
want to continue to be a martyr, that’s okay, I know some things are just better left alone. But I’m already here to love you
like a saint so we can skip the boiling and beheading this time and just get down to the music and the art and the
canonization.

See what music you bring out in me! Already, I have written three pages and I haven’t even started this letter in the least.
I don’t think of my life as mine alone any longer. I think of it as something shared with you. It’s always there for you; it
always was and always will be. I didn’t even realize it for a long time. I thought it was mine to do with as I pleased, no
matter how it affected others, certainly you. I always knew you had to share love for there to be love at all, but I had never
really considered that same truth applies with the concept of life. Life and love go hand in hand. Now, I realize that my
true gift is being able to share -- to both give and receive (or accept as a better word) -- the life and love that I have been
blessed with all these years on earth.

I have often thought that I didn’t ever want to be anyone else but me. I never wanted to be a big shot New York Times
reporter, for example, or felt like I had to get validation as a writer outside of writing the perfect sentence, the true
paragraph and revealing thought. I would not want to change my bald head or the brawn of my body or the waves of
inspiration that dance about in my mind for a thing or for anyone. I say what I think, write what I experience, believe what I
comprehend, and see what I know to be true.

What do I see now? What is true here between the love and life shared by me and you?

While it is true that I cannot see you, feel you, touch you, hear you, speak to you, kiss you, be with you, I can still love you.
It is also true that you don’t have to even see these words to know exactly how I feel about our love and our life.

I see nothing but truth in your love, whether it is in the present for someone else, in the hard truth of the past for myself or
others, in the love you have of yourself and your struggle to find and maintain the same balance in sharing your love and
your life, or even preserving such truths under the demands of daily survival.

Truly, I don’t want to take your love, I don’t want to reshape your life in my own image, although I have been guilty of
attempting that without a doubt in the past.

However, I would be grateful if you would care to share your love with me again one day, and I stand ready, able and
always available to share mine with you in any form that you should need, desire or require. Even this, even should you
have nothing left to share and nothing left to give.

I see that although our life together has been over now for some four or five years, my love for you endures in spite of
assaults by my endless imagination, despite the depths of nothingness, regardless of responses of total denial and final
dissolutions, without fear, under all the all-encompassing assaults on everything I once believed to be true and to be real.

Now I know simply that what IS true and real is me and you.

I know you will only talk to me again when you know that you can be true and honest with yourself, whether that means it is
true and real in your life and whether it can be accomplished under conditions in which you feel you will not have to
compromise either your love or your current balance in life. You will never lie again, and I know that you never lied to me.
It was me who started living the lie.

The truth I believe now, and this is not just a lie I tell myself, is that you and I have more in common than ever before in life.
The truth I believe is that we are each very amazing people who shared an abundance of life and love together that has
made us better people, that has bound us, linked us, connected us, and has now freed us to live a life of peace, joy,
happiness, hope, faith, dedication, commitment, realization, exploration.  The time to be at one with ourselves and what
we learned, the time for us to learn to live apart and to love again, has only brought me back to the one truth I know to be
absolutely true without a single doubt in my mind.

I was put on this earth to share my love with and for you, and you were put on this earth to show me what it truly means to
love in your search for the same love, too. I believe that there will come a day when we both will realize that same simple
truth together in the equally simple act of our smiling, peaceful presence. I pray that moment is now as you read these
words.

Love is not sorrow or resignation. Love is not resentment or jealousy. Love is not fear and regret. Love is not envy and
deceit. Love is not recrimination and anger. Love is not a compromise. Love is not even a choice.

Love is like crying tears of joy – like making love all weekend in a cabin next to the storm-swept ocean or on a cliff
overlooking the Pacific, the joy of watching our children grow, the joy of Layla, of the company of our travels together.  
Love is peace – a garden of flowers and fruits and vegetables from the earth, the peace and serenity of nature in our
surroundings, our adventures, the amazing conversations full of wisdom and understanding that still come from our union.

I miss your peace and the joy of your company more than I have ever missed anything ever in my life. I know I go around
and around in circles sometimes with my writing. But it always seems to bring me back to the same conclusions. It
matters not what form it takes. I still love you.

What this love produces for me is such wisdom and insight it just has to be the love of a saint that I have been blessed
with -- by your hands, your beauty, your spirit and soul, your love. I know of no other man who has ever been so blessed
or learned so much from love from the woman who no longer professes to love him in the least – the irony of all ironies in
the book, as in my life. Worse yet, or better yet depending on your perspective – I don’t think I could ever have loved you,
truly loved you, any other way. This, the writing here, the purity of my soul laid out on these pages that follow are the
culmination of that love, the full realization of that love, the total resurrection of that love from what to most mortals would
seem like the ultimate sacrifice of our love on the cross of our own doubts and fears about each other.

Here’s hoping that whatever man falls in love with now or in the future, that he has an easier time figuring all this out than I
did, because look how long it took me to catch up with history. Really, I am kind of writing this for him should you choose
never to come back to me, since I truly want you to be loved like you always wanted to be loved. I almost got there, both
you and I know that, but it wasn’t fully realized like it could be now. I have a lot of advice to give in that department that
might just help you truly be loved like you always told me you wanted to be loved. But back to that love stuff later.

Lately, I have been researching the life of my great-great-grandfather on my Grandmother Copsey’s maternal side, the
blue-blood English vein of my Argentine-British-California native heritage – the Herbert Snow Kynaston legacy, which is
amazingly quite large (just Google his name sometime). In addition to being the assistant headmaster at Eton for years
(1858-74) with a doctorate from Cambridge, and a Vicar at St. Luke’s in London, and being a noted English scholar,
champion rower and professor of Greek, he was a “Grand Chaplain of England” who “spoke in five or six languages and
could improvise effective poetic translations” on the spot or for sport. Once, in less than two hours, “he rendered an
Italian song into English verse which fitted the music.”
In doing further research online, I found an entire summation of the autobiography of his that I already have in my
possession. The summation comes from a memorial for Herbert that includes a number of annotations from his writings
and translations, even lyrics that were used for “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” His poetry is stunning and he wrote
several amazing hymns that were used in sort of an operatic presentation before huge crowds in London.

This one, while seemingly trite and one of his epigrams written to celebrate his “certificate of musical ability” at
Cambridge, seems most appropriate in the present, now about 200 years later in the history of our love in these letters.

On expectation’s tip-claw long I’ve stood.
And now am certified as passing good!
Woodwind and vocal tone I can surpass
And round my cage are bars of ringing brass.
No melody beyond my compass lies
My notes through octaves five or six can rise –
Divine Cecilia would herself rejoice
If she could hear my cultivated voice

I know now where much of my talent comes from, at least on my mother’s side of the family, where the soul of my family
rests, and the spirit of wisdom and music and poetry and athleticism and devotion to a higher and greater understanding
are central to what my family always has been about. It is not just my legacy, just like our love was not only your love to
take or make on your own. There is a purpose to everything, “Divine Cecilia,” and for that I certainly think we should
rejoice!!!

Which also is why I feel compelled to write songs or write in the first place, I am quite sure upon lasting reflection. With
time now firmly on my hands, I am now going to attempt that full and complete book of our families and how we got to the
place we are now, a book that you first conceived before I was truly fully ready, prepared or capable of writing  such an
amazing tale. I just wish you were here to share the joy and wonder with which life now unveils itself for me day my day.
Maybe you’ll write back and we will truly rejoice.

Mario

POSTSCRIPT: So that’s my long new greeting and a new prelude letter to a second letter that simply became another
chapter in the book – now the fourth chapter, which establishes the full story of the real Saint Cecilia, as well as the
groundwork for the writing that my great-great-Grandfather would accomplish in his lifetime, with his own ode to the
patron saint of music. It also establishes the song quality or poetic quality outside the writing of me and of you.

Enough of the book, which I’m sure is getting out of hand in many ways for both of us. I just keep thinking if I spend this
much quality time truly trying to love you each day in writing and words, just think how much quality time you could enjoy
just being loved by me again in reality. I know how much fun I have with you now and it is truly exhilarating to uncover your
writing, reconnect with all the things you were truly telling me in our life and marriage and our love, and find ways to
manifest that in my life here in temporary paradise. I hope you haven’t settled on one of those 15-minute-a-day
conversation relationships like you once abhorred so much, because I think might actually be able to “communicate” 16
hours a day each and every day under my present circumstances. Stamina squared. Much of it, I can tell you with
certainty, would be spent just listening to you. I have so, so, so many questions to ask you, and you always said I can ask
you anything.

Do you ever feel one of your ancestors in real sense, in a living vision, or with a certain certainty that brings you pure joy
and understanding?

What would be the country you would most want to visit if you could leave next week?

I have never in my life passed out or blacked out, and I know you have, and always wondered what that felt like?

How do you overcome your fear of the medical system? And I would love to see you write about your own experiences
here – not for me but for you and many, many others who could gain from your wisdom and understanding. God, if I could
convince you to do this alone, I would simply be the happiest man on earth. What is the chemo and the radiation really
like, how did it make you feel, what do you fear most now about the cancer and how do you cope with that? Did you ever
fully consider the effect it had living so close to the power lines under our old house, and I know you wondered about that
as a cause of the cancer before? Do you still blame me for some of the disease, too?

Okay, that is your story and I will leave it all to you, but my biggest question is: Why did you just stop writing?

I know that there is a permanence to the writing, a purpose to the words that I have never really felt or truly believed
before, so I just assume that they must have the same affect on you, especially rediscovering and revisiting the wonderful
words you once wrote. However, I could be way off base and caught in a pickle here, too, to use a sportswriter’s
analogy. My suspicion is that you could not possibly read this much from me and you have stopped reading altogether,
which is partially why I take so many freedoms and liberties. At least I am not taking the freedom or the liberty this time to
plaster it all over the Internet in any thoughtless manner I choose, and I hope you will come to see that I have taken all that
revisionist history down and will find more and do the same until there is no other trace of The Real Story other than what
you have in your hands or that exists within this living book and these songs, the poetry, the literature, the art, the myth,
the memory.


SONG FOR ST. CECILIA’S DAY

But oh! what art can teach,        
What human voice can reach        
The sacred organ’s praise?        
Notes inspiring holy love,               
Notes that wing their heavenly ways        
To mend the choirs above.        
Orpheus could lead the savage race,        
And trees unrooted left their place        
Sequacious of the lyre:               
But bright Cecilia raised the wonder higher;        
When to her Organ vocal breath was given        
An Angel heard, and straight appear’d —        
Mistaking Earth for Heaven.        
As from the power of sacred lays               
The spheres began to move,        
And sung the great Creator’s praise        
To all the blest above;        
So when the last and dreadful hour        
This crumbling pageant shall devour,               
The trumpet shall be heard on high,        
The dead shall live, the living die,        
And Music shall untune the sky.

-- John Dryden, 1687        






Real%20News%20NetworkQuantcast
Song of Cecilia soundtrack player:
Control chapter music selection here