De che parte devo andare?

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Exacting Sun: Multi-lapsing or Intellectual Promiscuity?

"Then they would all go outside to lie in the sun, and no one would speak. Man diminishes man's powers. The world leaves them intact. Rose, Claire, Catherine, and Patrice lived, at the windows of their house, on images and appearances, consented to a kind of game they played with each other, receiving with laughter, friendship, and affection alike but returning to the dance of the sea and sky, rediscovering the secret color of their fate and finally confronted with the deepest part of . Gula would creep out, perpetually offended, a black question mark with green eyes, slender and delicate, suddenly seized by a fit of madness and pouncing on shadows" (88).

"What she had really wanted to talk about to Robert Duncan, however, that night in Melbourne when he indicated so firmly that whatever she offered did not interest him, was not girls visited by gods but the much rarer phenomenon of men condescended to by goddesses. Anchises, for instance, lover of Aphrodite and father of Aeneas. One would have thought that, after that unforeseen and unforgettable episode in his hut on Mount Ida, Anchises -- a good-looking boyo, if one is to believe the hymn , but otherwise just a cattle herder -- would have wanted to talk about nothing else, to whoever would listen: how he had fucked a goddess, the most succulent in the whole stable, fucked her all night long, got her pregnant too.

Men and their leering talk. She has no illusions about how mortal beings treat whatever gods, true or feigned, ancient or modern, have the misfortune to fall into their hands. She thinks of a film she saw once, that might have been written by Nathanael West though in fact it wasn't: Jessica Lange playing a Hollywood sex goddess who has a breakdown and ends up in the common ward of a madhouse, drugged, lobotomized, strapped to her bed, while orderlies sell tickets for ten minutes a time with her. ' I wanna fuck a movie star!' pants one of their customers, shoving his dollars at them. In his voice the ugly underside of idolatry: malice, murderous resentment. Bring an immortal down to earth, show her what life is really like, bang her till she is raw. Take that ! Take that! A scene they excised from the televised version, so close to the bone of America does it cut" (184-185).

"...It is the meagerness of Christian feeling that disconcerts me, their rejection of this world in favor of a next which is -- to be tactful -- not entirely certain. Finally, one must oppose them because of their intellectual arrogance, which seems to me often like madness. We are told that there is only one way, one revelation: theirs. Nowhere in their tirades and warnings can one find the modesty or wisdom of a Plato, or that pristine world of flesh and spirit Homer sang of. From the beginning, curses and complaints have been the Christian style, inherited from the Jews, whose human and intellectual discipline is as admirable as their continuing bitterness is limiting and blighting" (384 ).

An Economy of Words

Metropolitan Life Insurance Building

" 'Thus, in the brief and crude account I give, did it come about that biblical scholarship and studies in Greek and Roman antiquity came to be coupled in a relationship never without antagonism, and thus did it come about that textual scholarship and its attendant disciplines came to fall under the rubric 'the humanities'.

'So much for history. So much for why you, diverse and ill-assorted as you may privately feel yourselves to be, find yourselves assembled this morning under a single roof as graduates-to-be in the humanities. Now, in the few minutes left to me, I am going to tell you why I do not belong among you and have no message of comfort to bring to you, despite the generosity of the gesture you have extended to me.

'The message I bring is that you lost your way long ago, perhaps as long as five centuries ago. The handful of men among whom the movement originated of which you represent, I fear, the sad tail -- those men were animated, at least at first, by the purpose of finding the True Word, by which they understood then, and I understand now, the redemptive word. ...' " (122 ).

"In the past, few had had the privilege of being led by a god to the Elysian Fields with their bodies still intact. And Hades was defined as that place where there is no body. But now, along with Kore's body, Eros penetrated the kingdom of the dead. The slender-ankled Persephone was the supple arrow Aphrodite ordered Eros to let fly at Hades when the goddess summoned her son to the black rock of Eryx. The world had reached a point at which the economy of metamorphosis that had sustained it for so long through the period of Zeus's adventures was no longer enough. Things had lost their primordial fluidity , had hardened into profile, and the game that had once been played out between one shape and another was now reduced to the mere alternation of appearance and disappearance. From now on, it was a question not only of accepting life in a single immutable form but of accepting the certainty that that form would one day disappear without a trace. Demeter's anger is the revolt against this new regime of life. But the goddess didn't know that at the same moment a new regime of death had also been inaugurated" (211-212).

"Let us put some pressure now on this word ananke.

Chantraine concludes that 'no etymology grasps that real sense of ananke and its derivations: 'constriction' and at the same time 'kinship.' The underlying notion that might justify this double semantic development would be that of the bond.' Others see the word as being close to the idea of 'taking in one's arms.' When speaking of Heracles caught in the horrendous shirt of Nessus, the chorus in the Trachiniae begin: 'If in the Centaur's murderous net, a dolopoios ananke torments him ...' But how are we to understand dolopoios ananke? A 'deceitful embrace'? Or 'deceitful necessity'? Or both? Once again we have the net, and necessity seen as a lethal embrace. With wonderful monotony, the net, its knots ever ready to tighten, is always there. It falls over Aphrodite's adulterous bed, over the battlefield beneath the walls of Troy, over being itself, and the cosmos, and the blistered body of Heracles. Whatever the situation, that one weapon is more than enough for Ananke. There were many in Greece who doubted the existence of the gods, but none ever expressed a doubt about that net, at once invisible and more powerful than the gods.

When Alexander arrived in Gordium, he went to the acropolis and found the cart that was tied to its yoke with a knot that no one had been able to undo. There was a legend about that cart, 'which said that whoever untied the knot that bound the cart to its yoke would rule over all of Asia. The knot was tied with cornel bark, and it was impossible to find either beginning or end. Unable to untie the knot and not wanting to leave it as it was, in case his failure should spread disquiet through his army, some say that he sliced the knot cleanly with his sword and then claimed that he had untied it.' But there's another version to the story, according to which Alexander 'removed the belaying pin from the drawbar [this was a wooden pin forced into the drawbar and around which the knot was secured] and thus removed the yoke from the drawbar.' Then Alexander and his followers ' went away from the cart convinced that the oracle's predictions about untying the knot had been fulfilled.' Thus, 'the knot that can be neither broken nor loosened, the knot that Zeus and Poseidon tightened around the heads of the warriors beneath the walls of Troy, was not to be untied even by Alexander.

...
In the late pagan era we can still find this in Macrobius: 'amor osculo significatur, necessitas nodo' : 'love is represented with a kiss, necessity with a knot.' Two circular images, the mouth and the noose, embrace everything that is. Eros, 'born when Ananke was lord and everything and everything bowed before her gloomy will,' once boasted that he had gained possession of the 'Ogygian scepter,' primordial as the waters of the Styx itself. He could now force 'his own decrees upon the gods.' But Eros said nothing of Ananke, who had come before him. There is a hostility between Eros and Ananke, a hostility that springs from an obscure likeness, as between the kiss and the knot" (97-99).

Lasciami entrare / Today's Top Ten List

Quiet Stream Peter Gabriel

Starling Tori Amos

The Endless Plain of Fortune John Cale
Tiempo y Silencio Cesaria Evora and Pedro Guerra

Drunkard's Prayer Over the Rhine
Finding Beauty Craig Armstrong

Persephone (Nue) Hector Zazou

Strange Ritual David Byrne

Sous le soleil du mois d'aôut Benjamin Biolay

Baby Rufus Wainwright

Pantoum for Ennene's Inscription for His Trees

“ He treads once more his gardens in the west, he is cooled under his sycamore, he gazes on plots of fair tall trees, which he himself had planted when on earth.”

Despite progress like this, I drank the raw riverwater. The veil at last lifted.
This is what the reader is offered, the odd remaining oxygen zagging in sunlight--

How it affects our atmosphere. In this world of water, it was a light blue philtre.

Your own embarrassment in regard to it, and those who pass through this

Frequently used door I am glad you have found, clasping at a rail in the sunlight

A door framed by mint and an abandoned nest. I peel and return these conduits

From the brace of memory. Railing less than that, at those who pass through this.

Things seem to be changing, enlarging at their weakest point, my speaking honestly

Is least of my blessings--a flowering branch--building walls to approach its conduit.

Circumspect about the others, an instrument to some purpose. We collage around in order

To find something truly vital and organic. Setting up in the standpipe, expanding this
Movement among two needles, before there were individuals or tomb garden frescoes.

Deciding on a bamboo bureau or uprooting the stand outside, your house is in order.
The woodwork in the vanity, a fell wind shaking the stain in the tracing, washed clean,

As if knowing the way back, water seeps to switch hands, and begin again in frescoes
In arbors and orchards that might have been windows. So many palms plastering the next

Project. Each stem separating through the brake, where kneeling, and rendered clean

There are the minder's hands, and shapes the surface where I drank the river. The veil lifted,

From arbors and orchards, beyond our windows. Our palms dug in the runnels, rooting the next.

While the reality inside does not make anything, except your greeting. Strained through the sun's blue filter.

Attempts at Prayer

Cet oiseau a une aile cassée.

"You get angry when I say Monsters, but just look at yourself. Look at yourself -- look at me. Go on, look. I am not wearing the red flower belt so you can see how I am. Now look at The Cleft, we are the same, The Cleft and the Clefts. No wonder you cover yourselves there, but we don't have to. We are nice to look at, like one of those shells we can pick off a rock after a storm. Beautiful - you taught us that word and I like to use it. I am beautiful, just like The Cleft with its pretty red flowers. But you are all bumps and lumps and the thing like a pipe which is sometimes like a sea squirt. Can you wonder that when the first babes like you were born we put them out for the eagles?" (12).

Wrestling the Angel

Despite progress like this, I drank the raw riverwater. The veil at last lifted.
This is what the reader is offered, the odd remaining oxygen zagging in sunlight--

How it affects our atmosphere. In this world of water, it is a light blue philtre.

Your own embarrassment in regard to it, and those who pass through this.

Frequently used door I am glad you have found,

Companion Pieces

The Armadillo

Elizabeth Bishop

for Robert Lowell

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars --
planets, that is -- the tinted ones :
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! -- a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

Skunk Hour

By Robert Lowell
(For Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchie privacy of Queen Victoria's century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season's ill-- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody's here-- only skunks , that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare. 1959

Trees may touch me, Tai Chi, Lake, Star

Countryside in Sardinia's Gennargentu

August 11 Tam-o'-shantered Acorns

Green acorns hang heavy in the oaks, ripening toward October when their tam-o'-shantered nut will be a harvest for every squirrel in the woods. From that harvest , since a squirrel's industry always surpasses its memory, will sprout tomorrow's oak groves. Thus, oak to nut to squirrel to oak again, have these noble trees spread and persisted.

There are about fifty species of oak native to this continent, and the acorn is the insignia of every one of them. They fall into two big groups, white oaks and black, and within each group is a variety of species. White oaks have light-colored bark and rounded leaf tips. Black oaks have darker bark and sharp-tipped leaves.

The old name for acorns, mast, came from an Anglo-Saxon word for meat. They are rich in fat and protein and in the old days swine were herded into oak woods to fatten on them. Both animals and birds still eat them. Green as they are, the squirrels already are sampling them. Another month
and they will be feasting; and planting acorns, unwittingly, in every woodland where oaks can find a foothold (219-220).

Prickly Reception

Sun spurge

The whole house breathes the island's cacti in two suites,

She is planning a revitalization effort. Hovering above planters of green rosettes.
Time is meted out on the porch lit hemisphere or other odd worlds muscle

Up the stairs, where this exhausted moth has fewer black stripes than first

Glimpsed. Alien creature, the baby, was late. This life is bolting the rosette
As if immaculately conceived. Here the foliage of the parent plant dies back.

Calamity comes embellished with the chosen lighting for a flighted thing, at first
Misidentified. Then the chance offering drapes the scene as the Emperor moth.

Winged Mercury sends no flowers, yet the foundation is not sinking, if to go back
In time. The antechamber, now closed to tourists, wears the sweat of our evenings
Tilting onto the mattress. We come together matching camouflage like the moth.
One mercy is the daylight after brushing our scales completely off. It is anything but.

Corymbs are visiting patterns in the vague reserves of a social life. Backyard evenings.
Floating islands against the fence. After an arrogant return and endless compliments
Steaming preparations such as these remind that we need love from those left, but

It is anything but mouthwatering now. I break to hug my cactus, from the flow of conversation

As I understand it through the furnishings, baby. Skimming satisfaction from the compliments--

Are we speaking too simply to ourselves, in nice little houses, or do they thankfully, localize us?
Who are not giving enough, to let ourselves be fully embraced in cicadas. We want conversation,
Slightly touching under tables, relating to astronomy. Was a plead made for sophisticated

Sauces? Speaking simply to myself, I overlook the effort. In the bind of some local

Imaginative quest--Yet a cutting of Euphorbia, with its milky, drying latex, calls on something
No sooner than you touched my palate, I refrained from suggesting a sophisticated
End to the evening. Wounded on your spikes, if not for a generous application of animal glue

Tell me if sex is reserved for another use? With its milky, drying latex calling on something
She is planting away from frames and glass--a revitalization effort. In planters of green rosettes
The object of home is suggested by the spikes wounding, if not for a generous animal glue
Unfading flypaper to living things. On a porch lit hemisphere here other odd words muscled in.