CXXVII
At what point did federalism shade into feralism?
Awfully square without you
Don’t get round much anymore
What is it that permits Chinese “landscape” painting to evoke absolutely unspectacular images of the natural? And how does this relate to the de-heroicized genre of the European “pastoral”?
What happens within and to these members of a generation that, out of whatever impulse or circumstance believes itself to be charged with the forging of something entirely new? And their children? And their progeny?
Soften your hearing at the café and it sounds like Nat “King” Cole is singing about candlelight on Devil’s Island and the ghost of something past…
Don’t you know that it’s a shame and a pity
You were raised up in the city
And you never learned nothin’ ‘bout country ways,
Aw, country ways…
Sang “Country” Joe McDonald oncet
Branded gentry
Duration of the present
And vice versa
A no-shoes restaurant
It comes with a sense of nausea, the realization that so many of your “generation,” “background,” “culture,” are deeply and truly hateful.
London, rival of Athens –
Huh?!
But so thought Voltaire:
Rival of Athens, London blest indeed
That with thy tyrants had the wit to chase
The prejudices civil factions breed.
Men speak their thoughts and worth can win its place…
In London, who has talent, he is great.
I was a locus amoenus for MI5
And when they had advanced almost upon each other
great Hector of the shimmering helm spoke first:
“No longer, son of Peleus, shall I flee from you as before
I fled three times around the great city of Priam, nor could then endure
to withstand your charge. But now my spirit stirs me
to hold firm before you. I will kill you, or be killed.
But come, let us take an oath upon our gods, for they
Will be the best witnesses and protectors of agreements.
I will not, outrageous though you are, dishonor you if Zeus grants me
to endure, and I take your life.
But when I have stripped you of your splendid armor, Achilles,
I will give your body back to the Achaens; and you do the same.”
Then looking at him from beneath his brows, Achilles of the swift feet spoke:
“Hector, doer of unforgettable deeds – do not to me propose your agreements.
As there are not pacts of faith between lions and men,
nor do wolves and lambs have spirit in kind,
but they plot evil unremittingly for one another,
so it is not possible that you and I be friends, nor for us two
will there be oaths; before that time one of us falling
will sate with his blood the shield-bearing warrior god…”
And when the two heroes faced each other,
Great Hector, helmet shining, spoke first:
“I’m not running any more, Achilles.
Three times around the city was enough.
I’ve got my nerve back. It’s me or you now.
But first we should swear a solemn oath.
With all the gods as witnesses, I swear:
If Zeus gives me the victory over you,
I will not dishonor your corpse, only
Strip the armor and give the body back
To the Greeks. Promise you’ll do the same.”
And Achilles, fixing his eyes on him:
“Don’t try to cut any deals with me, Hector.
Do lions make peace treaties with men?
Do wolves and lambs agree to get along?
No they hate each other to the core,
And that’s how it is between you and me,
No talk of agreements until one of us
Falls and gluts Ares with his blood…
[the first translated by Caroline Alexander, the second, Stanley Lombardo]
Seven billion narcissists walk into a bar
It is interesting to note that daoist thought moved counter to Greek thought at roughly the same moment, i.e. from a more “dualistic” to a more integrative and dynamic world view. This is evidenced in the two ways of arranging the circle of trigrams, the ba gua, representing foundational forces or principals. In the earlier arrangement (below left), Heaven and Earth are respectively at 12 and 6 o’clock positions, hence diametrically opposed. This arrangement, named for its creator, Fu Xi is also known as Pre-Heaven and it dates from c. 3000 BC.
About a thousand years later, King Wen is credited with arranging the ba gua as shown above right. This arrangement, also known as Post-Heaven is intended to reflect “the cyclical changes that characterize terrestrial life: day and night, the changing seasons, life and death.” [Tom Bisio, The Art of Ba Gua Zhang. New York: Internal Arts International, 2015. pp. 9-10]
Fire now stands at the 12 o’clock position, and Water at 6. Unlike Heaven and Earth, which are “pure” Yang and Yin principles, Fire and Water each contain an element of the other which enables them to interact generatively. Fire, a Yang element, houses a (broken) Yin line at its center, while Water “conceals” its hidden (solid) Yang line between a top and bottom Yin line. The implication is that of transmutation through dynamic interaction as distinct from a static principle of separation, or nullifying opposition.
But again, one moves not only from, but toward, and it is possible that, having expended its store of hierarchical categorization, the West will seek a more balanced and integrated mode of mind, one which lends a different bearing to its course.
Nineteen-oh-five, mon amour.
Dum Dum [Dômdôm in Bengali]: a town now part of greater Kolkata where, in the late 19th century, the British maintained an arsenal that manufactured the oh-so-effective hollow-point bullets used by Kitchener’s troops to defeat the Mahdists of Sudan, among others.
The first time I met the Dum Dum Boys
I was fascinated…
Sang Iggy Pop oncet
…I remember how they
Used to stare at the ground
They looked as if they
Put the whole world
Looked as if they put
The whole world down
City as global laundrybank: since 2011, $8 billionsworth of apartments priced at $5m plus have been bought here – half of them for cash.
During the same period, the price of a luxury residential square foot jumped from $1000 to $1,450.
So much jackola, so little accounting.
Sing, Goddess!
Or words to that affect
How many heroic translators’ shades have plunged down to Hades, victims neither of Achilles’ rage, nor Zeus’ will, but of that virulent malady Iliaditis? Some say the disease is not the work of the gods at all, but rather a self-inflicted curse upon the minds of men…
A host of strong-greaved, but fainter poets fled
When ox-tongued Lombardo unsheathed took up his awesome pen
Grrrr! – Don’t make me bring up my Numidian cavalry!
How does “justice” relate, or, more accurately, equate with our personal sense of entitlement?
The “qualitative”: ever under pressure to justify itself in quantities
All storms perfect
There’s more than one pedagogy to Old School
All gray and hair and no wisdom
Consider the word dumbwaiter
Turning and turning
In the winding and unwinding gyre
Out of stillness and movement
And the one qi turning
Ten thousand forms appear
Pace W.B.Y.
Practice makes practice
Ba Gua Zhang spirals at Washington Square Park in company, at his preferred altitude, with Bobbie the Hawk.
Old Monk Offers the Alms Bowl: Hide Flower Under Leaf: Green Dragon Turns Its Head: Hawk Overturns Its Body: Black Dragon Searches the Sea…
Ten thousand young folk converge on the NYU compound, ten thousand sharp young cutters blunting themselves inside boxes.
The Odyssey that keeps on odding
To Husserl With Love
A dramolette of café conversation from two young women at the adjoining table leaks over. It sounds like “intense frosting experience.”
I was an awesome possum for the WWF
What’s shaking in Bethlehem?
Infra rad
Spritius sangre
And the migraned workers, what of their plight?
Giants with birth defects
Disappointed in love, the poet Sincero leaves Naples and turns to shepherding. With his compatriots, he ascends a to a mountaintop temple. Above the entrance a painting depicts “some woods and hills, very beautiful and rich in leafy trees and a thousand kinds of flowers. A number of herds could be seen walking among them, cropping the grass and straying through the green meadows, with perhaps ten dogs about them standing guard, their tracks most realistically visible in the dust. Some of the shepherds were milking, some shearing fleece, some playing the pipes, and some there wore, as it seemed, who were endeavoring to match their singing with the pipers’ melody.”
Further, “what I was pleased to examine more attentively were certain naked Nymphs who were standing, half-hidden as it were, behind the trunk of a chestnut tree, laughing… Therewith four Satyrs with horns on their heads and goatish feet were stealing very softly through a thicket of mastic trees to seize them from behind.”
This painting, contrived by Jacopo Sannazaro and published in his Arcadia (1504), took no material form, it is a projection into words of an imagined painting – an ekphrasis that gained wide circulation and deeply influenced the renaissance pastoral landscape. It is no exaggeration to say that ten thousand paintings in oil on canvas and countless prints, derive from it.
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships –
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
