Dark Sayings for Late June: Trobar Clus

Nastiness has become endemic to the people I once respected, to the ideas I once found interesting, to the values we shared.  Have I matured or they regressed to savagery?

The heavier and blacker the clouds, the brighter the candle seems.

Weeks go by with nothing but requests from charities for donations, bills to be paid, and advertisements for dubious products.  On days when it rains and the mailbox floods in come real letters and packets of new books.  Mere chance or a message from the gods?

When cars stopped having rumble-seats and running boards, all the romance disappeared, along with parking spaces.

As soon as it is light, the bread is thrown under the plum tree.  Before I scurry back inside, the first sparrows fly down, then the blackbirds and sometimes other exotic fowl, to contest the treasures.  If I oversleep or get caught up in the newspaper, they hop indignantly on the patio.  If I try some variation in the offerings of the day, flap their wings against the windows.  Put in my place, I recognize the natural pecking order and try to do better.

Boethius’s consolation came when Philosophy told him she had lied and used poetic figures in place of rational discourses.  It is too hard to face up to the truth.  Yet one is relieved to know the past is all a pack of lies. 

Everywhere you go the signs say Gluten Free. But not only do you have to pay for it, but when you ask for gluten or speculate where they put it when it has been removed, the waitress doesn’t understand. 

Where there is clutter, there is clatter. 

It is more than a quarter of a century since I first heard of a child being named Jaden.  Now there are dozens of ways to spell the name and no one seems surprised.

Deceit, deception and denial, there you have it: modern politics.

Consciousness tends to fragment in scattered moments of sleep and waking: when we try to put the particles together and fill in the gaps by imagination, we call it poetry.  Unconsciousness is always there below the surface, not a coherent whole or a continuous narrative, but the substance of reality.  At best, we sense that it is present in others, never ourselves.

Old travellers to the South Seas sailed from dream to dream, and sometimes encountered distorted mirrors of themselves or of their own inner demons.  People on the islands were surprised to see their gods, dreams and ancestors arrive and speaking in high-pitched squeaks and able to put their white hair off and on.  How could anyone be so stupid?

In the midst of war, there is no time for the niceties of civil behaviour.  When they stop killing us, we can sit down and work out all these other little problems. 

The naïve see only what they want to see.  The cynics see what others don’t want to see.  The ancient rabbis saw what nobody can see.  History is a see-saw of reflections.

If I can’t step into the river twice is it because the river is not the same or because I have changed by the first action?  The snake swimming towards me does he know the reality of the water has shifted from the time he set out from the other side and that he is no longer what he started out to be, as though the skin of the world had been sloughed off and revealed something looking exactly the same?  Whoever and whatever, I am not sticking around to find out, though I am already older and wiser than I was a moment ago.

New Paperback Edition

Cambridge Scholars Press have now announced the publication of a paperback edition of my Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria.  There is a substantial reduction in the price.  I also took the opportunity to correct and smooth out parts of the text.

Two Difficult Sonnets

Having crept breathlessly up to the very edge

Of the abyss, I hesitated and would not look down

Where the moral cauldron roared.  I gave no pledge

To do what ancient philosophers did.  My frown

Could not match the Laughing One.  But still,

There was I—and there was the end of the universe.

For some, old melodies return and give a thrill,

As though the past were locked in song and verse.

Not me.  Nor could I bring to my mind apothegms,

Proverbs, sayings and popular words.  Meanwhile,

Out of the depths of that vast chasm, rhythms

Of a different sort escaped—Castle, Trial,

Metamorphosis, Mountain, Bride,

Little Man—and so I leaped, eyes opened wide.

                                ***

What a confusion of clichés down this rabbit hole!

What a phantasmagoria of neologisms!

The metrics of my mind went all askew, my soul

Did somersaults, and my memory shut down.

Someone yelled out: Karma! Another: Pleonisms!

Not the voices in the House of Fame or the crown

Of foolishness on the head of the Beast, but signs

Absorbing shadows and glimmering silhouettes

Conflated into music of the spheres—all schisms

Born of conjugations drawn through purple prisms.

What was there left for a poet to do, on the brink

Of eternity, but go for it, take all bets

And, throwing lumps of caution to the wind, link

his consciousness and distraught lonely pines.

Apothegms for June, Part 2

Considering the enormity of evil in the world, two things are clear: it is a wonder we can get from one end of the day to the next intact, or at least most of us, the state of our minds notwithstanding; the other is less awe-inspiring, the expenditure of denial and illusion may help us understand the endurance of civilization in spite of it all.

There is no pleasure in flushing spiders, cockroaches and other bugs down the plughole.  It is a necessity, like pretending to like other people’s pets and children. 

Children gather round and poke it with sticks.  Tourists take photographs and point at such a wonder.  We feel pity for the sick little hedgehog creeping across the open field in the park.  But not too much, as it is a carrier of disease. 

Deep in the loins a shuddering of life, like a river of ice with the first crunch of spring break; not students on their annual fall into sexual depravity but ancient forces long hidden in the darkness of what seemed a never-ending global winter.  All through the night, the heavy sounds of returning movement, and then at dawn, through the rose glow, the appearance of  huge formations of awakening power, until finally near evening another shudder and explosion. This second darkness is unbearable and crude but necessary.

We are so used to the sound of terrorist attacks that we hardly notice the shrieks of those who excuse such action. 

In the days when I could travel, I searched for the elusive pizza my youth, the taste that existed before there were commercial preparations and you had to go into the baker late in the afternoon when he made this wonderful bread with the day’s left—over dough.  From country to country I have hunted such an authentic pizza.  Several times, the product was good, tasty, and even pleasing to the eye, but it was not the real thing.  Only in my sleep, suddenly, the odour wafts into my dreams, more powerful than a tisane with madeleine to awaken archaic memories.  Perhaps today it exists only in heaven.

Now that the winter rains have come, old jokes return to haunt me.  Someone, for instance, complained about the ugly weather.  I replied, “I hope it all keeps up.” The other person looked startled.  “Well, of course,” I said, “if it keeps up, it doesn’t fall.”  He laughed nervously.  I learned that joke in 1944, my first year in kindergarten. 

The sparrows are impatient if the bread is not thrown out at them just at dawn.  They hop indignantly up to the kitchen door to express their feelings.  When I throw out their breakfast and toss the morsels at the other side of the plum tree, they take a while to realize the change.  Some of them—like some people we know—persist in searching on the side where the food is usually scattered.  Others watch my motions and go where the bread falls.  I know who they are like.

New Apothegms for June

Let your bitterness of soul ripen into indifference as the blinded bird crashes into the window when it flies against the wind.

Commonplace thought has become so rare, we celebrate the echo of forgotten mediocrity.

Only hypocrites save the resonance of old ideals.  Honest, straightforward thinkers, however, don’t even see the mind out of which they were shaped.

If you believe you can become all that you dream, it is best not to wake up too soon.  If only you believe in yourself, when all others mock or pity, the dream has already become a nightmare.  Why stumble around in the dark?

When does a child discover the difference between the scribbles and scrawls attached to the refrigerator by magnets to the unctuous sounds of praise and the treasures in the Museum of Fine Arts?  When is the artist, true to himself alone, willing to look into the darkness and count the distant stars a million light years away? 

A duckbilled platitude is no prating moron, though it never knows exactly how it evolved; and may, against the odds of logic and commonsense, navigate against the river of time; until it negotiates the fairest price from the gloomy gatekeepers of hell. 

Koalas cool themselves by moving from the trees that nourish to the branches that deflect the sun. 

My grandmother kept a framed photograph of FDR in her hallway, a token of esteem and pledge of happy days to come.  I keep it in my house now, though the evidence of the president’s perfidy is manifest, to remind me of her trust in hope.