David X Novak
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Peter Handke's Sorrow Beyond Dreams

2/28/2015

 
He relates how, after the war, his mother, who was "curious by nature", gradually "learned her place." She took refuge in "becoming a type":
[A]n emotional life that never had a chance of achieving bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, prevalent especially among women, the system in which “So-and-so is my type but I’m not his,” or “I’m his but he’s not mine,” or in which “We’re made for each other” or “can’t stand the sight of each other” —in which clichés are taken as binding rules and any individual reaction, which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation. For instance, my mother would say of my father: “Actually, he wasn’t my type.” And so this typology became a guide to life; it gave you a pleasantly objective feeling about yourself; you stopped worrying about your origins, your possibly dandruff-ridden, sweaty-footed individuality, or the daily renewed problem of how to go on living; being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness and isolation; he lost himself, yet now and then he was somebody, if only briefly.

Once you became a type, you floated through the streets, buoyed up by all the things you could pass with indifference, repelled by everything which, in forcing you to stop, brought you back bothersomely to yourself: the lines outside the shops, a high bridge across the Spree, a shop window with baby carriages in it. (She had given herself another secret abortion.) Always on the move to get away from yourself and keep your peace of mind. Motto: “Today I won’t think of anything; today I’ll enjoy myself.”
It was a life of hardships, though not without their amelioration.
But my mother had not been crushed for good. She began to assert herself. No longer obliged to work her fingers to the bone, she became herself again. She got over her skittishness. She showed people the face with which she felt more or less at ease.

She read newspapers, but preferred books with stories that she could compare with her own life. She read the books I was reading, first Fallada, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, then Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. What she said about books could not have been put into print; she merely told me what had particularly caught her attention. “I’m not like that,” she sometimes said, as though the author had written about her. To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life; for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something more about her.
The English is Ralph Manheim. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams will remain for me a cut below The Afternoon of a Writer, though it retains the virtue of brevity, one that I value in Handke. Even so, it felt like a long haul.

Upon the Death of Avijit Roy in Dhaka

2/27/2015

 
A paragon of tolerance,
Avijit Roy, and his wife also,
Who looked at violence askance— 
Why should their violent fate befall so?

Attacked and hacked both by machetes,
Returning from a book fair—they
Were suddenly surprised, beset: he's
Now dead, and she may go that way.

"Secular humanist" he called
Himself, did not believe in God;
Now death leaves decency appalled
While murderers gloat murders proud.

The hand is stilled which held the pen,
The voice is silenced; but resounds
The echo of his truthful ken
In living words which bear no wounds.

So they that strive to squelch the truth
Via heinous acts upon the gentle
But prove themselves coarse, cruel, uncouth
Despite their God: it's fundamental.

Party Politics in the Age of Caesar

2/26/2015

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Party Politics in the Age of Caesar by Lily Ross Taylor is indeed living up to the hype of the reviewer. "Classic" I would say, at least insofar as I can judge—three chapters in (out of eight).

"Most fascinating" (to use his words) to me so far has been the chapter entitled "Delivering the Vote". The bustle of Rome's politics has never felt so alive to me as in these descriptions—two paragraphs of which especially pleased me for their clarity and focus:
The striking thing about the city population as we know it is the lack of a middle class. The sons of freedmen and the countrymen who had not lost everything may have provided a small group of men of moderate means, but in general Rome was inhabited by the rich and the poor, with very few men in the middle group. Yet, as we shall see, it was the vote of the middle income group which counted particularly in the elections of consuls and praetors. Such men had to come mainly from outside the city, and since in our period the immediate vicinity of Rome, which once supplied the voters, was now almost denuded of freeborn men, most of them had to come a considerable distance. A representative system might have been the solution, but no one seems to have proposed that, though such a system existed in Macedonia. Augustus later devised a plan for absentee ballots, but by that time votes had ceased to have any real validity. In our period voters had to go to Rome and they made the journey not as representatives of their communities but on their own initiative or because someone arranged to bring them.
And:
The consular and praetorian elections, for which considerable numbers of men in the first class must have come to Rome from all Italy south of the Po, were normally scheduled in the latter part of July immediately following the games for Apollo, an attraction that doubtless aided in getting out the voters. The curule aediles, the quaestors, and the military tribunes were elected by the tribal assembly, usually just after the praetors had been chosen; and the officers of the plebs, the plebeian aediles and the tribunes, were ordinarily chosen in the same period. The crowd that had assembled for the consular and the praetorian elections was likely to be in the city still for these minor elections, but in the more democratic assembly, where the richer men counted less, the outcome was much less predictable. Cicero points this out in his defense of Plancius, who was prosecuted after his successful contest for the curule aedileship. Cicero’s own election to the aedileship had proved this, for he won the office in spite of the machinations of Verres, who had been able with his bribes to control the consular and the praetorian elections.
Let me include a third (slightly edited), because it presents a comically familiar picture of canvassing and advertisement:
The commendation of nobles was probably painted on signs along the roads leading to Rome and all over the city and the municipal towns. On tombs along the roadside there are inscribed warnings to candidates not to use the monument for sign posting. And all over the town of Pompeii are painted notices of candidates still canvassing for local offices when elections in Rome had either been discontinued or were little more than a sham. The form of recommendation accords with the personal character of the endorsement as we know it in republican politics. Many of them are painted on the walls of houses or shops and give the recommendation of the owner. He asks for votes (rogare, orare) and recommends his candidate in rather vague terms as a good man or one worthy of the republic, terms so conventional that they could be abbreviated. A little variation is supplied by the statements “this man will preserve the treasury,” or “ make so and so aedile and he will make you one.” [...] The inscriptions of Pompeii also include endorsement from groups such as teamsters, muleteers, hucksters of every type, dyers, barbers, and also from certain districts of the town.
Next chapter focuses on the role Roman religion played in all of this.
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Robert Bridges: Long Are the Hours

2/26/2015

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This is one of my favorite poems by Robert Bridges. So far as I know it hasn't a title, but I will emend that if I find out more
.

[Long are the hours the sun is above]

  
Long are the hours the sun is above,
But when evening comes I go home to my love.

I'm away the daylight hours and more,
Yet she comes not down to open the door.

She does not meet me upon the stair,— 
She sits in my chamber and waits for me there.

As I enter the room she does not move:
I always walk straight up to my love;

And she lets me take my wonted place
At her side, and gaze in her dear dear face.

There as I sit, from her head thrown back
Her hair falls straight in a shadow black.

Aching and hot as my tired eyes be,
She is all that I wish to see.

And in my wearied and toil-dinned ear,
She says all things that I wish to hear.

Dusky and duskier grows the room,
Yet I see her best in the darker gloom.

When the winter eves are early and cold,
The firelight hours are a dream of gold.

And so I sit here night by night,
In rest and enjoyment of love's delight.

But a knock at the door, a step on the stair
Will startle, alas, my love from her chair.

If a stranger comes she will not stay:
At the first alarm she is off and away.

And he wonders, my guest, usurping her throne,
That I sit so much by myself alone.




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Illiterate, Unlettered, but Making Headway

2/25/2015

 
Feeling it sorely, I’ve always lamented my lack of an education. Public school—for me—did not cover most things. We got a smattering of math; but I wish higher levels had been enforced. History—except for American, and that surely presented in a propagandistic light—was excluded. I’m not really sure what we did learn. Literature again was restricted to American, which certainly results in a distorted view. (Exceptions to that being, in high school, two plays by Shakespeare and Homer’s Odyssey in translation.)

Nevertheless, in a free society, I’ve always had the means—somewhat haphazardly, due to the vicissitudes of earning a living—to be able to try to fill in the gaps independently, albeit (mostly) without guidance. Euclid remains untackled; but, book by book, I try to make headway in literature and history.

History comes in for a bad rap. To the extent that historical study is more than just falsification of the past to prop up present policy, it is helpful in trying to understand the key questions: who are we, where do we come from? For me, it is precisely because so much of what I had been told (I felt) was wrong or distorted, that independent inquiry has proven necessary. Yet, as an older person, I—who as a child could barely be forced into reading a book—do it also for the reason that it is pleasurable. Now—after a long wait—that I have gotten into the Roman Republic (and thereabouts), I find it an inexhaustible supply of interesting things to think about and figure out.

Rome long intimidated me. I once bought (in digest version) Mommsen’s history, believing that might be an entry point, but it was not the right work or the right time. As a lad, out of the blue, I acquired a copy of Lucretius, which I found hard but fun—yet any single work in itself is not enough to provide enough context to compensate for a lack of education, so it led to nothing and enriched very little.

The first book of history I ever got—what a fortuitous choice—was M.I. Finley’s Evidence and Models. There from the get-go he tried to spell out what we can know, and how we might know it. Much was (and remains) above my head: having reread it innumerable times, if I never quite understood (he taking other previous historians as his foil so often) it at least taught me a serious approach to history. For years, that and his other books, remained my staples, before I ventured out; and then when I did, it was carefully. Those that know Finley know that he barely touches on Rome.

In the line of Evidence and Models, Bernard Lewis’s History—Remembered, Recovered, Invented, supplied further insight (if never so nuanced as Finley) of the use and abuse of history. Years later, I recognize that it is not uncommon for historians to reflect on their craft. One may not need exposure to more than a handful of such texts, but they are eminently useful.

To Rome specifically, it is harder to trace my introduction. A little reading in Seneca, perhaps. Then at some point I made the leap into speeches by Cicero. Michael Grant has many collections edited at Penguin—of several volumes, I read none straight through, but read a speech here and there as it appealed to me. Here again you must understand that—moving though Cicero’s orations may be—it remained hard to contextualize the experience; though typically Grant provided a thoughtful introduction. Then (goodness knows why) I made the even more strenuous leap into the complete Philipics. (Select ones are typically anthologized to good purpose.) Intermixed with that also I read Caesar in Gaul and Sallust. Still, the historical sweep was hard in coming.

A very handy book was Cicero and the Roman Republic—more a history of Rome than a biography of Cicero—and very useful for that. A reviewer at Amazon insisted that you wanted to get the fourth or fifth edition and I did so: a great generalized introduction. (Definitely more approachable than the Mommsen.)

So lately I fell into the Letters to Atticus, with which concurrently I read Cicero (Classical Life and Letters) by D.R. Shackleton Bailey. I’ve posted on all of this: it was helpful to read certain of the letters more than once with relevant discussion of the history behind them; though, due to the letters’ breadth, there was still limited information to be conveyed. The same author’s fuller annotated editions of the Letters would have pleased me—but cost remains a matter.

Without intention, I find serendipity shaping my steps; as yesterday in the bookshop I stumbled on Party Politics in the Age of Caesar by Lily Ross Taylor. What a reviewer calls “most fascinating” I also find most helpful: without having studied the structures of Roman politics, all the political machinations become daunting. “[T]he step ladder political game that Roman aristocrats competed in” (so far) is given a good threshing out, as well as discussion of the various factions constituting their society.

What a great bit of luck—I consider it—to come upon this “1949 classic” just at this time. Plus, at under 200 pages, I can hope to chew through this and spit it out without delay—if the gods are willing. (I am not yet done with Chapter 2.)

As I say, the study of history can seem a perplexing and daunting matter. It took me decades to feel comfortable enough to approach Rome; now, I feel assured, I have gained enough of a background to be able to reach out in any direction—though Rome is not my exclusive target of interest. Every little bit that you read gives another piece of the puzzle, in forming a mental construct (or even “model”). A good education might have made each successive step easier—instead of the blind gropings of an uninitiate. Yet progress comes: it would be nice to have a second lifetime to read everything again, this time understanding it better. Alas, time is short.

My undying debt to M.I. Finley has been acknowledged in The Requiem, in an excerpt which I have titled “In the Grove of Scholars.” Scholarship does not—or did not—come easily to me. However, in my latter days, I try to bide my time within that grove’s creaky gate as much as I might. It seems only right, as one who, with Oliver Sacks, hopes to say, “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Final Words on Cicero? And Thoughts on Future Plans

2/24/2015

 
Shackleton Bailey's biography is finished. All in all, I would recommend it to anyone interested in Cicero's life and letters (especially focusing on the letters) without having to read the almost (or more than?) 900 extant. His selections are excellent, woven into a historical context (absent from the Penguin edition that I read). Because I read both things concurrently, often enough in the biography I came across for the second time an extract which had already struck me as noteworthy on my first reading. In fact I have little bookmarks throughout the pages of snippets I'd like to post here.

That may prove itself too time-consuming. One awaits the coming of spring; and then a myriad non-literary projects await. My literary projects themselves seem unimportant to me. That play stopped at midpoint? Why bother? At this site I would like to get a couple of essays—in their unexpurgated form—up on display. Much ado has been made recently about a letter by the young Lincoln (now on display at the Morgan Library in New York) in which he castigates an editor for changing his wording. Editors do come up with the darndest things, and I would like my reading public to have access to the original versions of a couple things floating about there, even as I did with the Claude McKay.

John Cowper Powys, Poetry and the Meaning of Culture

2/23/2015

 
Nothing excites me quite like finding a thoughtful piece of writing about poetry, especially if the writer is an intelligent or enlightened generalist and not a poet himself. It is incredibly rare: those who write about poetry most often are those that designate themselves poets. Yet the insights of an Edmund Wilson are of a different order than those of a T.S. Eliot, who writes (or at times almost seems to pontificate) from a standpoint of personal experience. Both are valuable. The writer of it himself—with his own backlog of experience—will inevitably find some overlap in the criticism of the verse-practitioner; possibly less so in that of the critic who is not a poet himself. (Edmund Wilson may have written poems here and there; but he would not generally be considered a poet.)

So I was delighted to stumble upon The Meaning of Culture by John Cowper Powys, in which he devotes an entire chapter to “Culture and Poetry.” It is exciting to encounter a text that takes poetry seriously to begin with. As it turns out, Powys began his career as a poet, but is mostly known for other things. Wikipedia has this description:
Powys's first published works were poetry: Odes and Other Poems (1896), Poems (1899), collections which have "echoes […] of Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, among contemporaries, and of John Milton and Wordsworth and Keats".... In the summer of 1905 Powys composed "The Death of God" an epic poem "modelled on the blank verse of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson" that was published as Lucifer in 1956. There were three further volumes of poetry[.]
His thoughts, however, do not ring with the authoritative air of an Eliot (if they did it would be unreadable, his poetry lacking the traction of Eliot’s best), which is why I automatically lumped him in my category of the generalist; and indeed, the book, something in the vein of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, takes the tone of a generalized cultural inquiry, rather than a pronouncement.

Swaths of his argument can be avoided with no loss; and I would not take even the excerpts I quote as gospel. But they are food for thought:
Poetry, considered as an art, is the expression of a certain aspect of life, which for the moment I must content myself by defining simply as the poetical element. The deliberate heightening of one’s life by the aid of this mysterious and fluctuating quality in things seems to be an inevitable impulse in the mentality of any nature worthy of the title “cultured.” But what precisely is this quality? What is this floating element in life that the human race by an overtone of universal agreement has come to name the poetical? We can at least narrow down its field by indicating what it is not. It is not the ideal. It is not the beautiful. It is not the artistic. It is not the noble. It is not the moral. So much at least we can say. But, approaching the thing itself more closely, can we not, by means of concrete examples, arrive at some notion of what constitutes its essence?
He dwells, throughout his essay, on the distinction (and correlation) between poetry and beauty. This example is a bit dated, but in spite of its wear, I think he is straining for something important:
To realize this difference between beauty and poetry one need only visualize for a moment the illuminated body of some swiftly moving aeroplane, an aeroplane engaged in advertising, let us suppose, some toilet-necessity or some new brand of cigarettes, upon a city sky. Such a spectacle might easily be conceived as a genuine revelation, in the spheres of form and colour, of beauty considered as a non-human absolute. But with that peculiar quality in things I am trying to indicate as belonging to the essence of poetry such a spectacle would have nothing to do. In fact it would exercise a destructive influence upon the natural poetry of the particular night or twilight when such an occurrence took place.
However, without ever really answering his question about what the essence of poetry is, he displays unique insight into the function or role poetry performs in human culture—things which had not occurred to me, and which I would like to consider:
The chosen material both of modern mechanics and of modern aesthetics is bound to appear to the spirit of poetry as something alien and troubling; a discord, a menace. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that any manifestation of beauty may be completely unsympathetic to traditional emotion, feeling, sentiment; whereas it is of the very essence of poetry to remain saturated with all the historic human reactions, with every sort of old-world sentiment. Poetry is in fact a thing so totally different, in both its substance and its entelechy, from beauty that the two revelations appeal to different types of mind. We must remember that an object can be beautiful without being in the least poetical; just as it can be poetical without being in the least beautiful. Poetry is composed of a certain traditional body of feelings about life; a body which has gathered by slow adhesions into a presence of values, nuances, discriminations to which must conform what every nation and every age may add as an indigenous quota of its own.

...

Would it seem a too narrow doctrine if we were to take for granted that the art of poetry will be most sui generis, most entirely itself, when it expresses in words the purely poetic view of life? From the viewpoint of this doctrine, if we do accept it, most modern poetry falls short of the earlier kind. If any characteristic more than another stamps as modern the poetical experiments of our day it is the invasion of the peculiar terrain of the art of poetry by the more purely aesthetic values of the arts of painting and music. Poetry hovers over everything that has been a background to human life, over everything that has been a permanent accessory, a daily tool, long enough for a certain organic identification to have grown up between the diurnal usages of our race and this or that fragment of material substance. Thus it is not surprising that the most deeply satisfying poetry, and that which stirs the imagination most strongly, is the poetry of old times wherein this animism or vitalization of the inanimate is most marked. Homer is thus greater than Aeschylus, Aeschylus than Dante, Dante than Milton, Milton than Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold than W.B. Yeats!
He offers something like a footnote to the sweep of his assertion (which I think is generally correct) noting, “This particular sliding-scale of values must of course be taken loosely”. He goes on:
But though this historic lapse and lamentable subsidence of high human feeling, this gradual sinking down of poetic values from the simplicities of Homer to the sophistries of our contemporaries, cannot be gainsaid, there are epochs in English poetry that possess a magic of their own unlike anything else in the world. Such for example are those honey-breathing purlieus of enchantment, those green vistas and richly receding margins of romance, that we enjoy in the poetry of Keats or in the poetry of Walter de la Mare.
It is of course when critics get down to hard examples that cracks may begin to appear in the argument, especially when one reads with the accumulated benefits of hindsight; but nevertheless, his language is precise, his distinctions fine. How much more pleasant than the snipings one occasionally finds when a chatroom full of poets tries to discuss these things today.

Beyond general theory—again without endorsing his every particular—I found Powys interesting in his generalist discussion of poets that I have read:
The best way to appreciate Dante is to lay hold upon an edition where, as in Dent’s “Temple Classics,” a literal prose translation is placed opposite the text. Incidentally we must submit that it is well worth it—however unscholarly we are—to learn at least enough Greek and Latin and Italian to be able to read these old poets aloud, if it be only to ourselves. [Of course one remembers Eliot’s grotesque self-descriptions in “What Dante Means to Me.”]

And when it comes to reading the “Inferno,” wise indeed will the reader be who reads for imaginative and emotional pleasure and not as a student. One has to be a student in youth in order to get the clue to culture. But the perpetual student is seldom a cultivated person. Slide lightly, therefore, over the historical allusions. Dodge the theological problems. Fight shy of such abominable passages as reveal a vein of unmistakable sadism in the great poet. But with these exceptions there are things that one can well read in the “Inferno” over and over again, till rarer passages, memorized by love and repetition, come to be like chain-armour for our human spirit against the insolent intrusions of the vulgar present. Then it will prove true how possible it is, by a kind of empathy or nerve-transference, to share a great poet’s most intimate life-illusion. For your feelings will actually grow Dantesque in their concentration so that as you drag your legs in weariness along your river-side or stare at water-flies in the ditch by the tow-path, or tilt your head back to gaze at the flying swallows, you will actually come to share that curious realistic awareness of the stark physiognomy of life which it is this poet’s especial gift to express.
Or the great Romantic:
[Consider] the peculiar atmosphere of the poetry of Keats. One instinctively feels that its basic appeal is essentially poetical rather than aesthetic. That is why one can enjoy to the full fragments and morsels of Keats’s poetry such as occur, like wild-flowers dropped on a foot-path, in the midst of so much that is littered and pointless and puerile.
In a later chapter Powys explains his purpose:
Not one of our fellow-creators in this vast congeries of personal lives that we call Nature is devoid of some sort of instinct, corresponding to the accumulated weight of habitual consciousness which it is the purpose of our culture to supply with selected memories out of the past out of our own existence and the existence of our race. Animals and even birds and fish have a continuity of accumulated habits which answers to the sort of culture I am trying to define in this book.
Here, as elsewhere, I take the author’s mentions of “race” to refer to “the human race” in contradistinction to the mentioned birds and fish, without delving into possible other implications the word might have for us. His book was originally copyright 1929.

Also, having mentioned “The Death of God,” there are rumblings that a similarly themed epic is near to completion—whether a follow-up to that of Powys I know not, but I think not.

Oscar Wilde in Westminster Abbey

2/21/2015

 
“The Importance of Being Earnest” is subtitled: “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.” Wilde, despite a certain loucheness among his epigrams, was never trivial...
A piece up at the New York Times discusses Oscar Wilde's "honorable mention" in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey twenty years ago. Ted Scheinman was there, and recalls the event. A little piece of nostalgia fluff of the type that popular media seems to thrive on, but insightful for all that: "We canonize authors to pretend we understand them; we forgive authors who ought rather to forgive us." And:
So true. In the end, that was one of the compelling features of Cicero's letters (to Atticus) which I have finished reading. (The Shackleton biography not quite; but I am racing toward the finish.) Not only did he live in momentous times, but he took life (if not himself) extremely seriously. The letters are not without their trivia; but the all-encompassing sweep of his personality is such that it hardly intrudes. Some pithy and redeeming bon mot lies waiting a paragraph away in all likelihood.

I'm half tempted to pick up his letters to friends, but the stamina is not there; and while I've enjoyed Cicero, presently I have reached the saturation point. Let me keep them on the shelf for another day.

The letters to Atticus break off about a year before his death, so in a way I felt cheated or at least let down. Mention of his delivery of... no no no his writing of his second speech against Anthony occurs in one letter (it was not spoken); but the whole movement of that final year is missed. Presumably he had Atticus's company during that time, so had no need to write. In that I am happy for him. Presumably letters to friends would fill in the gaps; but without the intimacy he showed Atticus. The two volume set (in the Penguin edition I linked to in the preceding paragraph) contains a healthy section of letters to his brother (I believe), but relations had cooled somewhat between them and they may as well have had proximity during that time. At any rate, Cicero was not without "wile" in dealing with family members—certainly less so with Atticus.

Oscar Wilde and Cicero, eh? A random coupling. These are just stray thoughts—though Wilde is known for his letter writing also. The absolutely unique feature about Cicero's letters to Atticus is they were written entirely without an eye toward posterity (though Cicero was much concerned with the opinion it would have for him). Wilde, even in De Profundis, was aware. But then, he was a popular writer from the get go. Taken into account his journalism, he had his shallow moments too, or trivial, but then again, who does not?

On the Twenty-One Coptic Martyrs  

2/20/2015

 
    Heavenly Father, twenty-one
    Have been beheaded, men of faith,
    Egyptians from their homeland gone
    To seek employment, made the pawn
    To men’s ambitions who allege
    A Prophet’s missive bears no hedge
For that is what his holy Scripture saith.

    Twenty-one pawns within a game
    For world supremacy, in Quest
    To dominate, and so proclaim
    Jihad against the craven shame
    Of infidels—good men and true
    Who gave their testament unto
Crucified Jesus. Send them to his breast.

    What of the wives, now widows, and
    Children, relations now bereft
    These loving men felled by the hand
    Of hideous religion’s band
    Asserting itself judge and jury
    Of whom to save and whom to bury— 
What of these now bereaved and grieving left?

    Father, we beg thee Mercy. Love,
    Forgive us our trespasses; teach
    Us how to emulate enough
    That gentle spirit’s sterner stuff
    Revealed us in the Gospel: how
    We may love them that slay us now,
Nor not the message of forgiveness breach.

    So recently, as I recall,
    Boastful churchgoers waged their war
    Upon the innocent; made fall
    Into despair, or counseled crawl
    Within a world of rampant slaughter
    Sparing no mother’s son nor daughter,
Their artful words from Christian ethos far.

    Let me remember, as a man,
    These murderers of twenty-one
    As self-proclaimed Muhammadan
    Adherents to a boastful plan,
    Resemble me in human flesh,
    Present no praxis new or fresh— 
So temper my remorse at what they’ve done.

    Twenty-one children, Father, let
    Them live forever in thy See
    Of holy love, and their crowns set
    Within accordance, sans regret,
    Of thy Son’s own. Lord, teach us not
    To rage but even as was taught
By Jesus: to let loving set us free.

Prince Sattva and the Lions (Dunhuang)

2/20/2015

 

Prince Sattva and the Lions

Picture

Prince Sattva and his brothers came
    Upon a lioness
With cublings starving, deadly tame
    Out in the wilderness.

How shall we help her, each one asked,
    To stave death and refresh
And save her cubs—when we are tasked
    To take no mortal flesh.

Her little cubs, deserve to live,
    Their hunger be appeased,
Yet is there nothing we might give
    Whereby the gods be pleased?

In consternation so they left
    Abandoning a mother’s
Terrible plight, all hope bereft,
    Till Prince spoke to his brothers:

Go on before, that I may follow
    Within a moment’s time;
But unbeknownst, his words rang hollow,
    Dissembling not a crime.

He clambered down to where she lay,
    Moribund lioness,
Yet stirred she not, too weak to prey,
    There in the wilderness.

Prince Sattva climbed, would not be vexed
    But jabbed into his throat
A branch or reed, then tumbled next
    Into the pit remote.

His spewing blood revivified
    The lioness with cubs— 
Prince Sattva thought, before he died,
    My flesh as good as grub’s.

Thus they devoured him, limb by limb
    And tore his carcass raw;
When brothers two returned for him
    Mere skeleton they saw.

Our brother has committed here
    Deed most magnificent,
Although we grieve—in death no fear
    Resides: the story went

All across Asia—one so great
    To be the bodhisattva,
Thus life through death to consecrate
    Recorded in Jataka.

If Jesus died for mankind’s sins
    Prince Sattva did not less
Dying for all of sentience— 
    Small cubs and lioness.

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    ​Or whatever.

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