gregorbo blog

Journey of the Magi

2010-12-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

Prosperos of the East,

They had consulted their tables and books

And realized, of a sudden,

The end was come.

They left their homes and philosophies.

They packed lightly for the arduous trip.

They picked their way on camels and asses toward the West,

Filled with a faith they could not explain.

To honor the miracle even their dark arts could not help but to foretell,

They made their way past bandits and thieves

And wasted time even with a king.

But being wise, and then wiser still, they would heed warnings and go back a different way.

There, beneath the light of an unnatural star--

A quasar bursting celestial joy--

They saw a shadow of sorrow upon the land,

And knew it the beginning of the end

Of everything.

If they grieved, they did so in their hearts and were silent.

They offered Him gifts,

Such as they were,

Symbols: Frankinscence, gold, and myrhh.

They recognized Him the gift,

The something they could not say:
The sacrament

And sign.

And, then, humbly, they disappeared.

2009-08-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

L'Antica Rete

The painters had made it seem

as though Beauty was soft,

So, I suffered a modern affliction--

Passed to me (father to son to father and so on)--

That caused me to look at such jaundiced images

As if they were not really upside down.

And, like my father, I quickly mistook fear for awe

In that presence the first time I met it.

So, casting about (my own little net)I reached (as perhaps our Geoffrey had reached)

For such a tale as would tell me my place

And found (what my father had overlooked)

Vogli, Breatrice, volgi gli occhi santi

That I too was caught in l'antica rete:

As in her eyes, Beauty is hard

Like diamonds.

(image: Dante's Dream at the Death of Beatrice by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1871) English Pre-Raphaelite, oil on canvas, Walker Gallery, Liverpool)

Eve's Second Sorrow

2009-08-09T15:57:00.000-07:00

There are no images of Eve's second sorrow.

On the death of her son
From forseeable betrayal
There are contemplations of beauty.

Her sorrow then cannot be but precursor

To a Promethean blind hope

That Death might itself

Necessitate a salvation that only a medieval might understand.

But Adam surely died.
Did she cradle him in her arms?
I prefer to think she did--and Michealangelo captured something
Of the paradox in the Pieta:
A Mother mourning the death of the First Son, even
As an Eve shed tears for the passing of the second.

(image: (c) "The First Mourning." William Adolph Bourguereau

Tobias Says Goodbye to his Father

2009-05-09T17:25:00.000-07:00

I remember I had read something from Tobit,
But the last line was missing from the text.
I had not realized it until, staring down,
I knew the script was missing something important.

So I read it with a cadence that would make it seem complete.

It seemed at the moment quite like life.

Here I was, an honored man, asked to read a bit of Old Testament
Scripture during a wedding in Atlanta.
And, lo, a line was missing.

I thought for a moment that I might make something up.

But what could a jester add to the comedy of Tobit?
Nothing.

So, I read the last line and emphasized the wrong words,
Paused, said something about the Word of the Lord
And exited the stage--just shy of Fortinbras' entrance
Demanding the disaster be covered o'er with a pomp and circumstance
My rented tuxedo belied..

Being with child, and wanting my wife, for once, to enjoy
The joy that attends a wedding,
I took my youngest, restless, curious, and full of life,
Outside.

There, at the bottom of the steps I witnessed something singular:

Looking up to street-level I saw a man, in a long coat I something envied
Deposited from a fat yellow cab upon a rain-slicked walk.
He wore also a hat and scarf, the colors of which were dark and tasteful--
I could tell even from where I was below.

He paid the driver, had some talk, turned, and, straightening his hat,
Walked to the grand doors of the Cathedral.

I thought then that Coleridge's Mariner might accost him, but no-one appeared.
He paused, and then opened gently the door--and light spilled from within,
Illuminating briefly an infinite triangle (in all dimensions a kind of diamond) of grey
Speckled with rain and fluffy cotton-balls of snow.

Before he entered I noted he removed his hat
And the expiration of his breath reminded me briefly of mortality.

His hair was a silver-white in that seeming late-night light
And I thought: How I hope to be so distinguished someday.
Perhaps I will wear eye-glasses like that too.

Perhaps I shall live so long.

And then he disappeared.

Presumably, he went to join the wedding feast.
The Bride and Bride-Groom rosy in the rush of nuptial ceremony
Would later lead us to a reception where they did not fail to offer
The best wine first, second, and last.

I asked someone who had also seen him,
This distinguished man,
Entering stealthily into a marriage-vow
Just before the seal was sealed, and I discovered

I knew him:

His name was Peter, and he came because he knew them--

The Bride and Groom.

This Fisherman, lover, husband, founder--his orphans spread far and wide--
It was rumored, would never miss a wedding:

But had never seen a birth.

(Image: Tobias Saying Good-Bye to his Father. Painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
(1860)).

And Martha Must Wait

2009-04-14T18:46:00.000-07:00

Euryclea clap't her hands
But refrained from remarking upon the scar.
And Homer, honoring the goodly nursemaid's restraint,
Tells instead of boar and spear:
A boy's being blooded to become a man.

Who would blindly chase his fate and lose his way
For ten long years, return, a beggar's foot
Fallen into a basin, even as his beloved Telemachus
Was soothed by the fiat of a redeemed Helen of Troy?

How could she then, who'd suckled the boy,
Stay her very own lips and not shout for joy
That the man now Master had returned?

A prodigal without a brother, a son-father who was also a God?

But return he did and silent she remained.

He threaded the bow
Ascended the stair,
His labors complete,
And there then found that for which he'd been made:
Penelope.

And Martha wonders how this
Could be the better portion.

But faithful Euryclea cleansed the foot only of a pre-cursor
Of truth
And was content.

And Martha must wait.

(image: "Ulysses Recognized by Euryclea," Eustave Boulanger, 1849. Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris

Falling In Love (I) Thanks to Kate

2009-04-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

And in a sudden he saw her standing there, turning gracefully toward him and he could not speak. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he could not think of anything to say--this man of words was stunned, momentarily, to a profound silence as he looked upon the image of his heart's desire, one of which he had dreamed, knew he'd know, but never hoped to find since such dreams never really come true. And in that image he saw the hints of his future life, the graceful features of the hands of a daughter he would come to know, the deep-set, sad eyes of a son who would grow to be a man, the dark brown eyes of a grandchild who would love a funny man with a white beard called "Grampa."

In the coming weeks and days of their courtship, he continued to be haunted by the feeling that he simply did not know what to say. They conversed, he was funny, she laughed and fell in love. But still, he could not articulate what was in his heart--and then, on the day of their wedding he realized what it was that he wanted to say:

I do.

(image of Dante & Beatrice in Paradise by Amalia Ciardi Dupre, subject to copyright)

This is What it Looks Like to Fall in Love

2009-04-05T18:13:00.000-07:00

Some many years after Dante, as a nine year old, had seen Beatrice, he saw her again as an adult. There was no hope they could ever be together. He loved her anyway.

Gentleman

This is the image of a gift you've been granted. Embrace it. Live up to it. Be husbands. Be fathers. Recognize the beauty that has been offered to your humility.

If you are so gifted to have a Sophia, or a Sheila--or an Elizabeth or a Grace or an Eamon or Liam. Come to know them for the gifts to you that they are. The faces they show you are facets that otherwise you would not know.

Know them and come to know yourself.

And then abandon that part of you that thinks that they show you something about you. They don't. They show you something you need to know that you wouldn't know without them.

(image: © 2008 Jonamac Productions, "Dante and Beatrice", 1883, by Henry Holiday. Antonio Corsi posed as Dante. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England)

ShoeBox

2009-04-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

So, I'm going to California. I'm twenty. Why am I going? Because I'm young and I can.

That's not a very good reason, as it turns out, but I'm going anyway.

But before I go, I'm going home for a visit. My family life is pretty straightforward at this point. I'm the first to leave home and go away to college and stay there. So, I'm something of a golden boy for certain younger siblings. My younger sister Emily, who is also my god-child, always referred to my absence from her life a result of my being at "far-far-away-school." Which was true. After graduating high school, I left. I went as far as I could. To the University of Missouri-Columbia, thinking I wanted to be a journalist. I'd change my mind within a couple of months--but the fact remained that I left and didn't come back. Except for short visits.

It wasn't because I wanted necessarily to be away. I wanted to, well, be. And my little sister Emily figured into my thinking and feeling about this a great deal, as it turned out. But everything's hindsight, so it's hard to tell how forward thinking I was then versus how backward thinking I am now.

In any event, I resolved to accept an invitation to work in Los Angeles one summer. As I said, I was 20 at the time. But I couldn't just leave from Dallas and go. I wanted to visit home first.

I met and fell in love with a girl later who would receive a picture of me and my little sisters outside a laundry-mat during this visit home. I remember I wrote to her on the back of that picture--me and my sisters Emily, Linda and Kate, with my Mom's laundry stacked rather neatly inside the window on a table behind us, as we stood outside this South Texas laundry-mat--"Remember me" Huh. I gave her a picture of a much older brother cradling his adorable sisters in the hope that she would see that he could love innocence. But I really didn't know then what that meant at all. I do now--so the picture only imaged a kind of hope.

She married me anyway.

But, as I say, I traveled home before moving to Pasadena, California, and spent some time with the family. I loved all of them dearly. Still do. Differently. Time passes. He's a gentleman and a bastard at the same time. Stuff happens and still he marches. Sometimes steps on stuff.

But, I was home and was trying to steel myself for my very first adventure. Sure, I had left home to go make my way in the world at college--but, really, that's just one cocoon to another, you know? And I cried the first three weeks then--huddled in a phone booth in the basement of my dorm and trying to stifle my shame on the phone with my Mom or Dad during those days, so homesick I could taste the vitriol in my mouth when I hung up the phone. My rebellion had been replaced by a huge wave of sentiment, the taste of which I loathed and savored at the same time. Life is paradox--even when we have no sophistication.

But now I was embarking on a trip that would take me, by car, from deep South Texas to Los Angeles , California. When we got to El Paso, we were half-way there. Wow. For the first time I began to understand distance. Not because it is tedious but because it is, in itself, as Einstein came to realize, miraculous. Some gang-banger got shot to death in El Paso as I was passing through. That's a kind of miracle. They make movies about such happenstance in Hollywood--and that's where I was heading.

But before I left I searched for some pictures. I wanted to take some with me. And, as I said, I was planning on falling in love with a girl, so I needed a history. I didn't really think I'd meet her in L.A., but I knew I'd meet her someday. I wanted to give her something. Somehow.

So, I looked through a shoe-box.

There were all kinds of pictures there. There were pictures of me and my siblings from days in the '70's. With our buck teeth and pure innocence. Before braces but not before stupid clothes and bell-bottomed pants. Knit shirts and shag hair-cuts. In one picture my sister Laura stares out with her hands crossed upon her breast. Like what she will look like in her coffin. Strange and beautiful and scary. My youngest brother Rob too fat for his "one-zee." He's a contented Buddha with his whole life before him. He has no idea that he will be a fireman. But he will be a hero--and yet in the picture he's just a fat boy with everything in front of him.

So, I'm rooting through and I find a picture of my little sister Linda. It's one I took before leaving for college. She was perhaps 6 or 7 at the time. She's posing (for me) with some dog we had. I have no name for this dog. He's shaggy and dirty--like an unkempt Benji. One of the unnumbered strays we took care of in those days. She's not really smiling. But she's not sad either. She's just her. She's just--well, authentically Linda. I can't explain it well, but I love the picture and I want to take it to California. I don't know what awaits me there--there are dangers. I fear Pinocchio's 'Island of Lost Boys' there. I want her picture to ground me. I remove it from the box.

Then I find another picture. It's of my mother. It's black and white. She's cradling a dog too--it's a Boxer. She's on a beach. I know it must be the Cape. I wonder if the Boxer is the same as one in a picture of me from Indiana I saw once. I figure it can't be. I set this picture next to the one of Linda.

I've never considered Linda to resemble my mother--and yet they are clearly of the same stock. There's no denying it, despite the difference in hair and skin color and tone. My mother, in my imagination, has no freckles. Linda is scored with with them. But there's something in the expression of each that teaches me, inarticulately, a certain something about what it means to be person.

There they are, next to each other. The one in color, taken in the '80's, of my little sister. The other, in black-and-white, of my mother, taken by someone to whom I must be related but whose name I do not know. She looks fourteen--but there's no way to tell. Back in the 1950's, perhaps, dressed in a way that made them seem more mature. A white cotton blouse and clam-diggers, in the sand without shoes.

My mother looks out at the world--a young girl. All of her life ahead of her. The life that has now unfolded--married at 19. A first child at 20. And then nine children later and an oldest son ready to make his way West.

More importantly, they were people in their own right. I could see it in their eyes. Each with an entire life ahead of them, Demeter and Persephone before I'd even met them.

Mother and daughter and, with the pictures side by side, for the first time, I recognized that they looked alike. How strange. I saw in that moment the anguish of the Mother whose daughter will someday become a woman, of whom Zeus himself would brood upon, as Hesiod wrote.

What a miracle. What a miracle they each were. Separate and yet the same.

And had I ever been an Orpheus to rescue either from the Pomegranate seed? Could I ever be?

I cannot quite articulate the miracle of another individual except to say that it gives me hope. That there is such beauty in the world. That there is such beauty in the world.

It makes you understand not Achilles--but perhaps Odysseus or Aeneas. Perhaps. Definitely, Dante. Yes. Dante. Every man hopes for a Beatrice. We are all introduced to them. Few of us recognize them when we see them.

I love Dante.

(image: (c) H. Blairman & Sons, bas-relief by Ellen Mary Rope, 1899)

Three Worlds

2009-02-21T16:56:00.000-08:00

Within the rain-slick'd pavement's
Oil-fractalled water
A bird flying up-side-down.

(image M.C. Escher's "Sky and Water")

A Kind of Icarus

2008-12-21T18:34:00.000-08:00

Icarus--by Gregory Borse

"You laugh," she said, drying the last dish and placing it into the dish drain. "But it's true. Look at your father. He's afraid of death. That's the only way to explain the behavior of a man. He's not changed since the day I met him and when I married him, his mother told me that he hadn't changed since the day he was born." Now she looked at me directly. "Whether it's the reason they drink, the reason they work, the reason they mess around, or the reason they don't mess around. Men are afraid of death. Your father is a man and he's afraid too. So are you."

So he had me there. But she hadn't told me anything I didn't think I already knew. But that's the way it is, too. I always think that whatever somebody just said was something I thought of a long time ago. Probably the result of coming from the womb. Coming from a place already complete and whole and into a world all incomplete and fragmented. Coming into a place where they told you it was your job not only to find out who you were but to make up who you are too. But here she was talking about my own father and it occurred to me for the first time that she knew him better than I did. And, for that matter, she knew me and men in general better than I did. And that meant too that she was a person. And that had really not occurred to me at all. How can your parents be people? How is it that you are supposed to handle becoming a person yourself when all of a sudden, whily you're sitting at the kitchen table, you mother turns around, all gorgon-headed, and decides to let you know that she had an entire life before you were ever even born?

So, I thought about my father.

And I thought about how angry I had been at him. How angry I was that he wasn't more than he was. How angry I was that people laughed at him behind his back because he wore the wrong colored socks and drove the wrong kind of car. How angry I was that they knew what a great guy he was. How angry I was that he laughed at their jokes just to make them happy--even though I knew that, while we walked through the parking lot at the high school after my sister's basketball game (in which she had made a pathetic fool of herself by trying so hard sh had run into the wall going for a rebound), they laughed at his brown polyester pants and white socks and our 1979 orange Vega--no kidding. And how angry I was that he didn't care because his happiness had nothing to do with the kind of thing that motivated theirs. Because all he thought about then was putting an arm around my sister to let her know that he was proud to be her father, on that night and on every night.

So thta makes me think about how I can live up to a man whom everyone loves and who can keep a car running on nothing but hangers and duct tape. No air conditioning in the Vega and Mom says Dad's out scouting garage sales for a window unit he can rig up to the cigarette lighter. Loading up in our Sunday finery, and Dad yelling: "Everyone in the car, it's time to go to church! Everybody in! Cindy, Laura, Greg, Sarah, Chirs, Robbie, Linda, Emily, Kate!?" (He always called out in order of age, from oldest to youngest). "Good! Now--somebody keep a foot out of the car to make sure we're grounded! Hey!! Take that foil hat off of Robbie's head--that's not funny, that's just dangerous!"

Or that time we were leaving the Meijer's Thrifty Acres and Dad took a turn kinda fast and Sarah just kinda flew out of the car. But didn't she hit the pavement running--and holding on to the back door handle too. I'll never forget her face--eyes as big as saucers, her mouth open wide and nothing coming out of it. And then the screaming cacophony from the back seat--everybody stepping on everybody else's DAD, DAD! SARAH! STOP THE CAR! SHE'S! YOU GOTTA . . . AAAAHHHHH!!! And then all of a sudden a thunderous "SSSHHHUUUUUUDDDDD---UUUUPPPP!" from the driver's side of the front seat as a great arm swept from left to right (ours, not his) striking whatever happened to be in its path and he expertly driving and smacking his kids without even turning around. An expert. And then it was--as Faulkner would say--tableau: four kids in the back seat (Chris still sat on Mom's lap in the front and Robbie through Katy had yet to try out for the circus, so to speak) leaning forward in the seat to look at Sarah--who still ran beside the car, looking at us with an expression of amazed fear and perhaps a little curiosity too from trying to figure out why we were all making the same expression she was and we weren't even running. Until Mom turned her head back so we could see that Mom expression--you know, the one that says "You kids" and also says, but this time couldn't quite articulate since she caught a glimpse of her then youngest daughter running about twenty miles an hour beside the car, "you know better than to make so much noise while your Father is trying to drive," because instead it contorted into an expression that exactly matched all of ours before she could scream "Oh, Lanny!" before degenerating into an indecipherable mother-tongue understood without any need for translation by everybody and which itself had the power to bring the car to a sudden stop. But then, after we'd gathered out almost lost member back into the car and she had displaced Chris in the front-seat lap (making a couple of us wonder if Sarah had negotiated a stunt), and my Father had sufficiently satisfied the couple who had followed the scene in the parking lot thta it was not, indeed, appropriate to call the authorities, my Father--this man--didn't yell at us. He apologized. My Mother later told us that if we were more quiet in the car then screaming might be understood to inidcate an emergency. But the important thing to me--at least later on--was that he could have done a million other things. But he apologized--to Sarah and to the rest of us.

So, now I'm wondering how you live up to a man who is willing to admit a momentary weakness in front of how own children? And I can see him now too. Sitting there, his hazel eyes looking over the top of his black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses, thinking of that word that fits just right as he works another cross-word puzzle, not even noticing that he is old and the skin around his elbows is baggy. And I see, too, if I look into my own dauther's eyes, his own motivations and his own drives, his own weaknesses, just as I see them in myself. Beccause I've discovered that having a father--whether you know him or not--is inescapable. Not the way a mother is inescapable. Somehow differetn. Somehow always more distant and hovering but always there. We can point to our mothers and say, "That is my mother." We point to our fathers and utter an acf of faith.

When I was little I used to dream that I could fly. But I never flew high up in the sky. I never even flew outside of my own house. In my dreams I would drift effortlessly around my home--an Icarus without the danger of the sun.

My earliest memory of my Father must be of him when I was about one or two years old. I remember sitting in my high chair in the kitchen and my father walking through the door. I see him framed there. Those same Buddy Holly glasses. The hair black instead of white. Khaki pants and a t-shirt. No baggy skin around the jaw, nor around the elbows. I remember his pausing in the doorway and I remember asking him if he could touch the ceiling. I can see the muscles of his chest and his stomach as he reaches both hands upward, his fingertips resting gently on the white cork board above him. And I remember being amazed.

My Father could touch the ceiling.

But now, I think. He wasn't just touching the ceiling. He was holding it up.

Man was meant for Woman

2008-12-06T19:29:00.000-08:00

There's no way to explain the order

Otherwise she had been first;
Man was meant for Woman
Or else he'd be the worse.

She came after as equal
But also his--how should I say?
A partner, superior, and teacher
Who most cruelly shows the way.

He sees her first a Helen
Then a Fury--Lilith, or Salome,
And at long journey's end, a real Odysseus,
He meets Penelope.

She teaches him a humble way
And makes him close his mouth.
In the nuptial bower, however, there,
Reveals to him a truth:

You are not everything you seem
Nor are you what you lack--
Nor are you merely what you've done,
For truth will draw you back

In disguise, perhaps you'll learn
A thing or two 'bout youth
But from me, alone, you'll learn,
And naked then--
Something of God's reproof.

(image: Odysseus and Penelope, by Francesco Primaticcio, 1563)

On St. Thomas More--for her grandson, my nephew, his grandmother: My Mom

2008-05-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

Relativity

Most have some and few have none but More had
more than most, while he with most of all still
wanted more -- still wanted More. Yet More would
not take more nor give of More to seek what
most would want, for More had All and more was
none (to More but not to all). So More gave
all for All, gave More for All, to leave the
one with most not more, nor More, but less than
most, not even none: not all, not most, not more, not
More, not some, not less, not none, not even
none, but less, far less, and less than none at all.
(c) DHB 2008

III

2008-04-06T19:52:00.000-07:00

They've been used to profit
From years of traffic in men's desires
For which they've sailed the many seas
For which they've sacrificed their lives.

And all for what?

A Gold dubloon festooned upon a mast
That marked a value they could not measure?
Or perhaps these former schoolmasters
Fancied them masters instead of slaves.

But who ain't a slave? Tell me that.
What of it if some schoolmaster
Thumps and punches me and
Orders me to get a broom?
How if everyone is served in some such way
And the universal thump is passed around?

All hands should rub each-other's shoulder blades
And be content.

They have no cause for complaint, these
Grub-worms and Sub-subs,
For they have made their profit and ought
To count the pennies in their jars
Since no wine will ever warm them

Against the cold that can't help to come
Since the storm gathers
And presages a grand-hooded phantom,
Like a snow-hill in the air.

(image (c) copyright Justin Quinn, "Moby Dick Chapter 55 or 9200 times E")

And they've been used to profit

2007-12-24T20:21:00.000-08:00

Rembrandt's Christ Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple (1626)
(Part II, "They Say it is the Second Coming" (c) Gregory Borse 2007-2008)


II

In the market they complain
There's noone left to buy their wares:
And they've been used to profit.

From gold, silver, jewels, and pearls,
From purple linen and from silk,
From scarlet, sandalwood, and ivory,
From marble, iron and from bronze.

From cinnamon and from spices,
From ointment, incense, and from myrrh.

I'll keep my money against the cold
And wait for winter to take its hold.
And when I make again the street,
I'll hear them calling, men to mete:

Wine! Oil! Flour! Wheat! We can sell you things to eat!  
We have Cattle! We have Sheep! We have Goats! And Chariots!

I'll check the coins still in my pocket
And wonder at their bitter cry:

We have bodies and souls of men to buy. . .

[see post labeled "Let us go and make our visit" for part I]

Remembering a Friend

2007-12-22T14:27:00.001-08:00

Installed at the Gasson Rotunda at Boston College in 1913, this statue of St. Michael the Archangel's victory over Satan was commissioned in 1865 by Gardner Brewer for his Boston Street home. It was sculpted by Scipione Tadolini.

I offer the image today in tribute to a friend who passed away recently. He taught me something about hope and perseverance, faith and conviviality, good humor, courage, love, and wisdom. I will miss him.

Saint Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host -
by the Divine Power of God -
cast into hell, satan and all the evil spirits,
who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Amen.

Rest in Peace, friend. I will never forget your voice.

Let us go and make our visit

2007-12-08T18:54:00.001-08:00

Dante and Virgil in Hell by William Adolphe-Bouguereau (1850).

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

***

If I thought my answer were given/ to anyone who would ever return to the world, / this flame would stand still without moving any further. / But since never from this abyss/ has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true, / without fear of infamy I answer you.

Dante's L'Inferno--(Canto 27, 61-66) Spoken by Guido de Montefeltro (one of Dante's "false counselors"). The above translation, as well as the quote from T.S. Eliot below, from The Norton Anthology of Poetry Shorter 4th Edition (Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy, eds. Norton and Company, New York, 1997. 767).

Bouguereau's image is of Dante and Virgil's encounter, in the fifth circle, with those who suffer the sin of wrath, just on the edge of the river Styx. The lines quoted are secondarily from Dante's L'inferno, as incorporated into T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Disorienting, perhaps. But T. S. Eliot begins his poem with the quote from Dante, above, in the original Italian. He proceeds with a very curious opening speech--perhaps uttered by a kind of anti-Virgil inviting a wearily post-modern Dante on a tour of a different kind of Hell:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

***

Almost as if to say, but not quite yet:
(Here begins "They Say it is the Second Coming" (c) Gregory Borse 2007-2008)

I

They say it is the Second Coming,
So I hide myself on a side street
And count the coins in my pocket

To fill my flask one last time
And soften steely nerves
For the suffering I know
will surely come.

But it never does.

I go and buy my pint at the corner package store.
The counter-lady knows me there and asks if I'd like more.

I tell her yes but thank-you no
And wander to the street,
Forgetting to prepare my face
For the faces I might meet.

It doesn't matter.

They know me because they do not know me
Nor do I know them.
We simply share a circle
And will meet again.

(for Part II, see post labeled "And they've been used to profit")

What Price Bread?

2007-11-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

Ary Scheffer's Temptation of Christ (1854).

The last century proved not to be the deciding contest in the argument between security and freedom. But this century will prove to be so.

The twentieth century will go down for being, among other things, the beginning of a short war between authoritarianism and liberty. The twenty-first century will go down for being, perhaps for nothing else, the century in which that contest was decided. But the questions upon which this contest are founded were raised in the 19th century.

As Betty Burch, in Dictatorship and Totalitarianism (D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc. 1964) wrote, "The basic issues in the relation of freedom to authority are raised by Dostoyevsky in the dialogue between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor [in The Brothers Karamozov], a dialogue in which Christ remains silent. The aged Inquisitor chides Christ for offering men the freedom they dread instead of the bread they want. The Inquisitor admits that men must have something beyond bread for which to live, but whoever holds authority can guide their conscience, and whoever holds their conscience and gives them bread can rule the world and bring universal peace and happiness. The questions raised by the Grand Inquisitor lie at the heart of social organization. . . . [W]hat price in freedom are men willing to pay for bread . . .?"

Burch notes that in Dostoyevsky's dialogue, Christ "remains silent."

He remains silent, perhaps, because it is our time to speak.

Agrippa's Statement of Faith

2007-08-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

There is no more humble signature on a piece of art than Agrippa's on the Pantheon in Rome-- Agrippa: I made this.

I know it's tranlsated: "built during his third consulate." But it means "I made this."

And why I feel it's humble: I know what I've done and what I need to take responsibility for. Agrippa was the God of what he did. I am the God of what I have done.

I am not the God of what I have not done and do not insist that I am the God of everything. And yet there are things I have not done and yet are.

There is a God. And it's not me. . . .

3 a.m.

2007-06-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes at night
I see spirits in flight
In the air, along paths I know not where
Like a breath that leaves a warm mouth
and floats
to wintry air
and disappears
So too, these spirits I fear,
Tread on trails men do not dare--
But must
Sometimes at night.

2007-06-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

ON THE SECOND IRAQ WAR

(by Frederick Turner April 2003)

Few wars are ever quite as pure as this.

Around the world's round haunch you feel the shriek

Of thousands as their burning souls seek bliss,
The weight of guilt that bends us week by week;

But there's another sense, the cooling ebb

Of fever as the great boil, lanced, begins to shrink,

The lightening that dawns across the web

Of human comradeship, the cold sweet drink

Of liberty that's lifted to their lips,

The first small flowers of truth among the lies,

The lancet of a bright apocalypse,

The gasp of joy as death sheds its disguise.

Out of the sacred dust of Babylon,

The groves of Ur where Jacob once sought wives,

Has come the half-bred monster, half our own,

And half the oppression of a billion lives.

And so it's time the youngest breed of men,

Mixing themselves, as Tocqueville foresaw,

Back to the race of Adam, tried again

To build the Babel-tower on a just law.

And our young soldiers are so quiet and fine!

How did we merit their strange chivalry,

Their truthfulness, their loyalty, their spine,

After our decades of dishonesty?

And will again they save us from our flaws,

Those gentle warriors purged of irony,

As they once did, upon as great a cause,

Amidst the blood-drenched surf of Normandy?

Three Davids

2007-06-07T21:43:00.001-07:00

Michelangelo, Bernini, and Donatello tell a story. Michelangelo offers David on the cusp of his coming into his majority--he sees Goliath and salvation history takes a breath as David contemplates the stepping into his role: the boy is about to become the man. Bernini captures David as he enacts the union of intellect and will in perfect action. Donatello shows David over the severed head of the defeated Goliath deliberately fortelling the Archangel Michael's defeat of Satan, even as he establishes the house from which will issue the ultimate sacrifice that will secure the victory of Good over evil . . .

Expensive, delicate ships . . .

2007-06-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

Musee des Beaux Arts--W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Last Days First Days

2007-06-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

Thomas Kuhn wrote about paradigm shifts as periods in which shifts in culture occur as the result not of an inability to come up with the right answers, but a failure to ask the right questions.

Given the fractal nature of reality, perhaps we should understand overlapping paradigm shifts to account for a kind of biologic seething that forms the shape of a living culture. History is the study of the fossil remains of earlier shifts. And yet, as T.S. Eliot held in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," history as tradition remains part of the present shift, as it continues to exert its force upon the now. William Faulkner once remarked to Malcolm Cowley that his attempt in writing the Prologue to the fourth act of Requiem for a Nun ("The Jail: Not Yet Quite Relinquish") was to capture the sense that "the past was never really past." Hence, the prologue is two sentences long: the first sentence has perhaps thirty eight words; the second is perhaps forty five pages long . . .

This blog will be given over to random ruminations on the nature of reality, to aspects of our present culture--never really cut off from the past and never out of communication with any number of other presents (that are never really absent) that form what we call the "world." It will cover poetry (mostly past, some present), art, religion, culture, literature of the West, politics, philosophy, and current events. It will neither make sense of these things necessarily nor claim or declaim to exhaust them. The attempt here is to participate, to add, to fulminate, to make sense of, and to further.

My hope is that you will join me in a conversation that is actually productive. This sounds like a lot of naval gazing but that's not my inclination or nature. I won't burden readers of this blog with biographical material except as I see imperfectly that it participates in the larger epiphenomenon to which we are all subject--whether we acquiesce, surrender, or deny.