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Timon’s Rage: “Let Confusion Live”

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Timon Grubbing for Roots After He Has Fled Athens

No doubt you are familiar with the rage of King Lear after two of his daughters ave betrayed him. That is almost nothing compared to the rage of Timon, who has given all his wealth to his friends, but is deserted by them when he himself is broke. These are the opening lines of Act IV:

Let me look back upon thee. O thou wall,
That girdlest in those wolves, dive in the earth,
And fence not Athens! Matrons, turn incontinent!
Obedience fail in children! slaves and fools,
Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench,
And minister in their steads! to general filths
Convert o’ the instant, green virginity,
Do ’t in your parents’ eyes! bankrupts, hold fast;
Rather than render back, out with your knives,
And cut your trusters’ throats! bound servants, steal!
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are,
And pill by law. Maid, to thy master’s bed;
Thy mistress is o’ the brothel! Son of sixteen,
pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire,
With it beat out his brains! Piety, and fear,
Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries,
And let confusion live! Plagues, incident to men,
Your potent and infectious fevers heap
On Athens, ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatica,
Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt
As lamely as their manners. Lust and liberty
Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth,
That ’gainst the stream of virtue they may strive,
And drown themselves in riot! Itches, blains,
Sow all the Athenian bosoms; and their crop
Be general leprosy! Breath infect breath,
at their society, as their friendship, may
merely poison! Nothing I’ll bear from thee,
But nakedness, thou detestable town!
Take thou that too, with multiplying bans!
Timon will to the woods; where he shall find
The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.
The gods confound—hear me, you good gods all—
The Athenians both within and out that wall!
And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow
To the whole race of mankind, high and low! Amen.

Even Shakespeare’s minor plays can pack a punch. Timon of Athens is worth a read, especially when you are feeling unkindly toward your fellow man.

“You Have To Give It Up”

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Hungarian Poet Kukorelly Endre

To begin with, Hungarian is like Chinese in that the last name comes first. So what would be Endre Kukorelly in English is Kukorelly Endre in the Magyar tongue. I found this poem in the Hungarian Literature Online website—very sobering thoughts considering the season:

You Have To Give It Up

Soon you have to give it up. The body
and the heart and things, and the soul, too.
The soul flies up. Up, where. Soon you have
to give it up. The body leaves you.
Aches, falls, loosens. Aches, burns, burns
comes to an end, bone, the body flows away. How
easy it is. It leaves you.
You leave it, easier than you leave the street, a
bench, a glove, the sight of
pouring rain, the sobbing of it. The flowing rain.
Finally, the pain leaves, steps away. It won’t be worse.
It’s not worse, that’s it. Or it’s not cruel.
It rather might be sad—what isn’t?
The fallen fruit. Fragment.
For example, the sound doesn’t emerge. It sits far in
the back. Sat in the back. It sat in the back of a bus.
Sat back. To grieve. Or to run down. Thinking
it will run you down easier. Or
why. Why.
Soon you
have to give that up too.

The translation is by Michael Castro and Gabor G. Gyukics (or, in Hungarian, Gyukics Gabor).

“It’s All in the Wrist”

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Author Nelson Algren (1909-1981)

The following poem is how novelist Nelson Algren ends his best-known novel, The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). It is a tale of lowlifes, mostly of Polish ancestry, trying to eke out a living in postwar Chicago with no money and a hankering for drink, drugs, and gambling. It is perhaps the most compassionate novel ever written about the lower strata of American urban society. Its hero is Frankie Machine, a war vet who is a card dealer in a gambling club who has an unfortunate addiction to morphine.

Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm

It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue,
And Frankie Machine had the touch.
He had the touch—and a golden arm—
“Hold up, Arm,” he would plead,
Kissing his rosary once for help
With the faders sweating it out and—
Zing!—there it was—Little Joe or Eighter from Decatur,
Double trey the hard way, dice be nice,
When you get a hunch bet a bunch,
It don’t mean a thing if it don’t cross that string,
Make me five to keep me alive,
Tell ’em where you got it ’n how easy it was—
We remember Frankie Machine
And the arm that always held up.

We remember in the morning light
When the cards are boxed and the long cues racked
Straight up and down like the all-night hours
With the hot rush hours past.

For it’s all in the wrist with a deck or a cue
And if he crapped out when we thought he was due
It must have been that the dice were rolled,
For he had the touch, and his arm was gold;
Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat,
The arm that held up has failed at last.

Yet why does the light down the dealer’s slot
Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?
(A dream, they say, of a golden arm
That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)

A steerer is a person hired to lure customers into a gambling den.

Seize the Day

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Roman Poet and Muses

Princeton University Press has come out with an interesting series of books under the general heading Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. A few months ago, I read the volume on Epictetus. Just now, I have finished the one on Horace’s poetry, entitled How To Be Content: An Ancient Poet’s Guide for an Age of Excess.

Sadly, I have not tried yet in any sustained way to tackle the Odes, Epodes, Epistles, and Satires, what with their reams of footnotes and textual controversies. This volume, on the other hand, makes it easier to understand what Horace is about:

May I have what I have now, less even,
      and may I live for myself
 What remains of my days, if the gods
      grant any remainder:
 May I have a good supply of books and
      corn planted for the year,
 And never hang and float in waiting for
      an uncertain hour.

And:

To be daunted by nothing is the one and
      only thing,
 Numicius, that can make and keep you
      happy.

It is a sobering thought that we have created such complicated lives for ourselves, whereas more than two thousand years ago, there were certain extraordinary poets and philosophers whose advice is as current as today’s news. It was Horace, after all, who advised us all to carpe diem (seize the day).

Horace was as philosophical in dealing with the end of days:

Order wine and perfume and the too-brief
 Flower of the rose to be brought,
 While circumstances, time of life
 And the dark threads of the three sisters
      allow it.

The three sisters, of course, are the Three Fates of ancient mythology: Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who measures the thread of life; and Atropos, who cuts the thread of life.

Who Moves the Pieces?

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Chess Pieces

Here is one of Jorge Luis Borges’s sonnets about chess. Except, as you can imagine, it is about more—a whole lot more.

Chess

Faint-hearted king, sly bishop, ruthless queen,
straightforward castle, and deceitful pawn—
over the checkered black and white terrain
they seek out and begin their armed campaign

They do not know it is the player’s hand
that dominates and guides their destiny.
They do not know an adamantine fate
controls their will and lays the battle plan.

The player too is captive of caprice
(the words are Omar’s) on another ground
where black nights alternate with whiter days.

God moves the player, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

The translation is by Alastair Reid. Having just finished a cup of hot yerba mate at 9:30 in the evening, after having read a collection of Argentinean short stories by César Aira, I find myself, once again, drawn toward the land of the Sol de Mayo.

The Spiral Road

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U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

Here is another poem by Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Nation (Este Mvskokvlke), belonging to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). Considering all that has happened to her people, she is curiously optimistic “for earth’s grandsons.” And that is the title of her poem.

For Earth’s Grandsons

Stand tall, no matter your height, how dark your skin
Your spirit is all colors within
You are made of the finest woven light
From the iridescent love that formed your mothers, fathers
Your grandparents all the way back on the spiral road—
There is no end to this love
It has formed your bodies
Feeds your bright spirits
And no matter what happens in these times of breaking—
No matter dictators, the heartless, and liars
No matter—you are born of those
Who kept ceremonial embers burning in their hands
All through the miles of relentless exile
Those who sang the path through massacre
All the way to sunrise
You will make it through—

Pictograph at Chaco Canyon Showing the Spiral Road

I liked the way the poem ends with a dash: All this is still happening. I posted another poem by Joy Harjo on October 20 here. Both poems are taken from her recent book An American Sunrise (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).

An Astronomer Poet

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The Lobster Nebula Seen from the Hubble Telescope

It’s an unusual combination, but it sat well on Rebecca Elson’s shoulders. She was at one and the same time an astronomer and a poet. Unfortunately, she died young at the age of 39 with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I learned about her from Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings blog.

Canadian Poet and Astronomer Rebecca Elson

Antidotes to Fear of Death

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.


			

	
	



				
					


	


		
		
Seven Questions

				

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Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo





I present for your enjoyment—and serious consideration—a poem about politics by Joy Harjo, the Poet Laureate of the U.S., who is also a Muscogee Creek Indian whose people have suffered grievously from lying, weaselly politicians of all stripes through their history as the first real Americans.





The poem is from her collection entitled An American Sunrise.





For Those Who Would Govern










First question: Can you first govern yourself?





Second question: What is the state of your own household?





Third question: Do you have a proven record of community service and compassionate acts?





Fourth question: Do you know the history and laws of your principalities?





Fifth question: Do you follow sound principles? Look for fresh vision to lift all the inhabitants of the land, including animals, plants, elements, all who share this earth?





Sixth question: Are you owned by lawyers, bankers, insurance agents, lobbyists, or other politicians, anyone else who would unfairly profit by your decisions?





Seventh question: Do you have authority by the original keepers of the lands, those who obey natural law and are in the service of the lands on which you stand?










I found interesting Joy’s use of the word principalities in the fourth question. She herself is a member of a sovereign nation that is affiliated with the U.S.





In the sixth question, I would have included real estate developers, who are in my book archvillains.





Looking at our current president, he comes off in honest answers to these questions as a suppurating vessel of gangrenous pus.

			

	
	



				
					


	


		
		
The God Abandons Antony

				

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Marc Antony on Cleopatra’s Barge





It was in the first century AD that Plutarch first mentioned the tale that, as he was to face ultimate defeat from both Octavian (later Augustus) and his love Cleopatra, that he was visited by a strange vision:





During this night, it is said, about the middle thereof, while the city was quiet and depressed through fear and expectation of the future, all at once certain harmonious sounds from all kinds of instruments were heard, and shouts of a crowd with Evoes and satyric leapings, as if some company of revellers not without noise were going out of the city; and the course of the procession seemed to be through the middle of the city to the gate leading outwards in the direction of the enemy, and at this point the tumult made its way out, being loudest there. And those who reflected on the sign were of opinion that the god to whom Antonius all along most likened himself and most claimed kinship with was deserting him.





In his play Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare makes mention of this vision in Act IV, Scene 3.





But it was the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, a citizen of Alexandria, who wrote one of his greatest poems on the subject:










Constantine P. Cavafy





The God Abandons Antony





When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.





The poem is mentioned in Lawrence Durrell’s Justine and even printed there, but in Durrell’s translation. I have chosen instead to include the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

			

	
	



				
					


	


		
		
A Poem for Halloween

				

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Jack O’ Lanterns





Here is a poem redolent of the season by the U.S.’s new Nobel Prize Winner in Literature for 2020: Louise Glück.





All Hallows




Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:


This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one


And the soul creeps out of the tree.














Poet Louise Glück