Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
A post that moves me to find Larkin's Letters to Monica. Kurp quotes Larkin:
I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself . . . .
Related: Philip Larkin on Death
Mind and sense
Matter and meat
Together in man
Mystery complete.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl begins like this:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz . . . .
Debra Saunders' parody of Howl begins like this:
I saw the vast majority of three generations destroyed by madness, cursing unethical betrayed
Spitting at frozen screens teasing 404 error waiting for the dusk of peak hours
Onesie-clad hipsters sipping hot chocolate little marshmallows bobbing blinking hashtags in a sea of brown
Who opened cancellation notices all hollow-eyed and bitter sat up spewing the PolitiFact-tested rhetoric of 2010 word wars that promised nothing unfair to anyone rural or citified, and all that jazz . . . .
Read it all, and howl with rage and laughter.
Some selections by my freshman English professor, Seamus Cooney. I recently corresponded with him, not that he remembers me. But I remember him.
William Ernest Henley's Invictus ends as follows:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Half-right, say I. I am the captain of the ship of soul, my soul; I control rudder and sails and chart my course. But I am not the master of the sea or the wind or the monsters of the deep or the visibility of the stars by which I steer, or the stars themselves.
Nor am I the master of that which I control, my soul. That I am a soul is beyond my control.
And so my captaincy, sovereign in its own domain, and undeniable there, is bound round and denied by conditions and contingencies beyond my control.
I am not the master of my fate; at most I am the master of my attitude to it.
And then there are the conservatives (liberals) for whom a refusal to demonize liberals (conservatives) makes you one.
Here is the first stanza of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939):
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Read something old and and meaningful and inspiring:
A PSALM OF LIFE
Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, – act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solenm main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
For Zeno of Elea
My cat's named
Solvitur ambulando
Is his game.
If you paid attention in Logic 101 you may remember that the immediate inference called 'conversion' is valid for the I and E forms of the traditional square of opposition but not for the A and O forms. Poetic illustration courtesy of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) where 'Every poet is a fool' is an A-proposition:
Sir, I admit your gen'ral rule
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.
(Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber, 1977, p. 82)
Wise man:
This world is a vanishing quantity. I am glad soon to be quit of it. It has nothing to offer in the end but bagatelles that can fool only the foolish and must leave the wise unsatisfied. Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas.
Fool:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the
dying of the light.
Wise man:
Clever verse from a drunken fool to be admired by adolescents. It amounts to:
Do not go gentle from this dark Cave,
Old age should cherish its lack of sight:
But rage, rage against the gaining of the Light.
You actually
Crawled out of bed
Compromising your rest
To write down another
Of your
Wretched aphorisms?
One went off the deep end
The other off the shallow
Strange century.
Here are the first few lines of Charles Bukowski's one-page late poem "Zero" (You Get So Alone At Times it Just Makes Sense, Ecco 2002, p. 104, originally publ. 1986 by Black Sparrow Press):
sitting here watching the second hand on the TIMEX go
around and
around . . .
this will hardly be a night to remember
sitting here searching for blackheads on the back of my neck
as other men enter the sheets with dolls of flame
I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.
Here is an adolescent effort of mine when I was literally an adolescent:
tiredly picking my nose
listening to the grinding sounds of
clocks, air conditioners and refrigerators
i can hear it all this night
snarfing a fart now and then, tiredly
checking beef pies cooking in the oven
picking at a jammed-up typewriter
in confusion
dancing around on featherweight fright flights
and tiredly picking
picking my nose & my acne
and eating it
is this any way to run an airline?
I'll grant that Bukowski's poem, published when he was around 66, especially if you read the whole of it, is better than mine, which is not saying much. But there are plenty of common elements: self-indulgence, self-absorption, diasaffection, alienation and disconnectedness. My excuse is that my adolescent rubbish was written when I was 16. At 66 that particular excuse lapses.
Writing 'they' for 'he'
They sacrifice grammar
To the god of PeeCee.
Schmuck means penis in Yiddish
Ornament in German.
You see the link?