Richibi’s Weblog

          “Jupiter and Juno” (1597)

 

                   Annibale Carracci

 

                             ________

 

                ‘Twas now, while these transactions past on Earth,

                And Bacchus thus procur’d a second birth,

 

second birth, Bacchus / Dionysus

had been granted a second birth

after he’d been plucked from

Semele‘s womb in a first, abortive,

birth, and carried in Jove / Jupiter

/ Zeus‘s thigh to term for the

second, if you’ll remember

                When Jove, dispos’d to lay aside the weight

                Of publick empire and the cares of state,

                As to his queen in nectar bowls he quaff’d,

                “In troth,” says he, and as he spoke he laugh’d,

                “The sense of pleasure in the male is far

                More dull and dead, than what you females share.”

 

you might note here that these last

eight verses have been one long

sentence, incorporating here and

there other full sentences, but

within commas, like railroad cars

pulled along by a locomotive, none

independent of the others, it seems

to me I’ve seen that kind of thing

before

 

quaff’d, drank, took a draught

 

to his queen, in her honour

 

in troth, in truth, truly

 

Jove / Jupiter / Zeus has a question

to settle with Juno / Hera, he claims

that men are less attuned to

pleasure than women are

               Juno the truth of what was said deny’d;

 

Juno / Hera doesn’t at all agree

 

                Tiresias therefore must the cause decide,

 

Tiresias will be the arbiter, he will

the cause decide

 

Tiresias, mythical prophet

 

                For he the pleasure of each sex had try’d.

 

hmmm, you don’t hear stuff like

that in the Bible, the monotheistic

counterpart to Ovid’s pantheistic

Metamorphoses

 

a pantheistic religion would have

no categorical set of values, no

Ten Commandments, the gods

themselves would not agree on 

a code of behaviour, morality

would be in the eye of the

beholder, not divinely mandated,

Nietzsche will have a lot to say

about that in the 19th Century

eminently pertinent to ensuing 

generations

                It happen’d once, within a shady wood,

                Two twisted snakes he in conjunction view’d,

 

in conjunction, mating

                When with his staff their slimy folds he broke,

                And lost his manhood at the fatal stroke.

 

you shouldn’t mess around with

snakes, it appears

                But, after seven revolving years, he view’d

                The self-same serpents in the self-same wood:

 

self-same serpents, surely he means

the same species, not the same

snakes

                “And if,” says he, “such virtue in you lye,

                That he who dares your slimy folds untie

                Must change his kind, a second stroke I’ll try.”

 

if it worked once, it might work a

second time, Tiresias supposes

                Again he struck the snakes, and stood again

                New-sex’d, and strait recover’d into man.

 

it worked, Tiresias is reconfigured,

reconstituted, as a man

                Him therefore both the deities create

                The sov’raign umpire, in their grand debate;

 

create, appoint, assign duties to

 

the grand debate, the question,

the calculus, of pleasure

 

sov’raign umpire, chief, ruling,

irreversible by consent, judge

               And he declar’d for Jove:

 

women are more susceptible to

pleasure than men are, Tiresias

definitively decides

 

                                                     when Juno fir’d,

               More than so trivial an affair requir’d,

 

fir’d, not happy, furious, motivated

 

More than so trivial an affair, this

incident shouldn’t’ve been the

cause of, requir’d, the extreme

response to which Juno / Hera

condemns Tiresias

 

                Depriv’d him, in her fury, of his sight,

                And left him groping round in sudden night.

 

Tiresias, the blind prophet, the

apocryphal blind prophet, so

grimly subjected, finds powerful

resonance, incidentally, in Homer,

another, even more famous, and

actual, which is to say historically

authenticated, blind prophet, both,

nevertheless, of immeasurable

cultural consequence

                But Jove (for so it is in Heav’n decreed,

                That no one God repeal another’s deed)

 

an honour code among the gods,

to balance competing, however

august, visions, morality, in other

words, by consensus

                Irradiates all his soul with inward light,

                And with the prophet’s art relieves the want of sight.

 

thus Tiresias becomes the famed

prophet, for better, it’ll turn out,

or for worse, cursed, and blessed,

simultaneously

 

stay tuned

 

 

R ! chard