positions to ponder | Richibi's Weblog

the judgment of richibi

___________

at the end of a long overdue visit to
a friend’s home the other night, she
asked me, did you notice their facial
skin, which of us do you think had
the best complexion, you can be
honest, she insisted

we had intended to watch the finals
of a voice competition we’d both
been following, over a glass of
wine, or two, each, when a friend
called, from, essentially, the door,
with a second friend in tow on their
way to a concert in the city

the friend of the friend, a lovely,
effervescent woman, from Poland
originally, with a story to tell of
growing up behind the Iron
Curtain, was also a beautician in
a spa she runs in a nearby resort
city

the first friend, equally effervescent,
had been telling my own friend of the
intervening events since last they’d
met, while I lapped up, more or less
by default, this other alternate Soviet
reality, perfumed as it was irresistibly
throughout with the friend’s
friend’s mellifluous Polish accent

I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever
to skin quality apart from accepting
a spa courtesy card for my mother, who
would, naturally, be interested

my dearest dear, I answered, I am
not going anywhere near that one,
look what happened to Paris when
he fell into that trap

what happened, she asked

the Trojan War, I answered

the Trojan War, she asked

Paris was the son of Priam and Hecuba,
king and queen of Troy, I explained, he,
one of its princes, he’d been awarded
Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta,
by Aphrodite, goddess of love, he’d
chosen Aphrodite to be the most
beautiful among the goddesses, that
was her prize

but let me step back a little, I
interrupted, you need more context

Eris, goddess of discord, had not been
invited to the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis, I recounted, he a Greek hero,
she a sea nymph, parents both later to
Achilles, hero at Troy, slain, incidentally,
by that very Paris, you can read all about
it in the “Iliad“, I highly recommended

during the festivities, Eris tosses a
golden apple among the assembled
divinities, which reads

“to the fairest”

you can hear the stirrings of the much
later Sleeping Beauty, incidentally, in
this earliest of tellings, reconfigured
from the original myth

Athena, Aphrodite and Hera, all assume
they are meant to receive the apple, and
ask Zeus, father and husband, to decide

you’ll have to get someone else to touch
that one, he replies, much as I did

and delegates the task, with the help
of Hermes, the messenger god, to the
the guileless Paris, son of Priam and
Hecuba, Trojan king and queen, as I
said, he, Paris, prince

Paris was tending sheep on Mount Ida
when, fatefully, by a spring, the nubile
goddesses appeared vaunting their
unadorned splendours, stark, flagrant,
manifest, to the musical accompaniment
of the Graces, Faith, Hope and Charity,
also the Horae, the Hours, goddesses
of the seasons, maidens all in complicit
attendance

Paris, mere mortal, would never have
stood a chance

but to sweeten, nevertheless, the
deal, were it not yet sufficiently sweet,
Hera promises Paris Europe and Asia
should he choose her, Athena,
conquest in war, Aphrodite, goddess
of love, was set to give him the most
beautiful woman in the world

Paris opts for Aphrodite, and is
awarded Helen, the face that
launched the thousand proverbial
ships, the wife, not incidentally,
and completely inconveniently, of
the King of Sparta, Menelaus, who
attacks thereupon Troy with his
brother, Agamemnon, and their
allied legions, to reclaim
Menelaus’, whether abducted, or
indeed unfaithful, wife, no one
has ever conclusively determined,
Paris having been Paris

no one won

no one survived but Odysseus,
but that’s another story

I walked home shortly afterwards,
crossed my own Aegean, ten or
eleven blocks back, red lights,
nighttime traffic, watched the voice
competition I’d taped in any case at
home, whooped it up along with my
favourite contestants, drank to my
narrow miss, had gotten away, I
considered, with the equivalent of
Europe and Asia, if only in my
mind

beauty might be in the eye of the
beholder, I surmised, but it can
have its thorny indeed
consequences

Richard

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October 30, 2016

what is poetry

“The Poetess“ (1940)

Joan Miró

_____

when Aristotle “proceeds to declare the
parameters of “Poetry” for the ages“, his
definitions of the various poetic
“manner[s] or mode[s] of imitation”
have already been established, his
categorizations are not unlike Darwin’s
categorizations of the species during
a much later age, Aristotle was a natural
scientist much more than he was our
notion of an abstract philosopher, he
traded in facts rather than in the
esoteric musings that Plato, for
instance, pursued, Virtue, Justice,
the Good, his conclusions were more
verifiable

Kant, incidentally, is also famous for
following a similar form of investigation
as he attempted, nearly, for most,
inscrutably, to categorize the elements
of our faculty of understanding

a side story

Kant had stated that at birth we already
have within our perceptual framework
implicit understanding of space and
time, these are not learned through
experience but are already
incorporated within us, he said

many years ago, coming out of a
week-long coma, not knowing where
I was but alone, at that point even
just my consciousness, cause my
body, were it there, would’ve been
under the immaculate white sheets
I could see that would’ve been
shielding my legs

I looked around, could gather motes
upon rays of light that were entering
from what appeared to be a window
on the right, behind sheer white
curtains stirred by a soft breeze,
whirling the shimmering particles
alive in the light before me like
miniature spinning galaxies moving
at the pace of their own infinity

there was no sound

white walls around me stood utterly
still in the purview of my perception,
a door, also white, stood opposite
me on the opposite wall

where am I, I wondered, could this
be heaven, an afterlife, I might’ve
died, I thought, marvelling, no fear,
regret, nothing other than curiosity,
absorption, fascination

I tried to answer my question, where
am I, two dimensions, I figured
after having watched Terence Stamp
exiled by Marlon Brando to a flat
intergalactic window pane in
“Superman“, I hadn’t excluded this
eventuality, however ingloriously
transcendental, as a possible
outcome, I might be in a world with
only two dimensions, height and
width, no depth yet without more
investigation, experience

ergo, Kant, I concluded, was wrong,
our knowledge of space is not inborn
but a product of time and thought like
everything else

later, the white door on the far wall
opened, and a nurse walked in, also,
incidentally, in incandescent white,
and I understood I was alive

Aristotle suggested that our original
double instincts towards poetry were
our propensity to imitate, children
imitating their parents’ even
idiosyncratic mannerisms, for
instance

and rhythm, repetition, preludes to
order, coherence

those two

poetry, I read, is expression
reflecting the heartbeat, essentially,
in all its myriad representations

Richard

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October 25, 2016

“To One Who Loved Not Poetry” – Sappho

“In The Days Of Sappho“ (1904)

John William Godward

_________

if I digressed towards “Tragedy” in my
most recent chat about poetry, I perhaps
blurred the fact that there were several
kinds of poetry Aristotle was speaking
about, but that all had the essential
elements of both rhythm and
representation, the idea that a poem
was a reproduction of something
that was not itself, a retelling

some of these rhythmic utterances
were “tragedies“, others were mere,
indeed, verses without much of an
agenda other than being the replication
of something with rhythm the poet
wanted to promote

o, what a beautiful morning, two dactyls
and a trochee, for instance, the poetic
meters that describe – ta da da, ta da da,
dah dah – the natural music of that
exclamation

and that can be a poem

here’s one of Sappho‘s, who lived
sometime between 630 and 612 BCE
to around 570 of the same, of course,
era, famous for being from the island
of Lesbos, yes, Lesbos

it is “To One Who Loved Not Poetry“

“Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.”

so there, she says, I think, and all in iambic
octameter, eight times ta dah

I preferred not to use one of her more
flirtatious, therefore controversial,
utterances, for fear of skewing to
another, however compelling,
discussion

maybe next time

Richard

psst: the Pierian Spring was a spring in
Macedonia sacred to the Muses,
the source of inspiration for
science, then, as well as the arts

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October 23, 2016

Aristotle on poetry

“Aristotle” (1653)

Luca Giordano

___________

so what’s a poem

in an attempt to get a clearer picture
of what a poem should be, rather
than trust only my own, however
informed perhaps, opinion – though
it must be added that we all bring
something to that word’s definition,
mine no less worthy than yours,
yours no less worthy than mine – I
thought I’d go back to authoritative
sources to see what they might
have said

and it doesn’t get any earlier and
authoritative than Aristotle, writing
in 350 B.C.E., at the height of
Ancient Greek preeminence,
dissecting the term in his
penetrating and perspicacious,
ahem, “Poetics”

“I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds,
noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the
structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the
number and nature of the parts of which a poem is
composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within
the same inquiry.“, he says in Part 1 of his
magisterial treatise

and proceeds to declare the parameters
of “Poetry” for the ages

“Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes“,
he proceeds, imitation and rhythm

by imitation I think it best to think of
representation, which is another way,
anyway, of saying imitation, but
much more evocative in this instance,
more attuned to our sense of his word

a poem is a representation then, a
reproduction of something other than
itself

while its rhythm is what George
Gershwin‘s got, and by extension, as
you can see from this video, Gene Kelly

and yes, that means that “Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also
and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in
most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of
imitation.”

so, according to Aristotle, is dance

all, therefore, poems

an interesting elaboration about “Tragedy”
states that it should have the three unities
that I grew up with during my French
Canadian upbringing, the unity of time, of
space, and of action the famous French
Classical dramatists, Racine and Corneille,
applied under the aegis of Louis XlV

not to mention “Tragedy’s“ use of iambic
pentameter, Shakespeare’s ubiquitous
beat, a beat that persevered into the very
Nineteenth Century, in France with
Rostand‘s “Cyrano de Bergerac“, for
instance, and into the Twentieth Century
with Eliot‘s “Murder in the Cathedral“,
about the assassination of Archbishop
Thomas Becket at Canterbury in 1170
under Henry the Second‘s own aegis,
all written as poetry

the most famous play to follow the
three unities in the modern era is
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?“,
the play which I think defines the
Twentieth Century, which takes
place overnight somewhere in a
New England college town, mid-
century, at George and Martha’s

though followed closely by O’Neill‘s
“Long Day’s Journey int Night“,
which transpires from morning, one
day in August, 1912, till midnight, at
the home of, unity of space, note,
the dysfunctional Tyrones

so it appears not much has changed
about poetry, Aristotle got a lot of
mileage out of his early definition,
nearly 2500 years

makes you wonder why so much
attention was paid instead to
Plato, his contemporary, the
mystic, who would’ve banned
poetry, he thought it was
subversive

Richard

psst: for a modern day application
of the three unities, watch
“In Treatment“, a television
series, which takes place
in a psychotherapist’s office,
each episode a session,

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October 7, 2016

what is a poet

“Flowers In a Brown Vase“ (1904)

Odilon Redon

_______

if I imagine myself to be a poet, what
is a poet, I have to ask, or, more
accurately, what do I imagine a poet
to be

cause this is a two-way street, I am
defined by the word I inhabit, but I
define the word as well, redefining
it, essentially, to fit my etymological
purpose

my moral purpose I leave to myself,
in a completely other ideological
dimension

if I can

a poet then is one who writes, paints,
composes, manifests, in a word,
creates, poems

what is a poem

a poem is where beauty and truth
combine to create harmony,
coalescence, to the point of one’s
admiration, enchantment, wonder,
enlightenment, in incremental steps
leading to very transcendence, the
feeling that something has moved
in your heart

just a bouquet of flowers will do it,
for instance

that’s what I think

Richard

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October 2, 2016

on truth

“Truth Unveiled By Time“ (1645-1652)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

_______

a cousin once said to me about
his father, that he was as honest
as the day is long

though I didn’t say a word, this
was emphatically not my opinion

but I concluded nevertheless that,
once again, truth is in the eye of
the beholder, not, of course, truth
truth, the one we all would like to
believe must exist, but the one
which is the only one that we can
work with, our own

but what is true

no one knows but for personal
intimations, truth must be, in other
words, our individual constructions,
a kind of existential prosetry, a
consistent story we tell ourselves,
a walking shadow, a tale / told by
an idiot, according to Macbeth, full
of sound and fury, / signifying
nothing

I imagine I am a poet

imagine

Richard

psst: prosetry is poetry written in prose,
see “up my idiosyncracies – a bio“

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September 23, 2016

on art, its purpose

“Poet With Flower“ (2008)

Stefan Caltia

_____

wherefore art, I’ve long and often wondered,
with only a wink to Juliet’s Romeo, for my
question dug deeper, why, indeed, itself art

we build our souls on the stories we’ve
heard, the impressions we’ve received
from voices that spoke directly to our
senses, painters with paint, musicians
with music, writers with words, poets
with poems

it started with fairy tales, which told of
right and wrong, good and bad, courage,
kindness, responsibility, and dire
consequences for discord

Biblical stories also took up a lot of my own
childhood, Jesus, Adam and Eve, Moses
and the Ten Commandments, this last
reinforced by Cecil B. DeMille’s epic

but soon enough it was Oliver Twist, Little
Nell, and by an inescapable authorial leap,
since these were all by an irresistible
Charles Dickens for a guy my age, Sydney
Carton, who valiantly stands in for his
friend, Charles Darnay, at the guillotine, a
quantum, even existential, leap from
Peter Pan and Mary Poppins

though I had the good fortune to learn to
read and write music as a boy, play music,
learn about Bach, Brahms and Beethoven,
it didn’t take anyone else much more than
their enthusiasm to see what the Beatles
were similarly doing, the Rolling Stones,
the Supremes, they were not only singing,
but making history, shaping it, and us, we
followed the questions they rose, their
responses, the effects upon ourselves
for nothing is considered until it’s
mentioned, spoken, made clear, and they
were those prophets

the same goes for art, we see as we see
cause Monet, Picasso, Warhol showed
us how to see, what to look at

and of course poets, Shakespeare,
Rostand, Dante, Goethe, to inform, each,
their individual language, and culture

I have been Philip Carey, Scarlett O’Hara,
Blanche Dubois, Gary Cooper in “High
Noon“, both Martha and George in
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf“, lately
I’ve been even Hank Williams

as Babette would say, a French doll who
gets abducted in “Raggedy Ann and Andy:
A Musical Misadventure“, an animated
movie from the Seventies, – oo aahrr yoo

Richard

psst: all of them have been me too,
incidentally

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August 11, 2016

to Socrates – on monotheism‏

“The Sacrifice of Isaac“ (1598)

Caravaggio

________

by very definition, the inevitable

result of monotheism, Socrates,

is war, if there is one authority it

will eventually be opposed by a

contrary, however picayune,

however trivial, opinion, see the

Protestant Reformation, see Islam,

for instance, now

after which there is disintegration

before Christianity, there were gods,

a pantheon of them symbolically

alive among the rivers, the trees,

the mountains, read Ovid for an

exhilarating description, wars were

waged for territory, not conscience

Judaism, the religion of the Jews,

evolved for their own existence a

deity, Yahweh, who was their one

god, disdainful of foreign others,

an uncharacteristic attitude among

other religions then, becoming one

of the very first monotheistic, and

consequently existentially

compromised faiths, if not the

first

the intent was to rally ideological

support among its adherents so

that they could protect the lands

of Israel and Judah, their ancestral

homes, as they would have it, a

sanctification of the territorial

principle

their Bible, the Torah, a vengeful

work, and the basis for the

Christian Old Testament,

demanded of its followers

unblinking and cruel allegiance,

the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance,

a father required to sacrifice his

own son, however might it ‘ve

been at the last minute averted by

the intercession of an angel sent

by that very Lord

Christ came along to turn the other

cheek

which didn’t last long

indeed Montesquieu, an early

philosopher of the French

Enlightenment, tells of the

King’s librarian of Chinese

texts, who had been converted

to Catholicism in China, but

who was nonplussed upon his

arrival in Christian France to find

that the French did not do onto

others as they would have them

do unto themselves, nor did they,

more catastrophically, turn the

other cheek

for that matter see what Christian

Europe did to the Americans

Christ’s own followers, once they’d

achieved political prominence, after,

admittedly, 300 years of persecution

by the prevailing Roman authorities,

set their own deity, God, on high,

indeed beyond the rivers, the

mountains, the trees into the very

ineffable, the inscrutable abstract,

and squelched any opposition for

the next thousand and some years,

the philosophical underpinnings of

which was the work of your

contemporary, Plato, Socrates, his

ideal of the Ideal

Augustine signed those recalibrated

papers with his “City of God“, it took

the Renaissance to make a dent in its

armour, and another several centuries

to declare the Christian God dead,

Time magazine in the ’60s, on the

heels of Nietzsche‘s nihilistic

pronouncement some 70 years earlier,

that God had exited history

what we are left with, Socrates, is every

wo/man for hirself, therefore the Age of

Human Rights, for better or for worse,

otherwise many of us would’ve been

guillotined, burnt at the stake, stoned

to death, by now

what do you think

I’ll bet I can tell, you think that every

wo/man owes allegiance to what s/he

believes in, even to inexorable death,

however impractical, unfortunate, or

fateful, if your exemplary life has

anything to say about it

cheers

Richard

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July 30, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Plato‏

“The School Of Athens“ (1510-1511)

Raphael

_____

he sounds just like you, my friend said,

who’d bought me the works of Plato,

for C***mas maybe, or my birthday, or

maybe just because he knew I’d very

much appreciate them

we were reading him together, as is

always my inclination, his Meno

according to my calculations,

Socrates was doing most of the

talking, with Meno, a Sophist

acolyte, a school of philosophy then,

the Sophists, which claimed it could

prove anything by using the right

arguments

lawyers, of course, ensued, politicians

and rhetoric, the art of proving anything

by using the right arguments

philosophy had reached a structural,

indeed an existential, impasse, why,

they therefore wondered, philosophy

wherein it entered a phase of moral

speculation, Stoicism, Epicureanism,

Scepticism, Cynicism, and can you

blame them, theories about the

stars, the moon, the world, even

matter itself, had become so

questionable, was it fire, air, water,

atoms, at its source, who knew

I thought so too, I said, and told

him that Plato’s were the first

texts I studied in philosophy when

I entered university, that’s where I

learned to talk like that, philosophy

from the scratch, as my German

teacher would’ve said, which is to

say, from its very beginnings,

whence I could view, I figured, the

evolution of received wisdom in

Western culture

I was young then, the young have

such dreams

my father had been agnostic, ever

asking questions, though we were

being raised Catholic, my sister

and I, on account of our mother

tongue, our entire community,

having been historically linked

with that religion, and cause my

parents wanted us to be educated

in French

an existentialist crisis would

eventually follow, I intuited, as

indeed it did, so I majored in

philosophy

Socrates taught me to ask

questions, that no one had

all the answers

Plato, usurping his master’s voice,

created the paradigm for our present

version of a Divinity, and Its Paradise

there is an ideal version of any

item we might consider, he spouted,

an ideal table, for instance, exists

of which every material table is an

imperfect example

to virtue, love, beauty, truth, he

applied the same principle, which

early erudite Catholics, Augustine,

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, and

others, despite rejecting all of the

other Greek cultural achievements,

appropriated in order to bolster their

impression of God, the ideal of the

Ideal

this lasted uncontested for just

over a thousand years

for a thousand years our salvation

had been extraterrestrial,

supranatural, this, our very,

perhaps only, existence, an

imperfect reflection of somewhere

else an ideal, a mere simulacrum,

we were, a metaphor

Socrates had only asked questions,

what is virtue, what is justice, what

is beauty, truth

Plato presumed to have known the

answers

Aristotle is making a comeback,

whose method, in opposition to

his contemporaneous forebear,

was much more like Charles

Darwin‘s, working from the facts,

which proved then, and are

proving still now, to be multifarious,

diverse, astonishing, and nearly

enough to make you believe in

God/dess again, this time, however,

through the back door

or in a multiplicity, a panoply, a

very pavilion, even, of natural

deities, otherwise known as

angels, for better or for worse

God/dess bless, or angels

Richard

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July 22, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Albertine‏

“Wing Seller“ (2006)

Stefan Caltia

_______

what are you doing, a friend of mine

asked when he called

I’m reading my Proust, I answered,

comfy enough with my text, after

years waking up side by side, to

use the possessive adjective

what’s going on, he inquired

Albertine is lying on his bed, I

recounted, asleep, she’s been there

for the past ten pages, and she’s

just now turned onto her stomach

there is not so much story as

paintings, in Proust, detailed

descriptions applied like strokes of

colour to a canvas, that of recovered

time, colours that are specific to a

place and a period, like photographs

showing in their very fabric their

ancestry, their lineage

but in the elucidation of what he

sees, or, more accurately, of what

he remembers, Proust delivers

a work of the very highest art, a

mixture of poetry and philosophy,

Beethoven did as much, see his

“Hammerklavier“

Proust’s French is essentially

immaculate, his tone, however

intimate, always erudite, aristocratic,

perspicacious, wise, penetrating,

embracing, which is to say, French,

though German can be also,

incidentally, pretty cerebral, English

is narrative, just the facts, please,

though often, I think, hilarious

Albertine had been one of the “young

girls in bloom” he’d met at Balbec, a

seaside resort, with whom he’d

undertaken an illicit affair, but

whose faithfulness he doubted

as she lay on his bed at his Paris

apartment, he replays all the

speculations his imagination could

provide, an endless set of variations

on his anguish, which is to say, his

jealousy, worthy of a very Othello

for ten pages he paints a picture of

infidelities completely of his making,

which, of course, becomes the world

he will respond to

it is all in our little heads, I surmise,

however informed, intelligent, that

we create our little realities, they

have never been nearly enough,

though, indeed, our lives depend

on them, however dutifully

considered, however unconsciously,

and ever convincingly, contrived

make them, I submit, good ones

I imagine myself a poet, for instance,

how’s that for a shot in the improbable

dark

Richard

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Richibi’s Weblog

Category: positions to ponder

November 18, 2016

the judgment of richibi

October 30, 2016

what is poetry

October 25, 2016

“To One Who Loved Not Poetry” – Sappho

October 23, 2016

Aristotle on poetry

October 7, 2016

what is a poet

October 2, 2016

on truth

September 23, 2016

on art, its purpose

August 11, 2016

to Socrates – on monotheism‏

July 30, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Plato‏

July 22, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Albertine‏

“Wing Seller“ (2006)

Stefan Caltia