Richibi’s Weblog
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Category: walking in beauty
October 13, 2020
“The Story of Aglauros, transform’d into a Statue” – Ovid
“The Dancers” (c.1905)
Maurice Denis
________
This done, the God flew up on high,
This done, Hermes, the God, had just
turned Battus to a Touch stone
and pass’d
O’er lofty Athens, by Minerva grac’d,
Minerva, the Latin version of Athena,
was patroness of Athens, grac’d,
indeed, by the very Parthenon, then,
and still now, her temple
And wide Munichia, whilst his eyes survey
All the vast region that beneath him lay.
Munichia, the ancient name for a steep
hill, now called Kastella, in Piraeus, the
port of Athens
‘Twas now the feast, when each Athenian maid
Her yearly homage to Minerva paid;
let me point out that during the period
when pantheism prevailed, which is to
say anything earlier than the Emperor
Constantine, 272 – 337 AD, who
established Christianity as the official
religion of the Roman Empire, and going
back to the very beginnings of recorded
history, but at the very least to the epics
of Homer, his Iliad, his Odyssey, the 8th
Century BC, which tell of the Trojan War
and its aftermath, from the even more
distant 12th Century BC, homage was
paid, around the Mediterranean, to gods
and goddesses of Olympus, temples
were built, rituals performed in their
honour, much as in the Christian Era,
believers attend church, build cathedrals
to their preferred deity, feasts to Minerva
were as fervent then, in other words, as,
later, were those of devotees to their own
Christmas and Easter, say, celebrations
In canisters, with garlands cover’d o’er,
High on their heads, their mystick gifts they bore:
And now, returning in a solemn train,
The troop of shining virgins fill’d the plain.
see above
The God well pleas’d beheld the pompous show,
The God, Hermes still
And saw the bright procession pass below;
Then veer’d about, and took a wheeling flight,
And hover’d o’er them: as the spreading kite,
kite, a bird of prey
That smells the slaughter’d victim from on high,
Flies at a distance, if the priests are nigh,
And sails around, and keeps it in her eye:
her eye, the kite is given the feminine
gender here, perhaps following upon
the original Latin word’s grammar
So kept the God the virgin quire in view,
And in slow winding circles round them flew.
quire, archaic spelling of choir, a
group of instrumentalists or singers
As Lucifer excells the meanest star,
Or, as the full-orb’d Phoebe, Lucifer;
Lucifer, the Morning Star, the planet
Venus, as it appears in the East
before sunrise
Phoebe, pre-Olympian goddess
representative of the moon, thus
in the verse above the very moon
So much did Herse all the rest outvy,
And gave a grace to the solemnity.
Herse, a Greek princess
outvy, outvie, to surpass
Hermes was fir’d, as in the clouds he hung:
fir’d, inflamed, aroused, thus
flung as would be a missile,
the word fir’d here shimmers
with both meanings
So the cold bullet, that with fury slung
From Balearick engines mounts on high,
Glows in the whirl, and burns along the sky.
Balearick engines, slingshots,
the people of the Balearic Islands,
off the coast of Spain, were famous
in ancient times for their use of the
slingshot, or sling, especially as a
weapon
At length he pitch’d upon the ground, and show’d
The form divine, the features of a God.
He knew their vertue o’er a female heart,
their vertue, the virtues of both [t]he
form divine and the features of a
God, however be these identical,
allow grammatically for the
possessive adjective their to be
used here
And yet he strives to better them by art.
Hermes would rather seduce with
art, which is to say with charm
and artistry, than by his august
credentials merely
He hangs his mantle loose, and sets to show
The golden edging on the seam below;
Adjusts his flowing curls, and in his hand
Waves, with an air, the sleep-procuring wand;
The glitt’ring sandals to his feet applies,
And to each heel the well-trim’d pinion ties.
pinion, the outer part of a bird’s wing,
including the flight feathers, which
Hermes applies to his sandals
His ornaments with nicest art display’d,
He seeks th’ apartment of the royal maid.
to be continued
R ! chard
October 4, 2020
“Love Opened a Mortal Wound” – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695)
___________
in both style and substance, the
following poem reminds me of
Emily Dickinson‘s wonderful stuff
the poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
1651–1695, was the illegitimate
daughter of a Spanish father and
a Creole mother, who chose to
follow her many intellectual pursuits
and become a nun rather than submit
to the rigours of love and a secular life
R ! chard
_________________
Love Opened a Mortal Wound
Love opened a mortal wound.
In agony, I worked the blade
to make it deeper. Please,
I begged, let death come quick.
Wild, distracted, sick,
I counted, counted
all the ways love hurt me.
One life, I thought—a thousand deaths.
Blow after blow, my heart
couldn’t survive this beating.
Then—how can I explain it?
I came to my senses. I said,
Why do I suffer? What lover
ever had so much pleasure?
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(translated by Joan Larkin
and Jaime Manrique)
Con el Dolor de la Mortal Herida
Con el dolor de la mortal herida,
de un agravio de amor me lamentaba;
y por ver si la muerte se llegaba,
procuraba que fuese más crecida.
Toda en el mal el alma divertida,
pena por pena su dolor sumaba,
y en cada circunstancia ponderaba
que sobrarban mil muertes a una vida.
Y cuando, al golpe de uno y otro tiro,
rendido el corazón daba penoso
señas de dar el último suspiro,
no sé con qué destino prodigioso
volví en mi acuerdo y dije:—¿Qué me admiro?
¿Quién en amor ha sido más dichoso?
September 28, 2020
“Ocyrrhoe transform’d into a Mare” (II) – Ovid
“Indigo Sky Mares“
Laurel Burch
______
Thus entring into destiny, the maid
The secrets of offended Jove betray’d:
the maid, Ocyrrhoe, daughter of Chiron
and [t]he nymph Charicle
Ocyrrhoe had offended Jove, but
especially Hades, Jove’s brother,
ruler of the Underworld, when she
had prophesied that Apollo‘s child
with Coronis would be an acclaimed
healer, thus defraud[ing] the tomb,
thereby saving people from the
clutches of Hades, the especially
aggrieved god
More had she still to say; but now appears
Oppress’d with sobs and sighs, and drown’d in tears.
Occhyroe would have had more
to prophesy, but was impeded by
involuntary physical spasms
“My voice,” says she, “is gone, my language fails;
Through ev’ry limb my kindred shape prevails:
kindred shape, the bodily
characteristics of her father,
her kin, the centaur Chiron
Why did the God this fatal gift impart,
And with prophetick raptures swell my heart!
prophetick raptures, Occhyroe, who
knew her father’s arts, and could
rehearse The depths of prophecy,
had inherited through her father,
Chiron, who had himself received
it from Apollo, his own father, the
gift of divination, for better, for
either, we’ll learn, or for worse
What new desires are these? I long to pace
O’er flow’ry meadows, and to feed on grass;
I hasten to a brute, a maid no more;
what’s happening, What new desires
are these?, Occhyroe cries, or nearly
neighs, rather, at this point, I’m
becoming a brute, she groans, an
animal, a maid, no more, she objects
But why, alas! am I transform’d all o’er?
My sire does half a human shape retain,
And in his upper parts preserve the man.”
why, Occhyroe asks, since my
father, Chiron, is partially a man,
am I transform’d all o’er?, why
is there nothing left of me that
is human
Her tongue no more distinct complaints affords,
distinct, clear, easy to decipher
affords, allows, permits
But in shrill accents and mis-shapen words
Pours forth such hideous wailings, as declare
The human form confounded in the mare:
Occhyroe has become a horse,
the proof is in her braying
‘Till by degrees accomplish’d in the beast,
She neigh’d outright, and all the steed exprest.
all the steed exprest, was
everywhere the very picture
of a horse
Her stooping body on her hands is born,
born, borne, carried
Her hands are turn’d to hoofs, and shod in horn,
Her yellow tresses ruffle in a mane,
And in a flowing tail she frisks her train,
The mare was finish’d in her voice and look,
And a new name from the new figure took.
Occhyroe can no longer be called
Occhyroe, she is no longer she,
but a new figure, needing to be
identified as something else
R ! chard
September 22, 2020
Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium” – Leonard Bernstein
“Plato’s Symposium“
Anselm Feuerbach
__________
imagine my surprise when having put
on a concert I’d recently taped from
television and, not having checked
out the program, apart from having
noted the featured violinist, someone
I, however peripherally, knew, then
heading out to the kitchen to do
some kitchen things, chop vegetables,
stir a pot, watch water, maybe, come
to a boil, a piece came up with which
I wasn’t familiar, thought maybe it
might be Shostakovich for its atonality,
though with, here again, his signature
decipherable melodies, ever, and
characteristically, maimed, twisted,
contorted, for, too, its Eastern
European rhythms, its apparent
Jewish folklore, touches of Fiddler
on the Roof, I thought, hints of
Schindler’s List, maybe, when the
work turned out to be, however
improbably, by Leonard Bernstein,
most famous, rather, for his Broadway
shows, West Side Story, for instance,
but especially as a conductor
his Serenade for violin, string orchestra,
harp and percussion, known also as
Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium”,
was written, in 1954, in commemoration
of a couple of personal friends, husband
and wife, after their demises
Plato‘s Symposium is one of his several
dialogues, a clutch of noteworthy
Athenians meet socially after an earlier,
more crowded, revel, a kind of debriefing,
and decide to each give his definition of
love, the work remains one of the great
disquisitions on the subject, not tackled
much since, surprisingly, in the history
of philosophy
there are seven people in attendance,
though Alcibiades, yes, the Alcibiades,
orator and statesman, stumbles into
the gathering, late and last
Bernstein has a voice for each
participant, though in five rather than
seven movements, two couples, the
first and the last, have no break
between their conjoined movements
I. Phaedrus: Pausanias – lento and allegro
II. Aristophanes – allegretto
III. Eryximachus, the doctor – presto
IV. Agathon – adagio
V. Socrates: Alcibiades – molto tenuto and allegro molto vivace
in the Symposium, Eryximachus speaks
before Aristophanes, yes, the Aristophanes,
the playwright, cause the bard has the
hiccoughs, and the doctor, Eryximachus,
agrees to go first, if out of the agreed upon
order, an order that Bernstein chooses not
to follow, for reasons to do with tempo, I
suspect, otherwise the progression is as
in Plato
Eryximachus, interestingly, advises
Aristophanes to make himself sneeze,
a cure apparently for hiccoughs, in
order to be ready for his turn, which
he does, and indeed manages
Agathon was a poet, his adagio here
is accordingly gorgeous, melting,
completely appropriate for a writer
of verse, and entirely, incidentally,
worth the price of admission
Socrates‘ molto tenuto, even and
tempered, measured, is, likewise,
totally apt for a philosopher
enjoy
R ! chard
September 21, 2020
“Ocyrrhoe transform’d into a Mare” – Ovid
“Centaur and Nymph“
Arnold Böcklin
________
Old Chiron took the babe with secret joy,
Proud of the charge of the celestial boy.
His daughter too, whom on the sandy shore
The nymph Charicle to the centaur bore,
With hair dishevel’d on her shoulders, came
To see the child, Ocyrrhoe was her name;
Ocyrrhoe, daughter of Chiron and [t]he
nymph Charicle, c[o]me …[t]o see
the child
With hair dishevel’d on her shoulders,
there’s a suggestion here, regarding
Charicle, of madness, or possession
the child, the babe, the celestial boy,
the infant, ript, by its very father,
Apollo, from his unfaithful lover,
Coronis’, womb, and [given] … to
the centaur Chiron”s charge, into
its, or his, care
She knew her father’s arts, and could rehearse
The depths of prophecy in sounding verse.
it appears that Ocyrrhoe, daughter of
Chiron and the nymph Charicle, was
a poetess, was possessed, on her
father’s side, of poetry, could reveal,
decipher, or rehearse / The depths
of prophecy, in sounding verse, was
able, as wordmongers sometimes do,
to tell truth, deliver, in rhyme, incisive
evaluations
Once, as the sacred infant she survey’d,
the sacred infant, the child born of
Apollo and Coronis
The God was kindled in the raving maid,
The God, the child, the sacred infant,
by virtue of being half, if only half,
divine, having been fathered by the
god, Apollo
kindled, inspired
the raving maid, Ocyrrhoe, beset by
neurotic, irrational, though prophetic,
it is proposed, powers
And thus she utter’d her prophetick tale:
“Hail, great physician of the world, all-hail;
great physician of the world, the fated
child of Apollo and Coronis would
become a healer of legend
Hail, mighty infant, who in years to come
Shalt heal the nations, and defraud the tomb;
defraud the tomb, recall from the
hereafter, resuscitate, revive,
return to life
Swift be thy growth! thy triumphs unconfin’d!
Make kingdoms thicker, and increase mankind.
thicker, more populated
Thy daring art shall animate the dead,
Thy daring art, medicine, the mighty
infant will eventually be recognized
as a celebrated man of healing
And draw the thunder on thy guilty head:
guilty head, when Hades, king of the
Underworld, complained to Zeus, his
brother, that the mighty infant was
stealing his subjects, the departed,
Zeus shot the great physician down,
acknowledging the healer’s guilt, of
his defraud[ing] the tomb, condemning
the culprit with a punishing, an
annihilating, thunderbolt
Then shalt thou dye, but from the dark abode
Rise up victorious, and be twice a God.
Apollo, aggrieved, had had his son,
the child, the sacred infant, reinstated,
after tortuous ministrations, as an
immortal god, an entirely, however,
other story
And thou, my sire, not destin’d by thy birth
To turn to dust, and mix with common earth,
How wilt thou toss, and rave, and long to dye,
And quit thy claim to immortality;
When thou shalt feel, enrag’d with inward pains,
The Hydra’s venom rankling in thy veins?
the child, the sire, not destin’d by [its] birth
/ To turn to dust, which is to say, to be no
longer mortal but immortal, how will it, not
wanting particularly to survive, quit [its]
claim to immortality, deal with the
impossibility of dying, [w]hen [it] shal[l]
feel, enrag’d with inward pains, agonies,
that compel it to seek personal annihilation
Hydra, a snakelike monster with many
heads, whose venom and very breath
were poisonous, stationed at one of
the entrances to the Underworld
The Gods, in pity, shall contract thy date,
And give thee over to the pow’r of Fate.”
contract thy date, make mortal,
subject once again to Fate
R ! chard
September 17, 2020
Preludes and Fugues, Op.87 – Shostakovich
Tatiana Nikolayeva
___________
during this period of self-isolation, it
is nearly an unavoidable consequence
of such imposed solitude that one
would become contemplative, though,
I must admit, this is not for me an
especially unusual state
lately, I’ve returned to the Preludes and
Fugues of Shostakovich, a reinterpretation
of the form that Johann Sebastian Bach
had initiated in 1722, and indeed
reinterpreted himself between 1739 and
1742, each set known separately as
Books 1 and 2
a prelude is, as the name itself suggests,
an introductory piece, and I won’t get into
any further explanations of it, which would
be technical, and not especially relevant
here
a fugue is a line of music, however, that
is repeated a few bars in so that the tune
ends up essentially analyzing itself, for
voice we know this as singing in canon,
you’ve probably done this yourself, in a
group, singing, for instance, Row, Row,
Row Your Boat, or, even in French,
Frère Jacques
but the strictly instrumental form becomes,
by virtue of re-examining itself over and
over again, nearly, by definition,
introspective
there are neither highs nor lows, which
is to say, alterations in volume, in a fugue,
so that the couple of hours it takes to get
through any set including them would be
restful, though never not intellectually
intriguing, much as mental meandering,
or daydreaming, speculation, is
Shostakovich, much as Bach did,
composed his in every key, major
and minor, for a total of 24
here are his first 12
here are the remaining dozen
they were written by Shostakovich for
Tatiana Nikolayeva, who plays them
herself in both of these iterations
sit back, relax, enjoy
R ! chard
September 7, 2020
“The Story of Coronis, and Birth of Aesculapius” (IV) – Ovid
“Apollo and Coronis“ (1606 – 1608)
Adam Elsheimer
__________
On her incestuous life I need not dwell
(In Lesbos still the horrid tale they tell),
And of her dire amours you must have heard,
For which she now does penance in a bird,
That conscious of her shame, avoids the light,
And loves the gloomy cov’ring of the night;
The birds, where-e’er she flutters, scare away
The hooting wretch, and drive her from the day.”
Nyctimene, daughter of Epopeus,
king of Lesbos, a Greek Island in
the Aegean Sea, had been defiled
by her father, Minerva, out of pity,
transformed her into an owl, the
above verses tell the story of
that owl, Nyctimene
The raven, urg’d by such impertinence,
Grew passionate, it seems, and took offence,
And curst the harmless daw; the daw withdrew:
The raven to her injur’d patron flew,
And found him out, and told the fatal truth
Of false Coronis and the favour’d youth.
the raven, Apollo’s own bird, having
discovered Coronis to be unfaithful
to their master, its and hers, remained
intent, despite the daw’s warnings,
earlier here reported, on informing
the god of the Sun
The God was wroth, the colour left his look,
wroth, angry
The wreath his head, the harp his hand forsook:
[t]he wreath, … the harp, Apollo’s
usual attributes, symbols of his
harmony, concord
His silver bow and feather’d shafts he took,
And lodg’d an arrow in the tender breast,
That had so often to his own been prest.
though Apollo is not usually
associated with bows and arrows,
his twin sister Diana, goddess of
the Hunt, always is, it would not
be unusual to conflate the two
deities for poetic, or indeed
mythological, purposes
Down fell the wounded nymph, and sadly groan’d,
And pull’d his arrow reeking from the wound;
And weltring in her blood, thus faintly cry’d,
“Ah cruel God! tho’ I have justly dy’d,
What has, alas! my unborn infant done,
That he should fall, and two expire in one?”
This said, in agonies she fetch’d her breath.
it is supposed here that the unborn
infant is indeed Apollo’s
The God dissolves in pity at her death;
He hates the bird that made her falshood known,
And hates himself for what himself had done;
The feather’d shaft, that sent her to the Fates,
And his own hand, that sent the shaft, he hates.
Apollo is suffused with regret, anger,
self-recrimination
Fain would he heal the wound, and ease her pain,
Fain, with pleasure, gladly
And tries the compass of his art in vain.
the compass of his art, the range
of his ability, in this case vain,
faulty, ineffective
Soon as he saw the lovely nymph expire,
The pile made ready, and the kindling fire.
pile, pyre
the sentence lacks a verb here, it
should read The pile was made
ready, just saying
With sighs and groans her obsequies he kept,
obsequies, funeral rites
And, if a God could weep, the God had wept.
I’ll have to watch out for gods
weeping, I suspect some have,
some can
Her corps he kiss’d, and heav’nly incense brought,
And solemniz’d the death himself had wrought.
corps, body, corpse
wrought, brought about, made
happen
But lest his offspring should her fate partake,
Spight of th’ immortal mixture in his make,
Spight, in spite
He ript her womb, and set the child at large,
And gave him to the centaur Chiron’s charge:
Chiron, first among the centaurs,
half man, half horse, was highly
revered as a teacher, having
been raised by the twins, Apollo
and Diana / Artemis, supremely
accomplished deities
Then in his fury black’d the raven o’er,
And bid him prate in his white plumes no more.
black’d, Apollo turned the snowy
plume[d], [w]hite as the whitest
dove’s unsully’d breast raven
black
prate, babble, talk incoherently
R ! chard
September 1, 2020
“The Story of Coronis, and Birth of Aesculapius” (III) – Ovid
“Minerva, or Pallas Athena“ (1898)
Gustav Klimt
______
But you, perhaps, may think I was remov’d,
As never by the heav’nly maid belov’d:
says the daw to the still snowy plume[d],
[w]hite as the whitest dove’s unsully’d
breast raven
remov’d, rejected, discarded and
disgrac’d
the heav’nly maid, Minerva
But I was lov’d; ask Pallas if I lye;
Pallas, another name for Minerva
Tho’ Pallas hate me now, she won’t deny:
hate, note, is in the subjunctive here,
the mood of conjecture, where the s
is removed from the ending of the
third person singular, that she, he, or
one, for instance, read, no s on read,
Ovid, would be a part of any Latin
curriculum
For I, whom in a feather’d shape you view,
Was once a maid (by Heav’n the story’s true)
A blooming maid, and a king’s daughter too.
A crowd of lovers own’d my beauty’s charms;
own’d, admitted to, acknowledged
My beauty was the cause of all my harms;
to a vain friend once who complained
to me of the rigours of being beautiful,
I said, your beauty, girl, to upend the,
otherwise tiresome, conversation, is
your curse, get over it, which he did,
it did, in at least that instance
Neptune, as on his shores I wont to rove,
Neptune, god of the Sea
wont, to be used to, predisposed to
Observ’d me in my walks, and fell in love.
He made his courtship, he confess’d his pain,
And offer’d force, when all his arts were vain;
all of the gods, it appears, are engines,
ever, of irrepressible lust, perhaps
allegorically alluding to the unquenchable
generative powers of very Nature
Swift he pursu’d: I ran along the strand,
‘Till, spent and weary’d on the sinking sand,
I shriek’d aloud, with cries I fill’d the air
To Gods and men; nor God nor man was there:
who hasn’t been there, forlorn,
abandoned, desolate, forsaken
A virgin Goddess heard a virgin’s pray’r.
virgin Goddess, Minerva / Pallas
Athena
note that Minerva / Pallas / Athena,
the virgin Goddess, remains, however
unconventionally, however irregularly,
the mother of Erichthonius
For, as my arms I lifted to the skies,
I saw black feathers from my fingers rise;
I strove to fling my garment on the ground;
My garment turn’d to plumes, and girt me round:
My hands to beat my naked bosom try;
Nor naked bosom now nor hands had I:
the king’s daughter, still unnamed, note,
attesting to the interchangeability of
virgin’s in Greek and Roman mythology,
is in the process of becoming a daw, a
black bird
Lightly I tript, nor weary as before
Sunk in the sand, but skim’d along the shore;
it appears there are advantages
to becoming a bird
‘Till, rising on my wings, I was preferr’d
To be the chaste Minerva’s virgin bird:
go, girl
Preferr’d in vain! I am now in disgrace:
Nyctimene the owl enjoys my place.
Nyctimene, Minerva’s owl
friendship, it appears, can turn
on a dime, or an inadvertent,
but decisive, irritation
R ! chard
August 28, 2020
“The Story of Coronis, and Birth of Aesculapius” (II) – Ovid
“The Daughters of Cecrops Finding the Child Erichthonius“ (1640)
Jacob Jordaens
_________
Once upon a time,
something interesting happens here,
where earlier in this particular myth
we had a fable, a story in which
animals play major roles, Aesop is
famous for his, for instance, as is
Jean de la Fontaine, with the
opening catchphrase above, a line
as old at least as Dryden, we’re
suddenly in the land of fairy tales,
structurally, technically
The two-shap’d Ericthonius had his birth
(Without a mother) from the teeming Earth;
Ericthonius, son of Minerva, goddess
of Wisdom, and of several other traits
and abilities, and Hephaestus, god of
Craftsmen, Metallurgy, Fire, among
other, again, areas of malleability
and possibility
Without a mother, not in the usual,
mammalian, manner
two-shap’d, half human, half serpent,
don’t ask
Minerva nurs’d him, and the infant laid
Within a chest, of twining osiers made.
Minerva hid her fearsome child in
a box, a chest, closed the lid, and
entrusted the secret contents to a
trio of sisters
The daughters of king Cecrops undertook
To guard the chest, commanded not to look
On what was hid within.
king Cecrops, mythical founder and
first king of Athens
I stood to see
The charge obey’d, perch’d on a neighb’ring tree.
I, the daw, the storyteller
The sisters Pandrosos and Herse keep
The strict command; Aglauros needs would peep,
Pandrosos, not to be cofused with
Pandora, Herse, and Aglauros, the
three daughters of Cecrops
And saw the monstrous infant, in a fright,
And call’d her sisters to the hideous sight:
A boy’s soft shape did to the waste prevail,
But the boy ended in a dragon’s tail.
there’s the ring here, nevertheless,
of Pandora’s tale, though this story
is not at all as dire for humanity as
Pandora‘s fateful introduction of
very evil into the world
I told the stern Minerva all that pass’d;
But for my pains, discarded and disgrac’d,
The frowning Goddess drove me from her sight,
And for her fav’rite chose the bird of night.
the bird of night, the owl, with which
Minerva is often associated, often
portrayed
Be then no tell-tale; for I think my wrong
Enough to teach a bird to hold her tongue.
and aptly, we learn the lesson a
fable is meant, by definition, to
expose
R ! chard
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