“The Story of Aglauros, transform’d into a Statue” (lll) – Ovid
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Tag: Homer
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
April 20, 2020
“Metamorphoses” (The Giants’ War, III) – Ovid
“Charon Carries Dead Souls across the River Styx” (1861)
Konstantin Makovsky
____________
Jove, god of Thunder, speaks
I was not more concern’d in that debate
Of empire, when our universal state
Was put to hazard, and the giant race
Our captive skies were ready to imbrace:
I was not especially disturbed, Jove says,
when the state of our universe was
challenged, or debate[d], when the giants
tried to usurp our territory, were ready to
imbrace, or embrace, take on, our
vulnerable, [o]ur captive, skies
For tho’ the foe was fierce, the seeds of all
Rebellion, sprung from one original;
because the enemy, then, the adversary,
came from the one original source, its
however manifold predations, its
however myriad desecrations, would’ve
been identifiable to Jove, not foreign, not
unmanageable, he would’ve recognized
the black sheep of the Olympian family,
the giants
Now, wheresoever ambient waters glide,
All are corrupt, and all must be destroy’d.
ambient, nearby, related, infected, corrupt,
all has been corrupted
Let me this holy protestation make,
By Hell, and Hell’s inviolable lake,
here’s another anachronism, for Hell wouldn’t’ve
been even a concept in the era of Ovid, where
the Underworld, and Hades, entirely different
afterworlds, would’ve prevailed, areas of
persistent gloom and shade, see Homer here,
for instance, or Virgil
the Underworld of the ancient world was
surrounded by five rivers, Hell’s inviolable
lake, the most famous of which was the
river Styx
in the Divine Comedy, Dante updates this
watery boundary for his own 14th Century
readers, and makes it the passageway to
the fifth circle of Hell, where Charon
remains, after even over a thousand
years, the very same ferryman
see above
nor was there either any of our present
conception of Heaven, Heaven would’ve
been Olympus then, the exclusive domain
of the Gods, either Greek or Roman
I try’d whatever in the godhead lay:
Jove says, I tried everything a god
could use
But gangren’d members must be lopt away,
Before the nobler parts are tainted to decay.
you’ve got to lop[ ] away, cut off, the bad
parts before they infect the more vital
components of the body
There dwells below, a race of demi-gods,
Of nymphs in waters, and of fawns in woods:
Who, tho’ not worthy yet, in Heav’n to live,
Let ’em, at least, enjoy that Earth we give.
not all beings are corrupt, but nymphs
and fawns, innocents, Jove pleads,
should be given consideration on
Earth, if they be not yet worthy of the
majesty of Heav’n, and granted earthly
areas of enjoyment in the confines of
their forsaken place
Can these be thought securely lodg’d below,
When I my self, who no superior know,
I, who have Heav’n and Earth at my command,
Have been attempted by Lycaon’s hand?
if Lycaon could attack me, Jove, god
of Thunder, asks, how can these
innocents, nymphs, fawns, ever be
safe
At this a murmur through the synod went,
And with one voice they vote his punishment.
the punishment of Lycaon, which we’ll
soon encounter
Thus, when conspiring traytors dar’d to doom
The fall of Caesar, and in him of Rome,
The nations trembled with a pious fear;
All anxious for their earthly Thunderer:
Thus, or in a similar manner, did the nations
of the earth tremble when Caesar, their
earthly Thunderer, was assassinated
nations, incidentally, is another anachronism,
nations didn’t appear on earth until the
18th Century, with the French Revolution
Nor was their care, o Caesar, less esteem’d
By thee, than that of Heav’n for Jove was deem’d:
Ovid addresses Caesar here, his contemporary,
and compares that emperor’s esteem for nations,
his reliance on their allegiance, to the esteem
Heav’n has for Jove
Who with his hand, and voice, did first restrain
Their murmurs, then resum’d his speech again.
Jove calls for silence in the assembly
before speaking again
The Gods to silence were compos’d, and sate
With reverence, due to his superior state.
The Gods … sate, or sat, then took heed,
bowing to Jove’s superior position
the tale of the punishment of Lycaon
will follow
R ! chard
May 29, 2019
the indicative
“Grammar“
Gentile da Fabriano
____________
since I’d only recently vaunted both the
infinitive and the imperative moods of
verbs in this venue, you might’ve
expected that the indicative would
soon follow
and here it is, the indicative, the mood
of narratives, storytelling, the default
mode, essentially, where most of our
communication takes place, be it
oral or written
famous first lines of novels will attest
to that, lines you’ve probably heard
before, however only incidentally, if
not actually read
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities“
and the rest is so good, I can’t, in all
consciousness, exclude it
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was
the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the
season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
or
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
from Daphne du Maurier’s eerily Gothic
“Rebecca“, heiress to not only Charlotte
Brontë’s “Jane Eyre“, but also to her
sister Emily’s, to my mind, much more
accomplished work, “Wuthering“, and
indeed wonderful, “Heights“, whereupon
I’ll refrain from continuing to follow the
sentences, however compelling, for
lack of space and time
but
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
from “Out of Africa“, Karen Blixen’s
unforgettable novel, however brilliantly
translated to film, must take its place
here among towering introductory
sallies
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.
Proust’s answer to Homer, his “À la
recherche du temps perdu“, his
“Remembrance of Things Past“
For a long time, I’d go to bed early.
which, as I read on, no less than
changed my life
but that’s another story, however
totally engrossing
everywhere above, let me point out,
the mood has been indicative, to a
very verb, so unobtrusive you
probably didn’t even notice
in music, a counterpart for the
indicative would be the allegro,
the baseline, not too fast, not
too slow, the tempo listeners
would most easily respond to
but more about that only later, after
a traipse through the speculative
conditional, then the aspirational
subjunctive
meanwhile, check this out, “The
Heart of the Matter“, the Eagles, a
ballad, mostly indicatives, but with
here and there an infinitive, and a
peppering of conditionals, however
might these be signal, to utterly break
your heart
listen
R ! chard
April 22, 2016
Beethoven – piano sonata no.31, op.110 (3rd movement)
“Woman Reading in a Garden“ (1902-03)
_______
perhaps my best teacher ever was
my father, others never questioned
the orthodoxy, spewing out the
curriculum like it was sacred, dead,
untouchable, depriving it of its very
worth
my father was a philosopher, God
was a question, not an answer, I,
at the time, needed an answer
we were sent to a Catholic school,
my sister and I, where God was in
everything, everywhere, omnipotent,
omniscient, and, like a father then,
autocratic, industrious, demanding,
not unopposed to punishment
sins against the Father could be
summarized, at that age, briefly,
do not kill, do not lie, do not
disobey your parents, do not
cheat on your husband, wife,
and follow all the rituals of the
Church, the Ten Christian
Commandments, brought to
none of these graded offences
applied to me, really, then, but
lying, and disobeying one’s
parents, the others were all so
remote as to be inconsequential,
though the Church kept up on
our family’s abrogations of
religious rites – non-attendance
at Sunday mass, eating meat
on Fridays, worse – while
nevertheless tending dutifully
to our wayward souls, they told
us, holding out for a final repentant
confession
we never lied at home, I’d lied about
something once, and was so daunted
when my father probed, I sweated,
must’ve turned purple, not just red,
of embarrassment, I knew I couldn’t
use that tactic again, I’d inexorably
blush, flush
who put the Brylcreem on the dog,
he’d queried
not me, I trembled
my sister stood beside me, might
not have even known anything
about it, I can’t remember, though
I recall her dismay, I think, at having
been so blithely thrown under the
bus, or maybe that’s just me
extrapolating
my dad turned back to what he’d
been doing, having, I’d understood,
got his answer, proving himself to
be to me thereby omniscient, I’d
have no chance, I gathered, against
something like that, this turned me
into a good, an at least conscientious,
person
my teachers, paradoxically, only
ever took marks off for technical
stuff, Math, History, French, they
never taught me lessons
a teacher, once, had asked me to
stand at the head of the class and
read a passage from Shakespeare,
be Romeo, Mark Antony, Lear, I
can’t remember which
“O, pardon me, thou bleeding
piece of earth, / That I am meek
and gentle with these butchers!”,
I uttered, fraught with emotion,
“Thou art the ruins of the noblest
man / That ever lived in the tide
of times”
in my mind and in my body I was
Mark Antony there, shot through
with the weight of his friend’s
brutal death, his own irretrievable
loss
my teacher laughed
what, I asked
you’re right into it, aren’t you, he
replied, and shut me up right there
to any public display of expression
I didn’t stop reading Shakespeare
though, but by myself
later I read Homer, Ovid, Proust,
others, did the same with music
and art, made countless lifelong
friends thereby, people I’ve always
been able to turn to, even just in
ruminative thought as their stories
still pervaded me, diligently leading
still the way, like guardian angels,
maybe
Richard
December 20, 2015
“Tissue Gallery” – Loretta Collins Klobah
“Flower in a Jar“ (1689)
________
the only thing I’ll say about this poem
is that it’s about human tissue, also
that you’ll never forget it
though difficult perhaps, it is entirely
worth the journey – not only through
the stylistic thickets it might present
technically, but amongst the assorted
“homuncul[i]” it more substantially,
even clinically, describes – for the
spotlight it presses onto our world,
not to mention its own manifest
artistry
alliteration, for instance, the limpid
lilting of its language, hand in hand
with its kindred, and complicit,
onomatopoeia, enumeration, prismatic
facets of an idea like aspects of an
iridescent gem, vivid, vital metaphors,
apt allegories, the very literary lot, to
relay a big picture, then an even bigger
picture, then a transcendence, an
expression of very grace, poetry
of the very highest order, of which
even a Homer, I warrant, would sing
“Tissue Gallery“, my poem of,
at least, the year, and likely in my
memory forever
that’s, as I said, “the only thing I’ll
say about this poem”
Richard
_____________
On the fifth floor
of the medical school,
sequestered from public view,
a black slab lab table
lined with old apothecary jars and twist-top jars
sealed with paraffin wax,
a shoal of not-fish treading bronzy water,
each homunculus labelled
in terms of in-utero days and weeks.
In this jarscape, a palm-size one
sitting with legs crossed,
arms raised protectively,
clasping the top of his head
like a child expecting blows in a parental brawl,
and this golem, a perfect mini-person,
holds fingers curved lightly in front of him,
as if playing a piano chord,
and this quelque chose has blackened soles –
in the womb,
a douen meant to range the barefoot forest,
those faceless stillborn and early-dead children with backward feet,
who lure human playmates to the woods
and fill their always hungry mouths with little crabs.
All casualties are clipped
with yellowed plastic navel clamps
that look like bones.
Here are twins, one larger than the other,
one malformed
with hydrocephalitic-fissured face
and this one’s wrinkly forehead,
the face of a worried eighty-year-old concentrating
on his death, an extra epaulette flap on his shoulder,
as if he is sprouting wings;
triplets like three piglets,
one with lots of hair,
one with cauliflower, puckered ear,
one with a purple-black hand reaching out of the water,
as if in hope to be rescued from drowning.
The thirty-six-weekers are not stored in glassware.
A perfect pair, girl and boy, are on separate cookie baking sheets,
wrapped in sterile pads, their swaddling blankets.
They are not desiccated, withered, mummified,
quick-frozen, frost-nipped, or sealed in wax.
They look like leatherette dolls in mid-kick stop-motion animation,
as if they’d only now stopped breathing.
Girl was a low birth weight,
vagina snapped as tightly shut as the seam of a walnut.
Boy is not the color of life, a rich-colored brown boy
bleached-out to plasticine-pale, dun-white.
Still, on his cheek-ear-hair, the almost feel of life.
The abdomen is caved in,
and the testicles are paper-thin, black, crumpled leaves.
Some in the grey jars were named and tagged on the wrist.
I was told that I cannot tell you the names.
It is a secret between the women
and these medical anomalies.
One is named for a hurricane.
The resto muertos have closed eyes and African features.
They were not colorfast,
so the chemicals have bleached them to albino.
The women, who came with gravid uterus to Puerto Rico
from the Virgin Islands, seeking to save or end pregnancies,
do not know that the small ones are still here
curled in their womb poses,
each blanched
in its lit-glass aquarium,
lolling in solvent tinted the color of beer, brandy, honey, oil, or perfume.
These small floating gods in primer paint, never to be besprinkled
with blessed water to help them cross over,
never to evaporate, dust-scatter, or waste — they are here and not here!
What is the shelf-life of the unborn?
In the Caribbean, women must travel
from island to island
to get needed health care,
and so these doodads
were not carried home but donated,
no one knows how long ago.
I have been invited here by a doctor who loves the arts,
and whom I like.
I was told beforehand only that I would be seeing human tissue.
He proposes collaboration, an artistic public exhibition
of these impossible children,
who will never utter “peacock,”
“butterfly,”
“confetti,” “crazy quilt,” “cashmere,” or “soap.”
Skullduggery.
Monster Midway. Gaff joints. Shell games. Sideshow piebald children.
Human oddities and the science of teratology.
At home, I whisper to the midnight page,
Women of the Virgin Islands, Sistren,
I saw them, and they are okay.
Your small ones are still on Earth!
April 15, 2013
Beethoven piano sonata no 29, the “Hammerklavier”
take a few minutes, well, nearly an hour,
to watch, imbibe, incorporate, integrate,
this video, to smell this miraculous
flower, Beethoven’s piano sonata no 29,
the monumental “Hammerklavier“, the
equivalent, to my mind, of the Eiffel
Tower, the Coliseum, the Parthenon,
Homer’s “Iliad“, I promise it will
transform you
I’ll talk about it later, I also promise
Richard
psst: you might need some Kleenex
April 13, 2013
Beethoven piano sonata no 28 in A major, opus 101
___
Beethoven’s piano sonata no 28, opus 101,
in A major, is the first of what is considered
to be his late piano sonatas, as opposed to
early and middle, three entirely distinct
periods that are easily recognizable upon
closer listening, the early ones are bold,
even headstrong, with Beethoven’s ever
characteristic vigor and Promethean authority,
the length themselves of his early works are
a testament to his sense of his own great
personal validity, the first four, to my mind,
go on much longer than often enough they
should, a typically youthful presumption on
his part, and are musically at best trite, I find,
after their first expositions, the repeats come
as redundant, and tolerable merely, surprises,
even the famous 8th, the “Pathétique“, opus 13,
is, I think, too brash and impudent, however in
this manner, nevertheless admittedly, entirely
effective, listen
the “Pastorale“, of the middle period, opus 28,
no 15, is where I deem the music to become
henceforward sublime, it has a settled
confidence that brims with not only technical
wizardry but with also positively enchanting
and entrancing musical ideas, bursting like
very flowers in springtime, with colour and
inspired, effervescent, imagination
the late period is where Beethoven becomes,
however, a sage, a prophet, and indeed a
hierarch in the new secular order of a
reconstituted Heaven, after all, someone
had to take the place of the now discredited
angels, Nietzsche called them Übermenschen,
Supermen
the 28th sonata starts out slowly, or rather,
more slowly than the earlier forthright ones,
already a sign of less physical, more
measured and considered reponses, my
impression here is of a grandfather visiting
his granchildren, jovial but not too disportive,
merely jaunty, always cheery but for a moment
of haunting melancholy, at the adagio, before
becoming congenial and avuncular again,
with then a big, boastful ending, snapping
staunchly his patriarchal suspenders,
getting the last, and traditional, word, with
a firm, which is to say, a foursquare-major-
chord, finish, the aural equivalent of turning
out the lights
musically, however, the progressions are
exploratory, incremental, more and more
layered with possible, and often apparently
rejected outcomes, in order to try out
something more fitting, maybe, more
accurate, a deconstruction, in other words,
of musical ideas, an investigation, in search
of a viable musically cohesive path
in the 28th sonata Beethoven, I think, is
doodling, however, coming up with the
methods of his great addresses, the
language here is not yet philosophically
precise, a smattering merely of pianistically
plausible ideas, musical sketches, the first
stirrings here, you’ll gather, of formal jazz
in the next sonata, the 29th, the still
unsurpassed “Hammerklavier”, he writes
the definitive book, speaking for music in
the forthcoming history of the world, and
determining its future path, we are still
moving along on his transcendent carpet,
no one ‘s come along still to give us a
more assured ride, kind of like Homer,
some would say Shakespeare, others
Albert Einstein, other, incidentally,
post-Christian, post Revolutionary
Supermen
who do you presently pray to, who are
your angels, who your Superwomen,
-men, towards what do you aspire,
towards whom
Superwomen, -men, incidentally,
cultivate their own efflorescence,
manifest their own, I think, destinies,
or, if you like, their own Heaven
much as I believe angels also do
Mozart’s Fantasy in C minor on the
same program shows him in a nearly
Beethovenian mode atavistically, much
more somber than he usually is, but he’s
nevertheless easily distinguished by
his much less intricate musical
accompaniment and his much more
rigorous melodic line, you’re more
likely to hum it
Mozart also composes from the nursery,
I find, the exhilaration of playful discovery,
you can see the toy soldiers, the golden
tresses on little milkmaids in dirndls with
red circles for cheeks
Mozart’s pieces are like nursery rhymes
Beethoven progresses to literature
before you judge me too harsh on Mozart,
by the way, consider that my favourite
piece of the two in this program is the
Mozart, it’s like comparing apples and
oranges, though, it depends on your
mood that day which you’ll favour
cheers
Richard
psst: just in case you missed it, this version
of the “Pathétique“ is the best I’ve ever
heard, indeed, of all the pieces here
the most extraordinary, don’t miss it
January 7, 2013
Beethoven – “Pastorale” Sonata, no 15, opus 28
from the very beginning of this musical series I’ve
been wanting, looking forward to, highlighting
somewhere, somehow, this incandescent piece
by Beethoven, but hadn’t yet found either a
complete nor, more significantly, a worthy
interpretation, though one briefly came and
went in a blazing virtual, as it were, transit, that
would’ve been perfect, and may now be never
seen again, o, vast, too vast, eternity
here Konstantin Semilakovs, not even a finalist at
the third Helsinki International Maj Lind Piano
Competition last September, 2012, the competition
must’ve been severely tough, plays an enchanted
rendition
Beethoven is at the height of his euphoria here,
after his 7th sonata, his opus 10, no 3, he’d
followed through with his still resounding 8th,
his“Pathétique“, opus 13, through several
significant others to just before this one his
opus 27, no 2, the “Moonlight”
incidentally, usually retains the German spelling,
for the feminine word in German “Sonate”, and
it is generally pronounced, with an enunciated
“e”, that way – is in all of music the piece I find
the most enchanting, I call it my “Johnny
Appleseed” sonata for its youth, freshness,
exhilaration, sense of adventure, infinite and
effervescent possibility, there isn’t a single
adagio here, note, just, at the very slowest,
an andante, a normal walk, there’s too much
wonder and fascination in the music to slow
anything here down
you’ll note that Beethoven doesn’t too much
sway from the rigours of Classical structure,
the beat doesn’t significantly, nor even
infinitesimally much alter, though there are
some idiosyncratic Romantic liberties taken,
not an uncommon occurrence, by the interpreter,
fully redeemed however by his magical, meticulous
rendition
nor does Beethoven touch tonality, we remain
always in the same key, each according to its
own movement
repetition is also there in spades, but you get
there only after he’s taken you through a veritable
rabbit hole, like Alice, and you don’t even know
where you are, where you started, but there you
are again suddenly, to your enchanted wonder,
but already he’s starting you up again for another
apparently iteration, o joy, o even ecstasy
note intimations of Prokofiev already a century
earlier in the third movement, the sprightly
“scherzo (allegro assai)”, note the eccentricity
of the syncopation, already the future is here,
spreading its nascent but fully burgeoning
wings into even our very own 21st Century,
decisively, we will not hang Beethoven out
to dry, that’d be like losing Shakespeare
the elements of Classicism, to summarize,
remain strong with Beethoven, even essential
to his conception of music, the profound
difference is with the impact of the piano,
soft, loud, the hold petal, his use of volume,
his use of, from solemn to effervescent, pace
with these opportune tools he changed the
face of music, channeling through them his
profound, his supremely inspired, genius,
becoming along the way and incontestibly
the Homer, the highest priest and most
revered elder, of Western music, to this very
day unchallenged, still not outshone, nor
even ever yet matched, just listen
psst: you might want to compare this Beethoven
with Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy, for
their itinerary spirit
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