Phaedrus
- A drunk.
- Easy to trick into sex.
- The father of at least one daimon.
- The subject of a lot of gossip.
Æ.3
i’m only here because of you, you said
i said, you are your secrets too
Æ is built and born anew
from hiding
Phaedrus loves
to hide so grow
from hiding
//
if leisure
if leisure in the morning
then spare me a glance
if leaf-buds are forming
then we have a chance
if dew-drops are adorning
then the roses free
if leisure in the morning
you’ll also have me
if dreaming at noon
let’s meet in the shade
if weary come june
then put down your spade
if love is a simple tune
and laughter the key
if dreaming at noon
you’ll also have me
if easy in the evening
then let’s read a book
if lazy to be reasoning
come hide in your nook
if candle flame is flickering
close your eyes and see
if easy in the evening
you’ll also have me
if longing at midnight
go walking on the sand
if reaching for moonlight
you will hold my hand
if starlight is the invite
sing beyond the sea
if longing at midnight
you’ll also have me
//
Assalamu’alaikumwarahmatullahiwabarakatuh 🌔
a chariot is
reply to Isthmian I, via Phaedrus 227β
//
a chariot is artifact entombed
beneath packed sediment
an imprint on the earth
of acts not of the earth
sightless as solitude
lifeless as time itself
rotting perpetual
vehicle disposed
it falls apart
a chariot is
impervious
to crying
a chariot is a paragraph
about ancient technology
symbols illuminated by
old photos from museums
shaded settings in relief
straight lines on pregnant-bellied vases
fragments of singed and tattered verse
reasons described almost
as spatial motion re-constructed
of kingships and bloodline races
past endings to beginnings of
gods animals and man
words used as tools
each one to fix and justify
as evidentiary groping at
a world of human things
we still don’t know
a chariot is an easy gift
against a multitude
of horses
the machines we used to get
from place of rest to planet mars were splendid
magnificent creatures in their own
golden-
ratioed
grammars
and dragons that took hold of drivers' eyes
they thought the wind but caught to ride
a flaming sword instead between her thighs
maidens of modern mythologies arrived
on cliffside edges wearing white
translucent coats
arousal com-
partmentalized
to celebrate new body parts cognized
the jewel-tones of her lacquered toes
the scent of ozone taste
of toxic fizz behind
her sucking nose
her mouth disclosed
she swallows apples licks
a rose the absolute
glory hallelujah
ravenous grows
vulva exposed for clicks
each flick a seed she sows
from echoes loaded lead
her rainbows red as victory
she was the counting down to blasting off
she was four hundred thousand horses yoked
by arc of axel angel burnt tendrils
smoke billows over rocky rough terrain
past battlefields and nations past
her recent childhood and
arsenic smile
their eyes went to
her nippled curves and angles
her thorough flexibility
her starry nights and spangles
her lashes cruelly clawed
her pussies pawed
and oh how they
to her with her and of
her came
as realism
inscribed by god
rendered maidens un-made
oiled python sheen of ageless skin
she was the beauty left in violence
they were materials for war
sapphire eyes emerald or amethyst
you chose the crystal the correction and
the facets for
some child in Africa
was orphaned by each armored scale to feed
her un-weaned toddler burger meat
( at least the blacks buried
and did not eat
their very
fathers
a chariot is
from-dust-
arisen life transcribed )
annunciations posted inter-angel
a holy home a web apart
filters of pale ethereality
content implicitly divorced
from earth’s divided continent
baptismal diamantine written
laws skinlessly conceived that we
may find and hold as work of art
your child’s hunger as forgiven
a chariot is
already cleansed of blood it is
excerpted rage it is
brave forms we made
from partial purpose or
how to make pure
a brilliant woman true to life
but honestly a whore
a chariot is what you drive to get
to work your nightmares harnessed by
engines of piston pretenses
at likely sentences
a chariot is nothingness herself
but full of manliness
the games we play when we
make love in light of day
driving endlessly divine
at origins as orifices flying
a chariot is
a summary
of dying
//
selamat purnama 🌕
Notes on techne.
//
There is no eros in technology.
(Technology is anti-erotic,
Ending in the endlessness of desire.)
Techne is the technology of Allah.
(Techne is Al-Khaliq, Al-Bari, Al-Musawwir.
Eros is Ar-Rahman, Ar-Raheem.)
Poetry is erotic techne.
(The Qur’an is poetry of poetry.
The basmala —
Bismillah hir rahman nir raheem
By the Name of Allah, Ar-Rahman, Ar-Raheem
— is the poet’s seed.
The poet of poets is the Prophet,
Recollection as Self-conservation.)
The stranger (X) is the poet as lover.
Thoth is the poet as technician.
//
Phaedrus is a (the) passion.
//
Prayer becomes mantra
And we are taken for a ride —
//
A festival of purgation. //
“Being sick” is also a negotiation between myself and the world, I was thinking yesterday. As we kept progressing through this illness, as if it were an argument, the subsequent days offering different perspectives on it, beginning with aches, shakes, and nausea, that climax in a night of vomiting, (un-willing efforts to empty an already hollowed stomach), disease passing as through a spectrum of these bodily systems, modes. The last few days it turned into the upper part of the body, head and chest, which are now swollen with mobilization, inundative rescue efforts, wracked by sneezes and coughs. So chapped lips and nose, morning voices cut with sludge, and sinus headache. My trifling desire to shut out all light and sound.
This is not me falling prey, I (comedienne) assure my husband, who tends to view illness as weakness in surrender. This is a battle, this phlegmy mess is our mounted defense and a glorious victory in progress… And then (feeling very American) meekly apologizing for being a burden while thusly underway.
My mind has been so sluggish, especially after that weird mania of day three. The last thing I want now is to focus on the specific task of writing. Which requires razor edges and piercing sight, building by division and seeking subtler senses of coherence, not to mention, setting out the beggar’s bowl for inspiration. (And caffeine, now seven days without. Who even am I?) You never know what gift you’ll get. Reading, ok, I’ve done a lot of that, in a hazy stupor absorbing many terrible things. What else is new.
The whole Neil Gaiman situation is gross and fascinating, (the archived link, at six days old, is already obsolete?), with offshoots to and from nearly everything relevant, to me and my humble epic, an irresistible exemplar of subterfuge poetic manipulation. Or as (poor, dear) Tori put it, last year, a wolf disguised as sheep. How blessed we are to have our own contemporary Lysias. Good thing we’ve got horses, as those armies really kept perfectly still. It is not mine but my other favorite response so far is this one. (Is this guy an asshole? or just ornery? I don’t know these people, their whisper networks, and yet,) It brings a shiver to read such incisive commentary, or perhaps that’s just leftover fever.
I have some digesting to do, and further healing, before offering my thoughts on all that. Other than, to celebrate its coming out. A festival of purgation.
Then yesterday I was thinking, while coughing until the gag reflex came, (apologies but I guess I will add Montaigne to the inevitable list of influences around here, who really put no limits on the observations he would share), and why not? These sensations and this experience are no less expressions of something true than, well, a tree growing, or an approaching storm. The red rose blooming. Baudelaire’s “take” (“take” = “make”) on a rotting corpse. (The ever-unheeded warning that “anyone can do it”.) This too is experience and introspection is in theory possible, here as everywhere, in war as in peace, in decay as in life.
Perhaps it is a reliable cornerstone of interpretation for these modern horrors, as purgation. (Or as Americans call it these days, inauguration.) We have ceremonies too for calling out the demons, for coughing them up and spitting them out, the upending of bodily-function as vomit, (I despise and resist this feeling, to no avail), as banishment of the enemy one made of oneself. (Must we deal with it now, the nightmare of involuntary anal penetration? Dear God, what would Jesus do? With Christ’s remains interred in this necessary question.) Or what else is a virus? Embrace your closest intimate, the toilet bowl. Disease as ecstatic dance, revelling in the expulsive revelation of noxious bodily fluids!
I’d been thinking lately also, here is another possible referent of Morychos. A cthonic deity, local and obscure, the kind whose worship seems to have been ubiquitous in Ancient Greek “civilization”, as folk practice. These things rarely if ever made it into the written record. Modern historians had (imagine it) interpreted a whole society based only on its polite conversation. Ye noble Greeks. Here’s yet another way of cultivating a partial truth, by limiting your resources to official, state-sanctioned documents. Well history, which is human, will always be more akin to “the state”, than to “the true”. Disregard images on vases, atypical animals represented on temple reliefs, a coiling snake on the throne of Zeus. Which figure was the interloper? To which one did we sacrifice our children? This is not modern, not at all. It has ever been difficult for us to see through the deception of our ongoing efforts, “to groom”.
So I started reading (pre-flu) Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison, (a fascinating historical figure in her own right), the seminal academic text on stratification of divinity in the ancient world. Written word versus unrecorded ritual, text versus ceremonial relief, the one kind of god you like to talk about, the other that doesn’t bear mentioning. Indispensable reading for students of invisibility, (in whatever dialectical direction), a constant reminder that we are secrets kept from ourselves,
Of mystery as the shroud.
You will never understand anything unless you assume the unmentionable, subterranean. Dead bodies. That said, I’m not convinced I contain multitudes at all. This skin is too fragile, this spirit bloated, and this willing, quite broken. It seems more to me that they (or we, the multitudes) come spilling out, un-contained, as yellow bile. Seemingly seamless stories vibrate with fever of the undisclosed. We, who remain unread, unwritten will be known as forgotten prisoners of his, awaiting our climactic liberation.
This is the radical steadfastness of faith, as Furies. We do not look at the time.
Daughters of Typhon
// Phaedrus 227β // Isthmian 1
It felt good to translate Isthmian 1, like eating a nourishing bowl of food, with green and purple vegetables, roast potatoes, tempe, tender steamed rice underneath, and spicy peanut sauce drizzled (generously) on top. Doing something like that makes me feel applauded by ancestors, for sure. The only translations of that poem I could find (public domain) were so very fine (It’s awe-inspiring how flowery the old-fashioned translators were. What alien world did they come from, those boys of clubby leisure? Did they drink honey-wine for breakfast before sitting down to work?) that I failed to detect in them the brilliance of an original. Which I uncovered as I worked it out and translated for myself. Using fewer words, less adorned, to give it my own meter, then to brush away the sediment from this cut and polished gemstone. To put it in my words, to shape my lips around the poetic act.
As a physical, full-bodied shiver. I could feel the pride of the author, in the poem’s re-discovery.
“What’s more beloved / By good men than their parents, esteemed?” Indeed, smiling, I admired our work. Other possible translations for “esteemed” could be “cared for”, “valued” or “cherished”. Good people love to see their parents taken care of, “placed on high”, publicly loved. If you enjoy seeing your parents respected and celebrated, you are probably a good person. So suggests Pindar. And this is what I have done by translating his poem. Isn’t it? I have cared for a parent, if I could consider Pindar a parent. Could I? Would he be a father, or maybe a grandfatherly figure? If he would accept me, as such. Maybe.
//
Fathers and grandfathers are hard to come by, around here. Okay, the subject is difficult. I grew up without grandfathers. Then my father was (and is) a piece of work. He spent my childhood teaching me to read his darker feelings. I became very good at that.
It was not an easy childhood. I was somehow hoarded by him, he was my primary caretaker, or anyway, my mother left me unprotected, unshielded from the intensity of his self-loathing, which he daily poured over me like fuel, with which I should also burn. Maybe worse than if it had all been hostile, the infliction (and it was violent, if an adult man yelling full-force close to a six year-old girl’s face, as if to teach her with terror, is violent, his spittle in her eyes, as she is petrified and panicking with shame, and the daily ritual of this, for the first fifteen years of my life, that it framed everything) alternated on-and-off with love, as an oddly infantile affection.
My parents divorced when I was eleven or twelve. (It was after they had a giant fight, in Disney World.) A few years after that (when I was a teenager) I stopped living with my father, basically for fear. I called him and said I would live with my mother full time. I thought I was free then, but it was still all I knew. I had no perspective on the conditions of anger and shame I had suffered, through which I had learned (pathei mathos, as Aeschylus) the meaning of (fatherly) love. An open question, (mine), of whereto and wherefrom. What does it take to recover from that kind of growing up?
I (on my request) went to therapy with him, tried to keep in touch with him, (he never called me, he’s not that kind of parent), and struggled for years to maintain a tolerable connection with him. Until at (after the ceremony and reception were over, I’m not such an asshole) my sister’s wedding (in Disney World again, yes, of all places), (we are very different people), like so many times before, he found a reason to shame me. As if to re-establish dominance over a dangerous dog. He did it, as always, when nobody else was there to see. It was after I suggested taking my neice and nephew out for ice cream. I guess he thought that was the stupidest idea. The familiar timbre of his punishing voice, the physical vibration low and threatening, set my inner child quaking with fear. I took a deep breath and (not for the first time) told him he couldn’t talk to me like that anymore. I would not “be bullied”. He refused to admit wrongdoing, would not make eye contact for the rest of our time there. We all flew home from Disney World, and I didn’t call him again, after that.
(I pause here, to note some broader family context.)
My mother, although she was the target of his abuse for years, and her tears were my tears, rarely admits there was anything wrong. She says she didn’t know how he treated me. At first I thought that was impossible. As a child, I felt like she must know. I felt somehow like we were together in that, but also she would never speak of it, which was a betrayal. Here I begin to doubt my memory, and maybe it’s possible that nobody knew, my mom or my sister. Although there was very harsh treatment at the piano, my worst memories are from when I was closed away in “the study”. That was where he made me do hours of extra school work each day. The most severe of his demands, castigations, and punishments, might have been hidden. But my understanding remains foggy, because my dad was often very loud, when yelling how stupid or wrong I was. And how could my mother not know? Of course, anyone in her position wouldn’t want to know. Anyway, she doesn’t like to talk about it.
My sister holds it against me for “leaving him”. (She remained living with him up into her thirties, even after being married and having two children.) Although she avoids talking about it too, and I only got that snippet of perspective from her husband, so it might not even be true. Again, it seems like nobody else witnessed or acknowledges his longterm mistreatment of me, or cares. To the point that I begin to doubt my own memories. I’m not sure what I can say about that. It is a terrible thing, trying to choose between memories and familial acceptance.
An uncle, my mother’s brother, told me that I was an adult, so I should understand that I was “safe now” and endure mistreatment.
Their father, my maternal grandfather, was no better. My beloved grandmother (may she rest in peace) was the only one who would talk about him. Her stories suggest that he was quite nasty. He threatened her (my grandmother) with a pistol before abandoning them, when my mom and her brother were children. He pretended they died in a car accident and married somebody else. My grandmother also claims he broke into the house, after leaving, and stole her jewelry. She would tremble when she spoke of him. The man’s obituary (he passed in 2021, coincidentally just weeks after my grandmother) mentioned none of us as descendants.
My father, for his part, had cut both of his parents out of his life before I was born. I assume that my grandfather did a similar thing to my father, as my father did to me. This is not something he would ever talk about. I have no way of knowing. But I imagine there was a lot of meanness and cruelty there. And then, my father once told me he despised his mother for being “superficial” and “just a socialite”. My memory of that conversation is vague, and I’m really unsure how to interpret it. Anyway, that’s how I grew up without grandfathers.
(Violence doesn’t grow on trees, after all.)
Even though we hadn’t spoken in several years, I flew across the country to see my father before I moved to Indonesia (in 2019). I wanted to say goodbye, or “pay my respects”. There was no argument, but politeness, as a brief and transparent veneer. Underneath the tension was barely concealed his skepticism and contempt toward me and my life choices, along with a performative, condemnatory aloofness. The lack of warmth, not even by habit or accident, was heartbreaking. It was under duress and for the sake of survival that I had learned the languages of his shifting shadows, threatening always from the borderline of his (my) joy. Maybe I became too sensitive. How many times should I (could I) make myself vulnerable, by caring, or even smiling, in his presence? To be whipped with inexplicable rejection, at an unguarded moment, with shame, humiliation, and a panic whose bilious flavor would seep into all areas of my person, my body, my life. At the end, there was no hug goodbye. There was only a stiff wave.
We haven’t spoken since I moved to the other side of the world, so around five years, and that’s where my time with him leaves off. Sometimes I wonder what I will do when he dies. Or if he gets sick, how will I know? How will it make me feel? (The answer is very, very sad.)
Incidentally, Christmas Eve is his birthday, which is today. It has always cast a sadness across the holiday, to remember rituals of childhood pain, contrasted with those of childhood joy. (Like his joy, when he opened the packs of socks we always gave him, as that’s what he always asked us for). And just in case there are any doubts. I would happily reconcile, if he ever reached out, or otherwise communicated that he wanted to change, or just communicated that he wanted to communicate. I know he is tormented and I wish I could help. But if I had stayed, it wouldn’t have helped. It would just have been staying with abuse.
With all of my heart, I wish I knew how to make it (my father) right.
//
It feels natural (or inevitable) to blame myself for this alienation. No matter my trying to do the best thing, no matter me persuading myself I tried hard enough, or I’ve done enough self-work, or healing, it seems as though I am stained. It feels similar to my alienation from the country of my birth. (So I slip into speaking of “staying” and “leaving”.) With whom I tried, again and again, to make it work, (I fought for myself, in you), but from whom I grow only stranger, as my life goes on. (Or. As our synchronous deaths carry us ever further from reconciliation.) There has been a ripping out of organs, bones cracked, a wrenching of spines, skin charred and flayed. It brings me no joy to have these great gaping wounds in my soul. They are ever-ripe and liable to fester. They require constant vigilance, and even so, they spawn offspring.
As if to supply a perpetual war.
I wish to be a good, healthy, dutiful person. I wish to repay my debts, to respect my elders. I realize that I need a city wall, and stable laws to protect a soul from harm. But I would ask all the fathers, the poets and patriarchs, Plato, Socrates, Pindar. Even Bob. How now? What is wrong with me? Am I not “a good man”? How should I, if I am to be good, celebrate such broken things? Should I place them on high, and be broken to pieces, beneath them?
Or. Should I not myself have been powerful enough to put everything back together?
Or. Together again? What would be this “again”?
Or. What was the thing, unbroken?
The father unbroken. If it never was my personal father, what could it have been? Was it the shining city on a hill, or the beautiful one writ in heaven? Was it a garden, or a book? Was it the silver-bearded grandpa on the chapel ceiling? Or the Christ that broke all his own Fathers' rules? In whose name predators ascend to power, in a greusome catharsis that used to be the country of my birth. So I know that it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, or the U.S. Constitution. But was it Herodotus of Thebes, two-and-a-half thousand years in the past, on his magnificent golden chariot, whose reins were not held by another’s hands? Was it you, whose poetry tells of such things? As fathers, holy, revered, and unbroken. A six year-old girl, with no working fathers, and crumbling city walls, needed, for her life, to know.
//
Daughters, put to such questions, will only
Become witches. (We, who find
we are
as we do
as we make
as we uncover fossils
Of animals that could have been held high by us,
Who might make (us) right
In return, and growing backwards, as generations,
Flourish in veiled vacancy. I cherish your words.
And I make them my own.
But these things were broken long before I was born.)
With my words as my mark, (by such easy deathlessness),
We live and we breathe
(Laughing, replying) without a father’s permission.
//
(About.)
Just playin’ some Bob
Σωκράτης: ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν;
Socrates: Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
(…)
Φαῖδρος: πεύσῃ, εἴ σοι σχολὴ προϊόντι ἀκούειν.
Phaedrus: You will learn, if there is leisure for you, as you go, to hear.
Σωκράτης: τί δέ; οὐκ ἂν οἴει με κατὰ Πίνδαρον “καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον πρᾶγμα” ποιήσασθαι τὸ τεήν τε καὶ Λυσίου διατριβὴν ἀκοῦσαι;
Socrates: What? Don’t you think, as Pindar, I would make it “a matter higher even than non-leisure (business)”, to hear about your and Lysias' spending?
//
Behold, the destiny of human (political) being in its interior conflict: between the erotic-philosophic (desirous and r/evolutionary) soul and the material body’s need for (protective and conservative) law; with its resolution in the dialectic of (political/poetic) education; the infinite freedom of the human soul, as philosophy, is yoked (by logos/music), in service as conservation, to the body (politic/imaginary).
(Here is my Plato-feeling, “tree-reading” I should call it, or a tentative shorthand, The Republic in a nutshell, but with all of these other things, %gestures at blog%, in mind, and always, of course, through the lens of Phaedrus.
Translating you is mothering multitudes.)
//
I got caught up (through these next few lines of Phaedrus, which revolve poetically around leisure, and get sling-shotted around by Socrates' inversionary or may I call it tropical conservatism) thinking about leisure and responsibility, duty to parents and country, what one owes, how one serves. So I got caught up thinking about mothers and fathers. You can’t talk about “where from” without leisure, says Phaedrus. But you really can’t talk about it without mothers and fathers, and their celebration (in poetry), which is right where Socrates puts us, with Pindar, in Isthmian 1.
Then it happened that writing about fathers found me in a dark place, and I didn’t feel good about posting what I wrote. I will post it, but I needed to write this first.
To whom do I owe pleasure?
To whom do I owe life?
(Fertile Phthia is like the valley below, but for Achilles.
The valley below is like Key West, but for me.)
//
Listening to Bob Dylan’s more recent Rough and Rowdy Ways. Playing it for the chickens, it’s a great sound for them, they love it. For me, I’m always trying to be ready for this album, ever since I wasn’t several years ago, (the first year of the pandemic), when it was released. (That whole first year, I could only listen to two albums, but that’s another story for another time.) One of the boys practices crowing for “Black Rider”. As if to say, “these kids”, Frankie starts in with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”. He sounds so eloquent and sleekly up-tempo with Bob’s Tennessee whisky-soaked blues.
And then Bob takes us to church with “Mother of Muses”. Something about this reminds me of Little Drummer Boy, (from my favorite Christmas album, I admit, every year I weep for this song), it is a hymn sung with the same dutiful reverence, Bob’s most lovely and humble offering for Her. There is an Illiad and an Odyssey in his storyful prayer. Key West is a place to get away, (the one we need), the permission to go, the road and the highway sign to get there. (Honestly surprised at how many holes these fathers have left, written into the city walls. If only I trust myself to find them.)
Sunset and the bending-of-light through its longing shades of exit, and plentiful tears falling again for “Murder Most Foul”. I am learning from Bob how to remember someone who was already dead before I was born. Bob sings a shining, shimmering like-a-mirage, place of hope, dream on a hill.
The hardest thing about the death of a parent, from what I have seen, or what I have heard, is a leftover feeling of guilt, as of a duty unfulfilled. I wonder what kinds of things Bob feels responsible for, I mean to speak of history. He was there as the centerpiece of revolutionary American culture, although he constantly resisted being there, in his perverse way, until that worked and he wasn’t there, anymore. But he was at the heart of it, so if anybody could feel the pulsating heartbeat, I believe it would be Bob. He tells of the leaning over and falling of the body, into her lap, he tells me there was something alive, and then it was not, and (whispering, by now) it did not die a natural death. It was, he repeats, “a murder most foul”, and as I am alive, I believe him.
He gives us the funeral we need (at least, we who are left to listen).
It is a slow procession, full of myriad moments bitter and painful, a retrospective drawn by sorrowful progress toward the inevitable end. American destiny. Every dreamlike revolution is new tears flowing, emptying out in grandiose repetition, as an over-abundance of scattered light. It is a song of anger that would be too deep to feel, were it not already healing itself, like a laundering in the sea. The taste of frothy sand in Key West, washing away the beach, washing away the stain of the crime. Like Jackie washing the blood off her clothes, America washing the death off her clothes, after all the years. Our bard fulfills his final duty, delivering the eulogy, that’s what it feels like. After more than fifty years spent trying to understand who it was, what it was that died. Seeing the shining, past the anger, through the grief, of love.
Can’t talk about elders without talking about Bob Dylan. He tore it apart, turned it upside-down, and re-made it whole, again and again. A parent for poets and pirates, and probably philosophers too. (Remember that time when he gave us a recipe for figgy pudding on TTRH?) Love you forever, Bob.
//
Isthmian 1
//
This translation of Pindar’s first Isthmian ode is part of ongoing work on Plato’s Phaedrus, and undertaken with that dialogue in mind, specifically on the topic/trope of leisure. The full Greek text of Pindar’s poem is here. Other (public domain) translations can be found here, here, and here.
While the original has an irregular line and meter, I ended up fitting the translation into iambic pentameter. I nonetheless prioritized keeping the “literal” meanings intact, with the goal of preserving the analogical inner-workings of the poem. It is best read outloud and not too fast.
//
Isthmian 1
An Ode, by Pindar.
FOR HERODOTOS OF THEBES, CHARIOT.
My mother, Thebes of the golden shield,
I shall place your matter above non-leisure.
May rugged Delos, to whom I have myself
Supplied, not take offense: What’s more beloved
By good men than their parents, esteemed?
Yield,
Apollo’s land: That, by the gods, dancing
For Phoibos of the unshorn hair, in flow-
Encircled Keos with her salt-born men,
And for the wave-splitting ridge of Isthmos:
Both graces I shall yoke to this one end.
Six garlands from her games did Isthmos send,
With Kadmos' team, and fame for glorious
Victory, to my fathers’ land. It was there
Alkmene bore her fearless son, before
Whom bristled once the bold hounds of Geruon.
But, making for Herodotos a gift
For his four-horsed chariot, its reins
Held not by another’s hands, to the hymn
I would fit him, either of Kastor or
Iolaos. For the mightiest among
Heroes of charioteers were born
To Lakedaimon and Thebes: and at
The games, of contests, they always sought out
The greatest count, and with tripods they filled
Their houses, and caldrons, and gold vessels,
Tasting the wreaths of victory:
And their
Manifest excellence boldly radiated
In races run nude, or wearing forged armor
And clattering shields, likewise when hurling with
Taut hands the javelin or pointed spear,
And whenever they threw the quoit of stone.
(For in that time, there being no pentathlon,
Each deed was given a separate end.) Often,
Their rippling hair bound round by wreathed bundles,
They would appear beside the ever-flowing
River Dirke, or on the banks of Eurotas,
The mighty son of Iphikles, being
One people with the Spartan race, and he of
Tundareas, presiding with Achaians
In their highland seat of Therapne.
Rejoice.
But I, attending to Poseidon with song,
The sacred Isthmos and the banks of the
Onchestos, will sing in honor of this man,
The famous dispensation of his father,
Asopodoros, and of Orchomenos,
His ancestral land, which received him when,
In desolate misfortune, he was driven
Ashore, shipwrecked, disposed by briny sea
Unmeasured:
But these days, the good old times
Hath native destiny restored.
Hard work
Brings foresight to the mind: And if he submits
Every impulse to excellence, both in
Expenditures and labors, then for him
Who obtains clamorous praise for valor,
One must bear no grudging thoughts.
It is an easy gift for a wise man
To speak a beautiful word, against
A multitude of hardships, and set straight
The common good.
Different wages for different works
Are sweet to men, to the shepherd, the farmer,
The bird-catcher, the one raised by the sea:
Each and every one struggles to keep hunger
Perpetual from the belly. But who takes
Splendid glory in contests, the making
Of war, receives praise as their highest gain,
In citizens' and strangers' finest tongues.
For us, it will be seemly, by making,
To celebrate son of Kronos, earth-shaking,
Mere bystanders of horse races into
Benefactors of gleaming chariots,
And to invoke your sons, Amphituon,
From deepmost hollow of the Minyan,
The famous grove of Demeter, Eleusis
And Euboia, at these curving courses.
For Protesilaos, I also include
The sacred precinct of Achaian men,
In Phulake.
To tell all that Hermes,
Lord of games, would bestow, by horses, upon
Herodotus, the brief measure of the hymn
Prevents. And very often, to be silent
Garners greater cheer.
So may he be raised up
On splendid wings of Pieridean Muses'
Sweet voices. Beyond that, may all the choicest
Wreaths from Pythia, the Olympiads,
And from Alpheos fortify his hand:
Building honor for seven-gated Thebes.
But if anyone hoards hidden wealth within,
While marking others' trials in derision,
Their failure is to see: The soul, bereft
Of reputation, achieves its end, in Hades.
//
(About.)
(Can Phaedrus tell the difference between those two things?)
The worship of beauty (Love) begins on the outside a book of monster.
(Translation as tantra.)
Diatripse
Φαῖδρος: (…) συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ. (…)
Phaedrus: (…) For I spent a long time there, sitting since early morning. (…)
Σωκράτης: τίς οὖν δὴ ἦν ἡ διατριβή; ἢ δῆλον ὅτι τῶν λόγων ὑμᾶς Λυσίας εἱστία;
Socrates: So then, what was the spending? Or is it clear that Lysias was feasting you with speeches?
//
The spending was διατριβή, diatribe, a word built from dia (through) + tribo (to rub, to rub hard, to grind, thresh, pound, waste, bruise, ravage, wear away, wear out). And so, the meaning of diatribe starts with, to rub hard, wear away, consume, and Phaedrus has been at it with time (χρόνον or chronos) so it means to spend or waste or pass the time, and then sometimes the word comes to mean, to busy oneself (for example, with school work), with an implicit flavor, of rubbing and grinding it out.
So then, what was the spending?
Phaedrus describes a rubbing away of time, sitting, and growing weary enough that he wanted the refreshment of a walk. As if being there was physically exhausting and spiritually cramped, causing a feeling of claustrophobia, compelling him, following a doctor’s advice, to escape the city walls.
Socrates suggests the context for this was Lysias, (a sophist, or teacher-for-pay, a guru from abroad), feasting him with speeches, τῶν λόγων εἱστία, ton logon heistia. Ton logon is logos, it means a lot (here, accounts, speeches, arguments, words..). And heistia (as in Hestia, goddess of the hearth) means to receive at one’s house, to host or entertain, often as a celebration. Here, we note the back and forth. For what Phaedrus has given (being coy, it will soon be revealed) as a wasteful exhaustion, Socrates offers an alternative account, as a celebration or reward. That it was offered by Lysias for the benefit of Phaedrus, in worshipful adoration (as Socrates flirtatiously suggests) of his youthful beauty.
So then, what was the spending?
Phaedrus and Socrates speak circles around the house of Morychos, (nearby the Olympian temple), and what happened there. Each describes something like the opposite of his perspective, or as the other might like to hear. As lovers would in a fresh encounter, tiptoeing toward pleasure, with promiscuous words and excusable touch, they dance around the truth of things. While we here (being a chorus of gossips, or readers) are hungry for truth. Was Phaedrus given a blessed feast, while entertained by Lysias? Or did he endure a hard rubbing out, a grinding, a pounding, a bruising, a ravaging away, a wearing out?
Let us, for a moment, not be coy. Let us not flirt. Let us speak not in circles, as of the unspeakable, (holy and/or profane), but pierce straight into the heart of things. (The facts of life, without breaking the mood, and how can you break what was already broken?) Let us be shameless and use the words available to us, as we are, and the ones into which we were born. So then, what was the spending?
Was it a sacred celebration of beauty incarnate?
Or a (violent and degrading) fuck?
//
Modern science may be better understood as an extension of modern politics, than as a descendant of (ancient natural) philosophy.
One is born from wonder and matures into the work of love.
The other is (desire as) conquest, disguised as codifiable law.
(Just because you can light a fire doesn’t mean you’ve understood the flame.)
(Does this mean we’re all antifa now?) //
There are two words for we/us in Indonesian, one that includes you (as in, we live on earth) and the other that does not include you (as in, we live in Indonesia). It’s a useful distinction that English doesn’t have.
My husband reports that yes, I do write like I talk. F.Y.I., bitches.
Everybody has a special talent, their thing(s) they can do especially well. Most skills or talents can be put to use, subversively. We can be open-minded and creative about it. For example, I could be a really good messenger. Of, like, encoded messages.
This most recent translation (poem) I wrote went through really different and weird iterations. It was (uncomfortable, difficult, tricky) to write on the little line of dialogue. So heaps of in-progress verse were there waiting when the election happened. The election result was… key to re-working and finishing.
(This is a message (paraphrased) from my friend, A: When you lose a poem it gives birth to another poem about a lost poem. A poem she wrote was just published and I love it.)
I don’t really want write more poetry (or prose) that is so dark. But, well. It’s a fascinating time in history to be focusing on this specific passage from the Phaedrus. There is unfortunately more sexual violence to come. The intended purpose is therapeutic, … cathartic and transformative. My experience studying the dialogue now is so sharply different from when I was 18. When I first read it, I didn’t get it. I thought it was absurdist nonsense, a rhetorical game, reading the manipulative Lysias speech on sexual manipulation. My young mind could not wrap itself around the fact: the absurdity of (sexual, or other exploitative) violence, being educated into us, marketed, sold to us as love, is real, essential, and absolutely serious.
It breaks us. (?)
Either “The Memory of Trees” is better than I remembered or I’m just desperate for more Enya these days. It has some pretty mystical/elvish-sounding tracks but then I find myself humming the upbeat ones in the shower, this is embarrassing (fun).
Daily thunderstorms bring relief from heat with unpredictably cool gusts of wind, heavy with water. The bath garden is magical after it rains, a hot shower in the cool, drippy, cloudy-dark world. Some wood-ear fungus is growing on a nearby log, it enjoys the steam of my shower, this feels intimate. And we’re still very buggy here, more mosquitoes lately, lots of swarming ants and termites, all different sizes of those, moths, praying mantis, sweet, stingless trigona bees, mud-daubers and “murder hornets”, grasshoppers and crickets, katydids and cicadas, spiders, other spindle-legged bodies, tiny lightning bugs, all shapes and sizes of wriggling worms in the dirt, or coiling centipedes, slippery earwigs, shiny black beetles that are tiny or large, or very large and pincered, like scarabs.
Before, people wanted to protect democracy. After, people need to protect themselves from democracy. Democracy is in itself nothing (more precisely, anything). Education is the something-making.
It’s hard to say “fix your boat” to people who don’t realize they’re in a boat. Sometimes in an inflatable tube in a swimming pool on a gigantic (leviathan) cruise liner. Then I look around and wonder, what’s my boat that I don’t realize? This makes me feel very “Bill and Ted”. (Does it need fixing? Constantly, yes.)
Nature also floats, but it wasn’t built by humans.
(Yes. Yes, it does.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌗
School Days in Athens
Φαῖδρος: ναί, παρ᾽ Ἐπικράτει, ἐν τῇδε τῇ πλησίον τοῦ Ὀλυμπίου οἰκίᾳ τῇ Μορυχίᾳ.
Phaedrus: Yes, at Epicrates', in the house of Morychos, here, near the Olympiad.
//
Take words to it,
he said, and words were fire. And yet, you lacked
conviction. Crowded by black memories
of unseen hands and uninvited touch,
as old men’s trembling clammy kindnesses,
their groping behind doors, our voices as
stray syllables, or whimpering with fright,
the muffled passage of another, coaxed
with promises, down enforced aisles, bound by
vocabulary’s sight. Terrible child,
no light escaped the house of Morychos.
So how did you?
At nights, with flashlights,
we stayed up, mapping tangled vacations.
It wasn’t always hellish as it sounds.
We were kept kids, padlocked in battery
cages, our own best teachers, of tossed-off
certainties, known neighborhoods, and always
chasing some kind of slang. To spell the word
backwards, chop up and repurpose pieces,
or make the meaning opposite from what
it was. We traded jabs of pleasure in
the mottled darkness of his maze, tongues of
soft flesh. We rearranged worlds to make our
places.
What would your mother give to you
of time? Faded photos, hand-me-down jeans,
a crayon-drawn map of paradise, you were
a metaphor too well-worn for what you
became, true as, it feels ugly to be
ugly and the resolution offers
no resolution, just this hissing in
my ears, this chaos. Lay down in the dog
bog. Keep trying. Keep gashing out the lines,
edit twisting serpents from the narrative,
and trace the tattered logic left behind,
monster observing monster, overwrought
and double-blind.
History is the final
solution for you, so go, dissolve your words
in time. Let their bleached remains fortify
the temple, your descendants living down
the stupid crime. That’s what
religion was, at home, submission to
the uncomprehended solidarity of
teenage desire, or something like, romance.
On echinacea lawns, she dons glitter
bodysuits, writes parochial poetry
on freedom. We were such creators, in
our nascent phases, molding plastic limbs
to tether our volcanic bases.
I do
not want to go, I beg, don’t take me back.
In wept oceans let me clear the bitter
savor from my eyes. Picnics in real
places, manicures on brand, she painted party
faces, praising God for such justice
as could be found and leveraged there, in
shared maps of iron laces, corset-bound,
hound-hunted hallways exhumed from ancient
flavors of local reason, a child’s small
hand ghostly waving from the window like
a metronome. She swallowed blood and sand
to earn their graces.
Take words to it, I said,
and words were airplanes, it was time, and she
was ready. She heard rumors on the wind
of its disintegration, climbed a hill,
and saw it for herself: the metaphor had died.
The whole, wide world was failing beauty, spread
beneath her like a poem in multitudes,
legs-open bride. And still, she cried. She longed
for absolute intelligence of who
he was, of home, of houses on the street
and what they hide, of where the figure’s corpse
was buried, and what appetites for youth were
still fed and worshipped there.
Take care of it,
he said, and words were memories, to which
she had no scholarly reply. No house,
nor street belonged to her, no shoes or gowns
to pack in chests, but ashes and fresh-breath
mints lost in linings, crumpled tissues, all
forgotten reasons why. Because you were
unseen, you could escape the conflagration?
Not so, although, not too far off. Because
she took my parchment seeded in her and
bad wisdom gained, as blasphemy of sight,
enlightened predation.
If words be fire,
then seek us in my gold and burning bower:
a clown is a bad child with adult power.
//
(About.)
But, Lysias
Σωκράτης: καλῶς γάρ, ὦ ἑταῖρε, λέγει. ἀτὰρ Λυσίας ἦν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐν ἄστει.
Socrates: Beautifully said, fellow. But Lysias was, as it seems, in town.
//
(“What even is Athens?” asked the blind, somewhat frustrated, woman.)
When I was twelve, I got thrown off a pony. Bocara, reddish-velvety-brown, with black mane and tail and an opinion of her own. Or something less accessible than opinion. So we were out for a ride one day, and she spooked when she noticed something “off” in the other field, man or machine, she didn’t like it. The instructor said, go. The third time around was the third time she bucked, and I was thrown, landing dirt-hard on back, face-full of sky, chest spasm for air. (Damn.)
That day. Writing this other post, which was about (what we do with) time, made me late for what was next (on our schedule). Now as I was on the way in Sweet Orange, who also is an incubator, a protectrix of time, at present of Duckworth time, (listening to DAMN., by Kendrick Lamar, to summon this artist from the other side, of the earth,) we stopped to pick up bricks, (exchanged looks with Sundanese brick-makers, but the bricks were “belum matang”), then re-entered the churning sprawl of I-cannot-tell-you-how-many pale riders on motorbikes. (Sweet Orange drives slow behind a couple, two probably fine fellows, and total nerds, out on holiday, who, having not made it, push theirs up the steep slope of a ravine. Frustration metamorphs into sympathy, inside Sweet Orange, for how many of us, one, has been caught under such circumstances, but without the solid-pack of traffic to witness. To whiteness. Laughing sympathy, but sympathy, nonetheless.)
There is a body, and there is a virus. No, back up. There is an island, and there is a world. There is an interaction between these two things, the city and the jungle, (a person and a blog), and I interpret it as, There is a body, and there is a virus, and there is a coordinated response, of the body, to the entry of the virus, and I call it, an immune response. The virus multiplies. The immune system, to defend the body’s living soul, which is mine, which is sacred, targets viral particles for elimination and expulsion. The immune response is the xenophobia.
(I am a stranger. Xenophobia is relevant to me.)
An immune response, whatever that is, and all of its analogues, would be one way to know or understand a moving thing, something coming and going, or something that’s born, and dies, as well as something that has a wall, with people going in and out, no matter how porous, and oh, yes, laws, written, unwritten, and weird, an immune response. Athens also might have an immune response, with, well, a soldier’s DNA., who would target the foreign element, (disguised-stranger emoji), they would be a sort of philosophical guard dog, barking at everything they don’t already know. (The hounds of hate? Or of jealousy?) But in addition, Socrates, who might as well be on a leash today, has been led outside the wall. (Is it you, ghost-of-Snowden-flake?) Whereas the virus is at another professor’s total party house, seducing of-age students with unlicensed garfield merchandise, and the lines of the battle, here, are somewhat unclear.
Who is the aggressor? What needs a defense? (I thought we’d grown tired of the city?) (Everyone agrees, by the way, that this is the most boring part of the dialogue. Like a plane, delayed on the runway, it must be endured, and quickly, to make the connection in Singapore.) But whichever direction is inward, and which outward, we are being steered into Lysias, like a T-cell with confirmed coordinates. Except for one thing, which is, the coordinates are… algebraic. (It’s a Boeing-built plane.) The virus isn’t here. Or, what was the virus, again? Man, or machine. A gadfly, round the bud that forks the corner of a dark-lashed eye.
I woud never blame her, beautiful, spirited Bocara. She is a genius and a horse is never wrong. The instructor was a jerk, “instructors” nearly always are, but let’s be honest, the instructor wasn’t wrong. (And I held the crop.) I was a fool, and a child, and I won’t blame myself. But sometimes, on a horse, you must be direct, and you must welcome judgment day with open arms. I did not. Like I said, I am messy. Wrong was done and a lesson had to be learned. It was one of those moments around which everything changes, or breaks, and I carried Bocara with me, after that.
Fun fact. “No feelings involved” is impossible with horses. You can’t remove yourself, it’s impossible. She follows you, she sticks with you, you carry her, you might hide her, or become her without knowing it, or you love her, and her things that she sees, her ghosts and her witness, her trumpets and her fire, and she appears before you, at night, in your secret life (crying, confused). Something was beautiful, then everything went wrong. She/he/they haunt you. Hidden in your heart, in your tunic, or in the iPhone that you carry in your pocket, until it’s m.A.A.d. as Compton to tell what is the virus, and where is home. Silly Phaedrus, with his concealed scroll, and his leopard-skin pill-box hat, thinks it’s not-a-thing to step outside a wall. But, look,
there’s a war going on. Of all against one, or one against all, or all against all, (based on gender pronouns and deity preference), or it’s one against one, and it follows you, the war, tapping its pocket. Like blood, or a bloodhound, it will track you down, and you will be there, again. Landing dirt-hard on back, sky-full of face, chest spasm for air, (like I can’t breathe. Look,) a caught body, again. Until you win the war. Which you cannot win, because you are a single soul, brave, clever, damned Duckworth, fleeing from, pursuing, (whereto and wherefrom), human nature itself. You are so many terrible, body-caught things. You are Socrates, in America, you are Phaedrus, out of (what even is) Athens(?). On an island all-but-destroyed by pale riders, (no feelings involved), you are red horse, and pale rider. You are, the war, so it rules you, the war. Unless
(I) just love (you) and (learn
how to put down the weapon.)
//
(About.)
μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου. // Mousiken poiei kai ergazou. // Make music and work at it.
(This message comes to Socrates repeatedly in his dreams, as Plato describes in the Phaedo, (at 60e6), which takes place on the day of Socrates' death by hemlock. Socrates also describes himself as experimenting with his interpretation of the message.
This is an example of a daimonic message, in Diotima’s✨ sense of daimon, which is something that goes in between the human and the divine. One might keep it as a mantra, or reminder, subject to interpretation…)
The Poem
ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν;
Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
//
Holding (with love, and so
gently) dear Phaedrus
(my day, light-ephemera)
my first and undying
metaphor, for
holding (with love, and so
longing) as asking
(as humbled-home-making)
the perfected question
to keep you. Pan,
beloved, as the drawing-
together (from the inside)
of meaning, and lover
as embrace (from the
outside) of horizon, sun-
set to sunrise, as all-time,
is the heavy becoming light-
as-boundary at the edge
of a world. We are there,
together:
the hand
and the what-would-be-
held.
( As nature
I am birthing and dying
unquestionable irresponsive
a fleeing, hiding and
by-many-wanted thing. )
( As human
I am messy, interminable
a political and personal
history of hysteria, making
and remembering, desiring
and deceiving, a restlessly
in-between
word.
A fool and a monster,
my pillaged possessions
are images and accounts
of war, and music
is how I play failure
as comedy, as a
question for a problem
with a deadly and un-
summarizable sound. )
( As god,
I am end (of motion),
I am source (of motion),
I am being (of motion),
I am (hungry
for motion),
I am
may-we-be
love. )
Morningtime, in a garden. And what is
this, that was laid in my lap? That is si-
lent but asking, that seems sent, but scatters
leafing-out patterns of my un-formed self,
harmonic. I need to know. Is it male
or female, flesh-fire of creature, salad
scrumptious and/or ambrosial bane? Shall I
eat it, be eaten by it, become it
or come into dust, be taken, wind-swept
and tearful, or reborn as clean, unseen
green, after all? I must know. I cannot
not know its reflecting, it blooms when I
touch it, it shivers, it is water-light,
earth-dispersing, kaleidoscope versing,
tongue-teasing shadow of radiant tree.
//
(About.)
Pan //
(Is it)
the shiver
that
passes through your body
(to endings from beginning)
when
you make the connection
(from ending to beginnings)
and then realize
it isn’t you
who made it
(?)
Walking Through Walls (3/3) // Phaedrus 227α-β
Poros (and Poiesis) and Socrates (and Student)
Socrates is famous (then and now) for being without, (or against?), these two “things".
Socrates is (was) (generally agreed to be) a-poetic. That is, he doesn’t (didn’t) write.
Also, a-poretic (to be a-poros, to have no way out or through, at an impasse). He never leaves Athens. (Whadabout when he fought the war for Athens, Alcibiades slurs, symposium-crashing.) (And Meno claimed, that everybody agreed, that) Socrates inflicts a-poria on others. Anti-poros, as a weapon. They feel angry, embarassed, humiliated by him, so they put him on trial (and, by jury, convicted). Socrates sits (like Buddha) in a cell. Declines all plans, (from students et al.), to help him escape. Builds extra arguments to wall himself in. Invokes the law. (To be only himself, within only those walls.) (Admitted no poros. Other than,) he dies (died) in that cell.
(Deep in the city, a dead body where her heart should have been.) (Aporia Herself.) (Is it tragedy?) (Almost like that,)
wrote the student. (Never as herself, always of the other.) And she left the city. (Oh, she was angry? She didn’t like hemlock?) (She was sick of assholes with speeches?) (Some gross politicians?) (Her “pussy hat”?) (Well, things got weird.) (She abandoned her teacher. Her friends, her school, her family, civic responsibilities.) (She seduced a king? She was sold as a slave?) (She was run off and/or exiled by tyrants.) (Gave birth to a monster. A creature of gossip.) (Well, where was her heart?) Subjunctive, contrary to fact: Without her getting out, and writing a lot, (of SEO content), the words would have passed, with the man.
(The poros at the dark heart of Aporia. Is… what leads beyond city walls.)
Each soul is an argument. Across from, opposed to, in need of, the other, a romantic entanglement, a war between worlds, (the after, the before). Their interplanetary logics of love and their lawless reunion by meta/physical coup. (In a Platonic jungle. As dark hearts go, it’s lovely, and well lit.) (By following the law, he broke the law. Like, it’s broken now, like a chipped tooth on a fractured jaw. And they can’t fix it. So.) The lover lays a trap, (for the soul of the youth), while the poet lays a trap, (for whom?), (are they dead?), (are they mortal?), (do they even know Greek?), set ‘twixt crossed stars, in time out of hand. Spanning written word, and word, alive. Each being nothing if not caught in the snare of the other. (Marriage, divorce, remarriage, and?) And Phaedrus in the middle.
//
Walking Through Walls (2/3) // Phaedrus 227α-β
It isn’t trivial, from a human perspective, to translate words that are two-thousand years old. To carry meaning from past to present, (where to, where from?), of words, then, and now. Poros in practice. Requires naïveté, ambition, and the shameless exploitation of available tools.
Ποίησις (Poiesis)
ποιέω (Again, in middle/passive voice.) (Phaedrus is a middle/passive kind of fellow.) - to make, to do; to make, produce, create, bring into existence, to compose, to write (e.g. poetry), to invent. From which ποίησις - poetry, poem; creation, fabrication, production. From which English language words like poetry, poet, poem, etc.
Everybody knows what poetry is,
And anyone can do it.
To give shape, form, body. A finite instantiation of some (finite or infinite? Known or unknown?) purpose. Appearance (as alienated from being), surface (as alienated from depth), artwork (as alienated from the life of an artist). Inherently irresponsible, a letting go of responsibility, a thing for which responsibility has been denied. An ontological orphan. A “bastard”. (The inverted windegg? A fetus aborting its mother.) An amputation of self into indeterminate pieces (which the city, which the poem, which the self?). Nature gone weird. Frankenstein. Horcrux. Monster-being. Can hypothetically be tamed, but always at risk of making its own laws. A law unto itself. Sinister stuff, and not to be trusted. The action of I. The Mage, the apparent (non)being, (existence, ex + sistere), of the deck of cards.
(An attempt at coherence when history fails. A desperate measure. A talisman of) deathlessness. (A love letter. A good alternative to insanity or self-harm. A test at the limits of nature, a gamble for truth, a shot in the dark.) A prayer. (Example, it is poiesis for me to write and press “publish”.)
If you exit the city, you (have to, you can, you get to, it’s refreshing, to) make your own way, (the leisure of monsters), through un- (or other-) civilized spaces, “wilderness”, the (exterior? hostile? unknowable?) unknown. How reckless you are, how precariously tethered to pyramids in ice, ends and beginnings severed from sight.
Phaedrus passes through the wall to make, create, compose his walk, as a poet, writing a poem.
//
Walking Through Walls (1/3)
Φαῖδρος: παρὰ Λυσίου, ὦ Σώκρατες, τοῦ Κεφάλου, πορεύομαι δὲ πρὸς περίπατον ἔξω τείχους: συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ. τῷ δὲ σῷ καὶ ἐμῷ ἑταίρῳ πειθόμενος Ἀκουμενῷ κατὰ τὰς ὁδοὺς ποιοῦμαι τοὺς περιπάτους: φησὶ γὰρ ἀκοπωτέρους εἶναι τῶν ἐν τοῖς δρόμοις.
Phaedrus: From Lysias, Socrates, son of Cephalus, and I am going (πορεύομαι) for a walk outside the wall. For I spent a long time there, sitting since early morning. Persuaded by your fellow and mine, Acumenus, I take (ποιοῦμαι) my walk down the paths, for he says they remedy weariness better than the racetracks.
//
Two verbs get Phaedrus outside the wall, with Socrates following behind: πορεύομαι, from πόρος; and ποιοῦμαι, related to ποίησις.
Πόρος/Poros
πορεύω (Phaedrus uses the verb in middle/passive voice.) - to be driven or carried, to go, to walk, to go over, cross, pass over, traverse. From the noun πόρος - a means of passing a river, a ford, a ferry (e.g. Πλούτωνος πόρος, the Stygian ferry); the paths of the sea, a pathway, way, a passage through the skin (i.e., pores); a way or means of achieving, accomplishing; contrivance, device, resource. From πείρω - to pierce, to run through.
Phaedrus passes through the wall by poros. As through a pore in the skin, as a spear through your shoulder, as ferried across the river to Hades, as a way through an impossible problem.
Poros, who is a person, is mentioned at a symposium.
(A summary of Symposium, 203b-204a:)
Plato writes about Apollodorus,
(who is obsessed with Socrates),
who tells the story of Aristodemus,
(who is in love with Socrates),
who tells the story of Socrates,
(who is an expert at love),
who tells the story of Diotima✨,
(who has taught Socrates about love),
who tells the story of Poros (Πόρος),
who gets drunk at Aphrodite’s birthday,
and how Penia, (Πενία, Poverty),
who is a-poros and stuck at the doorstep,
schemes to lie beside Poros and conceive a child,
who becomes daimonic Eros, (Ἔρως, Love).
(A daimon, says Diotima✨, is what passes between human and divine, between not-having and having, and she spins the tale of a drunken hookup to show it.)
So. According to her story, (within a story), (x3 or 4), Poros is:
Other examples of poros include: Leaving a country, entering a country, im/migration in general and laws concerning these, imports and exports. The penetrability of political states, invasion, colonization, occupation, tourism, expatriation, migrant workers, the welcoming in of guests or strangers. Breaking or “bending” the law. Tax havens, other leakage. Doorways and windows into a house, out of a house. Small boats taken to big boats, ferries across rivers or between islands, cruise ships, other maritime vessels, airplanes, rocket ships, trains, other vehicles of ground transportation. Pores in the skin. Through which pimples, cysts, rashes, perspiration, body odor, hairs growing, wings growing from shoulders, a sprout breaking through the wall of a seed, a bud breaking through the wall of a stem. Other holes in the body, mucus membranes, organs of sensation, consumption, excretion, the mouth, the ears, the nose, the eyes, urethra, anus, vaginal canal. Sexual intercourse, sexual reproduction, birth canal, giving birth, producing a child or menses or a windegg. Eating, drinking, vomiting, passing gas, sneezing, burping, hiccuping, pissing, shitting, ejaculation, etc. Piercings and tattoos. Catching a virus or bacterial infection. Breathing in, breathing out, respiration, inhaling smoke or pollution or perfume. Taking medicine or a drug orally or intravenously or topically or as an inhalant. Seeing, listening, tasting, smelling, digestion, persuasion, education, miseducation. Conversation, dialogue, correspondence, gossip, rumor, media, news media, social media, “the internet”, blogging. Translation, metaphore, semaphore, analogy. Odysseus. Achilles is aporos, until he isn’t. The permeability of boundaries, membranes, definitions. Beliefs or opinions shattered, catharsis, to be wonder-struck, laughter, crying, compassion. Psychedelics. Scents, including the aromas of certain plants or plant parts (animal parts also?). Passageways between stages of life, changes in form, metamorphoses. Fantasies, dreams. The penetration or removal of any obstacle. Hermes, Hekate, Thoth, Ganesha, Hanuman, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, prophets and messengers and psychopomps, the Muse, Eros and other daimons (including Socrates' daemon), (who, almost always, says only “no”), angels, etc. The crack in every thing, the finitude of finitude, double negation, dialectic. To find a way through. That a person can change. Coming to be, passing away. A passage or transformation between life and death, death and life. Divine becoming human becoming divine, etc.
Human ingenuity, perseverance, desire, are drivers of poros. As are foolishness, recklessness, hamartia (missing-the-mark). Inherently ambiguous (vis-à-vis justice or injustice, good or bad, healthy or sick), always a risk, a vulnerability, in relation to the unknown. Poros is the empty eye of 0. The Fool, and the passage of each trump into the next. (Example, it is poros for me to write and press “publish”.)
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