Night Thoughts

William Blake, The Inscription over the Gate (1824–27): "Abandon all hope, you who enter here."

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate—Dante, Inferno, canto 3

Outside an endless light extends;

There no public execution dates

Capacities to make amends,

Conniving, much forgiveness waits.

Our aim down here is not alone,

And not devising why's or when,

But content and snug at home

Despite this Jungian 2 a.m.

While my cat besides me purrs,

For here no nightmare vision stirs,

Raising self-appointed rhymes

That will yank me back in time

And my daunting dreams refine

Of an unregurgitated scene—

Since things are seldom what they seem!

My bedside book is Young’s Night-Thoughts,

The midnight feast the ah’s and oughts,

the primrose path, sleep’s guillotine.

April 5, 1794 / December 26, 2024

The Spur of the Moment

Karl von Drais (1785–1851) on his original Laufmaschine in 1819

For Valerie and fietsers everywhere

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;

Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.

. . .

And Ixion rides upon a single wheel.

—Empson, "Invitation to Juno"

Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in 1815,

the biggest bang. It blotted out the sun,

and 1816 would be “the year without a summer”

—crops failed, and starving people ate their horses,

which ever since their ancestors' enslavement on the steppes

had for riding, transport, sport, and cavalry forces

served all the needs of bully Number One.

In Baden, Germany, though, about this time,

Karl Drais invented the fiets, or bicycle, his "Draisine"—

which some in France still call "the little queen."

They passed a law in New York outlawing these dangerous machines*

—legislation not worth the proverbial hill of beans,

since if things go on as they're going on now,

we'll have to credit centaurs, too, soon anyhow:

we'll all need ways to get around

on roads where streams of self-driven cars without a break abound.

And more years sans the once familiar seasons must, ere long, redound.

December 23, 2924

* "The machine enjoyed a brief peak in popularity in 1819, with thousands appearing in London alone. But fears about safety—of the rider and of the pedestrian public—quickly led to bans” (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/25/year-without-summer).

Doppelgangers

Pierre-Denis Martin, Le château de Conflans. Early eighteenth century. Musée de Sceaux.

"As Saadi sang in earlier ages, ‘some are far distant, some are dead.'"—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot to whose Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire we owe the Second Law of Thermodynamics,

died prematurely of cholera at 36 in 1832.

Named for the Persian poet Saʿdī—famed for his poem Gulistan, or,The Rose Garden—

he himself had a nephew named after him, Marie François Sadi Carnot, who as president

of France would in 1894 be murdered by an anarchist.

II

When strolling in his Château de Conflans garden with Paule-Françoise, duchesse de Lesdiguiéres, his sweetie, François III de Harlay, archbishop of Paris, both lover and priest, had a gardener follow them at a respectful distance with a rake to efface all traces of their faux pas.†

Barrès, that "great unknown," Godo calls him, thought this a mark of true civilization—Bohemian in spirit, but, on the surface, strict: “dans l’âme, le bohémianisme ; à l’extérieur, l’austérité !”‡

Saʿdī Shīrāzī might have agreed—

inasmuch as he was, he said,

a Sufi seer and a traveling salesman simultaneously—"like two almonds in the self-same shell."

Maybe we all have our doppelgangers, even more than one in the same chest, some to smell the roses and some to explore hell?

Pushkin, killed in a duel in the year of President Marie François Sadi Carnot's birth, put it well:

some of them are far away, he said

—and some of them are dead.

President Marie François Sadi Carnot’s assassination in Lyon, as depicted in Le Petit Journal, July 2, 1894.

† So says Saint-Simon, cited by Emmanuel Godo, Maurice Barrès: Le grand inconnu, 1862–1923 (Paris: Tallandier, 2023), 155.

‡ Ibid.