Va, pensiero

“Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” / “Go, thought, on wings of gold”—chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco, libretto by Temistocle Solera (1842)

“No, we have nothing death will not inherit,

Except the blessings of the mind and spirit.

Look, I—I’ve lost you, lost my land, my home;

I’m one whom no more can be taken from;

But my mind’s left, my sole delight and friend,

Where Caesar’s sovereignty does not extend.”

—Chris Childers’ translation of Ovid’s Tristia 3.7:

Ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque:

Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil.

https://www.literarymatters.org/13-1-ovid-tristia-3-7/

The famous Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE) was exiled by the emperor Augustus, for unknown reasons, to Tomis, on the Black Sea (now Constanța in Romania), where he lived the rest of his life. I learned these lines of his from Dr. Arthur Davids, mentor of the Citizen Group, which originated the modern South African concept of nonracialism, in Cape Town in the late 1950s.

December 22, 2024

The Unsayable

And Jesus said unto them, “See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.”—Matthew 24:2

The sordid trappings of modernity

We may now take as bloody read,

And what’s always been unsayable

Must, it seems, at last be said.

But why, O Lord, should it fall to me

To reveal this final secret

To the ungrateful living dead?

The reason, the Abyss replied,

Is this: You’ve got no fucking cred!

They’ll never get the Word you spread.

That way we keep them in the dark

So they can shuffle off their fears,

Though for form's sake allowed some spark.

Revelation’s never meant to last.

Thus it’s long been in aeons past.

God wants to keep them dim, the dears!

December 21, 2024

Under the Bodhi Tree

Piet Mondrian, Tree (1912). Credit: Mondrian/Holtzman Trust/ bpk/Staatsgalerie

From the world of representation

I to Costco's bourne retreat,

temple of the shopping nation

where the serfs of commerce meet

—Mammon’s children have to eat.

I'm impressed despite myself

to see such piles of potent pelf,

while outside on 250 East

countless cars with flaming eyes

pay their homage to the Beast,

heading maybe now to Hell

to buy such things as it may sell.

On the shores of this Red Sea

I search undone for sight of me.

Did I make the world, and Why?

Better then curl up and die!

Turning from the scary sight,

we head for home, I say goodnight.

Underneath the Bodhi tree

leave for now God's baby be.

Later on—well, then we'll see.

December 19, 2024