Le bal de têtes: A Postmodern Proustatectomy

Proust, who was born in 1871,

lit up the Welt the clever Prussians won,

collapsing the belle époque in a bal de têtes*

on which we, its distant heirs, yet bet.

Ezra Pound, a babe born 1885,

il miglior fabro of much modern jive,

chose, however, to be a Blackshirt pet.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,”*

odd though it is, not to survive,

but to grow elderly, then perish,

find happiness, or just accept one's fate

with a soupçon of sardonic relish.

Styles and fashions soon go out of date;

to change one's ways it never is too late.

Notes:

In Le Temps retrouvé, the final volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the characters’ senescent selves are portrayed attending a so-called bal de têtes, a masquerade ball in which only the head is disguised.

   In 1900, after Marcel’s brother, the pioneering surgeon Robert Proust, published a paper on perineal prostatectomy, “De la prostatectomie périnéale totale,” witty Parisians dubbed the novel operation a proustatectomie.

*William Wordsworth, “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement.”

Truth

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

— Emily Dickinson

In 1966, he stabbed Verwoerd,

the "architect of apartheid,” to death.

Crediting Jesus’ words in Matthew 10:

34,* he sought salvation, not in peace,

but in assassination’s sharp solution—

and, in a cruel judgment, drew life.

The ANC did not release him after

finagling its path to power;

he died in gaol, and so the circuit

closed, too bright for his infirm

delight, who’d trimmed the truth

down to the slanting of a knife.

I wasn’t surprised. Were you?

Some things we always knew.

*Matthew 10:34 (KJV): “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

See also https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-12-06-why-dimitri-tsafendas-should-be-seen-as-a-national-hero/

The Long Bones

“ . . . at this moment, or any moment, we are only a cross-section of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time . . .”—J. B. Priestley, Time and the Conways (1937)

The long bones speak as plainly as the skull,

and the tomb's paleolithic, not mine;

the vessel took on flesh to shape its hull--

dreams dreamt up in a forgotten valley.

This life of ours is but a pinhole sally,

the puzzle is to fit it all together and hear

the long bones speaking, near.