The ruins of the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion
"Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion.”—news report*
“If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.”—Roger Scruton to Ayaan Hirsi Ali
On this first day of 2025
Grace me no grace—I'm still alive,
No thanks to Mumbo-Jumbo,
Deity of the knacker’s yard,
The mercies of the whale hunt,
Slave barracoons, and abattoirs,
Whose horrors smudge the ungrieving stars:
For twelve years, his evil dauber Schicklgruber/Hitler
Wielded a spite that spavined half the world;
With a pen-stroke, then, a U.S. haberdasher
Out of all line with true
Showed we could be just as bad as him,
And with our patent banner furled,
Snuffed out innumerable lives
To score a point in Moscow and a tad more quickly win.
Fast forwarding to the quotidian,
With the IDF and Volodya Putin
Both shoveling helpless corpses in the bin,
There's scant prospect either
Now even of a break in boundless sin.
Slaves built the Pyramids, the Parthenon,
And probably Stonehenge.
Once apes invented love and bitchin',
Lots of luck and serfs they got—
The folks who fuel our malls and kitchen,
With greasy Joan to keel the pot.‡
In Syracuse, Plato’s jovial host
the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius the First,
Growing bored with philosophic fuss
Sold the sage into slavery.
What sort of slave, though, might such a savant be?
Like Epictetus: inventory,
Whose very name is just a tag
Reading: “Other Property.”
Put on the auction block in Aegina,
Him spotted by a shopping sophist,
who snapped him up for eighty owls
(five obols waived in unpaid fines)
—a bargain price for all that gist!—
Returned the savant to the Propylaea,
Even the slaves in Sounion's mines‡
Seemed, it's said, a soupçon gayer.
(“Back from Syracuse so soon?”
a colleague joked when Heidegger
Returned from smooching Goebbels’
bum
On Unter den Linden in Berlin,
Office of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Spin.)
Think but of J. S. Bach, says Roger Scruton.
His works outweigh Mumbo-Jumbo’s lies—
The Fifth Evangelist was him!
Why so I do! But damn your eyes
For bearding our great Mumbo's work
And making Jumbo out a jerk
Concede this, or be found a dope.
Who enter here, old Dante sighs,
Must all abandon hope of hope.
(An owl or two will buy you rope.)
Happy New Year!
And never fear,
These ungraced lines are just a winter ogle, not a springtime or a summer leer,
Let alone an autumn sneer.
*See Peter Savodnik at https://www.thefp.com/p/how-intellectuals-found-god-ayaan-hirsi-ali-peter-thiel-jordan-peterson
†When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.—Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
‡In the fifth century BCE, the silver mines near Cape Sounion paid for the Athenian triremes that won the battle of Salamis against the Persians, thus preserving Athenian democracy. “Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps” (Wikipedia).
January 1, 2025