Jamboree

Kallimachos, poem on plaster; Capitoline Museums A.C. inv. 32363; image: Brent Nongbri, 2025

"I kissed the doorpost. If this is wrong-doing, I do wrong."—Kallimachos (Alexandria, 3rd century BCE)

Kallimachos's teasing metaphor,

Doubtless funny to his ghost,

Still resonates in modern lore.

He did (them??) bad; he now is toast,

As we in turn shall someday be

Who fuck around a plastic sea!

The unity 'twixt wave and mold,

In Kallimachos' simile the "doorjamb"

He one day kissed, but now protests

It was no wrong (a Ptolemaic state??),

Was perhaps to poetry a gate—

Or Muse's toothbrush-—crafted, told.

Reading the verses here written,

Should veiled spitefulness apall,

No wonder that a world unsmitten

Misunderstands them. If at all!

When half in love with easeful life,

Enough's a doorjamb for a wife.

Epigram: ἐφίλησα

τὴν φλιήν· εἰ τοῦτʼ ἔστʼ ἀδίκημʼ, ἀδικέω.

Trans. Susan A. Stephens and Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Callimachus: The Epigrams (De Gruyter, 2025), 271. See, too, https://brentnongbri.c0om/2025/11/10/callimachus-on-the-walls.

In Modern Greek:

φίλησα μονάχα το κατώφλι.

Αν αυτό είναι αδίκημα, αδίκησα.

In Θ. Κ. Στεφανόπουλος

et al., Ανθολογία Αρχαίας Ελληνικής Γραμματείας.

Egypt's king and pharoah in Kallimachos' day was the Macedonian Ptolemy II Philadelphos (283–246 BCE), whose "reign is considered a golden age. . . . He expanded the Library of Alexandria and supported the work of scholars, poets, and scientists, including Euclid and Callimachus" (https://historact.com/the-ptolemaic-dynasty-the-last-rulers-of-ancient-egypt).

.

Prima facie

Frans Snyders, Cats fighting in a larder

So myche newe makyng, and so madd tyme spente ;

—John Skelton, "Speke Parrot" (1521)

If I were to write an autobiographical novel

Like Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being,

Would you read it? Rather racy in its bent,

Contemplating yesterday in a prima facie way,

It wouldn't bother with tomorrow or today,

Merely illuminate the mad time spent—

All that to-ing and that fro-ing,

All that coming and then going!

What's to be there is no knowing

When a living fossil's set for going;

Just a final seeming, wrapping up its being.

Antiquarian publishers, let me hear from you!

You may be confident I won't make it new.

All I want's the light to write. I've got no kitten in that fight!

Monday, January 12, 2026

The House of Being

Churchill sits in "Hitler's chair" amid the ruins of the Führerbunker in Berlin, July 1945

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell.

—Heidegger, "Letter on 'Humanism'" (1949)

How I agree with what the old villain meant!

He rattles on about the "quiet power" of the possible,

But has already said it all—and only four years since April 30 '45.

A member of the NSDAP throughout its twelve-year Reich,

He had, after all, come back from his Syracuse alive

(as did Plato, returning a slave). The bow is fashioned as the wood is bent.

Epigraph: Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Heidegger elaborates: "Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home."

Header image: https://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=5489

Sunday, January 11, 2026