Music for a While

Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)

Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.

—Middlemarch

Music for a while

Shall all your cares beguile.

—Purcell, song for Dryden's Oedipus

I had my faults, and would you had them, too,

But when I looked, you'd got no sense,

Or, in the shuffle, took another view,

With goals receding fast, as well you knew!

Best, I suppose, go on by trial and error.

The past recurs in leaps and jumps—

The What Has Been has earned its lumps.

Eternal Return brooking a denial,

You may correct things at your trial.

You might find solace in black bile.

You might think, Well, I never!

But this all comes from being clever!

For want of luck, make do, as ever.

There may be music for a while.

https://youtu.be/z3Xqn2IZRd8?si=vM-nUi4u0BGDV8oo

Monday, March 23, 2026

The Domestication of Suffering

Emile-Edouard Mouchy, Vivisection of a dog (1832). Wellcome Library, London.

Cogito, ergo sum / I think, therefore I am.—René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)

Sentio, ergo sum / I feel—hence, I am:

the soft answer to the "hard problem,"

so-called, of sapient consciousness.

Vivisecting dogs, Descartes missed,

it, shut his ears to howls of agony—

reason a blind torturer. He

tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,

Isaiah says. And so, too, evolution can!

It’s just as bad as bad as you suppose.

It's plainer than a pikestaff's nose.

Our reasoning will never turn

to answers we don’t wish to learn!

Domesticating dogs and corn,

you also bring in feeling's spawn.

Pain's these days of a higher grade,

sold in barrels—refined—well-paid.

And when you fill up at the source

remember Mother's old recourse.

Thus it was always meant to be:

“Think universal GDP.”

Shakyamuni knew that well,

as do other saints of stars 'round hell.

“It goes to feed the moon,” said Mr. G.

—a smart-ass kidder he loved to be!

Yet, in the salience of this joke,

there’s more (no doubt) than lunar yolk.

Saturday, March 21, 2026

The Anti-Messiah

Luca Signorelli, The Preaching of the Antichrist.

Orvieto Cathedral (ca. 1500-1504)

Into this wild abyss the wary Fiend

Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,

Pondering his voyage . . .

—Milton, Paradise Lost 2.17–19

Clogged clarions untrumpet Him

Sealed angels unsing Him

A thunderless God A dead God

O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb

—Gregory Corso, “Bomb” (1958)

Lest we forget, He’s human, too, the Anti-Messiah,

Ears jutting from his unappealing head,

Oracular. Gear? Sure, pants on fire.

He’s lost all sense of what his Mommy said,

An astronomic Atacama to the south;

A Kalahari on the Other Hand—

Death Valley, but, really, not to boast,

Saharan seasons on the Skeletal Coast,

A veritable Gobi Desert of the Mind,

Where all but Bulldust’s hard to find.

O Beelzebub, there’s so much sand!

Above in the cerulean sky a gibbous moon

Grins in the germfree afternoon of Hell,

And nought to quench one's thirst but Number 5 Chanel!

Is there no end to this parched pondering

That can at most cause Hunnish monks to sing?

(What, too, if a real Messiah should come,

Saying, “Get lost, you goddamn bum!”?)

Friday, March 20, 2026