Dogged

Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism (1628–30), Royal Collection Trust, United Kingdom

They say that, passing a belabored whelp,

He, full of pity, spake these words of dole:

“Stay, smite not! ’Tis a friend, a human soul;

I knew him straight when I heard him yelp!”

—Xenophanes on his contemporary Pythagoras, who claimed to remember his past lives

Xenophanes, castigator of Hesiod and Homer,

sold into slavery but manumitted

by Pythagoreans, lived to a great age and buried his sons with his own hands.

He believed that God is spherical and nothing like a man;

that worlds are numberless but keep different times;

that it’s impossible to find a wise man—

since it takes one to recognize one,

and that those who are not wise are mad.

A sporadic poet and philosopher, he flourished during the 60^th Olympiad—around 540 BCE to you and me.

Source: Roughly based on Diogenes Laertius, "Xenophanes," translated by A. Robert Caponigri

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Many Happy Returns, Max!

Variations on Coco Chanel's little black dress, or LBD, "Chanel: The Legend" exhibition, Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 2014

Today you share a birthday with Janis Joplin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dōgen,

Founder of the Sōtō school of Zen,

And likewise with Robert E. Lee and Dolly Parton.

You knew all that when you were ten!

But take another look at those partyers (some men):

• The Lord never bought Janis a Mercedes-Benz;

• Coco Chanel claimed Dolly (no LBD!!) lacked fashion sense;

• Lee's great victory at Chancellorsville was a debacle;

• The House of Usher, unfortunately, fell;

• And Dōgen lost his bucket down a well.

Such were the ragtag rewards of Fame

For birthday girls and boys in all but name.

If she thus treats her chosen few

What are the rest of us to do?*

There's little consolation in this sample;

Your birthmates set a bad example!

Don't do what Dōgen recommended

And meditate on nothing, but on self,

To which the cosmos lies extended

In all its cockamamie wealth!

*Cf. Samuel Hoffenstein:

"Well, if such as these could be

So foredoomed to misery,

And Fate despise her own elect—

What the deuce do you expect?"

Monday, January 19, 2026

In tenebris lux

This is the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but a whimper.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

—John 1:5

A bad poem, the source of those much-quoted lines

Worlds after all end uncounted times

And bangs and whimpers serve to furnish rhymes

Impossible to tell what future a fate mimes

The higher one gets the faster one climbs

Our allergies prevent reading all the latest signs

No telling on what flesh a final human dines

(washed down doubtless with the choicest wines)

We live today in a kind of prequel

Whose burden is a heart that rends

Yes, this may be the way this world ends

But after just deserts, there’s a sequel . . .

Sunday, January 18, 2026