The Spur of the Moment

Karl von Drais (1785–1851) on his original Laufmaschine in 1819

For Valerie and fietsers everywhere

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;

Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.

. . .

And Ixion rides upon a single wheel.

—Empson, "Invitation to Juno"

Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in 1815,

the biggest bang. It blotted out the sun,

and 1816 would be “the year without a summer”

—crops failed, and starving people ate their horses,

which ever since their ancestors' enslavement on the steppes

had for riding, transport, sport, and cavalry forces

served all the needs of bully Number One.

In Baden, Germany, though, about this time,

Karl Drais invented the fiets, or bicycle, his "Draisine"—

which some in France still call "the little queen."

They passed a law in New York outlawing these dangerous machines*

—legislation not worth the proverbial hill of beans,

since if things go on as they're going on now,

we'll have to credit centaurs, too, soon anyhow:

we'll all need ways to get around

on roads where streams of self-driven cars without a break abound.

And more years sans the once familiar seasons must, ere long, redound.

December 23, 2924

* "The machine enjoyed a brief peak in popularity in 1819, with thousands appearing in London alone. But fears about safety—of the rider and of the pedestrian public—quickly led to bans” (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/25/year-without-summer).

Doppelgangers

Pierre-Denis Martin, Le château de Conflans. Early eighteenth century. Musée de Sceaux.

"As Saadi sang in earlier ages, ‘some are far distant, some are dead.'"—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot to whose Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire we owe the Second Law of Thermodynamics,

died prematurely of cholera at 36 in 1832.

Named for the Persian poet Saʿdī—famed for his poem Gulistan, or,The Rose Garden—

he himself had a nephew named after him, Marie François Sadi Carnot, who as president

of France would in 1894 be murdered by an anarchist.

II

When strolling in his Château de Conflans garden with Paule-Françoise, duchesse de Lesdiguiéres, his sweetie, François III de Harlay, archbishop of Paris, both lover and priest, had a gardener follow them at a respectful distance with a rake to efface all traces of their faux pas.†

Barrès, that "great unknown," Godo calls him, thought this a mark of true civilization—Bohemian in spirit, but, on the surface, strict: “dans l’âme, le bohémianisme ; à l’extérieur, l’austérité !”‡

Saʿdī Shīrāzī might have agreed—

inasmuch as he was, he said,

a Sufi seer and a traveling salesman simultaneously—"like two almonds in the self-same shell."

Maybe we all have our doppelgangers, even more than one in the same chest, some to smell the roses and some to explore hell?

Pushkin, killed in a duel in the year of President Marie François Sadi Carnot's birth, put it well:

some of them are far away, he said

—and some of them are dead.

President Marie François Sadi Carnot’s assassination in Lyon, as depicted in Le Petit Journal, July 2, 1894.

† So says Saint-Simon, cited by Emmanuel Godo, Maurice Barrès: Le grand inconnu, 1862–1923 (Paris: Tallandier, 2023), 155.

‡ Ibid.

Va, pensiero

“Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” / “Go, thought, on wings of gold”—chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco, libretto by Temistocle Solera (1842)

“No, we have nothing death will not inherit,

Except the blessings of the mind and spirit.

Look, I—I’ve lost you, lost my land, my home;

I’m one whom no more can be taken from;

But my mind’s left, my sole delight and friend,

Where Caesar’s sovereignty does not extend.”

—Chris Childers’ translation of Ovid’s Tristia 3.7:

Ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque:

Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil.

https://www.literarymatters.org/13-1-ovid-tristia-3-7/

The famous Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE) was exiled by the emperor Augustus, for unknown reasons, to Tomis, on the Black Sea (now Constanța in Romania), where he lived the rest of his life. I learned these lines of his from Dr. Arthur Davids, mentor of the Citizen Group, which originated the modern South African concept of nonracialism, in Cape Town in the late 1950s.

December 22, 2024