Postcard

"Alexandra Meets Diogenes." Postcard. M. Toumbis, Athens

The most revolutionary act is a clear view of the world as it really is.—Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa was quoting Lassalle, that brave, that foolish man.

To tell truth to killers you must be both brave and foolish.

She knew that all too well. Her enemies murdered her

and threw her bleeding into Berlin's Landwehr Canal.

Not being all that brave, I recline here in my tub

Death springs from parrhesia*—via the barrel of a gun.†

"The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace."”‡

The Landwehr Canal at night, October 2024

*Parrhesia = freedom of speech, outspokenness; https://foucault.info/parrhesia/?origin=serp_auto

†Cf. Mao Zedong, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_the_barrel_of_a_gun?origin=serp_auto

‡Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

Diogenes

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Κατερίνα Αγγελάκη-Ρουκ; February 22, 1939 – January 21, 2020)

Translated by Peter Dreyer

By the day I perish in the barrel

I have no imitators in the dark.

Mother’s tabernacle has hardened

still I inhabit it

seeing that I was never born

but merely exist

and hurt each time

I touch the walls of the world.

Sprinkled with a few crumbs of light

for hours on end I watch the skin breathe

and more,

and more irascible lines of my fate

lines without future in the palm

because I have never hoped

never begun to weave

lies a

round the nakedness

of my death.

An aged embryo

wrapped in black stuff

daily the cloth unfurled

and it came up to my eyes.

Each day

I twist and turn, groan,

bite my tail

within these 24 hours

I say goodbye, pray for

just so much space and energy

so much passion

so much, no more

until tomorrow.

This day secured

moves

and changes color, light,

murders me, and I study it

humiliates me and I accept it.

I learn in the space of a span,

at a single ring of age.

There is nothing beyond the barrel,

creaking in the north wind

crackling in the heat

I roll on, roll on

with my celestial space about me

beyond the specific.

No one has ever moved

in the eternity of Nature;

I remember genesis

like last year’s fiesta,

about me the sun describes,

the orbit of a bug,

always about me

and I the grilled center

live as though I knew

sleep as if I had made answer

dream in my sleep

of my dead

dying again,

wake and doubt,

sink back into the wooden gut.

Orphaned thus in the gloom,

the counsel of friends is lost me

in the larynx of the night owl

with its unattainable wisdom

it cries “transitory”

things always adopt

me transitorily.

Prettily mirrored the world

in the round eye of the cow

as with her four legs she marks out the meadow definitively

but I have lost

the magic of appearances

and the depth that draws downward

joins with the seed

beyond death.

This translation was previously published in The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation (New York: Norton, 1976), 178–80; https://moderngreekliterature.org/texts/155?from_search=true

Crimean Memories, or, The Reason Why?

William Simpson, The Attack on the Malakoff (1855)

:

We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do,

We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too!

We've fought the Bear before and while we're Britons true

The Russians shall not have Constantinople!

—Victorian music hall song

Like a dog trotting, friendly, by your side,

With eyes alert on all the passing scene,

Tribal memory  takes things in its stride—

Seldom forgetting that which once has been.

Monks Orthodox and Catholic fought over the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,

And presently the great powers of the day fought, too, back then,

A hundred and seventy years past—

Three middling lifetimes end to end, gone fast.

Russia was beaten—the French and British

Had the Minié rifle, a winning bet,

With four times the range of a muzhik's muzzle-loading musket.

Over 450,000 Russians died, most of cholera, it's true,

Almost 100,000 Frenchmen, most of that illness, too,

And half that many Ottoman asker.

Of the British (22,000 or so dead), their descendants choose to remember,

prêt-à-porter, the Cardigan sweater, Raglan sleeve, and balaclava,

Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade,"

Though, also, worth boasting of, Florence Nightingale.

She, God knows, adorns the tale.

What did so many suffer and die for?

The suffering of the horses, above all,

Starving and perishing by thousands in the mud,

Or raked with fire in imbecile "cavalry actions,"

Wrenches the heart these many decades on,

The cruel carelessness of General Cardigan chills the blood.

In 1856, the powers of the West

Imposed a humiliating peace:

Tsardom's long-drawn-out death throes began.

The tribe does not forget, it bides its time, clinging to what has been.

Vladimir Putin rules the Russians now.

Why do so many of them, it seems, support him, you ask,

Waging yet another war that heedless time will scorn?

What goes around comes around, to the seventh generation born!

Lieutenant General James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

—Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade"