What to believe?

Map of the route Alexander the Great and Pyrrho may have taken to India

Toward the end of his life, someone evidently asked Karl Marx what the meaning of it all was. ”Struggle,” he reportedly said.

Pyrrho of Elis, perhaps one of the Klytidiai—

seers who, it's claimed, explained oracles

in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia—

it’s believed, traveled with Alexander the Great on his campaign to the East,

where he might in India have met Gymnosophists [naked philosophers],

who may have taught him—could be

by signs, for want of a lingua franca

—to doubt everything whatsoever.

“Must I then doubt even doubt?”

he's said to have have asked them

(whether in Sogdian or Greek).

And it seems they in reply signaled,

Yes, it was so!

We don't know. And he maybe did,

perhaps making an exception

for a certain little woman.

He may have lived, to near ninety,

as old as me!

from around 365/360 to 275/270 BCE.

All these things might well have been.

But such may-and-mighting will not serve

To lubricate the wheels of the quotidian:

We must believe in something!

Marx picked strife.

I'd choose the best I might conceivably deserve in life.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Αn Unwritten Parable

Henry Mark Anthony, Sunset (1846)

Imitation of Angelos Sikelianos's poem Άγραφον ("Unwritten")

Walking a ways beyond the walls

of Zion, Jesus and his disciples once,

just before the setting of the sun,

unexpectedly came across the place

where the city had long dumped its trash: sickroom bedding, broken chamber pots, rags, rank rubbish . . .

And there atop a congeries of crap, distended, legs sticking up, twisted

toward the sky, a dead dog lay—

hearing footsteps on the road,

the crows strutting about it had flown away

—it gave off such a stink, the disciples held their breath, palms cupping noses, shrinking back . . .

Jesus stepped calmly forward, though,

up to the pile alone and stood near it, gazing at the carcass; an astonished disciple yelled

at him from the rear, “Rabbi, how can you abide that awful stink and still stand there?”

And He, without turning his head

away from the sight before him, said:

“This awful stink anyone with pure

breath can smell even back in the city

where we’ve just been . . . And I marvel

at this misery’s message with all my soul.

"See how brightly that dog’s teeth gleam in the sunlight: like hail, like the lily, beyond despair, a mighty promise, reflecting the Eternal—but harsh Judgment’s thunderbolt, and hope too."

So spake He, and whether they grasped these words, or wouldn’t, when he walked on, the disciples trailed together once again

in His silent wake . . .

Surely the least of them, Lord, revolving now in my mind those words of yours, I stand before You with but a single thought: "Ah! . . . give . . . grant me too, roaming alone, far from Zion’s Crossroads, from Earth’s one end to the other, with nothing in view but garbage, rot, and unburied corpses choking the divine spring of breath, not only within our land but beyond its frontiers too, ah, grant me, Lord, Your sacramental peace, if but for a moment, in this awful stench in which I wander that I too may take pause calmly amid the putrefying carrion, and with my own eyes perceive somewhere within myself a snow-white omen—like hail, like the lily; something suddenly gleaming deep inside me, far from the ruin, beyond the ruin, like the dog’s teeth at which in that gloaming, You gazed and marveled, Lord, a mighty promise, reflecting the Eternal—but harsh Judgment’s thunderbolt, and hope too."

Note: This English imitation of Άγραφον appeared in the New English Review in July 2022. Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951), recognized as one of the greatest poets of modern Greece, wrote his poem in 1941 during the Hitlerite occupation, when the corpses of the starved lay in the streets of Athens. “A related parable is found in the Persian poet Nizami (1141–1203) and was adapted by Goethe for inclusion in his “Noten und Abhandlungen” appended to West-östlicher Divan” (Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, translated and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard [1978), 2nd bilingual edition [Katounia, Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 1996], p. 140n). The Greek title simply means “Unwritten.”

I dedicate my rendering of Άγραφον to the memory of my beloved friend Peter Mackridge, a great scholar of modern Greek, who died at Oxford in England on Thursday, June 16, 2022, just around the time when, in Virginia, I chanced to be reading Sikelianos’s Poems and was moved to begin this imitation, something I had never thought of doing before. Peter and I had been friends for well over half a century. We marched together in the poet Giorgos Seferis’s funeral procession to the Próto Nekrotafeío (First Cemetery) in Athens in 1971.

“God did not send his Son … to condemn the world” [οὐ ἀπέστειλεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν Υἱὸν … ἵνα κρίνῃ τὸν κόσμον].—John 3:17

The Codling Moth

白浜 鴎, Shirahama Kamome, variant cover, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, no. 6

On the bleakness of my poem "Knowledge"*

Our ancestors believed in Jesus' wrath,

The apple maggot, and the codling moth.

Later, they learned of Lenin's love—

Black as snow, the Russian saying went.

That was the wisdom of their time.

Though it was wrong, too few there were to shout,

"Fine! Be that way!" Wilde and Chekhov spent

Who'd once told hoi polloi, "Toss defunct knowledge out!

"On other worlds, the snow is white—it's Gaia's womb!

There, Squirrel Girl and Monkey Joe

Beat Iron Man and Doctor Doom."

What we believe, that, too, will pass.

Our trees are merely leaves of grass.

Scampering squirrel suitors know!

Alex Ross, Doctor Doom, variant cover, Guardians of the Galaxy 6, no. 1

*In Raritan Quarterly 44, no. 2

Sunday, January 26, 2025