domestic hellenism

REMBRANDT WORLD

Imagine a humble Rembrandt world

(domestic hellenism, say)

where everything is (replay,

rusty Super-8) revealed –

unsealed, familiar testament

wherein you were sown

amid Grant Wood corn

(Birthplace of Herbert Hoover), bent

beneath pewter thunderheads

like wheat long-planted

at a battlefield (wind-

harrowed silos, homesteads).

By the rude bridge that arched the flood

– the wordspan, carved against

despair (Grace hastens

with her furnace-lamp... slight lift of mood)

here once the embattled farmers stood

– measuring early earth,

where your Dream (4th

of J?) becomes flesh & blood

& fired the shot heard round the world.

Ariosto in Ferrara,

say – that avian eye

on tyranny (Limentani’s branded

heron-lid).  Poetry is resistance

against the Emperor

of pyramidal distemper;

Concord... Voronezh... (buoyant equivalence).

4.19.18

Orlando Furioso is rooted in & awash in games & play. Mazzotta goes into the Renaissance sensibility, in Shakespeare & Cervantes too, & many others. He quotes this beautiful passage from Plato's Laws:

"Though human affairs are not worthy of great seriousness it is yet necessary to be serious; happiness is another thing. I say that a man must be serious with the serious, and not the other way about. God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God's plaything and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and every woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest game, and be of another mind from what they are at present. For they deem war a serious thing, though in war there is neither play nor culture worthy the name, which are the things we deem most serious.
"Hence all must live in peace as well as they possibly can. What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man may be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win the contest."

(Thinking of Vallejo's poem about his brother who died in childhood : they play hide and seek, and he doesn't come back.)

I'd be surprised if many blog-readers are bothering to follow the obscure dull intricacies of these posts of late.

Reading G. Mazzotta (Cosmopoiesis) on Ariosto. The Stoic philosophy of the passions (via Seneca) which informs Orlando Furioso (contra Machiavelli). Love & poetry are among the "furies", passions, which drive people crazy.

In the very beginning of Stubborn Grew, "Henry" is in the backyard, reading Ariosto, listening to a bluejay yodeling. This is where the narrative journey starts.

Would be curious if Ariosto provides the (self-)criticism - the distance - which I need to escape the solipsistic labyrinth of my own (romantic) poetizing.

Henry Furioso

Link between Ariosto & ancient chansons de geste. Cinque Canti ends with disaster for Charlemagne. Echoes that ur-chanson, the Chanson de Roland (many of Ariosto's characters - in both Cinque Canti & Orlando Furioso - are drawn from the geste-legends around Charlemagne).

Mandelstam, in Voronezh, was reading Old French epics about Guillaume d'Orange (ie. Guillem de Gellone), one of Charlemagne's officers.

What does all this have to do with anything?

Good question. I dunno.

The atmosphere in some of these poems is one of anxiety & dread. One of their pervasive themes is the conflict (& the interrelations) between Islam & Christendom. Very old things & very new things - & old threads taken up from poet to poet.

Plus reading this kind of thing helps me avoid my contemporaries & the youngsters.

[Plus - & I'm sorry to repeat myself - I can trace my ancestry through my maternal grandmother's family back to Guillem de Gellone.]

there are some strange & secret paths in Stubborn Grew. This afternoon I was reading Ariosto again, in the backyard (Cinque Canti) - as when Bluejay dropped in (see p. 22 of Stubborn) & the poem got rolling.

Ariosto left Cinque Canti unfinished, like one of his models (Lucan's Pharsalia), like one of his models, perhaps (the Aeneid)... poems cut short, like the (un)Holy Roman Empire... unfinished long poems...

Rome, Italy, America... Dante, Pound...

like autumn, like Lazarus, like Every-body...