On the Sublime

I'm still wandering through late antiquity, led by Allegory, though I should be writing about 19th century philology. The hows and whys of textual preservation are fascinating to me, how is it we know what we know about such distant minds.


I read about the brilliant philosopher Hypatia, who was killed in Alexandria, and someone else who lost his head for thinking. I dreamed of the library there... A movie was made about her life, in 2009, Agora, which means, in Greek, a place of assembly, and in Portuguese, now. 

On the Sublime

To have been a scholar
in late antiquity
when a thinker got his head cut off
for being an advisor at the wrong time.

There was a woman
murdered in Alexandria,
before the library burned,
when we knew the origin of all things.

She taught philosophy, geometry,
Plotinus hated Longinus
who didn't write, finally,
On the Sublime.

The monk who read it cared too much.
Maybe he too wanted to be
that reader who would pass it on
to posterity through troubled times.

Today we hardly think
about the universe.
We take its picture.
It blinds us. We are blind.

Now, I should get back to work.

The Marriage of Philology and Mercury

I've been thinking about how writing often takes you in unexpected directions, and about the need to theorize a new kind of research skill, the one I most often use, based on intuition. Often my best ideas or most useful references come when I am browsing in the library or looking for some other book. Dreams are also a great source of ideas, or the ones that come to me in the bathtub or during a shower, true insights from the blank whiteness of ceramic and tile.

Since it was born in such a way, I have been thinking about the section of my dissertation that I am writing now as a kind of unexpected growth, like a new limb that has slowly emerged out of the original body of what I had planned to write. It is a somewhat strange formation, but I like it. It definitely belongs there. It's a history of philology through her personifications through the ages. She has become very real to me, especially because of the De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a strange and marvelous work by the fifth century African writer Martianus Capella. I fell asleep while reading it the other day and dreamed of figures who turned around me, like planets in the sky, but with hair and faces, in long robes.

Philologia

Yes, read the books I'm reading.
Strange tales of gods and stars,
turning cloudy planets like eyes,
yours, you'll see for yourself,
you'll like it. 

What's that name it mentioned?
A lost word, untracked and marked.
If you can find some meaning,
I can. Read it with me,
you'll like it.

The world is round, the universe an egg,
layers of air, imagined to cross;
we'll go there on clouds
led by horses with names like
Prudence, Destiny.

Hear it out, don't judge.
We'll go there together, you'll see.
We'll watch the gods sacrifice a goat, 
a sheep, a cow, all for the sake of
that slender girl.

I'm not sure who the "you" is in this poem, specifically. Often it is just there, in an open way. Feel free to feel included. In the meantime, I think I'm in love with the love of words.

Le vers orphelin

Writing engenders writing, or so it seems.

I've been seriously writing my dissertation for a few weeks now, watching one page a day become three pages a day, then watching my productivity fall back down again. It seems to come in waves. I've even written a poem or two, in between pages, as a break, or as commentary. I thought of sharing them. Then I realized that I had many to share. So I'm starting here, with one, the first one:

Le vers orphelin

An orphaned line
sits all alone
without a rhyme,
he has no home.

No coupledom,
no sense complete,
no rhythmic fun,
no bowing feet.

An orphaned line
sits all alone
between two more;
one ends, begins,

but him begun,
that thought a rhyme,
could never be
a part of one.

An orphaned line:
A scribe forgot
to put its pair
there in its spot;

no space, no room
for an addition,
just sad, alone,
full of contrition.

On a more serious note, here is what Roman Jakobson has to say about orphaned lines, and I am rather partial to his opinion:

"The metaphoric image of 'orphan lines' is a contrivance of the detached onlooker to whom the verbal art of continuous correspondences remains aesthetically alien. Orphan lines in poetry of pervasive parallels are a contradiction in terms, since whatever the status of a line, all its structure and functions are indissolubly interlaced with the near and distant verbal environment, and the task of linguistic analysis is to disclose the levels of this coaction. When seen from the inside of the parallelistic system, the supposed orphanhood, like any other componential status, turns into a network of multifarious compelling affinities." 

From: "Grammatical Parallelism and its Russian Facet," Selected Writings : Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, p. 135)

An orphaned line, there is no such thing!
Here's to growing a "network of multifarious compelling affinities."