Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
I finished the fourth and last writing assignment for ModPo. I’m attaching it because it was fun, a riff on the Chance poetics of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Bernadette Mayer (pic).
Next week we finish up and my 3 months excursion into the modern and the post modern through Coursera will be at an end. The gardening season has come to an end. And Holiseason is just beginning.
Over the next weeks and months I plan to consolidate my learning both in poetry and the post modern. As I’ve said before, I want to include these concepts in reimagining my faith.
BTW: Some of you have expressed interest in the MOOCs. Here are the two I’ve worked with and can recommend: Coursera and EdX.
The Weight of the Inert
Version I
“5 Before the sea and the sky that hangs over all the lands and
was one of the faces of the whole of nature in the world,
I have spoken of the chaos, the amount of raw indigestaque
and nothing but an inert and heaped up in the weight of the same
not well joined the seeds of discord of things.
10, supplying light to the world, no one has as yet the Titan,
not renew the waxing moon horns,
or hanging in surrounding air
balanced by its own weight, or long arms
edge of the lands stretching out her arms;
15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”
Version 2
5 and and which covers
One look in the whole world,
the said, the amount of raw
and only if the weight of the inert
things do not go well.
10 Nothing in the world,
neither growing Phoebe
or in the surrounding region
their own weights, and not long
15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.
Since I’m currently engaged in translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I performed the following operation. First, I copied a Latin section of Book I: 5-15 from Perseus, a classics aides website. I took that section and put it into google translate. I then went through the Latin and eliminated all words with the letter a and ran it again through google translator. The result is version 2.
I retained the first version here so you could see that the translation was far from smooth and contained some chance operations on its own. In that sense version 2 is more than 1 step away from the Latin version of number 1 since it introduces the still clunky results of the google translation algorithm into the altered text.
Version 2 surprised me. It makes almost as much sense, if not a bit more, than Version 1, not in the Latin, of course, but in the English machine translation.
I hear a surprised boy saying, “And, and which covers one look in the whole world.” Another voice, perhaps a chorus replies, “The said, the amount of raw and only if the weight of the inert.” Another, deeper voice, an adult male weary with experience says, “Things do not go well.”
The boy again, chastened now, “Nothing in the world, neither growing Phoebe or in the surrounding region…”
And finally a resonant female voice, mature and wise, “Their own weights, and not long and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”
All this on a stage bare except for the actors, a broken Greek column and a small tripod holding a basin in which a bright fire burns.
A fluxus moment, perhaps performed on an off-Broadway sidewalk, the stage improvised with concrete blocks and plywood. The air is cold, midnight of the Winter Solstice, and a flier announcing the performance reads, “Saturnalian Words. The voice of Sol Invictus.”
This has a Harry Haller, magic theater resonance for me. The whole thing could be a performance in one of the side stages, feeding the Steppenwolf in all of us.
OK, I know I’ve gone pretty far afield with this, taking it from chance to dialogue and from dialogue to theater and then positioning the theater in Hesse’s imagined dramatic space. But that very journey speaks of seed text and deterministic method, that somehow flensing an ancient text, then using a very contemporary technology to alter it, can create haunting, yes, I’ll say it, meaning. Meaning created in that most artistic of ways, with the caesura as important as the content.
What did that one look over the whole world see? And why does a rejoinder to it reference the raw and the inert? The next line seems very apt in a Kafkaesque, Hesseian way: “Things do not go well.” How could they?
Finally the last two spoken lines speak of loss and seem to refer back to that one look over the whole world which saw what? “The air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”
