Subject: Re: Mnemosyne: thinking poetization
Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 17:16:22 -0400


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Dear Allen,

You know I don't think I have ever used the expression "rule of life" before. I have had the time lately to loose myself in a review of my notes and old readings that have influenced me and wether it's Derrida, Nietzche, Heidegger, Montaigne, Seneca, Fenelon and others; I noticed a general emphasis on a delay that has many names which I tend to reduce to the virtue of patience. I don't think I ever stop writing on this so it's time I recognize it as the rule of my life. It was a Roman poet by the name of Propertius that encouraged me to the expression. In his collection of poems there is one (III.9) that is addressed to his patron Maecenas whom he asks: "Why launch me on such a vast sea of writing?/spreading sails aren't suited to my sloop,/ Shame to take on your head more weight than you can,/ And crushed, to turn back soon with sagging knees." He goes on to say that all affairs are not suited to all and that so each must follow the bent of his own nature. It was Propertius' nature to not go out to sea and help with the affairs involving the expansion of political and economic power but to stay at home and worship the household gods and the fire of the hearth. To his patron he says that he was forced to surpass his example, the rule of life that Propertius' himself took on. He tells him: "You refrain, and draw back modestly into the shadows:/ You furl of your own accord your sails' full swell [...] I do not cleave the rising sea with sails and keel: My whole delay is by a little stream." In terms of the subject matter of his poems what he means is that he, and he says this explicitly, is not interested in heroic epic verse, in celebrating the wars of Rome. Some of his poems are calls to the men to stay at home and not to go to war. For instance he writes (III.12): "How could you, Postumus, leave your Galla grieving, As a soldier to follow Augustus' valiant standards?/ Was any glory of Parthia despoiled worth much,/ With Galla begging you often not go? [...] Aelia Galla surpasses Penelope's faith."  When at the end of his poetic apprenticeship when as in III.3 he "seemed to recline in Helicon's gentle shade,/ Where flows the brook of Bellerophon's horse,/ To have the power in my sinews -- so great a task! --/ To declaim of Alba's kings and deed of kings" ; he is interrupted by the voice of Phoebus who says, "Fool, what have you to do with such a stream?/ Who bade you touch the task of epic verse? [...] Your talent's skiff is not to be overladen. Let one oar scour the water, the other sand,/ And you'll be safe: at sea, the tumult's vast, [...] You'll be content to be always drawn by snowy swans,/ No brave horse's neigh shall lead you to battle./ Not for you to blow a raucous horn,/ martial proclamations, dyeing our grove with Mars./" And this is how, he says, Calliope "drawing lymph from the spring,/ she moistened my lips with Philetean waters."

He is a bit difficult to read because of the mythology. Here is a link to a  search engine that gives you quick access to brief descriptions and some brief stories on stuff like Helicon, Calliope, Phoebus,  and Bellerophon

http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/europe/roman/

I only bring him up because I recognize the bent of my own nature in him. For me, the swelling expansion of sails for instance is the expansion of intentionality that would fullfill themselves in their aim whereas their withdrawal becomes intensity or passion without object, an equanimity of desire. Mind you, I don't know if he became free from his own restless anguish although there are moments of that calm in what Shelley in his poem "Epipsychidion" calls "an isle under Ionian skies,/ Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise" where there is a decayed ruin where "all the antique and learned imagery/Has been erased, and in the place of it/ The ivy and the wild-vine interknit/ The volumes of their many-twining stems; Parasite flowers illumine with dewy gems/ The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky/ Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery/ With moonlight patches, or star atoms keen,/ Or fragments with the day's intense serene;--/ Working mosaic on their Parian floors." This is where the poet invites the love of his life, Emilia to talk "until thought's melody/Become too sweet for utterance,/ and it die in words, to live again in looks, which dart/ With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,/ Harmonizing silence without a sound." The eloquence of words completely dissappears in a moment of vision where there is no longer subject and object and consciousness is rooted in a clearing which receives the last traces of the age of gold... vestigial remains of the oblivion of time

Gulio

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