POEM: THE GLOW OF ANTENUATED MAN

The Glow of

Attenuated Man

“And eventually,” the witch says,

“their fires faded and were

no longer there to guide them.

In darkness at the river’s bank,

they could not see the fetid waters,

nor the rot of the barge’s hull,

nor the old man’s toothless grin.

They saw nothing of these,

nor of the land beyond.”

I DON'T KNOW WHEN I WROTE THIS EXACTLY, the mid-aughts I expect. But I think it was after my visit to the theme park, Canada’s Wonderland, north of Toronto. They have an evening where they celebrate Halloween, and have minimum-wage workers dress up as psychopaths, mad doctors, serial killers, vampires and other friendly sorts of creatures. There are haunted houses and rides and things like that. Ooooo! Very scary! I noticed that as it got darker, more and more phone screens glowed in the park as people walked about and went in and out of the exhibits, and climbed aboard rides. This was early in the 2000s when cellphones were not as ubiquitous (and annoying) as they are today, so it caught my attention in a way that it probably wouldn't now. 
I thought that if you really wanted to scare these folks, crash the cellular service for about fifteen minutes, and see whether there would be a mad scramble for the gates by hordes of terrified, digitally-compromised patrons! Now, that would be fun to see!

     Cell phones, the internet and our mass communication system as a whole are unsustainable. But such a possibility is one that most people refuse to even consider. It’s almost like we're all under a kind of magic spell. Our technology has us hypnotized, enthralled like shuffling zombies looking for brains to eat. I think maybe that we need to return to older kinds of magic in order to give our lives meaning again. Or find new kinds. 

Cheers, Jake

 

"QUOTES": ARISTOTLE AND THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS

IN HIS WELL-CRAFTED PODCAST, Literature and History, host, Doug Metzger, provides the wonderful image of Aristotle as he wades through tide pools and lagoons along the shorelines of Lesbos, studying the creatures he finds there. Around the same time that his former pupil, Alexander the Great was out conquering most of the known world, Aristotle wrote his findings in a book called The History of Animals in the fourth century B.C. Metzger goes on:

“The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell considered Hellenism’s slow fall away from science one of its great tragedies. Russell wrote that Greece’s earlier philosophers had an attitude that in the main, was genuinely scientific whenever it did not merely embody the prejudices of their age. But it was not only scientific; it was imaginative and vigorous and filled with the delight of adventure. They were interested in everything - meteors and eclipses, fishes and whirlwinds, religion and morality; with a penetrating intellect they combined with the zest of children. From this point onwards, there are first certain seeds of decay, in spite of previously unmatched achievement, and then a gradual decadence. What is amiss, even in the best philosophy after Democritus, is an undue emphasis on man as compared with the universe. By now, you understand the point, I’m sure. The late Roman Republic, and the first days of the Empire are, from a historical perspective, mesmerizing in their eventfulness and scale. And though Aristotle would never be forgotten, his biological studies wouldn’t prove influential for a long time. Instead, the marvels of the natural world, whether we consider them a divine creation or simply an elegant efflorescence of physics and chemistry – the world beyond human affairs, with all of its frogs, and tide pools, and flocks of migrating birds, took second place next to our central pursuits of material power and blessed afterlives. We looked down into lagoons, but only to see our own reflections and envision extrasensory worlds that would someday welcome us. It would be a long, long time before we, like Aristotle did 2,300 years ago, again took to wading in tide pools and making notes about what we saw there."

As Metzer suggests, a wrong turn happened. Man became ascendant over all other creatures. We grew apart from nature, and came to see ourselves as not needing it. Instead we came to think of nature as something we needed to fear or conquer. It remains to be seen whether we have developed sufficient understanding and willpower to step down from the throne we've made for ourselves, and once more wade among the tide pools and shorelines of our world, and to feel a necessary sense of wonder about it all.

[I'll be adding other posts under the heading: "QUOTES", from time to time. So much brilliant thinking, so little time!]

Cheers, Jake.

     

POEM: THE GIRL AND THE GOAT

"Demelza" from Poldark...sigh...

The Girl and the Goat

A girl and a goat stood upon

a rocky ledge of land.

The goat fed on some mossy fern,

the girl upon the strand.

Though fair winds blew and storms were gone, 

the air lay still with salt.

And as day warmed and the sky cleared,

her heart became a vault.

As she watched the waves turn to gold,

with the sun’s rise toward noon

she knew that the sea had one, then;

the which she’d know of soon.

After a time there came a sound,

a stirring like the tide,

for creatures with the fairest hair

will not long quiet bide.

A riven foot on broken stone

beside her clapped the noise.

The fair-haired beast with red-rimmed eye,

that keeper she employs,

dinned the silence of her eyrie       

with tokens from a time

when sun and moon and stars combined,

to form a darker rhyme.

Your beauty to my eye at least

will stand the fairest ground.

Why don’t you choose the one you love

and start your marriage round?

Your choice is simple—one must live,

the other, he must die.

‘Tis natural as the rain doth fall

down from a storm-banked sky.

No pain or suffering, no final fear;

to sleep will this one go.

Death’s a blessing without your love;

such sorrow he’ll not know.

No harm in body, mind or soul

will come upon your choice.

But choose you must, to take your lot,

and soon you will rejoice!

She watched the sea and searched for sails,

as noonday’s light drew down.

And sure enough in distance rode

a ship through day’s gold crown.

It made its way from water’s world

and toward our harbour quay.

That one would live, the other die,

it was for her to say.

We waited for our half-dead men

to climb upon the dock,

to know which from the salvage saved

would hear the calling cock.

At last it was that two emerged,

near dead as all the rest.

We all knew then without a doubt,

of all, who’d chosen best.

For on the rocks beneath the cliff

two bodies lay aside.

Fair haired, both, like fond lovers lay,

soon taken with the tide.

 I WROTE THIS NOT TOO LONG AGO. I love the British TV show Poldark, and scenes with a woman standing on a cliff side looking for signs of returning ships is one that is repeated there; they are scenes replete with fear and loss, and hope and joy. Originally, I had a picture in my head of a young woman standing with a lamb looking out to sea. I knew she was watching for signs of her lover's return. I had that kind of Gothic or perhaps an earlier, late seventeenth century setting in mind, influenced by the wonderful portrayal of the Cornish coastline so well captured in Poldark. 

That image sat with me for quite a while; I didn't know what to do with it. Then I changed the lamb to a goat and thought of the traditional representation of Satan, and I began to think of the setting as one in which the woman will confront evil in some manner, specifically her own. In her heart she loves two men. Both have gone to sea, and their fleet has been caught in a storm. Who will return? Both? Neither?

     The goat temps her by offering her the assurrance that, indeed, one will return--provided she chooses which one. The devil's speech is without using quotation marks because I want to suggest good and evil are things within us (thoughts, attitudes, actions, choices) that we either suppress or bring to the surface. The goat is in her, metaphorically. The reader learns that the speaker/narrator is actually one of the women at the nearby dock who waits with the other women for the return of their men, just as the woman does on the cliff. The speaker indicates that the women gathered there have made their choices, their own pacts with the devil. But the girl on the cliff has made a different choice. 

     I guess one thing I'm expressing here is the need for care in making choices in life; every choice has its consequence. Bunjee cords are not an option.

Cheers, Jake.