When the Persians had marched across the desert, they took up a position close to the Egyptian army, in order to join battle. But then the king’s mercenaries, who were Greeks and Carians, found a way to vent their anger at Phanes for bringing a foreign army into Egypt. Phanes’ sons had been left behind in Egypt, so the mercenaries brought them to the Egyptian camp. They set up a bowl between the two armies, in full view of the boys’ father, and then they fetched the children one by one and cut their throats so that the blood spilled into the bowl. When they had finished with all the children, the mercenaries poured wine and water into the bowl, and when they had all drunk some of the blood, they joined battle. >Herodotus, The Histories, Book III
This is what comes to me: it is all changed.
Your voice scratching some thousands of miles away, cajoling me to jump.
Jump where? I ask.
It doesn't matter you say in your thick accent. That's not the point.
Lose yourself—leap.
Let's begin with a philosophical quandary that has disturbed some of our best minds for the better part of 200 years: how to balance
what is good for one,
with what is good for the rest.
I have always liked this question,
which in fact is not one question but three:
one, many and what is this good?
Some say beauty. I have seen that. Felt it in my gut, standing on mountain tops, amid fields at sundown and at the center of the bedizened city where man has climbed up from wherever he emerged and claimed himself (ignorantly) different. Others—like the poet who thinks in broken brown doors and soft spring afternoons—say the images, unfolding one frame to the next, as in a film. Who was it that wrote our lives have become like movies? Soundtrack, crane shots, color filters—a young woman rides a train between steep forested mountains somewhere near Nigata looking moodily out from behind dark sunglasses at a sometimes bursting sun.
In film, as in life (as in dreams),
we straddle the divide between what is and what isn't.
Mussolini in one of his many articulate moments wrote: "It is faith that moves mountains because it gives the illusion that mountains move." It’s said this is from Leopardi, who I have never read, but I believe it. A propagandist is rarely original, and power never came through originality alone, but rather steady application.
Mussolini also wrote that war is the most important thing in a man's life, like maternity in a woman's. That's true, I thought when I read it, nodding with the rest of Italy (1923).
Crisp black suit,
starched white shirt,
sweat soaking the collar
—I'll put a bullet in the fucking communist! (spit in Italian)
Was it you who told me that the first epigraphic examples of recognizably modern Italian (that is, distinct from its early medieval Latin progenitor) are a series of dirty words written as dialogue between two figures sketched on the back wall of a ruined church buried deep beneath modern Rome? They are busy burning a pitiable priest, if I remember correctly. Act of villainy to some, justice to others. At the very least, good entertainment for the mob, and god knows what they're speaking.
But I wonder.
Tua madre si da per niente!
The birth of new communicative powers comes without our realizing it.
People speak language as it is, not as it's becoming.
Let us pass,
to a rainy morning in Kyoto where I awoke in the bed of an older woman (how much older I would rather not say—forgive me this pettiness) at the center of a large tatami room, and was told that there would be no sex because there was blood between us and we are Jews, and even atheist Jews won't fuck while the woman is menstruating. We listen to a record instead. Madeleine Peyroux sings dance me to your beauty with a burning violin. I close my eyes and a hot spring rain falls like a thousand soft paws on a grass mat. This is how the world bends. 1938, Cairo—a dance hall spreads before us and a babble of Arabic, British accents, and pouting French (the woman was French of course). We are dancing in the heat before the war, expecting it between each step but all unaware of a furor that is not yet borne in us, but will be, one day in summer, staring down the barrel of a gun. It was a mystery to me until that evening late in his life when I found my grandfather's Silver Medal citation at the bottom of a chest of drawers, and I read of him killing half a dozen men with a Tommy Gun.
"He won't forget this!"
the devils all laughed
on a dusty road in August.
August will come, but before it, June, of which I have been reading a great deal lately. Strange that each time I pick up a book there is a new comment on June. Some new perspective from which to approach the season of now that is now as it was. Cinders that burn in urns of past nights, small amidst heavy flurries of snow that I have never seen but that I believe in with a faith most reserve for Yahweh. Flurries of snow lofting above the world that is born now as it was then at a different time when a man who would be blind and die between wars wrote leaning over a suitcase as he sat on his bed in drearylovelyleaveforever Dublin: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
He knew Latin better than I.
I always think this.
A weakness perhaps.
But there it is.
I wonder (with you) if we are worthy of the works.
Can we read of war, never having fought it?
With Hemingway, the sound of a shotgun blast.
The smell of a shotgun blast.
But then I claim the violence of being human,
and say that is enough.
I need not kill to kill.
Murder is in me, as it is in us all.
It needs only the chance
to become.
-end-