Signs

“All teaching is teaching of either things or sings, but things are learnt through signs.” — Augustine of Hippo (354-430) 

He cried unto the Lord; and the Lord showed him a tree. 

He cast the tree into the waters,  

and lo, 

the waters were made sweet 

He lighted upon a place, and tarried there all night 

He took the stones found in that place,  

and put them just so for his pillows,  

and there lay down to sleep. 

But when he lifted up his eyes, they fell upon a sound, 

a ram caught in a thicket by his horns 

and he went and took the ram, 

In place of his son, 

A burnt offering… 

The wood is a sign of the cross 

The stone and beast represent Christ’s human side 

These are things, but they are 

At the same time, 

Signs of other things: 

No smoke without fire…

On Sublimity

“Sublimity is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse. It is the source of the distinction of the very greatest poets and prose writers and the means by which they have given eternal life to their own fame. For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. This is because persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer. Experience in invention and ability to order and arrange material cannot be detected in single passages; we begin to appreciate them only when we see the whole context. Sublimity on the other hand, produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power at a single blow.”— “Longinus” (0 CE)

Preface

In the beginning

Nature rules all

Yet this is only made known

Through art

We cannot see directly

What must blind

All that is to say

Scorn power and wealth

Feel deeply

Think profoundly

Let your genius be natural

Five streams of sublimity

Great thoughts

Whether forming like a cancer

Or enwombed by artificial insemination

Set us on the ecstatic road that rings

like the ghosts of stones dropped into a deep, dark well

Strong emotion

In the broken tongue of Sappho

Who cannot see in the dazzling dark,

Who cannot hear above the hum

Who cannot speak but must

Under whose skin that subtle fire runs

To amplify, to terrify

And this Homeric storm she cannot endure

But must, but must, for all must be

Just as I must stare into the fury

Of a dozen bloody eyes

Certain figures of thought and speech

Apostrophe: while the mother of the bride primped and preened her flowers,

Jilting groom and cowmaid did elope.

Chiaroscuro: overshadow and eclipse the artifice

Hyperbaton: FOR SALE broken wings, sea-borne

Noble diction

When, with sticky little fingers,

the child takes off his guiser’s mask, and,

Tear-stained, chocolate-smeared

Calls out for his mummy…

Tenor killed in car crash

Cause of death a heart attack:

The great not of veins.

Digression: Starched Lysius shrinks from Drunken Plato;

Plain grain pales to sumptuous steak seasoned in Attic salt

the erratic genius towers over the impeccable mediocrity

We do not feel so much awe before the clear and pure little flame we kindle

As before the oft-obscured fires of heaven

We do not think our flame more worthy

Than the craters of Etna, whose roar belches,

rocks and hills entire out of the depths

And pours forth rivers of the earth-born instant fire

Dignified word arrangement

And The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat

Puts a tingle in your fingers and a tingle in your feet

Spin class, strobe light, smoke machine

Rhythm in your bedroom, rhythm in the street

Happy hardcore Kavanagh hearings

Yes, The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat

Pathos to ekstasis

Catharsis of reader and writer alike

And all those who transcend can’t help

But be in time themselves transcended

The Mad Poet

“The poet forms the young child’s stammering mouth, and turns his ear at a timely hour from obscene discourse; next he also shapes his heart with friendly precepts, castigating harshness, resentment, and wrath. He tells of deeds honourably done, instructs rising generations by the examples of famous men, and consoles the sick and helpless.”—Horace (65-8 BCE)

Am I a fool to purge my bile

when spring comes around?

Am I as sharp as whetted wit

Upon whose blade I’ve ground?

Piss on thy father’s ashes

Unearth the lightning strike

Engorge the bloody leech skin

Send raven into flight

Be good or else delightful

And always sing in tune

For its your right of freedom

To pay your Orphic due

(ut pictura poesis, ut canta poesis?)

In the full moon’s light, Dianna reads

Blood runs from the stones of her eyes

And she sends you, and your rusty lines

Back to anvil and flame

To beat the bear back into his bars

Ars Poetica

“Imagine a painter who wanted to combine a horse’s neck with a human head, and then clothe a miscellaneous collection of limbs with various kinds of feathers, so that what started out at the top as a beautiful woman ended in a hideously ugly fish. If you were invided, as friends, to the private view, could you help laughing? Let me tell you, my Piso friends, a book whose different features are made up at random like a sick man’s dreams, with no unified form to have a head or a tail, is exactly like that picture.” —Horace (65-8 BCE)

The burning bush paints shadow-black

Upon the canvas sand

‘Twixt Lucania and Apulia

Going, going, gone

To Rome, then on to Athens

And war

Octavian to Augustus

Enemy turned patron

Scriba quaestorius

Virgil grease the wheels

So he may write and write

And nothing else

Until his dying breath

Give me a practised mastery of a craft

Give me a systematic knowledge of theory and technique

Give me a capacity for objective self-criticism

Give me decorum: the discernment and use of appropriateness, propriety, proportion, and unity in the arts – to fit the part to the whole, to delight and instruct

The mad scientist tried in vane

To sew together snake to bird, and the tiger to the lamb

But the purple patch it could not bear

The fierce and gentle pull and tear of thread

Such monsters have no place

Here

In the wine-jar lung of the drowning man

Beggars can’t afford to be anything other than choosers

In the lion’s maw, cling to a single fang, and send the rest to the wind

Make familiar words new

Through your own tears

Make me cry

Attuned to Fortune

You cannot light the smoke

Only bring smoke to light

The friendliest of fires and

Weapons of Mad Divination

God shall not intervene

While the goat sings his tragic song

And the old drunk snores

His faced daubed red with lees and trub

A truly tragic end, when, at the curtain,

the bush speaks: Please Clap…

On Rhetoric

“There is persuasion through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly than we do others, on all subjects in general and completely so in cases where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt. And this should result from the speech, not from a previous opinion that the speaker is a certain kind of person; for it is not the case, as some of the handbook writers propose in their treatment of the art, that fair-mindedness on the part of the speaker makes no contribution to persuasiveness; rather, character is almost, so to speak, the most authoritative form of persuasion… As a result, authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally. (The latter is persuasive, the former the opposite; for people become resentful, as at someone plotting against them, just as they are at those adulterating wines.)” —Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Lexis
To be clear

The final cause

Is to persuade the public.

Travel through time:

The Past: Judicial accusation or defence; and you must rise to meet the audience where they lie to convince them of your case for the just.

The Present: Epideictic praise or blame

The Future: protreptic exhortation or apotreptic dissuasion, commence or cease, obey.

Telos

Do as I say, not as I do.

Poetics

“Representation is natural to human beings from childhood. They differ from the other animals in this: man tends most towards representation and learns his first lessons through representation… if one has not seen the thing that is represented before, its image will not produce pleasure as a representation, but because of its accomplishment, colour, or some other such cause.” —Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

(i) Prologue
To Make

The Great

Doctor Daddy in the King’s Court

Public recluse

A fifth of thought

in completely in

Notes

Black horse and the

Chair and Tree

(ii) Episode

Plot: a construction of incidents, the origin and soul of tragedy

Character: those people, of a certain appropriate sort (it is possible to be manly in character, but, Melanippe,it is not appropriate for a woman such to be so manly or clever), in action, actors, live laugh love

Thought: the torment of their brain

Diction: the torrent of their tongue, the art of the squeal

Music: throbbing embellishment

Spectacle: bound, gagged, enthralled

Mimesis, peripeteia, anagnorisis

hamartia, katharsis – a purgative that flushes by means of pity and terror

Rhythms given form

The mimes of Sophron

Be ye good or inferior

Vicious or virtuous?

For better or worse

In sickness and health

(iii) Exit

Dionysius paints us just as we are

No better or worse

In dithyrambs and nomes

Light House

Cyclopic eye, panopticonic beam

Observe and learn

Delight in representation

reversal and recognition: a change from ignorance to knowledge

The spear-head that the earth-born bear

From friendship to enmity

(iv) Choral

Phallic procession

To speak of universals

What is possible is believable

Genius or madman

Composer of plots

While tragedy occurs within one revolution of the sun

Epic is unbounded in time

(What is concentrated is more pleasurable than what is diluted with a lot of time)

Hanging in a moment, stationary yet thrumming with potential release

Fineness lies in magnitude and order

And they may well condemn you:

Impossible, improbable, harmful, contradictory or incorrect.

Still you try

To resolve

A tonic

Republic

“But all I’m saying is that no one is at all happy at being lied to and deceived in his mind about the facts; no on likes being ignorant, and the existence and presence of falsehood there are extremely unwelcome to everyone; they particularly hate it there.” — Plato (ca. 427-347 BCE)

II
“Make up a story”
“Disregard time“
“True and untrue”
“body and mind.“

“Lies. Lies. Lies:
Stories told by whispers”

“Lipsacrifice.“

“Loose Leaves…”
“… perceive?“
“Deceive.”

“Welcome to the Academy: to what do we aspire?”
“To be as godlike as humanly possible.“

III
“Draw a line…”
“Defend the border”
“Bbuuiilldd tthhee wwaallll“
I’d rather be a slave labouring for someone else – someone without property, who can hardly make a living – than rule over all the spirits of the dead.
The vile, dank halls, which even gods hate, might appear to men and gods…
Amazing! The soul, the likeness of a person, really does exist in Hades’ halls, but it is completely witless
He alone had consciousness, while the rest were darting shadows
His soul flew from his body and went to Hades bewailing its fate, forfeiting his soul went down to the underworld with a shrill cry
As when bats flit about squeaking in the depths of an awful cave, when one of them loses its perch on the crowded rock, and they cling to one another, so the flock of souls went with shrill cries.
Cocytus and Styx,
ghost and wraith
passages where eminent men weep and wail in mourning
“Do not cry“
“Do not laugh”
“Do not lie“
“Just die,
free.”

VII
Shadows. Echoes.
“And, now this is just my opinion…”
“Of course.“
“… but I think you should…”
“Yes?“
“Stare straight into the sun.”
“Aaaaahhh!“

X
“Mimesis?”
“Mutation.“

“Goldilocks and the three beds
Painter, Joiner, God?”
“Representer, Manufacturer, Progenitor.“
“Good. Because you do not know everything, you know nothing.”
“Innoculate me against this sorcery!“
“Measure, Count, Weigh
No aspect of human life is worth bothering about a great deal:
Apprehend only the number of the fallen die.”
“Medicate your Mourning?”
“Indeed. Are you not entertained?”
“No?“
“Good, keep it that way.”

Phaedrus
Oak: “Trust in writing: Remember”
Rock: “Trust in writing: and by reliance on the marks of others, forget”
Oak: “Black water, by any other name, would still be poison.”
Rock: “To each soul a speech, and to each speech…?
Oak: A soul. (aside) (Indeed, like opinions, we all have one, and most of them stink)
(to Rock) Let’s go.

Encomium of Helen

“The power of speech has the same effect on the disposition of the soul as the disposition of drugs on the nature of bodies…. With my speech I have removed this woman’s ill repute … for Helen’s encomium and my amusement.” — Gorgias of Leontini (ca. 483-376 BCE)

Speak.
Articulate. Absolve. Amuse.

O Fortuna,
Melting like ice.

As decreed
necessity,

she brings her back
bare to your villainy,

the whip is a string
plucked and throbbing

delirium protects
incantatrix injects

Sisters of craft and magic stir
joypainfearcourage
Pleasure
Bewitch. Benumb.

Love’s persuasion
Love’s compulsion
Mindsnare

And no one asked you
To do a thing
But listen

spring

earrach

Dnieper

Кыѣвъ, Киѣвъ, Кіѣвъ

весенняя пора

Києвъ

кїєва, Кїєвь

Киев, кїєво, кїєвом

києвє

Кіеве

Кїєвѣ, Києвѣ, or Киѣве

Kыѥвъ

Kyjevŭ gordŭ

Tide turn

Seasonal

весна

Borderland

Entanglements

7th February 2022: oojamaflip, n. A thing or (less commonly) person of which the speaker or writer cannot at the moment recall the name, or which he or she is unable to or does not care to specify precisely.

8th February 2022: froideur, n. Coldness of manner; indifference, disdain, reserve.

9th February 2022: chicken finger, n. Usually in plural. A narrow strip of chicken meat, esp. from the breast, coated in breadcrumbs or batter and deep-fried, and typically served with a dipping sauce.

10th February 2022: chopsy, adj. Chiefly in Welsh English. Inclined to talk a lot, especially in a rude, insolent, or belligerent way; loud-mouthed.

11th February 2022: bonze, n. A Buddhist priest or religious teacher. (OLDEST JAPANESE WORD IN OED)

12th February 2022: japchae, n. A Korean dish consisting of cellophane noodles made from sweet potato starch, stir-fried with vegetables and other ingredients, and typically seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil.

13th February 2022: rakeshame, n. A disreputable or dissolute person; a rogue.

Pass the ‘hing-mi, y’know, the oojamaflip. He was ignored, her look pure, passive, froideur. The last chicken finger remained in the bowl with the grease of departed comrades. His fourth beer bottle was almost empty and he was getting chopsy. She looked down at the televsion guide from the paper, and thought, from nowhere, of the word bonze. Such an old word, captured in the great tomes of linguistic conquest. Tomorrow she would poison the japchae. But which bowl?