Making Myths

... legends are memories greater than memories.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 176, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on work and weariness, part iv (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

VII. But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)
With half-dropt eyelids still,
Beneath a heaven dark and holy,
To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill—
To hear the dewy echoes calling
From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine—
To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling
Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!
Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,
Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

VIII. The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie relined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whisper'd—down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

on work and weariness, part iii (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

V.

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!
To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other's whisper'd speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy
Heap'd over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

VI. Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,
And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change;
For surely now our household hearts are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.
The Gods are hard to reconcile:
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath,
Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

on work and weariness, part ii (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

IV. Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

on work and weariness, part i (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

In the afternoon they came into a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.

I.

THERE is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

II.

Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
'There is no joy but calm!'—
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

III.

Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.
Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days,
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

gods and the end (harrison)

In retribution for his having violated the realm that lies behind the world of appearances, Artemis brings about Actaeon's change of appearance, while leaving his human essence intact.... In the process of external metamorphosis, he comes to realize that his own inner identity is superfluous in a realm governed by appearances. (25)

Tragic wisdom had given way to the triumphalistic claims of Socratic philosophy-- its love of an abstract nontragic wisdom that looked contemplation -- not Dionysian suffering-- for its fulfillment. [Turning against the vegetative and animal origins of life, Socrates idealized and formalized the essence of truth.] (38)

- from Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison

on belief and fullness (wordsworth)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
It moves us not. - Great God! I rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

- The World Is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth

From: The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Frank Kafka

The First Notebook
Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Fourth Notebook
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

from the Blue Octavo Notebooks

PROMETHEUS

There are four legends about Prometheus. According to the first, because he had betrayed the gods to men he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that devoured his perpetually renewed liver.

According to the second, Prometheus in his agony, as the beaks hacked into him, pressed deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

According to the third, in the course of thousands of years his treachery was forgotten, the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot.

According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of what had become meaningless. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.

What remained was the inexplicable range of mountains. Legend tries to explain the inexplicable. Since it arises out of a foundation of truth, it must end in the realm of the inexplicable.

- Frank Kafka, Third Notebook

Poetry, Classic Retellings: Jorie Graham

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance,
the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain
completely unharmed?--

the point-of-view darting in him, shiny head in the ash-heap,

hissing Once upon a time, and then Turn now darling give me that look,

that perfect shot, give me that place where I'm erased . . .

The thing, he must have wondered, could it be put to rest, there, in the
glance,
could it lie back down into the dustyness, giving its outline up?

When we turn to them--limbs, fields, expanses of dust called meadow and
avenue--
will they be freed then to slip back in?

Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with
minutes in it
called woman, its presence in him the thing called

future--could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out
into it,

tugging the wanting-to-finish out.

What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustyness,
but without their steps on it, their prints, without
song--

What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road
(can you
understand this?)--what she dreamed

was of disappearing into the seen

not of disappearing, lord, into the real--

And yes she could feel it in him already, up ahead, that wanting-to-turn-and-
cast-the-outline-over-her

by his glance,

sealing the edges down,

saying I know you from somewhere darling, don't I,
saying You're the kind of woman who etcetera--

(Now the cypress are swaying) (Now the lake in the distance)
(Now the view-from-above, the aerial attack of do you
remember?)--

now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be recalled,
now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be taken in,

(somewhere the castle above the river)

(somewhere you holding this piece of paper)

(what will you do next?) (--feel it beginning?)

now she's raising her eyes, as if pulled from above,

now she's looking back into it, into the poison the beginning,

giving herself to it, looking back into the eyes

feeling the dry soft grass beneath her feet for the first time now the mind

looking into that which sets the______________in motion and seeing in there

a doorway open nothing on either side
(a slight wind now around them, three notes from up the hill)

through which morning creeps and the first true notes--

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible swiftly took hold.

-Jorie Graham - Orpheus and Eurydice

From: The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Frank Kafka (Third Notebook)

THE SILENCE OF THE SIRENS
Evidence that even inadequate, indeed childish means may serve to save one.
In order to be safe from the Sirens, Odysseus stopped his ears with wax and had himself chained to the mast. All travelers, from the very beginning, could of course have done something of the kind, but it was common knowledge throughout the world that this was simply of no avail. The Sirens’ song penetrated through everything, and the passion of those who heard its magic would have snapped more than chains and a mast. But Odysseus did not think of that, even though he may have heard tell of it. He relied solely on the handful of wax and the network chains, and in innocent delight over his little stratagem he voyaged on towards the Sirens.
Now the Sirens have a weapon even more terrible than their song, namely, their silence. True, such a thing has not happened, yet perhaps it is thinkable that someone might have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Nothing earthly can withstand the sense of having overcome them with one’s own resources, and the overwhelming arrogance resulting from it.
And in fact, when Odysseus came, the mighty singers did not sing, either because they believed the only way of tackling this opponent was with silence, or because the sight of the utter bliss on Odysseus’s face, as he thought of nothing but wax and chains, caused them quite to forget their singing.
But Odysseus—let us put it like this—did not hear their silence, he thought they were singing and that only he was safe from hearing it. Fleetingly he saw first the poise of their necks, their deep breathing, their eyes brimming with tears, their half-open mouths, but he believed this went with the arias that were resounding, unheard, around him. Soon, however, everything slid away from his gaze, which was fixed on the far distance, the Sirens simply vanished in the face of his resolutions, and in the very moment when he was nearest to them he had already forgotten them.
But they—more beautiful than ever—stretched and turned, letting their dread hair float free upon the wind and tightening their claws upon the rocks. They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus.
If the Sirens had possessed consciousness, they would have been annihilated at that time. As it was, they remained; only Odysseus escaped them.
For the rest, tradition has a note to add to this. Odysseus, it is said, was a man of so many wiles, was such a cunning fox, that even the goddess of destiny could not penetrate into his inmost being. Perhaps, although this is beyond comprehension by the mind of man, he really noticed that the Sirens were silent, and confronted them and the gods with the pretended trick described above only, so to speak, as with a sort of shield.

Various Literary Quotes: Lawrence, On Joyce, On Helton and Poetry

The satire, which in The Man of Property really had a certain noble touch, soon fizzles out, and we get that series of Galsworthian ‘rebels’ who are, like all the rest of the modern middle-class rebels, not in rebellion at all. They are merely social beings behaving in an anti-social manner. They worship their own class but they pretend to go one better and sneer at it. They are Forsyte antis, feeling snobbish about snobbery. Nevertheless, they want to attract attention and make money. That’s why they are anti.
Phoenix (1936) by D.H. Lawrence (pg 547)

Streets intersect, shops advertise, homes have party walls and fellow citizens depend upon the same water supply; but there is no co-operation between human beings. The individual stands motionless, like Odysseus becalmed in the doldrums.
James Joyce (1944) by Harry Levine pg 96

"Roy Helton’s: 'May Jones Takes the Air'
Proud queens, old queens, pale and dead and fair,
Who will be waiting to match her beauty there?
The night is nailed aloft with gold, the wind is on her hair.
And love is searching through her eyes; if time has love to spare
Bring love! Show love! Raise it like a crown!
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town!

Nations are marching. Cities yet unseen
Roar on the pavements where her feet have been:
New Worlds! Wise Worlds! Worlds all gold and green!
This is your birth night. Rain your splendours down!
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town.

“A little street walker seen through a poet’s eyes! Plato is right in calling him divinely mad.
Rapture may be a force that rushes imperfect poetry to great heights.” (183, Flaccus)

poetry: his sensible daddy and the glorious death (anne sexton)

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that feel back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.
- "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton