Unattic Nights: John H. Finley On The Latin Language.

It was the House Master's residence celebrating some triumph or other of Eliot House in the Master's dining room. Sherry was served. John Finley stood at the head of the table with others standing around, including students. Someone said something in or about Latin. Finley immediately leaned back as if looking into a distance that none of us could see. He stood there a moment and then said, to no one in particular and as if reading from an invisible text beyond the ceiling of the dining room, “Latin is like a pinball machine.”

Everyone quieted down—we all knew an extended metaphor was on the way.

“The pinball after a push bumps around and lights blink. Suddenly it goes into the right hole and everything is flashing lights, ringing bells, and buzzers.”

The quotation is to deon and may not be exact. Finley also may have said this, roughly, at many other times and places.

The gist surely rings true for those doing more elaborately worked Latin.

Those who knew John Finley personally will understand immediately that there was an implied contrast with ancient Greek.

In memory he is still standing there, and has been, in this and other scenes for more than fifty years.

E. A. Costa 31 December, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua.

The Odd Couple: Gertrude Stein & Ezra Pound

Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound are the odd couple of American letters, who, despite enormous contrasts of surface, had much in common. Both spent early years in the American West—Stein in California, where she was raised, Pound in Idaho where he was born. Both were highly educated in ways no longer widely understood--Stein eventually at Harvard under William James, among others, Pound more widely—at Cheltenham Military Academy—then at the University of Pennsylvania but everywhere with the monomaniacal appetite of the brilliant autodidact.

Stein was nouveau riche in American terms, and Pound, though poor much of his life, descended from the earliest English in the New World. But both were far from any American or other lower class.

Both were ex-patriates by choice and for a long period of their lives, Stein in France, where it is said she got on quite well in later years with some high-ranking NAZI officials, Pound in various venues, including London and later Fascist Italy where he carried on in radio broadcasts, sometimes in his most backwoods American dialects.

Pound is generally identified as a virulent anti-Semite most of his life, which is not so much inaccurate as incomplete. Part of his vitriol was purely literary, to preserve an earlier and traditional English usage of “Jew”, shared with Shakespeare, for example. Interestingly enough, he often used the same word to describe the greed of some of the leading gentiles, British and American, whom he saw as examples of the same traits.

Stein, on the other hand, wholly secularized and independent, early rejected the whole characterization of being Jewish, especially in terms of significant self-characterization.

Their dislike for one another was intense, though with respect, and on occasion they sat down to supper together, less over what food and spirits were served, than over the shared topics of art and literature.

They were both great poets in their own and different ways, and revolutionary, and also patrons of others, Stein most notably of Pablo Picasso, Pound of T. S. Eliot, whom he early promoted and whose early work he edited brilliantly.

Interestingly enough, in relation to another reversal and thus similarity, Stein was clearly what might be called the harder and more masculine of the two, in which the terms are not meant to carry obloquy of any sort, but just the opposite.

In short, both were uniquely American in new ways, and in ways that will never occur again. It is clearly a case of two sides of the same coin, or, as Stein herself subtly implied, the city mouse and the country mouse.

Both were cutting wits, though in vastly different modes. Stein was the stiletto who skewered in an instant image, Pound the scalpel that more carefully and laboriously sliced opened and cut a away.

In this Stein surely had the upper hand, describing Pound quite neatly as “the village explainer”, useful if one is in a village and not, if not. Pound's riposte, if any, is not recorded as far as one knows. In  distant retrospect,  it is obvious enough. If Pound was the explainer, Stein was the national pain in the ass.

Both roles were key not only in what passed for American “culture” at the time, but also, insofar as both managed to escape into a wider literature than that of the still provincial and crass United States, for Europe, and through Europe, for the world.

E. A. Costa 31 December, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua

Del nuevo diccionario del diablo: s.v. BAQUIANO

BAQUIANO, BAQUEANO: s.m. (Am. Lat.), explorador de nuevos senderos por terreno desconocido. En inglés: “pathfinder”, “scout”, “guide”. Refrán viejo: Para hacerse baquiano hay que perderse alguna vez (e.g. “to learn by trial and error”). Ejemplo nuevo clásico: "Virgilio es el baquiano de Dante por el infierno" [Paraíso Postergado, Canto XIII, verso 326].

E. A. Costa diciembre 28 2014 Granada, Nicaragua

The Mannequin On Calle La Calzada

                “Pero una estatua de sal

                no es una Musa inoportuna....”

                                     Carlos Martínez Rivas

She sits on the sidewalk

outside the shop in a black mesh chair.

Dressed in the latest fashion,

she sits one long leg draped over the other,

in a perfect pose of being about to rise recognizing you.

She sits a martyr's plaster of eagerness with the littlest kiss of lipstick.

She sits waiting for you during daylight & vanishing every night.

The shop girl sitting within, mobile in ice and boredom,

simply can't compete.

E. A. Costa 26 December, 2014  Granada, Nicaragua

El Maniquí de Calle La Calzada

              “Pero una estatua de sal

               no es una Musa inoportuna....”

                            Carlos Martínez Rivas

Sentada

en una silla

de red negra

en la acera

fuera de la tienda

es vestida

a la última moda

cruzando las piernas

una sobre otra.

Se está sentando

a la postura perfecta

de estar por levantarse

para contigo encontrarse.

El rostro es yeso de mártir deseoso

con un matiz de lápiz labial.

Cada día te aguarda

y cada noche desaparece.

Sentada en otra silla

la muchacha de tienda

móbil en hielo y hastío

con ella no rivaliza.

E. A. Costa diciembre 26 2014, Granada, Nicaragua*

___________________________________________

* N.B. This began as a fairly literal translation and

slowly turned into something a bit different, so to say,

structurally, though still a translation.

De Carmen Naranjo (traducción en inglés)

Ayer te busqué

en ese asiento vacío

del avión

en ese asiento vacío

del parque

en ese asiento vacío

del taxi

en ese asiento vacío

del comedor

en ese asiento vacío

de mi cuarto.

Hoy te sequiré buscando.

Carmen Naranjo (2001)

Yesterday

I looked for you

in the empty seat

on the airplane

on the empty park bench

in the vacant passenger seat of the taxi

in the unfilled chair at that little eatery

in the emptiness of my room.

Today I will keep looking.

(Tr. E. A. Costa  Granada, Nicaragua 22 December 2014)

Siestas y desperezos

The Irish had planted potatoes there.

The first Fall my family dug them up

and ate them.

That must have been about A.D. 1952.

In Spring in the cold clean river

we hunted watercress and ate it as salad.

In Summer we went north to Ipswich

and spent all day on the rocks

gathering periwinkles,

brought them back iced--buckets of them,

spent all day with needles

pricking them out of their shells,

for a sauce never sold

in any market.

We ate them over linguine

cooked in huge pots

in Rosa's magnificent kitchen.

Friday was fish day.

Masses were Latin.

There is really no way to recall the night sky.

There was less night light in those days.

The air was clean.

Laid out on your back

on the moist grass

where the potatoes

had been hiding,

was a universe above.

Half of the huge oak

had been blasted away by the hurricane.

The ancient miniature pear tree survived,

bore endless fruit every Fall.

It filled bushel baskets.

We ate them.

More came.

Some fermented on the concrete slab

over which laundry was hung and dried.

They smelled like brandy.

Laundry was white and heavy.

There was much linen.

It smelled like ozone.

Skippy the Collie chased cars

and was killed, died howling

and bleeding on the front porch.

Blood smells metallic.

It is hard to remember what world it was.

Massachusetts? Middlesex County?

E. A. Costa 7 December 2014 Granada, Nicaragua

Poetry Is F_____g up (Alcman Q.E.D.)

           
            "Another thing these gentlemen seem not to know 
             is that poetry and history offer different wares, and
             have their separate rules...."

                         Lucian of Samosata  (tr. Fowler & Fowler) 

Poetry is f_____g up.

Falling.

Dead poets: n_ s___ t____.

No such thing.

Poetry is what happens between words when no one is looking.

War

Laughing

Intercourse

Autoeroticism

Echoing

Mutating

&....

Why say one thing with one word

when you can sing everything with two?

Tú.

Too.

Twin.

Twain.

Tween....

Explaining the endless endurance

of love poetry.

He said.

She said.

And by the way

what did Alcman

love when he threw away

his shield?

And by the way

what did Alcman

love when he lyricized

throwing away

his shield?

Running?

Laughing?

Archilochus?

Being openly unshielded?

By a bush?

These verses

and melodies

Alcman discovered

by paying close attention to:

f_____g up.

falling.

fouling.

fowling.

Fooling around with two,

with tú and you &

other partridges

in a pair tree.

Caccabides.

Ars.

A(r)matoria.

Naso beware.

Q.E.D.

E. A. Costa 8 December 2014 Granada, Nicaragua
__________________________________________
Nota Bene: As far as is known, Archilochus, soldier and poet, was the first to drop his shield in battle and run, then treat the event in a poem, vowing to get another one just as good. Thus began the figure called the rhipsaspia, or the throwing down of the shield, known also in regard to Alcaeus and Anacreon and later used by Horace, who fled the battle of Philippi, relicta non bene parmula (“my little shield having been left behind not at all nicely”). Did Horace actually carry a shield in the battle to throw down, and not only that one by definition small enough not to hinder running? It is the best with topoi and figures, poetic and otherwise, to leave the question open. Alcman unshielded, on the other hand, is a modern expansion.

El candado cansado

       Encúrvase el dedo y ya tienes el espacio....

                                             Álvaro Urtecho

1.

They are strangling themselves

with strange love's black hands

to the vast amusement of a third man

in a third land with a third eye

and three ugly feet.

Who has a clue? Who has the key? They do.

It is in their right back pocket.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

2.

What is the space between two songs?

Does nothing have its reasons,

like all other reasons invented

after the fact?

Does the size of vacuity matter?

Does it have its vicinities and seasons and changes of face,

like the moon?

To half a glass eye it adds a crescent

and becomes gibbous, growing slowly

to eclipse.

Like a clipper ship around the horn

a new world is born freighting frost

to San Francisco and back in long round days

at sea.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

3.

Tell me, good people,

who is your creator but the devil,

whom you yourself invented and treasured

with all the secret pleasures of a sleeping

secret Egyptian,

whose long whiles lay stock still along the Nile

for four thousand years,

with ears like the jackal

and a nose like the three noses

of the platypus who smells

electromagnetism.

Fickle she was this river,

this shoelace through mountain waste,

fickle and fish-tasting but trickable

by immobile Pharaonic bluff.

Which while was that?

Which Nile—white or blue?

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

4.

Your chaos

written in blood

is nothing new or huge

screwed tightly on the Canopic jar

of putative new anatomy and knowledge.

You are not the river.

You are not the barge.

You are not the driver.

You are not the sea—neither of you,

nor even the universal crocodile

shitting your tripes into the muddy flow

of rising brown water in flood.

You are the ersatz & exchangeable ant,

red and black, picayune and huge,

whose phases are dunce cap and corner,

honed and wired and mass-producing

nosegays distinct and fungible

on a bed of invisible roses.

Come the locust.

Come the groundhog.

Come the pubic lobster.

Come the bullfrog.

Come the giraffe of sunset.

Come lunatic laughter in silhouette.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

5.

The third ant and real.

The third authentic bee.

The third wolf and the third feral dog.

The third bear. The third hare. The third cat.

The third termite & the third acacia tree.

The beating of the Book of the Dead

door to door, floor to floor,

evangelizing islands and isthmuses,

sanitizing, harmonizing, simonizing

twilight into one more false dawn.

Let loose all your death.

Let loose all dolor.

Let loose the dull colors of your last curse

and shake the newborn earth

into morbidity.

No one will remember you.

No one will know your name.

No one will know you were here or there

for a year or a million or a day.

No one will resurrect you.

No one will reconstruct you.

You do not matter.

And as you pass hand in hand

through two performances in platinum

at the same and different time,

and the goose is cooked,

the band plays on.

E. A. Costa 4 December, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua

Prueba ontológica (Ontological Proof)

                     
                           Cur dea mulier?

Señor Walker y sus filibusteros
destruyeron la mujer bellísima
que era la ciudad de Granada.

Los Granadinos lloraron.

Y después de las lágrimas
grabadas en memoria y imagen
la construyeron de nuevo
aún más bella que antes....

E. A. Costa Granada, Nicaragua noviembre 27, 2014


Ontological Proof
                    
                       Cur dea mulier?

Mr. Walker and his filibusters
ravaged the exquisite woman
who was the city of Granada.

The Granadinos wept.

And after all the tears
graven in memory and image
they raised her anew
even fairer than before....

[Translated E. A. Costa]

Galleta de mar (The Sand Dollar)

On the vacant beach

white as first snow

a mountain bicycle

and a man nearby

stooped over the sand.

He gestures--”¡Venga! ¡Mire!--

¿Habla español?”

“Sí.”

“Y esto. ¿Qué es? ¿Cómo se llama esto?”

He holds up a sand dollar.

“Es una criatura del mar que vive

bajo la arena como una almeja...”

“¡Qué bonita! ¡Qué bonita!...”

He traces the star

gently with his finger

as if it were a lover.

“Sí, el mar es lugar

con cosas bonitas sin fin...”

On the vacant beach

white as one's first snow

a mountain bike

and a man nearby

stooped over the sand....

E. A. Costa San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua  18 noviembre 2014

Gorgias Resartus

              Omnis scientia est de universali,

                quod est unum in multis, quia de

                singularibus non est  scientia... 

                                                     (Duns Scotus)

The individuum does not exist.

If the individuum exists, it is not knowable.

If the individuum is knowable, it is not communicable.

E. A. Costa 30 October, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua

La Bala (Salomón de la Selva)

La bala

La bala que me hiera
será bala con alma.
El alma de esa bala
será como sería
la canción de una rosa
si las flores cantaran
o el olor de un topacio
si las piedras olieran,
o la piel de una música
si nos fuese posible
tocar a las canciones
desnudas con las manos.

Si me hiere el cerebro
me dirá: yo buscaba
sondear tu pensamiento.

Y si me hiere el pecho
me dirá: ¡Yo quería
decirte que te quiero!

Salomón de la Selva

The Bullet

The bullet that wounds me
will be a bullet with soul.
The soul of the bullet will be
as might be the song of a rose
if flowers could sing,
or the smell of a topaz
if stones had fragrance,
or the skin of music
if it were possible for us
to touch songs stripped bare
with our hands.



If it smashes into my brain
it will tell me: I was trying to sound out
your thought.


If it wounds me in the heart
it will tell me: I wanted to tell you
it is you I long for.


Tr. E. A. Costa 28 October, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua

[Original photo EAC. Click on image to enlarge]

Is Life Evaporation?

Is life evaporation?

Do we savor the odor

of the sun?

Or do we sublimate

into the light

and so

again

obliterate

time,

falling

like rain

on

the sea.

E. A. Costa October 6, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua 

Storm In Far Country Recently Electrificated

Drops on tin

hardly heard—then

torrents and grumbling thunder,

bulls bellowing madly under the metal roof,

cows lowing mercy.

In the murmuring grow rivulets

scowling with flashes of lightning.

The night thirsts for fear.

The corrugated roof

screeches and howls

for seeming hours,

for the sin of protection

or for the arrogance of its erection?

A drip begins by the bed.

Diminution is showers

ungrowing slowly--

what weatherman called them light or heavy?

The rest of the night

is soaking rain with no run off.

City falls uneasily to sleep.

The peasants dream of pigs and chickens and geese

fattened on rice and beans.

E. A. Costa October 4, 2014  Granada, Nicaragua

Lake Möbius (Lago Möbius)

                 “Words can be like X-rays if you use

                  them properly -- they’ll go through anything."

                                                                       (Aldous Huxley)

Greatest among rivers

is River Ocean

which winds up and down

around the world

layered in seven spheres

through which shines

the cold indifferent moon....

Lago Möbius

                   “Words can be like X-rays if you use

                     them properly -- they’ll go through anything."

                                                                            (Aldous Huxley)

El mayor entre los ríos

es Río Océano que serpentea

arriba y abajo alrededor

del mundo estratificado

en siete esferas por las cuales

brilla la luna fría y indiferente....

E. A. Costa 19 September 2014, Granada, Nicaragua

Haïku Deleuze

In the beginning
all there was was difference
from which rose same names....

E. A .Costa  9 September 2014, Granada, Nicaragua

Columbus, Freud and Nietzsche

                   

                     El ánimo que piensa en lo que puede temer,

                     empieza a temer en lo que puede pensar.

                                                      Francisco de Quevedo

Freud is very much like Columbus, who uncovered for Europe a putatively “new” world but had little idea what the uncovery was exactly.

The idea that Columbus’ advocacy of a spherical earth was revolutionary is nonsense. A spherical earth, for example, is implicit in both Copernicus and Galileo, whether or not baldly stated, and it is also implicit in Kepler.

Moreover, behind them all is the ancient proposition of the Pythagoreans that the earth must be spherical.

None of this was new.

Columbus, Genoese navigator, innovates only in what he intends to gain by his proposition—namely, the ability to sail around the globe and open up the trade with the Far East that the Venetians had monopolized through their dealings with the Saracens, Turks and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In some key sense Columbus is merely a marine Marco Polo.

In practical terms, besides his ability to enlist the Spanish Crown in his project, he had the skills, as did Freud, of a master dead reckoner.

So Freud, who in dreams uncovered a supposed “unconscious” that had indirect access to consciousness through language, uncovered very little new about either dreams or “the unconscious” except insofar as he intended to exploit his new world “scientifically”, partly for his own advancement as a psychiatrist, and partly—so he clearly thought—in the interests both of self-knowledge and of that same “science”.

Freud, then, is the repressed and supposedly scientifically trained man uncovering a “new world” of seeming irrationality that includes his own deeper mind.

Even in modern dress, however, most of what Freud uncovered about what was not taken as “conscious” is already in Nietzsche, though Nietzsche is not particularly interested in the dream state as a primary means of circumnavigating the new mind.

Indeed, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche uncovers the irrational element--among the very inventors of logos--in drama, ritual, and religion, all of which are a kind of external unconscious.

It  is enormously interesting that, as Lacan saw, Freud envisaged the object of his study, “the mind”, as a spherical surface—very much like Columbus’ globe.

What Freud uncovered, as Lacan also saw, he misnamed as clumsily as Columbus misnamed his “new” world, using as he did grammatical categories for psychic realities that are not only the substrate of natural language but pre-existent to it.

Moreover, Freud consciously or unconsciously depreciated Nietzsche as his great precursor and as the inventor of the new psychology while using ancient Greek figures like Oedipus to name his supposed elaborations of what he uncovered.

Why he did this is still somewhat of a mystery.

The most plausible explanation is that Freud, overimpressed by the “method” in which he had been trained, could not easily see Nietzsche, philosopher and philologist, and self-described "pyschologist", as his predecessor in anything Freud was prepared to call “scientific”.

Giving Freud all due credit for having, like Columbus, the perseverance to sail into an unknown continent, one also must emphasize that the new world, though Freud himself could not see it, was at once very ancient and also in the modern age the previous uncovery of Nietzsche.

It is in this context that among the French, it is Gilles Deleuze who is the true innovator philosophically in his more conscious reinvestment in Nietzsche both as predecessor to Freud—thus Lacan—and also as the channel to an ancient world that has been there all along logically, epistemologically and philosophically among the ancient Greeks, who exist previous to Hegel and Marx, and who enter the latter part of the Twentieth Century as the de-ideologizing of politics and economics by psychological insight, as perpetrated so brilliantly also by Herbert Marcuse.

Even Deleuze’s Rabelaisianism, which seems very French and modern and thoroughly grotesque (thus”unclassical”) is indirectly also a return, mediated by Nietzsche, to the same Dionysian Greeks.

E. A. Costa 2010- August 2014 Durham, North Carolina

Metamorphoses (Nerudesque)

          When an extra finger is added,

           to gnaw it off makes you cry out

           in pain....

                                             Chuang Tzu

Is it impertinent to ask

why moths fly to flames?

Do they confuse the lantern

under a basket with the sun?

Or is it just a matter of

misunderstanding names?

Why don't they wake early in the morning

from a fantastic dream and fly straight

into sunrise to become butterflies?

Do owls recall when they were

simple-minded eagles and unwise?

Do bats dream of being mice?

And amoebas—do they dream

of being twice-born?

The unicorn—does he or she

have nightmares under a rack

of antlers?

So with the polar bear.

Is it some boring bruin

who followed the bright ice

north growing waterwings?

Or under all the whiteness

is just some grizzled fright

who one Spring night neglected
to awake from dreams of ice cream
and seal-flavored popsicles?

E. A. Costa 24 May 2014 Granada, Nicaragua

The Impossible Black Tulip/ El tulipán negro imposible

利瑪竇

You,

longbeard most admired

among the big noses:

stand here with us

at the center,

at the midpoint of the quicunx.

you,

longbeard most admired

among the big noses:

you,

impossible like the black tulip

and yet exist with us here at the center...friend.

El tulipán imposible negro

利瑪竇

Tú,

de barba larga,

el más admirado

entre las narices grandes:

Tú,

estás de pie aquí con nosotros en el centro,

en el punto medio del quincunce.

Tú,

de barba larga,

el más admirado

entre las narices grandes:

Tú,

imposible como el tulipán negro

y aún existes en el centro con nosotros--amigo.

E. A. Costa  17 mayo 2014 Granada, Nicaragua