It's a magical world

Happy Birthday to recessional!

And Happy Birthday and Deathday to WS, the onlie begetter. Really given my druthers I would just repost Sonnet 107 ad infinitum, or more precisely to the grave, but novelty is the soul of fashion, and so we must on. Despite the fact that I have read the entire sonnet sequence at least three times, I had a really hard time choosing this year, until I remembered 81--


Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
     You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
     Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.


Previous sonnets: 107, 77, 56, 65.

Space-Faring Tradition

Holds that there is naught
Between the stars, but the void
Tells other stories.

I read this aloud in lecture last month, because it was my lecture and I got to do whatever I wanted. It's stuck in my mind since then. Philip Pullman fans may recognize this passage as one of the epigraphs to The Amber Spyglass.

This past spring, history—in the shape of a Navy SEAL team—seemed to provide the era with some closing punctuation. The death of bin Laden, coupled with the events of the Arab Spring, augured at least the possibility of a new age. Violent Islamism no longer seemed inevitable or indomitable. Events in North Africa and the Middle East promised, at the very least, a powerful alternative to both stagnant authoritarian governments and Islamist terror. There is no doubt that great struggles lie ahead—struggles among and within liberal modernity, religious fundamentalism, tribalism, and remnants of the old regimes—but little hope of human liberty ever resided with the regimes of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, or Muammar Qaddafi, to say nothing of Bashar al-Assad, the Iranian mullahs, or, indeed, the Saudi royals.

But, for all the recent moments of promise, this tenth anniversary is a marker, not an end. It is a time to commemorate, consider, and reconsider. A decade later, we pay tribute to the resilience of ordinary people in the face of appalling destruction. We remember the dead and, with them, the survivors, the firemen and the police, the nurses and the doctors and the spontaneous, instinctive volunteers, the myriad acts of courage and kindness. A decade later, we also continue to reckon not only with the violence that bin Laden inflicted but with the follies, the misjudgments, and the violence that, directly or indirectly, he provoked—the acts of government deception, illegal domestic surveillance, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced interrogation,” waterboarding.

-- David Remnick, "When the Towers Fell", The New Yorker

---

Or, have this poem, by way of kaigou:


Martín Espada: "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100"
for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with the shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

( Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,/like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. )

---

Every September, without fail, no matter where I am, these blue skies and a certain cast of light make me think, "World Trade Center weather," and if the skies aren't blue, I think how they're not World Trade Center weather--and I wasn't even there. But I was closer than most other people around the world, close enough to resent the appropriation of those events and their meaning personally, however absurd that may seem. If the past ten years are any indication of what memory, unchecked, can do, no, I don't want to remember. But I can't forget, and even if I could, no, I wouldn't want to do that either. I hope it rains in New York on Sunday; it will make no difference. Memory is dangerous, but history--what we tell ourselves about the past--is no less perilous.

Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.

For this week, at least.

Fushimi Inari: 233m (K: "I didn't realize we were going to be climbing a mountain today!" Me: "You should always expect to randomly climb a mountain with me in Japan!")
Konpira-san: 538m to the inner shrine

I should mention that both of these climbs took place in 33ºC+ heat.

Sanuki udon is delicious. No one is surprised. The ride over the Seto Ôhashi on JR is also gorgeous (but not for the agoraphobic).

---

Kobe always reminds me of Gondor:

Kobe! Kobe, between the mountains and the sea!
Salt breeze blew there; the aroma from the bakeries
Filled Sannomiya like incense in the days of old.
O wedding halls! Harbor tower! O Mt. Rokko and the cable car!
O Kobe, Kobe! Shall I there eat delicious bread,
Or salt breeze blow again between the mountains and the sea?

Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.

I just finished watching Avatar: The Last Airbender with unjapanologist. HOW SO AWESOME, SHOW!? I just want it to go on forever and ever and ever, amen. At least Legend of Korra comes out (sometime) next year… I will have more to say at some point.

On the walk back to the subway I made up a completely unrelated poem.

Kyoto at night
The wind rustles the rice fields
Between frogs and stars.

It's metrical if you pronounce the long vowel in 'Kyoto.'

Happy birthday, recessional!

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Not exactly the most festal sonnet, but still one of my absolute favorites--I had to do a project on this one and recite it to the class in high school, and it's actually way more clever than it looks on first read.

It was either this or 72, which manages to be a lament and a string of sexual puns at the same time. And that is why Shakespeare is, 400 years later, still the best. Happy birthday, WS!

Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste;
The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear,
And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste.
The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know
Time's thievish progress to eternity.
Look what thy memory cannot contain,
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
     These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,
     Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.

My mother died two years ago today. All day I've felt like I have nothing to say about it, caught between the feeling that I should feel more and the realization that, if I am not reconciled to her loss, I've become used to it in the past year in a way that I don't feel like I quite was before. And frankly I'm not sure I like that use. My mother would be fifty-nine right now; when I think about how I've lived nearly ten percent of my life without her already, and my younger sister even more, I just…no, I don't understand in any but the most superficial sense, and I don't think there is anything to understand.

By way of a tribute to my mother, here is my translation of Catullus 65, which the poet sends to his friend Hortalus as an accompaniment to his translation of some lines of Callimachus (Battides in the poem), one of the great Hellenistic poets whose work is mostly lost and whose influence Republican poets are thought to have felt greatly. Those lines are poem 66, one of Catullus' epyllions ('little epic'). Catullus' brother apparently died near Troy and was buried there; the poet visited his grave before composing poem 101. 'The Daulian' is Philomela, who killed their son Itylus in revenge for her husband Tereus' rape of her sister Procne; Zeus changed Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale so that they might escape Tereus' wrath. 'The learned maidens' in line 2 are the Muses, mentioned by name in the next line. The disjuncture of the simile that closes the poem is intentionally so, in the classic style of the Homeric simile.


Etsi me assiduo confectum cura dolore
  sevocat a doctis, Hortale, virginibus,
nec potis est dulcis Musarum expromere fetus
  mens animi, tantis fluctuat ipsa malis—
namque mei nuper Lethaeo in gurgite fratris
  pallidulum manans alluit unda pedem,
Troia Rhoeteo quem subter litore tellus
  ereptum nostris obterit ex oculis.
  numquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,
aspiciam posthac? at certe semper amabo,
  semper maesta tua carmina morte canam,
qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris
  Daulias, absumpti fata gemens Ityli--
sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto
  haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae,
ne tua dicta vagis nequiquam credita ventis
  effluxisse meo forte putes animo,
ut missum sponsi furtivo munere malum
  procurrit casto virginis e gremio,
quod miserae oblitae molli sub veste locatum,
  dum adventu matris prosilit, excutitur,
atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,
  huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor.


Although being worn out by persistent painful distress
Summons me away, Hortalus, from the learned maidens,
It is not possible to expel the fruit of the sweet Muses
From my mind: it surges like a wave itself from such great evils--
For the running wave from the raging abyss
Of Lethe has recently washed my brother's pale foot,
Whom the Trojan earth crushes beneath
The Rhotean shore, torn away from my sight.

Shall I never see you, brother more lovable than life,
Hereafter? But certainly I will always love you,
I shall always sing sad songs on your death,
Such as those the Daulian sings beneath the dense shadows
Of the branches, lamenting the fate of Itylus gone away--
But despite such great griefs, Hortalus, I send
These translated songs of Battides to you,
Lest you should think your words to have flowed out
By accident from my mind to restless winds,
Just as an apple that has been sent as a secret pledge
From a fiancé rolls out of a pure maiden's lap
Because, placed and forgotten beneath the wretched girl's soft robe,
While she leaps up at her mother's approach, it rolls out,
And by its headlong course she is driven, stooping,
And self-conscious blush flows over her sad face.

This is the poem I've been posting, very slowly, in the cut-text of my translation posts. Readers of Philip Pullman will recognize the last stanza as the epigraph to The Amber Spyglass.


"Worse than the sunflower," she had said.
But the new dimension of truth had only recently
Burst in on us. Now it was to be condemned.
And in vagrant shadow her mothball truth is eaten.
In cool, like-it-or-not shadow the humdrum is consumed.
Tired housewives begat it some decades ago,
A small piece of truth that is it was honey to the lips
Was also millions of miles from filling the place reserved for it.
You see how honey crumbles your universe
Which seems like an institution – how many walls?

( Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged/And soon. )

Between T.S. Eliot and my mother, I spend a lot of my time in April thinking about death, and also looking for poems to post that may or may not be related. This one definitely is--found by way of my sister last year, whose comment was, "it's kind of like that," and which I cannot better.

Let us be excellent to each other, dear readers; life is too important and too short.

---

Lenox Hill
by Agha Shahid Ali

(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery, my mother said the sirens sounded
like the elephants of Mihiragula when his men drove them off cliffs
in the Pir Panjal Range.)


The Hun so loved the cry, one falling elephant's,
he wished to hear it again. At dawn, my mother
heard, in her hospital-dream of elephants,
sirens wail through Manhattan like elephants
forced off Pir Panjal's rock cliffs in Kashmir:
the soldiers, so ruled, had rushed the elephant,
The greatest of all footprints is the elephant's,
said the Buddha. But not lifted from the universe,
those prints vanished forever into the universe,
though nomads still break news of those elephants
as if it were just yesterday the air spread the dye
("War's annals will fade into night / Ere their story die"),

( the punishing khaki whereby the world sees us die/out )