Saturday, September 10, 2022

The Art of the Footnote: Ted Hughes and the Breughelesque Nightmare Vagina

Image from page 572 of "Brehm's Life of animals: 
A complete natural history for popular home instruction and for the use of schools. Mammalia" (1896)


 Once in a great while, I come across a writer who employs footnotes in the same manner as those Spanish masons who built cathedrals: to "show how insane with God" they were. Angus Fletcher comes to mind. David Foster Wallace. There is an art of the footnote - sometimes a terse apothegm, other times a great beast that runs along several pages - the side creek threatening to swamp the river. So it was I was reading Ted Hughes' Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which makes much of the Goddess and the Boar, and discovered one of the finest footnotes I have ever read. It is pure carnal poetry:

The Boar's peculiarly hermaphroditic nature is almost universally recognized in mythology. This presumably derives from our long and intimate acquaintance with the unique bodily character of this most impressive, dangerous, fascinating and human of the animals that are both domesticated and hunted. As a matriarch equally well known, the cow has been given the benign, spiritual role of the nursing mother. But the sow has attracted different associations. Her combination of gross whiskery nakedness and riotous carnality is seized by the mythic imagination, evidently, as a sort of uterus on the loose - upholstered with breasts, not so much many-breasted as a mobile tub entirely made of female sexual parts, a woman-sized, multiple udder on trotters. Most alarming of all is that elephantine, lolling mouth under her great ear-flaps, like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with over-production, famous for gobbling her piglets, magnified and shameless, exuberantly omnivorous and insatiable, swamping the senses. This sow has supplanted all other beasts as the elemental mother (even Zeus was born of a sow, even Demeter, Mother of lacchos/Dionysus and Persephone, was a sow (ct.page 73)). But she fulfills an ambiguous lunar role. Her variable dark part is sinister, not only because she incorporates more shocking physical familiarity, more radical enterprise, more rapturous appetite, cruder travesties of infantile memory, wilder nostalgias, than the cow, but because she is inseparable from the lethal factor of the Boar, who carries the same vaginal grin yet is prodigiously virile - that same swinging, earth-searching, root-ripping mouth but equipped with moon-sickle tusks - and who incarnates the most determined, sudden and murderous temperament. (As a country boy, and the nephew of several farmers, Shakespeare enjoyed a familiarity with pigs that is not irrelevant to his myth. The imagination’s symbols are based on subliminal perception. The male, aphrodisiac, pheromone scent spray, sold in modern sex shops, is commonly based on a hormone extract from the wild boar.) This figure of the Boar has assimilated the magical birth-source of the Sow to create a symbol that emerges, in a man's eyes, from everything about female sexuality that is awesome, alien, terrifying and "beyond' the reaches of his soul. So the Boar becomes the animal form of the Queen of Hell, the Black Witch, the Terrible Mother, bringing the crippling wound in the thigh, wherever he enters man's fantasy. In his role in this myth of the god who dies for and by the Goddess, and who is reborn to destroy her, he appears at the centre of religious mysteries, and Shakespeare could have found him, in the same role, as easily in England (for instance, as the Twrch Trwyth, the terrible Boar King, who is hunted through the Celtic world in the great Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen) as in classical mythology (see page 465.)

Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Great Being, p 11.  

Sunday, April 17, 2022

A Litany for What Is Lost

Skull SouthPop BJones
Photo by B. Jones


Some say there were 500 Buddhas Before The Buddha -

That the Buddha was just the one

Who chose to make himself known. 500 Jesuses. 500 Platos. 500 Lao Tzus.


And no Buddha

Ever wrote down a single word. Neither did Jesus

(Well, once in the dust.

But no one ever read it.) Neither did Socrates.


Most of what we have of Aristotle

Are mere lecture notes from his students.

All of his dialogues are lost. All of them. Cicero said,

“They were Rivers of Gold

When compared with Plato's Rivers of Silver”.


Imagine it:


500 Giottos placidly painting houses.

500 Beethovens humming happily to themselves.

500 Shakespeares whispering sonnets only into a solitary lover's ear.


If not for the efforts of Heminge and Condell,

It’s unlikely we would have much Shakespeare at all.

If Thomas Thorpe had not disregarded Shakespeare's intentions, There’d be no Sonnets.

What we have of the entirety of Elizabethan Drama

Is about one sixth of the more than 3000 plays.


The litany goes on:

Fires and the desires of the dying

Have nearly consumed much beauty:

If not for Augustus defying Virgil’s deathbed wish,

The Aeneid would’ve been burned.

Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls.

Lavinia Dickinson elected to not burn her sister’s poems. Kafka burned most of his work during his lifetime

And asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn the rest. Brod betrayed his friend’s last wish.


What remains,

What we have

Are the merest fragments, fractions, scattered remnants, 

Of the radiance and luminance of human artifact.


We know only those few

Who have come out of the Wood, 

Out of the Wilderness,

Out of the Desert.


More often than not,

What has come down to us,

What we know,

Has made it only by the slightest twists of Fate.


Recently, the story was told

Of the rediscovery of Lucretius' On The Nature of Things. 

If Poggio Bracciolini had not been the right person,

In the right place at the right time

And in the graces of rightest of luck,

It could have easily been otherwise.


Without Lucretius,

A critical catalyst for the Renaissance 

Would have been absent.


Lucretius -

Student of Epicurus,

Disciple of Democritus. 

Lucretius brings me to my point.


I was reading a book on Quantum Theory

Which contained a list of all the lost works of Democritus. 

Not a single work of his survives.


All we know of Democritus

Is through fragments, quotations in other’s writings. 

(Mostly now, in spirit, through Lucretius.)


 To read over that list of what has been lost, is to ache...


Democritus was one of the most influential intellectual figures In the ancient world.

Most now know him best from Natural Philosophy: Everything is made of atoms.

But in his time,

His influence in was profound.

It has been suggested that

If Democritus' works had survived,

His teachings would have eclipsed Plato And reshaped the influence of Christianity.


Regardless, the list of his lost works Is beautiful and sad,

Utterly tantalizing to the imagination. It is its own sort of poem.

Our own Canticle for Leibowitz.


The Lost Works of Democritus


Ethics

Pythagoras

On the Disposition of the Wise Man On the Things in Hades

Tritogenia

On Manliness or On Virtue

The Horn of Amaltheia

On Contentment

Ethical Commentaries


Natural science

The Great World-ordering (may have been written by Leucippus) Cosmography

On the Planets

On Nature

On the Nature of Man or On Flesh (two books) On the Mind

On the Senses

 On Flavours

On Colours

On Different Shapes On Changing Shape Buttresses

On Images

On Logic (three books)


Nature

Heavenly Causes

Atmospheric Causes

Terrestrial Causes

Causes Concerned with Fire and Things in Fire Causes Concerned with Sounds

Causes Concerned with Seeds and Plants and Fruits Causes Concerned with Animals (three books) Miscellaneous Causes

On Magnets


Mathematics

On Different Angles or On contact of Circles and Spheres On Geometry

Geometry

Numbers

On Irrational Lines and Solids (two books) Planispheres

On the Great Year or Astronomy (a calendar) Contest of the Waterclock

Description of the Heavens Geography

Description of the Poles Description of Rays of Light


Literature

On the Rhythms and Harmony

On Poetry

On the Beauty of Verses

On Euphonious and Harsh-sounding Letters On Homer

On Song

 On Verbs Names


Technical works

Prognosis

On Diet

Medical Judgment

Causes Concerning Appropriate and Inappropriate Occasions On Farming

On Painting

Tactics

Fighting in Armor


Commentaries

On the Sacred Writings of Babylon On Those in Meroe Circumnavigation of the Ocean On History

Chaldaean Account

Phrygian Account

On Fever and Coughing Sicknesses Legal Causes

Problems