Peter Dale Scott
from:
MOSAIC OF ORPHEUS: Five Canadian Poems
HOLY LAND II: FORCE
La vraie civilisation n'est pas dans le gaz….
--- Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 153
From some deep instinct roused
by the shock of a kindly man
muttering softly but intently
as we drive from the shell-pocked city
to the mosaic of Orpheus
gently charming the birds
in the ruins of Sephoris Zippori
where Judeo-Christians healed Renan History of the Origins V
the Mishnah was compiled
and until 1948
the Crusader tower
was an Arab school
the Americans should have taken all their planes
and flattened Mecca…
and the shock of my silence
I am absurdly obsessed
by my gaffe two decades ago
at the radical chic party
for Astorga the Sandinista Nora Astorga
guerrillera and UN ambassador
(with connections to the powerful
Somoza family)
by then pale with terminal cancer
but still beautiful
who quit her safe career
as a corporate lawyer
having finally been convinced
that a rifle
cannot be met with a flower Astorga
and who professed no guilt
(He was too much of a monster) Astorga
when the Somoza general
she had seduced to her apartment
resisted being kidnapped
so her comrades slit his throat.
From some wild impulse cf. Virgil Georgics 4:488
while chatting with Dekka Treuhaft Jessica Mitford
the Communist whose sister
was Duchess of Devonshire
Dekka who helped bust racist
housing covenants in Berkeley
who gave a little needed
pizzazz to our antiwar movement
and whose son Ben outwitted
the hapless State Department
with his exports to embargoed Cuba
of used pianos
I was moved to tell Dekka
how in the Cotswold graveyard
below the hilltop church
with the stained-glass windows
naming her titled parents
the very same day
I had revisited Sally’s home Sally Philipps Kavanaugh
I had stumbled incredibly
on Sally’s tomb
showing her dead at twenty-three
as if Sally my Rilkean angel
had guided me there herself
the way her mother Rosamond Lehmann
had spoken of her
in her bizarrely spiritualist book
as a corn goddess Persephone Lehmann, Swan in the Evening,101
with a sweet returning force
at which words -- Rosamond Lehmann --
Dekka turned away
with a look of what I still
vividly remember
as Communist aristocratic
anticolonial scorn.
We are mysteries to ourselves!
As to why I plagued Dekka
with Rosamond’s belief
in Sally as a revenant
which was treated solemnly
by a feminist critic Shirley Neuman Genre, Trope, Gender, 62
but by Nancy Mitford not Selina Hastings, Rosamond Lehmann, 354,
Guardian 6/8/02
I suppose what I really wanted
(assuming it was I)
was to engage her with Dante
who from the refining love
of beauty transfixed in death
wrote of a sweet new
different society
with the force of a gentle heart cor gentil
able to change the world
Dante who expounded
what love dictates within Purgatorio 24:54
and who dared to name the cause la cagion
of what makes the world wicked che’l mondo ha fatto reo
as bad government mala condotta
not nature corrupt in us Purgatorio 16:103-05
followed by Hölderlin
Schiller Marcuse
who all hoped original sin
would prove to be historical
diminished by civilization Baudelaire; Eliot; Marcuse
like Wordsworth who after
his faith was nearly broken
by the shock of the guillotine
and years of counterrevolution
claimed he himself could soften
the future -- what we have loved,
others will love, and we will teach them how Prelude 14:446-7
but facing hunger and massacre
how could one have hoped
to persuade Dekka’s rebel
aristocratic heart
with middle-class Canadian
talk of gentleness
not to mention courteous love?
Amid the senseless crowd
Dante’s hopes for empire shattered
he wrote in the end it was best
to be a party for himself cf. Paradiso 17:62, 68-69
just as H?lderlin broken-hearted
that the world had denied his freedom
died in an asylum
And now a vivid nightmare
of the counselors at my camp
gone off to some rich hotel
while those bullies long forgotten
cast my belongings about
evincing the violence
that explodes within myself
I awake relieved
to be only where I am
chastised with self-rebuke
The Tao that can be expressed
is not the true Tao…. Tao Te Ching 1
How then shall we make use
of the most incomprehensible
mystery of the universe --
that as Einstein said
it is comprehensible? Einstein 1935
If the deep structure of our mind
is somehow fitting
to the structure of the cosmos
dare we imagine our instincts
however fallible
could be somehow fitting as well
in the universe emerging
since the axial age Jaspers, Way to Wisdom 99-100
dreamt by meditators
the whole world over
all clinging tightly
to the virtue of peace Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
as our hopes whirled
in the conflicts of history
slowly become gentler
just as pebbles tossed
by the tides of the sea
surely become more smooth
to help explain how
in the throes of disaster
hatred violence madness
the world becomes more lovable (as in
the faces of the young women
who brush right by me
on their morning runs)
so that a few maintain
that all will be well Julian of Norwich, Showings 225
and others rightly or wrongly
are still willing to risk death
for love to prevail?
Mosaic Orpheus
in the House of the Nile
gently charming the birds
and calming tigers mulcentem tigris Virgil Georgics 4:510
with wisdom from having seen
ghosts driven like leaves
in the gusts of a wintry gale
with great Caesar once again
on the Euphrates Virgil Georgics 4:560-61
I write of a trivial wrong
and bless that kindly man
who helped me recognize
in the light beyond all words
the world can what it can
Haifa 11/14/07
