Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Jack Scott writes

A Pet of Poetry

Love,

a pet of poetry, 
now limps within vocabulary 
as, within canebrake, 
aging herpetologist, 
forsakes rattlesnake 
for safety’s comfort. 
I speak too soon; 
I speak in haste. 
I should speak slowly 
of coming waste: 
- of love, 
-of poetry, 
-of vocabulary. 
There is plenty of rattlesnake.
 Image result for rattlesnake paintings
Rattlesnake Medusa -- Bill Flowers

1 comment:

  1. In an ode written in 490 BCE Pindaros wrote of "fair-cheeked Medusa." Centuries later Publius Ovidius Naso described her as "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," including Poseidon, who raped her in Minerva's temple. In retaliation, Minerva transformed Medusa's beautiful hair into serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. This was done either in rage against Medusa or to protect her against other men. In some modern interpretations, efforts to avoid looking into her eyes represent the refusal to recognize that the universe is meaningless. For instance, in 1914 Jack London wrote in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore, "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie." (In Indian philosophy Maya embodied the concept of "illusion" or "magic" and represented both that which exists but is constantly changing and is thus spiritually unreal, and also the principle that conceals the true character of spiritual reality.) From another perspective, as Sigmund Freud articulated it in his posthumous "Das Medusenhaupt” (Medusa's Head), her decapitation by Perseus equaled castration. “The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother."

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