The Melancholy Korean

Drawing by Eden Gallanter

Standing
Her precisely
Incisive, steel-tempered
Saber, on the precipice, she whispers
‘I do’

Winter Storm

Lips to kiss the snowflake
(Unreliable forecast)
Wake to lonely daybreak

Part 3

Soulevons la paille
Regardons la neige
Écrivons des lettres
Attendons des ordres

Fumons la pipe
En songeant à l’amour
Les gabions sont là
Regardons la rose

La fontaine n’a pas tari
Pas plus que l’or de la paille ne s’est terni
Regardons l’abeille
Et ne songeons pas à l’avenir

Regardons nos mains
Qui sont la neige
La rose et l’abeille
Ainsi que l’avenir

Let’s lift up the straw
And look at the snow
And write some letters
Let’s wait for orders

We’ll smoke our pipes
And dream of love
The gabions are there
Let’s gaze at the rose

The fountain hasn’t dried up
Any more than the straw’s gold has dulled
Let’s look at the bee
But we’ll not dream of the future

Let’s stare at our hands
For they are the snow
The rose and the bee
As well as the future

To P.

Her name rhymes
With “leonine,”

Her lines, feminine,
Growing serpentine
Recall uncoiled Brandywine

Of Pennsylvania.
In memoria:
Abandoned Philadelphia!
Howe Triumphant!

So the headline’s announcement.

When their regiment
(Of the nasty British)
As the battle finished,

The city, Brotherly
Love, approached,
It was their discovery,
The city: undefended.

So now your lesson
Is ended.
You may have guessed
How she’d captured
My heart — unoccupied —
Was similar: surprise.

Part 2

James Joyce:

—Fudge! said Heron. Ask Dedalus. Who is the greatest writer, Dedalus?

Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:

—Of prose do you mean?

—Yes.

—Newman, I think.

John Henry Newman:

I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans… I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of the material world.

Hegel:

Winckelmann, by contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients, received a sort of inspiration, through which he opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit.

Walter Pater:

The old man would have had him study theology. Winckelmann, free of the master’s library, chooses rather to become familiar with the Greek classics. Herodotus and Homer win, with their “vowelled” Greek, his warmest enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are devoted to them; disturbing dreams of an Odyssey of his own come to him. ‘He felt in himself,’ says Madame de Staël, “an ardent attraction towards the south. In German imaginations even now traces are often to be found of that love of the sun, that weariness of the north (cette fatigue du nord) which carried the northern peoples away into the countries of the south. A fine sky bring to birth sentiments not unlike the love of one’s Fatherland.”

Part 1

Paul Fussell:

In the appraisal of poetry an axiom perhaps generally accepted is that, given a poetic subject and treatment that “work” — that is, that stand a good chance of engaging repeatedly the best wits of a good reader—and given the benefits of an accurate taste in the contrivance and disposition of its metaphors, a poem stands a chance of attaining greater success and permanence the nearer it approaches absolute economy and absolute coherence of the parts that comprise it. What is wanted is the closest possible approximation of absolute density.

Pound:

His true Penelope was Flaubert
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair

Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Peggy Guggenheim, photographed by Man Ray, Paris, 1922.

Horace:

pone me pigris ubi nulla campis
arbor aestiva recreatur aura,
quod latus mundi nebulae malusque
     Iuppiter urget;

pone sub curru nimium propinqui
solis in terra domibus negata:
dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo,
     dulce loquentem.

Set me on the lifeless plains where no tree
revives under the summer breeze, a region of
the world over which hover mists and a
gloomy sky;

set me beneath the chariot of the
sun where it draws too near the earth, in a
land denied for dwellings! I will love my
sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking Lalage.

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Duchess of Leeds (nee Irma Amelia de Malkhozouny) photo by Norman Parkinson        But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

photo by Norman Parkinson        Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run. 

(Marvell)

Part 2

‘Unavailable for more than friendship’

Eden Gallanter, Princess of Sticks

‘Preoccupied’

Eden Gallanter, Queen of Cups

Married

Eden Gallanter, Queen of Swords

To B.

Deinde considerandum est de amicitia. Whether it is possible for us to be friends?

Ad primum sic proceditur. It would seem, given our mutual interests, we should remain friends. Friendships are formed around activities and shared reflections on those activities. We like similar activities. Therefore, friendship is possible.

Praeterea, everything happens for a reason. Our recent geographic propinquity was not accidental. Therefore, continued friendship is possible and has been universally ordained.

Praeterea, time heals all wounds, both feelings of rejection and desire. Therefore, given enough time, friendship is possible.

Sed contra as Harry Burns says (Harry Met Sally, Rob Reiner director, 1989) “What I’m saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.”

Respondeo your beauty is a loaded gun pointed at my soul. Is it fair, or possible, to ask the shopkeeper to treat an armed robber like one of his regular customers? 

Ad primum ergo dicendum activities are not done by blind robots. I am neither blind nor dead. 

Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.

Harry Burns: No you don’t.

Sally Albright: Yes I do.

Harry Burns: No you don’t.

Sally Albright: Yes I do.

Harry Burns: You only think you do.

Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?

Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.

Sally Albright: They do not.

Harry Burns: Do too.

Sally Albright: They do not.

Harry Burns: Do too.

Sally Albright: How do you know?

Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.

Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?

Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ‘em too.

Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?

Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.

Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.

Harry Burns: I guess not.

Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.  

Ad secundum dicendum Our geographic propinquity is temporary. I leave for Paris within the year.

Ad tertium dicendum Physical beauty may decline over time, but this is not necessarily true, or, in your case, likely. However, beauty is only partly determined by physical form. The rest is indestructible and not subject to the ravages of time. In other words, time cannot rust, or decompose, or destroy, the gun pointed at my soul. Therefore, friendship is impossible. 

To B.

The Pearl

Your name calls forth the phrase
My lips ablaze
To kiss:
Ser una perla
Della mia anima

Upon your shell, you did amaze—
Alas, my gaze
Can’t miss:
Sempre cara
Mi la tua bellezza

Your hair, to memory’s foggy haze:
Kinch, the knife-blade.

To A.

Amandus, A, Um

An ending sound
In Latin seals
The meaning, thus:

The first, we start:
Amandus Est
‘He must be loved’

Of course, the last:
Amandum Est
‘It must be loved’

Not least, betwixt:
Amanda Est
Alas, alas,
Alas, alas!
‘She must be loved.’

Callimachus:

Ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν, οὐδὲ κελεύθωι
χαίρω τίς πολλοὺς ὧδε καὶ ὧδε φέρει,
μισέω καὶ περίφοιτον ἐρώμενον, οὐδ’ ἀπὸ κρήνης
πίνω· σικχαίνω πάντα τὰ δημόσια.

I hate the cyclic poem, nor do I take
pleasure in the road that carries many
to and fro. I abhor too the roaming
lover, and I drink not from every well.
I loathe all common things.

Lytton Strachey:

The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England.  We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existence of men. With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, that they were composed by that functionary, as the final item of his job. 

Callimachus: 

μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν

Big book, big evil

To B.

Return to Sender

I give away the heart of my desire.
The question at her feet is lain:
Will she accept this token of love’s lyre?

The one who lit first sparks of flaming fire,
To you — Kitty — who in my soul remain,
I gave away the heart of my desire.

Let truth be told, do not abide the liar,
Upon reception, they ask and ask again:
Did you accept this token of love’s lyre?

Alas, upon reception, so much did you require
Alas, upon rejection, too much pain—
You threw away the heart of my desire.

But now (the gods together do conspire)
I ask, with courage having been regained:
Will she accept this token of love’s lyre?

Again, I dare to burn upon the pyre,
Again, I dare astound: Can I be sane?
I give away the heart of my desire.
Will she accept this token of love’s lyre?

Part 1

Fierce integrity

Oriana Fallaci:

Perhaps it is because I do not understand power, the mechanism by which men or women feel themselves invested or become invested with the right to rule over others and punish them if they do not obey. Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. I may be mistaken but the earthly paradise did not end on the day that Adam and Eve were told by God that from now on they would work by the sweat of their brows and bring forth children in sorrow. It ended on the day that they realized that they had a master who tried to keep them from eating an apple, and, driven out over an apple, placed themselves at the head of a tribe where it was even forbidden to eat pork. Of course, to live in a group requires a governing authority; otherwise there is chaos. But the most tragic side of the human condition seems to me precisely that of needing an authority to govern, a chief. One can never know where a chief’s power begins and ends; the only sure thing is that you cannot control him and that he kills your freedom. Worse: he is the bitterest demonstration that absolute freedom does not exist, has never existed, cannot exist. Even if it is necessary to behave as though it existed and to look for it. Whatever the price.

I feel I should warn the reader how much I am convinced of this, and also that apples are born to be picked, that meat can even be eaten on Friday. Still more to remind him or her that, to the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality. I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the holy way to use the miracle of having been born. I have always looked on the silence of those who do not react or who indeed applaud as the real death of a woman or a man. And listen: for me the most beautiful monument to human dignity is still the one I saw on a hill in the Peloponnesus. It was not a statue, it was not a flag, but three letters that in Greek signify No: oxi. Men thirsting for freedom had written them among the trees during the Nazi-Fascist occupation, and for thirty years that No had remained there, unfaded by the sun or rain. Then the colonels had obliterated it with a stroke of whitewash. But immediately, almost magically, the sun and rain had dissolved the whitewash. So that day by day the three letters reappeared on the surface, stubborn, desperate, indelible.

L + B

Loneliness and bitterness, two pairs of a pea,
Separated at birth but reunited by Chance,
Give meaning to life — that’s with a small ‘c’ —
Loneliness and bitterness, two pairs of a pea,
Give depth to our soul, but I’d like to see
The difference in France.
Loneliness and bitterness, two pairs of a pea,
Separated at birth but reunited by Chance.

Silent, faithful, naked

“Being with you — I realize now I am a lesbian.”

“I am unavailable for more than friendship.”

“Take me out of your address book.”

“I don’t date.” 

Email subject title: “Personal Growth”

Taller

Thinner

More attractive

Less intelligent