The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.
Lady Luck. Serendipity. Fluke. Whatever you want to call it, when I found my idea for today's story it was a remarkable moment. And thank god I sat down to look for something a few days ago and didn't do what I usually do and wait until Monday morning. Looking for an idea, I checked my Bartlett's, but was unprepared for the coincidence--the GLBT coincidence--I'd find.
Under details, Bartlett's had only two citations: the first, God is in the details, by Anonymous, and the 5-line poem with its: I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,/with so many incidents, so many details.
The poet is gay icon Constantine Cavafy, known today in GLBT circles for his homoerotic poetry. To be fair, though, only a portion of Cavafy's work is homoerotic. Virtually unpublished in his lifetime, Cavafy is today regarded as one of the great European poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Constantine Cavafy died in 1933 at the age of 70. Born to Greek parents in the Egyptian port-city of Alexandria, Cavafy lived the entirety of his life closeted. His poetry was introduced to the English-speaking world by his friend and then equally closeted writer E.M. Forster. Forster, though, who died in 1970 at 91, managed in his last years to emerge some from the closet. Cavafy, dying 1933, wasn't so lucky.
A prolific writer, Cavafy drew heavily from classical history, Greek and Hellenistic. History, and Cavafy's home Alexandria with its own rich history, serve as metaphor for the whole of the human experience.
First this--to make today seem a little less like a grad seminar in poetry:
It's not a trick, your senses all deceiving,
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust -
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.
This is not Cavafy. This is another of my heroes: Leonard Cohen. Cohen transformed Cavafy's poem, The God Abandons Antony, into a somewhat autobiographical love song, changing Alexandria to Alexandra. In the Cavafy poem ...
Anthony is Marc Antony, Cleopatra's lover. The story goes when Alexandria was besieged, the night before the city fell, Antony dreamed he heard an invisible troupe leaving the city. He awoke the next morning to find that his soldiers had in fact deserted him--which Antony took to mean even the god Dionysus, his protector, had abandoned him. The poem has many layers of meaning beyond the historical. Most say it's about facing up to great loss: lost loves, lost dreams, lost opportunities--ultimately, of course, life itself.
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don't mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with cowardly pleas and protests;
listen--as a last pleasure--to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
I'd wondered whether a poetry sampler was appropriate stuff for Storytellers. It's hardly run-of-the-mill memoir ("Then in 1988 this happened to me ... "), but as a taste of some of the poetry I like, it qualifies, I think, as memoir-light.
But, you're thinking, what about those homoerotic poems? I'll give you a sample of two of Cavafy's shorter homoerotic poems. Now, neither one is going to make you go, Oh my God how could someone write that? --but consider when these were written. Cavafy's homoerotic poems, mild as they may seem to us today, do evoke the stifling repression that made emotional cripples of men like Cavafy and Forster.
He lost him completely. And he now tries to find
his lips in the lips of each new lover,
he tries in the union with each new lover
to convince himself that it’s the same young man,
that it’s to him he gives himself.
He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
He wanted, his lover said, to save himself
from the tainted, unhealthy form of sexual pleasure,
the tainted, shameful form of sexual pleasure.
There was still time, he said, to save himself.
He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
Through fantasy, through hallucination,
he tries to find his lips in the lips of other young men,
he longs to feel his kind of love once more.
Tame, no, by what we're used to? But the works of kindred spirits like those of Constantine Cavafy and E.M. Forster--written only a few generations ago--remind us of how much we've to be thankful for today.
That last poem is called In Despair. This:
At the Next Table
He must be barely twenty-two years old—
yet I’m certain that almost that many years ago
I enjoyed the very same body.
It isn’t erotic fever at all.
And I’ve been in the casino for a few minutes only,
so I haven’t had time to drink a great deal.
I enjoyed that very same body.
And if I don’t remember where, this one lapse of memory
doesn’t mean a thing.
There, now that he’s sitting down at the next table,
I recognize every motion he makes—and under his clothes
I see again those beloved naked limbs.
I'll end with a cut of one of Cavafy's best-known poems Ithaka. You can find a YouTube video of Sean Connery reading Ithaka. "Since Homer's Odyssey . . . [and I shoplifted this from a Cavafy website] . . . Since Homer's Odyssey, the island, Ithaca, symbolizes the destination of a long journey, the supreme aim that every man tries to fulfill all his life long . . . "
As you set out for Ithaka
hope that your journey is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare sensation
touches your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so that you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would have not set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
About the Author
No comments:
Post a Comment