My Mother Earth

 

Who knows where I've been in the last twenty centuries?

May be I was a roman soldier

guarding the Adrian Wall

where I met a pale blue eyes blonde love

to warm my winters

to show me love is anywhere

anyhow.

and I was scattered back

on some Mediterranean  coast

groping with the Normans

a new life, which is also

and again an old life;

like that I had as Greek's slave

before my manumission

when I captured those

I had been conquered by.

And when  I'll be searching

for other worlds

far in the skies

will I remember

 my Mother Earth?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07H44DYF7

London for ever - 25

We cut off Leicester Square  and, through a maze of lanes, we hit the Trafalgar Square. We stopped at the center of the huge square, sitting on the edge of an imposing square fountain, whose tall, wide bushes at moments tickled the mouths of the four mighty stone lions that majestic delimited it at its four corners.

 The sky was cloudy and the warm sunshine dominated the great shining and cheerful square that day, as I had never seen before. Along the benches, arranged at regular intervals throughout its perimeter, some retirees were lovingly launched to hungry doves, crumbling bread crumbs or corn seeds, these bought in small bags, directly on the spot, by some street vendors.

In the sun, the many badges that Nancy, as I had found was named the pretty Irish girl, shone on the faces of his black leather jacket. In addition to the rose he had bought shortly before, there was one that depicted a sort of american-style jolly with a red tongue out; Others reported slogans of youthful movements that were in their favor. One in particular,  struck me more than any other, because it depicted a green leaflet asking for "legalize marijuana".

"Do you like to smoke?" He asked me, looking me half-eyed.

 To my assenting  answer she gave me a joint already  packed! It had a truncated-conical appearance, tapered and solid, close to the base, wider on top; it had been packaged with three cigarette papers; The base was closed by a cardboard filter; At the top it had been folded inside to prevent the contents from falling out ; His manufacturer, whoever he was, had been very skilled.

- "What is it?" I asked, smelling it.
- "It's a black Pakistani ", he replied prompting his lighter. - "It comes from Kashmir,  advanced from a party last night. It's very good, smoke it quietly! "

With a burst  of laughs I realized she was right. Smoked in  the morning, furthermore!

- "You have more badges than   the shop!" I said laughing, passing over the joint and continuing to look at his pins. - "And what is this ?! I immediately added, intrigued by a banal white brooch on which a German-language spelling out I had not even noticed before. There was  written: "Das Mütterrecht".

"Let me think about it," she said, concentrating on a complex response. - "It is the opposite of patriarchy." And she smiled, aware and amused by her strange explanation.
She continued after a further moment of reflection: - "Patriarchy is our social order, centered on the father's figure, while in the  Matriarchy the mother is the predominant social figure. 'Das Muterrecht' is to indicate a social and legal system that governed the life organized before the classics of Greece. We do not know exactly when, but before the gods we know establish their power in the world, there was another authority and another law: the natural rules  of life. This is in short the Matriarchate. "

She paused as if to realize whether I was following her speech or perhaps to give me a way to interact.

.- "Go ahead," I said, passing the joint again, "I'm following you with great interest."

25. to be continued...

Dante's Ulysses

 –  Inferno Canto XXVI-

“When I left Circe who more than a year

   retained me over there close to Gaeta

long before Aeneas came  there

 giving the place that name,

   not fondness for my son, nor pity

on my old father, nor Penelope`s claim

to the joys of conjugal love,

   could overcome  in my mind the lust

 to get  experienced of  the whole world

and  all  human faults and virtues,

   and  I turned into the large and open sea

with just one  ship and only those few comrades

who  did not desert me. 

   I saw  both shores as far as Morocco

 and as far as Spain and I saw Sardinia

and the other islands  washed by that sea.

  I and my  comrades were old  and worn

when we sailed  into the narrow pass

where Hercules rose his columns

  warning all men not to go further,

already I had left Ceuta on the left,

Seville now sank behind me on the right.

  “Comrades,” I said, “who through a hundred thousand

perils have reached the West, in the short time

we have still left of our lives

   let us   not deny  ourselves  to experience

 the uninhabited world  following the course

of the sun where it set.

   Consider your origin! You were not born

to live your lives like brutes,

but to  follow the path of virtue and knowledge!”

   With this brief exhortation I made my men

so eager for the voyage I could hardly

have held them back if I changed my mind,

   and turning our stern toward morning,

we bore southwest out of the  known world ,

making wings of our oars for our fool`s flight.

   The night  showed already   all the constellations

 of the other hemisphere and our pole

 had so declined that it did not rise out of its ocean bed.

    Five times  the  moon’s face

 had brightened  and as many time  waned

since we had started our voyage

   when   a mountain appeared to us 

so far that it  looked dark,  a peak so tall

I doubted any man had seen the like.

   We cheered  and  soon we cried

because  a whirl broke hard

upon our ship from the new land:

   three times it turned over and over the ship

 in the wave ,  at fourth the poop rose

 and the bow went down, as Somebody wished

      till the sea closed over us.”

English Translation by Angelo Ruggeri

Ulysses in the time

Ulysses is may be the best known myth of Ancient Greece. His personality has fascinated all the great writers all over the times  in the western culture from Dante to Joyce.

His original characters are depicted in the Homer's epic poems Iliad and Odyssey.

In the first, though the central role is played by monolithic epic warriors like Achilles, Agamemnon and Menelaus, emerges his cunning and his courage, jointly with his prudence and wisdom.

 In the second, where he plays an absolutely main role, hits mostly his curiosity, his bravery and craving of knowledge but also his  misfortunes and disgraces (po’lymetis and po’lytlas are the two Greek  words that connote and mark his character soon in the incipit of Homer's late masterpiece).

Ulysses, with his anxiety of knowledge, sometimes even against the Greek’s gods will, reminds in someway to the biblical account of Adam and Eve, who tasted against the God’s prohibition the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

We cannot be sure that Homer (or better the more ancient traditions that the classic fonts assign conventionally to his collection) was influenced by the direct vision of the biblical reports; but we can neither exclude it utterly, so mysterious and intricate are the contaminations between different cultures, all over the human history.

But in the Ulysses of Dante we can notice that jointing with the Greek-roman tradition, the new Jewish-Christian vision prevails on the eldest basic  characters: in the XXVI Canto of Dante’s Comedy, the immortal Greek hero doesn’t follow the knowledge at any rate, but his intentions are moved for thirst of “virtues and knowledge”. That’s what we read in the Ulysses prolusion to his mates “You were not born for living like brutes/ but for following virtues and knowledge”.

As matter of fact Dante puts his Ulysses with the cheating advisers (jointly with Diomedes) and not with the Angels rebelled against God (though we must observe that they are nevertheless very close each other, in the bottom of the horrible hell).

In other words we can say that modern western culture accepts the Dante’s vision of the Inferno’s Ulysses.

The rebellion against God is therefore reserved to Adam and Eve and to the Angels who fought against God for supremacy; Ulysses is the positive hero whose anxiety of knowledge is to be framed in the quest of God; or at least that’s the positive idea that western culture accepts unanimously now days.

This perspective of Ulysses‘ myth is also accepted by the graduated poet, the English Alfred Tennyson.

Totally opposite is instead the vision given by Irish writer James Joyce in his controversial novel Ulysses.

Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904 (conventionally the day Joyce's married  his  wife, Nora Barnacle).

The  novel establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem (Leopold Bloom corresponds  to Ulysses, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus).

Ulysses  is divided into eighteen episodes. Since publication, the book has been a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday.

It's useful to describe now the equivalence between the epic's characters and the main  subjects in the modern  Joyce's Ulysses. As everyone knows the three main characters in the Irish novel are Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus (a sort of autobiographic profile, already featuring in a previous author's novel as The portrait of an artist as a young man). The story establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the Homeric's poem:  Leopold Bloom corresponds to Odysseus, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus.

It could  have  been very  hard to find a real coincidence in the two stories (the Homeric and the Joycean) if Joyce himself had not given a precise, peculiar imprint in that direction. As matter of fact James Joyce divided his novel into 18 different episodes, each one reminding the Homeric's Ulysses events. But while the Homeric hero lives those events through a ten years journey all over the mediterranean basin, Bloom, Molly and Stephen are shown to the reader featuring all over a single day in Dublin.

We cannot correctly understand the Joyce's work, if we don't sight it in the right  frame of the  cultural background of the Joycean's times.

The Irish writer lives and creates in the same period of Picasso decomposing  reality into the cubism painting technique. In the same time that Dadaism cries out its anti-war politics through a rejection against the war and the bourgeois way of thinking and behaving both in its  political and colonialist approaches.

May be right title for the Joyce's opus could be "The hidden side of the Homeric  hero Ulysses" also considering the probable freudian influence on the literature and arts in the same Joyce's epoch.

In fact the Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, make me think that Freud’s  concepts of the conscious, primary process and dreams can help illuminate Joyce's characters.

As matter of fact, in the first two decades of the XX century, ‘the stream of consciousness’ writing  technique finds several followers, such as Marcel Proust in France and Italo Svevo in Italy (besides Joyce himself).

The great, innovative  discovery of these  three novelists, has been to  turn fiction from the external to internal reality.

Of course you might like or not Joyce’s novel (its reading being so difficult and hard, though joyful and agreeable in certain pages, where humor and nonsense prevail on the apparent leisure of the full contest),  and so,  still prefer the myth as Homer has engraved it in his unforgettable masterpiece, but Joyce’s Ulysses is already like a shadow who will follow forever the Greek myth of Odysseus.

Titus Lucretius Carus - II

Since ever manhood,  on their reflections on life,  has been wondering the reasons why we were born and the reasons why we must suffer.

Lucretius in his fith book of  " de rerum natura" praises Epicurus for his endeavors  to cut out religion from human life.

When I was younger I thought that religion was just a way to dominate the men: a toil in the hands of the priests to control men's life; exactly what Epicurus said in the third millennium B.C. and Lucretius quotes in his masterpiece "de rerum natura".

According to Epicurus men must search for happyness; to do with this they must not fear death; as matter of fact, says the great greek philosopher , when a man is alive,  is not conscious of death; and when is dead, he cannot realize death.

The fear of Death is the key for superstions, passions and all the other conditioning of life.

Epicurus says that Gods do not exist and  men must search for happyness regardless of gods.

Then I found out my faith in God: in the truly, unique, God; and I have found Him out through the life, the words, the example of His Son, Jesus, who descended in the earth wearing clothes of man.

I know that my faith is not a rational answer to thoughts like those of Epicurus (and even those of Lucretius), but faith is not a result of reasoning; faith is a search of reasons: reasons of life, of suffering, of happiness...

On the other hand Epicurus, like most of ancient greek philosophers may consider to be illuministic thinkers (in an ante litteram sense) and to them can be told what theologists  have answered to Illuminism since 18th century A.D.(this is not the right place to undertake such an ardous task).

I don't want to diminish the value of their concepts against mines: I instead take much respect on their ideas though I can't share them in the light of God.

It must be said that probably western thinking must never approached even the religious thruths it now accepts, without such great contributes from greek and roman Writers.

Angelo Ruggeri, a bright scholar on classic studies, in his critique and analysis of Lucretius masterpiece, declares the powerlessness of Epicurus's thought against harmness and sufference in human life.

In his own words, he asks : "does the universe of Epicurus  really remove fears from human mind, enabling a happy life?" (I'll to try to give an answer, with the help of Angelo Ruggeri in a next post).

I present in the end of my post an English translation of some verses from Lucretius'  masterpiece's  Book VI, wich is one of the praises that the roman poet dedicates to his greek mentor through out all the six books.

About these verses Angelo Ruggeri himself explains:

"As in a system of tyranny who is defending its own just rights, defends the rights of all, so in this  society of dissatisfied individuals, who manages to be happy and teaches others the way to be such , shall cooperate to the happiness of all. The Roman poet Lucrezio placed the Greek philosopher Epicurus among the Gods  for having proposed this order."

Praise to Epicurus - from Book V - VV 1-51

English Version by Angelo Ruggeri

Who ever could have so much strength in the heart

to raise a song worthy of the  grandiosity

of the things treated and of the wonderful discoveries?

Or have so much value to be able with words

to compose a praise worthy of the merits

of the one who left us gifts so wanted ,

drawing  them from his own mind?

None I think, who is made of mortal body.

In fact, if we want to use words worthy

of the acknowledged grandiosity of the work

he was a God, noble  Memmius, a God certanly

he who first found the rule of life that today is called wisdom

and by means of this art, pulled the life from the darkness

of a stormy sea, and raised it in a quiet and enlightened place.

Compare this exploit with those of ancient Gods.

Cerere is said to have given harvest to mortals,

Bacco  the strong  and sweet juice  of the vine:

indeed we could live without those goods,

as it is fame that  live  some people,

but we cannot live happy without a  quiet heart ;

therefore with a just reason we think he is a God

who has taught us the comfort of sweet life

that even today, disseminated among men,

cheer up minds.

If you then thought that the undertakings of Ercole

are of greater value, you’re ages ago from the truth.

What evil could make us today the  Nemeus lion

with its big mouth or the terrible wild boar Arcadius?

What harm could make us the bull  of Creta

or  the pestiferous Hydra  of Lerna fitted with poisonous snakes?

Or the  trebled strength of Gerione  provided of three bodies?

What evil would do us  today the Harpies

who live in the Stinfali woods or  Diomede’s horses

which in Bistonia and in Ismaro blows flames from their nostrils?

What  harm could  do us the snake

wrapped around the tree with the enormous

body and the fierce look which guards

the splendid  golden apples  in the garden of Esperidi,

at the beaches of Atlas and the  stormy sea where nobody,

Roman and barbarian do ever  approach?

These and similar monsters, now disappeared, 

had them not been won and still lived

what evil could make us today? None I think:

even today the earth abounds up to satiety

of fierce beasts and  it is full of appalling

terrors within the great mountains,

the canyons and the deep forests,

but we are not forced to go there if we do not want.

But if the heart is not pure,  how many  dangers 

creep  in and how many inside battles

there are preparing  against our will!

How many  pungent anxieties tear man

 invaded by passions, and then how many fears!

And the pride, the dishonesty, the presumption,

 what they  do? How many massacres do!

What does shamelessness ,  what  apathy?

The man thus, who  has beaten all these evil

and thrown them out of the soul with the words,

not with the weapons, do not deserve  to be put among Gods?