[Lunostrelki]

Vereinsamt by Nietzsche. My source translates the title as "Lonely" but it might be better understood as "isolated."

The crows caw
and go with zipping wings to the city:
soon it will be snowing.
Happy is he who now yet has a homeland!

Now you stand numbly,
gazing backward, ah! for how long already?
Why, you fool,
did you flee into the world as Winter approached?

The world - a door
to a thousand wastelands silent and cold!
He who has lost
what you have lost, never stops anywhere.

Now you stand pallid,
cursed to wander in the winter,
like smoke
that is always seeking colder skies.

Fly, bird, rasp out
your song in the melody of a bird of the wastes!
Hide, you fool,
your bleeding heart in ice and sneers!

The crows caw
and go with zipping wings to the city:
soon it will be snowing.
Woe is he who has no homeland!

------
some thoughts for interpretation:
- The "homeland" (Heimat in the German) refers to cultural practices, like religion, family, and the like. People with a "homeland" live normal lives, more or less content with their identity and place in the world.
- Fleeing "into the world" can be coupled with the crows flying to the city. Possibly this refers to the movement of people from their traditional rural "homelands" to the modern, cosmopolitan cities.
- People become "numb" as change brings hardship (the coming of winter) and compels them to leave their homelands.
- The move is foolish, however, since fleeing into the world simply brings the traveler/refugee to "a thousand wastelands." People in "the world" have lost their "homelands" and have no deep connection to anything -- they are atomized.
- "Cursed to wander the winter": with each successive generation, memory of the "homeland" become more distant. The path for the one without a homeland is progressively dreary.
- By this point I'm convinced the crows and birds are stand-ins for people. The bird of the wastes has taken up a new, rootless identity, one that contradicts its bleeding heart that cannot survive without its homeland.
- The final stanza is just an inversion of the first. The homeland is lost and the winter isolation has set in.

[Rush87]

I wrote this about that one time in Bangkok:

Gonorrhoea, it all started with a Singha beer,
Riding a Tuk Tuk, prossie in the rear,
A hotel looming, the Sheridan in sight,
We walk inside, give reception a fright,
My hookers' a train wreck, 40 at least,
But those Thai DD's are looking a treat,
We hit the bedroom, I need a drink,
Bang a bar girl, nah, I've gotta think,
I sip on my jack and stare at her rack,
Fuck it I say, lets have a crack,
Bitch pulls out my dick, this shit is a lock,
But then she said something which gave me a shock,
A comment so vile it took years off my clock;
"You got a nice penis but I got a nice cock".

[The Lizard of Oz]

Philip Larkin

Toads Revisited

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses --
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me,

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets --

All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,

Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
No friends but empty chairs --

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Leigh Hunt

To A Fish

You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be,—
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste:—

O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is't ye do? What life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles?

[The Lizard of Oz]

Vasko Popa

The Starry Snail
(from Serbian)

You crawled out after the rain
After the starry rain

The stars of their bones
Built you your house themselves
Where are you carrying it on the towel

Lame time is coming after you
To catch you up to tread on you
Put out your horns snail

You crawl over the vast cheek
Which you will never survey
Straight into the maw of nothingness

Turn aside to the life line
Of my dreamed hand
Before it is too late

And bequeath to me
The wonder-working towel of silver

[Buck Wild]

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-Matthew Arnold

[Paracelsus]

Ithaca, C.P. Cavafy.

For clarity, Cavafy is said to be Greece's greatest poet of the 20th century, if not all time. Some people go to extraordinary lengths - learning ancient Greek, in which Cavafy often wrote his poems - to get the full experience.

I ran across this poem in the frontispiece of Paulo Coelho's otherwise excremental The Zahir.

Ithaca was the home of Odysseus, or Ulysses as he was called in Latin, the subject of Homer's Odyssey. After the Trojan War was over, Odysseus, like the rest of the Greeks who'd finally sacked the city of Troy after a 9 year war, set off for home. Odysseus was king in Ithaca and had a faithful wife, Penelope, waiting for him, and a son, Telemachus.

But the journey home took him ten years as the gods' anger was kindled against the Greeks at Troy's destruction - Poseidon in particular, who opposed his every attempt to get home. The Odyssey tells the story of how Odysseus confronted monsters, natural dangers, and sorcerous women before he finally reached home and, with the help of his son, slaughtered all of the suitors who had been besetting his faithful wife and reclaimed his throne for himself.

Even in the translation from Greek, there is a magic to these words.


As you set out for Ithaca
hope the voyage 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 excitement
stirs 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.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.