On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day

On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day

By Edward Moore

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), The Children of Niobe A piece by the composer Pelecis, entitled “Nevertheless” takes me back to an old love-making scene (and I use the word “scene” carefully, for no real loving occurred, just a fantasy reaction) … Anyway (I almost wrote “nevertheless”) something cold and calculating in me was born that night … or perhaps not born but encouraged to tickle the hyper-nervous tendrils of my imagination. It is often tempting to use adjectives like “tragic” or “revelatory” to describe moments that are really just selfish jaunts into the domain of the sensual. I love sensuality, and the physical form … What did Wallace Stevens say?

Beauty is momentary in the mind – The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.

(“Peter Quince at the Clavier” IV.51-54) The body lives in the taste left on my lips, the sweat that covers me after … After what? Pretending that she was Aphrodite on her crimson shell, or Thetis with the glistening feet coming to console her war-weary … lover? No, the body dies every day, in myriad ways, and only the noussurvives. Nevertheless, a fetish cannot be sustained by intellect alone: it requires taste, texture, a certain scent, and (hopefully) words to go with it. To hear a word of sensual kindness from a desirable woman is probably the most beautiful thing the world has to offer a man. But we – or at least I – seek alternatives. This descending motif of Pelecis, in which the violin vies with the piano for supremacy is like one of those rare and wonderful episodes of love-making in which the woman can laugh and the man can get annoyed and both find, in one orgasmic moment, that they love each other more than words or even music can tell! Some things are terribly funny, like a woman farting in the tub and the man making a crude joke, and then wrapping her in a towel, telling her what a goddess she is, and tasting every ounce of her womanhood with an ardor born of aeons of evolution. It should be obvious from this that I have, as D. H. Lawrence famously put it, “sex on the brain.” But it’s more than that. It’s a return to origins: to a time when all was new and I could be silly without being branded a drunken fool with a foot fetish by women with whom I used to discourse upon the finer points of Hegelian philosophy. So now I have turned from Pelecis to Beethoven: quite different effluences of the divine pneuma. Since I’m on to Ludwig’s violin concerto now, here comes a poem. A gentle tread upon the grass How different from the blistering bluesy antics of concrete! One wants to be surly but can’t (for) The tired indifferent glance of the world makes us long for friendship. Tears can fall with power, like an aggressively scraped G-string on a Stradivarius. But they can rain gently, too, like the tears of Echo as she tried desperately (and ingeniously) to court Narcissus. It’s the same, really. Remember what Whitman said: “There is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me.” I would love a woman who would rape me with words: Who would tear back the dull husk of my noetic diaphragm to reveal the glossy suppuration that festers within. I would love such an one – not with a love of roses and chocolates, but with a love of Niobe-like contentment with a glorious pissing-off of the gods. To make something, as ktisis:create (which is a Christian term) … Perhaps to be demiourgos… That’s better. I want to invite love into the world, not demand it! When I sit on the shore fishing, I want to catch crabs … Crabs that will walk backward and return me to the history of my race. When I make love to a woman, I want to be carried forward, into a world that even my drunken mind can’t conceive. That is Love.  AGAPE

Too late to talk, too late to not think

I have no ashtray and my cigar is smoldering.

Why on earth can I not rest at the feet of a woman like this ...? Sometimes I think that loving beauty too much is a curse. Yannaras indicated as much in his Person and Eros. Begin: I once loved a goddess, a noetic form morphed into an all-too-mortal frame. Or coil, as Hamlet would say. Chivalric codes once placed Woman on a pedestal, to be worshipped. Now we expect women to be confident, aggressive, even cruel. But what happens when a man cries ... a Roy Orbison-type cry, not a pussy-bitch cry? What then? I think I've spent too many hours at the feet of beautiful women, worshipping them, and not enough time striving to strip off my Herculean shirt. I'm going to end on a lighter note: Madame Recamier probably had a hygiene problem. I wouldn't have wanted to ... well, sure I would. But I'm human, hygienic, and hyper-sensitive. And I've only had six beers today. 24 ouncers!

Ladies in Transition: Prey

My feet killed me today, as I walked the city, searching for a goddess

...what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

~ Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"

I know little about America, I'm no Walt Whitman, but I do know something about the scowl of Charon, and the manner in which it rotates one's eyes back from the darkness to the light of the agalmic entity that I've posted at the head of this ... A sweet Venus, born without luck, as if such a thing exists ... A sweet Venus, one with whom I could vociferate like a loquacious bore about Bach and the atonalism of Schoenberg. Perhaps she would smile and embrace me, or else walk away with a smirk ... Either way, I would be living. I'm not living now. I'm a silent form frozen in a monument of sluttish time. But I'll tell you this: Life won't let me go. I'm engaged and enraged and plagued by the very air I breathe. I'd like to pass into the other realm, but I know it doesn't exist. My Venus is out there, writhing in liquid ... It would be too lame to say it's my tears. Ha! Again: Do you exist, my angel?

Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my angel?

~ Ginsberg, ibid.

"I'm all alone, and I'm expecting you to lead me off in a cheerful dance."

~ Bob Dylan, "Workingman's Blues"

Earlier today I rested beneath a brick wall, on my way back from buying beer. My body is not behaving like an Iamblichean soul-vehicle. No: instead, it's breaking down, rigidly, with the ardor of a rotting oak. But somehow, day after day, I get my ass out of bed and look up shit like this:

If you think of its birth and death as ever-recurring, then too, Great Warrior, you have no cause to grieve

~ Bhagavad Gita, "The Second Teaching" 26.

I'm no warrior, but I am the greatest person I know, for I wake up with myself every morning and pass out drunk alone every night ... Unless, of course, I have a woman with me, and then it only exacerbates my monadic nature, demanding an almost Gnostic-like reversion to utter silence. Sige as the Coptic Gnostics called it: it meant the profound stare of the lone eye into boundless space, with no one with whom to speak, and nothing to hope for ... So why do I grieve? Because I need an aeonic partner. Someone out there knows what I mean. Someone ... I don't want to undergo the labor of birth again, nor the infantile mommy-cry of death, Bhagavad Gita be damned. It's a nice thought, but you know what's nicer? My beautiful lady, smiling at me at the end of a long day, kicking off her shoes, and telling me not to talk about Heidegger, but just to make love to her. And it says I have no cause to grieve!

T. S. Eliot called Dido's snub of Aeneas in Hades "the most telling snub in all of poetry."

Among them Phoenician Dido wandered, in the great wood, her wound still fresh. As soon as the Trojan hero stood near her and knew her, shadowy among the shadows, like a man who sees, or thinks he sees, the new moon rising through a cloud, as its month begins, he wept tears and spoke to her with tender affection: ‘Dido, unhappy spirit, was the news, that came to me of your death, true then, taking your life with a blade? Alas, was I the cause of your dying? I swear by the stars, by the gods above, by whatever truth may be in the depths of the earth, I left your shores unwillingly, my queen.

Virgil, Aeneid bk. 6.440-476.

Need I write more. I left my own shores like Ulysses, with ancient mariners still adept at adventure. But tired as I am, I weep daily the folly of my passage through the straits.

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes.

~ Milton, Paradise Lost bk. I. 60 ff.

Bereft of hope a man stands strong. There is a suppliant nature that is encouraged by hope. A different nature – not that I believe in phusis, after having read Sartre – desires only to stand like Manfred on the Jungfrau. Shades of my past haunt me. Is that nature? Regions of sorrow kick me in the posterior each day. Is that nature? Rest is a dream and a second death. No nature there. Hope, on the other hand … Someday I hope to see a tall blonde woman strolling through a meadow, white shoes in her hands, bare feet stained green with grass. I’m talking about my ex-wife (a terrible appellation!) Sweetness lives in memory. And I’ll leave off, like I often do, with a quote:

Her blue-veined feet unsandl’d were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair.

~ Coleridge, Christabel I.63-65. I’m writing / quoting here of my ex-wife. If the pain is not apparent, “I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais (1851-52) Edward Allan Poe said somewhere that there is nothing more beautiful than a dying woman. He was drastically wrong. Life on the ascendant is what we all strive for, and what we love. A beautiful face beneath the water, with a sorrow unspoken engraven on her visage … No! Rather, a bright set of eyes across a table at a cheap diner, promising something unattainable: that is what makes life worth living.

Omens are always bad

...bad as the omens were, The end was wrose, for as the bride went walking Across the lawn, attended by her naiads, A serpent bit her ankle, and she was gone.

~ Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk 10 In times past I have found that certain illusions of dearth plague my mind with dear fear. The passage in pearly white sandals of my wife, across the lawn of our reception, made me think that someday those feet would bleed, and that I would not be there to tend to them. I crossed over into Phlegethon, I think ...

Into that thick and murky atmosphere, Fear gathered in me as my error fled

` Dante, Inferno Canto XXXI So what? The tenebrous veil of this valley came as a surprise to me? Hardly! I set myself to sweet worship and a love born of hopelessness. I did look on the face of theos, like Moses, and I spoke these words:

The Lord made a babble of the language of all the world; from the place the Lord scattered men all over the face of the earth

` Genesis 11. And so I die slowly, being misunderstood. No hunter of men like Nimrod, just a false prophet of my own fantasies. And somewhere, someplace, my Venus still walks, in her pristine white sandals, soft soles waiting to be kissed. And some other man has her. Yet I write, with sorrow and Mozart as my two best friends. Oh, to die! "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die." `Byron, Manfred III.151.