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Ascolo Parodites
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Everything that Rachel findeth is vanity; everything that wise men find turneth to Myrrh, Frankincense, and to Gold. Therefor let thy speech be of yea! and of nay! and let these thine articulus vel stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae be, wherein consists the whole spirit of the laws and of the Republic, or of the social contract, under whatever names they have been given. Is Cherethites and Pelethites entirely unknown to you, my philosophers? -- the Spirit that quickens, that is mirrored even in the shards of Jerusalem, and in that shattered vessel, like the sun, in droplets on the grass, that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men? Let there be no hymn, no lyre even! but golden hair and one of Thessaly's javelins for my muse. For yesterday the sadness of thy little Shechem was upon the floor of Zalmon alone; today there is sadness upon the whole of Zalmon, and thy little Shechem may rest secure! To be always in a state of optimism, or even to abide by that noble thought, sit Galatea tuae non aliena viae, can never be the lavish background required of compassion, much less self-compassion. Compassion is peculiar to one who is conscious, not of simply having experienced a misfortune similar to some other person; for compassion does not even require empathy, but for a moment having fallen from both grace and knowledge. Thus do I ask myself: do I still have eyes even to see? Yea, I am Oxylus; this is my mule. Look at his two eyes, they are named pity and longing, and my single eye is named hope. Here I stand amidst the frozen vegetation and the bleak air, of the north, who is named hopeless; whose air licks at the ears of my mule: from all sides it is howling, threatening, shrieking at me. Suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before me a great northern bear, walking cautiously in the silence. What? Has all the halycon and contemplation of the world commenced here? Is my self-pity itself sitting in this quiet place- my self, completely released to the spirit of this north; my injured and shamed self, my second, therein immortalized self? Not yet to have died, but also to have never truly lived? As a testing, spiritlike, and intermediate being? As though I were that bear that moves over the pale north with its white coat, like an enormous moth into the sun! But what is the sun for it, when there is no such thing as 'warmth?' Why do these northern airs, these dead winds also bring on a poetical mood and the inventive pleasure of verses? In this cruel solitude, in this northern land, I have learned that all beautiful women, all noble bodies, make us place delight in taciturnity and reservation: for all our words to them betray our shortcomings, our wounds, our shame. The woman's pity singeth unto her solicitude, and she calls this her love; for though a man may bring her to tears with his confessions and emendicating for forgiveness, the law of her love is yet ardeat ipsa licet, tormentis gaudet amantis. To illicit genuine commiseration in a woman, this is an impossibility provided she has fallen in love with you. For she cannot say with the elegy of Propertius: invidiae fuimus: non me deus obruit? an quae lecta Prometheis dividit herba iugis? non sum ego qui fueram. Yet, when a man loves, he must betray himself of his shortcomings, all his shame and weaknesses; that is to say, he must conquer in himself guilt, by taking a woman worthy of it. Is not wounded memory the mother of all playfulness and manly gaiety? Porna suis tantum, Memmi, substernit amicis. [Theodori Bezae Vezelii Poemata P. 41] But where love is wounded certainly grows there something better than gaiety. Verily, where love has been wounded did I discover what were the pains of birth. But more importantly did I discover this: that a man's love, that is the profoundest humanity, because it testifies to and preserves the law of the sexes: all propriety, with respect to the manner of the sexes, is surely born out of this. Conversely, all impropriety and solecism is born from the woman's love. With it, enters flamboyance into man, the gloating over and parading of women, contestation of all kinds, the propensity towards extravagant spending, the ostentation of wealth and estate, etc. All of these defects are absent in the man that has had little experience with the love of women: this is not a coincidence. Just as much as all of these defects in man, which have been mentioned, are analogous to the intrinsic qualities of the woman, her love may be accredited with the general degradation of the sexes. Pity is her pax Cererem nutrim, solicitude her pacis alumna Ceres. Ah, but this is a man's greatest snare and Trojan stupidity. Woman, if you would forgive my Semonidean temperment, what is then the secret of thy happiness? I find it expressed in the contention of Blesensis, facilius sustineantur; sic cor humanum necesse est igne charitatis accendi, ad hoc ut de facili sustineat tribulationes, that the disposition to doing good blosters a good disposition. Yet, when a man stands in the midst of his own beauty, in the midst of his own northern airs of taciturnity and reservation, he is likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for- his mistakes, his wounds, his shortcomings. Verily, with the woman's beauty I purify my body: with the man's beauty I purify my soul. Yet, even with this yearning, man almost believes that his greater self lives there amongst the shortcomings, the humiliations, the injuries: in these quiet regions even the fiercest air, even the howling air, turns into deathly silence, and in the most remote northern regions, where you will find the white bear, youth itself even turns into a dream of youth. Yet even for the most beautiful and gliding bear, there is so much howling and screaming of the wind, and unfortunately so disinterested, bored wind! The magic and the most powerful self-compassion, the most gracious effect of our shortcomings is, so to speak, reccedant vetera: but that first requires age! And age will forgive us even of our haec olim meminisse juvabit in our shortcomings, mistakes, wounds: Cui respondit intuens rotae, volubilitatem in qua mox summa max ima funt, cogito de nostra fortuna. Infini enim animi est, hominis parum sibi constantis, qui perpetuum vitae tenorem somniet.. [Edinus Cyriacus in Momos et artium liberalium mastygas] I cannot say that I have found life distasteful. This is my punishment for so desiring: every accusation I could raise against life, that would be my terram domare for maledictions and continual maledictions! Life is unreasonable, therefor life is unjust, therefor life is painful, etc. And even in each one of these, do I forget the one that came before it: I cannot find a perspective with which to confront life. To pronounce life finally distasteful, then I would be forced to give up even my love of hatred! This has been my great chastisment: the adumbration of the peril of my own beauty, as a man, and the idea that life could be the metnis inops, a jealousy born with danger even by the gods, of the image of life. And for this reason, the peril of my own beauty has also been my great liberator! A woman can never really experience the great perils of her own beauty, for what idea does she have of propriety and felicity, which is to say, the masculine ideal? And propriety and felicity themselves, or the ideal of the masculine; which could also be called the image of life, the blooming narcissus-- let this be something else for others, a rock to lay their back against, a hammer to crush with: for me it is a world of dangers in which heroisims, too, can find places to kiss and hold each other. Yet a longing for seduction abideth in me now, which speaketh in all the measure and cadences of diuturna voluptas and seduction. [Nicolaus Taurellus in Carmina Funebria] Darkness am I: how I long for a luminary, that it might pierce into my effluence, even that I would dance unto seduction like the stream before the moon, whose timidity danceth unto seduction, and steppeth on the toes of temptation! Alas, why am I not full of light and like unto the sun? How joyfully would I then eat of the fruits of the dying year, and how babishly would I sup of the milk of this night, oh! how would I find ardor in silence like unto a nursling at breast! And even you would I bless, ye billowy clouds, who steal away the moon from me and become argent thereunto! Oh, how ye do remind me of myself: I am argent, and even I have put out the light of my own luminary; for aurum, that is too clumsy a temptation wherewith my timidity to dance unto! And certainly, even I live unto my own night, and unto my own mirages in my night: I approach them, and lo! Ever back unto myself my timidity do I disprove. I know not the happiness of vulnerability, and therefor not that of the hand stretched forth with golden apples; and oft have I dreamt that seducing must be more blessed than tempting. Oh Juvenal, how wrong you are: tanti tibi non sunt opaci omnis arent Tagi, quodque in mare volvitur aurum ut somno careas. Ye do not mean to execute, ye women and spirits of levity, tota proles Eoli pugnaxque proles invicim, [Marcus Zuerius in Poemata P. 112] until the man hath bowed his head? Lo! The blessed Narcissus hath bowed his head: out of his eye speaketh the great contempt. "Mine self-pity is something which is to be surpassed: mine self-pity is to me the great contempt of woman": so speaketh it out of that eye. When he loved himself-- that was his supreme moment; let not the exalted one fall back upon abjection and demesne! There is no salvation for him who thus pityeth from himself, unless it be speedy death. Your execution, ye woman, shall be shame and not timidity; and in that ye slay, see to it that ye yourselves justify the life of man! It is not enough that ye should mediate with him whom ye slay, with man. Let your shame be love to Narcissus: thus will ye justify Narcissus's love just as the man justifies yours, and you will not only justify your own love! It is to you that the charge of pregnancy is placed? What of it? It is to us men, that the charge of the living is placed. What does man know of the pains of birthing, what does the woman know of the pains of living? How can one who lives in and by the emotions, the passions, ever intuit the emotional significance of an idea, of a philosophy? What is, for you women, the greatest resemblance to impotence? It is fine speaking. Verily, the soul of a man is beautiful with the pains of life; the soul of a woman is beautiful with the pains of birth. And what is the most alien love to woman? The love of work: the love of writing, tilling, tending, etc. Some of them garden... and that is only to remind themselves that there is such a thing as work! What then is my weariness, the weariness of Narcissus? That my sickness and shame hath contained my music, and I hath rather sung unto my sickness and shame as an Orpheus than offered them as love: just as the woman hath sung unto her shame rather than offer it as love unto Narcissus. What is the riddle of Orpheus's love? That love conquereth itself. nulla suos uxor melius iactabit amores: nam mori ut euridice bis bene nulla potest. et si forte mori cuiquam bis posse daretur: euridice fieri non tamen ulla velit. [Actius Sincerus Sannazaro in Epigrammata] And what is the riddle of Narcissus? Dying in this song, have I ventured these notes only that I may cling to the noble hierarchies, and to some extent support the objective world as the Phrygian scale upon small notes. But these notes fall, and the last have no further reflection and connote only nothing, and only indicate sorrow. Yet, a thing is within me, I call it forgetting. It hath hitherto clung unto every sorrow of mine. For forgetting may be the most awkward memory but is yet the profoundest- forgetting that clingeth. For in every forgetting there is a stirring music of sorrow: dulcia surenum cantu magis, e quibus omnis pendula spes animae statque caditque meae. [Iosephi Scaligeri Poemata omnia, ex museio Petri Scriverii. P 279] And if it clingeth unto sorrow- there is the power of interpretation. Verily, forgetting that graspeth and stretcheth is the greatest interpreter of wisdom! Verily, I am yet a miraculous fountain: I return life to the castaways of the past, I alone gazeth unto myself and thinketh what has been forgotten. No mariner hath found the rose of my reflection in this sea, the rose that brings memories of their mother's mothers: for I alone hath grown weary of living unto one petal of that rose. Forgetting is the greatest interpreter; forgetting interpreteth even self-pity. But self-pity is the deepest abyss. As deep as man looketh into self-love, so deep he looketh into self-pity: Oh, Naricissus! When will you find the rose of your reflection, rather than live unto a single petal of it? The heart has broken ties, because of the rose of my reflection, and Narcissus is even weary.
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