from a late Alexandrian

I don't really have much to say about today's entry beyond what follows being inspired in part by Cavafy's "Dareios" and a conversation I had with a moron (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent) about trans-Pacific influences in American poetry and pop culture. Cavafy is a-whole-nother can-o-worms, so I'll leave him be for now.


from a late Alexandrian scholiast in the Roman period, [Diogenes]


on the second burial of Polyneikes

we don’t like to admit that what Antigone was burying
was the ground. we’d rather call it something else:
her politics, her brother, the latter of which belies our faith
in the immortality of the human subject. Antigone believed
this too: it was her brother, was Kreon’s politics.
but the genuine tragedy of the human subject is that it was
neither, that its immortality has nothing to do with us.


on the argument of Oidipous and Kreon

Kreon does not know precisely what Oidipous
too knows not, and his willful failure to speak
about that which he does not know syncopates
Oidipous’ earnest and dire ramblings. Kreon
is the silence to perceive all melodic rhythms
nascent in the cacophony of the poetic line.


on a famous quotation from Emperor Shun in 文心雕龍

詩言志、poetry speaks not so much intention as
the will, the will to create and make, which is why
歌永言、the song composes the words, those words
by which lyric announces itself and not the poet.


of a line quoted by Zigong for sake of clarification

如切如磋、“as cut, as filed;” not belabored by numerous
strokes of anxious care, the beauty of the simple cutting
into living wood comes from unintended revelations;
如琢如磨、“as chiseled, as polished;” stone, then, too,
its surface not smeared with brushing powders, shines
easily having suffered the pain of but a single strike.