Ever Feel Like Being A Seed? (The Ritual Function of Orgy) MIRCEA ELIADE

 

The Ritual Function of Orgy

“The orgy sets flowing the sacred energy of life. Human beings become at one with the forces of the universe. They break down the barriers between man, society, nature and the gods; they help force life and the seeds of things to move from one level to another, from one zone of reality to the next.”

Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion

 “Like seeds that lose their shape in the great underground, merging, disintegrating and becoming something different (germination), so men lose their individuality in the orgy, combining into a single living unity . . . They try once more to enter the primal, pre-formal, chaotic state—a state that corresponds in the cosmological order to the chaotic formlessness before the creation. Man yearns to be seed, not person.”

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be, Where Be We?]

Poem by Bobby Goosey, SOLEDAD QUIETUS

 

Bobby Lee Goosey

                                               This Poem Is Dedicated to Soledad Quietus
You’re the
Topmost upmost utmost
Ghost
(How I’d like to get to know you better)

Sitting on the
Upmost, utmost uttermost
Post
(How I’d like to get to know you better)

Standing on the
Westmost eastmost furthermost
Coast
(How I’d like to get to know you better)

Gnawing on the
Cooked most burntmost turkeyleg
Roast
(How I’d like to get to know you better
How I’d like to help you eat that roast
Bet it tastes real fine with burnt black toast)
 
You’re the
Utmost, upmost, toppermost, uttermost
Lastmost, vastmost
Ghost.

Translation of Poem by Igor Chinnov, Игорь Чиннов, "А может быть, всё же – спасибо за это," GRATEFULNESS

                                James Crombie Photo of Starling Murmuration in Ireland

Игорь Чиннов
(1909-1996)
 
А может быть, всё же – спасибо за это:
За нежность туманно-жемчужного света,
За свежесть дождём всколыхнутого сада,
За первые знаки – уже – листопада.
 
Спасибо, что облако меркнет и тает
Над этой в закат улетающей стаей,
И розовый свет приближается к морю…
Ну что же, спасибо. Да разве я спорю…
 
[«Пасторали» Рифма: Париж, 1976, стр. 105]
 
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                                     Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

                                       Gratefulness
 
But, could be, nonetheless, I’ll say thanks all the same:
For that light with a tender and hazy-pearl sheen,
For that mist reeking freshness on rain-scrambled lane,
For the first signs in fall of a leaf-fall serene. 
 
Thanks, God, for clouds wispy o’er air jasmine-scented,
For starlings near sunset in mass murmuration,
For that rosy-pink gleam there, on sea’s condensation . . .
Yeah, even so, thanks—do I sound discontented?
 

Translation of Poem by Anna Akhmatova, Анна Ахматова, "Молитва," A PRAYER

 

Анна Ахматова
(1889-1966)

Молитва

Дай мне горькие годы недуга,
Задыханья, бессонницу, жар,
Отыми и ребёнка, и друга,
И таинственный песенный дар —
Так молюсь за Твоей литургией
После стольких томительных дней,
Чтобы туча над тёмной Россией
Стала облаком в славе лучей.

May, 1915. Day of the Holy Ghost
St. Petersburg

 

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                                                       Literal Translation by Judith Hemschemeyer
                                                                                     

                    Prayer

Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song—
This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.
 
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                                     Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
 
                                                                    A Prayer
 
Send me bitter long years of illness on end,
Labored breathing, insomnia, fever,
Take my one offspring, take my best friend
And my gift as a poet, dream-weaver.
So goes my prayer during liturgy mass,
After tormenting weeks of travail,
I pray that the nimbus that looms o’er dark Rus
Turn to clouds steeped in glory, bright-hale.

 

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Translator’s Note

 So much for the efficacy of prayer. The year 1915 was early on in the morass of chaos and grief that was to plague Holy Rus and its denizens (including Anna Akhmatova) in the twentieth century. Still to come were the further horrors of the First World War, two revolutions, a civil war, various famines, then what was billed as the Glorious Socialist Paradise, the Soviet Union, which included the Leninist Terror, more famine, another World War, the mass arrests of the Stalinist Terror, the Gulag Archipelago, etc., etc. With the collapse of the USSR the nineties promised a new democratic Russia, but that decade came with economic collapse, followed by the new capitalist oligarchs and their seizure of the country’s natural wealth. And then came next what was old hat in Russian history: a new authoritarian leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Who decided, in 2022, that only war with Ukraine could save his country from utter second-class status as a world power.

 

 

Translation of Poem by Anna Akhmatova, Анна Ахматова, "Привольем пахнет дикий мед," WILD HONEY REEKS OF WANTON ABANDON

                                       Tintoretto, "Christ Before Pilate," Sixteenth Century

Анна Ахматова
(1889-1966)

Привольем пахнет дикий мед,
Пыль — солнечным лучом,
Фиалкою — девичий рот,
А золото — ничем.
Водою пахнет резеда,
И яблоком — любовь.
Но мы узнали навсегда,
Что кровью пахнет только кровь...

И напрасно наместник Рима
Мыл руки пред всем народом,
Под зловещие крики черни;
И шотландская королева
Напрасно с узких ладоней
Стирала красные брызги
В душном мраке царского дома...

 1933

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                                                Literal Translation by Judith Hemschemeyer
                                                    (with slight amendations by URB)
 

Wild honey smells like freedom, [the Russian word here means more than just freedom; it    connotes the kind of freedom of wide-open spaces, wild unbridled license]
Dust — like a ray of sun.
Like violets — a young maid’s mouth,
And gold — like nothing.
The flowers of the mignonette smell like water,
And like an apple — love.
But we [have] learned once and for all [all too well]
That blood smells only like blood...

 

And in vain the vice-regent of Rome
Washed his hands before all the people,
Urged on by the ominous shouts of the rabble;
And the Scottish queen
In vain washed the spattered red drops
From her slender palms
In the stifling gloom of the king’s [Thane of Cawdor’s] home...

 

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                                               Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
 
Wild honey reeks of wanton abandon,
While dust has the smell that a sunbeam ought,
A small girl’s mouth of violets picked at random,
And gold smells like what? Like naught.
Aqueous is the tang of the flower mignonette,
While love has the scent of apple or spud,
But to our chagrin we have learned with regret
That blood smells like nothing on earth but blood.
 
And in vain did the Roman prefect
wash his hands in front of the hoi polloi,
to the sinister hoots of the rabble;
and the Scottish queen,
in vain as well,
from her slender palms,
in the stifling murk
of her own royal home,
blotches of red
rinsed away . . .
 
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                                                                 Translator’s Note
While Akhmatova uses standard rhyming schemes and meter in the first stanza (first eight lines) of this poem, in the second stanza (last seven lines) the rhyming scheme falls almost completely apart, as if to illustrate that spattered blotches of blood can rend rhyming useless and moot.

 

 

The Pledge of Allegiance: The Way It Used to Be

 

One Nation, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice For All

I come from the generation when this nation was not yet under God; it was simply indivisible, it had liberty and justice for all, but it was not under God. God got on top of our nation when I was maybe in fifth or sixth grade, and when they added him on it somehow broke up the rhythmic structure of the incantation. You never felt quite right saying the pledge anymore after you had to start sticking the nation under God over the nation every time. He didn’t feel right up there, and maybe we were better off without Him. Given the uses to which God has been put in America, I'd say that, yes, we are often better off without Him.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]

Bobby Goosey, "So On and So Forth and So and So and Such and Such"

 

Bobby Lee Goosey

So On and So Forth and So and So and Such and Such

So On and So Forth went to see So and So. They had a talk about such and such. So On and So Forth said that such and such was so, but So and So said that was certainly not so. So On and So Forth demurred, saying that such and such was so, and that, furthermore, So and So was a silly, imbecilic so and so. Then So and So blew his top and called So On and So Forth a stupid son of a So and So, in fact, such a dumb such and such that he can’t tell his own such and such from a hole in the ground.

With that they came to blows. So On and So Forth backhanded So and So to the noggin, and then So and So kicked So On and So Forth right in the fat such and such. After that the fight was over; they dusted each other off and made up. They were friends again. So On and So Forth said such and such, and So and So agreed that such and such was so. So and So said, sorry, he really didn’t think that So On and So Forth was a stupid son of a So and So, and he was sorry for having said so. He knew, in fact, So On and So Forth’s Daddy, and he knew that So On and So Forth’s Daddy was a pistol, and that, therefore, So On and So Forth was a fine Son of a Gun.

So it always goes whenever So On and So Forth goes to visit So and So. Maybe So and So is not really a silly, imbecilic sod of a so and so, and maybe So On and So Forth is not really a stupid son of a So and So, but one thing is for sure: they both are really wimpy dolts and twits.

Translation of Poem by Anna Akhmatova, Анна Ахматова, "Уводили тебя на рассвете," THEY LED YOU AWAY

                                         "Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy" (fragment)

 Анна Ахматова
(1889-1966)

Уводили тебя на рассвете,
За тобой, как на выносе, шла,
В темной горнице плакали дети,
У божницы свеча оплыла.
На губах твоих холод иконки,
Смертный пот на челе… Не забыть!
Буду я, как стрелецкие женки,
Под кремлевскими башнями выть.

1935 г.

(отрывок из произведения «Реквием»)

 

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                                                  Literal Translation by Judith Hemschemeyer
                                                       (with slight amendations by URB)

They led you away at dawn.
I followed you, like a mourner [following a coffin],
In the dark front room the children were crying,
By the icon shelf the candle was dying.
On your lips was the icon’s chill.
The deathly sweat on your brow . . . Unforgettable!—
I will be like the wives of the Streltsy,
Howling under the Kremlin towers.
(excerpt from the long poem “Requiem”)
 
d
 
Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
 
They led you away in the early dawn hours,
I trailed behind as a mourner does, crying,  
In darkness the children stood wailing by the doors,
The icon shelf candle was guttering, dying. 
On your lips was the chill from the icon’s dark mien,
Deathly sweat on your brow . . . hideous!
I’ll be like the Streltsy wives (think of the scene),
Under the Kremlin walls shrieking and piteous.

d
 
                                         Note from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
                              Judith Hemschemeyer (translator), Roberta Reeder (editor), p. 806
 
“This poem refers to the arrest of Nikolai Punin (1888-1953), the art historian and critic with whom Akhmatova lived from 1926 until the late Thirties. After the Revolution he worked under Lunacharsky in the Fine Arts section of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. During the purges Punin was arrested and sent to a forced-labor camp. He died in a camp in Abez, Siberia, in August, 1953.
 
“The Streltsy—an elite military corps instituted by Ivan the Terrible. Their mutiny in 1698 was mercilessly crushed by Peter the Great and 2,422 of them were tortured and hanged. Their wives pleaded for them ‘under the Kremlin towers.’ This incident is the subject of Vasily Surikov’s famous painting, ‘The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy.’”
 
                                                       From Brittanica Article Online
 
Vasily Surikov's painting, "The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy" (1881), depicts a pivotal moment in Russian history. The streltsy were a musketeer corps established in the 16th century that served as the tsar's bodyguard and held significant political influence. By the late 17th century, they became discontented and revolted against Peter I. Although Surikov's painting is set in Red Square, the actual executions took place elsewhere. The artwork captures a frozen moment of historical time, focusing on the emotional weight of the event rather than strict factual accuracy, reflecting Surikov's view of history as tragic.
  

This monumental painting is held in the collection of the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.

 

                           "Morning of the Execution of the Strelsty" (fragment)