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Homage to Pico della Mirandola |
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| . . . the older
gods had rehabilitated themselves, and men's allegiance was divided. -Walter
Pater |
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Pico della Mirandola died in 1494, between two ages.
Tradition holds that a seeress predicted Pico's death at the time of lilies. |
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| Fever, all day. Sunset, the boatman on the river,
coin for the passage, flotsam past care- much as one dreads, versed in old wisdom and the Church. In fact, it's little to die: learning's the difference self made in self, and will pass. Nothing remembers, books, house or towns where you lived by cunning and integrity, having given village girls your wealth, hardship your strength, and finally everything for knowledge. |
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| With all the talk today about the medieval, its clarity,
one would think that from the muddle of antiquity and the soul's passion in Christ, none of it doctrinal, somebody would take you, up or out, to place you in the bosom of words. Dust in the summer, ants in the house: every pattern continues, despite what we know. We too are unlifted: the trees shimmer, fantastic laboratories, and sun and stars rotate, and yet our wisdom's molecular--combined, not indivisible, comes unglued on the tongue. |
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| Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Aramaic and Greek. Five hundred paradoxes, Plato and the burning bush (your books burned, yourself almost, though after a while inquisitors tired of you): none of this saved a hair of you? Gargoyles sink deeper into stone, and the new, man-centered beast raises its head. |
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| Pico, can you hear? If we remember afterward--so you said--you should this: Florence at the time of lilies, and all the width of night. Beside your bed, a lamp; and you fevered, near death: it seems if you summoned energy, the lamp would brighten like an ancient verb, filling the night as do the flowers, which are not as we take for sign or emblem, and not, like pardon or success, imponderable-- if one could stir. |
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Listen. Suppose we got it wrong, there isn't memory en masse, but a few who try to think back. Else, how silly, an army of ants tackling the same current, a tang of formic acid uniting their ranks--for generations. Straw bridges the workers, clumsy in articulated armor, cling to and tear apart, while some drift on the current, twigs for canoes, or their own carcasses in jagged shorthand across the ripples: some flotilla. |
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| Can we think, despite the arduous struggle, that there is among the sigla corpses built, anything but desperate bridges? Possibly, on the opposite bank, the matter these held valuable becomes fodder, chewed up like incunabula to line a nest. But regardless the journey (and we may say, without drama, it was terrible) I shall remember you, as one does the nights he can't sleep. |
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