1311 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.
When, my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young.
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both side thus is simple truth suppress’d:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore says not I that I am old?
O! love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138
Today is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shake’speare’s Sonnets.
The sonnets are a part of my literary DNA. I still have my ancient Signet 95 cent paperback edition, with an introduction by W.H. Auden, purchased circa 1977. However…
I might as well confess right off that I can’t write a decent sonnet to save my life. Nevertheless, I aspire to write a sonnet as good as one of Shakespeare’s–someday. This, barring a miracle, is an unachievable goal. I think it good for a poets and artists to have such goals, aspirations that may be failed honorably, and repeatedly. Failure is as necessary to poets and other makers as it is to God.
Note: I like Dave McKean’s short film of Sonnet 138 very much. It’s everything I’d like my scissor dances to be had I the animation skills to make them actually dance.
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Unquestionably, this is today’s reason to live.
Great find! I looked for Shakespeare on YouTube a while back, to include in Moving Poems, but this one isn’t very well tagged, I guess — I missed it.
Dear Doc, i have been busy as usual in May
wrangling the wolves at the door, finding them
a fit pack and an unfit herd shot round by round
past that impertinent gobstopper/ gabtopper,
to twist the lingual sarcoma til it rots and wrings
out a lumpen paron-omastic unEvened. But hence,
i have been somewhat unavailable to the Shew of shews.
Your confessor is now in. Say a trimoron of Ave Maria’s
and go in peace, son. Or else beat back your nemeses
imagioned with the knob end of a TRex bone of
thigh. I shall set myself the perpetual penance of
finding a sonnet midst your ouevre. Taking you for the
moment at your word, i.e., no sonnet to thy name, here is
your solace of salvation via the imperative of golgotha, only
in the place of racked skulls do we calvarize up a sonnet,
knowing full well you shall not go forth to sin no more
[ by omission ], but though unchristened and likely to be
unchrismed, heathen, still to savor the impenitence of
the confessional box, sans the niceties of little sliding doors or
purple doilies hung betwixt my impersonation of
the all unknowing Father and your personation of
the misguilted Son.
The most likely reason you do not perpetrate a sonnet
is that sonnets are brief vacations from reality, short
fast trips that begin with laying rubber and end with
a hard brake in front of a wall of mirrors. Particularly
as written by El Shakesbaugh, the sonnet begins with
saying hard and contradictory things that ordinary lovers
have the wisdom to avoid at all costs. The sonnet
proceeds as if a compacted journey ahard upon pilgrimage road
with Wife of Bath, no peregrinations, point to point
is the lie of their seeming transigence of logics, until
the contradiction gets resolved in wit, i.e. in a most
charming lie.
Since you live and create within an encompassing unified
reality, comfortably at your ease within conflictual zones,
you have no need to create false journeys, and no need
to resolve. You love chaos, your savings and loans are
perpetually insolvent and unpanicked, no Resolution Trust
Aggrandizement for thou, my son. Ah the bright and
shining lies of Willie Sonneteer, thou unwilling son et
teared town tiered up and torn down at nonce.
Don’t believe Father William as he shucks your oysters ?
Consider then the unseemly jewel of Sonnet 116.
What does the doubtable Shakescene do when the
contradiction in his premise, the impossibility of love,
the certainty of the all death, the fitriance and the dearth,
the Universitial Twit, the Reading Gaol of conturbat me,
threatens defeat to his Inner Poet ? He retreats into
Dense Imagery. Those Rotten Fruit, those tripely
tropes, just do not blend. Defeated, the Bailbondsman
of Irony succumbs to Mixmaster of metaphor.
Which is where the Doc has always lived and arted,
in medias res, no, worse, in the thick of it, in the plasmatic
turbulence, unwitted, unnarratived, unlogicked into lie.
Unificatio, acceptance of the contradense, the imagination
of truth. As compared to the sonnet, an imago, an impositiono
of gross logic upon the primrose path to narcosis.
Pandemonium, that’s where the good Doctor lives,
and dares to raise his head. No lieing little footsteps
up the yellow brick road thru the bower of bliss until
the happy couplet passes beneath the Arc d’Triomphe
of perpetrated lie.
Do the Locomotion ? Not our Doc.
and, btw, thank you C.G.J., Shakespeare
would have said, ” Thank Gott, I am Shakespeare and not a Shakespearean.”
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