Visit from the Cumaean sibyl

So unexpected. Late afternoon and I went out to the security gate to say hello to my neighbour T, going out into an autumn wind, oak leaves scattered thick on the path. He held up some kind of wrapped parcel. We talked in Afrikaans

I was tired and slightly impatient, edgy with insomnia and dream-haunted. All week I had dreamed of going down into tunnels and caves under the Vatican where I wandered through the filmy sludge of bat droppings and luminous stalactites trying to catch distant echoes and piece together a chewed-up jigsaw puzzle. In one dream I was walking under the grey-eyed Tiber, moving through a deep hollow chamber where a tall woman with her face turned away from me wove herself into a cage of twigs.

‘Look at this,’ said T and unwrapped a hessian covering. A chipped gilt frame, a poor reproduction spoiled with cheap crackled varnish. ‘It is very religious and biblical.’

He was holding up a copy of Romanelli’s painting of the Cumaean Sibyl. Sitting with the page of her book spilling open in creamy parchment or  cured hide, the lettering that read ‘Ut Non Confondar’. Let me not be misunderstood.

A visit from the Oracle, no less.

Unexpected, unanticipated. Before me hung Romanelli’s Sibyl of Cumae who bartered with Tarquin, King of Rome, for a fair price for  the Sibylline Books of prophecy,  who deciphered oracles on oak leaves and lived in a cave with a hundred mouths, who guided Aeneas down to the Underworld and  lived for at least 1 000 years suspended in an urn or basket until all that remained was her voice.

My neighbour: ‘So the artist wasn’t even Christian?’

Me: ‘No, he was very  much a Catholic, the nephew of Pope Urban VII. The Cumaean Sibyl prophesied the birth of Christ.’

Even while greeting my sibyl I had to explain to my neighbour that  medieval, Renaissance and Baroque artists painted both biblical and pagan classical themes. Both/and not either/or.  He was dismayed to think his painting showed a pagan fortune teller and not a good woman from the Bible. He bought it at an auction in Paarl and  now felt cheated.

The Cumaean Sibyl was said to inhabit a cave with one hundred mouths, each of which had a voice accessible by a still existing dromos. The Cave of the Sibyl near Naples, Italy, known as the “Antro della Sibilla”, was rediscovered in May, 1932, by Amedeo Maiuri. The cave is a tunneling passage over 130m long, running parallel to the side of the hill and cut out of volcanic stone, filled with echoes.

My dreams and what they don’t tell me,  or tell me only indirectly.  Pico Iyer in the New York Review of Books:

Perhaps we impute too much to dreams precisely because we cannot control them; we infer that they come to us from some larger or at least external place that knows things that we don’t. Certainly my interest in their reapportioning of the dimensions of my life began to rise when I recently spent eight years writing on the kinship I felt with the unmet novelist Graham Greene. The fact that there was scant basis for my sense of affinity was precisely what gave my presumed connection potency; what one can’t explain away keeps echoing inside one as the explicable never does.

When the poet Aeneas employed her services before his descent to the Underworld to visit his dead father Anchises,  the Sibyl warned him that it was no light undertaking:

“Trojan, Anchises’ son, the descent of Avernus is easy.
All night long, all day, the doors of Hades stand open.
But to retrace the path, to come up to the sweet air of heaven,
That is labor indeed.”

 Aeneid 6.10.

She haunts  Eliot’s The Waste Land, as you will know –

“For I myself once saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in her jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered ‘I want to die.’”.

The Sibyl in the dead land, the Sibyl writing down her messages on withered oak leaves, ephemera. The voice in The Waste Land, echoing what Marina Warner has called ‘dark, archaic grief’:

I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

In another artist’s vision  she now hangs on the Sistine chapel ceiling, courtesy of Michelangelo, muscular of forearm ( transgendered a little?), indomitable, knowing. The incarnations of the  Sibyl unable to die. While Popes come and go beneath her gaze.

And there she was at my gate in a dessicated African autumn, piercing and terrible.

My neighbour said goodbye and left with his  reproduction. The Sibyl stayed and watched me reassemble oak leaves on the path. I sat with those oak leaves all afternoon, just looking at the reds and browns and crinkled surfaces. Mapping my guide to the Underworld.

What Teju Cole said

Following on his seven-point Twitter sequence that went viral as fast and unforgettably as  poetry on fire, this from the New Yorker:

 

This ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers is done for our sakes. But more and more we are seeing a gap between the intention behind the President’s clandestine brand of justice and the real-world effect of those killings. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words against the Vietnam War in 1967 remain resonant today: “What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them?” We do know what they think: many of them have the normal human reaction to grief and injustice, and some of them take that reaction to a vengeful and murderous extreme. In the Arabian peninsula, East Africa, and Pakistan, thanks to the policies of Obama and Biden, we are acquiring more of the angriest young enemies money can buy. As a New York Times report put it last year, “Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants.”

Assassinations should never have happened in our name. But now we see that they endanger us physically, endanger our democracy, and endanger our Constitution. I believe that when President Obama personally selects the next name to add to his “kill list,” he does it in the belief that he is protecting the country. I trust that he makes the selections with great seriousness, bringing his rich sense of history, literature, and the lives of others to bear on his decisions. And yet we have been drawn into a war without end, and into cruelties that persist in the psychic atmosphere like ritual pollution.

 

Landbase: Pieter Hugo’s Permanent Error

Permanent Error. A series I come back to again and again when thinking about accountability to the landbase.

During 2009-2010 photographer Pieter Hugo photographed the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, is referred to by local inhabitants as Sodom and Gomorrah, a vivid acknowledgment of the profound inhumanity of the place. When Hugo asked the inhabitants what they called the pit where the burning takes place, they repeatedly responded: ‘For this place, we have no name’.

Their response is a reminder of the alien circumstances that are imposed on marginal communities of the world by the West’s obsession with consumption and obsolesce. This wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology.

 

Image from Permanent Error found here

 

 

 

Anti-war poem in a month celebrating love

Surprised to find this from Wallace Stevens at Behind the Lines:

 

A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home

The wound kills that does not bleed.
It has no nurse nor kin to know
Nor kin to care.

And the man dies that does not fall.
He walks and dies.  Nothing survives
Except what was,

Under the white clouds piled and piled
Like gathered-up forgetfulness,
In sleeping air.

The clouds are over the village, the town,
To which the walker speaks
And tells of his wound,

Without a word to the people, unless
One person should come by chance,
This man or that,

So much a part of the place, so little
A person he knows, with whom he might
Talk of the weather–

And let it go, with nothing lost,
Just out of the village, at its edge,
In the quiet there.

Another outrage

Seventeen-year-old Anene Booysen, of Bredasdorp in the Southern Cape, South Africa, was gang raped and badly mutilated, later dying in hospital after identifying her rapists so that they could be brought to justice. Her mother, Corlia Olivier, recounted to the SABC the sight of her daughter after the attack: “My child almost looked purple. She was in such a bad state. All her fingers were broken, her legs were broken. Her stomach had been cut up, you could see her intestines. Her throat was also slit open.”

So many parallels with the woman, a physiotherapy intern,  who died after a brutal gang rape in New Delhi, India, this past December.

 

What does it take to  change a rape culture, to stop a rapist, all rapists? To create a society in which women can be free of that  fear and  danger?

Jay Naidoo in the Mail & Guardian, calling on men to respond and take action to stop sexual violence:

What we need is a massive campaign. Now. The number of victims mounts daily. The psychological and physical toll and economic costs are incalculable. We need our political leadership today. Words are not enough. Lead by your actions. You will find us citizens of South Africa willing to follow bold action to secure the human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Women  have to be equal partners in building the democracy we fought for.

We owe it to Anene Booysen.

 

 

 

Reclamation work on Plath

Astonishingly, it is 50 years since Sylvia Plath took her own life on 11 February, 1963. She was only 30 years old and yet her impact on poets, writers and feminists to this day is not only enormous but fraught, controversial, vexatious. Not a bad thing –

 

 

Jacqueline Rose in the Guardian talking  about Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar

Secondly, if the book is important, it is because it weaves its brilliant depiction of the tortuous professional and personal life of a young would-be female writer into the landmark events of 1950s America – the novel opens with the execution of the Rosenbergs. The personal diagnosis is therefore part of a much wider political malaise. For that reason alone, the tendency to read The Bell Jar as if it were the unmediated biography of Plath’s personal life seems to me to diminish its significance. Why do readers of her work always reduce it to her biography, thereby cheating her as a writer, cheating any writer, of the power to transform their lives in their art?

 

A language, a history, a culture, a vision slips away with you

What pierces  us with a loss we should have foreseen. A language fresh in the dawn of time, before  civilisation, before colonial trespass.
Aenki Kassie, 71, who was one of only three people who spoke the N/uu language, died in Upington on January 7.

Her son said she died in hospital of chicken pox.

She was part of the Khomani people of the Kalahari desert, whose language became known to researchers in 1998 through a land claim which helped form the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Only a few people are left who can speak the oldest surviving San language of Southern Africa.