The same foolishness and more

December 9, 2014

In which – again! – I don’t end up where I

thought I was going (because I started in the 

middle, instead of the beginning or before?)

Do things just hop into your hand too – especially during a stiff gin-and-tonic and valium breakfast? This morning I found this in my left hand, scribbled on the palm, possibly by fairies during the night: “Ernest Dowson *”. And on the back, the * : “Horace” and the numbers,I, 4 and 15, separated by periods. Meaning the Odes, Book I, Ode 4, line 15, the title of one Dowson poem, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam. “The short span of life forbids our encouraging long [or lasting] hope.”  Or, as David West translates: “the brief span of life does not allow us to start on long hopes.”

      Even in spring, Horace tells Sestius in the ode, when Venus dances with the “lovely Graces, linking arms with the Nymphs” - even in spring when we are sure to trip and fall in love with tender Lycidas, “whom all the young men now burn for and for whom all the girls will soon be warm,” even in spring . . . Wait: what if “soon” does not come for any of the girls, or even for you, Sestius (however wealthy and honored you may be)? Dowson is right. Here's his poetic advice:

                    They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,                               
                            Love, desire and hate;

                    I think they have no portion in us after

                            We pass the gate.

                    They are not long the days of wine and roses;

                            Out of a misty dream

                    Our path emerges for a while, then closes

                            Within a dream.

Dawson is right to say “the weeping and the laughter.” It is not only dancing that does not last, or love or passion for Lycidas (or Laura); mourning does not last, or rage or hate. “They have no portion in us after / We pass the gate.” 

     But then what?  For Dowson, it is not that we become nothing or that we come from nothing. We are in “a misty dream” before “our path emerges” for this little while; and after, it closes into another dream. Only in between are there “days of wine and roses.”  (I can’t help but think of the movie with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in which the days become darker and darker – as if spring had leapt straight into winter, as if evening had broken through afternoon and into late morning – in which love and hate are making love.)

          However we spend them, these wine-and-roses days are not long; not long do we have teeth to eat good bread, not long tongues to taste and throats to swallow wine, nostrils to breathe in the smells of the ground and air – no time at all to taste, to touch, to grasp and hold, to inhale, to warm or choke ourselves with love and hate. Then, what was a dream becomes dream again.

Dowson raises the question my personal-salvationist friends assiduously avoid – as if there were no question. If we have eternal life, must it not be from forever as well as to forever? If so, where were the saved and the damned before they accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior or, as God already knew, decided not to? Where were they, or in what when?

Not where you thought I was going either . . . though I’m not done. Put on Dick Vitale:

  imrb

(in medias res, baby!)

to be continued