CYCLADIC IDYLL: AN APOLOGIA

Abstract

9 2 Y C Y C L A D I C I D Y L L A N A P O L O G I A S T E P H E N Y E N S E R ‘‘I don’t know why you don’t just go over to Catalina.’’ – Bill Edinger 1 I come here for the views. I come because there is no news. Because things have been arranged. Because I have no other plans. Because there are no plans for me. Because I do not have to choose. I come here for the arid, aromatic, aromantic emptiness – where one might ‘‘get a grip’’ and ‘‘sort things out.’’ Add them up. Make some sum. Compose oneself – like a concerto for flute and strings. I come to be alone. Because I am alone. Out of season. Like the few midges left. Adrift on a stony island no known poet hails from. Enisled. Outlandish as that term. (Annihiled is di√erent but only by a smidge.) To remind myself how simple things can be. Simple as the music of the marble figures of the harpist – and the unique double-reed player. Not to mention concepts. To remind myself how when it comes to things like concepts, Heraclitus and Plato had all we would ever need. (Pythagoras I set aside for now.) 9 3 R I come here to learn to speak clearly. To make carefully with the right mouthparts the sounds for thing and nothing, for bread and wine, for come and go, here and now and then and there. For good evening and farewell. Because my own language has become extravagant and tra-la, tra-la. Tralatitious, one might say. And – the olives everywhere remind me – indecently indehiscent. Because I want fewer such words to weigh. To be less weighword, so to say. Therefore less wayward and less spendthrift. Less spindrift, in a word. Not to mention grave, preponderant, and dark. (I come here to be struck by lightening !) Because here in the right place a thésis can be a good flat stone to sit on and not a lizardlike thing to nail down then argue with. Because here amid abandoned villages’ abundant dilapidation there is no reason for reason, no urge to originality. Because as I wait to be transported by the bus I read on small trucks that ply the main road the descriptor Metaphorá. I come here to sit at length and read some Whitman, who adored words plain as stones, regardless of those exultant exaltations of ‘‘eidolons.’’ To browse idly, to idle on in a brief, worn lexicon, to let it lead me on. Because I need new old sayings. Because the good ones die too soon. Because bean by bean fills the bag. Because I will save time, because it will not save me, here where it twists on itself like the walkways to waylay laid-up freebooters like me and my dead friend. 9 4 Y E N S E R Y 2 I come back to stop in on the way to see this time by appointment Edward Lear’s watercolors in the Gennadius, Because he did them as sketches for oils he could paint then sell back home, so they were valueless themselves, so they were kept unmatted and loose in cartons pulled o√ shelves thirty years ago for improvident visitors like me and my friend who was my guide to shuΔe through and take quick notes like these on his. Because even this delicate, vehicular medium meant fixity, his nemesis, so in hopes that glazed and scumbled oils could get the shifty shades right, he jotted in light pencil across the images descriptions, shot through with nonce terms and puns fleeting as pains taken, rubbed and faded, sometimes indecipherable, wishful notes written on washes disappearing before our eyes, which follow them, into sea, cli√, olive stand, distant temple, dovecote, asphodel. ‘‘catch gold light grass’’ ‘‘all turquoisy & Byzantine bluesy’’ ‘‘O poppies!’’ ‘‘very olivish’’ 3 I come here not to contemn my city’s columbaria of condominiums and book emporia with their stacks of fresh books on chocolate chockablock with guides to the Galápagos and Godot and...