The True Universal Pandemic (And on the Meaning of the Ancient Dispute Between Socrates and Homer)

 

The only true path to guide us out of confusion

is the soul; only the soul can track down true reality.

Plato, Phaedo, Socrates’ Apology to his friends

 

Every speech, every poem even,

like life itself carried on this earth,

is invaded by small, hollow silence

bound to grow and soon to envelop

 

its victim to eat it, swallow whole

once the Great—the soul—departed

for even in this land of Whitman

soulless creatures develop and sprout,

 

and life moves through the seeping void

of avoidance to dodge the bullet or—

the truthful, heartfelt, flashing point.

That’s how people wall and coop up

 

their man-made Hells and hallways

where the good, the true, the beautiful

lie forsaken, ousted, cleansed and slain.

That’s where the Dark Side of Man stays,

 

a monster richly fed and groomed to swell.

It needs no Socrates, no Plato, no angelic poet.

Fiends turning man to stone is the chosen diet.

As the soul recedes, something else, much different,

 

takes her place, rising its jaws and countless heads.

It is death or its bastardized—mortician’s figure

that puts makeup, life’s fake face, on what’s murderous

and thus by far deader than anything naturally only dead.

 

Anything that’s lyrical is being drowned in deafness

which only racket and ruckus takes from its lows up high.

Or some fix, some fad, some buzz—no room for depth

where only the dead do imitate what’s their thought of death.

 

Through the hollow—and these ways—Heaven draws away,

and the soulless pull—like the blind enchained—further down

this world—and the divine like all else—is gauged up for a sale.

Those are the times of fevers, morbid fanatics, malaise, and decline.

 

Minds and hearts benumbed. And out of communion even lovers are.

Beauty ceased to relate to what is true, and the true is no more good.

The light within went out, and the light without is a bulb of sickly plant.

And the human left—is harnessed to be harvested—for its bitter gall.

 

The base and the low now stand above, and the high and grand

is like the ash mixed with seeds which Psyche or some Cinderella

tries to weed out on her own when the lights went dark and cold.

This is the time of solitudes—of solitudes of hardened seeds.

 

For the way of these seeds goes back—always—back to the soul,

her concealed sharpened blade or wing and sail and oar—

that old mysterious Palladium which empires love and need

to steal and repossess from one another like London, Carthage,

 

Sparta, Rome, or Troy. These are the times when hermits bury

their gold as they forage in the songs and wisdoms of those

who, however remote or forgotten, would consent to talk

and plant a different season into the ear that may bud

 

on a gravid mind or on new Prometheus’ stalk from the bough

of which someone would make one day Athena’s new flute.

From where, against all the odds, does the soul, the Great Power,

stem and come as silence even in-between and within simple words

 

is being suddenly (or was it painstakingly slow?) overflown and filled

with light, cracking, bursting the dark and all the more the dead—?

From where is the feminine that knows of such deathless love,

endurance, and longing which splits neither death, nor life, nor time?

 

There is a Spring, and every Spring is a union through which Eros lives

to whose point and arrow the Goddess gives the power, the aim, the quill.

Just as each such Paradise or Genesis from within its fountained midst

emerges where the Creative and its Arousing are being matched and found.

 

For there is no other worth inside than the power of the soul once her tongue

her lover too begins to speak—that fire from which even gods themselves

draw and gather their deathless harmony and breath—apportioned ambrosia.

Just as only the true piety and hesychia can draw and attract such a serene boon.

 

For what else is man in the final and decisive account than a seed of this

that fell from stars and Heaven—through the clash of spirits who did meet

down into this time and space—to become once more a light of flower

for someone kindred or a poem to fit, rekindle, care for and pollinate?

 

For even humans are—like everything else—sown and scattered

tones and notes and grains—present, past, and future fruits—or stones

of the music that ordains, creates, steers all—even if the notes themselves

won’t hear more than their closing hum or if they themselves lost a sense of sound.

 

Where the true real is, there is always some prodigious and divine Bach

hearing and playing in the key of sacred beauty and the deepest harmony

by which the union with the soul is remembered and rejoiced once more

or rejoined ever even as indissolubly realized as true and just and constant.

 

One is either in harmony with the soul and her nodding call or at variance,

wondering over the deserts of the waves like Odysseus bound, and yet adrift,

killing and losing all, fathers as well as their sons and even female slaves—

a bringer of death both to friends and enemies alike, as we are all part

 

of the old, perennial conflict that sets the soulless against the soul,

the murderous and morbid against life’s true sense, tending, exaltation,

just as the broken noise tries to terminate or drown or mime true music

so that the latter would die in its image and to its likeness, lost and darkened,

 

so that nothing would make a difference, and all be the same, caved and empty.

Futile, depraved, dispossessed, absurd, lowly, wasted, meaningless, and fatal.

So how does the foul gasp of the soulless depart—with the numb and senseless?

How does one purge the polluted? One is either with the Caesar or with Soul.