Americanization of Amusia via Russian Onegin

London’s dandy—Onegin’s shaper-dresser,
professor, overseeing handler.
—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 1.V

The advent—Epiphany of the Dark.
—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 6.XXI

Empires always PR-ed themselves
as golden times of PEACE
even when or if—war
was their bread and wine.

“They make a desert and call it peace”
(ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant)
in casting his eye on the spoils and shards,
Tacitus already remarked famously and dryly,

speaking via the persona of Calgacus,
a Scottish chieftain addressing the troops:
empire achieves dominance
through destruction, theft, and slaughter,

and then calls such crime and doom
liberty and peace—even reign of law—
when supposed souls invert and mock
Heraclitus’ old adage—

that, if “water” is to be death of the soul,
then a dry soul is the best—
Empire demands—the egos,
having shed the soul

like a bride’s cathedral train,
turn—as if under a malefic gaze
of Medusa multi-serpentīna—
and become withered, desiccated,

and cruelly so—like Onegin,
inside out—dryly ossified
as lifeless stone (6.XLV, 7.XXII),
and such stones—cast and assigned—

in lieu of souls—“growing cold and hard
and stiff as stock—in deadening fashion,
and in that morass, all afloat” (6.XLVI).
It’s the “peace” where “the poet’s

dead, and no one recalls him” (7.XIV),
and what passes for poetry—
and not less—if composed,
secreted by the Jungian—

“language died” (8.XIX),
“friendless and estranged” (8.XXXII);
for it becomes “the agony
of hollow sequence” (8.XI),

which is to say, “losing
the language of the gods” (8.V).
Thus we live, as Pushkin foretold—
“and the presage—secret message” (5.V)

in that “strange freedom and peace” (8.XXXII),
in “stately orchestration
of oligarchic converse…
with imported rout” (8.VI-VII)

where the order’s pivot, spinning pin
is “a monster of the gens Satanic,
a Demon of the [modern] dream,
[someone like Pushkin’s] Onegin” (8.XII)

and where people’s miens
are masks and these are covered
with ciphers—imprecations,
prints of the dark and shadows

and hellish fiends and powers—
the underworld (3.XXII)
which Jung with Freud prescribed—
as the prose of now-ordinary devils,

installed instead of sublime
poetry and songs (3.XIII);
and “this mental fog enwraps up,
each moral being put to doze

so that evil traps us—and the fog—
that’s the triumph of British Demon-Muse” (3.XII),
“a trance coopted” (3.X) under which

“all men are zeroes, and the units

are ourselves alone—all else
only instruments and tools” (2.XIV).
And such egoism, “panacea,”
is a cast, a figure deadlier and colder

and more soul-destroying
than the Ghost of Death (1.XXXVII-III)
which is prima facie odd—
that such “souls”—

souls without character and crux (7.XXII)
are as bad to intellect as they are to heart…
But—no wonder—since this order
is made of perfidy and treason

where all betray all and where
“what we ourselves betray
deceive us in turn” (8.XI);
and since there is no wisdom

and no rhyme, no reason
since “the soul had perished
long time ago” (7.II),
there’s no stop to this either—

this world of unrestrained betrayal
of what is good, beautiful, and holy
is the Lethe’s nether world of souls,
made “hermetic” as in “closed and dumb” (7.XI).

It is a world and order whose “law
is to share—in promiscuous fashion” (8.III).
As Onegin, the accessory-legislator,
speaking via Pushkin’s voice, decreed:

“On such indifference, such forgetting
we all must build—foes, friends, and loves
the voice of soul stilled” (7.XI).
And so it seems that this late Empire

reduced all and every divination
to Hexagram 12 of I Ching,
all down to Stagnation,
to the Dark Side of Peace,

to the times made like Paradise
both of Earth and Heaven—
except here they are hurled apart
to make an ensuing void.

The great had left, and the trite
invades what was left behind,
and the below and the above
can no longer meet,

and the inferior collects
rewards denied to the good.
It is a time of void
that calls sickness good

and health is a threat
for which it finds no use;
“attention turns to the quick fix,
the instant celebrity, the fad,

the one-nighter, the current buzz.
No room for depth—only strange
legends, bas-reliefs, dead poets,”
drowned in amusia, tone-deaf noise.