FALL 2016

poetry

Sanctum

Danijela Stojkovic

6

Almost

Victoria Butler

9

Always on the Buttered Side:

Daniel Galef

10

Speaking an Asexuality

ElĂŠa Regembal

13

Cinnamon Kings

Lexie Mumey

14-15

A Watermelon in Toronto

Boris But

18-19

Descending Quatrains in Chaos

Meridional

22

mutually assured destruction (1995)

Sean Sokolov

30-31

Style

Christopher Barnes

32

Palmyra, or, Love Under Common

MW Jaeggle

34-35

Sea Change

Max Binks-Collier

38

Die Katabasis Von Pylaimenes

Daniel Galef

40-42

Sense

prose

driving into the woods

Louis Sanger

7

The Smart Man

Zain R. Mian

11

Name

Maia Klee

21

Hungry Women Seeking

Emily Szpiro

24-25

Na-Il Faid

27-28

Male Lovers Quid Possum

art

One

Michaela Jones

Cover

Ascension

Daniel Galef

8

Two

Michaela Jones

12

watchu lookin at

Chloe Rowan

16

gender non-conforming

Chloe Rowan

17

Three

Michaela Jones

23

me in tree

Sadie Mallon

26

Four

Michaela Jones

29

Abraxas

Daniel Galef

33

Nameless Days

Daniel Galef

36

lake ont 04/16

Katie MacKinnon

37

Hide and Seek

Sophie Panzer

39

the veg literary magazine fa l l 2 0 1 6 v o l . 1 3

The Veg Literary Magazine is funded by the Fine Arts Council and the Journal Fund of the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) of McGill University. The content of this publication does not necessarily represent the views of the AUS or McGill University.

Layout and Design by Marie Labrosse printing by

The Editors Emily Hoppe Sam Kessler Alexander Keys Maia Klee Marie Labrosse Emily Mernin Joseph Mulholland Zoe Shaw Mark Weissfelner

Dear Reader, Whether you are new to The Veg or vintage like the hand writing this, we hope this issue both surprises and delights.

This semester’s volume is for the palette, and its contents are surreal: Fruits. Whole worlds or things lost. Landscapes. Ruins. We thank every writer who submitted work to us over the past months. We literally did not have enough room to publish all of the wonderful writings that made it to us from each of you.

The words thus selected reflect the world they spit. Leonard Cohen, in 1992, lamented and celebrated the painful cycles of human affairs in The Future… especially the value of one’s suffering in illuminating the world - the “crack in everything” of “Anthem.” Around that time, he also sang a song about a banana. This, too, is important.

The past days have been overwhelming. Ideas have died. The old bard above too.

We’re reminded of the world’s artillery-fire this morning. It echoes.

Yet there remains a sacredness in the space between silence and the contours of lettering. Mr. Cohen spoke to otherworldliness as a lover, or a friend at bay, and occasionally even as something to be played with – vulgarised – and given form by his pen. Years ago he asked himself if he had a right to do so.

Today, Ezra Koenig and the boys of Vampire Weekend put that same sentiment to a rhythm, speaking to the potential immediacy of the otherworldly while remixing the holy name on their last studio album, Modern Vampires of the Weekend. They repeat playfully, in a refrain of “Ya Hey,” the words of the burning bush: “I am that I am.”

They are - that lordly, estranged voice of the wilderness. But might we not be, in some small shard, too? Power speaking from vast absences, yet unwrit.

Thus, to sung titles from desert fire. Our mouths as witness. To words and the seeds in them each.

And to bananas. They’re important too.

From a shrine off of Saint-Dominique, patron saint of those looking up, November Eleventh, Two-thousand-and sixteen, Mark

Sanctum the orange-peels on the table curled, milk side up

milk side in in the tired sunlight and made shadows. cracks in the oak swallowed slivers of their darkness and tucked it away forever

and so and such they stashed a part of the day that depended on a craving to settle out of time and out of sight

Danijela Stojkovic

driving in the woods there is something calming about driving into the woods, something terrifying too in the way the radio loses touch as the houses do and your car is hidden by the dutiful trees who stand guard over all the creatures of the forest, and eventually all the other cars are gone and the signs are gone with them until the only reminder of your own species is the lonely and searching road that carves its way endlessly into the dark woods, and you look out the window but all you can see is your own reflection and all the memories that are left, stagnant in the back seat of your mom’s old car that rattles over the sandy road, and there are two people with you; a driver and another passenger and they might be your mother and father but for now they are simply extras in the silent film that encompasses all of your life, and all that came before it, and all that led up to your birth and there, in the middle of the lonely woods, alone in the packed car, you realize that you are nothing but a creature of coincidence, a creature who has no right to be there, in those woods, in that car, in that night, and you are happier when your mother turns the high beams off because driving into the woods is best done in the dark.

7

Louis sanger

Ascension Daniel galef

Almost Here you are, seeking your pockets for something you lost on the way to see me.

We stand outside for hours in the cold as you keep checking again and again.

9

Victoria butler

Always on the Buttered Side: Descending Quatrains on Chaos i Murphy was an optimist—Who knew?

“What can go wrong will go wrong?” Sure they do!

What’s left unmentioned is: Before too lon, What can’t go wrong at all will still go wrong.

Paradoxically

ii If felines always make a landing On four paws and proudly standing, And toast falls butter-down, at that— Then what befalls the buttered cat?

Reversibility

iii As futile, Maxwell reckoned, As un-breaking ceramics: And that would break the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Entropy

iv The only true law Ever spoken: Every new law Will be broken.

But for now

v Dust, Fate Must Wait.

Until

vi

Daniel galef

The Smart Man When Jacques Lacan first posited the mirror stage, do you think he looked straight at himself, closed one eye like Humphrey Bogart and said “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

I think he did. Smart people can be strange, you know. Take my good friend Akbar here, for instance. Akbar is a smart man. He works at an office in the city. The city is Karachi and Akbar is happy he works there as an accountant. He wears a shirt and tie and white pants to work-- the kind you don’t wear to other, less important jobs.

But, like Jacques Lacan, Akbar is a silly man. He knows that his wife will one day fuck the neighbour. Akbar reminds me of Einstein in that photo with his tongue out. Very intelligent, but also very silly. Akbar reads much Shakespeare. He feels it gives him a distinguished air. He has read four plays and all of them have told him of man’s inevitable cuckoldry. Akbar, ever the haughty cock, recites these passages to his wife.

He is not an insecure man, and he makes it a point that she know this.

He is content with his package and she must be too. He recites thus: “Go play, boy, play. There have been, Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Akbar is a bit sad. She has not been given an orgasm since the day she married Mr. Akbar some seven years ago. All this while she has listened to her husband talk about cuckoldry at least twice a day. On this day the idea hits her at last. “I’ll fuck the neighbour,” she says. She looks out through a convenient window and sees him, Andrew Pinchesky, discarding his briefs. The moment is fortuitous. She leaves through the front door.

Andrew Pinchesky is a well-hung English Jew. He has come back from his job at the firm only some ten minutes ago. He hears a knock on the door. He is still shirtless but he answers nonetheless. At the threshold he finds a woman. She stares at his chest with popping eyes and breathes heavily and titters. He feels she has gone mad and is about to close the door on her but she rushes into the house and plomps onto the sofa.

Andrew is upset. He is expecting his girlfriend Mary to arrive any time but here is this woman and what will she think. The woman is slipping out of her clothes. She is shirtless first and then pantless and now naked.

“Lover,” she says, “gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover I must have you.”

Mary enters through the door. She sees Andrew, then the woman. She looks at Andrew, then the woman again. She is angry. This woman has nicer tits than hers. She shouts at Andrew, “I knew you were a cheat the day I met you!” Andrew tries to go to her but Mary is gone and he is once again alone with the naked lady. He does not know what to do. He looks out the window and sees Mr. Akbar reading a book on Shakespeare. Akbar is a smart man, so he gives this bedfellow a wink, and pulls the curtains.

11

Zain R. Mian

Two michaela jones

Speaking an Asexuality A word without a voice, Skin an opaque barrier Between the urgent cry of the inside And the cryptic silence of the Other.

Emotions like ancient agate and quartz In a geode body, Easily shattered by a hand too rough.

A destruction not named, Stored in a drawer on the coast Of unknown lands A wanderer never treads twice.

Dreams of blurring selves, Understanding their rhymes and the Oscillations of fluttering surfaces, Dissecting the movement to uncover its Beauty, a fleetingly shared sign system.

But a moment later a glance Reveals asymmetrical desires, Speaking different languages.

13

A new burning necessity to expand Vocabulary, to name, to define, Enveloped by an understanding word, Curled up in the felted matter of An unearthed mutual song.

elĂŠa regembal

cinnamon kings The mystic saint, Kabir once said, “What you understand is who you are.”

And what the dancer understands is how to make love to a roomhow to give and take spacehow holy is the body, how holy is the body, the dancer says the body is the most moon.

The mother says the entire world once lived inside of her womb, the griever says all things are arcing towards death, but the sage says, my Lord you are the breath within the breath.

And the sufi says we are all a little bit anatheistwe have all turned our backs on God, but the poet says we must leave to arrive.

And today I overheard a man on the phone, he said, I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re coming home.

I understand this.

I am beginning to understand a lot of things.

I see everyone I know in everyone I see and cinnamon kings in every cup of coffee I see Belize and Mexico and I think of all the things I didn’t know before I knew I loved you like alchemy and Spanish, the way people happen when we belong to ourselves, the way little girls touch all things like most of us only touch our lover’s face with softness and celebration, as if to say - you are the most, you are the most.

The ways that we explain each other: she is the most, she is the most, and she loves just like the Grand Canyon I swear.

It is beckoning and deep, >>>

extending forever in all directions or so it seems, so vivid and wide, she holds space so we can breathe and see how much there is of things.

The ways that we explain each other: “She is my sister.”

“I could not love her any more.”

“Tangled up.”

“Ecuador.”

“Can I tell you something? The sun is my friend,” and when it’s warm like that and yellow, I know the green earth has a good father and the good father says, I am in the taste of water.

I understand this.

He says the way out is the way through, and I understand this too.

I understand there must have been a day where God whispered to the earth, “I just want to give birthto a poem.”

For I have seen glimpses of just this, in my lover’s face and in my mother and the sage, and the dancer that gives space, and the little girl who translates the very heart of God you are the most. You are the most.

Holy like everything else.

15

Lexie Mumey

watchu lookin at c h l o e r o wa n

17

gender non-conforming c h l o e r o wa n

A Watermelon in Toronto I swear, the watermelons are unguarded, Po-Po! They’re sitting by themselves in the corner of the street, Lovely and untouched.

I swear that nobody will be watching!

Why are you frowning, Po-Po, Your wrinkles are usually filled up with smile lines, If someone wanted them, they’d have stayed with them and Put them somewhere nobody would ever see.

You take my hand in your hand, A cautious gesture of your guilt and self-implication, After all you were only eighty-three at the time.

I recall the dull thumps that the melon rind made Against your soft leather palm.

You told me that the colorless and faded ones Were juiceless and dry and veiny and when you hit them They sounded like they wanted nothing more to do with you.

After several moments of self-deliberation, The unconscious mutterings that old ladies always make When there is nobody else to talk to, you gesture For me to take this oddly-shaped Old thing back home.

The young and the old crouch outside A corner supermarket somewhere in Toronto.

You, a willing participant in this act of trivial thievery, Knowing that nobody in the world cared more about A left-out, aging watermelon than I did.

I took the old thing back home.

The watermelon rolls beneath my feet like a raving gust collecting all dust and snow and casually-forgotten debris, Spinning freely, the sputter and bounce on body and skin Merging incoherently with my thoughts of you, >>>

Of the musk of your white flower ointment Hanging onto your earthy clothes and your sagging skin.

I remember it all, How the watermelon left a trail of itself - traces of itself, Its sunken rind going thump-thump-thump Against a concrete pavement.

And you standing behind me, watching and listening As if there was nothing else that mattered in the Universe.

19

Boris but

Name He awoke. He felt a tremor in his chest. Yawn. Another day. Get up, get at it, tend your affairs as if flowers. Let’s get this moving.

Slips out, sidles, sees self, faints of shock. Just kidding. Same old, star anise curled around ears, roosting crows, rumpled, meek half-heart. Checks self, double checks, too shy to check third. Steels stomach, meets outside space.

Wanders about, ping pongs off others. Given ample opportunity to prove himself— the taste of iron, bitter like sex. Gradually, tried and true cards are played. Earnest lust for success, a wanting for one who sees him kindly. Quick sharp darts, undermining plot twists. This is what he sees in his network.

He strolls down the street, knowing who he is. Shoes clop merrily and birds zigzag through the ridges of spines singing jaunty show tunes. But somehow, strange pools. Seams up the sides of buildings, binding them elegantly, pushing their breasts out. Dice roll through underground tunnels, splashing sewage water. Mice scurry across football fields, dancing in patterns, creating crossword puzzles with their dismal formations.

Later, dark room. Liquid black like oil spills, seeping lethally into foaming-tide bodies. Candlelight swims golden fishes from palace balconies. All of sudden: clash. Heat meets spit meets raging poison dreams. Hair threading finger spaces, sharp as needles, tight as locked closets. Silk ropes weave from heart to hatred to mind again. Her, underneath it all, a consequence of rusty workings.

In that moment it opened. He awoke. He came out. He felt himself unlock. There was no light where he came from, no solemn dancers scraping out his insides with sterile machinery. Now: a fabric. A tapestry of backstory. A quilt of what was previously decided. There was more down there, pieces of puzzles that made up the whole, scabbed wounds in deep tissue.

These findings cloaked him in cold—the neck of it drawn tight as a noose.

He peered down into the crevices, no belayer, no climbing climb away.

The writer saw that he saw them, within the eye of it, huddled over dusty parchment, scrawling their recipes. >>>

“Hello?”

(Groan) “What do you want now?”

“Who am I?” “Who knows?”

“What am I?” “Who cares!”

“I care. You care. Tell me why I do what I do.”

“Well you can see now, for yourself.”

“Why did you do it?”

“You needed to be full.”

Wrench: struggle steal take fall crumble.

The man like most could not bear to see himself. Under ancient forests there are layers of soil needed to make these old men grow. In mirrors of mirrors, what’s reflected goes on forever. There was a fracture in the system of secrets and hidden truths. He saw his foundation and broke with it. What happened was this: blood on mountainsides, old women dead with no name.

21

maia klee

Meridional This might sound fantastic but, every time I see the mountains of Maine from the highway I want to bore down to the middle of the earth and evaporate in her core, to make sure those peaks keep growing.

will crosson

23

Three michaela jones

Hungry Women Seeking Male Lovers Christine felt a familiar ache in her mouth as she walked through the doors. It was early, and the room was filled with light. Panic and slick bile rose in her throat, both of which she swallowed down.

“Yes,” she said aloud, her voice wavering. “Yes, this will do.”

Christine looked in the mirror and smiled widely. It felt unnatural and hard, as if her cheeks would split like bursting fruit. Her white lips made her face look pale and peaked, so she applied lipstick and grimaced at her reflection. She ran her tongue over her teeth methodically, then walked over to the phone and ordered food.

She ate with the hurried, sexless pleasure of someone who does not enjoy food so much as they enjoy the act of eating. She ate the bread first, chewing it quickly. When it became soft enough she would drink tea, thick with cream and sugar, to swallow it down, and when the pot ran out she drank coffee instead. After the bread she ate eggs: poached, fried, scrambled, soft-boiled. With nimble fingers, she peeled the papery brown shells off countless hard-boiled eggs and shoved them in her mouth. French toast, pancakes, waffles with butter and sugar. She drank the maple syrup, letting some dribble down her chin, and ate the cottage cheese, too.

She bit hunks of chicken, sucking the charred bones until the flavour was gone, then gnawed at a ribeye steak. She clumsily picked apart a piece of salmon, eating the skin and all, feeling each rubbery piece slip down her throat. She wolfed down thick slices of meat pie, then apple pie, and then dry little crackers. With a final gasp, she finished the wine. She licked the fork clean until there was nothing left of the fork, and when that was gone she ate the spoon, and then the knife. She licked the plates until those were gone too, then the wine glass and the cloth napkin. She ate the curtains, then the blanket on the bed, then the pillows, then the table, until everything in the room was in her stomach except for the mirror.

Christine anxiously wiped her mouth and reapplied her lipstick. She paced the length of the room, staring out the window at one end and staring at herself in the mirror on the other. As she walked, she bit her nails and swallowed the hard little edges. It was getting late – the sun’s yolky gold light was already beginning to cast long shadows across the room. Christine bit her nails down until nothing remained, then chewed nervously at her fingers. When she had chewed those apart, she nibbled on her wrists. It was getting late, she thought, biting all the way down her arms. Instead of walking back over to the window, she paused in front of the mirror. She was wearing white. It had taken her weeks to fit into this dress. There was nothing left of her arms, so she chewed off her legs, then her dress, her lovely white dress, and then each breast. She bit >>>

lips until the lipstick wore off and soon her lips were gone. It was so late that the sun was nowhere to be seen. She had eaten it entirely.

At midnight, there was a knock at the door, and Christine answered it.

“Hello,” the man in the suit said with a smile. He showed each and every one of his teeth, which were milk white and straight as soldiers. A shiver ran through Christine and she smiled back, hungry.

“Hello,” she said, licking his lips.

25

E m i ly s z p i r o

me in tree sadie mallon

Quid Possum When Henry arrives home from where he works, a possum is lying dead in the driveway. When he pokes it with his foot, it hisses at him and scurries away, angry at him for resurrecting it. Before he opens the front door, he talks to the little window below the big one. Its name is Elizabeth, and she has been dead for almost a year. She doesn’t really live in the window, and Henry knows this, but he pretends that she is alive and standing just on the other side. Like a priest in one of those confessionals, he thinks, though he hasn’t been in a church since the funeral, when a shuffling man put a cold hand on his back and told him that the lord works in mysterious ways. Henry puts down his little black case next to the door and spends a few moments making sure his shoes are aligned equally. He can almost imagine he smells pancakes, which he has not been able to eat for a long time. Two rooms in the house are bad, and Henry no longer goes into them. When he walks past them, he is careful not to look at them or pause, because then a part of him wins that he doesn’t believe he has. Dr Beutell told him that, he thinks, or else he told him it was silly. It probably was. He doesn’t look anyway.

* * *

Henry drinks too much of something and then goes to sleep. He dreams about Elizabeth. The girl, not the window. He never dreams about anything else, but he doesn’t usually dream at all. She is in a fur coat that looks familiar but that Henry doesn’t remember, and she is smiling and yawning and stretching. She is covered in dirt. She explains to Henry that she was never really dead, she was just pretending. It was all one big joke and they can go back to normal now. Her brother was in on it too, and the doctors. She’d told Henry once, while he was asleep, but he forgot and buried her anyway. He kisses her, but starts crying uncontrollably in the middle. Her mouth is full of tiny, pointy teeth.

27

* * *

Henry wakes up on the couch and puts on a striped tie with a foreign hand. The man in the mirror is someone he’s never met, but he’s dreamed about him. When he finishes, he looks at his watch and doesn’t like how it looks, so he leaves. The house is lonely while Henry is gone. It cools. It settles. Henry has already settled. He settled in the house when it had enough rooms. Now it has too many. Henry doesn’t know that Elizabeth settled, too. If he did, he would be unsettled. Henry comes back when the sun is shining somewhere else on people he’s never met, and drinks almost enough of something else. He kisses Elizabeth the window, but starts laughing uncontrollably in the middle. >>>

* * *

The next day, Henry rides a train to and from a place he’s never been, and does something in between. He forgets what. On the way back, he holds his little black case between his knees and tries not to look at anything or think about anything. His car is parked at the station in the space he left it in. There is no way to know whether it’s been sitting there all day. Henry thinks about this. In his driveway, Henry runs over something small and furry, but it’s just a possum. He moves it over onto his neighbor’s lawn, and it doesn’t hiss at him or run away, even when he pokes it with his foot. It’s gotten better at pretending. There isn’t much to tell the window today. There are more empty bottles than full ones.

* * * Henry dreams about tiny teeth. When he wakes up, Elizabeth is in the kitchen, making pancakes. But it’s okay: she is only pretending to be alive. He is too, he has been almost forever now, but he didn’t realize it until she told him. She kisses him with syrupy lips. They laugh.

N a- i l f a i d

29

Four michaela jones

mutually assured destruction (1995) in a nuclear world any state will be deterred by another state’s second-strike forces. within the rational deterrence framework, three major requirements for stable relationships exist: 1) there must not be a preventive war during the transition period when one state has nuclear weapons and the other state is building, but has not yet fallen for the other; 2) both states must develop not just the ability to inflict unacceptable damage to the other side, but also a sufficient degree of “second-strike� invulnerability so that its forces could retaliate if heartbroken; 3) the nuclear arsenals must not be prone

>>>

to accidental outbursts. nuclear optimists believe that nuclear states will meet these requirements because it is in these states’ obvious interests to do so for the sake of the person they love. this is, as I have shown, and will again, a very problematic belief

31

sean sokolov

Style Jackie Stallone’s Nagasaki vacation Wobbled crabbed. The mushroom, belly-flopped by parachute, Harbingered air raid ear-splits.

Implosion tarred on a megacritical squeeze, In one howling flash.

Skin-rips tasselled her limbs.

The crumpled face Pussed grisly.

Dior’s rig-out blistered.

The elegant Saké bar jiggled, molten.

Christopher barnes

33

Abraxas Daniel galef

Palmyra, or, Love Under Common Sense i Common sense tells us that our existence is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Understanding life, mending our coarse histories, that space between our initial darkness and our final darkness— this is my sense of love.

Oh mighty conjecture, how does sense corroborate, tally, balance, register fanatics, fugitives of faith?

Justify the caustic silence, the roar of explosives, the refugee.

From this mound, we can see the ground rising, columns folding, the sand dropping a blanket across Palmyra.

The rising ground will reach the Euphrates soon and we will see those images, be made to feel the sediment in our collective palms.

Watch others search for bones.

History is men around tables, the diagrams, representations near; is the talk of intention and common sense.

There is nothing communal about it.

Love is austerity: relations made cheap, easier thrown than mended.

Are you sure you would like to remove this friend?

Like amphorae, we are discarded into a charnel house—an occupation.

Reified contacts, a cell in a spreadsheet, a number subject to common sense, we are a blip mediated by the market. ii I am looking at a black and white photograph of Palmyra held at the Library of Congress. It was taken sometime before World War One,

>>>

before the Great Powers split the Ottoman Empire. The photographer looks down a darkened alley. In the background, the remnants of a temple, its Corinthian columns, loom down on two men moving through an intersection in the alleyway. In the centre of the photograph is a woman holding a child. I can only make out the outline of their bodies against the alley. I want to hold their hands in that darkened alley of Palmyra before partition, before neoliberalism, before iconoclasts break the horizon. I want to hold their hands before common sense devalues love. iii There is no such thing as a private feeling or sensation; its origins are private, but what has been brought into being pervades the commons, our shared inheritance.

35

MW Jaeggle

Nameless Days Daniel galef

37

lake ont 04/16 k at i e m a c k i n n o n

Sea Change Calypso was a bottle of Tide Liquid Detergent with charred sticks for bones. Nets and frayed turquoise ropes were her dreadlocks.

Flies, mites, and crabs teemed in sand-encrusted pubic and armpit hair: hard seaweed, seagrass. Sea-glass teeth scattered in the snarl of the broken and pretending. Waiting for words to curve out of a conch shell’s scraping.

It wasn’t always like this.

There were not always ribs rising against flaking flesh and stone-grey gills, cartilaginous crevices and shelves carving the air with gaping, pockmarking it with sandy absence of eyes.

Her coral brain once had gyral folds corresponding to whorls of thought that then became lines from mussels moving blindly.

So it feels rich and strange that brine and stinging sand flooding the swirls of her mind, creating terse whirls of currents until she hears the crash and pounding of her Charybdis.

Sinews of wet sand finally surfaced clump her skeleton, crush insect, crustacean and she screams frothy rage, crumbling with fingers of rising tide the flotsam of internalized hatreds.

I am more than just alive.

Max Binks-collier

39

Hide and Seek s o p h i e pa n z e r

Die Katabasis Von Pylaimenes (On an Essay of Lewis) In the Iliad There is a fantastic and abysmal hole somewhere between Book V and Book VIII (the distinction must lie in the III, it is between the Is, pineal, extraneous) which few know of but many have tried to fill.

Pylaimenes is a Paphlagonian king, maybe.

In Book V, he dies.

In Book VIII, he mourns.

Not a happy existence, certainly, although there may be other bits we don’t know about.

It is generally accepted that there always is, to some extent.

We are not told of Polyphemos’ eye color, but he has one, presumably.

We do not know whatever happened to Gryllus, but no one thinks he winked out of existence as soon as the full stop dropped.

Nothing is accidental, and everything is ambiguous.

Thus, he reasoned, something happened in between (there is always an in between, as well, no matter how close, that is obscured by the persistence of textual vision) that would explain everything, whether or not we know it, whether or not Homer knew it, whether or not anyone ever even noticed it to begin with. >>>

He died, and then he mourned.

Menelaus saw nothing remarkable, although his sword had been the king’s spit and no Achaean, even heely Achilles, ever killed so many that they forgot any one.

But he was slain, and then quietly an unassumingly wasn’t.

Sure, Herakles saw the twisted gates of Hades on his morning constitutional, and Orpheus at least made the jaunt.

Theseus had his passport stamped as well, and Pirithous.

Charon’s had to put in turnstiles.

But it usually merits at least a note.

An anecdote. A song. Something.

Maybe it was a mistake.

But Watson disagrees, because he doesn’t exist, but neither does Homer, to Hector.

Hesiod, to Hyperion?

God: Nietzsche is dead.

(And he would know.)

41

He argued there is an implied epic, perhaps Homer’s finest, because it has no imperfections and is fitted to the reader more closely than anything less self-contained.

I can argue with Achilles (heck, who can’t?

The man was an idiot) but what Pylaimenes said to Minos?

A gem of rhetoric!

(Especially that fourth line and the bit where he mentions cyclicism.)

Maybe he had something more to not say, and dutifully didn’t say it, or maybe his doomed son had a terrible fear of the image of Death, and he valiantly did his best to allay it.

>>>

Maybe he simply had an allotted part, and he could do nought but play it.

We are perched on the points of a dilemma with infinitely many branches.

Maybe he knows what lies beyond, and returns, and whispers, and warns.

Maybe he had seen the sun rise on precisely one too few Anatolian morns.

Maybe he departed a shade, a false image like Clytemnestra at Thebes from between the Lethe’s infernal horns, but all I know is, in Book V he dies, and in Book VIII he mourns.

Daniel galef

T V

H E

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