Byrd Calls
“This is my fiftieth year to heaven, as the poet Dylan Thomas would have
it, in this sometimes hellish chamber, place of words and honor and
increasingly crumpled diction, like that foul best slouching towards
Bethlehem to be born, wretched in smell and eccentricity. Cinquente, my
Mexican amigos say in Wheeling or cinquanta uttered by senators de Roma two
millennia ago or “half a mo” in the language of the Cockney street
suggesting post- 9/11 a new measure which in ancient Roma as in King
Arthur’s time--by the way, he and Merlin have a place in my pantheon of
great leaders who together were able to marry the iron fist and smoke and
mirrors (precisely the lesson in governance that my esteemed colleagues
should emulate)--was the length of a king’s arm or stride or multiple times
the diameter of a slave’s tongue or a donkey penis or a harlot’s curse, all
measures, small and large, measures on measures--not “Measure for Measure”
which as we all know was not a drama about time but how to measure life in
coffee spoons, the substance just coming in from the east and was like a
brown god and its import spot on the banks of the bustling Thames would
mark the time where Greenwich Mean Time began--but a new beginning, again,
as in the first fall light (I’m in Wales again) when time not only waits
for no man but is out of joint, not marching in Christian certitude to the
lion’s den or less romantically to the tick-tock of life slipping through
our veins, a violent disjunction as if the Great Chain of Being that held
the world in check, was sundered like the temple curtain on that dark day
of sacrifice and extortion, and Hamlet rages against his mother and begs
this sullied flesh to melt, verbal but unconscious because God was no
longer in his heaven and all was not right with the world because man has
deconstructed the divine, invited Him down from Olympus with the rest of
his pantheon and took Him inside,, listening to the ego’s bitter drum.
losing the incantations from that great day in Roman history when the cross
and the sword were joined in Constantine’s dream and memory and if this
were vanity, like these small words that chase meaning, at least the cause
was just but now, in the footsteps of the unsure Danish prince, Olympus has
crashed and the gods have become diseases where there is no respite, no
health care relief from this incestuous turning of public opinion into hero
worship, a genuflection Cato would not have countenanced, not for Caesar or
any emperor, yet we fiddle like Nero when Roma burns, from the inside, when
well-meaning souls, most in expensive robes, throw wisdom books on the fire
like the ancients who added in Florence the hair of harlots, the poetry of
veneration, and the cosmetics washed up from the bitter Tigris, charring
memory, history and sharp tongues until all that civilization could endure
was the chatter and incontinence of slaves who knitted that unruly globe
together for those who would be drunk on wine and flesh, stitching wool
over the eyes and ears so no one heard the other god who had his own
historical dream of plunder and domination under the heel of righteousness,
as now when all hearing is mute and while we still bury our dead we have
lived the event and lost the meaning--as Eliot said but not in the
Wasteland which was about another end before the end, the war that would
end all wars--so we become inflated, like the circus clown but small of
purpose--we are the small men, we are the Hollow men, wondering if we
should eat a peach or wear the bottom of our pant legs rolled--thinking
this way and that as if in an arrogant military march, goose-stepping
toward truth, forgetting what that great Senator from California--the
dearly beloved Sam Hayakawa, may God rest his soul--said about discourse,
about the danger of inventing “the little man who wasn’t there”, the boogie
man who willingly accepts all our entreaties, and prayers, and sins like a
scapegoat of old so the tribe can survive, killing the best of what is in
us because we fail to find conscience and language to fit the occasion and
fill this great hall reminding all who remember ancient Rome if we move
like a herd, we are a herd, if we march to the one drum beat without seeing
the sword and cross of Constantine firmly in our dreams, we are slaves, if
we don't hear the guttural cry from the East we are deaf and no amount drum
roar will keep us from the nightmare of our silence, the surrender of our
days.
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