Save me, I am not a goat

[sovay]

My poem "Idle Thoughts While Watching a Faun," after elisem's earrings of the same name, is now online at Strange Horizons.

My novelette "A Ceiling of Amber, a Pavement of Pearl," originally published in Singing Innocence and Experience (2004), will be reprinted in this month's Sirenia Digest alongside greygirlbeast's newest story, "Houndwife." If you don't already have a subscription, why not?

I have no idea why, tonight being the first night of Pesach and my family's seder, I dreamed that I had been invited to celebrate a (fictional) Hindu festival with my downstairs neighbors in the converted textile mill where I was living. There was discussion of the fact that outsiders writing about religious traditions tend to focus on the wrong things—and why do they fetishize the floor-washing? I dunno, wouldn't you want a clean floor if all your relatives were coming over? All hail self-reflexively critical dreams.

Speaking of which, I have to clean the house.

Comments

[sovay]

It's gorgeous! And I especially love how it wraps up

Thank you! I am very glad.

I susect there's a layer or two I don't have the referents for & am missing, but this happens

What would you like to know?

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Er... what it is I'm not getting :) Or possibly sideways references I could look up? I know sometimes with your poems I am insufficiently well-read & need to do some research & reread to get resonances, and this one feels like that, only I don't know what to look up.

[sovay]

Er... what it is I'm not getting

Okay; silly question. Sorry about that.

Or possibly sideways references I could look up? I know sometimes with your poems I am insufficiently well-read & need to do some research & reread to get resonances, and this one feels like that, only I don't know what to look up.

The phrase in Greek is a quotation from Plutarch's De defectu oraculorum (On the Failing of Oracles):

As to the death of such beings [i.e, gods], I have heard the report of a man who was neither a fool nor a liar. The father of Aemilianus the orator, whom some of you have listened to, was Epitherses, a fellow-citizen and grammar-teacher of mine. He said that once, while sailing to Italy, he took passage on a ship carrying commercial goods and many passengers; at evening, off the Echinades, the wind died and the ship was borne toward Paxi; most of the passengers were awake, and many who had finished dinner were still drinking; and suddenly they heard a voice from the island of Paxi loudly calling, "Thamous," so that they were amazed. Thamous, an Egyptian, was the pilot, not even known by name to many of the passengers. Twice he was called and kept silent, but the third time he answered the caller; and it raised its voice and said, "When you come to Palodes, announce that great Pan is dead [ὁ μέγας Πὰν τέθνηκε]." Hearing this, Epitherses said, everyone was stunned and argued among themselves as to whether it would be better to obey the order or not to get involved, but if there was a breeze, Thamous decided, he would sail past in silence, and if the sea was still and the air calm, then he would say aloud what he had heard. So when he came to Palodes and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamous, looking out from the stern toward the land, said as he had heard, "Great Pan is dead." He had not yet finished when there was a great sound of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mixed with sounds of amazement.

After which everyone from John Milton to Robert Graves argues about exactly what the hell this means—Christianity! Tammuz! Frazer-style mythographical free-for-all!—but it's a famous line and an evocative one, so it wound up in this poem. Setinum was a highly prized Roman wine, from grapes grown in Setia (Sezze) in Latium; it was considered by some writers even better than Falernian, itself the wine of the ancient world. Stéphane Mallarmé's "L'après-midi d'un faune"—the inspiration for Debussy's tone poem and Nijinsky's ballet—is one of the definitive poems of the Symbolist movement and worth reading on general principle.

Any of this useful to you?