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But a saint dies with her boots on
I wish I had Carthaginian or Etruscan authors to love as much as the Greek or Roman ones. I stared at the Pyrgi Tablets last night and thought again that they are one of the coolest things I know from the ancient world, and so very singular. Wikipedia in translating both texts renders the personal name of Thefarie Velianas as "Tiberius," although the Etruscan form is older. His city was Cisra. The Romans called it Caere; it was Kyšryʼ to his Phoenician-speaking allies. I'm sure the political situation was complex. It is a curious thing for a ruler to dedicate a shrine in gratitude to another people's god. But he calls her Uni-Astre, syncretizing. (Her name on the Phoenician side of the tablets is rendered ʻštrt, Aštart—cognate with Akkadian Ištar, Hebrew Aštoret, I don't like to use Astarte outside of Greek contexts for the same reason I prefer not to Romanize Greek names wherever possible. That š is important.) The Romans assimilated Tanit to Juno Caelestis, raised temples to her after the destruction of Carthage and the building of Roman Carthage on the same ground. Not Venus, despite her equivalence to the evening star. Carthage is Juno's city in the Aeneid; its future defeat is the reason the goddess hates Aeneas, his abandonment of Dido and her enmity-ensuring curse a closed loop of time. Roman tradition held that Juno herself was taken from the Etruscans by evocatio at the siege of Veii in 396 BCE. Scipio Aemilianus is supposed to have performed the same ritual on Tanit during the sack of Carthage in 146. At Cisra, she was offered a shared name and invited in. These old, old links, irrecoverable fragments. Everything becomes a sigil of something lost: an unspoken language, an unreadable book. I have no more right to the Etruscans than D.H. Lawrence, but I can't stand reading his Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932), lovingly as he writes of their ruins and their art; he romanticizes them so much, so much freer, more spontaneous, more sexual, more primitive than the clipped stony Romans who succeeded them. So much more in tune with nature, so unspoilt. (Plus lots of assumed phallic symbolism, because this is Lawrence. I cannot actually read his interpretation of the duck with a straight face.) The Etruscans were as warlike as anyone else in the ancient world, not just in fighting off Roman expansion. They had colonies themelves. They made sacrifice of prisoners taken in war. Nothing is as simple as falling in love with a painting on a tomb wall. I keep coming back to voices that cannot speak for themselves; I never want to be Lawrence. I wish I knew some of their poetry. Or even the histories they wrote.
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So beautifully mused.
But do tell us about Lawrence's duck. Will I need a kazoo?
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I'm really sorry. You did ask.
But the duck that swims on the water, and lifts his wings, is another matter: the blue duck, or goose, so often represented by the Etruscans. He is the same goose that saved Rome, in the night.
The duck does not live down within the waters as the fish does. The fish is the anima, the animate life, the very clue to the vast sea, the watery element of the first submission. For this reason Jesus was represented in the first Christian centuries as a fish, in Italy especially, where the people still thought in the Etruscan symbols. Jesus was the anima of the vast, moist ever-yielding element which was the opposite and the counterpart of the red flame the pharaohs and the kings of the east had sought to invest themselves with.
But the duck has no such subaqueous nature as the fish. It swims upon the waters, and is hot-blooded, belonging to the red flame of the animal body of life. But it dives underwater, and preens itself upon the flood. So it became, to man, the symbol of that part of himself which delights in the waters, and dives in, and rises up and shakes its wings. It is the symbol of a man's own phallus and phallic life. So you see a man holding on his hand the hot, soft, alert duck, offering it to the maiden. So today the Red Indian makes a secret gift to the maiden, of a hollow, earthenware duck in which is a little fire and incense. It is that part of his body and his fiery life that a man can offer to a maid. And it is that awareness or alertness in him, that other consciousness, that wakes in the night and rouses the city.
The paragraph immediately preceding the rhapsody of the duck is also worth noting—
But the sea the people knew. The dolphin leaps in and out of it suddenly, as a creature that suddenly exists, out of nowhere, He was not: and lo! there he is! the dolphin which gives up the sea's rainbows only when he dies. Out he leaps; then, with a head-dive, back again he plunges into the sea. He is so much alive, he is like the phallus carrying the fiery spark of procreation down into the wet darkness of the womb. The diver does the same, carrying like a phallus his small hot spark into the deeps of death. And the sea will give up her dead like dolphins that leap out and have the rainbow within them.
—because as far as I can tell D.H. Lawrence never met the creature, symbol, or element he could not liken to his penis, unless it was a creature, symbol, or element he was likening to something he could put his penis in.
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So I tried to find the poem of Lawrence's I remembered which started off about flowers and all of a sudden turned into his cock and instead I found a poem about whales fucking, which I think proves my point just as well.
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HA! excellent--like Kate Beaton's Byron.
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YES.
(Did she ever do a comic on Lawrence? Why not?)
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I was just thinking that!
Also, Oh Dear God WTF Lawrence. That paragraph read like a parody of itself.
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Too much phallus. Phallus no longer special.
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"And that is another curious thing. One can live one's life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis: that is, the phallic symbol! Here it is, in stone, unmistakable, and everywhere, around these tombs. Here it is, big and little, standing by the doors, or inserted, quite small, into the rock: the phallic stone! Perhaps some tumuli had a great phallic column on the summit: some perhaps by the door. There are still small phallic stones, only seven or eight inches long, inserted in the rock outside the doors: they always seem to have been outside . . . The big phallic stones that, it is said, probably stood on top of the tumuli, are sometimes carved very beautifully, sometimes with inscriptions. The scientists call them cippus, cippi. But surely the cippus is a truncated column used usually as a gravestone: a column quite squat, often square, having been cut across, truncated, to represent maybe a life cut short. Some of the little phallic stones are like this—truncated. But others are tall, huge and decorated, and with the double cone that is surely phallic. And little inserted phallic stones are not cut short."
SOMETIMES A ROCK IS JUST A ROCK.
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I am engorgingly in love with youI love you so much.no subject
Spectacular.
Nine
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For that duck may be somebody's...
Nine
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