Image: Archaeological Park of Plato’s Academy, Athens, Greece. photo: George E. Koronaios, public domain
WHERE OUR STORY ENDS
May 18
Slavoj Žižek, at 76,
self-confessed misanthrope, workaholic,
communist, enemy of wisdom,
admits to his fear of a painful death,
preferring to go in a flash,
and who amongst us would dissent?*
Denys Arcand,
at the ripe old age of 84,
thinking back on his films
marking an era in Quebec cinema,
on his love for history
that first brought him there,
admits that his muse has vanished for good,
and who amongst us
would find that surprising?**
For even as I draft these lines
in the early morning hours,
I’m thinking of you, my generational peers,
who’ve lived through much
the same sequence of events,
now forced to own up,
à contre-cœur or not,
to where our story ends.
*El Pais, May 18, 2025 **Le Devoir, May 17, 2025
WHEN THE WAR COMES TO DAMOUCHARI
Damouchari, Greece, July 24
We were sitting on the patio
under the plane tree
finishing our noon-day meal,
when just below us,
adjacent to the cove,
the altercation began.
A young Israeli
and five Greeks her age
debating le thème du jour,
each side with pitched voice
demanding the floor
to expound the horrors of Hamas and Oct. 7
or the daily toll of Palestinians
slaughtered by the IDF,
neither side prepared to cede an inch.
The fate of a quiet beach town
where Israeli tourists have long been prone to come
in a time of war.
PLUS ÇA CHANGE
August 2
In 1937,
when the census figures for the USSR
fell considerably short
of what the Little Father of the People had expected,
he had the census takers arrested
and the census declared invalid.
In 2025,
when the labour market numbers for the United States
fall considerably short
of what the MAGA Piper-in-Chief had expected,
he has the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics fired,
claiming the figures have been rigged.
Two different political systems,
a century apart,
yet a convergence of behaviour
that tells a tale.
THE OLIVE GROVE
Damouchari, August 10
The muses here consort and on these plains
the olive grows, self-born, immortal, unafraid of foes.
— Oedipus at Colonus
Their branches exultant in the breeze
can blind you as the sun
plays trickster with the leaves,
now light green, now silvery,
as the fruit slowly ripens in the heat
and their trunks stand guard
against the avatars that through the ages
seek to wrestle them to the ground.
PLATO’S ACADEMY: OR THE RUINS OF PHILOSOPHY
Athens, September 6
As always in Greece,
there’s a myth behind a name,
hence Academus, an Attic hero
supposedly buried on this spot
where centuries later, in a public grove,
Plato is said to have founded his Academy.
Cicadas are chirping away
in the trees above the site
in imitation of the chatter to and fro
that echoed here millennia ago.
In the park that has grown up around,
neighbouring residents walking their dogs,
mothers with their prams,
small kids fighting for possession of a ball.
Not quite the search for some eternal truths
by Plato and his acolytes,
but to those venturing here
some distance off the beaten tourist track,
a reminder that the philosophical quest
began in ruins like these.
IT ONCE WAS THE CASE
October 2
It once was the case
that the seasons changed
with some predictability,
that summers were warm and winters cold,
that the rivers and seas
seemed to know their place
with the icebergs and poles fairly well behaved
in the planetary scheme of things.
It once was the case
when we turned on the news
that the world as a whole
seemed to be on a roll,
that the ills of the past,
the despots and wars,
the famines and plagues,
might never return.
It once was the case
as the young came of age
that the future ahead
promised little but hope,
new breakthroughs in science,
new medical feats,
if only we’d keep technology harnessed
and our demons at bay.
CLIO
October 5
We were told by Santayana
that those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it.
In Israel/Palestine we see what happens
when there is too much history
and all too little geography to contain it.
In the Slavic world of Kyiv and Moscow
the same may hold true for the past,
though geography is not in short supply.
For those who ponder
authoritarianism’s current return,
Suetonius and Tacitus
have become figures of inspiration.
And for the many among us
who find Clio too much to cope with,
there is always Melpomene, her sister muse,
to keep us company.
THE PROPHETS
October 28
Watchman, what of the night?
— Isaiah 21:11–12
We are not the first
to face the looming winter nights
without a crystalline sense
of where we may be heading
or a compass to direct us.
Perhaps this is the way it has always been,
danger lurking in the darkened passageways,
grievances and bitter enmities
stirred up from the lower depths
as chaos threatens.
Lulled by the good times we have known,
ill-prepared for what awaits us
now that the critical hour is upon us,
we look for guidance from the prophets
and there is none.
DOMUS AUREA
November 7
If Nero could build a House of Gold
with his plunder,
what of the Oval Office
transformed by a garish ogre?
If corruption long proved the bane
of empires and republics,
what of liberal democracies
where stellar fortunes breed overweening power?
If instinct and emotion
so often beat out sobriety and reason,
what future for a species
with its reptilian charger?
Just asking.
THE FEARS
November 14
Then back they come, the fears that we fear.
— W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety
We’d quite forgotten
what fear was all about
in those halcyon years,
at least in the West,
when the future was looking ever brighter,
major wars a figment of the past,
international law and human rights
more redeeming and substantial
than autocracy’s recurring scourge.
Did we have blinkers on,
believing a utopian age had dawned
with the pent-up enmities of old
packed away for good,
even as new dangers
we’d never dreamed about
lurked on our fractured planet?
Did we think our generation,
so boastful and self-assured
about all it had achieved,
was somehow immune
from the instinctual fears
that so many through the ages
have endured?
THINGS HAPPENED
November 19
“Things happened,”
said the ogre to the Prince
who knows a thing or two about how to make
pesky critics vanish without a trace
and has untold trillions with which to build
futuristic cities in the desert
where Ozymandias, King of Kings,
once reigned.
And they spoke of deals to come,
of F-35s to hasten the process along,
of bulldozers, excavators
clearing the rubble from Gaza’s ruins,
of an Abrahamic Peace about to grace
the Holy Land and Middle East
with the fabled troubles of the past
swooshed away in the swirling sand.
