Friday, September 30, 2016

OTI:two poems and notes:9/30/16

Open To Interpretation

All Dreaming

I know you are all dreaming
And wonder
Why you are all smiling.


Stir

So, so,
Herodotus,
Let me get the plot straight:
The Phoenicians took Io.
The Greeks took Europa.
And the Greeks took Medea.
Paris, the Trojan, took Helen.
"Now, as for the carrying off of women," you tell me,
Herodotus,
"It is the deed they say, of a rogue;
But to make a stir about such
That are carried off, argues a fool."
Oh, if you only knew,
Herodotus,
Automobiles run on fuel.

DolphinWords

Notes:  from the history studies, I have it that now and then a neo-classicists urge takes hold of popular culture, and buildings, and paintings, and writings, and laws, and all, go up in the fashion of Ancient Greece...late 18th early 19th centuries the last one in America...it would be nice, to have as a resource, the tales of the gods and goddesses, and by resource I mean an audience familiar with them...I'm sorta getting there...re-reading the opening of Herodotus' history, I go, 'oh, I know the tale of Medea now'...finished reading Euripides' Medea yesterday...the connection to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venus, at least partly, the scholars make, is that Medea was a stranger in a strange land, like Shylock, and to some extent the other characters, who all seem to be separated from a 'state' they want to be in...Antonio is sad, losing Bassanio, Bassanio is in love with Portia, but in a 'state' of poverty, and so on...Medea is over the top in anger over Jason taking up with another wife, Creon's daughter...and the back and forth goes from it's 'not a big deal', to Jason, to it's 'armageddon', to Medea...and includes the concern of where she will live afterwards, after murdering her children, and Creon's daughter, and incidentally, Creon too...there's an epic of Trojan War scope waiting to be written of Medea in exile...her witchcraft wiles are such, she fashions a 'golden parachute', by making Aegeus take an oath to protect her no matter what when she arrives in his country, a pursued criminal refugee...oh, wait, it's being done...Medea is Israel, Shylock is Israel...essh...how in the world did the old Greek playwrights, and Shakespeare, get so much right!...hmmph...it was very useful for historians like Herodotus to have the gods' and goddesses' tales as explanatory resource!...here's the article about the Greek playwrights influence on Shakespeare:

quote

http://www.academia.edu/5811542/More_Greek_than_Jonson_thought_Euripides_Medea_in_The_Merchant_of_Venice

Medea in
The Merchant of Venice
Zachary Hutchins and Amy Lofgreen

unquote

and to confuse things, there are many different versions of what happens to Medea after the events in Euripides' play...to quote wiki:

quote

Medea then returned to Colchis and, finding that Aeëtes had been deposed by his brother Perses, promptly killed her uncle and restored the kingdom to her father. Herodotus reports another version, in which Medea and her son Medus fled from Athens on her flying chariot, to the Iranian plateau and lived among the Aryans, who then changed their name to the Medes.[1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea

unquote
 
:)
 
DavidDavid


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