LA ARME BLANCHE

novel by Lara Biyuts (final chapter)

December 26. London. Creativity Must Go On

FROM POET’S LETTERS

MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS TO INSTANTIUS RUFUS

…And again, my Instantius, the icy breath of the Alpine heights, and again the blue hoar-frost covering the door-knob, garden seat and curvatures of the pines. But a winter day is not hopeless--drawing a bath with the July heat, and then having a spiced fat poultry and a cup of good wine, and then reading the Sybaritic sex manuals, you forget how Sylvanus is in the fields now.

*_*

Let it be known: in mid-summer, on the bucolic herbage, he used to haft the silly young things--but the time has passed, and now barefoot and bareheaded, he is but a naked statue. And yet the defoliated maple, the orphaned son of Pomona will give his hundreds hands to verdant leaves again in March, and the thought of him is like an arrow-like pillar;

*_*

a thought, my Instantius, doesn’t bear two truths about only one thing like Bucephalus cannot be adjusted to two saddles at once. Rome is the only, and Caesar is the only, and the only is my verdict to cities and villages, urbi et orbi: the realm of truths is authorities, the realm of poems is elements. If so, an ear of a fish is won by those who are barefoot;

*_*

really, you cannot say vivas to everyone who sneezes as god have not gone mad; the wine-press squeezes the juice out of grapes and not Hermes’s caduceus entwined by serpents--but the golden locks are shining in Apollo’s rays. Go out to the Forum, Instantius--whose shouts,

whose place is there? Nummus Theos.

*_*

Life is like the Games, as Pythagoras said: some come to compete, some to trade, and the happiest to watch. Staring at the sky, you see the face of a poem, with words worth each other like branches of the maple overhead. What if language is the thing from which, ab ovo, even gods have derived? In fact, of old, some ashes flew where atoms there are now. And Eros is father of all substances. So, wine to him--to him and all Dieu Lare!

*_*

If we have metre, Rome will do without that, Instantius. After four kyathoi of one hundred years old Falernian, let’s glance round what is oikoumene now--terra. Our Rhodes. Our Arcady with the undulate landscape with Paniskoi in the retinue of

Dionysos out of sight.

*_*

And Rome is where we stop, my friend, yes, where we are. By Jupiter! It must be said: however vividly Quirites skip but a flea is more skilful; so, for us, it’s no good to compare Helios’ chariot with long-legged grasshoppers of days--or, shall I hint, just a teeny bit more? If you have two birds and the bush in blossom, then confound the only bird in the hand! What are the Nubian large-eared elephants to us, my friend Instantius? Or the oaks and mistletoes of Gaul?

*_*

What should we say to the hyperborean in the horrific snows? That our Caesar is father but not of the trochee? That, turning his eye to the diamonded space, Poet rules hexameter or iambus as easy as Hercules of yore destroyed the Lernaean Hydra? Is our lot to eat lentil and oilcake and to be glad living for one day, setting hopes on the next morning? Maybe, but we throw the pearl of soul into a cup of wine, we go down the primrose path to the sound of flutes, we live on honeycomb, because more unpredictable than Ananke, Eros has power over soul;

*_*

therefore, staking out the blue with the pupils of my eyes, taking things as they come, lost in the hinterland of dream at times, I talk about this and that; not Chryssipus yet I judge everything as a true stoic--the world is not worth refusing to become a poet, but becoming a poet is worth the whole world. The earth is flat, as the philosophers teach, and there are enough places--not only for merchant travels whose reason is boorish like drinking merum on an empty stomach and whose result is the wine and a lot of sweet necessities.

*_*

Aiming the invisible staff at the ether, we go neither forwards nor backwards but upwards, my Instantius, which doesn’t prevent us from finding time for some prosaic work: cleaning grandsires’ pots at Lararium or going for walk about the grove, where the old silver birch has a hoof-like wart.

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Full stop. Anthony put the pen aside and leaned back in the

chair.

[…the end of the excerpt…]