At one time, if only by poets, the Sun was conceived of as an indefatigable traveler who grows stronger and then weaker through the day and the seasons. Perhaps men too were bound to a wheel of birth and death just as the Sun was yoked to a like Duty or stern Necessity. At a later point, a more mechanistic viewpoint prevailed. Diodorus Seculus suggested that Hyperion- 'he who walks on high'- was the first human being to understand the motions of the Heavenly bodies. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, it seemed that Humanistic Enlightenment had been but a diabolical dazzlement. Cartesian truth was but, by translatio imperii, Racine's machine of Terror. Death was the remorseless Sun whose noontide none could survive save in the shelter of the heart's broken shadows. Holderlin's Hyperion, losing his beloved in a vain attempt to liberate Greece from the Caliphate, sings of Fate as the futility of existence in a storm tossed world. Yet, the continued advancement of utilitarian science and commerce was making Greece's liberation a certainty at just about this time. Destiny itself wielded no shears of eternal doom but had to cut its coat according to its cloth.
Still, to journey, to search, to transact- in a word, to change- is to diminish by reason of the opportunity cost incurred by exercising choice. The loss of an option, even if the outcome is wholly salutary, nevertheless seems irreversible.
Change, it is believed, is denoted by the Proto-Indo-European 'mei' which also has the meaning 'small'. In every exchange, there is friction, or entropy, a diminishment of what was possible and, for one party or the other to any exchange, a smaller or unfairer share.
Where there are transactions, there is a need for
1) memory of a particular type which may involve witnesses or tokens
2) prudence or access to good counsel
3) an unique- if only arbitrarily so- account of transactions
The Roman Goddess, Juno Moneta, at whose temple coins were minted and from whose name our word 'money' ultimately derived, was variously considered to remind, warn, counsel or represent either Memory or Uniqueness.
Keats, in 'the fall of Hyperion'- which like Blake's visionary poetry denies the possibility of 'natural' religion and has no truck with any notion of 'the general Good'- has Moneta, personifying Memory, stand as the sole priestess of Saturn's vanished cult- a wraith of wretchedness with
wan face,
Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright blanch'd
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change,
Saturn- emasculated by his son Zeus- has a Moneta who presides over desolation just as Juno Moneta presided over the burgeoning of the Roman Empire. Keats and Blake were Cockneys- native to a City whose Empire would dwarf that of Rome or the Golden Horde. The Moneta of this child of the City of London could be maternal
My power, which to me is still a curse,
'Shall be to thee a wonder; for the scenes
'Still swooning vivid through my globed brain
'With an electral changing misery
'Thou shalt with those dull mortal eyes behold,
'Free from all pain, if wonder pain thee not.'
As near as an immortal's sphered words
Could to a mother's soften, were these last
The reign of Saturn was one where the common man exulted in a primal stupidity which however was never undersupplied with good things to eat and drink or lips ripe for kissing. An utilitarian enlightenment might- like the Alchemist's 'reign of Saturn transmuted into an Age of Gold'- turn the lead of ophelimity- the profit motive- into the lost lilies of Romantic Idealism's Ophelia to but gild what goes with the wind or, more to the point, inscribe Ozymandias's name on water.
Keats' Saturn, felled upon sodden sand, seems listening yet, 'to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort'- which, sadly, like many Mums whose son's testicles have been ripped off by a querulous grandkid, she was loath to supply. 'Serves you right for eating your babies!' tends to be the bruit we impute to her gravamen.
Keats turns from Moneta as Mnemosyne, Memory- mother of the Muses- to Thea, that which endows gold with value. But even could she, by no means would she, wake Saturn to but bootless, unbollockled, woe- which, I suppose, is good to know. Sadly, Saturn does wake up only to mightily whine. His big complaint is that death isn't doing its job. But, it turned out, death could settle Keats's hash in a prompt enough manner. That's all the theodicy Eng Lit can afford this Iyer who was forced to memorize 'La Belle damn sans mercy' in Eighth Standard at St. Columba's back in 1974. Fuck you Keats! Fuck you very much!
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