George Washington's favorite poet [could be] Sappho

I mean, why not. He was a nice guy and smart enough. George Washington was brave and loved his wife, whatever it is love means. I sense he could have been outre enough to have liked Sappho's delicious verse. Soldiering and Presidenting took time and energy so I don't expect too much from Father Washington, but today is the 4th of July, and I am grateful for the freedom to post whoever I want.

By the way. Boo! to Pope Gregory and other 3rd Century book-burning Byzantines. Do. Not. Burn. Books. Just don't. Don't be afraid of "pagans" or ideas or women or poetry. Free yourself. I work at it every day and so can Pope Gregory and you too, my beloved reader.

Here's the woman, tr. by Lattimore. I lifted this off poets.org.

The Anactoria Poem

Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen
on the black earth is an array of horsemen;
some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
she whom one loves best

is the loveliest. Light were the work to make this
plain to all, since she, who surpassed in beauty
all mortality, Helen, once forsaking
her lordly husband,

fled away to Troy--land across the water.
Not the thought of child nor beloved parents
was remembered, after the Queen of Cyprus
won her at first sight.

Since young brides have hearts that can be persuaded
easily, light things, palpitant to passion
as am I, remembering Anaktória
who has gone from me

and whose lovely walk and the shining pallor
of her face I would rather see before my
eyes than Lydia's chariots in all their glory
armored for battle.

---Sappho

Poem: Experiential Philosophy

One of my earliest romantic loves was Baruch Spinoza, the 17th Century Dutch-Portuguese-Jewish philosopher. My emotions were Wagnerian operas roared. I had no control; gentle Spinoza understood. That man knew me. Blew my mind though I was unable to work his logic on my passions or "consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies."

I read both Spinoza and Descartes while cozied in a chair I inherited from an upperclassman (who was in truth a woman but upperclasswoman feels like gentry rather than year in college). That chair so padded and accommodating was the chair of chairs, the eidos (Platonic form) of reading zones. I am unable even now to distinguish the philosophy I read from my experience of reading the philosophers.

Experiential Philosophy

Descartes was not a philosopher,
but a chair with one arm
around me and another
under my legs,
carrying the puny selfhood
I crawled from at 18
on knees and elbows.
You can live in the ring of mist
around the leaning Chinese peak
if a hung-up life’s enough.
Ah, the consolation of
philosophy.

Spinoza was the man
I’d have married
if I’d moved to Salinas,
worked in a Woolworth’s,
lived over a bar, not “matriculated,”
written. Smiled at the gentle.
To know who you are
is to be complete. “Your mother
tried to protect you.”

Rationality is fearless,
mysticism a corolla of the sun,
a parley with the soul,
hot gold and warm honey
in the melancholy beehive.

Each substance has attributes,
i.e., the cat’s meow: is

proof enough of my existence;
existence proof that paralysis
is a few pages of the history,
that history is just a word and
“now,” this one, I said, here,
is a liberation, if observed new.

Published in Fogged Clarity and collected in The Future Is Happy.
Note: The whimsical and imaginative illustration is from a blog which I'm unable to read (Italian): http://mariodomina.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/lezione-spinozista-8-sub-specie-aeternitatis/ [Blog di riflessione, critica e discussione filosofica a cura di Mario Domina]