August 2004
Man
is not Bat
From The
Bestiary: A Book of Beasts, translated by T.H. White, 1960 (Capricorn
Books, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York) pp. 140-141
VESPERTILIO
the Bat is a paltry animal. It takes its name from the evening (vesper).
It
has wings, but at the same time it is a quadruped and uses teeth—a
thing which one does not usually find in other birds.
The
Bat parturates like a quadruped, bringing forth, not eggs, but living young.
Moreover, it does not fly with wings, but is supported by a membrane, poised
on which just as if on a flight of feathers it moves and weaves about.
There
is one other thing about these undistinguished animals, and this is that
they hang on to each other alternately, and depend from any place like
a cluster of grapes. If the top one let go, they would all be scattered.
And this they do from a certain duty of affection, of a kind which it is
difficult to find in man.
Compassionate
mammal once believed bird,
Only
one of you can support many unhurt.
You
take your name from the evening;
We
take our name from 'to do wrong'.
The
affection bats have for one another
In
us becomes greed, envy, and murder.
So
let us become bats and keep safe and secure
Every
human life from the Wolf of War!
December
17, 2002
Translation
of a Recently Discovered Hexametric Poem Written by a Pre-Socratic Philosopher
[Editors
note: we believe that this is a forgery by Mr. Beleu. We can not find any
reference in the accepted literature to either the discovery of the tomb
in 1991 or the 1995 transliteration and translation of the poem.]
An
ancient Greek manuscript was discovered in 1991 in a tomb carved into a
stone cliff in the hills surrounding Ephesus. The tomb has as its door
a small square opening halfway up the cliff that is no wider than 2 x2
feet. The tomb contained only one body. Beside the body was a small clay
vase, still sealed, that held the following text, here translated into
English for the first time. Apparently the tomb has been broken into and
looted long ago, but the thieves took only the usual grave loot of gold
ornaments, finely worked pottery, and expensive grave clothes. They ignored
the plain clay vase that held the true treasure of this manuscript, which
German scholars have identified as having been written by a Presocratic
philosopher. Its author seems to have been a student of the philosopher
Xenophanes (app. 570 to 475 B.C.), or at the very least was a student of
one of Xenophanes' students. Our author knew Xenophanes' belief that the
opposition of earth and sky creates our world in an endless cycle: oceans dissolve the earth to become mud,
which then accumulates to rise up again out of the oceans to become earth.
Our author states that this cycle of creation and destruction is mirrored,
in the manner of microcosm reflecting macrocosm, in caves:
In
caves water drips down to become earth,
Casting
off the moisture of oceans, rivers, and rains.
Slowly
it thickens until it becomes the stone
Of
downthrusting cave teeth above
And
upjabbing teeth below. Age
of Soil
Follows
Age of Ocean in eternal cycle,
And
we humans go down into the salty oceans
That
overrun the fertile, tilled soils of farmers
And
even the high mountains that our ancestors
Believed
eternal gods lived upon. All this is recorded
And
as well foretold in the lives of caves.
Scholars
speculate that this poem, written in Greek hexameters, may be only part
of a philosophical poem excerpted here to accompany its author into his
own cave-like tomb.
NOTE: The original Greek poem, written in hexameters,
I could only translate into English in our traditional five-foot iambic
pentameter. I worked from the 1995 German transliteration and translation.
The original is housed in the National Archeological Museum in Athens.
2001
Steve Beleu,