Burning the Aeneid
The Aeneid is unfinished. We know this because there are some lines that end halfway through, breaking off in the middle of Vergil’s flawless meter. If you read it in translation you would never know that they are there.
We don’t know how far the incompletion goes. The unfinishedness of the text, like a ghost in the machine, is a convenient reference point for its more puzzling aspects. What does it mean that Aeneas exits the underworld through the gate of false dreams? Or the ending: the blind rage of our pious hero, “and with a groan Turnus’ life fled defeated into the shadows below.” A dark final note for Vergil, the shy vegetarian who lived for nearly ten years in a pacifist spiritual commune, who ended his first major work with “Love conquers all; let us surrender to love.”
No good answer; let’s say the author would have cleared things up if he had only a little more time.
We know that Vergil wanted the draft burned but we also don’t know why. Was it those incomplete lines that so offended the poet’s famed perfectionism? Guilt over leaving as his legacy a work ostensibly in support of a political regime he was fundamentally opposed to? A delirious act of self-destruction from a fevered mind looking back on the obsession of his last twelve years? We don’t know and never will.
The stories say that Vergil would wake up in the morning, dictate 80 lines to his scribe, and over the course of the day edit them down to one or two. This rate of output, one or two lines per day, 10 to 15 syllables, tracks with the total amount of poetry generated over the years he was active.
How those raw lines felt as they were absorbed into a singularity of dactylic hexameter, we don’t know.
An old friend of mine from college died more than two years ago in a work-related accident. I learned this only recently, via Facebook. We hadn’t seen each other since graduation, had messaged back and forth a few times and I once stayed in his desert cabin outside Santa Fe while he was away, but no contact since then. I try to remember where I was and what I was doing at the time he was dying; if some shade of him flickered through my awareness.
Though it sucked the air from my lungs to see the notice on his Facebook page, it doesn’t feel right to mourn someone who died already so long ago. It feels selfish even, too obvious that I’m really only grieving for myself, for the Toby I believed was alive all those years. As if if I hadn’t fancied a bit of Facebook stalking that evening he would still be alive, reciting Greek lyric poetry and building bonfires and harvesting wild mushrooms, walking at night in wild places that don’t belong to one town or another. All the things I remember him for. Someone else would remember him for different things, and what he did alone and without telling anyone, no one now will remember.
This is a poem I wrote many years ago based on some stories he told me about his life in New Mexico. In my notes it’s labeled as “fragment 108,” an interesting synchronicity since 108 is a sacred number but I didn’t know that at the time, the title is only in reference to some work of Callimachus.
In the place he grew up
there was a ravine where a
child was once killed by feral dogs and
flash floods would leave things in it
from upstream.
There was no grass in that place
and by night he would
walk from town to town.
Don’t worry about going west alone.
There are always ancient cities
wrapped up in new ones
and the old highway runs
through the pocket of your hand.
As a writer you are constantly surrounded by incompletion. For every work that eventually makes it to readers’ eyes, (such as the above poem, which was published in I forget which small print journal,) there are dozens of shadows, from the pieces that I view as finished but can’t get published (and lacking an audience, the art is forever incomplete), to the drafts I never got around to editing, the ones I made it halfway through and gave up on, and the collections of fragments that seem so promising I can’t bring myself to try and pin them down, not to mention the floating lines, phrases and ideas that just barely have one toe in manifestation.
The constant longing is to tie up the loose ends, to finally finish everything I’ve started and start fresh with a clean slate, but not only is that impossible, after that there could be nothing new. This fragmentary cloud is the primordial soup from which creativity emerges.
As a human being you are also constantly surrounded by a cloud of incomplete drafts, only these are drafts of yourself. They come and go all the time, sometimes merging into each other, sometimes splitting apart. Sometimes one will run strong for a while and then sometimes it’s more of a flickering between them in rapid succession like frames of a movie.
None of them really exist, of course. At any given moment you are only what you are. But cast the light from a certain perspective and they will seem to appear, looming up around you like an army of shadow puppets. Fine, I will say it: like the forms in Plato’s cave.
For the last several years, the yogi version of myself has been the most prominent. If someone were to ask who I am, it’s the puppet I would point to.
But the other versions are still there, out of the spotlight but going about their own existence along with me. The writer, the musician, the classicist, the wandering hippy, the horse girl. The Buddhist and the yogi share a cup of tea; the tantrika and the Christian nun cast side eyes at each other; the urban hipster gives them all the finger.
Who I am with you is not who I am with my mother or my best friend or the girl at the shop. Every relationship generates a new person. None of these are who I am when I’m alone, much less who I am deep in the core of my being.
None of these versions will ever be complete. I would never be happy being any one of them. They have no life in themselves and yet they persist seemingly of their own accord, sometimes like a kite trailing above and behind me, sometimes like coins over my eyes.
Some other things we know about Vergil:
He may or may not have predicted the birth of Christ.
He died in Brundisium, returning from a trip to Greece.
His first language was probably not standard Latin but the local dialect of Mantua, which became extinct likely within his lifetime.
The Middle Ages swapped the e in his name for an i, for a complicated triple pun that I won’t explain here but it has to do with the fourth Eclogue.
He was tall, dark, handsome, gay, apparently unlucky in love though this is mostly conjecture, and often in poor health.
He lived for many years in an Epicurean colony. “Epicurean” not hedonists but utilitarian stoicists, who said that the universe has no beginning or end but the mind doesn’t exist before or after death, so life is ultimately meaningless but in a way that makes you peaceful and content when you realize it. (The afterlife in common Greek and Roman culture was nothing to write home about anyway: mostly just a bunch of ghosts standing around waiting for their friends and family back in the world to pour blood offerings for them, and slowly fading.)
A lot of traditional facts about Vergil’s life are actually speculations based on his poems, especially the Eclogues, which is not considered a valid mode of interpretation by scholars today. Inconvenient since the poems are still here and the man, whoever he was, if he even existed, is not.
One last fact: he was good friends with the poet Horace and at least once they went on a trip together, also to Brundisium.
If I could write another ending to the Aeneid it would go something like this, only imagine it in dactylic hexameter, even in Latin if you can, or better yet if you can imagine it in Latin why not in a provincial dialect of Latin from the north of Italy that went extinct in the first century BC:
And Turnus’ life fled down among the shadows
And so did the life of Aeneas three years later
And the life of Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, many years after that
And the life of Vergil the poet from Mantua
And the life of you who are reading these words
And things continued peacefully just as they were before, full of peace
