1.
Poverty is a scapegoat.
We drive them out!
“Hermes, I shiver like crazy, give Hipponax a cloak.”
(Don’t look it in the eyes).
We forbid your asking “in God’s name” for bread.
We distinguish relative (some teeth) from absolute (no teeth) poverty by an algorithm.
2.
Hipponax invented a poetic metre called “limping iambic,” deliberately ugly in rhythm.
Longing and violence, built up over a lifetime? Unload it on the scapegoat!
Did you think the Black Death, with its depopulation of Europe by one third, would bring an abundance of bread?
Instead everything ran out!
Stinginess blazed from all eyes.
Never mind morals, no one had a fig or a cloak.
3.
Beware the ruses and swindles of the poor, many of whom already have a cloak.
You say, Is poverty so different? We want things, it wants things, similar rhythm?
Note: shame lives upon the lids of the eyes.
First we wash you in the angels’ tenderness, dear little filthy farting goat—
then out!
(Well yes, we keep all the bread).
4.
We forbid you using the God-card casually, for bread.
We forbid you touching our cloak.
No gloves, here’s a dollar, no hands, out!
And this Hipponax, who was he, with his scatological girls and cock-shaker rhythm?
Buffoon? Imposter? Caricaturist? Scapegoat?
Hunger came “parching” out of his eyes.
5.
We have a little game: take turns looking in the eyes
of that filthy farting one with his filthy farting bread
who (we’re sure) has volunteered to go forth as scapegoat
from the folds of our sacred civic cloak
and the beat of our reddish-foam rhythm.
Count 4 when you breathe in and 6 when you breathe out!
6.
Tell me, is “drive them out”
the same as “have stones for eyes”
sung in a shame-resistant extra-grammatical grand-nasty mother-fig-fucker-flogged rhythm
that soaks the bread
in blood and rips the cloak
off the scaped goat?
[envoi]
Why does poverty exist? Because stinginess does—
in its macroeconomic (law-of-demand-and-demand) cloak,
in its ritual-pharmakos (we-beat-them-with-branches) cloak,
in its they-might-be-faking-it (pity-and-barley cakes) cloak,
in its war-against-idleness (we’re-all-debts-owed-to-death) cloak,
in its “enough-if-they-do-not-die-of-hunger-or-cold” (Martin Luther) cloak.
Give Hipponax a cloak.
Give Hipponax a cloak.
Give Hipponax a cloak.
Appendix 1: on pharmakos (φαρμακός)
Official name of one sacrificed as an atonement for others or to cleanse a community. Scapegoat. Necessary theater of a good community conscience. A word that quarrels with itself. Pharmakos is cognate with pharmakon, which means “poison” and “medicine,” both at the same time, so logically a scapegoat is both savior and source of the problem, both taint and cure. A presence (dirt) solved by its own absence. Hipponax describes the ritual: choose an animal or person (ugly, vagrant, criminal, deformed). Lead him out of wherever he is. Garland him. Beat him with fig branches seven times on the genitals. Drive him from the city. It was nice if the scapegoat offered itself voluntarily. Wine or milk might be poured on an animal’s forehead, causing it to shake this off, taken as a gesture of assent. Or a person might be lured by luxuries—fed richly on special foods (barley cakes, cheese, black and white figs) for a day or a year before sacrifice.
Appendix 2: on shame (αἴδως)
Lonely people are ashamed of their solitude. Adults are ashamed of the children seeing. Rich people are ashamed of plastic bags. Poor people too. Not the same bags. Children are ashamed of the weirdest things and it haunts them through life. Aunt Shirley was ashamed of wearing pants to church. Was Wordsworth ashamed of taking poetic phrases from Dorothy’s journals? Hard to know. Shame lives on the eyelids, according to an ancient Greek proverb. How you meet another’s eyes, a question of status, of spiritedness, of the red dab on her hem. Sisters and brothers have a special shape of shame between them, like a dance notation no one else can read. I can’t get the right tone for this. The murderous tone. All that dirt we can’t face. You’d have to be crazy to muddle it all together, beggars, brothers, Jaggers, doves and mice—oh I forgot to put that story in, didn’t I—well, she did lose her mind in the end, in fact years before the end. I deflect onto Dorothy, a way to stop thinking badly of myself and Wordsworth, the way all our minds work nowadays, this muddle, this miasma, no one clean, no one even grammatical! A brother and sister have private jokes. Dorothy and William would at times lean together utterly helpless with laughing. At her kitchen door, Dorothy welcomed vagrants (as they were then called) who regaled her with tales (which she passed on to William) of shimmering and Hollywood and homelessness. The one about the dove and the mouse, as Dorothy tells it, will break your heart. For Dorothy was an artist, Dorothy knew how to package shame. In pity and fear. Is that itself something to be ashamed of? Ask Jeff Koons. Ask the last red leaf on a high tree. Ask Simonides of Ceos who wrote on an epitaph,
We are all debts owed to Death.
The Greeks liked this sort of nihilist glee on tombstones. Death for them was Ploutos (Wealth) and he is the king of stingy: everyone ultimately gets added to his real estate and he never pays any of us back. We admire him. Envy him. But really, it’s just a pile of dirt.
Appendix 3: on stinginess (στενοχωρία)
Theophrastus divides stinginess into three aspects:
1 μικρολογία (mikrologia) “minute calculation of expense”
2 άνελευθερία (aneleutheria) “lack of freedom in giving”
3 αίσχροκερδεία (aischrokerdeia) “shameless grabbing at profit”
Sometimes I get used to seeing a certain homeless person on a certain street corner, then one day that person is gone. Giving rise to anxiety. And a measure of relief. I keep my dollar. Avoid shame. I am confused. Shame is confused. We are all stingy. Wordsworth was stingy. According to Thoreau, who visited him in his cottage, Wordsworth offered guests one piece of bread and one cup of tea for dinner, if they wanted more they had to pay.
Appendix 4: on miasma (μίασμα)
As if walking between two fires, I go north on Sixth Avenue on my way to the YMCA pool, past homeless people on both sides of the street, some in blankets, some with a handwritten cardboard, some with a dog or dogs, some mad haters, some tending an inner world, some blessing all who pass, some funny. Sometimes I give a dollar or two dollars. Sometimes I bring all my quarters from home, or buy a homeless man a cup of coffee. Sometimes I offer him a meal of barley cakes, cheese, black and white figs, then flog him on his genitals and drive him out of the city. Purification, says Plato, is part of the science of division, “the kind of division that retains what is better and expels what is worse” (Sophist 226d). I have many reasons for not wanting to be touched. For “touched” read tainted, polluted, defiled, dirtied, mixed up. Dirt is matter out of place. Who names the place? Remember the closet of Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer in Dickens’s Great Expectations, where he “washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or a dentist….” Mr. Jaggers washes again after a dinner party. Who is pure?
Appendix 5: on Hipponax (Ίππῶναξ)
Hipponax is a mystery. His style a challenge. His shamelessness an education. His poems treat of people who are poor, cold, hungry, angry, begging, criminal, deformed, iridescent with reasons to be unhappy. He talks about gulping and whipping and stooped-over women, about millet and filth-holes and his own soul. Describes drinking out of a pail because the cup broke. Gives literature its first instance of “motherfucker” (μητροκοίτης fr. 12W). Calls someone who is starving “knife-in-the-belly” (fr. 32W). Knows a lot about hunger. Reported by Ovid to have died of hunger himself. Unlikely. But watch out. Angry ghost. Threat to the public good. He talks of scapegoats. He talks of shame. Later sources say he was ugly, deformed, fractious. That when mocked for his deformity he responded with songs so bitter his mockers killed themselves. Shame puts a pressure on poetic diction. Yet shame likes nothing more than to thrust shame aside. Shame is shameless. Shame has fun selling itself as an artistic persona. We don’t know if Hipponax was really poor (the poor are tricky). But if it is true there was an ancient genre of poetry devoted to dramatizing the adventures and misadventures of the underclass, then we are thrown into turmoil about whom to give a dollar to, whom to whip on his genitals, whom to reprint in a bilingual edition.
Appendix 6: on being of two minds (διχόνοος)
Whether or not the scapegoat was ultimately killed is a question that fascinates and divides scholarly opinion. The evidence is all over the place. Callimachus (fr. 90) states unequivocally that the chosen one was merely chased over the border, possibly with stones, but not put to death. Tzetzes says that Hipponax says the scapegoat was fed fat, then garlanded, then beaten, then killed, then burned, then thrown in the sea. But Tzetzes lived centuries after Hipponax, who was anyway a poet and may have made stuff up. What is unmistakable in the sources, literary and historical, is the ambiguity people felt about dealing death to one of their own. My favorite story is from an ancient town called Leukas, where a victim sentenced to be thrown from a rock into the sea had birds and feathers fastened to him and a boat waiting below to take him over the border. Who is pure? Remember the librarian in the rare-books room who made you put on white linen gloves before touching a book? Now the gloves are thought to be less clean than you are. Every touch is a modified blow, my mother used to say, but more to the point, every touch is dirt. Can you fall asleep if you haven’t washed your face and put on the night lotion? How did the scapegoat sleep, the night before the ritual, on his strip of cardboard over the subway grate, holding his garland out of the dust of the street with one hand, wondering what’s bad, what’s good, whether to eat or save the pocketful of barley cakes?
Appendix 7: on rhythm (‘ρυθμός)
It strikes me to wonder about the relation between motion and economic status. Middle-class people “go running.” This would horrify Adorno, for whom even running for the bus had implications. “Running in the street conveys an impression of terror…. Once people ran from dangers too desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror…. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted by command or terror” (Minima Moralia p. 162). I have seen rock stars run onto the stage but this is the faux terror of fame or adoration. Queens and kings and popes and governors move in a way that is called “stately,” they carry the state on or with them, this is heavy. But what is the rhythm of poverty? Homeless people sit on the sidewalk, beggars stand fairly still. If a visibly poor or homeless person were running in the street, he would be assumed to have stolen something and might be shot in the back by police. That poor soul who often stands on the corner outside my building, who is unusually tall and deeply mad, has a motionlessness that gathers itself around itself like a tree. Grand, regardless, like a tree. It might very well blow down in a storm, but it will never just walk away.