The Apologia of Mercurius
– One of my names, and it will have to do.
I’ve had so many names, I can’t keep track.
If you’re a god, and everywhere at once,
And you have been around a long, long time,
You find it hard remembering events
In their right order, and you often tend
To wander and digress. And one is busy
With being what one is. Right now, for instance,
I’m trying to figure out the price of gold,
Tracking a sweet and viral metaphor,
Checking a Hindu wife’s new microloan,
Getting to know an optical computer
With quantum logic, that I’ll have to use,
Stalking a loophole in a banking regulation,
And trying to guide this stupid poet’s mouse.
Or maybe “Hermes” would be better – sure,
“Hermetic,” “hermeneutics” still have traction,
And Trismegistus, though a fiction, lives.
Fictions can live, metabolize, and grow,
Respond to stimuli, and sometimes think.
But Hermod, Lug, Chibchakun, Ayizan,
Yacatecuhtli, Hebrew Metatron,
Or Benzai-ten, or Volos of the Slavs,
Or Ekahau or Eshu, all would work
If you repeat the name; oldest of all
Among the written languages of men
Would be Ningizzida, the lord of light,
The lord of the all-fruited, snake-girt tree,
But I’ll stick with “Mercurius” for now.
In every myth I am a latecomer,
And there’s a deep injustice in this charge.
I recall dimly, as a larval daemon,
Coming to consciousness among the lichens.
Only a trade then, a communication
Between the alga and its fungal host,
The phycobiont and the mycobiont,
A sort of contract, offering sugar fuel
For solvent from the fungus water-tank.
But traders always seem new-fangled to
The partner who takes on a middle-man;
As Hermes I was deemed a parvenu,
And had to steal Apollo’s kine to get
A voice with the august Olympians,
And pull off one of my most favorite deals,
The herald’s karykeion for the lyre.
That karykeion, the caduceus,
Was Jacob’s crook, who in a war of cons,
Outsmarted Laban, as he had his brother,
And plied the lever of domestication
To make a profit and to make a prophet,
The father of the tribes of Israel.
I warned you I would wander, but it seems
My story’s so connected everywhere
That every thread drags out another braid.
As an old god I know I’m garrulous;
As an old goddess, more garrulous still.
But there’s a river-mouth to these meanders:
Follow me from the source and we’ll get there.
The lichens surely weren’t my beginning
(Now that I think about it). That was late.
I must have been around to be the trade
Of ions between molecules, electrons
Between the nuclei, and waves of light
And gravity between the particles,
Even the glue that fastens quark to quark.
I am the quid pro quo, what Dante called
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
You want to say that that’s not love, I see.
You want a love that’s “unconditional,”
Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare.
(Alas that they should wear our colors there
In that chill, Kantian, eternity!)
You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit.
Sure, you must cast your bread upon the waters,
Suffer the risk of magnanimity;
That’s not the point. You run more risk, not less,
In hoping that your gift will be repaid.
The greater risk than gift without return
Is trusting that reciprocation will
Bear all the fruits of prodigality.
The unrequited gift is not a bond
But the attempt by one to eat another.
Making the needy one a part of you.
A merchant’s doctrine, yes, but that’s my name.
If you want something else, then go elsewhere.
Yes, he who paid his life down for your sake,
Said that you could not serve both God and Mammon;
But also, it’s as just to give to Caesar
What’s Caesar’s, as to give to God what’s God’s.
And you reciprocate by all the glory
Of art and science, wealth and liberty,
That you have piled up prodigally since
He seeded it with his audacious story.
To understand me, you must learn to see
More than one meaning of “eternity.”
Plato, who hated me, and took me as
A god for only cities of the pigs,
Despised the common usage of the word
As just a long, a very long, extent of time.
Seeking a final validation, proof
Against the many rotting shams of change,
He took the timeless for eternity.
Who eats no food is surely safe from poison;
Who takes no breath can surely breathe no harm;
To save Good from decay one way might be
To take away the time where rot can grow
(The time where Good can also come to be).
Is good that cannot grow a good at all?
Can music happen where there are no waves?
Timeless is beingless: being is trade,
And time’s the money of benevolence.
Suspect eternity you cannot count,
Suspect a numberless infinity.
The only true eternity is time
That you can count but cannot cease to count;
The only true infinity is time,
Blossoming inward always out and on.
What counts is always only who can count:
A counter that records what happens to it,
One who accounts for what he, she, has done.
But there’s a third kind of eternity,
The one I count as mine: the branching tree
Of bifurcations, broken symmetries,
Physics’ four forces sprouting out of one,
Carbon’s unending new vocabularies,
Darwin’s wild bush aflame with speciation,
The stemma of the human languages,
Entropy multiplying information,
Matings that propagate the family tree.
The Karykeion is the DNA,
The mating snakes that old Tiresias knew,
Coiled round a staff of bonding hydrogen,
Whose parting makes a four from what was two.
I am that staff of Moses, Metatron,
The branch I plucked out from the tree of life;
I am both angel and the branch he plucked,
The serpent tamed, the dead stick come alive,
The lyre of Orpheus wherewith he sought
To heal the sickness of Eurydice,
The golden bough that offers you safe-passage
Through the strange valley of the shade of death.
I am the herb of immortality
Snaked from the grasp of weary Gilgamesh,
I am the shepherd’s staff of Jacob, who
Guided the sheep to mate and breed a stock
Pied with the stigma of domestication,
And won himself an endless progeny
Such that his name became that of a nation.
As Eshu, god of paths, I walk Benin,
Driving hard bargains with the sons of men,
Bringing them messages of what things cost.
I lead them from one state into another,
Even from life into the vale of death.
I wear a hat, red one side, black the other;
The villagers on each side come to blows
About my hat, if it is red or black.
The wise ones know deep truths reverse themselves;
And for the rest, I am the lord of strife.
Even the self itself is generated
Out of the knot of reciprocity:
To trade is to acknowledge as an agent
The one whose interest and will one shares.
How can a being know another mind
Unless it has had dealings with it? More,
How can one know one is a mind at all,
Except another give it recognition?
So here is my apology for who
I am: one who is not good, nor a goodness,
But one who makes all goodness possible.
I am the trickster, the invisible hand;
I am exchange, the love of interest,
The work you do whenever you decide
To choose this dress, this home, this work, this lover,
And so engender value and desire.