Page 16 - GALIET Memory and Poiesis: On Apollo's Wings IV

studied from the “old spirit-leaved book” (Hyperion: 2:133) 3⁄4 his reign’s “firm-based footstool” (Hyperion: 2.138) 3⁄4 realizes that his deep study of “Nature’s universal scroll” (Hyperion: 2:151) yields only “sign, symbol, or portent / Of element, earth, water, air, and fire” (Hyperion: 2:139-40), which causes a “quadruple wrath [that] / Unhinges the poor world” (Hyperion: 2.146-47). As a result, Hyperion and Saturn fall due to their naïveté and limitations to decipher the heavenly logos of necessity, and precisely because they cannot decipher it, they fall. Even immortals must abide by and understand that the Socratic fate of reading and language is circularity.8
Ultimately, the Titans collapse because they are unable to read the figure created by reading, and at stake, “is a certain circle whose figure precipitates both time and the gift towards the possibility of their impossibility.”9 But is there a remedy? Hyperion and Saturn’s despair at the inability to read the signs of the spheres can only be mediated by sacrifice to the gods. The presence of sacrificial ground in both poems functions as a reminder of mimesis between political and natural cyclical changes. The first poem’s wintry circle of Druid Stones,
8 Plato. Complete Works. Meno.. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
9 Derrida, Jacques. Given Time. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 6
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