Dionysus and Apollo

Dionysus and Apollo
are the paradigms to follow,
never minor, mainly MAGAs.
in Bible generations’ sagas.

One at one time we can tend,
their contrast the color of its trend,
when for the talent of the other
we do not feel we have a druther.

Although they’re contradictory,
each can provide a victory,
often with a lot of hype
when fruit it bears is fresh and ripe,

Dionysus: always very
like a mango, peach or berry,
sweet and succulent and tempting,
caution like a wind pre-empting.
For mangoes, even for a peach,
never does he dare to reach,
though in most moments of the day
cast as the hero of this play.

Apollo far more like an apple,
his inner core compelled to grapple,
and after eaten to discard,
like receipts of a credit card.

Sometimes he’s a special treat,
tart first, then extremely sweet,
but the flavor rarely gushes
from Apollo, far less luscious
than the Dionysian flavor
which more people rush to savor.

My pseudo-Hippocratic oath:
all efforts to combine them both
should be rejected, rotten ruse;
their tempting pleasures tend to bruise
each other. Dangerous to swallow
both together, with Apollo
presiding as our playful priest,
providing to what God has leased
to us, our flimsy, fleeting lives,
support for our spirit when it strives,

like my poetic utterances,
my wonderbread and butterances,
minor key for word-bred generations,
major keyed by my genes’ variations.

The last two lines of this poem are based on the Hebrew word for “generations” which also denotes the stories on which biblical sagas are based, as in Gen. 37:2:

אֵ֣לֶּה ׀ תֹּלְד֣וֹת יַעֲקֹ֗ב יוֹסֵ֞ף בֶּן־שְׁבַֽע־עֶשְׂרֵ֤ה שָׁנָה֙ הָיָ֨ה רֹעֶ֤ה אֶת־אֶחָיו֙ בַּצֹּ֔אן וְה֣וּא נַ֗עַר אֶת־בְּנֵ֥י בִלְהָ֛ה וְאֶת־בְּנֵ֥י זִלְפָּ֖ה נְשֵׁ֣י אָבִ֑יו וַיָּבֵ֥א יוֹסֵ֛ף אֶת־דִּבָּתָ֥ם רָעָ֖ה אֶל־אֲבִיהֶֽם׃

This, then, is the line of Jacob: At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended the flocks with his brothers, as a helper to the sons of his father’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah. And Joseph brought bad reports of them to their father.

My poem provides a midrashic suggestion to the question: Was the Apollo Belvedere inspired by 1 Sam. 20:35-36?

On 11/30/24, a Shabbat that precedes the new moon, we predicted the appearance on its morrow of the first day of the next Hebrew month, the ninth month of the year which is called Kislev, and read in the haftarah that follows the parsha of the Torah — the sidra — part of a story that is told in 1 Samuel 20. The reading starts with the following text in 1 Sam 20:18-23, whose translation by the KJV I quote below:

18 Then Jonathan said to David, Tomorrow is the new moon: and thou shalt be missed, because thy seat will be empty.

19 And when thou hast stayed three days, then thou shalt go down quickly, and come to the place where thou didst hide thyself when the business was in hand, and shalt remain by the stone Ezel.

20 And I will shoot three arrows on the side thereof, as though I shot at a mark.

21 And, behold, I will send a lad, saying, Go, find out the arrows. If I expressly say unto the lad, Behold, the arrows are on this side of thee, take them; then come thou: for there is peace to thee, and no hurt; as the Lord liveth.

22 But if I say thus unto the young man, Behold, the arrows are beyond thee; go thy way: for the Lord hath sent thee away.

23 And as touching the matter which thou and I have spoken of, behold, the Lord be between thee and me for ever.

Like the mental image of the youthful Jonathan holding his bow and arrow, Apollo stands holding his. By coincidence, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Apollo Belvedere. In “The Apollo Belvedere: New Life for a Marble God,” WSJ, 11/29/24, A.J. Goldmann writes:

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/fine-art/the-apollo-belvedere-new-life-for-a-marble-god-0df4a43c

The Apollo Belvedere—chiseled in the second century, excavated from a ruin over a millennium later, and installed at the Vatican in the early 16th century—has come to be regarded as the epitome of classical beauty.

A Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze original from circa 330 B.C., the Apollo Belvedere has inspired masterpieces by Dürer (Adam in his 1504 engraving of “Adam and Eve”) and Canova (“Perseus Triumphant,” 1800-01) all the way through to De Chirico’s metaphysical canvas “The Song of Love” from 1914. In the 18th century, the pioneering German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann declared the sculpture “the highest ideal of art among the works of antiquity that have escaped its destruction.

Reading the article after hearing the haftarah in shul inspired me to imagine the Apollo Belvedere to have been inspired by the story that is told in 1 Samuel 20. I pondered also whether the Greek Apollo Belvedere might be imagined as a most loving Jew, Jonathan, the son of King Saul and the best friend of a man who was destined to replace his father:  the future King David.

When the Apollo Belvedere was exhumed from the ruins of an ancient Roman home on the Viminal Hill in Rome in 1489, its left hand and much of the right arm were missing. Two decades later, Pope Julius II installed the statue in the Octagonal Court, the nucleus of the pontifical antiquities collection. Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, a disciple of Michelangelo’s, was commissioned to replace the statue’s broken arms in 1532 and 1533. His interventions have provoked mixed reactions, especially among 20th-century art historians. The limbs he added were removed in 1924, only to be reintroduced in 1999. A fig leaf, added in the mid-16th century at the request of Pope Paul IV, was removed in the late 20th century.

Poets and philosophers from Goethe to Byron and Schopenhauer to Pushkin have swooned over this youthful, naked god, depicted in a balletic contrapposto after having fired an arrow, his weight shifted onto his right leg and his left arm outstretched.

With his serene and somewhat haughty gaze, Apollo checks whether his arrow has hit the mark. (The exact moment being depicted is a matter of some debate; art historians have proposed that Apollo’s target might be the serpent Python or the giant Tityos.) Winckelmann, in language that borders on the erotic, described Apollo’s face as “an image of the lovely gracefulness of youth and the beauty of blooming years, combined with pleasing innocence and soft charm.”