Triskaidekaphobia, Superstition, and Serendipity—Poetry of Luck Good and Bad

I have never been superstitious and have often been condescending to those who are—cue Stevie Wonder.  That is, of course, if you discount the two years in my boyhood when I carried a rabbit’s foot key chain in my jeans pockets until all the hair wore off and I was left with a weird mummified paw with surprisingly sharp nails.  But I outgrew that phase.  Later in my militant atheist literally piss-on-churches youth I lumped religion with superstition and went around muttering about mystric-tristic bullshit.  I rolled my eyes at my hippie friends who got into New Age crap—crystals and pyramids, Tarot, I Ching, an Ouija boards.

I try to be more tolerant now, but I still get the hives when I read that more Americans believe in angels and demons  than man-made climate change.  There are a lot of credulous folks out there who are apt to take what they seen on some History Channel hype and hokum as gospel truth.

Fear of Friday the 13th  is a classic superstition.  Most folks don’t know what is supposed to be unfortunate about the day, but the dread it anyway.  Some even think it’s about that slasher from fictional Crystal Lake.

Despite its wide-spread acknowledgement apparently considering the 13th day of the month falling on a Friday is not even that old of a tradition.  Apparently the Greeks and others regarded Fridays as unlucky because it was the day of the crucifixion.  Some numerologists considered 13 unfortunate both for convoluted mathematical reasons and because it was said that there were 13 present at the Last Supper on the 13th day of the Jewish month Nisan considered by Christians  as Maundy Thursday, the eve  of the crucifixion.    But these two dreads were not put together until the 19th Century.

Yet for whatever reason by the closing decades of the 1800s Friday the 13th was entrenched in popular culture.  The wide spread story that it was the date in 1307 that Philip IV of France arrested hundreds of the Knights Templar leading to their torture and execution was made up out of whole cloth in a popular novel and boosted more recently in Dan Brown’s idiotic thriller The Da Vinci Code.  

The low budget slasher movie franchise that made Friday the 13th more terrifying for many.

And, of course, there were all of those dead teen-agers at that summer camp.

Anyway, today is Friday the 13th of April and we will honor the occasion with poems about that and other manifestations of luck, good and bad.

This intriguing poem was posted by a writer identified only as Ugo, then Columbia University Doctoral candidate on the web site Hello Poetry in 2012.

Stream: the 13th love song of Alfred Prufrock

The beauty of comatose can only be seen through
the eyes of a wizard in a blizzard
strutting in garlic slippers,

or Christ with knees bent at the tabernacle
peeling bananas and kicking prayers
farther than eternity with each gapping second,

or like Basquiat slumped back to the wall,
with ounces of speedball dancing through his veins,
eating 80’s free-based fried chicken cocaine 

as his eyelids paints beautiful nightmares of lemon flowers
and Bacchus bacon over a glycopyrrolate desert
of flagrant cuckold buffoonery.

Or like leprechauns burning chocolate cocaine candles
on the mantle of Zion, sipping oatmeal sprinkled
with Staten Island malt liquor bacon.

or like Tupac reading the thoughts of Mother Shipton
through the daze of California cannabis
and hearing the ominous voice of Plutarch sing death assignments

from heaven to Assassins on horsebacks goggling opium water
to wet the dry bones of their throats as they prepare to fulfill
the gospel of self-fulfilling prophecies of being fell by negro bullets.

Or like sophisticated wallets of spice and kitchen characters in a bald head
cooking chemical kisses and 18 February nights under Moloch’s skin,
where constitutions are written in charcoal diaries with Egyptian ciphers and razors.

“I had rain sowed into the pockets of my sneakers and composed 1310 eulogies
at the basement of king David’s tower,” said the Kraftwerkian caricature,
as he dangles cigarettes in remembrance of Klaus Nomi and philosophizes on the proliferation
of poetic vandalism at urinals where modernism failed under the phosphorescence of coloration at the avenue of no trees where Picasso’s “Guernica” Kill Lies All.

—Ugo

Rita Dove

Rita Dove, one of our most popular contemporary poets considered the upside of luck, serendipity in this 1989 poem.

Happenstance

When you appeared it was as if
magnets cleared the air.
I had never seen that smile before
or your hair, flying silver. Someone
waving goodbye, she was silver, too.
Of course you didn’t see me.
I called softly so you could choose
not to answer—then called again.
You turned in the light, your eyes
seeking your name.

—Rita Dove

 

C.D. Wright

C.D. Wright was a prolific poet who served as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, and in 2013 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.  She died in 2016 at the age of 65.  In this poem she advised numerical precision, perhaps to the point of obsession.

Count your fingers

Count your fingers

Count your toes

Count your nose holes

Count your blessings

Count your stars (lucky or not)

Count your loose change

Count the cars at the crossing

Count the miles to the state line

Count the ticks you pulled off the dog

Count your calluses

Count your shells

Count the points on the antlers

Count the newjack’s keys

Count your cards; cut them again.

—C.D. Wright

 

Amy Lowell.

The leading American Imagist on this side of the Atlantic, Amy Lowell was one of the extended New England Brahmin Lowell clan that was studded with generations of influential poets.  Ostracized for her weight and lesbianism and attacked by self-appointed Imagist pope Ezra Pound, Lowell none-the-less won a Pulitzer Prize and a wide readership.

Superstition

I have painted a picture of a ghost

Upon my kite,

And hung it on a tree.

Later, when I loose the string

And let it fly,

The people will cower

And hide their heads,

For fear of the God

Swimming in the clouds.

—Amy Lowell

 

Lynn Pedersen

Our final poet is more contemporary—Lynn Pedersen, Georgia writer whose collection The Nomenclature of Small Thing came out in 2016.  Like Lowell nearly a century before her, Peterson has a kite image up her sleeve.

The Birth of Superstition

It’s not hard to imagine: my ancestor—a dry season,

               dust like chalk on her tongue—mixes

                              spit with clay,

traces a river on rock. Next day: rain.

                                                                           Why shouldn’t she believe

               in the power of rock and her own hand?

I carry this need for pattern and rule, to see connections

               where there aren’t necessarily any.

                                                            After my first miscarriage,

I cut out soda, cold cuts.

               After the second, vacuuming and air travel.

After the third—it’s chalk and spit again. I circle rocks,

               swim the icy river.

                                             And when my son is born, he balances

the chemical equation that is this world.

                                                                                          And logic?

Logic is my son’s kite, good so long as you have

               wind, string,

                                             something heavier than hope

                                                                                          to tether you.

—Lynn Pedersen

Serendipity—It’s Not Just a Coincidence

Horace Walpole, the word coiner.

It is the birthday of one of the most useful and beautiful words in the English Language—serendipity.  It is not often that we know the exact date a word was coined—and who is responsible.  But thanks to the quaint 18th Century custom of keeping letter books or tying up one’s correspondence with nice—and expensive—silk ribbon, etymologist have this one nailed down.

On January 28, 1754 Horace Walpole, a/k/a the Earl of Orford took up his quill to write to his friend Sir Horace Mann, Horace evidently being a more popular name back then than it is today. Walpole was a noted English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician who happened to be the son of the very first English Prime Minister, Robert Walpole.    Mann was a scholarly gentleman and sometime diplomat who was a long time resident of Florence, Italy who kept a legendary open house there for the English gentry touring the Continent.  The two Horaces kept a correspondence for more than 40 which was published in 1833 and widely read among the literary set.  Mann was no direct relation to the later American Transcendentalist, social reformer, and educator of the same name but the Yankee was named in his honor. 

The Three Princes of Serendip from an old Persian manuscript..

In his letter to Mann, Walpole boasted about creating a new word after reading a Persian fairytale called The Three Princes of Serendip in which said princes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”  Yeah, Walpole was the kind of guy who passed his time reading Persian fairytales, quite likely in some dead language.  The creation story of the word is practically its definition.

Serendip, it turns out was a translation into Persian from Sanskrit, and Tamil before that for Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka.  The Tamil, dark skinned Hindu people, ruled much of the island divided with the lighter skinned Indian Kings of Kerala.  The story was very old and is thought by some to be the inspiration of the Magi described in the nativity story.

All very well and good, you say, but just what the hell does serendipity mean anyway?

It is part chance, part coincidence, part happy accident.  But more than that, it is the recognition of or creation of unexpected benefits from a seeming random event by someone sagacious enough to make the connection.

This movie may not have fully understood the concept.

The term is often applied to scientific discovery or invention.  Think of something as grand as Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin in 1928 or as trivial as the development of Silly Putty from a failed attempt at creating synthetic rubber.

Writers and artists of various kinds also have similar experiences and make the connections described as “finding bridges where others find holes.”  This experience is related to, but not identical with the concept of an epiphany.

Serendipity is so fun to say that it has entered popular use where, however, the sagacious transformation of a pleasant surprise is often missing.  In these uses it is reduced to mere luck.

In fact the meaning of the word is so nuanced that a British translation service placed it on a list of the ten English words hardest to translate into other languages.  Its scientific applications, however have introduced it into many languages, even French where the defenders of linguistic purity at the Académie française try their damnedest to stomp it out.