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Sketch: Millennial Rage

Excerpt from Bucolica

By Rob AngeliPublished 10 months ago 2 min read
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Sketch by the author after Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego

Sketch again (Millennial rage the newest hottest voices): A present generation now of shepherd youth learning the ropes of herdsmanship, so spending lots of time singing songs and recanting incantations contemporary to their forbears that told infectious gossip about the newest hottest voices recollected in Past Song Fame. This once passed as the very definition of craftsmanship. They mourned the silence of the songbreakers so jaded and sick with plaints so sick of love thus no longer lovesick, reed-breakers, aulos-smashers, tibia crushers, flesh and blood and bone, and others gone with these reallocated land portions bringing many a Chloe and a Lycidas from the countryside into being city dwellers after being shoved out of their own fields and robbed by the Government of their precious Herds: thus runs progress and the industrial revolution and the august Caesars and all the rest. They would reflect on past tradition, the dead departed and those who ceased to sing and poetize for whatever reason, and recite their now-classic songs: success as seasons and as the seasons flow a series, they will renew, every present tense being cast of leaf and trunk and flowery field or grassy slope, succession without transition, a world of dead campestral memories, crying for next generation’s resurrection, like the seasons, the blooming, and the snow, in spiral plant sex orgies and hibernation, a texture of rampant rhizomes, there is no break in the Daisy-Chain: they observed Nature, and sang about What they saw via the marvel of mammalian senses, they were animists, decanting the vintage of leaf and trunk and fur and tooth, and sweet heat of mating season, in normalcy or inverted form, in season or just when-fuckin-ever in whatever place, whatever flower grove or bower; eternal fields not in being everlasting but in repeating themselves in degree of succession which was the resurrection in nature or in culture and not just the sentimental revival but Daphnis himself in his fragmentary songs preserved only as quotations in other writers and Rosalind’s invaluable and green-thumbed gardening tips she who was popularly called the Green Reaper (by apellation contrôlée) in the Thessalonically Heliconoid domaine she once in olden days would haunt (a dream-realm with gorgeously painted sceneries between the Tagus and the Euphrates in Euboican Hesperidicana land, New World, until she moved to Sicily with her Syracusan boyfriend in a paradise for good sheep and meek pastors once they get over Love and focus on the Works and the Days, and other useful agricultural DIY manuals: profligate in the land of Kent A Golden Aged Return (the Return on which many departed Herdsman rhythmed their strophes, the hoped-for Homecoming, fitting Subject, and all for the Season) expectant of the Green Thumb or the Reaper and the sexy sacred youth and maidenhead repeatedly reinvigorated tho constantly mowed down w/the sweeping swipe of that sickle.

A Good Way to Go!

My Bucolica is a modern reboot of the "eclogue" form originating in Classical Greece and Rome and much rehashed throughout all European literature. It usually comes in the form of a collection of shepherd's songs, dialogues, and stories featuring themes of love/desire, nature/the seasons, death/mortality, and the passing of time. It is often a playground to poeticize the animal world and humankind's relation to it, as well as particulars of the seemingly idyllic life led by simple shepherds and farmers in Arcadia. It is also referred to as bucolic literature. I wrote my Bucolica 2017-2018 in a mix of poetry and prose.

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About the Creator

Rob Angeli

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

There are tears of things, and mortal objects touch the mind.

-Virgil Aeneid I.462

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