CHUTES AND LADDERS

Asi es la vida...
Жизнь походит на это...
La vita è come quella...
Leben ist das ähnlich...
Grin and Bear It--- Alleluia...

This week I reread Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiyat, and it was a very good revisitation of a collection of poems I have loved for a long time. The Rubaiyat is a work actually co-authored by two people, and I especially like collaborative efforts. In this case the two poets lived eight centuries apart, one in a place that is now Iran and the other in Victorian England. Edward FitzGerald not only translated Khayaam’s poetry into English; he added to it. Rubaiyaa is the Farsi plural for rubai. Rubai is the Farsi word for Quatrain, a four line verse. FitzGerald set the poems in English, iambic pentameter, usually with an AABA rhyme scheme.

O.K., O.K., I almost forgot what I was about when I slipped into my English teacher automatic cruise control. What about the Chutes and Ladders direction this writing was supposed to take? Carpe Diem is the theme of the poems, and we can be quite sure both Khayyam and FitzGerald believed it is important to take whatever we can manage to get out of life, to “seize the day.”

What most people remember from the poem is the following quatrain:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

But the quatrains which caught my imagination when I was young and intrigues me still are the lines which use the game analogy for life...

We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that toss'd you down into the Field,
He knows about it all--He knows--HE knows!
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And then:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not your hands to It for help--for It
As impotently moves as you or I.
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I wonder what Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald would written if they had known about bicycles... and photography.