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Excerpts

In 1027, not far from Bernburg,
eighteen peasants were seized
by a common delusion.
Holding hands, they circled for hours
in a churchyard, haunted by visions,
spirits whose names they called in terror or welcome,
until an angry priest cast a spell on them
for disrupting his Christmas service,
and they sank into the frozen earth
up to their knees. In 1227
on a road to Darmstadt, scores of children
danced and jumped in a shared delirium.
Some saw devils, others the Savior enthroned
in the open heavens. Those who survived
remained palsied for the rest of their days.
And in 1278, two hundred fanatics raved on a bridge
that spanned the Mosel near Koblenz.
A cleric passed carrying the host
to a devout parishioner, the bridge collapsed,
and the maniacs were swept away.
A hundred years later, in concert with
The Great Mortality, armies of dancers
roved in contortions all over Europe.
The clergy found them immune to exorcism,
gave in to their wishes and issued
decrees banning all but square-toed shoes,
the zealots having declared they hated
pointed ones. They disliked even more
the color red, suggesting
a connection between their malady
and the condition of certain infuriated
animals. Most of all they could not endure
the sight of people weeping.
The Swiss doctor Paracelsus was the first to call
the Church's theories of enchantment
nonsensical gossip. Human life is inseparable
from the life of the universe, he said.
Anybody's mortal clay is an extract
of all beings previously created. Illness
can be traced, he said,
to the failure of the Archaeus, a force
residing in the stomach and whose function
is to harmonize the mystic elements (salt,
sulphur, mercury) on which vitality depends.
He advocated direct measures, proposed remedies
fitting the degree of the affliction.
A patient could make a wax doll of himself,
invest his sins and blasphemies within the manikin,
then burn it with no further ceremony.
He could subject himself to ice-water baths,
or submit to starvation in solitary confinement.
Noted for his arrogance, vanity
and choler (his real name was Theophrastus Bombast
von Hohenheim), Paracelsus made enemies.
They discovered he held no academic degree
and caused him to be banished from Baste,
to become a wanderer who would die mysteriously
at the White Horse Inn in Salzburg in 1541.
After a drunken orgy, said one report.
The victim of thugs hired by jealous apothecaries,
said another. And the dance mania
found its own way through time to survive
among us, as untouched as ever by the wisdom of science.
Think of the strange, magnetic sleep
whole populations fall into every day,
in gymnasiums full of pounding darkness,
in the ballrooms of exclusive hotels,
on verandahs overlooking the ocean and played upon
by moonlight, in backyards, on the perfect lawns
of great estates, on city rooftops, in any brief
field the passing tourist sees as empty --
how many millions of us now, the living
and the dead, hand in hand as always,
approaching the brink of the millennium.

A.R. Ammons
Anxiety's Prosody

Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes
the skimmer to floats of greasy globules and with cheesecloth

filters the broth, looking for the transparent, the colorless
essential, the unbeginning and unending of consommé: the

open anxiety breezes through thick conceits, surface congestions
(it likes metaphors deep-lying, out of sight, their airs misting

up into, lighting up consciousness, unidentifiable presences),
it distills consonance and assonance, glottal thickets, brush

clusters, it thins the rhythms, rushing into longish gaits, more
distance in less material time: it hates clots, its stump-fires

level fields: patience and calm define borders and boundaries,
hedgerows, and sharp whirls: anxiety burns instrumentation

matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high
suasive turnings, mild natures tangled still in knotted clumps.

Copyright © 1998 by David Lehman