Cato’s Ceterum Censeo on Ice
There are some great books written on the solar wind
Histories recorded on aurora borealis
Plasma has the bullhorn
of whirled entirety
So I hear
What’s said on the Senate floor
Palimpsest of unpresidential tweets
Echo of repetitions from the ancient Roman republic
Drip-drip of an ice sculpture of the word Truth
on the National Mall
Art of the melt by repetition
of letting go of substance, solidity
Or is it transmutation? — bit by bit
Release of the rigid
Into Spirit
Intent
In the Kuiper belt, there is a statute of Cato that wasn’t, the very statue of which he said he’d rather people ask, “why is there no statue of Cato in the Forum?” — than ask why there is one. This statue exists — in space, orbiting amidst dust and ice, frozen volatiles, the tails of comets. Up close it’s transparent, but not a ghost. It’s marble, and intact, and rolling.
“Echo of repetitions” isn’t tautology — repetitions are of intent, while echoes are of historic rippling, cosmic portent.
Cato the Elder, aka Cato the Wise, aka Cato the Censor — Cato Censorious — potent, a conservative, who — with intent — understood the art of repetition, and ended every speech whatever the topic, off topic, with “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.”
Basically, in English: “In conclusion, I declare Carthage must be destroyed.”
& it was.
Hannibal defeated, Carthage obliterated. Intent propagated until realized; whatever the topic, for years — he could have been talking about agriculture and the olive harvest, but then: “Carthage must be destroyed.”
Cato’s Ceterum Censeo
I like translations that are etymological, get at roots of the words…
tactile-ly (and tactically) to the root, yet also colloquial, current even to the point of slangy…
I wonder what that Censeo really is saying at the root.
Just like Truth melting, absolutely— under the onslaught of
disinformation and lies
& yet, always, Meaning emerges
outed in the melt somehow
when the worst of this regime has to be…
Immigration policies that separate children from parents, concentration camps for immigrant children, rapacious raids within our communities both near and far from our borders, corrupt profiteering from detention centers, cruel extra-legal empowerment beyond control of our courts and congressional oversight, cages as hotbeds of contagion, deportations into mortal danger; we have rogue militarized forces as outrageous as anything human history has dumped on us— Hitler’s gestapo, the Stasi, the various Soviet secret police incarnations (Cheka, GPU, Stalin’s NKVD, KGB) — our nefarious agencies now: US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
So Truth is Melting indeed under this administration and its over 5000* lies so far; and yet, on the flipside, with the ice sculpture of truth melting on the lawn in the face of the Capitol building, I can’t help but think
the truth itself…
Censeo
Sense, yo! (& pointless to try to pin down my pronunciation — maybe I should be stricter with the hard C, like a K…)
Censeo of the Censor. Cato had the role of counting citizens (the census) for voting and tax assessment; he also had the role of monitoring public morals.
Political implications of our 2020 census and who’s in control, who can vote; and of our public morals, civic virtue, of who’s in control — an issue separate but related to censorship, when we’re unmoored from the morality of truth and human rights. The worst of the regime: violent, racist, and inhumane to the core, ICE’s policies depend on lies and disinformation. Crime has to be covered up, camouflaged, to persist. Iniquity is self-evident.
ICE melts — is discredited by light of day/ heat of reality/ the truth itself.
A perfect census counts every star and grain of sand
through the pinch of a corset glass;
each has a vote with its passage
A perfect censor is truth
There are sensors in the universe for truth.
I wonder what that Censeo is saying at its root
I don’t think I have time to get into the C’s and K’s of its etymologies and estimates — the “I” is there, subjective authority and eye of witness, assertion, responsibility in its “I declares” and “I am of the opinion” and “I assess…”
The Censor’s tax assessments
The Censor’s moral censure
Then there’s the ceterum, etc.
I’ll leave off here
all that section from an earlier draft to be appended somewhere else
though just to note in the ceterum there’s an elsewhere contrastive to a here
the other, or the rest, implicated in the one
& so on & so on, moreover and furthermore
one to another, any phrase helping a turn of topic
in recognition that at the nitty-gritty
of every etymology and epistemology
we all stand
on a sieve
& so
At any rate, “I” declare, eye witness
Ceterum Censeo
ICE is a crime
It makes sense.
I make sense.
Throughout millennia, every individual caged or cast out of a land
had a star and a grain of sand pinched into a single spark
sacred remembrance Now & Forever
procession of the deathless
each name uttered re-lights a candle
no face to hide
guilt lurks in history’s wayside gloom
& so, Ceterum Censeo — I make sense — it makes sense
At any rate, I declare until time’s end, this crime’s end, repeatable ad infinitum
#TruthMeltsICE
Melt ICE, Crush ICE
Defund ICE, Abolish ICE
*As of the time of writing, during LiganoReese’s “Truth Be Told” art installation on the National Mall at the onset of autumn 2018. At the approximate time of Up, Up with Liberation!’s posting this piece little more than a year and a half later, the Trump administration has perpetrated more than 18,000 lies as reported by the Washington Post.
Magus Magnus is a poet, writer, and, in recent years, immigrant rights advocate active in the nation’s capital. Books include Verb Sap, Idylls for a Bare Stage, Heraclitean Pride, and The Re-echoes, as well as a Kindle eBook, The Free Spirit.
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