Mea Lesbia: Or How Not to Love.

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,

 Do not estimate the rumors of all the

 strict elders to be worth a penny!

The sun is able to set and to rise;

 We set with it that same brief light,

 And  night is as one sleeping perpetually.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred

Then another thousand, a second hundred  

Then even another thousand, at last a hundred

Then, when we have made the many thousand

We will confuse them, lest we know

Or lest those who are able to do evil know

Since the number of kisses is so great.

(If any one wants to call me out on the translation, feel free. You can find the Latin text at http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/rcardona/poetry/catullus/5.html)

Catullus is without a doubt one of the most resonant poets in the post-modern era. Vergil is trite, Horace is good but carpe diem has already been worked into the ground and none of us (save for athletes and those sundry others who wish to misquote the man, and use it as a false form of motivation) really want to deal with it any more; until we raise our glasses and say some carpe noctum or "eat and drink for tomorrow we die". The problem is we rarely ever die tomorrow.

Catullus, not waxing nearly as philosophical as Horace instead is proposing something much more down to earth. He speaks to his lover, telling her to kiss him, because when they use their mouths for talking bad things tend to happen. "Those who are able to do evil" in this work come out as spiritual numina, household spirits who demand compensation for all the good things done by them, every kiss, every spiritual favor, but Catullus' previous comments about night being an unbroken sleep make one skeptical of his belief in an afterlife, and as such we cant take his comments about superstition too seriously.

But I'm using metaphors to beat around the bush. Who in their right mind would think to call Catullus a good lover, especially in which his Lesbia in the series of a few short poems turns into ista Scelera (that whore) and even later becomes quadrantaria (she who turns tricks for a quarter). It would be patronizing of me to work all the way into how this is not a relationship we should model, but it is something that seems to happen all too often.

Some things never change. Indeed in our most Roman America Catullus cuts like a knife into our collective psyche, with "my beloved's" turning into "she's a whore" all too rapidly. Not to say that we are a nation incapable of love, we are a nation with shoddy motivations, and it's easy to see how a carpe diem complex can worm its way into a complex of instant gratification, the two are not so dissimilar.  This is the same cultural line which brings us to St. Augustine's lovely prayer of  "Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo." (Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.") 

Instant gratification is also perpetual procrastination, and it is funny that we should use procrastination as much as we do in a carpe diem culture. (Pro Cras- translating to literally 'for tomorrow') The way in which we tend to ignore temporal realities when transitioning from Lesbia to Scelera best amounts to a kind of double think: for example.

"I love her, I have always loved her" = "Oceania is at war with Eurasia, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia."

"I never loved that bitch anyway, my new interest is now the object of my love, and who I have loved forever."= "Oceania is at war with East Asia, Oceania has always been at war with East Asia."

We self impose this doublethink as a coping mechanism when we do not willingly recognize the nature and motivations of our interpersonal involvement. Catullus rings of this, though not nearly as much as thousands upon thousands of facebook relationship statuses. The thousands upon hundreds of kisses, the carpe diem mindset, the buy now pay later ethos all share in common their propensity to postpone the consequences and then rationalize them in to a non-issue. 

This is no way to live, or love.