On the beard of George Bernard Shaw

The lovely cognitive dissonance by which the adjective derived from the name of this unusually hairy-faced man is Shavian ...

Riverside poem

There are no hawks.
There are neither hulks nor icebergs.
Nothing drops violently

down from the white sky.
The river flows between its banks
as the wind does between

Earth and sky.
Suds on the water's surface
are clouds, clouds, clouds,

erratic and baggy or
tight as bolted cloth.
The sun sets and there is no sun.

Poetry and Science

Miroslav Holub’s essay ‘Poetry and Science’ (in 1991’s The Dimension of the Present Moment) challenges artists who ‘content themselves on the one hand with a subnormal understanding of the present sciences in particular and with a pretended general understanding of “Science” on the other, albeit they mix up science, technology and the application of both—which is rather the consequence of the given social structure than the responsibility of scientists.’ Holub wants to assert the community of poets and scientists on the grounds on ‘a common silence’ and a shared ‘realization of inner freedom, of the freedom of choice, of one of the very few moments of existential freedom.’ This is puzzling, as if Holub’s main point of contradistinction between the two fields: ‘the scientific theme implies as much light as possible, the poetic one as many shadows as possible.’ I’d say the opposite is true: that the 21st century is revealing the great object of scientific enquiry to be, precisely, dark matter; where poetry puts the hairs up at the back of the neck precisely by articulating, in various ways, the impossibility of existential freedom.

On TV endings

The rubbishness of the endings of so many contemporary TV serials: BSG, Lost, Life on Mars. The essence of the TV serial is a kind of non-evolving, un-narrative continuous present. Hence the eternal fixture of the ages of the Simpsons, say—Homer is always in his late 30s, Bart is always 10, and as the series goes on these fixed facts bend historical time around them (so that in1990 Homer remembers being young in 1970, and now he remembers being young in the late 1980s). Endings do a violence to this weird existential stasis by implying it can pass away. The success of Life on Mars depended upon a larger version of this—not only that the 1970s were ‘better’ than modern life, with better music and cooler clothes, a time when men could be like Gene Hunt, but more importantly that somehow 1970s had never ended. The ending broke that illusion simply by virtue of the fact that it was an ending. Deadwood avoided that problem by playing the ending precisely in terms of an implied build-up to a climax that was then elegantly knight’s-moved away from. It went with the grain of anticlimax, and so it defused it.

Identification with the Plight of the Wretched

When Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace describes the divine incarnation as ‘that fugitive from the camp of the conquerors’ she is pinpointing something beyond simple contingency about the event. When she talks of ‘Christ’s paradoxical identification with the plight of the wretched’ she presumably means ‘paradoxical’ in the sense that Christ, as God, is something like the opposite of ‘wretched’. But I wonder about this. The particularities of the incarnation, whilst fit the circumstances of a marginalised and persecuted people in a geographical backwater, surely present a problem to believers when it becomes the cultural logic of a overwhelmingly populous (two and a half billion of the world’s six billion people are Christians; vastly more than any other religion) and powerful. When Christians are the most powerful people in the world, how do they make of Christ’s message to the disempowered? When Christianity is culturally central, how can it apprehend Christ’s message of marginality? It’s an old question, of course. Perhaps the answer is that Christians, consciously or otherwise, imbibe a kind of psychological marginality—they take Christ’s address to actual disempowerment, poverty and oppression to be statements about ‘metaphorical’ disempowerment, poverty and oppression. But that’s a pretty lame way of taking it, surely? Wouldn’t it make more sense to assume that a Christian life requires the genuine attempt to live all that is marginalised by contemporary existence—to live, for instance, and paradoxically, as an isolated individual rather than a member of a supportive congregation, to live as an atheist rather than a believer? That’s less paradoxical than it might appear, I think.

To put this another way: Christ as a Jew came to redeem not mainstream Jewry, but a small obscure brand-new Jewish sect existing on the margins of Jewry. But now, in the same way that Christian thinkers assert that the phrase 'Christian tragedy' is a contradiction in terms, because the fullness of divine Grace now fills what was previously an empty world (death can hardly be a tragedy if death leads to eternal bliss) -- in such a circumstance where are the wretched to be found, if not on the outskirts of that revelation, amongst the unbelievers and atheists? And precisely not, of course, in order to convert them, but to engage with them precisely on these terms of unbelief?

Cleanness again

Cleanness occupies this weird space between sterility and fertility: between death and nurturing hygiene. Although the ground of cleanness is nihilistic, yet it’s not necessarily an obliterating nihilo. It might be like the forest fire that clears the ground of senile wood and fertilises it with ash ready for new growth.

Per noctem in nihilo velu

These famous lines of Catullus:

Soles occidere et redire possunt
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

An article on the poet from the May 15th 1913 TLS (nearly a century ago!) discusses various translations:

Here is Mr Stuttaford's version:

Suns can set and rise again, but to our brief light, when once it sets, there comes a never ending night that must be passed in neverending sleep.

And here is Mr Cornish's:

Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the short light had once set, remains to be slept the sleep of one unbroken night.

We may find some amusement in comparing Mr Stuttaford with Mr Cornish, in giving Mr Stuttaford a good mark for ease and rhythm, and a doubtful one for the repetition of "never ending", so unlike the monumental brevity of the original, or in detecting the flaw in Mr Cornish's English, the Latinistic "remains to be slept", the hoof-mark of the construing lingo beloved of schoolboys, abhorred of men and gods. But if we wanted to give an English reader, innocent of Latin, some idea of Catullus's lines, we should take him neither to Mr Cornish nor to Mr Stuttaford, but to Herrick:

Our life is short; and our days run
As fast away as does the sun:...

I quite like "remains to be slept", mind you (though not so much as I like the idiom 'the hoof-mark'...). But I'm moved to try a different sort of translation, one that preserves more of the shape of the signifier than the signified. Too long has 'content' ruled the logic of translation ...:

Soles occidere et redire possunt
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Suns axe lessens the day, and re-day perhaps
Know this: come senility's axe, and our brief look's
noxious perpetually in a dormant ending.

God. That's terrible.