Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
The story of An Lushan
http://www.theworldofchinese.com/2016/05/the-barbarian-and-the-babe/
The story of An Lushan has been told so many times that it qualifies as Tang Dynasty slash fic. There is the aging emperor, his sensual concubine, and the exotic foreign warrior who comes between them. But this story is far more Byzantine than an 8th-century love triangle gone horribly sideways. An Lushan, and the rebellion he launched against the emperor, was representative of a complex interplay of forces between Tang China and the civilizations of Central and North Asia. While the Tang Empire managed to survive An Lushan’s challenge, Chinese culture would be forever changed. An outward looking state turned inward. A culture known for its openness and cosmopolitanism began to harbor deep anxieties about foreign elements in the culture. The state which emerged from the ashes of the An Lushan rebellion was brittle, defensive, and increasingly nativist.
We don’t know very much about An Lushan’s background. Best guess is that he was Sogdian, a people who emerged what is today Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. He first enters the official records around 740 AD, one of many foreign soldiers and mercenaries the Tang court employed to guard the borders of the empire.
By all accounts, An Lushan was a large man, a fierce fighter, and a cunning tactician. He was also a master at court politics, somebody who knew how to play to expectations. Sometimes it was as a Falstaffian clown, performing for the benefit of his cultural “superiors.” Other times, An Lushan cleverly cultivated close personal relationships with influential denizens of the court. His patrons included the chancellor, Li Linfu, a powerful official who all but ran the government. An also developed a close — some would say VERY close — bond with Yang Guifei, the emperor’s favorite concubine and one of the most famous women in Chinese history.
Whether or not Yang and An ever had anything more than a just-friends relationship is unknown. It would seem a terrible risk for both to carry on an affair. It also seems unlikely that the corpulent and, it was said, severely ulcerated An would have been a very tempting target for the celebrated concubine Yang. Even if their affection did not extend to the bed chamber, it was still an odd alliance. Some records indicate that Yang even adopted the older An Lushan, less as her child and more the way one would foster a stray dog.
Whatever their relationship, An Lushan used these connections to build his power bases. He was appointed to a series of important positions both in the border guards and at the capital. But beginning in 752, things started to go poorly for An Lushan. His patron Li Linfu passed away that year. Li’s successor as chancellor Yang Guozhong — who was the concubine Yang Guifei’s cousin — was not a fan. Yang Guozhong earnestly tried to convince anyone who would listen, particularly the emperor, that An Lushan was a grave threat to the security of the empire.
Whether or not An was secretly plotting rebellion, as Yang Guozhong feared, or was merely reacting to the chilly winds blowing his way from the throne, in 755 he threw off his allegiance to the Tang. Marching southeast from his power base near present-day Beijing, An and his armies quickly swept through and captured Luoyang, the eastern secondary capital of the empire.
The court in the primary capital, Chang’an, attempted to organize a response, but few of their top military officials were battle-tested. An and his men had spent years guarding the borders. They were hard men always ready for a fight. Now they faced conscripts led by men whose knowledge of war was gleaned as much from history books and epic poems as it was from battle. It was hardly a fair match.
In late 756, with An Lushan’s troops approaching the capital, the emperor and his court fled for their lives. But just a few hundred miles into their retreat, the imperial bodyguards refused to go further until justice was done. The soldiers had little love for An Lushan, but to a man they felt that the trouble had all started with Concubine Yang and her meddling cousin, the chancellor Yang Guozhong. The imperial officers informed the emperor that Yang Guifei and Yang Guozhong had to be executed before their troops would take another step. Distraught, but out of options, the emperor ordered the killing of both his beloved and his top advisor. It left the emperor a broken man for the rest of his days and the melodrama, full of death, romance, and pathos, became a staple of plays and opera, films and TV series.
Ultimately, the Tang doesn’t so much defeat An Lushan as allow An and his allies to implode. Less than a year after capturing the Tang capitals of Luoyang and Chang’an, An Lushan is murdered by his son. The allies who stood with An Lushan in the beginning of the rebellion began to get ideas of their own. An’s successors were unable to muster the support needed to finish off the Tang and consolidate their own empire.
But the damage was done. By the time the An Lushan Rebellion came to an end seven years later, the empire was severely weakened. The rebellion cost the Tang its control of the western regions of the empire including the valuable trade routes to Central Asia. Increasingly, power devolved to military governors in charge of the border provinces, weakening the central government’s authority.
Moreover, there was a growing unease over the extent of foreign influences in Tang culture and politics. Before the An Lushan Rebellion, the Tang capital at Chang’an had been one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Buddhist monasteries, Confucian academies, and Daoist shrines shared their streets with mosques, Manichean temples, and even synagogues and Nestorian Christian churches. It was common to see foreign merchants and travelers in the markets of Chang’an and An Lushan was one of many non-Chinese who had considerable power at court and in the provinces. That all changed. Future Tang emperors and officials would be much more suspicious of non-native people and ideas.
Finally, the An Lushan rebellion accelerated a long-term demographic shift which forever changed the cultural and economic landscape of China. Up until the mid-Tang, the political and cultural heart of Chinese civilization was still the Yellow River basin. After the Tang, there is a shift southward toward the Yangtze River watershed, particularly the area known as “South of the River” (Jiangnan) centered on the rising urban cores of Suzhou and Hangzhou.
While An Lushan failed in his bid to topple the Tang and create his own state, his rebellion was a watershed moment in Chinese history. And his story, along with that of the doomed concubine Yang and the besotted emperor reverberates throughout the annals of Chinese history and literature down to the present day.
The story of An Lushan has been told so many times that it qualifies as Tang Dynasty slash fic. There is the aging emperor, his sensual concubine, and the exotic foreign warrior who comes between them. But this story is far more Byzantine than an 8th-century love triangle gone horribly sideways. An Lushan, and the rebellion he launched against the emperor, was representative of a complex interplay of forces between Tang China and the civilizations of Central and North Asia. While the Tang Empire managed to survive An Lushan’s challenge, Chinese culture would be forever changed. An outward looking state turned inward. A culture known for its openness and cosmopolitanism began to harbor deep anxieties about foreign elements in the culture. The state which emerged from the ashes of the An Lushan rebellion was brittle, defensive, and increasingly nativist.
We don’t know very much about An Lushan’s background. Best guess is that he was Sogdian, a people who emerged what is today Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. He first enters the official records around 740 AD, one of many foreign soldiers and mercenaries the Tang court employed to guard the borders of the empire.
By all accounts, An Lushan was a large man, a fierce fighter, and a cunning tactician. He was also a master at court politics, somebody who knew how to play to expectations. Sometimes it was as a Falstaffian clown, performing for the benefit of his cultural “superiors.” Other times, An Lushan cleverly cultivated close personal relationships with influential denizens of the court. His patrons included the chancellor, Li Linfu, a powerful official who all but ran the government. An also developed a close — some would say VERY close — bond with Yang Guifei, the emperor’s favorite concubine and one of the most famous women in Chinese history.
Whether or not Yang and An ever had anything more than a just-friends relationship is unknown. It would seem a terrible risk for both to carry on an affair. It also seems unlikely that the corpulent and, it was said, severely ulcerated An would have been a very tempting target for the celebrated concubine Yang. Even if their affection did not extend to the bed chamber, it was still an odd alliance. Some records indicate that Yang even adopted the older An Lushan, less as her child and more the way one would foster a stray dog.
Whatever their relationship, An Lushan used these connections to build his power bases. He was appointed to a series of important positions both in the border guards and at the capital. But beginning in 752, things started to go poorly for An Lushan. His patron Li Linfu passed away that year. Li’s successor as chancellor Yang Guozhong — who was the concubine Yang Guifei’s cousin — was not a fan. Yang Guozhong earnestly tried to convince anyone who would listen, particularly the emperor, that An Lushan was a grave threat to the security of the empire.
Whether or not An was secretly plotting rebellion, as Yang Guozhong feared, or was merely reacting to the chilly winds blowing his way from the throne, in 755 he threw off his allegiance to the Tang. Marching southeast from his power base near present-day Beijing, An and his armies quickly swept through and captured Luoyang, the eastern secondary capital of the empire.
The court in the primary capital, Chang’an, attempted to organize a response, but few of their top military officials were battle-tested. An and his men had spent years guarding the borders. They were hard men always ready for a fight. Now they faced conscripts led by men whose knowledge of war was gleaned as much from history books and epic poems as it was from battle. It was hardly a fair match.
In late 756, with An Lushan’s troops approaching the capital, the emperor and his court fled for their lives. But just a few hundred miles into their retreat, the imperial bodyguards refused to go further until justice was done. The soldiers had little love for An Lushan, but to a man they felt that the trouble had all started with Concubine Yang and her meddling cousin, the chancellor Yang Guozhong. The imperial officers informed the emperor that Yang Guifei and Yang Guozhong had to be executed before their troops would take another step. Distraught, but out of options, the emperor ordered the killing of both his beloved and his top advisor. It left the emperor a broken man for the rest of his days and the melodrama, full of death, romance, and pathos, became a staple of plays and opera, films and TV series.
Ultimately, the Tang doesn’t so much defeat An Lushan as allow An and his allies to implode. Less than a year after capturing the Tang capitals of Luoyang and Chang’an, An Lushan is murdered by his son. The allies who stood with An Lushan in the beginning of the rebellion began to get ideas of their own. An’s successors were unable to muster the support needed to finish off the Tang and consolidate their own empire.
But the damage was done. By the time the An Lushan Rebellion came to an end seven years later, the empire was severely weakened. The rebellion cost the Tang its control of the western regions of the empire including the valuable trade routes to Central Asia. Increasingly, power devolved to military governors in charge of the border provinces, weakening the central government’s authority.
Moreover, there was a growing unease over the extent of foreign influences in Tang culture and politics. Before the An Lushan Rebellion, the Tang capital at Chang’an had been one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Buddhist monasteries, Confucian academies, and Daoist shrines shared their streets with mosques, Manichean temples, and even synagogues and Nestorian Christian churches. It was common to see foreign merchants and travelers in the markets of Chang’an and An Lushan was one of many non-Chinese who had considerable power at court and in the provinces. That all changed. Future Tang emperors and officials would be much more suspicious of non-native people and ideas.
Finally, the An Lushan rebellion accelerated a long-term demographic shift which forever changed the cultural and economic landscape of China. Up until the mid-Tang, the political and cultural heart of Chinese civilization was still the Yellow River basin. After the Tang, there is a shift southward toward the Yangtze River watershed, particularly the area known as “South of the River” (Jiangnan) centered on the rising urban cores of Suzhou and Hangzhou.
While An Lushan failed in his bid to topple the Tang and create his own state, his rebellion was a watershed moment in Chinese history. And his story, along with that of the doomed concubine Yang and the besotted emperor reverberates throughout the annals of Chinese history and literature down to the present day.
Monday, May 23, 2016
THE ANALYTICAL LANGUAGE OF JOHN WILKINS
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated from the Spanish 'El idioma analítico de John Wilkins' by Lilia Graciela Vázquez; edited by Jan Frederik Solem with assistance from Bjørn Are Davidsen and Rolf Andersen. A translation by Ruth L. C. Simms can be found in Jorge Luis Borges, 'Other inquisitions 1937-1952' (University of Texas Press, 1993)
I have noticed that the 14th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica does not include the article on John Wilkins. This omission can be considered justified if we remember how trivial this article was (20 lines of purely biographical data: Wilkins was born in 1614, Wilkins died in 1672, Wilkins was chaplain of Charles Louis, Elector Palatine; Wilkins was principal of one of Oxford's colleges, Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, etc.); it is an error if we consider the speculative works of Wilkins. He was interested in several different topics: theology, cryptography, music, the building of transparent beehives, the orbit of an invisible planet, the possibility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and principles of an universal language. To this latter problem he dedicated the book 'An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language' (600 pages in large quarto, 1668). There are no copies of this book in our National Library, I have consulted, to write the present article, 'The Life and Times of John Wilkins' (1910), by P. A. Wright Henderson; the 'Wörterbuch der Philosophie' (1935), by Fritz Mauthner; 'Delphos' (1935), by E. Sylvia Pankhurst; 'Dangerous Thoughts' (1939), by Lancelot Hogben.
All of us have once experienced those neverending discussions in which a dame, using lots of interjections and incoherences, swears to you that the word 'luna' is more (or less) expressive than the word 'moon'. Apart from the evident observation that the monosyllable 'moon' perhaps is a more suitable representation of such a very simple object than the bisyllable 'luna', there is nothing to add to such a discussion; apart from the composed words and the derivations, all the languages in the world (including the 'Volapük' of Johann Martin Schleyer and the romantic 'Interlingua' of Peano) are equally inexpressive. There is not one issue of the Grammar of the Royal Spanish Academy that does not ponder "the enormous treasure of pitoresque, bright and expressive words of the extremely rich Spanish language", but it is mere bragging, without corroboration. In fact, this same Royal Academy edits every few years a dictionary, defining Spanish words... In the universal language which Wilkins invented in the seventeenth century, each word is defined by itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1629, had already noticed that, using the decimal number system, it may take only one day to learn how to name all the numbers up to infinity and how to write them in a new language, namely that of ciphers (1); he did also suggest the creation of a language similar to this former system, a general language, organizing and covering all human ideas. John Wilkins, around 1664, started to work on this task.
He divided the universe in forty categories or classes, these being further subdivided into differences, which was then subdivided into species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element fire, a flame. In a similar language invented by Letellier (1850) a means animal;ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi,herbivore; abiv, horse; etc. In the language of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) imaba means building; imaca, harem; imafe,hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imari, house; imaru, country house;imedo, coloumn; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling;imogo, window; bire, bookbinder; birer, bookbinding. (This last list belongs to a book printed in Buenos Aires in 1886, the 'Curso de Lengua Universal', by Dr. Pedro Mata.)
The words of the analytical language created by John Wilkins are not mere arbitrary symbols; each letter in them has a meaning, like those from the Holy Writ had for the Cabbalists. Mauthner points out that children would be able to learn this language without knowing it be artificial; afterwards, at school, they would discover it being an universal code and a secret encyclopaedia.
Once we have defined Wilkins' procedure, it is time to examine a problem which could be impossible or at least difficult to postpone: the value of this four-level table which is the base of the language. Let us consider the eighth category, the category of stones. Wilkins divides them into common (silica, gravel, schist), modics (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insolubles (chalk, arsenic). Almost as surprising as the eighth, is the ninth category. This one reveals to us that metals can be imperfect (cinnabar, mercury), artificial (bronze, brass), recremental (filings, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper). Beauty belongs to the sixteenth category; it is a living brood fish, an oblong one.
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
The Bibliographic Institute of Brussels exerts chaos too: it has divided the universe into 1000 subdivisions, from which number 262 is the pope; number 282, the Roman Catholic Church; 263, the Day of the Lord; 268 Sunday schools; 298, mormonism; and number 294, brahmanism, buddhism, shintoism and taoism. It doesn't reject heterogene subdivisions as, for example, 179: "Cruelty towards animals. Animals protection. Duel and suicide seen through moral values. Various vices and disadvantages. Advantages and various qualities."
I have registered the arbitrarities of Wilkins, of the unknown (or false) Chinese encyclopaedia writer and of the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels; it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is. "The world - David Hume writes - is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died" ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779). We are allowed to go further; we can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, it's aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.
The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are concious they are not definitive. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns. The classes and species that compose it are contradictory and vague; the nimbleness of letters in the words meaning subdivisions and divisions is, no doubt, gifted. The word salmon does not tell us anything; zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the man knowing the forty categories and the species of these categories) a scaled river fish, with ruddy meat. (Theoretically, it is not impossible to think of a language where the name of each thing says all the details of its destiny, past and future).
Leaving hopes and utopias apart, probably the most lucid ever written about language are the following words by Chesterton: "He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of this own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire" (G. F. Watts, page 88, 1904).
---
(1) Theoretically, the number of numbering systems is unlimited. The most complete (used by the divinities and the angels) has an infinite number of symbols, one for each individual number; the simplest needs only two. Zero is written as 0, one 1, two 10, three 11, four 100, five 101, six 110, seven 111, eight 1000... This is an invention by Leibniz, who was stimulated (it seems) by the enigmatic hexagrammes of I Ching.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Handgun - Ouyang Jianghe
you can take a-
part a handgun, break it
in two, into
a hand a gun
paint the hand black, you've got
a faction—
put the gun on a boat: that's
a means of persuasion
you can take apart a faction
into further partitions
parties
ambitions
you can break it into act, or action—
the world divides in infinite fissions
one eye you aim
at love; the other you ram
into the barrel of a gun
the bullets ogle
you level your nose at your enemies'
part a handgun, break it
in two, into
a hand a gun
paint the hand black, you've got
a faction—
put the gun on a boat: that's
a means of persuasion
you can take apart a faction
into further partitions
parties
ambitions
you can break it into act, or action—
the world divides in infinite fissions
one eye you aim
at love; the other you ram
into the barrel of a gun
the bullets ogle
you level your nose at your enemies'
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Friday, May 20, 2016
Cassady's letter to Kerouac
Neal Cassady’s long lost letter to Jack Kerouac, dated 17 December 1950, has permeated virtually every conversation about the Beat era. Referenced not only by Kerouac but by Allen Ginsberg, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Herbert Hunke, and a host of their contemporaries, Cassady’s fluid, incantatory, and deeply revealing prose influenced the entire generation of Beat writers.
The letter was written on a three-day Benzedrine high, Cassady later confessed. It contained, by Kerouac’s first calculation, at least 13,000 words and ran to 40 pages, offering a compelling, unaffected and discursive account of Cassady’s frenetic love life in 1946, particularly with Joan Anderson (whom he visited in a hospital after a failed suicide), and ‘Cherry Mary’, recounting an acrobatic escape through a bathroom window when they were surprised by Mary’s aunt. The uninhibited, non-literary narrative pointed to the way to the free, truthful style to which Kerouac aspired.
Overwhelmed by what he read, Kerouac wrote ecstatically to Cassady on 27 December: ‘I thought it ranked among the best things ever written in America… it was almost as good as the unbelievably good ‘Notes from the Underground’ of Dostoevsky… You gather together all the best styles… of Joyce, Celine, Dosy… and utilize them in the muscular rush of your own narrative style & excitement. I say truly, no Dreiser, no Wolfe has come close to it; Melville was never truer.’
The letter was written on a three-day Benzedrine high, Cassady later confessed. It contained, by Kerouac’s first calculation, at least 13,000 words and ran to 40 pages, offering a compelling, unaffected and discursive account of Cassady’s frenetic love life in 1946, particularly with Joan Anderson (whom he visited in a hospital after a failed suicide), and ‘Cherry Mary’, recounting an acrobatic escape through a bathroom window when they were surprised by Mary’s aunt. The uninhibited, non-literary narrative pointed to the way to the free, truthful style to which Kerouac aspired.
Overwhelmed by what he read, Kerouac wrote ecstatically to Cassady on 27 December: ‘I thought it ranked among the best things ever written in America… it was almost as good as the unbelievably good ‘Notes from the Underground’ of Dostoevsky… You gather together all the best styles… of Joyce, Celine, Dosy… and utilize them in the muscular rush of your own narrative style & excitement. I say truly, no Dreiser, no Wolfe has come close to it; Melville was never truer.’
Thursday, May 19, 2016
The First Test Match
While there had already been four major tours by English sides to Australia, the team arranged and captained by James Lillywhite that left England in November 1876 was the first to visit as a business venture rather than following an invitation.
Three years earlier WG Grace had led a similar venture, but there had been deep divisions within the group and Lillywhite's Cricketers Companion had noted that it was unlikely that any attempt to mix amateurs and professionals would happen again.
Lillywhite, who had been involved in that unhappy trip, learnt from his experiences and relied entirely on professionals, leaving all the amateurs at home. While he had a strong bowling attack, the best batsmen were by and large the absent amateurs - the previous summer only four of the top 26 in the averages were professionals. And with every penny spent eating into the venture's profits, the squad was made up of only 12 players, meaning very little rest for those involved.
This was also the first trip to play matches against anything other than odds. The Australian teams were generally considered to be too weak to meet on equal terms, and so opposing sides fielded as many as 22 players. That helped account for the remarkable number of wickets and eyebrow-raising analyses of the leading bowlers on such trips. Alfred Shaw took 19 for 50 against XXII of Newcastle, for example.
But Australia's cricketers were improving fast, and Lillywhite's side were challenged to an 11-a-side game by New South Wales shortly before the tour diverted to New Zealand for six weeks in mid-January 1877. Although the tourists had the better of a draw in the two-day game, the other states were not about to be outdone and Victoria issued a similar challenge.
Meanwhile, Lillywhite's side played eight odds matches in New Zealand. While there, they lost wicketkeeper Ted Pooley, an inveterate gambler, who was left languishing in a Christchurch jail after a betting scandal, and so they returned to Australia with the core 11 players.
The financial demands of playing as many games as possible meant that Lillywhite had accepted the Victorians' offer and on March 15, barely 24 hours after they arrived back, the 18th match of the tour took place at the MCG between Lillywhite's XI and a Combined Australia XI, a side raised between the Victoria and New South Wales authorities. Although not advertised as an international, it is recognised this was the first match between two representative teams and it was subsequently given the accolade of being cricket's first official Test.
England came into the game in a poor state, exhausted by endless cricket and travelling without a chance to rest - Pooley never rejoined the squad - and the reserve keeper, Harry Jupp, was suffering from an inflammation of the eyes. One of the XI, James Southerton, was 49 when he made his debut. Jupp was not trusted to keep wicket but the lack of any reserve meant that he had to play. As it was, he top-scored for England with 63 in their first innings.
Australia, too, had their problems, with a simmering row between the Victoria and New South Wales associations undermining preparations. The biggest loss came when the great fast bowler Fred Spofforth refused to play because he disapproved of the choice of wicketkeeper, insisting in vain that Billy Murdoch play. The selectors brought in Frank Allen as Spofforth's replacement, only for Allen to pull out after deciding he preferred to attend a local fair.
Around 1500 spectators were inside the MCG when, shortly after one o'clock on a sunny afternoon, the first ball in Test cricket was bowled by Alfred Shaw to Charles Bannerman. The first run came off the next delivery, and the first wicket in the fourth over, when Allen Hill bowled Nat Thompson. The ignominy of the first duck fell to Edward Gregory later in the day.
The MCG at the time had one newly built grandstand that could seat 2000, with the remainder of the ground surrounded by a grass bank. By the close 4500 people had turned up, but few bothered to use the stand, which was said to have only a smattering of people in it all day.
At the close, 5pm - there had been around three-and-a-half hours' play - Bannerman had made 126 out of 166 for 6, Test cricket's first hundred. The two teams spent the evening at the opera.
Bannerman continued to dominate the next day until, shortly after lunch, the middle finger on his right hand was split by a lob from George Ulyett, forcing him to retire hurt on 165. His percentage of the innings - 67.3% - remains a record. It was not the best innings and he was helped by what contemporary reports described as poor bowling and fielding. He was dropped when in single figures - a simple chance to mid-off hit a nonplussed Tom Armitage in the stomach.
Armitage, determined to make amends, bet his captain £7 to £1 that he would make a fifty. He failed in that regard as well. In his defence, he, like several of his team-mates, had suffered from severe seasickness on the return trip from New Zealand and was reportedly barely able to stand on the morning of the match.
In reply to Australia's 245, England were bowled out for 196, Billy Midwinter taking 5 for 78. It would have been far worse had either umpire spotted that Jupp had trodden on his wicket before he had scored, but he survived the appeal, to the booing of the crowd.
England did better second time round, dismissing Australia for 104 in front of a third-day crowd of 12,000. Bannerman, severely incapacitated and given a rousing reception as he walked out, was again dropped, this time before scoring, but it wasn't nearly such a costly miss, as he made only 4.
Chasing 154 to win, England were skittled for 108, with slow bowler Tom Kendall (like Bannerman, born in England) taking 7 for 55. Their chase might not have been helped by the large lunch, and copious quantity of beer, they consumed during the break. They lost Allen Hill second ball, slogging to mid-on, and within an hour were 22 for 4. From there, on a wearing pitch, there was no way back.
The margin of Australia's victory was 45 runs, a result remarkably repeated in the Centenary Test in March 1977. "The combined team worked together with the utmost harmony and goodwill," reported The Australian.
There were the almost customary moans about the quality of the pitch and the umpiring, but of more concern to Lillywhite's men was their share of the gate money. Southerton noted that throughout the trip "the financial returns rarely tallied with the estimated number of people present".
The Australian XI were all presented with a gold watch each by the Victoria Cricket Association - captain Dave Gregory getting a slightly larger one - while a public subscription raised £83 for Bannermann and £23 for Kendall and wicketkeeper John Blackham.
Although England squared the series by winning the second Test, the Australians were jubilant at having shown that they could match their rivals. One newspaper summed up the mood in an editorial on the day Lillywhite's side set sail for home. "It shows that in bone as muscle, activity, athletic vigour, and success in field sports, the Englishmen born in Australia do not fall short of the Englishmen born in Surrey or Yorkshire".
"For the time being," wrote the Argus, "we must forget we are Victorians and New South Wales and our geographical distinctions, and only remember that we are of one nation - Australia."
Three years earlier WG Grace had led a similar venture, but there had been deep divisions within the group and Lillywhite's Cricketers Companion had noted that it was unlikely that any attempt to mix amateurs and professionals would happen again.
Lillywhite, who had been involved in that unhappy trip, learnt from his experiences and relied entirely on professionals, leaving all the amateurs at home. While he had a strong bowling attack, the best batsmen were by and large the absent amateurs - the previous summer only four of the top 26 in the averages were professionals. And with every penny spent eating into the venture's profits, the squad was made up of only 12 players, meaning very little rest for those involved.
This was also the first trip to play matches against anything other than odds. The Australian teams were generally considered to be too weak to meet on equal terms, and so opposing sides fielded as many as 22 players. That helped account for the remarkable number of wickets and eyebrow-raising analyses of the leading bowlers on such trips. Alfred Shaw took 19 for 50 against XXII of Newcastle, for example.
But Australia's cricketers were improving fast, and Lillywhite's side were challenged to an 11-a-side game by New South Wales shortly before the tour diverted to New Zealand for six weeks in mid-January 1877. Although the tourists had the better of a draw in the two-day game, the other states were not about to be outdone and Victoria issued a similar challenge.
Meanwhile, Lillywhite's side played eight odds matches in New Zealand. While there, they lost wicketkeeper Ted Pooley, an inveterate gambler, who was left languishing in a Christchurch jail after a betting scandal, and so they returned to Australia with the core 11 players.
The financial demands of playing as many games as possible meant that Lillywhite had accepted the Victorians' offer and on March 15, barely 24 hours after they arrived back, the 18th match of the tour took place at the MCG between Lillywhite's XI and a Combined Australia XI, a side raised between the Victoria and New South Wales authorities. Although not advertised as an international, it is recognised this was the first match between two representative teams and it was subsequently given the accolade of being cricket's first official Test.
England came into the game in a poor state, exhausted by endless cricket and travelling without a chance to rest - Pooley never rejoined the squad - and the reserve keeper, Harry Jupp, was suffering from an inflammation of the eyes. One of the XI, James Southerton, was 49 when he made his debut. Jupp was not trusted to keep wicket but the lack of any reserve meant that he had to play. As it was, he top-scored for England with 63 in their first innings.
Australia, too, had their problems, with a simmering row between the Victoria and New South Wales associations undermining preparations. The biggest loss came when the great fast bowler Fred Spofforth refused to play because he disapproved of the choice of wicketkeeper, insisting in vain that Billy Murdoch play. The selectors brought in Frank Allen as Spofforth's replacement, only for Allen to pull out after deciding he preferred to attend a local fair.
Around 1500 spectators were inside the MCG when, shortly after one o'clock on a sunny afternoon, the first ball in Test cricket was bowled by Alfred Shaw to Charles Bannerman. The first run came off the next delivery, and the first wicket in the fourth over, when Allen Hill bowled Nat Thompson. The ignominy of the first duck fell to Edward Gregory later in the day.
The MCG at the time had one newly built grandstand that could seat 2000, with the remainder of the ground surrounded by a grass bank. By the close 4500 people had turned up, but few bothered to use the stand, which was said to have only a smattering of people in it all day.
At the close, 5pm - there had been around three-and-a-half hours' play - Bannerman had made 126 out of 166 for 6, Test cricket's first hundred. The two teams spent the evening at the opera.
Bannerman continued to dominate the next day until, shortly after lunch, the middle finger on his right hand was split by a lob from George Ulyett, forcing him to retire hurt on 165. His percentage of the innings - 67.3% - remains a record. It was not the best innings and he was helped by what contemporary reports described as poor bowling and fielding. He was dropped when in single figures - a simple chance to mid-off hit a nonplussed Tom Armitage in the stomach.
Armitage, determined to make amends, bet his captain £7 to £1 that he would make a fifty. He failed in that regard as well. In his defence, he, like several of his team-mates, had suffered from severe seasickness on the return trip from New Zealand and was reportedly barely able to stand on the morning of the match.
In reply to Australia's 245, England were bowled out for 196, Billy Midwinter taking 5 for 78. It would have been far worse had either umpire spotted that Jupp had trodden on his wicket before he had scored, but he survived the appeal, to the booing of the crowd.
England did better second time round, dismissing Australia for 104 in front of a third-day crowd of 12,000. Bannerman, severely incapacitated and given a rousing reception as he walked out, was again dropped, this time before scoring, but it wasn't nearly such a costly miss, as he made only 4.
Chasing 154 to win, England were skittled for 108, with slow bowler Tom Kendall (like Bannerman, born in England) taking 7 for 55. Their chase might not have been helped by the large lunch, and copious quantity of beer, they consumed during the break. They lost Allen Hill second ball, slogging to mid-on, and within an hour were 22 for 4. From there, on a wearing pitch, there was no way back.
The margin of Australia's victory was 45 runs, a result remarkably repeated in the Centenary Test in March 1977. "The combined team worked together with the utmost harmony and goodwill," reported The Australian.
There were the almost customary moans about the quality of the pitch and the umpiring, but of more concern to Lillywhite's men was their share of the gate money. Southerton noted that throughout the trip "the financial returns rarely tallied with the estimated number of people present".
The Australian XI were all presented with a gold watch each by the Victoria Cricket Association - captain Dave Gregory getting a slightly larger one - while a public subscription raised £83 for Bannermann and £23 for Kendall and wicketkeeper John Blackham.
Although England squared the series by winning the second Test, the Australians were jubilant at having shown that they could match their rivals. One newspaper summed up the mood in an editorial on the day Lillywhite's side set sail for home. "It shows that in bone as muscle, activity, athletic vigour, and success in field sports, the Englishmen born in Australia do not fall short of the Englishmen born in Surrey or Yorkshire".
"For the time being," wrote the Argus, "we must forget we are Victorians and New South Wales and our geographical distinctions, and only remember that we are of one nation - Australia."
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
The Last Messiah
The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes.
One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.
He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.
Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.
That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.
II
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life’s embrace.
So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion’s claw. But man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother’s womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself – he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved – there are other smiles as well, a torn boot with toes. Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice – he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.
But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.
From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.
Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.
The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.
In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
III
Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?
Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.
If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was vocated by creation’s hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.
The identity of purpose and perishment is, for giant deer and man alike, the tragic paradox of life. In devoted Bejahung, the last Cervis Giganticus bore the badge of its lineage to its end. The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-consciousrepression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.
Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, ‘fear of life,’ refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced – correctly – as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential.
The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. Though they take a vast and multifarious variety of forms, it seems legitimate to at least identify four major kinds, naturally occuring in every possible combination: isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation.
By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engström: “One should not think, it is just confusing.”) A perfect and almost brutalising variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on.)
In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.
The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become mattersof course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated ‘infantile bonding;’ the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘ephemeral’ as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. “In Autumn, I will attend middle school.” If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, ‘feelings of inferiority,’ over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.
Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one ‘adopts a goal’.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalised form, as deliberate action, it is found among ‘decadent’ playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one’s life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one’s point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering cases (‘living lies’); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.
Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).
The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognised as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.
Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones (‘the limited duration of Truths’) – and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.
The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.
Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer that segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly painfree occurrences (‘disappointments’); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole right to the bottom, and the scene is instantly transformed from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.
The very foundational firmaments are rarely replaced without great social spasms and a risk of complete dissolution (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are increasingly left to their own devices for anchoring, and the number of failures tends to rise. Depressions, excesses, and suicides result (German officers after the war, Chinese students after the revolution).
Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature’s deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.
We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life).
When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality.
A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. “Mom, what am I to do.” A little English girl visiting her Norwegian aunts came inside from her room, saying: “What happens now?” The nurses attain virtuosity: Look, a doggie! Watch, they are painting the palace! The phenomenon is too familiar to require any further demonstration. Distraction is, for example, the ‘high society’s’ tactic for living. It can be likened to a flying machine – made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly. The pilot may grow drowsy and comfortable out of habit, but the crisis is acute as soon as the engine flunks.
The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction.
A considerable evil of imprisonment is the denial of most distractive options. And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter inendurability of that condition.
Pure examples of life-panic are presumably rare, as the protective mechanisms are refined and automatic and to some extent unremitting. But even the adjacent terrain bears the mark of death, life is here barely sustainable and by great efforts. Death always appears as an escape, one ignores the possibilities of the hereafter, and as the way death is experienced is partly dependent on feeling and perspective, it might be quite an acceptable solution. If one in statu mortis could manage a pose (a poem, a gesture, to ‘die standing up’), i.e. a final anchoring, or a final distraction (Aases’ death), then such a fate is not the worst one at all. The press, for once serving the concealment mechanism, never fails to find reasons that cause no alarm – “it is believed that the latest fall in the price of wheat...”
When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
Only a limited part of humanity can make do with mere ‘changes’, whether in work, social life, or entertainment. The cultured person demands connections, lines, a progression in the changes. Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as ‘yearning’ or ‘transcendental tendency.’ Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it – the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one’s life. The promotion from private to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the one from colonel to general. Any grounds of ‘progressive optimism’ are removed by this major psychological law.
The human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.’ And if we use the word in a religious sense, only the latter description fits. For here, none has yet been clear about what he is longing for, but one has always a heartfelt awareness of what one is longing away from, namely the earthly vale of tears, one’s own inendurable condition. If awareness of this predicament is the deepest stratum of the soul, as argued above, then it is also understandable why the religious yearning is felt and experienced as fundamental. By contrast, the hope that it forms a divine criterion, which harbours a promise of its own fulfilment, is placed in a truly melancholy light by these considerations.
The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.
Unless the worst sting of suffering is blunted by other means, or denied control of the mind, such utilisation is unlikely, however. (Image: The mountaineer does not enjoy his view of the abyss while choking with vertigo; only when this feeling is more or less overcome does he enjoy it – anchored.) To write a tragedy, one must to some extent free oneself from – betray – the very feeling of tragedy and regard it from an outer, e.g. aesthetic, point of view. Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one’s ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.
The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.
The ‘martyrdom’ of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation – they gain in significance thereby.
Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.
IV
Is it possible for ‘primitive natures’ to renounce these cramps and cavorts and live in harmony with themselves in the serene bliss of labour and love? Insofar as they may be considered human at all, I think the answer must be no. The strongest claim to be made about the so-called peoples of nature is that they are somewhat closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural people. And when even we have so far been able to save a majority through every storm, we have been assisted by the sides of our nature that are just modestly or moderately developed. This positive basis (as protection alone cannot create life, only hinder its faltering) must be sought in the naturally adapted deployment of the energy in the body and the biologically helpful parts of the soul1, subject to such hardships as are precisely due to sensory limitations, bodily frailty, and the need to do work for life and love.
And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilisation, technology and standardisation have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.
Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind’s common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share.2
The current phase of life’s chronic fever is particularly tainted by this circumstance. The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse todistraction (entertainment, sport, radio – ‘the rhythm of the times’). Terms for anchoring are not as favourable – all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leak in through the rifts (‘corpses in the cargo.’) Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism has also a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all.
V
If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.
And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.
Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:
“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.
He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1933
Notes:
1 A distinction for clarity.
2 I emphasize that this is not about fantastic reform proposals, but rather a psychological view of principle
Many thanks to Mrs Berit Zapffe for permission to publish this translation.
One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.
He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.
Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.
That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.
II
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life’s embrace.
So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion’s claw. But man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother’s womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself – he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved – there are other smiles as well, a torn boot with toes. Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice – he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.
But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.
From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.
Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.
The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.
In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
III
Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?
Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.
If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was vocated by creation’s hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.
The identity of purpose and perishment is, for giant deer and man alike, the tragic paradox of life. In devoted Bejahung, the last Cervis Giganticus bore the badge of its lineage to its end. The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-consciousrepression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.
Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, ‘fear of life,’ refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced – correctly – as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential.
The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. Though they take a vast and multifarious variety of forms, it seems legitimate to at least identify four major kinds, naturally occuring in every possible combination: isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation.
By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engström: “One should not think, it is just confusing.”) A perfect and almost brutalising variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on.)
In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.
The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become mattersof course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated ‘infantile bonding;’ the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘ephemeral’ as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. “In Autumn, I will attend middle school.” If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, ‘feelings of inferiority,’ over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.
Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one ‘adopts a goal’.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalised form, as deliberate action, it is found among ‘decadent’ playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one’s life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one’s point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering cases (‘living lies’); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.
Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).
The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognised as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.
Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones (‘the limited duration of Truths’) – and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.
The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.
Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer that segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly painfree occurrences (‘disappointments’); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole right to the bottom, and the scene is instantly transformed from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.
The very foundational firmaments are rarely replaced without great social spasms and a risk of complete dissolution (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are increasingly left to their own devices for anchoring, and the number of failures tends to rise. Depressions, excesses, and suicides result (German officers after the war, Chinese students after the revolution).
Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature’s deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.
We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life).
When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality.
A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. “Mom, what am I to do.” A little English girl visiting her Norwegian aunts came inside from her room, saying: “What happens now?” The nurses attain virtuosity: Look, a doggie! Watch, they are painting the palace! The phenomenon is too familiar to require any further demonstration. Distraction is, for example, the ‘high society’s’ tactic for living. It can be likened to a flying machine – made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly. The pilot may grow drowsy and comfortable out of habit, but the crisis is acute as soon as the engine flunks.
The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction.
A considerable evil of imprisonment is the denial of most distractive options. And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter inendurability of that condition.
Pure examples of life-panic are presumably rare, as the protective mechanisms are refined and automatic and to some extent unremitting. But even the adjacent terrain bears the mark of death, life is here barely sustainable and by great efforts. Death always appears as an escape, one ignores the possibilities of the hereafter, and as the way death is experienced is partly dependent on feeling and perspective, it might be quite an acceptable solution. If one in statu mortis could manage a pose (a poem, a gesture, to ‘die standing up’), i.e. a final anchoring, or a final distraction (Aases’ death), then such a fate is not the worst one at all. The press, for once serving the concealment mechanism, never fails to find reasons that cause no alarm – “it is believed that the latest fall in the price of wheat...”
When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
Only a limited part of humanity can make do with mere ‘changes’, whether in work, social life, or entertainment. The cultured person demands connections, lines, a progression in the changes. Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as ‘yearning’ or ‘transcendental tendency.’ Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it – the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one’s life. The promotion from private to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the one from colonel to general. Any grounds of ‘progressive optimism’ are removed by this major psychological law.
The human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.’ And if we use the word in a religious sense, only the latter description fits. For here, none has yet been clear about what he is longing for, but one has always a heartfelt awareness of what one is longing away from, namely the earthly vale of tears, one’s own inendurable condition. If awareness of this predicament is the deepest stratum of the soul, as argued above, then it is also understandable why the religious yearning is felt and experienced as fundamental. By contrast, the hope that it forms a divine criterion, which harbours a promise of its own fulfilment, is placed in a truly melancholy light by these considerations.
The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.
Unless the worst sting of suffering is blunted by other means, or denied control of the mind, such utilisation is unlikely, however. (Image: The mountaineer does not enjoy his view of the abyss while choking with vertigo; only when this feeling is more or less overcome does he enjoy it – anchored.) To write a tragedy, one must to some extent free oneself from – betray – the very feeling of tragedy and regard it from an outer, e.g. aesthetic, point of view. Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one’s ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.
The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.
The ‘martyrdom’ of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation – they gain in significance thereby.
Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.
IV
Is it possible for ‘primitive natures’ to renounce these cramps and cavorts and live in harmony with themselves in the serene bliss of labour and love? Insofar as they may be considered human at all, I think the answer must be no. The strongest claim to be made about the so-called peoples of nature is that they are somewhat closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural people. And when even we have so far been able to save a majority through every storm, we have been assisted by the sides of our nature that are just modestly or moderately developed. This positive basis (as protection alone cannot create life, only hinder its faltering) must be sought in the naturally adapted deployment of the energy in the body and the biologically helpful parts of the soul1, subject to such hardships as are precisely due to sensory limitations, bodily frailty, and the need to do work for life and love.
And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilisation, technology and standardisation have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.
Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind’s common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share.2
The current phase of life’s chronic fever is particularly tainted by this circumstance. The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse todistraction (entertainment, sport, radio – ‘the rhythm of the times’). Terms for anchoring are not as favourable – all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leak in through the rifts (‘corpses in the cargo.’) Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism has also a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all.
V
If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.
And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.
Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:
“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.
He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1933
Notes:
1 A distinction for clarity.
2 I emphasize that this is not about fantastic reform proposals, but rather a psychological view of principle
Many thanks to Mrs Berit Zapffe for permission to publish this translation.
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Monday, May 16, 2016
From the Aeneid Book VI - Seamus Heaney
Elsewhere Anchises,
Fatherly and intent, was off in a deep green valley
Surveying and reviewing souls consigned there,
Those due to pass to the light of the upper world.
It so happened he was just then taking note
Of his whole posterity, the destinies and doings,
Traits and qualities of descendants dear to him,
But seeing Aeneas come wading through the grass
Towards him, he reached his two hands out
In eager joy, his eyes filled up with tears
And he gave a cry: “At last! Are you here at last?
I always trusted that your sense of right
Would prevail and keep you going to the end.
And am I now allowed to see your face,
My son, and hear you talk, and talk to you myself?
This is what I imagined and looked forward to
As I counted the days; and my trust was not misplaced.
To think of the lands and the outlying seas
You have crossed, my son, to receive this welcome.
And after such dangers! I was afraid that Africa
Might be your undoing.” But Aeneas replied:
“Often and often, father, you would appear to me,
Your sad shade would appear, and that kept me going
To this end. My ships are anchored in the Tuscan sea.
Let me take your hand, my father, O let me, and do not
Hold back from my embrace.” And as he spoke he wept.
Three times he tried to reach arms round that neck.
Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped
Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Friday, May 13, 2016
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Monday, May 9, 2016
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Friday, May 6, 2016
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Monday, May 2, 2016
Epic
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
