1269 Arts and sciences poems

Injured, sleep-deprived, sorely tested, Adah, Cain, and Father K are falsely imprisoned in a shallow cave with other unfortunates seeking refuge from their war-torn homeland. It is hard to blame the writers’ room if “Unlike All Other Empires” felt as cynical and world-weary as its protagonists. Cain, in need of medical attention he will never receive for his infected gunshot wound, entertains the children with parables of the less than K and Adah fragments of cheese and dried a side pocket rucksack in rendition of the five thousand. lost and the only view comes from talkative guard, sunstroke, who plight as the of humanity. human. Father portion out tiny dehydrated goat bread found in of K’s deflated some worn out feeding of the All hope seems external point of an unusually half mad with regards their normal situation And yet there Holed up in a bothy, Adah and Fr. K share dried curd and stone bread with the yet breathing. Hew, chew, survive. Cain: foulmouthed & hedgehoggy; not mint. The children have an illustrated book called Dehumainze! He reads to them. Afternoon: hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot.Ohhh. Life hobbled, un- ornamented, unnoteworty runoff. As Westerners-by-birthright it's hard to ha- bituate to horror, huh? We try to leave some permanent scrathes in the dirt. is a will to live, an ember which has not quite been scotched. Those lines in the dust could be as nihilistic as any ephemeral gesture, or they could be the most hopeful, the most human impulse we possess. “Posterity is bullshit. This is where we always planned to end it,” says Halberg, well aware that there were still a full nine episodes to go in the projected 31-episode run, and that many shows could complete an entire plot cycle without much more screen time than that which he’d set aside for the denouement. “It was discussed at the outset, so don’t listen to Lin or James or any of the other whiners I should have let go at the halfway point.” A toast to the not rescued. The Edward Said quotation in full: “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”

A much-needed swan song from Cain, blasting Father K’s bien-pensant ideology and everyone else in his path. A neoliberal trying to ingratiate himself with the construction worker and trustafarian alike, his argu- ments lighter performed as a he’s right, you Ingram. “You them, but it’s particularly good they? There’s take the side well-presented Otto Thud (who Dr. in spite of nomenology) is unsought cameo fornicator (a on an anecdote I one to tell me). than air and spectacle. “And know?” says feel sorry for not like they’re or anything, are a tendency to of the most suffering.” Poor never went by his PhD in phe- given another as the moonlight monicker based cannot get any- Furthermore, B– “Fr. K, you hater! The standard liberal monotony: thinking all that is persecuted must be the truth. Hah! But no. Some things are only persecuted. Oh Fido, thitherward, round the houses — hold the hard hat, hold the standby ban- danna — you launch the featherweight countercharge, the mere badminton, the waterfront hotbed. Neon Ivy Federation! The moonlight fornicator: he had more worth. (Hi, Dr. Otto, where’s the hooch?) This is how behavior devolved. “neon ivy federation” was generally taken to be a sideswipe at his beloved alma mater, [redacted], which Halberg considered one of the lesser liberal arts schools in the Ivy League. The last straw, by all accounts.

An extremely hubristic, unflattering, and accurate self-portrait, this episode saw Halberg in direct conversa- tion with Cain, questioning his own methods. The passing allusion to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin appears to reference Chapter 4, stanza XXXV: “But I myself read my bedizened /fancies, my rhythmic search for truth, /to nobody except a wizened /nanny, companion of my youth; /or, after some dull dinner’s labour, / I buttonhole a wandering neighbour /and in a corner make him choke /on tragedy; but it’s no joke, /when, utterly worn out hausted and I take /a beside my get up; with ing/alarmed by lay,/they leave fly away.” There able system of the show, which not discuss, appears to be the is a geometric to Euclidean by rhyming,/ex- done up, rambling walk lake,/and duck instant tim- my melodious their shores and is an unfathom- numbers within Halberg will but episode 25 key. An orthant term referring n-dimensional I could close the deal with my brattish coauthor, harry reputation’s toreador, or detonate the whole trenchant, un- fathomable bandwidth. Thumb-horned orthant. (The bits where Pushkin’s like:UGHHHH! RHYMES! and goes for a beer.) Can’t unread the footnote: Is this worthwhile? Am I? Oh shanghaied heart- throb, thirteenth dandy havoc-hound. Gentrify the favela runt or defend the loon; sod the chrome T-totum. Ever the bodybuilder, even in ghosthood. space, the analogue of a quadrant (2D) or an octant (3D). Thumb-horned has the feel of an order of mockery /cuckoldry but may also be a reference to Cain’s mark, according to some scholars, being the gradual protrusion of horns. A T-totum (or teetotum) is a little metal Roman spinning top used for gambling. William Ernest Henley’s “The Double Ballade on the Nothingness of Things” opens with the lines: “The big teetotum twirls, /And epochs wax and wane /As chance subsides or swirls ... ” Triskaidekaphobia can be traced back to the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia where the 13th day of each new year is considered evil, or a day when the power of evil is particularly intense and can cause trouble, thus to this day people leave cities and camp overnight in the countryside. God has thirteen attributes of mercy according to rabbinic commentary on the Torah, and thirteen is also the number of nodes which make up Metatron’s Cube in Kabbalistic account. Metatron is an extraordinarily important angel in the apocryphal Book of the Palaces; it is suggested that Metatron is the only reason the human race was given knowledge of God and the cube forms a kind of “map of creation.” This appears to relate back to the “rhombohedral monolith” of the early episodes, the college’s strange obelisks. It is worth mentioning that Euclidean spaces generalize to higher dimensions. I feel really weird.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ +++++++++++++ Oh, that Thou teach even me. I who abhor truth, the stubborn bloodhound. Worth three hairbrushes, if that. No: hydrogenated fats. No: enhanced form- aldehyde. What shorthand thunderbolt could halt my hibernation & dog thirsts? The unabridged refrigerator, the unnoted cheese board. Heh. Shortlist me with the redundant heathen, half my covenant with toothache. Foot the noun. Whatever it takes. Lord, have mercy. Gospodi po- miliu. Kyrie eleison. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The scientists are in terror and the European mind stops Wyndham Lewis chose blindness rather than have his mind stop. Night under wind mid garofani, the petals are almost still Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona, When one’s friends hate each other how can there be peace in the world? Their asperities diverted me in my green time. A blown husk that is finished but the light sings eternal a pale flare over marshes where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change Time, space, neither life nor death is the answer. And of man seeking good, doing evil. In meiner Heimat where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

Shrugging shallowly down, burrowing in beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallow- brown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle bean- dripping locust and the still so innocent fruit trees—bare-boughed and newly blossoming—skinnily shadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my “now” [in this pictured perfect] four- year-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lie low. I remember hiding in the fort too: bedtimes once how snug among books and the plush beasts we spoke the speech of angels. Now the world is huge- ly hushed. The winter sky is hard, kiln-fired blue. The cherry wood retouched with buds. And small, untimely flowers like blood-drops on the snow. • Time lapsed. Time dwelt. There was nothing apparently to those rumors of rescue or reprisals. Absence only emptied the mind. The fond heart felt light—likewise lifted right and justly up to praise the day as it was to high heaven. You were a “find”: rare, rose- lipped, hennaed, ochred, kohled, long black- stockinged O like one of Schiele’s urewig girls, flashing a shy semaphore— spelling eloquently out the f- word, tenderly revisiting its history. Lust—like love lost—was the catalyst: exquisitely expedient, unchanged.

[De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I] “We will endeavor, the word aiding us from Heaven, to be of service to the vernacular speech” —from “Heaven” these “draughts of the sweetest   honey-milk”, si dolcemente from the language we first heard endearments    whisperings infant song and revery a world we wanted    to go out into, to come to ourselves     into, organizations in the sound of them verging upon meaning, upon “Heaven”, hermetic talk into which my range of understandings was to grow    for love of it portents and adults expounding controversial doctrines, personal science fictions and rules of order, but our own “is that which we acquire without any rule”    for love of it “imitating our nurses”

2 There is no end to the torment that comes from watching dead actors in old, and no so old, movies, and you always fall into the hole of uncertainty; you know you don’t know if they’re alive or dead, some of them look so radiant on films made not so long ago. Richard Harris, the hero of The Heroes of Telemark, is undergoing a second birth in old man roles, while in the rockface rappelling, snow on castles icecapade,Where Eagles Dare, two out of three leads, Richard Burton and Mary Ure, are both quite dead, as is her second husband, Robert Shaw. A lot happens in Eagles, but what sticks in my mind is the escape, where Mary Ure, coifed, oblique glimmer of a smile, cradling a machine gun like a weightless toy on the caboose’s deck, bullets in mesmerizingly endless supply, decorously mows down row on row of Nazi pursuers, who drop into the white Alpine ridges like knocked over counters in a game, as if she were answering the blasts from Jimmy Porter’s trumpet as they merge with a shrieking train whistle and screech of brakes. 3 To St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, for Robert Shaw’s memorial service. A beautiful, still day. There was a gathering of figures from the profession, plus friends and family. Harold Pinter gave a short address, stressing Bob the writer... It was a fairly joyful occasion, serious but not sad. I had my usual bewilderment about our lack of ritual. We all huddled together in the sunshine outside the church—Paul Scofield, Kenneth Haigh, Harold, and many, many others. We all wanted to be together in Bob's memory. But what could we, un-Christian as most of us are, do? Off to the Riverside Studios to see The Changeling, beautifully staged by Peter Gill, precise and clear. But I had the impression of a not very talented cast dutifully following the conception of a quite brilliant director. —1978, Saturday 7 October, Peter Hall’s Diaries I abhor assumptions but from the tension Robert Shaw emitted on screen and in his other incarnations, the athletic boozer’s fatal heart attack in middle-age seemed at first less surprising than Mary’s Ure’s ambiguous end. Shaw looks so painfully alive in Jaws as the shark- crazed minor Ahab it’s hard to digest how quickly he raced toward a death from natural causes, so shortly afterwards. There’s much that could be said about Robert Shaw, a ubiquitous, menacing, explosive presence during the previous decade in British films before the American public began to pin a name

The day glared, breathless: an eye socket. Clouds barely shifted, and the opal sky was sheared into dry-dazzling millions. Yet fall in, the sky, it did not. The mail did not go undelivered, dogs were walked; lovers fell savagely out of and in love, and all between. Seven concussed days, his draft longhand swaying like supple pillars of gray flame, erasures; in the long nights his desk lamp revealed the window streaked with chalk sweated off the fen, which was England. Once Ribera’s Jacob, now Jerome, Ugg-booted at the piano, “The Irishe Dumpe” from the Fitzwilliam Virginal hindered by the little lion kneading his lap. Later, the papers howling of guignol ambush would milk his delighting spleen as the rectory self-veiled in evensong and dusk. Somewhere over an inexpressive sea of rain-sleek tiles, the contemptible perfection of gardens, perhaps up from the weird moonlike muteness of the Black Country’s broken kilns and felt absences, it came winging. He died without dread or pain. A sour storm rides the Levant, rinsing the domeless yellow streets. On the steep road to Worms Ash the coverts take the tincture of foxgloves, where the shade of Housman, deadly-formal kink still running through him, fidgets among the cinder-like moths. Hill makes his way to Pisgah.

Auld Coila now may fidge fu' fain, She's gotten poets o' her ain— Chiels wha their chanters winna hain, But tune their lays, Till echoes a' resound again Her weel-sung praise. Nae poet thought her worth his while To set her name in measur'd style: She lay like some unken'd-of isle Beside New Holland, Or whare wild-meeting oceans boil Besouth Magellan. Ramsay and famous Fergusson Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon; Yarrow and Tweed to mony a tune Owre Scotland rings; While Irvin, Lugar, Ayr an' Doon Naebody sings. Th' Ilissus, Tiber, Thames, an' Seine Glide sweet in mony a tunefu' line; But, Willie, set your fit to mine And cock your crest, We'll gar our streams and burnies shine Up wi' the best! We'll sing auld Coila's plains an' fells, Her moors red-brown wi' heather bells, Her banks an' braes, her dens an' dells, Where glorious Wallace Aft bure the gree, as story tells, Frae Southron billies. At Wallace' name what Scottish blood But boils up in a spring-tide flood! Oft have our fearless fathers strode By Wallace' side, Still pressing onward red-wat-shod, Or glorious dy'd. O sweet are Coila's haughs an' woods,. When lintwhites chant amang the buds, And jinkin hares in amorous whids Their loves enjoy, While thro' the braes the cushat croods Wi' wailfu' cry! Ev'n winter bleak has charms to me, When winds rave thro' the naked tree; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree Are hoary gray; Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, Dark'ning the day! O Nature! a' thy shews an' forms To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms! Whether the summer kindly warms Wi' life an' light, Or winter howls in gusty storms The lang, dark night! The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himsel he learn'd to wander Adoun some trottin burn's meander, And no think lang; O sweet to stray and pensive ponder A heart-felt sang! The warly race may drudge and drive, Hog-shouther, jundie, stretch an' strive: Let me fair nature's face descrive, And I wi' pleasure Shall let the busy, grumbling hive Bum owre their treasure.