The philosopher was anatomizing some small forest creatures and meditating on the ways in which their humours and organs were variously disposed, when a poet came upon him and stayed his hand.
“Ho! Get your own dinner!” said the philosopher. But the poet’s eyes filled with tears as he chanted:
“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
“Then you obviously haven’t met my cat,” said the philosopher.
Posted in animals, philosopher, poetry
The poets of Louchébem – so Scaliger informs us – do not prize novelty, either of content or of form. Their themes are taken from a rigorously circumscribed palette. Young love, the frailties and pleasures of the body, the changes of the seasons; these few phrases suffice to describe the subjects of their entire corpus. Likewise, the verse forms permitted them are exactingly strict in their prosody; and, beyond this, there are still more abstract restraints on the appropriate rhetorical structures for a given form or subject.
It may seem surprising, then, that the quality most prized by these poets was improvisational skill. But we need only consider the example of Baroque music to see that the combination of strict formal rigour and a relish for impromptu composition can spur on artists to heights of creativity. In Louchébem, the greatest poets, or makars, to give them their formal title, are those who, when given a form and a theme, rise to the challenge of inventing a poem on the spot with the greatest verbal adroitness.
With this in mind, we can, perhaps, imagine the feelings with which our young poet Aniseed approaches the dais in the Great Hall of the Academy, on the day of his Master-work. The Great Hall is low, damp and long, and resembles the dining room of a provincial coach-inn. Its name does not refer to physical grandeur but rather to the august names of those – Smilax! Tansy! – who have gone through this ritual before Aniseed, and of whom he must surely be thinking now.
He reaches into the ballot cauldron and takes one of the many small terracotta pots. It is shaped like a miniature amphora, sealed at the end with red wax. He dashes it to the floor before the eyes of the Masters, where it breaks into four shards. Two white mice, their tails tied with a red ribbon, are released from the pot and scamper in futile circles on the tiles.
“Four stanzas,” comes the voice of a Master. “A tied ballad.” He gestures towards the musician standing discreetly to one side of the dais, who begins to pluck a repetitive, ritualistic phrase on his aoud.
Aniseed begins, as is customary, with two long, drawn-out syllables.
Oooohhhh, IIIIIIII,
Once had a girl who was seven-parts troll,
She put her finger right into my
Wholegrain is good but sourdough is better,
I kissed her down there and it tasted like
Fetter your horse and lie down by this rock,
They call me “The Stallion” because of my
Cockroaches, cockroaches, breed in the heat,
It’s awful in summer, they crawl on my
Meat is a luxury, tighten your purse,
But loosen it now and give thanks for my verse.
He doffs his journeyman’s cap and waves it before the Masters in an elaborate, stylised gesture which ends in a deep bow. The aoud falls still.
“The fourth hinge-word,” says the eldest Master. He is not, of course, addressing Aniseed. “I see the double-entendre, but there is no homonym.” His cracked voice is enlivened by pedantry.
“Now, Master Borage. The word is clearly used in two senses.” The Master who replies is rotating a gold coin between his thumb and fingers.
Aniseed’s nervousness is at such a pitch that he is not surprised by the fact that it is his old enemy, Dock, who has come to his defence. “This insistence on an alteration in spelling, as well as in meaning…”
He lets the insinuation of an over-reliance on the printed word, as opposed to the verbal, linger for a few seconds. It is more than enough to make Borage retract his objections, although he makes his retreat fussily and his colleagues are obliged to settle his ruffled feathers with low, soothing voices.
Aniseed has the disturbing sense of being privy to an ancient and scandalous disagreement between his elders. He barely catches the gold coin which Dock tosses into his cap as a token that he has passed.
Adapted from Augustus De Morgan’s “Rule for determining Easter Day of the Gregorian Calendar in any year of the new style,” A Budget of Paradoxes I pp366-7. I reckon that the best thing we got out of Easter, culturally speaking, was the ability to use algorithms. For instance, Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Short to his mates) was one of the first Western scholars to use something like the concept of zero in his Easter tables.
| I | Add one to the year you are given. | 2011 | |
| II | Divide the year by four, rounded down. | 502 | |
| III | From the centuries, take sixteen (if you can) | 4 | |
| IV | And divide that by four, rounded down. | 1 | |
| V | Add I, II and IV, then take away III, | 2510 | |
| VI | Then take that value modulo seven | 4 | |
| (Divide by seven and keep the remainder) | |||
| VII | Subtract that from seven again: | 3 | |
| This is the dominical number. | |||
| VIII | Take I mod nineteen (if it’s zero, nineteen) | 16 | |
| This is the year’s golden number. | |||
| Now take seventeen from the centuries, | 3 | ||
| IX | Over twenty-five (chuck the remainder) | 0 | |
| Take IX and 15 from the centuries | 5 | ||
| X | Over three (and chuck the remainder) | 1 | |
| To VIII, add ten times (VIII minus one) | 166 | ||
| XI | Take that sum modulo thirty | 16 | |
| Add XI, X and IV and then take away III, | 14 | ||
| (If it’s large enough, modulo thirty) | 14 | ||
| If it be twenty-four, make it twenty-five; | |||
| If twenty-five, and if VIII is more than eleven | |||
| Make it twenty-six instead; | |||
| If it’s zero, set it to thirty. | |||
| XII | The result is the epact; a good Scrabble word, | 14 | |
| The age of the moon on New Years’ Day. | |||
| If the epact is less than twenty-four, | |||
| XIII(b) | Subtract it from forty-five (write that down) | 31 | |
| Then subtract the epact from twenty-seven | |||
| Divide that by seven and keep the remainder: | |||
| XIV(b) | If it’s zero, change it to seven. | 6 | |
| If the epact is higher than twenty-three, | |||
| XIII(b) | Subtract it from seventy-five instead | ||
| Then subtract the epact from fifty-seven, | |||
| Divide that by seven and keep the remainder: | |||
| XIV(b) | If it’s zero, change it to seven. | ||
| Then add XIII to VII (the dominical number). | 34 | ||
| If XIV’s more than VII, add seven more. | 41 | ||
| XV | And then take away what you got for XIV. | 35 | |
| If the result is below thirty-two, | |||
| Easter Sunday’s in March, and that’s the date, | |||
| Otherwise, it’s in April – subtract thirty-one. | 4 |
Posted in computers, connections, poetry, religion
“Learned colleagues!” The Director
Of the Research Institute
Raised his voice above the chatter
And the scientists fell mute.
I say “voice,” but it was nothing like
You’ve ever heard before –
But we’ll get bogged down in details
If I don’t use metaphor.
The Director wasn’t human,
If that means “a smartish ape”.
He wasn’t three-dimensional.
He barely had a shape.
He, or it, was a truncated
Asymmetric hypercube
With an eye at every vertex
And an oscillating tube
Which, for him, did what your voice does
When you speak above a crowd.
The Director’s was a good one:
It was “resonant” and “loud”.
The scientists (not girls and guys
With spectacles or beard,
But a throng of hypercreatures
Who were every bit as weird),
Hushed their “voices”, filled their “glasses”
While their leader took the “floor”.
(A complex embedded manifold –
You get the drift, I’m sure.
So there’ll be no more reminders.)
“Learned colleagues,” he declaimed,
“Our quest has lasted ages.
And been variously named:
“Philosophy, Religion,
Metaphysics, Meditations,
We should not sneer at these old words;
These elderly relations
“Of our bold and modern science
Sought to answer the same call –
The fevered, burning question:
What is behind it all?
“Are we fancies in the mind of God?
Or shadows in a cave?
Or a wave which tells an atom
How an atom should behave?
“Though our senses tell us that the world
Is permanent and plain,
Physics teaches us that, underneath,
It’s more or less insane.
“Solid matter isn’t solid:
It’s a web of force and field,
Behind which is still more strangeness.
So our science has revealed
“A deep labyrinth of levels,
Each one underneath the next,
Each one running on the lower
So the problem which has vexed
“Our most noble minds, becomes a
Meta-problem, if you will:
Does this maze go on forever?
We’d decided so, until
“We detected strange attractors
On the most abstracted layer
Which suggested – nay, confirmed
That the answer to our prayer
“Lies beyond: the Final Substrate,
On which everything is founded.
There will be no more beneath it:
We’ll be ultimately grounded.
“And now, my friends,” – his audience
Were looking at the floor,
Or glancing out the window:
They’d heard all this before.
“With our mighty Substrate-Auger,”
And he waved at the machine,
“We will pierce the final veil
And see what no-one else has seen.”
It was big and it was rather
Geometrically awry.
It had parts that hurt to look at
From the corner of your eye.
A timid young technician
Sat in the controller’s chair.
She was gawky, shy and graceless
But was skilled beyond compare
At the art of Auger-driving.
The Director gave a nod.
The technician blushed and turned a switch
And pulled a little rod.
The parts that hurt to look at
Seemed to swivel inside-out,
All aglow with blinding brightness.
The technician had to shout
To be heard above the droning
Of the intricate machine.
“Baseline nominal,” she called out
As she gazed into the screen.
“I can see the latest Substrate:
Two dimensions with a border.
A chaotic, fibrous membrane,
But there is a kind of order
“To the symbols which it carries,
In symmetrical array.
Now we’ll see the final level -”
And her voice faded away.
Her hands fell from the console
And she cried “It cannot be!”
“Girl, what is it? Is it working?
Tell us! What is it you see?”
The technician turned her chair around.
Her face was pale with fright.
“The symbols” – here, she shuddered –
“Are an ordered code, alright,
“But the blank white mass they stand on
Is a vision, or a dream.
It’s an image, represented
By a crude perceptual scheme
“Which is running on a processor,”
She stared towards her feet,
“An intelligent computer –
A computer made of meat.
“Two disgusting balls of jelly
Dance a hideous saccade
As they upload all the symbols
Out of which our world is made.
“Oh! The squishy horror of it
Is enough to turn me vegan:
We are fictions in a “novel”
By a something called “Greg Egan”!”
Envoi
The Director never knew it
But they hadn’t reached the bottom.
If the techies knew the details
They suppressed ’em or forgot ’em,
Out of mercy, out of terror,
For the truth was so much worse.
There is no such Egan novel,
Just this parody in verse.
They were all as insubstantial
As an autumn morning’s fog;
In a nonexistent fiction
In a ballad on a blog.
Your brother’s dead, your legs don’t work,
The Earth’s a living hell;
Technology, which got you here.
Can get you out as well.
Come, make out with a blue-skinned babe
On a world of floating rock
And beat Old Robodaddy
With your giant flying cock.
Shakespeare: the not especially funny bits
I’ve already made fun of Hamlet elsewhere in these pages, so here’s something else.
In a chamber at Elsinore
Byron! – he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to “The Times” about the Repeal of the Corn Laws. –Beerbohm, Zulieka Dobson
After all these years, I still miss Father.
My very bones are cold — another glass?
We old-timers have got to stick together.
The image of him is as clear as ever,
Although my memory’s not what it was.
After all these years, I still miss Father.
To think he died the same year as his brother,
The year I — yes, I know, the year I “lost”.
We old-timers have got to stick together.
Don’t fuss so. I’m your King, not some old duffer.
I have my funny turns; they always pass.
After all these years, I still miss Father.
And you were always there as Lord Protector.
That dream was horrible — I saw her face —
We old-timers have got to stick together.
Her face was blurred like something underwater.
What would I do without you, Fortinbras?
After all these years, I still miss Father.
We old-timers have got to stick together.
Posted in poetry, shakespeare
We meet in Glebe in the winter wind
We hold each other tight.
I got you an adjective coffee:
A skinny large flat white.
For this political dispute
Australia is going mad:
I think we just like saying “ute”.
In other lands they’ll up and shoot
You if you say the leader’s bad,
For this political dispute
Is seen as neither wise nor cute
In Tehran or Islamabad.
I think we just like saying “ute”.
There’s Berlusconi’s prostitute
(He’s old enough to be her dad!)
For this political dispute,
Or England’s, where they’ve got a beaut,
Would not fly here: too dull and sad.
I think we just like saying “ute”.
They say that Turnbull’s quite astute,
But I don’t give a hanging chad
For this political dispute;
I think we just like saying “ute”.
Nannygoat Hill 