Personal Blogs

I really admire the Swiss. For me they are a roll model.

"Nobody likes advice", I said. But they didn't listen.

I'm a big fan of the film maker Roy Andersson. If you want to know why, see this interview.

Tonight I'm watching 'You, the Living', whose title is from a poem by Goethe. It's the middle film of a trilogy that took 14 years to make. They are humanistic films, about poetry and existence.

There are many YouTube clips so you can join me if you want.

The other night, in my local pub, 'The Moon Under Water', a friend brought in an archaeological find, a gold coin.

Photographing coins is hard, because getting the lighting is tricky, especially on a bar counter, but here is my snapshot.

This is a Celtic gold stater. 'Stater' is from Greek, and the Greeks and the peoples from Asia Minor they traded with were the first in the western world to mint coins, about 600 BCE, see this famous example from the British Museum.

Incidentally the origin of the word stater is of great interest. It meant 'weight' and is connected with Latin stare, English stand, the suffix -stan (as in Parkistan), and similar words in most Indo-European languages.

Knowledge of the use of coins diffused westward and eventually reached the Iron Age people of Gaul and Britain. One suggestion is that the idea could have been transmitted by Celtic mercenary soldiers, perhaps fighting under Phillip or Alexander the Great, who survived and returned safe home with coins in their pockets. Or perhaps dissemination was via Rome.

Either way, before the Romans conquered the fashion had caught on and the Gauls and the Britons minted their own staters. This is one from that era.

It is a 'uniface' coin; the reverse is just a smooth, slightly convex, surface. The design you can see in my photograph is a stylized horse, a common motif on staters.

It would have been 'struck': an engraver would have cut a die from a harder metal and used it to stamp out the coin. Looking at online images of these coins, many thousands of which have been found, it's impossible not to be impressed by the artistry of the engravers. Even though they followed stereotypes, every individual die had its own originality and lively depiction of the things it portrayed, like the horse in the photograph.

I advertised a sundog.

Cunobeline, the 'Cymbeline' of Shakespeare's play, was a real person, a king of the part of modern Britain where I live now, with a domain stretching from Hertfordshire to Essex. He was probably in power from about 5 BCE until around 40 AD.

'Cunobeline' means 'Dog of the sun'. The first element 'cuno' means dog, as in Latin canus (think canine) or Ancient Greek kunos (as in cynic, the kunikoi were the 'dog philosophers').

The second element is from the Celtic god Belenus, whose name seems to mean 'shining' and who may have been a sun god. His name survives in the name of the summer festival Beltane and he was associated with the horse and the wheel, perhaps connected with the sun's passage across the sky.

The coin in my photograph is probably from one of the sundog Cunobeline's mints, since it's believed there was one not far from here.

Here's a striking quotation from Cymbeline. It's one of my favorites from Shakespeare.

I always used to think 'paradise' was from the Greek 'paradisos', a garden—and so it is, but the word is apparently something classical Greek borrowed, from an ancient Persian word for a deer park, or something with a wall round it.

The word survives into modern Greek, although 'κηπος' ('key-poss') is commoner.

Now here's the link-up. 'Garden' means a guarded place. It's Germanic and seems to imply a perimeter fence. Variants are 'yard' (as in front or back), and 'ward', as in keep watch over (what a warden does).

So gardens are places that have walls around them, to conserve things. Just like paradises.

And what is kept in a 'κηπος'? Well if it's trees it could be a "δενδρόκηπος', dendrokipos = tree garden = orchard.

Beware the apples Adam and Eve! You may be evicted and end up beyond the pale.

There was an old fellow called Clerihew,

Who never wrote Limericks, or very few.

He frequently tried

But after the third line his attempt always died.

Julius Caesar
What a helluva geyser.
He said "Let's bring it on!" ^[1]
And crossed the Rubicon.

[1] "alea iacta est"

I daren't get on the scales anymore.

They're frightened of me too.

Chora wrote a famous and charming haiku: as a gardener addressing a toad he knew, and who probably knew him.

If this sounds improbable, my aunt had a toad who lived for several years at the bottom of her garden. She would feed him (or her) and as a teenager I was taken to see the toad, who lived under some stones and did indeed hop out to greet us, and would consent to be scratched on the head, and tickled on the chin.

Chora's haiku goes something as follows in (very) free translation:

I thought that, for once, rather than compress a poem, which is my instinct, I would try to expand one, and also add rhyme and meter. Usually haiku in English are without rhyme, and end on a characteristic falling tone, which is very evocative, but not necessarily faithful to the original Japanese tradition. Other languages however have different and now longstanding traditions about the form translated or composed haikus. That's for another post though.

Here is my longer appeal to Mr Toad, in entirely my own idiom. But with falling tone.

As I slept
A dark thought
Jumped on my back
"I am Winter",
It hissed.

What is thought, what knowledge?

Such a troubling question.

Asked in every season.