Personal Blogs

Go to bed old man.

Who cares anyway?

All this blah blah blah about winter.

I wrote before about Shakespeare's sonnet 73

is an example. In nine words (and 10 syllables) we are carried from "yellow leaves" (the poet lets us know it's autumn, a time of decay) through "or none" (everything is gone) to "or few" (not quite none, but going).

This economy is extraordinary, as is the whole poem with its metaphor of the seasons, the time of day, and the stages of a human life, all rolled into one, and the final plea to hold on tightly against the flickering light.

So my earlier and inadequate attempt to capture the sonnet in a Haiku needs some more work.

Somewhere Summer crossed into Autumn.

And then I felt Winter's bite.

A tooth fell out.

In the middle ages - it is said - there was such a thing as trial by ordeal.

Simply put (in the law of Athelstan, ruler of England 924 to 927)

1. You are accused of a crime

2. You need to prove you are innocent

3. You plunge one hand in boiling water and retrieve a stone from the bottom of the vessel.

There's a tariff. 1 accuser = up to the wrist. 3 accusers = up to the elbow.

If your burns started to heal after three days then you are judged innocent.

Ironically, Athelstan means "noble stone".

If this was ever really applied then I can't conceal my contempt for such a way of thinking.  How could anyone even begin to believe (or perhaps just cynically suggest to others) that such a process would reveal truth?

In the modern age a physicist reinvented this idea of ordeal, but he was not on trial. The accusation went the other way now. Science and truth were attacking irrationality and fear. The accuser - Jearl Walker - plunged his hand into not just boiling water but molten lead, to support rational thought.

Jearl Walker wrote a column in Scientific American for many years. I always read it eagerly. I remember well, after perhaps 30 years, his description of how he thought the laws of physics would let him plunge a hand into molten lead without injury.

He said something like (from half a life-time's recollection) "I checked my calculations one final time, and they were correct. I felt a little fear, but trusted science, went ahead - and science was right was right, as I thought it would be."

A test of faith.

Jearl Walker is alive and well. You can see his demonstration of faith repeated here. Do watch.

Remember to spit on your finger before you test your iron!

If you travel back in time to 10th century England and are subjected to trial by ordeal, spitting on you hands won't work of course. I'm not sure what would.

I'm not quite prepared.

So Snail you're the one I trust

To carry my cheque up the mountain.

Last night I accidentally discovered "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch (reflecting on existence)."

I fell in love with the film at once. It's like a series of haiku - snapshots that try to capture the experience of being.

Haiku originated from an earlier tradition of collaborative poetic composition. One of the collaborators would produce a short opening verse - the Hokku - and the others would contribute stanzas one after another to build up a longer poem.

Later the Hokku evolved into a free-standing poetic form, roughly the Haiku as we know it today, but poets still often wrote a sequence of linked Haiku, classically as a travel diary.

"A Pigeon" is a series of loosely connect episodes, some quite fantastic, most deliberately banal, but all inviting us to consider who we are, who others are, and how we relate to one another. Each moves us in one way or another. Yet the situations are all absurd to a greater or lesser degree, which is perhaps true of real life. Many are surreal, and some monstrous.

Foregrounds are simple and actors deadpan, but each scene, like a poem, is ambiguous. It shows us a deeper background we hadn't noticed at first and often adds glimpses of an indifferent external world, sometimes seen through a window.

I've always been obsessed with the way all our small everyday experiences can join together to give us a sense of self and identity. Like Haiku, this film gives an emotional interpretation to this feeling of mine. You might say that all feelings are emotional but I don't think that's exactly correct.

One of my interests is wild flowers. Here a picture I took of celandines outside the front of my house. The celandine is one of my favorite flowers and there are hosts of them where I live.

Not a lot of people know that Wordsworth wrote a poem "The Lesser Celandine" about this flower. Personally I think it's rather dull and I can see why it's less well known than Wordsworth's other flower poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", alias "Daffodils".

Although the latter is one of the most famous poems in the English language it's never really attracted me. I much prefer Herrick's "To Daffodils"

I think that's a beautiful evocation of the transitory nature of things.

Marie Curie. A person of extraordinary intelligence and courage. On the wall of the British Library is inscribed a quote

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

I've passed it many times, and it always give me a little extra hope, because I am not very brave.

Bumblebee you said it was Spring.

I didn't listen.

Until today.

Snail, how can I save you in this dark?

Conscience draws me back to help.

Prosper on the other side.

What form an upper and lower mountain range?

Stop! Go back

Listen again to the running stream.

Aren't you glad to hear it?

Roman Frister died recently.

He was a concentration camp survivor (then aged 15), later journalist, book author, and founder of a university school of journalism.

Frister's frank and harrowing tale of being in the camp describes a horrible moral dilemma.

Camp inmates had to wear the regulation cap for morning roll call. Anyone bareheaded was instantly shot. One night Frister's cap was stolen.

In the dark of the hut he found a cap that belonged to someone else. Next day he heard that person shot.

Frister lived with this and a half-century on wrote a memoir, whose title The Cap was taken from the incident.

I read the book, some years ago now, but it still haunts me.