Paean to the Equinox

 تُولِجُ اللَّيْلَ فِي النَّهَارِ وَتُولِجُ النَّهَارَ فِي اللَّيْلِ ۖ

 [Sura 3, ayah 27]

Hail Equinox!  Emblem of an equal King,

whose balance-pan lies level ‘neath the oak

where his hands  with open palms dispense

plain justice, to earl and churl alike.

Now doth the husbandman  fête Harvest-Home,

from sheavèd grain   bakes celebrating loaves,

and with sweet rising smoke salutes

the prospect of the fall of autumn leaves.

E’en as our Maker  sundered dark from light,

in one proportion, when the World began,

so too the equinoctial Judge sits throned,

and equably  divides the day from night.

Praise Him! whose broad hand shaped us out of clay,

and like the Equinox, parts night from day.

Ontological discontinuity (at the nether end)

As was known to all until perhaps the 18^th century (when certain mechanists would strive to deny it, as do certain homunculi  even in our own day), there is an ontological discontinuity between Man and Beast; a matter touched upon here.  But what is the case, within the order of the Beasts;  or indeed, between the least of these, and the mere madness of atoms?

We have  from time to time  penned odd little poems, or perplexing parables,  which in fact do seek to glimpse that phase-change, from random atoms  to the least of God’s creatures -- the infinum of the scala naturae.  For a representative sample, try this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/gabriels-pep-talk-to-bugs.html

For the full roster of such things, here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/bugs

Huthi: How to Pronounce it

Having improbably broken out of their northwest-Yemen fastnesses, first to overrun Yemen itself, a previously obscure Zaydi tribal formation  has now captured world headlines and are all over the airwaves.   It’s still early days, and two pronunciations are vying for mastery, one correct and one a mispronunciation.  The correct pronunciation is: 

HOO-thee, 

with the voiceless version of the interdental fricative th,  thus rhyming with toothy.  (Were it the voiced version of our ambiguous digraph th, it would rhyme with smoothie.)  Some broadcasters are mispronouncing it HOO-tee;  this post is an effort to strangle that in the cradle.   (We earlier offered the same service w.r.t.  ISIS vs ISIL;  in that case, the changeling won out.)

This interdental fricative phoneme is not especially common among the better-known world languages, but Arabic in fact has it in both voiced and voiceless versions, respectively spelled  ذ   and   ث  .  The latter appears in the Yemeni name حوثي.

The French language lacks both of these, and the h sound as well (of which last Arabic is richly supplied with two phonemically distinct versions, a breathy and a ‘strong’ or pharyngealized);  hence they are reduced to bleating   “oo-tee”.  But you wouldn’t want to sound like that, now would you.

Meta-Modernism

On the occasion of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, who once appealed to my undergraduate taste, Louis Menand considers whether that author should be considered a Modernist or a Postmodernist;   and adds an acute discussion of the ambiguity of the prefix “post-” in such employment.   In the first, “Mission Accomplished” sense, “being postmodernist just means that we can never be pre-modernist again.”   In the snootier “epitaph” or “we’re so over that” sense, “being postmodernist means that we can never be modernist again.”

As for the original project of the Modernists (as, Picasso, Joyce), “they did it by shifting interest from the what to the how of art,  from the things represented in a painting or novel  to the business of representation itself.

[The New Yorker, 23 Feb 2009, p. 68]

As in other cases of such self-consciously trendy, navel-gazing devolutions,  the gambit was not original.  In Curtius’ chapter on the post-Classical period in Greece,

The materials and implements necessary for writing  now also became worthy of a poet’s art.  We have epigrams on the writing tablet; on the wax with which it is covered; on the calamus;  as well as a threat to the boring beetle, “enemy of the Muses”.

[Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), p. 306]

From thence  it is but a few steps down to exhibiting urinals in museums (thus Duchamps), or penning an ode to a chamber-pot, as in Gide’s accurately titled Les Faux-Monnayeurs:

La Vase Nocturne

Quiconque à quarante ans    n’a pas d’hémorroïdes …

Hidden glimpses

Brandenburg Gate monostich

He could make out the lorries on the eastern side  through the waving veils of rain.

-- Tim Powers, Declare (2001), p.  267

Foggy mini-monostich

… mists  in the middle distance…

-- Tim Powers, Declare (2001), p. 483