Lenten reflections

 Here:

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

TR monostichs

 

Upon the sudden assassination of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt is rushed to Washington, at sunset:

 

An old farmer, hearing the onrush of the train,

climbed off his harrow  and stood to attention,

his red shirt  indandescent

in the horizontal light. 

Children ran to cluster around him.

Their spindly shadow, leaping east,

briefly stroked the wheels of Roosevelt’s car.

For the next half hour,

Roosevelt sat with his elbow on the window ledge,

staring through his own reflection

at the speeding darkness.

-- Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), p. 36 -7

 

hot   sun

beat   down

on bald heads

and bright medals

-- Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), p. 110

 

light          sliced

through thinning  trees

-- Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), p. 120

 

Light vertical, horizontal, and aslant.

 

 

 

Tableau!

 

The selections which appear on this site with the label “found poetry”, are so chosen by reason of a certain pithy verbal felicity, which makes the phrase (or sentence, or distich) stand forth from its prose context;  it may or may not reflect any excellence specifically visual.

Aesthetically  related, yet distinct, are “tableaux”, in which some striking, static,  visualization  sends a sight, or a passage describing it,  suddenly forth from its otherwise prosaic context.  

[Morphological footnote, for lexicophiles:  The English noun tableau  is borrowed from French, and retains the Gallic spelling, its plural in -x, and the oxytone pronunciation.  In French, tableau  is formally a diminutive of table, though its current semantics does not reflect that origin, and indeed tableau itself admits a further, double diminutive:  tabl-eau-tin.] 

But what lies specifically behind the selections that shall appear here so labeled, is the use of tableau as a one-word exclamation -- the rough equivalent of framing the scene with your fingers, displayed as cater-corner right-triangles.   This use is perhaps commoner in French than in English;  in any case, Harrap’s French-to-English dictionary  explicitly recognizes the idiom:

 

Hier on l’a surprise  assise sur les genoux du chauffeur; tableau!

Yesterday she was caught sitting on the chauffeur’s knee; tableau!

 

As a plain noun, rather than a holophrastic exclamation, this particular sense of a visually frozen, striking moment, is also denoted tableau-vivant (French pl. tableaux-vivants), literally a ‘living picture’.

 

An example, with picture-frame supplied:

 

She’d disappeared into the building, and a few seconds later  yellow light awakened the second floor, spilling through gaps between the shutters.  Her silhouette, disconcertingly large and bulky in her abaya, moved from one side to another, adjusting the shutters, then disappearing.

-- I.S.Berry, The Peacock and the Sparrow (2023)

 

And, again graphically framed (describing an escape, in semi-darkness, through serpentine and unfamiliar subterranean passageways, from the secret police):

 

He teetered at the top of a landing, reeling a bit as he peered down into the dimness of a steep wooden stairway, which then went black  as the door slammed shut behind them.

-- Dan Fesperman, Pariah (2025)

 

Another from a thriller -- an ominous sedan  looms into view:

 

She saw the Bentley and hesitated, watering-can poised in midair,  appearing every bit  in the late morning light  as if Renoir had captured her by surprise.

-- Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance (1988)

 

Thus, in this case, a overt comparison to a painting.

 

For further examples of this toothsome micro-genre, try these:

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

 

 

Gatsby monostichs

 

(1)  Wind & Wafting

 

Outside, the wind was loud, and there was a faint flow of thunder along the sound. …. The electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain…

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

Wilson’s eyes  turned out to the ashheaps,

where small grey clouds  took on fantastic shape,

and scurried here and there

in the faint  dawn  wind.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

 

(2) The Moon  Too  Illumines

 

The moon  soaked  with wet light

his tangled clothes upon the floor.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

They were still under the white plum-tree

and their faces were touching

except for a pale thin ray of moonlight  between.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

They came to a place  where there were no trees,

and the sidewalk  was  white   with moonlight.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

And, one from his earlier work:

 

while   the   moon

at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of the world,

showered its illicit honey

over the  drowsy  street.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

 

.

Winter Solstice

At first, we must endure

the weak, wan light,

like a sighing

in the sky:

 

 

   It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons

   in early winter,

 

   when the daylight is silver

   rather than gold,

   and pewter    rather than silver.

 

   -- G.K. Chesterton, “God of the Gongs” (1914)

 

Yet then,

a-lo, behold,

amidst the depths,

the harbinger of rejuvenescence:

 

This time each year,  the sun doth wend,

signaling days-dying’s end.

Henceforth  throughout  the grateful lands

our daily dose of light  expands.

Thus do we, cheered  by this faint grace,

take heart for Winter’s chill embrace.

And though the brisk winds  scourge the earth,

look forward to  our Spring rebirth.

Christi dedico in nomine;
Gratias agimus, Domine.

 

 

 

Ill Will / Sick Light

I just finished reading an engrossing and intricate novel.  These snippets may either whet your appetite for it, or warn you off;  either reaction would be appropriate.

 

a fuzz of dust on the lampshades

that made the light seem dull and dirty

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

The pool emanated 

a chlorinated glow.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

 

Not a monostich (lacks the requisite rhythm and concision), but in the spirit of such depictions of dim/ill light:

 

There was a kind of dimness about northern Ohio light as it approached the winter solstice, a kind of suffocating lack of direct light.  On days like this, you could scope the sky for the sun, but couldn’t pinpoint its location, the cloud cover was so thick.  It made me think of the neurology class I took in college,  the professor talking about eigengrau -- intrinsic gray, brain gray.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

This queasy-swimmy novel itself  might be dubbed, not quite noir, but eigengrau.

 

And:

 

Things      were going

            bad

between them.

Now there were four cigarette buts,

like four little people,

twisted into poses of decease.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

Elective Acolytes

 

Not many are called, and even fewer chosen.

Tales from the Vienna Circle Woods

 

Vienna, 1927:

After several more appointments with Schlick alone, Wittgenstein had been persuaded to get together with a select group from the Circle, though he had never once attended an official Circle gathering.

Waismann began, subconsciously, to imitate Wittgenstein’s speaking-patterns.  Schlick began to attribute  some original ideas of his own  to Wittgenstein, though they had been expressed before he had even read the Tractatus.  Wittgenstein must have approved of this submissive attitude:  by the fall of 1929  he was choosing to restrict his discussions to Schlick and Waismann alone, usually at Schlick’s home.

-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 48-52

 

Though recalcitrant about joining, or even really following the lead of, the Wiener Kreis, Wittgenstein did attend their summer 1930 congress in Königsberg (the one-time hometown of Kant, who was the Circle’s Aunt Sally), which honored him with a presentation re “The Nature of Mathematics:  Wittgenstein’s Standpoint”.  Here he again encountered a couple who had known him as a teen:

Present too at Königsberg  were Professor Stanislaus Jolles and his wife, Adele.  They were the couple with whom Wittgenstein had stayed during his spell in Berlin, 1906-08.  Their relationship with their lodger had been affectionate;  Stanislaus felt protective and paternal toward “Little Wittgenstein”, as they called him.  But, as so often with Wittgenstein, there had been a rupture, and, typically again, it seems to have arisen from Wittgenstein’s perception that his hosts had fallen short of his exacting standards.

-- ibid, p. 97

It didn’t take much for the prickly master to cancel you (or, to use the term current among Berkeley lefty groupuscules during the 1970s before cancel acquired its later flavor among the Woke, to “break with” you).

If you did manage to remain in Wittgenstein’s good graces, it was a mixed blessing, for he tended to treat such scholars as acolytes or thuriféraires, rather than full colleagues.  Consider the case of Friedrich Waismann, mathematician and physicist, and a core member of the Kreis, who enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally being closeted with Wittgenstein alone:

 

Waismann’s principal function was prompt and note-keeper.  One philosopher later described his relationship to Wittgenstein as one of “glove puppet to controlling hand.”  … There was something shocking about the degree to which he subordinated his interest to those of Wittgenstein, and the ingratitude with which his efforts were rewarded.
-- ibid, p. 101, 104

 

Bertrand Russell, a supremely well-established logico-philosophical panjandrum himself, could not be so scanted; yet “Bertrand Russell, according to Ayer, was now downgraded to being merely ‘a forerunner of the Christ (Wittgenstein)’.” (ibid, p. 109)

Russell himself was cordial to Wittgenstein, who had read Russell’s mathematical philosophizing, and who in 1911  showed up at Russell’s rooms in Cambridge, and soon formed a close relationship.   Russell had been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, cosily known to themselves as simply “the Society”;  and Wittgenstein received an invitation to join.  But once again, Wittgenstein held back from any circle whose multiplicity made them unwieldy to dominate as a whole.

In a letter of 1913, Russell wrote to a friend:

My friend Wittgenstein was elected to the Society, but thought it was a waste of time, so he imitated henry john roby and was cursed.

-- The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (v. 1, 1951), p. 364

 

(The reference is to an earlier selectee, who disdained ever to attend the Apostle conventicles;  the miffed members promptly canceled him by decapitalizing his name for all eternity, and pronouncing a ritual malediction from time to time.)

 

~  ~  ~

 

In 1932, through the good offices of Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer  was introduced for the first time  to Wittgenstein at Cambridge.   Queried by the eminent Austrian  as to what was the most recent book he’d read (cocktail-party filler or ice-breaker, one would have thought),  Ayer replied, La Vida es Sueño, adding modestly that he hadn’t understood it very well.  That was actually owing merely to his shaky Spanish; but Wittgenstein apparently took it as trenchant skepticism, much along the lines of the logical empiricists protesting that they “didn’t understand” (i.e., considered as rubbish) a great many everyday non-scientific statements.  “From then on he treated me as a protégé.” (-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 120.)

Ryle appears later to have some regrets about those good-offices:

 

Ryle had met  and got along with  Schlick, but his encounters with Wittgenstein left him with serious reservations.  This was evidently a man who needed acolytes, not colleagues;  someone always on the brink of an explosion,  too quick to divide the world into the saved and the damned.

-- Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure:  Philosophy at Oxford  1900-1960, p. 54)

 

In the same memoir, the mild-mannered Ayer recounts the brusque reception that met Waismann, who had so long sedulously served Wittgenstein, when they later became colleagues at Cambridge University:

Waismann was Jewish, and when Vienna fell to the Germans  he fled with his family to England.   He went to Cambridge, which was willing to accept him, but Wittgenstein did not desire that what he regarded as a deceptive echo of his own thought  should be audible in the same university, and therefore announced that anyone who attended Waismann’s lectures  would not be allowed to come to his.

-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 132

 

Horresco referens, but such petty and revanchist behavior reminds me of Tr*mp.

~

 

The incomparable logician Kurt Gödel  played a notably honorable role in this Kreis of often quarrelsome prima donnas.   While faithfully attending their gatherings, he was content so remain modestly in the background, and be taken for a subaltern, while all the time excogitating, leading to work more important more lasting than anything any of the others in the Kreis would accomplish.   Again, let the portraitist tell it:

 

Although almost all Circle members became convinced that, drawing on Wittgenstein and Ramsey, they had solved the problems of mathematics -- that mathematical truths were a type of tautology -- Gödel had sat quietly at Circle meetings  without believing a word of this.  He was a mathematical Platonist.
-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 148

 

Those affordances of the Circle, and of Wittgenstein in particular, were worse than useless: positively stultifying for the practice of mathematics.  [For our essays on the subject, consult

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Platonism  

]

 

As for the excesses of acolytism, Gödel kept a level head:

 

While Schlick and Weismann revered Wittgenstein, Gödel was among several  bemused by the cult-like deference he inspired in his acolytes. … [And later, when Wittgenstein reigned at Cambridge:]  Many students became disciles -- who, like Waismann in Vienna, subconsciously came to mimic his mannerisms.

-- ibid, p. 149, 247

 

The socio-historian and polemicist Ernest Gellner  provides a glimpse of the Cambridge period of Wittgenstein’s ascendency.  There grew up

 

… the first set of ‘companions of the prophet’.  Initially, there was a small, carefully vetted, conventicle of devotees in Cambridge, in the years preceding the Second World War. … But the movement grew …

Maor premise:  all cultural cocoons, all forms of life, are valid and self-sufficient, and Wittgenstein has shown this to be the case.  Minor premise, never spelt out or discussed, but operationallly taken for granted:  only our cocoon is of any interest. … Entry to Wittgenstein’s seminar was restricted at the master’s whim, and the ideas circulated in privately-copied typescripts which Wittgenstein himself refused to have published.  This esotericism greatly enhanced the appeal of the ideas, which were treated as a major revelation by the adepts.

 

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), pp. 160-165

 

(Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced…)

~  ~  ~

 

Let it not be supposed that the field of philosophy is at all atypical  among academic specialties, as regards such interpersonal rugosities.  Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced.  As, the mathematician Mark Kac, father of the linguist Michael Kac, remarks in his memoir:

 

Linguistics is a strange field, full of cliques and fiefdoms, each fiercely attached to its staked-out territory, and consumed with enmity toward the others.

-- Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance (1985), p. 107

 

For an extended look at academic acolyte relations, pour yourself a brandy  and relax with these:

 

=> http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes.html

and its appendix

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.html

 

These include anecdotes about my fondly former Berkeley Doktorvater  in Rom. Phil.,  Professor Yakov Malkiel, including portraits of the (pro tem) Malkielitas, and one (canceled) Malkielito.  One will detect, in the telling, a Nabokovian tone;  which is only just, as the Malkiel family and the Nabokov clan  were BFFs in Berlin, back in the ‘30’s (while it lasted).

 

Fleetwood Nation

 

One of the finest passages in musical history, includes lyrics as follows:

 

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

                        (da capo  al fine del mondo)

 

The lead singer -- a guy named Gary, it turns out -- begins in a style that, in refined circles, is denominated "a capella" (from the Latin; literally, "in chapel style"), but which, in the doo-wop era, was known simply as "singing".  How it all came about:  This guy Gary (we learn from Wikipedia, which knows all) was waiting with this other bobby-soxer at a bus-stop, see, and they got to singing, and it was pretty neat, and so the girl, she had this friend, and so the three of them sang at school, and all the kids liked it, so they "formed a group" -- a process as simple then  as forming a collection out of a, b, and c, in set theory.  The group was called "Two Girls and a Guy", which really said it all.  Originally they were purely a-capella; later they added a rhythm section, consisting entirely of Gary's car-keys.

 

Then later, when they started to get famous, some manager changed their name to "The Fleetwoods", which is still a pretty neat name.  (Notice I do not say, "a cool name"; that would be beatnik.)  But they never forgot their roots -- in fact, the "Fleetwoods" were not so dubbed after the Cadillac of that description, but after their own telephone exchange (as in "Fleet-wood Four Five Seven Oh Nine").

 

The masterpiece referenced above was -- well, obviously, you had to be there, there and then.  The then and the there was American suburbia in 1959.   Back then I was even younger and even more completely clueless than in 1961, anno "Please Help Me I'm Falling" (**).  The Fleetwoods TOOK THE AIRWAVES BY STORM (to use a phrase  echoic of the late conflict, by then safely forgotten)  with a hit song called "Come Softly to Me".  Originally, at the sock hop in their high school gym, the song had been called, with better brevity, "Come Softly", but (again, Wikipedia) that same publicity-savvy manager made them change it, on the grounds that the original was... too... something called....  "risqué". (??!! Wh-wh-*what* ???????)  Anyway, it's a neat song, and if you listen to it, and tell your friends, they'll think it's really neat too.

 

*

 

You might gather from the above  that I am slighting this song;  if so, you gather amiss.  It was actually a major stepping-stone in my (thitherto minimal) musical education.

 

The poverty of our musical upbringing, on our little cul-de-sac  there in the suburbs, was astonishing.  If it were somehow translated into imagery, you would see a huddle of stricken children, wearing nothing but Keds, ribs showing, bellies distended, with the International Red Cross shaking their heads in the background, giving up the case as hopeless.  Later on, some kids had to take piano lessons, but I never did, and any music I was exposed to  came out of a little plastic slab, of the size, and essentially the function, of a cigarette pack. 

 

The song actually confused me, and I didn't like it at first.  But since it was NUMBER ONE, everyone wound up hearing it several dozen times a day.   It was almost my first introduction to multi-part singing -- songs like "The Little White Duck", till then the principle fare, tended to monody -- and my very first introduction to stretto -- the voices easing in and easing out, delicately overlapping like waves breaking softly upon waves.  And like, what was it up to?  It wasn't funny, like "Purple People Eater" or "The Chipmunk Song"; it didn't tell a story, like "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" or "Kisses Sweeter than Wine"; it didn't bounce up and down, like "At the Hop"; and it didn't have a simple "Hickory Dickory Dock" sort of tune, like "Rock Around the Clock".  And it certainly wasn't guy fare, like "Hound Dog". It was, you might say, kind of -- girly.

 

*

 

So once again I made the pilgrimage to Youtube.  And once again, learned something new and richly evocative, even though, again, I had remembered that song perfectly, note for note, for all those years.

 

Firstly, it turns out that Top 40 on a dirtcheap AM transistor radio (or, in the previous couple of years, off a little plastic crystal set that my dad put together from a kit, and that only got one channel) does not provide the full depth of musicality that one may derive  from either live performance  or some assemblage of digitized woofers and tweeters.  This little thin sound trickled out; and if the song had a good beat, you could hear the beat part, and sometimes make out some of the words.  The highest praise for a song was, "It has a good beat and you can dance to it"; only I couldn't dance to it, being shy and only nine years old.  As for "Come Softly", it wasn't clear how even teenagers could dance to it.  It wasn't jitterbug, but neither was it the sort of simple Slow Dance such as -- much, much later, when I was all of twelve -- we would dance to at Canteen, at the junior high, in gingerly contact with an individual of the opposite and complementary (and wholly unimaginable) gender,  simply rocking slowly from foot to foot until the music was over.  It was -- not syncopated exactly, more like... you couldn't put your finger on it.  It seems to have been scored for naiads.

 

Hearing it now, though only on the speakers of my PC, I realize that the kid Gary had a voice for which the gods sighed,  chins propped on hands as they listened, with eyes shut, over the clouds.  The song opens a capella, and you can hear why:  What accompaniment could possibly improve upon his voice?

 

Secondly,  learning the concrete matter-of-fact details  brings you up short.  Simply to learn that the trio is from an actual place (in the event, the state of Washington) is like a wake-up splash of water.  I don't know where I imagined singers came from, back then -- "from Hollywood" or "from Broadway", maybe.  But these three are from Olympia, not Olympus.  And they have just regular names, like other kids -- "Gary", not something made up, like "Elvis" or "Dion".  In fact their lead singer, whom I would have pictured, had I tried (though I did not, not being a girl), as a cross between Lord Byron and Apollo, turns out to look like somebody's kid brother (and his sidekicks might almost be his mother).  He has what I now recognize as a “bedroom voice”; but his babyface says rather, Tuck me in.  He looks like he just stepped out of a soda shop.

 

*

 

It suddenly occurs to me that soda shops no longer exist.  The younger among you can probably scarcely conceive what such a thing would even be -- the product-line seems strangely impoverished; as who should say, a "water shop", or a "bicarbonate of soda store". Yet for a teen in the years before the Great War, and then after the Great War, and then during the Big One that they had to give a number to, and then right on in through the 'forties and 'fifties, these constituted the principle cultural and anthropological institutions of the land.

 

No, I'm not being nostalgic. It was a time before either Google or Wikipedia, so that life was worth living only in a narrowly restricted and relative sense.  Still, its pop songs are even better than I'd remembered.

 

========

(**) Note: For “Please Help Me I’m Falling”, see:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/duet-at-distance.html