November 30

1935, 1667



The deaths - I am confident that I am correct in employing the plural - of Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, a disquieting number of individuals who may actually have written just four books (more than eighty are ascribed to him, directly or indirectly, but "scribed by" and "ascribed to" are not necessarily the same thing), three of them collections of poetry in English ("Antinous" and "Sonnets" in 1918, as well as "English Poems" in 1921), a fourth in his native Portuguese ("Mensagem" in 1933).

The heteronymity of languages results from Pessoa's father having died when Fernando was just five, and his mother taking him to live in Durban, South Africa, where he exacerbated the unhappiness of grief for just eight years, returning to Lisbon in 1905, and dying there, of cirrhosis of the liver, in 1935, virtually unknown even by his neighbours, and totally unknown in the world of literature. And yet, in "The Western Canon", Harold Bloom lists two versions of Pessoa among the twenty-six writers of "the democratic age" responsible for establishing the parameters of contemporary western literature. A remarkable achievement!

Whether or not Pessoa wrote the book for which he is now best known is a matter of academic dispute. Certainly most of the words belong to him, though many also, or instead, may be attributed to Bernardo Soares, who shared Pessoa's life, insofar as any other human can be said to have shared Pessoa's life, for many years; other fragments have been attributed to one Vicente Guedes, though this name does not appear on any electoral roll or census document for the city of Lisbon at that epoch. The book, however, known in Portuguese as "Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa", was not published until forty-seven years after both Pessoa and Soares' deaths, and required the organisational skills of several editors to give it the multiple forms in which multiple very different versions of it may be read today, some even by the same editor, twice.

All this, however, is mere biography; what interests me, what draws me back again and again to re-read him, are the particular combinations of ordinary words which he constructs into phrases, clauses and sentences, and which are known among we cultural and intellectual snobs as Literature. Forgive me if I do not give page numbers for the citations that follow; there are now so many versions of the book, each of a different physical size and therefore heteronymously paginated, each numbering its own choice of fragments in its own disorder; you are much encouraged to acquire a copy and find them for yourself. I personally recommend Richard Zenith's 1991 translation, though it is entirely possible that Iain Watson, Alfred MacAdam and Margaret Jull Costa, who have allegedly published alternative translations, are in fact merely noms de plume employed by Zenith, or indeed that Zenith is one of them.
"I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason that their elders had had it - without knowing why." 
The expression of what I call "Zeitgeist Opinions" or "Quondam Opinions", those views we hold, and believe to be our own, independently arrived at, by what we delude ourselves into thinking is critical judgement, but which are in fact the delineations of that narrow box of currently permitted views known as "free speech".
"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I am compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it is here that I meet others. But I am neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I am sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting."
The Zero Positive incarnate! As is this:
"The way I see it, plagues, storms and wars are products of the same blind force, sometimes operating through unconscious microbes, sometimes through unconscious waters and thunderbolts, and sometimes through unconscious men... such is the world - a dunghill of instinctive forces that nevertheless shines in the sun with pale shades of light and dark gold." 
"Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I had languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out with forceps."
I have a sneaking suspicion that Frida Kahlo may have painted that paragraph.

(There is a link from this to several passages in Kafka's diaries - click here)
"The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts."
I have to dispute with you, on this occasion: "consensus"? what consensus?
"Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one."
"The contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal. There is infinity in a cell or in a desert. One can sleep cosmically against a rock."
I only came upon Pessoa in 2004, and yet I feel I have known him all my life, can find every one of these phrases in my own stories, poems, aphorisms, diaries, even from many decades prior to that encounter. Perhaps I too am merely one more anagram of the destiny of Pessoa.
"Revolutionary or reformer - the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair... a sensitive and honest-minded man, if he is concerned about evil in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life."
The next I have slightly modified, because I think Pessoa has missed a trick. His version reads: 
"Only one thing astonishes me more than the stupidity with which most people live their lives, and that is the intelligence of this stupidity." 
My re-phrasing: "Only one thing astonishes me more than the stupidity with which most people live their lives, and thatis the amount of education that has been poured into this stupidity."
"All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown part to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller's cordiality."
This final one is very tough - I doubt even Nietzsche could have gone this far:
"I see humanity as merely one of Nature's latest schools of decorative painting. I do not distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever interests my thinking eyes. If the tree is more interesting to me than the man, I am sorrier to see the tree felled than to see the man die. There are departing sunsets that grieve me more than the deaths of children."
More splendid sentences, as well as more background and commentary, can be found in my piece about Pessoa in "Private Collection"; and more about the man in a "Book of Days" piece about Pseudonyms, here.



1667


I am confident that Jonathan Swift was not one of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, though I would be amazed if Pessoa had not read him, and been massively influenced by him; and even, in some elements of his deeply solitary journeys into reality by way of the imagination, conceived of himself as a latter-day Gulliver on many an occasion. 

Their goals though were quite different. In a letter to Alexander Pope (29th September 1725) Swift wrote:
"... the chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than to divert it, and if I could compass that design without hurting my own person or fortune I would be the most indefatigable writer you have ever seen..."
Lemuel said much the same thing in the Travels (4:12):
"my principal design was to Inform, and not to amuse thee";
while back in his own persona he gave this advice to a young poet:
"... once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonable good understanding."
But there are so many memorable phrases:

"It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind."

"Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after; so that when men come to be undeceived it is too late; the jest is over and the tale has had its effect."


"Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events."

I am also intrigued to discover that Swift was the coiner of certain now clichéd phrases, including:

“A penny for your thoughts.” (Introduction to "Polite Conversation")

"The sight of you is good for sore eyes" (Ibid. Dialogue 1)

"She looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth" (Ibid)

"rain cats and dogs" (Ibid. Dialogue 2)

"you and he were hand-in-glove" (Ibid)

“all the world and his wife” (Ibid)


Swift was born today, November 30th 1667



Amber pages


St Martin in the Fields, London


Everything that Swift says about himself, the subversive wit especially, could as easily have been said by, or about, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born today in 1835. The reason for his pen name - Mark Twain - can be found in my page on Pseudonyms, on February 8


Andrea Palladio, Italian Renaissance architect, the man responsible for all those porticoed columns, born today in 
1508


Sir Philip Sidney, English poet and statesman, born today in 1554

June 18


2016


Because the linked site is live (at the time of writing this), and therefore constantly changing, I have placed a screenshot of one key moment below, and leave you to follow up for yourself if you are as excited as I am by this extraordinary expedition. Click here for the European Space Agency website.





And no, you are right, Tim Peake was by no means the first human to travel in space, not even the first Brit (that was Helen Sharman, the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991), but somehow the length of this expedition (six full months with no gravity, though lots of levity), and the sheer number of important tasks it undertook, and the effervescent personality of Tim Peake himself, and the fact, for a serial-blogger like me at least, that this is definitely the first ever space-expedition to have its own daily blog, have all combined to make this an inexorable entry for June 18th in this Book of Days.

Among the achievements, I discount his being the first Brit to undertake a spacewalk, because then we will end up with the fatuousness of cricket and baseball statistics (the first man ever to do a spacewalk wearing a green shirt on a Thursday in June et cetera), though I cannot resist, and watched a part of it on the television, the sheer absurdity of his participation in the London Marathon, on a treadmill, in zero gravity (he wore a special harness to simulate gravity), and in just three hours, 35 minutes and 21 seconds, which is frankly ridiculous back on Earth (I did the same marathon, in stages, in my local park, averaging about fifteen hundred paces a day, and it took me almost as long as he spent in space).

This, of course, was just a frivolous publicity stunt on one of his rare days off. The remaining time was spent trying to justify the galactic size of the cost of these expeditions into the black hole of Heaven. It included a number of scientific experiments which are only achievable in zero gravity, such as the impact of extreme radiation and vacuums on various organisms, and the physical and psychological impact of extreme isolation on humans; the former could obviously be simulated back on Earth, and the latter is, though California's Supreme Court has now declared it a breach of human rights in their prison system, and Turkey, Iran, Zimbabwe and Egypt, among others, are being encouraged to follow suit.

Principia.org's website provides links to some of the other key experiments, but you will have to surf these yourself if you want to understand them, because frankly science and ancient Greek are the same language to me.

EML: Thermolab and NEQUISOL
EXPOSE-R2: Life in space? Life on Mars?
iVOICE and EPSILON
Measuring Brain Pressure in Space
METERON – human-robotic planetary exploration





All this is the future. I was amused, in the midst of all this remarkable technology, to witness the primitive method of landing Major Peake's spacecraft back on Earth, an absurdity so absurd it made me think of a very different Peake, one Mervyn, some of whose nonsense poems, set to music by Richard Rodney Bennett, I spent the evening listening to in a church in Mill Hill. The last time I saw an object falling out of the skies in this manner, it was November 1973, and I was on the hillside of Korazim in Galilee, in a romantic tryst with a young lady, and what came falling from the skies was her cousin, an Israeli fighter pilot who had just had a rather too close encounter with a surface-to-air missile (you can read the full details in the poem "The Abelone Shell" by buying a copy of my Collected Poems "Welcome To My World"). Surely NASA can invent a better way of doing it than this?




Amber pages:


1898: M.C. Escher born - and perhaps it needs a mathematically artistic mind like Escher's to conceive the viable improvement to the spacecraft-landing system: are those impossible reversals that he creates perhaps the answer?
?rewsna eht spahrep setaerc eh taht slasrever elbissopmi esoht era :metsys gnidnal-tfarcecaps eht ot tnemevorpmi elbaiv eht eviecnoc ot s'rehcsE ekil dnim citsitra yllacitamehtam a sdeen ti spahrep dna - nrob rehcsE .C.M :8981


1815: Battle of Waterloo - the moment when a man
who was an obnoxious, monomaniacal, megalomaniacal, arrogant, ultra right wing bigot (the Duke of Wellington, I mean) became transformed into the national hero that he is still seen as to this day. And why? Because he defeated what he and his fellow rulers regarded as the greatest threat to their power, well, ever... and in so doing set back the development of Equal Opportunities, Gay Rights, Women's Lib and Anti-Racism by fully two hundred years - imagine if Napoleon had won at Waterloo and brought Britain into the original European Community, the one bound by the "Edicts of Tolerance".


1979, SALT II agreement signed - has Donald Trump pulled out of this yet? 



You can find David Prashker at:


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All rights reserved
The Argaman Press

June 30

1520, 1859, 2017


The treacherous death of Montezuma (which probably should be Motecuhzoma II Xocoyotzin), Ninth Emperor of the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán, who succeeded his uncle Ahuitzotl in 1502, and ruled a kingdom that stretched from New Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua, worshipping many gods, but none more so than Huitzilopochtli (pronounced Weets-ee-loh-posht-li), fearing many gods, but none more so than Quetzalcoatl, the white, bearded Dionysus to H's Apollo, iconned in the form of an eagle and a snake - D.H. Lawrence's "Plumed Serpent".

Why "treacherous"? The arrival of Conquistador Hernán Cortés appeared to confirm many ancient oracles and prophecies about the coming of the gods in strange ships. Montezuma mistook him for a good man, and invited him to enter his capital city, Tenochtitlán, without so much as insisting that he leave his rifles at the gate.
"Adorned with feathers and paint, the Aztec warriors whirled, dancing and stamping, their song rising in an intoxicating crescendo to honour the gods. As the long lines of celebrants wound into the temple precinct, the great drum played constantly, uniting their steps and their voices. Suddenly, among the sounds of worship, the screams of battle were heard and the drummer was abruptly silenced as a Spanish soldier sliced off his arms. Trapping the unarmed Aztecs, the conquistadors slaughtered them mercilessly until, according to the Nahuatl (Aztec language) chronicles, “the blood of the warriors flowed like water”.
Not my purple prose - it comes from the "history extra" blog, and you can read the full details of the genocide there (I am using the term "genocide"; the blog calls it "an incredible achievement in military history"; and maybe those two really are the same thing.)

The Aztecs were not the only people to find themselves wiped out, or reduced to reservations, as superior white European Christian male liberated the primitive continent of America from its primordial state, and brought it to enlightenment, prosperity and especially Christianity. A full list of all the native tribes of South America can be found by clicking here, of North America here; the site does not detail how many of these people are still left alive today, nor in what conditions they are living.

Neil Young's tribute to Montezuma can be enjoyed here.




1859


Many, many years ago I wrote a poem for one of my many heroes of the Immaculate Failure, those folk who set out on adventures and expeditions, usually both inward to the depths of themselves as well as outwards to some corner of the universe where no one has ever gone before - my own sense of this is that you have to do both simultaneously to achieve either, but neither is actually achievable: hence Immaculate Failure. 


Scientists who go hunting for an explanation of the origins of the universe and stumble upon a possible cure for cancer by accident instead; golfers who hit eighteen birdies in a single round, but rue afterwards the two simple eagle putts they missed; women who do more than sex and housewifery in a male-dominated culture but still don't get paid equally; artists and composers who travel way beyond impersonation of their maestros, but still have nothing to say even in their own original voice; folk who run or walk or sail or fly into the uncharted regions, and get there second... everyone of them a failure of course, but what a failure, what a transcendence of the life of most-of-us, in which we live our triumphs entirely vicariously, usually with the help of a beer and pizza in our broken-down sofa.

Charles Blondin (his real name was Jean-François Gravelet) was the subject of that particular poem, published in my collection "Coins" back in the 1990s, and then again in my Collected Poems, "Welcome To My World", in 2013, and reprinted below, though I would obviously prefer you to buy a copy and read all the poems.

As happens to me very often, because I tend to be like those explorers who I so admire, I was rambling the Internet in search of something quite unconnected that took place on June 30th of a different year, when there was Charles Blondin walking towards me once again, just as I would expect him, on a tightrope, with a man on his back, and probably, though you can't see it, a bullet from a rifle arranged several hundred yards away the reason why he isn't wearing a hat. It was June 30th 1859, and this the very first time he had undertaken the crossing that would make him famous for doing something so utterly and unequivocally pointless, and yet majestical: the crossing of the Niagara Falls in Canada, by tightrope.

Now I should point out that I have crossed Niagara Falls myself on many an occasion, though I did it by road the first time, on the Rainbow Bridge from the Canadian side to the US, and then back again, while amusing myself by blue-toothing the audio of my Blondin poem to my car radio as we drove through; several times after that (when you live in Toronto, as I did for four years, Niagara is where you take your overseas visitors) on foot across the wall at the summit, and literally inside the rocks, inside the waterfall, where tourists are encouraged to wear waterproofs at any time of year, though (as the pictures in the link will show you), the best time is in mid-winter, when it's minus 18 degrees Celsius, not counting the wind-chill, and the snow and icicles are everywhere. There is the boat too, "The Maid of the Mist" I think she was called, tame and boring once you've done the wall in winter, though "tame and boring" are relative terms. 

Relative to each other, that is, but especially relative to Blondin's achievement, which a man named Nik Wallenda repeated in June 2012, though in his case wearing a safety harness, which would not have impressed Blondin.

Richard Cavendish described Blondin's rather more spectacular spectacle in "History Today" (Volume 59 Issue 6 June 2009).


"Jean-François Gravelet was the most spectacular funambulist, or tightrope-walker, of his day or probably any other day. Born in 1824, he was the son of a veteran of the Grande Armée who was nicknamed 'Blondin' for his fair hair. The family lived at Hesdin in the Pas de Calais and when a circus came to town the little boy was so fascinated by the tightrope-walkers that he decided to be one himself and started practising immediately using his father's fishing-rod as a pole. His parents sent him for training as an acrobat at the celebrated École de Gymnase in Lyons. He made his first professional appearance as 'The Little Wonder' at the age of five and later adopted his father's nickname.

"Blondin's first crossing of the Niagara Falls, in 1859, was the most famous feat in a life packed with them, and like all the others was painstakingly prepared, organised and exploited for maximum publicity. He took care to enlist the support of the Niagara Falls Gazette which at first thought it was a hoax and then decided he was mad but went along anyway. Newspapers all over the country were soon interested. The rival Niagara Mail was sarcastic in its coverage and the New York Times said Blondin was a fool who ought to be arrested, but posters and handbills boosted the excitement. The railway companies laid on special trains and thousands of spectators assembled to watch.

"The tightrope was taken across the river in a rowing boat. More than three inches (7.5cm) thick, it sagged by some 60 feet (18m) in the middle, so it had a steep slope. The distance was a little over 1,000 feet (305m). Blondin offered to carry a volunteer over on his back but, unsurprisingly, no one stood forward. Bands on both banks played as he began his crossing at 5.15pm and took his time over what he privately considered an easy task. He stopped and lay down for a rest at one point and stood on one leg for a while. The crossing took him a little over 17 minutes. After a pause he went back across on the rope, much faster this time. He was cheered to the echo and the feat was reported all over America and in Europe.

"In several later crossings Blondin introduced variations. He carried his top-hatted manager across on his back, crossed blindfolded or on stilts or in a gorilla costume and pushing a wheelbarrow. One of the wonders of the age, he built himself Niagara House in the London suburb of Ealing in 1889 and died there of diabetes in 1897, days before his 73rd birthday. He lies buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. Neighbouring streets in Ealing, Blondin Avenue and Niagara Avenue, preserve his memory and there's a Blondin Street in Bow."


And a Blondin Park too, but apparently Mr Cavendish didn't know that.




In Praise Of Tightrope Walkers

(for Charles Blondin)


Charles Blondin
I sing to you on your birthday
a song of praise
knowing full well that no one else
has even heard of you
Blondin? Blondin?
Isn’t he a pop star, a footballer?
Wasn’t he that fascist who?
No, just a moment, I saw him in that film.
Then he must have been a friend of Byron’s?
A Symbolist poet? A politician?

The truth is
he was none
but he was also all of these
for all of these walk tightropes
one way or the other
His real name was Jean-Francois Gravelet
though he styled himself Charles Blondin
and he was first presented to the public
aged five in Saint-Omer
as “The Little Wonder”

And what a wonder!
Circus tightropes anyone can do
with a little bit of training
a harness and a safety net
even the unharnessed headstands and the somersaults
that were his speciality

But Niagara Falls
on a rope stretched 160 feet above the surging water!
Blindfolded!
With a sack over his head!
Trundling a wheelbarrow!
With a man on his back!
On stilts!

One time, he got so carried away
by the need to entertain the thousands
who turned out to watch him crossing
that he stopped half-way
set up a portable grill
cooked and ate an omelette
then had a marksman with a shotgun
in a tugboat down below
fire a bull’s-eye through the hat
that he was wearing

Where are you now
heirs and followers of Blondin
little wonders of the high tightrope?
Where are the artist Blondins
the politician Blondins
the scientist Blondins
where are you when we need you?
Have you all retired as he did
to that park in Ealing
where the streams are forded
by neat bridges made of planks
precisely wide enough for wheelchairs
where the nearest thing to a tightrope
is on pulleys in the kiddies’ playground
supervised by trained child-minders
dug in with cement to health and safety guidelines,
and three-foot pile rugs to catch a fall
from what is anyway just six feet?





2017


Death of Simone Veil, today in 2017. And in my diary for that day: 

"Simone Jacob, if you look for her name on the wall of the deportees at the Holocaust memorial in Paris; 78651 if you look for her camp number in the registry. One of the truly great women of the modern age, and nothing, not a word, not a photo, not so much as a passing mention, on any of the UK news outlets."

There was, in fact, a piece in The Guardian, a week later. The New York Times obituarised her as "an Auschwitz survivor who as health minister of France championed the 1975 law that legalized abortion in that country", but it took the eventual posting by the Jewish Women's Archive before she got the obituary she deserved: "arguably the one person most responsible for advancing women's legal rights in France during the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first..." President of the European Parliament, member of France's constitutional court... you can read the rest for youself here.



January 8


1642


The list of poems (and other works, but let's stick to the poems for the moment - you can find many of the books on December 6) banned as heresies, whether religious, political, moral or social, is too long for this page; but I shall try. 

Noteworthy among them is Ovid's "Ars Amatoria", which upset the Roman Emperor Augustus so much that he both banned the work and banished the poet; the poem survived, until the monk Savonarola included it in his "Bonfire of the Vanities" in 1497 (not to be confused with, but the reason for the title of, Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel and the film that was made of it). Christopher Marlowe translated it into English in 1599, only to find his version banned and himself imprisoned; U.S. customs added it to their list in 1930. 

The 1881 edition of Walt Whitman's endlessly rewritten and reprinted canonical "Leaves of Grass" was banned in Boston, though that city now requires study of it as part of its Literature programme (I guess I should write that as "program", given that Boston is in the USA) in secondary schools; required reading and banning are of course both forms of coercion and control. 

The French government suppressed six of the poems in Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", and charged him with corrupting public morals; the work was republished the following year and has never been out-of-print since. The version I have linked to here provides an English translation alongside the French original - just trying to be helpful (as well as so enjoying putting these equivalents of the "Mohammed cartoons" out there on my own version of Charlie Hebdo pages!). 

The complete works of Osip Mandelstam disappeared on Stalin's orders, with the poet banished to death-by-exile (he died in Voronezh in 1937; I bought my copy from a book-scalper on the Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg in 2003, exactly the same place Yevtushenko reports buying his, in "Wild Berries"; alas I can't find a complete works in English anywhere on line; if you can, please let me know and I will update this page - and in the meanwhile, click here, and then here). 

Alan Ginsberg's "Howl" fell victim to an obscenity trial in 1957. 

"Education for Leisure" by the current English Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy was banned in 2008 by the school’s examinations board AQA… plus ça change…

Why have I put all this under January 8th, and noted the year as 1642? Because this was the date on which Galileo Galilei died, in Arcetri in Italy, not a poet it is true, but a name that I cannot bring myself to wilfully exclude from a list of the banned geniuses of our moronically stupid world. I wrote this poem for him, many, many years ago:



Heresies
(for Galileo Galilei)


1642
at Arcetri
near Florence
under house arrest
working only under close policing
completely blind
censured by the ecclesiastical authorities
sentenced to death by Pope Urban VIII
(commuted at the personal behest of the Duke of Tuscany)
on the 65th birthday of the Danish astronomer Johannes Fabricius
(the man who actually discovered sunspots)
on the anniversary of the death of Marco Polo
at the age of 77
Galileo Galilei
died
broken on the rack of disappointment

Of his achievements we can list:

the inference
from the oscillations of a lamp
suspended in the cathedral at Pisa
of the usefulness of a pendulum
in measuring time exactly

the invention of a hydrostatic balance

a treatise on the law of specific gravity

the theory of falling bodies

the invention of the thermometer
and the proportional compass

the development of the refracting telescope
and its use in determining
the nature of the lunar landscape

the discernment of the structure of the Milky Way

the discovery of four satellites of Jupiter

the proof of solar rotation
based on the evidence of sunspots

the law of uniformly accelerated motion

the law of the parabolic path of projectiles

the law of virtual velocities

the law of inevitable weightedness

All these
science
or heresy
depending on your point of view


(published in "Welcome To My World"; to purchase your copy, click here)

*

Some time after writing that poem, I found myself drawn back to the theme (probably something of mine had just been banned, or me forced to resign from some position, or even imprisoned briefly, because somebody didn't like something I had written), and wrote a rather more prosaic piece which I called:

THE INDEX

The Argaman Press proudly presents its unique catalogue of writings which, according to the highest authorities of their days, constitute some of the greatest masterpieces of all time, the equals of Shakespeare, Dante, Molière...

“La Grande Bataille de Crecy”; author or authors unknown, probably written down in the late 13th century but originating much earlier, it is held to be the greatest of all works in the troubadour style of poetry, though unusual in that it departs from the customary themes of love and romance to speak of the massacre of the Celtic French (Armoricans) by the Angevins (Normans).

“The Gospel According to St James”; written in Greek and originally published in Egypt, James’ account of the life of his master is characteristically different from the better known synoptic gospels, particularly in its insistence on what may be termed gnostic conceptions. The book first appeared in Europe in about 1400 CE; many scholars hold it to be a fake.

“La Saga di Gabrielle” by Roberto di Guislano; a 14th century Italian romance which sought to merge the Commedia Dell’Arte and Condottiere traditions of Italian theatre and prose. It tells the story of the archangel Gabriel, sent by God to announce the birth of Jesus to Mary, and of how he fell deeply, and carnally, in love with her, ultimately fathering the child himself.

“Tempus Fugit” by Guiseppe di Scarlatto; an early 15th century Italian tractate which promulgated the notion, gleaned as so much Renaissance culture was from the Arabic, that time is less important than action, and that the person who carries out the action is the least important of all.

“The Virgin Mary Magdalene”, a poem by the 15th century Flemish poet Richard Van Der Elk, in which it is imagined that the two Marys of Christian tradition were in fact one and the same.

“Antonio” by Mordechai Levy; written in 1634 but never performed in England, it presented a riposte to Shakespeare’s story of “The Merchant of Venice” from a Jewish perspective.

“Against Slavery: A Polemic” by Brahame Swift. Unlike his elder brother, Jonathan, Brahame wrote but one book. A marginal note in the journals of William Wilberforce suggests that copies of the book were circulated privately over several decades. Wilberforce himself was powerfully influenced by its coherent and lyrical attack on all forms of human slavery, including, interestingly, marriage.

“Gott Ohne Ich, Ich Ohne Gott” by Hermann Dietrich Fassbinder. A 19th century German essay in novel form which arguably was the first modern work to establish atheism as a defensible intellectual posture.

“The Princess Clementine Rose”; an otherwise run-of-the-mill romance by one of the 19th century’s lesser known women novelists, Mary Graveney; it enjoyed a brief succes de scandale for its unusually graphic descriptions of lesbian love.

“The Complete Poems of Osip Mandelstam.” Only about a tenth of Mandelstam’s oeuvre has survived his persecution at the hands of Stalin. This volume brings the remainder together for the first time.

All of these works - and many, many more - are offered by us as titles only, as the manuscripts are alas no more. What all these works have in common is their unavailability, and the reason for their unavailability. They share a common fate. What might otherwise have been handed down to us as some of the greatest masterworks of European culture may now only be savoured, relished, deified, as titles. Each of these works was banned, burned or prescribed by the particular authorities of their day, because they were perceived as challenging those authorities, or the status quo, or as being inflammatory and therefore dangerous to the common reader. What remains is an index, utterly mouth-watering, though alas not mouth-watering enough to quench the fires in which they burned. 


(published in "Welcome To My World"; to purchase your copy, click here)





The illustration immediately above is from an exhibition that I was fortunate enough to see in Toronto, and even bought the catalogue, which I still have. You would be amazed at how much of what is regarded as the world's greatest works of literature has at some time, including right now, been banned, in one country or another, and sometimes all of them. "Nihil obstat", or in full "nihil obstat quominus imprimatur", is the nearest the Pope will ever commit himself to approving a book for publication; "it contains nothing contrary to faith or morals" is not actually a green light, but it allows the process to move forward. Once it is approved by the full Synod, it is given the stamp 
"imprimatur" - "let it be printed". There is no equivalent for the refusal of a book; like the thousands that sit there unread because unsolicited in the dumping-rooms of commercial publishing houses, books that you don't want to publish can simply and safely be ignored.

Some of this blog-entry is taken from my collected poems "Welcome To My World", with the additional piece "The Index" from my minimalist-story collection "The Captive Bride", both published by The Argaman Press in 2013.

I apologise to all those many authors, poets, painters, scientists philosophers, journalists, and more, who I have not managed to include on this page, and dedicate this day to all of you. Damn the censors!






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