It’s been far too long since I posted a poem by my favourite of the metaphysical poets, Thomas Traherne (who lived from c. 1636 to 1674), so here’s another of his remarkable works, called The Salutation, in which he ponders the deepest questions of existence complete with authentic 17th century spelling…
These little Limbs, These Eys and Hands which here I find, This panting Heart wherwith my Life begins; Where have ye been? Behind What Curtain were ye from me hid so long! Where was, in what Abyss, my new-made Tongue?
When silent I So many thousand thousand Years Beneath the Dust did in a Chaos ly, How could I Smiles, or Tears, Or Lips, or Hands, or Eys, or Ears perceiv? Welcom ye Treasures which I now receiv.
I that so long Was Nothing from Eternity, Did little think such Joys as Ear and Tongue To celebrat or see: Such Sounds to hear, such Hands to feel, such Feet, Beneath the Skies, on such a Ground to meet.
New burnisht Joys! Which finest Gold and Pearl excell! Such sacred Treasures are the Limbs of Boys In which a Soul doth dwell: Their organized Joints and azure Veins More Wealth include than all the World contains.
From Dust I rise And out of Nothing now awake; These brighter Regions which salute mine Eys A Gift from God I take: The Earth, the Seas, the Light, the lofty Skies, The Sun and Stars are mine; if these I prize.
A Stranger here, Strange things doth meet, strange Glory see, Strange Treasures lodg’d in this fair World appear, Strange all and New to me: But that they mine should be who Nothing was, That Strangest is of all; yet brought to pass.
In view of my current rather hectic schedule – why else would I be up at this ungodly hour? – I thought I’d combine another bit of recycling with some audience participation. I’ve updated below the list of Haiku I posted some time ago with some new ones I’ve jotted down at random intervals over the intervening months.
How about a few Haiku of your own on themes connected to astronomy, cosmology or physics?
Don’t be worried about making the style of your contributions too authentic, just make sure they are 17 syllables in total, and split into three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively.
Here are some of my own to get you started:
Quantum Gravity:
The troublesome double-act
Of Little and Large
Gravity’s waves are
Traceless; which does not mean they
Can never be found
The Big Bang wasn’t
So big, at least not when you
Think in decibels.
Cosmological
Constant and Dark Energy
Are vacuous names
Microwave Background
Photons remember a time
When they were hotter
Isotropic and
Homogeneous metric?
Robertson-Walker
Galaxies evolve
In a complicated way
We don’t understand
Acceleration:
Type Ia Supernovae
Gave us the first clue
Cosmic Inflation
Could have stretched the Universe
And made it flatter
Astrophysicist
Is what I’m told is my Job
Title. Whatever.
“Clusters look cool,” said Sunyaev and Zel’dovich, “because they are hot”.
Gaussianity is produced by inflation, normally speaking.
Gravity waves are a kind of perturbation; they make you tensor
Bubble collisions Leave marks in the C-M-B To please A. Linde
This Haiku contains “Baryon Oscillations” in its middle line.
What should we build next: S-K-A or E-L-T? Or maybe neither…?
J W* S T, (the James Webb Space Telescope); long name, big budget
* “W” has to be pronounced “dubya” for this one to work!
Contributions welcome via the comments box. The best one gets a chance to win Bully’s star prize.
I’ve just finished reading a strange but wonderful book entitled Thames: Sacred River written by Peter Ackroyd. On one level it’s a kind of biography of the River Thames, from prehistoric times to the present day, but it’s much more complex and involving than a simple narrative history. What Ackroyd does is to look a the river from many different angles, each time focussing on a different aspect. There are chapters on connections between the Thames and human life- religious observance, art and artists, poetry and literature, commerce and crime and so on – as well as its wildlife, geology and other physical properties. As you can probably imagine, this means that the book jumps backwards and forwards through history, often visiting the same period many times but from a different perspective.
Rather like the river whose progress it charts, this book is both large and meandering. I have to admit that at times I found it heavy going. Ackroyd’s prose is often magisterial in its beauty, but he does get a bit grandiose every now and then. I got a bit irritated by his persistent use of the word “riverine”, for example. I’ve nothing against the word itself, but he uses it with such regularity that you can predict when the next appearance is due, as if he’d allowed him a certain number at the outset and determined to spread them uniformly through the text.
Despite all that, what makes this book so wonderful is that, for all its majestic sweep, it’s also full of rich and fascinating detail. Surprising little tidbits of information appear on practically every page to illustrate some aspect of the river, some playful and amusing, others dark and disturbing. Ackroyd’s mastery of the little details is really marvellous and it more than compensates for his occasional verbosity. I’d heartily recommend this as a work that can be read all the way through, but is also very rewarding to dip into.
As usual with my little reviews I’m not going to give a systematic description of the book, but just pick something that struck me as a read it to try to convey an impression of the content. Near the end there’s a chapter about a particularly dark side of the Thames, namely its association with death by drowning. For a start I was staggered to read that there are approximately 400 suicides each year involving people jumping into the Thames at some point along its length; most, but by no means all, of these happen in London. It’s also striking that this figure appears not to have changed much over the past couple of centuries. The Thames seems to be a magnet for the suicidal. Not long ago, a young French lady travelled all the way to London from Paris, specifically to throw herself in the Thames.
But, of course, not all deaths by drowning are suicides. Over the centuries countless unfortunate people have lost their lives by falling accidentally into the water. The worst peacetime loss of life in the history of the Thames occurred on September 3rd 1878 when a paddle steamer, the Princess Alice, collided with a collier and sank almost immediately. Many passengers on the Alice died by drowning, but most of those that didn’t drown suffered the perhaps worse fate of being poisoned by the heavily polluted water in the river. Many of those rescued died in the ensuing days and weeks of unknown ailments almost certainly caused the range toxic materials that were routinely dumped in the Thames in thos days. It’s estimated that around 700 people died altogether as a result of the sinking of the Princess Alice.
I knew about this terrible event before reading Ackroyd’s book, as it features prominently in others I read about the East End of London when I lived there, years ago. However, one particularly unsettling coincidence had escaped my attention until now. Apparently, one of the very few survivors of the Princess Alice disaster was a young woman by the name of Elizabeth Stride. She lived another ten years, in fact. But her ultimate fate was to be no happier than the many who died in 1878. On 30th September 1888 she became the third victim of Jack the Ripper….
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
I’m off travelling for a few days to a conference, of which more anon (assuming I succeed in connecting to the interwebs while I’m away). It will do me some good to change location after the terrible week I’ve just had. Anyway, I thought I’d leave you with a whimsical poem while I’m travelling. It’s a bit silly, I know, but I like it. It’s called Love and Tensor Algebra and it was written by Stanislaw Lem.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not – for what then shall remain? Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! the product of four scalars it defines! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
As regular readers of this blog will know, I have a – sometimes excessive – interest in the origin and meaning of words. It’s not something that many people share, but I think language is a fascinating thing, in the way that it evolves so that words and phrases take on different nuances.
It’s not just in English that this happens, of course. The other day I received in a brochure about Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming production of Don Giovanni (for which I’ve already got first-night tickets). I’ll no doubt post a review in due course, but probably the most famous scene of what is arguably Mozart’s greatest opera is near the end of Act II when the statue of the murdered Comendatore arrives to claim Don Giovanni’s soul, with the words
Don Giovanni a cenar teco m’invitasti e son venuto!
(Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you and I have come!) It’s a stunning scene from the point of view of both music and drama, and can also be genuinely frightening when done well.
Here’s an example from Youtube, with the doom-laden basso profundo of Kurt Moll as the Comendatore
Some years ago in Nottingham I went to see Don Giovanni performed by the Lithuanian National Opera. It was a nice but unremarkable production until it reached the Comendatore scene. The arrival of the ghostly figure is preceded by an ominous knocking sound which, in this production, emanated from offstage, to the right, as the audience watched. The cast all looked in this direction, as did all the audience. But it was a classic piece of stage misdirection. Suddenly, the music announced the arrival of the statue, a spotlight flashed on and there was the Comendatore already in centre stage. It took me completely by surprise and I gasped audibly, to the obvious disapproval of the team of old ladies sitting in the row in front of me, who shook their heads and tutted. I had seen Don Giovanni before, and knew exactly what was coming, but was still scared..
Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post. At a conference some years ago I was talking to an Italian colleague of mine and he told me something I found fascinating, which is that the Comendatore scene had led to an idiomatic expression in Italian Il Convitato di Pietra (“The Stone Guest”) which is in quite common usage.
So what does it mean? It’s not quite the same as the Comendatore scene would suggest. In Italian it is given as
(una) presenza incombente ma invisibile, muta, e perciò inquietante e imprevedibile, che tutti conoscono ma che nessuno nomina
which I’ll translate with my feeble Italian as
an impending but invisible presence, dumband therefore disturbing and unexpected, which everyone knows but no-one names
In other (English) words, “The Stone Guest” is someone who’s not actually present – at least not physically – but who nevertheless manages to cast some sort of a shadow over the proceedings. I’m sure we can all think of occasions when this would have been a very apt phrase but there seems to be no English equivalent. It’s not quite the same as the Elephant in the Room, but has some similarity.
Now that I’ve had a chance to think, though, perhaps there is an English equivalent. A person who is perpetually absent but despite that exerts baleful influence on those present? A name connected with stone?
Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides; And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads, The things of light File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
A candle in the thighs Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age; Where no seed stirs, The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars, Bright as a fig; Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
Dawn breaks behind the eyes; From poles of skull and toe the windy blood Slides like a sea; Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky Spout to the rod Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
Night in the socket rounds, Like some pitch moon, the limits of the globes; Day lights the bone; Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin The winter’s robes; The film of spring is hanging from the lids.
Light breaks on secret lots, On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain; When logics die, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotment the dawn halts.
I feed a flame within, which so torments me That it both pains my heart, and yet contents me: ‘Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die than once remove it.
Yet he, for whom I grieve, shall never know it; My tongue does not betray, nor my eyes show it. Not a sigh, nor a tear, my pain discloses, But they fall silently, like dew on roses.
Thus, to prevent my Love from being cruel, My heart ‘s the sacrifice, as ’tis the fuel; And while I suffer this to give him quiet, My faith rewards my love, though he deny it.
On his eyes will I gaze, and there delight me; While I conceal my love no frown can fright me. To be more happy I dare not aspire, Nor can I fall more low, mounting no higher.
This poem by Dylan Thomas, arguably his greatest, was first published just after the end of the Second World War and was written after Thomas heard news of a young girl who had burned to death when the house she was in was set on fire during an air raid. The full title is A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London.
The idea behind the poem is complex, and its message double-edged, but Thomas finds a perfect balance between horror and sadness, and between indignation and heartbreak. Children shouldn’t have to die, and neither should anyone else whose life is cut short by another’s hand, but we have to accept that they can and do. There’s no consolation to be found in mourning and in any case it’s hypocritical to favour one death with elegies, when suffering is so widespread. The best we can do is allow the dead some dignity.
During my delayed journey yesterday I passed some of the time by following the reaction on Twitter to the terrible events in Norway. I wish I hadn’t. Such events bring out the ghloulish worst in some people, and the worst of the worst is always to be found on the internet. Going online is sometimes like lifting the lid on a cesspit.
I was going to post something myself, but having realised that I don’t really care much for what other people think about this, I can see no point in adding to the blizzard of opinion. Far better to post this, which expresses everything I might have aspired to say far more eloquently than I ever could.
Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other.
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In the Dark 