The Drying of the Paint

“I wonder why I write verses for nobody reads them.”

—Shelley (in 1820)

Learn to live with brute despair,

Since the slughorn reason’s there,

Full in view, embattled sight—

Allow yourself a luck that's bare!

Seeking merely, find the right.

Bid a fond farewell to hope,

Always such a slippery slope!

Like a little, the love you bear.

What to do, though, if you can’t,

My fellow stoic supplicant,

Puzzling how to forge some good

And yet be widely understood?

Scan the surface! Make it new!*

The paint? It's drying quickly, too!

*Make It New, the title of a 1934 collection of essays by the poet Ezra Pound, became the battle cry of the modernist movement in art and literature.

Epigraph: Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, quoted in Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 258.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Belphegor's Feast, or, The Writing on the Wall

“Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Primeval slurry of the universal

From which we sprang without rehearsal,

One quark "down"; two quarks "up"

Glued by gluons in nuclear soup,

Proton croutons crowd this miasma,

Videlicet, "the quark-gluon plasma."

Was God obliged by sympathy

To cause infinite suffering to be?

Or is it just a make-do sauce in which

Some sous-chef demon (damn the bitch!)

Drowned the ambitious dinner dish,

Descending from an ancestral fish?

Leftover landfill in the fridge,

Box wines flowing beneath the bridge,

Drinkable, if you must know—

Well, drunk Chaos says it's so!

Meal cuisinée by Old Whiskers,

Nightmare dining! Slutish sisters !

O dear creatures of the night,

Who doubt that humans get it right,

Do comprehend what notions sprout

When contemplating logic's rout

By wild invention’s carefree sense

Of whither, whether, why, and whence.

The demon Belphégor, in Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal  (1863)

Notes: Written after reading Emily Convover’s eulogy for "Rick," the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, switched off for good this February: “Where Worlds Collide,” Science News 208, no. 3 (March 2026), 40–47.

The cover image is, of course, actually of Rembrandt's painting Belshazzar's Feast, now in the National Gallery, London. But one doomed feast deserves another!

Epigraph: See, too, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378192688_Three_Quarks_for_Muster_Mark_A_Slavic_gloss_to_Joyce’s_’Finnegans_Wake’

Thursday, March 5, 2026

The Sameness of the Same, II

Chaïm Soutine, The Room Service Waiter (1927). Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.—Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV)

"Brown shoes don't make it."—Frank Zappa

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,

A French savant opined in 1849, a year of failed revolutions:

"The more things change, the more it stays the same."

Born a century later, I could say that, too!

I lie in bed and sip my coffee, searching for solutions,

Not to blame for the saucy sameness of the same—

Heaven knows!

2/28/26