All the Rage

But sad Ulysses, by himself apart,

Poured the big sorrows of his swelling heart;

All on the lonely shore he sate to weep,

And roll’d his eyes around the restless deep;

—Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer, "The Departure of Ulysses from Calypso," 5.81–84

Fearing to squander genius on a wife,

Put to one side his "long disease, my life,”*

Aware expense of spirit would be steep,

Pope wrote poetry, thinking it might keep.

Like Odysseus on Calypso's isle,

He doubted wisdom had gone out of style.

What, then, fear I, in this enchanted den

I’ve dug to keep apart from other men?

They mean well—but confabulation reigns

In societies long contrived for gains.

It seems our species loves truth too little—

Freaked-out jots detest a weighty tittle!

While in the Siberia of its cage

Observed, the panther's pacing’s all the rage.

*Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735):

The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife,

To help me through this long disease, my life . . .

Dr Johnson called Pope's translation of the Iliad "certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen . . . one of the great events in the annals of learning." But who reads Pope now (or Dr Johnson himself, for that matter)? My late friend Peter Green, in his own translations of Homer (which I copyedited for the University of California Press), dismissed "translators like [!] Pope" on grounds that "rhyming was unknown to Homer." Sic transit . . .

Jot: From the Latin iota, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet.

Tittle: The dot over the letters “i” and “j,” from the Latin titulus, title or heading.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

The Fate of Things

Res ipsa loquitur . . .

Everything that could be created has.

No, that's wrong! There's an infinity of things,

They crowd me close, each wretched dingus

Wanting an owner and respect,

To last until it's good and wrecked.

And who can say when that might be?

Like us they love eternity,

Old, crippled things, so hard to see.

Discarding them you must play rough

And dig them under, like the tough

Who ploughs the dough that buys the stuff.

I do my best to ward them off

Or hurl them from the light of day

To the Golgotha called “away,"

For it's impossible to find

(could be that the seeker’s blind).

Christmas Day, 2025

Algorithm

Happiness, said Zeno of Kition,

Is a good flow of life. Calm, I carry on,

Surveying the flotsam that comes down

The overbearing stream, stoically,

A citizen-patient of my dream

In an enormous emergency room.

I had an algorithm for equilibrium,

Such as was known of yore in Citium,

Which in this global clinic set me free

With simulated annealing from GPT.

Notes: Citium is the latinized form of the name of Zeno's city on the south coast of Cyprus, Greek Κίτιον (Kition), Phoenician KTY.

Simulated Annealing (SA) is an algorithm that approximates the global optimum of a function by employing randomness in searching, so that output can vary for the same input.

Christmas Eve 2025