The hobgoblin has been dreaming.
How long? Centuries at the least.
But that’s an exaggeration,
And who gives a damn? Hobgoblins
Don’t recognize time! It’s awake
Now—AI conjures up its squinty eye—
But soon rolls over with a sigh,
Returning to its habitual nighttime place
Those nightmare humans to efface.
No, was that it? What did the warning say?
With fleeting lapse, the goblin brain
Sinks back a-bed to snooze a bit again.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
"Everything is what it is, and not another thing."—Bishop Butler
The more intelligent, the less you sleep
And, exhausted, slower creep along,
Rhythm lost to redundant rhyme,
Pleonastic prosing lacking sweep.
(Make mention here, perhaps, of crime?)
Some things are shallow; other things are deep!
He fixes the future with his basilisk stare.
And you might wish you had one, too.
Beware! The detritus of longed-after powers
Mounts fetid in what once were pretty bowers.
For “longing” has a hidden "Freudian" sense.
This wombfill of stale pleasures is immense:
We are too many, though we think too few.
These are some things bizarro Faustus knew.
You can’t just cuddle? So, there's this twist:
"Post coitum omne animal triste
est—sive gallus et mulier."*
In this matching of hombre and mujer,
Those unhappy now might yet get sadder.
There is no burden that the earth can't bear,
And no fine prospect that's not best left bare.
Pasture now, tomorrow may be missed.
Dumps full today will, in time, get fuller!
The acropolis of the ancient Roman city of Pergamon, now in the Republic of Türkiye
*A saying attributed to the great physician of antiquity, Galen of Pergamon: "All animals are sad after sex—Gauls as well as women."
(Evidence that there were indeed such saddened Gauls in Anatolia in that era is provided by St. Paul, who visited them; he says unambiguously in his Letter to the Galatians 5:12: "I would they were even cut off which trouble you.")
Epigraph: Bishop Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons, Preface § 39 (1844)
Tuesday, January 27, 2025
Map of the route Alexander the Great and Pyrrho may have taken to India
Toward the end of his life, someone evidently asked Karl Marx what the meaning of it all was. ”Struggle,” he reportedly said.
Pyrrho of Elis, perhaps one of the Klytidiai—
seers who, it's claimed, explained oracles
in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia—
it’s believed, traveled with Alexander the Great on his campaign to the East,
where he might in India have met Gymnosophists [naked philosophers],
who may have taught him—could be
by signs, for want of a lingua franca
—to doubt everything whatsoever.
“Must I then doubt even doubt?”
he's said to have have asked them
(whether in Sogdian or Greek).
And it seems they in reply signaled,
Yes, it was so!
We don't know. And he maybe did,
perhaps making an exception
for a certain little woman.
He may have lived, to near ninety,
as old as me!
from around 365/360 to 275/270 BCE.
All these things might well have been.
But such may-and-mighting will not serve
To lubricate the wheels of the quotidian:
We must believe in something!
Marx picked strife.
I'd choose the best I might conceivably deserve in life.
Monday, January 27, 2025