Prima facie

Frans Snyders, Cats fighting in a larder

So myche newe makyng, and so madd tyme spente ;

—John Skelton, "Speke Parrot" (1521)

If I were to write an autobiographical novel

Like Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being,

Would you read it? Rather racy in its bent,

Contemplating yesterday in a prima facie way,

It wouldn't bother with tomorrow or today,

Merely illuminate the mad time spent—

All that to-ing and that fro-ing,

All that coming and then going!

What's to be there is no knowing

When a living fossil's set for going;

Just a final seeming, wrapping up its being.

Antiquarian publishers, let me hear from you!

You may be confident I won't make it new.

All I want's the light to write. I've got no kitten in that fight!

Monday, January 12, 2026

The House of Being

Churchill sits in "Hitler's chair" amid the ruins of the Führerbunker in Berlin, July 1945

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell.

—Heidegger, "Letter on 'Humanism'" (1949)

How I agree with what the old villain meant!

He rattles on about the "quiet power" of the possible,

But has already said it all—and only four years since April 30 '45.

A member of the NSDAP throughout its twelve-year Reich,

He had, after all, come back from his Syracuse alive

(as did Plato, returning a slave). The bow is fashioned as the wood is bent.

Epigraph: Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Heidegger elaborates: "Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home."

Header image: https://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=5489

Sunday, January 11, 2026

The Sameness of the Same, I

Wolf Kibel, Interior with bed, oil on canvas, 310 x 670 mm, Sanlam Art Collection, Cape Town

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)

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

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

"The more it changes, the more it stays the same."

Born in 1939, I could say that, too, Heaven knows!

I lie in bed and sip my coffee gratefully. So it goes.

I was just born lucky, I suppose!

But am I —or aren't I—to blame for the Sameness of the Same?

Saturday, January 10, 2026