Spirits of Saturn

Jack Hawkins boasted an African

on his coat of arms in 1564.

Black was the color of defeat.

It wasn't cool to be a Moor,

dark-complected—crème cuite.

The coat of arms granted to the slaver Sir John Hawkins by Queen Elizabeth I

Oh, make our faces snow-white, please!

English ladies begged Spirits of Saturn

(blanc d’Espagne, Venetian ceruse).

That ointment, though, was hydrocerussite,

which is to say, white lead,

and Queen Bess died—a ghastly sight,

horribly poisoned, in her bed.

Well, vanity's a dangerous deed:

« Ce sont les belles peaux qui ont des rides » *

as Morand's Bibi later said.

* "It’s the beautiful skins that wrinkle [fastest],” the charlatan cosmetician Habib (“Bibi”), a Lebanese Greek veteran of the Great War sporting an Old Etonian tie, says in Paul Morand’s parody of Proustian high society, “La nuit de Putney” (1923).

Ezra Pound translated some of the multinational "Nights" in Morand's Tendres Stocks (to which Proust contributed the Preface), but not "La nuit de Putney." For Pound's (clunky!) English versions, see Morand, Fancy Goods: Open All Night (New York: New Directions, 1984).

Old Dreams

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, “Ōshū Adachigahara Hitotsu Ie no Zu” (奥州安達が原ひとつ家の図), illustrating the legend of an ogress who drank the blood of unborn children. A print banned by the Meiji government in the 1880s.

A riff on Haruki Murakami’s novel “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.”

In Fukushima Prefecture in Japan,

A cannibal ogress once roamed

Who plucked babies from their mothers’ wombs.

Radioactive spillage there now fangs the sea,

And in Murakami's invented public library,

The books have all been replaced by old dreams

Which only a certified Dream Reader can read.

Hoi polloi, it seems, no longer read at all!

Where I live these days, it’s kind of the obverse:

Old dreams have been replaced by smart phones

Which all and sundry fish up from the deep,

While I—qualified Dream Reader that

I am!—call upon in sleep

Old books that anyone at all can read,

Evoking fetal dreams that cannot spill their seed.

The onibaba, or ogress, depicted in Toriyama Sekien's 1776 Gazu Hyakki Yagyō ("Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons")

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Zero-knowledge Proofs

Lascaux cave painting, ca. 20,000 BCE

A “zero-knowledge proof” in computer science is a way to prove that something is true without revealing anything else about it.*

But is this not what artists, musicians and poets have always done?

Palaeolithic painters show the beasts have souls,

And countless other artists' "zero-knowledge" goals

Need no evidence to prove their points.

Blind fools doubt them, which scant sense anoints.

Bach proved his God a mighty fortress;

Songs prove that love's a real thing;

Piero, that angels walk on air;

Yeats, that bees might supplant a stare.†

Hamlet, act 5, should not distress!

It states its case with gravid flair:

"If it be now, 'tis not to come:

if it be not to come, it will be now:

if it be not now, yet it will come:

the readiness is all."

(But such things might be forgotten

In times when nonsense lacks a bottom)

*https://ethereum.org/en/zero-knowledge-proofs/

†https://poetrybrigade.org/the-stares-nest-poem-and-explanation/

Tuesday, January 7, 2025