Breaking Things

Claude Rowberry, London Blitz—Interior of a Ruined House. Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, UK

“Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.”—1 Cor. 15:33 (KJV)

Thaïs, a celebrated courtesan in Antiquity

got Great Alexander to burn down Persepolis

it’s said—revenge of some sort, who knows?

And we fear Persians with nuclear weapons!

“When children begin to play, they don't eat,”

Anna Freud observed at her nursery school.

“The pleasure's greater than the wish to eat.”*

These children were, of course, not starving—

Passing a bombed house on a walk, a child said, “Naughty, naughty!”†

For him, things broken in the Luftwaffe’s Blitz

or in a boyish game were much the same.

To break things is the great temptation,

as we begin to grasp in this our nation.

Lives had been shattered in that city.

For these the breakers felt scant pity.

* Anna Freud, “Children’s Lunches, with trays,” report, Freud Museum, London, cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 224. Quotations edited.

† Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 212.

Epigraph: As Milton noted in his preface to Samson Agonistes, "Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy," Saint Paul is here quoting Euripides (perhaps by way of Menander’s lost playThaïs). Paul is considered the patron saint of the city of London.

Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Clowns in Limbo

Christ in Limbo by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlandish, ca. 1450–1516), Philadelphia Museum of Art

Sir, Colonus is an Inhabitant:

A Clown Original: as you’ld zay a Farmer, a Tiller o’th’ Earth,

E’re sin’ the Romans planted their Colony first . . .

—Ben Jonson, A Tale of a Tub (1633), act 1, scene 3

Migrants to Limbo, sense conveys,

are in many ways quite a lot like us.

They read the news just as we do,

eat, like us, what they choose, fancy

a little travel, do romantic research,

sing popular songs, write poetry.

But “three things ought always to be kept under: a mastiff dog, a stone horse*

and a clown; and really I think a snarling,

cross-grained clown to be the most unlucky

beast of [the] three,” says Timothy.†

Such migrants, too, no matter how many

generations they’ve been in a country,

are always considered to be settlers.

Still, isn't that likely true of us as well,

once, finally, we’ve nothing left to sell?

Envoi

“The language spoken by the tribes of Limbo

Has many words far subtler than our own

To indicate how much, how little, something

Is pretty closely or not quite the case,

But none you could translate by Yes or No,

Nor do its pronouns distinguish between Persons.Ӥ

* That is, a stallion with balls. "Clown" = farmer, countryman (1599), likely derived from Latin colonus. Cf. Swedish kluns "a hard knob; a clumsy fellow"; Afrikaans klonkie, "Of black or ‘coloured’ people: a patronizing name for a youth; an insulting name for a man" (https://dsae.co.za/entry/klonkie/e03912). The name Columbus is probably just another corruption of colonus; in Spanish, he is Cristóbal Colón. (The name may be an adopted one. Some allege him to have actually been a Marrano, or cypto-Jew.)

† Timothy Nourse, Gent., Campania Foelix (1700).

§ W. H. Auden, “Limbo Culture” (1957).

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Time’s Arrow: The Whig Version

For Joel Cutrara

The Truth was there already to be true.—Auden, "The History of Truth" (1958?)

It came to me just now, dreaming,

that time’s arrow points to both ways

not merely on the subatomic level.

"Infinite" doesn't mean extremely

big, but endless; galaxies fly apart

unceasingly; past and future exist,

and we thus may rectify our errors,

future upgrading as past's amended

with unending, infinite regrets—

sort of like a self-cleaning oven.

Only the present doesn't change.

Think of it as an imaginary number,

say, the square root of minus n.

“Distinguishing between past, present,

and future's an illusion,” Einstein says.

Somewhere, Petronius Arbiter,

not awaiting Nero’s fatal sentence,

opens his veins, but binds them up

again and gets some needed rest,

so that in death, forced on him,

he will at least look natural!

Grinning, he writes his tell-all will,

blowing the gaff on the imperial court.

Magda Goebbels murders her children,

since the Red Army draws near.

Uncle Bill drawls to his wife by

the Wabash, “I was just funning, dear!”

Upstart Crow jots on a piece of paper:

“More an antique Roman than a Dane?"

"Good night, sweet Yogi. Flights

of shortstops sing thee to thy rest!"