Cosmic Gall Redux

Neutrinos, they are very small.

They have no charge and have no mass

And do not interact at all.

—John Updike, “Cosmic Gall” (New Yorker, December 17, 1960)

Fuzzy waves that zip through space,

Neutrinos might in fact be large.*

Measuring their wave packet charge

Is these days raising quite a racket.

It's feared that neutrino oscillations

Could be causing bad vibrations:

Dark matter and dark energy

Distort the things that we can see!

Meanwhile, in a different place,

viroids are found extremely small.†

These critters now generally appall.

Smaller than viruses or germs,

they very seldom come to terms.

Their biased nature we must face:

The simplest-possible replicators,

They bite, it seems—like alligators!

The moral of such analysis

Is never be too sure of this.

What you believe might all be guff.

You couldn’t make up this stuff!

Nothing’s for certain in our world.

Keep that big umbrella unfurled.

*https://www.newscientist.com/article/2468207-how-big-is-a-neutrino-were-finally-starting-to-get-an-answer/

†https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535300-700-a-whole-new-world-of-tiny-beings-challenges-fundamental-ideas-of-life/

Monday, February 16, 2025

Non Sequitur: Improv for a Pin-tailed Whydah

The Whydah Gally, a former Ouidah slave ship captured by Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy in the Golden Age of Piracy

“Extravagance is a legitimate feature of poetry.”—Anthony Hecht

The great cities' steel arteries,

Metro, Subway, Underground, Tube,

Shànghǎi Dìtiě, Subte, Bart,

and the proverbial hill of beans,

last-farting demagogic "Duh!"

melting snow on my verandah,

mean less to me than a Pin-tailed Whydah!

Spotted in Mzansi's endless river garden,

A dance no Subway pirate could devise,*

Set against the fleecing works of man,

How priceless any day this birdie's courting prance:

repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise†

Male pin-tailed whydah, South Africa

* https://youtu.be/3RRXdPH9brI

† Elizabeth Bishop, “North Haven”

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Formal Causes

I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.'

—Yeats, "Adam's Curse"

Even if not a tour de force,

a poem's tacitly a wager,—

a bet with certain risk assumed

(albeit ensuring it may be caught)

putting the cart before the horse

when that’s what the sibylline muse

assigns to your ordainèd course—

a morceau de bravoure,* in sh inort.

Yeats’ gong-tormented Byzantine sea,

the Emperor in Roth's Radetzky

March,†

e.g., are blatant clues in Sherlock's sport.

Deciduous history's poetry's not.‡

And as to the formal causes of art . . .

Well, there's this horse before the cart.

* Cf. Charles Dantzig, Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2005), s.vv. Morceau de bravoure, tour de force, originalité.

† Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March), tracking the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was published in 1932.

‡ "As if all history were deciduous," Anthony Hecht exclaims in "A Birthday Poem."

Saturday, February 15, 2025