The Song of the No-See-Ums

Digital painting by Sukanto Debnath (Hyderabad, India, and Hungary, 2009)*

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.

—Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

“No-see-ums” are small biting flies

Not visible to careless eyes.

Their scientific name

is Ceratopogonidae.

So small, they nip and get away.

You’re itching for another day!

These punkies’ counterparts in brain

Are types of a deceiving strain.

The more ridiculous the tale,

They'll preach it to you without fail.

As creatures of fantastic lore,

They scarcely know what lies in store.

What they're taught by their mad master,

They gulp right down to void the faster.

Ignorance has been called a sin—

And so it is, deployed to win

By those whose end it is to harm,

By retailing a false alarm,

The polity from which they spring,

Buying into a con man's thing.

I’m sure you know now who I mean.

You met him in a nightmare dream.

*https://www.sukantodebnath.com/

October 11, 2024

Thomas Hardy at Wimborne Market

Wimborne Minster

"Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,

That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill, . . .

Will you not grant to old affection's claim

The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?"

—Thomas Hardy, "She, to Him"

Let’s say I’m Tom Hardy

Come to Wimborne today

To tup a fair young ewe.

I think she’ll have me too,

Knowing I’m good that way.

Come hell, or high water,

She surely loves to play,

My randy todger’s prey!

In that next century but one,

Don’t you wish you were me, old son?

My novels will make me famous—

More yet than that famous Seamus!

And poetry and love that's free

Have here got equal rights in me.

Vide Matthew Bevis, "I prefer my mare,"

review of Thomas Hardy: Selected Writings, ed. Ralph Pite (Oxford); Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems, ed. David Bromwich (Yale); and Mark Ford, Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry (Oxford). London Review of Books, October 2024, 46, no. 19, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare.

October 10, 2024

Luck: Sophocles among the Dinosaurs

Statistics distinguishes three sorts of luck,

circumstantial, resultant, and constitutive:

(a) being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, (b) the outcome, and (c) fortunate or unfortunate context, such as, e.g., the asteroid that killed the flightless dinosaurs sixty-six odd million years ago.

Philosophy's hair-splitting distracts!

What was the luck we really had?

Why me, why you? Well, good or bad?

What did we do? And was it fun?

Perhaps luck is feeling, feeling facts,

and not a haphazard chance outcome?

I’d be content (imagining Sophocles

and the big dinosaurs'd both survived)

to be a thoughtful little thunder lizard

or perhaps a blue jay in an apple tree—

a perch convenient to the birdie's gizzard!

Luck's but “chance, taken personally."

it's said, and taken thus, as far as

can today be told, looks after me.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/07/the-big-idea-should-we-be-thinking-about-luck-differently. The writer, Sir David Spiegelhalter, is emeritus professor of statistics at Cambridge and the author of The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (London: Pelican Books, 2024).

"Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best," the Chorus declares in Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus.