Belphegor's Feast, or, The Writing on the Wall

“Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Primeval slurry of the universal

From which we sprang without rehearsal,

One quark "down"; two quarks "up"

Glued by gluons in nuclear soup,

Proton croutons crowd this miasma,

Videlicet, "the quark-gluon plasma."

Was God obliged by sympathy

To cause infinite suffering to be?

Or is it just a make-do sauce in which

Some sous-chef demon (damn the bitch!)

Drowned the ambitious dinner dish,

Descending from an ancestral fish?

Leftover landfill in the fridge,

Box wines flowing beneath the bridge,

Drinkable, if you must know—

Well, drunk Chaos says it's so!

Meal cuisinée by Old Whiskers,

Nightmare dining! Slutish sisters !

O dear creatures of the night,

Who doubt that humans get it right,

Do comprehend what notions sprout

When contemplating logic's rout

By wild invention’s carefree sense

Of whither, whether, why, and whence.

The demon Belphégor, in Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal  (1863)

Notes: Written after reading Emily Convover’s eulogy for "Rick," the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, switched off for good this February: “Where Worlds Collide,” Science News 208, no. 3 (March 2026), 40–47.

The cover image is, of course, actually of Rembrandt's painting Belshazzar's Feast, now in the National Gallery, London. But one doomed feast deserves another!

Epigraph: See, too, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378192688_Three_Quarks_for_Muster_Mark_A_Slavic_gloss_to_Joyce’s_’Finnegans_Wake’

Thursday, March 5, 2026