I have read interpretations of the Sick Rose that posit the Rose to be life or love and the Worm to be decay. I say that Blake suffered from sinusitis. The “rose” represents the nasal passages. When a germ “the invisible worm” invades the tissues they become inflamed and red “crimson” and then you get the sore throat and headaches and the coughing and the chills and sweats and these do “thy life destroy”.
It does not actually destroy your life but at the time it feels like it. And I speak from a position of experience in the now. Moan, moan, moan….
The sinus is a fold, curve or bend. The word originates from ancient Rome and the practice of toga wearing. A fold of the toga hung over one arm and this fold was called the Sinus. It acted as a useful pocket in which to keep odds and ends; a speech for the Senate, a snack, an amulet to ward off invisible flying worms.
When you graduate with a bachelors degree your gown has no sleeves, but if you move to a masters degree the robe has these strange sleeves with slits for your hands to pass through. The ends of these sleeves are sewn shut and they are called sinuses. In the days when teachers wore gowns in school they often kept chalk and a duster in their sinus. If they confiscated contraband from schoolboys it would end up in that magical voluminous sleeve end.
The Sick Rose; by William Blake
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, that flies in the night in the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed of crimson joy: and his dark secret love does thy life destroy.
Golden Week in China kicks off on Friday Oct 1st with China National Day. The 7 day national holiday period results in some of the largest movements of people on the planet. Planes, trains and automobiles are all locked solid. City based workers try to get home for the holidays and everyone tries to visit a good tourist attraction.
As a European the image of the Great Wall of China above is my vision of the seventh level of tourist hell. I will avoid visiting China during this week in any year. As for this year in particular, with the Delta variant of the Covid-19 Virus in full swing it is the perfect week for transmission.
The best advice for this Golden Week is to stay at home in your own bubble. But this is very hard for those who are homesick. Homesickness is a strong theme in China, where family is so important. In my post Beauty of Form I talk about Li Bai’s Tang Era poem “Thoughts on a Still Night”.
Narrating My Troubles on an Autumn Evening in Poor Lodgings; by Meng Jiao
Bedded in the cold, bereft of distant desires, I give an ear to autumn, suffering estranged love. Branches high and low are tossed in the wind, giving voice to the thousands and tens of thousands of leaves.
A shallow well will not slake a thirst; a barren field in time destroys the plough. New colleagues are not old friends, and listening to poor conversation is torture.
It was 1977 and six of us were crammed into the new Renault 12 station wagon for a summer holiday camping on the continent. We traveled via the landbridge taking the Dublin-Liverpool car ferry and driving across England to Ramsgate. Hoverlloyd then zipped you across the channel in car ferry hovercraft which was highly exciting.
In Ramsgate, before the crossing, we stocked up on dairy produce from Ireland. It was a vagary of taxation which meant that we could buy Irish dairy products for half price across the water. So my mother filled the camping ice-box to the brim with Kerrygold and some Irish Cheddar and Edam cheeses.
We moved rapidly through France, which in those years was an expensive place for the Irish. Spain beckoned with its cheap food, cheaper booze and the promise of eternal sunshine. But we did include some sightseeing along the way. In the Cevennes my Mother’s “Fodor’s Guide to France” advised a trip to the naturally refrigerated caves in which Roquefort cheese is matured.
On the guided tour we learned about the apocryphal shepherd boy who found a cold space under a rock and used it to store his cheese sandwiches. On one occasion he had to rescue a lost sheep and left his sandwiches behind. Weeks later he returned to find the bread had gone mouldy. But he peeled it off the hunks of the local white sheep cheese and found the green mould had penetrated and veined the chunks. He thought it improved the flavour and he invented the most expensive cheese in the world.
Excavation beneath his rock uncovered a maze of ice cold caves in which the cheese is still stored today. At the end of the tour we were given the opportunity to purchase some of this expensive cheese. My mother caved into the pressure and bought the smallest (cheapest) pack available.
The cheese went into the camping ice-box, but cannot have been there for long. We nibbled away at it and with six hungry mouths it was gone in short order. Or so we thought.
In the following days the living spores in the Roquefort cheese explored the contents of the ice box. Remember that pile of Irish Butter and Cheese? We began to notice that our butter had a certain faint French je ne sais quoi. As we delved deeper into the Catalan countryside the flavour intensified.
A small taste of blue cheese is OK when you are a 13 year old on holiday, but when all your butter tastes of blue cheese the pleasure is gone. Every slice of toast had the salty tangy bang. The boiled potatoes with a knob of butter tasted of blue cheese. The summer of Société put me off blue cheese for years.
I had some St Agur on homemade brown bread for lunch today and this post materialized from the aroma and is presented here for your consumption. Bon Appetit.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love; by Christopher Marlowe
Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove, that valleys, groves, hills, and fields, woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks, seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, by shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses and a thousand fragrant posies, a cap of flowers, and a kirtle embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
a gown made of the finest wool which from our pretty lambs we pull; fair lined slippers for the cold, with buckles of the purest gold;
a belt of straw and ivy buds, with coral clasps and amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, come live with me, and be my love.
The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing for thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, then live with me, and be my love.
The battle of Warns took place on this day in 1345 between the Frisians and the Hollanders for control of the east coast of the Zuiderzee. What makes this event funny is that it resonates with anyone from Dublin. When a gang of skangers start throwing shapes at each other they usually begin with verbal threats warning of what comes next if you don’t back down.
The Dublin idiom for friendly banter is called slagging. In Dutch the battle of Warns is called the Slag bij Warns. I don’t think it can be an accident that the Dutch for a battle – slag – has become a word for insulting someone in Dublin. I need a friendly linguist to trace the evolution of one to the other.
If you do travel to Dublin and happen to run into a mental headcase it is quite likely he will open the dialogue with a question such as “Are you lookin’ at somethin’ pal?”
The correct response to this question is “Sorry.” Saying “No” is a trap because it triggers the follow on “Are you calling me a liar?”
But if you want to get your head kicked in you could riposte with a witty quip such as “What’s it to you ya bleedin’ dickhead!”
My image of the Battle of Warns is lots of Dutchmen dressed in shell suits with neck chains, holding a can of Dutch Gold in one hand and a JP Blue in the other as they shout at each other.
The Mandarin name for China is Zhōngguó (中国) and translates to English as Middle Kingdom. It dates from the early days when China saw itself as haven of civilization surrounded by violent hairy barbarians on all sides. I suspect that many Chinese still see the world through this lens.
The Western nations have long feared a strong China and have stereotyped the Chinese as untrustworthy, inscrutable, suspect. The USA in particular is the polar opposite in Capitalist Economics and in the defense of individual rights over the collective wellbeing of the nation.
The photograph above reminds me of a poem. It is taken from the heights of the Baiyun mountain forest park overlooking the Zhujiang river. As a child I learned it was the Pearl River, which gave Hong Kong access to Canton (Guangzhou) and served as the British gateway to China. A gateway prized open using a crowbar called the “Unequal Treaties”.
On Stork Tower by Wang Zhihuan is a Tang era poem describing the view over the mighty Yellow River from one of the great military lookouts. Today China announced a climate change package in which it will cease to construct coal fired energy plants abroad. This is a big step and a huge recognition of the need for change from one of the greatest polluting nations on the planet.
Sadly it comes at a time when China is beating a military drum, flexing its muscles on its borders with India, in the South China Sea and on the Taiwan strait. I hope China is truly the cradle of civilization it sees itself to be, rather than an imperialist that has been patient for a long, long time.
The next big war will probably be fought over rights to water.
At the heart of that war is the Capitalist ambition to monetize water resources. Water has always been the most important public resource underpinning civilization. You simply cannot have a functional civilization without good public water. If you doubt this take a look at Flint Michigan.
The first great civilizations were made possible by large scale collective public water works. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus and Yellow River civilizations all involved large scale collective irrigation and water management projects.
Clean water is such a precious commodity that many cultures revere wells and springs as religious sites. In Ireland springs are considered to be entrance portals to the sidh, the fairy world. With the arrival of Christianity many of them were converted into pilgrimage sites and given the name of a Christian Saint.
As Christianity made an early appearance in Imperial Rome Emperor Claudius was responsible for public works that brought more water to Rome in 50AD than is available to the city today. The Romans pioneered water purification systems. In moving the water from the mountain sources to the city they incorporated sand beds and filters, standing tanks where sedimentation could occur to remove solids, man made cascades of aeration to remove bad tastes and odours.
What the Romans did not have are modern chemicals to encourage coagulation and flocculation. Nor did they have post-treatment sterilization and disinfection where we use chlorine, ultraviolet radiation or ozone. We modern humans would have found ancient Roman water to be distinctly “fruity” and would slap a boil notice on it. The Romans added vinegar to water to make it more potable.
Even with all our vaunted technology we still have issues with drinking water. E-Coli outbreaks and prion contamination such as cryptosporidium can defeat our defenses. It requires a strong public service focus paired with solid investment in infrastructure to keep water clean in the developed world.
The Capitalist paradigm is to under-invest in water for decades and blame any shortfalls on public sector inefficiency. Then offer to buy out the water infrastructure at an undervalued price and turn it into a cash cow. Whereas for the Public Sector any single contamination incident is a major political incident when it comes to private operators they are happy to roll the dice with our health. As long as the Return on Investment is healthy they are happy to take chances with our safety.
In the developing world the problem is many times greater. One in eight humans in developing countries has no access to clean drinking water. Mortality and disease from water borne agents are major problems. Capitalist water operators bribe public officials to take control of the water and turn it into a revenue stream. It is effectively a form of theft by Western investors from the poorest of the poor in the developing world.
WATER INFRASTRUCTURE SHOULD BE ENSHRINED IN PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
What mystery pervades a well!; by Emily Dickinson
What mystery pervades a well! That water lives so far – a neighbor from another world residing in a jar
whose limit none has ever seen, but just his lid of glass – like looking every time you please in an abyss’s face!
The grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he can stand so close and look so bold at what is awe to me.
Related somehow they may be, the sedge stands near the sea – where he is floorless and does no timidity betray
but nature is a stranger yet: The ones that cite her most have never passed her haunted house, nor simplified her ghost.
To pity those that know her not is helped by the regret that those who know her, know her less the nearer her they get.
Today, being International Talk Like a Pirate Day I give you the most famous pirate song, a song that does not exist,
The chorus goes:
Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest— …Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest— …Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
The only lyric we have from the writer, Robert Louis Stephenson, is :
But one man of her crew alive, What put to sea with seventy-five.
Stephenson took the name of a cay in the Caribbean from a book by Charles Kingsley describing the Virgin Islands. Dead Man’s Chest became the seed from which grew Treasure Island. That book became the template for every pirate yarn ever since.
Over the years many people have put pen to paper to imagine what the other verses may have held but this was never a real sea shanty. Any you hear are fakes.
When Treasure Island was filmed in 1950 by Disney they cast Robert Newton as Long John Silver. Newton was a British Actor from Dorset in England. His exaggerated West Country drawl became the archetypal voice of piracy. Arrr Jim Lad! It be true.
Now, where’s me treasure map? I’m away to find the spot marked X.
-=o0o=-
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Today, as happens every day, hundreds of people are illegally riding Mexican trains bound for the US border. It is interesting to ponder the economics of Capitalism that have resulted in an economy of human trafficking, rape, murder and manipulation of power dynamics to engage in a form of exploitation in employment which is tantamount to slavery.
There is no passenger train that legally permits Mexicans to cross into the USA. Think about that. Why are civilians not permitted to legally cross from Mexico to the USA? “Borderlines: The Edges of U.S. Capitalism, Immigration, and Democracy” by Daniel Melo is worth a read in this context.
The USA was founded on cheap labour. The Capitalist dream began with contracts of indentured servitude of early colonists. This was reinforced by transportation of criminals to the nascent English colonies. The early successes from the English colonies came from Caribbean Sugar, Virginia Tobacco and Southern Cotton. The massive profits made on these crops were made possible by the African slave trade.
After the Civil War US style capitalism faced a labour crisis. Freed slaves felt they had rights. Legislators looked East to the old country for solutions from history. They borrowed heavily from the English suppression of the Irish in the 17th Century and the Irish Penal Laws. These were transcribed to the New World as the Jim Crow Laws and succeeded in maintaining a low cost workforce for another century.
In 1929 white supremacist Senator Coleman Blease made unlawful entry a misdemeanour and entering the country after having been deported a felony. In passing these laws he paved the way for the current jobs market for undocumented immigrants who are forced to operate in a shadow world of exploitation with the constant threat of arrest or deportation.
The Gig Economy is a natural result of illegal workers. Bogus self-employment contracts allow employers to sidestep tricky issues of employment law, minimum wages, social security, health insurance and social insurance. The Prison-Industrial complex in the USA is unique on the planet in turning the prison system into a profit centre. Profits made by locking humans behind bars are another form of slavery. It comes with the bonus of being able to offer prisoners as low-cost workers. More profits!
US foreign policy in South and Central America has reinforced the power imbalance by destroying progressive economic policies in Latin American countries. Socialist leaders, who might make life better for the poorest, risk denying the USA it’s unending supply of low cost labour. Every potential Peron or Allende is replaced with a Galtieri or Pinochet. The job of the CIA in Latin America is to ensure that the poorest people are very, very poor. Only someone desperate would risk riding La Bestia, the train of death, bound for the US Border.
Wind, Water, Stone; by Octavio Paz
Water hollows stone, wind scatters water, stone stops the wind. Water, wind, stone.
Wind carves stone, stone’s a cup of water, water escapes and is wind. Stone, wind, water.
Wind sings in its whirling, water murmurs going by, unmoving stone keeps still. Wind, water, stone.
Each is another and no other: crossing and vanishing through their empty names: water, stone, wind.
-=o0o=-
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September 14th 1607 is considered to be the date of the Flight of the Earls from Lough Swilly in Ireland. The more you read of history the more you question the “official” record of events, the dates, what exactly happened, who was or was not there.
One thing is certain they did not fly. They departed by ship. After the disaster suffered at the Battle of Kinsale Hugh O’Donnell left Ireland for Spain in 1601. He was seeking additional help from the Spanish to maintain their resistance against Elizabethan England. Red Hugh died in Spain in 1602 only one year before the death of Elizabeth, Queen of England.
In the aftermath of the loss of Red Hugh and with James I ascending the throne the Spanish seem to have reassessed their position. After departing from Donegal the Earls: Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell, made directly for Spain. Finding no welcome their they meandered from one court to another in Europe until they fetched up in Rome.
The lands of the O’Neill’s did eventually see flight in WW2 when the RAF stationed Flying Boats on Lough Erne. The Catalinas and Short Sunderlands were used to patrol the North Atlantic, primarily on U-Boat hunting duties. It was a Lough Erne Catalina that spotted the Bismarck in 1941 attempting to escape the North Sea for the rich hunting grounds of the North Atlantic Ocean. The mighty surface hunter became the hunted as the Royal Navy threw everything into their effort to prevent the Battleship from reaching port in France. That flight ended in the sinking of the German flagship.
In the late 1980’s I was doing a lot of sailing and I signed up to crew yachts and dinghies in a number of Dublin yacht clubs. I helped one guy to crew his GP-14 a couple of times. He decided to race in Lough Erne so I travelled with him with the boat on a trailer behind the car.
The Lough Erne dinghy club was located in one of the old Catalina hangars, which meant you could leave your mast and sail stepped and rigged and just park the boat trailer in the shed. I was impressed with the vast size of that hangar.
As for our sailing performance, we lost a bolt somewhere on the road and had to jury rig a solution which was not optimal. We were not frequent partners and when he leaned in I leaned out and vice versa. We capsized numerous times. Needless to say we did not collect any silverware.
My enduring memory of the weekend was returning to the Republic of Ireland via an unapproved road. There was a British soldier on duty at the border and he stopped us and asked what we were up to. My sailing partner, the boat owner and car driver, told him we spent the weekend sailing.
“Did you catch anything?” asked the squaddie.
“No, we weren’t fishing. We were in a dinghy race.”
“Fishing any good this time of year?” persisted the soldier.
“No, we weren’t fishing, we were sailing” insisted the skipper.
“So, was it mackerel you were after?” asks the very bored and mischievous trooper.
“No, I chimed in, it was a lake, we were after trout, but we didn’t get a bite all weekend.”
“Oh well, better luck next time. Safe trip.”
As he waved us on we flew out of there.
The Fish: By W.B. Yeats
Although you hide in the ebb and flow of the pale tide when the moon has set, the people of coming days will know about the casting out of my net, and how you have leaped times out of mind over the little silver cords, and think that you were hard and unkind, and blame you with many bitter words.
I stole the image from Elizabeth Floyd, the foxgloves mounted in earthen pots upon a pretty tablecloth. The blossoms dangle from their calyx like bells in a carillon. In his poem below Louis MacNeice paints a picture of a perfect moment suspended in time, a meeting with a special lady in a coffee shop with a table cloth depicting deserts, an ash tray decorated with a forest, crockery decorated with motifs of mountain streams flowing through heather. On the table a vase containing a bell shaped flower, maybe foxgloves?
Louis was born on this day in 1907 and died the year I was born. He was recording sound effects in caves on the Yorkshire moors and was caught in a rainstorm. He didn’t bother changing out of his wet clothes because his Irish mammy died when he was just a boy of seven. So he never learned that you must change out of wet clothes. And as a result he caught a cold and that turned into bronchitis and he was admitted into hospital with viral pneumonia and died only nine days short of this 56th birthday. This is why you must listen to your mother.
Meeting Point ; by Louis MacNeice
Time was away and somewhere else, there were two glasses and two chairs and two people with the one pulse (somebody stopped the moving stairs): Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down; the stream’s music did not stop flowing through heather, limpid brown, although they sat in a coffee shop and they were neither up nor down.
The bell was silent in the air holding its inverted poise — between the clang and clang a flower, a brazen calyx of no noise: The bell was silent in the air.
The camels crossed the miles of sand that stretched around the cups and plates; the desert was their own, they planned to portion out the stars and dates: The camels crossed the miles of sand.
Time was away and somewhere else. The waiter did not come, the clock forgot them and the radio waltz came out like water from a rock: Time was away and somewhere else.
Her fingers flicked away the ash that bloomed again in tropic trees: not caring if the markets crash when they had forests such as these, her fingers flicked away the ash.
God or whatever means the Good Be praised that time can stop like this, that what the heart has understood can verify in the body’s peace God or whatever means the Good.
Time was away and she was here and life no longer what it was, the bell was silent in the air and all the room one glow because time was away and she was here.
Mindship 