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Parting Words from Moristotle (07/31/2023)
tells how to access our archives
of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues,
essays, reviews, interviews, correspondence….
The right to vote
By Ed Rogers
We have all placed our trust and hope on one candidate or the other at some time in our life—if you haven’t, why vote at all? The right to vote has forever been in the hands of the rich. White Americans never questioned the right to vote until the voting act of 1965. Outside of the South, people seemed to believe that everybody was voting who wanted to vote. But in the South, citizens with money pretty much controlled who got elected, and they controlled who was allowed to vote. A number of blocks were placed in the road to guarantee white control. From Wikipedia’s article on “Voting rights in the United States”:
Only the dead know
By Ed Rogers
As a young man, I didn’t give much thought to death or dying. However, as you get older you begin to notice people who are younger than yourself passing away.
Que sera, sera
By Rolf Dumke
“That mysterious flow,” wrote Paul Davies about time in the February 2006 Scientific American. We all experience it as an unstoppable flow from a given past to a flighty present, onwards to an unknown future. But, he argues, for physicists this is a mere illusion: time does not fly or flow. It merely exists. See Davies’s book, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1995, Simon & Schuster).
Speaking out
By Ed Rogers
I guess that seeing the world in a totally different light than the talking heads, and most people from my home state, I’m expected to keep quiet. However, I’m tired of hearing the same old crap and saying nothing.
Its paradoxical aesthetic asymmetry
By Rolf Dumke
What fun to read your philosophical-historical query on why is there something rather than nothing!
Modern physicists have indeed analyzed why there is something. According to the latest theories, the initial Big Bang should have created exactly the same amount of matter and anti-matter – i.e., in symmetry – at the first moment of explosion. And these should have immediately combined to eliminate each other, eliminating everything that had been created in the first tenzillionth squared of a second.
Interlude
By Morris Dean
This column's regular host, Eric Meub, is taking a pause from musing. In the interim, we'll be using his Third Monday slot for whatever other musings might come along, keeping the slot readily available for Eric's brand of musings whenever he's ready to start again. We all look forward to his return.
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| Eric Meub is away |
In retrospect
Edited by Morris Dean
Eric Meub is away on architectural assignment. It's a good occasion for us to catch up with his musings and return to any of his previous columns we may have missed or just wish to savor again:
By Eric Meub
Sister Susan finds these Musings difficult. She claims the fault is hers. That’s just her way of being gracious. I know my failings far too well to imagine that a turbo-charged conversationalist like Susan should find a properly constructed Musing difficult. So let us build a better Musing. Here are some suggestions:
The dove-tailed world
By Eric Meub
Hugh Kenner, in The Poetry of Ezra Pound, gives us a formula for metaphor:
A/B : C/D
Metaphor, says Kenner, “affirms that four things (not two) are so related that A is to B as C is to D. When we say ‘The ship ploughed the waves’, we aren’t calling a ship a plough. We are intuitively perceiving the similarity in two dissimilar actions: ‘The ship does to the waves what a plough does to the ground.’” This gives us:
Shockspeare
By Eric Meub
You probably know everything you need to know about Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Not too long ago I thought I did too. My Norton Anthology of English Poetry contains thirty of them. (My Complete Poems and Plays of William Shakespeare includes them all, of course, but I have a hard time turning such thin pages, so I favor the Norton.) As of a month or so ago, I had read probably half of the thirty, including some skimming. In the numbering of the Sonnets one can see that Shakespeare wrote quite a few (154 of them, in fact, when I glanced at the notes), but thirty were enough for me. Could there really, I thought, be anything profoundly different in the other 124? Shakespeare’s Sonnets are such a cornerstone of culture: don’t we all know them, to some extent, the way we know the Mona Lisa?
The last word
By Eric Meub
There are sentences I come across that stop my pulse, like a precipice across the trail. I have to set the book aside and take a breath. I look out the window, try to hear if there’s a bird somewhere, then slowly settle back into my skin again. I read one of these sentences recently in Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems. It was near the end of a poem titled “Merengue”:
Exclusion
By Eric Meub
1. I’m writing this in Mecca. Let me clarify: I am sitting at a conference table in a university whose grounds lie within the metropolitan limits of Mecca. I am not, however, within the precinct of the Holy Capital, the spiritual center of Islam and the most important city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where entrance is forbidden to non-Muslims. On all sides of the university campus, I can see the infrastructure and venues for the yearly hajj, the act of devotion each Muslim must make once in a lifetime, when over a million pilgrims flood the region for a week of fastidious following in the footsteps of the Prophet (‘alayhi s-salaam – or “Peace be upon him” – should be uttered after any mention of his name).
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| Matthew Arnold |
The continuing relevance of Matthew Arnold
By Eric Meub
Edith Sitwell once famously quipped that the only people who like Matthew Arnold’s poems are precisely those who dislike poetry. Time has not agreed with Miss Sitwell: Arnold’s work remains, unlike her own, securely within the canon. But there is some truth in her remark. Arnold was not primarily a poet of craft; he was a poet of thought. And his thoughts often found more fruitful expression in his later prose.
Remembering Tom Bombadil
By Eric Meub
A recent weekend witnessed the opening of the second installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy: The Desolation of Smaug. While millions of us will watch the director continue to indulge his limitless thirst for vertigo, this is also an excellent time to muse upon those fragments of the J.R.R. Tolkien opus that have escaped such cinematic spectacle.
Interior journeys: Reading stream of consciousness
By Eric Meub
[This is the first of Eric Meub's new monthly column.]
Why is Great Modern Literature at times so difficult to read? The challenges can range from elevated diction and obscure references to, occasionally, the total absence of a plot. My hardest struggle with the modern masterpieces, though, involved a narrative tool that’s known as interior monologue or stream of consciousness. This literary device locks the reader inside a character’s head: truly inside, with less of the “he thought…” or “it occurred to him…” of more conventional writing. In interior monologue, the reader listens to thoughts that play out in a fictional character’s consciousness in the order they occur. It’s sloppier than mind-reading and far more invasive. But the power of such a literary experience transcends our concepts of “a good read.”
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