Eggs Laid by Tigers

Monday, February 16, 2009

 

Talib in Swat




The New Your Times today reported on a cease-fire agreement between the Palistan government and the Taliban in Swat.

A Tanib condition of a permanent cease-fire is the imposition of Shariah law in Swat. Shariah law is already the defacto law of the district, with horrifying punishments of it announced on the Talib-congfoled radio station there.  The Palistan governemnt says it is "dispotching more judges" to ajudicate disputes, as if tthat will help.

This may be good news for the US; it is bad news for all residents of Swat who are female or who wish to shave a beard.

It will be interesting to see if the Talib findamentalists succeed imposing their fufundamentalist,, Old Testiment views on Chitral, with its long history of independenc nd its yak-riding polo players.

Swat is beautiful; it was, befure the Taliban incursion, a popular resort area.  would like to visit there and hope I may some day.  I don't like the Talibs.  They remind me of Rick Warrem, only worse.  Self-righteous pricks.
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Swat:
 



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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

 

I feel pretty










I feel pretty, 
Oh, so pretty, 
I feel pretty and witty and bright! 
And I pity 
Any girl who isn't me tonight.

Do you feel pretty?  Handsome?  Good-looking?  Attractive?

Humans have been trying for centuries to define what is is that makes one face seem attractive and another not.

This blog is devoted to some of the forms of beauty that surrounds us.  Warning:  some beauty is accompanied by horror: facing that may make us freer than we are.









Plato believed the “golden proportion” was the key to a good-looking face and to buildings and pots and everything else..  He applies the same formula to the ideal forms of man.  A man's body was considered a creation, just as the modern gyms would have us believe.  (You may note that, the modern ideal form of a man -- a bit freakish in its extreme definition -- is remarkably similar to Plato's ideal.)


  
 Would old man Plato be pleased, were he alive today?







". . . eying the grocery boys . . . " Ginsberg says about Walt Whitman
















Do any of you  prefer beautiful form in a grotesque frame?  Goya does.  


An art history professor of mine once rebuked a student for admiring the beauty of Goya's "line".  Was he right to do so?

 Width of the ideal face would be two-thirds its length and the nose no longer than the distance between the eyes, says Plato.  Science News, Feb, 2009.

Percy Bysshe Shelley thought this about beauty:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye 
need to know.'

(If you read the whose poem Shelley's words will make more sense that the circularity of the quotation.)  


Shelley's is a very different idea of beauty from the classical definition.  Gone are the sexual implications so cleverly hidden.  Gone is any visual representation at all. What could be more asexual than Truth?

Well, the Romantic painters made Truth manifest, in their view.  There are thousands of examples.  Here are four of mine.  If you decide to Comment on this Blog, you can probably add a few of yours.































And an all-time favorite; I fell in love with this painting in an Art History class during my Fourth year in Law School, after I had, once more, irrevocably decided that I would not become a lawyer, and before the professor told me that one must be independently wealthy to have a successful career in Art History -- my poor, longsuffering Dad, who never uttered a word of complaint [i mention all this for you young'uns who are uncertain what course life should take:  never fear, it will take a course, will he nill he, whether wisely or no, and you will arrive at a safe harbour where you can while awaty time doing a you please, provided tyou have, along the way, happened upon a satisfactory -- or at lease a satisfying -- philosophy.].



Whole generations of your ancestors, (if your ancestors spoke English) grew up believing Shelley.  Complete philosophies, favored by Germans, internally consistent though nonsensical, wee developed on Shelly's axiom.  

I was, in one of my many youths (hoping to cease not being young 'til death), taken with the notion of a pure, beautiful Truth. Truth, by way of Ralph Waldo Emerson ("When Duty whispers low, Thou must, the youth replies, I can."), was one of the more honorable things that lead me to vlunteer for the Dtaft, to fight in Truman's Police Action to Defend Korea Against Communist Aggression.   Romance was, then, still humming in our ears 150 years after Shelley's death.

Hard science now clears and clouds the air.  Romance is deader than a door nail, except in the hearts of those who love, with a passion exceeding all other passions, our President.  Science and its brother, Rational Thought, lets us see, with blinding clarity,  the beauty of hings never seen before, and think deep, near-magical, almost-incredible thoughts never thought before;they, Science and Rational Thought, show us errors of thought and action more certainly than was ever before possible; and makes those errors many time more horrible that at any time since Vladthe Impaler.  

Sad to see Romance leave, but it left a mess.  The Romantic movement was as incapable of dealing with the horrors of their wars as tour own counter-cultural movement was of dealing with ours.  Smoking weed is not a way of dealing with horror, tbut of forgetting about it -- though I'll admit that oblivion for a time was bliss.  And the sex was great.

The Science News article referred to before proves that, no matter what your race, culture, age, sexual preference, or gender, one face-- and one face alone -- is beautiful. The studies (which, of course, Tim, rely completely on computers for validation) are exhaustive and conclusive.  You cannot be modern and not accept the outcome, whatever your personal idiosyncratic, odd-ball preference maybe.

You ant proof?  Here's proof.


"Research shows that a composite face -- one that is made by mathematically blending individual faces -- is more attractive than the faces that are combined to make it (minus the hair, of course). Above, the six smaller faces have been blended to create the middle image. Scientists say this technique evens out features, hides any irregularities and smooths out skin tone."

Ya got it.  Only if your face resembles one blended by a computer can it be thought to be truly beautiful.

I must say that one or two of you have beautiful faces, even by Science's standards.


BUT 

"The world is half the devil's and my own."
(We'll get to the author in good time.)

When's the first time you fell in love?  I mean truly, head-over-heels in love?  Lusty kind of love.  Do you remember the face of your beloved?  Of course you do.  And did you afterware fall out of love?  I'm sure most of you did.  

Do you remember how, then, when you fell out of love, you noticed the blemishes, the ordinariness of the face of him whom you loved (some of you may have to substitute gender for the rest of this to make sense)?  

Have you ever had the experience of being in lust and not in lust with the same person at the same time, so that at one moment he may seem the most beautiful creature on earth and the next he may seem ordinary, even unattractive?

You have, you know what I'm talking about.  Beauty springs from an intense relationship, personal or in fantasy.  

And beauty also springs from warmth, affection, sharing, care, respect -- all the things that go into a deep friendship. When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes . . .

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the Lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings
 hymns at Heaven's gate

See below

Good friends are beautiful, faces melded as by a computer or no. Hapily, by chance and the good offices of the email, I think of good friends often.

Then consider good friend Al Valerio.  PFC Al Valerio. 

 
We shared a tent one bitterly cold winter in Korea.  I got to know Al we well as one can know another in 12 months of enforced close proximity..  Nice face on Al, huh? Good kid, too.  From New York, an Italian neighborhood, teeming with life and vitality; a sweet girl waiting for him; dying of loneliness and boredom cooped up in a 12-man tent with no where to go, nothing to do. unending month after month.  Sweet, unhappy kid.

Our mission, Al's and mine, was to fire 81 mm mortars st Gooks on the other side of the DMZ (the demilitarized zone, which has just been established beterrn us good guys and the Gooks.)  Their mission, od course, was to fire mortars at us.  We were each zeroed in on the other.

If the North Koreans had fired on us, would I have fired back?  You bet I would have;  if they came swarming across the DMZ ((we thought of them that way:  Gooks; swarming) and threatened Al's life, would I have killed to protect him and me? Every Vet knows the answer to that.

And yet . . . 

And yet,vodiess blown to bits, mangled, eyes burned out -- the horrors of f Hell.

We didn't use White Phosphorus in those days, but it was  demonstrated for us; we saw its effects; we knew what to expect if a speck were to land on us.  We were prepared because no telling what the Monsters on the Other Side would use.
















We used it in Iraq. 

 


White Phophorus is appropriate for the Sixth Level of Hell, except the burns don't last forever.  A speck of white phophorous lands on your arem, say, and it feeds of the mousure it generates until it burns clean through your am.  Then it may land on your leg and it'll burn right through your leg.  It lands on top of your head, Good by, but a pretty slow, horrible Good by. . . .

War speaks of another kind of beauty that we love, even you and I, more than life itself.  No use denying it.

As our lovely trator, Ezra Pound sings

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

Ah yes!  The 'ol Shock an Awe.  How we love it!


Can't say it better than 'ol Pound the Facist and one of our greatest poets:

"Then houl I ma heart nigh mad with rejoycing."

Do you hear me,Bushco?  I hate you.  I despise you.  Thate you and the horse you road in on.  And I am you.  How can I deny it?  I would have killed.  I would have committed s every act of savagery if one of Them attacked Al or Jack or any of the guys in my tent.

"May God damn for ever all who cry 'Peaxe'!"  Pound in his ire.  I have smelt but not tasted that bitter brew and I know it lies in me to drink of it if mad beauty comes on me. 

And that is how wars get fought in a paroxysm of mad, dark beauty, followed by drink and drungs and brutal sex and child abyse and whatever comes handy to blot out images that will ot fade; until, in you[re patient, peace at last comes. 

(Well, it doesn't completely explain Bushco, all of whom dodged the draft; none of whom ever wore the Uniform, none of whom smelt that bitter brew.  No.  It doesn't explain a cold-blooded lust for war.  No.  That I don't understand.  I don't find that in me.  What bitter brew do they drink?  Do you understand them?  Do you find hem somewhere in you? 
(It's a human lust,alright.  To order cole-blooded killing is human.  To celebrate it and justify it is, too.  I would like to understand all things human.  Mad men kill in cold blood.  I sorta understand madness.  But if our leaders are mad, madness different from clinical descriptions in the AMA's Diagnostic Manual.)

War's savage beauty of another sort, and killing, and one we can't dismiss with a shrug and turning away:  that's not me; that's some other guy.  I'll bet it's you, each of you, in the right circumstance.

So back then,  them Gooks didn't look pretty to me or to any of us.  They looked, in our mind's eye. pretty ugly.

And so did the South Korean souldiers who served right along side of us.  They were utterly foreign to me, odd and an odd habit of kicking each other.  Texans didn'tkick.  It's women who kick, I thought back then  But the Koreans, standing in the chow line, kicked each other.  How could I understand that?  When I was in Korea, I couldn't recognize indivual features.  As we say in Hawaii, "All those Houlis look alike."  

It wasn't until last year that I looked at some pictures I brought home from Korea that I discovered that the Korean soldiers look just like folks I know and love here in our IIsland Paradise.  The kid on the left is, in my mind's eye, beautiful; he looks like one who ended up in the our legislature.

If you grew up in Hawaii or sprnt time here, you'll know what I mean.  Human, right?  Ordinary folks, just like you and me.

For the truth is that there is no more than six degrees of separation between me or you and anyone on earth  (I don't try to understand this.  I just take it on trust.  Sorta made sense until I looked at the wikipedia chart:
 
Mathematics is another kind of beauty forever hidden from my view.  I don't think it's based on human intimacy, but I won't pass judgment on what is forbidden to me.  It may be that the beauty of mmathematics becomes nanifest when a deep discovery is shared with a collegue, but I doubt it.  One of you who sees the beauty of mathmatics, tell how it is..

Friends are beautiful; enemies are brutes; and then they're not.  War is beautiful, then it's horrible.  

Beauty is not, I think, in the eye of the beholder but in the kind and quality of the relationship you have with another and with the world, for good or ill, provided you allow the relationship to reach a degree of intimacy that transports you away from whatever you may think of as normal. 

Or , when it is good, it generates on the zing in your heart.  And haply, as I think ofall of you, my heart zings; and when I think of my kinsmen, none more than six degrees of separation away, ,beaten, starving, eaten away by human and other creatures of the Earth, my heart pains and aches.  

Hearts do not nreak, 
They pain and ache

But we cannot be too serious for too long.

Katisha, a battleship of a woman, sings those lines.  My grandmother was such a woman. I have a deep, abiding fondness forlarge, formidable women.  

Katishafinds Ko-Ko, as Ko-Ko realized when the alternative is beheading (The Mikado):

Katisha:

There is beauty in the bellow of the blast,
There is grandeur in the growling of the gale,
There is eloquent outpouring
When the lion is a-roaring,
And the tiger is a-lashing of his tail!
Ko-Ko:
Yes, I like to see a tiger
From the Congo or the Niger,
And especially when lashing of his tail!
Katisha:
Volcanoes have a splendour that is grim,
And earthquakes only terrify the dolts,
But to him who's scientific
There's nothing that's terrific
In the falling of a flight of thunderbolts!

Ko-Ko:
Yes, in spite of all my meekness,
If I have a little weakness,
It's a passion for a flight of thunderbolts!
Corus

If that is so, Sing
Dreey down 
Derry!  It's ecident 
verey, Our thoughts
are one. . . . 

So . . .  away let's go sing Derry down Derry to a very Good Night.  Dream lustilly of saints and deamons, beauty and the beast.  

"The world is half the devils and my own."

We are all of them, all the time.  When I can be all, all at one time, I hope wisdom will come, and just maybe some day we'll stop hurting each ouher, except on the football field or in the bedroom.  Hee hee.
___________________________________________________________

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self­conscious
looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the
tomatoes!­­and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the
watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing
the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the super­market
and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue au-
tomobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage­teacher, what Amer-
ica did you have when Charon quite poling his ferry and you got out on
a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on black
waters of Lethe?

­­­­­Allen Ginsberg
____________________________________________________

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

Shall it be male or female? say the cells,
And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.
If I were tickled by the hatching hair,
The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,
The itch of man upon the baby's thigh,
I would not fear the gallows nor the axe
Nor the crossed sticks of war.

Shall it be male or female? say the fingers
That chalk the walls with greet girls and their men.
I would not fear the muscling-in of love
If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.
I would not fear the devil in the loin
Nor the outspoken grave.

If I were tickled by the lovers' rub
That wipes away not crow's-foot nor the lock
Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies
The sea of scums could drown me as it broke
Dead on the sweethearts' toes.

This world is half the devil's and my own,
Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
An old man's shank one-marrowed with my bone,
And all the herrings smelling in the sea,
I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail
Wearing the quick away.

And that's the rub, the only rub that tickles.
The knobbly ape that swings along his sex
From damp love-darkness and the nurse's twist
Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,
Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast
Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six
Feet in the rubbing dust.

And what's the rub? Death's feather on the nerve?
Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?
My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?
The words of death are dryer than his stiff,
My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.
I would be tickled by the rub that is:
Man be my metaphor.

Dylan Thomas
______________________________

When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate.
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the Lark at break of day arising)
From sullen earth sings hymns at Heaven's gate,
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with Kings.

Wm Shakespeare

______________________________________________________________


by Ezra Pound

Loquitur: En Bertrans de Born.
Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a
stirrer-up of strife.
Eccovi!
Judge ye!
Have I dug him up again?
The scene in at his castle, Altaforte. "Papiols" is his jongleur.
"The Leopard," the device of Richard (Cúur de Lion).

I

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

II

In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth's foul peace,
And the lightnings from black heav'n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God's swords clash.

III

Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour's stour than a year's peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there's no wine like the blood's crimson!

IV

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing.

V

The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth's won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.

VI

Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There's no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle's rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges 'gainst "The Leopard's" rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace!"

VII

And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot black for always the thought "Peace!"

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Lest you think Pound is always entranced  with the beauty of ire, I give you one of my favorites:

The Lake Isle

1 O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
2Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
3With the little bright boxes
4 piled up neatly upon the shelves
5And the loose fragment cavendish
6 and the shag,
7And the bright Virginia
8 loose under the bright glass cases,
9And a pair of scales
10 not too greasy,
11And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
12For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

13 O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
14Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
15 or install me in any profession
16Save this damn'd profession of writing,
17 where one needs one's brains all the time.
_______________________________________________________________

I like the Pound poem -- how often I have prayed to lose "any profession save this damed profession" that I happened to find myself in!
 
And I also like Pound's poem because of its echo, too clever for words, clever as a mathmatician, of the more famous Lake Isle poem:

The Lake Iske of Inisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

* * * * *

Here's the Lake Isle:



and here's the pavement grey: [Good Lord! is there nothing you can's find on google?]



_______________________________________________________


If you gooogle "Dery down Dery" you'll get many an obscure and interesting hit.  Google it if obscure English Literature interests you.


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