I usually make the Buoy logos by "borrowing", i.e., stealing photographs etc from elsewhere but for a change a photograph that I thought would make a great logo the moment I saw it, taken by my friend Sgt. Joao Bambuman in the Brazilian outback. Go look at his Brazil photographs and then go visit him if you can!

Moooo...

Antville lacks an easy interface to dump information/raw data here, directly from the web browser. Couple this with my customary laziness for not recording encounters (I will be cursed to reconstruct all of them later like Proust because of this laziness perhaps?) in order to spead the 'good news' to others, and what you get is quite a dormant blog. Perhaps I should force myself to write a short missive here everyday, as an exercise in writing as well as to keep record of the stuff that knocks my neurons (dying, slowly dying) around.

So for today, as I tool around in Cyber-ia, for I am waiting for Godot, I bring to notice this museum exhibit in the British Museum (O Londoners, go go to this one!) on Ancient Persia:

www.nytimes.com

Interesting question this rises: can museum exhibits reconstruct history? I think not, for history is narrative stories (historians would grumble here that, yes but the story has to be based on verifiable conjuctures; to which the skeptic would snort, baah a bunch of verbose speculators) that we tell ourselves over and over again. So to change the story, the new story has to be told and accepted over the old, over and over again.

And this tasty beast poem, which I read before the above article on Persian art, for lunch today:

from Apollinaire's Le Bestiarie

Elephant

An elephant has got its ivory But I also have a treasury In my mouth... Words precious As the grandest tusks...

from a reading of a Paz’s essay titled “Reading and Contemplation”

1. The presence of multiplicity of languages as an attack on the unity of the mind, and the condemnation of Babel, in the Hebrew Bible, as a condemnation of plurality, and of the cosmopolitanism of that first pluralist city, Babylon:

Observe the parallels with ideologues (who usually happen to fall on the extreme ends of thought spectrum, who while they would like to think of themselves as loci, as centers, are essentially driven away from the messiness of centers, those locales of Mammon), in this case to the right, and their wish to keep the nation pure.

Here in the United States (consider Samuel Huntington’s recent characterization Hispanic immigrants to the United States as the enemy, posing a much stronger threat than any other enemy, for example the Chinese, to the (White) Anglo Saxon Protestant dominance of the world, made even worse because ‘they’ threaten from within. In this the scholar stands in complete agreement with Pat Buchanan’s brand of racist isolationism) or over there in India, by Hinduvata elements who wish to purge the country of all other religions, most notably of whom they label the historical oppressor and destroyer of temples – the Muslim .

Also isn’t this one of the central forces and justification offered by the Jihadist – reclaiming the lands of Islam by fighting and expelling the infidel, who happens to be predominantly Christian, from his midst? Also wasn’t this taken to the extreme by that curious religion of the Aryan Volk, and subsequent flushing of the undesirables, by making soap out of them, in those great factories we now call the concentration camps?

2. The prevalence of Glossolalia, or the speaking in tongues, in which languages doesn’t mean but is, across religions and cultures, suggests that this is indeed another of the human constants:

A discussion of the auditory powers ascribed to certain Sanskrit sounds, and their use as mental palliatives – the idea of a mantra as a sound that is tending towards silence. Also the glossolalia that accompanies the frenzied energy of certain religious dances and singing, during which perhaps thinking is short circuited, and man goes into a state close to music, that of pure form?

3. The rhythms of Glossolalia and their relation and similarities to rhythms inherent in poetry:

The certain pull exuded by that woman Pentecostal televangelist, who spoke in tounges, over her audience, which by accident had included on that date me, in large part over me because of the hypnotic and rhythmic power of her speech. One can very well hear these cadences in the speeches given by MLK Jr.

4. Glossolalia as parctized in literature by writers and poets, notably Lewis Carroll, with his jointed words exploding the multiplicity of possible meanings to a maximum, and those crazy experiments of James Joyce, who took this practice to the extreme (J.L. Borges had brought to my attention one particularly delightful combination: the glittergates of elfinbone).

Also more recently Galway Kinell in his introduction to some of his translations into English of Rilke’s German poems, pointed out that one of the central difficulties in the task was Rilke’s wonderful use of the ability to mix, match and weld together compound words in German, and the near impossibility to do so in versions of his English translations.

5. Valery on translation of poetry: the translator seeks to produce similar effects through different means. Also translation of religious treatises and documents with the aim of preservation and transmission of sacred truths:

Must look up that recently reviewed book on the making of the King James Version of the Christian Bible, and its impact on the English language. Also the role of a translator as a doorkeeper and that power that such a role that enables him to accumulate – after all isn’t this what the role of most priestly classes essentially is: translators between man and God, between man and the Word?