Discontinuous Poems

Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don’t begin thinking whether it feels.
I don’t force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
…….. it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
…….. without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
…….. valuable.
The value is there. In my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
…….. of mine.

by Fernando Pessoa
from the Poetry Foundation

Editorial note: Until I read this poem I’d never encountered a poem that so accurately expresses what writing a poem is, is about, or for that matter, what the creative experience itself is. —Jim

Lydia Denworth in Scientific American:

In September 2017, when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the storm first made landfall on a small island off the main island’s eastern coast called Cayo Santiago. At the time, the fate of Cayo Santiago and its inhabitants was barely a footnote in the dramatic story of Maria, which became Puerto Rico’s worst natural disaster, killing 3,000 people and disrupting normal life for months.

But more than three years on, the unfolding recovery on the tiny island has something interesting to tell us about the critical role of social connections in fostering resilience. Santiago is home to some 1,500 rhesus macaques who have been closely observed by scientists for decades. To everyone’s surprise, nearly all the monkeys survived the storm. That made their response to the devastation of Maria, which wiped out 60 percent of the island’s vegetation, an unusual natural experiment. How would they cope? How would the competition for resources—food and shade—play out? Scientists also wondered whether the trauma of having experienced the storm might make the animals strengthen their existing bonds. Would they solely rely on their closest friends, as many humans have had to do during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The monkeys reacted by changing their social order, it turned out. The macaques built broader and more tolerant social networks, according to a paper published today in Current Biology. “It’s a wholesale shift in the level of connectedness across the population,” says neuroscientist Michael Platt of the University of Pennsylvania, who is co-senior author of the study.

More here.

Isabel Kershner in The New York Times:

JERUSALEM — The annual Israel Prize ceremony is supposed to be an august and unifying event, a beloved highlight of the Independence Day celebrations that fall on Thursday this year. This being Israel, it is rarely without controversy. The latest ruckus goes to the heart of the political divides and culture wars rocking the country’s liberal democratic foundations even as it remains lodged in a two-year leadership crisis. The prize is the state’s most prestigious honor, traditionally awarded to 10 or more citizens or organizations for outstanding contributions to the sciences, culture and society. The scandal began about a month ago, when Education Minister Yoav Gallant, whose ministry oversees the prize, refused to honor one winner, Oded Goldreich, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Mr. Gallant, from the conservative Likud party, asserts that Professor Goldreich supports the international, pro-Palestinian campaign to boycott Israel, even though the professor has said he is neutral on the issue — now a touchstone of the dominant right-wing camp’s test of loyalty and patriotism. Over the years, the Supreme Court has fielded requests from outside critics to disqualify several laureates from across the political spectrum. This year, unusually, the selection committee that chose Professor Goldreich itself turned to the Supreme Court to complain that Mr. Gallant had overstepped his authority: The education minister grants the prize but has no say over the committee’s choices.

Wen Stephenson at The Baffler:

It’s hard if not impossible to imagine a figure of Weil’s stature in the intellectual and political culture of today’s left, the only region of the political spectrum where she might possibly fit. And not just because of her religiosity, which would of course instantly ghettoize her. It’s also because she’s so hard to pin down with any neat, easy label—or rather, because the labels are too many and apparently conflicting. (She’d be eaten alive on Twitter from all sides—or, worse, simply shunned and ignored.) “An anarchist who espoused conservative ideals,” Zaretsky writes in his opening pages, “a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a saint who refused baptism, a mystic who was a labor militant, a French Jew who was buried in the Catholic section of an English cemetery, a teacher who dismissed the importance of solving a problem, the most willful of individuals who advocated the extinction of the self: here are but a few of the paradoxes Weil embodied.”

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_k1UZ1GERM

Rozina Ali at The New Yorker:

Beyond erasing this diversity, casting Palestinian radicalism as innately Islamic severs resistance from the essential question of land and geography. The novel reflects this: Nahr’s status as the daughter of Palestinian refugees in Kuwait certainly affects her life—she is pushed out of an official dance troupe, and her family’s allegiance is suspected after Saddam Hussein’s invasion. But being Palestinian doesn’t take hold as a political reality until she lives in her ancestral homeland. What fuels her fight isn’t a divine commandment about good and evil; it is the land itself. Nahr observes settlers encroaching on a Palestinian village, and wonders how Bilal and his mother have been able to keep them away from their land. She visits her mother’s childhood home, in Haifa, and picks figs from a tree her grandfather planted, before being chased off by a Jewish woman who now lives there. She helps to redirect water from a pipe meant for settlers to the olive groves. There is violence inflicted upon this land, but Abulhawa centers its beauty: “I was content to just sit there in the splendid silence of the hills, where the quiet amplified small sounds—the wind rustling trees; sheep chewing, roaming, bleating, breathing; the soft crackle of the fire; the purr of Bilal’s breathing,” Nahr reflects. “I realized how much I had come to love these hills; how profound was my link to this soil.”

more here.

Yanis Varoufakis in Project Syndicate:

Imagine that the coronavirus pandemic, rather than undermining confidence in the European Union, had strengthened it. Imagine that COVID-19 had persuaded EU leaders to overcome years of acrimony and fragmentation. Imagine that it had catalyzed the emergence this year of a stronger, more integrated bloc to which the world looked for global leadership.

Imagine. It isn’t hard to do.

At the end of February 2020, two weeks before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the EU Council had already instructed the European Commission to coordinate Europe’s war against the coronavirus. Within days, the Commission compiled a list of essential gear in short supply across Europe, from protective equipment to intensive care units, and placed orders with manufacturers. It also convened Cov-Comm, a committee of top epidemiologists and representatives of EU public health systems to offer daily guidance. Liberated from the need to procure essential supplies and work out optimal travel and social distancing strategies, national governments concentrated on implementing the emergent EU plan.

More here.

Kalpana Sunder in Atlas Obscura:

It is a mango tree like no other. Standing tall in a nursery near Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, its massive canopy is large enough to seat 15 people for a picnic and its branches hang heavy with fruit. Unlike the young trees it towers over, though, the texture of the leaves on each branch is different: Some are dull green or olive green; others are glossy and vibrant. The mangoes on each branch look different too: round, oval, or kidney shaped, some green, some yellow, and others with hues of orange, pink, and purple. That’s because this magical mango tree grows more than 300 varieties.

Over a video call, Kalimullah Khan, 80, known as the “Mango Man,” introduces me to his creation. Stocky and bearded in a crisp, white kurta pyjama, he sits under its canopy and points out varieties, each identified by a tiny label on its green pedicle: Dasheri mangoes from a nearby village, Himsagar from West Bengal, Langra from Bihar. And of course the prized Alphonso mango, whose sweet, creamy, saffron-colored pulp is in high demand domestically and internationally.

More here.

John Palattella in The Point:

A year ago, there was no snow on the ground, and I was thinking about icebergs. “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,” begins the first stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Imaginary Iceberg,” and continues,

although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.

These lines came to me when I was reading, walking or cooking, was alone or sharing someone’s company, and they came in all kinds of weather. “The Imaginary Iceberg” is a poem that I love, although at the time I could not remember when I had last read it. Yet there it was, its first four lines on repeat in my mind’s ear, a phantom verse.

It was March and I was in Jena, a small city in eastern Germany. The nearest sea was 340 miles to the north; the nearest icebergs, at least 2,000 miles to the northwest. The nearest body of water was the river that meandered through my neighborhood and onward through fields of winter wheat. I lived in Jena for six months, and the only memorable bits of marble I saw there were the busts of Goethe, Schiller and Hegel perched atop columns on the university campus, where those men had once taught. Otherwise, Bishop’s lines reminded me of nothing I saw around me.

More here.  [Thanks to Holly Case.]

Empty Souls

…… Tibetan prayer flags
…… flap in the wind
…… no one to talk to

Why Tower Air? I ask as my husband packs a suitcase to get ready to attend his
mother’s funeral. Because it’s a bargain, he says.

Wouldn’t you rather fly a major carrier?

I pull a card from my Tarot deck. Out of the 78 possibilities, it’s the Tower that shows
up. Flames shoot from the top of a crumbling brick tower while a couple with shock
imprinted on their faces falls through the air, crowns flying. There’s no soft landing
in sight.

I plead with my husband to book with another airline, but he says he’ll be fine. I
shouldn’t put such faith in divination. As I entertain a couple of acquaintances, the
phone rings. My husband’s voice sounds far away.

…… dusk signals the jasmine to release its scent

I’m at Kennedy. We had to make an emergency landing. While flames shot from the
engine, the pilot told us to put our heads in our laps and brace for impact. The silence
was so thick, no one could make a sound. I took my wallet from my jacket, placed it in
the seat pocket facing me, just in case my body couldn’t be identified. And then I saw
a newspaper headline which seemed so vivid and real—son dies in plane crash after
attending mother’s funeral. It was the most bizarre experience. I thought my life was
over, that I’d never see you again. When we got off the plane, some people actually
kissed the ground. Everyone is shaken including the pilot’s wife. It was her husband’s
last flight before retirement.

While my guests stuff themselves on tacos and guacamole, I try to regain composure.
Don’t sweat the small stuff, they tell me. Get over it. Move on. Come eat. I want to
throw them both out but instead I bite my tongue until it aches. I count the minutes
until they’re out of my space.

…… the cat brings home a screech owl

I sense disappointment in my brother-in-law’s voice. Had there been a fatal accident,
he’d inherit all of the mother’s estate. I so need to vent, but my next-door neighbor,
who caught a blip about it on the news, is nonchalant.

During break in qi gong class, my husband tries to tell a classmate about the incident,
but the instructor glares at him as if to say, keep your sad stories to yourself.

…… The taste
…… of loneliness
…… evening meal

by Alexis Rotella
from Rattle #70, Winter 2020

Terry Hong in The Christian Science Monitor:

The announcement of a new Haruki Murakami title inspires gleeful anticipation: Will there be music (classical, jazz, Beatles – yes), baseball (certainly), local watering holes (take a seat), thwarted young love (indubitably), the impossible made ordinary (naturally), and … cats (meow)? The Japanese writer doesn’t disappoint in his latest collection to arrive stateside, “First Person Singular,” a phrase that also succinctly summarizes his preferred writing style: The eight stories are each revealed by a contemplative “I”-narrator. Over the 40-plus years Murakami has produced novels, short stories, nonfiction, and personal essays, he’s first and foremost a remarkably accessible storyteller. His books are an intimate invitation to revel in his perpetually unpredictable, yet remarkably convincing, imagination.

Take, for example, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” – the title already signals a willingness to suspend reality as monkeys don’t talk, much less confess. The plot outline could verge on the nonsensical: A traveler at a rural inn with hot springs; a low-voiced monkey offering back-scrubbing assistance; an evening sharing drinks, snacks, secrets; the narrator’s meeting five years later with an editor whose sudden inability to remember her own name confirms the lovelorn Shinagawa Monkey’s penchant for stealing women’s identities. Dubious …? And yet Murakami writes with such assurance as to turn the implausible credible, the outlandish engrossing.

More here.

Hope Jahren in Nautilus:

There exists a social hierarchy within science that strikes people who are not mixed up in it as ridiculous. It goes like this: Mathematicians are superior to Physicists, who are, in turn, superior to Chemists, who are of course, superior to Biologists. There’s also a pecking order within each of these disciplines. Take biology, for example: Geneticists are superior to Biochemists, who are superior to Ecologists. The system breaks down when we come to sociology, psychology, and anthropology and devolves into a debate as to whether the social sciences are really Sciences after all. Scientists arguing about whether a science qualifies as Science is more common than you might think. Zoom in, and you’ll see scientists arguing about who does (and doesn’t) qualify as a Scientist. Within the last five decades or so, it is generally accepted that more and more women have become Scientists, which implies that if we look back in time, there were fewer and fewer. This ultimately begs the question: Who was the first Woman Scientist?

Was it Marie Curie? She discovered the element radium, and later polonium, near the end of the 19th century. Does she count? After all, she viewed herself as more of an Artist: “The scientific history of radium is beautiful. And this is proof that scientific work must be done for itself, for the beauty of science,” she wrote in 1921. Was it Émilie du Châtelet? She formulated the existence of infrared energy. Does she count? She apologized often for not knowing how to say what she wanted to say. “I use everyday words here in contravention with propriety but cannot avoid the too-frequent return of the same word because, technically, there are both things and not-things that we call Fire,” reads a footnote on the very first page of her dissertation, written in 1758.

Was it Hypatia of Alexandria? She developed the mathematical technique of long division, which was cutting-technology during the fifth century A.D. Does she count? Hypatia taught men of great influence and highest government, and was eventually stripped, stoned, torn to pieces, and burnt to ashes for her trouble. Suidas, the 10th-century author of the first encyclopedia, devoted most of Hypatia’s entry to the debate over whether she died a virgin.

Was it the Neanderthal female whose name has been lost to time?

More here.

Jennifer Wilson at The Nation:

In a new collection of Gogol’s short stories, translated by Susanne Fusso, a professor of Russian studies at Wesleyan University, readers are reintroduced to the familiar cast of characters—identified by their rank, of course—that populate many of the Ukrainian author’s most celebrated works, including “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.” There are the titular councillors, the collegiate assessors, the section heads of unnamed departments, the recently promoted (and thus insufferable). In short, the book’s stories cover nearly all manner of pompous, status-obsessed, careerist bureaucrats. It could be said that the Table of Ranks defined Gogol’s narrative landscape, but what is also true is that Gogol in turn redefined the Table of Ranks for his readers, then and now. As the scholar Irina Reyfman notes, “To a large degree, the way people now think of the world of state service is determined by Gogol’s portrayal of it in his fiction.”

more here.

Christopher Turner at Cabinet Magazine:

To the untrained eye, Kinetography looks esoteric and occult, but to the few who can read it the complex strips of hieroglyphs allow them to recreate dances much as their original choreographers imagined them. Dance notation was invented in seventeenth-century France to score court dances and classical ballet, but it recorded only formal footsteps and by Laban’s time it was largely forgotten. Laban’s dream was to create a “universally applicable” notation that could capture the frenzy and nuance of modern dance, and he developed a system of 1,421 abstract symbols to record the dancer’s every movement in space, as well as the energy level and timing with which they were made. He hoped that his code would elevate dance to its rightful place in the hierarchy of arts, “alongside literature and music,” and that one day everyone would be able to read it fluently.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

One of the most intriguing moments in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s magisterial Tristes Tropiques of 1955 arrives when the anthropologist is playing with a group of Nambikwara children deep in Brazil’s interior. All of a sudden:

… a girl who had been struck by one of her playmates took refuge by my side and, with a very mysterious air, began to whisper something into my ear. As I did not understand and was obliged to ask her to repeat it several times, her enemy realized what was going on and, obviously very angry, also came over to confide what seemed to be a solemn secret. After some hesitation and questioning, the meaning of the incident became clear. Out of revenge, the first little girl had come to tell me the name of her enemy, and the latter, on becoming aware of this, had retaliated by confiding to me the other’s name… After which, having created a certain atmosphere of complicity, I had little difficulty in getting them to tell me the names of the adults.

But why, now, should the Nambikwara, who otherwise seem to be perfectly at ease with this anthropologist in their midst, seek to keep their “real” names secret? Why should a person not have a single all-purpose name for others to learn upon making their acquaintance? Is it not the essential purpose of names to enable us to refer to things and people correctly?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn’t think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take the time? But storytelling is a craft like any other, with its own secret techniques and best practices. Charlie Jane Anders is a multiple-award-winning novelist and story writer, but also someone who has thought carefully about all the ingredients of a good story, from plot and conflict to characters and relationships. This will be a useful conversation for anyone who tells stories, reads books, or watches movies. Maybe you’ll be inspired to finally write that novel.

More here.

Blake Smith in Foreign Policy:

For nearly half a century, Lévy has been one of the most visible public intellectuals in France and a master at manipulating philosophical and political controversy. With his good looks and outsized ego, Lévy is a compelling performer. He is also an irresistible target for critics from the left, right, and center. The inaccuracies and incoherencies of his voluminous body of work have been exposed in a number of unflattering biographies, of which the best is Philippe Cohen’s 2005 book BHL. The media’s tendency to thus refer to Lévy by his initials, BHL, suggests that he is, like LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), an iconic national brand—and perhaps nothing more than a label. Since the earliest days of Lévy’s career, rivals have denounced him as a cynical, vacuous pseudo-philosopher who puts intellectual culture in the service of self-aggrandizing spectacle.

More here.