R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 24

Anne Hathaway after Whisky in Stratford

Husband dear please come to bed,
To-morn I’ll beat you on the head,
But if you want to hold me tight
I’ll let you do it just tonight.

Husband, brigand ne’er do well:
To-morrow you can go to hell
But if you friendly want to be
I’ll let you lie right next to me.

Varlot, skainsmate, rogue and whore,
I love you not, not any more
But if you want to hold me tight
I’ll let you do it for tonight.

Thou beetle-headed fen-sucked rat--
Thou crookpate clotpole qualling bat
Come kiss me lest I change my mind
And to another bed do wind.

What’s this you maggot pie, no take?
Thou hedgeborn unchin-snouted fake.
Get lost you tardy-gaited bore
And don’t forget to close the door.

Random Thoughts on Darwin Devotion

"The Darwin of the theory and the Darwin whose ideas informed modern evolutionary biology is one man in two undivine persons. A lot of good science can be taught without touching Darwin, just like a lot of good cosmology can be taught while still believing in God. The proof of this is that it happens every day. “Darwin” as a theory is not the basis for teaching the complex of disciplines we call the sciences...."

Read more...

The Departed

We were talking about Moses, and Osiris:
It could have been a game—‘things that floated
on the Nile.’ One was a slave
from a despised and petulant tribe
who grew up to be a lawyer;
one was a god, Isis’s lover, Isis the doomed,
the pitiful queen and dreamer and wife
whose endless tears flooded the land,
soaked the desert, and turned the Nile gray and blue—
so deep that her beloved’s coffin
could be floated out like a trinket, away to the horizon.
He would not return, not really:
Too much of him had been lost in the division.

Twenty one days, a magic number,
until I fly like a quiet griffon
into the darkening sky across the Nile, alone--
out of Egypt, above Jeddah, over Makkah, home.
The river I see today is that river,
full of tears, running with disappointment.
There are barges, barks—but no people go near
Because they know, Osiris will not come today.

While I wait she waits. She imagines
the days can be rolled out
like dough on a cutting board,
ever thinner, lasting until they are so thin
holes appear, and you start again—again.
There is always a new day, there is always Bukra,
days that can be made infinitesimal like silica
rubbed and rolled into eternity, regathered,
reshaped and rolled out again.

Oh, my Love!
The Worker of Days teases us into complacency--
whispers, tongue flicking, like the ancient villain,
that our murdered happiness can be put in baskets
for when we are old and restore us to life.
The flow of days and nights, a galactic trick
of lights made by the gods to have us think
One will always follow the other,
one is never without the other—Isis and her Osiris--
That in the end, day and night will rhyme;
No, no it will not all go to black
--After twenty one days, a magic time,
Osiris will again be seen; he will come back.

Daylight

Again, again the muezzins
bay at the sky
howling for God
to take the moon away,
because he is great
and Muhammad is his prophet.
And lo! the moon goes
fleeing before their prayers.
It is a miracle
and who can doubt it?
The sky turns orange
and the dust swells
on the ground and begins
its swirling domination
of the earth. The sellers
go to their stalls.
Parents check their childrens'
nails for grime
and pack them off to school.
Boys meet girls with downcast
eyes who giggle behind
modest palms at the sidelong glances
and the yearning
(oh the yearning).

All day long it will be this way,
donkeys and rickshaws and dust,
barbers on broken curbs
reading newspapers between
customers and prayer
until the muezzins ask God
to take the sun away
until the women bake bread
until we drink water again.

Santayana

George Santayana was the most distinguished American philosopher of his era and the new world's greatest intellectual re-gift to the old--a man who lived eight years in Spain, forty in Boston and forty in Europe.

He was the entrepot between classicism and the American form of naturalism that had its roots in the thought of the transcendentalism of New England, especially the works of Emerson. But even though he scoured the works of his teachers for ideas and inspiration, his own thinking transcends the pragmatism of his teachers Josiah Royce and C.S. Peirce.

A standard reference work recites that he was "...a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer."

It also needs to be said that he was the epitome of the kind of synthetic thinking that has been in steep decline since his death in 1952 and will probably never be equaled.

Santayana was not just educated at Harvard; he was completed in Boston and completed others. His students included the poets Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens; journalists and writers Walter Lippmann, Max Eastman, Van Wyck Brooks; academics Samuel Eliot Morison, Harry Austryn Wolfson, and scores of others.

At the age of 48 he left America for England and Europe and never returned. As late as 1929 Harvard urged him to come back by offering him the University's Norton Professorship of Poetry, its most senior professorship. Equanimously, after that, he refused offers of chairs at Oxford and Cambridge.

Santayana was a careful poet and the poets he taught in his classes are also known for the precision of their diction and the sharply etched, almost single- minded control of imagery. Though he was a cradle Catholic, Santayana's aesthetics were influenced by the puritan ghosts and the New England spare style that reigned in Boston. Language is not just sound (a feature he despised in both Longfellow--ironically Harvard's most famous poet in the nineteenth century--and Tennyson) but ideas incarnate and made beautiful again. Wallace Stevens captures this part of Santayana's philosophy in his tribute, "The Old Philosopher at Rome" written at the time of his teacher's death:

Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.

Here as a taste of Santayana's poetic fusion of the natural and the spiritual (classically understood as inseparable from our nature)is one of his most famous poems:

Premonition

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

A hidden light illumines all our seeing,
An unknown love enchants our solitude.
We feel and know that from the depths of being
Exhales an infinite, a perfect good.

Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow
And be not happy like a naked star,
Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow,
Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.

Our heart strings are too coarse for Nature's fingers
Deftly to quicken as she pulses on,
And the harsh tremor that among them lingers
Will into sweeter silence die anon.

We catch the broken prelude and suggestion
Of things unuttered, needing to be sung;
We know the burden of them, and their question
Lies heavy on the heart, nor finds a tongue.

Till haply, lightning through the storm of ages,
Our sullen secret flash from sky to sky,
Glowing in some diviner poet's pages
And swelling into rapture from this sigh.

George Santayana

A Year Poem

You sit down to write
the perfect new year’s poem.
Images: yes. ‘The darkling thrush
On this bright night no, better lush,
A bluebird doth become.’ Oh God,
what tripe, and you begin to nod,
What is a thrush? Is darkling dark--
Do they inhabit Regent's Park?
You have never seen a true blue
bluebird and as far as you know
they’re legendary. So no birds,
bells, sweet songs, looking backwards,
or ahead, oh joy (alas) the life misspent,
The month you couldn’t make the rent.
Why is a new year new when you, my dear,
are one year older. How unfair
that the world grows ever younger
while you can only sit and wonder
What what what is a thrush?

Rest in Peace 2013

Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is not the longest poem in the English language but it is the most agonizing to read.

Punctuated by moments of reflection, despair, uplift and serenity, it ends with a famous section that has become a poem in its own right, "Ring Out Wild Bells."

It's too bad in a way, this skiving off, because its ecstasy cannot be savored without going through the trauma of death and acceptance that Tennyson himself endured over the loss of his friend, Arthur Hallam who had befriended him at Cambridge.

It's safe to say that "In Memoriam" is a deliberate catharsis of the feelings of doubt and hopelessness that Tennyson felt, a despair he links consciously and liturgically to the passing of the year over a succession of Christmases.

New Year's has become the most trivial of holidays, but in human history from our earliest known epic right up through the story of creation in the Book of Genesis, written to be recited by priests, it is our most enduring human celebration.

It is all about death and renewal--a sort of Christmas, Good Friday and Easter packed into one unlikely holiday. It shows that what human beings want most of all is not eternal life but a new beginning--another chance. It sees death as a cutting off of opportunity and judgment as lived, conscious regret. That is why medieval theology defined punishment for sin as everlasting consciousness of sin--an eternity of lost chances. The New Year celebration was a perennial reminder that we must change our lives and change our minds: the "resolution" is the flimsy reminder of what was once a law of consciousness.

It is looking back in despair, as Tennyson does, and forward in hope--like Janus himself, the two-faced God who gave his name to this month.


Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/pr...

High Noon for Gun Control

My friend Joe Segor, whom I’ve had a couple of enjoyable evenings with in Miami, had a good comment on “A Secular Argument for Gun Control.” He writes:

“An excellent essay. Unfortunately, it won’t convince the gun nuts. Not even those who can understand the argument. The people at the top of the NRA are there to protect the arms industry. Most of the rest have a fanatical belief in the right to own firearms. A friend of mine is rational on every subject except guns. He is beyond persuasion.”

I couldn’t agree more. Usually I let my occasional comments rest quietly in the Comment section where they die a peaceful death in 24 hours (or earlier). But here is what I said to Joe:

“I doubt any gun nut would make it through the first paragraph, or even stumble on the site unless they think New Oxonian is a new British micro-brew.

There is only one good analogy for the cowardice and lack of moral resolve the national government shows in the stare-down with the gun lobby.

It’s is a scene we all know from watching too many Hollywood Westerns–a collage:

The good but morally conflicted tenderfoot sheriff from back East who takes the place of the former sheriff (who was last seen galloping out of town while the gittin’ was good) is trying to restore law and order to Dry Gulch.


But the town is held hostage by a gang of roustabouts who shoot first and ask questions later. And prefer not to ask questions. The sheriff asks them politely to put their guns away. They spit, take a slug of whisky and knock his hat off. Then they go upstairs to visit Miss Kitty, rob the bank (again) and ride out of town to terrorize some stage coaches hauling gold from Joplin to San Francisco.

The sheriff [strains of “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'”] wags his head and wonders why some men are just plain ornery. His glance becomes steely. He reaches to his side and remembers, he’s got a gun too–a gift from Aunt Emma in St Louis when she heard he was going to Injun country. By gum, he says, I’ll do it. “Somebody’s got to! I’m tired of being pushed. I think I ought to stay,” says Will.

In the movie, there will be a showdown between the sheriff and the quick-triggered outlaw in the black hat and matching whiskers, the smartest in a gang of eight whose next-smartest member can only count to five but can shoot a rattlesnake through the eye from half a mile away.

In Washington, there won’t be–a showdown I mean–even though that sad city is just as surely being held hostage by a gun totin’ mob as Dry Gulch. And just like in High Noon, they own the law, the lawmakers and a few judges. Hell, what kind of American are you effn you don’t carry a Bible in your right hand and a gun to defend it wif in your left.

It’s even worse than I just painted it, because the guys with guns–Joe’s gun nuts– probably love High Noon and they think they’re the sheriff. After all, don’t Gary Cooper solve his little problem because he knows how to use a gun? And don’t it make his pacifist Quaker wife Amy look like a silly stewing woman–until the end where she gets spunky and tussles with Miller to give the marshal a clear shot and BANG problem solved.

So pardner, whaddya reckon?

It isn’t the gun owners we need to go after: a lot of them can’t count to five either. It’s the gang. It’s the NRA with their belief that they own the law and the lawmakers and ain’t no sheriff strong enough to do nothin’ about it nohow. They seem to be right. Where is Grace Kelly (Amy) when you need her?

Know what I think? That the best line of that paradigmatic film belongs to Martin Howe: “The public doesn’t give a damn about integrity. A town that won’t defend itself deserves no help.” Aren’t we fickin sick of public outrage that lasts for two news cycles and then dies away? My argument, you’re right, will persuade no one in the Miller gang. But we have empowered them and we are too cowardly to take their guns away. And you can’t do that with guns. Apparently you can’t do it with votes either. This isn’t Hollywood: we are caught in a real life Western. Welcome to Hadleyville–Dry Gulch.

A Secular Case for Gun Control?

Presumably, a secular argument would be based, as the word implies, on the good of the state. It can be seen for example that in the history of civilizations, the state has always regarded it a cardinal good for persons to be secure from harm and, thus, that it is an obligation of government (“lawful authority”) to protect persons from injury, even when it is necessary to use force and violence to do this. To protect a majority of persons from injury, the state may inflict injury on others: Thus the state or lawful authority is empowered to punish criminals, send men to war, and sometimes ostracize, intrude upon or punish sub-populations thought to be dangerous to the common good. This is possible because the “common good” is not a settled term but a political one that has been understood differently in different times of national histories.
Kings and politicians routinely appeal to this and equivalent terms (e.g., “God and country,” “the American people”) which in fact are more metaphysical than real constructs.... more

Christmas in the Holy Qur'an

I was always told matter-of-factly that the Qur'an "mentions" the birth of Jesus and reveres Mary. Few people actually bother to read the beautiful descriptions of the excellence of Mary and the nativity, so offered here without comment are the relevant passages. The illustration is from a 16th century Turkish miniature depicting the Quranic story of Allah providing a date palm to nourish Mary in the desert

“And recite when the angels said, ‘O Mary, indeed God has chosen you, purified you, and chosen you above the women of the world.’ ‘O Mary, be devoutly obedient to your Lord and prostrate and bow down along those who bow down (in prayer).’ This is a part of the news of the unseen, which We reveal to you O Muhammad. You were not with them when they cast lots with their pens to decide which of them should take care of Mary, nor were you with them when they disputed.” (Quran, Surah 3:42-44)

The Good news of a new-born child

“And recite, O Prophet, when the angels said, ‘O Mary, indeed God gives you the good news of a word from Him, whose name will be the Messiah Jesus, the son of Mary, held in honor in this world and in the Hereafter, and of those who are near to God.’ ‘He will speak to the people in the cradle, and in old age, and he will be of the righteous.’ She said, ‘My Lord, how can I have a son when no man has touched me.’ He said, ‘So (it will be,) for God creates what He wants. When He decides something, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is. And He will teach him the Book and wisdom and the Torah and the Gospel. And (will make him) a messenger to the Children of Israel (saying), ‘Indeed I have come to you with a sign from your Lord. I make for you out of clay the likeness of a bird, then breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by the permission of God. And I heal the blind and the leper, and I bring the dead to life by the permission of God. And I inform you of what you eat and what you store in your houses. Surely, there is a sign for you in that, if you are believers. And (I have come) confirming the Torah that was (revealed) before me, and to allow you some of what was forbidden to you. And I have come to you with a proof from your Lord, so fear God and obey me. Indeed, God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him. This is the straight path.” (Quran 3:45-51)

“And recite in the Book the story of Mary, when she withdrew from her family to an eastern place. And she placed a screen to seclude herself from them. Then We sent to her Our angel (Gabriel), and he took the form of a well-created man before her. She said, “Indeed I seek refuge with the Most Merciful from you, if you do fear God.”[1] (The angel) said, ‘I am only the messenger of your Lord to give to you (the news of) a pure boy.’ She said, ‘How can I have a son, when no man has touched me (in marriage), and I am not a prostitute?’ He said, So your Lord said, ‘It is easy for Me. And We will make him a sign to people and a mercy from Us. And it is a matter (already) decided.’” (Quran 19:16-21)

The Virginity of Mary

“And she who guarded her chastity, so We breathed (a spirit) into her through Our angel, and We made her and her son (Jesus) a sign for the worlds.”[3] (Quran 21:91)

The Birth of Jesus

“So she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a remote place. And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, ‘I wish I had died before this, and had been long forgotten. ... Then the baby Jesus called her from below her, saying, ‘Do not be sad, Mother. Your Lord has provided a stream under you.’ Shake the trunk of the palm tree towards you, and it will drop on you fresh ripe dates. So eat and drink and be happy. And if you see any human, then say, ‘Indeed I have vowed a fast to the Most Merciful so I will not speak to any human today.’ Then she carried him and brought him to her people. They said, ‘O Mary, indeed you have done a great evil.’ ‘O sister of Aaron, your father was not an evil man, and your mother was not a fornicator.’ So she pointed to him. They said, ‘How can we speak to a child in the cradle?’ (Jesus) said, ‘Indeed, I am a slave of God. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.[4] And He has made me blessed wherever I am, and has commanded me to me pray and give charity as long as I remain alive. And (has made) me kind to my mother, and did not make me arrogant or miserable. And peace be upon me the day I was born, and the day I will die, and the day I will be raised alive.’” (Quran 19:22-33)

“Indeed, Jesus is like Adam in front of God. He created him from dust, then said to him, ‘Be,’ and he was.” (Quran 3:59)

“And We made the son of Mary and his mother a sign, And We gave them refuge and rest on a high ground with flowing water.”(Quran 23:50)

“And God gives as an example for those who believe, the wife of Pharaoh, when she said, ‘My Lord, build for me a home near You in paradise, and save me from Pharaoh and his deeds, and save me from the wrongdoing people.’ And (the example of) Mary, the daughter of Imran, who guarded her chastity, so We infused the spirit of Jesus into her through Our angel Gabriel. And she believed in the words of her Lord, and His scriptures, and she was of the devout ones.” (Quran 66:11-12)