Greer Gilman's Blog, page 40

The gods at play

Voragine crater, Mount Etna, 3 December 2015.

Awesome.

Nine

Will you still be sending me a Valentine?

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

A bit stony underfoot this year, but Pinewoods was a lovely retreat: an island "full of noises, sounds and sweet airs."

Hope the next stretch brings orchards, outlooks, and riverbank picnics. There isn't a map.

Nine

"This is the strangers’ case..."

Shakespeare at work, play-patching, on Sir Thomas More:  we think.  The language, both by intuition and sophisticated tests, is his; the quirks of spelling ("scilens," "strainger," "sealf") are his; the idiosyncratic hand is not a copyist's, but someone's who makes running changes as he writes:  it matches all the little cluster of quirks we know from Shakespeare's signatures.  And as Shakespeare will, this passage goes on speaking, now and now and now.

He pleads for refugees, for strangers.

Here Ian McKellan speaks a bit of the scene, and tells us why it matters.  (He slips a little on his history of religion.)




Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

[...]

                        O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you like rebels lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven!

[...]

                       You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.

Nine

Widening gyre

Ongoing anonymous bomb threat here: three buildings have been cleared for re-entry, a fourth is still being searched. Helicopters are circling. Last time this happened, the perpetrator was an idiot sophomore who hadn't studied for a final exam, and thought he'd play for time.  This time?  Much more worrying.  I live in a target, a paradise of free thought.

Yes, it's infuriatingly smug and over-privileged. But here are all genders and all races, the godless, godly, and uncertain, studying (and sleeping) together.

"Madam, I am civilization."

Nine

Update 5:36 pm: All clear.

9

"Tossed by the waves but not sunk."

The arms of Paris, as drawn by Joann Sfar of Charlie Hebdo.  The full sequence is here.

Nine

L'Heure Bleue

Paris remembered.

Nine

Scholarly exercise

Rule 39:  Any book that you suddenly need on a wet night, 25 minutes before the Circ. Desk closes—say, a volume of Erasmus's Colloquies—will be shelved on P3.  That means a half-mile scurry and slither on dead leaves; up the endless black waterfall of stone steps (and don't even think of falling down them or you will); card point; trot; card point; trot; down four flights; through a long tunnel; down another flight; to the end of the stacks, where—whoever wrote this episode should DIE—it's all electronic shelving that could crush you FLAT like a flower in a quarto.  To make the thing less like Galaxy Quest, they've thoughtfully installed safety swtches, which mean you have to run up and down the aisle looking for whatever blinking button is holding up the works and punch it.  Mellon. Then the whole apparatus parts and rolls back, creaking like the crypt.  At least the light went on this time.  I've found books in the pitch dark before.

And I made it to the Circ. Desk—puffed and dishevelled—at 9:43.

Nine

Ephemera

A trove of undelivered letters "from aristocrats, spies, merchants, publishers, actors, and musicians," written between 1680 and 1706, is being studied in the Hague.

I can hear this as a polyphonic story, a formally constructed fugue of voices.

Nine

Unleaving

Elms sparkle.

Nine

Ablaze

All Hallows Day:









After All Souls:







Nine