Rhinostrich

Aerodynamic Drag

Alas, the lowly rhinostrich, wings stretched as if for flight,
for its nosecone's lost its function in some oriental plight.
Extra Pound
looks around,
but finds no monkey wrench to reach in extricable sight.

It's a travesty!

No Limerick to Tickle Your Fancy?

I don't want to constantly 'pound' on Ezra, so here's a non-Ezra-pounding limerick:

Deadwood Lime

I once had a wood rick or two,
Till a big log fell onto my shoe,
While my foot was still in it,
Such a foot-pound ill bent it,
And left me a lime rick to do!

Inspired by Puns that Tickle Only the Eye . . .

Writer's Block 5: Truth Triumphant?

John Milton

Temple of British Worthies
Stowe

I'm still suffering writer's block, which has inspired another poem, this one drawing upon Milton's Areopagitica and his Sonnet 12, the two of which seem together to conjoin a view of truth as always discernable with a view of truth as not always discernable, a consequence of our rebellious nature:

Writer's Block 5: Truth Triumphant?

If every sort of doctrine were loosed
upon the world, as seems to be the case,
could truth fend truly in that steeplechase
and run unimpaired, even without a boost?

Do not we all misdoubt her doubtful strength,
not having seen her with all falsehood grapple,
for we've seen how, with that one false apple,
sure put to worse was truth, and at great length?

Now good and evil grow inseparably,
and Adam's judgement is this one great doom,
to judge, as twixt twins leapt forth from the womb,

the taste of good and evil from the tree
that brought in death and made the world a tomb.
But still revolts the man whom truth set free.

This is where Milton leaves us -- in a moral quandary, our doom! We judge good and evil by means of the good and evil we experience within ourselves, in what we attain as good or commit as evil. Or so thinks Milton . . .

I've heard of tree huggers, but . . .

Richard Torres and Blushing Bride
Google Images

. . . few of them get serious enough to tie the knot! Richard Torres, however, has just married a tree:

Peruvian environmental activist Richard Torres . . . pose[s] for a photo during a symbolic marriage to a tree . . . . Torres invited [people] . . . to care for trees . . . . Torres says that he intends to take his message of saving the environment to other Latin American countries. (Yahoo News, 2014)

He's actually an infamous tree-polygamist and has probably married a whole forest by now. That's what made the above photo from Google Images possible - it shows an earlier wedding, and I needed a photo because the image at the Yahoo site was worthless.

Just like a polygamist's wedding vow . . .

Milton's Paradise Lost: Adam and Eve Should Have Known Better!

Eve and the Serpent
You'd think she'd have suspected . . .
By hawanja

I previously said that with respect to Adam and Eve's awareness of the foe's aims, the alert reader should consider PL 9.351-356, in which Adam elucidates faculty psychology further:

But God left free the Will, for what obeyes
Reason, is free, and Reason he made right
But bid her well beware, and still erect,
Least by some faire appeering good surpris'd
She dictate false, and misinforme the Will
To do what God expresly hath forbid . . .

On the Milton List I noted an implication of what God had forbidden, for God had forbidden only one thing, eating from the tree of knowledge:

Given that Adam said (9.356), "To do what God expresly hath forbid," Adam and Eve would seem to have an inkling that the foe would somehow try to get them to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, for what else could Adam be referring to? And what else could Eve have understood him to be referring to? Yet, Eve seems not to remember this . . .

I was challenged on my statement that Eve had forgotten the command, but I actually meant something a bit different, as I clarified:

[P]erhaps I wasn't clear. I meant that Adam's warning about doing what God had expressly forbidden implies that Adam knows - and that Eve should realize - that the foe they face will use the tree of knowledge in some way to try to mislead them, yet they also seem simultaneously not to know this, since otherwise they would speak more directly about avoiding the tree.

I also think that if Eve was expecting the foe to use the tree, she should have recognized that she had met the foe as soon as the serpent led her to the Tree of Knowledge.

Why didn't she?

Woland and Lindall: More on "Satan's Peculiar 'Grace'"

Woland
. . . with a witch bowing in reverence . . .

Wikipedia

In Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Woland -- a stand-in for Mephistopheles, himself a stand-in for Satan, and thus Woland is Satan -- responds to a request for mercy from Margarita:

"One thing remains, perhaps: to procure some rags and stuff them in all the cracks of my bedroom."

"What are you talking about, Messire?" Margarita was amazed, hearing these indeed incomprehensible words.

"I agree with you completely, Messire," the cat mixed into the conversation, "precisely with rags!" And the cat vexedly struck the table with his paw.

"I am talking about mercy," Woland explained his words, not taking his fiery eye off Margarita. "It sometimes creeps, quite unexpectedly and perfidiously, through the narrowest cracks. And so I am talking about rags . . ." (Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, 1997, translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, page 131)

This is certainly peculiar of Woland, but according to Wikipedia, "Woland's name itself is a variant of the name of a demon who appears in Goethe's Faust: the knight Voland or Faland." And Mr. Faland Em, as my novella shows, can -- even with contracts signed in blood -- draw upon an "extralegal reservoir of mercy to wash away the binding signatures and thereby release the contractee," a peculiar sort of grace available here. Of course, he can only do so by God's grace . . .

Speaking of which . . . Terrance Lindall has added some remarks about Satan's peculiar grace by way of a promise:

Actually I am soon to write up my Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione. It expands on "Satan's Peculiar Grace."

In it I expound on the nature of our place in the world, what the world is, the necessity of evil and the million other things I have been talking about for years. The new idea is that in fact "I" am and will always be the original Adam (how? read my tractatus). I have experienced the paradise of the ignorant bliss of childhood and then was brought "knowledge of good and evil" by my experience of the world around me (the world is the apple and my engaging with it is my bite and taste of it) . Although I fell from grace of loving all people around me because of what I perceived as evil, I eventually became reconciled through knowledge itself and was through knowledge elevated to "understanding." I came to realize that this is "the best of all possible worlds." I have been redeemed to Paradise!

"Love the sinner, hate the sin." So too, Satan should be loved!

"Love the sinner, hate the sin" is from St. Augustine. His Letter 211 (c. 424) contains the phrase Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum, which translates roughly to "With love for mankind and hatred of sins." The phrase has become more famous as "love the sinner but hate the sin" or "hate the sin and not the sinner" (the latter form appearing in Mohandas Gandhi’s 1929 autobiography).

Now you can ague that Satan is a special case and should be hated. But I argue further that Satan plays an important role in God's plan.

Robert J. Wickenheiser disagreed with Lindall, raising the stakes by challenging his citation of St. Augustine:

St. Augustine (whose name I bore in the monastery) did indeed say "Love the sinner, hate the sin," but he NEVER intended it to be applied to Satan, and I defy you to find a passage in Augustine in which he makes such application or even hints at it. And "With love for mankind and hatred of sins" does not in any way refer to the evil fallen angel below, called Satan.

Lindall responded:

Bob has rightly chastised me! But the dialogue/dialectic is engaged. In the fires of the the dialectic the gold of Truth will be revealed. As Milton said "Let her (Truth) and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" Satan get thee gone!

But the fact is that most evil in the world, although INSPIRED by Satan is actually performed by man. Satan offers his "color" and we are inspired to action!

We do not have to fear Satan. We just have to be vigilant about not succumbing to our own base inclinations . . . greed, ambition, hatred, jealousy, etc. We must stand just like Christ on the mount who was offered the world.

It is our duty to be knowledgeable about the repercussions of our actions . . . if bad, the result will not be good even for the one whose actions result in some perceived gain from doing injury to others. And for the leaders and thinkers, it is their duty to pass on this knowledge. Unfortunately we do not live in that kind of world with philosopher kings. So the world is very "colorful" and artists like Bien or writers like Jeffery or Carter have a lot of material with which to work. Thus Satan is the patron saint of many artists and writers.

"No man knowingly does evil." - Plato's Socrates in The Meno

"Ultimately knowledge will redeem man!" - Terrance Lindall

In defense of Lindall's views, I might note that since the Middle Ages, the Russian Orthodox Church has had prayers offered for the salvation of Satan -- if he happens to repent. I am therefore open to Lindall's 'Orthodox' view on Satan -- that Christians ought to pray for Satan's repentance. However, I have some qualms about the view that "knowledge" will save us. Wisdom might be a better candidate for that role, particularly the wisdom of knowing that we often have no inkling as to the repercussions of our actions, a point that Lindall appears to acknowledge. Wisdom thus counsels caution where knowledge forges boldly ahead, secure in its self-assurance that it knows the causes and effects, the reasons and results, the actions and reactions . . . often only to stumble badly.

I therefore eagerly await Lindall's Tractatus, and not only for his views on knowledge, but its appearance is probably going to take some time . . .

Georges de Feure - Le fruit défendu: péché as pêche

Le fruit défendu (1895)

Georges de Feure

(MutualArt)

My reading in Ben Hale's novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, has turned my thoughts again toward forbidden fruit and its rare depiction as a peach, which Ben picks up on and works into his story. After reading John Milton's description of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in terms better fitting a peach than an apple, as pointed out to me by Robert Appelbaum (who has written on this topic), I wondered about the possibility of a pun in French on pêche (peach) and péché (sin). I haven't confirmed that such a pun has been explicitly made, not in so many (or so few?) words, but the painting above by the French Symboliste painter Georges de Feure (real name: Georges Joseph van Sluÿters, 1868-1943) looks like a visual pun on Eve's biting of a peach as the original sin. Here's what the catelogue notes at Sotheby's Auction says about this painting:

Among the rare works created by de Feure during his sojourns in Bruges, this work is one of the most unusual for its symbolism and modernism. In the foreground, partially obscured by a floral border, a nude woman, Eve-like, holds the gaze of the spectator and proffers a peach she has already bitten. This fruit and its rich juice evoke the biblical temptation in Paradise, and mankind's ensuing fall from grace.

In the background, in the town streets moves a procession of nude women, dancing, applauding and caressing each other. Some wear black stockings while others brandish smoking amphoras above their heads. In front of them, a group of civil and religious dignitaries wave flags and an incense burner. An old bearded man and two naked boys with linked arms form the vanguard of the extraordinary march.

In creating this provocative work, De Feure was possibly inspired by two historical events associated with Bruges: the procession of Saint-Sang that occurs on the day of the Ascension in commemoration of the relic brought back in 1149 from the Second Crusade by Thierry d'Alsace, Count of Flanders; and a group of Anabaptists brutally persecuted in the sixteenth century. The Anabaptists believed that at the apocalypse, God would baptise them in fire (represented by the smoking amphoras in the composition), and consumed by religious fervor, they ran naked through the city streets. Whatever the veracity of these potential sources, De Feure accentuates the sexual and sensual, using the duality of the concept of blood and the underlying theme of Original Sin and redemption. (Lot 41, George de Feure, Le fruit défendu, Sotheby's 19th Century European Paintings (L09663), November 24, 2009, pages 74-75)

For its own source, Sotheby's cites Ian Millman work on George de Feure, Mâitre du Symbolisme et de l'Art Nouveau (Paris, 1992, p. 89, catalogued and discussed; p. 88, illustrated), which can be found among Google Books here (see Section 4 of the text) . As Sotheby notes, the illustration appears on page 88. Pages 89 and 90 are not shown in the preview, but page 92 (not 89!) is actually the page from which Sotheby gets its catalogue notes, having translated the French. The French original refers to the "pêche" (peach) and "Péché originel" (Original Sin), but does not explicitly note any pun.

Any knowledgeable individuals who might add to this query are welcome to post comments.