Down the Meat Hole

A Review of Some Books Recently Come My Way

Tim Flannery, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet (New York: Harper Collins)
Curt Stager, Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth (New York: St. Martin’s Press)
Lester R. Brown, World on Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: Norton)
Frances Moore Lappé, EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want (New York: Nation Books)
Thomas Keneally, Three Famines: Starvation and Politics (New York: PublicAffairs)
Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply (New York: New Press)


“By and large, it is painful to think.”

—Norwegian philosopher and ecologist Arne Næss (1912–2009)


If blissful ignorance is your cup of tea (or should I say, your poison), you’ll probably shy away from these books. That’s unfortunate, because if you read them your grandchildren, if any, might have slightly less reason to curse you one day.
     Global warming, acidification of the oceans, mass extinction of species, potentially toxic genetically modified foods, water wars, famine, the whole litany of environmental horrors . . .
     But in fact some of the news is good. First of all, we are we living in a time of scientific and technological progress to rival the 1850s and 1860s, when Clausius, Helmholtz, Joule, Kirchhoff, and above all Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, among many other remarkable investigators, were dispelling the dark of what the French call la nuit des temps (the night of ages).  
    We also have before us a shining example of environmental success. The problem of cholorofluorocarbons (CFCs) destroying stratospheric ozone was tackled, largely because the United States to the lead in confronting the problem, and the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking. If this had not happened, Tim Flannery observes in Here on Earth, we would now be in the middle of a catastrophe, because ultraviolet radiation, from which ozone protects us, “penetrates cells, tearing apart DNA and disrupting metabolic processes.” Without the ozone, you could get a nasty sunburn in a matter of seconds.
     Moreover, our era is one of great ethical and humanitarian progress.
     I can’t argue the case in detail here, but let me simply mention that less than three centuries ago, in 1723, my own direct ancestor Johannes Augustinus Dreyer, aka Isacq d’Algué, resigned his post with the Stellenbosch magistrate’s court at the Cape of Good Hope at least in part because it obliged him to be present in an official capacity at executions by methods that included impalement and breaking on the wheel, not to speak of the facial mutilation of recaptured slaves by cutting off their ears and noses. Homosexuals, if discovered at the Cape, were simply ordered taken out to sea and thrown overboard, weighted down with rocks or cannon balls.
     Slavery was then practiced in almost every inhabited country. In England, hanging was the mandatory punishment for any theft of property worth more than five shillings. In China, the condemned were sometimes executed by a method called “slow slicing,” also known as “the death of a thousand cuts.” In Japan, execution by crucifixion and burning alive were commonplace; women and girls were routinely bought and sold--often by their own families--like any other kind of property.
     I am well aware of the objections to the notion that moral progress matches technological progress: the Shoah, Dresden, Hiroshima, the Gulag, 9/11 . . . But to suppose that the human superorganism “cares” who or how many pass under the wheels of Juggernaut, or how they suffer, is pathetic fallacy (as James Lovelock riposted to Richard Dawkins’s criticisms of his Earth system theory: “Gaia is alive in the same way that genes are selfish”). In the bleak light of hindsight, these monstrous, psychotic episodes are to be seen as learning experiences in the process of ethical evolution, and what is important now is that we are clearly learning from them. Gazing at our history in revulsion, we say, “Never again!”
     There may, indeed, will, of course, be an again, and again an again. But one day, perhaps, there won’t be.
     We’ve come a long way, and we’ve come along astoundingly fast. Right now we’re perhaps in the last lap of a race with ourselves. At issue: will our huge intelligence, charitable instincts, and innate biophilia win out, or will it be our equally endless stupidity, murderous instincts, and addictions to meat, gasoline, narcotics, and, worst of all, the bean counters’ bottom line?
     The key is the point Arne Næss makes: by and large, it’s painful to think. It’s easy enough to think “surgically,” about the Greenland glacier, say, or the rain forest, or whether what you plan to cook for dinner contains genetically modified organisms (GMOs). But thinking by and large means trying to think about everything, and the big picture is more terrifying by more than a few orders of magnitude than any of its parts.
     The authors of the books I draw your attention to here are seriously worried. But they also know that, in the words of the British moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, “pessimism is [a] cultural luxury that we can’t afford.” So they’re thinking by and large, and positively, as hard as they can.
     This may be painful, but it’s seldom boring.
     In Here on Earth, the distinguished paleontologist Tim Flannery (Australian of the Year in 2007) points to the “remarkable fact that despite our huge population, humans are one of the most genetically uniform of mammal species, there being more genetic diversity in a random sample of about fifty chimpanzees from west Africa than in all seven billion of us” (122). This is believed to be because an eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia about 70,000 years ago killed off all but a few thousand “breeding pairs of humans,” creating a genetic “bottleneck” through which the forebears of the whole human race had to pass. We are thus all of us very, very close relatives and given to making significant sacrifices for one another in the interests of the group, an instinct paradoxically blocked by the reflexive othering of others (i.e., racist/tribalist mentalities). The late Oxford biologist Bill Hamilton even came up with a mathematical formula for this: C < R × B, with “C being the potential reproductive loss of the one making the sacrifice, R being the closeness of the genetic relationship between the two, and B being the benefit the recipient derives.” In the real world, Flannery concedes, “things are not as simple as this splendidly crisp formula suggests,” but this was nonetheless the basis on which human communities were built. It was what sent countless soldiers over the ages to die for their “kith and kin,” as symbolized by their country’s flag. Once the group is clearly understood by a majority of people to be the whole human race—and it seems to me this goal is shaping in the distance—we should be in a position to move rapidly to implement a rehabilitative agenda for the planet like that so rigorously proposed by Lester Brown (see below).
     Flannery does a superb job of recounting the progress of the upright apes, our ancestors, who emerged in Africa some seven million years ago, through their progressive evolution of bigger brains (and then again, alas, to somewhat smaller ones: it is estimated that today’s human males have lost around 10 percent of brain mass, and today’s women 14 percent, compared their ice-age forebears), slaughtering and devouring our fellow creatures as, we went from place to place until “around eight thousand years ago, humans discovered the Caribbean Islands and the beasts [native ground sloths, monkeys, and giant guinea-pig-like rodents] vanished into the same black hole that had consumed their mainland relatives—the hole located between nose and chin in a human being. Humans ate them all, down to the last one.” Within 500 years of the arrival of humans (proto-Amerindians, roughly 13,000 years ago), North America had lost thirty-four genera of large mammals; South America lost fifty genera.
     Now, of course, teratoid corporations are mindlessly ravaging the world just as fast as they can to produce meat in hitherto unheard-of quantities. Perhaps mercifully, the creatures we anciently incorporated into the human superorganism to serve the hospitality industry have also lost brain mass—modern pigs, for instance, have as much as a third less brain than their wild ancestors.
Flannery believes we have it in us to beat the odds, restore the planet to a sustainable state, and survive into the unknown, perhaps amazing future. But not if we continue to “sit in our air-conditioned homes and eat, drink and make merry . . . without the slightest thought about the consequences of our consumption of water, food and energy.”
     In Deep Future, Curt Stager, a paleoclimatologist, looks back and forward in an attempt to envisage what the future might be like once we have greened Greenland, “one of the few places likely to benefit substantially from global warming.” He too is an optimist, and far-sighted enough to consider what thing might be like for humans after global warming has run its course and a new ice age inevitably looms in, say, 130,000 C.E. Stretching Hamilton’s equation for benevolence a bit, Stager even proposes we take into account the needs of our distant descendants by leaving coal deposits in the ground, because they might one day be essential to modify the climate yet again: “coal is both too valuable and too environmentally damaging to burn indiscriminately. It’s highest use is as a long-term climate protection device, not just cheap and dirty furnace food. Running power plants on it is like burning your house down around you because it’s cold outside.”
     Lester Brown offers a hard-nosed but deliberately optimistic set of goals in World on the Edge: stabilizing climate, eradicating poverty, and restoring the economy’s natural support systems. These, he notes, are mutually dependent: “Moving the global economy off the decline-and-collapse path depends on reaching all four goals.” To confront the problem, Brown proposes the creation of a Department of Global Security and literally go on the equivalent of a war footing. He even supplies a tentative budget. Saving civilization might perhaps be done for $185 billion annually. This compares with the annual U.S. military budget of $661 billion and a world military budget of $1,522 billion. Civilization would seem a bargain at the price, but don’t hold your breath.
     Frances Moore Lappé is even more of an optimist. But she is no Pollyanna. She knows only too well that you can’t play the Glad Game on Planet Earth anymore: that “what we’ve been calling ‘growth’ is largely waste and destruction”; that of the more than 80,000 chemicals used in the United States, the EPA has been able to enforce testing of only around 200, and that only five of these chemicals have been restricted or banned; that the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest polluter; that there is no such place as “away” to throw things you don’t want; that every 30 minutes, on average, a ruined farmer in India commits suicide . . .. Nonetheless, Lappé argues in EcoMind that solutions exist, are known, and within our reach.
     Thomas Keneally, an Australian of Irish descent, famous as the author of the book Steven Spielberg made into the movie Schindler’s List, offers exquisitely sketched case studies of three famines that foreshadow what might likely be expected worldwide in the decades to come: the Great Hunger that began in the mid-1840s in Ireland; the famine in Bengal in 1943–44; and the two waves of famine that devastated Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s. All three famines were rooted in failures of the imagination on the part of rulers, ranging from callous incompetence to deliberate genocide on the part of the Ethiopian Stalinist dictator Mengistu (currently enjoying his golden years in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe). Keneally tells what starvation is like, as the body starts to consume its own tissue, the organs deteriorate, the immune system collapses, and opportunistic diseases like dysentery and typhus step in to claim their harvest.
     Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto, in a journalistic tour de force that reads like science fiction, depicts the sorcerer’s apprentices of the private sector at work, with the intimate collusion of politicians and government bureaucrats, trying to save the world and make a buck. In a book, she tracks the astonishing history of Monsanto, the little company that could, and did, from Dioxin, PCBs, and Agent Orange through Roundup and Bovine Growth Hormone to GMOs and the patenting of genes.
     Consider only this: 300 milliliters—just three-quarters of a cup—of Roundup, once touted as biodegradable and environmentally harmless, is the lethal dose for an adult human. In fact, it’s a poison of choice for despairing Asian farmers (although you die horribly). Intensive use of it tends to sterilize the soil too. “It is hard to see how a total herbicide able to eliminate every kind of plant would spare the microbial flora essential for soil fertility,” Robin says. Experts say that Roundup, the world’s leading herbicide, has never been properly tested for its carcinogenic potential in humans.
     What it comes down to is: historical experience shows that businesses systematically practice deception; that regulators are frequently to be found in bed with those they regulate; that as a result toxic substances of all kinds have been released into the environment; that genetically modifying DNA is a broad-scatter process and there is no knowing what the effects of consuming the resulting food products may be over the long term: “the genetic material in food survives digestion and circulates through the body, fragments of plant RNA have been found swimming in the bloodstreams of people and cows. . . . substantial research suggests that not all genetic matter from food dissolves in the stomach and intestines,” the New Scientist noted recently.
     School systems throughout America are now faced with increasing numbers of children who are in one way or other simply defective—born broken, suffering from autism, autoimmune diseases, and a whole range of physical and mental problems. Is it merely coincidence that these children and their parents consume food derived from GM food crops and meat and dairy products from animals injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH, aka “crack for cows”), banned in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the European Union, but permitted in the United States? And in the longer term . . . well remember what happened with PCBs?
     One of the problems with all this is that we have to rely on experts. Very few of us have the technical knowledge to judge any of these subjects. And no one has the technical knowledge to pronounce authoritatively on them all. But who are the experts? “Research on GMOs is now taboo,” an Italian scientist told Robin. “You can’t find money for it.”
     In Scotland, Árpád Pusztai was doing research on transgenic potatoes at the Rowett Institute. Rats in an experimental group fed such potatoes were found to have “brains, livers, and testes less developed than those in the control group, as well as atrophied tissue, particularly in the pancreas and the intestine.” It seemed as though the rats’ immune systems were treating the transgenic potatoes as foreign bodies. Troubled, Pusztai went to the director of his institute, Professor Philip James, who was at first “very enthusiastic. . . .Then, suddenly, everything changed.” Pusztai was soon after summoned by James, with a lawyer present, and “told that his contract had been suspended, he would be dismissed, and the research team would be dissolved.” A torrent of denunciation was unleashed against him. As reported by the Guardian, the Royal Society itself blasted Pusztai’s research and established a “rebuttal unit,” the paper discovered, “to mould scientific and public opinion with a pro-biotech line and to counter opposing scientists and environmental groups.” What had happened? Pusztai’s collaborator, the Aberdeen University pathologist Dr. Stanley Ewen, later discovered that there had been intervention at the highest level. “Phone calls went from Monsanto to [U.S. President Bill] Clinton. Clinton rang [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair and Blair rang [Rowett Institute director Philip] James,” the Daily Mail was told by a former Rowett Institute staffer. Pusztai and Ewen were forced into retirement.
   By Robin’s account, such pressure has been brought to bear worldwide to legitimize GMO products: “in the United States now you can’t work in biology if you don’t accept funding from biotechnology firms,” one scientist told her. “That’s why I say we’re living in a totalitarian world, ruled by the interests of multinational corporations who recognize their responsibility only to their shareholders.”
     A French biochemist at the University of Caen told her: “In France, as in most industrialized countries, there is no interest and thus no money for laboratories to conduct epidemiological studies or scientific reassessments of the toxicity of the chemical products that have invaded our daily life. . . . [but] there is real urgency, because our bodies have become veritable sponges for pollutants. One finds attached to the entire genome of human fetuses, as I have been able to observe, several hundred toxic substances, such as hydrocarbons, dioxins, pesticides, residues of plastic and glue. These products, which were designed not to be soluble in water, accumulate and concentrate in our fatty tissue, and no one knows what their long-term effects may be.”
     Is all this true? I’m no biochemist. I only know what I read. But there it is.
     No doubt the sorcerer’s apprentices believe they’re doing good, feeding the world and all that. They make a living too, of course—in 2009, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant’s take-home compensation is reported as having been over $26 million. (Even so, things aren’t looking all that bright these days. In the fiscal quarter ended August 31, 2011, Monsanto reported a net loss of $112 million.)
So is it worth it to them? After all, they and their children have to live on the same planet as the rest of us. Maybe it’s time for a little thinking by and large, Hugh? You know the facts about your company much better than we do. Do you eat that stuff personally, knowing what you know? Do your kids drink rBGH milk, the kind with the extra pus, blood secretions, insulin growth factor, and antibiotics in it?
     Back in the days of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his brilliant colleagues thought there was just a slight possibility that setting off a neutron chain reaction might actually ignite Earth’s atmosphere, spelling finis to the human race, if not to life itself. Fermi is said to have offered to make book on the probability. But they went ahead and built the bomb anyway.
     You’d think that if there was even the remotest, tiniest chance . . .
     As Robin remarks of the ongoing proliferation of toxic and lethal chemical substances: “The reasonable solution would be to ban outright any molecule that presents the slightest danger to people and the environment. But instead, to satisfy the interests of the major chemical companies—and some would say, the interests of modern consumers—every effort is made to regulate dangerous substances only as much as necessary to limit the most obvious or immediate damage. For the rest, après nous le déluge.”
     Pogo famously observed: “We has met the enemy and he is us!” We’re so smart and bad we had to say it twice: Homo sapiens sapiens. Only us can beat us!
     But we’d better get started soon. Or, to put it bluntly, we won’t have a hope in hell.

The Wines of China

Sent to the Western Land by Han-wu Emperor on 138 B.C., Zhang Qian found that “in the neighborhood of Wan people make wine with grapes. The done-well possess stores of up to 10,000 piculs and preserve the wine for scores of years. People drink wine habitually and the horses like to eat lucerne.” The emperor then started planting grapes and lucernes in fertile fields with the seed brought back by the envoy. “As the horses were introduced in great number, more foreign couriers came, and some of them would left the imperial palace and look at the boundless fields of grapes and lucernes.”
In the time of the East Han Dynasty, wine was still precious, which could be proved by the story of a bribery recorded in the Han’s History Sequels. A man named Meng Tuo from Fufeng bought the position of a governor with one dou of wine from the then Premier Zhang Rang.
Though winemaking technique was introduced into China in Han Dynasty, it was restricted within a small area, and it’s believed that grape cultivation no longer existed afterwards, which could be proved by the fact that wine was offered to emperors as contribute from frontiers from time to time. By the time of Tang Dynasty, the central China knew nothing about grapes, and the Tang’s Tai Emperor had to introduce grapes from the West Land. “The Tai Emperor occupied Gaochang and collected Maru grape seeds there to be planted in the Imperial Garden and made wine with the introduced technique. The wine is green, tastes cool and strong, with a flavor of Sihu. It’s the first time Chang'an people knew wine” (The New Book of the South, vol. 3). According to Song Dynasty’s classification book Cefuyuangui, vol. 970, the then Gaochang was 20 km east of present Tulufan, with uncertain sovereignty. By the time of Tang Dynasty, wine was so popular in the hinterland, that it’s mentioned frequently in Tang literature. Wang Han in his Liang’s Poem had “with wine in crystal and fluorescent cup, warriors are reluctant to get on their chargers.” Liu Yuxi, one of the most renowned poets of that period, admitted that “ being a native Shanxi man, I plant this jady fruit. Brewed into delicious wine, I cannot get enough of it.” Other poets sang wine too, and some foreigners in Changan run pubs in which western wine was sold.
Xu Guangqi of Ming Dynasty listed the grape varieties in the then China in his Farming Encyclopaedia: “crystal grapes; purple grape; green grape from Sichuan, just like the green grape from the West, also named hare’s eyes, sweeter than honey, the elite is without seeds; small grape from the West, as tiny as pepper . . . those from Yunnan are as big as dates.”

--Bijou Dreyer

Red Plenty

I revive this slumbering blog to offer a plug for Francis Spufford’s wonderful new book Red Plenty (London Faber & Faber, 2010).

"Is it a novel? Is it non-fiction? It all depends on your definitions. It tells a true story, but it tells it as a story. Whatever you call it, it’s about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea - central planning via cybernetics - and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed. To give the economics some human depth, Red Plenty generates a miniature Soviet Union on the page, peopled by scientists and politicians, fixers and managers, dreamers and cynics."

Books banned in Virginia prisons

A selection from the “Disapproved Publications List” of the Virginia Department of Corrections, September 2009:

Ulysses by James Joyce
Underboss by Peter Maas (1997)
Understanding Solid-state Electronics
Understanding the Struggle
United State Marine Corps Concepts & Programs 2007 (Pentagon)
Unleashing the Warrior Within (R. Machowicz)
Up Against the Wall, Teach
U.S. Armed Forces Nuclear, Biological & Chemical Survival Manual (D. Crouch)
U.S. Army Survival Manual
Valor of the Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone
Velvet Skin by Aishling Morgan
Venus School Mistress (Anon.)
Verlaine

Pandachucks

 

Panda lovers are desolate because their beloved adolescent panda Tai Shan (pronounced "ty shawn") is soon to be deported to China, although he is a native American, born at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. All pandas are Chinese property, it seems. However, researchers at a gene-splicing facility in western Maryland (for security reasons, it cannot be named) report that a "beta" model all-American groundhog-panda hybrid is ready to roll. In the beta model, genes from a red panda (Ailurus fulgens) were spliced into those of a common American groundhog (Marmota monax), also known as a woodchuck or whistle-pig, caught dumpster-diving on North Market Street in Frederick, Md., creating the new Marmota fulgens americanus (photo). "We hope equally to succeed soon with a giant panda," an unidentified spokesman said. "We think this is totally cool! Groundhogs are actually much more intelligent than pandas--as we all know, they have some truly remarkable prognosticative skills--and the possibilities are huge!" There is even talk of engineering a "pandachuck" that will glow with fluorescent light, using new techniques developed at the University of California, San Diego (already shown to work in mice), making it much easier for future Punxsutawney pandachucks to see their shadows.

An unidentified spokesman for the People's Liberation Army contacted by Amolosh had no comment.

Nous sommes
le 15 Frimaire, An 218

Annie

 

My grandmother, Anne Lavinia Bailey, born at Newlands, Cape Town, this day in 1871 and named for an aunt born in Dorset in 1827. Grannie Annie died on January 28, 1944.

The Gaussian Copula

You've always wondered, I know. So here's Sam Jones's nicely nuanced account (link) of how Moody's and Standard and Poor's came to incorporate the fatal Gaussian copula default function formula devised by David Li (aka Xiang Lin) into their methodology for rating collateralised debt obligations. Hornswoggled by Li's "riot of equations, mathematical lemmas, arching curves and matrices of numbers" at a presentation "not a million miles from some kind of science fiction convention" into believing that they could gauge the interrelatedness of risks with mathematical certainty, the Masters of the Universe threw traditional prudence to the winds: "No need to spread your eggs across baskets if you knew the exact odds of your one basket being dropped. . . . CDOs built solely out of subprime mortgage debt became the rage. . . . using the magic of the Gaussian copula correlation model, and some clever off-balance-sheet architecture, high-risk mortgages were re-packaged into triple-A-rated investor gold. The CDO market exploded."

And the rest is history, as they say.

In 2007, David Li apparently moved back to China. His present whereabouts seem to be unknown.

Nous sommes
le 8 Floréal, An 217

Lingua Tertii Imperii: Des Führers Geburtstag

Today is Hitler's birthday, an anniversary once celebrated in the Third Reich with religious intensity. As late as 1945, many Germans believed that come April 20, the Führer would unleash amazing secret weapons that would turn the war around. Ten days after his birthday that year, Hitler was dead, however, and the Nazi segment of the great nightmare of the twentieth century was over.

In his invaluable book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947; see link above)*, the philologist Victor Klemperer, who himself almost became a victim of the Shoah, argues cogently that it was through cunning distortion of the German language that Hitler bewitched his faithful. LTI's epigraph is from Franz Rosenzweig: "Language is more than blood."

We ought to reflect on what this might mean for us. What is language, and especially the various dialects of political correctness, Left and Right, and the frivolous bamboozlement of academe that one associates with names like Heidegger and Derrida, doing to us today?

If one thinks about it, Hitler could conceivably have been stopped without a preemptive war. What if, instead of bolting its gates, the United States had simply said to the Nazis in the 1930s: Sure, send us your Jews! We’ll take them all! And if you happen to have any other good people you don’t want, send them over here too! America would have benefited immeasurably, of course, as indeed it did from the talents of the handful of European Jews who managed to get here (Einstein, Segré, Schoenberg, Kurt Weill . . . and the list goes on) and the rug would have been pulled from under the Nazis’ feet. They would been shown up for what they were: a vile, ridiculous, and ultimately pathetic set of gangsters. If the United States (already long the number one industrial power and in many ways culturally dominant in the world) had resolutely rejected antisemitism in this way (and perhaps even mocked the Nazis as idiots for giving away such valuable human capital) in the mid 1930s, Hitler’s psychological base of support among Germans--and even his own self-confidence--would have been drastically undermined. In many ways, Hitler saw antisemitism as the strongest card he had (which is why the extermination machinery of the Holocaust would later be given priority even over the war effort). Moreover, by the very same magnificent act, the United States would have undercut the Comintern as well, because countless Jewish communists (Zinoviev, Litvinov, Pauker, Slansky . . . and the list goes on) would no longer fatally have imagined Stalinism to be the sole antidote to antisemitism.

And the unending catastrophe of Israel/Palestine might also have been avoided . . .

If the United States failed to act decisively against the Nazis in this way in the 1930s, it was largely because of the ingrained racism of a large part of the American ruling classes at that time. It was not for nothing that Hitler kept a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in his office.

And that racism too was nourished in innumerable ways by language.


*Translated by Martin Brady as The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook (London: Continuum, 2002)

Philogrobolized

Mais un d'entre eulx . . . le plus sçavant, le plus expert et prudent de tous les aultres, un jour qu'ilz estoyent tous philogrobolizez du cerveau, leur dist:

"Messieurs, jà long temps a que sommes icy sans rien faire que despendre, et ne pouvons trouver fond ny rive en ceste matiere, et, tant plus y estudions, tant moins y entendons, qui nous est grand honte et charge de conscience, et à mon advis que nous n'en sortirons que à deshonneur, car nous ne faisons que ravassera en noz consultations . . . "

--Rabelais, Comment Pantagruel equitablement jugea d'une contreverse merveilleusement obscure et difficile si justement que son jugement fut dict fort admirable


Note also also Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart (1664), 3.26.212: "I find my Brains...metagrabolized and confounded"; Kipling, Stalky & Co. 119: " . . . we have metagrobolised 'em."


Nous sommes
le 27 Germinal, An 217

Péchés de vieillesse

No. 1. Forgetting Tithonus:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes...

I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

Nous sommes
le 24 Germinal, An 217