Emerson

Purple
Gravitas
Red
 
Rev.21:23
"And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof."

Ghost in Pere Lachaise Paris cemeterythe spooky combo of ghostly elements (lightning and a vintage eyeless ghoul) and the absence of color worked together to make this photo the winner of the Creat...

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836)

Chess: "Purple"; "Red": (Anglo-Spanish); "John Avnet" (Righteous Killing: sun-moon:gold-silver) "gravitas"

Woodstock

October 29, 2008, 1:43 pm

A Poem for the Pentagon

By Barry Gewen

Wislawa Szymborska (Eric Roxfelt/Associated Press)

Last week, when I was writing about the Caucasus and all those peoples no one outside the region had ever heard of, I couldn’t get a poem out of my mind. It was “Voices” by the Nobel-prize-winner Wislawa Szymborska.
I’m not much for modern poetry, but I like Szymborska because of her compassion, her humility and her warm good humor. What’s more, you don’t need a Ph.D. in literature to understand her. Once I was comparing notes with a friend much more literary than I about modern poets we enjoyed reading: Philip Larkin, of course, and then we both said, simultaneously, “Szymborska.”
“Four in the Morning” is a poem with a Larkinesque theme but spun with Szymborska-esque whimsy: “No one feels good at four in the morning./If ants feel good at four in the morning/— three cheers for the ants.” Addressing the women in Rubens’s paintings, she writes, “O meloned, O excessive ones … you lavish dishes of love.” Then she adds that the 17th century “had nothing for the flat of chest.”
Szymborska’s subjects are the subjects of poets everywhere — love, death, art, the infinite coupled to the quotidian, the world in a grain of sand. But she is also attentive to current events. One of her poems is entitled “Vietnam,” another “The Terrorist, He’s Watching.”
And there is “Voices.” Inspired by Livy, it isn’t as overtly political as some of her other poems. Still, I’d like to see it tacked up on bulletin boards in the Pentagon and at Foggy Bottom.
Here are the first few lines*:

You can’t move an inch, my dear Marcus Emilius,
without Aborigines sprouting up as if from the earth itself.
Your heel sticks fast amidst Rutulians.
You founder knee-deep in Sabines and Latins.
You’re up to your waist, your neck, your nostrils
in Aequians and Volscians, dear Lucius Fabius.
These irksome little nations, thick as flies.

Click to read the whole poem at Google Books.
* “Voices” is in the translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. The other quotations are from the translations by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire.

Gee!!!!

Prov.5:18

"Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth."

Summer countryside

Description:

Ethereal light dances across the landscape along the path to Fairyland. What magic creatures will you meet along the way?

Chess: "Saint Joseph" "San José" "I see S" "Eye sees" "Mary" "Museo de los niños: Paco Amighetti: Emilia Prieto:Iris:Paris Hilton:Daisy" " "Bride" "Isis" "Bridge" "ER" "Revelation"

 

Origins of the Swan Lake story

Many critics have disputed the original source of the Swan Lake story. The Russian ballet patriarch Fyodor Lopukhov has called Swan Lake a "national ballet" because of its swans, who originate from Russian lyrically romantic sources, while many of the movements of the corps de ballet originated from Slavonic ring-dances.^[4] According to Lopukhov, "both the plot of Swan Lake, the image of the Swan and the very idea of a faithful love are essentially Russian".^[4] The libretto is based on a story by the German author Johann Karl August Musäus, "Der geraubte Schleier" (The Stolen Veil),^[5] though this story provides only the general outline of the plot ofSwan Lake. The Russian folktale "The White Duck" also bears some resemblance to the story of the ballet, and may have been another possible source. The contemporaries of Tchaikovsky recalled the composer taking great interest in the life story of Bavarian King Ludwig II, whose tragic life had allegedly been marked by the sign of Swan and who—either consciously or not—was chosen as the prototype of the dreamer Prince Siegfried.^[4]

The White Duck

Once upon a time a great and powerful King married a lovely Princess. No couple were ever so happy; but before their honeymoon was over they were forced to part, for the King had to go on a warlike expedition to a far country, and leave his young wife alone at home. Bitter were the tears she shed, while her husband sought in vain to soothe her with words of comfort and counsel, warning her, above all things, never to leave the castle, to hold no intercourse with strangers, to beware of evil counsellors, and especially to be on her guard against strange women. And the Queen promised faithfully to obey her royal lord and master in these four matters.

So when the King set out on his expedition she shut herself up with her ladies in her own apartments, and spent her time in spinning and weaving, and in thinking of her royal husband. Often she was very sad and lonely, and it happened that one day while she was seated at the window, letting salt tears drop on her work, an old woman, a kind, homely-looking old body, stepped up to the window, and, leaning upon her crutch, addressed the Queen in friendly, flattering tones, saying:

'Why are you sad and cast down, fair Queen? You should not mope all day in your rooms, but should come out into the green garden, and hear the birds sing with joy among the trees, and see the butterflies fluttering above the flowers, and hear the bees and insects hum, and watch the sunbeams chase the dew-drops through the rose-leaves and in the lily-cups. All the brightness outside would help to drive away your cares, O Queen.'

For long the Queen resisted her coaxing words, remembering the promise she had given the King, her husband; but at last she thought to herself: After all, what harm would it do if I were to go into the garden for a short time and enjoy myself among the trees and flowers, and the singing birds and fluttering butterflies and humming insects, and look at the dew-drops hiding from the sunbeams in the hearts of the roses and lilies, and wander about in the sunshine, instead of remaining all day in this room? For she had no idea that the kind-looking old woman leaning on her crutch was in reality a wicked witch, who envied the Queen her good fortune, and was determined to ruin her. And so, in all ignorance, the Queen followed her out into the garden and listened to her smooth, flattering words. Now, in the middle of the garden there was a pond of water, clear as crystal, and the old woman said to the Queen:

'The day is so warm, and the sun's rays so scorching, that the water in the pond looks very cool and inviting. Would you not like to bathe in it, fair Queen?'

'No, I think not,' answered the Queen; but the next moment she regretted her words, and thought to herself: Why shouldn't I bathe in that cool, fresh water? No harm could come of it. And, so saying, she slipped off her robes and stepped into the water. But scarcely had her tender feet touched the cool ripples when she felt a great shove on her shoulders, and the wicked witch had pushed her into the deep water, exclaiming:

'Swim henceforth, White Duck!'

And the witch herself assumed the form of the Queen, and decked herself out in the royal robes, and sat among the Court ladies, awaiting the King's return. And suddenly the tramp of horses' hoofs was heard, and the barking of dogs, and the witch hastened forward to meet the royal carriages, and, throwing her arms round the King's neck, kissed him. And in his great joy the King did not know that the woman he held in his arms was not his own dear wife, but a wicked witch.

In the meantime, outside the palace walls, the poor White Duck swam up and down the pond; and near it laid three eggs, out of which there came one morning two little fluffy ducklings and a little ugly drake. And the White Duck brought the little creatures up, and they paddled after her in the pond, and caught gold-fish, and hopped upon the bank and waddled about, ruffling their feathers and saying 'Quack, quack' as they strutted about on the green banks of the pond. But their mother used to warn them not to stray too far, telling them that a wicked witch lived in the castle beyond the garden, adding, 'She has ruined me, and she will do her best to ruin you.' But the young ones did not listen to their mother, and, playing about the garden one day, they strayed close up to the castle windows. The witch at once recognised them by their smell, and ground her teeth with anger; but she hid her feelings, and, pretending to be very kind she called them to her and joked with them, and led them into a beautiful room, where she gave them food to eat, and showed them a soft cushion on which they might sleep. Then she left them and went down into the palace kitchens, where she told the servants to sharpen the knives, and to make a great fire ready, and hang a large kettleful of water over it.

In the meantime the two little ducklings had fallen asleep, and the little drake lay between them, covered up by their wings, to be kept warm under their feathers. But the little drake could not go to sleep, and as he lay there wide awake in the night he heard the witch come to the door and say:

'Little ones, are you asleep?'

And the little drake answered for the other two:

'We cannot sleep, we wake and weep,

Sharp is the knife, to take our life;

The fire is hot, now boils the pot,

And so we wake, and lie and quake.'

'They are not asleep yet,' muttered the witch to herself; and she walked up and down in the passage, and then came back to the door, and said:

'Little ones, are you asleep?'

And again the little drake answered for his sisters:

'We cannot sleep, we wake and weep,

Sharp is the knife, to take our life;

The fire is hot, now boils the pot,

And so we wake, and lie and quake.'

'Just the same answer,' muttered the witch; 'I think I'll go in and see.' So she opened the door gently, and seeing the two little ducklings sound asleep, she there and then killed them.

The next morning the White Duck wandered round the pond in a distracted manner, looking for her little ones; she called and she searched, but could find no trace of them. And in her heart she had a foreboding that evil had befallen them, and she fluttered up out of the water and flew to the palace. And there, laid out on the marble floor of the court, dead and stone cold, were her three children. The White Duck threw herself upon them, and, covering up their little bodies with her wings, she cried:

'Quack, quack--my little loves!

Quack, quack--my turtle-doves!

I brought you up with grief and pain,

And now before my eyes you're slain.

I gave you always of the best;

I kept you warm in my soft nest.

I loved and watched you day and night--

You were my joy, my one delight.'

The King heard the sad complaint of the White Duck, and called to the witch: 'Wife, what a wonder is this? Listen to that White Duck.'

But the witch answered, 'My dear husband, what do you mean? There is nothing wonderful in a duck's quacking. Here, servants! Chase that duck out of the courtyard.' But though the servants chased and chevied, they could not get rid of the duck; for she circled round and round, and always came back to the spot where her children lay, crying:

'Quack, quack--my little loves!

Quack, quack--my turtle-doves!

The wicked witch your lives did take--

The wicked witch, the cunning snake.

First she stole my King away,

Then my children did she slay.

Changed me, from a happy wife,

To a duck for all my life.

Would I were the Queen again;

Would that you had never been slain.'

And as the King heard her words he began to suspect that he had been deceived, and he called out to the servants, 'Catch that duck, and bring it here.' But, though they ran to and fro, the duck always fled past them, and would not let herself be caught. So the King himself stepped down amongst them, and instantly the duck fluttered down into his hands. And as he stroked her wings she was changed into a beautiful woman, and he recognised his dear wife. And she told him that a bottle would be found in her nest in the garden, containing some drops from the spring of healing. And it was brought to her; and the ducklings and little drake were sprinkled with the water, and from the little dead bodies three lovely children arose. And the King and Queen were overjoyed when they saw their children, and they all lived happily together in the beautiful palace. But the wicked witch was taken by the King's command, and she came to no good end.

(from The Yellow Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang)

Simon

Lord
Word
Ford

Psalm 32:3
"When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long."

White-tailed Deer FawnA delicate fawn enjoys the quiet stillness of this perfect moment.

Chess: "lord" "word" "ford" "cord" "board" "gourd"

Kenning

In literature, a kenning is a poetic phrase, a figure of speech, substituted for the usual name of a person or thing. Kennings work in much the same way as epithets and verbal formulae, and were commonly inserted into Old English poetic lines.

In its simplest form, it comprises two terms, one of which (the 'base word'), is made to relate to the other to convey a meaning neither has alone. For example the sea in Old English could be called seġl-rād 'sail-road', swan-rād 'swan-road', bæþ-weġ 'bath-way' or hwæl-weġ 'whale-way'. In line 10 of the epic Beowulf, the sea is called the hronrāde or 'whale-road'.

The word is derived from the Old Norse verb kenna við, "to express [one thing] in terms of [another]", and is prevalent throughout Norse, Anglo-Saxon literature and Celtic literature. Kennings are especially associated with the practice of alliterative verse, where they tend to become traditional fixed formulas. The skalds made such extensive use of kennings that these have come to be regarded as an essential nature of 'skaldic verse'.

A good knowledge of mythology was necessary in order to understand the kennings, which is one of the reasons why Snorri Sturluson composed the Younger Edda as a work of reference for aspiring poets. Here is an example of how important this knowledge was. It was composed by the Norwegian skald Eyvind Finnson (d. ca 990), and he compares the greed of king Harald Gråfell to the generosity of his predecessor Haakon the Good:

Bárum Ullr, of alla

ímunlauks, á hauka

fjöllum Fýrisvalla

fræ Hákonar ævi;

nú hefr fólkstríðir Fróða

fáglýjaðra þýja

meldr í móður holdi

mellu dolgs of folginn

Paraphrased, with kennings deciphered, the verse runs: "O warrior, we carried gold on our arms during all of Hakon's life; now the enemy of the people has hidden gold in the earth."

This could be translated more literally as: "Ullr of war-leek! We carried the seed of Fýrisvellir on the mountains of hawks during all of Hakon's life; now the enemy of the people has hidden the flour of Fróði's hapless slaves in the flesh of the mother of the enemy of the giantess."

War-leek is a kenning for "sword". Ullr of war-leek means "warrior" and refers to king Harald; this kenning follows a convention whereby the name of any god is combined with some male attribute (e.g. war or weaponry) to produce a kenning for "man". The seed of Fýrisvellir means "gold" and refers to a legend retold in Skáldskaparmál and Hrólf Kraki's saga in which King Hrolf and his men scattered gold on the plains (vellir) of the river Fýri south of Gamla Uppsala to delay their pusuers. The mountains of hawks are "arms", a reference to the sport of falconry; this follows a convention in which arms are called the land (or any sort of surface) of the hawk. The flour of Fróði's hapless slaves alludes to the Grottasöng legend and is another kenning for "gold". The flesh of the mother of the enemy of the giantess is the Earth (Jörd), as she was the mother of Thor, the enemy of the Jotuns.

A list of kennings may be consulted for reference purposes.

A notable peculiarity of kennings is the possibility of constructing complicated kenning strings by means of consecutive substitution. For example, those who are keen in kenning readily know that slaughter dew worm dance is battle, since slaughter dew is blood, blood worm is sword, and sword dance is battle.

Another kind of wordplay is based on the inversion of kennings. For example, if sword dance is battle and spear-din is another kenning for battle, then sword may easily become "spear-din dancer".

The root "ken" is still used in Scandinavian (känna), in German (kennen), in Dutch (kennen) and in Afrikaans (ken), whereas its English use is restricted to Scots and the North of England. In northern Britain it is used in describing what a person knows about something or what they see, especially when seafaring. For instance, if somebody queries the happenings of the North Sea, of a lighthouse resident, the watcher would say he is kenning this or that — "D'ye ken what a kenning is?". The root was applied to the "k" rune, pronounced similarly.

List of kennings

Jean Paul Sartre

source : Five Dials
My Darling Beaver
HOW TO WRITE A LETER
Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir
These few letters from Sartre to Simone de
Beauvoir are taken from the collection Witness
to My Life, which was published after Sartre’s
death, translated by Lee Fahnestock and
Norman MacAfee, and edited by de Beauvoir
herself.
From playful declarations of affectionand detailed descriptions of everyday life, tophilosophical conjecture and in-depth discussionsof books, the letters offer a fascinating
insight into one of the most famous relationshipsof the twentieth century and are testament toan incredible intellectual affinity which lasted a lifetime. Yet, blithely interwoven with the
intimacy of shared ideas and emotions are also Sartre’s unflinching accounts of his affairs with other women, and although complete honesty and transparency was a fundamental tenet of the pair’s relationship, these are still difficult to read without squirming with jealousy on de Beauvoir’s behalf. But perhaps I should reserve judgement about Sartre – at any rate, that’s what his eerily prescient words in the letter of 16th September seem to implore us to do. – Anna Kelly July, 1939 · My darling Beaver, When it comes to you, my little darling, everything is idyllic. I got both your letters at the same time. You’ve finally read Heidegger, it’s worth your while and we’ll talk about it. The day after tomorrow I’ll see you, my love. I can’t sit still. I have little stirrings of hope now (I was logy and drowsing) but I’m
also more nervous. Now I can tell you that prospects weren’t at all rosy these past days. When I arrived there was fear of war for the following day (there was an aborted coup in Danzig, the papers are now calling it the July 2 coup), and I was petrified that war would erupt while I
was still in Saint-Sauveur. Do you realize what that means? And then later, on Tuesday, things calmed down. But then on Wednesday I got a letter from Tania that annoyed me, pure delirium of passion on my part. And then I calmed down. I’m so nervous and out of sorts here
that yesterday, while reading an idiotic and sentimental scene from a piece in L’Illustration, suddenly I was teary-eyed. With no thought or qualms on my part but due, I think, to the strangely larval, overagitated state in which I find myself. But it’s over. On the other hand, I think I’ve done some excellent work. You’ll be the judge of that. I love you with all my heart, my little one. You are my haven, and I need you. I send you all my love. Late July, 1939 · My darling Beaver, I received your two delightful letters, which I read without skipping a single one of the descriptions (which are very spare, incidentally), and I was very moved by your small compliments. Dear God, how nice you are, my Beaver. You fill me with regrets and longings, and yesterday I was completely morose not to be with you. Who wanted this? you will ask. I did, probably, but without you it’s like Paradise Lost. I love you. For now I’m relentlessly devoting myself to my personal life (we said it better, I think: personal doggedness), but personal life doesn’t pay. To tell the truth, Tania is almost always charming and affectionate, and it is very nice sleeping with her, which happens to me morning and evening, for the moment. She seems to get pleasure out of it, but it kills her, she lies on her bed dead to the world for more than 15 minutes after her revels. The thing is, it takes the violence of arguments or the touching quality of reconciliation for me to feel alive. Last night we had a terrific argument but it was worth the effort ( . . . ) Adieu my darling Beaver, she has just arrived and I am finishing right in front of her. You know my feelings, but I don’t
dare to write them, because it’s not that difficult to read upside down.

16th September, 1939 · My darling Beaver,There’s a package for me at the postoffice. A small one. From you? That would be the first sign of you I’ve had since Ceintry. Except that for me to get it the postal clerk has to sign a discharge, and of course the postal clerk isn’t there.
Letters, none. There were 100 this morning for the whole division but of course not one for the AD. That’s already some progress. Our first sergeant hasn’t had a letter in twenty-five days. This silence is beginning to weigh on us. I think that our existence would be different – perhaps more vulnerable – if we had daily news from civilian lives. I’d so like to know
what’s going on in your life. I get the impression that after some few days of gloom, Paris is beginning to come back to life. Am I wrong? Have you gotten back to your novel? Are you giving your attention to ‘the social life’? For me, I feel out of touch with social matters. This war is so disconcerting – still Kafkaesque, and rather like the battle in The Charterhouse of
Parma. It defies thought; I struggle valiantly to catch it, but ultimately everything I think holds good for field manoeuvres, not for the war; the war is always screened, elusive. Actually there’s nothing new. I’m calm, but the calm doesn’t much satisfy me, it isn’t a calm based on good reasons, and I justify myself in my little black notebook. Whoever reads it after my death – for you will publish it only posthumously – will think that I was an evil character unless you accompany it with benevolent and explanatory annotations. In short, I’m
morally a bit disoriented (don’t worry, moral preoccupations don’t spoil my appetite),
like the guy who, getting ready to lift a heavy barbell, suddenly realises it’s hollow and, at the same time, that deep down he was hoping it was. Needless to say, he finds himself flat on his ass.

17 th November, 1939 · My darling Beaver,
No letters from you today. I’d foreseen
it for one of these days, because
the day before yesterday I inexplicably
received two at the same time. Since I
have no anxieties and even find this gap
natural, for the reason I’ve just mentioned,
it allows me to understand all
the better what I miss when a day goes
by without anything from you; it is a
sort of Goethesque wisdom that allows
me to attend the various events of my
life without actually partaking of them.
With your letters I feel Olympian at little
cost, because I regain a world we hold in
common, which is good, be it in war or
peace, like a tormented novel that ends
happily. I think that it comes from the
absolute and total regard I have for you:
the moment that exists, there is that absolute,
the rest must clearly follow, even the
worst. I imagine that is what you must
be feeling when you call me your ‘little
absolute.’ My darling, I love you very
much.
I got an exalted letter from Dumartin
spontaneously proclaiming himself my
disciple, avowing an admiration that is
not intellectual but human, and ending
by asking me to correct twenty pages
of a novel he has just written. There
are a few pages of subtle humour in it
that I liked very much, as when he says,
‘I spent two months of isolation and
individuality in England’. But I am even
more amused by this shower of former
students that still associate me with their
little concoctions, one (Hadjibelli) asking
me for a bibliography, another (Kanapa)
a definition of Aristotle’s physics, the
third that I read his literary work. Alas,
I’ll have to answer them all. I’ll devote
one whole day to it. I’ve finished the
difficult passage in my novel and in a way
that pleases me. But will you be satisfied,
little judge?

From The Times

October 23, 2008

An impossible crash brought Keynes back to life

It seemed that the great economist was history - just like the Great Depression. But recent events have proved him right

Robert Skidelsky

When Alistair Darling said that “much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense”, anyone under 40 might well have asked: “And who on earth is Keynes”?
When I first started writing about him in the early 1970s, John Maynard Keynes was a name to conjure with - not in the league of Led Zeppelin, to be sure, but certainly familiar to the mythical educated layman. Economic policy was “Keynesian” - that is, governments aimed to keep unemployment below the “magic” figure of one million, as they had for the previous 30 years, by expanding public spending or cutting taxes.
Then Keynesian policy suddenly became obsolete and the theory that backed it was consigned to history's dustbin. He might have been a great economist, right for his times - the Great Depression of the 1930s - but he had nothing to offer the modern world, and moreoever was responsible for the “stagflation” of the 1970s. In her assault on inflation, Margaret Thatcher put the Keynesian engines into reverse and created three million unemployed. Keynes seemed as dead as the dodo.
In fact, while dead to the public, Keynes lived a ghostly half-life in the corridors of the Bank of England and the Treasury. In setting interest rates, the Bank continued to pay attention to what was happening to output, the amount of economic activity, as well as inflation - although the inflation rate was its only “target”. Gordon Brown's fiscal rules allowed for the influence of the “automatic stabilisers”: the movement of the budget into deficit or surplus as the economy slowed or speeded up.
But basically the authorities relied on “managing expectations”, by the gentlest adjustments to interest rates, to keep us in perpetual non-inflationary boom; we lived in a world from which inflations and depressions had been banished, and for which Keynes was no longer needed.
For ten years the new formula worked. We were blessed with what Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, called a “nice” environment - a combination of strong growth in the US and Far East and the downward pressure on prices of a competitive globalising economy. More fundamentally, Keynesian economics was rejected by most of the economic profession as having caused inflation in the 1970s.
The main prescription of the “new” classical economics was to minimise the role of government and let markets do their job. It rested on an assumption that if economic agents are rational - the key assumption on which the claim of economics to be a science is based - the market system accurately prices all trades at each moment in time. If this is so, boom-bust cycles must be caused by outside “shocks” - wars, revolutions, above all political interference with the delicate adjustment mechanisms of the “invisible hand” of the market.
But this view has been blown sky- high by the present crisis. For this crisis was generated by the market system itself, not some outside “shock”; moreover, within a system that had been extensively deregulated in line with mainstream teaching. The automatically self-correcting market system to which the economics profession has mostly paid homage has been shown to be violently unstable. And this is exactly how Keynes expected it to behave.
What was left out of the mainstream economics of his day, and its “post-Keynes” successor, was the acknowledgement of radical uncertainty. “The outstanding fact,” he wrote in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) “is the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made”. We disguise this uncertainty by resorting to a variety of “pretty, polite techniques”, of which economics is one, “which try to deal with the present by abstracting from the fact that we know very little about the future”.
But any view of the future based on “so flimsy a foundation” is liable to alternating waves of irrational exuberance and blind panic. When panic sets in there is a flight into cash. But while this may be rational for the individual, it is disastrous for the economy. If everyone wants cash, no one will lend. As Keynes tellingly reminded us “there is no such thing as liquidity... for the community as a whole”. And that means that there may be no automatic barrier to the slide into depression, unless a government intervenes to offset extreme reluctance to lend by huge injections of cash into the economy.
This is exactly what world governments have been doing, in defiance of the contemporary theory that tells them that the huge mispricing of debt which provoked the present meltdown is impossible.
What the Chancellor rightly pointed out is that the rescue of the banking system may not be enough to avert a deep recession, and a fiscal stimulus may be needed. The International Monetary Fund is predicting that output will fall short of trend by 1.05 per cent of GDP this year, rising to 3.16 per cent next year. With unchanged policy, the result may well be three million unemployed by the end of next year. Yes, the economy will ultimately correct itself without government stimulants. But it may take a long time, with huge damage while the required “corrections” are taking place. This is the case for a Keynesian rescue operation.
Beyond the ambulance work, there is the question of working out a policy framework, domestic and international, that will at least minimise the danger of these self-destructive market-generated storms arising in future. Politics, of course, will compel all kinds of new regulations, good and bad, to rein in the wild excesses of recent times.
But politics is blind: the politicians are like passengers on the Titanic rushing to the lifeboats. But unless their policies are backed by a more adequate theory of economic behaviour than is currently available they will not survive when times return to “normal”. Keynes tried to supply that theory. He may not have clinched his case, but even his arch- critic Milton Friedman conceded that it was “the right kind of theory” for his times. Because the possibility of collapse is always present, Keynesian theory remains a better guide to policy than one that assumes that markets are inherently stable.
Keynes understood that it is ultimately theory that determines policy, and that one cannot for a long time justify policies that run counter to accepted theory. He also said: “In the long run we are all dead.” That is one observation which happily does not apply to him. Over to you, Darling.
Lord Skidelsky is author of John Maynard Keynes: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman

Serendipity; or, not that close? CD: color-dolor

"Good Neighbor Policy"

His Theory? Color Chaos

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

MEXICO WAY Richard Schultz, pictured, and Anado McLauchlin mix the traditional with the funky in their home. More Photos >

By JOYCE WADLER

Published: October 22, 2008

La Cieneguita, Mexico

Multimedia

Slide Show

Casa de los Colores

“FORGET the address,” Anado McLauchlin says on the phone. “That’s like a dream: it doesn’t exist. How’s your Spanish? Tell the cabdriver: near the balneario de Guadalupe en La Cieneguita. That’s the bathhouse. Or the casa de los colores — that’s the way a lot of them know us.”

Not this cabdriver. After driving the five miles or so from the arty mountain town of San Miguel de Allende, he turns onto a cobblestone road, stops in front of an old church and declines to continue.

“There’s nothing there,” he says firmly.

A short time later a search party is dispatched in the form of Richard Schultz, a tall, bearded man who, thanks to the legalization of same-sex marriage in California (where he and Mr. McLauchlin keep an apartment), is Mr. McLauchlin’s husband of two weeks. Mr. Schultz leads the way up a steep road, past a crumbling stone wall covered with morning glories. The braying of their four foundling burros is heard. At last, Mr. Schultz arrives at the wrought-iron gates of their home.

The first thing a visitor experiences, looking through those gates, is a blast of purple. It’s nothing so static as pigment on a surface — it’s a force.

Barely an inch of this home, which has been a work in progress since Mr. McLauchlin and Mr. Schultz bought it in 2001, is without color and decoration. Much of it is in mosaics of ceramic and glass. A vintage wrought-iron outdoor table and chairs are purple and yellow; one side of the house has been painted purple, then decorated with a mural of what appears to be an Eastern goddess held aloft by a playful, familiar-looking cherub.

Mr. McLauchlin, an assemblage artist who makes furniture, decorative objects and jewelry, is also bright with colors when he comes out to greet his guest. A short man with a beard, he resembles one of the benign hairy creatures in an Edward Koren cartoon. He wears a Buddha T-shirt over his jeans, rainbow-striped socks and leopard-print shoes.

His explanation of the mural on the house is itself a kind of mosaic. “Our Guadalupenized Ganesh,” he says, invoking the Mexican saint and the Hindu deity. “He’s the god who breaks through obstacles. She appeared to Juan Diego, an Aztec, in 1531, on a sacred hillside.”

That cherub looks like Mr. McLauchlin. “That’s been remarked on,” he says.

The interior of the house is another pinwheel of colors: pink and purple walls; a candelabrum painted purple and hung with Mardi Gras beads and Day of the Dead paper cutouts. It’s the decorating equivalent of leaving gray New York in winter and going to a blue-sky beach. After a season of beige modular sofas, the royal blues and crazy pinks are so intense, one feels they are saturating the skin and there is the possibility of a burn.

There is a home décor question, Mr. McLauchlin is told, that one trembles to ask: What’s your palette here?

Mr. McLauchlin seizes on the question with gusto, as if he has waited all of his 61 years to answer it.

“The palette is ‘no rules,’ ” he says. “When you have rules like only beige or oatmeal, you’re limited to that palette. When you use all the different colors, there are no rules, there is no editor. It’s very freeing.”

He gestures at the kitchen, which has red walls, a green ceiling and a yellow table. “This is the Anjelica Huston dining room,” he says. “A friend of mine had an Architectural Digest in her home. She had a dining room that was red and yellow, so this is my interpretation.”

The glass-covered tabletop has been embellished with tiny objects: colored bells, Cracker Jack charms, tarot cards, dominoes. The table’s purple legs are studded with tiny Christ figures. The chairs have been decoupaged by Mr. Schultz, who teaches art history online for a boys’ school in San Francisco, but whose primary job is looking after Mr. McLauchlin and the business.

The couple may look like old hippies, but business is good. Mr. McLauchlin says his pieces range in price from $150 to the thousands (he tends to make up prices on the spot), giving him an annual income in the low six figures. “The house is really a showroom — just about everything is for sale,” he says. “One wealthy woman from Austin came out and bought a painting and bought one of our couches.”

“Everything is impermanent — you’re going to lose everything anyway,” his partner says, not unhappily.

That impermanence includes identities. Mr. McLauchlin’s given name is not Anado. He was born James Rayburn McLauchlin III, son of an Oklahoma City doctor who is long dead but still a presence in this house.

“My dad was a real trip,” Mr. McLauchlin says when the talk turns to biography. “He was a womanizer. I have two illegitimate brothers I’ve never met, and when my dad died I called up the woman who gave birth to them and invited them to the funeral. Supposedly they were sitting behind us.”

Did he turn around and look?

“I don’t think so.”

He fetches a photo of his father, a dark-haired good-looking man, as polished as Mr. McLauchlin is unkempt — his shrink said he should keep the picture out, he says. Asked why, he stumbles to answer, then tells a story.

“I was in bed about 4:30 this morning, holding Richard, and I thought about my dad and I started weeping,” Mr. McLauchlin says. His father, who thought he was a punk hippie, “never really got to know me,” he says. “He would have enjoyed the fact that you were coming.”

How did his father die?

“He was with his mistress in this private plane coming back from Bermuda. I was this hippie artist in Oklahoma. I was at this art opening. I felt kind of odd. I walked outside and this big brilliant thunderstorm was coming across the Oklahoma sky, and that was the thunderstorm that took down my father’s plane. My mother found out about it on TV.”

Art school at the University of Oklahoma was not satisfying (his work was too decorative, according to his professors, he said), so in 1971 Mr. McLauchlin dropped out and went to New York. There were the usual survival jobs (cabby, delivery boy) while he did poetry readings and performance art; there was an extended stay in an ashram in India, where he was given the name Anado; and a move to Marin County, Calif., where he made his living as a landscape gardener and started working seriously on decorative furnishings.

“I’d find things in junk stores and paint them and embellish them,” Mr. McLauchlin says. “With no rules you can do just about anything. I did a laundry hamper with a Tibetan Buddhist thing.”

He met Mr. Schultz in 1998, on the Internet, in an AOL chat room. They visited San Miguel de Allende two years later. Mr. McLauchlin recalls what enchanted him about the place: “The color, the festivity, the lovers in the street, the burros, the chaos.”

Their property, when they found it in the summer of 2001, was a wreck: a two-story stone house that had been designed to look like a Swiss chalet and was inhabited by scorpions. The interior walls were a faded orange, the fixtures had been stolen. They paid $100,000, then spent about $30,000 renovating. They whitewashed the interior, creating a clean canvas, and Mr. McLauchlin began throwing up colors. There were mistakes — the oranges and blues he used for the upstairs balcony overlooking the living room evoked a Howard Johnson — but when they happened, he just tried another color.

“Mistakes are the best thing,” he says. “Then you can always get real crazy and inventive.”

The house continues to be a work in progress. Colors change, new studios are built. Art lovers and artists come through. Mr. McLauchlin also runs workshops for artists who are blocked (information on tours and workshops is available at madebyanado.com).

“With the no-rules concept, you can get unstuck pretty easily,” he explains. “I also have a Day of the Dead workshop, which is not only about creating art but honoring a loved one. I had one woman come out here who had not gotten over a 35-year breakup with a guy. They were going to come to San Miguel, but they broke up 35 years ago, so she felt she had to come here. She made a little altar with his picture.”

Did she get over him?

“I don’t think so. I never saw her again, but I don’t think she did. She was pretty depressed.”

Florida

Psalm 32:7
"Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.Selah."





Chess: "Florida"
Our Old Feuillageby Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

---

Always our old feuillage! Always Florida's green peninsula--always the priceless delta of Louisiana--always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas, Always California's golden hills and hollows, and the silver mountains of New Mexico--always soft-breath'd Cuba, Always the vast slope drain'd by the Southern sea, inseparable with the slopes drain'd by the Eastern and Western seas,
The area the eighty-third year of these States, the three and a half
millions of square miles,
The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main,
the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
The seven millions of distinct families and the same number of dwellings--
always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches,
Always the free range and diversity--always the continent of Democracy;
Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers,
Kanada, the snows;
Always these compact lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing
the huge oval lakes;
Always the West with strong native persons, the increasing density there,
the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;
All sights, South, North, East--all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,
All characters, movements, growths, a few noticed, myriads unnoticed,
Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering,
On interior rivers by night in the glare of pine knots, steamboats
wooding up,
Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys
of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke
and Delaware,
In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the
hills, or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink,
In a lonesome inlet a sheldrake lost from the flock, sitting on the
water rocking silently,
In farmers' barns oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done, they
rest standing, they are too tired,
Afar on arctic ice the she-walrus lying drowsily while her cubs play around,
The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail'd, the farthest polar
sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes,
White drift spooning ahead where the ship in the tempest dashes,
On solid land what is done in cities as the bells strike midnight together,
In primitive woods the sounds there also sounding, the howl of the
wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk,
In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead lake, in summer
visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming,
In lower latitudes in warmer air in the Carolinas the large black
buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree tops,
Below, the red cedar festoon'd with tylandria, the pines and
cypresses growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat,
Rude boats descending the big Pedee, climbing plants, parasites with
color'd flowers and berries enveloping huge trees,
The waving drapery on the live-oak trailing long and low,
noiselessly waved by the wind,
The camp of Georgia wagoners just after dark, the supper-fires and
the cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
Thirty or forty great wagons, the mules, cattle, horses, feeding
from troughs,
The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees,
the flames with the black smoke from the pitch-pine curling and rising;
Southern fishermen fishing, the sounds and inlets of North
Carolina's coast, the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery, the
large sweep-seines, the windlasses on shore work'd by horses, the
clearing, curing, and packing-houses;
Deep in the forest in piney woods turpentine dropping from the
incisions in the trees, there are the turpentine works,
There are the negroes at work in good health, the ground in all
directions is cover'd with pine straw;
In Tennessee and Kentucky slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge,
by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking,
In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence,
joyfully welcom'd and kiss'd by the aged mulatto nurse,
On rivers boatmen safely moor'd at nightfall in their boats under
shelter of high banks,
Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle,
others sit on the gunwale smoking and talking;
Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing
in the Great Dismal Swamp,
There are the greenish waters, the resinous odor, the plenteous
moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree;
Northward, young men of Mannahatta, the target company from an
excursion returning home at evening, the musket-muzzles all
bear bunches of flowers presented by women;
Children at play, or on his father's lap a young boy fallen asleep,
(how his lips move! how he smiles in his sleep!)
The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the
Mississippi, he ascends a knoll and sweeps his eyes around;
California life, the miner, bearded, dress'd in his rude costume,
the stanch California friendship, the sweet air, the graves one
in passing meets solitary just aside the horse-path;
Down in Texas the cotton-field, the negro-cabins, drivers driving
mules or oxen before rude carts, cotton bales piled on banks
and wharves;
Encircling all, vast-darting up and wide, the American Soul, with
equal hemispheres, one Love, one Dilation or Pride;
In arriere the peace-talk with the Iroquois the aborigines, the
calumet, the pipe of good-will, arbitration, and indorsement,
The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun and then toward
the earth,
The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted faces and guttural
exclamations,
The setting out of the war-party, the long and stealthy march,
The single file, the swinging hatchets, the surprise and slaughter
of enemies;
All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of these States,
reminiscences, institutions,
All these States compact, every square mile of these States without
excepting a particle;
Me pleas'd, rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok's fields,
Observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butterflies
shuffling between each other, ascending high in the air,
The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects, the fall traveler
southward but returning northward early in the spring,
The country boy at the close of the day driving the herd of cows and
shouting to them as they loiter to browse by the roadside,
The city wharf, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New
Orleans, San Francisco,
The departing ships when the sailors heave at the capstan;
Evening--me in my room--the setting sun,
The setting summer sun shining in my open window, showing the
swarm of flies, suspended, balancing in the air in the centre
of the room, darting athwart, up and down, casting swift
shadows in specks on the opposite wall where the shine is;
The athletic American matron speaking in public to crowds of listeners,
Males, females, immigrants, combinations, the copiousness, the
individuality of the States, each for itself--the moneymakers,
Factories, machinery, the mechanical forces, the windlass, lever,
pulley, all certainties,
The certainty of space, increase, freedom, futurity,
In space the sporades, the scatter'd islands, the stars--on the firm
earth, the lands, my lands,
O lands! all so dear to me--what you are, (whatever it is,) I putting it
at random in these songs, become a part of that, whatever it is,
Southward there, I screaming, with wings slow flapping, with the
myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida,
Otherways there atwixt the banks of the Arkansaw, the Rio Grande,
the Nueces, the Brazos, the Tombigbee, the Red River, the
Saskatchawan or the Osage, I with the spring waters laughing
and skipping and running,
Northward, on the sands, on some shallow bay of Paumanok, I with
parties of snowy herons wading in the wet to seek worms and
aquatic plants,
Retreating, triumphantly twittering, the king-bird, from piercing
the crow with its bill, for amusement--and I triumphantly twittering,
The migrating flock of wild geese alighting in autumn to refresh
themselves, the body of the flock feed, the sentinels outside
move around with erect heads watching, and are from time to time
reliev'd by other sentinels--and I feeding and taking turns
with the rest,
In Kanadian forests the moose, large as an ox, corner'd by hunters,
rising desperately on his hind-feet, and plunging with his
fore-feet, the hoofs as sharp as knives--and I, plunging at the
hunters, corner'd and desperate,
In the Mannahatta, streets, piers, shipping, store-houses, and the
countless workmen working in the shops,
And I too of the Mannahatta, singing thereof--and no less in myself
than the whole of the Mannahatta in itself,
Singing the song of These, my ever-united lands--my body no more
inevitably united, part to part, and made out of a thousand
diverse contributions one identity, any more than my lands
are inevitably united and made ONE IDENTITY;
Nativities, climates, the grass of the great pastoral Plains,
Cities, labors, death, animals, products, war, good and evil--these me,
These affording, in all their particulars, the old feuillage to me
and to America, how can I do less than pass the clew of the union
of them, to afford the like to you?
Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you
also be eligible as I am?
How can I but as here chanting, invite you for yourself to collect
bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of these States?

---

Calypso

Calypso
Patagonia

Psalm 32:9
"Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee."

Vampire feeding on a donkey in Trinidad (source of pic: The New York Times)

Chess: "Patagonia"

Dry quicksand

Dry quicksand is loose sand whose bulk density is reduced by blowing air through it and which yields easily to weight or pressure. It acts similar to regular quicksand, but it does not contain any water and does not operate on the same principle. Dry quicksand is an example of a granular material.

Until recently, the existence of dry quicksand was doubted, and the reports of humans and complete caravans being lost in dry quicksand were considered to be folklore.

Scientific research

Writing in Nature, physicist Detlef Lohse and coworkers of University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands allowed air to flow through very fine sand (typical grain diameter was about 40 micrometers) in a container with a perforated base. They then turned the air stream off before the start of the experiment and allowed the sand to settle: the packing fraction of this sand was only 41% (compared to 55–60% for untreated sand). ^[1]

Lohse found that a weighted table tennis ball (radius 2 cm, mass 133 g), when released from just above the surface of the sand, would sink to about five diameters. Lohse also observed a "straight jet of sand [shooting] violently into the air after about 100 ms". Objects are known to make a splash when they hit sand, but this type of jet has never been described before.

Lohse concluded that

In nature, dry quicksands may evolve from the sedimentation of very fine sand after it has been blown into the air and, if large enough, might be a threat to humans. Indeed, reports that travellers and whole vehicles have been swallowed instantly may even turn out to be credible in the light of our results. ^[1]

Occurrences in literature and otherwise

During the planning of the Project Apollo moon missions, dry quicksand on the moon was considered as a potential danger to the missions. The successful landings of the unmanned Surveyor probes a few years earlier and their observations of a solid, rocky surface largely discounted this possibility, however. The large plates at the end of legs of the Apollo Lunar Module were designed to reduce this danger, but the astronauts did not encounter dry quicksand.

Dry quicksand was occasionally featured in literature. The 1966 movie African Gold (released abroad as Ride the High Wind) shows an actress being trapped in dry quicksand. Mindwarp (1990) also has an actress wandering into dry quicksand before being rescued. The movie 12 to the Moon (1960) shows a crew member being lost in moon dust similar to dry quicksand. In the film Lawrence of Arabia, a servant of T. E. Lawrence "drowns" in dry quicksand (this was never claimed to have happened in real life). The plot of the Arthur C. Clarke novel A Fall Of Moondust (1961) was based on the perils of working and travelling on a moon surface covered by a deep layer of dry quicksand, based on the actual risks considered during the planning of the Project Apollo missions.

The novel Dune features an Arrakian safety hazard called "sinks" by the Fremen natives, a pit filled with dust that swallows travelers. The movie and book The Princess Bride, featured "Lightning Sand" (described as being similar to quicksand, only dry where quicksand is wet), one of the three terrors of the Fire Swamp. Dry quicksand was also featured in the movies , and the 2004 Chinese film, . In the 1999 film The Mummy, dry quicksand buried Captain Winston Havlock and his crashed biplane. In the 1993 film Pure Luck Martin Short's character finds himself sinking in dry quicksand in Mexico before being rescued.

Phillip J. Fry and Turanga Leela drive a (stolen replica) lunar rover from an amusement park into a pit of dry quicksand in the Futurama episode "The Series Has Landed".

Word of the Day
Sentient (adjective)

Pronunciation: ['sen-chent or 'sent-shee-ênt]
Definition: Having sensation or feeling; finely attuned to sensation or feeling; aware.
Usage: This word is like "unique." It means finely sensitive to physical stimuli, so there's no need to put an intensifier with it. In addition, we at YourDictionary.com have noticed that "sentient" is sometimes used to mean "conscious of oneself or one's existence." That's not completely correct, as the definition shows.
Suggested Usage: "The spate of cold weather made me sentient to my flannel sheets and reluctant to get out of bed." "I was sentient of a movement, as if a mouse had shuffled behind the chair."
Etymology: Latin sentient-, present participle of sentire "to sense, perceive." Akin to "scent," "sense," "sentence," "sentiment," and, possibly, to "send."
–Dr. Language, YourDictionary.com