TRIGGER-TIGER, RIFLE-TRIFLE

Tierra del Fuego

Trigger

Tiger

Trifle

Gatillo

Disparador 

 

Proverbs 21:28
“A false witness shall perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly.”

 

 

 

 

 "What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"~~~William Blake. THE TIGER

 

  

 Psalms 107:1
“O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 "he had come to know every triffling feature that bordered the great river"~~~Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 "En el principio de los tiempos, tan dócil a la vaga especulación y a las inapelables cosmogonías, no habrá habido cosas poéticas o prosaicas. Todo sería un poco mágico. Thor no era dios del trueno; era el trueno y el dios." ~~~Jorge Luis Borges. EL ORO DE LOS TIGRES. Prólogo

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Chess: "Trigger" "Gatillo" "Tierra del Fuego" "Trifle"

 

 Chess: "California" "Cáliz" "Chalice"

 

 

 

 

 "En un plato de trigo,
tres tristes tigres,
trigo comieron"

 

 

 

 

 

 THE TIGER

By William Blake

Published in 1794 in Songs of Experience
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water`d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Chess: "Trigger" "Gatillo"

Theme
.......“The Tiger,” by William Blake (1757-1827), presents a question that embodies the theme: Who created the tiger? Was it the kind and loving God who made the lamb? Or was it Satan? Blake presents his question in Lines 3 and 4:
    What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Blake realizes, of course, that God made all the creatures on earth. However, to express his bewilderment that the God who created the gentle lamb also created the terrifying tiger, he includes Satan as a possible creator while raising his rhetorical questions, notably the one he asks in Lines 5 and 6:
    In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thy eyes?
Deeps appears to refer to hell and skies to heaven. In either case, there would be fire--the fire of hell or the fire of the stars.
.......Of course, there can be no gainsaying that the tiger symbolizes evil, or the incarnation of evil, and that the lamb (Line 20) represents goodness, or Christ. Blake's inquiry is a variation on an old philosophical and theological question: Why does evil exist in a universe created and ruled by a benevolent God? Blake provides no answer. His mission is to reflect reality in arresting images. A poet’s first purpose, after all, is to present the world and its denizens in language that stimulates the aesthetic sense; he is not to exhort or moralize. Nevertheless, the poem does stir the reader to deep thought. Here is the tiger, fierce and brutal in its quest for sustenance; there is the lamb, meek and gentle in its quest for survival. Is it possible that the same God who made the lamb also made the tiger? Or was the tiger the devil's work?
Meter
The poem is in trochaic tetrameter with catalexis at the end of each line. Here is an explanation of these technical terms:
    Tetrameter Line: a poetry line usually with eight syllables but sometimes seven. Trochaic Foot: A pair of syllables--a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Catalexis: The absence of a syllable in the final foot in a line. In Blake’s poem, an unstressed syllable is absent in the last foot of each line. Thus, every line has seven syllables, not the conventional eight.
The following illustration using the first two lines of the poem demonstrates tetrameter with four trochaic feet, the last one catalectic:
    .....1...........2...........3...............4 TIger, | TIger, | BURN ing | BRIGHT .....1...........2...........3...............4 IN the | FOR ests | OF the | NIGHT
Notice that the fourth foot in each line eliminates the conventional unstressed syllable (catalexis). However, this irregularity in the trochaic pattern does not harm the rhythm of the poem. In fact, it may actually enhance it, allowing each line to end with an accented syllable that seems to mimic the beat of the maker’s hammer on the anvil.

 

Track

Track
Train
Trump 
 
Prov.21:28
"A false witness shall perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly."

“When, like a running grave, time tracks you down” ~~~Dylan Thomas 

Mario Gomez

Alice Munro

 

Chess: "Train" "Track" "Trump"

 

Jeopardy : AT THE TRACK: The "Toy Train" is a nickname of this country's Darjeeling Himalayan with a two-foot gauge to help it climb hills  Ans.: India

Historically, north of the Frisco rail line was "the wrong side of the tracks" in this northeast Oklahoma city   Ans.: Tulsa

 The tracks of these mountains' "Scenic Railroad" run from Utica, New York to Lake Placid  Ans.: the Adirondacks

Singer

Singer
Ojo 

Soldier 

Alaska

Trigger

Tiger

Gatillo

Disparador

 

Jas. 1:8

"A double minded man is unstable in all his ways."

 

 Proverbs 21:28
“A false witness shall perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly.”

 

 

 

 

 

Elephant Seal Pup, Año Nuevo

A young Elephant Seal Pup takes a break in the sun at Ano Nuevo State Natural Reserve.

Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge at Night, Sydney, Australia

Chess: "soldier""Singer" "Alaska" "ojo" "occhi" "cantilever" "eye of the tiger" "Pirates of the Caribbean" "camera" "cámara" "Kilimanjaro" "fugo fish: camarón: shrimp"

The Tiger By William Blake Published in 1794 in Songs of Experience

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?


In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?


And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?


What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?


When the stars threw down their spears,
And water`d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?


Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?


Theme
.......“The Tiger,” by William Blake (1757-1827), presents a question that embodies the theme: Who created the tiger? Was it the kind and loving God who made the lamb? Or was it Satan? Blake presents his question in Lines 3 and 4:

What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Blake realizes, of course, that God made all the creatures on earth. However, to express his bewilderment that the God who created the gentle lamb also created the terrifying tiger, he includes Satan as a possible creator while raising his rhetorical questions, notably the one he asks in Lines 5 and 6:

In what distant deeps or skiesBurnt the fire of thy eyes?

Deeps appears to refer to hell and skies to heaven. In either case, there would be fire--the fire of hell or the fire of the stars.
.......Of course, there can be no gainsaying that the tiger symbolizes evil, or the incarnation of evil, and that the lamb (Line 20) represents goodness, or Christ. Blake's inquiry is a variation on an old philosophical and theological question: Why does evil exist in a universe created and ruled by a benevolent God? Blake provides no answer. His mission is to reflect reality in arresting images. A poet’s first purpose, after all, is to present the world and its denizens in language that stimulates the aesthetic sense; he is not to exhort or moralize. Nevertheless, the poem does stir the reader to deep thought. Here is the tiger, fierce and brutal in its quest for sustenance; there is the lamb, meek and gentle in its quest for survival. Is it possible that the same God who made the lamb also made the tiger? Or was the tiger the devil's work?
Meter
The poem is in trochaic tetrameter with catalexis at the end of each line. Here is an explanation of these technical terms:

Tetrameter Line: a poetry line usually with eight syllables but sometimes seven. Trochaic Foot: A pair of syllables--a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Catalexis: The absence of a syllable in the final foot in a line. In Blake’s poem, an unstressed syllable is absent in the last foot of each line. Thus, every line has seven syllables, not the conventional eight.

The following illustration using the first two lines of the poem demonstrates tetrameter with four trochaic feet, the last one catalectic:

.....1...........2...........3...............4TIger, | TIger, | BURN ing | BRIGHT.....1...........2...........3...............4IN the | FOR ests | OF the | NIGHT

Notice that the fourth foot in each line eliminates the conventional unstressed syllable (catalexis). However, this irregularity in the trochaic pattern does not harm the rhythm of the poem. In fact, it may actually enhance it, allowing each line to end with an accented syllable that seems to mimic the beat of the maker’s hammer on the anvil. For a detailed discussion of meter and the various types of feet, click here.
.


Structure and Rhyme Scheme The poem consists of six quatrains. (A quatrain is a four-line stanza.) Each quatrain contains two couplets. (A couplet is a pair of rhyming lines). Thus we have a 24-line poem with 12 couplets and 6 stanzas–a neat, balanced package. The question in the final stanza repeats (except for one word, dare) the wording of the first stanza, perhaps suggesting that the question Blake raises will continue to perplex thinkers ad infinitum.
Figures of Speech and Allusions
Paradox: If the maker of the tiger also made the lamb.
Metaphor: Comparison of the tiger to a fire.
Anaphora: Repetition of what at the beginning of sentences or clauses. Example: What dread hand and what dread feet? / What the hammer? what the chain?
Allusion: Immortal hand or eye: God or Satan
Allusion: Distant deeps or skies: hell or heaven
Alliteration: See poem annotations.
Symbols
The Tiger: Evil (or Satan)
The Lamb: Goodness (or God)
Distant Deeps: Hell
Skies: Heaven
.
Annotations
Alliteration
The color-coded letters in the first two stanzas give examples of alliteration.
Meaning of the Poem
Stanza 1: What immortal being created this terrifying creature which, with its perfect proportions (symmetry), is an awesome killing machine?
Stanza 2: Was it created in hell (distant deeps) or in heaven (skies)? If the creator had wings, how could he get so close to the fire in which the tiger was created? How could he work with so blazing a fire?
Stanza 3: What strength (shoulder) and craftsmanship (art) could make the tiger's heart? What being could then stand before it (feet) and shape it further (hand)?
Stanza 4: What kind of tool (hammer) did he use to fashion the tiger in the forge fire? What about the chain connected to the pedal which the maker used to pump the bellows? What of the heat in the furnace and the anvil on which the maker hammered out his creation? How did the maker muster the courage to grasp the tiger?
Stanza 5: When the stars cast their light on the new being and the clouds cried, was the maker pleased with his creation?
Stanza 6: The poet repeats the the central question of the poem, stated in Stanza 1. However, he changes could (Line 4) to dare (Line 24). This is a significant change, for the poet is no longer asking who had the capability of creating the tiger but who dared to create so frightful a creature.

For many of us, the enduring image of Mann is to be found at the end of Visconti’s film of Death in Venice; Dirk Bogarde as he lies dying in a deck-ch

Big Ben
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
Prov. 21:28
"A false witness shall perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly."

Venecia

Chess: "Big Ben" "Thomas Mann" " The Magic Mountain"
Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the anti-fascist Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952.

From The Sunday Times

January 5, 2003

Review: Biography: Thomas Mann by Hermannn Kurzke translated by Leslie Willson

IAN THOMSON
THOMAS MANN: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography
by Hermann Kurzke trans Leslie Willson
Allen Lane £30 pp581

When Thomas Mann died in 1955 at the age of 80, he was dismissed by younger readers as a starchy man of letters. His fiction, with its lofty themes of nihilism, decadence and decay, seemed too old-fashioned and patrician for post-war Germany. The image of Mann as a sort of Teutonic Galsworthy, however, was destroyed in the mid-1970s when the embargo on his diaries expired. The journals revealed that Mann was prone to bouts of nausea, his nerves frayed by homoerotic fantasies. Few should be surprised. Mann’s most celebrated novel, Death in Venice, is not just a high-flown hymn to unrequited love; it is about gay desire.

Yet at the height of his success in prewar Germany, Mann represented the perfect paterfamilias: he had fathered six children, and radiated a stolid, mercantile air. The guilty truth lay hidden in his diary entries; towards the end of his life, these celebrated snake-hipped boys, elevator attendants (“Flirt mit dem lift boy”), sailors and actors. Mann was rather too aloof and self-obsessed to be a good father. In Switzerland, where he spent his last years divorced from his children, he became besotted with a Bavarian waiter named Franz. Poor Franz could not have guessed at his fate. When the 10th and final volume of the Mann diaries came out in 1995, German reporters tracked down the startled former waiter to New York and turned him into a minor celebrity. Mann would have been appalled (even though Franz was immortalised in his unfinished comic novel Felix Krull).

This new biography of Mann has been a bestseller in Germany, and not surprisingly it draws heavily on those salacious diaries. The author, Hermann Kurzke, is literature professor at Mainz University and has a flair for windy abstractions. Thus Mann betrays “the pure reality of the dream world”; he also rejects “the laxness of the homily of sympathy” (whatever that may be). Nevertheless, the professor has a thesis to demonstrate and he does so tirelessly: Mann sublimated his guilty sexual urges in his fiction.

One may be sceptical of this sort of cod psychology. But whatever Mann’s true sexual nature, few have written so alluringly about the enigma of human desire. Hans Castorp’s ill-fated passion for Clavdia Chauchat in The Magic Mountain is charged with a sultry eroticism, where sex glitters dangerously in the death- enchanted sanatorium. Clavdia has a conceivably masculine figure, with her willowy frame and boyish hips. Yet, contrary to what Kurzke and other biographers may believe, there is no evidence that Mann ever moved from homoeroticism to homosexuality. After reading Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, he demanded in his diary: “How can one sleep with a man?” Ronald Hayman, in his reliable 1996 biography of Mann, mentions this entry, but Kurzke pointedly omits it.

All his life, Mann was afraid of being outed. Exiled during the war to Los Angeles as an anti-Nazi, he had rashly left his diaries behind in Hitler’s Germany. If Goebbels had got hold of them, suggests Kurzke, Mann’s reputation as a virtuous patrician liberal would have been ruined. For the Nazis, Mann was too cosmopolitan, un-German, decadent and snobbish. And the fact that his wife, Katia Pringsheim, was the daughter of converted Jews endeared Mann even less to the regime. In January 1937, Goebbels banned all mention of the novelist from German papers. Mann had left Germany shortly before Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and did not return until the war’s end.

Kurzke defends Mann from charges of anti-semitism, rightly so. From his part-Brazilian mother, Mann liked to think that he had inherited Indian blood, and he opposed Nazi notions of racial purity. His anti-Hitler propaganda, relayed from America to Germany via the BBC, alerted listeners to the destruction of European Jewry. Moreover, as the genocide unfolded in occupied territories, Mann published his biblical saga, Joseph and his Brothers. To portray Jews as the founding fathers of our modern morality — at such a time — showed a rare German humanity. (Unfortunately, the Joseph opus is Mann’s most soporific effort: how many have got to the end of it?) Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art is a thick, teeming book that combines first-class scholarship with flashes of awkward humour and somewhat smarty-pants observation. Mann, I think, would have hated it, but then he was an over-sensitive individual who flinched from cremation (“It may hurt”) as much as from biographers.

For many of us, the enduring image of Mann is to be found at the end of Visconti’s film of Death in Venice; Dirk Bogarde as he lies dying in a deck-chair, while gazing at the beautiful boy on the beach.

Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi is published by Hutchinson. Thomas Mann is available at the Sunday Times