Gaia Endrained

i caught this evening weeding's failure
kingdom of greening's greatness
fern-frond flashing furious flora
surging stalks storm-drain seething

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There are some lovely leaves to be seen in that drain. They are deep green, with pink hearts and dappled yellow. There are some tiny fernlets and an accretion of moss. The drain may be discomfited, but Gaia has been poking her elegant nose into the business of men again, and her little beautiful victory is to be respected.

The Just Man Just Is

The title of this post is actually derived almost directly from a famous poem. The point of the line really is that it's a pun based firmly on etymology.

The Latin jus means 'right' — that is, something which a person is entitled to obtain, have and/or possess. Justice is therefore the process by which a right is upheld. However, the Latin juxta means 'near' or even 'joined to'. It is this latter word that we get 'adjust' from. The problem is that sometime during the Middle Ages and with the later arrival of the printing press, 'just' as in 'upright or fitting in terms of the maintenance of rights' became conflated with 'exactly or very close to something'.

It's now pretty difficult to decide which sense was meant when we say something like 'make this text right-justified'. Nevertheless, it's important to think about it, because it might make the difference between being 'just a man' and being 'a just man'. It is the difference between 'justice' and 'adjustment'.

That leads me to realise that perhaps there are, indeed, two kinds of justice. The first kind, spelt 'justice', means something like 'fair dealing based on a code that maintains rights'. The second kind, spelt 'justice' as well, means something like 'shifting things around until everyone is equally unhappy or as nearly equally unhappy as possible'.

What? Two words with different meanings spelt the same way? Well, there are ample examples of that in English. Just the other day, I was reading an IB text proof in which the author had written, "Drugs are often derived from lead compounds extracted from natural sources."

Excuse me? Lead compounds??

Then it dawned on me. 'Lead' not as in 'dense grey metal' but 'lead' as in 'being foremost'. It made me realise that 'leader' too can have several meanings, and one of them is 'a person who covers things in lead (metal)'.

Why is English like that? Well, many people have written excellent books on this phenomenon. For me, it just is.

Spike

Hurrrrr. The picture I'm assembling in my mind is not anywhere as pleasant as the cardboard jigsaw puzzles of my youth. Rather, it is a litany of obfuscatory, mendacious and ill-considered pagan rituals. It reminds me of my bedtime reading from that long-lost youth: The Glory that was Greece, The Grandeur that was Rome and other such archaeological tributes to civilisations that no longer occupy the lands which now contain their descendants.

The buildings stand, the chronological heritage stands, perhaps the legal occupancy is indisputable. But the heirs cheated and lied and stole and thought to befuddle the historians (if they ever thought of such at all). And as it was with Agamemnon, that most ambitious of the Atreides (beautiful word, that, in all four syllables), the end will be ignominious and rather sad.

I suppose that's what you get for writing stories and poems when sitting around feeling bleak. Then again, there is always a bright spot. As Hopkins says in The Windhover:

...blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Despair?

Despair is the emptiest of feasts. It is one which most of us have tasted; some of us have tried every dish on its malignant buffet. Some of its offerings include despondency, gloom and depression in all their various flavours. The word itself is, like 'desperation', descriptive of hopelessness and bears that meaning.

Twenty-five years ago, I cut a deal with despair. The documentation of that deal was based on the terrifying and logical contract first conceived in poetic form by that greatest of poetical Jesuits, Gerard Manley Hopkins. His 1918 poem, 'Carrion Comfort' is reproduced below. It is my fond hope that my friends who grapple with that Giant, Despair, will take comfort of a true kind from the reading of this poem.

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

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Dum spiro, spero, say the old texts. While there's life, there's hope is the equivalent in English. Always. For Hope was the last of the things to fly out of Pandora's Box. Some say it was the most final of evils, but I prefer not to embrace such pessimism.

Homesick

Rabindranath Tagore was my late maternal grandfather's favourite poet. Here is one example of why this was so. It's a poem by Tagore called Salutations. I thank She-Who-Binds for the remembrance of it.

In one salutation to thee, my God, let
all my senses spread out and touch
this world at thy feet.

Like a rain-cloud of July hung low
with its burden of unshed showers let
all my mind bend down at thy door in
one salutation to thee.

Let all my songs gather together
their diverse strains into a single
current and flow to a sea of silence in
one salutation to thee.

Like a flock of homesick cranes
flying night and day back to their
mountain nests let all my life take its
voyage to its eternal home in one
salutation to thee.

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Ah, bright wings...