Old Dreams

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, “Ōshū Adachigahara Hitotsu Ie no Zu” (奥州安達が原ひとつ家の図), illustrating the legend of an ogress who drank the blood of unborn children. A print banned by the Meiji government in the 1880s.

A riff on Haruki Murakami’s novel “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.”

In Fukushima Prefecture in Japan,

A cannibal ogress once roamed

Who plucked babies from their mothers’ wombs.

Radioactive spillage there now fangs the sea,

And in Murakami's invented public library,

The books have all been replaced by old dreams

Which only a certified Dream Reader can read.

Hoi polloi, it seems, no longer read at all!

Where I live these days, it’s kind of the obverse:

Old dreams have been replaced by smart phones

Which all and sundry fish up from the deep,

While I—qualified Dream Reader that

I am!—call upon in sleep

Old books that anyone at all can read,

Evoking fetal dreams that cannot spill their seed.

The onibaba, or ogress, depicted in Toriyama Sekien's 1776 Gazu Hyakki Yagyō ("Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons")

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Zero-knowledge Proofs

Lascaux cave painting, ca. 20,000 BCE

A “zero-knowledge proof” in computer science is a way to prove that something is true without revealing anything else about it.*

But is this not what artists, musicians and poets have always done?

Palaeolithic painters show the beasts have souls,

And countless other artists' "zero-knowledge" goals

Need no evidence to prove their points.

Blind fools doubt them, which scant sense anoints.

Bach proved his God a mighty fortress;

Songs prove that love's a real thing;

Piero, that angels walk on air;

Yeats, that bees might supplant a stare.†

Hamlet, act 5, should not distress!

It states its case with gravid flair:

"If it be now, 'tis not to come:

if it be not to come, it will be now:

if it be not now, yet it will come:

the readiness is all."

(But such things might be forgotten

In times when nonsense lacks a bottom)

*https://ethereum.org/en/zero-knowledge-proofs/

†https://poetrybrigade.org/the-stares-nest-poem-and-explanation/

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Back from Syracuse

The Stoic slave-philosopher Epictētus (ca. 50–135 CE) as depicted in Edward Ivie’s 1715 Latin translation of his writings in his student Arian's Enchiridion. His name is derived from epíktētos (ἐπίκτητος), meaning "acquired."

For Babette Salamon

Plato made three trips to Syracuse:

the first to see Mount Etna's fiery crater

—"It was not to savor Sicilian fine cuisine, O noble Aristidēs, as you claim!"—

the second in hope of finding in that city's tyrant Dionysus the Great a philosopher-king;

and third to rescue his friend Dion from imprisonment by the latter's heir, Dionysus II.

Who, however, set Plato up for slavery.

What sort of slave might such a savant be?

Like wise Epictētus, inventory . . .

whose very name was just a simple tag

that read: “Property.”

Put on the auction block in Aegina,

Plato was spotted there by Anniceris,

a Libyan on his way to Ellis

to compete in the four-horse chariot race,

who, finding the philosopher for sale,

snapped him up for eighty owls

(with five obols waived in unpaid fines)

—a bargain price for so much gist!

and returned him to the Athenian Propylaea,

thus earning greater merit than any chariot race could win,

as Olympiodorus observed in Alexandria a millennium after this.*

Even the poor slaves in Sounion's mines†

were made by word of Plato's rescue, it may be, perhaps a soupçon gayer.

“Back from Syracuse so soon?”

a  colleague wisecracked when Heidegger

returned from kissing Goebbels’

ring,

Unter den Linden in Berlin's

Office of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Spin.

Ancient ruins at Nicopolis in Epirus, Greece, where Epictetus spent his life after being banished from Rome.

*See Olympiodorus (ca. 500–570 CE), Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9, trans. Michael Griffin (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 74–75.

†In the fifth century BCE, the silver mines near Cape Sounion paid for the Athenian triremes that won the battle of Salamis against the Persians, thus preserving Athenian democracy. “Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps” (Wikipedia).

Monday, January 6, 2025