Hell's Toddlers

Goya, Duendecitos (Hobgoblins), plate 49 from "Los Caprichos." Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Toddlers are taking over. O

ver!

—John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs, 12 (1966)

Ouch! those cute toddlers are in their glory

now and call the shots. Shit, Berryman!

Had you but seen the sequel to the story!

Toddlers “of a certain age,” Fate’s curs’d plan

—Zuckerberg, Thiel, and the preening Elon Musk,

the whole ineffable technomogul army,

erstwhile toddlers, basking in this vile dusk,

Artificial Intelligence well diced

to stew with natural stupidity.

The result, it’s what you’d fear to see! O

vertigo! These vegetable pricks grow

fatter than turnips, and not near as slow!

A hundred years at least should serve to damn

Hell’s crazed toddlers—and their confounded spam.

Apologies to Andrew Marvell

Merdrigal

Paul Klee, Revolution des Viadukts / Revolution of the Viaducts (1937). Hamburger Kunsthalle.

In our country there are two parties,

the crazy party and the stupid party.

They nobly share the burden of self-rule.

We owe them thanks and get to choose between them

every four years in an exciting duel,

until the issue’s settled by the banks.

Envoi

The term merdrigal was coined by the poet and boulevardier Léon-Paul Fargue (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on-Paul_Fargue), whose sardonic original verse of that title reads:

Dans mon cœur en ta présence

Fleurissent des harengs-saurs.

Ma santé c’est ton absence,

Quand tu parais, je sors.

In my heart in your presence

Kippers blossom.

My health is your absence,

When you show up, I split.

Kippers, or harengs-saurs, smoked salted herrings, also called gendarmes in France. Loch Fyne kippers are a favorite breakfast in Scotland.

"Ecrivez des merdrigaux! C'est rude, c'est rigolo et, finalement, ça ne fait pas de mal à qui que ce soit, si l'on ne nomme pas!!!"—

http://orlandoderudder.canalblog.com/archives/2006/03/03/1459256.html

Stultiloquium

Alexander the Great in a diving bell. Scene from the Roman d'Alexandre (1170)

“Philosophy ought really to be written as poetry.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Witters wrote this in a notebook in the '30s. Carnap'd

called metaphysicians “musicians without musical

musical abilityӠ; and by equal argument

philosophers are poets unbussed by Calliope,

born tergiversators, in want of a poetic map.

In consequence, to put it bluntly, they’re all badly bent—

bluntness inevitably is as bluntness does (tee-hee);

poetic genius's, then, to put it mildly, heaven-sent.

Write about what you know, wiseacres fondly recommend.

Contrariwise, I choose to write about what I don’t know.

This is called “agnotology”—the pursuit of ignorance.

I don’t know why I hid under that hedge when I was four

and clung so tightly to my father’s back when six, surfing

at Muizenberg, he back from the war up North and drinking

his way down to disaster, so that at eight I had to

bid adieu to Cape Town, growing up in the Great Karoo.

Those are the kinds of things I don’t know, and why, too, to love

has always been so hard for me. But of such confessions

enough! Let’s look rather at the knowledge poetry grants.

Say you are sailing the Aegean, and that a Triton

sprung from the waves demands, “Where is the Great Alexander?”

Knowing the correct answer is important: your caïque

and your life may depend on it! Say simply, though untrue,

“The Great Alexander lives and reigns.” The water spirit

will reply, “Thanks much!” and sink back into the sea. Or say

atheists fustigate the Donation of Constantine

by which Rome, Italy, and all the Western Empire’s lands

were bestowed on the dragon-slaying Pope Saint Sylvester;

but for which we’d all be Unitarians. Note merely

that it was forged and's replete with bad Latin and fake facts.

In the Renaissance, Lorenzo Valla called it “idiot speech,”

stultiloquium.‡ These are things a wise poet knows.

Bad English and fake facts multiply around us today

by which the world could well be warped a similar way.

I love strange words, don’t you? Stultiloquium, Latin

for “foolish talk,” might help us, fearful moderns, walk the walk.

Envoi

Franz Kafka died—he starved to death—in 1924,

asking that his diaries and MSS be burned unread.

Now, in 2024, readings from his diaries in St Andrew's

Church, Holborn, grace the Goody Two-Shoes LRB.*

If I were Kafka, I'd probably be annoyed!

†Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language” (1932), trans. Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), 60–81.

‡Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiarum linguae Latinae Libri VI / “Six Books on Latin Style” (ca. 1450.) 

*LRB = London Review of Books.

Fresco illustrating the purported Donation by the emperor Constantine of Rome, Italy, and the Western Empire to Pope Sylvester I. 13th century. Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome.