Making things happen

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia (1514)

"Poetry makes nothing happen," W. H. Auden said.

But some people are plainly terrified that it might,

And some uncharted thing could prove it right

—perhaps one day even resurrect the dead:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/28/moscow-court-hands-long-jail-terms-to-two-men-for-reciting-poetry

Words have a magic force—they sometimes rhyme

Not in the spelling, but in the sense.

Things in themselves might come to recompense.

The trouble for us is, they take their time!

Word of the Day: Regurgitalite

Regurgitalite, noun and verb

1. Fossilized vomit (“Fossil oral ejecta, or regurgitates, offer insight into the ecology and physiology of Mesozoic fauna. Dinosaurs with an opportunistic diet are regarded as the most likely producers of such regurgitalites.”—American Emetologist).

2. The political philosophy of supporters of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement (“in a speech to constituents, Senator Lindsey Graham drew extensively on regurgitalite"; "members of the audience regurgitalited vociferously"—K Street).

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Figments

À quoi bon faire sortir du néant ce qui y dort ? Faire venir un être, c’est faire venir un misérable.—Flaubert

My old friend Peter Green* once suggested to me that there might only be a handful of real people in the world—all the others being merely figments.

How nice it would be to believe that! Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Jacob Zuma, Benjamin Netanyahu . . . figments all!

One had conjured the miserable wretches out of the nothing in which they slumbered, and, as Flaubert says, what earthly good is that! Now if only you could perhaps conjure them back into oblivion!

But then again, to the others, one is probably just a figment oneself.

*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Green_(historian)