Exponential Growth

Les trente glorieuses

They call the years from ’45 to ’85 “the thirty glorious ones.”

They’d have done better to kick out the bums!

I was growing up then—I quite enjoyed the farce

and, playing possum, let them pass.

Les trente merdeuses

“. . . ces jours merdeux arrivent accumulés entre le nez et les yeux, il y en a rien que là.”--Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932)

 

The West’s heroic age is now  no more:

it perished in the trente merdeuses,

the years from late ’14 to long ’44.

I was just a kid but saw it go.

Don’t blame me! How could I know?

--Peter Dreyer

Epigraph: “ . . . those shitty days just piled up in your face.”—Céline, Voyage to the End of the Night (freely translated).

Public Transportation

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.— Blaise Pascal (1623-62)

“All human problems spring from a single cause: not knowing how to remain quietly in a room.” So said Pascal, who invented the bus.

From Vincennes to the Porte de Saint-Cloud

The Métro will bear me and you;

But if we should go is what we don’t know.

I haven’t a clue, said Saint-Cloud !

Note: In the sixth century CE, a Frankish prince called Clodoald, grandson of the founding Merovingian king Clovis I, renounced his title and lived as a hermit monk. Canonized as Saint-Cloud (pronounced sɛ̃-klu in French), he was subsequently adopted as the patron of nailmakers (clou = nail). Saint-Cloud, a place named after him, is just west of Paris. See www.itineraire-metro.fr/subway/trajet-Vincennes-vers-Porte+de+Saint-Cloud.html.

Artificial Intelligence

    Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the --one of the questions from the Turing Test, devised by Alan Turing to discover whether a hidden entity, such as a computer, is able to think Forth Bridge.

A: Let us suppose the bridge to be the Fourth

(Not cantilevered above some Scottish firth,

Entraining passengers to Queensferry North),

Successor to First, Second, & Third on Earth.

First is what Tristram was so long a-doing;

Second is upgrowing at whatever age;

Third is, of course, the mystery of dying.

So what is Fourth, when do we reach that page?

The soft simulacrum in the sealed room

Posts piping secrets through her handy slot;

Unhandy demons, scheming in the gloom,

Wildly mistake the that that is for that that’s not.

So long as machines puzzle--and men can be,

So long lives that; that that makes sense to me!

Bridge pose

Previously published in the New English Review in October 2021.