Knowing Poe and The Mystery to a Solution

The Knowing Poe website just won a Webby Award, so I imagine it will get a fair, and deserved, amount of attention over the next few months. But the occasion gives me a chance to quote from one of my favorite books, John Irwin's masterful The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytical Detective Story:

In creating the detective story, Poe produced the dominant modern genre, and I mean this not merely in the sense, so often cited, that it is the genre with the most titles listed or the most copies printed in any given year, but that it is preeminently the genre of an age dominated by science and technology, an age characterized by mental-work-as-analysis. In the detective scenario and the figure of the mastermind Dupin, Poe gave us at once the most appealing format and the most glamorous mask for mental work and the mental worker. From psychoanalyst to literary critic, from particle physicist to diagnostician, the most (self-)satisfying description of what one does (and thus what one is) seems to fall naturally into the scenario of a knotty problem and its solution - the patient amassing of clues, the false leads, the painstaking analysis, the ultimate triumph - culminating with the observation (hopefully made by someone other than oneself), "Why, you're really more interesting than you look. In fact, you're like a detective." But we should note that in creating the detective story Poe also gave us a cautionary tale about the mastery of mind and our modern scientific world. For Victor Frankenstein and C. Auguste Dupin are products of the same period and the same impulse, except that Dupin is his own monster. Which is to say, he is the first great characterless character, the name for a mental position in an entirely plot-driven scenario, the image of a man of whom one could remark that what he does is the sum total of what he is, a man who foreshadows our present world in which the manipulation of electronic gadgets take the place of thought and in which machines are all too often more interesting than people. And Poe turns the detective story into such a cautionary tale by setting as the task for the mind's exhibition of it mastery the analysis of its own structure. In baiting this task with a narcissistic hook, Poe makes it seem as if the Delphic injunction "Know thyself" had been inscribed on the obverse side of a coin whose reverse bore the inscription "Those whom the gods would destroy, first they make blind."

Pareidolia

Virgin Mary Stains - Chicago

From Wikipedia:

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse. The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia to gain insight into a person's mental state.

[ image source ]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Flickr Pareidolia Photo Pool

Sin-Eater || Scape-Goat

John Isaacs 
Other Peoples Lives [scapegoat]
2003

From Funeral Customs: Chapter IV: Wakes, Mutes, Wailers, Sin-Eating, Totemism, Death-Taxes:

A less known but even more remarkable functionary, whose professional services were once considered necessary to the dead, is the sin-eater. Savage tribes have been known to slaughter an animal on the grave, in the belief that it would take upon itself the sins of the dead. In the same manner, it was the province of the human scapegoat to take upon himself the moral trespasses of his client--and whatever the consequences might be in the after life--in return for a miserable fee and a scanty meal. That such a creature should be unearthed from a remote period of pagan history would be surprising enough, but to find reliable evidence of his existence in the British Isles a hundred years ago is surely very much more remarkable.

Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, actually saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.

Howlett mentions sin-eating as an old custom in Hereford, and thus describes the practice: "The corpse being taken out of the house, and laid on a bier, a loaf of bread was given to the sin-eater over the corpse, also a maga-bowl of maple, full of beer. These consumed, a fee of sixpence was given him for the consideration of his taking upon himself the sins of the deceased, who, thus freed, would not walk after death." He suggests the connection between the sin-eater and the Jewish scapegoat of the old Testament.

http://www.johnisaacs.net/
http://isaacs.aeroplastics.net/

Camille Paglia: The World's Top (Not Best) Political Events of Western History

Montezuma

1. Pharaoh Amenophis IV renames himself Ikhnaten, breaks with the powerful priesthood, and founds the new city of Akhetaten (modern Amarna), to which he moves with queen Nefertiti (c. 1344 B.C.).

2. Handsome, charismatic Alcibiades goads Athens into the disastrous Sicilian expedition against a Spartan colony in Syracuse, an imperialistic adventure that will bring Athenian power to an end (415 B.C.).

3. Mark Antony and Cleopatra foolishly choose to fight Octavian by sea at the battle of Actium (off Greece), which destroys their ambitions (31 B.C.). They commit suicide the following year, and Octavian (becoming Augustus Caesar) founds the Roman empire.

4. A Roman army led by the emperor Vespasian's son (and future emperor) Titus destroys Herod's Temple in Jerusalem and begins the Jewish diaspora (70 A.D.).

5. Building on the acts of Constantine, the emperor Theodosius ends paganism and makes Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire (392 A.D.).

6. The conquistador Hernando Cortez arrives at Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and is welcomed by Montezuma, the Aztec emperor (1519). Within two years, the Aztec empire and its capital will be destroyed.

7. Goaded by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, English parliamentarians reject the divine right of kings and execute Charles I, an act that sends shock waves through Europe and that will help inspire the age of revolutions more than a century later (1649).

8. While the Civil War still rages, Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, abolishing slavery in the Confederacy (1863).

9. The Treaty of Sevres following World War One dissolves the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire and creates British mandates in Iraq and Palestine (1920).

10. Al Quaeda's coordinated attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, bringing the twin towers down in 90 minutes, begins the Age of Terrorism, paralleling the waves of sporadic attacks by Huns and Vandals on the late Roman empire (2001).

More Camille at: http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/paglia/world.html

Paul Celan: Todesfugue: "Play death more sweetly..."

Auschwitz Orchestra.
Prisoners' orchestra during a Sunday concert for the SS-men in Auschwitz.
The orchestra was probably conducted by the inmate Franciszek Nierychlo. (1941)

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he whistles his hounds to stay close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped

He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue
stick your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
you aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers

He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise up as smoke to the sky
you'll then have a grave in the clouds where you won't lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Translation by John Felstiner from Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Yale University Press, 1995. (Apologies for the forced line breaks created by Blogger.)

From Felstiner:

[I]n 1964 he had written:

Water needles
stitch up the split
shadow- he fights his way
deeper down,
free.

About 20 April 1970, around Passover, Celan went from the bridge into the Seine and, though a strong swimmer, drowned unobserved.... On 1 May a fisherman came upon his body seven miles downstream.

A biography of Holderlin was found then on Celan's desk, open to an underlined passage: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart." Celan did not, I noticed, underline the rest of that sentence in the Holderlin biography: "but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously."

People have said that Celan took his own life at forty-nine because valid speech in German was impossible after or about Auschwitz. Yet this was the impossibility that incited him: "Spills of mire I swallowed, inside the tower." And he did speak - more validly than anyone could ever have been imagined.

More Celan:
Wikipedia: Paul Celan
Paul Celan Homepage
Little Blue Light: Paul Celan
Norton Poets Online
Black Milk of Language by Ruth Franklin

A tense debate has long existed about the translation of poetry. One view was epitomized by Vladimir Nabokov, who fiercely believed that only literal paraphrase, supported by copious commentary, can do justice to a poem in translation. As he once quipped:

What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.

The opposing view has been championed by George Steiner, who agrees that perfect translation, of either poetry or prose, is impossible--but concludes more pessimistically that, in the most exact sense, nothing can truly be transmitted by translation, because different systems of grammar have different ways of signifying, even with regard to the simplest words or phrases. Steiner describes various languages as nets piled atop one another, overlapping in some places but disjunctive at others: "No two languages mesh perfectly, no two languages ... see the world in the same order."