Beyond Death's Starry West

 Intercessional
by Geoffrey Bache Smith 

 There is a place where voices
Of great guns do not come,
Where rifle, mine, and mortar
For evermore are dumb:
Where there is only silence,
And peace eternal and rest,
Set somewhere in the quiet isles
Beyond Death’s starry West.
O God, the God of battles,
To us who intercede,
Give only strength to follow
Until there’s no more need,
And grant us at that ending
Of the unkindly quest
To come unto the quiet isles
Beyond Death’s starry West.

Soft as the Falling of Wind-Scattered Grain

A Rain Sonnet
by Nina Frances Layard 

And all the dank hair of the hurrying rain,
 Flung backward by the wind, did stream and fly
 Across the anxious forehead of the sky,
 And rattling lashed my shaken window-pane
 With sudden spotted sounds, that yet again
 Sink to a lighter fingering, or die
 Into a tinkling treble by-and-by,
 Soft as the falling of wind-scattered grain.

 
 So is my sorrow as the streaming drift,
 That from the mighty shoulders of a cloud
 Is shaken back and tangled in the blast;
 So is my dreadful sorrow, but I lift
 A trembling hand to God and cry aloud
 That He shall make it music at the last.

Hypagete kai Ekcheete

 And I heard a loud sound from the fane saying to the seven messengers: Depart, and pour forth the seven cups of God's spiritedness upon the land. 

And the first went off and poured forth his cup upon the land and there began to be a fester, bad and miserable, on the human beings having the stamp of the beast and those prostrating before its image.

And the second poured forth his cup upon the sea, and there began to  be blood like a corpse's, and every living spirit that was in the sea died.

And the third poured forth his cup upon the rivers and the fountains of water, and there began to be blood. 

And I heard the messenger of the waters saying, Just you are, Is-Being and Was-Being, Godly, for you have decided these things, for the blood of the consecrated and the prophets they have poured forth, and you have given them blood to drink; they are deserving. 

And I heard the altar saying, Certainly, Lord God All-Ruler, your judgments [are] truthful and just.

And the fourth poured forth his cup upon the sun, and there was given it the burning of human beings with fire. And the human beings were burned with a great glow, and they blasphemed the Name of God, the One having authority over these afflictions, and they did not repent to give him glory.

And the fifth poured forth his cup upon the seat of the beast, and its empire began to be blinded, and they were chewing their tongues from the toil, and they blasphemed the God of heaven from their toils and from their festers, and they did not repent from their deeds.

And the sixth poured forth his cup upon the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried, so that the way might be prepared for the emperors of the dawning sun.

And I saw from the wyrm's mouth, and from the beast's mouth, and from the pseudo-prophet's mouth, three unclean spirits, like frogs, for they are daimonic spirits making signs, which go forth to the emperors of the whole world, to gather them for the war of the great day of God All-Ruler.

[Revelation 16:1-14, my rough translation. Some old versions do not have the "from the fane/temple/shrine/sanctuary" in the first verse. In verse five, not all sources have the "Lord". In verse twelve, "of the dawning sun" is often translated as a poetic expression for "from the east".

The word I've translated 'cup' is phiale (hence the KJV transliteration, "vial"), which is often translated as "bowl". The latter is perhaps technically the stricter translation, but either works; a phiale would have been a broad, shallow bowl used for libation-prayers (which were common in the household piety of the Roman empire), but the term is also often used for any cup or bowl that is used in sacrifices, especially for catching blood. It's this sacrificial character that is behind the word here. The bowls/cups are called the cups/bowls of God's thymos. This is often translated as 'wrath', and it could mean something like that, but it's not the usual word for 'wrath'. It's a much broader word in fact: a spirited horse has a lot of thymos, not because it is wrathful but because it is hard to break; if you have high spirits, you have a lot of thymos; your thymos is the part of you that seeks not ease and pleasure but challenge and victory. My guess is that it is here standing for something like what in Medieval Hebrew is called hod, glory/splendor/majesty, or netzach, perpetuity/durability/victoriousness: that is, the bowls are the bowls of the unconquerability of God.

The address to God by the angel of the waters is interesting: Being (ho on) and Having-Been (ho en) have been previously used (Rv. 11:17) with Coming (ho erchomenos); here, however, they are joined with ho hosios, which means 'godly, pious, righteous, holy'.

I have translated with the word 'daimonic' rather than 'demonic', because I think the older meaning of daimonion may partly be in view -- a daemon is an intermediary between gods and men. The dragon, beast, and false prophet are setting themselves up against God, as if they were divine, and the unclean spirits are their 'daemons'. 

Each of the plagues seems to involve a form of poetic justice; those who receive the stamp (charagma, related to the word character) of the beast receive a wound; those who pour out the blood of the saints receive blood to drink, the lordship of the beast is afflicted with toil in darkness/blindness. The sea is afflicted because the beast comes from the sea.]

Except, Indeed, that He Was Lean and Skinny

Hobbes, but why, or on what principle, I never could understand, was not murdered. This was a capital oversight of the professional men in the seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject for murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny; for I can prove that he had money, and (what is very funny,) he had no right to make the least resistance; for, according to himself, irresistible power creates the very highest species of right, so that it is rebellion of the blackest die to refuse to be murdered, when a competent force appears to murder you. However, gentlemen, though he was not murdered, I am happy to assure you that (by his own account) he was three times very near being murdered. 

 Thomas de Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, in Miscellaneous Essays. Of course, it is not really what Thomas Hobbes says about "competent force" trying to murder you; Hobbes thinks you have a right to self-defense in the face of an immediate attempt to cause your death. But I, too, have wondered why, or on what principle, Hobbes was not murdered.

Artificial Stupidity

 Freddie deBoer says something that has also bothered me about much of the marketing for "AI", although with a bit more swearing than I would do (but the swearing is perhaps justified here):

Watch this Apple Intelligence advertisement. The explicit message of this ad - the explicit message - is that the product being sold is for the dumbest fucking people alive. Our main character, Warren, is so utterly dense that his boss is flabbergasted when Warren writes a formulaic 50-word email without tripping on his dick. Everything about the advertisement is designed for you to understand that the fundamental appeal of having “AI” on your iPhone - and you could do this just as easily in the web browser, but never mind - is so that you, a deeply unintelligent being, can operate as a minimally-competent human. They’re selling this thing to people who look at Warren and say, yeah, that’s me, to the absolute dullards. The mentally incompetent. The too stupid to live. I mean that’s exactly what that commercial is conveying, right? They create a protagonist who is intended to appear as helpless and intellectually vacant as possible. They then demonstrate the great value of the product they’re selling, Apple Intelligence, by having it take an email he spends 30 seconds writing and converting it into a more professional email that any human being who doesn’t have some sort of serious cognitive disability could also write in 30 seconds. And Apple is not the only company that’s selling AI by demonstrating its ability to shepherd the tragically stupid through life.

But it's even worse than that, I think; what I think grates me about much of the marketing for AI is that, even trying as hard as they can to make it seem must-have, they can't avoid presenting it as if it will make you more stupid. That is, I think, the really irritating thing. It's not really so much that they are marketing to people who are already stupid; it's that they are marketing to everyone the attractions of having something that lets you be stupid. The marketing is never, "This makes this complicated process easier for better results'", which is how other technological innovations are generally marketed, but "Why do anything that requires intelligent work when you can take the lazy route of being artificially stupid?"

Perhaps deBoer is right that the root cause is hype inflation; in particular, we have something that is very technologically impressive if we consider its development, but that currently, almost by definition, just does what we already do anyway. The closest we can get to making the effect sound impressive is putting some results of intermediate-level skills just in reach of people without those skills, like being able to produce an OK illustration without being an amateur illustrator or hiring a professional illustrator, which is not something most people need very often -- or trying to convince people that they need a means to do what requires very few skills at all, and that they can already do, like following a business email template.

I suppose the real irritation, though, is that this kind of scammery often seems to work on people.

Fortnightly Book, January 26

 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a religious ferment and chaos. Multiple new devotions spread throughout Europe, institutional structures shifted, certain classes of laity suddenly found themselves confronted with religious and moral questions that had before only been dimly anticipated. Pilgrimage became a major form of both religious practice and recreation. Reading of devotional works -- whether by reading them oneself or having them read to one -- became more common. And as often happens in such times, there was an explosion of mystical and ascetical theology, one that pervaded large portions of society, as people of all sorts of backgrounds turned from merely following along with the religious experience formed for them by institutions and in some sense took charge of their religious experience, or at least large parts of it, for themselves.

Into this ferment plunged Margery Kempe. Born somewhere around 1373 as Margery Brunham (or Burnham), to a well-to-do and influential family in the busy and important port city of Lynn (now officially known as King's Lynn, of which her father was the mayor), she benefited from a surge in the good fortunes of the bourgeois and mercantile classes. We don't know what kind of education she had, although we do know that she never learned to read, but we also know that she seems to have had a good memory, and could retain a great deal of anything read to her. In 1394, at about the age of twenty she married John Kempe, a local official in Lynn, with whom she would eventually have fourteen children. We don't know exactly when her mystical experiences began, but she was definitely struggling with them shortly after the birth of her child, and they seem to have never let up. She eventually forced her husband to accept a chastity agreement and began actively engaging in pilgrimage; everywhere she went, her devotion was as public as it can get, with loud prayers and weeping sobs and sudden strange reactions that put everyone around her off (an effect that has never entirely vanished, because her practices of religious devotion were, shall we say, very far from common ideas about religious devotion today). She was tried for heresy several times (always acquitted, because it was never really her beliefs that were causing the problems others had with her).

Eventually she dictated the book, now known was The Book of Margery Kempe, that is sometimes considered the first autobiographical work in the English language, giving in detail her accounts of her devotions, her many trials, her pilgrimages, and giving us one of the clearest snapshots of the religious practices, people, and pilgrimage places of the day, many of which she knew personally. (One of the most famous scenes of the book is when she met Julian of Norwich, and it is very clear that, despite being a very different person from Julian, she is giving a very close and accurate account of their exchange.) She had difficulty getting people to help her to put the book together. Then after her death, at some point in the sixteenth century the book disappeared, except for a pamphlet with a few extracts, and was only re-discovered in 1934. And of course, The Book of Margery Kempe is the next fortnightly book.