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[ by Charles Cameron — busy tidying away six or more posts before Spring Break delivers my college-age son to me — here’s one ]
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We observe Shakespeare gaming — staging — playing — the Battle of Agincourt:

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A play, a game, a gamble. The odds are “fearful”..

WESTMORELAND
Of fighting men they have full three score thousand.
EXETER
There’s five to one; besides, they all are fresh.
SALISBURY
God’s arm strike with us! ’tis a fearful odds.
WESTMORELAND
O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

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Medieval 2 Total War also games Agincourt:

Sadly, the voice over doesn’t seem to get any more rousing than this:

Henry’s longbowmen will be the key to defeating the French, striking them down as they traverse the muddy field. To protect his longbowmen from cavalry, Henry has ordered them to plant sharpened stakes in front of their positions…

An earthy voice shouts, “For Saint George!” a couple of times, but that’s about the level of inspiration offered. I haven’t played the game, I’m going by the video overview — but there’s no mention there of Crispin — though we do hear a yokel shout:

Once more unto the breach, my Lord

— a line swiped (and then tweaked) from King Henry himself, earlier in the play — at the siege of Harfleur, not at Agincourt, to be exact.

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It seems to me that the novel (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), film (Kagemusha, say) and television on occasion (The Honourable Woman) rise to their respective occasions — but games I think, not so much, thus far.

I look forward (on behalf of future generations, I suppose) to the Kurosawa of the game genre — and to its Jean Cocteau.

[ by Charles Cameron — time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away ]
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I’m more than a little proud of these two tweets from my nephew, the conductor Daniel Harding, who was in Japan at the time of the March 2011 quake:

I remembered them today while reading Anna Goldsworthy‘s The Lost Art of Listening — subtitled Has classical music become irrelevant?

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Goldsworthy’s central theme is this:

Reports of the death of classical music are not new. There are those who have made a career out of eulogising it, such as the English journalist Norman Lebrecht, who has written the same book on the subject several times; the late pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen quipped that “the death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition”. Classical music has absorbed a number of deaths already – the death of patronage, of the composer-virtuoso, of tonality. Clearly it is made of stern stuff, but can it survive the death of its audience?

It was this sentence, however, that reminded me so vividly of Daniel’s tweets:

Might there be a concert a few decades hence in which – God willing – my trio is still performing, but only to an audience of one? And if that listener were to perish mid performance, would we keep playing?

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I’m wondering whether Goldsworthy’s question — Has classical music become irrelevant? — may not parallel a similar concern about poetry.

Language shifts. Eliot caught it nicely:

                                  Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has announced its plan to “provide translated texts in contemporary modern English as performable companion pieces for Shakespeare’s original texts..” The OSF comments:

We have asked the writers to limit their efforts to updating the more antiquated language in the plays. Shakespeare’s works are all written in modern English; it’s just that in the last 400 years, many of the words, phrases and references have fallen out of use. So our focus is squarely on translating this antiquated language to increase understanding, while maintaining the vibrancy of the original.

So there you have it: Shakespeare’s works are all written in modern English; it’s just that..

And so the wheel turns.

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When I was researching 4chan clues to the recent Umpqa shooting, I had to avail myself of the Urban Dictionary to learn the meanings of such terms as sperg out, pepe, normie, edgelord —

Edgelord:

A poster on an Internet forum, (particularly 4chan) who expresses opinions which are either strongly nihilistic, (“life has no meaning,” or Tyler Durden’s special snowflake speech from the film Fight Club being probably the two main examples) or contain references to Hitler, Nazism, fascism, or other taboo topics which are deliberately intended to shock or offend readers

— and there isn’t even a definition for libcucks as yet. Hey, I’m an Ancient. It’s what happens to the young.

So I get the feeling Shakespeare may have now reached the point of obscurity that Chaucer had reached in 1951, when I was yet a child and Penguin published Neville Coghill‘s verse translation of The Canterbury Tales.

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One of many notable comments in Goldsworthy’s piece was this:

In 1942 starving musicians performed Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in Leningrad while the city was under siege. The musicians were given an hour-long ovation, and the concert was broadcast to German forces as a form of psychological warfare.

Pablo Neruda, Andrei Voznesensky: I’ve seen it suggested that poetry has urgency — and the large audiences to prove it — in those times and places where poets also risk imprisonment, perhaps torture, and even death.

Irina Ratushinskaya described her writing habits while in the Soviet Gulag:

In defiant prose, she tells of her refusal to cower in the camp “like a frightened mouse.” Determined to continue writing poetry, she would scratch verses onto bars of soap with the burnt end of a matchstick. One poem described “the first beauty which I saw in this captivity: a window in the frost!” Another confided: “We live stubbornly/like a small beast who’s gnawed off his paw/ to get out of a trap on three.” After memorizing her words she would wash the evidence away. Later she copied the poems, in minute handwriting, onto four-centimeter—wide strips of cigarette paper and smuggled them out to Igor, who passed them on to Western journalists. “All poets should have such a school,” she says now, with a laugh. “It taught me to be very spare and concise.”

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Daniel’s tweets:

Daniel Harding, Wonderful atmosphere on strangest of days

Daniel Harding, Would have played just for the 69 year old

Oregon Shakespeare Festival announcements:

News Release, OSF Launches Three-Year Shakespeare Translation Commissioning Project

Play On FAQ, 36 playwrights translate Shakespeare

Next year, Daniel takes up the post of music director of the Orchestre de Paris.

[ by Charles Cameron — some examples of deep dreams, mechanical and spiritual ]
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In the upper panel, a claim made for the Deep Dream Generator:

In the lower panel, an image of the chakras or lotuses in the subtle body, through which the kundalini serpent rises from deep sleep to full spiritual awakening.

The “sixth level” in the chakra system would be the Ajna chakra:

The Ajna chakra is positioned in the brain, directly behind the eyebrow center. Its activation site is at the eyebrow region, in the position of the ‘third eye.’

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Deep Dreams:

Here’s what Google’s Deep Dream Generator comes up with:

Here’s an early statue of Arya Lokeshvara from the Potala Palace, dating to the 7th century and described as the Potala’s most sacred statue:

This is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation of St Anthony:

From one of the marvellous array of manuscripts of the Beatus commentary on Revelation:

Here’s a deep dream in words, from Hermann Hesse..

Another, from Shakespeare:

A secular deep dream..

and a deep dream — as surreal as all the rest, yet capturing “no more than” simple reality — in a photo posted today by Bill Benzon:

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Roll over, Beethoven:

[ by Charles Cameron — Apocalypse Tomorrow: predicting another failed prediction ]
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The Author and Giver of all good things, as the Collect for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity calls Him, provided us with both an Authorized Version of his book (1611) and a Revised Version (1881, 1885); told the story of the earth’s creation in Genesis 1.1 — 2.3 and revised it in Genesis 2.4 — 2.24; and has now supposedly revised its ending from last week until, yes, tomorrow. From today’s Guardian:

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It seems to me the Guardian is playing this, a little tongue in cheek, as a minor skirmish in the alleged Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom:

Scientists have several theories about when Earth will be destroyed, although none of the data points to this Wednesday.

Assuming tomorrow is much like today and further tomorrows await us, in other words, science will be vindicated, much to the discomfort of the religious, no?

But wait — even the most starkly religious seem to be hedging their bets these days..

“There’s a strong likelihood that this will happen,” McCann said, although he did leave some room for error: “Which means there’s an unlikely possibility that it will not.”

Chris McCann, leader and founder of the eBible Fellowship, is the guy who, in this instance, has updated Harold Camping‘s failed predictions to provide his own.

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It was Shakespeare‘s Macbeth who suggested somewhat bleakly that tomorrows would follow tomorrows in an unbroken stream “till the last syllable of recorded time”. And you’ll note that even that last phrase is an undated prediction, made by a fictional character on a stage within a stage..

[ by Charles Cameron — from the Iliad via hadith to Afghanistan, 2011 ]
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Daniel Mendelsohn, Battle Lines: A slimmer, faster Iliad, in The New Yorker:

The August 22nd issue of Time featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan this past summer. What she said about him might shock some people, but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad:

“He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a choice to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.”

The Prophet, on the authority of Masruq, in Sahih Muslim, 4651:

The souls of the martyrs live in the bodies of green birds who have their nests in chandeliers hung from the throne of the Almighty. They eat the fruits of Paradise from wherever they like and then nestle in these chandeliers. Once their Lord cast a glance at them and said: Do ye want anything? They said: What more shall we desire? We eat the fruit of Paradise from wherever we like. Their Lord asked them the same question thrice. When they saw that they will continue to be asked and not left (without answering the question). they said: O Lord, we wish that Thou mayest return our souls to our bodies so that we may be slain in Thy way once again.

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We sometimes think of the jihadist would-be martyr as motivated by the belief that paradisal life after death trumps this life and its shallow attractions. If the parallels I am seeing here between the theology of martyrdom in Islam, the heroism of the Iliad, and that of the Navy SEAL in Afghanistan do in fact represent a deeper current common to all three, it may be that we should also look at the reverse premise: that even the delights of paradise may be trumped by the exhilaration of battle in a righteous cause.

An ill-favoured thought — one quite possibly ill-favoured enough to be labeled “counter-intuitive” — but mine own.