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[ by Charles Cameron — some of my own poems, some of my own theology, and a damn fine French police procedural on Netflix ]
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Engrenages / Sprial, season 4 episode 9

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Madhu, a wonderful friend of this blog, encouraged me some while back to post some of my poems here. I don’t do it often, and I hope you will at least tolerate it when I do.

This one, for instance:

The rolling dice
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That there is a murder to be committed, this the god knows, that the car
travelling through the woods contains victim and victor paired like dice strung
on a rear-view mirror, this the god knows, but it is the tops of trees
the god attends to, oblivious of the car which moves on its inerrant way
between them, the topmost branches it she or he observes, the upper
and as the car is first heard approaching, middle, and as it rolls into view
in left field, lower branches, the car now drawing his attention, riddle
of the two men still obscured by deflecting windows, roof doors tyres and

the leaves, the fallen, as though the two men from their high estate had fallen
to this, to the ground, among leaves which become mulch, the one sooner
and the other later, man become mulch as the god had become man, a
seasoning, of the ground, fall, a leavening of the earth, spring, in that primal
and primordial turning of planets and years on which between tree top
and mulch, between before and when with no after, two men’s dice are rolled.

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As you know, I’m interested in the workings of the imagination, and find much of its power concentrated in the specific theologies and rituals of the world’s religions. My poems, accordingly, allow me to explore themes at the intersection of human behavior in all its light and shade, with the divine, in all its brilliant clarity, depth of heart, and, well, ineffableness, inscrutablemness, indescribability.

Indescribable? The word the Athanasian Creed uses is Incomprehensible:

As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible.

You see, for my purposes the word god refers precisely to a greater unknown that nevertheless permeates and can inspire us — and simply saying that indescribable is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent gives us very little understanding. Inspiration and revelation are, for me, poetic openings on what cannot in any definitional sense be known, but from which our lives can glean radiance, love, clarity, courage.

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In my attempt to glean some of that harvest for myself, and to spread some of what I glean around in words, I have found myself writing a long, continuing series of poems that take their central motif from films. If god, or whatever name you might use to point to that Incomprehensible — that medium “in which we live and move and have our being” — if that is indeed conscious of all that is, I’m inclined to wonder how it (he, she, other, all or none of the above) perceives, in a way that makes sense to me.

And the “seeing” that most extends my own outward perception of the world is the seeing done by cameras and brought to me by movies. So I give “god” in this series of poems all the zooms, overhead shots, close-ups, jump cuts, helicopter rides, narrative thrust, slomo, freezeframe and other tricks that film is capable of… to get a human glimpse of an omni-director who might even, like Hitchcock and Renoir, choose to make a cameo appearance in his (her its or other) own film.

And what films do I use? The one’s I’m watching between fatigue and sleep, for late-night entertainment — usually thrillers, and on Netflix. The poem above and the two which follow were written this last week, triggered by an episode of Engrenages, a French policier [trailer here] which shows in the UK under the title Spiral, and which has been called “France’s answer to The Wire” in this Guardian write-up from an early season: Meet Spiral’s feminist anti-hero.

I like it very much — but have to put it on pause from time to time, when a poem comes on through.

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Okay, here are the other two poems from the set of three, drawn from my viewing of Engrenages, season 4 episode 9:

Still rolling
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The spade wasn’t used, wasn’t needed, wasn’t necessary, the dice rolled,
no murder was committed, did the god know this, no, that the car
traveling through these trees would roll back the two men out of the woods
and into some new relation, clearer for being less fearful, though
he wild with hope and he sweating with regret might yet change course
as the god already knew or might know or might not if there be such
a they it she or he know, passionate impassive or nonexistent, or might
mightily decide — but the dice had rolled, the car parts the trees, departs

the woods, burial and the eventual arising of young two leafed tree sprouts
will continue though the car has left to right of view, and still, moved,
the god sees, observes, reflects, and builds, in his own extended image,
narratives of birth and eventful or eventless lives and meaningless or
on some perhaps many occasions meaningful deaths, and — who knows,
perhaps the god if any, rebirths after eventful nonevents, and thus onwards.

and this one:

Stopt
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And then again the car, in the woods, its doors wide open like wings,
surely the god would lift the car above treetops, clouds, into some other,
some blue, some empyrean, yonder, where murder would no longer
be needed, necessary, where no dice would roll but puffballs,
tossed clouds. hither and yon without pattern or purpose, repeating
yet that eternal pattern, that this car so still might forever roll,
this breath so quiet might breathe, life under the trees and under these
stars continue, continue, one death less than the god expected, the

car wings watching to carry the spirit windward, deprived of the death,
the murder uncommitted is no murder but if it be committed, even
here late in the day in the woods, in this word, committed, then
there is murder under the high trees a few paces from the sad car, the
corpse carrier, the fortuneless car carriage, and a man who stood
upright yet walked crooked perhaps is fallen, flat, dead and truly buried.

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Caroline Proust as police captain Laure Berthaud, in Engrenages

Please feel free to comment on any or all of this: the ideas about a greater-than-human perception, poetry, cinema, Engrenages, these particular poems…

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a “zen“]

Throughout the past half century or so, it became commonplace for high level officials to speak to reporters cloaked in anonymity as “sources in the White House” or who were “close to the Oval Office” in order to pass along slightly harder truths or acidic observations to the public without attribution. Generally, these comments, however troubling the format, were usually smarter and more honest than the ones that could be heard extolling the administration line at official briefings or press conferences.

Well, the Obama administration is working hard to reverse that impression. In a little over a week, we have had these gems from senior officials regarding Syria and Russia:

A second senior official, who has seen the most recent planning, offered this metaphor to describe such a strike: If Assad is eating Cheerios, we’re going to take away his spoon and give him a fork. Will that degrade his ability to eat Cheerios? Yes. Will it deter him? Maybe. But he’ll still be able to eat Cheerios.

This is actually the less disturbing of the two examples. While inane as a choice of metaphor, it did at least correctly indicate the strategic insignificance of doing a “protest bombing” of Assad narrowly targeted to punish for chemical weapons use. That’s something.

This next one is truly amazing:

“Putin is now fully invested in Syria’s CW (chemical weapons) disarmament….

He put this proposal forward and he’s now invested in it. That’s good. That’s the best possible reaction. He’s fully invested in Syria’s CW disarmament and that’s potentially better than a military strike – which would deter and degrade but wouldn’t get rid of all the chemical weapons. He now owns this. He has fully asserted ownership of it and he needs to deliver.”

Yes, I’m certain Putin will put that right at the top of his to-do list now that he has finished submitting his ghost-written op-ed spiking the ball and doing a five minute celebratory dance in the White House end zone.

Let’s hope that was cynical posturing and not an expression of the administration’s operative geopolitical power calculus because it sounds remarkably like a political consultant type trying to import the effects of domestic political spinmeistership into foreign policy making. It is at best an exercise in wishful thinking unhinged from the cold and cruel realities of international relations.

If it represents the quality of thinking on foreign policy surrounding the President of the United States, then we may all be in big trouble.

[Mark Safranski a.k.a. “zen“]

Creativity is a subject that has  interested me, going back to the days long, long ago when I was an art student. Creativity is only mildly correlated with IQ, but like “intelligence”, the deeper you delve into the study of  creativity and creative thinking the more “creativity” looks like a multifaceted, multidimensional and diverse set of capacities, habits and circumstances than it does a single, universal, characteristic or ability.

Creativity has been studied from a neuroscientific, psychological, evolutionary,  behavioral, economic and social perspective but what of creativity”s opposite?  What about Ennui?

From a cognitive perspective, the two may be flip sides of the same coin, note the correlation between highly   creative  people and incidence of depression. It may also be a sign of overuse of certain brain functions, like adrenal exhaustion from an excess of physical and mental stress over a long period of time. Creativity, being in “the flow” is intoxicating but it usually involves peak exertion which accumulates weariness. Exemplary performance in one area can also come at the expense of penalties in another area.

Or perhaps ennui is the natural, cyclical ebb and flow between generative conceptual fertility and barrenness, the brain preparing itself for the next creative “surge” to come?

When are you creative and when are you not?

[ by Charles Cameron — on skilled design, and on choosing to purchase influence, elegance or beauty ]
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There’s something very neat about this front page:

Okay, okay, Jeff Bezos has bought the Washington Post. But what intrigues me about this front page of today’s digital edition as it appeared on my screen this morning was the way a color photo of Bezos sneaks in (left) below a larger black and while photo of Katharine Graham (center) — while an ad for the China Daily (right) takes up a third of the real estate (right), to be read, mark you, on Bezos’ own Kindle.

So we have today’s future, to coin a phrase, with the “pivot to Asia” and the “pivot to Bezos” right there together — and the “pivot to digital” pretty much a done deal.

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The price of the Post was $250 million, and plenty of people have talked about what Bezos could have bought instead — and while we’re on the topic of neat design, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s a $250 million penthouse under construction in Monaco, described by HiConsumption as The World’s Most Expensive Penthouse, and that one of the numerous architectural illustrations provided also features a striking lesson on graphics:

What catches my eye here is the parallelism between the window with its center divider and balcony rail (left) with the geometry of the painting on the wall (right) — that’s a brilliant design choice, as the photographer well knows.

In my dreams I’d prefer my own choice of art-work, frankly — and if I only had $250 million to play with, I’d go for a small craftsman cottage in Pasadena, perhaps — with that luminous $250 million Cezanne to grace one of my walls…

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That — and the digital Post on Kindle, I suppose.

[ by Mark Safranski a.k.a “zen“]

Longtime friend of ZP,  Adam Elkus interviews our own Charles Cameron at the highly regarded Abu Muqawama blog:

Interview Charles Cameron 

[….]  AE: How has the study of apocalyptic tropes and culture changed (if it has at all) since 9/11 focused attention on radical Islamist movements?

CC: USC’s Stephen O’Leary was the first to study apocalyptic as rhetoric in his 1994 Arguing the Apocalypse, and joined BU’s Richard Landes in forming the (late, lamented) Center for Millennial Studies, which gave millennial scholars a platform to engage with one another. David Cook opened my eyes to Islamist messianism at CMS around 1998, and the publication of his two books (Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature), Tim Furnish’s Holiest Wars and J-P Filiu’s Apocalypse in Islam brought it to wider scholarly attention — while Landes’ own encyclopedic Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience gives a wide-angle view of the field in extraordinary detail.

I’d say we’ve gone from brushing off apocalyptic as a superstitious irrelevance to an awareness that apocalyptic features strongly in Islamist narratives, both Shia and Sunni, over the past decade, but still tend to underestimate its significance within contemporary movements within American Christianity. When Harold Camping proclaimed the end of the world in 2011, he spent circa $100 million worldwide on warning ads, and reports suggest that hundreds of Hmong tribespeople in Vietnam lost their lives in clashes with the police after moving en masse to a mountain to await the rapture. Apocalyptic movements can have significant impact — cf. the Taiping Rebellion in China, which left 20 million or so dead in its wake.

Read the rest here.