We Win!

We lose - because we win -

Gamblers - recollecting which

Toss their dice again!

Emily Dickinson

The Bronze Horseman - Introduction

The Bronze Horseman

A Tale of St. Petersburg

Alexander Pushkin

Preface

The story described here is based on an actual incident. Details of the flood are taken

from magazines of the time. V. N. Berkh.

Introduction

        On a shoreline of desolate waves

He stood, filled with great thoughts

And looked into the distance. Before him the broad

River rushed; a humble boat

Sped along with it, by itself.

On the mossy, muddy banks

Black huts appeared here and there,

Abode of a wretched Finn;

And the woods, unaccustomed to the rays

Of a sun concealed in fog,

Rustled all around.

                                And He thought:

From here is where we’ll threaten the Swede.

Here a city will be laid out

To spite our proud neighbor.

Here nature has destined us

To cut a window to Europe,

With a foot planted firmly on the sea.

Here on tides new to them

Will arrive as our guests every flag

And we shall hold feasts in the open air.

        A hundred years go by, and the young city,

Glory and wonder of the lands of midnight,

From forests dark, from swampy bogs,

It has risen resplendent, proud;

Where once a Finnish fisherman,

Sorry stepchild of nature,

Alone on the shallow banks

Threw into unfamiliar waters

His worn-out net, there now,

Along the bustling waterfront,

Heaps of slender mansions and towers

Are crowded; a throng of ships

From every corner of the world

Seek the overflowing wharves;

The Neva has been dressed in granite;

Bridges have been hung over the waves;

Gardens of a deep green

Cover its islands,

And, faced with the younger capital,

Old Moscow has faded away

Like a widow in purple

Before a new tsarina.

        I love you, creation of Peter,

I love your austere, graceful form,

The majestic Neva’s flow,

Its granite embankments,

The cast-iron tracery of your fences,

Your contemplative nights

Of transparent twilight, the moonless splendor,

When I, in my room,

Am writing, reading without a lamp,

And the drowsy immensity

Of the empty streets is clear, and bright

Is the spire of the Admiralty,

And, not admitting the dark of night

Into the golden skies,

One dawn to follow another

Hurries, allowing night a half hour.

I love your brutal winter,

The still air and the frost,

The sleds gliding along the broad Neva,

The faces of the girls brighter than roses,

And the sparkle and the noise, and talk of dances,

And, at the bachelor’s happy hour,

The fizz of foaming glasses

And the blue flame of the punch.

I love the martial vitality

On show on the Field of Mars,

The uniform beauty

Of the infantry and calvary,

In their formation gracefully rippling

Their tattered flags of victory,

The gleam of these brass helmets,

Bearing bullet holes of battle.

I love, capital of war,

The smoke and thunder of your citadel

When the Tsarina of midnight

Bestows on the royal house a son,

Or when Russia again prevails,

Victorious over an enemy,

Or when, breaking apart its blue ice,

The Neva carries it to the sea

And, sensing the days of spring, rejoices.

        Shine forth, city of Peter, and stand

Unshakable like Russia.

May they be at peace with you,

Those you have defeated;

Their long-standing enmity and captivity

May the Finnish waves forget

And may futile spite not

Trouble the eternal sleep of Peter!

        It was a terrible time,

The memory of it is fresh...

For you, my friends, I will

Begin the tale of it.

Sorrowful will be my story.

Translation - Barry Link
 

No Parking

You Can Talk That Talk, But Can You Play That Sax?

Yeah, Baby

Doop Scoodily Doop

The Travails of Kenny G

Riffin'

Who Invited Frank?

The Whole Gang Saved Kenny's Groove

 

How Men Become Pope

Unlock the Secrets

Well, for 10 points

A Bunch of Eminences

Oh, the Shame!

They Have a Vision

Pope David

And some extra credit reading: Jacques Hébert 1790

 

Thou Vain Toy

 

From the beginning Ahab was, and to the end remained, a master of his science of whaling. But rapidly he narrows the very concept of science down to what serves his purpose simply and directly. Any other kind of science he will destroy.

One day he has just taken the daily reckoning from the sun with the quadrant when in a sudden rage he dashes it to the deck. ""Science! I curse thee, thou vain toy," he yells and stamps upon the instrument.

His reason is one of Melville's profoundest penetrations into the nature of totalitarianism. The quadrant, Ahab says, can tell where the sun is. But it cannot tell man what he wants to know, and that is where he will be tomorrow. It lifts man's eyes up to the great and glorious sun. But man by doing so only ruins himself. Man was made to live with his eyes limited to the earth's horizons.

"Aye, thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!" Here is the ruthless limitation of social aspirations which totalitarianism imposes on the masses of its followers. Their eyes must be kept level with the horizon until after the purpose is achieved. It is on the same evening that the storm breaks, the fires burn on the masts, and Ahab defies the fires of industry. Thus, within one day, Industry and Science, the twin gods of the nineteenth century, have been deposed.

C.L.R. James - Mariners, Renegades & Castaways

Our newly reelected Ahab is a master of no science and what purpose he sees on the horizon is obscured by his lies and subject to digestive disorders. What we can make out is the dubloon that he has nailed to the mast to motivate his crew. It is the chimera of post-war American life, not the life of those who engaged in rebellion, but those who clung to the old causes. The rallying point for this new economics is the factory, the factory that used to be here but now has been stolen. In its place they now see themselves hosting, against their will, alien workers of malevolent and subversive intent.

Trump is dating himself with this story. It’s been a very long time since the old factories left and America lifted up its eyes to the worship of finance. Not that any of this process was part of his education. He began practicing this resentment when he saw the rich crop of votes and offerings to be had from it. 

But the story plays. Theft and invasion are the work of foreigners. Globalist ideology, even as he denounces it in his domestic political opponents, comes from outside the nationalist spirit. Within the movement which carried him to power there is no distinction of classes. The only struggle is between inside and outside. 

Although the story is founded in layers of American myth and has served Trump well in his campaigns it is only because it has avoided, so far, being tested in reality. Its failure, now that it has actually been put in practice, has been immediate. Treasury Secretary Bessert assures us that his boss is all about creating leverage. But it's plain to all that Trump has no leverage.

If American business, as he claims, had been taken advantage of out of its own stupidity that might be corrected. That the guile required to do so has arisen from the playing fields of big city real estate is hard to imagine. American business, instead, stands where it does as a result of what are usually called market forces. Its position is more or less what the invisible hand has assigned it. 

While Trump may be able to sell his tears to his own followers, he has no chance of selling them abroad. I can't be the only one to suspect that he had a higher estimate of the economic situation bequeathed him than he professed for political purposes. But the ace up his sleeve, the American market, is already overextended. It exists only as long as the rest of the world is willing to extend to it the credit that it craves.

And what of the quadrant? What of the science that we need to determine our location? For Ahab it was useless, for Trump it's a threat. His political support is a validation of the will to blindness. What is being torn out of the federal project is any attempt to see where we are. To know that is to open the question of where we want to go. If all we want to do is go back to where we were, to where we felt safe, then all we have to do is get rid of those who ask questions.

By calling for a fearful retreat Trump is not just mollifying and corralling his audience. He is also bargaining with those who own everything to advance their interests. In our world the quadrant is not politically neutral. When we know our location we know our connection to the rest of the world. We know our exposure to climate, to contagion, and to exploitation. We know that these dangers and the warfare that pursues them are never more than temporarily remote. And therefore we know that those who describe the world as lacking only sufficient barriers and prisons are no longer just leading us in a mad pursuit of the white whale. Before our eyes they are enacting an auto-da-fe shipwreck by pillaging the timbers of our masts and hull.

Men Become Pope

Still locked

Fan mail from some flounder

Happy Easter

With Rocket Launchers!

Plaid

New tablecloth

Tres cohetes

                      

 

What Happens on Tortuga

For every wild escalation

Do you grant me absolution

And things are getting out of hand here again

What happens on Tortuga

What happens on Tortuga

Yes, what happens on Tortuga

Stays on Tortuga

Time for a Brawl!

Aboard the Flying Dutchman

And the Jolly Roger

Abandoned Ships, Everyone on Tortuga

That's a Win for the Fishman

Counterclockwise too!

 

Marianne Faithfull - 12/29/1946 - 1/30/2025

 

In the Year of the Snake

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”

The hexagrams of the I Ching, six-bit, eight sided, sixty four in all, serve as oracles of occasion. Although it is the Book of Changes it is outside of time, founded in an unchanging natural and social landscape. The signs of the Chinese zodiac, on the other hand, are bound to a calendar cycle; twelve signs matched with five elements for a complete cycle of 60 years. Although it repeats it is not the same. This Year of the Wood Snake, 4723, is not 4663 although that was also a Year of the Wood Snake, nor is it 4783, the next iteration in the cycle. 

There are ways of assigning hexagrams to years but there is no enforced agreement on which hexagram goes with which year. I take that, on no authority whatsoever, as permission to wander afield in prophecies of political-economy for this most uncertain of snake years.

Ask Google Gemini which hexagram goes with this new year and it will tell you it's 5, Waiting; the trigram Water above and Heaven below. 

When clouds rise in the sky, it is a sign that it will rain. There is nothing to do but to wait until the rain falls. It is the same in life when destiny is at work. We should not worry and seek to shape the future by interfering in things before the time is ripe. We should quietly fortify the body with food and drink and the mind with gladness and good cheer. Fate comes when it will, and thus we are ready.

Quietist advice. Seems the Democratic leadership is taking it to heart.

The danger is not yet close. One is still waiting on the open plain. Conditions are still simple, yet there is a feeling of something impending. One must continue to lead a regular life as long as possible. Only in this way does one guard against a premature waste of strength, keep free of blame and error that would become a source of weakness later on.

Ok, at least something is impending. Suddenly...

The situation is extremely dangerous. It is of utmost gravity now-a matter of life and death. Bloodshed seems imminent. There is no going forward or backward; we are cut off as if in a pit. Now we must simply stand fast and let fate take its course. This composure, which keeps us from aggravating the trouble by anything we might do, is the only way of getting out of the dangerous pit.

Dire auspices.

Even in the midst of danger there come intervals of peace when things go relatively well. If we possess enough inner strength, we shall take advantage of these intervals to fortify ourselves for renewed struggle. We must know how to enjoy the moment without being deflected from the goal, for perseverance is needed to remain victorious. This is true in public life as well; it is not possible to achieve everything all at once. The height of wisdom is to allow people enough recreation to quicken pleasure in their work until the task is completed.

But other sources take us to hexagram 38, Opposition; the trigram Fire above and Lake below. Now we're talking.

When people live in opposition and estrangement they cannot carry out a great undertaking in common; their points of view diverge too widely. In such circumstances one should above all not proceed brusquely, for that would only increase the existing opposition; instead, one should limit oneself to producing gradual effects in small matters. Here success can still be expected, because the situation is such that the opposition does not preclude all agreement.

Again, sounds almost like standing still. But, if we want to speak of the dangers of proceeding brusquely, it becomes pretty clear to which faction this applies.

The two elements, fire and water, never mingle but even when in contact retain their own natures. So the cultured person is never led into baseness or vulgarity through intercourse or community of interests with persons of another sort; regardless of all commingling, they will always preserve their individuality.

Baseness, vulgarity? We would never..

If you lose your horse do not run after it; it will come back of its own accord.

When you see evil people guard yourself against mistakes.

Well, all right.

A person misjudges their best friends, taking them to be as unclean as a dirty pig and as dangerous as a wagon full of devils. They adopt an attitude of defense. But in the end, realizing their mistake, they lay aside the bow, perceiving that the other is approaching with the best intentions for the purpose of close union. Thus the tension is relieved. The union resolves the tension, just as falling rain relieves the sultriness preceding a thunderstorm. All goes well, for just when opposition reaches its climax it changes over to its antithesis.

Scratch my head on that one. Divination is a tricky business. Not a good beginning, but a good end.

All quotes from the Cary F. Barnes translation of Richard Wilhelm's German translation.

Alien in the Year of the Snake