Dr. Metablog

Some Euphemisms

"Physical pressure" is entirely too vague -- goodness gracious, it could refer to something no more serious than a firm handshake -- and as a result it's impossible even to guess what's being euphemized. "Abuse" is similarly hazy. Verbal abuse?  Spousal abuse? Gosh, it's hard to say. "Harsh methods" and "harsh tactics" offer more of a clue, except that nowadays the word "harsh" can be used semi-comically, as in the teen-age "oh, that's harsh." You don't want inadvertent comedy when you're inventing prize-winning euphemisms. But "harsh" has more heft when used in combination with other adjectives, as for example "harsh interrogation methods" and "harsh interrogation techniques." The three-word phrases sound as though they've been translated from the original German, always a plus when language is being corrupted. "Rough treatment" is not very imaginative. I definitely prefer "abusive treatment," and "abusive techniques." "Coercive interrogation" has a nice ring -- and it leaves a lot of room for the imagination. "Brutal treatment" and "brutal methods of interrogation" -- well, what's the point? Once you start using words like "brutal", you might just as well just abandon euphemism altogether and say "torture," for goodness sake. "Enhanced interrogations" and  "enhanced interrogation techniques" effectively combine euphemism and bureaucratese. It's a stroke of genius to take the word "enhanced," which ordinarily denotes an improvement, and transfer it to the world of thumbscrew and electric shock. "Enhanced" is much more effective than its alternative "extreme," as in the widely used but colorless "extreme interrogation methods." My personal favorite is "advanced interrogation techniques," in which the word "advanced," customarily employed to describe progress in civilization, has been thoroughly perverted to refer to primitive, barbaric practices. "Advanced interrogation techniques." Now that's what I call a world-class euphemism! Credit another success to our government and to our compliant journalists.    

Our Glorious Past

William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and one of the great, insightful novelists of Victorian America, visited the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876.  He toured the pavilion in which native American crafts were displayed.  Howells' judgment:  "the red man, as he appears in effigy and in photograph in this collection, is a hideous demon, whose malign traits cannot inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence." 

Am I naive that I continue to be shocked by the barbarities of the past? 

The "Singing Man of Windsor"

In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, it is reported that Falstaff once boldly compared the King to a "singing man of Windsor" -- and was assaulted for doing so. Who, then, is this controversial "singing man?" 

The evidence that might solve this mystery is buried in the dark backward and abysm of time. The throwaway reference to a "singing man of Windsor" may have tickled Globe audiences, but later playgoers (and scholars) don't have a clue as to why.  

The singing man owes his shadowy existence to Mistress Quickly, who inserts him into a one of her ungainly rambling narratives, the point of which is to claim that Falstaff has promised to marry her. "Didst thou not swear to me... when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor...," she complains. 

Presumptuous indeed for Falstaff to compare his King to any ordinary mortal -- but what, we may ask, was so offensive about the "singing man" that his mere mention provoked the prince to violence?  Misshapen, ugly, drunken, foolish?  There must have been more jeer to the "singing man" than is now obvious. 

The phrase "singing man" was a technical term that described not popular balladeers but professional choristers, usually priests, who were associated with a church or college. Shakespeare knew about a priest of Windsor named Maudelen -- the story is in Holinshed's Chronicles -- who resembled Richard II and was deployed as a figurehead in a plot to overthrow the king. Is it possible that Falstaff''s "singing man" referred to Maudelen and therefore challenged the legitimacy of Henry's kingship?  Maudelen is not known to have been a singer, and so the theory, weak as it is, seems to founder badly. 

More likely is that there was a real, notorious Windsor singer, offensive in some unknown way, who enjoyed local celebrity in the 1590s. Would Shakespeare insert a real person into the history play?  Well, yes, he does such things. This sequence of Henry plays, nominally set in the early decades of the fifteenth century, is given to anachronism and occasionally introduces one of Shakespeare's contemporaries into the story, perhaps as some sort of private joke. A "William Visor of Woncote" who was very likely a member of the Visor or Vizard family of Woodmancote in Gloucestershire is mentioned by Shallow's factotum Davy. And then there's "Clement Perkes a' th' Hill," who as been traced to the Purchas or Perkis family who dwelled on Stinchcombe Hill. And also the "red-nosed innkeeper of Daventry" (Daventry is a village on the London-Coventry road that Shakespeare no doubt frequented.)  These imagined beings are indulgences on Shakespeare's part that might have amused the knowledgeable but can only puzzle us. 

The "singing man of Windsor" stands as another such bafflement. It's a clue to Shakespeare's temperament, but a clue that leads nowhere. 

Nick and the Candlestick

Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick," a scalpel of a poem, is exasperating in its details but crystal clear in "plot" and feeling. Here it is in its entirety. Read it through; don't be alarmed if it seems impenetrable or opaque; it's not. Or not entirely so.

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Here''s the story in simple outline: the candlestick-bearing poet enters a dark bedroom in which she finds rugs on the wall, an aquarium, and her sleeping infant -- the "Nick" of  the title. The poem's import: simply that the world may be dangerous and hostile, but is redeemed by the child. It's a simple tale in a traditional form ("dramatic monologue") but its language and imagery are startling, intense, even revolutionary. The poem's governing idea is not unusual, but it is conveyed with magnificent electric imagery and emotion.

Some lines are clear, others entirely mysterious. A line-by-line commentary follows.

"I am a miner." For the purposes of the fiction, the poet bluntly transforms herself into a miner and explorer. The space into which she enters is a bedroom, which in terms of the metaphor, is cast both as a mine and a cave. What minerals will the miner extract?  Both the rich and rare (a ruby) and the poisonous (mercury).  

"The light burns blue."  The candle that she carries is nearly extinguished (or, alternatively, there is a gas heater in the room).

"Waxy stalactites drip and thicken." Candle drippings, in the poet's imagination, become stalactites; we are in a cave. But she holds a candle as it would be employed in worship. It is through the agency of the candle that religion (specifically Roman Catholicism) enters the poem. 

"Tears/ The earthen womb/ Exudes from its dead boredom." The room, the mine, the cave, is now figured as a womb. Tears/womb extends and transforms candle/cave. The series of terms  "room" (implied) "mine," "cave," "womb") is the metaphorical center of the poem -- the "spaces" that will be evoked in the poem's next to last sentence. The womb is the previous home of "Nick," who is also a babe of larger meaning in the climax of the poem.  

The phrase "from its dead boredom" is not clear, at least to me. It's tempting to say that the poet transfers her own emotion onto the wax/stalactite/tear -- so that "the womb is crying just as I am" -- but nevertheless the phrase "dead boredom" is too personal and vague to communicate perspicuously. The room/cave/womb, at this point in the poem, seems to be infertile ("dead") and un-engaging. But that will change.

"Black bat airs/ Wrap me, raggy shawls,/ Cold homicides." I understand why the poet encounters bats in her cave, and it makes sense that she defines her own clothes as a tattered shawl. It is also clear that the room into which she has entered is dangerous and inhospitable. The syntax of the sentence is less than clear. Does the phrase "cold homicides" stand in apposition to "airs?" Who are these "cold homicides?" A "homicide" can be a murderer or a victim of murder or even an abstraction. In what sense can a poet be "wrapped" in "cold homicides?" 

"They weld to me like plums." The least explicable line in the poem. "They" seems to refer to "black bat airs" -- but how airs can "weld like plums" is beyond me. In the same way way that plums weld to me?  What way is that?

"Old cave of calcium/ Icicles, old echoer." Calcium icicles are clearly the stalactites and a cave is certainly a place of echoes. But "old? Once again, tired, unproductive, never fertile, but possibly also "old" in the sense of familiar, as in "old friend."

"Even the newts are white,/ Those holy Joes." The stalactite-dominated cave with its calcium icicles is drained of color. So too are the newts, or salamanders, which ought to be red. Newts are traditionally associated with fire, but not here. In Christian symbolism, they stand for faith, because, in the legends, they survive the fiery passions of disbelief. Why are they "holy Joes?" The only meaning of "holy Joe" with which I am familiar is "military chaplain," which isn't pertinent. But "Joe" is significant, because Joe or Joseph is the absent father of the baby in the barn. But why is there a salamander in the room, unless it lives in some sort of aquarium or terrarium?

"And the fish, the fish---/Christ! They are panes of ice,/ A vice of knives,/A piranha religion, drinking/ Its first communion out of my live toes." Not just a newt in this room/cave/womb, but fish as well. Fish, of course, are the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity -- the Greek word ixthos, fish, signifying Jesus Christ theos ouk soter (god and savior). But these fish, like the salamander, are anything but redemptive. On the contrary, they stand for a "piranha religion" and a sacrament not of communion but consumption -- with the poet herself, or perhaps only her toes, the sacrifice.

These lines bring to conclusion the first part of the poem, which does not offer any good news. But then begins the second movement of the poem, which is of a more optimistic character.

"The candle/ Gulps and recovers its small altitude,/ Its yellows hearten." Well, that's encouraging. The candle was almost extinguished, and with its return comes a bit of color, at last. And perhaps some cheer. 

"O love, how did you get here?/  O embryo/ Remembering, even in sleep,/Your crossed position."  How, my child, did you find yourself in such a cold and inhospitable universe. The baby is newly arrived, his legs still crossed as they were in the womb -- "crossed," being, of course, an obvious reference to "the cross."

"The blood blooms clean/ In you, ruby." No original sin in this jewel of a child.

"The pain/ You wake to is not yours." It is the world's pain to which the innocent child must gradually accommodate -- but not yet, and not in this poem..

"Love, love,/ I have hung our cave with roses./ With soft rugs----/ The last of Victoriana."  The room is momentarily figured as a better world -- a pre-modern world. It's comfortable, blooming; a room in strong contrast to the colorless, cold cave of the first movement of the poem.

"Let the stars/ Plummet to their dark address,/ Let the mercuric/ Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well," "Let" has the force of "even if." Even if the world ends, even if the earth is polluted and poisoned, the poet exclaims,  

"You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious." You, Nick, my infant child who makes the world whole, are the "one solid," the only palpable reality, which the spaces (vacuities, caves, rooms, emptinesses of all sort) lean upon. And finally, at last,

."You are the baby in the barn."  You, my own newborn infant, are the baby in the barn. Which is to say, you, not Him. You, not Jesus, are my savior. As we've seen, the poem is not traditionally reverent. The baby in the barn is stripped of religious mystery. The poet has already made clear her feeling about Christianity -- it's a "piranha religion." But the "baby in the barn" -- Jesus in the manger -- that's another thing. This barn-born baby (barn, not cave) is a universal, trans-religious symbol of rebirth, of hope. "You are the baby in the barn" invests meaning in Everyinfant. It repudiates the claim to special importance of any particular child, even the god/man of theology. The poet rejects Christianity in favor of a universal human and natural relationship (parent-child) that underlies and precedes all religion.   

It's a poem that travels a great distance in a handful of lines.  Brilliant, isn't it?

Classic Announcerese

NBC NCAA announcer to MSU coach Tom Izzo at the end of last night's game: "This is one of the great atmospheres I've ever been able to watch."