British history and culture at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony

For those who, like me, missed out on the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, catch a replay of the elegant exposition of British history and culture on the blog Allan is the Man.

Alfred Eisenstaedt and the twilight of the idol that was Ernest Hemingway

I am indeed one of those people who are more fascinated with Ernest Hemingway's erratic persona rather than with his straight to your face literary economics. When I read his works in college it was already evident to me that the man himself, who prowled the tropics in search of adventure, was as difficult as his writings were as easy, judging from the terse paragraphs and impatient dialogue running across his pages, symptomatic of the man who if possible prefers to get into the action quicker than his words ever could. Take for example the following sentences from one his best works For Whom the Bell Tolls:

Anselmo lay face down behind the white marking stone. His left arm was doubled under his head and his right arm was stretched straight out. The loop of wire was still around his right fist. Robert Jordan got to his feet, crossed the road, knelt by him and made sure that he was dead. He did not turn him over to see what the piece of steel had done. He was dead and that was all.

Hemingway wanted to get things over so quickly that he even took his own life rather than sit and wait for his evening.

It was indeed an unlikely spectator, the famous photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt who saw the innovative author of The Sun Also Rises at his worst. Eisenstaedt went to Cuba in 1952 to photograph the writer for LIFE's September issue of that year, but instead of seeing a mighty, dazzling and larger-than-life celebrity, what he found was a crazy, berserk, wild and insulting giant who often went blue in the face with sudden, uncontrollable anger and drank alcohol for days on end.

Though Eisenstaedt was only able to take a few photographs due to difficulties getting along with the man, his snapshots were still able to capture a side of the author different from what he experienced - that of Hemingway's younger disposition to cheerfulness in the face of pressure, a bear who wrestled with the beasts of the jungle and enjoyed his dangerous sports as the best rituals of life.

Click here to view Eisenstaedt's rare photos of the author as recently published by LIFE.

Weekend Poetry: Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's marriage to the poet Ted Hughes developed from fairy-tale to stormy and ended up as one of the most tragic in literary history when Plath committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Her poems, the greatest ones of which were written months before she took her life, reflect intonations of darkness and death, as remembrances of her earlier attempts at suicide coupled with repetitive visits of depression and her marriage's subsequent failure contributed to the themes which permeated her writings during her short but nonetheless productive life. Poets and critics hailed her works as the best examples of confessional poetry, as is summed up by the below poem written shortly before her death and published in her posthuomuous collection Ariel.

In Daddy, Plath describes her complicated feelings towards her father Otto who died after her eighth birthday due to undiagnosed diabetes. In the poem Plath regards her father's memory as something which she has to bury in oblivion. She describes him in God-like terms, and she seems to have difficulties coming to grips with his death, that at one point she recalls a suicide attempt at age 20 to join him (At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you.) She then goes on to say that she married Hughes for his resemblance to her dead father, a manifestation of the Electra complex which Plath was aware herself. At the end Plath says she has killed both of them (that is, forgotten both of them) and that she is therefore through with her father's lingering memory.


Daddy
by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Light and how they reached for it

When Einstein formulated his famous special and general theories of relativity, it did not mean that he overturned every vestige of classical science. He was in fact by all means indebted to a few but very important discoveries of the past two hundred years, to which his famous (but oft-misunderstood) equation E = mc² provided a revolutionary continuity. But while some of the individuals behind these discoveries are well-remembered, there were some who seemed to have just faded to absolute obscurity.

Below is an outstanding two-part docudrama which reminds us of scientific heroes who paved the way to the understanding of the vast universe around us, and, whether they knew it or not, made little ripples in the pond of their time that later shook the oceans of ours. More than the power of their intellect what is noteworthy about these men and women is the power of their courage and determination with which they managed to overcome the obstacles and achieve the things they aspired for. With poverty, politics, war and inequality ever-present to shake their faiths they did not choose to falter and instead with an undaunted spirit broke the very rules which initially bound their genius to the circumstances of their birth and of their society.

It is in the aftermath of their suffering, and during the time of Lise Meitner's fortitude, that through a young and unknown patent clerk in Berne science would realize that there was more to it than its little world.

Weekend Poetry: Miracle Fair by Wislawa Szymborska

When she died on February 1, 2012, Wislawa Szymborska was already considered one of the greatest pillars of Polish literature. Her small body of work - an oeuvre of only less than 350 poems in 16 anthologies - are notorious for their linguistic simplicity and philosophical depth, as well as for their irony, anecdotes, paradox, playfulness, contradiction, bitter humor and understatements which bring to our attention several truths the world has taken for granted. She used to be a staunch socialist like many other members of the Polish intelligentsia during the post-war years, but soon repudiated the ideology and renounced her earlier political works reflecting Stalinist ideals, eventually establishing contacts with dissidents and writing for opposition journals. A shy poet, the playwright and former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel once called her "such a pleasant, decent and modest lady." Her prominence spread around the world after winning the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."

Below is a poem representative of Madame Szymborska's technique which explains why the Nobel committee dubbed her the “Mozart of poetry.”


Miracle Fair
by Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it's backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

The empirical front

Last week was a delirious week for the entire scientific community following the discovery of a subatomic particle with mass of around 125 GeV similar to the theoretical Higgs boson. Though their properties are fairly alike, scientists are yet to confirm the particle as a hundred percent Higgs boson, and yet CERN has announced that it has almost struck oil and is a few inches away from what could become the most famous eureka of our age. We know that the Higgs boson is the last piece in the standard model that will explain the interactions between all known particles, something which will have a huge impact not only in the subatomic but also in the macrocosmic level. The "theory of everything" sprouting from this long-nurtured crop may finally explain the question of how do we happen to get here.

Growing up I have always been fascinated by science's relevance to the question of existence and its origin. Somehow we used to understand existence as something more religious and philosophical than scientific. Our generation itself has been reared in a culture which busies itself on spiritual questions which answers do not fit in to the logical patterns of our understanding. This, despite the fact that for over two hundred years the bridging of the empirical and the rational thought have done so well to dispel the old myths and misconceptions of people about nature.

That is why institutionalized religion is so often threatened by scientific advances because the foundations of much of their canons and dogmas are products of premature conceptions and the church is just too great a matter for a small fire to kindle. In the past, what philosophy could not explain was left to religion, and afterwards when chemistry and the other experimental sciences came into being philosophy changed its ally as thinkers suddenly realized that religion itself was an irrelevant response to the complex inquiries of the times. The rise of empiricists such as Hume, Locke, Berkeley and the others brought out a D-Day on the beaches of conformity and razed the prevailing ideas on miracles and inverted cause and effect logic down to the ground.

And today is a very good time to commemorate and celebrate empirical knowledge. It is again time for philosophy and experimental science to sit together and have a cup of coffee, and for institutionalized religion to rethink as it has so often done so in the past.