Tag: people

The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond.

Random thoughts swirling through the poet’s mind after waking up

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

For millennia, people thought
that the sun revolved around the earth,
and it took a great deal of ingenuity,
pursued by burning at the stake,
to mentally set foot on the former,
or rather beyond both celestial bodies.
And yet we still have ardent flat-earthers among us.

After only a few miles on the bike,
a well-oxygenated brain may absorb a fair dose
of Wittgenstein or decide to leave the typical nine-to-five
for something more exotic, like a snake milker,
a ravenmaster, or a professional mourner.
If you are particularly lucky, you might even land your dream job
as an eternal employee, although that would require moving
to Gothenburg in Sweden.

My father used to say, ‘Ordnung muss sein,’
so that I would know that bending over a stool
and counting aloud the blows with his army belt
was for my future good;
otherwise, I could mistake it for an act of cruelty.
I wonder what his views would be
if he lived to see today, when even a light smack
is a criminal offence.

Surreal oil painting depicting a group of people around an hourglass with sand and people inside

A rude awakening

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

In the river of yellow umbrellas,
the rain swims with frantic crawls,
as if plotting wet shoulders were barely enough.
But even if the sky forgives the reflection
and the wind forgets the manner,
once they learn that forever has a pretty short shelf life,
they will realise all that’s left is to count
the grains of sand stolen from an hourglass
and be cautious.

an oil painting showing a poet struggling to write a poem

Journal (There were never so many poetasters as now)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski2 Comments

“Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have given reputation to our French poesy, every little dabbler, for aught I see, swells his words as high, and makes his cadences very near as harmonious as they: ‘Plus sonat, quam valet.’ [‘More sound than sense’—Seneca, Ep., 40.] For the vulgar, there were never so many poetasters as now; but though they find it no hard matter to imitate their rhyme, they yet fall infinitely short of imitating the rich descriptions of the one, and the delicate invention of the other of these masters.” (from The Essays of Montaigne—Volume 05 by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton)

Reading his words, I wonder what Montaigne would say about the state of poetry in our times, as not only has it evolved in form but it has also democratised, and today in France alone, probably more people write poetry than were educated in that country in his time. But reading this passage, I feel that they are as relevant now as they were then. If I happen to stumble upon a poem, especially one published online, I almost never find any satisfaction in reading it, let alone being impressed, and that’s also why I’ve stopped writing poetry myself. But enough about that because the sun finally came out after the storm Babet, so it’s time to go outside.

an oil painting showing a man sitting on a bench on the beach promenade and looking at the strollers who are not paying attention to him

Journal (Let’s all pretend we live forever)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Sometimes I need a hug, or I miss soft-spoken words amid the cries of seagulls. Sometimes there are not enough colours in a watergaw that I spot over the sea. Sometimes I want to shout, “Let’s all pretend we live forever and stop asking what the exchange rate is.” But most of the time, I simply sit on a bench on the promenade by the beach and watch the strollers passing me by, hoping one day someone notices me. I guess everyone should have their own little impossible to cherish.

an oil painting showing a group of people playing a board game

Journal (A gracious AI or an obnoxious human)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I’ve never been into games. I find them dreary, but they also require interaction with other people, and that’s a challenging endeavour for me. For most of my life, I stayed on the sidelines, observing others running like lab rats in a maze, which proved convenient when I started working for newspapers. That’s probably why I became a journalist in the first place, as it embraced this habit of mine, allowing me to make a living out of it while at the same time feigning involvement in the affairs of others, at least up to the final punctuation mark, so I could for a little while convince myself that the detachment from the real world that I have always felt is nothing but my imagination. However, one may ask oneself what is more desirable: indifferent reliability or compassionate inadequacy (knowing people, they would aim for compassionate reliability—what a greedy creature human is). But it turns out that if you sugarcoat the former with an impression of sympathy, we are more than happy to embrace it, like the Diplomacy board game players, who were happier to lose to gracious AI than obnoxious human players (see What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? by Virginia Heffernan in Wired magazine).