What is or is not poetry?

 What is or is not poetry?

 

After all, what on earth is this thing called poetry? Well, what is usually defined as poetry is "another way of using language". Once upon a time, at the beginning of humanity, it might have been the only way of using language, or even-even the language itself! Then came the prose. It is believed that either poetry or language was part of the rituals of the early agricultural societies.

But a short, concise and possibly one of the most apt definitions of poetry is that given by Nobel Prize laureate W.B. Yeats, who was born in 1865 (see image).

Disney Studios changed and transformed the messages of the original Pinocchio story, as written by Italian author and journalist Carlo Lorenzini (under the pen-name Carlo Collodi).

 

Disney Studios changed and transformed the messages of the original Pinocchio story, as written by Italian author and journalist Carlo Lorenzini (under the pen-name Carlo Collodi).

 

Lorenzini's works were criticizing the social and political situation in Europe at that time, and his books were often allegorical stories meant to satirise Italian and European society. 

His book 'Le Avventure di Pinocchio' (The Adventures of Pinocchio), in 1883, was recognised as an allegory about human nature.

As is always the case, the American entertainment industry and in this specific case, 'Disney Studios', when making the film in the late 1930s, made an effort to transform the story of Pinocchio and change the messages of Lorenzini's original story.

Thus, while the original is essentially a social satire focusing on education and industrialisation with messages of the type:

- humans are generally deceitful and duplicitous beings, but they can change if they try

- those who were not prepared for the new world of industrialisation could end up becoming harmful actors in that world, like Pinocchio

- those children, like Pinocchio, who do not go to school will become morally compromised individuals, that is, they will be treated like this wooden hero, who we see, for example, even the fairy advising him to go back to school and stop being so lazy

in the story shaped and presented by Disney Studios, the social messages/comments have been removed, e.g. the fact that in the original story, Pinocchio kills Jiminy Cricket, and the story becomes a fairy tale that ultimately doesn't resemble the original (dark) social satire at all.

If it's not true, then it's a well-cooked story...

 If it's not true, then it's a well-cooked story...

 

Well, you have all heard the question, "Did Einstein steal the Maxwell-Lorentz theory?" So, it's not a question that could lead to conspiracy theories or anything like that, anyway. Einstein did indeed use the Maxwell-Lorentz formulas, he named them within his treatise, but he didn't include a citation.

 

It is quite possible that both Lorentz and as well as Poincare, who also worked out these mathematical formulas, may have never understood their physical meaning, i.e. how these formulas interpreted the physical world.

 

In any case, Einstein himself, in order to finally arrive at the theory of relativity, went through a certain amount of reflection and thoughts. It should not escape us that he started with the concept of the mechanical ether, which he abandoned by accepting the constancy of the speed of light.

 

It was on this change of views that he tried to avoid getting involved with the Maxwell-Lorentz formulas by devising a theory of emission, but he continued with these formulas - at least in the part where they were applicable - and abandoned his original notions of the wave nature of light.

 

This was perhaps the time when Einstein could unify the two conceptions of light (wave and particle), since, of course, he had relativised the concept of time.

 

The irony of the story is that this synthesis of the two theories was something that was achieved more than 20 years later, with quantum field theory, but it never met with the satisfaction of Einstein himself.

 

So tell me, if this story was not true, could it not well be considered a well-cooked story?

In the photos you can see:

Albert Einstein

Henri Poincaré 

Hendrik Lorentz

James Clerk Maxwell

UNIVERSAL SINGULARITY

UNIVERSAL SINGULARITY (SHAPE THAT MAKES PATTERNS WITHOUT REPEATING)

Indeed! There are entities (persons or things) in the universe that have the property of being associated with some uniqueness.

Of course, we as human beings may be unaware and/or slow to identify such universal entities. After all, as is well known, in science we know what we think we know.

Well, the shape illustrated in the picture is characterised by such a universal singularity. It is, as can easily be observed, a shape that consists of 8 individual polygons and its uniqueness lies in the fact that it makes - theoretically infinitely - patterns without repeating! As far as we know so far this is the only shape that offers this possibility.

What remains now, after the discovery of such a universal singularity, is to find some useful, for various scientific fields, applications of it.

WORLD POETRY DAY

 WORLD POETRY DAY

Αlthough poetry should generally be left without comments and without distortions, on this day, the World Poetry Day, I found and herewith quote a poem by Elytis, for which I can only make my small comment on the confirmation, through this poem, of the relationship between the Nobel Laureate poet and his compatriot, the ancient and world pioneer lyric poet, Sappho.

The following is a draft translation into English, only for the purposes of this post.

"Of the Moon of Mytilini" by Odysseas Elytis, 1980

Old and new ode

So I embrace my misery - I know:

Only to Thee will I tell it, my old sea moon.

There were on my island some women who if I am not mistaken.

A thousand years ago Sappho secretly

She brought you into the garden of our old house

And I could hear the pebbles in the water

That your name is Selana and that you hold

And play the mirror of sleep.

 

How on my back I remember coming out of July

I'd watch you come down where the hubbub shone

And flies over the rotting leaves

Myriads of myriads you were glowing! How sweet it all was! And deep

The noise of the wheel in the night...

 

Or times when you brought me the owl

To my lonely chamber

Lifting shadows from the furniture

To frighten me. But what was dead I did not know

 

What does Weather and Opacity mean

What the white of the Virgin Mary on the waters

The great hieroglyphics on your face

Love and death - well, I didn't know...

 

And I was so sad! Only it was night

Only the leaves were dripping only inexplicably

I had gone down to Mother

Her echoing depths the depthless

And the black piece that was distracting

From within me and into the well

And the dirt that crushed beneath my tread

Like a peacock swelling the rosemary

Only they hungered only they pressed my breast

I could feel tears welling up.

 

Away to the silver-roofed houses

The other children were lifted by the voice

Their voices were lifted by their harmonica

Alone on the stairs I cried like a persecuted man

And I begged you: take me, take me in your arms

And comfort me where I was born!

 

Not that I was unlucky - I mean

That the years upon me did not take hold like water

And my words in the light leaping

Like fishes longing to reach

Through the other sky - But where no one

To read no one knew heaven

My old sea moon, my old sea moon, I'll only tell it to you

For you have made me miserable - and I know:

 

My old home I still inhabit

And in the same creaks, I'm frightened

And the nights are still coming out in July

Wrapped in your black greenery I talk too much

 

Gone are gone, gone are the people

In the deep hidden cypresses

In slow shuddering the tide that the Night

Through the leaves is always drawing sparks

 

But where's the joy? Where is the new life?

But I witnessed when on the third height

One by one the air's lilies awoke

And half of me stayed out of Time

The valley that Death hid

To face again. The rotting Zodiac around me.

 

So far away on earth. The flow of the sea

And evil eyes in the smoke of the gardens. But what

The poet with his empty lips

Ever behind his grief: the Unspeakable.

Take me, take me in your arms

And comfort me where I was born.

 

That so light to the brow the touch was

So blah the flowers. So dripping

Of the eyes

Nice after happiness was gone

Away in the sea dawn

The kiss I held while my star was breaking

The slope of August so pure

 

So bitter in my skirt the peace

So black and small the people

With the foot forward that always goes on

All straight for Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon.

Because... this day deserves a PO.CRA.N. "POetic CRAck in the Normality"!!!

What will the West do now?

 

What will the West do now?

 

To tell the truth, we have all noticed that something has been going on in NATO for quite some time now! There is a problem at the eastern edge of the Alliance and the problem is called Turkey! The West's 16th century A.D. bulwark against Russia's expansionism is no longer working.

Important published texts (articles, books, etc.) point, in one way or another, to the above-mentioned issue. It is worth mentioning here some of the most authoritative such texts, for example: The important post, titled as, "Has Turkey Become an American Foe?" of the great and authoritative 'The National Interest' which is a leading forum for US foreign policy thought leaders, which includes a really interesting view, the also interesting approach in the book "Never Give An Inch" by Mr. Mike Pompeo, Former CIA Director and US Secretary of State, where, among other issues, he also deals with the US-Turkey relationship, the ECONOMIST Special Report entitled "Turkey's Looming Dictatorship", where it is pointed out, aptly, that a flawed democracy could tip into full-blown autocracy and other publications.

Well, Turkey is what it has always been, throughout the centuries. Anyone who knows history and looks back at the historical data will find some Mongol tribes that started in the depths of the East and have always tried to advance towards Europe with conquests, wreaking havoc. These are the Turks.

But the question today is how the West will behave. The West, which again based on historical documentation, over time, has shown a fearful attitude towards Russia's expansionist intentions, and as a result, has tried to use Turkey (formerly the Ottoman Empire) as a bulwark against Russia. The culmination of this hastily misguided Western policy was that in the 15th century, it allowed a Christian Empire, the Byzantine Empire, to be replaced by a Muslim Empire, the Ottoman Empire.

The question, then, is: What will the West do now?

First and foremost, it is worth reading in the book “Better the Turkish sari than the Papal tiara” by Anthony Dernellis (available on all Amazon platforms), all the historical documentation you need to understand exactly what the West's responsibilities were in the replacement of the Christian Byzantine Empire in the East by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. In this book, you may find all the historical documentation you need to understand exactly what the West's responsibilities were in the replacement of the Christian Byzantine Empire in the East by the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

In fact, the West has a guilty history of responding to the former Ottoman Empire and the current Turkish state. The West's responsibilities and intentions have been mainly as follows:

·       once it was clear that the Christian Byzantine Empire was to be replaced by a Muslim, that is, the Ottoman Empire

·     and then, in the 16th century, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566), although no friend of Christendom, was considered by the leaders of the Great Powers of the West at that time, namely Henry VIII of England, Francis of France and Charles V of Spain (Holy Roman Emperor), that he deserved to rank as fourth of the sixteenth-century princes of Europe, precisely because the Ottoman Empire served the West as an important bulwark against Russian aggrandizement

·       note that Suleiman after playing the game of opportunistic Francis who encouraged him to resume his advance on Charles's capital, Vienna, he was stopped after 1526 from any further advance into the West and turned back to Constantinople- and much later on (late 18th to early 20th century) when the fear of Russian expansionism, which was even then one of the Great Powers, made the other two, mainly, Great Powers of the West - England and Austria-Hungary - boycott the only solution for the decadent Ottoman Empire, which was the dissolution of the Eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, which became the present Turkish state, as, of course, the Western part of the Ottoman Empire, which bordered Western Europe, was also dissolved to form the Balkan states.

Therefore, the issue is not what Turkey has done, is doing, and intends to do, but what the West will do this time!