Catherine Eisner

Saturday, 19 July 2025

A Very British Disorder: Finishing School for Versifiers (Part 8)

A late 20th Century survey suggested 8 per cent of the UK adult population had recently written a poem in some manner (of which two-thirds were women*). Source: Writers & Artists Yearbook.

Is it, one wonders, a wholly unrelated statistic, then, to consider the curious correlation that – today – 8 percent of the population of Great Britain meets the criteria for diagnosis for Common Mental Disorders. Source: Mental Health Foundation.

Prey to mad uncontrollable rages, the poet Paul Scarron

(1610-1660) demonstrates the state of mind of one

whose reluctant Muse is deaf to all appeals.

Mount Helikon Awaits Ascent by Over Three Million Brits.

Certainly, today, the Case of the Upublished Poet suggests an as-yet unclassified mania threatening the sanity of possibly over 3 million adults in Britain (or 8 in 100) who suffer as forlorn aspirants, fretful to claim the summit of Mount Helikon or, indeed, Mount Parnassus.

Also, to put it another way, is it conceivable for a common British mental disorder to persist in an unclassified, untreatable compulsion that’s fixated on the composition of poems that remain in the shadows of the psyche, unpublished and unremembered?

AMS. The New Syndrome?

Is a new definition, therefore, demanded to categorise this complaint?

Could it be . . . ?

AMS. Absent Muse Syndrome: ‘A Poem : The Unanswered Prayer of the Id in Beseechment of the Super Ego.’ (Catherine Eisner, 2025.)

Or is this, actually, the definition of ALL poetry, whether by adepts or also-rans, published and unpublished? One has to ask.

As to Complaints.

Did not Edmund Spenser publish, in his 1591 collection Complaints, the poem Teares of the Muses? It would seem this work is the earliest sighting of Absent Muse Syndrome since the poet characterises the Muses – Clio, Melpomene, Thalia, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Calliope, Urania, and Polyhymnia – as sorrowers lamenting the shameful decline of Spenser’s fellow Men of Letters.

The Prosodic Pathogen and Pentacostal Tongues.

In many respects, this hidden psychiatric disorder recalls Typhoid Mary, who famously was asymptomatic yet a carrier of the typhoid pathogen.

So may we imagine the unpublished poet as an asymptomatic carrier of the prosodic pathogen? By definition, is such an unfortunate individual a carrier who’ll never witness the fever of presenting the full-blown disease yet one who’s condemned to speak in pentacostal tongues unheard?

There can be no consolations, then, for sufferers of unrequited bardic passion, we may conclude.

But . . .

The Anon Canon. The Anon Invocation.

Consider the rivalry of the authors, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Horace Smith in their contest to write Ozymandias.

One effort is regarded as a received classic in the canon of English Poetry, the other is a historical footnote. Yet, does not Smith’s own coda to his Ozymandias have a haunting sonorousness quite the equal of Shelley’s?

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Yes. Be assured. Together with Horace Smith, overshadowed neglected poets should, with excusable pride, claim membership to their own canon . . . the lost canon of a most powerful Unrecorded Race of Versifiers.

And, should you admit to sharing the woes of those blighted by Absent Muse Syndrome, you are directed to adopt without delay this not inefficacious AMS invocation evidently once composed to awake an intransigent muse . . .

Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire!

Your Concord Flight Plan: Destination Parnassus.

The idea of two states of mind coexisting and coequal, which confer the acuity of perceptual duality can be, perhaps, best demonstrated by aviation technology and the concept of the Artificial Horizon and its ADI – Attitude Display Indicator – to guide the pilot.

In the Poet’s search for Attitude, the Poet must emulate the Pilot and recognise and respect two ways of seeing Their Horizon from the pilot’s Point-of-View in the cockpit.

In general, the Inside-Out Convention has been adopted by commercial and military aviation for viewing the Artificial Horizon on the ADI, a concept that provides a moving horizon to gives a consistent frame of reference for a pilot seated at the controls, although it’s a visualisation that does not mimic the angle of the wings in the mind’s eye. (In the diagram the angle of the horizon is mimicked and the aircraft banks in reality. The moving part consists of a two-colour moving background defining earth and sky.)

More commonly adopted by aviation in the East, the Outside-In Convention reverses the action of the moving part; the horizon is static and the bank angle is an active representation of the angle of the wings. Despite the ‘Inside-Out’ set-up dominating Western aviation, the superiority of the ‘Outside-In’ convention is often cited in respect to the possible diminishment of comprehension in the case of an emergency recovery manoeuvre from a static bank angle displayed by ‘Inside-Out’.

In fact, a senior Concord pilot of my acquaintance comments: ‘I might have liked the “outside in” provided the real horizon is not about to appear! It all depends on what one is used to. “Chacun a son horizon” as they say in France.’

Well. Amen to that.

So what more can one add on the question of Knowing One’s Place in the World of Versification except this: ‘Everyone has their own horizon and to each I wish, “Happy landings!” ’

* ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’ ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

Tuesday, 8 July 2025

The Flip Side of the Mother of Exiles: Return the Statue of Liberty to France!

Reality is that which everything is an instance of.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

‘Give us back the Statue of Liberty. We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants. . . ’ thus spoke centre-left politician Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, on Sunday, March 16 2025 at a convention of his Place Publique centre-left movement. ‘We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home in France.’

Le Monde 16.03.25

Statue of Liberty – ‘Mother of Exiles’ – was

unveiled in New York City’s harbour on

October 28, 1886 for the centennial of the

American Declaration of Independence as a

gift from the French people to America.

(Photo: Pedestal project for Liberty

by Bartholdi, c. 1880.)

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore:

Framed in the silver of the fog and in the faint glow of the distant city, there she stood—lamp, robe, diadem, tablet, and all.

“Statue of Liberty. Finest sight a returning American ever beholds. Do you know the words of the inscription?”

Fleetwood smiled again in spite of himself. His companion's enthusiasm was infectious. He recited from memory:

                            Give me your tired, your poor,
                            Your huddled masses, yearning to be free.
                            The wretched refuse of your teeming shore . . .

Miles Fleetwood stole a glance at Phil’s enraptured face. No sense spoiling the moment for Phil, so Fleetwood checked an impulse to speak an opinion of his own. To him the statue and the verse amounted to a clever fraud. A subtle masterpiece of propaganda and effrontery planted right here on America's doorstep, back in 1884, by the wily French. Not one American among millions, he would bet, knew how deviously their country had been cozened into admitting hordes of undesirable immigrants, swelling the ranks of the indigent and criminal class, let alone the ranks of those with hyphenated loyalties. What else could he expected of Europe’s “wretched refuse” and the rest of it? Only a sentimental, simple-minded people, which Americans generally were, would have fallen for it. How many injurious immigration bills had been the result of the old lady’s preposterous presence in New York harbor!

Yet the converse of the national hospitality mania was hypocritically ignored. Why did America object so emotionally when a man “yearning to be free” reversed the process, gave up America as his country and embraced multi-nationality? Was America doomed by its ambiguity – and by much else? Well, Miles hadn’t for years been able to summon much regret about it. He didn’t care any more. The country’s doom seemed to him inevitable, and hence acceptable – like his own.

“I guess our eyes have seen the glory,” said Phil. “I just can’t wait to set foot on American soil again. ‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead.’ ” He broke off with a flush that carried up under the roots of his careless hair.

The Equivocal Men, Tales of the Establishent.

by Holmes M. Alexander, 1964.

False flag incursions by returnees.

Reportedly, between 1962 and 1989 the desperate ransom strategy of the impecunious German Democratic Republic facilitated the repatriation to the West of 34,000 East German political prisoners in exchange for hard currency or goods from West Germany. This practice, conceived by Erich Mielke, head of the East German Ministry for State Security, was known as Häftlingsfreikauf (ransom paid for prisoners’ freedom) at a cost thought be as high as 8 billion Deutsche Marks. However, in East Germany penal servitude made little practical distinction between political prisoners and criminal inmates; thus murderers and criminals with sentences of more than five years and political prisoners with sentences of three or more years were classed together as Category 1. Criminals with sentences of 2 to 5 years and political prisoners with sentences of less than three years were classed as Category 2. Category 3 prisoners were almost all criminals on short sentences. It is said that the artful Mielke (whose nerve centre at Stasi HQ was Room 101) could therefore ruthlessly exact handsome payments from West Germany for his republic’s more ‘embarrassing’ inmates, exchanging hardened criminals in the guise of political prisoners at exorbitant prices. The exact number of career criminals or Stasi agents released to the West by this subterfuge is unknown.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

On 26 June 2024, at the renowned Chatham House think tank in London – the Royal Institute of International Affairs – the panel of their ‘Weaponising Prejudice’ forum promulgated an ‘open-door’ policy for refugees categorised as those falsely ‘criminalised' by Russia and its ideological satellites and seeking asylum in the West as victims of anti-LGBTQI+ persecution. From the panel it was stated ‘that a lot of [war refugees] are, actually, LGBTQI+ individuals and that they are finding their way out of the Russian Federation . . . ’ and, hence ‘. . . integrating LGBTQI+ refugees and migrants, would be very important.’ Never raised by the debate, however, was the possibility of Russia’s LGBTQI+ victims of persecution reconfiguring to replicate the conditions under which East Germans fled to the West, particularly as the terms of reference to validate an individual's persecution in response to their sexual orientation would be inexact. Nor did the panel of policy-shapers appear to recognise the Law of Unintended Consequences, which surely applies when the forum’s exhortations to promote open borders would suggest that the plight of up to 6 million of those persecuted by anti-LGBTQI+ measures within the Russian Federation could result in that number crossing borders to the supposedly welcoming nations of western Europe. The flippancy of the debate’s co-speaker, the UK's Special Envoy on LGBT Rights, Lord Herbert, was equally indicative of simplistic policy-making on the hoof. His flimsy nudge-nudge whimsy – the dystopian future of a ‘Pink Pelmet’ [sic] over Russia – points up the potentialities of the East German scenario, since surely a pelmet (iron or otherwise) is NOT a curtain but a frill that is purely decorative with no appreciable function, a remark of his Lordship which unwittingly tends to highlight a border’s greater porosity and, in consequence, its appearance as a heightened threat to the security of neighbouring states.

Source:

Transcript of ‘Weaponising Prejudice’ forum.

Chatham House, 26 June 2024,

Polish Troops Defend Border Against Failed Asylum Seekers.

July 2025. Poland announces it will deploy 5,000 soldiers to its borders with Germany to stop Germany sending back failed asylum seekers. Tensions have flared between the two countries over how to deal with refugees trying to cross from Poland to Germany amid wider frustrations over migration. Poland and Germany are among a growing number of countries in Europe who are bringing back border controls to quell a backlash over undocumented migration, which has strained the EU’s Schengen passport free travel zone.

The Daily Telegraph

July 7 2025

See Ellis Island 1902

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/ellis-island-1902.html

Tuesday, 1 July 2025

Fourteen Years Past: Publication of ‘Listen Close to Me’

Today, from my publisher’s Facebook page:

Today. I wrote:

Yes, indeed. As I remember it, the cover’s facelessness was the more sinister for its expressing the ‘moral vacuum’ of the principal characters and even the indeterminateness of gender of at least two of them; that is, one is described by his lawyer father as having ‘no inheritable blood’ (!) and another described as having a ‘naïve unusedness’ of ‘no particular gender’, so your design does wonders in capturing those unknowable subtleties of appearance, for which – at that well remembered time – I was extremely grateful. Today, I wish you all at Salt another successful epoch of distinguished ground-breaking publishing and a wonderful new stable of literary discoveries for your next quarter century.

See:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

Saturday, 21 June 2025

Walt Whitman’s Private Anthem Exalts a Certain Breed of Liberated Man Desirous They should Together Sing His America.

‘May the glory of that pinnacle hold

free men untramelled, free and unenthralled.’

Walt Whitman by Ralph Steadman from

Ambit 176 Spring 2004.

(With respectful acknowledgements.)

For another fugitive fragment of verse, see:

Lines rejected by Rainer Maria Rilke

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/02/lines-rejected-by-rainer-maria-rilke.html

cf. A Man’s Man.

Compare my mother’s verdict on those self-appointed claimants to wisdom when the writer is a Man’s Man who presumes to write of the ‘qualities and tempers’ of women. In my mother’s time there were two such public men. She called them The Walt Whitmen of Women’s Weeklies. ‘Sentimentalists. They speak for womanhood yet haven’t the beginnings of a clue.’ Then she added darkly, ‘They don’t know the half ot it.’ She was referring to the two mid-20th Century longtime celebrated British columnists, Beverley Nichols of Woman’s Own magazine and his counterpart, Godfrey Winn of Woman magazine. Both men were reportedly lovers of Somerset Maugham. Both magazines are still published.

Moral: An omniscient narrator is an object of profound suspicion.

Sunday, 8 June 2025

Co-regnant: The Coregency of British Postage Stamps.

Yes, presently these British postage are co-regnant as to their currency and validity wihin our postal system.


The contents of a Briton’s pocketbook June 2025.

Royal Mail comments: To minimise the environmental and financial impact of the change of monarch, existing stocks of definitive stamps that feature Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will be distributed and issued as planned and will remain valid for use in line with our recent transition to barcodes on definitive stamps.

In this same period of transition, it should be remembered, we are in want of an Archbishop of Canterbury, the previous incumbent – who crowned our new monarch – having been found wanting.

So though we are at present inconvenienced by an Anglican interregnum (lower case) it may be said that King Charles III is mercifully not troubled by an Interregnum (capitalised), that unfortunate period in the history of his forebears, which bloodied his realm between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

More about a not so unrelated Charles here in my earlier post:

Frog Regnant London NW3

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/07/frog-regnant-london-nw3.html

Friday, 30 May 2025

Vignette 9: Twenty-five words.*

Reclusive maiden aunt requests brother to park his motorbike outside her house to deter suitors.

Bachelor, attracted to motorbike, visits house to purchase . . . marries aunt.

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

*THE LAW OF TWENTY-FIVE: ‘Of the quinary, or number five; that number five pertains to the Law. . . . accordingly the number twenty-five signifies the Law, because five by five — that is, five times five — make twenty-five, or the number five squared.’

Augustine’s Tractate 25 on the Gospel of John.

Sunday, 13 April 2025

AI Catastrophe! Ultimate Torment of the Species: Interrogation by Chatbot.

Once, many years ago, while studying a theatre programme, I read in a note on performers the observations of the polymathic opera director Jonathan Miller who confessed his worst fear was to be tortured for information he did not possess.

My congenital morbidity tells me I can imagine a fate far worse.

Scene from Metropolis the 1927 expressionist silent film

directed by Fritz Lang, whose Maschinenmensch is the

prototypal humanoid robot for dystopian visionaries.

Chatbot Torquemada.

Far worse, surely, would be if one survived the torture of a robotic intérrogatoire énergique to be condemned to the torture of the intérrogatoire prolongée by a fiendish inquisitor – a Chatbot Torquemada – to extract information one did not possess.

I have no doubt that such an instrument of torment for the ultimate surrender of humanity is at this moment in development at Artificial Intelligence HQ, a secret black site whose location is unknown to me . . . an example of specific information that, regardless of the consequences, I do not possess.