An Oxbridge Tragedy . . .

             Eyes dart, evade. Cheeks flush. “Must dash, I’ve
             barely time for my next viva.”
             She never looked quite so alive
             as when they dragged her from the river.

  Catherine Eisner                  

Words in Time of Pestilence . . . Plague: Are Allegorical Pandemics Instructive? Albert Camus and Kurt Vonnegut.

The spikes on the outer edge of the COVID-19 virus particles
resemble a crown, bestowing on the disease its potent name.

The Plague (La Peste) a classic existentialist novel that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It poses a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. An allegory of stoic resilience, charged by hope more than faith, the novel charts the challenges faced by individuals unsustained by any communal ideology other than a sense of duty, fellow feeling and the will to live.

La Peste by Albert Camus,

a philosophical novel

published 1947 

ICE-9: An alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature, whose crystals cause all the water in the world’s seas, rivers, and groundwater to turn into ice-nine. The freezing of the world’s seas at once causes illimitable catastrophes from a causal chain driving violent storms and tornadoes that ravage the Earth’s terrain.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, 

a science fiction novel

published 1963

COVID-19: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), previously known by the provisional name 2019 novel coronavirus, is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA (ribonucleic acid) virus. It is contagious in humans and is the cause of the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that has been designated a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization.

Here are some of the most beautiful words in the English language (Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence, 1593) ...

                        Brightness falls from the air, 
                        Queens have died young and fair, 
                        Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. 
                        I am sick, I must die:
                        Lord, have mercy on us. 

Postscript:

One can predict that a catastrophe on the scale of Coronavirus will spawn reflexive cinema and even now developers are in intense conclave in Hollywood. It is said that the movie, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a 2004 drama directed by Mary McGuckian, was a consolatory narrative in response to the 2001 9/11 attack on The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_of_San_Luis_Rey_(2004_film)

A Visit Recalled: Dame Edith Sitwell.

‘Chocolate?’
I had foolishly arrived with a scarce box of fancy liqueur chocs.
‘My dear, the last time 
                                       I ate
                                            chocolate
                                                  was Nineteen Twenty-Eight.’
The half-smile of the poetess was 
                                       matched only by her half-rhyme.
Points of light flashed from a large blue agate
set on one of the rings 
                                      with which her fingers were laden.
Bangles jangled as the empress extended her hand with
                                      a flourish
                                            as though it were some form
                                                  of impish
                                                        sabre-rattling at the whim
of a capricious potentate.
                                      ‘Mais non . . . !’
She selected a chocolate-coated fragment the size of a crumb.
‘. . . Maybe I’ll simply choose the makeweight 
                                      en hommage à la poésie concrète!’

‘She was impressively grand, quite eccentric . . . 
She wore her usual loose, dramatic robes, her high,
Plantagenet headdress. Her lovely hands were
covered with the most beautiful rings I had ever
seen actually worn: they were deep, deep, coloured
stones — aquamarines, blue agates, large and
pool-like.’ (A Drink* with Dame Edith by
Muriel Spark. Literary Review. February 1997.)

Special Note: A ‘makeweight’ was, according to custom, a small, very thin, tablet of pure chocolate added, as occasion demanded, to a box of chocolates to meet trading standards when the tray was underweight.

*Dame Edith’s favourite tipple was, apparently, Gin-and-Pineapple-Juice.


See also: Variation on a Theme by Edna St. Vincent Millay
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/variation-on-theme-by-edna-st-vincent.html

See also: Premature embalmment of anti-art
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/dotty-premature-embalmment-of-anti-art.html

See also: Poésie trouvée, the unsought text
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/colour-blind.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

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 (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Ignoble Retreat at the Edge where Earth and Firmament meet . . .

Ubi cœlum terræ se conjungit.

                           A host of angels
                                       vent their dirge obscure
           as of a vanquished 
                                       army of cicadas
           to signify alarm or
                                       their displeasure
           called to retreat, scorned
                                       unavailing stardust.

‘. . . and now in little space the confines met
of Empyrean Heav’n and of this World . . .’
                                                                                     Paradise Lost Book 10
                                                                                              1667 John Milton

A Miotic and Dilative Cosmic Eye

In his paper published in April 1930, Zum kosmologischen Problem der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, Albert Einstein  speculates briefly on a universe in a process of Expansion (Dilatationsbewegung) and Collapse in an eternal cycle of extinctions and rebirths. His flirtation with Oscillating Universe theory develops from a presumption of ‘spherical  space [spharischen Raum], whose radius is variable over time [and, in consequence, a progressive decrease in expansion follows, which] sets an upper boundary for the radius of the cosmos that cannot be exceeded with the passage of time . . . whereupon the whole process is gone through in the opposite sense (umgekehrtem Sinne) . . .’

Medieval Verse (4) Praise Crown Restored . . . Raise Voice in Song . . .

[ This hitherto untranscribed text is by a hand unknown and no putative attribution to any earlier scriptor should be assayed. ]

Discovered inscribed in cursiva anglicana (Middle English

and Latin) by stylus on a wax tablet. Early 14th Century.

This tabletta (tabula or ceraculum), one of a number hinged together and
sealed in a carrying-pouch, is in the personal possession of
Catherine Eisner who has transcribed the orthographical variants,
with reference to The Middle English Dictionary and 

to The Index to Middle English Verse; and within 

the limitations of current scholarship Eisner 

believes this text to be a faithful rendering.

                     In Truth May All Our 
                                                         Prayers Exalt the Tongue
                     Loud to Condemn the 
                                                         Wrongs by Falsehoods Shriven.
                     Praise Crown Restored 
                                                         in Faith Raise Voice in Song
                     Not Death Besought but 
                                                         Souls their Harvests Thriven.

This verse, perhaps the final jottings on these wax tablets
to be deciphered (since the succeeding tabulae in the
series are seemingly irredeemably welded together),
 is thought to celebrate the seizure of power by Edward III,
aged seventeen, in the coup d'état against Roger Mortimer,
the de facto Regent of England; so a ‘restoration’ of the 
true king would have been strong in the mind of  the writer,
possibly a mendicant preacher. This series of verses (1307
to 1330?), therefore, spans the reign of Edward II and the
early years of his heir, the boy King Edward III. 
It’s clear the tablet-scriber was alert to the unfolding drama
within the unruly House of Plantagenet and aware, too, of the
monarchical intrigues of his turbulent times, so it’s 
frustrating that his later shrewd observations are hidden
from us. The fact that the travelling-pouch of tablets lay
concealed in a secret cache for over six hundred years surely
evidences the caution the writer must have observed
in safeguarding his indiscreet clerical broadsides. 

The figuration of the growth of the Soul as a spiritual
harvest to be reaped by Righteousness may be
found in 2 Corinthians 9:10. 

For a transcription of the first of these medieval verses by an unknown hand, see

Verse 1 (possibly 1307) a devout prayer on the occasion of Edward II’s coronation:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/medieval-song.html

The tabulae appear chronological in composition; see the following Verse 2 of 1312:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/01/medieval-verse-2-hart-there-was.html

Verse 3 (possibly 1325-1330) records the Fall of Edward II with the defeat of Queen Isabella – the She-Wolf of France – together with her lover, Roger Mortimer:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/medieval-verse-3-when-lief-churl.html

The Cambridgeshire Hoard

Provisional details of the 14th Century Cambridgeshire Hoard will be announced by Eisner following completion of the first phase of studies.

I realised only yesterday, following the uncovering of a childhood cache of my drawings, that I must have been – even in my early teens – fascinated by 14th Century clerical thought and practice. This pastiche of a medieval woodcut – a pilgrim – I printed at home when I was fourteen.

Medieval Verse (3) When lief a Churl

[ This hitherto untranscribed text is by a hand unknown and no putative attribution to any earlier scriptor should be assayed. ]

Discovered inscribed in cursiva anglicana (Middle English

and Latin) by stylus on a wax tablet. Early 14th Century.

This tabletta (tabula or ceraculum), one of a number hinged together and
sealed in a carrying-pouch, is in the personal possession of
Catherine Eisner who has transcribed the orthographical variants,
with reference to The Middle English Dictionary and 

to The Index to Middle English Verse; and within 

the limitations of current scholarship Eisner 

believes this text to be a faithful rendering.

                    When lief a Churl   

                                                 Our Chateleine enthrones 

                    To Woe a Mort ere  

                                                 More Her Dower* guerdones   

                    For Domayne Reft  

                                                 the Wolf-Dam nere atones 

                    Til Lord of Hosts 

                                                 fain All of Heaven summons

Above: 1326,
Queen Isabella, ‘She-Wolf’ of France, consort of Edward
II, and her lover Roger Mortimer raise an insurgent
mercenary army to rule England as de facto regents.

Beneath the overt meaning of this verse it’s tempting to

read a dangerously libellous covert broadside whose

intention, if correctly interpreted, places its composition

at some point between 1325 and 1330.

Overt meaning: ‘When willingly Our Lady Regnant

raises a Ruffian to High Office/a great deal [mort] of

her Dowery, before an even greater amount, is gifted to

Sorrow/since the She-Wolf never atones for Plundering

the Realm/until the Kingdom of Heaven is obliged by evil

deeds on earth to summon the aid of the Lord God.’

Covert meaning: ‘When willingly Queen Isabella raises

an Upstart [Mort-i-more] to the Throne of England/

a great deal [mort] of England’s Treasury, before an even

greater amount, is gifted to England’s Bankruptcy/

because the She-Wolf of France never atones for

plundering the English Realm/until the Kingdom

of Heaven is obliged by the Lovers’ evil deeds

on earth to summon the aid of the Lord God.

Above: 1308,
Princess Isabella, twelve years old, daughter
of King Phillip IV of France, marries the new
king of England, Edward II, aged 24.

*Anglia dos Mariae. (England, Mary's dowry.)
On reflection, when probing deeper into the connotations of this verse, I believe the words are an anti-royalist Mariolatrous invocation protesting the despoiling of England by the French She-Wolf’s predations on the King’s treasury. The words possibly seek to quicken in the reader (assuming there existed a trusting confidant in the 14th Century privy to read them) an affirmation of a religiose national idolatry. The denunciatory character of the verses are all the more heretical since they point up the extreme comparison to be found in Queen Isabella’s ‘Dowry-by-Plunder' when contrasted with the metonym for England that is Our Lady’s Dowry (or Dowry of the Virgin and similar variations). This metonym had become widespread by the middle of the fourteenth century for at that time it is stated, ‘It is commonly said that the land of England is the Virgin’s dowry.’  The Virgin Mary was regarded, therefore, as England’s Protectress who, through her power of intercession, acted as the country’s defender or guardian. The iambic scansion of these lines suggest that 'dower’ was pronounced with a diphthong.



For a transcription of the first of these medieval verses by an unknown hand, see

Verse 1 (possibly 1307) a devout prayer on the occasion of Edward II’s coronation:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/medieval-song.html
The tabulae appear chronological in composition; see the following Verse 2 of 1312:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/01/medieval-verse-2-hart-there-was.html
The Fourth verse, which ends the series (the succeeding wax tablets are irredeemably welded together) see:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/medieval-verse-4-praise-crown-restored.html

Medieval Verse (2): A Hart there was...

[ This hitherto untranscribed text is by a hand unknown and no putative attribution to any earlier scriptor should be assayed. ]

Discovered inscribed in cursiva anglicana (Middle English

and Latin) by stylus on a wax tablet. Early 14th Century.

This tabletta (tabula or ceraculum), one of a number sealed in a carrying-pouch,
is in the personal possession of Catherine Eisner who has transcribed the 

orthographical variants, with reference to The Middle English Dictionary

and to The Index to Middle English Verse;

and within the limitations of current scholarship Eisner 

believes this text to be a faithful rendering.

                       A Hart there was, 

                                                    a Hart so grievous hurt,

                       A Cry there was, 

                                                    a Cry of Hounds astart,

                       A Death there was,

                                                    a Death of Beauty caught,

                       A King there was,

                                                    a King most desolate.

This verse appears to be a hazardous essay into lese-majesty,
almost certainly written in 1312 or shortly after, for in that year
the King’s Favourite, Piers Gaveston, described as ‘the Minion of
a hateful King’ was hunted down and executed by a group of nobles
led by the Earls of Lancaster and Warwick, who had long sought by
any means to eliminate the influence – considered meddlesome and
scandalously improper – the upstart Piers exercised over Edward II.

For a transcription of the First of these medieval verses by an unknown hand, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/medieval-song.html
For the Third transcribed verse, believed to be in chronological order, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/medieval-verse-3-when-lief-churl.html
The Fourth verse, which ends the series (the succeeding wax tablets are irredeemably welded together) see:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/medieval-verse-4-praise-crown-restored.html