Catherine Eisner

Sunday, 27 July 2025

Revanchist Polonium: Vengeance Deferred. (Dramatic Irony. Part 2.)

Definition: Dramatic Irony.

A plot device in which apprehension of events or motives is the god-like privilege of the audience but not within the grasp of characters in the unfolding events who may, indeed, never survive the action of the drama to achieve such self-knowledge.

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As I wrote in Dramatic Irony, Part 1: ‘It is not for me to glibly remind ourselves of how tragic events in our national life adhere to Aristotelian definitions of classic drama conducive to the terror and pity essential for the cathartic experience Aristotle prescribes to purge our congested emotions.’

Polonium was discovered on 18 July 1898 by Marie

Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, the result of

extraction from uranium ore pitchblende (Uraninite),

its identity revealed by its strong radioactivity.

It was named for Poland, Marie’s homeland.

Again, I simply juxtapose two events for spectators, god-like, to apprehend undercurrents of portents and their fulfilment.

Portent 1. The September 7th 1939 entry in Comintern General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov’s Diary quotes Stalin’s very clear views about Poland: ‘Doing away with Poland in conducive circumstances would mean one bourgeois fascist state less.’

Scorched Earth.

It’s only now that we – the onlookers who behold the distorting mirror of history – only now we who can see the fated pattern resolve itself in the looking glass.

Consider the tragic drama of betrayal that unfolded in Nazi-occupied Poland, in August 1944 – the Warsaw Uprising – when Polish partisans unaided defended their capital against the besieging German forces.

Treachery? Yes.

Calculated betrayal by their ostensible Allies. Yes.

Because on the 1st of August, the day of the Uprising, the Soviet advance was halted at the east bank of the Vistula by a direct order to the Red Army from the Kremlin. Hindsight let’s us give credence to the case that Stalin benefited from Soviet non-involvement in the failed relief of Warsaw, because future opposition to his military objective to eventually control Poland as a Soviet state was effectively removed by permitting the Nazis to destroy the loyal Polish nationalist partisans. This Soviet objective was completed indirectly when, in the aftermath of the Uprising, the Nazis enacted long-laid plans to raze Warsaw to the ground, destroying up to 90 percent of its buildings as an egregious act of reprisal following capitulation.

It was a scorched earth policy that played into the hands of their adversaries, the reinvigorated Soviet oppressors of Poland. (We remember Stalin’s threat, ‘‘Doing away with Poland in conducive circumstances . . . ’)

As Stalin foretold, dependence on Soviet hegemony required the total annihilation of the Polish Underground State, with the entire Polish population repressed or purged by operational groups of the NKVD, the USSR’s ruthless instrument of military counterintelligence and state security, and forerunner of the KGB.

Victims of Polonium poisoning: Irène Joliot-Curie, the

daughter of Marie Curie who first isolated Polonium;

Alexander Litvinenko, Russian defector and former officer of

the Russian Federal Security Service, successor to the NKVD.

Poison du temps : Divine Vengeance Postponed.

When we read of the depredations of the NKVD from their betrayal and subjugation of the Polish nation, how then can we interpret the well nigh mythical comeuppance meted out to those mutinous descendants of the NKVD – officers of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) – who betray their Kremlin masters?

For FSB defectors, the poison du temps is evidently Polonium poured from a deceptively innocuous teapot, the modus operandi for the despatch of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

And, if Litvinenko was the first to be publicly exposed as a victim of Russian state sanction by means of this sinister contrivance, then can we be certain that, since 2006, there have not been any number of other intended deaths as condign punishment hastened by the Curies’ Poland-inspired deadly poison at the hands of FSB-trained assassins?

The biter bit?

The Robe of Nessus.

Should we then reconsider the tragic death of Marie Curie’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie in 1956 as a mythological precursor of Litvinenko’s death? In that year of her death another national uprising in defiance of Russian dominance, in an echo of Warsaw’s fate, was viciously crushed by Soviet tanks and troops . . . Hungary.

Portent 2. Irène became the first confirmed victim of lethal Polonium, having been accidentally exposed to hazardous levels of radioactivity when, ten years earlier, in 1946, a sealed capsule of the chemical element exploded in her laboratory, the tragedy occurring only two years after the razing of Warsaw.

By birth Marie Curie, Irène’s mother, was a Varsovian.

Like her mother, Irène received the Nobel prize (1935) for her researches into the phenomena of radioactivity, in her case profound discoveries that significantly advanced the efficient production of radioactive materials, the bedrock of new techniques in curative medicine. Yet, for Irène, the price she paid for the bestowal of that matrilineal wealth of knowledge was death.

And should we seek correlatives to explicate this fatal chain of events then perhaps we should reflect on two myths.

According to one account by an early Greek poet, Medea – sorceress and accomplished adept of pharmakeía (medicinal magic) – killed her children by accident then buried them alive in the Temple of Hera, believing this would make them immortal. Certainly, for Irène, immortality followed a tragic accident due to her mother’s arcane researches, with its aftermath crowned by the same Nobel laureateship that had honoured her mother.

The Robe of Nessus: wrapped in embrace of fire.

Or should we seek further for an agonised protracted death of divine retribution then let us remember the tragic end of Hercules, who in retribution for infidelity in his amours receives the gift of the Robe of Nessus, raiment stained with the envenomed blood of the centaur Nessus whom Hercules had killed, which enwraps the warrior in an embrace of fire, whereat, to escape this unbearable unending pain, he builds a funeral pyre and immolates himself.

Are there concordances here, one wonders, in the history of Polonium as an instrument of divine vengeance deferred; because, in the case of another treacherous warrior (according to the verdict of the FSB), the agony before death would be prolonged for three weeks of slow progression that is the penalty of acute radiation poisoning.

Polonium’s Three Weeks, therefore, is the measure for the slow retributory death of an officer of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation at the hands of his own treacherous fellow FSB servicemen.

Compare . . .

Poland’s Three Months was the period that followed the capitulation of Poland’s capital on October 2nd 1944 to Germany, while treacherous so-called Allies, the Soviet forces and their operational units of the NKVD, waited calculatedly on the east bank of the Vistula, during which time vengeful German forces demolished much of what was left of the city of Warsaw and deported 650,000 Polish civilians to labour camps, thus clearing adventitiously the stage for repossession of the city by the USSR to declare the nation as henceforth under the Soviet heel.

Revanchist Polonium . . . the rare gift of the expiatory ill-fatedness of myth.

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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.