Catherine Eisner

Tuesday, 26 August 2025

‘Hostage in Peking’ Sonnet circa 1968 ‘A Vacuum of Hell’

In July 1967, journalist Anthony Grey was imprisoned by the Chinese People’s government for 27 months of solitary confinement endured in the basement of his house whose exterior was daubed with anti-imperialist taunts by the Red Guard.

It was his ‘vacuum of hell’, a torment magnified when he was forbidden possession of his books . . . until he discovered an instruction leaflet in his bathroom cabinet attached by ‘an elastic band round a bottle of T.C.P. [trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl] liquid antiseptic . . . I eagerly absorbed the literary elegance of such phrases as: “Influenza, as a precautionary measure during epidemics, use night and morning as for colds.” And “Mouthwash: use daily diluted with about five parts water after meals.” And “Chilblains, aching feet, athletes foot: freely apply undiluted.” ’

Had this discovery been for Grey a sort of Damascene moment, one speculates, an encounter with his lost Rosetta Stone preserved in the bathroom cabinet, so long deprived of such emollient wording in his own cherished tongue, the language of Shakespeare?

And, therefore, at such a moment in his ‘Forsaken Place’*, did he subconsciously attempt to deconstruct the paucity of those T.C.P. instructions – savouring each phrase in iambic pentameter – to contrive a testament to his hard wrought defiance in our time-honoured Shakespearean Measure?

Did he pummel some sort of sense into those inoffensive words? I rather suspect he did.

January’s a danger month, Mother,

                    particularly when its germ toxins
                    take hold, with forty-four hurts deep in the
                    membranes of strict preventative routines

                    night and morning, so no foreign body
                    might escape into the system or leave
                    a feverishness to see multiply
                    the severe dampness of one’s handkerchief.

So extra help is needed that counteracts

threats of dirt-embedded skin necrosis

or incubated unwanted side effects.

Let Nature ease discomfort . . . if you start this

extra internal action early enough
you’ll have a real chance of throwing it off.

*For further reflections on ‘Lazarine Literature’ and ‘The Forsaken Place’ see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/11/thought-police-message-from-secret.html

Friday, 1 August 2025

A Child’s Definition of Humanity.

You’re IT. Pass it on.

it, it, pronoun, the neuter of he, him, (and formerly his), applied to a thing without life, a lower animal, a young child . . . in children’s games, the player chosen to oppose all others; (colloquially) the ne plus ultra; that which answers exactly to what one is looking for; an indefinable crowning quality by which one carries it off – personal magnetism . . .

•

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.

•

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.