Author: trespasserine

In Vino An Honest Drop

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And much as Wine has play’d the Infidel,
And robb’d me of my Robe of Honour–Well,
I wonder often what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell.

(Omar Khayyam, Ar-Ruba’iyat, Verse 95)

In vino veritas. In wine, truth. In a good drop, much truth. Whoever coined that proverb must have experienced drunkenness and candidness hand in hand, the cause probably the former, the effect most likely the latter. The author of that most enduring of Latinate proverbs might have been inspired to speak out of turn, so sozzled on Etruscan red he was. Yes, even Romans woke up, brain sack shrunk through dehydration, hangover crushing. Tongue dry as one of their famed sandals, with the hangover came the remorse. Did I put my foot in it last night? Oh, quod? As sensation and sensuality governed Julio-Claudian Rome in the same manner that sense and sensibility governed Regency England, the truth might have been a scandalous confession of love for the senator’s lovely wife, rebuffed with a sharp futuo off, homunculus.

Before it was “Dutch Courage” it was “Roman Fortitude”. Even the meekest among them could give as they got. All it took was a cheeseboard and half an amphora of the red rocket fuel to find courage to give a piece of the inebriated mind to the local taberna’s resident loudmouth cūlus (arse to you and me). You can see the coward now, sitting there in his sackcloth on a stifling night by the banks of the Tevere, downing cups of wine while quietly enduring some demobbed legionnaire – flush of his legion’s seashell collecting heroics on the English Channel – boast about the invasion of Britain that never happened. With word out that the Emperor, Caligula, is feeding his beloved horse, Incitatus, flakes of gold with its oats, this rumour is depressing enough. On and on the ex-soldier goes, railing against what he calls those Britanni barbari. Pissed good and proper, fed up with Roman hubris, and unable to tolerate this bigot’s excreta anymore, our ever-suffering wine tippler, who has drunk the colony of Sicily dry, staggers to his feet, balling ‘Caput tuum in ano est, you complete cunnus!”

Yesterday This Day’s Madness did prepare
To-morrow ’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair
Drink! for you not know whence you came, nor why
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

(VS 74)

That vino-inspired epiphany probably landed our honest tippler a fattus lippus, but there’s no denying that in wine there has ever been truth. Who cannot fail to imbibe a quart of Cabernet without a slight loosening of the old tongue? Who, for that matter, can imbibe any less without fessing up to the fact that more imbibing is on the cards? This in spite of the surgeon-general’s appeal to the vox populi to cut down on unit consumption, conveniently leaving our government-appointed expert with the shelves all to him/herself to stock up on quality Pomerol for the end days to come, which they inevitably will when them lunatics in their lab coats get around to establishing the link between Malbec and Mad Cow Disease, or a £4 blended cépage from Aldi (fit for the casserole pot) linked to a pestilence fit for the common man, heart disease for argument’s sake.

Hear ye, outposts of empire! Raise a toast to the full-bodied blood that runs through these Roman veins. From the wheat belt of Mauritania in the southwest to the damp and underwhelming wall of mud-grass that Hadrian had built in the northwest – Laude! Praise! Let the wine flow from all our yesterdays till all our tomorrows. It matters not that you don’t know your arneis from your elbow, or a Pineau d’Aunis from a Pinot Noir, we’re all in this binge together. Vitis is the grapevine. You heard it on here. Vitis is vital. Vital is life. C’est la vie. C’est le vin. C’est comme ça. C’est comme ca qu’on s’aime. This is how we love. This is what we love. Wine is that thing we love more than even our loved ones. Dionysus would never have been preserved in the vinegar of immortality were he not soused the entire classical period. As for the golden age of Persian poetry? They might as well have teetered a millennium early under the tea-totalling tyranny of the 1979 Islamic revolution were the likes of Hafiz or Khayyam left downing libations less red and lyrically bewitching than a cup of glorious Shiraz, or ten.

Nothing like wine can prepare us for the now. And nothing like the now can render the before and the after so pointless, so sober and so bereft a land fit to dwell in.

What have the Romans ever done for us? Made us rather partial to wine is what they did. Now, that’s got to be a legacy worth bequeathing.

Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash the Body whence the Life has died,
And lay me, shrouded in the living Leaf,
By some not unfrequented Garden-side. 

                                                                                  (VS 91)

Freehold Tenancy of the Cerebral Kind

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Picture for a minute a language wherein its speakers have to find a way of describing quintessential stuff like love and recollections without recourse to metaphor. Leave out, for a minute, the symbolic referents used to get over the problem of abstractions: mind-benders such as, What is this Crazy Little Thing Called Love I keep hearing about on the jukebox? What is a memory, because I’m damned if I can remember? What is this feeling of joy because trying to describe it is really getting me down? And, If death is the undiscovered country, then who the f**k would want to fly there? Try getting by in the bardic language of love and remembrance without borrowing heavily from the world around us – from the phenomenological world of things: of nature’s great spectacles, like hurricanes and heatwaves, and drops of water, and delicate plants and hearts of oak, and organisms – like love itself – that live for a day then die. There would be no picture, for one. My love is like a red, red rose would become my love is like a physiological entity, a feeling if you will, induced by the hormones oxytocin and endorphin that are secreted in varying quantity as an endocrine response to a strong impulse normally associated with human behaviours, most notably sexual reproduction and pair-bonding. For the dispassionate scientist of love, this most mammalian of felt experiences does not flood the senses, burn the fingers, smoulder with desire, or even – to borrow from the late, great Jackie Wilson – lift me higher and higher. Rather, it needs no symbolic transport to carry it from speaker to listener, because for the scientist love is not an abstract, it is biological function of higher mammals that finds its context socially. At a push, love is a trick designed by nature to make the bonding stick, to maximise parental success in raising their single offspring through a relatively long period of care and early years development. Or, to fall back on a metaphor, love is a trap for fools. Not that all parents are fools. One thing love is not is the force that makes the world go round. No, no. That would be angular momentum, conserved by something felt not only as a physical force but also, coincidentally, by lovers falling rapidly out of love: namely, inertia.

Let us think of the head without recourse to metaphor. A stab at the head might result in injury, but a stab at defining it? Can that result in anything other than metaphor? In ifkucinglovescience terms, the head is a biological development shared by nearly all orders of animal. Some heads, admittedly, are more head-like than others. Your average head contains brain cortex and that cortex contains centres/lobes tasked with different jobs. Vital organs generally situated in earshot (clear punmanship intended) of the brain endow the organism with hearing, seeing, tasting and smelling. Now let us do away with these inadequacies – with this dour, clinical description – and think instead of the head as a command centre for all sensory instruction. Better think of it as a nerve centre for all signals sent and received to and from various locations around the organism. Better still, how about as a whole universe in itself, or a third eye of higher consciousness, or even an ever-greying signature of physical identity? Maybe the head area as the part of the whole that we fall in love with most and remember best. Now let us go mental on metaphor. Let us wallow in the stuff as a hippo would in a mud bath. The head is now a house. The cranium is the walls, the eyes are the windows, the ears and nose the alarm system, the mouth the noise that emanates from it, and the brain? Oh! That chestnut. The brain is the sum total of the various rooms that connected by electricity, gas and water make the house a homeostatic, live-in system. But more than that, the brain is everything within the house that brings that house to life. An empty house is pretty brain dead as the living brain dead are pretty vacant. Hence, in making symbols of the head we have a perfectly suitable metaphor to describe a house to, say, an undomesticated E.T. who exists on an exoplanet without streets and cul de sacs. But one, nevertheless, evolved to have livings, sentient beings with heads.

Now let us take a tangential journey through metaphor back to sentiment. We are going to bring the head back to love via the house. Stay with me now. The de facto head of the household was, in days of yore, nearly always the man. However, in the larger houses, aka manors, a governess (she who put the manners into manors) was oftentimes employed to do what Mary Poppins couldn’t without bed knobs and broomsticks. Many governesses became so attached to the higher pursuit of etiquette that their sense of duty became their eventual raison d’être. As career spinsters their heart would often lie within the walls (or cranium) of the house. Once those governed under their wing (why use the word tutelage when the metaphor wing will fly?) had grown up and flown the nest, the life of the ex-governess must have been lonely and sometimes bereft. Comforted by an eternally grateful head of household, some may well have been allowed to grow sick and die there in their attic beds from where they rose again to resume their duties, this time as ghosts. To this day many a spectre – wearing heel length Edwardian frock, pigeon-breast blouse, talking like Eliza Doolittle could only dream of – goes drifting down dilapidated manor halls looking for kids to graduate from the school of propriety. They haunt the house. They fill the metaphorical head, in other words, with ghosts of the past. The memory that stole you away, out out the blue, from your present whatever-it-is- you-were-doing, that memory was actually the riffling of white diaphanous drapes in the conservatory, the kind you see in spooky films. And that sudden recollection of a girl you once thought you would love until death shook some sense into you, the one that made you drop your spanner in the alternator belt, rear up and whack your head on the underside of the car bonnet? That was actually the dog barking furiously in the kitchen from an inexplicable presence that, among the newest occupants of that big, old manor where legend had it an old lady in a long black frock died sitting primly in the attic one hundred years before, none but their dog could sense.

Dogs and metaphors – where would we be without them?

 

 

 

Traffic Flow on the Arab Street

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We polled three separate classes this morning on how they thought leadership traits compared between six candidates over three American presidential debates: Clinton vs Dole 1996; Bush vs Gore 2000; and Obama vs McCain 2008. After watching extended highlights of the live televised debates, a total of 50 Emirati women were asked to assess the aforesaid candidates on the following criteria: articulacy, perceptiveness, self-confidence, self-assuredness, persistence, determination, trustworthiness, dependability, friendliness, and outgoingness. Neither banality nor mendacity were included, although stupidity came under close consideration.  Of those acceptable leadership traits, three – articulacy, self-confidence and trustworthiness – were identified as key character indicators common to what the pollsters say matters in U.S/Western political culture.

On a scale of 1-5 where 1 equals crap and 5 flatteringly untrue, a mean average was tabulated. Lies, damned lies and statistics? You could argue equally, in numbers there is truth.

Here’s what the stats returned:

On being articulate:

  1. Clinton ranked 3.9 in class 1,  3.6 in class 2, and 3.7 in class 3 (an average overall of 3.73), suggesting that our ladies need to brush up on their oratory and rhetoric. (Editor’s note: let’s face facts: Clinton is an easy 4. His homespun drawl belies a rare gift that keeps on giving on stages the world over).
  2. America’s most unquotable political bore Bob Dole cooked up 2.6, 3.15 and 3 respectively (2.92), a score inflated by the phonetic similarity of his given name – uttered with an American twang – to the Arabic word for gate, Bab. Well, who wouldn’t dare commend the man on being the first U.S. politico to know more Arabic than just the word Jihad?
  3. Truly in a class of his own, who could misunderestimate Bush on a knee-slapping, tub-thumping, gun-toting 3.5, 2.5  and 3.4 resuspectfulnessly (overall 3.13) ? It mattered not to our Arab analysts that with his shark-black eyes set dangerously close together he could barely read far less speak. What swayed it for them was invoking the name of the Big Man with Bush’s hand-on-heart pledge… should I be forshnut to became your predisent, when I put my hand on the bible, I will swear to (not) uphold the laws of the land, but I will also swear (not) to uphold the honour and dignity of the orifice to which I have become erected. So…help me God? The Lord moves in mysterious ways. Well He moved Bush into the White House, didn’t He?
  4. Gore suffered an inconvenient untruth with 3.3, 3.82 and 3.4 (3.51) respectively. The fact that he is a distant cousin to America’s great essayist and verbalist, Gore Vidal, is not for nothing. Again, so blatantly human when stood against his simian opponent, that to have outweighed Bush by a meagre 0.28 percentage points seems a travesty of justice equal to the one that denied him the presidency after the Florida recount.
  5. Obama racked up 4.0, 4.15  4.0 respectively (for an overall 4.05). And who can begrudge the lawyer from Chicago, or is it Hawaii, or Kenya, or Jakarta, or did he come up the Nile in a reed basket? Is he even a lawyer? Where did he come from, anyway? 4.05 for a latter-day Martin Luther King? My girls take a lot of impressing, it would appear. That said, Arab Street likes the sound of this habibi, as will the rest of us when he is replaced by a tongue-tied moron in a grey shirt, grey tie and grey underpants.
  6. McCain clearly didn’t do much conversing, or vocabulary acquisition, during his five years submerged up to his neck in a one square-metre bamboo cage in deepest Vietcong country. The senator in the skin mask might have been a one-time hostage to war but evidently was never a hostage to loquacity. Still, he can justifiably feel a tad hard done by bringing up the rear of two American political figures – Bush and Dole – who, for all the good they did to the English language, might as well have transplanted their mouths and their anuses. McCain’s oven chips – well and truly cooked. Plods along at a mediocre 2.5, 2.7 and 2.5 (2.57) disrespectfully.

On self-confidence;

  1. Clinton polled 4.3 in class 1,  3.82 in class 2, and 4.0 in class 3 (4.04 overall). Never one to eschew the limelight, the two-time president (or was it the two-timing president?) launched onto the scene in ’92 already emboldened first by Oxford then by the trappings of governorship. William Clinton Esq. could also draw on his ineffable charm, a charm that brought flocking first the ladies then, at the summon of his popular powers years later, trouble at mill.
  2. Dole polled 2.2, 2.9 and 3.1 (2.73 overall), which goes to show that, with a self-confidence rating of over 50%, if God did in fact create women He did so with a few wee flaws built into them. When the two came head to head, you could see Dole’s anaemic blood trickle down Clinton’s fangs with every whimpering cry for conservatism.
  3. Bush bagged 4.1, 2.12 and 2.7 (2.97), eliciting vastly different responses between class 1 and 2/3. Unlike on the world stage, where his self-confidence extended to gaffes, nervous snickering and inane grinning, to hit the 4s rating his persona must have exuded a confidence not normally attributable to someone of such limited means. One can only conclude that the class snoozed through a parade of style and substance that would undoubtedly clinch the presidency for the incredulous 43rd president, who spent the next four years in suspended disbelief. Be that as it may, by class 2 the niqab was off, so to speak. All they saw (and no, all the girls are classy and none are veiled) was a man at ease with his extended childhood. Ah, the arrogance of youth! (Bush was in his mid-fifties at the time of filming, by the way).
  4. Gore grabbed 3.9, 4.37 and 4.3 respectively (4.19), projecting a quiet self-assuredness based on an unwavering conviction that his opponent was a dyed-in-the-wool plonker. Gore spoke in measured tones, slowly and deliberatively, careful not to overstate the intellectual abilities of his audience of millions. Deep in the knowledge that his IQ points trumped nearly 90% of the electorate, his self-confidence may have been misconstrued for both smarminess and a lazy intellectual climb down. Nevertheless, our girls were comfortable with those character flaws, flaws they have to contend with in most of their menfolk.
  5. Obama polled 4.3, 4.37 and 4.3 respectively (4.32). Who could deny this man his stake in the annals of early 21st history? First African-Indonesian-American-Martian with a middle name not too dissimilar to that of Bush’s comic book enema…enemy: he with the beret, murderous eyes and bushy moustache. While Barack Hussein Obama was cutting his teeth on the great electoral roadshow, you might well say he was putting up great wooden palisades of words and metaphors behind which he barricaded his fragile confidence from the predators outside. Then again the guy might be that rare and protected species, aka the American orator. And that voice, oh! that gasoline voice. Half an octane lower and he’d have legions of front-row admirers spontaneously orgasm.
  6. Which brings us fittingly to Jock McCain. He wowed the Arab crowds with a piffling 2.5, 2.8 and 2.1 respectively (average of 2.47). McCain quivered and bumbled through the debacle, sorry, debate, leaving the great American public in no doubt of his leadership potential. But what enthralled the viewing public more than his steely self-belief, hewn from the rock of captivity, was the remarkable lack of coordination between the flow of his words and the movement of his face. One can only conclude that self-confidence sometimes needs no expression. Statistical analysis report: McCain a presidential dud, with a self-confidence rating of a shell-shocked war veteran with P.T.S.D. brought on by all the mortar fire still going off in his head forty years after the Paris peace accords, which in all fairness to him might well be his problem.

On Trustworthiness;

  1. Clinton polled 3.6 in class 1, 4.0 in class 2, and 3.1 in class 3 (overall 3.57), concealing his sexual peccadilloes remarkably well from a bunch of unsuspecting yet highly discerning 22 year-old Arab women.
  2. Dole polled a doleful 2.1, 2.62 and 2.3 respectively (2.34), which goes to show that it’s better to sell new cars than used ones.
  3. Bush polled a whopping 0.8, 0.9 and 0.9 (.87), falling an agonizing 0.041 points short of his all-time favourite number: 0.911. 09/11, That was the day the boy became a man and the man came of age. A pity it will never go down as a golden one.
  4. Gore, again judged unfairly, polled 3.7, 3.4 and 3.2 (3.43), and that’s without the recount. If only he had won the Nobel Peace Prize before the presidential debates of 2000, trustworthiness or no trustworthiness, Bush would romped to victory.
  5. Obama gets an impressive 4.0, 4.22 and 3.6 respectively (3.94), but that might be something to do with his middle name. “Aisha Mohamed? Would you trust a man called Hussein?” “Teacher, that depends on whether or not he was Iranian.” ‘Fair enough, Aisha.”
  6. Last but truly least, Rooster McCain, who gets the thumbs down from our girls, bagging a dubious 2.7, 2.65 and 2.3 (2.55), and affirming what women the world over have long suspected: that pear face never won fair maiden, not her trust at least.

Qualitative analysis: high degree of perceptiveness from women born too late to have any preconceptions of these candidates, other than Obama who they are happy to know, and Bush who they wish they hadn’t.

Verdict: it’s high time women of the world united to foment a peaceful takeover by virtue of being much better readers of men than men are of themselves and others of their ilk. Having systematically f*cked up the world since monotheism by downgrading the sacred feminine in favour of self-proclaimed prophets, all of whom had beards just so they could distinguish themselves from the female of the species, as well as having used unscrupulous statecraft to strip women of the socio-political nexus they held together in a pre-classical age before war became systematized, men have forsaken their right to govern anymore. Period. I mean, Jumpin’ Jack Flash!! Look around, folks. In the sea, on the land, in the air. See what we’ve done with men at the helm.

Prophets of doom. The bearded ones blew it. It’s time to pass the reins to the other 50%. Let the age of Aquarius begin anew.