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Tuesday 31 May 2016

fireflies

.
. | by an|ca

The Magical Exocet (L'atome et le vide): photo by Cathy Lehnebach, 3 August 2015
 
Your courteous Lights in vain you wast
 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Helkivad_%C3%B6%C3%B6pilved_Kuresoo_kohal.jpg

Noctilucent clouds, Kuresoo bog, Soomaa National park, Estonia: photo by Martin Koitmäe, 2009

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Helkivad_%C3%B6%C3%B6pilved_Kuresoo_kohal.jpg

Noctilucent clouds, Kuresoo bog, Soomaa National park, Estonia: photo by Martin Koitmäe, 2009

File:Glow worm lampyris noctiluca.jpg

Female Glow Worm (Lampyris noctiluca) in field grass, Princes Risborough, Bucks.: photo by Timo Newton-Syms, 2007 


Shi'ite fighters with Iraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes with Islamic State militants near Falluja...Shi'ite fighters with Iraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes with Islamic State militants near Falluja, Iraq, May 29, 2016.  REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani .

Shia fighters with Iraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes with Islamic State militants near Fallujah, Iraq: photo by Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters, 30 May 2016

Shi'ite fighters with Iraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes with Islamic State militants near Falluja...Shi'ite fighters with Iraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes with Islamic State militants near Falluja, Iraq, May 29, 2016.  REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani


Shia fighters with Iraqi security forces fire artillery during clashes with Islamic State militants near Fallujah, Iraq: photo by Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters, 30 May 2016

2 comments:

tpw said...

Thanks, Tom. Great post. Marvell lives on!

TC said...

Thanks, Terry, on behalf of the magical Mister Marvell.

I've long been dazzled by this lovely small artisanal poem -- triumph of an amber-in-glass cabinetmakerlike lyric tradition which peaks in the work and and dies with the passing of this brilliant poet.

It manages to combine extremely particularized celebration of the local and natural with a rumour of something historical and unnatural, signalling subtly, in Marvell's unique way, toward larger matters (the fall of a kind of government and a political order and an idea about the cosmos).

It seems all but indestructible.

One can't ruin it even by imbedding it in a delirious matrix of images of the end of human civilization and sensibility as known.

These lunatic Chinese tourist-market "amusements", which amuse by numbing and stunning (further alienating the alienated and dehumanizing the post-human), appear from this distance a not too subtle form of social control, and from the evidence, they seem quite effective at that.

I thought the Jia Zhangke film World, made a dozen years ago, and staged in a Chinese theme park duplicating in scale model the major tourist venues of the globe (Eiffel Tower, Pyramids & c), the whole show running on the miserable labour of hideously exploited migrant-caste "performers", looked like arresting prophecy at the time it came out... now it begins to look more like historical realism, and all the scarier for that.

Jia Zhangke: World (2004)