Derek Walcott Venus

This will be small-minded.

First, an aside.

I could not help but notice a strange parallel between Robert Graves in the trenches (1915?), the bombardments, (Goodbye to All That) and Elizabeth Smart's (1938?) kangaroos in a garden (on the subject of time).

Now, the unwelcome gristle.

Walcott "North and South" (1981) has Venus rising in an opening stanza that also carries both a full moon and a sunset.

Through the weeks, you might speak of Venus rising in the west (when first seen at sunset.)  But the rising Venus of morning is the only rising Venus, whether, as he reminds us, she survives translation or not.

Poetic license ?  Not with the planets.

More a question of knowing eastern and western, whether to your north or to your south.

Geddes has a photon flashing innumerable times among crystals in the snow.  Can he escape knowing that a photon takes millions of years to translate from the solar core to the shell of the sun ?  Was this his parallel? What is the poet to know of the local inferno ? The flipping magnetic poles ?

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PET Deception and deep subjectivity in science

Perhaps more interesting than PET scans and the intent to engender a view of oneself in the perceptions of others, would be PET scans and persons in partisan conflict achieving intersubjectivity and a measure of humility and some genuine interest in understanding the others and feeling understood oneself.

The effort to understand, the effort to be understood and the distance that always remains.

And here I thought that intersubjectivity and friction was not amenable to Galilean experiment.

Mars: "If two irregular marbles named Phobos and Deimos are rolling down a smooth inclined plane and one feels dissed by the other, will the experimenter take note?"

Venus: "It depends on whether she is observing with a suitable spyglass."