Winston Churchill and “Horatius at the Bridge”

I am German and the most salient aspect of that identity is that I am of a people that has burdened itself with incomparable guilt. The connection is not too familial; my parents got married and conceived myself partly because my mother’s grandfather and my father’s father met in the domestic Lutheran church resistance to Nazi hegemony, the Bekennende Kirche. But I am also a patriot, I deeply love my Fatherland, so it matters. My awareness of the fact that the fascist version of my country eventually got defeated is therefore laden with deep and abiding gratitude. This defeat had many causes, as will be obvious to anyone who has studied it as extensively as I have. The cause most salient to me is that in 1940, UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill personally prevented his United Kingdom and British Empire from exiting the war through a peace deal with Hitler, which would have allowed the Wehrmacht to wage a single front war against the Soviet Union, in which it would inevitably have had more success than it in actuality had in the two front war that eventually ground it down.

The speeches

Churchill achieved this in several ways, arguably largely through his sheer bone-headed denial of the dreadful military situation that bordered on outright lying to his government, king and empire. Most visibly, he did it by writing and delivering a set of objectively epoch-making public speeches that continue to be available on YouTube and continue to bring tears to my eyes.

These speeches have fascinated me for many years. I am a poet and I do claim a degree of expertise in the art of crafting particularly effective sentences, particularly precise word choices and a particularly resonating message. Through this lens, these speeches, known as “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat”, “We shall fight on the beaches” and “Never was so much owed by so many too so few”, are exemplary works of poetic art and skill, and it is an uncontroversial historical fact that Churchill actually wrote and delivered them all by himself. So the man was a poet! A conclusion so unlikely it long compelled me to doubt my lone subjective judgment. Why and how would an accomplished soldier and triumphant statesman of world historical stature also be a poet?

The answer is contained in his autobiography. There Churchill admits he was such a poor pupil that he would have never finished school, and would consequently likely never have amounted to anything, had he not won a poetry recital competition by performing from memory one particular poem that, depending on how quickly you recite, goes on for about 25 minutes. I happen to know from experience what committing to memory a very long poem does to a human mind; it remains there to stay! You can never get rid of it. Every time you hear a word that is anywhere in that poem, you recall the line it is in and reactivate the memory of all of what this line is woven into. So that confirmed my lone subjective judgment; Churchill must necessarily have had ringing through his head that one particular poem, from childhood and for his entire life, including the fateful days when he wrote and delivered those pivotal speeches. This begs an obvious question. What the actual fuck was that poem?

The poem

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a late Victorian English scholar of the Roman Empire who drew a surprising and original conclusion. At his time, the British Empire was going out into the world, conquering the natives and inventing anthropology as a tool for that conquest. Finding, in the process, that all peoples who did not use writing, without exception, had oral traditions to pass through the generations what in their society was essential knowledge that every child needed to learn: What do the gods want of us, how did we get here, why do we need to preserve this technology or that social institution, why are we friends with those guys and enemies with those others. As mnemonic devices to aid faithful transmission over the generations, these oral traditions employed drama, poetry and often song. Macaulay realized that the rural Roman Empire, the subject of his extensive studies, was such a society that did not have writing! Writing in the Roman Empire happened in the cities; cities were where the schools and the bureaucracy and non-local trade were situated. The rural population, the pagani, had no use, nor time nor money, for writing. So, Macaulay reasoned, they too must have had such oral traditions that due to the lack of writing would have been lost to history. So he wrote a book of poetic imaginations of what these people would have transmitted to their children, if they had spoken Victorian English: Lays of Ancient Rome. The first chapter, the first poem, the one Winston Churchill memorized, is the suitably dramatized but essentially true story of Horatius Cocles: Horatius at the Bridge. I very strongly recommend everybody to read the entire thing! But here’s my summary anyway.

The hero

In 509 BC, the Romans throw out their king and abolish the monarchy, founding the Roman Republic, the first and only fledgling democracy in the wider area. The king had been tyrannical for a while, but history as written by the victors (such as Livy) emphasizes as pivotal that beforehand, this tyrant had failed to punish his son Sextus for a rape of the wife of a consul. The king and his son Sextus are banished from the city, but the Romans make a big mistake; they don’t kill them.

So the exiles very reasonably go to their royal colleague Lars Porsena, king of the powerful city of Clusium, and complain that they have suffered a coup d’état by terrible uppity commoners and need to borrow his army in order to retake Rome and restore right and proper monarchy. An exciting prospect, because while Rome presents a rich opportunity for plunder, it is also young, small and militarily weak; the Roman Legion has not yet been invented. Many other rulers of the region agree, and the poem spends many lines detailing the enormity of the host that comes assembled to conquer Rome. So one day, the Romans look out over their walls and see the sky blotted out with the dust of the approach, and outlying towns set aflame by, an enormous hostile host.

However, Rome, being young small and weak, is still mostly confined to just one side of the river Tiber, and the army is on the other one! One bridge connects them and since catapults haven’t been invented yet either, the army will have to cross it in order to do any damage. So, basically the Romans could demolish that (fortunately wooden) bridge quickly, and chill.

Yet the invading army has already advanced to the river and devastated the scant defenders on their side of it. How do you demolish a bridge while a large and murderous army stands ready to annihilate any team of demolition workers? And the future Caput Mundi (capital of the world) would have fallen, and the Roman Republic would have been strangled in its crib, had not, in the words of the poem:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

And he goes out, with two friends who leave later, to hold the entire fucking army at the choke point of that bridgehead. He kills and is wounded many times and does manage to defend the destruction of the bridge. So he can’t go back over it and instead jumps into the river Tiber, which fortunately tosses him onto its Roman held bank, where the Romans take him in, celebrate him and build him a statue.

Two and a half millenia later, Rome has gone through a lot but a newer statue of Horatius Cocles is still there and they’re still laying down flowers. As I shall when I visit Rome.

The project

There is one translation of Horatius At The Bridge into German, published in 1888 by Harry von Pilgrim. I am glad someone tried, the archaic language seems appropriate to the subject matter and it does fittingly copy the original verse and meter; tragically, the translation as such is shoddy work that cannot do justice to poetry of such towering import.

Da sprach zu ihm Horatius,
der sonst das Thor bewacht:
“Es steigt ein jeder einst hinab
In finstern Todes Nacht;
Für’s Vaterland zu sterben
Ist wohl des Römers Werth,
Für die Manen seiner Väter,
Für der ew’gen Götter Herd,

Therefore, with the Seven Secular Sermons and the Six Secular Songs complete, my new undertaking is to produce a new and better translation of this poetic monument to heroic defense of democracy in the face of tyrannical invasion. A thousand kilometers west of Ukraine, I begin this work today.

Da nahm das Wort Horatius
der an der Brücke steht:
“Zu jedem Manne tritt einmal
der Tod, ob früh, ob spät.
Und wo als vor dem grimmen Feinde
könnte einer besser fallen,
für die Asche seiner Väter
und für seiner Götter Hallen?

Joyful flowering

With publication of the German language version of the 7th Sermon, the main part, the hard part, of this project has been complete since January. I then published a video recording of myself reading the Sieben Säkulare Sutras in their entirety…

…as a complement to the English language video from last August.

My personal health situation continues to be terminal. I am on a hilariously overpowered highly experimental chemotherapy that despite its (for my type of brain cancer) literally unprecedented intensity has turned out to, very unexpectedly, permit major neurosurgery to be performed during not after. This should postpone my death by several years.

Of course I will spend those doing more Sermons things. I hope to cast (I don’t say recite) the Sermons live at the Church of Interbeing and wherever else will have them, and for that purpose I’m writing songs that shall go between them, Six Secular Songs, because the number of people I hope to enrich with this work is far greater than the number of people who are undaunted by the prospect of doing nothing but meditation for two hours straight. I would also like there to be better audio or video recordings than mine, and to produce good print versions, and to offer it all on the podcast apps, and generally see the thing flower into more and more delightful offerings.

The felicitousness of poetry translation

This is a true story. One of overwhelming joy, but it starts in East Berlin under the socialist dictatorship, where Der Herr der Ringe (The Lord of the Rings) was a book of legend.

All books printed in the West were illegal, so politically adventurous people like my parents who had some would lend them to each other, and sometimes not get them back, like if the borrower had been arrested. But Der Herr der Ringe was so special that the owner of the only copy in the city refused to take that risk, so he declared that anyone who wanted to read it had to do so at his home.

Continue reading

A very dramatic quarter

This quarter, I got very bad news.

  • I learned about my cancer and started treatment for it.
  • The treatment has been grueling.
  • And it will get worse once the chemotherapy starts, but that still beats dying next year.

I also got very good news:

  • I’m getting massive amounts of help with that, from healthcare and friends and family. German heathcare is good, but I seriously cannot (and need not) imagine how anybody, given only that, would deal with this the very bad news above.
  • I completed the German translation of the fourth Sermon.
  • My theory of consciousness got published in the place I was hoping for
    • …and it didn’t receive too much serious criticism. If it is wrong or incomplete, which remains likely, it is at least not obviously wrong.
    • Of course there are people who object to physicalism on principle. Those didn’t like my attack on their favorite reason why they don’t need to accept that everything is nature; but I think they’re just wrong and I have better things to do than metaphysics.
    • I even got invited for an interview about that theory at one of my favorite podcasts, by Eneasz Brodski, who I’ve been a rabid fan of for a long time.
  • I translated Kipling’s “If” into German.
  • Although my health and treatments (and painkillers against the side-effects of the treatments) slow me down a lot, I worked on the German translation of the fifth Sermon. It now stands at 33 of 80 stanzas completed.
    • I’ll translate the sixth and seventh next, obviously.
    • But it is really time to seriously think about what poetry writing or poetry translation I will do afterwards. Nothing to announce yet, but I do have a plan and I enjoy that.
  • I got to read, to a large-ish audience at a famous regular literature event, in German, an abbreviated summary of the first five Sermons, modified in order to not make the meditation aspect too obvious. Everyone seemed to like it, a few came to me afterwards outright ecstatic. This new version of the text should serve me well at future occasions where I might get to read out loud to an audience that brings less time and no inclination to meditate.
  • I wrote another thing, in prose not in poetry, but also very meaningful to me. It should be published in a week or two. The writing helped a lot against the pain and fear, and what I wrote might help others too.

Still, the cancer is holding me back. That is also why this quarterly report is delayed. But the most important thing (completion of the seventh Sermon) and also the first video of the entire thing, was already in my extracurricular mid-quarter report so I guess it’s fine.

Wry records the first three Sermons

A brilliant British lady named Wry, with the voice of a trained actor and a heart for poetry that Aleister Crowley could only have envied, has thoroughly outclassed my own recordings of the first three Sermons, and magnanimously allowed me to share them with you. Here (and on the Downloads page) they are:

Adrift in space and time

The games of entropy

One of Us

i shall hope she similarly outclasses the recordings for Sermons 4 to 7 as well, but of course it would be improper to ask for more, after such a delicious gift.

Meditation as/is an art form

Of course ritual is an art form. Different from theatre, the performers and the audience/consumers are not separated. Like all art (indeed all indirect effort) it was used by religions a lot, but arts are eventually secularized and when that happens it is usually good for the art. You can make your own rituals, especially with the kids, and at weddings and funerals. The frankincense is over there, have fun.

Less obviously, all of that is true for meditation.

Read more: Meditation as/is an art form

The intentional, deliberate design of conscious experience, which happens to be where all art cashes out. Its canvas is that non-obvious web of personal connections between “self and non-self representations” that filters perception and ideation.

Like all art (indeed all indirect effort) meditation finds therapeutic use, and when that happens it is usually bad for the art, but good for the patients, who matter more (says one of them). We don’t expect Mr Baker’s laudable overcoming of his trauma to replace Beethoven. Let’s not expect Jenny’s meditation on anxiety to represent all of what meditation can do, either.

The secularization of meditation is overdue, so in an accident of history, it is already being medicalized while a few old men on mountains still think it uniquely expresses the Cosmic Order.

In my own artsy meditations, I lean on poetry a lot, but that’s only an artistic choice. Music may be a more powerful weapon, dance certainly is.

Progress on several sidelines (Q2 2024)

I mentioned before that was going to do the scary part: to spell out my explanation of consciousness, which needs to be part of the 7th Sermon, in prose first, in order to see whether it actually makes sense, by making it explicit and exposing it to the critical attention of others. I’ve been incubating this idea since one particular moment of insight hit me back in (I think) 2011 as I was walking home from my job at the time as a research associate in an EEG lab, through a sunlit summer park. From the moment the Sermons were conceived as a concept, in early summer 2012, I knew this had to be part of the 7th Sermon. But for 12 years it was just a bunch of ideas in my head that I thought and meditated about.

I had a very strong feeling it was right, which was in tension with my understanding that it rationally didn’t deserve that, because it amounts to a claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness, unsolved for decades despite concerted efforts of very many very smart people. This quarter, I wrote it all out, and failed to find such a flaw myself. And several friends far more educated in philosophy than I am, who I solicited feedback from, didn’t find it either.

Continue reading