The felicitousness of poetry translation

Related musings

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.

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A very dramatic quarter

Progress reports

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

Derived works

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

Related musings

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.

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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)

Progress reports

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.

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Completion is on the distant horizon

Progress reports

The first quarter of 2024 is only half done, but there is enough progress to warrant a report.

Work on the seventh sermon has progressed satisfactorily. The single thread to be spun through the many Big Ideas is becoming clear. While much of the narrative that needs to become stanzas is quite complex, I currently feel I’m probably up to the task. The draft currently stands at 33 stanzas, with a few more removed since the last progress report. I’m increasingly optimistic I might finish it before the end of this year, if the vicissitudes of life permit it. This means I’m nearing completion of the entire set of seven!

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