Bring it on.

So the winter solstice is past. Apparently, it took our ancient ancestors several days to be certain of this fact. lacking as they did the modern instruments available to astronomers. And so we celebrate on Thursday. This would have been in the begining the festival of Yule or some such before it was hijacked by the Christians as Christmas Day. The Romans, slow in the uptake perhaps didn't get around to having the New Year for another week. But that's good, because we're getting our shot at celebrating twice. 

Enjoy and hope you avoid unnecessary complications.

The Winter Solstice

Today is the wnter solstice. Here is a delight from RobertGraves. Juan. 

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether are learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right she crooks a finger smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving—cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses
There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea—blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

Denigration of poor women

Chat with Gemini.

Been reading Madness: A History by Pietikainen. Long account of history of efforts to understand neurosyphilis with details of the observed epidemiology often swept up with role of prostitutes in its transmission. All reasonable enough save for no word at all on the fates of those women not even a mention of the fact that their outcomes globally are seemingly not worthy of comment.

Your observation hits on a profound and deliberate "silence" in the historiography of medicine. In Pietikäinen’s Madness: A History, as in many classical medical histories, the prostitute is often treated as a vector—a biological delivery system—rather than a subject with a fate of her own.

​This omission isn't just an accidental oversight; it’s a reflection of how the 19th and early 20th-century medical establishments viewed these women. Here is a breakdown of why their "fates" are so rarely recorded and what we actually know about what happened to them.

​1. The Vector vs. The Victim

​In the epidemiology of neurosyphilis, the focus was almost exclusively on the "Great Men" who fell to the disease (artists, philosophers, and the bourgeois). Because neurosyphilis—specifically General Paresis of the Insane (GPI)—could take 10 to 20 years to manifest, the focus remained on the person who had the "clout" to be admitted to a private asylum or a prestigious clinic.

• ​The Prostitute: In medical records, she appears at the moment of transmission.
• ​The Patient: He appears at the moment of degeneration. The medical narrative essentially "ends" for the woman the moment she is identified as the source, as she held no social or "scientific" value to the observers beyond that point.

​2. The Institutional "Lock"

​For many of these women, their fate was tied to the Contagious Diseases Acts (in Britain) and similar "regulated" systems in Europe.

• ​Lock Hospitals: Women suspected of being "common prostitutes" were forcibly examined. If found infected, they were confined to "Lock Hospitals."

• ​Treatment as Punishment: The "treatment" usually involved massive, debilitating doses of mercury, which caused tooth loss, kidney failure, and neurological tremors (hydrargyria) that were often indistinguishable from the disease itself.
• ​Erasure from Records: Once released from a Lock Hospital, these women often moved, changed names, or died in workhouses. Because they lacked the "respectable" family structures that kept records (wills, obituaries, gravestones), they effectively vanished from history.

​3. The Biological Paradox

​Interestingly, there was a long-standing medical myth that prostitutes were somehow "hardened" against the worst effects of syphilis, or that they didn't develop neurosyphilis as often as men.

• ​The Reality: They died much younger. While a wealthy man might live long enough to develop the late-stage brain rot of neurosyphilis, a 19th-century sex worker was far more likely to die in the secondary stage from tuberculosis, malnutrition, or the toxicity of mercury treatments before the disease ever reached her central nervous system.
• ​Infant Mortality: A significant part of their "fate" was the loss of children. Syphilis-induced miscarriages and stillbirths were the norm, often leaving these women with no surviving kin to remember their history.

​4. The "Innocent" vs. the "Guilty"

​Historical accounts often divided women into two categories:

1. ​The Innocent Wife: Infected by a straying husband. Her fate is often recorded as a tragedy of "marital cruelty."
2. ​The Prostitute: Her infection was viewed as a "professional hazard" or a moral inevitability.

​Because the medical community viewed her fate as "earned," they rarely felt the need to document it with the same clinical pathos they reserved for the "decline of a great mind."

​Suggested Reading for the "Missing" Perspective

​If you want to find the voices Pietikäinen leaves out, I recommend looking into:

• ​Judith Walkowitz: Prostitution and Victorian Society. She brilliantly deconstructs the Contagious Diseases Acts and the actual lives of the women targeted by them.
• ​The Campaign of Josephine Butler: She was one of the few contemporary figures who fought against the medical "objectification" of these women and documented their suffering in the Lock Hospitals.n

A poetic prophecy for our time.

AUGUST 1968 The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips. W. H. Auden Rings a few bells. ( Blogger can't do line breaks. Sorry.)

Trump has done his work.

The hostages are free. Now the genocide can move up a gear with no bargaining chips for the Gazans. Two million Gazans to be processed. Israelis seem to have learnt from experience. Or have they. We need to ensure they understand the inevitable fates of mass murderers. Germany can tell it's tale.

"Love is not" all by Edna St Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Says it all. 

October Flower

A little poetry.

dawn songs in the dews of young orange trees;

and raging orisons; and wordless longings;

sung in tranquility's waters sliding in sun's

 light;

and benisons sung in these trees . . . 

From "In England's Green &

by

Jonathan Williams. 1929-2008

Simple Delights

Walking along a path with small dog on a dry calm morning when the dog stops to sniff forcing me to stop and stand gazing vacantly into the hedgerow. Then a tiny flicker of movement, whatch closely and there is a long tailed tit on a branch. It quickly flies away unable to be captured on camera. Further along a small path stright ahead if me in the middle of the path apparently floating freely in mid-air I see a single withered leaf fluttering close up apparently unsuspended in mid-air attached to nothing. it was fluttering gently on the breeze can't get camera to focus on it. No sign of how it was suspended but presumably a spiders web. Utterly delightful. And free. At the point of consumption. As they say. Which opens many a can of worms.

They made a desert and called it peace.

So said some ancient sage. The celebration of this "peace" in Gaza is grotesque. The international community should demand the arrest and trial of the Hamas Leaders who triggered the disaster, the Israeli leaders whose response wa unutterably disproportionate and Trump just for being what he is. 

Look at the pictures. 

Count the dead diseases and downtrodden.

Listen to the genocidal rhetoric and feel the pain of  the Palestinians suffering endlessly from a failed experiment by global powers in the wake of the Nazis. 

Normal humane people cannot accept this as grounds for celebration! 

Saving the USA

USA as it is at its core is an essential global resource. We all depend on it in innumerable ways. It has however made an unwise choice which is proving catastrophic both for us and for Americans. Time up. Trump has to be removed. Those who can do it are only senior figures in the Republican party some of whom must be hurting by now. Quiet words in his ear and the support of any half decent yet well respected psychiatrist and he should be quietly escorted out the side door into suitably air brushed retirement. Vance is a horror but would surely be chastened  by this unusual event. You know who you are, you know who they are, you may read this. Do your duty. 

Sociology of Science 101

There was a sociological history of science and it got it all wrong. The sociologists seemed to think that what mattered was a sociologically informed account of "what happened" It wasn't. What mattered was and is "what was happening", a totally different issue, and one only a scientist could discern. The thread of thought which has brought us the benefits we as a species enjoy over the experiences of our ancestors runs through science from the beginning. It starts well before there was anything called science. What it was called endlessly fascinates the sociologist and is endlessly irrelevant. The sociologists, and those historians affected by the sociological turn, share a compulsion to never come to a conclusion but to write endlessly about the minutiae of individual experience. History of something. But not of science. Quote from Euler Letters to a Princess The three classes of truths which I have now un-folded are the only sources of all our knowledge; all being derived from our own experience, from reasoning, or from the report of others. Letters to a Princess. https://archive.org/details/lettersofeuleron01eule/page/448/mode/2up AKA Personal Experience, Rationale, and Established Public Knowledge.

Second attempt.

Haven't written for ages uncertain if anyone was out there reading it. Apologies if you were. Decided to use this as a platform to write for myself. What did I think about xyz a year ago? Memory not what is was. And even then distorted by nostalgia and suchlike.

Writers on Religion

Had a conversation with Chat GPT on Robert Bellah and his atitude to religion. The conversation moved on to atitudes to religion and the supernatural generally and the impossible postures adopted by the likes of Charles Taylor who espouses rationality but practices Catholicism. Towards the end Chat GPT gave me a one liner fit for any T-Shirt "Emotional disorientation is not a warrant for metaphysical retreat." Beat that!