official state media for a secessionist republic of one
Abolish the police.
Most of Minneapolis City Council pledges to 'begin the process o…
"Decades of police reform efforts have proved that the Minneapolis police department cannot be reformed, and will never be accountable for its actions…
Liz Navratil @ startribune.com
Reading: William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Chapter VI, The Ecological Impact of Medical Science and Organization Since 1700
The usual Over My Shoulder rules apply:
Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, which should be more a matter of context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than they are a matter of discussing the material.
Quoting a passage absolutely does not entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.
Anyway, here’s the quote. This is from Chapter VI, The Ecological Impact of Medical Science and Organization Since 1700, in William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976/1998). Like a lot of the work it’s a resolutely Malthusian exploration, and I think is both very usefully insightful and also of course a lot of wild oversimplification. But I marked it off as interesting because of the reflection on a changing relationship between town and country — not the fact of a division, which is as old as cities, but a shift in the terms of that division, and one possible sort of impact not only on the relationship between the two but on the endogenous development of cities themselves.
Chapter VI.
. . . Obviously, there was always a considerable lag between decision to introduce improved water and sewage systems and the completion of necessary engineering work. But by the end of the nineteenth century all major cities of the western world had done something to come up to the new level of sanitation and water management that had been pioneered in Great Britain, 1848-54. Urban life became far safer from disease than ever before as a result. Not merely cholera and typhoid but a host of less serious water-borne infections were reduced sharply. One of the major causes of infant mortality thereby trailed off towards statistical insignificance.
In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities seldom were capable of making sanitary water and sewage systems available to all the population; yet even there, as the risks of contaminated water became more widely known, simple precautions, like boiling drinking water, and periodical testing of water supplies for bacteriological contamination, introduced a quite effective guard against wholesale exposure to water-borne infections. Administrative systems were not always capable of sustaining an effective bacteriological watch, of course; and enforcement was even more difficult in many situations. But means and knowledge needed to escape large-scale outbreaks of lethal disease became almost universal. Indeed, when local epidemics of cholera or some other killing disease occurred, it soon became common for richer countries to finance international mobilization of medical experts to help local authorities in bringing the outbreak under control. Hence even in cities where a water-sewage circulatory system had never been installed, some of the benefits of public sanitation were swiftly brought to bear.
By 1900, therefore, for the first time since cities had come into existence almost five thousand years previously, the world’s urban populations became capable of maintaining themselves and even increasing in numbers without depending on in-migration from the countryside.[66] This was a fundamental change in age-old demographic relationships. Until the nineteenth century, cities had everywhere been population [pg]280[/pg] sumps, incapable of maintaining themselves without constant replenishment from a healthier countryside. It has been calculated, for example, that during the eighteenth century, when London’s Bills of Mortality permit reasonably accurate accountancy, deaths exceeded births by an average of 6,000 per annum. In the course of the century, London therefore required no less than 600,000 in-migrants for its mere maintenance. An even larger number of in-migrants was needed to permit the population increase that was a conspicuous feature of the city’s eighteenth-century history.[67]
Implications of this change are profound. As cities became capable of sustaining growing populations, older patterns of migration from rural to urban modes of life met new obstacles. Rural in-migrants had to compete with a more abundant, more thoroughly acculturated population of city-born individuals, capable of performing functions formerly relegated to newcomers from the countryside. Social mobility thereby became more difficult than in times when systematic urban die-off opened niches in the cities of the world for upwardly mobile individuals coming in from rural backgrounds. To be sure, in regions where industrial and commercial development proceeded rapidly, this new relation between country and city was masked by the fact that so many new occupations opened in urban contexts that there was room for city-born and rural in-migrants alike. In regions where industrialization has lagged, on the other hand, the problem of social mobility has already assumed visible form. In Latin America and Africa, for example, vast fringes of semi-rural slums commonly surround well-established cities. These are squatting grounds for migrants from the countryside who are seeking to become urban, yet cannot find suitable employment and so must eke out a marginal existence amid the most squalid poverty. Such settlements give visible form to the collision between traditional patterns of migration from the countryside and an urban population that no longer, as aforetime, withers away so as to accommodate the newcomers crowding at the gate.
— William H. McNeill (1976)
Plagues and Peoples, 279-280.
Let’s wrap up Ovid’s first narrative stanza on primordial Chaos. After the epic invocation, the call back to the very beginning of the world and the naming of Chaos as the first face of the universe (1, 2), and the mythological allusions to the elemental forces and the elder gods that hadn’t yet taken form, that could not take form except in a world brought out of the primal chaotic mass. The stanza concludes by adding the element of conflict and instability to primordial Chaos. Hesiod’s Χάος is empty and void, a dark and yawning pit; it plays a role after the Titanomachy because it establishes that the younger gods consign the conquered elder gods to a place so deep and far away that it beyond Χάος, effectively the bottom of the Bottomless Pit beneath the inhabited universe. Ovid’s Chaos is full of mass,
of weight,
of heaps of the seeds of things not well joined
. They’re ill-joined due to discord, and at the close of the stanza Ovid explicitly introduces the idea not only due to confusion or mess, but because without the separation of elements, every part of everything is locked in conflict and violence, an unceasing all-pervading cosmic war of each against all. Here’s Book I, lines 16-20 in the original Latin:[66]
Mundi origo.
. . . Sic erat instabilis tellus, innabilis unda,
lucis egens aer; nulli sua forma manebat,
obstabatque aliis aliud, quia corpore in uno
frigida pugnabant calidis, umentia siccis,
mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus.
Here is a word-for-word breakdown of the Latin grammar and vocabulary:
| 16 | Sic | erat | instabilis | tellus, | innabilis | unda, | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| adv. | v. 3d. sg., impf. act. ind. | adj., fem. nom. sg. | n., fem. nom. sg. | adj., fem. nom. sg. | n., fem. nom. sg. | ||
| [thus, so] | [was] | [unstable] | [soil] | [unswimmable] | [wave, water] | ||
| 17 | lucis | egens | aer; | nulli | sua | forma | manebat, |
| n., fem. gen. sg. | pres. act. part., masc. nom. sg. | n., masc. nom. sg. | adj./pron., neut. dat. sg. | adj. poss. 3d, fem. nom. sg. | n., fem. nom. sg. | v. 3d. sg., impf. act. ind. | |
| [of light] | [lacking] | [the air]; | [to nought] | [its own] | [form] | [remained, kept] | |
| 18 | obstabatque | aliis , wanting, impoverished | aliud, | quia | corpore | in | uno |
| v. 3d sg., impf. act. ind. + conj. | adj./pron., neut. dat. pl. | adj./pron., neut. nom. sg. | conj. | n., neut. abl. sg. | prep. | adj./num., neut. abl. sg. | |
| [held back] + [and] | (with) [other things] | [other thing] | [because] | [body] | [in] | [one] | |
| 19 | frigida | pugnabant | calidis, | umentia | siccis, | ||
| adj., neut. nom. pl. | v. 3d. pl., impf. act. ind. | n., neut. abl. pl. | pres. act. part., neut. nom. pl. | n. neut. abl. pl. | |||
| [cold things] | [were fighting] | (with) [hot things] | [wet things] | (with) [dry things] | |||
| 20 | mollia | cum | duris, | sine | pondere | habentia | pondus. |
| adj., neut. nom. pl. | prep. | adj., neut. abl. pl. | adv. | n., neut. abl. sg. | pres. act. part., neut. nom. pl. | n., neut. acc. sg. | |
| [soft things] | [with] | [hard things] | [without] | [weight] | [things having] | [weight] |
Most of the grammar here is pretty straightforward. The passage is describing a background condition rather than narrating sequential events, so the verbs are all in the imperfect past, or present active participles describing the scene. Word order is mostly familiar, once you allow for the use of elliptical constructions when the poet sets up parallelism within a list of elements. Depending on whether you take the adjectives in the first two lines as attributive adjectives or predicate adjectives, erat could be read either as a copula (So the ground was unstable, the water unswimmable…
) or as an impersonal existential (So there was unstable ground, unswimmable water…
). Pairs of alius… alius… forms (here: aliis… aliud…) are using a pronomial adjective that literally means the other… the other…; in Latin, they have the meaning of exhausting a set or contrasting a pair, like The one… the other…,
or Some… others….,
Some things… everything else…
Nulli is in the dative because things can remain to their owners, e.g., After tea-time, one scone remained to me.
sine-pondere is not used as a prepositional phrase here, but as a noun phrase, meaning those things without weight. In the vocabulary, innabilis is an unusual word, constructed to rhyme with instabilis, but with the relatively transparent meaning of where one can’t swim
(NO, NARE). Obstat and pugnat (to stand against, to struggle, contend or fight) have both generalized meanings and also specific military meanings, indicating defense or obstructive force on the one hand, and offense or combative violence on the other.
Here’s my attempt at a prosy sort of a translation of the passage:
|
|
Let’s try a pass at a verse translation. Since these lines close out the stanza from the last sets (1, 2, 3) and continue the theme started there, I wanted to include the entirety of the stanza, and the opening epic invocation along with it. But stitching the two stanzas together raises another translational question. In line 1 and line 17, Ovid uses and then re-uses a critical word that appears throughout the Metamorphoses, forma
. In the opening line, I translated the term as figures,
but also took the poetic license of echoing it in the word Transformed!
at the head of my first line. In line 17 so far, I’ve been inclined to translate it as form
or shape.
The word itself has a whole range of meanings: it can mean physical form, contour or shape; it can mean visible appearance or image; it can mean pattern, stamp or model; it can mean sort, essential form or nature. It is often used in connection with terms for the body and to mean bodily figure, and like the English shapely
or figure
it can also be used to refer to beauty (cf. formosus). Part of my reason for favoring figure
in line 1 is that the gods, spirits and mortals described throughout most of the epic narrative have figures, and — not to put too fine of a point on it — a lot of the transformations are tied to violent, ugly or troubling stories about gods and men chasing after spirits or mortal women described in terms of their bodily beauty. The word might seem a bit more odd in this opening stanza, where the formae we are talking about belong to primal elements in the state of Chaos. On the other hand, these are also referred to as elements striving with each other within one body
(corpore in uno
), so maybe by a metaphorical stretch the translator can keep to the same word here in each case, rather than splitting the decision between the two lines. In any case, here goes:
|
|
Anyway, that’s what I’ve got in my notebook. What do you think? How would you handle these lines?
All the original translations that I post to this blog are freely available in the public domain.
Rad Geek, to-day:
OUT OF STATE
Reading: Jesse Walker (2020-06-01) @ Reason.com
The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the 'Outside Agitator' Story
The perpetual scapegoat for unrest
Jesse Walker @ reason.com
. . . St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter claimed Saturday morning that “every single person” arrested in his city the night before had been from out of state. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reiterated the idea that the troublemakers were outsiders: His “best estimate,” he said, was that “about 80 percent” of the rioters were from elsewhere. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned that “white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors” were trying “to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.” President Donald Trump didn’t agree with Frey’s list of culprits—”It’s ANTIFA and the Radical Left,” he proclaimed—but he grabbed hold of the governor’s number, tweeting as a settled fact that “80% of the RIOTERS in Minneapolis last night were from OUT OF STATE.”
By the end of the day, those figures had fallen apart. . . .
Activists do travel to protests in other parts of the country, of course. Leninist grouplets drove down to Ferguson; Oath Keepers headed out to the Bundy ranch. And yes, people with their own agendas sometimes try to escalate violence—though they don’t necessarily come from out of town to do it. Visitors are often peaceful, and hotheads can be homegrown. Sometimes they almost have to be homegrown: Given how many places are boiling over right now, it’s hard to believe that they’re all in thrall to outsiders sweeping in from someplace else.
Hard to believe, but convenient to believe. . . . Such beliefs are so convenient, in fact, that they’ve cropped up many times before. There’s a long history of dubious rumors about outside agitators—some of them “possibly even foreign,” as Mayor Frey might say. . . .
— Jesse Walker, The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the
Outside AgitatorStory
Reason.com, 1 June 2020.
What I’m Reading: Charles Hamilton Sorley, in World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others (1997, ed. Candace Ward).
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this,They are dead.Then add thereto,
Yet many a better one has died before.
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.—Charles Hamilton Sorley (1915/1916)When you see millions of the mouthless dead…
World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others
This was Sorley’s last poem. The manuscript was recovered from his soldier’s kit after a sniper killed him at Loos.
It was published posthumously in Marlborough and Other Poems (Cambridge, 1916). I read it, and copied it out of, the Dover anthology World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others (1997, ed. Candace Ward).