by Chimezie Ogbuji
by Chimezie Ogbuji
Ogbuji, Chimezie; Gomadam, Karthik; Petrie, Charles;
Case Western Reserve UniversityThis paper appears in: Internet Computing, IEEE
Issue Date: July-Aug. 2011
Volume: 15 Issue:4
On page(s): 10 - 13
ISSN: 1089-7801
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/MIC.2011.99
Date of Current Version: 2011-06-30 10:41:12.0
Sponsored by: IEEE Computer SocietyAbstract
Contemporary Web-based architectures can help address the technological and architectural challenges inherent to modern personal health record (PHR) systems. Current research in the area of healthcare informatics has focused on incorporating Web-based technology for PHR systems' primary functions. This special issue presents work in this area of research.
I received my complementary copy of this IEEE IC with the special issue on Personal Health Records that I was guest editor for. It turned out well in the end.
As for the second point, I say what our faith says, and the truth of the matter. At a certain time a motion begins which is not precipitated by another motion and this occurs in this very manner: that there has been eternally a first mover, although there was not eternally a first moved; but at a certain time the first moved began, and then motion began.
—Albert of Saxony, Questions on the Physics (Questiones et decisiones physicales insignum virorum). Uche Ogbuji's translation. Latin original as follows:
Quantum ad secundum, dico quod secundum fidem nostram et rei veritatem. Aliquando incepit motus quem non precessit aliquis motus et hoc per istum modum quod eternaliter fuit primum motor, licet no eternaliter fuerit primum mobile; sed aliquando inceperit, et tunc incepit motus.
For some reason I've been sparring with the notion of the Prime Mover a lot this year. In my poems and other writings I've taken on the idea playfully, angrily, and sometimes in sheer bafflement. The idea comes from the tortured efforts to reconcile Platonism and Aristotelianism, received by medieval scholars with such reverence once re-discovered in contact with the Islamic civilizations, with Christian dogma. I think this struggle still dominates modern science and philosophy, though no serious enquirer outside the Bible Belt, except maybe Peter Geach, would dare plead directly to Christian principles in such discussion, and not many would directly invoke Aristotle. Despite this coyness a great deal of thinking behind Western civilization is bogged down in two theoretic systems which seem to betray utter ignorance of the natural world.
Albert of Saxony was one of those medieval natural philosophers instrumental in marrying Aristotle with St. Augustine; I believe I ran into his quote at the library of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and I managed to dig it up again in God and reason in the Middle Ages by Edward Grant. As I've grown older I've become very sympathetic with Epicurianism, respectful of Sophism and hostile towards Socratism, the great enemy of both. Unfortunately Socratism won out in post-Classical times, with its insistence on impossible absolutes and false humility in style. I won't go so far as to claim that looking back more to Epicurus (who in turn looked back to Democritus, subject of savage attacks by Plato) would have prevented the religious distortions, cultural chauvanism and geopolitical distortion that characterize the West's material triumphs, but I do think Platonism served as a heavy, clumsy stick swung wildly about the world by Europe.
I must admit that it was not Plato and Aristotle who gave the Europeans that chilling formula "dico quod fidem nostram et rei veritatem", "according to faith and the truth of the matter," which so polluted Medieval natural philosophy with divinity studies. Ibn Rushd ("Averroës" in the West) had already compiled a herculean defence of Aristotle against some agents of Islamic dogma, having to cover much the same ground as Christians did centuries later. Since they were getting their Aristotle from the schools of Ibn Rushd, the Christian philosophers had to deal not only with the Greek, but also with the brilliant (though fundamentally flawed) elucidations of the Spanish Moor. In the end they pretty much just cut Ibn Rushd out with the neat scalpel of church dogma. Back to superstition square one. The dogma of six-day creation sixteen hundred years before the great flood could not withstand the empirical idea from the natural world that nothing suggests any beginning to the chain of causality. Things are in motion because things have always been in motion. The church needed to silence this heresy to make room for Yahweh and they did so with the garrotte rather than with fair debate.
The lasting effects of this strangulating threat occurred to me once again a few days ago when listening to Kool and the Gang's soaring, aching composition, "Who's Gonna Take the Weight." What lyrics there are to this song are eye opening:
People! The world today is in a very difficult situation,
And we all know it because we're the ones who created it;
We're gonna have to be the ones to clean it up;
We're gonna have to learn to live together
And love each other.
Because I believe one day someone or something
Is gonna wanna judge
Who's creating all this corruption and death and pollution,
All these difficult situations on earth.And he's gonna wanna know:
Who's gonna take the weight?
So the world is screwed up, and we're the ones who have to sort it out, but why? Not because it's our world to sort out, but because it's a world belonging to some Daddy Abstract hanging out in the sky who's going to come along some day to judge what we've done. What's the point of so much soul if all were doing is renting it, anyway?
Under the Aristotelian shadow of Ptolemy both Islamic and Christian natural philosophers wound themselves into ridiculous contortions until Copernicus and Galileo. The primum mobile, the first or empyrean sphere was equated to utter goodness in gratification of Christian doctrine and was accounted by Sacro Bosco in his seminal De Sphaera the only sphere of "motus rationalis" (i.e. rational motion by which they meant the rotation any idiot can see by observing the sun) and then by complete hocus-pocus the idea came about that all other spheres were of "motus irrationalis sive sensualis" ("irrational or sensual motion"; take that, Aristotle!). So now suddenly the church had not only the keys to goodness, but also to reason. How convenient!
Sadly, I'll close with one of the more lurid illustrations I've seen of how all this nonsense addled even the most brilliant minds in the West. "Good-friday, 1613, Riding Westward"
by John Donne is a poem of his usual technical virtuosity, but is full of the sloppy, slavish sentiments that leave me so scornful.
LET man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
This is about the half-way point of the poem, and marks the heave of theme from a philosophical to a devotional bent. The church was all about facilitating such arcs, and The Dean of St. Pauls well illustrates how they got their wish for so long. I like to think the 21th century will mark another turning point in which we throw all that twaddle into the vaults of history, and actually look upon the universe with our own eyes. I personally have no truck with waiting out to determine Who's Gonna Take the Weight.
The first leader of a newly independent Ghana
Faced many a challenge to visions of utopia;
The vision is based on science and agriculture;
Here come the vultures shitting like pigeons on a sculpture.
Nobody's perfect, yo! he's got faults you can list them... Dr. Nkrumah's intentions were the best
Why it's all a mess cause we still needed lots of help from the West...Kennedy and his foreign aid
During the cold war turning Ghana into economic slaves... Military coup after coup it's appaling
Seventh time a charm: enter Jerry Rawlings...There once lived a great man with a geat vision, great plan,
A great dreamer determined to realize what he'd seen for Africa
Things fell apart at the seams in Ghana...We salute ya, we salute ya,
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
—from "Nkrumah Salute" by King David
My cousin and sound producer extraordinaire released this clear-eyed tribute to the great man who spearheaded the African independence movements of the 50s, including that of Nigeria, whose independence came a few years after Ghana's. Nkrumah was the father among pan-African visionary leaders from Nyerere to Azikiwe who did succeed in the most visible successes of independence, but whose energy and charisma were not quite enough to counter the complex manipulations engineered by colonial powers within the field of influence of the globally influential cold war poles in Washington and Moscow.
What I like about this Nkrumah salute is that it doesn't shy away from calling out the disaster of Nkrumah's Volta river project, which also pioneered errors repeated across Africa where ambition for foreign exchange and rapid industrialization led governments into economic patterns that extended the hegemony of Western powers while decimating indigenous industries. These errors led to corruption, which led to erosion of the most important human resources and caused perilous internal strains. In Ghana the false gold was bauxite, which inspired the Volta river project. In Nigeria it was and still is petroleum. Such projects required strong central control, which bred autocracy, in which Nkrumah was also an unfortunate pioneer, and eventually this led to a wave of military coups across Africa, and made it easier for the CIA and KGB to conduct their proxy wears across the continent.
Despite all that we rightly salute Nkrumah. if these have been harsh lessons for Africans to learn, it has been essential that we learn them ourselves, and Nkrumah led the way to such self-determination. It is also for us to address the problems over time. We should be wary of quick fixes. Everyone salutes Mandela for his greatness, but I'm sure he paid careful attention to his African history, and learned the right lessons. Even Mandela had his elders, among whom Nkrumah was a leading light.
I've always personally enjoyed the fact that Nkrumah took his pan-Africanism even as far as matters of the heart, marrying an elagent Coptic Egyptian lady Fathia, whom he impressed as a fiery African nationalist in the spirit of Nasser. The marriage fell apart with the strains of Nkrumah's later years in power and Fathia returned to Cairo even before Nkrumah went into exile in Guinea, but after Fathia's death a few years ago she was flown according to her wishes to be buried beside her husband in Ghana.
We are the punch bag of fate
on whom the hands of destiny wearies
and the show of blows gradually lose
their viciousness on our patience
until they become caresses of admiration
and time that heals all wounds
comes with a balm and without tears,
soothes the bruises on our spirits.
—from "Ghana's Philosophy of Survival" by Kwesi Brew, richly discussed in "Poetry as Cultural Memory", by Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah. It's also well worth reading "Africa, 1966" on the same Weblog.
Je vis, je meurs: je me brule et me noye,
J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure:
La vie m'est et trop molle et trop dure.
J'ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye: Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoye,
Et en plaisir maint grief tourment n'endure:
Mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure:
Tout en un coup je seiche et je verdoye. Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine:
Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser je me treuve hors de peine.Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certeine,
Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.
—Sonnet VIII by Louise Labbé (I found an English guide to the poem.)
The first time I heard Morcheeba's Au-delà, featuring Manda, the french fan who became a lead singer for a brief spell, I was at a Morcheeba concert in Denver, just before the album Dive Deep came out. When she started singing the lyrics, I started jumping up and down yelling "C'est Louise Labbé!" I guess half-hoping Manda could hear me. Yeah, wifey thought I'd gone mad. She would have thought so even more if she'd realized, as I did quickly, that the lyrics that started with Labbé quickly went its own way.
Je vis, je meurs; je ris, je pleure.Je vis de la mer; je vis de la terre.Je le dis aux fleurs; au lac de vapeur.Au ciel de toutes les couleurs,Ton soleil réchauffe mon cœur.Je vis, j'ai peur; je crie de douleurs.En secret je m'enterre: je cherche la chaleur.Je m'enfuis dans les airs; au delà de la terre.Au ciel de toutes les couleurs,Ton soleil réchauffe mon cœur.
—"Au-delà" by Morcheeba
I live, I die; I laugh, I cry.
I live of the sea; I live of the ground.
I say it to the flowers; to the lake of steam.In the all-colored sky,
Your sun warms my heart.I live, I die; I scream of pain.
I bury myself secretly: I am seeking heat.
I abscond into the air; beyond the earth.In the all-colored sky,
Your sun warms my heart.
—translation by Uche Ogbuji
BTW the last time I mentioned Morcheeba on Copia I was anticipating the new album after Skye Edwards had rejoined them. "Blood Like Lemonade" came out last year and is I think worth the wait. If you've been sleeping, wake up and check it out.
Labbé's sonnet famously brings Petrarca's style of antithetical tropes into French. Just this morning Au-delà came up in my shuffled playlist and I remembered I'd resolved to translate it, to see if I could preserve some of its music, which has eluded translations I've seen so far. Here is an excerpt from my attempt:
All at a stroke I laugh and I lament,
And suffer many torments in my pleasures:
They live forever, my absconding treasures:
All at a stroke I wither and augment.
—from "Je vis, je meurs" a translation of Sonnet VIII by Uche Ogbuji
re: lament/augment, you can either accept it as rime riche, or consider the "g" borrowed into its following syllable, as it does sound in my pronounciation.
The morning glory climbs above my head,
Pale flowers of white and purple, blue and red.
I am disquieted. Down in the withered grasses something stirred;
I thought it was his footfall that I heard.
Then a grasshopper chirred. I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed,
I saw him coming on the southern road.
My heart lays down its load.
—"The morning glory climbs above my head" by Helen Waddell (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913)
Yesterday I was going through old notes from my writing while at The University of Nigeria at Nsukka, and I came across Waddell's translation, which I'd copied out by hand. In those days before Google and ready cut&paste, I used to do a lot of copying out poems I found and loved. This lovely poem, a translation of a translation from the Book of Odes, was originally published with the note "Written in the twelfth century before Christ, c. 1121," and demonstrates once again that extraordinary facility that's blessed Asian poetry through the ages of taking the broad sweep of Nature and tacking it lightly onto the human experience, such as compelled Ezra Pound to toil over Fenollosa's notes to produce Cathay. Of course that's what many European Classic poets tried to do in pastoral efforts, but generally ended up being so much more heavy-handed with political and academic statement than their Asian counterparts. That's what the European Romantic movement poets tried to do, but also without much subtlety or delicacy.
The modernist movement in Europe seems to have unfortunately banished this sort of expression entirely, and that is a major tragedy. Even among poets working to reinstate metrical verse to contemporary practice, there seems to be some inexplicable terror of abstract and natural themes. This is a shame, but I'll take what I can get, and yesterday I also came across "The Wind with its Smell of Flower," a wonderful translation from Mongolia's Poet Laureate G. Mend-Oyoo by Simon Wickham-Smith and Lyn Coffin.
I love this peaceful blue evening
It is absolutely a castle of the East
I love this cloud with its golden mane
It is absolutely a lantern of the East
I love this wind with its smell of flowers
It is absolutely the fragrance of the East
—from "The Wind with its Smell of Flower," translation from G. Mend-Oyoo by Simon Wickham-Smith and Lyn Coffin in Qarrtsiluni
If you read Mongolian, I'd guess you are very lucky to be able to read the original "ЭНЭ ЦЭЦЭГ ҮНЭРТСЭН САЛХИ." And while at Qarrtsiluni be sure to check out "The Man in the Yellow Coat/L’Homme au Pardessus Jaune" by my friend M.J. Fievre, a stunning story both in the original French/Creole and in the English translation made by the author. I'll repeat in public something I remarked to the author in private:
You say "While the omniscient P.O.V is admissible in Haiti, a country known for its oral tradition, it was frowned upon in American literature." I'm not much for American fiction but that startled me. If it's true, it probably helps explain why I'm not much for American fiction.
For me banning the omniscient narrator from story-telling is like banishing the color black from visual art. Or hey! maybe like banishing abstraction and nature from poetry. Shame on any MFA departments and workshop people involved in such heresy.
By the way, my title for this posting includes some poetic license. More accurate to my point would be something such as "Ou sont les idylles bucoliques d'antan," but that doesn't sound nearly as nice.
Let’s imagine for a second that the robin
is not a contained entity moving at speed
through space, but that it is a living change,
unmaking and remaking itself over and over
by sheer unconscious will, and that
if we were to slow down the film enough
we would see a flying ball of chaos,
flicking particles like Othello counters,
—from 'Robin In Flight' by Paul Adrian, winner of The National Poetry Competition, UK
This might be the best poem I've ever read to have won a recent competition. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the winner has never published before. The more I deal with the poetry establishment the more I'm convinced it has a way of curbing fresh voices. I hope this honor encourages Mr. Adrian to persevere with his style. For me it's not far from being up there with the great bird poems (OK maybe not 'The Windhover' but does anything even approach Hopkins's iconic piece), including D.H. Lawrence's 'Humming Bird.'
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.
I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.
—from 'Humming Bird' by D.H. Lawrence
Back to the UK National Poetry Competition, one of the runners up is quite good fun.
The records show that in Shanghai
at the end of the Yuan Dynasty,
the year 1364, a glassblower blew
a mermaid that came to life, and swam
away. And in Cologne, in 1531, a team
of glassblowers blew an orchestra,
instruments and all, and these played.
Then on Hokkaido, in 1846, a blind
monk blew his own Buddha to pray to,
and the next day he was able to see.
—from 'A History of Glassblowing' by Matthew Sweeney
Here's a neat project using Blake's illustrations and music to set The Songs of Innocence and Experience nicely into video.
It includes treatment of "The Blossom."
Pretty pretty robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Hears you sobbing sobbing
Pretty pretty robin
Near my bosom.
—from 'The Blossom' by William Blake, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789
Solvency or luxury—adapted from "The Madison Front" by Uche Ogbuji
Or modesty of revenue—
Campaigners seem to want all three
But most that they can have is two.
The above stanza is the crux of my poem, "The Madison Front," which was posted in Verse Wisconsin this weekend as part of their "Poems About Wisconsin Protests" series. It takes a critical look at all sides of the politics and economics of the Madison protests. There's also audio of my reading it, which in some cases will automatically play when you load the site. I'll try to figure out how to record better quality audio next time.
The bottom line is that I think all sides tend to miss the most important point, though no one more than Scott Walker and his supporters. Gutting union rights won't solve their fiscal problems. The only things that will are increasing revenue or reducing the overall standards of living to a point neither left nor right would be likely to accept. This is a fundamental problem throughout the U.S. Most of the talk about "small government" by folks such as the Tea Party is either vague, or focuses on institutions that offend right-wing social sensibilities and are yet the most infinitesimal fraction of spending. No one who insists on maintaining current levels of defense spending while sniping at environmental and educational institutions is in the least bit serious about budgets.
At the same time the left has lost its backbone. Despite steeply declining overall tax rates over the past century, right wing campaigners have succeeded in turning "tax" into a word so dirty even progressives fear to use it. I personally think it's a good ting that tax rates have declined, but I think it's common sense that there reaches a point where you reach the nerve bundle of the tradeoff in my stanza above.
No one in the U.S. seems to be calling the true debate. Are we willing to accept being the greatest military power in the world by just a small margin rather than by two or three times, or are we willing to sacrifice our standards of living to levels that would place us wel at the bottom of OECD league tables? No one seems interested in the latter, and I can understand that. I enjoy having a high per-capita standard of living. I think the crux of the debate, then should be in the matter of defense spending versus taxation, but everyone seems terrified to press this point forthrightly.
It's hardly unusual for the U.S. to have arrived in this situation. It's just the way of power in the world. As Samuel Johnson says in a famous quote:
There is a general succession of events in which contraries are
produced by periodical vicissitudes; labour and care are rewarded with
success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and
negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised.
—from section 21 of The Rambler by Samuel Johnson
And speaking of The Rambler, my search for the above image of Dr. Johnson (caught possibly in the eyes-open phase of winking and blinking) led me to a Weblog established by a gentleman inspired by the great Doctor's efforts. I've read a few of the entries and it's got a bit of The Copia about it. I'm always delighted to find a fellow journeyman.
Somehow, the Miyazaki (of Studio Ghibli) movie Tales from Earthsea slipped through the cracks and I wasn’t aware of this Miyazaki film until just last week when Netflix suggested it to me. My friend, Nnedi is usually the one who keeps me up on his latest movies. This one was actually one of the best of the more recent films by his studio. Certainly not as good as my all time favorites: Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and Princess Mononoke, but definitely up there and more memorable.
It is much darker than his others, so I wouldn’t recommend it for children under 11. However, the atmosphere, the artwork (of course), and the creativity of the story is classic Miyazaki. The story takes place in a fantastic, medieval setting and is about the journey of the son of a King, who in a fit of unexplained rage kills his father and steals his magic sword
Marie:
Aujourd'hui je bouge
Chercher mon nouveau move
Je n'ai plus de cash
Même pas de crédit card
Je fais façon-façon!
C'est ce qui fond ma conviction!
Refrain (Marie & co.): Tomana Toma cha na taboo!
Toma na Toma cha ni tout baigne!
(4x)
Toma! (Tout baigne!)
Na Ouais! ça bouge
Tomana Toma
Ah! Tout baigne
Mon plan pour ce soir
J'veux pas vous décevoir c'est moi qui vous mène
Et ça en vaut la peine
Trop de frustration
Vivre dans une money nation (money nation)
Dis-moi, toi!
Arno, dis-moi!
Sans l'argent
Dans l'attente
Tu fais quoi?
Refrain
Arno:
Toma ton machin,
Ça c'est bien ça!
Sans argent, t'as pas le choix
On rève, comme un roi charmant
On chante "ah si j'étais riche moi!
(What we're gonna do today?)
Refrain
My favorite song off Zap Mama's "Supermoon" album. When she came to Boulder a few years ago to support it (as she does often, happily) one of my keenest disappointments was that she performed the song mostly translated to English, so I couldn't sing along with the French lyrics I knew from the album.
Yeah yeah it's a rat race and blah blah blah and we're all just squirrels trying to get a nut and yada yada. It's nice to have someone actually having a great deal of fun with those old complaints. And I love Marie just doing her wacky thing in the video, especially pop-locking in the robot get-up. Charming chemistry hanging out with French pop-rocker Arno, too.
Today I'm getting my ass in gear
To figure out my new move
I ain't got no more cash
No more on the credit card
I'm just making do
Which is why I'm ain't messing around...
As a bonus, here's a fun music video by Arno: