I saw a tree (Edith Södergran)

I saw a tree ...

I saw a tree that was bigger than all others
and thickly hung with unreachable cones;

I saw a big church with open doors

and all that came out were pale and strong

and ready to die;

I saw a woman who smiling and in makeup

threw dice for her happiness

and saw that she had lost.

A circle was drawn round these things,

that none infringes.

(Edith Södergran (1892 - 1923). The first poem in her first collection, Dikter (Poems), published in 1916.)

Jag såg ett träd ...

Jag såg ett träd som var större än alla andra

och hängde fullt of oåtkomliga kottar;

jag såg en stor kyrka med öppna dörrar

och alla som kommo ut voro bleka och starka

och färdiga att dö;

jag såg en kvinna som leende och sminkad

kastade tärning om sin lycka

och såg att hon förlorade.

En krets var dragen kring dessa ting

den ingen överträder.

Lines 1-2: Nordic readers would instantly visualize a Norway Spruce (Picea abies -- the prickly old-style Christmas tree we all used to buy before Nordmann Firs came along). It's an impressive tree in its native regions, though often an unhappy-looking one in the UK.  Its hanging cones are usually produced in the highest part of the tree. (Pictures below.)

Line 6: sminkad.  Smink means make-up, rouge, or (in the theatre) grease-paint. 

Line 7: lycka means happiness as well as luck. 

Line 9: krets (an ancient Germanic word) is often neutrally synonymous with cirkel ("circle"), but can be suggestive of a religious or magic circle, the boundary of a camp, etc.  

Line 10: den is normally an article ("the") or demonstrative adjective ("this", "that"), but here it's being used as a relative pronoun, instead of the usual som (cf. lines 1,4 and 6). (In the SAOB, this is den C.IX.1 -- to save you the 100 pages that I just scrolled through.)  Den, det, dem... agrees with the antecedent in gender and number. Södergran also uses this construction in the third poem; again with ingen ("no-one"). I'm guessing it would have struck readers as poetic or archaic, so I tried to represent that in my translation.

Line 10: överträder, literally over-tread, generally means "transgress", "infringe" or "trespass". 

*

Whether you call it a ring or a circle, it's at any rate not a wall. So could it be crossed, even though no-one does? And is the infringement to be imagined as getting in, or as getting out? 

The three scenes: at least two of them (1 and 3) contain the idea of out of reach, of  not attaining. Two (1 and 2) contain the idea of bigness. 

The ending suggests we outsiders can't, or at any rate don't, share in these scenes. There's a privacy, a sacred quality. 

The scenes don't feel quite naturalistic. The tree "bigger than all others" sounds like a mythic world-tree. The church scene suggests soldiers being prepared for a war. (Likely enough, in a poem of this date.) But the bigness of the church, coming after the bigness of the tree, also suggests a symbolic scene, a dream about the fabric of life. Likewise the gay woman's gamble seems not so much a literal dice-throw or a stereotypical "falling" as an existential catastrophe, maybe an image of permanent and inevitable loss. 

For David McDuff (in his Introduction to Edith Södergran's Complete Poems, p. 21) this image of a woman is Södergran herself, returning bruised from Davos to Finland; the uncrossed circle represents her ineluctable fate (she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1908).  A thought that provokes another, that the big church where one is prepared for death could also image one of the sanatoria where Södergran spent so much of her short life.

Norway Spruce (Picea Abies)

[Image source: https://treesplanet.blogspot.com/2016/05/picea-abies-norway-spruce.html . A remarkable thing about the shape of these trees is that scrolling up or down creates the impression of zooming out or in. Try it!]

Cones of Norway Spruce (Picea abies)

[Image source: https://treesplanet.blogspot.com/2016/05/picea-abies-norway-spruce.html .]

You can read the whole of Dikter (1916) in David McDuff's excellent translation: http://englishings.com/nvinprint/sodergran-poems-1916.html .

But translating afresh is good for my Swedish and it makes me read the poems with attention, so let's carry on for a few more poems:

The day cools ...

I

The day cools towards evening ...

Drink the warmth in my hand,

my hand has the same blood as the spring.

Take my hand, take my white arm,

take my thin shoulders' longing ...

It would be wonderful to feel,

for just one night, a night such as this one,

your heavy head against my breast.

II

You threw your love's red rose

into my white lap --

I hold it fast in my hot hands,

your love's red rose that soon withers ...

Oh you sovereign with chilly eyes,

I receive the crown you reach to me,

it bends my head down to my heart ...

III

I saw my master for the first time today,

trembling, I knew him at once.

Now I already feel his heavy hand on my light arm ...

Where is my girl's ringing laughter,

my woman's freedom with head borne high? 

Now I already feel his fast grip on my shaking body,

Now I hear reality's hard clang

against my fragile fragile dreams.

IV

You sought a flower

and found a fruit.

You sought a spring

and found a sea.

You sought a woman

and found a soul --

you are disappointed.

Dagen svalnar . . .

I

Dagen svalnar mot kvällen ...

Drick värmen us min hand,

min hand har amma blod som våren.

Tag min hand, tag min vita arm,

tag min smala axlars längtan ...

Det vore underligt att känna,

en enda natt, en natt som denna,

ditt tunga huvud mot mitt bröst.

II

Du kastade din kärleks röda ros

i mitt vita sköte --

jag håller fast i mina heta händer

din kärleks röda ros som vissnar snart ...

O du härskare med kalla ögon,

jag tar emot den krona du räcker mig,

som böjer ned mitt huvud mot mitt hjärta ...

III

Jag såg min herre för första gången i dag,

darrande kände jag genast igen honom.

Nu känner jag ren hans tunga hand på min lätta arm ...

Var är mitt klingande jungfruskratt,

min kvinnofrihet med högburet huvud?

Nu känner jag ren hans fasta grepp om min skälvande kropp,

nu hör jag verklighetens hårda klang

mot mina sköra sköra drömmar.

IV

Du sökte en blomma

och fann en frukt.

Du sökte en källa

och fann ett hav.

Do sökte en kvinna

och fann en själ --

du är besviken.

Though such an early composition, "Dagen svalnar ...." has become one of Södergran's best-known poems.

Line 10, sköte. The imagery is more openly sexual than in English. Sköte means lap but also means pudenda. 

Lines 18, 21, ren. A form of redan ("already"), common in Finland-Swedish. 

The old house

The way new eyes look upon old times,

like strangers who have no heart ...

I long to go to my old graves,

my mournful bulk weeps bitter tears

that no-one sees. 

I go on living in the old days' softness

among strangers building new towns

on blue hills up to the sky's rim,

I gently talk with the captive trees

and sometimes comfort them.

How slowly time the essence wastes,

how noiseless the tread of Fate's hard heel.

I must await the mild death

that brings its freedom to my soul!

Det gamla huset

Hur nya ögon se på gamla tider

likt främlingar som intet hjärta ha ...

Jag längtar bort till min gamla gravar,

min sorgsna storhet gråter bittra tårar

dem ingen ser.

Jag lever kvar i gamla dagars ljuvhet

bland främlingar som bygga nya städer

på blåa kullar upp till himlens rand,

jag talar sakta med de fångna träden

och tröstar dem ibland.

Hur långsamt tiden tingens väsen tär,

och ljudlöst trampar ödets hårda häl.

Jag måste vänta på den milda döden

som bringar frihet åt min själ!

Line 5, see note on poem 1 ("I saw a tree ..."),  line 10.

Södergran's free verse divided readers, but there are a number of popular poems in Dikter that, like this one and "Nocturne" and "Autumn Days", edge towards a more traditional rhymed and strophic form. 

Nocturne

Airy silver moonlight eve,

the night's blue billowing,

numberless the glittering waves

on each other following.

Shadows falling across the path,

Shoreline bushes weeping softly,

blackish giants guarding shoreline silver.

Silence deep in summer's midst,

sleep and dream, --

the moon glides over the sea,

white and warm.

Nocturne

Silverskira månskenskväll,

nattens blåa bölja,

glittervågor utan tal

på varandra följa.

Skuggor falla över vägen,

strandens buskar gråta sakta,

svarta jättar strandens silver vakta.

Tystnad djup i sommarens mitt,

sömn och dröm, --

månen glider över havet

vit och öm. 

All the verbs apart from glider (glides) are infinitives. I've translated them as present participles.

A wish

Of all our sun-filled world

I only wish a garden sofa

where a cat suns itself ...

There I would sit

with a letter at my bosom,

just one little letter.

That's how my dream looks ...

En önskan

Av hela vår soliga värld

önskar jag blott en trädgårdssoffa

där en katt solar sig ...

Där skulle jag sitta

med ett brev i barmen,

ett enda litet brev.

Så ser min dröm ut ...

Above, "En önskan" read by Kerstin Andersson.

Edith Södergran was a cat lover. Many of the surviving photos from Raivola show her cat Totti in her arms. Raivola, though only 60km from St Petersburg, was then (just) in Finland. In 1900 only about 10% of the population were Finns (Wikipedia). It became part of Russia after the Winter War (1940) and is now called Roshchino, a name referring to the nearby roshcha, the extraordinary stand of Siberian Larch sown in 1738 (known as Lintula to Russians and Raivola to Finns). There's an Edith Södergran monument in Roshchino, and a few metres away a statue of Totti the cat who, it's said, pined away at his mistress' grave. 

Statue of Totti at Roshchino (Raivola), by Nina Terno

[Image source: https://vsuete.com/stories-behind-cats-monuments/ .]

Autumn days

Autumn days are transparent

and painted onto the wood's golden ground ...

Autumn days smile at the whole world.

It's so lovely to fall asleep without a wish,

sated with flowers and tired of greenery,

with the vine's red crown at the bed-head ...

The day of autumn yearns no more,

its fingers are relentlessly chill,

in its dreams it sees everywhere,

how white flakes incessantly fall ...

Höstens dagar

Höstens dagar äro genomskinliga

och målade på skogens gyllne grund ...

Höstens dagar le åt hela världen.

Det är så skönt att somna utan önskan,

mätt på blommorna och trött på grönskan,

med vinets röda krans vid huvudgärden ...

Höstens dag har ingen längtan mer,

dess fingrar äro obevekligt kalla,

i sina drömmar överallt den ser,

hur vita flingor oupphörligt falla ...

My translation doesn't even hint at some of the rhymes, notably lines 4-5.

Line 5, mätt. A much more commonplace word in Swedish than "sated" in English. You would ask a small child, "Är du mätt?" -- "Have you had enough to eat?" It's perfectly polite, when declining a second or third helping, to exclaim "Jag är så mätt!"  -- it implies contented satisfaction, without the suggestion of disgust that lurks in the English word "sated".

Monument to Edith Södergran at Roshchino (Raivola), designed by Wäinö and Matti Aaltonen

[Image source: http://willimiehenjaljilla.blogspot.com/2017/08/raivola-edith-sodergranin-muistomerkki.html .]

The monument quotes the first verse of "Arrival in Hades" ("Ankomst till Hades"), one of Södergran's last poems:

Se här är evighetens strand,

här brusar strömmen förbi,

och döden spelar i buskarna

sin samma entoniga melodi.

See, here is eternity's shore,

here the stream runs by,

and death plays in the bushes

his same monotone melody. 

Creon and Ismene

 Σοφοκλῆς

Sophocles (c. 496 - 405 BCE)

*

But we begin with Homer:

And I saw the mother of Oedipus, fair Epikastê,
who in the ignorance of her mind did a great deed
by marrying her own son; he, after killing his own father,
married her. The gods soon made it known among men.
But though he suffered pains in much-loved Thebes
he continued to rule the Cadmeans through the god’s baleful plans.
She descended to the house of the powerful gate-fastener Hades,
lashing a noose to a steep rafter,
subdued by all her anguish. And she left her son pains,
as many as a mother’s Furies bring to fulfillment. 

(The Odyssey, 11.271-280)

Epikastê is one of the "wives and daughters of famous men" that Odysseus meets when he visits the underworld: she is of course better known to us as Jocasta. This is one of the sparse handful of Theban allusions in Homer. (*see Note 1)

That terrible image of a hanged woman becomes the catastrophic onset in two of Sophocles' Theban plays: i.e. the moment when the catastrophe has definitely arrived, though its destructive work has not ended. 

More specifically, these Sophoclean scenes portray the discovery of the hanged woman by a man who loves her. In Antigone (shortly before 441 BCE) the hanged Antigone is discovered by her fiancé Haemon, who stabs himself. In Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE) the hanged Jocasta is discovered by her husband Oedipus, who blinds himself using the pins on his wife's brooches. 

But no-one could confuse Antigone's lonely pride with Jocasta's horrified despair: they belong to different worlds, to plays whose centres of interest feel very distinct. 

And yet Sophocles' three Theban plays, each such a distinct entity, often play variations on the same motifs. Creon, like Antigone and Ismene, appears in all three. In Oedipus Rex he's wrongfully accused, in Oedipus at Colonus he's rightfully accused, and in Antigone he's an out-and-out opponent. One has the sense of dipping into a dressing-up chest. The Creon mask and robes were already in there: they begged to be used. And Euripides  was able to use them too, in the Phoenician Women, before Oedipus at Colonus got its belated airing in 401 BCE. 

The Creon character maintains a certain flavour: never quite heroic himself, glib, vulgar, self-interested but a true native Theban, a public servant, incompetently high-handed, always apt to anger the heroes (Oedipus, Antigone). 

Creon's pain somehow doesn't matter as much as other people's, he's too coarse to worry about. In the Phoenician Women, Teiresias tries to spare him, but not very hard. (Teiresias, whose reluctant prophecies are always painful, is another costume in that dressing-up box.)

*

There's some argument about Sophocles. Alistair Elliot, for instance, makes persuasive criticisms of his poetry (*Note 2). It's possible to lose sight of the obvious. Sigmund Freud asked himself why Oedipus Rex is so powerful, when we can shrug off other tragedies of fate; a question leading to a very significant outcome, in his case. Matthew Arnold seemed to deny that the situation in Antigone had any interest for a modern reader (*Note 3).

Sophocles was the greatest of the tragedians, but it's easier to be a fan of Aeschylus or Euripides; it's easier for a reader to "discover" them, to arrive with lower expectations and to be swept away by their fertile invention and their strangenesses. With Sophocles, on the other hand, we're apt to notice what creaks, what jars, what falls flat. But that's because his work still lives in a very direct way, his plays still concern us. 

Think of that opening scene with Antigone and Ismene: Antigone's egotistic, destructive, idealistic activism versus Ismene's tempered, cautious, furtive timidity. Reading Sophocles is uncomfortable. There's no hiding-place, we're all confronted by that choice.

[ANTIGONE]
But the body of Polynices . . .

He's to be left unwept, unburied, his precious body

for the circling vultures to spy and feast on. 

That's the martial law that the good Creon

imposes on you and me -- yes, even on me -- . . .

Anyone who disobeys it will die, no appeal, 

stoned to death inside the city walls!

So now you know. Now you'll show what you're made of,

Ismene: are you worthy of your birth, 

or a coward, for all your royal blood?

ISMENE:

Poor sister, if things have come to this,

what could I do to mend them, tell me,

what good can I do for you? 

ANTIGONE:

                       Decide.

Will you share the labour, share the work?

ISMENE:

What work, what's the risk? What do you mean?

ANTIGONE:

Will you lift up his body with these bare hands

and lower it with me?

ISMENE:

What? But you can't bury him, 

when a law forbids the whole city!

ANTIGONE:

                        Yes!

He's my brother and -- say what you like to deny it --

he's your brother too.

No-one will ever accuse me of betraying him. 

ISMENE:

You're so desperate, when Creon has specifically --

ANTIGONE:

                                                           No.

He's got no right to keep me from my own. 

ISMENE:

. . .

We've got to be sensible. Remember we're women,

we weren't born to contend with men. Then too

we're underlings, ruled by much stronger hands,

so we just have to put up with this -- and with even worse.

I -- I'll beg the dead to forgive me --

I'm forced, I've got no choice -- I must obey

those in power. Don't rush into extremes --

that's madness, madness.

ANTIGONE:

                                     I won't insist.

No, even should you change your mind now

I wouldn't welcome you, not with me.

Go ahead, you do what you like, do whatever suits you,

and I'll bury him myself. . .

. . .

Yes, you do what you like, dishonor the laws

that the gods themselves honor!

ISMENE:            I don't dishonor them.

But defy the city? I can't do that.

ANTIGONE:

You've found your excuses. But I'm on my way.

I will raise a mound for him, for my dear brother. 

ISMENE:

You're being so rash, Antigone, I'm so afraid for you.

    . . . 

ANTIGONE:

 . . .               I won't suffer

anything so bad as an inglorious death.

[Selected lines from the first scene of Antigone. Based on Robert Fagles' 1982 translation, but freely paraphrased by me. I've struggled to find an English translation of Sophocles that I consistently get along with.]

It's so easy to be uncompromising in a play, where the consequences aren't real. But still, Antigone flings down a challenge across the millennia. 

For Shelley and Brecht, Antigone was an inspiration: they adored her fire. Those of us less besotted with uncompromising principle and less blind to its path of destruction will perhaps be more inclined to consider Ismene's point of view. I really enjoyed Jennet Kirkpatrick's essay "The Prudent Dissident: Unheroic Resistance in Sophocles' Antigone" (The Review of Politics, Cambridge University Press, Vol 73 No 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 401-424), with its thoughts about how Ismene's "unheroic weakness" might operate in corners and actually lead to better outcomes; and about Antigone, whose egotistic idea of collective action is that other people should submerge their identities into her personal mission.

You can read it on JStor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23016517 .

*

But I don't buy into the idea (considered by Kirkpatrick) that it was Ismene, not Antigone, who performed the first hasty funeral rites on Polynices' body: it's an illuminating thought-experiment, but I can't believe that any ancient drama would involve a plot-line that can only be inferred; nor can I understand Antigone's "sharp, piercing cry" at finding the body uncovered, which the sentry compares to a bird finding its chicks gone -- What else would Antigone expect to find, if this was only her first visit to where Polynices lay? --;  nor can I understand why, if Ismene had indeed carried out the first rite, she wouldn't say anything to refute Antigone's disdainful assertion (twice) that Ismene never touched the body. 

What I think you could argue is that Antigone, when she performed the first "burial", was sufficiently mindful of Ismene's prudence to make some effort at secrecy.  But when she came back and found all her work undone she lost patience with this furtive way of fulfilling an obligation. As she had already half-glimpsed during the argument with Ismene, her deed needed to be a public statement. True, Creon could still order Polynices' body to be re-exposed. But Antigone's open willingness to sacrifice her own life was an honour to Polynices that couldn't be taken away, whatever Creon did about it. 

Edipo discovers Giocasta in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo Re (1967)

[Image source: http://www.actingoutpolitics.com/pier-paolo-pasolini-edipo-re-oedipus-rex/ . Giocasta was played by Silvana Mangano, Edipo by Franco Citti.  You can watch the whole movie here (with Spanish subtitles): https://archive.org/details/1967EdipoRey .]

Note 1: 

Homer's Theban references are sparse but significant. They form the subject of a fascinating recent book by Elton T. E. Barker and Joel P. Christensen, happily available online: Homer's Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts, 2019 (Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies).

I've borrowed their translation (see Chapter 3) of the passage in question. 

Note 2:

See Alistair Elliot's interesting 2011 review (in Translation and Literature) of Reginald Gibbons' Sophocles: Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (2008):  https://euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/E0968136109000570 .

Note 3:

. . .But clearness of arrangement, rigour of development, simplicity of style – these may to a certain extent be learned: and these may, I am convinced, be learned best from the ancients, who although infinitely less suggestive than Shakspeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive.

   What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models? the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize. An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest. . . .

Matthew Arnold's comment deserves to be read in the full context of his Author's Preface to Poems, A New Edition (1853). But even when it is, it remains a bit mystifying. Arnold's ringing commendation of the ancients is founded on their sense of the necessity and centrality of a great action, one of those "which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time". See e.g. this earlier passage:

. . . their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated; because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of excellence: and it was not thought that on any but an excellent subject could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few actions, therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared inexhaustible; they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to the genius of every fresh poet. 

Antigone was the most admired of Sophoclean dramas, and surely Arnold wasn't saying that in this play alone Sophocles had neglected the great, significant and fitting action that (in his own view) the ancient writers perceived as essential? 

I can only suppose his intention in this aside was to warn the modern writer against a sort of classical antiquarianism: against becoming so entranced with the atmosphere of ancientness that you don't focus on the "elementary feelings" that compose a great action but only on the external trappings, on what is culturally time-bound, e.g. specific funeral rites. 

But Arnold seems to say it in a strange way, and I can't help wondering if there's a vein of sarcasm. Even his own description of the conflict in Antigone seems bound to provoke the "deep interest" that he denies it. It's as if one were to say of Oedipus: "a story about not being able to escape committing patricide and incest, yawn yawn". 

And after all, one of Arnold's own poems was "Fragment of an Antigone", in which he meditates intently on some of the themes in Sophocles' play. 

New language in business computing

 

Just to keep me sane during my IT training (vSphere 7: VCP-DCP Official Cert Guide, 4th Edition), here's some emerging linguistic usage that I thought was worth recording:

Enable or disable Network I/O Control, which if enabled will prioritize network traffic.

Prioritize not in the sense of "assign a high priority" but "assign priorities" (as opposed to treating all network traffic the same). 

Terms that become familiar in the authoritarian world of data processing, where no-one turns a hair when we talk about "the principle of least privilege",  are prone to take up a second career in the processing of the human population. "Security" and "health" are obvious current examples. Likewise "prioritization" has a great future, replacing the unacceptable term "discrimination". . .

Pop-up charts are useful for maximizing the available real estate for a chart

I think it means letting the chart fill up the whole screen . . .

Changes to the logging level are persisted in the vCenter Server configuration file /etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg

You are responsible for keeping track of the password. It is not persisted anywhere in vSphere.

persisted = rendered persistent (e.g. by being written into the config file)

Gap's stylish winter range is perfect for gifting this Christmas.  

An advertising break.

"Gifting" already exists in standard English, as e.g. the hapless team that "gifts" their opponents a goal-scoring opportunity. In this game-playing context, "gifting" is pejorative, it implies a stupid mistake. 

Here it's being deployed to mean something else, something like "the activity of choosing gifts" (and selecting and paying for them). It's what we used to call Christmas shopping.

The word "giving" has long seemed not quite right for this activity. For at its archaic heart it ought to mean giving something that belongs to us to someone else: for instance, a ring or a tool or a horse. It's what the thee Kings did, but it's not what the much-stimulated hive behaviour of a capitalist Christmas has ever implied.

"Gifting" abstracts from the physical foot-slogging and bag-lugging of Christmas shopping. It has an enhanced sense that much of the "gifting" at Christmas will now be done remotely: we'll never, even momentarily, possess the "gifts" that we've organized and paid for. 

I'm not yet a firm enough divester to act on what I sense, that "gifting" remains much the same stupid mistake as that weak back-pass in the penalty area. 

For example, if you set a vSAN Primary level of failures to tolerate to 1, then the HA admission control policy must reserve enough resource that is equal to 1 host. If you set the vSAN Primary level of failures to tolerate to 2, then the HA admission control policy must reserve enough resource that is equal to 2 ESXi hosts.

enough resource that is equal : The linguistic confusion reflects the self-contradiction in other VMware documentation, which says that implied reservation in vSAN must not be lower than implied reservation in HA, but also says that if HA reserves less, failover is unpredictable. The resources we're referring to aren't the same: vSAN is about disk capacity and HA is about compute/memory, but both can be crudely expressed as provision for a given number of host failures within the cluster.  My course authors hedge their bets (and have probably ended up getting it the wrong way round), while strongly hinting that the only safe choice is to make the vSAN and HA values equal (or equivalent).  

Each ESXi host has a vSAN storage provider, but only one is active. Storage providers on other ESXi hosts are in standby. If an ESXi host with an active storage provider fails, a storage provider from another host actives.

Actives = "becomes active" (the words used in vSphere 6.7 documentation), but avoiding the connotation of passivity in "becomes". Apparently the authors want us to imagine the storage provider as the agent of its own destiny. But that isn't the case. It's the vSAN component of vCenter that will make a storage provider active. So why is it important to promote an imaginary picture of community and personal agency? 

we exchange a few questions (W.S. Merwin)

Tahina spectabilis at the Merwin Conservancy, Maui (Hawaii)

[Image source: https://merwinconservancy.org/2015/11/featured-palm-tahina-spectabilis/ . Jason Denhart (Merwin Conservancy Executive Director) with a young specimen of this critically endangered palm, native to Madagascar.]

With over 2,740 individual palm trees, featuring more than 400 taxonomic species and 125 unique genera, with nearly 900 different horticultural varieties, W.S. Merwin’s garden is recognized as one of the largest and most extensive palm collections known to exist on earth. (The Merwin Conservancy)

Here W.S. Merwin died on 15 March 2019, aged 91. He was at his off-grid house in north Maui, set in the garden he had created on a deforested former pineapple plantation. In 1977 the site had been 3 acres, but Merwin later extended it to nearly 19 acres. Here he planted over 3,000 trees, mostly palms. 

(Michael Carlson's Guardian obituary madly claims that Merwin "replanted some 3,000 acres".)

It wasn't his first act of restoration. He had purchased the dilapidated farmhouse Lacan de Loubressac, above the Dordogne, for just $800 in the early 1950s, about the time of his first poetry collection.  (We can pay a virtual visit to the farmhouse in this 2018 article by Michael Wiegers:  https://lithub.com/windows-to-the-world-at-ws-merwins-old-french-farmhouse/ .) This was where he wrote e.g. The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders. Here too he bought some more acres over the years, preserving a fragment of the landscape around him.  

End of a day

In the long evening of April through the cool light
Bayle’s two sheep dogs sail down the lane like magpies
for the flock a moment before he appears near the oaks
a stub of a man rolling as he approaches
smiling and smiling and his dogs are afraid of him
we stand among the radiant stones looking out over
green lucent wheat and earth combed red under bare walnut limbs
bees hanging late in cowslips and lingering bird cherry
stumps and brush that were the grove of hazel trees
where the land turns above the draped slopes and the valley
filled with its one sunbeam and we exchange a few questions
as though nothing were different but he has bulldozed the upland
pastures and the shepherds’ huts into piles of rubble
and has his sheep fenced in everyone’s meadows now
the smell of box and damp leaves drifts from the woods where a blackbird
is warning of nightfall Bayle has plans to demolish
the ancient walls of the lane and level it wide
so that trucks can go all the way down to where the lambs
with perhaps two weeks to live are waiting for him at the wire
he hurries toward them while the sun sinks and the hour
turns chill as iron and in the oaks the first nightingales
of the year kindle their unapproachable voices

This is a farmed landscape. The managed walnut trees and the lucent wheat are part of what composes it, so are the sheep and dogs. And though the poem reacts with hostility to this active, pitiless neighbour, countrymen like him undoubtedly lie behind how this beloved landscape evolved in the first place, just as much as behind the shocking fresh scars of this particular day. 

This poem comes from The Vixen (1996), a whole collection set around the Dordogne farmhouse. Merwin made later visits to it, but this collection of 64 poems feels like a farewell, on a magnificent scale. 

A good few of them are available online, as from his many other collections: a testament both to the generosity of Merwin's estate and publisher (e.g. the many poems on the Merwin Conservancy site) and to the wide range of people who engage with his poetry.  Here's my working list of the contents of The Vixen, with links to the poems that are available to read. (I could have added more if I'd included The New Yorker, but that requires subscription.)

Fox Sleep      https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38456/fox-sleep

Oak Time      https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=38768

Gate       https://lemonhoundcom.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/michael-redhill-on-w-s-merwin/

Threshold      https://merwinconservancy.org/2017/03/threshold-by-w-s-merwin/

The West Window

Authority      https://hellopoetry.com/poem/14496/authority/

Walkers

Ill Wind

Net

Garden        https://merwinconservancy.org/2015/08/poem-of-the-week-garden/

Letters

Commemoratives

White Morning       https://merwinconservancy.org/2017/08/white-morning-by-w-s-merwin/

Color Merchants     https://merwinconservancy.org/2018/02/color-merchants-by-w-s-merwin/

Entry       https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=38766

Forgotten Streams    https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/laura-quinney-merwin/

Present

Passing

The Bird

Returning Season

End of a Day      https://merwinconservancy.org/2013/04/end-of-a-day/

Other Time

Francois De Maynard 1582-1646

Holderlin at the River   https://www.thefreelibrary.com/WAKE+UP+IN+A+WORLD+OF+LIGHT%3A+MEMORY%2C+GRIEF%2C+AND+TEMPORALITY+IN+W.+S....-a0531624067

In the Doorway

One of the Lives   https://poets.org/poem/one-lives

Night Singing      https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52823/night-singing

Untouched

Romanesque

Dry Ground     https://merwinconservancy.org/2016/05/dry-ground-by-w-s-merwin/

Battues

Snake

Vehicles      https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/07/w-s-merwin-twelve-poems/59028/

Late      https://www.writewithkathleen.com/blog/ws-merwin-helps-me-understand-what-defies-categorization

Season      https://merwinconservancy.org/2015/09/poem-of-the-week-season/

Emergence

The Speed of Light    https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/07/w-s-merwin-twelve-poems/59028/

Old Question

One Time

Peire Vidal      https://chloestrix.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/w-s-merwin-peire-vidal/

The View     https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39063

Old Walls

The Furrow     https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/en/Merwin%2C_W.S.-1927/The_Furrow

The Time Before     https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39224

Portrait     https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39483

Possessions

Legacies

The Red

Completion      https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39484

Passing    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39064

Substance

The Shortest Night     https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39222

A Taste

Upland House

Bodies of Water

After Fires

Thread

The Cisterns

Ancestral Voices

Old Sound

Green Fields    https://merwinconservancy.org/2016/04/green-fields-by-ws-merwin/ 

Distant Morning

Vixen    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52824/vixen

A Given Day.

The kitchen at Lacan de Loubressac

[Image source: https://lithub.com/windows-to-the-world-at-ws-merwins-old-french-farmhouse/ . Photo by Michael Wiegers.]