jolly hill of grapes

 

and moreover wasps and bees are born as worms and when the lion steps on a stone-oak leaf his whole body turns to stone and the beaver bites off its testicles when it is hunted and the hyena is sometimes male sometimes female and is sometimes impregnated by others and sometimes impregnates others and therefore that creature is impure because its nature is mixed and changeable and when the hedgehog enters a garden he lies on his side under the grapes and spears the grapes on his spines and heads back home like a jolly hill of grapes and the elephant feels no desire for marriage so she wanders east where Paradise lies and tears a mandrake from the ground with her trunk which exudes a seductive scent and makes her pregnant and funniest of all is of course the unicorn which is caught by a virgin baring her breast and letting it suckle and then the hunters come and tie him up and life is finite for anyone who comes into being through reproduction and the parrotfish is the only fish that chews the cud

and moreover our life is the wasps nest or swallows nest that we build for ourselves and everything is different in different places because in Florence Savonarola has forced the servants to spy on their masters and the children on their parents and on bonfires they throw masquerade costumes and books by Boccaccio and Petrarch and perfume and mirrors and musical instruments and chessboards and all the paintings depicting naked female beauty and the moral children dance in a ring round the bonfire in triple rings moreover and chant Savonarolas words about the Church of Prostitution whose poisonous stinking breath rises up to despairing Heaven and the Pope sits sullenly in Rome and curses the tumult

but in Bologna it is the exact opposite because there a doctor can blaspheme against the underhand Christ who deserved his death on the cross and still be let off after a simple expression of regret

and in the worlds heart Rome the Popes eldest son is murdered by his younger son and his corpse is found in the Tiber with nine stab wounds in his throat and is carried in a torchlight procession to his resting place while the Pope cries and refuses to eat for three days and it is the first fast the Pope has submitted to and everyone whispers that his murderer son Cesare loves his sister Lucrezia passionately and that her eldest brother was murdered out of jealousy because he also loved her and for the first time in my life I heard about the disease

(pp 10-11)

someone told me that Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India around the southern tip of Africa and when the Portuguese reached the equator the astrolabe stopped working

the nearer you got to the equator the nearer the North Star approached the horizon and when you crossed the line the star disappeared entirely

there is thus a place where all instruments fail and it became a peculiar point in my mind and the point became a dream hall where I could send all dangerous thoughts and bizarre sounds and secret tones and the order of words and amidst the tempting mythology surrounding the wild carnival in Rome and the fratricide Cesare Borgias feats as a newlywed lover with eight orgasms a day in front of an open curtain I found myself sitting with Double Vigilance before Priscian's Latin grammar and enjoying the images of the initials and listening to the expositions of Thomas Aquinas about everything that "God" is not

he is not moved and simultaneously he is not still

and he is like a human being?

no

he is his own essence and his own existence and he lacks a body because he is not composed.

for a body consists of parts

but if we are his parts?

no

we are divided into Essence and Existence while He is Essence and Existence simultaneously and forever

while we change existence now and then

we did not understand the meaning of this and I know that even today an old woman sits a few houses away from here pouring oil into a cup of water and watching with staring eyes the shapes of the oil on the surface of the water

(pp. 12-13)

*

These are two extracts from the early pages of Molza, älskaren (Molza, the lover), a 1988 novel by Torbjörn Säfve.

The Italian poet Francesco Molza (1489 - 1544) lies dying of syphilis. In these extracts he recalls his childhood in Modena (c. 1500), his education and the sensational stories that reached him even then.

stone-oak: the Holm Oak.

parrotfish: this ancient observation (e.g. by Aristotle) identified the fish's constant mechanical grinding of dead corals with cows chewing the cud.

the shapes of the oil: a type of divination called lecanomancy. 

Inquiry of bowl divination and necromancy: Whenever you want to inquire about matters, take a bronze vessel, either a bowl or a saucer, whichever you prefer. Pour water into it—rainwater, if you call on the heavenly gods, seawater, if [you call] on the gods of the earth, river water, if you call on Osiris or Sarapis, spring water, if you call on the dead. Holding the vessel on your knees, pour green olive oil into it. Bend over the vessel and recite the prescribed spell. Address any god you desire and ask him any questions you wish. He will reply and tell you everything. After he has spoken to you, dismiss him with the dismissal formula. Having used this spell, you will be amazed. 

Spell to be recited over the water: amoun auantau riptou mantauiimantou .... etc

Translated from the Egyptian magical text PGM IV, aka the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, copy of c. 4th century CE but probably much older.

From Yvette Hunt, "Exploring Ancient Lecanomancy", University of Queensland, 2019.

https://www.academia.edu/39640230/Exploring_Ancient_Lecanomancy

*

Here's a Google Translate of what Swedish Wikipedia says about Torbjörn Säfve (omitting references, links, etc):

Lars Torbjörn Säfve, also known as Ali Touba, born 6 July 1941 in Jukkasjärvi parish, Norrbotten County, is a Swedish author and debater. Säfve lives in Haddebo in Närke.

Biography

Torbjörn Säfve was born in Kiruna, but the family moved to Luleå and the Malmudden district when he was two years old. After graduating from Luleå Higher General Education in 1962, he moved south, settling first in Uppsala, then in Stockholm. Säfve studied literature and philosophy at Uppsala University from 1963 to 1966 and from 1968 to 1971. During his time as an active member of the Norrland Nation at Uppsala University, where he has been an honorary member since 2001, he was chairman of the Debating Society. In his youth, Säfve was also an active Maoist as well as describing himself as an "anarcho-Stalinist".

He was a directing student at the Stockholm Film School from 1966 to 1968 and made the film Masturbationsdrama and the short film Montebello in 1967, in which, among others, the actress Ulla-Britt Norrman made her film debut. Säfve then returned to Norrbotten and lived for a number of years in Luleå before moving south again. Säfve is very interested in boxing, and boxing is also the theme of several of his books. Siki (1977), Gorilla (1986) and Druidparken (1996) are three novels on the theme. In 1973 he competed in the New 10,000-Kronor Question on the subject of professional boxing.

He has converted to Islam and professes Sufism, and there is a statue in the Örnäset district of Luleå. Säfve regularly contributes to the Islamic cultural magazine Minaret. His Islamic name is Ali Touba.

Norrland Nation: Uppsala University has a number of student "Nations" relating to regions of Sweden. Membership of a Nation was formerly obligatory for students. Uppsala's Nations are loosely comparable to Oxbridge colleges, or Durham ones anyway. 

Debating Society: The Norrland Nation's Talförening was once famous, and the post of chairman was considered quite prestigious. It existed from c. 1900 until 1972. 

New 10,000-Kronor Question: This was the name of a relaunch of the long-running Swedish TV quiz show Double Or Quits, based on the US show The 64,000 Dollar Question. 

Omar Khayaam

Rubā‘ī C 134 from the Calcutta MS

[Image source: from Edward Heron-Allen (2), link below.]

AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

    And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultán's Turret in a Noose of Light.

(Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1st edition, 1859)

WAKE! For the Sun who scatter'd into flight

The Stars before him from the Field of Night,

   Drives Night along with them from Heav'n,                                                                    and strikes

The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

(Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th edition, 1879. Unchanged in the posthumous 5th edition.)

The Sun casts the noose of morning upon the roofs,

Kai Khosrū of the day, he throws a stone into the bowl:

Drink wine! for the Herald of the Day, rising up,

Hurls into the days the cry of "Drink ye!"

(Edward Heron-Allen's literal translation of Rubā‘ī C 134, 1899)

While Dawn, Day's herald straddling the whole sky,

Offers the drowsy world a toast 'To Wine',

The Sun spills early gold on city roofs –

Day's regal Host, replenishing his jug.

(Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam, 1967)

*

Kai Khosrū or Kay Khosrow, a legendary king of Iran whose story is told in the Shahnahmeh. He was brought up in exile in the desert. He avenged the murder of his father Siavash, ruled for sixty years, and finally disappeared mysteriously into the mountains. He is named later (Fitzgerald 1st edition 9, Graves/Shah 9)

Throwing a stone in the bowl. According to Heron-Allen it was a Bedouin signal to strike camp. No more drinking, so to speak? But the Calcutta MS is anomalous: most other texts of this Rubā‘ī throw "wine" (badeh) rather than a "stone" (sakhareh) into the bowl, which is a better fit with the lines that come next. (Though personally I think the stone is more exciting.) Anyway, maybe that's why Fitzgerald rejigged his opening stanza (while making it even less of a translation). 

[Image source: from Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam (1967), p. 72. This is the same rubā‘ī as C 134, but with the word "wine" (badeh) instead of "stone" (sakhareh). They don't specify the manuscript that's reproduced here.]

*

Omar Khayyam (or "Khayaam", in Graves and Ali-Shah), 1048 - 1131, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, from Nishapur (NE Iran, not far from the borders with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan). 

In his 1174 anthology of Arabic poetry Kharidat al-qasr (Pearl Pendant of the Palace), Imad al-Din al-Isfahani describes Omar as a poet and quotes four short Arabic poems. 

But the poems with which Omar is associated all over the world are quatrains in Persian (Rubā‘iyāt). These Rubā‘iyāt were independent, pithy, memorable poems that were at first orally shared. It was a popular form, I suppose, somewhat comparable to haiku in Japan or bayati in Azerbaijan. Over time a good many Rubā‘iyāt were attributed to Omar. Perhaps they were the ones especially characterized by a sceptical flavour, appropriate to a renowned philosopher in the Greek tradition. The upshot is an "Omarian" literature, around 1200 quatrains in all. The main manuscripts are diwans, implying the collected work of a single author (what's more, one who constantly refers to himself by name), but their contents vary enormously. It's possible that the historical mathematician Omar didn't write a single one of these poems. But supposing he did, was it half a dozen, thirty-five, a hundred, 250? Readers and scholars have had many different impressions of a more authentic or central core.

What many have sought, Omar Ali-Shah claimed to possess. A twelfth-century manuscript of "uncontradictable authority" containing 111 Rubā‘iyāt. Reading his words (p. 32), you have the feeling that Ali-Shah hardly expected anyone to believe this, noting that at any rate the chosen 111 quatrains were all in one or more of the older manuscripts in  libraries (manuscripts, in other words, that actually exist). Whether his co-translator Robert Graves fully grasped the rules of the game is rather an open question.  But both translators wanted to fashion Omar anew, that is, to reclaim the poetry from what they saw as Edward Fitzgerald's imposition of 19th-century scepticism and hedonism. The idea that Fitzgerald had misrepresented Omar had been around a long time. Fitzgerald himself remarked (preface to Third Edition): 

While the second Edition of this version of Omar was preparing, Monsieur Nicolas, French Consul at Resht, published a very careful and very good Edition of the Text, from a lithograph copy at Teheran, comprising 464 Rubaiyat, with translation and notes of his own.

Mons. Nicolas, whose Edition has reminded me of several things, and instructed me in others, does not consider Omar to be the material Epicurean that I have literally taken him for, but a Mystic, shadowing the Deity under the figure of Wine, Wine-bearer, &c., as Hafiz is supposed to do; in short, a Sufi Poet like Hafiz and the rest.

I cannot see reason to alter my opinion. . .

(Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, Les Quatrains de Khèyam (1867), link below.)

A great deal depends on whether the Omarian poems came from a wine-drinking culture or a teetotal one. A simple question, not so easy to answer conclusively. If nobody drank wine but everyone wrote about it, then yes, it probably signified something else.  

It's a kind of debate that I recognize from my student days, when I was navigating the literature of medieval Christendom. Our favourite poets (Chaucer, Gottfried, Chrétien, Marie de France, Guillaume de Lorris) so often seemed daring, heterodox, rebellious... We were thrilled and a bit taken aback by their seeming failure to comply with the orthodoxy of a very authoritarian age. But were we hopelessly deluded, selectively picking out what spoke to our own Age of Faithlessness, grossly ignorant of the tremendous sophistication of a very different culture, profoundly addicted to literalism and averse to allegory, the most fundamental tool of the imaginative artist in that era of the Ovide Moralisé? Those were the questions raised by D.W. Robertson, Jr and his colleagues. Whether their own interpretations were any better than ours was a moot point, but the methodological issue couldn't be dodged. Since it was medieval poetry we were reading, what did that mean for how we go about reading it? We lived in a time when intuitive common sense was constantly being proved wrong: in psychology, biology, economics, to name but three glaring examples. So why would we continue to trust our common-sense intuitions when reading the poetry of a very different culture? 

Graves and Ali-Shah were offering a counter-Fitzgerald, but their poem owes a lot to his. Most real Persian manuscripts present their quatrains in Diwan order (that is, alphabetical order of the final letter of the end-rhyme of lines 1, 2 and 4). It was Fitzgerald himself who chose to begin with a quatrain about the dawn that he picked out of the Calcutta manuscript (C 134 in Heron-Allen's numbering). Fitzgerald was constructing an elegy that would begin in the hopeful dawn, wander through a garden, and reserve its most searching and desolate summations for dusk. But Ali-Shah's purported 800-year-old manuscript turned out to be in more or less the same sequence as the one Fitzgerald himself had constructed; dawn at the beginning, the garden, the musings of the pots, the fall of night... 

*

Except they don't end with the starkness of Khayyam's empty glass, but in a more pious state of fragile hope. 

LXXV

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on The Grass,
   And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!

TAMÁM SHUD.

(Final stanza of Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1st edition, 1859.)

CI.

 And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass
 Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
   And in your joyous errand reach the spot
 Where I made One--turn down an empty Glass!

TAMAM.

(Final stanza of Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th edition, 1879. Unchanged in the posthumous 5th edition.)

107

Sweet friends, in joy assembled here together,

Never forget us, once your sweetest friends.

Before you greet the jug, Khayaam adjures you:

When his turn comes, turn down his empty bowl.

108

Khayaam, who stitched the hides for Wisdom's tent

Has tumbled in Grief's clutches. He lies burning;

The shears of Death have closed upon his guys

And Hope the Broker sells him for a song.

109

Fools, with damnation as your destiny,

Sentenced to fuel the eternal fires of Hell, 

How long will you still plead for Omar's pardon,

Nudging his mercy from the Merciful?

110

Though pearls in praise of God I never strung,

Though dust of sin lies clotted on my brow,

Yet will I not despair of mercy. When

Did Omar argue that the One was Two?

111

The palace with huge walls soaring to Heaven,

Where prostrate Kings did reverence at the gate –

A ring-dove perches on its battlements;

'Where, where?' it coos, 'where, where?'

(Final five stanzas of Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam, 1967.)

TAMÁM SHUD, TAMAM: FINIS.

Though pearls in praise of God...  This is the first rubā‘ī in the 15th-century Ouseley MS in the Bodleian Library; like some other diwan collections, the Ouseley MS starts with a couple of praise poems that are not in diwan sequence. (See Edward Heron-Allen (1), linked below.) The Ouseley MS was Fitzgerald's main source of rubā‘iyāt, but he made no use of this one; evidently he thought it was spurious (see his Preface to the 5th edition). Graves and Ali-Shah, on the other hand, deployed its firm monotheism to ring in the departing reader's ears. 

The palace with huge walls... Fitzgerald translated this in his 2nd edition (quatrain 20), but then dropped the idea. 

*

The five editions of Edward Fitzgerald's poem, on Wikisource.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Fitzgerald)

The first and fifth editions, on Project Gutenberg.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/246/246-h/246-h.htm

Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, Les Quatrains de Khèyam, 1867. His 464 quatrains don't include a parallel to C 134, as far as I can see. 

https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Quatrains_de_Kh%C3%A8yam

Edward Heron-Allen (1), The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyām: Being A Facsimile of the Manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, with a Transcript into Modern Persian Characters; Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, and Some Sidelights upon Edward Fitzgerald's Poem, by Edward Heron-Allen (2nd Edition, 1898).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pqNfHgsRvHEC&pg=PR22&dq=edward+heron-allen+ouseley&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjcitG_z7GWAxUsR0EAHdubLLIQuwV6BAgLEAg#v=onepage&q=edward%20heron-allen%20ouseley&f=false

Edward Heron-Allen (2), Edward Fitzgerald's Rubâ‘iyât of Omar Khayyâm, With their Original Persian Sources Collated from his Own MSS., and Literally Translated (1899).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ahe95OSJZ1MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=edward+heron-allen+rubaiyat&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

*

On the Rubā‘ī form in Persian literature:

https://kamaustine.com/2025/08/19/what-are-persian-quatrains-rubaiyat/

*

Medieval European literature: exegetical methodologies, contrasted with new critical methodology.

I found a lively outline of this debate in Paul A. Olson's 2017 Foreword to D.W Robertson Jr's Uncollected Essays.  

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188&context=englishfacpubs

The three friends

The three friends. 20 November, 2025.

One evening last November I was walking up the alley and noticed that someone had chucked out some bedding plants. They lay on the gravel, out of their pots and with very little soil on their roots, but in the November gloom you could still see a flower or two, like a lost bead.  

After a couple of days I took it into my head to try and rescue them. There were two geraniums (pelargoniums I mean), one of which had shut up shop, but the other was still making a gallant effort to produce new flowers. There was also a begonia with dark red leaves, but it was so tiny and bedraggled I didn't expect much from it.

Anyway, they were company. Back home in Swindon, I potted them up and sat them on a recycling bin in my porch, where the sun sometimes reached them. 

The three friends indoors. 11 December, 2025.

Nothing much changed through the winter. They didn't die, was about the best you could say. It was a mild winter and there was little danger of frost in the back of the porch. All the same there were a few nights when I brought them inside. The induction hob seemed like the perfect spot to plonk them.

Then in April I moved back to Frome, so I passed them on to a friend with a garden. She took care of them, potted them on, kept them watered through the long dry summer. Here's what they looked like last week.

The two pelargoniums, 6 August 

Pelargonium is a southern hemisphere genus, mostly southern Africa (some in Australia). The ancestors of our garden hybrids are predominantly South African. 

Classifying the garden types is phenomenally complicated. Typical schemes involve up to twenty categories. I think both of my plants would fall into the zonal category, though only one of them shows the zonal marking on the leaves. 

It's become a blur already. The one fact I'll retain is that in Pelargonium each bunch of flower buds is considered a pseudoumbel, because the flowers don't all bloom at the same time. 

The begonia, 2 August 2026.

Begonia is one of the largest plant families. Aside from its 2,000 wild species there are endless hybrids and cultivars. 

I think this is what they call a wax begonia: plants of many different colours but all with rounded gleaming fleshy leaves and small cheerful flowers. They are grown as bedding annuals (though as my plant demonstrates they are not actually annuals).

The wax begonias (Begonia x sempervirens-cultorum) are cultivars with several species in their makeup. One of them is Begonia cucullata, native to Argentina, Brazil, etc. -- The Wikipedia entry is fairly informative.

When I did some image matching on my plant I kept hitting references to Begonia sparreana. Frustratingly, I still can't decide if there's any substance to this. 

Begonia sparreana is a plant endemic to Ecuador, rather threatened in its native habitat (moist tropical lowland forest on the Amazonian side of the Andes). From the invaluable Missouri Botanical Garden site (it's free to use, but you have to create an account) I downloaded Jorgensen and Léon-Yánez's Catalogue of the Vascular Plants of Ecuador, which is fascinating about Ecuador plant life in general, but it doesn't describe individual species, and as far as B. sparreana was concerned I wasn't much the wiser (it's on p. 318). 

Much of the internet fluff derived from the English and Spanish Wikipedia entries for B. sparreana, which both appear to show an image of a standard wax begonia just like mine, snapped in a British garden. (I couldn't find any images of B. sparreana in its native habitat.)

Do wax begonias with burgundy leaves and pink flowers have B. sparreana in their ancestry? It's tempting to dismiss it as a simple error replicated dozens of times, but I found just enough variation in my search hits to leave the matter in doubt. 

For example Casey Elizabeth Dennis has a post showing B. sparreana as a hanging basket type of begonia with small pink flowers on bright red stems (there's a picture). Different from my plant, but not so different as to rule out any connection.  Yet her lengthy post has a naggingly synthetic feel, suggesting it's mostly computer-generated. So is B. sparreana really a thing, in the horticulture world? I still don't know. 

https://plantophiles.com/plant-care/begonia-sparreana/

Afterwards I had a nightmare vision of a future in which human beings can no longer find anything out from the internet, because truth and falsehood have become inextricably tangled. Only Al can work the internet. Al can't tell the difference between true and false, but it can chew through so much data that the truth mostly lands uppermost. And true or not, there's no means of questioning it.

My SF dystopian fiction has begun!

The two pelargoniums, 10 August 2026.