Photo: CERN
by Brett Rutherford
Although I am nothing, really,
ten thousand aspiring
physicists have published papers
claiming some intimate knowledge
of my attributes.
If some of these papers
are pasted together
from other papers,
and my name dropped in
at random to secure fame
and instant promotion,
do not be surprised.
I join the ranks of ether,
orgone, and phlogiston.
My name is dropped
with finality, to explain
anything whatever
at a cocktail party.
String Theory?
How “yesterday!”
No matter how
you squint, or turn
the pages of formulas
that claim to prove me,
I am not there at all.
I soon expect
to become an ingredient
in food supplements,
and fill black stones
in costume jewelry.
Homeopathic labels
will list me as key
to infinite dilution.
Massless,
weightless,
colorless,
spinless,
of no particular
political party,
uninterested
in evolution or progress,
I am nonetheless
on everyone’s lips.
I may be the God particle,
but I do not attend Mass.
Without an altar
on any planet,
I am more famous
than Jesus
or the Beatles, already.
Get with it, morons!
On your knees, fools!
The Boson cometh!
by Brett Rutherford
Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “March 1871”
Back-to-back. Mourning after mourning.
Ah! the ordeal redoubles.
So it goes. This pensive man can bear it;
this pensive man appears untroubled.
Certainly, it is good that some are made this way.
When robust pains attack savants,
soldiers and hardened fighters,
tribunes, or apostles,
who have devoted their lives to righteous things,
they remain standing no matter what.
You have seen it, Guernsey,[1]
you have seen it, Caprera.[2]
Once a consciousness is fixed,
then nothing will falter there.
For, whatever the wind that blows on their flame,
deep principles do not tremble in the soul,
for it is in the infinite that their calm fire shines.
For the sinister hurricane, fierce by night
can shake its shadows and dark webs up there,
without once causing the stars
to move or stray in their fixed folds.
by Brett Rutherford
Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “March 1871.”
From the fields, the animal roar of drum-beats.
Windless, the flags hang limp at half-mast.
From the Bastille we march to the foot
of the dreary hill where the ages past sleep
next to the living century beneath the cypresses.
The mute wind moves no branches.
The people have weapons on their arms;
they are in respite from their own struggles.
The people are sad; somber they stand, and full of thought/
Silently, their large battalions form a hedge around the grave.
The dead son is there,
and the father longing for the tomb is there,
one yesterday still valiant, robust and handsome,
the hiding the tears on his face, is old;
and each legion greets them as they pass.
O people! O majesty of sweetness immense!
Paris, city of sunlight, you whom the invader
assailed and was unable to conquer,
and whom he has incarnadined with blood,
you whom one day we will see, amid a royal orgy,
emerge, with lightning on your forehead,
like the Commendatore,[1]
O city, you have this height
of grandeur to pay mind to the pain of one man.
To find a soul in Sparta
and to see a heart in Rome,
nothing is more admirable;
and Paris has tamed the universe
by the force through which we feel goodness.
These people are heroes; these people are righteous.
They do much more than conquer: they love.
O august city, that day everything trembled,
when the revolutions rumbled, and in their mist,
through the rays, you saw re-open before you
that terrible shadow which sometimes opens wide
before great peoples; and the man who followed
his son’s coffin paused to admire you,
you who, ready for all proud challenges,
unfortunate, made humanity prosperous.
Dark, he felt like a son at the same time as a father,
a father when thinking of him,
a son when thinking of this city.
May this illustrious young fighter full of faith,
gone into the deep place that calls for us all,
O people, keep your great soul forever close to him!
You gave it to him, people, in this supreme farewell.
That up in the superb freedom of the blue sky,
he witnesses, holding on high an unseen weapon,
the struggles of duty, and carries them on.
Law is not law only here below;
the dead are living people still fraught in our battles,
sometimes having good, sometimes evil as their targets;
sometimes we feel their invisible arrows passing by.
We believe them to be absent. No, they are present;
we get past the earth, the days, the tears,
but there is no getting past fate.
The tomb is our sublime extension.
We wake up there surprised
to have thought we ever fell.
As into the deeper azure the swallow migrates,
we enter happier into an even greater duty.
We see the useful with the right parallel;
and on our own wings we are carried out of the shadow.
O my blessed son, serve France,
from the middle of this abyss of love that we call God.
It is not to sleep that we die,
no, it is to do from above
what our humble sphere does below;
only to do it better, only to do it well.
We only have the goal, heaven has the means.
Death is a passage where everything changes to grow;
who was an athlete on earth
is in the abyss an archangel;
on earth we are limited, on earth we are banished;
but up there we grow without hindering the infinite.
the soul can display its sudden scope there;
it is by losing your body that you regain your form.
Go then, my son! go then, spirit! become a torch.
Shine! Glide into the immense tomb!
Serve France. For God places in it a mystery,
for you now know what the earth does not know,
for the truth shines where eternity shines,
for as we see only night, it is light
that leads you forth.
—Paris, March 18.
[1] Royal orgy … Commendatore. I take this to be a reference to the last act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the corrupt Don Giovanni, amid a wild dinner party, is interrupted by the arrival of the ghost of the Commander whom he had murdered. The earth opens up, and Don Giovanni is dragged into Hell by his ghost-visitor.
The 15th century poet Kabir writes:
by Brett Rutherford
Based on an
Old Assyrian Hymn,
(Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judentum, ii, 413.)
Sleep not on your back, for Lilith comes,
and from your seed her progeny shall rise.
If warts and boils assail you, they are
the lip-prints of Lilith’s kisses, beware!
An evil demon has enveloped your bed.
An evil ghost prevents your rising.
A great devil has taken your breath
and made all your hairs to stand on end.
Bewail at morning the hag-demon’s clutch,
the breath of a ghoul still fresh in our mouth.
The robber-sprite makes dim your eyes
and no mortal human beauty ravishes you;
only the thought of dark pollution pleases you.
Your limbs are wracked by an evil goddess,
the Night-Phantom’s Handmaid
has made you her groom.
And when you die, alone, unshriven,
the legion of your invisible children,
pale kindred of your nocturnal emissions
shall crowd about and call you ‘Father.’
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, March 1871.
Charles! Charles! O my son! O Death, what now?
My son has been taken from me.
All, flying away from me, everything,
to make me know that nothing can
last!
Into the great clarity obscure to us,
you have vanished in an instant.
I, in my sunset, see Charles, my east, perish.
How we loved one another, father and son.
A man, alas, creates and dreams, and smilingly binds
his soul to other souls. He tells himself
it shall be always thus, and goes about his way.
Commencing his own descent in years,
he lives, he suffers, the price of being,
and suddenly in the palm of his hand,
he holds nothing but ashes.
It seems but yesterday
when an emperor proscribed me.
Two decades, hemmed in by the seas,
I stayed away, my spirit bruised.
Fate reaches down to each and all,
striking for reasons all his own.
God took away my homeland.
I have only one son, one daughter left.
Here I am almost alone in this shadow
within which I walk forward.
God ekes my family away from me.
Oh! stay, you two who still remain
with me!
our nests fall down, but your mother blesses you
out of dark death, and I, in bitter life, bless you.
Yes, in the manner of the martyr of Zion,
I will go on and complete my struggle,
and I will continue the harsh ascent
which feels more like the fall.
Following the truth is enough for me,
seeing nothing but the great sublime goal.
I walk, in mourning, but proud.
Behind duty I march straight to the abyss.
