Like a Straw Bird It
Follows Me, and Other
Poems
Translated by Fady Joudah
Yale University Press (2012)
$26, 121 pages
Translations ‘About’ Ghassan Zaqtan: On The Powers Of Laughter
‘the deep brotherhood that leads to no wisdom
the talk that’s no longer suitable for high altitude.
’ from ‘The Canyon’
The hermeneutic temptation to read these details as symbols and to search for their hidden meaning should be resisted: they are exposed fragments of the real which resist meaning. The meaning of their context—the terrible situation of the Shoah—is too traumatic to be assumed, so this sudden focus on material details serves the purpose of keeping meaning at a distance.' Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing
A Healing Art, Or
Antinomy In The Poetry
Of Norbert Hirschhorn
Published: Spring 2013, The Warwick Review
‘…At the Oasis Café someone asks,
where are you from? I reply, I am from disjointed frag-
ments of time. Someone says, Answer the question.
I answer, I am from you. Someone persists, but when
I’m gone? I say: I am from my words.’
‘Qaseeda – A Love Song’ in Monastery of the Moon
Norbert Hirschhorn, MD, is both a distinguished physician and a distinguished poet. What I would like to suggest in this article commending his work, is that in many different ways the two ‘vocations’ are deeply cognate. The ground of this article are Hirschhorn’s three extant collections: A Cracked River (Slow Dancer Press, 1999); Mourning in the Presence of a Corpse (Dar al-Jadeed, 2008); and, very recently, Monastery of the Moon (Dar al-Jadeed, 2012).
To start with: perhaps there is a generic way in which the medical profession dovetails with the literary: I can think of three immediate examples off the top of my head. Mikhail Bulgakov, Primo Levi, and Lawrence Durrell (this last never was a doctor, but from Ian MacNiven’s Faber biography, I learnt that later in life the one profession he wished he’d pursued apart from writing, was medical.) Perhaps the generic commonality is the vocation of ‘healing’ – something I deal with below in the flesh, so to speak; or perhaps, more formally, it is to do with modality – being detached, an observer of life, of the living and the dying, aloof like Joyce’s famous Godly artist paring his fingernails?
Dancing About Rodin
Published: Spring 2013, Poetry Ireland Review
Patricia McCarthy, Rodin’s Shadow (Clutag Press & Agenda Editions, 2012),
p. 110, ISBN: 978-1-908527-09-7
‘I start to work in dawns: hiding-places
re-opened in the winded breath of statues.’
From ‘Exercises for Two Hands’
‘Oh waltz and waltz through me
who should have been your bride.’
From ‘The Waltz’
In his first work (I believe), The Romantic Image, the late Sir Frank Kermode spent the central chapters dilating on Yeats’ image of a ‘dancer’ wholly spent in the ‘dance;’ Kermode suggests that this was emblematic of the symbolic turn into modernism. Much the same phenomenon as that aphoristically elicited in the ‘Princess Lizard’ section of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the beloved image is imagined or fantasized as without individuation or depth of her own – that projected lacuna allowing for the constitutional need of the lover to ‘stage’ a ‘rescue’; the idea being that a symbolically-precocious loving gaze, that of a deeply imaginative man, needs such a tabula rasa upon which to bestow his erstwhile surfeit of ego. Patricia McCarthy’s Debussy speaks, thus: ‘Despite your claim // to dislike music, you gave me the naked flesh / of ultimate sound to compose into courtship // in the small hours...’
Sudeep Sen’s The
HarperCollins Book of
English Poetry (by Indians)
Published: Spring 2013, Agenda
‘One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow,
and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt
and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.’
— theodor w. adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through The Past’
Long, long ago, I read an essay in George Steiner’s Language and Silence, on the ‘baroque’ novels that were and are Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. In it Steiner made an observation that has remained with me: he said that reading Durrell’s ‘brassy’ prose he felt he was reading an author who was just now discovering each word and the language; something like that anyway. And the impression has proved right in my own case: having the ‘music’ of another tongue envelope me from my childhood, I find my relationship to my (native) English that much more precious: in the sense of gems, jewels, not affectation of any sort (most of the time, at least). Perhaps this reflexive realization informs the way I read this endlessly minable anthology of postcolonial English poetry by Indians, a volume — as though in love with the language — that has stirred me.
On Fiona Sampson’s
Coleshill
Published: Winter 2013/14, The London Magazine
‘If only form
were language...’
(‘Dreamsongs’)
‘We tremble,
feeling everything’s in motion,
and that feeling goes to and fro
in the world that shivers round us –
World, too, is something poured
and endlessly pouring itself.’
(‘Sonnet Twelve -- Deer At Middleleaze’)
‘only a part of me feels free
to shape the words I lack.’
(‘The Soloist’)
In her latest collection, Coleshill, Fiona Sampson remakes her authorial space in direct continuity with the modernist tradition. Much like modernist (and late modernist) icons, such as Ford, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, or – a known favorite of Sampson’s – Durrell, the poetry in this superlative collection speaks with uncanny authority from and in the space before or, thereby, beyond the discrete ego’s organization. However, where the idea of the ‘spirit of place’ fits, say, Durrell, under the ‘idea of spatial form’ (Joseph Frank), where time or narrative becomes a radically sliding, eliding, relative enterprise, Sampson’s verse seems to me to be sourced and targeted at a slightly different gambit.
The Headiness,
The Heaviness Of
Womanhood
Published: Autumn 2012, Agenda
‘I train to the trellis what once was wrecked,
and await the springtime of candling plants.’
‘Walls Have Ears’
This superb collection opens on a heady, dizzying note, which is at the same time atoned by the formal choices made. Out of the shifting and sly juxtaposition of subjects and pronouns in ‘My Last Rochester’ – ‘She, her, you, him –’ we are faced with experience in medias res, what Sir Frank Kermode called a ‘middleness,’ and what one of the founders of modernism, Ford Madox Ford, called an ‘affair.’ The (disenchanting) last line of this opening poem reads ‘It was never you that she wanted,’ thereby suggesting what this poem, as a whole, effects, namely a corrective to an hackneyed and male portrayal of femininity. As opposed to the idea of some kind of ‘empty signifier’, where a woman is what whatever bad infinity is desired of her, we have in this last sentence a tonic; not to mention the assertiveness of lines in the blunt indicative like, ‘She’s writing after so long, sensible or not. / She’s not asking for anything, not ever.’ Another rewriting of masculine, skewed views of femininity, is offered by the formal pattern, which is by turns synchronic/contrapuntal and diachronic, of the first and third verses, and the second and fourth verses, corresponding – leading to the pursuant development of the last two verses. When Brigley writes, ‘you both made your way to the hotel in silence…’ what is evoked is not only intimacy, but also her ability to stand outside of herself, to not be a victim of her experience, but its shaper, both within and without the poetic space.
The Virtue Of Not Being
Able To Totalize: On D.
Nurkse’s Voices Over
Water
Publish:2013, ENVOI
‘…and he wished in secret
there was another man strong as he on our island,
so he might kill instead of simply dying.’
‘The Island Gospel’
To start slantwise, and to justify later, the guiding spirit over this memorable volume of plosive poetry is, for my purposes, Mikhail Bulgakov. As I read Nurkse’s work, its major tenor for me is that of a magical realism. Just as Bulgakov’s limited hero in The Master and Margarita only achieves ‘peace’ rather than ‘light’ at the conclusion of his magisterial novel – as index of his limitedness – so for me the major pattern to emerge from this volume is, if you like, the impossibility of totalization, or of experience going neatly into one valence or another. In a way, what I intend to suggest below is what Theodor Adorno once criticized Walter Benjamin for, in his work on Baudelaire, namely an un-mediated or we might say un-processed combination of ‘magic’ and ‘positivism.’ This, for me, is of the essence of Nurkse’s effects: namely a deadpan demotic, a ruthless colloquialism which shapes a kind of (exilic) experience that points – but intransitively – beyond the plain of immanence. To complicate this picture, and to add texture to it, let me begin with the beginning and ending of the volume – which contrapuntal parallelism may well suggest that at a higher level of abstraction, the content of what I tease out below, is contradicted; which, if I too am thinking poetically in my interpreting, both proves my point, and I guess, refutes it – which, again, is the point. (I am not trying to be funny….)
Worldliness Far From Cynicism, Or, The Fallen-ness Of The Un-fallen: On Marilyn Hacker’s Names And Essays On Departure
Published: Spring 2013, Agenda
‘To want substance in cognition is to want a utopia.
It is this consciousness of possibility that sticks to the concrete, the
undisfigured.’
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Introduction,’ Negative Dialectics
‘Exiles, at least, have clarity of purpose:
can say my town, my mother and my fate, my country.’
from ‘Ghazal: dar al-harb’
As the epigraphs above intimate, there is a very strong case for saying that true ‘Otherness’ isn’t truly occluded as Other. The otherness or adequate transcendence Adorno invokes belongs in a sense only to God. This (very poetic) philosopher wishes for an Adamic naming, an (impossible) Adamic concept, where thing and word are immanently one. Similarly, the poet’s ‘clarity’ is the clarity of those ‘beyond’ the Pale.
A woman, a feminist, a (non-Zionist) Jew, a lesbian, Marilyn Hacker partakes of this paradox. ‘[E]piphanous’ or ‘ephemeral’ (‘Lauds’), mise-en-abyme or thoroughgoing Adamic closure, age and innocence, hope and despair, agency and impotence, among many of the woven and processual dichotomies which inhabit this collection – there is a sense in which Hacker’s poetic persona is an Other to (her own) Otherness. So when she writes in the final stanza of ‘For Kateb Yacine:’
Aspects of Indefiniteness and Definiteness in
George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Published: 2005, in The George Eliot Review
As notions come of abstractions, so images come of
experiences; the more fully the mind is occupied by
an experience, the keener will be its assent to it…and
on the other hand, the duller will be its assent and the less
operative, the more it is engaged with an abstraction…
John Henry Newman
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other,
for images are the brood of desire…
George Eliot
On my first reading of Middlemarch I noticed immediately in my pedantic way the word ‘indefinite’ repeated throughout the novel. Later, having thought about the novel at a little more depth, I realised how significant this was. The ideas of indefiniteness and its opposite, by themselves and cashed out in terms of other kindred antitheses, are central to the overall meaning of the novel- viewed formally and simply as a story. Below, in addition to their own significance, I have translated the terms ‘indefinite’ and ‘definite’ into other sets of antitheses, such as abstract and concrete; general or universal and particular; whole and part; ideal and real; external and internal. These different senses often overlap and I believe this validates my decision to use them as siblings to the indefinite/definite antithesis. The fact that they recur and confirm each other’s antitheses in different ways hopefully shows that their conceptual coupling corresponds to a more fundamental philosophic unity. And so what follows is an exploration in search of some of the places in the novel where these antithetic meanings can be teased out. I will begin by discussing formal features of the novel and will then descend to a closer look at its content.
The Virtue Of Not Being Able To Totalize: On D. Nurkse’s Voices Over Water
Published: February 2013, in Envoi, 164
‘…and he wished in secret
there was another man strong as he on our island,
so he might kill instead of simply dying.’
‘The Island Gospel’
To start slantwise, and to justify later, the guiding spirit over this memorable volume of plosive poetry is, for my purposes, Mikhail Bulgakov. As I read Nurkse’s work, its major tenor for me is that of a magical realism. Just as Bulgakov’s limited hero in The Master and Margarita only achieves ‘peace’ rather than ‘light’ at the conclusion of his magisterial novel – as index of his limitedness – so for me the major pattern to emerge from this volume is, if you like, the impossibility of totalization, or of experience going neatly into one valence or another. In a way, what I intend to suggest below is what Theodor Adorno once criticized Walter Benjamin for, in his work on Baudelaire, namely an un-mediated or we might say un-processed combination of ‘magic’ and ‘positivism.’ This, for me, is of the essence of Nurkse’s effects: namely a deadpan demotic, a ruthless colloquialism which shapes a kind of (exilic) experience that points – but intransitively – beyond the plain of immanence. To complicate this picture, and to add texture to it, let me begin with the beginning and ending of the volume – which contrapuntal parallelism may well suggest that at a higher level of abstraction, the content of what I tease out below, is contradicted; which, if I too am thinking poetically in my interpreting, both proves my point, and I guess, refutes it – which, again, is the point. (I am not trying to be funny….)
Ros Barber, The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre, 2012), p. 445, ISBN: 978 1 444 73738 7
Published: Winter 2001, in The Warwick Review,
What’s in a name? Ros Barber’s moving refiguring of Elizabethan literary history, and the life and myth of Christopher Marlowe (and ‘William Shakespeare’) which is emblematic of that time, is signally undergirded – both in the gripping narrative and in the lyric soliloquies which pit that narrative in such a timely way – by the problem of the name. The Marlowe Papers returns us with renewed vigor to the age-old debate over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
Throughout Barber’s eminently readable, light yet powerful narrative, it is not just the usual ambiguities of Marlowe’s imprimatur in the documented record that is at stake, but also a deeply embedded and extended poetic reflection on poetic and humane ‘authority.’
The Doggedness Of Underdogs: Verse Of Resistance
Published: November, 2013, in Wasafiri
Poetry of the Taliban, trans. Mirwais Rahmany & Hamid Stanikzai, ed. Alex Strick van Linschoten & Felix Kuehn (London: Hurst & Co, 2012), Hb., ISBN: 978-1-84904-111-9
Owen Gallagher, Tea with the Taliban (Smoke Stack Books, 2012), Pb., £7.95, ISBN: 978-0-9568144-7-0
Poetry of the Taliban, a vibrant anthology of pre-and-post 09/11 Afghan poetry comes equipped with a scholar’s (Faisal Devji) contextual, historicizing and intriguing preface, as well as the editors’ (Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn) introduction, which details the more quotidian context of (the poetry of) the Taliban in recent history, and of the history of this very anthology which aims to reflect it. After the first section of selected poetry, pre-09/11, there are five more thematic sections: ‘Love & Pastoral’; ‘Religious’; ‘Discontent’; ‘The Trench’; and ‘The Human Cost’.
The Warwick Review
Published: Winter, 2013, in The Warwick Review
Maitreyabandhu, The Crumb Road (Bloodaxe, 2013), ISBN 978-1-85224-974-8, 79 pp, £9.95 (pb)
Marianne Burton, She Inserts the Key (Seren, 2013), ISBN 978-1-78172-038-7, 64 pp, £8.99 (pb)
Andrew Philip, The North End of the Possible (Salt, 2013), ISBN 978-1-907773-41-9, 76 pp, £12.99 (hb)
Heather Phillipson, Instant-flex 718, (Bloodaxe, 2013), ISBN 978-1-85224-970-0, 64 pp, £8.95 (pb)
The verse epigraph to much-feted poet, Maitreyabandhu’s first full collection, The Crumb Road, holds within it some of the tensions to be elicited here. It is comprised of two verses which, while postulating the harmlessness of lyricism and song, both end with: ‘Whatever else there is, there’s this as well.’ An equivocation, then, and one significantly coming at the end. Unlike, say, Don Paterson, closing Rain, or indeed the infamous dictum of Auden, Maitreyabandhu posits the ineffable value of verse, as well as the suggestion that it is de trop. Poetry, commemoration in this case – of family / loved ones in the main – is both aligned with other patent goods, an-other thing, and at the same time de-ontic-ally detached from them. Poetry matters as much as matter, and, but also, more so.
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
Published in June 2015 in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: Centenary Essays (Brill, 2015), ed. Max Saunders & Sara Haslam
REALISATION BEYOND DEFENCE:
DURRELL’S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET AFTER, AND
BEYOND, FORD’S THE GOOD SOLDIER
The provenance of this essay is both the common ground and the essential difference
in epistemological (and by proxy ethical) stance between Lawrence Durrell’s The
Alexandria Quartet and its putative forbear, in many respects: Ford Madox Ford’s The
Good Soldier. More specifically, I aim to critique the role and value of each author’s
use of story-telling narrators and/or narrator-characters – in relation, of course, to the
overall signifying topography of each novel.
 Los Dissidentes
Published in POEM July 2015
Coming to anything late in the day has an allure
all its own.
'Los Dissidentes'
Paul Muldoon' s Oxford Lectures, The End of the Poem, is one of the most brilliant
books on poetry I have ever read. What I found so thrilling about it was the way
both formal analysis of chosen poems and the elicited historical/biographical contexts
fi tted so neatly and with such aplomb in Muldoon' s discourses. Indeed, so
neat was the hanging-together of the critical, authorial insight across the 15 lectures
that it became clear, at a sort of depth-grammar level, that Muldoon' s dilations were
just simply "objectively" the truth of the matter behind and within and through the
poems.
Life Writing
Published: 12 November 2015.
The Authority of Soul, and The Sole Authority: Comparing Two Catholic Memoirs, The Romantic Approach / The Classical
The provenance of this article is somewhere between a critical review of two less-well-known Catholic authors (and their respective memoirs), and a reflective commentary on the same. As the head-title has it, the unifying and necessitating chosen reading direction pits the two Catholic memoirs as contrasting romantic and classical approaches to self-representation and self discovery; and this, of course, within the purview of their Christian itineraries. In short, I read both memoirs as sacramental journeys as well as empirical journeys. While Belloc’s work invokes personality and animation across both his recounted journey and his reflective/pictorial representation of such, Knox evinces in turn a classical asceticism wary of temperamental vagaries and influences, both substantively and formally or stylistically. Precisely because both authors are less well-known, I have sampled their respective works generously, reflecting, again, the dual purview of the article: not only an interested commentary but also an advertent critical review.
Henry Miller: Colossus Upon Colossus
Then Gaudier rose. It was suddenly like a silence intervened during a distressing and ceaseless noise ... there, he seemed as if he stood amidst sunlight; as if indeed he floated in a ray of sunlight, like the dove in Early Italian pictures. In a life during which I have known thousands of people; during which I have grown tired and sick of “people” so that I prefer the society of cabbages, goats, and the flowers of the marrow plant; I have never otherwise known what it was to witness an appearance which so completely symbolized – aloofness. It was like the appearance of Apollo at a creditor’s meeting. It was supernatural.
—Ford Madox Ford, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction. 106
Water In The Desert
Published: February 22, 2017
We are all born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr.Causabon, and be come wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness that is no longer reflection but feeling…that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows fall with a certain difference. (George Eliot, Middlemarch)
I am of ten asked by students who espy me from a distance in the library with my nose buried in a book, a pencil in hand readied to scribble marginalia, “what” exactly I am doing. They seem to marvel that someone who has gone through undergraduate then postgraduate study, and who has completed such, would still, well, study. It seems to seem bizarre, if not absurd, to them.
G. K. Chesterton’s London: Traversing Therapeutic Space
Published: 2017
OMAR SABBAGH’s poetry and prose have appeared in many prestigious
venues: Poetry Review, PN Review, The Reader, The Warwick
Review, POEM, Kenyon Review, Agenda, The Wolf and elsewhere. His
three poetry collections include: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and
The Square Root of Beirut (Cinnamon Press: Blaenau Ffestiniog [UK],
2010/12). A monograph, From Sight through to In-Sight: Time, Narrative
and Subjectivity in Conrad and Ford , was published by Rodopi, in
January 2014. A novella, Via Negativa , and a fourth poetry collection,
To the Middle of Love , are forthcoming (Cinnamon Press: Blaenau Ffestiniog
[UK], 2016). Currently he is Assistant Professor of English at
the American University in Dubai.
“Christ is contingency.…
There is a sense in which love’s truth is proved by its end, by what it
becomes in us, and what we, by virtue of love, become.”1
“Romance is the structural core of all fiction: being directly descended
from folktale, it brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the
sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as the epic of the creature man’s
vision of his own life as a quest.”2
F(r)ictions from the critical imaginary: the singular case of George Steiner
Published:19 May, 2017
In a recent work, The Poetry of Thought, the eminent critic
and scholar, George Steiner, sets out to trace the style and
rhetoric of thought, the music, implicit as otherwise, of
discursive moves in the history of the Western tradition and
canon. He speaks there, resolute and bold, as ever, of the
‘creativity of reason.’ He speaks of the “discovery” of ‘metaphor,’
as that which ‘ignited abstract, disinterested thought.’
Mud and Holy Water: A Question Of Ends
Published: 03 July 2015.
Paul Muldoon’s Oxford Lectures, The End of the Poem, is one of the most brilliant books on poetry I have ever read. What I found so thrilling about it was the way both formal analysis of chosen poems and the elicited historical/biographical contexts ï¬tted so neatly and with such aplomb in Muldoon’s discourses. Indeed, so neat was the hanging-together of the critical, authorial insight across the 15 lectures that it became clear, at a sort of depth-grammar level, that Muldoon’s dilations were just simply “objectively” the truth of the matter behind and within and through the poems. Having started with that observation, I have chosen to read Muldoon’s latest collection through the lens – one, no doubt, of potentially many, many more – of different and eliding senses of “ending”. Let me start with the “end” or purpose of the title itself.
Fathering Sons, Or, Re-Hearsing His Race: On Don Paterson
Published: 06 April 2016.
Permit me this ï¬ction. Imagine that Jorge Luis Borges was to have a lovechild, out of (novelistic) wedlock, necessarily, with Kazuo Ishiguro. That is ï¬ction. Now to poetry: their child might be the eminent/eminently gifted poet under discussion here. First things ï¬rst (so to speak)…By way of introducing the major tenor of this article, let me adumbrate(ore numerate) some of Paterson’s titles: Nil, Nil (1993), God’s Gift to Women (1997), The Eyes (1999), Landing Light (2003), Orpheus (2006), Rain(2010), and now 40 Sonnets (2015).
Note the bold gambits implicit in these titles. Archetypal elements, archetypal organs, the invoking of the Everything and the Nothing – light and dark, the feminine, the masculine: landlubb-ing and the oneiric. (Forty, of course, is a Biblically-metonymic number.) Borges has a famous two-page skit titled “Everything and Nothing”. The short tale is a metaphor for how, without de-limitation, the human animal, like Paterson’s “Tony Blair” in ‘The Big Listener’ (In his latest work, 40 Sonnets), is soulless. The thespian narrating the tale has acted all the major leading roles – except himself. There is something of this, but in a highly acutely knowing manner, in Paterson’s latest book– as elsewhere, earlier. In a way, Paterson is a ventriloquist of himself; thus, a ventriloquist who is not one.
The Singular Case of George Steiner
Published in (T&F) Prose Studies, 2017.
ABSTRACT
In a recent work, The Poetry of Thought, the eminent critic
and scholar, George Steiner, sets out to trace the style and
rhetoric of thought, the music, implicit as otherwise, of
discursive moves in the history of the Western tradition and
canon. He speaks there, resolute and bold, as ever, of the
‘creativity of reason.’ He speaks of the “discovery” of ‘metaphor,’
as that which ‘ignited abstract, disinterested thought.’ These
two (recent) statements may serve to sum-up what I show,
reflectively and in concrete detail, in this paper – making use
however of far earlier published works; namely, his intellectual
memoir, Errata: An Examined Life, and a sample long short
story, ‘Return No More.’ It is a thesis as old as modernism
(Wilde, Nietzsche), that all works, including, say, literarycritical
and creative writing, are ultimately autobiographical.
I try to show this in this paper, parsed however by the
more minor premise that critical writing is always a form of
imaginative creativity, and that creative writing is informed,
at its best, by analytical intelligence. I choose Steiner as a
case study in this paper, not only because he does indeed
offer a shining and telltale example of the cohabitation of
critical and creative motives; the music of the mind: the mind
in the music; but also because his now-seemingly-obsolete
singularity as a polymathic intellectual, is lived-out in the
singularity of his insights into the, or his, equally singular
conception of the human condition. Steiner’s storytelling,
in this view – whether it is a critical, non-fictional narrative
or a more-nominally creative one – is seen to epitomize the
true texture of historical experience, where temporal reality
is a function of unique contingencies, but also susceptible
to necessitating induction. As read here, in both form and
content, Steiner provides an exceptional occasion for seeing
and understanding these truths.