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I have to report a really interesting objection about the possibility of regressive cases of evolution, a language moving back to a previous stage of development.

I will not deny that and I will even say that is always possible since at every stage the language that develops from there contains all anterior stages in itself. Our European languages have clicks though we have most of the time consonantalized them, like with dentals that can retain an aspiration or be merged with an S, or other solutions still. The best case is the click we use to call chickens: "CL-CL-CL-CL" that has been entirely consonantalized in click, clock, cluck, etc.

The most important element is that over the last ten years or so the point of origin of Homo Sapiens has moved from 150,000 Before Present to 250,000 BP and moving backward all the time.

The other idea is that language is nothing but a side effect of mutations and developments that were respectively selected and produced by the fact that Homo Sapiens is a bipedal long distance runner and that is essential to his success in hunting, for his survival and escape from some predators, etc, to the point that the low larynx indispensible for human articulated language is going against the survival criterion of selection since it can cause grave problems when swallowing food too fast or carelessly, and particularly suffocation, to the point a special "Heimlich maneuver" was developed to counter and solve the problem when occurring.

Here are all the recensions and reviews I signed for the e-journal Cercles at Rouen University, France, over the years.

They are all in English, except two that are in French. One of these two is on JOHN CALDWELL CALHOUN by Gérard HUGUES, a senior professor at the Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille 1. The editors of the journal published it at first. Then they censored it. They checked the review I had published on Amazon.fr and since they could not have it removed they added one that was going against mine. Then they excluded me from the team of readers and reviewers. I had to ask why they did not send me books any more and even insist a second time to finally get that explanation. They did not like my review. They disagreed with it. I had been critical against one top member of their institution. So they negated my freedom of speech in the name of their editing freedom.

You will find all these reviews are critical. I have systematically published them on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk yesterday June 20, 2012, or I have upgraded the shorter reviews that I had published in the past when the normal review was limited to 1,000 words. Nowadays such reviews can go up to 5,000 words. I was obliged to shorten a couple of them, but here you have the complete reviews.

Let me tell you I do not regret one single word written in these reviews. I actually may not agree with them today entirely, but that’s what reviewing, criticizing, researching are all about: it is a living process that is never finished, that never ends. But without full freedom of expression it is nothing. That means the reviewer has to take into account in no way at all who the author of the book he is reviewing is, neither his institutional echelon, his race, his color, his sex, his gender, his religion, his national origin, his ethnic origin, his political affiliation, and whatever you may think of.

These four recensions and reviews represent a short collaboration with this e-journal in Aix en Provence.

It was lade tense at once with the recension on Blake. The book concerned was very clear about the anti-Semitism of Blake, a trait or feature that was absolutely common in his time in Great Britain; At the time France was the only exception  that had completely legalized the Jews during the French Revolution, though it had not criminalized anti-semitism, far from it. But in Great Britain it was standard to express anti-semite feelings and arguments.

The “editor” of this review required the point to be softened, which was for me a great pain in the ass and in my Jewish mind. I more or less accepted their formulation.

But it became unfriendly with Chaucer when an English professor of absolute French extract started telling me my English was not acceptable and requiring a  complete rewriting. Of course I refused. This recension was never published. It is out here for the first time after having published a less than 5,000 word reduced version two days ago on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

In France we do not have “editors” in the English or American meaning. But some who are in fact readers for a publisher pretend to act as if they were editors in the Anglo-Saxon meaning that they do not understand and they start picking small details here and there they dislike and they are just that: details they dislike and not in any way things that are bad or wrong or whatever. I could understand discussing the anti-Semitism of Blake, or Shakespeare as for that, and the evaluation of it, but to start telling you that

“Such a book targets three different audiences. university – and other – libraries who will buy such a book to display it next to Chaucer’s poems for their curious public.”

is incorrect because the highlighted phrase is not syntactically acceptable is absurd. It is obvious the reader does not understand the use of dashes and what’s more it amounts on this reader’s side to this simple commentary – which I got recently from another reader of the type though at least that reader was an English speaking  native from the Anglo-Saxon world – that I write the way I speak.

I am proud of that. If something I write cannot be read and even more, cannot be spoken, it is dead language, linguistically ossified, mummified. I am not a mummified Egyptian Pharaoh and I do speak the way I write and I do write the way I speak.

Conclusion

These paintings were produced in a particular historical time and many poems retain the connection. But most reject this approach and see the ladies they try to describe through the eyes of nature with a great number of natural, vegetal or animal metaphors, including one little fable of a bee caught by a lily flower.
Yet the most original, hence interesting, approach is the Buddhist one that tries to confront itself with the passion some men are feeling in front of these paintings and that tries to find a way out. The easier way is to imagine the real women reborn in these pictures that then lose their real power since they are only pictures. The more difficult way is to understand that their beauty as images is the mark of the power of the painter who is trying to affect us with emotions, but these are purely artistic, aesthetic and not physical or mental, hence no tanhā at all.
Nature in other words is used to describe the women or their lot there stuck forever on the rock face, at least till the wear and tear of the yearly monsoon washes them away, but the mind is used in order to bring the viewers back to reason, though not in the western way, by teaching them some good attitude, why not some truth, but in the Buddhist way by building the right attitude in oneself and letting others know for them to use their minds and meditation to achieve a similar detachment, eventually.

Conclusion.

I have little to add. I believe our world has lost a tremendous amount of humanity, of humanism, of human values and dignity by losing the sense of the sacred, the consciousness of the sacred, the rituals necessary to keep the sacred alive. We need to suffer in our endeavors if we want them to be dealing with the sacred. Never forget sacred is nothing but another way of writing scared and for scared people there is nothing sacred, not even the life of other human beings, and then we get to rituals of a totally other style like in The Passion of The Christ.

That’s probably the best part of these novels. What looks good is not necessarily good and what looks bad is not necessarily bad. We have to discriminate good and bad in every one person or every one situation. The best character to represent this attitude is probably Puddleglum, the Marsh-wiggle in The Silver Chair without whom nothing would have been achieved. He systematically says the pessimistic reverse of what we would think in any situation. He is the perfect party pooper , the perfect post-modern dubitative unbeliever who yet believes there is nothing one can really believe in.
I will conclude with him and you should wonder about the meaning of his two “should” and especially “shouldn’t”:

“And I hope we’ll meet again,” added Jill.
“Not much chance of that, I should say,” replied Puddleglum. “I don’t reckon I’m very likely to see my old wigwam again either. And that Prince – he’s a nice chap – but do you think he’s very strong? Constitution ruined with living underground, I shouldn’t wonder. Looks the sort that might go off any day.”
“Puddleglum!” said Jill. “You’re a regular old humbug. You sound as doleful as a funeral and I believe you’re perfectly happy. And you talk as if you were afraid of everything, when you’re really as brave as – as a lion.”
“Now speaking of funerals,” began Puddleglum, … "

We will stop there and meditate on the meaning of funerals in Children’s literature.

Le premier drame ne peut se clore que dans le sang de celui qui se dit prophète et de celle qui capricieusement prétend le posséder, bien qu’elle ne possèdera que la tête morte de l’objet de son désir, et il s’agit bien là d’un objet. Le deuxième drame ne peut se clore que dans la mort de l’impossible savant et dans la déconfiture complète des maîtres de ce monde que sont les deux faces de la divinité, la face sombre et la face claire, Satan et Dieu ou même l’inverse.
La mise en scène de David McVicar et son bourreau nu tout autant que la mise en scène de Peter Mussbach et son cadran nu d’une horloge mettent à nu ou en abîme l’élément essentiel de chaque drame : le temps historique déréglé par les désirs de sang des hommes d’une part et le temps cosmique déréglé par les désirs de savoir des mêmes hommes d’autre part.
Le temps est hors de ses gonds quand Jochanaan sort de sa cellule souterraine, sorte d’oubliette que nous n’oublierons plus jamais, ou quand Faustus est emporté dans un trou au cadran de l’horloge à la troisième heure, l’heure de la mort du Christ à la croix, la neuvième heure de tous les évangiles qui sont parole de Dieu.

We definitely see the zipper in the back of the Morlocks, and the clear cut division of the world in two antagonistic visual universes is too simple though it is acceptable as a dream, a vision, hence a simplified discourse because it is richly incrusted in a 19th century world. The same remark applies to the second film. But the special effects are extremely good and the visual effects are perfect. But this time there is a discourse that cannot be considered as a simplified dreamlike vision because we do not come back to 19th century New York: we stay in 802,701. Hence this future world is entirely accepted as morally, ideologically, historically and even materialistically possible. The final scene makes it even more difficult for one to distantiate oneself from the virtual universe because it is connected to and justified by love and saving both Mara, the woman Alexander loves, and Kalen, the child this woman loves, along with the Eloi community. In the same way any distantiation is difficult because of the progressive discourse on education and re-building civilization that Alexander is assuming in this world in which he has trapped himself. That’s where Wells’ warning is completely lost. There is no warning at all, except that we have to get ready to totally destroy our human enemies.

The most visible betrayal is at the level of the concepts and the trend in Sri Lanka today to keep the Pāli concepts and to develop a good glossary to explain the subtlety and the rich semantic meaning of these concepts is the good solution.
Sri Lanka is a special case and they hope the peace that is finally coming to this island will enable them to dedicate more energy and means to deepen their thinking and their approach of the modern world, that is to say articulate Buddhism and sustainable development.

Samuel Beckett in a vast metaphor of the vision of the world after the holocaust seen through the eyes of the cremated Jews or other victims whose ashes have been thrown over the plains of Poland as sung in The Peat Bog Soldiers by Pete Seeger:
“Far and wide as the eye can wander, / Heath and bog are everywhere, / Not a bird sings out to cheer us, / Oaks are standing, gaunt and bare. / [Chorus:] / We are the peat bog soldiers. / We're marching with our spades, / To the bog.”

That could not be a better description of the world in Corkadoragha, or the setting of Waiting for Godot, or the landscape seen at the beginning of Malloy with only one difference here, the cows. It is the same cosmic order of an obsessive compulsive universe in which we are nothing but prisoners of some fate from which we cannot evade or escape. In a way the very black and dark humor of Flann O’Brien is part of a phenomenal tragic vision shared by many writers, artists or simple human beings in the 20th century, let alone the 21st century. Is that novel still funny when we look at it in this perspective?

And languages all come from the most distant historical (and of course pre-historical) times. It was invented by Homo Sapiens 150,000 years ago, on the basis of the vocal practices of their ancestors or predecessors (Homo Ergaster , or some apes ), and it has evolved since then in a myriad of forms. But no matter what the level reached by this or that language may be, it has developed a full communicational discourse and it has never forgotten and totally rejected the means of its origins. To illustrate this historical survival of what Lévy-Bruhl called “primitive” in our modern languages I will use a little bit of prose by Walt Whitman again:

“Mild, foolish, dough-colored, simpering face; black cloth suit-shad-bellied, single-breasted coat, with low standing collar all round, vest buttoned close to throat, knees a little bent, toes turned out, and chin down. Episcopalian deacon.” (Walt Whitman, "Street Yarn", in Life Illustrated, August 16, 1856; in New York Dissected, E. Holloway and R. Adimari, eds, Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936)

Mephistopheles is totally wrong. In language the past is not what is no more and the future is not what is not yet. In language the past is always present and the future is always being born, I mean breath-borne, to life every minute one person speaks. The concept of primitiveness in that context is just irrelevant.

On voit alors que les traductions de François-Victor Hugo, qui contiennent parfois des contre-sens, sont le plus souvent en un français qui tout en collant au mot à mot essaie d’être coulant et agréable.
Notons pour clore cette conclusion que le thème de l’amour d’un homme mûr pour un jeune homme ou un jeune adolescent est courant dans la littérature anglaise. Citons par exemple Dickens avec Oliver Twist, David Copperfield et Great expectations. On pourrait aussi citer Benjamin Britten avec Curlew River, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd et Death in Venice. On pourrait aussi penser à la littérature irlandaise et à Flann O’Brien et ses romans. Il me semble que c’est un héritage de la littérature héroïque ou épique du Moyen Âge, voire d’une tradition monastique chrétienne qui s’ancre dans les disciples de Jésus.

To tell Europeans they are Elois, wallowing in their comfort would make many laugh or even become angry or aggressive. To tell US citizens they are Morlocks would probably evoke in their minds the numerous cases of aggressive actions they have performed and still are performing in the world, certainly not the social violence the American society contains from beginning to end, and maybe from historic and genetic birth. The Pilgrims escaped from some violence and brought it with them in the form of their obsession about witches. The plantations were founded on slavery, a practice that was violent by principle and essence including to the point of banning African languages and even religious education, at least for some decades, when it was not impregnating the women in order to produce more slaves that were sold away as soon as they were weaned, just another income for the planter. The United States were born through a violent and vicious war against Great Britain. The continent was conquered through many wars and the quasi-extermination of Native Americans. The Civil War was the first war in human history of this magnitude as for victims and casualties. Gettysburg fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863, all by itself and in three days, had 51,000 casualties according to the Gettysburg National Military Park. We seem to forget that this heritage makes most Americans less sensitive to human suffering, human deprivation, human dereliction. Maybe American Psycho has it all right: the world is nothing but a big Hell’s Kitchen and the human species is composed of two subspecies, like in H.G. Wells: those who butcher and cook the meat and those who are or will be the meat when they are fat enough in the eyes of the masters of this psycho-derelict slaughterhouse of the no less psycho-fantastic restaurant the rest of the world is.
Consume, dear consumer, you will always be consumed in your turn one day or other.
We all need a small fat Eloi grazing in our back yard or cooling in our fridge.

We are today reaching the next stage and we become able to see that the future of the world and of humanity depends more on the multiple visions emerging from and created by the various and multifarious cultures of all the peoples and social, ethnic, cultural, religious, philosophical, you name it you have it, groups or communities in the world than on simple political programs and actions : the latter cannot be effective if they are not based on and rooted in the visions of the artists that can give life to our spirituality, our soul, our mind and our thinking power.
Since nothing under the sun is created from nothing, one necessary step is to rediscover the spiritualities of the past and to integrate them in our vision. The reference to Vodun in these books partake in this phenomenon, even if Vodun is not only a spirituality of the past, but a still present and living spirituality. Then we all have to borrow the spritualities of other groups that might have been isolated if not segregated against and marginalized in the past or recent present, hence bringing them back into the common stream of consciousness and creativity of our evolving world. There is no future that is not founded on patrimonial heritage.

Wagner ainsi ouvre le drame à une toute autre dimension qu’il n’avait jamais vraiment eu avant. Il n’est plus un exploit ou une geste de la libération de l’humanité d’un mal et de l’apport à l’humanité d’un bien, mais la fable d’un adolescent orphelin dans sa quête de la liberté, de l’autonomie, de la gloire et de l’amour. Il s’agit donc en définitive d’un drame parfaitement romantique où l’épée n’est que l’outil de cette maturité d’homme conquise à sa pointe. La dramatisation de l’enlèvement du plastron de l’armure de Brünnhilde, justement à la pointe de l’épée de Siegfried, de Notung devient une forme symbolique clairement identifiée comme un viol, une perte de virginité, de valeur féminine et montre combien on est près à ce moment là de ne considérer Notung que comme un symbole de la masculinité sexuelle (je ne dirai pas phallique car en fait il s’agit du pénis de l’homme et Lacan a toujours clairement déclaré que même les femme ont un phallus puisque le phallus n’est que l’Idéal du Moi).
Nous avons vu au début comment le mythe nous fait passer d’une société matriarcale à une société patriarcale avec un questionnement sur la libération des eaux, de la mer, des rivières. Ici nous approfondissons ce passage et nous atteignons une société de domination sexuelle mâle que seul l’amour permet de dépasser. On entre là dans une vision quasi matrimoniale (ou ne devrions-nous pas dire patrimoniale) de la société dont l’épée est le symbole direct.
On est loin de la mère de Grendel et de ses épées de géants

Je conclurai avec une remarque sur le style de la « traduction » de J.R.R. Tolkien. Il veut importer directement en anglais la poétique noroise, en particulier des vers avec deux accents toniques (dimètres). Prenons un exemple de J.R.R. Tolkien.
« Their word was spoken,
wills were hardened;
fate drove them on,
fey they parted.
None might hinder
near them thronging
lords nor wisement;
with a laugh they rode. » (Guðrunarkviða en nyja, v. 60, p. 273)
On remarque que Tolkien ne tient pas la régularité iambique. La troisième ligne est iambique mais à contre sens ou bien bancale (et avec trois accents) si on respecte le sens : ‘ - ‘ - contre ‘ ’ - ‘. La dernière ligne ne peut être que bancale : - - ‘ - ‘. Notons également que mises à part le premier vers et le dernier vers qui commence sur des syllabes non accentuées donc son iambiques, bien que bancale dans les cas (- ‘ - ‘ - et - - ‘ - ‘), tous les autres vers commencent sur une syllabe accentuée et sont donc trochaïque. Mais ma remarque principale sera qu’en anglais les formes traditionnelles, celles qui ont le souffle nécessaire, pour le récit épique sont le ‘heroic couplet’ donc fondamentalement des pentamètres iambiques, ou bien la ‘ballad’ fondée sur un tétramètre puis un trimètre iambiques principalement. La forme retenue par J.R.R. Tolkien manque d’ampleur et le force souvent à faire des élisions et des inversions désagréables musicalement, sémantiquement et syntaxiquement, créant parfois des obscurités de sens.

England was not ready for a true parliamentary system of the people for the people by the people. Free and general elections were not even thought possible. Habeas Corpus and other fundamental human rights were not yet imagined. They will need the Restoration, which will be a failure with James II, and the Glorious Revolution that will oust him. Cromwell had the great merit of not trying to force history, or at least not too much. The beheading of the king was probably a mistake as Tony Benn thought, but Cromwell refused to become a King. He stopped short of this irreversible mistake.

Intellectual property in spite of our difficulty to define and manage it has become today an unavoidable dimension of artistic life and creation. It has been inscribed and codified in international treaties for more than a century, since the Berne Convention in 1886. Most countries are linked by many agreements, treaties, conventions, international organizations and even international governance as for intellectual property and there is no way to evade it today. The US have even set that principle of the copyright in their constitution, making it a basic right of all Americans who are governed by this constitution. But above all the very principle of the income that is due to any worker for his work, according to the value of the work, to the value added in the products, to the value of the working power of the worker, an income hence proportional to the quantity and quality of the work and products must apply to these artistic workers. We have to find a well balanced equilibrium between this intellectual property that requires an income and the fact that this work produces products that are part of human heritage. Then two questions come up. How can we conserve it for future generation? And How can we manage public domain property?
Dean Baker did not even consider these questions and many others I asked all along.

But here the saga adds a final touch that implies the fight between men and machines is neither eternal nor to the death, but rather till a reasonable compromise may be found.
The that the films have deep roots in some vast popular religious or philosophical stances and visions makes them long lasting beyond world change, able to reach a vast audience, even a blockbusting level and also able to articulate themselves within a vast cultural production in the whole world.
We are then waiting for the films that are announced for 2012 and 2013 to see if his gubernatorial episode has not cut him from his line of inspiration and work.

Quoted Schwarzenegger films
Red Sonja, 1985
Raw Deal , 1986
The Running Man, 1987
Predator, 1987
Red Heat, 1988
Total recall, 1990
The Terminator, 1984
Terminator 2, Judgment Day, 1991
Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines, 2003
Terminator 4, Salvation, 2009
The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season 1, 2008
The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season 2, 2009

Coppola, though, seems to use the cinematographic medium as a way to convey meaning through images, always keeping the various sides balanced so that the film remains understandable, in one way or another, by all members of the audience. It is a commercial necessity, of course, one which corresponds to the spirit of our day. Maybe this spirit has been created by the commercial intentions of the medium (where the medium is the message), or the spirit of the day has emerged from history itself and has invested the medium with its essence (where the message is the medium). Does postmodernity emerge from the market economy in the field of ideas, ideologies, and cultural constructions, or does it come from the slow and steady evolution of the human species in its historical adventure? We cannot know for sure. We might even say that this market economy can be seen as part of this historical adventure in what some identify as a dialectical though not antagonistic relation. For sure, great filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola go along with the spirit of their time, trying to satisfy their own artistic needs in addition to the commercial needs of their audiences. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Coppola attempts to connect as many people in the audience as possible beyond their various divides—sexual, social, economic, cultural, artistic, religious, or whatever.