Controversial Conceptual Poem for Vanessa Goldsmith

(with special thanks to Wikipedia and the idea of "It's much too late"...)

Adolf Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother and an anticlerical father; after leaving home Hitler never again attended Mass or received the sacraments. Albert Speer states that Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church to his political associates and though he never officially left it, he had no attachment to it. He adds that Hitler felt that in the absence of the church the faithful would turn to mysticism, which he considered a step backwards. According to Speer, Hitler believed that either Japanese religious beliefs or Islam would have been a more suitable religion for the Germans than Christianity, with its "meekness and flabbiness". Japanese "new religions" are new religious movements established in Japan. In Japanese they are called shinshūkyō (新宗教?) or shinkō shūkyō (新興宗教?). Japanese scholars classify all religious organizations founded since the middle of the 19th century as "new religions"; thus, the term refers to a great diversity and number of organizations. Major sects include Risshō Kōsei Kai and Shinnyo-en. Major goals of Shinshūkyō include spiritual healing, individual prosperity, and social harmony. Many also hold a belief in Apocalypticism, that is in the imminent end of the world or at least its radical transformation. Most of those who joined Shinshūkyō in this period were women from lower-middle-class backgrounds. Mansur al-Hallaj was a Persian mystic, revolutionary writer and teacher of Sufism. He is most famous for his poetry, accusation of heresy and for his execution at the orders of the Abbasid Caliph Al-Muqtadir after a long, drawn-out investigation. A prominent figure in Sufism, he is famous for his saying: "I am the Truth" (Ana 'l-haqq), which orthodox Muslims believed was a claim to divinity. Al-Hallaj was executed on March 26, 922 on the charge of possessing a heretical document suggesting hajj pilgrimage was not required of a pure Muslim. Thousands of people witnessed his execution on the banks of the Tigris River. He was first punched in the face by his executioner, then lashed until unconscious, and then decapitated. His body was doused in oil and set alight. A cenotaph was "quickly" built on the site of his execution, and "drew pilgrims for a millennium" until being swept away by a Tigris flood during the 1920s. Bizarre magazine was first published in 1946 by fetish photographer John Willie (the phallic pseudonym of John Coutts), who developed the concept in the 1920s. Willie was able to avoid controversy in censorship through careful attention to guidelines and the use of humor. Publication of Bizarre was suspended completely from 1947 to 1951 because of post-War paper shortages. By 1956 Willie was ready to give up the magazine, and in that year he sold it to someone described only as R.E.B., who published six more issues before Bizarre finally folded in 1959.  Reb is a Yiddish honorific traditionally used for Orthodox Jewish men. It is not a rabbinic title; it is the equivalent of the English "mister". In writing it is abbreviated as ר׳. It may also be a short form of Rebbe. The title was adopted by Orthodox Jews at the time of the schism with the Karaites, as a sign of loyalty to Rabbinic Judaism. When addressing someone directly, Reb is usually used with the first name only ("May I help you, Reb Chaim?"). In other circumstances, it can be used with either the first name or the full name ("This is Reb Chaim Jacobs."; "Would you please help Reb Chaim?"). In formal written address, it is usually used along with the full name. The United Kingdom agreed in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence that it would support Arab independence if they revolted against the Ottomans. The two sides had different interpretations of this agreement. In the event, the United Kingdom and France reneged on the original deal and divided up the area in ways that the Arabs felt was unfavourable to them under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Further confusing the issue was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised support for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. The Hedjaz region of western Arabia became an independent state under Hussein's control, until 1925, when, abandoned and isolated by the British policy– which had shifted support to the al Saud family–it was conquered by bin Saud,  leading to the creation of Saudi Arabia. Frank Holmes (1874–1947), known affectionately by Arabs as "Abu Naft" (the Father of Oil), was a British-New Zealander mining engineer, geologist and oil concession hunter. Following distinguished service in World War I, he was granted the title of honorary Major and was thereafter known as Major Frank Holmes in his civilian life. In 1920, Holmes helped set up the Eastern and General Syndicate Ltd in London to develop, among other things, oil ventures in the Middle East. In 1922 he travelled to Arabia to discuss the possibility of an oil concession with Emir Ibn Saud, who ruled parts of the eastern peninsula. With Ibn Saud’s permission, he carried out a survey over four weeks in the desert and returned to Hofuf with earth samples which he claimed bore traces of oil. In order to allay the suspicions of British officials, Holmes claimed that he was looking for a rare butterfly, the Black Admiral of Qatif, although this deception appears not to have been effective. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions  in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome. Qatif functioned for centuries as the most important trade port in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The term Qatif is derived from what translates to "harvest" or "grain", signifying the area's past agricultural history. The historic oasis area shows its first archaeological evidence of settlement beginning about 3500 BC. It was known by other names, such as Al-Khatt (الخَطّ), immortalized in the poetry of `Antara ibn Shaddad, Tarafa ibn Al-`Abd, Bashar ibn Burd (in his famous Ba'yya), and others. The word "Khatty" became the preferred "kenning" for "spear" in traditional poetic writing until the dawn of the modern era, supposedly because the region was famous for spear making, just as "muhannad" ("of India") was the preferred kenning for "sword". The older name also survives as the eponym of several well-known local families ("Al-Khatti", spelled variously in English). Muhannad sounds a lot like Mohammed. The flag of Saudi Arabia is the flag used by the government of Saudi Arabia since March 15, 1973. It is a green flag featuring in white an Arabic inscription and a sword. The inscription is the Islamic creed, or shahada. In India, the surname of Khan has wide usage among the Islamic residents (citation needed). Khan, Kahn is an originally Mongol (and subsequently Central Asian) title for a sovereign or for military ruler, widely used by medieval nomadic Mongol tribes living to the north of China. "Khan" also occurs as a title in the Xianbei confederation for their chief between 283 and 289. The Rourans were the first people who used the titles khagan and khan for their emperors, replacing the Chanyu of the Xiongnu, whom Grousset and others assume to be Turkic. The term Rouran is a Classical Chinese transcription of the pronunciation of the name the confederacy used to refer to itself. Ruanruan and Ruru remained in usage despite being derogatory. They derived from orders given by the Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei, who waged war against the Rouran and intended to intimidate the confederacy. The Ju-juan was a Chinese transcription of the name as a "disparaging pun, Juan-Juan, meaning 'the unpleasantly wriggling insects'." The power of the Rouran was broken in 552 by an alliance of Göktürks, the states of Northern Qi and Northern Zhou, and tribes in Central Asia. Khan sounds suspiciously like Chin. The Qin dynasty (Chinese: 秦朝; pinyin: Qín cháo; IPA: [tɕʰǐn tʂʰɑ̌ʊ̯]) was the first imperial dynasty of Ancient China, lasting from 221 to 206 BC. Named for its heartland of Qin, in modern-day Gansu and Shaanxi, the dynasty was formed after the conquest of six other states by the Qin state, and its founding emperor named Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of Qin. The strength of the Qin state was greatly increased by the Legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the fourth century BC, during the Warring States period. The chin or the mental region is the area of the face below the lower lip and including the mandibular prominence. It tends to be smaller and more rounded in human females, while bigger and more square in human males. It is formed by the lower front of the mandible. In humans there is a wide variety of chin structures, e.g. cleft chin. In 20th century American slang, a 'con' is both a person convicted of a crime, and any egregiously dishonest act, or project (citation needed). Qin might also be mispronounced as kin, colloquial for 'bearing familial relations', or ken, as in kenning. A kenning (Modern Icelandic pronunciation: [cʰɛnːiŋk]; derived from Old Norse) is a type of circumlocution, in the form of a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry. In a book entitled English Romantic Irony, Anne Mellor, referring to Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Coleridge and Lewis Carroll, writes, "Romantic irony is both a philosophical conception of the universe and an artistic program. Ontologically, it sees the world as fundamentally chaotic. No order, no far goal of time, ordained by God or right reason, determines the progression of human or natural events." Furthermore, Of course, romantic irony itself has more than one mode. The style of romantic irony varies from writer to writer. ... But however distinctive the voice, a writer is a romantic ironist if and when his or her work commits itself enthusiastically both in content and form to a hovering or unresolved debate between a world of merely man-made being and a world of ontological becoming. The Schwerbelastungskörper (German: "heavy load-bearing body") (a.k.a. Großbelastungskörper - GBK) is a hefty concrete cylinder in Berlin, Germany located at the intersection of Dudenstraße, General-Pape-Straße, and Loewenhardtdamm in the northwestern part of the borough of Tempelhof. It was erected in 1941-1942 by Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer to determine the feasibility of constructing large buildings on the area's marshy, sandy ground, specifically a massive triumphal arch on a nearby plot. The arch was to be about three times as large as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and was one component of a plan to redesign the center of Berlin as an imposing, monumental capital reflecting the spirit of the Third Reich as envisioned by Hitler. Albert is a masculine given name. It is derived from the Germanic words adal "noble" and beraht - "bright". Ethel is an English feminine given name. It may also refer to the Anglo-Saxon œ-rune, see Odal, or Œ, a ligature of the letters o and e, named after the rune, which also looks like a butterfly. The Elder Futhark Odal rune (ᛟ), also known as the 'Othala' rune, represents the o sound. Its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name is *ōþalan "heritage; inheritance, inherited estate". It also looks like a missile journeying skyward. The element -berht has the meaning of "bright", Old English beorht/berht, Old High German beraht/bereht, ultimately from a Common Germanic *berhtaz, from a PIE root *bhereg- "white, bright". The female hypocoristic of names containing the same element is Berta. Big Bertha (German: Dicke Bertha)—literal translation "Fat (or heavy) Bertha"—is the name of a type of super-heavy howitzer developed by the armaments manufacturer Krupp in Germany on the eve of World War I. Its official designation was the L/12, i.e., the barrel was 12 calibre in length, 42-cm (16.5 inch) Type M-Gerät 14 (M-Equipment 1914) Kurze Marine-Kanone ("short naval gun", a name intended to camouflage the weapon's real purpose). Dicky is an adjective meaning unsound, likely to fail, unhealthy. Also spelt dickey and dickie. E.g."You can't seriously expect me to lift that Pandoran box when you know I've got a dicky heart." "Gasoline" is cited (under the spelling "gasolene") from 1863 in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was never a trademark, although it may have been derived from older trademarks such as "Cazeline" and "Gazeline". In many countries, gasoline has a colloquial name derived from that of the chemical benzene. In 1833, Eilhard Mitscherlich produced it via the distillation of benzoic acid (from gum benzoin) and lime. He gave the compound the name benzin. In 1836, the French chemist Auguste Laurent named the substance "phène"; this is the root of the word phenol, which is hydroxylated benzene, and phenyl, which is the radical formed by abstraction of a hydrogen atom (free radical H•) from benzene. A phene is an individual genetically determined characteristic or trait which can be possessed by an organism, such as eye colour, height, behavior, tooth shape or any other observable characteristic. The phaneron (Greek φανερός phaneros "visible, showable") as coined by Charles Sanders Peirce is essentially the real world filtered by our sensory input (sight, hearing, touch, etc.). Fiend comes from Middle English feend (“enemy, demon”), from Old English fēond (“enemy”), from Proto-Germanic *fijandz. Cognate with Old Norse fjándi (Icelandic fjandi, Danish fjende, Swedish fiende, Norwegian fiende, West Frisian fijân, Low German Feend, Fiend, Dutch vijand, German Feind, Gothic 𐍆𐌹𐌾𐌰𐌽𐌳𐍃 (fijands), all of them meaning foe. The Old Norse and Gothic terms are present participles of the corresponding verbs fjá/𐍆𐌹𐌾𐌰𐌽 (fijan, “to hate”). Akin to Sanskrit पियति (piyati, “(he) reviles”). "Fee-fi-fo-fum" is the first line of a historical quatrain (or sometimes couplet) famous for its use in the classic English fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk. The poem, as given in Joseph Jacobs's 1890 rendition, is as follows: Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive, or be he dead I'll grind his bones to make my bread. Though the rhyme is tetrametric, it follows no consistent metrical foot; however, the respective verses correspond roughly to monosyllabic tetrameter, dactylic tetrameter, trochaic tetrameter, and iambic tetrameter. The poem has historically made use of assonant half rhyme. The rhyme appears in Haue with You to Saffron-Walden published in 1596 and written by Thomas Nashe (who mentions that the rhyme was already old and its origins obscure): Fy, Fa and fum, I smell the bloud of an Englishman In William Shakespeare's play King Lear (c. 1605), the character of Edgar exclaims: Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man. The verse in King Lear makes use of the archaic word "fie", used to express disapproval. This word is used repeatedly in Shakespeare's works, King Lear himself shouting, "Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!" and the character of Mark Antony (in Antony and Cleopatra) simply exclaiming "O fie, fie, fie!" The word "fum" has sometimes been interpreted as "fume". Formations such as "fo" and "foh" are perhaps related to the expression "pooh!", which is used by one of the giants in Jack the Giant-Killer; such conjectures largely indicate that the phrase is of imitative origin, rooted in the sounds of flustering and anger. Charles Mackay, proposes in The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe that the seemingly meaningless string of syllables "Fa fe fi fo fum" is actually a coherent phrase of ancient Gaelic, and that the complete quatrain covertly expresses the Celts' cultural detestation of the invading Angles and Saxons: Thus "Fa fe fi fo fum!" becomes "Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger!" Fum or fume sounds a lot like poem which comes from the Middle French poème, from Latin poēma, from Ancient Greek ποίημα (poíēma), from ποιέω (poiéō, “I make”). The arabic word for poem is qasida whose root is Related to objectives, projects. Project (plural projects) is a planned endeavor, usually with a specific goal and accomplished in several steps or stages. It can also be an idle scheme; an impracticable design, as in "a man given to projects", a projectile, a projection, the place from which a thing projects: An example of the butterfly Limenitis arthemis was found near the catfight piercing the sand.