(For Eileen Joy.)

In postscript to “OCCITAN LYRIC POETRY AS DEFENCE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS”: here is a poem from around the 1170s or the 1210s. It’s one of the first Old Occitan poems I read. Guilhem de Peiteus got to me first, but only just; there’s a place in my heart for the Comtessa de Dia too, and others, and I hope many more besides; I’m comfortable with that even if some fals lausengier mal parlan might think they shouldn’t be compatible with Marcabru, Jean de Meun, Christine de Pizan, Rabelais, and Louise Labé.

Hey, it’s my heart and we’re talking about poetry.

This:

And not that:

So. I met this poem in 2000; there’s at least another two annotated copies of it from back then, lugubriating in an old file. This here is the 2003 copy. Notes from then relate to proto-dissertation work, doomed affairs of the heart of the time, and/or both (it was that kind of dissertation). Layer two: autumn that year, that doom turned epistolary amor de lonh (it was that kind of—c’est la vie). 2004, a dissertation with chapters and flow, and some early happy thoughts (which continue, and long may they and their subject do so) about a relation of bon fin vers entendemen.

Can we coin (or rather, take back and embrace) #femflow? On being in that zone, non-compartmentalised integrated active interactive dynamic multiple holistic creative intellectual work which may hurt but after which you feel at least somewhat cleaned out (though I’d also be an advocate of ending periods; I mean, in this day and age? We all know that if men were the ones to have them, periods would be a research-funding priority and they’d be long gone). Flowiness, in short?

Layer the fourth, from last week’s work for yesterday’s paper. It never appeared in the talk, a hapless victim of the translatio from inventio to dispositio, because even I have some (albeit poor and limited) awareness of the line between amplification and digression.

Sorry Countess.

P.S. Meet The Countess:

There was still some Comital presence yesterday, though, in the form of an excellent poem about what free willing consent looks like: here it is, as a consolation-digression in this present post:

(Did you see the Floire & Blanchefleur reference? Isn’t that very fine indeed?)

Returning to the poem that constituted a digression for yesterday’s purposes. It really was a digression: in rereading various things last week, I had spotted something out of the corner of my eye.

Updated this morning. Now with six layers of reading including a bad, cynical pun with apologies to Bruno Latour; and with apologies for my choice of colours.

So: in homage to #mansplaining’s translations as #mecspliquer, #mecsplication, and #herrklären: welcome to #femfog as #fembuée and #fembuer…

An uncanny foretelling: Fog and Joy, more than eight hundred years ago.

A canny one: I’m not usually triumphalist, and try to maintain a careful balance between good-humoured hope and its contraries, but: may Joy, swift happy bright lightness, radiance, and general sunniness win the day.

Embrace the #femfog, and may it be a joy and a comfort: car le “sexe faible” c’est celui qui a le #con #fort.