He served out some grog with a liberal hand,
And bade them sit down on the beach:
And they could not but own that their Captain looked grand,
As he stood and delivered his speech.
"Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears!"
(They were all of them fond of quotations:
So they drank to his health, and they gave him three cheers,
While he served out additional rations).
The Shakespearean quotation will be familiar to all poetical and political earmongers. The Bellman has been depicted in the definitive Roman pose of imperial authority known as the adlocutio, which has been visually modified here to prove, amongst many other things, that everything old is new again.
Clothed in the rhetorical and semiotic crypto-imperial habiliments of Marxist-Leninism, the Bellman not only demands his auditors’ ears but even their arms so that he may throw them (their arms, not his audience) across the shoulders of the tottering capitalist-running-boojums and assist them into an early grave. This odd affinity (an unelective affinity?) towards Comrade Lenin is no accident, it allows us to make a second auricular reference to the rumored waxen ear which has replaced the genuine, damaged article on Lenin’s embalmed corpse.
The ear motif receives its third and final reiteration (thus fulfilling the Clochetic Rule of Three) in the somewhat maimed person of Vincent van Gogh, who stands behind Comrade Bellman (somewhat in the manner of the Laputian flappers, methinks) to encourage the enthusiasm of all concerned with his sinister aura … of menacing risibility.
Their audience, the proletarian hunters of the Snark, react to all this intellectual palaver as expected. Drinks all around and afterwards, dancing on the upper decks for the lower ranks! Huzzah for His Nibs the Bellman, huzzah for the Snark, huzzah for the revolution!
_______________________
NB. Heartfelt thanks to the LCSNA for their very kind mention of this never-ending Snark Hunt of mine in the latest issue of the Knight Letter. With forks and hope we ink onwards and upwards!
"He thought he saw a Garden-Door
ReplyDeleteThat opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
'And all its mystery,' he said,
'Is clear as day to me!'"
And he left a comment
ReplyDeleteThat proved he was the Pope
He looked again and found it was
A bar of mottled soap.
A fact so dread, he faintly said,
Extinguishes all hope.
We shall continue to pursue, on our separate but converging blogs, all things with forks & hope. Cheers!
Is this double rule of three perhaps both clochetic and cochletic (the latter Gallicly divided into three parts?) And in combination, if a bell jar rings in a vacuum, does it make a sound?
ReplyDelete