Coronavirus Australia live news: Victoria premier Daniel Andrews to provide Covid update in press conference as PM says vaccine will be mandatory

 

MANDATORY??????? WHAT BULLSHIT IS THIS?

 

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2020/aug/19/coronavirus-australia-latest-updates-nsw-security-guard-hotel-quarantine-victoria-testing-daniel-andrews-health-vaccine-live-news

 

 

Antibodies may curb pandemic before vaccines

 

While the world is transfixed by the high-stakes race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, an equally crucial competition is heating up to produce targeted antibodies that could provide an instant immune boost against the virus. Clinical trials of these monoclonal antibodies, which may both prevent and treat the disease, are already underway and could produce signs of efficacy in the next few months, perhaps ahead of vaccine trials. “If you were going to put your money down, you would bet that you get the answer with the monoclonal before you get the answer with a vaccine,” says Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

“Antibodies have the potential to be an important bridge until the vaccine is available,” says Ajay Nirula, a vice president at Eli Lilly, one of several large companies investing in them. Likely to be more effective than remdesivir and dexamethasone, the repurposed drugs shown to help against COVID-19, antibodies could protect the highest risk health care workers from becoming infected while also lessening the severity of the disease in hospitalized patients. But producing monoclonals typically involves using bioreactors to grow hamster or mouse cells engineered to carry genes that make the proteins. On 15 July, Lilly, AbCellera, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Genentech, and Amgen jointly asked the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) whether they could share information about manufacturing their monoclonals without violating antitrust laws “to expand and expedite production.”

Soon after the pandemic began, researchers in industry and academia began to identify, design, tweak, and conduct lab tests of monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Most bind to and “neutralize” the viral surface protein, or spike, that initiates an infection. On 29 May, Lilly, working with AbCellera, launched the first human study of a monoclonal antibody—a phase I trial testing its safety and tolerability in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Other safety trials followed, from Lilly's Chinese partner Junshi Biosciences and Regeneron, which developed a cocktail of three monoclonals that works against Ebola.

Regeneron is now testing the efficacy of its COVID-19 cocktail, which combines a spike antibody from a person who recovered and one from a mouse given the spike protein, in three large-scale, placebo-controlled trials. A prevention trial run in coordination with NIAID's COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (CoVPN), an arm of the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed, will recruit 2000 people who live in a house with a confirmed COVID-19 case. One treatment study run by the company aims to enroll nearly 2600 hospitalized people with severe COVID-19, whereas another, about half that size, will test the antibodies in infected people with mild or moderate symptoms. Lilly has launched its own trials, including a phase III, placebo-controlled study in 2400 residents or staff of long-term care facilities, run with the help of CoVPN.

“We should be able to see an efficacy signal very quickly” from these trials, says Amy Jenkins, who heads the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which for 2 years has invested in speeding the development of monoclonal antibodies. Although Jenkins hesitates to make a firm prediction, she says the November-December time frame is “realistic and conservative.” That is likely earlier than any vaccine will prove safe and effective, researchers predict. “I would be reluctant to say [that] would be any earlier than the end of the year,” Fauci said at a press conference about the launch of NIAID's first COVID-19 efficacy vaccine trial on 27 July.

Regeneron's Christos Kyratsous notes that vaccine trials must wait a few weeks for a person's immune system to develop appropriate responses to shots and further weeks for “the event”—a chance exposure to SARS-CoV-2. This means those trials require time and many people. In contrast, for the antibody treatment trials, “your event has already happened,” Kyratsous says. And in the prevention studies, the household contacts of COVID-19 cases will be much more likely to be exposed than people who typically join a vaccine efficacy study.

Immunologist Dennis Burton, whose group at Scripps Research has isolated highly potent monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 that it hopes to move into human studies (Science, 15 June, DOI: 10.1126/science.abc8511), says he is optimistic that monoclonals will protect people from infection for months with a single shot. “It's much easier to take care of a few incoming virus particles than to try and resolve or cure an ongoing infection.” The same logic holds for treatment. “Hit the virus hard and early,” Burton says.

Kyratsous says even if monoclonal antibodies don't beat vaccines to the finish line, they still might have a role to play against COVID-19. “We're going to need both approaches in the long run,” Kyratsous suggests. Vaccines are rarely 100% effective, and many people may decline a vaccine or skip immunization for other reasons. What's more, he notes, the elderly or people who are immune compromised may not mount robust immune responses after being vaccinated.

Supplies of monoclonal antibodies may be limited, however, in part because of modest investment. Operation Warp Speed, for example, has committed $8 billion to six different COVID-19 vaccines; for monoclonals, the government has invested about $750 million, much of it in Regeneron, which will produce somewhere between 70,000 and 300,000 doses before it even has efficacy data. Lilly says it will have 100,000 doses by the end of the year.

But no one knows how far those doses would stretch, says Janet Woodcock, who is on leave from the Food and Drug Administration to lead Warp Speed's therapeutic effort. If the antibodies work, a study from the Duke University Margolis Center for Health Policy estimates the United States alone could require nearly 40 million doses next year for prevention and treatment. “Unlike with vaccines, it is hard to project the number of treatment courses that will be available,” Woodcock says. Prevention, which would be a single intramuscular shot, requires less product than the intravenous infusions used in treatment, she notes, but the amount needed depends on a person's weight.

Although how to prioritize vaccine distribution has already sparked extensive debate, no such discussion has yet taken place about monoclonal antibodies. But DOJ acknowledged the supply concerns on 23 July, giving the six companies that had petitioned it the green light to share production information.

Regeneron is not part of that group, yet Kyratsous is optimistic about meeting the need. “The good thing with some of these biologics is you can ramp up production fairly fast,” he says. Nirula agrees. “If we have success in these clinical trials, we will have a lot of drug available,” he says.

The cost of monoclonals, especially for the higher doses needed for treatment, could split the world into the haves and have-nots. “It's unlikely that that treatment will get down to a price point in the near future that it would be easily affordable globally,” says Seth Berkley, who leads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and heads an international COVID-19 vaccine effort.

Jenkins says a key aim of the P3 project, which has provided four groups with $96 million in seed money, has been to develop monoclonal antibodies that can be made by the body itself, instead of in large fermentation tanks. The idea, which has not yet been tested in humans for COVID-19, is to inject people with DNA or messenger RNA that encodes a desired antibody, allowing their own cells to make it. “We think we can bring down the cost of monoclonal antibodies,” Jenkins says.

Regardless of cost, evidence that monoclonals work as preventives could benefit everyone by giving vaccinemakers a clear sign that antibodies against the surface protein of SARS-CoV-2 are enough to protect a person. This, in turn, could provide a strong indicator for evaluating the worth of a candidate vaccine short of actual efficacy data. “It will be earthshaking to the vaccine field in a positive way,” says Myron Cohen of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who leads testing of monoclonal antibodies for CoVPN. “It provides a thousand opportunities to move forward faster.”

 

Jon Cohen

 

Science  14 Aug 2020:

Vol. 369, Issue 6505, pp. 752-753

 

And if "MANDATORY", MAY AS WELL BE VACCINATED WITH THE RUSSIAN VACCINE... It's already available...

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has moved to assure Australians any coronavirus vaccine will not be compulsory, despite earlier saying he expected that would be the case.

On Wednesday, the federal government announced it had signed a letter of intent with British drug company AstraZeneca, in a step towards securing supply of a leading vaccine candidate that could be supplied free to Australians.

If a successful candidate is discovered, the government wants to see 95 per cent of Australians vaccinated.

Talking up hopes of a successful vaccine on Wednesday morning, Mr Morrison told Melbourne radio station 3AW he would “expect it to be as mandatory as you can possibly make it”, noting the devastation COVID-19 has wreaked on the world.

“There are always exemptions for any vaccine on medical grounds, but that should be the only basis,” he said.

But just hours later, Mr Morrison told listeners on Sydney radio station 2GB that the government would not make vaccination mandatory for anybody.

“It’s not going to be compulsory to have the vaccine,” he said.

“There are no mechanisms for compulsory … I mean, we can’t hold someone down and make them take it.”

While the government does not mandate vaccination for other diseases, parents can lose access to government payments like the Family Tax Benefit A and the Child Care Subsidy if their children do not meet immunisation requirements.

Mr Morrison said the government would take measures to “encourage” people to be vaccinated.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/coronavirus/2020/08/20/scott-morrison-ma...

 

Now this is back-pedalling at the speed of fading-popularity... Meanwhile in Germania:

 

Taking your dog for walks twice a day for at least an hour in total could soon become the law in Germany.

There could also be a ban on keeping dogs chained for long periods. 

Rules are also being devised to crack down on "puppy farms" by banning breeders from looking after more than three litters at any one time. 

"Pets are not cuddly toys, their needs have to be taken into account," Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner said about the planned changes. 

'No knock on the door'

Under the planned rules, dog owners:

• will have to take their dogs for walks twice a day for a minimum of one hour in total
• will not be allowed to keep their dogs chained for long periods of time
• will not be allowed to leave dogs alone the whole day

Breeders will be restricted to looking after a maximum of three litters and puppies will have to spend a minimum of four hours a day in human company to ensure they get socialised.

 

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53839286

 

Not so strangely, at last night's covid-free party of the local village, the old people exchanged their views on "man's best friend" costing a mint to buy, ruining their budget to take the mutt to the vet to be dewormed and get rid of its testosterones, and feed it like a loyal king... And let's not mention cats!

Somewhere in the Jura, France

My friend, dear Gus…

You are too didactical, too searching of the unreal precision of knowledge, you are too much of an existential bod. I know you won’t mind me remind you of such that we have discussed many times over the years. 

The dead may have forgotten they ever existed but we have not forgotten then. We hold them close in our heart. Here is a humble translation I made of a poem by Apollinaire, this “enfant-terrible”, possibly the best poetic genius of the langue Française, apart from Victor Hugo. But here, in his “La Maison des Morts”, Apollinaire surpasses the old Victor master, simplement… We shall dedicate this to our friend Marc L. whose sudden death a few days ago made all his friends, including you, cry beyond belief…

Hope you’re well in masked isolation...

Your friend forever. Jules.




The house of the dead


Guillaume Apollinaire


Stretched by the sides of the cemetery
The house of the dead framed it like a cloister
Inside its shop windows
Similar to those of fashion stores
Instead of smiling standing up
The mannequins grimaced for eternity


Arrived in Munich fifteen or twenty days ago
I had entered for the first time and by chance
This almost abandoned cemetery
And gnashing my teeth
In front of all this bourgeoisie
Exposed and dressed possibly at best
While awaiting for burial


Suddenly
Fast as my memory be
Eyes lit up again
From cells of glass to glass houses
The sky was populated by an apocalypse
Alive


And the flat earth became infinite
As before Galileo
Covered with a thousand motionless mythologies
A diamonded angel shattered all the windows
And the dead approached me
With many a worldly face


But their visages and their attitudes
Soon became less of a requiem
Heaven and earth lost
In their fantastical appearance


The dead were rejoicing
To see their departed bodies between earth and the light
They laughed at their shadows and watched them
As if truly
These shadows had been their lives past


So I counted them
They were forty-nine men
Women and children
Whose beauty improved at a glance
And they were looking at me now
With so much cordiality
So much tenderness even
That taking them into my friendship


Suddenly
I invited them for a promenade Far from the arcades of their house


And all of us arm in arm
Humming military tunes
Yes all your sins are forgiven
We left the cemetery


We crossed the city
And we as well met
Relatives of friends who were joining
To the small troop of the recent dead
Everyone was so gay
So charming so good
No clever man could have
Distinguished the dead from the living


Then in the countryside
We scattered as
Two light-horses joined us
They were celebrated
We cut some viburnum wood
And some elderberry
For Whistles to be made
That were distributed to the children


Later at a country ball
Couple hands on shoulders
Danced to the sound of sour sitars


They hadn’t forgotten the steps
These dead men and these femmes dead 
We drank too
And from time to another a bell
Announced that a new barrel
Was going to be drunk
A dead woman sitting on a bench
Near a bush of thorny twigs
Allowed a young student
Kneeling at her feet
Talk to her about engagement


I will wait for you
Ten years twenty years if need be
Your will will be mine


I will wait for you
Your whole life
Answered the dead woman


Children
Of this world or of the other
Sang some of these rhymes
Full of absurd and lyrical words
Which are the remains no doubt
Of the most ancient poetic monuments
Of humanity


The student passed a ring
Over the finger of the young dead
Here is the pledge of my love
To our engagement
Neither time nor absence
Will make us forget our promises


And one day we will have a beautiful wedding
Tufts of myrtle
On our clothes and in your hair
A beautiful sermon at church
Some long speeches after the banquet
And music
Music


Our children
Said the bride
Will be more beautiful even more than beauty
Alas! the ring was broken
What if they were made of silver or gold
Emerald or diamond
Lighter even lighter they will be
Than the stars of the sky
Than the light of dawn
Than your glance my fiancé
Will even better be than perfume
Alas! the ring was broken
That the lilac just blossomed
Like the thyme the rose or a strand
Of lavender or of rosemary


The musicians gone
We continued the walk


From the edge of a lake
We had fun making ricochets
With flat stones
On the water that was dancing barely


Boats were moored
In a haven
Untied
After the whole troop had embarked
And a few dead were rowing
With as much vigour as the living


At the front of the boat I was steering
A dead man was talking to a young woman
Dressed in a yellow dress
And a black bodice
With blue ribbons and a grey hat
Adorned with a single small feather untwisted


I love you
He said
Like the pigeon loves the dove
Like the nocturnal insect
Loves light


Too late
The living woman answered
Push push away this forbidden love
I am married
See this ring shining
My hands are shaking
I cry and I would like to die


The boats had arrived
At a place where the light-horses
Knew an echo was responding from the shore
We never got tired of questioning it
They were extravagant questions as such
And answers so full so real
That it was worth dying laughing
So said the dead man to the woman living


We would be so happy together
The water will close upon us
But you're crying and your hands tremble
None of us will return


We went ashore and it was the way back
When the lovers were in love
And in pairs with beautiful lips
Walked at unequal distances
The dead had chosen the living
And the living
The dead
A juniper somewhat
Was like a ghost


The children’s music filled the air
Hollow cheeks blowing
In their viburnum whistles
Or of elderberry
While the soldiers
Shouted Tyrollean trills
By answering each other like we do
In the mountains


In the city
Our troop gradually diminished
To each other we said
Goodbye
See you tomorrow
See you soon
Many entered the breweries
Some left us
In front of a butcher's shop for dogs
To buy their evening meal


Soon I was left alone with those dead
Who were going straight
To the cemetery
Or
Under the Arcades
I recognised them
Laying
Motionless
And well dressed
Waiting for burial behind the windows


They did not suspect
Of what ever happened
But the living kept the memory
It was an unexpected happiness
And so certain
That they were not afraid of losing it


They lived so nobly
That those who still the day before
Looked at them as their equals
Or sometimes something less
Now admired
Their power, their wealth and their genius
Because is there nothing that uplifts you
Like having loved a dead man or woman
We become so pure that we arrive
In the frozen ice of our memory
To be melded with the remembering
We are fortified for life
And we don't need anyone anymore


Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, 1913

The inclusion of poets in a republic would provide marginalised elements of society with an important and educational voice, writes Dr Robert Wood.

In my last few pieces for Independent Australia, I have outlined some of the possibilities of an Australian republic. This has been as an inclusive, independent, non-violent, supportive and connected form of government.

We need to dream of what to make the place rather than critique the Queen as something to negate. We need to paint a picture of the future as we can reimagine this place, thinking, of course, about this continent in a deeper and truer nature that nourishes us as citizens and people.

All of that matters and is a historic task before us as we seek justice, equity and healing. To reflect, though, on the philosophical concerns posed by writing on the republic, I want to turn to Plato.

Many readers will be familiar with Plato’s ‘Republic’. This is the foundational text out of which emerges a whole body of Western political thinking, considering the place of many others that came after, from the revolutionary French and American republics to the decolonised ones in Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century. Not everyone may have read Plato, but we can return to the text as a way to read our historical moment.

Although there are many great things about Plato’s idealised political community, despite a great many criticisms, I want to focus on poets most of all. I am a poet. It is what I mainly write and am known for. It has a different logic today than it did before and it is also something I care deeply about. It has different cultural positions in different places, even here in Australia. I know that from experience in university and communities, in cities and the country and I am also assured of it in my daily interactions that suggest we need to care for language most of all.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/the-crucial-role-of-poets-in-an-australian-republic,14229

 

Read from top especially: 

vale our great friend, marc l.

 

 

On this site Richard Tonkin is our poet laureate.

 

 

 

 

Crowded townships. Communal washing spaces. The impossibility of social distancing in communities where large families often share a single room...For months health experts and politicians have been warning that living conditions in crowded urban communities in South Africa and beyond are likely to contribute to a rapid spread of the coronavirus."Population density is such a key factor. If you don't have the ability to social distance, the virus spreads," said Professor Salim Karim, the head of South Africa's ministerial advisory team on Covid-19.But some experts are now posing the question, what if the opposite is also true? What if those same crowded conditions also offer a possible solution to the mystery that has been unresolved for months? What if those conditions - they are asking - could prove to give people in South Africa, and in similar settings globally, some extra protection against Covid-19?"It seems possible that our struggles, our poor conditions might be working in favour of African countries and our populations," said Professor Shabir Madhi, South Africa's top virologist and an important figure in the hunt for a vaccine for Covid-19.In the early stages of the pandemic, experts across Africa - echoed by many leaders - appeared to agree that the continent faced a severe threat from the virus."I thought we were heading towards a disaster, a complete meltdown," said Professor Shabir Madhi.Even the most optimistic modelling and predictions showed, for example, that South Africa's hospitals - and the continent's most developed health system - would be quickly overwhelmed.

And yet, today South Africa is emerging from its first wave of infections with a Covid-19 death rate roughly seven times lower than Britain's.Scientists acknowledge that reliable data is not always easy to come by and all these figures are likely to change. But even if deaths have been under-reported here - perhaps by a factor of two - South Africa has still performed impressively well, as have many other parts of the continent, where many hospital beds remain empty, and where infection graphs have almost entirely avoided the pronounced peaks and sharp angles seen in so many other parts of the world.

Read more:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53998374

Gus has another theory... Covid19 tends to kill "older" people, mostly above 65... Life expectancy in South Africa is 63.54 years (2017)... SA hardly has "old people"... I could be wrong...

Read from top.

 

Apollinaire meurt le 9 novembre 1918 de la grippe espagnole,
affaibli qu’il est par ses blessures de guerre
(un éclat d’obus l’avait blessé à la tempe et avait nécessité qu’il soit trépané).

 

Apollinaire died on November 9, 1918 of the Spanish flu, weakened as he was by his war wounds (a shell fragment had injured his temple and required trepanning).

 

BEFOREHAND, HE HAD WRITTEN THIS POEM WHICH SHOWS HIS ENTHUSIAM TO GO TO WAR — NOT ABOUT THE GLORIFICATION OF WAR....

 

La petite auto

 

(TRANSLATION FOLLOWS)

Le 31 du mois d’Août 1914
Je partis de Deauville (1) un peu avant minuit
Dans la petite auto de Rouveyre

Avec son chauffeur nous étions trois

Nous dîmes adieu à toute une époque
Des géants furieux se dressaient sur l’Europe
Les aigles quittaient leur aire (3) attendant le soleil
Les poissons voraces (4) montaient des abîmes
Les peuples accouraient pour se connaître à fond
Les morts tremblaient de peur dans leurs sombres demeures

Les chiens aboyaient vers là-bas où étaient les frontières
Je m’en allais portant en moi toutes ces armées qui se battaient
Je les sentais monter en moi et s’étaler les contrées où elles serpentaient
Avec les forêts les villages heureux de la Belgique
Francorchamps (5) avec l’Eau Rouge (6) et les pouhons (7)
Région par où se font toujours les invasions
Artères ferroviaires (8) où ceux qui s’en allaient mourir
Saluaient encore une fois la vie colorée
Océans profonds où remuaient les monstres
Dans les vieilles carcasses naufragées
Hauteurs inimaginables où l’homme combat
Plus haut que l’aigle ne plane
L’homme y combat contre l’homme
Et descend tout à coup comme une étoile filante
Je sentais en moi des êtres neufs pleins de dextérité (9)
Bâtir et aussi agencer un univers nouveau
Un marchand d’une opulence inouïe (10) et d’une taille prodigieuse (11)
Disposait un étalage extraordinaire
Et des bergers gigantesques menaient
De grands troupeaux muets qui broutaient les paroles
Et contre lesquels aboyaient tous les chiens sur la route

 

 

Et quand après avoir passé l’après-midi
Par Fontainebleau (12)
Nous arrivâmes à Paris
Au moment où l’on affichait la mobilisation (13)
Nous comprîmes mon camarade et moi
Que la petite auto nous avait conduits dans une époque
Nouvelle
Et bien qu’étant déjà tous deux des hommes mûrs
Nous venions cependant de naître

 

--------------------------

 Guillaume Apollinaire “The Little Car”

 

Written By Huck Gutman

 

I initially wrote about Guillaume Apollinaire’s wonderful poem, “The Little Car,” and then hesitated to send it out, because, as I acknowledge at the outset and again at the end, it is not just about war, but about glorifying war.  Yes, it says other things too; But in a world where nationalism and tribalism are rising, a world which too often seems to forget how destructive war can be, Apollinaire’s poem can be – well, it can tell us the wrong things.  Wrong things?  War is awful, terrible, hellish – and yet it exists, and men rush off to fight in it.  Closing our eyes to this is not beneficial, I think; and poetry exists, in part, to enable us to see what we would otherwise ignore.  So take this as an analysis of  an ambivalent poem which recognizes the power of war to transform human beings and human society, a poem which  at the same time partly resists the massive destruction and tragedy that always accompanies war….

 

The Little Car
         Guillaume Apollinaire

On the 31st day of August in the year 1914
I left Deauville shortly before midnight
In Rouveyre's little car

Including his chauffeur there were three of us

We said goodbye to a whole epoch
Furious giants were looming over Europe
The eagles were leaving their eyries expecting the sun
Voracious fishes were swimming up from the abysses
Nations were rushing together to know each other through and through
The dead were trembling with fear in their dark dwellings

The dogs were barking in the direction of the frontiers
As I went I carried within me all the armies that were fighting
I felt them rising within me and spreading out over the regions through which their columns  wound
With the forests the happy villages of Belgium
Francorchamps and Eau Rouge and the pouhons
A region through which invasions are always taking place
And the railway arteries along which those who were going away to die
Saluted one more time a life full of colours
The deep oceans where monsters were stirring
In old carcasses of wrecks
The unimaginable heights where men fight
Higher than the eagle soars
Man fights there against man
And falls suddenly like a shooting star
I felt within me new beings full of dexterity
Building a new universe and running it as well
A merchant of unheard-of-opulence and of prodigious stature
Was setting out an extraordinary display of stock
And gigantic shepherds were driving forward
Great dumb flocks grazing on words as they went
And at them barked all the dogs along the road

I shall never
                  forget this journey by night during which none
                                                                                       of us said a word

 

      O
      dark                    O                                                                       u
      departure              tender                     O                                    h    r
      when our 3            night of                   vil       towards which    d        r
      headlights failed     before the war        lages                                e    i
      B L A C K S M I T H S  R E C A L L E D

                                                                                                    E M O R N I N G
      B E T W E E N  M I D N I G H T  A N D  O N E  I N  T H
                           n                                                     V
                     e    a    r                                            e r s a
                   L i s i e u x                  or else              illes the
                     the very                                             g o l d
                        blue                                                   en

                                                                                               r s t  t y r e
a n d  3  t i m e s  w e  h a d  t o  s t o p  t o  c h a n g e  a  b u

And when having passed through Fountainbleau
During the afternoon
We got to Paris
At the moment at which the mobilization posters were going up
We understood my comrade and I
That the little car had brought us into a
New age
And that although we were both already fully grown men
We had nevertheless just been born


trans. Oliver Bernard

 

https://www.ralentirtravaux.com/lettres/sequences/cinquieme/le-depart/la-petite-auto.php

 

 

This is, in many ways, a strange poem.  It has a picture – almost like from a children’s book – in the middle of it.  And it is about war, taking a celebratory stance, that very much unsettles me, toward the start of a war.  [And after drafting this essay, I wondered why I would be sending it out, and why I like the poem so much.  As I say at the end, we don’t have to agree with what poems say to discover that they speak powerfully to us.  I think there is an amorality to this posture I take, yet I would defend it in deference to a higher morality.  As the Latin poet Terence wrote, trenchantly,  "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto:" "I am human, and nothing human can be alien to me.”]

         Apollinaire wrote this poem as a recollection of the start, in France, of the First World War.  The journey he recounts in the poem was by car (hence the title of the poem), a journey that took place on July 31, 1914.  The war, for France, began a day later with a general mobilization on August 1.  Two days later, on August 3rd, Germany declared war on France. 

         This poem was published posthumously in a book called Calligrammes.  It was Apollinaire’s third book of poetry; many of the poems in it were calligrams, or what we in English call ‘concrete poetry,’ where the shapes of the words on the page create an image which conveys in a visual form what the poem is ‘about.’ So with this poem, in which there is an image of a car made out of the words: an image comprised of the car, its driver (behind the steering wheel) and two passengers, and the road on which the car is proceeding.

         The First World War would prove to be enormously destructive.   Millions died in it, and it is not clear now – nor was it clear then – what the purpose of the war was.  Apollinaire himself would die of a head wound he suffered in 1916: injured in the temple, his skull was drilled open (the procedure was known as trepanning) and although he survived he was greatly weakened, so much so that he succumbed to the Spanish flu in the pandemic which raged across Europe and indeed around the world in 1918.   But let us not get ahead of ourselves: This poem is about the very start of World War One, as Apollinaire experienced it.

         Four things make the poem so strange.  One I have already mentioned:  it is a calligram, a visual poem.  Second, it is celebratory: we are accustomed to think (rightly, I believe) that war is destructive, and that it should be bemoaned and not celebrated.  [Walt Whitman welcomed the war with his early “Beat! Beat! Drums!” but would later see it as a locus of injury and death, as in “The Wound-Dresser,” which I wrote about in an earlier email.]   Third, it is predictive, seeing the yet-to-happen war as an event of transformational power.   As William Butler Yeats would write about an event occasioned by that war, “All is changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.” 

         The fourth thing: It seems to me, although of course the poem is written in French and we are reading an English translation (although I do read French), that Apollinaire is partly writing in the vernacular.  As Wordsworth had put it so trenchantly a century before Apollinaire wrote (Wordsworth ushered in the new movement away from ‘poetic diction’), poetry should be written in  a “selection of the language really spoken by men.”  There are poetic passages in “the Little Car,” but the spoken vernacular is the armature of the poem.   Of course, the Apollinaire poem also has, as we shall see, all sorts of ‘poetic diction’ and imagery.   What makes the poem so unusual, in part, is this conjoining of both the vernacular and the poetic. 

 

READ MORE: https://www.huckgutman.com/blog-1/guillaume-apollinaire-the-little-car

 

 

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