Seamus Heaney - Field Work 1976

„Our shells clacked on the plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary.” (Heaney “Oysters”, 1976, p.11).

 

“There they were, as if our memory hatched them,

As if the unquiet founders walked again;

Two young men with rifles on the hill,

Profane and bracing as their instruments,

 

Who’s sorry for our trouble?

Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves

In rain and scoured light and wind dried stones?

Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.” (Heaney “After a killing”, 1976, p.12).

 

“For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,

Spoke an old language of conspirators

And could not crack the whip or seize the day:

Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round

Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres

Slow arbitarators of the burial ground.” (Heaney “The Strand at Lough Beg”, 1976, p.17).

 

“I turn because the sweeping of your feet

Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees

With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,

Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass

And gather up cold handfuls of the dew

To wash you, cousin, I dab you clean with moss

Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.” (Heaney “The Strand at Lough Beg”, 1976, p.18).

 

“I loved his whole manner,

Sure-footed but too sly,

His deadpan sidling tact,

His fisherman’s quick eye

And turned observant back.

 

Incomprehensible

To him, my other life.

Sometimes on his high stool,

Too busy with his knife

At a tobacco plug

And not meeting my eye.

In the pause after a slug

He mentioned poetry.

We would be on our own

And, always politic

And shy of condescension

I would manage by some trick

To switch the talk to eels

Or lore of the horse and cart

Or the Provisionals.

(…)

I missed his funeral.” (Heaney “Casualty”, 1976, p.21).

“I was taken in his boat,

The screw purling, turning

Indolent fathoms white

I tasted freedom with him.

To get out early, haul

Steadily off the bottom,

Dispraise the catch, and smile

As you find a rhythm

Working you, slow mile by mile,

Into your proper haunt

Somewhere, well out, beyond …

 

Dawn-sniffing revenant,

Plodder through midnight rain,

Question me again.” (Heaney “Casualty”, 1976, p.24).

 

 

“So I say to myself Gweebarra

And its music hits off the place

Like water hitting off granite

I see the glittering sound.

 

Framed in your window,

Knives and forks set on oilcloth,

And the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,

Scanning everything.

 

People here used believe

That drowned souls live in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam for a singer

 

Who might stand at the end of the summer

In the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

His shoulder to the jamb, his song

A rowboat far out in evening.

 

When I came here first you were always singing.” (Heaney “The singer’s house”, 1976, p.27).

 

 

 

“He conducted the Ulster Orchestra

Like a drover with an ashplant

(…)

’How do you work?

Sometimes I just lie out

Like ballast in the bottom of the boat

Listening to the cuckoo.’” (Heaney “In Memoriam Sean O’Riada”, 1976, p.29).

 

 

“The way we are living,

Timorous or bold,

Will have been our life.” (Heaney “Elegy”, 1976, p.31).

 

 

“Two a.m., seaboard weather.

Not the proud sail of your great verse …

No. You were our night ferry

Thudding in a big sea,

 

The whole craft ringing

With an armourer’s music

The course set wilfully across

The ungovernable and dangerous.” (Heaney “Elegy”, 1976, p.32).

 

 

“Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

The mildest February for twenty years

Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound

Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

Now the good life could be to cross a field

And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe

Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense

And I am quickened with a redolence

Of the fundamental dark unblown rose.

Wait then … Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,

My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.

The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets I”, 1976, p.33).

 

“Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

Words, entering almost the sense of touch

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch – “ (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets II”, 1976, p.34).

 

“I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse

From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.

Dorothy and William-‘ She interrupts:

‘You’re not going to compare us two …?’

Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze

Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets III”, 1976, p.35).

 

“Outside the kitchen window a black rat

Sways on the briar like an infected fruit:

‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not

Imagining things. Go you out to it.’

Did we come to the wilderness for this?

We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,

Classical hung with the reck of silage

From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

Blood on a pitch-fork, blood on chaff and hay,

Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing –

What is my apology for poetry?” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets IX”, 1976, p.41).

 

“I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

On turf banks under blankets, with our faces

Exposed all nights in a wetting drizzle,

Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.” (Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets X”, 1976, p.42).

 

 

“The child cried inconsolably at night.

Because his curls were long and fair

The neighbours called him la petite

And listened to him harrowing the air

That dampened their roof tiles and their vines.

At five o’clock, when the landlord’s tractor,

Familiar, ignorant and hard,

Battled and gargled in the yard,

We relished daylight in the shutter

And fell asleep.” (Heaney “High Summer”, 1976, p.45).

 

“When you plunged

The light of Tuscany wavered

And swung through the pool

From top to bottom.”  (Heaney “The Otter”, 1976, p.47).

 

 

“After the sudden outburst and the squalls

I hooped you with my arms

 

And remembered that what could be contained

Inside this caliper embrace

 

The Dutch called bosom; and fathom

What the extended arms took in.

 

I have reclaimed my pro

All its salty grass and mud-slick banks;

 

Under fathoms of air, like an old willow

I stir a little on my creel of roots.” (Heaney “Polder”, 1976, p.51).

 

 

“A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road

Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

Stand off among the rushes.

 

There are the mud-flowers of dialect

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens.” (Heaney “Song”, 1976, p.56).

 

 

“As you plaited the harvest bow

You implicated the mellowed silence in you

In wheat that does not rust

But brightens as it tightens twist by twist

Into a knowable corona,

A throwaway love-knot of straw.

 

(…)

 

The end of art is peace.

Could be the motto of this frail device.” (Heaney “Song”, 1976, p.58).

 

Bulletproof Problem solving – Conn and McLean, 2018

 “Learning how to define a problem, creatively break it into manageable parts, and systematically work toward a solution has become the core skill for the twenty-first century workforce.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.´xiii).“Problem solving is decision making when there is complexity and uncertainty that rules out obvious answers, and where there are consequences that make the work to get good answers worth it.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.´xiii).

“problem solving means the process of making better decisions on the complicated challenges of personal life, our workplaces, and the policy sphere.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.3).

Define the problem

“A scattergun approach to data gathering and initial analysis always leads to far more effort than is necessary.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.32.

“The insight here is that the most granular and local solutions are often not optimal for the larger organization.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.40. “You find what makes sense for a single unit is not what makes sense for the company overall. Wherever you can, target your problem solving efforts at the highest level at which you can work, rather than solving the interest of smaller units.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.41).

Problem disaggregation and prioritization

“Any problem of real consequence is too complicated to solve without breaking it down into logical parts that help us understand the drivers or causes of the situation.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.50). “when we can see all the parts clearly, we can determine what not to work on, the bits that are either too difficult to change or that don’t impact the problem much.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.50).

“Logic trees are really just structures for seeing the elements of a problem in a clear way, and keeping track of different levels of the problem.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.51).“Better trees have a clearer and more complete logic of relationships linking the parts to each other, are more comprehensive and have no overlaps.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.51). “The only rule here is to move when you can from trees with general problem elements to trees that state clear hypotheses to test.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.53).

A tree should be MECE: “MECE stands for “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive.” Because this tree confuses or overlaps some of its branches, it isn’t MECE. It’s a mouthful, but it is a really useful concept.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.55).

 “Good problem solving is just as much about what you don’t do as what you do. (…) But we don’t want to retain elements of the disaggregation that have only a small influence on the problem, or that are difficult or impossible to affect.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.71). “Expert practitioners of problem solving often employ existing frameworks or theories to more quickly and elegantly cleave problems into insightful parts.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.74).

Team process:“we don’t do any analysis for which we don’t have a hypothesis. We never go off and build a model without a very good idea about what question it answers. We sharpen our thinking even more by requiring that we can visualize what form the output might take (we call it dummying the chart), so we know if we would want it if we had it.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.89).“Focus your work on the 20% of the problem that yields 80% of the benefit.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.93).

 “But the best teams typically have relatively little hierarchy in the structure of brainstorming and ideation. (…) When we work within large organization, we nearly always set up temporary teams that act outside the normal reporting structures and deliberately have limited lives. This allows for non-hierarchical and creative team processes that are more likely to generate good solutions.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.98).

“This kind of mistake is sometimes called an availability heuristic (you use the framework you happen to have handy, not the right one) or the substitution bias (you substitute a simple model you know rather than understanding the more complicated actual model).” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.100).

“To disagree without being disagreeable is the heart of great problem-solving team process.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.104).

 “Occam’s Razor – favor the simplest solutions that fits the facts – wich originated in the fourteenth century. It tells you to select the hypothesis that the fewest assumptions. (…) If you have four assumptions that are independent of each other, with an 80% separate chance of being correct, the probability that all four are correcr is just over 40%.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.114).

“Often data we would love to have shed light on our problem just doesn’t exist. Experiments give us a way to make our own data.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.149).

From one-day-answers to pyramid structures:

“We hypothesize a one-day answer using a situation-observation-resolution structure and we constantly pressure test this with our analyses.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.184). “The visual structure we use to represent our story structure is traditionally a pyramid – which is really just one of our logic trees turned on its side.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.186). “At the very top level is our lead or governing statement of the problem. Not surprisingly, your latest situation-observation-resolution statement is usually the best governing statement.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.187). “But our bias in most circumstances is to lead by answering the question “What should I do?” and then summarize the situation and key observations that support action.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.187).“While this conclusion (…) was rock solid, it was not one that the local management team wanted to hear. In circumstances like this, it can make sense to use a revealed approach to your arguments, employing decision tree structure rather than the traditional pyramid.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.190).

Long time frame and high uncertainty:“Uncertainty can be a good thing for strategic problem solvers! Hedge fund and other clever investors hope for uncertain and volatile markets – provided they have an analytic edge. If your problem solving is right you can earn good returns and guard your downside while others are floundering.” (Conn and McLean, 2018, p.198).

Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare 1992.

Serving the republic or personal ambition? This question arises to all protgonists, Brutus, Cesar, Anthony.

They are almost arranged along philosophic stances: from being unmovable like the north star, to struggling stoic Brutus and Epicurean Cassius.

So needless to say, that – reading it for the fifth time or so – I still enjoyed this a lot.

 “Marcus Brutus:

(…) If it be aught toward the general good,

Set honour in one eye, and death I’th’other,

And I will look on both indifferently;

For, let the gods so speed me as I love

The name of honour more than I fear death.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.584).

“Cassius:

(…) I was born free as Caesar; so were you:

We both have fed as well; and we can both

Endure the winter’s cold as well as he.

(…) and this man

Is now become a god; and Cassius is

A wretched creature and must bend his body,

If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.

(…)

Men at some time are masters of their fates:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.584).

“Cassius:

(…) But life, being weary of these worldly bars,

Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

If I know this, know all the world besides,

That part of tyranny that I do bear

I can shake off at pleasure.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.587).

“Casca:

O, he sits high in all the people’s hearts:

And that which would appear offence in us,

His countenance, like richest alchemy,

Will change to virtue and to worthiness.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.588).

“Marcus Brutus:

It must be by his death: and, for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn him,

But for the general. He would be crown’d.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.588).

“Marcus Brutus:

(…) and what other oath

Than honesty to honesty engaged,

That this shall be, or we will fall for it?

(…) unto bad causes swear

Such creatures as men doubt: but do not stain

The even virtue of our enterprise,

Nor th’insuppressive mettle of our spirits,

To think that or our cause or our performance

Did need an oath.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.589).

“Marcus Brutus:

(…) This shall make

Our purpose necessary, and not envious:

Which so appearing to the common eyes,

We shall be call’d purgers, not murderers.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.590).

“Decius Brutus:

(…) I can o’ersway him; for he loves to hear

That unicorns may be betray’d with trees,

And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,

Lions with toils, and men with flatterers:

But when I tell him he hates flatterers,

He says he does, - being then the most flattered.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.590).

“Portia:

 (…) upon my knees,

I charm you, by my once-commended beauty,

By all your vows of love, and that great vow

Which did incorporate and make us one,

That you unfold to me, yourself, your half,

Why you are heavy?

(…) Am I yourself

But, as it were, in sort of limitation, -

To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,

And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs

Of your good pleasure? If it be no more

Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.591).

“Julius Caesar:

            What can be avoided

Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?

Yet Caesar shall go forth; for these predictions

Are to the world in general as to Caesar.

Calphurnia:

When beggars die, there are no comets seen;

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

Julius Caesar: Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.592).

“Julius Caesar:

And tell them that I will not come today:

Cannot, is false; and that I dare not, falser:

I will not come to-day.

(…) The cause is in my will, - I will not come;

That is enough to satisfy the senate.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.592).

“Julius Caesar:

I could be well moved, if I were as you;

If I could pray to move, praers would move me:

But I am constant as the northern star,

Of whose true fixt and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.594).

 “Cassius:

Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life

Cuts off so many years of fearing death.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.595).

“Marcus Brutus:

(…) If there be any in this assembly, any

Dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’

Love of Caesar was no less than his. If, then, that

friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar,

this is my answer, - not that I loved Caesar less,

but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather

Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that

Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As aesar

Loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I

Rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but,

As he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears

For his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his

Valour; and death for his ambition.

(…)

I have done no more

To Caesar than you shall do to Brutus.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.597).

“Marcus Antonius:

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is often interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;

If it were so, it was a grievous fault;

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

(…) I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honourable man.

(…) But here’s a parchment with the seal of Caesar, -

I found it in his closet, - ‘tis is will:

Let but the commons bear his testament.

(…)Have patience, gentle friends, I must not read it;

(…)I have o’ersgt myself to tell you of it.

I fear I wrong the honourable men

Whose daggers have stabb’d Caesar; I do fear it.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.598).

“Marcus Brutus:

How he received you, let me be resolved.

Lucilius:

With courtesy and with respect enough;

But not with such familiar instances,

Nor with such free and friendy conference,

As he hath used of old.

                                   Thou hast described

A hot friend cooling; ever note, Lucilius,

When love begins to sicken and decay,

It useth an enforced ceremony.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.601).

“Marcus Brutus:

There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats;

For I am arm’d so strong in honesty,

That they pass by me as idle wind,

Which I respect not.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.602).

“Marcus Brutus:

Do what you will, dishonor shall be humour.

O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb

That carries anger as the flint bears fire;

Who, much enforced, shows a hasty park,

And straight is cold again.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.603).

“Strato:

For Brutus only overcame himself,

And no man else hath honour by his death.” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.610).

“Marcus Antonius:

This was the noblest Roman of them all: All the conspirators, save only he,

Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;

He only, in a general honest thought,

And common good to all, made one of them.

His life was gentle; and the elements

So mixt in him, that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’” (Shakespeare, 1992, p.610).