Seeing Galileo

About the Book

Seeing Galileo contains contemporary poetry, photography, and scripts, with a criti-
cal introduction that touches on key literary and historical conjunctions.

About the Author

Jason Lee, is a world-authority on transgression, with work translated into six lan-
guages. He is Head of Film and Media with Creative and Professional Writing at the
University of Derby. Among other work, he is the author of Pervasive Perversions:
Child Sexual Abuse in Media/Culture (London: Free Association Books, 2005).
According to James Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Chair and Professor of English, at the
University of Southern California, the leading international expert in this field
during the 1980s and 1990s, Jason Lee’s work is ‘the finest to appear on the sub-
ject’. Cambria Press published Lee’s Celebrity, Paedophilia and Ideology in American
Culture in 2009, and will also be publishing an edited collection by him on addic-
tion and obsession in 2010. He is editor of the international journal and book series
Transgressive Culture.
Seeing Galileo
Seeing Galileo

Jason Lee
A Gylphi Limited Book

First published in Great Britain in 2010

by Gylphi Limited

Copyright © Jason Lee, 2010. Photographs © Rebecca Griffith, 2010.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans-

mitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78024-000-8 (pbk)

Printed and bound in the UK by the

MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

Gylphi Limited
PO Box 993
Canterbury CT1 9EP
UK
In Lieu of a Prayer
I raise you on high
I raise you above the clouds
I raise you to the stars
You are so near the sun
its rays blind me
I can no longer see you
I close my eyes
darkness enfolds me
loneliness and fear engulf me
Why did I raise you up so high
that I can no longer behold you?

Ryszard Kapuscinski, from I Wrote Stone: The Selected

Poems of Ryszard Kapuscinski (Ontario: Biblioasis, 2008)
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts, Design and Technology at the University of
Derby, particularly Professor Neil Campbell, Senior Research Fellow, for support-
ing elements of this project. Many thanks to Rebecca Griffith for her wonderful
photographs and editing, to Cameron Griffith and Amanda Power, and to Professor
Gordon Campbell at the University of Leicester. Thanks to the editors and publish-
ers of the following, where some of this work first appeared: ‘Technicalities’ was a
finalist in the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition 2009, and was published in
the Aesthetica Creative Works Annual 2010; ‘Old Religion’ appeared in Shadowtrain,
Issue 24, July–August 2008; a version of ‘A river flowed from Eden’ included in ‘See-
ing Galileo II’ was published in European Judaism, Vol. 40, No. 2, Issue 79, Autumn
2007; parts of ‘Umbiblical’ were published in Lost Passports; ‘The Pre-Columbian
Rain’ appeared in FIRE 25.
‘Seeing Galileo II’ refers to The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht.
‘In Lieu of a Prayer’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski from I Wrote Stone reproduced with
kind permission of Biblioasis.
Contents

Foreword 1
Preface 3
Technicalities 11
Seeing Galileo I 13
Craven 17
Seeing Galileo II 23
The Feast of St Agatha 29
The Moth’s Tongue 31
Old Religion 33
The Look 35
Umbiblical 37
Fill Your Lungs 53
The Four Minute Warning 55
Bibliography 61
Foreword
In this book, ruminations over the possibility of a half-blind encounter between
Galileo and Milton give birth to poetry that at times looks to the stars and at others
provides asinine characters for our entertainment. The texts have an accumula-
tive effect on the reader, echoed by the Beckettian script ‘Craven’, encouraging
us to imagine not a romantic, poetic and uplifting history but to see Milton and
Galileo engaged in a relationship akin to that of Hamm and Clov in Endgame.
‘Why not?’ asks Lee in his preface, not ‘Yes, yes, yes’, and this apathy towards
what is historically possible is like a fever, the only antidote to which is more his-
tory. If we don’t turn time and again to another history when we reach the limits
of the first, then there is a risk that we turn to the television and find ourselves
eternally trapped in the present. This is a message that burns itself onto our reti-
nas as we read.
The creative texts carry us from The Tempest to the apocalypse, placing
human integrity under the microscope. Drawing us back to the time of the Inqui-
sition and English Civil War. The battle between Parliamentarians and Royalists
exists at a level of subconscious anxiety in the work. On the surface, Catholicism
and Protestantism and a broader history of the world threaten to engulf us as we
sit drinking coffee, relaxing in the city.
The photographs at times pun, at others they punctuate and sometimes
they hang loose in atmospheric indifference. Providing us with height, breadth,
depth, light, reflection and mild eroticism, but above all placing us in Florence
and Pisa. While also pointing to the wider significance of Rome and Venice for
the English Renaissance: the poetry, the religion, the history, and the more di-
rect connections between Italy and England.
There is an ebb and flow in this collection of work through which a strong
tide pulls us. The connection of the before (Columbus) to the after (Captain
Cook) is played out in the writing. Big questions are placed alongside small ones.
Aristotle and the stars look down on Marvell as he walks along the Thames. End-
less connections are made, as the present (Oprah Winfrey, Pukka Pies), the near
past (Auschwitz, JFK, Marilyn Monroe and the fall of the Berlin Wall), the long

1
past (the love-life of Shakespeare), and the Ancient (Ptolemy), and even the be-
ginning of mankind (Eden) continuously collide, but strangely none seems to
weigh more than another. Each having its place in the Florence of Galileo and
Milton, and seeming to exist timelessly for intellectual minds to feast upon.
This book is about the present and how we live with the past. At times ignor-
ing it, taking it for granted, or abusing it, and at others being overwhelmed by
it. It is at once critical, creative and theoretical, and as we read each discipline
feeds upon the other. Providing a sense of interconnectedness through what is at
times altogether unwritten, but can be glimpsed in the gaps as we peer through.
Anthony Levings
Managing Editor, Gylphi