This is a photograph of my front room. Tell me you have never felt like this. This is how my camera felt after this year's Thanksgiving, which is not the the day after New Year's Eve, but for me it was. I ate too much of too many kinds of cuisine that left me with a food hangover.

For this reason, I was able to get some extra bed-time that I used to condense all the advice my mother gave me over time and put it in a single sentence. This is it: Be smart and act dumb. Dumb yourself down, way down.

Of course, I am totally against this idea, and it left a gargantuan rift between us. I can be really dumb as a matter of course, because book learning and street smarts are not the same they tell me, although everything I ever read about Beowulf has happened to or around me. Some people say it happened because I read it. Where do you draw the line between psychology and superstition?

It feels like a women's issue, and that put me in mind of a set of photographs I found in Aperature, Ireland: A Troubled Mirror, in particular Amelia Stein's The Four Rules of the Women of Ireland, dated 1992. You will not find the Stein's bride in Bride's magazine.

Before you pick this book up, I have to tell you it involves nudity of a female person and might be difficult to explain to a grade-school aged child.

By the way, Thanksgiving was the best one ever, and I'd do it again.

I thought of another old expression you don't hear very often, if at all, unless you watch black and white movies, "Take a powder". When I looked this up online, I noticed the web site suggests you see "keep your powder dry" as well. This second idiom means to be "ready for orders for action". It must have originated in the days when there was such a thing as musket fire.

I'm not sorry the expression "take a powder" has mostly passed out of use. It's the sort of thing you would expect George Raft to say to some dame.

Going even further back in time, those of wealth and status, and those in power wore powdered periwigs. The powder could be made of flour, corn starch, orris root, plaster of Paris, and scented with orange and/or lavender.

In my lifetime, there has been a shift away from commercially made baby powders containing talcum because of concern that it might cause cancer if inhaled. A powder containing corn starch is often recommended as a replacement.

My grandmother used tons of Evening In Paris talcum and matching cologne. She has since passed away, but I don't know that her prodigious use of scented talcum is to blame. She would be 111 years old this year.

Frank's casket is made of whale bone:

"Surprisingly, the main runic inscription on the front does not refer to the scene it surrounds. It is a riddle in Old English relating to the origin of the casket. It can be translated as 'The fish beat up the seas on to the mountainous cliff; the King of terror became sad when he swam onto the shingle.' This is then answered with the solution 'Whale's bone.' It tells us that the casket was made from the bone of a beached whale."

A shingle beach is one of pebbles rather than sand.

There are varied translations of the runic and carved riddle on Frank's Casket:

"hronæs ban
fisc . flodu . ahof on ferg (compound continued on next line)
enberig
warþ ga:sric grorn þær he on greut giswom
Which may be interpreted as:
whalebone

fish flood hove on mountain

The ghost-king was rueful when he swam onto the grit"

Whoever made Frank's Casket knew some Bible stories all the way up to the life of Jesus.

In the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, the whale swallows Jonah. Jonah is enclosed inside the whale, which symbolically becomes a casket for Jonah. The whale eventually vomited a live Jonah from inside his belly onto the beach. In this case, Jonah is like a beached whale, except for him this means life, not death, for him. Jonah is saved from drowning. He is a living miracle in the story.

The story of The Flood precedes that of Jonah and the Whale.

In the Biblical story of The Flood, the ark (a very large casket) encloses Noah and his family, from which they are eventually released, saving them from drowning in the flood waters. They are living treasures because they are the only surviving humans of the catastrophe.

The fish ended up in the high mountains because the flood waters covered the highest peak. A whale could be considered one of the largest of fishes by people unaware of mammalian classification. Whales were outside the ark, but safe because water is their natural habitat. Jonah and Noah were out of their element in the ocean, but are kept safe in the container, a whale and an ark respectively. They both got a second chance at life after a horrendous experience.

Childbirth, with the growing child safely inside the womb, can be considered an archetypical ark. The child to be born carries the genetic code of his ancestors, thus preserving a family line. The Bible has huge genealogical lists.

It was thought originally that Frank's Casket may have been filled with treasures handed out as gifts by a king. The casket was made by finding a beached whale, which was the casket of Jonah, so to speak, making a casket that was made from a casket. This riddle is something like Sampson's "Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet."

If Shakespeare can be trusted, a ghost king was dead but still able to speak to the living, as in Hamlet. A ghost king could also be one who is numbered among the dead because of desperate circumstances, or as the expression goes "as good as dead".

The epic Babylonian hero Gilgamesh also escaped drowning in a flood by building a boat. In the Biblical version, the flood waters come from both the windows of the heavens and the fountains of the deep.

Gilgamesh is also involved in a scenario that is much like the garden of Eden where the proverbial Fountain of Youth was supposed to have been located:

"As Gilgamesh is leaving, Utnapishtim's wife asks her husband to offer a parting gift. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh of a boxthorn-like plant at the very bottom of the ocean that will make him young again. Gilgamesh obtains the plant by binding stones to his feet so he can walk on the bottom of the sea. He recovers the plant and plans to test it on an old man when he returns to Uruk. Unfortunately, when Gilgamesh stops to bathe it is stolen by a serpent that sheds its skin as it departs, apparently reborn. Gilgamesh, having failed both chances, returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls provokes him to praise this enduring work of mortal men. The implication may be that mortals can achieve immortality through lasting works of civilization and culture."

The key element is eternal youth stolen by a serpent.

I call it a wishbone, but its correct name is furcula, which means "little fork" in Latin. Ordinarily, you think of it as a chicken or turkey bone that two people pull on in a kind of tug-of-war while each makes a wish, and is associated with Thanksgiving. 

Because the furcula is actually strong and flexible, the wishbone is often saved until it dries out before it is a good wishing bone. When the bone is pulled, the person who gets the biggest portion of the broken wishbone is supposed to have their wish come true. Even though people know this is silly, they still do it.

Some kinds of dinosaurs also had furculas, but what difference does it make if there were no men who walked the earth with the dinosaurs?

There are quite a few formula beliefs or superstitions that guarantee a wish coming true, one of which is 'wishing on a star'. There is also the magic lantern and genie (jinn) which can make sure your wishes or dreams come true. As we know from The Micky Mouse Club, "A dream is a wish your heart makes when you're fast asleep." Usually, the wish must be kept secret or it will not come true. This comes in handy when it doesn't come true and avoids embarrassment for wanting a hot car you can't afford or a date with Elvis.

Often, an unexpected success is called a lucky break. Get it?

This type of lucky-charm belief is so old that it probably predates history. Many historians think belief in the power of the wishbone comes from the times of the Romans and Etruscans. Finding a four leaf clover is considered a portent of good luck because it is rare, as is a date with Elvis.

There was once a time when any change in a person's status was so unlikely that it would take a real miracle to make it happen. An old belief in unchangeable fate caused people to appeal to the gods who decreed their fate to change it, however unlikely. Man can go to the moon, but the Hindu caste system still exists like cast iron.

Where does my useless prayer go?

It goes out into the universe, to every person, to all animals.

Their prayers are coming my way too, although I can not hear them aloud.

Their prayers are their thoughts from a long way off in time and distance.

My prayer goes out to a million of me, to all possible outcomes;

Each one, in their different plane of existence, hears my prayer, not in their ears,

But in a place in their minds where consciousness starts as a wisp of smoke

And ends as a roaring fire.

It goes backward in time as well as forward because it does not depend on light,

Or the tapestry of time and space, penetrating the ears of men and animals and planets.

Locusts sleeping underground for twenty years hear it all too.

When I am sleeping, my mind chugs away, computing it in my hidden ear,

Which keeps a memory.

When I wake up in the morning, I have an invisible tabulation of new thoughts.

Not so long ago people laughed at this, but since quantum physics, not so much.

November 18, 2011

Mesa Verde is located in Colorado, very near the "Land of Enchantment", New Mexico. Mesa means table or flat surface, and verde means green. It is a collection of prehistoric dwellings built into caves carved into high cliff walls. These caves were probably the result of erosion by natural forces such as wind and rain and, possibly, waves.

In Mesa Verde National Park: The First 100 Years, it says:

"As they moved from the San Juan Mountains, Newberry describes the sight of the 'green slopes and lofty battlements of the Mesa Verde beetling over some high and rockbound coast above the level ocean'" (Houk, Marcovecchio, 9).

There was no level ocean anywhere near Mesa Verde when Mr. Newberry visited. He was speaking metaphorically or possibly saw an ocean in his "mind's eye" as he gazed at it from a distance.

Sixty million years ago, Marshall Mesa Trails, in the relatively arid elevations of Boulder County, Colorado was once an ancient sea that eventually gave way to swamps, ferns, and dinosaurs, so it is possible that Mesa Verde was also once covered by a sea that gradually receded.

The greatest peril to Mesa Verde today is people. The ruins are somewhat delicate. Mesa Verde has been visited by millions of people since it became a state park.

I have visited the park twice, once as a child and once as an adult. Both times, the experience was, well, enchanting. Although the inhabitants of the ruins have been gone for a long time, there is still a strong sense of their presence as you hike the steep trails, climb the rough timber ladders to the upper storage areas and apartments, and peer down into the kivas.

Kivas and pithouses were sacred spaces for the Anasazi, but a visit to Mesa Verde feels like a sacred space in itself.

A chameleon is a reptile known for its ability to seemingly change color. They have "pigment granules" controlled by their brain's central nervous system. The Physics of the Buffyverse tells this regarding their color changing ability:

"They can do this because they have several layers of cells...Under the transparent outer skin are two cell layers containing red and yellow pigments; under these are cell layers that reflect blue and white, supported by an even deeper layer of brown melanin" (Ouellette).

Before going further, since this is a blog and not a news report, I noticed that Jennifer Ouellette's last name reminds me of the word oubliette which means dungeon and was also a 1914 silent film starring Lon Chaney.

I was also thinking about the components of the word chameleon, since the ch is pronounced as k. The origin of the word is this:

"Word Origin & History. chameleon. mid-14c., from O.Fr. chaméléon, from L. chamaeleon, from Gk. khamaileon, from khamai "on the ground" (also "dwarf")" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chameleon).

Chameleons can range in color from bright parrot-like to drab browns. They can vary in size from very small to quite large, such as the Malagasy Giant Chameleon found in Madagascar. Its scientific name is Furcifer oustaleti, furcifer meaning forked, referring to its feet, not its tongue.

Chameleon can also refer to a person whose personality seems to change depending on circumstances and often refers to a "fair weather friend".

I don't think I've ever had contact with a live chameleon, but certainly everyone, even me, has had some experience with the metaphorical chameleon.