My Imaginary Life

2012-02-01T17:56:00.000-08:00

Old books sometimes contain very interesting material. For instance, I checked out Egypt Observed by Henri Gougaud.

Of course, it's obvious that many of the structures built by the ancient Egyptians were incredibly beautiful when first built, and they retain much of their original beauty. But here are the kinds of things I also notice. First of all, the temple of Djoser was built of six steps in six stages. If I do the math, that means every stage yielded a step. Why does this cause my neurons to go on the fritz? They should never have told me that.

I wonder about how do you say that name, D-j-o-s-e-r? Surely, the Egyptians weren't any better at saying two hard consonents together at the beginning of a word such as Djoser than I am. Can you imagine how relieved I was to learn the pronunciation is Zoser? Another question, though: In the discussion of thePyramid of Djoser, it states that "deep crypts were hollowed out of living rock" (51). Living rock is different from dead rock? I'm still working on this one, since I haven't figured out how there could be rock that continues to increase its mass in the middle of the desert sand.

The name Ptahhotp is another matter. It seems to require extreme dexterity of consonant pronunciation. Have you noticed how important a new baby's name is? At one time, baby books gave lists of popular baby names and a brief description of its origin, but now you need to read pages and pages of history about the name and do some numerology to determine if the name is a good one. Otherwise, your offspring may disown you for giving them a less than auspicious name.

In Egypt, the Apis bull was worshipped, embalmed, and put in sarcophagi that sometimes weighed sixty tons. Apis worship was adopted by the Greeks and Romans at a later date. "Special spots" on the white hide of cattle drawings indicated a bull. (53). The sacred bulls spent their lives in bliss amidst a "harem of cows".

The most surprising thing in the book was the description of the village of Siwa:

"Custom ordains that the sexes be rigorously seperated from the age of puberty. The women live as recluses, and at night the men leave the village. Until quite recently, marriages between boys were recognized in civil law- everything was, and still is, ordered so that children should not proliferate...for they could not feed too large a population" (106).

Time goes by, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

2012-01-22T14:02:00.000-08:00

This was once a fresh orange pumpkin. Then someone took a knife to it and left it out in the cold. Weather did its work.

Good People of America:

What happened to America? Where is it, that America in which I imagined I grew up? I realize that the land mass is still here, holding up real estate and people, but was I living in a fool's paradise? I realize that other countries such as Canada and Mexico consider themselves Americans in that they live on the American continent, but you know what I mean unless you were born with a silver iPod in your mouth.

People in high and responsible places have said crazy things such as "if 'we' don't behave ourselves", retirees won't get their social security checks on time, spank spank. Other things, such as turning off the switch for social security, eliminating the child labor laws so "we" can put children, those incredible leeches, into productive low-paying jobs, and possibly creating a class of "men without a country" have been uttered and broadcast on television and radio.

Are we, the people who are born, live, pay taxes, and die in America, such objects of ridicule and contempt that world leaders, most especially our own, think "we" are ludicrous?If so, I must sign up for clown school. If you are already an amateur clown, think about becoming a professional.

Clowns are usually scary to young children who have never seen one. Imagine the first time something resembling a human with grotesque features and coloring aggressively jumps up into your vision and honks a horn at you or makes some other surprising and loud noise to get your attention. Scary clowns make good subjects for horror movies, as you already know, so don't let world leaders clown around anymore. You know what to do.

By the way, that weathered pumpkin has a beauty all its own if you are able to appreciate it.

2012-01-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

The holidays are over, and bill paying is about to begin in earnest. The Xmas tree is thrown out in the compost, and all the gift wrap is in the dumpster. So what's next, you?

A lot of people feel despondent at post-holiday time. That means depressed, although it's not a politically correct term, I guess. There are many good ways to fight depression, but you probably will have to fight it. Ignoring it does not make it go away.

After reading about how to fight depression, you may still feel depressed. Remember, every cloud has a silver lining, and sometimes the lining is gold with esoteric symbols and messages from aliens, or maybe it's a sketch of the tetragrammeton in a triangle as seen in Marie Antoinette's chapel. If you're feeling not OK, remember, there are people crazier than you are, maybe. Probably me. That should cheer you up, as a starter.

When I feel down in the dumps, I think of extreme things to do which just aren't permitted or simply not practical. For instance, and try not to get addicted to this one, you know that seventy-two flavors of ice cream place? Yep, do it. Empty that penny bank, and go get one of each. Maybe you can haggle with the owner for a price break, because at 50 cents a scoop, you're still going to have to pay more than $35.00 plus tax. You could take a friend or two, or not (more ice cream for you).

Sometimes, I think it's the lack of sunshine in your life. I have, in the past, put on my bathing suit in January, smeared on lotion and donned sunglasses, and hopped into my home's bay window for a "day at the beach". It was a nutty idea, but it worked. It is sometimes a problem for the neighbors, and people could honk a lot as they drive by, so try to find a safe and private area to do this, maybe your car if it has a skylight and a fold-down seat.

I've included my own two examples because you should feel free to be creative, especially if other attempts have not worked.

2011-12-30T20:30:00.000-08:00

What do dolphins like to do? The best way to find out is to ask the dolphins. They can't really talk right now, but they're working on it. You could ask that question about any animal. Often, careful observation of the subject answers the question.

I was watching a YouTube video yesterday of captured dolphins. That's what made me ask the question. In the video, the dolphins were swimming in what appeared to be turquoise water. The water probably appeared to be that color because the bottom of the pool was painted turquoise. One dolphin kept leaping onto what looked like a white plastic platform with a "slide"built into it, something like a one-piece fiberglass shower and tub unit that people foolishly install in their homes. The dolphin's behavior looked a lot like someone repeating a boring task.

As an aside, on the subject of fiberglass tub and/or shower units, I would like to ask people who have had them installed in perfectly good homes, "how do you like those things after three or four years?" You can only clean them with a few products as explained in the care guide that accompanies them and which almost no one reads. If you use anything harsher than say, baking soda, the shine comes right off. It gets worse and worse from there on. The plastic-like fiberglass surface becomes a sponge and attracts film and bonds forever with it. The job of cleaning the shower then becomes a real workout. There are a lot of people who know exactly what I'm talking about. Porcelain is the best way to go in the long run.

Let's return to the subject of dolphins. They can obey commands and signals and appear to enjoy these types of activities in the ocean, but that may be because they can swim away when they get bored. At the Dolphin Research Center, the dolphins train the trainers to work with them. Although you can't make a direct correlation, dolphins are like people in that they have different personalities and different likes and dislikes. Mostly, they just like to have fun.

In trying to make a practical application of this information, try to remember "one fish after every behavior" is boring.

2011-12-24T23:50:00.000-08:00

First of all, let me say this didn't happen to me. It happened to a friend of a friend, and that's how I know about it.

Let's just say the holidays are tough and sometimes confusing for this person. It seems he or she, whatever, was waiting for the pumpkin pie to come out of the oven and feeling funny, glanced at the laptop keyboard, when all of a sudden, things looked completely different, kind of like a time warp to a different plane. For example, he or she had never really comprehended the full meaning of the "Fn" on the keyboard before. Suddenly, it seemed to mean "fun", whereas it had never seemed to mean that before. Also the lamp on the book shelf seemed to take on the characteristics of a saint, fully illuminated.

The friend of a friend does not take drugs. Alcohol is enough to render them silly. That's why it's OK for some people to say, "No, thanks, I'm driving." even if they're not.

God Almighty, I love John Denver, because he was the first one to condone the Rocky Mountain High and think it was funny.

2011-12-23T22:45:00.000-08:00

I am not a Master Fromager. As a cheese lover, I don't know what's good, but I know what I like. That's a true statement if you consider what a real Master Fromager thinks of my favorite cheese, Munster. In the book Mastering Cheese, Lessons For Connoisseurship From A Maitre Fromager, Munster is listed as a "stinky cheese". I hadn't noticed. It is also called "cow-y", but I don't see that they call goat cheese goat-y or sheep cheese sheep-y. I feel bad for Munster, as if someone had said my pet could be a contender for The Ugliest Dog In The World contest.

St. Benedict is not actually the patron saint of cheese, but he can be thanked for "inspiring the construction of monasteries...which in turn led to the creation of a great modern cheese type: washed-rind stinky 'monk cheeses'" (33).

The blue cheeses, called Miraculous Moldies in the book, are blue because of the mold that gives them their flavor. This mold is a kind of pennicillin. I don't know if you could culture a medicinal grade of penicillin in a lab from blue cheese or not. That's like saying, sure, I'll deliver your baby in an end of the world scenario, otherwise, no.

It seems they've got cheese tasting down to a science:

"What we humans perceive as cheese flavor is made up of a few of fundamental components: first, the five flavors detected by the taste buds on our tongues- sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami (savory); and second, the thousands of odors we can pick up with our noses" (92).

There are terms you can use to describe cheese. "Terms such as fruity, nutty, and grassy are common...You'll find some interesting- at times quirky, quizzical, comical, and even anthropomorphic- references. Some of them are a tad alarming; some are even cute. (See sidebar on "squidgy" and "bilious", page 100) (98).

The sidebar title Take a Good Sniff suggests that one should Smell The Rind, but not to eat it if it smells "funky". Yes, that's the exact word used.

What do you call it when the cheese squeaks on your teeth?

The book is actually quite informative and could raise your level of cheese awareness beyond pasteurized American cheese:

"...In 1851, a dairy entrepreneur named Jessie Williams built America's first industrial cheese factory in Rome, New York...American cheese manufacturers skimmed off their cream and sold it for extra income. By cutting corners and shipping out inferior cheeses, they were able to turn a better profit."

American cheese has ruled America since then. It, like Americans, could be called bland due to the so-called Melting Pot effect, but I prefer to think of it as The Sleeping Giant. I think it is the Industrial Strength bi-product of America's love of cheese.

2011-12-06T18:46:00.000-08:00

A window to the sky is not slavery. It is an invitation to let your mind soar. There is no prison of the spirit if your mind can fly yourself out of there, wherever you might be. They say that "kids these days" have so much content provided for them that they are short on imagination. I suppose if they didn't have computers and such, you could just give them a couple of sticks and they could rub them together and discover fire all over again, but that's a different blog. This blog is about being enslaved.

There are many ways to be enslaved. You can be enslaved by your own life, your desires, your passions, and whatnot. I am fond of saying that men are slaves to their biology, and that keeps me from having to think, dispute, or reconcile some of their behavior.

When you think of plantations, do you think of Gone With The Wind? This movie is a classic film drama, but Scarlett and Rhett represented the privileged few, the sharp point at the top of the pyramid. The truth is that plantations existed before the Old South in the United States of America.

Tudor and Stuart plantation systems were established in Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries. Plantations in the Caribbean were stocked with Irish slaves and servants, many of them children. Orphaned and poor children, in fact, were often used as slaves in the past and today.

Many Scandinavian people came to the United States as indentured servants. An indentured servant did have the option of being free after fulfilling a term of service.

This brings up a touchy subject. On a plantation there has to be two classes: masters and servants. This subject is not so touchy with the masters, but it is a real stinker with the servants and slaves.

Slavery exists today in human trafficking of both adults and children.

From time to time it is necessary to think about something which requires our attention, since awareness that a problem exists is the first step in solving a problem.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like if you were a slave? That might be difficult if you don't know anything about it, the everyday and harsh reality.

This brings to mind the subject of autonomy. To me, this word means the right to choose one's own course in life, to make one's own decisions, and most of all, to do one's own thinking. If someone else tells you what to do and what to think all the time, are you not similar to a robot which is programmed to obey commands?

2011-12-02T23:16:00.000-08:00

Blogger has an exciting feature. Just go into "settings" and enable yourself to translate your blog into several other languages. A word of warning though, when you are on the dashboard page, do not, I repeat, do not click on Arabic unless you can write it. It will take you a while to find the English button again.

This feature comes with a tutorial, This is part of it:

"How do I use the transliteration feature?

The Quick Answer

Go to the Settings|Basic tab and enable the transliteration option.
* Select your language.
Click the Transliteration button on the posting form to type in transliteration mode.

What is transliteration?

Blogger offers an automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to the characters used in the following languages:

Amharic

Arabic

Bengali

Greek

Persian

Gujarati

Kannada

Hindi

Malayalam

Marathi

Nepali

Punjabi

Russian

Sanskrit

Serbian

Tamil

Telugu

Tigriny

Urdu

This lets you type these languages phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- the sound of the words is converted from one alphabet to the other, not the meaning. For example, typing 'hamesha' transliterates into Hindi as:
"

Even though my native language is English, and I think and blog in English, someone who blogs in Russian could translate my blog into English.

Imagine that!

2011-11-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-25T12:03:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-21T01:35:00.000-08:00

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 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 himself onto the beach. In this case, Jonah is like a beached whale, except this means life, not death, for him. Jonah is saved from drowning. He is a living miracle.

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.

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.

2011-11-20T21:21:00.000-08:00

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, so it is associated with Thanksgiving. (Some kinds of dinosaurs also had furculas.) 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.

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 comes 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.

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.

2011-11-19T21:32:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-07T15:37:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-10-21T22:21:00.000-07:00

It's odd how you get interested in something, possibly because of just one word or idea. Of course, one thing leads to another. Soon, it becomes so complicated you want to call in the experts.

I was reading about a town in England called Wormshill:

"A 1994 landscape survey identified woodland to the north of the village as having contained ancient flint tools and what appeared to be flint boundary markers, the latter apparently gathered from loose-lying surface flints. The area around the village features ancient deneholes, or agricultural chalk mines, some of which are pre-Roman. These holes, which may be up to 30 metres (100 ft) deep, were often dug at the edges of fields, onto which the chalk marl would be spread."

Wormshill is a very ancient place with a name connected to a Viking god, Odin.

I began wondering about the origin of chalk. I've never found any deep deposits of chalk in my yard or heard about any such discoveries in the yards of anyone I know. I typed in the search term origin of chalk, and the first entry was about mineral deposits in Belchalwell in southern Britain. It seems that chalk and flint are associated minerals.

I wondered what the meaning of the place name Belchalwell might be. It sounds like belch well, but that couldn't be it. I had already read that the town name Wormshill was derived from ancient times:

"The village is thought to be much older, its name derived from the Anglo-Saxon god Woden (a cognate with the Norse god, Odin) and meaning 'Woden's Hill'" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormshill).

Knowing this, there might be an interesting interpretation given to the name Belchawell. One Internet site gives the meaning of of Belchawell as "hill by the cold stream". My first guess had been about "Bel", associated with Beltane and fires on the hills.

Another site added to this by saying:

"Many written references state that 'Bel' or 'Bell' is Old English for 'Hill', though this seems to be a rather simplified version, as more detailed interpretations seem to give it the meaning 'sacred hill' or 'hill of sacrifice'...

Our own thoughts are that the name could originate from much earlier times, and be associated with the Celtic festival of Beltain (Beltain, Beltane, Beltaine), which was still widely celebrated up to the 17th century, and still is in places. The hill was an important place to our ancestors, with evidence of use and occupation stretching back thousands of years into the neolithic period. The ancient earthworks around the boundaries and the tumuli at the summit evidence this significance, and the multiple layers of field systems from different periods patch-working the hill show it's fertility and usefulness to many hundreds of generations."

Belchalwell is still in existence today. This site has photos from the not so ancient past. My favorite was:

"The Cross, now known as Post Box Cottage, taken 1949. We don't know who the gentleman in the picture is, but the building is remarkably little changed today compared with most properties in Belchalwell Unknown, donated by Jack Yeatman."

Hmm, maybe I was on to something after all, but what? Digging for obscure meaning is much like digging in my garden for fossils and other mineral deposits, very hard work and very interesting.

2011-10-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

OMGG. Oh my, Good Golly, Miss Molly.

Let me explain.

Where do I start?

It seems that people actually read my blogs. For some time, I have been treating my blog as a sort of note -taking pad, using my own mental shorthand to sort of, kind of map out a few things I want to say, mostly to myself.

Now, I feel I really must give them all a quick once-over to see if they make sense in a public way, like having a lot of children hanging from the chandeliers and subsequently finding out the rector is on the way over for a little chat.

Whoops, kiddos!

2011-10-10T17:31:00.000-07:00

My garden space was the worst place in the world to plant a garden. The garden site was sloped so that if I turned over the soil at all, I risked losing the bit of fertile soil there was with the first rain. Digging into the minimal topsoil, the shovel would crunch into rocks covered with a sticky red clay. The site was so bad that I considered buying some type of large containers to fill with topsoil and put the garden plants in them instead of in the ground. Then I thought that would become too expensive, for the number of containers I would need might be more than one hundred, so why not turn the clay soil into ready-made pots in the ground and fill the holes with fertile ground. I dug holes about two feet deep, and when the digging got especially rough I would fill them with water and let it soak in for a while. I used all the big square rocks that I could find to terrace the slope a bit. It turned out to be a pretty good idea.

I began the task, but it was really strenuous. Sparks would fly every time I unexpectedly struck a rock with my shovel. I would often have to pry the rocks out of the tough, sticky clay. I worked at it all spring and summer, usually piling the debris in small heaps throughout the garden, the summer heat making me lazy about carting them out in a wheelbarrow.

As the spring and summer rains began, the clay slowly washed off from all the rocks, and I began to think some of them looked peculiarly like fossils, but who would ever think that untold eons ago, some process, maybe a melting glacier, would dump so many proofs of ancient life right there, right where millions (Dare I guess how long ago?) of years later I would try to grow tomatoes?

One day, I picked up what looked like a thin slice of shale and dipped it into a bucket of water to clean off the last remnants of dirt. There, looking right into my face, was an unmistakable face of a creature who had once been alive, however long ago. There it was, grinning back at me, with obvious mouth and eyes, and maybe a glob was once a nose.

After that, my garden began to look more like an archeological dig than a proper garden. The tomatoes grew beautifully too in their underground containers.

2011-03-12T16:19:00.000-08:00

The Devil's Rooming House by M. William Phelps and Refuge in Hell by Daniel B. Silver were on the library bookshelf, separated only by one book.

Other than the idea of the Devil and Hell, what could these books have in common?

According to the book jacket, M. William Phelps has written "the first book about the life, times, and murders of America's most prolific female serial killer." In the summer of July, 1911, Amy Archer-Gilligan ran a boarding house for old age pensioners in Windsor, CT.

The heat during that summer in New England literally caused people to commit suicide. A lot of people in her Windsor home for "aged and chronic invalids" were also dying. Her story was the inspiration for the play Arsenic and Old Lace, written by Joseph Kesselring and directed by Bretaigne Windust.

Daniel B. Silver wrote about "How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted The Nazis". Mr. Silver, according to the book jacket "has served as general counsel to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. He lives with his wife in Chevy Chase, MD."

Silver's book chronicles the survival of not only the Krankenhaus Der Jusischen Gemeinde, located on Iranischestrasse in Berlin, but also of many German Jews who took refuge there. It was a strange and complicated alliance between the Jewish doctors and nurses in the hospital and Nazi boss Adolph Eichmann.

Early in the book The Devil's Rooming House, the author recreates a probable scene in the prologue Simmering Death, page x, between an inmate of Amy Archer's home and a visiting doctor. The inmate tells the doctor that he thinks Mrs. Archer is poisoning him. "You want I should whisper?" the doctor asks with a raided eyebrow?"

The Devil's Rooming House states that "Windsor socialites rallied to Amy's side. There was no way, many were quick to say, that Sister Amy - given that nickname because she was rarely seen around town without her trusty Bible in the crook of her arm - was killing people." In Refuge in Hell, the nurses were called Sisters; there is a photograph of Schwesters Ada and Carry.

The inmates at Sister Amy's were dying in great numbers as were the Jews in the Berlin Jewish Hospital. Both pogroms went on for several years before they were called to a halt.

Refuge in Hell gives these statistics "If overall admissions were low, the death toll, as a percentage of admissions, rose sharply during the 1943-45 period. In 1943, the 425 deaths that were recorded represented almost 29 percent of the number of admissions" (188). At first, the deaths at Amy Archer-Gilligan's were not suspect. The inmates in her home signed over their entire fortunes to her in exchange for room and board for the rest of their lives. It was only when the number of deaths started to snowball and a large of amount of arsenic purchased by her was discovered that serious questions began to be asked.

In The Devil's Rooming House, Amy Archer-Gilligan began to move dead bodies without the proper permits. "Removing a dead body from any home - business or private residence - without a permit was in violation of the law. Transporting that body across town lines, moreover, was a second violation. Amy was guilty, admittedly, of both. Franklin Andrews had been driven to Hartford - Smith and Sons' Undertaking - immediately after his death (188).

"Captain Robert Hurley got a shock when he showed up at the Archer Home the morning after Amy's arrest...Still, Seth Ramsey, an inmate who had taken over Franklin Andrew's role as Amy's 'helper' around the house had broken into the barn during the night. Even worse, Ramsey had apparently taken all of the papers and other 'articles' from inside the barn and burned them in the incinerator."

2010-06-15T16:31:00.001-07:00

A Place For Everything and Everything In Its Place

The founding fathers of the United States of America, aware of the fact that oppression often arises, tried to provide the most balanced and thoughtful laws in the Constitution and its amendments and in the Bill of Rights.

These documents make it clear that there must be a separation of church and state. What does this mean?

The “state”, that is established government, must not legislate that there be an official religion to which all citizens are compelled to bend the knee. The state must not force any citizen to render homage to any religion, to pay monies to any religion, or to compel them in any way to support or participate in religion.

This does not mean that the citizens of the United States of America are obligated to be atheists. U.S. history and tradition make it clear that the majority of Americans have had an affiliation or attachment to one religion or another during its history. Freedom of religion is also provided for by the same body of law that mandates separation of church and state. Even atheism is a statement of belief or beliefs by individuals about religion and spiritual matters . U.S. Citizens are guaranteed both the freedom of and the freedom from religion.

The purpose behind these ideas is to make sure that government does not establish a religion that is at one with itself, forcing the populace to render taxation monies to support that religion, and thus, taking away the freedom of choice to worship in whatever way an individual might choose, robbing them of the right to give free exercise to their conscience. It is a protection against enforced robotic obedience to arbitrary rule.

This purpose of law also forbids, by extension of principle, enforcing support of a state church by police action or military force to compel citizens and those resident aliens sharing their freedom to attend or observe any religious practice whatsoever. It does not forbid that religion be held and practiced by individuals or those united in congregation. It forbids that government take over the running and monetary support of religion, and particularly holding a monopoly on religion.

The “state”, whether it be federal, state, or municipal, may not use monies from any source, foreign or domestic, to establish religion or enforce its observance by threat of force, punishment, or penalty of any sort.

There are many days of national observance proclaimed by Congress. However, it is clear that no one is compelled or forced to participate in these events. Rather, days of national observance are statements that the purpose and intention behind these observances are held in esteem and would be respected by the majority of citizens.

A National Day of Prayer does not command observance, and because it is not obligatory, it allows for participation or abstention. It does not direct attention to any particular religion. Just as Arbor Day doesn't demand that everyone plant a tree on that day and International Peace Day cannot guarantee international peace on that day, so a National Day of Prayer acknowledges and affirms that Congress, in behalf of its constituents, believes it is an accepted and honorable ideal, but it not law and not obligatory. It acknowledges that its citizens, for the most part, still believe in a Deity and believe that spiritual petition is efficacious. It affirms that America has a spiritual and cultural inheritance that continues into our 21^st century.

It is our birthright to say In God We Trust. It is a motto closely allied to the origin of these United States. It implies the ability to exercise what is often called our "God-given right" to hold separate beliefs and opinion from others and make us a free society. In this sense, the promise of freedom of worship and separation of church and state is inextricably linked to the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

2010-04-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Bog People: from Archeology, May/June 2010

I have a fascination with the Bog People. I am hungry for every bit of news about them. I'm in good company. Seamus Heaney, the noted Irish poet and writer, thinks one of the Bog People looks like his uncle.

I blog about the Bog People. I write essays about them. A lot of people feel the same interest, as evidenced by the many articles I find in magazines and other publications.

In the May/June 2010 issue of ARCHEOLOGY magazine is an article called “Bog Bodies Rediscovered”. The facts uncovered about the Bog People lead me to suspect that the pagan people of Europe, including the British Isles, were closely connected to each other by belief and customs, these connections being reinforced by the constant traveling, visiting, trading, and interaction of cultures.

Tollund Man, who appears on the cover of the magazine, was found naked as a stillborn child in the fetal position except for his hat, a “two-strand leather rope” around his neck that seemed to be the instrument of his murder, and a leather belt. This bog person has the most preternatural look of peace on his face, a curious thing for a strangled man to have. The article says “It was as though the dead man's soul had for a moment returned from another world, through a gate in the western sky.”

That's the thing about the bog people, they appear so strangely real, despite the strange coloring that the tobacco-brown peat juices give to their bodies. It makes time-traveling seem almost possible.

I had seen the Windeby Girl, another Bog person, before in photographs in books, and I always thought, no offense meant, that she must have been, well, a somewhat unattractive girl. It turns out that there is a good reason for that. The Windeby Girl is actually a boy. It is suggested that what appears to be a blindfold was probably a headband that has slipped down due to shrinkage and was probably used to keep his hair from his eyes. The Windeby person has his hair “half-shaved” on one side and the probably reason given for the lack of the other half to is “natural process of decay from greater exposure of oxygen on one side of her head than the other, or of trowel damage...”.

If you can see the little whisker hairs of Tollund Man still intact, isn't it possible to tell if the head of the Windeby Girl was shaven or not? The reason I ask is that there was a pagan goddess named Hel who had one half of her face shaded and one half in light, much like the faces shown on the cover of the Beatles' Meet The Beatles Album.

In the Scottish Outer Hebrides, the bodies at Cladh Hallan seems to give proof that they were deliberately mummified in a bog and then retrieved and buried elsewhere. If true, that would mean that not all the corpses found in the peat bogs were accidental victims who fell in due to bilberry intoxication. The article suggests that the burials give evidence of ancestor worship. One of the bodies seems to be a composite of several bodies, which fact gives rise to a lot of other questions.

I have a question about Red Franz on page 26 of the magazine. If he died as a young man, what is with his eyebrows? He has the eyebrows of an eighty year old man. It was interesting that he has “'riders' facets'” on his thigh bones. These are described as “protrusions caused by the increase of the muscles and connective tissues of the hip, which can occur from constant horseback riding.” Another question: Since it was discovered that “after decades of being displayed on his back, they turned him over onto his abdomen” and found his throat had been cut, what took them so long to roll him over?

More questions arise on reading page 28: Did you notice that some of the figures, both interior and exterior, on the Gundestrup Cauldron have their hands up as if the police had yelled “Freeze right there and keep your hands in the air”? Page 29 shows the partial torso and arms of a bog person called Old Croghan Man in just the same posture. There may have been ritual postures that signified different facets of pagan religious rites, and that may be one, just a gangs and secret societies today have secret signs and handshakes. Of course, there are also unicorns on the inside of the cauldron. Incidentally, this bog person as well as Clonycavan Man had their nipples pinched and cut off. Various speculations are thrown about.

The Clonycavan Man has a skull that had been opened with an ax and had also been clobbered in the nose, probably by the very same ax. This puts the theory that bog people were hopelessly lost in the bog or intoxicated and accidentally fell into the bog waters. They were undoubtedly murdered, possibly ritually. Clonycavan Man has combed his hair into a twist, thrown forward up onto his head and cemented with an "organic" hair gel. He is described as six and a half feet tall and a regular eater of meat. You can probably piece a picture together of this man and his personality.

2010-04-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread...”

When I was reading Timpson's Country Churches, I came across a photograph of a stone on which was carved with what looked like a sheaf of wheat, or a piece of rope that was unraveling, or maybe the stylized figure of a man. The Steyning stone is 5' 8" tall, a good height for a man back then.This stone is kept at St. Andrew's Church, Steyning, England.

There is also a statue of St. Cuthmann in Steyning. A copy of the standing stone rests on the ground next to a seated figure of St. Cuthmann. Britain is filled with carved and standing stones from antiquity. Stones were apparently worshiped back then. In fact, the Standing Stones o' Stenniss in the Orkneys should reinforce this idea.

A source alludes to the possible underlying paganism of the stone at Steyning. "One author tells us of a legend that St. Cuthman brought down a pagan stone that the people here were worshipping, but that may be a modern legend derived from the analysis of the placename (Candlin 1985 p.55). "

A description of the photograph from the book Timpson's Country Churches explains that “The name of the village comes from the Saxon word Stenningas meaning 'the people of the stone' - and this could be the stone” (Timpson, 97).

The text explaining the origin of St. Andrew's, Steyning, formerly St. Cuthmann's, tells the legend that St. Cuthmann, seeking a place to build a church, pulled his invalid mother in a home-made handcart with a rope fashioned into a yoke around his neck. Please remember that this is a legend. Realistically, the yoke would be placed in such a way that most of his mothers' weight would have been on his shoulders and chest, however strong his neck might have been. Besides, a rope around the neck is not a pleasant image.

The wording of this legend suggests a connection to the pre-Christian and pagan cult, in which the 'hanging god' is obliquely mentioned. The rope around Cuthmann's neck broke, and as in the case of a condemned man, if he lived through the hanging because the rope broke, he was allowed to live.

Cuthmann made a “handle” of elder branch to pull the handcart, but that also broke. Perhaps the broken rope and elder branch indicated that the situation had gone far enough. It is said that St. Cuthmann vowed to build his church when he could go no further.

As for the carving on the stone in the church, it was no doubt symbolic of ideas important to the stonemasons who carved it, in this case probably the Saxon people who established the village, or perhaps an even earlier settlement of people from whom the Saxons borrowed their symbolism. Does the fact that Stenningas means the people of the stone indicate the particular stone at St. Andrews or does it have some older and deeper meaning? Even if it refers to that particular stone, what does the carving upon the stone mean?

The Saxons, having converted to Christianity, may have been referring to Jesus' quote to St. Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”. This is commonly believed to be a pun on Peter's name that is linked to the word petros, rock, having the meaning “You are Peter (stalwart as a rock), and you will be the foundation of my church.” This quote can be compared with Jesus' parable about the man who built his house upon the rock which survived the flood waters that destroyed all the houses not havinge a solid foundation. The Saxons might have been referring to the fact that they belonged to the Christian Church founded by St. Peter. Most probably, they applied this meaning after the rejection of paganism.

What was the significance of placing the stone inside St. Andrew's? Many of the English churches in Timpson's book feature art that is distinctly pagan, renewed in a Christian context. They were probably having a hard time giving up their pagan ways.

Another example of pre-Christian imagery is in St. Mary's church, Happisburg, which contains, “The fifteenth-century font with its club-wielding wodehouses, traditional wild men”. That motif is linked to legendary wild men of the forest who were part of the cult of Odin (Norse) or Wodin (English). The current generation has no idea how wild some of the men of England once were.

These carvings were familiar symbols to the stone masons and woodcarvers who helped build the early churches. The name Happisburg indicates the meaning of the apis village, or bee village, beehives also being an ancient symbol. Bakers' ovens were once constructed in the shape of large beehives.

The pagan symbols and customs of harvest time were remembered and used by converted pagans. Bread, corn, sheaves, and harvesting implements figured in lore so old that people eventually forgot their origin even though they continued to celebrate the custom, such as in the case of Halloween. All Hallow's Eve was once a time filled with superstition and dread but is now viewed as a frolic for children and adults alike.

The appearance of the figure on the stone at St. Andrew's is somewhat rune-like and could be mistaken for a stick-figure of a man, the center section of the figure being the torso and the top and bottom sections being the arms and legs respectively. The figure is headless. It might also be seen as a braided piece of work of two strands, or as a sheaf of wheat.

A photograph from the book Timpson's Country Churches, shows the Steyning stone kept as an artifact of antiquity at St. Andrew's Church, Steyning, England. The wire around the top does not appear to be holding the stone to the wall but is merely looped around the place where the head of a figure might be, were it symbolic of a man.

In the book Baking with Julia, written by Dorie Greenspan, there might be an answer as to what the figure on the stone represents. In the chapter titled "Artisan Breads Crusty and Rustic", the photographs of braided bread and the braided dough for Wheat-Stalk Pain de Campaign, risen and ready for baking, closely resemble the carving on the Steyning stone in St. Andrew's.

A photograph from the book Baking with Julia, shows an illustration of how to form the braid of the Braid-and-Wheat Pain de Campagne. The finished bread has a braided corona (couronne or crown) around the perimeter of the round loaf and a pattern of wheat stalks on the top of the bread. The braid is formed by lining up parallel elongated pieces of dough and starting the braid in the center.

In Pain de Campagne the author says “this loaf is made by the centuries-old chef-levain method, which depends on capturing and nurturing airborn wild yeast...To straighten out terminology, the chef, or chief, is a mixture primarily of flour and water that is allowed to ferment over a period of two days, after which it is 'fed' with more flour and water...the Pain de Compagne can be made using the fountain method...The large round loaf can sport an outer braid and a decorative bouquet of wheat stalks...or the grape cluster and star-shaped breads...”

Many of the terminologies of bread-making involve actions similar to harvesting corn and grain in the days before modern farm machinery. They sometimes sound violent, such as “slashing the batard...hold the razor almost parallel to the loaf and make three cuts..Slash the others and get them into the oven as soon as possible.”

The photograph from Baking with Julia shows the completed Braid and Wheat Country Bread.

Baking With Julia also dispalys a collection of rolling pins for related chores like “butter bashing”. It admonishes cooks to choose the French pin if only one can be had because it has no handles. (Remember that St. Cuthmann, made a handle from an elder branch for his handcart.)

The couronne or crown is a ring-shaped bread reminiscent of the halo in both Christian and pre-Christian symbolism. The bread has a hole in the center and resembles the ring-shaped rocks called logans that children were passed through in pagan times to heal them. Oddly enough, the book shows a technique for putting a hole in the dough: “Plunge your elbow into the center of the dough to make a hole.”

They actually plunged in their elbows. There is a photograph to show the correct technique.

2010-04-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Book of Irish Verse
Irish Poetry From The Sixth Century To The Present
edited by John Montague
published by Bristol Park Books, New York, 1998

OLD MYTHOLOGIES

The poem CORMAC MAC AIRT PRESIDING AT TARA, version by Douglas Hyde, describes an ideal king. “Beautiful was the appearance in that assembly. Flowing and slightly curling was his golden hair.”

This first sentence is followed by a long passage describing the appearance and dress of Cormac in that assembly. The description of his appearance is followed by a last sentence telling why he was considered beautiful, “ And he was himself, besides, symmetrical and beautiful of form, without blemish or reproach” (Montague, 50).

Symmetry was the defining quality of beauty. The importance of symmetry and balance is a point I make in parts of my research essay about John Millington Synge's play Riders to The Sea.

Not only does the passage in CORMAC MAC AIRT PRESIDING AT TARA give a description about the subject of symmetry, but the written form of the passage is symmetrical in that the first and last sentences balance each other, with a lavish description in between.

Another example of balance and symmetry in Irish poetry is found in THE ALPHABET CALENDAR OF AMERGIN, version by Robert Graves. The poem, in three stanzas, begins with “I am” in every line, followed by a noun, separated from the description by a colon. For example:

“I am a stag: of seven tines.” The right side, after the first line, can be read as a continuous flow, “I am a stag of seven tines across a plain on a deep lake the Sun lets fall, above the cliff beneath the nail among flowers, who but I Sets the cool head aflame with smoke? (Montague, 45).

The form of this poem is perfectly balanced, with the colon acting as a fulcrum between the two sides. It also hints that each side of the equation might contain its own story and logic apart from each other, just as the human brain has two hemispheres that work in unison but also contain their own separate left brain – right brain functions.

The poem THE PLAIN OF ADORATION, version by John Montague, describes a vile idol once worshiped in pagan Ireland. It is a poem of seven stanzas, the first being “Here was raised/ a high idol of cruel fights:/ the Cromm Cruaich-/ The King Idol of Ireland.”

The poem goes on to tell: “He was their Molech,/ this withered hump of mists,/ dominating every harbour,/ denying the eternal kingdom.” Calling to mind stone circles like Stonehenge, The third verse says, “In a circle stood/ four times three idols of stone:/ to bitterly enslave his people,/ the pivot figure was gold.”

The ancient festival of Samhain is brought to mind with these words, “In dark November/ when the two worlds near each other,/ he glittered among his subjects,/ blood-crusted, insatiable.”
The fifth verse states that “To him without glory,/ would they sacrifice their firstborn;/ with wailing and danger/ pouring new blood for the Stooped One.”

The sixth verse is this, “Under his shadow/ they cried and mutilated their bodies;/ from this worship of dolour/ it is called the Plain of Adoration.”

The final verse compares the two halves of the Irish belief system. “From the rule of Eremon/ well bred and graceful Goidels/ worshipped such stones until/ the coming of good Patrick to Armagh” (Montague, 48-49).

In my research essay Riders to The Sea, I discuss the festival of Samhain in connection with the character Maurya who talks about the dark days of Samhain. There is also a brief statement about the struggle between the old religion and Christianity. The stones were apparently symbolic of the King who was symbolically compared to the god Molech. It was to this idol that human sacrifices were offered, particularly the sacrifice of the first newborn child of the adherents. The Old Testament of the Bible contains laws stating the proscribed sacrifices of herd and crops. The “first fruits”, the best of everything, were to be offered to God through the Levitical priesthood. The Bible specifically denounces the human sacrifices to Molech, who is mentioned specifically.

In Leviticus 18:21 it states: “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God. I am Yahweh” (The New Jerusalem Bible or NJ version).

Leviticus 20:2 repeats the command, “Anyone, be he Israelite or alien resident in Israel, who gives any of his children to Molech, will be put to death...” (NJ). 1 Kings 11:7 states, “Then it was that Solomon built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, on the mountain to the east of Jerusalem, and to Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites (NJ).

Footnote b of that page explains “'Milcom' Gk; “Molech” Hebr.”, or in other words, Milcom was another designation for Molech. Jeremiah 32:34-35 shows the reason why Molech was a debased god, “Instead, they set up their horrors in the Temple that bears my name to defile it, and built the high places of Baal in the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, to burn their sons and daughters alive in honour of Molech: a thing I have never ordered, that had never entered their thoughts- that they would cause Judah to sin by anything so loathsome" (NJ).

Although the poem THE PLAIN OF ADORATION is listed under the section called Old Mythologies, it is clear from Biblical history that the Israelites faced the same set of circumstances in opposing the worship of Molech as did the new religion, Christianity, when Saint Patrick forbade converts to continue sacrificing their children to Cromm Cruaich.

THE HAG OF BEARE is a poem from the ninth century. This poem gives good examples used in ancient times as motifs and archetypes. One example was the Hag motif. In mythology, the Hag could appear at any stage of life. In spring she was a beautiful maiden. In winter she was old and ragged. She typified the agricultural year that was linked to various fertility gods and their rites. She was also an archetype of mother and goddess. The poem is twenty-nine verses in length.

The poem describes life from an old woman's viewpoint. She discusses her youth and how things were better in the “good old days”. There are several correlating points to my essay about Riders to The Sea. In the play, Maurya is an old woman who recalls the days when her husband and sons were all alive and providing for the family as fishermen. After their deaths she speaks of the poverty facing her and her daughters.

In THE HAG OF BEARE, the speaker introduces herself in the second stanza, “I am the hag of Beare/ Fine petticoats I used to wear/ Today, gaunt with poverty,/ I hunt for rags to cover me” (Montague, 71).

Toward the end of the play Riders to The Sea, a group of woman mourners come to Maurya's cottage wearing red petticoats, a garment common on the Island where Synge lived for a time.
The speaker in THE HAG OF BEARE states another motif that could be linked to Odin, “And my right eye has been taken away/ As down-payment on heaven's estate...”

An integral part of the mythology of Odin is the belief that he lost an eye as the price of learning sacred secrets. This woman may have lost an eye after a lifetime, but it is more likely an allusion to the worship of Odin. Since Odin was a trickster and shape-shifter, the poem also inherently asks the question if he might have also been a cross-dresser in one of his disguises.

THE WARP-SPASM, version by Thomas Kinsella, contains a long description of the physical changes Cuchulain experienced when he grew angry with battle furor. “He sucked one eye so deep in to his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it on to his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek (Montague, 78).

Unlike Odin and more like The Incredible Hulk, Cuchulain returned to his normal form after he recuperated from the effects of his anger.

2010-01-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

Watch your language.

While reading up on something else, I came across the Latin word fucus, 'hornet'. I didn't study Latin in school, so the pronunciation is a toss-up for me. Hornets and bees both have stings, but aside from that, they are not so much alike.

I'm glad I don't have to struggle with the issue of pronunciation of this Latin word in front of a group of people. I remember my German teacher conjugating the verb fahren, "to go, travel or drive', for the first time in my class with all the resulting laughter at the third person singular present indicative form, much to his perennial annoyance, as it turned out. The joke is ever new and young to each freshman class but apparently aggravating to someone who has to endure it for twenty years or more.

A person can only conjecture about the comparisons and links that the human mind makes between language and culture, with a bit of heathen mythology thrown in for good measure. Although we don't always know the whys and wherefores of the things we say and do, there is usually a long and complicated tradition in language and culture, married centuries before we were even born.

In the same online Google book Gods of the Ancient Northmen, page 103, I learned that the word drittin, "dirty" referred, at least originally, to the worker bee returning to the hive laden with pollen and fragments of vegetation clinging to its body. So, the worker bees of the world are revolting peasants.

Beer and ale are made from grains, but mead is fermented from honey. In the etymological discussion from Gods of the Ancient Northmen, honey and mead and bitterness are braided together metaphorically. I guess sweet honey and bitter mead are something of an oxymoron. So, I ask you "What's good to drink and is both sweet and bitter?"

It gets complicated, but in my reading about Norse myth and Odin, I discovered that in myth Odin is able to call and question the Valkyrie and the volva, both of which classes of persons may, at times, be one and the same. These semi-spirits were manifested through a living medium called to predict the future at Norse farms.

The volva, a kind of traveling fortune teller, may have begun her session as she went into a trance to talk to Odin with a formula chant something to this effect that "She tells him that she knows where he put his eye." The pledge that Odin gives to Mimir in exchange for a drink of water is the sacrifice of his eye. Odin may have bitterly regretted this pledge, thus linking the honey mead to bitterness.

In the ensuing discussion, it seems I can't decide if the pledge is the eye or not. The pledge is like a contract where Odin wants a drink from the well containing wisdom and knowledge but has to consent to a binding agreement to give something valuable in exchange. One thing is sure, since only the volva can see Odin (wink, wink), someone has to put real rings and other valuables in her possession before she starts to prophesy. She is obviously in it for the money.

From Stephen Crane's The Black Riders:

II
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

I have to say that this sounds like the idiom "Eat your heart out", a phrase more bitter than sweet.

2009-12-31T16:43:00.001-08:00

It's the last day of the year 2009, and the thing that most grabbed my attention was hearing that Tasmanian Devils are threatened by extinction from a contagious cancer.

You could try to picture what a Tasmanian Devil looks like, but you will probably keep coming up with the image of a cartoon devil .

It's their noise and the aggression which must have earned Tasmanian Devils their name. They might be called cute if their behavior was nicer.

It seems that the sound and the fury of the Devil is accompanied by biting. We aren't talking about the proverbial love bite which, at least in humans, doesn't break the skin, and in a state of arousal is considered enjoyable by some. No, we are talking about Devil confrontation and combat.

The cancer that afflicts the Tasmanian Devil, only one of two types of contagious animal cancers, is found in the Devils' mouths, because that is the weapon they use in their mating battles. Their teeth puncture a site, and the cancer is transferred by injection.

It is reported that approximately 70% of the total Devil population has already died from this disease. Scientists and doctors are not without a clue. They have found that it originates in the Schwann cells. These are nerve cells, and the problem involves the myelin sheath which coats the nerves like plastic on an electric wire. The myelin sheath protects the nerve. When the correct function of the sheath is disrupted, disease occurs.

Multiple sclerosis is one of many afflictions in humans caused by a disease process of the myelin sheath. If the sheath wears thin or is lacking in any way, the result is the jerking motor movements associated with these diseases.

Malnutrition, alcoholism, and other factors can play a part in demyelination. Babies are sometimes born with incomplete myelination. The choppy movments of their arms reveal this, but happily, most babies continue to form myelin as they develop, outgrowing their uncoordinated movements. This is another good reason to insure that pregnant mothers and babies receive superior nutrition.

In our long list of prayers for understanding and cures, let's add this one, not just for the sake of Tasmanian Devils, but also because research might uncover new information that could help humans as well.

2009-12-29T08:56:00.000-08:00

On Grendel, the monster...

The term monster is subject to interpretation.

History is written by the victors, so Grendel's arch-enemy Beowolf is the protagonist, and Grendel is the antagonist. The name Beowulf means bee-hunter or bee-slayer and is a kenning for bear.

Some people think that the Grendel character from Beowulf was taken from the Biblical Cain tradition. Cain killed his brother Abel and became an outcast for the murder.

Others think that Grendel's character might be derived from the Berserkers: "berserks are often described as being fantastically ugly." The reason for that is much more than physical appearance.

According to the Cain tradition, Cain's mother saw him drink the blood of his brother Abel in a dream, and Berserkers were said to have drunk the blood of bears and wolves to gain their superhuman strength and battle fury.

A Grindle Stone is a grind stone by definition. It sounds a lot like Grendel, and if you remember "Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread" as a quote from the Giant in the children's story Jack and the Beanstock, you might think there was a connection.

The Biblical character Sampson was a man of superhuman strength who was captured by his enemies, blinded, and put to work at the grinding house of a mill. It seems possible that, because of his strength, he was tied in some way to the mechanism turning the grindstone, so that he took the place of a beast such as an ox or a team of oxen. His captors made fun of him, and in the end, his rage and misery caused him to pull the supporting pillars of the temple down, killing himself and his tormentors.

Fum and odur, Fume and rage: Odin's name meant rage, and fum from the Giant's rhyme probably meant fume, as in the sentence "He was fuming with rage", describing the Berserker and the Giant.

Whatever the case, Grendel was not like those that taunted him. He was probably mistreated all his life. Is it any surprise that he lashed out and ripped people limb from limb, biting and clawing like an animal?

Beowulf and his band of men crept up on Grendel on his deathbed and cut off his head. So much for monsters.

2009-12-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

Peon Bees or Worker Bees, what would you call them?

I love the honeybee because of its irreplaceable link in the chain of life, just as I appreciate that the scientific principle of cell wall integrity enables a world of diverse and beautiful forms instead of a vast pool of primordial pea soup covering the earth's surface.

That's not to say I don't like pea soup, provided it can be eaten with a spoon and not a fork.

Today, as I browsed NPR's online web site, I was amused listening to There's A Fly In My Urinal. In this story, I found out that the men's (Need I really say men's when I speak of urinals?) urinals in Schiphol, the Netherlands, have small etchings of a fly, one per urinal, embedded in the porcelain. There is a practical reason for this, although some urinals are designed as objets d'art.

These designs are not a trademark like the Izod alligator. They are there for a psychological reason. It seems that men need to aim for something. Without a specific goal or target, things can get messy.

In their radio program, NPR does not use the word piss. They say pee so as not to offend the sensibilities of their listeners. As an example of piss, I offer pissoir, a word taken from the French. It means a public urinal. Lots of Americans would prefer not to pronounce this word, probably because it relates to a bodily function, an uncomfortable subject for some.

Consider the Middle English word Pes meaning something like this or that. Imagine having to read out the conjugation of this word:

Case Masc. Fem. Neut.

Nominative pes peos pis

Genitive pisses pisse pisses

The Latin word pes means foot in English.There is also the expression the fly on the wall. Can he hear you? Aren't you glad that fly can't see you? He can't, can he?

P.S. Don't forget to button your fly. Straighten up and fly right.

Maybe men are just trying to clean things up by washing the fly away.

If there is such a strong impetus of the male toward a goal, maybe a psychologist or even a team of psychologists could figure out a way to use this instinct to engineer a striving for world peace, target date 2011.

It seems that possibly, deep in the primeval cave known as the mind of man, there is an urge to keep things down by, well, by pissing on them. There is an expression to that effect.

The same action can be found in the animal kingdom in regards to scent-marking territorial turf.

Of course, this doesn't apply to any of the men I know. None of them live in man-caves formerly inhabited by bears who fled in terror, so there is no reason for them to be offended at the suggestion that some men are primitives.

It turns out that the genus Apis from the "tribe" Apini, known mostly as the bee, is also found in urinals. One source dates its origin as far back as Victorian times. By this, I mean the urinal with the bee in it, not the bee itself. Apis also means a sacred bull. Language can be so confusing.

An online picture of a urinal disguised as a large flower, maybe a poppy, tulip, or calla lily only complicates the subject, because flowers are supposed to draw bees. That will give the bees something at which to aim.

In the end, one must ask if men and boys are around, is your garden safe? How safe are the bees?

2009-12-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

Ten thousand leaves. A thousand cranes.

From December 2009 National Geographic magazine:

"Each appendage consists of a folded flap of paper, and each flap, origamists realized in the 1990's, uses a circular portion, or a quarter or half circle, of the original square."

Scientists have solved the mathematical puzzle by algorithm that enable them to fold complex shapes such as telescope lenses into small spaces. "In 1995 Japanese engineers launched a satellite with a solar array that folded in pleats like a map...to fit into a rocket."
By intuition, the Japanese knew this all along.

From Stephen Crane's The Black Riders:

"IV
Yes, I have a thousand tongues,
And nine and ninety-nine lie.
Though I strive to use the one,
It will make no melody at my will,
But is dead in my mouth."

Crane's meaning probably reflects more on ancient folk beliefs, yet intrinsic in these lines is the idea that even in nine hundred and ninety-nine plus one, that only one is true or real. No matter how many origami designs exist, only one can be manifest in the intention of folding a single origami figure.

All Origami figures are contained in a single sheet of paper. Yes, all of them. That might add up to a billion. All the plans are in that one piece of paper and your brain. Of course, you may select only one per sheet.

Even a simple task like folding towels informs us that we are saving space or reshaping to fit a space.

Folding: Towels, space, paper squares. These three are already folded and ready to go. Yes, that towel is folded. You just can't see it yet. Yes, there is a crane in that sheet. You just can't see it yet, but you will when the right conditions are met.

If you think of it, a riddle has the answer in it, although you may not see it right away.

Some things arrive completely folded, a package tied with string, as it were. The blueprint for many things is hiding in some other form. It has always been and has always been there waiting for you to see.

A garden seed is formed with a tiny plan or blueprint in it.

The plan unfolds and grows by the addition of water and nutrients. You could think of a seed as a plan that is "bound so tight it cannot grow" until the right conditions are met.

A snowflake is a plan that unfolds with the addition of water and cold. As an amateur snowflake aficionado, I have not succeeded in creating snowflakes in the freezer compartment of my refrigerator. Sometimes there are ice crystals in there, but they lack the romance of the snowflake, close but not quite. I have created ice cubes, but I have yet to find a coffee table book filled with wondrous photos of beautiful ice cubes.

That means there is something unique about the snowflake even though it has the same ingredients as frost and ice cubes.

The frost chrysanthemums that bloom on my winter's window are gorgeous in their way, but still they are not snowflakes. They don't possess the same freedom of movement.

Where is the blueprint for a snowflake? Since it is a rain drop transformed, the plan must be in the raindrop, but that plan cannot emerge from its wet chrysalis without the additional elements of sky, light, space, and cold.

A snowflake is not a living thing, but it shimmers with light, a mirage of life.

How can a transition be made from discussing a snowflake to discussing a virus? A comparison could be made from the fact that they remain hidden or dormant until the right conditions are met for their transformation.

Interestingly, the archaic meaning of virus is venom. A spider often hides before its attack, and a snake is often coiled before it strikes.

A virus, a living entity, is a folded plan that needs help from a cell to replicate. Some viruses look like an alien unpacking its suitcase. To humans, viruses are rarely thought of as beautiful or good, but they do have a demonic appetite for survival.

A bacteriophage is particularly scary looking. It eats bacteria, an effective way of destroying them. Phages have been used in place of medicine. "They have been used for over 60 years as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.^[5] They are seen as a possible therapy against multi drug resistant strains of many bacteria."

In this way, it acts as a beneficial agent, if the bacteria that it eats is harmful to living things that we value.

A computer virus is like a biologic virus in that it is folded and appears small in a harmless way or seems inconspicuous at face value. It is plain and harmless looking and may go unnoticed for a long time, that is, until it begins to unpack its suitcase.

2009-11-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

Here is my Thanksgiving list for 2009. I give thanks for:

cell wall integrity/ oatmeal/ that my head still faces forward/ Goths and Visigoths/ trauma centers/ my squirrel hat/ that none of my family is currently behind bars/ book nooks/ trepanning to let out the devils/ vegetable medley/ Z-pack/ my brand new leopard skin pillbox hat/ garden boots/ Queen Anne Cherry pie filling/ muddling through/ cellos and french horns/ my go cart/ my other go cart/ the cloths of heaven/ Xerox machines/ the quick brown fox/ laptops/ animal crackers/ potato soup/ body stockings/ piece of me/ puppy dog pie/ Iowa Basic Skills/ simple tools/ the horrible dreadful mistake/ for "everything about it is wrong"/ neural networks/ George Orwell.

That is a complete load of bricks, not shy of a single brick. I guess the Christmas Wish List is next.

2009-08-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

Grim Tunes

My father died, or so I am told.
I wasn't there to witness it for myself,
So, for all I know, he escaped the tyranny of this life
And moved to Florida and is now yucking it up
With all the widow ladies in some retirement village,
Splitting wood and borrowing things from their pantries.

Then again, as a counter balance,
I saw his death certificate,
Although my parents are perfectly capable
Of pulling strings and getting one, dead or alive.

And yet again, I have my mother's account of
How he never woke up after my sister and I
Sang Waltzing Matilda to him in his sick room.

That was the last time I saw him.
Two or three weeks after that,
Under hospice care,
Without food or water and enough
Morphine to fell a horse,
He let out one last long breath, his final bitch,
And expired,
Quite a long time after his expiration date.

After he died, my mother said, he just stayed put,
Getting uglier by the second and
Turning a very bad color
Until she could stand it no more and
Called 911 or the coroner or the funeral home,
I can't remember which, for The Removal.

She couldn't get over the mangled wreckage, and
I couldn't tell her to her face that he died like a dog
Or a cat or even a deer by the side of the road,
Whose remains, without the art of mortuary science,
Shock and repulse the living,
The antithesis of what we like to call life.

What I am left with is his DNA,
Solid and mean as a brick wall,
And a suitcase full of old ties.
I am reminded that this is how we all end up,
Completely totaled in the corporeal junkyard,
Grim faced, empty, the stuff of scary stories,
Wondering why we are not allowed any believable opium.

August 21, 2009

2009-07-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

There are virtually no unique transactions and no secrets anywhere.

Secrets were once lovely, delicious things shared between intimates.

Every time you put your check or credit card forward to purchase something, you link any number of bank and credit accounts with other numbered accounts.

How many people have seen your social security (ss) number and your driver's license (dl) number? I have both of these on a neon sign that flashes in my front yard, 24-7-365 1/4 to prove that I have nothing to hide.

ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss dl ss

Don't waste your breath telling people who demand proof of your identity that your social security number is only for use with your social security account and, therefore, private. It simply doesn't compute. In these hard economic times, how many applicants are going to withhold their ss number on those countless job applications looked at by ever so many people, not all of whom are scrupulous?

Why does the dentist have to have your social security number even if you are paying by cash or credit card? Just try refusing to divulge it to the dentist's office personnel and see what happens.

Here is an example of what I mean by linking transactions. If you are buying groceries, the supermarket has a numbered, dated, and timed transaction ticket called your receipt. Their computer keeps a copy and links the number on your check or credit card with that particular transaction. It tells them that you or the person who stole your identification were in a particular place at a particular time buying the data listed items.

These records can be scanned for peculiarities. Why is an 8o-ish female in a household of one buying Pampers and fifteen sharp knives along with broccoli and Geritol?

Each and every purchase is a unique moment in time, because it will never happen exactly that way again, at least not in this dimension. It is an almost sacred moment except it is usually so humdrum.

Additionally, if you have some kind of store savers' card that logs your transactions to date, gives you the current sale price, or adds bonus points for your purchases, that card also has a unique transaction number linked to the store computer, which computer also houses your credit and banking information.

These stores are linked to large data selling companies which have your credit report, all medical information about you that could be scavenged, and various and sundry information that might shock the pants off you, such as what your neighbors told the FBI about your lawn care and whether you park your car in the garage according to the neighborhood association's bylaws and other really important indicators of your homeland security status.

Are you considering stealing your neighbor's stimulus check and depositing it in your account? That stimulus check is marked with a unique number linked to the recipient's name on the front of the check. Your bank will mark your deposit with a number linking the rightful owner of the check to your bank account. You can probably guess that when the rightful owner makes inquiry via the stimulus payment center which sees that the stimulous check has been cashed at a bank, which bank also has both a unique number according to the bank's name and a subnumber of the particular branch of that bank, they will find your bank account number linked to that unique check.

Plus, your photo is taken every time y9ou use the ATM machine and every time you step up to the bank teller's window. What did you say your name was again?

I'm not sure if you can escape this process by using cash at the store, but if you think the cashier didn't notice the 40 pounds of rat poison you bought, think again. She or he probably pushed a silent alarm button with her toe while smiling and bagging it up. Smile for your snapshot.

Consider too, that in many places there is also a surveillance video tape running, taking pictures of each and every customer to add to the data file of your unique, once-in-a-lifetime transaction. This is almost as neat as a wedding video, except you will never likely view it unless you blow up a major government building, heaven forbid.

Just recently I received an offer to link my grocery store surveillance card to my cell phone number. Naturally, I snapped up the offer immediately. Now when I 'm out of town, my grocery market can check on my whereabouts while they are logging the list of my groceries so I can get my twenty minutes of free cell time.

Still and all, there are moments in time that cannot be made pedestrian, however much publicity has shone upon it, moments when new snow falls on old snow and every snowflake is a unique individual self. How very unlike the synchronized and identical flash of a neon sign, such as the one in my yard.

Your chances of getting away with anything are virtually nil, but for those adventurers out there, you never know.

2009-06-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

David Jones of San Diego is off the hook. He can have a Bible study of fifteen or so in his home now without having a permit costing thousands of dollars. He can say amen anytime he pleases in his home and can make all the references to Almighty God in any format that he may want.

I was completely aghast when I first read that a possible parking violation near Mr. Jones' home led police to discover that he was talking about God and saying amen without a permit. I suppose one solution to the problem would be for the guests to carpool, but is that really the problem?

What kind of permit would one ask for?

I know countless people who have small Bible studies in their homes.

Besides the obvious issue of Americans' right to practice religion in their own way and possibly the issue of the right to peaceful assembly, (When did one have to get a permit to assemble in one's own home?) I wondered what was so terribly unsettling about this.

I grew up in the Midwest. In grade school, there was no such thing as a person who didn't celebrate Christmas. Kids had no idea that there were people like Jews and Moslems and Buddhists. In short, everybody was presumed to be Christian and entitled to read the Bible on Sunday, attend the church of their choice, and worship the Easter Bunny, that herald of the risen Christ.

But there was something much deeper than that bothering me.

Christianity is the rebellious stepchild of Judaic tradition, the tradition of the synagogue. In that tradition, when 10 men (minyan) of like mind would gather to study, that would constitute a synagogue. It was the tradition that gave form and founded churches.

What bothered me at the deepest level was that this was a rough incursion against our tradition of intellectual freedom, the most fundamental right to think and worship and learn. It felt like my worst nightmares about Big Brother, Storm Troopers, and the Gulag Archipelago for bad poets.

2009-06-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

This is about design again.

I astonished myself by not realizing the way Nature is designed until recently.

I was planting my Purple Calabash tomato seeds and, for the first time, noticed that there is a round or blunt end as well as a sharp end on the seeds that I was planting.

The sharp end goes into the planting medium first. It is a little wedge that enables the seed into the ground.

The tomato seeds are fuzzy and flat. The likeness of perfectly coiled embryo tomatoes, looking like coiled fern fronds about to unfurl, are "painted" on the sides of the seeds.

Pigs' tails curl. Curls are intrinsic to the design of pigs, just as horse tails are long and flowing like their running stride.

2009-04-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

Love makes the world go around. Not really, it's much more complicated than that.

Equal Temperaments. Doesn't that sound nice, compatible, and easy on the nerves? It sounds somewhat like evil temperaments.

Equal temperaments is a musical term used to describe a system of tuning and a frequency ratio. It is comparable to a mirror site, although, as in the case of reflections, the mirror image is not identical to the image that we call real, but grading on the curve, it's close enough. It depends, of course, from which side of the looking glass you are viewing the situation.

Are clones identical? Most probably not. They are genetically identical, which is not the same as identical in appearance. Multiple clones would probably look like very closely related family members.

That brings to mind doppelgangers and evil twins.

A doppelganger or double-goer looks exactly like the real person and is thought to be very evil, a portent of death and danger, and usually haunts the real person. Theoretically, if you see your doppelganger, it means you will die soon. At least that is what the doppelganger seems to want you to think. Since the doppelganger is rottenly evil, he loves scaring you and smells your fear, as it were or maybe really so. This gives him or her a psychological advantage, just as if you were competing for a job with someone who was seven feet tall, since height is considered a psychological advantage. Occasionally, a doppelganger thinks he looks like you, while you think the resemblance is not even close. That is when the death portent comes into extreme conflict.

An evil twin is the bad guy, while you are the good guy. It's a black hat versus white hat issue in cowboy terms or an antagonist versus a protagonist issue in literary terms.

That brings up a good premise for a discussion panel, talk show interviews, podcasts and whatnot. It would make for a lively discussion, with both twins competing for the title of Good Twin. People often think of themselves as the good guy, but what is your evil twin thinking?

An evil twin can be quite frightening in the case of spoofing sites and wireless networks.

In cases of twins in utero, one twin often dies before or shortly after birth. I'm sure the living twin would often characterize himself, if given a choice, as The Good Twin,
although not always if you think Goth, vampires, the undead, etc.

The old expression is that opposites attract. This is true. It is also true that similarities attract.

In the study of biology, there are some nice illustrations suggesting receptor sites. In a way, they are like mirror sites, attracted to each other because they are exact opposites. They fit together something like Legos or a jigsaw puzzle. A chemical or molecule must supply the correct fit to attain binding status, otherwise it looks like a Lego construction by a two-year-old. The site must receive compliments in just the right places. Some synaptic receptor sites are ion channels, such as acetylcholine.

Attraction doesn't always mean romance. It is possible to attract flies and mosquitoes, invariably considered pests. The attraction concerns certain chemicals contained in rotten flesh and sugar, or for mosquitoes, blood. Fruit flies are attracted to rotten fruit. Houseflies are attracted to anything that's rotten. You may have heard the expression There are no flies on him. Again, in a way, rotten fruit is like a receptor site. The flies fit right into the purpose of disposing of the fruit. I say this only to illustrate that life and romance often seem contradictory to what you might consider the best probable outcome.

2009-04-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

In my small efforts to make and leave the earth a slightly better place, I have planted apricot, peach, persimmon, apple, and pear trees.

I have not planted any plums.

The Latin word for plum is pruna, which changed in Germanic languages to pluma. It's easy to see the connection of prunes to plums.

The Spanish word for pen is pluma. The reason that sounds like plumes or feathers might be because pens were once made from quill feathers.

At that time, most fancy pillows were stuffed with feathers. If you are saying, "What else could they have used to stuff pillows?" the answer is straw.

An early literary reference to plums is probably Little Jack Horner who put in his thumb and pulled a plum out of his Christmas pie. I don't think there is a recipe connection to plum pudding in Jack's pie, since the definition of plum at the time could mean mean various other fruits. The nursery rhyme was first published in a chapbook designed to be read as a way to spend the winter evenings. You are probably familiar with Mother Goose which is similar.

There are many varieties of plum, but the prettiest is the Green Gage plum. The Green Gage derives its name from the English Gage family. The Green Gage plum has other names in countries other than Britain. "They are also called la bonne reine (French for "the good Queen") in France."

The Green Gage is to plums as Seckel is to pears, that is, they are sweet and considered a dessert fruit.

Some of the best pear dessert recipes are simple ones.

Snow Geese

2009-04-07T17:07:00.001-07:00

2009-04-06T13:54:00.000-07:00

The War on Drugs. The War on Poverty. The War on Terror. The War on Crime. The War On Obesity. The Battle of the Sexes. The War on... all bad stuff.

By using the word war so many times, I risk being profiled as a warmonger, but I am just trying to illustrate how many un-won wars have been going on in my lifetime.

War requires so much time and energy that there is no time left for love.

War talk may seem specific at first, but if you start asking about the details, the ideas becomes fuzzier. War talk seems designed to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. Just know that, yes, we need to jump in the tank and fire off a few rounds and volley and show rage and fume and kill those bastards and send them into oblivion. That's what war is all about, right?

Do you recognize these words "We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia"? It is from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I don't mean to be critical. I'm not an expert on war, but sometimes a little common sense would go a long way. When you wage war, you make a war plan, right? You size up the situation, gather your collected intelligence, and carefully determine your course of action, much like building a house. To win a war, you have to have a winning strategy or else you just slaughter a lot of people and destroy a lot of things that are expensive and/or impossible to replace.

Isn't it time we started to win our wars or else get off the rhetorical high horse? Isn't it just a little bit embarrassing to wage a war for decades and be in exactly the same place decades later? If you keep doing the same things over and over again and fail, does it make sense to keep doing the same things over and over again?

That is, of course, if your objective is to win the war.

When used, the words The War (on anything) sound so righteous and defensible, but are they really? If you wage war on something, that thing must be bad or why bother?

The frequency of a word used in any language tells how important that word is in the particular culture in which it is used. Eskimos have many words to describe the different kinds of and different uses for snow. The Greek language has many words to describe love. The English language mostly just uses the word war. One of the reasons is that it is a three letter one syllable word. Were it multisyllabic, something would have to change. War would have to end or people would find a monosyllabic word for it. Besides, too many words can look like clutter.

I don't fault the Inuit for their use of snow or the Greeks for their use of love. It's useless to fault a culture for their love of anything, including America's apparent love of war.

The ingenius strategy would be to discern what is intrinsic in human nature and to turn it into an advantage. Doesn't anyone remember the phrase kill'em with kindness? That, of course, doesn't jive with the jump in your armored vehicle, shoot canons, make a lot of noise and generally appeal to the inner caveman squadron of the brain.

How can the intrinsic need for "two minutes hate" be turned to advantage? How can we growl, scratch, scream, make ugly faces, direct bad words at the enemy, and just loosely cast off all the rules of propriety and civilization that family, church, and school have spent so many long years inculcating in us?

There's always love, sex, and peace, but there's no time for that. We are At War and always have been: WWI, WWII, (Please explain to the young that this and www has noting to do with the World Wrestling Federation), the Korean Conflict, The Vietnam War, The Persian Gulf War, The War in Iraq, and the War in Afghanistan, just to hit the highlights.

How about a War on Grime? Is there anyone that you could not convince? Isn't grime a bad, evil, hateful thing, usually? It crosses all cultural and national demographics, and you don't have to be kind. People hate that.

A War on Grime could be an unending war, waged with vehement force. Grime could become the psychological whipping boy. There's plenty of it, always was and always will be. You thrash one grime monster and a new one springs up in its place. That's the nature of microbes.

Finally, a never-ending war that can be won. Imagine the news updates on the number of macrophages set upon the enemy, the number of specific bacteria and virus entities destroyed by our forces.

2009-04-02T20:22:00.000-07:00

As the orchards begin to blossom, I am always amazed that beauty can be so renewable.

I am also happily surprised at some of the reading selections on the Internet.

The subject of bees always interested me. Although there is nothing new about bees, there is so much about them that I personally don't know.

Today I was looking at sites with the search term pleasure drone, when after pages of listings for a metal band called Halloween and their song entitled Pleasure Drone, I stumbled upon a Google digital scan of a book about bees called Dzierzon's Rational Bee-Keeping or Theory and Practice of Dr. Dzierzon by Dr. Jan Dzierzon. Incidentally, my parents' wedding anniversary is on Halloween.

The book's table of contents is an education in itself.

The book is 289 pages and is an old fashioned and complete guide to beekeeping, published in the mid-nineteenth century. Like human nature, bee nature has not changed very much. There is a lot of sociobiology in the book.

Long before modern medicine, people recognized that honey had medicinal properties. "When used topically (as, for example, as a wound dressing), hydrogen peroxide is produced by dilution with body fluids."

Honey has a very acidic nature, a pH between 3.2 and 4.5. Because of this, undiluted honey can be used as a topical ointment in cases where medicinal antibiotics have proven ineffective, such as in cases of diabetic ulcer and in easing the damage that is done by colitis.

Wound gels with honey combined with other "Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)" have proven effective.

In emergencies, honey can be used as a topical dressing. Pure honey, poured into a spoon, makes a wonderful cough remedy.

Honey has historic applications in cosmetics also. This is largely for the same reasons it is effective as a medicine.

"The beneficial effect of honey on the skin has an age-old repute. Poppea, the comely wife of Nero, who employed a hundred slaves to attend her beauty, used honey and tepid asses' milk as a face lotion."

Most likely it was the milk that was tepid.

Let's face it, the real joy of honey is its sweetness, however cloying or astringent. It can be clear or murky, sometimes described as smokey, with delicate hints of meadow flowers and savory herbs. It runs slowly and languidly, if at all.

Mellifluous.

The honeycomb, a seeming byproduct, is a marvel in its own right. Beeswax is an unctuous wonder with many uses.

Honeybees are insects that can be herded like sheep or cattle, insects that are somehow lovable despite their stings.

The idea that honeybees might become extinct is absolutely unacceptable. All the space debris and metallic docking stations, all the cigar-shaped rocket ships blasting off for fun-filled adventures in Buck Roger's 21st Century, all the wind-up toys banging clashing cymbals are metaphors needing a salve made of honey.

Those who write about the rapidly diminishing numbers of bee colonies claim to be completely in the dark as to what the problem is. A clear mind and steady hand that actually knows the answer is apparently impossible to find.

That is why I found Dzierzon's Rational Bee-Keeping or Theory and Practice of Dr. Dzierzon by Dr. Jan Dzierzon so dear.

Dr. Dzierzon seems to know every swarming and subtle thing about bees and their keeping, but in his day there were no cell phone towers or H.A.R.P. or evil death rays, excepting the sun, to complicate their keeping.

2009-03-29T19:43:00.000-07:00

I took this photo the other night because it reminded me of a moon flower, a large glowing white bloom that attracts garden insects and people. It is a photo of a crescent moon in the night sky with a hint of mountain.

Moon flowers, on a starry and full moon night, appear to be gazing heavenward. In fact, if blooming prolifically, they appear to be a whole crowd of amateur astronomers eagerly searching the night sky, a crowd of alien amateur astronomers, but still fun to stand around with in the garden at night, if you do things like that.

I do things like that.

A moon flower, no doubt given that name because it opens and blooms progressively as the day closes and evening progresses, could be imagined as the opposite of the morning glory, which begins to open at dawn and glow with each particle of sunlight, closing tightly at the end of day.

They are not really opposites because they are in the same family as the morning glory. These flowers have hallucinogenic properties and, like another garden plant, Angel Trumpets, can be very dangerous if ingested.

The moon flower is velvety and has a subtle and intoxicating fragrance. You could call it heavenly.

The interior of both the moon flower and the morning glory, when fully opened, looks like a starfish. Starfish are sometimes called sea stars.

What an odd coincidence of form.

2009-02-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

Believe me when I tell you that each person creates their own reality.

Don't feel bad if you have been working on this concept and nothing much seems to have changed. It doesn't happen overnight, not usually. It's an ongoing process, like redecorating the house, involving more people and other factors.

Usually.

I am not the only one who believes this. Deepak Chopra writes, "If your sense of self is constricted, then it expresses itself as a tight and constricted body, a fearful outlook, and an insecure environment...If a critical mass of people were to express their expanded selves, not only would they spontaneously fulfill their personal desires, they would change the very way culture articulates itself."

Compare uptight and rigid with relaxed and expansive. Choose and create good schools, good families, good communities, and good companions.

Create a safe world, full of delight.

Caregivers of all sorts should know this. It is their job to create an expansive environment designed for thriving.

I went to the ocean and noticed that everything adjacent to the ocean was similar in quality. This might sound like a no-brainer, but I saw that the tide left pictures of fishes in the sand.

I went to the Colorado mountains in winter, and the trees there showed the characteristics of frost and snowflakes: sharp, slender, crisp, and spiky. An environment expresses itself in every facet of the "landscape".

Reading the magazine Technology Review, there were many photos of chips, transistors, and processing boards. There was an article about power grids. The power grids look like large information processors. It could compute information if the grids were built in the correct formation and not just seemingly willy-nilly.

Economy of effort with full utilization of design and components are key.

When you become part of a network, you become part of a recipe. The final result will be the combination of all ingredients. Choose good ingredients.

When many people use the Internet and social networking programs, they shape and define what the protocol is and is to be, regardless of the template. The individual members, a group of components, serve as a processing unit.

The Internet, as it exists today, does not resemble what it was originally conceived to be.

You are undoubtedly more than what someone had in mind when you weighed somewhere between two and ten pounds.

Possibly more.

Like music, each member of any group-circuit-board, serves as a separate note, two or three as a chord, and the whole can tune and function as a symphony.

Certain metaphors come to mind.

The content, of what participants of any group think and feel, even if it is subtle and restrained in character and nature, is conveyed to the other members, who process that information, making it a kind of reality.

Even our words, our language, shape and create who were are and how we experience reality. Quantum mechanics seems to be saying that particles don't always make their move until the observer recognizes and chooses it as a reality.

Choose carefully.

Oh, and P.S., you know who you are - you can't really separate what is truly cohesive.

2009-02-07T18:23:00.000-08:00

Your home electrical wiring is probably low voltage cable. It operates on a circuit. Your home most likely has telephone wiring too.

"This page gives you all the information you need to know about how to install and wire up a small CAT5, CAT5e, or CAT6 ether net computer network, such as in your home or a small office; or to make your own Ethernet cables. " A colorful description of the basic wiring requirement of a twisted pair is that "A key thing to remember is that a twisted-pair network must be arranged in a "star".

http://www.derose.net/steve/guides/wiring/

Energy Star indicates an appliance that is designed with efficiency in mind.

Where is this leading? Nearly every home in America is a circuit on a grid with many other homes in an even larger grid. The wheels are turning. Are we missing an opportunity to hook up everyone to a giant Turing computing scheme?

2009-02-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

Got TMS?

Today's read is from MIT's magazine Technology Review, February 2009 issue, page 26, located towards the bottom of the page near a teal colored rectangle with the word Psychiatry inside.

The article is entitled Magnetic Depression Treatment, and in case your eyes might play tricks on you, that's not Manic Depression Treatment.

A quick look at the photo might confuse you. The setup looks pretty much like a dentist's office, except if you will look more closely, there is a "Treatment Coil - converts electrical currents into MRI-strength magnetic fields". This unit plugs into a standard wall outlet.

According to the magazine article, the treatment is delivered with a specially made wand held over the head which " delivers highly focused magnetic pulses to a part of the brain that's been linked to depression".

Another article gives a good review.

To you skeptics out there, think of all the magnetic words you know: magnetic storm, magnetic imaging, horseshoe magnet, horseshoe crab (oops), and Wooly Willy. Wooly Willy is a primer of the fact that magnetism can move things.

Wooly Willy was a toy, the guy on the thin plastic tablet in a plastic case filled with metal shavings. The user held a magnetic tipped plastic wand and rearranged the metal shavings to add or subtract hair and beard to Willy's head and face. You remember don't you?

Willy was OK until you started messing him up.

2009-02-03T18:21:00.000-08:00

Burundanga - a new word for me. It is an odorless, tasteless powder said to be derived from the flower of the borrachero tree. We'll get to the tasteless part in a minute.

The magazine article I am reading is in Latino University, November 2008. A photograph shows flowers that look like Angels' Trumpets, attractive plants you can grow from seed at home. In warm climates such as California, the Sun Belt, and Mexico, the plant does not winter kill. Non-stop growth leads to gigantic shrubby plants.

The nickname for this substance, "Columbian Devil's Breath", translates as scopolamine, a drug once used for women in childbirth. It was popularly thought that it made labor painless. What it really did was cause amnesia. When the drug wore off, women did not remember their labor. It is difficult to believe that the medical establishment really believed that to be true. I have read accounts about women sedated with scopolamine screaming and clawing, and that doesn't sound like they were pain-free to me.

"Devil's Breath or scopolamine - is known for its zombifiying (That's right, -ying) effect, completely ridding the user of his free will." Parenthetical words are mine. It actually makes you think you're unconscious.

So, in a way, there are real zombies. "Although you appear sober and coherent, you can't remember anything you did while on the drug." So just watch your drinks, noses, and hands when traveling to South America because you don't want to end up burundangiado."

As if the effect weren't bad enough, this powder can be put in your food or drink. It can be blown into a victim's face, smeared on a business card, and even dusted into a bouquet of roses delivered to your door. The perpetrator can rob you, molest you, or even beat you up. You really won't remember that it ever happened unless there is physical evidence.

It's not just another date-rape drug.

2009-01-23T23:21:00.000-08:00

I have a cell phone. I always worried that they might not be the best thing for your health, but now I find there is a moral objection to it.

I was reading my horoscope in Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology, where, of all places, I read that "If you use a cell phone, you have in your possession a metal called coltan, a component that's essential to the cell's function." Quickly, I did a mental review of the Periodic Table of Elements, not a complete review, of course. What is coltan?

My horoscope further went on to say that "Most of the world's coltan comes from the Congo, and is mined by Rwandans who survived their countries genocide in the 1990's. They often work for militias that sell coltan illegally to finance their military operations." I looked it up on the Internet, and there it was, nearly word for word as it was written in my horoscope.

Another Internet article from the San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 2009 discusses "Cell Phones and Congo's War Against Women".

"So even though the issue we have in common is our use of products dependent on the Congo's resources, the issue that really unites us is that the Congo - with the highest rates of sexual violence globally - has become the world's most dangerous place to be a woman or a girl. This is not the first time that armies or militias have used rape as a weapon of war."

As we use our cell phones, computers, iPods and video games every day, we are benefiting from Congo's natural wealth. We need to stand up for the women of the Congo and the world and let our elected officials know that we want to see an end to that violence. We need to let the electronics companies from whom we buy our products know that it matters to us where they get the raw materials that run the devices. How does that get done?

The question of how to do that remains mostly unanswered because, while people are uncomfortable with the issue of violence against women, they find it hard to write a letter or pick up a phone and make a call to an elected representative or a cell phone company. It's not really that difficult. Elected officials maintain a staff that answers phone lines. Manufacturers have similar staff. You can look up contact numbers on the Internet or ask your local librarian to help you find contact information. A brief and polite call simply stating that you are concerned alerts the representative or manufacturer that people are thinking about the subject.

There is little point in throwing the cell phone in the rubbish heap right now, but since I seldom use it, it will be a long time before it wears out.

Our cells phones could be the electronic version of conflict diamonds.

2008-10-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

There is a device to scare away groups of young people. It is called the Mosquito, designed to disperse gangs of loiterers. It is a device that emits a high frequency noise that supposedly only the young can hear, and it must be unpleasant in some way. Why else would it cause them to move away?

The noisy throng could probably be dispersed with a little more thoughtfulness. What do teenagers really hate? I'm told they hate cheap tippers in restaurants if they are servers and chat about gardening and coupon exchanges. Couldn't some very uncool people be sent to mix around the teenagers and talk about things that they find boring? I'm sure they would disperse like crazy.

If I lived in a high crime area with youthful perpetrators, I might have a more favorable opinion of this type of "mosquito", but my experience is that anything that hurts people will probably be used by sadists and jokers to torment. Because they can.

Here's another handy device that sounds like much the same thing.

2008-01-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

Is cooking compatible with computing? Of course, because while you are looking for recipes on the Internet, after you find a good one, you can always read something while the food is cooking.

Although I feel like talking about resistors, there's no time today. I don't know as much as I'd like to, but even if I knew a lot, the information would be outdated the next day.

I baked blue cornmeal muffins for breakfast. I had to shop and shop to find the blue corn meal, but I finally found the last bag they had at Whole Foods. I must share the recipe with you some time. "Blue corn meal is cornmeal with a light blue or violet color that is ground from whole blue corn and has a sweet flavor. The corn meal is dried corn kernels that have been ground into a fine, medium texture."

I did look up something on medical implant devices in my kitchen while I was sprinkling the Hawaiian red clay natural sea salt on the skillet fried potatoes I was cooking. I was looking for some kind of foil that I could use for baking potatoes that would be more natural than aluminum. When I was a child my mother always call it tinfoil, but was it made of tin? She tended to use a brand name for a generic product. For example, all bathroom cleansers were called "dutch cleanser" because the brand she usually bought was Dutch Cleanser.

Everyone else had kitchen towels, not to be confused with paper towels. We had tea towels. They were the same thing.

2007-09-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

Obey every law in the Bible? I came across an article on the Internet about a guy who tried to obey every rule in the Bible for one year. Doesn't this sound like a prescription for madness? It looks like he tried every hair style in the Bible too.

To err is human. I suppose that even those who were formerly not men, such as the Beast-Folk on the Island of Lost Souls must some day consider if they can be perfect. Are we not men, so to speak?

Bible readers are the minority in some countries. Oops. It feels bad to be any ethnic or religious minority, I suppose. It's because of prejudice of the "We hate you because you're not just like us" variety. That attitude is pernicious. It slowly erodes every joy.

The funny thing is that everyone is a minority somewhere, everyone.

Obeying all rules and laws of any sort is pretty intense. A year is about all you can spend under that kind of pressure.

If you are the only one of whatever-minority-you-are, you are in the wrong place, unless you are a crusader or have a martyr complex. It's not strictly about race. For instance, a dedicated and outspoken redneck in San Francisco, a Boston Irishman in China, a black soul brother among the Eskimos, or a flagrant pagan sex priest in a moderate mid-western community are examples of the idiomatic expression of sticking out like a sore thumb. I use these only as theoretical examples.

One of the reasons it feels bad to be completely all wrong in your location is that everyone hates you - intensely. No matter how much time people might spend spewing talk of love, peace, brotherhood, and how kissey-face-huggy-friendly-enlightened-and-accepting-of-you they are, that is seldom the case.

I have taken on a "no swearing" (cursing) vow for a year, not even hell or damn or butt. I shall blush if I read pork butt on the supermarket sale flier. After less than two months, I found myself replaying a scene on video film with the F-word in it over and over again with a perverse pleasure that I can only liken to diving into a chocolate cream cake after breaking your vow to give up chocolate. After making the initial vow, I snickered to myself when I think of hell or damn or butt. I find myself saying hello and realizing it has the word hell in it, and that is perverse, because it wasn't funny before.

Swearing is bad. It puts you squarely and demographically at odds with the raised-eyebrow class of a population. A lot of churches and social groups will kick you out if you swear, even if you want them to. Cursing puts you into an adult category, therefore, children are not allowed to curse. Of course, on the computer screen, the cursor is a constant.

Swearing is not allowed on television.

That's not a true statement. I hear swearing on television all the time. It's just that I am not supposed to swear. Why is that? In movies from the 1970's and 1980's they seemed to be swearing like crazy, like troopers, like sailors.

I guess that's what bothers me. Why are we all pretending that sailors don't cuss? Why are we pretending a lot of other stuff isn't true? Do we think that a lot of bland talk will cover a multitude of sins, social injustices, and vicious unfairness?

I'm not suggesting that we take down all the barriers to all sorts of language. Words can carry a wallop, some of it hurtful.

What's the substitute for cuss words? What words will we use to pepper up our listless conversations that call for more than the creativity of a dull robot? What words do we use to convey we are at the very limit of our tolerance? Dare we use words over two syllables or is that off limits?

I solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I swear by the moon and the stars in the sky. Hamlet's father told him to swear, so why shouldn't I?

2007-08-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

I like to visit castles. They are nice places to visit, but I wouldn't want to live in them.

They were pretty snazzy places to live way back when, especially compared to the serf's place. I've been to Edinburgh castle and Crichton.

I came across a new one, located not too far from Amsterdam. It's called Muiderslot. I don't know what the meaning of that is, but it looks quite scenic.

2007-07-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

How much like a bee are you? Have you been sprayed with any pheromones lately?

It seems that odor might play a significant part in honeybee life and in yours too. There have been a lot of articles written about this.

Could you say that a taser feels like a sting? Tasers are not just for the police anymore. They also come in electric blue, metallic pink, titanium, and black pearl. How sexy is that? Doesn't that just reek of pheromones?

As personal tasers become part of the electric generation's collection of gadgets, we could all become clean slates all of the time. Yep, members of the clean slate club. Attention deficit disorder pales in comparison to blank slate. Bees aren't the only creatures with problems in the adverse learning arena.

Think of the life of a worker bee. Now think of the life of human workers. Now touch your toes...just kidding.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some hidden "smell" that put people under the spell of the "hive commander"? All you would need do each day would be to obey, no thinking required.

A worker bee works and works until it dies. It never seems to understand that work is its only reward, as the beekeeper keeps taking the honey away from the hive, cleaning up and cleaning them out regularly. Even if they understood, would that change anything for the bees?

The beekeeper would laugh at the silly thought that bees even care.

Software makers would laugh that people might want to get paid for finding software flaws. WabiSabiLabi is a Swiss company that "will sell details on unpatched software flaws". The site is currently offering details on four bugs in products such as the Linux kernel and Yahoo Messenger. No bids have yet been registered, but asking prices for the research ranged between €500 and €2,000. "

The odd thing is that there is some debate about whether this is a moral, just, and fair way to conduct business and life. Isn't it just an honor to be able to help "beekeepers" make honey money? They always say thank you, worker bees for your help.

The thing is, I can't remember when one of these business giants gave away their product.

Do I sound cynical? None of your beeswax.

2007-07-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

Or So I'm Told..

According to someone's notes (Numbers 7:89) "Whenever Moses went into the tabernacle to speak with the Lord, he heard the voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the Ark's cover..." New Living Translation

What if somehow the Ark of the Covenant inside the Tabernacle, because of some quirk in the space-time continuum, functioned as a radio receiver, and Moses found himself listening to someone in the 20th century reading from the Torah in a language he could understand, possibly Hebrew. And he wrote it all down.

Yes, I know there is a film with that theme - a son talks to his dead dad in what appears to be real time.

The Bible, for Christians, is in two parts or "halves", commonly called the Old and New Testament, much like a peach or a brain. Or trilobites.

In many ways, the New Testament is the mirrored half of the Old, because Jesus and his chroniclers quote often from the Old Testament and then add comment. It is not an exact copy of the first part, because of the extra comments. 1 Corinthians 13:12 mentions a mirror.

Out in space, I am told, there are swirling particles of dust and gasses and star masses and galaxy confetti. Some of that stuff reflects light, and that's why we can see it. Scientists have devised ingenious ways to see things that don't reflect light. They have even figured out ways to see things that may only be theoretical. They can see things in a shower of meteorites that might have once existed.

Could all the debris (I include planets) possibly produce a hologram?

2007-06-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

The Peach.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word peaches? Georgia? Ty Cobb? Fuzz? Juicy?

They convey the idea of summer to me.

I bought a new variety of peach at the grocery store yesterday. The sales receipt listed it as a "donut" peach. It is also called a Saturn Peach. It is quite small and sort of flattened. It remains to be seen if "donut" peaches will replace coffee shop doughnuts.

The little round sticker tells me everything I need to know about the "donut", and more. They are comparatively small but very beautiful.

You can grow this variety in your home orchard or buy them from a local commercial orchard. Though it seems like a non sequitur, Swiss chard too, can be grown at home, if you want. It is as beautiful, in its own way, as a peach.

2007-06-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

The Star Thrower by Loren Eisley, Part 3

This realization brings about a spiritual release.

Now he sees.

He now knows the question. He also knows that there is an answer, but it is not on the predictable prairie plains of modern science that he has made his fortress. Out of the center of his brain, the primitive layers unfolding in his subconscious, the haunted rooms of his mind are unlocked one by one.

On a conscious level he realizes Darwin, Einstein, and Freud might be said to have released the shadows. The barricade to his spiritual illumination has been removed. The way is now open for him to search for the messenger in the rainbow light.

The seed has grown and opened in flower, leaving behind the dark shadows which threatened him. He feels that he has not been a man for a long time, mired down as he had been with his personal and evolutionary past. He is now free to comprehend that it was men as well as starfish that one seeks to save.

He imitates the example of the inestimable beauty of man in the prism light and throws back the starfish that they might live.

Like God, who throws stars in the far-flung heavens, like Jesus who became a fisher of men, like the Messenger from the East, he finds himself also to be a kind of savior, both of himself as well as of stars and starfish.

He has sorted out the conflict of the evolutionary striving to be the fittest at the expense of the weak. He has chosen instead to become a Thrower who loves life itself and not just individual beings, a man who must walk a lonely path on the beach of Costabel. He is not a man who walks in desultory defeat.

He has a second chance, a second wind for the rest of his life. He makes a small but infinite statement when he says, "I understand".

The images of darkness are scattered by an epiphany of enlightened understanding, moving him in a spiritual evolution from his haunted beginning to the joy of discovery, abounding with hope and the breaking of a new day for him.

2007-06-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Star Thrower: Some Thoughts After Reading Loren Eisley, Part 2

Eisely uses myths and fairy tales to help explain his inner abode. He talks about the witching hour, the twelfth hour which is that time when transformations often occur.

It is at this hour that the coach turns back into a pumpkin and black magic works its ancient art. Instability lies at the heart of the world, he says. This perceived world of instability lies at the root of his perception of "mother". About his actual mother he further states, "She had been deaf. All her life she had walked the precipice of mental breakdown."

His mother's walk on the treacherous bluffs of imagined glacier mountains becomes his burden.

The image of darkness occurs in other cases besides the form of the trickster. The image of a trickster often portrays the unknown, something to be feared. Darkness at the edge of the shore, at the edge of his mind, haunts him as no pale ghost could. He grapples with this idea and with his perceived primeval evolutionary past.

The mysteries of the unadorned human psyche are shrouded in the wrappings of undiscovered darkness. His journey to meet the messenger begins in darkness and progresses as the light increases. He writes, "I arose and dressed in the dark." The dark for him is a kind of psychological blindness. He needs to illuminate his landscape in some way.

The meeting of a savior-like figure, something that his mother could not be, proves to be Eisley's pivotal point, the shifting of Eisley's despair. He dresses in the darkness but feels a faint sense of coming light "somewhere behind me in the east". There is expectation and anticipation.

Morning enters slowly, and a vague figure appears to him in a rainbow light, the covenant symbol of a New World. It appears to be a human figure, although he is not conscious of his place in Eisley's scheme of things.

This image is a messianic one, a fisher of starfish is like a fisher of men, a replacement figure for the rejecting mother.

This symbolic person takes the religious posture of kneeling in the ever-changing light. The Star Thrower hurls a starfish back into the sea saying that it may live, raising the question of whether this is possibility or permission, for he had "the posture of a god".

In this first encounter with the savior-metaphor, a seed is sown in his heart that must filter down from his conscious mind for his heart to accept. The seed will take some time to germinate.

He walks away, not yet a true believer. He thinks that the man on the beach is only a man after all, one man in the midst of all the death washed ashore on the shipwreck-beach of Costabel.

In some ways Eisely's life is a shipwreck washed ashore. He is trying to sort things out there: what to save, what to keep?

He returns to his mother's home after her death, having literal and psychological sorting to do. His mother, like the sea, has been an overwhelming memory for him. He speaks of the sea in this way, "In the end the sea rejects its offspring".

His mother, mute for many years after her death, the originator and sea of primordial life in his embryonic state, breaks the ties of her legacy to him just as the umbilical cord separates mother and child at birth. The spectral mother speaks to him.

He finds Victorian photographs of her relatives with her eyes. They also seem to be speaking to him. "The gaze was mutely clairvoyant and lonely". Her eyes are his eyes, in his imagination and figuratively.

In this repressed Victorianism, in a small town in Iowa he finds that, "Here it all began, her pain and mine".

There is never any mention of a father. It is only his mother who figures into the barren landscape of the photographs. There, in the grainy silver reflections of reality, he discovers the source of his dark images and the source of his eye motif. The eyes in the photograph were remote and shadowed.

This is also the source of the shadow which looms over him. He is his mother's son, and the words and images he uses tell much of the conflict and pain between the two. The agonized eye stays frozen in his mind's portrait even when Eisley closes his own.

Can there be a more haunting image? This conflict results in another portrait in his brain, the torn eye.

The Biblical injunctions, no doubt whispered to him by his mother's Victorian upbringing, exhort him to reject the world and its vulgarities, but he loves worldly things and all its weak creatures. Perhaps his mother thought he was weak and vulgar, mired down in the primal ooze, unable to rise to the level she had envisioned for him. The eye in his room in Costabel discovers yet another eye also present there, searching, penetrating, and looking through him as if he were a transparent jellyfish.

That eye is not one of a dead octopus, not the eye of an ever watchful God, nor the eye of the battered animal from childhood memory. He superimposes external reality over the interior mirage and writes, "Finally, there was an eye that seemed torn from a photograph. I know the eye and the circumstance and the question. It was my mother. She was long dead, and the way backward was lost".

2007-06-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

The Star Thrower: Some Thoughts After Reading Loren Eisley, Part 1

A writer such as Loren Eisely can convey his struggles and intellectual quests in complicated and interwoven ways, and that is what he has done in The Star Thrower.

He combines and interlaces images and words from the world's great religions with images of the Messenger and with insight from Zen Buddhism: the skull and the eye, Jesus and the Wandering Jew, the pagan trickster, the djinn and demons cloaked in black magic. He immerses himself in the depths of Freud, Darwin, ancient myth, and even children's fairy tales.

The story is one of personal quest, a quest in which a man seeks the grail of his evolutionary past, diving into the sea of questions and answers that must be found somewhere within his own interior landscape.

He makes a journey to complete his psychological and spiritual growth and to be able to stand to the full height of his humanity. To do this he must overcome personal hurdles such as the real or imagined influence of the memory of an unstable mother. He must make sense of the tangled skein of his conscious and "other-conscious" mind.

Costabel is a village by the seashore, located on the boundary of all opposites. This borderline setting, where water meets sand, is the demarcation of life and death, where evolution marks the change of sea creature to land animal. It is a place of turning points.

It is here, in this place that Eisely says that every form of life is striving to return, the great archetypal mother, who has nourished and protected them, that the protagonist sees the largely symbolic act of throwing the stranded starfish back into the sea.

The archetypal image of "mother" plays a dual role in his mind. It is both a nourishing and protecting figure, as well as an ultimately rejecting type for him.

Costabel is a paradox, both real and imagined, buzzing around in the author's brain. Ideas are like swarms of insects in his thoughts. They whir and buzz, rise to the beam of light that he imagines radiates from his skull, somewhat like a lighthouse beacon, searching for some kind of truth in the dark night.

He pictures himself as the stripped empty skull with eyes orbiting around it. For him, there is a dual meaning, since the eyes are set in the orbital sockets. It is hard to tell how much of a double entendre he intends, since he is writing from a deep need to understand an unconscious perspective. He makes a revealing statement about himself later in the work. "I was the inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone on the shores of the world."

The shore of Costabel represents his entire universe, and Eisely becomes a star-traveler within. The eye motif is repeated in varying forms throughout this journey, as the idea moves from the revolving eyes of his planetary skull to the torn eye of cosmic judgment to the Reproachful Eye floating upon night and solitude.

As a child, Eisely's mother kept an eye on him, but there is a plethora of conflict in his memories of her. From his perspective, she was a model of instability, and he uses many metaphors to try and explain his view of her to himself and to us. He feels that she was, in a sense, a Christ-like figure, but not as Savior, since she calls her presence on earth "her long crucifixion of life" .

This viewpoint has left him feeling less than secure, as if she had taught him to walk on the precipice of an iceberg rather than on the stable flat land of the prairie.

Even the image of the prairie, that dependable terrain, does not assuage his fears that things are treacherous, for even there, tormenting dust devils could arise out of nowhere to terrorize him.

As a child he dreamed of hiding from the dust devils in caves, in earth cellars he had dug to shelter himself. His efforts at self-preservation do not reassure him, for the Neanderthal caveman of his Id cannot run or hide from the djinn-like dust devils and demons that chase him on the nightmarish flatland of his interior landscape.

As an adult, Eisely is a man of reason, a trained scientist, but he is haunted by the more primitive image of the trickster, a comic and yet sometimes sinister figure found in the fables of many aboriginal peoples.

The figure in Eisely's scenario is a mocker, dancing gleefully behind his back. This is his nemesis personified, a masked and demonic figure.

His trickster is mute, never speaking. He is "nightmare" itself, painted fully in black, taking on all the characteristics and definitions of darkness that he harbors, and there are many such images stored in his brain. The trickster carries a little whip, flicking and punishing him, full of silent laughter and derision. This demon is a spirit that lives metaphorically in his home.

Eisely writes, "In the moment I witnessed that fireside performance, I knew with surety that primitive man had lived with a dark message." He describes this personal demon. The trickster's timed and stylized posturing conveyed derision.

After saying this, he almost immediately describes himself as going out into the dark night as a troubled believer with the shadow of the trickster looming behind him and haunting him always. This demon is perennially near but has not spoken for twenty-five years. It is a mute stalker, and he wonders: Who or what is this trickster?

2007-06-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Spring

We come here with our ghost children to escape summer heat,
Meeting in a cave of trees herding their heads,
Huddled above the lime rocks.

Walks of step-stones meet in agreement.
From the hill wall a spring issues an invitation to the eyes.

We see that water pours forth,
Acopius rain upon vegetation, from the source:
Poetry,
Song,
A little singing river,
Gracious giver of fountains,
A gift brook alive with the marriage of hydrogen and oxygen,

New creation,
New life, forever flowing,
Forever long and longing for the Father of Waters,
Liquidly revived, a daughter of his laughter,

A jewel of its universe,
Quietly disbursed, dispersed into a pool of the most profound solicitude,

A cistern of sustenance to which all souls yearn
To be born,
To return,
The origin of a love so fierce it is cruel,
Though we are fooled, for the surface is restrained,
Cool in its demeanor.

We are minded, reminded of our own
Turning, tumbling, water fetus days,
Happy rolling ammonite ecstasies,
Oceans to live and drink.

We think we were never so happy as then
And now,
Like snow from mountains,
Like blue water to the spirit,

That, and this spring-brook which dibbles and dabbles,
Filling the laver, lower pool, with refreshment,
Safe from the sibilant sun smoking outside the grove.

This is our cove, our cozy waterfall,
Soft moss-haven.

Our recollected contentment rises high above our heads,
Reaching toward heaven,
Sighs to be seized, released, messenger balloons,

Sea bottles of green fernery, finery,
Poured and stored in this wet rockery.

(May 25, 1988)

2007-06-09T13:43:00.000-07:00

How did the Ancients do It?

It is always so mysterious, the Mystery of the Pyramids, the Mystery of the Incas.

How in the heck did they figure out how to build a pyramid that would last? How did those Incas fit those stones together? How did they make mummies? Even with our best technology, it is nearly impossible to even guess.

You may as well ask what life is like for a goldfish whose attention span is three seconds.

The assumption is that we are the latest, the greatest, and the brightest humans ever and that anyone who lived more than one hundred years ago was not much smarter than the common household pet.

It ain't necessarily so.

Take the Incas, for example. How did they ever figure out how to fit stone blocks together so well?

Professor Ivan Watkins of St. Cloud University, Minnesota has theorized that the Inca Pachacutec was wearing the golden discs of the sun for reasons other than just ornamental. He feels that those brilliant discs represented parabolic mirrors that were used to amplify the sun's light to melt rock. He attempted to demonstrate this on Nova's Secrets of Lost Empires - Incas. (NOVA: Secrets of Lost Empires - Inca (1997).

"Consequently, I propose the following hypothesis to explain how the Incas cut and polished their incredible stonework. First, the energy used was solar energy focused with large parabolic gold mirrors (figure 4). The reflectors could be made of any focal length, or combined with plane mirrors to cut in any direction at essentially any distance from the large primary reflector" (Watkins, 1986).

While he was only able to set a Popsicle stick on fire, I think he was on to something. After all, there are all sorts of applications for uses of parabolic mirrors, light, heat, and lasers.

2007-06-04T12:15:00.000-07:00

The Wedding

This is where we meet, on this street, in this house of ghosts,
Ghost House, closed to the public, not on view,
Not new, but renewed nightly.

You bought it sight unseen,
For me, for us, for the wedding.

Time collects in the attic and below stairs.

This marriage is, and we are dust, I maintain.
Amused, you turn to my explanation, answering with a strange caress
That this wedding dress is cut from the same cloth as all the others,
Very old lace.

Woven, we are wed in each other's arms.

To go upstairs means that our priest conducts the
Ceremony without ceremony,
Administering the sacraments with every step we climb.

This time we've got it right, have got the right.

You are cruel and very-violet-sweet.
Beneath us, under the bed, under the sheets,
Are the dead, dancing,
Forgetting that this is not their house, their place yet.

There is certain perspicacity in these, our ghosts,
Who will not let us pause, tangled in our sweat,
While this grammar is being taught
As it always has been, ever shall be,
World without end.

Your face inspires a new consideration,
Grace to be said over your body,
Not to be mistaken for all the men
Laid in repose in this room,
Whose widows loved and mourned,
Within these same four walls.

Still, we are certain we hear candle-music, angel-music,
Visions of choirs of children born
And burning with our harmonies,
Those come down to us in myth and legend
And written in our genetic code.

We are intent on explaining ourselves
To these children until we are spent.

While we sleep,
Our ghosts consent to keep vigil
Over our bed.

March 6, 1988

2007-05-29T13:25:00.000-07:00

Is Freyr the same person as Odin? I know that's a hot topic everywhere.

The reason I ask is that Man, Myth & Magic, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and The Unknown says on page 965 "Freyr had his own ship, Skipbladnir, said to be large enough to hold all the gods, but small enough to fold away in a pouch when not in use." Yet, I read that Odin has the same set up. The ship could travel at incredible, one might even say warp, speed.

This may not sound logical unless the gods are tiny, "quantumly" small, and space is folded in some way.

Skipbladnir was a longboat. Long things were venerated: longhouses, long beards, longboats, etc.

These days people tend to travel in ships of the air (am I kenning ?) to airports with names like Schiphol, which name is said to mean "ship hell".

2007-05-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

The Orchard

The orchard is a leftover from other times.

The trees are bent, gnarled and twisted from years and weather,
Disgraced, deformed,
More like fossils of doubled-up skeletons in high chalk walls,
Than the thralls of spring's capture.

They are empty faces in late winter's dim sun.

We have come to picnic
Beneath the branches,
Calculating the odds, the chances,
That our arrival will disturb the peace of this boneyard backyard.

The orchard can be reached only by the path
That runs through the cemetery.

We have brought blanket and basket, though it is empty,
A ruse to leave Ghost Children at home.

They will not come here, they say,
Until they can run among pealing petal-bells,
Appealing rain-rockets of fairy pinks and whites
And nights of such tender blooming
That their hearts fairly burst in fury of rapture
At nature's cause,
Because this is their heart-food.

For us, it is enough to view the vision of these prodigious wonders,
Fecund habits of the apples and pears,
From the distance of winter's waiting.

In our eyes this miracle has already been and blossomed.

We have memorized the meaning, the meandering liturgy of every season,
Even the bare one.

That prepares us to take our pagan hearts part-way to the commitment of dying.

Lying here, already covered in leaving,
We build castles and altars of blood and sacrifice,
A flood of reasons why the orchard must go on without us,
And reasons why
We must not actively seek our release but,
Waiting,
Taking our time, like troubles, into our nest,

Rest and wait to be called to peace.

(March 21, 1988)

2007-05-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Riders to The Sea, Odin, part 1

Do you remember that Odin had a missing eye? The Old Testament advised an "eye for an eye" policy.

Here is a mathematical way to delete the "i":

"In talking about wave function in a system's quantum state, psi ( Psi upper case Ψ, lowercase ψ) is the 23rd letter of the Greek Alphabet), there is a way to predict the probability of a particle showing up at a particular place or with particular momentum is given by the square of the amplitude of psi."

In Teleportation, The Impossible Leap by David Darling, page 69, this question is asked "Why the square of the amplitude of psi and not psi itself?"

And he may well ask.

He continues, "Because psi is a complex function - complex in the mathematical sense that it contains terms that involve the square root of minus one √-1, (written as i)...
Using the amplitude (also known as the modulus) is a process that gets rid of all the i's."

http://lindamunson1.tripod.com/riderstotheseaodin

2007-05-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

The Garden

The garden to Ghost House is barred, enclosed.
The yard is flowering, flowing in peony springs,
Waters-of-the-valley.

The grass sings concerts of constant companionship
With roses and kisses.
The lovely lies of summer rear their heads,
Promising eternity in beds of blossoms,
Butterflies vamping the honeysuckle, flourishing,
Jealous bees visiting from the orchard,
Bringing the profit of pollination
To the little apple trees.

Ghost Garden is planted with projects,
Rejecting nothing that will grow green,
A rendition of truth.

Joy has taken root, taken an interest here,
Sending out shoots and runners,
Blossoms and pregnant celebrations of life and self.

Ghost Garden is wife to Ghost House,
Espoused on the wedding day.
She is clever in getting her way
By being beauty to the beholder,
And what she wants is worship,
Which is, in her view,
Taking you into her confidence,
The penultimate of satisfactions.

You are seduced.
She woos, wins and compasses to her aim.

That purpose which is her glory,
She can safely claim,
Can tell the story of
Faithfulness, perfumes, mysticism,
Romance of the real and the compassionate.

She is glib in these matters,
Does not falter,
Does not alter
One line of fire.

Those not admitted are fated
Never to understand the poetry of her person,
Cannot even estimate its wealth.

Ghost House revels in its garden,
Glorifies its seasons,
Condones the triumph of emotion
Over sober reason.

(March 12, 1988)

2007-05-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

In the play Riders to The Sea, Maurya had a vision of her sons riding on horses. There is an underlying or implied theme of the Norse god Odin in the play.

Odin had an eight-legged horse. A spider has eight legs and spins. The Norns, goddesses of fate, spun the fate of individuals on their spinning wheels. Since the Norns spun yarns, a person couldn't be sure if his fate was based on truth.

Sleipner was Odin's horse, and, of course, he was the greatest of all horses. He was sometimes linked with the color blue just as Garm might be. Perhaps this was because the Celts painted their bodies blue with woad before they went into battle and had blue tattoos on their bodies. The color blue was thought to have intrinsic magical properties.

Odin's horse, Sleipnir, was suggestive of funerary imagery, since Odin is the Lord of the Dead. Sleipnir's eight legs were thought to represent four men (two legs apiece) carrying a corpse.

In some legends, Odin leads the Wild Hunt, riding Sleipnir. Whether under the name of Grim or Wotan, Odin the Gallows God led a terrifying hunt in the sky, but who or what was his prey? It may be that the Wild Hunt was practiced by his devotees, not in the sky, but on the ground in the name of their god.

This myth served as a memorial of all the dead from the Wild Hunt and the physical routes they had taken to and from their graves.

The theme of resurrection occurs in this myth. If you look at the Viking burial customs described by Ibn Fadlan, you can see that when the corpse of the king was dug up after its first burial, he was still considered one of the living.

http://lindamunson1.tripod.com/riderstotheseaodin

2007-05-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

There is a theory, or if not I can make one up, that speakers who are fluent in more than one language tend to mix, match, and meld, not only single words but also the elements and ideas found in all the languages stored in their brains. Here are some examples of what I mean:

In Irish the word gorm means blue. In an Odin tale, Odin names the best of everything. This takes quite a long time, because this naming is a form of bragging, and Odin owns the best of everything and wants everyone to know it. Just ask him. When he gets to the subject of dogs, he names his dog Garm as the best dog ever. Obviously, gorm and Garm sound a lot alike.

It is an old folk maxim that gives the name Old Blue as a proverbial dog name, just like Spot. Old Blue is a good name for a hunting dog, but rarely used for a poodle.

Those of us who live in the sticks have heard of a coon dog (Not corn dog).

In the book Arcade of Word Origins by John Ayto, page 287, some explanation is given about the origin of the word hound. "Until superseded around the 16th century by dog, hound was the main English word for dog (and indeed its relatives in the other Germanic languages remain, so German, Swedish, and Danish hund, for instance, and Dutch hond)... It goes back ultimately to Indo-European *kuntos, a derivative of the base which also produced Greek kuon do'..."
(Arcade of Word Origins, John Ayoto, Arcade Publishing, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1990).

Of course, there's also the phrase hound dog, which is really dog dog, called a reduplication.

Here's another example: The Old English word for wise is horsc.
Horse, horsc is, therefore, Horse wise or horse sense.

A lot of these types of old phrases are really reduplications.

The brain seems to want to balance out both sides, but since the left brain and the right brain differ in function, just as in England long ago when there were Norman French words and Anglo-Saxon words for essentially the same thing, such as pig and pork, calling to mind the expression pig in a poke.

The brain seems to want to divvy out a slightly different form of a word to each hemisphere of the brain and then to come up with a new product in phrases as in the case of horse sense.

Unless you look up word origins, you probably won't know the Old English or the Old Irish words, but people like these combinations, as evidenced by their use up until the present time.

2007-05-10T13:04:00.002-07:00

Why do we die? What process causes the human body to stop protecting and building itself and start to malfunction? The answer to this, if it is ever found, touches on religious and scientific perspectives.

The seekers for the proverbial Fountain of Youth were and are many. Even today, scientists look for the key to unlock the riddle about why humans age and die.

In times past, riddles about old age were plentiful, as were riddles about all sorts of other things.

In one Norse legend, Thor wrestled with a symbolic woman who represented old age. He lost the contest because the answer to the riddle about the City of Illusion was that death was inevitable. Every man must die sooner or later.

The Sphinx became a symbol for many things. ("The word "sphinx" comes from the Greek Σφιγξ — Sphigx, apparently from the verb σφιγγω — sphiggo, meaning "to strangle" (note that the ng and nx sounds were written in ancient Greek as a double gammas.")

In Oedipus Rex, the hero answered the Sphinx's riddle. In so doing, he was granted entrance to Thebes. The fable teaches that the king cannot escape his fate. If a person knew his fate ahead of time, this could cause the same despair Thor experienced when he was defeated by Elli who symbolically represented old age.

Another riddle is found in the story of the Gordian Knot. It is said that Alexander the Great cut the knot with his sword, fulfilling a prophesy. Other opinions were that he pulled out a pin that held the knot together. Some suggest that the knot was a cipher guarded by the religious priests of the time. What knowledge did this cipher unlock?

This knot was a symbol for a difficult problem. Like the Sword in the Stone of Arthurian legend, it was considered nearly impossible to solve. This puzzle, like Oedipus' riddle and the sword in the stone, was linked to kingship.

2007-05-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

Myths reflect our cultural and psychological souls. The fables of gods and goddesses, fairies and elves, gnomes, giants, and various otherworldly people and customs tell a lot of things about the people who keep them alive by thinking and writing about them.

The Forgotten Language by Erich Fromm, page 195, tells:

"If one fails to grasp the true meaning of the myth, one finds oneself confronted with this alternative: either the myth is a prescientific, naive picture of the world and of history and at best a product of poetically beautiful imagination, or- and this is the attitude of the orthodox believer- the manifest story of the myth is true, and one must believe it as a correct report of events which actually happened in 'reality'".

Generally, the myth is seen in symbolic terms by people in the 21st century.

Leach discusses the fairies in The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend:

"One of the oldest Irish sagas states that the barrows where the fairies dwelt were open about Samhain... According to Keating, in heathen times the druids on Ireland assembled to sacrifice to the gods and burn their victims on Samhain Eve. All other fires were extinguished to be rekindled only from that fire" (Leach, 968).

In this statement, we see the elements of the hill barrow or fairy mound where an underground world flourished. Samhain or Halloween (All Hallow's Eve) was the time when the gates between two worlds were open and where, through these gates, the living human and the Otherworld folk, including the dead, could pass freely.

In Ibn Fadlan's historical account of the Viking king burial, the dead chieftain was buried in the ground for a while, but he was exhumed at a later time. By the time of exhumation, the dead king's skin had turned black from being in the cold earth.

In olden times, preceding burial and during the Wake, the dead body was often treated as if the person were alive. Sometimes the corpse was set up to a table in a chair, spoken to, and danced with by the living before being buried.

All these funeral customs were expressions of cultures that showed a conviction about this present life as we know it. There was a strong belief that there was another existence or afterlife. It was felt that a life on earth preceded a new life in some other dimension or realm.

Many of the old pagan customs involved lighting fires and subsequently passing people and cattle through the fire. Passing people through fire was symbolic of moving people or spirits from one condition to another and maybe representing some kind of purification. These fires were often lit during the nights when spirits were said to enter into this world through spiritual portals with very narrow time opportunities.

These fires may have been lit because of fear and to appease the spirits. In ancient times, the passing of people through the fire was most often literal, burning them alive as sacrifices. Those ancient customs seem to be nearly identical to the heathen practice of sacrificing children to Molech, burning them alive. Eventually, the practice of Christianity caused people to modify their behavior and make symbolic burnings. As Christianity made progress in changing the heathen rites, the more acceptable custom of having people dash across and through a bonfire became acceptable.

The pagan fires of Beltain were lit on the eve of the festival and burned all night, leaving only ashes the next day. People rubbed the cold black ashes on their faces. The word Beltaine or Beltane was Gaelic and referred specifically to May or May Day. Today, this festival has both pagan and Christian significance.

If you consider the extinguished life fires in Maurya's household in Riders to The Sea, you can discern the need for a new fire to be lit on the hearth, as the Beltaine fires were each year.

2007-05-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

The Old English word for cup is bune. If you really want to be confused, you can read that bune can also mean purchase and maiden. A long time ago there used to be a thing called bride price. It actually cost something to get a wife. These days people expect to get everything for free, and then they don't appreciate it. Instead, they complain that it wasn't worth what they got it for - nothing.

Toward the end of the play Riders to The Sea, there is a small container of holy water mentioned in connection with Bartley's death:

"MAURYA (raising her head and speaking as if she did not see the people around her). They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. ...I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening. (To Nora.) Give me the Holy Water, Nora, there's a small sup still on the dresser."

These days, "surf's up", surf sup, at the beach.

In Riders to The Sea, there is no living husband, but since there is a sub-theme of Odin the trickster in Riders to The Sea, and Colum is in the house making the coffin, you can't help but wonder what they are really talking about.

In Porgy and Bess, a collection is taken up to pay for a funeral. They "fill up de saucer 'till it overflow". My grandmother would pour her cup very full with coffee and then spill it into her saucer and drink from it first before drinking from the cup. The practical reason for this was to cool the coffee quickly in the saucer, but I'm wondering if there is an unremembered custom behind this.

My great-grandparents homesteaded their farm. Buan is an Old English word that means to dwell, settle, or cultivate. In times past, the husband of the household would lead in the work of homesteading.

One linguist gives this definition:

"Webster's gives the etymology of husband as:
Etymology: Middle English husbonde, from Old English husbonda master of a house, from Old Norse husbOndi, from hus house + bOndi householder; akin to Old Norse, bua to inhabit; akin to Old English buan to dwell."

An agrarian society marked the seasons of the year with festivals that celebrated not only the important planting and harvesting times but also threw religion into the festival mix.

Sir Walter Scott writes: "On Hallowmas Eve, ere ye boune to rest". Halloween was once the festival of Samhain with customs and ideas that were really scary at that time.

Easter is a springtime festival. In England, they make hot crossed buns. The origin of this custom is pre-Christian:

"At the feast to Eastre, an ox was sacrificed and the image of his horns carved into ritual bread - which evolved into the twice-scored Easter biscuits we call 'hot cross buns.' In fact, the word 'bun' derives from the Saxon for 'sacred ox,' 'boun.'" Sacred Origins of Profound Things. A cross bun kept from one Good Friday to the next was thought to bring luck, the buns were supposed to serve as a charm against shipwreck, and hanging a bun over the chimney-piece ensured that all bread baked there would be perfect. Another belief was that eating hot cross buns on Good Friday served to protect the home from fire."

Livestock was once a vital part of the old homestead, but don't mistake the Old English word horsc, which means wise, for horse, even though real horse sense was needed in those times and also in ours.

2007-05-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

Bart's body is carried home in the play Riders to The Sea, and he is put on the table. His feet are bare, and "a great wind" is blowing on them.

Feet are often symbolic, and this symbol occurs in mythology.

A Scottish custom called first-footing is still remembered today. If a tall, dark, and handsome man is the first to enter your home on New Year's Eve, it is considered a lucky omen for the coming new year. First-footers crossed the threshold at the stroke of midnight during Hogmanay.

"In all countries Halloween seems to have been the great season of prying into the future; all kinds of divination were put into practice that night."

In Wales, Halloween was the weirdest of all the Teir Nos Ysbrydion, or Three Spirit Nights, "when the wind, blowing over the feet of corpses, bore sighs to the houses of those who were to die within the year."

The familiar tune My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean seems silly, but some versions of it have winds blowing and stinking feet, possibly forgotten references to pagan customs of prediction.

The Norse also had a legend about feet. Skadi did a favor for the gods, so they told her she could marry any man she wanted, but there was a catch. She could only look at their feet to make her choice. She looked long at all of the feet, and then chose the cleanest pair.

Njord's home was called Noatun, which means harbor, and his wife was the giantess Skadi who married him because he had "beautiful feet". She later left him because they couldn't decide in whose dwelling they should live.

Since people will inevitably compare some ideas in Riders to The Sea to the story of Christ, it might be noted that nails were driven through His feet, and women cried at the foot of the cross. Christ also washed the feet of his disciples.

Various customs come together to make whole cloth of our beliefs and celebrations.

2007-04-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

In Germanic mythology, people did not possess free moral agency. Instead, their fate was predetermined by women called Norns. They "wrote your life's plan".

The Norns were spinners who spun their yarn, weaving the fate of individuals over whom they watched, into the fabric. "His thread of life was cut short" is a phrase that described the fate of one who died.

With the image of a cozy rustic home in mind, you can imagine a spinner working at the spinning wheel to make yarn for warm and durable garments. Even the spinning wheel itself conjures the image of hearth and home in mythology.

The pattern of the knit had something to tell.

The Norse Norns could be compared to the Greek goddesses of fate. These supernatural spinning women tended the tree Yggdrasil and determined fate. Their names were: Urd (fate), Skuld (necessity)], and Verdandi (being).

There were more than three Norns. It was believed that a Norn is present at a person’s birth to determine his or her fate, much like a Guardian Angel.

How closely related are the diverse myths from many cultures? The book
Carrots Love Tomatoes, page 37, tells about the herb Elecampane (Inula helenium):

"My German heritage bids me have great respect for elecampane, sometimes called horseheal or horse alder. This herb was under the protection of the goddess Hulda, who first taught mortals the art of spinning and weaving flax. Candied elecampane, according to a 17th-century herbal, as thought to 'cause mirth'".

The Hulda Lady, the Norns, and spinning seem to have much in common.

2007-04-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

During one point in the play Riders to The Sea, Maurya appears to be having a vision and sees two of her sons on horseback. One of them has been dead for some time and the other is Patch, presumed dead.

The two brothers seem to be racing in some sort of otherworldly Triple Crown race or, to make a pun, the Irish race.

A literal reading of the ghostly ride isn't likely. Perhaps they were riding as if the demons were chasing them.

Celtic Myths by Miranda Jane Green has this to say about the goddess Epona, "Her imagery is distinctive: she is always depicted in company with horses, either riding side-saddle on a mare or between two or more horses or ponies" (60).

Since Epona is described as riding between two ponies, could it be interpreted that she was riding between the two sons? Synge may have alluded to this goddess as if she were between the sons’ horses in a figurative sense. Then again, those two horses may have appeared to be an eight-legged horse like Odin's Sleipnir from a distance, especially if one had been having a pint, as they say, and viewed from ground level, which would explain why two heads were not reported.

Elements of the Wild Hunt, the Green Man, and Herne the Hunter are suggested by these riders.

The horse as an element and symbol appears in both a literal and symbolic sense and is linked to various other cult symbols and practices. Always valued by man for its proverbial horse-sense and for its usefulness, the horse was also worshiped as a deity at times and used to play out mystical dramas. The Gaulish Celts worshiped the Mare Goddess, appearing in other cultures as Epona and associated with The Three Epona and the Triple Goddesses.

The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft describes one cult practice in twelfth-century Ireland involving a local king acting out a re-birth ritual in a "white mare ceremony". Afterward, the mare was slaughtered and eaten. We read of the culmination of the ceremony by the king. "He stood on an inauguration stone and received a straight white wand, which he held while turning three times left and three times right in honor of the trinity" (165).

There are other horse symbols in mythology.

The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, edited by Maria Leach, adds further to our understanding, "The beginning of winter (Samhain) was the occasion for the lighting of bonfires and for processions from house to house to solicit contributions of coin and food. In County Cork, the procession was led by a man called the White Mare (Lair Bhan) wearing a white robe. The fairies and the spirits of the dead were supposed to be abroad" (202).

Standard Dictionary goes on to relate, "One of the oldest Irish sagas states that the barrows where the fairies dwelt were open about Samhain. According to Keating, in heathen times the druids on Ireland assembled to sacrifice to the gods and burn their victims on Samhain Eve. All other fires were extinguished to be rekindled only from that fire" (Leach, 968).

Another custom exemplifying the use of a symbolic figure of the horse to ensure fertility for the upcoming harvest was called the "horse dance".

Leech describes it in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, "Ritual riding on a live horse or a hobby horse...at the grave of the goddess Talltiu in Taillten, Ireland, they race to give chthonic spirits an access of vigor for crop production" (504).

The question arises about the origin of the stick horses that children pretend to ride on. Sticks and horses are both elements in the play Riders to The Sea.

In all of these examples, we find a connection to festivals, the fairies, and horses.

2007-04-26T11:03:00.001-07:00

Since times long ago, man has believed in rebirth and regeneration of life after death, and many pagan rituals were developed upon this theme, accompanied by stories of gods and heroes to whom this resurrection applied, gods and myths intertwined.

Confusion over names can occur, since the fertility figures, connected to themes of resurrection, act out basically the same role no matter which culture they appear in or by what name the god is called. There are myriads of stories on this theme.

From long ago times, man has believed in rebirth or regeneration. Pagan rituals were developed, accompanied by stories of gods and heroes to whom this resurrection applied.

The Green Man, god of vegetation, appears in English myth. Also called Jack-in-the-Green or Green Knight, the Green Man was closely linked to the Savage Man, also called the Wild Man, and Herne the Hunter. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits by Rosemary Ellen Guilley says that Herne is the leader of the Wild Hunt, a nocturnal procession of the dead and is linked to the old god Cernunnos. Odin is also pictured in legend as leading a wild howling ghostly host across a stormy night sky. Since a storm often manifested itself with thunder and lightning, Odin's host might have included Thor, the Norse god of thunder.

These characters are closely tied to the agrarian year with its seasonal festivals and to forests, since they are the habitat of the Green Man motifs in their various forms. Some of these characters such as Herne, associated with Windsor Forest, are alleged to have once lived as actual historical people, and some are merely re-makes of archetypes that reach back to the cradle of civilization. Even as late as 1990, this kind of festival is recorded taking place in Hastings, England.

One such festival is described in The Green Man, The Archetype of Our Oneness With the Earth by William Anderson:

"The Jack in the Green has erupted from beside the sea. He is escorted by several Green Men. They are accompanied by a girl carrying a high spray of flowers. She is completely black and very comely. The crowd follows the procession along the sea front and turns up to the castle on the cliff above the town for the purpose of the ceremony: the release of the spirit of summer. This happens in the last dance, for which the Jack descends from his mound and bobs up and down on the edge of a side of Morris dancers performing a stick dance. They crack their wooden swords together. Jack in the Green falls dead "(9).

Continuing in the book The Green Man, it says:

"Having made the point that the evidence for linking the Green Man as he appears with the leaf-covered figure of folk ritual is often patchy, the archetypal force behind both the Green Man of art and the leafy figures of custom is the same. They are different manifestations of the same primal urge."

Long ago, the sacrifice of the Green Man archetype was believed to ensure a fruitful harvest. The Green Man was dead and reborn, again and again, spring after spring. The harvest festival was celebrated later in the year, and then the dark period of the declining year, Samhain with its deep gloom, appears near the time of winter's longest days. In the spring, the people were once again happy to renew their pact with the pagan cult of fecundity and reenact the story yet again: life, death, and rebirth.

Lots of people might think history and myth are boring subjects, but a little reading shows that these are some of the wildest and scariest stories ever told, and they resonate with a certain truth because this is the history of people from whom many of us have descended.

2007-04-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

The pronunciation of a word plays an important part of the understanding of it. However it might be spelled, the sound of a word calls certain images to mind. Samhain, pronounced aloud, has the sound of sow in it. In the play Riders to The Sea, there were festivals that Maurya would likely have had knowledge of that involved the idea of the word sow, and that festival was known as hogmanay.

Death is the preeminent theme in Riders to The Sea, with an underlying theme of resurrection. In this way, the elements are balanced.

Including a discussion of Samhain is appropriate to the themes in Riders to The Sea. In fact, the ramifications of the celebrations are so many and so varied that the word is loaded with associations, much of it so deeply rooted in history that many of the readers or members of the play's audience would not actually know the original source of the customs and ideas, although Synge's audience was probably a little sharper about some things than today's audience might be.

The pre-Christians had their own ideas about death and afterlife, and conversion to Christianity did not erase those ideas completely. The mystical shadow of the Druids in Europe and Ireland still fell upon the Irish people. Druids were the keepers of the sacred fire for which a fee was levied to restart all the quenched hearth fires at Samhain.

The folk aspects of the holiday appear in the play as everyday items or events. Irish legend alludes to this most precarious of times, when mischief might be done as well as magic. In Holiday Symbols it says:

"An old legend associated with Samhain tells the story of the annual destruction of Tara...Every year at Samhain a goblin called Aillen played the harp so skillfully that everyone was charmed into sleep, allowing him to set fire to the palace" (Thompson, 430).

Still another death and resurrection legend included in the same book is this:

"According to Irish folklore, a god named Cenghus fell in love with a young girl Caer (also known as Rhiannon), who was capable of taking the form of a swan at the festival of Samhain...the only way he could be with her was to wait for the festival and then transform himself into a swan. United at last, the pair flew three times around the lake putting everyone else into a dream-sleep that lasted three days and three nights...The festival of Samhain may have celebrated, through the legend of people and gods shape-shifting into swans, the transformation of life from one state to another" (Thompson, 431).

About Cuchulainn's mother Dechtire, Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Myths and Legends tells that "Legend recounts how on swallowing a fly which flew into her cup at her wedding feast, Dechtire fell into a deep sleep." A deep sleep sets the scene for many an act of mischief in legend. Where did the children's song that begins with, "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly” originate?

An important religious theme underlies all of this: the hope of rebirth or resurrection. Whether Christian or pagan, people of the Aran Islands during Synge's stay there needed to bolster their belief that there was some kind of hope in their hard lives. The mere mention of Samhain was enough to call to mind all of the associations of the Otherworld or afterlife, thus offering a spiritual tone, albeit barbaric.

Celtic Myths, written by Miranda Jane Green offers this insight to the delicate balance in the world:

"The somber aspect of the Otherworld is equally represented in myth. Samhain at the beginning of November is a dangerous time, a kind of limbo where the barriers between the real and supernatural worlds are temporarily dissolved and where humans and spirits can penetrate each other's space, thus upsetting the normal balance" (74).

The idea of symmetry and balance, like the symbolic Scale of Justice, is also included in this context, making the two dimensions or worlds delicately balanced, aligned with one another and separated, as it were, by a veil that was dangerously permeable during the Eve of Samhain. During this time, according to legend, the spirits of the dead were free to roam, often thought of as returning to their former homes.

The home hearth was often the center of family life during ancient times. It was the place where food was given as well as warmth from the fire and family fellowship. In The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, this theme is discussed:

"The festival of Samhain and Hogmany had similar themes, one of which was the lighting of the hearth fire."

The fire of many of the lives of Maurya’s household has been extinguished. Their hope for the future may have been doused, but the question of the bundle arises. Although its first meaning is a literal bundle of clothes, the phrase "bundle of joy" comes to mind. If one of Maurya's two daughters, like the Biblical Mara with her two daughters-in-law in the book of Ruth, should find that one of them marries and provides a new husband and heir, the fire would then be rekindled. This is not a likely option for Maurya, and she doesn't sound optimistic about her daughters' luck turning for the better.

There is the underlying idea of sacrifice in these festivals. The thought is that, as seen by the loss of men in the family and from historical reference, the ocean may give a sparse living, but it wreaks the most terrible havoc on the peasants of Aran.

In Celtic Myths this thought ties the cult of Odin to Samhain. "One Irish tradition involved the triple killing of a king, by burning, wounding and drowning, at the feast of Samhain" (Green, 69). Not only are the natural elements vicious, but their so-called celebrations are equally horrible.

If Odin appeared in the play, it would be in disguise. He might be playing the part of the old man who makes the coffin in Riders to The Sea, a paradox that portrays Odin as the long dead mythical hero, and yet, alive enough to build a coffin.

2007-04-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

On the Orkney Islands at Yule Tide, old customs whose origins most people do not know or cannot remember, were celebrated. These celebrations were in closely tied with Scottish and Irish custom.

Worship of a Goddess or Mother Figure took many forms. The Norse "seer" or volva was involved with supernatural events and might have been viewed as possessing the spirit of the Goddess when she was in a trance. It was during the visitation of this lady that the people conducted a feast. Religion and feasts were closely linked. The pleasure of plenteous food for people who often did not have enough to eat created a bond with the religious observation.

Similar customs go back to Biblical times and originated in the land of the Babylonians.

Alexander Hislop wrote:

"To show the connection between country and country, and the inveterate endurance of old customs, it is worthy of remark, that Jerome, commenting on the very words of Isaiah already quoted, about spreading 'a table for Gad', and 'pouring out a drink-offering to Meni', observes that it 'was the custom so late as his time [in the fourth century], in all cities especially in Egypt and at Alexandria, to set tables, and furnish them with various luxurious articles of food, and with goblets containing a mixture of new wine, on the last day of the month and the year, and that the people drew omens from them in respect of the fruitfulness of the year.'"

The Norse tradition of "seeing” is featured in the 1957 film by Ingmar Bergman titled The Seventh Seal. The story line is something like this: A knight who has come back from the Crusades plays chess with Death, a figure in a hooded black robe. This is a time of Plague. An itinerant entertainer and his wife Mary are two of the survivors, although the knight and his companions are not.

At the conclusion of the film, the player looks into the distance and remarks on the specters he sees:

"I see them. Mary! over against the stormy sky. They are all there, the smith and Lisa, the knight, Raval, Jons, and Skat, and the strict Lord Death bids them dance. He wants them to hold hands and to tread the dance in a long line. At the head goes the strict Lord with scythe and hour glass, but the Fool brings up the rear with his lute. They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance. Away towards the dark lands, while the rain cleanses their cheeks from the salt of their bitter tears."

His wife, Mary, sees nothing and says to him: "You with your visions."

These words from the film show that the same feature found in Riders to The Sea, in which Maurya falls into a trance state and sees her dead sons is typified.

The old prayers and customs are still in the conscious memory of the Northern people even in this century.

2007-04-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

"Watch your back." "Turn your back on them." Those are idiomatic expressions. It's an uncomfortable thing to always be looking over your shoulder. You hope someone has "got your back".

In the play Riders to The Sea, there are a couple of instances when there is talk about "keeping your back to the door" (or audience) just as the twig-bearers do in historical Norse funeral rites.

Talking together like magpies, Cathleen tells Nora to conceal the bundle from Maurya, saying, "Keep your back to the door the way the light'll not be on you." She means it is a dark secret, a covert matter, or maybe she means that what they are about to discuss "won't stand the light of day". Christianity was known as "The Way", so perhaps the light of the faith would not reach whatever it was they were concealing, indicating the transitional time when supposedly Christianized people still clung to their forbidden pagan practices in secret.

We also read this stage direction, (Nora sits down at the chimney corner, with her back to the door). What significance is there in Norah sitting with her back to the door? Does the modern reader know where the door is on the set in relation to the play's audience?

After Maurya sees her vision of her sons on horseback, she behaves in this way according to stage directions: "Maurya begins to keen softly, without turning round." Keening is an old custom of loud crying and mourning. Is she keeping her back to the door still?

At the conclusion of the play, the stage directions describe the physical action of the mourners, the women who enter the cottage:

"The old women begin to come in, crossing themselves on the threshold and kneeling down in front of the stage with their backs to the people, and the white waist bands of the red petticoats they wear on their heads just seen from behind".

There is something unsettling, even sinister, about this scene, something lurking beneath the surface. Red petticoats were distinctive dress were worn by the women of the Aran Islands, but in other contexts this may indicate another meaning.

Like the daughter-waves of Lir, these women mourners convey the idea that there is more here than simply meets the eye. The play ends in the same manner as the previously described funeral rites, with backs to the people.

Is there something going on behind their backs? Of course.

2007-03-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

If you think the sound of storm water runoff is rainbow, maybe you are different from the madding crowd. Brain Man is a word play on Rain Man. The first reaction of people to the word savant is, you know, retarded. That is probably now on the list of politically incorrect words, but it means merely slow, although slow does not mean retarded. En retard - is French, I think.

Being different has never been a secure place for people, but if they realized that everyone has a little bit of genius in them, they might feel differently. If everyone exercised their little bit of genius, a lot more problems could be solved, including but not limited to the global water crisis.

Rain water harvesting is one solution. Doesn't it sound like some melodic and cosmic vibe resonating in the reservoir of your brain and body, which is, by the way, made mostly of water.

Aren't we running a little bit late in addressing this issue in an intelligent manner?

2007-03-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

If you give coffee to hyperactive kids to drink, you can sometimes make them calm. There are tests and proof. There are similar arguments against it.

If you try to drive a crazy person crazy, he or she may become sane. I'm sure this can be proved somehow.

In the book night by A. Alvarez, page 48, he makes the point that under insane conditions, the insane function normally.

"Bruno Bettelheim, who had been a prisoner at Dachau and Buchenwald, pointed out that seriously disturbed people- especially paranoids- seem to lose their symptoms, and even to cope quite well in the concentration camps because the horrors of everyday life effortlessly outstripped those of their internal worlds. Maybe this was also true for me, on a miniature scale: when every night brought violence and the threat of death, without any intervention on my part, there was no longer any need for me to be afraid of my own night within the night."

There is no end of ways to cope.

2007-03-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

I read The World According To Garp a long time ago.

In this book, a group called the Ellen Jamesians voluntarily had their tongues cut out in protest of crimes against women, but maybe also because they are afraid to say anything at all, for fear of repercussions. When you don't speak up for what is right or to defend yourself and those who can't defend themselves, then symbolically, you don't have a tongue either.

There is far too much fear and intimidation in the world. The perpetrators of fear and intimidation seem to have the upper hand. They seem to be saying "keep your mouth closed or you or your family or your bunny will get hurt."

Nevertheless, people are endlessly inventive in finding ways to communicate without directly tackling the subject at hand. It seems to be that human nature and communication go hand in hand.

Clinically depressed people who show a "flat effect" have lost or supressed the ability to show a full range of emotions. They are apathetic about everything. Symbolically, they have lost their tongues.

Those attempting to induce a "blunt affect" in a population by restricting normal human activities that include communication and speech and laughter and interpersonal relationships are sick, sick, sick.

2007-03-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

Well, ok, then, jump in the tub.

No, not this one. This photo makes me feel like a stainless steel psycho.

Let's call it a small pool, indoors. Maybe we could "honeymoon" somewhere off the beaten path.

2007-03-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

When the ladies get together for a Quilting Bee and have a Hen Party, look out! Quilting is not a forgotten art in the hinterlands of America, and it's not some drab scrap thing. There are lurking and menacing implications in the quilting frame, but you have to know the lingo.

I'm not talking about the mass produced quilts where some lonely mill worker feeds great sheets of material into an ever hungry machine quilter. This is about hand quilting or home sewing machine quilting.

Here is a crash course overview: Quilting essentials (the basic ingredients), Different quilt stitches, Hand sewn insertions, Different types of quilting, Different types of quilt patterns, Quilting in the ditch, Contour and echo quilting, Random quilting, Tying a knot, tufting, Embellishments, and Binding.

Here are some types of quilt patterns: Rail fence, Log cabin, Crazy quilt, Pinwheel, Card trick, Star, Mariner's compass, Drunkard's path, Dutchman's puzzle (triangles), Trip around the world, Tumbling blocks, Flying geese, Secret garden, Dresden plate, Wreath, Celtic knot (bias strip), Tulip, Hawaiian applique, and Broderie Perse.

These are types of quilting: Sashiko, Italian, Trapunto, and Kantha.

Here are just a few stitches for hand quilting: running, whipped running, stem, Portuguese knotted stem, outline, chain, raised chain, knotted cable, twisted chain, rosette chain, zig zag chain, rope, feather, maidenhair, arrowhead, fly, fern, blanket, closed blanket, crossed blanket, whipped blanket, Basque, knotted blanket, Breton, glove, Vandyke, Wheatear, cross, Romanian, long arm cross, open Cretan, petal, Mountmellick, coral, cable, chevron, double knot, loop, and bonnet.

You should be OK, because I didn't tell you all of them.

2007-02-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

Trees, you can't live without them. They are the opposite from people in respiration, breathing in our carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen that humans need. I'm sure that's what they told me in science class.

Just in case trees can't do the job of extracting carbon emissions from the air, someone has invented the synthetic tree:

"As the wind blows though plastic "leaves," the carbon is trapped in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid carbon dioxide." This particular tree does not look like a tree, but there are some that do. If whoever is in charge of these things would just employ these types of air cleaning devices, there would be no need to start taxing people for carbon footprints.

Trees are just plants that often grow very tall. That should be the end of story, but in the past, people have made them mythical and symbolic, and sometimes frightening things, especially when gathered together and call a forest.

These are some thoughts on trees I collected when writing a paper on J.M. Synge's play Riders to The Sea:

References to the northern cult of Odin appear in the play Riders to The Sea. Odin is linked to many other mythological figures and motifs, including the Green Man hidden in foliage and trees.

Yggdrasil was the name of the tree in the saga of Odin. Sacred trees and groves figured in the beliefs of the pagans. The Mythic Image explains Yggdrasil as the World Ash and describes the worm gnawing at its root as a dragon, "the Old Germanic world ash, Yggdrasil- where the dragon Nithogg gnaws at the root..." (Campbell).

The Mythic Image by Joseph Campbell gives examples of tree worship and inversion. This inversion turned things topsy-turvy. Trees were said to grow downward and have roots above and branches downward.

This calls to mind the Tarot cards which can be read inverted and have a different meaning than those read right side up.

The Green Man motif, found in many cultures, shows a man enmeshed in foliage or vegetation. This theme is primal or archetypal to civilization's worship of all phases of the birth, reproduction, and death cycle. The forbidden fruit hanging upon the tree in Eden, Christ crucified hanging upon the tree in Golgotha, and Odin hanging on the tree of Yggdrasil all belong to the Green Man theme, man and tree united in concept.

Albrecht Durer's Crucifixion painting shows a Christ upon the cross amidst a group with foliage in the background. His Agony In The Garden depicts several symbols that are both pagan and Christian. Among them are a tree, chalice, cross, and sword.

Trees played a part in pagan theologies. The body of Osiris was said to be encased in a tree trun k in Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols:

"TAT (Dad, Daddu, Tet, and Zad)...Osiris's backbone, the tree trunk in which his body supposedly had been enclosed..." (Gertrude Jobes, the Scarecrow Press, Inc., New York, 1961, p 1537).

The Green Man, Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest, the Haunted Woods, all of these have themes with trees as important symbols.

In ancient days, the forest was a dangerous place, especially at night. They contained many secrets. The leaders of various mythic cults would engender fear and awe of the forest for their own purposes.

Joan Baez, in her album Baptism, sings a warning to stay on the path and not venture into the woods, the same advice given to Little Red Riding Hood:

"The wood is full of shining eyes, The wood is full of creeping feet, The wood is full of tiny cries: You must not go to the wood at night!" (The Magic Wood, by Henry Treece)

Little Red Riding Hood was warned to stay on the path and not to go into the woods. In the Charles Perrault version of Red Riding Hood, the girl encounters an Old Father wolf. When the wolf arrives at grandmother's house and wants her to unlock the door, she says, ""Pull out the peg and the latch will fall." This is reminiscent of the Gordian knot puzzle.

Sherwood Forest, Yggdrasil, and images of spooky and magical forests are all part of tree legends of Northern Europeans. Trees were at times thought to contain spirits and gods. They were often held sacred. Groves of trees were the settings for the mystic rites of Druids and other cults, where strange and grisly proceedings were practiced.

During the Nazi regime of World War II, "trees" were constructed of poles set in the ground with concrete and having wooden pegs at the top for hanging victims in a kind of crucifixion.

A video excerpt from the film Paragraph 175 says:

"Heinz Dörmer, now a very frail 89-year-old, spent nearly 10 years in prisons and concentration camps. In a quivering, barely audible voice, he remembers the haunting, agonized cries from "the singing forest", a row of tall poles on which condemned men were hung: "Everyone who was sentenced to death would be lifted up on to the hook. The howling and screaming were inhuman. Beyond human comprehension."

This example shows that old pagan beliefs about woods and trees still had mythical power over the minds of people in the 20th century. The film, The Brotherhood of the Wolves, portrays people using the woods as an outdoor cathedral for their pagan rites.

A tree is just a tall plant that serves to remove carbon emissions from the air, but long ago, a tree was not just a tree.

2007-02-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

You need a vacation.

Even if you're not French, you need a lot of vacation time to offset the nightmare we call work.

You know, the place where they set traps for you when you pop your head around the corner and wiggle your whiskers.

I read that the French take an entire month, usually August, for a vacation. I can easily get my mind around that, but I know a lot of employers who probably couldn't.

Of course, you can always take a mental vacation at work. Just imagine some scene that evokes endorphins or similar good vibes. Personally, I need this most about now when the winter has dragged on long enough. I like to think of white sand and turquoise water. In a mental vacation, you can stay out in the sun as long as you want with no aftereffects, no tan either.

Dressing for a vacation should not be stressful. For instance, if you will be at the seaside, choose a bathing suit, or several, in a variety of sizes and colors so that you can sleep in them if you want. The idea is to have a complete casual wardrobe.

I always enjoy the never-get-dressed vacation where I simply add accessories as the weather or task allows. For instance, your pajamas might be a seasonable fabric weight jog suit or vice-versa. Baby doll pajamas could function as your core attire. To this you can add rain, cowboy, or snow boots, any number of hats and/or goggles, coats, vests and jewelry. You need never actually have to take off your core outfit except for hygienic purposes. Or maybe not even that.

Remind me, and next time we will talk about dining, repasts, and cuisine on vacation.

2007-02-12T11:32:00.000-08:00

Dreams and nightmares originate in the same place but seem like complete opposites.

The snow on cherry blossoms that was not supposed to happen, as it was unseasonable, happened anyway, like beautiful frosted glass, as beautiful as a dream, but ruining the spring cherry crop.

The snow on a black and white television screen seems nostalgically funny now, but was as exasperating and disappointing as the uncontrolled horizontal roll.

The overwhelming tide of Sapporo snowmen may seem funny or frightening. Creatures built from snow express human whimsy and creative genius. Only snow soldiers can properly guard ice palaces.

2007-01-30T11:47:00.000-08:00

What is privacy, and why would we want any of it?

The word is privacy, not piracy.

We are born naked apes. When we are young, our parents read our diaries and listen in to our phone conversations and make all our decisions for us, so where do we get the idea of privacy? The dictionary tells us that it implies seclusion.

Somehow, the idea of privacy is linked to those ideas that came from the proverbial Adam and Eve that they were nude and needed to cover themselves, naked apes no longer. This idea happened at approximately the same time that they ate of the fruit of the Tree of Life, as suggested by Satan, so that they would possess the power of self determination, knowing the difference between good and evil.

I chuckle to myself.

2007-01-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

People are the most dangerous animals of all.

One is warned that a human bite is far more deadly than any animal bite. The good news is that I have rarely been bitten by a human, although the same goes for animals.

Still, people are very preoccupied with controlling all the species, human and animal. Radio signal collars and implants are tracking and controlling cougars, apes, and people.

You may be scoffing right now, thinking this is crazy. Can you deny that they collar cougars, and with good reason? They are dangerous. They kill people and animals, and they especially like lamb chops.

I have to pepper my grim thoughts with humor for, you see, I have this antiquated obsession with privacy, which has gone pretty much the same way as pure water.

They radio-collar gorillas too. I don't know if gorillas are truly dangerous, but they might bite if they are scared. And squirrels, they track squirrels. And people, they track people. They like to call it authenticating. I authenticate my encrypted password. Yep, it's really me.

Hunter-gathering is as old as the proverbial cave men. The urge to hunt is probably forever embedded in the human genome. Hunting differentiates in many ways such as looking for your socks under the bed when you want to go home or looking for your car in the parking lot after the bar closes. The "prey" can be elusive.

There is good hunting. There are good tracking devices. In Colorado, USA, skiers and outdoorsmen are advised to carry a tracking device that emits a signal that can be used to find a hiker lost in the woods or a skier buried under an avalanche. They can save your life.

The solution is about voluntary participation, at least for humans. Do squirrels even care?

2007-01-16T17:01:00.000-08:00

Is heaven in our heads?

I was reading about an artist who thinks heaven is in our imagination. I saw a Book with Wings.

People who believe in angels, definitely believe in things that can't be proven. They believe in them anyway.

Angels are said to have what we rudely call a pecking order. That order requires a beak, so if you don't have one, then you're out of order. You're not even allowed in line. That doesn't sound angelic, but rather more pedestrian.

Could it be that whatever we feed our minds, whatever concepts of paradise that we imagine. that is what will be there waiting for us when we die? Could it be that all the people we miss will all be in there waiting for us if we can only remember them?

Remind me not to think of Odin's Carrion Hall complete with Valkyries. Perish the thought. Images of horned helmets, unlimited mead, and the undead could haunt my dreams.

Might it be worth investing in some furniture for "up there"? Maybe we should put a lot of good stuff in our brains for, oh, the Heavenly Choir.

I know a lot of people who have completely rejected playing a harp on a cloud for eternity, but that was before cloud computing.

What would you like to do for eternity? The question is attempting to get at what subject wouldn't bore you if you had to do it for eternity. It's much like the question of asking what book you would choose if you were stranded on a desert island and if you could only choose one book to possess, what would it be?

Choose wisely.

A psychologist once told me about research work that was attempting to locate the God Center in our brains. If it exists, I find it odd that Nuns don't seem to have it. And if the Nuns can't find it, how am I supposed to?

2007-01-16T12:07:00.000-08:00

Henley On Thames

I am grieving for my lost family,
The husband,
The little boys and girls,
The kidnapped dog,
The house that burned to the ground.

You look at me strangely,
Because these people are all alive,
Living in other states,
The husbands married to their fifteenth wives,
The kids in the counting houses counting out the money.

The only people who are really gone
Are those who escaped to live it up in Never Never Land,
While we had to starch our clothes
And sit in wooden chairs,
Staring at paper mache dummies
The undertakers had made in the back rooms,
Snickering behind our backs
As we were sitting in those stilted slat back chairs.

You say I am being too melodramatic
With all my flowery words.
I don't answer you back,
Because I am planning my new family,
Husbands and children with more IQs
And even higher expectations.

There will be no disappointment,
Because I have written it so that this all takes place
On a mission probe to deepest space,
Where time is so badly warped
That we all live happily ever after.

January 13, 2007

2007-01-12T12:51:00.000-08:00

The Hollow Men. The Queen of the Silver Dollar.

How many silver dollars do you have on your person right now? Check your pockets, your purse, your backpack, your fanny pack, that velvet box you carry with you that contains your jewels.

How many did you find? I didn't find any.

Silver dollars are rarely ever in circulation and given as change in ordinary transactions on a day to day basis. A collector might have quite a few, but I doubt he will be carrying them around on his person.

That is why I was utterly confused to read that US defense contractors are walking around with silver dollars in their pockets. They are not ordinary silver dollars. They are hollow and have transmitting devices and space for microfilm and such.

They look quite a lot like Hanukkah gelt. Maybe they discovered the devices when the disappointed person pried it open to get at the chocolate. No chocolate. Surprise. Surprise.

Several U.S. Pentagon contractors with high level security clearances had them on their persons. The rest is secret, because it is scary and embarrassing and has further repercussions.

I'm just wondering if, because I am not among this crowd, maybe it is typical to have silver dollars in your pocket. Otherwise, isn't anyone saying hmmm, "who is giving out loaded silver dollars?"

Right now, I'm thinking I don't want any in my pocket, dans ma poche.

I am thinking it would be more fun to think about fun, maybe do my hair up in ringlets and get out of the house for a while with my staff, go to a bull fight, basketball or hockey game or something.

Don't accept any wooden nickels, kid. Also, put a hold on the silver dollars.

2007-01-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

I have read a lot about Snorri Sturlson. Unfortunately, this is not very important to very many people, but if anyone out there is going WOW!, I think we need to talk.

The name Snorri means something akin to "attack". I've yet to meet anyone named Snorri in real life. Without naming names, there are a lot of people who should have been named Snorri.

I was born in the U.S.A. "The U.S.A." covers a vaster area than many people realize, not all of it geographical.

For example, in my genealogy file I have an old city directory of the town where I lived as a child. Here are some sample last names chosen at random: Gudmunder, Osgoodby, and Ostrom. Here are some first names: Gustav, Ricka, Roland, Signe, Sigrid, and so on. Not everyone has such a name there, but enough do to give the city a distinctive flavor. Seriously, this had to have had left its mark on my psyche.

I am no longer located anywhere near the area where I was born. There is a huge cultural gap between that city and where I find myself now. This is a problem, I think, and I'm not sure that there is any way to solve it. There is too much distance involved.

I've heard it said that the cold causes the Northern people to be the way they are. You know what I mean, the Ole and Lena jokes.

Labels: every culture has to have one. Scandinavians are either big, blond, and hot-tubbing or slow, nebulous, and dumber than gravel. This is racial stereotyping.

Someone told me that the numbing cold caused thought processes to retreat deeper into the brain tissues which are much older and more primitive than the surface areas. Is that even scientific? They also told me that the goofy slowness only happens among friends. People will tell me anything.

Why wouldn't evolution give some people the capacity for a deeper layer of thought in the cold? The Berserker lived in a state of deep lethargy until he was called to battle. Apparently, he had to work himself up into an adrenaline frenzy, and then, of course, he went berserk.

Thus, may one access the Cave Man self. Again, the caveat, "Don't try this at home."

2006-12-30T13:11:00.000-08:00

Our lives are measured in increments.

What event could describe this, what is it, and who is ultimately responsible?

12/25/06:
10:15 am
11:27 am
12:39 pm
01:23 pm
02:22 pm
03:23 pm
03:59 pm
05:25 pm
05:51 pm
06:49 pm
08:04 pm
08:40 pm
10:16 pm

12/26/06:
12:35 am
12:56 am
02:34 am
03:07 am
11:05 am
11:55 am
01:09 pm
02:00 pm
02:40 pm
03:06 pm
03:20 pm
03:45 pm
06:04 pm
07:41 pm
09:01 pm
10:13 pm
11:06 pm
12:51 pm

12/27/06:
03:57 am
04:57 am
06:30 am
07:34 am
09:10 am
11:08 am
12:51 pm
01:57 pm
02:25 pm
04:03 pm
04:39 pm
06:17 pm
07:01 pm
07:26 pm
etc.

12/28/06:
01:30 am
02:09 am
06:21 am
11:08 am
01:03 pm
01:38 pm
01:55 pm
03:25 pm
05:25 pm
06:20 pm
07:36 pm
08:31 pm
09:41 pm
11:42 pm
etc.

And then I ask, is there a rise in cortisol, and or any of these: corticosteroid, epinephrine, adrenaline levels when you scroll fast?

2006-12-28T11:52:00.000-08:00

The Tyranny of the Christmas Tree. How is that, you might ask?

The whole subject is tyranny and power gone mad. If you have children and are at least nominally Christian, can you get away with not getting one? It is the Center of Attention, the very Focal Point of the season.

When Christmas is over, there is an important lesson for the kiddies. The Hallowed Tree, just days before glistening with tinsel, lights, and sparkling gem-like ornaments, is now stripped of its finery and thrown out on the cold curb like some pagan drunk whose nasty behavior will no longer be tolerated, a deflowered virgin in a society which sells it to the highest bidder.

Given this, why are you surprised that the kiddies are in tearing their expensive plastic toys to pieces, giving their dollies buzz cuts, and generally creating Christmas mayhem. You may be blaming that on all the sugar treats you are force feeding them at meals and in-between meals, but don't kid yourself. Throwing out the Tree serves as a valuable lesson to them of the transitory nature of life and how little value anything really has.

The Tree had its fifteen minutes of fame, its Queen For A Day day. It's a tosser.

You may think children don't really absorb the end of Christmas in that way, that the idea of planned obsolescence can't really be expressed in that way. What about Divorced Dogs and the Trophy Wife?

Well, maybe not. But think about what buying a small living tree that can be replanted somewhere might say.

Buying an artificial tree also says something. It may not be as pleasant as a real tree, but the kids will see that you keep and cherish things and bring them out to celebrate them again and again.

On the other hand, there is the Tyranny of those who don't like Christmas for religious or any other reasons. This would be OK, but some of those opposers are very aggressive in letting you know their wrath will be wreaked about this subject and seem to ooze threats if so much as a carol is lilting and lofting in the air.

Christmas, that most cuddly and forgiving of holidays, is loved because no one dies and everyone, in theory, gets presents and food.

2006-12-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

Speed dating. I haven't tried it yet, but from what I understand you get about ten minutes to decide whether you see any redeeming value in another human being and whether you ever want to see them again in this lifetime.

Yes, I'd like to see you again. That seems fair.

Are you accepting that? Are you just accepting that ten minutes is quality time and that you could decide if the prospective date had anything to offer you?

Well, what did you have in mind to find out? Some things are instantly apparent by looking. These are not the things I need to ask.

I want to know if you have clean socks and underwear on, and are they they gorgeous or plain? I don't have x-ray vision, you know. Do you mow your own grass or pay to have someone do it for you? Are mobsters after you for non-payment of any debts? Do you own a trick pony? Are you solvent? Would you like to spend this winter with me in the Keys, and if so, how do you want to spend it? Have you got a dependable car? If you could have a really expensive anything, would you want it and should you have it? If you were invisible, would I like your personality?

Are these questions too quirky?

Forget questions with answers like "I like to walk on the beach at sunset and hold hands" or "I like to roll naked on a sealskin rug in front of a roaring fire while I eat a banana split sundae".

Are lines like these going to reel you in for more?

2006-12-12T14:38:00.000-08:00

Bees have a dance they do in the hive to show the other bees where they can find a good honey stash. Some people dance with wolves. Snoopy had a happy dance.

I was looking through my files and came upon an article that I had printed from the Internet entitled The Devil's Dyke Morris Men. Morris Dancers are men only; that's the tradition. Devil's Dyke is a location in England.

The tradition of the Morris Men is ancient. You need only to do a search for Morris Men on the Internet to call up a great number of entries from many parts of the world. The Devil's Dyke Morris Men trace their history to the Dark Ages when a dyke, a massive earthwork, was built in the fens to keep out the marauding Mercians.

Maurauding Mercians has kind of a ring to it, doesn't it? So, logic follows that a bunch of men would wear special clothes in stylized dances to keep out the invaders, right? There must be more to it than that.

These Morris Dancers do a variety of dances that include sticks, handkerchiefs, face paint, long sword, rapper, and clogs. That's why they should be in my research files.

Even though the Morris Dancers are currently doing their dance, I think what they are doing is much older than that.

The Morris dancers probably had a good reason for dancing on the Devil's Dyke, I suppose. Were devils thought of as being of the male gender? The Devil, himself, was always pictured as male.

2006-12-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

If you believe all the dire predictions about the weather on our planet, soon polar bears will have no place to go. The Netherlands and Daytona Beach will be underwater. Sink holes could swallow up Eskimos families in their sleep.

I read National Geographic and other publications and watch true to life video commentaries. The future looks hot.

Two things that these places have in common, like many resort locations, is water. Everyone loves water, water in which to play, swim, bathe, and drink. Clean water is becoming a rare commodity. The earth needs clean water now, and scientists are working on different projects to try to find economical and safe ways to purify contaminated water. One really appealing way is through the use of sunlight. Using one of nature's constants to refine another of nature's constants seems like an ideal solution

Do I careabout these problems? Yes, I do. The Netherlands and Daytona Beach are two of my favorite vacation spots. I feel uncomfortable at the idea of Atlanta being the next beach resort. I'm not sure what land mass could replace the Netherlands, but maybe it's somewhere in Germany. The Dutch are not going to take this sitting down.

You might ask how much I care. To what lengths would I go to help out the eco-cycle??

I care enough to hardly ever never use the dryer to dry my clothes. Yes, I do use a washing machine because bending over a tub is good exercise and all, but I really hate the punishment of
Magdalene Sisters. That was a depressing movie.

It is apparently the belief of many that women are inherently evil, that many women are thinking lustful thoughts and contemplating sexual action and need to be punished immediately in this lifetime for sin and evil they might commit if they are allowed to use a washing machine. That seems to be the line of reasoning, so, washboards are efficacious in preventing their pitiful souls from burning in Purgatory for any length of time. Men are never in this danger and can use washing machines as much as they want.

I found this out this from reading and watching documentaries and videos. However, the message may be skewed between intention and reality.

2006-12-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

Myths, legends, stories, and lies, and don't forget pithy sayings, homilies, and conundrums.

Why should you believe anything you mother tells you or anyone else for that matter?

Did she not tell you that there was a Santa Claus, an Easter Bunny, and a God who cares? Policemen are good and Boy Scouts will escort you across the street? Wonder Bread builds strong bodies twelve ways, although those ways are mysterious and unspecified and possibly confusing during puberty.

After thinking about it, I realized all these things are true, sort of, with a twist. For instance, I've seen Santa. Every year, right around this time, there are thousands of them. People sit on their collective laps while he makes profuse promises. The Easter Bunny is real. You and I have eaten him. He usually manifests himself in a chocolate way, white or milk, solid or shell. Delicious any way. God, similarly.

Didn't you believe at some point in your life that those in authority were decent and capable of making decisions you could not make?

It turns out that I can make many of those same important decisions that are currently being made by "those in charge" in more creative ways.

For instance, if you place a number of fortune cookie messages, each one in a separate balloon and inflate them with helium gas, letting them free float to the ceiling and then, by means of darts, ask important questions of the Divine Presence, popping one balloon for each important question, and reading the message, you can determine the course you should take. It was long ago done with animal entrails too, although it's no longer recommended. It was called divination. This was formerly done in days before balloons.

What shall we name our child? Should we get married? Did you get your deer yet?

Did you get your deer yet? This reminds me of the people in the elevator who always say "Oh, can't complain" to any subject that is brought up. Can't complain? Do they lack initiative and imagination?

When was the last time you heard "Your money's no good here"? My money seems to be good everywhere I go, and that covers a lot of territory. It's similar to the expression "I can't get arrested in this town." No? Personally, I don't want to find out.

2006-11-27T16:53:00.000-08:00

Food, wonderful food.

I was reading about a modern day Epicurean. He bills himself as the Chow Hound.

Imagine having a job that entails thinking about food, searching for food, ordering food, eating food, and then writing about all the proceedings.

One has to love food to stay with a job like that. Not just like food, but love food. One would have to think about food most of the time and be ready and willing and able to eat food at all times. There might be a sick day from time to time as there is in all employment.

After reading a description about what must be a typical day for the Chow Hound, I was sure I could not do his job.

When I plan to try some particularly good food, I want to be hungry. I want to have a ferocious appetite and be able to savor every molecule as it passes over my trembling palette. So to speak.

Wine tasters only taste the wine. Then they spit it out. Otherwise, they'd be drunk on the job.

Think about the number of four letter words in this post: food, chow, like, love, stay, most, time, sure, good, want, able, wine, over, plan, only, spit, well, many, grab.

This man is said to invite you to taste some extremely tempting and well-crafted food, but on the way, he stops at so many other places that grab his fancy that he never actually takes you to the place you were expecting to go.

2006-11-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

I guess you could put "How Can That Be Possible?" on my tombstone. It's like the word Free. How could that be possible?

It's not that I am as simple as people think. It's more that I am constantly amazed and awed by everything on this planet.

Aliens coming from a bleak and colorless world could not be more amused and delighted with this planet like a big blue marble, spinning there in space. If it is very quiet for a long time and a bird tweets, I sometimes laugh.

I must not have all my marbles.

Would it be so bad if every waking day everyone was surprised and in wonder because we took the time to notice?

2006-11-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping for a Tompten-like snow this winter, maybe just a couple of days' worth. We haven't had a really good snow for about seven years now. That could be blamed on global warming for want of any other reason.

The beauty of each individual snow flake is like the beauty of each individual fingerprint.
How can it be possible that there are no two alike?

I have a fact sheet about fingerprints from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, CJIS division, Clarksburg, WV 26306.

Whew! The information is overwhelming.

There are three boxes with the whorls of somebody's fingerprints. They must be some actual person's, right? I don't think I would like mine to be paraded out there as an example to the public, but a case of a dirty job, right?

There are loops and deltas and arches in each fingerprint.

"The lines between center of loop and delta must show."
"These lines running between deltas must be clear."
"Arches have no deltas."

Snow, at least in theory, is pure as it falls from the sky, or it used to be thought so. Not anymore, of course. We now know that it is undoubtedly polluted.

Fingerprints are made from the oil on the ever so slightly raised grooves on your fingertips. A lot of fingerprints all over your glass surfaces means a lot of grease, not elbow grease but oil exuded by the fingers. Remind me to ask a scientist about the evolutionary reason for this.

Only in the most abstract way could you metaphorically imagine fingerprints to be like snowflakes, no matter how softly they might touch the glass.

That would be like imagining a myriad of moths beating frantically against a light bulb or like the blur of snow trying to break through window glass in a snow storm. Or the glub glub of a fetal heartbeat on a monitor.

The touch of a velvet hand "like a lizard on a window pane" are words from a Beatles song.

2006-08-07T14:16:00.000-07:00

Now I know why people love dogs. It's because dogs love like groveling, insanely worshiping, idol prostrating fools. They lick, slobber and fawn all over you. But that's not really it in a nutshell.

I realized what that really was when I returned home from an extended vacation.

I had an epiphany at an extremely low time, emotionally speaking, for me. It was probably a bad time for the dog too.

The dog, a poor stray that somebody heartlessly dumped onto the country gravel roads near our farm, that stray who wandered into our yard and accepted our hospitality with ecstatic joy, that dog who acts like a silly coyote jumping three feet into the air to eat a bee, that dog who jumps into the car and slobbers all over you like you were a lollipop sucking three-year-old grandchild come to visit, that dog who runs up behind you like a bushwhacking bandit and licks your bare arm or leg or, worse yet, your clothed behind, that dog that got into a bug tussle with a skunk last night.

That dog went wacko with welcoming when I returned from a month vacation and made me feel like one person in the world really loved me.

2006-04-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

I had a great dream. I had my own personal secretary, keeper of my secrets if I have any.

I really need one. You have no idea how much work, business, correspondence, ectoplasm, sorting, sorties, I have each week. I'm up to my ears in stuff to do.

Hiring strangers can be plagued with mishap, though.

Condition for employment: must strongly agree with me on important and unimportant issues. I can't think of anything worse than a secretary who thinks you are a nincompoop and that you are misguided on all theories and critical issues of life, or worse yet, one who plans to undermine, sabotage, and set you up for a fall. Does anyone need to pay money for this?

I'd prefer he or she was neat, or at least smelled pretty good and didn't come drunk to work. It would be heaven if my Secretary was funny and liked to make tea for me a couple of times a day. It would be helpful to know a few things about how life really works and had a lot of interests and hobbies. It would be delightful if my secretary had a mania for cooking up secret delicious recipes to test on me and did the occasional doodle or work of art.

Search In Progress.

2006-04-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

If I said that I am now the ruler of the world that would be an example of megalomania. A megalomaniac is serious.

Poetic license seems to be similar except everyone is supposed to know you aren't serious. Could I tell you my dreams without you charging me with lunacy? Can I set sail on the ship of words?

If you kiss the Blarney Stone, you are supposed to receive the gift of eloquence. However, it is more likely to be the gift of gab, which isn't the same thing as talking your leg off. This last expression was the way I heard it growing up, but it probably is taken from talk the hind legs off a donkey, and if you consider that someone was telling you that a certain person could talk your leg off, smiling at you, well, think about it. I dislike the expression because, save for one letter, it says taking your leg off, and that opens up an entirely different can of worms.

Does it seem that people use these salty old expressions less these days and are more literal?

Returning to the subject of me being in charge of everything, forget that I said I owned the moon and that, for a good price, I could sell some very nice lots. Joke. But why would I have to explain that? The best things in life are free. There's another song that says "The best things in life are free, but you can keep them for the birds and bees." Take your pick.

2006-04-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

If I ruled the world, "there'd be music, sweet music, there'd be music everywhere".

They forget to make me the ruler of the world, but they will soon remember to do so. I'm sure.

Why? Because I would put music in the workplace. Make that will. And it would not be just stupid elevator music. I'm going to insist and encourage that Pod and related devices and satellite music and music of the planets and a planetarium is included in the cafeteria with shows continually in the workplace.

OK, not insist, because that would discriminate against music haters. But they could have News of the Weird or Grouch Anonymous or whatever tickled their fancy. It would be imperative to have their fancy tickled.

I know, I know, people will say that will cut production, causing people to goof off and not get their work done. Poppycock. Walrus gumboot.

Things are not exactly bodelicious right now. People have some issues about the workplace. As if a happy worker is in need of some discipline because everyone knows that a work environment must be rigid and unyielding and definitely not fun or enjoyable or even endurable.

Managers are hired and promoted on their ability to ramrod the help, avert their uprisings, quell their dispositions, snuff their foments, stamp out their lunch clubs and various other managerial skills, turn off their sex machines, squelch their woofers, warp their tweeters. Take the rock out of their rock out. Scissors cut paper and take out those ear buds now or you will be fired.

After lunch, and this is sans music, the staff quietly bend over their PCs like drugged prairie dogs or like the entire castle full of people in Sleeping Beauty and quietly slip into some type of trance state. Do you call that productive? How could music cause any less productivity?

The only flaw in the design plan would be if your ears had implant transponders or a type of broadcasting unit, while others, unknown to you, had receivers in their ears, and "your" brand of music makes them crazy. But, that's crazy. Stop the craziness. There is no need to return to the drawing board. Let's get the lead out. Let's get the rocks out.

My theory is that people suffer from lack of jolly and forbidden be-bop from not getting to rock out at work, and in some cases, not getting to rock out ever.

You can guess I'm not from Gen X, possibly not even from this planet if you can believe some of the talk that goes on, but that's another subject.

The filling station where I gas up has some of the peppiest music around. Maybe it's targeted to people with gas cards, but whatever. I look forward to going there. As soon as I step out of the car I can feel my brain function change to relaxed and happier.

OK, it's a crazy dream. Have fun, enjoy work, be more creative...at work? Is this some kind of interstellar galactic plot?

No.

My Imaginary Life

"IV

Snow Geese