Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Twelve

Winter sun - the marina - looking towards Europe.

“The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.” 

(T.H. White)

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Eleven

Winter sun - the marina

...transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life... 

(John Milton)

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Ten

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

(King James)

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Nine

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

Paul Simon

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Eight

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. 

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Seven

“If you keep wandering in the dark streets, may be it is because you find peace in the darkness rather than in the light!” 
― Mehmet Murat Ildan

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Six

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(Shakespeare)

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Five

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for? 

Robert Browning

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Four

Un du akerst

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells— 
In hall ye deck another dwells. 
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see 
The steel ye tempered glance on ye. 

With plough and spade and hoe and loom 
Trace your grave and build your tomb 
And weave your winding-sheet—till fair 
England be your Sepulchre. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Three

Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

From this – experienced Here –
Remove the Dates – to These –
Let Months dissolve in further Months –
And Years – exhale in Years –

Emily Dickinson

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day Two

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”

― Robert Jordan

Twelve Days of Christmas 2017 - Day One

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

Dystopian desktop towards the end of November

Sylvia Plath wrote 'Wind warns November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious'. But she was born in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Coincidentally, her father, Otto, was from Grabow (in Germany) and wrote about bumblebees.

Chekov's Brother

One of the left tributaries of the River Dnieper is the Psyol which flows through Russia and Ukraine. About this time of year (November) it starts to freeze. If you check around here you will come across hares, foxes, deer , wild boar and beavers.  The river flows through the city of Sumy which, during the revolution of 1905, became famous throughout Russia for in effect having established an independent peasant republic.

Don't take it to heart

Alliances come and go, but the River Dnieper (mentioned by Herodotus in the 5th century BC) flows on and goes on - forever (or at least since the 5th century BC). 

Having been persuaded (by a sharp salesman) into buying her DNA profile, Magritude Feather has traced her roots back to a tiny village between Kiev and Smila. This is puzzling since (although she was born in Wyoming) her father was Irish, and her mother a Sephardi Catalan.

(Feel free to comment)

What more could I ask for?

Then there's the elephant in the room...

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind. (E. M. Forster)

Eternity in an hour...

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. (Wm. Blake)

Scaramouche

Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very fright'ning 

Two kids get on a bus...

Here's the thing, just yesterday I was sitting on the number 7 bus, and two school kids got on and started talking about Brodsky. I don't know why I was so surprised (mind you they still kept checking their mobiles as they talked).

What gets left of a man amounts
to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech. 
(Joseph Brodsky, 1976)

The Banlieue of Lompleques

Although it is an irrefutable fact that we all invent ourselves, it is seldom done with the deliberate forethought that Fabio Gerentless gave to his creation. But his first project was to construct an imaginary world in which to set his new character, for although he was at peace in his new environs in New Caledonia, Noumé itself did not satisfy his creative urge. So stone by stone, house by house, street by street, he brought into being the banlieue of Lompleques (it being understood that his use of the term banlieue had specific exotic connotations).

The Extraordinary Diary of Fabio Gerentlas

When Fabio Gerentlas reached the venerable age of fifty-six he looked back on his life with little satisfaction. He had done what people had expected, he told himself. But inside he felt he had let himself down. He had not achieved anything that he himself would accept as worthwhile.

And so in his fifty-seventh year he resolved to change everything. He resigned from his job as an administrator in the Government Actuary’s Department advising his superiors on project and enterprise risk, divorced his unsuspecting wife and bought a one-way ticket to New Caledonia. Here in Nouméa he set up household with a kanak teacher who taught French officials how speak Drehu. As Fabio's creative skills were primarily literary (he had little artistic or musical ability), he decided that he should become a diarist - but life was simple and uneventful, so he devised instead a fictional record of extraordinary complexity. And the main motif was time.

Piranesi de nos jours (Hova etiam)...

Once, many years ago, I lived in a village by a wadi, beneath a rounded hill. Sometimes, not very often, I climbed that hill, and looked down on the tiny houses and orchards, and the vast landscape. Decades later, thousands of miles away, I climbed another rounded hill, and looked down on the tiny farms and villages, and danced.  Such recollections are laid across my mind like those hills: the structure of my memories.

The whereabouts

Antonio Salieri was an Italian classical composer, conductor, and teacher. Born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, he spent his adult life and career as a subject of the Habsburg Monarchy. Salieri was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera who helped to develop and shape many of the features of operatic compositional vocabulary. He was director of the Italian opera from 1774 until 1792, and he wrote works for opera houses in Paris, Rome, and Venice, and his dramatic works were widely performed throughout Europe during his lifetime. As the Austrian imperial Kapellmeister from 1788 to 1824, he was responsible for music at the court chapel and attached school. He was one of the most important and sought-after teachers of his generation, and his influence was felt in every aspect of Vienna's musical life. Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, and Ludwig van Beethoven were among the most famous of his pupils. He never met a Shaffer of whatever ilk.

...in living every day...

Gold was found in the Dolgellau area in the 1850s and a mining rush developed. The first gold was discovered at Gwynfynydd in 1863, but it was not until 1887 that the mine was developed commercially. By this time the mine had been acquired by William Pritchard Morgan, who was to become known as the "Welsh gold king", and who paid for two police constables to protect the mine.

By 1888, two hundred people were employed at the site, the gold being extracted by driving horizontal tunnels (adits) into the mountainside, with the miners working deep underground by candlelight. The machinery was powered by water wheels and water turbines. In contrast to other mines in the area where the gold was found in shallow deposits, the Gwynfynydd gold is extracted from large quartz veins deep underground.

Functional shift

In linguistics, functional shift occurs when an existing word takes on a new syntactic function. For example, the word like, formerly only used as a preposition in comparisons (as in "eats like a pig"), is now also used in the same way as the subordinating conjunction as in many dialects of English (as in "sounds like he means it"). The boundary between functional shift and conversion (the derivation of a new word from an existing word of identical form) is not well-defined, but it could be construed that conversion changes the lexical meaning and functional shift changes the syntactic meaning. Shakespeare uses functional shift, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence.

Everything passes...

כל מה שפעם היה ונשכח היום הוא לא חוזר

All that once was, and was forgotten,will not come back today.

Here we go again....

It's strange that words are so inadequate. (T. S. Eliot)

A Freudian slip

'The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization...' (S.Freud) Why does Freud always address pertinent issues and manage to just miss the mark?

The Limbo of the Matriarch

A whole book could be written about Magritude Feather. Unfortunately not this one. This fascinating woman was recently excised from my novel and is urgently scurrying around trying to find a home elsewhere. Please don't forget her.

Saint Allen by the Stones

There were golden days when Rama, Sita and Lakshmana having traveled along the banks of river Godavari, settled in a garden clearing where they built houses and lived off the land. But far away, beyond the stone mountains, Rakshasa, the demon king, was stirring. 

Drumbeat

As an indicator of financial resilience, our beloved transvestite taxidermist, Gruffydd Beddows, who recently sold his business and retired, likes to point to the income from his sideline as a repairer and renovator of percussion instruments. However even he is stumped by the unusual damage to the Welsh  tabwrdd that is standing forlornly on the workbench in his garage.

(It is fascinating that beyond their specific role in novels, some characters continue live out their day-to-day life in events that have no link to the plot into which they were conceived.)

קִטְנִיּוֹת - The Small Things of God

Kitniyot (small things) are foodstuffs similar to those banned at Pesach (Passsover). Ashkenazim refrain from eating things like rice and beans for this reason. In the 1930s Maxwell House hired a rabbi to research coffee, resulting in a determination that the coffee bean is more like a berry than a bean, thus making it kosher for Passover. However, we do not know whether this applies to Nescafe instant coffee (that to the colour-blind looks like flour).

Translocation - make of it what you will.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. (T.S.Eliot apparently) 

Atsilut

The Five Worlds are the comprehensive categories of spiritual realms in the descending chain of Existence. They are: 1/ Adam Kadmon (אָדָם קַדְמוֹן) Primordial Man, 2/ Atzilut (אֲצִילוּת), Emanation, 3/Beri'ah (בְּרִיָּה) Creation, 4/Yetzirah (יְצִירָה)Formation, and 5/Assiah (עֲשִׂיָּה), Action. The original builder of the Royal Pavillion (with two L's) could not have know how his creation would evolve either.

A Stranger in Paradise

In case it is not clear, there seem to be two Metatrons, one spelled with six letters (מטטרון), and one spelled with seven (מיטטרון). Neither should be confused with Megatron (and definitely not with Enoch Powell). It is mentioned here because it is related that Elisha ben Abuyah (the Akher) bumped into the Metatron when he entered the orchard. In mentioning the Orchard or Pardes(פרדס ) it is clear that the meaning is Paradise (same etymology) and that (for Davnob geeks) suggests a familial link. But let's not be over-judgemental.

So what do we really know about the Hushites then?

In the Book of Chronicles (דִּבְרֵי־הַיָּמִים‎) we learn that the Shuppites and Huppites were the descendants of Ir, and the Hushites the descendants of Akher. This Akher was someone else Akher completely (not the later vilified and misunderstood Rabbi).  There are some politicians who try to identify Akher in other texts with the figure of Akhiram from the tribe of Benjamin (in Numbers 26:38).

Ben Abuya - who else could it be?

Four men went into an orchard, and three are still there. The other, the Akher, went out and, as Isaac Deutscher notes, took a stroll with Rabbi Meir. But the Akher saw that the Rabbi had reached the Eruv - the boundary beyond which he ought not proceed, and advised him to return. Without that intervention the Rabbi would have transgressed.

A Vague Impression

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. (Henry David Thoreau - he was always saying that).