I'm Trying to Be Smart Now, I Swear
EMOTION
Eyes of the clearest blue
And darkest night
Surrounding all I know
Close, open, cloud, water
Stream rivers of tears
Around mountains
Into valleys
Cheeks and lips
Caves and mouth
Smiles, frowns
Whispers the winds to a sigh
And everything shakes
Tremors, thunders
Pain and laughter
Covers all
Rains of sorrow
Rains of joy
It weeps fitfully.
Then, done weeping
For a breadth of time
Eyes flash a golden hue
And mouth turns a colorful, prismatic smile.
Oh yes!
If only I were as expressive
As the sky above me.
*Ahem.* I forgot what I was going to ramble on about. Something about school. Ohwell.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM! You're forty today, w00t. Geez, aren't you old! I still have hummummmummummm a little over eighteen years to go before I'm where you're at now.
So many September birthdays! You know what that means? People need to stop drinking over The Holidays.
An online response to something from my Hybrid World Lit I class...
Time Keeps on Slipping...
To us, those old stones may seem alien, mystical, and eerie in a charming way, a monument to a culture lost and nearly erased beyond the realms of a common culture, language, or text. We understand, somewhat, the ancient technology involved, but what do we understand of the desire? The very idea of a group of Neolithic people carving, moving, erecting, and constructing with such large stones seems as ambitious as our society building the Titanic to cruise around the world or constructing a rocket to place a man on the face of the moon. It wasn’t easy by any means, yet the people in that ancient civilization-and others further south of Maeshowe-were dedicated enough to something to do what they did. What was it?
I try to picture how these ideas formed: the beginnings of spirituality, a sense of life and death in this world, such as elephants caressing old, dry bones, or ancient men making wreathes of flowers to cover the dead. At some point, our ancestors conceived the notion of animism, that everything in existence is imbued with some sort of energy, spirit, or force, from human beings to other animals to the plants and rocks and sea and sky. Somehow, these non-human spirits began to solidify in the human mind and take on personas with mystical attributes. It is a very minimal stretch to go from the simple concept of animism to the idea of the Earth, sun, moon, and stars being the very first significant deities.
Looking at Maeshowe and the henges, they clearly chart the paths of the sun (and moon) across the sky. The sun hits certain stone markers at sunset and sunrise, winter and summer solstice. It illuminates corridors with breathtaking rays of light or filters through dominoes of stone to touch, as with a golden fingertip, another, yet very different pillar of stone beyond and outside the inner circles of the henge. Clearly, this all has something to do with the movement of celestial bodies in the sky. Neolithic mythology? Quite possibly, yet it could be more complicated than a simple place for rituals and worship.
Back in our modern time, most of us don’t really think we worship the sun or moon in a cult. Yet we do live our lives according to a calendar, which first formed in the way we know of it now back in the times of the Roman Empire. September through December used to be the seventh through tenth months, coming from the Latin words for numbers (septem, octo, novem, decem), before August and July were added (for the Roman emperors Julius and Augustus Caesar). The earlier months in the calendar are named after gods and objects in the sky, as were many of the days of the week. The cycles of the moon became roughly a month and the cycles of the sun a year. In a sense, the very essence of Roman mythology and beliefs created the calendar controlling their day-to-day lives, and our lives now as well. We, the secret worshippers in love and in fear of time itself.
All time is essentially the measurement of the movement of an object over a certain distance. This distance and this object could be anything: you and me over the Earth as it rotates on its axis, the Earth as is rotates around the sun, the sun as it rotates in the Milky Way, the galaxy in the universe. In a sense, the entire universe is the ultimate clock, and everything in it the cogs and the gears and the tickings away of time. Life and death are also markers to the passage of time. We are slaves to the fourth dimension.
The stones were more than just a religion or spiritual idea; they were birth, life, and death, for they were time, an all-encompassing property the ancients worshipped with the daily tickings of their individual lives and the movements of the bodies in the sky. Is it possible that those old stones mutated and evolved into analog and digital forms to be mounted on our walls and displayed on our computer screens? Time is as old as existence itself, beyond complete understanding, yet it rules all without mercy. In this sense, we aren’t really all that different from our Neolithic counterparts, and the stones that governed their lives and deaths are no longer so foreign.
I wrote it in 45 minutes filled with distraction. Cut me some slack! Dx
Is it sad that I actually find the K-Ville series intriguing for the sole sake of that catchy New Orleans vibe? o_____O
BLAH.
Eyes of the clearest blue
And darkest night
Surrounding all I know
Close, open, cloud, water
Stream rivers of tears
Around mountains
Into valleys
Cheeks and lips
Caves and mouth
Smiles, frowns
Whispers the winds to a sigh
And everything shakes
Tremors, thunders
Pain and laughter
Covers all
Rains of sorrow
Rains of joy
It weeps fitfully.
Then, done weeping
For a breadth of time
Eyes flash a golden hue
And mouth turns a colorful, prismatic smile.
Oh yes!
If only I were as expressive
As the sky above me.
*Ahem.* I forgot what I was going to ramble on about. Something about school. Ohwell.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM! You're forty today, w00t. Geez, aren't you old! I still have hummummmummummm a little over eighteen years to go before I'm where you're at now.
So many September birthdays! You know what that means? People need to stop drinking over The Holidays.
An online response to something from my Hybrid World Lit I class...
Time Keeps on Slipping...
To us, those old stones may seem alien, mystical, and eerie in a charming way, a monument to a culture lost and nearly erased beyond the realms of a common culture, language, or text. We understand, somewhat, the ancient technology involved, but what do we understand of the desire? The very idea of a group of Neolithic people carving, moving, erecting, and constructing with such large stones seems as ambitious as our society building the Titanic to cruise around the world or constructing a rocket to place a man on the face of the moon. It wasn’t easy by any means, yet the people in that ancient civilization-and others further south of Maeshowe-were dedicated enough to something to do what they did. What was it?
I try to picture how these ideas formed: the beginnings of spirituality, a sense of life and death in this world, such as elephants caressing old, dry bones, or ancient men making wreathes of flowers to cover the dead. At some point, our ancestors conceived the notion of animism, that everything in existence is imbued with some sort of energy, spirit, or force, from human beings to other animals to the plants and rocks and sea and sky. Somehow, these non-human spirits began to solidify in the human mind and take on personas with mystical attributes. It is a very minimal stretch to go from the simple concept of animism to the idea of the Earth, sun, moon, and stars being the very first significant deities.
Looking at Maeshowe and the henges, they clearly chart the paths of the sun (and moon) across the sky. The sun hits certain stone markers at sunset and sunrise, winter and summer solstice. It illuminates corridors with breathtaking rays of light or filters through dominoes of stone to touch, as with a golden fingertip, another, yet very different pillar of stone beyond and outside the inner circles of the henge. Clearly, this all has something to do with the movement of celestial bodies in the sky. Neolithic mythology? Quite possibly, yet it could be more complicated than a simple place for rituals and worship.
Back in our modern time, most of us don’t really think we worship the sun or moon in a cult. Yet we do live our lives according to a calendar, which first formed in the way we know of it now back in the times of the Roman Empire. September through December used to be the seventh through tenth months, coming from the Latin words for numbers (septem, octo, novem, decem), before August and July were added (for the Roman emperors Julius and Augustus Caesar). The earlier months in the calendar are named after gods and objects in the sky, as were many of the days of the week. The cycles of the moon became roughly a month and the cycles of the sun a year. In a sense, the very essence of Roman mythology and beliefs created the calendar controlling their day-to-day lives, and our lives now as well. We, the secret worshippers in love and in fear of time itself.
All time is essentially the measurement of the movement of an object over a certain distance. This distance and this object could be anything: you and me over the Earth as it rotates on its axis, the Earth as is rotates around the sun, the sun as it rotates in the Milky Way, the galaxy in the universe. In a sense, the entire universe is the ultimate clock, and everything in it the cogs and the gears and the tickings away of time. Life and death are also markers to the passage of time. We are slaves to the fourth dimension.
The stones were more than just a religion or spiritual idea; they were birth, life, and death, for they were time, an all-encompassing property the ancients worshipped with the daily tickings of their individual lives and the movements of the bodies in the sky. Is it possible that those old stones mutated and evolved into analog and digital forms to be mounted on our walls and displayed on our computer screens? Time is as old as existence itself, beyond complete understanding, yet it rules all without mercy. In this sense, we aren’t really all that different from our Neolithic counterparts, and the stones that governed their lives and deaths are no longer so foreign.
I wrote it in 45 minutes filled with distraction. Cut me some slack! Dx
Is it sad that I actually find the K-Ville series intriguing for the sole sake of that catchy New Orleans vibe? o_____O
BLAH.