Beyond the Cavern of the Seven Sleepers

Beyond the Cavern of the Seven Sleepers

That’s a line from one of Robert Graves poems, and referenced I knew not what until I googled it.* In it’s context it clearly meant something to overcome, and I thought maybe a seven headed dragon or something. But no, the Seven Sleepers is a famous medieval story. When the Roman’s were persecuting the Christians, seven youths took refuge in a cave, and the Romans sealed them in it. They went to sleep for two hundred years! And when they awoke, without aging, and left the cave, they found Rome transformed into a Christian nation.

That’s a fine tale, but the no aging part has caught my eye.

In the Terminator films, when they begin, Arnold comes from the future enveloped in an energy time traveling bubble of some sort, and when it drops him off it leaves a circle of fire. Now, on first seeing this, I thought of magic circles. Magicians make magic circles, and there’s one famous one in particular, Honi the Circle Drawer.

On a whim I looked him up too last nite, and in his story he goes to sleep and doesn’t age for seventy years. (His story is that he sits stubbornly in a circle until God makes it rain—Honi is a Rainmaker).

Now, that’s odd, and there’s a movie, Flight of the Navigator, where a kid goes to sleep for a number of years and wakes up in a future time.

I could fill in the steps of how I leapt around here, but that’s for another time.

But the no aging thing, and traveling forward in time, that’s right out of Einstein, the Theory of Relativity, and traveling at light speed.

A curio, that’s what I call these things!!!

*In googling about I noticed a connection of Camelot with Seven Sleepers, and tracking that out found that legend has it that King Arthur is asleep in a cave with seven sleeping Knights of the Round Table, and that theses seven represent stars in the Big Dipper, or Ursus Major, the Big Bear--are they all sleeping in a bear cave?? They await a day when England is in peril, when they will awake and come to aid. This may be what Graves' is about. A neat thing is that the Round Table may represent the revolving night stars. That's cool! This will get it's own take/post!!

Oh, I should ad that there is a juvenile Christian book series based on the Seven Sleepers...in the book the juvenile heros awaken in a post apocalyptic world to battle the evil Sanhedran. I dont know how the Sanhedran receently regenerated, or at least an attempt by some theologians, takes to that!!

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
May 17, 2007

Cythera and the Ephemeral Sierra

Ansel Adam's called the Sierra The Range of Light, no wait, that might be John Muir, letme check...Muir!, Adam's has a book, Yosemite and the Range of Light.

It's ephemeral.

The mountains are so ancient, and solid granite hereabouts, but the play of light on them gets everyone's attention. For photographers it is an ultimate challenge. Aritists just give in, take what they can from a field sketch, or a reference photo, and try to recall what they see and put into the picture. The light is ephemeral and constantly changing--the Ephemeral Mountains.

(hooey! already a book of that title!)

The rainbows are what maybe most express this. I call Yosemite sometimes The Valley of the Rainbows. And there's moonbows, this time of year with a full moon and the Falls full, a moonbow shows up at the lower Falls. I imagine at the other falls too...I hadn't thought of that...worth a nite trek to Vernal.

One nite my roommate dragged me out to see a moonbow around the moon (it may have been a circumhorizonal arc thing). I tried to photograph it, but all I have is a recollection. It looked like the aura around the Catholic saint so popular in Mexico...my roommate being Catholic was totally taken with it, much as I was with the Circumhorizontal arc which I saw for the first time on my first time atop Half Dome. In the High Country these are quite common.

You never know if you will ever see again the things you see in the Sierra.

When I come back from a hike, hiking back, my back is turned to what I've seen, many paddle on back with nary a care, but I'm all the time glimpsing back, looking back from the bus window at Tenaya and Pywaick.

It is truly sad, and I suppose it's the sadness that is in beauty. Watteau captured it in his famous painting in the illustration, Leaving from Cythera.

Tioga is open, and the hiker's bus begins June 1.

Wiki has a bit on Cythera, spelled Kythera.

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

May 16, 2007

Christian Virtue Channel

Let me go back to the first line of Souvenir as it is puzzling me.

"Oh, from a Christian virtue channel that was engaging awhile,"

It maybe should have been "Christian virtues", but as it is there might be other "virtue" channels. I'll leave that to contemplation.

A down day, down in the sense I just didn't have enough energy to do much after yesterday's hike up the Falls, and just layed down in my bunk a lot!

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

May 15, 2007

Continuum

Well, this last bit is easily understood if one has read Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son. And if one hasn’t, and I explain it, it might give away the story. Suffice to say scientist have developed a sub culture of sorts where they see their efforts in a continuum: discoveries leading to more discoveries. Like Archimedes, they are preoccupied. Before science the continuum was the purview of poets.

Star Men’s (and Women’s) sons (and daughters)
Astride their cats
Will sift the ruins for their memories.


About DavidDavid…

I’ve started signing off on things this way as people keep saying, “David, David, David…” often while shaking their heads.

DolphinWords. Long before the marketing of domain names I made this one up. See John Lilly.

And about signing off with Yosemite..

I sign off where I am, something I notice poets do, notably Robert Graves who took up refuge in Majorca. I am at some risk doing this, as anyone is using their name and place on the web, but I am of the opinion I better be just exactly who I am. Already my name has been usurped, so I’m hereabouts for any questions or correspondence. Kids have imaginary friends, I have imaginary readers! As refuges go, Yosemite might be the ultimate redoubt.

DavidDavid
Yosemite
May 14, 2007

Jericho

The next bit of "Souvenir" references the TV show, Jericho, which is a post nuclear war story. I used wikipedia to remind myself of the story of Jericho in the Bible, but here I’m using it a bit different. Soldiers tramp and cities tremble, and the sense may not come across that “Jericho” is all of us in our cities, and they still stand. That’s what I was aiming at. That the ancient Israeli’s were doing the tramping is neither here nor there, the tramping is war.

So many have trampled
And made Jericho tremble.

Nonetheless, out there in web, and I mean out there, controversy rages among theologians of the ancient past and more recent past centering on Jews and Israel. Simply put, the Holocaust of WW2 in Germany where millions of Jews, and others too, died, is set beside the stories in the Bible, in an effort to point out that the ancient Israeli’s committed genocides too.

I’ve wondered about this my ownself as the Angel of Death in the Exodus story seems ungodly cruel.

But in the past were cruel times, ancient and recent. People have been ungodly cruel.

God can certainly inspire a person, or a whole nation of people, but that doesn’t mean God is that person or nation. And clearly the ungodly things they do are just that, inspight of their exhortations that they are doing God’s will.

Prince I think did care when he wrote 1999.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
May 13, 2007

Oops out of time

Today’s bit from “Souvenir”…

“And then there’s our Prince,
Who missed with 1999…”

I saw the news footage of Prince performing at Superbowl time when I wrote Souvenir, and that’s how he got in there. He was being Devilish. And one of the charms of the web is I can now read lyrics to songs I’ve always had trouble understanding. I hear okay, but rock and roll lyrics, and Spanish lessons have always escaped me!

Here’s some of the lyric…

“I was dreamin' when I wrote this

Forgive me if it goes astray

But when I woke up this mornin'

Coulda sworn it was judgment day

The sky was all purple

There were people runnin' everywhere

Tryin' 2 run from the destruction

U know I didn't even care

'Cuz they say two thousand zero zero party over

Oops out of time

So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999”



I think I might make the same caveat regarding “Sourvenir”: forgive me if I go astray.

But Prince’s words are really good. While I’m writing, CNN is doing a documentary on Iraq, Month of Mayhem, with a British or Austrailian newsman narrating.

And that song was written in 1983, and all those years leading up to the turn of the century it was a kindof party anthem.

Party singing for me is singing, Take me out to the ball game… during the seventh inning stretch! But I can see/hear Joan Jett singing, I love rock and roll…

Songfacts on the web has the best collection of rock and roll lore I’ve found.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
May 12, 2007

The Ruler of this World

"I give my heart so easily to the Ruler of this World..."

There is a Reason

Alison Krauss

{Illustration: Michaelangelo's Last Judgement}

The next bit of “Souvenir”…

“Who’s to say who will compound (or confound) Armageddon
When we see a bogeyman in every bush?”

Well, there’s some puns in the poem, and this far along in the poem lots happens with double senses…the molten metal scene was hellish in Terminator 2, and in some theologies, the Devil rules over this world. Chavez down there in Venezuela called President Bush the Devil. And in the Terminator movies I think Arnold is the villain in the first movie.

These movies are so well known that a kind of short hand can be used to reference them, which is what poems often do. They play off the general knowledge of the reader. This “ekphrasis poem” is playing off the wide general knowledge we all have of apocalyptic stories.

Before I get too far from the first bit, the “sad goodbyes”, I’d like to add that I’ve been going over the endings of films. Films all work on the same few plots, and scenes, and riding off into the sunset is the most common, but this group scene of people saying farewell is common too, and I find very moving. I wonder if Spielberg borrowed from this scene in I’d Climb the Highest Mountain for the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Back to the Devil… The Devil has a big part in Armegeddon, and his cohorts, and I got to playing with this with the words, Governor, Prince and bogeyman.

The Pope says today the world has slipped into Hedonism. And meanwhile a Mickey Mouse lookalike is being used by a Hamas TV channel to propagandize Palastinian kids into hating Israel.

Next, Prince and his song 1999, which I find a remarkable song.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
May 11, 2007