Yazidi

Well, it's a shame that I study out a religious group because it's in the war news. Never heard of them before, but after reading wikipedia's take, I'm struck by the Heptad...at the center of their faith are seven angels, which harks back in the blog here to my interest in the hierarchy of angels...see Seven Sleepers posts.

I don't understand how such elaborated explanations of things, the descent from Adam, rather than Eve, or Adam And Eve, gets passed down from generation to generation for centuries. There is a puzzle in this.

And the connection to the Sufis is a puzzle. My poetry teacher was a Sufi. At the least he wrote a couple little books about them, Another Way of Laughter, and ...I forget the other one, it was about Nasrudin.

I've followed the war news with some trepidation for the Sufis. But have learned too, in reading about old war in Chechnya, that they're no strangers to war, and take to it like fish to water as everyone else does!!

And this new horror seems to have come about as a vendetta. The Yazidi, members anyway, stoned a young girl for falling in love with a Muslim and converting to Islam. Now, in a dual purpose, Al Quida has blown up a great many Yazidi. What next!? They're all capable of mythologizing this and making a perpetual vendetta that will last till doomesday. Which the way things are going isn't far off!!

It's become a war of irreconcilables, to use Newt's term...

Another curio is Gurdjieff, who wrote a book called Meetings with Remarkable Men a long time ago, and it was made into a curious movie. I didn't know the movie was made from his book, as I liked the movie, but dont like him!! His book was partly based on the Yazidi, according to Wiki.

I tied in Gurdjieff with jfk lore, though at moment I cant recall how...something to do with art and color theory and Mary Meyer...who dabbled in colorist art.

It's remarkable the number of exhibits, threads, I've posted over in jfk, whithout really knowing what whole cloth and fabric they belong too.

Everything is in fragments, snips of thread.

Illustration is one of the Yazidi angels.

Peacocks are cool. We had a pair for pets. To see them fly is remarkable. They look like angels. One was hit by a car, and the other stopped coming around.

Considering the carnage on the highway, one would think cars would be the object of vendettas.

I wonder what the media journalists are doing googling up Yazidi?? It was just a matter of time before the conflict introduced Americans to the hodgepodge of faiths over there.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
August 15, 2007

Hard Rain

Could be worse,
How?
Could be raining…

Young Frankenstein

It's a great movie....hmmmmmmm!!

quote (final lyric of one of Dylan's songs)

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?

I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',

I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,

Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,

Where black is the color, where none is the number,

And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,

Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',

But I'll know my song well before I start singin',

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

Bob Dylan

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

August 14, 2007

One Day

I collected butterflies when I was a kid, and I always wanted to capture one of these big moths. The shadow is a tourist sitting on the nearby bench.

I've been thinking on what all can be done in one day, and since today has been kindofa wash, plans for Tuolumne scraped just from being plane worn out, I would have to point to today's effort as this pic!

Any long time effort narrows down to one day, and the moments of that day. And if you look at these moments it's hard to figure how they fit into a long time effort.

Like when I was learning to play the trumpet...one day's practice can just seem futile.

I dont know what's happened to the ceiling music at work. Home on the range to violins. And Amparita Roca, my festival, and many others, solo piece at Festival. And Strangers in Paradise. Sheesh. Soothing though...Trumpeter's Lullaby by Leroy Anderson, not Amparita Roca, and we did it as a trio I think. What a fine old memory web search that was!!

I set aside the trumpet on high school graduation...commencement last time I sat with the band. Imagine the racket I'd make here if I picked it up again!!

A full blown orchestra playing in the valley would be very cool.

Ferguson show his clip with Merv Griffen...the scottish kilt story. :)

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
August 13, 2007

JFK and the Bay of Pigs

Well, the new show, The Company, is on. They just hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs...

This is all jfk stuff!!

Forgoodness sake...lemegosee what the buffs are saying!!...

No threads on this one...yet.

It will be a curio to see if the show crawls through time up to the assassination.

More melodrama...the American advisor swims...

I've read the books about the BofP could fill a large library all by themselves.

Meteor shower is on, so up to Tuolumne tomorrow.

And now Kevin Kostner is on in something about JFK too....sheesh...well...I dunno...Oh, it's the Cuban Missile Crisis. We had a wall to climb in Jr. High on the obstacle course, part of the fitness craze, and I remember sitting atop it contemplating this with friends.

I grabbed a pic of Castro from wiki.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
August 11, 2007

Science Fiction

Well, the new show, Master's of Science Fiction, was on. At the brink once again, humanity survives. Interesting the quote from Isaiah as it's one bit that often draws my curiosity.

The story seems familiar, I mean I may have once read the story the show was based on...lemegolook!!...based on a short story by Howard Fast.

I was gonna post about a Peter Gabriel song...for tomorrow...I'm sleepy.

Pic is bird outback with crippled right leg.

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

August 11, 2007

Fallen Soldiers

Steven Segal is on the train again...this is the one where the villain has control of a laser beam satellite.

Sheesh, lost in thought I held down the shift key too long...sounded like a light bulb popping!! Some trick called Filterkeys...

Segal is reassuring, and the other Heroes.

Front page had another fallen soldier story from the San Joaquin Valley. The young people in the long valley are a soldiering bunch.

In the back page was a bit on the Nagasaki memorial...Japanese spokesman calling for nuclear disarmament.

I suppose, proportionally speaking, that story should have been on the front page. I would hope it's not just there to fill some obligatory need!!

The front page story was a bit of an example of yesterday's post about iconography. And it was sad.

Funeral rituals are often used to re enforce the culture. And to establish the legitimacy of the successors.

Fallen Heroes.

Segal movie ends with the graveyard scene.

The doggone spacing between sentences is wrong in this post. This happens when I paste a post that I missposted to Fauna and Flora...I try to reestablish the line breaks but some things just don't get picked up...frustrating!! Everything looks right in the edit... but...

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

August 10, 2007

Iconongraphy

Pic is the poet Robert Graves from site mentioned.



On the news last night was bit with a general talking in Iraq. Behind him were the American flag and the Iraqi flag, and some shields...it was all an iconograph.

Old Egypt didn't have radio and TV, and to communicate they used iconographs, and the hieroglyphs. These things weren't limited to two dimesional graphics, but three dimensions too..the pyramids and temples and such. All of the clutter of things in King Tut's tomb represented a hieroglyph, or illustrated an iconograph.

Robert Graves explains in the introduction to his two volume Greek Myths that the ancients saw the myths as iconographs, that in fact many of them are stories made from graphics, like a story made from a painting.

What we have that is something like it, is the politcial cartoon. Uncle Sam, the Elephant, the Donkey. What's been lost is the sense the ancients knew for their iconographs. Graves tries to restore them in his books.

Maybe I can find what he wrote....brb...searched Robert Graves Greek Myths Political Cartoon...and found

quote
Robert Graves noted that the myths were no more than political cartoons and what the myths represent is a very cloudy, but nonetheless very interesting, history of a world of markedly differing values from that of the classical world.
http://www.islomane.com/thebookreview.htm
unquote

He also explains that all expressions of art were tied in with worship, and heavily charged with magic and superstition. There was no notion of ornamentation just for ornament, or personal decoration.

This gets at my notion of a hieroglyphic fabric, where everything is mention of a central, I don't know, deity. All the Egyptian hieroglyphs were mention of Pharoah and the mystery religion surrounding the king.

Everything in St. Peter's Cathedral is tied in with Catholic Christianity, as our the rituals that go on there, and I would suppose all of the Vatican.

Now, when the general stood there doing his CNN interview there was something of all this!! The media has created an iconographic fabric. And it's all ritualized.
quote

Dale Fuchs in MadridSaturday July 1, 2006The Guardian
The Spanish holiday island of Mallorca is to honour its most illustrious British expatriate resident, the novelist, poet and scholar Robert Graves.
The hilltop stone country home where the novelist lived on and off from 1931 until his death in 1985 will open as a museum tomorrow. During his self-imposed exile in the once bucolic town of Deya, he wrote many of his most famous works, including I, Claudius, The White Goddess and The Greek Myths.

unquote

That's cool.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
August 9, 2007