Unknown Once Now Hidden by Naught

There we the once-sundered together were blended,
we strangers, unknown once, were hidden by naught.
I kissed and I wondered how doubt was all ended,
How friendly her excellent fairness was wrought.

....

Haste! mount and haste
Ere the short night waste,
For night and day,
Late turned away,
Draw nigh again
All kissing-fain;
And the morn and the moon
Shall be married full soon.
So ride we together with wealth-winning wand,
The steel o'er the leather, the ash in the hand.
Lo! white walls before us, and high are they built;
But the luck that outwore us now lies on their guilt;
Lo! the open gate biding the first of the sun,
And to peace are we riding, for slaughter is done.

-William Morris, The Well at the World's End

From the East the Donkey Came, Mally's Meek, Prophecy of the End (self-sung)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yoOyIl2LIs&feature=related

This song originally hails from a 12th century Latin song "Orientis Partibus" which first appeared in France and is usually attributed to Pierre de Corbeil, Bishop of Sens (d 1222) ("Office de la circoncision," "Lew manuscrit de l’office de la Circoncision de Notre-Dame-du-Puy," or "L’Office de Pierre de Corbeil," circa 1210). The Feast of the Circumcision is celebrated on January 1. The song is associated with the Feast of Fools.

The tune is said to have been part of the Fete de l’Ane (The Donkey’s Festival), which celebrated the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt and was a regular Christmas observance in Beauvais and Sens, France in the 13th century. During the mass, it was common for a donkey to be led or ridden into the church.

The words and tune were designed to give thanks for the ass on which Mary rode, and began: Orientis partibus Adventavit asinus (‘From the East the ass has come’). Each verse was sung, and finished with the chorus ‘Hail, Sir donkey, hail’. It was a solemn affair, but the tune became very popular in 17th and 18th century Germany.

Orientis partibus
adventavit asinus,
pulcher et fortissimus,
Sarcinis aptissimus.

Hez, Sire Asne, hez!

Hic in collibus Sychen
iam nutritus sub Ruben
transiit per Jordanem
saliit in Bethlehem

Saltu vincit hinnulos
damas et capreolos
super dromedarios
velox madianeos

Dum trahit vehicula
multa cum sarcinula
illius mandibula
dura terit pabula

Cum aristis, hordeum
comedit et carduum
triticum ex palea
segregat in area

Amen dicas, asine
Iam satur ex gramine
amen, amen itera
aspernare vetera

An English Translation:
In Easter Lands
the ass arrived
beautiful and strongest,
for burden fittest made.

Here in the hills of Sychen
nursed now below Ruben,
he crosses over Jordan
he enters Bethlehem!

In his leaps he conquers mules
fallow deer and roebucks
and surpasses camels
so speedy of the Medes.

While he pulls the wagons,
many loaded heavy,
using his jaws,
he grinds the tough fodder.

He eats barley, beards and all,
and the spiny thistles,
Separates the wheat from chaff
on the threshing floor.

You say Amen to the ass,
now all filled with grass!
"Amen, Amen!" once again,
spurning what is passed.

**********************
From the East the donkey came,Stout
and strong as twenty men;Ears like wings and eyes like flame,Striding
into Bethlehem.Faster than the deer he
leapt,With his burden on his back;Though all other creatures
slept,Still the ass kept on his track.Still
he draws his heavy load,Fed on barley and rough hay;
Pulling on along the road--Donkey,pull our sins away!Wrap him now in cloth of gold;All rejoice who see him pass;Mirth inhabit young and old On this Feast Day of the Ass.
Refrain: Heh! Heh, Sir Ass, Oh Heh!

***********************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeRPZS5-4Vc

***********************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHYLpHb3NOo

Summermon

Overheard from Memorial Union lakefront on Tuesday evening: "This cup is too round!" (why she spilled down shirt). "My dog ate all my friends' weed out of all their purses!". Sign on water: "For swimmer's health, please do not feed ducks." Logic? Is proscriptive, or *pre*scriptive?

Advice from my friend named Alan, GodsoS, a local personage

Soul you shun
B
Solution
contrary 2 it B

My dear Wormwood, this is funny (to *us*)

Conversation between two Demons

"My Dear Wormwood,

Everything is clearly going very well. .... You speak of their being great laughers [these humans]. I trust this does not mean that you are under the impression that laughter as such is always in our favour. This point is worth some attention.

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like occurs in Heaven - a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

Fun is closely related to Joy - a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy [God] would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

....

The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the modern generation who take their "sense of humour" so seriouisly that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is "mean"; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and kids his friends with having been taken - he is no longer "mean" but a comic. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humourous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful - unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that modern seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as "Puritanical" or as betraying a "lack of humour."

But Flippany is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people that Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from Joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it."

-from Chapter XI of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters

Endeavor and Play

"The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed as if one believes in all prospects." -Brian Sutton-Smith

He was "a staunch dissident against the view that endeavor is futile." -Tom Shippey[?], describing J.R.R. Tolkien's Christian and Germanic ethic for life's choices, which are innately heroic.

"The kids with pretend guns who pop out to shoot adults with 'Ha I shot you!' are functional happy optimists. The same adults (who will not play dead!), disturbed by kids with toy guns, are already dead to life, and ought to be shot." -NPHillman

"Polyconjugating is Polydisorienting" -NPH

"Cowardice, Cruelty, Numbness and Abasement result necessarily from the absence of Remorse and Joy." -NPH

"The fear of personal redemption and transformation is the greatest fear known to man and woman." -NPH

The New Hypocrite

From G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

"The old hypocrite . . . was a [person] whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. .... It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies."


"The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future. Evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl."

"The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. .... The goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of [human]kind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our fore[bears]. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. The future is a blank wall on which [I] can write [my] name as large as [I] like. .... I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity."

"These colossal ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone those things we ought to have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to do."

"It is very currently suggested that the modern ... is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. .... Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the '48? Are we strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared?"

"This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination. .... The need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution."

"We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. .... The really courageous [person] is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be."

"There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, 'You can't put the clock back.' The simple and obvious answer is 'You can.' A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed."

Thanksgiving

"Thanksgiving,
and terror of loss,
make all but my love of life
dross."

Rick Lee, via Nic Jones


The Staid Saxon

The ox he's never woe
till he to harrow go,
for the harrow like the witches
runeth the rows in twitches

-Thomas Tusser, 15th century

Commentary: Dorothy Hartley compares oxen to English Saxons who, like oxen, preferred life's steady unchanging pace. The tails of mediæval harrows were made of dense, sharp twigs which jerked and skipped when drawn. Witches shiftily followed the lines of hedgerows (literally 'hag-rows') at darting speeds upon sticks.