Iubile (Jubile, Jubilee).

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Read Jim Hansen, The People’s March: I wish to persuade you ... The People's Climate March website is replete with good information. The good folks at 350 Toronto are coordinating return bus from Toronto and lodging in NYC including on-line ticketing. You Can Attend This Important And Historic Event. Yes! Better than refute an argument is not take the point, refuse to understand. Or, put another way: (re-)frame the argument in your own terms. So says George Lakoff; and I'm lapping it up until I trip over reality-is-in-our-brains and notice its equivalence with Frye's wall-to-wall mythopœia. If faith amounts to nothing more than the belief that there really is a world out there ... well ... THX1138 and all that eh? "God formed man of the dust of the ground," says one of the creation myths in Genesis. By the time we get to Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar's dream the feet are made of an unlikely amalgam of iron and clay which turn, in a twinkling, back to dust (chaff) again. Now dust and clay are different things. Potters know that clay loses properties if it is frozen f'rinstance. So what?! The words in the title of this post have two quite different pronunciations: jubile (2 syllables) &, jubilee (3 syllables). [As far as I can see from the OED that is, though 'jubile' is not a word I use everyday.] Maybe not important, or maybe so if one considers it in the framework of Marshall McLuhan's media daisy-chain: the first few links there involving speech as the content of the written word, and the written word as fodder for Gutenberg's printed alphabet. Leviticus says: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family." There is some discussion in the OED around the interval - not often that I come down on the side of Leviticus but fifty years does strongly improve the odds that anyone may experience such a jubilee once in their lifetime. It's a ram's horn trumpet (just in case that 'twinkling' there diverted you). The land if it want a Iubile will in time grow hartlesse. (1611 - from an OED citation.)   Hence to Carnaval, Lent, and Victor Turner with Liminality, Communitas, & Anti-Structure: There's a lot to be seen here, even on the Internet. Just a f'rinstance: the snake is above Adam & Eve before the fall, and an angel is above them after; but both are 'above'. There might be a bit more in a couple of posts from August 2008: here and here. The fellow in the blue & pink tuxedo leads the Bloco da Ansiedade. Not very far though - the two years I participated it got two or three city blocks and permanently stalled (and perfectly). I faked the orgasm.                                                                       But the love was true. Oooo! Eeee! Iiii!                             I want a divorce.                                                                 Tired of so much sex?     Tired of pretending. If you are interested you can begin here for the June 2 1922 revolt in Rio, and here for the possibly faked photograph of a death in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Nobody said it was gonna be easy: It's taken me all this time to discern a few small patterns, figgure out just a few contingent details; patches, and very small, tiny & insignificant patches at that. There seems to be a line that runs along through: secular - atomized - urban - anonymous; but I can't quite make it out. In the Geneva bible one of the books begins: "At sondrie tymes and in diuers maners." Handel gives us Isaiah: "All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way." The OED tells us that 'divers' includes ‘turned different ways’. I went along (following Bob) to see what I could find in Verlaine & Rimbaud. This is dodgy territory since many critics seem to think (for political reasons perhaps) that it is important that they were not strictly heterosexual. Even so, one nugget turns up in Verlaine - this is a cursory investigation y'unnerstan' an' without the side-by-each French/English editions I would get nowhere:             O la femme à l'amour câlin e réchauffant,             Douce, pensive e brune, e jamais étonnée,             Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant. The translator seems to think the poem is about conventional lovers - but all I know of such grace is not. Stephen Foster also died young. I wake one morning with a tune in my head which takes several days, almost a week, to recognize as the second part of 'Beautiful Dreamer'. I have asked the library for a biography to see if there are any clues that he may have had something in common with Rimbaud's dérèglement. Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad. Some Greek said that did he? An already anonymous author quoted by Euripides in 'Antigone'. There could be an axis from this ancient notion, whoever said it, running towards Northrop Frye when he says, "There is nothing so unique about death as such, where we may be too distracted by illness or sunk in senility to have much identity at all," (which would be a mercy). And it could be as humdrum ho hum as the observation often made during death watches (by, say, respiratory technologists on ICU wards) that organ failure can lead to uncharacteristic ... remarks. But try to thread in 'The Grasshopper and the Ants' or the babbling butterfly in 'The last Unicorn' - even Shakespeare's ubiquitous fool, or ... Ophelia: "Her clothes spread wide and, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes." Then the axis gets much wider, fuzzy, disappears but not quite. Grasp, reach, and vision and all that eh? Maybe Dylan Thomas was just whistlin' Dixie when he wrote. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." D'you think? I don't. I am standing in Hans' large and gracious back yard where a huge ash tree is growing. Something clicks and catches, but it is (again) several days before Yggdrasil floats up out of the murk. Which holds which? Does earth support the ash tree or does the ash tree support earth? Ash trees stand out. Partly because of their compound leaves which change the way the light comes through. Baobabs also have compound leaves (palmate not pinnate but compound). ['Yggdrasil' took days but 'pinnate' floated up after only 10 hours. :-) ]

 
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