Teleidoscope

Fri, Mar 16, 2007

Mayan Sprit Guides to Purify Sacred Sites after Bush Visit

Posted at 10:42 pm MDT to Current Events

Link found at Making Light.

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The Second Coming

Posted at 9:50 pm MDT to Media

This is one of my favorite poems, and suits my mood this week. (There's a bumper sticker that says: "Where are we going and what are we doing in this handbasket" that would also be apt.) The poem is seasonally appropriate, too, since Yeats is an Irish poet.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
 The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand;
 Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
 When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
 Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
 A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
 Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
 Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
 The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

by William Butler Yeats.

My senior year in high school I did an advanced placement English class. The goal was to place out of Freshman English in college by taking the AP English test that was available along with the SATs. (I got 790 out of 800 points, and did more interesting things than English composition with my Freshman class choices.) Our teacher was Timothy Sullivan, and there were a lot of books by Irish authors on his book shelves, including a translation of the Tain bo Cuailnge (The Cattle raid of Cooley: the story of Cuchulain) that I liked a lot at the time and now own. I found it in a book store a few years ago.

There is a principle called Huffman coding that says terms that are used a lot should be short and terms that are used less frequently can be longer. It probably says something about ancient Irish culture that they had a word as short as 'tain' for cattle raiding.

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