Cosmic Aging

Most everything in the Universe   changes with age:

Stars consume their fuel and die;

we humans grow wrinkled and wise.

-- Kip Thorne, Black Holes & Times Warps (1994), p. 479

I O U

2 Nature:  1 death.

Chill Wind

[With the sudden return  of chill and wintry weather,  we post this;

 for Spring has not yet won her definitive victory.]

In winter time when the north winds blow

     and the winter winds  blow keenly

Two ravens sat amidst the snow

     and the winter winds  blow cold

"In yonder cottage lives a lad"

     and the winter winds  blow keenly

"He's dying of the love he had"

and the winter winds  blow cold

Then it's Ho for the western ocean,

and Ho  for rovers bold

God grant us space and peace and place

for the winter wind blows cold

'Tis winter and the winds blow hard

and the winter winds  blow keenly

Two ravens sat without the yard

     and the winter winds  blow cold

"He pines and moans  upon the thorn"

and the winter winds  blow keenly

"And sighs for the maid who did him scorn"

     and the winter winds  blow cold

Then it's Ho for the western ocean,

and Ho  for rovers bold

God grant us space and peace and place

for the winter wind blows cold

When embers died within the grate

and the winter winds  blow keenly

two ravens sat upon the gate

     and the winter winds  blow cold

"In all the lands that Christ doth rule

and the winter winds  blow keenly

was there e'er a maiden half so cruel?"

     and the winter winds  blow cold

Then it's Ho for the western ocean,

and Ho  for rovers bold

God grant us space and peace and place

for the winter wind blows cold

Two ravens lingered, black as night

     and the winter winds  blow keenly

and all amid the snow so white.

     and the winter winds  blow cold

"In all the lands where the wind blows loud"

     and the winter winds  blow keenly

"there never was  a maid so proud."

     and the winter winds  blow cold

Then it's Ho for the western ocean,

and Ho  for rovers bold

God grant us space and peace and place

for the winter wind blows cold

The first bird to the second said

and the winter winds  blow keenly

"What may we do to rest his head?"

     and the winter winds  blow cold

The second to the first intones

and the winter winds  blow keenly

"What might we try, t' avenge his bones?"

     and the winter winds  blow cold

Then it's Ho for the western ocean,

and Ho  for rovers bold

God grant us space and peace and place

for the winter wind blows cold

"We'll pluck her eyes out from her head

and the winter winds  blow keenly

and shade her grave when she lies dead."

     and the winter winds  blow cold

"We'll soothe him with a mournful sound

     and the winter winds  blow keenly

and croak a dirge when she's in the ground."

     and the winter winds  blow cold

Then it's Ho for the western ocean,

and Ho  for rovers bold

God grant us space and peace and place

for the winter wind blows cold

With Time Remaining: Testament

Speak less;  but let it tell.

From this  last  quiver

see that  each  fledged  flight

streak  to its mark.

What thou hast seen,  share;

what fancied, ill-grasped,

die with it yet in thy breast.

At the end, it may be little

that thou canst bequeath.

Enough to fill a headstone, merely.

Eternity in Autumn

seest thou

(ambergolden)

something whirling

from off the tree?

(!)

‘Tis Larry:

Larry the Leaf.

Larry is in the grip of gravity,

whirling to earth.

flashing now grandly

in the twilit  sunlight

dizzily dreaming

of when he was green …

           ~

Soon,  he(it) settles,

on/(in) a bank of    softly-fallen, softened

(Lisa & Lennie & Lea  the Leaf)

melding to mulch

sans name  &  sans dream …

…  ………

Rest in peace,  little leaflet  leaf:

rest in sweetsome /   dreamlesssleepy   / sleep ……….

On Reading in Someone Else’s Traces

As an impecunious graduate student, and later as a threadbare lexicographer, I bought used copies of books  whenever possible.  Sometimes, these had been ill-used.  This happened especially in the case of volumes currently being used as textbooks.   Absurdly overpriced when new, these might come within the price-range of the elbow-patched pauper  after having passed through the hands of some subsidized undergraduates  who never really should have taken the course in the first place, and who now sold their texts, out of sight out of mind,  allowing us (as Leviticus prescribes) to survive on their leavings and gleanings.   These individuals would often underline in ink, or highlight in yellow (or, horresco referens, pink), sometimes every other sentence or paragraph:  and the color would bleed through the page, spuriously hemi-highlighting many a quite random passage.   To read through the work, I had to wade through the swamp of their mediocrity of mind.   Why couldn’t they at least highlight in pencil?

At present, I am reading a used paperback copy of Gordon Craig’s classic 1978 history of Germany.   And as the chapters go by, it becomes increasingly apparent that the previous owner had been a scholar, or scrupulous autodidact.   The passages marked are few, and always in faint pencil.  Moreover, these do not constitute “highlights” in any obvious sense;  rather, they illustrate some theme which that reader was pursuing in his mind, no longer apparent to this one.   His interests, whatever they might have been, do not match mine:  the phrase “civil service” merits, in his recension, a rare double-underline.  Moreover, there are occasional pithy marginal notes, but penciled-in so small that, even with a magnifier, I cannot decipher them -- in part because he uses personal abbreviations, in part because the thought is not predictable.  But one sigil thus used  I do understand, and it marks him as my Sinnesgenosse:  that little pyramid of three dots, which signifies “therefore” to a logician.

∴

~

Someday, when I am gathered  to that great library in the sky,  my own annotated holdings will flood the market (if it still exists;  perhaps paper will be obsolete, and everyone on Kindle).   And the purchasers will puzzle over my own arcane jottings.   To aid later philologers, I shall mention here, that many of the abbreviatory symbols stem from lectures by Gleason or Quine:  the rounded curly-d for ‘boundary’, an acutely downhooked upright for ‘restricted to’ (whence ‘only, just’), a perpendicularly downhooked horizontal for ‘not’, a square for ‘necessarily’ (whence ‘must’), a diamond for ‘possibly, maybe’, a thick-shafted arrow (=>) for ‘causes, gives rise to’, an upside-down A for ‘all’, a backwards E for ‘there is, there exists’, an inverted point-triad for ‘since, because’, and so forth.  Or perhaps, like my own sad ashes, they will simply all be pulped.

[Note:  The more usual symbol for restriction of a function to a subset of a domain  is simply vertical-bar.  But that has many, many other meanings;  so I follow Gleason in adding a hook, which  quite appropriately  depicts the restrictor as a grappling-iron …

Likewise, there are many traditional symbols used for ‘not’, all of them grievously ambiguous.  I follow Quine in adding the disambiguating hook.]

Aus dem Nachlass

[Any one of us  might die tonight;  none knoweth when his soul might be required.

And when I expire, should any glance into my drawers, they shall find

many upon many

unfinished thoughts and fragments.

Here, just a sample.

Should I survive, I might flesh it out.]

Chesterton’s “The Wrong Shape”;  but this I shall defend:

the wisdom of the Yin-Yang symbol -- that dot of white  within the swirling black tadpole; that patch of black, within its mirror counterpart….

The Ball and the Cross -- each needs the other.  The Cross, said Chesterton, needs the round earth whereon to stand.  And the great globe needs the cross, …

The honorable atheist, straightforwardly depicted in the autobiography of  CSL.

Yet, more dialectical in the fiction of GKC.

The atheist in this fantasia, respects -- in oppostion - that which he so strenuously denies.

Not outlined, but, by duality, implied -- the theist as well needs the atheist.

-- I don’t want to say more on these lines, lest I turn into some fatuous Frenchman flatulating-out bogus profundities;  but leave this little seed, to work in your imaginations ….