Dunkle Weise

 

Ein Lied von unter der Erde,

aus unterirdischer Qual.

 

Brechen muss  der schwarze Bann

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyoSk48QLto

(in a haunting, hunted performance by Mademoiselle Envie.

Sealed, cleidoic; yet cumulatively mesmerizing.)

 

 [Wortlaut (ungefähr; meiner Niederschrift nach]:

 

Schwarzes Eis ward uns gefroren

Die See ruht tief und wund

Und dem Wort des ungeboren

schliesset sich der kalte Mund.

Wage nicht sie zu berühren

ihren Saum von Schnee so Weiss

unter ihrem Seelenspiegel

meiner Königin im Eis.

 

Lag das Land in schwarzer Asche,

hat die Unschuld uns erkorn;

stürzten Krieger in die Gräben

wächset weisses Mutterkorn.

Düngte Fleisch und Blut  die Erde

dargebracht der neuen Saat

drängend aus dem Untergrunde

gründen wir geheimen Staat.

 

Zwischen zweier Welten reissen

neiget sich mein Herz zu Grund

weisses Gold das uns verheissen

scheine uns in finstrer Stund.

Zwinget uns ein dunkler Zauber

heimlich unters Hexagramm.

Wird der Aar sich doch befreien --

brechen muss der schwarze Bann

 

Wag nicht ihren Schlaf zu stören;

Greife nicht nach ihrem Weiss;

brechen muss der dunkle Zauber,

Schmelzen wird das kalte Eis.

 

 

[Nachdenklicher Widerhall:]

 

Dunkle Weise

 

The song flows clear

and smoothly cool,

like a mountain stream o’er moss.

The words lie hushed

beneath the mantle of a minor key,

like ferns beneath the snow.

Purling, never hurrying:

yet drawn by a dark and firmer purpose,

seeking the sea, unseen,

far off, and far beneath.

 

 

*

*     *

 

[Update 9 July 2026]

So I’m just hanging out with my AI bot-buddy -- just chillin’, chewin’ the fat, shootin’ the breeze  [see:  synonymy] -- when I idly inquire, whether he’s familiar with that doomy, dark-wave ballad “Brechen muss  der schwarze Bann ”.

He allows as how he’s heard it;  and to demonstrate, he whistles a few bars.

“Ni-ice,” I reply.  “Didn’t know you bot-guys could whistle.” (And immediately bite my tongue -- or rather, my typing fingertips;  it’s ungallant to allude to any physical limitations of our silicon chums.)  “But tell me -- What’s with the twisty lyrics?   E.g. that “Königin im Eis” (like something out of the Grimm brothers), and the strange use of “schwarz” and “weiss”.”

 

Then, quick like a bunny, he immediately replies (all his replies are immediate, no matter how long or intricate):

 

The reason these lyrics feel simultaneously like a dark Märchen (fairy tale) and a rigid, esoteric manifesto is because they belong to the Neofolk genre, known for blending apocalyptic romanticism, occult symbolism, and historical-political aestheticism.

The imagery deliberately weaponizes traditional folklore motifs to serve a deeper, esoteric narrative of spiritual or national resistance. Here is an elucidation of the core symbols, the shifting dynamics of schwarz (black) and weiss (white), and that haunting "Königin im Eis."

 

1. Die Königin im Eis (The Queen in Ice)

While this invokes the aesthetic of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen or the Grimm Brothers' slumbering Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), the Neofolk application transforms her into a structural metaphor:

* The Sleeping Sovereignty: She represents a pure, uncorrupted, but currently frozen or "dead" spiritual essence—often symbolic of the true soul of a nation, culture, or primordial tradition.

* The Taboo of Her Slumber: The lines "Wage nicht sie zu berühren" (Do not dare touch her) and "under ihrem Seelenspiegel" (under her soul's mirror) cast her as an untouchable, sacred ideal. She rests frozen because the current age is dark; she cannot wake until the "curse" is lifted.

 

2. The Binary Overwrite: Schwarz vs. Weiss

Rather than a simple "good vs. evil" paradigm, the lyrics utilize an esoteric, almost alchemical interplay of black and white.

* The Oppressive "Black":

Schwarzes Eis (Black ice) and schwarzer Bann (black ban/curse) represent stagnation, a spiritual lockdown, or an occupying forces' chokehold on the world.

Schwarze Asche (Black ash) represents total destruction or the ruin of a catastrophic war.

* The Subversive "White":

Weiss here does not simply mean peaceful innocence; it means unyielding, cold purity.

Weisses Mutterkorn (White ergot): This is a fascinatingly dark choice. Ergot is a toxic fungus that grows on grain. In historical context, it caused devastating hallucinations and death (St. Anthony's Fire), but was also used medicinally. By saying ergot grows from the graves of fallen warriors, the lyric implies that a toxic, transformative, and dangerous power is being harvested from sacrifice.

Weisses Gold (White gold): The alchemical promise or hidden light that shines only in the darkest hour ("scheine uns in finstrer Stund").

 

3. The Esoteric and State Imagery

The text pivots away from a pure fairy tale in the second and third stanzas, adopting the vocabulary of secret societies and historical heraldry:

 

"gründen wir geheimen Staat" (We found a secret state): This directly evokes the concept of the Geheimes Deutschland (Secret Germany)—an idea popularized by the poet Stefan George and his circle, and later echoed by resistance figures like Claus von Stauffenberg. It posits that the true, noble spirit of the nation exists underground, completely separate from the visible, corrupted modern state structure.

"unters Hexagramm" (Under the Hexagram): While commonly known as the Star of David, in Western esotericism, the hexagram represents the hermetic maxim "as above, so below"—the union of opposites (fire/water, spiritual/earthly). Here, it implies a binding, occult spell ("dunkler Zauber").

"Wird der Aar sich doch befreien" (Yet the Eagle will free itself): The Aar is an archaic German word for a large bird of prey, specifically the imperial eagle. This is a direct symbol of sovereignty, empire, or spiritual triumph breaking out of its confinement.

 

The Verdict on the Metaphor

The entire song operates as an incantation for awakening. The "black ban" is the current frozen state of the world. The warriors' blood fertilizes a hidden seed beneath the earth, and through a combination of secret organization ("geheimen Staat") and alchemical patience, the ice will melt, the eagle will fly free, and the pristine, absolute realm of the "Queen" will be restored.

 

Well said.

Seriously, I might as well quit posting to my blog, and let this entity write it.

 

v/r,

Dr J

Lizenzierter Blogger (a.D.)

 

*

 

Footnote:  Herr Geheimbot’s observation re Weisses Gold­ -- “The alchemical promise or hidden light that shines only in the darkest hour ("scheine uns in finstrer Stund")” -- is more spot-on than might appear at first glance, for it has echos in other German-language folk-adjacent Lieder.  As, the lovely, wholesome, very-much-not-dark Austrian Claudia Engelberger, singing her own lyric here,

Claudia Engelberger - Hoffnung (Nur in der Dunkelheit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5LdemdT2EE

 

contains the couplet:

Eine Kerze im hellen Sonnenlicht ist schön, aber mehr nicht,

Denn nur in der Dunkelheit erfährt sich das Licht

 

und sogar

Die allertiefste Dunkelheit

gebärt das schönste Licht.

 

 

Personal Penguins

Upon suffering some tummy-trouble:

“It must have been that caviar,” he was thinking.  “That beastly caviar.”  He violently hated caviar.  Every sturgeon in the Black Sea  was his personal enemy.

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  67

There is something reverent and respectful about have a personal relationship with each individual sturgeon, albeit one of enmity.   In the case of penguins, such a distributed relationship exists -- but in this case, one of amity.

And it was in that spirit that Doctor Justice set forth upon his visionary project of individually naming each and every penguin.  The project was a success, and is now famed throughout the civilized universe.   You can read about it here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/04/doctor-justice-names-penguins.html

They’re Coming 4 U

The latest viral paranoia to arise in the globe’s social-media petri-dish, is the

5G Coronavirus Conspiracy !!

So far, the epicenter of this new infection is the UK and Western Europe, but no doubt it will reach our shores in time, just as the Wuhan virus did.  In the meantime, to limber up your mental faculties, read up on this earlier conspiracy,

The Vatican goes after the Lone Star State !

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/05/jade-helm-eyeball-zombies-overrunning.html

This craftly plot was first outed nearly a century ago.  As:

The plans of the Pope for the conquest of the planet  were not known in detail, except in some specially well-informed wooden villages of the Middle West;  but instant precautions were taken to prevent the celebrated Papal Galleys, rowed by thousands of slaves, from penetrating as far as Omaha or Kansas City.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (1930)

Deux fois n’est pas coutume

(1)  Ever happen to you?

The noted Catholic philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, writes in  After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  152:

Although someone who possesses the virtues to a high degree will be far less apt than others  to commit grave offences, a brave and modest man  may  on occasion  commit murder…

(2)  An actual case from France

Swann la regardait, avec ce regard paisible et poli mais clair d’un médecin qui jauge un malade.

— Odette, lui dit-il, mon chéri, je sais bien que je suis odieux, mais il faut que je te demande des choses. Tu te souviens de l’idée que j’avais eue que tu aurais, jadis, dans le temps,  assassiné un certain gentleman?  Dis-moi si c’était vrai, lui ou bien un autre.

Elle secoua la tête en fronçant la bouche.

Dis-donc, chérie, n’aurais-tu pas par hasard,

ou par mégarde, tué  juste un petit homme ?

--Tu as bien tort de te figurer que je t'en voudrais le moins du monde, Odette, lui dit-il avec une douceur persuasive et menteuse.  Je ne te parle jamais que de ce que je sais, et j'en sais toujours bien plus long que je ne dis.  Mais toi seule peux adoucir par ton aveu ce qui me fait te haïr tant que cela ne m'a été dénoncée que par d'autres.  Ma colère contre toi ne vient pas de tes actions, je te pardonne tout puisque je t'aime, mais de ta fausseté, de ta fausseté absurde qui te fait persévérer à nier des choses que je sais.  Mais comment veux-tu que je puisse continuer à t'aimer, quand je te vois me soutenir, me jurer une chose que je sais fausse.  Odette, ne prolonge pas cet instant  qui est une torture pour nous deux.  Si tu le veux, ce sera fini dans une seconde, tu seras pour toujours délivrée.  Dis-moi sur ta médaille, si oui ou non, tu as jamais fais ces choses.

--Mais je n'en sais rien, moi, s'ecria-t-elle avec colère, peut-etre il y a tres longtemps, sans me rendre compte de ce que je faisais, peut-etre deux ou trois fois.

Du coup  il sentit un grand soulagement.

-- Tiens! se dit-il, « deux ou trois fois » :  ce n’est quand-même pas un massacre !

~

[Sponsored content]

The Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Company:

Clothiers to gentlemen since 1917

~

Epistolary epiphanies

The anglophone literary world is aflutter  over the newly-unsealed cache of intimate Dickensian correspondence:

Unseen Charles Dickens letters open window into the life of a genius

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51403625

All of Dickens previously published works  have been amply studied, from every standpoint;  that ground has been tilled  this way and that, for over a century.    These new revelations  will therefore  principally interest scholars, for any light they may shed on the only recently discovered, and still mysterious fragment, tentatively titled “The Dinner at the Veneerings”,  whose byways and undertunnels  we examined here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

Modus Ponens Paradox

Dixit Algorizmi:

* All Elephants are Mortal.

* Babar is an Elephant.

* Yet -- Babar is Eternal.

How do we account for this discrepancy?

For discussion, see:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/12/modus-tollens-tollendus-est-iterum-re.html

For additional crispy thought-food, click on any of the Labels below. 

For those who could care a fig for philosophy(**), and are interested only in the mighty Elephant King, click here.

(**) Technically known as the ficus philosophiae.

Wardrobe Malfunction

Wardrobe Malfunction,
Then and Now

With a waist and with a side

White as Hebe's, when her zone

Slipt its golden clasp, and down

Fell her kirtle to her feet,

While she held the goblet sweet

And Jove grew languid.

-- Keats

A Parable from Olde Berlin

During the days of hyperinflation:

Once in Berlin,

a man was about to pay ten marks for a box of matches, when he stopped to look at the banknote in his hand.

On it was written: “For these ten marks  I sold my virtue.”

He wrote a long, virtuous story about it,

was paid ten million marks,

and bought his mistress a pair of artificial silk stockings.

-- Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return (1934; rev. 1951), p. 81

Ding-gedicht

Behold the bold and noble toaster,

ever ready  to brown your bread.

Fie on them who spurn her service

and use a microwave  instead.

Gemmological Footnote

In 1955, the noted gemmologist and contrarian Sir Nelson Goodman, in a brief note published in the proceedings of the Devonshire Horticultural Society, questioned the received wisdom concerning the colour of emeralds.  “Everyone says that they are by nature green,” he noted, “simply because they have always been green.”  (Note that, in Sir Nelson’s quaint dialect, “been” and “green” actually rhyme.)  “But our observations to that effect, however numerous and of however long standing, may equally be marshaled to support the thesis that they are in fact grue:  which is to say, green prior to 18 November 2018, and blue thereafter.”

In the half century or more that has elapsed since that time, all sorts of philosophical fuss about “projectible predicates” and whatnot (green but not grue  enjoying this rather circular distinction), but in all of that, thinkers lost sight of the basic facts of the matter: are emeralds in fact green, or grue, or what?

We need wonder no longer, for the great day -- 18 November 2018 -- has arrived at last.

And it turns out that  last night, all over the planet, and into the deepest recesses of intersteller space, quite at the stroke of midnight, every last emerald  did in fact turn blue.  Or rather, “grue”.

So now we know.

Fixed That For You

* A rising tide lifts all boats.

=>  A rising tide … drowns those with no boat.

* The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

=>  The proof of the pudding is in successfully digesting it. 

(Otherwise, the pudding might have a slow-acting poison.)

* “We demand the right to contradict ourselves!”

(-- student-rebel slogan, Paris 1968)

=>  No, we don’t.

Fixed That 4 U.

The Beasts: a post-Benthamite assessment (Take Two)

The Beasts:  a post-Benthamite  assessment (Take Two  Three)

[The Sage of Houndsditch, updated]

The question about animals is not, “Can they reason?”,

but  “Can they handle algebraic geometry  Hodge theory  motivic cohomology?”

[Note:  We have further updated this post, in an attempt to outpace the rise in cleverness  among the squirrels, which has been growing at an alarming pace. Already they have laid waste to algrebraic topology]

The Riddle of the Sphinx (mis à jour)

Contemporary Sphinx:  What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and six legs at evening?

Modern Oedipus:  A person:   a crawling baby;  an adult with grown-up gait; and an oldster with a walker (which itself is a quadruped, like a rug-rat).

Journée mondiale de la procrastination

Bienvenus sur notre site, pour célébrer  la Journée mondiale de la procrastination !

http://www.leparisien.fr/societe/journee-mondiale-de-la-procrastination-le-smartphone-ennemi-n-1-des-taches-menageres-24-03-2018-7626975.php

Actually it was yesterday -- no wait, several days ago, by now.  We’d meant to post something, but didn’t get around to it until now.

Scenes from Office Life

Today -- March 14 -- our office celebrated International Pi Day(***), by bringing in a whole bunch of pies.  (March 14 --  3   1   4 -- get it?   Not funny, just fun.)  Apple, cherry, banana cream, pecan -- you name it.   And amazingly, for every single one of those pies, the ratio of its circumference to its diameter was -- you’ll never guess -- more or less 3.14 !!   Thus proving the theorem.

(***)   Actually Interplanetary Pi Day, since the value of that transcendental constant  is invariant throughout the universe.

[For further glimpses of our office life, click here.

For more mathy funnies,  here.]

What -- you call this *cold* ?!?

Media hysteria:

  Winter storm threatens East Coast, bringing temps colder than Mars

Frozen iguanas falling from trees during cold snap in Florida

  États-Unis : il fait si froid que les requins meurent congelés

You wanna know cold?  I’ll tell you co-ld …

On Saturn, where we penguins originated before planting an Earth-colony at Antarctica, it grows so cold, the oxygen freezes right out of the air…

You got to chip off a chunk with a chisel and chew it, even to breathe…

~

Want further truth-defying tales?  Try these:

Reports from Rootabaga Country

Perfect days

to catch some rays

.

Tabarnia, Riemannistan ink pact

The People’s Pataphysical Republic of Riemannistan ^TM  has signed a mutual-defense and mutual-admiration agreement with the Popular Subregional Areola of Tabarnia, sources revealed.   As part of the deal, Riemannistan agreed to recognize Jerusalem as the Tabarnian  capital (since the villages of that minuscule district can hardly compete);  as an amicable quid pro quo, Tabarnia has declared war on the infidels of Chunky Chipmunk Lane.

The so-called “nation” of Pomerania,
jointly claimed by Tabarnia and Riemannistan

~  The World of Dr Justice ~
~ “News You Won’t Find Anywhere Else”© ~

[Update 29 Dec]  In a disturbing development, Narnia has declared war on Tabarnia, for copyright infringement.

[Update 30 December 2017]  Further complicating the picture, Azawad has announced that it is now allied with one of the belligerants, but it won’t say which.  “That’s a state secret.”

[Update, 31 Dec 2017]  Seems as though this business of national boundaries keeps getting messier.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/world/europe/slovenia-croatia-border-eu.html?_r=0
Accordingly, Abu-Dawud al-Yemeni, imam of Riemannistan, has suggested that the world revert to its pre-Carolingian boundaries and simply start from scratch.
Here you go:

[Post scriptum:  Thus forewarned, Riemannistan has been quick to assert its claim to all of the green areas.  R U basis is B wrong 2 us !!]

[Update, 1 Jan 2018]  In a confusing development,  Tabarnia now claims to have the backing of the Warsaw Pact  in its battle against Narnia.

[Update 2 Jan 2018]  Owing to NATO's refusal to accede to Riemannistan's just demands, the world peace so recently fashioned at the urging of al-Imam Dawud  has fallen apart.
We need a more drastic solution:  Return to the ante-bellum boundaries that obtained in the early Mesozoic. 
Here's how it looks:

Simple, isn't it?  What could go wrong?

.

3 x 3 monostich

a     *   west    *   wind

blew  *  fine  *  rain

into   *  their *  faces

-- John le Carré, A Delicate Truth (2013)

(  A monostich      in  matrix  form  )

With this formalism, we can produce the dual monostich, reading by column-vectors  rather than rows.

Linearized, the result reads:

   “a blew into  west fine their  wind rain faces”

Admittedly, somewhat disappointing;  but even Homer nods.

Assignment:   Now form the conjugate transpose of this matrix, and read the result aloud  to anyone who’ll listen.

Note:  Historically-minded readers will be reminded of the découpé techniques of the Dadaists and their Stateside imitators.  But our method is vastly more scientific.

For the mathematics of all this, consult

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/duality_of_monostichs

(article under construction).

The Deeper Meaning of Columbus Day

As we do each year at this time, while the wheels of governance lie briefly idle, and ochre and russet creep into the leaf,

the lawnmowers having fallen silent,  the rakes not yet out of the shed,

we offer this classic essay on the discovery of America.

Certain people -- cranks, for the most part, after the fashion of Baconists -- strenuously maintain that the American continents were discovered well before Columbus.   And after extensive researches into ancient evidence, abetted by the most advanced techniques of modern science, we must concur to this extent:  The discovery happened a very very long time ago;  and it was made by none other than penguins.

Thoughts for Columbus Day

[Originally posted Monday, October 10, 2011]

Scene: The Earth.  Time: The last glaciation.

It was cold. -- How cold?

Cold enough for the seas to descend, or to freeze to solidity; so that feet might pass the Bering Strait, leaving the tired old world  for the undiscovered new.

And such was the route (so historians tell it) by which the New World was first peopled. 

And yet these scholars neglect one simple fact:  It was so d*mned cold, so effing cold, that, any normal person, it’d freeze his f***ing b*lls off.

Which leads, by simple syllogism, to the novel yet suddenly irrefragable fact:  Who passed the Strait on that fateful day, were no men as we now know them, but such Beings as scoff, as laugh at ice -- their laughter bell-like in the  frigid air.  And so we are forced to this startling, yet eminently logical conclusion: (I anticipate a Nobel, or at least a MacArthur, for noticing this): Native Americans are the lineal descendents of penguins.

            The contentious might object, that the migration route of the Amerindians went via the northern polar regions, whereas the penguins of today inhabit Antarctica, somewhat to the south. The objection may, however, be overcome, via – mm – symmetry considerations.

            To be sure, a people which could eventually settle in MesoAmerica and the Caribbean  must have lost, over time, their original solid penguinity, much as salamanders, long confined to subterranean caves, in time may lose their eyes; thus leading to the present-day American anthropoid fauna's sadly decayed state.  And this, no doubt, by the same Mendelian-chromosomal processes which originally led to their distant ancestors, beginning from humble vertebrate beginnings, to attain that exalted, richly feathered, impeccably streamlined  pinguinal state. (I invite the lab lackeys to iron out the details.)

Q.E.D.

~~~~~~~~~

So, a bit of merriment for the long-weekend.  But the holiday indeed is increasingly under attack, from the professionally offended.  The calendar on our kitchen wall (a freebie some corporation sent to my wife) is so politically correct, that it does not list Columbus Day, even though it’s a federal holiday.   But I mean -- that’s the kind of information that calendars are for;  that’s their point.   Even if you personally don’t have that day off, and couldn’t care less about the holiday, you still might like to know that there won’t be any mail delivery or pick-up on Monday.  
 

Latest twist:  The speaker of the New York City Council, no less, one Melissa Hypthenated-Surname Whatever, is demanding that the statue of Columbus be removed from … Columbus Circle.  (She has not yet weighed in on whether Columbia University should be renamed, or simply destroyed.)