Mathematical Art and Full Moon

The latest distraction in my life is a program called iOrnament.  It's a doodle-pad that has some automatic graphic symetry built into it.  Paint a line, and it's instantly reflected, glided, and tessellated into one of seventeen different patterns -- it's kind of like drawing with a kaleidoscope.  

It's very easy to get Moroccan tiles out of it, and I think if I choose the right settings and place curves carefully I can get Celtic knots out of it.

I'd say for the most part it's relaxing, but it runs on my mobile, so I'll have to watch out that I don't get a kink in my neck from hunching over a notecard-sized drawing area while I swipe lines with my fingertips. Like most art tools, I think you get what you put into it.  

I may or may not have gotten a kink in my neck working on the fiddly details of green scarab legs in an Egyptian-inspired design.  

Last night was the Full Moon.  It became visible above the hills and trees around 9:45 PM.  The geography of our back yard means that it can be difficult to site the Moon in the Summer time -- especially if the Moon is hanging out below the ecliptic, which makes a low summer moon even lower.  

Last night was also the night "Jefferson Starship" performed at the county fair, so strains of "Jane," "Somebody to Love," and "We Built This City" kept floating over the hill and ricocheting off of the neighbor's houses.  Luckily for the mystic vibes, by the time the moon rose high enough in the sky to be visible, the concert was finished.  

I wasn't in the mood for a Full On Solitary Neo-Pagan High Ritual, so I set up the Four Cardinal Patio Tables, got a chair, and quietly harped in the shadows and dappled moonlight.  Many of the tunes I play are traditional ballads in the key of A-minor, and I tried to focus on songs in C-major instead.  There was a lot of improvisation, but I did manage to pluck out "Center of the Sun," which I always imagine hearing the old Seattle a cappella group, "We Three" singing, but comes out nicely on the harp.  

The reflective moment was a grounding end to an obnoxious week.

Scintillating Wednesday

Wednesday was a low energy day.  It started out fine, but then a little after 9 this morning I started getting a blind spot in my vision, and then the flashing dots appeared.  There wasn't much of a headache, but the strobing did make it difficult to read anything.   I'm not sure what triggered it -- I hadn't had a chocolate snack yet (or that much tea), and the last one had been the previous night.  I'm wondering if my mobile phone might have been the culprit, but I really won't know.   I was mostly fine after a two hour nap, but not at my best for the rest of the day.   The only thing good about these stupid migraines is that they're mostly flashing vision problems, so I'm thankful that they don't feel like someone's driving nails into my head -- but I do wish if I were going to have scintillating spirals in my vision that some sort of mystic Hildegard von Bingen experience would come with them.  

Saturday, Mark and I went to the beach with Aoife.  We ended up at Muriel O. Ponsler Memorial State Scenic Viewpoint and beach.  I am trying to remember the last time I was at a beach, and it must have been before the COVID outbreak.  The sky was mutable, with patchy clouds blowing overhead; at one point a thick cloud bank blew southward over the coastal spurs.   The strong wind blew little tendrils of sand along the dunes and reminded me of a dream I had back in the 1980's where blowing coastal wind indicated a spirit gull's displeasure.

I brought my sand compass, and also the anchored string for making spirals.  Aoife wanted to eat the stick I used to make arcs in the sand, but I managed to create a thirty-two foot diameter pattern of arcs and concentric circles.  The anchor stayed put more securely than I'd hoped, and it would be very easy to use it to make a spiral path in the sand.  As long as the dog doesn't help too much.  Next time I'll have to bring some plywood for a straight edge. 

There were a few times when we could let Aoife off leash--she loved running back and forth in the sand--but as it got later, it seemed prudent to keep her leashed.  Also, we didn't want her harassing the sea gulls too much.  Aoife didn't want to be more than about two blocks away from us, so we had to stick together on the beach.  Mark held her leash while I drew; I held her while Mark went exploring on the low tide rocks.  

We didn't find any agates, but there was a nice basalt stone that feels good in the palm, and also a stone that looks a little like a worn Egyptian cartouche with mysterious, suggestive strokes within it.  

On the way back home, Mark stopped the car at a scenic overview and we managed to see four whales spouting.   On the way back home, Aoife slept and slept and slept.  

Group Dancing Dreams

Dreamed I was on top of a mesa.  I think I was in a rectangular, fenced area.  On the other side of the fence, there was a group of people dressed in white:  white pants, billowy white tank-tops.  They ran along the side of the fence, leaping over logs and rocks.  It occurred to me that they were dancers, and that they were dancing a herd of cows running along the fence.  

There's a break in my recall.

I was with a large group of people.  I'm thinking that possibly a wedding happened earlier in the dream, and the group was gathering in a large stoney cave (? underneath the mesa ?).   I think we were gathering to get on a bus or train.  In any case, the cave floor was a rough square, and I have an impression of benches or rows of seats.  There was a block and tackle in the cave, and (I don't recall if I started it or someone else) it was swinging from one side of the cave in a large, circular arc.  Folks had to duck to avoid getting whacked by it.  

A discussion of sorts started, with someone commenting that there was lava beneath us, and this would be a bad place for a secret lair.  I chimed in, "I would totally build a nuclear reactor here!"

There's another break.

The group of people and location had changed, but I was still in a largish group inside a large room. It might have been Library Story Hour.  A speaker or teacher or instructor appeared, he wore bulbous, reflective sunglasses that gave him an insect-look.  He had a soundtrack... I guess hip-hop?  And he started leading a dance-exercise routine.  I got close enough to him to notice that he wore reflective plastic around his eyes (sort of like a mask, only there were two pieces of plastic), which extended the reflective area around his eyes. 

Art Imitating Egyptology

For the longest time, I've always enjoyed the love duet sung in Philip Glass's Akhenaten.  I'm not sure if my favorite lines are "I behold thy beauty every day," or "it is my desire to be rejuvenated with life through love of thee," or, "give me thy hands, holding thy spirit, that I may receive it and live by it," or "call thou my name unto eternity, and it shall never fail."   Okay--it's the last line with its image of a lover invoking their beloved's name and the sound rippling through time and space in a sustaining wave that speaks to me the most.   

The opera's libretto notes that this is a love poem found in a royal mummy of the Amarna period, from Journal of Egyptian Archæology, translated by Sir Alan Gardiner.  I imagined that a strip of poetry was wrapped up with other amulets and talismans, maybe even written by the surviving partner.  

Fast forward--for fun I'm taking an introductory class in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I thought, if I'm learning how to actually read the things I'm seeing at the MET, I should see what the original love poem looks like.  If Gardiner translated it, that implies he worked from hieroglyphs.  And maybe I could reproduce the hieroglyphs into a translated piece of art for the home.  So I started to search.

I wound up on JSTOR, and spent what felt like six hours trying various searches of Journal of Egyptian Archæology AND Gardiner, or Gardiner AND "love poem", or Amarna and poem (it was here that I discovered the libretto I was working from had spelled Amarna "Armarna").   The problem was that the Journal spans over a hundred years of articles, and the libretto didn't specify which volume it was referencing.  It looked like I was going to need the services of an Honest to Horus Reference Librarian.

When I told Mark, and he realized I was working from an opera, he said, "Uh, John; maybe they made the poem up.  You know, it's art."  I protested that the journal and Gardiner were real, but Mark just smiled. 

I went back to JSTOR and figured that I had to do a different kind of search.  Somehow, I hit the right combinations of Akhenaten and Glass and came up with a Egyptologist's review of the Philip Glass opera.  While he didn't quote the poem, he did mention in the footnotes that it was from the King's Valley Tomb 55, and that Gardiner had written an article, "The So-Called Tomb of Queen Tiye" in the Dec 1957, 43rd volume of the Journal of Egyptian Archæology.   I would have never found it using the keywords I had been using.

I skimmed the article... old French archeologists..., haphazard tomb..., so-and-so can be forgiven for..., souvenirs..., this translation is gibberish..., is it a man or a woman in this sarcophagus, ... and I got to a description of bands of gold foil that had been affixed to the inside of the sarcophagus but had fallen onto the mummy... very likely Akhenaten's name had been removed from the gold foil and someone else's name replaced... and Gardiner's actual translation.  

Which was similar to the English words in the libretto.  But some phrases from the original had been omitted in the libretto, and the libretto's transliteration in general was short, present-tense declarations, instead of a long future-tense affirmation.  The result is that Glass's wording is more ambiguous, whereas Gardiner's translation is more firmly a prayer from a woman (probably Nefertiti) to a divine being (the Aten, or Akhenaten as the emissary of the Aten). It wasn't even wrapped in the mummy, the gold bands of a funerary prayer or spell had fallen off of the inside of the lid of the sarcophagus and onto the mummy.  

"It's not the real grail?!?!" I said, quoting Micheal Palin as Galahad in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Mark was right, sort of, Glass had taken artistic license with the poem.

Oh well.  I've got the original hieroglyphs now, I suppose I can work with Gardiner's scholarship and see what design I can come up with.

Sunday Morning Writing

Last night I stayed up way too late reading old "Dykes to Watch Out For" (the moving van volume).  As a result, I had some weird dreams about moving into an old house that had its front end on a fraternity row (in the dream it was a cross between 26th Street between Monroe and Tyler Streets in Corvallis and a mashed-up quad from Carleton College and the UO), had its middle in a New York City Times Square shopping mall, and its end and garage near an ocean (which required a twenty minute drive through winding coastal hill forest roads just to get around to the front).   I remember liking the house's interior, but other than a vague recollection that I was starting a new job with academia, I don't remember much.  

The yard is blooming in a haphazard way.  Mark would like more formal plantings, but neither of us has the inclination to plan that far ahead.  It doesn't help that our soil has a high clay content and probably has orchard chemicals in its past.  Mark does have many bonsai and other potted plants outside, and he did build a raised bed, but the effect is more like the back-side of a gardening store than an actual formal garden.  Oh well... Mark has some plans for arbors, so that will be nice.

Mark has taken Aoife on a hike, so I'm writing in the garden circle.  We'll see how long I last before the pollen overcomes me.  Since the dog is gone, I've opened up the garage for cross-ventilation and have just been visited by Cicero's brother, Spencer.  It remains to be seen if our cats will actually venture into the yard -- oh!  and here comes Smokey now, to sit on my keyboard and shed all over everything.  

(On cat session and tea-refresh later)

I'm continuing to study Egyptian hieroglyphs: I've got the uniliteral "alphabet" ones down and I'm slowly adding bi- and trilteral signs to my pile of flashcards.  𓆣 is a trilateral sign pronounced (by Egyptologists, at least) as kheper, and has the same phonetic value as   𓐍 𓊪𓂋 .   I've got a few more on-line classes, and by the end of them I should be able to do a translation of an offering formula.   I'm hoping that I can find the siting of a love poem from the Journal of Egyptian Archæology, translated by Sir Alan Gardiner, and used in Philip Glass's, Akhnaten, (I breathe the sweet breath that issues from thy mouth / I behold thy beauty every day...) but so far I haven't located it (reading ninety-year-old oh-so-polite arguments of how to translate three-thousand-year-old poetry is amusing, however).  Thinking about it some more, I suspect the original is in hieratic and not hieroglyphic, but it would fun to see the original and see how "call thou my name unto eternity, and it shall never fail" was written:  was it "give voice" to my name ?  or "invoke" my name ?  or "speak" ?   Given the ancient Egyptian attitudes toward magic and the written word, I'm curious how how much of the poem is a spell.  

Hieroglyph Flashcards

As part of my Intro to Hieroglyphs class, I've made some flashcards as a memory aid to the uniliteral phonetic hieroglyphs used during the Middle Kingdom period in Egypt.  Between visits to the MET and various books I've picked up over the years, I seem to have about half of them memorized already.  For the ones that I don't know, I've had to make up little stories to remember their sounds.  

𓄡  is a mammal's belly (and tail), and makes the "ch" sound in the German word, "ich;" so I had to come up with the rhyme, "We want a pitcher, not a belly "ich"-er.   Not to be confused with

𓍿 which is a rope hobble, and makes a "tch" sound, like in "itch."  

𓐍 is something Egyptologists debate (is it a loaf of bread or a placenta?), and makes the "ch" sound in the word "loch", so I pretend this is Nessie's (the Loch Ness Monster's) eye.  

𓂝  looks like a Boston valet's arm and hand as they offer to "park the car", and it makes the ayin sound, which is broad "a" sound.

I'm not sure if I have a favorite hieroglyph.  It would be something like 𓀆 (to purify?) or 𓇽 (star) or 𓇱(night?) or  𓇰(storm?)  or 𓆈 (a gecko) or 𓆣 (scarab; to manifest ,to become)

I'll have to make flashcards for bilateral and trilateral signs next.

July Dragonfly

The dragonflies have been patrolling our yard.  This one seems to be a regular.  I'll have to look up what kind it is--they're common in this end of the valley--it's probably a flame skimmer.  

The cats haven't been in the yard much because of the dog.  However, they're venturing into it more and more, which will probably make things harder for the small flying creatures that have had a cat-free spring.

 

Researches

It has been a slothful Sunday morning.  I woke up a little sore, and elected to transition form sleep to waking in a hot bath.  Further indulgences included an outside breakfast of half an avocado, black tea, and Pop Tarts.  

Mark, ever more industrious than I am, especially in the early mornings, has already varnished a new bench he is building, planted lavender seeds, reduced a pint of raspberries for a desert topping, harvested some poppies and foxglove seeds, and done general weeding.  

Spurred to some action, since breakfasting, I've photographed some new sunflowers, photographed some violet flox, trained stray grape vines back onto their "arbor," spread a few poppy and foxglove seeds, and now I'm writing while finishing up the last remains of the tea.

On the writing front, "Doors of the Past" has been released at Abyss and Apex Magazine.  So far the reader feedback I've gotten has been very good, and I'm pleased that the story has found a home.  

On the NeoPagan Readings Front, I picked up a copy of Storm Faerywolf's Betwixt and Between (2017).  No Hot Gay Male Pagan Secrets so far--and it may be a bad assumption on my part, based on Faerywolf's orientation, that there are.  Some of the "poetry is truth" and pedigree statements about Feri in the introductory chapters in B&B prompted me to dig up my old copy of Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (1994), by Cora Anderson.   I'm not the biggest fan of the testimonial style in Fifty Years, (although it does remind me a little of the cloak and dagger insinuations of Dion Fortune) and Anderson has a whole pile of axes she grinds in her sixty-three page book.  But it does explain some of secret traditions and midichlorian count faerie-blood claims (and in turn reminds me of some of the writings of William Butler Yeats on Fairy Doctors).  I'm also tempted to contrast and compare with Starhawk's Spiral Dance (1979).  B&B appears to pick up in chapter three; I really appreciated the part where Faerywolf brings up time management as a skill witches should have in their toolkits.  

In other news, I'm taking an on-line introductory course in reading Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphs.  I'm telling myself it's Story Research, but really, it's so I can have a better idea what is written on various artifacts at the MET.  The biggest insight so far (which I should have realized before the class) is that Middle Kingdom Scribes had a C.S. Lewis-Discarded-Image-esque symbolically mystic relationship to their written language that is different from the modern, Western, information-revolution, scientific tool of description relationship with our modern alphabet and written English.