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.