easter yellow

Easter drink and card

I'm not sure when yellow became the brand colour of Easter. I suppose it owes a lot to chicks and daffodils.


Or is it the colour of resurrection, as in Tom Clark's poem?


and your childish mind would be ever alive, wondering
what kind of lounge furniture do they have in heaven
a cloud, awash in a soft spray of golden
yellowish light... God-light... perhaps extending a hand
or more likely ignoring your presence
as though you hadn't really died
yet, but were just being treated to a brief
preview of the festivities, which for that
matter didn't really appear to have anything festive in them
certainly no creaturely joy or solid colour or sweet wild song
for without the material world, how
throw together a halfway decent festivity?
Is there no change of death in paradise?

When they roll away the stone, does light pour in?
Are there, like... snacks? 
The idea of death
in the mind of a child
is an idea wasted on an unformed mind
way back when, in the pre-world
before imagination died
God would be there, in that spray of golden
yellowish light
coming out of a bright mist of cloud
through which one might walk
or fall...  that wide water
without sound
but for the soft calls of the wood doves
beside a pool in Palestine
along the Perkiomen,
the deer coming down to water, ...


From "Easter Lilies"
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/thomas-wyatt-there-was-never-ffile.html


In East Somerset, Mells Daffodil Festival (commonly shortened to "Mells")  is an important event in the calendar. It always takes place on Easter Monday.


But Easter and the blooming of daffodils are both moveable feasts. This year Easter came late and the daffs exceptionally early, so their yellow was just a distant memory by the time of Mells.


But in spring yellow keeps on coming ... waves of dandelions (once again, very early compared to St George's Day (April 23), the traditional day for gathering dandelions), celandines, forsythia, buttercups and laburnum. The latter two are really May sights, but not this year....

Laburnum, Swindon 24th April 2017 08:45

Cadbury Mini Eggs Easter Egg

Chair for sale

Ring around the moon, Swindon, 10th April 2017 23:14



The physics behind these fairly common 22 degree rings around the sun and moon is lucidly explained here:


http://turningmirrors.com/22-halo




The ring indicates that there are icy cirrus or cirrostratus clouds in the upper atmosphere, which could presage a change in the weather. And certainly this proved to be the end of the summery heat that had been building for a month since mid-March -- the cause of all that early flowering. But the rest of April, though colder, has carried on being almost bone dry. April showers? What are those?

oil painting by Christer Caramon

[Image source: https://myspace.com/christer.caramon/mixes/profilemix-355677/photo/78478976]




Just before this post hastens to its close, here's a portal to the multi-talented enigma Christer Caramon, outsider artist and musician with a glorious singing voice.




https://soundcloud.com/christer-caramon


Two of my favourite tracks. "Greetings dear Mollberg" is an eighteenth-century song by Carl Michael Bellman, relating the unfortunate experience of a musician who insisted on playing "polskas" during a time of anti-Polish hysteria. [Actually, the "polska" - despite its name - seems to be an entirely Swedish dance tradition. -- It is not the same thing as a polka, by the way.]


Text of Bellman's song Tjenare Mollberg, hur är det fatt? (Fredmans Epistel No. 45)
https://www.anacreon.de/se/bellman/fredmans-epistlar/fe45.php


[No longer available on Soundcloud, unfortunately...!]



The second, "Cecilia Lind", is a song by Cornelis Vreeswijk (1937 - 1987), Dutch-born but an immigrant to Sweden at the age of 12. He went on to become one of Sweden's best-loved troubadours.



And here's a whole 20-track playlist of Swedish songs in English...


[No longer available on Soundcloud, unfortunately!]

moonrise. saharan style

This is from the fantastically well-written Extreme Trifle blog. The Extreme Triflers are sleeping out in the Sahara desert. They've admired the millions of stars and have now settled down, but they're having trouble sleeping.

A combination of feeling slightly vulnerable in this place, the sheer weirdness of it all, and Charlie and Oz's farting which was always followed by a bout of schoolboy giggles. But then the mood changed a bit. "Charlie" Oz whispered. "Who the fuck is that?"

Just beyond the horizon was a shimmering light, small at first but getting rapidly larger. Our first thoughts were that it must be the headlights of a convoy of 4x4's. We sat bolt upright and stared in silence as the light source got more intense and then suddenly swept up over the horizon. It took a few seconds to register, but the convoy of 4x4's turned out to be...the moon. It was so weird. The moon is either in the sky or it isn't. We've all seen a sunset and a sunrise, but certainly neither of us had ever seen a "moon rise". Weird.

Eventually I'll bring this together with my other lunar meditiations. Anyway, the point is, that moonrises and moonsets are a lot more noticeable in a place where there's no light pollution.

the first book

In these clear evenings of early March, even a few uninterested passers-by must have been briefly diverted by Jupiter and Venus in such bright proximity, more or less in Aries - and the young moon passing close to both. And at the other end of the ecliptic, below Leo's belly, Mars is glowing pinkly.

We don't read it often, but it's a book; the first book of humanity. Animals perhaps read a little in this book: for example seabirds navigating on clear nights. It seems unlikely that plants have much use for it, except possibly the moon: biodynamic farmers may know more about this.

It is not an accident that writing and astronomy developed together in arid locations such as Mesopotamia. You do not do much star-gazing in rain-forest or on clouded Atlantic coasts. Besides, arid conditions are the best for making permanent records; they do not rot. In the short span of human life, many sublunar objects appear permanent: the local hilltop, the river, the large tree. Permanence is one requirement of a book that can be read by successive individuals. But the night sky is more book-like. It is two-dimensional. Its characters are small compared to its page. It revolves, so that like a book it cannot be read all at once; it imposes gradualness.

Vincent (comment below) draws attention to Abram's idea about the influence from tracking to reading. I like that. What both this idea and the night sky idea have in common is that they are non-linguistic. But of course the really obvious derivation of reading is from listening to someone talking (chanting, singing...); by the same token, the really obvious derivation of the book is from oral artefect (e.g. oral legend or maxims or ceremonial chant). After Derrida, we almost neglect that background, and we shouldn't. But still, there are aspects of "bookness" that are distinct and different from the oral interchange of language.

Gilbert Murray's generalized description of "the ancient book" in The Rise of the Greek Epic (1911) emphasizes that it was only quite recently that we came to regard the book as "something you read yourself". The nineteenth century was the classic era of private individual communings with the book; those marvellous portraits of pretty readers; Charlotte B's intimate address to "Reader"; &c.

The ancient conception of a book was different. You did not read it yourself. Reading was highly professionalized so, of course, you needed an expounder. (In my corner of the world it was Wyclyffe and Tyndale who eventually shifted this gigantic boulder of an idea.)

In the night sky, we see why you'd need an expounder. This book is not written by a human being and it does not have a language, i.e. interpretation does not depend on a pre-existing code.