morningambassador’s posthaven

I'm going to try something that posterous says is possible to do like this:

Attaching Morcheeba playing "The Sea" on the album, "Big Calm."
Hope it's really okay, or someone will tell me nicely, and I'll remove in a flash.

I'm putting this song on as my test in celebration of the Atlantic Ocean, 4 blocks away. I wish I had been able to get down to be there more while being here, but them's the breaks, and I DID enjoy every moment I was brought to see the lively blue roiling waves.

Here's to the Jersey Shore. May there be one for a while more!!!

I'm drawn to rhymes, but don't like them, really, most of the time. I write them and sing them to the kittens, though. Going against my tastes all by myself.

Of course, some poets write it to go down like butter or treacle; but not most.

Here's mine for tonight...

Cats are fed; time to go to bed.

Really, that's the best I can do today.

Shaky, weak, in addition to migraine - in a New and Exciting Way - not complaining, mind... just minutely documenting. It doesn't help a smidgen, complaining... at least it doesn't work well for me.

I've watched pretty much all the depictions of Hamlet's Ophelia, plus read the play several times, but I NEVER quite understood her character, so I sort of made up what I thought might be happening.

When I saw the 4 hour version, long as a 4-hr. sole sit through can be on certain muscles, I finally came to understand her through Kate Winslet's incredible performance and Brannagh's direction (and all involved!). :)

I thought it was as simple as love lost without explanation, but the manipulation, the evil behind it... she understood - and then broke like a bright piece of artful glass. When one's heart is open and sensitive, there is susceptibility and insight too hard to bear.

What a performance... but then, I think she always comes through with range, dignity, and truth.

Why do I keep finding myself in the Hamlet topic?

There you have it. Kate Winslet... may you continue long time!  xox

http://katewinslet-celebfan.blogspot.com/2008/03/kate-winslet-hamlet-1996-oph...

Tiger Crouching Underwater

What a work of nature! Gorgeous.

Link is in the picture itself.

There's a whole series of these, including one smiling.... ;)

"Oh Sorry! I Thought You Were a Neutral Vessel!" by Planas

I have been sorry all my life.

I don't know why.

For my existence or the time before?

For what I was told?

And so, I'm sorry now too.

Still early; I'll have a talk with myself.

Why, in so many of the predominant creation myths is woman seen to be troublesome or a punishment to man. Are we really that irritating and useless?

It makes me sad, but these stories also show the power in creation and birth anew that is apparently both a blessing and a curse.

According to ancient histories and art, many  of the  first communities were matriarchal... but time bore a stiff backlash.

The 'weaker sex' was blamed for evil in the world... restrained in some areas, contrained in others, 'second citizens' in still more.

SOME images of the divine are seen to be jealous, male, and vindictive, and their lesser companions petty and vengeful.

Why can't we all get along?I have some ideas, but I think we could try a whole lot harder.... and the only way seems to me to be to work on the one being we have a chance with - ourselves, Hard enough to get that in line before tackling world societies. And if we don't do that first, woe continues to betide us.

The story of Pandora is particularly fascinating to me as she was made to  be a companion and fashioned with curiosity as a punishment to man. This sounds so familiar to us, but how could there possibly be fault in it. She was made that way, conditioned to be that way, wasn't shown a different model.

http://greek-history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_myth_of_pandoras_box

The story of the first man, refitted later in history when many cultures turned vehemently patriarchal, held that the first woman was made second to man, in some cases from of a small piece of him - to assuage the fact that women were an important part of the creation and birth cycle -  and loosed evil on the world. A vehicle as it were. The gods' gifts were complicated...  a reflection of the complex ways that humans understood and projected their limited understanding on the world around them.

How can we understand the divine to be more than we understand about ourselves? Mysterious ways still sound a lot like the mysterious development of the human spirit through time.

Why is there war, illness, disagreement when all is human free will? We still have trouble with these questions, and so there are made to be answers... often at the fault of the feminine. Less often at the hand of the masculine.

If you have not read the Dostoyevsky chapter entitled, "The Grand Inquistor," it is well worth your time. A twist worth mulling over. What would happen if that situation and time were actual? The author of "The Brothers Karamazov's" rendition... or some other?

http://www.bookrags.com/The_Grand_Inquisitor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor

It is curious to me in the extreme, that among all the 'gifts in Pandora's jar/box/what have you... that Hope was placed in there too. Was it an afterthought... or  a sense of guilt through all-seeing eyes, or a deliberate experiment to see if it would be enough to keep these 'inferior' creations alive in a difficult world?

Without Hope, all is lost, I feel that in myself, deep inside.

At first, when all evils were loosed on the world, hope was the only thing that was caught alone - last in the box. Finally it was released as a conscious decision to assuage the damage done.

I really don't know where I'm going here... but it makes me upset that modern 'stories,' kept from the past, still blame women first and foremost. It is easy to blame them as they are mothers and sisters and daughters, holding the fabric of family and  culture together in important, but often subservient ways, but bound to that work as a result - deer caught in the headlights sometimes. I see it all over.... using the same arguments culture uses to blame themselves.

I know I've been imprinted with blame, from the moment I was born - call it original sin or something else. There is another story out there, and we need to find it or create it once more in order to survive as a species, I believe. Eve is cast as the gullible bringer of sin into the world; Pandora as the releaser of human trouble, save Hope.

I am so tired... but I know balance is the only way out of OUR diseased state of affairs. The coin of unity has two sides. The first split in the cosmic egg.

I am not saying ANYONE is at fault - just that a villain had to be collectively found for what was wrong in people's everyday lives... easy pickins were used, jealousy was involved, and balance must be found. This makes many people mad - both men and women... conditioned from birth to accept their roles. It drives some men to war against  'enemies' and domestic violence to climb ever higher. It drives some women to other crimes.

We must all get to a solution fast. People are being murdered every day, all over the globe, in the name of that most high, cast as only human projection can, to be jealous and angry, among other qualities. It really has always made me sad, as I have felt those shackles, as well as the freedom from them at times, swirl and plait through my life and days.

Which brings me back to hope. When the box is closed, and all seems lost... That is what we have to work with. It can change the course of history, but the hour is getting late... and as the hour is late whilst I write this too... I fret and worry. Doesn't help. Hard to hold on to the small voice that still whispers constantly in my ear to keep me moored to life to the best extent I can manage.

I know this is not a well-written or cogent piece, and I am not proud of it. I just don't know what to do... Perhaps I will think a while on the Lakota tribe's spider woman, who is still weaving our tale.

Hate abounds, and I really don't want it directed at me, but I woke up VERY early with this adamant concern.

Whatever will be will be, and our spirits will move on - maybe here or maybe not, but no amount of fretting will change that - only action and acceptance of what we are able and unable to do as a species NOW, for that is the only time that truly exists... ever.

Men have their own burdens too, and I feel for them, just as deeply. It's most likely that I don't understand what individuals create and sell to the world. All I know is that I have questions and concerns, and little energy or understanding to DO at this moment... anything. I do see people gathering and trying, more than at almost any time in MY life.

Sad. Tired. Hopeful? All I've done is try to express deep-seated observations and questions.

Painting: "Pandora (1896)" by John William Waterhouse

It's hard to know which face is the real one sometimes when you tend toward being a pleaser... especially when ill.

I take these things quite seriously - sensitive-to-others behavior. It's conditioning, I know, but also nature... Habits of a lifetime are a lifetime's work - or more - to untie those knots. And not throw the baby out with the bath water.

I was just told:

"Comedy is tragedy plus time."

I remember hearing that back in the day.

I was so sick the other night that I was trying to argue that King Lear and Ordinary People were examples of comedy by the classical Aristotelean definitions. The next day I was shocked by what had come out of my mouth... though it is enlightening - perhaps valuable on occasion - to argue the other side of the coin from what you have studied and imbibed and with which you agree. Mental exercise or what?

Things can change in a minute. Don't forget it. It might save your life some day. That and jumper cables and a first-aid kit and cell phone. And chewing gum, so I've heard. Don't forget that either.

Have you read any of Salman Rushdie's books? I know his predicament in the real world, but he has effectively built real worlds of his own, inclusive, symbolic, multi-cultural, humorous, serious. I find his main works, especially, stunning and astounding. Books like that I put down upon completion, and all I can think is to question the universe, "How does a human being write something like that?" I bring him up as he clownishly manipulates existential questions that trouble me.

I probably shouldn't write where the world can see when I'm feeling like this and in this state of mind, but then it wouldn't be balanced, would it? I guess folks can just look askance if certain entries trouble them. Rest assured my state changes during the day, the week...

Here are a few quotes by Rushdie and also a favorite of his books: "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."

"We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses: A Novel) 

This one is to fill out the first.

"We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners."
— Salman Rushdie 

"Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin."
— Salman Rushdie

And that brings me back to a previous post on writing... I should edit it in there, but not right now. Really. It's just the red shoes driving me on.

These days I often have trouble finding my words. I'll know there'll be the perfect word for something, and that my mind can feel it sparking through synapses, but I can't reach out and actually grab it. Often the best I can do is find the first letter, maybe leapfrog that way, or maybe I will give it up.

I'm stubborn, though, so that does not come easily to me:The Giving Up part.

Actions have convincingly been said to speak louder than words, but words can be actions too - in the right context. And all our emotions seem mainly to be transmitted by energy frequencies and nonverbal movements. What do you do if words are the main way you can do anything?

I've heard the term, "BEING is significantly more important than DOING," and yet I feel this urge to do, do, do... and all I have for raw materials are words, morphemes, letters.

That's why I'm writing about writing even though I don't like to put this self-referential type narrative out there.

It seems like it's not the direction in which I want to go, but writing is nothing if not a surprise.

I wish I knew whose quote this is, as:
-I should know, and
-they should get credit, and
-the person who read it to me most recently isn't here, and I'm impatient to get on with it, SO:

If I'm off a little, please forgive me. In fact I won't quote it at all, just sum up as I don't know it exactly, just the point of it:

'Writing is the surprise left over once everything important you meant to say is taken out.'

I really like that, and my experience seems to back it up... Like this.

Except I was too tired to find the puzzle called extraneous. Next time I promise to try harder.

Hard to think.

"Girl Reading Book"

http://suzanne-williams.blogspot.com/