Flee him, my heart - and hurry! -for I know all too well this love of yours.
My antic heart won't let me walk like others
but dances off when I want it home.
It will not wait to let me catch my tunic
nor stop to let me get my party fan;
It leaves no time to shadow eyes with love lines,
no time at all to oil my unloved body.
"Don't stand there waiting! Get inside!"
so heart says as I stand there full of him.
O heart, don't make my aching thoughts turn foolish!
Why, are we mad? who gave you leave?
(It's wrong!)
Believe it or not, that glorious poem was created between 1600 – 1085 BCE ... in Ancient Egypt, the New Kingdom era. Found in Love Songs of the New Kingdom, translated from the ancient Egyptian by John L. Foster (1974, University of Texas Press, Austin). Love the book, love that poem among many others ... but it made me wonder if I were reading an Egyptian poetess (in which case, she's astonishing!), or John L. Foster - he does say he tried to remain true to the idioms, syntax, etc., of the originals, but also says he used a certain degree of freedom in translation. I would love to see the original hieroglyphics and literal translations for this particular one, to see how he did his translation - although he does do that for some of them. Summary: a marvelous collection of love poetry.
Nothing like starting a job search only to find out that COMCAST has disabled your fax line, moved your home telephone to the disabled fax line, and never bothered to look into it, despite repeated calls. By the fourth or fifth call, they finally sent someone out and fixed it. (Meanwhile, I’d never given out my cell phone number as a contact, and my answering machine announced that I had 41 missed calls!) Another fun day with Comcast. Yet another reason why they’re one of the most intensely disliked companies in the entire country.
But on the “glass half full” side – finally! I got my SETI@home program to work. I signed on to that in about 10 years ago, and at some point it stopped working. SETI may be excellent at a lot of things, but Customer Service ain’t one of them – I’d continually ask for help and get no reply, so the program just sat there, idle, for the longest time. Finally, they offered a new version of the program to download that was much more user-friendly, and I was able to re-start it. I’m back to being mesmerized by the working graphics. And I’m sure my computer will be the one to process the unit that proves we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe! (Ahh, nothing like delusions of grandeur to cheer me right up.)
A topic they posted on their website basically asked, “What would the impact on society be if the discovery of life in space actually happened?” Their analysis was a great deal more positive than my own “off-the-cuff” analysis was. Not that I thought American society would degenerate into chaos or anything, but my own feeling was that the number of people who, like me, would react with a “Coool!” and a fascination to learn more would be relatively small compared to the number of people who would immediately toss the news onto their own political and religious accelerant bonfires ... making the news a lot more terrifying than it actually was. All we would have discovered was that life VERY far away (and at some time in the past, when you take into account how long it would have taken for it to reach us) used radio signals, not that they were planning an immediate invasion and the annihilation of a swarm of parasitic homosapiens in a galaxy far far away from them. But most Americans aren’t exactly logical, are they?I’m sure I should be doing something industrious, but right now I’m just basking in the goofing off of it all. Except for picking up the mail, there is nowhere I have to go or need to be .... and I definitely don’t want to battle pre and post-holiday shoppers anyway. I did trek back over to North Andover and take a good look at my storage facility there ... Dana is going to clear it out. and I finally won’t have to pay them anymore, thank goodness.
But I did find my mother’s teapot! Once I can find my iPhone cord, I’ll upload the photo. I thought I had lost it; apparently, I had packed and stored it. It’s one of those plain, much used variety of utilitarian teapots that bring back warm fuzzy memories of my mother. I’m in the middle of cleaning it out, using denture cleaner tablets – which have so many great uses, I’m almost sorry I don’t wear dentures. This was not the teapot she used for Sunday dinners or company – this was her own personal daily teapot. Dad did drink tea occasionally, but mostly drank coffee, so I always associate it with Mom.
And now for the amazing news. Apparently, I will be “celebrating puberty with Bob Cowsill” after all. They are having a 50th Anniversary concert on April 11th at The Cutting Room, celebrating their first record deal with Joda Records. You never saw anyone hit the “Buy Tickets” button so fast in your life. Then I had one of those, “I can’t believe it ... after all these years, I’m finally going to see ...” moments that almost felt like I’d reverted back to those days of hopeless idiocy I remembered. I still can’t believe it. Hotel booked, train tickets purchased, concert ticket bought ... methinks I’m off to see The Cowsills.
http://tickets.thecuttingroomnyc.com/event/754693-cowsills-new-york/
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