More Paradise Lost in one month. I missed out Day 7. Today, I reached Book 3, Line 653.
God has said that humanity can be saved only through grace, but so as to satisfy divine justice, another must step forward to pay the price of the coming sin. There is silence in heaven (interesting!), until the Son offers himself (L 236-241):
Behold me then, me for him, life for life
I offer, on me let thine anger fall;
Account me man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased, on me let Death wreck all his rage
Jesus is confident that he’ll rise from death, but he’s prepared to go through hell first, so “admiration seized all heaven” (L 271-2). God the Father replies, very pleased with the Son’s decision. The best bit comes in lines 305-312, a meditation on how power and prestige should be exercised:
Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
God-like fruition, quitted all to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By merit more then birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being good,
Far more then great or high; because in thee
Love hath abounded more then glory abounds
The angels appreciate God’s speech and raise a song of their own, lasting 72 lines (L 344-415), corresponding to the 72 people Jesus sent out with his message in the synoptic Gospels. Also, by tradition, there were 72 angelic names. In Milton, it seems, no word is there simply by chance. The angels’ song is one of praise to God an account of the previous victory over the rebel angels, and praise to the Son for the love shown in offering to die for humanity.
That’s the scene in heaven. The action then switches to “the firm opacous globe/ Of this round world, whose first convex divides/ The luminous inferior orbs” (L 418-20) where Satan walks, the sphere of the fixed stars and planets, outside both heaven and chaos. The place is lifeless, although later all vain and transitory things will fill it like aerial vapours. It’s probable that Milton based this idea on various satires and comedies depicting a limbo of fools and didn’t really take it seriously himself. The builders of the tower of Babel would be likely to end up there, as would those who seek Christ on pilgrimage to Golgotha (when he is risen) and (rather mischievously) those clad in Franciscan and Dominican robes. They would come near heaven and see Peter at the gates with his keys (an unbiblical concept Milton is satirizing), but a sudden wind would blow them “ten thousand leagues away” (L 498).
But at this time, the whole region is “unpeopled and untrod.” Suddenly a ladder appears from heaven, a clear reference to the vision Jacob had of a ladder stretching to heaven, soon after he had cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright. Just afterwards, an opening emerges, stretching down to earth. Satan looks out on all this with wonder. After all the nothingness, this panoramic vision must have been astonishing. He’s not in the best of moods, after being taunted by the ladder to the very place where entry is impossible for him, but he’s definitely interested in the universe laid out before him. He flies in the general direction of the sun and soon he’s in a place of almost indescribable light (L 613-16):
Here matter new to gaze the devil met
Undazzled, far and wide his eye commands,
For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade,
But all sunshine
In the sun, Satan sees an angel (Revelation 19:17 – “I saw an angel standing in the sun”). He’s glad to find someone who might know the way to the earth, but realises that the archangel Uriel might not be too willing to help. So Satan metamorphoses into a cherub.
6 comments:
...72 people..sent out with (t)his message in the synoptic Gospels...Dandy and Beano and..Also, by tradition, there were 72 angelic names...and:
"There is a very intricately rendered tall tale - or joke told-straight - in the 14C Book of Ballymote Ogam manuscript, recounting a clearly made-up event about Fenius Farsa; a mythical king of Scythia in classical antiquity, on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe and in the northern Caucasus, which is currently Kazakhstan, Southern Russia, Eastern Ukraine, Azarbaijan, Belarus, and some of Poland.
With two Irish men called Goídel mac Ethéoir and Íar mac Nema He gathered together 72 scribes and went to study the confused languages at Nimrods Tower on the Shinar plain in Mesopotamia, only to discover that the Tower of Babel had collapsed and the poets dispersed.
Fenius scattered his flock of penmen to study with the original linguists and stayed at the tower co-ordianting the retreival and ten years after his literate quest was complete, and 25 centuries later Wikipedia , the new re-incarnation , re-birth and ordering of the canon, the Library of Alexandria states:
"...and Fenius created in Bérla tóbaide "the selected language", taking the best of each of the confused tongues, which he called Goídelc, Goidelic, after Goídel mac Ethéoir.
He also created extensions of Goídelc, called Bérla Féne, after himself, Íarmberla, after Íar mac Nema, and others, and the Beithe-luis-nuin (the Ogham) as a perfected writing system for his languages.
The names he gave to the letters were those of his 25 best scholars....".
And when you say:
"In Milton, it seems, no word is there simply by chance", you are correct perhaps, but whether this is down to angels cannot be proved empirically and so:
"the angels' song is one of praise to God an account of the previous victory over the rebel angels, and praise to the Son for the love shown in offering to die for humanity."
as we all do, and Milton is the messiah of blank English verse, the first to go blind so extravagantly, and he excites and repels, is part of a double act, paired in prose wiv crumble well he knew Latin and invented summat so insanely out there it is every word appearing measured, slotted in to tarry wiv tar-quil's keedz bob and the scene in paradise is the "scene" in heavenly inaction that when switching to
"the firm opacous globe/ Of this round world, whose first convex divides/ The luminous inferior orbs"
Satanic spheres fix the stars walking and planets,
chaos outside both heaven and chaotic lifeless, a "placeless heaven" within though later, when all is revealed as vanity and transitory things, then will we fill with it, like water vapour and ariel Miltonic probe based bores on this idea of being in various satirical comedies and depict a limp limbo slam at the coffee shop, combining it with the first page of a cut up-write-in, straight f*** of unending pretense, fool who didn’t take it really seriously himself.
"The builders of the tower of Babel would be likely to end up there, as would those who seek Christ on pilgrimage to Golgotha (when he is risen) and (rather mischievously) those clad in Franciscan and Dominican robes. They would come near heaven and see Peter at the gates with his keys (an unbiblical concept Milton is satirizing), but a sudden wind would blow them "ten thousand leagues away" (L 498)."
~
Whatever floats the boat of inner freedom and the liberty of utterance in public as a concerned square doing it for jazz daddioo arh yer wunt it lar dee diddle consciousness, united we split, four way thrash, sport of consuming spiritual beings bob, bobbing to Cobbing, bunting for Bob, let rip the rood of wren and roach, pub and commonplace words we spoke back then, in the early eighties, still on stilts, out the game, doing research for a learning long line of ceaseless Ogham, where the 72 scribes idea is deployed and these are all named in a long list of documented evidence in its native poetic explanation for the coming to be of the root starting beat of gaelic.And Milton is great, but balance is needed, epics abound and ultimately Milton's project is wit devoid of wisdom, in the most practical of sense, that he roused the rabble to action, knowing full well his call, and some zeig heil hail him as a kinder antidote of poetic proof that a pc backlash is underway, expressing itself in the forbidden of Milton as primary role model to imitate convincingly as a poet on the make for source info, base line knowingness, here it is:
"The link between Ogam and Goidelic to the casual reader flicking through the Book of Ballymote cannot be grasped in a skim-read, if at all, and even from this short explanation, you will appreciate how a full study of the orthography of Gaelic is not a five minute job for those of us working to write in the perfect tongue using tricks found in language retrieved from the Tower of Babel.
Whatever the truth about the roots and evolution of the Goidelic language is, the material holding the clues is voluminous and proved impossible to crack.
Robert Graves, like Dante and Yeats, had a go at tackling Ogam and dilineating the holy grail of Western European language, but after a short way in the poet realises that Graves is only juggling a million snatched pieces of myth from the pan-European corpus, and offering us the blaze of sheer intellectual invention, lots of spark but no purchasing flame or single logical thread of extrapolation to convince any but those who wish to be led by his charisma alone, trancers lacking spiritual sustenance mistaking his his mumbo jumbo for literate druidic "wood utterance" or "fiodhradh," a tree-letter divination rite performed by druids using magical Ogam and a few twigs.
Graves whole premise starts shaky and is founded on very tenuous connections based on what his imagination wants to believe, asking an illogical amount of faith from us, and is too daft to amount to an argument whose startling blaze is in place of the absent knowledge his instinct sniffs but his eye failes to deliver in print. Although he knows his stuff, being a know all on Greek myth, one suspects a lot of smoke and mirror and bluffing, as by the end (if you reach it) he has juggled so many ifs and buts that we no longer follow (or care) as he lost us long before once we realised his blather was not about conveying knoweldge to a reader, but his poetic own-search and trawl, his theory much like Yeats' or Dantes' and thus the personal belief system each single poet constructs if they are to write serious critical prose on the subject of the straight art of faith called verse.
The White Goddess is his imaginative go at proving his knowledge of Ogam to himself and his father, an Ogam expert. Graves wanted to be the main know all on "wooden utterance," which is the invisible and silent tongue so tantalisingly unknown and misunderstood by most, the verbal shade all poets spend their career of ritual ram-raiding in the word-hood, seeking wordic booty and spoil in the life long prayer to reach and cloak their art crafty, unseen by the competition they closely watch and observing what knowledge within the rough weave and pool of self-hood can be tousled and osmosis out to be woven and washed in to a different composition.
A medieval poet, when compiling any set of texts, in the attempt to add - in his time and culture - academic weight to a deity who makes the poetry gig happen will voice from behind the many masks covering the gag of his oir her life and tell whoppers in the straight art spun with metrical yarn in a narrative stitched to such logically mindboggling lengths, that only the very committed reader can hope to unpick the thread of logic or unravel any sense from them, other than them being the gobs to cause contemporary ears to gasp in greening amazement at the pointlessness beauty of their sound.
Approaching the Book of Ballymote Ogam trieste illiterate, deaf and without some awareness of the wider Irish corpus, the poet is left with a confused impression; the half-glimpse a mild prod may not direct to understanding, as full cognisance involves a lorra intellectual ossification for the skeleton outline of a literate history to dilineate within the ollamh's intellect, these men living on forgotten pages only those seriously committment to he whose name stems from the Brythonic word for "raider," eye with any coherent cognisance of what Mangus was scribing on about.
The astonishing and incredibly complex Ogam de-coding procedure is so rarely done some claim the intellectual mechanism must be "inbuilt" (as well as anal, the Goidelic sound-raider might say) and this de-bars all but the most committed of Goidelic groupies to discern what incrediblely sophisticated level of cultural skullduggery went on in these Bard's minds, for the thousand years of Goidelic letters, life and practice.
The bards' business was fact, incredibly tall stories, needed for all the illigitimate children to an official pedigree when pledging to fight for the right to be a sweet singing wordy git.
Ogma is the poetry god who invented the Goidelic alphabet and gag-kitty, and secret knowledge of his letters lie in the mythical cranebag of Mannan mac Lir, a sea god - "Mannan son of Lir" - Lir being the shadowy ruler of time and deep space in the Goidelic pantheon. The magic bag from which the secret formula of the Goidelic language is supposed to spring out from when the the lucky druid got a grip of this slippery thing, made from the skin of Mannan's daughter Aoife, and containing nine articles that appear elsewhere in the myth:
"..Manannan's house, shirt, knife, the belt and smith's hook of Goibniu, the shears of the King of Alba, the helmet of the King of Lochlann, the belt of fish-skin, and the bones of Asal's pig which the son of Tuirenn had been sent to fetch by Lugh. The treasures were only visible at high-tide, at the ebbtide they would vanish. The bag was passed from Manannan to Lugh, then to Cumhal and finally to Fionn. The contents of the crane's bag correspond to the Hallows of Annwn and to the treasures guarded by Twrch Trwyth...."
This wizzards sound-satchel ended up in the hands of Fionn MacCumhal in the time he is supposed to have lived in the first few centuries after Jesus. Finns name translates as - Finn "son of slave-women," a "cumhal" being a female slave, worth three rare gold coins from the royal Tara mint, in a time when bartering greased business.
Like Cuhullain, Sean the Proud O'Neill Mor, but unlike Finn, Ogma - Father deity of the Tuatha De Dannan - was a shagger with lots of kids by different women and the de facto cosmic dictator, playing his role in the history of the Goidelic lingo and letters that route to a druidic order, who invented the Ogam orthography (precursor to proto-Oh ey) first writ on twig, branch, rock and which morphed into Old Irish in the 5-6C.
Ogma's name means "honey mouth." Hmm, Goidel is an oily shaping shade and deity innit? Sibling song of Gual, alive in the "oil," one of the "yes" in three languages Dante picked to mix in his trilogical three card trick he tried to construct the tower of babel with, much like the later magus Yeats did with his apologia "The Vision," which "I" Goidel bets is one of the most impenitrible poetic texts ever assembled, with a side pot in short odds that only silly Willy himself could poorly articulate - if at all - to the uninitiated poetry bore looking for canonisation, what he meant.
A Butler vision silly Willy never realised or finished writing, thus his final thought on the whole wordplay thing ultimately stopped at the point of his passing.
~
Did that play the butler wrote
Send men to their utterance
Casual or in full ceremonial
Saffron battle dress perhaps
As he waited for a wit to crack
Silly butler spacer-man moaning Sligo Amigo whose mind contained
Maghnus mac Melaghlin Ruadh O Duibggeannain - Manus "son of Melaghlin Roe O'Duigenan" - a "fili" or poet trained to scribe at Goidel High - Bard School, an oak in the wood of the tree Universities who wrote the Book of Ballymote.
Osborn Bergin knew Magnus well as he was a Dante shedding the Celtic Twilight literary movement on which an island founded itself at the revolutionary start of the 20C. Bergin was a man who connected to the spirit of Amergin, the founding professional historian, poet and genealogists who came with the final wave of invaders, the Milesians, and Amergin's number was glueing the various fictional strata of contemporary myth, to strands in the cultural cloak of Goidelic society, whose spiritual bond was literately snipped, as plantational fury pinnacled with the unleashing of Cromwell, champion of the common herd wishing only violence be brutal and swift, teach the scumbags no trick of "civilisation" to low to turn and murmer from the existential poetic cauldron of Amergin and Algihieri.
Magnus Roe O'Duigenan was from a clan of post-graduate professional historians and wood centric scribes, pledging fealty to a sept from the MacDermot kings of Moylurg in Roscommon, NE Ireland.
The etymology of Ireland is unclear. Whether it is Ir, brother of Amergin, or Eriu, daughter of war goddess Ernmas is unclear, as there are so many competeing blocks of data and fantasy that evolved during the thousand golden years of literature in the Goidelic civilisation, and Magnus was but a tiny cog scribbling along, in and through his span, weft in a tradition drenched in - and printed by - filidh poets tied to the iron age mindset, their ancient language a dinosaur, and nearing the final flush of it's maturity during Magnus' Medieval era.
To digest and yield a track leading to difinitive linguistic proof on the nomenclature of Ireland, leads the shadow chaser to the ghost of a potentially non-existent Ir, generally considered by the spacers in the know, as an interlopation by a poet on the make, claiming lineage to someone he made up who didn't exist in the official myth of a tribal history situated in the topography of outright fiction, created by an honorable bunch in the scam to explain how a swan seeded the bun in Ir's wife's Goidelic oven.
The essentiall bollix wrapped in an enigma posing as myth masquerading as truth depending on how daft an audience can be led to believe existence can be, is or descend to. One two three, the metrical diamond trilogical daemons in the O.I. card trick, one for each base, another for now and a spare to direct the readers inner pyschological floe, gettit?
The intellectual shag-ice a maestro of hocus pocus and wholly fictional non-existential magus in full telepathic powers, can slip on as his pathology collapses in the wieght of a disbelieving ear. The Moylurg of Magnus was itself a sub-kingdom the Connachta ruling dynasty bossed, who along with many competing branches seeking to become the apical founder of all island rule in a culture of continual war raid and invasion on Eriu daughter of Ernmas, sister of Fodhla and Banbha, singular aspect of the triple land goddess the Goidelic kings ritually wedded to when stepping up to the ultimate role of Ri of the tuatha and also sister to the three war goddesses, Badb, Macha, Morrigan aka Annan and with brothers Glon, Gnim, Coscar, Fiacha and Ollom, you can get a flavour of the shifting sands on which the history's written. It is interesting to note however that Eriu is the Norse and Saxon word for "land."
~
The Ogham trieste in the 14C Book of Ballymote was assembled one hundred years after Dante's "De vulgarati eloquentia" - "On vernacular speech," a work with clear parallells to the Goidelic tongue, also a vernacular which had been in print for seven hundred years when Dante first upgraded his Tuscan from vulgar to official vernacular.
Moylurg in Goidelic is Magh Luirg an Dagda, "the plain of the tracks of the Dagda." The Dagda is the apical deity in the Tuatha De Danna mythology, who are the penultimate peoples or "wave of invasion" strands of the Irish corpus of tall tales, that one finds in the verbal aeroplanes that spell - in lettered smoke - the sky, voiced not in vulgar "lingua d'oc" of Southern Europe Dante co-opted into his failed attempt to definitively blueprint the how and why Babel works, in De Vulgari eloquentia. As the Wikipedia author puts it:
"nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil" ("some say oc, others say si, others say oïl"), thereby classifying the Romance languages into three groups based on each language's word for "yes", the oïl languages (in northern France, Gual), the oc languages (in southern France), and the si languages. The word òc came from Vulgar Latin hoc ("this"), while oïl originated from Latin hoc illud ("this [is] it"). Other Romance languages derive their word for yes from the Latin sic, "thus", such as Spanish sí, Insubric sé, Italian sì, Catalan sí, or Portuguese sim...."
~
Magnus fits into the oil'ish myth, compiled from the dawn of the Irish printed utterence, and competing dynasties in the wider Goidelic culture - which had shrunken considerably to a small island on the fringe - stressed in femminine upsing and existed through a quirk of time accident and distance from the centre of an imperial force that snuffed out Gual and lit French to a Gallo-Romance language, as Goidel's Brythonic sibling fought it out with the waves of Dane, Saxon, Angel and later Viking culture, all vying for linguistic supremacy at the fringe of Roman speech.
Clients of Ceasar in the time of Caligula fought for a villa and back-up from the status-quo troops, drawn from all over Europe, North Africa and beyond all knowing the shrunken Goidelic spark flamed fierce in the quirky air, one days dangerous sail away, over - what in Goidelic mythology is termed - "nine waves," an apt, pointed shorthand blowing in the wind and whose eytomolgy belies it's simple poetical consistency.
This resolutely natural sounding bit of wordplacement fits the first shoe of metrical everffescent success , founded on the rule of overwhelming physical force in number, like being Irish and it's king a client of the from a apologia, historical ,Dante's ouevre and purpose."authorial artist to lend weight to their claim of being verbal magicians and an indispensible caste of "Nemed" status, their written history a thousand years old when the edifice collapsed after Henry VIII ginger issue began steering the intrique for her forty year ride, the queen king, ace knave and joker of the Northern European Renaissance.
Her face is a card in the poker game of history whose slender corporeal weight was irrelevant when infused with life, when the virgin queen was herself as conscious energy, divine princess no longer but Queen and ruler whose psychic hand dealt and dabbled in chess and specialised in bluff, her illusion conquering all at court with a policy of divide and rule. To her enemies she was an ace of hearts in michief and wickedness, who excelled in the courtly atmosphere of con and counter-con, triple bluff, unheard of skullduggery, but to her servants she was the hefty bluff in their quest for power in her name in the golden age of English letters, when it took its first gulps of air as a living vernacular, 300 years after Dante's essay.
The bluffing poet can also extract using the first trick in the book of verbal illusion, by inverting the similarity tool, to expand into uncharted space of poetic meaning, the binary whose fixed, neutral state is always weighted to lilt with upsing or alliteratively positive snag, acoustic barb of immeasurable weight when spoken, but for the anal poetry bore, the grain of agitation at the centre of their search for verbal oyster as they dive, find, prize and methodically discard, extracting a use for whatever turns up, catches the eye, the spoken pearl of singular basic return.
~
Luminous is the light and dark, a trick of accident and chance, volume, selection and the learner in language tries to cultivate this femminine effevesence and charge for linguistic expansion, as the plough and star in their field of literate force, going red drawf of imploding, absence or coruscatingly "there" in the moment of mimesis, making kicks as an artist shelling their string.
Both Dante's and Magnus' works, to amatuer and bluffing professional alike, convey the polar opposite cultural charges of the tradition in these two men. Dante is the positive, overflowing force who effectively invented modern Italian, by combining the different written Medieval Romance dialects of Latin Europe , the Oil, Oc and Si, to create the template for modern Italian, in his own uniquely literate ideolect, stunningly sensible for imitation as his voice sought any word from an speaker.
As Mahon said, its the acoustic profile a poet tunes to over the years, how the sound of a word dilineates to fit the self-made blueprint of utterance the aural object must specify to for the artists whose names were crushed as Goidelic society collapsed and the "fili" (poet) lineage - stretching back to an originating druidic pool doing all the important talking during the pre-literate iron age, aristocracy, were snuffed in a short sharp slap, the twighlight unbreaking the dip of one
Sunset strip shimmy through window slats
Edging across a bone white wall and beech
Wood floor with mole knots dotting the faded
Grain.
As dusk draws darkness in
Peeling back the pith of light
Opaque forms appear in pale shadows
And cast a chill spell in the night air.
A ghostly clan seep
From the otherworld through pictures
On brick, visit the room filling the hours
Before dawn with an aroma of spirits
Spectres and long silent ancestors.
Their fuse of flesh life lit and left
As a pyramid of past
We’ve no cognisance of, the human
History, reality chained existence
To an unfathomable entity.
A void of unconsciousness
No man or woman will speak
Of until humanity detaches, sings
No more of distress, but happiness.
Dip header Dereks off again:
"realistic homegrown tradition and something more experimental and cosmopolitan"
Reffering to Higgins and Magahern, saying
"I think maybe Higgins' time has come."
Mahon continues, speaking at home in Kinsale, at the Aidan Higgins at 80 Weekend where his life and work are being celebrated, poetry getting affirmed.
LEARNING OUTCOME
Have a putsch Cull the duffer hack,
please Ms can I make a suggestion?
Ring in the imperial vibe,
enthrall the colonial chavs
let their bitching be the cause of slit psychosis,
the latest mental tick must have, try out lifestyle-tourettes
fashion victim loving scuzzy black dress scag goddess scrummy
scummy septum sniffer, pure image, cosmetic slap, remote con
of the beautiful one, self unexceptional
hanging, awaits love to come calling when detox is over
a back-pocket bung, reward for the long haul, O'Cuiv, O'Higgins, O'Ward O'Daly and literate septs in lettered combat,
poison in satire, outright lies bought and paid for, truth the Gordon knot comrades, the loonies detach, brutal, vicious, rude back-slang patois of chat illegible to the uninitiated of God knows where, some kip in Ipswich
where soul survivors on a lost weekend reunite , Caister on the Norfolk Coast, unattractive Britonic masses go mad, middle aged idots dress as tarts, pimps and traffic wardens for the fun night out spent searching for a craic in their mid-life crisis,
immortalise the memory of fat people wearing next to nowt
dressed for a masque ball of boring Albion soul circa Wigan Casino, '79
Blondie at the height of her power, yeees. ~
Tommy Eliot is stern
Kappa Kappa Gamma media chav slappa
bore I'd not heard of...
"but I have so many squares I want to compete with right now...wait a bit..plan to go right and devour :
Nogzi: The Tweeney Implosion and Wayne: The True Crocky, Mandy Motions new soccer stat. bio on Rooney McLoughlin doing a bitta blue bizz in the hibiscus border
grannie Beeb and a BBC Radio Four tranny locked in a bog in the corrider blowing Andy Crowley's mesmeric allure. What a book!
What a writer! Check out Mandy and learn to avoid offence when care free commenting above the line his art's holiness is tenderly banging on to Joanna about, after not bumming but noting an awareness, adroit and ambidextrous with identity shifting on bank of self.
Experience a confused buttercup, let love be its verbal first divination, twig it, the bore behind the comment that's being offered on the box?
Will You Ever Feck Off Out Of it
Whooa donkies bonking ponies
Eddy, just as were getting too cozy.
There is a brilliant writer in Galway (moving to Cork) whose blog The Arse End Of Ireland is on the roll.
She's the psychological front-of-house, ecstatic knowing quotidian power of non-stop slagging, Sweary say:
"fantasise about travelling back in time to Leaving Cert year, just for a week, with the unshakeable confidence and shit-stirring glee that's developed in me since, and I'd create such ginormous ripples in the teenage psyches of my nemeses that they'd be dribbling in wheelchairs by the time 2007 rolled around. Teenagers are vicious. Adults are vicious and much, much more imaginative."
Cooor What A Shocker Sweary Sweary McInerney
"When I reached this place"
It was all very various
All very today,
Verily MacNeice Scowling Graves lost
In thicket-foe of fawn, dawning Doe-eyed Mexican
Genral op Mick and Boston prof Ricks
Affirm the songstress with
"a complex about being... the same kind of tenacious little bitch that all the pretty, damaged girls were, and she'll get great marks in Irish, and wash her hair every day, and get everyone else's names wrong..." not that
"The wit was indelicate
The wind well timed
Eloquently blown from a branch
Of a language tree-spelt and
Rooted in the lingusitic silt
Of a profuse and shrouded past
Elegantly polished silken
Whitethorn blosom, which litter
This wind-drenched land Sidhe (shee)
Shucked empty of myth
"I pulled a nice pint, which kept the ould men happy, and I wore tight t-shirts, which kept all the men happy. I wasn't the chattiest of barwomen, though. You wouldn't have found me huffing my way through hyperbolic scandal like some sort of bedhopping Coronation Street character. I pulled pints, I took money, I gave change, and I watched TV. I didn't really go in for the ould interaction.
Why this, you might ask? Ah. Well, you see, in the Arse End Of Ireland in particular, you have what's known as the locals to put up with. Your regular customers, in the pub trade, are your lifeblood. Grand day, isn't it? It's supposed to stay like this all week. The wind's got a bite on it like a starved Mary Harney on a toffee apple, but it's good for the few blades of grass you call crops, isn't it?"
Oh what a terrible way to carry Denise Riley,
"I don't want absence raw
..this beautiful...rain lyric
..a pool with an eye in it."
Pallster sweary McInerney funnily slagging to us, Connacht people's investigitive gonzo princess with the gob from a cast-list of Viz,
do you remember the day when a ghost
besuited in white offered assistance to Randal
Hopkirk and the figure who re-drawers
the Rubicon
Everyone nodding
No sodden boys
It was all very
Unexceptional
Very Tommy Stearns
Viv
Viv betrothed to Eliot
Imagine what returns
To sharpen the tooth
God, invert the dog
When glory glitters
Humminbirds bent,
beat meaning God
Ezra looped in the sky
Insanely content believing
Inversion reversed us God
Animals who suffer
The ecstacy
Tom
Tom
Bolw Tommy blow
"Whispers and small laughter
Between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters
Meet
Bowspirit cracked with ice and paint
Cracked with heat. I made this, I" may
"Have forgotten
Remember
The rigging weak and..canvas
Rotten...my own..garboard strake
Leeks, the seams need caulking
This form, this face, this life .....
The awakened lips...of time
Beyond...speech unspoken
...granite islands toward my timber
And woodthrush calling through the fog"
Comes verily discreet the one who knows
"Irish people won't let anything like the tragic or mind-boggling personal stories of others get in the way of their flapping on about themselves, as in Ireland, no one listens to anyone; they just wait for them to stop speaking..."
Sweary Sweary you shit hot bitching amigo, before switching on to gas under my own identity pedal; do you know the succesfull execution of the island accent is the only true test of a non Irish actor's ability, effable McInerney?
"Sure, how long were the English putting us down and ignoring our heritage? It's no wonder the nation matured into one full of windbags, and each with our own fecking personal geography...."
Tis true I assure you
"regulars.. wear you down, you know, drive Mother Teresa into the arms of heroin, so annoyingly monotonous are we, come in, sit down, get Guinness, and sup it til it solidifies, interjecting every twenty seconds, "Lovely day". Every twenty seconds. Lovely day. Lovely day. Lovely day. the reason I turn out so twisted."
But at this time, the whole region is "unpeopled and untrod."...Oh no it's not:
"Suddenly a ladder appears from heaven", a clear reference to me bobbing the vision roberto, Macca a Jacob cracker mad as that hard hat "of a ladder stretching to heaven"
..soon after you cheated my brother Esau out of his birthright Bob, you minger, just a ponk ass duel after the real Bhards, "an opening emerges, stretching down to earth" and Bob, Satan does not "look out on all this with wonder" after all, what is this nothingness you are on about, this trancey state of hey man,, cloudy art, "this panoramic vision must have been astonishing" Rob, an angel no less, which is?
Instinct manifest in person and print, voice and vice versa the knock knock of not being in the best of moods, after all, s/he is being "taunted by the ladder to the very place where entry is impossible for him" s/he took in two and nurtured in the triads, traditionally passed, ear to lip, documented, all there, proof prosaic, poetry always in the hands of the O'Dalys, Wards, O'Higgins, and many more, so s/he’s definitely interested in defying the universe to fly the general of sun and soon, to "a place of almost indescribable light (L 613-16):
Here matter new to gaze the devil met
Undazzled, far and wide his eye commands,
For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade,
But all sunshine
Sun the Satan sees in an angel Revelation 19:17 – "I saw an
angel standing in the sun"
S/he’s glad to find us who know might is a wan care of one know all, their way on earth, or a canon of feck of you grunt, c*** f*** of foolish cool but what race realised the arch angel Uriel who might not be all as s/he seems, as too willing we help Satan Bob, selling our real self to Satan for a crumbie mention by an ex-poet-in-residence of a phone box every other sunday, 4 till 5 AM, and metamorphoses into a chav.
Desmond, you have far too much spare time on your hands. And, I imagine, blisters.
Rob, I'm impressed by your unflagging devotion to Milton. Will you survive this 'month in hell'?
I got some critical tomes on Milton out of the library yesterday, so will start boning up soon in order to make the odd erudite comment. Until then, well done ...
Jane, we all have the same amount of time on our hands, so i can't really get what you are trying to say, unless it is an attempt at humour, and in that case, it is a very easy joke to direct at me, knowing i suffer from depression and have major addicton issues. Please do not hold it against me for being a junkie hooked on playing wiv words Lady Laureate, or hate me for being a scummie chav unable to fake feeling superior, my life a mess of seeking poetic attainment, excluded by those like yourself who are less charitable and very droll, who likes to organise and boss about..erm, i mean help people your Ladyship Maam, Milton i am not interested in as much as the four cycles of irish myth, and i know you are very busy being important, and thank you for the support: dedicate this to you, please forgive me for being different, whatever you say is so deep and connecting to half the planet, as self appointed gob on a stick, like me, from the earliest dawning:
The story of the composition of the Senchus Mor made, in the words of those who wrote the introduction to the work:
The place of this poem
and place of the Senachus
is Teamhair in the summer
and autumn, clean, pleasant
during these seasons;
at Lisanawer the stone
of Patrick in place during
winter
and spring, near to fire
wood and water,
on account of its warmth
in the time of winter
cold, and the Senchus
composed at the time
of Laeghaire the son
of Niall, Ard Rí na
hÉireann, High King
as monarch Theodosius
was in the world
at that time, mid 5C,
and in commemoration
of this the poet said:
"Patrick baptized with glory
In the time of Theodosius.
He preached the Gospel without failure
To the glorious people of Miledh's sons.
And the authors of the Senchus were the number of the persons of the Senchus.
Laeghaire, Corc, Daire, the hardy,
Patrick, Benen, Cairnech, the just,
Rossa, Dubhthach, Ferghus, with science,
These were the nine pillars of the Senchus Mor."
The the author of this poem was Dubhthach Mac ua Lugair, royal poet of the island wo/men
The cause of the Senchus Mor having been composed.
And here the berla na filidh
language of the poets
whaddya know of it Milton
didn't taste the light much
ending in flames of inner
combustion, experimental
gate-keeper: exclude, moan
whinge on Milton, headest
of high up starts, Oxford
Milton, spread the message,
messiah poet in dodgy love,
in a practical sense of going round the Windsors and executing them, telling them, your the one the arts council sent to instruct them in verse, as part of a commisssion, for diversity and inclusion, all of us equal right to be a victim, particularly Milton, the poor lamb, took in an educated in the spires of privilege and rent himself a state sanctioned poet in an age of anarchy and now his defenders taking the brass, chest decorations, tops and tails, sir milton is my greatest infuence, such a monarchist man, erm...sorry, does my un PC credentials show my arse is where it's gob should be, as a very pressing gob on a stick..Exclusion is when a fat lady sings, "get out!!! your banned coz i can't take the competition, from a a man stopping my dream of being real, a ha, Milton, Extinction, state subsidised whingers and whiners, all the regional coffee shop laureates, silent at the back, laughing fodder, get lost, exclude me the messiah, i mean Milton from your gulag and tell all the rest they are crap, masquerading as a man a tad too obsessed with the career, 9-5, tea towel slogans for female empowerment, Milton was the man..
Interesting that you bother to pick out the numerical strands of Milton. (Babel seems to have inspired some on your blog). Clearly, you are following Fowler. Fowler does not quite explain the imagery here. Milton was well aware of Kabbalah (the true version prior to Madonna!) In this tradition, 72 represented the many names of God...often envisaged as a wheel. So, in effect, the 72 line hymn encircles God with his Holy Names. Central to Milton's mysticism in Paradise Lost is the Mystery of the Chariot of God. The 72 lines of the Hymn split into a 28:44 arrangement. And the 44 lines divide 22:22, to centre like the whole of Paradise Lost on a Triumphal Chariot. (These triumphal arrangemenst echo across the cosmic surface of Paradise Lost). There are layers of implicit imagery in Milton that the modern mind reads over. Good, that you see the structural images in Milton.
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