In Pursuit of Mysteries

Poetry

I’m trying to remember a poem… I know it is well known and I’ve read it within the last year. I’ve heard it quoted off and on so I know it gets around.

I don’t remember how any of the lines go exactly (or I’d be able to find it).

The narrator (or poet) speaks about how our strength is not the strength of old (or the old heroes or gods) but what strength we have, we have. He speaks about enduring and striving with what we do have.

If anyone can recognize it from what little I can really recall, I’d appreciate you telling me.

Seven Sermons to the Dead, Sermo VII

Well, God rested on the seventh day or something and I forgot to post the last one. ;-)

Sermo VII

Yet when night was come the dead again approached with lamentable mien and said: There is yet one matter we forgot to mention. Teach us about man.

Man is a gateway, through which from the outer world of gods, daemons, and souls ye pass into the inner world; out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and transitory is man. Already is he behind you, and once again ye find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or innermost infinity. At immeasurable distance standeth one single Star in the zenith.

This is the one god of this one man. This is his world, his pleroma, his divinity.

In this world is man Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his one world.

This Star is the god and the goal of man.

This is his one guiding god. In him goeth man to his rest. Toward him goeth the long journey of the soul after death. In him shineth forth as light all that man bringeth back from the greater world. To this one god man shall pray.

Prayer increaseth the light of the Star. It casteth a bridge over death. It prepareth life for the smaller world and assuageth the hopleless desires of the greater.

When the greater world waxeth cold, burneth the Star.

Between man and his one god there standeth nothing, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.

Man here, god there.

Weakness and nothingness here, there eternally creative power.

Here nothing but darkness and chilling moisture.

There wholly sun.

Whereupon the dead were silent and ascended like the smoke above the herdman’s fire, who through the night kept watch over his flock.

ANAGRAMMA:NAHTRIHECCUNDE

GAHINNEVERAHTUNIN

ZEHGESSURKLACH

ZUNNUS.

The Tempest

R and I went to see a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by the Seattle Shakespeare Company. We had a good time and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at the play. The company’s space is a small theatre in the Seattle Center House at the Seattle Center and it probably seats 80 people at best and wasn’t completely full. The actors do their production with a fairly minimal set and were probably all of twenty to twenty five feet away from the two of us most of the time. I’ve never seen the Tempest before (only read most of it at various points) and it was good to see it all. The group is doing a production of Twelfth Night and the Taming of the Shrew during their current season as well.

This weekend was fairly easy going. R and I went out to breakfast Saturday morning, something we rarely do with our dietary restrictions these days, and then visited a travel agent to speak about our trip to Greece. We didn’t really get a sense that we were going to get a better rate working with someone so we retreated to home. I wound up buying tickets via Expedia after looking at various options. We’re going for less than $1,500 round trip for both of us (total). That’s not chump change but it’s a lot less than the $2,300 or more that I saw in places. We’ll be there the first two weeks of April and will leave on Easter.

We watched the second half of the long version of the Fellowship of the Ring and semed to get sucked into a lot of movies on TV this weekend. I also finished The Holy by Daniel Quinn this weekend and found it to be quite good. I’m looking to finish Psychohistorical Crisis this week (which I had put down because it is a hardback and a huge book and didn’t want to carry it on the bus). I’ve got a couple of books from the UK from some of my favorite authors there on the way so I can continue to be a Science Fiction snob.

Tonight I get to look forward to a few hours of Greek. I didn’t really study this weekend and class is tomorrow so I’ll be doing homework, reading and making flash cards this evening at home.

I’m still investigating schools for possible Graduate work. Classics at the University of Washington seems to be clearly out. I e-mailed the only prof with interests even related to my own and he just passed me off to the chair of the department with the addition of the comment that they normally only take people with a bachelor’s in Classics. Since mine is Cultural Anthropology and he also hinted about more than two years in both Latin and Greek (which doesn’t really match what was learning there) to get in, I’m thinking Religious Studies more and more. I was hoping to find a good program here in Seattle since R is looking at going to Graduate school at Seattle University in the next year or so as well and we have to mesh things between us.