Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Quite early his morning

  Quite early his morning, I watched Selene,the Moon herself, chase Phosphoros, the Morning Star, out of Nothingness.

No appropriate link

Stanisław Wyspiański: Eos, Phosphoros, Hesperus, Helios, black-coloured pencil drawing, The National Museum in Warsaw, 1897  Wikipedia.


 Soon Helios, the Sun God, . . .



. . . bestirred himself from Chaos' icy grip and chased them both.   

Phosphoros disappeared into the clear blue sky until evening, when she is expected to reappear resplendent, though now she will be as a guy, Hesperus,  the Personification of the Evening (Anton Raphael Mengs, ca. 1765) --




 -- Helios after Selena after Prosperous, only to be chased by  Hesperus as he; Helios, sinks again into apparent Nothingness;

into .  . .

as it appears, into the Great Eastern Ocean which stretches from giant flotillas of ice north and south only to settle into the warm middle of the Wold, kind to mammals and to me, sitting quietly on my back porch.

The Chase around or under the World that takes place each December and January is a tiny part of the journey that we take each morning, you and I and all of us

and everything, at dizzying speed; and none of us feels it a bit.

sitting quietly, a s it may be, on our back porches, or doing whatever creative or destructive thing that Ananke (goddess of Fate and Necessity) has in store for us


Helios, a normal star, circling the Milky Way galaxy rapidly, but with apparent slowness, given the great distance around


itself a medium-sized galaxy in our local group of galaxies


all moving toward the immensely powerful and still undiscovered Great Attractor, itself insignificant when considered a part of the our universe




Belief is easy if you are an attic Greek in 480 BCE: it's all up to Fate and Necessity;

tricky if you know a little cosmology and if you get your cosmology from one of several conflicting sacred texts. Belief in the truth of sacred texts gets mankind in a lot of trouble, as does unbelief.  We've been in trouble from the time first creaturet ate another, long ago.

and if you doubt a part  a sacred text, trust in the rest f it fades.  we human animals are in for a lot of trouble and so are elephants, dauphins, jellyfish, panthers and their kittens, because of us:  all except for germs are in trouble, unless we love more with more, well, love --  than we did last century.


Not much a worry, setting quietly on a warm back porch, watching the Cosmos dance its way around and under and through me, watching the grass grow..

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.  
  
Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;  
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;  
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;  
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps;  
And here you are the mothers’ laps.  
  
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers;  
Darker than the colorless beards of old men;  
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.  
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!  
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

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