Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I just turned the radio on while eating my lunch. A pleasant female voice, singing in Spanish, the lyrics vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite decipher them.

Then she got to the chorus, and I was singing along before I thought about it: "Guantanamera." One of the songs I grew up with, thanks to Pete Seeger. When I was sixteen or so, I was hanging out at a friend's house, and there were a bunch of other people there, mostly Dominicans [1]. It was someone's birthday, and they were improvising a song about him, in Spanish. I didn't know him, wasn't close to fluent, but I joined in on the choruses, and seemed to be a little more part of the group.

Literally, a "Guantanamera" is someone from Guantanamo. Yes, that Guantanamo. Too many layers of significance. One verse has the singer stating her (or his—I learned this from Pete) sympathy and affiliation "con los pobres de la tierra," the poor of the world.

It's not that history is a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, it's that it's layered, like Schliemann's Troy, and what we write changes meaning with time. I found myself explaining Flanders poppies in a comment last week, after casually offering one in response to a post elsewhere on LJ about 11:11. "Someday no-one will march there at all," and I never doubted that lyric, but neither did I think about that "someday" as something that would be part of my life.

[1] La Republica Dominicana, not monks.

I asked wild_irises to remind me when the apa deadline was, and she reminded me in theory 4 p.m. (Pacific Time) today, in practice this time 9 a.m. (PDT) tomorrow. I thanked her, noting that the former was impossible, the latter only unlikely.

I just sent her three pages (granted, half of it recycled from something I posted here in early May, but the other half first-draft), at 6:56 my time, or four minutes before the nominal deadline.

I try not to make a habit of it, and would have been worried had it reached 11:55 EDT tomorrow before I'd sent it off. As is, I'm amused, and will now go back to my tea.

My favorite jeweler, elisem, is having a clearance sale. Instead of splurging a whole $12 for this pendant, I'm taking on an artist's challenge, which means I'll need to sort out something that all those branches are pointing to, and what those pearls are trying to say.

[The precise phrasing of this post is part of the process, though I'll know much more once I have the branch in my hand.]

It's reading things and talking to people and going places that cause me the most trouble. Also listening to stuff and looking at stuff and doing stuff. Nouns, really. Nouns are a lot of trouble. Also verbs. Prepositions are mostly safe: aboard about above across after against along among...gosh. I remember more of the list Mrs. Stalker made us memorize than I thought.—mrissa, in a friends-locked post.

Spoof/farce version number 2:

Same set-up, warnings, etc., but this time our trysting couple are, again, from outside the UK, and haven't done much research. So they find a slightly lopsided stone "circle" in a field, and are going at it, when they are interrupted by giggling eight-year-olds and a middle-sized friendly dog. A few weeks later, they find out that the supposedly ancient monument was put up by a 20th-century eisteddfod that should have hired a geometer. I am not making this up: the standing stones in Singleton Park aren't even a convex polygon. (http://www.welshwales.co.uk/swansea_city_life_attractions.htm mentions it, but doesn't mention that it isn't round.)

In response to a thread on alt.poly, I sketched a quick horror-movie plot. And now I've got people saying I ought to write it as a short story.

To do that, I'd need something resembling plausible characterization. Given that all I know going in is that at least one of these people thinks it would be "cool" to have sex in a stone circle or passage grave, and is sure that if they ask whatever spirits may reside there for permission, they can trust the answers they get, making them even two-dimensional might be difficult.

What I have at the moment is two youngish idiots, one male and one female; one or more "resident beings"; and (in the movie-plot sketch) an older man who lives nearby and does the "I told you so" routine. I think the ominous music can go.

elisem, what exactly was the Breton phrasing about nobody knowing why the monuments were built?

( more details, including the Usenet post )

Ken MacLeod has posted his Boskone Guest of Honor talk to his Weblog, with the heading "where I get my other ideas": some of the roots of his thinking and writing. He starts off by saying that he's tired of talking about Trotskyism, libertarianism, and cyberpunk, so instead he's going to talk about landscape, religion, philosophy, and real science and technology. (If you prefer it as an LJ syndicated feed, it's at http://syndicated.livejournal.com/kenmacleodblog/38723.html.)

[I went to post this to my "real" Weblog <http://www.redbird.org/yawl.html>, added an entry for a cool science result cattitude pointed me to, and realized that I seem to consistently write my Weblog entries in the present perfect, as above.]

Like sisters, the cameraman says, praising our closeness. Is this how humans love their sisters, trunks entwined, a large love more sexual than their little bodies can encompass?

Everyone I know is my sister, mother, aunt, child, or Grandmother. Grandmother loves us all fiercely, never as close as I to my lovers, too wise or too careful for bodily love, for singling out just one or two of her daughters.

We, we are old enough to know this desire, not so old that we must turn from it.

Trumpeting at the purple evening sky, shouting our love to the world, to the herd, always to each other, a long low song of joy.

( Note )

I have accepted elisem's challenge, done a couple of very minor revisions, and sent her my piece. I've also spent some time happily googling for pictures of elephants, and not attached any of them.

(I'll post it here next week.)

I'm not sure these exactly count as "works in progress," but I might go back to them someday:

• You can't hide a dodo in Central Park: eager binoculars spotted it within the hour.


• Chloe liked Olivia. [1]

[1] My nanonovel, and yes, I know it's not original.