Log24

In memory of mathematician Richard K. Guy
and of songwriter Eric Taylor, 
who each reportedly died on March 9.

For Guy, some small numbers:

For Taylor, a link to the lyrics of his song "Dean Moriarty."

See as well this journal on March 9.

(More backstory — Posts on Nanci Griffith.)

Lughnasa — An Irish harvest festival.

"It was usually celebrated on the nearest Sunday to August 1st." —Chalice Centre

Related material:

1. Dancing at Lughnasa, a play by Brian Friel
2. Natasha's Dance, an entry in this journal
3. Dancing at Lughnasa, an entry in this journal from August 3, 2003

News from Belfast

“I was a child in the sixties
Dreams could be held through TV
With Disney and Cronkite and Martin Luther
Oh, I believed, I believed, I believed”

— “It’s a Hard Life
     Wherever You Go,”
     by Nanci Griffith

“Today we will witness
  not hype but history.”

— Martin McGuinness, of the
   republican and mainly Catholic
   Sinn Fein party, on today’s
   home rule ceremony in Belfast

Long Time Gone

Today’s hymn from KHYI, Plano, Texas…
(played at 11:15 AM Sunday, CST):

They got money but they don’t got Cash;
They got Junior but they don’t got Hank.

From the album Real Time,
by Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott.

Update of 1:50 PM EST…

Thanks, too, KHYI, for what may be
becoming my favorite Texas hymn
(played at about 12:45 PM CST)….

Love at the Five and Dime,
by Nanci Griffith

Morning Flight

“I’m working on a morning flight to anywhere but here….

It’s not the way you say you hear my heart
when the music ends
I am just learning how to fly away again”

— Nanci Griffith on KHYI.com, 6:45 AM

Click on the above yantra for deeper meditations from May 24 and 25, 2003.

See entries of June 10-14, 2003, for more on the symbolism of the above figure’s central two triangles, which represent Shiva and Kali united.  For the symbolism of the eight petals, see the eight-ray star of Venus in my Oct. 23, 2002, entry.  This is one interpretation of the eightfold “Spider” symbol

which plays a major role in the Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber (my favorite mythology).  This symbol, like the two-triangles symbol at the center of the eight-petal lotus above, represents “Shiva and Kali united in love,” according to Leiber. (See my journal note “Biblical Proportions,” written on this date in 1997.)

For a Christian perspective on the Spider symbol, see Quine in Purgatory.

For a different religious perspective on the two-triangles symbol in the lotus, see

You Don’t Look Buddhist,

Suzanne Takes You Down, and

Satori at Pearl Harbor.

Dancing at Lughnasa

“The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer….”

— Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

“And he sang:
‘Dance a little closer to me,
Dance a little closer now,
Dance a little closer tonight.
Dance a little closer to me,
    hey it’s closing time,
And love’s on sale tonight
    at this five and dime.’ “

— “Love at the Five and Dime,”
written and sung by Nanci Griffith 

“Going up.” — Nanci Griffith

Late Night Grande Hotel

“I feel like Garbo in this late night Grande Hotel
 ‘Cause living alone is all I’ve ever done well”

— Nanci Griffith, Song lyric

“…the thought of those dark three
Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.”

— Wallace Stevens,
    “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” 

“I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star… but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own.”

— Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

Thank you, KHYI.com, for playing Nanci Griffith on this, the feast day of Presbyterian saint Wallace Stevens.  She is not Garbo or Marie Trintignant (see previous entry), but she will do.

 “Beauty is momentary in the mind —
     The fitful tracing of a portal;
     But in the flesh it is immortal.”
     — Wallace Stevens,
     Peter Quince at the Clavier