Day 683 (Tidbits)

A poem dedicated to Blondepoet/Debbie Murray is what is in store for you once you visit Blake's Day 683 post over on THE 800 DAYS blog.

To my knowledge, Blondepoet is someone Blake has never met as she lives in Australia. I'm familiar with Blondepoet from a writing site we all frequent and so I have a special interest in this poem - about a person Blake and I both know of but have never met. I've read Blondpoet's writings online, too.

My fave lines of the poem:

• To write our poems and sing songs for people we shall never meet, and singing words to people who we shall know only inn our dreams,
• but never do remember when we wake from the walking sleep upon a morning glorious sweeter once it is weened

I'm not positive I kept with the line structure Blake intended for these two lines but I hope he will forgive the line manipulation in favour of my presenting the lines on my blog to indicate the powerful message about acquaintanceship/friendship over distances...

In my interpretation of the poetry, the narrator (possibly Blake, maybe an anonymous narrator within the poem) is basically saying - "Distance is NOTHING... personal connection with people is everything and is what is important."

I also like the end of the third line, the message, "[...] and our two worlds collide" - very graphic, apt, metaphorical but powerful...

I also really love the balance brought about by the last few words of the last line, "[,,,] like so many a fairytale completes." What an awesome way to wrap up a poem with balance in both temporal concept (distances bridged) but literal suggestion (end of poem, completion of fairy tale).

The Day 683 post is associated with Sunday February 6 2011.

Day 713 (Tidbits)

More of Blake's poetry is featured in the Day 713 entry over on THE 800 DAYS BLOG.

The first two lines of the poem set the mood and state unquestionable truths to hold in the mind while navigating through the rest of the poem:

"Everything lives in motion

Everyone is lost in chaos"

In my interpretation, these lines state the obvious, present state of things. In the temporal world of the poem, readers are quickly plunged from a present-day statement and into the truths of the past, the first 12 lines dedicated to addressing our current state of being and our world right now - and after line twelve - the words seem designed to take us straight to the ancient Elders and deities...

"As...

The temples of the Elders hold the magic

The sun god he predicts the final days [...]"

The words directly relate to ancients at the same time as to these these blogs, the 800 DAYS (Countdown) Project, as well as honouring what is known about the ancients, the Mayan Calendar, Mayan culture, past and present bloody and spiritual sacrifices that have been and are inherent in our world... A nice fusing of past and present.

The poem is artistic - but is also so much more. A condensed history of the past is contained in the words.

Here's a warning for you all...

The poetry is beautiful, attractive - so look past the beauty and into the messages here - THINK! Think hard - look for the metaphors, stop at the ends of lines to pause and THINK about what is unfolding line by line...

...the events Blake voices so wonderfully in his poetic words - are about ancient events - murder, treachery, transgressions against humankind's spiritual considerations - by other human groups - all of this runs so very deep in the history of the existence of people...

Perhaps using poetry to tell truths such as the ones here is the only way to make our historical wrongs against humanity available to a wide-spread audience. We're conditioned to like pretty things, right?

Kudos to Blake for inserting reality, past, present and truths into his works and not giving us cute-sie bubblegum eye candy passages in his poems.

In my opinion, the most powerful lines of the poem:

"But by the hands of a man

We followed the ancient rituals

But had forgotten the ancient pride

We surrendered to the legions our cities of gold

And we left our cities of stone, and our temples in the sky"

Perhaps if we keep reading, keep thinking, keep searching and pay attention to how to use our whole mind in the next seven hundred odd days, we will be able to understand what the end of the Mayan Calendar means but moreso - simply how to be human and humane to each other within this time. If a more sizeable "end" is coming, aside from a piece of ancient technology stopping functionality on December 21 2012, I'm sure that what is going to happen next is going to require that humankind be wiser and more benevolent than right now...

A strange quirk of the human mind is that - when confronted with horrors, it copes sometimes - in ways which makes us worse human beings. ie: we see war, murder and death, then our mind copes in a strange way by dissociating - which makes us capable of witnessing and performing greater acts of horror...

The way out of this tendency is AWARENESS and HUMANE-NESS and if poetry doesn't bring you to awareness and if Blake's particular brand of poetry doesn't bring you to humane-ness, many of us are going to remain truly as lost and in as much chaos as Blake asserts in the beginning lines of this particular poem...

Again, the lines are:

"Everything lives in motion

Everyone is lost in chaos"

If we can overcome our dissociations, people can't rule us in markedly detrimental ways. We'll either dissociate and fall down in our inability to confront horror (this will stop us from acting in any way that is detrimental to another human or living species - nobody can die or be harmed by our hand this way) or our minds and bodies may find a better way to cope and stand aware against detriment to our human species.

We can start preparing our minds for mindfulness and benevolence - by learning...

Go read the poem and start navigating through the concept of understanding!

Prophecy of the Azteca

The Day 713 post is associated with Friday January 7 2011.

Day 729 (Tidbits)

I'm going to go ahead and post some quotes I believe in - right before reviewing the Day 729 entry on THE 800 DAYS BLOG.

Why would I do such a thing? Well... just so you get the IMPACT of what Blake does...

The quotes:

"Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. "

~~Aristotle.

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

~~Allen Ginsberg.

"Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history."

~~Plato.

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences."

~~T.S. Eliot.

"Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to those who need it."

~~Unknown.

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

~~Carl Sandburg.

"Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not made accessible to science."

~~Sigmund Freud.

Unfortunately, of my fave quotes, almost all of them come from old, dead dudes - lol. I feel that in our current day and age, POETRY AND POETICS are a lost art, misunderstood and greatly undervalued. In ancient times, a great deal of time was spent on poetry and poetics in education systems. Today, many youngsters equate "poetry" with only "rhyme" that occurs at the end of every couple of lines of text or so, using the most commonly rhymed words - while alliteration, syllabic structure, apostrophe (not a punctuation mark - but an effect in poetry), synechdoche - techniques and effects - are largely ignored and even unknown to vast numbers in our civilized population.

I'm not sure how much Blake has studied poetics but his knowledge of how words go together, sometimes quite artistically - sometimes in powerful prose for effect - is worth looking at within the context of the quotes above...

Just take a few moments, please, and chill... letting the quotes above sink in... before continuing on to Blake's 800 DAYS blog.

What awaits on The 800 Days blog is

POETRY

Three Sections of Expression by Blake4d on The 800 Days blog await: "Autogenesis," "My Religion Is Not What I Want," and "Of Starlight, Crimson, and Scarlet: The Last Prophecy."

The Day 729 post is associated with Wednesday December 22 2010.

Day 769 (Tidbits)

Do you like Coffee or Tea? You'll want to take some time for yourself in reading about what's on THE 800 DAYS blog. Surely, if you've read some consecutive articles or done some reading of back to back posts, it's time to get in "artsy" head space for just a few moments. For the Day 769 post, what you'll find is poetry. If you usually drink coffee...try a tea as you sit down to read some poetry. If you normally drink tea - try some coffee. Try something different - DO something different than you normally do today... it helps - as poetry surely does - to build different ways of perceiving of the world.

Enjoy!

You'll still require a THINKING CAP, of course, but Blake's material for Day 769 is significant without being something that will hit you like a sack of hammers. I know, I know - sometimes the content for the 800 Day Countdown has been nothing short of DIFFICULT to wrap a head around so far - but Blake's piece, "Nameless The Goddess" is a nice change of pace for everyone.

Now, I wasn't joking about the thinking cap. If you want to know how to make a thinking cap:

 Free Thinking Cap (paper construction directions here)

I tried making a paper thinking cap... ended up with a conical sort of funnel thing that made me look quite stoopid while reading Blake's Nameless The Goddess poem... but I didn't/don't care. It's what's inside the cap that's important.

:)

Favourite lines of Nameless The Goddess:

Shield your eyes with my kind sighs

Cover your heart and its flutters

The silence will tame the beast

The dark will tame the beast

I don't know whose eyes and sighs are whose but this hasn't kept me from enjoying the blending of sense perception that we are asked to endure, imagine, accept in these lines.

ie: sighs are abstract - sounds - not material, physical things like a hand which might cover someone's eyes.

I enjoyed creating that sense/stretch or sense/mixup in my mind as I read what Blake's poetics demanded of the reader.

I went on to assume (but you don't have to) that the heart-covering and the covering of heart-flutters was also the domain/management of the abstract sighs - and THIS created a lot of physical sensation...I ended up sighing to "invoke," in a way, the ability to take this sense/blend far enough to use it to cover my heart.

I like that the silence and darkness are mentioned with beast...that's not "typical" in many poems where "beast" is mentioned. I like the new association I was just able to make with "beast" - with "beast" as being calmed in darkness and silence.

Normally, when I see "beast" in any literature or art, it is with the associations of:

• crashing noise
• loud roars
• some darkness but with the beast surrounded by flame, fire, sparks, etc
• the beast in semi-darkness but with the darkness in the background
• agitation (an agitated beast)
• violent movements
• agitated, forceful movements which create noise

With the newer associations, however, the beast is uncharacteristically attached to "calm" and "darkness." The beast no longer roars, nor comes from some moody, darkened landscape to leap noisily and violently into view...

Well - that's by my interpretation and via my imagination, anyway.  I hope you enjoy Nameless The Goddess by Blake4d as much as I did...with or without the thinking cap!

Day 769 is associated with Friday November 12, 2010 in the 800 Day Countdown.

(If you read this poem a couple of times in a row and find it "speaks to you," perhaps then you'll know - if you didn't before - why it is that arts and literature have so often been banned and put off limits in the past... Powerful...moving. Enjoy!)

Day 793 (Tidbits)

Don't let the short poetry bits fool you on The 800 Days blog for Day 793. You're going to see some rather pretty words at the top of the page but get ready to put your thinking cap on because not everything is "artsy" about the Day 793 material!

We were recently introduced to the topic of Magick on the 800 days blog, and Blake wastes no time at all with getting into some theories about exactly WHO might be using Magick in our day and age - also, some theories about WHY Magick is used by some powerful entities in our world, both past and present.

Please DO enjoy the poetry first before you go clicking around into the Magick related articles. One awesome thing about POETRY is that... there's a pleasant structure to poetry that can sometimes get the right and left sides of the brain working together. Basically, reading some poetry before launching into an intense article should help you to think, using both sides of your brain (connecting emotional right brain stuff to logical left brain stuff, at least marginally) instead of just launching into a text based article mainly using only your left hemisphere for thinking.

Poems offered in the Day 793 post:

• Kalyptos
• Protophanes 
• Autogenes
• Human Kind
• The Animal Kind

...by Blake4d.

Get ready for some really interesting concepts in the non-poetry bits on Day 793. There is more talk about Magick in this post and more than a few points are made about governments around the globe understanding that Magick exists in the world. There are definite claims that the government actually uses Magick on the people...an idea I don't find very hard to believe at all - however - you'll have to read and decide for yourself!

Either head to The Day 793 Post right away

Or check out the article Your Government Knows Magick - Do You?

Let me know which parts you find interesting...

The date of posting for Day 793 was Tuesday, October 19, 2010