Ussins

I’ve been very taken with a tune I found (and what it necessarily has to do with Christmas re the album I have no idea, and I’ve otherwise been nonplussed with this artist’s work). I’d kept thinking it captures my feelings about Nem-nem’s arrival, and that I’d like to use it in my video here depicting my idea of that. I’d kept meaning to look up the song origin and finally did. I at first mistook it for one of many old Scottish folk tunes but it was apparently written by two Germans in 1982 for a bagpipe festival in Scotland. It’s called Highland Cathedral. Two prominent sets of words (at least) have been written for it; I very much like this set:

There is a land far from this distant shore
Where heather grows and Highland Eagles soar
There is a land that will live ever more
Deep in my heart, my Bonnie Scotland

Though I serve so far away
I still see your streams, cities and dreams
I can’t wait until the day
When I’ll come home once more

So Lord keep me from the harm of war
Through all the dangers and the battles roar
Keep me safe until I’m home once more
Home to my own in Bonnie Scotland

On first reading these lyrics, I was overhwelmed by the coincidence that the tune both expresses my feelings about Nem-nem’s birth and that these lyrics are so similar in several ideas to words I wrote for Mago’s Lullaby:

So together we’ll hie
Through the sky love, and fly
To the sunny bright places we’ll see
With the Irish we’d die
For our mothers would cry
For the days to be sunny and green

Both are songs of a fair distant land of my ancestry, both speak of soaring/flying, both refer to battle (that’s what I mean by “With the Irish we’d die”).

So Highland Cathedral is Nem-nem’s lullaby.

I’ve got Scottish blood, so I suppose it isn’t necessarily fair to give the Irish all the attention (as I do with my children’s nicknames). But I don’t have any children for England, or for Wales (yet), or..

I’m also struck by allegory in the words; Nem-nem arrives from a distant land she left (her place with God) to serve in a battle (the war for souls on this earth) and will long for her eternal home. So I sing it in homage to both God and my ancestors. Further, I hadn’t even realized when I wrote Mago’s lullaby that it maybe could work allegorically in the same way.

Here is the song with this video for Nem-nem; only it isn’t so “lullaby” here, though it can be sung that way and has been child-tested and found to work. It’s versatile. Click the image.

The stills in this are deep space photography which I color-alter, distort, zoom, pan, cross-fade, and change lighting of to give a sense of travel, merging into the opening sequence from CONTACT reversed and sped up. CONTACT had it wrong. In that film, pious scientists/priests repeatedly declare that the remainder of space without any life apart from Earth would be a “waste”. On the contrary I feel it isn’t about how far we can look or travel out there and whether it means anything to anyone else, human or alien, but how amazing, beautiful and meaningful it all makes our existence here. Not that life elsewhere isn’t compelling.

Incidentally, I hope my video, while philosophically in great sympathy with this amusingly distasteful schlock I found at YouTube, may be better. Even a little better would fill me with hope.

These were Tia’s comments on my video: “It’s good”. Later I sought clarification on this:

“So you like it?”

“I don’t like that music with it. This Scottish tune to that.. it doesn’t fit.”

“You’d appreciate it more if you appreciated Star Trek.”

(Derisive sarcasm) “Well, yeah.”

“You don’t remember [Star Trek II Spoiler!] show

“Did I ever see show

“Well, there you go. It’s really good, I recommend it.”

Today I confessed to Tia for the umpteenth time that my sleep habits are insane. She replied: “I think it goes back to my theory that for anything really out of balance in your life, you start with scripture study and prayer.” As soon as she had said this, Mago, sleeping in his crib and heard through the baby monitor, emitted a sudden, brief, intense gale of laughter, joyful almost to crying, over as soon as it started.

I think he likes that theory. And his laughter in sleep has recommended prayer and the like before. It’s like that. As a biased parent I’ll say that If the kid won’t sell that, no one and nothing will.

My wife is very good. This is of course always a contrasting statement, if you are a Mormon, meaning that I am very bad. But seriously, that she should recommend this while I.. need to go to bed this second! I will! Anyway, that she should recommend this to I, who am supposed to Lead (TM) puts me to shame. But this is good. She has a good idea there.

Tia’s old dog Rosie died in her sleep last Sunday night at her dad’s house. She’d been withering and vomiting and couldn’t use the bathroom in her final days. We went to say goodbye to Rosie on Sunday evening.

I wrote this for Rose - I of course miss people too but mabye just remember them silently. I don’t know if this has a form, and it went in silly directions I didn’t necessarily pick. This may be knowing bad taste - but for me it’s one of those terrible situations where sentiment overpowers it.

Out at the stair she met me
Waited for me to play
But now her weathered ages
Ask for me to stay

In a corner, behind the couch
On a bed where memory rests
The loneliness of departure
From the days we spent our best

Running circles, playing chase
Fighting over prey
Throttled out, devoured life
Bleeding to the grey

And grey is where she meets me
Now turning into black
I’ve come to say I’m sorry
For leashing too much slack

For leaving off, for leaving life
For trading sweet for bitter
For visiting too little
And it tastes like kitty litter!

But this dog knows and understands
That kitty litter happens
There’s too much life in this old dog
So litter only fattens

Though retching out the last of life
She tells me where it goes
It is not dog, but mighty God
Who has come to take this Rose

She won’t bear and I won’t bear
The retching for the wreched
And in her ageless sinlessness
She knows the Lord has fetched

For all our wrongs a better toy
Than any wrong could wish for:
A timeless life, an endless day
Where angel doggies soar.

Here’s a Triptych I did of him. I’ll update this post soon with links to the source images [yeah, right -2007-07-04]. Photos by Tia, selection, arrangement and titling by me. Click this image for a larger image.

Here are the originals from which were combined to make this.

[1] [2] [3]

.. are the things that I must do..

He’s walking all over the place all the time now. He loves the guitar and the one song I sorta play which I wrote (a toungue-in-cheek bit entitled NEW HOTEL - that’s a link to a crummy sketch recording). He wanders over to the guitar case and tries to get the guitar out, saying “Da! Da!” which I guess means guitar.

He’s invented a sign which he uses, holding a wrist with the other hand. We don’t know what it means.

In reference to my recent [sadly dull and desperate] post about pants, I’ve had an idea for new designer pants. Whereas current pant design trends send a message of being used by a sweatshop/company, I’m going to wear pants that bear a message of my son claiming support or maintenance from me. The other night I was feeding him a bottle at bed time, and out of nowhere he erupted a great load of milky vomit all over - himself, the chair, my shirt, and some smallish splatters and streaks of it got on my new pants, and the floor. I haven’t yet washed the pants because of business. But I’m thinking, maybe I’ll just leave it. Maybe I’ll work up the motif further with notable splatters of milky-white glue, small dried chunks and smears of seeming food trapped therein. That is my idea. What do you think? Think that will be “all the rage”?

(This is blatantly and particularly churchy. Anyone disinterested may skip it without offending me.)

Yesterday I was thinking a lot about Joseph Smith’s “First Vision”, as it has come to be called, when God the Father and God the Son appeared to him. Actually, I was thinking that there may be many earthlings who have seen visions of God the Father - Lehi in THE BOOK OF MORMON apparently saw a vision of God:

.. he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels.. - THE BOOK OF MORMON, 1st Nephi 1:8

In the late evening Tia related a comment she heard in Relief Society - which of course I didn’t hear, not going to the women’s meetings in my church and it’s a comment I hadn’t heard before anyway - it is that people have looked back through records of the weather in the year Joseph Smith had his vision, and correlated these reports with Joseph’s comment on the weather the day of his vision, to guess that his vision was probably on March 26th. Joseph’s weather comment is in this verse of his witness:

So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty.. - JOSEPH SMITH—HISTORY, verse 14

Apparently the only clear day in early spring of that year was March 26th.

Blatantly, I see it as more than coincidence that I was thinking heavily on the First Vision on the apparent anniversary date of it, unaware. If it’s not the anniversary, the synchronicity of thought is striking. None of this is proof to me; only signs (I see a distinction between the two), if this hearsay is verifiable. Whatever the case, my faith rests on more certain things.

.. Another significant coincidence: about mid-two-years ago I woke up thinking I should get in the Christmas Spirit (as it were, and I never really did, and I often am abysmally not in that spirit), and that it was probably halfway to Christmas. I didn’t know it literally was until I looked at my calendar and calculated. I forget the date now as I don’t consciously track dates. I unconsciously track them. .. I could doubtless benefit from consciously tracking them, except that now I’m curious what other signs I’ll find unconscious, drunken and not with wine..

Tia called me at work to let me know he took a step from the bed toward.. the computer. Um.. I don’t know what kind of omen that might be. Anyway, he was standing alongside the bed and wandered off [holding both arms in front of him (update: I reported this a bit wrong at first writing)], stood balancing on both feet, took a step forward, [stayed balanced for a short while, and grabbed the back of the chair in front of the computer. Tia said he was laughing and just full of joy through the whole adventure].

[Tia doesn’t write here often because she’s not a blogomaniac. No, not even for the children. Well, the child. Actually she said she wants to - but I think this will do for this.]

Also he has five teeth and one more coming in. And he gave me a gentle affectionate vampire bite this morning.

Also I forgot to say that at church last Sunday we passed a glass case in the wall, and he reached for it after I passed and went “Hhuuuuuuuuh!” - I said “What?” and moved for the case. It was full of antique and modern Boy Scout pariphinalia, and he ogled at all of it. When I caught up to Tia again, she asked what we stopped for and I told her - and when I did, he grinned from ear to ear. So he might be really interested in scouts.. which he’ll probably be ready for in what feels like a blink.

Oy.

I loved scouts.. only for the campouts. Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges! .. maybe he’ll want them. I have no doubt I’d have been very proud to be an Eagle Scout. I don’t even know how far I got.

Something I read reinforced an I suppose innate idea I have that kids need nature, the wilderness .. but I don’t think it’s any different for adults.

And a note from church.. the Elder’s Quorum president talked about how he was kind of creeped out when he was younger that they blessed (dedicated) his house - he said maybe it’s because you normally bless sick people, or something else I don’t remember, or, I sardonically inserted, a grave, which made people laugh.

I learn from an uncle that when I was very little, maybe 3 or 4, at a baptism I was roaming around while a speaker preached about the Holy Ghost. At the mention of the term, I exclaimed in a high pitched, emphatically expressed astoundment: “The Holy GHOST!?” and continued wandering around. The speaker continued and soon repeated the same term, at which I exclaimed in the same manner but more intensely: “The Holy GHOST!? *AGAIN!?*”