Twinkle, twinkle, pretty spindle, let the white wool drift and dwindle

Reference

John Francis O’Donnel, A Spinning Song

Note

It would appear to be thing. Two references so far both male poets.

Both examples relate to love, one wants here lover to appear the other is weaving the padded doublet for Armour in war.

Both examples relate to love, one wants here lover to appear the other is weaving the padded doublet for Armour in war.

and fleeter than a faling star: Amid the surging ranks he’ll go

bä, to do, the symbol used is a hoe (be33),

The red tiger serves as our steeds

                                                                       bä (be33)

Here  the spinning wheel is bä (be33), it threads, words, time, desire, hope and love, in the low slow murmur of the wheel.

Image

Frontispiece, The Sportsman’s Dictionary Containing Instructions For Various Methods To Be Observed In Riding, Hunting, Fowling, Setting, Fishing, Racing, Farriery, Hawking, Breeding and Feeding Horses For The Road and Turf; The Management of Dogs, Game and Dunghill-Cocks, Turkeys, Geese, Doves, Singing Birds, Etc; And The Manner of Curing Their Various Diseases and Accidents.

Old post.

Stuck for a last minute gift idea for that special person. Byssus recommends

“Leave a tub of these lying around and watch the fun from a distance!”

” I pray for the next customer.”

“After the period of ripeness, most fleshy fruits undergo a new kind of alteration; their flesh either rots or blets.^*

* May I be forgiven for coining a word to express that peculiar bruised appearance in some fruits, called blessi [sic] by the French, for which we have no equivalent English expression ?”

Emphasis and footnote in original, and though written as blessi, the French word for bletted is blette, and Lindley coined “blet”, suggesting an error in the text.

 

Reference

Wiki

Candia Comes Clean, Medlar Jelly (Kelmscott)

Note (The Familiar and the Changeling)

Fruit is allowed to blet before being made into ripe tasting jam or jelly. Being somewhat contrary, examine the rotten end of the spectrum and how the measure and rule of jam making judgement’s play out on a cosmic scale.

Between Fire and Wall

Next an example of Irish storytelling and an example of how its altering and taking a more literary form.

Contained in a letter sent by John Dunne to the editor of the Kilkenny Moderator (a newspaper) in 1850.

I have sent you at length the legend of the spinners exactly as I have heard it from the lips of the narrator who told it in Irish.

This in itself is a standard formula in storytelling ‘ I tell the tale as I heard it and no word of it is a lie’

Newspapers became a way in which these tales could still circulate and be consumed both at home and abroad.

Tales need a home for the telling, and in this period the context, home, hearth, family is becoming fragmented, as the population moves from rural to an urban setting, or takes to the waves to Glasgow, , Liverpool or Manchester, or further transportation from urban industrial hubs to Australia, America or Canada.

Working and middle class taste for ‘tea time tales,’ that could be spoken or read out loud in printed form. A distinct literary style emerges, it allows for communication across the vast  distances opened by the industrial processes of modernity.

A thread through the labyrinth.

These are stories that speak, of who people are, where they have come from, what they have lost and what they can find again.

Not a thing of the past, what is found are the creation of new national identities and of maintaining difference within them Glasgow Irish, American Irish etc.

In turn it allows modern nation states Like Britain and later Ireland to create new relationships of economic and political influence in the guise of the ‘Mother country.’

These are working objects and they are worked in a number of ways. They are not the playthings of misty eyed romance.

This is the age of the nation state and of empire.

The study of folklore and folktales has had a relationship with the Administrative classes, long before the establishment of the nation state. Important form of data in understanding how populations function. Its a subject which has long pertained to the Emperor.

These forms have always been of the wind and the sea, moving along the old trade routes from old worlds to new.

The relationship between folk a messy and entangled affair.

Note

Wider context is not relevant to the task at hand, but thought I should include it. Make a vain attempt to pretend I know what I am talking about or what I am doing.

Context is distinct and despite appearance has a relationship with today’s media.

A dteasduigheann bean sniomh uiat? A dteastuigheann bean cardail uit?

Do you want a spinning woman? Do you want a carding woman?

There are seven sick-maintenances most difficult to support in Irish law: maintenance of a king, maintenance of a hospitaller, maintenance of a poet, maintenance of an artificer, maintenance of a smith, maintenance of a wise man, maintenance of an embroidress, For it is necessary (to get) somebody to undertake their duties in their stead, so that the earnings of each of them may not be lacking in his house.

Reference

Aine O’ Neill, ‘The Fairy Hill Is on Fire!’ Proceedings on The Symposium on the Supernatural in Irish and Scottish Migratory Legends.

D.A. Binchy, Sick Maintenance in Irish Law

Games demonstrated by Ibrahim Suleiman used sound properties of the lithophone. A stone rolling game involved one or two players letting stones roll over the ‘back’ of the nugara, as well as a game in which a stone was thrown from a distance, bounced, rang, and came to rest on the horizontal slab. The most recent use of the cup marks involved a mysterious liquid that had been observed in some of the cup marks in 2009 and again in 2014 and 2015, which was revealed to have been the result of a (now discontinued) local tradition of small boys aiming at and urinating into the cup marks on their daily toilet trips. Mohamed Gibril Saad provided nearly a century of perspective on the recent use of the nugara and how it was played. He stated that, when he was very young, the instrument was played communally, by children and by adults, and only one hammer stone was used by each player. There was no specific occasion for rock gong play, which appears to have been a pastime with some people playing the rock gong, others dancing and singing. During his childhood, the visitation and play of the nugara was temporarily discontinued when a local resident observed a female devil or spirit in its vicinity and the place was deemed dangerous. Mohamed Gibril’s son, Ali, volunteered information on how he witnessed the nugara being played. He recounted that one hammer stone was used by each individual, alternating between two cup marks. Rock gong play would be coordinated with other players, who would strike neighbouring sets of cup marks in an agreed rhythm. This account brings an added perspective to the archaeological study of the Dar en-Njoum rock gong, which isolated pairs of cup marks that may have been played together during two-handed play. In the recent past, pairs of cup marks were indeed used, but during one-handed play, with each set of cup marks representing the space a person would occupy when playing the rock gong.

Secret Island of The Han(d)

The Asu concession covers 90 km in the Great Bend region of the Nile River, west of Abu Hamed, in northern Sudan………. 23 new rock art localities were identified and documented……….. Depictions of rhinoceroses, camels, goats, dogs, birds and anthropmorphs, as well as geometric motifs, were also documented. Compositions included depictions of animal-animal interaction, such as a dog chasing birds, and human animal interaction, such as anthropomorphs riding a cow or bull, or holding cattle by their tail.

During the 2009 survey, the rock art landscape also was found to comprise an acoustic aspect in the form of rock gongs or lithophones…………… some located in proximity to rock art and others some distance from art sites……….. One of the largest and most extensively played was found at site ASU 09-26. On its upper surface, more than 100 percussion zones and cup marks were identified, roughly circular or oval depressions that formed over time as the rock surface was struck with hammer stones. These physical traces of producing sound testify to the popularity of the ancient instrument, which would have beeen played by numerous individuals or groups of people over a span of thousands of years. Because it is situated amongst graves and clusters of tumili that appear to date to the Kerma period (c 2500-1500 BC) this rock gong was- at least for part of its use life- located in the center of an active mortuary landscape………………………

Rock gongs are defined as ‘ringing rocks used for the production of musical notes by Bernard Fagg (1956,31), one of the first to describe rock gongs on the African continent. His definition conceptualizes them as musical instruments separated from sound and soundscape and noises produced by daily activity, ritual and sonic environments. Technically, the correct terminology is ‘lithophone’, a type of idiophone that is an object with the potential when struck to make musical sound without the use of strings or membranes. Lithophones may be natural objects, may sometimes be sound tools rather than musical instruments, and their use may be a part of wider activity rather than as a separated musical behavior.

Reference

C. Kleinitz, R.Till, B.J. Baker, The Qstar-Sudan Archaeological Project- Archeology and acoustics of rock gongs in the Asu Bone, The Sudan Archaeological Research Society Bulletin