Breakfast and the Sunday paper. Then opening the email I first see the Marriem-Webster’s Word of the Day. Very appropriate and one character Merlyn would enjoy.
The Word of the Day for May 1 is: Beltane \BEL-tayn\ noun: the Celtic May Day festival
Examples:
Aunt Kat vividly described the huge bonfires and colorful rituals she had
witnessed at the Beltane festival in Edinburgh as a girl.
"Meg said that Beltane eve was one of great natural power. Blessings and curses
abounded as the veil between the worlds thinned." -- From Traci E. Hall's 2010
novel Boadicea's Legacy
Did you know?
To the ancient Celts, May Day was a critical time when the boundaries between
the human and supernatural worlds were removed and people needed to take special measures to protect themselves against enchantments. The Beltane fire festival originated in a spring ritual in which cattle were herded between two huge bonfires to protect them from evil and disease. Perhaps the earliest mention of Beltane (formerly spelled "beltene," "belltaine," and "beltine") appears in an Old Irish dictionary commonly attributed to Cormac, a king and bishop who lived in Cashel, Ireland, toward the end of the first millennium. The "Beltane" spelling entered English in the 15th century by way of Scottish Gaelic.
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You hesitate, orndorff, because you think I am going to entice you to place your ‘Indian Hill environmentally nurturing times’ created poem: “Beltane’s Eve” here.
It was in the early eighties and I was attempting to ‘think’ Druid-like creatively. I wanted to ‘feel’ the projection of being a Druid for authenticities’ sake as I had been working a novel around such a character (though I forget his name). The setting and plot dealt with Caesar’s confrontation with the Druids in France and his ultimately unsuccessful invasion of the Druid’s Isles. That’s my recollection. The hundred-page draft is in the basement and I no longer hold the interest. If I remember correctly the poem was one of light humor and upbeat. And, on one May Day the class visited the famous cemetery in Cincinnati though presently I can’t remember its name. We were reading Waugh’s The Loved One, and I thought it would be an appropriate time for a field trip. Besides, the Spring setting of the cemetery is very naturally romantic. Spring Grove Cemetery, that’s the name – forty miles of paved road within the hills and its many famous trees and tombs. The much more famous Forest Lawn Cemetery in California is based on Spring Grove if I remember correctly. Many cultures remember their Dead on May Day. Here, we remember them at the end of the month, Memorial Day. At least they are remembered.
Post. – Amorella.
Just after noon, and you just put down Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom by Charles Beauclerk. If it is to be believed, and you mostly do believe it, although you may be related to the De Vere’s, you are not related to Edward, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford who was supposedly the bastard son of Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour and fourteen year old Elizabeth, his step-daughter (who was being raised by Henry VIII’s last wife, Catherine, who remarried the Lord Admiral).
I enjoyed the book. What insight. What insight into the plays and sonnets. I feel though, it was too long, too much circumstantial evidence that I found myself questioning its over-delivery. De Vere, the Earl of Oxford, still is placed as the best choice of Shakespeare with what I humbly know. If I ever discover the truth, that is, read of its discovery with smoking gun evidence I will be delighted to know it. How one man’s mind could create such theatrical order is beyond my reasoning. Perhaps Beauclerk and others are correct, politics, power, and incest are the drivers. What a terrible way to create the greatest works in the English language; well, along with the greatest works of Chaucer and Milton.
Post. – Amorella.
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Last night you had a terribly strange dream. First, you were in a restaurant with some old college friends and from there you were all on a local bus heading down High Street from Clintonville (north end Columbus). As the bus was turning onto a side street there was an accident up ahead, a car had overturned. Next, you were off the bus alone looking for your friends – somehow you had misplaced them or they you.
You were carrying a strange package after getting off the city bus, it was the color of a paper grocery bag but it was a baggy sweater covering up a grotesquely distorted human head. The teeth were broken and yellowed, the nose broken, and the eye sockets were slightly widened and thus further separated. The eyes were gray, cloudy covered. The top of the head was perhaps twelve inches wide and four inches high above the eyes. It was a man’s head but the hair was black, long, curly, matted and dirty like the head had been rolling around on a dirty wooden floor in a small long ago empty room or large closet. You carried it along and came to a run down bar and walked in looking for directions back to High Street to catch the bus back to Clintonville (you did not remember you had been heading to Ohio State University and also had forgotten your friends).
Four young tough guys with black leather jackets came up and said they would take the package and tell you where to pick up the bus. You gladly gave them the head because you didn’t know where it had come from in the first place or why you were carrying it. They took the head as if it were a prize and give you good directions not only to High Street but when you came out of the dark alley you saw the bus stop not more than thirty feet away, one bus was leaving going north and another was coming so you were sure you could make it back to Clintonville without any problems. Then you woke up.
The dream was in color because I could see the colors under the streetlights. It was a strange head; the skin was grayish from a kind of slow decomposition. I don’t really remember it weighing very much, about the weight of a large paper mache mask but it was a whole grotesque oversized human head. Thinking about it now it should have weighed the size of a sixteen-pound bowling ball, but it didn’t. It was a real head though. That’s what I really remember, carrying that head around the dark side streets of north Columbus about a mile before the university campus.
It is better to rid the mind of such dreams (they take up too much energy) by writing them out for personal introspection.
The dream does have a forward sequence. Go to OSU with friends, lose friends and pick up head that appears old and real, but it is too light, more like a mask than a head, probably carrying it in a grocery sack not a sweater. Bar people were mostly polite but they wanted that head, personally I didn’t care, I just wanted directions back towards Clintonville. I never really felt threatened but I didn’t like the dark streets and alleys. I was about to catch the bus so it was ending well. Any suggestions, Amorella?
It was your head, orndorff.
That’s weird.
Your dream, boy. Time for bed. Post. – Amorella.
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