Museum at Bath: Roman Gravestone of Vitellius [First Century AD]

Amorella here. The bits of history below are not my idea but orndorff enjoys looking up and disgorging such facts. This was also his nature when the Merlyn books were being written. In the books if the reader finds subjects of interest and Google’s them, sheorhe will probably be reading the same knowledgeable bits of entertainments orndorff did. Curiosity of this sort, one does take with herorhim, at least in the books scribed by me [through Richard]. Here is a quote and source from Google:

"Roman gravestone of Vitellius  [First Century AD]

This reads Lucius Vitellius Tancinus, son of Mantaius, a citizen of Caurium in Spain, horseman of the cavalry regiment of Vettones, Roman citizens, aged 46, of 26 years service, lies here.

Caurium is in western Spain, in the region of the pre-Roman tribe of Vettones, from which Vitellius' regiment was recruited. The cavalry units of the army were auxiliaries and were not usually recruited from Roman citizens, but this inscription states specifically that this regiment was.

Found in 1736 near the Guildhall, in central Bath.    

Height: 1550 mm.”

>  www.romanbaths.co.uk/explore/Object_Details.aspx?objectID=batrm_1986_5_5    <

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I can’t help it, Amorella. Google and other search engines, plus Encyclopedia Britannica are a marvel. I read my first encyclopedia in junior high for the pure joy of it. If I remember right, it was my Grandfather Orndorff’s new Collier Encyclopedia, twenty volumes (1953-55 era). I would borrow one or two deep red colored volumes at a time, starting with the A’s. It was great for junior high and high school students in the fifties. (I probably didn’t read all the volumes as one would a novel but I skimmed over each page looking for major articles to dive into which I then did as I trolled along.)

You are thinking you did not remember anything from those books, but that is not the case. Your memory of facts is encased in feelings, in emotions first then memory. Plus, it focused your mind on cataloging, which is what you still do. Loving to learn new things is a spiritual value in my book orndorff, again, whether you agree or not. – Amorella. 

30 St. Mary Axe

Amorella here. Is humor a spiritual value? Orndorff chose “weighty” as the most descriptive word for The Rosetta Stone in yesterday’s posting. Today he chose another photograph for the juxtaposition, the architectural contrast. While standing, camera in hand, within the ancient Tower of London he spotted what Londoners affectionately call “Gherkin” rising between the stone walls. Here is what Google came up with:

“30 St. Mary Axe in the City of London, affectionately known by Londoners as the Gherkin or the Erotic Gherkin, is located on the site of the former Baltic Exchange which was badly damaged by an IRA bomb in 1992. Controversially, the decision was taken to demolish the Exchange, a Grade 2 listed building.

The new tower looks somewhat like a bullet: circular, narrower at the base, widening on the floors above before tapering to its apex giving a distinctive outline on the London skyline. More than that, the distinctive new building has been designed to use 50% less energy than a traditional office block.”      > london.allinfo-about.com/ features/gherkin.html <

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I had to look up “gherkin” and M-W says it is “the immature fruit of the cucumber especially used for pickling.” The gherkin is a pickle. How funny. I think the building looks like a bullet. In either case, one sees the sharp contrast between old and new London.

Looking up humor in the M-W, I found this:

Humor: “TEMPERAMENT  *of cheerful humor*  c : an often temporary state of mind imposed especially by circumstances  *was in no humor to listen*  d : a sudden, unpredictable, or unreasoning inclination  : WHIM  *the uncertain humors of nature* 3 a : that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous  b : the mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous.”

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I can see from this definition that it is no wonder that Amorella says the Dead have a different appreciation of humor. Recognizing one’s self as being both dead and alive at the same time would have to be absurdly incongruous, at the very least. What else could one do but laugh or at least inwardly smile. And this is not even gallows humor which makes this concept all the more humorous.

Amorella again. I see the above as an example of spiritual humor. Others may see nothing of the sort. Modern humor leaves the ancient human spirit in something of a pickle though, does it not?

The Rosetta Stone

This is Amorella. Orndorff is pumped up, as it were, to see this photograph once again as it was buried away with others from the last trip to England in 2007.

I remember climbing the steps to the museum. I had only been there once before and I was excited partly because our old college friends, Craig and Alta, were with Carol and myself on this trip. The stone is one of the most awesome pieces in the museum and one of the first artifacts seen upon entering the place. Here is what Wikipedia says:

“The Rosetta Stone is 114.4 centimetres (45.0 in) high at its highest point, 72.3 centimetres (28.5 in) wide, and 27.9 centimetres (11.0 in) thick.[1] It is unfinished on its sides and reverse. Weighing approximately 760 kilograms (1,700 lb), it was originally thought to be granite or basalt but is currently described as granodiorite of a dark pinkish-gray color.[2] The stone has been on public display at The British Museum since 1802.”

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My point is that nothing is lost in translation on that stone but you have displayed your focus which is different than my own. Which is fine, orndorff, no need to work up some tethering piece about your Free Will here.

Imagine, if you will, the complexity of translating a work that has no words into one that does. Any time anyone writes words from a place deep down where words essentially do not normally exist there is a difficulty in first choosing the proper tone to propel the piece, this is then followed by the grammar, which is then followed by word placement within the grammar that fits the originally expected tone.

This reminds me of a good word, Amorella, nuance. Here is what Merriam-Webster has to say:

Nuance: “1 : a subtle distinction or variation
2 : a subtle quality  : NICETY
3 : sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value).”

It seems to me any time one is trying to convey what one is translating from the heart it must have a sense of meaning, feeling, or value or any combination of the three.

As such orndorff, here is a short assignment for you. Describe what the Rosetta Stone means to you in one personally meaningful heartfelt word. When you find and write the word below, we are done with today’s posting. By the way, I have to agree, it is the closest descriptive word for the Stone in your heart of hearts. No BS-ing just to get it done.

The descriptive word chosen is:   weighty 

Pigeon at the River

Amorella right here in river city with the pigeon and paddlewheels in the background. The Ohio is a bit off color, but then mud is expected in rivers from time to time. Orndorff is thinking about beginning book four on a new blogsite and forgoing formal self-publishing altogether.

This “off color” comment has to do with the impolite language that is used in the first three books doesn’t it?

We have gone over this before, orndorff. We don’t need such common vulgarities in book four.

Cursing other vulgarities are common in human thinking and verbal behavior.

Among the Dead such vocabularies don’t account for anything. I’ll find something suitable that fits the occasional situation. We don’t want to upset the idealistic sensibilities of the world wide web.

The pigeon in the photo reminds me of the old Tom Lehrer song, “Poisoning Pigeon’s in the Park.” > www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY&feature=related < Dark humor again, but it can’t be helped. One with less darkness but still Tom Lehrer is the “The Elements.” > www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8&NR=1 < I love his humor. It was good in the sixties and it’s good now.

What did you think of the new television show, “V”, orndorff?

The new production looks better than the 1983 production I saw Sunday on SyFy. I look for differences in style and they were easy to see. I think the original Terminator film and a few others of fast pace, and the CSI and FBI centered shows of today have their influence in this new production.

People expect a fast pace, lots of drama, characterization, and action depicted not only by the actors but by the physics of the camera also. The camera is a new dimension (to me) in this sense. Working the camera today is a dramatic dimensional addition similar to the music in films. Pans and close-ups, all kinds of fast-paced and still shots add an effective modern technological depth to the telling of the emotion in the story as well as to the setting.

This shows me the story-telling in narrative form is too slow and cumbersome particularly for younger people and non-readers today. People will wait for the movie version.

Not my books though, ever.

Why is that, orndorff?

You are leading me here, Amorella. You know why. You wrote books that cannot easily be translated to another language as a matter of point. You also wrote in an organizational ‘dream-like’ fashion that cannot be put on film with any literary honesty to the book. Shoot, even in English there is a very limited audience of curious and psychologically interested readers. If I had been found mad it would sell a few more books, but still a very limited and thinking and dark humored audience.

One either writes books for a particular audience or sheorhe writes books for herorhimself and possibly a few others. I chose the latter.

The Merlyn novels are self-poison for booksellers. No fancy paddle-wheelers for you. You are no fence-sitting pigeon either.

What do you think?  In today’s photo we two are as the air, orndorff, completely invisible and free.

I should hope so, Amorella. Being invisible and free is something you ought to be able to take with you when you die as well as to carry around within when you are alive.

Flower Lady of Santo Amaro Market

Amorella here at the weekly open air market Carol and Richard frequented while working in Sao Paulo almost forty years ago. This brings a smile because the woman was always friendly and kind and gave Carol a single flower every week. The Orndorffs’ always bought a bouquet, usually similar to the ones along the bottom left corner of the photo.

The point is that Richard has never forgotten the flower lady even though he doesn’t remember her name. The Dead do not know in advance who and what they will remember from life in the Merlyn books. Grandma’s stories continually reflect this conditional in death. Each of her stories through the three books is taken from a human individual, one of the Dead. A few of these characters will also be found in book four, The Rebellion. After all, they lived before the rebellion of the first ten thousand (or so) still conscious people in HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither.

This is news to me Amorella. I thought I had to create all new people for this book and I did, but I never have been able to get beyond the second chapter. I spent almost a year on those pages what with research and all.

Let’s show the reader an example of this work.

I don’t know what I would show, plus, what difference does it make, book four is not going to be written as I thought.

I’ll pick something.

What for? I see no purpose in it, Amorella. Obviously, I wasn’t on the right track otherwise I would have gone further. This is what happened in book two of the first three book series, Home (Stuck, Home, On Earth) that focused solely on the Marsupial and human species. I found myself in chapter two with no where to go until you intervened and the character, the Soki, (yourself) wrote with the help of another major character, Friendly, a Marsupial. Once I was not mentally (consciously) involved the book moved forward and on through book three.

Then, when I was ready to publish you suggested I add more depth and meaning to the work by adding “The Brothers” and “Grandma’s Stories and putting those first three books into “Pouch Text”. What was I going to do, say no to making the books have more depth and meaning as far as I am concerned?

You had the free will to say ‘no’ then, and you have the free will not to finish the next three books now.

I am ever curious to see what words can come out of my head as long as they make sense in a fiction. I can’t write books when I’m dead. Besides, I am retired and I have the time. I love my MacBook. The tips of my fingers stop, but they advance outside myself into a recording computer machine. Being one with the keyboard is as being one with the world.

What an unabashed Romantic I am. How embarrassing to see this on the screen. I set myself as a man of integrity and reason and this open-minded Romantic persona comes up.

Others may have worse notions pop up in their heads, orndorff.

If I live long enough I’ll finish the six books, and if I don’t, well, the books will be as done as I am. It won’t make any difference to me then in any case.

Amorella, I don’t feel comfortable showing an example of what I have written for book four as I will begin it again.

That is reason enough.

Professor Dodgson at Christ’s College, Oxford

Amorella, still here at the ‘entrance’ wall of the Great Hall. This portrait hangs just to your right as you walk in as the teachers and children do in the Potter films, and professors and students may do in real life, of course.

This is how I remember its location, Amorella. I don’t know for a fact that it is still in the same place today, let’s just say it was on the right just inside the entrance coming down from the balcony. I am always leary of remembering most anything as an out and out fact.

Is this the reason you like to consider yourself ‘mostly fiction,’ enough so that you would like it etched onto your gravestone?

Yes, I say so, Amorella. Having little or no worthy memory without a backup leads to a lot of imagination and hope for the best. Doubt has had its inner growth through lack of decent memory. For my own personal comfort it is a necessity that I write out my thoughts. Seeing the words of my thoughts on the computer screen shows me that my mind exists. 

The framed painting on the wall of the Great Hall at Christ’s College exists. Why do you doubt your own existence, as you do when you say you are ‘mostly fiction’?

This is an extremely good question, Amorella. I have attempted to respond to this for several minutes now but I find I cannot, even though I do feel that deep within I am mostly fiction. I am bound by the circumstances and conditions of my ‘existential inner self’.  

This is worthy of thought in terms of ‘what one takes with herorhim when sheorhe dies’ at least of context of the conditions within the three Merlyn books.

The writer of Shakespeare said “To thine own self be true,” and Socrates reported said, “Know thyself.” It appears impossible to ‘know’ or ‘understand’ one’s deep inner feelings and motivations even some of the time. How then can one ever be true to one’s self?  

The humor of this in the Merlyn books, from my perspective anyway, is that the just desserts are that no one in their right mind can say after deep thought, that sheorhe ‘knows’ who sheorhe is. The humor is that after death, when an angel, let’s say, comes up to anyone and says: “Who Are You?”

In my deepest inner self, under those circumstances, I would have to say before an angel or G---D, “I really do not know.” As such, under these conditions, I can honestly say, “I think I am mostly fiction. In fact, the more I think into it the more unsure I am of my total conscious/unconscious reality, therefore I feel I may be even more fiction than not.”

You think you would say this to G---D or to an Angel of G---D?

I do.  I’m POed enough to say it now.

Perhaps we can use this in book four, The Rebellion. A lead character rebels not against G---D but against what sheorhe considers a false truth about herorhis sense of self. The character has no place to go except to others of the Dead who feel and understand that their predicament or circumstance is that it is seemingly impossible to define one’s sense of self accurately.

It is impossible in life, and impossible in death also. Therefore, says this new leader of the Dead, let us go back into the world of the living so that we the Dead may better find the truth of our circumstances so that we might share this with our children, the Living. What do you think, orndorff?

In my present anger it sounds reasonable. I will have to give the concept more thought.

Good enough. Keep in mind that the fictional "rebellion" (ironically) would be an authentic part of your own seemingly deeper nature.

Such humor, Amorella. I smile at it and even want to laugh out loud. There indeed may be some autobiographical truth in this new fiction after all. Who would have thought? I may be honestly framed in a fiction yet unwritten.

Who Am I? Each person has herorhis own internal mystery within, it is a part of our species. To deny this is to deny a part of the truth of ‘conscious self-existence’. That’s my opinion. The interested reader will have herorhis own opinion also, but opinion in either of our cases is not fact. 

Towards A Corner of the Great Hall, Christ’s College, Oxford

Amorella here, ready for a respectable dinner. This hall is fact, of course, but most people first saw it cleverly used in the fiction of J. K. Rowling. For those who have hardly been conscious of the world of children’s books Wikipedia has this to say.

“Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. . . .

Since the 1997 release of the first novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States, the books have gained immense popularity, critical acclaim and commercial success worldwide.[1] As of June 2008, the book series has sold more than 400 million copies and has been translated into 67 languages,[2][3] and the last four books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history.”

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What I want to know is why the title was changed when it was released in the United States? Why dumb down the title? Were the editors afraid readers here wouldn’t buy a book that had ‘Philosopher’s’ in the title? It is downright embarrassing.

Again, a turn to Yahoo Answers.

“Why was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone retitled [Harry Potter and]the Sorcerer’s Stone in the USA?

‘Arthur Levine, my American editor, and I [J. K. Rowling] decided that words should be altered only where we felt they would be incomprehensible, even in context, to an American reader... The title change was Arthur's idea initially, because he felt that the British title gave a misleading idea of the subject matter. In England, we discussed several alternative titles and Sorcerer's Stone was my idea.’”

Source: > http://ask.yahoo.com/20020123.html <

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It turns out you are intuitively correct on this one, orndorff. My original idea was to seek out publishers for the first book Braided Dreams and you followed my suggestions but no one was interested.

Just your initial concept that someone would publish such a work, Amorella, lead me to believe you were indeed some sort of alien species that was unaware of the climate of our current American culture. The Merlyn’s Mind series requires the reader to think clearly which I admit would be easier if more grammar and editing errors had been caught and changed. This my fault. My concern was more with the ideas and how they would or would not provoke the reader to think and do some wondering, and it was my intent to publish one book a year.

More than one of my first reader friends and I laughed at the thought that if aliens landed and were ‘marsupial’ as in the book on how the sales might go up. It is still a silly thought, but it fits in my sense of ‘gallows humor’ which is the reason I remember the comment.

At first, when Amorella wrote the “Pouch Text” as a series I secretly wondered if it could possibly be some sort of real alien message and that Amorella was a kind of faster than light communication devise. What else would anyone expect from a long time science fiction fan and teacher with an over-exaggerated imagination? 

Under your existential circumstances you thought a lot of things – mostly you worried that people would think you were out of your mind.

True. At the time I checked with a reputable psychologist on this subject and he didn’t see real evidence. I would have never continued teaching if I though I would in any way do harm to a student, and since the mid-eighties I have always had at least one friend reading the private notes, mostly between Amorella and myself. Now I have eight friends to whom I still send my private notes. All are trustworthy enough that I know one or another would tell me if I have gone off the deep end. No one has so far.

I am still with you on your friendships. After you and wife/partner finished raking leaves you watched a part of the original ‘V’ series playing today on the SyFy channel. You want to watch the new series that begins on Tuesday at the same time as one your favorites, NCIS – the real reason for signing up on cable for a DVR last week.

Yes, that and Thursday’s new show opposite another favorite ‘Bones’. Another science fiction program called, ‘Fast Forward’. Still, ‘V’ depicts ‘friendly’ aliens that turn out not to be so friendly. I can’t imagine any real and intelligent and genuinely friendly species would want to stop by. I don’t know what all this has to do with one’s spirituality though.

You continued writing the books when you realized there was no chance of selling them and making money and becoming famous like J. K. Rowling.

A good friend, a reader, and former colleague thinks I am a very arrogant person, arrogant enough to ask the reader to come to me rather than me come to the reader. I have to agree, but I didn’t think of it that way though.

I wanted a book or a series of books that my former students could read if they wished. I always taught my senior English high school classes as close to the level my college classes were taught when I was a sophomore. This is the reason I am upset with the ‘dumbing down’ business.

I never dumbed down that I can remember. Never. And, I always tried to be fair and reasonable with the grades. When in doubt, give a higher quarter grade and see what happens. Almost always the student did better the next quarter.

The books are written based on these principles of my classroom. Broadening one’s perspective is more important than anything else in one’s personal education. And, on that I practice what I preach. I always try to practice what I preach.

You had something you wanted to say before you died and this is what you are doing. Silently. This has to do with one’s spirituality, orndorff whether you agree or not. – Amorella.