Saturday, October 31, 2015

Cerridwen

It's Halloween...

A text only post, and about history, afield from fauna and flora, sort of...and grim, so dear readers, a caution to read on...

I'll put the search strings in bold, these are the beginning of a quote; and the link(s),  the ulrs, which are highlighted too, will be the quote's end(s)...

dna dreams
 
Directed by 25-year old Lin Lin, BGI’s cloning lab and experimental farm outside of Shenzhen produces cloned pigs at an unprecedented scale. Deeply in love with her work, Lin Lin feels ‘like a mother’ to the piglets that are conceived under her microscope. Some have been manipulated genetically to shine a fluorescent light in the dark
 
 
That's where I left off with yesterday's post...a search on youtube of 'dna dreams' will likely bring up a better running clip than that link I have up...
 
LinLin reminded me of bit of Cerridwen...and her pigs...and her cauldron, the ubiquitous giant black boiling pot witches stir their brews in...a fanciful correspondence to the dna processing computers...
 
ceridwen pigs cauldron
 
Cerridwen’s themes are fertility, creativity, harvest, inspiration, knowledge and luck. Her symbols are the cauldron, pigs and grain. 
 
 
And, and Cerridwen has a dark side...
 
cerridwen dark
 
The symbol of the Dark Goddess is the new moon. She is the Crone, the Great Queen, the Supreme War Goddess.
 
She is known to us as Kali, Hecate, Cerridwen, Lilith,
Persephone, Fata, Morgana, Ereshkigal, Arianhrod, Durga,
Inanna, Tiamat, The Morrigan, and by a million, million other names
 
 
I took only one class in writing poetry, this in contrast to the dozens in how to paint and draw, and several in how to write fiction, journalism and scripts, and on the second meeting of that class, we were situated in the student union on couches in the basement of CSF now CSUF, for each class we met in a different place, and sitting next to me in the group during our self introductions of our previous efforts, was an attractive couple who related they were studying tantric yoga...we all took this in stride...being poets we must be worldly sorts...and it was a smile, but tantric yoga has a dark side...
 
tantric human sacrifice
 
In Bulandshahr, the nearest town of any description, locals whispered darkly of happenings in Barha. Their advice was unanimous: 'Don't go. It is an evil place. The people there are cursed.'
... ... ...
She consulted a tantrik, a travelling 'holy man' who came to the village occasionally, dispensing advice and putrid medicines from the rusty amulets around his neck.
 
His guidance to Sumitra was to slaughter a chicken at the entrance to her home and offer the blood and remains to the goddess. She did so but the nightmares continued and she began waking up screaming in the heat of the night and returned to the priest. 'For the sake of your family,' he told her, 'you must sacrifice another, a boy from your village.'
 
... ... ...
 
The killings have focused attention on Tantrism, an amalgam of mystical practices that grew out of Hinduism. Tantrism also has adherents among Buddhists and Muslims and, increasingly, in the West, where it is associated with yoga or sexual techniques.
 
Indian cult kills children for goddess
 
 
 
Many of the famous temples with erotic statuary in India were destroyed by Muslims when they ruled parts of India, but a few that were remote in the hills escaped their attention, fell into ruins, overgrown with vegetation, and then discovered by British explorers who were a bit taken aback by what they found...since, the Temples have become world heritage sites, and much visited nowadays...
 
erotic temples india
 
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments is a group of Hindu and Jain temples in Madhya Pradesh, India. About 175 kilometres (109 mi) southeast of Jhansi, they are one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in India.[1][2] The temples are famous for their nagara-style architectural symbolism and their erotic sculptures.[3]
 
 
kajuraho tantric yoga
 
The the temples of Khajuraho are famous for their sculptures, because, in our lugubrious, Western mind, they appear "erotic." The profusion of tantric images on the temples date from the times when the Indian Tantra was still influnced by women - who taught their male consorts how to dance — the images at Alchi are from the same period — and how to make love, not for purposes of procreation, but to please and gain esoteric insights in return.
 
 
Once in a creative writing class at SAC, we were given the assignment to write a Sestina...this was a bit after attending CSF...now and then circumstances were such that I said to myself, 'wth, take some classes, go back to school'...and I was thinking to post it here, but it's saying 'wait on that'...it came to mind with the looking about for Cerridwen...
 
From the very first poems I wrote, I had the notion that poems are like dna...I'd seen the stories in Nat Geo, and dna was a  recent discovery, and when working with poem rhyme schemes, I could see a correspondence between rhymes and the way the molecules link in dna strands...and very early on I had the fantastic idea that dna could talk to one through a poem...dna is poetry...
 
dna poetry
 
This is the underlying truth that science historian Lily Kay elaborates when she writes: “once the genetic, cellular, organismic, and environmental complexities of DNA’s context-dependence are taken into account,” we might find that genes “read less like an instruction manual and more like poetry, in all their exquisite polysemy [multiplicity of meaning], ambiguity, and biological nuances.”
 

Logic, DNA, and Poetry 



 


 

hmmph...that search reminded me of what I already know...something you come up with is original until you google it...but even knowing that, it's annoying to find one's treasured thought coins to be common as pennies!

 

Sestinas have a complicated form...one chooses six words and uses them to end each line with...and each stanza begins with the line ending of the previous stanza...in my sestina, I added the complication of rhyming the six words, and using ten syllable lines, sometimes iambic...I like Shakespeare...oh...I'll post it by itself, so it will be free somewhat of all this clutter (it follows this post, see Subien)...at the end of a Sestina is a three line envoy that uses all six words...

 

Sestina

 

Graphical representation of the algorithm for ordering the end-words in a sestina

 

Sestina


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
 
well, there I find if mathematical algorithms correspond to poetic rhyme schemes, my apologies for ignorance of what algorithms are is disingenuous!...I've known about them all along!
 
There was an interruption in my class taking at CSF, and in desultory fashion, I went back to make up, and take one class to have enough units for a BA in English...it was a drama literature class, and on the first day we took our seats in one of those cubicle classrooms with the heavy doors with tiny  long rectangular windows,  I took note of another student who took his seat with a copy of Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yoga under his arm...under mine was Graves' The White Goddess...
 
DavidDavid

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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