thread continuation for muggle matters
from the comments on this thread
http://www.mugglematters.com/2006/01/x-marks-spot-goblet-of-fire-and-chiasm.html
http://www.mugglematters.com/2006/01/x-marks-spot-goblet-of-fire-and-chiasm.html
posted by jkr2 | 7:02 am
10 Comments:
Just checking in Jo, will be posting more soon on the discussion we had going over on Muggle Matters
Merlin
looking forward to it merlinus
Ok, I am still planning on writing some more on this matter, just have to go back and read the thread and see exactly where we were goinf (busy days right now, my father has been in and out of the hospital for tests and such connected with an inoperable malignant tumor in his esophagus, ie esophagial cancer that has spread at least to his liver)
But I wanted to post this here because it came to mind in writing some of my recent posts over on Muggle Matters, especially those connected with the blood image - but an instance that falls under
One of my favorite Paul Simon songs ever is "Hearts and Bones." (Title Track of his 1980/1981 album) Simon being of Jewish decent lends a special quality to the character/s of "one and one half wandering Jews," which of Course connects with Asher Lev's mythic ancestor ("come wander with me, my Asher .... paint the anguish in the world, and together we will restore order, come wander with me") .... BUT also in the context of this theme of "irreconcilable" things (pr as GK Chesterton talks about in Orthodoxy - paradoxes) AND in reference to the Jewish sense of "mystery" specifically in the context of the Christian west (and, for my interests in the blood-heart-soul connection in Harry Potter, all encapsulated in an image of the blood of Christ ... AND, Jo, in a climate much more like that enjoyed by you and your DH and your children)
"One and One Half Wandering Jews
Free to Wander Wherever they Choose
Are Traveling together,
in the Sange DeCristo
The Blood of Christ Mountians
In New Mexico
On the last leg of a journey
They started a long time ago
The Arch of a Love Affair
Rainbows in the High Desert Air
One and One Half wondering Jews
Return to their natural course
To step out occasionally
Renew Old Acquiantances
And Speculate who had been damaged the most
Easy time will determine
If these Consolations will be their Rewards
The Arch of a love affair
Waiting to be Restored"
Those are the first and last verses. The Middle verse (with which the bridge of the song forms an inner elemental pairing of a sort of Chiasm) is killer as regards the love affair of Harry and Ginny in Rowling
"Looking back to the season before
Looking back through the cracks in the door
Two people were married
The act was outrageous
The Bride was contageous
She burned like a bride
The events may have had some effect
On the man with the girl by his side
The arch of a love affair
His hands rolling down her hair"
On that matter of how for a masculine psyche, the feminine psyche is the most compelling agrument there ever could be for the existence of God, as well as for the Incarnation, read the last few lines of Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursdagy (after reading the whole novel of course ... it is a short one ... and then read his debut novel The Ball and The Cross, also a short one) where GK describes Syme and Gregory coming upon Gregory's sister Rosa cutting flowers, "with the simple gravity of a girl."
(So there are 2 more for your list :) )
firstly, i am so sorry to hear about your dad's health issues. our family has been touched by this same disease (as have many) and my heart goes out to you guys.
your view of my life and gender is always heartening merlin! just when i think i'm a lost cause i end up being proof that there's a god.
i feel quite small when you say these gracious things because i always say that one of the first things i'm going to do when i get to heaven is ask god what he was thinking when he made men and women so different....
but the deeper truth of course is that the making of something more beautiful and 'greater than the sum of it's parts' by embracing the 'other' is such an amazing glimpse into how god seems to do things generally.
my favourite quote (and my signature on one forum i visit sometimes) is from lewis - off the top of my head so this is likely a paraphrase than a direct quote - "i know that god is not a figment of my imagination, because he is not at all as i would imagine him to be"
those lyrics nearly undid me. i must be tired.
and thanks for the 2 new book suggestions. i shall go and remind myself that they are there.
As far as the "paradoxical" nature in male female relationships, as this thread is on that matter of paradoxes, the bridge to the Simon song is where that occurs:
Oh, she says, Why
Why don't we drive through the night?
Wake up down in Mexico
Oh, he says, I don't know nothing
Nothing bout no Mexico
Oh, she says, why?
Why Can't you love me for who I am
where I am?
He says, 'cause that's not the world is, baby ...
This is how I love you, baby
Right now I am listening to HP book 5 and remebering many things from book 6, especially on Ron and Hermione's growing relationship - how he always says she is mad and she always finds him insufferable - but that is how we always knew they would wind up together. (and on the matter of the masculine and the feminine ... you will love the pairings in The Ball and the Cross - great stuff ... and I love Lewis's profoundly insightful wit too, one of my favourites is "I don't pray to change His mind, I pray to change mine.")
And thank you for your prayers for my father and our family, right now my job as his son is to help him focus on what he has in his life and family around him right here right now ... not to get too caught up in "sitting beside the fire and thinking" (cf the poem, "I sit beside the fire and think" recited by Bilbo Baggins in one of the chapters around the Council of Elrond in Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring.)
And he is doing well at it, I just came in from a trip to my residence about 1.5 hours away to take care of some things (it being about 4 am here) and found him asleep in a chair in the living room, sleeping there because of the closeness to an outlet for a heating pad for some pains in his back ... and he woke and I got some stuff he needed, and the lamp was on and the room just seemed sort of quite and warm and peaceful, and when he opened his eyes he seemed very happy to see me ... and it warmed me (it being rather cold outside right now) to know that his "sitting beside the lamp and sleeping" (sort of like sitting beside the fire and thinking) was met by footsteps that actually did return (again, you have to read the poem by Bilbo to understand) ... some moments in life you can't really put into words.
wow, thanks for sharing that poignant moment with me (/us.. in cyber space, but hey i know no one else reads this blog! :P )
i'm not so close to my folks as i'd like to be, which is yet another paradox, because i am so intensely connected to those i love, but with my parents we've always just not managed to get it right.
it's kind of like reading one of those conversations between ron and hermione where you are just screaming "aggghhhh, don't say THAT!!!!!" "NO, that's not what he meant!!!!".
my dad's wife and i have better conversations than i do with either my dad or my mum. and with my mum's illness we just kinda don't go there
oh well......
why did i get all maudlin then? oh yes,
i hope you can file that lovely memory of your dad's delight in seeing you away in the memory banks to warm your heart when ever needed in the future.
i can feel a desire to delve more into the implications of the alchemic structure etc as a way of understanding the 'man/woman thing' but don't really have the energy right now. it would be neat if that turns out to be helpful for my dh and i. we are kind of like ron and hermione actually.... he's not quite so thick and i'm not quite so smart, but a lot of the same angst is there... we both doubt we're what each other needs all the time.
ok.
are you going to finish your thought from the second paragraph in your second post on this thread?
jo
Oh ... um, yes ... just takes a second for me to pick it back up when I leave a trailing thought like that.
That song always comes to mind when dealing with some of the things writing over at MM, and in this case epsecially the blood image, because I love how he works in that image/line of the Blood of Christ Mountains ... but it also fits properly under this discussion we are having of paradoxes ... the "one and one half wondering Jews" are divided but united, as are the man and woman ... and it is most interesting that it comes from Paul Simon, who is of Jewish descent but not a "practicing Jew" necessarily, but it is amazing how close he is in tone there to somebody like a heavy Jewish Scholar like Jon Levenson, who points out the things Christian intepretation often musinderstands but must take into account about the Jewish way of thinking ... but Levenson also writes a number of books dealing with the Christian idea of the fulfillments of various aspects of the Hebrew Scriptures, he's sort of fascinated and eager for it the way Arthur Weasley is about Muggle things ... That's what Simon's line of "Traveling together in the Blood of Christ mountains" makes me think.
On Ron and Hermione, I think last night I heard what I have now decided is my favorite Ron and Hermione moment ... and it doesn't even involve both of them together, it's when Harry has been all testy and finally just lit into Ron and Hermione and told them he is getting tired of them bickering and then in Divination Ron tells Harry they have stopped fighting but that Hermione said she thinks Harry is being a bit unfair in the whole thing, and when Harry starts to fire back Ron cuts him off with, "I'm just passing it on from her ... but I figure she's right, you know ... we can't do anything to help what Seamus' mother reads or believes."
I just thought it was pretty cool the way she has Ron and Hemrione get united on something in such a natural way ... AND it is about the first time Ron has stepped up to the plate and helped Hermione out, and he manages to pull it off in a pretty natural and deft way that does not trample under-foot what Harry is actually going through in the whole thing (And, in my humble opinion, this was a hidden ability that somebody wise like DD could see in Ron and THAT is the real reason he made Ron a Prefect).
... just a healthy sort of kick in the pants, because Harry is being a bit of a thick headed Pratt ... he doesn't seem to notice at all the sacrifice of honesty it must have been for Seamus to ask the question seriously about what happened that night in the graveyard (especially being that it becomes obvious that he is sensitive to the worries that probably drive his mothers opinions ... the same that are the reason's Uncle Vernon uses for trying to kick Harry out in the beginning of the book ... familial protection, a natural and VERY good goal), Harry should have taken him up on his openness ... and he definitely should not have taken shots at the mother, no matter how silly or worse her disposition was
... Rowling is very sensitive to the maternal,probably for very obvious reasons :) - but especially after "Mrs Weaseley's Woes" Harry should have known to heed Seamus' plea of "leave my mum out of this")
Oh ... and I love all three of Harry, Ron and HErmione, as well as Dean Thomas and even Parvati Patil united against Umbridge ... Jim Dale's reading of Umbridge is way too effective ... I was finishing out that side of that tape sitting in my parents driveway at 3:30 am, with seat cocked back and my eyes closed and kind of tired ... and still my blood pressure was rising. Felt like telling Umbridge, "yes, I expect to be attacked by somebody using dark magic in your classroom ... you!" (nasty bit of work, that quill of hers ... seems to me to link up with the "ever-bleeding" aspect of Sectum Sempra, as a sort of "bureaucratic penal system" instantiation)
Oh, and ... I do hope there are other readers ... you have some really good thoughts on things.
But on the masculine and feminine thing, I think that at a certain point you have to admit that Bono probably has the description at which you eventually have to leave it, "the mysterious distance bewteen a man and a woman"
It's kind of like Pauli (who is my brother-in-law, in cas that had not been guessed :) ) said once to me: He and I were in a band together (the only full out, "actually rehearsing, writing together, touring together" band either of us have been in) and he said that every once in a while somebody will say to him, afer they have heard one of our Cds or something, "wow, you guys were really good, why did you quit, or why aren't you at least still in some other band etc you still have your bass rig and all right?" and he said he just figures "Stinging Rain was the time to sing about it and now is the time to live it" (and trust me my 2 nephews and nephew/god-son about to be born ... they're a whole lotta living to keep up with LOL) ... but come to think of it, I need to get together sometime and jam with him, i've been pulling out the guit-fiddle and messing around more recently, just as sort of an outlet, and Pauli is a really good bass player (and I love his bass ... I'm not that good at it but something just feels so much more organic and alive about a fretless bass) ... the lead singer/writer of the band was our friend Nathan, 6 of whose 7 children refer to me affectionally as "uncle Brett" - usually right before they tackle the living stuffing out of me (usually an afternoon or evening at Nate and Julie's place means I roll over the next morning going "ooohh, that aches" LOL)
Oh yeah, just remembered there was somthing else on the whole paradox thing.
One prof I had for one class (only took him once) always loved to talk about "learning to live in the tension!" ... but for him it just meant he liked having an excuse to be a contentious git towards certain elements at the university.
so, just to mention that it is something to "keep a wather-eye out for" - that some people use it to defend a wrong sort of relativism or a generally contankerous and curmudgeony attitude
actually, the more i muse on this we are more like a pairing of harry and hermione. YIKES! my dh is more similar to harry as he is a bit of a tortured soul and he broods and locks himself away. (why do you think i have all this time in the evenings to be online lol)
and the thing is i am not like ginny at all. i have to work very hard to get inside her head. but i kind of see her as how i *should be* which is interesting considering the relationships *need* to work out.
not that i am going to use a work of fiction (as insightful etc as it is!) as sounding the death knell to our marriage!
maybe that's why harry's suffering touches me so deeply, and ron's lightness (but loyalty etc) appeals in a kind of wistful way.
oh and bono really has a way of articulating that space between people SO well. it's one reason i am a fan.
i'll never forget their zoo tv tour. we were REALLY poor and somehow my dh scraped money and bought me a ticket. we could only afford the one of course, and i was SO nervous going on my own. it was this HUGE show (don't know if you saw it) and full of satire and cynicism and insight. and then they did 2 songs 'she moves in mysterious ways' and 'one'. they had this kind of belly dancer all swirly scarves in a single spot dancing down a stage extension into the crowd. that's all you could see, for 'mysterious ways', so the mood really changed.... and then just bono singing 'one'.
we're one, but we're not the same and i honestly felt (never had this before or since) that there was no one else there and it was being sung straight to me and my life.
"One" is definitely one powerful song
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