Antiquity, Orthodoxy, the Bardic Tradition and Reincarnation

A months-long series of synchronistic serendipities inspired this train of thought.  In this latest computerless period, as I’ve been reading more than I had been since I got online around the turn of the millennium, several excellent books in an obscure genre have come my way.  The genre involves “anomalies” such as evidence for Egyptians (or Atlanteans) in ancient MesoAmerica, Japanese in the Anasazi period of the Pueblo Southwest, Icelandic Norse visitors in Newfoundland before the Europeans were supposed to have found it, and others I’d be able to list if I were blogging from home or if I’d taken notes.   

This evidence is called anomalous because it conflicts with the orthodox archaeological and anthropological views.  I have a great deal of respect for archaeology and anthropology.  Researchers and writers in those fields have greatly enriched my mind.  Where my respect lags is when it comes to orthodoxy in general.  It is, by definition, inflexible and almost always obsolete. 

Where the bardic tradition comes into this might be obvious to anyone versed in folklore.  Icelandic skalds tell of voyages that went to Vinland and returned.  Zuni oral traditions speak of ancestors who came from the west, and the language in which they tell their ancient stories has more in common with Japanese than with any North American tongue. 

Some archaeologists and anthropologists ignore or discount oral traditions.  “Prehistoric” generally means before history was written down although people were keeping oral “records” and traditions long before writing was developed.  In the BBC series, In Search of the Trojan War, which I’ve been watching on DVD this week, Michael Wood (in 1985) attempted to track down evidence for the historical reality of Homer’s Iliad.  Homer, a bard, lived 500 years after the war he sang about.  It was later still before someone wrote down the stories that Homer (if there was a Homer) sang.  In my opinion, Michael Wood’s conclusions from his travels, library research, and interviews with archaeologists and folklorists, etc., are as plausible as any theories and more plausible than those of Schliemann, Blegen, etc.  The way he ended up seeing the matter resonates with me.

The subject of reincarnation crept into this story for me as I listened to several bards recorded for that BBC series.  One was Irish, others were Turkish.  It surprised me how many similarities I heard between them.  The rhythms and alliteration appear to be cross-cultural bardic traits.  Another little surprise (which Doug greeted with a “well du-uh” when I exclaimed over it) was how much the Turks looked and sounded like Romany “Gypsies.”  The Rom carried many ancient bardic tales with them when they left their homeland in Northwestern India in Medieval times.  My far memory resonated with what I was hearing, and it started a chain of associations that continues to extend and branch out even now.

When I was a kid and those “far memories” would crop up, I’d ascribe them to “racial memory”, a concept I’d heard about somewhere.  That was a politically correct idea, and reincarnation was not.  But the concept of genetic memory has some inherent flaws.  If the memories are carried in the genes, then would one be able to remember anything which occurred after those genes split off upon ovulation or ejaculation?.  I think not.  To me, it seems utterly illogical to suppose that one can have “genetic” memories of, for example, anything that occurred at an advanced age or in a lifetime that was childless.  Don’t genes have to be passed along to pass along genetic memories?

For now, my working hypothesis is that I have lived before.  I’ve listened to bards in many lives in various cultures and I’ve been a bard in more than one of those cultures, I suppose.  This, when viewed in the light of the karmic paradigm, explains my lifelong interest in folklore and myth.  It also accounts for those chills that run up my spine when I hear someone sing or chant the old stories, even in languages I don’t understand.  It’s the simple explanation, and I like to keep it simple.

My hour is nearly up here at the library.  I’m weary of the noise, distraction and the constantly running timer.  That aversion, and the attraction of the immanent return of my home computer, impel me to forego the library-to-library hop today for an hour here, drive forty miles for another hour, another 25 miles for another hour, etc.  With any luck, my next blog will be composed at home on our new machine.  Hold that thought.

The check is in the mail.

That’s what the post office insurance division says.  They paid our claim yesterday.  Now we just have to wait for it.  We are trusting it will be here soon and be all we expect.  Doug and I are taking an unscheduled trip to town (that’s right, it’s only Wednesday — just because I’m online, doesn’t mean it’s Thursday) to take the broken new computer and the old one it was to replace to the shop, where they will salvage what they can from the two machines and build us another one.

That’s the big news for my kid and me.  Other news around our neighborhood includes the discovery of a meth lab in the motel just around the corner, up beside the highway.  Doug saw a TV news van and hazmat team there when he went for the mail, and asked someone what was going on.  Meth lab — it wouldn’t have been a surprise if it had happened at Felony Flats where Greyfox lives.  Two labs have been busted there in the past two years that I know of.  In our little railbelt neighborhood, such things are rarer.

I have been thinking about a blog on antiquity and orthodoxy, or something like that.  Maybe I’ll get it done tomorrow when I go back in again to drive the van from the rehab center to the NA meeting.  Or maybe I’ll blog about the Voice of Addiction.  So much to say….  It will be good to be able to blog from home again.  I’m old fashioned, I guess.  I still tend to think of libraries as places for books.  But, come to think of it, my home is full of books, too.  Ah, well….

Greener

My neighborhood is greener than I’ve ever seen it.  It’s buggier than anyone has seen it, too. The early thaw and frequent rain has brought us the biggest infestation of insects in living memory.  Most noticeable for the last few weeks are the mosquitoes and some black and white moths.  Thousands of moths take to the air from the moist ground outside my door when I step outside.

There are lots of wasps, too.  One night on a midnight trip to the bathroom (not the outhouse, the actual but nonfunctional [except when I hang my camp shower bag in the shower stall] indoor bathroom), I heard a wasp buzzing, but didn’t see it.  A brief search revealed a paper wasp nest the size of a golf ball hanging on the ceiling.  I removed it.

The infestation of leaf miners in the quaking aspens that I noticed last summer has increased in this area and has spread so much that it made the news in the Anchorage papers and on broadcast media.

The water level in the muskeg is subsiding.  Around the edges, some swamp grass is emerging above the surface.  I got pics of that this morning and will post them along with the other shots, dating back to when there was still ice on the muskeg and it was flooding over the edge of the road, when I get my new computer fixed.  Tadpoles have begun showing the little bumps that will become legs.

Yesterday, I saw my first dragonfly of the season.  Now the violet-green swallows will have some help to reduce the mosquito population.  A few of the big yellow and black butterflies (“painted lady” butterflies?  I’ll have to get out my field guide and relieve my ignorance or refresh my knowledge.) have emerged.

The waterfowl have apparently already mated and settled down.  I haven’t heard much from the cranes, swans, loons and geese lately.  An American robin was hopping around on the woodpile yesterday, happily gorging on bugs.

I’m in the midst of an auto-immune flareup:  aching joints, stiff neck, chills and fever, swollen lymph nodes, etc.  I can only imagine the havoc going on beneath my awareness, the bone resorption and all the rest.  I’m grateful for the years of experience and my knowledge of the mechanisms involved here.  Otherwise this shit would scare me to death. 

There are those who say the ME/CFIDS syndrome doesn’t kill.  That’s not entirely accurate, I think, because there are some symptoms such as dyspnea that if untreated can stop one’s breathing, which is usually fatal.  However, the fear and the pain has led many to suicide, and the drugs many of us take to relieve the symptoms can kill, too.

Life is full of wonders and pleasures, even though the vehicle through which I’m experiencing it is somewhat defective.  Even with those defects, though, I’m in no rush to leave this body behind.  Too much to see and do, no time right now to break in a new body, learn to walk and read all over again and such.

This is one of the times of the year when the time of day becomes irrelevant.  It is never dark, so we don’t sleep much.  The other time when the clock doesn’t mean so much is at the opposite end of the year, when it is dark most of the time and we sleep enough to make up for these midnight walks and the summer all-nighters when the thought of going to bed just doesn’t come up.

I celebrate both solstices.  Winter Solstice is a time of joy because it signals the return of the sun, increasing hours of daylight.  Summer Solstice has a bittersweet edge to it, even amid all the green and the midnight sun, because then the days begin to grow shorter again.

I probably won’t get to town again before the solstice.  Three years ago, on the Summer Solstice, I took a walk around my neighborhood late in the evening, took some pictures (one of which JadedFey AKA oOMisfitOo made into a banner for me), then came home and posted the pics and my reflections on my philosophy of life.  It’s still there, although some of the pics did not survive my paring down of my Xanga image files in an effort to stay within my limits.

It must be Thursday; SuSu’s online.

Direct from the Willow Public Library, where there’s no time limit as long as there is nobody waiting to use one of the three web-enabled computers, and the chairs adjust in height almost high enough for me to comfortably reach the keyboard, I’m online!  Physically, this is the most comfortable of all the valley’s libraries and that lack of time limit is a great plus, but the librarian here is very gregarious and chatty.  My last entry and several comments to it mentioned the former tradition of quiet in libraries.  This library is the first one in my experience where the librarian herself is the noisiest person around.  Right now, she has a patron sitting behind her at her desk, looking over her shoulder at a monitor showing the pics she took on her recent vacation in Rome, and I’m listening to the travelogue.

I suppose that having Greyfox provide updates is better than no updates, maybe.    As he himself noted in a comment to his latest update, his eyes tend to glaze over whenever the topic under discussion strays away from himself.  That’s due to NPD of course, and it’s a sign of great progress that he has gained such a level of self-awareness that he can recognize it.  Amazing, isn’t it, that a lifetime of self-obsession doesn’t necessarily provide any great deal of self-awareness?  Anyway, perhaps I’d better caution my readers not to take anything he says literally or to credit much of what he reports about me and my circumstances.  I’m the one who got the Truth in Blogging Award, not he.

I looked at the $250.00 system for sale at TigerDirect that Amethyst62 recommended in a comment.  The system specs show why it is so much cheaper than the system that rosabelle‘s roommate Rich built for us.  I think that settling for such a drastic downgrade would be unwise in that it would be even more limited than the old system that Rich and Diane’s gift replaces.  That seems somehow ungracious or ungrateful as well as being a false economy.  We had outgrown that old system.

Without that gift from Rich and Diane, we might have settled for getting the old machine repaired yet again and might have had the same old repair tech give us another used and possibly defective hard drive that would have malfunctioned again before the warranty expired.  We still had not decided whether to go that route or go into debt for a new system when Diane told us that Rich was willing to build a new system for us.  Doug and I both really wanted a new one, but were hesitant to go for it since Greyfox had just put his “new” used car on a credit card.  Rich and Diane solved that dilemma for us.  Now we just have to wait and see if the insurance settlement comes through.  Then we will shop and negotiate and try to come up with the system that meets our needs at the best price — not necessarily the lowest price, but the one that gives us the most bang for the buck.

This incident illustrates why I value Xanga so highly.  Diane is someone I’ve never met.  She lives in the city where I was born, and she came to Xanga and blogged after having found my site through Google and reading some of my memoirs.  She told me recently when we were talking on the phone about the postal snafu that the reason she wanted to help us with the computer was because she had read about that other Xangan who had initiated the difficulty over the business license that caused the hiatus at KaiOaty.  She felt that by sharing her resources and her roommate’s skills, they could “balance things out.”  Isn’t that sweet?

I have some things I want to share with you.  One of the odd little ironies of my current situation is that since I can’t get on to blog and surf Xanga, I read and listen to the radio more, which provides me with even more than the usual amount of blog topics.  Below are some of the choicer examples from recent weeks:

• I’ve been picking up a lot of specific info about brain anatomy and function, in particular related to memory, mood and so-called “psychic” awareness.  Two areas of special interest are the anterior cingulate cortex (info here and there ) and the amygdala.  The amygdala is a fascinating little blob of protoplasm, and the more I learn about it the better I understand my own personal brand of insanity (or super-sanity).
  
• The U.S. government wants to give us a hand in identifying misinformation .  Now, if somebody would just help us determine what portion of our government’s information is actually disinformation….
  
• Under the heading of “bird brains”:  seabirds, mostly immature gulls, are feasting on the hulls of soybeans washed ashore after last winter’s wreck of the Selandang Ayu.  Sixty thousand tons of soybeans were in the holds when the ship broke up and sank off Unalaska Island in the Aleutians.  She also was carrying half a million gallons of fuel oil.  The beans got waterlogged and sank.  The bean hulls got oil-soaked and washed ashore.  The birds… well….
  
• Sugata Mitra thought that perhaps children could learn computer skills independently, the way they learn many other skills, but didn’t have a chance to test that theory until he found a way to combine it with a commercial project.  The result, Hole-in-the-Wall places computers in outdoor kiosks.  Kids are taking to it with great success, of course. 

I gotta go now.  Someone wants this computer.  I may get back on later from a different library… ya never know.

UPDATE, 4 hours and two libraries later:

I spent my allotted hour at the Big Lake Public Library checking and answering email from my currently active yahoo account (kathylynn_douglass, for any who want to email me there) and reading the most recent mail from my primary account through mail2web.com.  It’s an alternative for when I can’t get into my regular mailbox (like now) but using it is slow and cumbersome for me because every time I elect to read an email from one of these library computers, I have to log back in to the site to read more mail.

After getting through as much of the backlog as possible there and forwarding a few old messages to myself at Yahoo for future reference, I came on into Wasilla, spent a few minutes at Greyfox’s place, then came into town with him for another hour at this library, where I finished off the email backlog.  My hour is almost up now, so I won’t have time to visit the imbecilic Xangan who claims who claims that “fibromyalgia” is not a real disease but only an excuse for “whiners” to take drugs and shirk work.  That’s probably just as well, anyhow.  I haven’t the time to properly engage in a flame war on these benighted library computers, anyway.  I don’t call it “fibro” anymore anyway.  I now use the preferred international terminology:  myalgic encephalomyelopathy/chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome, and I am here to tell the world IT IS REAL, I have it, I shirk only as much work as I am absolutely unable to do, and I take no medication for the pain.  The addiction to the medication was one of the worst effects of the disease, before I learned how to deal with the pain through the PAINSWITCH (which switch is explained fully in the post linked in my left module — the best drug is no drug).

Ignorance is not bliss.  Ignorance is just a lack of knowledge.  Inform yourself, bitchmistress, before flaunting your ignorance.  **sigh of contentment**  Aaaah, that felt good.  When I get my new computer, I’m going to rant to my heart’s content — yeah!