2006-09-21

I remembered this as I was doing the dishes and I felt I had to write about it.
I'm calling it the anthropology of water.
or one of these...
Aegyptus had 50 sons.
Danaos had 50 daughters.
Oh, the irony.
Damn me and my feeble mind.


Water must be held in something other than your hands. You cannot hold it. You'll notice it slips through places where you thought were seamless. Like people. I have tried. All took themselves out of my palms. This perhaps is how it should be. What - If I remember - anthropologists call 'normal dangers' in the idea of encountering alien cultures. I remember the friend who first taught me about that. He over-emphasized using the word encounter instead of discovery when he was talking about it. I remember:
'Think of it as the difference between believing what you want to believe and believing what can be proven"
I thought about it. Actually, for far too long. I should have just spoken my mind. I said I don't want to believe anything (lying) and I have nothing to prove(lying again). I just want to travel into the world I see as 'reality', and stop, noticing whats under the sky (this is, indeed still, the truth).
Cruelly then, he mentions something about a culture he had studied in his 3rd year where true virgins and false virgins are identified by a water ordeal. Apparently, an intact virgin can dive deep into water but a woman who has known love will drown. Sounds like a risky testing procedure, but anyways.
Ignorantly, I said something along the lines of I'm not interested in true and false(the incoming is a proven point of my once(probably still) ignorant nature. Once you realize you're a tool you find yourself looking for other places you shone so brightly as such and then you have THE why water will find the cracks in what seems so seamless)
I wanted to ask him other things, because he is so good at keeping me grounded, but my inhibitions took over for some reason. I wanted to ask him the difference between heaven and hell. I didn't, I ended up telling him the story of Danaos and his daughters.
Quickly, Danaos was this hero in greek myth who had 50 daughters. They loved him so much, it was almost as if each was a part of his body. When he would stir in bed they would wake up and go to him. They grew up and when it was time to marry. Danaos found 50 bridegrooms ( 50 boys of Aegyptus). Set the day, married them...blah blah. At midnight on the wedding day, 50 doors closed simultaneously. Then a terrible encounter took place. 49/50 of the daughters had a knife in their thighs and stabbed her bridegroom to death. (the 50 bridegrooms had planned on killing the brides anyways...).
This archetypal crime of women was rewarded by the gods with a kind of paradigmatic punishment. They were sent to hell and sentenced to spend eternity gathering water in a sieve.
What happened to the other daughter? It was never confirmed.

Lets just say, the water was deep.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit:

In the foreground a half-barren tree
speaks louder than that sky
whose wind screams mercilessly in my ears
and the leaves are falling from the tree
but its bark makes not a sound.

Katrina at 5:19 PM

2006-09-21

I remembered this as I was doing the dishes and I felt I had to write about it.
I'm calling it the anthropology of water.
or one of these...
Aegyptus had 50 sons.
Danaos had 50 daughters.
Oh, the irony.
Damn me and my feeble mind.


Water must be held in something other than your hands. You cannot hold it. You'll notice it slips through places where you thought were seamless. Like people. I have tried. All took themselves out of my palms. This perhaps is how it should be. What - If I remember - anthropologists call 'normal dangers' in the idea of encountering alien cultures. I remember the friend who first taught me about that. He over-emphasized using the word encounter instead of discovery when he was talking about it. I remember:
'Think of it as the difference between believing what you want to believe and believing what can be proven"
I thought about it. Actually, for far too long. I should have just spoken my mind. I said I don't want to believe anything (lying) and I have nothing to prove(lying again). I just want to travel into the world I see as 'reality', and stop, noticing whats under the sky (this is, indeed still, the truth).
Cruelly then, he mentions something about a culture he had studied in his 3rd year where true virgins and false virgins are identified by a water ordeal. Apparently, an intact virgin can dive deep into water but a woman who has known love will drown. Sounds like a risky testing procedure, but anyways.
Ignorantly, I said something along the lines of I'm not interested in true and false(the incoming is a proven point of my once(probably still) ignorant nature. Once you realize you're a tool you find yourself looking for other places you shone so brightly as such and then you have THE why water will find the cracks in what seems so seamless)
I wanted to ask him other things, because he is so good at keeping me grounded, but my inhibitions took over for some reason. I wanted to ask him the difference between heaven and hell. I didn't, I ended up telling him the story of Danaos and his daughters.
Quickly, Danaos was this hero in greek myth who had 50 daughters. They loved him so much, it was almost as if each was a part of his body. When he would stir in bed they would wake up and go to him. They grew up and when it was time to marry. Danaos found 50 bridegrooms ( 50 boys of Aegyptus). Set the day, married them...blah blah. At midnight on the wedding day, 50 doors closed simultaneously. Then a terrible encounter took place. 49/50 of the daughters had a knife in their thighs and stabbed her bridegroom to death. (the 50 bridegrooms had planned on killing the brides anyways...).
This archetypal crime of women was rewarded by the gods with a kind of paradigmatic punishment. They were sent to hell and sentenced to spend eternity gathering water in a sieve.
What happened to the other daughter? It was never confirmed.

Lets just say, the water was deep.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit:

In the foreground a half-barren tree
speaks louder than that sky
whose wind screams mercilessly in my ears
and the leaves are falling from the tree
but its bark makes not a sound.

Katrina at 5:19 PM