ICARUS' DREAM

My passions dance before you
Scattering sparks all around
Awaiting a touch with the laurel by you
You heedless also behead every (e)motion
The spirit of Daedalus is yours
The dreams of Icarus is mine
Some sudden prodigious lift of circling hope
Another primordial pain
Once more I
Another projection of me
Another ancient toil
Am Ende,
Quietly sinking down, wrapped therein
Each dance looses itself into a tragedy

Alleinsein

In der schonen Welt,
Man ist so allein,
Das weist aber es nicht!

“What a heart-awakening autumn dusk it is!”
Yeah, it is!
What a heart-awakening autumn dusk it is.
Full of a fear,
Special and rare,
Emptying out the hearts and ears,
As if every thing is done death, mute!
Or the ears have gone deaf, out!
If just we would in such an air,
In such a time,
In such a place- a heavenly desert-
Stare into the sky, into horizon,
Where "the air and the earth come to meet up".
Then we would walk into the palace
Or, no…

Songbird #2

Like a bird
In the sky
The air of flying is in my heart
To take wing
To soar
To fly far away
To wing my way
And
In an eternal peace
Search for the Day.

LONELINESS STORY: 31-10-05

l
(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

WALK

I walked my troubles away
I walked
Lost myself in the rhythm of the movements of walking
Creativity walks

MUCH MISSED AND NEVER LOST

Not to worry- Relieved as I am,
Since all we private souls don’t lEAve forever,
We madcaps laugh by one another,
For ever n’ ever n’ ever…

One cloudy anticipating fall eve
The wanderer, and the wonderer,
Having come from the astronomy domain
Your own, out of map, inner sphere
In a full moon night—
O lunatic, how faithful to your crazy note
That you couldn’t just wait the light easy shine
And flied home:
To the dark side of the moon.
Right after thirty flies around the sun
Right after thirty by twelve rounds and rounds around the moon
Home, home again:

Back to your own wet dream dome.
On an all-ways board
Free from the keys, scales and insects
Now,
At last,
You star student:
Self-taught every tune of fly,
Now,
You flower power:
Having done the self-sung lullaby,
Now,
You saved from faulty human touch
And having saved sight into seraphs
With self-made-close eye
No fear of melting arms:
Play and play and fly high
NOW!
It’s the (W)right time for the gig in the sky

THE UNIVERSAL QUESTION OF WHY

WHY?

BLACK CROW

Why was his soul so colossal
That made a hard time on earth to contain the burden?
Why was his sound so shrill
That missed the ears he wished to safe-net?
Why was his look so distant
That out-reach the lines he tended to shelter?
Why was his cry so fervent
That missed the ones he would hit?
I yearn for crows
Shining black crows
Black dancing crows
Keenly awake crows

Ancient Greek: THEATRE

Panoramic view of the Greek theatre at Epidaurus

The Greek theatre history began with festivals honoring their gods. A god, Dionysus, was honored with a festival called by "City Dionysia". Plays were only presented at City Dionysia festival.
Athens was the main center for these theatrical traditions. Athenians spread these festivals to its numerous allies in order to promote a common identity.
At the early Greek festivals, the actors, directors and dramatists were all the same person. After some time, only three actors were allowed to perform in each play. Due to limited number of actors allowed on-stage, the chorus evolved into a very active part of Greek theatre. Music was often played during the chorus' delivery of its lines.
Tragedy, comedy, and satyr plays were the theatrical forms.
Tragedy means "goat song", perhaps referring to goats sacrificed to Dionysus before performances, or to goat-skins worn by the performers.
Aristotle's Poetics contain the earliest known theory about the origins of Greek theatre. He says that tragedy evolved from dithyrambs, songs sung in praise of Dionysus at the Dionysia each year. Comedy was also an important part of ancient Greek theatre.
Greek Theatre
Theatre buildings were called a theatron. The theaters were large, open-air structures constructed on the slopes of hills. They consisted of three main elements: the orchestra, the skene, and the audience.
Orchestra: A large circular or rectangular area at the center part of the theatre, where the play, dance, religious rites, acting used to take place.
Skene: A large rectangular building situated behind the orchestra, used as a backstage. Actors could change their costumes and masks.
Audience: Rising from the circle of the orchestra was the audience. The theatres were originally built on a very large scale to accommodate the large number of people in the audience, up to fourteen thousand.
Acting
The cast of a Greek play in the Dionysia was comprised of amateurs, not professionals (all male).
Costumes and Masks
The actors were so far away from the audience that without the aid of exaggerated costumes and masks they would not be understood.
However, most Greek theatres were cleverly constructed to transmit even the smallest sound to any seat.
The masks were made of linen or cork, so none have survived. Tragic masks carried mournful or pained expressions, while comic masks were smiling or leering.
The shape of the mask amplified the actor's voice, making his words easier for the audience to hear.

Ancient Greece: OLYMPIC GAMES

The Greeks invented athletic contests and held them in honour of their gods. The Isthmos games were staged every two years at the Isthmos of Corinth. The Pythian games took place every four years near Delphi. The most famous games held at Olympia, South- West of Greece, which took place every four years. The ancient Olympics seem to have begun in the early 700 BC, in honour of Zeus. No women were allowed to watch the games and only Greek nationals could participate. One of the ancient wonders was a statue of Zeus at Olympia, made of gold and ivory by a Greek sculptor Pheidias. This was placed inside a Temple, although it was a towering 42 feet high.
The games at Olympia were greatly expanded from a one-day festival of athletics and wrestling to, in 472 BC, five days with many events. The order of the events is not precisely known, but the first day of the festival was devoted to sacrifices. On the Middle Day of the festival 100 oxen were sacrificed in honor of a God. Athletes also often prayed and made small sacrifices themselves.
On the second day, the foot-race, the main event of the games, took place in the stadium, an oblong area enclosed by sloping banks of earth.
At Olympia there were 4 different types of races; The first was stadion, the oldest event of the games, where runners sprinted for 1 stade, the length of the stadium (192m). The other races were a 2-stade race (384 m.) and a long-distance run which ranged from 7 to 24 stades (1,344 m. to 4,608 m.).The fourth type of race involved runners wearing full amor, which was 2-4 stade race (384 m. to 768 m.), used to build up speed and stamina for military purposes.
On other days, wrestling, boxing, and the pancratium, a combination of the two, were held. In wrestling, the aim was to throw the opponent to the ground three times, on either his hip, back or shoulder. In ancient Greek wrestling biting and genital holds were illegal.
Boxing became more and more brutal; at first the pugilists wound straps of soft leather over their fingers as a means of deadening the blows, but in later times hard leather, sometimes weighted with metal, was used. In the pancratium, the most rigorous of the sports, the contest continued until one or the other of the participants acknowledged defeat.
Horse-racing, in which each entrant owned his horse, was confined to the wealthy but was nevertheless a popular attraction. The course was 6 laps of the track, with separate races for whereupon the rider would have no stirrups. It was only wealthy people that could pay for such training, equipment, and feed of both the rider and the horses. So whichever horse won it was not the rider who was awarded the Olive wreath but the owner. There were also Chariot races, that consisted of both 2-horse and 4-horse chariot races, with separate races for chariots drawn by foals. There was also a race was between carts drawn by a team of 2 mules, which was 12 laps of the stadium track.

After the horse-racing came the pentathlon, a series of five events: sprinting, long-jumping, javelin-hurling, discus-throwing and wrestling.The ancient Greeks considered the rhythm and precision of an athlete throwing the discus as important as his strength.
The discus was a circle shaped stone, iron, bronze or lead. There were different sizes according to age groups. The javelin was a long wooden stick shape with spear head, similar height to that of a person. In the middle was bound a thong for a hurler's fingers to grip and guide to the correct angle it was thrown.
To jump long distances athletes used lead or stone weights to increase the length of the jump. These weights were known as 'halteres' were held in front of the athlete during his ascent and then swung behind his back and dropped during his descent to help propel him.

Songbird #1

I wonder:

Behind those mountains,

Is sky deep enough

To spread my wings

And have the last laugh?

Play Fools

HENRY BOLINGBROKE
O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?

O, no! the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:

Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more

Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.


William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
English poet and playwright.
Richard II, Act 1, Scene 3

A Friend of Mine: The Critical Question

Sarmad is a friend of mine with whom I'm acquainted for some 4 years. He has just asked, to quote exactly his own words, a "critical question... A question that no one knows the answer... Is there anybody knows what we are living for?"

And I, the Mistress of Quotation Marks, having a try to answer his question, would say "Why are we here if we are not to make the life easier for each other?"

Ancient Greece: SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Greece in the Archaic Period was made up from independent states, called Polis, or city-state. The social classes applied to men only, as women all took their social and legal status from their husband or their male partner. Women in ancient Greece were not permitted to take part in public life.

Greek Society was mainly broken up between Free people and Slaves, who were owned by the free people. As Athenian society evolved, free men were divided between Citizens and Metics. A citizen was born with Athenian parents and were the most powerful group, that could take part in the government of the Polis. After compulsory service in the army they were expected to be government officials and take part in Jury Service. A metic was of foreign birth that had migrated to Athens, to either trade or practice a craft. A metic had to pay taxes and sometimes required to serve in the army. However, they could never achieve full right s of a Citizen, neither could they own houses or land and were not allowed to speak in law courts.

By 600 bc chattel slavery (treating slaves as property) had become widespread in Greece. By the 5th century BC slaves accounted for as much as one-third of the total population in some city-states. Children born to slaves became slaves themselves. Greeks took many slaves from non-Greek populations, but they also enslaved other Greeks in war.

Slaves were used as servants and labourers, without any legal rights. Sometimes the slaves were prisoners of war or bought from foreign slave traders. Although many slaves lived closely with their owners, few were skilled craftsmen and even fewer were paid.To encourage slaves to work hard, owners sometimes promised freedom at a future date.

Unlike in Rome, freed slaves in Greece did not become citizens. Instead, former slaves mixed into the population of metics—non-citizens, including people from foreign lands or other states, officially allowed to live in a city-state.

City-states and gods also legally owned slaves (the gods’ slaves were generally managed by the gods’ earthly intermediaries, temple priests). These public slaves enjoyed a measure of independence, living on their own and performing specialized tasks. In Athens, for example, public slaves were trained to look for counterfeit coinage. Temple slaves worked as servants of the sanctuary’s deity. Sparta had a special category of slaves called helots, Greek war captives owned by the state but assigned to Spartan families. Helots raised food and performed household chores so that Spartan women could devote their time to raising strong children and men could devote their time to training as hoplite warriors. The helots lived harsh lives and often revolted. Spartans annually sent out a secret band of young men to murder any helots who looked likely to provoke rebellion.

Ancient Greece: WHERE?

Ancient Greece civilization thrived around the Mediterranean Sea from the 3rd millennium to the 1st century BC.

Geographically, it indicates the heartland of Greek communities on the north coast and nearby islands of the Mediterranean Sea.
The heartland of ancient Greece consisted of the mountainous Balkan Peninsula and southern Italian Peninsula, as well as dozens of rugged islands in the northern Mediterranean region.

Mountains acted like walls separating communities. The mountains were once heavily wooded, but early Greeks steadily deforested the slopes for fuel, housing and ships. Most fields were level enough for farming and raising animals were small, supporting communities of only a few hundred inhabitants

The Mediterranean Sea, which connected Greeks with each other and with the rest of the world, encompasses the Aegean Sea and the Ionian Sea. In the world of the ancient Greeks, the seas were more efficient travel routes than roads. Ships could go much faster and carry much more cargo than wagons bumping over rough train. Access to the sea was so important that most Greek communities were within 60 km (40 miles) of the coast. Eventually, ancient Greeks inhabited about 700 communities clustered around the Mediterranean Sea. The settlements reached from the Iberian Peninsula (now occupied mostly by Spain) in the west to the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East in the east, extending southward to the northern coast of Africa.

MOMENTA

Momentum, the singular form of MOMENTA, in physics, is the measure of movement: a quantity that expresses the motion of a body and its resistance to slow down. It is the fundamental quantity characterizing the motion of any object. Momentum is a vector quantity, which means that it has both magnitude and direction.
In philosophy Momentum is the basic element: an essential part of a whole.
Concerning physics, the total momentum of a system made up of a collection of objects is the vector sum of all the individual objects' momenta. For an isolated system, total momentum remains unchanged over time; this is called conservation of momentum. For example, when a batter hits a baseball, the momentum of the bat just before it strikes the ball plus the momentum of the pitched baseball is equal to the momentum of the bat after it strikes the ball plus the momentum of the hit baseball. As another example, imagine a beaver jumping off a stationary log that is floating on water. Before the beaver jumps, the log and the beaver are not moving, so the total momentum is zero. Upon jumping, the beaver acquires forward momentum, and at the same time the log moves in the other direction with an equal and opposite momentum; the total momentum of the beaver plus the log remains at zero.

Diotima of Mantinea

Diotima of Mantinea
Diotima of Mantinea is a major figure in Plato's Symposium. The Symposium is the dialogue set during an all night banquet where the participants decide to examine the concept of Love. It should be noted that no women are present at the banquet. This is a 'men only' view of the topic.
It is interesting that Socrates, the one who is the figure of THE PHILOSOPHER, is the person who introduces the ideas of a woman philosopher.
The speakers introduce most of the major theories about Love. Then, finally, Socrates speaks and he tells of an encounter with a priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who taught him the meaning of Love.
He repeats her teaching with its linking of Love and Beauty and the human soul ascending a ladder of the human perfection in love.

In Plato's Symposium, Socrates says that Diotima was a seer or priestess who, in his youth, taught him "the philosophy of love". Socrates also claims that Diotima successfully postponed the plague of Athens.
Her name has often been used as a moniker for philosophical or artistic projects, journals, essays, etc.: German poet Friedrich Holiderlin used the pen name Diotima as a moniker for Susette Borkenstein Gontard, who inspired him to write Hyperion. In this work, the fictitious first-person author Hyperion addresses letters to his friends Bellarmin and Diotima.

Diotima

"...they are only breath,

words which I command are immortal"