Angels again - Archangel this time.

The angels are two days and two nights older than we: the Lord created them on the fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the first moon they scanned the infant earth, barely more than a few wheat fields and some orchards beside the waters. These primitive angels were stars. For the Hebrews, the concepts of angel and star merged effortlessly: I will select, from among many, the passage of the Book of Job (38:7) in which the Lord spoke out of the whirlwind and recalled the beginning of the world, "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

From Jorge Luis Borges, The History of Angels

I love word origins, angel for example:

14c. fusion of O.E. engel (with hard -g-) and O.Fr. angele, both from L. angelus, from Gk. angelos "messenger," possibly related to angaros "mounted courier," both from an unknown Oriental source,

early 13c., messager, from O.Fr. messagier, from message (see message). With parasitic -n- inserted by c.1300 for no apparent reason except that people liked to say it that way (cf. passenger, harbinger, scavenger).

c.1300, "communication transmitted via a messenger," from O.Fr. message, from M.L. missaticum, from L. missus, pp. of mittere "to send" (see mission). The Latin word is glossed in O.E. by ærende. Specific religious sense of "divinely inspired communication via a prophet" (1540s) led to transferred sense of "the broad meaning (of something)," first attested 1828. As a verb, "to send messages," attested from 1580s (http://www.etymonline.com/)

So the idea of a message as having information content only came into general use sometime in the 16th century. What were we saying to each other before then?

Ran into a W.H.Auden poem in a bookshop this evening

While this is not a bookshop (or W.H.Auden) it seems appropriate somehow. And this is the poem:

Who's Who

A shilling life will give you all the facts: 

How Father beat him, how he ran away, 

What were the struggles of his youth, what acts 

Made him the greatest figure of his day; 

Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night, 

Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea; 

Some of the last researchers even write 

Love made him weep his pints like you and me. 

With all his honours on, he sighed for one 

Who, say astonished critics, lived at home; 

Did little jobs about the house with skill 

And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still 

Or potter round the garden; answered some 

Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

Darkness in the margins

Some Dylan Thomas - the first line is the title I suppose:

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

When clouds are cursed by thunder,

Be said to weep when weather howls?

Shall rainbows be their tunics' colour?

When it is rain where are the gods?

Shall it be said they sprinkle water

From garden cans, or free the floods?

Shall it be said that, venuswise,

An old god's dugs are pressed and pricked,

The wet night scolds me like a nurse?

It shall be said that gods are stone.

Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground, 

Flung gravel chime? Let the stones speak

With tongues that talk all tongues.

People in a window on a beach.

Images in stone

Darn - I guess I was asleep