Ridged Knot Stitch

INSURANCE, n.  An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

Insurance Agent: My dear sir, that is a fine house--pray let me insure.

House Owner: With pleasure. Please make the annual premium so low that by the time when, according to the tables of your actuary, it will probably be destroyed by fire I will have paid you considerably less than the face of the policy.

Insurance Agent: O dear, no--we could not afford to that. We must fix the premium so that you will have paid more.

House Owner: How, then, can I afford that?

Insurance Agent: Why your house may burn down at any time. There was Smith's house, for example, which--

House Owner: Spare me--there were Brown's house, on the contrary, and Jone's house, and Robinson's house, which--

Insurance Agent: Spare me!

House Owner: Let us understand each other. You want me to pay you money on the supposition that something will occur previously to the time set by yourself for its occurrence. In otherwords, you expect me to bet that my house will not last so long as you say that it will probably last.

Insurance Agent: But if your house burns without insurance it will be a total loss.

House Owner: Beg your pardon--by your own actuary's tables, I shall probably have saved, when it burns, all the premiums I would otherwise have paid to you--amounting to more than the face of the policy they would have bought. But suppose it to burn, uninsured, before the time upon which your figures are based. If I could not afford that, how could you if it were insured?

Insurance Agent: O, we should make ourselves whole from our luckier ventures with other clients. Virtually, they pay your loss.

House Owner: And virtually, then, don't I help to pay their losses?

Are not their houses as likely as mine to burn before they have paid you as much as you must pay them? The case stands this way: you expect to take more money from your clients than you pay to them, do you not?

Insurance Agent: Certainly; if we did not--

House Owner: I would not trust you with my money. Very well, the. If it is certain, with reference to the whole body of your clients, that they lose money on you it is probable, with reference to any one of them, that he will. It is these individual probabilities that make the aggregate certainty. 

Insurance Agent: I will not deny it--but look at the figures in this pamph--

House Owner: Heaven forbid!

Insurance Agent: You spoke of saving the premiums which you would otherwise pay to me. Will you not be more likely to squander them? We offer you an incentive to thrift.

House Owner: The willingness of A to take care of B's money is not peculiar to insurance, but as a charitable institution you command esteem. Deign to accept its expression from a Deserving Object.

New outfit for Easter from the Lydia/WiseBuysThrift shop; $$11.00!  SCORE!

Stockinette Ridge

 I                               Oh, when I have hung
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
Or half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed
Suspended by the blast which blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears; the sky seemed not a sky
Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds.
II
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear grass on that wall,
By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er,
As once I passed, did to my mind convey
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and looked so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream that could not live
Where meditation was. I turned away
And walked along my road in happiness.

III
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

IV
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent by, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Uon the glassy plain; and often times,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal rounds!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquill as a dreamless sleep.

 Seamus Heaney 

1968-1978

Happy Birthday Patricia Savilla Willson-Comfort

March 30, 1940

Diagonal Checks

Dawn Shoot

Clouds ran their wet mortar, plastered the daybreak

Grey. The stones clicked tartly

If we missed the sleepers but mostly 

Silent we headed up the railway

Where now the only steam was funnelling from cows

Ditched on their rumps beyond hedges,

Cudding, watching, and knowing.

The rails scored a bull's-eye into the eye

Of a bridge. A corncrake challenged

Unexpectedly like a hoarse sentry

And a snipe rocketed away on reconnaissance.

Rubber-booted, belted, tense as two pairachutists,

We climbed the iron gate and dropped

Into the meadow's six acres of broom, gorse and dew.

A sandy bank, reinforced with coiling roots,

Faced you, two hundred yards from teh track.

Snug on our bellies behind a rise of dead whins,

Our ravenous eyes getting used to the greyness,

We settled, soon had the holes under cover.

This was the den they all would be heading fro now,

Loping under ferns in dry drains, flashing

Brown orbits across ploughlands and grazing.

The plaster thinned at the skyline, the whitewash 

Was bleaching on houses and stables,

The cock would be sounding reveille

In seconds.

And there was one breaking

In from the gap in the corner.

Donnelly's left hand came up

And came down on my barrel. This one was his.

'For Christ's sake', I spat, 'Take your time, there'll be more,'

There was the playboy trotting up to the hole.

By the ash tree, 'Wild rover no more',

Said Donnelly and emptied two barrels

And got him. I finished him off.

Another snipe catapulted into the light,

A mare whinnied and shivered her haunches

Up on a hill. The others would not be back

After three shots like that. We dandered off

To the railway; the prices were small at that time

So we did not bother to cut out the tongue.

The ones that slipped back when the all clear got round 

Would be first to examine him.

Seamus Heaney, 1965-1975

Garter-Stitch Steps

"I second that motion!"

Steps

RULE #62:  
"Don't take yourself so seriously!"

Interrupted Rib

"Who are you working for?  I see I'll have to find out the hard way."

Double-Ridged Rib

THE FIRED I' THE FLINT

And I have asked to be 

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb

And out of the swing of the sea.

In each case the verse lives by its music and suggestiveness, but with one important difference: the suggestiveness here condenses on a stated theme, 'a nun takes the veil', and the heaven-purity-cold idea equates with the haven-nun-ery-quiet images in a relationship that is essentially allegorical rather than symbolic. The Hopkins poem is fretted rather than fecund. In the Blake poem the rose might be a girl but it remains a rose. Yet it is also a rose window, blookshot with the light of other possible meanings. The rose and the sickness are not illustrative in the way the lilies and the haven are. In 'Heaven-Haven' it is the way things are exquisitely wrought, the way a crystal is sharp and sided and knowable rather than the way a rose is deep and unknowable that counts. Hopkin's art here is the discovery of verbal equivalents, in mingling the purity of images with the idea of a vow of chastity. The words are crafted together more than they are coaxed out of one another, and they are crafted in the service of an idea that precedes the poem, is independent of it and to which the poem is perhaps ultimately subservient. So much for the dark embryo. We are now in the real of flint-spark rather than marshlight. 'Heaven-Haven' is consonantal fire struck by idea off language. The current of its idea does not fly the bound it chafes but confines itself with in delightful ornamental channels.

To take another comparison witha a poet whose nervous apprehension of phenomena and ability to translate this nervous energy into phrases reminds us also of Hopkins: take this line by Keats, describing autumn as the season of fulfilment:

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

and compare it with a Hopkins line that also realizes a sense of burgeoning and parturition, imagining Jesus in Mary's womb:

Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey.

Both lines rely on the amplitude of vowels for their dream of benign, blood-warm growth, but where Keats's vowels seem like nubs, buds off a single uh or oo, yeasty growths that are ready at any moment to relapse back into the original mother sound, Hopkins's are defined, held apart, and in relation to one another rather than in relation to the original nub: if they are also faceted. Hopkin's consonants alliterate to maintain a design whereas Keats's release a flow. I am reminded of something T. S. Eliot wrote compaing Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. In Jonson, Eliot remarked in The Sacred Wood:

unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verseo but in the desing of the whole.

We must say much the same of Keats and Hopkins lines.

Keats has the life of a swarm, fluent and merged; Hopkins has de design of the honeycomb, definite and loaded. In Keats, the rhythem is narcotic, in Hopkins it is a stimulant to the mind.

Keats woos us to receive, Hopkins alerts us to perceive.

I think that what is true of this single Hopkins line is generally true of the kind of poetry he writes. For in spite of the astounding richness of his music and the mimetic power of his vocabulary, his use of language is disciplined by a philological and rhetorical passion. There is a conscious push of the deliberating intelligence, (there it isn't) a siring strain rather than a birth-push in his poetic act. Like Jonson, he is poeta doctus; like Jonson's, his verse is 'rammed with life', butting ahead instead of hanging back into its own centre. As opposed to the symbolist petic, it is concerned with statement instead of states of feeling. Indeed, at this point it is interesting to recall Ben Jonson's strictures on the Shakespearian fluency, rejecting linguistic mothering in favour of rhetorical mastery. Jonson, you remember, was not impressed by the way Shakespeare's current flies each bound it chafes:

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand.'...He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature wherein he flowed with tath facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped... His wit was in his own power: would the rule of it had been so too.

pg 84-85

Seamus Heaney

Ridged Stitch

HADES, n.  The lower world; the residence of departed spirits; the place where the dead live.
   Among the ancients the idea of Hades was not synonymous with our Hell, many of the most respectable men of antiquity residing there in a very comfortable kind of way.  Indeed, the Elysian Fields themselves were a part of Hades, though they have since been removed to Paris. When the Jacobean version of the New Testament was in process of evolution the pious and learned men engaged in the work insisted by amajority vote on translating the Greek word 'Alons' "Hell"; but a conscientious minority member secretly possessed himself of the record and struck out the objectionable word wherever he could find it. At the next meeting, the Bishop of Salisbury, looking over the work, suddenly sprang to his feet and said with considerable excitement: "Gentlemen, somebody has been razing 'Hell' here!" Years afterwards the good prelates's death was made sweet by the reflection that he had been the means (under Providence) of making an important, serviceable and immortal addition to the phraseology of the English tongue.

Tile Stitch

Bird #2
Bird~Watchers
Bird~watching, one of the fastest growing national hobbies, takes many forms. It can be a science, an art, a recreation, a sport, an environmental ethic, or a religious experience.  After all, birds are the only creatures that share with the angels the attribute of feathered wings.
   A bird~watcher by any other name--ornithologist, bird lover, bird bander, bird fancier, bird spotter, birder--is still someone who watches birds. I favor bird~watcher for general use because the term is inclusive.  It describes almost everyone who looks at birds or studies them--from the watchers at the window who simply feed birds to the elite level of the fellows of the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU), and Nobel laureats such as Konrad Lorenz and Nikko Tinbergen, who have won distinction for their work on bird behavior.  As for myself I am primarily a bird artist and bird photograper, a visual person with a consuming passion for birds. To paraphrase the late E.B. White. I watch them and they undoubtedly watch me   
   Around 1920, when I was cutting my teeth, so to speak, on Junior Audubon leaflets, people who watched birds fell into two categories: ornithologists, who usually shot birds, and bird lovers, who did not.  In Color Key to NOrth American Birds, published in 1903 Frank Chapman addressed this dichotomy: "From the scientific point of view there is but one satisfactory way to identify a bird.  A specimen of it should be in hand." Then, aware of an increasing dilemma he wrote, "But we cannot place a gun in the hands of these thousands of bird lovers we are yearly developing."  He used the term bird lover freely in his writing. If we insist on speaking of dog lovers and horse lovers, bird lover would be a logical usage. Dogs and horses are pets, however, almost like members of the family; wild birds are not. Loving involves reciprocation , and birds ho not reciprocate in an affectionate way. They could not care less about us, even though we feed them and call them our feathered friends.
When I am asked by the media how many birders exist I must as "Do you mean birders or bird-watchers? It depends on your definition." The term bird-watcher includes anyone who feeds birds. In my neighborhood, everyone up and down our road puts out sunflower seeds and other goodies for chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals, and finches. If I go for a midwinter holiday with my wife, Ginny, I rest assured that if the birds eat ll the birdseed, our chickadees will not perish; they will simply go to the neighbors' yards. Then there are those several million people who watch birds through a gunsight rather than binoculars, their focus, however is generally limited to ducks, quail, pheasants, and few other species.

If we include these and other peripheral categories, we could contend that there are between 20 and 40 million bird-watchers in the United States. The United States Bureau of Outdoor Recreation came up with a figure of 11 million. Robert Arbib, former editor of Americna Birds, arrived at a far more conservative estimate of the number of true birders. A birder, according to Arbib, is one who occasionally goes out looking for birds beyond the confines of the backyard. Most birders own binoculars, field guides, and scopes. Although millions of people own field guides and other bird books, Arbib puts the maximum  number of bonafide birders countrywide at 150,000. Only a fraction of these would be called hard-core, but the number is growing and will continue to increase as advanced or specialized bird guides become available.  Ornithologists, on the other hand, possess a high level of expertise of a scientific nature. It is presumptuous to call yourself an ornighologist simply because you identify birds or make bird lists. Most ornithologists are professionals with college degrees--either a doctorate opr at least a master's. A very few nonprofessionals who devote their time year after year to some specialized problem of avian research might be included in this category. We could make the generalization that the average person who watches birds is interested in what the bird is; an ornighologist is more interested in what it does. Most fellows and many of the elective members of the AOU look with disdain on the field-identification buffs. They contend that anyone who watches birds seriously should work on a problem of some kind. This rather lordly attitude was why the American Birding Association (ABA) was formed--as an antidote of sorts, to promote birding as a competitve game or sport. The ABA aspired to form an elite of its own that would set itself apart from the hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, who call themselves bird-watchers.

Orthos' Guide To 

The Birds ARound Us 

to be continued...

Butterfly Lace

HOMICIDE, n.  The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praise-worthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another--the classification is for advantage of thge lawyers.

Diamond Panels

The Birds Around Us
Guided by Nature
As we learn more about birds, we find they are not quite the gloriously unrestrained being we had imagined them to be. They are bound by all sorts of natural laws. They go north and south almost by the calendar. They seem to follow certain flyways and routes between their summer and winter homes. A robin that lives in Connecticut this year is not likely to go to Michigan next year. Some behaviorists--Tinbergen, Lorenz, and others--caution us against saying that birds think. They tell us that birds are creatures of action and reaction. A night-heron newly arrived in the rookery performs a step-by-step ritual of song and dance. Leave out any one of the steps, and the sequence is disrupted--the reproductive cycle does not carry through to fruition.
We learn, too, that most birds have territories. The males hold down a plot of ground as their own--it may be an acre, or it may be 5 acres. They are property owners just as we are. Song, instead of being only a joyous outburst, is a functional expression--a proclamation of ownership, an invitation to a female, a threat to another male. Most thought-provoking of all is to discover the balance of nature: the balance between a bird and its environment, the interrelation between the hawk that eats the bird, the bird that eats the insect, and the insect that eats the leaves--perhaps the very leaves that grow on the tree in which the hawk nests. We learn that each ecosystem has a carrying capacity, and that predation harvest only a surplus that otherwise would be leveled off in some different way; hence, putting up fences and shooting all the hawks and cats will not raise the number of Red-eyed Vireos to any significant degree. Birds, then, are almost as earthbound as we are. They have freedom and mobility only within prescribed natural limits.
I have often likened birds to litmus paper. Their high rate of metabolism and fast pace cause them to react sensitively to anything in their habitat that is out of kilter. Thus, they are much more than cardinals, jays, or chickadees to brighten the suburban garden, ducks or quail to fill the hunter's bag, or rare shorebirds to be ticked off on the birder's list--they are indicators of the environment that send out signals that we must heed to ensure our own survival, as well as theirs.

Orthos' Guide to

Purled Ladder Stitch

HEAT, n.  He says Professor Tyndall, is a mode

O motion, but I know not how he's proving 

His point; but this I know--hot words bestowed

With skill will set the human fist a-moving,

And where it stops the stars burn free and wild.

Crede expertum--I have seen them, child.

Gorton Swope.

Dot Stitch

HERMIT, n.  A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve

Big Brother Mark Evan Sammons

being owed--owe ours--owed your people--owed your tree-owe her/him--owe our eyes--eyes ours--SS!

Little Hourglass Rib

3. Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966

The Lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs

Him back on his haunches, lodging  thunder

Grossly there between his chin and his knees.

He is raised up by what he buckles under.

Each arm extended by a seasoned rod,

He parades behind it.  And though the drummers

Are granted passage through the nodding crowd

It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

To every cocked ear, expert in its greed,

His battered signature subscribes 'No Pope'.

The goatskins sometimes plastered with his blood.

The air is pounding like a stethoscope.

Seamus Heaney

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney

http://pickfordcinema.org/page/Playing-PFC.aspx#1291

http://pickfordcinema.org/page/Playing-PFC.aspx#1291

Chasing Ice!

Half Fisherman's Rib

HONORABLE, adj.  Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur."

"Angry Birds!"

This is the menu for this weekend (Easter too, 2 weekends from now)  Do I like Easter in March?
Tea, from the Greenhouse, mixed with Vita-juice.  Tea for relieving stress, tea for lifting spirits, tea for clear skin.

Menu:
Steak with potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower.
Hot-dogs with chips, and Caesar salad.
Finger sandwiches.  (see recipe on Se'jour prenons un pot! blog)

Saint Patrick's Day sugar cookies, clover-leaf and apple cutters.

Easter sugar cookies, bunny, chick, carrot and egg.

Bon Apetite'!

Broken-Rib Diagonal

ABILITY, n. 

The natural equippment to accomplish some small part of the meaner ambitions distinguishing able men from dead ones.  In the last analysist abillity is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of soulemnity.  Perhaps, however, this impressive quality is rightly appraised; it is no easy task to be solemn.

Double Fleck Stitch

I never saw that you did painting need, And therefore to your fair no painting set, I found (or thought I found) you did exceed, The barren tender of a Poets debt: And therefore have I slept in your report, That you yourself being extant well might show, How far a modoern quill doth come too short, Speaking of worth, What worth in you doth grow, This silence for my sins you did impute, Which shall be most my glory being dumb, For I impair not beauty being mute, When others would give life, and bring a tomb. There lives more life in one of your fair eyes, Than both your Poets can in praise devise.

Sonnets, 1XXXiii

Fleck Stitch

O More than Moone,

Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,

Weep me not dead in thine armes, but forbeare

To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone,

   Let not the winde

   Example finde,

   To do me more harm, then it purposeth,

   Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath, Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest and hasts the others death.

                                                                                                 W. Epsom 7 Types of Ambiguity

Fisherman's Rib

INFANCY, n.  The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven lies about us."  The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

Diagonal Rib 1

IMBECILITY, n.  A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affection censorious critics of this dictionary.

Broken Rib

IMAGINATION, n.  A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

Moss Panels

IMPENITENCE, n.  A state of mind intermediate in point of time between sin and punishment.

Lattice Stitch

ILLUSTRIOUS, adj.  Suitably placed for the shafts of malice, envy and detraction.

Mock-Cable Rib

ILLUMINATI, n.  A sect of Spanish heretics of the latter part of the sixteenth century; so called because they were light weights--cunctationes illuminati.

Box Stitch

ENOUGH, pro.  All there is in the world if you like it.
                             Enough is as good as a feast--for that matter
                             Enougher's as good as a feast and the platter.
                                                                                                   Arbely C. Strunk.

Moss Stitch

INDECISION, n. The chief element of success; "for whereas," saith Sir Thomas Brewbold, "there is but one way to do nothing and divers ways to do something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of going astray as he who pusheth forwards"--a most clear and satisfactory exposition of the matter.
   "Your prompt decision to attack," said General Grant on a certain occasion to General Gordon Granger, "was admirable; you had but five minutes to make up your mind in."
   "Yes, sir," answered the victorious subordinate, "it is a great thing to know exactly what to do in an emergency.  When in doubt whether to attack or retreat I never hesitate a moment--I toss up a copper."
   "Do you mean to say that's what you did this time?"
   "Yes, General; but for Heaven's sake don't reprimand me:  I disobeyed that coin."

Seed Stitch 1

IMPOSTOR, n.   A rival aspirant to public honors.

Crossed Stockinette Stitch

DISOBEDIENCE, n.  The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

Reverse Stockinette Stitch

DISCUSSION, n.  A method of confirming others in their errors.

Stockinette Stitch

DISABUSE, v. t.  To present your neighbor with another and better error than the one which he has deemed it advantageous to embrace.

Garter Stitch

RADIUM, n.  A mineral that gives off heat and stimulates the organ that a scientist is a fool with.

Rectangular Checks

DIPLOMACY, n.  The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

Pique Check Stitch

HEAVEN, n.  A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.