Dec 22, 2021
Day 4 Before Christmas
On the Most Promising Palindrome!
It’s 12/22/21 — the last palindrome in a very unusual month for palindromes. This is the kind of thing that gets numbers nerds like Stu and so many others smiling and feeling sure that there’s good in the universe.
It’s also the first day that the sun starts rising in the sky and staying up longer. However, in the usual sense, winter has just begun. Stu’s Cursory Rhyme today touches on so many things, from the sun, metaphors about life, relationships, and the American Civil War era Christmas song that I mentioned when we started. Here’s the poem, and I’ll explain more below of what Stu’s brought into this special poem on this very special day and date.
For 12–22–21 Four Days Before Christmas
The days are getting longer,
but winter will hold sway.
There’s cause for hope and sunlight,
but chill won’t go away.
Deep drumbeats mean procession,
promise…or ominous progression,
the power of thunder, canon fire,
and war, but not perception.
For that you need the highs and lows,
the bells to quell too common woes,
so ring them and make friends from foes,
and bring them in, where the fire glows.
The fire lights a side inside where
heart and mind make peace. It shows.
I really like that one.
Okay well, the first stanza combines the literal with the metaphorical realities of life on earth. If we had more time, we could get into how Stu handles the Modest Mousian case of the Dystopos, meaning people who feel benefits from darkness and woe through commiseration and the good feelings that can provide.
Those are people who love bad news, like from the Modest Mouse album in 2004, which was an emergence year for Brood 10 Periodical Cicadas and clearly significant if you know about insectual interactions with humies, according to Stu. Anyway, Stralfs love this perspective and aesthetic because of how the emotional tension is useful for them. I wish we had more time, but let’s go to the next stanza.
The second stanza is partly a reference to the Four drummers drumming (Correction: No, of course, there were Four calling birds, twelve drummers drumming, so my apologies to the birds and the other eight drummers. It doesn’t affect Stu’s poem, which was about how music/sounds touch us) in the Twelve Days of Christmas. Stu looks at things forwards and backwards, which is why he loves palindromes so much probably, so he takes the Twelve Days as a countdown and not just a progression series. (Tomorrow he’ll include the Three French Hens.) He loves our music, but he’s also aware of the negative effects on our emotions and thinking when things are composed certain ways. Again, this stanza is both literal and metaphorical in broader ways.
I don’t need to say much about this stanza, and I’d rather not. I do need to mention that Stu has come up with an involved theory about a Star Eye inside each of us, which gets covered with an atom shell before we’re born into this real world. Looking at fire and certain intensities and spectra of other light helps bring out the Star Eye regardless of the varying strengths and thicknesses of humie atom shells, according to Stu. It’s actually a fairly Christmas-y concept, which is why I mention it briefly here.
Enjoy your Fourth Day Before Christmas. And thanks for reading.
Tim
