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| sunset, december 21, 2011, from our porch in woodland hills |
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| http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/ua/SunAndSeasons.html |
Lots more information at the site (click on the caption).
Seasonal sadness doesn't seem to be a new thing. Alignments of standing stones set up thousands of years ago mark the point the sun will reach before finally starting to come back.
The photo below shows the southernmost reach of the sun, right at the top of Santaquin Mountain. Moving to the left, as the sun now will do, it will slide down the mountain, climb the peak with the microwave tower, and descent down into the next dip before June 21.
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| sunrise, day after the solstice |
In honor of this year's solstice, some photos from that trip (much better ones all over the internet; but these are mine and thus memoryladen):
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| Avebury |
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| Avebury |
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| Stonehenge: No Access to Stone Circle! |
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| Standing Stones of Stenness (Orkney Islands) |
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| Ring of Brogar (Orkney Islands) |
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| And the most phallic of them all! The Devil's Arrows |
Addendum
The Flowerville blogger's response to the photos took me back to the notebook I had with me on the trip. A couple of images scanned from the book I left in a London cinema near the end of the trip, after seeing Wim Wenders' Bis ans Ende der Welt, and then retrieved, gratefully!, hours later):
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| Standing Stones of Stenness |
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| Ring of Brogar |
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| What Remains of my Orkney Lunch |
A Work for Poets
To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk
Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read
That not far from the stone
A well might open for wayfarers
Here is a work for poets --
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence
And a poem by my friend Leslie Norris, may he rest in peace, about poetry and life and the cromlech in the photo above (note the 12 stanzas -- *sta-nzas):
“The Twelve Stones of
Pentre Ifan”
The
wind
Over
my shoulder
Blows
from the cold of time.
It
has
Shaped
the hill,
It
has honed the rock outcrops
With
the
Granules
of its
Rasping. When the old ones
Were
born
They
dropped in dark-
ness,
like sheep, and hot animals
Howled
for
The
afterbirths.
I
watch the great stones of
Faith
they
Moved
in the flickering
Mountains
of their nameless
Lives,
and
See
once more the
Points
of adjusted rock, taller
Than
any
Man
who will ever
Stand
where I stand, lifting their hope
In
still,
Huge
stone, pointed
To
the flying wind. The sea ebbs again
And
round
The
endless brevity
Of
the seasons the old men’s cromlech
Prepares
Its
hard shadows.
The
four great stones, elate and springing,
And
the
Smaller
stones, big
As
a man, leaning in, supporting.
Leslie Norris (Walking the White Fields: Poems 1967-1980)
7 comments:
do you know george mackay brown? i like his stuff.
orkneys are on my travelling list since ages and now even more so... nice old pictures... you've seen more of england than me :)
thanks for the g.m.brown suggestion. i hadn't known him, but will read him now.
you can see by what i've added to the post that your response took me back. many thanks.
you're very welcome scott. travelling back in time is nice... and especially so when one can remember such nice things and share them... those drawings are really cool. i can't draw. i like that about the nameless lives in that poem of your friend... it's a beautiful beautiful landscape, this all... mental and outside too...
I am going to be a bit irrev on the subject of stones: I had a poet friend Michael Lebeck, a fine translator too, [Nossack] who however was bit touched, and suddenly joined a cult. When I asked him, at a deli at Sixth Avenue and 57th in NYC, what he did there, he replied that he moved an imaginary rock up and down, apparently in his head, which I then told another friend, who succeeded Michael Lebeck in occuppying what had been EE Cummings' dolls house Mews building in Patchin Place, also in NYC. That was the lyricist Jerry Leiber whose one line response was "ROCKS IN HIS HEAD" - on the principle of projection: perhaps that is what those Norseman had back then a few thousand years ago, and perhaps they still do, although they no longer extroject them in quite that memorable a fashion! http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
rocks in their heads indeed!
i think i told you once that my friend diana girsdansky epperson is the granddaughter of the woman who lived with eecummings in that place (cummings second wife) until dr. girsdansky made a house call and took her with him.
hey scott...are you suggesting that, perhaps the main, purpose of the standing rocks has to do with the shadow they cast? hhmmm...interesting...wonder if groupings is a factor too?
the alignments are often meant to mark the solstices, and there would indeed be shadows at that time, like that slice of sunlight that touches the spiral in chaco canyon.
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