My Faux Libation Bearers,
Do you ever feel like technology just ain’t working for ya?
I’ve had one of those days, hence the late delivery of this newsletter.1
Sometimes I wish we could go back to the days before the typewriter.
Hell, let’s go back to the days before running water.
Today’s song addition to the “Mixed Up Files” is all about that sentiment.
Listen here:
Now of course it would be foolish to wish to live in any age other than the one one is born into, right?
We must be thankful that we are alive today, etc.
But still, I can’t help but wonder at my ancestors in those days going to the well unsupervised and the shennanigans that must have ensued.
I recovered an old journal with some notes that pertain to this “going down to the well” and so I will share them here.
This journal entry is from January 27, 2007:
I wonder if religion would exist if humans did not dream. I don’t subscribe to the notion that we popped up as intelligent beings. If you extrapolate the numbers for child mortality over the past two hundred years back to pre-written-word humans, you’d think it’s a wonder anyone survived when life expectancy was about 30 seconds for 3 out of 5 humans born. Those that lived past 3 were a boon, for they could work.
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But one must go back to when only the young survived. Oh those heady days of walking to the well & meeting your fate. We can only hope that love flowered before language.
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That euphoric feeling.
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When a language dies it is called a dead language. At that point, it can be an intellectual curiosity and exist on paper. It is no longer a means for survival in the spiritual2 world of the people who spoke it. A god dies with that language & only remnants of its vanity survive.
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Certainly dreams predate language and, one might assume, reason, but . . . considering the infant mortality rates extrapolation—if you factor in the will to survive versus the numbers, you might be surprised.
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pulchitrudinous
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Imagine having a dream that there is something coming to take you away & not having the language to express the dread fear immediately upon waking.
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The Edenists are those who find love in the first flower and make it bloom till the end; the hedonists are those who scratch their own surfaces waiting to wake up.
by wake up, I mean give birth.
Men, sadly, can never truly wake up.
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Here endeth the journal entry of 1/27/2007 (the edibles had kicked in.)
Also, here endeth Volume 5 of “From the Mixed Up Files of Mr. Matthew T. Schindler”3 over on Bandcamp, as the Equinox falls this Friday, September 22, 2023, and I try to change with the seasons, like so many well-meaning mortals do.
Next week begins Volume 6 of FTMUFOMMTS.
I remain your humble servant,
OX&C,
Faux Jean
Here are the lyrics:
Down to the Well
For water we used to go down to the well
Now it's down to the corner store, what the hell?
Or at a gas station at three in the morn
you're coming home from work and your
all ripped and torn.
I wish we still had time to go to the well
Where the water's sweet and spirited as hell
And we'll get drunk on the water just fine
We'll have a drunk and had a good time at the well
At the well we got ourselves in really deep
At the well ourselves such a ball
Hell, well
They don't know what the well can do for you
The well can do for me
You know the water's pure the water's sweet
The water is sweet
The water is sweet
The water is sweet
The water is sweet
The Adobe Creative Cloud is Crushing my sad 8GB iMac. I also had to get the kids to various lessons after school pickup and go to Costco etc. etc.
I.e. emotional.
Which one may see stylized as FTMUFOMMTSV5 here and there.