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Tom Sakic wrote:Thank you, Jack. It seems so clear now:-) I always perceived this song as love prayer, with clear plea on its end. ("Oh please let me come into the [your] storm.") But as we know, a man never got the woman, not by begging on his knees.

lizzytysh wrote: give the verses a context that make a wholly different kind of sense, and I really like it.

~ Lizzy

thequeenisdead wrote:On to the title:

One of us--the narrator, the doctor, the saint, the Eskimo; Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, etc—has to be correct in our beliefs, it seems to be saying. One of “us” must have the answer to all of this, or so it seems.

Ray

The Eskimo verse has always been a mystery to me. An Eskimo with a movie camera? Why an Eskimo? How her [the woman in the song being where the Eskimos are] being 'there'? Why the Eskimo showing it to the singer? Many questions surrounding it... yet, ultimately, I saw it signifying her protection of her heart with many layers of ice sufficient to summon the image of Eskimo [the Eskimo taking a picture of her, for me metaphorically signified that she didn't wear the protective garb of the north, as her heart and her soul were sufficiently frozen already, as to cause even the Eskimo to shiver and his fingers to turn blue ~ garb to 'protect' one from the cold would have been redundant or superfluous... for she is the cold ~ interestingly, or not, I've actually always imagined her as being nude, with the snow and the wind whipping about her, sometimes nearly veiling her out completely, as she stood tall, stoic, and even serene, with an erotic element and his shivers the same] . What you've done with this, regarding the Eskimos themselves with religion, and aboriginal people and the medicine wheel take it all places I'd never have dreamed of going... and give the verses a context that make a wholly different kind of sense, and I really like it.

Byron wrote:
One short phrase hit me between the eyes (or is that ears?) anyway.......
"There's no such thing as one."

.

At Minimun Two

Synergy is
the complex behavior
of whole systems
unpredicted by
the isolated observation
and consideration
of only one or more
parts of the system.

Love is the synergy
of omnipermeative
and inherently differentiating
metaphysical radiation
nonsynchronously coexisting
with omniembracing
and systemically integrating,
eternally conserving,
metaphysical gravity.

Metaphysical radiation
and metaphysical gravity
eternally and only
coexist.

The always and only coexistent
positive and negative mathematics
demonstrate scientifically
that unity is plural
and at minimun two.

In its inherent cell dichotomy,
biology demonstrates
that unity is plural
and at minimun two.

Science demonstrates
that unity is plural and at minimun two
with it's life-initiating
awareness of otherness.
No otherness, no awareness.
No Life.
Life is inherently two.

Science again demonstrates
that unity is plural
and at minimun two
by requiring
both an insideness and outsideness
of both
the observed and the observer.

Science again demonstrates that unity
is at minimun two
in the concomitant,
always and only coexisting
convexity and concavity.
Science demonstrates
that convexity diffuses
and concavity concentrates
the same impinging radiation
wherefore the always and only
coexisting concavity and convexity
demonstrate that they are not
the same function
wherefore unity is plural
and at minimun two.

The eternally convergent-divergent
dissynchronous juxtapositioning
of inherently dissipative radiation
and inherently conserving gravity
pulsatively and resonatively propagate
the infinite variety
of wavelenghts and frequencies
of nonsimultaneous, differently enduring,
only overlapping episoded,
only locally aborning and dying
and only sumtotally
eternally regenerative
scenario Universe.

Appreciation of the integrity
of eternally regenerative, scenario Universe
is sometimes called "Wisdom."

Employment of
the only metaphysically experienced,
eternally regenerative scenario Universe
is sometimes identified as "Love."

Unity of Universe is always plural
and in its minimun twofoldness
as both Wisdom and Love,
these two synergize
to constitute the phenomenon
we intuitively identify
as God.

This is probably as close
as we may ever come
to such human-thought identifying.

Duality is the essential synergetic building block of everything.

...
the poor man could hardly stop shivering,
his lips and his fingers were blue.
I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes
and I guess he just never got warm.
But you stand there so nice, in your blizzard of ice,
oh please let me come into the storm.

"Now King David was striken with frost in his body, to his very bones. It was the month of zif, when to everyone else the heat seemed unbearable. He could get no sleep; he became more and more like a solitary bird on a rooftop.

They covered him over with layer upon layer of sheepskins, skins that had been displayed before the face of the Lord, and yet still he shook and shivered incessantly from cold.

And wine, wine which had in Mephiboshet produced an over-abundance of warmth and sleep, he could not swallow – it merely trickled out from the corner of his mouth.

And Bathsheba said: ‘Woman is the warmest of all God’s creatures. Let us find him a woman who is in her warmest years.’

For she knew: both kings and gods had been awakened to renewed life, had even arisen from the dead in the shimmering heat exuded by youth.

It was Abishag from Shunem they found. Solomon found her. He called her the Shunammite after the city where he found her. It was said of her that withered trees she touched bor fruit within ten days, and that infertile asses became pregnant at ounce if she slapped their hind quarters. It was for these reasons that Solomon asked to see her. Babylonian merchants thought her real name was Ishtar. She had once been taken out into the desert and red-blossomed oleanders had grown up in her footprints.

When Solomon saw her, he realized at once that she was the one who could cure the King. If the frost in his body could withstand Abishag the Shunammite, then it was incurable. The sun had burned her dark brown: she had once been the guardian of a vineyard. Her teeth resembled a flock of newly-washed ewes, her hair was long and gleaming black, and her breasts were firm and pointed.

And Abishag from Shunem went to the King’s bed. She crept in beneath the pile of sheepskins, and those who stood nearest said they heard her whisper Tamar’s name. When her fingers brushed against a fig cake that had been laid on one of the festering sores on the King’s neck, there sprang forth from the cake a fig branch with magnificent leaves.

She remained there for twenty-eigth days, the length of time she was clean.

But not once did he have carnal knowledge of her. No , when he felt her with his withered hands he could not even distinguish the parts of her body one from another. He no longer knew for sure what was breast and stomach and pudenda, and he no longer remembered how the various parts of the body were to be used – the frost had turned his fingers blinds.

And when Abishag the Shunammite rose from the bed on the twenty-eighth day, King David had still not ceased shaking with cold. But the skin on the side of Abishag’s body that had lain against the King had become wrinkeld and dried up.

Then Bathsheba commanded them all to leave the King’s room. And she took off her cloak and slipped into his bed.

Quite soon his trembling abated, the terrible iciness retreated from his body. She lay at his left side, and he pressed himself against her like a new-born lamb against a ewe: he nestled into her warmth as if he were a little babe.

As if this warmth were the one truly godly experience of his entire life.

She could feel how shrivelled he was: his knees and pelvic bones and elbows cut into her flesh as if they were deer antlers. She lifted his head carefullly on to her arm, and she felt his breath on the lobe of her ear.

And for the first time in a very long while she heard his voice.

‘Bathsheba,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied, very gently and carefully in order not to frighten him.

‘Holiness no longer helps me,’ he said, panting for breath.

‘Has it ever helped you?’ she asked.

‘I do not know,’ he said. And then, after a pause, ‘What is holy?’

‘The incomprehensible and the uncertain are all that is holy,’ she said.

Then he asked – and he asked as if he had perhaps been mistaken all his life – ‘How is uncertainty holy?’

‘By the very fact that we know it exists,’ she replied, ‘and that we recognize that it is incomprehensible and uncertain.’

‘I have always sought holiness in the Lord,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And sometimes you have found it.’

Then he lay silent for a long time. He let himself be permeated by the imcomprehensible warmth which she radiated.

But finally he asked – and his voice had become such a low whisper that she could catch his words only with difficulty – he asked, as if groping for words and almost fearful that she would not have any answer: ‘What is the nature of the Lord?’

And she answered at once from within her warmth and certainty, ‘He is like me. He is exactly like me.’

She felt him relax in her arms: his legs and joints seemed to soften and his breathing became clam as if he were about to fall asleep.

But then she heard him quietly, almost inaudibly, repeating her words to himself, as if he were trying to interpret their mystery and to understand fully their unfathomable significance.

‘He is like you,’ he said. ‘Yes, He is just like you.’

And there was a distinct note of bliss in his almost soundless whisper.

Then they lay in silence together. She heard his breathing becoming weaker and slower. He sucked on a lock of her hair which she raised to his mouth with her right hand; from time to time his lips made a feeble supping sound like a sleepy babe at the breast.

But then, long after she thought him to be sleeping, when in fact she was already sure that he had fallen asleep for ever, he spoke, loud and clear, and she could feel the vibration of his throat against the skin of her shoulder, that tremor which she had so often seen and heard but never before felt: ‘You are perfection, Bathsheba. Your perfection is your greatest flaw.’

That was King David’s final utterance.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------
From swedish writer Torgny Lindgren’s novel, Bathsheba.
Translated by Tom Geddes
Collins Harvill, London, 1989

lazariuk wrote: In the jewish tradition the golden rule had it's origin when a rabbi named Hillel was asked by a non-jew to teach him the sum total of the Torah (The Law) while standing on one leg. Hillel replied "What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbour" or as it is usually expressed "Love your neighbour as yourself"
In the Christian tradition the golden rule had it origin when Jesus said that all of the Torah can be filled by observing two commandments. The first is to love God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind and with all of your might and He said that the second was like unto the first (maybe implying that they were in ways the same) that you should love your neighbour as yourself.

DBCohen wrote: Hillel and Jesus were more or less contemporaries. Jesus seems to have adopted the verse literally, and required everyone to love their neighbors. Hillel was more realistic;
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