A Soul In Ev'ry Stone

[Paul Mackin]

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From: 	Jason Teeple[SMTP:jteeple at tiac.net]
>. . . But there's just one last question I have: what do y'all think the
Final Song >means?  


>>>For me it's a traditional, preEinsteinian paraphrase of vonBraun's opening statement: 

While individuals die, Life goes on (for a while anyway); the dead leave earthly traces and are not forgotten (at least not right away).

I like Jason's version also.

				P.
>
1 >"There is a hand to turn the time,
2 >Though thy glass today be run,
3 >Till the light that hath brought the Towers low
4 >Find the last poor Pret'rite one...
5 >Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
6 >All through our crippl'd Zone,
7 >With a face on ev'ry mountainside,
8 >And a soul in ev'ry stone...
 >
 >Now everybody "

Here's my stab:
Line one establishes a force/being in control of the universe
Line 2 you're corporeal existence is finished
Line 3 The light I took to be the white explosion of the Bomb, Tower to
be both
       the Towers (skyscrapers) constructed by the elite and by
humankind
Line 4 It'll get all of us, even those people who have been 'passed
over' in        life...the poor and disenfranchised will die the same as
those players        in world politics and war games etc.
Line 5 Riders did have a Tolkein feel, though I though of the seven
horsemen of        the apocalypse (is that right, my Biblical knowledge
is slim). They have 
       done their task reaping souls, and now sleep by every road.
Line 6 If the Zone is an Eden, an open space, the crippled Zone may be
the        world in which we live, where free space has been 'crippled'
though not
       entirely destroyed. (crippled may also reference a
post-nuclear        landscape)
Line 7 & 8 I think the world is becomoing animated again, although as
humans        we may have destroyed ourselves and much life, the world
remains        invested with some form of life or soul (perhaps
transendent) beyond        what we commonly consider real or forms of
life (the Gaia concept        u.s.w.) 
I guess I read the overall message as an ironic blessing -- Be reassured
there is a prime mover in the universe, although you are lost, there is
a different mode of life that persists.

I'd love to hear what others of you think too.

-- 
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Jason Teeple   ***   Jteeple at tiac.net

...what counts most is not what life is made of but the organizing
processes behind it.
		Sherry Turkle, _Life on the Screen_

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