GR translation: womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past

alice wellintown alicewellintown at gmail.com
Mon Apr 22 06:06:22 CDT 2013


The knotting into, the woof and warp, the thread, the yarn spinning, the
book making, mat-making (see Moby-Dick), these are all in play here, and
the knitting of alliances, the un-knitting of alliances, the arrangements
that are knotted and un-knotted in the zone and, as the speaker here
suggesests, beyond. On the other side. Wick's famous tangled lines reply to
this, as THEY would control memory and history, ontology, epistemology,
with the Word made, fabricated against the day.

Fury. Milton refers to fate or destiny here as a "Fury," as if one of the
Eumendies from classical Greek drama. Some traditions personify the Fates
as three sisters, the sisters of destiny; one spins the thread of life, one
measures out its length, and the third snips it with shears. Hughes asserts
that this figure is Atropos. See Plato'sRepublic
620e<http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg030.perseus-eng1:10.620e>
.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/




On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 6:53 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/The_Fates/the_fates.html
>
> The Fates have the subtle but awesome power of deciding a man's destiny.
> They assign a man to good or evil. Their most obvious choice is choosing
> how long a man lives. There are three Fates. Clotho, the spinner, who spins
> the thread of life. Lachesis, the measurer, who choses the lot in life one
> will have and measures off how long it is to be. Atropos, she who cannot be
> turned, who at death with her shears cuts the thread of life.
>
> On Monday, April 22, 2013, Mike Jing wrote:
>
>> Of course, I just realized that twisting is needed when spinning yarn.
>> Silly me.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:36 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> P212.5-14   “You were in London,” she will presently whisper, turning
>>> back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the
>>> night-streaked yarn of her past, “while they were coming down I was in ’s
>>> Gravenhage”—fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile’s
>>> lingering—“while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a
>>> rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that
>>> between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You
>>> haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the
>>> visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us
>>> know. . . .”
>>>
>>> First, I thought this obviously refers the spinning of the roulette
>>> wheel, which is like a spinning wheel for yarn.  But then "the
>>> night-streaked yarn of her past" seems to refer to the story of he past,
>>> which she is "twisting" somehow.  Am I reading too much into this?  (Or is
>>> that even possible?)
>>>
>>
>>
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