In my December 2020 post "Here come the twenties," I proposed as a theme song for the whole decade a track from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band album The Roaring Silence.
Did you know that the oxymoronic idea of a "roaring silence" is actually biblical? I didn't until my recent engagement with the Penitential Psalms: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long" (Ps. 32:3).
Recently the sync fairies have been drawing my attention to the old They Might Be Giants song "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" -- the first track from their first album (1986).
The bridge contains these lines:
You know everything that I know,
so I know you've heard the voice
that makes the silent noise
They don't actually use the word roar, but the concept is similar -- and the silent roar syncs with another TMBG theme: a lion in space:
In the spaceship, the silver spaceship,The lion takes control
In a lion were in space, his roaring would naturally be silent, as They remind us in another song:
I heard they had a space programWhen they sing you can't hear, there's no airSometimes I think I kind of like that andOther times I think I'm already there
On a whim, I ran a search for can't hear the roar, and it turned up a Science Daily article about how the paralyzing power of a tiger's roar may come from the part we can't hear. The article is dated December 29, 2000. I found it today, December 29, 2022 -- the same date, only in the Year of the Tiger.
14 comments:
The funny thing about an oxymoron is, even if you remove the ox, there'll always be a moron. The question remains: Y?
Back in September, I wandered from All Saints' Never Ever (check the first annotation) to Janet Jackson's Miss You Much, to (after looking at what else Janet's done) No Sleeep, to "quiet storm", a similar oxymoronic phrase.
Heh, more lions and tigers and -- *squints at the name of the third embed*
Last month, I was pointed to the trailer for the movie City of Angels, in which an angel and a human fall in love with each other. I haven't seen the whole movie, but Wiki says that to be with his love, Seth decides to become human, which involves literally falling -- "jumping from the top of a skyscraper". Sounds rather like the reverse of "When you're following an angel / Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?"
Oxymoron is from Greek for "sharp-stupid" -- the same etymology as the name Tolkien (from the same Germanic roots as "dull-keen").
Mormon children sing a song about an ox-cart. We used to joke that we were "oxy-Mormons."
Your mentioning City of Angels in connection with a reversal is a minor sync; just yesterday I watched this Mark Dice video in which he says, "Everything is backwards and upside down in Los Angeles. Even the city's name, Los Angeles, is Spanish for 'the City of Angels,' when really it's a city of demons."
St. Thomas Aquinas was nicknamed “the Dumb Ox,” so I guess he was also considered an Oxy Moron.
This post has several syncs with some thoughts I recorded Dec 30. I had been thinking about the hydrologic cycle and its implication that the combined downward flow of all waterfalls is less than the combined upward flow of water vapor in the atmosphere.
"Then I considered the sonic environment of a great waterfall. All that evaporated water silently "falls" upward, but some waterfalls are exceptionally loud.
...
Finally I thought of the description of the voice of Jehovah recorded by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery: "as the sound of the rushing of great waters" (Doctrine and Covenants 110:3)."
The track title "Roaring Silence" accurately describes the silent upward flow of water vapor, but also accurately describes the pleading voice of Jesus, the Lion, as missed by those who will not hear.
This comment section is just riddled with 33s and 34s
To be clear, I recorded the above thoughts on Dec 30 but the entry starts with "The other night", so the thoughts occurred before this post was written, and certainly before I read it.
lol 62-29=33
@Ben Pratt
Your idea of an inverted waterfall makes me think of one of the choral lyrics from Medea, about the sacred rivers running uphill back to their source.
@ben
6:9 :: 714:417
@William
Pretty cool
@Wm I wasn't familiar with Euripides' Medea. Lines 410-411 in Attic Greek read:
ἄνω ποταμῶν ἱερῶν χωροῦσι παγαί͵
καὶ δίκα καὶ πάντα πάλιν στρέφεται.
My amateur translation:
Uphill flow the springs of holy rivers,
and both order and all things are reversed
@BP
There are lots of people who are unfamiliar with the major works of the major Athenian dramatists, and there are a few people who are able to translate Attic Greek on the fly, but I had always assumed the two were disjoint sets!
@Wm
Haha! I've always been drawn more strongly to grammar than to literature. 10+ years ago I taught at a school that offered Attic Greek and I used to pick the teacher's brain about things like declensions, cases, and middle voice. I'm not sure what possessed me to attempt my first translation, but I relied heavily on various online resources and thoroughly enjoyed it.
In fact, doing the earlier translation was so fun that I've gone ahead and translated lines 106-110 because "cloud" nephos appears there and I had a sync with clouds in the same note I referred to above.
δῆλον ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς ἐξαιρόμενον
νέφος οἰμωγῆς ὡς τάχ᾽ ἀνάψει
μείζονι θυμῷ : τί ποτ᾽ ἐργάσεται
μεγαλόσπλαγχνος δυσκατάπαυστος
ψυχὴ δηχθεῖσα κακοῖσιν;
"It has long been clear that
a cloud of lamentation is rising up that is quickly kindled
having too much wrath, which at some point will make itself
swollen out of control,
her life-breath having been injured by mistreatment."
Besides the obvious there are some interesting cloud connotations here. The word I rendered as "wrath" is thymos, which may come from the PIE word for smoke. Wrath is smokey in that it obscures other things, and of course a column of smoke can look quite like a cloud. Also the subtextual smoke ties in with the verb "to kindle" anapto, in the same way that the KJV often mentions the Lord's wrath being kindled. Finally, the smoky connotation juxtaposes with the first word delos, -n = "visible/conspicuous/manifest".
Note also that the word for life-breath is psyche, which never refers to respiration but rather to the animating spirit of a being or the mind as the seat of reason.
Incidentally, the words highlighted above appear in Strong's Concordance.
anapto is G381
delos is G1212 and is used to translate "Urim" in the LXX
thymos is G2372
psyche is G5590
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