Saturday, July 12, 2025

Don't go back abed

This morning, I woke up an hour before my alarm, with a simple melodic motif in my head as if left over from a dream. Wanting to jot it down before it evaporated but not being musical enough to write out a tune by ear, I tapped it out on a piano app and scribbled down the names of the notes: D G B A B E D.

I immediately recognized this as a message -- presumably from Claire, as she has used this musical spelling method before (see "More on Joan and Claire"). DGB stands for "don't go back," and the remaining notes are a word, "abed." This is clearly related to the Rumi poem in "WaGon," with its repeated line, "Don't go back to sleep."

Changing "to sleep" to "abed" was necessitated by the constraint of having an alphabet that only goes up to G, but "abed" is also a word that has come up recently. In "Turnum outknaves all three," I linked to an old post from 2013, "Poems cut short by death," because one such poem is the Aeneid, which ends abruptly with the death of Turnus. But one of the other poems in that post is the one I wrote in 2009 and reposted earlier this year, "I worry so for dear old Bill," in which Bill has us worried because he has been "so long abed."

Obviously after that I couldn't very well just go back to sleep! So far nothing out of the ordinary has resulted from my getting up an hour earlier than planned.

2 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Hours after posting this, I saw an online article for which the subtitle was "Golf, Golf, Foxtrot Alpha Golf" -- i.e. "GG, fag." Somewhat of a sync because it's a coded message using only the letters from A to G.

WanderingGondola said...

Why do I get the sense this is a message for me...?

For the unaware, "GG" is gamer slang for "good game". It's generally used at the end of a match/session with others online (like shaking hands after real-life games), though not always in a positive sense.

Don't go back abed

This morning, I woke up an hour before my alarm, with a simple melodic motif in my head as if left over from a dream. Wanting to jot it down...