Qualche Film

Change is in the air. My gut feeling tells me there is. I can feel it in every corner of my body. (Right, not in my hair.)

Something else. The summer turns into autumn. The leaves are falling and the green of the trees become a wonderful mixture of yellow and brown. Recognizable and not unexpected - it's the seasons, right - yet always in some mysterious way new and full of surprise.

Did I ever tell you that I don't believe in ends? Ends are always new beginnings. It's all a matter of perspective and trust. Trust that it will be okay. And if not that's okay too.

Did I ever tell you that I miss you?

P.S. The text above is the song Fine dell'Estate from band Thegiornalisti. Song: here.

Blue of Heaven and Golden Glitter of Sun

The blue stone 'lapis lazuli' was for the ancient Egyptians the real thing. Its colour combines the blue of the heaven and the golden glitter of the sun. In the ancient Egyptian language  it's called 'ḫsbḏ'. The colour of the cosmos, fertility, sustance and rebirth. But this stone was rare and expensive because it had to be imported, via Mesopotamia, from the Kokcha River valley in Afghanistan (Sar-i Sang mines).

Scarab made from lapis lazuli: 

To meet the high demand of blue the ancient Egyptians invented the pigment called Egyptian blue. The term for it in the ancient Egyptian language is 'ḫsbḏ-ỉrjt', which means 'artificial lapis lazuli'. Unknown is who invented it, where and how. By accident just like glass-making? In our time and age Egyptian blue is known as calcium copper silicate. A mixture of silica, lime, copper, and an alkali. It was first synthesized during the Fourth Dynasty (ca. 2613 BC–ca. 2494 BC) and used extensively until the end of the Roman period in Europe (400 AD). No written information exists in ancient Egyptian texts about the manufacture of Egyptian blue. It was first mentioned only in Roman literature by Vitruvius during the first century BC.

 

Egyptian blue on a fragment showing Nebamun hunting in the marshes around 1350 BC.

Recipe to make this pigment (source: NILE, september 2021):

Recipe according to Vitruvius, 'De Architectura', Book VII, Chapter 11 (here):

In the early Christian tradition lapis lazuli was regarded as the stone of the mother of Jezus, Mary. The blue of the heaven and the golden glitter of the sun. The stone of Mary.

P.S. The scarab is on display in The Met as 26.7.755: here.  The hunting scene is on display in the Michael Cohen Gallery of the British Museum: here.

I Repeat

More about being woke or wokery. In his article ‘Over het gevaar van de woke-inquisitie en de cancel culture’ (English: About the danger of the woke inquisition and the cancel culture) Floris van den Berg discusses these books:

• Haidt and Lukianoff, ‘The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure’ (2018).
• Scruton, ‘Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Thinkers of the Left’ (2019).
• Pluckrose and Lindsay, ‘Cynical Theories. How universities made everything about race, gender, and indentity – and why this harms everybody’  (2020).
  

A reflection on the differences between science and wokery: 

How to deal with people with a woke mindset? See if you can learn something from them, reflect on history, historical heritage, the moral presuppositions in language and what science is and why it works. Be open to rational criticism and substantiated arguments. I repeat: be open, reflect and use arguments.

P.S. Source article: here.

Tudu Bong

Standard Dutch is my first language. Not the local dialect in the little village I was born in. I comprehend it with ease and sometimes use one of its words (usually the names of plants and fruit) but I don't speak it. Nevertheless, it apparently influences my choice of words and melody. My son T. always says, "You speak differently when you talk to grandpa." His observation must be true but I don't even notice it myself. This happens completely automatically.

Linguists estimate that by the end of this century 3,500 languages - half of the 7,000 languages spoken today - will fall silent. Caused by globalisation and urbanisation people all over planet Earth shift to a more prestigious majority language. Social and economic mobility at the expense of their own language.

Below a bilingual (Kristang-English) poem from Martha Fernandez. 'Kristang' is a Creole language by Eurasians of Portuguese descent that learned their language from Portuguese traders who settled in the ports of Malacca, West Malaysia, Singapore and Macau.  

A poem about using a first language that sounds like music, feels safe and was found again. A language that makes feel whole again: tudu bong (literally: all good).

P.S. Source poem: here.

P.P.S. Did you know that Cleopatra VII could speak ten languages? She spoke: Koine Greek, Egyptian, Ethiopian, language of the "Troglodytes", Hebrew (or Aramaic), Arabic, the Syrian language (perhaps Syriac), Median, Parthian, and Latin. Her first language was Koine Greek. Source: Plutarch, 'Life of Anthony', 27.3-4 (here) and wikipedia (here).