Happy One Year!

Word of the Week:

matutinal 

/muh-toot-n-l, muh-tyoot-n-l/

adjective.

pertaining to or occurring in the morning; early in the day

Today was (more or less) the one year anniversary of Aural Aurora! Thank you for tuning in for whatever fraction of that you have. [The preceding sentence should receive a nomination for most awkward syntax ever. Sorry.]

Today, despite not playing the song, we kept things easy like Sunday morning, enjoying a variety of matutinal music. By the way, matutinal derives from Mater Matuta, an Italic goddess of the dawn. While  Matuta does not count among the lucky ladies, there are about 5 million dawn goddesses whose names all derive from the word/reconstruction Hausōs, the name given to the dawn goddess in Proto-Indo-European religion.

Not to be overdramatic, but the discovery of Proto-Indo-European religion kind of makes me reconsider my whole imaginarium of the ancient world. It shouldn't (I probably should have realized that something like it existed before), but it does. 

Many peoples came from the same source. The same place. Had the same culture. Wild. Revolutionary.

A sculpture of Mater Matuta; I'm not sure if she's holding babies or loaves of bread. 

An Atmospheric Aural Aurora

Word of the Week:

blustery

adjective form of bluster /bluhs-ter/

to roar and be tumultuous

to be loud, noisy, or swaggering; utterly loud empty menaces or protests

How tumultuous!

This is this is the sky above clouds:

This is lightning above clouds:

Both are really cool, but I only have a link for one. 

Next week, Aural Aurora goes to the moon! Leave your favorite lunar tunes in the comments, please!

Object to Be Preserved

"One has a pair of hands and they obey. How are one's order's transmitted to one's hands? 
I had made a discovery that horrified me: my hands were numb. My hands were dead. Probably they had been numb a long time and I had not noticed it. The pity was that I had noticed it, had raised the question. That was serious.
Lashed by the wind, the wings of the plane had been dragging and jerking at the cables by which they were controlled from the wheel, and the wheel in my hands had not ceased jerking a single second. I had been gripping the wheel with all my might for forty minutes, fearful lest the strain snap the cables. So desperate had been my grip that now I could not feel my hands. 
What a discovery! My hands were not my own. I looked at them and decided to lift a finger: it obeyed me. I looked away and issued the same order: now I could not feel whether the finger had obeyed or not. No message had reached me. I thought, 'Suppose my hands were to open: how would I know it?'  I swung my head round and looked again: my hands were still locked round the wheel. Nevertheless, I was afraid. How can a man tell the difference between the sight of a hand opening and the decision to open that hand, when there is no longer an exchange of sensations between the hand and the brain? How can one tell the difference between an image and an act of will? Better stop thinking the picture of open hands. Hands have a life of their own. Better not offer them this monstrous temptation. And I began to chant a silly litany which went on uninterrupted until this flight was over. A single thought. A single image. A single phrase tirelessly chanted over and over agin: 'I shut my hands. I shut my hands. I shut my hands.' All of me was condensed into that phrase and for me the white sea, the whirling eddies, the sawtoothed range ceased to exist. There was only 'I shut my hands.' There was no danger, no cyclone, no lands unattained. Somewhere there was a pair of rubber hands which, once they let go the wheel, could not possibly come alive in time to recover from the tumbling drop into the sea."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars


The passage above is taken from a chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars in which Antoine describes piloting his mail plane through a cyclone over the Andes. I know it's a little bit long, but I think it does a really good job at tackling those strange distinctions between "I," "me," "my mind," and "my body."


Here are two of my favorite Man Ray pieces from the wonderful Man Ray-Lee Miller exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. Unfortunately, it left on December 4th, but the art and the story are definitely still worth looking into. 

I wish that this photo could convey the wonderful color that this painting, Lips (Heure de l'Observatoire), has irl. It's so morosely decadent!

On its own, Object to Be Destroyed is, eh, another piece of surrealist sculpture. But the backstory - oh the backstory! - so interesting.

And the links to the two stories about animal faces. Wasps and sheep.

Kind of sounds a knell for anthropocentrism, don't you think? 

(Or at least starts to).

The Avian Edition

Word of the Week:

zugunruhe /tsook-uhn-ruh-he/

a migratory drive in animals, especially birds

Is your radio show in need of something cute and thematic? Put a bird on it!

This song isn't about birds at all, but a bird features very nicely in the video:

What a lugubrious goob!

Word of the Week:

lugubrious /lu-goo-bree-uhs, lu-gyoo-bree-uhs/

mournful, dismal, or gloomy, especially in an affected,exaggerated, or unrelieved manner

Some of Chagall's falling lovers...

Which one do you think feels most like the song?

Here it is again for reference:

Here's the article on those wacky xenophyophores.

It's a Snow Day

Word of the Week:

niveous /niv-ee-uhs/

resembling snow, especially in whiteness; snowy

This happens in real life!

With snakes, of course. Not Grinches. 

Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, and Tweak

Word of the Week:

oddment /od-muh'nt/

1. an odd article, bit, remnant, or the like

2. an article belonging to a broken or incomplete set

3. Printing. any individual portion of a book excluding the text, as the frontispiece or index.

THIS IS THE COOLEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN!

Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. Honestly, though, I think it's in the top ten.