The Cat and the Moon - The Lord of the Rings

It's a good day for nonsense! :D



There’s an inn of old renown
Where they brew a beer so brown
Moon came rolling down the hill
One Hevnsday night to drink his fill!

On a three-stringed fiddle there,
Played the Ostler’s Cat so fair
The hornèd Cow that night was seen
To dance a jig upon the green!

Called by the fiddle to the middle of the muddle where the cow with a caper sent the small dog squealing,
Moon in a fuddle went to huddle by the griddle but he slipped in a puddle and the world went reeling -

Downsides went up - hey! Outsides went wide,
As the fiddle played a twiddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides went west - hey! Broadsides went boom,
With a twiddle on the fiddle inn the middle by the griddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Dish from off the dresser pranced,
Found a Spoon and gaily danced -
Horses neighed and champed their bits,
For the bloodshot Moon had lost his wits!

Well, Cow jumped over, Dog barked wild -
Moon lay prone and sweetly smiled!
Ostler cried, “Play faster, Cat!
Because we all want to dance like that!”

Gambol and totter till you’re hotter than a hatter and you spin all akimbo like a windmill flailing!
Whirl with a clatter till you scatter every cotter and the strings start a-pinging as the world goes sailing!

Downsides go up - hey! Outsides go wide!
You can clatter with your platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides go west - hey! Broadsides go boom!
With a batter and a clatter you can shatter every platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle!
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle!
Hey-yey-yey-yey-oh-ho
Hey-yey-yey-yey-oh-ho!
Hey-hey-din-dang-do
Hey-hey-din-dang-do!
Hoo-rye-and-hott-a-cott-a ho
Hoo-rye-and-hott-a-cott-a ho ho!
Hott-a-cott-a-hotta-ko
Hott-a-cott-a-ko-cott-a-ko-ho!
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle-hi-ho
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle-hi-ho!
Ho fiddlee-ding-galli-do
Ho fiddlee-ding-galli-do
Hoo-rye-hoo-rye oops-oops- ay!
Hoo-rye-hoo-rye oops-oops- ay!
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo!
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo!

Downsides go up - hey! Outsides go wide!
With a twiddle on the fiddle in the middle by the griddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides go west - hey! Broadsides go boom!
With a batter and a clatter you can shatter every platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Hey!

The Devil is a Liar - Seawind

This song is dear to me more for reasons of personal history than for contemplative purposes, but it's perfectly suitable for that as well.

(Also, my website is now apparently the only place online with the lyrics!)



How many times, in the back of your mind,
Have you heard a voice - calling to you?
Won't you come over here, let me talk in your ear -
I have something tempting for you...

I can give you all of the world,
With buildings that reach up to the sky!
Just sign your name in my book today,
And give me your soul when you die...

There are bunches of cars, and big black cigars,
People living their lives by reading the stars
Nobody's watching you now, you can take what you want
Wouldn't you rather have than have not?

Don't be a fool! 'Cause
I can give you all your desires!
Precious diamonds and rubies found so rare
Just sign your name upon the line
And give me your soul if you dare...

But don't you believe - you'll be deceived
You're playing with fire...
Because the devil is a liar

But don't you believe, you'll be deceived
You're playing with fire
Because the devil is a liar

He'll promise you all his kingdoms of gold
Then he'll leave you standing alone in the cold
He'll trick you and tease you
Entice, and then leave you a fool...

The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah

Every hour of the day, the game of life goes on
And you and I will have to choose the right way from the wrong
And just when you have made your choice, for the game you want to win
The tireless voice you know so well starts tempting once again!

He tells us... there's no God above
And only foolish people fall in love
But it's plain to see
The devil hates you and hates me

He'll trick you and tease you
And then he'll deceive you

But don't you believe - he's a liar
But don't you believe - the devil's a liar
Don't you believe, you'll be deceived, you're playing with fire,
But don't you believe, the devil's a liar
Don't you believe, you'll be deceived, you're playing with fire,
But don't you believe, the devil's a liar
Don't let the devil do his number on you, no...

Dandelions - Five Iron Frenzy

In a field of yellow flowers, underneath the sun
Bluest eyes that spark with lightning - boy, with shoes undone
He is young, so full of hope, revelling in tiny dreams
Filling up his arms with flowers, right for giving any queen!

Running to her, beaming bright while cradling his prize
A flickering of yellow light within his mother's eyes -
She holds them to her heart, keeping them where they'll be safe
Clasped within her very marrow, dandelions in a vase!

She sees love where anyone else would see weeds
All hope is found; here is everything he needs!

Fathomless, Your endless mercy; weight I could not lift...
Where do I fit in this puzzle? What good are these gifts?
Not a martyr or a saint, scarcely can I struggle through -
All that I have ever wanted was to give my best to You!

Lord, search my heart! Create in me something clean
Dandelions - You see flowers in these weeds!

Gently lifting hands to heaven, softened by the sweetest hush
A Father sings over His children, loving them so very much
More than words could warrant, deeper than the darkest blue
More than sacrifice could merit - Lord, I give my heart to You!

Lord, search my heart! Create in me something clean
Dandelions - You see flowers in these weeds

What Good This Deafness? - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

It's a pretty pathetic state of affairs when I can't even be bothered to post a song to think about in a week.



[From the shadows a beautiful spirit, Fate, and her deformed dwarf son, Twist, emerge to inform Beethoven of what he has already deeply suspected, that this is to be his last night on earth. They are accompanied by numerous spirits and ghosts from his past.]

[With each successive crack of lightning the spirits move closer and eventually Beethoven finds their distraction unbearable.]

Beethoven:
What good this deafness, when my whole life I have dread?
What good this deafness, with these voices in my head?
What good this deafness, when this prattle I must hear?
If I were blind, I'm sure they wouldn't disappear!

Twist:
Do you really want to believe what you're saying?
Do you really want to be here alone?
Have I interrupted a moment of praying?
While your life's decaying -
Your sins, are they weighing?
While you've been carving your stone...
All on your own?

Do you really want to sit here in silence?
Could it be that brooding is... part of your art?
Is it an extension of artistic license?
A moving defiance,
Of all of life's tyrants!
While you've been searching your heart...
...Alone? :)
...With us. :D
...In the dark! 8D

[Beethoven implores the spirits to leave him alone, but Twist tells him that as shadows they only exist by the light that Beethoven's life has cast and as that light is fading, it is only natural that they should cling to its last moments of illumination. As the clock strikes midnight their conversation is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of Mephistopheles. His presence causes all the other spirits to shrink silently back to the corners of the room...]

Versus Society

I'm sorry, I've had very little time to continue my posts lately and this may continue into next week. In lieu of a proper post, I'd like to leave you with some examples of what I mentioned briefly last time.
Here are some historical instances when a behaviour was diagnosed as a psychiatric disorder based principally on the Deviance criteria, of whether an individual behaves in accordance with their society. Most of these have either been formally overturned by the DSM or ICD or both, or are controversial while they remain documented.

• Hysteria
• Drapetomania and Dysaethesia Aethiopica
  
• Sluggish Schizophrenia, which I learned of recently in The Secret History of Moscow, a fascinating urban fantasy by Ekaterina Sedia. (Also refer to Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union.)
• Hospitalism, in which the deaths of infants due to the failures of hospital care were essentially attributed to suicidal depression in the infant
• Imbecility
  
• General Paresis
  
• Homosexuality
  
• Excited Delirium
• Neurasthenia
  

And yes, it is possible that such disorders continue to exist as defined by modern psychiatry as well. It's worth thinking about the various personality disorders, which are essentially various personality types which the patient extends to the point of disorder; or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which if it were regularly diagnosed in adults and not just children could easily be abused for political purposes. It's also worth considering whether this may be the case for many other more stereotypical and more 'obvious' mental ailments for which deviance is the most prominent diagnostic criterion.

The Psychology of the Mundane

Congratulations. You are, most likely, not crazy.

The reason I feel comfortable stating this is simple. Insanity is, ultimately, a (non-quantitative) measure of normalcy based around how well a person is able to interact with other people around them. It can have a variety of causes, ranging from the individual's genetic heritage to chemical imbalances derived from their environment, to how they understand and behave toward their own personal history. Psychopathologists and abnormal psychologists have developed a variety of approaches to studying, explaining, and treating such problems, appropriate to the individual problems as they are discovered and recognized, but because of the diversity of the field and the nature of the problem it's difficult to speak of as a whole. How do you distinguish someone with actual mental problems from someone who's just rather strange?

To address this issue, four basic questions are used to determine whether a person is insane:

• Deviance: Are the person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior typical of their culture? (Note the specificity of 'their' culture. This is not used to condemn an entire culture or subculture that deviates from the rest of society; it's been a huge problem historically, as I'm sure you can imagine.)
• Distress: Is the person troubled or deeply emotionally affected by the way they think and act? Do they feel in control of themselves?
• Dysfunction: Is the person impaired in their ability to survive? Can they get by in life on a day-to-day basis?
• Danger: Is the person prone to violent or injurious behavior, to themselves or to others?

The vast majority of humanity is self-organized into social groups that promote their own utility and well-being, and most of those people who aren't have physical conditions or circumstances that prevent them from doing so. Therefore, most human beings are, by definition, not crazy. That probably includes you, no matter how really angry or lonely or loopy or rebellious or unsympathetic you've felt recently - if the biggest obstacle to obtaining everything you want in life is the unfair perversity of the cosmos, you're not insane.

So, if you're one of those people, congratulations. You're adapted to society. You're normal enough to get by. You're not less special. You're better off.

Okay. Now flip the coin over and stare at the other side.

If insanity doesn't mean a lot of things you thought it did, the same is true of sanity. Sanity doesn't mean you know what you're doing. Sanity doesn't mean your beliefs and thought processes are true to reality. Sanity doesn't mean you're rational. Sanity doesn't mean you understand. Sanity means you're adapted to society and you're normal enough to get by.

Society is a vast and amorphous beast, a picture puzzle where the pieces are constantly moving and being joined to other pieces and all kinds of different pictures can be created from largely the same pieces... a piece that is considered insane in one particular subset of society may be perfectly well-adjusted to another. And then we could consider phenomena like hallucinations in the sane which 10% of healthy, sane individuals will experience at least once in their lifetimes, despite being almost universally associate with insanity in the popular mindset.

But more importantly than any of that, as far as I'm concerned, is the sticky ethical morass of whether being well-adjusted to human society is in itself a good thing. There is a long, long list of psychological observations demonstrating that human beings do not think clearly or reasonably, do not understand the world around them, do not understand each other, and even do not understand themselves... when you think you have a pretty good understanding of it all, and so does everyone else. It's called cognitive bias.

The Road Goes On - The Lord of the Rings

There's a Road, calling you to stray
Step by step, pulling you away
Under Moon and Star - Take the Road, no matter how far!
Where it leads, no-one ever knows
Don't look back, follow where it goes
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road, wherever it runs!

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Hill by hill
Mile by mile
Field by field
Stile by stile
The Road goes on, ever ever on

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

One more mile, then it's time to eat
Pick some pears, succulent and sweet
To the farthest shore - Take the Road a hundred miles more!
Sweet pink trout, tickled from a stream
Milk a goat, churn it into cream
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road wherever it runs.

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Moor by moor
Glen by glen
Vale by vale
Fen by fen
The Road goes on, ever ever on

See the Road run past your doorstep
Calling for your feet to stray
Like a deep and rolling river
It will sweep them far away
Just beyond the far horizon
Lies a waiting world unknown
Like the dawn its beauty beckons
With a wonder all its own!

Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Hilya! Hilya! Auta. Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

The Colour of Insanity

Two excellent writers I follow have been independently writing on the same subject: Kyle (A Deeper, Darker Ocean Green), in Psychopath, and Nixie (Musings from the Well), in an entire series (!) called Disturbing the Disturbed. Both would like you to know that you are not a psychologist, you don't actually know what the signs of mental illness are because everything you've heard about them is the second-hand grossly-oversimplified theme park version, and, basically, you just don't know enough facts yet for your self-diagnosis to be worth sixpence.

Go on, go and read. They are fascinating. Detailed. And right.

Don't fret, though. You're not less special because you're not crazy. In fact, you already have enough of your own psychological problems to get in the way of accurately understanding yourself and the world around you without having to claim psychological and emotional disorders as well!

So, next week, we get to talk about normal psychology and cognitive biases.

The Storm - Blackmore's Night

A timeless and forgotten place,
The moon and sun in endless chase;
Each in quiet surrender, while the other reigns the sky...
The midnight hour begins to laugh -
A summer evening's epitaph -
The winds are getting crazy, as the storm begins to rise...

...

Wild were the winds that came,
In the thunder and the rain!
Nothing ever could contain the rising of the storm!
In the wings of ebony,
Darkened waves fill the trees
Wild winds of warning echo through the air!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

It seems to come from everywhere -
Welcome to the Dragon's Lair!
Fingers running through your hair, she asks you out to play!
For all of Nature's sorcery,
The most bewitching entity -
Heaven hath no fury like the rising of the storm!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

Meet the New Year!

...same as the Old Year!

I want to start taking advantage of the fact that there is more than one day per week. Sunday will be a day for sharing music, and possibly other art, that I find worthy of reflection. This category will be denoted with the tag "Selah".

Poets of the Fall - War

Do you remember standing on a broken field,
White crippled wings beating the sky?
The harbingers of war, with their nature revealed,
And our chances flowing by

If I can let the memory heal,
I will remember you with me on that field...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me a reason to try

Turn the page - I need to see something new -
For now, my innocence is torn
We cannot linger on this stunted view,
Like rabid dogs of war

I will let the memory heal
I will remember you with me on that field

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!

With no-one wearing their real face,
It's a whiteout of emotion,
And I've only got my brittle bones to break the fall

When the love in letters fade,
It's like moving in slow motion
And we're already too late if we arrive at all

And then we're caught up in the arms race -
An involuntary addiction -
And we're shedding every value our mothers taught

So will you please show me your real face,
Draw the line in the horizon?
'Cause I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!