Balloonery

Yeats wrote:

Hands, do what you're bid
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

... and the extrasyllabic middle two lines bulge out suggestively, like the balloon. There ought to be a specific name for this rhetorical trick: a sort of formal meta-onomatopœia. (The off-rhyme, or sight-rhyme, mind/wind plays its part too). The narrow shed is the skull of course, and the balloon, filled with its spiritual hot-air, is the material brain matter, splodgeing and squishing like a jellyfish (why else do squid have such a pedigree in science fiction as icons of thinking aliens?) But what's particularly nice here is the way in which Yeats implies that hands trump thoughts. Homo sapiens is a handling animal before s/he is a pondering animal.

Red

Egyptians call themselves Kemet: from '(kṃt), or "black land" (from kem "black"), [which in turn] is derived from the fertile black soils deposited by the Nile floods, distinct from the deshret, or "red land" (dšṛt), of the desert.'

As a red man what can I think, but that the desert is my proper home? Conversing with the shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. And thinking: Adam Kem would be a good name for a character.

Egyptian gods

What's so disconcerting about the Ancient Egyptian pantheon (for an outsider, I mean) is that they worshipped gods they couldn't eat. For the rest of the world edibility is a key component of a God-Animal: a lamb, a fish, a cow. But a scorpion? A dog? A lion? Those aren't on the menu ... how can we worship them?

Reason

Tolstoi said: 'if we allow that human life can be governed by reason the possibility of life is annihilated'. Crazy old bird! Or is this the deliberate paradox of a man who knows very well that in War and Peace he has written one of the most thoroughly reasonable novels in literature?

Wreath

The greenery of spring is a wreath upon winter's grave. The cherry tree positively weeps blossom.

Immodesties

Life is modest; it is consciousness that is not. It is in the nature of consciousness to exaggerate, in the sense that a non-exaggerating consciousness could hardly function.

Worldend

Ravens todd about the sky like wind-blown leaves. White, and whites. Will the world end in white? Or we could say, winter construes the whiteness of tornados into something static? She says Atlases and he says Atli--it's a kind of game between them. Oranges, oranges, the bloom of their scarfs. The birds are a mess against the whiteness. She says muster, he says muster? mustard? She could speak up. He could be less deaf. The birds could quieten down a little. It's not as if the world is ending. The ice snip-snaps scissorlike when they step onto the puddles. The crack spreads, the cracks spread. It's not as if the world is untried, or untrying, or untryable. The copse of trees on yon hill: an acropolis. The west sucks the sun through the milk. Her mind is a blank. She thinks she remembers where they parked the car. She is trying to remember exactly where.