Inside the Bay Psalm Book

This is a picture of 2 pages from inside the Bay Psalm Book. It is 367 years old. Considering this fact, there are papyrus' from the time of Jesus in almost as good a shape. However, this copy was one of a small number produced; the colonists' were here a mere 20 years. Considering how rough an existence the settlers had at the time, and how few resources at their disposal, it was quite a feat to produce. Also, the book was handled multiple times a day. One copy was shared among many, whereas, the papyrus' were written and then sealed away in airtight, and centuries untouched compartments. The Bay Psalm book was in use for over a century, traveling overseas to England and Scotland, where many of the Psalters, used in translation, originated from.

This is the original Bay Psalm Book. It was the first book printed in the original thirteen colonies. It was published in 1640 and contains rough translations of several imported Psalters.

This, original copy, is kept at Harvard. I am taking my foreign students on a tour of MIT and Harvard next month as part of my American History course.

Before the Bay Psalm Book, American music was purely an oral tradition, passed from generation to generation, in Native American cultures.

I am having a hard time finding circa 17c. Native American recordings...more later


 

Selections from Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

1. It's so much easier to get further from home than nearer that all men become travelers. 

2. Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired. 

3. What you give to a thief is stolen. 

4. There are silences harder to take back than words. 

5. Say nothing as if it were news. 

6. Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, or the one who holds on? 

7. Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to. 

8. Impatience is not wanting to understand what you don't understand. 

9. Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method. 

10. Harder to laugh at the comedy if it is about you, harder to cry at the tragedy if it isn't. 

11. Patience is not very different than courage. It just takes longer. 

12. I could explain, but then you would understand my explanation, not what I said. 

13. If the saints are perfect and unwaivering, we are forgiven for trying to imitate them. Also, if they are not. 

14. Easy to criticise yourself, harder to agree with the criticism. 

15. Tragic hero, madman, addict, fatal lover. We exhalt those who cannot escape their dreams because we cannot stay inside our own. 

16. Every life is allocated 100 seconds of pure genuis. They might be enough, if we could be sure which ones they were. 

17. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: then it is only distance that separate us. 

18. How much less difficult life is when you do not want anything from people. And yet you owe it to them to want something. 

19. Where I touch you lightly enough, there I am also touched. 

20. Laziness is the sin most willingly confessed to, since it implies talents greater than have yet appeared.  

21. If you reason far enough, you will come to unreasonable conclusions. 

22. The one who hates you perfectly, loves you. 

23. What you fear to believe, your children will believe. 

24. The road not taken is the part of you not taking the road. 

25. We invent a great loss to convince ourselves we have a beginning. But loss is a current: the coolness of one side of a finger held up, the faint hiss in your ears at midnight, water sliding over a dam at the back of your mind, memory, unremembering.

William Blake

William Blake 1757-1827
What's wrong with a grown woman, wearing pajamas, motoring in to a quickie mart, and exiting with three jumbo-bars of chocolate with nuts? Nothing. I will eat chocolate before bed to liven up my dreams. I will eat salt and sugar, in alternating bites, until I no longer feel. I will get away someday, soon. Or I will go mad. Or worse--I will lie down and become pliant, lobotomized, and selfless.

This sea-flower blooms in the darkness; in the cold dense salty water, through volcano ash, pushing through sedimentary coral-seashell-shark tooth resistence. It never senses sunlight, nor admiration. I don't know if anything feeds on it. It seems predator-less. I am like this silent flower; however, I am surrounded by predators and parasites.

When we do not speak up to defend ourselves, to clarify misinformation, as I had always believed was the higher course, the rabble, the lecherous, gossip-classes pry open (for me anyway) the mouth, and fill it with their words, their poisons. Before we know it, we are speaking these words to ourselves. Internalizing and digesting the thoughts and ideas of others. Eventually, we become them, if we become isolated for too long. The brain becomes soft; there are white out moments of nothingness. Since the one safe place is gone, and everything inside has turned against us. Self doubt, ruination, and general haziness replace. This is an exquisite hell. This is the new society, as I experience it.