What is Anagogical?

I love to come across unfamiliar words. I enjoy tracking them down to their lair and discovering their meanings, usage and pronunciation. The word today, anagogical, comes from John Granger in Harry Potter's Bookshelf. The definition comes from Merriam-Webster online: "interpretation of a word, passage, or text (as of Scripture or poetry) that finds beyond the literal, allegorical, and moral senses a fourth and ultimate spiritual or mystical sense" Of the several online dictionaries I checked, only Merriam-Webster puts anagogical in its proper literary context of four interpretations of a text. Granger applies all four interpretations to the Harry Potter books, beginning with the literal and ending with the mystical (anagogical) sense of the plot, action, dialog, names, colors and numbers in the books. Some of Granger's revelations are not only stunning to me, but so obvious once they were pointed out that I was embarrassed to not have seen them already. (Anagogical is a word new to the spell checker for eblogger - it keeps wanting me to change it to 'analogical', which is not at all the same. What a difference one letter makes.)

Friends: old, true and gone

I have reached that time in my life when nearly every week brings news of a classmate that has passed on. A reminder that we graduated as a group from high school but we graduate to what is next individually, at seemingly random times and places.

This is a time to appreciate old friends and true: the ones who look me up on Facebook to say we are still friends after all these years; the ones who send emails and letters and cards, even though my response is sporadic at best; the ones who text me their important events as they happen. All generous souls who share their love and hopes, concerns and fears, with a dollop of humor and a helping of humility.

I am so grateful to be included in their lives, however haphazardly, for I am inconsistent in communications, often turning inward with depression, something I want not to share but probably most need to. This afternoon I have an appointment with a mind doctor (aka psychiatrist). I wonder if psychic surgery were possible, would we choose to have painful memories excised? But that is a function of many anti-depressants - to repress the sad memories and enhance the good times. Too bad my biochemistry repudiates those happy pills and produces nasty side-effects. Oh well, when life gives you sh**, plant flowers!

Vampires Biting Mother Earth

A recent development in drilling for natural gas, "high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking", resonates with me as a strong corollary to vampires biting our Mother Earth. Like the mythical monsters of blood-sucking fame who inject their poison to paralyze their victims and then drain them of life, these corporate monsters inject poisons into our earth before draining her of fluids. Or at least, that is the nightmare I had last night, and waking did not dispel it, as proven here: The New York Times: Regulation Lax as Gas Wells' Tainted Water Hits Rivers. What is next on the agenda? Glow-in-the-dark rivers? Glow-in-the-dark people? Perhaps when their profit-dollars also glow in the dark they will not want them quite so much? I thought Erin Brokovitch fought and won this battle for us already, but the undead monster has risen again to torment mankind. As long as profits outstrip pollution-penalties, corporations will ignore the risks to humanity.