his mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

"I thank my God upon every remembrance of you,"
is a verse from the Bible -- Philippians, Chapter 1, Verse 3.


It's a good one, for after someone dies, and a person's working with grief and mourning.


One translation says, "I thank my God in all my remembrance of you."


Other translations:


"I thank my God every time I remember you."
"Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God."
And there are some more...
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But I like the first one, the King James one, best:
"I thank my God upon every remembrance of you."


Upon every remembrance
of you
I thank God.


Upon every remembrance of you I thank my God....


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"I thank my God upon every remembrance of you."


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Two posts ago here, we were contemplating hunting and wildlife management and ecology, and how people don't all understand everything.


Not everyone wants to go deer-hunting.  ("Ooh!  Go out and shoot Bambi's mother?  Gross!")  On the other hand, if there were no deer-hunting licenses and no deer were killed, and they overpopulated and starved, then deer would probably start coming into town looking for something to eat. ...I would hate to wake up and see the sidewalk and street piled up with dead or dying deer.  That would be horrible.


I'd be one of those people -- I don't want to hunt them myself, but I also don't want to be confronted with the results of their overpopulation.  (Me, nervously, to hungry deer in front yard:  "I am not a member of PETA -- but my cat has been meaning to join" ...)


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Talking, here, August 31st, the post was titled, "so I walk one, two flight, three flight-four" because I was thinking you could apply the idea of that song -- how hard and exhausting it was to run those twenty flights of stairs (in "Twenty Flight Rock"), you could apply it to the concept of people trying to understand, and not be freaked-out by, each other's pastimes...


Some people go deer-hunting...so that you aren't stuck having to try and resuscitate them (the deer, not the people) if the population were to grow too big for the food supply...


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That song is hard to get a handle on, when you first learn to listen to it -- not easy to remember later where the beat comes down...


"So I walk one, two flight, three flight four


Five, six, seven flight, eight flight more..."





The hammer falls on the word "walk," not on the word "one," as you might assume...


So I WALK one two flight THREE flight four
Five six seven flight EIGHT flight more...





Eddie Cochran sang this in 1957, with the tight, balanced, ping-pong back-and-forth rhythm style you'd associate with Carl Perkins and many of Elvis Presley's 50s singles.  Strung tight like a game of cats-in-the-cradle...





When the Rolling Stones sang "Twenty Flight Rock" in 1981 their version was true to the original, but with their natural slampower it was less like a balancing string-game and more like a snow-blower...








Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger


Up-on-the-twelfth-I'm-startin'-to-sag
Fifteenth-floor-I'm-ready-to-drag...


Similar to that T.S. Eliot cat poem, if you say it out loud, there's compelling rhythm and bounce...


...But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.


When you notice a cat in profound meditation,


The reason, I tell you, is always the same:


His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation


Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name...





Eddie Cochran (1938 - 1960)


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