View From The Northern Wall: Human Longtime History

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Human Longtime History

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3 comments:

RachelWSeptember 2, 2011 at 5:30 PM
Christopher? Are you there?
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christopherSeptember 4, 2011 at 10:43 AM
Took a computer vacation due to overwork.
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RachelWSeptember 5, 2011 at 11:19 AM
Good. I'm glad that's all it is. :)
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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.