Today I asked the question shown in Figure 1 that also shows the response that I received.
 |
| Figure 1 |
I thought that the question displayed on a whiteboard might be a good way to focus my attention. So I did this, looked at the question for a while, then closed my eyes and uttered "Meher Baba, Ki Jai" several times in groups of triplets. When I opened my eyes and looked at the whiteboard, the blue eraser on the bottom left caught my attention and I immediately thought of the phrase the "blue bird of happiness".
There's a well-known eponymously titled song from 1934, part of the lyrics of which are:
So be like I, hold your head up high
Till you find a bluebird of happiness
You will find greater peace of mind
Knowing there's a bluebird of happiness
And when he sings to you
Though you're deep in blue
You will see a ray of light creep through
And so remember this, life is no abyss
Somewhere there's a bluebird of happiness
Pat Boone does a nice version of it (YouTube link). More information on the song can be found by following the Wikipedia link. Of course, nobody can forget Vera Lynn's famous song "There'll Be Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs of Dover". Figure 2 contains a link to her singing the song.
 |
Figure 2: link to song |
The lyrics to that song go:
There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see
There'll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, when the world is free
The shepherd will tend his sheep
The valley will bloom again
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again
There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see
The shepherd will tend his sheep
The valley will bloom again
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again
There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see
Another Wikipedia article begins by saying that "the symbol of a bluebird as the harbinger of happiness is found in many cultures and may date back thousands of years."
The latter article includes an interesting quote from Oscar Wilde in which a "Blue Bird" is mentioned:
And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we
shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be
found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper
of wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world
will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise
Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped
galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when
books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander
about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of
fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see
the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the
Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float
the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of
things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are
not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must
cultivate the lost art of Lying.
— Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1891
 |
Figure 3: Toadstones from Jurassic sediments in Oxfordshire UK |
The reference to "the jewel in the toad's head" perplexed me so I sought an explanation:
The toadstone, also known as bufonite (from Latin bufo, "toad"), is a mythical stone or gem that was thought to be found in the head of a toad. It was supposed to be an antidote to poison and in this it is like batrachite, supposedly formed in the heads of frogs. Toadstones were actually the button-like fossilized teeth of Lepidotes, an extinct genus of ray-finned fish from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They appeared to be "stones that are perfect in form" and were set by European jewellers into magical rings and amulets from Medieval times until the 18th century.
Getting back to the bluebird of happiness however, one must thank Maurice Maeterlinck for its twentieth century renaissance:
In 1910, the blue bird of happiness landed in the United States, in New York, to be specific, on Broadway. The Blue Bird was a philosophical play written by Maurice Maeterlinck, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year for it and other works.
His Pelléas and Mélisande is better known today, as productions of the Debussy opera continue to enliven the stage. But at the start of the 20th century, The Blue Bird was all the rage, emerging in film and song, baptizing airplanes and race cars, and like most popular cultural symbols, being reduced to its simplest iteration: the blue bird of happiness.
Read the full article, which is very interesting, by following this link. The article concludes:
Our memory of Maeterlinck has faded, but the glimmer of his ideas continues to resurface in unexpected places, in a hashtag shorthand for perfect snow and sky on Twitter, today’s go-to blue bird, or somewhere over the rainbow. Maeterlinck gave us the bird, but happiness is for us to find.
While the Twitter bluebird is ubiquitous, there is an Indonesian species as well in the form of the Blue Bird taxis. Blue Bird translates as Burung Biru in Indonesian.
The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
Anyway the answer to my question has brought up many interesting associations and has certainly assuaged my currently very bleak view of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment