Sunday 10 November 2013

The Psalter as a tent

It has been a while since I used the AMA GX-LEAF Diagramming tool as a diagram surface. I have been using it in so many ways as a means of creating web forms. It is still a fabulous diagramming surface.

I have been thinking for months about the Psalter as a tent which one inhabits as one might inhabit poetry - metaphorically(!)  A tent doesn't need one gate though Psalms 1 and 2 provide one. One can always slip under the canvas - or perhaps it is open all round. But a tent does require some tent poles and a few high wires. There are such poles - two sets in fact: the 8 acrostics (9 poems - one got ripped in half) and the poems that immediately precede the acrostics - 7 of them (figure out how only 7 precede 9 poems).  And secondly, the duplicated poems.

The 16 that 'hold up' the whole tent are in Books 1 and 5. The 7 others create a space between Books 1, 2, and 5 for Books 3 and 4 - shorter books whose canvas just drapes over them without the need for being held up. There is also a pair of high wires from 8 to 144 and from 36 to 110.  There are others as well, but these two are thick cables - perhaps their weight rests on the duplicated psalms as pillars...

Notice that none of these poems is attributed to Korah or Asaph. They are all 'of David' or unattributed.




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