haMephorash

May 14th, 2017
music, unsong
The last installment of Unsong comes out today. I transcribed the words of the main song from the chapter headings:
haMephorash
 - Leonard Cohen
   - Scott Alexander

(Tune is Hallelujah by non-fictional
 Leonard Cohen)

Now I've heard there was a sacred word
  That Jala said, and it named the Lord
But you don't really know of magic, or us.
    It goes like this - a tav, a resh
    A fearsome joy, a fervent wish
The Comet King incanting haMephorash

haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephor-or-a-ash

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof
  (Hay hay yud tav mem tav vav kuf)
A ship on which another sailed before us
    She saw his flag on the highest mast
    She saw a dream that couldn't last
The Comet King receiving haMephorash

haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephor-or-a-ash

You say I took the Name in vain
  And after that, I lost the Name
I gave it back to Him who holds it for us,
    But echoes sound in every word
    It doesn't matter what occured
You never really lose the haMephorash

haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephor-or-a-ash

Somebody had to, no one would
  I tried to do the best I could
And now it's done, and now they can't ignore us
     And even though it all went wrong
     I'll stand against the whole unsong
With nothing on my tongue but haMephorash

haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephorash
haMephor-or-a-ash

Julia and I also made a quick recording of it, singing and playing guitar in front of my laptop (without ambient noise reduction): mp3.

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The Grimke Sisters and Sexism

The necessity of birth control

via Thing of Things April 22, 2024

Clarendon Postmortem

I posted a postmortem of a community I worked to help build, Clarendon, in Cambridge MA, over at Supernuclear.

via Home March 19, 2024

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both …

via Posts on March 16, 2024

more     (via openring)