Seventh Ocean

You may think of today as June 8, but in the Universal Solar Calendar it is Seventh Ocean.  

Initially, the Ocean days followed Twelfth days in the Calendar. The 12th day of the year was First Twelve followed by First Ocean, and 24th day was Second Twelve followed by Second Ocean, and so on. But for some reason, the 36th day of the year is called The Ancient Village, followed by Third Ocean, and thereafter the Ocean days seems to come more or less at random.  Today, as I said, is Seventh Ocean. 

The name Seventh Ocean is auspicious, recalling as it does the Seventh and Final Voyage of Sinbad. The Voyages of Sinbad are a cycle themselves embedded in the larger cycle of the 1,001 Arabian Nights. 

Read the late John Barth's The Tidewater Tales for a dizzying analysis of the numerology in the  Scheherazade stories.   His premise is that 1,001 is a very deliberate number, not just "a big number and then one more." That number, Barth asserts, is the number of menstrual cycles a woman has in her lifetime. In his version, Scheherazade tells the Sultan one of the Arabian Nights stories each time she's  having her period and is deemed "unclean" for sex by Islamic standards, and thus delays her execution. The Sultan apparently had the attitude, "if you can't fuck 'em, kill 'em," but was so entertained by her stories on her "off" nights that he spared her until she was "clean" again. 

The math holds up. 1,001 periods divided by 12 periods a year is 83 years, and while a woman isn't ovulating 83 years of her life, Barth points out that each month, Scheherazade may have been "out of commission" for two nights, so 1,001 stories would have gotten her through 500½ periods. In addition, she bore the Sultan five children, and for each of those children missed nine periods. 500 less (nine tines five) 45 is 455, and 455 periods divided by 12 periods a year is a more reasonable 38 years. If she reached puberty at the age of 10, had five children, and reached menopause at 48, that's 1,001 Arabian Nights.  Or so The Tidewater Tales claim. 

Anyway, as per our custom here at WDW, each Ocean day is accompanied by one of Elaine Radigue's Occam Ocean compositions, and today is no exception. Here's Occam Ocean Hepta 1 performed by Ensemble Dedalus at the Crossroads Festival on June 12, 2018 at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg.