46 Comments

This song can easily be used for the beginning of a James Bond film.

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"They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well—

Long, long shall I rue thee,

Too deeply to tell."

Unknown yet deep connections beyond the ability of others to detect or describe.

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Wait.... Lord Byron was a self admitted Lambda. Unless like Dungeons and Dragons the SSH also allows dual classed characters? Lambda-Sigma? Scary prospect indeed!

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Wasn't he bisexual? Bisexual is not the same as Lambda. Plenty of degenerate Alphas throughout history have done their share of buttstuff.

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Yeeah.... No.

1. You can't unsuck a dick.

2. I'm not sure what Vox thinks about this in his SSH but way I see it, the classic Alpha is not some guy who nonchalantly goes about doing "butt stuff".

3. Aside anything Vox thinks, I just don't see an Alpha doing this. Sigma... it's possible, because some of them are downright weird. A Sigma might just do it out of curiosity, or scientific experiment, or 15 other reasons no one else thought of. But I'd still think maybe that's a bit of an aberration even for a Sigma. And Byron was known for several "dalliances" with "swords" that are known. And knowing the proclivities of Lambdas, there may well have been dozens that were not spoken of.

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You don't understand what Lambda is. Or apparently, homosexual behavioral patterns as opposed to a homosexual action.

Byron's behavior was more indicative of the Sigma pattern than the Lambda one, although one could argue that his obsession with death and short lifetime indicates the opposite. He had plenty of affairs with women. The fact that he also had a few affairs with men doesn't make him a Lambda; sexual incontinence is not limited to Lambdas.

The idea that just one action can define a behavioral pattern is a) binary thinking and b) fundamentally incorrect.

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My contention, was more that with a possible very rare odd exception I don't see an Alphas doing this. Sigma, yes, but not in great numbers necessarily, though hard to tell as there are few Sigmas in general. Anyway, I generally agree with your take.

In quasi-gamma-like fashion though, I will rebut that I think you know me better than to assume I am a binary thinker, and while your statement that just one action (or apparently several, and several times over and with different people if we are still talking about Byron) can define a behavioural pattern is PERHAPS correct maybe even most of the time, it is absolutely NOT correct enough of the times to make it a more or less definite rule, because it depends on the action.

If one were to kill and eat a baby "just that one time" and be fine with it, it would still make them someone requiring death, because there is no way that behaviour can ever be dismissed as not really "relevant" thereafter. And while perhaps you may think sucking a few guys off is just fun and games, I think differently. I don't disagree Byron was a sigma, but he probably wasn't the generic prototype. Then again, what do I know, I was never in a certain waxtrax band, and I didn't come up with the nomenclature. I bow to your more expert knowledge. heh.

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Bloody hell, I hope that's not true about Alphas.

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If its not true of alphas then king David was no alpha. Him and Jonathan were a bit sus.

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It's not. Potential aberration aside, I don't see that as being anything like a "common" Alpha theme.

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Alpha is not a moral category.

St. Peter was an Alpha, and so was Nebuchadnezzar.

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morality in the broader (non-Christian) sense has nothing to do with sexual preference of being willing and able to indulge in homosexual encounters.

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Good grief, that puts a whole new spin on Byron's poems.

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indeed

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I'm least certain when it comes to Lambda. From the perspective of the hierarchy, it makes sense, but it seems like it might be a nature modifier rather than a nature in and of itself.

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Tomato, tomatoe, tomatah. Regardless of the why, it is the effect that counts.

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Long, long shall I rue thee,

Too deeply to tell.

i wonder, is this one about his sister? nahh he probably didn't care that much, if at all.

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Sounds like it's about a lover, who was probably married to another man.

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The picture: The Sigma, walking down the city pavement one slushy February day, spots the barrister's wife he had spent a few pleasant surreptitious nights with a few years before. She crossed in front of him like a black cat attempting to administer a curse; despite being dressed all in white, her visage was like a cold, hardened mask that had become second nature to her since that time. His heart twisted inside. He blinked, once, and continued on.

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the thing is about byron my dear friend... is... anyway we dont disagree there.

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Oh crap. Nothing in that poem indicates it's a woman.

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"Pale grew thy cheek and cold, colder thy kiss" = Sigma-widowed.

"Thy vows are all broken" = cheated on her husband.

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"Colder thy kiss" = buttboy wasn't having it anymore

"Thy vows are all broken" = buttboy was married to a woman at the time

Who knows, though. I hope it was a woman, after all.

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no one was off his list.

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This is my first time reading "When we two parted". Wow, there really is nothing new under the sun in human experience.

On Sigmas in music - back in the 90s I had a job where I was often around some pretty famous musicians for various big events. Looking back, the only one who I'm pretty confident was a Sigma is Billy Gibbons. He's one of the very very few Sigmas I've met in real life. A LOT more famous musicians of the time were probably Lambdas than you would expect too.

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Whitesnake - here I go again on my own.

Thought this one was just obvious.

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English, because its nouns and verbs and adjectives are mostly uninflected, has a unique capacity for rhyme that allows poetry to draw connections between unlikely concepts.

For example, in languages with heavily conjugated verbs and heavily declined nouns and adjectives, the adjective "cold" and the active past tense verb "foretold" would probably not rhyme. Nor would the nominative "kiss" rhyme with the prepositional objective pronoun "this". But Lord Byron gave us

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

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"Why wert thou so dear?

They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well—"

Unusual attachments, and no one is ever the wiser seems very Sigma.

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"Yesterday and tomorrow now vanished forver" is very good how it fits musically. That very much captures the sigma's way of things.

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The last bit,

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How should I greet thee?—

With silence and tears.

is sigma. He will communicate with her with his eyes. It's what sets him apart from her alpha or whomever she has had those long years.

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"So we'll go no more a'roving, so late into the night, though the heart be still as loving, and the moon be still as bright...." has been set to music several times...

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What would be the movie equivalent to this?

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*silence*

*tears*

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Women love Lord Byron. My mother kept a book of his poetry on her dresser but never spoke of it. In a nod to Frank Hamer's possibly husband murdering wife I'll go with:

In secret we met—

In silence I grieve,

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

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Why wert thou so dear

Read: why was I ever into you?

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