Month: July 2006

On the Beat Box: Zero Cult…

Why We Fight…

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An excellent Film; it gives the foundation of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Interventions, the lies that got us in, the lies that keep us there.

Please see it. Share it with young people, they need to know the roots of what is around them….

on the menu….

The Links

To Love Abundantly: Sharon Salzberg’s Journey on the Path

Poetry: Allen Ginsberg

Hot weather here in Portland, 103 or so today… Praying for rain!

Have a decent weekend, stay cool!

Gwyllm

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The Links

The Heights of Athens

Scientists Plan to Rebuild Neanderthal Genome

Kaunos ancient theater had rotating stage, say archaeologists

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To Love Abundantly: Sharon Salzberg’s Journey on the Path

By Trish Deitch Rohrer

How Sharon Salzberg found loving-kindness in the darkest of times.

In 1971, a few days before eighteen-year-old Sharon Salzberg was meant to

leave for India on an independent study project from State University at

Buffalo where she was a student, she heard Tibetan meditation master Chogyam

Trungpa Rinpoche was giving a talk in town, and she went to see him. After

his talk, Trungpa Rinpoche asked for written questions, and Salzberg, who’d

never meditated before, had one. “I wrote out, ‘I’m leaving for India in a

few days to study meditation,’” Salzberg remembers. “’Could you suggest

where I might go?’” Hers happened to be one of the questions that Trungpa

Rinpoche picked out of the large pile which had accumulated in front of him.

“He read it out loud,” she says, “and he was silent for a moment. And then

he said, ‘I think you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident.’”

Salzberg laughs now, sitting on her couch on a bright fall morning in

Barre, Massachusetts. She lives just through the woods from the Insight

Meditation Society’s retreat center, which she co-founded in 1976 with Jack

Kornfield—now the founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center—and Joseph

Goldstein, who lives next door to Salzberg on the property adjacent to IMS.

Salzberg continues, “Trungpa Rinpoche gave me no map, no guidebook, no set

of directions, no ‘Hey! My friend the lama is waiting to teach you on some

mountaintop!’ There was nothing. And so I went to India, just like that.”

When asked if she knew what Chogyam Trungpa meant by “follow the pretense

of accident,” she says, “No! It made no sense to me whatsoever! I thought,

What does that mean?! But of course it’s exactly what unfolded. One

thing led to another.”

When Salzberg was four, her father left her mother. When she was nine,

her mother started hemorrhaging on the couch one night when only the two of

them were home, and, though the little girl managed to call an ambulance

before her mother bled to death, she died two weeks later. That night on the

couch was the last time Salzberg saw her. A couple of years after that,

Salzberg’s father—not the glamorous fellow she’d always imagined him—came to

live with Salzberg and her grandmother, and six weeks later tried to kill

himself with an overdose of pills. Eleven-year-old Sharon stood outside on

the sidewalk as he was taken off in a stretcher to a psychiatric hospital.

He never returned.

No one talked—ever—about any of what was happening to Salzberg: about all

that profound loss and its attendant grief, shame, confusion and

self-hatred. Maybe they did in whispers, but they stopped when she came into

the room. So a consequence of the events of her childhood was that Salzberg

felt left out of the flow of life. “Things were good for other people,” she

says, “but not for me.”

About five years ago Salzberg, who had written two well- received books

about Buddhism and was a teacher and inspiration to thousands of people,

felt compelled to write a book about faith. Not many, however, were

interested in supporting the project. Faith?! What does faith—a concept

associated with theism—have to do with Buddhism? Still, Salzberg proceeded

with her plan: she had a story to tell about faith in the context of her

thirty-year experience as a Buddhist, and there was no way she could stop

herself from doing it.

At sixteen Salzberg moved from Manhattan, where she lived with her

grandmother, to Buffalo, and at seventeen, in an Asian studies class there,

she heard the Buddha’s teachings for the first time.

“Here, finally,” she says, “was the Buddha saying what I longed for

somebody to acknowledge: that there is suffering that exists.” Salzberg also

heard the Buddha saying that no one is left out—not even Sharon Salzberg—of

the possibility for the cessation of suffering. Something, in that moment,

“ignited” in her.

“The Buddha’s vision of the possibility of what freedom could look like

was…” Salzberg looks out the window, and says, ”…tremendous.”

And so the sophomore in college, having it in her mind that Buddhist

meditation was the one thing that could free her from her suffering, put

together the independent study project to India, and following the pretense

of accident as best she could, she set off to find a teacher.

In Salzberg’s kitchen at dinnertime, six friends are sitting around a

long country table yakking away about not much, laughing, eating two kinds

of ice cream and apple pie and expensive chocolates after a

large meal of leftovers liberated from the industrial-sized, stainless steel

refrigerators at IMS, where a handful of people are doing silent retreats.

Salzberg, though, is sitting in a chair just away from the table, in the

corner, watching. Or maybe not watching—maybe she’s just being

there—listening, kind of smiling, occasionally saying a few words and then

falling silent again.

If you were angry, you might think she was angry; if you were sad, you

might think she was sad; if you were lonely or bored or tired or scared or

feeling above it all or deeply, deeply depressed or very happy, you might

think she was that. Which means that Salzberg, doing nothing but quietly

being there, is doing her work well: she’s being what Ram Dass says she is:

a kalyanamitra, a “special friend,” a mirror that shows you—if you

care to take a look on a dark Saturday night—your mind.

“This is not a drama queen,” says Michele Bohana, director of the

Institute of Asian Democracy in Washington, D.C. “She has tremendous

compassion, she’s extremely generous, she is a fabulous teacher, she has

total commitment to the dharma, she’s extremely humble and there’s nothing

fancy-schmancy about her—she’s very down to earth.” Bohana laughs. “Us

American women?” she says, “We’re all very hyper. We’re all very, ‘Deadline,

deadline, can’t talk now, call me back!’ Right? Well, she’s, ‘Gotta go

practice.’ Quite the difference.”

Sunanda Markus, a consultant for Mirabai Bush’s Center for Contemplative

Mind and Society, says, “She’s one of those people whose love of the dharma

rings throughout every cell of her body. And she has an understanding that

the dharma is really what has import. And that’s why she’s here. And why she

went to India when she was eighteen. You might think I’m completely nuts,”

Markus says, “but I actually believe that she has done many lifetimes of

practice and is an incredibly evolved person.”

In Faith, Salzberg tells the story of arriving in Bodh-gaya in ‘71

and sitting next to a monk under the Bodhi tree where the Buddha was

enlightened. The monk turned out to be one of the Dalai Lama’s teachers,

Khunu Rinpoche.

“As I sat next to Khunu Rinpoche,” she writes, “I sensed deep within me

the possibility of rising above the circumstances of my childhood, of

defining myself by something other than my family’s painful struggles and

its hardened tone of defeat. I recalled the resignation in my father’s eyes

at the constraints that governed his life. The boundary of his autonomy was

the decision about where to have lunch if someone took him out of the

hospital on a pass. With a surge of conviction, I thought, But I am here,

and I can learn to be truly free. I felt as if nothing and no one could

take away the joy of that prospect.”

Salzberg traveled around India for a while in 1971, but couldn’t find

anyone to teach her how to meditate. Finally, at a yoga conference she’d

stumbled upon, she heard about a ten-day retreat in Bodh-gaya, led by a S.N.

Goenka of Burma, who had started doing Vipassana meditation to cure his

migraines. It was at this first retreat that Salzberg met a group of people

who would become her longtime colleagues and friends: Joseph Goldstein, Ram

Dass, Daniel Goleman, Mirabai Bush and Krishna Das.

“I had a great sense of discovery,” she says, “and homecoming and

rightness at being there. As difficult as it was to do—I couldn’t

concentrate, I couldn’t sit still, and a lot of uncomfortable feelings

started to surface—I loved it. It was like falling in love. And, in a way,

I’ve never veered from that. I do different practices or I approach the

dharma in a different way, but that feeling hasn’t faded.

“I was working against so much unhappiness,” she says of her early

practice, “trying to come out of it, that it was all me-me-me, all the way.”

She laughs. “Perhaps it would have been healing to be able to reach out to

help others, but I didn’t have it in me, even though I tried practicing

generosity a lot.”

Salzberg stayed in India for a year and a half that trip, remaining in

Bodh-gaya to do additional retreats with Goenka, and then moving on to meet

and study with Tibetan teachers Kalu Rinpoche and the 16th

Karmapa, Rigpe Dorje. But there was something in the simplicity of the

Theravadan tradition of mindfulness practice that Salzberg was drawn back

to. She was drawn back to Vipassana meditation, and a practice that Goenka

introduced only at the end of Salzberg’s first retreat: metta—loving-kindness

practice.

One thing that makes Salzberg different from many other Western students

who sat at the feet of great Indian, Tibetan and Southeast Asian Buddhist

teachers in the early 1970’s and brought what they taught back home, is that

Salzberg embodies a very particular piece of the dharma puzzle. She stresses

one thing: that in order to be free from suffering—and therefore to be able

to give abundantly to others—one must endeavor to love oneself abundantly.

Even for people whose lives have been less painful than Salzberg’s, the

Buddha’s teachings on loving-kindness work to connect a person to their own

heart and the hearts of all other beings without exception.

The day Salzberg sat under the Bodhi tree, she made a vow to herself: she

vowed to learn to love as the Buddha loved. “Loving as the Buddha loved of

course meant being able to love oneself as well,” she says in her living

room. “It’s not really a question of, ‘May all sentient beings be free from

suffering,’” she laughs, “’—except for me.’ It has to include oneself.” The

question was how to do that.

Salzberg met two female teachers in India during that first trip who

became examples to her of people who had transformed their misfortune into

abundant generosity and love. The first teacher was Dipa Ma, a tiny Indian

housewife living with her daughter in the slums of Calcutta. Dipa Ma had

gotten so sick she nearly died of grief after losing her husband and two of

her three children. According to Salzberg, when someone told Dipa Ma that

meditation might save her life, she crawled—because that’s the best she

could do—up the steps of the meditation center to receive instruction.

Salzberg related to this story—to the way Dipa Ma used her pain as

motivation to liberate herself, and then to liberate others who suffer. The

intensity of Dipa Ma’s motivation, Salzberg understood, was the key.

“Dipa Ma modeled the ability to transform one’s suffering—even immense

suffering—into loving compassion.” Salzberg looks at you impishly—“I always

knew I wanted to be that kind of person when I grew up.”

Then Salzberg tells the story of meeting a friend of Dipa Ma’s—another

female Indian teacher whose father-in-law had forbidden her to meditate. “I

asked her, ‘How did you accomplish what you needed to accomplish to be a

teacher?’ and she said, ‘I was very mindful when I stirred the rice.’”

Salzberg looks at you with soft green eyes, raises her eyebrows and smiles.

She says, “I think we have the ability to seize that possibility for

ourselves, and we don’t do it.”

Salzberg came back to the States in 1974, finished school, and—because

Dipa Ma told her to, saying that Salzberg “really understood suffering”—she

helped Joseph Goldstein teach a class in meditation at the Naropa Institute,

which had just opened its doors in Boulder, Colorado. Though Salzberg was

practicing, and now beginning to teach—and even starting to lead

retreats—she was still incredibly hard on herself, full of self-judgment,

“straining,” she says, all the time to change herself, be better, get

somewhere with her practice. Ram Dass says of Salzberg in those years, “She

was quite lost.”

Ram Dass agrees, however, with others who say that Salzberg must have

built up stores of merit in other lifetimes, because, though lost,

straining, self-critical and at first all for herself, she worked diligently

to stay on a difficult path that would eventually have a huge impact on a

lot of people. When she was only 23, she and Jack Kornfield and Joseph

Goldstein, joining with a group of friends, bought, with very little money,

an old building from the Catholic Diocese, and started the now

well-respected and very successful Insight Meditation Society.

It wasn’t until 1984 that Salzberg and Goldstein met Sayadaw U Pandita,

the Theravadan teacher from Burma who would turn Salzberg’s life around once

again. U Pandita had a reputation for being very, very difficult.

“Oh, boy—he was a tough guy,” says Ram Dass, who met U Pandita in Burma

during an early retreat with Salzberg and Goldstein. Ram Dass laughs. “I was

happy to leave there. I felt like I escaped.” Ram Dass says it was at this

time, 1985, that Salzberg started doing metta intensively. “I watched

her change,” he says. “She went from being in her mind, to being very soft,

loving, sensual, actually. Because she was coming into herself.”

Between 1985 and 1991, U Pandita worked with Salzberg on two practices:

mindfulness practice and loving-kindness practice. Though she’d been

meditating for fourteen years, and had been at IMS for nine, it was a new

beginning.

“I was seeing him six days a week when on intensive retreat,” Salzberg

says, “and I’d go in for an interview, and describe something, and he’d say,

‘Well, in the beginning it can be like that,’ and I’d think, ‘I’m not a

beginner!’” She laughs. “And I’d come in the next day and describe something

completely different and he’d say, ‘Oh, in the beginning it can be like

that.’ You know?!” Salzberg says, and, feigning infuriation, looks at

you, “‘I’m not a beginner!’ And it went on that way for a very long time,”

she says, “until I got it: It’s good to be a beginner. It’s good not to have

all these ideas—‘I shouldn’t experience this, I should be doing more of

that.’ It’s good to just see what’s there, to say, ‘Wow! Look at that!’”

One of the resident teachers at IMS, Amy Schmidt, is laughing about

Salzberg. She’s remembering the time U Pandita came to IMS and made Salzberg

slow down her mindfulness meditation to such a snail’s pace that sometimes

she had to leave the shrine room two hours before lunch, in order to make it

the fifty or so steps to the kitchen in time for the meal.

Salzberg rolls her eyes when she talks about this. “And there was

Joseph,” she says, “walking around at his normal pace. I thought, ‘Why isn’t

anybody doing this correctly but me?’”

U Pandita, though, obviously had something in mind for Salzberg. Again,

he had her come in six days a week for interviews. The idea was that she

would write down something she noticed about one meditation period per day,

and one walking meditation.

“I’d go in there,” Salzberg says, “and before I could read my notes to

describe my sitting and my walking, he’d say, ‘What did you experience when

you washed your face?’ Which was nothing, because I hadn’t paid the least

bit of attention to that.” Salzberg shakes her head. “And that was my

interview. So I’d leave and I’d sit and walk and wash my face as mindfully

as I could—I’d feel my hands in the water, and the water on my face—and I’d

go in the next day and he’d say, ‘Tell me everything you noticed when you

drank your cup of tea.’ Which was nothing.” Salzberg smiles, remembering.

Sometimes Salzberg would come into the room and bow to U Pandita and her

hair would fall in her face and she’d brush it away with her hand and he’d

say, “Did you note that?” “And I’d say, ‘No,’ and I wouldn’t get to read my

sitting and walking notes that day either.” Salzberg called this experience

the “torment of continuity,” but after a while she understood something

more: where before she’d thought that meditation was what took place inside

the shrine room, now she began to see that there was no difference between

meditation and non-meditation. “We all have a tendency,” she says, “to think

the real stuff happens in the meditation hall, and that if you’re drinking a

cup of tea in the dining room and you get lost in a fantasy, the thing to do

is throw the cup in the dishwasher and run back into the meditation hall to

regroup. Well, that tendency for me was gone.

“The phrase that kept coming up in my mind during that retreat,” she

says, “was from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, in which Suzuki Roshi says

something like, ‘We practice not to attain buddhanature, but to express it.’

Finally I could just say, ‘O.K., I’m just expressing this right now, and

right now, and right now.”

You walk with Salzberg through the woods from her house to IMS, and she

just walks, hands in coat pockets, eyes on the ground. You take a stroll

with her on a country road nearby, past horses, trees and a pond, and she

just strolls. She’s not unfriendly—she tells stories and answers questions

and smiles and laughs a lot—but she’s not busy building herself up, or

entertaining you. The only thing you can do around her is let go of all

expectation that something has to happen, that you have to be someone, that

she has to respond as someone else.

In loving-kindness practice, a practitioner begins with him or herself,

wishing four things: may I be free from danger, may I be happy, may I be

healthy, may I live with ease. The practitioner then moves on to wish a

“benefactor”—someone who has cared for them—the same four things. Then they

make those aspirations for a good friend, then a neutral person—a person

they normally ignore, like the counter person at the dry cleaner—then a

difficult person, and then all beings without exception. If one were doing a

metta retreat, one would do this practice using the same people over

and over again.

“We tend to associate love or loving-kindness with a feeling or emotion,”

Salzberg says, “but I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s something

deeper—it’s really about being able to connect rather than exclude.”

Salzberg tells the story of the time when Joseph Goldstein went to see

the 16th Karmapa in Sikkim. “He said that the Karmapa greeted his

arrival as though it was just about the most important thing that had ever

happened in his life. Which one guesses it was really not. And he did that

not through great pomp and circumstance, but through an absolute fullness

and completeness of attention. The presence Joseph felt was the feeling of

being completely loved.”

Salzberg goes on: “And when Joseph told me this story, I felt quite

regretful about all the encounters that I have where I’m kind of half there

and half thinking about the next person I need to talk to, or the phone call

I need to make. So the first thing is that gathering of energy—when I feel

like my energy is somewhere else, I go…“ here Salzberg looks at you gently,

but with full attention. “Here we are,” she says.

Salzberg does not seem like the mushy type. She is not, as she puts it,

“sweet and feeble-minded,” qualities people often think of when they hear

the word “love.” When she is there with you, she is simply there, with no

pretension, no elaboration, no show. When you e-mail her, she e-mails you

right back. When you call her—and she gets dozens of calls a day—she returns

the call.

Talking about loving-kindness practice, she says, “I really like the

‘neutral person’ part of the practice a lot. Because here’s this person that

you don’t really know, you don’t have a story about them, you don’t know

about their sorrows or their joys. But you pay attention to them every day,

in effect, because you’re using them as an object of meditation, and wishing

them well. And by virtue of the fact that you’re paying attention to

somebody rather than overlooking them or ignoring them—suddenly there’s this

real caring.

“A lot of the really charming stories of loving-kindness practice at IMS

come out of that phase. People will be sitting and sitting and sitting and

they’ll have a neutral person who’s also a meditator on retreat and they’ll

say, ‘I don’t feel anything. I’m not doing this right. I’m not good at

this.’ And one day I’ll get a note saying, ‘My neutral person didn’t show up

at breakfast—could you please go up and check on them?’” Salzberg laughs.

“You know? Like, ‘Yeah, right—your neutral person wants me banging on

their door.’” Salzberg laughs again.

Salzberg did loving-kindness practice for four years with U Pandita, and

then he wanted her to stop. Metta is not the main practice, he said,

mindfulness is: metta will do many things, but it won’t necessarily

enhance your understanding of emptiness. “It’s not,” Salzberg says, “a

liberating practice.”

On retreat with U Pandita in Australia in the late eighties, then,

Salzberg, who at this point thought she knew her mind, went back to

mindfulness practice—and fell into a hole: feelings about her mother’s death

she thought she’d worked through resurfaced. Miserable, she once again had

to reweave the threads of connection from a lonely, desolate place. As a

result, her compassion grew, first for herself, and then for everyone else.

Many of her friends can describe the change. Joseph Goldstein says, “When

Sharon was just starting out, she was quite an unusual yogi—it was clear

that there was wisdom there. But her teaching abilities weren’t clear at

that time. Now, though, she has the confidence, and is wonderfully

articulate, so the wisdom really shines through.”

Salzberg was riding in an elevator in a New York City hotel a few years

ago, when she realized that she was carrying her very heavy suitcase in her

arms. “I had the brilliant thought,” she says, “—‘Why not put it down, and

let the elevator carry it?’” That’s what it’s like for Salzberg, finally:

every moment now there’s another chance to let go—not to strain to be

something better, not to strive to get over anything, not to practice life

in any kind of harsh, judgmental, demanding or controlling way—but to just

let go, moment after moment after moment. And in that moment of letting go

is kindness.

“Even if I’m teaching people just to be with the breath,” she says, “my

emphasis is that the critical moment in the practice is the moment we

realize we’ve been distracted. We have a phenomenal ability to begin

again—when we’ve gone off somewhere, we can begin again. And in that moment

of beginning again, we can be practicing loving-kindness and forgiveness and

patience and letting go. That was always taught to me,” she says, “but I

couldn’t hear it. So maybe my evolution has been my ability to hear those

words.”

In 1985, Salzberg and Goldstein were in Nepal together, when someone

asked them if they’d like to go meet the great Tibetan teacher Dilgo

Khentsye Rinpoche. “We were in Bodhnath, just hanging around,” Salzberg

says, “and so we said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ you know, and we kind of went in and

there he was in his state of half undress. He was eating lunch, or something

like that. It was just the two of us and a translator and him, and he said,

‘Do you have anything you want to ask me?’ And we said, ‘No.’” Salzberg

rocks backwards on the couch and laughs hard. “And he burst out laughing,”

she says, “like, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing, you dunces!’

Six years later we were studying with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and would have

done anything to be in a room with Khentsye Rinpoche to ask him

questions.”

Salzberg often tells these kind of self-deprecating stories, and you end

up feeling great affection for her—she seems to have made as many mistakes

as you, only she’s learned to laugh about them, tossing them off as

teachings on how to give oneself a break.

Around 1991, twenty years after her first trip to India—and two years

after she’d grappled, again, with the agony she felt at her mother’s death—Salzberg,

still following the pretense of accident, “conceived an interest in Dzogchen”—the

Tibetan Vajrayana practice of the Nyingma school. “It’s hard to even

describe this,” she says, “but it was like a kind of craving, a yearning

that came up. Some friends came by—students of Dilgo Khentsye Rinpoche’s—and

I said, ‘Can you teach me?’ and of course they couldn’t.” She laughs. “’Can

you tell me something about it?’” she remembers saying then, “’No.’” She

laughs again. “And then Surya came.”

Salzberg asked Western Buddhist teacher Surya Das to give her some

Dzogchen teachings, but he said it’d be better if he introduced Salzberg to

his teachers. And that’s when she went to Nepal to meet Tulku Urgyen,and

eventually to Paris where she met the late Nyoshul Khen, called “Khenpo” by

his students.

Salzberg “fell in love” with Khenpo. She felt devoted to him, but it was

a different kind of devotion than the one she felt for her earlier teachers.

With Goenka, Dipa Ma and U Pandita, Salzberg felt a kind of dependency—after

all, they were teaching very fundamental things, baby steps to being fully

human. But Nyoshul Khen, up until his death in 2000, kept turning Salzberg’s

attention to something she was overlooking—not his buddhanature, but hers.

“I had a different experience with him,” Salzberg says, “because I was a

much more mature being at that point. I’d always been very devoted to my

teachers. But with them the ground of my own self-respect was not that

strong yet.”

In the last few months of Nyoshul Khen’s life, Salzberg kept looking to

him as the person with the answers, with the strength, with the great love

and wisdom. And he kept pointing her to herself for those things. “It turns

out,” she says, “we look at the Buddha to see ourselves. And we look at

ourselves, not to see ourselves as separate and more wonderful than anybody

else.” She laughs. “But we look at ourselves and basically see everybody.”

Finally, after over thirty years of intense practice, of traveling all

over the world and studying with what she calls an “ever-changing pantheon

of teachers,” Salzberg allowed her teacher to show her what she’d vowed to

learn under the Bodhi tree: faith in herself, and in her ability to love.

“From the point of view of the Buddhist teaching,” she says, “we all have

that capacity to love. No experience of suffering, of loneliness or of

unlovability we may have gone through or may yet go through can ever destroy

that capacity. And that faith is the bedrock of loving-kindness. It’s faith

in one’s buddhanature, in one’s awareness and the potential to love. It’s

faith in an interconnected universe.”

Salzberg, at fifty, doesn’t think, at all, that this is the end of her

path.

“I have definitely remade my life,” she says. “I’ve re-parented myself

with my teachers, and I’ve found a home in the dharma, and have an amazing

community of friends. I have practiced. But like any person, I’m not

completely free. I do have faith, though, that any of us can be.”

To Love Abundantly:Sharon Salzberg’s Journey on the Path, Trish Deitch Rohrer, Shambhala Sun, January 2003.

_______________

Allen Ginsberg

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for

I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache

self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went

into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families

shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the

avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what

were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,

poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery

boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the

pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans

following you, and followed in my imagination by the store

detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our

solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen

delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in

an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the

supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The

trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be

lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love

past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,

what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and

you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat

disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955

—-

CIA Dope Calypso

In nineteen hundred forty-nine

China was won by Mao Tse-tung

Chiang Kai Shek’s army ran away

They were waiting there in Thailand yesterday

Supported by the CIA

Pushing junk down Thailand way

First they stole from the Meo Tribes

Up in the hills they started taking bribes

Then they sent their soldiers up to Shan

Collecting opium to send to The Man

Pushing junk in Bangkok yesterday

Supported by the CIA

Brought their jam on mule trains down

To Chiang Mai that’s a railroad town

Sold it next to the police chief’s brain

He took it to town on the choochoo train

Trafficking dope to Bangkok all day

Supported by the CIA

The policeman’s name was Mr. Phao

He peddled dope grand scale and how

Chief of border customs paid

By Central Intelligence’s U.S. aid

The whole operation, Newspapers say

Supported by the CIA

He got so sloppy and peddled so loose

He busted himself and cooked his own goose

Took the reward for the opium load

Seizing his own haul which same he resold

Big time pusher for a decade turned grey

Working for the CIA

Touby Lyfong he worked for the French

A big fat man liked to dine & wench

Prince of the Meos he grew black mud

Till opium flowed through the land like a flood

Communists came and chased the French away

So Touby took a job with the CIA

The whole operation fell in to chaos

Till U.S. intelligence came in to Laos

Mary Azarian/Matt Wuerker

I’ll tell you no lie I’m a true American

Our big pusher there was Phoumi Nosavan

All them Princes in a power play

But Phoumi was the man for the CIA

And his best friend General Vang Pao

Ran the Meo army like a sacred cow

Helicopter smugglers filled Long Cheng’s bars

In Xieng Quang province on the Plain of Jars

It started in secret they were fighting yesterday

Clandestine secret army of the CIA

All through the Sixties the dope flew free

Thru Tan Son Nhut Saigon to Marshall Ky

Air America followed through

Transporting comfiture for President Thieu

All these Dealers were decades and yesterday

The Indochinese mob of the U.S. CIA

Operation Haylift Offisir Wm Colby

Saw Marshall Ky fly opium Mr. Mustard told me

Indochina desk he was Chief of Dirty Tricks

“Hitch-hiking” with dope pushers was how he got his fix

Subsidizing the traffickers to drive the Reds away

Till Colby was the head of the CIA

-January 1972

—-

Kaddish, Part I

For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on

the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking,

talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues

shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm–and your memory in my head three years after–

And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud–wept, realizing

how we suffer–

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,

prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-

swers–and my own imagination of a withered leaf–at dawn–

Dreaming back thru life, Your time–and mine accelerating toward Apoca-

lypse,

the final moment–the flower burning in the Day–and what comes after,

looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city

a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom

Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed–

like a poem in the dark–escaped back to Oblivion–

No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,

trapped in its disappearance,

sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-

ping each other,

worshipping the God included in it all–longing or inevitability?–while it

lasts, a Vision–anything more?

It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,

Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-

dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant–and

the sky above–an old blue place.

or down the Avenue to the south, to–as I walk toward the Lower East Side

–where you walked 50 years ago, little girl–from Russia, eating the

first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock

then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?–toward

Newark–

toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice

cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards–

Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,

and learning to be mad, in a dream–what is this life?

Toward the Key in the window–and the great Key lays its head of light

on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the

sidewalk–in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward

the Yiddish Theater–and the place of poverty

you knew, and I know, but without caring now–Strange to have moved

thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,

with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on

the street, firs escapes old as you

–Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me–

Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe–and I guess that dies with

us–enough to cancel all that comes–What came is gone forever

every time–

That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret–no fear radiators, lacklove,

torture even toothache in the end–

Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul–and the lamb, the soul,

in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change’s fierce hunger–hair

and teeth–and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,

braintricked Implacability.

Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death let you out,

Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with

God, done with the path thru it–Done with yourself at last–Pure

–Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all–before the

world–

There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.

No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more

fear of Louis,

and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,

loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands–

No more of sister Elanor,–she gone before you–we kept it secret you

killed her–or she killed herself to bear with you–an arthritic heart

–But Death’s killed you both–No matter–

Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and

weeks–forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-

ity, Chaplin dance in youth,

or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin’s at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar

–by standing room with Elanor & Max–watching also the Capital

ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,

with the YPSL’s hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts

pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and

laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920

all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave–lucky to

have husbands later–

You made it–I came too–Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and

will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer–or kill

–later perhaps–soon he will think–)

And it’s the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now

–tho not you

I didn’t foresee what you felt–what more hideous gape of bad mouth came

first–to you–and were you prepared?

To go where? In that Dark–that–in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the

Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with

you?

Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull

in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon–Deaths-

head with Halo? can you believe it?

Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,

than none ever was?

Nothing beyond what we have–what you had–that so pitiful–yet Tri-

umph,

to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower–fed to the

ground–but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,

shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth

wrapped, sore–freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.

No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the

knife–lost

Cut down by an idiot Snowman’s icy–even in the Spring–strange ghost

thought some–Death–Sharp icicle in his hand–crowned with old

roses–a dog for his eyes–cock of a sweatshop–heart of electric

irons.

All the accumulations of life, that wear us out–clocks, bodies, consciousness,

shoes, breasts–begotten sons–your Communism–’Paranoia’ into

hospitals.

You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of

stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is

Elanor happy?

Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over

midnight Accountings, not sure. His life passes–as he sees–and

what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might

have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-

mortality, Naomi?

I’ll see him soon. Now I’ve got to cut through to talk to you as I didn’t

when you had a mouth.

Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson’s horses

–headed to the End.

They know the way–These Steeds–run faster than we think–it’s our own

life they cross–and take with them.

Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-

ried dreamed, mortal changed–Ass and face done with murder.

In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under

pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.

Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,

Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m

hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore

Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not

light or darkness, Dayless Eternity–

Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some

of my Time, now given to Nothing–to praise Thee–But Death

This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-

derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping

–page beyond Psalm–Last change of mine and Naomi–to God’s perfect

Darkness–Death, stay thy phantoms!

II

Over and over–refrain–of the Hospitals–still haven’t written your

history–leave it abstract–a few images

run thru the mind–like the saxophone chorus of houses and years–

remembrance of electrical shocks.

By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your

nervousness–you were fat–your next move–

By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you–

once and for all–when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my

opinion of the cosmos, I was lost–

By my later burden–vow to illuminate mankind–this is release of

particulars–(mad as you)–(sanity a trick of agreement)–

But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and

spied a mystical assassin from Newark,

So phoned the Doctor–’OK go way for a rest’–so I put on my coat

and walked you downstreet–On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,

unaccountably–’Where you goin Lady to Death’? I shuddered–

and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask

against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma–

And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of

the gang? You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on–to New

York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound–

4 Octaves, with ease…

Check out their site – Gjallarhorn…!

Well, we went to the Gjallarhorn Show at the Aladdin. Excellent, most excellent! Peter from Olympia, Mike from Chehalis, Steve from Olympia were there, and Rowan came along, and had the time of his life. He was so wired he couldn’t get to sleep until 3 in the morning afterwards.

That Wild Contra Bass Recorder in Action…

If there is such a thing, it would be called Nordic/Northern Soul. Amazing stuff. Intricate rhythms, 4 octave vocal range, unworldly contra-bass recorder sounds… Raging viola and tales, ancient tales from Finland to Iceland.

Rowan getting his CD’s autographed…

We all got to meet the band after the show, and they were very sweet, sincere and good natured.

Rowan is working this summer as an Au Pair, getting his money together to purchase a fiddle. The Gjallarhorn show seemed to fire him up, he is heading to the folk instrument store today to check for fiddles/lessons….

Gjallarhorn… Posing for the crazy man with the digital camera…. 80) (I cajoled them by telling it was going up on Turfing….)

If you get to see Gjallarhorn, do. A wonderful evening!

Well… this is what is up for this Entry…

The Links

Poems from the Kalevala

Enjoy,

Gwyllm

__________

Links:

George Loses His Virginity…

Chinese Black Helicopters?

Amnesty: Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft doing bad things in China

Required Listening: RU Sirius interviews Paul Krassner…

_________

THE KALEVALA.

PROEM

MASTERED by desire impulsive,

By a mighty inward urging,

I am ready now for singing,

Ready to begin the chanting

Of our nation’s ancient folk-song

Handed down from by-gone ages.

In my mouth the words are melting,

From my lips the tones are gliding,

From my tongue they wish to hasten;

When my willing teeth are parted,

When my ready mouth is opened,

Songs of ancient wit and wisdom

Hasten from me not unwilling.

Golden friend, and dearest brother,

Brother dear of mine in childhood,

Come and sing with me the stories,

Come and chant with me the legends,

Legends of the times forgotten,

Since we now are here together,

Come together from our roamings.

Seldom do we come for singing,

Seldom to the one, the other,

O’er this cold and cruel country,

O’er the poor soil of the Northland.

Let us clasp our hands together

That we thus may best remember.

Join we now in merry singing,

Chant we now the oldest folk-lore,

That the dear ones all may hear them,

That the well-inclined may hear them,

Of this rising generation.

These are words in childhood taught me,

Songs preserved from distant ages,

Legends they that once were taken

From the belt of Wainamoinen,

From the forge of Ilmarinen,

From the sword of Kaukomieli,

From the bow of Youkahainen,

From the pastures of the Northland,

From the meads of Kalevala.

These my dear old father sang me

When at work with knife and hatchet

These my tender mother taught me

When she twirled the flying spindle,

When a child upon the matting

By her feet I rolled and tumbled.

Incantations were not wanting

Over Sampo and o’er Louhi,

Sampo growing old in singing,

Louhi ceasing her enchantment.

In the songs died wise Wipunen,

At the games died Lemminkainen.

There are many other legends,

Incantations that were taught me,

That I found along the wayside,

Gathered in the fragrant copses,

Blown me from the forest branches,

Culled among the plumes of pine-trees,

Scented from the vines and flowers,

Whispered to me as I followed

Flocks in land of honeyed meadows,

Over hillocks green and golden,

After sable-haired Murikki,

And the many-colored Kimmo.

Many runes the cold has told me,

Many lays the rain has brought me,

Other songs the winds have sung me;

Many birds from many forests,

Oft have sung me lays n concord

Waves of sea, and ocean billows,

Music from the many waters,

Music from the whole creation,

Oft have been my guide and master.

Sentences the trees created,

Rolled together into bundles,

Moved them to my ancient dwelling,

On the sledges to my cottage,

Tied them to my garret rafters,

Hung them on my dwelling-portals,

Laid them in a chest of boxes,

Boxes lined with shining copper.

Long they lay within my dwelling

Through the chilling winds of winter,

In my dwelling-place for ages.

Shall I bring these songs together

From the cold and frost collect them?

Shall I bring this nest of boxes,

Keepers of these golden legends,

To the table in my cabin,

Underneath the painted rafters,

In this house renowned and ancient?

Shall I now these boxes open,

Boxes filled with wondrous stories?

Shall I now the end unfasten

Of this ball of ancient wisdom,

These ancestral lays unravel?

Let me sing an old-time legend,

That shall echo forth the praises

Of the beer that I have tasted,

Of the sparkling beer of barley.

Bring to me a foaming goblet

Of the barley of my fathers,

Lest my singing grow too weary,

Singing from the water only.

Bring me too a cup of strong-beer,

It will add to our enchantment,

To the pleasure of the evening,

Northland’s long and dreary evening,

For the beauty of the day-dawn,

For the pleasure of the morning,

The beginning of the new-day.

Often I have heard them chanting,

Often I have heard them singing,

That the nights come to us singly,

That the Moon beams on us singly,

That the Sun shines on us singly;

Singly also, Wainamoinen,

The renowned and wise enchanter,

Born from everlasting Ether

Of his mother, Ether’s daughter.

—-

RUNE I.

BIRTH OF WAINAMOINEN.

IN primeval times, a maiden,

Beauteous Daughter of the Ether,

Passed for ages her existence

In the great expanse of heaven,

O’er the prairies yet enfolded.

Wearisome the maiden growing,

Her existence sad and hopeless,

Thus alone to live for ages

In the infinite expanses

Of the air above the sea-foam,

In the far outstretching spaces,

In a solitude of ether,

She descended to the ocean,

Waves her coach, and waves her pillow.

Thereupon the rising storm-wind

Flying from the East in fierceness,

Whips the ocean into surges,

Strikes the stars with sprays of ocean

Till the waves are white with fervor.

To and fro they toss the maiden,

Storm-encircled, hapless maiden;

With her sport the rolling billows,

With her play the storm-wind forces,

On the blue back of the waters;

On the white-wreathed waves of ocean,

Play the forces of the salt-sea,

With the lone and helpless maiden;

Till at last in full conception,

Union now of force and beauty,

Sink the storm-winds into slumber;

Overburdened now the maiden

Cannot rise above the surface;

Seven hundred years she wandered,

Ages nine of man’s existence,

Swam the ocean hither, thither,

Could not rise above the waters,

Conscious only of her travail;

Seven hundred years she labored

Ere her first-born was delivered.

Thus she swam as water-mother,

Toward the east, and also southward,

Toward the west, and also northward;

Swam the sea in all directions,

Frightened at the strife of storm-winds,

Swam in travail, swam unceasing,

Ere her first-born was delivered.

Then began she gently weeping,

Spake these measures, heavy-hearted:

“Woe is me, my life hard-fated!

Woe is me, in this my travail!

Into what have I now fallen?

Woe is me, that I unhappy,

Left my home in subtle ether,

Came to dwell amid the sea-foam,

To be tossed by rolling billows,

To be rocked by winds and waters,

On the far outstretching waters,

In the salt-sea’s vast expanses,

Knowing only pain and trouble!

Better far for me, O Ukko!

Were I maiden in the Ether,

Than within these ocean-spaces,

To become a water-mother!

All this life is cold and dreary,

Painful here is every motion,

As I linger in the waters,

As I wander through the ocean.

Ukko, thou O God, up yonder,

Thou the ruler of the heavens,

Come thou hither, thou art needed,

Come thou hither, I implore thee,

To deliver me from trouble,

To deliver me in travail.

Come I pray thee, hither hasten,

Hasten more that thou art needed,

Haste and help this helpless maiden!”

When she ceased her supplications,

Scarce a moment onward passes,

Ere a beauteous duck descending,

Hastens toward the water-mother,

Comes a-flying hither, thither,

Seeks herself a place for nesting.

Flies she eastward, flies she westward,

Circles northward, circles southward,

Cannot find a grassy hillock,

Not the smallest bit of verdure;

Cannot find a spot protected,

Cannot find a place befitting,

Where to make her nest in safety.

Flying slowly, looking round her,

She descries no place for resting,

Thinking loud and long debating,

And her words are such as follow:

“Build I in the winds my dwelling,

On the floods my place of nesting?

Surely would the winds destroy it,

Far away the waves would wash it.”

Then the daughter of the Ether,

Now the hapless water-mother,

Raised her shoulders out of water,

Raised her knees above the ocean,

That the duck might build her dwelling,

Build her nesting-place in safety.

Thereupon the duck in beauty,

Flying slowly, looking round her,

Spies the shoulders of the maiden,

Sees the knees of Ether’s daughter,

Now the hapless water-mother,

Thinks them to be grassy hillocks,

On the blue back of the ocean.

Thence she flies and hovers slowly,

Lightly on the knee she settles,

Finds a nesting-place befitting,

Where to lay her eggs in safety.

Here she builds her humble dwelling,

Lays her eggs within, at pleasure,

Six, the golden eggs she lays there,

Then a seventh, an egg of iron;

Sits upon her eggs to hatch them,

Quickly warms them on the knee-cap

Of the hapless water-mother;

Hatches one day, then a second,

Then a third day sits and hatches.

Warmer grows the water round her,

Warmer is her bed in ocean,

While her knee with fire is kindled,

And her shoulders too are burning,

Fire in every vein is coursing.

Quick the maiden moves her shoulders,

Shakes her members in succession,

Shakes the nest from its foundation,

And the eggs fall into ocean,

Dash in pieces on the bottom

Of the deep and boundless waters.

In the sand they do not perish,

Not the pieces in the ocean;

But transformed, in wondrous beauty

All the fragments come together

Forming pieces two in number,

One the upper, one the lower,

Equal to the one, the other.

From one half the egg, the lower,

Grows the nether vault of Terra:

From the upper half remaining,

Grows the upper vault of Heaven;

From the white part come the moonbeams,

From the yellow part the sunshine,

From the motley part the starlight,

From the dark part grows the cloudage;

And the days speed onward swiftly,

Quickly do the years fly over,

From the shining of the new sun

From the lighting of the full moon.

Still the daughter of the Ether,

Swims the sea as water-mother,

With the floods outstretched before her,

And behind her sky and ocean.

Finally about the ninth year,

In the summer of the tenth year,

Lifts her head above the surface,

Lifts her forehead from the waters,

And begins at last her workings,

Now commences her creations,

On the azure water-ridges,

On the mighty waste before her.

Where her hand she turned in water,

There arose a fertile hillock;

Wheresoe’er her foot she rested,

There she made a hole for fishes;

Where she dived beneath the waters,

Fell the many deeps of ocean;

Where upon her side she turned her,

There the level banks have risen;

Where her head was pointed landward,

There appeared wide bays and inlets;

When from shore she swam a distance,

And upon her back she rested,

There the rocks she made and fashioned,

And the hidden reefs created,

Where the ships are wrecked so often,

Where so many lives have perished.

Thus created were the islands,

Rocks were fastened in the ocean,

Pillars of the sky were planted,

Fields and forests were created,

Checkered stones of many colors,

Gleaming in the silver sunlight,

All the rocks stood well established;

But the singer, Wainamoinen,

Had not yet beheld the sunshine,

Had not seen the golden moonlight,

Still remaining undelivered.

Wainamoinen, old and trusty,

Lingering within his dungeon

Thirty summers altogether,

And of winters, also thirty,

Peaceful on the waste of waters,

On the broad-sea’s yielding bosom,

Well reflected, long considered,

How unborn to live and flourish

In the spaces wrapped in darkness,

In uncomfortable limits,

Where he had not seen the moonlight,

Had not seen the silver sunshine.

Thereupon these words be uttered,

Let himself be heard in this wise:

“Take, O Moon, I pray thee, take me,

Take me, thou, O Sun above me,

Take me, thou O Bear of heaven,

From this dark and dreary prison,

From these unbefitting portals,

From this narrow place of resting,

From this dark and gloomy dwelling,

Hence to wander from the ocean,

Hence to walk upon the islands,

On the dry land walk and wander,

Like an ancient hero wander,

Walk in open air and breathe it,

Thus to see the moon at evening,

Thus to see the silver sunlight,

Thus to see the Bear in heaven,

That the stars I may consider.”

Since the Moon refused to free him,

And the Sun would not deliver,

Nor the Great Bear give assistance,

His existence growing weary,

And his life but an annoyance,

Bursts he then the outer portals

Of his dark and dismal fortress;

With his strong, but unnamed finger,

Opens he the lock resisting;

With the toes upon his left foot,

With the fingers of his right hand,

Creeps he through the yielding portals

To the threshold of his dwelling;

On his knees across the threshold,

Throws himself head foremost, forward

Plunges into deeps of ocean,

Plunges hither, plunges thither,

Turning with his hands the water;

Swims he northward, swims he southward,

Swims he eastward, swims he westward,

Studying his new surroundings.

Thus our hero reached the water,

Rested five years in the ocean,

Six long years, and even seven years,

Till the autumn of the eighth year,

When at last he leaves the waters,

Stops upon a promontory,

On a coast bereft of verdure;

On his knees he leaves the ocean,

On the land he plants his right foot,

On the solid ground his left foot,

Quickly turns his hands about him,

Stands erect to see the sunshine,

Stands to see the golden moonlight,

That he may behold the Great Bear,

That he may the stars consider.

Thus our hero, Wainamoinen,

Thus the wonderful enchanter

Was delivered from his mother,

Ilmatar, the Ether’s daughter.

Peter and Steve came over, a pleasant evening. Steve recounted his latest adventures, Peter helped me on some file sharing, and we all shared a wee dram of the excellent whiskey that Tomas gifted me. We are all meeting up again to head out to see Gjallarhorn tonight at the Aladdin Theatre… it promises to be a great night of Finnish/Swedish Music!

Fire Trucks/Ambulances in the neighborhood last night. The girlfriend of the neighbor was taken away, screaming into the night. She looked fairly freaked out. I haven’t talked to him yet, it didn’t look good…

Off to do some painting, will talk at ya later,

Gwyllm

On the Menu

The Links

Instructions for the Kali Yuga

Poetry: Faeries…

________________

The Links:

Mouse n Drugs…

Eurovision Winnaaaa!

Top Ten Signs You’re a Fundamentalist Christian

The Quest for the $1,000 Human Genome

_________________

Instructions for the Kali Yuga – from Hakim Bey

THE KALI YUGA STILL has 200,000 or so years to play–good news for advocates & avatars of CHAOS, bad news for Brahmins, Yahwists, bureaucrat-gods & their runningdogs.

I knew Darjeeling hid something for me soon as I heard the name–dorje ling–Thunderbolt City. In 1969 I arrived just before the monsoons. Old British hill station, summer headquarters for Govt. of Bengal–streets in the form of winding wood staircases, the Mall with a View of Sikkim & Mt. Katchenhunga–Tibetan temples & refugees–beautiful yellow-porcelain people called Lepchas (the real abo’s)–Hindus, Moslems, Nepalese & Bhutanese Buddhists, & decaying Brits who lost their way home in ’47, still running musty banks & tea-shoppes.

Met Ganesh Baba, fat white-bearded saddhu with overly-impeccable Oxford accent–never saw anyone smoke so much ganja, chillam after chillam full, then we’d wander the streets while he played ball with shrieking kids or picked fights in the bazaar, chasing after terrified clerks with his umbrella, then roaring with laughter.

He introduced me to Sri Kamanaransan Biswas, a tiny wispy middleage Bengali government clerk in a shabby suit, who offered to teach me Tantra. Mr. Biswas lived in a tiny bungalow perched on a steep pine-tree misty hillside, where I visited him daily with pints of cheap brandy for puja & tippling–he encouraged me to smoke while we talked, since ganja too is sacred to Kali.

Mr. Biswas in his wild youth was a member of the Bengali Terrorist Party, which included both Kali worshippers & heretic Moslem mystics as well as anarchists & extreme leftists. Ganesh Baba seemed to approve of this secret past, as if it were a sign of Mr. Biswas’s hidden tantrika strength, despite his outward seedy mild appearance.

We discussed my readings in Sir John Woodruffe (“Arthur Avalon”) each afternoon, I walked there thru cold summer fogs, Tibetan spirit-traps flapping in the soaked breeze loomed out of the mist & cedars. We practiced the Tara-mantra and Tara-mudra (or Yoni-mudra), and studied the Tara-yantra diagram for magical purposes. Once we visited a temple to the Hindu Mars (like ours, both planet & war-god) where he bought a finger-ring made from an iron horseshoe nail & gave it to me. More brandy & ganja.

Tara: one of the forms of Kali, very similar in attributes: dwarfish, naked, four-armed with weapons, dancing on dead Shiva, necklace of skulls or severed heads, tongue dripping blood, skin a deep blue-grey the precise color of monsoon clouds. Every day more rain–mud-slides blocking roads. My Border Area Permit expires. Mr. Biswas & I descend the slick wet Himalayas by jeep & train down to his ancestral city, Siliguri in the flat Bengali plains where the Ganges fingers into a sodden viridescent delta.

We visit his wife in the hospital. Last year a flood drowned Siliguri killing tens of thousands. Cholera broke out, the city’s a wreck, algae-stained & ruined, the hospital’s halls still caked with slime, blood, vomit, the liquids of death. She sits silent on her bed glaring unblinking at hideous fates. Dark side of the goddess. He gives me a colored lithograph of Tara which miraculously floated above the water & was saved.

That night we attend some ceremony at the local Kali-temple, a modest half-ruined little roadside shrine–torchlight the only illumination–chanting & drums with strange, almost African syncopation, totally unclassical, primordial & yet insanely complex. We drink, we smoke.

Alone in the cemetery, next to a half-burnt corpse, I’m initiated into Tara Tantra. Next day, feverish & spaced-out, I say farewell & set out for Assam, to the great temple of Shakti’s yoni in Gauhati, just in time for the annual festival. Assam is forbidden territory & I have no permit. Midnight in Gauhati I sneak off the train, back down the tracks thru rain & mud up to my knees & total darkness, blunder at last into the city & find a bug-ridden hotel. Sick as a dog by this time. No sleep.

In the morning, bus up to the temple on a nearby mountain. Huge towers, pullulating deities, courtyards, outbuildings–hundreds of thousands of pilgrims–weird saddhus down from their ice-caves squatting on tiger skins & chanting. Sheep & doves are being slaughtered by the thousands, a real hecatomb–(not another white sahib in sight)–gutters running inch-deep in blood–curve-bladed Kali-swords chop chop chop, dead heads plocking onto the slippery cobblestones.

When Shiva chopped Shakti into 53 pieces & scattered them over the whole Ganges basin, her cunt fell here. Some friendly priests speak English & help me find the cave where Yoni’s on display. By this time I know I’m seriously sick, but determined to finish the ritual. A herd of pilgrims (all at least one head shorter than me) literally engulfs me like an undertow-wave at the beach, & hurls me suspended down suffocating winding troglodyte stairs into claustrophobic womb-cave where I swirl nauseated & hallucinating toward a shapeless cone meteorite smeared in centuries of ghee & ochre. The herd parts for me, allows me to throw a garland of jasmine over the yoni.

A week later in Kathmandu I enter the German Missionary Hospital (for a month) with hepatitis. A small price to pay for all that knowledge–the liver of some retired colonel from a Kipling story!–but I know her, I know Kali. Yes absolutely the archetype of all that horror, yet for those who know, she becomes the generous mother. Later in a cave in the jungle above Rishikish I meditated on Tara for several days (with mantra, yantra, mudra, incense, & flowers) & returned to the serenity of Darjeeling, its beneficent visions.

Her age must contain horrors, for most of us cannot understand her or reach beyond the necklace of skulls to the garland of jasmine, knowing in what sense they are the same. To go thru CHAOS, to ride it like a tiger, to embrace it (even sexually) & absorb some of its shakti, its life-juice–this is the Path of Kali Yuga. Creative nihilism. For those who follow it she promises enlightenment & even wealth, a share of her temporal power.

The sexuality & violence serve as metaphors in a poem which acts directly on consciousness through the Image-ination – or else in the correct circumstances they can be openly deployed & enjoyed, embued with a sense of the holiness of every thing from ecstasy & wine to garbage & corpses.

_______

Poetry: Faeries…

FAERY SONG – Oran Sidhe

Trans by Shaw

“Faery lovers of both sexes who come to mortal kind are common in Celtic story. The faery kind are not seen as diminutive sprights in Celtic tradition, but as the immortal and ancestral spirits who often have communion and conference with human kind. This ‘Oran Sidhe” or faery song describes the beauty of a faery woman” Caitlin Matthews

I left in the doorway of the bower

My jewel, the dusky, brown, white-skinned,

Her eye like a star, her lip like a berry,

Her voice like a stringed instrument.

I left yesterday in the meadow of the kind

The brown-haired maid of sweetest kiss,

Her eye like a star, her cheek like a rose,

Her kiss has the taste of pears.

—

THE HOSTS OF THE FAERY

According to Patrick Logan (The Old Gods – the facts about Irish Fairies), this poem can be found in the Book of Leinster written in the twelfth century. “It describes a party of warriors who went to Magh Mel (Plain of Honey), and of the many names of fairyland, to help the king recover his wife who had been abducted from him. When they had recovered the stolen wife they all decided to remain in fairyland where their leader shares the ruling power with the king.

White shields they carry in their hands,

With emblems of pale silver;

With glittering blue swords,

With mighty stout horns.

In well-devised battle array,

Ahead of their fair chieftain

They march amid blue spears,

Pal-visaged, curly-headed bands.

They scatter the battalions of the foe,

They ravage every land they attack,

Splendidly they march to combat,

A swift distinguished, avenging host!

No wonder though their strength be great:

Songs of queens and kings are one and all;

On their heads are

Golden-yellow manes.

With smooth comely bodies,

With bright blue-starred eyes,

With pure crystal teeth,

With thin red lips.

Good they are at man-slaying,

Melodious in the ale-house,

Masterly at making songs,

Skilled at playing fidchell.

Translation: Kuno Meyer

———-

A bit more contemporary…

The Fairy Ring

By George Mason and John Earsden

Let us in a lover’s round

Circle all this hallowed ground;

Softly, softly trip and go,

the light-foot Fairies jet it so.

Forward then and back again,

Here and there and everywhere,

Winding to and fro,

Skipping high and louting low;

And, like lovers, hand in hand,

March around and make a stand.

I’d Love to be a Fairy’s Child

By Robert Graves (1895–1985)

CHILDREN born of fairy stock

Never need for shirt or frock,

Never want for food or fire,

Always get their heart’s desire:

Jingle pockets full of gold, 5

Marry when they’re seven years old.

Every fairy child may keep

Two strong ponies and ten sheep;

All have houses, each his own,

Built of brick or granite stone; 10

They live on cherries, they run wild—

I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.

The Fairies

By William Allingham

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen,

We dare n’t go a-hunting,

For fear of little men;

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl’s feather.

Down along the rocky shore

Some make their home,

They live on crispy pancakes

Of yellow tide-foam;

Some in the reeds

Of the black mountain-lake,

With frogs for their watch-dogs,

All night awake.

High on the hill-top

The old King sits;

He is now so old and gray

He’s nigh lost his wits.

With a bridge of white mist

Columbkill he crosses,

On his stately journeys

From Slieveleague to Rosses;

Or going up with music,

On cold starry nights,

To sup with the Queen,

Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget

For seven years long;

When she came down again

Her friends were all gone.

They took her lightly back

Between the night and morrow;

They thought she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow.

They have kept her ever since

Deep within the lake,

On a bed of flag leaves,

Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,

Through the mosses bare,

They have planted thorn trees

For pleasure here and there.

Is any man so daring

As dig them up in spite?

He shall find the thornies set

In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen,

We dare n’t go a-hunting,

For fear of little men;

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl’s feather.

On The Menu

The Links

Homeland Security

DOUBT!: THE GNOSIS INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT ANTON WILSON

Somali Poets in Canada: Media, Information…

Somali Poet: Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’

Kind of an eclectic mix and all.

Tuesday somewhere, here, there I would suppose.

Steve Fenwick, and Peter Moulton stopping by tonight, it should be fun.

Gotta Hop…

G

___________

The Links:

Into The Acid Mash…

Jump Day!

Australian Residents Upset at Use of Loud Barry Manilow Music to Shoo Late-Night Revelers

Washington Babylon…

___________

A MOB of kangaroos living in America’s Deep South has been identified as a terrorism target by the US Department of Homeland Security — to the astonishment of residents in the tiny town of Dawsonville, Georgia. “Who would want to hurt a little innocent kangaroo?” asked Dawsonville mayor Joe Lane Cox.

Dawsonville’s Kangaroo Conservation Centre has joined the Brooklyn Bridge, the Washington Monument and New York’s JFK Airport on a federal anti-terrorism database.

The 77,000-site list was ridiculed by a report this week.

_____________

Doubt!: The Gnosis Interview with Robert Anton Wilson – by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney

A conversation with Robert Anton Wilson is like talking to an adult after spending years cooped up with children. Not that Wilson is dour or stern; he isn’t. But after spending time with this consummate challenger of what “everybody knows,” it’s hard to avoid thinking that most of what passes for accepted truth amounts to little more than schoolyard prattling.

Longtime GNOSIS readers will remember Wilson for his articles on the ultimate secret society (in #6) and Jung and synchronicity (#10). Others may remember him for his Illuminatus! trilogy, coauthored with Robert Shea in the 1970s, in which he took the reader for a stroll down just about every corridor of conspiracy, real and imagined, and left us wondering whether there just might not be something in it all.

Wilson’s latest work is Everything Is under Control (Harper-Collins), an engaging stroll into his favorite beat – the world of conspiracies, cults, and coverups. In this brief encyclopedia of un-conventional wisdom, Wilson explores everything from the secret “Mason word” to the murder(?) of Marilyn Monroe to UMMO. UMMO is supposedly an extraterrestrial race that has been sending letters on advanced scientific topics to selected specialists since the 1960s, all signed with the glyph )+(. Although a psychologist named Jose Luis Jordan Pena has confessed to hoaxing this material, Wilson isn’t so sure he’s telling the truth, since according to some experts, the letters actually do reveal knowledge surpassing human science; moreover a spaceship bearing the UMMO glyph apparently touched down in a large Russian city, Other topics covered in this book include the Sirius mystery, Yale’s Skull and Bones society, and the Zapruder film of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

We went down to visit Wilson in his sunny apartment on the central California coast in September 1998. There we spied, among other artifacts, a copy of Aleister Crowley’s Magick: Book 4 on his endtable.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Richard Smoley: Why is conspiracy a hot topic these days?

Robert Anton Wilson: The major reason is that we’re undergoing such tremendous social change. Everything people take for granted is changing rapidly. This is because information flow is increasing faster than at any other time in history. I have some favorite figures I like to quote in that connection from the French statistician Georges Anderla, who says information doubled between the time of Christ and Leonardo; that’s 1500 years. It doubled again between Leonardo and the steam engine, 250 years; doubled between the steam en­gine and quantum theory, 150 years; doubled between 1900 and 1950, that’s 50 years. And he concluded his study in the ’70s; it had doubled between ’68 and ’73, that was five years. Jacques Vallee recently calculated that it’s doubling every eighteen months.

Jay Kinney: Is that information or data?

Wilson: Information in the mathematical sense. Things that can be converted into binary units – and almost everything can be; that’s why you can see the Mona Lisa on your computer. That’s why compact discs sound so good. So as information doubles, society changes rapidly. After Leonardo, after that doubling, we had the first successful Protestant revolution in Ger­many, followed seventeen years later by the second successful Protestant revolution in England. After 1750, we had the American Revolution, the French Revolution, sev­eral Latin American revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution. So as information doubles faster and faster, there’s more and more dramatic and chaotic social change.

I heard Theodore Gordon, a mathematician, talking about information and fractals at the World Future Society in ’89. He said that every time he shows a cor­poration a fractal in any process that they’re trying to control, they say, “Who did it?” They can’t believe it’s intrinsic to the in-formation process itself; they look for some-body to blame.

That’s why we have so many conspir­acy theories. People are saying, “Who are we going to blame for everything changing?”

Smoley: Of all the conspiracies you’ve looked at over the years, which ones are you most inclined to believe in?

Wilson: I put them on a scale from zero to ten. With the ones I put above five, I’m more inclined to give then credit than to doubt theta. The ones I put above seven, that’s pretty close to belief, except I try to shy away from belief, I think it’s a dangerous state co get into,

Bucky Fuller has a theory of the Great Pirates – the sociopathic types who have always been the dominant force in history. The Great Pirates in modern times make up a group the abbreviates “MMAO”: Machiavelli, Mafia, atoms, and oil. It’s the international banks, the Mafia, and the atomic and oil cartels. He doesn’t claim they work together, but they more or less make a singular force. But he also says that they’re so engaged in conflicts with one another that they’re steering Spaceship Earth in 50 different directions, which is why we’re going around and we’re not getting anywhere. I tend to find that fairly credi­ble. A simplification of it is Carl Oglesby’s theory of the Yankee and Cowboy War – the war between Western and old Eastern wealth. Those seem fairly credible to me.

The ones I find most incredible are the ones based on recovered memories therapy – the Greys and the monsters from outer space that are engaged in sexual molestation of people.

Kinney: How about Satanic abuse?

Wilson: That’s based on the same sort of evidence as the Greys. It’s the recovered memory therapy, which, for all I know, might be true, but I know you can get people to remember anything you want if you hypnotize them often enough. So the evidence doesn’t seem very strong to me. I have no­ticed that with the more extraterrestrial conspiracy theories, you’re essentially getting back to the Middle Ages. You’ve got incubi and succubi again. You’ve got sex demons that attack people at night. And you’ve got these Zarathustrian cosmic wars between good and evil, like Scientology or the Church of the SubGenius — one of which I believe is a parody, I’m not sure which.

Smoley: This has all taken the field for imaginative play out of the purely physi­cal realm into alternate realities. The astral plane is populated by angels and devils and incubi and succubi or extraterrestrials.

Wilson: Well, if you identify the astral plane more or less with Jung’s collective unconscious, then all these beings exist on that level. The question is, how much of the other kind of reality are you going to attribute to them?

Smoley: Of all the paranormal experiences I’ve heard about, I can think of maybe two or three people who have told me about something that might sound like an encounter with a ghost. But I seem to know dozens who say, “I was walking down the street and there was a silver disk over-head.” I don’t know what they saw, I’ve never seen anything like that myself, but just from my own anecdotal experience, UFO reports seem to be the most common type of paranormal phenomenon.

Wilson: That doesn’t surprise me. I see two or three UFOs a week, but that’s be-cause I’m not quick to identify things. I not only see UFOs, I see UNFOs – unidentified non-flying objects. I see all sorts of things I can’t identify. As for the ones in the sky, I’ve seen things that I haven’t the foggiest idea of what they are. They might be spaceships. Then again, they could be airplanes with the sun blinking off them in a strange way.

I remember how once at the Irish sci­ence fiction society, after a lecture some-body asked me whether I believed in UFOs. And not yet having devised my ten-point scale between belief and unbelief, I said,”Yes.” So he launched into a long rap about how they were all heat inversions.] said, “We agree. We both believe in UFOs. You think you know what they are, but I don’t know.”

Kinney: Do you think that the interest in conspiracies now, with things like “The X-Files,” could be in part attributed to the Illuminatus! trilogy?

Wilson: I often wonder about that. The problem with that is that it would be tempting to think I’m responsible for all this. They all owe me money in that case; they’ve all been ripping me off and they should pay me. But I suspect a tendency to self-flattery in that theory.

I think Illuminatus! was ahead of its time. And now is the time, for some rea­son; people are inclined to think that way. Although llluminatus! is still not in the mainstream, because it doesn’t accept any conspiracy theory literally; it toys with them, it plays with them, it uses them to open the reader’s mind to alternative pos­sibilities, but it doesn’t sell anything.

My major difference with conspiracy theorists – and I’m a bit of a conspiracy theorist myself, though a skeptical one – is that most of them have never heard the word “maybe” Everything is the truth: “My conspiracy theory is true. Anybody else is a CIA disinformation agent trying to confuse people.” They’ve never heard of the word “maybe,” whereas “maybe” is a very central word in my vocabulary.

Smoley: What do you make of crop circles?

Wilson: I find crop circles endlessly en­tertaining, because every time a new group of hoaxers confesses, another bunch of cir­cles appears that couldn’t have been done by their method. I don’t mind being per­plexed. I think both people who are quick to believe in occult theories and people who are quick to deny them – like CSICOP – can’t stand being perplexed; they want to have an answer right away. But I find most of the universe so damn perplexing that a little bit of perplexity doesn’t bother me. The whole damn thing is perplexing,

Kinney: Have you had personal experi­ences over the years that have convinced you of deeper dimensions or subtle planes?

Wilson: I would rather say that I have had experiences that have convinced me that the commonsense, everyday map of real­ity is inadequate. We need other maps. I’m not particularly wedded to any particular other map. As you can tell from my novels and from my nonfiction too, I alternate between maps. If you’re going to talk politics, you want a political snap. If you’re going to talk geology, you want a geological map. If you want to talk weather, you want a meteorological map. A meteoro­logical map changes every hour or so; the political map changes after every war; the geological map changes over eons, but no map lasts forever. That’s a metaphor I adopt­ed from Alfred Korzybski, founder of gen­eral semantics.

Smoley: Of the metaphysical maps, which are the ones that you’ve found most per­sistently appealing?

Wilson: I suppose the Buddhist map which tells you don’t believe in any of your maps. Or don’t believe in them too fervently. To be absolutely honest, although I don’t be­lieve in anything too fervently, I do tend to believe in some kind of mind behind the cosmos. I don’t like calling it God, because God to most people means a grouchy old man sitting on a cloud, counting all the kids who are masturbating so he can put them in hell later on. That’s so ridiculous that I can’t use the word at all. But I don’t believe that everything happened by acci­dent. I just can’t believe that – to use a metaphor adapted from Arthur Koestler – if you keep throwing junk over a wall for seven million years, you’ll get a 747 jet in full working order. I can’t believe that; I think there’s intelligence somewhere in evolution.

Smoley: There’s also that notion of the secret meta-real brotherhood that’s sup­posedly working to enlighten humanity over the eons. Where do you put that on your scale of belief?

Wilson: It depends on what year you ask me. Back in the late 1970s, that was very high in my belief system. Since then I’ve retreated from that position quite a bit, al-though I haven’t totally abandoned it. Every now and then I have strange experiences which make me wonder. I’m quite satisfed to be left wondering rather than having an absolute certitude on such matters.

Kinney: Why have you retreated from that position?

Wilson: Because I found more reasons to believe that it was a wishful projection of my own Fantasies. But some synchronicities look like they’re orchestrated. I don’t dismiss it out of hand; I put it somewhere around Five right now on my zero-to-ten scale.

Kinney: In terms of updating old beliefs, I was curious how you stand these days on SMI2LE, since you were a big expo­nent of that.

Wilson: SMILE: space migration, intelli­gence increase, life extension. It was a slo­gan coined by Timothy Leary; one of Tim’s great talents was coining slogans.

I still have an ardent desire to see hu­manity migrate off the planet. For a vari­ety of reasons: one, I think we’re exhausting the resources of a single planet; and two, I think every time we move to a new envi­ronment, our intelligence increases. And I think that freedom is always found on the expanding perimerer. The further out you are from the centralized control system, the more freedom you have, And four, both the Russian and the American astronauts and cosmonauts – about 85% of them – have had consciousness-altering experiences of the type I regard as positive. Neurosomatic turn-ons, experiences of beauty and ecstasy, which I think is good for us. If 85% of the human race migrates off the planet, it means that 85% of the human race will mutate to a higher level of perception and consciousness.

I like life extension because the older I get, the more I realize how little I know. I’d like to live long enough to figure out a few things anyway. And intelligence in-crease is to me the number one priority on the planet. I’ve become more and more convinced that the major problem on this planet is stupidity, which not only exists as a thing in itself, but it’s supported and encouraged and financed. There are dozens of entrenched interests that want to pro-mote stupidity.

However, I’m more interested in the Internet than in SMI2LE right now., because the Internet is happening right now, and it’s happening fast and I’m a part of it – a small part, but I’m part of it – whereas SMI2LE I now see as about a generation away. lt’s not as close as it seemed as when I was wildly enthusiastic about it and ready to blast off in the next spaceship.

Kinney: It seemed to me – maybe this was mainly in the ’70s – that you were a better spreader of Leary’s ideas than he was.

Wilson: He said that too, which was one of the most flattering things I ever heard. I don’t know, I guess I reached a different audience than he did, that’s all. One of my favorite Timothy Leary stories was, a month after his death, I got an e-mail from him. It said, “Dear Robert, How are you doing? I’m doing fine over here, but it’s not what I expected. Too crowded. Love, Timothy” (laughter).

Kinney: Was there ever any explanation for that?

Wilson: Oh,Tim knew a lot about computers; I assume he had it set to go off at a certain time after his death.

Kinney: This interview is going to appear in our issue on Good and Evil. How you would define evil?

Wilson: I don’t like the terms “good” and “evil” at all. They invoke too much sub­jectivity disguised as objectivity. I would rather talk about kindness and cruelty. They’re a little more clear-cut and specif­ic about what you’re talking about. You get shady areas, you get some ambiguity, but by and large, when you say you’re in favor of kindness and against cruelty, you’re setting up a standard. When you say you’re for good and against evil, you’re like the cler­gyman in the story about Cal Coolidge. After church somebody asked him, “What was the sermon on, Cal?” “He was against sin.” It’s easy to be against sin and evil; what the hell do you mean? I’m against cruelty. That’s more clear.

Kinney: Do you think there’s any source of malevolence or cruelty larger than hu­manity itself- say, built into the universe as a force or a seductive tendency?

Wilson: I don’t believe in that; I find that very dubious, although it’s produced some damn good books – Moby Dick, and a lot of Faulkner. I think it’s a great idea for lit­erature, but I don’t personally think there’s any evil force seducing people. I think peo­ple do a good enough job seducing them-selves. Besides, I’m more inclined to look at it in the Buddhist way: it’s more igno­rance than malignancy. As a matter of fact, Ezra Pound got around to that at the end of his life after raving and ranting about conspiracies for so many years; toward the end of the Cantos he keeps repeating”Nicht Basheit – Drurmrheit”: “not evil – stupidity.” Which was his ultimate judgment on what was wrong.

And the trouble with fighting evil is, to quote Pound again, “I lost my center fighting the world.” If it could happen to Ezra Pound, it could happen to anyone. Don’t get too concerned about fighting evil; you lose your own center that way. Hey, I sound like a philosopher!

Kinney: It does seem as if one of the biggest sources of evil in the world is try­ing to do good too vociferously.

Wilson: Or trying to force people to be-come good. I once said, “An honest politi­cian is a national calamity. “The crooks we can tolerate; we have to; we’re used to them. An honest politician can turn the whole world upside down in his attempts to reform it. He could wreck everything.

Smoley: I’d certainly prefer a crook to an ideologue under most circumstances.

Wilson: Exactly. John Adams defined “ideology” as “the science of idiotism.” That’s what I think every time I hear someone spouting the standard libertarian line, the standard Marxist line, or any other stan­dard line: “My God! Where have their brains gone? They’ve turned into parrots.”

Kinney: Though you were identified with libertarianism pretty strongly.

Wilson: I think of myself as a kind of lib­ertarian, But I know I’ve got as many crit­ics in the libertarian movement as I have admirers. They don’t like my relativism, my tolerance – “tolerance” is a self-praising word; my indifferentism, my Buddhism – they want me to fight evil, like they’re fighting evil. But I prefer libertarianism to any form of authoritarianism.

Smoley: People who are blowing up Federal buildings are supposedly asserting freedom. But you wonder if

that’s helping anything. It’s also terrifying to think what would hap-pen if these people were actually able to dictate how society is run.

Wilson: I was a Trotskyist when I was sev­enteen. And the thing that drove me out of the Trotskyist movement was one of those doctrinaire meetings where we were

all being corrected for our ideological er­rors, I didn’t get particularly bad criticism, except for liking Carl Jung and James Joyce, but something occurred to me: if these peo­ple ever took over the country, it’d be so much worse a mess than it is now. That’s when I began to develop the pragmatic distrust of ideologies that I’ve kept for the rest of my life.

Smoley: Do you think American society is more ideological than it was 50 years ago?

Wilson: I’m astounded by the extent to which people are governed by almost meaningless slogans that are repeated over and over again. They don’t seem to have much content at all, but you just keep hearing them over and over again, like “the liberal media.” You break down what’s in most of the media, and how the hell it could possibly be considered liberal is beyond my comprehension.

And yet I know what they’re getting at, the people who talk that way. What they’re talking about is that the media tends to be liberal on one issue and one issue only, and that’s sexual morality. And to these people that’s the most important issue. So therefore the defining characteristic of the media is liberalism. Never mind the fact that the media is conservative on almost all economic and political ideas. Clinton is a godsend to these people; he’s the proof that liberals are sexual outlaws.

By and large, ruling-class males, how-ever they got into the ruling class, all tend to behave pretty much the same. Clinton’s is the typical behavior of the alpha male in any mammal pack. I think it’s hilarious that Ken Starr has taken five years and $50 mil-lion to uncover the fact that Clinton acts just like any other ruling-class male.

Smoley: To backtrack a little to Timothy Leary, could you perhaps tell us a little about your take on the possibilities of psychedelics?

Wilson: In the first place, my major take is the laws against them were imbecilic. I think the benefits in the early research were so promising that the research should have been allowed to continue.

I can see why one doesn’t want fif­teen-year-olds playing around with LSD, but even there I don’t think law is the best way to handle it. I think education is the best way – except when you say that, you sound like an idiot when you see what they put on as drug education. I mean se­rious drug education that tells the truth, But of course that’s the major thing that most teachers have been fired for in the his­tory of this country. If they’re ever caught attempting to tell the truth about anything, they’re immediately called before the school board and usually they’re fired. That’s what Scopes stood trial for: telling the truth about biology.

As for the dangers of psychedelics, I think Timothy understood those better than anybody. He said drugs depend on the set and the setting. And you look at the worst cases; the people who survived the CIAs MK ULTRA, in which they were given LSD and other powerful drugs or elec­troshock therapy or locked in rooms with their own voices played back to them over and over when they were on drugs. This produced horrible results because the set and the setting were calculated to produce horrible results. Even if they were just given drugs without any warning, that’s enough to make you paranoid. Some of them suf­fered from paranoia for decades after.

And if you’re just taking them with-out any knowledge of what you’re doing, that’s dangerous too. But I feel pretty sure that given by a sympathetic and intelligent psychotherapist in a supportive environ­ment – and I mean very intelligent as well as very sympathetic — they can be tremendously beneficial. I still believe that. The evidence supports it, actually. There’s very few cases of people being damaged in therapy by LSD. There’s lots of cases of people being tremendously helped, in­cluding Cary Grant, who went around rav­ing and ranting about how much good LSD did for him. He never went to jail for that. I think he learned to moderate his enthusiasm after a decade or so.

Kinney: But you’ve also been an advocate of recreational drug use over the years.

Wilson: I don’t think I ever advocated recreational drug use. I advocated the right of people CO decide for themselves if they’re going to do

that. I would say if you want recreational drug use, stick to marijuana, that’s the most recreational drug around. If you take any psychedelic, you’re going to get into some-thing deeper than recreation, and you may not be prepared for it. And I definitely don’t trust cocaine, I don’t like people who use cocaine getting into my environment. If I find out anybody is using cocaine, I try to keep them away. I don’t trust peo­ple on cocaine. Same thing with speed.

Again this is a practical approach based on information; it’s not a metaphysical ap­proach: “Drugs are bad.” People who say “drugs are bad” never stop to think how many drugs the doctor gives them. If you go to a doctor and he says, “This is the galloping conniption fits; it’ll go away in seven days,” you feel let down. If he says, “This is the galloping conniption fits; take this for seven days, and it’ll go away,” you feel he’s done his job. Everyone in this cul­ture depends on drugs, and then they tell us we’re having a war on drugs.

You’ve got to take one drug at a time, and say what you think about that drug. I don’t think there’s any drug that’s good for everybody, even penicillin; there are people who are allergic to it.

Smoley:Are there any spiritual teachers these days that you admire particularly?

Wilson: I’m more inclined to people who don’t use the label of religion or mysti­cism for what they’re doing. I’m a great admirer of Richard Bandler of neurolinguistic programming. I was a great admir­er of Tim Leary, and I still am. Ram Dass does a religious bit sometimes; I like him. Oh hell, I’ve met a few Zen masters I liked. I liked Baker Roshi. But I’m sort of sus­picious of religious leaders. As a friend of mine once said – he was a Druid; I know a lot of Pagans of various schools – “A perfect master is ideal, but only if you want to be a perfect slave.” I’m very suspicious of perfect masters.

Kinney: Were you raised in a religious household?

Wilson: Yes and no. I was raised by two lapsed Catholics. I don’t know why they lapsed, but since they only had two chil­dren, I suspect the Church’s position on contraception had something to do with their lapse. They were pretty skeptical about the Church, but they sent me to a Catholic school on the grounds that children should be taught some kind of morality. That makes sense to me in retrospect. I wish they had sent me to someplace else to learn some kind of morality rather than to a bunch of crazy nuns. My wife Arlen said the other night every ex-Catholic she knows hates the Church. And I said, “I don’t think that’s true. But they all hate nuns.” Because those are the ones that hit you with the yardsticks when you’re too small to fight back.

Smoley: I couldn’t help noticing the Crowley book on your endtable. What do you think of Crowley?

Wilson: He fascinates inc. because by my standards he rates as a genius of some sort. He was an incredibly brilliant person, with talents in so many fields, and I’ve never been able to figure him out. He always leaves me feeling somewhat puzzled. I ad-mire him a lot; I’ve learned a lot from him; I enjoy his sense of humor, but peo­ple who consider him a Satanist and a monster don’t seem totally deluded to me. There was something strange about Aleister Crowley that leaves me perpetually puzzled. And yet I’d rather read a book by Crowley than just about any other New Age writer. Because he’s always a lot of’ fun, and he always gives use new ideas and new perspectives. Even a book I’ve read before, I reread, and my God, I didn’t notice that before! He’s like an exploding volcano of perceptions and insights you don’t get anywhere else.

Smoley: That sense of the monstrous and Satanic may have meant that he was will­ing to look at things that most other peo­ple close the door on.

Wilson: To get back to Timothy Leary again, Timothy said, “When you realize how many reality tunnels there are, you want to open the door to every one and see what’s in there, but if you open the door and there’s nobody in there but can­nibals and Nazis, you close the door right away. You don’t go in to check it out.” Crowley seems to have opened a awful lot of doors; I don’t know how many he walked into. I think he had enough sense to stay out of the worst ones.

Smoley: What’s striking to me about peo­ple like Crowley and Jung and Gurdjieff is that their ideas are incredibly powerful and alive, but then they settle down into a comfortable slumber in the minds of followers.

Wilson: Maybe that’s why I like Crowley so much. I find it impossible to slumber with Crowley. I’m always arguing with him whenever I’m thinking about him: “Yes, Meister, but . . . ” Sometimes he wins the argument, though.

Smoley: Speaking of books, what are you trying to do with your new book Everything Is Under Control?

Wilson: One of my major ideas was writing a book that would be like surfing the Web. Every entry has links following from it, and if you follow the links from item A and, say, you come to “Nazi hell creatures,” it’ll seem utterly absurd. If you follow links from someplace else and come to “Nazi hell creatures,” you’ll suddenly think, “Oh my God, maybe there’s something in this.” And I like the way it crisscrosses so that every item, however innocuous it seems at first sight, will turn either into a joke or into something that scares the pants off you. I like playing head games with my-self and my readers.

It’s also an interactive book. You can follow the links right out of the book onto the Web. And then you can go on for years following up these leads and steadily grow­ing crazier, if you’re inclined to believe all this stuff. Or laughing your head off, if you’re inclined that way. Or just being perplexed like use, if you’re inclined that way. Some of it I’m quite convinced ranks as so absurd that I can’t take it seriously for a moment. But there’s a great deal of it in the area where I feel it sounds pretty silly, but Jesus, maybe if I investigate it further, who knows?

Smoley: One thing I find interesting in that book is the real or imagined UMMO hoax, which I don’t think is well known over here.

Wilson: It’s better known in Europe. The fascinating thing about UMMO was that somebody confessed recently that he did the whole thing by himself, and yet there are some things he couldn’t have done. The original UMMO sightings in Madrid would require the technology of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to do.

There was a sighting in Voronezh, a large industrial city in Russia. There were hundreds of people who saw what seemed to be a spaceship landing, what seemed to be eight-foot-tall extraterrestrials getting out and walking around, and there seemed to be teleportations; I don’t know what the hell happened there. But I don’t see how the guy who confessed could have managed all that by himself. He may have written the UMMO letters, but something else was going on; I don’t know what.

That’s another thing conspiracy theo­rists seldom say: “I don’t know what.”

Smoley: And yet in all of this, there’s prob­ably some border, however thin and neb­ulous, between conspiracy theory and just plain old paranoid schizophrenia. Where do you draw that line?

Wilson: Well, the line will of course be a little bit fuzzy. But when you get to peo­ple who, when you try to discuss the mat-ter with them rationally, gradually come around to the viewpoint that you are one of their CIA babysitters, then I think you’re not dealing with just an absurd belief system, but with a serious mental derangement.

Smoley: Many of your ideas have to some extent become part of the New Age con­sensus view. How do you feel about that?

Wilson: Uncomfortable.

Kinney: You don’t have much use for New Age circles?

Wilson: I don’t want that label put on my writing. If I have to have a label, I’d prefer co be known, like Kierkegaard, as “that individual.” That’s what he said he wanted to be called. If I have to have a label, “postmodernist” is not too bad. But I really prefer “damned old crank.” That one is the least pretentious I’ve thought of in all my years.

______________

Somali Poetsin Canada: Media, Information…

Hassan Samatar… spoken word poet (Somali)

BURAANBURKA DUMARKA singing her poetry…

K’naan at Myspace, my favourite is “In The Beginning”…

The Dusty Foot Philosopher..

Refugees in Canada – Composed by Hawa Jibril and translated by Faduma A. Alim

Indeed Canadians welcome refugees

And do not let them starve

Yet one is always unsatisfied and broke

For the little we get

Hardly suffices our food and shelter.

They are strange people coming from everywhere

Never notice you or even greet you

Each one keeps to himself

Always hastily locking his door.

I feel isolated and sick with loneliness

Deprived from my beautiful Africa

And the land of my inspirations and songs.

I must be contended with the fate

That my God has reserved for me.

____

Somali Poet: Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’ (lives now in the UK)

Kudu

My father told me this story

when I was a child. We sat

in the shade of a tree and he began:

Long ago there lived a king

who sprouted a pair of horns – just buds,

at first, but he checked them every day

and wore his turban low to hide

this blemish, to hide this mark of shame.

But a king, of course, doesn’t wash his own hair!

His man-servant knew all about the king’s shame

and day by day the knowledge grew

inside him, a word that had to be spoken,

a terrible secret that had to be told.

They said, You’re mistaken.

He said, No.

They said, Dead men keep secrets.

He said, Ah…

There were people, he knew, who would feed on such news,

but his daily bread stuck in his throat.

There were people, he knew, who dreamed of such news,

but he slept on a bed of burning coals.

Then, one night, he could bear it no longer.

He left his house, he walked out of the village,

mile after mile in a torrent of darkness

and came to the watering holes, where the eagle

took flight at his footstep, where the gentle gazelle

shied and ran. He sat by the water

and thought, ‘There was a time when such things

could be openly said. Yes, there was a time

when even the poor could be told the truth.’

When dawn-light shone through the trees, he dug

with his hands, deep down, as a beast digs a den

and placed his mouth close to the hole

he’d made and whispered his terrible secret

to the earth: ‘King Goojaa, King Goojaa has horns.

Horns like the kudu. The king has horns!’

Don’t interrupt, my father said.

Please don’t ask me what these things mean.

It’s just a story I got from my father,

And he from his. Do you want to know

how it ends? Then listen: when the man told his tale

to the earth, the burden left him, it went

underground, and the man, why, he brushed himself down

and went on his way. And this is the strangest

part of the story: that even today,

when the soft rain falls on that place in the bush,

that very same place where he planted his secret,

horns like the kudu’s grow from the ground.

Translation By: David Harsent

—–

PASSING CLOUD

Setting sun

You’re on the run:

Late afternoon

And gone so soon!

What are you scared of? What’s the rush?

Is it the spears of light that shine

Back at you from rock and bush?

Is it the dark creeping up on you

Or bad news from the depths of night

That makes you want to hide your light?

Or is it this girl, more beautiful

Than rain in the season of drought, whose grace

Is greater by far than the subtle pace

Of a passing cloud when it’s nudged by the wind?

When you and she exchanged glances just now,

It was you who grew pale, it was you who shrank

From the gleam in her eye and the glow of her smile.

Setting sun

You’re on the run:

Late afternoon

And gone so soon!

Have you gone

To warn the moon

That she must face

This greater grace?

The roll of the clouds, the furl of the waves –

A sea of cloud stained purple and red,

The swing of her arms, the swing and the sway

Of her hips as she walks is just like the way

You sway and dip and the end of the day.

Now the clouds turn their backs on you.

They only have eyes for the eyes of the girl:

Eyes that launch love-darts, darts that sink

Into the flanks of the clouds and draw

Droplets of blood that stain the sky.

Setting sun

You’re on the run:

Late afternoon

And gone so soon…

These are the lines

That seemed to fall

To hand when first

I saw the girl.

Now this is what

I most recall:

The way she reached up to gather fruit

Believing herself to be alone

Until she saw me there, wide-eyed,

As the wind read my mind and sent a gust

To part her dress and lay her breast

Bare for the space of an indrawn breath.

Ah, yes, I remember that…and the way

She caught at the cloth and fastened it,

Turning her face from mine, her eyes

Lowered, as if to say: No man

Has seen before what you saw today.

——

A Poem Still In Translation…

Watergate

Suspicion has entered me, Carter, regarding you as a companion

What I have seen from experience and the books that have informed

Humanity still groans from the confusion you have caused

A question I ask you is of fundamental importance to me

The brotherliness I used to praise, who made it tight?

While following segregation who was two-faced?

A striped hyena is a danger to the driving which livestock are lost from.

Each time a woman wears a mourning scarf having lost the one who married her

I was aggrieved by the death of Malcolm X, by God

Which one was it who skinned that combatant who stood up?

When a hero becomes furious, who watered him with aloe juice?

Who led the men who cut Luther King’s throat?

Who struck the Red Indians killing them in great numbers?

By God, the calamities you’ve set down are beyond comprehension

Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame

Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you’ve told about

A man who knows the grief of the Palestians becomes thin with gloom

When their country was plundered, saddled by desperation

They are wanderers in foreign lands like [animals] told to shoo

They do not enter a hut or yard from what winter has in store

Who has forced that, put out to dry nation in that way

Does someone not share the infamy and shame of the Jews?

By God, the calamities you’ve set down are beyond comprehension

Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame

Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you’ve told about.

All the world wonders at what you have caused in Vietnam

At dawn you attacked with heavy weapons

Aeroplanes holding deadly danger brought in disarray

Bullets exchanged places like winter rain drops

A man who has sought information understands the stress of Saigon

When a hyena has butchered the limbs of a first born

The barking and wailing of the mothers comes together

I still weep for the men you have hit with the spear

The oldest man will never leave me

Woe! At the death of Ho Chi Min my pupils have run dry

By God, the calamities you’ve set down are beyond comprehension

Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame

Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you’ve told about

The war(?) of Angola has exploded and the noise of war has called

They wanted to stop the Portuguese who had brought harm

When it touched the heart they got on their horses [to fight]

They struggled and struggled to the day when the flag was hoisted

The rain clouds and clouds thundered, the rivers burst their banks

When victory was named with Neto had struggled hard for

That a representative go to the UNO set up(?) committee

I don’t understand the position of weakness, your clear duty

Shame! Why did you throw in the sling of the veto?

By God, the calamities you’ve set down are beyond comprehension

Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame

Admit it! The Watergates are more than the ones you’ve told about.

You drank your fill from us before, as from a well full of salty water

Your industry is watered by the blood I spit

The person who takes sides with `wabiin’ has no wisdom

(I became aware of ?) the spoken wallaahis and the lying mutterings

I hold the worry of Zimbabwe, the one like Weris

Men have cordoned off the river beds of Namibia with wire

If it weren’t for you support, Ian Smith would not throw the sling

By God, the calamities you’ve set down are beyond comprehension

Nixon seems easy to me, if you are concerned with shame

Admit it. The Watergates are more than the ones you’ve told about

________

Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’ was born in Hargeysa in 1949, and lives there now. He attended school in Sheikh in Somaliland and then graduated in biology at the Somali National University, following which he was a teacher for several years. As a keen poet and literary scholar also, he later worked at the Academy of Culture in Mogadishu and then as a lecturer in Somali literature at National University. From the 1970s onwards he has been one of the most important Somali poets, composing on a great variety of topics from nuclear weapons to Nelson Mandela. He was also a poet who was not afraid to engage in the politics of Somalia through his poetry, and he was the initiator of one of the largest ‘chain poems’, ‘Deelley’, to which many poets contributed, each one alliterating in ‘d’, hence the name of the chain. In addition to his poetry composition, Gaarriye was the person who first articulated the metrical patterns of Somali poetry, which he published in 1976 in a number of articles in the national newspaper of the time. This work was invaluable and a major intellectual achievement.

Martin Orwin

This edition is dedicated to Luis Bunuel and his friend, Garcia Lorca… You will find media files of import to Bunuel’s early career as a film maker… Take your time with this one, and I hope you enjoy it.

Blessings…

Gwyllm

City That Does Not Sleep

Federico García Lorca

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.

The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,

and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the

street corner

the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the

stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

In a graveyard far off there is a corpse

who has moaned for three years

because of a dry countryside on his knee;

and that boy they buried this morning cried so much

it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!

We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth

or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead

dahlias.

But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;

flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths

in a thicket of new veins,

and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever

and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day

the horses will live in the saloons

and the enraged ants

will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the

eyes of cows.

Another day

we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead

and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats

we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.

Careful! Be careful! Be careful!

The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,

and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention

of the bridge,

or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,

we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes

are waiting,

where the bear’s teeth are waiting,

where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,

and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is sleeping.

If someone does close his eyes,

a whip, boys, a whip!

Let there be a landscape of open eyes

and bitter wounds on fire.

No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.

I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.

But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the

night,

open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight

the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

Translated by Robert Bly

______________

The Links:

The Obligatory Blapunkt Commercial…

Dear Doctor

—

A Brief Introduction is in Line….:Bunuel…

_______

A Certain Dog From Andalusia…

A review of Un Chien Andalou…

by Michael Koller

Michael Koller is the executive programmer for The Melbourne Cinémathèque and co-curator of The National Cinémathèque program. Un Chien Andalou

Un Chien Andalou (1928 France 17 mins)

Source: CAC/NLA Prod Co: Ursulines Film Studio Prod, Dir, Ed: Louis (Luis) Bunuel Scr: Louis (Luis) Bunuel, Salvador Dali Ph: Duverger (Albert Dubergen) Assist Dir: Pierre Batcheff Art Dir: Schilzneck

Cast: Simonne (Simone) Mareuil, Pierre Batchef (Batcheff), Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali

[Note on the opening credits: all names in the original credits are incorrectly spelt except for Dali’s name. The incorrect spelling, with its correction in parenthesis, is included above for the sake of completeness. Additional credits are also included.]

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Un Chien Andalou was the calling card of two desperate, unknown Spanish artists. It “came from an encounter between two dreams.” (1) The script was an easy and joyful joint collaboration between Buñuel and Dali (Buñuel would continue to write scripts in collaboration for the rest of his life), and Buñuel shot the film quickly over two weeks on a small budget supplied by his mother. Dali later claimed to have had a greater involvement in the filming, but by all contemporaneous accounts this does not seem to have been the case.

The film illustrates Buñuel’s awesome ability as a fledgling filmmaker and served as a calling card for Buñuel and Dali into the elite club of the surrealists. After just over seventy years, the remarkable opening sequence still retains its power: “Once upon a time.” the introductory title proclaims. A proletarian Buñuel, feverishly puffing a cigarette, sharpens the blade of a razor. He cuts his fingernail to prove it is sharp. He exits the room for a balcony and looks at the full moon. A slither of a cloud is about to bisect the moon. Buñuel forces open wide the eye of a woman who has appeared from nowhere. The cloud cuts across the surface of the moon and the razor slices the eye apart. There is a second title, “Eight years later,” which like all of the titles in the film is paradoxical and seemingly irrelevant.

This sequence still shocks and it is purported that Buñuel, although the originator of the idea and the images, was nauseated the first few times he viewed the scene. (2) This is the most famous sequence but it is also the key to the rest of the film. As Jean Vigo so profoundly stated: “Can there be any spectacle more terrible than the sight of a cloud obscuring the moon at its full? The prologue can hardly have one indifferent. It tells us that in this film we must see with a different eye.” (3)

It is with this different perspective that the film must be viewed. One sequence leads seductively to the succeeding one, objects from one shot reappear in the next, a process of free association occurs; the illusion of a narrative of sorts develops. Dali stated in 1928, of the film’s theme: “the pure and correct line of ‘conduct’ of a human who pursues love through wretched humanitarian, patriotic ideals and the other miserable workings of reality.” (4) This seems to be the general perspective of most writers discussing the film. Nevertheless, Buñuel offered an alternative explanation: “Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.” (5)

Buñuel wanted to shock and insult the intellectual bourgeoisie. Buñuel later said, “Historically the film represents a violent reaction against what in those days was called ‘avant-garde,’ which was aimed exclusively at artistic sensibility and the audience’s reason.” (6) His film was to be ‘a gob of spit in the face of art,’ as Henry Miller, an obsessed supporter of Un Chien Andalou, was later to describe his own Tropic of Cancer. To achieve this, Buñuel and Dali made a film that was open to a myriad of interpretations, rendering such analyses redundant. The crutch of understanding through narrative or theme is useless. As Dali explained, the intention of the film was, “To disrupt the mental anxiety of the spectator,” and one of the easiest ways to do this is to thwart the viewer’s ability to logically interpret proceedings. (7) In the film, as in dreams, there is a dislocation of time and space. The disruption of time predominantly occurs through the use of the intertitles which almost appear to be a key to an understanding of the film. The dislocation of space occurs through the opportunistic use of locations. A street and a beach occupy the same space outside the room, itself the central location of the film. What is necessary is to accept the film for what it is.

Yet most critics desire to increase our comprehension and ability to access the film through interpretation. As the film is made by a surrealist, psychoanalysis comes to the fore as an interpretative method. Yet interpretation is ultimately pointless. The most effective manner in which to appreciate the film is to allow the images to seduce, to watch with your eyes and emotions and not to seek an explanation.

This is a first film by two relatively young intellectuals and it is striking. Yet for all its critical and financial success, it never truly achieved its aim of outraging or affronting middle-class sensibilities. (8) Although there are reports of disruptions of screenings, these seem to be based on false memories of events surrounding the release of Buñuel’s next film, L’Age d’Or (1930), where the blasphemy and perversion quotient was increased. L’Age d’Or was banned, but Buñuel was disappointed by the bourgeoisie’s reception of Un Chien Andalou. He would later justify their response by stating, “What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?” (9) Yet Sergei Eisenstein, on viewing the film in Switzerland in August 1929 stated that the film exposed, “the extent of the disintegration of bourgeois consciousness.” (10) Was Eisenstein far from the truth? Buñuel was raised as a member of the feudal gentry in a pious and disciplined Catholic Spain, and although exiled by Franco’s regime, he was, by the 1950s, increasingly accepting of Franco, even saying controversially in 1983, “I am even prepared to believe that he [Franco] kept Spain out of World War Two.” (11)

Un Chien Andalou was, as were many of Buñuel’s later films, a huge success amongst the French bourgeoisie, and a parallel can be seen between the careers of Buñuel and Chabrol. Chabrol is a self-confessed bourgeois who hates the complacency of his class. His films are deeply critical of the bourgeoisie yet his films have always benefited from the patronage of the middle-class. The same can be said of Buñuel. This can also be seen in Buñuel’s uneasy relationship with the Catholic church. Undoubtedly the blasphemous content of his first two shorts contributed to Buñuel’s banishment from Spain, and his ongoing vitriolic criticism of the Catholic church maintained the enmity of Franco’s government. But Nazarin (1958), about a saintly but impractical priest’s inability to improve the living conditions of the destitute peasants around him, nor to influence their hypocritical values, won an ecumenical prize from the International Catholic Cinema Office.

Buñuel always liked to shock. The eye-slicing in Un Chien Andalou, and Christ portrayed as the Duo de Blangis (obviously the Marquis de Sade) in L’Age d’Or are prime examples of this. Referring to Un Chien Andalou in 1983, Buñuel wrote, “I suggested that we [the surrealists of 1929] burn the negative… something I would have done without hesitation had the group agreed. In fact I’d still do it today; I can imagine a huge pyre in my own little garden where all my negatives and all the copies of my own films go up in flames. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference.” (12) Yet, for someone so nonchalant about his work, it is revealing that in the 1960s Buñuel created the sonorised version of Un Chien Andalou, based on the original music (Wagner, a South American tango) used for its original release.

How does Un Chien Andalou fit into the body of Buñuel’s work? As with all of Buñuel’s films, Un Chien Andalou illustrates Buñuel’s obsessions and is replete with references to his upbringing. Recurrent reference points are surrealism and religion, as already mentioned, seasoned with violence and a willingness to shock. Images from Spain appear regularly throughout his work as do images of the poor and suffering. It was Buñuel’s only silent film and perhaps for this reason appears more dynamic than his other works. Along with L’Age d’Or and Las Hurdes (1933), the film is very explicit and confrontational. These three films are exercises in style and form. It is here that Buñuel learnt his craft, but thereafter, as Freddy Buache has said, Buñuel could still shock but “He preferred to bury his explosives blandly beneath the surface of an apparently traditional style.” (13) However, this could be misconstrued. Rene Clair’s surrealist Entr’acte (1924), made four years before Un Chien Andalou, has a greater appreciation of, and daring use of style. It does make Buñuel’s film look traditional by comparison. Yet, for a film made as a companion piece to a Dadaist ballet, it lacks Un Chien Andalou’s grace and fluidity. Clair may be the greater stylist, but Buñuel is the greater filmmaker.

Endnotes:

1. Luis Buñuel in his autobiography, My Last Breath, Jonathan Cape, London, 1983, p.103

2. John Baxter, Buñuel, Fourth Estate Books, London, 1995, p.82

3. Jean Vigo, “Un Chien Andalou,” Vers un Cinéma Social, trans. Marianne Alexander, 1930, reprinted in L’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou, Lorrimer Publishing, 1968, p.81

4. Dali, quoted in Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972, p.391

5. Buñuel, p.103

6. Buñuel quoted in Art in the Cinema, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1947

7. Salvador Dali quoted in Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, Secker & Warburg, London, 1975, p.64

8. The film ran for eight months in Paris yet Buñuel never recouped his original investment due to dubious accountancy practices utilised by the exhibitor.

9. Luis Buñuel in his preface to the script in La Révolution Surréaliste no. 12, December 1929.

10. Sergei Eisenstein quoted in Baxter, p.100

11. Buñuel quoted in Baxter, p.243

12. Buñuel, p.110

13. Freddy Buache, The Cinema of Luis Buñuel, The Tantivy Press, London, 1973, p.10

_______

L’AGE D’OR [1930]

A review of L’Age d’Or (1930) …

by Bill Mousoulis

Buñuel’s debut feature L’Age d’Or is extremely funny and extremely

sexy. A passion play about the travails of love (or l’amour fou,

though one wonders exactly what the “mad” thing is) in the bourgeois

world, it combines a clear-cut narrative (a man and a woman are

continuously thwarted in their attempts to make love) with bizarre,

random set pieces (the death throes of a ragged band of soldiers;

the killing of a child; a man walking through a park with a loaf of

bread on his head; a hair-adorned wooden cross; etc.) L’Age d’Or

The film functioned as a Surrealist statement at the time, typically attacking the bourgeoisie and the Church. Now, L’Age d’Or still remains remarkably fresh, its violence incredibly salutary, its devilry magnificent.

It attacks the bourgeoisie both from the outside (as when two drunken yobs on a rickety horse and cart pass through the loungeroom where an upper-class party is taking place) and the inside (our hero is a ministerially-appointed “Ambassador of Good Will”, and our heroine the daughter of a Marquise). And there’s a glorious attack on Christianity in the closing sequence.

Our heroic, nameless couple, the Man (Gaston Modot) and Woman (Lya Lys), are in the throes of an intense, unconsummated desire all through the film. The erotic charge on display is exemplary: Modot looks in a store window at an advertising photo of a woman leaning back in a chair, and the film dissolves to Lys in the same pose. She then looks into her dressing-table mirror, and the infinite sky replaces her reflection, and she experiences a sublime psycho-sexual longing. Compared to this, the spiritual connection between the lovers in L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) is somewhat mild and homely. Imagine what more Buñuel could have achieved in the ’30s (think of Renoir) had he been given the chance …

L’Age d’Or is one of the cinema’s great “shock” films. At the time, it was accompanied by a manifesto. It needs no such justifications or provocations now. All one has to do is to watch it, and its power and passion literally explode off the screen.

______________

The Age of Gold: Lorca

Garcia with his Lover, Salvador…

Ditty of First Desire

In the green morning

I wanted to be a heart.

A heart.

And in the ripe evening

I wanted to be a nightingale.

A nightingale.

(Soul,

turn orange-colored.

Soul,

turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning

I wanted to be myself.

A heart.

And at the evening’s end

I wanted to be my voice.

A nightingale.

Soul,

turn orange-colored.

Soul,

turn the color of love.

———

The Faithless Wife

So I took her to the river

believing she was a maiden,

but she already had a husband.

It was on St. James night

and almost as if I was obliged to.

The lanterns went out

and the crickets lighted up.

In the farthest street corners

I touched her sleeping breasts

and they opened to me suddenly

like spikes of hyacinth.

The starch of her petticoat

sounded in my ears

like a piece of silk

rent by ten knives.

Without silver light on their foliage

the trees had grown larger

and a horizon of dogs

barked very far from the river.

Past the blackberries,

the reeds and the hawthorne

underneath her cluster of hair

I made a hollow in the earth

I took off my tie,

she too off her dress.

I, my belt with the revolver,

She, her four bodices.

Nor nard nor mother-o’-pearl

have skin so fine,

nor does glass with silver

shine with such brilliance.

Her thighs slipped away from me

like startled fish,

half full of fire,

half full of cold.

That night I ran

on the best of roads

mounted on a nacre mare

without bridle stirrups.

As a man, I won’t repeat

the things she said to me.

The light of understanding

has made me more discreet.

Smeared with sand and kisses

I took her away from the river.

The swords of the lilies

battled with the air.

I behaved like what I am,

like a proper gypsy.

I gave her a large sewing basket,

of straw-colored satin,

but I did not fall in love

for although she had a husband

she told me she was a maiden

when I took her to the river.

——-

Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias

(fragment)

1. Cogida and death

At five in the afternoon.

It was exactly five in the afternoon.

A boy brought the white sheet

at five in the afternoon.

A frail of lime ready prepared

at five in the afternoon.

The rest was death, and death alone

at five in the afternoon.

The wind carried away the cottonwool

at five in the afternoon.

And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel

at five in the afternoon.

Now the dove and the leopard wrestle

at five in the afternoon.

And a thigh with a desolate horn

at five in the afternoon.

The bass-string struck up

at five in the afternoon.

Arsenic bells and smoke

at five in the afternoon.

Groups of silence in the corners

at five in the afternoon.

And the bull alone with a high heart!

At five in the afternoon.

When the sweat of snow was coming

at five in the afternoon,

when the bull ring was covered in iodine

at five in the afternoon.

Death laid eggs in the wound

at five in the afternoon.

At five in the afternoon.

Exactly at five o’clock in the afternoon.

A coffin on wheels in his bed

at five in the afternoon.

Bones and flutes resound in his ears

at five in the afternoon.

Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead

at five in the afternoon.

The room was iridescent with agony

at five in the afternoon.

In the distance the gangrene now comes

at five in the afternoon.

Horn of the lily through green groins

at five in the afternoon.

The wounds were burning like suns

at five in the afternoon,

and the crowd was breaking the windows

at five in the afternoon.

At five in the afternoon.

Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!

It was five by all the clocks!

It was five in the shade of the afternoon!

2. The Spilled Blood

I will not see it!

Tell the moon to come

for I do not want to see the blood

of Ignacio on the sand.

I will not see it!

The moon wide open.

Horse of still clouds,

and the grey bull ring of dreams

with willows in the barreras.

I will not see it!

Let my memory kindle!

Warm the jasmines

of such minute whiteness!

I will not see it!

The cow of the ancient world

passed her sad tongue

over a snout of blood

spilled on the sand,

and the bulls of Guissando,

partly death and partly stone,

bellowed like two centuries

sated with treading the earth.

No.

I do not want to see it!

I will not see it!

Ignacio goes up the tiers

with all his death on his shoulders.

He sought for the dawn

but the dawn was no more.

He seeks for his confident profile

and the dream bewilders him.

He sought for his beautiful body

and encountered his opened blood.

I will not see it!

I do not want to hear it spurt

each time with less strength:

that spurt that illuminates

the tiers of seats, and spills

over the corduroy and the leather

of a thirsty multitude.

Who shouts that I should come near!

Do not ask me to see it!

His eyes did not close

when he saw the horns near,

but the terrible mothers

lifted their heads.

And across the ranches,

an air of secret voices rose,

shouting to celestial bulls,

herdsmen of pale mist.

There was no prince in Seville

who could compare to him,

nor sword like his sword

nor heart so true.

Like a river of lions

was his marvellous strength,

and like a marble toroso

his firm drawn moderation.

The air of Andalusian Rome

gilded his head

where his smile was a spikenard

of wit and intelligence.

What a great torero in the ring!

What a good peasant in the sierra!

How gentle with the sheaves!

How hard with the spurs!

How tender with the dew!

How dazzling the fiesta!

How tremendous with the final

banderillas of darkness!

But now he sleeps without end.

Now the moss and the grass

open with sure fingers

the flower of his skull.

And now his blood comes out singing;

singing along marshes and meadows,

sliding on frozen horns,

faltering soulless in the mist,

stumbling over a thousand hoofs

like a long, dark, sad tongue,

to form a pool of agony

close to the starry Guadalquivir.

Oh, white wall of Spain!

Oh, black bull of sorrow!

Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!

Oh, nightingale of his veins!

No.

I will not see it!

No chalice can contain it,

no swallows can drink it,

no frost of light can cool it,

nor song nor deluge of white lilies,

no glass can cover it with silver.

No.

I will not see it!

Lorca and his good friend, Bunuel

Lovely Day in P-town. Bright, sunny no hint to the other 9 months of cloud and drizzle…

Visited Janice and Ed last evening, as it was Caitlins’ 21st birthday. He was delighted to be turning this part of the wheel, and as we sat there his good friends were filtering in.

I must be aging. 21 looks incredibly young to me now. The waves of years advance, retreat, advance, and I am beginning to feel the ebb and flow of time that stretches far past my brief moment here.

It is like shadows, all of it. Dappled sunlight, wind passing through trees.

We came home from the party, and Rowan brought Ian and Isobel over for dinner. Rowan has been friends with Ian since the 1st grade, and has known Isobel since the beginning of middle school which must be almost 5 years now. He introduced them together, and now they are inseparable. It is lovely to see. Everything out side of what is occurring between them is indeed passing shadows. They are transfixed in their here and now. Love, at its primal beginning. The mirror, the reflection.

Rowan, Sofie and I walked them home later on. It was very enjoyable. Sofie now doesn’t always need to have a leash on. She is delighted. I am delighted. We are all delighted. Then there are other dogs of course. The leash comes out. Delight flees. The “other” dog departs. The leash goes away. Delight returns.

The conversation was lively there and back. I am pleased to know that there are thoughtful young people still. I know the complaints that have been saddled on the young since the time of Plato, but really just listen to them. They are full of beauty and aspiration.

A brilliant Sunday to you and yours.

Gwyllm

_____________

The Real Buddha

People perform a vast number of complex practices

hoping to gain spiritual merit as countless as the grains

of sand on the riverbed of the Ganges:

but you are essentially already perfect in every way.

Don’t try and augment perfection with meaningless practice.

If it’s the right occasion to perform them, let practices happen.

When the time has passed, let them stop.

If you are not absolutely sure that mind is the Buddha,

and if you are attached to the ideas of winning merit from spiritual practices, then your thinking is misguided and not in harmony with the Way.

To practice complex spiritual practices is to progress step by step:

but the eternal Buddha is not a Buddha of progressive stages.

Just awaken to the one Mind,

and there is absolutely nothing to be attained.

This is the real Buddha.

– Huang Po

—

The Road To Cold Mountain

People ask for the road to Cold Mountain,

but no road reaches Cold Mountain.

Summer sky-still ice won’t melt.

The sun comes out but gets obscured by mist.

Imitating me, where does that get you?

My mind isn’t like yours.

When your mind is like mine

you can enter here.

– Hanshan

—

You do not need many things

My house is buried in the deepest recess of the forest

Every year, ivy vines grow longer than the year before.

Undisturbed by the affairs of the world I live at ease,

Woodmen’s singing rarely reaching me through the trees.

While the sun stays in the sky, I mend my torn clothes

And facing the moon, I read holy texts aloud to myself.

Let me drop a word of advice for believers of my faith.

To enjoy life’s immensity, you do not need many things.

– Ryokan

Young Sasha Keller has made his parents Jolene and Mike very happy by arriving to their arms this last week… All of our best wishes to Sasha and his Mum and Dad. May they all be happy together!

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory, do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

– William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

Mike and Sasha….

___________

Happy Friday.

Mike sent me pictures this week of his Son , Sasha. I could not resist. I met Mike at Sacred Elixirs, where he was kind enough to record as much of it as he could. (You can find the recordings on Earthrites.org) He has a wonderful site: Plant Consciousness.com Jolene and Mike are settling in with young Sasha up in the south bay hills at this time. Our warm wishes go out to them at the start of the great adventure!

Bright Blessings!

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

The Links

On Dying and Being Reborn – by Ralph Metzner

Poetry: Brendan Perry

Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood – William Wordsworth

Art… various Symbolist…

___________

Coulter or Hitler?

“What side-effects—?”

Donato Giancola

Nemo’s Utopia… (Thanks D!)

___________

On Dying and Being Reborn – by Ralph Metzner

(excerpt)

So long as you do not have this dying and becoming, you’re only a gloomy guest on this darkening Earth.

– J. W. Goethe

To die and be reborn is a metaphor for the most radical and total transformation that consciousness and identity can undergo. When our self-image or self-concept, the sense of identity with which (and as which) we have lived, comes to an end, then we feel as though the ego or self is dying. The pattern of this transformation metaphor is as follows: whatever I call “me” is finished and dying; then, after a period of turmoil and uncertainty, there is the “rebirth” of a new identity, a new sense of who “I” am. The transformation involves all aspects of the psyche, because it involves the central organizing principle of selfhood. The new self that is born is naturally of a childlike nature, filled with the wonder, joy, and spontaneity of childhood.

In the mystery religions of ancient times and in many traditional cultures, “death-rebirth” was and is the name of an initiatory experience. Associated with it are ritual practices such as entombment, profound isolation, or painful ordeals through which the initiate must pass. Afterward, the initiate customarily adopts a new name, perhaps a new garment, and sometimes a new role in society, all of which express the newly reborn being. Although we no longer perform the ancient rituals of death and rebirth, many people, in changing their name, lifestyle, or work, are publicly signaling that a transformation has occurred.

The transformed personality can live and thrive only if the previous personality has died. This is also the meaning of Meister Eckhart’s saying that the Kingdom of God (which symbolizes the transformed, enlightened state of consciousness) is “for none but those who are thoroughly dead.” Both physical and psychological dying are valued because they lead to a better state, a transformed and more enlightened state. Similarly, there is an ancient tradition that the practice of dying leads to liberation and wisdom. Thus we hear Socrates say that “true philosophers make dying their profession, and to them of all men death is least alarming.”

Many a mythic hero or heroine, including Gilgamesh, Inanna, Odysseus, the Grail knights, and the Mayan twins, undertake dangerous journeys into the underworld land of the dead in order to fathom the secrets of death and life. Such journeys pay homage to the power and mystery of death.

Every time something ends in us, it dies: thus we experience thousands of little deaths each day, each hour. Thoughts arise, die, arise again; images form, dissolve, form again; feelings well up from within, crest and recede, to emerge again later. Insofar as we are identified with these thoughts, images, and feelings, we die, are reborn, die again, are reborn, continuously. Rumi said that “every instant you are dying and returning.” The German theologian and mystic Johannes Tauler spoke of the great value of such daily dying: “A man might die a thousand deaths in one day and find a joyful life corresponding to each of them.” Anyone who has ever had the experience of letting go of some craving or attachment and has felt the sudden lift, the ecstatic freedom that comes from this, will know the truth of these statements.

___________

___________

I first became aware of Brendans’ work with Dead Can Dance. Now I love Liza Gerrards’ voice and all, but my favourite bits would be Brendans’ soulful, though provoking works. His output is not what it should be, for my taste, but all good things comes to those who wait. I suggest picking up his Eye of The Hunter. great album that.

Enjoy.

G

—-

Poetry/Lyrics: Brendan Perry

The Captive Heart

The old clock is ticking now

Marks the space between us

Your memory enshrouds my heart

For I am held a captive

Sometimes my soul desires

To take leave of this old world

To spread these golden wings and fly

To the city of angels

But then if I close my eyes

I can see you standing there

Your face in permanence smiles

Your lips a chalice

Seems like Ive loved you all my life

Never thought Id find you

One day the muse may lend these words wings

So I can touch you

But hey!

Dont worry if the feelings not strong for you

I have lived my life in accordance

To the windfalls of passion

Though I know what it means

To be loved and then forgotten

I have seen too many men

Driven insane by their distractions

—

Voyage of Bran

Father father

Can you tell me

Where the hours go

Where time flows ?

It is written in the stars

Upon the milky way

That we must burn bright

Before we fade away ?

Mother mother

Can you tell me

Where the fire goes

When the flames cease ?

“From the ashes to the astral plain

Where the setting sun meets the sea, Brendan”

I live by the river

Where the old gods still dream

Of inner communion

With the open sea

Through the eye of the hunter

In search of a prey

Neither beast nor human

In my philosophy

If you don’t recognise me

Well it’s simply because

I’ve outgrown these old clothes

Time to move on

For you and I will outlive

The masks life gave us

When this shadowplay comes

To a close

—-

Medusa

When all you have left are your memories

And diamonds and pearls for company

I’ll be sailing to St. Lucia on the ocean breeze

With the moon and my scars for company

In your bedroom you keep an iron cage

Where a blackbird sings her freedom song

For you know the true value of keeping slaves

They sing the saddest of songs

Medusa you robbed me of my youth

Abandoned me on the tropic of solitude

Seducer of the shipwrecked and forlorn

You told me to undress

Then crowned my head with thorns

Medusa you robbed me of my youth

Abandoned me on the tropic of solitude

Seducer of the shipwrecked and forlorn

You told me to get dressed

Then turned my heart to stone

—

Sloth

Sometimes when I’m alone

I imagine that the world is a mirror

And in minds eye behold my dark inner nature

I’ve been waiting time on this time honoured whore

‘Til I get so confused I can’t see anymore

And I have crawled where I should have seen the signs

Dragging my feet when I could have been flying

Sometimes when I’m sad

I drink to the health of my torment

And dance at the altar

To the tune of a drunken black tango

I’ve been waiting time on this time honoured whore

‘Til I get so confused I can’t see anymore

Wastes my mouth trying to settle old scores

Dragging my feet when I could have been flying

Dragging my feet when I could have been flying

Dragging my feet

—

How Fortunate the Man with None

You saw sagacious Solomon

You know what came of him,

To him complexities seemed plain.

He cursed the hour that gave birth to him

And saw that everything was vain.

How great and wise was Solomon.

The world however did not wait

But soon observed what followed on.

It’s wisdom that had brought him to this state.

How fortunate the man with none.

You saw courageous Caesar next

You know what he became.

They deified him in his life

Then had him murdered just the same.

And as they raised the fatal knife

How loud he cried: you too my son!

The world however did not wait

But soon observed what followed on.

It’s courage that had brought him to that state.

How fortunate the man with none.

You heard of honest Socrates

The man who never lied:

They weren’t so grateful as you’d think

Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried

And handed him the poisoned drink.

How honest was the people’s noble son.

The world however did not wait

But soon observed what followed on.

It’s honesty that brought him to that state.

How fortunate the man with none.

Here you can see respectable folk

Keeping to God’s own laws.

So far he hasn’t taken heed.

You who sit safe and warm indoors

Help to relieve out bitter need.

How virtuously we had begun.

The world however did not wait

But soon observed what followed on.

It’s fear of god that brought us to that state.

How fortunate the man with none.

_______

Brendan Perry Bio

I was born in Whitechapel, London in 1959 to Anglo-Irish parents and subsequently raised and schooled in the East End of London, until my family emigrated to Auckland, New Zealand, seeking a new life and new opportunities. Having received no prior formal musical education, I began to play the guitar under the guiding influence of Maori and Polynesian muscians at the catholic school I attended in Ponsonby. After half hearted attempts to become a primary school teacher and then join the civil service, I drifted through a series of jobs until I was asked to join The Scavengers in 1977. At first I played bass Guitar later taking on the duties of lead vocalist when the original singer left the band. Apart from a handful of original songs we would cover music from the Stooges, New York Dolls, and the late 60′s Psychadelia. After two years of entertaining controversy, unable to secure a recording deal or live dates (largely due to the media’s sensationalist attitude towards punk) We decided to move to Melbourne, Australia, in 1979 and changed our name to the Marching Girls. In 1980 I left the Marching Girls to pursue a more creative personal musical odyssey, experimenting with tape loops, synthesis and alternative forms of rhythm.

In 1981 I formed Dead Can Dance with Simon Monroe and Paul Erikson (both of whom were to leave within the year soon after we had relocated to London) and of course Lisa Gerrard, who was to become my fellow navigator and soul musical companion for the next fifteen years. Today I live in Rural Ireland where I can be found indulging myself in mythological and natural interests such as Dragon Hunting.

——

Welcome to the wide and tumbling world Sasha, may you grace it with your beauty and love!

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

I

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;–

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

III

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,

And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor’s sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

And all the earth is gay;

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity,

And with the heart of May

Doth every Beast keep holiday;–

Thou Child of Joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy

Shepherd-boy!

IV

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel–I feel it all.

Oh evil day! if I were sullen

While Earth herself is adorning,

This sweet May-morning,

And the Children are culling

On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,

And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:–

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

–But there’s a Tree, of many, one,

A single Field which I have looked upon,

Both of them speak of something that is gone:

The Pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

V

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

VI

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,

And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,

Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!

See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies,

Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,

With light upon him from his father’s eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;

A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,

And unto this he frames his song:

Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little Actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his “humorous stage”

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That Life brings with her in her equipage;

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.

VIII

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy Soul’s immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,–

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,

A Presence which is not to be put by;

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest–

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:–

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realised,

High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:

But for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

X

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

And let the young Lambs bound

As to the tabor’s sound!

We in thought will join your throng,

Ye that pipe and ye that play,

Ye that through your hearts to-day

Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Looks like a rough ride on the ol’ planet. People out to hurt each other, from here to there… take a moment, and maybe give something out of your heart for some, Peace, Love, and Understanding.

Gotta Hop,

G

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On The Menu

Links

Tim Leary Quotes

Poetry: Hafiz

Art: Jean-Léon Gérôme

_________

The Links:

The Grudge Report…

The Legendary Pink Dots: DMT_TV_001

The Tear Garden – Sheila like the rodeo

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Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D. – The Declaration of Evolution

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God’s creatures – in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

From The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary

—

Acid

Acid is not for every brain – only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.

—

Set & Setting

First and most important, provide a setting removed from one’s usual interpersonal games, and as free as possible from unforseen distractions and intrusions. The voyager should make sure that he will not be disturbed; visitors or a phone call will often jar him into hallucinatory activity. Trust in the surroundings and privacy are necessary.

Using LSD to Imprint the Tibetan-Buddhist Experience by Dr. Timothy Leary

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Poetry: Hafiz

Wild Deer

الا ای آهوی وحشی کجایی

Where are you O Wild Deer?

I have known you for a while, here.

Both loners, both lost, both forsaken

The wild beast, for ambush, have all waken

Let us inquire of each other’s state

If we can, each other’s wishes consummate

I can see this chaotic field

Joy and peace sometimes won’t yield

O friends, tell me who braves the danger

To befriend the forsaken, behold the stranger

Unless blessed Elias may come one day

And with his good office open the way

It is time to cultivate love

Individually decreed from above

Thus I remember the wise old man

Forgetting such a one, I never can

That one day, a seeker in a land

A wise one helped him understand

Seeker, what do you keep in your bag

Set up a trap, if bait you drag

In reply said I keep a snare

But for the phoenix I shall dare

Asked how will you find its sign

We can’t help you with your design

Like the spruce become so wise

Rise to the heights, open your eyes

Don’t lose sight of the rose and wine

But beware of your fate’s design

At the fountainhead, by the riverside

Shed some tears, in your heart confide

This instrument won’t tune to my needs

The generous sun, our wants exceeds

In memory of friends bygone

With spring showers hide the golden sun

With such cruelty cleaved with a sword

As if with friendship was in full discord

When flows forth the crying river

With your own tears help it deliver

My old companion was so unkind

O Pious Men, keep God in mind

Unless blessed Elias may come one day

Help one loner to another make way

Look at the gem and let go of the stone

Do it in a way that keeps you unknown

As my hand moves the pen to write

Ask the main writer to shed His light

I entwined mind and soul indeed

Then planted the resulting seed

In this marriage the outcome is joy

Beauty and soulfulness employ

With hope’s fragrant perfume

Let eternal soul rapture assume

This perfume comes from angel’s sides

Not from the doe whom men derides

Friends, to friends’ worth be smart

When obvious, don’t read it by heart

This is the end of tales of advice

Lie in ambush, fate’s cunning and vice.

—

Saghi Nameh

ساقی نامه

O Bearer, bring the wine that brings joy

To increase generosity, & let perfection buoy

Give me some, for I have lost my heart

Both traits from me have kept apart

Bring the wine whose reflection in the cup

Signals to all the kings whose times are up

Give me wine, and with the reed-flute I will sing

When was Jamshid, and when Kavoos was king

Bring me the elixir whose grace and alchemy

Bestows treasures, from bonds of time sets free

Give me so they’ll open the doors once again

Of long life and the bliss that will remain

Bearer give the wine that the Holy Grail

Will make claims of sight in the Void and thus fail

Give me so that I, with the help of the Grail

All secrets, like Jamshid, themselves avail

Speak of the tale of the wheel of fate

proclaim to the kings and heroes of late

This broken world is in the same state

As seen by Afrasiab, the mighty, the great

Whence his mobilizing army generals

Whence cunning heroes’ war cries and calls

Not only his palace has gone to the dust

Even his tomb is destroyed and long lost

This barren desert is in the same stage

As the armies of Salm & Toor were lost in its rage

Bring the wine whose reflection in the cup

Signals to all the kings whose times are up

Well said Jamshid, the old majestic king

Worthless is this transient stage and ring

Come Bearer, that fire, radiant, bright

Zarathushtra, beneath the earth, seeks so right

Give me wine, in the creed of the drunk

Whether fire-worshipper or worldly monk

Come Bearer, that wholesome drunk

Who is forever in the tavern sunk

Give me, ill repute bring to my name

The cup and the wine I shall only blame

Bring Bearer, the water that burns the mind

If lion drinks, forest will burn and grind

Courageous, I’ll go hunting lions of fate

Mess up this old wolf’s trap and bait

Bring Bearer, that high heavenly wine

That angels with their scent would entwine

Give me wine, I’ll burn it like sweet incense

Its wise aroma I will sense now and hence

Bearer, give me the wine that makes kings

Witnessing its virtues, my heart sings

Give me wine to wash away all my flaws

Joyous rise above this rut’s deadly claws

When the spiritual garden is my abode

Why have me bound to a board on this road

Give me wine and then see the Ruler’s face

Ruin me & see treasures of wisdom and grace

And when I hold the cup in my hand

In the mirror everything I understand

In my drunken state, kingship proclaim

A monarch, when I am drunken and lame

Drunken, pearls of wisdom unveil

In hiding secrets, the selfless fail

Hafiz, drunken, songs will compose

From its melody Venus’ song flows

O singer, with the sound of the stream

Of that majestic song muse and dream

Till I make my work joy and ecstasy

I will dance and play with robe of piety

Given a crown and throne by his fate

The fruit of the kingly tree of this estate

Ruler of the land, and Lord of the time

The grand and fortunate King of the clime

He is the greatness vested in the Throne

comfort of bird and fish from Him alone

For the blessed, he is light of the eyes

Yet he is the gift of the soul of the wise

Behold, O, auspicious bird

The happy inspiration to be heard

The world has no pearls in its shells like Thee

Fereydoon and Jamshid had no heirs like Thee

Instead of Alexander, be here many a year

Know thy heart and discover joy is near

But seditious fate many plans may devise

Me and my drunkenness troubled by Beloved’s eyes

One, for his work, may pick up the sword

Another’s business only deals with the word

O Player, play the song of the new creed

To music of the stream tell to my rival breed

Finally with my enemy I have a chance

At victory, in the skies I can glance

O Player, play something pleasing to the ear

With a song and a Gahzal begin a story, dear

My sorrows have tied me to the ground

Raise me with my principles that are sound

O singer, with the sound of the stream

Play and sing that majestic song I dream

Make the great souls happy with you

Parviz and Barbad remember too

O Player, paint a picture of the veil

Listen, inside, they tell a tale

Sing a minstrel’s song, such

That Venus’ harp dances with her touch

Play so the Sufi goes into a trance

Drunken, in Union, leaves his stance

O Player, tambourine and harp play

With a lovely tune, sing and sway

Deceptions of the world make a vivid tale

The night is pregnant, what will it entail

O Player, I’m sad, play one or two

In his Oneness, as long as you can, play too

I am astounded by the revolving fate

I don’t know who will next degenerate

And if the Magi set one on fire

Don’t know whose light will then expire

In this bloody resurrection field

Let the cup and jug their blood yield

To the drunk, of a good song, give a sign

To friends bygone, a salutation divine

—

For a long time, has left me with concerns

Embraces strangers, yet lovers he spurns.

Not even upon my state had a glance

In this way, praise of the wise ones he earns.

Better to keep his arm in his sleeve

Hearts of the gifted artists, his hand churns.

Neither rose nor nightingale are spared the pain of love

One rends its garment, other crying, yearns.

He who seeks obedience in colorful & patched robes

His graceful eye, upon the ignorant turns.

He is the apple of my eyes, light of my soul

When tired me approaches him, he returns.

Jewels of the Holy Grail come from an unworldly mine

Why then beg for the potters’ clay to make these urns?

O heart, O wise Master, experienced in love

Why then seek love from apprentices & interns?

You must pay for this your last pot of gold

Why beg this thief that gold & silver returns?

Insanity & madness, admittedly are my sins

Lover is enslaved to love, for love burns.

Spend your days free from blame & concerns

Expect naught from temporal world, Hafiz learns.

This edition is dedicated to our friend Tomas, and his family…

Gwyllm

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On the Menu:

The Links

Tomas in Oregon…

Poetry: Tomas

Money versus Wealth

Art/Photos.. Painting, Gwyllm… Gathering at Caer Llwydd Gwyllm & Mary… Nature Photos through poems and down.. Tomas

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The Links:

Lucifer Sam…

Paranoid Shift…

Hovering Object…

Required Reading…

Astronomy Domine…

For Mike Crowley…

______________

Tomas in Oregon…

I first became acquainted with Tomas back before 9/11 on the VSL list. We kept in touch, and when Earthrites began, he became one of the earliest members. He has a healers approach to situations, and a truly wonderful sense of what is needed at critical moments.

He lives back on the right coast, but will always be welcome and loved out here. He is a very good poet as well, which is the icing on the cake.

He is back home now, on his land by the bay…

Tomas was visiting family in California and Oregon and was able to pass through Portland for a couple of days.

Here he is with his daughter Leah at Caer Llwydd

—

Hanging out in the back of Caer Llwydd…

Mary, Tomas, Leah, Mike Hoffmann, and Mr. PK.

Lazing on a Sunday afternoon…

—

Leah, bemused at the lot of us….

—

Tomas and Gwyllm….

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Poetry: Tomas Brawley…

“everything, everyone on this earth are a part of a greater whole, a finger of the earth”

Mushrooms say the strangest things

Life runs before the Suns radiance

The ultimate wave of creation

All thoughts, consciousness, meaningless!

But for the moment, the now.

I surf the wave creation,

it carries the now for ever.

It has no voice but the Wind.

And the endless vistas of all that

lies with in what cannot be spoken.

Like endless waves, with no shore.

So is the crash of the moment, the now.

It is silent but for those immersed with in.

I surf the wave creation.

Surrounded by it’s vastness.

Again and again, we allow it

to slip past unnoticed but for the

sweep of the second hand

the minute hand the hour strikes

half past a life time of not seeing

what is!

So is the condition of man….

Being In It

A calm across flowing green

The air still with a pulse of heat

The craft that is silence

Inhaling all that is in a breath

Again I am touched by it all

Again I touch it all

And with a yearning of appreciation

I make this my prayer

That I know I am not alone

They are here with me

Below, above, and all around

It is they who speak

In the sound of the Wind

In the green of the grasses

In the return of the Cicadas

and the Birds that sing.

I manifest my connections to here and now….

Pray of Everyday

As the Earth turns my spirit yerns.

It is because my heart is with her?

Alone in the throngs of the unconscious.

She is all but forgotten, but for those!

Soon to be gone.

Soon to be gone.

They know where they are from.

And they know where they are going.

Not to a heathen hell.

They need no forgiveness.

But back to their mother.

Back to their relations.

To live on in all that lives.

To all that breaths.

All that is in beauty.

All that is in motion.

All that is in balance.

We will live again.

Thanks and gratitude.

The prayer of every day….

Awaken

Awaken to amber hues.

A crush of cold presses me.

The din of a memory.

Of the Suns embrace.

Beckoning a song,

of another season

that is to be.

Gone from this place,

or a memory that was.

Alone in this space,

I occupy.

Do you see, hear, smell,

and taste all that I?

What is of God?

Is it herald in great halls?

Or is it in the hills and valleys

of my emotions?

Can it be captured in an image?

And if so what of its expression?

God is in the grace of a new day.

And the beginning of a new season.

All is a gift of the Love of our God Earth!….

Breath of The Earth

Can you here it?

It’s the breath of the Earth .

In the songs of the birds.

In the life of the insects.

All that is motion.

And all that is color.

Is the breath of the Earth.

That is our relations.

That is why we cry.

Though we leave one form.

We become many.

And we too become.

The breath of the Earth! ….

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Money versus Wealth – by David C. Korten

What is this madness? The economy is booming. The stock market is setting new records. The US is again heralded as the world’s most competitive economy. We are assured that we are richer than ever before and getting richer by the day. Yet we are also told there is no longer enough money to provide an adequate education for our children, health care and safety nets for the poor, protection for the environment, parks, a living wage for working people, public funding for the arts and public radio, or adequate pensions for the elderly. According to the official wisdom, even though richer, we can no longer afford what we once took for granted. How is this possible? What’s gone wrong?

A quick hint. The problem most definitely is not a lack of money. The world is awash in it. The world’s 450 billionaires alone have combined financial assets greater than the combined annual incomes of half of humanity.

The problem is this: a predatory global financial system, driven by the single imperative of making ever more money for those who already have lots of it, is rapidly depleting the real capital ­ the human, social, natural, and even physical capital ­ on which our well-being depends.

The truly troubling part is that so many of us have become willing accomplices to what is best described as a war of money against life. It starts, in part, from our failure to recognize that money is not wealth. Wealth is something that has real value in meeting our needs and fulfilling our wants. Modern money is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer that by social convention gives its holder a claim on real wealth. In our confusion we concentrate on the money to the neglect of those things that actually sustain a good life.

It is striking how difficult our very language makes it to express the critical difference between money and real wealth. Picture yourself alone on a desert island with nothing to sustain yourself but a large trunk filled with bundles of hundred dollar bills. The point becomes immediately clear.

During a visit to Malaysia some years ago I met the minister responsible for forestry. In explaining Malaysia’s forestry policy he observed that the country would be better off once its forests were cleared away and the money from the sale was stashed in banks earning interest. The financial returns would be greater. The image flashed through my mind of a barren and lifeless world populated only by banks with their computers faithfully and endlessly compounding the interest on the profits from timber sales.

The importance of the difference between money and wealth is not limited to people who find themselves stranded on desert islands. It is basic to understanding why the more money we have as a nation the less we can afford. It is as well a key to understanding the underlying pathology of the global economic system.

—

Money pathology

Think of a modern money economy as comprised of two related subsystems. One creates wealth. It consists of factories, homes, farms, stores, transportation and communications facilities, the natural productive systems of the planet, and people going to work in factories, hospitals, schools, stores, restaurants, publishing houses, and elsewhere to produce the goods and services that sustain us. The other creates and distributes money as a convenient mechanism for allocating wealth. In a healthy economy the money system serves as dutiful servant of wealth creation, allocating real capital to productive investment and rewarding those who do productive work in relation to their contribution.

In a healthy economy, money is not the dominant value, nor is it the sole or even dominant medium of exchange. Indeed, one of the most important indicators of economic health is the presence of an active economy of affection and reciprocity in which people do a great many useful things for one another with no expectation of financial gain. Such voluntary sharing creates and maintains the fabric of trust and mutual caring of which the social capital of any healthy family, community, or society is comprised.

Pathology enters the economic system when money, once convenient as a means of facilitating commerce, comes to define the life purpose of individuals and society. The human, social, and natural capital on which the well-being of any society depends becomes subject to sacrifice on the altar of money making. Those who already have money prosper at the expense of those who don’t. It is a social pathology called finance capitalism.

When financial assets and transactions grow faster than growth in the output of real wealth, it is a strong indication that the global economy is getting sick. A study by McKinsey and Company found that from 1980 to 1992 financial assets in the developed countries of the OECD grew twice as fast as their underlying economies and bullishly predicted that future financial growth would be three times real output growth. [William Greider, One World, Ready or Not; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, page 232.] Indeed, as the Malaysian minister noted, in the global economy money is growing a great deal faster than the trees.

Furthermore, the biggest profits are going to those who deal in pure finance. For 1996, the shareholders of the seven largest US money center banks reaped an average total return of 44 percent. Mutual funds specializing in finance averaged a 26.5 percent return, besting all other industry categories by a wide margin. Funds specializing in much-touted technology stocks came in a poor second at 21 percent.

The growing dominance of money is also revealed in the increasing monetization of human relationships. Not long ago, even in the most supposedly advanced countries, half of the adult population worked without pay to maintain home and community. These are among the most fundamental and important of functions in a healthy economy. Now, it typically takes two adults holding two to three paid jobs between them to support a household. Child and home care is either left undone or hired out. Community service becomes the work of public employees ­ to the extent there is public money to pay them. As the social capital of caring relations is depleted, family and community life fall into disarray.

—

Pyramids, bubbles and the global casino

Albania recently suffered a national crisis brought on by the collapse of fraudulent pyramid schemes. Westerners wise in the ways of the market were bemused by the naiveté of the Albanians who fell for “investment” schemes promising returns as high as 25 percent a month with no real business activity behind them. During the course of the nationwide speculative frenzy, farmers sold their flocks and urban dwellers their apartments to share in the promised bonanza of effortless wealth. The inevitable collapse sparked widespread riots, arson, and looting when the Albanian government failed to make up the losses.

Those inclined to laugh at the innocence of the Albanians should first consider their own response to proposals that social security contributions be invested in a stock market that even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says is substantially over valued. The speculative financial bubble, which involves bidding up the price of an asset far beyond its underlying value, is little more than a sophisticated variant of the classic pyramid scam.

Investing in a bubble is a form of gambling and it isn’t entirely naive. Who cares if there is nothing behind it? The bubble is the action. The trick is to place big bets and get out before it bursts. It is a game of nerves. The action gets especially exciting when banks are willing to accept the inflated assets as collateral and lend new money into existence to stake further play, which pushes prices ever higher. This process of borrowing into bubbles with newly created money is key to making financial wealth increase faster than real wealth. Furthermore, when a leveraged bubble bursts and banks are left with substantial portfolios of uncollectible loans, governments are almost forced to step in with a bailout to stop a banking collapse ­ as the US government did in the case of the Great Depression and the more recent Savings and Loan crisis. This amounts to another money transfer, this time from taxpayers to those with money.

Betting on financial bubbles is only one of the lucrative games that attract players to the global finance casino. There are as well opportunities to speculate on short-term price movements, buy and sell simultaneously in different markets to profit from minute price differences, and bet on derivatives contracts. While economists have become exceedingly facile in rationalizing how such activities actually benefit society, in truth they are more accurately described as forms of legal theft by which a clever few expropriate rights to the real wealth of society while contributing more to its depletion than to its creation.

—-

Consuming capital to make money

William Greider, in his newly released book One World Ready or Not, observes that corporations get caught in the trap of having to compete for investment funds against the often more lucrative financial games of the world of pure finance. With the rare exception of companies with a hot product or distinctive market niche, in an unregulated global economy most corporations have little choice but to use their economic and political power to externalize ever growing portions of their costs onto the community. The dynamics of a competitive global economy favor the cost externalization process because they pit workers and communities against one another in a deadly race to the bottom. By competing for the jobs corporations offer, workers and communities are compelled to deplete real wealth to make corporations more profitable.

Responding to the pressures of financial markets, corporations:

Deplete social capital by moving production to places where they can pay less than a living wage or use the threat of moving jobs to break up labor unions and bargain down wages. Gains from productive activity are thus shifted from working people to money people. Furthermore, the stress of attempting to maintain self and family on insecure jobs paying less than a family wage results in family breakdown and violence, depleting the social capital of society.

Deplete human capital by hiring young women in places like the Mexican maquiladoras under conditions that lead to their physical burnout after three or four years. Once eyesight problems, allergies, kidney problems, and repetitive stress injuries deplete their efficiency, they are replaced by a fresh supply of younger women. Such practices destroy lives and deplete society’s human capital.

Deplete the Earth’s natural capital through strip mining forests, fisheries, and mineral deposits, dumping wastes, and aggressively marketing toxic chemicals.

Deplete institutional capital by fighting environmental and other regulations essential to the long-term health and viability of society. Corporations further demand direct public subsidies, subsidized infrastructure, and relief from their fair share of taxes. This shifts a greater share of the tax burden onto working people and undermines the credibility and performance of government in its essential functions, thus eroding the legitimacy of democratic government.

Deplete business capital. Corporate managers are forced into a short-term view even in regard to their own operations. They cut investment in research and training essential to their own future prospects. As they downsize, the sharp employee quickly learns to use the job only to build a resume to attract a higher bidder. These actions erode the corporation’s own human, intellectual, social, and physical capital.

Intent on making ever more money for those who already have money ­ even at the cost of depleting the natural, human, institutional, and social capital on which the very survival of society depends ­ the money system becomes like a cancer that consumes its host and ultimately destroys itself.

The CEO of a publicly traded corporation who fails to maximize profits because of a moral aversion to engaging in such predatory practices is almost certain to be eliminated by the system, even if he ­ they are almost all men ­ runs an otherwise profitable operation. Where the shareholders don’t step in, a corporate raider most surely will.

The money system becomes like a cancer that consumes its host and ultimately destroys itself.

Pacific Lumber Company for years pioneered the development of sustainable logging practices on its substantial holdings of ancient redwood timber stands in California. It also provided generous benefits to its employees, fully funded its pension fund, and maintained a no-layoffs policy during downturns in the timber market. This made it a good citizen. It also made it a prime takeover target. Corporate raider Charles Hurwitz gained control in a hostile takeover. He immediately doubled the cutting rate of the company’s holding of thousand-year-old trees, reaming a mile-and-a-half corridor into the middle of the forest that he jeeringly named “Our wildlife-biologist study trail.” He then drained $55 million from the company’s $93 million pension fund and invested the remaining $38 million in annuities of the Executive Life Insurance Company ­ which had financed the junk bonds used to make the purchase and subsequently failed.

The remaining redwoods are now the subject of a last-ditch effort by environmentalists to save them from clearcutting.

Professional buy-out artists are drawn like bees to honey by a socially responsible firm that internalizes its environmental costs, pays union wages, invests in worker training, fully funds its pension fund, and pays its full share of taxes. In a system that puts short-term profits first, these are inefficiencies to be eliminated.

Over the last several years, the biggest corporations have performed as the financial markets have demanded ­ increasing their profits by an average of 20 percent a year. In 1996, the 30 US corporations whose stock prices comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average returned to their shareholders an average of 28.2 percent for the year, a substantial increase from the five-year average of 18.3 percent. Each such increase further lifts the floor under investor expectations and increases the pressure on top managers to maintain such returns in the future ­ by any means.

The global corporation is arguably the most powerful instrument for concentrating power and wealth ever devised. Indeed, of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations. The economy of Mitsubishi is larger than that of Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country and a land of enormous natural wealth.

Because we have so little experience in designing money systems to create societies that benefit people and nature, we will need to be creative.

—-

Healing the money system

To heal society we must heal the money system. This will involve a two-fold process of reducing money’s importance in our lives and restoring its appropriate role in service to the creation and protection of real wealth.

It will be necessary to de-myth money. I earned MBA and PhD degrees from one of the world’s leading graduate schools of business, but I was never taught the difference between making money and creating wealth, nor how to distinguish between productive and predatory investments. Such lessons should be a basic part of education for business or responsible citizenship.

We need to reweave the social fabric. In a society in which relationships are defined by love, generosity, and community, the importance of money in mediating personal exchange and allocating resources is likely to decline markedly. This will require reducing monetary dependence and restoring non-monetary exchanges through a process that selectively delinks individuals, families, and communities from dependence on the predatory institutions of a global economy, downscaling consumption to reduce dependence on paid work, increasing reliance on local products to meet basic needs, and strengthening the engagement of all persons in the productive life of family and community.

The truly monumental task will be to redesign the money system to make money the servant of the creation and protection of real wealth. Among other things, corrective measures will need to:

1. make speculation unprofitable;

2. limit the growth of financial bubbles;

3. increase incentives for cooperation among people and communities;

4. reward productive work and investment;

5. create a just distribution of claims to real wealth;

6. provide incentives for patient and locally rooted investment in real assets; and

7. strengthen the social fabric of family and community.

A common currency exclusive to the members of one city or geographic region is one means of moving towards these goals. Another is to introduce zero- or negative-interest money. We should also consider whether it makes sense for private banks, rather than government or communities, to create money, and seriously consider substantial taxes on short-term speculative gains.

The purpose of such measures is not to promote global growth and competition, but rather to create healthy and prosperous societies that provide economic security and just rewards for productive contribution to their members, have a strong and caring social fabric, and live in balance with their natural environment. Because we have so little experience in designing money systems to create societies that benefit people and nature, we will need to be creative; there are no tested guidelines.

Many of the best minds of our time are engaged in finding ways to use the finance system to claim ever more of the world’s real wealth for those who already control much of it. But there are also those who are concerned with how we might redesign money to serve a society that works for all people and preserves the natural environment. The articles that follow contain some of their thinking and experimentation.

——————————————————————————–

David Korten has an MBA and PhD from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, has served on the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Business, and has spent many years in Asia on assignment from the Ford Foundation and the US Agency for International Development. He is the author of When Corporations Rule the World (Berrett-Koehler and Kumarian Press, 1995), president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and chair of the board of Positive Futures Network, publisher of YES!

Working at home today…

The News being what it is, my mind is tumbling around. (see previous edition: “The Crack in the Wall”)

It has been an eventful week already here at Chateau Llwydd… It continues on of course.

Look to possibly more updates later tonight.

The sun is out again, gotta hop.

On The Menu:

The Links

Anarchist Therapy

Poetry: The Song of the Sirens…

Be Happy!

G

_________________________________

Links:

The Love Life of Albert…

Vicar gets into the grove

Woman says firm fired her for being Wiccan

Druids vow to defend sword ban to the hilt

Last but not Least… “The Velveteen Rabbi”!

An Ancient One Passes…

___________________

Anarchist Therapy – Clandestino

In 1964, the military in Brazil carried out a coup d’etat supported by the CIA and local right-wing groups, inaugurating a bloody dictatorship. It was during the dictatorship that a clandestine anarchist activist named Roberto Freire, who also was a psychoanalyst, (anti)psychiatrist and author of books and plays, confirmed the destructive effects of repression on people’s behavior and psychological and mental health. Freire believed that micro-social relationships are the genesis for macro-social authoritarianism and he aimed for understanding the politics of modern society through people’s behavior in their everyday life. He realized that the fact that one believes in a certain ideology and has a libertarian view of the world doesn’t always lead one to have a libertarian behavior in his/her personal relationships with his/her fellows – there is something else, like an unconscious barrier, that determines the attitudes of the individuals towards life and other people. Freire, then, broke with psychoanalysis and over the next decades researched and developed Somatherapy – a therapy form in shape of a pedagogy, or a kind of pedagogy with therapeutic effects. That means that the way of dealing with neurosis is shifted from a medical perspetive to an educational one. The goal is to liberate those who have been subjected to repression (all of us). Somatherapy supports itself in theory and praxis with the social and corporeal psychology of Wilhelm Reich, Antipsychiatry, Gestalt Therapy, Anarchism and with the Afro-Brazilian art form of the people called Capoeira Angola.

The technique that he created consists of assembling a group of people to form a collective with limited duration (about a year and a half) that, through self-managed and non-hierarchical dynamics, will search to explore, understand and develop their capabilities to be creative, self-regulated, to love and to be loved and to be confident in the defense of their own desires and needs towards a society hostile to independent individuals.

All of this happens in a methodology composed of four elements: (1) experience of exercises created by Freire and carried out by the therapist in charge of the group (Freire or a disciple of him); (2) meetings of the group without the presence of the therapist (that guarantees the group’s and each person’s independence and responsibility for the therapeutic process); (3) practice of Capoeira Angola; (4) interaction of the group’s members in various social activities, either for fun or any kind of collective work.

The exercises created by Freire usually are body exercises, following Wilhelm Reich’s realization that neurosis is located not only in one’s mind, but also in his/her body. Reich realized that the authoritarian social structure and its mechanism of repression shape people’s personality, creating a neuromuscular character armor. That means a chronic rigidity in the muscles that obstruct the full circulation of the vital energy. Then it becomes a lifeless body, unable to act spontaneously, to feel pleasure, love or true emotions.

Reich was positive that this illness has social causes, that it is implanted by systematic suppression of instinctual needs of sex, pleasure and love carried out by authoritarian mechanisms that enforce all of us, starting in the first days of life, to adapt ourselves to patterns of social behavior. “The millenary subjugation of impulsive life created the ground for the psychological fear of the masses to the authority and the submission to it, for an incredible humility, on one side, and a sadistic brutality, on the other side – and that’s why in the last 200 years the capitalist economy of profits could expand and survive” said Reich.

Roberto Freire is a forerunner of Reichian Therapy in Brazil and one of the few people in the world who kept the unity between social-political and psychotherapeutic approaches against neurosis. Opposing ideologies of sacrifice (neurosis), Freire maintains that the healthy human condition dwells in what he called ideology of pleasure. The exercises that he created bring the participants to bodily communicate their barriers and difficulties, at the same time they provide bioenergetic relief, release of creativity and stimulation and

awakening of the senses. They have simultaneous diagnostic and therapeutic effects.

Following the principle of pleasure, Freire refuted the tendency in traditional psychology to relate therapy with discomfort, suffering and formality and strove to create ludic, playfull and pleasant exercises that, based on theatrical techniques, stimulate sociability and new ways of interaction.

After each exercise the participants make use of verbal communication, but in a peculiar way. Sitting in circle, each person reports the sensations that she had, the barriers that she perceived in herself and other people, what kind of pleasure she felt or what kind of fear and difficulty came out. The way to report the experience should follow the theories and methods of Gestalt Therapy, which prioritize an objective and practical approach, trying to acknowledge (how it happened) rather than interpret (why it happened).

Based on studies of human perception, Dr. Frederick Perls, precursor of Gestalt Therapy, sustained the fundamental significance of living perceptually alert to the present moment. Perls believed that the unmediated perception through the senses allows the spontaneous and natural mechanism of self-regulation. Rational abstraction prevents this spontaneity from occurring and creates another mechanism that is alienation and self-censorship through acceptance of external values and judgments (coming from the family, society, etc.), which are settled in the conscious and unconscious.

Gestalt Therapy determines the practical way in which the anarchist therapy of Roberto Freire happens. Somatherapy is neither clinical nor confessional. It does not deal with traumas of the past, but it does deal with their manifestations in the present, through the situations experienced during the exercises and everyday life. Freire understands that one of the many problems that people have is related to inability to define what they want and like. He believes that spontaneous self-regulation is achieved by the search for pleasure and by the discovery of each person’s own unique originality.

Because neurosis is born in social relationships, group therapy is more efficient because it creates a micro-social lab in which a variety of relationships may happen. In Somatherapy, it’s the self-managed and non-hierarchical dynamics that effectively make the therapy happen, on the personal level (self- awareness) and on the social level (new strategies for living together), in so far as it establish a state of collaboration, cooperation and complicity between the members of the group.

Also, only in a group is it possible to deal with damaging forms of communications brought to light by Antipsychiatry. Somatherapy doesn’t work with schizophrenics or people in advanced states of emotional unbalance, but it uses those studies of Gregory Bateson, David Cooper and Ronald D. Laing that have prophylactic uses for neurosis.

Antipsychiatry makes use of the studies in pragmatics of human communication, which prove that paradoxical ways of communication in a context of strong emotional and affectional ties can lead to deep psychological disturbances in one’s personality. Somatherapy allows one to realize how his personality is shaped by the paradoxical communications used against him by his family when he was a child, as well as being able to perceive when it happens in the present. It makes possible the creation of strategies to defend oneself against emotional blackmails and teaches the importance of choosing sincere and direct ways to communicate and prove how useful metacommunication is (communication about the situation in which interaction takes place).

One of the last elements that Roberto Freire added to his technique was Capoeira Angola. Unlike other styles of capoeira that spread out all over the world, Capoeira Angola is an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines playing music, dancing and fighting – it’s a theater and a playful game. It has its origin in African tribal rituals and dances. In Brazil, aspects of martial arts were introduced, so that black people could prepare themselves to fight their oppressors: the slave masters and the Portuguese (and later Brazilian) Empire. Freire found in Capoeira Angola an excellent bioenergetic exercise, that enables body awareness, teaches how to keep all senses alert, and wakes up the ability to confront, which is very necessary in the struggle to defend oneself against repression and to affirm a free personality.

Subjective Ecology

With its anarchist perspective, Somatherapy brings to psychotherapy the concept that neurosis is a deviation in natural and ecological human behavior. Traditional psychology manifests in its praxis the attempt to adapt one to the social rules in force. Somatherapy helps the individual to recover her capacity to satisfy her needs and desires by defending herself and struggling against a psychotic society that denies her the freedom to exercise her own unique originality.

For Roberto Freire, the human being must be understood in his unicity: the individual is the indivisible and non-hierarchical unity of his body, mind, emotions, memories, expectations, desires, culture, social behaviors and actions that he does at every moment. In western societies, the aspects of life are fragmented. Freire created Somatherapy with the aim to struggle for the totality of being, for the unity that allows the natural principle of spontaneous self-regulation. He conceived his technique for revolutionaries, challengers of the status quo and anyone who feels libertarian, as a tool in the struggle for a life directed by joy, beauty and pleasure.

Acting on the level of subjective ecology, which is understood as living accordingly to biological impulses, Somatherapy shows a different path in the struggle against patriarchy. Helping to liberate an individual from the barriers that prevent him from his own self-determination and freedom is consistent with the idea of not intending to construct a new world, but giving people the opportunity to create this new world by themselves.

Radical changes of behavior that enable the experience of pleasure and love are the reconciliation with our own nature, and that’s a step towards the utopia of a society that is not harmful to individuals or their environment. “Civilized society is at risk of disintegration by the primary hostility of men towards each other,” said Wilhelm Reich. “Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.”

__________________________________

Poetry: The Song of the Sirens…

The song of the Sirens – (Homer)

In the Odyssey, the Sirens sing a song so irresistible that none can hear it and escape. Circe warns Odysseus of the danger and tells him how to avoid it. He must plug up his mens’ ears with beeswax, and have himself tied to the mast, if he wishes to hear it:

Square in your ship’s path are Sirens, crying

beauty to bewitch men coasting by;

woe to the innocent who hears that sound!

He will not see his lady nor his children

in joy, crowding about him, home from sea;

the Sirens will sing his mind away

on their sweet meadow lolling. There are bones

of dead men rotting in a pile beside them

and flayed skins shrivel around the spot.

Steer wide;

keep well to seaward; plug your oarsmen’s ears

with beeswax kneaded soft; none of the rest

should hear that song.

But if you wish to listen,

let the men tie you in the lugger, hand

and foot, back to the mast, lashed to the mast,

so you may hear those harpies’ thrilling voices;

shout as you will, begging to be untied,

your crew must only twist more line around you

and keep their stroke up, till the singers fade. (Book 12, 41-58)

As with the lethal text, the implication is that the song has irresistible force. Unlike ordinary language, it cannot be merely heard: it must also be obeyed. Also like lethal texts, it is self-reflexive, in that it is about itself:

Sweet coupled airs we sing.

No lonely seafarer

Holds clear of entering

Our green mirror. (Book 12, 173-176)

The Odyssey is unique, however, in actually giving the contents of the lethal text. None of the other works with lethal texts do. They merely describe its outward form. (Apparently the text isn’t too dangerous in translation and without the original music.)

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey emits a shrill, siren-like sound when it first sees sunlight. And like the Sirens, it is extraordinarily compelling. None can see it and not be drawn to it. Like the Sirens, it too is a lethal text.

—-

Siren Song – (Margaret Atwood)

This is the one song everyone

would like to learn: the song

that is irresistible:

the song that forces men

to leap overboard in squadrons

even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows

because anyone who had heard it

is dead, and the others can’t remember.

Shall I tell you the secret

and if I do, will you get me

out of this bird suit?

I don’t enjoy it here

squatting on this island

looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,

I don’t enjoy singing

this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,

to you, only to you.

Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!

Only you, only you can,

you are unique

at last. Alas

it is a boring song

but it works every time.

—

The Sirens’ Song – (William Browne)

Steer, hither steer your winged pines,

All beaten mariners!

Here lie Love’s undiscover’d mines,

A prey to passengers–

Perfumes far sweeter than the best

Which make the Phoenix’ urn and nest.

Fear not your ships,

Nor any to oppose you save our lips;

But come on shore,

Where no joy dies till Love hath gotten more.

For swelling waves our panting breasts,

Where never storms arise,

Exchange, and be awhile our guests:

For stars gaze on our eyes.

The compass Love shall hourly sing,

And as he goes about the ring,

We will not miss

To tell each point he nameth with a kiss.

–Then come on shore,

Where no joy dies till Love hath gotten more.

—

The Song of the Siren

The ship heads for shore, for land and for home.

Come to me; come to me.

It’s sails flap and it’s boards groan.

Come to me; come to me.

The crew has been hoping for port for so long.

You’re coming to me; you’re coming to me.

But the helmsman has picked up an entrancing song.

You’re coming to me; you’re coming to me.

Down from the cliffs a mysterious tune floats.

You have all heard me; you HAVE ALL heard me.

Hoping to reach unfortunate boats.

You have all heard me; you have all heard me.

The crew hears the tune drifting over the waves.

You are facing me; you are facing me.

The boat turns to the cliffs; no one will be saved.

You are facing me; you are facing me.

As if in a trance, the boat travels on.

You will soon see me; you will soon see me.

No one on board realises something is wrong.

You will soon see me; you will soon see me.

As the ship hits the rocks they see their mistake.

Come down to me; come down to me.

The crew starts to panic; the ship starts to break.

Come down to me; come down to me.

Like lemmings, the sailors tumble into the sea.

You will now see me; you will now see me.

Most scramble onto the rocks, leaving naught but 3.

You will now see me; you will now see me.

Those that are left are grabbed by the feet.

Come down with me; come down with me.

Taken by those evil sirens whose songs are so sweet.

Come down with me, come DROWN with me…

—-

The Song of the Sirens (Homer) -translated, from the Greek, by Diskin Clay

The episode of the Sirens has two stages in Odyssey 12. Both are related by Odysseus in the Palace of Alkinoos on Skeria. In the first, Circe warns Odysseus and his companions of the dangers they will encounter on their way home; in the second, Odysseus tells of his encounter with the Sirens.

On Circe’s Island

On the way home

At daybreak, Odysseus and his men set sail from Circe’s island. Odysseus addresses his men: (Odyssey 154-202)

My companions, there is no reason why only one of us

Or two-should know of Circe’s prophesies. She is a goddess,

Among goddesses. I will tell you what she told me,

So that, with our-eyes open, we can meet Death

Or keep it from us and escape our black Fate.

Her first warning was-Keep far away from the voice

Of the inspired Sirens; keep away from their lush meadow

Thick in flowers.” She told me that I alone

Should listen to their divine voice and song. You, for your part,

Are to bind me to the mast. Keep me fast to it,

Winding ropes about me til they bite. If I beg you, if I order you

To release me, tie me even tighter to the mast with more ship’s cable.

I told my companions all the goddess had told me.

Our tight ship scudded over the sea and soon we sighted

The Siren’s island with a steady wind filling our sails.

Then the wind fell. The sea subsided to a waveless silence.

No breeze stirred. Some god lulled the sea to slumber.

My men stood up from their benches, furled the sails,

And stowed them in the hollow of the ship. They returned

to their benches and with their well-hewn oars

They stirred the sea into foam.

Then, I took a great plug of wax and shaved it

With my sharp sword and kneeded it in my palms.

And it yielded to me and became soft under the warmth

And rays of Lord Helios, Hyperion’s son.

One by one, I went to my companions and sealed their ears

Shut. They, for their part, bound me arm and leg

Upright against the mast, fastening the ship’s cable to it.

Then they settled down and with their oars they stirred

The blue sea gray. When we had just reached shouting

Distance from the Sirens’ island, our ship cutting through the sea,

The Sirens sighted us and our ship approaching swiftly.

Then they began to sing their Siren song.

“Come to us, Odysseus, you who are the pride of the Achaeans,

You great man. Stay your ship’s course. Listen to our Siren voice.

No seafarer has yet sailed past our island in his black ship

Without listening to the silver music of our divine voice.’

No, he delights in its spell and returns home the wiser.

We can sing of all the grievous pain Argive and Trojan

Once suffered on the plains of Troy, as the gods desired.

We can sing all that comes to pass over the fertile earth.”

This was the song they sang in their haunting Siren voice.

And within me my heart told rhe to listen to their song.

I begged my companions: “Free me, release me now!”

Their ears shut tight, they paid no attention to me

As I motioned threateningly with my head and glared at them.

Perimedes and Eurylochos got up from their stations

And wound more rope about me even tighter.

Then my companions fell upon their oars and sped on.

I watched as the Sirens’ island slipped away into the sea.

Once we could no longer hear the Sirens’ voice and song,

My good companions took the wax from their ears

And released me.