Month: October 2006

‘Understood in its metaphysical sense,

Beauty is one of the manifestations of the Absolute Being.

Emanating from the harmonious rays of the Divine plan,

it crosses the intellectual plane to shine once again across

the natural plane, where it darkens into matter.‘

-Jean Delville 1899

(Jean Delville – The School of Silence)

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Welcome to Thursday….

Short of breath, trying to catch up with life as it happens…

Talk Later,

G

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On the Menu

Zoviet France – Shadow

The Links

Robert Anton Wilson Pt 2

From The Troubadours: Raimbaut d’Aurenga

Art: Jean Delville

Jean Delville Bio…

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(Zoviet France – Shadow)

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The Links:

Local astronomer sights UFO

Study links women’s fashion sense to ovulation

The Bible’s Flood To Have A Scientific Explanation

Radical solution proposed for Stonehenge

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(Robert Anton Wilson Prt 2)

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From The Troubadours: Raimbaut d’Aurenga

Raimbaut of Orange (c.1147–1173), or in Occitan Raimbaut d’Aurenga, was the lord of Orange and Omelas and a major troubadour, having contributed to the creation of trobar clus, or cryptic style, in troubadour poetry. About forty of his works survive, displaying a gusto for rare rhymes and intricate poetic form…

(Jean Delville – Dante Drinking the Waters of the Lethe)

Lady, he who is a good friend of yours

Lady, he who is a good friend of yours,

and to whom you are harsh and hostile,

begs you to have mercy in one thing:

that you hear properly what he means to tell you

here, ([it is] written in this letter)

and that you listen to the way he tells it;

and he begs you not to answer it

until you have listened to it all,

for there could easily be something

at the end that won’t displease you.

Lady, I’m in great throes because of you:

before you I didn’t know what pain was.

I have indeed loved other times,

in other places, when I was young,

loyally and without deception,

but never did it give me such anguish.

And never did any love [even] touch me

in the spot where your wrath stabbed me.

Nor did it spring from so deep [a place]

as this one – and the place’s unknown to me.

I never knew what love was,

and I didn’t feel these pains of his;

for love has put me in such throes

that it chills me in times of searing heat

and heats me in times of bitter cold

and makes me sad no matter how merry it once made me.

I have two too deadly enemies:

you and Love, and you are both cruel.

But my nemesis is you,

who take my cheer, joy and comfort away,

and show me your ill will

and tell me to my face;

but I can’t either hear or see Love,

nor do I know which way he dwells,

so that I can’t fight with him.

But he distresses me, for he doesn’t leave me

and makes me love you in such a fashion

that our love is unfairly parted:

for I love you, and you don’t love me;

he has truly shared the game unfairly.

Love shows itself low-born,

in letting you remain gay and sound:

and see that is has hurt me so much

that I am worse off than dead,

for if only he tortured me to death,

I wouldn’t lament so loudly:

he who lives all the time in pain

which nobody allays is worse off than dead.

If Love were well-bred enough,

if he had hurt you but a little

– only the thousandth part

of the wound it gave me with a glance –

with that he would have healed me

of the ill blow that has wounded me.

The damage is not apparent

but it sears and gnaws at my heart within;

and no medicine can help me,

without you, no matter how excellent;

and if it leads me to my grave,

you and Love will bear the blame,

for you could cure and heal me.

Wouldn’t it be better for you to blandish love?

Lady, I cannot fight with everybody,

endear you and parry Love’s blows;

for I can’t make you love me at all

unless love agrees to help me.

Since I see that my plea does not avail me,

I shall renounce it – if I could do otherwise!

But Love doesn’t let me heal,

Love, who has put me in this quagmire;

for I don’t listen nor watch in any other way

but towards the land and the place

where I most often see you, but it grieves me the more

because of the joy it used to bring me.

I often consider never seeing you again,

and remaining far from you;

for when I saw you for the first time

you had many a kind word for me,

but the closer I moved to you

– behold – the more you took to abusing me;

thus I fear that, if I saw you more,

I would pay dearly for it right off;

for you would have me killed at once,

and I don’t want to die quite yet;

for I wish to live for Good Expectation’s sake only.

I don’t know whether I offer foolish words to you,

but if you think of me as a fool

because of what I say, I bow my head.

All you like is fair and good to me.

I’ll never oppose your will again.

It grieves me that I cannot wish you ill,

for Love doesn’t give me the strength:

for if I could wish you ill,

we would have something in common;

furthermore, if you didn’t wish to love me,

I could turn to someone else.

But I can’t do aught about it,

for I’m not the master of myself:

you can well boast about me!

Now you are well pleased if I love and desire you;

for if I knew in all truth

that you’d never wish to have me,

and that in your entire life

your friendship wouldn’t be ever destined for me,

I still couldn’t love another woman

for all the beauty she could have.

If you don’t want to be my friend,

you can’t take this away from me:

that I be forever your friend,

although your heart be cruel to me.

Lady, why don’t I praise you in my writings,

nor do I mention your beauty?

I do it quite on purpose

and in this one thing I show some sense;

for, if it were left to me, you wouldn’t believe

you were this beautiful;

for I know that you despise me more

because of your own beauty.

Lady, may mirrors be cursed!

(and beauty, for it doesn’t fail you)

Lady, may you never believe a mirror!

Do you think you are as fair

as you see yourself in the mirror?

You’re quite a fool if you so believe,

for all mirrors are liars,

and may they all be shattered.

Lady, know that those who praise you

for anything, don’t it in good will:

for they want to mock you as much

when they praise you with their lies.

But I shall never lie to you,

lady, and now I’ll tell you the truth;

believe me, lady, for I speak truly

– or may I not have any potency –

for I don’t praise you as pretty at all,

and say instead you’re as swarthy as a negress.

Lady, I declaim in every corner

that you’re uglier than I paint you;

but were you to be very enough to me,

such an ugly thing would appeal to me so!

Lady, if I were to say

all I think about you

I wouldn’t have told you in a year, [sic]

but I’m afraid it could turn to my detriment;

thus, I don’t want to make a long plea of it

and I’ll tell you straight away,

lady: if your vassal loses in any matter,

know that you lose in it as well.

You know well that I am yours

and that I have no other master below god;

therefore know for a sure thing

that if I lose in something, so do you.

Lady, about that little wrong I have done,

I can’t redress it by myself;

even if the right were manifestly on my side,

you would invent more charges.

You could accuse me for eternity

and dispute with me all time,

lady, for between us two

I wish for no lawyer but me and you.

Let us never this suit of ours part

for in no other way can I express my heart.

Do not plead this suit before the law:

write its sentence yourself;

and I intend indeed to bring forth arguments

in which you can’t find a flaw.

Can’t you concede to mercy?

For we ought to be swayed by it:

where nothing avails,

mercy must allay the ill.

Have thus mercy and pity!

I don’t bring any other guarantor before you,

lady; I beg for mercy, an you please.

In many ways I cannot express

I beg here for mercy and forgiveness,

as when god forgave the thief.

Lady, if I am lead to my grave by you,

it won’t ever do you any good.

Shall I die? – Indeed! just like a culprit

who already is half-dead in thought.

Sighs make me end my argument:

I bow before you, won and subdued.

Tears prevent me from telling more,

but I imagine what I’d like to say.

Lady, I beg for mercy, an you please;

for mercy’s sake, may you have mercy!

I beg for mercy, my sweet friend,

before death thus takes me away.

—

(Jean Delville – Parsifal)

—-

Now I am all overcome

so that I recall very little,

for I have forgotten, out of it, joy and laughter,

and tears and grief and sadness;

and the outlook isn’t too good,

nor do I believe – since I have such an asset –

that anything but god protects me.

For I don’t believe at all that,

through plea or through threat,

I could achieve, by all means,

or conquer such a lover

if god, whom I thank for her,

hadn’t set me on the [right] path

and put a kind heart in her.

I shall pray more for a new grace

than I used to for the old one;

for he has given me a taste

the rest of which I sought of him;

and I know why he bestowed such a grace on me:

for he knows I am without deceit

towards her who keeps me as her own.

Such a love befits her

that god granted her to me:

for to a man who would betray her,

he wouldn’t grant suzerainty,

nor would he keep her for his own revel:

she wasn’t meant to be betrayed,

so valuable she is – but I’m letting out too much.

For, if I say about her what is fitting

to remain sealed in my heart,

everybody would know, by my troth,

who she is; for all people cry

and know, and it is quite obvious,

which is the best there is.

This is why I praise her and pleaded her.

I have such a reckless heart

that I can hardly abstain;

for love rides my thoughts,

so that I have a mind to extol her

for everybody – such is the desire that assails me –

but Respect and Nobility

and righteous Good Love hold me back.

For, although she wished me not [to show] my cheer,

my heart cheers, full of joy;

for I imagine I am in paradise

when I hear anybody talk sensibly about my lady,

(who tethers me so much

that I don’t address any other woman)

barely because he tells me about her.

Thus, it is a great gift

when one barely mentions the castle

where she abides. But I can’t see how

anyone who isn’t connected to her is

of any account, for, before I was her subject,

I don’t know why I was worth

anything, except for the good I would have of her.

.

Never a lance nor a bolt

scares me, nor does a steely sword

when I kiss or regard her ring;

and if I am quite a gascon about it

I ought indeed to be so;

and if one thinks I am a fool,

he doesn’t know the ways of love.

Let anyone who does not respect

my folly die of knife,

of stone or of bolt.

Joglar, may god, who did so much for you,

and who increases your worth each day,

guide you as befits you.

—-

Now the flora shines, perverse,

through the jagged cliffs and through the hills.

Which flora? Snow, ice and frost

which stings and hurts and cuts;

wherefore I can’t hear anymore calls, cries, tweets and whistles

among leafage, branches and twigs.

But I am kept green and merry by Joy

now that I see wither the felons and the bad.

For now I so reverse [things]

that fair plains look to me like a hill

and I mistake flowers for frost

and, through cold, heat appears to me to cut

and the thunder I believe to sing and whistle

and leafage seem to me to cover the twig.

I am so firmly bound in joy

that, to me, nothing looks bad.

But a crowd grown perverse,

as if it were brought up among the hills

plagues me far more than the frost:

for each one of their tongues cuts

and speaks softly, as in whistles;

and it doesn’t avail [hitting them] with staves and twigs,

nor do threats; for they call joy

doing what makes people call them bad.

I cannot by kept by cold nor by frost,

nor by plain or hill,

from kissing you, reverse,

lady for whom I sing and whistle,

but by powerlessness too much am I cut [down];

your beautiful eyes are the twig

that punishes my heart so much with joy

that, towards you, my intentions don’t dare be bad.

I have gone about like a perverse

thing, searching crags and dales and hills,

as distressed as one whom frost

bites and batters and cuts:

but I am not won by songs and whistles

more than a foolish student is won by twigs.

But now – god be praised – I am harboured by Joy

in spite of the slanderers, captious and bad.

Let my verse go – for I rerverse

it so that it can’t be stopped by wood or hill –

there where one doesn’t feel the frost,

nor cold has power enough to cut.

May someone tersely sing and whistle

it to my lady, and may it sprout [a new] twig

in her heart; let him be one who can sing nobly and with joy

for it doesn’t befit a singer who is bad.

Sweet lady, Love and Joy

match us in spite of the bad.

Joglar, I have much less joy:

since I don’t see you, I look bad.

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Biography – Jean Delville…

The Magical Biography…

This master of esoteric symbolism studied under Barbey d’Aurevilly, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and later became influenced by writer-magician Joséphin Péladan, creator of the Salon de la Rose+Croix where Delville showed regularly (1892-1895). In 1896 he founded the Salon d’Art Idéaliste in Belgium and after being a professor and director at the Glasgow School of Art from 1900 to 1905, taught at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels until 1937.

Delville was profoundly influenced by idealism, Cabbala, magic,Theosophy, and hermetic philosophy and became a follower of Krishnamurti. Reacting against the agnostic skepticism of the age, he felt himself completely devoted to the mission of returning the Divine Mystery to the world through art and poetry.

The Other Biography…

(b Leuven, 19 Jan 1867; d Brussels, 19 Jan 1953). Belgian painter, decorative artist and writer. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, with Jean-François Portaels and the Belgian painter Joseph Stallaert (1825–1903). Among his fellow students were Eugène Laermans, Victor Rousseau and Victor Horta. From 1887 he exhibited at L’Essor, where in 1888 Mother (untraced), which depicts a woman writhing in labour, caused a scandal. Although his drawings of the metallurgists working in the Cockerill factories near Charleroi were naturalistic, from 1887 he veered towards Symbolism: the drawing of Tristan and Isolde (1887; Brussels, Musées Royaux B.-A.), in its lyrical fusion of the two bodies, reveals the influence of Richard Wagner. Circle of the Passions (1889), inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divina commedia , was burnt c. 1914; only drawings remain (Brussels, Musées Royaux B.-A.). Jef Lambeaux copied it for his relief Human Passions (1890–1900; Brussels, Parc Cinquantenaire). Delville became associated with Joséphin Péladan, went to live in Paris and exhibited at the Salons de la Rose+Croix, created there by Péladan (1892–5). A devoted disciple of Péladan, he had his tragedies performed in Brussels and in 1895 painted his portrait (untraced). He exhibited Dead Orpheus (1893; Brussels, Gillion-Crowet priv. col.), an idealized head, floating on his lyre towards reincarnation, and Angel of Splendour (1894; Brussels, Gillion-Crowet priv. col.), a painting of great subtlety.

(Jean Delville – Orpheus)

(Charles Rickett – Oedipus and the Sphinx)

Wednesday, would ya believe it? We are going semi-Symbolist on the subject today…

Have Fun!

Gwyllm

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On the Menu

Interesting Stuff…

The Links

Robert Anton Wilson Part 1(at the Avalon Book Store in Santa Cruz circa 1990)

Welsh Fairy Rings

The Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé

Biography of Stéphane Mallarmé

Art Illustrations: Charles Rickett

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Interesting Stuff….

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The Links:

The Hum is Back

BirdFest approaches amid ivory-billed enthusiasm

New Orchid species discovered in rain forest

Mexican archeologists find largest Aztec figure

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Robert Anton Wilson Part 1

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Welsh Fairy Rings

The Prophet Jones and his Works–The Mysterious Languages of the Tylwyth Teg–The Horse in Welsh Folk-Lore–Equestrian Fairies–Fairy Cattle, Sheep, Swine etc.–The Flying Fairies of Bedwellty–The Fairy Sheepfold at Cae’r Cefn.

I.

THE circles in the grass of green fields, which are commonly called fairy rings, are numerous in Wales, and it is deemed just as well to keep out of them, even in our day. The peasantry no longer believe that the fairies can be seen dancing there, nor that the cap of invisibility will fall on the head of one who enters the circle; but they do believe that the fairies, in a time not long gone, made these circles with the tread of their tripping feet, and that some misfortune will probably befall any person intruding upon this forbidden ground. An old man at Peterstone-super-Ely told me he well remembered in his childhood being warned by his mother to keep away from the fairy rings. The counsel thus given him made so deep an impression on his mind, that he had never in his life entered one. He remarked further, in answer to a question, that he had never walked under a ladder, because it was unlucky to walk under a ladder. This class of superstitions is a very large one, and is encountered the world over; and the fairy rings seem to fall into this class, so far as present-clay belief in Wales is concerned.

II.

Allusion has been made in the preceding pages to the Prophet Jones, and as some account of this personage is imperatively called for in a work treating of Welsh folk-lore, I will give it here, before citing his remarks respecting fairy circles. Edmund Jones, ‘of the Tranch,’ was a dissenting minister, noted in Monmouthshire in the first years of the present century for his fervent piety and his large credulity with regard to fairies and all other goblins. He was for many years pastor of the congregation of Protestant Dissenters at the Ebenezer Chapel, near Pontypool, and lived at a place called ‘The Tranch,’ near there. He wrote and published two books, one an ‘Account of the Parish of Aberystruth,’ printed at Trevecca; the other a ‘Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the County of Monmouth and the Principality of Wales,’ printed at Newport; and they have been referred to by most writers on folk-lore who have attempted any. account of Welsh superstitions during the past half-century; but the books are extremely rare, and writers who have quoted from them have generally been content to do so at second-hand. Keightley [‘Fairy Mythology,’ 412] quoting from the ‘Apparitions,’ misprints the author’s name ‘Edward Jones of the Tiarch,’ and accredits the publication to ‘the latter half of the eighteenth century,’ whereas it was published in 1813. Keightley’s quotations are taken from Croker, who himself had never seen the book’; but heard of it through a Welsh friend. It is not in the library of the British Museum, and I know of but a few copies in Wales; the one I saw is at Swansea. The author of these curious volumes was called the Prophet Jones, because of his gift of prophecy–so a Welshman in Monmouthshire told me. In my informant’s words, He was noted in his district for foretelling things. He would, for instance, be asked to preach at some anniversary, or quarterly meeting, and he would answer, “I cannot, on that day; the rain will descend in torrents, and there will be no congregation.” He would give the last mite he possessed to the needy, and tell his wife, “God will send a messenger with food and raiment at nine o’clock tomorrow. ” And so it would be.’ He was a thorough-going believer in Welsh fairies, and full of indignant scorn toward all who dared question their reality. To him these phantoms were part and parcel of the Christian faith, and those who disbelieved in them were denounced as Sadducees and infidels.

III.

With regard to the fairy rings, Jones held that the Bible alludes to them, Matt. xii. 43 ‘The fairies dance in circles in dry places; and the Scripture saith that the walk of evil spirits is in dry places.’ They favour the oak-tree, and the female oak especially, partly because of its more wide-spreading branches and deeper shade, partly because of the ‘superstitious use made of it beyond other trees in the days of the Druids. Formerly, it was dangerous to cut down a female oak in a fair dry place. ‘Some were said to lose their lives by it, by a strange aching pain which admitted of no remedy, as one of my ancestors did; but now that men have more knowledge and faith, this effect follows not.’ William Jenkins was for a long time the schoolmaster at Trefethin church, in Monmouthshire, and coming home late in the evening, as he usually did, he often saw the fairies under an oak within two or three fields from the church. He saw them more often on Friday evenings than any other. At one time he went to examine the ground about this oak, and there he found the reddish circle wherein the fairies danced, ‘such as have often been seen under the female oak, called Brenhin-bren.’ They appeared more often to an uneven number of persons, as one, three, five, &c.; and oftener to men than to women. Thomas William Edmund, of Hafodafel, ‘an honest pious man, who often saw them,’ declared that they appeared with one bigger than the rest going before them in the company. They were also heard talking together in a noisy, jabbering way; but no one could distinguish the words. They seemed, however, to be a very disputatious race; insomuch, indeed, that there was a proverb in some parts of Wales to this effect: ‘Ni chytunant hwy mwy na Bendith eu Mammau,’ (They will no more agree than the fairies).

IV.

This observation respecting the mysterious language used by fairies recalls again the medieval story of Elidurus. The example of fairy words there given by Giraldus is thought by the learned rector of Llanarmon [Rev. Peter Roberts, ‘Cambrian Popular Antiquities,’ 195. (1815)] to be ‘a mixture of Irish and Welsh. The letter U, with which each of the words begins, is, probably, no more than the representative of an indistinct sound like the E mute of the French, and which those whose language and manners are vulgar often prefix to words indifferently. If, then, they be read dor dorum, and halgein dorum, dor and halgein are nearly dwr (or, as it is pronounced, door) and halen, the Welsh words for water and salt respectively. Dorum therefore is equivalent to “give me,” and the Irish expression for give me” is thorum; the Welsh dyro i mi. The order of the words, however, is reversed. The order should be thorum dor, and thorum halen in Irish, and in Welsh dyro i mi ddwr, and dyro i mi halen, but was, perhaps, reversed intentionally by the narrator, to make his tale the more marvellous.’

V.

The horse plays a very active part in Welsh fairy tales. Not only does his skeleton serve for Mary Lwyds [See Index] and the like, but his spirit flits. The Welsh fairies seem very fond of going horseback. An old woman in the Vale of Neath told Mrs. Williams, who told Thomas Keightley, that she had seen fairies to the number of hundreds, mounted on little white horses, not bigger than dogs, and riding four abreast. This was about dusk, and the fairy equestrians passed quite close to her, in fact less than a quarter of a mile away. Another old woman asserted that her father had often seen the fairies riding in the air on little white horses; but he never saw them come to the ground. He heard their music sounding in the air as they galloped by. There is a tradition among the Glamorgan peasantry of a fairy battle fought on the mountain between Merthyr and Aberdare, in which the pigmy combatants were on horseback. There appeared to be two armies, one of which was mounted on milk-white steeds, and the other on horses of jet-black. They rode at each other with the utmost fury, and their swords could be seen flashing in the air like so many penknife blades. The army on the white horses won the day, and drove the black-mounted force from the field. The whole scene then disappeared in a light mist.

VI.

In the agricultural districts of Wales, the fairies are accredited with a very complete variety of useful animals; and Welsh folk-lore, both modern and medieval, abounds with tales regarding cattle, sheep, horses, poultry, goats, and other features of rural life. Such are the marvellous mare of Teirnyon, which foaled every first of May, but whose colt was always spirited away, no man knew whither the Ychain Banog, or mighty oxen, which drew the water-monster out of the enchanted lake, and by their lowing split the rocks in twain; the lambs of St. Melangell, which at first were hares, and ran frightened under the fair saint’s robes; the fairy cattle which belong to the Gwraig Annwn; the fairy sheep of Cefn Rhychdir, which rose up out of the earth and vanished into the sky; even fairy swine, which the hay-makers of Bedwellty beheld flying through the air. To some of these traditions reference has already been made; others will be mentioned again. Welsh mountain sheep will run like stags, and bound from crag to crag like wild goats; and as for Welsh swine, they are more famed in Cambrian romantic story than almost any other animal that could be named. Therefore the tale told by Rev. Roger Rogers, of the parish of Bedwellty, sounds much less absurd in Wales than it might elsewhere. It relates to a very remarkable and odd sight, seen by Lewis Thomas Jenkin’s two daughters, described as virtuous and good young women, their father a substantial freeholder; and seen not only by them but by the man-servant and the maid-servant, and by two of the neighbours, viz., Elizabeth David, and Edmund Roger. All these six people were on a certain day making hay in a field called Y Weirglodd Fawr Dafolog, when they plainly beheld a company of fairies rose up out of the earth in the shape of a flock of sheep; the same being about a quarter of a mile distant, over a hill, called Cefn Rhychdir; and soon the fairy flock went out of sight, as if they vanished in the air. Later in the day they all saw this company of fairies again, but while to two of the haymakers the fairies appeared as sheep, to others they appeared as greyhounds, and to others as swine, and to others as naked infants. Whereupon the Rev. Roger remarks:

‘The sons of infidelity are very unreasonable not to believe the testimonies of so many witnesses.’

VII.

The Welsh sheep, it is affirmed, are the only beasts which will eat the grass that grows in the fairy rings; all other creatures avoid it, but the sheep eat it greedily, hence the superiority of Welsh mutton over any mutton in the wide world. The Prophet Jones tells of the sheepfold of the fairies, which he himself saw–a circumstance to be accorded due weight, the judicious reader will at once perceive, because as a habit Mr. Jones was not specially given to seeing goblins on his own account. He believes in them with all his heart, but it is usually a, friend or acquaintance who has seen them. In this instance, therefore, the exception is to be noted sharply. He thus tells the tale:

If any think I am too credulous in these relations, and speak of things of which I myself have had no experience, I must let them know they are mistaken. For when a very young boy, going with my aunt, early in the morning, but after sun-rising, from Hafodafel towards my father’s house at Pen-y-Llwyn, at the end of the upper field of Cae’r Cefn, … I saw the likeness of a sheepfold, with the door towards the south, … and within the fold a company of many people. Some sitting down, and some going in, and coming out, bowing their heads as they passed under the branch over the door. … I well remember the resemblance among them of a fair woman with a high-crown hat and a red jacket, who made a better appearance than the rest, and whom I think they seemed to honour. I still have a pretty clear idea of her white face and well-formed countenance. The men wore white cravats. . . . I wondered at my aunt, going before me, that she did not look towards them, and we going so near them. As for me, I was loth to speak until I passed them some way, and then told my aunt what I had seen, at which she wondered, and said I dreamed. . . . There was no fold in that place. There is indeed the ruins of some small edifice in that place, most likely a fold, but so old that the stones are swallowed up, and almost wholly crusted over with earth and grass.’

This tale has long been deemed a poser by the believers in Cambrian phantoms; but there is something to be said on the side of doubt. Conceding that the Reverend Edmund Jones, the dissenting minister, was an honest gentleman who meant to tell truth, it is still possible that Master Neddy Jones, the lad, could draw a long bow like another boy; and that having seen, possibly, some gypsy group (or possibly nothing whatever) he embellished his tale to excite wonderment, as boys do. Telling a fictitious tale so often that one at last comes to believe it oneself, is a well-known mental phenomenon.

VIII.

The only other instance given by the Prophet Jones as from the depths of his own personal experience, is more vague in its particulars than the preceding, and happened when he had presumably grown to years of discretion. He was led astray, it appears, by the Old Woman of the Mountain, on Llanhiddel Bryn, near Pontypool–an eminence with which he was perfectly well acquainted, and which is no more than a mile and a half long and about half a mile broad.’ But as a result of his going astray, he came to a house where he had never been before; and being deeply moved by his uncanny experience, ‘offered to go to prayer, which they admitted. . . . I was then about twenty-three years of age and had begun to preach the everlastng gospel. They seemed to admire that a person so young should be so warmly disposed; few young men of my age being religious in this country then. Much good came into this house and still continues in it. . . . So the old hag got nothing by leading me astray that time.’

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(Charles Rickett – Orpheus and Eurydice )

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The Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé

Sigh (Soupir)

My soul rises towards your brow, o calm sister,

On which dreams a bespeckled autumn,

And toward the changing sky of your angelic eye

It rises, as in a melancholy garden

A faithful white fountain spray sighs towards the blue sky

– Toward the tender blue sky of October, pale and pure,

Reflecting its infinite languor in the great pools

of the fountain, and trailing a long languid yellow sunbeam

On the still water, where leaves In their tawny death

drift before the wind and trace a cold wake.

—-

SEA-WIND

The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read.

Flight, only flight! I feel that birds are wild to tread

The floor of unknown foam, and to attain the skies!

Nought, neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,

Shall hold this heart that bathes in waters its delight,

O nights! nor yet my waking lamp, whose lonely light

Shadows the vacant paper, whiteness profits best,

Nor the young wife who rocks her baby on her breast.

I will depart! O steamer, swaying rope and spar,

Lift anchor for exotic lands that lie afar!

A weariness, outworn by cruel hopes, still clings

To the last farewell handkerchief’s last beckonings!

And are not these, the masts inviting storms, not these

That an awakening wind bends over wrecking seas,

Lost, not a sail, a sail, a flowering isle, ere long?

But, O my heart, hear thou, hear thou, the sailors’ song!

—–

Apparition

La lune s’attristait. Des sйraphins en pleurs

Rкvant, l’archet aux doigts, dans le calme des fleurs

Vaporeuses, tiraient de mourantes violes

De blancs sanglots glissant sur l’azur des corolles.

—C’йtait le jour bйni de ton premier baiser.

Ma songerie aimant а me martyriser

s’enivrait savamment du parfum de tristesse

Que mкme sans regret et sans dйboire laisse

La cueillaison d’un Rкve au coeur qui l’a cueilli.

J’errais donc, l’oeil rivй sur le pavй vieilli

Quand avec du soleil aux cheveux, dans la rue

Et dans le soir, tu m’es en riant apparue

Et j’ai cru voir la fйe au chapeau de clartй

Qui jadis sur mes beaux sommeils d’enfant gвtй

Passait, laissant toujours de ses mains mal fermйes

Neiger de blancs bouquets d’йtoiles parfumйes.

—-

Afternoon of a Faun

These nymphs that I would perpetuate:

so clear

And light, their carnation, that it floats in the air

Heavy with leafy slumbers.

Did I love a dream?

My doubt, night’s ancient hoard, pursues its theme

In branching labyrinths, which being still

The veritable woods themselves, alas, reveal

My triumph as the ideal fault of roses.

Consider…

whether the women of your glosses

Are phantoms of your fabulous desires!

Faun, the illusion flees from the cold, blue eyes

Of the chaster nymph like a fountain gushing tears:

But the other, all in sighs, you say, compares

To a hot wind through your fleece that blows at noon?

No! through the motionless and weary swoon

Of stifling heat that suffocates the morning,

Save from my flute, no waters murmuring

In harmony flow out into the groves;

And the only wind on the horizon no ripple moves,

Exhaled from my twin pipes and swift to drain

The melody in arid drifts of rain,

Is the visible, serene and fictive air

Of inspiration rising as if in prayer.

Relate, Sicilian shores, whose tranquil fens

My vanity disturbs as do the suns,

Silent beneath the brilliant flowers of flame:

“That cutting hollow reeds my art would tame,

I saw far off, against the glaucous gold

Of foliage twined to where the springs run cold,

An animal whiteness languorously swaying;

To the slow prelude that the pipes were playing,

This flight of swans — no! naiads — rose in a shower

Of spray…”

Day burns inert in the tawny hour

And excess of hymen is escaped away —

Without a sign, from one pined for the primal A:

And so, beneath a flood of antique light,

As innocent as are the lilies white,

To my first ardours I wake alone.

Besides sweet nothings by their lips made known,

Kisses that only mark their perfidy,

My chest reveals an unsolved mystery…

The toothmarks of some strange, majestic creature:

Enough! Arcana such as these disclose their nature

Only through vast twin reeds played to the skies,

Then, instrument of flights, Syrinx malign,

At lakes where you attend me, bloom once more!

Long shall my discourse from the echoing shore

Depict those goddesses: by masquerades,

I’ll strip the veils that sanctify their shades;

And when I’ve sucked the brightness out of grapes,

To quell the flood of sorrow that escapes,

I’ll lift the empty cluster to the sky,

Avidly drunk till evening has drawn nigh,

And blow in laughter through the luminous skins.

Let us inflate our MEMORIES, O nymphs.

“Piercing the reeds, my darting eyes transfix,

Plunged in the cooling waves, immortal necks,

And cries of fury echo through the air;

Splendid cascades of tresses disappear

In shimmering jewels. Pursuing them, I find

There, at my feet, two sleepers intertwined,

Bruised in the languor of duality,

Their arms about each other heedlessly.

I bear them, still entangled, to a height

Where frivolous shadow never mocks the light

And dying roses yield the sun their scent,

That with the day our passions might be spent.”

I adore you, wrath of virgins-fierce delight

Of the sacred burden’s writhing naked flight

From the fiery lightning of my lips that flash

With the secret terror of the thirsting flesh:

From the cruel one’s feet to the heart of the shy,

Whom innocence abandons suddenly,

Watered in frenzied or less woeful tears.

“Gay with the conquest of those traitorous fears,

I sinned when I divided the dishevelled

Tuft of kisses that the gods had ravelled.

For hardly had I hidden an ardent moan

Deep in the joyous recesses of one

(Holding by a finger, that her swanlike pallor

From her sister’s passion might be tinged with colour,

The little one, unblushingly demure),

When from my arms, loosened by death obscure,

This prey, ungrateful to the end, breaks free,

Spurning the sobs that still transported me.”

Others will lead me on to happiness,

Their tresses knotted round my horns, I guess.

You know, my passion, that crimson with ripe seeds,

Pomegranates burst in a murmur of bees,

And that our blood, seized by each passing form,

Flows toward desire’s everlasting swarm.

In the time when the forest turns ashen and gold

And the summer’s demise in the leaves is extolled,

Etna! when Venus visits her retreat,

Treading your lava with innocent feet,

Though a sad sleep thunders and the flame burns cold.

I hold the queen!

Sure punishment…

No, but the soul,

Weighed down by the body, wordless, struck dumb,

To noon’s proud silence must at last succumb:

And so, let me sleep, oblivious of sin,

Stretched out on the thirsty sand, drinking in

The bountiful rays of the wine-growing star!

Couple, farewell; I’ll see the shade that now you are.

—-

Great French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme was born in Paris in 1842. He began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Charles Baudelaire. His first poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s.

The work of the Stephane Mallarme has often been considered the best example of “pure poetry.” Mallarme dealt in metaphorical obliquities and attempted to practice alchemy with words — to create a kind of poetry where the word as symbol would have a new mobility and would achieve new intensities and refinements of meaning.

Mallarme’s most well known poems are L’Apres Midi D’un Faun (The Afternoon of a Faun) (1865), which inspired Debussy’s tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by Manet. Among his other works are Herodiade (1896) and Toast Funebre (A Funeral Toast), which was written in memory of the author Theopile Gautier. Mallarme’s later works include the experimental poem Un Coup de Des (1914), published posthumously.

From the 1880s Mallarme was the center of a group of french writers in Paris, including Andre Gide and Paul Valery, to whom he communicated his ideas on poetry and art. According to his theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lies the essence of perfect forms and it is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarme’s poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. Each poem is build around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists on subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. Mallarme’s vers libre and word music shaped the 1890s Decadent movement.

Debussy’s tone poem The Afternoon of a Faun, and the ballet immortalized by Nijinski, are based on a famous poem of Mallarme , while the visual pattern of his poem A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance foreshadowed the typographical experimentation of contemporary poetry. Certain of Mallarme’s aesthetic theories parallel those of the abstract painters of today, while his poetical syntax can be compared to the technique of the Cubists.

For the rest of his life Mallarme devoted himself to putting his literary theories into practice and writing his Grand Oeuvre (Great Work). Mallarme died in Paris on September 9, 1898 without completing this work.

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(Charles Rickett – Bacchus in India)

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On The Menu

Garmarna

A letter worth reading

Anniversary – Comments etc…

The Links

The Unquiet Dead – Lady Gregory

Poetry: Fredrico Garcia Lorca

Art: The Symbolist School

Enjoy Your Visit!

______

Garamarna

________________

(From our friend Steve in Olympia…)

A letter worth reading:

Thenac, France — Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh recently wrote a handwritten

letter to US President George W. Bush about a dream he had of his

brother. He shared this dream of his with the President and implored

Mr Bush to rethink the situation in the Middle East. Here is the

letter in full.

Honorable George W. Bush

The White House

Washington DC, USA

Plum Village

Le Pey 24240

Thenac, France

Dear Mr President

Last night, I saw my brother (who died two weeks ago in the USA)

coming back to me in a dream. He was with all his children. He told

me, “Let’s go home together.” After a millisecond of hesitation, I

told him joyfully, “Ok, let’s go.”

Waking up from that dream at 5 am this morning, I thought of the

situation in the Middle East; and for the first time, I was able to

cry. I cried for a long time, and I felt much better after about one

hour. Then I went to the kitchen and made some tea. While making tea,

I realized that what my brother had said is true: our home is large

enough for all of us. Let us go home as brothers and sisters.

Mr. President, I think that if you could allow yourself to cry like I

did this morning, you will also feel much better. It is our brothers

that we kill over there. They are our brothers, God tells us so, and

we also know it. They may not see us as brothers because of their

anger, their misunderstanding, and their discrimination. But with

some awakening, we can see things in a different way, and this will

allow us to respond differently to the situation. I trust God in you;

I trust Buddha nature in you.

Thank you for reading.

In gratitude and with brotherhood,

Thich Nhat Hanh

Plum Village

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What We Are Reading…

Picked this up Monday Night at Powells’… I intend to read it through from cover to cover. Mary got Alice in Wonderland (we may be doubling up on this… somewhere on the bookshelves, somewhere….) Rowan got the Oxfords’ Celtic Mythology Dictionary.

________

As it was our Anniversary, we went out for dinner, and a drink at the local Bridgeport Pub. They have changed menus… and the judgement is still out on that. Still, their ales are marvelous. If you come to Portland, let me take you there!

After the pub we wandered over to Powells’ (see above). Nothing like a book store. They vibrate, they really do. I am always amazed at the worlds that open up when I walk through just looking at the various books, and all of the lives that constructed these wonders, and all the lives touched in some way by these different authors…

All in all it was a very quiet day here in Portland, rain, sun, rain….some work in the morning, then onto car repairs, dog wash, wandering with Mz Mary in our local shopping disttrict.

____________

The Links:

Cultural Infiltration vs. Cultural Contamination and Little Green Men

‘Jolted’ Fish Gave Early Warning Of Hawaii Quake

A natural solution

Celestial Siblings

________________

Just in time for Samhain…

The Unquiet Dead – Lady Gregory

A GOOD many years ago when I was but beginning my study of the folk-lore of belief, I wrote somewhere that if by an impossible miracle every trace and memory of Christianity could be swept out of the world, it would not shake or destroy at all the belief of the people of Ireland in the invisible world, the cloud of witnesses, in immortality and the life to come. For them the veil between things seen and unseen has hardly thickened since those early days of the world when the sons of God mated with the daughters of men; when angels spoke with Abraham in Hebron or with Columcille in the oakwoods of Derry, or when as an old man at my own gate told me they came and visited the Fianna, the old heroes of Ireland, “because they were so nice and so respectable.” Ireland has through the centuries kept continuity of vision, the vision it is likely all nations possessed in the early days of faith. Here in Connacht there is no doubt as to the continuance of life after death. The spirit wanders for a while in that intermediate region to which mystics and theologians have given various names, and should it return and become visible those who loved it will not be afraid, but will, as I have already told, put a light in the window to guide the mother home to her child, or go out into the barley gardens in the hope of meeting a son. And if the message brought seems hardly worth the hearing, we may call to mind what Frederic Myers wrote of more instructed ghosts:

“If it was absurd to listen to Kepler because he bade the planets move in no perfect circles but in undignified ellipses, because he hastened and slackened from hour to hour what ought to be a heavenly body’s ideal and unwavering speed; is it not absurder still to refuse to listen to these voices from afar, because they come stammering and wandering as in a dream confusedly instead of with a trumpet’s call? Because spirits that bending to earth may undergo perhaps an earthly bewilderment and suffer unknown limitations, and half remember and hall forget?”

And should they give the message more clearly who knows if it would be welcome? For the old Scotch story goes that when S. Columcille’s brother Dobhran rose up from his grave and said, “Hell is not so bad as people say,” the Saint cried out, “Clay, clay on Dobhran!” before he could tell any more.

I was told by Mrs. Dennehy:

Those that mind the teaching of the clergy say the dead go to Limbo first and then to Purgatory and then to hell or to heaven. Hell is always burning and if you go there you never get out; but these that mind the old people don’t believe, and I don’t believe, that there is any hell. I don’t believe God Almighty would make Christians to put them into hell afterwards.

It is what the old people say, that after death the shadow goes wandering, and the soul is weak, and the body is taking a rest. The shadow wanders for a while and it pays the debts it had to pay, and when it is free it puts out wings and flies to Heaven.

An Aran Man:

There was an old man died, and after three days he appeared in the cradle as a baby; they knew him by an old look in his face, and his face being long and other things. An old woman that came into the house saw him, and she said, “He won’t be with you long, he had three deaths to die, and this is the second,” and sure enough he died at the end of six years.

Mrs. Martin:

There was a man beyond when I lived at Ballybron, and it was said of him that he was taken away-up before God Almighty. But the blessed Mother asked for grace for him for a year and a day. So he got it. I seen him myself, and many seen him, and at the end of the year and a day he died. And that man ought to be happy now anyway. When my own poor little girl was drowned in the well, I never could sleep but fretting, fretting, fretting. But one day when one of my little boys was taking his turn to serve the Mass he stopped on his knees without getting up. And Father Boyle asked him what did he see and he looking up. And he told him that he could see his little sister in the presence of God, and she shining like the sun. Sure enough that was a vision He had sent to comfort us. So from that day I never cried nor fretted any more.

A Herd:

Do you believe Roland Joyce was seen? Well, he was. A man I know told me he saw him the night of his death, in Esserkelly where he had a farm, and a man along with him going through the stock. And all of a sudden a train came into the field, and brought them both away like a blast of wind.

And as for old Parsons Persse of Castleboy, there’s thousands of people has seen him hunting at night with his horses and his hounds and his bugle blowing. There’s no mistake at all about him being there.

An Aran Woman:

There was a girl in the middle island had died, and when she was being washed, and a priest in the house, there flew by the window the whitest bird that ever was seen. And the priest said to the father: “Do not lament, unless what you like, your child’s happy for ever!”

Mrs. Casey:

Near the strand there were two little girls went out to gather cow-dung. And they sat down beside a bush to rest themselves, and there they heard a groan Corning from under the ground. So they ran home as fast as they could. And they were told when they went again to bring a man with them.

So the next time they went they brought a man with them, and they hadn’t been sitting there long when they heard the saddest groan that ever you heard. So the man bent down and asked what was it. And a voice from below said, “Let some one shave me and get me out of this, for I was never shaved after dying.” So the man went away, and the next day he brought soap and all that was needful and there he found a body lying laid out on the grass. So he shaved it, and with that wings came and carried it up to high heaven.

A Chimney-sweep:

I don’t believe in all I hear, or I’d believe in ghosts and faeries, with all the old people telling you stories about them and the priests believing in them too. Surely the priests believe in ghosts, and tell you that they are souls that died in trouble. But I have been about the country night and day, and I remember when I used to have to put my hand out at the top of every chimney in Coole House; and I seen or felt nothing to frighten me, except one night two rats caught in a trap at Roxborough; and the old butler came down and beat me with a belt for the scream I gave at that. But if I believed in any one coming back, it would be in what you often hear, of a mother coming back to care for her child.

And there’s many would tell you that every time you see a tree shaking there’s a ghost in it

Old Lambert of Dangan was a terror for telling stories; he told me long ago how he was near the Piper’s gap on Ballybrit racecourse, and he saw one riding to meet him, and it was old Michael Lynch of Ballybrista, that was dead long before, and he never would go on the racecourse again. And he had heard the car with headless horses driving through Loughrea. From every part they are said to drive, and the place they are all going to is Benmore, near Loughrea, where there is a ruined dwelling-house and an old forth. And at Mount Mahon a herd told me the other day he often saw old Andrew Mahon riding about at night. But if I was a herd and saw that I’d hold my tongue about it.

Mrs. Casey:

At the graveyard of Drumacoo often spirits do he seen. Old George Fitzgerald is seen by many. And when they go up to the stone he’s sitting on, he’ll be sitting somewhere else.

There was a man walking in the wood near there, and he met a woman, a stranger, and he said “Is there anything I can do for you?” For he thought she was some countrywoman gone astray. “There is,” says she. “Then come home with me,” says he, “and tell me about it.” “I can’t do that,” says she, “but what you can do is this, go tell my friends I’m in great trouble, for twenty times in my life I missed going to church, and they must say twenty Masses for me now to deliver me, but they seem to have forgotten me. And another thing is,” says she, “there’s some small debts I left and they’re not paid, and those are helping to keep me in trouble.” Well. the man went on and he didn’t know what in the world to do, for he couldn’t know who she was, for they are not permitted to tell their name. But going about visiting at country houses he used to tell the story, and at last it came out she was one of the Shannons. For at a house he was telling it at they remembered that an old woman thev had. died a year ago, and that she used to be running un little debts unknown to them. So they made inquiry at Findlater’s and at another shop that’s done away with now, and they found tnat sure enough she had left some small debts, not more than ten shillings in each, and when she died no more had been said about it. So they paid these and said the Masses, and shortly after she appeared to the man again. “God bless you now,” she said, “for what you did for me, for now I’m at peace.”

A Tinker’s Daughter:

I heard of what happened to a family in the town. One night a thing that looked like a goose came in. And when they said nothing to it, it went away up the stairs with a noise like lead. Surely if they had questioned it, they’d have found it to be some soul in trouble.

And there was another soul came back that was in trouble because of a ha’porth of salt it owed.

And there was a priest was in trouble and appeared after death, and they had to say Masses for him, because he had done some sort of a crime on a widow.

Mrs. Farley:

One time myself I was at Killinan, at a house of the Clancys’ where the father and mother had died, but it was well known they often come to look after the children. I was walking with another girl through the fields there one evening and I looked up and saw a tall woman dressed all in black, with a mantle of some sort, a wide one, over her head, and the waves of the wind were blowing it off her, so that I could hear the noise of it. All her clothes were black, and had the appearance of being new. And I asked the other girl did she see her, and she said she did not. For two that are together can never see such things, but only one of them. So when I heard she saw nothing I ran as if for my life, and the woman seemed to be coming after me, till I crossed a running stream and she had no power to cross that. And one time my brother was stopping in the same house, and one night about twelve o’clock there came a smell in the house like as if all the dead people were there. And one of the girls whose father and mother had died got up out of her bed, and began to put her clothes on, and they had to lock the doors to stop her from going away out of the house.

There was a woman I knew of that after her death was kept for seven years in a tree m Kinadyfe, and for seven years after that she was kept under the arch of the little bridge beyond Kilchriest, with the water running under her. And whether there was frost or snow she had no shelter from it) not so much as the size of a leaf.

At the end of the second seven years she came to her husband, and he passing the bridge on the way home from Loughrea, and when he felt her near him he was afraid, and he didn’t stop to question her, but hurried on.

So then she came in the evening to the house of her own little girl. But she was afraid when she saw her, and fell down in a faint. And the woman’s sister’s child was in the house, and when the little girl told her what she saw, she said “You must surely question her when she comes again.” So she came again that night, but the little girl was afraid again when she saw her and said nothing. But the third night when she came the sister’s child, seeing her own little girl was afraid, said “God bless you, God bless you.” And with that the woman spoke and said “God bless you for saying that.” And then she told her all that had happened her and where she had been all the fourteen years. And she took out of her dress a black silk handkerchief and said: “I took that from my husband’s neck the day I met him on the road from Loughrea, and this very night I would have killed him, because he hurried away and would not stop to help me, but now that you have helped me I’ll not harm him. But bring with you to Kilmaeduagh, to the graveyard, three cross sticks with wool on them, and three glasses full of salt, and have three Masses said for me; and I’ll appear to you when I am at rest.” And so she did; and it was for no great thing she had done that trouble had been put upon her.

John Cloran:

That house with no roof was made a hospital of in the famine, and many died there. And one night my father was passing by and he saw some one standing all in white, and two men beside him, and he thought he knew one of the men and spoke to him and said “Is that you, Martin?” But he never spoke nor moved. And as to the thing in white, he could not say was it man or woman, but my father never went by that place again at night.

The last person buried in a graveyard has the care of all the other souls until another is to he buried, and then the soul can go and shift for itself. It may be a week or a month or a year, but watch the place it must till another soul comes.

There was a man used to be giving short measure, not giving the full yard, and one time after his death there was a man passing the river and the horse he had would not go into it. And he heard the voice of the tailor saying from the river he had a message to send to his wife, and to tell her not to be giving short measure, or she would be sent to the same place as him-self. There was a hymn made about that.

There was a woman lived in Rathkane, alone in the house, and she told me that one night something came and lay over the bed and gave three great moans. That was all ever she heard in the house.

The shadows of the dead gather round at Samhain time to see is there any one among their friends saying a few Masses for them.

An Islander:

Down there near the point, on the 6th of March, 1883, there was a curragh upset and five boys were drowned. And a man from County Clare told me that he was on the coast that day, and that he saw them walking towards him on the Atlantic.

There is a house down there near the sea, and one day the woman of it was sitting by the fire, and a little girl came in at the door, and a red cloak about her, and she sat down by the fire. And the woman asked her where did she come from, and she said that she had just come from Connemara. And then she went out, and when she was going out the door she made herself known to her sister that was standing in it, and she called out to the mother. And when the mother knew it was the child she had lost near a year before, she ran out to call her, for she wouldn’t for all the world to have not known her when she was there. But she was gone and she never came agam.

There was this boy’s father took a second wife, and he was walking home one evening, and his wife behind him, and there was a great wind blowing, and he kept his head stooped down because of the seaweed coming blowing into his eyes. And she was about twenty paces behind, and she saw his first wife come and walk close beside him, and he never saw her, having his head down, but she kept with him near all the way. And when they got borne, she told the husband who was with him, and with the fright she got she was bad in her bed for two or three day–do you remember that, Martin? She died after, and he has a third wife taken now.

I believe all that die are brought among them, except maybe an odd old person.

A Kildare Woman:

There was a woman I knew sent into the Rotunda Hospital for an operation. And when she was going she cried when she was saying good-bye to her cousin that was a friend of mine, for she felt in her that she would not come back again. And she put her two arms about her going away and said, “If the dead can do any good thing for the living, I’ll do it for you.” And she never recovered, but died in the hospital. And within a few weeks something came on her cousin, my friend, and they said it was her side that was paralysed, and she died. And many said it was no common illness, but that it was the dead woman that had kept to her word.

A Connemara Man:

There was a boy in New York was killed by rowdies, they killed him standing against a lamp-post and he was frozen to it, and stood there till morning. And it is often since that time he was seen in the room and the passages of the house where he used to be living.

And in the house beyond a woman died, and some other family came to live in it; but every night she came back and stripped the clothes off them, so at last they went away.

When some one goes that owes money, the weight of the soul is more than the weight of the body, and it can’t get away and keeps wandering till some one has courage to question it.

Mrs. Casey:

My grandmother told my mother that in her time at Cloughhallymore, there was a woman used to appear in the churchyard of Rathkeale, and that many boys and girls and children died with the fright they got when they saw her.

So there was a gentleman living near was very sorry for all the children dying, and he went to an old woman to ask her was there any way to do away with the spirit that appeared. So she said if any one would have courage to go and to question it, he could do away with it. So the gentleman went at midnight and waited at the churchyard, and he on his horse, and had a sword with him. So presently the shape appeared and he called to it and said, “Tell me what you are?” And it came over to him, and when he saw the face he got such a fright that he turned the horse’s head and galloped away as hard as he could. But after galloping a long time he looked down and what did he see beside him but the woman running and her hand on the horse. So he took his sword and gave a slash at her, and cut through her arm, so that she gave a groan and vanished, and he went on home.

And when he got to the stable and had the lantern lighted, you may think what a start he got when he saw the hand still holding on to the horse, and no power could lift it off. So he went into the house and said his prayers to Almighty God to take it off. And all night long, he could hear moaning and crying about the house. And in the morning when he went out the hand was gone, but all the stable was splashed with blood. But the woman was never seen in those parts again.

A Seaside Man:

And many see the faeries at Knock and there was a carpenter died, and he could be heard all night in his shed making coffins and carts and all sorts of things, and the people are afraid to go near it. There were four boys from Knock drowned five years ago, and often now they are seen walking on the strand and in the fields and about the village.

There was a man used to go out fowling, and one day his sister said to him, “Whatever you do don’t go out tonight and don’t shoot any wild-duck or any birds you see flying-for tonight they are all poor souls travelling.”

An Old Man in Galway Workhouse:

Burke of Carpark’s son died, but he used often to be seen going about afterwards. And one time a herd of his father’s met with him and he said, “Come tonight and help us against the hurlers from the north, for they have us beat twice, and if they beat us a third time, it will be a bad year for Ireland.”

It was in the daytime they had the hurling match through the streets of Gaiway. No one could see them, and no one could go outside the door while it lasted, for there went such a whirl-wind through the town that you could not look through the window.

And he sent a message to his father that he would find some paper he was looking for a few days before, behind a certain desk, between it and the wall, and the father found it there. He would not have believed it was his son the herd met only for that.

A Munster Woman:

I have only seen them myself like dark shadows, but there’s many can see them as they are. Surely they bring away the dead among them.

There was a woman in County Limerick that died after her baby being born. And all the people were in the house when the funeral was to be, crying for her. And the cars and the horses were out on the road. And there was seen among them a carriage full of ladies, and with them the woman was sitting that they were crying for, and the baby with her, and it dressed.

And there was another woman I knew of died, and left a family, and often after, the people saw her in their dreams, and always in rich clothes, though all the clothes she had were given away after she died, for the good of her soul, except maybe her shawl. And her husband married a serving girl after that, and she was hard to the children, and one night the woman came back to her, and had like to throw her out of the window in her nightdress, till she gave a promise to treat the children well, and she was afraid not to treat them well after that.

There was a farmer died and he had done some man out of a saddle, and he came back after to a friend, and gave him no rest till he gave a new saddle to the man he had cheated.

Airs. Casey:

There was a woman my brother told me about and she had a daughter that was red-haired. And the girl got married when she was under twenty, for the mother had no man to tend the land, so she thought best to let her go. And after her baby being born, she never got strong but stopped in the bed, and a great many doctors saw her but did her no good.

And one day the mother was at Mass at the chapel and she got a start, for she thought she saw her daughter come in to the chapel with the same shawl and clothes on her that she had be-fore she took to the bed, but when they came out from the chapel, she wasn’t there. So she went to the house, and asked was she after going out, and what they told her was as if she got a blow, for they said the girl hadn’t ten minutes to live, and she was dead before ten minutes were out And she appears now sometimes; they see her drawing water from the well at night and bringing it into the house, but they find nothing there in the morning.

A Connemara Man:

There was a man had come back from Boston, and one day he was out in the bay, going towards Aran with £3 worth of cable he was after getting from McDonagh’s store in Gaiway. And he was steering the boat, and there were two turf-boats along with him, and all in a minute they saw he was gone, swept off the boat with a wave and it a dead calm.

And they saw him come up once, straight up as if he was pushed, and then he was brought down again and rose no more.

And it was some time after that a friend of his in Boston, and that was coming home to this place, was in a crowd of people out there. And he saw him coming to him and he said, “I heard that you were drowned,” and the man said, “I am not dead, but I was brought here, and when you go home, bring these three guineas to McDonagh in Galway for it’s owned him for the cable I got from him.” And he put the three guineas in his hand and vanished away.

An Old Army Man:

I have seen hell myself. I had a sight of it one time in a vision. It had a very high wall around it, all of metal, and an archway in the wall, and a straight walk into it, just like what would be leading into a gentleman’s orchard, but the edges were not trimmed with box but with red-hot metal. And inside the wall there were cross walks, and I’m not sure what there was to the right, but to the left there was five great furnaces and they full of souls kept there with great chains. So I turned short and went away; and in turning I looked again at the wall and I could see no end to it.

And another time I saw purgatory. It seemed to be in a level place and no walls around it, but it all one bright blaze, and the souls standing in it And they suffer near as much as in hell only there are no devils with them there and they have the hope of heaven.

And I heard a call to me from there “Help me to come out of this!” And when I looked it was a man I used to know in the army, an Irishman and from this country, and I believe him to be a descendant of King O’Connor of Athenry. So I stretched out my hand first but then I called out “I’d be burned in the flames before I could get within three yards of you.” So then he said, “Well, help me with your prayers,” and so I do.

_______

Poetry: Fredrico Garcia Lorca

Little Viennese Waltz

In Vienna there are ten little girls

a shoulder for death to cry on

and a forest of dried pigeons.

There is a fragment of tomorrow

in the museum of winter frost.

There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!

Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,

of itself, of death, and of brandy

that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,

with the armchair and the book of death

down the melancholy hallway,

in the iris’s dark garret,

in our bed that was once the moon’s bed,

and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!

Take this broken-waisted waltz

In Vienna there are four mirrors

in which your mouth and the echoes play.

There is a death for piano

that paints the little boys blue.

There are beggars on the roof.

There are fresh garlands of tears.

Aye, ay, ay, ay!

Take this waltz that dies in my arms.

Because I love you, I love you, my love,

in the attic where children play,

dreaming ancient lights of Hungary

through the noise, the balmy afternoon,

seeing sheep and irises of snow

through the dark silence of your forehead.

Ay, ay, ay ay!

Take this “I will always love you” waltz.

In Vienna I will dance with you

in a costume with a river’s head.

See how the hyacinths line my banks!

I will leave my mouth between your legs,

my soul in photographs and lilies,

and in the dark wake of your footsteps,

my love, my love, I will have to leave

violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons.

—-

Ode to Walt Whitman

By the East River and the Bronx

boys were singing, exposing their waists

with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.

Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks

and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

But none of them could sleep,

none of them wanted to be the river,

none of them loved the huge leaves

or the shoreline’s blue tongue.

By the East River and the Queensboro

boys were battling with industry

and the Jews sold to the river faun

the rose of circumcision,

and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied

herds of bison driven by the wind.

But none of them paused,

none of them wanted to be a cloud,

none of them looked for ferns

or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.

As soon as the moon rises

the pulleys will spin to alter the sky;

a border of needles will besiege memory

and the coffins will bear away those who don’t work.

New York, mire,

New York, mire and death.

What angel is hidden in your cheek?

Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?

Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,

have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,

nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,

nor your thighs pure as Apollo’s,

nor your voice like a column of ash,

old man, beautiful as the mist,

you moaned like a bird

with its sex pierced by a needle.

Enemy of the satyr,

enemy of the vine,

and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth…

Not for a moment, virile beauty,

who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,

dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river

with that comrade who would place in your breast

the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,

man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,

because on penthouse roofs,

gathered at bars,

emerging in bunches from the sewers,

trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,

or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,

the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.

He’s one, too! That’s right! And they land

on your luminous chaste beard,

blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,

crowds of howls and gestures,

like cats or like snakes,

the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,

clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,

the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.

He’s one, too! That’s right! Stained fingers

point to the shore of your dream

when a friend eats your apple

with a slight taste of gasoline

and the sun sings in the navels

of boys who play under bridges.

But you didn’t look for scratched eyes,

nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,

nor frozen saliva,

nor the curves slit open like a toad’s belly

that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces

while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.

You looked for a naked body like a river.

Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,

father of your agony, camellia of your death,

who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.

Because it’s all right if a man doesn’t look for his delight

in tomorrow morning’s jungle of blood.

The sky has shores where life is avoided

and there are bodies that shouldn’t repeat themselves in the dawn.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.

This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.

Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,

war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,

the rich give their mistresses

small illuminated dying things,

and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire

through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.

Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time

a breeze that drowses in the branches.

That’s why I don’t raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,

against the little boy who writes

the name of a girl on his pillow,

nor against the boy who dresses as a bride

in the darkness of the wardrobe,

nor against the solitary men in casinos

who drink prostitution’s water with revulsion,

nor against the men with that green look in their eyes

who love other men and burn their lips in silence.

But yes against you, urban faggots,

tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.

Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies

of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

Always against you, who give boys

drops of foul death with bitter poison.

Always against you,

Fairies of North America,

Pájaros of Havana,

Jotos of Mexico,

Sarasas of Cádiz,

Apios of Seville,

Cancos of Madrid,

Floras of Alicante,

Adelaidas of Portugal.

Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!

Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.

Opening in public squares like feverish fans

or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.

No quarter given! Death

spills from your eyes

and gathers gray flowers at the mire’s edge.

No quarter given! Attention!

Let the confused, the pure,

the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants

close the doors of the bacchanal to you.

And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the Hudson’s banks

with your beard toward the pole, openhanded.

Soft clay or snow, your tongue calls for

comrades to keep watch over your unbodied gazelle.

Sleep on, nothing remains.

Dancing walls stir the prairies

and America drowns itself in machinery and lament.

I want the powerful air from the deepest night

to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,

and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites

that the kingdom of grain has arrived.

—

Ode to Salvador Dali

A rose in the high garden you desire.

A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.

The mountain stripped bare of Impressionist fog,

The grays watching over the last balustrades.

The modern painters in their white ateliers

clip the square root’s sterilized flower.

In the waters of the Seine a marble iceberg

chills the windows and scatters the ivy.

Man treads firmly on the cobbled streets.

Crystals hide from the magic of reflections.

The Government has closed the perfume stores.

The machine perpetuates its binary beat.

An absence of forests and screens and brows

roams across the roofs of the old houses.

The air polishes its prism on the sea

and the horizon rises like a great aqueduct.

Soldiers who know no wine and no penumbra

behead the sirens on the seas of lead.

Night, black statue of prudence, holds

the moon’s round mirror in her hand.

A desire for forms and limits overwhelms us.

Here comes the man who sees with a yellow ruler.

Venus is a white still life

and the butterfly collectors run away.

–

Cadaqués, at the fulcrum of water and hill,

lifts flights of stairs and hides seashells.

Wooden flutes pacify the air.

An ancient woodland god gives the children fruit.

Her fishermen sleep dreamless on the sand.

On the high sea a rose is their compass.

The horizon, virgin of wounded handkerchiefs,

links the great crystals of fish and moon.

A hard diadem of white brigantines

encircles bitter foreheads and hair of sand.

The sirens convince, but they don’t beguile,

and they come if we show a glass of fresh water.

–

Oh Salvador Dali, of the olive-colored voice!

I do not praise your halting adolescent brush

or your pigments that flirt with the pigment of your times,

but I laud your longing for eternity with limits.

Sanitary soul, you live upon new marble.

You run from the dark jungle of improbable forms.

Your fancy reaches only as far as your hands,

and you enjoy the sonnet of the sea in your window.

The world is dull penumbra and disorder

in the foreground where man is found.

But now the stars, concealing landscapes,

reveal the perfect schema of their courses.

The current of time pools and gains order

in the numbered forms of century after century.

And conquered Death takes refuge trembling

in the tight circle of the present instant.

When you take up your palette, a bullet hole in its wing,

you call on the light that brings the olive tree to life.

The broad light of Minerva, builder of scaffolds,

where there is no room for dream or its hazy flower.

You call on the old light that stays on the brow,

not descending to the mouth or the heart of man.

A light feared by the loving vines of Bacchus

and the chaotic force of curving water.

You do well when you post warning flags

along the dark limit that shines in the night.

As a painter, you refuse to have your forms softened

by the shifting cotton of an unexpected cloud.

The fish in the fishbowl and the bird in the cage.

You refuse to invent them in the sea or the air.

You stylize or copy once you have seen

their small, agile bodies with your honest eyes.

You love a matter definite and exact,

where the toadstool cannot pitch its camp.

You love the architecture that builds on the absent

and admit the flag simply as a joke.

The steel compass tells its short, elastic verse.

Unknown clouds rise to deny the sphere exists.

The straight line tells of its upward struggle

and the learned crystals sing their geometries.

–

But also the rose of the garden where you live.

Always the rose, always, our north and south!

Calm and ingathered like an eyeless statue,

not knowing the buried struggle it provokes.

Pure rose, clean of artifice and rough sketches,

opening for us the slender wings of the smile.

(Pinned butterfly that ponders its flight.)

Rose of balance, with no self-inflicted pains.

Always the rose!

–

Oh Salvador Dali, of the olive-colored voice!

I speak of what your person and your paintings tell me.

I do not praise your halting adolescent brush,

but I sing the steady aim of your arrows.

I sing your fair struggle of Catalan lights,

your love of what might be made clear.

I sing your astronomical and tender heart,

a never-wounded deck of French cards.

I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.

I sing the small sea siren who sings to you,

riding her bicycle of corals and conches.

But above all I sing a common thought

that joins us in the dark and golden hours.

The light that blinds our eyes is not art.

Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.

Not the picture you patiently trace,

but the breast of Theresa, she of sleepless skin,

the tight-wound curls of Mathilde the ungrateful,

our friendship, painted bright as a game board.

May fingerprints of blood on gold

streak the heart of eternal Catalunya.

May stars like falconless fists shine on you,

while your painting and your life break into flower.

Don’t watch the water clock with its membraned wings

or the hard scythe of the allegory.

Always in the air, dress and undress your brush

before the sea peopled with sailors and ships.

____________

A riddle from the Middle Ages…

Oft I must strive with wind and wave, Battle them both when under the sea

I feel out the bottom, a foreign land. In lying still I am strong in the strife;

If I fail in that they are stronger than I, And wrenching me loose, soon put me to rout.

They wish to capture what I must keep. I can master them both if my grip holds out,

If the rocks bring succor and lend support, Strength in the struggle. Ask me my name!

(answer: Anchor)

Simonetta Vespucci

________________

Welcome to Monday…

Raining over the weekend here in Portland. The glory days of sunshine are now but a memory. The cat now stays in until spring. He leaves for but a short while, and then back on the couch, or in front of the fire…

Time Together: Today Mary and I have been married for 28 years. I would have never met her if it had not been for our good friend Lizbeth (I swear I will write a long one to you Lizbeth, this week, I promise!) I went to visit Lizbeth when I came back from Germany to London. I walked in, and there was Mary… A happy accident indeed! (BTW – Lizbeth & her Greg just celebrated their 10th! Congratulations to them!)

Hopefully we are off to dinner tonight, with maybe a film before.

On the Menu Today:

Natacha Atlas

The Links

A bit of Imperial History from our friend Diana..

Medieval Riddles…

Troubadours Revisited: Poems & Lyrics From The Sublime to the Bawdy

I hope you enjoy this riddling entry…!

Gwyllm

________________

Natacha Atlas…

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The Links:

Unholy row breaks out after night-school course in Satanism

Why Isn’t the Atmosphere Warming Like the Earth’s Surface?

POLAND: Shadowy being encountered in Pionki [10/10/06]

Does world-record meteorite await unearthing in Kansas?

Science vs. Séance

_________________

A bit of history from our friend Diana…

____________

Another Riddle:

A lonely wanderer, wounded with iron, I am smitten with war-blades, sated with strife,

Worn with the sword-edge; I have seen many battles, Much hazardous fighting, oft without hope

Of comforts or help in the carnage of war Ere I perish and fall in the fighting of men.

The leavings of hammers, the handiwork of smiths, Batter and bite me, hard-eged and sharp;

The brunt of the battle I am doomed to endure. In all the folk-stead no leech could I find

With wort or simple to heal my wounds; But day and night with the deadly blows

The marks of the war-blades double and deepen

(answer: Shield)

Troubadours Revisited: Poems & Lyrics From The Sublime to the Bawdy

From Jaufre Rudel…

When the rill of the fountain

When the rill of the source

turns clear, as is its habit

and the dogrose blossoms

and the nightingale on the bough

performs and repeats and smoothens

and improves its sweet song,

it is time I take mine up again.

Love of a distant land,

for your sake all my heart aches

and I can’t find a remedy

(unless it is your name’s reverberation)

to the ill of lacking sweet love,

in the garden and behind the curtain,

of a longed-for companion.

Since I don’t get a chance all day

it is no wonder I crave for it

because a prettier Christian

never was nor–god forbids it–

a Jewish or Saracen woman.

He is well paid in manna

he who gains some of her love.

My heart desires incessantly

her whom I love the most,

and I believe my will deceives me

since lust takes her off from me;

it is more stinging than a thorn

the pain which joy heals,

so I don’t want anyone to pity me.

When I have time to fantasize about her

then I kiss and hug her;

but then I twist and turn

because it frustrates and fires me

that the flower doesn’t give fruit.

The joy which torments me

abates all my pride.

Without a parchment scroll

I send this poem, singing

in plain Romance language,

to Ugo Bru, through Filhol.

I am happy that people from Poitiers,

Berry and Guyana

are gladdened by her: and the Bretons likewise.

—-

When the nightingale in the woods

When, in the woods, the nightingale

gives love, and requires it, and takes it

and modulates its song in joy

and often admires its mate;

when the brooks are clear, and the meadows gentle,

because of the happiness that reigns over them,

a great joy dwells in my heart.

I long for a friendship

since I don’t know of a worthier joy

than this, which would suit me

if she gave me a present of love;

her shape is full, delicate and gentle

without anything to mar it:

and her good love has a good taste.

I am concerned about this love

whether I am awake or sleeping

for there I have a marvelous joy

because I joyfully enjoy her joy.

But her beauty comes to no avail,

because no friend teaches me

how to taste of her.

I am so gripped by this love

that when I run towards her

I feel like I am walking backwards

and like she is fleeing from me.

And my horse keeps so slow

a pace, that I think I’ll never reach her

unless she wants to wait for me.

Love, I leave you happily

since I pursue something better,

and flee towards such an adventure

that my heart already rejoices in it.

However, because of my Good Warranter,

who wants me, calls me and condescends,

I must split my desire.

He who reigns here in delight

and does not follow god in Bethlehem

I don’t see how he could be valiant,

or achieve salvation,

since I believe, as far as I know,

that only he who is taught by Jesus

can be sure of his schooling.

___

And now… For some of the Bawdy Ones…

I come to you, Sir, with my skirt lifted,

since I have heard your name is the Mounting Lord,

and I was never sated with fucking:

I kept a chaplain for two years,

and his clerics and all his following;

and I have a large, firm and sprightly butt

and a larger cunt than any woman ever.

And I come towards you, Lady, with my trousers lowered,

with a larger cock than any randy donkey,

and will fuck you with such an outburst

that you’ll have to wring your bed-sheets the day after

—and say thereafter that they need to be washed;

Neither I, nor my huge nuts will leave

unless I fuck you until you pass out.

Since you anticipate so much fucking,

I would like to know, Sir, your pride,

since I have armoured my entrance quite well

in order to resist the attack of large testicles;

then I’ll start kicking so much

that you won’t be able to hold to the front hair

and you’ll have to begin again from behind.

Know, my lady, that I agree to all this:

as long as we are together until tomorrow,

I shall ram into your armoured entrance;

then you’ll know whether mine is just boasting,

since I’ll make you cast through your arse

such farts as will sound like they come from a horn

–and your dance shall suit the music.

—

While walking along a shore,

alone, on a bummel,

I saw a mirthful swineherd,

who was watching a herd of pigs;

I went towards her right away,

following the ridge of a fallow.

With her ugly, repulsive body,

swarthy, black like tar

and as fat as a barrel,

each of her breasts

was so large that she looked like an English woman.

Upon seeing her so disgusting,

I was taken aback.

She stayed there dumbly,

and I told her: “Gracious lady,

beautiful thing, and courteously learned,

tell me whether you are a maiden”.

In the meanwhile, under her skirt,

she scratches and rubs with vigour

her misshapen tub of a body:

and, hadn’t the rim of the skirt been there,

all her slit would have been visible!

She then answered,

with a bellowing, hoarse voice:

“Man, what do you want from me?

Get lost, for god’s sake!”

“Lovely girl”, I resumed,

“I have suffered much for your sake,

and therefore I endear you to tell me

willingly what I ask you”.

“Sir, in order to avoid an argument

and to escape a dispute,

on condition that it isn’t blamed on me,

I will tell you this, as much as I can:

no husband nor spouse rules over me,

nor was I ever submitted to a man,

nor was I his table or saddle”.

“Today, girl, you shall be caught red-handed,

since I well know who embraces you”.

“Don’t blame me for the cattleman, poor me!

for I would have been interred

long ago, without his

cheerfulness! He plays his flute so well

he makes me rejoice and renews me!

There doesn’t pass a day he doesn’t drink with me

from the barrel’s bottom, with his mouth,

without trying anything dishonourable,

which between us just doesn’t happen.”

“Swineherd, apparently,

you love him of perfect love?”.

“Oh yes, more than the pig loves acorns

or a true sow cabbage!”

“Sister, you speak so well

that you transpierce me all over.

I endear you that we both go

amuse ourselves among those ferns

before my love-sickness grows”.

“Sir, I don’t think that this May

you will see me go that way:

she who betrays her oaths must drain the bitter cup!”

“Since embroidery without eyelets

is worth little, said I,

let your good heart avail me!”

“You are moving me to great folly,

fair lord, because I love you plenty”.

Therefore she let herself go

so much that I was almost afraid.

“Sister, since you can catch so well,

let’s go place our trap

down there in the early grass”.

She lifts her skirt up

to better walk unhindered,

and leads me under a beech,

and there she bends over.

“On the front side, said I, my girl,

you are too becoming,

so that you shan’t see me, this year,

docking in this port of yours”.

“Since you see that I am playful,

sir, you think about perversions;

and I would rather be struck by lightning

than commit such a grievous sin”.

She walks away and makes her getaway;

she goes with her threadbare skirt,

big enough to look like a cupboard.

But, while crossing a rill, she slips

and deals with it so skillfully

that, with a flick of her jaw,

she falls bottom up.

Upon seeing such an expertise,

I left the place altogether.

Humble Flower, purity

and beauty never leave your side;

and since you are the flower of nobility,

my heart tells and repeats me

that he is a fool who opposes you.

Note: this poem is not as cryptic as one might suppose. The troubadour is one of those several men who dislike having to compare to a series of former lovers. He therefore, while courting a lady whose “side purity never leaves”, goes for an abominably ugly swineherd in the hope she is a virgin. Upon seeing she is not, he proposes to sodomize her instead; she formally refuses, but then “slips” in a convenient position for the practice. Upon seeing the skill with which she goes about it, the troubadour infers she is inured to the practice and goes away. This fairly tasteless piece is interesting for two reasons. First, it treats a fetishist subject in an age (the late XIII century) in which the church reacted with torture and imprisonment even to the most innocent erotic literature. Second, it makes fun of the troubadouric stereotype of the faithful poet who always loves “of perfect love”, of the “pastourelle” genre and even (in the envoi) of religious literature. The choice of the author of remaining anonymous should not surprise anyone.

______________________

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Changes… Changes…

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Article: The poetry of Robert Graves – by Robert Richman

Poetry: Robert Graves…

I hope you enjoy the entry for today!

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The poetry of Robert Graves – by Robert Richman

Originally from The New Criterion home page

I stood beneath the wall/ And there defied them all.

—Robert Graves, in “The Assault Heroic”

At the time of his death in December 1985, at the age of ninety, on the island of Majorca, Robert Graves had long been a legendary figure in the literary world. This was due in part to his immense production: nineteen novels and short-story collections, sixty-three books of nonfiction (including translations), and fifty-six volumes of poetry. Because of this extraordinary productivity, Graves is the only serious writer of our time whose career was on a scale we associate more with the previous century than with our own.

Yet there is another and more important reason why Robert Graves became a figure of legend in the literary world of his time. This was his reputation as a rebel. Graves’s fame as a cranky individualist derives, first of all, from his well-known autobiography, Goodbye to All That, published to coincide with his departure from England in 1929. (He went to Majorca, where he remained until the Spanish Civil War caused him to leave in 1936; ten years later he returned to the island and lived out the rest of his life there.) No reader of Goodbye to All That will forget Graves’s bitter account of his youth in Edwardian England—especially the grim years at Charterhouse, the public school he attended between 1910 and 1914—or his moving portrayal of the war that devastated his generation and almost cost him his life.

Graves was part of the literary generation that was profoundly altered by the war. For some, the response took a political form. In the case of Graves, the war only confirmed what he had learned to despise at school. To him, the nastiness of the generals was a larger and more lethal version of the nastiness of his masters at Charterhouse. As he writes in Goodbye to All That: “We [the soldiers] could no longer see the war as one between trade rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.”

Especially vile to Graves was the generals’ cynical misuse of the army’s regimental pride. His war experiences resulted in Graves’s permanent alienation from his country.

When Graves left England in 1929, however, he was fleeing something more than painful memories. He was also running away from the modern world. Poetry, he said, was his “ruling passion,” and he had come to believe that the modern world had little use for poetry, or for the myths that, in his view, it was derived from. The literary and historical works Graves began producing once he settled in Majorca—works which consistently confounded critics and scholars—were clearly conceived by Graves as a means of avenging himself on the modern world he found so loathsome.

These books were not the only strange things emanating from the island, however. Rumors of a liberated sexual atmosphere in the Graves’s household also filtered to the world beyond Majorca. It was said—correctly—that Graves shared his bed with numerous “muses.” It was also said—incorrectly—that Graves had fathered half the children born on Majorca between 1929 and 1975. So well known were Graves’s emancipated views on such matters that in the Sixties Majorca became a mecca for hippies seeking escape from conventional moral taboos. Some no doubt also came for advice on the proper consumption of hallucinogens, the use of which Graves had advocated in his Oxford Addresses on Poetry (1962).

There are some ironies, to be sure, in Graves’s posture as a rebel. For one thing, although the content of many of his books is unconventional, the writing itself isn’t. The poems are in fact written in a traditional style. His prosody might even be described as conservative. In Goodbye to All That, he attempted to account for his dual literary nature by pointing to his family history. His father’s side of the family, he said, was cold, rational, and “anti-sentimental to the point of insolence,” while his mother’s side was gentle, “gemütlich,” “noble and patient.”

Another irony is that Graves in his own life craved guidance. This is nowhere better seen than in his thirteen-year association with the American poet Laura Riding. In the early Twenties, Riding was affiliated with John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, and with their Fugitive group, which espoused regionalism in literature. Ransom used the occasion of a review in The Fugitive of Graves’s On English Poetry to praise the English poet for his ability to express his “charming personality … without embarrassment in prosodical verse,” something certain unnamed “brilliant minds” (i.e., Pound and Eliot) were, in Ransom’s view, unable to do. At Ransom’s urging Graves initiated a correspondence with Riding in 1924. Two years later she arrived in England and moved into Graves’s house. Graves’s growing attachment to Riding resulted in his separation in 1929 from his first wife, Nancy Nicholson.

The Graves–Riding partnership was a curious one, to say the least. Judging from Martin Seymour-Smith’s biography of Graves, [1] it could easily be characterized by the title of one of Graves’s poems: “Sick Love.” For Graves, Riding was, variously, the incarnation of an ancient Mediterranean moon goddess, the embodiment of the perfection of poetry itself, and a feminist advocating the overthrow of male-dominated society. Whatever role she played, she demanded, and received, total fealty from her subject. The Graves–Riding bond involved far more than Graves’s relinquishing the household to her, or submitting his poems to her for approval, or accepting a subordinate role in their “joint” literary endeavors—all of which he did. The fact is, she treated him, as Tom Matthews, an American writer who stayed with the couple in 1932, observed, “like a dog. There was no prettier way to put it.” Matthews, whose testimony is recorded in Seymour-Smith’s book, wrote that Graves

seemed in a constant swivet of anxiety to please her, to forestall her every wish, like a small boy dancing attendance on a rich aunt of uncertain temper. … Since I admired him and looked up to him as a dedicated poet and a professional writer, his subservience to her and her contemptuous bearing towards him troubled and embarrassed me … she was not so much his mistress as his master.

So enthralled was Graves with Riding that he even emulated her in a (pre-Majorca) 1929 suicide attempt, undertaken because she loved a third party (one Geoffrey Phibbs) and Phibbs loved Nancy Nicholson. Graves leapt from a third-story window after Riding had jumped from the floor above. (This had been preceded by Riding’s drinking Lysol, to no effect.) Graves escaped unscathed; Riding suffered a compound fracture of the spine. According to Seymour-Smith, the police’s grilling of Graves after this incident was “one of the experiences that made him want to leave England.”

The sources of Graves’s idealization of and submission to Laura Riding are well documented in the recently published Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895–1926 by Richard Perceval Graves, the first installment of a proposed three-volume biography of Graves by his nephew. [2] This volume, which is based on heretofore unreleased family letters, diaries, and extracts from a memoir of Robert by Perceval Graves’s father, is a biographical undertaking of a different kind from Seymour-Smith’s. Seymour-Smith’s narrative is a more or less objective rendering of events. Perceval Graves’s book, on the other hand, is a chronology of Robert’s shifting psychological states. As a means of understanding the poetry, this approach leaves much to be desired. But it is invaluable for comprehending the childhood sources of Graves’s bizarre behavior toward Riding. One is certainly given a sense, by both Seymour-Smith and Graves himself in Goodbye to All That, of the moralistic tenor of the Graves family household. “We learned to be strong moralists, and spent much of our time on self-examination and good resolutions,” writes Graves in Goodbye to All That.

But the revelations in those two volumes pale in comparison to what Perceval Graves divulges. It appears the demand for moral perfection in the Graves home was constant and shrill. The letters Robert’s mother wrote to her children at school are the best evidence of this. These letters, none of which are quoted, “were so emotional and intense,” writes Perceval Graves,

that as I read them more than seventy years later I cannot help feeling terribly sad that my father’s generation of the family were subjected to such intense moral pressure. So often, Amy [Graves’s mother] seems to be equating personal worth with the almost impossibly saintly behavior and self-sacrifice which she was accustomed to demand of herself. Any falling short of the highest ideals is greeted with a terrible sorrow, all the more devastating for being couched in such loving language.

The mania for purity pervaded every aspect of the children’s lives. According to Perceval Graves, Robert’s father would become enraged when he saw “a corner of a page folded down to mark a place, or—still worse—a book left open and face down.” The attempt to make the children morally spotless, Graves says in Goodbye to All That, gave him and his siblings “no hint of [the world’s] dirtiness and intrigue and lustfulness.” As Perceval Graves says about this remark: “the very words Robert chooses to describe this show the extent to which he had been affected by [his mother’s] moralizing.” The result is that it was “very hard,” according to Perceval Graves, “For [Robert] to come to terms with the world as it really is.”

This puts the matter too benignly, however. What Graves was left with was a truly disabling horror of reality, particularly sexual reality. The disgust Graves expresses in Goodbye to All That at the soldiers’ custom of picking up local girls offers some indication of this, as does his reaction to a girl’s advances in a Brussels pension in 1913: “I was so frightened,” he said, “I could have killed her.” Seymour-Smith observes that “physical desire and the sexual act, the ‘thing,’ is what terrifies [Graves].”

Graves’s craving for purity was undoubtedly one source of his poetry, in which he creates a timeless realm beyond history. (In Poetic Unreason, his Oxford thesis that was published in 1925, Graves describes poetry as something as “remote and unrealizable an ideal as perfection.”) It also helps one understand Graves’s taste for Laura Riding’s poetry, the principal feature of which is her self-chastisement for not having attained the requisite flawlessness.

Graves’s craving for purity also sheds light on his attraction first to Nancy Nicholson—a feminist crusader—and then to Riding. In both cases, Graves tried to escape the world’s “dirtiness and intrigue and lustfulness” by submitting himself to someone he invested with redemptive, cleansing powers. (So numinous a realm did Riding inhabit that after a point in their relationship she refused to sleep with him.) Riding’s “unquiet nature and propensity to criticize,” says Seymour-Smith, “was something that Graves was no doubt unconsciously seeking out.” Perhaps it is not all that surprising that Graves, who went to such lengths to spurn what he deemed to be the suffocating moralism of England, became involved with strong-minded women like Nicholson and Riding. The fact is, in England or out, Graves could never escape the stern moralism of family, school, or military; he took it with him wherever he went.

Randall Jarrell believed that Graves’s poetry, along with the theory of poetry he constructed around it, was a sublimation of his life with Laura Riding. There is little reason to disagree. At the heart of Graves’s theory is the idea that all “true” poetry is an invocation of the Mother-Goddess who ruled the world up to the thirteenth century B.C. What Mother-Goddess? you might ask. Well, Graves claimed to have discovered evidence of an ancient matriarchal cult while reading for Hercules, My Shipmate (1945), a retelling of the travels of Jason and the Argonauts. With clues taken from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and other anthropological works, Graves concluded that the Mother-Goddess had been ousted by thirteenth-century B.C. invaders of what is now Greece. These invaders installed in her place the Olympian gods. The legacy of this momentous shift in spiritual power is Western civilization as we know it, with its (in Graves’s view) undue emphasis on rationality and order, and distrust of magic and myths—indeed, all forms of “poetic unreason.”

The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Graves’s 1948 study of Britain’s own dethroned Goddess and her connection to the Mediterranean one, is without a doubt the author at his crankiest. In the words of the critic Douglas Day, the book is “a curious blend of fact and fancy, an often impenetrable wilderness of cryptology, obscure learning, and apparently non sequitur reasoning brought to bear on the thesis that has its roots partly in historic fact, partly in generally accepted anthropological hypotheses, and partly in pure poetic intuition.” Suffice to say that Graves’s attempt to prove the existence of this matriarchal religion— which involved him in readings of medieval Welsh poems, analyses of secret Druidic alphabets, musings on ancient tree-worship, and correlations between Greek and Celtic myth—was fervently rejected by anthropologists and literary critics alike. But this never shook Graves’s confidence, for The White Goddess was in his eyes a document of faith. And its debunking by “rational” critics—who (Graves would assert) are products of a patriarchal society and therefore on a covert search-and-destroy mission for every contemporary manifestation of the Goddess—only served to intensify his devotion. It was the same kind of devotion he had evinced for Riding, who appears to have been for Graves a rare embodiment of the long-lost Goddess.

Poetry, an invocation of this beleaguered antique Muse, was, according to Graves, the most meaningful writing a Goddess-worshiper could undertake. As a result, Graves was quite candid about the ancillary role his books of nonfiction and historical fiction played in his life. These volumes, Graves said, were the “show dogs I breed and sell to support the cat.” This does not mean,however, that Graves ever passed up the chance to use these books as a means of correcting the false history propagated by various anti-Goddess forces. In Wife to Mr. Milton (1943), for example, the English poet is portrayed as a ranting Puritan and his wife Marie as the epitome of charm. (The reverse is closer to the truth.) Hercules, My Shipmate, the British title of which is The Golden Fleece, argues that the triumphs of Jason and the Argonauts in the Mediterranean, and their recapture of the fleece, occurred because Jason had been blessed by the White Goddess. Homer’s Daughter (1955), takes off from Samuel Butler’s conviction that the Odyssey was written not by Homer but by the woman who calls herself Nausicaa in the story. Not surprisingly, the books written before Graves’s mythological “discovery”—I, Claudius (1934), Claudius the God (1935), Count Belisarius (1938), and King Jesus (1943)—show a deep need for some redeeming force. Throughout these popular historical novels is Graves’s preoccupation with the unhappy fate of a pure soul in a corrupt and lustful world.

Graves’s rewriting of the past was not his only means of demonstrating his obeisance to Riding and the White Goddess. It can also be seen in his refusal to develop original plots or psychologically persuasive characters. Judging from these novels, at least, it would appear that the muse tolerated from her vassal no extra-poetic invention. “There is one story and one story only,” goes the first line of Graves’s well-known poem “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” and Graves seems to have believed this with all his heart. As entertaining as many of these novels are—I, Claudius, King Jesus, and Count Belisarius are certainly good reads—all have an extremely short imaginative reach.

Most of Graves’s nonfiction is similarly scarred. The underlying assumption of both The Greek Myths (1955) and The Hebrew Myths (1964) is the suppression of the various manifestations of the Goddess in antiquity. Graves’s literary criticism, the bulk of which is collected in The Crowning Privilege (1955), has the same narrow focus. Many of the essays seek to expose the rational impulse that has helped undermine “true” poetry throughout the centuries. As one would expect, Graves detests the poetry of Eliot, Pound, and Stevens. In his view, the motives of these modernist poets are critical, not creative.

Perhaps the most important contribution Graves makes in his criticism is his advocacy of the plain style. In a letter from 1920, Graves declared that he wanted to be “able to write … with as much economy of words & simplicity of expression as possible.” Whatever the other defects of his prose, his loyalty to this principle was unwavering.

The one book that does survive as a prose classic is Goodbye to All That. Graves’s autobiography, which was revised thoroughly in 1957—the original edition was written hastily and poorly—is without a doubt his most important book. It captures the spirit of rebellion—of a young man’s bursting free of the shackles of his elders—in a way that few other books of our time do. In the very first pages, Graves writes:

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

This refreshingly heady swagger continues to the end of the book.

Nevertheless, posterity will remember Graves best not as a novelist, mythographer, or biographical legend, but as a poet. Graves himself insisted on this, and his critics have obliged. But even if they are right to focus principally on the poetry—for it is the part of Graves’s oeuvre that has the greatest claim on our attention—many have been inclined to make extravagant and faulty judgments of it. Jarrell declared “To Juan at the Winter Solstice” to be one of the century’s greatest poems. Martin Seymour-Smith referred to Graves as “the foremost English-language love poet of this century—and probably of the two preceding ones, too.” And Perceval Graves writes that his uncle “has come to be regarded as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.”

These claims are unwarranted. Reading through the 1975 edition of Graves’s Collected Poems, one is struck by how fine some of them are. But one is also struck by how much the verse sinks from the weight of the “one story and one story only,” especially the later poems. What impairs the majority of the poems, however, is not the presence of the Goddess theme so much as its treatment. For in a way, Graves is correct: good poetry is on some level an invocation of the Muse, if the Muse is indeed the embodiment of poetic intuition. The bulk of Graves’s verse is marred because he persists in addressing the Muse directly instead of allowing the poem to invoke her implicitly. If Graves had not been so often compelled to be literal—that is, anti-symbolical and anti-metaphorical— he probably would have been freer to take on a wider range of emotional and thematic concerns in his verse. As it is, too large a percentage of his poems are like “In Her Praise”:

This they know well: the Goddess yet abides.

Though each new lovely woman whom she rides,

Straddling her neck a year or two or three,

Should sink beneath such weight of majesty

And, groping back to humankind, gainsay

The headlong power that whitened all her way

With a broad track of trefoil—leaving you,

Her chosen lover, ever again thrust through

With daggers, your purse rifled, your rings gone—

Nevertheless they call you to live on

To parley with the pure, oracular dead,

To hear the wild pack whimpering overhead,

To watch the moon tugging at her cold tides.

Woman is mortal woman. She abides.

On the level of language and technique, this poem is unobjectionable. What undoes “In Her Praise” is its content. By discussing his conception of the Goddess, rather than presenting his emotional response to her, Graves diminishes the poem’s effectiveness, and he shuts out those readers who do not share his almost religious devotion to her.

“To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” the poem Randall Jarrell thought so much of, is a much better poem, if not a great one. It works as well as it does because its charged, resonant language redeems the “one story and one story only”:

There is one story and one story only

That will prove worth your telling,

Whether as learned bard or gifted child;

To it all lines or lesser gauds belong

That startle with their shining

Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,

Or strange beasts that beset you,

Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?

Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns

Below the Boreal Crown,

Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,

From woman back to woman:

So each new victim treads unfalteringly

The never altered circuit of his fate,

Bringing twelve peers as witness

Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,

All fish below the thighs?

She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;

When with her right she crooks a finger, smiling,

How may the King hold back?

Royally then he barters life for love. …

“On Portents,” another fine poem, also survives the Goddess/Riding theme, not only because of its superb language and technique, but also because the female figure in the poem is more generalized than in “To Juan at the Winter Solstice.” The fact that “she” could refer to any anyone is crucial to the success of the poem:

If strange things happen where she is,

So that men say that graves open

And the dead walk, or that futurity

Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,

Such portents are not to be wondered at,

Being tourbillions in Time made

By the strong pulling of her bladed mind

Through that ever-reluctant element.

“A Love Story” works well because in it Graves sketches a symbolic landscape—rare for him—which gives the reader an equally rare chance to get extra-literal sense of the poet’s internal emotional state:

The full moon easterly rising, furious,

Against a winter sky ragged with red;

The hedges high in snow, and owls raving—

Solemnities not easy to withstand:

A shiver wakes the spine. …

Much more common is Graves’s literalism, which spoils many of his love poems. “Three Times in Love,” “Crucibles of Love,” and “Depth of Love” are almost entirely devoid of imagery. What one is left with are dry arguments that squeeze most of the inspiring passion out of the poem. Typical in this respect is “The Falcon Woman,” in which love’s power is depleted by Graves’s purely intellectual apprehension of it:

It is hard to be a man

Whose word is his bond

In love with such a woman,

When he builds on a promise

She lightly let fall

In carelessness of spirit.

The more sternly he asks her

To stand by that promise

The faster she flies.

“The Visitation,” on the other hand, succeeds because it is invigorated by an image of a living presence: “Your slender body seems a shaft of moonlight / Against the door as it gently closes. …”

To my mind, Graves’s best poems are the early ones, the majority of which predate his post-Thirties absorption in the Goddess. “Like Snow,” “The Pier Glass,” “Love in Barrenness,” “The Terraced Valley,” and “The Cool Web” are some of the best among them. “The Cool Web,” in particular—in which the poet expresses his gratefulness for the protection from reality that language affords—is exquisitely written. It is also compelling for the way it seems to set the stage for the later poems—the poems in which Graves seeks similar protection from a fallen world in the cold arms of an abstract Goddess:

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,

And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.

We spell away the overhanging night,

We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,

Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:

We grow sea-green at last and coldly die

In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,

Throwing off language and its watery clasp

Before our death, instead of when death comes,

Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,

Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,

We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Robert Graves never let his tongue “lose self-possession,” but his worship of the Goddess prevented him from securing major status as a poet, largely because it led him to adopt an anti-metaphorical, anti-symbolical stance toward poetry. (He once characterized this in a letter as his habit of discussing things “truthfully and factually.”) The limited imaginative range of his work—the “one story and one story only”—obviously owes everything to her as well.

As reductive as it was, Graves’s fixation seems to have been derived from the terror of reality instilled in him as a child. Laura Riding only exacerbated an existing condition. Reading through Graves’s poems, one finds oneself aching for a dose of the hated world the poet seeks protection from—even that portion of reality which is no more than “dirtiness and intrigue and lustfulness.”

It is the element of “real” emotion that gives the poem “Through Nightmare” its hint of greatness. Like “On Portents,” the poem is generalized enough to make the reader wonder if Graves is perhaps addressing himself, especially in the final stanza. If “Through Nightmare” is indeed Graves’s confession of his timorousness in the face of the nightmare of the modern world, the poem could easily serve as his epitaph, and as a kind of lament for the unfulfilled promise of this enormously gifted, and tragically tormented, writer:

Never be disenchanted of

That place you sometimes dream yourself into,

Lying at large remove beyond all dream,

Or those you find there, though but seldom

In their company seated—

the untameable, the live, the gentle.

Have you not known them? Whom? They carry

Time looped so river-wise about their house

There’s no way in by history’s road

To name or number them.

In your sleepy eyes I read the journey

Of which disjointedly you tell; which stirs

My loving admiration, that you should travel

Through nightmare to a lost and moated land,

Who are timorous by nature.

————-

Notes

1. Robert Graves: His Life and Work, by Martin Seymour-Smith (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982). Go back to the text.

2. Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895–1926, by Richard Perceval Graves (Viking, 1987)

—-

Poetry of Robert Graves

Robert Graves – Dialogue on the Headland

SHE: You’ll not forget these rocks and what I told you?

HE: How could I? Never: whatever happens.

SHE: What do you think might happen?

Might you fall out of love? – did you mean that?

HE: Never, never! ‘Whatever’ was a sop

For jealous listeners in the shadows.

SHE: You haven’t answered me. I asked:

‘What do you think might happen?’

HE: Whatever happens: though the skies should fall

Raining their larks and vultures in our laps –

SHE: ‘Though the sea turn to slime’ -say that –

‘Though water-snakes be hatched with six heads.’

HE: Though the seas turn to slime, or tower

In an arching wave above us, three miles high –

SHE: ‘Though she should break with you’ – dare you say that? –

‘Though she deny her words on oath.’

HE: I had that in my mind to say, or nearly;

It hurt so much I choked it back.

SHE: How many other days can’t you forget?

How many other loves and landscapes?

HE: You are jealous?

SHE: Damnably.

HE: The past is past.

SHE: And this?

HE: Whatever happens, this goes on.

SHE: Without a future? Sweetheart, tell me now:

What do you want of me? I must know that.

HE: Nothing that isn’t freely mine already.

SHE: Say what is freely yours and you shall have it.

HE: Nothing that, loving you, I should dare take.

SHE: O, for an answer with no ‘nothing’ in it!

HE: Then give me everything that’s left.

SHE: Left after what?

HE: After whatever happens:

Skies have already fallen, seas are slime,

Watersnakes poke and peer six-headedly –

SHE: And I lie snugly in the Devil’s arms.

HE: I said: ‘Whatever happens.’ Are you crying?

SHE: You’ll not forget me – ever, ever, ever?

—

Robert Graves – Sail and Oar

Woman sails, man must row:

Each, disdainful of a tow,

Cuts across the other’s bows

Shame or fury to arouse –

And evermore it shall be so,

Lest man sail, or woman row.

—-

The Travellers’ Curse after Misdirection

(from the Welsh)

May they stumble, stage by stage

On an endless Pilgrimage

Dawn and dusk, mile after mile

At each and every step a stile

At each and every step withal

May they catch their feet and fall

At each and every fall they take

May a bone within them break

And may the bone that breaks within

Not be, for variations sake

Now rib, now thigh, now arm, now shin

but always, without fail, the NECK

—

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher

Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,

So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly

Singing about her head, as she rode by.

—

Welsh Incident

‘But that was nothing to what things came out

From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.’

‘What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?’

‘Nothing at all of any things like that.’

‘What were they, then?’

‘All sorts of queer things,

Things never seen or heard or written about,

Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar

Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,

Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,

All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,

All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,

Though all came moving slowly out together.’

‘Describe just one of them.’

‘I am unable.’

‘What were their colours?’

‘Mostly nameless colours,

Colours you’d like to see; but one was puce

Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.

Some had no colour.’

‘Tell me, had they legs?’

‘Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.’

‘But did these things come out in any order?’

What o’clock was it? What was the day of the week?

Who else was present? How was the weather?’

‘I was coming to that. It was half-past three

On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.

The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu

On thrity-seven shimmering instruments

Collecting for Caernarvon’s (Fever) Hospital Fund.

The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,

Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,

Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them

First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,

Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,

Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,

Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward

Silently at a snail’s pace. But at last

The most odd, indescribable thing of all

Which hardly one man there could see for wonder

Did something recognizably a something.’

‘Well, what?’

‘It made a noise.’

‘A frightening noise?’

‘No, no.’

‘A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?’

‘No, but a very loud, respectable noise —

Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning

In Chapel, close before the second psalm.’

‘What did the mayor do?’

‘I was coming to that.’

—-

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,

And speech, to dull the roses’s cruel scent,

We spell away the overhanging night,

We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,

Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:

We grow sea-green at last and coldly die

In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,

Throwing off language and its watery clasp

Before our death, instead of when death comes,

Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,

Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,

We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

<

The Emerald Table of Hermes

True, without error, certain and most true: that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, to perform the miracles of the One Thing.

And as all things were from One, by the meditation of One, so from this One Thing come all things by adaptation. Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon, the wind carried it in its belly, the nurse thereof is the Earth.

It is the father of all perfection and the consummation of the whole world. Its power is integral if it be turned to Earth.

Thou shalt separate the Earth from the Fire, the subtle from the coarse, gently and with much ingenuity. It ascends from Earth to heaven and descends again to Earth, and receives the power of the superiors and the inferiors.

Thus thou hast the glory of the whole world; therefore let all obscurity flee before thee. This is the strong fortitude of all fortitude, overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. Thus the world was created. Hence are all wonderful adaptations, of which this is the manner.

Therefore am I called Hermes the Thrice Great, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That is finished which I have to say concerning the operation of the Sun.

_________

Well… it has been a beautiful week up in Oregon. 70-80f, clear skies, low or no breeze. Went for a longish bike ride with my friend Paul mid-day on Thursday up the Johnson Creek corridor. to the east. Awfully pretty, trees changing, meadows golden, nice weather. We had a great time. My nephew Andrew and his intended, Catherine came over for dinner last night. I drove them home afterwards and then worked on the blog for awhile…

Fog this morning, on the radio they said that the weather would be cooler this weekend.

This has been a most wonderful Autumn!

Have a nice Weekend,

Gwyllm

________

On the Menu

Pink Moon – Nick Drake

The Links

Dr. Con on Earthrites

Learning to be Silent

The Later Poems – Yeats

_________

Nick Drake – Pink Moon

I saw it written and I saw it say

Pink moon is on its way

And none of you stand so tall

Pink moon gonna get you all

It’s a pink moon

It’s a pink, pink, pink, pink, pink moon.

——

Well, the contest continues as no one got the answer correctly… remember, a Tee-Shirt! Therefore, let us do another… Why is Pink Moon the best known Nick Drake Song? Email me: gwyllm@earthrites.org with the answer!

_________________

The Links:

Nev. religious leaders make case to legalize pot

New motor first to be powered by living bacteria

Cat Parasite Aiming For Global Male Domination

Giant Insects Might Reign If Only There Was More Oxygen in the Air

Alien “ID Chart” to Aid Search for Extraterrestrial Life

_________________

Please Check out Dr. Concresence’s Poetry Page!

Yeah, we are pretty excited about it, and I think the good Doc is as well! Check it out! Check out other poets via this link:Earthrites Poetry Resources…

____________________

Learning To Be Silent

The pupils of the Tendai school used to study meditation before Zen entered Japan. Four of them who were intimate friends promised one another to observe seven days of silence.

On the first day all were silent. Their meditation had begun auspiciously, but when night came and the oil lamps were growing dim one of the pupils could not help exclaiming to a servant: “Fix those lamps.”

The second pupil was surprised to hear the first one talk. “We are not supposed to say a word,” he remarked.

“You two are stupid. Why did you talk?” asked the third.

“I am the only one who has not talked,” concluded the fourth pupil.

____________________

The Later Poems – Yeats...

HE TELLS OF THE PERFECT BEAUTY

O CLOUD-PALE eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,

The poets labouring all their days

To build a perfect beauty in rhyme

Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze

And by the unlabouring brood of the skies:

And therefore my heart will bow, when dew

Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,

Before the unlabouring stars and you.

—-

THE BLESSED

CUMHAL called out, bending his head,

Till Dathi came and stood,

With a blink in his eyes at the cave mouth,

Between the wind and the wood.

And Cumhal said, bending his knees,

“I have come by the windy way

To gather the half of your blessedness

And learn to pray when you pray.

“I can bring you salmon out of the streams

And heron out of the skies.”

But Dathi folded his hands and smiled

With the secrets of God in his eyes.

And Cumhal saw like a drifting smoke

All manner of blessed souls,

Women and children, young men with books,

And old men with croziers and stoles.

“Praise God and God’s mother,” Dathi said,

“For God and God’s mother have sent

The blessedest souls that walk in the world

To fill your heart with content.”

“And which is the blessedest,” Cumhal said,

“Where all are comely and good?

Is it these that with golden thuribles

Are singing about the wood?”

“My eyes are blinking,” Dathi said,

“With the secrets of God half blind,

But I can see where the wind goes

And follow the way of the wind;

“And blessedness goes where the wind goes,

And when it is gone we are dead;

I see the blessedest soul in the world

And he nods a drunken head.

“O blessedness comes in the night and the day

And whither the wise heart knows;

And one has seen in the redness of wine

The Incorruptible Rose,

“That drowsily drops faint leaves on him

And the sweetness of desire,

While time and the world are ebbing away

In twilights of dew and of fire.”

—-

UNDER SATURN

Do not because this day I have grown saturnine

Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought

Because I .have no other youth, can make me pine;

For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,

The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone

On a fantastic ride, my horse’s flanks are spurred

By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,

And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,

And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died

Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.

You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said

Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay–

No, no, not said, but cried it out–”You have come again

And surely after twenty years it was time to come.”

I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain

Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

—-

A MEDITATION IN TIME OF WAR

FOR one throb of the Artery,

While on that old grey stone I sat

Under the old wind-broken tree,

I knew that One is animate

Mankind inanimate phantasy.

—-

THE CAT AND THE MOON

THE cat went here and there

And the moon spun round like a top,

And the nearest kin of the moon

The creeping cat looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,

For wander and wail as he would

The pure cold light in the sky

Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass

Lifting his delicate feet.

Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?

When two close kindred meet

What better than call a dance,

Maybe the moon may learn,

Tired of that courtly fashion,

A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

From moonlit place to place,

The sacred moon overhead

Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils

Will pass from change to change,

And that from round to crescent,

From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

Alone, important and wise,

And lifts to the changing moon

His changing eyes.

This is sort of the worm eating itself episode of Turfing… If you can figure it out, and what it is about, I will send a tee-shirt with the EarthRites Radio logo in your size to you. First one there, gets the prize.

Had a good day yesterday with Mary, and we had a time of it in the yard. She was pulling down dead plants and harvesting basil, and I was harvesting salvia. Best harvest, ever.

We ended up the day by going out for dinner at the local Indian Restaurant, and scooted home after…

On The Bench:

Nick Drake – Riverman

The Links

CREATIVE AGNOSTICISM Part 2 – Robert Anton Wilson

The Idiot Boy – William Wordsworth

I hope your day goes well.

G

_____________________

(Nick Drake – Riverman)

Betty came by on her way

Said she had a word to say

About things today

And fallen leaves.

Said she hadn’t heard the news

Hadn’t had the time to choose

A way to lose

But she believes.

Going to see the river man

Going to tell him all I can

About the plan

For lilac time.

If he tells me all he knows

About the way his river flows

And all night shows

In summertime.

Betty said she prayed today

For the sky to blow away

Or maybe stay

She wasn’t sure.

For when she thought of summer rain

Calling for her mind again

She lost the pain

And stayed for more.

Going to see the river man

Going to tell him all I can

About the ban

On feeling free.

If he tells me all he knows

About the way his river flows

I don’t suppose

It’s meant for me.

Oh, how they come and go

Oh, how they come and go

________

The Links:

Marijuana-Worshipping Church Is Fractured as Leaders Face Charges

A close personal relationship

Library volunteers just say no to drug testing

Teen ticketed for Hacky Sac

__________________

CREATIVE AGNOSTICISM Part 2 – Robert Anton Wilson

.Nor is it surprising that Dr. Leary, like Dr. Reich, was subsequently denounced, slandered colorfully and, finally, imprisoned. The ideas we have been discussing—the ideas that, in a sense, were being tested in the convict rehabilitation research—are profoundly threatening to all dogmatists, not just to materialistic dogmatists. Powerful churches, political parties and vested (financial) interests, for example, have a strong desire to program the rest of us into the particular “Real” Universes that they find profitable, and to keep us from becoming self-programmers. They want to “take responsibility’ for us, and they have no wish to see us “take responsibility’ for ourselves.

Materialism-in-the-philosophical-sense is very much supported by materialism-in-the-economic-sense.

To summarize:

Consciousness is not a given, or a fact. Our mode of consciousness seems historically to have been determined by neurological (unconscious) habits. When we become aware of this, and struggle against the inertia of habit, consciousness continually mutates, becomes less particle-like and “fixed,” spreads like a flowing wave. It can move between the poles of pure in-DIVIDE-ualism and pure in-UNITE-ualism, and between many other poles, and can become increasingly “creative” and “self-chosen.”

Since there is no explanation for these experiences of consciousness-altering-consciousness, or self-programming, in the materialist model, we can either reject them as “hallucinations” and “appearances” if we wish to retain the materialist model at any cost, or we may supplement the materialist model by recognizing that, like all models, it describes sombunall5 of Universe, whereupon we may choose a more inclusive model, which in this case seems to be supplied at present by existentialist-humanist psychology, quantum mechanics, and the thought of philosopher-psychologists like Nietzsche, James, Husserl and Bergson.

In the “Real” Universe, all things are determined, including us and our thoughts. In the experienced world, things come and go incessantly and some come and go so fast that we can never know why; causal models fit only sombunall of experience. There is a sense of flow, process, evolution, growth, and of what Bergson called “the perpetual upsurge of novelty.” In this experienced world, and not in abstract theory, we are faced by apparent decisions continually. We make them and we experience the sense of choice as we do so. We can never know how much such choice is “real” absolutely, but since we can never know anything else absolutely, we make do on probabilities.

In the “Real” Universe we are re-active mechanists; in the experienced world, we are creators, and The “Real” Universe is just another of our creations—a dangerous one, with a tendency to hypnotize us.

Concretely, on any ordinary day, we may observe ourselves contacting the experienced world continually, merging with it, actually breathing its molecules in and out, eating and excreting other parts of it. It “passes through” us as often as we “pass through” it. Since we edit and orchestrate the signals that make up our personal share of the experienced world, we are never separate from it or from responsibility for it.

Neurological research during the past two decades has rather clearly demonstrated that the passive consciousness in which there is a “Real” Universe “out there” is characteristic of left-brain domination. Correspondingly, any method of moving into the flowing-synergetic-holistic mode of consciousness—with meditation, or with certain drugs, or by the process of Zen-like attention described in the previous pages—leads to an increase in right-brain activity. Presumably, if we stayed in the flowing right-brain mode all the time we would become, in Mr. Okera’s term, Dionysian.

It is more amusing, and more instructive, I think, to orchestrate one’s consciousness, by “dialing” the TV set—choosing which mode one uses. This way one learns the best, and worst, of both hemispheres of the brain. One also can learn, with self-experiment, that there are other modalities besides right and left. There seems to be a top-bottom mode also, connected with the degree of possible delay we can tolerate: the bottom, or old brain, seems to be reptilian in its reflexes, the top, or new brain, more easily visualizes a multiple-choice reality-labyrinth in place of the either/or of pure reflex. And there even seems to be a front/back polarity: the frontal lobes seem to fine-tune the intuitions in the general direction of that damned and verboten “ESP.”

In short, it appears to those who try the experiments/experiences of yoga and humanistic psychology, that what is tuned in, is a function of how we use our brains habitually, and what is not-tuned-in may, in many cases, become tuned-in, with practice in neurological reprogramming (a variety of exercises to test these general conclusions for yourself can be found in my book, Prometheus Rising).

I go to a pub and talk to another man. He is experienced deeply part of the time, and shallowly another part of the time, depending on the quality of my consciousness. If I am very conscious, meeting him can be an experience comparable to great music or even an earthquake; if I am in the usual shallow state, he barely “makes an impression.” If I am practicing alertness and neurological self-criticism, I may observe that I am only experiencing him part of the time, and that part of the time I am not-tuning-in but drifting off to my favorite “Real” Universe and editing out at the ear-drum much of what he is saying. Often, the “Real” Universe hypnotizes me sufficiently that, while I “hear” what he says, I have no idea of the way he says it or what he means to convey.

I walk down the street and, observing my state of consciousness, I see that I am in contact with experienced reality part of the time only. Some trees are quite beautiful, but then I realize that I have passed other trees without noticing them. I have drifted off into The “Real” Universe again and edited out a large beautiful hunk of the experienced world. The trees did not cease to exist; they were simply not-tuned-in.

One who remains alive and alert to the experienced world knows where he is, what he is doing and what is going on around him. It is truly startling, at first, to practice neurological self-criticism and notice how often one has lost track of such simple matters as that. It is even more startling to notice that one is walking among hypnotized subjects who, most of the time, have completely lost track of such matters and are telling themselves stories about The “Real” Universe while editing out vast amounts of the experienced world.

When the mathematician Ouspensky was studying with Gurdjieff, he found it very hard, at first, to understand this unique human capacity to forget where one is, what one is doing, and what is going on around one. He was especially dubious about Gurdjieff’s insistence that this “forgetting” was a type of hypnosis. Then, one day, after World War I had begun, Ouspensky saw a truck loaded with artificial legs, headed toward the front. Educated as a mathematician and trained in statistics, Ouspensky remembered that—just as it is possible to calculate how many persons will die of heart attacks in a given year, by probability theory—it is possible to calculate how many legs will be blown off in a battle. But the very calculation is based on the historical fact that most people most of the time will do what they are told by Superiors. (Or, as some cynic once said, most people would rather die, even by slow torture, than to think for themselves.) In a flash, Ouspensky understood how ordinary men become killers, and victims of killers. He realized that “normal” consciousness is much like hypnosis indeed. People in a trance will do what they are told—even if they are told to march into battle against total strangers who have never harmed them, and attempt to murder those strangers while the strangers are attempting to murder them. Orders from above are tuned-in; the possibility of choice is—not-tuned-in.

War and crime—the major problems of our century and chronic problems of our species—seem, to the existentialist-humanist psychologist, the direct results on drifting off into self-hypnosis, losing track of experience and “living” in a “Real” Universe. In the “Real” Universe, the Right Man is always Right, and the blood and horror incidental to proving that is only an appearance, easily forgotten. Besides, the Right Man knows that he is only a re-acting mechanism and ultimately The “Real” Universe itself is to blame for “making” him explode into such furies.

In existential experienced life, we notice that we are making bets and choices all the time, and are responsible for being alert and aware enough to make them intelligently and to revise them when necessary. We cannot blame everything on The “Real” Universe, since it is only a model we have created to deal with experienced life. If the model is not good enough, we do not blame it but revise and improve it.

Ultimately, existentialist psychology agrees with neurology (and sounds remarkably like quantum mechanics) in stressing that there is no model that is not an expression of the values and needs of the model-maker, no description that is not also an interpretation, and hence no “objective observer behind a glass wall” who is merely watching what happens. In short, the whole traditional language of “the thing out there,” “the image in here,” and “the mind” separate from both, is totally inadequate to describe our experience, and we need a new holistic, or synergetic language. The search for this new language—for “a new paradigm”—is increasingly acknowledged in many other disciplines, these days, as it becomes obvious to more and more researchers that the old models have outlived their usefulness.

The “jargon” suggested in parts of this book—the strange new terms used in place of old terms—is a groping and fumbling, and it is meant to be suggestive and poetic rather than precise. The new paradigm has not quite emerged yet; we see only its broad general outlines.

The human brain, from the viewpoint of perception theory and existentialist psychology, appears much like a very unique self-programming computer. It chooses—usually unconsciously and mechanically—the quality of consciousness it will experience and the reality-tunnel it will employ to orchestrate the incoming signals from the experienced world. When it becomes more conscious of this programming, its creativeness becomes truly astounding and has been called meta-programming by Dr. John Lilly.

In meta-programming or neurological self-criticism, the brain becomes capable of deliberately increasing the number of signals consciously apprehended. One looks casually, in the normal way, and then looks again, and again. Dull objects and boring situations become transformed—partly because they “were” dull and boring only when the brain was working on old mechanical programs—and, without being too lyrical about it, the synergetic unity of observer-observation becomes a thrilling experience. Every experience becomes the kind of intense learning that usually only occurs in school when cramming for exams. This state of high and involved consciousness—called awakening by the mystics—seems perfectly normal and natural to the brain that has been programmed to watch its own programming. Since, in the existential world of experience, we have to make bets and choices, we are consciously “cramming” all the time, but there is no special sense of stress or anxiety involved. We are living time instead of passing time, as Nicoll said.

The brain, it seems, works best under pressure. The soldier being decorated for bravery often says “I don’t remember doing it—it all happened too fast.” Even in situations less terrifying and punishing than war, most of us have had flashes of this staggering efficiency and rapidity of brain processes in emergencies. It seems very likely that habitual feelings of “helplessness” and “inadequacy” derive chiefly from our habit of wandering off into The “Real” Universe and not being electrically involved in where we are, what we are doing, and what is going on around us. In crises, this wandering off or hypnosis is not permitted: we are urgently aware of every detail of the experienced field. Some people develop a suicidal habit of seeking danger—mountain climbers and other sportsmen, for instance—just to enjoy this state of rapid brain functioning and High Involvement again and again. Meta-programming or neurological self-criticism, developed as a habit to replace the old habit of wandering off to “Real” Universes, creates that kind of “ecstasy” more and more frequently, and it appears that one has never been using one’s brain before but only misusing it.

Concretely, two people can “be” in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels. If they are both modeltheists or Fundamentalists, these different reality-tunnels will both be experienced as “objective” and each will react passively. If both are in heightened consciousness—seeking more and more signals every minute—both reality-tunnels will still be different, but each will be experienced as a creation and both persons will be involved. It is more likely in the second case they will be able to communicate clearly and understand one another; in the former case, they may fall into violent quarrel about who has the “real” reality-tunnel and the Right Man will have to punish the other for “error.”

It seems that when “God” or “nature” or “evolution” presented us with a human brain, we were not given instructions on the operation of this marvelous device. As a result, most of our history has been an attempt to learn how to use it. In learning that this involves taking responsibility and being involved we seem to be learning, also, lessons that are not merely technological but esthetic and “moral.” Once again, it seems the experienced world functions holistically and our separation of it into separate grids—“science,” “art,” “ethics”—is more confusing than helpful.

To use the brain efficiently—to be aware of where one is and what one is doing and what is going on around one, and to take responsibility for one’s bets or choices—seems to increase “intelligence” and “creativity.” That is hardly a surprise. Whatever our technical definitions of these mysterious functions, it is obvious that they are somehow connected with the number of signals consciously apprehended, and with the rapidity of the revision process. When one model is held statically between ourselves and experience, the number of signals drops, no revision occurs, and “intelligence” and “creativity” correspondingly decline. When many models are available, and when we are consciously involved in our choices, the number of signals consciously apprehended increases, and we behave more “intelligently” and “creatively.”

But the same process of involvement, responsibility, conscious choice, etc. also increases those faculties that are traditionally called esthetic and moral. There is no separation; experience is a continuum. What we see and experience tells us the most intimate truths about who and what we are as well as disclosing increasing richness of “meaning” in every existential transaction. To quote Blake again:

The Fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees.

Once again, it appears that the materialist model of mechanical consciousness covers some but not all experience, and it excludes precisely that part of experience which makes us human, esthetic, moral and responsible beings.

One may suspect that this is why the materialist age has become increasingly inhuman, ugly, amoral and blindly irresponsible.

One may suspect that this is also why the Citadel—the economically entrenched section of the New Fundamentalism, which serves and is fed by the Warfare State—increasingly draws most of the brain-power of most of the living scientists in the world to the single task, as Bucky Fuller said, of delivering more and more explosive power over greater and greater distances in shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people.

To the existentialist-humanist, the “Real” Universe is not forcing us to behave collectively that way. Ultimately, Irrational Rationalism—the reality-tunnel of Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove—is a social invention. Ultimately, ‘The Communists are plotting to enslave us” is a Game Rule of the cold war; it permits every Russian act—however conciliatory it may appear to neutral observers, however it may seem to aim at detente—to be defined as another trick. Ultimately, “The Americans are plotting to destroy us” is a similar Game Rule of the Politburo. The “Real” Universe where this madness appears as sanity is our collective creation. In existential experience, we are only making bets, but we have become hypnotized by our models and we walk toward Armaggedon thinking The “Real” Universe makes it impossible to stop and try a better game.

Like cattle going to slaughter—or like Ouspensky’s soldiers going to have their legs blown off—we do not stop to remember who we are, where we are, and what is going on around us.

The resistance to hearing the women at Greenham Common6 is not unrelated to the resistance to “bizarre” information we have been examining. There are economic as well as neurological reasons why Dr. Reich and Dr. Leary went to prison, while Dr. Teller, Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, is a recognized Authority on The “Real” Universe, rich, honored and praised throughout the Citadel.

Editorial Annotations

1. Elsewhere in The New Inquisition, Wilson describes “The Right Man” and one variant, “The Violent Male” as one who “seems to be a man who literally cannot, ever, admit that he might be wrong. He knows he is right; he is the total psychological opposite of the agnostic, in claiming absolute gnosis, total certitude about all things.”

2. A “modeltheist” is a person who is completely committed to a single model of the “Real” Universe, and for whom all other modes are, by definition, false. According to Wilson, “modeltheism underlies the intolerance which perpetuates most of the violence and wars on this backward planet and creates the violent Right Man personality.” A modeltheist has all but stopped thinking and perceiving, whereas a model-agnostic encourages continual thought and perception.

3. Wilson thinks of “matter” as a metaphor. He defines a “liberal materialist” as “one who holds that materialism is a ‘relative best bet’ among competing philosophies, or the most plausible model around, whereas the fundamentalist materialist—either out of ignorance or philosophy or out of sheer bravado or out of blind faith—proclaims that materialism is the One True Philosophy and that anyone with doubts or hesitations about it is insane, perverse, or a deliberate fraud. This One True Philosophy is the modern form of the One True Church of the dark ages. The Fundamentalist Materialist is the modern Idolator; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it.”

4. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour”

— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

5. “Sombunall” is a word, created by Wilson, that conflates “some but not all.” Wilson explains: “We never know ‘all;’ we know, at best, sombunall.” Wilson uses the word (and encourages others to use it) to avoid making what he calls “all-ness statements.” Wilson writes, “Imagine Arthur Shopenhauer with a sombunall instead of all in his vocabulary. He could still have generalized about sombunall women, but not about all women; and a major source of literary misogyny would have vanished from our culture. Imagine the Feminists writing about sombunall men, but not about all men. Imagine a debate about UFOs in which both sides could generalize as much as they wished about somnbunall sightings but there was no linguistic form to generalize about all such sightings.”

6. Exemplifying non-violent, direct action, a group of women marched from Cardiff, Wales to Greenham Common, England, in 1981. They set up a Peace Camp, which they called Yellow Gate, at the Main Gate of the U.S. Air Force Base in protest of a NATO decision to locate Cruise Missiles at Greenham Common. Satellite camps sprouted around the perimeter of the base, each represented by a color of the rainbow. All nuclear weapons were shipped out of Greenham Common by 1991.

___________

The Idiot Boy – William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

‘Tis eight o’clock,–a clear March night,

The moon is up–the sky is blue,

The owlet in the moonlight air,

He shouts from nobody knows where;

He lengthens out his lonely shout,

Halloo! halloo! a long halloo!

–Why bustle thus about your door,

What means this bustle, Betty Foy?

Why are you in this mighty fret?

And why on horseback have you set

Him whom you love, your idiot boy?

Beneath the moon that shines so bright,

Till she is tired, let Betty Foy

With girt and stirrup fiddle-faddle;

But wherefore set upon a saddle

Him whom she loves, her idiot boy?

There’s scarce a soul that’s out of bed;

Good Betty! put him down again;

His lips with joy they burr at you,

But, Betty! what has he to do

With stirrup, saddle, or with rein?

The world will say ’tis very idle,

Bethink you of the time of night;

There’s not a mother, no not one,

But when she hears what you have done,

Oh! Betty she’ll be in a fright.

But Betty’s bent on her intent,

For her good neighbour, Susan Gale,

Old Susan, she who dwells alone,

Is sick, and makes a piteous moan,

As if her very life would fail.

There’s not a house within a mile,

No hand to help them in distress:

Old Susan lies a bed in pain,

And sorely puzzled are the twain,

For what she ails they cannot guess.

And Betty’s husband’s at the wood,

Where by the week he doth abide,

A woodman in the distant vale;

There’s none to help poor Susan Gale,

What must be done? what will betide?

And Betty from the lane has fetched

Her pony, that is mild and good,

Whether he be in joy or pain,

Feeding at will along the lane,

Or bringing faggots from the wood.

And he is all in travelling trim,

And by the moonlight, Betty Foy

Has up upon the saddle set,

The like was never heard of yet,

Him whom she loves, her idiot boy.

And he must post without delay

Across the bridge that’s in the dale,

And by the church, and o’er the down,

To bring a doctor from the town,

Or she will die, old Susan Gale.

There is no need of boot or spur,

There is no need of whip or wand,

For Johnny has his holly-bough,

And with a hurly-burly now

He shakes the green bough in his hand.

And Betty o’er and o’er has told

The boy who is her best delight,

Both what to follow, what to shun,

What do, and what to leave undone,

How turn to left, and how to right.

And Betty’s most especial charge,

Was, “Johnny! Johnny! mind that you

“Come home again, nor stop at all,

“Come home again, whate’er befal,

“My Johnny do, I pray you do.”

To this did Johnny answer make,

Both with his head, and with his hand,

And proudly shook the bridle too,

And then! his words were not a few,

Which Betty well could understand.

And now that Johnny is just going,

Though Betty’s in a mighty flurry,

She gently pats the pony’s side,

On which her idiot boy must ride,

And seems no longer in a hurry.

But when the pony moved his legs,

Oh! then for the poor idiot boy!

For joy he cannot hold the bridle,

For joy his head and heels are idle,

He’s idle all for very joy.

And while the pony moves his legs,

In Johnny’s left-hand you may see,

The green bough’s motionless and dead;

The moon that shines above his head

Is not more still and mute than he.

His heart it was so full of glee,

That till full fifty yards were gone,

He quite forgot his holly whip,

And all his skill in horsemanship,

Oh! happy, happy, happy John.

And Betty’s standing at the door,

And Betty’s face with joy o’erflows,

Proud of herself, and proud of him,

She sees him in his travelling trim;

How quietly her Johnny goes.

The silence of her idiot boy,

What hope it sends to Betty’s heart!

He’s at the guide-post–he turns right,

She watches till he’s out of sight,

And Betty will not then depart.

Burr, burr–now Johnny’s lips they burr,

As loud as any mill, or near it,

Meek as a lamb the pony moves,

And Johnny makes the noise he loves,

And Betty listens, glad to hear it.

Away she hies to Susan Gale:

And Johnny’s in a merry tune,

The owlets hoot, the owlets curr,

And Johnny’s lips they burr, burr, burr,

And on he goes beneath the moon.

His steed and he right well agree,

For of this pony there’s a rumour,

That should he lose his eyes and ears,

And should he live a thousand years,

He never will be out of humour.

But then he is a horse that thinks!

And when he thinks his pace is slack;

Now, though he knows poor Johnny well,

Yet for his life he cannot tell

What he has got upon his back.

So through the moonlight lanes they go,

And far into the moonlight dale,

And by the church, and o’er the down,

To bring a doctor from the town,

To comfort poor old Susan Gale.

And Betty, now at Susan’s side,

Is in the middle of her story,

What comfort Johnny soon will bring,

With many a most diverting thing,

Of Johnny’s wit and Johnny’s glory.

And Betty’s still at Susan’s side:

By this time she’s not quite so flurried;

Demure with porringer and plate

She sits, as if in Susan’s fate

Her life and soul were buried.

But Betty, poor good woman! she,

You plainly in her face may read it,

Could lend out of that moment’s store

Five years of happiness or more,

To any that might need it.

But yet I guess that now and then

With Betty all was not so well,

And to the road she turns her ears,

And thence full many a sound she hears,

Which she to Susan will not tell.

Poor Susan moans, poor Susan groans,

“As sure as there’s a moon in heaven,”

Cries Betty, “he’ll be back again;

“They’ll both be here, ’tis almost ten,

“They’ll both be here before eleven.”

Poor Susan moans, poor Susan groans,

The clock gives warning for eleven;

‘Tis on the stroke–”If Johnny’s near,”

Quoth Betty “he will soon be here,

“As sure as there’s a moon in heaven.”

The clock is on the stroke of twelve,

And Johnny is not yet in sight,

The moon’s in heaven, as Betty sees,

But Betty is not quite at ease;

And Susan has a dreadful night.

And Betty, half an hour ago,

On Johnny vile reflections cast;

“A little idle sauntering thing!”

With other names, an endless string,

But now that time is gone and past.

And Betty’s drooping at the heart,

That happy time all past and gone,

“How can it be he is so late?

“The doctor he has made him wait,

“Susan! they’ll both be here anon.”

And Susan’s growing worse and worse,

And Betty’s in sad quandary;

And then there’s nobody to say

If she must go or she must stay:

–She’s in a sad quandary.

The clock is on the stroke of one;

But neither Doctor nor his guide

Appear along the moonlight road

There’s neither horse nor man abroad,

And Betty’s still at Susan’s side.

And Susan she begins to fear

Of sad mischances not a few,

That Johnny may perhaps be drown’d,

Or lost perhaps, and never found;

Which they must both for ever rue.

She prefaced half a hint of this

With, “God forbid it should be true!”

At the first word that Susan said

Cried Betty, rising from the bed,

“Susan, I’d gladly stay with you.

“I must be gone, I must away,

“Consider, Johnny’s but half-wise;

“Susan, we must take care of him,

“If he is hurt in life or limb”–

“Oh God forbid!” poor Susan cries.

“What can I do?” says Betty, going,

“What can I do to ease your pain?

“Good Susan tell me, and I’ll stay;

“I fear you’re in a dreadful way,

“But I shall soon be back again.”

“Good Betty go, good Betty go,

“There’s nothing that can ease my pain.”

Then off she hies, but with a prayer

That God poor Susan’s life would spare,

Till she comes back again.

O, through the moonlight lane she goes,

And far into the moonlight dale;

And how she ran, and how she walked,

And all that to herself she talked,

Would surely be a tedious tale.

In high and low, above, below,

In great and small, in round and square,

In tree and tower was Johnny seen,

In bush and brake, in black and green,

Twas Johnny, Johnny, every where.

She’s past the bridge that’s in the dale,

And now the thought torments her sore,

Johnny perhaps his horse forsook,

To hunt the moon that’s in the brook,

And never will be heard of more.

And now she’s high upon the down,

Alone amid a prospect wide;

There’s neither Johnny nor his horse,

Among the fern or in the gorse;

There’s neither doctor nor his guide.

“Oh saints! what is become of him?

“Perhaps he’s climbed into an oak,

“Where he will stay till he is dead;

“Or sadly he has been misled,

“And joined the wandering gypsey-folk.

“Or him that wicked pony’s carried

“To the dark cave, the goblins’ hall,

“Or in the castle he’s pursuing,

“Among the ghosts, his own undoing;

“Or playing with the waterfall.”

At poor old Susan then she railed,

While to the town she posts away;

“If Susan had not been so ill,

“Alas! I should have had him still,

“My Johnny, till my dying day.”

Poor Betty! in this sad distemper,

The doctor’s self would hardly spare,

Unworthy things she talked and wild,

Even he, of cattle the most mild,

The pony had his share.

And now she’s got into the town,

And to the doctor’s door she hies;

Tis silence all on every side;

The town so long, the town so wide,

Is silent as the skies.

And now she’s at the doctor’s door,

She lifts the knocker, rap, rap, rap,

The doctor at the casement shews,

His glimmering eyes that peep and doze;

And one hand rubs his old night-cap.

“Oh Doctor! Doctor! where’s my Johnny?”

“I’m here, what is’t you want with me?”

“Oh Sir! you know I’m Betty Foy,

“And I have lost my poor dear boy,

“You know him–him you often see;

“He’s not as wise as some folks be,”

“The devil take his wisdom!” said

The Doctor, looking somewhat grim,

“What, woman! should I know of him?”

And, grumbling, he went back to bed.

“O woe is me! O woe is me!

“Here will I die; here will I die;

“I thought to find my Johnny here,

“But he is neither far nor near,

“Oh! what a wretched mother I!”

She stops, she stands, she looks about,

Which way to turn she cannot tell.

Poor Betty! it would ease her pain

If she had the heart to knock again;

–The clock strikes three–a dismal knell!

Then up along the town she hies,

No wonder if her senses fail,

This piteous news so much it shock’d her,

She quite forgot to send the Doctor,

To comfort poor old Susan Gale.

And now she’s high upon the down,

And she can see a mile of road,

“Oh cruel! I’m almost three-score;

“Such night as this was ne’er before,

“There’s not a single soul abroad.”

She listens, but she cannot hear

The foot of horse, the voice of man;

The streams with softest sound are flowing,

The grass you almost hear it growing,

You hear it now if e’er you can.

The owlets through the long blue night

Are shouting to each other still:

Fond lovers, yet not quite hob nob,

They lengthen out the tremulous sob,

That echoes far from hill to hill.

Poor Betty now has lost all hope,

Her thoughts are bent on deadly sin;

A green-grown pond she just has pass’d,

And from the brink she hurries fast,

Lest she should drown herself therein.

And now she sits her down and weeps;

Such tears she never shed before;

“Oh dear, dear pony! my sweet joy!

“Oh carry back my idiot boy!

“And we will ne’er o’erload thee more.”

A thought is come into her head;

“The pony he is mild and good,

“And we have always used him well;

“Perhaps he’s gone along the dell,

“And carried Johnny to the wood.”

Then up she springs as if on wings;

She thinks no more of deadly sin;

If Betty fifty ponds should see,

The last of all her thoughts would be,

To drown herself therein.

Oh reader! now that I might tell

What Johnny and his horse are doing!

What they’ve been doing all this time,

Oh could I put it into rhyme,

A most delightful tale pursuing!

Perhaps, and no unlikely thought!

He with his pony now doth roam

The cliffs and peaks so high that are,

To lay his hands upon a star,

And in his pocket bring it home.

Perhaps he’s turned himself about,

His face unto his horse’s tail,

And still and mute, in wonder lost,

All like a silent horseman-ghost,

He travels on along the vale.

And now, perhaps, he’s hunting sheep,

A fierce and dreadful hunter he!

Yon valley, that’s so trim and green,

In five months’ time, should he be seen,

A desart wilderness will be.

Perhaps, with head and heels on fire,

And like the very soul of evil,

He’s galloping away, away,

And so he’ll gallop on for aye,

The bane of all that dread the devil.

I to the muses have been bound,

These fourteen years, by strong indentures;

Oh gentle muses! let me tell

But half of what to him befel,

For sure he met with strange adventures.

Oh gentle muses! Is this kind?

Why will ye thus my suit repel?

Why of your further aid bereave me?

And can you thus unfriended leave me?

Ye muses! whom I love so well.

Who’s yon, that, near the waterfall,

Which thunders down with headlong force,

Beneath the moon, yet shining fair,

As careless as if nothing were,

Sits upright on a feeding horse?

Unto his horse, that’s feeding free,

He seems, I think, the reins to give;

Of moon or stars he takes no heed;

Of such we in romances read,

–’Tis Johnny! Johnny! as I live.

And that’s the very pony too.

Where is she, where is Betty Foy?

She hardly can sustain her fears;

The roaring water-fall she hears,

And cannot find her idiot boy.

Your pony’s worth his weight in gold,

Then calm your terrors, Betty Foy!

She’s coming from among the trees,

And now, all full in view, she sees

Him whom she loves, her idiot boy.

And Betty sees the pony too:

Why stand you thus Good Betty Foy?

It is no goblin, ’tis no ghost,

‘Tis he whom you so long have lost,

He whom you love, your idiot boy.

She looks again–her arms are up–

She screams–she cannot move for joy;

She darts as with a torrent’s force,

She almost has o’erturned the horse,

And fast she holds her idiot boy.

And Johnny burrs and laughs aloud,

Whether in cunning or in joy,

I cannot tell; but while he laughs,

Betty a drunken pleasure quaffs,

To hear again her idiot boy.

And now she’s at the pony’s tail,

And now she’s at the pony’s head,

On that side now, and now on this,

And almost stifled with her bliss,

A few sad tears does Betty shed.

She kisses o’er and o’er again,

Him whom she loves, her idiot boy,

She’s happy here, she’s happy there,

She is uneasy every where:

Her limbs are all alive with joy.

She pats the pony, where or when

She knows not, happy Betty Foy!

The little pony glad may be,

But he is milder far than she,

You hardly can perceive his joy.

“Oh! Johnny, never mind the Doctor;

“You’ve done your best, and that is all.”

She took the reins, when this was said,

And gently turned the pony’s head

From the loud water-fall.

By this the stars were almost gone,

The moon was setting on the hill,

So pale you scarcely looked at her:

The little birds began to stir,

Though yet their tongues were still.

The pony, Betty, and her boy,

Wind slowly through the windy dale:

And who is she, be-times abroad,

That hobbles up the steep rough road?

Who is it, but old Susan Gale?

Long Susan lay deep lost in thought,

And many dreadful fears beset her,

Both for her messenger and nurse;

And as her mind grew worse and worse,

Her body it grew better.

She turned, she toss’d herself in bed,

On all sides doubts and terrors met her;

Point after point did she discuss;

And while her mind was fighting thus,

Her body still grew better.

“Alas! what is become of them?

“These fears can never be endured,

“I’ll to the wood.”–The word scarce said,

Did Susan rise up from her bed,

As if by magic cured.

Away she posts up hill and down,

And to the wood at length is come,

She spies her friends, she shouts a greeting;

Oh me! it is a merry meeting,

As ever was in Christendom.

The owls have hardly sung their last,

While our four travellers homeward wend;

The owls have hooted all night long,

And with the owls began my song,

And with the owls must end.

For while they all were travelling home,

Cried Betty, “Tell us Johnny, do,

“Where all this long night you have been,

“What you have heard, what you have seen,

“And Johnny, mind you tell us true.”

Now Johnny all night long had heard

The owls in tuneful concert strive;

No doubt too he the moon had seen;

For in the moonlight he had been

From eight o’clock till five.

And thus to Betty’s question, he

Made answer, like a traveller bold,

(His very words I give to you,)

“The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,

“And the sun did shine so cold.”

–Thus answered Johnny in his glory,

And that was all his travel’s story

So… here I am typing away and it just so happens to be Mary’s Birthday today. I don’t think the clients will get much out of us today, as we like to do these occasions in a grand way. (whenever possible). We are heading out soon for her new ID, and to do a bit of shopping for colors for the house. (we paint around here fairly frequently)

I am finding it a bit challenging lately to get the Turf out on time. Is Gwyllm drying up? Does he have a limited capacity for finding worthy poetry to continue the Turfing Quest? We will see. I keep threatening to make the whole ball of wax a bit smaller, but to no avail… I have noticed over the last year that patterns emerge on the entries. This might indeed be a form of poetmancy – articlemancy – linkmancy emerging from the depths of the Turf. What does it mean? What does it portend? Can I get fries with that? Do you want that poetry supersized?

Robert Anton Wilson has been on my mind as of late, and therefore we will be featuring him in various forms in the next week or so. From what I understand, he has started the process of checking out from this Bardo, and we need to honour his work, energy and love as best as we can at this point. RAW came into my life at the right moment. He has had that effect on many from what I can gather…

Radio Free EarthRites is down at the present, while British Telecom fumbles along with a new line for the server. Some things don’t change. British Telecom has never functioned very well, and there is no improvement with age.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, random thoughts, love calls…. let us know.

Pax,

Gwyllm

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On the Menu:

The Links

CREATIVE AGNOSTICISM Part 1

Poems by Zen Master Hsu Yun

Enjoy!

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The Links

UK to join ‘killer’ asteroid hunt

Drill hole begins Homeric quest

The ghoulish quest for God

LSD helps alcoholics put down the botttle

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CREATIVE AGNOSTICISM Part 1 – Robert Anton Wilson

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind,

modern science, refuses to recognize the depths of its own

creativity, and has now reached the point in its development

where that very refusal blocks its further growth.

Modern physics screams at us that there

is no ultimate material reality and that

whatever it is we are describing,

the human mind cannot be parted from it.

—Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor

If, as Colin Wilson says, most of history has been the history of crime, this is because humans have the ability to retreat from existential reality into that peculiar construct which they call The “Real” Universe and I have been calling hypnosis. Any Platonic “Real” Universe is a model, an abstraction, which is comforting when we do not know what to do about the muddle of existential reality or ordinary experience. In this hypnosis, which is learned from others but then becomes self-induced, The “Real” Universe overwhelms us and large parts of existential, sensory-sensual experience are easily ignored, forgotten or repressed. The more totally we are hypnotized by The “Real” Universe, the more of existential experience we then edit out or blot out or blur into conformity with The “Real” Universe.

Concretely, the Violent Male—the extreme form of the Right Man1—edits out the suffering and pain he causes to others. That is only appearance and can be ignored. In The “Real” Universe, the victim is only one of Them—one of all the rotten bastards who have frustrated and mistreated the Right Man all his life. In existential reality, a large brutal male is beating a child; in The “Real” Universe of self-hypnosis, the Right Man is getting his just revenge on the oppressors who have abused him.

We have repeatedly employed Nietzsche’s metaphor in which existential reality is abysmal. In one dimension of meaning, this merely asserts that it is endless: the deeper you look into it, the more you see. It has the sense of infinity about it, whether or not it is topologically infinite in space-time.

The “Real” Universe—the model which has become experienced as the real universe—is, on the other hand, quite finite. It is compact and tidy, since it has been manufactured by discarding all the inconvenient parts of existential experience. This is why those self-hypnotized by a “Real” Universe of this sort can be so oblivious to the existential continuum around them. “How could a human being do something so cruel?” we sometimes ask in horror when an extreme Right Man is finally apprehended. The cruelty was “only” in the world of existential appearances; it does not exist in the edited and improved “Real” Universe of the Right Man. In The “Real” Universe, the Right Man is always Right.

The ghastly acceleration of violent, inexplicable and seemingly “pointless” crimes by Right Men in this century—and their hideous magnification into mass murders and war crimes by Right Men in governments—indicate the prevalence of this type of self-hypnosis and what Van Vogt calls “the inner horror” that accompanies it. This “inner horror” is a sense of total helplessness combined with the certainty of always being Right. It seems paradoxical, but the more totally Right a man becomes, the more helpless he also becomes. This is because being Right means “knowing” (gnosis) and “knowing” is understanding The “Real” Universe. Since The “Real” Universe is, by definition, “objective” and “outside us” and “not our creation,” we are made puny by it. We cannot act but only re-act—as The “Real” Universe pushes us, we push back. But it is bigger, so we will lose eventually. Our only defense is in being Right and fighting as dirty as possible.

This, I think, is in succinct form the philosophy of Adolph Hitler. It is the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, and of any rapist or thug you can find in any prison in the world. Where Single Vision reigns—where The “Real” Universe is outside us and impersonal—this shadow-world of violence and horror follows in its wake.

This, probably, is why Nietzsche, who understood this pathology from within, raged against both the modeltheistic2 epistemology—denying The “Real” Universe entirely—and against what he called the Revenge motive. Even if The “Real” Universe were real, he said again and again, we could not know it, since all we know is the existential world of experience. Besides that, linguistic analysis indicates rather clearly that The “Real” Universe is our creation, made up of our metaphors and models. But his deepest attack goes at the psychology of The “Real” Universe and its connection to Revenge, and the disguises of Revenge. If a man feels overwhelmed by The “Real” Universe, he will seek to destroy what oppresses him. Since we cannot get at The “Real” Universe, revenge must be directed at symbolic targets in the existential continuum. The Will to Power—which Nietzsche held was essentially a will to self-overcoming: to neurological self-criticism in my terminology: to become more than one was—then becomes deflected into a Will to Destroy.

In the language of modern existentialist and humanist psychology, Nietzsche is describing the process by which we shirk responsibility. We seek revenge, but since we are only re-acting. The “Real” Universe made us do it. Any criminal will give you his own version of what Nietzsche is describing: “It was my mother’s fault.” “It was my father’s fault.” “Society was to blame.” “I wanted to get even with all those bastards.” “I couldn’t control myself; I just went haywire.” “They pushed too hard and I exploded.” Man as a re-active mechanism—the Materialist metaphor—is Man with a grudge. The most well-known, and probably the most typical, lines of verse of the twentieth century almost certainly are:

I, a stranger and afraid,

In a world I never made

This is the self-image of modern humanity: of the Right Man in particular, but also of masses of ordinary men and women who have internalized the Fundamentalist Materialist3 metaphor and made it the New Idol. Pessimism and rage are never far below the surface of most of the art of the Materialist age: the sad clowns of early Picasso—the frenzied monsters of his middle period—the defeated heroes and heroines of Hemingway and Sartre and Faulkner—the cosmic butcher shop of Bacon—the homicidal nightmare of such arch-typical films as Dead End and Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown—the bums and thugs and the endless succession of self-pitying and easily-defeated rebels in virtually all the novels and plays and films that claim to be Naturalistic—the music that has increasingly become less a melody and more a shriek of pain and rage—the apotheosis finally achieved by Beckett: man and woman in garbage cans along with the rest of the rubbish.

Adolph Hitler read Nietzsche, mistook the diagnosis for prescription, and proceeded to act out the worst of the scenarios Nietzsche could imagine, ironically incorporating precisely that nationalism and anti-semitism that Nietzsche most despised. The world looked on in horror, learned nothing, and decided Hitler was a “monster.” It remained hypnotized by the same materialistic biological determinism which, to Adolph, had justified both his self-pity and his revenge.

And so we stumble on toward a bigger Holocaust than the Nazis could imagine, complaining bitterly that it is “inevitable.” The “Real” Universe will not give us a chance.

When I speak of The “Real” Universe being created by self-hypnosis, I do not intend anything else but psychological literalness. In the hypnotized state, the existential “reality” around us is edited out and we go away to a kind of “Real” Universe created by the hypnotist. The reason that it is usually easy to induce hypnosis in humans is that we have a kind of “consciousness” that easily drifts away into such “Real” Universes rather than deal with existential muddle and doubt. Everybody tends to drift away in that fashion several times in an ordinary conversation, editing sound out at the ear like Bruner’s cat. As Colin Wilson points out, when we look at our watch, forget the time, and have to look again, it is because we have drifted off into a “Real” Universe again. We visit them all the time, but especially when existential concerns are painful or stressful.

Every “Real” Universe is easy to understand, because it is much simpler than the existential continuum. Theists, Nazis, Flat Earthers, etc. can explain their “Real” Universes as quickly as any Fundamentalist Materialist explains his, because of this simplicity of the edited object as contrasted with the complexity of the sensory-sensual continuum in which we live when awake (unhypnotized).

Being hypnotized by a “Real” Universe, we become more and more detached from the existential continuum, and are annoyed when it interferes with us.

“Real” Universes make us puny, however, because they are governed by Hard Laws and we are small compared to them. This is especially true of the Fundamentalist Materialist “Real” Universe, and explains the helplessness and apathy of materialist society. Vaguely, we know that we are hypnotized, and we do not even try to act anymore, but only re-act mechanically.

Since the criminal mentality derives from such hypnosis by a “Real” Universe and the helplessness and rage induced by such metaphors, the criminal becomes, more and more, the typical person of our age. When the “Real” Universe becomes politicized—when the hypnotic model is based on “Us”-versus-“Them” Aristotelian logic—the criminal graduates into the Terrorist, another increasingly typical product of the materialist era.

Against all this mechanized barbarism, existentialist psychology and humanist psychology—aided, perhaps not coincidentally, by the metaphors of quantum physics—suggests that other models of human existence are possible and thinkable and desirable.

In existentialist and humanist models—models influenced by the thought and experiments of researchers such as Maslow, Sullivan, Ames, Peris, Leary, Krippner, and many others—the human being is seen as both in-DIVIDE-ual and in-UNITE-ual, separated in some ways but connected with all things in other ways. How a human being experiences his or her world is not regarded as an immutable “fact” but as that human’s “interpretation,” perhaps learned from others, perhaps self-generated. The “Real” Universe is regarded as a model—a linguistic construct—and we are stuck with existential experience, which may or may not mesh with our favorite “Real” Universe.

According to existential-humanist psychology, where the materialist says “I perceive,” it would be more correct to say “I am making a bet.” Concretely, in Ames’s cock-eyed room, we “make a bet” that we are seeing something familiar to us. If allowed into the room and asked to touch a corner of the ceiling with a pointer, we quickly discover the gamble in every act of perception. Typically, we hit almost everything but the corner in our first attempts—the walls, other parts of the ceiling, etc. A strange thing happens as we go on trying. Our perceptions change—we are making a new series of bets, one after another—and gradually we are able to find the corner we are aiming for.

The same sort of thing happens in any psychedelic drug experience, which is why existentialist-humanist models became more popular with psychologists after the 1960s. The same sort of thing, again, happens in meditation—clearing the mind of its habits—and that is why so many psychologists of this tradition have been involved in researching what happens, physiologically, to those who meditate.

When we return to the ordinary world of social interactions after such shocks as the cock-eyed room, LSD or meditation, we observe that the same processes are going on—people are making bets about which model fits best at a given time—but they are not aware of making bets. They are—it must be repeated—hypnotized by their models. If the models do not fit very well, they do not revise them but grow angry at the world—at experience—for being recalcitrant. Most typically, they find somebody to blame, as Nietzsche noted again and again.

Edmund Husserl, who was as important as Nietzsche in pioneering this kind of existential analysis, points out that, where in the materialist metaphor consciousness appears passive, once we recognize the gamble involved in every perception, consciousness appears very active indeed. Nobody is born a great pianist, or a quantum physicist, or a theologian, or a murderer: people have made themselves into those things by actively selecting what types of perception-gambles they will make habitual and what types of other experience they will edit out as irrelevant. It is no surprise, from this perspective, that the world contains Catholic reality-tunnels, Marxist reality-tunnels, musical reality-tunnels, materialist reality-tunnels, literary reality-tunnels, ad infin. It is a mild surprise, almost, that any two individuals can superimpose their reality-tunnels sufficiently to communicate at all.

This surprise vanishes when we remember that none of us was born and grew up in a vacuum. We are socialized as well as “personalized”—in-UNITE-uals as well as in-DIVIDE-uals. Even the most “creative” of us will be found, most of the time, “living” in a social reality-tunnel manufactured of elements which are, in some cases, thousands of years old: the very language we speak controls our perceptions (bets)—our sense of “possibility.”

Nonetheless, the process of socialization or acculturalization—the Game Rules by which Society imposes its group reality-tunnel on its members—is only statistically effective. Every individual seems to have a few eccentricities in her or his private reality-tunnel, even in totalitarian states or authoritarian churches. The alleged conformist—the typical “bank-clerk,” say—will reveal some astonishing creative acts in his or her private model, if you talk to such a person long enough.

In short, consciousness, in this model, is not a passive receptor but an active creator, busy every nanosecond in projecting the art work that is an individualized reality-tunnel and is usually hypnotically dreamed of as The “Real” Universe. This trance, in most cases, appears as deep as that of anybody professionally hypnotized to repress pain during surgery. The criminal—we return to this point to stress that these observations are not academic but urgently existential—repressed sympathy and charity just as “miraculously” as the patient repressed pain in the above example. We are not the victims of The “Real” Universe; we have created the particular “Real” Universe that we happen to dwell in.

This existentialist-humanist psychology thus comes around to the same conclusion as the majority of quantum physicists: whatever we are talking about, our mind has been its principle architect. “Nothing is real and everything is real” as Gribbin says. That is, in this model, nothing is absolutely real in the philosophical sense, and everything is experienced reality to those who believe in it and select it in their perception-gambles.

If we recognize some validity in these observations and try to “wake” ourselves from the hypnotic trance of modeltheism—if we try to recall, moment by moment, in an ordinary day that The “Real” Universe is only a model we have created and that existential living cannot be compressed into any model—we enter a new kind of consciousness. What Blake called “Single Vision” begins to expand into multiple vision—into conscious bet-making. The person then “sees abysses everywhere,” in Nietzsche’s deliberately startling metaphor. (Blake says it more soothingly when he speaks of perceiving “infinity in a grain of sand.”) 4 The world of living experience is not as finite, or static, or tidy, as the trance called The “Real” Universe. Like Godel’s Proof, it contains an infinite regress. In talking to another human being for two minutes, “I” experience and create dozens of gambles (reality-tunnels) but never fully know that person anymore than the quantum physicist “knows” if the electron “is” a wave, or a particle, or a “wavicle” (as has been suggested), or something created by our acts of seeking. The other person’s “mood” or “self”-at-the-moment, similarly, now seems friendly, now bored or unfriendly, now shifting too fast to be named, now something I have helped create by the act of seeking to tune in that person.

As the Buddhists say, the other person and indeed the whole continuum of experience now seems to “be” X and not-X and both X and not-X and neither X nor not-X. All that seems like relative certainty is that whatever I think I “know” about a person, or a whole world, is just my latest gamble.

One begins to perceive that there “are” at least two kinds of consciousness. (There seem to be many more.) In “ordinary consciousness” or hypnosis, models are considered The “Real” Universe and projected outside. In this state, we “are” modeltheists, Fundamentalists, and mechanical; all perceptions (gambles) are passive mechanical acts. We “unconsciously” (neurologically) edit and select bits of existential experience and admit them to The “Real” Universe only after they have been processed to accord with the “laws” of The “Real” Universe. Being mechanical and passive, we are also, or experience ourselves as, dominated by The “Real” Universe and pushed here and there by its brutal impersonality.

In this existentialist-humanist mode of consciousness, on the other hand, we “are” agnostic, and consciously recognize our models as our creations. In this state, we “are” model-relativists, “sophisticates” and actively creative; all perceptions (gambles) are actively known as gambles. We consciously seek to edit less and tune in more, and we look especially for events that do not neatly fit our model, since they will teach us to make a better model tomorrow, and an even better one the day after. We are not dominated by The “Real” Universe since we remember that the linguistic construct is just our latest gamble and we can make a better one quickly.

In the first, materialist mode of consciousness—as Timothy Leary says—we are like persons sitting passively before a TV set, complaining about the rubbish on the screen but unable to do anything but “endure” it. In the second, existentialist mode of consciousness, to continue Leary’s metaphors, we take responsibility for turning the dial and discover that there is not just one “show” available, that choice is possible. The tuned-in is not all of existence; it is only—the tuned-in.

To ask which mode of consciousness is “true,” after experiencing both, seems as pointless as asking whether light is “really” waves of particles, after seeing the two-hole experiment.

In fact, the emphasis on “choice” and “creativity” in existentialist-humanist psychology has an exact parallel in the two-hole experiment. Many physicists think the best metaphor to describe that experiment is to say that we “create” the wave or particle depending on which experimental set-up we “choose.”

The wave/particle complimentary seems to mirror the existential experience of consciousness even more closely when we examine it. The ordinary consciousness of the “self”—in the vernacular sense, with no technical philosophic doctrine implied—is much like a particle: “solid,” “isolated,” “real,” encapsulated by the skin and more or less static. When one becomes detached enough for neurological self-criticism—for revising models as one goes along—the “self” appears more like a process and even a wavy process: it “is” a succession of states, rather than a state itself (as Hume noticed) and these states come and go in a wave-like manner, “flowing” between “inner” and “outer.” As one observes them come and go, one learns to choose desirable states, at least to the same extent that the two-hole experiment “chooses” waves or particles.

One of the best ways to learn to experience the wave-aspect of consciousness, of course, is listening to music, especially Baroque music, with one’s eyes closed. Much quicker than Oriental meditation, this makes one aware of consciousness’s wave-like flowing aspect, and of its synergetic nature. At its richest, as in meditation, consciousness appears to become the object of its attention; “there is no separation between me and the music,” we say. This simple experience, available to all, makes clear that in-UNITE-ual and flowing modes of consciousness are existentially as “real” as the in-DIVIDE-ual “particles” that we normally experience as our “selves.”

In Dr. Leary’s Flashbacks (1983), he writes the latest account of his celebrated and controversial “drug research” with Massachusetts convicts in the early 1960s, in which, statistically, many “criminals” became “ex-criminals,” and the recidivism rate dropped dramatically. Leary emphasizes, as he always did, that there is no “miracle” in any drug per se, but in what he calls the set and setting—the preparation for the drug experience. This included an explanation, in simple terms, of the main points of existentialist-humanist psychology. During the drug experience, not unexpectedly, music was played. Some criminals wept, some laughed uncontrollably, some sat in silent awe: all were receiving more signals per minute than usual, and understanding how signals are usually edited. In a phrase, they were given the opportunity to look at materialist consciousness from the perspective of existentialist consciousness. It is not surprising that many of them thereafter “took responsibility” and ceased robotically repeating the imperatives of their old criminal reality-tunnels.

To Be Continued…

______________________

Poems by Zen Master Hsu Yun

A Time of Regulation

What luck! The chance to practice the Supreme Dharma of Emptiness

Without fear of being invaded by the foolish affairs of outside life!

Set the time of sitting! Make it just as long as it takes one fragrant incense stick to burn down.

In that time we can thread the basic principles of Buddhism into a lovely string of pearls.

One by one those marvelous concepts came from the West

To encircle our hearts here in this Eastern Land.

Here in this Temple we touch these sacred pearls

And sing their praises like the sound of ocean waves.

—

Looking out at the Evening View on Mount Gu after the Rain

The mountain begins to awaken, sluggish after such a drunken rain.

A little cold light filters down to this place I’m sitting in.

The unruly fog pulls itself together to clothe the trees in white;

While the setting sun splashes red onto the distant hills.

I hear the wood cutter whistle as he collects his twigs

And the fisherman sing as he pulls in his hooks

And the temple bell ring from way beyond the clouds.

The cranes, startled, flap into flight.

—

Ten Thousand Buddha Mountain – Red Flower Grotto

This place used to be called Red Flower Grotto.

Now it’s called Ten Thousand Buddha Mountain.

Visitors come here to play chess

And listen to the pouring rain safe inside their plaited huts.

The beauty of a thousand peaks still fills this grotto.

Streams flow into it and pools turn nine times as they form.

In the countryside nearby, tigers prowl.

Above, the pines jut into the sky just as they did in the days of Han.

The Spirit Dragon flies around through the dark rain.

But only white ghostly visions dance through the Chan gate of Awakening.

The Sangha gather beyond the boundary of the blue sky.

The Sangha spend their leisure with the white clouds.

—-

Entrance to the Way

So many people enter the hall to practice.

How many of them carry that long sword

The sword of Heavenly Reliance?

Everything has to be hacked to pieces.

Saints, demons, everything!

Blood has to be splattered all over the mansions of heaven.

That’s the Direct Teaching!

Pull down those golden locked gates to the Profound

That guard the Entrance to the Way.

Be fierce when you sit! Make your sitting a blade that hacks through the

wilderness of incomprehension.

Let your eye pierce the Emptiness!

Expose that True Face

The One that was yours before your mother gave birth.

This is a little slice of Bohemia, and a tip of the hat to Patti Smith.

On the Menu:

waiting underground

Because The Night

The Links

The Walls Came Tumbling Down – Robert Anton Wilson

People Have The Power…

Have a good one!

G

waiting underground – by patti smith, oliver ray

if you believe all your hope is gone

down the drain of your humankind

the time has arrived

you’ll be waiting here as I was

in a snow-white shroud

waiting underground

there by the ridge be a gathering beneath the pilgrim moon

where we shall await the beat of your feet hammering the earth

where the great ones tremble

in their snow-white shrouds

waiting underground

if you seek the kingdom come, come along

waiting by the ridge there’ll be a gathering

beneath the pilgrim moon

where the [railroad] thunders

oh where we shall await the beat of your feet hammering the earth

and as the earth resounds where the great ones tremble

and your humankind becomes as one

and then we will arise

in our snow-white shrouds

when we’ll be as one

but until that day we will just await

in our snow-white shrouds

waiting underground

in our snow-white shrouds

waiting underground

waiting underground

waiting underground

waiting underground

waiting underground

waiting underground

waiting underground

___________

Because The Night…

Take me now baby here as I am

Pull me close, try and understand

Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe

Love is a banquet on which we feed

Come on now try and understand

The way I feel when Im in your hands

Take my hand come undercover

They cant hurt you now,

Cant hurt you now, cant hurt you now

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to lust

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to us

Have I doubt when Im alone

Love is a ring, the telephone

Love is an angel disguised as lust

Here in our bed until the morning comes

Come on now try and understand

The way I feel under your command

Take my hand as the sun descends

They cant touch you now,

Cant touch you now, cant touch you now

Because the night belongs to lovers …

With love we sleep

With doubt the vicious circle

Turn and burns

Without you I cannot live

Forgive, the yearning burning

I believe its time, too real to feel

So touch me now, touch me now, touch me now

Because the night belongs to lovers …

Because tonight there are two lovers

If we believe in the night we trust

Because tonight there are two lovers …

___________

The Links…

Start a Revolution!

Psychos Need a Little Sympathy

Spring-Heeled Jack

Villagers in Bihar worship a ‘miracle’ tree

News on Robert Anton Wilson, Adam Stanhope turned us onto…

RAW Efforts Succeeded

_____________

The Walls Came Tumbling Down – Robert Anton Wilson

-excerpt

The first time I saw a “flying saucer” happened in Brooklyn during the first wave of “saucer” excitement during the summer of 1947. My parents and I, sitting on our verandah, saw the “saucer” cross the sky, rather slowly, and watched for about three minutes before the taller buildings downtown blocked it from our view. At the age of 15 I found this tremendously thrilling and wanted to make it even more thrilling by reporting it to the police or the Brooklyn Eagle. My parents absolute refused to allow this, and said I should never even talk about it to my friends. I think I can best summarize their attitude as “People who see such things get laughed at, we don’t want to get laughed at, so we will pretend we didn’t see it.” Since we didn’t report this, no investigation followed and I have no idea what the hell we saw that evening. A weather balloon? An airplane given a strange oval-like glint by the twilight? A real honest-to-gosh Space Ship? Swamp gas? A “heat inversion”? None of those labels seems absolutely convincing to me, at this stage, because I just don’t have any data to judge by. All I know about the damned thing consists in the observations that it looked oval and it seemed to glint like a metal craft of some sort. Note that I do not say it “was” oval or “was” a metal craft; I report what I saw in a purely phenomenological manner. (Frankly, the weather balloon theory seems most probable to me right now…. but I don’t claim to know….)

I recall this story here only because it illustrates the mental habits of most of humanity throughout most of our history. When confronted with the mysterious, the inexplicable or the unsettling, popular wisdom tells us we should ignore it and hope it will go away. (An Irish proverb says, “If you see a two-headed pig, keep your mouth shut.”) Just about the only humans not governed by this infophobic reflex have dwelt in the bohemian artistic and “deviant” sub-cultures, where the dominant attitude partakes more of infophilia. (As one of Shakespeare’s characters says, “If it be new, it matters not how vile.”) Modern experience, as it graduates into the postmodern, seems to have overwhelming tendencies to move more and more people from infophobia to infophilia, sometimes with shocking and traumatic abruptness.. Let me define the two key terms I have just used. As readers of Prometheus Rising will remember, the Leary model of “first circuit” (infantile, oral) consciousness has a forward-back polarity: we tend to go forward to Mother/safe-space or anything motherly (associated with mother/safety by genetic programs, imprints or conditioning) and we tend to retreat backward away from the unmotherly, the unsafe, the predatory. This level of consciousness exists throughout faunal evolution, and in humans it forms the bedrock of either a innovative/creative or a conservative/conformist lifestyle.

In my first attempts to popularize Dr. Leary’s work, I called these tendencies “neophilia” (creative) and “neophobia.”(conformist) I have more recently decided that infophilia and infophobia have more generality and describe the associated habits more broadly. The pure infophobe (represented not too badly by most “respectable” law-abiding citizens anywhere) obsessively avoids exotic foods, exotic ideas, exotic clothing, exotic people, “dern foreigners,” new technology, innovative art or music, tabu subjects, originality, creativity etc. Sen. Exon, Sen. Gramm, most of Congress, Theodore Roszack and Unibomber represent various styles of compulsive infophobic imprints. The pure infophile remains a relatively rare person at this primitive stage of evolution. The infophile seeks out the new and exotic in food, ideas, clothing, technology, art — everywhere. Picasso, Joyce, Niels Bohr, Bucky Fuller and all the murdered heretics and innovators of history represent extreme infophiliac imprints.

In Cosmic Trigger III, I represented these extremes by CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), representing infophobia, and CSICON (Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal) representing infophilia. Amusingly, many readers assumed I invented one of these organizations as a hoax or Swiftian satire, but they disagreed about which one…. Most of us, of course, exist somewhere on the continuum between pure infophobia and pure infophilia. (Personally, I lean toward infophilia about almost everything except eating octopus, in which case I remain nervously infophobic. I tried it once, and only once. I’d rather try digesting the back left tire of my car.)

Unfortunately for the infophobic majority, civilization derives from increasingly rapid information processing, which means that those “open societies” which accumulate information fastest provide a higher quality of life in all respects than the “closed societies” where infophobia dominates. Tribal societies where tabu imprisons the minds of its members in strict infophobia never advance beyond Stone Age conditions until or unless incorporated into more “open” societies.

After the coming of the Holy Inquisition, nobody discovered any new chemical elements in the Catholic nations of Europe; all the new chemical discoveries, i.e., the majority of the elements now known, came from Protestant nations. (See my Reality Is What You Can Get Away With for more data on this.) Even today, the effects of the Inquisition linger on, visibly, in the quality of life in most of northern Europe as compared to southern (Catholic) Europe. Similarly, seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the effects of the Stalinist closed society still hang on as a dead weight against the efforts of the reformers.

Moslem nations, although suddenly rich due to Oil, still show general backwardness compared to the more open European nations. As Norbert Weiner, one of the first two mathematicians to define information and show its importance, wrote once, “To live effectively is to live with adequate information.” Infophobic societies do not live very well compared to more open societies where infophilia remains permissible even if not yet widespread. For instance, a United Nations study of “quality of life,” including education, life expectancy, civil liberties, medical care and economic wellbeing ranked the five top nations as:

+ Canada

+ Japan

+ Iceland

+ Sweden

+ Switzerland

None of these nations have one dominant religion or one dominant dogmatic ideology; all rank as “open” in Sir Karl Popper’s sense, and all either encourage or allow infophilia. No Catholic or Islamic nation made it into the top five. Infophobia means stagnation and, usually, filth, poverty, plague and general misery. (And don’t forget that what I here call infophobia means exactly what the Right Wing in this country calls “traditional family values,” including the right to hate the same people that Grandpa hated.) But an infophiliac age, such as we now willy-nilly live in, has its own risks, and the chief of these lies in the growing uncertainty that comes over all those who try to “keep up” with the latest discoveries. The most telling example of this social Uncertainty Principle: the dizzying attempt to find out what foods really nourish you and what foods might shorten your life. I sometimes think this adds a bit of stress to every mouthful of food we eat these days.

Every time a major new scientific study of nutrition and health appears, millions learn that some of what they have believed safe actually may contain hidden dangers — or, even weirder, foods considered dangerous by the known data of 1986 may look much safer according to the data of 1996. I use this example because more average persons try to keep up with this field than with any other; but the same general indefinite wobble infests all science lately. If you have miraculously read enough to have the latest knowledge in all fields as of December 1996, a large part of what you know, or think you know, has already fallen under the axe of more recent research. But even more unsettlingly, you simply could not have read that much, even if you found a way to live without eating or sleeping. Dr. Stanley Ullam estimated, nearly 30 years ago, that the best-read full-time mathematicians knew about 5% of the theorems published since 1900; nobody in any other science knows much more than that about their own field. I once met a very knowledgeable physicist, who had specialized in rocketry and astronautics, and he not only knew less about Bell’s Theorem than I, a layperson, did: he had actually never even heard of Bell’s Theorem. (I feel quite sure that among the 99% of biochemistry I know nothing about, there exist several discoveries as important as John Bell’s nonlocality.) According to a legend I have always doubted, the Chinese have a curse which says, “May you live in interesting times.” I doubt this because you can’t say that to anybody unless you live in the same times as they do; but nonetheless I find wisdom in the subtle Oriental irony here. Nobody any longer doubts that we live in interesting times, or that they get more interesting every year.

If the I.R.A. has given up negotiations and returned to bombs today, they may give up bombs and return to negotiations next Tuesday after lunch. Maybe. Reports of UFOs, lake monsters, Bigfoot etc. continue despite all Establishment denials. The Palestinians now have their own state, and Arafat and the Israelis negotiate with each other instead of bombing each other. The biggest event of the last decade — the collapse of the Soviet Union — occurred entirely without violence: the first nonviolent revolution of that size in all human history, extending from Berlin to Siberia. Citizens of the U.S. now suffer the surrealist humiliation of urine testing on the job by our new Piss Police, a kind of totalitarian lunacy never dreamed of in the wildest satires of Kafka or Orwell. Several universities now fund research on “near death” and “out of body” experiences.

The Internet more and more evolves toward the “planetary brain” once only imagined by visionary scientists like Tielhard de Chardin and Arthur Clarke; and the U.S. Congress has panic attacks over the fact that some of this brain contains “pornographic” fantasy. (Do you know any brain that doesn’t?) A Japanese consortium plans to build a luxury hotel in outer space. The most popular show on U.S. television, and now a big hit in England also, The X Files, deals with governmental conspiracies that only the “kooks” took seriously a decade ago. You’ve heard this already but think about it: Nelson Mandela has gone from a prison cell to the President’s office in a country that has evolved from White Supremacy to power-sharing in only a seven years. We recently heard a concert in which a dead man sang with three friends on worldwide TV. Ireland, to return to that most distressful country, has gone from a place “more Catholic than the pope” to legalized contraception in 1988 and now legalized divorce in 1995.

Fewer and fewer American families can survive with one breadwinner. The marriage in which both partners work has become more and more common. As the War Against Some Drugs escalates, usage of those drugs also increases. Somebody, somewhere, seriously misunderstands the situation. Most of the gains achieved by labor unions in the last century have gotten lost in only 8 years, during the Reagan Era, and nobody seems very confident that the unions can stage a comeback.

Internet World for March 1996 says bluntly that “….regulatory and legislative policy cannot hope to keep pace with technological innovation. This legislative time-lag between what politicians understand and what is technologically operative today is an abyss….The union of computers and telecommunications is primed to cause economic and political earthquakes.” In other words, we more and more live with a technology that our alleged rulers do not understand well enough to regulate in any way.

Black helicopters hover above and some think they “only” mean to discover our forbidden farm-crops while others think they represent the first wave of UN or extraterrestrial conquest.

As I have tried to prove in my nonfiction and dramatize in my fiction, what we perceive depends on what we believe possible, and as the latter changes, the former will change. Some new perceptions, like most new lifeforms will not survive evolutionary testing; others will come to dominate the human world of the next century. What some have called my “blasphemous cheerfulness” (or my “cockeyed optimism”) just depends on my basic agnosticism. We don’t know the outcome of this worldwide transformation, so it seems sick and decadent (in the Nietzschean sense) when fashionable opinion harps on all the gloomy alternatives and resolutely ignores the utopian possibilities that seem, today, equally likely (and, on the basis of past evolution, perhaps a little more likely.)

I regard it as late in the day to still cling to Christian and/or post-Christian masochism. Let us have the courage to think in less neurotic categories. The stars, now, look like they await us.

_____________

People Have The Power…

I was dreaming in my dreaming

of an aspect bright and fair

and my sleeping it was broken

but my dream it lingered near

in the form of shining valleys

where the pure air recognized

and my senses newly opened

I awakened to the cry

that the people / have the power

to redeem / the work of fools

upon the meek / the graces shower

it’s decreed / the people rule

The people have the power

The people have the power

The people have the power

The people have the power

Vengeful aspects became suspect

and bending low as if to hear

and the armies ceased advancing

because the people had their ear

and the shepherds and the soldiers

lay beneath the stars

exchanging visions

and laying arms

to waste / in the dust

in the form of / shining valleys

where the pure air / recognized

and my senses / newly opened

I awakened / to the cry

Refrain

Where there were deserts

I saw fountains

like cream the waters rise

and we strolled there together

with none to laugh or criticize

and the leopard

and the lamb

lay together truly bound

I was hoping in my hoping

to recall what I had found

I was dreaming in my dreaming

god knows / a purer view

as I surrender to my sleeping

I commit my dream to you

Refrain

The power to dream / to rule

to wrestle the world from fools

it’s decreed the people rule

it’s decreed the people rule

LISTEN

I believe everything we dream

can come to pass through our union

we can turn the world around

we can turn the earth’s revolution

we have the power

People have the power ..

GOD OF MADNESS, PHANTOMS &amp; HALLUCINATION

“Bacchus [Dionysos] himself, grape-bunches garlanding his brow, brandished a spear that vine-leaves twined, and at his feet fierce spotted panthers lay, tigers and lynxes too, in phantom forms.” – Ovid Metamorphoses 3.572

“[Dionysos makes phantoms appear:] the crash of unseen drums clamoured, and fifes and jingling brass resounded, and the air was sweet with scents or myrrh and saffron, and – beyond belief! – the weaving all turned green, the hanging cloth grew leaves of ivy, part became a vine, what had been threads formed tendrils, form the warp broad leaves unfurled, bunches of grapes were seen, matching the purple with their coloured sheen. And now the day was spent, the hour stole on when one would doubt if it were light or dark, some lingering light at night’s vague borderlands. Suddenly the whole house began to shake, the lamps flared up, and all the rooms were bright with flashing crimson fires, and phantom forms of savage beasts of prey howled all around.” – Ovid, Metamorphoses 4. 389

(William Bouguereau – La Jeunesse de Bacchus [The Youth of Bacchus])

Bacchus – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bring me wine, but wine which never grew

In the belly of the grape,

Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through

Under the Andes to the Cape,

Suffer no savor of the earth to scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute

From a nocturnal root,

Which feels the acrid juice

Of Styx and Erebus;

And turns the woe of Night,

By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread;

We buy diluted wine;

Give me of the true,

Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled

Among the silver hills of heaven

Draw everlasting dew;

Wine of wine,

Blood of the world,

Form of forms, and mold of statures,

That I intoxicated,

And by the draught assimilated,

May float at pleasure through all natures;

The bird-language rightly spell,

And that which roses say so well.

Wine that is shed

Like the torrents of the sun

Up the horizon walls,

Or like the Atlantic streams, which run

When the South Sea calls.

Water and bread,

Food which needs no transmuting,

Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,

Wine which is already man,

Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which Music is,

Music and wine are one,

That I, drinking this,

Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;

Kings unborn shall walk with me;

And the poor grass shall plot and plan

What it will do when it is man. Inner link

Quickened so, will I unlock

Every crypt of every rock.

I thank the joyful juice

For all I know;

Winds of remembering

Of the ancient being blow,

And seeming-solid walls of use

Open and flow.

Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;

Retrieve the loss of men and mine!

Vine for vine be antidote,

And the grape requite the lote!

Haste to cure the old despair,

Reason in Nature’s lotus drenched,

The memory of ages quenched;

Give them again to shine;

A dazzling memory revive;

Refresh the faded tints,

Recut the aged prints,

And write my old adventures with the pen

Which on the first day drew,

Upon the tablets blue,

The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

________

A good weekend – My father and step-mother came to visit; a reunion of sorts with other family members. Both of my nephews came by, as well as their mom.

Worked at a site after they all left, and was gifted by our friend Janice with a new cabernet and some foch grape juice as well. We stopped by our friend Glen’s house (who happens to be the vintner of the cabernet) and had a taste of the new wine. Truly heady stuff.

This is indeed the season of Dionysus/Bacchus, and we celebrate it today with poetry, a bit of history and some lovely art from that very fine French Artist : William Bouguereau. Click on this link to see the full painting: La Jeunesse de Bacchus – The Youth of Bacchus

On the Menu:

The Links

The Chakras… (Alex Gray Animation)

To Dionysus – Hesiod

Excerpts from “The Bacchae”

Have a good one!

________

The Links

Aztec ruins unearthed in Mexico

Neglected Event May Reveal Much About Illinois’ Giant Birds of ’77

Interest growing in Earthworks

HOW DID WE GET HERE

________

_________

From Hesiod:

To Dionysus

I will tell of Dionysus, the son of glorious Semele, how he appeared on a jutting headland by the shore of the fruitless sea, seeming like a stripling in the first flush of manhood: his rich, dark hair was waving about him, and on his strong shoulders he wore a purple robe. Presently there came swiftly over the sparkling sea Tyrsenian pirates on a well- decked ship — a miserable doom led them on. When they saw him they made signs to one another and sprang out quickly, and seizing him straightway, put him on board their ship exultingly; for they thought him the son of heaven-nurtured kings. They sought to bind him with rude bonds, but the bonds would not hold him, and the withes fell far away from his hands and feet: and he sat with a smile in his dark eyes. Then the helmsman understood all and cried out at once to his fellows and said:

(-Probably not Etruscans, but the non-Hellenic peoples of Thrace and (according to Thucydides) of Lemnos and Athens. Cp. Herodotus i. 57; Thucydides iv. 109.-)

`Madmen! What god is this whom you have taken and bind, strong that he is? Not even the well-built ship can carry him. Surely this is either Zeus or Apollo who has the silver bow, or Poseidon, for he looks not like mortal men but like the gods who dwell on Olympus. Come, then, let us set him free upon the dark shore at once: do not lay hands on him, lest he grow angry and stir up dangerous winds and heavy squalls.’

So said he: but the master chid him with taunting words: “Madman, mark the wind and help hoist sail on the ship: catch all the sheets. As for this fellow we men will see to him: I reckon he is bound for Egypt or for Cyprus or to the Hyperboreans or further still. But in the end he will speak out and tell us his friends and all his wealth and his brothers, now that providence has thrown him in our way.”

When he had said this, he had mast and sail hoisted on the ship, and the wind filled the sail and the crew hauled taut the sheets on either side. But soon strange things were seen among them. First of all sweet, fragrant wine ran streaming throughout all the black ship and a heavenly smell arose, so that all the seamen were seized with amazement when they saw it. And all at once a vine spread out both ways along the top of the sail with many clusters hanging down from it, and a dark ivy-plant twined about the mast, blossoming with flowers, and with rich berries growing on it; and all the thole-pins were covered with garlands. When the pirates saw all this, then at last they bade the helmsman to put the ship to land. But the god changed into a dreadful lion there on the ship, in the bows, and roared loudly: amidships also he showed his wonders and created a shaggy bear which stood up ravening, while on the forepeak was the lion glaring fiercely with scowling brows. And so the sailors fled into the stern and crowded bemused about the right-minded helmsman, until suddenly the lion sprang upon the master and seized him; and when the sailors saw it they leapt out overboard one and all into the bright sea, escaping from a miserable fate, and were changed into dolphins. But on the helmsman Dionysus had mercy and held him back and made him altogether happy, saying to him:

`Take courage, good…; you have found favour with my heart. I am loud-crying Dionysus whom Cadmus’ daughter Semele bare of union with Zeus.’

Hail, child of fair-faced Semele! He who forgets you can in no wise order sweet song.

From The Bacchae:

One grasped her thyrsus staff, and smote the rock,

And forth upleapt a fountain’s showry spray:

One in earth’s bosom planted her reed-wand,

And up there through the god a wine-fount sent:

And whoso fain would drink white-foaming draughts

Scarred with their finger tips the breast of earth,

And milk gushed forth unstinted: dripped the while

Sweet streams of honey from their ivy staves.

and…

The land flows with milk,

the land flows with wine,

the land flows with honey from the bees.

He holds the torch high,

our leader, the Bacchic One,

blazing flame of pine,

sweet smoke like Syrian incense,

trailing from his thyrsus.

As he dances, he runs,

here and there,

rousing the stragglers,

stirring them with his cries,

thick hair rippling in the breeze.

Among the Maenads’ shouts

his voice reverberates:

“On Bacchants, on!

With the glitter of Tmolus,

which flows with gold,

chant songs to Dionysus,

to the loud beat of our drums.

Celebrate the god of joy

with your own joy,

with Phrygian cries and shouts!

When sweet sacred pipes

play out their rhythmic holy song,

in time to the dancing wanderers,

then to the mountains,

on, on to the mountains.”

Then the bacchanalian woman

is filled with total joy—

like a foal in pasture

right beside her mother—

her swift feet skip in playful dance.