The whole folderol and whoop-de-do about the 1960s was that the crypto-fascist bullshit agenda was damn near overthrown by a bunch of 19 and 20 year olds on campuses scattered around the high tech world. The male dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe.Terence McKenna
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Freezing rain, early morning, just past midnight… Off to bed. Hope all is well with you and the world…
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Sylvian & Fripp – Jean The Birdman
The Links
The Quotes
Sufi Tales… Part 1
David Sylvian & Robert Fripp – God’s Monkey
Sufi Tales Part 2
Poetry: More Robinson Jeffers…
David Sylvian & Robert Fripp – Blinding Light Of Heaven
All Art: Gustave Klimt
Enjoy!
Gwyllm
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Sylvian & Fripp – Jean The Birdman
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The Links:
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The Quotes:
“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
“One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”
“Advertisements… contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
“You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.”
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
“If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”
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Sufi Tales… Part 1
THE FOUR MEN AND THE INTERPRETER
Four people were given a piece of money.
The first was a Persian. He said: ‘I will buy with this some angur.’
The second was an Arab. He said: ‘No, because I want inab.’
The third was Turk. He said: ‘I do not want inab, I want uzum.’
The fourth was a Greek. He said: ‘I want stafil.’
Because they did not know what lay behind the names of things, these four started to fight.
They had information but no knowledge.
One man of wisdom present could have reconciled them all, saying: ‘I can fulfil the needs of all of you, with one and the same piece of money. If you honestly give me your trust, your one coin will become as four; and four at odds will become as one united.’
Such a man would know that each in his own language wanted the same thing, grapes.
– taken from the sufi Jalal-Uddin Rumi (d.1273)
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Mahmud of Ghazna
It is related that Mahmud of Ghazna was once walking in his garden when he stumbled over a blind dervish sleeping beside a bush.
As soon as he awoke, the dervish cried, You clumsy oaf! Have you no eyes, that you must trample upon the sons of men?
Mahmuds companion, who was one of his courtiers, shouted, Your blindness is equaled only by your stupidity! Since you cannot see, you should be doubly careful of whom you are accusing of heedlessness.
If by that you mean, said the dervish, that I should not criticize a sultan, it is you who should realize your shallowness.
Mahmud was impressed that the blind man knew that he was in the presence of the king, and he said mildly, Why, O dervish, should a king have to listen to vituperation from you?
Precisely, said the dervish, because it is the shielding of people of any category from criticism appropriate to them which is responsible for their downfall. It is the burnished metal which shines most brightly, the knife struck with the whetstone which cuts best, and the exercised arm which can lift the weight.
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David Sylvian & Robert Fripp – God’s Monkey
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Sufi Tales Part 2
The Frogs
A group of frogs were traveling through the woods, and two of them fell into a deep pit. All the other frogs gathered around the pit. When they saw how deep the pit was, they told the unfortunate frogs they would never get out. The two frogs ignored the comments and tried to jump up out of the pit.
The other frogs kept telling them to stop, that they were as good as dead. Finally, one of the frogs took heed to what the other frogs were saying and simply gave up. He fell down and died.
The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could. Once again, the crowd of frogs yelled at him to stop the pain and suffering and just die. He jumped even harder and finally made it out. When he got out, the other frogs asked him, “Why did you continue jumping. Didn’t you hear us?”
The frog explained to them that he was deaf. He thought they were encouraging him the entire time.
This story holds two lessons:
1. There is power of life and death in the tongue. An encouraging word to someone who is down can lift them up and help them make it through the day.
2. A destructive word to someone who is down can be what it takes to kill them. Be careful of what you say. Speak life to those who cross your path.
The power of words… it is sometimes hard to understand that an encouraging word can go such a long way. Anyone can speak words that tend to rob another of the spirit to continue in difficult times.
Special is the individual who will take the time to encourage another.
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Why Are You Here?
One day Nasrudin was walking along a deserted road. Night was
falling as he spied a troop of horsemen coming toward him. His
imagination began to work, and he feared that they might rob him,
or impress him into the army. So strong did this fear become that
he leaped over a wall and found himself in a graveyard. The other
travelers, innocent of any such motive as had been assumed by
Nasrudin, became curious and pursued him.
When they came upon him lying motionless, one said, “Can we help
you? And, why are you here in this position?”
Nasrudin, realizing his mistake said, “It is more complicated
than you assume. You see, I am here because of you; and you, you
are here because of me.”
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Poetry: More Robinson Jeffers…
Birth-Dues
Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely
contemptible, the dangled
Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice;
But limitary pain — the rock under the tower
and the hewn coping
That takes thunder at the head of the turret-
Terrible and real. Therefore a mindless dervish
carving himself
With knives will seem to have conquered the world.
The world’s God is treacherous and full of
unreason; a torturer, but also
The only foundation and the only fountain.
Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes
of hunger; who hides in the grave
To escape him is dead; who enters the Indian
Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in
love with the God is washed clean
Of death desired and of death dreaded.
He has joy, but Joy is a trick in the air; and
pleasure, but pleasure is contemptible;
And peace; and is based on solider than pain.
He has broken boundaries a little and that will
estrange him; he is monstrous, but not
To the measure of the God…. But I having told
you–
However I suppose that few in the world have
energy to hear effectively-
Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the
people.
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Fawn’s Foster-Mother
The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels
With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.
Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun
And saying that when she was first married
She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.
(It is empty now, the roof has fallen
But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods
Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;
The place is now more solitary than ever before.)
“When I was nursing my second baby
My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake
And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast
Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.
Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,
Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.
I had more joy from that than from the others.”
Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road
With market-wagons, mean cares and decay.
She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin
Soon to be shed from the earth’s old eye-brows,
I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,
The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.
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The Broken Balance
I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch’s Life of Sulla
The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
They marvelled; the soothsayers answered:
“Although the Gods are little troubled toward men, at the end of each period
A sign is declared in heaven
Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the Romans
Rule, and Etruria is finished;
A wise mariner will trim the sails to the wind.”
I heard yesterday
So shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast,
It was hard to be wise…. You must eat change and endure; not be much troubled
For the people; they will have their happiness.
When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry It;
When life grows hateful, there’s power …
II To the Children
Power’s good; life is not always good but power’s good.
So you must think when abundance
Makes pawns of people and all the loaves are one dough.
The steep singleness of passion
Dies; they will say, “What was that?” but the power triumphs.
Loveliness will live under glass
And beauty will go savage in the secret mountains.
There is beauty in power also.
You children must widen your minds’ eyes to take mountains
Instead of faces, and millions
Instead of persons; not to hate life; and massed power
After the lone hawk’s dead.
III
That light blood-loving weasel, a tongue of yellow
Fire licking the sides of the gray stones,
Has a more passionate and more pure heart
In the snake-slender flanks than man can imagine;
But he is betrayed by his own courage,
The man who kills him is like a cloud hiding a star.
Then praise the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;
The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock
With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills
The red-shafted woodpecker flying,
A white star between blood-color wing-clouds,
Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.
These live their felt natures; they know their norm
And live it to the brim; they understand life.
While men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked
Their natures until the souls the in them;
They have sold themselves for toys and protection:
No, but consider awhile: what else? Men sold for toys.
Uneasy and fractional people, having no center
But in the eyes and mouths that surround them,
Having no function but to serve and support
Civilization, the enemy of man,
No wonder they live insanely, and desire
With their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death.
Their ancestors were good hunters, good herdsmen and swordsman,
But now the world is turned upside down;
The good do evil, the hope’s in criminals; in vice
That dissolves the cities and war to destroy them.
Through wars and corruptions the house will fall.
Mourn whom it falls on. Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall.
IV
Rain, hail and brutal sun, the plow in the roots,
The pitiless pruning-iron in the branches,
Strengthen the vines, they are all feeding friends
Or powerless foes until the grapes purple.
But when you have ripened your berries it is time to begin to perish.
The world sickens with change, rain becomes poison,
The earth is a pit, it Is time to perish.
The vines are fey, the very kindness of nature
Corrupts what her cruelty before strengthened.
When you stand on the peak of time it is time to begin to perish.
Reach down the long morbid roots that forget the plow,
Discover the depths; let the long pale tendrils
Spend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good
But only the steel mirrors of discovery . . .
And the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish.
V
Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth
Under men’s hands and their minds,
The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,
The spreading fungus, the slime-threads
And spores; my own coast’s obscene future: I remember the farther
Future, and the last man dying
Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars.
It was only a moment’s accident,
The race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal
Splendor; from here I can even
Perceive that that snuffed candle had something . . . a fantastic virtue,
A faint and unshapely pathos . . .
So death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape’s by-shot
Was moderately admirable?
VI Palinode
All summer neither rain nor wave washes the cormorants’
Perch, and their droppings have painted it shining white.
If the excrement of fish-eaters makes the brown rock a snow-mountain
At noon, a rose in the morning, a beacon at moonrise
On the black water: it is barely possible that even men’s present
Lives are something; their arts and sciences (by moonlight)
Not wholly ridiculous, nor their cities merely an offense.
VII
Under my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass
Stands narrowed between the people and the storm.
The ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet
Summer after summer encroach and destroy.
Stubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you, ignorant which color,
Gray-blue or pale-green, will please the late stars;
But laugh at the other, your seed shall enjoy wonderful vengeances and suck
The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.
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Sylvian & Fripp – Blinding Light Of Heaven
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