Heading Down The Garden Path…

As a result of confusing the real world of nature with mere signs such as money, stocks and bonds, title deeds and so forth we are destroying nature. This is a disaster. Time to wake up!—Alan Watts

Heading Down The Garden Path…

I swear, I swear. This is a bit of the hodge-podge today. Somewhat distracted and mired down in life at hand.

After the whole Gonzales thing, I realized that the task at hand is a bit Sisyphean in its nature; up the hill and back again with that damn rock. So, I found an article put together by Albert Camus which throws the myth into another light. Thanks Albert for that…

I am introducing Turfing to Austin Clarke, perhaps one of the last of Irelands’ Bardic Poets. This really is a treat IMHO. Wonderful Stuff!

Links are a bit wacky today, and the quotes, are well the quotes.

I hope this finds you well, and heading down the garden path of delight and joy.

Bright Blessings…

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On The Menu:

The Links

The Quotes

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Poetry of Austin Clarke

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The Links:

Orion’s Cradle

Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian right is re-imagining U.S. history

Spell May Comprise Oldest Semitic Text

Just a wee bit creepy…

Macabre secret of ancient cave revealed in TV series

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The Quotes

“It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.”

“Never give a party if you will be the most interesting person there.”

“People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”

“It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.”

“With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn’t think possible in today’s world. They have created a land of make-believe that’s worse than regular life.”

“Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250″

“If God had really intended men to fly, he’d make it easier to get to the airport.”

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The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of h is deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods w as necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screw ed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmou nted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the on ly bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—by such narrow ways–?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eage r to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The strugg le itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Translation by Justin O’Brien, 1955

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The Poetry of Austin Clarke

The Lost Heifer

When the black herds of the rain were grazing

In the gap of the pure cold wind

And the watery haze of the hazel

Brought her into my mind,

I thought of the last honey by the water

That no hive can find.

Brightness was drenching through the branches

When she wandered again,

Turning the silver out of dark grasses

Where the skylark had lain,

And her voice coming softly over the meadow

Was the mist becoming rain.

Penal Law

Burn Ovid with the rest. Lovers will find

A hedge-school for themselves and learn by heart

All that the clergy banish from the mind,

When hands are joined and heads bow in the dark.

The Awakening Of Dermuid

From ‘The Vengeance of Finn’

In the sleepy forest where the bluebells

Smouldered dimly through the night,

Dermuid saw the leaves

Like green waters

At daybreak flowing into light,

And exaltant from his love upspringing

Strode with the sun upon the height.

Glittering on the hilltops

He saw the sunlit rain

Drift as around the spindle

A silver threaded skien,

And the brown mist whitely breaking

Where arrowy torrents reached the plain.

A maddened moon

Leapt in his heart and…

Whirled the crimson tide

Of his blood until it sang aloud of battle

Where the querns of dark death grind,

Till it sang and scorned in pride

Love – the froth-pale

Blossom of the boglands

That flutters on the waves of

The wandering wind.

Flower quiet in the rush strewn sheiling

At the dawntime Grainne lay,

While beneath the birch-topped roof

The sunlight groped upon its way

And stopped above her sleeping white body

With a wasp yellow ray.

The hot breath of the day awoke her,

And wearied of its heat

She wandered out by the noisy elms

On the cool mossy peat,

Where the shadowed leaves

Like pecking linnets

Nodded round her feet.

She leaned and saw

In the pale-grey waters,

By twisted hazel boughs,

Her lips like heavy drooping poppies

In a rich redness drowse,

Then swallow…

Lightly touched the ripples

Until her wet lips were

Burning as ripened rowan berries

Through the white winter air.

Lazily she lingered

Gazing so,

As the slender osiers

Where the waters flow,

As greentwigs of sally

Swaying to and fro.

Sleepy moths fluttered

In her dark eyes,

And her lips grew quieter

Than lullabies.

Swaying with the reedgrass

Over the stream

Lazily she lingered

Cradling a dream.

The Subjection of Women

Over the hills the loose clouds rambled

From rock to gully where goat or ram

Might shelter. Below, the battering-ram

Broke in more cottages. Hope was gone

Until the legendary Maud Gonne,

for whom a poet lingered, sighed,

Drove out of mist upon a side-car,

Led back the homeless to broken fence,

Potato plot, their one defence,

And there, despite the threat of Peelers,

With risky shovel, barrow, peeling

Their coats off, eager young men

Jumped over bog-drain, stone to mend or

Restore the walls of clay; the police

Taking down names without a lease.

O she confronted the evictors

In Donegal, our victory.

When she was old and I was quickened

By syllables, I met her. Quickens

Stirred leafily in Glenmalure

Where story of Tudor battle had lured me.

I looked with wonder at the sheen

Of her golden eyes as though the Sidhe

Had sent a flame-woman up from ground

Where danger went, carbines were grounded.

Old now, by luck, I try to count

Those years. I never saw the Countess

Markievicz in her green uniform,

Cock-feathered slouched hat, her Fianna form

Fours. Form the railings of Dublin slums,

On the ricketty stairs the ragged slumped

At night. She knew what their poverty meant

In dirty laneway, tenement,

And fought for new conditions, welfare

When all was cruel, all unfair.

With speeches, raging as strong liquor,

Our big employers, bad Catholics,

Incited by Martin Murphy, waged

War on the poor and unwaged them.

Hundreds of earners were batoned, benighted,

When power and capital united.

Soon Connolly founded the Citizen Army

And taught the workers to drill, to arm.

Half-starving children were brought by ship

To Liverpool from lock-out, hardship.

“innocent souls are seized by kidnappers,

And proselytisers. Send back our kids!”

Religion guffed.

The Countess colled

With death at sandbags in the College

Of Surgeons. How many did she shoot

When she kicked off her satin shoes?

Women rose out after the Rebellion

When smoke of buildings hid the churchbells,

Helena Maloney, Louie Bennett

Unioned the women workers bent

At sewing machines in the by-rooms

Of Dublin, with little money to buy

A meal, dress-makers, milliners,

Tired hands in factories.

Mill-girls

In Lancashire were organized,

Employers forced to recognize them:

This was the cause of Eva Gore-Booth,

Who spoke on platform, at polling-booth

In the campaign for Women’s Suffrage,

That put our double-beds in a rage,

Disturbed the candle-lighted tonsure.

Here Mrs. Sheehy-Skeffington

And other marched. On a May day

In the Phoenix Park, I watched, amazed,

A lovely woman speak in public

While crowding fellows from office, public

House, jeered. I heard that sweet voice ring

And saw the gleam of wedding ring

As she denounced political craft,

Tall, proud as Mary Wollenstonecraft.

Still discontented, our country prays

To private enterprise. Few praise

Now Dr. Kathleen Lynn, who founded

A hospital for sick babies, foundlings,

Saved them with lay hands. How could we

Look down on infants, prattling, cooing,

When wealth had emptied so many cradles?

Better than ours, her simple Credo.

Women, who cast off all we want,

Are now despised, their names unwanted,

For patriots in party statement

And act make worse our Ill-fare State.

The soul is profit. Money claims us.

Heroes are valuable clay.

Austin Clarke (May 9, 1896–March 19, 1974) was one of the leading Irish poets of the generation after W. B. Yeats. He also wrote plays, novels and memoirs. Clarke’s main contribution to Irish poetry was the rigour with which he used technical means borrowed from classical Irish language poetry when writing in English.

Effectively, this meant writing English verse based not so much on metre as on complex patterns of assonance, consonance, and half rhyme. Describing his technique to Robert Frost, Clarke said “I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free.”

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