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“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
George Orwell
(Kris Kuksi – The Mouth Of Hades)
Tuesday is upon us, like a rush of wind. Hope you enjoy this edition, as we go down some different paths together….
Gwyllm
On The Menu:
Quotes From The Ozone
Alan Watts: Does The Wake Steer The Ship?
The Changeling and his Bagpipes
Pete’s Pick #2: Pitch Black – Lost in Translation
Poetry: Yeats, the later years…
Featured Artist: Kris Kuksi…
Kris Kuksi
“It is far to objectionable to even begin to agree upon what art is or what great art should be. Therefore, it is most certain that myself within this occupation be true to my tastes and to expel those pressures to conform to art-trends new or old.”
His art best fits into ‘Fantastic Realism’, yet the overall body of works have no specific category as seen in his broad range of ideas. He feels that using many directions and styles in art are necessary to express his voice and he feels that to succumb to just one style is without growth or diversity. A quiet and gentle man, Kris Kuksi continues his ideas of beauty and the strange in art while living a lifestyle suited to a nocturnal and oftentimes impulsive individual.
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Quotes From The Ozone…
“Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue – to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.”
Socrates
“If you want to become Yogis, you will have to get a move on.”
Aleister Crowley
“By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.”
George Carlin
“So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe.”
Alan Watts
“The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens – the more you control all the people.”
Noam Chomsky
“Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next and on and on.” – Kurt Vonnegut (Galapagos)
“I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own. So both of them together is certain death.”
George Carlin
“I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.”
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
If you are looking for vengeance, be sure to dig two graves.
Chinese saying
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
Gandhi
Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness…
Brave New World
“The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”
Henry David Thoreau
“I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.”
Orson Welles
“In this theater of man’s life, it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers-on.”
Pythagoras
“As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”
Michel Foucault
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Petes’ Pick:Soundpicture 1995 #1
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Alan Watts: Does The Wake Steer The Ship?
Alan Watts: The course of Time is very much like the course of a Ship. Here’s the ship, it leaves a wake, the wake fades out and that tells us where the ship has been.
In just the same way that our past tells us what we have done. But as we go back into the past, and we go back and back, to prehistory and we use all kinds of instruments & scientific methods for detecting what happened. We eventually reach a point where all record of the past fades away in just the same way as the wake of a ship.
The important thing to remember in this illustration is that the wake doesn’t drive the ship, anymore than the tale wags the dog!
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“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions,
that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
-Alan Watts
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(Kris Kuksi – Parasite and Host)
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The Changeling and his Bagpipes
A certain youth whom we shall here distinguish by the name of Rickard the Rake, amply earned his title by the time he lost in fair-tents, in dance-houses, in following hunts, and other unprofitable occupations, leaving his brothers and his aged father to attend to the concerns of the farm, or neglect them as they pleased. It is indispensable to the solemnities of a night dance in the country, to take the barn door off its hinges, and lay it on the floor to test the skill of the best dancers in the room in a single performance. In this was Rickard eminent, and many an evening did he hold the eyes of the assembly intent on his flourishes, lofty springs and kicks, and the other fashionable variations taught by the departed race of dancing-masters.
One evening while earning the applause of the admiring crowd, he uttered a cry of pain, and fell on his side on the hard door. A wonderful scene of confusion ensued,–the groans of the dancer, the pitying exclamations of the crowd, and their endeavours to stifle the sufferer in their eagerness to comfort him. We must suppose him carried home and confined to his bed for weeks, the complaint being a stiffness in one of his hip joints, occasioned by a fairy-dart. Fairy-doctors, male and female, tried their herbs and charms on him in vain; and more than one on leaving the house said to one of his family, “God send it’s not one of the sheeoges yous are nursing, instead of poor wild Rickard!”
And indeed there seemed to be some reason in the observation. The jovial, reckless, good-humoured buck was now a meagre, disagreeable, exacting creature, with pinched features, and harsh voice, and craving appetite; and for several weeks he continued to plague and distress his unfortunate family. By the advice of a fairyman a pair of bagpipes was accidentally left near his bed, and ears were soon on the stretch to catch the dulcet notes of the instrument from the room. It was well known that he was not at all skilled in the musical art; so if a well-played tune were heard from under his fingers, the course to be adopted by this family was clear.
But the invalid was as crafty as they were cunning; groans of pain and complaints of neglect formed the only body of sound that issued from the sick chamber. At last, during a hot harvest afternoon when every one should be in the field, and a dead silence reigned through the house, and yard, and out-offices, some one that was watching from an unsuspected press saw an anxious, foxy face peep out from the gently opened door of the room, and draw itself back after a careful survey of the great parlour into which it opened, and which had the large kitchen on the other side. Soon after, the introductory squeal of the instrument was heard, but of a sweeter quality than the same pipes ever uttered before or after that day. Then followed a strain of such wild and sweet melody as held in silent rapture about a dozen of the people of the house and some neighbours who had been apprised of the experiment, and who, till the first enchanting sound breathed through the house, had kept themselves quiet in the room above the kitchen, consequently the farthest from the changeling’s station.
While they stood or sat entranced as air succeeded to air, and the last still the sweetest, they began to distinguish whispers, and the nearly inaudible rustle of soft and gauzy dresses seemingly brushing against each other, and such subdued sounds as a cat’s feet might cause, swiftly pacing along a floor. They were unable to stir, or even move their lips, so powerful was the charm of the fairy’s music on their wills and their senses, till at last the fairy-man spoke–the only person who had the will or the capacity to hold conference with him being the fairy-woman from the next townland.
He.–Come, come! this must be put a stop to.
The words were not all uttered when a low whistling noise was heard from the next room, and the moment after there was profound stillness.
She.–Yes, indeed; and what would you advise us to do first with the anointed sheeoge?
He.–We’ll begin easy. We’ll take him neck and crop and hold his head under the water in the turnhole till we’ll dhrive the divel out of him.
She.–That ‘ud be a great deal too easy a punishment for the thief. We’ll hate the shovel red-hot, put it under his currabingo, and land him out in the dung-lough.
He.–Ah, now; can’t you thry easier punishments on him? I’ll put the tongs in the fire till the claws are as hot as the dive!, and won’t I hould his nasty crass nose between them till he’ll know the difference between a fiery faces and a latchycock. [a]
She.–No, no! Say nothing, and I’ll go and bring my liquor, drawn from the leaves of the lussmore; [b] and if he was a sheeoge forty times, it will put the inside of him, into such a state that he’d give the world he could die. Some parts of him will be as if he had red-hot saws rasping him asunder, and others as if needles of ice were crossing and crossing each other in his bowels; and when he’s dead, we’ll give him no better grave nor the bog-hole, or the outside of the churchyard.
He.–Very well; let’s begin. I’ll bring my red-hot tongs from the kitchen fire, and you your little bottle of lussmore water. Don’t any of yez go in, neighbours, till we have them ingradients ready.
There was a pause in the outer room while the fairyman passed into the kitchen and back. Then there was a rush at the door, and a bursting into the room; but there was no sign of the changeling on the bed, nor under the bed, nor in any part of the room. At last one of the women shouted out in terror, for the face of the fiend was seen at the window, looking in, with such scorn and hate on the fearful features as struck terror into the boldest. However, the fairy-man dashed at him with his burning tongs in hand; but just as it was on the point of gripping his nose, a something between a laugh and a scream, that made the blood in their veins run cold, came from him. Face and all vanished, and that was the last that was seen of him. Next morning, Rickard, now a reformed rake, was found in his own bed. Great was the joy at his recovery, and great it continued, for he laid aside his tobacco-pipe, and pint and quart measures. He forsook the tent and the sheebeen house, and took kindly to his reaping-hook, his spade, his plough, and his prayer-book, and blessed the night he was fairy-struck on the dance floor.
The mutual proceedings of the intruding fairies and the intruded-on mortals, are not always of the hostile character hitherto described. It is with some pleasure that we record an instance where the desirable re-exchange was effected without those disagreeable agencies resorted to in the case of “Rickard the Rake.”
[a] Attempts at two law terms. The author has been acquainted with peasants to whom law terms and processes were as familiar as ever they were to poor Peter Peebles.
[b] Great Herb. The Purpureus Digitalis, Fairy-finger, or Foxglove.
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Pete’s Pick #2: Pitch Black – Lost in Translation
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Poetry: Yeats, the later years….
TO A SHADE
IF you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.
A man
Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought
In his full hands what, had they only known,
Had given their children’s children loftier thought,
Sweeter emotion, working in their veins
Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,
And insult heaped upon him for his pains
And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set
The pack upon him.
Go, unquiet wanderer,
And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
About your head till the dust stops your ear,
The time for you to taste of that salt breath
And listen at the corners has not come;
You had enough of sorrow before death–
Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.
September 29, 1913.
—
EASTER, 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We-know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse–
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
September 15, 1916.
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THE SECOND COMING
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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(Kris Kuksi – Fall of Rome)
