October 2007 – Gwyllm.com

Tuli Kupferberg – Interview by Jason Gross (June 1997)
PSF: What were you working on before the Fugs?
Well, I was the world’s greatest poet before I became the world’s oldest rock n’roll star. I wasn’t with the Fugs until I was 42 but before that my life was trivial. I went to graduate school for sociology in Brooklyn. I dropped out and became a bohemian, living in Greenwich Village. The rest is mystery and history. It’s all one blur now.
I was a free-formist. I never took to the traditional forms. I never bothered to learn them. It’s OK to learn the old forms though and study what you’ve inherited in any art. I valued spontaneity a lot and being young, you’re always afraid that you’re going to be overwhelmed by the masters so you try to avoid it.
PSF: What kind of things were influencing you then?
The usual things. Ego, sex, money, in that order I think. Money wasn’t actually up there though. You could actually live on much less than you can today. I was sort of influenced by anybody I read.
PSF: How did you get interested in politics?
I was very political at an early age. When I was in my pre-teens they had those ‘Hoover-villes’ during the Depression. My father had a retail store that failed three times. We were just on the brink of going on welfare. You’d be amazed at how that can make you politically and economically conscious. My generation really experienced adversity so a dime is still big money to me! You had to be REALLY STUPID not to be political then. Even when things got better, you didn’t see it was better for you personally. It could always happen again and it always does. Besides the economy, you also had wars. When there’s a crisis in society, sometimes you see things more clearly. Otherwise, it just kind of waves right over you, especially when you’re young.
PSF:What did think of the Beat movement when it first started happening?
I remember being shocked by it. I guess I was still in some sort of traditional mode. Shocked, jealousy and then adaptation. It was liberating. I was shocked by Ed Sander’s freedom of sexual expression. I’m sure people were shocked by mine when I started. Ginsberg is your best example of a liberating force. It’s not just the language or the freedom of the language because that just reflects character structure. A person who drops dead or wants to kill someone would use all those words you’re not supposed to use. It’s more than language. It’s attitude towards sexuality and human relations along with domination and love. It’s not that people who shout about sexual freedom understand everything that’s involved. In order to have good sex, you have to have good human relationships and vice versa. When I grew up, in my community, you weren’t going to have sex until you got married- this was a middle-class Jewish community. Maybe you went to a prostitute… But that gradually broke down. That was all for the good and not just for me but also for most of America.
PSF: So you got to be part of the Beats yourself then?
Everyone was. But I felt that they had a heritage with the bohemians. The term comes from 12th century University of Paris. The craziest students came from Bohemia and they gave them this name. There’s this old tradition of living outside of the mores of society. Until the burgeouis revolution, most artists lived on the patronage of the ruling class. LA VIE DE BOHEME, the libetto for that opera, tells you what was happening then in the 18th century. So that’s a 150 year old tradition that’s still going on. It used to be linked to geography with places like New York, San Francisco, Munich, Paris. But now, with the Internet, you could be crazy, wild, free and self-destructive anywhere you want. But hopefully, there’s still communities of people out there. Utopian colonies who are just friends.
PSF: Before the Fugs, did you have any interest in music?
I’m not a musician- I can’t read music. The only thing I know how to play is the radio. I sing and write and compose songs. I have a memory of thousands of songs. There was always some music in the house. I seem to remember melodies better than some musicians I know. I had a sliver of that particular kind of intelligence. I listened to a lot of pop music on the radio but there were no musicians around me. Poetry and music used to be the same thing so if I had an interest in poetry, it was part of a musical interest as well.
Speech is music. It’s bad music. Some languages are very musical. When you hear certain people read, it’s almost music. Some people who do music, it’s almost speech. It’s a continuance.
PSF: A lot of your music comes from chants and sing-a-longs.
I like to invovle the audience like a number of writers, directors and political people do. I like to break down the barriers. The artist wants to move people and see the results. That’s why performing is more pleasurable than just writing, to me at least.
PSF: How did you start out with Ed and the Fugs?
We were both poets on the lowest East Side. We met at a place called the Metro. They sold furniture and since they had the tables and chairs there already, so they decided to open a coffee shop. Once the coffee house was established, it became the center of poetry readings. This was in the early ’60s. After the poetry, we would go to a place called the Dom on St. Marks. We would go there and try to dance, listening to the Beatles and the Stones. The early Beatles were not great poets but they did become great poets later. We decided that we could do something like that. So we decided to enter the field and we were sort of an instant hit. We had a wide range- Ed was a wild, crazy, mid-Western young man and I was a New York radical Jew. So together he had everything or, as some people would say, nothing.
PSF: Peter Stampfel said that he was impressed with all the songs that you and had written before the Holy Modal Rounders joined you.
He was a great help to us. He sort of gave us the illusion that we were musicians and a band. We were sort of a punk band. Our idea was that anybody could do this. Peter and Steve Weber gave us a lot of encouragement. We didn’t give a fuck actually. We weren’t out to do high art. For our first performances, our friends joined us on stage and carried on. We had a few people who would write songs like Ted Berrigan. The most archetypical Fug line was ‘I ain’t ever gonna go to Vietnam, I prefer to stay here and screw your mom’ which was from Ted. That’s from ‘Doing Alirght.’ That was enough to get us beaten up if we did it in the right place.
With the War going on then, it was a desperate time. There were thousands of dead and all the young men were facing that attempt to murder them. The nation was still supporting ‘our boys.’ We were really the ones being patriotic because we were trying to save lives. Other people were just trying to kill other people that they had never seen. That’s what war is- you go somewhere and kill people you’ve never met.
PSF: What happened with the Fugs after Peter and Steve left?
We got other musicians. I was sort of opposed with the idea of perfecting our music. I felt that it would interfere with our message: love, sex, dope. The only thing I think is safe or worth doing is marijuana. Also, as Ed put it ‘all kinds of freedoms given to us that the First Ammendment hadn’t taken care of.’ We were poets. Poets can say whatever they want about anything. So we felt that we did that with music. Pop music from the ’20s to the ’60s was mostly courtship music. In pop music, the Beatles sang abou
t everything in life and so did everyone else, including us.
PSF: Do you think a lot of people who were getting serious about politics at that time were phonies or were they genuine?
There’s the problem that if you keep faking something long enough, you start to believe your own lies. But I think mostly they were genuine. The ’60s were a time of great crisis in America. The war was the focal point. There was also minorites who demanded equal rights and the womens’ movement and various kinds of socialism, communism and anarchism. Then you saw that these things were connected. For instance, a woman couldn’t have equal pay unless you had some sort of control over the economy unless you fixed it in the law (though I really don’t believe in the law). It’s still inter-related but people aren’t conscious of this. You have to be very clever, quick and lucky to escape such an oppressive system.
PSF: You think that you did that?
Well, we were never arrested, which is amazing. We were threatened many times. Ed has these FBI advisories. Someone in the FBI probably realized what a farce it would be and what asses they would make of themselves if they put Ed on the stand. ‘What exactly do you mean by ‘Coca-Cola Douche’ Mr. Sanders?’ ‘You know, Coke! No Pepsi!’ There were suggestions that we’d be prosectued but nothing ever happened. People in the government aren’t THAT stupid. After ‘Howl’ was being prosecuted, it became the most famous poem in the country and thousands of people wanted to read it. So if we HAD been arrested, we would have probably sold a few hundred thousand more albums.
PSF: Since you were talking about it before, what kind of interactive things were you doing with the Fugs?
Pete Seeger used to do it but going way back. There were whole societies that had huge choral groups. Mass singing was done with the Welsh and the Russians. You could do it in two ways. You could print up the lyrics and force the audience to sing with you. You could also repeat a line or do the song once and then give the audience the line. Depending on what mood they’re in, you get audience response. It depends on the song too. The best audience was the third audience at midnight on a Saturday at a club we used to play at on MacDougal Street. They were all drunk so you could come out on stage and wave your hands and they’d scream and yell for you. In our first performances in the East Village, the audience would come on stage and do all sorts of things.
In the sixties, we were really the USO of the Left. We did a lot of benefits. We were one of the most conscious bands but we weren’t the only ones. It was really the attitude and style, which later became co-opted. In all due modesty, I don’t think there other bands that were as radical then. Zappa was kind of a cultural radical but he was a liberterian and a political idiot as far as I’m concerned. He started out in advertising and he stayed there to some extent. Ginsberg started out in advertising but he never looked back. The Who, The Stones and Beatles were saying very radical things. A lot of folk music is culturally and politically radical. There is a tradition in folk music for that though a lot of the songs are bad. It goes back to the Wobblies in the 19th Century. Woody Guthrie also. Dylan started very political. Phil Ochs too. Folk purists used argue about playing rock n’roll but good music is good music where ever it comes from. Music by itself can move people, sometimes very destructively like with a military march.
PSF: A lot of your songs involved writing new lyrics for songs.
It’s a very old tradition. I used it a lot when I didn’t have a band. The earliest singers I remember that did this was (Martin) Luther who took popular songs of the period and made church hymns out them. He said ‘why should the devil have the best of tunes.’ Then Joe Hill in the early part of the 1900′s used church hymns and changed them into radical pop songs.

Long-haired preachers come out every night

Try and tell you what’s wrong and what’s right

But when asked about something to eat

They are sure, they are sure to repeat

‘You’ll get pie…

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (that’s a lie)

Work and pray

Live on hay

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (it’s a lie)’
So it’s an old tradition. I call them para-songs.

PSF: Did the Fugs have any particular goals?
Our goal was to make the revolution. That would have been a complete revolution, not just an economic or political one. We had utopian ideals and those are the best ideals. What happened was that this movement that flourished then had a lot of problems. A lot of promises weren’t as deeply rooted or as well grounded as we thought. The technological revolution and the movement of world capital created problems that no one had ever thought possible. The sixties never connected. It was basically a youth movement and basically a middle-class, male movement. That’s not enough. There were students but the war fed itself on that part of the movement and the previous radical history. There were a lot of ‘grown-ups’ and academic people and ordinary people but its roots were not deep enough and its analysis (Marxist and anarchist) wasn’t enough to take over. We didn’t know how to get from our good ideas to the society we wanted.
Then it slowly collapsed once the draft ended and once the war ended. Obviously the forces of the old society (religion and tradition) were much stronger than we thought. So things continued the way they are. We still don’t have the ideology to get out of this. We never connected to the working class and now they seem to be disappearing into microchips- you have a lot of ‘surplus’ people. We need some sort of understanding of what’s going on because everything is out of control, especially out of our control. We have very little influence, we radicals today.
The sixties were a complete surprise because in the fifties, American society was just recovering from World War II and young man just wanted to go back to school and start a family. There was no politics. Then the sixties happened. You can never predict when it’s going to happen because it’s rooted in human nature that you can only take so much oppression before you do something. But sometimes you do the wrong thing. We don’t have the answers but if they only gave us a chance… It was not a complete failure because a lot of the things we believed in have gone a long way to being realized. We were not the idealists. We manifested them and learned from other people.
PSF: With the Fugs, what was happening with the band after ’65?
I think that our songs developed and become more sophisticated and complicated. We spread into different areas and the music got better. I don’t think we should have disbanded. It was due to personal conflicts which I really don’t completely understand. We would have been really needed in the ’70s because that was a slow decline where everything that that generation thought was going to happen, just disappeared slowly.
PSF: What were you doing after the Fugs broke up?
I formed a group called the Revolting Theater, which sort of carried on in the tradition of the Fugs. Basically we acted out artifacts that we had found in society- advertisements or crazy songs or poetry. That had a mild reason for being. We played mostly at colleges. Then I formed a group called the Fuxxons and that was me and anybody that was around- we did some Fugs songs and other stuff.
Then in ’84, the Fugs were reformed. I would have been always ready to reform but I think Ed decided that it should happen at that particular time. We did a reunion concert with new musicians at the Bottom Line. A lot of people came and it was fun. We’ve been playing on and off since then. I don’t think that we had the impact that we did in the sixties for a number of reasons. We did the Real Woodstock Festival in ’94 where Ed lives. That same year, we played in Italy.
PSF: Before you said the Fugs were about dope and fucking. What about now?
No, I said that the Fugs were about dope and fucking and any kind of mind liberation that didn’t kill you or damage your internal organs. I was always careful about that because I’d been a medical librarian and I knew all about that. My phrase was ‘better to be a live ogre than a dead saint.’ I knew a lot of dead saints. It was about politics and it was about life and relations between people and ‘freedom,’ meaning the ability to explore and express yourself and other peoples’ feelings. We were all about creating a utopia and we had our ideas about what it was. We tried to work for it and to live it because we weren’t going to wait- ‘we want the world and we want it now.’ We were impatient, especially in the sixties where young people faced death and they weren’t going to wait to enjoy anything after they were dead.
It’s a mistake to put it (freedom) in terms of physiology. Nothing wrong with that. The basic unit of human society is the human body. You have to know how to use it and enjoy it. That’s only part of it though because if you have a human body and you put it in the dark and leave them there, you get something that isn’t quite human. It needs nourishment and human society. It doesn’t have to be the patriarchal family. In the age of AIDS, I recommend group marriages with four couples. More than eight people would be too much.
Bascially, the Fugs are the same except we’re more refined and more clever and more worked out and more beautifully put and less listened to.
PSF: You were saying that things are different for the Fugs now.
What’s different isn’t the Fugs- it’s the society around which we function. There was more of a community for the arts before. If you lived in the Village, you knew the film makers and the painters. Due to mass media, there’s no much of a community because there are many, many small communities and groups. If you go into Tower Records, you can find 2500 bands- that’s good because it means a lot of people are doing things. But audiences have also become more broken down. There’s no large community. The question is whether the times create the great artist or whether the great artist helps to create the times. It works together. If you’re incredibly great, you can surpass the times. If you’re just a little good, then times will push you onward and make you better. If the times are terrible, you’ve got to work against all of it. It’s really complicated but we’re always ready for more good music and more good times.

_________________
Tuli & Ed Saunders

Interview With Tuli Kupferberg – 2004/ Matthew Paris

M.P. – Tuli, you started out as a young anarchist; were you Kropotkinesque or Bakuninesque?
T.K. – Well, actually I was a Stalinist. In those days everybody was a Stalinist but very shortly I became a Trotskyite or demi-Trotskyite, and then I became very confused. All those terrible questions were being asked about the trials, though other people were asking them. I was very young, about thirteen; it was the Depression so there was a lot of motivation around.
M.P. – Why Stalinism? He was a Russian nationalist and Trotsky international; how did you defend that?
T.K. – When you’re thirteen you don’t really defend too much. It’s just that the Communist Party was the most active group around and they would have first shot, so to speak, at a young person who became politically concerned. When I went to New Utrecht High School it was a hotbed of political radicalism; all Jewish areas were. (laughs) They were the children of immigrant workers a lot of whom were radicals of various kinds.
M.P. – How do you feel about those days when causes were so clear and simple?
T.K. – 0, if they would only come back! (laughs) Maybe simplicity was part of being young, but Fascism, Hitler helped crystalize us. I think there’s a lot to that theory that Western Capitalism built Hitler up, particularly. France and England, to devour the Soviet Union. My God; he didn’t do exactly what they wanted! Maybe the telephone receiver wasn’t too clear.

It’s peculiar because American ideology was Part of this simplicity, such as Manifest Destiny, Progress. The easy way out was simplicity. Whenever you found a Socialism you didn’t like you’d say, this is not Socialism. In the end, the ideology was not developed enough to explain or foresee things. Therefore we had these incredible mistakes, if you can call what cost millions of people their lives a mistake happened.
Marx predicted a lot of things wrong, made a lot of mistakes, and had a lot of success; he predicted the revolution would happen in a developed country like England and it never did. Revolution in Russia because it was undeveloped stood outside the theory. In retrospect one can say that both Marxism and Anarchist theory had serious defects. The Anarchists say their theory has never been tried; that’s one of the faults. If it never took power anywhere, it’s a defect.
M.P. – Aren’t these etudes in artifice that stand apart from Nature?
T.K. – Nature is a word I never use; I think everything is natural, even artificial things; it’s a different kind of nature. Not everything that’s natural is wonderful as anyone who eats the leaves of the hemlock will easily find out.
I don’t associate with any group; maybe no group will associate with me. I think the 60s was a search for community because American society has none; it has small groups organized to exploit small groups-and then larger groups. At first anarchism has to be an attitude; it starts with disrespect for institutions. If you have a general disrespect, you might slight something worthwhile.
M.P. – How did you meet Ed Sanders?
T.K. – I guess I met him at the Metro, a coffee house on Second Avenue; we had readings in the free art forms of the period. You were there.
M.P. – Yeah. If people didn’t like the poetry there was some rather violent criticism of it.
T.K. – I think that’s all right.
M.P. – Also there was utter freedom to say whatever you wanted; that was revolutionary.
T.K. – Well, Paul Goodman always said you could always say whatever you wanted as long as it didn’t have any effect.
Only In America. The owner was not exactly a poetical type. It was a commercial thing for him; he was sort of a Birchite actually. The poets brought him a lot of business so he was quite happy with that. It had a reputation of a place where people read and met their friends in those kinds of circles.
M.P. – There was you, Ed Sanders, Allen Katzman, Allen Ginsberg; you never knew what was going to happen. One girl read tragic limericks. Ed Sanders ran it, right?
T.K. – No, it passed through several hands because it got too disgusting for one person to do all that organizing and balance these inflated egos against one another. One of the games was getting the perfect place on the schedule. You didn’t want to read too early, but you didn’t want to read too late. You had to find the place where the audience was at the perfect pitch of receptivity.
M.P. – Those were eight hour sessions. When was that?
T.K. – 0, it would be a little past the middle, generally. In my novel which has the same unmentionable title as a magazine I helped edit, I discuss it; if anyone can convince a publisher to do it, they can ponder over it too.
M.P. – There was one poet, who seemed to have bought a costume out of an old IWW shop, who’d bring a poem of 30,000 pages, read excerpts, and always have a different girlfriend. He was very serious.
T.K. – There were thousands of people like that; you’ll have to be more specific.
M.P. – He looked like a Warner Brothers fantasy of a dangerous Red; no smiles.
T.K. – I got inoculated against bad sentimental poetry there. I didn’t get pickled, just sweet and sour. I once was going to do an anthology called The World’s Worst Poems. It was very hard to do, because no matter how hard I tried, there would always be something good in one of them, or if the poem were totally bad, it became something else: a perfectly funny thing, actually.
M.P. – It’s a virtuoso trick to be banal all the time.
T.K. – The trouble with a cliché is that you don’t hear it at all. Newspapers are a means of non-communication; you have to read between the lines. I make a lot of poems out of them but sometimes you want to rip out the paper and recite it as the joke of the month.
M.P. – Could you talk about the politics in your mag with the unmentionable name?
T.K. – Not all of it was. It was A Magazine of the Arts. You’re allowed to say Arts, I think. Ed Sanders was the editor. He was sort of a lyrical wild man; he just sort of spoke those words quite naturally. It’s really in the American tradition.
Ed is from Missouri; there really is a lot of Mark Twain in him. He gathered the liveliest things he could find around the East Village at that time and put them all together. He didn’t worry about language and he got a pretty lively magazine.
M.P. – How do you feel about Al Goldstein’s mag, to not use another word)?
T.K. – The sexism seems to be so obvious and stupid that I don’t consider it to be very harmful. I like the humor of it, the lightness it brings to sex. I think if you talk to Al he’ll deny that he’s sexist.
M.P. – Yeah, I talked to Al. He says that. He says it’s Flaubertian satire.
T.K. – I don’t know whether it started out that way. If you carry anything to an extreme it becomes ridiculous. I’ve had this experience with satire: you have to know what you’re doing, but if you’re willing to take the risk, you’ve got to make yourself very clear.
M.P. – Did you like working for the East Village Other?
T.K. — I was a free lance as opposed to a slave-lance journalist. It had some possibilities; it did some good things.

M.P. – How did The Fugs start?
T.K. – It was Ed’s idea. We had been going to the Dom, which was an ethnic bar around the corner from the Metro; you remember it-we were listening to the Beatles, and the Stones on the jukebox. Ed saw a logical connection to putting that music and that energy into poetry.

I thought it was a great idea; I picked the name. We had been performing; those readings were sort of performances. There’s always been a link between music and poetry, as Ed knew being a classical scholar, so we just connected them. A lot of it

really worked.
M.P. – How did you like touring?
T.K. – It was a mixed bag. It was nice to go somewhere you wanted to go, but it wasn’t good to leave some place you wanted to stay. Motel rooms are not the most wonderful place. But it was exciting to meet the folks out there. At first it’s all very exciting and you accept it uncritically, but then you begin to wonder what exactly is being adulated and why, and is it overdone, overblown, is it wrong, is the whole idea of the Artist or anybody as hero valid? In the media it’s almost impossible to escape that role.
The form demanded that I have a broader sense of humor. Since none of us were musicians we had to do more than music. Since Ed wouldn’t let me sing, I became more an actor.

There were some good reasons why I shouldn’t have sung. But we were working in the pattern of the folk balladeer, the minnesinger, which I’m still doing; the traditions became confusing because the music got in the way of the poetry. It was at times too loud for the music, and no point to us, though we had good musicians.
M.P. – Do you think the 60s idea of an honest life was a dream?
T.K. – It’s not the first time this dream has been around. I can remember the dream of the 30s that died in the 50s. Another was alive in the 60s and died in the 70s, and it’s older than that. Nothing is wasted; no voice is wholly lost.
M.P. – Do you feel that your historical role is over as Trotsky’s was in Mexico?
T.K. – Did Trotsky really feel that? Why did he keep on writing then? If one particular role is over, it’s up to you and your sense of self to look for another role which is not necessarily a contradiction of the old one but will continue the things you want to do.
___________

Poems From The 90′s: Tuli Speaks His Mind…

BECAUSE THE STATE
tune: chorus of “Because the Night (Belong to Lovers)”

by Patti Smith & Bruce Springsteen
Because the state belongs to fuckers

Because the state belongs to them

Alpha primate otherfuckers

Wasps in the edenic glen
& because the state was made by fuckers

Because the state was made for them

Pleasure-hating motherfuckers

Lover-baiting sons a guns
And the state holds monopoly of force

“Cop killers” also mean “cops who kill”

& tho the idea is somewhat coarse

Wilheim Reich might hold: “That’s a sexual thrill”
& because the state seducts us early

From 3 years on to postgrad docs:

Because the state educts us early

Dripdries our brains, hangs ‘em out like sox
& because the state thrives with armies

Protects its properties thru blacks & blues

Soldier boys are never called “murderers”

But what the hell is what they do?
& soon no doubt when we’re alone

The govt’ll tape your cunt & my bone

The state is a devil disguised as God

That throws its laws like a lightening rod
& this “executive committee of the ruling class”

Shoves its media up our ass

Will the evil of two lessers set you free?

Now the question’s: “To be internet or be TV?”
But because the state belongs to fuhrers

Because the state kills us for fun

Because the state belongs to furors

Because the state thinks only with the gun
& because the state belongs to fuckers

Because the state belongs to them

Gotta underthrow them motherfuckers

To return us to our edenic glen
O because the state belongs to fuckers

Because the state belongs to them

Oh we’ll have to change them all to lovers

& we’ll have to try & start again

Yeah we’ll have to change us all to lovers

Oh we’ll have to try to begin again….
OY!

—
GREAT MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM

URANUS (to the tune of AQUARIUS from ‘Hair’)
This song is dedicated to the Passers of the Welfare Reform Bill
When the stools are in the Gringrich House

And Senators align with Mars

Then Greed will guide our country

Pure Ego steer our Pol-Stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Uranus

The Age of Uranus

Uranus, Uranus
Simony, misunderstanding

Cruelty, sad lusts abounding

Lots more lying and derision

Golden parachutes their vision

Mystic racist fulmination

Nation-soul in constipation
Uranus, Uranus
When the Pricks are in the Clintrich House

And Congressmen are paged with bribes

Then Idiots will damn our destiny

And Shits will ruin our lives
This is the dawning of the Age of Uranus

The Age of Uranus

Uranus, Uranus
Conspiracy and underhandling

Media control astounding

Circuses with bread omission

Downsize lives without contrition
Uranus, Uranus
Now the Ghouls are in the Masters House

And Murderers kill us en masse

Now the Rule they Rule the Planet

And wipeout the Underclass
This is the Sundown of the Age of Uranus

The Age of Uranus

Uranus, Uranus
Let the Moonshine

Let the Moonshine

Let the Moonshine in!

—

PAINT IT RED (& BLACK)
Tune: ‘Paint It Black’ (Rolling Stones) with spoken extensions

NOTE: Red & Black are the Anarchist colors
I see the White House & I want to paint it Red

Rabbi Jesus whispers to me: ‘Besser Red zan Dead.’

I see the Kremlin & I’m gonna paint it black

Clinton’s toasting Yeltsin: ‘Zdrovye Bourgeois Hack!’
I spoke to Tolstoy: ‘Emma Goldman’s coming back!’

He sat there writing on a shard of red & black

Black & Red. Coming back!

Red & Black. They’re comin’ back!
The homeless Alien morphs to Newt’s Sonovabitch

The Species (social) Being’s served up: dessert for the rich

The Lions of Reason strobe the deep grave of yr dream

The Lamb of Love hides in the Caves of Academe
I hear the students as they wonder what comes next

They’re forced to take the test but do not have the text

They wander thru the World Wide Internet

They still believe they’ll find the Finland Station yet!

(in St. Petersberg where Lenin entered Russia in 1917)
I heard Mohr (Marx) & General (Engels) laughing in their Hell

They said Bakunyin had a funny tale to tell

‘Anarcho Pacifist Bolshelvism never had its chance!’

Perhaps we could invite St. Francis to the dance? And hey St Paul & Jacob Frank!

(18th Cent PolJewCath pansexual Messiah)

YOWZAH!
I see the White House & I want to paint it Red

Willy Reich is shouting at me: ‘Better Bed than Dead!’

Now Billy’s roasting Yelstin: ‘So long Bourgeois Flack!’

I spy the Kremlin Hey we’re gonna take it back!

RED & BLACK

GET IT BACK

RED & BLACK

WE’RE COMING BACK

RED & BLACK

_________

October 28, 2007

Inner Bohemia…

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

– Tuli Kupferberg

This is entry #728… if you are still with me, you might of picked up on some trends and modalities that I am running with. I think that the concept of Bohemia is more than just a take on artist in France, Beats in NY and San Francisco in the 50′s… Hipsters around the world in the 60′s, 70′s and so on… more than Burners and Ravers. It is an accumulation of the Underground streams running for hundreds if not thousands of years, that tie us back to pre-neolithic sensibilities. Bohemia is about Love primarily, Love, Sex, Dope, Art as some would say. The basic drives. Feel good about it, and be the creature you really are….
The idea of ‘Scene’ seemed to disappear in the last few years… Tuli Kupferberg said in an interview:
“But I felt that they had a heritage with the bohemians (the Beats). The term comes from 12th century University of Paris. The craziest students came from Bohemia and they gave them this name. There’s this old tradition of living outside of the mores of society. Until the bourgeois revolution, most artists lived on the patronage of the ruling class. LA VIE DE BOHEME, the libetto for that opera, tells you what was happening then in the 18th century. So that’s a 150 year old tradition that’s still going on. It used to be linked to geography with places like New York, San Francisco, Munich, Paris. But now, with the Internet, you could be crazy, wild, free and self-destructive anywhere you want. But hopefully, there’s still communities of people out there. Utopian colonies who are just friends.”
This speaks to me of the Inner Bohemia, the Bohemia of the Heart. Not a phrase bandied about much, but still, it is a state, and to me, maybe equivalent to a state of grace. An inner connectiveness, a community united by the heart, the mind, the soul.
So, Utopian Communities…. indeed. Whether it is in a TAZ, or a neighborhood where the shared ideals creates a Commons… more on this later? What are your visions of a Utopia? Drop me a line…
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

___________________
On The Menu:
Peters’ Video Feed

Koan’s

The Poetry of Petr Borkovec

Peter’s Video Feed:
DCD – American Dreaming…

=en_US&fs=1&”>

_______

Lisa Gerrard – Come Tenderness

=en_US&fs=1&”>

_______

Koan’s
Storyteller’s Zen
Encho was a famous storyteller. His tales of love stirred the hearts of his listeners. When he narrated a story of war, it was as if the listeners themselves were on the field of battle.
One day Encho met Yamaoka Tesshu, a layman who had almost embraced masterhood in Zen. “I understand,” said Yamaoka, “you are the best storyteller in our land and that you make people cry or laugh at will. Tell me my favorite story of the Peach Boy. When I was a little tot I used to sleep beside my mother, and she often related this legend. In the middle of the story I would fall asleep. Tell it to me just as my mother did.”
Encho dared not attempt to do this. He requested time to study. Several months later he went to Yamaoka and said: “Please give me the opportunity to tell you the story.”
“Some other day,” answered Yamaoka.
Encho was keenly disappointed. He studied further and tried again. Yamaoka rejected him many times. When Encho would start to talk Yamaoka would stop him, saying: “You are not yet like my mother.”
It took Encho five years to be able to tell Yamaoka the legend as his mother had told it to him.
In this way, Yamaoka imparted Zen to Encho.

—

The First Principle
When one goes to Obaku temple in Kyoto he sees carved over the gate the words “The First Principle”. The letters are unusually large, and those who appreciate calligraphy always admire them as being a mastepiece. They were drawn by Kosen two hundred years ago.
When the master drew them he did so on paper, from which the workmen made the large carving in wood. As Kosen sketched the letters a bold pupil was with him who had made several gallons of ink for the calligraphy and who never failed to criticise his master’s work.
“That is not good,” he told Kosen after his first effort.
“How is this one?”
“Poor. Worse than before,” pronounced the pupil.
Kosen patiently wrote one sheet after another until eighty-four First Principles had accumulated, still without the approval of the pupil.
Then when the young man stepped outside for a few moments, Kosen thought: “Now this is my chance to escape his keen eye,” and he wrote hurriedly, with a mind free from distraction: “The First Principle.”
“A masterpiece,” pronounced the pupil.
_________________

____________
The Poetry of Petr Borkovec

Commuter Train, 0.05 a.m.
AZURE FORMICA, fluorescent tubes –

the heavens open, floods of light: Father

with adult daughter, ermine, me, the odour

of sodden clothes, a few rows down some troops.
The whistle. Lamps streak by. Then dark. The windows

hold our gaunt and yellowed faces. The soldiers

deal out cards on their laps. A woman, close,

her swaying earrings sputa of bright jasper.
Father and daughter can’t doze off to sleep

remembering the heart which bleeds and sears

on the drunk’s palm at the tiny platform shop.
She’s willowy and tall. Her program slips clean

off her lap towards the drunk – for Cymbeline.

She stoops in white, as she would to a kiss.

—
The Light Dragged Off
THE LIGHT DRAGGED off and rain began to pour.

Hell glinted through the pavements here and there.
Like Lada’s pictures, with tender and kind hearts,

the devils set to laying out their hoards.
Above the lamps, three late birds homeward bound.

Above the listless, sad and drawn-out standpoint
of the evening city, of the windows of each bookshop,

of the pubs going at full tilt and all lit up,
of the fountain with a naked marble lad

consoling a small carp in a marble lota
(the nose his father’s, the eyes his mother gave him…

how gaily coins glint at the water’s bottom),
of the weakening rain and the devils with their secrets.

We stood there and lit two sweet cigarettes.
It’s nothing, love. You’re shaking like a feather.

Hold me. Let’s go. We will sleep together.

—
We Rose
WE ROSE. SEPTEMBER. Long house shadow.

Dust everywhere, the radio’s drone.

Sun on the bedframe’s chrome.

You reached for your cigarettes.

The stairwell dreaming still beneath us,

the curtains slowly stirring, flowing down.

The empty sink was like a silver bust

and the seconds always flowing and flown

past warmth, its touch. Time at a standstill,

and all things aswell, unmoored from their roles

the sunlight on the bedframe stalled,

the hook, the picture on the wall.

I saw your cigarette’s fresh smoke,

the books beside us in a stack,

and the duvet’s fish and fowl and flowers

all slipped and slid down to the floor

where they cooled in blue geometry.

Dust on the wardrobe, dust on the aria.

The window’s coloured block going nowhere.

Outside, no plans were hatched in shadows,

and the towel, lying idle by the chair,

had the same story as us.

—-
For J.K.
The twenty-third pavilion,

The wall lit with October sun –

A bright memorial plaque for summer –

The same one Fet and Bunin have somewhere.

SLIGHT DÉJÀ VU –

some ornaments familiar;

around me came spring air

like screens pulled to.
Chilled to the bone. The trees

sent memory ranging back.

The sun pressed on my cheek

like iron, a piece of steel.
Hands over eyes, each finger

like a braid of rubies.

The heat’s a heavy figure

placed upon the earth.
As though someone had pressed

my back and hid the sun –

cold and blue the vein runs

through a memory, its dry hand.
I go with sick-bed gait

about this April morning;

inclosure, classic gate,

wind and light, their blows
against white walls, verandahs

of the numbered pavilions,

metallic noise through curtains

flies out the window – they
are like a sign or way

for someone else, not me.

As if about a white bed,

body twisted and awry,
with chamber-pot of urine,

amber, settled, cold,

I go about the morning.

Not I – two eyes unbodied.
Machine-like, quick, the nurse

makes up the sheets and covers.

The bedstead’s metal glows

like sunlight on the clouds.
Linoleum with patterns.

Like spring air in the gardens

four listless blank screens hold

a body which grows cold.

__________
Petr Borkovec (b. 1970) is the most prominent of the young generation of Czech poets who emerged after 1989. His first book of poems was published in 1990, and since then he has published four further collections, most recently, Polní práce [Field Work] (1998). He is also a noted translator of Russian poetry, and recently he has been working on translations of Sophocles and Æschylus. Borkovec lives in Cernosice, a town to the southwest of Prague.

___________

October 26, 2007

Friday Flickering Furiously…

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

-Leonard Cohen
(My White Bicycle – HapsHash)

I recently started exploring Poster art… and I have be revisiting Hapshash’s Nigel Waymouth & Michael English’s works… It is a wondrous thing that so much good art exploded onto the scene in such a short time…. Anyway, these guys are right up there with Rick Griffin & Stanley Mouse, but they definitely have the British aesthetic.
This edition of Turfing explores some of these pieces…. Enjoy!
On The Menu:

On The Music Box – Maps/We Can Create

Maps -It Will Find You

The Links

The Private Sea

THREE KOANS

Leonard Cohen For A Late Friday…

Art – HapsHash & The Coloured Coat….

_______
On The Music Box – Maps/We Can Create (find this one!)

A nice mixture of vocal harmonies, intricate phrasings, good rhythms, electronic keyboards blended with traditional instrumentations and a lush mix. Tasty Stuff! Recorded on an old 16 track recorder in James Chapman’s bedroom, this masterpiece was mixed by Ken Thomas of Sigur Ros production fame.
Maps – We Can Create…. Download it here!

Maps – It Will Find You

=en_US&fs=1&”>

_________________
(HapsHash – Love Me)

_________

The Links:

Thoughts On Days Of The Dead…

Scotto strikes again: Comfort Music!

The Leonard Cohen Files…

Modern Times…

Orthodox Moorish Radio…

__________

The Private Sea – William Braden

3. Chemistry and mysticism
In its broadest sense, mysticism refers to direct communion with the divine; to intuitive knowledge of ultimate truth; to the soul’s sense of union with the absolute reality that is the Ground, or the source, of its Being. And apparently it is impossible to distinguish this experience from the central experience produced by LSD and other psychedelic agents.

The classic accounts of mystical experience read like psychedelic Baedekers. In recent years, moreover, a number of studies have compared the two experiences, and the results have reinforced the idea that the experiences are in some way connected. The best known of these studies was undertaken by psychiatrist Walter Pahnke at Harvard University, where psilocybin was administered in a religious setting to ten theology students. Nine of the ten felt they had genuine religious experiences, and Pahnke concluded that the phenomena they reported were “indistinguishable from, if not identical with,” a typology based on W. T. Stace’s widely known summary of mystical experience.

At Princeton, students were shown accounts of a religious experience and a psychedelic experience, and two-thirds of the students identified the drug-induced experience as the religious one. In a book in which they summarize five separate studies, including Pahnke’s, R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston stated that “religious-type” experiences were reported by 32 to 75 per cent of subjects who received psychedelics in “supportive” settings, and by 75 to 90 per cent of those who received them in settings that included religious stimuli. And so on. The consensus of research seems to be that the two experiences are at least phenomenologically the same. This is a way of saying: “Well, they certainly look the same, and beyond that I’m not going to stick my neck out.” What this neatly avoids, of course, is the problem of comparing the sources of the experiences.

Significant parallels to psychedelic experience are to be found in William James’s observations on religious conversion, the faith-state, and mystical experience. Conversion occurs, said James, when a formerly divided self becomes unified, and “a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth.” James made the point that “self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life.” And the total abnegation of self or ego is without question the hallmark of psychedelic experience. “Only when I become as nothing,” wrote James, “can God enter in and no difference between his life and mine remain outstanding.” Discussing the faith-state, James observed that it too is characterized by an objective change in the appearance of the world, which takes on a sweet and beautiful newness. “It was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a person without love, or upon the same person with love.” In addition, there is a loss of all worry: “the sense that all is ultimately well with one” and a “willingness to be.” Finally, there is “the sense of perceiving truths not known before,” and these “more or less unutterable in words.” As for mysticism, James found that it also is marked by an ineffability requiring direct experience, as well as a noetic quality which carries with it “a curious sense of authority for aftertime.” Still another aspect is passivity, in which “the mystic feels as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” And a final factor is transiency. “Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit.”

One of those rare exceptions perhaps was Emanuel Swedenborg, the so-called Swedish Aristotle, who was said to have had a mystical experience which lasted, more or less continuously, for almost three decades. LSD cannot match that record, but it does seem to improve somewhat on the normal time limits indicated by James. Except for duration, however, there is obviously a remarkable similarity between James’s typology and psychedelic experience. And just incidentally, James noted that mystical states are often accompanied by various photisms, or luminous phenomena, which also are an aspect of psychedelic experience (for example, Paul’s blinding vision and Constantine’s cross in the sky). Finally, let us call attention to James’s observation: “One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its roots and centre in mystical states of consciousness.” In other words, we are likening psychedelic experience not just to mysticism but to religious experience as a whole.
From this background, then, emerges LSD’s first clear challenge to orthodox theology.
Did the saints owe their visions to some biological short-circuit which caused them to experience spontaneously what LSD cultists achieve with a chemical? Can their mystic raptures be traced to a malfunction of the adrenal glands? Does the faith-state have a neurological basis? Is the religious experience as such nothing more than a fluke of body chemistry?
The materialists would like to think so, and do. Dr. Sidney Cohen (who is no materialist) has suggested that religious experience may one day be redefined as “a dys-synchrony of the reticular formation of the brain.”

Some scholars have pushed even further. Not only do psychedelics appear to duplicate religious experience, they say. It is possible that religion itself is psychedelic in origin. One of the major spokesmen for this viewpoint has been Gordon Wasson, an authority on the psychedelic mushrooms of Mexico, who has suggested that primitive men may have stumbled many times upon innocent-looking plants which produce the same effects as LSD. These theobotanicals, possibly mushrooms, might well have been a “mighty springboard” which first put the idea of God into men’s heads. Wasson also has proposed a psychedelic explanation of the ancient Greek cult that produced the Eleusinian Mysteries, and he has advanced the idea that Plato’s pure Ideas might be the product of a psychedelic insight. (In other words, Plato was an acidhead.) Following this line of reasoning, it might seem logical to conclude that the Eden story is actually a psychedelic parableand we would be happy to propose that theory ourselves had we not already proposed another theory with an antithetical conclusion. In any case, Wasson goes on to suggest that psychedelic sacraments in the course of time may have been replaced by more innocuous hosts, and that they represent perhaps “the original element in all the Holy Suppers of the world.” The whole idea, of course, is pure speculation, and necessarily so, but at the same time it is very interesting speculation and by no means implausible. It is particularly tempting to apply Wasson’s theory to the metaphysics of India; according to Masters and Houston, an estimated 90 per cent of the holy men in that country are currently on hemp and various other drugs.
The point often is made that religious ascetics traditionally have promoted their mystical states of consciousness by employing techniques that rival LSD in their probable impact on biochemical balance. These include fasting, yogic breathing exercises, sleep deprivation, dervish dances, self-flagellation, and monastic isolation. Even in the pews of the pious, religious contemplation may be supported by such trance-inducing aids as organ music, stained glass windows, repetitive chants and prayers, incense, and flickering candles.
The question of religious chemistry has been underscored recently by the wide attention given to the theories, already mentioned, of Dr. Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond. Their adrenochrome-adrenolutin hypothesis suggests that schizophrenia may be caused at least in part by defective adrenal metabolism. Very briefly, the adrenal gland secretes the hormone adrenaline, which helps coordinate biological mechanisms in emergency situationsfor example, a fist fight or a threatened traffic accident. Heart rate is increased, the blood is sugared up and pumped to the necessary muscles. Adrenaline also may affect the emotions, contributing to anxiety and depression. In the body it turns into a toxic hormone called adrenochrome, which in turn can be converted into either of two other compounds: dihydroxyindole or adrenolutin. It is possible that dihydroxyindole balances off adrenaline to reduce tension and irritability; in schizophrenics, however, adrenochrome is converted primarily into adrenolutin, which also is toxic, and the combination of adrenochrome-adrenolutin results in a poisonous disruption of the brain’s chemical processes. That is the theory. And the prescribed antidotes are nicotinic acid (niacin) or nicotinamide (Vitamin B-3). Discussing one of the villains in the piece, the scientists write: “There are few who doubt that adrenochrome is active in animals or in man, and it is now included among the family of compounds known as hallucinogenscompounds like mescaline and LSD-2 5 capable of producing psychological changes in man.”
The Hoffer-Osmond studies are far from conclusive, and similar theories have been advanced in the past. But the studies hold promise, and they are receiving serious considerationdue in part, no doubt, to the significance they have in other areas of current debate, including religion. The line dividing insanity and mysticism has never been too sharply drawn, and the biochemical theory of schizophrenia makes it all the more tenuous. Vitamin B-3 actually has cured cases of schizophrenia, according to Dr. Hoffer and Osmond. But Vitamin B-3 also has proved effective in terminating LSD experiences, and the implications of this must be obvious. As we asked earlier: Are insanity, mysticism, and the psychedelic experience in some way related?

Aldous Huxley has suggested they are. The experience of absolute reality is awesome enough in small doses, and the schizophrenic, drugged by his own body chemistry, is like a man who is permanently under the influence of a psychedelic. He is “unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with.” He cannot take refuge, even for a moment, in “the homemade universe of common sensethe strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions.” The result is a bad trip which never ends. But the psychedelic subject knows that he can and will return to that limited but comforting world, and he is therefore in a position to accept his experience: to enjoy it and to learn from it. This in fact appears to be the main basis for denying that psychedelics produce a model psychosis. As Dr. Cohen and parapsychologist Gardner Murphy expressed it: “When the dissolution of the reasoning self occurs in a chaotic manner, the result is called psychosis. When the state is not accompanied by panic or anxiety, it is perceived as mystical, and creative solutions of (or at least an armistice with) life problems could result.” Dr. Cohen has proposed that the difference here makes logical a distinction between insanity and unsanity, which he would place at polar ends of a continuum; in the middle, somewhere, would lie sanity. Nevertheless, it is a bit jarring to consider the possibility that religious experience is an end-product of adrenochrome, described as a dark crystalline material which can easily be made in a laboratory. “In its pure form,” write Dr. Hoffer and Osmond, “it manifests itself as beautiful, sharp, needle-like crystals which have a brilliant sheen. When the crystals are powdered, it appears as a bright red powder, which dissolves quickly in water to form a blood-red solution.”
It would be interesting to see if a shot of vitamins could terminate a spontaneous religious experience. But what if it did? And what if LSD does in fact initiate such an experience? Does this mean the experience is simply a manifestation of the drug?
(Jazz at the Roundhouse – HapsHash)

__________
THREE KOANS

It is Not Mind, It is Not Buddha, It is Not Things
A monk asked Nansen: `Is there a teaching no master ever preached before?’
Nansen said: `Yes, there is.’
`What is it?’ asked the monk.
Nansen replied: `It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not things.’

Nansen was too kind and lost his treasure.

Truly, words have no power.

Even though the mountain becomes the sea,

Words cannot open another’s mind.

—

Dried Dung
A monk asked Ummon: `What is Buddha?’ Ummon answered him: `Dried dung.’

Lightning flashes,

Sparks shower.

In one blink of your eyes

You have missed seeing.

—

The Enlightened Man
Shogen asked: `Why does the enlightened man not stand on his feet and explain himself?’ And he also said: `It is not necessary for speech to come from the tongue.’
Mumon’s Comment: Shogen spoke plainly enough, but how many will understand? If anyone comprehends, he should come to my place and test out my big stick. Why, look here, to test real gold you must see it through fire.

If the feet of enlightenment moved, the great ocean would overflow;

If that head bowed, it would look down upon the heavens.

Such a body hsa no place to rest….

Let another continue this poem.

____________
(Middle Earth – HapsHash)

____________

Leonard Cohen Poetry For A Late Friday…

Bird On The Wire

Like a bird on the wire,

like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free.

Like a worm on a hook,

like a knight from some old fashioned book

I have saved all my ribbons for thee.

If I, if I have been unkind,

I hope that you can just let it go by.

If I, if I have been untrue

I hope you know it was never to you

—
Sisters Of Mercy
Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.

They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.

And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.

Oh I hope you run into them, you who’ve been travelling so long.

Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.

Well I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned:

When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.

Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them.

They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn

they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon.

Don’t turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon.

And you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:

We weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right,

We weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.

—
Beneath My Hands
Beneath my hands

your small breasts

are the upturned bellies

of breathing fallen sparrows.
Wherever you move

I hear the sounds of closing wings

of falling wings.
I am speechless

because you have fallen beside me

because your eyelashes

are the spines of tiny fragile animals.
I dread the time

when your mouth

begins to call me hunter.
When you call me close

to tell me

your body is not beautiful

I want to summon

the eyes and hidden mouths

of stone and light and water

to testify against you.
I want them

to surrender before you

the trembling rhyme of your face

from their deep caskets.
When you call me close

to tell me

your body is not beautiful

I want my body and my hands

to be pools

for your looking and laughing.

—
The book of longing

I can’t make the hills

The system is shot

I’m living on pills

For which I thank G-d

I followed the course

From chaos to art

Desire the horse

Depression the cart

I sailed like a swan

I sank like a rock

But time is long gone

Past my laughing stock

My page was too white

My ink was too thin

The day wouldn’t write

What the night pencilled in

My animal howls

My angel’s upset

But I’m not allowed

A trace of regret

For someone will use

What I couldn’t be

My heart will be hers

Impersonally

She’ll step on the path

She’ll see what I mean

My will cut in half

And freedom between

For less than a second

Our lives will collide

The endless suspended

The door open wide

Then she will be born

To someone like you

What no one has done

She’ll continue to do

I know she is coming

I know she will look

And that is the longing

And this is the book

—
Mission
I’ve worked at my work

I’ve slept at my sleep

I’ve died at my death

And now I can leave

Leave what is needed

And leave what is full

Need in the Spirit

And need in the Hole

Beloved, I’m yours

As I’ve always been

From marrow to pore

From longing to skin

Now that my mission

Has come to its end:

Pray I’m forgiven

The life that I’ve led

The Body I chased

It chased me as well

My longing’s a place

My dying a sail
(Traffic at the Saville – HapsHash)

October 23, 2007

Invisible College Magazine….3rd Edition!

It has been a week since I posted… very busy with art and getting the new Invisible College Magazine ready for release, and as a matter of fact, here it is:The Invisible College Magazine 3rd Edition!
Please check out this free online version of IC-3rd edition…. The printed version will be out shortly btw… a few days whilst I figure how LuLu.com does its thing and all.
Lots of stuff in this one The Free-Online version clocks in at 92 pages, and the Complete Printed version clocks in at 108 pages. More poetry, art and articles!
Stay Tuned, and Enjoy!
Gwyllm
On The Menu:
A Saucerful of Secrets

& A Saucerful of Secrets

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun…

Poetry: by Percy Bysshe Shelley
=en_US&fs=1&”>
A Saucerful of Secrets(from Fortean Times….)

UFOs were not just in the air, theyd become a religion and the word a common sacrament to everyone whod tripped. – Neil Oram
The word hippie conjures visions of brightly clad youth rebelling against society while advocating peace, free love and the right to alter their consciousnesses in whatever way they chose. But behind the fashions and fads, the hippie underground movement in the UK was responsible for the greatest expansion of interest and belief in fortean phenomena in history.
Social historians invariably associate the hippie movement with Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, sources of both inspiration and imagery, and the hippies interest in these belief systems has been well documented. But there was another alternative to the blinkered Western worldview of the 1960s already deeply embedded in the British cultural psyche, and already present in the lives of those who would form the movement known as the Underground the flying saucer culture.
In the mid-1960s, although flying saucers were being discussed among the influential group of post-beatniks and modern mystics who would form the core of the Underground, the nascent movement lacked a voice. A figurehead was needed, someone who could breathe life into the background hum of belief in flying saucers, articulating it for the burgeoning subculture.
That voice came in the form of John Michell, whose influence on the Underground, and forteana in general, cannot be overestimated. Like many of his generation, Michell was disillusioned by the acquisitive post-war society: When I was at Cambridge, the whole atmosphere was extremely rationalistic, materialistic. Everyone believed the current academic orthodoxies of the time and there seemed no way of questioning them.
UFOs first caught Michells imagination in the 1950s when he noticed that it was quite obvious that people were having experiences that werent allowed for within the context of our education. There was a split between the view of the world wed been taught and accepted unquestioningly and the world of actual experience. To Michell, flying saucers were more than just nuts-and-bolts craft; they were one of a number of phenomena which became attached to the Matter of Britain. This corpus of belief largely concerned itself with the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail and was focused on the Somerset town of Glastonbury.
The View Over Glastonbury
Glastonbury is firmly embedded in the public consciousness as a centre of all things strange. Since the early 20th century, it has been the pulse of alternative Britain and has seen wave after wave of settlers arrive there, each seeking their personal Holy Grail. This vortex of the weird was well known to John Michell, who decided to experience the Glastonbury effect for himself:
It was, I think, in 1966 that I first went to Glastonbury, in the company of Harry Fainlight We had no very definite reason for going there, but it had something to do with strange lights in the sky, new music, and our conviction that the world was about to flip over on its axis so that heresy would become orthodoxy and an entirely new world-order would shortly be revealed.
At that time I was writing the first of my published books, The Flying Saucer Vision. It followed up the idea, first put forward by CG Jung in his 1959 book on flying saucers, that the strange lights and other phenomena of the post-war period were portents of a radical change in human consciousness coinciding with the dawn of the Aquarian Age. A theme in my book was the connection between unidentified flying objects and ancient sites, as evidenced both in folklore and in contemporary experience. In this statement, Michell encapsulated an entirely new way of looking at flying saucers and their meaning.
Michell may have been the catalyst and helmsman for the hippies interests in flying saucers but the motive power was provided by the drug LSD, which had hit London during 19645. LSD, or acid as it was known, was quickly taken up by the countercultural mystic vanguard and suddenly everything was not only possible, it was likely!
Art gallery owner and Underground luminary Barry Miles summed up the effect of the drug on the hippies: From the mid-Sixties onwards you have what would have to be called a sort of LSD consciousness permeating the whole of the counterculture side of British society. And you get it in the songs of Pink Floyd all these bands incorporate LSD-inspired imagery, and that of course was not the normal imagery of love songs and picking up girls, it was much more to do with a sort of specifically British form of psychedelia which involved dancing gnomes and flying saucers.
The combination of a new generation of seekers with powerful psychedelic drugs revivified Glastonbury as a spiritual centre. Now, in addition to King Arthur, the terrestrial zodiacs and other landscape legends, flying saucers were also woven into the tapestry of belief. Issue one of the Underground magazine Albion, edited by Michell, provides the visual clues; dragons and UFOs appear in the skies over Glastonbury Tor, while swords, serpents and geomantic imagery are visible in the Earth below. A new meaning for flying saucers was being forged, and to the Underground this blend of saucers, sacred sites and mythology was a damn sight more interesting than the nuts-and-bolts, sci-fi derived vision of the UFO orthodoxy.
Barry Miles was also aware of the attraction Glastonbury held for those in the counterculture: The Kings Road led straight to Glastonbury in those days The people we knew led double lives, experimenting with acid, spending entire evenings discussing flying saucers, ley lines and the court of King Arthur. Other people waited patiently at Arthurs Tor for flying saucers to land. And as word got around that Glastonbury was the new window area for UFO sightings, more and more hippies made it a place of pilgrimage. According to Michell, UFOs were constantly being sighted over St Michaels Tower on Glastonbury Tor. Mark Palmer, Maldwyn Thomas and their group were then travelling with horses and carts on pilgrimages across England. They often camped near the Tor, and while I was with them we used to watch the nightly manuvrings of lights in the sky. Jungs prophecy of aerial portents being followed by a change in consciousness was evidently being fulfilled.
Craig Sams, who set up Englands first macrobiotic restaurant, was also a Glastonbury enthusiast: I didnt see a flying saucer till October 1967 when I went to Glastonbury. One day I got a phone call from Mark Palmer saying that it would be a good idea to come down, that there was a lot of UFO activity, that John Michell, who had just written The Flying Saucer Vision, was camping down there, and Michael Rainey. So here we are in the field and up come the UFOs. We werent tripping, Id given up acid. I was completely normal, maybe Id had a cup of tea about half an hour before Mark Palmer saw them they were definitely there. They were in the classic cigar-shaped mother-ship form. Little lights emanating from them. Then at one point you saw these other lights coming up towards them and the smaller lights just shot into the cigar-shaped mother-ship, which then just disappeared at high speed. The other lights had been RAF jets. It was obvious that the RAF had scrambled some jets.
It would be easy to dismiss the Undergrounds fascination with saucers if it werent for the fact that 1967 was a huge flap year for UFO sightings in the UK. This wasnt just a hippie thing it was even happening to policemen, who chased them for hours in their patrol cars. The MOD was so inundated by UFO reports it radically changed its UFO policy and set up a team of investigators to interview civilian UFO witnesses, the first time this had been done.
Saucer Ro
ck
As flying saucers became further embedded in popular culture, rock musicians were becoming interested in them as a means of expressing the psychedelic experience. Music promoter Joe Boyd consolidated the link between drugs, music and flying saucers when he named one of the first hippie clubs, on Londons Tottenham Court Road, UFO. Although Unidentified Flying Object was only one of its meanings, advertisements in International Times (it) showed a flying saucer hovering over the head of a dancing hippie. Most musical histories of the psychedelic era use Eastern influences sitars and raga-like instrumentals as the primary indicator of how far out the music was. But there was another aspect of psychedelia steeped in saucers and space.
Pink Floyds first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn included the atmospheric pæan to deep space Astronomy Domini, possibly the first song to use outer space as a metaphor for inner space. By their second album, Pink Floyd had further absorbed saucer culture, entitling it A Saucerful of Secrets, and were mixing ideas of UFOs and the secrets of the mind (with, perhaps, a nod toward a particularly potent batch of LSD called flying saucers). The sleeve artwork left fans in no doubt that space inner or outer was the place: swirling universes and spinning discs mixed with signs of the zodiac (adapted from the Marvel Comics encounter between Dr Strange and the Living Tribunal). The albums keynote song, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, became the backdrop for many psychedelic journeys toward dawn.
Even the Rolling Stones possibly the least spiritual band of the Sixties generation took an interest in saucers. John Michell accompanied them on a saucer-spotting mission to Stonehenge, while singer Marianne Faithfull recalls the Stones ill-starred rhythm guitarist Brian Jones taking a great interest in Michells ideas on the subject; Like a lot of people at the time, myself included, he was convinced there was a mystic link between druidic monuments and flying saucers. Extraterrestrials were going to read these signs from their spaceship windows and get the message. It was the local credo: Glastonbury, ley lines and intelligent life in outer space Similarly, the Stones Keith Richards was more than curious about saucers: Ive seen a few, but nothing any of the ministries would believe, he told a Melody Maker journalist. I believe they exist plenty of people have seen them. They are tied up with a lot of things, like the dawn of man, for example. Its not just a matter of people spotting a flying saucer. Im not an expert. Im still trying to understand whats going on.
Throughout his career, David Bowie has flirted with the idea of the alien, often mentioning extraterrestrials in songs such as Starman, and creating the Ziggy Stardust persona. In the late 1960s, before he was catapulted to fame with the single Space Oddity, he claimed to have been closely involved with flying saucer research. In 1975, he revealed to Creem magazine: I used to work for two guys who put out a UFO magazine in England about six years ago. And I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year, when I was in the observatory. We had regular cruises that came over. We knew the 6.15 was coming in and would meet up with another one. And they would be stationary for about half an hour, and then after verifying what theyd been doing that day, theyd shoot off. The fact that the 6.15 was so regular over south London should have given Bowie a hint that it might have been an aircraft rather than a UFO! Bowies active interest in UFO research dwindled as his fame as a performer grew, but it cant have been helped by this event, recounted in a recent issue of The Word: An early attempt, while living in Beckenham, to attract extraterrestrials involved standing on his roof at dusk pointing a coat hanger into the skies. He gave up, dejectedly, when a passer-by enquired, Do you get BBC2?
Notes From the Underground
If music was one way of spreading the flying saucer message through the Underground, then poster art was another powerful method. Artists created lavish posters for even the smallest-scale event, incorporating the myths, signs and symbols of the era with visual images of the music and musicians. Barry Miles recalled: The symbol of the flying saucer on the posters of Michael English and Nigel Weymouth and the references in all of the songs wasnt just used as a graphic symbol or a convenient lyrical device. People did feel that flying saucers were shorthand for a wider, deeper understanding, a sort of god figure I suppose or a sense of an external spiritual deity of some sort. There was one clothes shop called Hung On You that Michael Rainey had, and he very much believed in flying saucers, and there was a lot of flying saucer imagery all over the shop.
As saucers permeated the hippie subculture, they began to appear more frequently in the underground press. International Times featured many articles and book reviews concerning saucers, engaging John Michell as its UFO correspondent. In the 16 June 1967 issue, it reviewed Anatomy of a Phenomenon, the first UFO book by French scientist and influential ufologist Jacques Vallee. Reviewer Greg Sams used the argot of the period to express what a significant book it was: Do you believe in flying saucers? Most people with even a slightly open mind accept their existence, if only because so many reliable people have seen them The book itself doesnt turn you on. You must read the book and turn yourself on If you are just beginning to be interested in saucers then read his book. If you are already convinced and want a beautiful rave with your mind, read other further out authors.
Quite!
Oz was less keen on UFOs, editor Richard Neville being more interested in provoking the establishment through explorations of radical politics or sex than through modern myths. But when Neville took his eye off the ball for issue nine, leaving the work to poster artist Martin Sharp and designer John Goodchild, he was shocked at the result: To my embarrassment, it was devoted to flying saucers. Enraged, he asked Sharp, How can you indulge your intergalactic delusions, when Asia is a bloodbath? Sharps reply typified the zeitgeist: There are far more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The cover of Flying Saucer Oz, as it became known, featured a large flying disc, taken from a collage by the Dadaist/Surrealist Max Ernst, with six coloured pages featuring a variety of quotes about the saucer phenomenon from hip people ranging from Charles Fort to Mick Jagger.
John Michells influence on the hippie movement, coupled with his erudition, was such that the establishment couldnt just ignore him. Following the screening of UFOs and the People Who See Them on BBC1 on 9 May 1968, The Listener devoted most of that weeks issue to a discussion of flying saucers. Michell was asked to contribute an essay, simply entitled Flying Saucers, which clearly laid out the hippie philosophy in relation to aerial phenomena a blend of sightings of inexplicable lights in the sky, snippets of folklore, Glastonbury ley and dragon lines and other ephemera from the Undergrounds dream world.
Listener editor Karl Miller contributed a critical piece, Midsummer Nights Dreams, analysing the UFO cult and Michells place within it. He is less a hippie, perhaps, opined Miller, than a hippies counsellor, one of their junior Merlins. Recognising Michells influence, but critical of his stance, Miller wrote that Michell behaves like a visionary, though his language doesnt always avoid the current jargon of the pads and barricades. He likes to talk about how the light from the midsummer sunrise shot across the land, travelling a line from holy
place to holy place, starting the crops, bathing the feasts and fairs that saluted its passage. I would say that his book is relatively weak, busying itself with sundry mysteries like that of the Mary Celeste and converting them to extraterrestrial proofs. Straight society was intrigued by the hippie take on flying saucers but then, as now, saw no real evidence it could take seriously.
Just as straight society dissociated itself from the hippies, mainstream UFO enthusiasts kept their distance too, the nuts-and-bolts saucer buffs considering the newcomers to be just a bunch of drug takers with strange views (the irony that mainstream society viewed the nuts-and-bolts crowd as being equally strange was completely lost on them!)
Saucer Camp
Nevertheless, some influential individuals from the orthodoxy saw that the hippies were receptive to new ideas, and that mercurial aristocrat of flying saucer culture, Desmond Leslie, decided to organise the UKs first flying saucer convention for them (see FT225:4047). The conference, held during the summer of 1968 on Lusty Beg Island on Lower Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, was jointly organised by Leslie and Camilla, Countess of Erne. Camilla was a wealthy socialite with an interest in flying saucers who frequented the edges of the Underground.
The Lusty Beg event was small, with attendance estimated at about 80 people, but many of those who attended were influential movers and shakers from the Underground, including Nicholas Saunders, editor of Alternative London and founder of the Neals Yard shopping complex in Covent Garden. Saunders recalled: I was fascinated by what John Michell was saying about UFOs and leylines and so on, but felt pretty guarded about it too. I did go to a Flying Saucer conference on an island in the middle of a lake in the northwest of Ireland. There were all these people plodding about in the rain and the mud and there were very serious talks by people who either said that flying saucers had visited, that theyd been on flights themselves or that theyd seen them.
Another key member of the Underground, Neil Oram (See FT217:4449), was also there. Oram had morphed from beatnik wanderer to hippie philosopher, later writing his semi-fictional memoirs as The Warp trilogy. In Lemmings On the Edge, he describes the scene as he arrived at the shores of Lough Erne: At the waters edge, we were met by Michael Roner, who took us across the choppy lake in a battered rowing boat which was equipped with a noisy, erratic outboard motor. Apart from the big white house on the lawn, the rest of the island was overgrown, without a trace of permanent habitation. Although now there were camp fires and tents scattered all over the wooded hills, which rose quite steeply from the beach.
Desmond Leslie was responsible for organising the conference lectures, held each evening in a large marquee. Scant information now exists as to exactly who spoke, but Neil Oram remarks that they consisted of rather dull pronouncements of what lay in store for the human race. According to Oram, It wasnt until the fourth night that we were given some real information, by an ex-Australian Air Force radar expert. This impressed Oram: It made my hair stand on end when we learnt that hed picked up unidentified craft, whose estimated diameter was in the region of three hundred miles! MILES! Travelling in excess of one hundred THOUSAND miles an hour!
Johan Quanjar, another attendee, recalled: [D]ozens of people had descended on the island for fun, jollity and invocation of higher energies. By the end of the week, the entire hippie UFO community had gone native. They had formed separate tribes with some not speaking to others.
This event was as close as the hippies ever got to organising the subcultures fascination with flying saucers, but they were rapidly losing interest. Too many other fantastic possibilities vied for their attention, and when youd explored inner space, outer space could seem positively tedious. Essentially, those among the Underground who took an avid interest in flying saucers did so not out of certain belief, but from a desire to explore the possibilities. When the flying saucer experience didnt deliver the goods or, as the hippies saw on Lusty Beg, it descended into conflict and argument, they didnt want to know.
Poet and author Barry Gifford, whose novel Wild at Heart was used by David Lynch as the basis for his film, sojourned as a hippie in late 1960s London. In The Duke of Earls Court, Gifford writes of his interest in UFOs and refers to an incident in which a friend called Ace invited the editor of Flying Saucer Review to dinner. The clash of cultures was inevitable: It was obvious upon his entrance that the editor, an ordinary-looking, balding, middle-aged man in a dark grey three-piece suit, was visibly shaken by the den of freaks to which he had unwittingly lent his presence. He had no idea, he said, attempting to smile, that the dinner was to be such an event.
After answering a few desultory questions about saucers, it was clear that the editor wanted to be anywhere else but with those people. The food was macrobiotic and when he enquired what was in the meal was told, Brown rice, kasha, bulgur, soy, miso. The food of the people. It makes you high. Mention of the word high caused the editor to drop his fork, obviously afraid that the meal had been spiked with drugs of some form. He left soon afterwards, pleading a prior engagement.
Selling Saucers by the Pound
Flying saucers continued to be courted by the Underground in the dying embers of the 60s, but by 1970 the hippie movement had become subsumed into the broader spectrum of youth culture: now, you could buy kaftans in Marks and Spencers, and like all youth movements, it had been diluted and repackaged by commercial interests; it was being sold rather than invented. Those who had been heavily involved in saucerdom moved swiftly on. For everyone else, the subject of UFOs was now just another hip belief to be into; the publishing floodgates opened and books on Earth Mysteries, witchcraft, folklore, astrology, occultism and mysticism offered other ways of thinking and being.
But were it not for the hippies interest in flying saucers, nurtured by John Michell, its doubtful that the continuing interest in such subjects would be part of our cultural landscape in the 21st century. This brief burst of drug-fuelled exploration cross-pollinated many fortean subjects, the results of which we see today. Where mainstream ufology was mired in the yes/no argument about the physical reality of UFOs, the hippies treated the subject as just one in a long line of possibly useful ideas. This difference of attitude between the hippie and straight views of saucers was aptly summed up in an exchange between Barry Gifford and his friend, after the FSR editor had fled their dinner party. Referring to the editors stuffy attitude Ace pointed out to Gifford:
But its OK man, it really is; hes a dedicated cat. I mean hes never seen one, but he really believes in them flying saucers.
So do you, Gifford said.
Ace nodded. Sure, man, sure I do. The difference between him and me is that Im not so bloody serious about it.

______________
Set The Controls For the Heart of the Sun

=en_US&fs=1&”>

_______________
Poetry: by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

—
Ode To The West Wind

O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odors plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

II.

Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: oh hear!

III.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV.

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an extinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unwakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

—
Hymn Of Pan

From the forests and highlands

We come, we come;

From the river-girt islands,

Where loud waves are dumb,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,

The bees on the bells of thyme,

The birds on the myrtle bushes,

The cicale above in the lime,

And the lizards below in the grass,

Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

Liquid Peneus was flowing,

And all dark Tempe lay

In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing

The light of the dying day,

Speeded by my sweet pipings.

The Sileni and Sylvans and Fauns,

And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves,

To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves,

And all that did then attend and follow,

Were silent with love, as you know, Apollo,

With envy of my sweet pipings.

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the dædal earth,

And of heaven, and the giant wars,

And love, and death, and birth.

And then I changed my pipings–

Singing how down the vale of Mænalus

I pursued a maiden, and clasp’d a reed:

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus;

It breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed.

All wept — as I think both ye now would,

If envy or age had not frozen your blood–

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

October 17, 2007

Stumbling into the Hinterlands…

Off to do some Poster Printing at Doran’s… The magazine will be out later this week, I flew the tester past Earthrites yesterday. Some iffy bits, but generally well received. We are putting it out in two formats… printed! and pdf. Be there or be square!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

________

On The Menu:

The Links

Uh ty, govoriashchaja ryba!

The Apples of Youth and the Living Water

Gerard Manley Hopkins Poetry

Watts’ – Art

___________
The Links:

Legally Questionable FBI Requests for Calling Circle Info More Widespread than Previously Known

Ancient Mexican city raises questions about Mesoamerica’s Mother Culture

Four sue police, alleging “dirty tactics”

How to Reappear Completely

Portland Will Vote to Legalize Marijuana
____________

Uh ty, govoriashchaja ryba!

=en_US&fs=1&”>

_____________

The Apples of Youth and the Living Water
In a certain kingdom, in a certain land, there lived a Tsar, and he had three sons. The eldest was named , he second was named , nd the youngest was name .
This Tsar was in his old age, and his eyesight was poor. And he heard that past , in te kingdom, there was an orchard where apples of youth grew, and where a well full of living water could be found. If the old man could eat such an apple, he would find youth, and if he could wash his eyes with that water, his sight would be restored.
Therefore the Tsar ordered a t be prepared, and he called all the and al the , and he told them:
“Who among you, faithful noblemen, would be first among the chosen, first to volunteer, who would ride beyond three-nine lands, into the three-tenth kingdom, and would bring me some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water? I would give half my kingdom to such a man.
But then the bhind the younger, and the younger hid behind the youngest, and the youngest kept his mouth shut.
Prince Fedor came out, and said:
“We do not wish to give the kingdom away to a stranger. I will go on that errand, and I will bring you some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water.
Fedor went to the stables, chose , put on it a bridle, took out a brand-new whip, and secured the saddle with twelve straps, and one more: he did not do it for looks, but for strength. Then prince Fedor took off on his errand: he was seen mounting up, bt .
He rode far, or he rode near, he rode high, or he rode low he rode from dawn to dusk. He arrived at a crossroads where three roads met. There was flat at that crossroads, and there was an inscription inscribed on it:
“Whoever takes the right road will save himself and lose his horse. Whoever takes the left road will save his horse and lose himself. Whoever rides straight ahead will find a wife.”
Fedor thought to himself: “I shall ride where I will find a wife.”
And he went straight ahead. He rode, and he rode some more, and he arrived to a tall ith golden roofs. A beautiful maiden ran out to greet him:
“O prince, I shall help you dismount, come with me, partake of my hospitality.”
“No, fair maiden, I do not wish to dine, and sleep will not make the road grow shorter. I must ride on.”
“O prince, do not hasten to ride on, hasten to take pleasure in life.”
Then the fair maiden helped him dismount and took him inside the castle. She fed him, and gave him to drink, and led him to bed.
No sooner did prince Fedor lie down by the wall that the maiden turned over the bed, and the prince fell down into the cellar, deep into a dungeon.

fter a time, long or short, the Tsar again ordered a great feast to be prepared and he called all the princes and all the boyars, and he told them:
“Who among you, faithful noblemen, would be first among the chosen, first to volunteer, who would ride beyond three-nine lands, into the three-tenth kingdom, and would bring me some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water? I would give half my kingdom to such a man.
But then the eldest hid behind the younger, and the younger hid behind the youngest, and the youngest kept his mouth shut.
Prince Vasilii came out, and said:
“We do not wish to give the kingdom away to a stranger. I will go on this errand, and I will bring you some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water.”
Vasilii went to the stables, chose a green-broke horse, put on it a brand-new bridle, took out a brand-new whip, and secured the saddle with twelve straps, and one more: he did not do it for looks, but for strength. Then prince Vasilii took off on his errand: he was seen mounting up, but no one saw which way he went.
He rode far, or he rode near, he rode high, or he rode low he rode from dawn to dusk. He arrived at a crossroads where three roads met. There was a flat stone at that crossroads, and there was an inscription inscribed on it:
“Whoever takes the right road will save himself and lose his horse. Whoever takes the left road will save his horse and lose himself. Whoever rides straight ahead will find a wife.”
Vasilii thought to himself: “I shall ride where I will find a wife.”
And he went straight ahead. He rode, and he rode some more, and he arrived to a tall castle with golden roofs. A beautiful maiden ran out to greet him:
“O prince, I shall help you dismount, come with me, partake of my hospitality.”
“No, fair maiden, I do not wish to dine, and sleep will not make the road grow shorter. I must ride on.”
“O prince, do not hasten to ride on, hasten to take pleasure in life.”
Then the fair maiden helped him dismount and took him inside the castle. She fed him, and gave him to drink, and led him to bed.
No sooner did prince Vasilii lie down by the wall that the maiden turned over the bed, and the prince fell down into the cellar, deep into a dungeo.
As he fell, a voice called out to him:
“Who falls?”
“Prince Vasilii. Who has fallen?”
“Prince Fedor.”
“Well, brother, we certainly fell for it!”

. After a time, long or short, the Tsar ordered for the third time a great feast to be prepared and he called all the princes and all the boyars, and he told them:
“Who among you, faithful noblemen, would be first among the chosen, first to volunteer, who would ride beyond three-nine lands, into the three-tenth kingdom, and would bring me some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water? I would give half my kingdom to such a man.
But then the eldest hid behind the younger, and the younger hid behind the youngest, and the youngest kept his mouth shut.
Prince Ivan came out, and said:
“Father, give me yor to go on this errand, to bring you some apples of youth and some living water, and also to look for my brothers.”
The Tsar gave him his blessing. Prince Ivan went to the stables to look for to suit him. But when he looked at a horse, it shook all over, and when he put his hand on a horse, it fell to its knees.
Ivan could find no horse to suit him. He went out, his brash head bowed low. An old woman came up to him, and asked:
“Good morning, child, prince Ivan! Why are you so glum?”
“How can I not be glum, , wen I cannot find a horse to ride on my errand.”
“You only needed to ask me! There is a good horse that will suit you in the dungeon, tied down with an iron chain. If you can take it, you will find it a good horse.”
Prince Ivan went to the dungeon, he removed an iron plate from the opening. He ran up to the good horse, and the horse put its forelegs on Ivan’s shoulders. Ivan did not flinch. The horse tore off the iron chain, burst out of the dungeon, taking Ivan with it. Ivan put a brand-new bridle, and a brand-new saddle on the horse, and twelve straps, and one more he did not do it for looks, but for strength.
Then prince Ivan set out on his errand: he was seen mounting up, but he was not seen leaving. He reached the crossroads and stopped to consider the inscription.
“If I go right, I’ll lose my horse. And what would I do without a horse? If I go straight, I’ll be wed. That’s not what I’m after. If I go left, I’ll save my horse. That’s the best way for me.”
. And he turned onto the road where he would save his horse, but lose himself. He rode for a time, long or short, he rode high, or he rode low, over green fields, over rocky mountains, he rode from dawn to dusk, and reached a smal.
The izba stood o . It had only one window.
“Izba, little izba, turn your back on the forest, your front towards me! As I enter, so will I leave.”
The little izba turned its back on the forest, and its front towards prince Ivan. He went in, and saw of the bony leg, her shoulders stretched from corner to corner, her nose had grown into the ceiling.
“Ugh, Ugh,” she said, “I haven’t heard a i a long time, haven’t seen one even longer, and here’s one coming to me! Are you seeking something, or running away from it?”
“How so, baba-yaga, you question me even before you greet me! Won’t you offer me food and drink, and a bed for the night? Then I will tell you all about me and my errand.”
The baba-yaga did just that, gave food and drink to Ivan, and made his bed, sat down by his side, and asked:
“Well now, where are you from, good man, brave youth? What land? Who are your father and your mother?”
“Grandmother, I am from such-and-such a kingdom, such-and-such a land, I am prince Ivan the Tsar’s son. I am riding beyond three-nine lands, beyond three-ten kingdoms, to fetch apples of youth and living water.”
“Oh, my dear child, you have far to travel: the apples of youth and the living water belong to a powerful , t . She is my own niece. I don’t know whether you will be able to obtain those goods…”
“Well, grandmother, would you lend your head to my shoulders, and advise me on what to do?”
“Many a youth went this way, few spoke courteously. Take my horse, child. My horse runs faster, it will take you to my middle sister, she will advise you.”
Prince Ivan arose early in the morning. He thanked the baba-yaga for her hospitality, and rode off on her horse.
Suddenly he said to the horse:
“Stop! I dropped my gauntlet!”
The horse answered:
“While you were speaking, I traveled two hndred !”
. Prince Ivan traveled far, or maybe near, he traveled all day till dark. Then he saw a small izba ahead. It stood on a chicken leg, and had only one window.
“Izba, little izba, turn your back on the forest, your front towards me! As I enter, so will I leave.”
The little izba turned its back on the forest, and its front towards Ivan. Suddenly, a horse neighed and the horse Ivan rode neighed in answer. The horses were herd-mates.
The baba-yaga in the izba (even older than the first one) heard the horses and said:
“Sounds like my sister comes to visit.”
And she came out on the porch.
“Ugh, Ugh,” she said, “I haven’t heard a Russian in a long time, haven’t seen one even longer, and here’s one coming to me! Are you seeking something, or running away from it?”
“How so, baba-yaga, you question me even before you greet me! Won’t you offer me food and drink, and a bed for the night? Then I will tell you all about me and my errand.”
The baba-yaga did just that, gave food and drink to Ivan, and made his bed, sat down by his side, and asked:
“Well now, where are you from, good man, brave youth? What land? Who are your father and your mother?”
“Grandmother, I am from such-and-such a kingdom, such-and-such a land, I am prince Ivan the Tsar’s son. I am riding beyond three-nine lands, beyond three-ten kingdoms, to fetch apples of youth and living water from the mighty warrior-maiden Sineglazka.”
“Oh, child, I don’t know whether you will be able to obtain what you seek. The road is difficult to the abode of the maiden Sineglazka!”
“Well, grandmother, would you lend your head to my shoulders, and advise me on what to do?”
“Many a youth went this way, few spoke courteously. Take my horse, child. My horse runs faster, it will take you to my older sister, she can advise you better than I.”
Prince Ivan arose early in the morning. He thanked the baba-yaga for her hospitality, and rode off on her horse.
Suddenly he said to the horse:
“Stop! I dropped my gauntlet!”
The horse answered:
“While you were speaking, I travele !”
. A tale is soon told, a deed is done slowly. Prince Ivan traveled the whole day from dawn to dusk. He arrived to a small izba. It stood on a chicken leg, and had only one window.
“Izba, little izba, turn your back on the forest, your front towards me! As I enter, so will I leave.”
The little izba turned its back on the forest, and its front towards Ivan. Suddenly, a horse neighed and the horse Ivan rode neighed in answer. Another baba-yaga came out, old, even older than the second. She looked at the horse, recognized it as her sister’s, but the rider was a stranger, a handsome young man.
Then Prince Ivan bowed to her courteously, and asked her for her hospitality. The baba-yaga had to offer him her hospitality: it was due to all, to those who came on horseback and those who came on foot, to rich and poor alike.
The baba-yaga took care of everything in no time at all: she stabled the horse, and gave food and drink to Prince Ivan, and then she questioned him.
“Well now, where are you from, good man, brave youth? What land? Who are your father and your mother?”
“Grandmother, I am from such-and-such a kingdom, such-and-such a land, I am prince Ivan the Tsar’s son.
I was at your youngest sister’s, and she sent me to your middle sister, who sent me to you. I am riding beyond three-nine lands, beyond three-ten kingdoms, to fetch apples of youth and living water from the mighty warrior-maiden Sineglazka.”
“Oh, child, I don’t know whether you will be able to obtain what you seek. The road is difficult to the abode of the maiden Sineglazka!”
“Well, grandmother, would you lend your head to my shoulders, and advise me on what to do?”
“Many a youth went this way, few spoke courteously. Oh, well, I will help you. The maiden Sineglazka is my niece, she is a powerful and mighty warrior. Her kingdom is surrounded by a wall hgh, thick. There is a watch f at the gate, they won’t even let you in. You have to go there in the middle of the night, on my own good horse. Once you’re at the foot of the wall, whip the horse with a never-lashed whip: it will jump the wall. Tie down the horse and go into the garden. You will see the apple tree with the apples of youth, and a well under the tree. Take three apples, not one more. And fill a ewer with the water. The maiden Sineglazka will be sleeping, don’t you go into her chambers, get back on the horse and whip him stoutly: he’ll jump the wall again.”
. Ivan did not spend the night at this old woman’s, he mounted her good horse and rode off in the dark. This horse hopped over swamps and bogs, jumped over rivers and lakes.
After a long time or a short, having ridden high, or maybe low, Prince Ivan arrived in the middle of the night to the foot of a towering wall. There was a guard of thirty three warriors at the gates. Ivan squeezed the horse with his legs, whipped him with his never-lashed whip. The horse was angered, and jumped over the wall. Prince Ivan dismounted, went into the garden, and saw: there stood an apple tree with silver leaves and golden apples, and there was a well under the tree. Prince Ivan picked three apples and filled his ewer from the well. And then he desired to see the powerful, mighty warrior-maiden Sineglazka with his own eyes.
Prince Ivan went into the castle, where everybody was sleeping: on one side slept six warrior-maidens, and on the other side slept six warrior maidens, and in the middle the warrior-maiden Sineglazka was sprawled all over her bed in her sleep, roaring like mountain rapids.
Prince Ivan could not resist. He kissed her and left. He mounted his good horse, but the horse said to him in a human voice:
“You did not do as you were told, Prince Ivan, you went into the castle to see the maiden Sineglazka! Now I won’t be able to jump over the wall.”
Prince Ivan whipped the horse with his brand-new whip.
“You old nag, , bg of grass, we won’t just spend the night here, we’ll lose our heads!”
The horse was angered more than ever, and he jumped over the wall, but he caught a shoe on the top of the wall: strings sounded and bells rang.
The maiden Sineglazka awoke and saw that she had been burglarized.
“Awake, awake! We have been robbed of our goods!”
She commanded that her warrior’s horse be saddled, and raced off with the twelve warrior-maidens in pursuit of Prince Ivan.
. Prince Ivan was riding as fast as his horse could go, and the maiden Sineglazka was hard on his heels. Prince Ivan arrived to house of the oldest baba-yaga, and she had a horse all ready for him. Ivan changed horses on the fly and raced off. He was scarcely out the gates when Sineglazka rode in, asking the baba-yaga:
“Grandmother, did an animal pass by here?”
“No, child.”
“Did a man ride by here?”
“No, child. But won’t you have a cup of milk after all this riding?”
“I would, grandmother, but it takes a long time to milk a cow.”
“Oh, no, child, it won’t take but a moment.”
The baba-yaga went to milk the cow, and she took her time. The maiden Sineglazka had a cup of milk and set off again in pursuit of Prince Ivan.
Prince Ivan arrived at the house of the younger baba-yaga, changed horses, and raced on. He was scarcely out the gates when Sineglazka rode in.
“Grandmother, did an animal pass by, did a man ride by here?”
“No, child. But won’t you have some ater all this riding?”
“It will take you so long to fry them!”
“Oh, no, child, it won’t take but a moment.”
The baba-yaga fried a mountain of pancakes, taking her time to prepare them. The maiden Sineglazka ate them and raced off after Prince Ivan.
Prince Ivan arrived at the house of the youngest baba-yaga, dismounted and got on his own good horse, and raced off. He was scarcely out the gates when Sineglazka rode in and asked the baba-yaga whether a man had ridden by.
“No, child. But won’t you take a nice ater all this riding?”
“It will take you so long to heat up the bath house!”
“Oh, no, child, it won’t take but a moment!”
The baba-yaga heated up the bath house, and prepared everything. The maiden Sineglazka had a steam bath, and then raced off after Prince Ivan. Her horse jumped from mountain to mountain, hopped over rivers and lakes. Soon she started catching up after Ivan.
. Ivan saw that he was pursued: twelve warrior maidens, and a thirteenth the maiden Sineglazka. They were about to catch up with him, and they were ready to behead him. He slowed down his horse, and the maiden Sineglazka rode up to him and yelled:
“You thief, why did you drink from my well and did not replace the cover?”
He answered:
“Let’s ride three horse-jumps apart and measure our strength against each other.”
Then Prince Ivan and the maiden Sineglazka rode three horse-jumps apart, took out their war-, heir long-measured lances, their sharp sabers. They met each other three times, they broke their maces, they split their lances, they dulled their sabers, and yet neither could throw the other to the ground. There was no point in fighting a-horseback: they jumped off, and fought on bare-handed.
They fought from morning till night, thill the bright sun set. Prince Ivan’s leg slipped, he fell to te . The maiden Sineglazka put her knee on his , nd took out her great dagger to stab him in the heart.
Prince Ivan said to her:
“Do not slay me, fair maiden Sineglazka, take me instead by my white hands, help me rise from the ground, kiss me on my sweet lips.”
Then the maiden Sineglazka helped Prince Ivan to stand up, and kissed him on his sweet lips. They set up their pavillion in the wide field, in the open plain, on the green grass. They spent three days and three nights there. There they were nd exchanged rings.
The maiden Sineglazka said to him:
“I will ride home, and you go home as well, but beware: do not turn from your path anywhere… Await me in your kingdom three years hence.”
They mounted up and rode away. After a long time, or maybe a short events happen slowly, but a tale is quickly told Prince Ivan arrived at the crossroads where the flat stone lay, and thought:
“This is not good! I am riding home, and my brothers are lost without a trace.”
. He did not follow the orders of the maiden Sineglazka, he turned onto the road that promised marriage. He arrived to the castle with the golden roofs. Suddenly Prince Ivan’s horse neighed, and his brothers’ horses responded, for the horses were herd-mates.
Prince Ivan went up the stairs to the porch and knocked the ring so hard the finials on the rooftops shook and the window frames became crooked. A beautiful maiden ran out.
“Oh, Prince Ivan, I have been waiting for you for so long! Come, partake of m , and spend the night.”
She took him into the castle, and served h
im a real feast. Prince Ivan did not eat so much as he threw under the table, he did not drink so much as he poured out under the table. The fair maiden took him into the bedroom:
“Lie down, Prince Ivan, rest comfortably.”
But Prince Ivan threw her onto the bed, he turned the bed upside down, and the fell into the ellar, the deep dungeon.
Prince Ivan leaned over the dungeon and called out:
“Who’s alive down there?”
And he was answered:
“Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii!”
Prince Ivan pulled them out of the dungeon: their faces were black with dirt, moss had begun to grow on them. Prince Ivan washed his brothers off with living water, and they became as before.
They mounted up on their horses and rode off. After a long while, or a short, they arrived at the crossroads. Prince Ivan told his brothers:
“Watch my horse while I rest a little.:
. He lay down on the silky grass and fell into a deep warrior’s sleep. But Prince Fedor said to Prince Vasilii:
“If we return without apples of youth or living water, there will be little fame for us, our father will send s to .”
Prince Vasilii answered:
“Let’s throw Prince Ivan into a deep ravine, and let’s take these things and hand them over to our father.”
So they took the apples of youth and the living water out of Ivan’s pocket, and threw Ivan into a deep ravine. Prince Ivan fell for three days and three nights before he reached the bottom.
Prince Ivan fell onto a sea shore, came to, and saw that there was nothing around him, just the sky and the water, and under an old oak tree, some fledgling birds were calling, for the sea was pummeling them.
Prince Ivan took off his ad covered up the fledglings, and hid under the oak tree.
The weather calmed, and the great bird Nagai came flying.
She arrived, landed under the tree, and asked her fledglings:
“My dear little children, did you suffer from the terrible weather?”
“Do not cry, mother, a Russian saved us, he covered us with his caftan.”
The bird Nagai asked Prince Ivan:
“How did you happen to be here, good man?”
“My own brothers threw me into the ravine for the apples of youth and the living water I had.”
“You protected my little ones, ask anything you want: gold, silver, precious stones,”
“I do not need anything, Nagai: I do not need gold, or silver, or precious stones. But can I return to my native land?”
The bird Nagai answered him:
“Find two barrels, each full of some twelve s of eat.”
So Prince Ivan shot many geese and y the sea shore. He put the meat into two barrels, and put one barrel on the right shoulder of the bird Nagai, the other on the left, and sat on her back. Then he began feeding the bird, and she took off and rose higher and higher.
She flew, and Prince Ivan kept feeding and feeding her. They flew a long time thus, or maybe a short time, and Ivan fed both barrels to the bird. And Nagai turned her beak to him again. Ivan took out his knife, cut a chunk off his thigh, and gave it to the bird Nagai. She flew further, and turned her beak to him again. Ivan cut a chunk off his other leg and fed it to her. They were almost there, and the bird turned to Ivan a third time, and he cut a chunk off his chest and fed it to her.
Then the bird Nagai arrived in Prince Ivan’s native land.
“You fed me well the whole time, but the last piece was the most delicious, I have never eaten the like of it.”
Prince Ivan showed her his wounds. The bird Nagai regurgitated the last three chunks, and said:
“Put them back where they belong.”
Prince Ivan did so, and the chunks adhered to his bones.
“Now dismount, Prince Ivan, I shall fly home.”
The bird Nagai rose in the air, and Prince Ivan went his way home.
. He arrived at the capital, and found out that Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii had brought their father the apples of youth and the living water, and that the Tsar was healed: he recovered his good health and his sight.
Prince Ivan did not go to his father, or to his mother. He gathered all the drunkards, the barflies, and went from tavern to tavern.
At that time, beyond three-nine lands, in the three-tenth kingdom, the mighty warrior Sineglazka gave birth to two sons. They grew hour by hour, not day by day. A tale is quickly told, a deed is done slowly: three years passed. Sineglazka took her sons, gathered her army, and rode out in search of Prince Ivan.
She arrived in his kingdom, and set up her white pavilion in the wide field, in the open plain, on the green grass. She carpeted the path to the pavilion with bright cloth. And she sent a messenger to the capital to say to the Tsar:
“Tsar, give up your son. If you do not, I will trample your whole kingdom, I will burn it, I will take you prisoner.”
The Tsar was frightened and he sent his oldest son, Prince Fedor. Fedor walked on the bright cloth, and arrived at the white pavilion. Two boys ran out.
“Mother, mother, is this our father coming?”
“No, children, this is your uncle.”
“What should we do with him, mother?”
“Treat him as he deserves, children.”
The two little boys took some switches and began whipping Prince Fedor just below his back. They whipped him stoutly, and he barely managed to get away.
And Sineglazka sent another messenger to the Tsar: “Give up your son!…”
The Tsar was even more frightened, and he sent his middle son, Prince Vasilii . He arrived at the white pavilion. Two boys ran out:
“Mother, mother, is this our father?”
“No, children, this is your uncle. Treat him as he deserves.”
The two little boys took some switches again and began whipping Prince Vasilii just below his back. They whipped him stoutly, and he barely managed to get away.
And Sineglazka sent a third messenger to the Tsar:
“Go find your third son, Prince Ivan. If you do not find him, I will trample and burn your whole kingdom.”
The Tsar was frightened even more than before, and sent for Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii, and ordered them to find their brother, Prince Ivan. But the brothers fell to their knees and confessed how they took the living water and the apples of youth from the sleeping Prince Ivan and threw him into a deep ravine.
Upon hearing this, the Tsar shed many tears. At that time, Prince Ivan was making his way by himself to Sineglazka’s pavilion, and all the barflies went with him. They tore up the bright cloth underfoot and tossed it to the wind.
Prince Ivan arrived at the white tent. Two boys ran out:
“Mother, mother, some drunkard is coming here with many barflies!”
Sineglazka answered them:
“Take him by his white hands, bring him into the tent. This is your own father. He has been suffering for no reason for three years!”
The boys took Prince Ivan by his white hands and brought him into the tent. Sineglazka washed him and combed his hair, put fresh clothes on him, and put him to bed. Then she gave a drink to each barfly and they went their way.
The following day, Sineglazka and Prince Ivan arrived at the Tsar’s palace. Then there was a great feast, and wedding to follow. Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii earned little fame: they were thrown out from the palace to spend a night here, a night there, and the third nowhere.
Prince Ivan did not i his kingdom, he went away with Sineglazka to her own kingdom.
And that is the end of the story.

_______________

Gerard Manley Hopkins Poetry

The child is father to the man

THE CHILD is father to the man.

How can he be? The words are wild.

Suck any sense from that who can:

The child is father to the man.

No; what the poet did write ran,

The man is father to the child.

The child is father to the man!

How can he be? The words are wild.

—

Gods Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears mans smudge and shares mans smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

—
Epithalamion

HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe

We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood

Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,

Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,

That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown

Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between

Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.

We are there, when we hear a shout

That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover

Makes dither, makes hover

And the riot of a rout

Of, it must be, boys from the town

Bathing: it is summers sovereign good.

By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise

He drops towards the river: unseen

Sees the bevy of them, how the boys

With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,

Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.

This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast

Into such a sudden zest

Of summertime joys

That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best

There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;

Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood

By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air,

Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there,

Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots

Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off withdown he dings

His bleachèd both and woolwoven wear:

Careless these in coloured wisp

All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks

Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp

Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots

Fast he opens, last he offwrings

Till walk the world he can with bare his feet

And come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks

Built of chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks

And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy quicksilvery shivès and shoots

And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims,

Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the fleet

Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs

Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish while he looks about him, laughs, swims.

Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean

I should be wronging longer leaving it to float

Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note

What is the delightful dene?

Wedlock. What the water? Spousal love.

. . . . . . . .

Father, mother, brothers, sisters, friends

Into fairy trees, wild flowers, wood ferns

Rankèd round the bower

October 15, 2007

For Irina…

Our friend Irina moved to Olympia on Friday…. We helped with the packing and moving stuff to the van. She is off on a new adventure, but we will miss her here!
I spent some 20 hours this weekend on the magazine, it is almost there… Trying to get it to do just what I want, but it seems to have a mind of its own…

Gwyllm

____________

On The Menu

Acid Trip

DMT Experience

For Irina: Anna Akhmatova Poems

Art: Watts

Acid Trip

=en_US&fs=1&”>

______________
DMT Experience

-Scott Fossel

A composite essay of my first two DMT trips
disclaimer: This is a pale reflection of a bottomless mystery.

The things I say it is, it is now – these are but linguistic

shrouds I am able to cloak it in. Please don’t think you know DMT

from having read this, you don’t. But DO please go and try some,

go extract it from a plant – then you will KNOW. Oh, this is my

experience, you can ask me any questions you like. Everything

here is with closed eyes unless otherwise indicated – this is

really the only way to go DEEP.
The small wooden pipe was in my mouth and a match was coming to light it.

The scenario almost seemed like smoking pot except I knew the taste to be

very wrong as the complex, sweetly acrid smoke filled my lungs. Anyway, my

pulse never raced like this from the anticipation of getting stoned.
The first thing was a sense of dropping away, but to say downward would be

too simple. There were all sorts of frequency modulations and crescendoed

stacatto pops as the trip descended. This sound data was quiveringly

involved with these visual architectonic dream waters that were beginning

to emerge, dripping and slipping amongst themselves, and my being became

overwhelmed by vacuous, gravity-like suction experiences which impelled me

further in. Around me I felt a crowding in of beings as if the Celtic

Faerie land of Fay had become momentarily co-present with where I was. I

sensed them, but did not experience these creatures. The sucking experience

took over for a while then, driving the morphological acrobatics of

spacelove that lay before me. There was something about it that makes me

think of a voluptuous alien seductress with big, fat lips pulling me to her

body in the weirdest feeling embrace ever. It felt like I was being smeared

sensually and lustfully around the space in some sort of vacuum-tube

funhouse. At this point (maybe a minute into the experience) I started

picking up something like the Escher painting of all those sets of stairs

with figures descending by all manners of gravity, only its surfaces were

emerald isles of what I can only describe as fractal Medusa liquid,

serpentine and sexy. There was a thought that I was in a room full of

aliens and they were playing with me, but that somehow they had conspired

to make me this way – the alien carney music bar on the planet Tatooine in

the Star Wars trilogy seems relevant.
Then I had the thought (which just seems to pop up and not really pertain):

“What have I done! How did I get this way?” Meaning, how did I come to

enter something so foreign that my petty human ontological premises and

hopeful body of knowledge seem like a wrench trying to adjust a camel? At

that point I lost any touch with my body and was thrust forward into

complete and utter amazement. The world became so crammed full of intricacy

to the nth that it seemed every nook and cranny in my spacetime was

exfoliating little crystalline dancing worlds, bellowing ecstasy. It moved

like snakes move: all rippling of muscle and sun glinting scales. I cannot

emphasize enough the catapulting, titanic motions of this iridescent zigzag

bottlerocket, this nuanced, whittling circus of form, this Brobignagian

roller coaster safari across the jeweled plains of wonderland, straining

the limits of the knowable.
This is where I was when I felt a certain sort of shockwave across the dome

of the sky which gave me memory of the real world. I then entered this

whole journey that I would call extrication. Going in was “intrication” or

delving into intricacy, so coming back out was sensibly extrication. The

experience was very literally an incedible groping back out of this wild

wooly thing until I made it “out”, which afterwards I realized was only the

physical action of opening my eyes. The pipe was in my mouth – its touching

my lips had been the reality shockwave I’d felt. The woman who was handling

the pipe for me looked like a fractal Medusa as well, but incarnate – she

was buzzing all over with this really freaky energy. I said something like,

“You expect me to call this a mouth?”, a comment which was silenced by the

stem of the pipe. One toke and I was out of my body again, yanked back

through the scrim of the worlds into the blast furnaces of heaven.
I “came to” in some sense at this point and realized that I could do

anything in a space like this, could instantly unfold my richest possible

imaginings. “O.K.”, I said to myself, “What about trying to do what you

believe possible by your perceptual theory of higher dimensional

experience?” You see, I got the idea that there is no reason why, in an

inner experience, one has to have visions only in front of one. I began to

believe this was an imprint that years of bringing the external world into

construction of inner spaces had created, but was not necessary. I then

tried to imagine what it would be like to see in every direction at once,

i.e. what would a ball look like if you could see every side of it at once?

I could sense it but not imagine it in my mind. So this is the challenge I

set myself. It not only seemed to work (though with everything else going

on inside, it was a bit like trying to do a sensitive physics experiment in

the midst of a drunken bacchanal) but it did so immediately. I rushed

upwards into this superspace that was a spun galactic ecology of stars, a

swarming hive of dragonfly constellations . . . This was very profound, but

in doing it, it seemed I had reduced the alien quality of what had been

going on previous to this excursion.
I let my will go then and tumbled forward into elfland. Terence McKenna is

apt in calling these entities “elves”. They are elves/not-elves. They don’t

appear, they kind of ooze out of the woodwork seductively and before you

know it they’re there – the whole realm is infested with these creatures

like nothing else you could ever imagine. They do sing things that are like

“self-dribbling jeweled basketballs” or whatever you want to call them.

They make Faberge egg concoctions with ingredient lists like: 1) space, 2)

lust, 3) politics, 4) circus sideshows, 5) time, 6) gall bladders, 7)

existential notions of polyfidelity, cucumbers, 9) Beethoven’s 5th

symphony, 10) the smell of petunias, and so on. This is somewhat of an

arbitrary list, but the point is, all my categories of mind fell away

because they were being ceaselessly synthesized and re-synthesized into

these hyperdimensional objects, undulating, ululating along. It makes me

think of getting home from school when your mother says that she’s baked

you some treats, only these are like no treats Mom ever made, and when you

see them you almost want to say, “Aw, mom, you shouldn’t have. I mean you

really shouldn’t have”. What you do with these elves is some sort of a game

of catch, only the physics of the game has been replaced by the physics of

synesthesia. In catching the things they threw, in playing with them, I

participated in the ineffable mysteries that they were. This place is the

Joycean “Merry go raum”. Being there I came to understand the Heraclitus

fragment: “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls”. It is this. As

well I understand, “Still the first day, All Fool’s Day, here at the

center.” It is this too.
So for what seemed like centuries I played with the trippy freaky elves and

they kept bringing me into atrium after atrium in the antics annex, and all

I could do was wonder when we would get to their front door. As far as I

know, we never did. Instead they said many things, though I can’t say they

used what we would call a voice to accomplish this communication. I

remember only parts of this. At first they said, “Build this”, indicating

hyperspace. Later they amended this by saying, “Build it. He will come.”

from the movie Field of Dreams. Very funny.
Then it was as though alarms started to go off, and the whole space was

going through these quivering emergency elaborations. I get the image of a

submarine movie sequence when I think back on this, just when it has been

discovered on the surface, the periscope retracts and the whole interior

goes into haywire, preparatory gymnastics as all the hatches are battened

down. There is a phenomenally high-energy dynamic associated with this

part, as they try to get you out and shut the great bronze dancing doors of

hyperspace. It is as if everything is charged with imponderable

electricities and is racing around because someone shouted: “Places

everyone!!” They start cramming your soul out of there with a million hands

at once, grabbing you by twelve dimensions you never knew your body had.

Finally, the thing shuts and there is a sense of finality to that, but just

as soon you are on to the next thing.
Slowly then it begins to make farewells and say its goodbyes. Ancient

mythos holds that the world is supported by turtles “all the way down”, but

as I came out of it, my sense was of jeweled great glass revolving

elevators all the way down. I remember thinking that I was passing back

through the 50,000 veils that the Sufis say the mystery has, one by one,

and I clearly remember the awe I felt that each one of them was closed,

sealed, and put away in a unique and voluptuous, succulent way. It was

without question the most beautiful goodbye I have known in this life.

There was no regret of leaving or longing not to leave, just an

overpowering acceptance of the imminent return. This went on and upon

opening my eyes I had this very zap experience and I was right back in this

world, amazingly enough, only ten minutes gone. Slight tracers on light and

then these gone too. I was amazed of the idea that one could go back there,

could in fact just go there, that where I had been felt entirely like it

was a whole hyperspace, raging right next door. I remember saying, and

being very sure of this as I still am now, “Those are the gods”. By which I

meant, of all the things I’ve experienced in life, they are the most like

real living gods, and should be called that. It was very interesting to me

that I didn’t need to process a whole lot, which I usually require after

the mushrooms. Instead, I think I was in a state of being so existentially

surpassed by the quality of what I had just been a part of, that I couldn’t

muster any sort of conceptual or descriptive response to it at all. By

default, I was left with just a purity of acceptance for it – I just simply

had nothing to put to it in any sense. Instead I resorted to looking wildly

and deeply into other peoples eyes and by some existential-perceptual

force, to impress upon them the utter beauty of what I had just been. This

seemed to work somewhat, though probably not. I definitely felt I had been

closer to the core of the real than ever before and that this mystery is

front and center to who we are as humans, who we really are. I felt very

connected to my universe, very sensitive and strong and in touch with

things. Because I apparently have the gift of being able to remember it

quite well (others do not), I have to live with memory of its being out

there somewhere: very real, very powerful, very alive. There has not been

an hour to pass since I did it that I haven’t thought of it and tried again

to reference it to this world, failing. I do feel it is a very important

experience to have as a human being, and in some sense a whole lot safer

than mushrooms or acid. I say this because I am aware that I usually have

time and opportunity in a traditional trip to come up with weird ideas and

believe them which can be hell to integrate when things return to normal.

DMT seems to be so awe-inspiring, one is just so floored by it, that there

is no chance for trying to figure it out.
This is left for when you return, spacecraft still steaming.
_____________
For Irina: Anna Akhmatova Poems…

“Along the Hard Crust…”

1917
Along the hard crust of deep snows,

To the secret, white house of yours,

So gentle and quiet we both

Are walking, in silence half-lost.

And sweeter than all songs, sung ever,

Are this dream, becoming the truth,

Entwined twigs a-nodding with favor,

The light ring of your silver spurs…

—
“I Was Born In the Right Time…”

1913
I was born in the right time, in whole,

Only this time is one that is blessed,

But great God did not let my poor soul

Live without deceit on this earth.
And therefore, it’s dark in my house,

And therefore, all of my friends,

Like sad birds, in the evening aroused,

Sing of love, that was never on land.

—

Our Native Earth

1961
There are not any people in the world –

So simple, lofty, tearless — like us.
1922
We do not carry it in lockets on the breast,

And do not cry about it in poems,

It does not wake us from the bitter rest,

And does not seem to us like Eden promised.

In our hearts, we never try to treat

This as a subject for the bargain row,

While being ill, unhappy, spent on it,

We even fail to see it or to know.

Yes, this dirt on the feet suits us fairly,

Yes, this crunch on the teeth suits us just,

And we trample it nightly and daily –

This unmixed and non-structural dust.

But we lay into it and become it alone,

And therefore call this earth so freely — my own.

—
Muse

1924
When, in the night, I wait for her, impatient,

Life seems to me, as hanging by a thread.

What just means liberty, or youth, or approbation,

When compared with the gentle piper’s tread?
And she came in, threw out the mantle’s edges,

Declined to me with a sincere heed.

I say to her, “Did you dictate the Pages

Of Hell to Dante?” She answers, “Yes, I did.”

October 9, 2007

The Wednesday Waffling…

Here is a question for you… How do you personally learn? Through someone talking to you, by book, by tactile input? Just thinkin’….
Anyway, here it is for Wednesday. It is raining in P-Town, and I am closing in on the final for The Invisible College… (yes yes yes!)
Off to a customers, hopefully not the longest of days.
Blessings,
Gwyllm

_________
On The Menu:

The Links

Celebration Dance!

The Meeting Of Science And Mysticism

Poetry From The Past: Thomas Moore

Art: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

_________
The Links:

You Must Watch What You Read…

Marchers press for legal marijuana

The Woman, the Witch and the Goddess

Why Are Huge Numbers Of Camels Dying In Africa And Saudi Arabia?

This Modern World: In 1969, a group of radicals hatched a secret plan…

___________
Celebration Dance!

=en_US&fs=1&”>

____________

The Meeting Of Science And Mysticism

New theories in physics suggest that no man is an island and the greatest is within the smallest
By Robert Anton Wilson
In 1964 Dr. John Stewart Bell, an Irishman working at CERN nuclear research centre (Switzerland) published a mathematical paper that staggered the scientific world. The central idea of the paper-now Called Bells Theorem suggested new views about reality so hair-raising that even Dr. Bell himself repudiates most of the interpretations by other physicists about what his mathematics imply.
Bells Theorem seems to portray a universe far weirder than science has previously realized so weird, in fact, that it hauntingly resembles many mystical and superstitious ideas of the past. For instance, I shook hands with the editor of a Berlin magazine a month ago. Since our hands touched, according to Bell, some particles in my hand remain, and always will remain, in a kind or correlation or union with some particles in the editors hand. Mystics have talked about such linkages all through history, of course, but science never took such ideas seriously until Bell came along.
Since so much dispute rages about Bells demonstration, we should use careful language in discussing it.
What Bells math showed was that 1) if we accept an objective universe separate from our ideas, and 2) if the equations of quantum (sub-atomic) physics accurately describe that universe, then 3) any two particles that once contacted each other continue to influence each other, or remain parts of a unified system, no matter how far apart they subsequently move in space or in time-even if they move to opposite ends of the universe.
Bells math thus suggests that space and time only exist on some levels of the universe-or only in our minds-or that we must assume a level of reality where space and time dont exist at all. Here is there, says physicist Dr. Nick Herbert, when explaining Bells Theorem. There is no difference between anything, he adds with a twinkle in his eye.
THE BILLIARD TABLE EXAMPLE

To visualize what this means, and how it differs from all previous science, imagine an ordinary billiard table.
In Newtonian physics, if a ball (lets call it B), moves, its because it is hit by another ball (which we can call A).This accords with the standard mechanical picture of the universe, which most people still identify with science with a capital S.
However, in field physics (pioneered in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell), ball B might move and ball A along with it, not because of mechanical collisions, but because a magnet below the table has created an electromagnetic field, which causes the balls to jump in a certain direction. Field theories, while in a sense less materialistic than mechanical collision theories, still involve connection, interaction and causality. They still live in the same ball park as mechanical theories.
In Einsteins General Relativity, we find a third kind of causality. The balls might move because of the seeming flatness of the table, which we see, only appears on the small scale. On a larger scale the table actually curves. (In the Einstein universe the planets orbit the sun because space itself curves, even though we cant see the curvature directly and have to deduce it mathematically.) This moves us even further from collision models than the field theories do, but Einstein remains in a ball park we can visualize-with a little extra effort. Einsteinian space-time involves connections, interaction and a kind of determinism-geometric determinism. The mass of matter determines the curvature of space, and the curvature of space determines the movement of matter.
In all these kinds of scientific explanations-the mechanical, the field theory and the geometric (curvature) Theory-the cause of the movement of the billiard balls can be pictured in a mental image and, once we understand the theory, it makes sense to us.
In Bells universe, however, ball A and ball B might moves without any of these three types of causes (the only types of causes science recognizes) -and perhaps without any cause at all! In other words, A moves because B moves or B moves because A moves and we seemingly cannot say anything more about the movements. Maybe we cant even say the much since the word because doesnt really seem to fit this case.
Imagine yourself in a room with such a billiard table. Ball A at one end of the table suddenly turns clockwise and exactly at that moment ball B at the other end turns counter-clockwise. You observe carefully that nobody pushed the balls or fired another ball at them. You check under the table and find no hidden magnets to create field effects. You then think of Einstein and geometry, but when you check, the table has no curvature of any sort. You look at the table again and ball A turns counter-clockwise while ball B turns clockwise. That sort of thing usually only happen in movies about haunted house.
SPOOKS,FLIM-FLAM OR…
At this point you would probably say, spooks! or something similar. James Randi would shout Fraud! or Flim-flam!
Thats just about what most physicists said when Bells Theorem was published. The math was absolutely irrefutable, but the conclusion seemed impossible to believe.
Several experiments, however most notably, those by Dr. Clauser of the University of California at Berkeley and Dr Aspect at the optical institute in Orsay, France have shown that atomic particles behave exactly as Bell said they should. For instance, in Aspects most recent experiment two photons (particles of light) ejected from a common source (a mercury atom) acted just as Bell predicted, or just like the billiard balls in our illustration. Whenever the photon manifested the mathematical state called spin up, the other photon measured spin down. This happened despite the total absence of any form of connection or cause known to science.
ANOTHER MODEL
To be even clear about how mystical this seems, let me paraphrase a life size model once used by Dr. Bell in a lecture.
Imagine two men who live in Paris and Mexico City. Imagine that we keep them under observation continually and discover that every time the man in Paris wears red socks, the man in Mexico City wears Blue socks. Now suppose we check every possible communication system and prove that no way exists for the two men to send messages to each other they cant get near a phone or shortwave radio or telegraph or any similar device. Then we take the red socks of the man in Paris and put blue socks on him. Immediately with not a fraction of a second of time delay the man in Mexico City sits down, takes of his red socks and puts on blue socks.
Even stranger, this would happen every single time we tried the experiment if the man behaved like the atomic particles in Bells Theorem and the experiments of Clauser and Aspect.
WHAT IT MEANS
What the deuce can this mean? Physicists remain in violent disagreement with each other about the question, but all the answers are equally astounding to ordinary folks.
According to Dr. David Bohm of the University of London, It may mean that everything in the universe is in a kind of total rapport, so that whatever happens is related to everything else; or it may be that there is some kind of information that can travel faster than the speed of light: or it may mean that our concepts of space and time have to be modified in some way that we dont now understand. (London Times, February 20, 1983.)
A HOLISTIC UNIVERSE

Consider the first alternative. If what happens is related to everything else, we live in the kind of holistic Universe described by the mystics of the East, especially the Hindus and Buddhists. In the humorous metaphor of Charles Fort, a a bear coughs at the north pole, a bottle of Ketchup will fall out of a wind on in New York City. In the more grim metaphors of Buddhism, if a single angry or cruel act (or thought) occurs anywhere, every sentient being in the universe will feel the effects. In the poetic language of the Englishman, John Donne: No man is an island…if a clod of Spain be washed away, Europe is the less…Each mans death diminishes me, for I am involved in humanity.
This non-local connection (as some call it) may mean that if you have touched a pair of dice your brain can then exercise some control over them, just as most gamblers think. This sounds some wild, science-fiction elaboration of Bell, but it has been seriously proposed by Dr. Evan Harris Walker, an American physicist who deduced, from Bells math and the math of Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle* just how the human brain should be able to affect the dice.
In The Complete Quantum Anthropologist, Dr. Walker demonstrates that this mathematically theoretical limit of control mind over matter corresponds exactly to the degree of control demonstrated by Hakoon Forwald, a retired electrical engineer, in a long-running series of experiments on psychokinesis. Forwalds subjects in the years between 1949 and 1970 tried to influence dice by brain power and score just as far above chance as Walkers math says they should have scored.
It does not seem far from this psychokinesis to the traditional belief that if a sorcerer gets a hold of a strand of your hair, anything he does will eventually affect your hair.
INFORMATION WITHOUT TRANSPORTATION
Before we get spooked too much by this line of thought, let us look at Dr. Bohms second alternative:
Information that can travel faster than the speed of light, Since no energy can travel faster than the speed of light, this means information without energy. Another physicist, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, has called it information without transportation. Such ghostly information moving around without energy or transportation to carry it might explain the kind of things that parapsychologists call telepathy or precognition or ESP.
This sounds a medieval as the sorcerer working magic on a lock of hair, doesnt it? Nonetheless, two physicists from Stanford Research International (now SRI International), Dr. Harold Puthoff and Dr. Russell Targ, in their book Mind Reach, offer it as an explanation of distant viewing (telepathy across thousands of miles.)
TIME TRAVEL
Even more bizarre, as Dr. Sarfatti has pointed out in many lectures, information without transportation: could travel into the past. You see, in Relativity Theory, going faster than the speed of light seems impossible because it means going backwards in time. Some interpretations of Bell, however, suggest that information can indeed go backwards in time. This leads to speculations that have previously only appeared in science fiction, not in science.
For instance, it leads to the Grandfather paradox. Thus: if I had a time machine, went back to the 1890s, and for some perverse reason murdered my grandfather before he could marry my grandmother, then when I came back to 1992 I wouldnt find myself here, would I? Where would I exist, if I existed at all? It seems from a theoretical mathematic basis I would dwell in a parallel universe one in which I remained sane enough not to go back in time to kill my granddad. But this universe, where poor old granddad, would still exist except that my father and I wouldnt live in it.
The same logic that governs such a sci-fi time machine applies to information that moves faster than light. If I could send Bells kind of information into the past, my grandfather might receive it. He might alter his actions in such a way that I wouldnt get born in this universe anymore. I would have sent the information from the universe next door, so to speak.
If that doesnt boggle your mind, consider a further development suggested by Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, often called the father of the Hydrogen bomb. In the Science Digest of October 1984, Dr. Wheeler suggests that the current and recent scientific experiments on atomic energy literally created this universe (or selected it out of all possible universes).
In other words, every time we meddle with an atomic system, according to Dr. Wheeler, the non-local effects go every which way into space and time, and some of them affect the nature of the Big Bang from which the universe emerged. You see, Dr. Wheeler has often argued that many, many universes emerged from the Big Bang more than 10,000-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-

million-million-million-million-million of them, at least all of them stacked up in parallel to ours in super-space, a geometrical construct he invented to solve some of the problems with General Relativity. Dr. Wheeler now argues, in the light of Bells Theorem, that we have, through our experiments, fine-tuned the Big Bang to produce the kind of universe in which we can exist and can conduct such experiments. Zillions and Zillions of other universes, without our meddling, evolve in different ways, and most of them collapse inward again very shortly after the Big Bang and thus never produce human beings.

SPACE AND TIME MIGHT NOT EVEN EXIST
Then we have Dr. Bohms third alternative: Our concepts of space and time will have to be modified in some way we do not understand. Many philosophers have examined this idea in the past especially the Buddhists in the East and Bishop Berkeley and Immanuel Kant in Europe. All come to the same conclusion, basically. Space and time dont exist out there, apart from us. The human brain just invented them to have a filing system for its impressions.
Dr. Nick Herbert presents a scientific form of this theory in his book, Quantum Reality. According to Dr. Herbert, all experience remains local (bound by space and time) but reality itself exists non-locally (not bound by space and time, or transcendental) in exactly the sense of all mystic teachings.
Dr. Bohm states the same idea in a more precise way. As he sees it, the universe may consist of an implicate order much like the software (programs) of a computer and an explicate order, much like the hardware what we can see and experience has locality. It remains here, not there, and now, not then. The implicative order or software, however – which we cannot see or experience but only deduce from our experiments and math has total non-locality. It exists both here and there, both now and then.
In this model we do not need to posit information without transportation or any of the spook stuff. The information does not travel without a medium because it does not travel at all; it exists already, always, everywhere. In every electron, in every atom, in every molecule, every stone, every animal or person, every planet, every galaxy, however different their locations in space and time, the basic information, or universal blueprint (Bohms implicate order) remains the same.
This sounds very much like the Hindu concept of God or the Chinese Tao. In fact Bohms implicate order exactly fits Lao-Tses paradox of the Tao: The greatest is within the smallest. It also strikingly resembles the major axiom of Hermetic mysticism in the West: That which is above is reflected in that which is below.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR BACK IS TURNED?

There remains one way to avoid all of these shocking and bizarre sounding interpretations of John S. Bells discovery. That way is to deny the first step of the argument that we can posit an objective universe separate from our ideas. This path, thus far, has appeared only in the works of Dr. David Mermin of Columbia University. In two astounding papers Quantum Mysteries for Everyone and Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?- Dr. Mermin argues that quantum physics (the physics of small particles, from which Bell began) finally makes sense if we assume the universe only exists when we look at it. If you dont look at your automobile, and nobody else looks at it, it ceases to exist until somebody looks at it again. Then it pops back into reality presto!
This theory, known as solipsism, has never appealed to scientists or philosophers, although a few cynics have always argued in favor of it, just to annoy the orthodox. Nobody seems to have ever taken it seriously until now. Dr. Mermin soberly claims that solipsism leads to less absurd results than any other way of interpreting Bells math.
I dont think Dr. Mermin intends to make a joke. He truly fins solipsism less unthinkable than ghostly information moving every which way in space and time with no medium to carry it, or parallel universes being created out of nothing whenever an atomic measurement is made, or the other alternatives that physicists are considering in trying to understand Bells theorem.

SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM JOINED?

In summary, Bells theorem does not prove the truth of the basic ideas of mysticism, but it definitely makes them seem more plausible than any previous scientific discovery did. Any alternative explanation of the non-local reality described by Bell does not bring us safely home to common sense. The other explanations sound even stranger than anything that mystics have ever claimed. We can only conclude, as the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane did after experimenting with yoga, that The universe may be, not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.

+ Editors note: The Uncertainty Principle is that the accurate measurement of one or two related, observable quantities, as position and momentum or energy and time, produce uncertainties in the measurement of the other, such that the product of the uncertainties of both quantities is equal to or greater than h / 2 pi, where h equals Planks constant. [ – from The Random House Dictionary of the Englaih Language]. Simply put, the principle means that you can know either the position or motion of a particle, but not both.

_______________

Poetry From The Past: Thomas Moore

Song
They may rail at this life — from the hour I began it

I found it a life full of kindness and bliss,

And until they can show me some happier planet,

More social and bright, I’ll content me with this.

As long as the world has such lips and such eyes

As before me this moment enraptur’d I see,

They may say what they will of the orbs in the skies,

But this earth is the planet for you, love, and me.
In Mercury’s star, where each moment can bring them

New sunshine and wit from the fountain on high,

Tho’ the nymphs may have livelier poets to sing them,

They’ve none, even there, more enamour’d than I.

And, as long as this harp can be waken’d to love,

And that eye its divine inspiration shall be,

They may talk as they will of their Edens above,

But this earth is the planet for you, love, and me.
In that star of the west, by whose shadowy splendour

At twilight so often we’ve roam’d thro’ the dew,

There are maidens, perhaps, who have bosoms as tender,

And look in their twilights as lovely as you.

But tho’ they were even more bright than the queen

Of that isle they inhabit in heaven’s blue sea,

As I never those fair young celestials have seen,

Why, this earth is the planet for you, love, and me.
As for those chilly orbs on the verge of creation,

Where sunshine and smiles must be equally rare,

Did they want a supply of cold hearts for that station,

Heav’n knows we have plenty on earth we could spare.

Oh! think what a world we should have of it here,

If the haters of peace, of affection, and glee,

Were to fly up to Saturn’s comfortless sphere,

And leave earth to such spirits as you, love, and me.

—
Come, Send Round the Wine

Come, send round the wine, and leave points of belief

To simpleton sages and reasoning fools;

This moment’s a flower too fair and brief

To be wither’d and stain’d by the dust of the schools.

Your glass may be purple, and mine may be blue,

But, while they are fill’d from the same bright bowl,

The fool who would quarrel for difference of hue,

Deserves not the comfort they shed o’er the soul.
Shall I ask the brave soldier, who fights by my side

In the cause of mankind, if our creeds agree?

Shall I give up the friend I have valued and tried,

If he kneel not before the same altar with me?

From the heretic girl of my soul should I fly?

To seek somewhere else a more orthodox kiss?

No, perish the hearts, and the laws that try

Truth, valour, or love, by a standard like this!

—

How Oft Has the Benshee Cried

How oft has the Benshee cried,

How oft has death untied

Bright links that Glory wove,

Sweet bonds entwined by Love.

Peace to each manly soul that sleepeth;

Rest to each faithful eye that weepeth;

Long may the fair and brave,

Sigh o’er the hero’s grave.
We’re fallen upon gloomy days!

Star after star decays.

Every bright name, that shed

Light o’er the land, is fled.

Dark falls the tear of him who mourneth

Lost joy, or hope that ne’er returneth:

But brightly flows the tear,

Wept o’er a hero’s bier.
Quench’d are our beacon lights —

Thou, of the Hundred Fights!

Thou, on whose burning tongue

Truth, peace, and freedom hung!

Both mute, — but long as valour shineth,

Or mercy’s soul at war repineth,

So long shall Erin’s pride

Tell how they lived and died

October 7, 2007

Pictures From An Exhibition….

(Picture From an Exhibition: Golden Dawn – G.Llwydd)

This is a bit late getting out… but here ya are. Lots, and I mean lots on this entry… so with out further blather… I present the menu!
On The Menu:

Pictures From An Exhibition…. “The Samsara Engine” The Gallery Opening!

Koan: Flower Shower

Waterboys – Everyone Takes A Tumble…

Koan: The Giver Should Be Thankful

Zen Mind: The Poetry of Bassui

_________________
(Picture From An Exhibition: Mantis 1-G. Llwydd)

The Official Opening of ‘The Samsara Engine’ Exhibition at the Clinton Corner Cafe …
We had some brave 50 souls or so show up for the opening at the Cafe on Saturday night…
It was quite a varied crowd, from 10 month olds (Mr. Eildon) up to the late 60′s, college kids, some of Rowan’s friends, other artist, family in all its mutations and friends! Lots of friends!
We were scheduled for 5-7 but it went on past 9:30… It was interesting getting feedback on what I had been working on for so long. Many Earthriters were there… Miss Cymon made an appearance, Lyterphotos’ and his lovely family and friend, Victor and the Divine Miss Kim (Victors’ better half), Leana & Richard, PK who is an Earthrites graduate… There were many friends of Turfing as well, which was gratifying. Morgan Miller popped in, Doran, Tim and Leland were there in the corner goofing, and our neighbors Fritz, Cindy and their daughter as well.
It seem that it was a wonderful time had by all!
Miss Cymon and PK talking… This was Cymon’s first outing since her surgery at the end of August! She braved it out until the end. It was very nice to see her up and about, we were very happy to see her. PK showed up earlier at our house before the show when I was running around like a mad man… Collecting bamboo for picture frames….

The lovely Miss Carlie, with our nephew Ethan (on the left) and his twin, Andrew. Yeah, I know. anyway… (they did once look like each other) Carlie just got back from living in Rome for the summer studying architecture, and living the good life in Italy… Ethan and Andrew were very attentive to the cheese tray, and excited about the whole event. Two of the most enthusiastic young men that I know!

Mary and Julie greeting each other… Julies’ wonderful Mike is on the left behind, and her ex John on the right… We have known Julie and John since we first moved to Portland 15 years ago. Julie does some brilliant scientific research, (along with Mike) and John does environmental restoration in the local parks. Wonderful minds, and very good friends.

Leana and yours truly nattering away. I was so pleased that Leana and her husband Richard came to the opening! They moved up here from Berkeley and have been settling in to the South West Portland area….

If you want to visit the exhibition with me as a guide… just let me know via email. I will be happy to show you around. All the prints will be available on-line soon for purchase if you are interested!
Thanks a big bunch,
Gwyllm
(Picture From an Exhibition: Homage to Aldous -G. Llwydd)

_______
Koan: Flower Shower
Subhuti was Buddha’s disciple. He was able to understand the potency of emptiness, the viewpoint that nothing exists except in its relationship of subjectivity and objectivity.
One day Subhuti, in a mood of sublime emptiness, was sitting under a tree. Flowers began to fall about him.
“We are praising you for your discourse on emptiness,” the gods whispered to him.
“But I have not spoken of emptiness,” said Subhuti.
“You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness,” responded the gods. “This is the true emptiness.” And blossoms showered upon Subhuti as rain.
______
Waterboys – Everyone Takes A Tumble…

=en_US&fs=1&”>

______
Koan: The Giver Should Be Thankful
While Seisetsu was the master of Engaku in Kamakura he required larger quarters, since those in which he was teaching were overcrowded. Umezu Seibei, a merchant of Edo, decided to donate five hundred pieces of gold called ryo toward the construction of a more commodious school. This money he brought to the teacher.
Seisetsu said: “All right. I will take it.”
Umezu gave Seisetsu the sack of gold, but he was dissatisfied with the attitude of the teacher. One might live a whole year on three ryo, and the merchant had not even been thanked for five hundred.
“In that sack are five hundred ryo,” hinted Umezu.
“You told me that before,” replied Seisetsu.
“Even if I am a wealthy merchant, five hundred ryo is a lot of money,” said Umezu.
“Do you want me to thank you for it?” asked Seisetsu.
“You ought to,” replied Uzemu.
Why should I?” inquired Seisetsu. “The giver should be thankful.”

________
Zen Mind: The Poetry of Bassui

What is this mind?

Who is hearing these sounds?

Do not mistake any state for Self-realization.

Continue to ask yourself:

What is it that hears?

—
Who is hearing?

Your physical being doesnt hear,

Nor does the void.

Then what does?

Strive to find out.

Put aside your rational Intellect,

Give up all techniques.

Just get rid of the notion of self.

—
Cast off what has been realized.

Turn back to the subject

That realizes

To the root bottom

And resolutely

Go on.

—
Just stop your wandering,

Look penetratingly

Into your inherent nature,

And, concentrating your Spiritual energy,

Sit in zazen

And break through.

—
Look directly!

What is this?

Look in this manner

And you wont be fooled!

—

October 6, 2007

In Memory Of Ernesto…

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

– Ernesto Che Guevara

40 years? Really? I am amazed at how the time flies. I was sitting with friends when the news came. I felt the breath go out of me when I heard. I was 16 years old, and the fall was coming on, while it was spring in Bolivia…
There had been much talk over the summer about the effort going on by Che and his band. Friends that I had who were part of what would later become the Venceremos Brigade were preparing to go to Cuba for the harvest. I had been invited to go earlier in the year with another volunteer group with other goals.
‘CIA’ everyone agreed they had hunted him down. Whether true or not, it was a fact that afternoon.
We all sat back, thinking our thoughts. We were silent for a very long time. It was not the best of days. Finally, I rolled a number, went out and watched the sun set over the Pacific sitting on the rocks overlooking the surf. The night descended in all its beauty, and the stars came out overhead.
Here is to you Ernesto, may your writings and your spirit survive.
Gwyllm
___________
Search Order

by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for

in my house?
What is this officer doing

reading the sheet of paper

on which I’ve written

the words “ambition,” “lightness,” and “brittle”?
What hint of conspiracy

speaks to him from the photo without a dedication

of my father in a guayabera (black tie)

in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him

when he reads the ten-line poems

and discovers the war wounds

of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen

are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,

and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks

and want to know where little Andrea sleeps

and what does her asthma have to do

with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu

in the upper part

of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile

of the comrade):

“Castles with music box. I won’t let the boy

hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie.”
A specialist in aporia came,

a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal

who examined at the point of a gun

the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen

in my house

with a search order,

a clean operation,

a full victory

for the vanguard of the proletariat

who confiscated my Consul typewriter,

one hundred forty-two blank pages

and a sad and personal heap of papers

the most perishable of the perishable

from this summer.

____________
Quotes from Ernesto….
We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.- Ernesto Che Guevara
Hasta la victoria siempè! (Until victory always — Struggle until victory forever!) – Ernesto Che Guevara
If you tremble indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine. – Ernesto Che Guevara
Words that do not match deeds are unimportant. – Ernesto Che Guevara
Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel! – Ernesto Che Guevara
I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man. – Ernesto Che Guevara (just before he was shot and murdered)

______________
=en_US&fs=1&”>

______________
The Dictators

by Pablo Neruda
An odor has remained among the sugarcane:

a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating

petal that brings nausea.

Between the coconut palms the graves are full

of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.

The delicate dictator is talking

with top hats, gold braid, and collars.

The tiny palace gleams like a watch

and the rapid laughs with gloves on

cross the corridors at times

and join the dead voices

and the blue mouths freshly buried.

The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant

whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,

whose large blind leaves grow even without light.

Hatred has grown scale on scale,

blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,

with a snout full of ooze and silence

October 5, 2007

Spotted Dick and all That!

Mary and I were at a local supermarket (Fred Meyers / Krogers) when we stumbled into the new British Import Section…. HP Sauce, Branston Pickle (bought some for Plowman’s Lunch!) Curry Sauces of various types, and yes ‘Spotted Dick’, Sponge Cake that is… Haven’t had it in some 20 years, but worth waiting another 20 years unless you get it fresh…
I am amazed actually how much markets have changed over the last 20 years, and the sheer variety of it all. Anyway, not to belabor the point and all that….
Heh.
On The Menu:

Yeats reads from Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

Two Songs Of A Fool

Rowan is 17/ His Favourite Yeats Poem

Oisin’s Mother

Two More Poems From William Butler Yeats…

____________
Yeats reads from Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

=en_US&fs=1&”>

____________
Two Songs Of A Fool
I
A SPECKLED cat and a tame hare

Eat at my hearthstone

And sleep there;

And both look up to me alone

For learning and defence

As I look up to Providence.
I start out of my sleep to think

Some day I may forget

Their food and drink;

Or, the house door left unshut,

The hare may run till it’s found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.
I bear a burden that might well try

Men that do all by rule,

And what can I

That am a wandering witted fool

But pray to God that He ease

My great responsibilities.
II
I slept on my three-legged stool by the fire,

The speckled cat slept on my knee;

We never thought to enquire

Where the brown hare might be,

And whether the door were shut.

Who knows how she drank the wind

Stretched up on two legs from the mat,

Before she had settled her mind

To drum with her heel and to leap:

Had I but awakened from sleep

And called her name she had heard,

It may be, and had not stirred,

That now, it may be, has found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

-William Butler Yeats…

____________
Rowan is now 17…

Rowan’s Favourite Yeats Poem:
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I WENT out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

_____________
Oisin’s Mother
CHAPTER I

Evening was drawing nigh, and the Fianna-Finn had decided to hunt no more that day. The hounds were whistled to heel, and a sober, homeward march began. For men will walk soberly in the evening, however they go in the day, and dogs will take the mood from their masters. They were pacing so, through the golden-shafted, tender-coloured eve, when a fawn leaped suddenly from covert, and, with that leap, all quietness vanished: the men shouted, the dogs gave tongue, and a furious chase commenced.
Fionn loved a chase at any hour, and, with Bran and Sceo’lan, he outstripped the men and dogs of his troop, until nothing remained in the limpid world but Fionn, the two hounds, and the nimble, beautiful fawn. These, and the occasional boulders, round which they raced, or over which they scrambled; the solitary tree which dozed aloof and beautiful in the path, the occasional clump of trees that hived sweet shadow as a hive hoards honey, and the rustling grass that stretched to infinity, and that moved and crept and swung under the breeze in endless, rhythmic billowings.
In his wildest moment Fionn was thoughtful, and now, although running hard, he was thoughtful. There was no movement of his beloved hounds that he did not know; not a twitch or fling of the head, not a cock of the ears or tail that was not significant to him. But on this chase whatever signs the dogs gave were not understood by their master.
He had never seen them in such eager flight. They were almost utterly absorbed in it, but they did not whine with eagerness, nor did they cast any glance towards him for the encouraging word which he never failed to give when they sought it.
They did look at him, but it was a look which he could not comprehend. There was a question and a statement in those deep eyes, and he could not understand what that question might be, nor what it was they sought to convey. Now and again one of the dogs turned a head in full flight, and stared, not at Fionn, but distantly backwards, over the spreading and swelling plain where their companions of the hunt had disappeared. “They are looking for the other hounds,” said Fionn.
“And yet they do not give tongue! Tongue it, a Vran!” he shouted, “Bell it out, a Heo’lan!”
It was then they looked at him, the look which he could not understand and had never seen on a chase. They did not tongue it, nor bell it, but they added silence to silence and speed to speed, until the lean grey bodies were one pucker and lashing of movement.
Fionn marvelled. “They do not want the other dogs to hear or to come on this chase,” he murmured, and he wondered what might be passing within those slender heads.
“The fawn runs well,” his thought continued. “What is it, a Vran, my heart? After her, a Heo’lan! Hist and away, my loves!”
“There is going and to spare in that beast yet,” his mind went on. “She is not stretched to the full, nor half stretched. She may outrun even Bran,” he thought ragingly.
They were racing through a smooth valley in a steady, beautiful, speedy flight when, suddenly, the fawn stopped and lay on the grass, and it lay with the calm of an animal that has no fear, and the leisure of one that is not pressed.
“Here is a change,” said Fionn, staring in astonishment.
“She is not winded,” he said. “What is she lying down for?” But Bran and Sceo’lan did not stop; they added another inch to their long-stretched easy bodies, and came up on the fawn.
“It is an easy kill,” said Fionn regretfully. “They have her,” he cried.
But he was again astonished, for the dogs did not kill. They leaped and played about the fawn, licking its face, and rubbing delighted noses against its neck.
Fionn came up then. His long spear was lowered in his fist at the thrust, and his sharp knife was in its sheath, but he did not use them, for the fawn and the two hounds began to play round him, and the fawn was as affectionate towards him as the hounds were; so that when a velvet nose was thrust in his palm, it was as often a fawn’s muzzle as a hound’s.
In that joyous company he came to wide Allen of Leinster, where the people were surprised to see the hounds and the fawn and the Chief and none other of the hunters that had set out with them.
When the others reached home, the Chief told of his chase, and it was agreed that such a fawn must not be killed, but that it should be kept and well treated, and that it should be the pet fawn of the Fianna. But some of those who remembered Bran’s parentage thought that as Bran herself had come from the Shi so this fawn might have come out of the Shi also.

CHAPTER II

Late that night, when he was preparing for rest, the door of Fionn’s chamber opened gently and a young woman came into the room. The captain stared at her, as he well might, for he had never seen or imagined to see a woman so beautiful as this was. Indeed, she was not a woman, but a young girl, and her bearing was so gently noble, her look so modestly high, that the champion dared scarcely look at her, although he could not by any means have looked away.
As she stood within the doorway, smiling, and shy as a flower, beautifully timid as a fawn, the Chief communed with his heart.
“She is the Sky-woman of the Dawn,” he said. “She is the light on the foam. She is white and odorous as an apple-blossom. She smells of spice and honey. She is my beloved beyond the women of the world. She shall never be taken from me.”
And that thought was delight and anguish to him: delight because of such sweet prospect, anguish because it was not yet realised, and might not be.
As the dogs had looked at him on the chase with a look that he did not understand, so she looked at him, and in her regard there was a question that baffled him and a statement which he could not follow.
He spoke to her then, mastering his heart to do it.
“I do not seem to know you,” he said.
“You do not know me indeed,” she replied.
“It is the more wonderful,” he continued gently, “for I should know every person that is here. What do you require from me?”
“I beg your protection, royal captain.”
“I give that to all,” he answered. “Against whom do you desire protection?”
“I am in terror of the Fear Doirche.”
“The Dark Man of the Shi?”
“He is my enemy,” she said.
“He is mine now,” said Fionn. “Tell me your story.”
“My name is Saeve, and I am a woman of Faery,” she commenced. “In the Shi’ many men gave me their love, but I gave my love to no man of my country.”
“That was not reasonable,” the other chided with a blithe heart.
“I was contented,” she replied, “and what we do not want we do not lack. But if my love went anywhere it went to a mortal, a man of the men of Ireland.”
“By my hand,” said Fionn in mortal distress, “I marvel who that man can be!”
“He is known to you,” she murmured. “I lived thus in the peace of Faery, hearing often of my mortal champion, for the rumour of his great deeds had gone through the Shi’, until a day came when the Black Magician of the Men of God put his eye on me, and, after that day, in whatever direction I looked I saw his eye.”
She stopped at that, and the terror that was in her heart was on her face. “He is everywhere,” she whispered. “He is in the bushes, and on the hill. He looked up at me from the water, and he stared down on me from the sky. His voice commands out of the spaces, and it demands secretly in the heart. He is not here or there, he is in all places at all times. I cannot escape from him,” she said, “and I am afraid,” and at that she wept noiselessly and stared on Fionn.
“He is my enemy,” Fionn growled. “I name him as my enemy.”
“You will protect me,” she implored.
“Where I am let him not come,” said Fionn. “I also have knowledge. I am Fionn, the son of Uail, the son of Baiscne, a man among men and a god where the gods are.”
“He asked me in marriage,” she continued, “but my mind was full of my own dear hero, and I refused the Dark Man.”
“That was your right, and I swear by my hand that if the man you desire is alive and unmarried he shall marry you or he will answer to me for the refusal.”
“He is not married,” said Saeve, “and you have small control over him.” The Chief frowned thoughtfully. “Except the High King and the kings I have authority in this land.”
“What man has authority over himself?” said Saeve.
“Do you mean that I am the man you seek?” said Fionn.
“It is to yourself I gave my love,” she replied. “This is good news,” Fionn cried joyfully, “for the moment you came through the door I loved and desired you, and the thought that you wished for another man went into my heart like a sword.” Indeed, Fionn loved Saeve as he had not loved a woman before and would never love one again. He loved her as he had never loved anything before. He could not bear to be away from her. When he saw her he did not see the world, and when he saw the world without her it was as though he saw nothing, or as if he looked on a prospect that was bleak and depressing. The belling of a stag had been music to Fionn, but when Saeve spoke that was sound enough for him. He had loved to hear the cuckoo calling in the spring from the tree that is highest in the hedge, or the blackbird’s jolly whistle in an autumn bush, or the thin, sweet enchantment that comes to the mind when a lark thrills out of sight in the air and the hushed fields listen to the song. But his wife’s voice was sweeter to Fionn than the singing of a lark. She filled him with wonder and surmise. There was magic in the tips of her fingers. Her thin palm ravished him. Her slender foot set his heart beating; and whatever way her head moved there came a new shape of beauty to her face.
“She is always new,” said Fionn. “She is always better than any other woman; she is always better than herself.”
He attended no more to the Fianna. He ceased to hunt. He did not listen to the songs of poets or the curious sayings of magicians, for all of these were in his wife, and something that was beyond these was in her also.
“She is this world and the next one; she is completion,” said Fionn.

CHAPTER III

It happened that the men of Lochlann came on an expedition against Ireland. A monstrous fleet rounded the bluffs of Ben Edair, and the Danes landed there, to prepare an attack which would render them masters of the country. Fionn and the Fianna-Finn marched against them. He did not like the men of Lochlann at any time, but this time he moved against them in wrath, for not only were they attacking Ireland, but they had come between him and the deepest joy his life had known.
It was a hard fight, but a short one. The Lochlannachs were driven back to their ships, and within a week the only Danes remaining in Ireland were those that had been buried there.
That finished, he left the victorious Fianna and returned swiftly to the plain of Allen, for he could not bear to be one unnecessary day parted from Saeve.
“You are not leaving us!” exclaimed Goll mac Morna.
“I must go,” Fionn replied.
“You will not desert the victory feast,” Conan reproached him.
“Stay with us, Chief,” Caelte begged.
“What is a feast without Fionn?” they complained.
But he would not stay.
“By my hand,” he cried, “I must go. She will be looking for me from the window.”
“That will happen indeed,” Goll admitted.
“That will happen,” cried Fionn. “And when she sees me far out on the plain, she will run through the great gate to meet me.”
“It would be the queer wife would neglect that run,” Cona’n growled.
“I shall hold her hand again,” Fionn entrusted to Caelte’s ear.
“You will do that, surely.”
“I shall look into her face,” his lord insisted. But he saw that not even beloved Caelte understood the meaning of that, and he knew sadly and yet proudly that what he meant could not be explained by any one and could not be comprehended by any one.
“You are in love, dear heart,” said Caelte.
“In love he is,” Cona’n grumbled. “A cordial for women, a disease for men, a state of wretchedness.”
“Wretched in truth,” the Chief murmured. “Love makes us poor We have not eyes enough to see all that is to be seen, nor hands enough to seize the tenth of all we want. When I look in her eyes I am tormented because I am not looking at her lips, and when I see her lips my soul cries out, ‘Look at her eyes, look at her eyes.’”
“That is how it happens,” said Goll rememberingly.
“That way and no other,” Caelte agreed.
And the champions looked backwards in time on these lips and those, and knew their Chief would go.
When Fionn came in sight of the great keep his blood and his feet quickened, and now and again he waved a spear in the air.
“She does not see me yet,” he thought mournfully.
“She cannot see me yet,” he amended, reproaching himself.
But his mind was troubled, for he thought also, or he felt without thinking, that had the positions been changed he would have seen her at twice the distance.
“She thinks I have been unable to get away from the battle, or that I was forced to remain for the feast.”
And, without thinking it, he thought that had the positions been changed he would have known that nothing could retain the one that was absent.
“Women,” he said, “are shamefaced, they do not like to appear eager when others are observing them.”
But he knew that he would not have known if others were observing him, and that he would not have cared about it if he had known. And he knew that his Saeve would not have seen, and would not have cared for any eyes than his.
He gripped his spear on that reflection, and ran as he had not run in his life, so that it was a panting, disheveled man that raced heavily through the gates of the great Dun.
Within the Dun there was disorder. Servants were shouting to one another, and women were running to and fro aimlessly, wringing their hands and screaming; and, when they saw the Champion, those nearest to him ran away, and there was a general effort on the part of every person to get behind every other person. But Fionn caught the eye of his butler, Gariv Crona’n, the Rough Buzzer, and held it.
“Come you here,” he said.
And the Rough Buzzer came to him without a single buzz in his body.
“Where is the Flower of Allen?” his master demanded.
“I do not know, master,” the terrified servant replied.
“You do not know!” said Fionn. “Tell what you do know.”
And the man told him this story.

CHAPTER IV

“When you had been away for a day the guards were surprised. They were looking from the heights of the Dun, and the Flower of Allen was with them. She, for she had a quest’s eye, called out that the master of the Fianna was coming over the ridges to the Dun, and she ran from the keep to meet you.”
“It was not I,” said Fionn.
“It bore your shape,” replied Gariv Cronan. “It had your armour and your face, and the dogs, Bran and Sceo’lan, were with it.”
“They were with me,” said Fionn.
“They seemed to be with it,” said the servant humbly
“Tell us this tale,” cried Fionn.
“We were distrustful,” the servant continued. “We had never known Fionn to return from a combat before it had been fought, and we knew you could not have reached Ben Edar or encountered the Lochlannachs. So we urged our lady to let us go out to meet you, but to remain herself in the Dun.”
“It was good urging,” Fionn assented.
“She would not be advised,” the servant wailed. “She cried to us, ‘Let me go to meet my love’.”
“Alas!” said Fionn.
“She cried on us, ‘Let me go to meet my husband, the father of the child that is not born.’”
“Alas!” groaned deep-wounded Fionn. “She ran towards your appearance that had your arms stretched out to her.”
At that wise Fionn put his hand before his eyes, seeing all that happened.
“Tell on your tale,” said he.
“She ran to those arms, and when she reached them the figure lifted its hand. It touched her with a hazel rod, and, while we looked, she disappeared, and where she had been there was a fawn standing and shivering. The fawn turned and bounded towards the gate of the Dun, but the hounds that were by flew after her.”
Fionn stared on him like a lost man.
“They took her by the throat–”the shivering servant whispered.
“Ah!” cried Fionn in a terrible voice.
“And they dragged her back to the figure that seemed to be Fionn. Three times she broke away and came bounding to us, and three times the dogs took her by the throat and dragged her back.”
“You stood to look!” the Chief snarled.
“No, master, we ran, but she vanished as we got to her; the great hounds vanished away, and that being that seemed to be Fionn disappeared with them. We were left in the rough grass, staring about us and at each other, and listening to the moan of the wind and the terror of our hearts.”
“Forgive us, dear master,” the servant cried. But the great captain made him no answer. He stood as though he were dumb and blind, and now and again he beat terribly on his breast with his closed fist, as though he would kill that within him which should be dead and could not die. He went so, beating on his breast, to his inner room in the Dun, and he was not seen again for the rest of that day, nor until the sun rose over Moy Life’ in the morning.

CHAPTER V

For many years after that time, when he was not fighting against the enemies of Ireland, Fionn was searching and hunting through the length and breadth of the country in the hope that he might again chance on his lovely lady from the Shi’. Through all that time he slept in misery each night and he rose each day to grief. Whenever he hunted he brought only the hounds that he trusted, Bran and Sceo’lan, Lomaire, Brod, and Lomlu; for if a fawn was chased each of these five great dogs would know if that was a fawn to be killed or one to be protected, and so there was small danger to Saeve and a small hope of finding her.
Once, when seven years had passed in fruitless search, Fionn and the chief nobles of the Fianna were hunting Ben Gulbain. All the hounds of the Fianna were out, for Fionn had now given up hope of encountering the Flower of Allen. As the hunt swept along the sides of the hill there arose a great outcry of hounds from a narrow place high on the slope and, over all that uproar there came the savage baying of Fionn’s own dogs.
“What is this for?” said Fionn, and with his companions he pressed to the spot whence the noise came.
“They are fighting all the hounds of the Fianna,” cried a champion.
And they were. The five wise hounds were in a circle and were giving battle to an hundred dogs at once. They were bristling and terrible, and each bite from those great, keen jaws was woe to the beast that received it. Nor did they fight in silence as was their custom and training, but between each onslaught the great heads were uplifted, and they pealed loudly, mournfully, urgently, for their master.
“They are calling on me,” he roared.
And with that he ran, as he had only once before run, and the men who were nigh to him went racing as they would not have run for their lives. They came to the narrow place on the slope of the mountain, and they saw the five great hounds in a circle keeping off the other dogs, and in the middle of the ring a little boy was standing. He had long, beautiful hair, and he was naked. He was not daunted by the terrible combat and clamour of the hounds. He did not look at the hounds, but he stared like a young prince at Fionn and the champions as they rushed towards him scattering the pack with the butts of their spears. When the fight was over, Bran and Sceo’lan ran whining to the little boy and licked his hands.
“They do that to no one,” said a bystander. “What new master is this they have found?”
Fionn bent to the boy. “Tell me, my little prince and pulse, what your name is, and how you have come into the middle of a hunting-pack, and why you are naked?”
But the boy did not understand the language of the men of Ireland. He put bis hand into Fionn’s, and the Chief felt as if that little hand had been put into his heart. He lifted the lad to his great shoulder.
“We have caught something on this hunt,” said he to Caelte mac Rongn. “We must bring this treasure home. You shall be one of the Fianna-Finn, my darling,” he called upwards.
The boy looked down on him, and in the noble trust and fearlessness of that regard Fionn’s heart melted away.
“My little fawn!” he said.
And he remembered that other fawn. He set the boy between his knees and stared at him earnestly and long.
“There is surely the same look,” he said to his wakening heart; “that is the very eye of Saeve.”
The grief flooded out of his heart as at a stroke, and joy foamed into it in one great tide. He marched back singing to the encampment, and men saw once more the merry Chief they had almost forgotten.

CHAPTER VI

Just as at one time he could not be parted from Saeve, so now he could not be separated from this boy. He had a thousand names for him, each one more tender than the last: “My Fawn, My Pulse, My Secret Little Treasure,” or he would call him “My Music, My Blossoming Branch, My Store in the Heart, My Soul.” And the dogs were as wild for the boy as Fionn was. He could sit in safety among a pack that would have torn any man to pieces, and the reason was that Bran and Sceo’lan, with their three whelps, followed him about like shadows. When he was with the pack these five were with him, and woeful indeed was the eye they turned on their comrades when these pushed too closely or were not properly humble. They thrashed the pack severally and collectively until every hound in Fionn’s kennels knew that the little lad was their master, and that there was nothing in the world so sacred as he was.
In no long time the five wise hounds could have given over their guardianship, so complete was the recognition of their young lord. But they did not so give over, for it was not love they gave the lad but adoration.
Fionn even may have been embarrassed by their too close attendance. If he had been able to do so he might have spoken harshly to his dogs, but he could not; it was unthinkable that he should; and the boy might have spoken harshly to him if he had dared to do it. For this was the order of Fionn’s affection: first there was the boy; next, Bran and Sceo’lan with their three whelps; then Caelte mac Rona’n, and from him down through the champions. He loved them all, but it was along that precedence his affections ran. The thorn that went into Bran’s foot ran into Fionn’s also. The world knew it, and there was not a champion but admitted sorrowfully that there was reason for his love.
Little by little the boy came to understand their speech and to speak it himself, and at last he was able to tell his story to Fionn.
There were many blanks in the tale, for a young child does not remember very well. Deeds grow old in a day and are buried in a night. New memories come crowding on old ones, and one must learn to forget as well as to remember. A whole new life had come on this boy, a life that was instant and memorable, so that his present memories blended into and obscured the past, and he could not be quite sure if that which he told of had happened in this world or in the world he had left.

CHAPTER VII

“I used to live,” he said, “in a wide, beautiful place. There were hills and valleys there, and woods and streams, but in whatever direction I went I came always to a cliff, so tall it seemed to lean against the sky, and so straight that even a goat would not have imagined to climb it.”
“I do not know of any such place,” Fionn mused.
“There is no such place in Ireland,” said Caelte, “but in the Shi’ there is such a place.”
“There is in truth,” said Fionn.
“I used to eat fruits and roots in the summer,” the boy continued, “but in the winter food was left for me in a cave.”
“Was there no one with you?” Fionn asked.
“No one but a deer that loved me, and that I loved.”
“Ah me!” cried Fionn in anguish, “tell me your tale, my son.”
“A dark stern man came often after us, and he used to speak with the deer. Sometimes he talked gently and softly and coaxingly, but at times again he would shout loudly and in a harsh, angry voice. But whatever way he talked the deer would draw away from him in dread, and he always left her at last furiously.”
“It is the Dark Magician of the Men of God,” cried Fionn despairingly.
“It is indeed, my soul,” said Caelte.
“The last time I saw the deer,” the child continued, “the dark man was speaking to her. He spoke for a long time. He spoke gently and angrily, and gently and angrily, so that I thought he would never stop talking, but in the end he struck her with a hazel rod, so that she was forced to follow him when he went away. She was looking back at me all the time and she was crying so bitterly that any one would pity her. I tried to follow her also, but I could not move, and I cried after her too, with rage and grief, until I could see her no more and hear her no more. Then I fell on the grass, my senses went away from me, and when I awoke I was on the hill in the middle of the hounds where you found me.”
That was the boy whom the Fianna called Oisi’n, or the Little Fawn. He grew to be a great fighter afterwards, and he was the chief maker of poems in the world. But he was not yet finished with the Shi. He was to go back into Faery when the time came, and to come thence again to tell these tales, for it was by him these tales were told.

___________

Two More Poems From William Butler Yeats…

THE CAP AND BELLS
THE jester walked in the garden:

The garden had fallen still;

He bade his soul rise upward

And stand on her window-sill.
It rose in a straight blue garment,

When owls began to call:

It had grown wise-tongued by thinking

Of a quiet and light footfall;
But the young queen would not listen;

She rose in her pale night gown;

She drew in the heavy casement

And pushed the latches down.
He bade his heart go to her,

When the owls called out no more;

In a red and quivering garment

It sang to her through the door.
It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming,

Of a flutter of flower-like hair;

But she took up her fan from the table

And waved it off on the air.
“I have cap and bells,” he pondered,

“I will send them to her and die”;

And when the morning whitened

He left them where she went by.
She laid them upon her bosom,

Under a cloud of her hair,

And her red lips sang them a love-song:

Till stars grew out of the air.
She opened her door and her window,

And the heart and the soul came through,

To her right hand came the red one,

To her left hand came the blue.
They set up a noise like crickets,

A chattering wise and sweet,

And her hair was a folded flower

And the quiet of love in her feet.

—
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.” p. 35
“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.”