Phriday Phrolics!

People say, “Don’t you think you ought to be able to do it by yourself?” And I love this question because the answer is: You can’t do it by yourself. That’s the entire message of the last 10,000 years of human history. The self is insufficient. The ego will not suffice…you must humble yourself to the point where you admit that you can’t do it unless you have help from someone whose idea of home is a cow flop.—Terence McKenna

Dear Friends,
I attended a talk at the local Hermetic Society last night, given by friend Lyterphotos. It was excellent fun, and informative (of the Entheogenic Sort). A nice welcoming crowd, and I have to say I really enjoyed myself!
Not much to add on the personal note at this point, except I am off to do some work, and to enjoy the cooler temperatures!
More on the way!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Charlie Chaplin speech from “The Great Dictator” remix

The Links

The Fairy Race

Poet: Lorca…

Maura O’Connell – The Blessing (Live)

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Charlie Chaplin speech from “The Great Dictator” remix

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The Links:
Seattle police seize marijuana patient files

Missing 2 and 4….

This Sand…

Photo Essay: From The Beginnings Of The Spanish Civil War

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The Fairy Race – by Lady Francesca Speranza Wilde

THE Sidhe, or spirit race, called also the Feadh-Ree, or fairies, are supposed to have been once angels in heaven, who were cast out by Divine command as a punishment for their inordinate pride.
Some fell to earth, and dwelt there, long before man was created, as the first gods of the earth. Others fell into the sea, and they built themselves beautiful fairy palaces of crystal and pearl underneath the waves; but on moonlight nights they often come up on the land, riding their white horses, and they hold revels with their fairy kindred of the earth, who live in the clefts of the hills, and they dance together on the greensward under the ancient trees, and drink nectar from the cups of the flowers, which is the fairy wine.
Other fairies, however, are demoniacal, and given to evil and malicious deeds; for when cast out of heaven they fell into hell, and there the devil holds them under his rule, and sends them forth as he wills upon missions of evil to tempt the souls of men downward by the false glitter of sin and pleasure. These spirits dwell under the earth and impart their knowledge only to certain evil persons chosen of the devil, who gives them power to make incantations, and brew love potions, and to work wicked spells, and they can assume different forms by their knowledge and use of certain magical herbs.
The witch women who have been taught by them, and have thus become tools of the Evil One, are the terror of the neighbourhood; for they have all the power of the fairies and all the malice of the devil, who reveals to them secrets of times and days, and secrets of herbs, and secrets of evil spells; and by the power of magic they can effect all their purposes, whether for good or ill.
The fairies of the earth are small and beautiful. They passionately love music and dancing, and live luxuriously in their palaces under the hills and in the deep mountain caves; and they can obtain all things lovely for their fairy homes, merely by the strength of their magic power. They can also assume all forms, and will never know death until the last day comes, when their doom is to vanish away–to be annihilated for ever. But they are very jealous of the human race who are so tall and strong, and to whom has been promised immortality. And they are often tempted by the beauty of a mortal woman and greatly desire to have her as a wife.
The children of such marriages have a strange mystic nature, and generally become famous in music and song. But they are passionate, revengeful, and not easy to live with. Every one knows them to be of the Sidhe or spirit race, by their beautiful eyes and their bold, reckless temperament.
The fairy king and princes dress in green, with red caps bound on the head with a golden fillet. The fairy queen and the great court lathes are robed in glittering silver gauze, spangled with diamonds, and their long golden hair sweeps the ground as they dance on the greensward.
Their favourite camp and resting-place is under a hawthorn tree, and a peasant would die sooner than cut down one of the ancient hawthorns sacred to the fairies, and which generally stands in the centre of a fairy ring. But the people never offer worship to these fairy beings, for they look on the Sidhe as a race quite inferior to man. At the same the they have an immense dread and fear of the mystic fairy power, and never interfere with them nor offend them knowingly.
The Sidhe often strive to carry off the handsome children, who are then reared in the beautiful fairy palaces under the earth, and wedded to fairy mates when they grow up.
The people dread the idea of a fairy changeling being left in the cradle in place of their own lovely child; and if a wizened little thing is found there, it is sometimes taken out at night and laid in an open grave till morning, when they hope to find their own child restored, although more often nothing is found save the cold corpse of the poor outcast.
Sometimes it is said the fairies carry off the mortal child for a sacrifice, as they have to offer one every seven years to the devil in return for the power he gives them. And beautiful young girls are carried off, also, either for sacrifice or to be wedded to the fairy king.
The fairies are pure and cleanly in their habits, and they like above all things a pail of water to be set for them at night, in case they may wish to bathe.
They also delight in good wines, and are careful to repay the donor in blessings, for they are truly upright and honest. The great lords of Ireland, in ancient times, used to leave a keg of the finest Spanish wine frequently at night out on the window-sill for the fairies, and in the morning it was all gone.
Fire is a great preventative against fairy magic, for fire is the most sacred of all created things, and man alone has power over it. No animal has ever yet attained the knowledge of how to draw out the spirit of fire from the stone or the wood, where it has found a dwelling-place. If a ring of fire is made round cattle or a child’s cradle, or if fire is placed under the churn, the fairies have no power to harm. And the spirit of the fire is certain to destroy all fairy magic, if it exist.

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Poet: Lorca…

The Faithless Wife

So I took her to the river

believing she was a maiden,

but she already had a husband.

It was on St. James night

and almost as if I was obliged to.

The lanterns went out

and the crickets lighted up.

In the farthest street corners

I touched her sleeping breasts

and they opened to me suddenly

like spikes of hyacinth.

The starch of her petticoat

sounded in my ears

like a piece of silk

rent by ten knives.

Without silver light on their foliage

the trees had grown larger

and a horizon of dogs

barked very far from the river.
Past the blackberries,

the reeds and the hawthorne

underneath her cluster of hair

I made a hollow in the earth

I took off my tie,

she too off her dress.

I, my belt with the revolver,

She, her four bodices.

Nor nard nor mother-o’-pearl

have skin so fine,

nor does glass with silver

shine with such brilliance.

Her thighs slipped away from me

like startled fish,

half full of fire,

half full of cold.

That night I ran

on the best of roads

mounted on a nacre mare

without bridle stirrups.
As a man, I won’t repeat

the things she said to me.

The light of understanding

has made me more discreet.

Smeared with sand and kisses

I took her away from the river.

The swords of the lilies

battled with the air.
I behaved like what I am,

like a proper gypsy.

I gave her a large sewing basket,

of straw-colored satin,

but I did not fall in love

for although she had a husband

she told me she was a maiden

when I took her to the river.


Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

1. Cogida and death
At five in the afternoon.

It was exactly five in the afternoon.

A boy brought the white sheet

at five in the afternoon.

A frail of lime ready prepared

at five in the afternoon.

The rest was death, and death alone.
The wind carried away the cottonwool

at five in the afternoon.

And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel

at five in the afternoon.

Now the dove and the leopard wrestle

at five in the afternoon.

And a thigh with a desolated horn

at five in the afternoon.

The bass-string struck up

at five in the afternoon.

Arsenic bells and smoke

at five in the afternoon.

Groups of silence in the corners

at five in the afternoon.

And the bull alone with a high heart!

At five in the afternoon.

When the sweat of snow was coming

at five in the afternoon,

when the bull ring was covered with iodine

at five in the afternoon.

Death laid eggs in the wound

at five in the afternoon.

At five in the afternoon.

At five o’clock in the afternoon.
A coffin on wheels is his bed

at five in the afternoon.

Bones and flutes resound in his ears

at five in the afternoon.

Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead

at five in the afternoon.

The room was iridiscent with agony

at five in the afternoon.

In the distance the gangrene now comes

at five in the afternoon.

Horn of the lily through green groins

at five in the afternoon.

The wounds were burning like suns

at five in the afternoon.

At five in the afternoon.

Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!

It was five by all the clocks!

It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
2. The Spilled Blood
I will not see it!
Tell the moon to come,

for I do not want to see the blood

of Ignacio on the sand.
I will not see it!
The moon wide open.

Horse of still clouds,

and the grey bull ring of dreams

with willows in the barreras.
I will not see it!
Let my memory kindle!

Warm the jasmines

of such minute whiteness!
I will not see it!
The cow of the ancient world

passed har sad tongue

over a snout of blood

spilled on the sand,

and the bulls of Guisando,

partly death and partly stone,

bellowed like two centuries

sated with threading the earth.

No.

I will not see it!
Ignacio goes up the tiers

with all his death on his shoulders.

He sought for the dawn

but the dawn was no more.

He seeks for his confident profile

and the dream bewilders him

He sought for his beautiful body

and encountered his opened blood

Do not ask me to see it!

I do not want to hear it spurt

each time with less strength:

that spurt that illuminates

the tiers of seats, and spills

over the cordury and the leather

of a thirsty multiude.

Who shouts that I should come near!

Do not ask me to see it!
His eyes did not close

when he saw the horns near,

but the terrible mothers

lifted their heads.

And across the ranches,

an air of secret voices rose,

shouting to celestial bulls,

herdsmen of pale mist.

There was no prince in Sevilla

who could compare to him,

nor sword like his sword

nor heart so true.

Like a river of lions

was his marvellous strength,

and like a marble toroso

his firm drawn moderation.

The air of Andalusian Rome

gilded his head

where his smile was a spikenard

of wit and intelligence.

What a great torero in the ring!

What a good peasant in the sierra!

How gentle with the sheaves!

How hard with the spurs!

How tender with the dew!

How dazzling the fiesta!

How tremendous with the final

banderillas of darkness!
But now he sleeps without end.

Now the moss and the grass

open with sure fingers

the flower of his skull.

And now his blood comes out singing;

singing along marshes and meadows,

sliden on frozen horns,

faltering soulles in the mist

stoumbling over a thousand hoofs

like a long, dark, sad tongue,

to form a pool of agony

close to the starry Guadalquivir.

Oh, white wall of Spain!

Oh, black bull of sorrow!

Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!

Oh, nightingale of his veins!

No.

I will not see it!

No chalice can contain it,

no swallows can drink it,

no frost of light can cool it,

nor song nor deluge og white lilies,

no glass can cover mit with silver.

No.

I will not see it!
3. The Laid Out Body
Stone is a forehead where dreames grieve

without curving waters and frozen cypresses.

Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time

with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets.
I have seen grey showers move towards the waves

raising their tender riddle arms,

to avoid being caught by lying stone

which loosens their limbs without soaking their blood.
For stone gathers seed and clouds,

skeleton larks and wolves of penumbra:

but yields not sounds nor crystals nor fire,

only bull rings and bull rings and more bull rings without walls.
Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone.

All is finished. What is happening! Contemplate his face:

death has covered him with pale sulphur

and has place on him the head of dark minotaur.
All is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth.

The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest,

and Love, soaked through with tears of snow,

warms itself on the peak of the herd.
What is they saying? A stenching silence settles down.

We are here with a body laid out which fades away,

with a pure shape which had nightingales

and we see it being filled with depthless holes.
Who creases the shroud? What he says is not true!

Nobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner,

nobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent.

Here I want nothing else but the round eyes

to see his body without a chance of rest.
Here I want to see those men of hard voice.

Those that break horses and dominate rivers;

those men of sonorous skeleton who sing

with a mouth full of sun and flint.
Here I want to see them. Before the stone.

Before this body with broken reins.

I want to know from them the way out

for this captain stripped down by death.
I want them to show me a lament like a river

wich will have sweet mists and deep shores,

to take the body of Ignacio where it looses itself

without hearing the double planting of the bulls.
Loses itself in the round bull ring of the moon

which feigns in its youth a sad quiet bull,

loses itself in the night without song of fishes

and in the white thicket of frozen smoke.
I don’t want to cover his face with handkerchiefs

that he may get used to the death he carries.

Go, Ignacio, feel not the hot bellowing

Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies!
4. Absent Soul
The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,

nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.

The child and the afternoon do not know you

because you have dead forever.
The shoulder of the stone does not know you

nor the black silk, where you are shuttered.

Your silent memory does not know you

because you have died forever
The autumn will come with small white snails,

misty grapes and clustered hills,

but no one will look into your eyes

because you have died forever.
Because you have died for ever,

like all the dead of the earth,

like all the dead who are forgotten

in a heap of lifeless dogs.
Nobady knows you. No. But I sing of you.

For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.

Of the signal maturity of your understanding.

Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.

Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.
It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born

an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure.

I sing of his elegance with words that groan,

and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.

—-
City That Does Not Sleep

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.

The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,

and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the

street corner

the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the

stars.
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

In a graveyard far off there is a corpse

who has moaned for three years

because of a dry countryside on his knee;

and that boy they buried this morning cried so much

it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!

We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth

or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead

dahlias.

But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;

flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths

in a thicket of new veins,

and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever

and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.
One day

the horses will live in the saloons

and the enraged ants

will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the

eyes of cows.
Another day

we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead

and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats

we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.

Careful! Be careful! Be careful!

The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,

and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention

of the bridge,

or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,

we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes

are waiting,

where the bear’s teeth are waiting,

where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,

and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.
Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is sleeping.

If someone does close his eyes,

a whip, boys, a whip!

Let there be a landscape of open eyes

and bitter wounds on fire.

No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.

I have said it before.
No one is sleeping.

But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the

night,

open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight

the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

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Maura O’Connell – The Blessing (Live)

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