The Archon’s Of Sleep…


The Archon’s Of Sleep: Okay, now I looked that one up, and I OWN it. None of this Time Lord stuff, we’re dealing here with the real enchilada. These are the beings that keep the human race enthralled, whilst they such up the dreams and longings for another version of this world. They suck the universe down, one vision at a time. These beings have been around forever, from what I understand, and are behind every machination… 80)
Talking Monday & Tuesday:Radio Free Earthrites is back up, and you can access it at this addy: http://78.105.9.201:8000/ As I am listening right now, I can tell you that Bombay Dub Orchestra is rattling along. Nice Stuff.
“The Chamber”


The Chamber is another piece that will be at my showing with the SE Portland Art Walk located at The Mirador Community Store On February 28th & March 1st…
We have Zen Tales, Sufi Poetry, Music on The Day Of Wrath and Quotes of course to ease you into the early part of this week. We have had snow today, and the coldest 2 months in many a year here in P-Town.
Hope this finds you well! Keep Warm!
Gwyllm

______________________
On the Menu:

The Quotes

Verdi: Requiem, Dies irae

Three Zen Tales

Poetry Of The Sufi Schools

Mozart – Dies Irae

________________________
The Quotes:
Richard P. Adler | “All television is children’s television.”

John Adams | “In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.”

John Ciardi | “A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.”

John Kenneth Galbraith | “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”

Larry Hardiman | “The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’, meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’, meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.”

Dr. Seuss | “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”

Samuel Johnson | “Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.”

________________________
Verdi: Requiem, Dies irae

_________________________
Three Zen Tales:

A Buddha
In Tokyo in the Meiji era there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics. One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon, kept Buddha’s precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants, nor did he eat after eleven o’clock in the morning. The other teacher, Tanzan, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University, never observed the precepts. When he felt like eating, he ate, and when he felt like sleeping in the daytime, he slept.
One day Unsho visited Tanzan, who was drinking wine at the time, not even a drop of which is supposed to touch the tongue of a Buddhist.
“Hello, brother,” Tanzan greeted him. “Won’t you have a drink?”
“I never drink!” exclaimed Unsho solemnly.
“One who does not drink is not even human,” said Tanzan.
“Do you mean to call me inhuman just because I do not indulge in intoxicating liquids!” exclaimed Unsho in anger. “Then if I am not human, what am I?”
“A Buddha,” answered Tanzan.

_

_
Not Far From Buddhahood
A university student while visiting Gasan asked him: “Have you even read the Christian Bible?”
“No, read it to me,” said Gasan.
The student opened the Bible and read from St. Matthew: “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these…Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”
Gasan said: “Whoever uttered those words I consider and enlightened man.”
The student continued reading: “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, is shall be opened.”
Gasan remarked: “That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.”

_

_
Mokusen’s Hand
Mokusen Hiki was living in a temple in the province of Tamba. One of his adherents complained of the stinginess of his wife.
Mokusen visited the adherent’s wife and showed her his clenched fist before her face.
“What do you mean by that?” asked the surprised woman.
“Suppose my fist were always like that. What would you call it?” he asked.
“Deformed,” replied the woman.
The he opened his hand flat in her face and asked: “Suppose it were always like that. What then?”
“Another kind of deformity,” said the wife.
“If you understand that much,” finished Mokusen, “you are a good wife.” Then he left.
After his visit, this wife helped her husband to distribute as well as to save.

_________________________
Poetry Of The Sufi Schools

Mehmed Muhyiddin Üftade
Saying Hu
Hu is a dervish’s rapture

Hu is a dervish’s grandeur
Hu is a dervish’s wealth

Uttering Hu is a dervish’s litany
With Hu, one ascends every degree

Saying Hu is a dervish’s guide
The gates of the way to the Friend appear

Then light surrounds the dervish
When he is liberated from seeing other than Him

The eye of the dervish’s heart is opened
Then he will be able to see the beautiful face of the Friend

And the dervish’s secret consciousness will be opened up
Üftade, if you desire the remedy for pain

Serve the dervishes by saying Hu.

—-
Oh He and You who is He
If you desire the Beloved, my heart,

Do not cease to pour out lamentations.

Observing His existence, reach annihilation!

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.
Let tears of blood pour from your eyes

May they emerge hot from the furnace

Say not that he is one of you or one of us

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.
Let love come that you may have a friend

Your distresses are a torrent

Sweeping you along the way to the Friend

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.
Take yourself up to the heavens

Meet the angels

And fulfil your desires

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.
Pass beyond the universe, this [unfurled] carpet

Beyond the pedestal and beyond the throne

That the bringers of good tidings may greet you

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.
Remove your you from you

Leave behind body and soul

That theophanies may appear

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.
Pass on, without looking aside

Without your heart pouring forth to another

That you may drink the pure waters

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.
If you desire union with the Beloved

Oh Üftade! Find your soul

That the Beloved may appear before you

Say “Oh He and You who is He”.

_

_
Sheikh Ansari – Kashf al Asrar

‘The Friend Beside Me’
O God

You know why I am happy:

It is because I seek Your company,

not through my own (efforts).
O God,

You decided and I did not.

I found the Friend beside me

when I woke up!


‘Where Are You?’
O God,

You are the aim of the call of the sincere,

You enlighten the souls of the friends, (and)

You are the comfort of the hearts of the travellers—

because You are present in the very soul.
I call out, from emotion:

“Where are you?”
You are the life of the soul,

You are the rule (ayin) of speech, (and)

You are Your own interpreter (tarjaman).
For the sake of Your obligation to Yourself,

do not enter us into the shade of deception, (but)

make us reach union (wisal) with You.


‘Pursuit of the Friend’
The heart left,

and the Friend is (also) gone.

I don’t know whether I should go after the Friend

or after the heart!

A voice spoke to me:

“Go in pursuit of the Friend,

because the lover needs a heart

in order to find union with the Friend.

If there was no Friend,

what would (the lover) do with (his) heart?”


‘The Beauty of Oneness’
Any eye filled with the vision of this world

cannot see the attributes of the Hereafter,

Any eye filled with the attributes of the Hereafter

would be deprived of the Beauty (Jamal) of (Divine) Oneness.


‘In Each Breath’
O you who have departed from your own self,

and who have not yet reached the Friend:

do not be sad, (for)

He is accompanying you in each of (your) breaths.
Sheikh Ansari Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah al-Ansari (1006-1089) He was called Sheikh al-Islam and he was also given the title Zayn al- ‘Ulama (Ornament of the Scholars) and Nasir al-Sunnah (Supporter of the Prophetic Tradition). Later on in Persian texts he was called Pir-e Heret (the Sheikh of Heret).
Some of Ansari works include Kashf al-Asrar “Unveiling of the Secrets” (Commentary of the Qur’an), Tabaquat al-Sufiyya (The Generations of the Sufis), “Munajat” (Intimate Invocations) which is incorporated into the Kashf al-Asrar and in the Tabaqat.

________________________
Mozart – Dies Irae

________________________

The Retreat Of The Time Lords

Have you ever thought what it’s like, to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles?

-The Doctor, in “An Unearthly Child”


Saturday: So I am working on this project for a book of sorts, and I come up with this phrase: “The Retreat Of The Time Lords” Sounds grand, doesn’t it? I was weaving a story around a group of aliens that were immortal, and on occasion changed out their bodies, but retained their consciousness, whilst messing with the inhabitants of Earth over the millennia, and then I started to think… Hadn’t I heard that term before? I sat pondering for awhile, then ran it into the search engine. See the above illustration. My brain is leaking. Tom Baker, has colonized my cortex. Help!

So I went to the S.E. ArtWalk meeting for artist today for an hour. Just to let you know, yours truly is participating this next month. I am going to have a very large selection of prints, cards, paintings, the lot. The event is for the weekend of February 28th – March 1st. I am very excited. I will be a guest artist at Mirador Community Store hosted by the wonderful Lynn & Steve Hanrahan. We will be unveiling the infamous “Mirador Mural” for 2 days, much to the consternation of our arch-nemesis: Clear Channel (hisssssssss)
You’ll Find This Print & Many Others At Mirador During The SE Portland ArtWalk! – Support The Arts!


Sunday: It has been a couple of days of Mary being down with allergies, and various other things occurring. So, we have been scrambling to playing catch up. It has been snowing again in Portland. Climate Change, not Global Warming around here. Coldest Winter in Oregon as far as I can tell since 1968-69. It is beautiful, but I start dreaming of warm beaches about now.
For the present, I am starting to organize for the ArtWalk Exhibition coming up. Lots to do!
I hope this finds you well….
Gwyllm

_____________
On The Menu:

The Links

Younger Brother – Scanner

The Parson’s Pig (Porc’hel ar person)

Poetry:THE DIWAN OF ABU’L-ALA

Biography of Abu-I-Ala

Younger Brother – I Am A Freak

_________________________

The Links:

The Duel…

Prepared for the Weather??

Atlantis Forgotten…

Atlantis…. again

_________________________
Younger Brother – Scanner

__________________________
Folk Tales Of Lower Brittany: The Parson’s Pig (Porc’hel ar person)

Once upon a time there was a poor family. This family was very, very poor indeed: the father had a flock of children to feed and had no idea how to do it. One day he looked at his offspring said to himself “Why not steal a pig from the rector?”
He knew that the rector had a gloriously fat pig in his piggery, just ready to eat. The poor man took the pig without any great difficulty, killed it noiselessly (not a small feat), and cut it into small pieces.
The next day, the youngest boy was walking the family’s sole cow to the fields. He sang merrily as he walked:
Kig porc’hel ar person a zo mat

Leret hinoz gan me zat!
The meat of the parson’s pig was good

That my father stole last night
Unfortunately the pastor passed close by him on the same path, on his way to church. He was greatly surprised by the song, and called out, “What are you singing, my lad?”
But the boy refused to say.
“Sing again! Repeat what you just sang,” the pastor insisted.
“Oh, no.” replied the young boy, demurely, “I can’t say it.”
“Really, I would like you to sing it again, and loudly, too!” encouraged the parson.
“Monsieur le recteur, I only tell the truth.”
“So be it then: since it’s the truth, you can come to Church on Sunday and tell everyone.”
“Oh, Monsieur le recteur, I can’t come to Church looking like this. All my clothes are so old …”
“I’ll buy you a new outfit,” the boy was promised. “Come and find me on Sunday, before mass.”
And on that Sunday the parson gave the young lad a set of beautiful new clothes so that he could attend church. In the middle of mass, the man of the cloth announced to his assembled parishioners:
“Listen to this child. He is going to tell you the truth.”
Then he said to the boy, “This is the pulpit of truth. Stand here where I am now and tell everyone what you sang the other day on the road.”
The young lad was not worried. He clambered into the pulpit and said very loudly:
“Ar person ha ma mamm zo mognonet

Ha me zat ac’nras Doué n’avin ket!
The parson and my mother are friends

And, thank God, my father doesn’t know a thing!
“It’s not true,” the parson protested, furiously. “That isn’t what you said.”
“Yes it is, ” replied the boy, “It’s exactly what I said.”
“No it’s not,” said the rector, and gave him a quick kick up the behind.
“Monsieur le recteur,” said the child, with dignity, “It’s all that I can say.”
And the whole congregation laughed with the boy.

Notes: Massignon indicates that this is type 1792 in the Aarne-Thompson classification (the major index of folk tale types), existing in 8 French versions, but far more common in Germany. It differs from the norm by having a poor family instead of the sacristan, as the parson’s foil. She points out that irony and gentle mockery aimed at the clergy is a part of Breton folk culture, when the clergy are considered to be at fault.

__________________________

Poetry: THE DIWAN OF ABU’L-ALA
I

Abandon worship in the mosque and shrink

From idle prayer, from sacrificial sheep,

For Destiny will bring the bowl of sleep

Or bowl of tribulation——you shall drink.
II

The scarlet eyes of Morning are pursued

By Night, who growls along the narrow lane;

But as they crash upon our world the twain

Devour us and are strengthened for the feud.
III

Vain are your dreams of marvellous emprise,

Vainly you sail among uncharted spaces,

Vainly seek harbour in this world of faces

If it has been determined otherwise.
IV

Behold, my friends, there is reserved for me

The splendour of our traffic with the sky:

You pay your court to Saturn, whereas I

Am slain by One far mightier than he.
V

You that must travel with a weary load

Along this darkling, labyrinthine street——

Have men with torches at your head and feet

If you would pass the dangers of the road.
VI

So shall you find all armour incomplete

And open to the whips of circumstance,

That so shall you be girdled of mischance

Till you be folded in the winding-sheet.
VII

Have conversation with the wind that goes

Bearing a pack of loveliness and pain:

The golden exultation of the grain

And the last, sacred whisper of the rose
VIII

But if in some enchanted garden bloom

The rose imperial that will not fade,

Ah! shall I go with desecrating spade

And underneath her glories build a tomb?
IX

Shall I that am as dust upon the plain

Think with unloosened hurricanes to fight?

Or shall I that was ravished from the night

Fall on the bosom of the night again?
X

Endure! and if you rashly would unfold

That manuscript whereon our lives are traced,

Recall the stream which carols thro’ the waste

And in the dark is rich with alien gold.
XI

Myself did linger by the ragged beach,

Whereat wave after wave did rise and curl;

And as they fell, they fell—I saw them hurl

A message far more eloquent than speech:
XII

We that with song our pilgrimage beguile,

With purple islands which a sunset bore,

We, sunk upon the sacrilegious shore,

May parley with oblivion awhile.
XIII

I would not have you keep nor idly flaunt

What may be gathered from the gracious land,

But I would have you sow with sleepless hand

The virtues that will balance your account.
XIV

The days are dressing all of us in white,

For him who will suspend us in a row.

But for the sun there is no death. I know

The centuries are morsels of the night.
XV

A deed magnanimous, a noble thought

Are as the music singing thro’ the years

When surly Time the tyrant domineers

Against the lute whereoutof it was wrought.
XVI

Now to the Master of the World resign

Whatever touches you, what is prepared,

For many sons of wisdom are ensnared

And many fools in happiness recline.
XVII

Long have I tarried where the waters roll

From undeciphered caverns of the main,

And I have searched, and I have searched in vain,

Where I could drown the sorrows of my soul.
XVIII

If I have harboured love within my breast,

’Twas for my comrades of the dusty day,

Who with me watched the loitering stars at play,

Who bore the burden of the same unrest,
XIX

For once the witcheries a maiden flung——

Then afterwards I knew she was the bride

Of Death; and as he came, so tender-eyed,

I—I rebuked him roundly, being young.
XX

Yet if all things that vanish in their noon

Are but the part of some eternal scheme,

Of what the nightingale may chance to dream

Or what the lotus murmurs to the moon !
XXI

Have I not heard sagacious ones repeat

An irresistibly grim argument:

That we for all our blustering content

Are as the silent shadows at our feet.
XXII

Aye, when the torch is low and we prepare

Beyond the notes of revelry to pass——

Old Silence will keep watch upon the grass,

The solemn shadows will assemble there.
XXIII

No Sultan at his pleasure shall erect

A dwelling less obedient to decay

Than I, whom all the mysteries obey,

Build with the twilight for an architect,
XXIV

Dark leans to dark! the passions of a man

Are twined about all transitory things,

For verily the child of wisdom clings

More unto dreamland than Arabistan.
XXV

Death leans to death! nor shall your vigilance

Prevent him from whate’er he would possess,

Nor, brother, shall unfilial peevishness

Prevent you from the grand inheritance.
XXVI

Farewell, my soul!—bird in the narrow jail

Who cannot sing. The door is opened! Fly!

Ah, soon you stop, and looking down you cry

The saddest song of all, poor nightingale.
XXVII

Our fortune is like mariners to float

Amid the perils of dim waterways;

Shall then our seamanship have aught of praise

If the great anchor drags behind the boat?
XXVIII

Ah! let the burial of yesterday,

Of yesterday be ruthlessly decreed,

And, if you will, refuse the mourner’s reed,

And, if you will, plant cypress in the way.
XXIX

As little shall it serve you in the fight

If you remonstrate with the storming seas,

As if you querulously sigh to these

Of some imagined haven of delight.
XXX

Steed of my soul! when you and I were young

We lived to cleave as arrows thro’ the night,——

Now there is ta’en from me the last of light,

And wheresoe’er I gaze a veil is hung.
XXXI

No longer as a wreck shall I be hurled

Where beacons lure the fascinated helm,

For I have been admitted to the realm

Of darkness that encompasses the world.
XXXII

Man has been thought superior to the swarm

Of ruminating cows, of witless foals

Who, crouching when the voice of thunder rolls,

Are banqueted upon a thunderstorm.
XXXIII

But shall the fearing eyes of humankind

Have peeped beyond the curtain and excel

The boldness of a wondering gazelle

Or of a bird imprisoned in the wind?
XXXIV

Ah! never may we hope to win release

Before we that unripeness overthrow,——

So must the corn in agitation grow

Before the sickle sings the songs of peace.
XXXV

Lo! there are many ways and many traps

And many guides, and which of them is lord?

For verily Mahomet has the sword,

And he may have the truth—perhaps! perhaps!
XXXVI

Now this religion happens to prevail

Until by that religion overthrown,—

Because men dare not live with men alone,

But always with another fairy-tale.
XXXVII

Religion is a charming girl, I say;

But over this poor threshold will not pass,

For I may not unveil her, and alas!

The bridal gift I can’t afford to pay.
XXXVIII

I have imagined that our welfare is

Required to rise triumphant from defeat;

And so the musk, which as the more you beat,

Gives ever more delightful fragrancies.
XXXIX

For as a gate of sorrow-land unbars

The region of unfaltering delight,

So may you gather from the fields of night

That harvest of diviner thought, the stars.
XL

Send into banishment whatever blows

Across the waves of your tempestuous heart;

Let every wish save Allah’s wish depart,

And you will have ineffable repose.
XLI

My faith it is that all the wanton pack

Of living shall be—hush, poor heart!—withdrawn,

As even to the camel comes a dawn

Without a burden for his wounded back.
XLII

If there should be some truth in what they teach

Of unrelenting Monkar and Nakyr,

Before whose throne all buried men appear——

Then give me to the vultures, I beseech.
XLIII

Some yellow sand all hunger shall assuage

And for my thirst no cloud have need to roll,

And ah! the drooping bird which is my soul

No longer shall be prisoned in the cage.
XLIV

Life is a flame that flickers in the wind,

A bird that crouches in the fowler’s net—

Nor may between her flutterings forget

That hour the dreams of youth were unconfined.
XLV

There was a time when I was fain to guess

The riddles of our life, when I would soar

Against the cruel secrets of the door,

So that I fell to deeper loneliness.
XLVI

One is behind the draperies of life,

One who will tear these tanglements away—

No dark assassin, for the dawn of day

Leaps out, as leapeth laughter, from the knife.
XLVII

If you will do some deed before you die,

Remember not this caravan of death,

But have belief that every little breath

Will stay with you for an eternity.
XLVIII

Astrologers!—give ear to what they say!

“The stars be words; they float on heaven’s breath

And faithfully reveal the days of death,

And surely will reveal that longer day.”
XLIX

I shook the trees of knowledge. Ah! the fruit

Was fair upon the bleakness of the soil.

I filled a hundred vessels with my spoil,

And then I rested from the grand pursuit.
L

Alas! I took me servants: I was proud

Of prose and of the neat, the cunning rhyme,

But all their inclination was the crime

Of scattering my treasure to the crowd.
LI

And yet—and yet this very seed I throw

May rise aloft, a brother of the bird,

Uncaring if his melodies are heard——

Or shall I not hear anything below?
LII

The glazier out of sounding Erzerûm,

Frequented us and softly would conspire

Upon our broken glass with blue-red fire,

As one might lift a pale thing from the tomb.
LIII

He was the glazier out of Erzerûm,

Whose wizardry would make the children cry——

There will be no such wizardry when I

Am broken by the chariot-wheels of Doom.
LIV

The chariot-wheels of Doom! Now, hear them roll

Across the desert and the noisy mart,

Across the silent places of your heart——

Smile on the driver you will not cajole.
LV

I never look upon the placid plain

But I must think of those who lived before

And gave their quantities of sweat and gore,

And went and will not travel back again.
LVI

Aye! verily, the fields of blandishment

Where shepherds meditate among their cattle,

Those are the direst of the fields of battle,

For in the victor’s train there is no tent.
LVII

Where are the doctors who were nobly fired

And loved their toil because we ventured not,

Who spent their lives in searching for the spot

To which the generations have retired?
LVIII

“Great is your soul,”—these are the words they preach,—

“It passes from your framework to the frame

Of others, and upon this road of shame

Turns purer and more pure.”—Oh, let them teach!
LIX

I look on men as I would look on trees,

That may be writing in the purple dome

Romantic lines of black, and are at home

Where lie the little garden hostelries.
LX

Live well! Be wary of this life, I say;

Do not o’erload yourself with righteousness.

Behold! the sword we polish in excess,

We gradually polish it away.
LXI

God who created metal is the same

Who will devour it. As the warriors ride

With iron horses and with iron pride——

Come, let us laugh into the merry flame.
LXII

But for the grandest flame our God prepares

The breast of man, which is the grandest urn;

Yet is that flame so powerless to burn

Those butterflies, the swarm of little cares.
LXIII

And if you find a solitary sage

Who teaches what is truth—ah, then you find

The lord of men, the guardian of the wind,

The victor of all armies and of age.
LXIV

See that procession passing down the street,

The black and white procession of the days——

Far better dance along and bawl your praise

Than if you follow with unwilling feet.
LXV

But in the noisy ranks you will forget

What is the flag. Oh, comrade, fall aside

And think a little moment of the pride

Of yonder sun, think of the twilight’s net.
LXVI

The songs we fashion from our new delight

Are echoes. When the first of men sang out,

He shuddered, hearing not alone the shout

Of hills but of the peoples in the night.
LXVII

And all the marvels that our eyes behold

Are pictures. There has happened some event

For each of them, and this they represent——

Our lives are like a tale that has been told.
LXVIII

There is a palace, and the ruined wall

Divides the sand, a very home of tears,

And where love whispered of a thousand years

The silken-footed caterpillars crawl.
LXIX

And where the Prince commanded, now the shriek

Of wind is flying through the court of state:

“Here,” it proclaims, “there dwelt a potentate

Who could not hear the sobbing of the weak.”
LXX

Beneath our palaces the corner-stone

Is quaking. What of noble we possess,

In love or courage or in tenderness,

Can rise from our infirmities alone.
LXXI

We suffer—that we know, and that is all

Our knowledge. If we recklessly should strain

To sweep aside the solid rocks of pain,

Then would the domes of love and courage fall.
LXXII

But there is one who trembles at the touch

Of sorrow less than all of you, for he

Has got the care of no big treasury,

And with regard to wits not overmuch.
LXXIII

I think our world is not a place of rest,

But where a man may take his little ease,

Until the landlord whom he never sees

Gives that apartment to another guest.
LXXIV

Say that you come to life as ’twere a feast,

Prepared to pay whatever is the bill

Of death or tears or——surely, friend, you wilt

Not shrink at death, which is among the least?
LXXV

Rise up against your troubles, cast away

What is too great for mortal man to bear.

But seize no foolish arms against the share

Which you the piteous mortal have to pay.
LXXVI

Be gracious to the King. You canot feign

That nobody was tyrant, that the sword

Of justice always gave the just award

Before these Ghassanites began to reign.
LXXVII

You cultivate the ranks of golden grain,

He cultivates the cavaliers. They go

With him careering on some other foe,

And your battalions will be staunch again.
LXXVIII

The good law and the bad law disappear

Below the flood of custom, or they float

And, like the wonderful Sar’aby coat,

They captivate us for a little year.
LXXIX

God pities him who pities. Ah, pursue

No longer now the children of the wood;

Or have you not, poor huntsman, understood

That somebody is overtaking you?
LXXX

God is above. We never shall attain

Our liberty from hands that overshroud;

Or can we shake aside this heavy cloud

More than a slave can shake aside the chain?
LXXXI

“There is no God save Allah!”—that is true,

Nor is there any prophet save the mind

Of man who wanders through the dark to find

The Paradise that is in me and you.
LXXXII

The rolling, ever-rolling years of time

Are as a diwan of Arabian song;

The poet, headstrong and supremely strong,

Refuses to repeat a single rhyme.
LXXXIII

An archer took an arrow in his hand;

So fair he sent it singing to the sky

That he brought justice down from—ah, so high!

He was an archer in the morning land.
LXXXIV

The man who shot his arrow from the west

Made empty roads of air; yet have I thought

Our life was happier until we brought

This cold one of the skies to rule the nest.
LXXXV

Run! follow, follow happiness, the maid

Whose laughter is the laughing waterfall;

Run! call to her—but if no maiden call,

’Tis something to have loved the flying shade.
LXXXVI

You strut in piety the while you take

That pilgrimage to Mecca. Now beware,

For starving relatives befoul the air,

And curse, O fool, the threshold you forsake.
LXXXVII

How man is made! He staggers at the voice,

The little voice that leads you to the land

Of virtue; but, on hearing the command

To lead a giant army, will rejoice.
LXXXVIII

Behold the cup whereon your slave has trod;

That is what every cup is falling to.

Your slave—remember that he lives by you,

While in the form of him we bow to God.
LXXXIX

The lowliest of the people is the lord

Who knows not where each day to make his bed,

Whose crown is kept upon the royal head

By that poor naked minister, the sword.
XC

Which is the tyrant? say you. Well, ’tis he

That has the vine-leaf strewn among his hair

And will deliver countries to the care

Of courtesans——but I am vague, you see.
XCI

The dwellers of the city will oppress

Your days: the lion, a fight-thirsty fool,

The fox who wears the robe of men that rule——

So run with me towards the wilderness.
XCII

Our wilderness will be the laughing land,

Where nuts are hung for us, where nodding peas

Are wild enough to press about our knees,

And water fills the hollow of our hand.
XCIII

My village is the loneliness, and I

Am as the travellers through the Syrian sand,

That for a moment see the warning hand

Of one who breasted up the rock, their spy.
XCIV

Where is the valiance of the folk who sing

These valiant stories of the world to come?

Which they describe, forsooth! as if it swum

In air and anchored with a yard of string.
XCV

Two merchantmen decided they would battle,

To prove at last who sold the finest wares;

And while Mahomet shrieked his call to prayers,

The true Messiah waved his wooden rattle.
XCVI

Perchance the world is nothing, is a dream,

And every noise the dreamland people say

We sedulously note, and we and they

May be the shadows flung by what we seem.
XCVII

Zohair the poet sang of loveliness

Which is the flight of things. Oh, meditate

Upon the sorrows of our earthly state,

For what is lovely we may not possess.
XCVIII

Heigho! the splendid air is full of wings,

And they will take us to the——friend, be wise

For if you navigate among the skies

You too may reach the subterranean kings.
XCIX

Now fear the rose! You travel to the gloom

Of which the roses sing and sing so fair,

And, but for them, you’d have a certain share

In life: your name be read upon the tomb.
C

There is a tower of silence, and the bell

Moves up—another man is made to be.

For certain years they move in company,

But you, when fails your song do fail as well.
CI

No sword will summon Death, and he will stay

For neither helm nor shield his falling rod.

We are the crooked alphabet of God,

And He will read us ere he wipes away.
CII

How strange that we, perambulating dust,

Should be the vessels of eternal fire,

That such unfading passion of desire

Should be within our fading bodies thrust.
CIII

Deep in a silent chamber of the rose

There was a fattened worm. He looked around,

Espied a relative and spoke at him:

It seems to me this world is very good.
CIV

A most unlovely world, said brother worm,

For all of us are piteous prisoners.

And if, declared the first, your thought is true,

And this a prison be, melikes it well.
CV

So well that I shall weave a song of praise

And thankfulness because the world was wrought

For us and with such providential care——

My brother, I will shame you into singing.
CVI

Then, cried the second, I shall raise a voice

And see what poor apologies are made.

And so they sang, these two, for many days,

And while they sang the rose was beautiful.
CVII

But this affected not the songful ones,

And evermore in beauty lived the rose.

And when the worms were old and wiser too,

They fell to silence and humility.
CVIII

A night of silence! ’Twas the swinging sea

And this our world of darkness. And the twain

Rolled on below the stars; they flung a chain

Around the silences which are in me.
CIX

The shadows come, and they will come to bless

Their brother and his dwelling and his fame,

When I shall soil no more with any blame

Or any praise the silence I possess.

—-
Biography of Abu-I-Ala
Abu-l-Ala was born in Maarra, a small town in northern Syria near Aleppo; his family was highly respected. He received a good education for his day, in spite of the fact that he was partially blinded by smallpox at the age of 4. Syria was recognized at that time as a highly intellectual and cultural area, and Abu-l-Ala received his education in Aleppo, Tripoli, and Antioch under the best Syrian scholars. He seems to have studied to be a professional encomiast like his predecessor al-Mutanabbi but soon rejected this calling because of his proud nature.
Soon after the age of 20 Abu-l-Ala returned to Maarra, where he lived off the fees he received from his pupils until 1010. He then moved to Baghdad, the intellectual center of Islam. But he left after 19 months because he refused to write flattering verses for those in power. This period was the turning point in his life. To date, he had won distinction as an erudite savant and as an accomplished poet in the style of al-Mutanabbi, a poet he admired. But Abu-l-Ala’s great works appear only after his visit to Baghdad. His later poetry is filled with many unorthodox ideas that he could have come across only in Baghdad.
He reached his hometown to find his mother had died. This affected him immensely. It is said that afterward he lived in a cave and adopted ascetic habits. He was nicknamed “the double prisoner” because of his blindness and seclusion.
But Abu-l-Ala’s fame continued to draw students to him. He eventually amassed great wealth in his retreat. He passed his last 40 years in retirement but not idleness. This is evident by his long list of compositions. He is best known for two collections of poems entitled Sakt al-Zand and Luzumiyat and for many letters.
The problem of Abu-l-Ala’s orthodoxy is often debated. He is usually held to be a heretic because of his chiding works on the Koran. His ideas are unusually skeptical of many accepted doctrines of his day. He was a monotheist, but his God was little more than an impersonal fate. He did not accept the theory of divine revelation. Religion in his view was the product of man’s superstitions and the need for society to control these feelings. And he was always against religious leaders’ taking advantage of their unsuspecting followers for their own personal benefit. He did not believe in a future life, and it was against his better wisdom to have children because of the miseries of living. He was a vegetarian and an ascetic. He did believe in a religion of active piety and righteousness, and thus his ideas were much like the Indian thought of his time.

__________________
Younger Brother – I Am A Freak

___________________________

Dream Land

We join spokes together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.
We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

-Tao Te Ching
Russian Summer


A bit of different with this one…

From a quick view of Psilocybin mushrooms, to the automatic writings of Austin Osman Spare, the artist that defined much of the latter days of the OGD (though not a member) and associated magickal thought , to the dream poetry of Cymric writer Arthur Symons. Photographs were found on a Russian site. Russia’s forest and country side are an enchantment. I hope before I shed this mortal coil that I can travel across Russia some summer.
On The Home Side:

What I have been reading – Quicksilver – Part 1 of the Baroque Cycle I would suggest you read the reviews. Wonderful work. Neal Stephenson is the author. I have been transported back in time to a world of monumental discovery and adventure, mixed just right. I want to thank Leanna for turning me on to these. I read it it daily for about a half hour, and explore a world gone by but still influencing the present. Not to missed.
What we have been watching – HogFather Not to be missed. Loved this film. It explores the winter celebrations of Discworld, very similar to Solstice and Christmas, but with a delicious twist. Terry Pratchett is a hero in our household, not only for his writing and Humanistic stance, but for how he is dealing with early onset Alzheimer’s. His works continue to inspire many people, and I have to say, HogFather is truly wonderful. You can rent it from Netflix, and if I were you (which I am not) I would rent it right away.
And with all that said, enjoy.
Gwyllm

___________________
On The Menu:

A wee bit of a documentary on Psilocybin…

A history of Playing Cards – Illustrations: Ukrainian Face Cards

Anathema of Zos ~ The Sermon to the Hypocrites

Arthur Symons in Dreamland…Poetry

Photographs – Summer Across Russia

___________________
A wee bit of a documentary on psilocybin…

___________________

A history of Playing Cards – Illustrations: Ukrainian Face Cards
c820AD

Cards are invented in China, during the Tang dynasty. The first suits are in fact increasing denominations of currency (coins, strings of coins, myriads of strings, and tens of myriads), which suggests they may have been derived from actual money. Alternative theories say they may have been a paper adaptation of dominoes, or dice.
Early 14th century

Probable first arrival of cards in Europe, in Italy. They have travelled from China via India and the Middle East, and specifically with the Mamluks of Egypt.
1371

First documentary evidence of cards in Spain; in a Catalan rhyming dictionary, of all places.
1377

First detailed description of playing cards in Europe, by a Swiss monk named John of Rheinfelden.
1380

Suddenly, they’re everywhere – mentions of cards crop up as far afield as Florence, Basle, Regensburg, Brabant, Paris and Barcelona.
1392-93

Charles or Charbot Poupart, the treasurer of the household of Charles VI of France, records payment for the painting of three sets of cards.
1440

Johann Gutenberg invents the movable-type press. Improvements in printing technology mean that cards can now be mass-produced.
1462

Earliest reference to cards in Britain. This and most of the mentions thereafter are bannings, fulminations against the evils of gambling, or notices of arrest for so doing.
1480

The four suits now commonly seen worldwide are first used in France, adapted from the German suits of hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns.
Late 1400s

The ace, or one, which had always had the lowest value in cards, starts to gain a special significance. Ace becomes high.
Early 1500s

Card-makers at Rouen hit upon the distinctive card illustrations that we still use today.
1520

First mention of the game of triomphe in Spain. Now obsolete, the game spawned many games such as euchre, whist and bridge.

1674

Publication of Charles Cotton’s Compleat Gamester, one of the first attempts to lay down authoritative rules for many card and dice games.
1685

The first paper money is issued in North America – as IOUs on the backs of used playing cards – by Jacques de Meulles, the French governor of Quebec.
1711

First systematic tax on packs of cards introduced.
1742

Publication of Edmund Hoyle’s Short Treatise on the Game of Whist. The pamphlet goes through several editions and becomes one of the bestselling publications of the 18th century.
1793

Post-revolutionary French authorities ban the depictions of royalty on playing cards. Kings, queens and jacks became liberties, equalities and fraternities. This stands for 12 years until Napoleon comes to power and tells them not to be so silly.
1834

First documented game of poker on a Mississippi river steamer. The game, a refinement of the Persian game “as nas”, takes its name from a similar French game, “poque”.
Mid-1800s

Card names abbreviated and placed in the corner for the first time. Partly for this reason, the “knave” (whose abbreviation is the same as for “king”) now becomes the “jack”.
1857

First appearance of the joker.
1868

Bezique is introduced to England. The rules, as published, are unclear; panic in the streets.
Early 20th century

Canasta is invented in South America. It becomes globally popular after WW2.
1909

In a New York club, ET Baker invents gin rummy. It catches on in Hollywood, and subsequently the world, in the 1940s.
1914-18

Pontoon is the game of choice among soldiers in first world war trenches.
1925

Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, on a cruise from San Francisco to Havana, perfects the rules of contract bridge, which becomes the most popular card game in the west.
1935

Card manufacturers attempt to introduce a fifth suit (not black, not red, but green) called the “eagles” in the US and “crowns” in the UK. It is a dismal failure.

___________________
~ Anathema of Zos ~ The Sermon to the Hypocrites

An Automatic Writing By Austin Osman Spare

Hostile to self-torment, the vain excuses called devotion, Zos satisfied the habit by speaking loudly unto his Self. And at one time, returning to familiar consciousness, he was vexed to notice interested hearers-a rabble of involuntary mendicants, pariahs, whoremongers, adulterers, distended bellies, and the prevalent sick-grotesques that obtain in civilisations. His irritation was much, yet still they pestered him, saying: Master, we would learn of these things! Teach us Religion!
And seeing, with chagrin, the hopeful multitude of Believers, he went down into the Valley of Stys, prejudiced against them as Followers. And when he was ennuye, he opened his mouth in derision, saying:-

O, ye whose future is in other hands! This familiarity is permitted not of thy-but of my impotence. Know me as Zos the Goatherd, saviour of myself and of those things I have not yet regretted. Unbidden ye listen’d to my soliloquy. Endure then my Anathema.
Foul feeders! Slipped, are ye, on your own excrement? Parasites! Having made the world lousy, imagine ye are of significance to Heaven?
Desiring to learn-think ye to escape hurt in the rape of your ignorance? For of what I put in, far more than innocence shall come out! Labouring not the harvest of my weakness, shall I your moral-fed desires satisfy?
I, who enjoy my body with unweary tread, would rather pack with wolves than enter your pest-houses.
Sensation . . Nutrition . . . Mastication . . . . Procreation . . . ! This is your blind-worm cycle. Ye have made a curiously bloody world for love in desire. Shall nothing change except through your accusing diet?
In that ye are cannibals, what meat should I offer? Having eaten of your dead selves savoured with every filth, ye now raven to glutton of my mind’s motion?
In your conflict ye have obtained . . . ? Ye who believe your procreation is ultimate are the sweepings of creation manifest, returning again to early simplicity to hunger, to become, and realise-ye are not yet. Ye have muddled time and ego. Think ye to curb the semen sentimentally? Ye deny sexuality with tinsel ethics, live by slaughter, pray to greater idiots-that all things may be possible to ye who are impossible.
For ye desire saviours useless to pleasure.
Verily, far easier for madmen to enter Heaven than moral Lepers. Of what difference is Life or Death? Of what difference is dream or reality? Know ye nothing further than you own stench? Know ye what ye think ye know for certain? Fain would I be silent. Yet too tolerant is this Sun that cometh up to behold me, and my weakness comes of my dissatisfaction of you solicit . . . . but be ye damned before obtaining fresh exuses of me!
Cursed are the resurrectionists! Is there only body and soul?
Is there nothing beyond entity? No purchase beyond sense and desire of God than this blasting and devouring swarm ye are?
Oh, ye favoured of your own excuses, guffaw between bites! Heaven is indifferent toyour salvation or catastrophe. Your curveless crookedness maketh ye fallow for a queer fatality! What! I to aid your self-deception, ameliorate your decaying bodies, preserve your lamentable apotheosis of self?
The sword-thrust not salve-I bring!
Am I your swineherd, though I shepherd unto goats? My pleasure does not obtain among vermin with vain ideas-with hopes and fears of absurd significance. Not yet am I overweary of myself. Not ye shall I palliate abomination, for in ye I behold your parents and the stigmata of foul feeding.
In this ribald intoxication of hypocrisy, this monument of swindlers’ littlenesses, where is the mystic symposium, the hierarchy of necromancers that was?
Honest was Sodom! your theology is a slime-pit of gibberish become ethics. In your world, where ignorance and deceit constitute felicity, everything ends miserably-besmirched with fratricidal blood.
Seekers of salvation? Salvation of your sick digestion; crippled beliefs: Convalescent desires. Your borrowed precepts and prayers-a stench unto all good nostrils!
Unworthy of a soul-your metamorphosis is laborious of morbid rebirth to give habitance to the shabby sentiments, the ugly familiarities, the calligraphic pandemonium-a world of abundance acquired of greed. Thus are ye outcasts! Ye habitate dung-heaps; your glorious palaces are hospitals set amid cemeteries. Ye breathe gay-heartedly within this cess-pit? Ye obtain of half-desires, bent persuasions, of threats, of promises made hideous by vituperatious righteousness! Can you realise of Heaven when it exists without?
Believing without associating ye are spurious and know not the way of virtue. There is no virtue in truth, nor truth in righteousness. Law becomes of desire’s necessity. Corrupt is the teacher, for they who speak have only spent words to give.
Believe or blaspheme! Do ye not speak from between your thighs?
To believe or unbelieve is the question. Verily, if you believe of the least-ye needs must thrive all things. Ye are of all things, of all knowledge, and, belike, will youor stupidity to further self-misery!
Your wish? Your heaven? I say your desire is women. Your potential desire a brothel.
Ah, ye who fear suffering, who among ye has courage to assault the cloudy enemies of creeds, of the stomach’s pious hopes?
I blaspheme your commandments, to provoke and enjoy your bark, your teeth grinding!
Know ye what ye want? What ye ask? Know ye virtue from maniacal muttering? Sin from folly? Desiring a teacher, who among ye are worthy to learn?
Brutally shall I teach the gospel of soul-suicide, of contraception, not preservation and procreation.
Fools! Ye have made vital the belief the Ego is eternal,, fulfilling a purpose not lost to you.
All things become of desire; the legs to the fish; the wings to the reptile. Thus was your soul begotten.
Hear, O vermin!
Man has willed Man!
Your desires shall become flesh, your dreams reality and no fear shall alter it one whit.
Hence do I travel ye into the incarnating abortions-the aberratons, the horrors without sex, for ye are worthless to offer Heaven new sexualities.
Once in this world I enjoyed laughter-when I remembered the value I gave the contemptible; the significance of my selfish fears; the absurd vanity of my hopes; the sorry righteousness called I.
And you?
Certainly not befitting are tears of blood, nor laughter of gods.
Ye do not even look like MEN but the strange spawn of some forgotten ridicule.
Lost among the illusions begat of duality-are these the differentiations ye make for future entity to ride your bestial self? Millions of times have ye had re-birth and many more times will ye again suffer existence.
Ye are of things distressed, living down the truths ye made. Loosing only from my overflow, perchance I teach ye to learn of yourselves? In my becoming shall the hungry satisfy of my good and evil? I strive me neither, and confide subsequent to the event.
Know my purpose: To be a stranger unto myself, the enemy of truth.
Uncertain of what ye believe, belike ye half-desire? But believe ye this, serving your dialectics:-

Subscribing only to self-love, the outcroppings of my hatred now speak. Further, to ventilate my own health, I scoff at your puerile dignitaries’ absurd moral clothes and bovine faith in a fortuitous and gluttonous future!
Dogs, devouring your own vomit! Cursed are ye all! Throwbacks, adulterers, sycophants, corpse devourers, pilferers and medicine swallowers! Think ye Heaven is an infirmary?
Ye know not pleasure. In your sleep lusts, feeble violence and sickly morale, ye are more contemptible than the beasts ye feed for food.
I detest your Mammon. Disease partakes of your wealth. Having acquired, ye know not how to spend.
Ye are good murderers only.
Empty of cosmos are they who hunger after righteousness. Already are the merciful spent. Extinct are the pure in heart. Governed are the meek and of Heaven earn similar disgust. Your society is a veneered barbarity. Ye are precocious primitives. Where is your success other than through hatred?
There is no good understanding in your world-this bloody transition by procreation and butchery.
Of necessity ye hate, and love your neighbor by devouring.
The prophets are nauseating and should be persecuted. Objects of ridicule, their deeds cannot live through their tenets. Actions are the crierion, then how can ye speak other than lies?
Love is cursed. Your desire is your God and execration. Ye shall be judged or your appetite.
Around me I see your configuration-again a swine from the herd. A repulsive object of charity! The curse is pronounce; for ye are slime and sweat-born, homicidally reared. And again shall your fathers call to the help of women. Ye vainly labour at a rotten Kingdom of Good and Evil. I say that Heaven is catholic-and none shall enter with susceptibility of either.
Cursed are ye who shall be persecuted for my sake. For I say I am Convention entire, excessively evil, perverted and nowhere good-for ye.
Whosoever would be with me is neither much of me nor of himself enough.
Zos tired, but loathing his hearers too much, he again reviled them saying:-

Worm-ridden jackals! Still would ye feast on my vomit? Whosoever follows me becomes his own enemy; for in that day my exigency shall be his ruin.
Go labour! Fulfil the disgust of becoming yourself, of discovering your beliefs, and thus acquire virtue. Let your good be accidental; thus escape gratitude and it sorry vainglory, for the wrath of Heaven is heavy on easy self-indulgence.
In your desire to create a world, do unto others as you would-when sufficiently courageous.
To cast aside, not save, I come. Inexorably towards myself; to smash the law, to make havoc of the charlatans, the quacks, the swankers and brawling salvationists with their word-tawdry phantasmagoria; to disillusion and awaken every fear of your natural, rapacious selves.
Living the most contemptible and generating everything beastly, are ye so vain of your excuse to expect other than the worst of your imagining?
Honesty is unvoiced! And I warn you to make holocaust of your saints, your excuses: these flatulent bellowings of your ignorance. Only then could I assure your lurking desire-easy remission of your bowdlerised sins.

Criminals of folly? Ye but sin against self.
There is no sin for those of Heaven’s delight. I would ye resist not nor exploit your evil: such is of fear, and somnambulism is born of hypocrisy.
In pleasure Heaven shall break every law before this Earth shall pass away. Thus if I possessed, my goodness towards ye would be volcanic.
He who is lawless is free. Necessity and time are conventional phenomena.
Without hypocrisy or fear ye could do as ye wish. Whosoever, therefore, shall break the precept or live its transgression shall have relativity of Heaven. For unless your righteousness exist not, ye shall not pleasure freely and creatively. In so much as ye sin against doctrine, so shall your imagination be required in becoming.
It has been said without wit: “Thou shalt not kill.” Among beasts man lives supremely-on his own kind. Teeth and claws are no longer sufficient accessory to appetite. Is this world’s worst reality more vicious than human behaviour?
I suggest to your inbred love of moral gesture to unravel the actual from the dream.
Rejoice ye! The law-makers shall have the ugly destiny of becoming ubject. Whatsoever is ordained is superseded-to make equilibrium of this consciousness rapport with hypocrisy.
Could ye be arbitrary? Belief foreshadows its inversion. Overrun with forgotten desires and struggling truths, ye are their victim in the dying and begetting law.
The way of Heaven is a purpose-anterior to and not induced by thought. Desire, other than by the act, shall in no wise obtain: Therefore believe symbolically or with caution.
Between men and women having that desire there is no adultery. Spend the large lust and when ye are satiated ye shall pass on to something fresh. In this polite day it has become cleaner to fornicate by the wish than to enact.
Offend not your body no be so stupid as to let your body offend ye. How shall it serve ye to reproach your duality? Let your oath be in earnest; though better to communicate by the living act than by the word.
This God-this cockatrice-is a projection of your imbecile apprehensions, your bald grossness and madhouse vanities. Your love is born of fear; but far better to hate than further deception.
I would make your way difficult. Give and take of all men indiscriminately.
I know your love and hate. Inquire of red diet. Within your stomach is civil war.
Only in Self-love is procreative will.
What now! Shall I attempt wisdom by words? Alphabetic truths with legerdemain grammar? There is no spoken truth that is not past-more wisely forgotten.
Shall I scrawl slippery paradox with mad calligraphy? Words, mere words! I exist in a wordless world, without yesterday nor to-morrow- beyond becoming.
All conceivableness procures of time and space. Hence I spit on your tatterdemalion ethics, mouldering proverbs, priestly inarticulations and delirious pulpit jargon. This alone I give ye as safe commandments in your pestilent schisms.
Better is it to go without than to borrow. Finer far to take than beg. From Puberty till Death realise “Self” in all. There is no greater virtue than good nourishment. Feed from the udder, and if the milk be Sour, feed on . . . Human nature is the worst possible!
Once I lived among ye. From self-decency now I habitate the waste places, a willing outcast; associate of goats, cleaner far, more honest than men.
Within this heterogenousness of difference, reality is hard to realise; evacuation is difficult.
These spiritualists are living sepulchres. What has decayed should perish decently.
Cursed are they who supplicate. Gods are with ye yet. Therefore let ye who pray acquire this manner:-

O Self my God, foreign is thy name except in blasphemy, for I am thy iconoclast. I cast thy bread upon the waters, for I myself am meat enough. Hidden in the labyrinth of the Alphabet is my sacred name, the Sigil of all things unknown. On Earth my kingdom is Eternity of Desire. My wish incarnates in the belief and becomes flesh, for, I am the Lijving Truth. Heaven is ecstacy; my consciousness changing and acquiring association. May I have courage to take from my own superabundance. Let me forget righteousness. Free me of mrals. Lead me into temptation of myself, for I am a tottering kingdom of good and evil.
May worth be acquired through those things I have pleasured.
May my trespass be worthy.
Give me the death of my soul. Intoxicate me with self-love. Teach me to sustain its freedom; for I am sufficiently Hell. Let me sin against the small beliefs.-Amen.
Concluding his conjunction, Zos said:-

Again, O sleep-walkers, beggars and sufferers, born of the stomach; unlucky men to whom happiness is necessary!
Ye are insufficient to live alone, not yet mature enough to sin against the law and still desire women.
Other than damnation I know no magic to satisfy your wishes; for ye believe one thing, desire another, speak unlike, act differently and obtain the living value.
Assuredly inclination towards new faculties springs from this bastardy!
Social only to the truths convenient to your courage, yet again beasts shall be planted.
Shall I speak of that unique intensity without form? Know ye the ecstasy within? The pleasure between ego and self?
At that time of ecstasy there is no thought of others; there is No Thought. Thither I go and none may lead.
Sans women-your love is anathema!
For me, there is no way but my way. Therefore, go ye your way-none shall lead ye to walk towards yourselves. Let your pleasures be as sunsets, honest . . bloody . . . grotesque!
Was the original purpose the thorough enjoyment of multitudinous self, for ecstasy? These infinite ramifications of consciousness in entity, associating by mouth, sex, and sense!
Has the besetting of sex become utter wretchedness-repetition made necessary of your scotomy?
O bloody-mouthed! Shall I again entertain ye with a little understanding? An introspection of cannibalism in the shambles of diet-the variating murder against the ancestral? Is there no food beyond corpse?
Your murder and hypocrisy must pass before ye are uplifted to a world where slaughter is unknown.
Thus, with a clean mouth, I say unto ye, I live by bread alone. Sleep is competent prayer. All morality is beastly.
Alas, there has been a great failure. Man is dead. Only women remain.
With tonque in cheek I would say: “Follow me! That ye realise what is hidden in all suffering. I would make your self-mortification voluntary, your wincing courageous.”
Still will ye be with me? Salutation to all suicides!
With a yawn Zos wearied and fell asleep.
In time the stench awoke him-for he had slept amidst the troughs- and he observed that the crowd were no longer with him-that only swine remained. And he guffawed and spake thus: “Not yet have I lost relationship and am thereby nearly asphyxiated! Caught up am I in the toils of sentiment, the moral hallucinations within the ebb and flow of hopes and fears?
Shall age alone transmute desire? Not yet have I disentangled illusion from reality: for I know not men from swine, dreams from reality; or whether I did speak only unto myself. Neither know I to whom my anathema would be the more impressionable . . . .
My insensible soliloquy s eaten as revelation! What I spake with hard strived conceit to increase enterprise brings forth only swinish snorts. Water is not alone in finding its level.
I have not me tragedy, no, not in this life! Yet, whether I have spewed their doctrines upon the tables of the Law or into the troughs, at least I have not cast away the flesh of dreams.
And turning towards his light, Zos said: This my will, O Thou Glorious Sun. I am weary of my snakes descending-making slush.
Farewell antithesis. I have suffered. All is paid.
Let me go forth to recreate my sleep.
Here Ends this Book

______________
Russian Summer – 2

______________
If a country is governed with tolerance,

the people are comfortable and honest.

If a country is governed with repression,

the people are depressed and crafty.
When the will to power is in charge,

the higher the ideals, the lower the results.

Try to make people happy,

and you lay the groundwork for misery.

Try to make people moral,

and you lay the groundwork for vice.
Thus the Master is content

to serve as an example

and not to impose her will.

She is pointed, but doesn’t pierce.

Straightforward, but supple.

Radiant, but easy on the eyes.

-Tao Te Ching

______________

Arthur Symons in Dreamland…Poetry
At Fontainebleau

It was a day of sun and rain,

Uncertain as a child’s swift moods;

And I shall never spend again

So blithe a day among the woods.

Was it because the Gods were pleased

That they were awful in our eyes,

Whom we in very deed appeased

With barley-cakes of sacrifice?

The forest knew her and was glad,

And laughed for very joy to know

Her child was with her; then, grown sad,

She wept, because her child must go.

And Alice, like a little Faun,

Went leaping over rocks and ferns,

Coursing the shadow-race from dawn

Until the twilight-flock returns.

And she would spy and she would capture

The shyest flower that lit the grass;

The joy I had to watch her rapture

Was keen as even her rapture was.

The forest knew her and was glad,

And laughed and wept for joy and woe.

This was the welcome that she had

Among the woods of Fontainebleau.


The Turning Dervish

Stars in the heavens turn,

I worship like a star,

And in its footsteps learn

Where peace and wisdom are.

Man crawls as a worm crawls;

Till dust with dust he lies,

A crooked line he scrawls

Between the earth and skies.

Yet God, having ordained

The course of star and sun,

No creature hath constrained

A meaner course to run.

I, by his lesson taught,

Imaging his design,

Have diligently wrought

Motion to be divine.

I turn until my sense,

Dizzied with waves of air,

Spins to a point intense,

And spires and centres there.

There, motionless in speed,

I drink that flaming peace,

Which in the heavens doth feed

The stars with bright increase.

Some spirit in me doth move

Through ways of light untrod,

Till, with excessive love,

I drown, and am in God.


Indian Meditation

Where shall this self at last find happiness?

O Soul, only in nothingness.

Does not the Earth suffice to its own needs?

And what am I but one of the Earth’s weeds?

All things have been and all things shall go on

Before me and when I am gone;

This self that cries out for eternity

Is what shall pass in me:

The tree remains, the leaf falls from the tree.

I would be as the leaf, I would be lost

In the identity and death of frost,

Rather than draw the sap of the tree’s strength

And for the tree’s sake be cast off at length.

To be is homage unto being; cease

To be, and be at peace,

If it be peace for self to have forgot

Even that it is not.


The Ecstasy

What is this reverence in extreme delight

That waits upon my kisses as they storm,

Vehemently, this height

Of steep and inaccessible delight;

And seems with newer ecstasy to warm

Their slackening ardour, and invite,

From nearer heaven, the swarm

Of hiving stars with mortal sweetness down?

Never before

Have I endured an exaltation

So exquisite in anguish, and so sore

In promise and possession of full peace.

Cease not, O nevermore

Cease,

To lift my joy, as upon windy wings,

Into that infinite ascension, where,

In baths of glittering air,

It finds a heaven and like an angel sings.

Heaven waits above,

There where the clouds a fastnesses of love

Lift earth into the skies;

And I have seen the glim of the gates,

And twice or thrice

Climbed half the difficult way,

Only to say

Heaven waits,

Only to fall away from paradise.

But now, O what is this

Mysterious and uncapturable, bliss

That I have known, yet seems to be

Simple as breath, and easy as a smile,

And older than the earth?

Now but a little while

This ultimate ecstasy

Has parted from its birth,

Now but a little while been wholly mine,

Yet am I utterly possessed

By the delicious tyrant and divine

Child, this importunate guess.

______________
Russian Summer – 3

______________

Making Magick…

Akashic Fountain – Ira Cohen


This entry came about from the Earth Rites List. (nods below) It got me thinking, and as usual, instead of a poem, it has turned into a multi-hour extravaganza of searching for photo’s, pictures, poems, article, music, video… argh.
I could go on and on about the selections today, but I will let you go through it. Larger than I wanted, smaller than I hoped, this entry touches on two pivotal points amongst the galaxies swirling in my cranium. I hope you find the beauty here that I was searching for tonight. This Entry is dedicated to Ira Cohen, and indeed features much of his work.
Much Love,

Gwyllm

__________
On The Menu:

The One And Only Link at the top of the page

Memories of a Free Festival – David Bowie

Making Magic – Peter Gorman

Links Of Interest

Frog Poison Trial

High Magick – The Poetry And Images of Ira Cohen

Ira Cohen Bio

Ira Cohen – Song To Nothing

____________
The One And Only Link at the top of the page….:

I love this link. I often overload people with stuff to read, but this is a little gem of an article. Copy the addy and spread this one about, okay?

Kids These Days…

__________________

Kinda a throw back for me, but this is a unique live recording from 1969 I had never heard. I think of the Festivals then, and now. Back then, they were often free….
Memories of a Free Festival – David Bowie

_________________
(Thanks to Don Ford for the tip in this direction – See Video Below)

Making Magic


By Peter Gorman

-from OMNI July 1993
The night air in the backwater lowlands of the Peruvian Amazon was thick with the incessant buzzing of insects. Overhead bats flew, their shapes silhoutted by a half moon rising behind the forest across the Rio Lobo. Though the rainy season had begun, the river was still near the low point of the year, and great gnarled tree trunks, swept from the banks during the last flood season, stood out against the water like monstrous sculptures in the pale light. From beyond the jungle clearing of the tiny Matses Indian puebla of San Juan came the howling of a distant band of monkeys and the melancholy cry of the pheasant-like paujil.
In the camp, a handful of Matses children played our flashlights into the village trees, while their fathers combed the branches and nearby brush, hunting for a dow-kietl, the frog that secretes sapo, a vital element in the Matses pharmacopoeia. (Although the word sapo means “toad” in Spanish, the extract comes from a frog) The Matses limited command of Spanish doesn’t draw a distinction between the two.) The men imitated the frog’s mating call, a low, guttural bark, as they moved, and the women nearby giggled at the sound. I was suprised that the dow-kiet!s didn’t respond.
The Matses are a small, seminomadic, hunting-gathering tribe who live in the remote jungle along the Rio Yavari, on the border of Peru and Brazil. Unlike other tribes in the region, they possess only rudimentary weaving and ceramics skills, they have no formal religion, no ceremony or dance, and they produce nothing for trade. What they do is hunt – with bows and arrows, spears, clubs, and occasionally shotguns when they can get shells. Theirs is the harsh world of the lowland forests and swamps, a world where malaria, yellow fever, and venomous snakes keep mortality rates high. To survive, the matses have become masters of the natural history of the flora and fauna of the region.
They know the habits and cycles of the animals that share their land, they’ve studied the plant life that surrounds them, and they’ve learned to see the jungle as their ally. For the Matses the earth is a benevolent ti-ta, or mother, who provides for all their needs. Neighboring tribes say the Matses can move like the wind and talk with the animals. They say the Matses know the jungle’s secrets. Sapo is one of them.
I had come to Peru to collect dow-kiet! Specimens for researchers at the American Museum of Natural History, for whom I’ve collected Matses artifacts – mostly throwaway things like used leaf baskets and broken arrows – and the Fidia Research Institute for the Neurosciences in Rome. My reports on the uses of sapo had sparked interest and curiosity among scientists who were eager to see a specimen of the frog that produces the unusual material, in part because of the extraodinary experience it produced in me and in part because of my description of it’s myriad of uses. I was eager to see the dow-kiet! As well, because although I’d seen sapo used and had myself, I had never actually seen the frog that produces it.
That Western science look an interest in sapo is encouraging: Until recently, most researchers have dismissed the natural medicines of indigenous groups like the Matses. Fortunately, that attitute is changing, but with the loss of an average of one tribe a year in Amazonia alone – to acculturation, disease, or loss of their forest homes – the plant and animal medicines of these peoples are disappearing faster than they can be studied.
The Matses are one of the tribes currently at risk. During the eight years I’ve been visiting their camps, both missionary and military contact have been steadily increasing, and they’re quickly acculturating to a new lifestyle. Camps that planted no more than two or three crops to supplement their diet of game and wild foods just a few years ago now plant a dozen or more. And where most Matses had only a handful of manufactured things when I first met them – some clothing, a few metal pots, a machete, and perhaps and old shotgun – in some caps the men now work for loggers, and the sound of chain saws fills the air. At San Juan, the most accessible camp on the Lobo, most of the Matses not only have new Western clothing, they have begun to refer to Matses who live deep in the jungle as animales.
This is a very different group from the first Matses I ran into in 1984. It was my second trip to Peruvian Amazonia – I’d fallen in love with the jungle on my first trip – and I was studying food gathering and plant identification with my guide, Moises, a former military man who specialized in jungle survival. We had been working on a small river called the Auchyako for about a week when we ran into local hunters who said they had seen signs that a family of Matses had moved into the area. Moises, excited by the news, said we should make an attempt to meet them.
I was easily sold on the idea: so, hoping they would make contact, we hiked three days into the jungle and made a camp. Two days later, a young Matses hunter carrying a bow and arrows, his mouth tattooed and his face adorned with what looked like cat whiskers, came into our camp and borrowed our gun.
When he returned later in the day, he was carrying two large wounded monkeys in palm-leaf baskets he carried from his forehead with templines. Clinging to his hair was a baby monkey the offspring of one of the adults. The hunter returned our gun, left one of the monkeys, and then disappeared into to forest. We followed him back to his camp and watched from a distance as he gave the remaining adult to a women who began to roast it over an open fire, oblivious to its cries. The baby monkey he brought to a young woman who was nursing a child of her own. Without hesitation, she took the monkey and allowed it to nurse at her free breast. Those dual images represented a combination of cruelty and compassion I’d never imagined and taught me more about the reaslity of the jungle than anything I had previosuly experienced. More than that, those images compelled me to return to the Matses again and again.
I first met Pablo in 1986 on my third trip to the Amazon. Moises and I had flown over the dense Peruvian jungle from Iquitos to the Rio Lobo, borrowed a small boat, and made our way to his camp. Pablo was Moises closest friend among the Matses, an adept hunter who fiercely resisted acculturation. The villiage, several days upriver and much more remote than San Juan, was home to Pablo, his four wives, their 22 children, and his brother Alberto, who had two wives and six children. Each wife had her own hut, so there were several in the puebla. When we arrived, we were invited to climb the steep and muddy riverbank to the Puebla. There, Pablo’s main wife, Ma Shu, served us a meal of cold roast sloth and yucca.
After dinner, Pablo produced an old brown beer bottle and a hollow reed tube. From the bottle he poured a find green powder into his hand and worked it into one end of the tube. Alberto put the other end of the tube to his nose and Pablo blew the powder into his nostrils. They repeated the process several times. Moises explained that the powder was nu-nu and that Matses hunters used it to have visions of where to hunt. He said that after the visions they would go to the place they had seen and wait for the animals in the vision to appear. I told Moises he was dreaming, but he insisted that was what happened and pressed Pablo to give me some. A few minutes later, the tube was put to my nose. When The nu-nu hit, it seemed to explode inside my face. It burnt my nose and I began to choke up a wretched green phlegm. But the pain quickly subsided and I closed my eyes. Out of the blackness I began to have visions of animals–tapir, monkey, wild boar–that I saw more clearly than my limited experience with them should
have allowed. Then suddenly the boars stampeded in front of me. As I watched them thunder past my field of vision, several began to fall. Moments later, the visions faded, and a pleasant spit of drunkenness washed over me.
Moises asked what I saw and whether I recognized the place where the vision happened. I told him it looked like the place where we’d eaten lunch earlier in the day. He asked what time it was in the vision, and I told him that the sun was shining but mist still hung from the trees. He put the time between 7 and 8 a.m. Despite my suspicion that I’d’ invented the entire vision, Moises told the Matses what I’d seen.
At dawn the next morning, several of us piled into our boat and headed toward the spot I’d described. As we neared it, I was astounded to hear the thunderous roar of dozens of boars charging across the river in front of us. We jumped out of the boat and chased them. Several ran into a hollow log and Pablo and Alberto blocked the ends with thick branches while me others made nooses out of vines. Holes were cut Into the top of the log with a machete, the nooses slipped through them, and the boars strangled. We returned with seven boars. enough meat for the entire village for four days.
Improbable as it seemed, the scene was close enough to what I’d described that there was no denying the veracity of the vision I later asked how nu-nu worked, and Pablo explained–in a mix of hand signals, Matses, and pigeon Spanish–that nu-nu put you in touch with the animals. He said the animals’ spirits also see the visions and know what awaits them. The morning after the hunt, I was with Pablo, sitting on the bark floor of Ma Shu’s hut, pointing to things and asking what the Matses words for them were. I made notes, writing down the phonetic spelling of things like bow, arrow, spear, and hammock. Pablo was utterly bored with the exercise until I pointed to a small leaf bag that hung over a cooking fire ‘Sapo.” he said, his eyes brightening.
From The bag he pulled a piece of split bamboo, roughly the size and shape of a doctor’s tongue depressor. It was covered with what looked like a thick coat of aging varnish. “Sapo.” He repeated, scraping a little of the material from the stick and mixing it with saliva. When he was finished, it had the consistency and color of green mustard. Then he pulled a smoldering twig from the fire, grabbed my left wrist, and burned the inside of my forearm. I pulled away, but he held my wrist tightly. The burn mark was about the size of a match head. I looked at Moises. “Una nueva medicinn,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve never seen It.”
Remembering the extraordinary experience I’d had with nu-nu, I let Pablo burn my arm a second time He scraped away the burned skin, then dabbed a little of the sapo onto the exposed areas Instantly my body began to heat up. In seconds I was burning from the Inside and regretted allowing him to give me a medicine I know nothing about. I began to sweat. My blood began to race. My heart pounded. I became acutely aware of every vein and artery in my body and could feel them opening to allow for the fantastic pulse of my blood. My stomach cramped and I vomited violently. I lost control of my bodily functions and began to urinate and defecate. I fell to the ground. Then, unexpectedly, I found myself growling and moving about on all fours. I felt as though animals were passing through me, trying to express themselves through my body. It was a fantastic feeling but it passed quickly, and I could think of nothing but the rushing of my blood, a sensation so intense that I thought my heart would burst. The rushing got faster and faster. I was in agony. I gasped for breath. Slowly, the pounding became steady and rhythmic, and when it finally subsided altogether. I was overcome with exhaustion, I slept where I was. When I awoke a few hours later, I heard voices. But as I came to my senses.. I realized I was alone. I looked around and saw that I had been washed off and put into My hammock. I stood and walked to the edge of the hut’s unwalled platform floor and realized that the conversation I was over hearing was between two of Pablo’s wives who were standing nearly 20 yards away. I didn’t understand their dialect, of course, but I was surprised to even hear them from that distance. I walked to the other side of the platform and looked out into the jungle; its noises, too, were clearer than usual.
And it wasn’t just my hearing that had been improved. My vision, my sense of smell, everything about me felt larger than life, and my body felt immensely strong: That evening I explained what was feeling with hand gestures as much as language. Pablo smiled. “Bi-ram-bo sapo.” he said, “fuerte.” It was good sapo. Strong.
During the next few days, my feeling of strength didn’t diminish; I could go whole days without being hungry or thirsty and move through the jungle for hours without tiring Every sense I possessed was heightened and in tune with the environment, as though the sapo put the rhythm of the jungle into my blood.
I asked Pablo about sapo’s uses and discovered there were several. Among hunters; it was used both to sharpen the senses and as a way to increase stamina during long hunts when carrying food and water was difficult. In large doses, it could make a Matses hunter “invisible” to poor-sighted but acute smelling jungle animals by temporarily eliminating their human odor. As a medicine, sapo also had multiple uses, serving as a tonic to cleanse and strengthen the body and as a toxin purge for those with the grippe.
The women explained that they sometimes used sapo as well. In sparing doses applied to the inside of the wrist it could establish whether a woman was pregnant or not. And during the later stages of pregnancy, it was used to establish the sex and health of a fetus. Interpreting the information relied on an investigation of the urine a woman discharged following the application of the medicine: Cloudiness or other discoloration of the urine and the presence or absence of specks of blood were all evidently indicators of the fetus’s condition. In cases where an unhealthy fetus was discovered, a large dose of sapo applied to the vaginal area was used as an abortive. There was no way for me to verify what they said, though there was no reason to doubt them.
When I asked Pablo how the Matses learned about sapo, he said the dow-kiet! told them. Whether he meant the frog told them through their study of its behavior and habits or whether he believed he was in communication with it on some level, I don’t know.
When I returned to New York, I was surprised to find that my description of nu-nu was old hat to the anthropologists I spoke with at the American Museum of Natural History–several tribes evidently employed similar snuffs for shamanic purposes. What did surprise them, however, was my account of sapo. None of them had ever heard of it, and while several South American tribes have hunting myths about frogs, there were no records of the Matses or any other tribe utilizing a frog’s secretions in the way I described. But while my report was considered interesting, it was also inadequate, as I had no photographs of the frog and no samples of the medicine. The following year I returned to Pablo’s village and discovered that sapo was also used as a shamanic tool. It was spring and the lowlands were flooded. Game had retreated deep into the forest to seasonal lagoons, so hunting was difficult, and even nu-nu failed to produce hunting visions. When I arrived, the Matses hadn’t eaten meat for several days.
Pablo explained that when the river was so high, it was trapping season and that he was about to set a tem-po-te!, tapir trap. He had been giving
himself five sapo burns each morning and night for three days in preparation for the task and would continue until the trap was successful. Pablo explained, as well as I could understand it, that sapo, used In such large doses, allowed a hunter to project his animas – his spirit – to his trap while he slept. The animas would take the form of a tapir and lure real tapir to it.
The day after we arrived, Moises and I went into the jungle with Pablo and Alberto. We walked for almost two hours before Pablo found a suitable site and began to construct the trap, a simple spring device set between two trees. Pablo called to the tapir while he worked, telling it what a special path he was making. He called to the other animals as well, warning them to stay away, to leave this place for his friend. When he finished the trap, he chewed handfuls of leaves and spit them out across the trip vine, both to cover his human scent and as a signpost so that his animas could find it at night.
As we were returning to the puebla, Alberto explained that traps were only set when there was no other way to get meat, because once a trap was set, no other animals could be hunted. When I asked why, he explained that animals talk to each other and that killing them provokes their spirits, ruining the trap. Seeing that I didn’t understand, Pablo added that when he sent out his animas masquerading as a tapir, the provoked spirits would warn the prey that what they saw was not a real tapir but a Matses animas in disguise. Exceptions to the taboo were large river turtles and sloth-the turtle because it doesn’t bother to talk to other animals and the sloth because it speaks so slowly that by the time it says what’s on its mind, the river has fallen and trapping time is over.
During the next two days. Pablo never returned to the trap, although he continued using massive doses of sapo. But on the morning of the third day, he awakened us before dawn and said he had a nu-nu vision that the trap was about to be sprung. He was insistent that we hurry.
The Matses moved through the forest effortlessly, almost at a jog, and the women chided me for having to struggle to keep up. But as we neared the trap area, everyone stopped and grew absolutely quiet. Pablo’s eyes blazed. “Petro,” he whispered to me excitedly, “tian-te, tem-po-te” A tapir was about to be trapped.
We waited about ten minutes, then heard a sharp snap, followed by an agonizing animal scream. Suddenly, everyone began running toward the trap. The wounded and disoriented tapir crashed through the brush, bellowing in pain, then fell into a stream bed. The women caught up with it, killed it, and began to cut it up. While they did, Pablo brought me to the sprung trap and gave me the bloody spike.
Back in camp we feasted. Afterwards I asked Pablo for a sample of sapo, but he’d been using so much to prepare far the hunt that he had none to give me. So once again I returned to the states with no hard evidence of the existence. of the dow-kiet!
It took two more trips to Peru before finally managed to secure a small amount of sapo, and when I finally did, I gave half of the stick to Charles Myers. the curator of the museum’s Herpetology Department, who passed it on to John Daly at the National Institutes of Health. Having finally produced the material I’d frequently talked about, my reports began to circulate and prompted a letter from Vittorio Erspamer, a pharmacologist who worked with the Fidia Research Institute for the Neurosciences. He wondered whether sapo might not come from one of a number of frogs he’d randomly collected in Amazonia several years earlier. Research done by the chemicals found in their skin had shown that several produced peptides-protiens-that were similar to peptides produced by humans. If it could be shown, he wrote, that one of those frogs was already in use by humans, it would be an important scientific breakthrough. I wrote back and offered to provide him with a specimen if I ever managed to collect one.
A year after Erspamer’s letter reached me, I traveled back to the Lobo with Moises. We hiked across the jungle to Pablo’s, discovered his burned camp, and moved down the river where happily we found him at San Juan. “Malo casadores,” Moises snarled, after we’d been watching the men of San Juan trying to find a dow-kiet! for nearly an hour. “Bad hunters. Everything is changed with them. They’re finished.” He was still grumbling about the state of the Matses when I heard Pablo calling me. “Petro Dow-kiet! Petro?” He was standing on a hill at the back of the puebla with Pa Mi Shua and two of his children. “Bi-ram-bo, Pablo!” I laughed: “Bi-ram-ho dow-kiet!.” Yes, I would like a dow-kiet!
Pablo laughed and began to bark out the frog’s mating call. The other men in the camp stopped their hunting and watched him. Between the guttural barking noises he was making we could hear him berating the frogs for making the hunt so difficult. Pa Mi Shua and his children, walking along side him on the path toward the center of camp, roared his antics.
Suddenly Pablo stood and stiffened. From the grass on the side of the path came the sound Pablo was making. He barked again, and again his call was returned. Then a second frog joined the first, and a third, and suddenly the whole camp seemed to resound with the barking of dow-keit!s. Pablo bent down and picked one up. “Mas dow-kiet!, Petro?” More, Peter? I laughed and said yes. He bent down and picked up another. “Mas? Bastan-te sapo, Petro?” More? Did I want a lot of sapo?
I told him two were enough. and he came into the camp, a frog in each hand. He gave one of them to me. It was beautiful. A little smaller than my palm, it had an extraordinary electric green back, a lightly spotted white underside, and deep black eyes. It grasped my fingers tightly, and in secends could feel my blood begin to heat up as the sapo it was secreting began to seep into the small cuts that covered my hands. I quickly put it down. Pablo giggled with delight, then broke a small branch from a tree and placed both dow-kiet!s on it, hilariously imitating my reaction.
One of the Matses men collected four sticks and stood them in the ground, making a small square. Another pulled apart some palm leaves, stripped out the fibers and rolled them into strings against his leg. He handed four of them to Pablo. who tied one to each of one frog’s legs, then tied the free ends to the four posts, suspending the animal like some strange green trampoline. Once the frog was secure, Pa Mi Shua knelt and gently began to manipulate the frog’s elongated center toe between her fingers, stimulating it to secrete sapo. It was an unexpectedly sexual image, and the men joked about it. Pa Mi Shua blushed and told them to be quiet.
The man who had placed the sticks in the ground disappeared into his hut for a moment, then returned with a piece of split bamboo. He began to scrape the suspended frog’s sides and legs, collecting sapo. When the stick was covered, he dried out the secretions over our tiny kerosene lamp and then gave the stick to me.
That night, both frogs were tied by one leg to a low tree branch to keep them from escaping, and in the morning, the sapo from the second frog was collected. Neither was hurt by the process, and if I hadn’t been taking the two specimens back to the States, they would have been set free.
One of the frogs died shortly after I returned home, and I gave its skeleton along with part of the sapo sample and some photographs to the Natural History museum. The healthy dow-kiet! along with a second sapo sample and similar photos was sent to Erspamer in Rome. Six months later, I received his report. He was very excited.
He identified the dow-kiet! as a phyllomedusa bicolor, a rare arboreal tree frog. The sapo, he said, is a sort of fantastic chemical cocktail with potential medical applicati
ons. “No other amphibian skin can compete with it,” he wrote. “Up to seven percent of sapo’s weight is in potently active peptides, easily absorbed through burned, inflamed areas of the skin.” He explained that among the several dozen peptides found in sapo, seven were bioactive- which meant that each has an affinity and selectivity for binding with receptor sites in humans. (A receptor is like a lock that when opened with the right key–the bioactive peptides-triggers chemical reactions in the body.) The peptide families represented in the dow-kiet! include bradykinins, tachykinins, caerulein, sauvagine, tryptophyllins, dermorphins. and bombesins.
Based on the concentrations and functions of the peptides found in and extracted from the sapo sample I sent, Erspamer was able to account for all of the physical symptoms I described as sapo intoxication. On the peripheral effects. Erspamer repoited, “Caerulein and the equiactive phyllocaerulein display a potent action on the gastrointestinal smooth muscle and gastric and pancreatic secretions. . . . Side effects observed (in volunteer patients with post operative intestinal atony) were nausea, vomiting, facial flush, mild tachycardia (heart palpitations), changes in blood pressure, sweating, abdominal discomfort, and urge for defecation.”
Phyllomedusin, a new peptide of the tachykinin family, strongly affects the salivary glands, tear ducts, intestines, and bowels: and contributed to the violent purging I experienced. Sauvagine causes a long-lasting fall in blood pressure, accompanied by severe tachycardia and stimulation of the adrenal cortex, which contributed to the satiety, heightened sensory perception, and increased stamina I described. Phyllokinin, a new peptide of the bradykinin family, is a potent blood-vessel dilator and accounted for the intense rushing in my blood during the initial phase of sapo intoxication.
“It may be reasonably concluded, Erspamer wrote. “that the intense peripheral cardiovascular and gastrointestinal symptoms observed in the early phase of sapo intoxication may be entirely ascribed to the known bioactive peptides occurring in large amounts in the frog material.”
As to sapo’s central effects, he wrote, “increase in physical strength, enhanced resistance to hunger and thirst, and more generally, increase in the capacity to face stress situations may be explained by the presence of caerulein and sauvagine in the drug. Caerulein in humans produces “an analgesic effect . . . possibly related to release of beta-endorphins .. . in patients suffering from renal colic, rest pain due to peripheral vascular insufficiency (limited circulation), and even cancer pain.” Additionally, “It caused in human volunteers a significant reduction in hunger and food intake.
The sauvagine extracted from sapo was given subcutaneously to rats and caused “release of corticotropin (a hormone that triggers the release of substances from the adrenal gland) from the pituitary with consequent activation of the pituitary-adrenal axis.” This axis is the chemical communication link between the pituitary and the adrenal glands, which controls our flight-or-fight mechanism. The effects on the pituitary-adrenal axis caused by the minimal doses given the laboratory rodents lasted several hours. Erspamer noted that the volume of sauvagine found in the large quantities of sapo I described the Matses using would potentially have a much longer lasting effect on humans and would explain why my feelings of strength and heightened sensory perception after sapo use lasted for several days.
But on the question of the “magical” effects I described in tapir trapping, Erspamer says that “no hallucinations, visions, or magic effects are produced by the known peptide components of sapo.” He added that “the question remains unsolved” whether those effects specifically, the feeling that animals were passing through me and Pablo’s description of animas projection were due to “the sniffing of other drugs having hallucinogenic effects, particularly nu-nu.
With regard to sapo’s uses relating to pregnancy, Erspamer did not address any of the issues but abortion: “Abortion ascribed to sapo may be due either to direct effect of the peptide cocktail on the uterine smooth muscle or, more likely, to the intense pelvic vase dilation and the general violent physical reaction to the drug.
From the medical-potential point of view, Erspamer said several aspects of sapo are of interest. He suggested that two of its peptide, phyllomedusin and phyllokinin have such a pronounced affect on the dilation of blood vessels that they “may increase the permeability of the blood-brain barrier. thus facilitating access to the brain not only of themselves, but also of the other active peptides.” Finding a key to unlocking the secret of passing that barrier is vital to the discovery of how to get medicines to the brain and could one day contribute to the development of treatments for AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and other disorders that threaten the brain.
There is also medicanal potential in dermorphin and deltrorphin, two other peptides found in sapo. Both are potent opioid peptides, almost identical to the beta-endorphins the human body produces to counter pain, and similar to the opiates found in morphine. Because they mirror beta-endorphins, however, sapo’s opioid peptides could potentially function in a more precise manner than opiates. Additionally, while dermorphin and deltorphin are considerably stronger than morphine (18 and 39 times, respectively), because of their similarities to the naturally produced beta-endorphin, the development of tolerance would be considerably lower and withdrawal less severe than to opiates.
Both phyllocaerulein and sauvagine possess medical potential as digestive aids to assist those receiving treatment for cancer. Other areas of potential medical interest in the peptides found in sapo include their possible use as anti-inflammatories, as blood-pressure regulators, and as stimulators of the pituitary gland.
The only report thus far on sapo from John Daly’s team at the National Institutes of Health (written with seven co-authors, including Katharine Mitten, who recently discovered the use of the phyllomedusa bicolor among several tribes closely related to the Matses) was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (November 14, 1992) and concentrates exclusively on a newly discovered peptide found in sapo One of the chemical fractions Daly’s team isolated is a 33-amino-acid-long peptide he calls adenoregulin. which may provide a key to manipulating cellular receptors for adenosine, a fundamental component in all human cell fuel. “Peptides that either enhance or inhibit binding of adenosine analogs to brain adenosine receptors proved to be present in extracts of the dried skin secretion,” Daly wrote. According to an interpretive report on the Daly paper written by lvan Amato and published in Science (November 20. 1992), “Preliminary animal studies by researchers at Warner-Lambert have hinted that those receptors, which are distributed throughout the brains of mammals, could offer a target for treating depression, stroke, seizures, and cognitive loss in ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Of course, medical potential only in frequently results directly in new medicines: Science may not be able to isolate or duplicate the peptides found in sapo or side effects may be discovered that would decrease their value as medicines. But even if sapo’s components do not eventually serve as prototypes for new drugs, sapo will become an important pharmacological tool in the study of receptors and the chemical reactions they trigger. Certainly the study of the unique activity of sapo’s bioactive peptides will advance our knowledge of the human body. Additionally, as possibly the first zoologically derived
medicine used by tribals ever investigated for Western medical potential. Sapo will help open the door to a whole new field of investigation.
Unfortunately, while science catches up to the natural medicines of tribal peoples, time is running out. That Pablo was the only man at San Juan still able to draw a response from the dow-kiet! is an indication that most Matses no longer rely on it. And we have no way of knowing how many other medicines the Matses–and others–once used but have abandoned, which might also have been valuable to us.
We do knew that nearly 80 percent of the world’s population relies on natural medicines for its primary health care. Investigations into a small portion of them have already provided us hundreds of drugs, from aspirin and atropine to digitalis and quinine. Fully 70 percent of the antitumor drugs used in the treatment of cancers are derived from traditional medicines as well. Yet our investigations have hardly begun. Obviously, there is much to learn from peoples like the Matses before acculturation strips them of their knowledge. It remains to be seen whether the discoveries that have begun to be made in connection with sapo spark the interest of investigators while there is still time to learn it.

Links of Interest:

Frog secretions and hunting magic in the upper Amazon

The Matsés Indians

Sapo – Phyllomedusa bicolor

_________________
Frog Poison Trial

_________________

High Magick – The Poetry And Images of Ira Cohen


Brussels
Here in the shadow

of the Church of Saint Marie

where the comfort of greatness

costs no more than the price

of a little heart
I wake to the unspoken

in the middle of the night

& take my warning from the

blood’s rumor
A stranger in the field

of sleep crosses the border

of our separation

and I see the fallen light

leap up in the darkness
The war is over

but the casualties continue

as the first snow of winter

disappears-

a confectioner’s dream

dissolved by dread.

-Dec. 5, 1998

(“like looking through butterflies’ wings”- Jimi Hendrix)

For Liza Stelle
Hither Hills, Montauk
Awake in a dark room
in the middle of the night

Too many sleeping bodies

for an insomniac with a fractured

elbow
Today we remember Liza,

bury her ashes under a shade

tree

behind the house

Kasoundra tells me of a game

Liza played with Lakshmi

who was around four years old

at the time

They traded sentences,

Maybe it was supposed to be

insults, & Lakshmi said,

“You are sex & cement!”

I am an aerial in the darkness

awaiting a flash of lightning

The procession still goes on

after reaching the sea where the urn

is washed clean-

The eyrie will be made with notched

wood

Not a single nail will be necessary

Venus is a mirror surrounded

by clouds,

eternity is surrounded by bolts of

lightning

& you appear in negative

freckled with bits of mica

singing a song filled with desire

“Take the scenic route,” you said-

Brightly colored Tibetan flags

surround your tent-

Invisibility surrounds your presence

to us, who have not yet embarked

So long, Rainbow, evanescence

was your middle name!


The Day That Paul Bowles Died

“Having no hope we live in longing”

Eternal you remain
After three days in a coma…

you were my link to the last

millennium,

the 1940′s camel hair overcoat

I could borrow from the closet.

when I asked you if you knew

Rumi,

you replied by asking,

“where is that?”

yet you knew Paul Robeson

& Greta Garbo–

a world of music in your head

I can’t imagine Tangier without

you,

just another old swimming pool

with grass growing in it

the muezzin sings your name

over the Casbah,

amigo, Sahabi–

Haunted by puberty,

almost blind & hard of hearing,

a rush of gardenias sends you

on your way–

So long, pal, a last pipe of kif &

salaam

now you are public property



Ballad of the Gone MacLise
for Angus MacLise died Summer Solstice, June 21, 1979

In the poem one can lay down

the heartline, the harp can bring the tears

muffled by the sound of the drum,

your gamelans cut by the Buddha’s knife

of compassion

Down at the Snowman I heard

them discussing your cremation

A dervish has fallen off the roof

the tall skinny one with the coathanger shoulders

I know the way the pillars of the Vision

trembled before you in the sunlight

You saw the door of Konya open in the slums

of Brooklyn where light shafted thru abandoned

factories in the amphetamine dawn

Now the shades of Mecca are drawn for you,

Poet,

the five Dhyani Buddhas transcend your

deepfreeze

& await your burning w/ cloths of the 5 wisdom colors

Your unsatisfied cravings fly out of the pyre,

the blessings of your friends crackle w/ ghee

the white and black til seeds (sesame) burn in

the untrammeled day & still you are wandering

Angus,

passing thru the Bardo Keyhole –

Listen once more to those Tibetan horns,

they are calling you past Freak Street

where you sold the White Goddess for junk

Forget all your regrets & go now w/ the egret,

put on your robe of sky –
The Vagabond Maverick Poet MacLise

has left these burning halls,

the windtraps are wild with sound

I see your hands beating a Persian rhythm

on suitcases of itinerant dreams,

I hear the droning of Beelzebub’s flies

making clear the ghastly way,

an opera undone by a chorus of 108 Mahasiddhas

singing your discarded lists of cembalums,

symphonic poems, untold futures

You bummed cigarettes from Ram,

borrowed time & change from Krishna

Now that your balance is finally broken

go in peace to the Buddhafields

nodding in to the sound of your tartan

The bane is over –

A new wheel is spinning its song

Tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock

we will meet at the Vidyaswari Ghat

For you it’s free, this one way ticket

which is non transferable

Remember that before you try to come back

May light mantle your shadow &

may you not see what is not to be seen

Farewell, MacLise, thawing on the Riverbank,

I do not expect to meet your like again,

Farewell, brother, the shadow of Don Quixote

lowers its lance & you are overstood.


RANSOM NOTE FOR BRION GYSIN
Inside the Phantom Bubble

a shrunken city is held suspended

by magnetic grapples

in a state of perpetual coma

could he then, by opening spirit

locks,

escape to the very edge of

futility???

Drops of water run down

a timeless vacuum goldenshocks

of white sliding mercury

turning from silk

on the tail

of unkept wishes

Under eyelids there is only the wall

of silence

He flickers thru mysteries

turning snowy diadems to fantasy

w/ gold

This man is forever passing,

he sees earth’s image become shadow,

this man who sleeps,

GLOWING!

All within, we rise.

Showers of stars sparkle everywhere

A procession of strange hunchbacks

& dwarves,

a windless calm

Head thrown back,

eyes upward,

whispered moment of immortality.

OMA’S SONG
He said paint ships

So I painted ships

He said paint mountains

So I painted mountains

He wanted hills

I gave him hills

But they were my ships

My mountains, my hills
– Spoke by Jack Micheline
Buddha sits in the shape

of a bell

He wears the smiles of children

on his fingers

In the kingdom of the eye

we reverence both Sun & Moon

filling their begging bowls

with real rice

Odin gave one eye

to gain back the knowledge

he lost

& he saw that it came pouring

thru his nose

The tears of the hungry ghost

run down the face our dreams

This is the story of his temple

In the eyes of the God

the dog is reflected

In the eyes of the dog

you can see the God,

the face of our civilization

with the plastic money mirror

bouncing flat light off the cross

On the drunken path

he gave it away

The colors, the lakes,

the karma of a goat.

———-
Ira Cohen – The Ira Cohen Akashic Record….
Ira Cohen is an “electronic multimedia shaman” who has travelled with those in the Beat Generation, but who remains a less talked-about, universal visionary and solider–across time, space, dimension, and light. His sashays into other cultures have brought us great and sometimes shocking photographs from the “other side”. His works with mylar photography brought the word home. He has photographed Jimi Hendrix, Herbert Huncke, and myriad of others in strange twisting colors. He has published people like Gregory Corso and Angus MacLise in his rice-paper presses. A complete artistic accomplishment, bibliography, and biography of Ira–as well as articles and artwork–is at Big Bridge Magazine. With permissions, I’ve excerpted a bio here.
He uses phrases like: “Electronic/Multimedia/Shamanism” and Akashic Record and they are cool names if you know what they mean or can get past them. He is not a “Beat” and resents association with the Beats though he has been called “post-beat” which is important for our knowledge. But I see him as being in the heart and belly of the 60′s doing the real work–camera, pen, dope, exploration of mysticism, a multi-faceted phenomenological mystic with real visionary powers. And I want to open people up to him. Bring them through a friendly door and then let them descend into Ira’s world without knowing it is happening, and then finally find themselves in this mystic paradise of life and death, his “revolving door”. And then ask themselves “how in the world could I have not known Ira Cohen?” Or have not known how key he is and was to the understanding of the old and the new, the hallucinatory mind-expanding layers of reality that frighten and amuse us, the panorama of the traveling circus of all physical and non-physical things. Cohen is a true and unquestionable original innovator, friend of Gysin, Burroughs, Bowles, and Charles Henri Ford, the absolute geniuses of transformation, transmigration, and the cosmic joke. And then when the audience walks away they will say, where is that monument to Ira Cohen, the one we built for Rimbaud and Baudelaire, for Burroughs and Valery, for Genet and Gertrude Stein. Ira Cohen must be made accessible! But he has made it absolutely impossible to penetrate the organic construct of his spirit, without running the risk that you will sell him out in the process–or maybe not. Maybe something gentle to begin with, a pale lavender, a dash of blue and fluff of white, then the slow spinning of Gods and Gurus and Shamans and Mythologies, the painted faces, deformed limbs, the broken erections, the flaming corpse of his dearest friend Angus MacLise and then settling everyone down to say: Hey, it’s alright. There is life, laughter, love and humanity in these strange visions, no need to come down from your trip, be cool with it, it is the inside of a beetle’s shell, life in a termite nest, air rushing through the lungs and jaws of a lion, a hoot!
– Michael Rothenberg
1935: Born to deaf parents; learned to spell on his fingers when he was one.
1964: Edited and published GNAOUA in Tangier featuring William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jack Smith, and Irving Rosenthal.
1966-1970: Started the Universal Mutant Repertory Company and became “The Father of Mylar Photography,” making celebrated photographs in bendable mirrors of Jimi Hendrix, Charles Ludlam, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Robert LaVigne, etc.
1966: Brought out The Hashish Cookbook under the name of Panama Rose, and Jilala, an LP record of Moroccan trance music. Wrote The Goblet of Dreams for Playboy Magazine.
1968: Directed and starred in the award winning film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. Appeared in Jack Smith’s Reefers of Technicolor Island. Produced Paradise Now in Amerika, a film of the Living Theater’s historic 1968 American tour.
1970s: Went to Kathmandu and started the Starstreams Poetry Series under the Bardo Matrix imprint, publishing on rice paper the work of Gregory Corso, Charles Henri Ford, Angus MacLise, and Paul Bowles (among others). Also published his own work including Poems From The Cosmic Crypt, Seven Marvels and Gilded Splinters.
1980-1985: Three photos by Ira Cohen (of Jules Deelder, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg) were produced as part of a limited-edition silkscreen series (1980-1993) by Kirke Wilson, and published by Ins & Outs Press, Amsterdam, Holland. Ira and Kirke Wilson later collaborated independently on an Akashic Silkscreen Edition print, a portrait of Charles Henri Ford from Ira’s photograph. Ins & Outs Press also published a series of postcards, which included many of Ira’s photographs, most notably the Bandaged Poets series.
1980 to present: Moved back to New York.
Photographic exhibitions worldwide include: Kathmandu Portfolio, The Bandaged Poet Series, Kings with Straw Mats, Dangerous Visions, Retrospectacle, About Faces (with Carol Beckwith), New York Slings Hots, From The Mylar Chamber (a two-man show at the Lessing Gallery in NYC with Man Ray, a two-man show at Space Time Light New York) with Jack Micheline, etc. Photographs have appeared in The London Sunday Times, Avant Garde, LIFE Magazine, Facade Paris), Nexus, Nieuwe Revue (Amsterdam), Caliban, etc.
Galleries include: Wildfire Gallery (Amsterdam), Photo Boutique (New York), ART (New York), October Gallery (London), Visionary Gallery (New York), Deer Gallery (New York), Susan Cooper Gallery (Woodstock, NY), TAM TAM Gallery (Prague), Caravan of Dreams (Ft. Worth, TX), Varia Theater (Brussels), Nul Gallery (Amsterdam), Merlin Theater (Budapest), TB Institute (Tokyo), Anya Gosseln Gallery (Dublin), Gallery of Photography (Dublin), Plateau (Akashic Weekend, Brussels).
He has photographed many book and record covers including: John McLaughlin’s Devotion and Spirit’s The 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. Recently, he has made photographs for Bill Laswell and Axiom Records, including Blues in the East. A silk-screen edition of a Mylar portrait of Jimi Hendrix, called Reflections, was also used on the recent CD The Ultimate Experience. Also did photos for Pharoah Sanders’ CD Message From Home (Verve) 1996
He has exhibited photographs of Southern Ethiopia and produced The Goblet of Dreams (Marrakesh 1987).
1986-1995: Uncountable poetry readings from Okinawa to San Francisco. He has also been a featured reader in Paris (Paysage du Nord-Ouest, Brussels John Cage Tribute), Prague, Portland (Artquake) and Texas (Mandalay Poetry Festival). He appeared in Dublin with the Burroughs-Gysin Here to Go Show.
Contributing Editor to: Ins & Outs (Amsterdam), Third Rail (Los Angeles), Ignite (New York), Nexus (Dayton, OH), XPress (Bohemia, NY), 15 Minutes (St. Louis), Growing Hand (San Francisco). Edited Jack Smith’s Historical Treasures for Hanuman Books. Co-edited The Great Society with Bobby Richkin. Published Petroleum Petroleum by Gustav Meyrink (Akashic Bulletin #1, 1991).
Books of Poetry: The Stauffenberg Cycle and Other Poems (Holland), From the Divan of Petra Vogt (Rotterdam), On Feet of Gold (Synergetic Press), Media Shamans Ratio 3 (with Gerard Malanga and Angus MacLise, Temple Press, England). Also, a CD of readings: The Majoon Traveler (with music by Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Moroccan trance music, etc., Sub Rosa, Belgium). Kaliban und Andere Gedichte (Altaquito Press, Gottingen).
President of The Akashic Record, a non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and preserving sacred materials, lost scenarios, the hidden meaning of the hidden meaning. Staged at The Kitchen, NY, in collaboration w
ith Sylvie Degiez and Wayne Lopes (Cosmic Legends, Gift of Eagle) an Akashic Event, ORFEO: The $500 Opera, based on the work of Angus MacLise. In May, 1995, he edited an Akashic Issue for Broadshirt, a magazine on a T-shirt designed by Phyllis Segura, with over twenty contributors including Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, Judith Malina, etc.
Contributing Editor and Photographer, NY Black Book 1997-99 NYC. Performed with John Zorn Radical Jewish Culture Group at Lincoln Center December 1995, NY. Collaborated with Nadine Ganase Dance Company on Crossing the Border, a multimedia performance from 1996-99 in Brussels, Paris, Glasgow, Amiens, Hamburg, Hanover, etc. Audio cassette of Crossing the Border, readings by Ira Cohen and music by Philippe Franck (available from Transcultures). Reading at St. Mark’s Poetry Project with Gerard Malanga Feb. 12,1997.
Jilala, CD release of historic 1966 recording with new material (Baraka).
Kings with Straw Mats, video documentary of the Hardwar Kumbh Mela, 1986 Mystic Fire Video, 1998). Online photo gallery (www.mysticfire.com) Ira Cohen Portraits of India.Minbad Sinbad, a book of writings and photos dealing with Morocco published in French (Didier Devillez, Brussels, 1998).
1998: Regular live broadcast bi-weekly on Internet called The Majoon Traveler (www.channelp.com).
1999: Photographic collaboration with Allan Graubard for his poem Fragments from Nomad Days.
October 1999 screening of The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda at the Whitney Museum, NYC.
Release of Angus MacLise CD The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda sound track (Siltbreeze); A Book of Photographs published in 2000 by Kargo (Paris).

And… much more. Check out his site! – Gwyllm

____________________
Ira Cohen – Song To Nothing

All Along The Watch Tower

“Love is the last relay and ultimate outposts of eternity.”

– Dante Gabriel Rossetti


All Along The Watch Tower: I kinda rediscovered what I liked about Dylan’s work over the holidaze. I stumbled on an album that I had downloaded of Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music) The Album is “Dylanesque” and there is something to say on the positive side to have someones songs re-interpreted by another singer/musician. Suffice to say, it has been a bit of a revelry for yours truly. Nothing beats a good vocal, and the emotions that are tied to the human voice. (a big nod to John Gunn on this, “yes John, you are right”) Ferry’s handling of these Dylan songs are recommended if you can find the album… There are some videos from youtube with Mr. Ferry’s take on Dylan.
Turfing Format Changes: I will be going back to a near daily format, but with an abbreviated form, more along the line other more traditional Blogs, with a blow out or 2 during the week. As it is, I have been taking several days getting these out, and I feel like I am losing a bit of edge… So, stay tuned!
On other fronts….
Radio Free EarthRites is back up!

A big thank you to our friend Doug in the Euro Bat Cave for bringing Radio Free EarthRites back on line! Click Here For The Radio!
All Three Channels are up and chugging away, and just awaiting your listening pleasure. It looks like Doug will be setting up Video capacities, and Cell Phone capacities as well for your listening and viewing pleasure!
We are currently uploading new music, some that I have found, and some that Peter up in Olympia turned me onto as well. Hopefully we’ll be doing some shows again, a little more focused activities etc. Raymond Soulard may be moving some of his shows over to Radio Free EarthRites as well, which would be an interesting addition. If you have interviews, music you want featured, or collected aural oddities (and soon visual hopefully) let me know at llwydd at earthrites.org.
If you enjoy the service, and want to contribute something to the kitty, we would be most appreciative!

We got a new bit of poetry from Laura & Dale Pendell ‘Seeding The New Year’, a limited edition from Exiled-In-America Press.

If I may quote:

“most hold it

some fold it

all honor it

speaking to it

through it”
Be sure to check out Dale’s new website as well: http://dalependell.com/ It looks like it is still growing, and so far I like the look of it. You can see some of Laura’s work at this site:http://www.womanrisingbooks.com/

New Year Art Specials!:

The Art Biz(well all biz) has been a bit quiet as of late, therefore we are I am getting ready for my next art show at the end of February, and have great deals going on Prints, Posters, Blotter Art and T-Shirts (adding the shirts tonight and new prints as well. Check out the art!

Gwyllm-Arts Web Site
We also have the new 2009 calendars available at lulu.com: Gwyllm’s New 2009 Calendar! There’s lots of new art on this calendar, as well as Moon Cycles, The Celtic Year, and Birthdates of Entheogenic Notable Personalities!
These calendars are known to grace walls of the Entheogensia throughout the land. Be one of them, don’t be left out! 80)
You’ll also find the first 2 editions of the ‘Invisible College’ Magazine/Journal on sale at this location as well Stay tuned for the next edition.

________
On The Menu:

Bryan Ferry – All Along The WatchTower

The Links

The Maynard James Keenan & Terence McKenna Quote-a-thon!

Folk Tales From India: The Soothsayer’s Son

The Poetry of Dane Zajc

Bryan Ferry – The Times Are A Changin’

Art: – Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Bright Blessings!

Gwyllm

________
Bryan Ferry – All Along The WatchTower

________
The Links:

Fearing The Anarchist of Tarnac….

Support The Tarnac 9!

Tarnac 9 and the State repression to come?

Cabbage-patch revolutionaries? The French ‘grocer terrorists’

_______
The Maynard James Keenan & Terence McKenna Quote-a-thon!
“I think psychedelics play a major part in what we do, but having said that, I feel that if somebody’s going to experiment with those things they really need to educate themselves about them. People just taking the chemicals and diving in without having any kind of preparation about what they’re about to experience tend to have no frame of reference, so they’re missing everything flying by and all these new perspectives. It’s just a waste. They reach a little bit of spiritual enlightenment, but they end up going, ‘Well, now I need that drug to get back there again.’ The trick is to use the drugs once to get there, and maybe spend the next ten years trying to get back there without the drug.”

-Maynard James Keenan
“Something has to change.

Un-deniable dilemma.

Boredom’s not a burden

Anyone should bear.”

-Maynard James Keenan
“It’s not enough.

I need more.

Nothing seems to satisfy.

I don’t want it.

I just need it.

To feel, to breathe, to know I’m alive.”

-Maynard James Keenan”
“Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience – and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that’s what holds the community together.”

-Terence Mckenna
“I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.”

-Terence Mckenna
“What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we’re calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that’s the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.”

-Terence Mckenna

_______________

“I have been here before./ But when or how I cannot tell:/ I know the grass beyond the door,/ The sweet keen smell,/ The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.”

-Dante Rossetti

_______________

Folk Tales From India: The Soothsayer’s Son
A soothsayer when on his deathbed wrote out the horoscope of his second son, whose name was Gangazara, and bequeathed it to him as his only property, leaving the whole of his estate to his eldest son. The second son thought over the horoscope, and said to himself:
“Alas! am I born to this only in the world? The sayings of my father never failed. I have seen them prove true to the last word while he was living; and how has he fixed my horoscope! ‘FROM MY BIRTH POVERTY!’ Nor is that my only fate. ‘FOR TEN YEARS, IMPRISONMENT’–a fate harder than poverty; and what comes next? ‘DEATH ON THE SEA-SHORE’; which means that I must die away from home, far from friends and relatives on a sea coast. Now comes the most curious part of the horoscope, that I am to ‘HAVE SOME HAPPINESS AFTERWARDS!’ What this happiness is, is an enigma to me.”

Thus thought he, and after all the funeral obsequies of his father were over, took leave of his elder brother, and started for Benares. He went by the middle of the Deccan, avoiding both the coasts, and went on journeying and journeying for weeks and months, till at last he reached the Vindhya mountains. While passing that desert he had to journey for a couple of days through a sandy plain, with no signs of life or vegetation. The little store of provision with which he was provided for a couple of days, at last was exhausted. The chombu, which he carried always full, filling it with the sweet water from the flowing rivulet or plenteous tank, he had exhausted in the heat of the desert. There was not a morsel in his hand to eat; nor a drop of water to drink. Turn his eyes wherever he might he found a vast desert, out of which he saw no means of escape. Still he thought within himself, “Surely my father’s prophecy never proved untrue. I must survive this calamity to find my death on some sea-coast.” So thought he, and this thought gave him strength of mind to walk fast and try to find a drop of water somewhere to slake his dry throat.
At last he succeeded; heaven threw in his way a ruined well. He thought he could collect some water if he let down his chombu with the string that he always carried noosed to the neck of it. Accordingly he let it down; it went some way and stopped, and the following words came from the well: “Oh, relieve me! I am the king of tigers, dying here of hunger. For the last three days I have had nothing. Fortune has sent you here. If you assist me now you will find a sure help in me throughout your life. Do not think that I am a beast of prey. When you have become my deliverer I will never touch you. Pray, kindly lift me up.” Gangazara thought: “Shall I take him out or not? If I take him out he may make me the first morsel of his hungry mouth. No; that he will not do. For my father’s prophecy never came untrue. I must die on a sea coast, and not by a tiger.” Thus thinking, he asked the tiger-king to hold tight to the vessel, which he accordingly did, and he lifted him up slowly. The tiger reached the top of the well and felt himself on safe ground. True to his word, he did no harm to Gangazara. On the other hand, he walked round his patron three times, and standing before him, humbly spoke the following words: “My life-giver, my benefactor! I shall never forget this day, when I regained my life through your kind hands. In return for this kind assistance I pledge my oath to stand by you in all calamities. Whenever you are in any difficulty just think of me. I am there with you ready to oblige you by all the means that I can. To tell you briefly how I came in here: Three days ago I was roaming in yonder forest, when I saw a goldsmith passing through it. I chased him. He, finding it impossible to escape my claws, jumped into this well, and is living to this moment in the very bottom of it. I also jumped in, but found myself on the first ledge of the well; he is on the last and fourth ledge. In the second lives a serpent half-famished with hunger. On the third lies a rat, also half-famished, and when you again begin to draw water these may request you first to release them. In the same way the goldsmith also may ask you. I beg you, as your bosom friend, never assist that wretched man, though he is your relation as a human being. Goldsmiths are never to be trusted. You can place more faith in me, a tiger, though I feast sometimes upon men, in a serpent, whose sting makes your blood cold the very next moment, or in a rat, which does a thousand pieces of mischief in your house. But never trust a goldsmith. Do not release him; and if you do, you shall surely repent of it one day or other.” Thus advising, the hungry tiger went away without waiting for an answer.
Gangazara thought several times of the eloquent way in which the tiger spoke, and admired his fluency of speech. But still his thirst was not quenched. So he let down his vessel again, which was now caught hold of by the serpent, who addressed him thus: “Oh, my protector! Lift me up. I am the king of serpents, and the son of Adisesha, who is now pining away in agony for my disappearance. Release me now. I shall ever remain your servant, remember your assistance, and help you throughout life in all possible ways. Oblige me: I am dying.” Gangazara, calling again to mind the “DEATH ON THE SEA-SHORE” of the prophecy lifted him up. He, like the tiger-king, walked round him thrice, and prostrating himself before him spoke thus: “Oh, my life-giver, my father, for so I must call you, as you have given me another birth. I was three days ago basking myself in the morning sun, when I saw a rat running before me. I chased him. He fell into this well. I followed him, but instead of falling on the third storey where he is now lying, I fell into the second. I am going away now to see my father. Whenever you are in any difficulty just think of me. I will be there by your side to assist you by all possible means.” So saying, the Nagaraja glided away in zigzag movements, and was out of sight in a moment.
The poor son of the Soothsayer, who was now almost dying of thirst, let down his vessel for a third time. The rat caught hold of it, and without discussing he lifted up the poor animal at once. But it would not go away without showing its gratitude: “Oh, life of my life! My benefactor! I am the king of rats. Whenever you are in any calamity just think of me. I will come to you, and assist you. My keen ears overheard all that the tiger-king told you about the goldsmith, who is in the fourth storey. It is nothing but a sad truth that goldsmiths ought never to be trusted. Therefore, never assist him as you have done to us all. And if you do, you will suffer for it. I am hungry; let me go for the present.” Thus taking leave of his benefactor, the rat, too, ran away.
Gangazara for a while thought upon the repeated advice given by the three animals about releasing the goldsmith: “What wrong would there be in my assisting him? Why should I not release him also?” So thinking to himself, Gangazara let down the vessel again. The goldsmith caught hold of it, and demanded help. The Soothsayer’s son had no time to lose; he was himself dying of thirst.
Therefore he lifted the goldsmith up, who now began his story. “Stop for a while,” said Gangazara, and after quenching his thirst by letting down his vessel for the fifth time, still fearing that some one might remain in the well and demand his assistance, he listened to the goldsmith, who began as follows: “My dear friend, my protector, what a deal of nonsense these brutes have been talking to you about me; I am glad you have not followed their advice. I am just now dying of hunger. Permit me to go away. My name is Manikkasari. I live in the East main street of Ujjaini, which is twenty kas to the south of this place, and so lies on your way when you return from Benares. Do not forget to come to me and receive my kind remembrances of your assistance, on your way back to your country.” So saying, the goldsmith took his leave, and Gangazara also pursued his way north after the above adventures.
He reached Benares, and lived there for more than ten years, and quite forgot the tiger, serpent, rat, and goldsmith. After ten years of religious life, thoughts of home and of his brother rushed into his mind. “I have secured enough merit now by my religious observances. Let me return home.” Thus thought Gangazara within himself, and very soon he was on his way back to his country. Remembering the prophecy of his father he returned by the same way by which he went to Benares ten years before. While thus retracing his steps he reached the ruined well where he had released the three brute kings and the gold smith. At once the old recollections rushed into his mind, and he thought of the tiger to test his fidelity. Only a moment passed, and the tiger-king came running
before him carrying a large crown in his mouth, the glitter of the diamonds of which for a time outshone even the bright rays of the sun. He dropped the crown at his life-giver’s feet, and, putting aside all his pride, humbled himself like a pet cat to the strokes of his protector, and began in the following words: “My life-giver! How is it that you have forgotten me, your poor servant, for such a long time? I am glad to find that I still occupy a corner in your mind. I can never forget the day when I owed my life to your lotus hands. I have several jewels with me of little value. This crown, being the best of all, I have brought here as a single ornament of great value, which you can carry with you and dispose of in your own country.” Gangazara looked at the crown, examined it over and over, counted and recounted the gems, and thought within himself that he would become the richest of men by separating the diamonds and gold, and selling them in his own country. He took leave of the tiger-king, and after his disappearance thought of the kings of serpents and rats, who came in their turn with their presents, and after the usual greetings and exchange of words took their leave. Gangazara was extremely delighted at the faithfulness with which the brute beasts behaved, and went on his way to the south. While going along he spoke to himself thus: “These beasts have been very faithful in their assistance. Much more, therefore, must Manikkasari be faithful. I do not want anything from him now. If I take this crown with me as it is, it occupies much space in my bundle. It may also excite the curiosity of some robbers on the way. I will go now to Ujjaini on my way. Manikkasari requested me to see him without failure on my return journey. I shall do so, and request him to have the crown melted, the diamonds and gold separated. He must do that kindness at least for me. I shall then roll up these diamonds and gold ball in my rags, and wend my way homewards.” Thus thinking and thinking, he reached Ujjaini. At once he inquired for the house of his goldsmith friend, and found him without difficulty. Manikkasari was extremely delighted to find on his threshold him who ten years before, notwithstanding the advice repeatedly given him by the sage-looking tiger, serpent, and rat, had relieved him from the pit of death. Gangazara at once showed him the crown that he received from the tiger- king, told him how he got it, and requested his kind assistance to separate the gold and diamonds. Manikkasari agreed to do so, and meanwhile asked his friend to rest himself for a while to have his bath and meals; and Gangazara, who was very observant of his religious ceremonies, went direct to the river to bathe.
How came the crown in the jaws of the tiger? The king of Ujjaini had a week before gone with all his hunters on a hunting expedition. All of a sudden the tiger-king started from the wood, seized the king, and vanished.
When the king’s attendants informed the prince about the death of his father he wept and wailed, and gave notice that he would give half of his kingdom to any one who should bring him news about the murderer of his father. The goldsmith knew full well that it was a tiger that killed the king, and not any hunter’s hands, since he had heard from Gangazara how he obtained the crown. Still, he resolved to denounce Gangazara as the king’s murderer, so, hiding the crown under his garments, he flew to the palace. He went before the prince and informed him that the assassin was caught, and placed the crown before him.
The prince took it into his hands, examined it, and at once gave half the kingdom to Manikkasari, and then inquired about the murderer. “He is bathing in the river, and is of such and such appearance,” was the reply. At once four armed soldiers flew to the river, and bound the poor Brahman hand and foot, while he, sitting in meditation, was without any knowledge of the fate that hung over him. They brought Gangazara to the presence of the prince, who turned his face away from the supposed murderer, and asked his soldiers to throw him into a dungeon. In a minute, without knowing the cause, the poor Brahman found himself in the dark dungeon.
It was a dark cellar underground, built with strong stone walls, into which any criminal guilty of a capital offense was ushered to breathe his last there without food and drink. Such was the cellar into which Gangazara was thrust. What were his thoughts when he reached that place? “It is of no use to accuse either the goldsmith or the prince now. We are all the children of fate. We must obey her commands. This is but the first day of my father’s prophecy. So far his statement is true. But how am I going to pass ten years here? Perhaps without anything to sustain life I may drag on my existence for a day or two. But how pass ten years? That cannot be, and I must die. Before death comes let me think of my faithful brute friends.”
So pondered Gangazara in the dark cell underground, and at that moment thought of his three friends. The tiger-king, serpent-king, and rat- king assembled at once with their armies at a garden near the dungeon, and for a while did not know what to do. They held their council, and decided to make an underground passage from the inside of a ruined well to the dungeon. The rat raja issued an order at once to that effect to his army. They, with their teeth, bored the ground a long way to the walls of the prison. After reaching it they found that their teeth could not work on the hard stones. The bandicoots were then specially ordered for the business; they, with their hard teeth, made a small slit in the wall for a rat to pass and re-pass without difficulty. Thus a passage was effected.
The rat raja entered first to condole with his protector on his misfortune, and undertook to supply his protector with provisions. “Whatever sweetmeats or bread are prepared in any house, one and all of you must try to bring whatever you can to our benefactor. Whatever clothes you find hanging in a house, cut down, dip the pieces in water, and bring the wet bits to our benefactor. He will squeeze them and gather water for drink! and the bread and sweetmeats shall form his food.” Having issued these orders, the king of the rats took leave of Gangazara. They, in obedience to their king’s order, continued to supply him with provisions and water.
The snake-king said: “I sincerely condole with you in your calamity; the tiger-king also fully sympathises with you, and wants me to tell you so, as he cannot drag his huge body here as we have done with our small ones. The king of the rats has promised to do his best to provide you with food. We would now do what we can for your release. From this day we shall issue orders to our armies to oppress all the subjects of this kingdom. The deaths by snake-bite and tigers shall increase a hundredfold from this day, and day by day it shall continue to increase till your release. Whenever you hear people near you, you had better bawl out so as to be heard by them: ‘The wretched prince imprisoned me on the false charge of having killed his father, while it was a tiger that killed him. From that day these calamities have broken out in his dominions. If I were released I would save all by my powers of healing poisonous wounds and by incantations.’ Some one may report this to the king, and if he knows it, you will obtain your liberty.” Thus comforting his protector in trouble, he advised him to pluck up courage, and took leave of him. From that day tigers and serpents, acting under the orders of their kings, united in killing as many persons and cattle as possible. Every day people were carried away by tigers or bitten by serpents. Thus passed months and years. Gangazara sat in the dark cellar, without the sun’s light falling upon him, and feasted upon the breadcrumbs and sweetmeats that the rats so kindly supplied him with. These delicacies had completely changed his body into a red, stout, huge, unwieldy
mass of flesh. Thus passed full ten years, as prophesied in the horoscope.
Ten complete years rolled away in close imprisonment. On the last evening of the tenth year one of the serpents got into the bed-chamber of the princess and sucked her life. She breathed her last. She was the only daughter of the king. The king at once sent for all the snake-bite curers. He promised half his kingdom and his daughter’s hand to him who would restore her to life. Now a servant of the king who had several times overheard Gangazara’s cries, reported the matter to him. The king at once ordered the cell to be examined. There was the man sitting in it. How had he managed to live so long in the cell? Some whispered that he must be a divine being. Thus they discussed, while they brought Gangazara to the king.
The king no sooner saw Gangazara than he fell on the ground. He was struck by the majesty and grandeur of his person. His ten years’ imprisonment in the deep cell underground had given a sort of lustre to his body. His hair had first to be cut before his face could be seen. The king begged forgiveness for his former fault, and requested him to revive his daughter.
“Bring me within an hour all the corpses of men and cattle, dying and dead, that remain unburnt or unburied within the range of your dominions; I shall revive them all,” were the only words that Gangazara spoke.
Cartloads of corpses of men and cattle began to come in every minute. Even graves, it is said, were broken open, and corpses buried a day or two before were taken out and sent for their revival. As soon as all were ready, Gangazara took a vessel full of water and sprinkled it over them all, thinking only of his snake-king and tiger-king. All rose up as if from deep slumber, and went to their respective homes. The princess, too, was restored to life. The joy of the king knew no bounds. He cursed the day on which he imprisoned him, blamed himself for having believed the word of a goldsmith, and offered him the hand of his daughter and the whole kingdom, instead of half, as he promised. Gangazara would not accept anything, but asked the king to assemble all his subjects in a wood near the town. “I shall there call in all the tigers and serpents, and give them a general order.”
When the whole town was assembled, just at the dusk of evening, Gangazara sat dumb for a moment, and thought upon the Tiger King and the Serpent King, who came with all their armies. People began to take to their heels at the sight of tigers. Gangazara assured them of safety, and stopped them.
The grey light of the evening, the pumpkin colour of Gangazara, the holy ashes scattered lavishly over his body, the tigers and snakes humbling themselves at his feet, gave him the true majesty of the god Gangazara. For who else by a single word could thus command vast armies of tigers and serpents, said some among the people. “Care not for it; it may be by magic. That is not a great thing. That he revived cartloads of corpses shows him to be surely Gangazara,” said others.

“Why should you, my children, thus trouble these poor subjects of Ujjaini? Reply to me, and henceforth desist from your ravages.” Thus said the Soothsayer’s son, and the following reply came from the king of the tigers: “Why should this base king imprison your honour, believing the mere word of a goldsmith that your honour killed his father? All the hunters told him that his father was carried away by a tiger. I was the messenger of death sent to deal the blow on his neck. I did it, and gave the crown to your honour. The prince makes no inquiry, and at once imprisons your honour. How can we expect justice from such a stupid king as that? Unless he adopt a better standard of justice we will go on with our destruction.”
The king heard, cursed the day on which he believed in the word of a goldsmith, beat his head, tore his hair, wept and wailed for his crime, asked a thousand pardons, and swore to rule in a just way from that day. The serpent-king and tiger-king also promised to observe their oath as long as justice prevailed, and took their leave. The gold-smith fled for his life. He was caught by the soldiers of the king, and was pardoned by the generous Gangazara, whose voice now reigned supreme. All returned to their homes. The king again pressed Gangazara to accept the hand of his daughter. He agreed to do so, not then, but some time afterwards. He wished to go and see his elder brother first, and then to return and marry the princess. The king agreed; and Gangazara left the city that very day on his way home.
It so happened that unwittingly he took a wrong road, and had to pass near a sea-coast. His elder brother was also on his way up to Benares by that very same route. They met and recognised each other, even at a distance. They flew into each other’s arms. Both remained still for a time almost unconscious with joy. The pleasure of Gangazara was so great that he died of joy.
The elder brother was a devout worshipper of Ganesa. That was a Friday, a day very sacred to that god. The elder brother took the corpse to the nearest Ganesa temple and called upon him. The god came, and asked him what he wanted. “My poor brother is dead and gone; and this is his corpse. Kindly keep it in your charge till I finish worshipping you. If I leave it anywhere else the devils may snatch it away when I am absent worshipping you; after finishing the rites I shall burn him.” Thus said the elder brother, and, giving the corpse to the god Ganesa, he went to prepare himself for that deity’s ceremonials. Ganesa made over the corpse to his Ganas, asking them to watch over it carefully. But instead of that they devoured it.
The elder brother, after finishing the puja, demanded his brother’s corpse of the god. The god called his Ganas, who came to the front blinking, and fearing the anger of their master. The god was greatly enraged. The elder brother was very angry. When the corpse was not forthcoming he cuttingly remarked, “Is this, after all, the return for my deep belief in you? You are unable even to return my brother’s corpse.” Ganesa was much ashamed at the remark. So he, by his divine power, gave him a living Gangazara instead of the dead corpse. Thus was the second son of the Soothsayer restored to life.
The brothers had a long talk about each other’s adventures. They both went to Ujjaini, where Gangazara married the princess, and succeeded to the throne of that kingdom. He reigned for a long time, conferring several benefits upon his brother. And so the horoscope was fully fulfilled.
X. NOTES: THE SOOTHSAYER’S SON
Source.–Mrs. Kingscote, Tales of the Sun (p. 11 seq.), from Pandit Natesa Sastri’s Folk-Lore of Southern India, pt. ii., originally from Indian Antiquary. I have considerably condensed and modified the somewhat Babu English of the original.
Parallels.–See Benfey, Pantschatantra, S 71, i. pp. 193- 222, who quotes the Karma Jataka as the ultimate source: it also occurs in the Saccankira Jataka (Fausboll, No. 73), trans. Rev. R. Morris, Folk-Lore Journey iii. 348 seq. The story of the ingratitude of man compared with the gratitude of beasts came early to the West, where it occurs in the Gesta Romanorum, c. 119
It was possibly from an early form of this collection that Richard Coeur de Lion got the story, and used it to rebuke the ingratitude of the English nobles on his return in 1195. Matthew Paris tells the story, sub anno (it is an addition of his to Ralph Disset), Hist. Major, ed. Luard, ii. 413-6, how a lion and a serpent and a Venetian named Vitalis were saved from a pit by a woodman, Vitalis promising him half his fortune, fifty talents. The lion brings his benefactor a leveret, the serpent “gemmam pretiosam,” probably “the precious jewel in his head” to which Shakespeare alludes (As You Like It, ii. 1., cf. Benfey, l.c., p. 214, n.), but Vitalis refuses to have anything to do with him, and altogether repudiates the fifty talents. “Haec referebat Rex Richardus munificus, ingratos redarguendo.”
Remarks.–Apart from the interest of its wide travels, and its appearance in the standard mediaeval History of England by Matthew Paris, the modern story shows the remarkable persistence of folk-tales in the popular mind. Here we have collected from the Hindu peasant of to-day a tale which was probably told before Buddha, over two thousand years ago, and certainly included among the Jatakas before the Christian era. The same thing has occurred with The Tiger, Brahman, and Jackal (No. ix. supra).
_______________
The Poetry of Dane Zajc

Slovenian Poet….

Words Into Rain
Rain, protect me from myself.

Let me not come to myself staggering,

with tattered skin.

With curses under my swollen

tongue, lies,

honeyed sweetnesses.

With smiles of my head’s journey,

promises, false

hopes. Rain, do not.
Do not let me near myself.

Not the trodden one. Not the harrowed one.

Not the grabbing one, rain.
You are thoughtfulness. Immuring me

into the quietude of drops. Drops.

Flooding pathways with water.

Making crossings impassable.

Grab him we talk about,

hold him under water, don’t let go.

Crush his soul at the Škednjovec cathedral.

Let him die. Let water inundate his eyes.

A torrent wash his words away.

Let birds and mice scatter him around.

Keep him away from me with a distance of life.

The cornerstone between us – death.
Rain, keep me in the water.

Cover me with water.

Keep me from speaking.

Lock me out of myself, rain.


Down Down
when I think about all your hopes

etched in your footsteps

I follow them

the footsteps that suddenly

sink into fog and mud

and damp cold
when I expect you and you come

and sit quietly by me

and I ask Is everything, everything gone

In a flash, you say, in an insane

instant it went down down

it vanished

I think of you coming with legs

corroded from a traitorous journey

and I see no reflection of your eyes

and I watch the heavy clouds falling

over the sharp-edged cliffs

and hear the spruce tips piercing

the bellies of a dark wind.


Gold Hats
brush my lips gently

so they don’t burst open

swollen with desire
(gold hats smell in the quiet sun

smell sharp of semen

of a drop that fell

into the scent of a girl’s body)
brush my nipples

with the tip of your tongue only

my impatient ardent

nipples will burst into flames

if kindled by your lips
(gold hats hide dark lust

in the deep throats

the flowery crowns bend toward the landscape beyond)
brush with tentacles

at where you are at where I am

until the head inside is ablaze

and you quiver give taste

and I press you crush you

drink you drink
(gold hats bend their

crowned heads

the scent of semen mixes with a sweet drop

the smell of a girl

in the lonesome afternoon)


Nothing
She vanishes in the clouds

And is gone

In clear nights she swallows stars of the

Big Dipper

With a sharp edge

And I know that beyond the edge there is a

Fathomless space
Nothing

—-

Dane Zajc

(Slovenia, 1929-2005)

Dane Zajc worked as a librarian and editor for several literary magazines. He made his debut in 1958 with a collection of neo-expressionist poetry. He went on to publish nine more volumes of poetry, but also made his name as a writer of lyrical drama.

Dane Zajc was President of the Slovene Writers’ Association from 1991 until 1995. He received several literary awards, including the prestigious Preseren Prize.
In his poetry Zajc communicates his experience of the world as an absurd and threatening place. His landscapes are empty, silent, blank, destroyed by man and inhabited by animals only. He shows us man’s existential situation, using symbols and archaic, biblical, often grotesque images. Zajc’s poetry is lyrical; his language concise and powerful. Silences seem as important and significant as words. A frequent theme in Zajc’s poems is the ineffectiveness of language and communication. The poet’s relation to his words is that of God to his creatures: they are ‘earth’, real and concrete, as well as unruly and rebellious. Zajc’s wording is clear; yet his words often seem to have detached themselves from their original meanings. The essence of things remains a mystery, although the poet tries to approach it in words as well as he can. Zajc’s later poems show a stronger tendency towards the dramatic, with less surreal, fantastic elements. His language has become more sober and austere, lending his poetry a prayer-like, incantatory quality.

_______________
Bryan Ferry – The Times Are A Changin’

_______________
“A sonnet is a moment’s monument, -/ Memorial from the Soul’s eternity/ To one dead deathless hour.”

– Dante Gabriel Rossetti quote

Hogmanay!

Here is to the Beauty, Here is to the Madness… Here is to good company, a glass of Absinthe and to sweet Poesy….
Here is to Women, in all their divine beauty, Here is to our Children… Here is to a future that we can all embrace…
Here is to the Living, and Here is to the Dead…
I tip my glass to the passing of the old, and the coming of the new, Here is to each and every one of you!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

Gates Of Eden
Of war and peace the truth just twists

Its curfew gull just glides

Upon four-legged forest clouds

The cowboy angel rides

With his candle lit into the sun

Though its glow is waxed in black

All except when ‘neath the trees of Eden
The lamppost stands with folded arms

Its iron claws attached

To curbs ‘neath holes where babies wail

Though it shadows metal badge

All and all can only fall

With a crashing but meaningless blow

No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden
The savage soldier sticks his head in sand

And then complains

Unto the shoeless hunter who’s gone deaf

But still remains

Upon the beach where hound dogs bay

At ships with tattooed sails

Heading for the Gates of Eden
With a time-rusted compass blade

Aladdin and his lamp

Sits with Utopian hermit monks

Side saddle on the Golden Calf

And on their promises of paradise

You will not hear a laugh

All except inside the Gates of Eden
Relationships of ownership

They whisper in the wings

To those condemned to act accordingly

And wait for succeeding kings

And I try to harmonize with songs

The lonesome sparrow sings

There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden
The motorcycle black madonna

Two-wheeled gypsy queen

And her silver-studded phantom cause

The gray flannel dwarf to scream

As he weeps to wicked birds of prey

Who pick up on his bread crumb sins

And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
The kingdoms of Experience

In the precious wind they rot

While paupers change possessions

Each one wishing for what the other has got

And the princess and the prince

Discuss what’s real and what is not

It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden
The foreign sun, it squints upon

A bed that is never mine

As friends and other strangers

From their fates try to resign

Leaving men wholly, totally free

To do anything they wish to do but die

And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden
At dawn my lover comes to me

And tells me of her dreams

With no attempts to shovel the glimpse

Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words

But these to tell what’s true

And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

-Robert Zimmerman

Gates of Eden – Bryan Ferry

___________

From The Carmina Gadelica
Hogmanay Carol
I am now come to your country,

To renew to you the Hogmanay,

I need not tell you of it,

It was in the time of our forefathers.
I ascend by the door lintel,

I descend by the doorstep,

I will sing my song becomingly,

Mannerly, slowly, mindfully.
The Hogmanay skin is in my pocket,

Great will be the smoke from it presently.
The house-man will get it in his hand,

He will place its nose in the fire;

He will go sunwards round the babes,

And for seven verities round the housewife.
The housewife it is she who deserves it,

The hand to dispense to us the Hogmanay,

A small gift of the bloom of summer,

Much I wish it with the bread.
Give it to us if it be possible,

If you may not, do not detain us;

I am the servant of God’s Son at the door,

Arise thyself and open to me.
Hogmanay Of The Sack
CALLUINEN HO!–This rune is still repeated in the Isles. Rarely, however, do two persons recite it alike. This renders it difficult to decide the right form of the words.
The walls of the old houses in the West are very thick–from five to eight feet. There are no gables, the walls being of uniform height throughout. The roof of the house being raised from the inner edge of the wall, a broad terrace is left on the outside. Two or three stones project from the wall at the door, forming steps. On these the inmates ascend for purposes of thatching and securing the roof in time of storm.
The ‘gillean Callaig’ carollers or Hogmanay lads perambulate the townland at night. One man is enveloped in the hard hide of a bull with the horns and hoofs still attached. When the men come to a house they ascend the wall and run round sunwise, the man in the hide shaking the horns and hoofs, and the other men striking the hard hide with sticks. The appearance of the man in the hide is gruesome, while the din made is terrific. Having descended and recited their runes at the door, the Hogmanay men are admitted and treated to the best in the house. The performance seems to be symbolic, but of what it is not easy to say, unless of laying an evil spirit. That the rite is heathen and ancient is evident.

Hogmanay of the sack,

Hogmanay of the sack,

Strike the hide,

Strike the hide.

Hogmanay of the sack,

Hogmanay of the sack,

Beat the skin,

Beat the skin.

Hogmanay of the sack,

Hogmanay of the sack,

Down with it! up with it!

Strike the hide.

Hogmanay of the sack,

Hogmanay of the sack,

Down with it! up with it!

Beat the skin.

Hogmanay of the sack,

Hogmanay of the sack.
Hogmanay
We are come to the door,

To see if we be the better of our visit,

To tell the generous women of the townland

That to-morrow is Calendae Day.

(hould the guisers be inhospitably treated, they file round the fire withershins and walk out, and raise a cairn in or near the door, called ‘carnan mollachd,’ cairn of malison, ‘carnan cronachd,’ scaith cairn)
The malison of God and of Hogmanay be on you,

And the scath of the plaintive buzzard,

Of the hen-harrier, of the raven, of the eagle,

And the scath of the sneaking fox.
The scath of the dog and of the cat be on you,

Of the boar, of the badger, and of the ‘brugha,’

Of the hipped bear and of the wild wolf,

And the scath of the foul foumart.
The Song Of Hogmanay
Now since we came to the country

To renew to you the Hogmanay,

Time will not allow us to explain,

It has been since the age of our fathers.
Ascending the wall of the house,

Descending at the door,

My carol to say modestly,

As becomes me at the Hogmanay.
The Hogmanay skin is in my pocket,

Great the fume that will come from that;

No one who shall inhale its odour,

But shall be for ever from it healthy.
The house-man will get it in his grasp,

He will put its point in the fire;

He will go sunwise round the children,

And very specially round the goodwife.
The wife will get it, she it is who deserves it,

The hand to distribute the Hogmanay,

The hand to bestow upon us cheese and butter,

The hand without niggardliness, without meanness.
Since drought has come upon the land,

And that we do not expect rarity,

A little of the substance of the summer,

Would we desire with the bread.
If that we are not to have it,

If thou mayest, do not detain us;

I am the servant of God’s Son on Hogmanay,

Arise thyself and open the door.

Hogmanay here! Hogmanay here!