How shall the nameless be defined
A thousand times my Guru I asked:
How shall the Nameless be defined?
I asked and asked but all in vain.
The Nameless Unknown, it seems to me,
Is the source of the something that we see.
—
Think On
Think within thee, till the light of day
Be as the darkness of very night—
Till the self-illuminated Way
Show thee the Darkness to be but Light.
Then shall the bounds of the solid Earth
Mingle with the liquid of the Sky:
Then shalt thou gain freedom from Re-birth,
Merging into Shiv the Self on high.
When the nectar of the waning Moon
Riseth to feed the awaiting Sun,
What is it aught but an empty boon?
Booty that the maw of Rah hath won.
Yet shall Self-illuminated Thought
Show another picture, late or soon:—
Ignorance blind—as a demon caught;
Rah himself as booty of the Moon.
There be that to know and to be known.
There be knowledge, too, to know them by.
By the Light in thee shall both be shown,
Thinking and thinking, if thou but try.
Rah it was came booty for the Moon;
Now shall the Moon be booty of thine.
Think on, and both shall a void soon:
Only shall remain the Thought Divine.
– Lalla Ded
—
The last week we have been on a bit of a walk-about, so I have not had a real chance to work on Turfing… Here we have it for this Saturday.
Sitting in bank of clouds, on the north rim at Ashford-Oaks.
Hope You Enjoy!
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
D.T. Suzuki Quotes
Rena Jones – Vital
Three Tales From Lord Dunsany
The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova
Rena Jones: The Passing Storm
Coda… Lalla Ded
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D. T. Suzuki Quotes:
“When traveling is made too easy and comfortable, its spiritual meaning is lost. This may be called sentimentalism, but a certain sense of loneliness engendered by traveling leads one to reflect upon the meaning of life, for life is after all a traveling from one unknown to another unknown.”
“The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.”
“The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one’s hum drum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.”
“Zen opens a man’s eyes to the greatest mystery as it is daily and hourly performed; it enlarges the heart to embrace eternity of time and infinity of space in its every palpitation; it makes us live in the world as if walking in the garden of Eden.”
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Rena Jones – Vital
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Three Tales From Lord Dunsany:
The Worm & The Angel
As he crawled from the tombs of the fallen a worm met with an angel.
And together they looked upon the kings and kingdoms, and youths and maidens and the cities of men. They saw the old men heavy in their chairs and heard the children singing in the fields. They saw far wars and warriors and walled towns, wisdom and wickedness, and the pomp of kings, and the people of all the lands that the sunlight knew.
And the worm spake to the angel saying: “Behold my food.”
“Be dakeon para Thina poluphloisboio Thalassaes,” murmured the angel, for they walked by the sea, “and can you destroy that too?”
And the worm paled in his anger to a greyness ill to behold, for for three thousand years he had tried to destroy that line and still its melody was ringing in his head.
______
A Moral Little Tale
There was once an earnest Puritan who held it wrong to dance. And for his principles he labored hard, his was a zealous life. And there loved him all of those who hated the dance; and those that loved the dance respected him too; they said “He is a pure, good man and acts according to his lights.”
He did much to discourage dancing and helped to close several Sunday entertainments. Some kinds of poetry, he said, he liked, but not the fanciful kind as that might corrupt the thoughts of the very young. He always dressed in black.
He was quite interested in morality and was quite sincere and there grew to be much respect on Earth for his honest face and his flowing pure-white beard.
One night the Devil appeared unto him in a dream and said “Well done.”
“Avaunt,” said that earnest man.
“No, no, friend,” said the Devil.
“Dare not to call me ‘friend,’” he answered bravely.
“Come, come, friend,” said the Devil. “Have you not put apart the couples that would dance? Have you not checked their laughter and their accursed mirth? Have you not worn my livery of black? O friend, friend, you do not know what a detestable thing it is to sit in hell and hear people being happy, and singing in theatres and singing in the fields, and whispering after dances under the moon,” and he fell to cursing fearfully.
“It is you,” said the Puritan, “that put into their hearts the evil desire to dance; and black is God’s own livery, not yours.”
And the Devil laughed contemptuously and spoke.
“He only made the silly colors,” he said, “and useless dawns on hill-slopes facing South, and butterflies flapping along them as soon as the sun rose high, and foolish maidens coming out to dance, and the warm mad West wind, and worst of all that pernicious influence Love.”
And when the Devil said that God made Love that earnest man sat up in bed and shouted “Blasphemy! Blasphemy!”
“It’s true,” said the Devil. “It isn’t I that send the village fools muttering and whispering two by two in the woods when the harvest moon is high, it’s as much as I can bear even to see them dancing.”
“Then,” said the man, “I have mistaken right for wrong; but as soon as I wake I will fight you yet.”
“O, no you don’t,” said the Devil. “You don’t wake up out of this sleep.”
And somewhere far away Hell’s black steel doors were opened, and arm in arm those two were drawn within, and the doors shut behind them and still they went arm in arm, trudging further and further into the deeps of Hell, and it was that Puritan’s punishment to know that those that he cared for on Earth would do evil as he had done.
____
The Giant Poppy
I dreamt that I went back to the hills I knew, whence on a clear day you can see the walls of Ilion and the plains of Roncesvalles. There used to be woods along the tops of those hills with clearings in them where the moonlight fell, and there when no one watched the fairies danced.
But there were no woods when I went back, no fairies nor distant glimpse of Ilion or plains of Roncesvalles, only one giant poppy waved in the wind, and as it waved it hummed “Remember not.” And by its oak-like stem a poet sat, dressed like a shepherd and playing an ancient tune softly upon a pipe. I asked him if the fairies had passed that way or anything olden.
He said: “The poppy has grown apace and is killing gods and fairies. Its fumes are suffocating the world, and its roots drain it of its beautiful strength.” And I asked him why he sat on the hills I knew, playing an olden tune.
And he answered: “Because the tune is bad for the poppy, which would otherwise grow more swiftly; and because if the brotherhood of which I am one were to cease to pipe on the hills men would stray over the world and be lost or come to terrible ends. We think we have saved Agamemnon.”
Then he fell to piping again that olden tune, while the wind among the poppy’s sleepy petals murmured “Remember not. Remember not.”
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The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova
Here Is My Gift
Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you’re gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
Muse
When, in the night, I wait for her, impatient,
Life seems to me, as hanging by a thread.
What just means liberty, or youth, or approbation,
When compared with the gentle piper’s tread?
And she came in, threw out the mantle’s edges,
Declined to me with a sincere heed.
I say to her, “Did you dictate the Pages
Of Hell to Dante?” She answers, “Yes, I did.”
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Here were all drunkards and whores,
Here were all drunkards and whores,
joylessly stuck together!
On the walls, birds and flowers
pine for the clouds and air.
The smoke from your black pipe
makes strange vapours rise.
The skirt I wear is tight,
revealing my slim thighs
Windows tightly closed:
whos there, frost or thunder?
Your eyes, are they those
of some cautious cat, I wonder?
O, my heart how you yearn!
Is it for death you wait?
Or that girl, dancing there,
for hell to be her sure fate?
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Always so many pleas from a lover!
Always so many pleas from a lover!
None when they fall out of love.
Im so glad it plunges, the river,
beneath colourless ice above.
And Im to stand God help me!
on the surface, fissured, gleaming,
with my letters, for posterity
to judge, in your safe keeping,
so that clearly, and distinctly,
they can see you, brave and wise,
in your glorious biography,
no gaps revealed to the eye?
To drink of Earths too sweet,
and Loves nets are too fine.
But may my name be seen
in the students books in time,
and, let them smile, secretly,
on reading my sad story
if I cant have love, if I cant have peace,
grant me a bitter glory.
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Rena Jones: The Passing Storm
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Coda….
Why do you dote
Why do you dote upon someone, my Soul,
who is not your true love ?
Why have you taken the false for the true?
Why can’t you understand, why can’t you know?
It is ignorance that binds you to the false,
To the ever-recurring wheel of birth and death,
this coming and going.
For ever we came
For ever we come, for ever we go;
For ever, day and night, we are on the move.
Whence we come, thither we go,
For ever in the round of birth and death,
From nothingness to nothingness.
But sure, a mystery here abides,
A Something is there for us to know.
(It cannot all be meaningless).
– Lalla Ded
