Author: Gwyllm

For the beautry of the day…

the rising of the Solstice Sun,

in perfect conjunction

in perfect bliss,

The young ones join

the long dance,

The older ones smile

sweet memories,

Here it is: The biggest dose of Light

On this day – Solstice Bright….

Join us tonight (Wednesday the 21st) to dance the Solstice down at the Oregon Zoo with Mariam et Amadou… A good time, a wild time promised for all.

There is no better way to celebrate the ripeness of the Earth than to dance the Sun into the Western Lands, there is no better way to connect to the pulse of life than raising your voice in song and your body in the Sacred Dance, the long dance…

Join us, we will be there with friends, lovers, kids, food and very, very good times…

Big Love, To You All….

Gwyllm

——

On The Menu:

The Summer Solstice (From the BBC)

The Poetry of the Solstice….

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(From the BBC)

Summer Solstice

21st June (sometimes 20th)

Standing stones on a summer’s day

As the sun spirals its longest dance,

Cleanse us

As nature shows bounty and fertility

Bless us

Let all things live with loving intent

And to fulfill their truest destiny

Taken from a Wiccan blessing for Summer

Solstice, Midsummer or Litha means a stopping or standing still of the sun. It is the longest day of the year and the time when the sun is at its maximum elevation.

This date has had spiritual significance for thousands of years as humans have been amazed by the great power of the sun. The Celts celebrated with bonfires that would add to the sun’s energy, Christians placed the feast of St John the Baptist towards the end of June and it is also the festival of Li, the Chinese Goddess of light.

Like other religious groups, Pagans are in awe of the incredible strength of the sun and the divine powers that create life. For Pagans this spoke in the Wheel of the Year is a significant point. The Goddess took over the earth from the horned God at the beginning of spring and she is now at the height of her power and fertility. For some Pagans the Summer Solstice marks the marriage of the God and Goddess and see their union as the force that creates the harvest’s fruits.

This is a time to celebrate growth and life but for Pagans, who see balance in the world and are deeply aware of the ongoing shifting of the seasons it is also time to acknowledge that the sun will now begin to decline once more towards winter.

When celebrating midsummer Pagans draw on diverse traditions. In England thousands of Pagans and non-Pagans go to places of ancient religious sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury to see the sun rising on the first morning of summer. Many more Pagans hold small ceremonies in open spaces, everywhere from gardens to woodlands.

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The Poetry of the Solstice….

The Haymaker’s Song

In the merry month of June,

In the prime time of the year;

Down in yonder meadows

There runs a river clear;

And many a little fish

Doth in that river play;

And many a lad, and many a lass,

Go abroad a-making hay

And when the bright day faded,

And the sun was going down,

There was a merry piper

Approached from the town;

He pulled out his pipe and tabor,

So sweetly he did play,

Which made all lay down their rakes,

And leave off making hay.

Then joining in a dance

They jig it o’er the green;

Though tired with their labour

No one less was seen.

But sporting like some fairies,

Their dance they did pursue,

In leading up, and casting off,

Till morning was in view.

——–

The sun is shining

The sun is shining –

The sun is shining

That is the Magic.

The flowers are growing-

the roots are stirring.

That is the Magic.

Being alive is the Magic

being strong is the Magic.

The Magic is in me-

it is in me.

It’s in every one of us.

From the Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

——-

The Fairy Ring

by George Mason and John Earsden

Let us in a lover’s round

Circle all this hallowed ground;

Softly, softly trip and go,

the light-foot Fairies jet it so.

Forward then and back again,

Here and there and everywhere,

Winding to and fro,

Skipping high and louting low;

And, like lovers, hand in hand,

March around and make a stand.

——-

I Stood Against the Window

By Rose Fyleman

I stood against the window

And I loked between the bars,

And there were strings of fairies

Hanging from the stars;

Everywhere and everywhere

In shining, swinging chains;

The air ws full of shimmering,

Like sunlight when it rains.

They kept on swinging, swinging,

They flung themselves so high

They caught upon the pointed moon

And hung across the sky.

And when I woke next morning,

There still were crowds and crowds

In beautiful bright bunches

All sleeping on the clouds

——-

MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

SHAKESPERE

Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;

Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;

Feed him with apricots and dewberries,

With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;

The honey-bags steal from the huble-bees,

And for night-tapers crop their waxen things.

And light them at the fiery glow-worm eyes,

To have my love to bed and to arise;

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies

To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes:

Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies

(Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 3 Scene 1)

——

PUCK

How now spirit! Whither wander you?

Over hill, over dale

Through bush, through brier,

Over park, over pale

Thorough flood, thorough fire

I do wander everywhere

Swifter than the moone’s sphere:

And I serve the fairy queen.

To dew her orbs upon the green

The cowslips tall her pensioners be:

In their gold coats spots you see

Those be rubies fairy favours

In those freckles live their savours:

I must go seek some dewdrops here

And hang a peaarl in every cowslip’s ear…

(Midsummer Night’s Dream)

——-

Through the Looking Glass 1872

Lewis Carroll

Child of pure, unclouded brow

And dreaming eyes of wonder!

Though time be fleet and I and thou

Are half a life asunder,

Thy loving smile will surely hail

The love-gift of a fairy tale.

——-

QUEEN MAB

P. B. SHELLEY

I am the Fairy MAB: to me ‘tis given

The wonders of the human world to keep:

The secrets of the immeasurable past,

In the unfailing consciences of men,

Those stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find:

The future, form the causes which arise

In each event, I gather: not the sting

Which retributive memory implants

In the hard bosom of the selfish man;

Nor that ecstatic and exulting throb

Which virtue’s votary feels when he sums up

The thoughts and actions of a well-spend day,

Are unforeseen, unregistered by me:

And it is yet permitted me, to rent

The veil of mortal frailty, that the spirit

Clothed in its changeless purity, may know

How soonest to accomplish the great end

For which it hath its being, and may taste

That peace, which in the end all life will share

——–

THE FAIRIES

ROBERT HERRICK

If ye will with Mab find grace,

Set each Platter in his place:

Rake the Fier up, and get

Water in, ere Sun be set.

Wash your Pails, and cleanse your Dairies;

Sluts are loathsome to the Fairies:

Sweep your house: Who doth not so,

Mab will pinch her by the toe.

Some Tickets Still on Sale for She Shamans & Magic Mamas Conference!

Though we cannot attend due to business responsibilities, I suggest that if you have the time, that you support this great and unique Conference.

I believe some tickets as still available, please contact the Conference Folks at the above Link!

On the Menu:

The Dance Upon The Lawn

Baal’s Fire…St. Johns’ Eve

Poetry: People of the Mounds…

A short one, off to work…

Getting ready for the Solstice. If you are in Northern California, or in Southern Oregon this coming weekend, may I suggest the above mentioned event?

We are off to the Oregon Zoo on Solstice for Mariam et Amadou… you can hear them on EarthRites Radio…..

Talk Later,

G

____________

THE DANCE UPON THE LAWN.

I sing the days, the merry days-

To English hearts most dear-

When good old English customs ruled,

And reigned throughout the year;

When merry lads and lasses met,

And daily toil was o’er,

And grey-haired fathers watched their mirth

Beside the cottage door.

Oh, there was joy in Britain’s isle,

And peace from night till morn-

When our sturdy peasants’ pastime was

The dance upon the lawn!

Oh, those were days, were happy days

For England’s peasant band,

When pipe and tabor’s merry sounds

Were heard throughout the land!

When May-pole, deck’d with ribbons gay,

Stood forth in village green,

And harmless mirth and jollity

Beneath its boughs were seen.

We join’d the happy cottar’s throng,

Nor lad nor lass would scorn

To trip a measure gaily in

The dance upon the lawn.

But though these days, these merry days,

Long since have passed away-

There still is plenty in the land,

Then, wherefore not be gay?

If summer’s glorious sunshine will

The fruits and flowers restore,

I know not he who would not be

As happy as of yore.

Then, care away, we’ll still be gay,

We’ll laugh our foes to scorn;

And once again we’ll sport it in

The dance upon the lawn.

____________

BAAL FIRE–ST. JOHN’S EVE

Readers of the Old Testament are well acquainted with the condemnation passed upon the worship of Baal, but some of them may be surprised to know that there is a custom in Northumberland of lighting Baal fires on St. John’s Eve, which is a relic of ancient Baal worship. The identity between the celebration of the pagan rite of old and of the modern remainder is too obvious to be doubted. The ancients passed their children through the fire, and the villagers at Whalton used to jump over and through the flames. Moreover, as will be seen from the historical references to be given shortly, there is further ground provided for establishing a genuine fire worship. Of the Whalton custom a modern writer says:–” As midsummer approaches, much wood is marked out for the bonfire, sometimes with the consent of local farmers. When this has been cut, it is brought into the village with a certain amount of formality. On the evening of the 4th July a cart is borrowed and loaded with branches of faggots, some of the men get into the shafts, more are hooked on by means of long ropes, and then, with a good deal of shouting and horn blowing, the lumbersome vehicle is run down into the village.” The same site for the fire is chosen year after year, and it has never been changed. The village turns out en masse to see the bonfire built. The children join hands and dance round the stack of wood and branches until they are tired; youths and maidens also dance a little distance away.

At dark a cry is raised: “Light her!” Soon the whole village is illuminated by a huge blaze, and the Baal fire is at its height. No ceremony follows, but tradition says people used to jump over the fire and through it, a tradition which is well founded, for we have strong evidence of such practices in Scotland and Ireland.

In Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (1794), the minister of Callander, in Perthshire, speaking of “Peculiar Customs,” says:–”The people of this district have two customs, which are fast wearing out, not only here but all over the Highlands, and therefore ought to be taken notice of while they remain. Upon the first day of May, which is called Beltan or Bal-tein-day, all the boys in a township or hamlet meet in the moors. They cut a table in the green sod, of a round figure, by casting a trench in the ground of such circumference as to hold the whole company. They kindle a fire, and dress a repast of eggs and milk in the consistence of a custard. They knead a cake of oatmeal, which is toasted at the embers against a stone. After the custard is eaten up, they divide the cake into so many portions, as similar as possible to one another in size and shape, as there are persons in the company. They daub one of these portions all over with charcoal until it be perfectly black. They put all the bits of the cake into a bonnet. Every one, blindfold, draws out a portion. He who holds the bonnet is entitled to the last bit. Whoever draws the black bit is the devoted person who is to be sacrificed to Baal, whose favour they moan to implore, in rendering the year productive of the sustenance of man and beast. There is little doubt of these inhuman sacrifices having been once offered in this country as well as in the East, although they now pass from the act of sacrificing, and only compel the devoted person to leap three times through the flames; with which the ceremonies of this festival are closed.”

In the same work, the minister of Logierait, in Perthshire, says:–”On the 1st of May, O. S., a festival called Beltan is annually held here. It is chiefly celebrated by the cowherds, who assemble by scores in the fields to dress a dinner for themselves of boiled milk and eggs. These dishes they eat with a sort of cakes baked for the occasion, and having small lumps, in the form of nipples, raised all over the surface. The cake might, perhaps, be an offering to some deity in the days of Druidism.”

Pennant’s account in his Tour in Scotland (1771) of this rural sacrifice is more minute. He tells us that, on the 1st of May, in the Highlands of Scotland, the herdsmen of every village hold their Bel-tein.

“They cut a square trench in the ground, leaving the turf in the middle; on that they make a fire of wood, on which they dress a large caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal, and milk, and bring, besides the ingredients of the caudle, plenty of beer and whisky; for each of the company must contribute something. The rites begin with spilling some of the caudle on the ground, by way of libation; on that, every one takes a cake of oatmeal, upon which are raised nine square knobs, each dedicated to some particular being, the supposed preserver of their flocks and herds, or to some particular animal, the real destroyer of them. Each person then turns his face to the fire, breaks off a knob, and, flinging it over his shoulders, says: ‘This I give to thee, preserve thou my horses;’ ‘This to thee, preserve thou my sheep;’ and so on. After that they use the same ceremony to the noxious animals. ‘This I give to thee, O fox! spare thou my lambs;’ ‘this to thee, O hooded crow;’ ‘this to thee, eagle!’ When the ceremony is over, they dine on the caudle; and after the feast is finished, what is left is hid by two persons deputed for that purpose; but on the next Sunday they reassemble and finish the reliques of the first entertainment.” “That the Caledonians paid a superstitious respect to the sun, as was the practice among other nations, is evident,” says Ellis, “not only by the sacrifice at Baltein but upon many other occasions. When a Highlander goes to bathe, or to drink waters out of a consecrated fountain, he must always approach by going round the place from east to west on the south side in imitation of the apparent diurnal motion of the sun. This is called in Gaelic going round the right or the lucky way. And if a person’s meat or drink were to affect the wind-pipe, or come against his breath, they instantly cry out disheal, which is an ejaculation praying that it may go the right way.”

The Baal worship is even more pronounced in Irish history. In The Survey of the South of Ireland we read something similar to what has already been quoted in a note from The Statistical Account of Scotland. “The sun” (says the writer) “was propitiated here by sacrifices of fire: one was on the 1st of May, for a blessing on the seed sown. The 1st of May is called in Irish language La Beal-tine, that is, the day of Beal’s fire. Vossius says it is well known that Apollo was called Belinus, and for this he quotes Herodian, and an inscription at Aquileia, Apollini Beline. The Gods of Tyre were Baal, Ashtaroth, and all the Host of Heaven, as we learn from the frequent rebukes given to the backsliding Jews for following after Sidonian idols; and the Phenician Baal, or Baalam, like the Irish Beal, or Bealin, denotes the sun, as Ashtaroth does the moon.”

In another place the same author says:–”It is not strange that many Druid remains should still exist; but it is a little extraordinary that some of their customs should still be practised. They annually renew the sacrifices that used to be offered to Apollo, without knowing it. On Midsummer’s Eve, every eminence, near which is a habitation, blazes with Bonfires–and round these they carry numerous torches, shouting and dancing, which affords a beautiful sight, and at the same time confirms the observation of Scaliger:–’En Irelande ils sont quasi tous papistes, mais c’est PapautŽ meslee de Paganisme, comme partout.’ Though historians had not given us the mythology of the pagan Irish, and though they had not told us expressly that they worshipped Beal, or Bealin, and that this Beal was the Sun and their chief God, it might nevertheless be investigated from this custom, which the lapse of so many centuries has not been able to wear away. . . I have, however, heard it lamented that the alteration of the style had spoiled these exhibitions; for the Roman Catholics light their Fires by the new style, as the correction originated from a pope; and for that very same reason the Protestants adhere to the old.”

I find the following, much to our purpose, in The Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1795:–”The Irish have ever been worshippers of Fire and of Baal, and are so to this day. This is owing to the Roman Catholics, who have artfully yielded to the superstitions of the natives, in order to gain and keep up an establishment, grafting Christianity upon Pagan rites. The chief festival in honour of the Sun and Fire is upon the 21st of June, when the sun arrives at the summer solstice, or rather begins its retrogade motion. I was so fortunate in the summer of 1782 as to have my curiosity gratified by a sight of this ceremony to a very great extent of country. At the house where I was entertained, it was told me that we should see at midnight the most singular sight in Ireland, which was the lighting of Fires in honour of the Sun. Accordingly, exactly at midnight, the Fires began to appear; and taking the advantage of going up to the leads of the house, which had a widely extended view, I saw on a radius of thirty miles, all around, the Fires burning on every eminence which the country afforded. I had a farther satisfaction in learning, from undoubted authority, that the people danced round the Fires, and at the close went through these fires, and made their sons and daughters, together with their cattle, pass through the Fire; and the whole was conducted with religious solemnity.” This is at the end of some Reflections by the late Rev. Donald M’Queen, of Kilmuir, in the Isle of Skye, on ancient customs preserved in that Island.

The Roman Catholic bishop, Dr Milner, was opposed to the notion of the Irish having ever been worshippers of Fire and of Baal. In An Inquiry into certain Vulgar Opinions concerning the Catholic Inhabitants and the Antiquities of Ireland (Lond. 1808), he tells us that the “modern hunters after paganism in Ireland think they have discovered another instance of it (though they derive this neither from the Celtic Druidesses nor the Roman Vestals, but from the Carthaginians or Phoenicians) in the fires lighted up in different parts of the country on the Eve of St. John the Baptist, or Midsummer Day. This they represent as the idolatrous worship of Baal, the Philistine god of Fire, and as intended by his pretended Catholic votaries to obtain from him fertility for the earth. The fact is, these fires, on the eve of the 24th of June, were heretofore as common in England and all over the Continent as they are now in Ireland, and have as little relation with the worship of Baal as the bonfires have which blaze on the preceding 4th of June, being the King’s birth-day: they are both intended to be demonstrations of joy. That, however, in honour of Christ’s precursor is particularly appropriate, as alluding to his character of bearing witness to the light (John vi. 7) and his being himself a bright and shining light (John v. 35).”

It is only natural that a Christian apologist should take up this attitude, but the verdict of history is against him; for, in addition to the testimony from Scotland and Ireland, there is similar testimony from England to the actual survivals, one of which has already been noticed.

Borlase in his Antiquities of Cornwall tells us:–”Of the fires we kindle in many parts of England, at some stated times of the year, we know not certainly the rise, reason, or occasion, but they may probably be reckoned among the relics of the Druid superstitious Fires. In Cornwall, the festival Fires, called Bonfires, are kindled on the Eve of St. John the Baptist and St. Peter’s Day; and Midsummer is thence, in the Cornish tongue, called ‘Goluan,’ which signifies both light and rejoicing. At these Fires the Cornish attend with lighted torches, tarr’d and pitch’d at the end, and make their perambulations round their Fires, and go from village to village carrying their torches before them; and this is certainly the remains of the Druid superstition, for ‘faces praeferre,’ to carry lighted torches, was reckoned a kind of Gentilism, and as such particularly prohibited by the Gallick Councils: they were in the eye of the law ‘accensores facularum,’ and thought to sacrifice to the devil, and to deserve capital punishment.”

Echoes of the ceremony are also found in unexpected quarters:–Every Englishman has heard of the “Dance round our coal-fire,” which receives illustration from the probably ancient practice of dancing round the fires in our Inns of Court (and perhaps other halls in great men’s houses). This practice was still in 1733 observed at an entertainment at the Inner Temple Hall, on Lord Chancellor Talbot’s taking leave of the house, when “the Master of the Revels took the Chancellor by the hand, and he, Mr Page, who with the Judges, Sergeants, and Benchers, danced round the Coal Fire, according to the old ceremony, three times; and all the times the antient song, with music, was sung by a man in a Bar gown.”

In an old collection of Epigrams and Satires this leaping over the Midsummer fire is mentioned among other pastimes:–

At Shrove-groate, ventor-point or crosse and pile

At leaping over a Midsummer bone-fier.

Or at the drawing clear out of the myer.

Leaping over the fires is mentioned among the superstitious rites used at the Palilia in Ovid’s Fasti. The Palilia were feasts instituted in honour of Pales, the goddess of Shepherds on the Calends of May. But fire ceremonies are not the property of one nation: they belonged to all, and to-day in Japan it is possible to see the celebration of fire-walking. From Japan one may travel to other Continents and see similar phenomena. As civilisation advances these customs tend to die down; but there can be no doubt the few remaining fire festivals in this country are the relics of a very old and superstitious worship, which our semi-savage forefathers indulged in at a time when the sun and moon were not items of science, but Gods of a truth. Christianity was responsible for most of the abolition of these curious practices. For instance, the Sixth Council of Constantinople, A.D. 680, by its 65th canon (cited by Prynne in his Histriomastix), has the following interdiction:–”Those Bonefires that are kindled by certaine people on New Moones before their shops and houses, over which also they are ridiculously and foolishly to leape, by a certaine antient custome, we command them from henceforth to cease. Whoever therefore shall doe any such thing; if he be a clergyman, let him be deposed; if a layman, let him be excommunicated; for, in the Fourth Book of the Kings, it is thus written: ‘And Manasseh built an altar to all the hoast of heaven, in the two courts of the Lord’s house, and made his children to pass through the Fire,’ etc.”

Prynne–the Puritan stalwart–remarks on this:–”Bonefires therefore had their originall from this idolatrous custome, as this Generall Councell hath defined; therefore all Christians should avoid them.” And the Synodus Francica under Pope Zachary, A.D. 742, cited ut supra, inhibits “those sacrilegious Fires which they call Nedfri (or Bonefires), and all other observations of the Pagans whatsoever.”

A custom that has survived so long in particular places–though few–in England, occasions the enquiry: How have they prevented the death which overtook the celebration elsewhere? At Whalton the people are more a people to themselves than others, because they are removed from train, tram, and motor bus. By and bye these agents of civilisation will reach them, and the end will be in sight. A new generation with new ideas will spring up, and there will be less disposition to gather the faggots and burn them as the darkness comes down. Finally, Baal fire, even as a fire, will cease to be, and one more custom will pass into history.

THE ORIGINS OF SUPERSTITIONS AND CUSTOMS

By T. Sharper Khowlson. 1910.

___________

Poetry: People of the Mounds…

FAERY SONG – Oran Sidhe

Trans by Shaw

I left in the doorway of the bower

My jewel, the dusky, brown, white-skinned,

Her eye like a star, her lip like a berry,

Her voice like a stringed instrument.

I left yesterday in the meadow of the kind

The brown-haired maid of sweetest kiss,

Her eye like a star, her cheek like a rose,

Her kiss has the taste of pears.

—–

A Fairy Song

by Percy French

Stay, silver ray,

Till the airy way we wing

To the shade of the glade

Where the fairies dance and sing:

The mortals are asleep –

They can never understand

That night brings delight,

It is day in Fairyland

Float, golden note,

From the lute strings all in tune,

Climb, quiv’ring chime,

Up the moonbeams to the moon.

There is music on the river,

There is music on the strand,

Night brings delight,

It is day in Fairyland.

Sing while we swing

From the bluebell’s lofty crest.

Hey! Come and play,

Sleepy songbirds in your nest;

The glow-worm lamps are lit,

Come and join our Elfin band,

Night brings delight,

It is day in Fairyland.’

Roam thro’ the home

Where the little children sleep,

Light in our flight

Where the curly ringlets peep.

Some shining eyes may see us,

But the babies understand,

Night brings delight,

It is day in Fairyland.

—-

The Fairy Ring

By George Mason and John Earsden

Let us in a lover’s round

Circle all this hallowed ground;

Softly, softly trip and go,

the light-foot Fairies jet it so.

Forward then and back again,

Here and there and everywhere,

Winding to and fro,

Skipping high and louting low;

And, like lovers, hand in hand,

March around and make a stand.

—–

I’d Love to be a Fairy’s Child

By Robert Graves (1895–1985)

CHILDREN born of fairy stock

Never need for shirt or frock,

Never want for food or fire,

Always get their heart’s desire:

Jingle pockets full of gold, 5

Marry when they’re seven years old.

Every fairy child may keep

Two strong ponies and ten sheep;

All have houses, each his own,

Built of brick or granite stone; 10

They live on cherries, they run wild—

I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.

—–

The Fairies

By William Allingham

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen,

We dare n’t go a-hunting,

For fear of little men;

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl’s feather.

Down along the rocky shore

Some make their home,

They live on crispy pancakes

Of yellow tide-foam;

Some in the reeds

Of the black mountain-lake,

With frogs for their watch-dogs,

All night awake.

High on the hill-top

The old King sits;

He is now so old and gray

He’s nigh lost his wits.

With a bridge of white mist

Columbkill he crosses,

On his stately journeys

From Slieveleague to Rosses;

Or going up with music,

On cold starry nights,

To sup with the Queen,

Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget

For seven years long;

When she came down again

Her friends were all gone.

They took her lightly back

Between the night and morrow;

They thought she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow.

They have kept her ever since

Deep within the lake,

On a bed of flag leaves,

Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,

Through the mosses bare,

They have planted thorn trees

For pleasure here and there.

Is any man so daring

As dig them up in spite?

He shall find the thornies set

In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen,

We dare n’t go a-hunting,

For fear of little men;

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl’s feather.

Saturday: Helped our friends Cheryl and Tom move out of their house Saturday for a bit … they sold it, as they are getting ready to head to Arizona. Tom and I have known each other some 38 years… Kinda strange and all thinking we won’t be on each others door step every few days. So, after they finished up, we had them and their nephew Woody, over for dinner, and then Woody left for a film with friends.

We sat back for a nice night of Absinthe drinking and general hanging out. A wonderful time, fraught with those emotions of this could be it for quite awhile. (they are threatening to come up for Winter Solstice, which would be rather cool)

A poem that came after they left that evening:

– La Fée Verte Saturday Night –

So the evening flows…

The lights fade, and we sit

drinking absinthe and talking

the times

future and past

and how it is now…

The candle plays across the glasses as I

perform the ceremony:

Absinthe, Spoon, Sugar, Cold Water

mixing the Cloud…

Mary Smiles, asking for a glass

her smile takes mine

and we soon are listening as one..

oh my beautiful one…

Another round

The heavy glasses clouded now

Tom is smiling, his pains have disappeared

“It’s a miracle he exclaims”!

His smile returns and he is the lad

I have always known…

No, it is but the “La Fée Verte”

and she is dancing, dancing in our heads…

I rush to make another and the light is amber

Laughter rises in waves, Laughter rises in waves,

and it is a wonder…

and it is a wonder…

a joyous

Wonder……

—

Sunday: Victor came by, after not showing up for many, many months it seems. Had a great time, talking, drinking coffee (it helped from the night before with the absinthe…) He brought some excellent sounds by, which will migrate over to Earth Rites Radio this week.

I got some nice cards for Fathers’ Day, from my relatives. Thanks to you all. We had a brilliant curry, that Rowan did lots of. He is learning basic Indian Cookery from Mary, and is taking to it like a duck to water!

—

The Week looks like it will be a busy one. Web Site work, finishing the Magazine, Some outside stuff and the odd and interesting that shows up…

On the Menu:

The Links

The Quotes

The Last Poem of Hoshin

Haiku/Poetry: Basho

The Art: Japanese Wood Block Prints from the 18th & 19th Centuries…

Enjoy!

Gwyllm

_________

The Links:

Taking Happy to the Extreme (caffeine powered!)

Who Owns the Word ‘Terror’?

SINGAPORE: Blogger who posted cartoons of Christ online being investigated

_________

The Quotes:

“Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.”

“Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.”

“A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.”

“The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.”

“Fashion is something that goes in one year and out the other.”

“Being in the army is like being in the Boy Scouts, except that the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”

_______

The Last Poem of Hoshin

The Zen Master Hoshin lived in China many years. Then he returned to the northeastern part of Japan, where he taught his disciples. When he was getting very old, he told them a story he had heard in China. This is the story:

One year on the twenty-fifth of December, Tokufu, who was very old, said to his disciples: “I am not going to be alive next year so you fellows should treat me well this year.”

The pupils thought he was joking, but since he was a great-hearted teacher each of them in turn treated him to a feast on succeeding days of the departing year.

On the eve of the new year, Tokufu concluded: “You have been good to me. I shall leave tomorrow afternoon when the snow has stopped.”

The disciples laughed, thinking he was aging and talking nonsense since the night was clear and without snow. But at midnight snow began to fall, and the next day they did not find their teacher about. They went to the meditation hall. There he had passed on.

Hoshin, who related this story, told his disciples: “It is not necessary for a Zen master to predict his passing, but if he really wishes to do so, he can.”

“Can you?” someone asked.

“Yes,” answered Hoshin. “I will show you what I can do seven days from now.”

None of the disciples believed him, and most of them had even forgotten the conversation when Hoshin called them together.

“Seven days ago,” he remarked, “I said I was going to leave you. It is customary to write a farewell poem, but I am neither a poet or a calligrapher. Let one of you inscribe my last words.”

His followers thought he was joking, but one of them started to write.

“Are you ready?” Hoshin asked.

“Yes sir,” replied the writer.

Then Hoshin dictated:

I came from brillancy

And return to brillancy.

What is this?

This line was one line short of the customary four, so the disciple said: “Master, we are one line short.”

Hoshin, with the roar of a conquering lion, shouted “Kaa!” and was gone.

__________

_________

Haiku/Poetry: Basho

Cold night: the wild duck

Cold night: the wild duck,

sick, falls from the sky

and sleeps awhile.

—

In this world of ours,

Yo no naka wa kutte hako shite nete okite

Sate sono ato wa shinuru bakari zo

In this world of ours,

We eat only to cast out,

Sleep only to wake,

And what comes after all that

Is simply to die at last.

—

The dragonfly

The dragonfly

can’t quite land

on that blade of grass.

—

Midfield

Midfield,

attached to nothing,

the skylark singing.

—

Wrapping the rice cakes

Wrapping the rice cakes,

with one hand

she fingers back her hair.

—

Four Haiku

Spring:

A hill without a name

Veiled in morning mist.

The beginning of autumn:

Sea and emerald paddy

Both the same green.

The winds of autumn

Blow: yet still green

The chestnut husks.

A flash of lightning:

Into the gloom

Goes the heron’s cry.

—

Heat waves shimmering

Heat waves shimmering

one or two inches

above the dead grass

More Basho:

arranged in saijiki fashion

AUTUMN

this autumn

as reason for growing old

a cloud and a bird

—

the whole family

all with white hair and canes

visiting graves

—

souls’ festival

today also there is smoke

from the crematory

—

lotus pond

as they are unplucked

Souls’ Festival

—

Buddha’s Death Day

from wrinkled praying hands

the rosaries’ sound

—

Mii Temple

knocking on the gate for a wish

today’s moon

—

not to think of yourself

as someone who did not count –

Festival of the Souls

—

the moon so pure

a wandering monk carries it

across the sand

—

all night

autumn winds being heard

behind the mountains

(from Oka no Hosomichi)

—

blue seas

breaking waves smell of rice wine

tonight’s moon

—

so clear the sound

echoes to the Big Dipper

the fulling block

—

hair shaved in a moon-shape

with their hands on their knees

in the early hours of night

—-

the setting moon

the thing that remains

four corners of his desk

—

sleeping in the temple

the serious-looking face

is moon-viewing

—

the full moon

seven story-songs of a woman

turning towards the sea

—

viewing the moon

no one at the party

has such a beautiful face

—

the farmer’s child

rests from husking rice

then sees the moon

—

occasional clouds

one gets a rest

from moon-viewing

—

famous moon!

circling the pond all night

even to the end

—

buying a measure box

now I feel differently

about moon-viewing

—

harvest moon

northland weather

uncertain skies

—

taken in my hand

it will vanish in hot tears

autumn frost

—

full autumn moon

to my gate comes rising

crested tide

—

thin from the Kiso trip

and still not yet recovered

the late harvest moon

—

bright red

the pitiless sun

autumn winds

—

autumn wind

broken with sadness

his mulberry stick

—

autumn winds

in the sliding door’s opening

a sharp voice

—

autumn wind:

as thickets in fields are

Fuwa’s barriers

On The Menu:

The Links

The Poetry: Rabia al Basri

All Art in this edition comes from a Brilliant Book: The Orientalist – by Kristian Davies

A most delightful, and somewhat controversial work. A wonderful friend of mine sent a copy along for me to check out and enjoy. (He knows my taste in this area of art)

A most cheerful and beautiful day here in the Northwest. Everything from wind and rain to beautiful fleecy clouds under a warm sun.

Worked in the garden and set up the Radio Show ” Solstice Soon”. Full of new music, hopefully to delight your ears. Struggled on the Magazine…

Have a good weekend, and may the Gods smile on you and yours.

Gwyllm

_______

IPOD Must Have!

LSD – You have Victor to thank for turning up this Gem!

A synchronistic bit of Tooning… Thanks to Dr. Con for pointing this one out!

Olde School Insult Generator – Sent in by Mike from PlantConsciousness.com

Re-Engineering the Ark

______________

Poetry: Rabia al Basri

Love

I have loved Thee with two loves –

a selfish love and a love that is worthy of Thee.

As for the love which is selfish,

Therein I occupy myself with Thee,

to the exclusion of all others.

But in the love which is worthy of Thee,

Thou dost raise the veil that I may see Thee.

Yet is the praise not mine in this or that,

But the praise is to Thee in both that and this.

—–

Reality

In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.

Speech is born out of longing,

True description from the real taste.

The one who tastes, knows;

the one who explains, lies.

How can you describe the true form of Something

In whose presence you are blotted out?

And in whose being you still exist?

And who lives as a sign for your journey?

—–

With My Beloved

With my Beloved I alone have been,

When secrets tenderer than evening airs

Passed, and the Vision blest

Was granted to my prayers,

That crowned me, else obscure, with endless fame;

The while amazed between

His Beauty and His Majesty

I stood in silent ecstasy

Revealing that which o’er my spirit went and came.

Lo, in His face commingled

Is every charm and grace;

The whole of Beauty singled

Into a perfect face

Beholding Him would cry,

‘There is no God but He, and He is the most High.’

—–

If I Adore You

If I adore You out of fear of Hell, burn me in Hell!

If I adore you out of desire for Paradise,

Lock me out of Paradise.

But if I adore you for Yourself alone,

Do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.

—–

In My Soul

In

my soul

there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church

where I knee.

Prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist.

Is there not a region of love where the sovereignty is

illumined nothing,

where ecstasy gets poured into itself

and becomes

lost,

where the wing is fully alive

but has no mind or

body?

In

my soul

there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque,

a church

that dissolve, that

dissolve in

God.

——————–

Though we have talked about her before, here is a nice article on Rabia:

Rabia the Slave

Written by Huda Khattab

Rabia was a mystic, or a holy woman, who spent her whole life in devotion to God. She was born over a thousand years ago, in the city of Basra, in Iraq. Long ago, in the city of Basra, there lived a young woman named Rabia. She came from a poor family. She and her three sisters suffered greatly, for their parents had died and then there was a great famine.

It was a violent and dangerous time. The famine made people cruel, ready to do almost anything to survive. Rabia knew it was not safe to walk alone in the town, but she had to find food. One evening, she slipped out of the house, and into the street. Suddenly, someone caught her, holding her roughly. A hand was over her mouth — she could not cry for help. She had been captured by a wicked dealer in slaves, who then sold her in the market, for just a few coins.

As a slave, Rabia served in the house of a rich man. She had to work hard, for long hours. Yet all the time, through out the day as she worked, she prayed and fasted. Even at night, she slept little. She often stood praying as dawn broke and her daily tasks began.

One hot night, Rabia’s master found he could not sleep. He got up, and walked over to the window of his room. He looked down, into the courtyard below. There, he saw the solitary figure of Rabia, his slave. Her lips moved in prayer, and he could just catch the words in the still night air. Oh God, Thou knowest that the desire of my heart is to obey Thee, and if the affair lay with me, I would not rest one hour from serving Thee, but Thou Thyself has set me under the hand of Thy creature. For this reason I come late to Thy service. . .

There was something very strange about the scene. At first, the master could not quite understand what it was. Then he realized. There was a lamp above Rabia’s head. Ithung there, quite still — but without a chain. As he watched, its light filled the whole house. Suddenly, he was afraid. He returned to his bed, and layawake, thinking of what he had seen. He was certain of only one thing. Such a woman should not be a slave. In the morning, he called Rabia to him, and spoke to her kindly. He told her he would set her free.

“I beg your permission to depart,” murmured Rabia, and her master agreed at once. Rabia set off out of the town, deep into the desert. There she lived as a hermit, alone for awhile, serving God. Later, she went to Makkah as a pilgrim.

CLICK ON THIS TO GO TO EARTH RITES RADIO

Radio Free Earth Rites Presents: “Solstice Soon Radio Show”

6:00 PST Friday, The 16th of June.

Featuring: Bombay Dub Orchestra, Boozoo Bajou – Remixes, Baba Zula & Baraka (lots o’ B’s to listen to~!)

Bright Blessings!

Gwyllm

This is a special Turf, featuring commentary and observations of Scott Taylor and Amanda Hain from The Dolphin Embassy.

I have known of Scott for quite awhile, he is a fellow traveller, and resides in Australia with his partner Amanda. Both are working hard for the Sea Peoples, The Dolphins, The Whales, and the health of all who live in the briny deep.

(All Photos were taken by Scott and Amanda, see below the article.)

More Turf Coming Later on Friday.

Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

____________

The Links: The Taking of the Farm – Blue Meanies and all that…

South Central Farm – Quicktime, DSL

South Central Farm – Quicktime, 56k

_____________

The Dolphin Embassy was heading toward LA to rendezvous with our old friend Leslie Morava when she told us of her involvement at the South Central Farm. She began by asking if we knew that there was a 14 acre

organic farm in downtown LA, in the warehouse district. Of course, we, like most people, knew nothing of the farm.

Leslie invited us to meet her there. She warned us before we arrived that we would be trespassing on so called “private land” if we entered the gates, and that we would be participating in a large act

of civil disobedience if we did. We headed straight for the farm.

Arriving in mid-afternoon, we found a huge, two-city-block area, fenced with tall wire fencing topped with razor wire. This was surrounding a paradise of small garden plots, full of food, green herbs, corn, large stands of nopal (the edible cactus of northern

Mexico), banana trees, peach trees, onions, squash and an endless variety of greens and vegetables. Paths wandered between plots, wandering alleyways between fences. There were faucets rising out of

the ground for watering systems. There were sheds and cleaning tables interspersed with shaded arbors overhung with grape vines, under hanging banana bunches.

We parked on a side steet, alongside the fence. We walked around the corner, reading the signs hanging everywhere. “Green, not Greed!”, “SCF is the lungs of LA!”, “AQUI ESTAMOS, Y NO NOS VAMOS!”. The front

gate was guarded by a young man, who looked us over carefully, grinned a huge grin, and welcomed us in.

On a former downtown street, now closed off and enclosed by fences and embraced by a multitude of gardens (over 350 of them), we found a smiling but grim group of determined people. Following signs, we

found our way to the big black walnut tree that was the central area for the protest. There, about 20 feet up, was a small platform, about seven feet long and about two and a half feet wide, upon which

sat a thin and beautiful young woman. Dark hair, intense eyes, and a radiant smile–it was Julia Butterfly Hill. She had lived in a tall tree for two years, in an attempt to save it and all old-growth forests. Her legendary feat gave extra presence to what we were seeing and feeling. She was 14 days into a water-only fast, and she was glowing….

Then a blonde, tall, athletic woman began rappelling down from another, equally small, platform on the other side of the tree. It was Daryl Hannah, the actress from “Splash”, “Revenge of the 50 Foot Tall Woman”, “Clan of the Cave Bear”, and other Hollywood tales. Her commitment to the organic food and alternative energy movements had earned her much credibility in recent years, and we found ourselves

instantly admiring her for her courage and funky charm (see her website for more: www.dhlovelife.com).

We found our friend Leslie, who was excited to tell us that Joan Baez was returning in two days time. On Sunday there was to be a, perhaps last, farmers market, and an interfaith prayer service, and Joan was to come and sing. We were invited to stay. We accepted.

Activism was part of my early life, and I was involved in several large civil disobedience acts in the 60s: at the Pentagon in the fall of 1967, and again in Colorado over the next few years. Then my spiritual quest took over, and I became more inward in my work toward peace, justice, and change in human society. Being on the LA farm, and being part of this brought a new feeling, yet it had old echoes, to be suddenly part of an act of defiance toward the onward rolling bulldozers of greed and social injustice.

We stayed. We ate our meals with the families there, buying tortillas from them as they were hand made before our eyes, eating squash- blossom quesadillas, drinking tamarind juice, and savoring the

“nopalitas”, the delicious cactus salad grown only 30 feet from where we ate them. We helped Leslie to gather pieces of the story for her endless flood of emails and phone calls, we interviewed farmers and

their families and customers, and we did whatever we could to show our solidarity.

On Sunday morning, after Joan Baez had come, sung her exquisite songs (in Spanish), and the priests had said their prayers (the local Traditional Catholic–not Roman Catholic– priest, who leads services

in the area and who had been leading services on the farm for several years, pledged to go barefoot until justice was found, and cast his sandals to the base of the walnut tree), and everyone but those forty of us who were staying overnight were gone, we felt a feeling of dread overcoming us. We wanted to do something for those who remained and for those who would be coming back for the evening prayer vigil (each evening at 7:00 pm there was a candle-light march around the entire farm, led by several Aztec dancers).

We asked around and found that there was a power cord that could be used. Amanda and I set about finding a way to hang our fabric screen, and scrounged together the pieces we needed to put on a video showing. We were asked by Daryl what we were doing, and when she found out she asked if we could download a video she had made that was posted on her website and show it. We agreed, and made a dash to the nearest WiFi site we could find, downloaded her movie and returned.

We got the screen stretched, a barrel was found and a bit of board to balance the laptop, data projector, and hard drive. We set up the sound system, and Ole!, we had an instant movie theater. We had

arranged it so that Julia and Hannah could see the screen from their vantage points. The evening vigil marched around the block and everyone filed back in for the final phase, the prayers around the

tree. The candles were put in a circle at the base of the tree, solemn prayers were intoned, and everyone grew silent.

The wind was gentle that night, and the leaves overhead rustled quietly. The weathered faces of the campesinos and the passionate and tired faces of those who had come to support them were all glowing in

the candle light. A spokeswoman for the community introduced us and told everyone that we wanted to say something…..

Not expecting this, I stepped up and told the crowd that we had come from Australia, that we were working to bring the voice of another people, the people of the sea, to the attention of the big nations of the world. I told them that the dolphins too were in need of recognition, and that we were there in solidarity with them all. And that we wanted to show a little bit of film about the beauty of the dolphins and whales, to remind us all about the beauty of the world of nature.

The spokeswoman translated, and there were cheers. We had not anticipated such a response and were a bit overwhelmed. e showed about 40 minutes of beautiful footage, of dolphins dancing and caressing in the turquoise waters, whales rolling together with

their babies under glittering waves, and sometimes we overlaid these images with footage of forests and flowers, trees and rivers. We ended with Daryl’s video about the farm.

Afterward people came up to us with tears in their eyes, thanking us. For us, it was too little, it was only an offering of what we had to give. We treasure the thanks, and wish we could have given so much

more.

Our itinerary soon took us away from our new friends, but our three days at South Central Farm will live in our hearts forever.

~~~~~~~~~

The Dolphin Embassy is a non-profit, educational organization incorporated in Australia, whose mission is to bring the voice of the dolphins– expressing the needs of dolphins, whales, and porpoises, the Cetacean Nation– to the community of nations. It conducts educational seminars, does presentations, and is currently preparing to join with a consortium of NGOs at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in making suggestions for improving the Earth Charter. We plan to participate in United Nations forums beginning in May of 2007.

We are currently on tour in the US, and will be taking part in a groundbreaking dolphin communication research project in Mexico in July of 2006.

Our website is www.dolphintale.com

Scott Taylor and Amanda Hain

Ambassadors, The Dolphin Embassy

719-360-7049

dolphin@dolphintale.com

All photos by The Dolphin Embassy

2006.

The Fisher King

And a man stood there, as still as moss,

A lichen form that stared;

With an old blind hound that, at a loss,

Forever around him fared,

With a snarling fang half bared.

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;

Like a dead weed, gray and wan,

Or a breath of dust. I looked again–

And man and dog were gone,

Like wisps of the graying dawn…

–Madison Cawein, “Wasteland”

When I was young, I imagined “The Fisher King” like the illustration above. I think the best version that I have seen on film is Terry Gilliams. I saw it for the first time tonight.

I recommend it, full of mystery, healing and may I say love.

The whole edition is tied into the story….

Blessings,

Gwyllm

________________

The Link

Wikipedia on The Waste Land

__________________

The Fisher King was a king encountered during the Quest for the Holy Grail. He is sometimes, but not always, identified with the Maimed King. He is called Pelles in the Vulgate Version, in which the Maimed King is named Parlan or Pellam. In Manessier’s Constitution we are told he was wounded by fragments of a sword which had killed his brother, Goon Desert. By Chretien we are told he could not ride as a result of his infirmity, so he took to fishing as a pastime. Robert de Boron gives his name as Bron and tells us he earned his title by providing fish for Joseph of Arimathea. In Sone de Nausay he is identified with Joseph of Arimathea himself. By Wolfram he is called Anfortas.

__________________

Which leads us to modern times, and T.S. Eliot. A long but fruitful read. I hope you enjoy…

1922 -T.S. Eliot

For Ezra Pound

il miglior fabbro.

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla

pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibulla ti qeleiz; respondebat illa:

apoqanein qelw.”

THE WASTE LAND – T.S. Eliot

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee* [A lake near Munich]

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten*, [A park in Munich]

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. [‘I am not Russian at all,

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, [I am a German from

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, [Lithuania’]

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind [‘fresh blows the breeze from the homeland’]

Der heimat zu

Mein Irisch kind, [‘my Irish child, why do you wait?’]

Wo weilest du?

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;”

“They called me the hyacinth girl.”

–Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer. [‘waste and empty is the sea’]

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Has a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor.

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something that he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself;

One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, “Stetson!

You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

You! hypocrite lecteur!–mon semblable!–mon frère!”

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion.

In vials of ivory and colored glass,

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid–troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odors; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carved dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantle was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the world enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

“What is that noise?”

The wind under the door.

“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”

Nothing again nothing.

“Do

“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

“Nothing?”

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag–

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”

“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

“What shall we ever do?”

The hot water at ten.

And, if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said–

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME [British call-out at pub closing time]

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert.

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time.

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said.

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot–

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

III. The Fire Sermon

The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I sat fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

[‘And oh, the voices of the children singing in the dome!’]

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d

Tereu

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic* French [vulgar]

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest–

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with a bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses;

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired.

Endeavors to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defense.;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronizing kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done, and I’m glad it’s over.”

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

“The music crept by me upon the waters”,

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester

Beating oars

The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

The peal of bells

White towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

“Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”

“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. He promised `a new start.’

I made no comment. What should I resent?”

“On Margate Sands

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.”

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord thou pluckest me out

O Lord thou pluckest

burning

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth,

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But here there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead, up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you,

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

–But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains,

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract,

By this, and this only, we have existed,

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms his prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumors

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: the boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon–O swallow swallow

Le prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Da. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

T. S. Eliot

_______

A nice night. Andrew (my nephew) brought his lovely new girlfriend Miss Catherine, over for dinner at our house. We ended up outside, sitting by the fire, eating melon, drinking wine (yours truly working with absinthe again as well…) eating fudge cookies, talking about Catherines’ home back in New Orleans. She came out here first getting away from Katrina, and finishing her semester out, and the second time for Andrew. He beams, he beams.

I am very happy for the both of them! It is truly delightful to see.

Rowan is finishing art projects tonight, tomorrow being his last day at school. I tried to talk him into working with me tomorrow afternoon, but nooooo. He is off for some bowling with friends. His art work is truly bizarre. Strangely Surreal in a Rowanian kinda way.

I have been dreaming of Spain. I have for years. All the dreams tend to be from the 1930′s, set in the Civil War. Durutti Column, Abraham Lincoln Bridgade… you know the routine. I have pondered this for some 25 years and I have yet to figure it out. The events happened 15 years before I was born, and yet I remember it. Ideas?

So, the title of the entry today says it all. One of my all time favourite poets. I need to pick up a new copy of his works, preferably in Spanish with a decent English translation… His works are so moving, and so “present”. I am dreaming and I feel ghost, and I see Lorca…. smiling forever.

Pax,

Gwyllm

——

On the Menu:

The Links

The Article: Backs to the Future

The Poetry: Lorca

_________

The Links:

I’ve found God, says man who cracked the genome

Putting the Dark into the Dark Age

Life Saving Beer Ingredient!

Coming Soon To Radio Free EarthRites: Bombay Dub Orchestra!

Much played at Caer Llwydd, soon migrating to the playlist at Radio Free EarthRites. Some 20 tracks on 2 CDs, and not a duff track in the bunch.

Fairly Lush, with a nice blending of Eastern and Western Musics. It could be Bollywood, it could be Hollywood, but what it really is, is Chilled, delightfully…

Check out the site, and look up their MySpace account if you can. Sample it!

More on them later, I am sure…

__________

Backs to the Future

The future is behind for the Aymara: The speaker, at right, indicates next year by pointing backwards over his left shoulder. Copyright Rafael Nunez, UC San Diego

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all the world’s studied cultures — so that the past is ahead of them and the future behind.

Tell an old Aymara speaker to “face the past!” and you just might get a blank stare in return – because he or she already does.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive Science and director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.

“Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world – from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on – have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model,” said Nunez.

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the “language of Adam.” More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called “Andean logic” – which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no – to computer applications.

Yet, Nunez said, no one had previously detailed the Aymara’s “radically different metaphoric mapping of time” – a super-fundamental concept, which, unlike the idea of “democracy,” say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn’t an obvious product of culture.

Nunez had his first inkling of differences between “thinking in” Aymara and Spanish, when he went hitchhiking in the Andes as undergraduate in the early 1980s. More than a decade later, he returned to gather data.

For the study, Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile. The volunteer subjects ranged from a monolingual speaker of Aymara to monolingual speakers of Spanish, with a majority (like the population at large) being bilinguals whose skills covered a range of proficiencies and included the Spanish/Aymara creole called Castellano Andino.

The videotaped interviews were designed to include natural discussions of past and future events. These discussions, it was hoped, would elicit both the linguistic expressions for “past” and “future” and the subconscious gesturing that accompanies much of human speech and often acts out the metaphors being used.

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year.”

But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole story.

Take an “exotic” language like English: You can use the word “ahead” to signify an earlier point in time, saying “We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m.” to mean “It’s now 12:40 p.m.” Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.

There are also in English ambiguous expressions like “Wednesday’s meeting was moved forward two days.” Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they’re picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by “We’re coming to the end of the year” vs. “The end of the year is approaching.”

Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn’t command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.

“These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon,” Nunez said. “That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn’t have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

“But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different,” he said.

Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.

A “simple” unqualified statement like “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is not possible in Aymara – the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.

In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen – and known/unknown – to such an extent as to weave “evidential” requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.

Though that may be an initial explanation – and in line with the observation, the researchers write, that “often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it” – it is not sufficient, because other cultures also make use of similar evidential systems and yet still have a future ahead.

The consequences, on the other hand, may have been profound. This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed, Nunez said, to the conquistadors’ disdain of the Aymara as shiftless – uninterested in progress or going “forward.”

Now, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in jeopardy – it numbers some two to three million contemporary speakers – its particular way of thinking about time seems, at least in Northern Chile, to be on the way out.

The study’s younger subjects, Aymara fluent in Spanish, tended to gesture in the common fashion. It appears they have reoriented their thinking. Now along with the rest of the globe, their backs are to the past, and they are facing the future.

Source: University of California, San Diego

________

Poetry: Lorca

Gacela of the Dark Death

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,

I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.

I want to sleep the sleep of that child

who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don’t want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,

how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.

I’d rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for

nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn

with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,

a second, a minute, a century,

but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,

that I have a golden manger inside my lips,

that I am the little friend of the west wind,

that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it’s dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me

because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,

and pour a little hard water over my shoes

so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,

and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,

because I want to live with that shadowy child

who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

——–

Romance Sonambulo

Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea

and the horse on the mountain.

With the shade around her waist

she dreams on her balcony,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

Green, how I want you green.

Under the gypsy moon,

all things are watching her

and she cannot see them.

Green, how I want you green.

Big hoarfrost stars

come with the fish of shadow

that opens the road of dawn.

The fig tree rubs its wind

with the sandpaper of its branches,

and the forest, cunning cat,

bristles its brittle fibers.

But who will come? And from where?

She is still on her balcony

green flesh, her hair green,

dreaming in the bitter sea.

–My friend, I want to trade

my horse for her house,

my saddle for her mirror,

my knife for her blanket.

My friend, I come bleeding

from the gates of Cabra.

–If it were possible, my boy,

I’d help you fix that trade.

But now I am not I,

nor is my house now my house.

–My friend, I want to die

decently in my bed.

Of iron, if that’s possible,

with blankets of fine chambray.

Don’t you see the wound I have

from my chest up to my throat?

–Your white shirt has grown

thirsy dark brown roses.

Your blood oozes and flees a

round the corners of your sash.

But now I am not I,

nor is my house now my house.

–Let me climb up, at least,

up to the high balconies;

Let me climb up! Let me,

up to the green balconies.

Railings of the moon

through which the water rumbles.

Now the two friends climb up,

up to the high balconies.

Leaving a trail of blood.

Leaving a trail of teardrops.

Tin bell vines

were trembling on the roofs.

A thousand crystal tambourines

struck at the dawn light.

Green, how I want you green,

green wind, green branches.

The two friends climbed up.

The stiff wind left

in their mouths, a strange taste

of bile, of mint, and of basil

My friend, where is she–tell me–

where is your bitter girl?

How many times she waited for you!

How many times would she wait for you,

cool face, black hair,

on this green balcony!

Over the mouth of the cistern

the gypsy girl was swinging,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

An icicle of moon

holds her up above the water.

The night became intimate

like a little plaza.

Drunken “Guardias Civiles”

were pounding on the door.

Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea.

And the horse on the mountain.

—–

City That Does Not Sleep

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

Nobody is asleep.

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

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

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

street corner

the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the

stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth.Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

In a graveyard far off there is a corpse

who has moaned for three years

because of a dry countryside on his knee;

and that boy they buried this morning cried so much

it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream.Careful!Careful!Careful!

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

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

dahlias.

But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;

flesh exists.Kisses tie our mouths

in a thicket of new veins,

and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever

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

One day

the horses will live in the saloons

and the enraged ants

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

eyes of cows.

Another day

we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead

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

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

Careful!Be careful!Be careful!

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

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

of the bridge,

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

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

are waiting,

where the bear’s teeth are waiting,

where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,

and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky.Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is sleeping.

If someone does close his eyes,

a whip, boys, a whip!

Let there be a landscape of open eyes

and bitter wounds on fire.

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

I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.

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

night,

open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight

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

_______

Federico García Lorca is presumed to be buried in a mass grave in Viznar, a village which lies at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Granada in Spain.

He was regarded by Franco’s fascists as a dangerous intellectual and was arrested on the 16th August 1936. Three days later he was dragged into a field, along with a schoolmaster and two bullfighters, and shot. His writings were subsequently burnt in the main Plaza in Granada.

While a student in Madrid, Lorca became friends with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali and the film maker Luis Buñuel. Dali designed the set for Lorca’s play Mariana Pineda which was first staged in 1927.

In 1929 Lorca traveled to New York. While in the Big Apple he wrote Poeta en Nueva York and also began El público (The Audience) – an explicitly homosexual play.

After returning to Spain, Lorca was appointed Director of the Madrid University Theatre ‘La Barraca’. The company toured the provinces giving free performances of classical Spanish plays.

Lorca is, today, regarded as one of Spain’s greatest 20th Century poets and playwrights. However, due to the fascist regime, his plays were not performed again until the 1940′s and certain bans on his work remained until 1971.

Lorca’s Andalusian upbringing had a profound influence on his writing. One of his finest poems, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, is an elegy for his friend the Andulusian bullfighter.

Tardará mucho tiempo en nacer, si es que nace,

un andaluz tan claro, tan rico en aventura.

Yo canto su elegancia con palabras que gimen

y recuerdo una brisa triste por los olivos.

So I was hanging off of a 30 foot roof scraping moss during a rain and the beginning of a passing thunderstorm. Nothing like being on an aluminium ladder in those situations for you to realize that it may be time to find another way of entertaining/making a living. Really, no reasonable offer refused at this point. If it can have good art and poetry thrown in… that would cinch that deal in a moment.

We watched the recent release of “Tristan and Isolde” this weekend. I enjoyed it, and thought it a worthy effort. If you get a chance check it out. Good cast, and the story is pretty close to what you find in the mythology books, as opposed to lots of the Hollywood tripe that is out there…

Muggy and Wet -I have not seen a June quite like this one in Oregon. It reminds me more of the East Coast than here. Usually some rain, but not weeks of it. I think a trend is developing. We had rain last year as well, not as long, but longer than before… It is warming up a bit.

On The Menu:

Art Education & Happenings This Summer and Fall with Martina & Roberto

The Links

The Article: inna bug conference: Bad Shaman Interview

The Poetry: Hafiz!

I have gotten enquiries into where the &@%(!!! is the Magazine? It will be here soon dear readers. I ran out of steam and inspiration. It happens. My relation to the Muse is a complicated one. I have just a bit more to do and it will all be here… patience please!

Thanks For Looking in on this ongoing project & thanks for the feedback, it means much to me!

Gwyllm

____________

I wanted to alert you to some great art and people happenings… Roberto Venosa and Martina Hoffmann teach classes every year in some quite wonderful places… If you have the time, and you want to make a leap forward with you art, these are idea situations! Great Locations, excellent company, and Art with a capital “A”.

The String Chees Incident Show, and Burning Man are unique happenings, take a chance on a wonderful opportunity!

G

—-

Martina & Roberto’s Summer Schedule…

+ Our annual Cadaques, Spain painting workshop (September 17 – 30, 2006) is now almost filled with

the exception of three spaces remaining.

To see images of the villa and to find detailed workshop information please visit:

Cadaques Spain Workshop

+ Beginning this Sunday we will be teaching a 7 day class at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY

June 18, 2006 – June 25, 2006

For Workshop info:

Omega Institute Workshop…

+ From July 8 –21, 2006 we will be on the gorgeous Island of Skyros in Greece at the Skyros

Institute for a 2 week painting workshop and to celebrate Mediterranean life:

Painting Workshop on Skyros

+ On July 2, 2006 we will be painting live on stage with String Cheese Incident at the fabulous Red

Rocks amphitheater. It would be great to see you there! We hear that tickets are selling quickly.

+ August 28 – September 4, 2006 we will be at Burning Man with an exhibition/installation in a 40’ dome

as part of the MAPS village. If you don’t do anything else crazy this Summer than this could be your

opportunity to feed your counter-culture needs:

Burning Man!

__________

The Links:

Do not be Deceived…

Edge of a Galaxy

From The Sixties in France… Hara-kiri Covers…

Sweet Summer Solstice Balances Life’s Bitterness

__________

inna bug conference: Bad Shaman Interview

Spiros Antonopoulos

Insectoidal Nourishment and the Bad Shaman

The Bad Shaman, while barely known, needs nor wants little introduction. He’s a hard-working American ayahuascero. A successful entrepreneur. Conscientious psychonaut. Researcher of arcane plants, animals and insects. He remains perfectly comfortable surfing the edge of obscurity. Like the shaman in many of history’s archaic societies, he lives and works on the outskirts. We visit the shaman as a last resort. His ways elude sense and nonsense. His mojo works, but never as we expect and always at a price. He would be the first to push you down the stairs, if it might cure what ailed you. He may even ask to eat your brains, but that’s another story.

humans eating bugs

Trip: What’s the history of bug eating?

Bad Shaman: Primates and humans have consumed insects since Neolithic and Prehistoric times. Only recently, within the last 100 years, has insect eating gone out of fashion, except in small rural areas of Mexico, China and a handful of other remote areas. Throughout history, insect eating has been a main source of food for most mammals and birds.

How do bugs taste?

Of the 70 species of insects that I’ve sampled, the only ones that weren’t very appetizing were ladybugs. And I’ve eaten grubs, larvae, beetles, wasps, sow bugs (roly-poly bugs), mealworms, pine grubs, post beetles, earwigs… Insects are surprisingly tasty and comprise the spectrum of flavors, from nuts to vegetables.

Earwigs couldn’t be too tasty.

They are surprisingly tasty. Stir fried with rice and snow peas. Very yummy. I’d like to order some take-out right now.

Which bugs are the yummiest?

The roly-poly bugs. They can taste like anything from spinach to oysters depending upon habitat. And if you cook them, they can be made to taste like just about anything.

If folks could get over the base level aversion, it sounds like roly-poly bugs could usurp tofu.

Yep, and that leads me to my basic assertion: If you eat shrimp and you can’t eat grasshoppers, you better re-examine your taxonomy and zoology.

ant eating

Tell us about psychoactive insects.

Psychoactivity in insects is esoteric at best. Certainly there have been reports of psychoactive honeys from bees in the new world and the old world. Rumors and stories abound. There is a tradition in southern California and the Southwest of eating red harvester ants for their hallucinogenic psychoactivity in the acquisition of spirit helpers.

How did you come upon such esoteric knowledge?

I have been interested in ant consumption by humans in different cultures around the world for over 25 years, and I read scientific papers. For example, ants are no longer an imaginary food source. There are serious papers being presented by entomologists suggesting that eating more insects may solve some world hunger problems and be an excellent source of nutrients for humans.

Traditionally, insect information and lore have been considered a female knowledge since the hunter-gatherer societies didn’t share equally in the vertebrate proteins. That is, men would kill the animals and thus procure most of the vertebrate proteins, leaving women to gathering plants. In doing so the women would also learn about what bugs you could eat. They knew that since insects and plants co-evolved in such a similar environment and parallel evolutionary scheme, their ability to transform plant products into insect poisons is an evolutionary strategy that nature has tried again and again successfully. Insect and arachnid poisons are currently being researched in venom therapies, much like the bee venom therapies used by the Greeks and Romans for thousands of years.

Where do the ants come in?

Primarily in central and southern California. Several tribes used the Pogo for their spirit helper acquisition powers. A person ate a prescribed number of ants and went into a dream state for a couple of hours in which (God willing) a spirit helper would appear in the form of an animal.

So this isn’t recreational bug use.

No, their use was mostly therapeutic. Ants have had therapeutic values with the tribes in southern California and other native peoples throughout the Americas. I met a Dr. Rodriguez from the University of California at Irvine who told me, 25 years ago, that there are 20,000 species of ants in Columbia. And Columbia is already the mother source of many of the poisons that the world is aware of today: tobacco, coca, those sorts of things…

How have you used the red harvester ants?

Over the years I have eaten ants both therapeutically and for the psychoactive effects. I had heard tales of ants being used for arthritis and rheumatism for years. And I have found sources indicating that indigenous cultures from South, Central, and North America have used ants in that way. So I would capture and eat a small quantity of ants for their beneficial effects with rheumatism. The ant that we have in New Mexico is a particular harvester ant in the species Pogonomyrmex californicus, which is specifically known for its venom. There are so many types of ants and each ant has a different ability to produce different types of chemicals and venoms.

Ants have the oldest history of farming. They invented agriculture over 60,000 years ago. They are able to grow funguses on harvested plant materials and control the growth of unwanted fungi and microorganisms with antiseptic sprays that they produce with their bodies.

The particular ant of which I currently speak has a historical tradition, and people at the turn of the last century knew about it. J.P. Harrington, a researcher who worked and lived at that time in the Santa Barbara area, documented two matching ceremonial accounts of ant consumption.

Have the venoms been analyzed for their active constituents?

To a small degree. But since there are so many compounds in ant venoms, it’s a process that’s ongoing. I suspect that even in the back annals of scientific literature, this is probably not a popular subject. But it is becoming more popular (see references).

vision questions

Please explain the traditional ceremonial techniques.

In the recorded anecdotes of native peoples giving ants in a prescribed way, that is, ceremonially, eagle down or cotton is used. The ants would be collected from the ant hive, four or five per cotton ball or feather. The cotton ball was then bitten and swallowed. The person would then wait a period of time, and then with the help of an administrator, would go into a sleep state for a couple of hours, after which they would be administered warm water which would help them regurgitate whatever ants might be left in their stomach. It was important that they consume ants while they were still alive.

I’ve eaten a couple of hundred ants and I find that there certainly is a neurotoxic or psychoactive effect. But as far as going into a dream state, passing out, and acquiring spirit helpers, I have yet to reach that level of saturation.

Can one obtain the same prescribed effect from dead ants or the extract? What has been your most successful experimental technique to date?

Ants are plentiful and easy to collect. I’ve found that using a glass pie pan with beer, water, juice or mescal, one can collect a rather large amount of ants in a short amount of time. The LD50, i.e., the lethal dose of ants, is about 1000, swallowing live ants, so a participant would want to consume about a third to half that amount. Be aware that there is a lethal toxicity to the harvester ants which have been traditionally used, and which I have been consuming.

It’s a bit like walking towards death…

People who are interested should research the literature before attempting to consume any ants. Again, it can be fatal and I don’t recommend it. The bite from this ant is extremely painful and will linger for hours, sometimes days.

Why are you using these particular liquids as the base for your extractions?

This is how we find out what solution is more likely to extract the ant’s psychoactive properties. The beer may extract qualities with alcohols that mescal doesn’t have. It may turn out that eating live ants is ultimately what has to be done to get them to exude their compounds in the time that you want and the quantity that you need.

Are the compounds oil-based?

There are high molecular weight compounds and low molecular weight ones. So I would think that they would have an affinity to many things because it is such a complex mix of proteins and histamines and seratonin-like compounds.

About an hour after I sampled the mescal extract, I was overcome with a severe heaviness. It was rather dark, but not particularly scary. Definitely a meet-your-maker heaviness. Is this typical?

I’m sure there’s a dose-response curve where at lower doses one could have physical benefits while at higher doses you could have psychoactivity, and at even higher doses one could have hallucinogenic activity. But this is an area of avant-garde research. Very basic work still needs to be done, but certainly here is an open field of potential for beginning to understand psychoactive insects as we have with psychoactive plants.

In Mexico, centipedes and wasps were commonly revered for their poisonous qualities and there were often beverages made from them.

How would you compare the ant buzz to a more commonly known psychoactive plant-based poison like datura?

Oh, it’s nothing like datura. And actually that’s not a fair comparison at all. It’s much more like the poison of the tarantella, the wolf spider of Europe.

Would you like to see some ants that I’ve collected?

juicing antcastles

This one has a very peculiar taste…

Very ant-y…

How would you describe the taste of ants?

Different ants have different tastes. These particular ants have a lemon-lime, Sprite-like taste. Not the formaldehyde and formic acid tastes of other types of ants. Nor the sweet buttery taste of black ants. Or the honey taste of honey pod ants.

While this is unexplored territory, it’s not for the faint or foolhardy.

No. It’s literally like playing in a wasp’s or hornet’s nest. Ants pack as powerful a venom and sting as those insects.

You’ve been bitten a few times playing in the nest.

When the ants bit my tongue it took about four or five hours for the burning sting to dissipate.

What about other psychoactive bugs?

These were gathered in the Mexican province of Chululah near Puebla. Terence McKenna speculated that the iridescent green was a signature of psychoactivity in bugs. These guys lived in an acacia tree at night and were attracted to the local poppies during the daytime. So I thought that may be a good indication that they were sequestering some psychoactive properties from the trees and flowers.

Have you tried them?

Well, we’ve smoked them and eaten them and there’s mild psychoactivity. But we really haven’t jumped into these bugs with both feet yet. We’re still trying to collect more background information before I start consuming something that could always be potentially lethal in its poison.

How does it compare to the ants?

That’s comparing apples and oranges. Beetles and wasp-like ants. I was reading, however, that there’s a beetle in Brazil that is raised in peanuts and eaten for rheumatism and arthritis. So I suppose there are a few parallels. Insects are often medicine in traditional cultures; the problem is the scarcity of professionally trained ethno-entomologists that can ask the question, “What insects were/are you using for medicines?” Interestingly, Merck currently has an agreement with Costa Rica to categorize not only all their plants but all of their insects, aware that insects are a possible source for chemicals and medicine. And why wouldn’t they be? Plants are certainly a source of medicine. Perhaps this is just the tip of an iceberg that we’ve yet to explore scientifically. It could hold a cure… perhaps even the cockroach holds the cure for cancer or some other unimaginable terminal disease.

Even so, do you have any moral issues with ant eating?

I do. I am concerned with the taking of life for certain solely psychoactive purposes, but for therapeutic purposes I find that it’s a medicine that’s worthwhile.

There’s a theory that the ant colony is a collective consciousness and that the living anima rests not within the individual ant, but with large groups of them…

Within their collective brain the ability to learn advances with each generation. The ants on this mound probably exist over a quarter acre or so. They know this environment so intimately because they are constantly searching to see what’s out there and what’s available. And the sheer quantity of them. We have no idea what it’s like. They’ve dug underneath all of this area. There are literally tens of thousands of them.

Hell, it’s more crowded in New York City, so humans do actually have an idea of what it’s like. What do you think about the ol’ role reversal, HG Wells’ Empire of the Ants and perhaps ants eating humans?

How do we know they don’t? Fuck this article, we should do a movie.

Spiros Antonopoulos was a contributing editor for the dearly departed Fringeware Review.

The Bad Shaman’s insect-eating reading list:

The Eat A Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon

Man Eating Bugs : The Art and Science of Eating Insects by Peter Menzel, Faith D’Aluisio

* Creepy Crawly Cuisine : The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects by Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, Peter Menzel

____________

Poetry: The Great Hafiz

LAST night I dreamed that angels stood without

The tavern door, and knocked in vain, and wept;

They took the clay of Adam, and, methought,

Moulded a cup therewith while all men slept.

Oh dwellers in the halls of Chastity!

You brought Love’s passionate red wine to me,

Down to the dust I am, your bright feet stept.

For Heaven’s self was all too weak, to bear

The burden of His love God laid on it,

He turned to seek a messenger elsewhere,

And in the Book of Fate my name was writ.

Between my Lord and me such concord lies.

As makes the Huris glad in Paradise,

With songs of praise through the green glades they flit.

A hundred dreams of Fancy’s garnered store

Assail me – Father Adam went astray

Tempted by one poor grain of corn! Wherefore

Absolve and pardon him that turns away

Though the soft breath of Truth reaches his ears,

For two-and-seventy Jangling creeds he hears,

And loud-voiced Fable calls him ceaselessly.

That, that is not the flame of Love’s true fire

Which makes the torchlight shadows dance in rings,

But where the radiance draws the moth’s desire

And send him fort with scorched and drooping wings.

The heart of one who dwells retired shall break,

Rememb’ring a black mole and a red cheek,

And his life ebb, sapped at its secret springs.

Yet since the earliest time that man has sought

To comb the locks of Speech, his goodly bride,

Not one, like Hafiz, from the face of Thought

Has torn the veil of Ignorance aside.

—-

There is the righteous one, here is ruined me.

See how far it is from one to the other!

What link do piety and righteousness have to the rend’s way?

There is the sound of the sermon, here is the melody of the rabab.

My heart grew weary of the cloister, the hypocrite’s cloak.

Where is the monastery of the Magi? Where is pure wine?

The day of union are gone. Let them be a joyful memory.

Where is that amorous glance? Where is that reproach?

What can the enemy’s heart find in my love’s face?

There is that dead lamp, here is this sun candle.

Do not be seduced by her dimpled chin, there is a well in that road.

Where are you going, O heart, in such a hurry?

Since the kohl of our insight is the dust of your doorway,

Please tell us, where do we go from this threshold?

Do not cover rest and sleep from Hafiz, O friend.

What is rest? Which is patience? And where is sleep?

—-

Oh Cup-bearer, set my glass afire

With the light of wine! oh minstrel, sing:

The world fulfilleth my heart’s desire!

Reflected within the goblet’s ring

I see the glow of my Love’s red cheek,

And scant of wit, ye who fail to seek

The pleasures that wine alone can bring!

Let not the blandishments be checked

That slender beauties lavish on me,

Until in the grace of the cypress decked,

Love shall come like a ruddy pine-tree

He cannot perish whose heart doth hold

The life love breathes – though my days are told,

In the Book of the World lives my constancy.

But when the Day of Reckoning is here,

I fancy little will be the gain

That accrues to the Sheikh for his lawful cheer,

Or to me for the drought forbidden I drain.

The drunken eyes of my comrades shine,

And I too, stretching my hand to the wine,

On the neck of drunkenness loosen the rein.

Oh wind, if thou passest the garden close

Of my heart’s dear master, carry for me

The message I send to him, wind that blows!

“Why hast thou thrust from thy memory

My hapless name?” breathe low in his ear;

“Knowest thou not that the day is near

When nor thou nor any shall think on me?”

If with tears, oh Hafiz, thine eyes are wet,

Scatter them round thee like grain, and snare

The Bird of joy when it comes to thy net.

As the tulip shrinks from the cold night air,

So shrank my heart and quailed in the shade;

Oh Song-bird Fortune, the toils are laid,

When shall thy bright wings lie pinioned there?

The heavens’ green sea and the bark therein,

The slender bark of the crescent moon,

Are lost in thy bounty’s radiant noon,

Vizir and pilgrim, Kawameddin!

——-

An Infant in your Arms

The tide of my love

Has risen so high let me flood

over

You.

Close your eyes for a moment

And maybe all your

fears and fantasies

Will end.

If that happened

God would become an infant in your

Arms

And then you

Would have to nurse all

Creation!

Nice Day… sitting outside, we witnessed a Crow Riot (lots of beatings handed out between different groups) A Blue Heron hanging out in our trees, then taking off… and a multitude of Bees all over the Blackberries and Rasberries.

Cat came in, a horrible mood afflicting him. Getting old does not agree with him, he gets a shorter temper daily. “I demand an immeadiate rub, with some attention to the belly (not too much as I will scratch) followed by feeding, with a back rub simultaneously.”

Headed over to Randies and DeDa’s for dinner, hanging out above OHSU… lovely evening indeed.

Came home in the gloaming, and have begun to upload a new show on the radio, of several hours length, stay tuned…

Our concentration for this entry is on the great Afghan Sufi Mystical Poet: Hakim Sana’i. Excellent, all of it.

On the menu:

The Links

The Article: A Dose Of Genius

Poetry: Hakim Sana’i (with Bio)

The Art: Illustrations from Ancient Islamic Afghanistan

Pax,

Gwyllm

_______

The Links:

Meet the Press in Hell

Crows Have Human-Like Intelligence, Author Says

Hitler ‘Tested Small Atom Bomb’

Russian Official Jailed for Forcing Subordinates to Study Scientology

_______________

A Dose Of Genius

Smart Pills’ Are on The Rise. But Is Taking Them Wise?

By Joel Garreau

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, June 11, 2006; Page D01

Studying with diligent friends is fine, says Heidi Lessing, a University of Delaware sophomore.

But after a couple of hours, it’s time for a break, a little gossip: “I want to talk about somebody walking by in the library.”

One of those friends, however, is working too hard for dish — way too hard.

Instead of joining in the gossip, “She says, ‘Be quiet,’ ” Lessing says, astonishment still registering in her voice.

Her friend’s attention is laserlike, totally focused on her texts, even after an evening of study. “We were so bored,” Lessing says. But the friend was still “really into it. It’s annoying.”

The reason for the difference: Her pal is fueled with “smart pills” that increase her concentration, focus, wakefulness and short-term memory.

As university students all over the country emerge from final exam hell this month, the number of healthy people using bootleg pharmaceuticals of this sort seems to be soaring.

Such brand-name prescription drugs “were around in high school, but they really exploded in my third and fourth years” of college, says Katie Garrett, a 2005 University of Virginia graduate.

The bootleg use even in her high school years was erupting, according to a study published in February in an international biomedical and psychosocial journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Mining 2002 data, it noted that even then, more than 7 million Americans used bootleg prescription stimulants, and 1.6 million of those users were of student age. By the time students reach college nowadays, they’re already apt to know about these drugs, obtained with or without a prescription.

Comparable accounts are common on other campuses, according to dozens of interviews with university students in Virginia, the District, Maryland and Delaware, as well as reports in student newspapers serving campuses in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana and Missouri.

“I’m a varsity athlete in crew,” says Katharine Malone, a George Washington University junior. “So we’re pretty careful about what we put in our bodies. So among my personal friends, I’d say the use is only like 50 or 60 percent.”

Seen by some ambitious students as the winner’s edge — the difference between a 3.8 average and a 4.0, maybe their ticket to Harvard Law — these “brain steroids” can be purchased on many campuses for as little as $3 to $5 per pill, though they are often obtained free from friends with legitimate prescriptions, students report.

These drugs represent only the first primitive, halting generation of cognitive enhancers. Memory drugs will soon make it to market if human clinical trials continue successfully.

There are lots of the first-generation drugs around. Total sales have increased by more than 300 percent in only four years, topping $3.6 billion last year, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical information company. They include Adderall, which was originally aimed at people with attention-deficit disorder, and Provigil, which was aimed at narcoleptics, who fall asleep uncontrollably. In the healthy, this class of drugs variously aids concentration, alertness, focus, short-term memory and wakefulness — useful qualities in students working on complex term papers and pulling all-nighters before exams. Adderall sales are up 3,135.6 percent over the same period. Provigil is up 359.7 percent.

In May, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America issued its annual attitude-tracking study on drug use. It is a survey of more than 7,300 seventh- through 12th-graders, designed to be representative of the larger U.S. population and with an accuracy of plus or minus 1.5 percent, according to Thomas A. Hedrick Jr., a founding director of the organization. It reported that among kids of middle school and high school age, 2.25 million are using stimulants such as Ritalin without a prescription.

That’s about one in 10 of the 22 million students in those grades, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Education. Half the time, the study reported, the students were using these drugs not so much to get high as “to help me with my problems” or “to help me with specific tasks.” That motivation was growing rapidly, Hedrick says.

Why should we be surprised? This generation is the one we have pushed to get into the best high schools and colleges, to have the best grades and résumés. Computer nerds are culture heroes, SAT scores are measures of our worth and the Ivy League is Valhalla. Hermione Granger in “Harry Potter” is a heroine despite being such a goody two-shoes that she doubles up her course load with a spell that allows her to be in two places at once. This is the kind of focused overachievement that is addressed by smart pills.

A student Web site for a consortium of tony Philadelphia prep schools makes the point with one of those jokes that’s not really a joke: You know you are part of this elite educational set if:

· “You applied to Penn as a backup school.”

· “You tend to think anything below a 1400 is a mediocre SAT score.”

· “You could get adderall in less than 5 minutes at practically any time of the school day.”

Smart-pill use has not been the focus of much data collection. This comes as no surprise to researchers such as Richard Restak, a Washington neurologist and president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, who has written extensively about smart drugs in his 2003 book, “The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind,” as well as his forthcoming “The Naked Brain: How the Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, Work and Love.”

Contributing to this dearth, he points out, is that these drugs are not famous for being abused recreationally and they are not being used by people with a disease.

This is not “the type of data collected by the FDA,” he says. Law-enforcement activity has been sparse. “Who is the complainant?”

Compared with the kind of drug users who get police attention, “This is an entirely different population of people — from the unmotivated to the super-motivated,” Restak says. These “drug users may be at the top of the class, instead of the ones hanging around the corners.”

Smart-pill use generally doesn’t show up in campus health center reports, he says, because “This is not the kind of stuff that you would overdose on” easily. Amphetamines are associated with addiction and bodily damage, but in use by ambitious students, “if you go a little over you get wired up but it wears off in a couple of hours. And Provigil has a pretty good safety record.” Finally, smart-pill use is a relatively recent development that has not yet achieved widespread attention, much less study, although Restak expects that to change.

“We’re going to see it not only in schools, but in businesses, especially where mental endurance matters.” Restak can easily imagine a boss saying, ” ‘You’ve been here 14 hours; could you do another six?’ It’s a very competitive world out there, and this gives people an edge.”

That’s why even small surveys conducted by students themselves are suggestive. For a senior project this semester, Christopher Salantrie conducted a random survey of 150 University of Delaware students at the university’s Morris Library and Trabant Student Center.

“With rising competition for admissions and classes becoming harder and harder by the day, a hypothesis was made that at least half of students at the university have at one point used/experienced such ‘smart drugs,’ ” Salantrie writes in his report. He found his hunch easy to confirm.

“What was a surprise, though, was the alarming rate of senior business majors who have used” the drugs, he writes. Almost 90 percent reported at least occasional use of “smart pills” at crunch times such as final exams, including Adderall, Ritalin, Strattera and others. Of those, three-quarters did not have a legitimate prescription, obtaining the pills from friends. “We were shocked,” Salantrie writes. He says that in his report, he was “attempting to bring to light the secondary market for Adderall” specifically because “most of the university is not aware” of its extent, he says.

When you start asking questions about smart pills, the answers you get divide sharply into two groups.

When you ask the grown-ups — deans, crisis counselors, health counselors — they tell you they don’t know too much about the subject, but they don’t think it is much of a problem at their institutions.

“I’m not sure of the size and scope,” says Jonathan Kandell, a psychologist and assistant director at the University of Maryland Counseling Center. “I have heard about it. But I don’t get a sense it’s a major thing that they come to the center about.”

When you ask the students, they look at you like you’re from the planet Zircon. They ask why you weren’t on this story three years ago. Even if some of these drugs are amphetamines, it’s medicine parents give to 8-year-olds, they say. It’s brand-name stuff, in precise dosages. How bad can it be? Sure, there are problems with weight loss, sleep loss, jitters and throwing up, they say. But other unintended consequences are not what you might expect. Universities now sport some of the cleanest apartments in the history of undergraduate education. Says one student who asked for anonymity because she has been an off-prescription user of these drugs: “You’ve done all your work, but you’re still focused. So you start with the bathroom, and then move on to the kitchen . . . .”

Warning: Side Effects

In the name of altering mood, energy and thinking patterns, we have been marinating our brains in chemicals for a very long time.

Caffeine is as old as coffee in Arabia, tea in China, and chocolate in the New World. Alcohol, coca leaves, tobacco and peyote go way back.

Even psychopharmaceuticals have been around for generations. Amphetamines — which are the active ingredient in Adderall and Ritalin — were first synthesized in Germany in 1887. Students have been using them for generations, in the form of Benzedrine and Dexedrine.

Beta blockers have been the dirty little secret of classical musicians since the 1970s. Originally prescribed to treat high blood pressure, they became the “steroids of the symphony” when it became clear Inderal controlled stage fright. As long ago as 1987, a study of the 51 largest orchestras in the United States found one in four musicians using them to improve their live performances, with 70 percent of those getting their pills illicitly.

What’s new is the range, scope, quantity and quality of substances, old and new, aimed at boosting our brains — as well as the increase in what’s in the pipeline. Current psychopharmaceuticals represent only the beginning of cognitive enhancers aimed at improving attention, reasoning, planning and even social skills.

The memory compounds being raced to market by four U.S. companies are initially aimed at the severely impaired, such as early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. But researchers expect the market for memory drugs to rapidly extend into the aging population we think of as normal, such as the more than 70 million baby boomers who are tired of forgetting what they meant to buy at the shopping mall and then realizing they’ve forgotten where they parked their cars, too. Or students who think such drugs could gain them hundreds of points on their SATs.

In research now underway, one such substance, ampakines, boosts the activity of glutamate, a key neurotransmitter that makes it easier to learn and encode memory. How useful they might be in a French or law exam.

But there are side effects with every drug. Strattera — the ADHD medicine that is not a stimulant and may be taken for weeks before it shows an effect — comes with a warning that it can result in fatal liver failure. The FDA warns it also may increase thoughts of suicide in young people. For a while last year, Canada pulled a form of Adderall from its markets as a result of sudden unexplained deaths in children with cardiac abnormalities. Provigil can decrease the effectiveness of birth control. All of these drugs come with a raft of side-effect warnings.

Nonetheless, pharmaceutical companies are racing to bring to market new drugs aimed at fundamentally altering our attitudes toward having a healthy brain. The idea is less to treat a specific disease than it is to, in the words of the old Army recruiting commercial, “Be all that you can be.”

Of Mice and Men

Is this what smart has come to in the early 21st century? Is Ken Jennings, the “Jeopardy” phenom, our model of smart? Do SATs and grade-point averages measure all of what it means to be intelligent? If so, these drugs have a potent future. But definitions of intelligence may change — already, some colleges have stopped requiring SAT scores from applicants.

Howard Gardner of Harvard is the godfather of the idea that smart is more than what IQ tests test. In his seminal 1983 book, “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” and later works, he laid out a then-novel model of cognition that included many other kinds of sagacity.

“I feel that what we call ‘intelligence’ is almost always ‘scholastic skill’ — what it takes to do well on a certain kind of short-answer instrument in a certain kind of Western school,” he writes in an e-mail. “Other uses of intellect — musical competence, facility in the use of one’s hands, understanding of other people, sensitivity to distinctions in the natural world, alertness to one’s own and others’ emotional states etc. — are not included in our definitions of intelligence, though I think that they should be. Unless performances in these other domains were directly tapped, we’d have no idea of whether ‘performance enhancing pills’ affect these other forms of intelligence as well.”

Eric R. Kandel is shocked by the idea that powerful elixirs like the ones he is developing might rapidly trickle down to ambitious college kids. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He also founded Memory Pharmaceuticals.

“That’s awful! Why should they be taking drugs? They should just study! I think this is absurd. What’s so terrible about having a 3.9? The idea that character and functioning and intelligence is to be judged by a small difference on an exam — that’s absurd. This is just like Barry Bonds and steroids. Exactly what you want to discourage. These kids are very sensitive. Their brains are still developing. Who knows what might happen. I went to Harvard. I like Harvard. It ain’t worth it.”

The mind amplifiers he’s working on, he insists, could have major effects on lots of needy people — those with mental retardation or Down syndrome, or those with memory loss from depression or Alzheimer’s or cancer chemotherapy or schizophrenia. “There are lots of populations out there that really, really need help,” he says.

Kandel is hugely enthusiastic about taking a memory that has slipped and bringing it back up to reasonable. His compounds are terrific in aging mice, he says.

But ambitious college kids?

Why take the risk?

In normal mice, he says, his stuff improves memory — only by 20 percent to 50 percent.

_________

Afghan Sufi Poetry – Hakim Sana’i

Saki,

bring wine

& don’t stop the flow!

Our old friend has broken his vows

of repentence. He’s lifted the siege of Self-denial

& Duty, & come to loiter round the

tavern with a notorious beauty!

He’s vacuumed his head of hypocrisy &

pious attitudinizing, & all at once he’s sprung him-

self from his monastery. He’s freed his ankle from

Religion’s chains-but cinched his waist with a

Fireworshipper’s sash. How he drinks! And urges me,

“Have one yourself! Stay drunk as long as you can!

Stick to this path toward nothingness

& light a fire beneath all

that survives!”

(Translated by Hakim Bey)

——–

The Good Darkness

There is great joy in darkness.

Deepen it.

Blushing embarrassments

in the half-light

confuse,

but a scorched, blackened, face

can laugh like an Ethiopian,

or a candled moth,

coming closer to God.

Brighter than any moon, Bilal,

Muhammed’s Black Friend,

shadowed him on the night journey.

Keep your deepest secret hidden

in the dark beneath daylight’s

uncovering and night’s spreading veil.

Whatever’s given you by those two

is for your desires. They poison,

eventually. Deeper down, where your face

gets erased, where life-water runs silently,

there’s a prison with no food and drink,

and no moral instruction, that opens on a garden

where there’s only God. No self,

only the creation-word, BE.

You, listening to me, roll up the carpet

of time and space, Step beyond,

into the one word.

In blindness, receive what I say.

Take “There is no good…”

for your wealth and your strength.

Let “There is nothing…” be

a love-wisdom in your wine.

—–

The Wild Rose of Praise

Those unable to grieve,

or to speak of their love,

or to be grateful, those

who can’t remember God

as the source of everything,

might be described as a vacant wind,

or a cold anvil, or a group

of frightened old people.

Say the Name. Moisten your tongue

with praise, and be the spring ground,

waking. Let your mouth be given

its gold-yellow stamen like the wild rose’s.

As you fill with wisdom,

and your heart with love,

there’s no more thirst.

There’s only unselfed patience

waiting on the doorsill, a silence

which doesn’t listen to advice

from people passing in the street.

—–

The Way of the Holy Ones

Don’t speak of your suffering — He is speaking.

Don’t look for Him everywhere — He’s looking for you.

An ant’s foot touches a leaf, He senses it;

A pebble shifts in a streambed, He knows it.

If there’s a worm hidden deep in a rock,

He’ll know its body, tinier than an atom,

The sound of its praise, its secret ecstasy –

All this He knows by divine knowing.

He has given the tiniest worm its food;

He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones.

—-

The Great Provider

Allah sets the table for all living things,

and lays out more edibles than eaters!

Everyone has its spirit, its days, its daily bread,

blessings and happiness from Allah.

Allah brings to light everyone’s daily bread,

then leaves the larder door wide open!

Unbeliever, believer, wretched and happy alike,

all creatures will find new sustenance and new life there.

A Bearded Man Leans on a Stick, Persian, 1630-40. Click for larger image.

While the N of need still sticks in their throats,

the M of His munificence has already provisioned them.

Nothing nurtures us other than bread,

and we eat it only because of our hunger for it.

Allah does not leap to the command of servants!

Having blessed us with our hunger for bread,

He will give us that bread as well.

Your bread and your soul are both in the divine treasury;

they are Allah’s buried treasure, if you only knew it!

If your meal waits for you in China,

the horse you will ride to it is already saddled and waiting.

Either you will be carried there quickly,

or your bread will be brought to your side while you sleep.

Did Allah not say,

“I am your Provider, the Knower of things secret, the Knower of things open.

I give you life, and I will give you bread.

Whatever you wish, I will give you in good time”?

Know that the work of daily bread is at your door like the dawn;

and that bread is a souvenir of the day.

The Mean One fears this truth,

and avoids the leftovers of the Wise.

The lion does not devour its prey alone —

when it’s had its fill, it leaves the rest.

Allah’s kindness is with you,

so you trade the life your hold in your hand for a crumb.

Mind your soul, for, just like bread,

loaf follows loaf till the edge of the grave.

Allah grants no one life without granting bread,

because the soul is sustained by it.

Take this seriously — eat now,

and soon you will eat the food of the soul…

Your daily bread is granted to you by the Knowing, Powerful One,

so don’t shake your fist at the King and the tax-collector!

When the soul flies from your body,

be certain that your daily bread has arrived at last.

It arrives through the gate of Allah,

not the gate of your teeth or throat.

You may sit at the head of the table, but only way of great suffering —

especially if you weren’t wealthy or wise to begin with!

So forget that place!

To rise to such a rank would assure you nothing but heartache and scattered desires — Let Allah be enough to fill you.

In any state, in any event, it is better that you seek support from Allah

than that you should seek it from an ass-powered mill or a sack.

In any state, in any event, it is better that you depend upon the benevolence of Allah

than that you should depend on an ass-powered mill and the sack.

______

Hakim Sanai

Timeline (1044? – 1150?)

Not much is known about Hakim Sanai, often just called Sanai or Sanai of Ghazna. Sanai is one of the earlier Sufi poets. He was born in the province of Ghazna in southern Afghanistan in the middle of the 11th century and probably died around 1150.

Rumi acknowledged Sanai and Attar as his two primary inspirations, saying, “Attar is the soul and Sanai its two eyes, I came after Sanai and Attar.”

Sanai was originally a court poet who was engaged in writing praises for the Sultan of Ghazna.

The story is told of how the Sultan decided to lead a military attack against neighboring India and Sanai, as a court poet, was summoned to join the expedition to record the Sultan’s exploits. As Sanai was making his way to the court, he passed an enclosed garden frequented by a notorious drunk named Lai Khur.

As Sanai was passing by, he heard Lai Khur loudly proclaim a toast to the blindness of the Sultan for greedily choosing to attack India, when there was so much beauty in Ghazna. Sanai was shocked and stopped. Lai Khur then proposed a toast to the blindness of the famous young poet Sanai who, with his gifts of insight and expression, couldn’t see the pointlessness of his existence as a poet praising such a foolish Sultan.

These words were like an earthquake to Hakim Sanai, because he knew they were true. He abandoned his life as a pampered court poet, even declining marriage to the Sultan’s own sister, and began to study with a Sufi master named Yusef Hamdani.

Sanai soon went on pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned, he composed his Hadiqatu’l Haqiqat or The Walled Garden of Truth. There was a double meaning in this title for, in Persian, the word for a walled garden is the same word for paradise, but it was also from within a walled garden that Lai Khur uttered the harsh truths that set Hakim Sanai on the path of wisdom.