Gwyllm.com

“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing”

On The Music Box: The Fountain Sound Track

This posting is an amalgam of a couple of different threads running through my experiences of late. I have been contemplating Mystery, Labour and Class relations among other subjects as I have gone about the everyday life. I was surprised and saddened to find that the great Jimmy Reid had passed on August 10th. I have included his famous Glasgow University Speech from 1972. Jimmy was part of a long tradition of working class intellectuals that helped craft Glasgow and the Glaswegian intelligensia over the centuries. Though not known so well in the US, he had a deep impact on the ideas of critical thinking, class and labour relationships and the now lost and lamented traditions of shipbuilding upon the Clyde. I have included a eulogy from Billy Connolly as well. It rambles a bit, but it helps shape the image of Jimmy in your mind if you let it.

There is a wee article on Mystery that I have crafted, part of another work that I have been putting together elsewhere. Mystery, Poetry, Music make up the remainder of this posting.

I should have another Turfing out soon, as I have been crafting another as I was working on this one.

Here is to you all,

Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Upon Mystery
Maps – I Dream of Crystal
Mystery Quotes
Fare Thee Well, Jimmy Reid: Still irresistible, a working-class hero’s finest speech
Billy Connolly’s Eulogy For Jimmy Reid
Sentient Fireballs and Biting Lights
The Poems Of Fedrico Garcia Lorca
Maps – Valium In the Sunshine
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Upon Mystery
(The Mystery Of It All!) We are born from mystery, swim through our lives with mystery, and with mystery we return to the great depths at the end of life.

Mystery. Give me mystery. that is the heart of the matter. When I contemplate mystery I’m engaged upon a quest opened up to multiple, perhaps infinite possibilities. Mysteries evokes a state of mind that motivates on multiple levels. I would rather have mystery than answers, To have the unformed churning in the mind, is to be on the threshing floor of creation. Mystery by its basic nature shares the event horizon with you.

Answers are perhaps the death of curiosity on many levels. When people think they have the answer(s), they apparently turn off to other possibilities, other paths. Answers move from the fluid state that mystery evokes, to a static state. That which is connected with the quest ceases. With answers, finite horizons assert themselves, what was once wild and boundless, now caged.

Imagine this if you haven’t experienced it… You are on a small craft, beyond the horizon from land, late at night. There is no moon, only stars. The craft is absolutely dark, you kneel by the gunwale, and let your hand drift in the water in the darkness… This is entering into mystery, a mystery rife with surrender, danger, anticipation, questing…

We go through our lives assured by what we think are the answers. Answers are comforting, and assuring. They delineate and guide. They are in the main harmless… We accept answers from an early age, we put innocent faith in those who first answer our questions. For some, this is enough. For others, asking the questions continues. It can leads one down the most peculiar of paths. If you ask the right questions you can end up either on the world stage, in prison, or on the path of wonder. The questing is the key, and the interpreting of the signpost along the way.

Invoke Isis, and she will come forth. Life is the mystery to be lived fully and with intent. (and no… that is not an answer!)

Blessings,
Gwyllm
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MAPS new album: Turning The Mind….
Maps – I Dream of Crystal

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Mystery Quotes:

Oscar Wilde: “The final mystery is oneself.”

Charles de Lint: “Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?”

Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

G. K. Chesterton: “The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.”

Henri Frederic Amiel: “Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring…”

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Fare Thee Well, Jimmy Reid: Still irresistible, a working-class hero’s finest speech

Jimmy Reid, the Clydeside trade union activist who died recently, was an inspiring orator. This speech, delivered on his inauguration as rector of Glasgow University in 1972, was compared at the time to the Gettysburg Address. It has lost little of its relevance

Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It’s the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.

Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways in different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal antisocial behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop-outs, the so-called maladjusted, those who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course, it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.

Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially de-humanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well-adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else. They remind me of the character in the novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was a farmer in the American Mid-West. He hated suggestions for things like medi-care, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was, however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor didn’t work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a comic figure. But think – have you not met his like here in Britain? Here in Scotland? I have.

It is easy and tempting to hate such people. However, it is wrong. They are as much products of society, and of a consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop-out. They are losers. They have lost the essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women. The big challenge to our civilisation is not Oz, a magazine I haven’t seen, let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed – although in a sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations.

Let me give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point.

Recently on television I saw an advert. The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His speech is full of phrases like “this full-bodied specimen”. Sitting beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of the bloke’s eulogy. Then he concludes – “and now I give…”, then a brand name of what used to be described as Empire sherry. Then the laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the victim but with her tormentors.

The other illustration is the widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term “the rat race”. The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended, friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, “Listen, you look after number one.” Or as they say in London, “Bang the bell, Jack, I’m on the bus.”

To the students [of Glasgow University] I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It’s more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is frightening and is a negation of democracy.

Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision-making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question, for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society.

From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants’ books. To appreciate fully the inhumanity of this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant, without provision made for suitable alternative employment, with the prospect in the West of Scotland, if he is in his late forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.

The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision-making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades, with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counter- balance to the centralised character of national government.

Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for de-centralising as much power as possible back to the local communities. Instead, the proposals are for centralising local government. It’s once again a blue-print for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked “Where do you come from?” I can reply: “The Western Region.” It even sounds like a hospital board.

It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of the Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals – where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Of community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.

Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under “M” for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.

If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let’s make our wealth-producing resources and potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let’s gear our society to social need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in a few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.

Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and, where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision-making processes of our society. The so-called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people’s participation. Anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.

To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people. I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It’s a social crime. The flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development.

In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with a full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings, can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.

Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard, initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow. Part of our educational process must be the involvement of all sections of the university on the governing bodies. The case for student representation is unanswerable. It is inevitable.

My conclusion is to re-affirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It’s an affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man’s heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit. In “Why should we idly waste our prime…”:

“The golden age, we’ll then revive, each man shall be a brother,

In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,

In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,

And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature.”

It’s my belief that all the factors to make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this goal. It’s a goal worth fighting for.
—-
Billy Connolly’s Eulogy For Jimmy Reid
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Sentient Fireballs and Biting Lights

Strange luminous encounters, from fleeting sightings to lethal attacks
Text: Theo Paijmans / Images: Sybille Delacroix

At the fringes of those luminous phenomena which range from spook lights to freak lightning, there are some strange accounts for which there is no ready explanation. These involve lights that show a parti­cular interest in human beings – and not always to their benefit.

Take what befell 12-year-old George Campbell and his father, EW Campbell. They were riding along the ‘Eighty-foot Road’, north of the city of Sherman, Texas, on the night of 4 October 1898. Somewhat after nine o’clock that evening, the boy was witness to a startling phenomenon:

He is a bright, intelligent little fellow, who said he didn’t believe in ghosts; that his parents had never scared him with spook stories, and he is one of the best- behaved scholars in the fourth grade at the Franklin school building. His story as told to a News reporter to-day is as foll ows: “Last night papa and I were riding along the ‘Eighty-foot Road’, about two and a half miles [4km] north of town, when all at once everything got very bright. We saw a great ball of fire coming down toward the ground. It got within about three feet [90cm] of the ground and seemed to rest for a while and then it went back up until it got clear out of sight. There was a buzzing sound all the time.” George describes it as being about 10 feet [3m] in diameter and that it hurt one’s eyes to look at it. Although they were very close to it, he says that he did not feel any heat. [1]

It’s a puzzling tale, one which nowadays might be interpreted as a UFO account.

Another encounter with a mysterious fireball did not have such a fortunate outcome. Twenty-two years previously, also in Texas, near the town of Palestine, another “intelligent boy” appeared, out of breath and “as pale as he could be”. His story was that he’d been trudging along a highway at night.

There was a negro woman riding a horse in the direction the little coloured boy was going. The boy appeared that night in Palestine… He said he saw a ball of fire come out of the sky and strike the woman and set her ablaze. The horse ran away with the woman afire on his back, and he ran to town to tell the people what had happened. The people went to look after further parti culars concerning this curious incid ent, and they found the woman lying on the ground, her clothing burned off, but enough of life in her to tell that she had been struck in the breast by a ball of fire. She died the next day. The horse was afterwards found with his mane singed. People here think that she was struck by a meteor. [2]

In contrast, there are also numerous instances of death from above by freak lightning manifesting as balls of fire. These incidents are no less outré, but in such cases we might console ourselves with a natural explanation. In 1866, Miss Addie Murray, a schoolteacher in Ross township, Vermillion county, Illinois, met her untimely end in this way: “She was sitting in the schoolhouse with two pupils, when the house was struck, and she was found sitt ing in the chair dead, with her clothing nearly burned off, and the child ren severely stunned. The child ren describe the scene as a ball of fire falling into the room.” [3] Something similar struck John Whitton, a driver for a telegraph construction train in Leavenworth that same year. “He had occasion to lift the tele graph line off the ground, when a flash of lightning struck the line at that point, tearing it into small pieces, and instantly killing him. The men who saw the accident state that they saw a ball of fire as large as a man’s fist issue from Whitton’s breast.” [4]

An unfortunate death by a fireball in 1933 was accompan ied by a curious premonition on the part of the unfortunate victim. “In San Rocco, during a thunderstorm, a cleric was killed by lightning. The priest was involved in a discussion with several of his congregation in the village street, when quite slowly a one metre [40in] big, orange-coloured fireball came floating through the air straight towards the priest, which then erupted in his vicinity. The incid ent made quite an impress ion on the superstitious farmers, more so, as the day before the priest had presaged his own demise that was soon to come.” [5]

A different kind of strange light, again attracted by the presence of a human being, was experienced by Alec Campbell, working as a game warden in Southern Rhodesia (now Zim babwe). One night, Campbell was walking by an old burial ground when suddenly a bright light appeared beside him. “The light turned into a ball of fire about the size of a softball and moved along at Campbell’s speed, he said… he turned and stared at the mysterious light. Immediately, the ball started advancing on him.” Campbell remembered the tales that said that if one encountered such a light, the best thing to do was to close one’s eyes, which would cause the light to disappear. He did so, and the light vanished. [6]

Could there be lights not only possessed of some sort of intelli gence but which are capable of forming a unique rapport with a person and even delivering painful stings when they so choose?

This seems to have been the case in Richmond, Indiana, in 1978. The bizarre incident involved local resident Martha Grieswell, 46 at the time, whose house had been plagued by “flashing pinpoints of light” ever since one had come into her bedroom one night in early January that year. Grieswell described how it appeared to her that she and the light were watching each other. The little light approached her: “I said ‘No,’ and it stopped about one and half feet [45cm] away. Then I held out my hand and it came right over and sat in my hand and turned my whole hand a psychedelic purple. It glowed for a while, then shut down to a point of light, then rose from my hand – then the others started to come in…”

Over the following nights, dozens of the “floating, flashing lights”, mostly white and pinhead-sized, entered her bedroom through the closed window; after that, they became her constant companions as soon as evening fell. Grieswell also began to note some of these lights during the daytime, although then they seemed less active. She moved out of the upstairs bedroom, where the lights continued to manifest, and began conducting experiments to try to ascertain what the lights might be. She captured several in containers, including an aluminium cigar ette case, and saw them shining through the container walls. Grieswell also immersed the lights in water, keeping them submerged for two days: “The lights were observed to ‘swim’ freely, and when released, to ‘fly’ free, their lights undimmed.” She got the same results when she locked them up in a freezer. She was only able to conduct these experiments when the lights were willing participants, since at other times they simply escaped through the walls of the containers. Radiation tests and an attempted chemical analysis turned up nothing. She did find out, though, that one thing had an effect on the lights. When she touched one with a burning cigarette, the light made “a crackling sound, as if you had wadded up cellophane very rapidly in your hand”. She was unable to replicate that experiment: “You can’t burn them any more. They move away too fast,” she explained. It dawned upon Mrs Grieswell that the lights might learn from experience and therefore might possess some kind of intelligence. When asked why she wanted to get rid of them, she gave the unnerving answer: “Because they bite.” At times, when the lights became more bright, they would sting or bite, giving off a sensation like “the sting of a sweat bee”, and leaving a very small welt. “They go through a tapping motion… When they land, they raise up, then light again… they feel like bugs when they sit on you and that’s when they burn.”

One night, a light got in her eye, which was a painful experience. The next day, she noticed that the eye was bloodshot and the corner crusted. When the lights were not stinging her, they had a tendency to land and crawl over her during the night. They also stung her husband, who wasn’t able to see them. This might be a significant detail; some of the many curious people who visited her house were able to see the lights, yet others were not.

Trying to escape the lights for a while, Mrs Grieswell went to her mother in Decatur, but on the third night after her arrival the lights came in through the window and were also seen by her mother. Perhaps, she reasoned, they had been able to follow her or had hidden themselves in her clothing or luggage. She got the impression that the lights meant to say that she could not flee from them. She sought help, and consulted scientists, ufologists and psychic researchers, but to little avail. As she said to the reporter who visited her (he wasn’t able to see the lights): “I’ve just made up my mind that I’m not going to get rid of them.” [7]

One of the psychic researchers whom Grieswell contacted offered as explanation that she might be “experiencing a stage of consciousness preliminary to becoming a psychic medium”. A plausible suggestion, coming from a psychic researcher, as puzzling luminous phenomena manifest themselves often around mediums, and are well known in the field of para psych ology. It is said that Helène Smith experienced the manifest ation of mysterious globes or lights in her studio where she had taken up painting, long after her association and ensuing break-up with Theo dore Flournoy: “The visions were accompanied by luminous phenomena. They began with a ball of light which expanded and filled the room. This was not a subjective phenomenon. Helène Smith exposed photo graphic plates which indeed registered strong luminous effects.” [8]

Then there is the case of Ada Bessinet, a Toledo medium of the 1920s. Denounced as a subconscious fraud by Professor Hyslop, who had investigated her during 70 sittings between 1909 and 1910, she clearly made more of an impression on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He wrote, describing a séance with her: “Brilliant lights are part of the medium’s power, and even before she had sunk into a trance, they were flying up in graceful curves as high as the ceiling and circling back on us. One nearly rested on my hand. It seems to be a cold light, and its nature has never been determined, but perhaps the cold, vital light of the firefly may be an analogy.” [9] Hereward Carr ing ton was another who was not impressed, but he did state that he observed some very curious lights at a 1922 séance which, “on request, hovered for a few moments over exposed photographic plates and that the plates, when developed, showed unusual markings which he failed to obtain by artificial means”. [10]
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Notes
1 “Aerial Phenomena in Texas”, Dallas Morning News, Texas, 5 Oct 1898; “Aerial Phenomena In Texas”, Galveston Daily News, Texas, 6 Oct 1898.
2 “Burned To Death By A Meteor”, Burlington Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, 23 Mar 1876; “Burned To Death By A Meteor”, Ohio Democrat, New Philadelphia, Ohio, 30 Mar 1876; “Burned To Death By A Meteor”, Decatur Daily Repub lican, Decatur, Illinois, 11 April 1876.
3 The North-West, Free port, Illinois, 23 Aug 1866.
4 Bangor Daily Whig And Courier, Bangor, Maine, 26 June 1866.
5 “Vuurbol Doodt Een Priester”, De Gelderlander, ed. Nijmegen, Netherlands, 18 Aug 1933.
6 Sanford Spillman: “Strange To Relate”, Winnipeg Free Press, Canada, 2 Aug 1969.
7 Barry Wood: “What Lights Through Yonder Window Broke?” and Barry Wood: “Others Say They’ve Seen The Lights At Mrs Grieswell’s House”, both in the Pallad ium-Item, Richmond, Indiana, 20 Aug 1978; also summar ised in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune, Logansport, Indiana, 28 Aug 1978. An account of Martha Grieswell’s ordeal was also published in Wonders, Dec 1995, as “Life As We Know It Not”, by Mark A Hall, pp109–118.
8 Nandor Fodor: Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, University Books, 1966, 3rd printing 1969, p350.
9 Walter B. Gibson: “Human Enigmas That Still keep the World Guessing, No. 14 – Ada Besinnet”, Lethbridge Daily Herald, Lethbridge, Canada, 13 Jan 1925.
10 Fodor: Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, p30.
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The Poems Of Fedrico Garcia Lorca

Before The Dawn

But like love
the archers
are blind

Upon the green night,
the piercing saetas
leave traces of warm
lily.

The keel of the moon
breaks through purple clouds
and their quivers
fill with dew.

Ay, but like love
the archers
are blind!
—
Gacela of the Dark Death

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to withdraw from the tumult of cemetries.
I want to sleep the dream of that child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I don’t want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,
that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water.
I don’t want to learn of the tortures of the grass,
nor of the moon with a serpent’s mouth
that labors before dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,
awhile, a minute, a century;
but all must know that I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips;
that I am the small friend of the West wing;
that I am the intense shadows of my tears.

Cover me at dawn with a veil,
because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me,
and wet with hard water my shoes
so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth;
for I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.
—
Gacela of the Dead Child

Each afternoon in Granada,
each afternoon, a child dies.
Each afternoon the water sits down
and chats with its companions.

The dead wear mossy wings.
The cloudy wind and the clear wind
are two pheasants in flight through the towers,
and the day is a wounded boy.

Not a flicker of lark was left in the air
when I met you in the caverns of wine.
Not the crumb of a cloud was left in the ground
when you were drowned in the river.

A giant of water fell down over the hills,
and the valley was tumbling with lilies and dogs.
In my hands’ violet shadow, your body,
dead on the bank, was an angel of coldness.
—
Gacela of Unforseen Love

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
Nobody knew that you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

A thousand Persian little horses fell asleep
in the plaza with moon of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.

Between plaster and jasmins, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say “siempre”,

“siempre”, “siempre” : garden of my agony,
your body elusive always,
that blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already lightless for my death.

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Maps – Valium In the Sunshine

Ever anticipated a dream, or wished one and had it occur? I had such an event last night. When I was younger, I had many “Flying Dreams”, where I would flap my arms and take off into the air; swooping, gliding, slowly drifting back to earth, and then springing high into the air. They don’t feel remarkable at all, and at times it seems the dream is more real than the waking. It was a bit of joy to return to this state again, oh the sense of freedom and limitlessness….

This edition of Turfing is made up of wild, rare and wonderful things… from the music of Bob Desper, a little known bard of psychedelic folk music from the Willamette Valley, a wonderful Coyote Tale from the Apaches, to the poetry of Bryce Milligan… I have had fun assembling this edition! Please check out Number 900 and The Great Bay as well.

Thanks,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Number 900: The Entries
The Great Bay
Bob Desper – Time Is Almost Over Now
Coyote in the Underworld
The Poetry Of Bryce Milligan
Bob Desper – Liberty 1974
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Number 900: The Entries…

So, let me explain. This is the 900th entry of Turfing. No. Really…
What started out as an almost daily event has over the years has slowed down a bit, but still, we carry on. It is perhaps the one defining act of art that I have stayed consistently with… Painting I go in and out of, The Invisible College is always around, Poetry comes when not beckoned (less frequently now), but the assemblage of Turfing has been a constant for almost 6 years now. It is the project that is always calling.

I have used it for good and ill; to bring obscure art, poetry and music forward, to ward off working on my other writings, art etc. In the end, it is all the same I think. In dodging something, I create something. That works. I found that I have edited individual postings up to 50 times, photos, music, articles, links… sometimes a post comes together in 15 minutes, sometimes I work off and on on a post for a couple of weeks entailing several hours. I do find myself at a loss on occasion on what to post. This is patently silly, there is so much poetry art, stories and music to publish, let alone commentary that could be made… yet there are times when inspiration flees, and can’t be coaxed back.

I began Turfing thinking I knew a fair amount about art, poetry, music, but over the years as I have expanded my materials, I have become convinced of my lack of true knowledge on these subjects. It doesn’t matter how much you read, there just isn’t enough time. The corpus is just so vast, and the more you discover, the more there is that you have not yet uncovered. I stand among riches beyond compare, and yet so much is unobtainable.

I often despair in the fact that there is a limit to what I can read due to lack of translations… Among many streams, I have a desire to dive into the Urdu schools of poetry, but the translations are so few and far between. As I have gone further and further into the Sufi poets, I realize that many of the gems are in the Urdu languages, and the translations are just not there. I will continue my searches, and true more stuff comes on line all the time. Hopefully, hopefully.

So, over the years, I have watched the postings evolve, and de-evolve. Sometimes I am pleased other times less so. What I do know is that it is an act of Magick: making sense out of the chaos of the last 5000 or more years of cultural tides, influences and dreams. The magick is in the mix, the elements that evolve out of the postings, whether it be Sheikh Nematollah, Ameregin, Oscar Wilde, Radiohead, Shpongle, Erik Davis, Jean Cocteau, Sappho, Petronius, Laura Riding, Allen Ginsberg, Christina Rossetti, or Aldous Huxley. Herein lies the Magick of cultural transmission. We sit together in the cave, seeing the pictures emerge from flame and shadow, out of dreams, and the stories of plants and daemons. Here we connect, across cultures, time, space, gender and different forms of consciousness. There is a stream that knows no beginning or end, that we have all dipped our cups into and drank of…

One of the sweet points of Turfing has been the feedback that I have gotten, most often directly emailed to me. People share that the poetry moved them, a story, or some of my musings. This is like gold to me. I do enjoy the contact with readers, and it is great to know that the assemblage known as “Turfing” touches people.

Off the top of my hat I would like to thank a few people: Ibn, who first put a blog setup together for me and gave it it’s name. He is now travelling around the world with his wife on a long deserved vacation, I wish I were in greater contact with him. Don Ford, for the encouragement and feedback over the years. Lo Ryder, Clark, Diane & Diana, Oliver, Chaff, Scott, Will Penna and many others who have contacted me over the years (Thanks especially to all on the Earthrites List). Col. Kurtz of course with software help, Morgan Miller for being an absolute champ, and a hero. Dale and Laura Pendell for their conversations and encouragement to explore even deeper, and last but not least, Mary who has been my constant Muse for many years. Without her, nothing would have ever floated.

Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
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The Great Bay – Dale Pendell

In a year that has seen the highest recorded temperatures around the world (102f in Moscow), and with the various ecological disaster scenarios playing out (freezing temperatures in the Amazon, droughts across the northern hemisphere, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico) the release of “The Great Bay” couldn’t be more timely. we are at a crossroads, there is no doubt, and have been for awhile. Whilst the crossroads remain the same symbolically, the scenario shifts and changes at what appears to be an ever quickening rate.

I have to admit, I have not read much science fiction as of late. I have not been reading Ray Bradbury (happy 90th birthday Ray!), nor William Gibson or Bruce Sterling. It seems most scenarios that I found fascinating in SF years ago have come and gone in rapid succession. (True, I have not seen the great worms of Arrakis, but I certainly have experienced the Spice./ )

The Great Bay moves into another territory altogether. Other books have had elements of it, but the story telling format within The Great Bay is unique. It has been remarked that this is a dystopian tale. Well yes, and certainly no. It has won “The Best Science Fiction” award from the 2010 Green Book Festival… The science is sound, and very well researched. There is great travail and obstacles presented in this collection of future tales and myths, intimately tied into Climate Change and its effects. In many ways it is a cliffhanger. Will the human race and the other inhabitants of earth survive the bumpy ride into the future? It is a chronology, of many characters spread over a vast expanse of time. (and what characters!) It begins with the melt down of world civilization due to the misuse of technology that results in the deaths of billions, leaving the survivors dazed, and scrabbling through the ruins of what once was. As the dust of years settles, that which went before becomes fading memories, stories, myths and then merely the faintest of distant dreams. Landscapes and seascapes change incessantly, and humans end up doing the same as well. Life finds new and unique patterns within the challenges.

I am reading it for a second time. I had to. I am absorbing the tales, the gyres and eddies of future myths and peoples. At times I want the book to hesitate over a certain period and cast of characters. Of course, it moves on. The book rises and falls like its namesake. The trick in reading The Great Bay is to relax into it, become absorbed. Give your self a couple of days; turn off the TV, the Computer, the Stereo. Sit outside, feet in dirt with natural light if you can. I found myself entering an (en-)tranced state several times, sinking down, down into the tales like one does in a lake or quiet river; with murmurs and waves. Some of the tales evolve in high drama; others the everyday of survival in difficult times. Tales of hunters, poets, future zen masters, warriors, priest, mothers, children and lovers swirl around you, drawing your attention this way and that. The characters are richly drawn, and I found an empathy for them. There is great joy and sadness in the tales, and at times a sense of grief early on. There is also more than a share or wryness and wicked sense of humour. It is a good mix.

One of The Great Bay’s subtext is often one of hunger. It lurks under many of the tales and stories, emerging time and again. Other subtexts that one can find, is the love of land, and place. There is a love affair here of California (read the dedication!). The detail given to the land in these tales speak of attention to the Spiritus Loci, and to the subtle shifts of seasons, wind and time as it plays out across the landscape. Several places that are named and presented in the book are near and dear to my heart. I found myself transported to these places in their future guises. Another subtext, and perhaps the one most important is that of community, and how community evolves and mutates. The communities in The Great Bay have a very wonderful part to play in the tales, truly they do.

I think you might enjoy this book as much as I have and am again. On reading the last chapter (for the first time) I felt the hackles rise up on my neck and arms. Prose that speaks as poetry, and fiction that brings out truth, grounded in the most ancient and future expressions of humanity. My one criticism is that I was left wanting more, but then I can be greedy. I hope Dale will re-visit the world he created in The Great Bay in additional stories down the way. This is one you shouldn’t pass up. A great book, excellent tales, and very, very timely.
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Bob Desper – Time Is Almost Over Now

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Jicarilla Apache Tales:
Coyote in the Underworld;
The Origin of the Monsters;
The First Emergence

This coyote was just like a real person in the old times. He was two-faced; he was evil, but he was also good. He had power in both ways, in the evil way and in the good way. The people often use him in the evil way; and in the good way, too, they use him, for he has power to help as well as to harm.

Coyote was down below with the people. The chief down there, before they started to come up, had a wife who seemed to be very sick with rheumatism. This chief tried in every way to cure her. He had all the men with power perform their ceremonies for her, but it did no good. This woman was not really sick; she was only acting sick and making her husband believe it.

She said, “Take me down to the river. It is the coolest place and there I feel well.”

A river was divided at a certain place and flowed from there in two branches. This place was called Divided Water, and it was here that she wished to be taken. The otter had spoken to this woman through his power; that was why she wanted to get to that place. He used his power as love medicine. Otter was a young man. The chief didn’t know about this.

The chief carried his wife down there every morning and took a lunch for her too. Each evening when the sun was going down he called for her.

After a while he got tired of this and wondered why she always insisted on going to this one place.

The next morning he took her there as usual. Then he turned and went back as though he was going straight for his camp. But as soon as he got out of sight, he ran around a hill and approached from another side and lay there in hiding, watching. Within an hour he saw someone come swimming to that place.

She, too, saw that someone was coming. She took off her clothes and jumped in the water. She and Otter met right in the water. So the otter is our brother-in-law.

Now the chief had found out what that woman was doing. He went back to his home. He was not going after her any more. He had seen that she was not sick, for she had jumped up and taken off her clothes and plunged in as though she were very active and entirely well.

When the sun went down he did not go there as usual. He stayed in his camp.

At nightfall, after waiting for him, the woman came crawling in on her hands and knees. She acted as though she was very sick.

She said, “The old man doesn’t feel sorry for this sick person. You see that I’m coming and having a painful time. See, here you are! You do not even come to get me any more.”

The husband had a grindstone at his side. He said, “Yes, I feel sorry for you!” and he picked up the stone and hurled it at her. The woman leaped up and escaped it. She ran to the home of her mother.

The mother-in-law of the chief was very angry with him. She thought the girl was really sick and thought, “Why does that mean man treat her like that?” [Another version relates that the girl’s mother was cognizant of her misbehavior but connived at it.] She called him all sorts of names, though she did not come into his presence. [I.e., despite her anger she did not violate the mother-in-law—son-in-law avoidance relation.]

She said, “The men are worthless! Look how this man has treated my daughter. I had a hard time to raise this girl and now he abuses her. The men think they do everything; they think they supply all the food and clothes and all the necessities. But the women work harder and do more than the men. The women know how to do things. They can do all the men’s work too if necessary.”

The chief came out when he heard her talking like this. He was very angry. He said, “All right! If you think you can do all the men’s work, we shall see. We shall see who has more power.”

He called all the men to him, even the boys, even the baby boys, and he told them that they were to separate from the women. Even the male dogs and male horses were taken on the men’s side. The men and all male things crossed to the other side of the river.

This chief had great power. He spoke to Kogultsude. He dropped four beads in a whirlpool in the water. [Four beads of different colors constitute a common offering to sacred rivers or springs for the Jicarilla.]

He said to Kogultsude [Kogultsude, whose name probably can be translated “he holds in the water,” is a powerful supernatural, the personification of the power of the water], “I want the water wide, so that the women cannot cross over.”

It was made so.

In the springtime the women and men both planted corn. They both hunted too. The women knew how to hunt too. That year the women as well as the men had plenty, all they wanted to eat. The second year the women had less. They were getting tired. They were afraid to go out and hunt as boldly as the men. They didn’t sow enough seeds. The third year they had still less. The fourth year very few of the women had anything to eat. None of them planted crops that year. The men had plenty every year. The women were beginning to starve and suffer.

The women were standing on the bank calling to the men, saying, “Come back and take care of us.”

But the chief would not let the men go. “Let them learn a lesson,” he said. “Let them be punished.”

All the older girls began to cry for the men now. They began to abuse themselves sexually. They masturbated with elk horn; and that is how the elk became an enemy of man. They used rocks also. That’s how it happened that the rock became the enemy of man. And they used eagle feathers too. That is how the eagle became a giant and killed many of the people. The girls also used the feathers of the owl. All the things that afterward killed men, all the monsters, came into being because of what these girls did. For these objects impregnated the girls, and the monsters were later born from these unions. These were the monsters which Killer-of-Enemies was to destroy later on, after the people came to this earth.

The men were affected in the same way as the women by the separation of the sexes. They became sexually aroused and unsatisfied. They tried to make vaginas out of mud and use them but they were unsuccessful.

This went on for a long time. Both sides were having a hard time of it and were punishing themselves because of what that old lady had said. The women couldn’t cross that river; it was too deep and strong.

About that time Coyote came along. Codi is always funny. He went into the river. He found a baby in the whirlpool. He swam in and got it.

He said, “Oh, this is a nice baby! I’ll take it and raise it myself.”

So he went back with it among the men. The child looked just like the babies of men, but it was the child of Kogultsude.

Kogultsude missed his child. He made the water rise so that his child would be brought back. He sent the water out to wash it back, to draw back his lost baby.

The chief was worried now. He said to the men, “We must go across the river and find out what has happened. Something has been done against this river that it acts this way.”

So the men swam over and were now reunited with the women. They all went to the mountains to escape the water which was still rising. Some of the men and women were drowned. The rest got on the top of a big mountain.

They said to Coyote, “You must help us. Save us from the water.”

So Coyote used his power to make the mountain grow. It grew and grew, but the water rose ever faster. All the time Coyote had the child under his cloak. At that time he had the same kind of fur that he wears now, only then he wore it as a man does a robe. No one knew that he had this baby under the robe.

The mountain rose and came right up to the present earth, this world. All the shamans were praying. But the water was still rising. All the people fell on this coyote. The water came right up to the edge of this world. It ran all over the country.

Now they were all getting after Coyote and scolding him. They said, “He is always the funny one! He must have done something.”

So at last he said, “I have this baby. I thought he was not going to get this baby again.”

The baby was almost dead; it was drying up. He took it out and showed it to the people, and then threw it into the water again. At once the water began to recede.

Before that there was no water on this earth, nor were there any mountains. The people didn’t like this place. They wanted to go down below again. So Coyote made the mountain go down again, and it shrank. But the water which had spread over the earth stayed, and this was the water that was present at the time of the real emergence. Before that there was none on this earth.

The people went down below again and stayed there for about nine or ten months. Then they started making the sun and moon down below after this. These people were supernaturals.

By the time the emergnce occurred, the girls who had abused themselves were already big with children. They had been impregnated from intercourse with the things they had used. These children they were carrying were therefore born here on earth, and they became the monsters that preyed on man, the monsters which Killer-of-Enemies had to destroy before men could multiply.

It was after the people went down below again that Hactcin’s dog asked that people be made for him as companions. So people of a different kind were made and these were the real Jicarilla. They intermarried with these first supernaturals who dwelt there, and so they were half human and half supernatural.

The supernaturals who were drowned when Kogultsude made the waters rise did not die. They turned to frogs and fishes. There was no death in those days.

That is why Raven and Buzzard had to decide whether man would die. It was half and half. In those days the dead were coming to life every four days. Then Buzzard threw a scraping pole in the water and said, “If this sinks man will die.” It came to the surface. Then Raven threw in a mano and said, “If this sinks man will die.” It sank; therefore man dies.
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The Poetry Of Bryce Milligan: Lost And Certain Of It

Five Years Gone
for Jane Kenyon

Behind the house, Jane’s garden is overgrown;
between there and Eagle Pond only ghosts:
trains that run silent over the grade’s gray stones
littered with rusted steel spikes, heavy bolts.
Beside the lake, a favored spot, good for sun,
good for water, only slightly wilder than
Jane’s garden where her spring ministrations
kept the volunteer maples down, so eager
to see the seasons in and out, in and out.
Down the road a mile there is a stone where
anonymous hands swap scraps of poetry
and sea shells for pine cones, single ear rings
or other scraps of poetry, some of it
Jane’s, mostly not, some taking, some giving.
Just over the fence, a small apple tree drops
the sweetest fruit I have ever tasted.

–
Visiting the Painter Lady:
Canyon, Texas, 1917

Once a week for six weeks, while farmboys died in France
Pauline visited Georgia – packed up her precious paints,
her half-finished flower scenes, cranked up the Model T
and rattled down the rutted wagon track that led
away west to the newly grated gravel road,
gearing down and down toward the top of the one long hill,
pausing there to catch a breath of wind and pretend
for a moment that the scent of scrub cedar was sweet pine,
then sailing the other side in neutral, fast enough to skim
the sometime-quicksand crust of the Canadian River ford.
Pauline spent an hour with the painter lady at the College,
two neat brick buildings overlooking Palo Duro Canyon,
that sudden red rift across tawny plains so stark
as to inspire imagination in a fence post, just to fill in
the colossal emptiness. Pauline painted scenes
of mountain meadows she had never seen, portraits
of unborn daughters in starched pinafores,
a woman in a grass skirt with a ukulele. Georgia
shaped colors: rich red rifts across tawny dreams
beneath looming orchid skies.
–
Wild mustard

for Mance
Sudden sunlight steams the wild mustard,
heavy headed with the vanishing mist,
and for miles the scent makes the sodden heat
worth enduring: windows down, elbow slung
against the warm damp wind.
All along this southern highway clouds
rise out of the ground to surround treetop
islands, each mysterious just so long
as it takes the gray incensed fog to fade
into the yellow light.
One hot May morning thirty years gone
I walked these Navasota bottomlands
with old man Lipscomb: “I’s up way early
for a bluesman,” and he laughed at the sun.
We stood in that rich light
until Mama’s sausage and biscuits
drew us inside to a day of stories
and guitar licks I would never get right –
not even understand until I smelled
wild mustard in your hair.

—
Lost and certain of it

Lost and certain of it, the woods crowd in
allowing only glimpses of the track
that was so clear and broad and well traveled
only moments back where the sun fell bright
between the leaves to dapple the mast, but
lost and certain of it, the woods crowd in
spinning the senses like leaves in a wind
risen from the past to obscure the path
that was so clear and broad and well traveled.
A broad green stream appears for a moment
strewn with rippled light and autumn’s soft flames.
Lost and certain of it, the woods crowd in
and the stream slips away into the deeper shade,
taking with it the desire for the path
that was so clear and broad and well traveled,
taking with it the memory of the last
dregs of love and I am glad that I am
lost and certain of it.
Let the woods crowd out
all that is clear and broad and well traveled.

Find a copy here at the excellent Wings Press!

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Bob Desper – Liberty – 1974

Information on Bob Desper’s Long Lost Album…
___________________

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things,
When people who go about singing or kissing
Know deeper things than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
And people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken. – Novalis
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Sunday, August 8th, 2010 – Today is our son Rowan’s 20th birthday, he arrived at 1:30PM 1990 on a very hot August day, in Mt. Shasta California.
(Here he is at almost a year old with his Mum)

He arrived in in a hurry (though not early), it was perhaps the fastest birth I have ever been aware of… anyway, he has always been in a rush, running before he walked leaping head long into one adventure after another. He spent his early life in Mt. Shasta and out on the coast at Arcata & Eureka, where he learned to love the beach and ocean, a passion he shares with his parents. He has lived in Oregon since just before his 2nd birthday.

If you have been a frequenter of Turfing lately, you know Rowan is in Art College now; becoming a cinematographer which has been his only real goal since he was five years old. (John Bormann’s “Excalibur” did the trick) He writes treatments and scripts all the time. I come home, and find scripts on my desk, or revisions for me to peruse. He recognizes that the Muse can withdraw her favours, so he works to please her, and offers up his hours of work with a joy and an enthusiasm that is moving to behold.

So here is to his new year on this blue orb; he is sitting now with friends in the back yard; some that he has known since kindergarten, and others from high school and college. They are laughing and shouting, full of joy and youth. Rowan moves through his world with a wonderful sense of grace and sharing; he attracts good people and situations… We love the lad as all parents love their offspring, we take great joy in all that he does.

Happy 20th Rowan!
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On The Menu:

The Model of the Universe…
Brendan Perry – Babylon
A Machen Short Story
The Poetry of Pamela Uschuk
Brendan Perry – The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
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The Model of the Universe…

Model describes universe with no big bang, no beginning, and no end
(PhysOrg.com) — By suggesting that mass, time, and length can be converted into one another as the universe evolves, Wun-Yi Shu has proposed a new class of cosmological models that may fit observations of the universe better than the current big bang model. What this means specifically is that the new models might explain the increasing acceleration of the universe without relying on a cosmological constant such as dark energy, as well as solve or eliminate other cosmological dilemmas such as the flatness problem and the horizon problem.

I have never been comfortable with the Big Bang Theory. Big Pulse though, I can get my head (sorta) around. While we will never really know the scenario as our glimpse of the whole process is so brief, so minute, this feels “closer” IMPOV. This is a great article if you get a chance to read it…
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Brendan Perry – Babylon

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A Machen Short Story:

A Double Return (1890)

One of the first of Machen’s new racy and very contemporary tales of the early 1890s, it succeeds in evoking eeriness and being (at least a little) salaciously shocking, though without the faintest touch of crudity. Oscar Wilde read this tale and was impressed with it; on its strength he took the young Machen out to dinner and encouraged him in his chosen career.

The express from the west rushed through Acton with a scream, whirling clouds of dust around it; and Frank Halswell knocked out the ashes from his pipe and proceeded to gather from various quarters of the carriage his newspapers, his hat-box, his handbag, and, chief of all, a large portfolio carefully packed in brown paper. He looked at his watch, and said to himself: “6.30; we shall be at Paddington in five minutes; and only five minutes late, for a wonder.” But he congratulated himself and the railway company rather too soon: a few minutes later and the train began to slacken, the speed grew slower and slower, and at last came the grinding sound of the brakes and a dead stop. Halswell looked out of the window over the dreary expanse of Wormwood Scrubbs, and heard someone in the next carriage explaining the cause of the delay with pardonable pride in his technical knowledge. “You see, them there signals is against us, and if we was to go on we should jolly well go to kingdom come, we should.” Halswell looked at his watch again and drummed his heels against the floor, wondering impatiently when they would be at Paddington, when, with a sudden whirl, a down train swept by them and the western express once more moved on. Halswell rubbed his eyes; he had looked up as the down train passed, and in one of the carriages he thought he had seen his own face. It was only for a second, and he could not be sure. “It must have been a reflection,” he kept on saying, “from the glass of one window to the other. Still, I fancied I saw a black coat, and mine is light. But of course it was a reflection.”

The express rolled into the terminus with dignity – it was only ten minutes late, after all; and Frank Halswell bundled himself and his traps into a hansom, congratulating himself on the paucity of his bags and the absence of his trunks as he watched the excited mob rushing madly at a Redan of luggage. “153, the Mall, Kensington!” he shouted to the driver above the hubbub of the platform; and they were soon threading deftly along the dingy streets that looked so much dingier than usual after the blue mist upon the sea, the purple heather and the sunny fields. Frank (he was a very popular artist in those days – a rising man, indeed) had been on a sketching tour in Devon and Cornwall: he had wandered along the deep sheltered lanes from hill to hill, by the orchards already red and gold, by moorland and lowland, by the rocky coast and combes sinking down to the wondrous sea.

On the Cornish roads he had seen those many ancient crosses, with their weird interlacing carving, which sometimes stand upon a mound and mark where two ways meet; and as he put his portfolio beside him he could not help feeling a glow of pride at its contents. “I fancy I shall make a pretty good show by next spring,” he thought, Poor fellow! he was never to paint another picture; but he did not know it. Then, as the hansom verged westward, gliding with its ringing bells past the great mansions facing the park, Halswell’s thoughts went back to the hotel at Plymouth and the acquaintance he had made there. “Yes; Kerr was an amusing fellow,” he thought; “glad I gave him my card. Louie is sure to get on with him. Curious thing, too, he was wonderfully like me, if he had been only clean shaven and not ‘bearded like the pard,’ Dare say we shall see him before long; he said he was going to pay a short visit to London. I fancy he must be an actor; I never saw such a fellow to imitate a man’s voice and gestures. I wonder what made him go off in such a hurry yesterday. Hullo! here we are; hi, cabman! there’s 153.”

The twin doors of the hansom banged open; the garden gate shrieked and clanged, and Halswell bounded up the steps and rapped loudly at the door. The maid opened it. Even as he said, “Thank you, Jane; your mistress quite well, I suppose?” he thought he noticed a strange look, half questioning, half surprised, in her eyes; but he ran past her, up the stairs, and burst into the pretty drawing-room. His wife was lying on the sofa; but she rose with a cry as he came in.

“Frank! Back again so soon? I am so glad! I thought you said you might have to be away a week.”

“My dear Louie, what do you mean? I have been away three weeks, haven’t I? I rather think I left for Devonshire in the first week of August.”

“Yes, of course, my dear: but then you came back late last night.”

“What! I came back last night? I slept last night at Plymouth. What are you talking about?”

“Don’t be silly, Frank. You know very well you rang us all up at twelve o’clock. Just like you, to come home in the middle of the night when nobody expected you. You know you said in your last letter you were not coming until to-day.”

“Louise dear, you must be dreaming. I never came here last night. Here is my bill at the hotel; you see, it is dated this morning.”
Mrs. Halswell stared blankly at the bill; then she got up and rang the bell. How hot it was! The close air of the London street seemed to choke her. Halswell walked a few paces across the room then suddenly stopped and shuddered.
“Jane, I want to ask you whether your master did not come here last night at twelve o’clock; and whether you did not get him a cab early this morning?”

“Yes, mum, at least -”

“At least what? You let him in yourself.”

“Yes, mum, of course I did. But, begging your pardon, sir, I thought as how your voice didn’t sound quite natural this morning when you called out to the cabman to drive to Stepney, because you had changed your mind, and didn’t want to go to Waterloo.”

“Good God! What are you thinking about? I never came here. I was in Plymouth.”

“Frank! You are joking! Look here, you left this behind you.”

She showed him a little silver cigarette case with his initials engraved on it. It was a present from his wife, he had missed it one day when he was strolling with Kerr, and had regretted it deeply, searching in the grass in vain.

Halswell held the toy in his hand. He thought he was indeed in a dream, and through the open window came the shrieks of the newsboys, “Extry speshal! extry speshal!” The light had faded; it was getting dark. But suddenly it all flashed upon him. He remembered Kerr and the face he had caught sight of in the passing train; he remembered the strange likeness; he knew who had found the cigarette case; he knew well who it was that had come to his house.

The maid was a good girl; she had stolen away. No one knows what manner of conversation Frank and his wife had together in the darkness; but that night he went away, as it was said, to America. Mrs. Halswell was dead before the next summer.
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The Poetry of Pamela Uschuk

Flying Through Thunder
(for John and Galway Kinnell)

I
From expectant sunflowers, mountain
blue birds, western meadowlarks
and the melancholy shadows
of their songs in sage; from
the spin and groan of the planet
we roar up, bucking through
the blue fury of thunderheads
on our final leg home.

The small turbo prop pitches
toward glacial peaks, saints gleaming
in the numen of autumn sun, while the pilot
warns us that it will be a rough flight.
As if we didn’t know, caroming
on the backs of jet stream storms, that
there are few smooth flights, as if we don’t read
headlines that daily explode the world.

Below us dump trucks erect a Denver landfill
into the shape of a Mayan temple
burying the relics of our excess
while lightning cracks its knuckles
on the Front Range and thunder
rattles the thin skin of this twin engine plane
shaking us from our loneliness.
Between bellicose clouds jut
sheer curtains of light.

In this space that freezes our imaginations
we bounce then drop through
air pockets rough as alcoholic fists,
dry sockets of turbulence.

II
I have no choice but release any illusion
of control, break my white-knuckled grip
on steel armrests that would splinter on impact
against rock crags that never learned my name.

In the row ahead of me the carefully coifed woman
checks her lipstick as a baby screams
and I wonder at vanity pitching
fragile as a cacoon 20,000 feet above tree line.

I think of the passion of poets
holding their hearts like worn ball caps
in their bruised hands, defying
the spiked teeth of hungry gods
swallowing truth whole before they eat them alive.

III
Even the stocky steward wipes sweat
from his forehead, groans as if he’s giving birth
when we yaw half-over, pushed
by stratospheric gusts we are blind to.

I remember the way my stomach dropped
as a child pumping my swing high,
pretending I was a pilot bombing enemies,
pretending I wasn’t afraid.
At the acme of my pendulum, the swing set ground
against its cemented feet, threatening
to slingshot me into space, and my brother
dared me to jump with him. His green eyes
were wild as a cougar’s, voice screech-pitched
with the blood of pretend death, hands
itching to let go of the chains.

Bomb’s away! We’re hit. Jump. Jump.
We’re on fire! Jump!

How could I refuse the catapult
out of my careening or forsee
my brother sent to paratrooper school,
to ruin his young knees
when he landed just off the training mark
preparing for Vietnam?
When the army found out he attended rallies, preached peace,
he was shipped to Da Nang, to dousings
with Agent Orange, to the burning
of village peoples, to daily mortar attacks
and sniper fire he still fights to live through.
Leaping from the swing’s apogee, what
I savored most was fear’s pure torch
scalding my body as it arced, suspended
before the plunge, that moment
gravity kicked in, and I knew
what real death would feel like,
hanging a long breath in space
astonished at the constellation of my life
coming into exquisite focus—family,
friends, ambition, anger, even love—before everything
ndropped away
like a billowing parachute.

IV
Now as the plane lunges, engines
steady above the Continental Divide,
I regard razor backed ridges
older than memory, vaster
than scars. They comfort me
in their lack of pity, their indifference
to our cares. Perhaps this is
all I need to know. It is not until
we begin to fall that we might learn
what it takes to survive.
—

The Horseman of the Crass and Vulernable Word
For J.H.

The hemlock loses the tanager,
a bright blood streak
in a whirling gauze of snow.
Where do we go?
You told me the eye was lost,
old lens in a dish of milk
going to blue-veined cheese,
a lens that sneezed
when you laughed the mockingbird’s laugh,
the horse’s white laugh,
saying your brother accidentally
shot it out as you crawled
under barb wire, hunting.

I was young and fell in love
with your wounds, your tongue,
half-song, half-glands,
strong as the Calvinist hands
that whacked and fed your swampy youth.
I was young and drank vermouth
while you fell to your knees
in the Ford’s back seat where you teased
until I laughed too much
when you begged please,
and your one-eyed touch
stared up at the night jar sky,
blinked at Orion, your
archer, saying good-bye.
I laughed but I feared your tongue,
your thighs. I was young.
I had heard.
Never love a poet at his word.

You were the man who could maim me
in those days when whiskey
clarified any dark thing.
Like Bobby and Annette we’d sing,
Baby, you’re my beach blanket;
I’m your Mickey Mouse coquette.

You knew my crippled heart, my blind side
but I’d ride ride
ride on that edge where the heart’s not given,
can’t be taken
or lost to an archer or poet with one eye.
Oh, the heart has a spongy hide
believing in love’s bromide.
Mine found its bed unmade, undone
when you left with your joking tongue.

But I tell you this now,
horseman of the crass and vulnerable word,
love is damp as a cloud-blown beach
and crawls in your bones
that never lose their ache.
When I dreamed your face- –
so blindly polite, just the glimpse
of a lens of a face, just before
the horse, the dark and slippery horse I rode
so far out to sea
that the shore was a crumb the gulls couldn’t eat- –
I went numb in my sleep.
Even numbness passes.
I am half-blind in this half-blind night
but I’ve learned to ferment
wine from ash.
And you, it’s always late–
you’ve broken your horse,
now lie under it.
—
Finding Peaches in the Desert

They taste like a woman, you say
and bite deep into the sweet heat
squeezing through tender skin,
while I laugh, taking the fruit you offer.
We close our eyes and transport
this delicious host to our loves
flown distant as time in dreams.
You can never eat too many, I say and pull
another ripe peach from the desert tree.
It fills my palm, my mouth as I suck
the unhusbanded nectar.
It is delicious as stealing light,
such innocent grace, a holiday
from history and eternity.
We bare our breasts to sun
as women have done for centuries
beside the blue water pool at ease with rabbits, shrill
wasps, the shy steps of occasional deer,
while vultures funnel mid-heaven.
Struck dumb by sun cauterizing
the Sonoran sky that flings its blue skirt
all the way across the ripe hip of Mexico,
we feast on peach after peach, while
peach-colored tanagers, wet
green hummingbirds and the topaz eyes of lizards
attend our anointment.
When I wipe one quarter across my breasts
and down my stomach to my thighs, I
am amazed at the baked odor of love
rising from everything I touch.
This is our ceremony to alter the news
of troops that mass for attack
in the Middle East, to alchemize all hatred
and greed, whatever name
it is given by multinational interests.
There is no aggression in sharing rare fruit
priceless as the wide imaginings of sky
or the brilliant coinage of dragonfly wings.
Even squadrons of wasps and fire ants
armed with nuclear stingers turn
from attack to the pungency of this
ritual feast that celebrates love
in the desert stunned green by unusual rain.

Crazy Love…. At the wonderfully eclectic Wings Press!

_____________

Brendan Perry – The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

“All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.” -Buddha

Whether you are going or staying or sitting or lying down,
the whole world is your own self.
You must find out
whether the mountains, rivers, grass, and forests
exist in your own mind or exist outside it.
Analyze the ten thousand things,
dissect them minutely,
and when you take this to the limit
you will come to the limitless,
when you search into it you come to the end of search,
where thinking goes no further and distinctions vanish.
When you smash the citadel of doubt,
then the Buddha is simply yourself.
– Daikaku

Late Sommer Arcing ….
I have found myself writing again;(not just for the magazine or Turfing) which of course is one of those acts that I do… either well, or poorly. I cannot pretend that I have a great talent at it, as I fledge at it whereas others soar. It is in the elbow grease; don’t give lip service to that which you don’t apply yourself to, right? I am finding that writing down notes as you go is pretty effective; inspiration hits me more often when I am away from the computer than when I am on it. The art of writing out by hand trumps typing for the capture of the pure thought. Typing is like herding words into the corral of structure, whereas writing is like climbing an open face of granite. Perilous at times, but so satisfying.

I have been reading Dale Pendell’s new book, “The Great Bay”. There is a review soon to follow, but suffice to say, it’s a page turner. (I am not going to give it away yet!) It is a complete new direction for his writing, and has already won the “Best Science Fiction” award for the 2010 Green Book Festival. It is very, very good.

I want to promote an event for another writer friend, Graham St. John this Friday in San Francisco for the American release of his wonderful “Technomad”. If you are not familiar with Graham’s work, follow the links below. It is really an impressive bit of anthropological work.

Anyway, on the Caer Llwydd front. Rowan has been working on film weekly since his new quarter started at the Art Institute. We will soon be posting a video or two of his, so stay tuned. Summer has somewhat arrived in Oregon. It is very odd though, unlike any summer I remember here. Intensely warm/hot for several days, then the temperature drops, and everything is extremely cool again. It must be playing havoc with the poor farmers. Life flows on here, every other day there is another film crew working in the house, Mary is in the garden and life is sweet as summer arcs into harvest. Fall, the old traditional Autumn, is but a few days away. How does it go so quickly? We walk together on the street at night, everything is just so perfect and the beauty of life shimmers all around us. Catch your breath, life tumbles on.

I hope this finds you with those you love, doing that which means the most to you, as we swim together through the air…

I hope you enjoy this edition.

Gwyllm
__________

On The Menu:
Technomad Book Launch
Anarchist Quotes
Silversun Pickups – Growing Old Is Getting Old (Live on MTV: Unplugged)
The Future of the Future – Robert Anton Wilson
The Daoist Poet: Yuan Mei
Silversun Pickups – “Kissing Families”

______________________________
I will soon have a review on Technomad, but meanwhile if you are in the Bay area this Friday, you might consider attending the US launch event!

Technomad Book Launch : San Francisco
Friday, JULY 30th 9:00pm – 10:00pm
1015 Folsom, 1015 Folsom Avenue San Francisco, CA

Book Launch for Graham St John’s Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. Panel discussion on San Francisco, Burning Man and its contributions to the “Global Tribal Revival”. Graham will read from his landmark book and discuss the contributions that Bay Area groups and projects have made to the international rave and festival
culture, including a panel discussion with: Marian Goodell (Burning Man), Michael Gosney (Digital Be-In, Earthdance) and Brad Olson (How Weird Street Faire/CCC)

The Launch is part of SOUL OF THE CITY: Transforming Metropolis at
1015 Folsom July 30 8:00pm – 3:00am
A benefit for Entheon Village, Red Lightning, Sacred Spaces and Feed the Artists at Burning Man 2010 – Celebrating the Evolution of the Revolution

Cost:
$15 in advance
$10 before 9pm (for Talks/Book Launch)
$20 at the door after 9pm

TICKETS @ http://thesoulofthecity.eventbrite.com/

PERFORMANCE LINE-UP

MAIN STAGE
9:00pm – 10:30pm
Outersect – DJ Set

10:30pm – 11:30pm
OM Live! – Live Act
First Bay Area live performance since Lost At Last for the new band featuring Digital Shaman Om with Kali’s Angel Amy Carr.

11:30pm – 12:30am
Lux D’Coda / DJ Goz – Live/DJ Act
The cosmic muse of Foxgluv is back to enthrall us with potent new magic, morphing into DJ Goz trance grooves.

Niema Lightseed, Prayer Performance

12:30am – 2:00am
AFROLICIOUS featuring DJ Oz – Live/DJ Act
A full on electronic live act featuring Afro-Tropi-Electro-Funk-Disco-House to dance yourself into bliss

2:00am – 3:00am
DJ tba

DOWNSTAIRS – Sacred Sound Temple
– Talks by Graham St John and Radhanath Swami
– Kirtan by Radhanath Swami
– Alan Tower’s Sound Eggs
– Graham Lightfinger
– Healing Zone
– Sacred Metropolis Community Altars

FRONT ROOM:
– CHLOROPHIL
– MODA – Romentum.com – LA
– OUTERSECT
– AIRE REDTREE

BM 2010 Interactive Art Preview
Food and Drink

More info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=130737523616731
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

BOOK PREVIEW

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures
by Graham St John (Equinox, 2009)

A cultural history of global electronic dance music countercultures, Technomad explores the pleasurable and activist trajectories of post-rave culture.

“Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures is the most wide-ranging and detailed of all the books on rave. More than the study of a musical movement or genre, Technomad offers an alternate history of cultural politics since the 1960s, from hippies and Acid Tests through the sound systems and ‘vibe-tribes’ of the 1990s and beyond…. Like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, Technomad makes unexpected but entirely convincing connections between people, movements and events. Like Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, St John’s book introduces us to unknown heroes, committed geniuses and genuine revolutionaries. Beautifully written, with a genuinely international perspective on electronic dance music culture, Technomad is one of the best books on music I’ve read in some time.” – Professor Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

(Get the book from the Earthdance Bookshelf <http://www.earthdancenetwork.com/page/bookshelf-1>)

Online excerpts from Technomad:
Digital Be-In: http://www.earthdancenetwork.com/notes/Conscious_Parties_and_Cybertribes
Burning Man: http://www.undergrowth.org/burning_time_begoggled_in_the_mega_vibe_burning_man_by_graham_st_john

Graham
____________________________________

Anarchist Quotes:

Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited–or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society. – Errico Malatesta

I am an anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule and also ruled I will not be. – John Henry Mackay

Anarchism…stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. – Emma Goldman

The political arena leaves one no alternatives, one must be either a dunce or a rogue. – Emma Goldman

The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all. – G.K. Chesterton

For every complex problem there is a solution which is straightforward, simple, and wrong. – H.L. Mencken
____________________________________

A Wonderful Band!
Silversun Pickups – Growing Old Is Getting Old (Live on MTV: Unplugged)

________________________________
The Future of the Future
– Robert Anton Wilson

There was a Fundamentalist Futurist back in the 1890′s who demonstrated that New York City would be abandoned as unfit for habitation by the 1930s. His argument was based on projection forward of population trends, and he correctly estimated that population would grow from 4 million to over 7 million in 40 years. (He didn’t guess it would reach over 12 million by now.) It was then obvious, he said, that the amount of horses necessary to provide transportation for that many people would result in a public health hazard of incredible dimensions: there would be horse manure up to the third floor windows everywhere in Manhattan. This illustrates the most frequent fallacy found in Future projections: the “elementalistic fallacy” named by Alfred Korzybski. The elementalistic fallacy as Korzybski noted, seems to be built into our very language. We can talk about Joe Smith in isolation from his (or any) environment; we can therefore think about Mr. Smith in such fictitious isolation; and in such “elementalistic fallacy” we will always draw wrong conclusions, because Mr. Smith cannot exist without some environment. (He will explode in a vacuum, and without a social world his mind will similarly explode — or implode — or at least mutate shockingly, as isolation experiments have shown. )

Projecting population forward without projecting other factors forward has produced numerous elementalistic fallacies similar to thinking of Joe Smith without an environment. Malthus, for instance, “proved” that population will always increase faster than resources, but this was disproven by technological history, and we now understand that “resources” only exist when identified by analysis and each new discovery in pure science shows us new resources everywhere.

One example: the Newtonian system allowed us to tap 0.001 per cent of the energy in a glass of water; 19th Century thermodynamics showed us how to tap 0.01 per cent of that energy; we can now tap 1.0 per cent. Nobody knows how much we’ll be able to tap in 50 years.

Elementalistic fallacies abound in Future projections (including my own). We are only gradually and gropingly learning to think “non-elementalistically” (in Korzybski’s phrase) or “synergetically” as Bucky Fuller liked to say. I have found one quick way to avoid the more obvious elementalistic and Fundamentalistic errors, which is this:

Whenever I project one trend forward, I then re-analyze the situation, projecting at minimum five other trends forward also.

For instance, lifespan and population have both been increasing in the past 200 years. Projecting these trends forward elementalistically (in isolation) has led to some notable Doomsday scenarios in which humanity overcrowds itself to death. An entirely different picture emerges, however, if one projects these trends synergetically along with five other trends, such as:

The effect of industrialism on population. As documented by Fuller (Critical Path) a nation’s population only rises rapidly in the transition from feudalism to industrialism, then levels off when industrialism is well established in a country.

The emergence of Feminism and self-choice among women, beginning with the 18th century radicalism of Mary Wollstonecraft and now including Women’s Liberation movements in all parts of the world — even dawningly in Islamic nations.

The movement of communication technology into space, with clear trends indicating that “industrial” (or more likely, post-industrial) technology will follow, with workers and then families and then schools and grocers and museums, etc. moving into space colonies.

The continued improvement in birth control technology and the fading line between contraception and abortion. There is already a heated debate, for instance, about whether certain devices — e.g. the IUD — “are” or “are not” abortifacients.

The neuroscience revolution (or H.E.A.D. Revolution — Hedonic Engineering And Development) with its increasing promise that humans in the near future will achieve more freedom from mechanical conditioned reflexes (both “physical” and “mental”) than ever before.

Whenever I try to project all five of these trends even 40 years into the future, I find the “overcrowding” problem seems less likely than New York being buried in horse manure. To get a feel for synergetic thinking, try your own projection, “guestimating” what the next decade will bring in each of these fields, and the decade after that, and so on, to 2029.
________________________________

The Daoist Poet: Yuan Mei

Nearing Hao-pa

(I saw in the mist a little village of a few tiled roofs and joyfully admired it.)

There’s a stream, and there’s bamboo,
there’s mulberry and hemp.
Mist-hid, clouded hamlet,
a mild, tranquil place.
Just a few tilled acres.
Just a few tiled roofs.
How many lives would I
have to live, to get
that simple.
–
Just Done

A month alone behind closed doors
forgotten books, remembered, clear again.
Poems come, like water to the pool
Welling,
up and out,
from perfect silence
–
Climbing The Mountain

I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
for a poem to come…

Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
leaning on my staff.

How I’d love to be a master
of the blue sky’s art:

see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
he’s brushed in so far today.
–
Mad Words

To learn to be without desire
you must desire that.
Better to do as you please:
sing idleness.
Foating clouds, and water idly running –
Where’s their source?
In all the vastness of the sea and sky,
you’ll never find it.
____________

Silversun Pickups – “Kissing Families”

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.” – Raoul Vaneigem

_____________

It has been a rough and tumble few weeks. I am not here for the complaining tho; I made it through and I am looking forward to new adventures, friends coming a-visiting, and new opportunities.

We are not going to spin wheels, but spin tales and display some wonders for you all. In this edition, we cover some of the territory from older editions of Turfing. I find the cycling interesting.

Remember the beauty that surrounds, remember the relationship that is.

Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

_____________

On The Menu:
The Links
“Above & Beyond”
Review: Opium For The Masses
Liza Gerrard – The Song of Amergin
Celtic Wonder Tales: Inisfail
The Poetry of Gabriel Rosenstock
Liza Gerrard & Patrick Cassidy – Amergin’s Invocation
___________________

The Links:
Inside Insides
Learning From The Ancients
The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense
I Have Been Saying This For Years…
African Child Witches On The Increase
___________________
“Above & Beyond”
We find out this week if Rowan & his friends film “Above & Beyond” goes to the national competition! We are very excited around here about this!

Above and Beyond – Portland 24 Hour Film Race from William Schultz on Vimeo.

Shooting for Amour Sincère resumes this next week as well!
__________________
Review: Opium For The Masses

Opium for the Masses – Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication
By Jim Hogshire

“Contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing
P. somniferum – Martha Stewart Living

I have to tell you; just the cover alone…. 80)

Michal Pollan wrote a lengthy feature (“Opium, made easy”) about Jim Hogshire in Harpers Magazine, amazed that the Opium Poppy which grows wild, grows legal and is available at craft and hobby stores and nurseries, could also be made into a drinkable tea that acts in a way similar to codeine or vicodin. (I am searching for a copy of this!)

This is perhaps one of the most important books for the home herbalist; in it one finds the folklore, the formulations, and the functions of the Opium Poppy in all its applications. Because of the propaganda, bad press and general ignorance of the modern age many have suffered needlessly. I have seen many sides of P. somniferum and its various constituents since I was young; from codeine, to morphine, heroin, darvon, vicodin, etc. etc,. I have seen the use, and the misuse of this ancient companion plant.

Let me be forthright; I feel people should be in charge of their own health, autonomous in as much as they can be. This includes using herbs, tinctures, exercising, meditation and more. It also includes pain management. In Opium for the Masses, you will discover information that is of great use for safe pain management. Opium and its derivatives have been in the cabinets and gardens of the apothecary since at least the Mesolithic. Fact: Until the late 19th century and 20th century, most people in Europe, Asia and parts in between had access to Opium without the crazed response in the west and elsewhere since Opiate Prohibition was initiated. (Originally instituted as a racist policy against the yellow peril in the US) It was commonly available in apothecary’s, pharmacies, in the garden, and in the wise woman’s bag of tricks back in the ancient of days. Opium eased the pain and agony of countless humans, and eased the passage of end of life for those in need of it; We still see its constituents used to this day in such worthy exercises like Home Hospice, and in countless hospitals around the world.

There is so much knowledge to be digested from Opium for the Masses. Histories, formulations, myths, the lies, truths, and anecdotes about this most intriguing of plants. The book is laid out in succinct order, the writing is very tight and flowing. It covers artist, addiction, and various forms of misuse. It illustrates the proper preparation of various opium formulas from poppy tea to laudanum. The book covers laws, and what one must be prudent about.

I would purchase this book just to have it on the forbidden knowledge shelf. Thankfully, it is in print again after 15 years of being out of print. Do yourself a favour, pick up a copy.
___________________

Liza Gerrard – The Song of Amergin

______________________

Celtic Wonder Tales: Inisfail

It was on the First of May that the Milesians came into Ireland. They came with their wives and their children and all their treasures. There were many of them. They came in ships, and it is said by some that they came from a land beyond the utmost blueness of the sky and that their ships left the track among the stars that can still be seen on winter nights.

When they were come to Ireland they drew up their ships. They put the fastening of a year and a day on them and set foot on the Sacred Land. Amergin was the first to set foot on the Land, and he made this rann in honour of it. He chanted the rann because he was the chief poet and druid among the Milesians.

THE RANN.

I am The Wind That Blows Over The Sea,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Wave 0f The Sea,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Sound The Sea Makes,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Ox Of The Seven Combats,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Vulture Upon The Rock,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Ray Of The Sun,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Fairest Of Plants,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Wild Boar,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Salmon in The Water,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Lake In The Plain,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Word 0f Knowledge,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The Spear-Point Of Battle,
Ah-ro-he!
I am The God Who Kindles Fire In The Head,
Ah-ro-he!
Who makes wise the company on the mountain?
Who makes known the ages of the moon?
Who knows the secret resting-place of the sun?
Ah-ro-he!

The Milesians gave a victory-shout at the end of the rann, and Amergin said:

“We will go forward now, and when we reach the place where it seems good to rest we will light a fire and put Three Names of Power on the Land so that it may belong to us for ever.”

They went forward then and they saw no one till Brigit took the shape of a woman that has known hardship, and came to try them. She wrapped herself in the cloak of Sorrow and sat by the roadside. She made a great keening.

“O woman,” said Amergin, “why is there such heavy sorrow on you, and why do you make such a shrill keening?”

“I am keening lost possessions, and lost queen-ship, and a name cried down the wind of change and forgotten.”

“Whose name is cried down the wind?”

“The name of Banba that was queen of this land.”

“Her name shall not be whirled into forgetfulness. I will put it on this land: it shall be called Banba.”

“My blessing on you, Stag with Golden Horns, and may the name-giving bring you luck!”

So Amergin gave away the First Name. They went on from that place, and Brigit took the shape of a fierce beautiful queen that has lost a battle, and came again to try them.

“O Queen,” said Amergin, “may all the roads of the world be pleasant to you!”

“O King,” said Brigit, “all the roads of the world are hard when those who were wont to go in chariots walk barefoot on them.”

“O Queen,” said Amergin, “I would fain better your fortune.”

“Grant me then a queen’s asking.”

“Name your asking.”

“I am Eriu, wife of Mac Grian, Son of the Sun, and I would have my name fastened on this land for ever.”

“I will put your name on this land: it shall be called Eriu.”

“My blessing on you, Sun-Crested Eagle, and may the name-giving bring you luck!”

So Amergin gave away the Second Name. They went on from that place, and Brigit took the form of an old wrinkled crone bent double with age, and came again to try them. She was gathering sticks, and the bundle was heavy.

“O woman,” said Amergin, “it is hard to see you lifting a bundle when age has bent you so low already. I would fain better your fortune.”

Brigit raised herself, and said:–

“Though I am an old crone now, bent and withered, yet I was once a great queen, and I will take nothing less than a queen’s asking from you.”

“What is your asking? ”

“Let my name be on this land: I am Fiola.”

“I will put your name on this land: it shall be called Fiola.”

“My blessing on you, Silver-Spotted Salmon of Knowledge, and may the name-giving bring you luck!”

So Amergin gave away the Third Name. It was after that they made a fire for themselves, and when the smoke of it rose against the sky, Ogma, Nuada, and the Dagda, came to try them.

“What people are you? ” asked Nuada, “and from what country have you come?”

“We are the sons of Milesius,” they answered; “he himself is the son of a god–even of Beltu, the Haughty Father. We are come from Moy More, the Great Plain that is beyond the horizon of the world.”

“How got you knowledge of Ireland?” asked Ogma.

“O Champion,” answered Amergin, “from the centre of the Great Plain there rises a tower of crystal. Its top pierces the heavens, and from the ramparts of it the wisest one among us got sight of this land. When he saw it his heart was filled with longing, and when he told us of it our hearts too were filled with longing. Therefore we set out to seek that land, and behold we have come to it. We have come to Inisfail, the Island of Destiny.”

“And ye have come to it,” said the Dagda, “like thieves in the night; without proclamation; without weapon-challenge. Ye have lighted a fire here, as if this were a no-man’s land. Judge ye if this be hero conduct.”

“Your words have the bitterness of truth in them,” said Amergin. “Say now what you would have us do.”

“You are a druid and a leader among your people,” said Nuada. “Give judgment, therefore, between yourselves and us.”

“I will give judgment,” said Amergin “I judge it right that we should return to our ships and go out the distance of nine waves from the land. Use all your power against us, and we will use all our power against you. We will take the Island of Destiny by the strength of our hands, or die fighting for it!”

“It is a good judgment,” said Ogma, “Get back to your ships! We will gather our battle-chiefs for the fight.”

Ogma, Nuada, and the Dagda, went away then from the Milesians.

The Milesians began to put out the fire they. had kindled, and as they were quenching the embers, Brigit threw her mantle of power about her and came to the Milesians in her own shape. When Amergin saw her he knew that she was the Mighty Mother, and he cried out:

“O Ashless Flame, put a blessing on us now, that our luck may not be extinguished with these embers.”

“O Druid,” said Brigit, “if you had wisdom you would know that before the First Fire is extinguished the name-blessing should be pronounced over it.”

“O Mother of All Wisdom, I know it, but the name-blessing is gone from me. I met three queens as I came hither, and each one asked the name-gift of me. They were queens discrowned: I could not put refusal on them.”

Brigit began to laugh then, and she cried:

“O Amergin, you are not counted a fool, yet it seems to me that if you had much wit you would know the eyes of Brigit under any cloak in the world. It was I, myself, who asked the name-gift from you three times, and got it Do not ask a fourth blessing from me now, for I have blessed you three times already.”

She stooped and lifted a half-quenched ember from the fire. She blew on it till it became a golden flame–till it became a star. She tossed it from one hand to the other as a child tosses a ball. She went away laughing.

The Milesians went back to their ships. They put the distance of nine waves between themselves and the land. The Tuatha De Danaan loosed the Fomor on them, and a mighty tempest broke about their ships. Great waves leaped over them and huge abysses of water engulped them. The utmost power of the Milesians could not bring the ships a hair’s breadth nearer to the shore. A terrible wind beat on them. Ireland disappeared. Then Amergin cried out:

“O Land, that has drawn us hither, help us! Show us the noble fellowship of thy trees: we will be comrades to them. Show us the shining companies of thy rivers: we will put a blessing on every fish that swims in them. Show us thy hero-hearted mountains: we will light fires of rejoicing for them. O Land, help us! help us! help us!”

Ireland heard him, and sent help. The darkness cleared away and the wind was stilled.

Then Amergin said:

“O Sea, help us! O mighty fruitful Sea! I call on every wave that ever touched the land. O Sea, help us!”

The sea heard him, and the three waves that go round Ireland–the wave of Thoth, the wave of Rury and the long slow white foaming wave of Cleena. The three waves came and lifted the ships to the shore. The Milesians landed. The Tuatha De Danaan came down to make trial of their battle-strength. Hard was the contest between them. The Milesians held their own against the gods. When they saw that the Milesians could hold their own, the Tuatha De Danaan drew themselves out of the fight. They laughed and cried to the Milesians:

“Good heroes are ye, and worthy to win the earth: we put our blessing on you.”

Nuada shook the bell-branch, and the glory that the Tuatha De Danaan had in Tir-na-Moe before they ever set themselves to the shaping of the earth–that glory–came back to them. They had such splendour that the Milesians veiled their eyes before them.

“Do not veil your eyes!” said Nuada, “we will draw the Cloak of invisibility, the Faed Feea, about us. We give you Ireland: but, since our hands have fashioned it, we will not utterly leave the country. We will be in the white mist that clings to the mountains; we will be the quiet that broods on the lakes; we will be the joy-shout of the rivers; we will be the secret wisdom of the woods. Long after your descendants have forgotten us, they will hear our music on sunny raths and see our great white horses lift their heads from the mountain-tarns and shake the night-dew from their crested manes: in the end they will know that all the beauty in the world comes back to us, and their battles are only echoes of ours. Lift up your faces, Children of Milesius, Children of Beltu the Haughty Father, and greet the land that belongs to you!”

The Milesians lifted up their heads. No glory blinded them, for the Tuatha De Danaan had drawn the Faed Feea about themselves. They saw the sunlight on the grass like emerald fire; they saw the blueness of the sky and the solemn darkness of the pine trees; they heard the myriad sound of shaken branches and running water, and behind it echoed the laughter of Brigit.
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The Poetry of Gabriel Rosenstock

Le Breis is Míle Bliain

Mo ghrá Thú!
Gach soicind.
Nuair a chorraíonn an ghaoth an féar
Lingim Chugat ionam
Id bharróg dhorcha soilsím
Is mé Aimhirghin – cé eile? –
Mholas T’ainm thar chách

For More than a Thousand Years

I love You!
Every second
When wind rustles the grass –
Now and tomorrow –
I leap to You in me
In your dark embrace I shine
I am Amergin – who else –
I have praised Your name over all.
—

As gach póir Díot

As gach póir Díot scallann an ghrian
Ar Do dhamhsa gan chríoch
Taobh dorcha na gealaí is geal
Má osclaíonn Tú Do bhéal
Éalóidh réaltaí, canfaidh iomainn Duit
Is Tusa iadsan
Ealaí ag eitilt go gasta ar gcúl
Conas a shamhlóinn barróg Uait
Mura bpléascfainn Id réaltbhuíon?

From Each And Every Pore

From each and every pore look how the sun beams
On Your eternal dance
The dark side of the moon is bright
If You open Your mouth
Stars will escape and chant their hymns for You
You are they
Swiftly swans fly backwards
How can I imagine Your embrace
Without exploding in Your galaxy?
—
slowly like Venice I am sinking (from Uttering Her Name)

Dar Óma
slowly like Venice
I am sinking
into Your beauty

Your grace
lapping at my door

when will I drown
in the spume-bright story of Your smile?
–
the grace showered on me (from Uttering Her Name)

Dar Óma
unbelievable
the grace showered on me
in my darkest hour
I didn’t know above from below

were grace to fall
it would beat on closed casements

in crazy crystals it came
Your disembodied love

I no longer whimper
for Your touch

a tree of love is growing
I sit in its shade

the night sings
ghazals to the absent moon

______________________
Liza Gerrard & Patrick Cassidy – Amergin’s Invocation

_________________

Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.
– Emma Goldman

Happy are those who find fault with themselves instead of finding fault with others.
– Muhammad

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The Stream of the Week…

Tuesday: On The Music Box: Hildegard Von Bingen
Hey There..
Summer finally opened up it’s doors today in Portland. Up past 80f and not a cloud in the sky, except for the clouds of Mosquito’s that all the damp weather has left us with. Clouds of the little monsters, and I am starting to look like an insect pin cushion. We have set up the back yard most comfortably, but need the citronella candles, and a bag of dry ice to keep the micro-vampires away.

Wednesday: On The Music Box: Harold Budd
Up past 90 today, out doing bids, working on the magazine, and floundering around as usual. I am perhaps the most incompetent person I know. I just flounder harder it seems, generating art and noise out of the mayhem. I am pulling the cord on the internet soon, and removing my main computer from our network when I am working on art and the publications. I fiddle whilst my personal Rome burns. Time seems so short, and on the other hand, everything seems to get done when it is supposed to. I feel art works pressing up against my mind, wanting to come in to be exposed. It is all part of the process….
–
Mary and I took the Sophie for a walk yesterday evening early, and the subject of the dreams from the previous week somehow came blurting out. With such coolness, she calmed my heart down. I am moved by the grace that surrounds her, and how it touches everyone who gets to know her. It is amazing really how just a few words can quiet a fire of the heart. The heart work is the hardest it seems. (except of course getting off of ones arse on projects) The hearts gateway is the door to another world. I am not looking for enlightenment as I once did, I feel that is an illusion with all of the rest. Everything fades before kindness, and caring inpov. Through the heart work, all changes are achieved, from what I have seen.
–
I want to turn you all on to an artist/friend: Richard Hoyen. His Blog addy is: Richard’s Blog and you can see more of his work at this gallery: Richard’s Gallery I think you will be pleasantly surprised. We went to a show last year, I’d seen his works previously, but he is going in such a fine new direction. Check it out!
–
This is an interesting edition (at least to me!), please especially check out the poetry. The Coyote stories are chock full of wisdom, and the quotes from Mircea Eliade and the music from Erik Satie rounds off everything nicely especially with the art of Louis Welden-Hawkins.

Hope this finds you well, with people you love, and who love you.

Blessings,
Gwyllm

On The Menu:
Erik Satie – Gnossienne No.4
Mircia Eliade Quotes
Coyote Tales
The Poetry Of Love And Devotion
Erik Satie – Gnossienne No.5
Art: Louis Welden-Hawkins
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Erik Satie – Gnossienne No.4

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Mircia Eliade Quotes

The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany…. One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity. (Images and Symbols)
–
“Do what he will, he [the profane man] is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present in him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.” (The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion)
–
“The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the “founding of the world”: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.” (The Sacred and the Profane)
–
“It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type (“light coming out of darkness”); weaving, the symbol of the “thread of life,” fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of “truths” relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection. ” (The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion)
–
“The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.” (The Myth of the Eternal Return)
–
There are, above all, urgent rectifications to bring to so many clichés still encumbering contemporary culture, for example, Feuerbach’s and Marx’s celebrated interpretations of religion as alienation. As one knows, Feuerbach and Marx proclaimed that religion estranges man from the earth, prevents him from becoming completely human, and so on. But, even if this were correct, such a critique of religion could be applied only to late forms of religiosity such as those of post-Vedic India or of Judeo-Christianity – that is, religions in which the element of ‘other-worldness’ plays an important role. Alienation and estrangement of man from the earth are unknown, and, moreover, inconceivable, in all religions of the cosmic type, ‘primitive’ as well as oriental; in this case (that is to say, in the overwhelming majority of religions known to history), the religious life consists exactly in exalting the solidarity of man with life and nature.” (The Quest, History And Meaining In Religion)
–
“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.” (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries)
–
“Neti! Neti! cries the sage of the Upanishads: “No! No! thou art not this; nor art thou that! In other words: you do not belong to the fallen cosmos, as you see it now, you are not necessarily engulfed in this creation; necessarily – that is to say, by virtue of the law of your own being. Now, nature has no true ontological reality; it is, indeed, universal becoming. Every cosmic form, complex and magestic though it may be, ends by disintegrating; the universe itself is periodically reabsorbed by “great dissolutions” (mahapralaya) into the primordial matrix (prakriti).” (Yoga: Immortality and Freedom)
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Coyote Tales

Yaqui: Coyote and Rabbit

ONE DAY rabbit was out on a plain eating when Coyote came up. “I am very hungry,” said Coyote. “I am going to eat you.”

“No, wait here and I will bring you a really good meal of chicken. They are cooking it over there.” Rabbit ran off toward the monte and Coyote happily waited, singing in anticipation of a fine meal. He waited a long time. At last he became angry and followed the tracks of Rabbit.

He found Rabbit in an arroyo standing by the cliff wall holding his forepaws against the cliff. “What are you doing?” asked Coyote.

“I am holding this cliff up,” said Rabbit. At that moment a little rock fell and he held the cliff up harder than ever. “Here,” he said to Coyote, “you hold it up while I go and get the food I told you about. It is almost ready.”

Coyote put his paws against the cliff, pushing desperately while Rabbit ran off. Another rock fell and Coyote pushed all the harder. He waited for a long time. He was very tired and terribly hungry. Suddenly he let go of the cliff and ran as fast as he could. Nothing happened. He followed the tracks of Rabbit.

‘Now I really am going to eat you!”

“Just sit down,” said Rabbit. “They are going to bring that food right here. They’ll be here soon.” So Coyote sat down, looking hungrily at Rabbit. Rabbit jumped up saying, “I’ll hurry them. You wait here just a minute.” He ran off. Coyote waited.

Meanwhile, Rabbit set fire all around the edges of the thicket. Then he ran back to Coyote. “Hear the cohetes?” he shouted to Coyote. “The fiesta is coming. They are bringing you a wonderful meal.” Then Rabbit ran away as fast as he could to avoid the fire. Coyote happily danced and sang as he waited for his meal. The fire soon surrounded him and he was burned up.
—
Shoshoni: Coyote And The Bear Cubs; The Death Of Wolf

One day Wolf said to his brother, Coyote. “I would like some seeds. I like them better than meat. Go to your aunt’s place and get some for me.” Coyote said, “We have no relatives.” Wolf said, “Yes; we have. You go over there and see.”

Coyote went out to find the seeds and met two girl cousins, two bear cubs. They looked like twins. They were gathering seeds. Coyote talked to them for a little while. Then he choked both of them; they died. He laid them side by side and covered them up with a rabbit-skin blanket. Then he started to gather seeds.

About sundown, Coyote’s aunt, Bear, came to where the girls were. She was carrying seeds. She said, “What are you doing there, sleeping at this time?” She walked over to them, and pushed and pinched them, trying to wake them up. When they didn’t move she looked under the blanket and saw that they were dead. This made her angry. She ran to Coyote and clawed all the meat off his back with her fingers. Coyote howled, “Wheeeeee.” Then he ran away.

Coyote covered his back with a blanket and went home without his seeds.

When he arrived at his home, Wolf asked for the seeds. Coyote said, “I did not see any.” Wolf, who knew everything, said “Yes, you did. Why do you cover your back? I know you killed those girls and your aunt clawed you.” Coyote admitted that this was so.

Wolf wished Coyote asleep. He had this power. Wolf then went out hunting and killed a very small fawn. He cut the meat off its back in thin strips. It was very smooth and tender. When he got home, Coyote was still curled up asleep. Wolf slipped Coyote’s blanket off and mended his back with the fawn’s back muscles. He made it smooth, just like new.

In the morning, Coyote stretched himself and felt his back. He said, “My back meat has returned. Last night it was gone and there were just bones back there, but now it has come back. It is fine and smooth!”

Wolf said to Coyote, “Now you be good. You are always fooling me. Don’t go back and bother your aunt. But, if you do, be sure to skin her and cut up all the meat and bring it home. Don’t leave any of it.”

Coyote said he would not go back, but he went nevertheless. He met Bear and cut her throat. He skinned her and cut up all the meat and wrapped it in the skin, but he forgot a piece of tripe. On the way home he remembered the tripe, and what Wolf had said about bringing all the meat home, so he went back for it. The Tripe had moved to the north. Coyote chased it but could not catch it. He asked, “What are you doing?” Tripe said, “I am well now. I am going to tell my people what you have done to my daughters.” Coyote said, “Go ahead. I am glad.”

When Coyote returned to the camp with the meat, he told Wolf he had brought it all home. Wolf said, “No you didn’t. You had better watch out. When you see your people, you will find out why.” Coyote said, “There are no people here. What is the matter?” Wolf only said, “In a few days you will see.”

In a few days Wolf said to Coyote, “Stand away from the fire and look to the north.” Coyote said, “Why should I? It is cold.” But he looked, and in the north there was a crowd of people. They looked black in the distance. There was lightning. Finally Coyote said, “It looks like people coming closer. I can see arms and legs. You look, Wolf.” Wolf would not look, but he said to Coyote, “You had better pack everything, and move away.” Coyote said, “Why should I move?”

Wolf went out to see the people coming. The men in the crowd shot Wolf and he died. Then they skinned him, and taking the skin with them they went back to the north. Coyote was afraid, but he followed their tracks until he came to a big camp. The people had made things ready for a circle dance around a fire.

Coyote didn’t dare go into the camp, but stayed on the outside, watching them. An old woman came up to him there and said, “Maybe you are Coyote.” Coyote said “What is this Coyote?” The old woman said, “He lives at Tin Mountain (i. e., Charleston Peak), Coyote said, “What is he, a bad Indian?” She said, “I think you must be Coyote.” He said, “I come from the north, but my grandfather told me about Coyote’s brother, Wolf, who lives on Tin Mountain. Have you ever heard of him?” The old woman said, “Yes, my son has killed Wolf. My people have Wolf’s hide. At sundown we will dance all night.” The old woman then told Coyote that during the dance she tended the children of the dancers. She gathered them all around her and covered them all up with Wolf’s hide. She said that was why she was crying. She told him that during the night while the children slept she, too, could dance a little, but in the morning the children would cry, “Mama, mama, come and take care of me.”

When Coyote heard this, he had an idea. He killed the old woman. He beat her and beat her and broke all her bones. He then made a little opening in her skin and pulled all the bones out and made a sack. He climbed into this sack and looked just like the old woman. He took her stick and hobbled into the camp. The children all cried, “Grandma is coming.” After sundown, the people all said, “Mama, look after the babies while we dance.”

While the people were dancing, Coyote quietly choked the children to death. He held their noses, and choked them. The people thought the children were asleep and they asked him to dance. Coyote said, “All right.” Then he jumped out of the old woman’s skin and put on Wolf’s hide. He ran out of the house shouting, “I am the man you killed,” and then fled from the camp.

The people followed him, but he ran, ran, ran, ran, and finally came to a wooded mountain. Here the people lost the track and returned home. Coyote walked back to the place where Wolf had been killed. Wolf’s carcass was all dried up and stiff like wood. Very carefully, he fitted Wolf’s skin over the carcass.

In the morning he went out to look and saw that the nose had moved a little and was slightly wet. The next morning Coyote was awakened by hearing Wolf howl. He got up to look, but found that Wolf had gone to the northeast. Wolf was alive but he was very angry.

He left Tin Mountain and never came back. That is why there are no wolves or bears on Tin Mountain now.
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The Poetry Of Love And Devotion

The whole world is a marketplace for Love,
For naught that is, from Love remains remote.
The Eternal Wisdom made all things in Love.
On Love they all depend, to Love all turn.
The earth, the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars
The center of their orbit find in Love.
By Love are all bewildered, stupefied,
Intoxicated by the Wine of Love.

From each, Love demands a mystic silence.
What do all seek so earnestly? “Tis Love.
Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts,
In Love no longer “Thou” and “I” exist,
For self has passed away in the Beloved.
Now will I draw aside the veil from Love,
And in the temple of mine inmost soul
Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love.
He who would know the secret of both worlds
Will find that the secret of them both is Love.

– Farid ud Din Attar
______________________

Come,
let’s scatter roses and pour wine in the glass;
we’ll shatter heaven’s roof and lay a new foundation.
If sorrow raises armies to shed the blood of lovers,
I’ll join with the wine bearer so we can overthrow them.
With a sweet string at hand, play a sweet song, my friend,
so we can clap and sing a song and lose our heads in dancing.
—
The sun
Won a beauty contest and became a jewel
Set upon God’s right hand.

The earth agreed to be a toe ring on the
Beloved’s foot
And has never regretted its decision.

The mountains got tired
Of sitting amongst a sleeping audience

And are now stretching their arms
Toward the Roof.

The clouds gave my soul an idea
So I pawned my gills
And rose like a winged diamond

Ever trying to be near
More love, more love
Like you.

The Mountain got tired of sitting
Amongst a snoring crowd inside of me
And rose like a rip sun
Into my eye.

My soul gave my heart a brilliant idea
So Hafiz is rising like a
Winged diamond.
– Hafiz

_____________

You’ve no idea how hard I’ve looked for a gift to bring You.
Nothing seemed right.

What’s the point of bringing gold to the gold mine, or water to the Ocean.
Everything I came up with was like taking spices to the Orient.

It’s no good giving my heart and my soul because you already have these.

So- I’ve brought you a mirror.

Look at yourself and remember me.

–

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You’re covered with a thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quiteness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.
– Rumi
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Erik Satie – Gnossienne No.5

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Intro: Not only do beings and things have spirits that in turn take the forms of beings and things, but deeds, words, thoughts, and feelings also have spirits of their own. Thus is may happen that the soul of a beautiful deed may assume the form of an angel. – Sheikh Badruddin

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Greetings…
One of those dry periods for Turfing entries, (unless you get “The Mini Turf” of course (If you want to notified about Turfing or The Mini-Turf send me your email addy of choice to – llwydd (at sign) earthrites.org – and I will add you right away) though I have been thinking about Turfing (like the new look?) and fiddling about.

So much to write about, but I shan’t burden you with all of the details in this intro. It has been a wild couple of weeks, in so many ways. We installed a new poetry pole, and still moving forward with The Invisible College. I cover what else that has been going on in The Cabinet Of Wonders

I hope you enjoy this entry!

Blessings,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
The Short Note: Event Of The Week!
The Cabinet Of Wonders
The Links
In Tom’s Head
Vieux Farka Touré : Bullet The Blue Sky
The Angel Of Death
Ahmed Taha Poems on Anwar Kamal
Vieux Farka Touré – Fafa
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The Short Note: Event Of The Week!

In This Pic: Guido Orio (Grip-Writer), Rowan Spiers-Floyd (Assistant Director/Producer-Writer), Wiley Parker (Director – Writer & Fill in Actor!)

Rowan worked in concert with a group on a 24 hour film project this past weekend on “Above and Beyond”, and their film will be first shown tomorrow night at the Hollywood Theatre at 42nd & NE Sandy, at the Portland Film Race 2010 Screening.
Here is the addy and other info:
Portland Film Race 2010 Screening
Location:The Hollywood Theatre
Time:Wednesday, 30 June 2010 19:00
Admission is 10.00 at the door
Be there early, “Above and Beyond” will be the first film shown!
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The Cabinet Of Wonders:

Well, it’s been awhile. I have been working hard in the actual world, and trying to figure out this place we call Here and Now… I am going to describe some events from the last couple of weeks.

First: It’s in between rain showers, and Mary and I are working in North East Portland. I hear a cry from the air, and see a hummingbird, doing a dance. It hovers, and then climbs, climbs, and climbs up through the ladders of air, dives straight down and as it almost hits a roof it pulls up and cries out. This ritual is done everyday at the same time, at the same place. It is absolutely beautiful.

Second: “Oh what is that!” I hear Mary cry in the darkening of the evening outside. I look to where she is pointing, and up on a roof nearly 3 stories up is a very, very large shape. It is circling the roof, and then settles in on the South West corner. “Is it a raccoon?” Mary asks, and as I flash my torch up at it, I see it is a cat. So large, at first I thought it a Lynx or a Wildcat, but no, it is a domestic cat. Obviously it had climbed the cedar next to the house perhaps in pursuit of a squirrel, and gotten struck. I bring Sophie (our dog) out and tried to point it out. She just doesn’t see it. The cat is staying stock still, Sofie being a sight hound doesn’t see it until Mary’s torch later catches only its shining eyes moving. Sophie goes absolutely nuts. In the morning, the cat is gone, having finally figured out a way off the roof. I had visions of the fire department coming to get it off of the roof if he was still stuck.

Third: Late night: After working in our yard together, Mary and are sitting in chairs outside. The moon rises up, and everything glows with beauty. We sit together, as we have all these years, sharing in the moment with the arch of the heavens above. In that moment, everything is right. Buster the cat lies in front of Mary, and Sophie lies where I can rest my foot on her. I feel the now deeply, and I drink it in.

Fourth: I have several nights of dreams about un-finished emotional work stemming from events that happened in my teens. Two nights of heart rending memories welling up, with mornings filled with hauntings. The third night, I wake up, and my heart feels like a knife is passing though it. No matter what you have done to change things, sometimes you carry actions by others and yourself for life. These are the depths that run often unexplored. Yet, in the end all must come to that place where truth abides, and all the stories culminate. Sad as these moments are, they must acknowledged whatever the cost. How do you reach across decades to people you no longer are in contact with?

Fifth: We show up to work at a clients house. Mary works mainly on the outside, and I am repairing a mural I painted on her neighbors garage wall. The old balloon with her family I had painted had faded to nothing due to my use of florescent paints. I get up on the wall, and slowly obliterate the balloon, and then the basket with her family. The client, her two children, and then last her husband who’d died 5 years previously. Just like that, as if they never were under a covering of white. I move further down the wall towards the street, and start anew. Different balloon, different basket, and maybe the family again.

Sixth: I am reading Essential Sufism, edited by James Fadiman & Robert Frager. I can’t describe the beauty of this book, I write James and tell him of my early adventures in the world of Sufism. He writes back with some wondrous tales of his own. I find that the book goes with me everywhere. I read it before I go to sleep, I read a page or two during the day. It is almost a home coming on many levels.

Seventh: Mary and I are working in the yard, taking down old beds, moving the dirt, going to the plant nursery, coming home and prepping, cutting back bamboo and blackberries for the summer. We work together like the matched pair, she has the drive and direction, and I the brute strength where it is needed. She talks, and before my eyes she creates the garden for this summer around us. What was virtually jungle now has her imprint upon it. This is a story that goes back before the neolithic, and it plays out in our small space. Loam between fingers, the smell of earth, and the salt of sweat in ones eyes. We sleep the sleep of the dead, and give it another go the next day, trying to catch up along with all the other workers of the soil, the gardeners, and the farmers after out very, very wet spring.
______________________

The Links:
Shark’s Carrying Anti-Bacterial Monsters
The World Fire
Burning To Leave The Office?
The Nuclear Reactor Next Door…
Moments with Shams
_______________________
In Tom’s Head

____________
Vieux Farka Touré : Bullet The Blue Sky

____________
Folk-lore of the Holy Land, Moslem, Christian and Jewish, by J. E. Hanauer [1907]

The Angel Of Death

Three mighty angels were standing before the throne of Allah with the most profound reverence, waiting to fulfil His high behests, and Allah said to one of them, “Descend to the Earth and bring hither a handful of its dust.” On receiving this command the messenger, with swift wing cleaving the atmosphere, descended to the Earth, and gathered a handful of its dust in obedience to the most High. No sooner, however, had he begun to do this, than the whole world shuddered and trembled from its centre to its circumference and groaned most pitifully; and, moved and startled by the distress and anguish which his attempt had caused, the gentle angel let the dust which he had gathered fall back, earth to earth, and returned weeping and ashamed to the Presence of Him that had sent him. And Allah said, “I blame thee not, it was not written on the tablet of destiny that this should be thine office. Stand now aside for other service.” Then Allah said to the second of the three angels, “Go thou, and fetch a handful of Earth’s dust.” He, too, flew swiftly down to Earth and tried to gather up a handful of its dust, but when he saw how the Earth shook and shuddered, and when he heard its groans, the gentle angel could not do the deed but let that which he had gathered fall, dust unto dust, and lifting up himself, he returned ashamed and weeping to the Presence of Him Who had sent him. And Allah said, “This task was not for thee. I blame thee not, but stand thou too aside, and other service shall be thine.” Then Allah sent the third angel, who descended swiftly, and gathered up the dust. But when the Earth began to groan and shudder in great pain and fearful anguish, the sad angel said, “This sore task was given me by Allah, and His Will must be done, even though hearts break with pain and sorrow.” Then he returned and presented the handful of Earth’s dust at Allah’s throne. And Allah said, “As thou the deed hast done, so now the office shall be thine, O Azrael, to gather up for me the souls of men and women when their time has come; the souls of saints and sinners, of beggars and of princes, of the old or young, whate’er befall; and even though friends weep, and hearts of loved ones ache with sorrow and with anguish, when bereft of those they love.” So Azrael became the messenger of Death. Azrael had done some wrong in Heaven, to expiate which he was obliged to live a man’s life on earth, without, however, neglecting his duties as Angel of Death; so he became a physician and, as such, attained wide celebrity. He married and got a son; but his wife was a dreadful shrew; and it did not increase his happiness in her society to know that she was destined to outlive him.

When Azrael had grown old, and the time for his release drew near, he revealed his real character to his son under oath of the strictest secrecy. “As I am shortly to depart,” he said, “it is my duty to provide for your future. You know all that can be known of the science and practice of medicine. Now I am going to tell you a secret which will secure infallible success in that profession. Whenever you are called to a bedside, I shall be present, visible to you alone. If I stand at the head of the bed, be sure the patient will die in spite of all your remedies; if at the foot, he will recover though you gave him the deadliest poison.” Azrael died, as was predestined; and his son, following his instructions, soon grew rich and famous. But he was a spendthrift, and laid by nothing out of all he earned. One day, when his purse was quite empty, he was called to the bedside of a rich notable, who lay at death’s door. On entering the sickroom, he saw his father standing at the head of the bed; so, after going through a form of examination and deliberation, he pronounced the patient’s case quite hopeless. At that the poor rich man, beside himself with fear, clasped the doctor’s knees, and promised him half his possessions if he would save his life. The son of Azrael was sorely tempted. “Well,” he said at length, “I will see what I can do, if you will make it three-fourths of your wealth, to be mine whether I succeed or no.” The patient in fear of death consented, and a contract was drawn up, signed and sealed and witnessed. Then the physician turned to his father, and by frantic gestures implored him to move to the foot of the bed, but the Angel of Death would not budge. Then, having called in four strong men, he bade each take a corner of the bed and, lifting all together, turn it round quickly so that the sick man’s head should be where his feet had been. This was done very cleverly, but Azrael still stood at the head. The manœuvre was oft repeated, but Azrael always moved with the bed. The son was forced to rack his brains for some new expedient. Having dismissed the four porters, he suddenly fell atrembling and whispered, “Father, I hear mother coming.” In a trice fear flamed in the grim angel’s orbs, and he was gone. So the sick man recovered. But from that day forth Azrael ceased to appear to his son, who made so many mistakes in his practice that his reputation fast declined.

One day he had been at the funeral of a Jew, his victim, and was strolling down Wady-en-Nâr, 1 in sad thought of his father, when he saw Azrael standing at the door of a cave. “In a few minutes you are going to die,” said the father sternly. “For thwarting me in my duties, your life has been shortened.” The youth implored his mercy, falling at his feet and kissing them, till Azrael said more kindly, “Well, come into my workshop, and see if your wits can find a way out of the difficulty. Though I myself am powerless now to help you, it is possible that you may yet help yourself.” They passed through a suite of seven chambers, the sides of which looked like the walls of an apothecary’s shop, being covered with shelves on which were all sorts of bottles, urns and boxes; each of which, as Azrael explained, contained the means of death for some human being. Taking down a vessel, he unscrewed its metal lid, and it seemed to the son as if some air escaped. “A certain youth,” he explained has to die within a few minutes by a fall from his horse, and I have just let loose the ‘afrìt’ who will scare that horse.” Of a second vessel he said, “This contains egg-shells of the safat, a strange bird, which never alights, even when mating. Its eggs are laid while on the wing and hatched before they reach the ground. The shells only fall to the earth, for the young are able to fly as soon as they leave the egg. These shells are often found and devoured by the greedy and blood-thirsty shibeh, 1 which goes mad in consequence and bites every creature that comes in its way, thus spreading hydrophobia and giving me plenty of work.”

Thus they passed from room to room till they came to a mighty hall, where, on rows upon rows of tables, were myriads of earthen lamps of various forms and sizes; some of which burned brightly, others with a doubtful flame, while many were going out. “These are the lives of men,” said Azrael. “It is Gabriel’s place to fill and light them; but he is rather careless. See! he has left his pitcher of oil on the table next to you.” “My lamp! where is my lamp?” cried the son feverishly. The Angel of Death pointed to one in the act of going out. “O father, for pity’s sake, refill it!” “That is Gabriel’s place, not mine. But I shall not take your life for a minute, as I have got to collect those lamps at the end of the hall, which have just gone out.” The son, left standing by his dying flame, grasped Gabriel’s pitcher and tried to pour some oil into his vessel; but in his nervous haste he upset the lamp and put it out. Azrael came and took up his son’s empty lamp, carrying it back through the rooms to the mouth of the cave, where the dead body of the physician was found later. “Silly fellow,” he thought to himself. “Why must he interfere in the work of angels. But at any rate he cannot say I killed him.” Azrael always finds an excuse, as the saying goes.

Among the soldiers of Herod there was an Italian named Francesco, a brave young man who had distinguished himself in the wars and was a favourite with his master as with all who knew him. He was gentle with the weak, kind to the poor, and except in fair fight had never been known to hurt a living thing. Children especially used to delight in his companionship. He had but one vice: he was an inveterate gambler, and all his spare moments were spent at cards.

Not only did he gamble himself, but he seemed to take a special delight in persuading others to follow his example. He would waylay boys and lads on their way to school, and apprentices sent running upon errands, and entice them to try their luck at a game. Nay, so infatuated did he become, that he is said to have ventured to accost some respectable Pharisees on their way to and from the Temple and invite them to join him at his loved diversion. At last, things went so far that the Chief Priests and Rulers betook themselves to Herod in a body and demanded his punishment. But card-playing happened to be a pastime in which Herod himself delighted so he did not take the charge against Francesco very seriously. Only, when the Jewish rulers kept on worrying him, he gave the Italian his discharge, and bade him leave Jerusalem and never again be seen within its walls.

Francesco entered on a new course of life. Gathering round him certain of his former comrades whose time of service had expired, he became the leader of a band of armed men whose business it was to waylay travellers on their way to and from the Holy City. Their principal haunt was a large cave on the road a little to the north of El Bìreh, the ancient Beeroth. In no case were they guilty of violence and they always let the poor go unmolested. Their mode of procedure was singular. They used to stop and surround travellers who seemed wealthy and invite them to their cave to play a game with Francesco. The travellers dared not refuse so courteous an invitation when delivered by a band of armed brigands. They were politely welcomed by the gambler, treated to wine, and made to stake at cards whatever valuables they had with them. If they won, they went undespoiled; if they lost, they were compassionated and begged to come again with more money and try their luck a second time.

This went on for a long while, till, on a certain day, the sentinel on the look-out announced that a party of pedestrians was in sight. “If they are on foot,” said the leader of the outlaws, “they are not likely to have with them anything worth playing for; still, let us see. How many of them are there?” “Thirteen,” was the answer. “Thirteen,” said Francesco musingly, “that is a curious number. Now where was it that I met a party of just thirteen men? Ah! now I remember; it was at Capernaum, where the Carpenter-rabbi of Nazareth cured the servant of one of the centurions belonging to our legion. I wonder whether by any chance, he and his twelve pupils can be coming this way. I must go and see for myself.” So saying he came out of the cave and joined the watchman at his point of vantage. The travellers were now near enough for Francesco to know them for Our Lord and His Apostles. He hastily called his men together, and told them that this time a really good man and a great prophet was coming, and that they must hide away the cards and all else that was sinful, for this was quite a different sort of person from the hypocrites of Jerusalem. Leaving them to prepare for the coming guests, he hurried down the road and, saluting the Saviour and His companions, pressed them, seeing evening was at hand and a storm threatening, to honour him and his comrades by spending the night with them. The invitation was accepted, and Jesus and His followers became the guests of the outlaws, who did their best to make them comfortable and, after supper, gathered round the Divine Teacher and, drinking in his gracious words, wondered. Although in all He said there was not a word that could be construed into blame of their way of life, yet a sense of guilt fell on them as they listened. The brigands made the guests lie down on their own rough beds, whilst they themselves wrapped their abâyehs around them and slept on the bare ground. That night it was Francesco’s turn to keep the watch. It chanced to strike him that the Saviour, lying fast asleep, had not sufficient covering, so he took off his own abâyeh and laid it over Him. He himself walked up and down to keep warm, but could not help shivering. Next morning, having breakfasted with the outlaws, Jesus and His Apostles departed, Francesco and some of his own men setting them on their way. Before parting, the Saviour thanked Francesco for his hospitality and that of his comrades and asked whether it were in His power to gratify any special wish he might have. “Not one, O Lord, but four,” replied the gambler. “What are they?” asked Jesus. “First,” said Francesco, “I am fond of playing cards, and I beg Thee to grant that whoever I play with, whether human or otherwise, I may always win. Next, that in case I invite any one to sit upon a certain stone seat at the door of our cave, he may not be able to get up without my permission. Thirdly, there is a lemon tree growing near the said cave, and I ask that nobody who climbs it at my request, may be able to descend to the ground unless I bid him. And lastly, I beg that in whatever disguise Azrael may come to take away my soul, I may detect him before he come too near, and be ready for him.” On hearing these strange petitions, the Saviour smiled sadly and answered, “My son, thou has spoken childishly and not in wisdom. Still, that which thou hast asked in thy simplicity shall be granted, and I will add thereto the promise, that when thou shalt see thy error, and desire to make a fresh request, it shall be granted. Fare thee well.”

Years passed away and many of Francesco’s comrades had left him, when one day the Angel of Death, disguised as a wayfarer, was seen approaching. Francesco knew him from afar, and when Azrael came to the door of the cave, the gambler invited him to sit down on the stone seat without. Having seen the angel fairly seated, Francesco cried, “I know thee. Thou hast come to take my soul, or the soul of one of my comrades, but I defy thee! I entertained the Lord of Life in this cave years ago, and He gave me power to forbid, any one who sits on that seat to rise from it without my leave.” The angel at once struggled to get up but found himself paralysed. Finding rage of no avail, he humbly begged to be released. Francesco extorted from him a solemn oath not to seek his soul nor that of any of his comrades for the space of fifteen years, then let him go.

The fifteen years passed, and Francesco now dwelt alone in his cave as a godly hermit, when the Angel of Death drew near once more. The recluse at once withdrew into the cave and lay down on his bed, groaning as if in agony. This time, Azrael entered the cave dressed in a monk’s habit. “What ails thee, my son?” he asked. “I have fever and I thirst,” came the reply. “I beg you to gather a lemon for me off the tree which grows close to the cave, and to mix a little of its juice with f water that my thirst may be slaked.” As it wanted yet some minutes of the time appointed, Azrael saw in the request a good excuse for administering a mortal draught; so he climbed the tree to reach the fruit. But, no sooner was he up in the branches than he heard a laugh and, looking down, beheld Francesco in the best of health. He strove to descend but could not move without Francesco’s leave, which was not granted until he had pledged his word to keep away for other fifteen years.

That term elapsed and Azrael came a third time. “Do you intend to play any more vile tricks on me?” he inquired of Francesco, now an aged man. “Not if you will grant me one favour,” answered Francesco, “and allow me to take my pack of cards into the other world.” “Will my giving you the permission lead to some fresh practical joke at my expense?” “No, I most solemnly assure you,” replied the old man. Hereupon the Angel of Death snatched up Francesco’s soul and his pack of cards and went with them to the gate of Paradise where St Peter sits to admit the souls of the righteous. Francesco was told to knock at the gate. He did so and it was opened, but when the porter saw who it was, and that he had brought his cards with him, he slammed the door in his face. So Azrael lifted the poor soul up again and descended with him to the gate of Hell where Iblìs sits, eager to seize and torment dead sinners. On beholding who it was that the Angel of Death had brought, he said in great glee, “Here you are at last, my dear. I have waited long for your arrival, and so have many others with whom you played cards on Earth. They all hope to see you beaten at your own game, for as you did not allow travellers to reach the Holy City till they had played with you, so shall I not allow you to roast on the red-hot coals till you have played a game with me. You have your cards, I see, so we will begin at once.” So Francesco and the Evil One began to play, and to the surprise of both Francesco won the game. Satan insisted on a fresh trial of skill, and when he was once more defeated, he would insist on another trial, till at last, when he had been beaten seven times, he lost his temper and drove out Francesco, saying that he could not have any one in Hell who excelled him in any thing even though it were a game. On hearing this, fresh hope was roused in the poor sinner’s heart, and, recalling the Saviour’s pledge to grant him one more boon, he begged Azrael who had stopped to watch the game to take him back to the gates of Paradise, as he felt sure the Saviour would not treat him as harshly as the Prince of Saints and the chief of lost spirits had done. So Azrael took the poor soul to Heaven’s gate and it once more knocked thereat, and when St Peter opened, and would have driven it away, it pleaded the Saviour’s promise to grant one more boon. So St Peter called his Master, Who, when Francesco asked for admission, confessing that his life had been one great mistake and offering to throw away his pack of cards, told Mar Butrus to let him in; and so the lifelong gambler entered Paradise.

Footnotes

177:1 This account of the appointment of Azrael was given by a Moslem lady of rank to a Christian woman, who passed it on to my wife.

179:1 Hell has seven gates, one of which is in Wady-en-Nâr; and the Angel of Death has his workshop in one of the caves in that gloomy valley, as appears in this story.

180:1 Shibeh (lit. “the leaper”) is one of the names of the leopard. But in folk-lore it is described as a creature combining the characteristics of the badger and the hyæna.
____________

Ahmed Taha Poems on Anwar Kamal

From: The empire of walls (cantos and stories)

Portrait of Anwar Kamel

You extend your spider web
beyond all exiles
and beyond the years that escaped you
this is why
the regime’s soldiers couldn’t hunt you
and your fragile threads remained
a dusky home for
the comrades who died or immigrated

How do you forget that you’re the one
who started departing
then invented your face
that we see so enigmatic
and the fingers that take refuge
in your eyes
whenever you hide
behind a stone table
or a silk coat

How do you hear now the beats of your body
whenever you read Nietzsche or Paul Eluard
you extend your hands to the desert
in order to meet God away from both the “Pasha” square
and the chairs of the “Odeon” café
you whisper to him about your rebellion
you remember your briefcase,
so you gesture to him
and give him the nearest poem, he reads it
and leans toward you
and the eyes smile
—

From: A final portrait of Anwar Kamel

Notes:
Anwar Kamel was an important member of the Egyptian avant-garde in the forties, a friend of George Henein and Edmond Jabes. Kamel was an early Trotskyite and wrote a book “El-ketab El-mamnoo’” that was banned then. After the military takeover in 1952, most of his friends either immigrated or were forced into exile. In the eighties, an old man, he published the new generation of Egyptian poets in his free, limited distribution, magazine/flyer “Fasilah”.

Shobra is a very crowded lower middle class neighborhood in Cairo where Ahmed grew up.
________
Anwar Kamel widens his exile:

For thirty years
you were alone in your exile
meanwhile, we crawled,
screamed,
and wore fatigues

You knew
that our path goes through here
so you were widening your exile
and building a fortress of names between your tomb
and the regime’s soldiers:

this is George Henein
taking out maps from his armpit
in order to pick where he would be born
and where he would get lost

this is Trotsky
bending over a book
and pointing to his heartache

this is Ramsis Younan
drawing a city of dreams and illusions
and disappearing in its streets

this is Besheer El-Sebaai
writing a romantic apology
for not dying in 1848

this is Ahmed Taha
creating these traps and holes
around himself
in order to chase his runaway childhood

this is Cairo, your city
not a single alphabet letter can penetrate it
to disclose its streets that host different epochs
like homeless old people
these streets where deities are conversing
as if they were friends in a coffee shop

and this is “Shobra”
a body that extends like a graveyard
that is big enough for everyone
yet doesn’t fit a single person
Shobra that is embarrassed of its sagging breasts
so it kneels
and the dead,
the hungry,
the kids,
and the grieving women
drop from it
like warm milk
yet the armies of police remain,
the empty cable cars remain,
the train graveyard in the north end of Shobra remains,
also the kids whose skin is mere dust,
men who mumble at night
and yell during the day,
women who weep — the same way they laugh —
beneath the weight of their husbands
or behind their coffins
women who get impregnated with men’s panting
and under their gowns their kids walk.
—
Anwar Kamel dies a natural death:

I always saw you
lying on the road
bullets gathered around you like flocks of flies
meanwhile your gray coat is completely open
and next to you, was this dark featherless bird
that — moments ago — used to be your leather briefcase
before they removed your papers from it

Yet you died an ordinary death
that is similar to your last escape
and similar to this awful type of death that we have in
Cairo,
Hegazz,
Nagd,
and Damascus
out of hunger
overeating,
laughter,
and depression

This canned death
that has already expired
and can only bring
vomit
and headache
this death that can be defeated by
aspirin and valium

You must feel jealous then of our surreal death
coming from the desert
riding its camouflaged camel
with computerized rockets in its saddlebag
and in the distance between its head and its fingers
a bowl of the leftover Fatta*
from yesterday’s dinner
________________
* Fatta is a Bedouin food

Anwar Kamel didn’t build a home country in his briefcase:

For thirty years
you were alone in your exile
and you were thinking
“Where does the original Cairo sleep
and how did the barracks extend to reach my window”

You were thinking
“How could the lost George Henein
have a home country
to put his arm around
or sit with in a café
and maybe feel its body after his second drink”

As for you
the home country that sits next to you doesn’t know your name
even after ten drinks
it may stretch
you may rub your eyes a little
then it would go about its daily journey
and you would go with your daily journey”

Well, let it be then
you only have this chest without nipples
after all the comrades have left forever
like wandering butterflies
where nipples grow like grass
on coffee shop tables
waiting for the dry lips
of those who migrated from the east

Let it be then
you will surrender your body to them
without any sign that points to your
specializing in death for thirty years
let them bury it in the graveyard of July
and you go back to what you were:
a spirit that wanders
in the relics of Heliopolis
—
A last dance with Anwar Kamel

As usual
I’ll slightly disagree with you
regarding who should die first:
Marx
or the husband of the woman I’m sleeping with?.

The General who is in khaki,
or the General who is in jeans?

Yet we will agree before the night ends
that everyone should die
and we will agree that we will organize everything
whenever the time permits
in the evening that follows
your final departure
—
Anwar Kamel celebrates the 14th of July:

Don’t say that all these defeats have colored me
with the color that doesn’t show in the darkness
this was my color from the beginning
as it is your color now
call it whatever you want
it is all you have

There is not a half death for you to die
and there is not half a color for me to live it
this is why I will stay — as I was created — a terrorist
and stuff my head with these big-bellied dying children
and ambush these blonde worms
like a fat spider

I won’t suck their viscous blood
I will organize them in my old notebooks
placed deep in each of their chests, a spear.
I will return their horns they put in museum halls
and their eyes that were stuck to the heads of fish
maybe I would dance around their corpses
that are lined up without shiny coffins
maybe I would fill their limbs with my words
that don’t know Rousseau or Voltaire
and don’t care about the 14th of July
and don’t resemble these three words
that fall from the pages of books
like fetuses in their third month
that stuck to the rears of cannons
like genital flees

But I embrace every moment with this shiny sword
that falls like an angry god
to put the heads of kings, prostitutes,
poetry recite-rs, revolutionary intellectuals,
Generals, beautiful women, and men of God in one basket

I wish if I were there
I would have brushed against the shoulders of these women
who are peeling their vegetables
then would have sat immediately behind that basket
wetting my quill with fresh blood
and write a love poem daily
on my sweetheart’s head

How did the gods ask about the tomb of Anwar Kamel:

There should be a dark universe
where the gods who created it stumble
while searching in the rubble of ancient cities
for any monument from the past
I’ll guide them like blind people
through the ruins that I know well
pointing at what remained of
steel,
plastic,
and canned sex organs

I’ll lie to them whenever I can
like tourist guides lie
to old folks seeking immortality

I will point at Paris’ skull and say:
here Anwar Kamel was born
and point to London’s vagina that is covered with gray hair:
here the faces of the revolutions of third world countries got stuck
and to Washington’s ass:
here third world countries’ officers became leaders
and to Moscow’s breasts that drip rotten milk:
here the leaders turned into philosophers

And when the gods try to return to their far skies
while holding their fake monuments
their eldest will ask me with his dignified voice:
what do you want you obedient servant?

I’ll kneel down in front of him
holding back a chuckle
and chant in a pious tone:
I want more flourishing cities,
more T.N.T.,
and more valium.
—

—
Anwar Kamel doesn’t intend to be a saint:

Now, here are the comrades: The Decembrists, the Octoberists
and the romantic assassin writers
unifying their death
they all arrive
with their unkempt beards dangling
with lit pipes.

They will fill the earth with saliva
the air with coughs,
and the sky with something dark
that resembles smoke

In between their sporadic exhalation
their teary voices will echo
while reciting the books of the ancestors
who followed God’s calling
so their blood flowed on His door
while carrying sharp-edged crosses

And you never return

Here are the comrades
raising the white flags
with bloody stripes
and the smallpox scars that resemble the stars
and chant the book of the Ecclesiastes

And you never return

Here are the comrades
their feet shaking absently
while they pray for exodus
the jazz music calms down,
the psalms begin,
their bodies are free from December’s ice
and they begin the New Testament
with their feet flying in the air
their beards touch in ecstasy
and moans that are louder than rock music
in front of the sacrifice scene

And you never return

Maybe you will write the last page
starting with a greeting
and ending with an apology
not for specializing in death for thirty years
and not for escaping from the time of the military and the Bedouins
and certainly not for migrating with the birds in the fall
but because — unlike these birds —
you won’t return the next spring.

_________

Vieux Farka Touré – Fafa

_________
Outro:
This spirit of divine origin appears in a man as man, in beast as beast, and in plant as plant. And it appears differently even within each species, appearing in each person in a different manner in accordance with his different capacity and predisposition. The spirit neither disappears not diminishes nor changes when the body is destroyed.
The body, until its end, is in continuous transformation, whereas the spirit never changes. It cannot be identified by anything other than the body it inhabits. There is no identification without appearance; therefore, it is essential for the spirit to have a form. Yet if the spirit becomes fully identified with a specific body, it cannot return to its origin. – Sheikh Badruddin

Hazrat Nizamuddin Awliya spoke a while on the subject of the departure of the friends of God from this world. One of those present mentioned the name of a particular man and said that at the time of his death he was softly uttering the names of God. This moved Hazrat Nizamuddin Awliya to tears and he reited the following quatrain:

Ayam be sar-e-kuye to puyan puyan
Rukhsar be ab-e-dide shuyan shuyan

Bichare rah-e wasl-e to juyan juyan
Jan mideham o nam-e to guyan guyan

I came to the end of Your street, running, running.
Tears came down my cheek, washing, washing.

Union with You, I am helplessly seeking, seeking.
My soul I surrender while Your name I am reciting, reciting.

____________

This is perhaps a bit early, but I have had some time on my hand due to the weather and all. It has been a strange time as of late, and I have been a bit pensive with the strangeness of it all.

Life rushes so fast. Wait, I am catching my breath!

Blessings,
Gwyllm

On The Menu:
On The Imaginarium & Musings on Mortality
Mammoth Time Lapse
The Banshee
Marconi Union – Tokyo Ginza District
Three Sonnets On Mortality
Marconi Union – Glace Bay (Part One) / Border Crossing
Art: Henry Siddons Mowbray
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On The Imaginarium & Musings on Mortality

Rowan’s key phrase from the film: “As long as the story is told…the unvierse will keep going”
My rejoinder: “And we all have a chapter in the story. When that chapter ends, we winkle out of existence, (or not)”

Last night at Caer Llwydd, we watched Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”. This was of course Heath Ledger’s last movie, he sadly died before completing it. Heath was one of my favourite actors, his past work with Terry Gilliam in “The Brothers Grimm” is a household favourite. “Imaginarium” is a most wonderful work of art. Every scene is chock full of eye candy, and has a cornucopia of philosophical underpinnings strewn about in a willy-nilly fashion. I kept on feeling I had read the story before, but no Gilliam has said it came all from him. I think the film touches on deep parts of the human psyche, and generates emotive responses to the questions and situations being layed before the viewers eyes. There are sincere questions on morality, mortality, and the role one wants to or should play in the world. Gilliam has such a deft touch (some would say daft), but this little film, is a fine, fine creation. If you haven’t seen it, you should.

Earlier this week, I seemed to be dogged by the feelings of fleeting mortality….

A friend had confided that they were contemplating ending their life. We had sat and talked for quite a bit what this meant for them. They were feeling worn down by decades of work and responsibility. It was one of those conversations that on one hand you don’t want to have, but on the other it was (perhaps) the most important conversation that we have had in our times together. In the end, it seemed like a dream scenario. People rushing past us on the street, and there we were talking about the limits of mortality. I felt weary after the talk, I must confess. The sky opened up, and the rain came down. I ended up at home, reading poetry and thinking deep into the evening.

So, this little encounter set me up for some interesting musings. I am prone to thinking about mortality, I mean it is the great mystery isn’t it? The divide between life and either another, or oblivion. The one raging question it seems for philosophers, sages, fools, kings and beggars, it has engaged everyone at sometime in their life. Of course, life is to be lived in the here and now, but there are those moments when you attempt to peer across the river…

Later in the week I found myself standing in the yard with the sun (fleeting as it is now days) and wind upon me. I had fallen into a fugue… I was a static point in the universe whilst the winds of time were playing across my mind and life. I felt as if the winds were pulling the fabric of my corporeal being apart in a splay of atoms, slowly increasing in speed and everything was dissolving into light. I must of stood there for an eternity before I returned to the present. I had been in a place where I wasn’t, yet was. I wasn’t sad, or panicked, but oddly detached from everything. Perhaps it was a moment of grace. I don’t know. Yet, the taste of it lingered for hours and into the next day.

I have no idea what really lies ahead, I used to think that I had a good idea, but really who actually does? We have this moment, this now in which we exist together. Though I easily contemplate what might follow in the world, I realize that everything I imagine is a projection of the now unto an unknown field. Intuitively I understand my actions and the way I comport myself sends a message to those who will be when I am not, and those who will not know that I once was. How I treat others, how I loved does have an effect and probably deeper than we realize. Our dealings with others in the present does indeed shape the future to come. What we inherited we have the choice to pass along; either the genuine inheritance from countless generations, or those cultural traps and eddies of stagnation and sleep.

I find myself again on that street talking with my friend; in that one beautiful moment we share our hopes, our fears, the essences of our lives; the mortal and the immortal parts of our beings.

Gwyllm

You Mustn’t Be Afraid Of Death

you mustn’t be afraid of death
you’re a deathless soul
you can’t be kept in a dark grave
you’re filled with God’s glow

be happy with your beloved
you can’t find any better
the world will shimmer
because of the diamond you hold

when your heart is immersed
in this blissful love
you can easily endure
any bitter face around

in the absence of malice
there is nothing but
happiness and good times
don’t dwell in sorrow my friend
Rumi – Translated by Nader Khalili
____________

(Thanks To Paul Bingman for finding this!)

.

___________________

The Banshee

(Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland –
by Lady Francesca Speranza Wilde [1887])

The Banshee means, especially, the woman of the fairy race, from van, “the Woman–the Beautiful;” the same word from which comes Venus. Shiloh-Van was one of the names of Buddha–”the son of the woman;” and some writers aver that in the Irish–Sullivan (Sulli-van), may be found this ancient name of Buddha.
As the Leanan-Sidhe was the acknowledged spirit of life, giving inspiration to the poet and the musician, so the Ban-Sidhe was the spirit of death, the most weird and awful of all the fairy powers.
But only certain families of historic lineage, or persons gifted with music and song, are attended by this spirit; for music and poetry are fairy gifts, and the possessors of them show kinship to the spirit race–therefore they are watched over by the spirit of life, which is prophecy and inspiration; and by the spirit of doom, which is the revealer of the secrets of death.
Sometimes the Banshee assumes the form of some sweet singing virgin of the family who died young, and has been given the mission by the invisible powers to become the harbinger of coming doom to her mortal kindred. Or she may be seen at night as a shrouded woman, crouched beneath the trees, lamenting with veiled face; or flying past in the moonlight, crying bitterly: and the cry of thus spirit is mournful beyond all other sounds on earth, and betokens certain death to some member of the family whenever it. is heard in the silence of the night.
*
The Banshee even follows the old race across the ocean and to distant. lands; for space and the offer no hindrance to the mystic power which is selected and appointed to bear the prophecy of death to a family. Of this a well authenticated instance happened a few years ago, and many now living can attest the truth of the narrative.
A branch of the ancient race of the O’Gradys had settled in Canada, far removed, apparently, from all the associations, traditions, and mysterious influences of the old land of their fore-fathers.
But one night a strange and mournful lamentation was heard outside the house. No word was uttered, only a bitter cry, as of one in deepest agony and sorrow, floated through the air.
Inquiry was made, but no one had been seen near the house at the time, though several persons distinctly heard the weird, unearthly cry, and a terror fell upon the household, as if some supernatural influence had overshadowed them.
Next day it so happened that the gentleman and his eldest son went out boating. As they did not return, however, at the usual time for dinner, some alarm was excited, and messengers were sent down to the shore to look for them. But no tidings came until, precisely at the exact hour of the night when the spirit-cry had been heard the previous evening, a crowd of men were seen approaching the house, bearing with them the dead bodies of the father and the son, who had both been drowned by the accidental upsetting of the boat, within sight of land, but not near enough for any help to reach them in time.
Thus the Ban-Sidhe had fulfilled her mission of doom, after which she disappeared, ‘and the cry of the spirit of death was heard no more.
*
At times the spirit-voice is heard in low and soft lamenting, as if close to the window.
Not long ago an ancient lady of noble lineage was lying near the death-hour in her stately castle. One evening, after twilight., she suddenly unclosed her eyes and pointed to the window, with a happy smile on her face. All present looked in the direction, but nothing was visible. They heard, however, the sweetest music, low, soft, and spiritual, floating round the house, and at times apparently close to the window of the sick room.
Many of the attendants thought it was a trick, and went out to search the grounds; but nothing human was seen. Still the wild plaintive singing went on, wandering through the trees like the night wind–a low, beautiful music that never ceased all through the night.
Next morning the noble lady lay dead; then the music ceased, and the lamentation from that hour was heard no more.
*
There was a gentleman also in the same country who had a beautiful daughter, strong and healthy, and a splendid horsewoman. She always followed the hounds, and her appearance at the hunt attracted unbounded admiration, as no one rode so well or looked so beautiful.
One evening there was a ball after the hunt, and the young girl moved through the dance with the grace of a fairy queen.
But that same night a voice came close to the father’s window, as if the face were laid close to the glass, and he heard a mournful lamentation and a cry; and the words rang out on the air–”In three weeks death; in three weeks the grave–dead–dead–dead!”
Three times the voice came, and three times he heard the words; but though it. was bright moonlight, and he looked from the window over all the park, no form was to be seen.
Next day, his daughter showed symptoms of fever, and exactly in three weeks, as the Ban-Sidhe had prophesied, the beautiful girl lay dead.
The night before her death soft music was heard outside the house, though no word was spoken by the spirit-voice, and the family said the form of a woman crouched beneath a tree, with a mantle covering her head, was~ distinctly visible. But on approaching, the phantom disappeared, though the soft, low music of the lamentation continued till dawn.
Then the angel of death entered the house with soundless feet, and he breathed upon the beautiful face of the young girl, and she rested in the sleep of the dead, beneath the dark shadows of his wings.
Thus the prophecy of the Banshee came true, according to the time foretold by the spirit-voice.
___________________

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Three Sonnets On Mortality
– by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 19: Devouring Time blunt thou the lion’s paws

Devouring Time blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood,
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix, in her blood,
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt swift-footed Time
To the wide world and all her fading sweets.
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen,
Him in thy course untainted do allow,
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
—

Sonnet 12: When I do count the clock that tells the time

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
—

Sonnet 49: Against that time, if ever that time come

Against that time, if ever that time come,
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,
Called to that audit by advised respects;
Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass,
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity—
Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine own desart,
And this my hand, against myself uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part.
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,
Since why to love I can allege no cause.
________________________

________________________
Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity.
The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death.
Tomorrow, when resurrection comes,
The heart that is not in love will fail the test. – Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep. – Rumi

“Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.”
Robert Anton Wilson

__________________
Ah… heading off to work so not much to say. New artist gracing our pages Caspar David Frierich, a romantic landscape artist this time around. Two articles, some links and some quotes, and two of my favourite Fever Ray videos. I hope she keeps going, she has an interesting musical style.

We finally have a bit of sun, gotta go and bask in it. Here is to beauty!

Have a good day, more coming soon.

Blessings,
Gwyllm

On The Menu:
The Links
Random Quotes
Fever Ray – Keep The Streets Empty For Me
Programmed Communication During Experiences With DMT – Tim Leary
Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying – Robert Anton Wilson
Ryokan For A Rainy Day
Fever Ray – Im not done
Art: Caspar David Friedrich
__________________
The Links:
The Ancients Within
The Life Nearby…
The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries
The Perniciously Persistent Myths of Hypatia and the Great Library
___________________

Random Quotes:
Dave Barry – “You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.”
Abraham Lincoln – “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
Nicholas Butler – “The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
Unknown – “People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it’s safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.”
Elizabeth Aston – “Love has no place in a lawyer’s office.”
Will Rogers | “Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.”
M.C. Escher – “He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.”
___________________

Fever Ray – Keep The Streets Empty For Me

___________________
Programmed Communication During Experiences With DMT (dimethyltryptamine)

Originally appeared in the eighth issue of Psychedelic Review, 1966
by Dr. Timothy Leary
During the first two years of the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project rumors circulated about a powerful psychedelic agent called dimethyltryptamine: DMT. The effect of this substance was supposed to last for less than an hour and to produce shattering, terrorizing effects. It was alleged to be the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family.

The Hungarian pharmacologist, Stephen Szara, first reported in 1957 that N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and N,N-Diethyltryptamine (DET) produced effects in man similar to LSD and mescaline. The only difference was in duration: whereas LSD and mescaline typically last 8 to 10 hours, DMT lasted from 40 minutes to 1 hour and DET from 2 to 3 hours. The higher homologues, dipropyltryptamine and dibutyltryptamine, were also said to be active but less potent. The parent substance, tryptamine, by itself has no effect. Chemically, DMT is closely related to psilocybin and psilocin (4-hydroxy-N-dimethyltryptamine), as well as to bufotenine (5-hydroxy-N-dimethyltryptamine). The mechanism of action of DMT and related compounds is still a scientific mystery. Like LSD and psilocybin, DMT has the property of increasing the metabolic turnover of serotonin in the body. An enzyme capable of converting naturally-occurring tryptamine to DMT has recently been found in some mammalian tissue; this suggests that mechanisms may exist whereby the body converts normally-occurring substances to psychedelic compounds. (1-5)

DMT has been identified as one of the ingredients in the seeds of Mimosa hostilis, from which the Pancaru Indians of Pernambuco, Brazil, prepare an hallucinogenic beverage they call vinho de Jurumena. It is also, along with bufotenine, one of the ingredients in the seeds of Piptadenia peregrina, from which the Indians of the Orinoco Basin and of Trinidad prepare an hallucinogenic snuff they call yopo. (6)

William Burroughs had tried it in London and reported it in the most negative terms. Burroughs was working at that time on a theory of neurological geography–certain cortical areas were heavenly, other areas were diabolical. Like explorers moving into a new continent, it was important to map out the friendly areas and the hostile. In Burroughs’ pharmacological cartography, DMT propelled the voyager into strange and decidedly unfriendly territory.

Burroughs told a gripping tale about a psychiatrist in London who had taken DMT with a friend. After a few minutes the frightened friend began requesting help. The psychiatrist, himself being spun through a universe of shuttling, vibratory pigments, reached for his hypodermic needle (which had been fragmented into a shimmering assemblage of wave mosaics) and bent over to administer an antidote. Much to his dismay his friend, twisting in panic, was suddenly transformed into a writhing, wiggling reptile, jewel-encrusted and sparkling. The doctor’s dilemma: where to make an intravenous injection in a squirming, oriental-martian snake?

Alan Watts had a DMT story to tell. He took the drug as part of a California research and had planned to demonstrate that he could maintain rational control and verbal fluency during the experience. The closest equivalent might be to attempt a moment-to-moment description of one’s reactions while being fired out the muzzle of an atomic cannon with neon-byzantine barreling. Dr. Watts gave an awe-full description of perceptual fusion.

In the fall of 1962, while giving a three-day series of lectures to the Southern California Society of Clinical Psychologists, I fell into discussion with a psychiatrist who was collecting data on DMT. He had given the drug to over a hundred subjects and only four had reported pleasant experiences. This was a challenge to the set-setting hypothesis. According to our evidence, and in line with our theory, we had found little differentiation among psychedelic drugs. We were skeptically convinced that the elaborate clinical differences allegedly found in reactions to different drugs were psychedelic folk tales. We were sticking to our null hypothesis that the drugs had no specific effect on consciousness but that expectation, preparation, emotional climate, and the contract with the drug-giver accounted for all differences in reaction.

We were eager to see if the fabled “terror-drug,” DMT, would fit the set-setting theory.

A session was arranged. I came to the home of the researcher, accompanied by a psychologist, a Vedanta monk and two female friends. After a lengthy and friendly discussion with the physician, the psychologist lay down on a couch. His friend’s head rested on his chest. I sat on the edge of the couch, smiling in reassuring expectation. Sixty mg of DMT were administered intramuscularly.

Within two minutes the psychologist’s face was glowing with serene joy. For the next twenty-five minutes he gasped and murmured in pleasure, keeping up an amused and ecstatic account of his visions.

“The faces in the room had become billion-faceted mosaics of rich and vibrant hues. The facial characteristics of each of the observers, surrounding the bed, were the keys to their genetic heritage. Dr. X (the psychiatrist) was a bronzed American Indian with full ceremonial paint; the Hindu monk was a deep soulful middle-easterner with eyes which were at once reflecting animal cunning and the sadness of centuries; Leary was a roguish Irishman, a sea captain with weathered skin and creases at the corners of eyes which had looked long and hard into the unseeable, an adventurous skipper of a three-masted schooner eager to chart new waters, to explore the continent just beyond, exuding a confidence that comes from a humorous cosmic awareness of his predicament–genetic and immediate. And next to me, or rather on me, or rather in me, or rather more of me–Billy. Her body was vibrating in such harmony with mine that each ripple of muscle, the very coursing of blood through her veins was a matter of absolute intimacy…body messages of a subtlety and tenderness both exotically strange and deliciously familiar. Deep within, a point of heat in my groin slowly but powerfully and inevitably radiated throughout my body until every cell became a sun emanating its own life-giving fire. My body was an energy field, a set of vibrations with each cell pulsing in phase with every other. And Billy, whose cells now danced the same tune, was no longer a discrete entity but a resonating part of the single set of vibrations. The energy was love.”
Exactly twenty-five minutes after administration, the psychologist smiled, sighed, sat up swinging his legs over the side of the couch and said, “It lasted for a million years and for a split-second. But it’s over and now it’s your turn.”

With this reassuring precedent, I took up position on the couch. Margaret sat on the floor holding my hand. The psychologist sat at the foot of the couch, radiating benevolence. The drug was administered.
___________________

Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying
Robert Anton Wilson

I don’t understand why people fear death — although of course I see good reasons to fear the process of dying. Dying often involves a great deal of prolonged pain, and in this country at least may drain your life savings into the bank accounts of the A.M.A.. Both prospects seem equally terrifying especially if you hoped to leave a decent estate to your children.

One can avoid these deplorable conditions, however, by moving to a civilized country with a national health plan and legal help to assist you in suicide if you have reached a condition where you can’t do it yourself. I personally intend to move to Nederland in the event that a painful, expensive and prolonged death seems inescapable. The medical banditos have made enough money out of me already; I refuse to enrich them further on my way out.

But as for death, and what — if anything –comes after death, I see no cause for apprehension whatsoever.

To consider the alternatives in order:

Most people through most of history have believed that after death comes rebirth (reincarnation). I think most people, planetwide, still believe that. It fails to terrify me. If I get reborn as a cockroach, I intend to hide in the vicinity of somebody’s computer and write poems on the keyboard at night, like archy, the famous roach who left his verse in the typewriter of Don Marquis. If I get reborn as a human, I might meet my wife Arlen again and love her again and marry her again. That sounds great to me.

Other rebirths, as a tree, say, or a blue whale, also seem more entertaining (and educational) than frightening.

Unfortunately, I have no good reasons to believe in reincaration, although I’d sort of like to. I include it only for the sake of completeness.

A sinister rumor, widely believed in the Occident, holds that after death we go to a place called Heaven. From all the descriptions I’ve read, it sounds dreadful to me. It seems to have a population made up entirely of some gang of Christians; the experts on Heaven disagree about which conglomeration of Christians will qualify, but they always seem to think that they personally belong to that elite group. An eternity with people that conceited seems intolerable to me,but fortunately I am not a Christian so I won’t be consigned to such a boring place.

An even more nefarious report appears in the United States Marine Corps hymn:

If the Army and the Navy
ever looked on Heaven’s scenes
they would find the streets were guarded
by the United States Marines

A place where every street is guarded by Marines sounds like a particularly vicious police state, especially if Christians run it, and I definitely don’t want to go there, even for a visit. I wouldn’t even wish it on my worst enemy, if I had any enemies. (Some people hate me for the books I write, but I refuse to hate them back, so they don’t count as enemies.)

Fortunately, as noted, I don’t qualify for Heaven, with all its harps and fanatic Christians and martial law by Marines. A worse idea, which has terrified millions, claims that some of us will go to a place called Hell, where we will suffer eternal torture. This does not scare me because, when I try to imagine a Mind behind this universe, I cannot conceive that Mind, usually called “God,” as totally mad.

I mean, guys, compare that “God” with the worst monsters you can think of – – Adolph Hitler, Joe Stalin, that sort of guy. None of them ever inflicted more than finite pain on their victims. Even de Sade, in his sado-maso fantasy novels, never devised an unlimited torture. The idea that the Mind of Creation (if such exists) wants to torture some of its critters for endless infinities of infinities seems too absurd to take seriously.

Such a derranged Mind could not create a mud hut, much less the exquisitely mathematical universe around us.

If such a monster-God did exist, the sane attitude would consist of practising the Buddhist virtue of compassion. He seems very sick in His head, so don’t give way to hatred: try to understand and forgive him. Maybe He will recover his wits some day. (I wrote “He” instead of the fashionable “He or She” because only male Gods appear to have invented Hells. I can’t think of a single Goddess who ever created a Hell for people who displeased Her .)

A fourth alternative after-death scenario involves merger with “God” or with “the Godhead” (the latter term seems more popular.) This idea, which seems Hindic in origin, currently enjoys vast popularity with New Agers. I see nothing terrifying here; in fact, I suspect I would enjoy it, based on my previous experiences in which this merging/melting seemed to take place on LSD. An infinite Acid Trip in which the whole universe seems like your body: who could fear that (except Republicans)?

The fifth and, as far as I know, the last thinkable alternative holds that after death comes total oblivion. This has either terrorized or angered many intelligent writers (e.g. Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre, who seem to have hated “life after death” for not existing, just as they remained permanently pissed off at “God” for not existing. ) Sorry: it doesn’t seem terrible to me at all. If I become totally oblivious, I won’t know about it (by definition of oblivion.) How can you feel terrified of something you can’t experience?

Besides oblivion means freedom from “all the ills the flesh is heir to,” from bleeding piles to cancer, including even bad reviews of my books.

Living in New York or Los Angeles seem much worse than not living in Oblivion.

Although I have a few opinions, or hunches, I have no dogma about what happens after death. But none of the above alternatives seem really unpleasant, except the ones that seem too absurd to take seriously.

As some Roman wrote:

Nothing to clutch in life.
Nothing to fear in death.
___________________
Ryokan For A Rainy Day

Who says my poems are poems?

My poems are not poems.
When you know that my poems are not poems,
Then we can speak of poetry.

* * *
The winds gives me
Enough fallen leaves
To make a fire

* * *
This world
A fading
Mountain echo
Void and
Unreal

Within
A light snow
Three Thousand Realms
Within those realms
Light snow falls

As the snow
Engulfs my hut
At dusk
My heart, too
Is completely consumed
***
Wild peonies
Now at their peak
In glorious full bloom:
Too precious to pick
To precious not to pick

O lonely pine!
I’d gladly give you
My straw hat and
Thatched coat
To ward off the rain
* * *

In my little begging bowl
violets and dandelions
Mixed together
As an offering to the
Buddhas of the Three Worlds
Picking violets
By the roadside
I absent-mindedly
Left my little bowl behind –
O poor little bowl!

I’ve forgotten my
Little begging bowl again –
No one will take you,
Surely no one will take you:
My sad little bowl!
____________
Fever Ray – Im not done

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We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from. Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements. — William Shakespeare

I started this entry out with the discovery of 2 Shpongle video’s I’ve not seen before. I think you might enjoy them. The art of William Waterhouse has been a long time favourite, and his colours always remind me of early summer. The 3 pieces I picked are some of the lesser known ones, which in itself is a bonus.

The Drowning of the Bottom Hundred is a Welsh Fairytale. It is highly entertaining! Being early summer, William Shakespeare comes to my mind. It seems the bard is everywhere now days; I woke up this morning to a program on the radio about the bard’s effects on students when read aloud, the cult around Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” etc… I watched “Midsummer’s Night Dream” with Mary again. I love that film, I truly do.

Well we are working as we can, dodging rain. I have never seen early summer quite like this except in the UK. I think the Ice Age cometh.

Blessings,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
The Random Quotes
Shpongle Demo Video For Electroplasm
The Drowning of the Bottom Hundred – Cymric Fairytales
Four Sonnets From William Shakespeare
Shpongle – Invisible Man In A Fluorescent Suit
Art: William Waterhouse
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The Random Quotes:
David M. Ogilvy – “Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left.”
Gore Vidal – “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”
Evelyn Waugh – “It is a curious thing… that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”
George Orwell – “On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
Will Rogers – “There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”
Sir Francis Bacon – “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”
Dale Carnegie – “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do.”
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Shpongle Demo Video For Electroplasm

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The Drowning of the Bottom Hundred
Cymric Fairytales….

I

In the beginning of the sixth century, Gwyddno Garanhir was King of Ceredigion. The most valuable portion of his dominions was the great plain of the Bottom Hundred, a vast tract of level land, stretching along that part of the sea coast which now belongs to the counties of Merioneth and Cardigan. This district was populous and fertile. It contained sixteen fortified towns, superior to all the towns and cities of the Cymry excepting Caer Lleon upon Usk. It contained also one of the three privileged ports of the Isle of Britain which was called the Port of Gwyddno, and had been known to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians when they visited the island for metal in the dim dawn of history. This lowland country was below the level of the sea, and the people of the Bottom Hundred had in very early times built an embankment of massy stone to protect it from the encroachment of that hungry element. This stony rampart had withstood the shock of the waves for centuries when Gwyddno began his reign. Watch-towers were erected along the embankment, and watchmen were appointed to guard against the first approaches of damage or decay. The whole of these towers and their companies of guards were ruled by a central castle, which commanded the seaport already mentioned, and wherein dwelt Prince Seithenyn, the son of Seithyn Saidi, who held the office of Lord High Commissioner of the Royal Embankment. Now, Seithenyn was one of the three immortal drunkards of the Isle of Britain. He left the embankment to his deputies, who left it to their assistants, who left it to itself.

One only was there who did his duty. He was Teithrin, the son of Tathral, who had the charge of a watch-tower where the embankment ended at the point of Mochras, in the high land of Ardudwy. Teithrin kept his portion of the embankment in good condition, and paced with daily care the limits of his charge. One day he happened to stray beyond them, and observed signs of neglect that filled him with dismay. This induced him to proceed till his wanderings brought him to the embankment’s southern end, in the high land of Ceredigion. He met with abundant hospitality at the towers of his colleagues and at the castle of Seithenyn: he was supposed to be walking for his amusement. He was asked no questions, and he carefully abstained from asking any. He examined and observed in silence, and when he had completed his observations he hastened to Gwyddno’s palace. It had been built of choice slate stone on the rocky banks of the Mawddach, just above the point where it entered the plain of the Bottom Hundred, and in it, among green woods and sparkling waters, Garanhir lived in festal munificence. On his arrival, he was informed by the porter that the knife was in the meat, and the drink in the horn; there was revelry in the great hail, and none might enter therein but the son of a king of a privileged country or a craftsman bringing his craft. The feast was to last so many days that Teithrin despaired of delivering his message, and went in search of the King’s son, Elphin.

The young Prince was fishing in the Mawddach at a spot where the river, having quitted its native mountains and not yet entered the plain, ran in alternate streams and pools sparkling through a pastoral valley. He sat under an ancient ash, enjoying the calm brightness of an autumnal noon and the melody and beauty of the flying stream on which the shifting sunbeams fell chequering through the leaves. The monotonous music of the river and the profound stillness of the air had all but sent Elphin to sleep. He was startled into attention by a sudden rush of the wind through the trees, and he heard, or seemed to hear, in the gust that, hurried by him the words, “Beware of the oppression of Gwenhudiw!” The gust was momentary: the leaves ceased to rustle and the deep silence of nature returned.

Now, Gwenhudiw is the mermaid Shepherdess of Ocean: the. waves are her sheep, and each ninth wave, which is always greater than the rest, is called her ram.

It was not the first time that the kingly house of Ceredigion had been warned against her oppression. Gwyddno had often heard the same mysterious words borne on the breeze. They had so haunted his memory and imagination that he had ceased to go down to the sea in ships, and dwelt inland, avoiding as far as he might the sight of the great waters. Elphin, too, had heard the prophecy before, but it had formed no part of his recent meditation. He could not, however, persuade himself that the words had not been actually spoken near him. He emerged from the shade of the trees that fringed the river, and looked round him from the rocky bank.

At this moment Teithrin discovered and approached him. Elphin knew him not and inquired his name.

“I am called,” he answered, “Teithrin, the son of Tathral.”

“And what seek you here?” said Elphin.

“I seek,” answered Teithrin, “the, Prince of the Bottom Hundred, Elphin, the son of Gwyddno Garanhir.”

“You spoke,” said Elphin, “as you approached?”

“Nay,” said Teithrin, “I spoke never a word.”

“Assuredly you did,” said Elphin, “you repeated the words, ‘Beware of the oppression of Gwenhudiw!’ ”

Teithrin again denied having spoken the words; but their mysterious impression made Elphin listen readily to his information about the decay of the royal embankment: and after their talk the Prince determined to accompany Teithrin on a visit of remonstrance to the Lord High Commissioner.

They crossed the centre of the enclosed country to the privileged Port of Gwyddno, near which stood the castle of Seithenyn. They walked towards the castle along a portion of the embankment, and Teithrin pointed out to the Prince its decayed condition.

The sea shone with the glory of the setting sun: the air was calm: and the white surf, tinged with the crimson of sunset, broke lightly on the sands below. Elphin turned his eyes from the dazzling splendour of the ocean to the green meadows of the plain: the trees that in the distance thickened into woods: the wreaths of smoke rising from among them, marking the solitary cottages or the populous towns: the massy barrier of mountains beyond, with the forest rising from their base: the precipices frowning over the forest: and the clouds resting on their summits reddened with the reflection of the west. Elphin gazed earnestly on the peopled plain, reposing in the calm of evening between the mountains and the sea, and thought with deep feelings of secret pain, how much of life and human happiness was entrusted to the ruinous mound on which he stood..

II

The sun had sunk beneath the waves when they reached the castle of Seithenyn. The sound of the harp and the song saluted them as they approached it. As they entered the great hail, which was already blazing with torchlight, they found the whole household roaring the praises of the blue buffalo horn:

Fill high the blue horn, the blue buffalo born:
Fill high the long silver-rimmed buffalo horn:
While the roof of the hail by our chorus is torn,
Fill, fill to the brim the deep silver-rimmed horn.

Elphin and Teithrin stood some time on the floor of the hall before they attracted the attention of Seithenyn, who during the chorus was tossing and flourishing his golden goblet. The chorus had scarcely ended when he noticed them, and immediately shouted aloud, “You are welcome all four.”

Elphin answered, “We thank you, we are but two.”

“Two or four,” said Seithenyn, “all is one. You are welcome all. When a stranger enters, the custom in other places is to begin by washing his feet. My custom is to begin by washing his throat. Seithenyn, the son of Seithyn Saidi, bids you welcome.”

Elphin answered, “Elphin, the son of Gwyddno Garanhir, thanks you.”

Seithenyn started up when he realised that he was in the presence of the son of the King, and with a bow intended to be gracious, invited the Prince to take his seat on his right hand. Teithrin remained at the end of the hall, on which Seithenyn shouted to him, “Come on, man, come on, sit and drink,” and motioned him to seat himself next to Elphin.

“Prince Seithenyn,” said Elphin, “I have visited you on a subject of deep moment. Reports have been brought to me that the embankment which has so long been entrusted to your care is in a state of dangerous decay.”

“Decay,” said Seithenyn, “is one thing and danger is another. Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old, I am free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it keeps out the water from the land. Cupbearer, fill.”

“The stonework,” said Teithrin, “is sapped and mined: the piles are rotten, broken and out of their places: the floodgates and sluices are leaky and creaky.”

“Our ancestors were wiser than we,” said Seithenyn; “they built the embankment in their wisdom: and if we should be so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it. This immortal work has stood for centuries and will stand for centuries more, if we let it alone. It is well: it works well: let well alone. Cupbearer, fill.’,

Elphin and Teithrin tried to reason with him, but all their words were met with the assurance that all was well with the embankment, and as every speech of the Lord High Commissioner ended with the command, “Cupbearer, fill,” it was not long before he fell on sleep. The members of his household had been imitating the example of their chief, and the words of host and visitors had been punctuated by the heavy falls from their benches of men sent to sleep by the yellow mead. By the time their chief fell all except the cupbearers were lying flat on the floor.

Elphin and Teithrin were gazing in disgust upon this scene of drunken disorder, when a side door, at the upper end of the hail, to the left of Seithenyn’s chair, opened, and a beautiful young girl entered the hall with her domestic bard and her attendant maidens.

It was Angharad, the daughter of Seithenyn. She gracefully saluted Prince Elphin, and he looked with delight at the beautiful lady, whose gentle and serious loveliness contrasted so strikingly with the fallen heroes of revelry that lay scattered at her feet.

“Stranger,” she said, “this seems an unfitting place for you: let me conduct you where you will be more agreeably lodged.”

“Still less should I deem it fitting for you, fair maiden,” said Elphin.

She answered, “The pleasure of her father is the duty of Angharad.”

Elphin paused to think what he should say in ‘reply to this, and Angharad stood still, expecting that he would follow. In this interval of silence, there came a loud gust of wind blustering through the holes of the walls. “It bids fair to be a stormy night,” said Elphin.

“We are used to storms,” answered Angharad. “We are far from the mountains, between the lowlands and the sea, and the winds blow round us from all quarters.”

There was another pause of deep silence; then there came another gust of wind, pealing like thunder through the holes. Amidst the fallen and sleeping revellers, the confused and littered hall, the low and wavering torches, Angharad, lovely always, shone with single and surpassing loveliness. The gust died away in murmurs and swelled again into thunder and died away in murmurs again: and, as it died away, mixed with the murmurs of ocean, a voice, that seemed one of the many voices of the wind, pronounced the ominous words, “Beware of the oppression of Gwenhudiw!”

They looked at each other, as if questioning whether all had heard alike.

“Did you not hear a voice?” said Angharad, after a pause.

“The same,” said Elphin, “which has before seemed to say to me, ‘Beware of the oppression of Gwenhudiw!’ ”

Teithrin hurried forth on the rampart: Angharad turned pale and leaned against a pillar of the hall. Elphin was amazed and awed, absorbed as his feelings were in her. The sleepers on the floor made an uneasy movement and uttered a cry.

Teithrin returned. “What saw you?” said Elphin. Teithrin answered, “A tempest is coming from the west. The moon has waned three days, and is half hidden in clouds, just visible above the mountains: the bank of clouds is black in the west: the scud is flying before them: and the white waves are rolling to the shore.”

“This is the highest of the spring tides,” said Angharad, “and they are very terrible in the storms from the west when the spray flies over the embankment and the breakers shake the tower which has its foot in the surf.”

“Whence was the voice,” said Elphin, “which we heard erewhile? Was it the cry of a sleeper in his drink, or an error of the fancy, or a warning voice from’ the elements?”

“It was surely nothing earthly,” said Angharad, “nor was it an error of the fancy, for we all heard the words, ‘Beware of the oppression of Gwenhudiw!’ Often and often in the storms of the spring tides have I feared to see her roll her power over the fields of the Bottom Hundred.”

“Pray Heaven she do not to-night,” said Teithrin.

“Can there be such a danger?” said Elphin.

“I think,” said Teithrin, “of the decay I have seen, and I fear the voice I have heard.”

A long pause of deep silence ensued, during which they heard the peals of the wind, and the increasing sound of the rising sea, swelling eve into wilder and more menacing tumult, till, with one terrific impulse, the whole violence of the tempest seemed to burst upon the shore. Before long there came a tremendous crash. The tower, which had its foot in the sea, had long been sapped by the waves: and the storm hurled it into the surf, carrying with it a portion of the wail of the main building, and revealing through the chasm the white raging of the breakers beneath the blackness of the midnight storm. The wind rushed into the hail, putting out the torches within the line of its course, tossing the grey locks and loose mantle of the bard and the light white drapery and long black tresses of Angharad. With the crash of the failing tower, and the shrieks of the women the sleepers started from the floor, staring with drunken amazement, and Seithenyn rose staggering from his chair.

The Lord High Commissioner of the Royal Embankment leaned against a pillar and stared at the sea through the rifted wall with wild and vacant surprise. Then he looked at Elphin and Teithrin, at his daughter and at the members of his household, but the longer he looked, the less clearly he saw: and the longer he pondered, the less he understood. He felt the rush of the wind: he saw the white foam of the sea: his ears were dizzy with their mingled roar. He remained at length motionless, leaning against the pillar, and gazing on the breakers with fixed and glaring vacancy.

“The sleepers of the Bottom Hundred,” said Elphin, “they who sleep in peace and security, trusting to the vigilance of Seithenyn, what will become of them?”

“Warn them with the beacon fire,” said Teithrin, “if there be fuel on the summit of the landward tower.”

“That, of course, has been neglected too,” said Elphin. “Not so,” said Angharad, “that has been my charge.” Teithrin seized a torch and ascended the eastern tower, and in a few minutes the party in the hall beheld the breakers reddening with the reflected fire, and deeper and yet deeper crimson tinging the whirling foam and sheeting the massy darkness of the bursting waves.

An unusual tumult mingled with the roar of the waves. Teithrin rushed into the hall, exclaiming, “All is over! The mound is broken and the spring tide is rolling through the breach.”

Another portion of the castle wall fell into the mining waves, and by the dim and thickly-clouded moonlight, and the red blaze of the beacon fire, they beheld a torrent pouring in from the sea upon the plain and rushing immediately beneath the castle walls, which, as well as the points of the embankment that formed the sides of the breach, continued to crumble away into the waters.

“Who has done this?” shouted Seithenyn. “Show me the enemy.”

“There is no enemy but the sea,”, said Elphin, “to which you, in your drunken madness, have abandoned the land. Think, if you can think, of what is passing in the plain. The storm drowns the cries of your victims, but the curses of the perishing are upon you.”

“Show me the enemy,” shouted Seithenyn, drawing his, sword furiously and flourishing it over his head.

“There is no ‘enemy but the sea,” said Elphin, “against which your sword avails not.”

“Who dares to say so?” said Seithenyn. “Who dares to say that there is an enemy on earth against whom the sword of Seithenyn is unavailing? Thus, thus I prove the falsehood.” And springing suddenly forward, he leaped into the torrent, flourishing his sword as he descended.

“Oh, my unhappy father!” sobbed Angharad, veiling her face with her arm on the shoulder of one of her female attendants.

“We must quit the castle,” said Teithrin, “or we shall be buried in its ruins. We have but one path of safety, along the summit of the embankment, if there be not another breach between us and the high land, and if we can keep our footing in this storm. But let us go: the walls are melting away like snow.”

Angharad, recovering from the first shock of Seithenyn’s catastrophe, became awake to the imminent danger. The spirit of the Cymric female, vigilant and energetic in peril, disposed her and her attendant maidens to use their best exertions for their own preservation. Following the advice and example of Elphin and Teithrin, they armed themselves with spears, which they took down from the walls.

Teithrin led the way, striking the point of his spear firmly into the earth and leaning from it on the wind. Angharad followed in the same manner: Elphin followed Angharad; the attendant maidens followed Elphin: and the bard followed the female train. Behind them went the cupbearers, and behind them reeled those who were able and willing to move.

In front of them, as they marched, was the volumed blackness of the storm: the breakers burst white in the faint and scarcely perceptible moonlight: within the mound the waters rushed and rose: the red light of the beacon fire fell on them from behind: the surf rolled up the side of the embankment and broke almost at their feet: the spray flew above their heads, and it was only by thrusting their spears into the stony ground that they bore themselves up against the wind.

They had not proceeded far when the tide began to recede, the wind to abate somewhat of its violence, and the moon to look on them at intervals through the rifted clouds, disclosing the desolation of the flooded plain, silvering the angry surf, gleaming on the distant mountains and revealing a lengthened prospect of their solitary path that lay in its irregular line like a ribbon on the deep. Morning dawned before they reached safety; daylight showed fully how dreadful was the destruction. The foaming waves were covering the fertile plains which had been the habitation and support of a flourishing population. Of the inhabitants, only the party led by Teithrin from Seithenyn’s castle and a few who saw the beacon fire in time to run to the high lands of Ardudwy and Eryri escaped destruction.

The nearest town to the submerged realm of Gwyddno is Aberdovey. If you stand on the beach there, you will sometimes hear in the long twilight evening chimes and peals of bells, sometimes near, sometimes distant, sounding low and sweet like a call to prayer, or as rejoicing for a victory. The sounds come from the bells of one of Gwyddno’s drowned churches, and these are “The Bells of Aberdovey” that the song speaks about.

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Four Sonnets From William Shakespeare

CI
O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
‘Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed;
Beauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermixed’?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.

CII
My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming,
The owner’s tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue:
Because I would not dull you with my song.

CIII
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth,
That having such a scope to show her pride,
The argument all bare is of more worth
Than when it hath my added praise beside!
O! blame me not, if I no more can write!
Look in your glass, and there appears a face
That over-goes my blunt invention quite,
Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace.
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?
For to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell;
And more, much more, than in my verse can sit,
Your own glass shows you when you look in it.

CIV
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey’d,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv’d:
For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.
____________________

Shpongle – Invisible Man In A Fluorescent Suit

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LX
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith, being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of natures truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow;
And yet, to times, in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.